review of shakespeare’s the taming of the shrew (directed by nina spijkers for toneelschuur producties) at stadsschouwburg groningen, the netherlands, april university of groningen review of shakespeare’s the taming of the shrew (directed by nina spijkers for toneelschuur producties) at stadsschouwburg groningen, the netherlands, april heijes, cornelis published in: shakespeare doi: . / . . important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): heijes, c. 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https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/review-of-shakespeares-the-taming-of-the-shrew-directed-by-nina-spijkers-for-toneelschuur-producties-at-stadsschouwburg-groningen-the-netherlands- -april- (fa -e fb- b-a e - fdbd f ).html https://doi.org/ . / . . full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rshk shakespeare issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshk review of shakespeare’s the taming of the shrew (directed by nina spijkers for toneelschuur producties) at stadsschouwburg groningen, the netherlands, april coen heijes to cite this article: coen heijes ( ) review of shakespeare’s the�taming�of�the�shrew (directed by nina spijkers for toneelschuur producties) at stadsschouwburg groningen, the netherlands, april , shakespeare, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & 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netherlands although the year has not seen the usual high frequency of shakespeare productions on the dutch stage, the bard continues to be the most popular playwright in the netherlands. oddly enough, after the unassailable leader hamlet, one of the most often performed plays in the past sev- enty years turns out to be the taming of the shrew (heijes ) and the year was no exception to this rule with a taming directed by nina spijkers for “toneelschuur producties”, a professional and subsidized theatre company, which has its home base in the city of haarlem, but also tours the country with its productions. as the audience filtered in for taming, they were confronted with a stage which resembled a changing room, with a clear differentiation between on the one hand dresses and high-heeled shoes, and on the other hand the usual shirts and jackets. the design (by katrin bombe) immediately set the tone for a binary and stereotypical contrast between the sexes, which was further underlined by attributes which accompanied the two sets, such as an iron and a hoover for the women and an axe and other tools for the men. as the audience had settled in, four female and two male actors entered the stage in their underwear and started dressing, the men as females, and the women as males. the stereotyping was further enhanced as the women strapped on artificial penises, and the men used bras with breast padding. the approach was part of an ongoing trend of the interchange of gender in taming productions. in , the dutch shakespeare theatre diever, a semi-professional theatre company directed by jack nieborg, produced a taming in which the gender of the actors playing petruchio and katherina was determined on the night of the performance. the two main actors had learned both parts but did not know beforehand which part they were going to play on the night. a member of the audience, through a spin of a wheel of fortune, determined which actor would play which role that night. the production drew a record number of , visitors. the jo clifford adaptation of taming, directed by michael fentiman, rewrote the play such that the male characters were female and vice versa. the rsc taming, directed by justin audibert, employed an equally straightforward reversal of gender roles, set in a matriarchal past, and in the programme notes the director said he was “interested in seeing what happens when you get female actors to play traditionally powerful male roles, and vice versa”. productions of this type address themes such as the social construction of gender roles, the cul- tural conditioning on which they are based, and the ensuing imbalance of power between the oppos- ing gender roles. one of the potential pitfalls tends to be that, while the gender swap as such may be interesting, the productions rather perpetuate existing, stereotypical perception of gender roles and binary identities, instead of breaking through them and presenting a more fluid picture of gender, power and identity. while at first, i thought this production would fall into this traditional, binary category, the song which was played while the actors were dressing made me doubt my initial © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact coen heijes c.p.a.heijes@rug.nl shakespeare , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:c.p.a.heijes@rug.nl http://www.tandfonline.com observation. it was the german song “komplex mit dem sex” by the group stereo total. on the one hand, the lyrics of the song factually described what was happening on stage as they ran: “i am a woman with a penis, a man with tits”. however, the song went beyond the simple, binary and gen- erally unproductive differentiation, as it continued with the lines “i am masculine, feminine, schizo- phrenic, hysterical, androgynous, hermaphrodite”. this had me at the edge of my seat, looking forward to an interesting taming, one that would move beyond the traditional gendering and the female-male duality, with or without gender swap. the play started off as an almost humorous gender-swapping, in which three of the four women, who played the lovers of bianca (xander van vledder), employed over the top stereotypical behav- iour, strutting about, farting, using the middle finger, in an effort to reproduce the perception of male behaviour by overdoing clichéd perceptions. apart from playing the three lovers individually, the three (linde van den heuvel, julia lammerts and anne-chris schulting) also played the servants and, simultaneously, baptista minola as a sort of greek chorus, which added to the sense that all men more or less conspired together and turned them into an amorphous entity where any specific individual characteristics were submerged beneath their gender. the element of humour quickly dissipated, however, once petruchio (astrid van eck) entered the scene. there was precious little tenderness in this petruchio, as scary a character as any i have ever seen, with always the hint of a smile on his face and always fully in control of his actions and emotions, which only enhanced the deliberate cruelty of his actions. he dominated katherina from the start, which made for interesting viewing, as petruchio was far smaller and physically more vulnerable than katherina. it highlighted how taking on a specific gender role would determine the behaviour of both sexes. there was an element of tenderness and dignity to this katherina (roe- land fernhout) when we saw that huge body walking very uncomfortably on the high heels, shouting, but simultaneously appearing very vulnerable in the argument with her father, giving a brief, little whimper in her voice as she said “call you me daughter?” ( . . ). katherina would soon be fully broken down, however, by petruchio, and the brutality of his approach was epitomized in the scene at his house, where katherina was locked up in what looked like a transparent cubicle. the continuous sound of alarms going on, the screaming in the background, and the lights turning on and off all the time, were reminiscent of the horrible torture scenes that one sees in movies or reads about in newspapers. this was a place where persons were reduced, physically and mentally, to less than zero, and in the end, katherina was dragged out of the cabin, unconscious and broken- down. it was not until the final act that the extreme stereotyping of the first four acts moved somewhat to the background, as the actors removed their previous clothes, penises and bras and changed towards a more neutral dress, a kind of tight-fitting black body, which reduced both the stereotyping of the costumes and also the visible characteristics of gender. the characters turned more into neutral, uni- versal human beings, unidentified by gender, and the gender fluidity which the song from stereo total at the beginning seemed to foreshadow first found its place here. it was, however, rather ten- tative, and the dominant feeling left by the production was one of duality and brutality, as perhaps best epitomized in the finale. katherina was standing on top of the cubicle, as petruchio asked her to take off all of her clothes, leaving katherina fully naked on stage as she spoke her submission speech. katherina reverted visibly back to a man, as petruchio moved towards her and in what resembled a final deed of breath play, he murdered her, after which he spoke: “why, there’s a wench” ( . . ). one could explain the final words of this production in myriad ways. were these words directed towards katherina, a “wench” capable of the ultimate submission, death? were they directed towards petruchio, as a “wench” who had just murdered someone who had dared to speak these lines? none of the four people i spoke to after the performance, including the director herself, were in agreement about the final lines. and perhaps the exact meaning as such was far less important than the actual deed on stage. it was brutal, perverse, vicious, and it fit with the fatalistic, black and white taming that had gone before. on the one hand, it was fascinating to see how gender identities were revealed to be social shakespeare constructions, which, once taken on, would not only take over but also change and degenerate the individual, whether male or female. one might even perceive an element of revenge in the pro- duction, and the production fit the paradigm through which (dutch) reviewers consider the play. reviewers currently describe taming in terms such as a “disgusting play” (lems), or an “incredibly sexist play” (wensink), and this production was received enthusiastically by the media, as it com- bined excellent acting with the very topical #metoo discussion, highlighting the horrors of gender inequality, and launching a frontal attack on patriarchal society. the downside of this production, and arguably of many others in a similar vein, was the seeming inability to break down the everlast- ing binary discussion on gender. the gender fluidity that the song “komplex mit dem seks” at the start of the production seemed to promise never really materialized on stage. the production served to highlight and reproduce existing, dominant perceptions of gender, without exploring the potential of the wide variety and fluidity of individual human beings that the song at the beginning seemed to indicate, a potential that gender-swapping might help to explore. there were no solutions, only pro- blems, and a gender-determined binary straitjacket. the production was a convincing, nightmare vision of what gender did to people, but it left little wriggling room to get out of it and failed to explore beyond the stereotypical duality. references heijes, coen. “‘i am not shakespeare’s shylock’: the merchant of venice on the dutch stage.” shakespeare bulletin, vol. , no. , winter , pp. – . lems, marijn. “het temmen van de feeks. wie niet horen wil, moet maar voelen.” theaterkrant, march . stereo total. “komplex mit dem sex.” paris berlin, disko b, . the taming of the shrew, directed by justin audibert for the royal shakespeare company, . programme wensink, herien. “deze twee vrouwelijke regisseurs namen het seksistische het temmen van de feeks onder handen.” de volkskrant, february . c. heijes 	references forthcoming in journal of the american philosophical association accepted manuscript (please cite published version), copyright – american philosophical association *i thank my colleagues m.l. arvan, steven geisz, and laura kane for their invaluable feedback and support. i am also grateful to helen de cruz, two reviewers, and the editors of the journal of the american philosophical association. finally, i thank thomas christiano and gerald gaus for guidance in the early stages of this project many years ago. nonideal justice as nonideal fairness marcus arvan university of tampa marvan@ut.edu abstract: this article argues that diverse theorists have reasons to theorize about fairness in nonideal conditions, including theorists who reject fairness in ideal theory. it then develops a new all-purpose model of ‘nonideal fairness.’ § argues that fairness is central to nonideal theory across diverse ideological and methodological frameworks. § then argues that ‘nonideal fairness’ is best modeled by a nonideal original position adaptable to different nonideal conditions and background normative frameworks (including anti-rawlsian ones). § then argues that the parties to the model have grounds to seek a variety of remedial social, legal, cultural, and economic ‘nonideal primary goods’ for combating injustice, as well as grounds to distribute these goods in an equitable and inclusive manner. finally, i illustrate how the model indexes the nonideal primary goods it justifies to different nonideal contexts and background normative frameworks, illustrating why diverse theorists should find the model and its output principles attractive. key words: justice, fairness, ideal theory, nonideal theory, original position moral, social, and political theorists have increasingly focused on the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory, for good reason. first, it is vital to determine whether we should theorize about ideals—as many allege ideal theorizing is inherently problematic (farrelly ; mills ; sen ; wiens . cf. lawford-smith ; simmons ; erman and möller ; volacu ). second, if ideal theorizing should be done, there are questions of how to do it properly and distinguish it from nonideal theory (rawls a: - , - ; stemplowska ; simmons ; valentini ; volacu ). third, there is the issue of how to extend ideal theories to nonideal conditions, both generally (arvan , ; mills : - ; phillips ; simmons ; volacu ) and for specific issues, such as affirmative action (taylor ; matthew ), reparations (carcien ; espindola and vaca ), and warfare (rawls b: part ii). finally, if ideal theorizing should not be pursued, there is the question of how to theorize properly without it (sen ; wiens ). mailto:marvan@ut.edu although substantial progress has been made on these questions, this article argues that two issues remain underexplored: the extent to which fairness should be central to nonideal theorizing, and how to theorize about ‘nonideal fairness’ properly. this article argues that diverse theorists have reasons to theorize about nonideal fairness. it then defends a new all-purpose framework for determining what nonideal fairness requires. § argues that fairness is central to nonideal theory across diverse ideological and methodological frameworks. first, § . argues that fairness is central to rawlsian nonideal theory. § . then argues that fairness remains central to nonideal theory for two very different ideologies: nozickean libertarianism and marxism. here i show that although nozick rejects fairness in ideal theory, he invokes it in nonideal theory—because only fairness appears capable of resolving conflicts in his theory of rectification. i then show that an analogous point extends to marxism. finally, § . argues the point extends to the ‘nonideal-theory-only’ approaches defended by sen and wiens. although § only addresses a handful of theoretical frameworks, i use them because they are influential, ideologically and methodologically diverse, and because they illustrate a general point: that nonideal conditions give rise to conflicting claims that fairness appears necessary to adequately resolve. accordingly, although § does not establish that all theories of justice require an account of nonideal fairness, it shows that several diverse and influential frameworks do; that nonideal fairness has been undertheorized across those frameworks; and that there are general reasons to think this may be true of other (if not all ) normative frameworks. as one reviewer noted, utilitarianism is a plausible counterexample: whether it supports ‘nonideal fairness’ depends on what maximizes utility. although this is true, rawls’ influential objection to utilitarianism—that it fails to respect the ‘separateness of persons’ (rawls a: , )—may be instructive. one possibility worth examining is whether fairness is central to nonideal theory for any normative framework that adequately respects separateness of persons. however, we must set this aside for future inquiry. next, § argues that a quasi-rawlsian model of fairness applied to nonideal conditions—a generalized version of a ‘nonideal original position’ previously defended in a rawlsian context—models a conception of nonideal fairness that diverse theorists should find attractive. finally, § explores principles of nonideal justice that might emerge from the model— principles i suggest diverse theorists should find attractive as well. . fairness as central to nonideal theory some contend that justice is fairness, understanding justice in terms of substantive principles of fairness justified by a fair procedure (rawls a: § ; dworkin ). however, not everyone does. libertarians identify an ideally just order as respecting liberty (nozick : chs. - , esp. - ), and classical utilitarians contend justice involves maximizing the good (mill : ch. v)—even though both arguably justify unfair treatment (rawls a: § ; nozick : chs. - ). thus, justice and fairness may or may not be identical. nevertheless, questions of procedural and substantive fairness loom large in nonideal contexts. for example, is affirmative action just? proponents argue justice requires or permits it for ensuring fair outcomes (appiah ; beauchamp ; burns and schapper ) or fair selection-procedures (harris and narayan ). however, opponents allege it is an unfair procedure of reverse discrimination (pojman ; taylor ; mulligan ). is universal health care just? proponents often argue fairness requires readers may note similarities to mills’ ( : epilogue, esp. ) suggestion that liberalism should utilize a modified rawlsian model to address racial injustice. however, there are important differences between our projects. first, my project is broader, arguing that a modified rawlsian model should be utilized by more diverse theorists, including libertarians, marxists, and those who disagree with mills’ ( , ) critiques of ideal theory. second, the modified rawlsian apparatus defended here is a generalized form of the model previously defended in arvan ( , ), where i argue it has different implications for racial justice than mills ( : - ) suggests. it (daniels ; dworkin ), others disagree (jacobs ). what about reparations for historical injustice? proponents often argue fairness substantively requires reparations (carcien ; espindola and vaca ; coates ). however, opponents allege reparations are an unfair procedure harming the innocent (horowitz ). and world poverty? some argue fairness requires a lot from people to alleviate it (singer ); others are less certain (arvan : - ; wenar ). i will not argue here that fairness is the only normative issue in nonideal theory (cf. arvan ). the relevant point is that fairness is normatively central to debates about justice in a nonideal world. we will now see there are good reasons why. . fairness in rawlsian nonideal theory given that rawls holds that justice is fairness, fairness is surely central to rawlsian nonideal theory. what is less well-understood is what rawlsians should take ‘nonideal fairness’ to be. some contend that rawls’ principles of ideal justice should be extended to nonideal conditions ‘in spirit’ (korsgaard : – ; taylor ). further, some who presuppose this approach suggest that nonideal theory cannot save rawls’ ideal theory from common critiques (kang ). these views, however, are mistaken. as simmons ( : § ) and i (arvan : - ) argue, rawls’ ideal theory cannot be extended to nonideal conditions straightforwardly—but when it is extended properly it can address issues not addressed adequately in ideal theory, including (contra kang) affording extra concern for the interests of marginalized groups (arvan : - ). allow me to explain. in arvan ( ), i argued that because rawls assumes ‘strict-compliance’ in ideal theory, rawlsian ideal theory generates no account of what fairness requires under nonideal conditions. rawls recognized this lacuna, writing: it will be recalled that strict compliance is one of the stipulations to the original position…because the parties are choosing a conception of justice suitable for favorable conditions…the principles [of justice] define then a perfectly just scheme…but even granting the soundness of these principles for this purpose, we must still ask how well they apply to institutions under less than favorable conditions, and whether they provide any guidance for instances of injustice. the principles and their lexical order were not acknowledged with these situations in mind and so it is possible that they no longer hold (rawls a: - ; emphasis added). specifically, in his theory of domestic justice, rawls has the parties to the original position assume theirs is ‘a society in which ( ) everyone accepts and knows that others accept the same principles of justice, and ( ) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles’ (ibid: ). simmons ( : ) shows this assumption entails two possible types of domestic non-compliance: non-compliance by individuals and by institutions. to see how rawlsian ideal theory thus fails to provide an analysis of nonideal fairness, consider one case of institutional non-compliance: the present-day usa. the us fails to strictly-comply with rawls’ first principle of ideal justice. for although the us constitution nominally ascribes equal basic rights and liberties to all citizens—in conformity with rawls’ first principle—the us fails to satisfy that principle’s requirement that everyone enjoy the ‘fair value’ of those rights and liberties (rawls : ; rawls : . see also krishnamurthy , ). some ways the us plausibly fails to do so include voter suppression (bentele and o’brien ) and evisceration of the fourth amendment for minority populations (alexander : ch. ). the us also fails to satisfy rawls’ fair- equality-of-opportunity principle, which plausibly prohibits (rawls b: , ) the us’s vast disparities by race and ethnicity in education (mickelson ), health-care (williams and jackson ), incarceration (pettit and western ), and so on. finally, the us fails to satisfy rawls’ ( a: - ) difference principle, which prohibits economic inequalities not to the advantage of all, particularly the least well-off—as economic inequality in the us primarily benefits the top % (piketty and saez ). none of this is surprising. if rawls’ ideal theory of domestic justice is correct, the united states must change substantially to become fully just. but at what cost, and to whom? consider one attempt to arguably move closer to rawls’ ideal of fair equality of opportunity: the affordable care act of , the nominal aim of which is to ensure all americans have access to affordable health care. suppose the aca brought the us closer to rawlsian ideals. regardless, transition to the aca imposed costs on people that would never arise in an ideal rawlsian society. among other things, businesses and insurance companies had to take on costs of unhealthy individuals who might have been healthier if the us had a just health care system from the outset (see kocher and adashi ). the point here is simple: nonideal conditions generate ‘nonideal costs’ that would never arise under ideal conditions—costs of injustice and costs of reform. this is critical. because of rawls’ strict-compliance assumption, the parties to his ideal original position never considered any such costs, including costs from individual non- compliance. consequently, if justice is fairness (as rawls contends), rawlsians still need to provide some further account of nonideal fairness factoring in nonideal costs. finally, because rawls ( b: ) similarly predicates his law of peoples on strict-compliance, rawlsians need a theory of nonideal fairness for international affairs as well (simmons : ; cf. arvan ). . fairness in non-rawlsian nonideal theory this article cannot examine every ideological perspective. instead, let us examine two deeply opposed ideologies: nozickean libertarianism and marxism. as we will now see, both also generate clear reasons to theorize about nonideal fairness, in ways not yet fully recognized. along with rawlsianism, i use these test-cases to illustrate that across diverse and opposing ideologies, nonideal conditions give rise to conflicting claims that fairness appears necessary to adequately resolve. let us begin with robert nozick’s libertarian theory. nozick ( : - ) defends negative rights to life, liberty, and property as moral ‘side-constraints’ that cannot be permissibly violated even for protecting the same rights of others. he then argues that only a ‘minimal’ libertarian state respects these constraints (ibid: chs. - ). throughout, nozick inveighs against the idea that justice is a matter of fairness, at least in ideal theory. first, he argues against fair play—the notion (see hart ; rawls ) that persons benefitting from mutually advantageous cooperative ventures (such as a nation-state) owe acquiescence to the venture’s rules as a matter of fairness. second, nozick ( : ch. ) argues against a ‘fair distribution’ of wealth and income, contending that justice requires respect for individual property-rights. finally, nozick argues against entitlements to fair equality of opportunity, meaningful work, and non-exploitation (ibid: ch. ). given nozick’s systematic opposition to fairness in ideal theory, why should a nozickean ascribe normative force to fairness in nonideal theory? the answer, surprisingly, is in anarchy, state, and utopia. first, on the few occasions that nozick discusses nonideal theory, considerations of fairness are prominent. consider nozick’s answer to what justice requires in rectifying historical injustice. nozick claims we should reason counterfactually, asking which property-holdings individuals would have if injustice never occurred (ibid: - ). however, nozick then adds: [w]hatever difficulties [one] has in applying the principle of rectification to persons who did not violate the first two principles [of the entitlement theory of justice] are difficulties in balancing considerations so as to correctly formulate the complex principle itself; ... (ibid: ). if ‘balancing considerations’ sounds like fairness, that is because it is. later, nozick argues that because we cannot determinately trace out the effects of historically-distant injustices (e.g. we cannot know precisely which individual(s) would hold this land had native peoples never been defrauded), we must appeal to some other normative notion beyond respect for liberty. and that notion? nozick writes: perhaps it is best to view some patterned principles of distributive justice as rough rules of thumb meant to approximate the general results of applying the principle of rectification…for example, lacking much historical information, and assuming ( ) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and ( ) that those from the least well-off group…have the highest probability of being the (descendants of) victims…then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in society….although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them (ibid: - , emphases added). in essence, nozick holds that when we lack sufficient information to rectify past injustices counterfactually (viz. respect for individual liberty), we must appeal to fairness, instituting something like rawls’ difference principle because it seems like the fairest thing to do. fairness also seems implicit in nozick’s addendum that socialism ‘would go too far.’ why would it ‘go too far’? what answer can nozick plausibly give here except, ‘that amount of infringement of liberty would be unfair’? second, by investigating the normative foundations nozick gives for libertarianism, we can see there are independent reasons to think he must invoke fairness in nonideal conditions. nozick gives two justifications for libertarian side-constraints. first, nozick ( : ) suggests that they are perhaps the best interpretation of the kant’s ( : : ) requirement to never treat humanity as a mere means (cf. rawls a: § ). nozick’s second justification focuses on our ability to plan our lives and pursue our ends. he contends that insofar as these things enable us to make our lives meaningful (nozick : - ), and we care about living meaningful lives—not merely pleasant ones (ibid: - )—we have moral grounds to treat liberty as a side-constraint. we can see how both rationales apply to nozick’s (ibid: - ) public address example against fair play. nozick asks whether, even if you enjoyed others playing a public address system, justice permits others to coerce you to play it on ‘your’ assigned day. nozick claims this would be unjust, as it would deprive you of your liberty (ibid: - ). regardless of whether we agree, we can see how nozick’s two rationales for libertarian side-constraints apply: forcing you to play the address system would in his view use you as a mere means for others, making you spend one day of your life doing something you do not find meaningful. however, can nozick’s normative rationales coherently justify libertarian side- constraints in nonideal conditions? it is hard to see how. consider slavery or historical injustices toward native peoples, the downstream effects of which are still pervasive. for nozick, historical injustices invalidate any resulting distribution of property-holdings. for example, if someone’s ancestor was unjustly deprived of this land, then for nozick no one other than the original holder or their descendants is morally entitled to it. here, though, is the problem. if we do not know who would have been entitled to this land had no injustice occurred, then nozick’s counterfactual account of rectification cannot specify who is now entitled to it. on the one hand, some people (descendants of native peoples, slaves, etc.) remain disadvantaged by historical injustice, compromising their ability to freely pursue their life plans in ways that (for all we know) they might be counterfactually entitled to. on the other hand, taking land or property away from you or i would interfere without our autonomy and life plans in ways we may be counterfactually entitled to. because in cases of distant injustice we cannot know precisely who is counterfactually entitled to what, nozick’s principle of rectification—his account of what respect for liberty requires in rectifying injustice—cannot specify what nonideal justice requires. but if liberty cannot settle this, what can? as nozick’s own discussion reveals, only some notion of fairness—some notion of how much liberty it is fair for people to sacrifice to rectify distant injustices—appears capable of specifying which forms of rectification ‘go too far’ and which do not. now consider communism—the marxist notion that an ideal, non-exploitive society would conform to the dictum ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their see my discussion earlier regarding systemic inequalities of basic liberties, opportunities, and income in the us, at least some of which surely reflect historical injustice on nozick’s libertarian picture. need’ (marx ). although marx’s theory of history (‘dialectical materialism’) holds that communism must be achieved through a proletarian revolution, marxism still implies an ‘ideal theory’ of sorts. after all, marx’s complaint against all non-communist systems is that they are unfairly exploitive (ibid.; marx and engels ; cf. elster ). insofar as marx argues that communism is normatively superior to other social-political systems, marxism implies that communism is ideal. we can now see in turn why marxists should theorize about ‘nonideal fairness.’ one reason is the astonishing unfairness and brutality of past and present ‘communist’ movements, such as mass murder and starvation in soviet russia following the bolshevik revolution (rappaport : ), the great famine resulting from mao’s great leap forward (song ), and so on. of course, many might contend that leninism, stalinism, and maoism misinterpreted or misapplied marxism. however, this does not obviate the need for a theory of nonideal fairness for marxists, for two reasons. first, because different interpretations of marxism can be held and have been pursued at great human cost, a nonideal theory of fairness for those interpretations might have helped to prevent immense atrocities—by getting leninists, maoists, etc., to understand that their ideals do not justify any and every means for achieving them. second, marx’s own theory of a proletarian revolution lacks an adequate account of the costs people should face in transition to communism. given marx’s normative opposition to unfair exploitation, moral consistency requires applying the same standard to transition: a marxist conception of ‘nonideal fairness’ (which i explore in § ). thus, across diverse frameworks—rawlsianism, nozickean libertarianism, and marxism—we observe similar issues. first, because each framework’s ideals abstract away from ‘nonideal costs’, each tradition needs to provide a normatively coherent and plausible account of how nonideal costs should be addressed. second, we have seen that on all three frameworks, only fairness appears capable of fulfilling this role—because ‘nonideal costs’ give rise to conflicting claims that other notions (like liberty) appear normatively insufficient to resolve. finally, we can see how the argument plausibly extends to other ideal theories. insofar as ideal theories focus on ideal conditions—abstracting away from nonideal costs and conflicting claims they generate—normatively forceful questions about nonideal fairness seem likely arise relative to other ideal theories as well. . fairness in nonideal-theory-only frameworks similar issues arise even for ‘nonideal-theory-only’ approaches to social and political theory. for example, amartya sen ( ) argues for reasoning about justice using comparative judgments, normatively evaluating actions and institutions based on their effects on human capabilities. similarly, wiens ( ) argues for focusing on institutional failure analysis— that is, on ways institutions generate problematic social outcomes, and ways to correct such failures. however, these accounts also need some further account of nonideal fairness. to see how, suppose we judge the current us health-care system to be comparatively worse than universal health-care (qua sen), perhaps because current institutions generate problematic outcomes (qua wiens). nevertheless, any transition to a system of universal health-care is going to impose costs on people, such as shifting tax burdens, putting insurance companies out of business, insurance adjusters out of jobs, etc. these costs raise questions of fairness not adequately addressed by sen’s or wiens’ methods. first, there are questions of fairness in weighing ‘comparatively better states of affairs’ or ‘better institutions’ against transition-costs. second, there are questions of fairness in distribution—of how transition-costs should be distributed across individuals, groups, or nations in social reform. consequently, nonideal-theory-only theorists also need a further theory of nonideal fairness: a theory of the costs it is fair to impose upon people for bringing about a comparatively better world. . nonideal justice as nonideal fairness we have seen that diverse theoretical traditions need an account of nonideal fairness. nonideal conditions give rise to ‘nonideal costs’—to conflicting claims inadequately addressed in ideal theory or by standard ‘nonideal-theory-only’ methods—that fairness appears normatively necessary to resolve. however, what would a compelling analysis of nonideal fairness look like? such an analysis intuitively needs to do several things. first, it should hold everyone in nonideal conditions to whichever duties of justice we might conditionally establish prior to factoring ‘nonideal costs.’ such duties may be specified in two ways. first, they might be specified by ideal theory. as we have seen, ideal theories define ideal conditions by abstracting away from nonideal costs: rawls derives his principles of ideal justice from an assumption of strict-compliance; nozick derives his ideal libertarian state from the assumption that libertarian side-constraints are never violated; and so on. because ideal theories abstract away from nonideal costs, they at most establish conditional duties— duties to bring about ideal conditions (relative to whichever ideal theory is assumed) all things being equal. alternatively, if ideal theory is rejected, conditional duties may be arrived at through ‘nonideal-theory-only’ methods—for instance, through sen’s method of comparative evaluation or wiens’ institutional-failure analysis. however, as we saw in § . , these methods also only establish conditional duties of justice. sen’s method at most specifies which end-states would be comparatively more just (abstracting away from transition-costs), and wiens’ method only tells us which institutions are failing and which institutions might work better (not which transition-costs are fair to impose upon people). consequently, a good model of nonideal fairness should not only include or ‘plug in’ whichever conditional duties of justice are established by other methods. it should also (i) model a fair procedure for, (ii) weighing such conditional duties against ‘nonideal costs’, and for (iii) justifying substantive conclusions about what fairness requires in nonideal conditions taking these matters into consideration. such a model, if constructed, would appear to comprise a compelling all-purpose analysis of nonideal fairness for two reasons: . it could be fruitfully attached to a diverse variety of ideological or methodological frameworks, inserting whichever conditional duties one’s favored theoretical framework affirms. . it would constitute a fair procedure for arriving at substantive principles of nonideal fairness on two critical issues we have seen other frameworks elide: (i) fairness in weighing conditional duties of justice against nonideal costs (and, by extension, weighing nonideal costs against each other), and (ii) fairness in distributing nonideal costs in social reform. can we construct such a model? in arvan ( ), i argued that a variant of rawls’ original position—a ‘nonideal original position’—does just this. although i only developed the model in a rawlsian context, we will now see that it can be generalized (cf. arvan ). for let us look at the model in detail. first, i proposed we imagine the parties to the nonideal original position as situated behind a ‘nonideal veil of ignorance’—a variant of rawls’ veil of ignorance applied to nonideal conditions instead of strict-compliance (arvan : - ). for example, in the case of rawls’ theory of domestic justice, the relevant parties to the nonideal original position would be all citizens of a particular state (say, the us) behind a veil of ignorance applied to the conditions of noncompliance in their society (giving them general knowledge of its injustices). the nonideal veil of ignorance then withholds from the parties any self- identifying information about which citizen (present or future) they might actually be. consequently, the nonideal original position models a fair method whereby no relevant individuals can arbitrarily privilege themselves in nonideal conditions over anyone else. next, i proposed the parties behind the nonideal veil are to all have rawlsian ideals as all-things-equal motivations (ibid: - ). this models the fact that rawlsian ideal theory (if correct) establishes ‘conditional’ duties of justice. because, as we saw earlier, rawlsian ideal theory entirely abstracts away from nonideal costs, everyone in the nonideal original position ought to regard themselves under a duty to pursue rawlsian ideals, but also as free to weigh those ideals against nonideal costs—since again, nothing in rawlsian ideal theory addressed such costs (ibid: - ). thus formulated, the nonideal original position superficially appears to contain a contradiction (ibid: , ). its parties are all stipulated to have rawlsian ideals behind the veil, while deliberating as though they could turn out to be any actual individual in nonideal conditions. because many actual individuals are not motivated by rawlsian ideals, this seemingly implies the parties to the model all have motive x (rawlsian ideals) but might not have x—an apparent inconsistency. however, this contradiction is illusory. because the parties behind the veil are stipulated to deliberate from rawlsian ideals, the model represents the commonsense idea that justice in a nonideal world requires holding everyone to their duties to pursue a more just world even if, in actuality, they are not motivated to do so (ibid: ). putting these two components together—the parties’ motives and the nonideal veil of ignorance—i argued that the model represents an important step forward in rawlsian theory. it provides rawlsians a fair procedure for weighing nonideal costs against rawlsian ideals, and for distributing nonideal costs fairly. non-rawlsians might wonder why, if they reject rawls’ original position in ideal theory, they should accept it as a model of fairness in nonideal theory. the answer, i will now argue, is that the nonideal original position represents an attractive model of nonideal fairness relative to diverse ideological and methodological commitments. for notice: the normative rationales for each component of the nonideal original position are perfectly general. the nonideal original position is a compelling model of nonideal fairness not because rawls’ theoretical apparatus implies it, but because it accomplishes several things we should want any nonideal theory of fairness to do—namely: (a) hold people normatively to whichever conditional duties of justice they have. (b) provide a fair procedure for weighing nonideal costs against those conditional duties and against each other. (c) provide a fair procedure for deliberating to substantive principles of fairness for distributing nonideal costs. we can see this by returning to anti-rawlsian frameworks. for example, what should a nozickean be looking for in nonideal theory? as we saw in § . , they should look to hold everyone to a duty to support libertarian ideals and a principle of rectification, but then give some principled analysis of which nonideal costs it is fair to impose upon people for rectifying historical wrongs. now consider marxism. what should a marxist want in nonideal i thank laura kane for pressing this concern. theory? as we saw in § . , they should want to hold everyone in nonideal conditions to a duty to support communism, while providing some principled analysis of which nonideal costs it is fair to impose upon people in transitioning toward communism. and what sort of model should a ‘nonideal-theory-only’ theorist (e.g. sen, wiens, etc.) be looking for? as we saw in § . , they should look to hold people to duties to support comparatively more just conditions (qua sen) or rectify institutional failures (qua wiens), but then provide some principled analysis of nonideal costs it is fair to impose upon people in pursuit of these duties. in each case, these are the very questions the nonideal original position provides a fair procedure for addressing. relative to whichever conditional duties one plugs into the model, the nonideal original position models a fair procedure for deliberating to substantive principles of nonideal fairness. the nonideal original position is thus an all-purpose method for engaging in volacu’s ( ) proposed process of ‘incremental derivation’ in nonideal theory. first, the model can be applied to any set of nonideal conditions—to rawlsian partial-compliance theory, unfavorable conditions theory, or 'no-circumstances-of-justice theory’ (see arvan : - ); to simmons’ various forms of noncompliance (simmons : ); to unjust international conditions (cf. arvan ); to historical injustices (viz. nozickean rectification); and so on. second, it may be applied to specific issues within nonideal theory: to affirmative action, poverty, warfare, etc. finally, as we have seen it can be applied using although in one sense the nonideal original position ‘idealizes’—modeling everyone under nonideal conditions in a position of fairness—that does not make it an ‘ideal theory.’ any normative theory—including theories of how we should respond to a nonideal world—will have to idealize in some way, telling us what would be fair in a given set of conditions. the salient question, volacu ( ) points out, is not whether a model idealizes but whether its idealizations accurately represent relevant normative considerations. the point of this article is that the nonideal original position correctly represents normative considerations relevant to determining what is fair in nonideal conditions. different ideals (nozickean ideals, marxist ideals, etc.) or nonideal-theoretic methods (sen’s comparative-justice analysis, wiens’ institutional failure analysis, etc.). . what nonideal fairness might be which principles of nonideal fairness might emerge from the nonideal original position? the short answer is it seems likely to justify different principles for different nonideal conditions—as different conditions (e.g. injustice in modern democracies, injustices in slave states, warfare, etc.) pose different challenges and possibilities. however, there are prima facie reasons to think the principles it is likely to generate will have certain commonalities regardless of nonideal context or which conditional duties are utilized. to see how, consider how in previous work i filled in the deliberative situation of the parties in the rawlsian case. first, i argued (arvan : - ) that because ideal theory establishes conditional duties, and the veil of ignorance enables the parties to weigh those duties against nonideal costs, the parties have three higher-order interests behind the nonideal veil: . bringing people in nonideal conditions who oppose or are ambivalent to rawlsian ideals to instead support and pursue those ideals—including the priority relations rawls ( a: - ) ascribes to his principles of ideal justice. . enabling everyone who has rawlsian ideals to rationally weigh those ideals against nonideal costs (and nonideal costs against each other). . enabling everyone who rationally weighs rawlsian ideals against nonideal costs to effectively advance their most favored weighting thereof. although these higher-order interests could lead the parties to different principles of nonideal justice for different conditions (e.g. slavery, warfare, etc.), they reveal the parties have similar deliberative concerns across nonideal contexts: promoting rawlsian ideals, rationally weighing them against costs, etc. notice, next, that these three interests are highly intuitive vis-à-vis what justice requires in a nonideal world. the first interest tells us that justice requires ‘changing the hearts and minds’ of people who lack the right ideals. although in previous work i presupposed rawlsian ideals, i need not have. if we were to build different ideals into the model (e.g. nozickean ideals, marxist ideals, etc.), the parties to it would have analogous interests relative to those other ideals: interests in changing people’s values in favor of whichever ideals (rawlsian, nozickean, marxist, etc.) one takes to be correct. this implication of the model is highly intuitive: bringing people to support the right ideals has been the aim of (roughly) every reform movement in history. now consider the second higher-order interest. it tells us that people in nonideal conditions have legitimate interests in rationally weighing ideals against nonideal costs, and nonideal costs against each other. this too is highly intuitive. whether it be affirmative action, reparations, or warfare, one major point of debates about justice in a nonideal world is how people should weigh just end-results (e.g. reparations, fair equality of opportunity, etc.) against costs. finally, the third interest tells us that nonideal justice involves enabling everyone who has the right ideals to have a (fair) say over the costs people should have to face for the sake of bringing about a better world. this is intuitive too, as fairness must take into account everyone’s legitimate interests, not arbitrarily privileging some people’s interests over others (though, as we will see, the parties may have fair grounds given the veil for favoring some people’s interests). here, then, is the key point: the same rationales for analogous higher-order interests exist relative to whichever normative framework we plug into the model (nozickean libertarianism, marxism, ‘nonideal-theory-only’ frameworks, and so on). given that, as we have seen, we can attach any of these normative frameworks to the model—let us call whichever theory is plugged-in theory t—the higher-order interests the parties to any nonideal original position should have are these: . bringing people in nonideal conditions who oppose or are ambivalent to theory t to support and pursue the conditional duties affirmed by it (‘t-duties’)—including any required weightings or priority-relations between t-duties. . enabling everyone motivated by t-duties to rationally weigh their t-duties against nonideal costs, and different nonideal costs against each other. . enabling everyone who rationally weighs t-duties against nonideal costs to effectively advance their most favored weighting thereof. as such, the deliberative situation of the parties should be similar irrespective of which normative theoretical framework one plugs into the model, indexing the parties’ higher- order interests to that model’s normative requirements. one important issue here is how t-duties may constrain how the parties should interpret their higher-order interests. consider luck-egalitarianism, which requires minimizing inequalities resulting from certain forms of luck, e.g. ‘brute bad luck’ (see knight ). if this is luck-egalitarianism’s fundamental social-political principle, the parties to a luck-egalitarian nonideal original position should take this t-duty to be a hard constraint that they cannot permissibly weigh against other things. still, there are reasons to believe that within such a constraint, important further questions about nonideal fairness arise for luck-egalitarians. to see how, consider two principles of nonideal justice that would equally i thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to examine these matters. minimize brute bad luck—one principle that minimizes brute bad luck quickly but with immense immediate costs (e.g. violent revolution), and another principle that equally minimizes brute bad luck more slowly with less-severe momentary costs spread out over a much longer period of time (viz. incremental reform). although both principles may equally minimize the total amount of brute bad luck in the world, there is still a further question of which distribution fairness requires. finally, although luck egalitarians might attempt to settle this question by other means—perhaps by arguing that luck egalitarianism requires lowering each person’s brute bad luck below some threshold (ibid: )—the nonideal original position provides a powerful new model for examining what fairness requires here. now turn to the next step that my previous work defended in a rawlsian context. in arvan ( : - ), i argued that given their three higher-order interests, the parties to a rawlsian nonideal original position should seek all-purpose ‘nonideal primary goods’ for advancing their higher-order interests’ are there any such goods? i argued there are, and will now defend additional ones, showing how the model can index them to different normative frameworks. first, i argued one nonideal primary good is the opportunity to participate effectively in grassroots social movements organized around rawlsian ideals (ibid: - ). this, very roughly, is because ‘people are power.’ if one wants to change ‘hearts and minds’ in a nonideal world (viz. the parties’ first higher-order interest) and advance one’s favored rational weightings of ideals against costs (viz. their second and third interests), one all- purpose means is to get ‘allies’—which grassroots groups provide. second, i argued that because nothing in rawls’ ideal-theoretic machinery dealt with nonideal costs, we must use the nonideal original position to determine which interests of bystanders (and even members of oppressing classes) are fair to be concerned with in nonideal conditions (ibid: , - , - ). next, i argued that because that because the parties’ higher-order interests are to enable anyone who has rawlsian ideals to promote those ideals, rationally weigh them against costs, etc., the parties have grounds to treat a kind of qualified openness and inclusivity in grassroots deliberation to be a second nonideal primary good (ibid: - ). specifically, the parties have grounds behind the veil to want grassroots deliberation to be open and receptive to anyone demonstrating sincere allegiance to rawlsian ideals— enabling any such individuals (i.e. ‘allies’) to have a say on how rawlsian ideals are promoted, weighed against costs, etc. finally, however, i argued there are also grounds for the parties to agree to a principle affording extra bargaining power in grassroots deliberation to victims of injustice in proportion to their level of oppression (ibid: ). this is because every party behind the veil knows that oppressed individuals suffer unjust deprivations— deprivations that, given their rawlsian ideals, the parties should want to compensate. how might additional bargaining power for the more oppressed be achieved in practice? in a number of ways, including greater proportion of more oppressed individuals in grassroots organizations relative to less-oppressed or non-oppressed allies; greater representation in leadership positions; group norms that require ‘centering’ voices of the more oppressed in debate and deliberation (see goodkind and deacon ); or even differential voting rights in the group, e.g. plural votes. whether some ways of weighting bargaining power are more fair than others (or even unfair) is an important further issue. one possibility i intend to explore in future work is how one substantive requirement defended in this article—that the oppressed and their allies should seek overlapping consensus—might be used to evaluate the fairness of different means of weighting bargaining. before examining other nonideal primary goods—ranging from social rights and duties to remedial legal, cultural, and economic goods—notice that although i developed the above arguments in a rawlsian context, the parties to alternative versions of the model (e.g. a nozickean version, marxist one, etc.) have reasons to seek analogous nonideal primary goods. first, just as the parties to a rawlsian nonideal original position should want to ‘change hearts and minds’ to favor rawlsian ideals, parties to a nozickean nonideal original position should want to change hearts and minds in favor of libertarian ideals; parties to a marxist version should want to change hearts and minds to favor communist ideals; etc. second, just as the parties to a rawlsian version of the model should regard open and inclusive rawlsian grassroots groups as all-purpose means for advancing their higher-order interests, parties to a nozickean version should regard open and inclusive libertarian groups as all-purpose means for doing so relative to their ideals; etc. although my arguments for these ‘social’ nonideal primary goods may be debated— and i defend additional nonideal primary goods below—the general point is that irrespective of which normative framework the nonideal original position is attached to, its parties have rational grounds to seek certain types of all-purpose goods: specifically, goods for advancing three higher-order interests indexed to their t-duties. several points here are important. first, the ‘social’ nonideal primary goods identified so far seem independently attractive. grassroots movements and deliberation have long been identified as a primary nexus of nonideal justice. for instance, liberals tend to identify racial and gender justice with the aims of various civil rights movements; marxists tend to identify nonideal justice with the aims of communist revolutionary groups; libertarians with fiscally conservative grassroots movements (e.g. the ‘tea party’); etc. second, the nonideal primary goods defended so far have important normative implications. for example, one longstanding question of procedural fairness is whether and to what extent social activism should be open and inclusive. during the ’s civil rights movement, whereas martin luther king jr. advocated for including whites in activism— while also calling out those who upheld injustice or stood on the sidelines (king )— many in the black power movement advocated against inclusivity (see ture ). similar debates continue today (see e.g. desmond-harris ; pollitt ). irrespective of whether my arguments from the model to openness and inclusivity are sound—though i believe they are—the more central point is that the nonideal original positions offers a powerful all-purpose method for rigorously investigating what fairness requires here. third, the model can be used to derive procedural and substantive requirements for another class of social nonideal primary goods: interpersonal rights and duties. such rights and duties have long been at the center of feminist theory and activism, as reflected in arguments for rights to freedom from epistemic injustice (see fricker ; kidd et al ) and duties to trust particular standpoints or forms of testimony (khader ; mckinnon ). further, such rights and duties can clearly advance the three higher-order interests of the parties to the model—viz. pursuing their t-duties, enabling people to rationally weigh t-duties against nonideal costs, etc. however, the parties to the model should not know behind the veil which particular social rights and duties they favor. the reason why is simple: not everyone the parties represent in nonideal conditions has the same views or accepts the same arguments about which social rights and duties best advance their higher-order interests. consequently, instead of agreeing upon a determinate list of social rights and duties, the parties appear to have grounds behind the veil for favoring a fair real-world procedure for settling which social rights and duties people have: a procedure giving every individual the parties might be a fair say over which rights and duties people have. we also already have the beginnings of what the parties should take such a procedure to be: open and inclusive grassroots deliberation guided by their t-duties and affording extra bargaining power to the oppressed. why? again, because such a procedure would, if implemented, give every person the parties might be opportunities to have a say in activist deliberation over what people’s rights and duties should be, given their t-duties and nonideal costs. finally, as we will now see, the parties also have grounds to favor a further substantive requirement to help ensure deliberation generates rights and duties fair to all. recall that the parties are to deliberate behind the veil as though they could be anyone in nonideal conditions motivated by t-duties: not just members of oppressed populations, but also bystanders and sympathetic members of oppressing classes—‘allies’ to the oppressed who also face nonideal costs (of social reform) they would never face in ideal conditions. because the parties deliberate on the assumption they could be any such individuals—and will not want to have their interests ignored or dominated once the veil is raised—the parties have grounds to want no subgroup’s interests to dominate the others. to be clear, the parties do have compensatory grounds to afford extra bargaining power to the oppressed to compensate for oppression. the point is simply that relative to that extra bargaining power, the parties have grounds to want deliberation to result in an overlapping consensus (see rawls : part ii, lecture iv): specifically, agreements on social rights and duties that no one, neither the oppressed nor their allies, considers unfairly exploitive. four points are important here. first, notice how well the basic procedural element of this account—settling social rights and duties by grassroots deliberation—coheres with how activism is already widely understood. grassroots activism, ranging from historical civil rights movements to #metoo, has long focused on precisely these issues: that is, on publicly debating, negotiating, and enforcing which social rights and duties people have in combatting injustice (see e.g. desmond-harris ). second, if i am correct, the model justifies important procedural and substantive constraints on activism to ensure no one is unfairly exploited. it requires activism to be open and inclusive to all those who demonstrate commitment to their t-duties, and for activism to seek consensus agreements on social rights and duties, albeit ones ‘tugged’ substantially in the direction of the interests of oppressed via extra bargaining power (viz. means outlined earlier). third, although my arguments to these conclusions may be debated—raising important further questions about how to ensure that the interests of the oppressed are prioritized rather than displaced by the interests of more privileged allies (or worse) —the most relevant point again is that the model provides a powerful new framework for rigorously examining what fairness requires here. finally, as we will now see, the parties also have grounds to seek several additional nonideal primary goods: remedial legal, economic and cultural protections. consider the national labor relations act (nlra) of , which created legal rights and procedures designed to correct ‘inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers…’ (nlra, title , ch. , subchapter ii u.s.c.: § ). similarly, consider the civil rights act of , which created laws and procedures to protect us citizens against unfair discrimination. neither act of congress would presumably be necessary in an ideal rawlsian society that strictly complied with rawls’ two principles of ideal justice. instead, the nlra i thank laura kane for encouraging me to recognize these concerns. and civil rights act afford people remedial legal rights and opportunities—ones that serve to advance all three higher-order interests of the parties to a (rawlsian) nonideal original position. first, the nlra and civil rights act both plausibly promote rawlsian ideals of economic fairness and equal basic rights and liberties (higher-order interest ). second, both acts created institutions—the national labor relations board and us commission on civil rights—whose roles include disseminating information about the remedial rights and opportunities established. insofar as such information is an all-purpose means for people to rationally weigh nonideal costs against rawlsian ideals, both acts advance the parties’ second higher-order interest. finally, the nlra and civil rights act give people all-purpose legal means for advancing their favored weighting of rawlsian ideals against nonideal costs (higher-order interest ). for example, the nlra does not require people to utilize the legal rights and opportunities it provides. rather, it affords all citizens legal rights and opportunities to pursue unionization if they judge the nonideal costs to be worth it. the civil rights act plays similar functions for combatting unjust discrimination. whether these particular acts of congress advance the parties’ higher-order interests better than all other alternative remedial legal rights requires further investigation. the relevant points for now are that the parties clearly should pursue some such remedial legal goods, and the model provides a formal framework for evaluating which remedial rights best advance the parties’ interests given the veil. these implications are important. first, they cohere with the fact that remedial legal rights and opportunities have been implemented in the us and elsewhere for broadly the reasons identified by the model. second, the nonideal original position is a powerful model justifying different remedial legal rights and opportunities across different nonideal contexts and ideological frameworks. for example, in previous work i suggested that parties to an international nonideal original position have grounds to agree upon a higher-order human right: very roughly, a right of oppressed peoples to collectively determine through fair international institutions (e.g. un consultation) the costs they should have face for the sake of promoting their first-order human rights (see arvan : chs. - ). if correct, this could be an important contribution to international theory and practice—as such a right might serve, if embedded in international law and practice, to protect oppressed peoples against unfair forms of ‘humanitarian’ intervention. third, as we will now see, the nonideal original position justifies different remedial legal rights and opportunities depending on which normative framework we conjoin with it. for example, suppose nozickean libertarianism is correct, and we plug libertarian t- duties into the model: duties to rectify historical injustices and respect individual liberty. given these motives, the parties to a nozickean version of the model have grounds to reject the national labor relations act as a remedial legal right, at least in its current form. this is because central features of the nlra are fundamentally inimical to respect for individual liberty. for one thing, the nlra makes a majority vote to unionize legally binding on all employees in a bargaining unit, restricting the liberty of those who would prefer to opt out (nlra: sec. , § , a & b). although the parties to a nozickan nonideal original position might consider this restriction on liberty given their t-duty to rectify historical injustice, it nevertheless conflicts with their conditional t-duty to respect individual liberty. consequently, the parties to the nozickean model have grounds to consider alternatives to ibid: - . to take one example, one of many justifications the united states gave for its invasion of iraq was the right of the iraqi people to freedom from tyranny. the nlra that might rectify injustice while better respecting liberty. one alternative might be a revised version of the nlra—one creating legal rights and opportunities to unionize but also legal rights for individuals to opt out. although this alternative might undermine the effectiveness of collective bargaining (viz. rectification), it would better respect individual liberty. consequently, the parties to the nozickean model should probably consider both alternatives (as well as any other relevant alternatives), and decide which to favor by reference to whichever decisionmaking rule—maximin or otherwise—is rational given the veil of ignorance. by a similar token, parties to a marxist nonideal original position should presumably seek very different remedial legal rights and opportunities. given their communist ideals, they should plausibly favor something like an ‘employee ownership act’ designed to increase worker ownership of corporations while giving people legal rights and opportunities to influence the nonideal costs they face in the process. finally, the parties have clear grounds to seek ‘economic and cultural’ nonideal primary goods—remedial policies and institutions designed to provide all-purpose cultural and economic support for effectively utilizing their other nonideal primary goods. one plausible institutional example is the naacp legal defense and educational fund, a non- governmental social institution that provides unjustly marginalized populations with legal, educational, and economic assistance in areas ranging from affirmative action to coalition building, policy research, voting, fair housing, and criminal justice. a plausible policy example is welfare for the unemployed—which parties to a rawlsian nonideal original position should presumably want to promote rawlsian ideals (viz. fair equality of opportunity); parties to a nozickean version might favor for rectification but tailor to libertarian ideals (viz. their t-duty to respect liberty); etc. because the creation and maintenance of remedial legal, cultural, and economic goods carry nonideal costs of their own, the parties to the nonideal original position should deliberate about these matters as well. two obvious possibilities present themselves here. first, the parties might agree upon priority relations among nonideal primary goods. for instance, insofar as grassroots activism is an all-purpose method for individuals to influence the costs they should endure for creating remedial legal, economic, and cultural protections, the parties might favor prioritizing their social primary goods (i.e. fair grassroots deliberation). a second possibility is the parties might use a particular decisionmaking rule (e.g. maximin) to decide these matters, holding that nonideal primary goods should be distributed in whichever way is maximally advantageous to the most oppressed. further development of these ideas must wait for another day. the point for now is that there are systematic reasons to believe that the nonideal original position is an attractive and powerful model for deriving procedural and substantive principles of nonideal fairness relative to whichever broader normative framework it is conjoined with. conclusion this article argued that fairness is normatively central to nonideal theory. it then argued that diverse theorists have grounds to adopt a new method for investigating nonideal fairness: a ‘nonideal original position.’ finally, this article outlined grounds for believing the model can be used to derive principles of nonideal fairness indexed to different normative frameworks and nonideal contexts—principles that cohere with moral commonsense, the history of activism, and contemporary legal practice, while also promising more controversial forms of normative guidance. for these reasons, i submit that theorists of diverse backgrounds should take interest in and examine the model further in future research. marcus arvan university of tampa marvan@ut.edu mailto:marvan@ut.edu references alexander, m. 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( ). ‘social sources of racial disparities in health.’ health affairs, ( ): - . adv. geosci., , – , https://doi.org/ . /adgeo- - - © author(s) . this work is distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. drawing everyday sexism in academia: observations and analysis of a community-based initiative marie bocher , martina ulvrova , maëlis arnould , nicolas coltice , claire mallard , mélanie gérault , and alice adenis institute of geophysics, department of earth sciences, eth zurich, zurich, switzerland centre for earth evolution and dynamics, university of oslo, oslo, norway laboratoire de géologie, ecole normale supérieure, paris, france earthbyte research group, school of geosciences, the university of sydney, sydney, australia earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, mit, cambridge, usa dataswati, massy, ile-de-france, france correspondence: did this really happen?! team (mail.didthisreallyhappen@gmail.com) received: november – accepted: february – published: april abstract. sexist behaviour in the workplace contributes to create a hostile environment, hindering the chance of women and gender non-conforming individuals to pursue an aca- demic career, but also reinforcing gender stereotypes that are harmful to their progress and recognition. the did this re- ally happen?! project aims at publishing real-life, everyday sexism in the form of comic strips. its major goal is to raise awareness about unconscious biases that transpire in every- day interactions in academia and increase the visibility of sexist situations that arise within the scientific community, especially to those who might not notice it. through the web- site didthisreallyhappen.net, we collect testimonies about ev- eryday sexism occurring in the professional academic envi- ronment (universities, research institutes, scientific confer- ences. . . ). we translate these stories into comics and pub- lish them anonymously without any judgement or comments on the website. by now, we have collected over tes- timonies. from this collection, we identified six recurrent patterns: ( ) behaviours that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical feminine roles, ( ) behaviours that aim at main- taining men in stereotypical masculine roles, ( ) the ques- tioning of the scientific skills of female researchers, ( ) situ- ations where women have the position of an outsider, espe- cially in informal networking contexts, ( ) the objectification of women, and ( ) the expression of neosexist views. we first present a detailed analysis of these categories, then we report on the different ways we interact and engage with the earth science community, the scientific community at large and the public in this project. introduction as in the rest of society, sexism is still pervasive in academia (troy, ). most stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are traditionally male- dominated and the diverse expressions of gender bias tend to maintain this status quo (williams et al., ; asplund and welle, ). this is the case for earth and planetary sci- ences where women represent between % and % of the academic community (according to numbers on american geophysical union (agu) fall meeting participation from to (ford et al., ), on european geosciences union (egu) general assembly and agu fall meeting par- ticipation in (popp et al., ) and a volunteer-based survey of the gender of abstract first authors at the egu gen- eral assembly ). gender bias contributes to this underrepresentation in three ways. first, it can lead to discrimination during recruit- ment (moss-racusin et al., ; sheltzer and smith, ), promotion (régner et al., ), grant evaluation (kaatz et al., ) and the article reviewing process (lerback and hanson, ) although their role in the underrepresentation of women in academia has been contested (ceci et al., ). second, it can lead to an underestimation of female achieve- published by copernicus publications on behalf of the european geosciences union. m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia ments, merits and performance (dutt et al., ; chávez and mitchell, ). finally, sexist behaviours and sexual harassment have a deterrent effect for female and gender- nonconforming individuals when considering attending spe- cific events or even pursuing an academic career (john et al., ; clancy et al., ; biggs et al., ; moss-racusin et al., ; dyer et al., ). ignoring gender bias does not make it disappear. on the contrary, in a statistical analysis of the national promotion scheme of french cnrs researchers, régner et al. ( ) showed that women’s promotion was less frequent when aca- demic committees did not believe in the existence of gender bias. that corroborates other studies showing that individuals who believe that they are objective show more bias (uhlmann and cohen, ). likewise, merely stating that an institu- tion is meritocratic has been shown to lead to more gender bias in promotion decisions (castilla and benard, ). institutional measures that address the mechanism of gen- der bias and improve gender diversity in academia are well documented (e.g. moss-racusin et al., ; monroe et al., ; greider et al., ; buitendijk et al., ; williams, ). however, one necessary condition of the application of such measures is that the earth science community at large, and especially those in a situation of power are con- vinced that they are needed and that they are a priority. that is why we consider that the recognition and apprehension of gender bias (implicit or explicit) is still a crucial factor to reach gender parity and equality of treatment in the earth science community. the project did this really happen?! (dtrh) emerged from the need to share experiences of gender bias, first as earth scientists, within our laboratory and with our direct col- laborators and colleagues (bedford, ). we are a team of seven scientists, of which six are early-career women, formed in around a research project studying the dynamics of the earth’s mantle convection and plate tectonics. initially, we started discussing gender biases during internal group meetings and realised that we had all encountered similar sexist jokes since the start of the project. to dig deeper into this topic, we invited two members of the local university diversity and equality service: philippe liotard and chloé schweyer to our discussions. in the meantime, the principal investigator (pi) of the project was solicited to talk about the management of his team at an egu general assembly ses- sion and we decided to present our experiences as a mostly feminine research team (coltice and bocher, ). in , we presented a second poster at the same session (arnould et al., ), on which we decided to draw comics about the sexist situations faced by each of us, thanks to the talent of alice adenis (adenis, ) who had joined the team in the meantime. this was initially a way to draw people’s attention to our stories. given the success of the poster and the comic strips, we decided to extend the project by collecting sex- ist stories from the academic community, and turning these stories into comics. in doing so, we want to give greater vis- ibility to this problem, which many scientists face. one of the challenges to bring awareness about gender bias issues is that prejudice tends to be minimised by peo- ple who are not concerned or benefit from it. for exam- ple, males tend to doubt and question studies showing gen- der bias more than women do (handley et al., ). more anecdotally, this is illustrated by a comment we received on our facebook page: “having been to lots of science confer- ences (and being a man) i have never encountered this sort of attitude, but i guess it exists, unfortunately.” moreover, although efforts have been globally conducted to improve male-female equity, the results of haines et al. ( ) seem to indicate very limited changes in gender stereotypes since the s. based on our experience, we acknowledge that it is difficult to recognise gender-stereotypical behaviours: such behaviours are deeply anchored in our society, our cultural habits, our education and are, therefore “internalised by both men and women” (hentschel et al., ). however, iden- tifying a situation as sexist is the first step to interventions (ashburn-nardo and abdul karim, ; valian, ). we believe that comics and illustrations of what everyday sexism looks like provide a complementary approach to statistics of real-life experiences and accounts of controlled experiments to raise awareness about unconscious biases. the core of the did this really happen?! project is de- scriptive: we want to show concrete examples of everyday sexism in academia, following the idea that it is easier and more recreational to read a comic strip rather than a plain text about a sexist behaviour. although our collection of comic strips does not cover the whole range of sexist situ- ations encountered in academia, we believe it can serve as a support for further discussions on the topic. we collect tes- timonies of sexism happening in academia via the website https://didthisreallyhappen.net/ (last access: march , dtrh team, a), and translate them into comics. the process of creating a comic strip from collected testimonies and an analysis of the testimonies received so far are pro- vided in sect. . we have also experimented with differ- ent ways to communicate on the project in various contexts to improve consciousness on sexist biases. we report on our communication and community engagement activities in sect. and comment on their impact. further, we put our project in a larger context of describing the different types of sexism in academia and finding strategies to minimise gender biases at different levels in our society in sect. . treatment, classification and analysis of received testimonies testimonies of everyday sexism in academia are mainly col- lected through our website platform, although the first testi- monies were gathered from our own experiences. figure shows the procedure to process a testimony. it ensures that adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / https://didthisreallyhappen.net/ m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . procedure of creation of a comic strip from the testimony of a given contributor. all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. dtrh stands for did this really happen?!. the comic strips are depicting the situation as experienced by the contributor who contacted us while preserving their anonymity. first, we collectively assess the validity of each received testimony using three main criteria: ( ) the story de- picts a situation of sexist bias, ( ) the story is different from the comic strip that has already been published ( ) it is pos- sible to tell this story within a short strip of maximum five drawings. upon acceptance of each testimony, we write a sto- ryboard for artist alice adenis who draws the corresponding comic strip. before and after the drawing stage, we exchange with the contributor to verify the realism of the expressions of all characters in the cartoon and the faithful depiction of the drawn situations. we also ensure that the desired level of anonymity is respected. after final approval of the comic strip by the contributor and members of the team, it is pub- lished and advertised on both our website and social media. in this section, we present a description and propose a clas- sification of the different types of sexism that appear in the collected testimonies. since we rely on voluntary self-report and advertise our initiative through personal and professional networks, this classification should not be interpreted as an exhaustive list of all existing sexist biases, but rather as a synthetic way to interpret the testimonies that we received so far. . received stories and proposed classification between and , we received testimonies, from which we accepted stories. so far, stories have been turned into comic strips and published online on our web- page. two of them ( . %) were written by men while stories (representing . % of all accepted contribu- tions) were shared by women. interestingly, most of the re- ceived testimonies are proposed by both early-career scien- tists (post-doctoral fellows and phd students) and full profes- sors (fig. ). one plausible explanation is that full professors are the ones who likely encountered more sexist situations during their career and that early-career scientists are more preoccupied with and more aware of gender biases due to the recent birth of international feminist movements such as #metoo that received a lot of public attention. the analysis of the testimonies points to sexist behaviours being the expression of gendered stereotypes that are still strongly anchored in our scientific community as they are in www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . career level of the authors of the accepted testimonies. fp stands for full professor, phd for phd student, postdoc for postdoc- toral fellow, ap for assistant or associate professor, bs for bachelor student, private sector for contributors working outside academia and ms for master student. the rest of the society. one of the most fundamental and still deeply rooted dichotomies associated with masculinity and femininity is the agency versus communality opposition (e.g. haines et al., ; hentschel et al., ). according to so- cial role theory (eagly and wood, ), men would be more agentic (meaning that they are more likely characterised by assertiveness, independence, instrumental competence and leadership competence), while women would be more com- munal (they would be more inclined to feel more concern for others, sociability and emotional sensitivity). such stereo- types do exist in the scientific environment, as we show in the following sections. new ways of expressing prejudice against women are modern sexism (swim et al., ) or neosexism (tougas et al., ). becker and swim ( ) explain that both terms describe covert forms; the first one recognises that gender bias exists but its importance is minimised; the second one arises from the pressure between gender egalitarian beliefs and negative feelings against women. these different types of sexism take form through per- sisting stereotypes, which appear in the testimonies we re- ceived. the distinct gender biases associated with each story can be described using several classifications. binary classifi- cations include but are not limited to: ( ) implicit (automatic and unconscious) versus explicit (conscious and willingly re- ported, e.g. miller et al., ), ( ) descriptive (characteris- tics that women/men are believed to have) versus prescriptive (characteristics that women/men should have, e.g. burgess and borgida, ) and ( ) benevolent (expression of sex- ism that appear to be positive, e.g. chivalry or the “women- are-wonderful effect” conceptualized by eagly and mladinic, ) versus hostile (sexist view expressed in term of hostile action or derogatory comments , e.g. glick et al., ) sex- ist behaviours. williams et al. ( ) identify four main gen- der biases encountered by women: ( ) the prove-it-again, where women have to make more effort to establish their place compared to their male colleagues, ( ) the tightrope, where women struggle between adopting a masculine be- haviour to be respected, seen as competent but unpopular and adopting a feminine behaviour to be liked but seen as incompetent, ( ) the maternal wall, related to challenges with motherhood and ( ) the tug of war, related to the com- petition between women as a result of the aforementioned pressures. we propose a different classification that is based on finding recurrent patterns in the testimonies we collected but shares similar categories with the existing classifications. we identify six classes of sexist attitudes: ( ) confining fe- males to stereotypical roles, ( ) confining males to stereo- typical roles, ( ) questioning female competencies, ( ) keep- ing women as outsiders in networking contexts, ( ) objecti- fying women and ( ) neosexism as a backlash of antisexist policies. a more detailed analysis of these categories is pro- vided in the following sections. we acknowledge the fact that this categorisation can be subjective. for instance, most fe- male/male stereotypes are defined as opposites, so oftentimes we observe that in a given situation, both male and female stereotyping are at stake. moreover, these categories are not exclusive, and several situations fall into several categories. . the expression of female stereotypes % of the accepted stories ( of them) involve behaviours that keep females into traditional roles. these roles are of- ten not in relation to academic work. many testimonies ex- press the fact that within their research environment, women scientists are put back to a gendered condition defined upon physical stereotypes, among which are attractiveness (“pretty face” and “sympathetic and good looking” comic strips), wearing a bra (unpublished testimony), and being or becom- ing a mother (“anyway you will soon be busy with children” being one quote among others). other testimonies highlight cases establishing a domina- tion relationship. one expression of such a bias is the fact that women are automatically categorised below males in the hierarchy. sometimes male scientists associate female pro- fessors or editors to students (“who’s your advisor?” comic strip, cf. fig. ). testimonies describe female senior profes- sors in a meeting being automatically chosen to take notes (for instance “who’s taking notes?” comic strip). sometimes, a female scientist is reduced to the wife/girlfriend of a man (“grad school husband” comic strip). we also received testimonies involving the traditional stereotype of females not being interested in science, or not having biological abilities for science by nature (“confer- ence wake up” comic strip for instance). instead, a lot of testimonies show the stereotype of women being more quali- fied to do administrative tasks (such as taking notes, “who is taking notes?” comic strip, or preparing the practical aspects of a field trip, “field trip takeover” comic strip). likewise, women tend to be assigned household-type tasks (cleaning the laboratory, preparing the meals or bringing the coffee dur- adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . “who’s your advisor?” comic strip that falls into the “fe- male stereotypical roles” category. in this case, a female is consid- ered at lower grade based on her appearance and gendered condition (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. ing workshops, meetings and field trips, “field trip takeover” and “who is taking notes?”). the testimonies with such stereotypes show repetitions of the same situations for different age classes, countries and situations (conference, laboratory, teaching, meeting). . male stereotypes we identified stories where descriptive or prescriptive stereotypes on males were at play ( % of the stories). such stereotypes include seeing men as physically superior and competent individuals, and therefore better fitted for field- work than women: a testimony reported for example that male researchers were encouraged to do a field trip while fe- males’ capabilities were questioned. positive masculine traits like being a leader and a decision-maker are at play in the “first author” comics, where a reviewer wrongly attributes the first authorship of the article they are reviewing to a male coauthor instead of the actual female first author. figure . example of “male stereotypes” and “women as outsiders in networking contexts” categories. peers are laughing at a male col- league who supports his wife’s career evolution. at the same time, a female scientist finds herself outside of the male fraternity circle. comic strip title: “his wife got promoted” (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – dis- tributed under the creative commons attribution . license. the dominance of male researchers is also argued using er- roneous biological arguments such as: “it’s normal that men are more aggressive during discussions because they have more testosterone” (“conference wake up” comic strip) or “men and women are just better at different things. it’s biol- ogy.” (unpublished testimony) suggesting that men are better in stem fields. failure to comply with stereotypical roles leads to strong reactions, such as in the comic strip entitled “his wife got promoted” (fig. ): the news that a man has relocated due to his wife’s promotion is received with mockery by male colleagues, and he is considered as weak because he does not conform with the traditional male dominant role of the breadwinner. another common mechanism is to interpret male behav- ior and decisions as necessarily motivated by sexual inter- www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . example of the “questioning female competence” cat- egory. a male colleague is putting the physical appearance of his female peer ahead of her qualification while playing down her scientific competence. comic strip title: “professor likes blondes” (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. est, such as in the comic strips entitled “professor likes blon- des” (fig. ) and “a man’s world”. phrases such as: “did you come with your harem” are used by peers to express men’s power and sexual dominance when a male pi is working with a feminine team, and de facto normalise predatory sexual be- havior. . questioning female competence we identified % of the accepted stories exhibiting ques- tioning competencies of a female scientist ( stories). a fe- male researcher has to prove again and again her excellence in science and give more evidence that she is as competent as her male colleagues and deserves her position. this is partly a result of conflicting views on being feminine and being an expert in the field. such a deeply rooted stereotype manifests itself in particular when it comes to obtaining distinguished recognitions from the community in the form of an award or a grant for example. success is perceived with doubts and con- tested: “you know why you won the award? that’s because they had to fill a female quota!” (“female quota” comics). questioning of female professional qualities is especially striking in cases where success is attributed to the physical appearance of the female researcher. “have you ever won- dered if people just stop by [your poster] because of your pretty face?” (“pretty face” comic strip) is an example of the depreciation of scientific success during a conference. “there were sure a lot of facts and figures in your talk, little lady.” (comics “little lady”) is a condescending remark that a fe- male researcher received after her talk, exposing her credi- bility and competencies. female scientists are too often con- fronted with being judged by their appearance rather than scientific competence. “oh, i guess he (the professor) likes blondes” (comic strip “professor likes blondes”, fig. ) that suggests that this male professor was working with a female researcher only because of her look. such comments come directly from close colleagues who work in the same research group, but also more indirectly from peers within the scientific community at large. an ex- ample of the latter is: “i never thought the author of this paper could be a woman!” (comic strip “authorship”). this points towards the ubiquity of this social bias. in addition, a recurring pattern in the stories arises when a man explains to his female colleague something in which the female scientist excels at herself and is very often even more competent. this so-called “mansplaining” (which in- volves males believing their expertise is more relevant than their female counterpart), is shown for example in the “con- ference classics” comic strip. . women as outsiders in networking contexts we observed that about a quarter of testimonies ( stories) depict situations in which female scientists are considered as marginal in the scientific community or as a different type of human beings. a recurrent situation shows male scientists meeting a group of people in which there is one or several women. men greet each other but either overlook women or salute them in a different way, sometimes non-professional (e.g. “nice headphones” comic strip). another recurrent situation in testimonies concerns the presence of one or two women in panels, boards or infor- mal gatherings among a majority of men. in such a context, stories depict how male scientists interact with each other ig- noring female scientists. the “his wife got promoted” comic strip or decisions made during an informal chat in the men’s restroom (received testimony) are examples. indeed, broth- erhood is an important factor that reinforces males’ position and leaves women outside this circle. some partial explanations of these situations are expressed in testimonies citing male scientists wondering how women behave, feel or react, as if they would be a different kind of human being. again, this shows how work relationships can adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . a female scientist finds herself isolated from the research community at a conference due to needs related to motherhood. ex- ample of “women as outsiders in networking contexts” stereotype. comics title: “breastfeeding at conferences” (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – dis- tributed under the creative commons attribution . license. drift towards relationships which put female scientists back to their gendered condition, and also to their condition of be- ing a mother in some cases. some actions related to mother- hood only reinforce their outsider position (e.g. “breastfeed- ing at conferences” comic strip, fig. ). to express breast milk, women often have to make do with rooms that are not designed for it. in the storage room, the lactating mother of the “breastfeeding at conferences” comic strip is in a posi- tion of being somewhere she should not be, like an outsider herself. and even more when someone comes by without respecting her intimacy. the underrepresentation of females creates situations in which such basic needs are not catered for. . objectification of women female researchers are sometimes perceived as objects while their scientific qualification and mental capabilities are com- figure . a young female scientist is reduced to her physical ap- pearance. example of the “objectification of women” category. comic strip title: “good looking young woman” (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. pletely neglected and ignored. in stories (making up % of the accepted stories), women are sexualised and primarily judged based on their appearance. their personality, exper- tise, and decision power are put aside while their attractive- ness and appearance-based perceptions are highlighted by peers. this is the case for the “pretty face” comics mentioned earlier. another example is when a professor tells his stu- dent: “you are a sympathetic, good-looking young woman.” (“good looking young woman” comics, fig. ) as her only positive attributes. in addition, we identified misogynous behaviour in a few stories. in one of them, a female body is shamed (unpub- lished story) and sexual comments are made towards females (“a man’s world” comic strip). beyond any doubt, such be- haviour should not be tolerated and accepted neither in the academic environment nor in any societal environment for that matter. www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia figure . a young female is receiving an award for being among the top three students of her year. her merit is questioned and at- tributed to an imaginary female quota. example of the “modern sexism and neosexism” category. comic strip title: “female quota” (dtrh team, a; adenis, ). all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. . modern sexism and neosexism although awareness of ordinary sexism in science remains to be achieved, scientists are able to recognise the symp- toms: an imbalance between women and men for jobs and awards. therefore, institutions have proposed diverse ways to counter this imbalance. however, such policies have their drawbacks, prescribing females to numbers for quotas or giv- ing an opportunity for scientists to attribute the success of a woman to her gender, even for a selection process that does not perform positive discrimination. % of the testimonies (eight stories) depict situations in which scientists attribute any type of recognition of a woman’s work to a result of an antisexist policy. for instance, an award, an invitation to join a project or to give a seminar would have come to fill the female quota (“being invited” and “female quota” comics, fig. ). in the testimonies, competencies are overlooked and women are considered as a minority that would be so much promoted that men would not be able to get awards, grants or jobs anymore. in a testimony depicting an astronomy class composed of women and men, a classmate says “are they practising some kind of affirmative action this year?” (un- published testimony). one special situation is proposed in the comic “nature cover” in which a scientist suggests that the presence of women in the editorial board of nature would ex- plain why the manuscript of a female scientist gets published. it reverses the traditional sexist situation, claiming women are biased against men. again, in a work context, most of these situations put fe- male scientists back to their gendered condition, but this time behind an institutional shield. our engagement and communication activities our communication activities essentially consist of an online presence directed to everyone (via our website and through social media) and more specific actions geared towards the scientific community (such as participating in conferences or laboratory seminars) as well as a large non-scientific public (participation in radio programs or round table discussions). these activities are an integral part of the project since our comic strips are based on true stories reported by members of the stem community. . nature of our engagement and communication actions although the project started in lyon, france, all members of did this really happen?! have moved away since then, bring- ing the project into new institutions, where we propose lo- cal presentations and discussions at various occasions. each member of the group takes any opportunity to talk about the project during a large variety of actions, which has resulted in spreading the project and its main message to a broad au- dience. adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia since the beginning of the project did this really happen?! in , we participated in major earth and planetary sci- ence conferences (hosted by the agu, the egu, the aus- tralian geoscience council convention and the european planetary science congress), by presenting either a poster or an oral contribution in the equality and diversity sessions (coltice and bocher, ; arnould et al., ; adenis et al., ; gérault et al., ; ulvrova et al., a, b). we also co-organised a short course on gender unconscious biases in geosciences, using the comics as illustrations of unconscious bias behaviour (alves de jesus rydin et al., , ). taking part in these international conferences is highly valuable since it allows us to have a diverse and broad audience as well as meeting and exchanging with other in- ternational scientific and institutional actors of diversity and equality. the development of our project has highly bene- fited from shared experience with other local, international or institutional members of the scientific community (like the Égalité group at ipgp, france, Égalité group, , and womeesa, australasia, womeesa, , women scientists, , pod in zurich and equalitea at eth zurich, equalitea, c). we also published a blog post on uncon- scious biases in geosciences (bocher and adenis, ), and were interviewed for an article about the birth of our project (bedford, ). all the fore-mentioned actions have mainly been directed to the earth and planetary science community to which we all belong. we also made efforts to reach other scientific and non-scientific audiences. first within our university of origin, in lyon, with the organisation of a day of discussion and con- ferences around gender equality in science in january (sexes égaux, sciences égales?, ), and intervention on radio brume, a lyon-based university radio (sciences pour tous, ). we also participated in the swiss radio show cqfd (pourquoi il faut plus de filles en sciences, b). we connected with other activists in academia through the participation to an evening on equality in science (bocher et al., a), by co-organising breaking gender barriers dis- cussion series ( women scientists, ), through the i, scientist conference (bocher et al., b) and the opportu- nity to present our initiative to the employees of the the re- searchgate company in berlin. we were also solicited for an interview by the radio of the hungarian university of pest (ulvrova et al., a). . statistics on our online presence since the launch of our website in january , which marks the start of our internet presence, we have compiled some statistics about the growth of our project (table ). we use these to measure and analyse the impact and evolution of our project. our website has a central role in our initiative since we use it to publish our comics and news about our actions and to collect testimonies on gender bias in academia from the stem community. since the launch of the website, the an- nual number of visits has remained stable. in it reached views ( unique visitors) and we gathered views ( unique visitors) in (as of november ). the website has subscribers. while most of our visitors are from europe (more than views, of which from france, from germany and from the uk), north america (more than views, of which from usa) and oceania (more than views, of which from australia) where the members of the group are located, we are starting to reach people from africa, asia and south america. for example, india is currently the th country with the largest number of views of our website ( views). we use facebook and twitter to advertise our actions and our newly posted comics. those media evince high poten- tial to reach a large audience including scientific and non- scientific public, making our comics accessible and visible to people from countries that we cannot reach via conferences or institutional seminars. on twitter, % of our audience is female, while the proportion of female visitors reaches % on facebook. our tweets have been viewed times on average each month ( views in total between january and november ), although there are large monthly variations (fig. ). major accounts re-tweeting our project often belong to scientific institutions, individual scientists active on twit- ter but also to independent media, artists, and associations ac- tively promoting more diversity and equality. so far, on both social media, the most represented countries are still from europe (more than % on twitter and more than % on facebook), north america ( % of our audience on twitter and % of our audience on facebook) and oceania (more than % on twitter and more than % on facebook). but our project has also reached other countries. for instance, in november , our account has been cited by an influen- tial female indian author on twitter and interest from indian accounts has increased since then. on facebook, over the period from may to novem- ber , accounts received content from our page per day on average, with seven accounts receiving content about our website through their social connections. among them, three accounts engaged with our page per day on average (via clicking or commenting on our project). . impact of our actions we first started to present our own insider experience as a feminine research team in earth sciences, so the earth sci- ence community was at first the main contributor to our project. however, the whole academic community is wel- come to collaborate on our project by sending us their sto- ries and the diversity of the contributors has increased as the project gained momentum. this way, scientists from diverse fields are involved in the project that further fuels the inter- www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia table . statistics on our web-based presence. data collected on nov website facebook twitter total values > since creation > since (date) (since may ) no. of subscribers and followers via the website/email followers/ likes followers/ likes no. of references to our work (re-tweets/references etc.) more than references to our website links and references to our website references to our web- site characteristics of the visitors/tweeters > dominant gender of the viewers unknown % female % female > dominant nationalities north america, europe, australia north america, europe, australia north america, europe, australia figure . evolution of the monthly number of views on twit- ter and on the website https://didthisreallyhappen.net/ (last access: march , dtrh team, a), and the number of accepted stories (as a function of their date of reception) since the website launch in january . there is a correlation between the high number of views, presentations of the project at international con- ferences and peaks of reception of testimonies that we accepted. also, note that the number of views increased significantly after de- cember as we are getting more attention in the past year. egu stands for the european geosciences union general assembly in vienna, agu for the american geophysical union fall meeting, and epsc for the european planetary science congress. est of the broader academic community in the did this really happen?! initiative. our comic strips describing sexist behaviours are freely available to download (under a creative com- mon attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . inter- national license) and print. their aim is to foster reflections and conversations on gender equality. recently, we have cre- ated a -page booklet assembling some of the published comics. we distributed the booklet assembling some of the published comics (available in the supplement) during con- ferences (egu general assembly , epsc and i, scientist ) to all interested scientists, who brought those printed comics in their laboratories. moreover, we con- duct informal discussions, small presentations, and work- shops within our respective institutions and laboratories to raise consciousness about gender inequality in science and promote adequate professional relationships between female and male scientists. from our experience, these discussions have often proved beneficial since the comics trigger reflec- tions on depicted sexist situations and people also start to reflect on their own behaviour. this is a necessary and crit- ical step forward in apprehending sexist biases, aggressions and microaggressions in everyday life. finally, we also dis- cuss our project while visiting other laboratories. this partic- ipates in increasing consciousness about gender inequality in various workplaces. the number of views on the project’s website and our so- cial network accounts varies through time. we observe a sig- nificant increase of the number of views and received testi- monies after international conferences (fig. ). this shows the impact of our interventions, and how the word of mouth propagation participates to the spreading of our project. the content of our website has been reused or cited more than times on forums (vis mon job de géologue et chercheure au cnrs, ), opinion pieces (valian, ) or institutional websites (equal opportunity committee crc- tr , ). it has also been retweeted or cited more than times on both facebook and twitter. with those social media, it is possible to reach a large audience that is more di- verse (in terms of occupation, origin, and ideas) compared to the conferences or local institutions. for example, the largest peaks of views of our project (such as the one in decem- ber , fig. ) not only coincide with presentations of our project at conferences but also with the advertisement of our website by influential people on social media. adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / https://didthisreallyhappen.net/ m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia . reactions to our actions the majority of the feedback that we have received is very encouraging: “great initiative. i am a phd candidate in geo- dynamics from india. . . i recently came across your poster in egu. . . cudos [sic] to the entire team for taking such an innovative initiative in fighting sexism”. many female re- searchers also identify themselves with situations depicted in our comics. for example, we received: “dear colleagues, i just discovered your site via twitter . . . looking at your comics [breastfeeding at a conference] i just can’t believe it, it exactly happened to me as well. thanks for representing it so well.” others acknowledge the fact that our comics made them more mindful of sexist behaviours around them: “you know what? i did not realise until i read your article that i was being discriminated by people from my lab and during congress. i am used to it. . . so sad. . . ” such reactions show that our comics can help to bring awareness of unconscious biases simply by showing such situations. sometimes people react to our comics by saying that they have never encountered, witnessed or recognised sexist atti- tudes depicted in the strips. another type of reaction com- prises people that are pessimistic about their own situation and that suffer due to gender stereotypes: “i am a woman and i have children, i [am] completely disappointed, it is toooo much and always what i am doing in the lab is not enough and moreover not appreciated. at home as well whatever i did with my children it is not enough, i need to spend more time with them but i can not. i feel like i am a bad mom and a bad scientist. i need more time to read, to think about what i am doing, to play with my children, to write the thesis, to find a fund after my phd. i need motivation !!!! i need more h per day to complete my duties!! in my next life, i will never be a woman”. finally, some of the comments point out that our comics often do not provide any reaction (other than anger, shock and surprise, which almost every time happened to be the real reactions of our contributors) nor provide any solution to the depicted situations: “these cartoons run the risk of portraying women as helpless victims. i think women often do not know how to respond either to doubts cast on their abilities or praise of their abilities. it would be helpful to provide women with possible answers” (bedford, ). we discuss these legitimate concerns in the next section. discussion we presented the results of two years collecting testimonies on everyday sexism in academia, translating them into comic strips and reporting on our observations (online, during con- ferences and in research laboratories). the aim of the project is twofold: revealing common patterns of sexism in academia and educating ourselves and others on these instances. both aspects of the project, the collection of testimonies on one side, and the communication around the project on the other side, are done simultaneously and thus influence each other. communication on the project is our primary way to gather testimonies, and, in return, new testimonies allow us to reevaluate the different instances of sexism one can en- counter in academia. this process makes it possible to gather evidence of everyday sexism within various academic com- munities while encouraging the members of these communi- ties to actively identify everyday sexism when they experi- ence it. one limitation of our analysis is the inevitable sources of bias in the testimonies collected: we rely on contributors ac- tively reporting to us. we observe that the participation to the project is biased from ( ) the academic discipline of the con- tributors, ( ) their place of work, ( ) their gender and ( ) the type of sexism reported. our contributors tend to come from the earth science com- munity and mainly work in europe, usa, and australia, which are places where members of the project are currently working. our ongoing efforts to eliminate this bias include participating in conferences that are not specific to the earth science community (e.g. the i, scientist conference), and also growing our influence on social networks. the third bias observed is the gender bias in both con- tributors and the public reached through social networks: so far, we have mainly reached women (more than % of the views on our social media accounts, and . % of accepted testimonies come from women). the very low percentage of male testimonies might mean that men are not noticing ev- eryday sexism, or do not identify it as such. the second hy- pothesis seems to be supported by the study of becker and swim ( ) who found that american male college stu- dents encountered the same amount of sexist remarks as their female counterparts, but, on average, considered them less sexist. drury and kaiser ( ) provide an extensive review of male detection of sexism and intervention. in particular, they identify two characteristics that tend to play a major role in male observer’s detection of sexism and intervention: the rejection of legitimising beliefs (i.e. the belief that one’s success is due to internal factors such as talent, hard work, and other intrinsic qualities) and the communal orientation (i.e. the tendency of individuals to focus on the well-being of others without expecting direct benefit from it). we suppose that the same mechanisms should lead men to contribute to our project, and thus plan on modifying the presentation of our project to appeal to both aspects (rejection of legitimising beliefs and communal orientation) by clarifying ( ) how sex- ist bias might affect the career of women, and ( ) how our project can contribute to changing behaviours in academia. the results described in hardacre and subašić ( ) and subašić et al. ( ) point towards one potential additional solution. they show that although framing the inequality is- sue as a common problem for both genders rather than as a women’s issue increases the legitimacy of leaders, an impor- tant aspect to convince men and women to take action is to www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia have the support of male leaders. we plan to integrate these adjustments in future presentations of the project. the fourth bias concerns the type of sexism that is re- ported. the study of williams et al. ( ) provides statistics of recurrent gender bias experienced by women in academia, based on interviews conducted on sixty women in the usa. this study offers a reference to which we can compare the testimonies that we received and allows us to identify poten- tial blind spots. however, we cannot compare directly the proportions given in their studies with our numbers since their classification is different, and the numbers provided re- fer to the proportion of women that have encountered a given bias, while we report on the proportion of a given bias within the testimonies collected. in agreement with williams et al. ( ), we find a preva- lence of the “prove it again” bias, which corresponds to the category that we named “questioning female compe- tence” ( . % of interviewees versus % of collected tes- timonies). most of the behaviours that we identify as “be- haviours that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical fem- inine roles” ( %) belong in their studies to the “maternal wall” ( %) and to the “reported pressure to take on dead- end traditionally feminine roles” ( . %). we also identified several types of bias that were not re- ported as such in williams et al. ( ). first, we chose to include instances in which the pressure is on men to con- form to typically masculine stereotypes. we consider that, in order to move beyond the stereotypical gender role assign- ments, it is also important to address it and include men in the conversation, as argued earlier in the discussion. secondly, williams et al. ( ) report on a sense of isolation among women of colour, but much less among white women. we identified stories that depicted women as outsiders, but we did not collect information on the skin colour of contrib- utors. finally, % of our stories reported modern sexist or neosexist views, a category which is absent from williams et al. ( ). on the contrary, several biases reported by williams et al. ( ) are underrepresented in our testimonies. for ex- ample, they report that . % of women scientists witnessed “tug-of-war” patterns, which are tensions between female professionals arising from gender bias, such as the “queen bee syndrome” (staines et al., ), when a senior fe- male professional is tougher towards female subordinates. we have not received any testimony describing this pattern. overall we received very few testimonies in which women behave in a sexist manner, while sexist bias in women exists and can be higher than men’s in some instances (ellemers et al., ). several studies have shown that ambiguous sexist behaviour was harder to detect when the perpetrator was a woman (baron et al., ; sterk et al., ), which could explain the absence of such testimonies. williams et al. ( ) also report the prevalence of sexual harassment en- countered ( . % of interviewees) while only received tes- timonies qualify as sexual harassment (although % of our testimonies contained behaviours related to the objectifica- tion of women). one plausible explanation is self-censorship, according to the personal discussions we had with potential contributors who had endured or witnessed sexual harass- ment in the workplace. they often feared to be recognised and also considered that comics are not the adequate support for these terrible stories. considering these aspects, our project should be seen as an incomplete picture of what everyday sexism can look like in academia, the statistics reported in sect. do not necessarily reflect the proportions of different types of sexism experi- enced by women in academia. for our future interventions, we plan to draw examples from the aforementioned literature to fill the gaps in stereotypes representation and encourage our audience to consider all types of sexism. comic strips are a good way to give visibility to issues that are usually overlooked. our project is centred on sex- ism in academia but could be extended to consider other types of prejudices, both independently from sexism, but also from an intersectional point of view (crenshaw, ). bernard and cooperdock ( ) provide an alarming syn- thesis on the state of ethnic diversity in earth sciences in the us, with no apparent improvement for the past years. it is difficult to estimate the situation in europe given the absence of unified ethnic statistics for historical and data protection reasons (simon, ), but there is no reason to expect a better representation of people of colour. con- cerning the situation of lgbtq in science, although the general society’s opinion has made progress in some coun- tries, a survey of uk physical scientists reported that % of lgbt+ respondents “considered leaving their workplace because of the climate or discrimination towards lgbt+ people” (dyer et al., ). this proportion rose to almost % for trans scientists. representing in a graphic form the struggles that the lgbtq community faces could help the rest of academia connect, empathise and become more inclu- sive. likewise, comics could be an efficient way to convey the experience of disabled scientists and bring cognizance on intentional and unintentional ableism, for example during conferences (fleming, ). beyond the specific discrimi- natory behaviours that are based on stereotypes against these different categories, we expect to find common ground in the situation of feeling like an outsider and being asked to prove again and again competence in science. for people to con- tribute to our project in these directions, we need to rethink our communication strategies, but also put more resources and energy into this project, which is challenging since we all act on a voluntary basis and have no dedicated time or funding for it. the primary goal of our comics is to depict the situation to our readers. oftentimes, the contributors are left surprised and shocked by the sexist comments or attitude, and there is a risk of consistently representing women as helpless vic- tims. the bystander intervention approach shows great re- sults in empowering women and men to fight against un- adv. geosci., , – , www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia conscious biases (powel, ). initiatives like advance- geo bring these much needed strategies to our commu- nity (advancegeo, ). we also participate in this ef- fort through complementary activities and discussions within our laboratories and at conferences. the communication on our project uses three main modalities: ( ) advertisement through social media, ( ) traditional communication prac- tices of academia (mobility of researchers, visit of collabora- tors, international conferences) and ( ) institutional equality- diversity-inclusion (edi) initiatives. we reflect hereafter on the importance of each of these modalities to spread our mes- sage and develop common strategies of change with other activists. over the last two decades, the ease of sharing information to a wide audience online, especially using social media, has allowed the rise of powerful feminist movements, aiming at talking about sexual harassment and aggressions, rape cul- ture and everyday sexism, the most well known and ground- breaking being the #metoo movement. within academia, courageous researchers raised their voices to speak out about their harassment experiences and push institutions to act (see for example jahren, , wadman, , and wadman, ). alongside exposing these dreadful stories, we believe it is also important to put a focus on more mundane instances of everyday sexism and microaggressions, in the spirit of the international everyday sexism project, for example (ev- eryday sexism project, b). the dynamics of the online community and solidarity of different initiatives and activists helped us tremendously to amplify our message, as reported in sect. . additionally, this project has developed in its current form because the necessary spaces existed within the academic world for it to emerge and grow. two factors played a ma- jor role in the inception of this project. first, the presence of the equality-diversity and communication services at the university claude bernard of lyon (mission égalité – di- versité, a) and the availability of two of their members, philippe liotard and chloe schweyer, were crucial to our evolution from a group of scientists experiencing gender bias to activists for gender equality and diversity and inclusion in academia. with their help, our informal exchanges on the everyday sexism that we experienced played the role of a consciousness-raising group, as they were used by second- wave feminism to identify a common pattern of oppression in the society (sarachild, ). the second element was the solicitation from erc program officer claudia alves de jesus-rydin to present our experience as an erc-funded team at the egu general assembly, in a session entitled “promoting and supporting equality of opportunities in geo- sciences” (coltice and bocher, ). both of these factors led us to release the first set of comics, one year later, at the same egu session (arnould et al., ). likewise, other spaces and periods created within the aca- demic life allowed us to develop our project and raise our am- bitions. most of us are currently working as researchers. we leverage our collaboration relationships, and take advantage of visits of and to other researchers to communicate on the project, informally, but also during scientific presentations. more importantly, the relative increase of the diversity of backgrounds of academic employees and the change in men- talities makes it more common to have dedicated equality- diversity-inclusion groups within laboratories and institu- tions. these groups play a crucial role in spreading infor- mation and creating initiatives from the local scale to the in- ternational scale. holmes ( ) uses the framework of risman ( ) to understand the barriers that women face in academia, with three levels at which women can find barriers to their pro- fessional development: the institutional, the interactional and the individual levels. generally, institutions develop solu- tions to these different types of barriers with a mainly top- down approach (buitendijk et al., ). however, the devel- opment of our project shows how institutional structures can create opportunities for individual or grass-root actions to emerge and grow. research has shown that diversity, equality and inclusion improve when all the members of an institution feel they are actors of change (dobbin and kalev, ). for it to be possible, it is important that institutions support and encourage grass-root initiatives that promote edi. conclusions the project did this really happen?! was created in by a team of seven scientists working on the geodynamics of earth’s mantle and lithosphere. after having faced sex- ists microaggressions, discussions arose internally to address these everyday issues. we chose to report on these sexist sit- uations through comic strips. this communication tool has the benefit of being approachable and engaging while show- ing the situations without the need for explanations or inter- pretations. between and , we have received testimonies, from which have been accepted, and pub- lished. from this sample of sexist biases collected from the scientific community, we are now able to analyse with more details the types of stereotypes that are still common in our research environments. we have classified the stories into six non-exclusive categories of sexist biases: ( ) those which maintain females to stereotypical roles, ( ) those which con- fine males to stereotypical roles, ( ) those which question fe- male competencies, ( ) those which keep women as outsiders in networking contexts, ( ) those which objectify women and ( ) those which show the backlash of antisexist policies. we found that although all these sexist biases are well repre- sented, whatever the age of the contributor, the country, and the context in which these situations took place, the major- ity of the comics ( %) follows a situation in which women scientists are defined upon physical stereotypes. the second most common feature is the questioning of female abilities ( %). male stereotypes are present in almost half of the www.adv-geosci.net/ / / / adv. geosci., , – , m. bocher et al.: drawing everyday sexism in academia comics ( %) while the other categories are less represented. although modern sexism is not represented abundantly in the comics, it provoked the most controversial feedback that we have received on this project. the large number of testimonies depicting recurring sexist situations suggests that such behaviours are still widespread, and we advocate for more vigilance and actions to fight against sexism in the workplace. these comics can help to point out (un)conscious biases at work. while women are currently more sensitive to these questions (based on the on- line presence, they represent more than % of our audience on social media and more than % of our contributors), one of our objectives is to encourage men to take an active role in addressing sexism by testifying. the short term goal of the team is to produce a more com- plete picture of everyday sexism in academia by producing new comics from the received testimonies. we will also im- prove our diffusion and communication materials so as to increase the accessibility of the project and to promote their use by research institutions. to do that, we will provide open- source presentations and workshops, including comics and bibliography on gender equality. we also plan to design a short movie on “unconscious bias in academia” to improve the visibility of our cause. another main objective is to lever- age the increasing number of followers to extend the scope of the project to other discriminations. we intend to encour- age discussions with other minorities but are also using our everyday proximity with the students to increase their sen- sitivity on sexists bias and inappropriate behaviours in the academic world. we encourage them to be proactive and are confident as this generation already stands up for what they believe in and embraces equality and inclusion values. data availability. in order to preserve the anonymity of contribu- tors, the data used for this article cannot be shared. supplement. the supplement related to this article is available on- line at: https://doi.org/ . /adgeo- - - -supplement. author contributions. aa drew all the comics. all authors partici- pated in the collection of testimonies and communication activities. mu, ma, mg, nc and mb participated in data collection and the statistical analysis of the project. mb, mu, ma, nc, and cm con- tributed to the redaction of the article. competing interests. the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. special issue statement. this article is part of the special issue “di- versity and equality in the geosciences (egu eos . & us , agu ed b, jpgu u- )”. it is a result of the egu general assembly , vienna, austria, – april . acknowledgements. all comics are hand-drawn by alice adenis – distributed under the creative commons attribution . license. this work is volunteer-based. we are thankful to claudia alves de jesus-rydin who gave us the spark to start our adventure and sup- port to continue, philippe liotard and cléo schweyer who guided us in the very beginning of the project, and to mary anne holmes and johanna stadmark who improved this manuscript through careful review. last but not least, we would like to thank all the anonymous contributors without whom the project would not exist. review statement. this paper was edited by claudia jesus-rydin and 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https://www.womeesa.net/ 	abstract 	introduction 	treatment, classification and analysis of received testimonies 	received stories and proposed classification 	the expression of female stereotypes 	male stereotypes 	questioning female competence 	women as outsiders in networking contexts 	objectification of women 	modern sexism and neosexism 	our engagement and communication activities 	nature of our engagement and communication actions 	statistics on our online presence 	impact of our actions 	reactions to our actions 	discussion 	conclusions 	data availability 	supplement 	author contributions 	competing interests 	special issue statement 	acknowledgements 	review statement 	references discussing emotions in digital journalism full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rdij digital journalism issn: - (print) - x (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdij discussing emotions in digital journalism kristin skare orgeret to cite this article: kristin skare orgeret ( ) discussing emotions in digital journalism, digital journalism, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: mar . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rdij https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdij https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rdij &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rdij &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule commentary discussing emotions in digital journalism kristin skare orgeret department of journalism and media studies, oslo metropolitan university, oslo, norway abstract until recently, the notion of emotion in media studies and commu- nication research was mostly examined through the lens of cultural studies, media effects, and visuals. research on emotion in journal- ism has been slow to arrive, as karin wahl-jorgensen shows in this special issue. however, this is radically changing. contributions by hassan, kilgo, lough, riedl, sanchez laws, waddell, and zou high- light how the affordances of digital journalism have an impact on the space for emotion in evaluating the relationships between jour- nalists, journalistic content and their audiences. embracing emo- tions as a dimension in digital journalism studies contributes to opening up interesting approaches towards concepts such as objectivity, and for more nuanced research on the power hidden in the ‘taken for granted’ in classic liberal journalism. while highlight- ing the liberating and empowering potential in the inclusion of emotions in journalism, there is also a need to focus on how affect- ive dynamics can be spurred by phenomena such as conflict and hate. when introducing emotions in the journalistic loop, new questions arise, and perspectives of power and negotiations must be included in these discussions. keywords emotions; participation; safety; empathy; power until recently, the notion of emotion in media studies and communication research was mostly examined through the lens of cultural studies, media effects, and visuals. research on emotion in journalism has been slow to arrive, as karin wahl-jørgensen ( ) shows in this special issue. however, this is radically changing. contributions by hassan ( ), kilgo, lough, and riedl ( ), s�anchez laws ( ), waddell ( ), and zou ( ) highlight how the affordances of digital journalism have an impact on the space for emotion in evaluating the relationships between journalists, journalistic con- tent and their audiences. embracing emotions as a dimension in digital journalism stud- ies contributes to opening up interesting approaches towards concepts such as objectivity, and for more nuanced research on the power hidden in the ‘taken for granted’ in classic liberal journalism. while highlighting the liberating and empowering potential in the inclusion of emotions in journalism, there is also a need to focus on how affective dynamics can be spurred by phenomena such as conflict and hate. contact kristin skare orgeret kristo@oslomet.no this article has been corrected with minor changes. these changes do not impact the academic content of the article. � the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. digital journalism , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com emotions have traditionally been understood as private and highly personalized experiences and, as such, seen as out-of-place in public debate. often overshadowed by more dominant ideas of objectivity and impartiality, emotions have – as charlie beckett reminds us – always been part of journalism: through “inspiration, creation, style, appeal and its resonance or impact” (beckett ). some scholars have argued that the quest for objectivity may itself be a frame, resulting in news stories that reflect particular criteria of newsworthiness. in the words of feminist scholar donna haraway, objectivity tends to privilege the views of dominant groups at the expense of others, as “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (haraway , ). the absence or misrepresentation of women in mainstream news media may be seen as a result of such perceived objectivity, reproducing certain power structures. the #metoo campaign, which was enabled by hashtag activism, involves a change in pub- lic focus towards more open discussions about the experiences of victims of sexual assault or unwanted sexual attention. hostile reactions to the campaign show how revolutionary it is to put the consideration of a vulnerable person’s emotions first. with the arrival of digital journalism emotions have gained significant new atten- tion. wahl-jorgensen explains how “the expanded opportunities for participation have contributed to question traditional distinctions between news audiences and pro- ducers and have ushered in new and more forms of emotional expression that have spilled over into practices of news production” (wahl-jørgensen ). the current media landscape with its new “cycle of sensitive content creation” (beckett ) is facilitating more personalized, participatory forms of journalism. beckett ( ) describes how, with digital journalism, events are often reported and discussed on social media and journalists’ work is subject to comments and sharing – in fact, they share this process with the public, live, as they are working. as emotion becomes a more significant factor in this process for both the newsmaker and the news consumer or sharer, there is an interesting feedback loop to the profession that increasingly impacts on how future news is produced. digital journalism emotional pressures of digital journalism practice a focal aspect here is the emotional pressure the digital journalist is exposed to and what may be called the emotional pressures of work. as digital journalism is inter- active, multi-platform, multi-linear and participatory, audiences’ emotions are projected back to the journalist more or less immediately. this may also include aggressive or violent emotions. within the field of journalist safety, we see how an increasing num- ber of reporters are attacked and how a rising number of journalists who are killed are reporters whose primary platform is internet based (henrichsen, betz, and lisosky ). journalists have become the customary target of online attacks and female journalists often face a double-burden: being attacked both as a journalist and as a woman. threats of rape, physical violence and graphic imagery constitute a horrifying ‘new normal’ for female journalists worldwide, as reporting on digital platforms push journalists to be more personal. in addition, as journalists are often urged by their institutions to be visible and responsive to the audience as much as possible, they are ever more vulnerable to the emotions of readers. therefore, it is important to be aware that the cycle of sensitive content creation may be used to spur hate and con- flict, as well as more positive audience perspectives. l€unenborg and maier ( ) show how current phenomena like hate speech and “shitstorms” via social media are to be understood as “explicit public articulations of emotions; at the same time they produce affective dynamics, which can be described as contagious and viral”. hence, at the reverse side of the optimism surrounding the early days of digital media, many of the enthusiastic theoretical concepts on user engagement did not endure close empirical inspection (quandt ). there is now an ever-increasing fear of populist turbulence, viral panics, experts under attack, and disinformation. quandt introduces the concept of ‘dark participation’, where user engagement “instead of positive, or at least neutral contributions to the news-making processes” is characterized by “negative, selfish or even deeply sinister contributions” and how this development seems to grow parallel to the recent wave of populism in western democracies ( , ). some fear a perverted image of the new openness, where instinct and emotion overtake facts and reason in the digital age. in particular, the combination of strong emotions and a lack of media and digital literacy may lead to populist turbulence. ferdous ( ) describes how millions of people in bangladesh started to use the internet without knowing much about fact- checking content or sources, making them easy targets for extremist islamists. instead of increasing freedom of expression through new media channels, these channels allowed for a rapid radicalization of people, and a quick erosion of moderate, know- ledge-based and secular mentality. this is not unique to bangladesh – rapid peer-to- peer information transmission has manufactured hate crimes in germany, as well as resulted in ethnic violence in sri lanka, myanmar and india. journalists and other con- tent producers need to be aware of the explosive potential of online rumours that may trigger physical mobilisations. as studies of twitter content have confirmed, “emotive falsehood often travels faster than fact” (davies ). chantal mouffe’s ( ) long-standing claim that democracies are in need of emotions and confrontations instead of just rationality and consensus – and how she draws on seventeenth century philosopher spinoza’s two core emotions of fear k. s. orgeret and hope – gain new importance here. what we see with emotions in the digital sphere is that the confrontationally oriented content often wins terrain in the public sphere. as algorithms increasingly steer journalistic content to tap into readers’ emotions, values and identities, a central question for further research is whether this will lead to more bias and divide or to more engaging content and promote understanding. emotional intelligence and empathy the algorithmic turn in digital news production was a key topic of the special issue of digital journalism, titled ‘algorithms, automation and news’. to continue to exist “outside the realm of what we can expect from robots”, lind�en believes journal- ists will be forced by algorithms “to think harder at defining their core human capabil- ities such as developing emotional and social intelligence, curiosity, authenticity, humility, empathy and the ability to become better listeners, collaborators and learners” (lind�en , ). the role of immersive virtual reality journalism in creating empathy is of great interest – as discussed by s�anchez laws ( ) and hassan ( ) in this special issue. feelings of concern and compassion are emphasized, reflecting the ‘hope’ side of spinoza’s oppositional pair. however, a crucial topic, which is only mentioned in passing in the conclusion of s�anchez laws’ article, is how internal repre- sentations of emotions can also involve negative ones where audiences respond “with hatred and anger towards the world within and outside virtual reality” (s�anchez laws , ). the need to introduce a higher degree of conflict awareness to these dis- cussion gains magnitude as the potential to create action in the real world potentially increases with immersive journalism. other contributions place more emphasis on the perspective of fear or negativity, such as zou ( ) when studying the role of fear as contributing to civic engagement and waddell ( ), who finds that audience feed- back on news teasers on social media are often uncivil. continuing from this, we need to ask more nuanced questions related to whether a cycle of emotionally driven content creation will open up for a broader spectre of more diverse voices in the news or only give room to the loudest ones. and what happens to the ‘boring but important’ information in this process? such discussions are so far largely missing. beckett’s ( ) feedback loop says little about the relationship between emotion driven sharing and bringing involvement or action in the real world. exploring the impact of different types of constructive news stories on readers’ motivation, baden, mcintyre, and homberg ( ) found that news stories that evoked negative emotions reduced intentions to take positive action to address the issues. in contrast, solution- framed stories that evoked positive emotions resulted in a more positive affect and higher intentions to take positive action. as an increasing number of scholars and journalists argue that remaining impartial is an inadequate response to challenges such as sexism, racism or climate change, i would argue that there is a vital need for more discussion of what an “innate sense of right and wrong” (gl€uck ) is involved in the context of emotionally driven, normative journalism. digital journalism including perspectives of power and negotiations research in neuroscience and psychology shows that emotions are not the enemy of reason, but rather a crucial part of it (e.g. bandes and salerno ). as human beings we understand the world both cognitively and emotively. therefore, it is both reason- able and commended to continue including emotions in the field of digital journalism studies (djs), while at the same time arguing that values, such as accuracy and factu- ality, remain in a mix that can strengthen and safeguard the ever-important credibility of journalism. when introducing emotions in the journalistic loop, new questions arise, and i have emphasized the need to increasingly include perspectives of power and negotiations in these discussions. future research questions may include, for example: whose emotions are guiding the various phases of the cycle of content creation? how is power negotiated in this process? perhaps mouffe’s ( , ) conflict model aimed at enabling a manageable conflict between opponents (agonism) instead of an out-of- control and irreparable enmity (antagonism) may gain new importance in further refinements of the field. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). references baden, denise, karen mcintyre, and fabian homberg. . “the impact of constructive news on affective and behavioural responses.” journalism studies ( ): – . bandes, susan a., and jessica m. salerno. . “emotion, proof and predjudice.” arizona state law journal . beckett, charlie. . “how journalism is turning emotional and what that might mean for news.” http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / davies, william. . “how feelings took over the world.” the guardian, september. ferdous, jana syeda gulshan. . “bangladesh: social media, extremism and freedom of expression.” in transnational othering. global diversities, edited by e. eide and k. s. orgeret – . gothenburg: nordicom. gl€uck, antje. . “should journalists be more emotionally literate?” european journalism observatory. https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/should-journalists-be-more-emotionally-literate haraway, donna. . “situated knowledges. the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies ( ): – . hassan, robert. . “digitality, virtual reality and the ‘empathy machine.” digital journalism ( ) henrichsen, jennifer r., michelle betz, and joanne m. lisosky. . building digital safety for journalism: a survey of selected issues. paris: unesco. kilgo, danielle k., kyser lough, and martin j. riedl. . “emotional appeals and news values as factors of shareworthiness in ice bucket challenge coverage.” digital journalism ( ): – . lind�en, carl-gustav. . “algorithms for journalism; the future of news work.” the journal of media innovations ( ): – . l€unenborg and maier. . “the turn to affect and emotion in media studies.” media and communication ( ): – . mouffe, chantal. . agonistics: thinking the world politically. london: verso. quandt, thorsten. . “dark participation.” media and communication ( ): – . k. s. orgeret http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/should-journalists-be-more-emotionally-literate s�anchez laws, ana luisa. . “can immersive journalism enhance empathy?” digital journalism ( ): – . doi: . / . . . . waddell, franklin t. . “the authentic (and angry) audience.” digital journalism ( ): – . wahl-jørgensen, karin. . “an emotional turn in journalism studies?” digital journalism ( ): – . zou, cheng. . “emotional news, emotional counterpublic.” digital journalism ( ): – . digital journalism https://doi.org/ . / . . . 	abstract 	emotional pressures of digital journalism practice 	emotional intelligence and empathy 	including perspectives of power and negotiations 	disclosure statement 	references the increasing importance of systematic reviews in clinical dermatology research and publication editorial © the society for investigative dermatology www.jidonline.org the increasing importance of systematic reviews in clinical dermatology research and publication the number of published systematic reviews is growing rapidly, and such reviews are receiving increased attention from sci- entists, editors, policy makers, and consumers. unlike most traditional review articles, quality systematic reviews use an explicit and systematic predefined methodology to minimize bias and to increase the precision of measurements of treatment effects. yet methodological flaws can exist in systematic reviews that limit their utility. to reduce unnecessary duplication of clinical trials and ensure that scarce resources address the most pressing research needs, institutional review board panels and dermatology journals should consider requiring systematic reviews or reference to existing systematic reviews as a pre- requisite for protocol approval and publication of clinical trials. what are systematic reviews? systematic reviews differ from traditional narrative expert- opinion reviews in their comprehensive sys- tematic approach to summarizing health-care evidence (levin, ) and are now required by some biomedical journals (for example, the lancet) for clinical trial publication (young and horton, ). the systematic approach starts with formulation of a clear question, followed by a thorough search for all relevant evidence, a critical appraisal of that evidence using predeter- mined criteria, quantitative pooling (metaanaly- sis) of similar study results when appropriate, and finally, interpretation of that evidence (bigby et al., ). authors of systematic reviews con- ducted within the cochrane collaboration make a commitment to update the review periodically with the goal of fine-tuning the research in light of any new studies that come along. if performed correctly, these reviews can provide complete, up-to-date, and unbiased measurements of treat- ment effectiveness by using metaanalytical sta- tistics. high-quality systematic reviews may also indicate whether existing evidence is consistent and can be generalized across patient popula- tions or variations in treatment (collier et al., ; parker et al., ). why might systematic reviews be important? results of isolated randomized controlled trials are frequently contradicted by subsequent stud- ies (ioannidis, ). under the most rigorous study design conditions, a well-planned single study, even if prospective and randomized, rarely provides definitive results, and primary studies tend to overestimate treatment effects. a recent study reported that % of a set of studies with at least , citations were either contradicted by or reported stronger effects than subsequent studies (ioannidis, ). relying on single high-profile clinical trials can therefore be harmful to patients’ health. well-designed randomized controlled trials are excellent when looking at effectiveness, though many fall short in quality reporting of safety and adverse events associated with an inter- vention. quality systematic reviews often have increased power and decreased bias as com- pared with the individual studies they include, and the careful pooling of treatment effects can provide the most accurate overall assessment of an intervention. benefits of systematic reviews in biomedical literature. systematic reviews may save both lives and resources. in addition to adopt- ing a systematic approach that minimizes bias, systematic reviews of all published and unpublished randomized controlled trials also have the potential through appropriate use of metaanalysis to produce a more precise estimate of treatment effect so that small but clinically important effects become apparent among a group of apparently conflicting sin- gle trials. the human cost of failing to produce such systematic reviews is illustrated by the journal of investigative dermatology ( ) , – . doi: . /sj.jid. journal of investigative dermatology ( ), volume © the society for investigative dermatology life-saving potential of a systematic review conducted to examine infant sleeping position and sudden infant death syndrome. although advice to place infants on their backs to sleep was widely available in the early s, the authors of the sudden infant death syndrome study showed that the mortality benefit of this sleep position would have been apparent if a systematic review had been performed any time after (gilbert et al., ). such a review potentially could have saved , infant lives in the united kingdom, europe, the united states, and australia. quality systematic reviews also possess the potential to save biomedical resources. cumulative metaanalytical tech- niques on trials investigating the effectiveness of aprotinin showed that the effectiveness of the drug was apparent after only trials (fergusson et al., ). thus the systematic review of aprotinin and perioperative bleeding identified unnecessary trials. had a systematic review been performed after the twelfth study, the treatment effect would have been apparent, duplicate trials would have been avoided, and patients would have experienced the benefit of a useful drug ten years earlier. antenatal corticosteroid therapy for fetal lung matura- tion reduces mortality, respiratory distress syndrome, and intraventricular hemorrhage in preterm infants (crowley, ). although corticosteroids are routinely used today to accelerate fetal lung maturity in infants at risk for prema- ture delivery, the medical community did not embrace this treatment unanimously during the s and s despite repeated randomized trials providing evidence supporting their use. a systematic review provided incontrovertible evidence in favor of antenatal corticosteroid therapy and revealed that tens of thousands of premature babies have needed more extensive therapy, suffered, and died unneces- sarily (crowley, ). these are just three examples of the costs of failure to perform systematic, up-to-date reviews of randomized con- trolled trials of health care in areas of medicine outside of dermatology. the question remains, therefore, to what extent such messages apply to dermatology. systematic reviews in dermatology risk of melanoma from indoor uv tanning. systematic reviews may reveal clear outcomes when individual stud- ies report widely varying, and even contrasting, results. this point is illustrated by a recent systematic review performed to examine the risk of malignant melanoma in relation to artificial uv radiation (gallagher et al., ). because exposure to artificial uv radiation through sunlamp and sunbed use may be intense and intermittent, concern arose that these devices might increase the risk of developing melanoma (elwood and jopson, ). studies performed to identify any potential risk of developing melanoma from exposure to sunless tanning devices have, however, includ- ed low numbers of exposed individuals and have reported inconclusive results (elwood and jopson, ). by com- bining individual study results, gallagher and colleagues ( ) were able to identify significant increased risk of melanoma in people exposed to artificial tanning devices. trials of topical immunomodulating medications and the “me-too” phenomenon. systematic reviews may suppress the “me-too” phenomenon common in today’s industry- driven research environment. new medications are marketed heavily to physicians and consumers. trials of new pharma- ceutical agents often fail to compare crucial active compara- tors with the study drug. licensing systems for medicines in europe and the united states only require new drugs to show efficacy above placebo and vehicle, leading to a large influx of new medications to the market with considerable increas- ing costs to government drug budgets (morgan et al., ). results from studies lacking comparison with traditional, often cheaper, therapies lead to confusion within the medi- cal community regarding the efficacy of new agents. simply because a newer medication is superior to a placebo does not mean that it is better than traditional, standard-of-care therapy. to examine the trials used to support the use of a new class of medication for the treatment of atopic derma- titis, a systematic review combined data from randomized controlled trials to determine whether topical pimecrolimus was more effective than other treatments (ashcroft et al., ). of trials using pimecrolimus, eight compared the drug with vehicle only. strikingly, none of the trials includ- ed a comparison with what is perhaps the most appropriate active comparator for mild atopic dermatitis, twice-daily % hydrocortisone. mirroring the aprotinin example, the efficacy of pimecrolimus as compared with vehicle at weeks was evident after completion of three trials. although additional trials are sometimes required to demonstrate efficacy in differ- ent groups, such as adults versus children or different ethnic groups, and government drug administrations may require the repetition of clinical trials, some of the remaining trials could be viewed as unnecessary and a waste of research resources. further studies are not needed to establish the effectiveness of pimecrolimus as compared with placebo. limitations of systematic reviews. like all scientific research methodologies, systematic reviews have limitations. extensive labor is involved in the creation of a quality sys- tematic review, and the finished product can be cumbersome to read for those not familiar with review methodology. one study reported that the median length of a cochrane system- atic review was printed pages, and a substantial number exceeded pages (johansen et al., ). funding for these time-consuming systematic reviews is currently limited, and most are done by volunteers interested in performing them. access to quality reviews is limited too, as databases of sys- tematic reviews like the cochrane database are available online only by subscription in some countries that have not arranged national procurement. the methodology associated with conducting a system- atic review is complex, and expertise is required at each step, from question creation to data collection, analysis and interpretation. errors can occur at any step in this complex process and potentially can lead to meaningless and misin- terpreted data. disease- and intervention-definition method- ology used prior to the collection and analysis of data can greatly influence which studies are ultimately included. editorial © the society for investigative dermatology www.jidonline.org editorial systematic review questions must be designed carefully so that the greatest number of appropriate trials is included in the final analysis. therefore, quality control is essential. a common concern expressed by those familiar with systematic reviews is the effect heterogeneity may have on review outcomes. heterogeneity in a systematic review can be described as a measure of the intervention variability and study variation that exist among included trials. it can be dif- ficult to know when it is appropriate to combine results from included trials. the decision to do so should rest on a solid understanding of trial heterogeneity. a critical eye is needed for the interpretation of the results of a systematic review, one that is better able to focus on the results by looking through sometimes complicated methodology. to be representative of all available evidence, systematic reviews must be periodically updated. updating has been defined as a discrete event with the aim of searching for and identifying new evidence to incorporate into a previously completed systematic review (moher and tsertsvadze, ). it is also often difficult to determine when it is appropriate to update a systematic review, as this decision must rest on an analysis of information evolution and the quantity of avail- able studies. the changing biomedical environment and systematic reviews. the number of systematic reviews has grown exponentially since (egger et al., ), and a grow- ing number of agencies are performing and using systematic reviews (atkins et al., ). systematic reviews now have an increased presence in policy at the government level, with reviews influencing coverage decisions made by the centers for medicare and medicaid services, consensus conferenc- es, and other policy initiatives (atkins et al., ; tugwell et al., b; moynihan, ). through the creation of an equity group, the campbell collaboration equity methods group and the cochrane collaboration equity field aim to use systematic reviews to improve health disparities world- wide (tugwell et al., a). systematic reviews epitomize evidence-based medicine; they are regarded by some as the pinnacle of the evidence hierarchy (guyatt et al., ) and are more cited than any other study design (patsopoulos et al., ). weighing the pros and cons: should dermatology jour- nals insist on systematic reviews? using systematic reviews to link past to present research improves study quality and effectiveness and may save lives and resources, but extensive labor is involved in performing, publishing, and updating a systematic review. this extra work would especially be noticeable in the field of dermatology, where the numbers of systematic reviews published to date are few — only % of all cochrane reviews from a search of the cochrane database of systematic reviews and the database of abstracts of reviews of effectiveness were deemed relevant to dermatol- ogy (parker et al., ). the requirement that all new studies be preceded by a systematic review also creates extra work for the journals that must ensure this before publication of new information. given the paucity of high-quality systematic reviews in dermatology, insisting on systematic reviews could impart an extensive labor requirement on investigators and potentially serve as an impediment to the publication of current ongo- ing studies. because journal submission and peer and edi- torial review are late steps in the publication process, more efficient policy might involve requiring systematic review for approval at the institutional review board level. some govern- ment bodies, such as the united kingdom medical research council, already insist on a systematic review or reference to a published one before considering funding new clinical trials. this requirement puts the proposed research into the context of the existing body of medical evidence and helps to avoid duplicative study. although systematic reviews are powerful tools, caution must be exercised in the consideration of policy change that could potentially hinder clinically useful research. insisting that all new studies should be preceded by a systematic review may be a bit drastic for dermatology at this time. insisting on the need to mention whether or not a system- atic review has been done, and how the existing body of evi- dence dictated the need for a new study, does seem entirely reasonable and achievable, however — a move that could discourage the nth placebo-controlled trial on another “me- too” product. current publication methodology may lead to selective publication of results that are more favorable to study spon- sors and to publication of trials that deviate from original study protocols (al-marzouki et al., ; smith, ). a newly proposed system for reporting clinical trials would require the posting of a systematic review on the internet as well as any subsequent study protocols related to the review (smith and roberts, ). this system would be freely accessible to patients, researchers, and editors and would ( ) force investigators to follow the original trial design, thereby preventing selective publication of results and misleading post hoc analyses; ( ) allow for feedback at any stage of the trial; ( ) allow research teams contemplat- ing undertaking new trials to see whether their proposed work has already been done; and ( ) permit those report- ing completed trials to refer to key ongoing trials. similarly, more efforts need to be directed at registering all clinical tri- als prospectively in a publicly searchable database such as current controlled trials (http://www.controlled-trials.com) or the cochrane skin group’s trial register (http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/ongoingskintrials/), a free resource that has recently been updated to incorporate the world health organization’s latest recommendations for trials registra- tion. the journal of investigative dermatology requires reg- istration of all clinical trials that started enrollment after july , prior to publication consideration (williams and stern, ). the journal of investigative dermatology fol- lows international committee of medical journal editors standards and information regarding this policy can be found at the journal's website (http://www.nature.com/jid/ author_instructions.html#clinical-trials-registration). redundant studies waste valuable resources, including those of the funding body, researchers, and, most importantly, journal of investigative dermatology ( ), volume © the society for investigative dermatology patients, who usually participate in clinical studies for altru- istic reasons. a policy at the journal or institutional review board level requiring any new study to relate its findings to the body of existing evidence should help to define the need for the study and sharpen its methodology. this requirement would help dissuade investigators from performing duplica- tive trials to better ensure that scarce resources available for clinical dermatology research are targeted toward the most urgent research gaps. conflict of interest the authors state no conflict of interest but are all enthusiastic participants in the cochrane collaboration. acknowledgments this work was supported by grant t aro from the us national institutes of health, bethesda, maryland, usa (to s.r.f.); grant k ca from the national cancer institute, bethesda (to r.p.d.); the university of colorado cancer center; and the united kingdom national health service research and development programme (to h.c.w.). scott r. freeman , hywel c. williams and robert p. dellavalle , university of colorado at denver and health sciences center, department of dermatology research laboratories, aurora, colorado, usa; centre of evidence-based dermatology, nottingham university hospital national health service trust, university of nottingham, nottingham, united kingdom; and department of veterans affairs medical center, dermatology service, denver, colorado, usa correspondence: dr. robert p. dellavalle, department of veterans affairs medical center, dermatology service, clermont street, # , denver, colorado , usa. e-mail: robert.dellavalle@uchsc.edu references al-marzouki s, roberts i, marshall t, evans s ( ) the effect of scientific misconduct on the results of clinical trials: a delphi survey. contemp clin trials : – ashcroft dm, dimmock p, garside r, stein k, williams hc ( ) efficacy and tolerability of topical pimecrolimus and tacrolimus in the treatment 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(bigby m, williams h, diepgen t, herxheimer a, naldi l, rzany b eds) bmj publishing group: london, pp – collier a, johnson k, heilig l, leonard t, williams h, dellavalle rp ( ) a win-win proposition: fostering consumer involvement in the cochrane collaboration skin group. j am acad dermatol : – crowley p ( ) prophylactic corticosteroids for preterm birth. cochrane database syst rev :cd , doi: . / egger m, smith gd, altman d (eds) ( ) systematic reviews in health care: meta-analysis on context. bmj books: london, p elwood jm, jopson j ( ) melanoma and sun exposure: an overview of published studies. int j cancer : – fergusson d, glass k, hutton b, shapiro s ( ) randomized controlled trials of aprotinin in cardiac surgery: could clinical equipoise have stopped the bleeding? clin trials : – gallagher rp, spinelli jj, lee tk ( ) tanning beds, sunlamps, and risk of cutaneous malignant melanoma. cancer epidemiol biomarkers prev : – gilbert r, salanti g, harden m, see s ( ) infant sleeping position and the sudden infant death syndrome: systematic review of observational studies and historical review of recommendations from to . int j epidemiol : – guyatt gh, sackett dl, sinclair jc, hayward r, cook dj, cook rj ( ) user’s guides to the medical literature. ix. a method for grading health care recommendations. jama : – ioannidis jp ( ) contradicted and initially stronger effects in highly cited clinical research. jama : – johansen hk, moustgaard r, gotzsche pc ( ) anatomy of the cochrane review. th international cochrane colloquium; october ; lyon, france. oral presentation. cochrane :op levin a ( ) the cochrane collaboration. ann intern med : – moher d, tsertsvadze a ( ) systematic reviews: when is an update an update? lancet : – morgan sg, bassett kl, wright jm, evans rg, barer ml, caetano pa et al. ( ) “breakthrough” drugs and growth in expenditure on prescription drugs in canada. bmj : – moynihan r ( ) evaluating health services: a reporter covers the science of research synthesis. milbank memorial fund: new york. available at http://www.milbank.org/reports/ moynihan/ moynihan.html parker er, schilling lm, diba v, williams hc, dellavalle rp ( ) what is the point of databases of reviews for dermatology if all they compile is “insufficient evidence”? j am acad dermatol : – patsopoulos na, analatos aa, ioannidis jp ( ) relative citation of various study designs in the health sciences. jama : – smith r ( ) medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies. plos med :e , doi: . /journal. pmed. smith r, roberts i ( ) patient safety requires a new way to publish clinical trials. plos clinical trials :e , doi: . /journal.pctr. tugwell p, petticrew m, robinson v, kristjansson e, maxwell l, cochrane equity field editorial team ( a) cochrane and campbell collaborations, and health equity. lancet : – tugwell p, robinson v, grimshaw j, santesso n ( b) systematic reviews and knowledge translation. bull world health organ : – williams hc, stern rs ( ) prospective clinical trial registration. journal of investigative dermatology ( ) , viii–x; doi: . /j. – x. . .x young c, horton r ( ) putting clinical trials into context. lancet : – editorial présentation: Écouter les histoires des femmes all rights reserved ©, theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : theatre research in canada recherches théâtrales au canada présentation: Écouter les histoires des femmes kim solga volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) graduate centre for the study of drama, university of toronto issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce document solga, k. ( ). présentation: Écouter les histoires des femmes. theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ -v -n -tric / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ prÉsentation hearing women / Écouter les femmes • pp - • / . • tric / rtac Écouter les histoires des femmes kim solga au moment où je m’installe pour vous adresser ces quelques lignes, une pleine année s’est écoulée depuis que le new york times a révélé que des allégations d’agression sexuelle s’éche- lonnant sur plusieurs décennies avaient été portées contre harvey weinstein, grand magnat hollywoodien. je sais exactement combien de temps s’est écoulé parce que comme bien des femmes en amérique du nord et ailleurs dans le monde, je suis collée au site du times en attendant de savoir si le sénat donnera le feu vert au candidat républicain brett kavanaugh pour rejoindre la cour suprême. kavanaugh a livré une interprétation magistrale du « je suis un homme blanc et tout m’est dû » devant un comité judiciaire du sénat qui s’était réuni pour l’interroger sur les accusations d’inconduite sexuelle portées contre lui ; sa performance est venue tout juste après le témoignage historique de christine blasey ford lors duquel cette dernière a relaté le souvenir douloureux qu’elle a gardé de son agression aux mains de kavanaugh pour ensuite expliquer patiemment le fonctionnement de la psychologie humaine et la façon dont le cerveau retient un traumatisme. si vous avez suivi cette histoire, vous aussi—et je mettrais ma main au feu que c’est le cas—vous savez déjà quelles leçons on peut en tirer. blasey ford a été l’image même du calme absolu, et ce, malgré la nature incroyablement périlleuse de ce qu’elle s’était proposé de faire en tant que citoyenne américaine concernée, malgré aussi le risque que lui posait le fait de revivre ce traumatisme. elle n’avait pas le choix d’agir ainsi : les femmes « hystériques » sont une cible trop facile pour les médias ; elles ne sont jamais crédibles, leurs histoires se perdent dans les effusions féminines maladroites. kavanaugh, quant à lui, a donné libre cours à ses émotions, à un point tel que l’imitation qu’en a fait matt damon dans l’accroche au saturday night live du septembre était à peine exagérée par rapport à la prestation originale. et pourtant…et pourtant. au moment où je vous écris, tout indique que le récit de kavanaugh l’emportera. (trêve de suspens : ce fut effectivement le cas.) en tant que femme, en tant que féministe et en tant que nord-américaine, cette inévi- tabilité apparente m’attriste et m’enrage. mais en tant que chercheure en théâtre féministe, je ne suis pas du tout étonnée. Étudiante au doctorat, je m’étais interrogée sur la façon dont nous avons cherché pendant des siècles à faire entrer de force dans des structures narra- tives patriarcales ce qu’ont à dire les femmes sur la violence sexuelle et conjugale ; j’en ai fait l’objet de ma thèse et le sujet de mon premier livre, violence against women in early modern performance: invisible acts. au deuxième chapitre de cet ouvrage, je présente le scénario de viol que devaient suivre les femmes à l’époque de shakespeare pour faire croire leur expéri- ence et convaincre les hommes respectables de leur communauté de mener une enquête. ce scénario a été décrit en détail dans un traité de intitulé the lawes resolutions of womens rights ; l’auteur voulait ainsi aider les femmes victimes de violence à avoir l’impression qu’elles avaient une certaine mesure de pouvoir social. prÉsentation tric / rtac • . / • pp - • hearing women / Écouter les femmes la leçon à retenir de ce texte daté d’il y a ans est la suivante : trouve un moyen de raconter ton histoire de façon à répondre aux attentes qu’ont les hommes quant aux sensations et aux apparences. (en supposant que vous n’avez pas vraiment donné votre consentement. en supposant que c’était quand même une assez grosse affaire.) trouve un moyen d’avoir l’air respectable et crédible selon des conditions qui leur importent—parce que ce sont les seules qui comptent. qu’est-ce que cela veut dire d’écouter—vraiment écouter—les histoires des femmes en ? en très peu de temps, le mouvement #metoo a galvanisé tout un pan de la population et a connu un essor incroyable. pourtant, les événements récents à washington en disent long non seulement sur les limites très réelles qui subsistent quant à la capacité des femmes d’exercer du pouvoir et de l’influence dans la sphère publique anglo-américaine, mais aussi sur la mesure dans laquelle les histoires des femmes (tant les témoignages de faits vécus que les preuves bien documentées—blasey ford offrait les deux à washington) continuent d’être minées, dénigrées ou tout simplement ignorées. pensons à la façon dont jian ghomeshi a refait surface dernièrement dans le new york review of books avec une réflexion personnelle sur l’expérience qu’il a vécue en étant « le premier à se faire haïr par tout le monde ». c’était là un geste calculé qu’il posait pour capitaliser sur la popularité du mouvement #metoo et son inévitable contrecoup ; or, comme l’ont fait valoir de nombreuses commentatrices, l’es- sai n’est pas une apologie. plutôt, le texte donne à voir ghomeshi qui raconte longuement, sur un ton de fausse modestie, comment il a vécu l’histoire et ses séquelles. ses propos ont été publiés sur une plateforme prestigieuse alors même que les histoires déchirantes et hor- rifiantes des femmes qui l’ont accusé restent largement incomprises, leur complexité ayant été mal gérée par la partie plaignante lors du procès de qui n’a pas su leur donner un sentiment de clôture ou de justice. alors je repose la question, mais cette fois dans mon rôle de rédactrice en chef de tric/ rtac : qu’est-ce que cela peut bien vouloir dire d’écouter, de manière réfléchie, avec attention et sans préjudice, les histoires des femmes? ce numéro donne quelques réponses provisoires, je l’espère, à cette question difficile, mais ô combien urgente. dans les pages qui suivent, vous trouverez six articles par sept chercheuses qui racontent les histoires d’un grand nombre d’au- tres femmes—des femmes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, des femmes fictives et réelles, des femmes homosexuelles et hétéros, des femmes de couleur et des femmes blanches. ensuite, deux autres femmes occupent les colonnes du forum d’automne avec d’importantes nouvelles concernant notre discipline. dans la première contribution au numéro, laine zisman newman se penche sur ce qu’elle appelle l’« empressement lesbien » dans l’œuvre de jess dobkin, une artiste basée à toronto. zisman newman nous invite à prendre conscience de l’« empressement » chez dobkin et de nous interroger sur ce phénomène, de voir dans l’interruption de cet empressement, dans les lacunes et les silences qui composent the magic hour de dobkins, l’occasion d’écouter un récit qui porte ses propres conditions d’énonciation. la deuxième contribution est signée par yasmine kandil et michelle macarthur, qui examinent death married my daughter, une pièce clownesque féministe signée par danya buonastella et nina gilmour sur la mort des personnages shakespeariens ophélie et desdémone. voyant le pouvoir politique « de la séduction et de la provocation » dans l’œuvre prÉsentation hearing women / Écouter les femmes • pp - • / . • tric / rtac bouffonne de buonastella et gilmour, kandil et macarthur font valoir que les clowns zombie féministes de la pièce ont bien des choses à transmettre aux praticiens du théâtre de tous les milieux—à condition que nous soyons prêts à tendre l’oreille aux disparues. deux autres contributions nous proposent d’aller à la découverte d’histoires de femmes canadiennes dans les livres et sur scène : cathleen mckague plonge dans les archives à la suite des traces laissées par robertson davies alors qu’il se préparait à présenter the taming of the shrew dans ce que l’on considère aujourd’hui comme le style des pratiques originelles au little theatre de peterborough, tandis que shelley scott fait un retour sur still stands the house, la pièce emblématique de gwen pharis ringwood. mckague décrit avec soin les leçons que nous transmet la production amateure à succès de davies sur la façon dont les praticiens canadiens ont dû tenter de concilier les techniques « britanniques » et « canadiennes » avant l’ère du festival stratford. scott, quant à elle, s’intéresse à l’entrelacement d’éléments liés à la géographie, au climat et à la violence dans la représentation par ringwood des rôles et rapports genrés à l’aune de la colonisation. nos deux dernières contributions, signées par kimberley mcleod et naila keleta- mae, nous proposent de nous demander en tant que chercheurs comment les histoires banales que l’on se raconte au sujet de l’art qui constitue notre terrain d’enquête peuvent agir de manière insidieuse lorsqu’il s’agit de légitimer et de faire circuler les points de vue normalisés sur cet art. mcleod s’intéresse à l’humoriste nathan fielder et à nathan for you, sa parodie de la télé-réalité, et fait valoir que le travail de fielder installe un dialogue riche et complexe entre le théâtre du réel et les tropes de la télé-réalité qui nous permet d’inter- roger comment et pourquoi les critiques culturels ont implicitement hiérarchisé ces genres en tant que « valable » et « rejetable » respectivement. quant à keleta-mae, cette dernière vient boucler notre sélection d’articles en proposant un survol de l’œuvre de trey anthony en tant que dramaturge et impresario. dans son article, elle examine comment anthony réussit à remplir ses salles de femmes noires en partageant fièrement et exclusivement sur scène les histoires de ces dernières. faisant fi de reproches qu’on lui fait à l’égard de son travail (ceux-ci étant souvent nés des attentes eurocentriques de critiques blancs sur ce qui constitue du « bon » théâtre), anthony taille une place pour les corps, les conversations et les émotions des femmes noires dans des auditoriums que la critique choisit de quitter. ce qui fait le malheur des critiques fait le bonheur des femmes noires. dans le forum de ce numéro, jill carter fait un retour sur les cinquante ans du centre for drama, theatre and performance studies de l’université de toronto, se penchant plus par- ticulièrement le travail actif du centre en matière de décolonisation des pratiques savantes et artistiques avant de considérer les progrès qu’il reste à faire dans cette veine. ensuite, dans ce qui deviendra, nous l’espérons, une tradition de présenter deux fois par année les tendances récentes en recherche sur le théâtre et la performance au québec, louise forsyth nous propose son tout premier compte rendu de nouvelles parutions dans les revues jeu, l’annuaire théâtral, alt. théâtre, et aparté/arts vivants—recherche & création. notre série habi- tuelle de critiques d’ouvrages vient clore le numéro. neuf femmes, donc, nous offrent neuf contributions marquées par l’exploration et la critique. inattendues, informatives, toutes différentes les unes des autres, elles vous sont fièrement présentées par l’équipe de rédaction de tric/rtac, laquelle est composée de prÉsentation tric / rtac • . / • pp - • hearing women / Écouter les femmes sept femmes qui travaillent sans relâche : selena couture (responsable des comptes rendus), allison leadley (assistante à la rédaction), sonya malaborza (traductrice), nicole nolette (rédactrice adjointe francophone), cassandra silver (directrice administrative), jessica watkin (assistante à la rédaction) et kim solga (rédactrice en chef). bonne lecture. et n’oubliez pas d’être à l’écoute. book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee review how to cite: wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ):  , pp.  – , doi: https:// doi.org/ . /os. published: august peer review: this article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of open screens, which is a journal published by the open library of humanities. copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open screens is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. https://doi.org/ . /os. https://doi.org/ . /os. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . /os. review book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee phil wintle university of leicester (history of film department), leicester, uk pjw @le.ac.uk this review explores jason lee’s timely work nazism and neo-nazism in film and media. lee raises several intriguing, and at times, challenging arguments about the position of the far-right as a mainstream power in modern society. lee’s work covers films, television, video games, and other media which raises possibilities for further discussions, as noted in this review. however, this review suggests that lee’s work too often abandons its remit as a study focused on film and media to instead explore philosophy and politics, and also highlights problematic discussions in lee’s text. keywords: nazism; neo-nazi; politics; philosophy; trump nazism and neo-nazism in film and media is a ranging text moving from the representation of nazis in film to their global spread and influence in modern politics. throughout, jason lee makes a contentious but interesting argument that nazism is in the mainstream and not the fringes of society. trump’s america is an overt example, but lee argues this trend is a global issue noting the influence and normalisation of the far-right that has forced policy shifts among national centralist parties. indeed, we live in a society that demonises the weak and poor (lee points to the tabloid presses that present those on welfare as ‘parasites’) which are ‘core values’ of nazism (lee, : ). looking at film and media surrounding both nazism and neo-nazism is ambitious as either one would provide enough discussion for a fair monograph, for instance with sabine hake’s screen nazis: cinema, history, and democracy ( ); however, lee does well to connect the two. discussion on film and television is mostly provided in the second and third chapters of the text; the second chapter https://doi.org/ . /os. mailto:pjw @le.ac.uk wintle: book reviewart.  , page of mostly focuses on depictions of nazism and the holocaust, moving from ilsa: she wolf of the ss ( ), to the reader ( ), and the hunger games ( ), the latter of which lee claims presents a nazi work ethic (which lee suggests is also found in capitalism). here arguments on ‘authenticity’ are made, for instance, that naziplotation allows the viewer to recognise and engage with the overt modification of history, whereas ‘authentic’ films such as son of saul ( ) present nazis as ‘the embodiment of evil’ and so offer only a ‘singular depiction’ (lee, : – ). neo- nazi films are discussed briefly, with lee noting that they offer ‘ontological crisis’ as a plot device, showing how ‘normal’ individuals descend to violence (lee, : ); a stronger link could be made between this argument and later points about the acceptability of the far-right in modern society. more space is given to the netflix series nsu german history x ( ) which follows teen neo-nazis, where lee notes how neo-nazism is presented not as a group looking to history but instead towards a hopeful future. this is potentially appealing narrative to youth and lee explains how neo-nazis on stormfront.com have found interest in parts of the show – an issue that deserves further academic discussion elsewhere. in the third chapter, looking at nazism and comedy, specifically look who’s back ( ), lee argues that fiction can be used to educate and warn of history, as well as to detach the evil ‘other’ from ourselves (lee, : ). these are justified arguments, although the chapter is short and a wider exploration on a relatively niche field would have been intriguing – indeed, most of the chapter focuses on the novel of look who’s back rather than the film adaption, which seems to contrast with the purpose of the text. that lee’s focus moves away from film and media is emphasised in the following chapter on ‘necrospectives and media transformations’ which heavily employs philosophical texts including nietzsche, baudrillard, and levinas, among others. without familiarity of such works, this chapter (and sections of the book overall) makes for complex reading. the separation of film and philosophy in lee’s book is jarring, whereas a merger of the two subjects (using philosophical text to support debates arising from film) could have been more conducive. the following chapter on globalization offers an interesting overview of nazism worldwide, importantly noting that through trump and the media the splintered http://stormfront.com wintle: book review art.  , page of right have united. the chapter concludes with a brief but constructive argument on nazism in video games, arguing that the universality of gaming demonstrates the global branding of nazism, and that nazi games may even ‘mirror’ society – these are interesting arguments for expansion; lee’s work is strongest when looking at media in detail as such maintaining this focus would have been beneficial. there are other issues with lee’s work. for instance, he explores the rising anti- semitism in america noting that between trump’s inauguration in january and march there were over one hundred bombing attempts on jewish community centres and synagogues in america (lee, : ). yet, lee gives no reference for this, and upon researching the matter it materialises that the bomb threats (not bombing attempts) had been orchestrated by a teenager in israel, not by american neo-nazis (beaumont, ); in lee’s text this is unclear, and is questionable evidence of rising global neo-nazism. in a text that bemoans the manipulation of the media by trump and his claims of ‘fake news’ this is a problematic misrepresentation. equally, lee claims that ‘[i]nstead of changing the world, citizens are more likely to photograph and record it’ (lee, : ), referring to this interaction as potentially able to provoke change but equally leading to a ‘narcissistic’ ‘false sense of activity’. there is, perhaps, some truth to this, but lee’s comments read as patronising and dismissive, especially as recently several videos have spread on social media showing police brutality in america and have raised public awareness of the issue. moreover, the black lives matter movement started as an online campaign, and the #metoo campaign has highlighted injustice and sexual abuse in the film industry and in society. the concluding chapter of lee’s work ostensibly focuses on modern politics. for instance, lee points to trump’s manipulation of the media, both social and news- broadcast, as evidence of nazism entering the mainstream. trump’s politics often do align with the far-right, his comments on immigration and travel bans do point to extremism in mainstream politics. lee equally argues that brexit is evidence of the social shift towards the right. yet, brexit divided traditional boundaries of the political left and right (moore, ), and relating brexit to nazism ignores the complexity of the vote and this political divide. indeed, the relevance of brexit to a text on wintle: book reviewart.  , page of nazism in the media is lacking. this said, lee’s concluding argument explaining how nazis dehumanise themselves is potent, as is lee’s challenge to the normalisation of nazism and far-right extremism in modern society and media. more emphasis on film and media is needed in lee’s work where the focus is often fragmented. nonetheless, lee’s work raises thought-provoking points for ongoing discussions on the acceptability and spread of the far right in modern society, and how this affects our humanity. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references beaumont, p. . israeli teen accused of , bomb hoax calls and blackmail. guardian online, april [online access at: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats. last accessed june ]. hake, s. . screen nazis: cinema, history, and democracy. madison: university of wisconsin press. lee, j. . nazism and neo-nazism in film and media. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. moore, p. . how britain voted, june. available at: https://yougov.co.uk/ news/ / / /how-britain-voted [last accessed july ]. how to cite this article: wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . /os. submitted: june accepted: august published: august copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open screens is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. open access https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats https://yougov.co.uk/news/ / / /how-britain-voted https://yougov.co.uk/news/ / / /how-britain-voted https://doi.org/ . /os. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	competing interests 	references higher education as a platform for capacity building to address violence against women and promote gender equality: the swedish example | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /s - - - corpus id: higher education as a platform for capacity building to address violence against women and promote gender equality: the swedish example @article{okenwaemgwa higherea, title={higher education as a platform for capacity building to address violence against women and promote gender equality: the swedish example}, author={leah okenwa-emgwa and e. von strauss}, journal={public health reviews}, year={ }, volume={ } } 	leah okenwa-emgwa, e. von strauss 	published 	medicine, political science 	public health reviews violence against women is an acknowledged public and global health problem which has adverse consequences for women’s health. education, especially higher education, has long been identified as an important arena for addressing the problem and promoting gender equality. two measures recently put in place in the swedish higher education have brought the role of the sector into focus. the first is the inclusion of gender equality as a measurable outcome in quality assurance in higher education… expand view on springer publichealthreviews.biomedcentral.com save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	women's health 	promotion (action) paper mentions blog post higher education as a platform for capacity building to address violence against women and promote gender equality: the swedish example 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department of history, university of massachusetts amherst, amherst, ma, usa abstract marked the th anniversary of title ix of the education amendments of , a sex non-discrimination policy which remade american education and athletics. has title ix fulfilled its promise to end discriminatory and disparate treatment of women in educational institutions? this article places policy in conversation with scholarly debate over how to best tackle persistent sex and gender inequalities, illustrating that the athletic policy sphere both addresses and reproduces sexist practices. it examines the under-appreciated complexity of sex equity politics and suggests the need to question how well public policy addresses inequalities. it argues that we are losing ground in the struggle to end gendered oppression – despite all that it may appear we have gained – because of title ix’s divergent implementation strategy which integrates women and men in classrooms and segregates them in sports. rather than vitiating sex discrimination, implementation generated a series of policy ironies, authorizing, rather than challenging the notion that women and men are inherently “different.” in order to continue addressing the ways in which gendered oppression asserts itself – in sex discrimination, in discrimination against trans* people, in gendered harassment and #metoo – we must bring a critical perspective to bear on current equity policy practices. article history received april accepted january keywords title ix; public policy; athletics; sex discrimination; sex segregation; transgender politics politics of gender inequality: what’s the problem? in june , president barack obama offered multiple public statements which cele- brated the th anniversary of title ix of the education amendments of , the sex non-discrimination policy which dramatically altered american educational institutions and their contingent athletic programs. president obama – whose daughters are both young athletes – openly lauded public policy, suggesting that it “helped to make our society more equal in general” (compton ). this positive narrative of policy success was widely promulgated in the media (whiteside and roessner ) and may, therefore, appear uncontroversial. scholars from various disciplines demonstrate a plethora of positive impacts of policy implementation, including women’s improved access to higher education (rose ), a nearly -fold increase in high school athletic opportunities for girls since the early s (ncaa b), women’s subsequent © western political science association contact elizabeth a. sharrow sharrow@polsci.umass.edu department of political science, department of history, university of massachusetts amherst, hicks way, amherst, ma , usa politics, groups, and identities , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:sharrow@polsci.umass.edu http://www.tandfonline.com increased labor force participation (stevenson ) and improved long-term indepen- dence and health (clarke and ayres ; kaestner and xu ). yet upon deeper reflection, president obama’s public celebration of title ix – particu- larly as it is applied to athletic programs in american high schools, colleges, and univer- sities – is peculiar. “equality,” under title ix in the realm of sports, exists through segregated boy’s versus girl’s, and men’s versus women’s athletic teams. the paucity of sex integrated athletic teams in interscholastic and intercollegiate athletics is not merely due to custom and tradition. the practice of sex segregation in athletics is “coerced” (mcdonagh and pappano ) under title ix’s policy design. thus, obama’s comments were not merely applauding the athletic girls and women who benefit from policy; the first black american president was openly and proudly celebrating the widespread athletic practice of separate but equal. separate but ostensibly equal segregated athletic teams for men and boys versus women and girls are pervasive in american high schools and colleges. simultaneously, title ix remains extremely popular and is commonly framed as a pre-eminent success of modern american feminist movements (whiteside and roessner ). political elites as dissimilar as ralph nader ( ) and sarah palin ( ) join the majority of average americans who express increasingly high levels of support for the law as applied to ath- letics, in particular (yougov ). our public narrative around title ix suggests, in short, that while policy remains unevenly implemented across athletic departments such that men and boys persistently enjoy greater athletic participation opportunities (e.g., yanus and o’connor ), the political battle towards achieving equality should focus on better enforcing the policy as currently designed. neither the public nor our pol- itical leadership openly grapples with the potential impacts of segregation as a non-discri- minatory solution. over years after congress passed title ix, what are the consequences of the divergent, yet concurrent approaches of sex segregation in athletics, and sex integration in classrooms for the broader politics of sex and gender? how does policy design shape how we think about sex-based inequality? this article begins from the premise that sex segregated athletics in american colleges and high schools must be understood in the broader context of public policy. when sports, under title ix, are placed in contrast to policy implementation in classroom spaces, policy design for athletics can be rendered curious instead of natural. core to this analysis is a close read of title ix’s central non-discrimination clause, “on the basis of sex,” through which policymakers are tasked with crafting equal educational institutions and opportu- nities for women and men. the meaning of “sex,” rather than existing as a given, requires a definition. alongside gender and queer theorists who have long argued that the meanings of “sex” and “gender” are fashioned by our social and medical institutions (e.g., butler ; fausto-sterling ), this article examines how sex non-discrimination policy design mobilizes that constitutive task through political institutions, and with what consequences. against the grain of policy success: title ix’s gendered paradox my analysis illustrates how title ix’s policy design establishes the meaning of sex built on a gendered paradox. policy design conceptualizes women and men as ( ) distinctive types of people, defined as such through a binary notion of “sex,” who are ( ) both “the same” politics, groups, and identities (in classrooms, where policy treats them similarly, integrating without regard to sex) and “different” (in sports, where policy segregates them on to separate athletic teams by virtue of sex) under the aegis of non-discrimination policy. on sports teams, but not in classrooms, title ix’s implementation guidelines divide girls and women from men and boys. policy design defines sex as a binary category for the purposes of com- petitive athletics, mobilizing this categorical definition to implement the practice of “separate but equal.” through the extant policy guidelines, sex serves as both the object of focus for policy (i.e., the identity category in classrooms on which differential treatment is prohibited) and the organizational category inherent to implementing it (i.e., the category through which some bodies are differentially treated in sports). policy design within title ix thus invokes an embodied, binary definition of sex for athletics, but not classrooms, knitting civil rights policy to binary notions about sexual difference and biology. several consequences follow from this framework for thinking about title ix. the paradox suggested in policy design sanctions, rather than challenges, pernicious stereo- types about women’s inferiority. this means that for all that title ix’s implementation has achieved in increasing opportunity for women, it has simultaneously undermined the goals of full gender equality. segregation is premised on the perceived “need” for women to be protected from men and their purportedly stronger, faster, larger bodies, in order to achieve their full, competitive athletic potential. as political theorist iris marion young elucidates, this encodes and transmits a confounding message: “feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality, which simultaneously reaches toward a pro- jected end with an ‘i can’ and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self- imposed ‘i cannot’” ( , ). this paradox then produces other “spillover” consequences within, and stretching beyond, title ix’s policy domain. chiefly, it reinforces the idea of a sex binary. dichot- omous understandings of sex are flawed scientifically and injurious both to transgender, intersex, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people (hereafter, “trans*”) as well as – albeit in different ways – to cisgender women. the paradox embedded within title ix fuels a host of intractable and on-going tensions which help to sediment, rather than dis- mantle, many of the unresolved gendered hierarchies at the core of equity policy battles, from gendered equality at work to youth sports. policy suppresses opportunities for direct competition between women and men while reifying the idea that women need to be “protected” from men. in a world grappling with the legacies of male enclaves in a sex integrated world (see menarndt with implications for #metoo), and a young generation increasingly apt to challenge the meanings of gender (meadow ), identifying the spillover and interconnections between sports and other venues is increasingly urgent. although i adopt this critical posture, i do not argue that title ix’s impacts have been purely negative. a host of studies illustrate how public policy has positively impacted women’s education, athletic opportunities, and long-term life outcomes, on average (e.g., staurowsky et al. ). however, my analysis cautions that current policy design contains inherent structural limitations. when we take seriously the gendered hier- archies “baked in” to policy design, there emerge more questions than answers about the role of title ix in full gendered liberation. i suggest that we need to read against the grain of the progressive narrative of policy success to reorient the conversation about title ix’s e. a. sharrow legacy. i aim to diagnose the functional logics of on-going sex and gender oppression oper- ating within the policy we often think is aimed to address them. in doing so, i point toward fresh possibilities for sex equity policy. in order to delineate my critical perspective, this article unfolds in four parts. first, i demarcate the contradictory logic of sex integration versus sex segregation embedded in policy design. next, i problematize it. this critical perspective enables my analyses of its spillover effects. i conclude by reflecting on how scholars and policymakers might proceed with this conversation going forward. policy design and separation by sex: classrooms versus athletics one element of the extensive u.s. civil rights policy apparatus, title ix became law as part of the education amendments (rose ). the gendered paradox at the crux of policy emerged in the early s when feminist activists successfully politicized the differ- ential and exclusionary treatment of women in education as a newly acknowledged form of discrimination “on the basis of sex.” activists drew on long traditions of feminist cri- tique (cott ), framing educational institutions as a breeding ground for sexist exclu- sions of women from public life (evans ). their main objective was to end biased treatment of women and girls in education (rose ); sports were absent from the leg- islative language and only emerged as a target of sustained discussion when implemen- tation deliberations began (sharrow ). policy discussions about environments for classroom learning generally targeted means for integrating girls and women into the androcentric realm of education (fishel and pottker ). the final guidelines which stipulate policy design explicitly address “access to class and schools” (herein: “classrooms”) independently from athletics. with regard to classroom spaces, guidelines specify, “a recipient shall not provide or otherwise carry out any of its education programs or activities separately on the basis of sex, or require or refuse participation therein by any of its students on the basis of sex” [ cfr . (a)]. two exceptions to requisite integration are named, ( ) “contact sports” in physical education class which involves bodily contact (including wrestling, boxing, rugby, ice hockey, football, basketball) and ( ) courses on human sexuality. integration is required for education programs pertaining to health, general physical education, indus- trial, business, vocational, or technical education, home economics, and music. in contrast, athletics “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport” at both the intercollegiate and interscholastic levels [ cfr . (b)]. additionally, the office for civil rights (ocr) issued a policy interpretation focused specifically on inter- collegiate athletics (ocr ). at the core of these divergent approaches to non-discrimination sits the operative definition of “sex.” in classrooms, policy design aims to make sex irrelevant as a category for learning. in sports, sex is the only category that matters. to justify these “separate but equal” athletic practices, policy design requires a definition of sex that is rigid and “essen- tial.” sex, as invoked for implementation in athletics, is an immutable attribute of the human body. it is central to policy implementation in sports but not in classrooms and thus has – unexpectedly – reduced complex functions of human biology, which are themselves embedded in an inequitable social world, to a gendered binary. politics, groups, and identities policy implementation details for intercollegiate athletics: separation paradigm this gendered binary is encoded in the granular details of policy design. the guide- lines for intercollegiate athletics instruct schools to comply with an equal opportunity paradigm, under which teams are allowed to be sex “separate”; notably, no such detailed guidelines delineate the practice of classroom integration. schools must demonstrate that their athletic opportunities for men and women are “substantially proportional” to the enrollment of their undergraduate student population. if % of the overall undergraduate student body is comprised of women, title ix’s policy guidelines suggest that % of the athletic opportunities (measured by the roster count of each sport on the first day of intra-squad competition by each team) also be available to women. these guidelines do not strictly prohibit the integration of women and men on the same team. schools are instructed that the “regulation does not require institutions to integrate their teams nor to provide exactly the same choice of sports to men and women” (ocr ). however, in the case of teams requiring some “competitive skill” (ostensibly refer- ring to all institutionally-funded, varsity-level athletic teams), “separate teams for members of each sex” are allowed. contingently, if an institution offers a sport only to “members of one sex,” it must allow the excluded “sex” to try out for the team in some, but not all circumstances. in many sports, where there exists a men’s but not a women’s competitive team, only a tryout is required, and even the tryout can be denied to women in so-called “contact sports.” the de facto result of these regulations is that historically dominant “men’s” sports have been unaffected by the policy designed to include women into sporting domains. football, in particular, has been essentially unrestricted under title ix, and very few women have been allowed access to (presumed “men’s”) football teams (brake ; hoye ). these enduring male-centered practices in sports – examples of what sandra bem names “androcentrism” – buttress the idea that sports are naturally men’s domain and that the paradigmatic athlete is male (bem ). the separate domains established by policy design largely serve to retain “men’s” sports for “male” par- ticipants and, because title ix does not require sex equality in spending practices, they have enabled widespread, nearly $ -to-$ expenditure disparities which dramatically favor men athletes in the largest athletic programs (ncaa b). this, alongside the tryout exclusions for women’s participation in “men’s” contact sports, illustrates how sex segregation is both premised on, and reproduces a gendered hierarchy. the fear of “contact” suggests ( ) a hetero-centric anxiety about physical proxi- mity and intimacy between women and men (but not between same-sex competitors) and ( ) that women need “protection” from men’s (presumed to be stronger) physicality during training and competition. these practices authorize pernicious ideas about women’s physical inferiority and heterosexist assumptions about the role that sexuality plays in bodily contact between competitors (e.g., that sexualized contact can be prevented by segregated teams and locker rooms). segregation diminishes the egalitarian potential of integrated practice, suggested by evidence of diminished sexist attitudes among men and boys who train and compete with girls and women (anderson ). it also it co-articu- lates with homophobia to introduce trepidation around the role that homosocial spaces play in the socialization of girls and boys. e. a. sharrow procedurally, sex integration is never required in athletic settings under title ix, and segregation, although not strictly compulsory, is – as mcdonagh and pappano ( ) argue – a “coercive” policy practice. if a school hosts both a “men’s” and a “women’s” team, women – regardless of skill – are generally not allowed to compete in the “men’s” division (brake ). at the high school level, some states even prevent girls who merely train with boys from ever again competing in the “girl’s” division (weil ). in the absence of designated teams for both sexes, women may be allowed to try-out for the “men’s” team using the same metrics as male candidates for the team. there are no particular rules to the content of such a try-out, only that it must be intern- ally consistent among both women and men candidates for the team. for “men’s” teams that are designated under title ix as “contact sports,” even this try-out can be denied to women. from policy to problem: thinking with feminist legacies the implications of this policy design require close attention. title ix makes meaning of biological sex through segregatory practices, implicitly replicating what kessler and mckenna ( ) call the “incorrigible proposition” of sex difference (i.e., that sex differ- ence exists outside of our social ideas about it). policy invokes social ideas about binary sex as the prima facie category of distinction in the establishment of athletic teams, despite mounting evidence from science and biology, and intensifying critique from gender and queer theory, that “sex” is neither a coherent nor a binary category (fine ; jordan- young ; karkazis et al. ). several generations of social scientists, theorists, and brain scientists scrutinize the operation of such “natural attitudes” (kessler and mckenna ) to suggest that “gender can be reconceptualized as an ‘effect’ rather than a mere fact, something that requires explanation rather than something that explains the social world” (jordan-young , ). increasingly, scholars argue that our under- standing of “sex,” rather than existing as a pre-gendered, biological binary, is, like gender, constituted by social ideas (butler ; fausto-sterling ; karkazis et al. ). “sex,” like “gender,” is best understood as a concept used to capture our imagined ideas about an embodied binary (male/female) than the existence of an actual sex binary itself. yet these ideas about a male/female binary are implicit in our social and political structures and discourse, including title ix’s policy design itself. although our under- standing of “gender identity” (i.e., the psychological dimension of sex-based identification) as distinctive from sex-assigned-at-birth (i.e., the categorical designation of male/female on birth certificates) has evolved significantly since the passage of policy (see also meyer- owitz ), policy design in title ix, particularly with regard to the separation paradigm, has not (balingit ). public policy plays an important role in naturalizing our (fraught and problematic) understanding of sex-as-a-binary through its use of sex segregated sports. policy design in title ix suggests that “sex” is an immutable physical characteristic of bodies. by segregating when matters of physicality are most salient (in competitive ath- letics), and integrating when intellectual concerns dominate, policy design suggests that women and men are categorically, biologically different from one another. policy design operates as a powerful engine for re-naturalizing the idea of sex difference, and stabilizing, rather than contesting, androcentric gender hierarchies. politics, groups, and identities can separate be equal? extant critiques of title ix and segregation several common arguments in favor of sex segregated sports endure including that ( ) men and women have different physical capacities which leave women unable to compete with men, ( ) segregation ensures that women need not compete with men over one set of shared opportunities (an argument which implies, again, that if/when women did compete with men, they would/will inevitably lose), and ( ) that women and men do not desire to compete against each other (see leong ; mcdonagh and pappano ; milner and braddock ). each of these arguments engages sex essen- tialized logics which assume that “men” and “women” are coherent and mutually exclusive categories and that all women, by virtue of being women, are weaker and slower than all men. such arguments in support of segregation have their historical roots both in patriar- chal, sexist logics and in feminist debates in the early s when women’s exclusion from competitive athletics was most pronounced (see cahn on the history of women in sport). in the absence of evidence about women’s latent athletic potential or competitive desire, the majority of feminist activists in the s authorized the segregationist strategy (e.g., psew for original feminist debate; sharrow for historical context). neither policymakers nor title ix’s activist proponents have seriously returned to the question of integrated athletics, effectively de-problematizing the approach over time. many scholars of sport, legal studies, and title ix delineate their concerns about the impacts of sex segregation. while some legal scholars suggest that sex segregation is “the most promising feminist strategy” (brake , ), even those who support it must grapple with its costs. in a book which most recently reinvigorated the debate over sex segregation, mcdonagh and pappano ( ) question whether the physiology of men and women athletes fundamentally justifies the practice of sex segregation within title ix, delineating many examples where women’s physical performance is equal to, or better than men’s. their argument critiques the policy guidelines insofar as the guidelines imply that segregation prevents women from being physically hurt or exposed to “unfair” competition. they convincingly argue that rather than merely reflecting sex difference between “male” and “female” athletes, sex segregation amplifies foundational sexist ideas. this socially constructed binary is central to falsely understanding some sports – and segregated teams – as either “men’s” (e.g., football or baseball) or “women’s” (e.g., softball or field hockey) domains, leading to the proble- matic exclusion of women from supposedly “men’s” sports (hoye ; ring ). such reasoning recalls judith lorber’s ( ) argument that “biology is ideology” (i.e., that gender, rather than biology, constructs social bodies to be different and unequal), and helps to situate the problem of segregation in the long-standing feminist critique of gendered binaries and sex essentialism (bem ; dietz ). the problematics of athletic segregation are intensely evident in the exclusionary treat- ment of trans* athletes who confront a complicated matrix of standards for athletic par- ticipation at the interscholastic, collegiate, and elite levels in a segregated system (acklin ; buzuvis , ; davis ; smith ). “sex testing” of elite female athletes, an invasive practice which has taken multiple forms (pieper ), now patrols testoster- one levels of ciswomen who aim to compete in some track events. elite-driven attempts to stabilize sex segregated competition directly engage a biologic notion of “sex” encoded through hormones, and are most restrictive for intersex and gender non-conforming e. a. sharrow athletes, particularly women of color (karkazis and jordan-young ). interscholastic and intercollegiate athletics governed by title ix borrow from signals transmitted by inter- national sports governing bodies (e.g., the international olympic committee) in maintain- ing policy design, even without “testing” participant sex. instead, ncaa and state high school association policies (not federal law) delineate the specific rules for transgender ath- letes to “jump” categories (see buzuvis ) in order to maintain eligibility in a sex segre- gated system. yet trans* athletes have been more apt to seek annexation under the segregated system of title ix rather than to challenge the federal law which reifies sex differ- ence itself. this is most impactful for transwomen who seek inclusion in the “women’s” cat- egory but are haunted by androcentric hierarchies that imbue natal hormones with enduring athletic power. even in a system designed to maximize “opportunity,” these logics harm both ciswomen (whose bodies are pre-supposed as “too weak” for integrated competition with men) and transwomen (whose bodies, even after medical transition(s), are thought to be “too strong” to compete fairly with ciswomen). thus, the practical and ideological harms of segregation for cisgender women are more closely aligned with trans* athletes than it may seem. gendered binaries policed thru ideas about embodied sex, in addition to forcing a categorical imperative onto fluid genders, also reifies the athletic hierarchy that favors cismen above all other identities. cismen encoun- ter virtually no surveillance in the tradition of maintaining “men’s” teams and competitive categories, while ciswomen and trans* athletes can endure significant scrutiny in their quest to retain eligibility in “women’s” competition. transgender athletes (particularly transwomen) may be rendered ineligible to compete in both their pre- and post-transition division; the maintenance of sex categories is the foundation of such harms. transmen are more readily incorporated into “men’s” teams because of other sexist logics which ascribe being assigned “female” at birth as a marker of inferiority which does not present a com- petitive advantage vis-à-vis cismen competitors. accordingly, the problem is not merely that trans* athletes may not find inclusion in a segregated system, although this is a problem worthy of concern. the problems for trans* inclusion should direct our attention back to purportedly “non-discriminatory” sol- utions “on the basis of sex.” certainly, the creation and maintenance of sex-based competi- tive categories for ciswomen under title ix have more positively benefited average cis athletes, but such teams have neither served to up-end male dominance in sports nor pro- vided non-discriminatory opportunities for trans* athletes. policy practices secure teams and competitive opportunities for women assigned “female” at birth, but do such teams provide the best opportunities to upend gendered stereotypes of “women’s” inferiority? and how do practices which value and protect both maleness and male enclaves inform our societal conversations about the gendered order? the next section considers the ramifications of title ix for these questions. spillover harms: a call to scholars of gender and policy the gendered paradox – men and women are “the same” while also “different” – within policy design illustrates our persistent ambivalence toward the meanings of sex and gender within institutions targeted by non-discrimination policy. in this final section, i develop the implications of my argument about the tensions in title ix’s policy design. these “spil- lover effects” of authorizing sex segregation in such a politically popular and normatively politics, groups, and identities valued policy suggest reasons to question the operation of segregation both within and beyond title ix’s domain. scholars of american politics indicate cause for concern in the on-going project of inte- grating women (and, though lesser discussed, trans* people) into the institutions of amer- ican government. women of color, women with disabilities, lgbtqia women, and other intersectionally marginalized subgroups struggle for political recognition (strolo- vitch ). women and girls now enjoy greater educational attainment and workforce participation than ever before due to the implementation of policies like title ix, and title vii of the civil rights act (cra) of . however, contrary to women’s purport- edly equal access to education, they face a complicated terrain upon entering the work- force defined by limited access to parental leave and health care, an entrenched wage gap, and a virtually impenetrable glass ceiling (grossman ). americans remain gripped by an age-old conundrum across multiple venues – grappling with whether women should be treated “the same” or “as different from” men – over how to conceive of and best address “women’s interests” at school, at work, and in politics. various factors account for the gaps between the promise of policy and the persistent “intersectional” gender inequalities in the status quo. public policy aimed at protecting women and girls from discrimination has arisen from complex movement demands (costain ; goss ). even after the passage of non-discrimination laws, battles over de jure enforcement are often prolonged (grossman ; thomas ). in general, the courts have provided only a partial pathway to recompense for sex discrimi- natory treatment (edelman ). in short, and as political theorists have contended for decades: gendered hierarchies remain fundamental to the organization of the american political system (dietz ; ritter ). yet scholarship which draws critical attention to policy designed to address these issues remains strikingly limited. we live in confounding times when the ideology of sexism is under intensive critique, yet misogyny seems resurgent. as philosopher kate manne reminds us, “sexism often works by naturalizing sex differences, in order to justify patriarchal arrangements, by making them seem inevitable, or portraying people trying to resist them as fighting a losing battle” (manne , ). misogyny, in contrast, “upholds the social norms of patri- archies by policing and patrolling them” (manne , ). although we rarely look to title ix as a domain in which misogyny may draw on sexist logics to hinder the liberation of trans* people and ciswomen and girls, my critique as applied to reading recent events suggest that we should. during the summer of , young girls in madison, wi, and omaha, ne experienced harassment and exclusion from competition in their youth soccer leagues because their short haircuts made them look “too much” like boys (koss ; mele ). the same summer, a new york times survey found that americans indicate substantial levels of dis- comfort with the sex integrated workplace (miller ) only one week after the women’s sports foundation – the preeminent women’s sports advocacy organization in the country – released a national poll indicating overwhelming support for title ix (yougov ). these seemingly disparate stories each reveal an insidious implication from the problem of sex segregation. the events in wisconsin and nebraska within girls’ soccer leagues illustrate how the ideology of gendered hierarchies “baked in” to sport diminishes, rather than expands the liberatory potential of title ix. girls on these teams fashioned their hair in short e. a. sharrow styles as an homage to u.s. national women’s soccer team members megan rapinoe and abby wambach. the haircuts were read by the parents of competitors as “too masculine,” and the young girls were subjected to accusations that they were masquerading “as boys” in a girl’s league (koss ; mele ). such accusations echo those lobbed at caster semenya and dutee chand, elite runners targeted by hyperandrogenism policy (karkazis and jordan-young ). what do such anxieties suggest about the conditions of “equality” available under a seg- regated system? for one, they illustrate that when we authorize segregation, we invite gen- dered surveillance of participants on girls and women’s teams. who are the “real” women and girls? how will we know them as such? this surveillance serves to authorize, rather than challenge, traditional gender expectations about “proper” gender presentation as fused to the physical body, illustrated by the accusations that short-haired athletes are not “really girls.” in wisconsin, the parents were asked to produce their children’s birth certificates to authenticate the sex of their child. that natal birth was assumed to verify inclusion (or exclusion, had the documents not “revealed” the proper sex) exposes the thorough permeation of athletics by embodied judgments of sex. the logic under which parents sought to invoke segregated athletics to exclude short- haired people also reveals the convenience of segregation for authorizing transphobia and homophobia. homophobia in segregated women’s athletics is a perennial concern (e.g., cahn ) which is especially evident in such appraisals of young girls who emulate out-lesbians like rapinoe and wambach. homosocial spaces “protect” girls and women from purportedly stronger men and boys, but not from the fear that athleticism shelters lesbianism. the potential exclusion of “masculine” girls hints at a how transphobia, co- articulating with homophobia, can swiftly police the “proper” participants on “girl’s” teams. the policing of masculine gender presentation on a “girl’s” team reveals how nar- rowly defined the category of “girl” (or “woman”) in segregated teams can be. with sexist logics guiding segregatory practice, therein lurks anxiety that gender non-normativity is poised to unravel the binary category of sex. it also suggests that the logics of strict segre- gation easily permeate youth sports. title ix’s authority does not extend to youth ath- letics, but its categorical logics do. girl and women athletes under a sex segregated system always run the risk of appearing (or developing skills that make them) “too good” for the “female” teams, but without recourse to compete elsewhere. finally, the actual accomplishments of women athletes are both occluded by their lack of opportunity to demonstrably out-perform men in head-to-head competition, and they are interpreted by many as inherently less impressive than the accomplishments of top-performing men. in short, the policy legacies of title ix have both reproduced hierarchies that non-discrimination policy aimed to denounce, and created additional problems which plague both its purported beneficiaries, and girls and women more generally. although title ix is not itself responsible for all persistent gendered inequalities, the ideology of sex segregation sanctions significant ambivalence toward the questions of how and where women and men should directly grapple with shared space. this was recently illustrated in a new york times poll (reported on the front page of the paper under the headline: “when jobs put sexes together, worker’s cringe”) regarding the impact of sex integration in the workplace (miller ). the poll, fielded after a politics, groups, and identities interview with vice president mike pence resurfaced in march which featured his statement that he “never eats alone with a woman who isn’t his wife,” found that: many men and women are wary of a range of one-on-one situations … around a quarter think private work meetings with colleagues of the opposite sex are inappropriate. nearly two-thirds say people should take extra caution around members of the opposite sex at work. a majority of women, and nearly half of men, say it’s unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse. (miller ) in short, american adults remain uncomfortable with the sex integrated environment of the american workforce. on its face, this poll should be interpreted advisedly. for example, the pollsters did not distinguish among the reasons that integration may be considered “inappropriate,” includ- ing among women who fear that sexual harassment may be more likely when left alone with male co-workers – a point underscored by “#metoo” activism. however, it illustrates another pernicious impact of the ideology of sex segregation. the ideology of women’s “difference,” when authorized anywhere is available anywhere to justify exclusion, disparate treatment, and sexual harassment. over the past half- century, at male-only institutions (strum ) and in the u.s. military (mackenzie ), feminist and civil rights advocates have fought mightily toward women’s full inclusion in historically male enclaves. similar battles are waged to create an integrated workplace under title vii (turk ). thus, the resurgence of ambivalence, and even skepticism towards integration should cause some alarm. male-enclaves – protected in athletics under title ix while they have been outmoded elsewhere – are perceived to both profoundly socialize men into proper masculinity, develop their “leadership skills,” and to do so in the absence of women (e.g., messner ). no wonder, then, that americans continue to express apprehension about the inte- grated workplace. in a society that celebrates the paradox of segregation in a popular public policy, even as the logics of that policy promote the ideology of sex essentialized difference, we are apt to remain perplexed. the scenarios in both youth soccer and the integrated workplace underscore – in different ways – that we remain trapped in an unre- solved dispute over whether girls and boys, or men and women, can share the same social spaces and be treated equally – or safely, as the resurgence of attention to sexual harass- ment and assault reminds us – if and when they do. in the early twenty-first century, americans remain committed to public policies (fore- most among them, title ix) that we believe will make sex discrimination a relic of the past, even as we repeatedly encounter evidence which demonstrates that at school, at work, and at play, policy has only partially produced such an outcome. not only must we reckon with the legacies of policy debate as we confront the possibilities for future alternatives, but we must also consider how the logics embedded in a policy which is often cited as an example of success nevertheless provides problematic models for parallel, unresolved policy areas. conclusions and future directions over the past years, there have been two distinct sets of practices and ideologies set in motion by policy implementation. on the one hand, policy has forced institutions to cease unilaterally denying women and girls access to competitive athletics. increased e. a. sharrow opportunities mean that now eighty-seven percent of americans believe that sports are “equally important” for girls and boys (yougov ), and current college athletes over- whelmingly support sex equitable athletics systems (druckman, rothschild, and sharrow ). policy has created the conditions for women and girls to develop physical skills which directly defy the presupposition that they are incapable of sports. with this, policy has shepherded evolutions to the gendered expectations about physicality, allowing women to pursue pathways for achieving their physical potential. but simultaneously, sex segregated sports have suppressed evidence of women’s increased speed, strength, and achievement vis-à-vis men. we rarely see post-adolescent athletes compete or train in integrated settings, and thus we seldom confront the challenge posed by women’s actual capacities to the reigning order of sports. we are slow to acknowledge, for example, that elite women marathon runners, whose fastest times have improved more rapidly than have men’s, are faster than many men also entered into the “elite” categories. because we name a “women’s champion” in such sex inte- grated competitions, for example, the sex segregated logic for all sports allows critics to discount the victory of the fastest women over the preponderance of men. the “women’s champion” can claim victory of all women, while the “men’s champion” is pre- sumed to claim victory over all. women’s accomplishments are conditioned on being merely “female athletes,” while men’s achievements in racing sports stand for the supre- macy of all men. unexpectedly, these issues are enabled within the public policy aimed at addressing sex inequity. title ix exalts these practices that serve to obscure the accomplishments of cis- gender women and police or exclude trans* people, even as public policy remains revered by many political leaders and in popular discourse. implementation has so normalized the practice of segregation that it simultaneously obscures its own harms and the pernicious spillover logics which inhibit women’s full liberation. yet policy once made can be rene- gotiated. evidence suggests that women athletes, rather than existing as a latent activist group, perceive implementation problems in policy and are prepared to politically mobilize around title ix (druckman, rothschild, and sharrow ). among elite ath- letes, the recent announcement of hyperandrogenism policies for some events in track and field were met with athlete protest (fryer ). such mobilization among policy benefi- ciaries and their allies will likely be necessary to advocate for revisions to the status quo. however, the first step in achieving such a political movement is denaturalizing this paradox in policy design. after four decades of policy implementation, scholars – if not yet interest groups or pol- icymakers – posit the need for revisions to title ix. several argue for a new two-tiered system, with open-access to “men’s” teams for women, and closed access to men for “women’s” teams – what mcdonagh and pappano ( ) call “voluntary” segregation. others suggest that sports should be subjected to the same “intermediate” legal scrutiny as occurs in other sex- and gender-based contexts (leong ), and many agree that the ban on sex integration in “contact sports” must end (e.g., bell ; caggiano ; sangree ). some advocate that athletics should be entirely free of sex-based classifications (george ). my suggestions for future directions align most closely with those scholars who center the radical possibilities available when men’s teams become more “open,” even if women’s teams should, at least in the near-term, remain “closed” to cismen (mcdonagh and politics, groups, and identities pappano ; milner and braddock ). my critical perspective on the gendered paradox in policy design, and in light of my argument that gendered hierarchies promoted through segregation both harm women and trans* folks while enabling logics of male supremacy, lead to the possibility for several specific changes. because “men’s” teams con- tinue to be the more highly resourced and valued, i propose that the near-term should be focused on opening men’s programs to more women athletes. although my long-term hope is that athletic competition can be organized more diversely – e.g., around weight class, body size, or participant skill level – depending on the requirements of the sport rather than the category of sex, the initial target of critique ought to be the arenas were the ideology of male superiority is most naturalized. namely, the “contact sports” distinc- tion needs to be eliminated. doing so would end the chief gatekeeping mechanism pre- venting women from the opportunity to “try out” for a “men’s” team. because the policy language is loaded with biased assumptions about men’s physical superiority, revis- ing it would ensure that girls and women with the skills and desire to challenge such norms are not impeded by the myth that “separate” is always equal. this would also provide the most ambitious “female athletes” the opportunities to train and compete with men, to enjoy the resources more widely available to men’s programs, and to directly challenge on the terms of their sport the notions that sex-difference determines competi- tive outcomes. allowing women to compete on “men’s” teams even when a similar team exists “for women” would enable competitors and spectators alike to observe and grapple with the significant overlap in athletic performance between women and men, much like required classroom integration has done for ideas about women’s intellectual capacities. ending strict segregation also lessens the complicated exclusions for trans* athletes, whose opportunities will broaden as we loosen our attachment to the idea that sex inheres in bodies and is largely synonymous with athletic prowess. finally, ensuring that male enclaves in sport are challenged, rather than protected, also provides pathways for integrated socialization which ensure that neither girls nor boys learn the logics of essentialism as if they are the “natural” order (see also anderson ). this would also revisit lesser-known, historical policy debates. athletic integration, after a period of investment in righting the historical exclusions from access to sports and athletic training experienced by women before title ix, was supported by some feminist interest groups in the s (sharrow ). aggressively pursuing partial integration, currently used to address some intractable male enclaves in the workplace (stevens ), would ensure that the best girls and women have every opportunity for high- level competition and training without abruptly forcing integration on all athletes. perhaps in time, more widespread integration of teams can seem less preposterous. at present, sex segregation has not produced non-hierarchical outcomes, and without some critical discourse, women and trans* people are inhibited in their abilities to chal- lenge their oppression. engaging the critique of segregated spaces will be fundamental to any strategy which tackles the most pressing problems in title ix, and broader gender politics, in the coming years. notes . signed into law on june , , title ix declares: “no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under e. a. sharrow any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” ( u.s.c. § ). it applies to all institutions receiving federal funding, with a few exemptions: single-sex edu- cational institutions, private schools controlled by religious organizations, military acade- mies, fraternities or sororities, and some specific auxiliary programs (i.e., boys and girls state programs, the boy scouts and girl scouts, etc.), and private school admissions decisions ( u.s.c. § - ). intercollegiate/interscholastic athletic programs are considered rel- evant under title ix because they are component programs of the larger university or college. . statistics on sex integrated athletic teams are scarce, although they are much more common in youth sports which fall outside of title ix’s purview. at the college level, sex integration is so uncommon that the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) does not report statistics on sex integrated teams. likewise, sex segregated competition in elite sport is ubi- quitous and, in contrast to collegiate and high school athletics, maintained through a long history of “sex testing” and “gender verification” of athletes competing in the women’s cat- egory (see pieper ). . title ix has also become a vehicle to address campus sexual climate and assault (see also doyle ; reynolds ). . policy history is also marked by critique from men athletes who participate in sports like gymnastics and wrestling (suggs ). although men’s opportunities have increased overall and men continue to enjoy greater numbers of participation opportunities, some lower-profile men’s sports have experienced significant cuts to funding and opportunities while men’s football budgets and opportunities have ballooned (ncaa a). . this stands in stark contrast with the contentious battles around racial desegregation in american schools (e.g., hochschild ). . i follow in the long tradition of feminist scholarship which argues that “gender” is the social expression of ideas around biology and that biologic notions about “sex,” like “gender,” are socially and ideologically constructed (e.g., fausto-sterling ; jordan-young ; lorber ; risman ). kessler and mckenna ( ) note that gender is socially produced through “natural attitudes” about a male/female dichotomy. according to both feminist biol- ogists (fausto-sterling ; fine , ; jordan-young ) and gender/queer theor- ists (butler , ), such attitudes are themselves socially constituted as a binary rather than a “fact” of nature. in the realm of politics, the terms sex and gender are increasingly used interchangeably (e.g., title ix is commonly referred to as a “gender equality” policy despite its specific reference to only “sex”) despite their particular and specific meanings and his- tories (meyerowitz ; repo ). . as i explore herein, policy employs a binary definition of “sex” which excludes transgender, intersex, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. although much debate transpired in the s over interpretation and policy implementation (edwards ; rose ; sharrow ), as i write this, the relationship between sex and gender-based discrimination in policy interpretation remains legally uneven. whereas the obama administration announced policy interpretations inclusive of non-discrimination protections for transgen- der students in , the u.s. department of education under president donald trump rescinded such guidelines (balingit ). . the term “trans*” is meant to encompass a host of gender expressions and “signals greater inclusivity of new gender identities and expressions and better represents a broader commu- nity of individuals” (tompkins , ). . the prevalence of #metoo activism toward sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond illustrates the persistent struggle of women’s treatment by men despite policy successes. . this narrative, while dominant, is not universally true. women of color and girls from econ- omically lower-resourced schools benefit less meaningfully from policy (e.g., pickett, dawkins, and braddock ). for other intersectional critiques of policy, see sharrow ( ). . these guidelines were produced through an overtly politicized process (sharrow ), and remain largely unaltered as the contemporary mechanisms for policy implementation and enforcement. the athletics policy guidelines have been contested in litigation and clarified politics, groups, and identities by the u.s. department of education primarily for reasons other than their treatment of sex segregation (brake ; but see love and kelly ). . this approach reflects what a large literature on feminist legal theory calls “formal equality” which is guided by the idea that “men and women should be treated alike if they are similarly situated for purposes of the policy or practice that is being challenged” (brake , ). brake extensively delineates the formal equality paradigm in sex discrimination doctrine as applied through title ix. this approach is widely discussed by legal scholars for its complex implications along debates of women and men’s “sameness-versus-difference” (e.g., mackinnon ). the formal equality paradigm is situated across multiple, second- wave, liberal feminist attempts to seek sex equality thru state institutions (see dietz ; turk for longer summary of feminist debate). . these sex essentialist approaches configure binary sex difference on the body and are thoroughly problematized by feminist theory (see dietz for summary of how this “difference” approach diverges from other strands of feminist thought which argue for the importance of “women” as a political category). . this proposition applies what sociologist michael messner ( ) names “hard essentialism,” which presumes bodily difference between women and men. trans* inclusion, under title ix, illustrates the rigidity of “sex” through the strict requirements that athletes jump categories from male to female, or vice versa (buzuvis ). . some feminist groups like the national organization for women (now) contested athletic segregation during policy development, although they eventually conceded to those who pre- ferred separate teams for girls and women (sharrow ). . schools must also pursue equivalent treatment, benefits (i.e., athletic scholarships), and opportunities in equipment and supplies; games and practice times; travel and per diem; coaching and academic tutoring; assignment and compensation of coaches and tutors; locker rooms, and practice and competitive facilities; medical and training facilities; housing and dining facilities; publicity; recruitment; and support services. (ocr ) . in practice, strict proportionality is not enforced but is instead evaluated under title ix’s “three-part test.” the policy clarification memo clarifies that “part three of the three- part test permits evidence that [when] underrepresentation is caused not by discrimination but by lack of interest … that underrepresentation alone is not the measure of discrimi- nation” (ocr ). schools are required to pursue, but not necessarily achieve, “propor- tionality” in opportunities and scholarships for women and men across their athletic program. if ocr (the u.s. department of education’s unit charged with policy oversight) discerns that a school offers “substantially proportionate” athletic opportunities, any federal investigation into compliance with the law will not proceed. if the school fails this test, ocr will examine the institution’s practices, evaluating whether it has a “history and continuing practice of program expansion which is demonstrably responsive to the develop- ing interests and abilities of the members of [the underrepresented] sex” (ocr ). if the school is found to pass this “program expansion test” it will meet the participation require- ment even though it failed the proportionality test. the third test of compliance is open to greater interpretation, allowing space for programs that have failed the “expansion” test. owing its historic roots to the debates over whether women are equally “interested” in pur- suing athletics (a sexist, but pervasive concern), policymakers resolved to allow schools to demonstrate that they had sufficiently met the student demand for athletic teams on their campus. schools are directed to demonstrate that the athletic interests and abilities of “male and female students” must be “equally effectively accommodated.” the methods for proving this have varied and are contested (buzuvis ). . i qualify the term “sex” in order to underscore how policymakers assume without defining the inherent meaning of this category. e. a. sharrow . “contact sports” are defined in the guidelines as “boxing, wrestling, rugby, ice hockey, football, basketball and other sports the purpose or major activity of which involves bodily contact” (ocr ). . i demarcate the terms “men’s” and “women’s” teams in order to underscore and denaturalize the casual ways in which possessive language naturalizes segregated teams as belonging to “men” or “women” at the exclusion of each other. . anxieties around intimacy are at once about privacy and sexual desire. nominally, privacy concerns are more openly discussed regarding other athletic spaces such as locker rooms (see sharrow ) where policy guidelines instruct schools to provide comparable but “sep- arate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex” ( cfr . ). however, sex segregated restrooms produce other apprehensions, particularly for trans* people (davis ). . single-sex classroom spaces have been thoroughly contested (english ). . sex segregated sports make it difficult to see, for example, that the times posted by decorated american swimmer katie ledecky at the ncaa division i women’s swimming cham- pionships would have allowed her to qualify for competition in the “men’s” championship. . the widespread and normative practice of women’s exclusion from “contact sports” also impacts men’s abilities to participate in “women’s” teams, as men’s legal claims to gain access to “women’s” teams have systematically been denied (love and kelly ). . scientists note that there are six distinct markers of what we call “sex” (including chromo- somes, gonads, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, external and internal genitalia) which confound the idea of a strict binary; many individuals might be categorized as “male” by some markers, and “female” by others, a fact which is acutely problematic for some women athletes (karkazis et al. ). the history of sex testing in elite athletics is illus- trates the central issues, and has been particularly damaging to gender non-conforming women and intersex individuals, virtually all from the global south (karkazis and jordan- young ; pieper ). . policy implementation remains impenetrable to such critiques as neither policymakers nor advocates target athletics as a civil rights domain that requires re-thinking: “women’s sports” are promoted as a “separate but equal” solution and not a problem (see discussion in brake , chap. ). . other venues, including sex segregated public restrooms and prisons, also naturalize the idea of sex difference. . other scholars echo this argument, placing segregation in sports in the context of proble- matic sex segregation in society elsewhere (e.g., cohen ). . feminist debates about the meanings of equality have a long history (cott ; goss ). the “sameness/difference” question regarding of sex non-discrimination is considered across many u.s. supreme court decisions regarding the interpretation of title vii of the civil rights act (grossman ; thomas ; turk ), debates over an equal rights amendment (mansbridge ), scholarly debate regarding feminist legal theory (brake ), and the u.s. v. virginia ( u.s. ) case regarding single-sex admissions at the virginia military institute (strum ). . activism coheres around attempts to end this focus on hormones, noting that it actively dis- criminates against intersex athletes (many of whom do not self-identify as such but who are, instead, revealed as possessing intersex traits by sporting officials who seek to confirm the eligibility of such athletes to compete in the “women’s” event) in many damaging ways (kar- kazis et al. ). . “sex testing” polices women athletes but never men (pieper ). this underscores my argu- ment that women’s bodies are the most targeted by segregation, even though title ix does not employ “sex testing” to police the category of sex. . this, because “transgender people create a profound category crisis for social institutions built on the idea that biological sex is both immutable and dichotomous” (meadow , ). politics, groups, and identities . whether that is the case is up to great debate, as endocrinologists and bioethicists are largely critical of the stance that male hormones, namely testosterone, in addition to other secondary sex characteristics, necessarily confer an inherent competitive advantage (karkazis and jordan-young ). . scholars delineate the specific harms endured by “trans* people in athletics (buzuvis ; davis ; sinisi ; skinner-thompson and turner ). the complex rules around physical transitions that define competitive eligibility for trans* athletes run parallel to issues for trans* inclusion in other policy arenas, including sex segregated restrooms, single-sex educational institutions, and state-issued identification documents (davis ; spade ). the definition of “sex” applied to athletics policy is less useful for gender- based forms of discrimination in education – particularly for trans* people whose identities frequently elide both a binary definition of gender, and/or a biological definition of sex. rather than benefiting from inclusion through biologic definitions of “sex,” trans* students are more often harmed by them. . this intractability of policy design echoes katherine franke’s argument that this disaggrega- tion of sex from gender in equality law is “the central mistake of equality jurisprudence” (franke , ). although discussions about transgender non-discrimination as protected under title ix emerged decades after franke’s article regarding workplace discrimination, the point remains prescient: antidiscrimination law is founded upon the idea that sex, conceived as biological difference, is prior to, less normative than, and more real than gender. yet in every way that matters, sex bears an epiphenomenal relationship to gender; that is, under close examination almost every claim with regard to sexual identity or sex discrimi- nation can be shown to be grounded in normative gender rules and roles. herein lies the mistake … sexual equality jurisprudence has uncritically accepted the validity of biological sexual differences. by accepting these biological differences, equality jur- isprudence reifies as foundational fact that which is really an effect of normative gender ideology. (franke , ) . women remain significantly under-represented in legislative bodies at all levels in the u.s. (cawp ), and are therefore hamstrung in their efforts to achieve representation on in a profoundly partisan environment. . title vii of the cra prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. it also applies to private and public colleges and universities, employment agencies, and labor organizations. the language in title ix of the education amendments of is modeled on title vii and title vi (which prohibits discrimination by government agencies that receive federal funds) of the cra (pub. l. - ). . gendered inequalities are inflected through the intersecting dimensions of race, sexuality, class, and physical ability (crenshaw ; strolovitch ). . ironically, youth sports, alongside recreational athletics, are some of the most fruitful locations for developing sex integrated praxis because they do not generally invoke the con- cerns about either embodied strength or physical intimacy between opposite-sex competitors. . cisgender men athletes who comport with normative masculinity do not commonly con- front this, although they receive similarly confusing signals from policy. men and boys are taught, by the conditions of policy implementation thru sex segregated sports, that there are two types of athletic competitors: athletes and female athletes, and that “female athletes” require their protection instead of their unmitigated competitive respect. gender policing also harms men whose gender challenges traditional masculinities (e.g., messner ). . pointedly, john mcenroe denigrated serena williams’ prowess as a tennis player in the summer of , suggesting that she would be low ranked “on the men’s circuit” (espn ). e. a. sharrow . mcdonagh and pappano ( ) explore many such examples, although the newly announced “hyperandrogenism” policy illustrates how such competitive achievements for women, under a segregated system, are subjected to scrutiny and retaliation (karkazis and jordan-young ). . nearly thirty-two percent of athletes surveyed in the study believed that “women and men should be permitted to participate on the same teams in non-contact sports.” . milner and braddock ( ) argue for integration from the “bottom up,” focusing on main- taining the more common practice of sex integrated youth sports into adolescence and relying on generational change. acknowledgements for assistance in developing this manuscript, i would like to thank patricia strach, julie novkov, mara toone, dara strolovitch, dara cohen, susan moffitt, barbara cruikshank, jesse rhodes, tatishe nteta, maxime forest, daniel thompson, and the american politics workgroup at the university of massachusetts amherst. i am appreciative of comments from nadia brown, and those from anonymous reviewers, which helped me improve the manuscript. i also acknowledge research support from the american academy of university women, the gerald r. ford presiden- tial foundation, the social science research council, the myra sadker foundation, the new england regional fellowship consortium, and the national collegiate athletic association. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. funding this work was supported by the gerald r. ford presidential foundation; american association of university women; national collegiate athletic association; new england regional fellowship consortium; myra sadker foundation; and the social science research council. orcid elizabeth a. sharrow http://orcid.org/ - - - references acklin, kayla. . “‘hurdling’ gender identity discrimination : the implications of state participation policies on transgender youth athletes’ ability to thrive.” boston college journal of law & social justice ( ): – . anderson, eric. . “‘i used to think women were weak’: orthodox masculinity, gender segregation, and sport.” sociological forum ( ): – . balingit, moriah. . “education department no longer investigating transgender bathroom complaints.” 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women in the barracks: the vmi case and equal rights. lawrence, ks: university press of kansas. suggs, welch. . a place on the team: the triumph and tragedy of title ix. princeton, nj: princeton university press. thomas, gillian. . because of sex: one law, ten cases, and fifty years that changed american women’s lives at work. new york: st. martin’s press. tompkins, avery. . “asterisk.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly ( ): – . turk, katherine. . equality on trial: gender and rights in the modern american workplace. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. weil, elizabeth. . “mary cain is growing up fast.” new york times magazine: mm . accessed march . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/mary-cain-is- growing-up-fast.html. whiteside, erin, and amber roessner. . “forgotten and left behind: political apathy and privilege at title ixs th anniversary.” communication & sport ( ): – . yanus, alixandra, and karen o’connor. . “to comply or not to comply: evaluating compliance with title ix of the educational amendments of .” journal of women, politics & policy ( ): – . yougov. . title ix and girls in sport. east meadow, ny: women’s sports foundation. young, iris marion. . “throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality.” human studies ( ): – . politics, groups, and identities https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/women-corporate-boards-california.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/women-corporate-boards-california.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/mary-cain-is-growing-up-fast.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/mary-cain-is-growing-up-fast.html 	abstract 	politics of gender inequality: what’s the problem? 	against the grain of policy success: title ix’s gendered paradox 	policy design and separation by sex: classrooms versus athletics 	policy implementation details for intercollegiate athletics: separation paradigm 	from policy to problem: thinking with feminist legacies 	can separate be equal? extant critiques of title ix and segregation 	spillover harms: a call to scholars of gender and policy 	conclusions and future directions 	notes 	acknowledgements 	disclosure statement 	orcid 	references << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left /calgrayprofile () /calrgbprofile (adobe rgb \ \ ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /off /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /srgb /dothumbnails true /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel /emitdscwarnings false /endpage - /imagememory /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct /optimize true /opm /parsedsccomments false /parsedsccommentsfordocinfo true /preservecopypage true /preservedicmykvalues true /preserveepsinfo false /preserveflatness true /preservehalftoneinfo false /preserveopicomments false /preserveoverprintsettings false /startpage /subsetfonts true /transferfunctioninfo /remove /ucrandbginfo /remove /useprologue false /colorsettingsfile () /alwaysembed [ true ] /neverembed [ true ] /antialiascolorimages false /cropcolorimages true /colorimageminresolution /colorimageminresolutionpolicy /ok /downsamplecolorimages true /colorimagedownsampletype /bicubic /colorimageresolution /colorimagedepth - /colorimagemindownsampledepth /colorimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodecolorimages true /colorimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltercolorimages false /colorimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /coloracsimagedict << /qfactor . /hsamples [ ] /vsamples [ ] >> /colorimagedict << /qfactor . /hsamples [ ] /vsamples [ ] >> /jpeg coloracsimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /jpeg colorimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /antialiasgrayimages false /cropgrayimages true /grayimageminresolution /grayimageminresolutionpolicy /ok /downsamplegrayimages true /grayimagedownsampletype /bicubic /grayimageresolution /grayimagedepth - /grayimagemindownsampledepth /grayimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodegrayimages true /grayimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltergrayimages false /grayimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /grayacsimagedict << /qfactor . /hsamples [ ] /vsamples [ ] >> /grayimagedict << /qfactor . /hsamples [ ] /vsamples [ ] >> /jpeg grayacsimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /jpeg grayimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /antialiasmonoimages false /cropmonoimages true /monoimageminresolution /monoimageminresolutionpolicy /ok /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /average /monoimageresolution /monoimagedepth - /monoimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k - >> /allowpsxobjects true /checkcompliance [ /none ] /pdfx acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier () /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname () /pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice kjme - .hwp personal views in order to be medically correct, we must be politically correct in class claire junga kim department of medical education, ewha womans university school of medicine, seoul, korea received: april , • revised: june , • accepted: june , corresponding author: claire junga kim (https://orcid.org/ - - - ) department of medical education, ewha womans university school of medicine, ewhayeodae-gil, seodaemun-gu, seoul , korea tel: + . . . fax: + . . . email: clairejungakim@gmail.com korean j med educ sep; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /kjme. . eissn: - Ⓒ the korean society of medical education. all rights reserved. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. last year, i was delighted by the surprising news that our students established a new club (dong-ari) to study feminism. even though i was fascinated by this news, i realized that i was ignorant of this new educational need until now. in fact, i kept thinking that feminism and inclusiveness are very important in our lives, but sadly, is mostly rejected as premature by the korean medical community. however, inspired by our students, i reflected on my own medical education. surprisingly, i became aware of a clear need for inclusiveness and “political correctness” in medical education. students have courageously started to point out faculty members’ politically incorrect remarks. furthermore, they view the issue not just with resentment but also from an academic perspective; more and more students are familiar with feminist studies, thanks to their liberal pre-medical education, and gender equality education during elemen- tary and secondary school. they seek greater gender sensitivity in society, including the medical community [ ]. indeed, the entire korean society is now dealing with the #metoo movement. although all politically incorrect remarks amount to sexual harassment, in- creased gender sensitivity on the part of students and the general public requires faculty members to critically reflect on their behavior. these circumstances raise the questions: “are we, the medical community and educators of that community, well prepared for the future? can we remain trust- worthy? what should we do, what should we teach and what should we fix?” we are at a critical point in medical education, where we need to reinforce trust among students, patients, their families, and medical care providers. these objectives can be achieved by address- ing the new educational need for political correctness. in this article, i will posit that medical education should be critically examined and reformed in order to achieve political correctness. this aim is consistent with the fundamental goal of the medical profession to be trustworthy and to create “the healing relationship [ ].” in other words, in order to stay medically correct, we should be politically correct. of course, this starts in class. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /kjme. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - claire junga kim : political correctness for medical correctness korean j med educ sep; ( ): - . political correctness may be defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against [ ].” what politically incorrect events, behaviors, or language are found in medical education? to name a few ex- amples: describing homosexuality explicitly or implicitly as a disease; ridiculing sexual identity; belittling female medical professionals and patients; stereotyping based on sex; dismissing certain groups of people as “impolite” without an effort to understand their conflict with behavioral norms in clinical settings; and ignoring the existence of relationships other than heterosexual gender-conforming couple. these problems are aggra- vated by the fact that there is no discussion during medical education of the unique characteristics of any social minority, and by the absence of a policy prohibiting any form of discrimination, including hate speech. it should be so obvious as to not require repeating that political correctness is necessary in a society where every individual has equal rights. inspired by students’ awareness, i attempt to show why political correctness is necessary in medical education; it is because political correctness in medical education is the precondition for medical correctness. first, as professionals who took the oath to care for the sick and not to harm them, we should pay attention to whether medical care is provided to those in need and at the same time does not cause unjustifiable harm. politically incorrect medical education betrays this ideal since it leads to discriminatory medical service. when medical professionals define something that is not a disease as a disease, or consider certain groups of people inferior to others, the affected people cannot achieve the levels of health that they would have achieved other- wise. in fact, access to health care is determined not only by the ability to pay; it can also be influenced by what values medicine explicitly/implicitly advocates. for example, doctors who believe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) identity is a disease cannot provide valid medical care to these patient groups; consequently, both medical care utilization and the health of lgbtq people suffer. this limitation is also observed in case of lgbtq medical professionals: the heterosexual male-centered subculture of medicine [ ] may marginalize and hinder them from functioning to their full potential. this not only constitutes an un- healthy environment for such medical professionals, but also fails to create an inclusive medical practice for patients. this failure is caused by lgbtq patients feeling that they are not welcome by medical pro- fessionals, just as lgbtq professionals themselves are prevented from expressing their own values and identities in their medical practice and cannot assure their patients of equal care. thus, if one seriously considers the harm that medicine may cause, one inevitably concludes that political incorrectness in medi- cine leads to medical incorrectness. due to the normative power that medicine and medical professionals enjoy, medical professionals may cause harm when they treat patients. although the discussion of “do no harm” in korea has largely been focused on physical harms such as pain during futile treatments, the harm that medical professionals may cause includes psychological harm such as stigmatization. we classify patients as normal and pathological, and sub-categorize the latter category for understanding and treatment purposes. these acti- vities in medicine may accompany the harms that i alluded to, but can be justified by the fact that we make those classifications and categorizations for the treat- ment of patients and there is a reasonable prospect for successful treatment. in other words, abuse of the normative power of medicine without such justification claire junga kim : political correctness for medical correctness cannot be accepted. for example, pathologizing specific conditions such as sexual orientation cannot be justified because the resulting stigmatization cannot be justified for the treatment purposes. our mission as medical teachers is to teach students to understand the dual nature of our power and to further the ideals of the hippocratic oath. second, we should be politically correct in order to avoid medical incorrectness because political incor- rectness may produce scientifically skewed knowledge. contrary to the belief in the absolute objectiveness of science, it is a well-known fact that science has a value-driven bias. this bias applies to medical science as well [ ]. for example, martin [ ] has pointed out how stereotyped male-female roles have influenced “science.” when scientists’ views are biased as a result of the social structure, their questions, research methods, and con- clusions are so distorted that they cannot capture the scientific truth. in addition to stereotyping, assuming that a certain group of people doesn’t even exist is also detrimental to medical science. because such assump- tions hinder research of that group, we lack sufficient knowledge of what that group needs in order to achieve physical, mental, and social well-being [ ]. these all prevent us from being medically correct since they blind us. needless to say, medical faculty members play a crucial role in determining the culture of schools and hospitals. if we as medical faculty members practice political correctness, we can change our culture and bring about medically correct research, practice, and delivery of healthcare. furthermore, since this is of paramount importance, professional bodies and academic associations must provide systematic policy-level lead- ership and recommendations. the korean society of medical education, of course, should assume this responsibility. in terms of medical education, three activities are crucial: open discussion of the issue, integration into education, and declaration of policy. first, we should start open discussion on political correctness in medical education and share the results. occasionally, the em- phasis on political correctness results in total silence on the subject. there is a tendency to avoid sensitive subjects, such as the differences between men and women or the gender-nonconforming population. how- ever, as noted, when we avoid discussing something, it becomes as if it does not even exist and any valuable knowledge or service the discussion may provide becomes unattainable. therefore, we need a forum for open discussion on the issue of political correctness in medical education. in this regard, students can play a pivotal role in the discussion. their keen perception is a valuable resource. second, a course that integrates political correctness into medical education is needed. medical students are already asking for education on diversity and gender equality [ ]. this demand is clear evidence suggesting a new educational need [ ]. increased public awareness on this issue also shows the critical need for a systematic approach to teaching and learning political correctness in order to remain trustworthy professionals. last, but not the least, a policy-level approach by academic associations and professional bodies is needed. in various ways, such as publishing recommendations or reports, or commenting on public issues, academic associations or professional bodies can reconfirm to their members and the public their mission as a healing profession. being politically correct is an undeniable need in today’s medical education. enhanced awareness on the part of public and students deserves respect from doctors and educators. and this is crucially related to the ideals of medical professionals. again, being politically correct is not just about maintaining a polite discourse— claire junga kim : political correctness for medical correctness korean j med educ sep; ( ): - . it is also about being medically correct. orcid: claire junga kim: https://orcid.org/ - - - acknowledgements: none. funding: none. conflicts of interest: no potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported. author contributions: whole process, ranging from conception of the work to critical revision, was done by the author. references . desirable pre-med curriculum. student presentation on self-learning fare: team leadership project meeting; december , ; seoul, korea. . pellegrino ed, thomasma dc. the virtues in medical practice. new york, usa: oxford university press; . . english oxford living dictionaries. definition of pol- itical correctness in english. web site. https://en. oxforddictionaries.com/definition/political_correctness. accessed march , . . cheng lf, yang hc. learning about gender on campus: an analysis of the hidden curriculum for medical students. med educ. ; ( ): - . . dijkstra af, verdonk p, lagro-janssen al. gender bias in medical textbooks: examples from coronary heart disease, depression, alcohol abuse and pharmacology. med educ. ; ( ): - . . martin e. the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male- female roles. signs j women cult soc. ; ( ): - . . world health organization. constitution of who: principles. web site. http://www.who.int/about/mission/ en/. accessed march , . . dent ja, harden rm, hodges bd. a practical guide for medical teachers. th ed. london, uk: elsevier; . https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/political_correctness http://www.who.int/about/mission/en/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ cem_ _s _abstract .. mp what to do with #metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence a. sobiesiak, bhsc, k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. shipeolu, ba, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, university of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: the #metoo social media movement gained inter- national status in october as millions disclosed experiences of sexual and intimate partner violence. people who experience violence from a former/current intimate partner may not present for care for many reasons, among them not knowing where to go for care, or not realizing they were experiencing abuse since the behavior was por- trayed as ‘normal’. empirical research identified increased police reporting, internet searches, and new workplace regulations on sexual assault/harassment after #metoo. less is known about how #metoo has influenced hospital-based care, particularly among ipv cases. we aimed to investigate if the #metoo social movement influenced pat- terns of ipv cases presenting for emergency care. methods: this study took place at the sexual assault and partner abuse care pro- gram (sapacp), within the emergency department of the ottawa hospital. patients seen from november st, through to septem- ber th, was considered pre-#metoo and those seen novem- ber st, to september th, was considered post-#metoo. all patients seen in october were excluded. analyses compare the proportion and characteristics of ipv cases seen pre- and post-# metoo. log-binomial regression models were used to calculate rela- tive risk and % ci. results: cases were seen by the sapacp during the total study period, of which ( %) were ipv cases. ipv cases were seen pre-#metoo and ipv post-#metoo. the clinical presentation for ipv cases was similar between both per- iods where approximately % of ipv cases presented for sexual assault, % presented for physical assault. an increase in frequency and proportion of ipv cases was observed post-#metoo. post-# metoo there were additional cases of ipv, corresponding to almost a % increase in risk compared to the pre-#metoo period. (rr: . , % ci: . - . ) post-#metoo, there were more pre- senting cases of ipv among male/trans cases ( vs ) and youth cases ( vs ). conclusion: #metoo is a powerful social move- ment that corresponded with a significant increase in ipv cases pre- senting for emergency care. while the assault characteristics among ipv cases remained similar, an important contribution of this research is the increase in youth, male/transgender patients who presented for care post-#metoo. continued investigations into pre- post-#metoo trends is needed to understand more about the changing clinical population and to inform resource and service allocation. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, trauma mp clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage follow- ing minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study e. mercier, md, msc, t. o’brien, mbbs, b. mitra, phd, mbbs, n. le sage, md, phd, p. tardif, msc, m. emond, md, msc, m. d’astous, md, phd, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: the primary objective of this study was to determine the incidence of clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemor- rhage (t-ich) following minor head trauma in older adults. second- ary objective was to investigate the impact of anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapies on t-ich incidence. methods: this retrospective cohort study extracted data from electronic patient records. the cohort consisted of patients presenting after a fall and/ or head injury and presented to one of five ed between st march and st july . inclusion criteria were age ≥ years old and a minor head trauma defined as an impact to the head without ful- filling criteria for traumatic brain injury. results: from the , electronic medical records evaluated, cases were included. the mean age was . (sd . ) years. one hundred and eighty-nine ( ) patients ( . %) were on an anticoagulant (n = ), antiplatelet (n = ) or both (n = ). twentypatients( . %)developedaclinically significant t-ich. anticoagulation and/or antiplatelets therapies were not associated with an increased risk of clinically significant t-ich in this cohort (odds ratio (or) . , % ci . - . ). conclusion: in this cohort of older adults presenting to the ed following minor head trauma, the incidence of clinically significant t-ich was . %. keywords: head injury, intracranial haemorrhage, traumatic brain injury mp factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review g. genois, i. vlahovic, l. moore, phd, b. beck, md, msc, p. blanchard, md, phd, m. Émond, md, msc, b. mitra, md, phd, mbbs, p. cameron, md, mbbs, a. nadeau, phd, É. mercier, md, msc, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: trauma care is highly complex and prone to medical errors. accordingly, several studies have identified adverse events and conditions leading to potentially preventable or preventable deaths. depending on the availability of specialized trauma care and the trauma system organization, between and % of trauma-related deaths worldwide could be preventable if optimal care was promptly delivered. this narrative review aims to identify the main determinants and areas for improvements associated with potentially preventable trauma mortality. methods: a literature review was performed using medline, embase and cochrane central register of controlled trials from to a maximum of months before submission for publication. experimental or observational studies that have assessed determinants and areas for improvements that are associated with trauma death preventability were considered for inclusion. two researchers independently selected eligible studies and extracted the relevant data. the main areas for improvements were classified using the joint commission on accreditation of healthcare organizations patient event taxonomy. no statistical ana- lyses were performed given the data heterogeneity. results: from the individual titles obtained by the search strategy, a total of studies were included. each study included between and trauma patients who had sustained mostly blunt trauma, frequently following a fall or a motor vehicle accident. preventability assessment was performed for to patients using either a single expert assessment (n = , , %) or an expert panel review (n = , . %). the definition of preventability and the taxonomy used varied greatly between the studies. the rate of potentially preventable or prevent- able death ranged from . % to . %. the most frequently reported areas for improvement were treatment delay, diagnosis accuracy to avoid missed or incorrect diagnosis and adverse events associated with the initial procedures performed. the risk of bias of the included studies was high for studies because of the retrospective design and the panel review preventability assessment. conclusion: deaths occurring after a trauma remain often preventable. included studies cjem • jcmu ; s s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	what to do with &num;metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence 	clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage following minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study 	factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review international journal of engineering and advanced technology (ijeat) issn: – , volume- issue- , february, published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijeat.c . twitter user’s behavior and events affecting their mood srishty jindal, amit kumar tyagi, kamlesh sharma abstract: sentiment analysis is an art to analyze and understand the human behavior. the analysis could be done for any purpose such as e-commerce, business analysis/revenues, detecting latest trends and analyzing reviews. the major work done was related to finding sentiment polarity of the text such as negative, positive or neutral. there are always some emotions hidden behind the text apart from positive/negative. so, nowadays, researchers are focusing on detecting mental behavior of people through social media. this mental behavior could be analyzed through the images, videos, text or posts shared by social media user. behavior analysis plays an important role through which society can be benefitted. behavioral analysis helps in finding the behavior/reaction of people about any event happening throughout the world with the help of social media. in this research, such events were collected through an online survey of people from different professions, their data was analyzed to understand the areas where our society is lacking. along with the events, the behavior of the person is also analyzed by understanding the basic routine of the user (routine of using social media). the major events were found by creating word cloud, such as disturbing the social media users were violence against women, politics, terrorist attack, elections and abusive text written by someone. keywords: online social media, sentiment analysis, twitter api, tweets. i. introduction this paper is an analysis of usage of twitter. people use twitter and other such platforms to share their feelings and thoughts. it is important to analyze that data as data is produced in bulk over the web. due to availability of huge amount of data, many researchers are attracted towards it. twitter data can easily be retrieved from twitter through twitter api. but, before proceeding towards the analysis of twitter data, it is important to find why to use and analyze twitter data. it is important to first find out why, when, and for what purpose the people are using twitter. for the same purpose, a survey was done among various people from different background, i.e. different age group, different profile, literacy and many more parameters. data was collected through google form and then analyzed to find the purpose of using twitter and finally the effect on their mood after using data. revised manuscript received on february , . srishty jindal, research scholar, school of computing, lingaya’s vidyapeeth, faridabad, haryana, india. assistant professor, department of computer science and engineering, mriirs, faridabad, india. e-mail: srishtyjindal@gmail.com amit kumar tyagi, school of computing science and engineering, vellore institute of technology, chennai campus, chennai, , tamilnadu, india. department of computer science and engineering, lingaya's vidyapeeth, faridabad, haryana, india. e-mail: aktyagi@pec.edu kamlesh sharma, department of computer science & engineering, manav rachna international institute of research and studies, faridabad, india. e-mail: kamlesh @gmail.com the purpose of this survey is to find the influence of various events on the mood of its users. the analysis is done to find how many people are affected by unusual posts posted by other users and discussions about various events going on. ii. literature survey alvaro ortigosa[ ] analysed the user personality by finding common patterns of their behaviour on virtual social networks. an application tp was designed to find the behavioural patterns of the users. it is assumed that common patterns shows similar type of personality. more than , facebook users participated in the survey. based on collected data, classifier was trained based on various machine learning techniques to find the personality patterns to analyze behavior on social media. these classifiers predict personality based on various parameters such as number of friends, no. of pasts posted on wall, posts per month, and posts per year. data can be collected through many ways. it could be web crawling, surveys or applications. web crawling is simply browsing through the web and finding the records. twitter api, facebook api and graph apis are the best example to retrieve data from the web[ ]. another way to collect data is through a survey of questionnaire. people fill the questionnaire and the data is collected through questionnaire only. this data is further analysed for research purpose. alvaro ortigossa[ ] used a zkpq questionnaire to predict the personality of the users. this survey was done with the help of an application tp . this questionnaire consists of questions including five dimensionality personality traits. questions were collected from zkpq- -cc, and further questions were added to enhance the personality test. survey analysis is done to analyse the real feelings of the person. there are many ways in which surveys can be analysed. in another research, the data was collected through an application sentbuk especially designed for facebook users[ ]. through this application, messages written by user were retrieved and their sentiment polarity was calculated. the research also support emotional change detection, classification of users based on their messages. this study also helps in e-learning systems to support personalised learning based on their emotional state. a survey was done to find the unethical acts happened over social media and the results shows the various types of unethical acts and their effect on people, also some remedial actions were discussed[ ]. social networking sites are very helpful in collecting data and hence promotion of research. the collected through social media is analysed for various purposes. one such area is sentiment analysis. sentiment analysis can be done with machine learning approach or lexicon based approach with the help of classifier. mailto:srishtyjindal@gmail.com twitter user’s behavior and events affecting their mood published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijeat.c . in the research, [ ] sentiments of tweets were classified in positive or negative using ensemble classifier. social media users access the social networking sites through their mobiles also so lot of information is gathered [ ]. the main area where the collected data is being used is finding sentiment polarity or opinion mining. sentiment polarity can be calculated through machine learning approach or lexicon based approach [ ]. to predict behaviour on health related issues, a group of participants was created on social network. participants were termed as health buddies. their behaviour was tested according to the decision taken by them depending on their health buddies [ ]. in another field related to health, use of social media also helps in gaining knowledge about their psychological wellbeing and ethics [ ]. as the information shared on social network is almost visible to all because people rarely knew/ read the terms and conditions before signing up to the account. their profile information may be visible to many intruders also and can leads to many problems. there are various threats attached to social media such as cyber bullying, spammers, internet fraud, phishing attack[ ] and many more[ ]. a lot of work has been done in this direction also to detect such people who use bad language [ ] over the web and their effects on people’s behaviour online or offline[ ]. psychologists are also working on improving /understanding the behaviour of social media users to use the platform ethically[ ]. as the people from various places are connected through social media, there must be some guidelines to be followed while interaction. iii. data collection social media is very common among people across the country. people from different communities all over the world join a common platform form a strong network. many social media applications are available nowadays. out of them twitter, facebook and youtube are the most commonly used social networks (fig. . ). fig. . importance of social media for finding actual usage of twitter, data is collected through a survey. in this, people from different profession and different age group are selected. they views are analysed to find their purpose of using twitter. people have also shared the incident that highly effect their mood/behaviour on social media. those incidents are analysed through sentiment analysis. iv. methodology data collection can be done in many ways such as direct from api, static data available over the web or survey. in this paper, to perform research on shared views of various online social network users, the data is collected through online survey about their twitter usage such as purpose of use, activities usually performed on twitter, logging duration, etc. the survey also includes the sharing of a moment that affect the life/mood of the person. the survey helps in finding some behavioural activities and impact of various events on an individual. the collected data was analysed to retrieve important information. first of all, data is collected, then the analysis was done to find the information as depicted in fig. . . fig . steps to find critical activity that affect someone’s mood above figure depicts the steps that were followed to identify/ extract useful information from data available on social media. the first step is to collect data from various people through an online survey where people shared their feelings. people who participated in the survey belongs to different profession and ages as shown in fig. . . all the professionals can be categorized as academicians/industry experts. different category of professionals participated in the survey and shared their views about twitter. the purpose of collecting data through different professionals was to retrieve the perception of social media from many angles. every professional has different timings and purpose of using social media. to understand their behavioural patterns, it was important to consider people from multiple platforms. the survey was a great success as many people participated in it and share their feelings along with their pattern of using social media. data collection twitter usage analysis depict the mood and reason for change in mood. social platform (twitter) people from different areas in connection with social media international journal of engineering and advanced technology (ijeat) issn: – , volume- issue- , february, published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijeat.c . fig. . participation of people from various professions the survey also includes the purpose of using social media. the analysis indicates that people are usually interested in current affairs that are discussed on social media i.e. % of the people are interested in current affairs, and the next highest number goes for politics (fig. . ). social media is considered as the fastest means to travel in formation worldwide. so, most of the people are connected through social media. that is why, it is considered as the best repository from where data can be collected for research in various fields. fig. . purpose of using social media (twitter) twitter users shared the effect on posts/tweets shared by other people on social media. various moods observed are happy, sad, anger, calm, and disgust. usually people feel happy from the post but there are some text/tweets that affect them and spoil the mood as shown in fig. . . fig. . effect of social media on mood v. analysis experiences shared by various people helps in determining the events that affect them most. the list of events was collected. the stop words were removed, and the text relevant to find the meaningful data was inferred [ ]and[ ]. a word cloud is created to find the important events. in fig. . , the word cloud is made up of words used by twitter users that affect their lives. information from multiple users was collected to find the impact of any information shared on social media. this word cloud clearly shows that #metoo movement affect their mood when it came with new stories. #metoo movement was initiated by girls and was based on the bad behaviour of other people in their contact. another word that was very famous and affect the human being was terrorist. it was clear from the information gathered that people are afraid of terrorist attack and need some help from government to save the nation. other important topics that were discussed and that affect the mood of people were elections, twitter user’s behavior and events affecting their mood published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijeat.c . politics, and abusive language written by people on social media. apart from that insecurity, eve teasing are also the subject of concern. fig. . wordcloud of events that effect life of social media user vi. conclusion and future scope twitter is most commonly used social network among celebrities, politicians and other renowned people. they share their feelings, thoughts and perception through twitter. survey conducted in this paper focussed on the usage of twitter from multiple point of views. the focus is on different categories of users depending on age, profession, time of usage, purpose of using twitter, and impact of various events on other users. it is clear from the facts that whether the user belong to any age group or profession, any post done by user effect its followers. also the analysis is done to find the relevant information regarding events that affect their lives on social media. it is important to understand and find the basic cause behind the change in behaviour of the user because of any person or any event. such posts/tweets (that affect human behaviour) could be avoided to protect people from change in their mood/behaviour on a negative side. to avoid such tweets, first it is important to detect the tweets which shows a negative behaviour and may affect the behaviour of the others. as a future work, the work done would be based on analysing the variations in behaviour of the user. if there is any event which is effecting the behaviour of that user or finding fluctuation in behaviour from normal behaviour, then finding that event and also finding the followers effected due to same. this analysis could be helpful in finding the events that are the major cause of disturbing the social life of any user. in future, such events could identified and the chain of forwarding the messages to other users could be stopped. so that no more users will be affected in future. reference . a. ortigosa, r. m. carro, and j. i. quiroga, “predicting user personality by mining social interactions in facebook,” j. comput. syst. sci., vol. , no. , pp. – , . . s. yousukkee, “survey of analysis of user behavior in online social network,” manag. innov. technol. int. conf. miticon , pp. mit –mit , . . a. ortigosa, j. m. martín, and r. m. carro, “sentiment analysis in facebook and its application to e-learning,” comput. human behav., vol. , no. , pp. – , . . k. chandra, n. k. singh, s. gounder, r. verma, and s. swastika mudliar, “the unethical practices on social media,” iosr j. humanit. soc. sci. 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social networks: threats and solutions,” ieee commun. surv. tutorials, vol. , no. , pp. – , . . s. jindal and k. sharma, “sciencedirect sciencedirect intend to analyze social media feeds to detect behavioral trends of individuals to proactively act against social threats,” procedia comput. sci., vol. , pp. – , . . t. althoff, p. jindal, and j. leskovec, “online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline user behavior,” wsdm - proc. th acm int. conf. web search data min., pp. – , . . m. maia, j. almeida, and v. almeida, “identifying user behavior in online social networks,” proc. st work. soc. netw. syst. soc. - affil. with eurosys , no. january , pp. – , . . p. goyal cse, “nlp for social media: pos tagging, sentiment analysis,” . authors profile srishty jindal, is research scholar at lingaya’s vidyapeeth and working as assistant professor in department of computer science and engineering, faculty of engineering and technology, manav rachna international institute of research and studies, faridabad, india. she received b.tech (ccomputer science and engineering) degree in and m.tech (computer science and engineering) in from maharishi dayanand university, rohtak. her current research focused on natural language processing, data mining, operating system and artificial intelligence. she published and presented refereed articles is prestigious venues such as ieee, elsevier etc. she is also a member of icses research community. she is a result oriented, proactive and focused professional with around years of diversified work experience with special emphasis on the areas database management system, operating system, software engineering and many more. adopted innovative teaching methodology like role play, case studies, simulation, presentations, live projects, smart classrooms technologies and combined these with regular lecture method to make the overall teaching learning process more effective. amit kumar tyagi, is an assistant professor (senior grade), and senior researcher at vellore institute of technology (vit), chennai campus, chennai – , tamilnadu, india since june working on blockchain technology. he was an assistant professor and head- research, lingaya’s vidyapeeth (formerly known as lingaya’s university), faridabad, haryana, india in - . also, he was contributed to some projects named “aarin”, “p -block” to address some of the open issues related to the privacy breaches in medical cyber physical systems and vehicular applications (like parking). he received the ph.d. degree from pondicherry central university, pondicherry, in with an “excellent” degree. his current research focuses on smart and secure computing, privacy (including genomic privacy), machine learning with big data, blockchain technology, cyber physical system. international journal of engineering and advanced technology (ijeat) issn: – , volume- issue- , february, published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijeat.c . he published and presented over refereed articles is prestigious venues such as ieee iccsp, springer, acm. he was an assistant professor at lord krishna college of engineering (lkce), in ghaziabad, uttar pradesh, india from - and - respectively. he is a member of various computer/ research communities like ieee, isoc, csi, iste, iferp, datascience, mirlab, etc. as additional qualification, he has qualified prestigious exams like gate, ugc-net, icar-net and ibps-po-mt. he is also brand ambassadors of bentham science (since ) from country ‘india’. dr. kamlesh sharma, is currently working as a associate professor, mriirs, faridabad, india (more than years teaching experience). mca, m. tech from mdu university and ph. d. in computer science and engineering from lingaya`s vidyapeeth, india. is currently supervising five ph. d. scholars. she has also supervised and guided research projects of m. tech, b.tech and application based projects for different competitions. she is also associated with four govt. research projects in filed of health recommender system, iot, machine learning, ai and nlp. she has published more than research papers in field of nlp, iot, bigdata, green computing and data mining in reputed journal (web of science, scopus, ugc, elsevier) and conferences (acm, ieee). her research area “natural language processing” is based on innovative idea of reducing the mechanized efforts and adapting the software to hindi dialect. she is associated with various professional bodies and renowned journals in varied capacities viz. csi (computer society of india), member, international journal of computer networks and applications (ijcna) as editoral board member, bjit - bvicam’s international journal of information technology, issn – , springer index as reviewer, international journal of computer science and information security (ijcsis), google scholar index as reviewer & editorial board member, international journal of science & engineering development research - ijsdr, ugc approved journal, google scholar index as member of referral/ review management system. #metoo – a concern for general practice? full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ipri scandinavian journal of primary health care issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ipri #metoo – a concern for general practice? emil l. sigurdsson to cite this article: emil l. sigurdsson ( ) #metoo – a concern for general practice?, scandinavian journal of primary health care, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: jan . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ipri http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ipri http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ipri &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ipri &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - editorial #metoo – a concern for general practice? the harvey weinstein scandal, with over women accusing the film producer of sexual assault and harass- ment, has led to a worldwide movement. the #metoo hashtag is now a global phenomenon. now women in many professions are unfolding their experiences of sex- ual harassment and violence. women, not only within the film industry but politicians, scientist, artists and female doctors have come forward with stories about how they have been violated or exposed to sexual abuse at their workplace. swedish female doctors have recently started a facebook group with over doctors already participating, willing to come forward with sto- ries but also prepared to act [ ]. even within the national health service (nhs) of england, scotland and wales female doctors are reveal- ing how male colleagues, often those who are supervi- sors, are responsible for these misdemeanors [ ]. indeed, some claim that there are mostly two types of sexual harassment: first, someone with more authority behaves badly on a woman in an inferior position and second, a silly man just behaving stupidly. the first scenario being worse with supervisors acting on female in a repressing and humiliating manner. in the latter case, the situation is most embarrassing to the man himself, although that actually applies to all these cases. this behavior has almost certainly been around for many centuries but that does not make it better. it is humiliating for male to behave like that and men must respond to this movement in a sensible and civi- lized way. recognizing their role in this misconduct and irresponsible behavior. what about general practitioners? what about female medical students? is there a reason to be of concern over sexual abuse within our discipline? the answer is defin- itely yes! there is no reason to believe that we are in any- way different with this respect. we should open a discussion about the situation within our working groups and we should also be concerned about the possible involvement of our patients. in a very interesting paper recently published in the sjphc: do patients consult their gp for sexual con- cerns? audun vik and mette brekke report on how often general practitioners deal with patient’s sexual concerns. their result suggests that just over % of consultations are on sexual concerns with a wide spec- trum of things brought up, ranging from erectile dys- function to sexual assault or rape [ ]. although this study is not primarily about sexual violations or harass- ment it gives an indication of how these problems are in the usual working day of gps. #metoo is a wakeup call for all people and it should be a challenge for gps as well. gps play a key role as a primary health care provider and as such have the oppor- tunity to assist women who have been the victim of sex- ual assault. gps know that there are many social determinants of health and this certainly is one of the more influential. it is important to notice that many women are reluctant to step forward and tell their story, some are even thinking if what they have suffered is bad enough. we should encourage women to step forward, all stories must be told, and we should even urge the abusers to step forward and acknowledging their role. voices from female gp’s must also be heard. a forum for them should be established and they supported in every conceivable way. taking into consideration the vital role gp’s play in the society both as health care workers and as a role model, it is crucial to undertake actions. all the five nordic colleges of general practitioners share a responsibility and should listen to these women and launch and participate in a comprehensive program aim- ing at eliminating or at least minimizing the magnitude of this problem. the sexual assault and harassment is an embodi- ment of a male–female powerplay, a play that should not be part of our culture anymore and should never have been. we should grow up, mature and move on showing each other dignity and respect, all individuals alike, men and women. we should show zero patience for empowerment and humiliating behavior in the wake of women. here as often before gps are in fun- damental position. to silence over violence is a way to maintain violence. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. scandinavian journal of primary health care, vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf http://www.tandfonline.com references [ ] available from: http://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/ / /lakare-samlar-sig-for-eget-metoo [ ] available from: https://www.theguardian.com/society/ / nov/ /nhs-sexual-harassment-me-too/ [ ] vik a, brekke m. do patients consult their gp for sexual con- cerns? a cross sectional explorative study. scand j prim health care. ; : – . emil l. sigurdsson department of family medicine, centre of development primary health care of the capital area, university of iceland, reykjav�ık, iceland haithamtorky@yahoo.com � the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial license (http://creati- vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /), which permits unrestricted non- commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/ . / . . e. sigurdsson http://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/ / /lakare-samlar-sig-for-eget-metoo http://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/ / /lakare-samlar-sig-for-eget-metoo https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /nov/ /nhs-sexual-harassment-me-too/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /nov/ /nhs-sexual-harassment-me-too/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf 	#metoo &hx ; a concern for general practice? 	disclosure statement 	references science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ efforts large and small speed science reform anne j. jefferson and melissa a. kenney doi: . /science.aat ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ original scientific paper . doi: . /zrffp - vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ university of novi sad faculty of philosophy department of english studies digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion abstract. although the challenges that authors have had to face in their attempts to articulate their intimate and public (hi)stories happen to be much older than computers, it was digital technology that offered a miraculously effec- tive existential and fictional frame for the mediation of literary testimonies. the fictional realism of the digital age is constructed around a newly formed class of young or middle-aged individuals most willing to adapt to a technology-centred civilisation and to a seismic technological change. the paper focuses on various forms of digital existence in contemporary fiction writing with the intention to illustrate crucial changes in the concept of reality and writers’ concern with the fidelity to experience. the surge of the so-called digital realism coincides with the revelation that the otherwise thin line between our digital personas and our real-world selves has grown obscure and even more difficult to detect, while new technologies are required to go beyond what our human senses can encompass and deliver. the paper intends to examine the ways new digital technologies contrib- ute to representations of reality in the novels by amber tamblyn, tamara jecić, mihajlo spasojević and aleksandar ilić, all of them aspiring authors whose novels deal with ways of life amid social networks and digital technol- ogies. stalking friends and foes on facebook and instagram, starting vladislava.gordic.petkovic@ff.uns.ac.rs the paper is the result of research conducted within project languages and cultures across time and space [on ] funded by the ministry of education, science and technological development of the republic of serbia. this paper was submitted on august th, and accepted for publication at the meeting of the editorial board held on september th, . collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ relationships online and pursuing boundless obsession with multiplicity of identity are among complex issues these novels deal with, capturing the voices at the margins and letting the characters transcend their real-life grounded identities. the novels show that the gap dividing the virtual and the (corpo)real world narrows, as their narratives range from intimate con- fession in letters and journals to blog posts, tweets, and statuses, introducing verbal and structural experimental practices which involve shifting points of view. keywords: technology; narrative; realism; culture; media. transgressions of realism abrupt historical changes have always called for cautious and grad- ual shift of interpretational strategies and priorities. in his ground- breaking and widely cited essay “the storyteller: reflections on the works of nikolai leskov” ( ), walter benjamin tries to find out what kind of collective experience might replace the solitary appreciation (benjamin, , p. ), whereas in alvin toffler coins the phrase “futureshock” in order to describe the mental condition of individuals who face enormous changes in a short period of time. addressing the issue of digital ontology, justin clemens and adam nash note that it means that “the digital literal- ly enacts a form of paraconsistency, simultaneously constituting and being constituted by it” (lagerkvist, , p. ). according to azade seyhan, our critical terms for literary study are not adequate for an exploration of the transfigurations we encounter in the world we inhabit: “the emergent literatures of deterritorialized peoples and literary studies beyond the confines of national litera- ture paradigms have as yet had no name or configuration” (seyhan, , p. ). this is the reason why a substantially altered strategic approach is needed when we discuss the writing in the age of fast changing technologies. technology has deeply affected the ways how we interact, introducing new strategies to redefine privacy and unwanted mechanisms to compromise it, amongst other things. what has also undergone transfigurations and redefinitions is realism, a much-abused word, as george orwell observed seven- ty-five years ago. although back in the past the genre was not always greeted enthusiastically by public and critics, it continues to transform into new, viable forms up to now. “a ‘realistic’ novel is digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ one in which the dialogue is colloquial and physical objects are described in such a way that you visualize them” (orwell, , p. ). realism in literature was introduced as a representation of the consciousness specific for an emerging modern world, with fidelity to experience as its leading principle. what the traditional realistic novel realizes in its narrative is the profound epistemolog- ical and ontological revolution announced by philosophers such as locke, descartes or spinoza, who see that reality is grounded in sense perception and quotidian experience (richetti, , p. ). according to ian watt, one of the groundbreaking literary histori- ans, “the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience”, “under an obligation to satisfy its reader with (...) details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms” (watt, , p. ). according to watt, the form of the novel’s primary criterion is “truth to individ- ual experience” (watt, , p. ). orwell observes that “the describing of everyday scenes and the construction of natu- ral-sounding dialogue are largely a matter of technical tricks which are passed on from one generation to another, gradually improving in the process” (orwell, , p. ). the realism in the novels by daniel defoe, tobias smollett and samuel richardson demonstrat- ed a pragmatic and empirical understanding of life and human behaviour, recognizing human individuality, knowledge and expe- rience. classical realism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted the identity as fixed and unchangeable, treating it as an element in a given system of differences which is human nature and the world of human experience (belsey, , p. ). the change occurs when contemporary literature has turned the inter- subjective moment into an interactive one, expanding the range of characters’ experience deep into the sphere of virtual communica- tion. a new surge of digital realism in literature coincides with the increase of awareness that the line between our digital selves and our corporeal, “real-world” selves has become unclear and impos- sible to regulate, whereas the new technologies are required “to go beyond what our human senses can encompass and deliver” (gordić, , p. ). if the narrative realizes that reality is some- where beyond the perception of the senses, it does not necessarily mean that the representation of it assumes the existence of a tangi- ble external “reality”. collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ the concept of reality can be understood much better when we take into account the metaphor jane austen used when she dis- cussed the technique and the scope of her novels: when developing plots which invariably dealt with country families occupied in mar- rying off their children, cousins and relatives, she focused on the narrative strategies with almost unnoticeable impact. austen described her text as a tiny piece of ivory and her technique as a delicate brush: “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which i work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour” (qtd. in chapman, , p. ). although her artistic prin- ciple seems to be deliberately understated and simplified in such an unpretentious explanation as this one is, austen becomes a good example to demonstrate that realistic novel is always dealing with what might be called the principal social and material concern of a particular class: in the imagined worlds she depicts there is hardly ever a noticeable change. the new technologies have readapted and reinforced systems for capturing the multitude of voices situated at the margins of social communities, and cyberspace has invented new strategies to tran- scend our grounded identities. this transformation became neces- sary for the environment of the new media and their capacity to represent a virtual entity, which has proved as an enticing possibil- ity to transgress restrictions. the challenges that authors have had to face in their attempt to create and circulate their intimate and public histories are much older than computers and informational highways. the daily routine in a postmillennial reality has come to encompass a multitude of intersecting empirical and virtual planes of existence: life, work and relationships develop in a dimension where geography and physical barriers have been largely ignored, which results in many alterations in “concepts of time and space, as well the concepts of privacy and intimacy” (gordić, , p. ). although “technology-centered civilization has given birth to numerous global problems, caused not only by the development of technology but also by the usage of it in terms of affecting man’s habitat” (malkova, , p. ), among those problems being “edu- cational, psychological, communicative” (malkova, , p. ), optimism prevails, at least until the individual affronts the impass- es of his or her emotional growth. for one thing, the dating landscape changes with the advent of the new technologies, so that the ways love is perceived and expe- rienced change as well. as another kind of collective experience digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ which replaces solitary appreciation, social networking has become a verified strategy in literature, television and film, convenient enough to reflect the character's growth in a sex-obsessed culture, in which young people are “forced to navigate a minefield more challenging, and pressure-filled than ever before when it comes to one vital topic: sex” (platt liebau, , ). being sexy has become “the ultimate accolade” (platt liebau, , p. ) and the perva- siveness of sex in today’s culture has left a considerable imprint on young people, leaving their parents unable to react in the proper way against what carol liebau fretfully calls “the decline of decen- cy”. present times are characterized, due to digital technologies used for creating and communicating virtually universally availa- ble information, by an “uncertain” relation with information, seen as the most important resource and treasure in many realms of life. networking started as a social activity which clearly responds to the need of new media technology users to focus on important events in their everyday life and to elicit an appropriate response from the audience they targeted. communicative practices in social networking show that our virtual identities continue to vacillate between public and private, but also between use and misuse. trauma, pain and the media: amber tamblyn amber tamblyn’s debut novel any man, a dark piece of experimen- tal fragmented fiction about a female serial rapist, gives voice to six men healing after the sexual predator called maude destroys their bodies and leaves them naked in the humiliation of her abuse, with a six-foot long, white hair left as the only proof of her presence. maude is both a brutal human assailant and a deformed mythical creature, and her victims can perceive only fragments of her body or slight signs of her presence: black eyes, misshapen hand or breath like rotting fish. instead of focusing on the transformation of the victim, tamblyn suggests that the repetitive act of inflicting pain becomes a transfiguring process for the perpetrator: maude transforms into a monster during the very act of killing or mutilat- ing her male victims. the origin of her crime and the roots of her hatred for her victims remain unclear, or lost in the fragments of facts and visions mediated by technology. the narrative voice in the novel focuses on interior monologues of the survivors, their correspondence with one another and on media echoes coming collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ from the tv and the internet, demonstrating how the society read- ily finds entertainment and even enjoyment in the pain of the vic- tims of sexual assault. tamblyn insists on placing the blame on the media for the way they relish in pain and horror of the men attacked by maude: publicizing the crime and celebritising the grief are motifs minutely observed within a community which can- not resist any of the two urges. tamblyn’s decision to make the rapist a woman and to write from the point of view of the rapist’s six male victims has upset some readers, but her intention was not just to reverse gender roles. the author, herself a hollywood star, an accomplished poet and one of the founders of “time’s up”, the organisation launched at the beginning of to fight sexual harassment in the film industry, was much more focused on provoking the interest into the rape culture and the ways sexual assault is addressed. tamblyn felt that the #metoo movement was too much focused on white, upper class women, ignoring the underprivileged women and male victims alike, and that is one of the reasons she decided “to show the violence of objectification; the physical and psychological vio- lence of assault; the violence of not being believed” (mahdawi, ). the novel is experimentally formatted, using prose, poetry, soliloquies, emails, online chat and tweets to tell the story. tam- blyn is mapping the discursive media strategies which are used to publicize rape with the intention to focus on the pain and the trau- ma the victims relive in their imagination. any man blends genres of journal entries, radio shows dialogue, dating app chats, mono- logues and erratic thoughts, and elements of suspense to shape the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence. the survivors all have to deal with the disbelief thrown at them that even a man can be raped, as well as with the media endlessly speculating about them as victims and the part they played in their own attack. the victims are shamed and even ridiculed: the aftermath unleashes a whole new hell after the initial crime, and that is just one aspect of their suffering; deep inside, the characters are also faced with humiliation, fear and feelings of disgust with themselves. the schoolteacher from watertown donald ellis reveals his dismay in a row of interior monologues: i talk about the walking shoes i just purchased, the best brands of mosquito repellent, the time i was mutilated and left for dead in an alley, the time i went rafting with friends for my forty-sixth birthday. i do not talk. i do not talk. (...) i do not talk. or i talk about the effects digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ of wind on different sizes of birds. i talk about taxidermy. i talk about golf. (tamblyn, , pp. – ) dealing with pain and shame makes the reality of the world change: the human smile no longer makes sense to me. why is it a sign of happiness? who decided that? why not the crinkling of the nose, or blinking, or a hard swallow? who invented the word smile and gave it its meaning? (...) smile is the shape of my mouth my therapist looks for when she asks how i’m doing. it is the shape of my mouth camilla wants to kiss when i return from a day’s work. the shape of my mouth my neighbors and colleagues desire to set them at ease. it makes others feel safe with my story. i practice this smiling, this mouth’s shaping, in the mirror. i do it for them. (tamblyn, , pp. – ) menacing and impossible to subdue, maude is also present in the cyberspace, praying on her victims, using the nick jasminerose while chatting with jamar sands (jamarvelous ) and other vic- tims. her invincibility is partly due to the fact that the press in en- chanted with her: when a journalist contacts maude, the tone of his message demonstrates an alarming combination of investigative journalism, sensationalism and pop psychology: joshua_dispatch: dear maude, my name is joshua greenfield and i am a reporter with the dispatch newspaper. in the event you ever check this okcupid account again, we would love to get a statement or comment from you regarding your relationship with jamar sands, donald ellis, or pear o’sullivan. specifically, we would love to hear from you directly regarding your motives. perhaps one of these men did something to you at one point? perhaps you have your own histo- ry with violent men? were you yourself ever sexually abused or harmed? anything you’d like to share with us would be greatly ap- preciated and would be printed verbatim. (tamblyn, , p. ) maude is an ever-present menace, hunting for her preys both on- line and offline, assuming many shapes, voices and identities, thus representing the omnipresence of evil which no digital existence can erase or remedy. her victims are humiliated by the ways they must affront the aftermath of their assault: they are exposed to dis- belief and doubts from the police, feelings of shame overcome them and alienate them from their family and friends. what makes their suffering much stronger is the fact that their pain is being publicly dissected. maude thus becomes a loaded figure which emanates the collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ society’s fears and fascinations, passion and misogyny. what is ex- traordinary about the novel is how as years pass these men learn to heal, by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. told in alternating viewpoints signature to each voice and experi- ence of the victim, any man is a narrative filled with emotion, rang- ing from abominable fear to heartfelt empathy. technology and temptations: displacing serbian fiction it is a quite recent trend in serbian fiction to accept the computer mediated communication as an interaction occurring in an entirely different environment, in a context visibly changed with the advent of tablets, smart phones, hyperlinks and applications. sev- eral new thirtysomething serbian novelists follow in the footsteps of the predecessors whose novels tackled various issues related to digital ontology or interaction transgressing boundaries of previ- ously practiced social mores. some authors born in the ’s, such as mileta prodanović, jelena lengold, and Đorđe pisarev have, all of their own accord, struggled to articulate narrative strategies that could channel their ultimate desire to share the most intimate con- cerns with the reader. technology offers some viable solutions to deal with both the temptations of society and history. when reflected in literature, the civil wars in yugoslavia demanded a new approach to the issues of rootlessness and uprootedness, but they also offered a chance to discuss the displaced characters with the help of technology. one of the most important motifs within this theme became the displace- ment from one’s native country and the estrangement from the culture one was born and raised in. probably the first serbian novel that tackles the issue of cyberspace and virtual identities while associating them both with otherness and exile is stinky onion by tamara jecić. the anonymous main character’s lonely life and yearning for intimacy are documented by his contemplation, recol- lections, dreams, as well as his internet activities such as chatting and texting with strangers who might offer a temporary solace. the reader immediately understands why the protagonist of jecić’s fic- tional autobiography, a thirty-something usa immigrant from ser- bia, introduces himself as an “indian”, living on the territory digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ native americans lost. the city of chicago used to be called stinky onion by the tribes which lived on the soil, so that the name becomes a common identifier for the history of displacements which includes the serbian immigrant who belongs to “the under- paid working class, whose degree and knowledge is not needed here” (jecić, , p. ). the self-proclaimed indian introduces himself as a person expected to work hard and achieve a little: “i, too am the one who is expected to be happy when given any job and who will grin and bear it, work, pay taxes at the end of the year, and when the time comes, vote for one of two provided presidential candidates” (jecić, , p. ). his first interaction with the loneliness in the new world occurs at the airport, owing to one of his odd jobs: the indian works as a wheelchair assistant, which signals an ironic, inverted parallel to his own helplessness. the conventional exchange with his custom- ers, mostly the elderly passengers in transit, serves as an introduc- tion into his further futile search for intimacy in the cyberspace. the airport instils in him the feeling of the so called “non-place” which is to follow him throughout his life in the usa. stinky onion turns out to be a non-place both to the protagonist and to the ex-yugoslavian diaspora, linked to cyberspace as another site of reinvention and restoring of one’s identity. marc augé coined the phrase “non-place” as a reference to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as proper places (augé, , p. ), such as a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket, and it is sensible to presume that the internet can be seen as a non-place as well, due to its lack of substance and con- stancy, owing to its endless capacity to mirror our fears and desires, as well as temporarily fulfil them. this vast network of data does not frighten the characters ready to dive into the digital reali- ty; it rather seduces and invites them, as we shall see in several examples. “in producing his localization, the indian redefines his collective and personal identity by negotiating his sense of belonging to many different communities, spatial and virtual” (marić, , p. ). the protagonist’s identity construction is challenged by comput- er-mediated communication, and the potential of this technology seems limitless at first, but very quickly turns into an inescapable addiction, which is “stronger than meeting real, live people” (jecić, , p. ). the indian starts looking for online companionship, driven by the hunger he classifies as intellectual, emotional, and collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ sexual. the cyberspace allows him to be simultaneously present and absent, as well as to simulate an otherwise non-existent social life, renounce the hidden traumas and troublesome past. digital technologies open an opportunity to consumers to reinvent them- selves through language and narrative, promising new freedom and independence to the participants in discourse who interact socially while still living a drab, solitary life. the unnamed narrator of stinky onion finally resigns to the idea that his depression will never go away, but he keeps on looking for the ways to resolve his dilemmas either through computer-mediated communication or in creating a narrative which mirrors the chaos and entropy of every- day life. risking another emotional turmoil after numerous shocks and defeats, the protagonist bravely gives in to search for self-iden- tity in an inconsistent and volatile world, fighting a hopeless battle against despair. contemporary novels which deal with technology show that any ordinary life can be lived not only within the social environment, but also in the realm of social networks. narratives presenting dig- ital reality range from intimate confession in letters and journals to social interactions in the forms of chats, tweets and facebook posts, introducing experimental practices which include shifting points of view, stream-of-consciousness technique, and various typo- graphical experiments. digital technology offered a solid existen- tial and fictional frame for the mediation of various kinds of testimonies as it emulates immediacy much better than the tradi- tional narrative techniques. in his kafkaesque novel a clueless man (Čovek koji nije imao pojma) serbian writer mihajlo spasojević casts a grotesque and sardonic dystopian tale about a high school in bronx where students public- ly shame their professors by stalking them, posting their photos to facebook, recording their awkward moments or by labelling them as “gay” just because they do not possess the brand new model of a cell phone. this funny and frightening parable about dismal per- spectives of education focuses on pessimistic prospects of using technology in classroom or digital technology being the easiest explanation for the alarming lack of interaction between the pro- tagonist (called simply professor s.) and his unruly students, as much as it tackles impasses in the educational system. education and culture seem to have moved with the help of technology far from modern archives such as museums and galleries, to post-mod- ern archives like the broadcast television systems and then to net- digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ work archives, like the global digital network, but no newly invented strategies manage to arouse the interest of young stu- dents to embrace knowledge. professor s. has not enough nerve to fight his students’ ignorance and lack of motivation, and he becomes a sad symbol of the older generation losing the battle to preserve traditional values and priorities. the critique of capitalism and modern school system subtly averts the reader’s attention from the impractical and clumsy pro- fessor s, as the novel gradually gives in to a futuristic fantasy about the iron fist of the bureaucracy which finally prevails over the agendas of independent individuals. spasojević’s novel focuses on impoverished lives of indifferent youngsters whose lack of motiva- tion is encouraged with attractive gadgets enabling them to share cheap thrills and superficial excitations. the author demonstrates how meaningless and estranged life becomes when the social net- works turn into the chief communication device by the very refusal to cast a proper character study of his main character. digital real- ity is not concerned with delayed responses, contemplation or dig- ging deep to find suppressed traumas and hidden motives: professor s. cannot ever become a complex character since he is dwindled down by his own environment and its harmful impact. his distorted vision of reality comes from the distorted society itself: the school principal, mockingly called her principality, insists that “our children need inspiration, role models!” adding that “our schools need another, another brand new narrative!” (spasojević, , pp. – ), but she is at a loss for what to do to fulfil these goals. describing a young man’s career in a cubicle of an advertising agency against the backdrop of a tumultuous love affair with his co-worker, aleksandar ilić’s novel pr introduces a disoriented and distracted hero whose daily life revolves around interacting on the social networks and juggling with mobile phone applications. the premise that more communication vehicles mean more audiences but also an increasing risk of fragmented consumption of informa- tion is best demonstrated in the case of the unnamed protagonist, who interacts with many people online, sharing his grief with some of them after the breakup with his lover sonja, but no close friend- ship or ensuing offline interaction result from this. his virtual friend that goes under the name anna from the wonderland seems to be of help during his emotional crisis, but her tips for a better life soon start to sound as bland as those coming from self-help books collection of papers of the faculty of philosophy xlix ( )/ vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ on depression. the life filled with advertising messages coming in various forms and shapes, text notifications popping from comput- er and mobile devices and online banners displayed on screen denies any chance that a loyal friendship or true love might grow out of random contacts, and the protagonist's lover will finally move away from the virtual world in order to fulfil her expecta- tions elsewhere. sonja will end the workplace romance, leaving the protagonist in despair and dejection which are mostly an outcome of wrongly chosen priorities and trading real life experiences for simulacra, as we can see in his vision of the afterlife: i believe there is no heaven, and that we should build it. i envision it as a gigantic server with an endless multitude of hard discs where it is possible to upload everything we take to be mental or spiritual: memories, emotions, or ideas. that heaven is digital and immortal digital people inhabit it, living in folders instead of houses made of bricks and concrete, with browsers instead of windows and antivirus programs instead of vacuum cleaners and hospitals. i picture myself signing in to my facebook profile from one of these servers after my body has died; or i blog, chat with my offspring that will be born in a thousand years or divorce my wife and divide our folder in two. (ilić, , p. ) with sonja at his side or without her, the protagonist’s life is re- duced to aimless interactions with virtual friends on google hangout, skype or facebook, getting stoned, playing computer games and indulging in sexual fantasies. with the revolving issues of casual sex and repetitive discussions with few dysfunctional friends, the deadpan narrative voice resembles the catatonic, indif- ferent voices from brett easton ellis’s less than zero and rules of at- traction, but is also similar to raymond carver’s characters’ testi- monies about lives burnt-out with alcohol and disappointment. concluding remarks: post , postwhat? the reductive, catatonic idiom of spasojević’s a clueless man and aleksandar ilić’s pr becomes functional in characterization not because the protagonists are traumatized or emotionally damaged like tamblyn’s: they actually adapt to the habitual mode of express- ing oneself that is prevalent in their environment. they adopt, either intentionally or unwittingly, interactive manners of the advertising industry as well as the codes of communication on digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ social networks which verify their pose of aloof existence. the post- sensibility seems to be adjusted to minimalist communi- cation as much as to relentless sexual liberation. still, the pressures of patriarchy and consumerism continue, and cannot stop med- dling in the socially acceptable modes of living. promiscuity and adultery happen against a cultural landscape where the rules of heterosexual relations are in a state of flux, rendering both men and women unsure and ignorant about what is expected of them in public and private spheres. faced with an independent and even relentless woman, hegemonic masculinity repositions itself as an unstable identity in need of redefinition. as a result, the formula for the ideal romantic hero has become imprecise, forcing the young generations to look for new ways of self-development, such as digital formats of communication and embracing new social practices in life and literature alike. tamblyn introduces a fictional reality in which both the human body, the pain inflicted to it and the social media treatment of the victim’s suffering become an indissoluble testimony of present times. the digital realism of tamara jecić and aleksandar ilić promises to be much more than a slight and unmeaningful altera- tion of the realistic strategies known as verism or minimalism, turning the digital media interaction into a harbinger of the new artistic sensibility, promising to influence the discourse of the real- istic novel and change the currents of narrative practices. references augé, m. 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( ). why write a novel about a brutal female rapist in the age of #metoo? amber tamblyn explains. the guardian, july . malkova, t. ( ). philosophy of technology: modern technological reality and the regularities of development. in: advances in social science, education and humanities research, vol. , pp. – . paris: atlantis press. marić, i. ( ). globalization, identity, commodity: the case of stinky onion (tamara jecić) and the penultimate journey (gordana Ćirjanić). kultura, ( ), – . orwell, g. ( ). tobias smollett: scotland’s best novelist. in: collected es- says, journalism and letters, vol. , pp. – . harmondsworth: penguin. platt liebau, c. ( ). prude: how the sex-obsessed culture damages girls (and america, too!). new york, boston, nashville: center street. richetti, j. ( ). the english novel in history – . london and new york: routledge. seyhan, a. ( ). writing outside the nation. princeton, n. j.: princeton uni- versity press. spasojević, m. ( ). Čovek koji nije imao pojma. beograd: rende. tamblyn, a. ( ). any man. new york: harper collins. watt, i. ( ). the rise of the novel: studies in defoe, richardson and fielding. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. ВЛАДИСЛАВА С. ГОРДИЋ ПЕТКОВИЋ УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ У НОВОМ САДУ ФИЛОЗОФСКИ ФАКУЛТЕТ ОДСЕК ЗА АНГЛИСТИКУ РЕЗИМЕ ДИГИТАЛНА ТРАНСГРЕСИЈА: ПРОЗА И ПРОМЕНЕ У ДОБУ ТЕХНОЛОШКЕ ЕКСПАНЗИЈЕ Тематски трендови у постмиленијумској српској прози сведо- че да полиглосија друштвених мрежа отвара ново подручје ин- спирације. Стога се јавља потреба да се пажљиво анализира при- суство технологије у савременом роману и да се преиспитају промене у приступу реалистичком приповедном поступку и његовом дефинисању. Приметни су напори и код читалаца и код теоретичара да се у нову дефиницију реалистичког укључе сви аспекти дигиталне димензије свакодневице, односно свест о различитим концепцијама упоредних светова: света емпиријске и света виртуелне реалности. digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion vladislava s. gordiĆ petkoviĆ Основе дигиталног реализма у књижевности утемељене су у сазнању да је граница између наших виртуелних и реалних идентитета нејасна и тешко одредива, упркос томе што желимо да их раздвојимо. Комуникација у сфери друштвених мрежа по- стаје дневна рутина, па тако окружење у роману stinky onion Та- маре Јецић уз географску и културну укључује и виртуелну ди- мензију, која подразумева стварање нових веза и са перспективом живота у страном свету, и са трауматичном про- шлошћу домовине. Михајло Спасојевић у роману Човек који није имао појма са критичке дистанце предочава природу и функцију технолошких достигнућа, која у контексту механицистичке, до апсурда бирократизоване педагогије губе на значају и примен- љивости. Критика либералног капитализма, неефикасног школ- ског система и неодговорног односа према младима видљива је у гротескној интеракцији Спасојевићевог јунака професора С. са колегама и ученицима, док Александар Илић у роману ПР као легитиман мизансцен користи садржаје са Инстаграма и „диги- торалну“ комуникацију са клијентима маркетиншке агенције, пошто његови јунаци усвајају интерактивне манире света адвер- тајзинга. Амбер Тамблин у дебитантском роману Било који му- шкарац комбинује епистоларну технику, исповест и дигиталну интеракцију са сензационалистичким медијским садржајима како би представила поразан утицај технологије и медија на културно и социјално (не)утемељену свест о силовању као зло- чину чија жртва може бити било ко, без обзира на родну и кла- сну припадност. Примамљива понуда нових технологија да нас одведу изван оквира емпиријске реалности наводи појединца да у жељи за променом заборави на ризике и прихвати преображене закони- тости фиктивног света, у ком јунаци почињу да на другачији на- чин трагају за изгубљеном синтезом љубави, наде и поверења. Јунаци напуштају офлајн свет како би у виртуелној димензији потражили одрживу илузију егзистенције. КЉУЧНЕ РЕЧИ: технологија; наратив; реализам; култура; медији. Овај чланак је објављен и дистрибуира се под лиценцом creative commons Ауторство-Некомерцијално Међународна . (cc by-nc  .  |  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /). this paper is published and distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial international . licence (cc by-nc .  | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /). 	vladislava s. gordić petković 	digital transgressions: fiction and change in the era of technological expansion we passed the trust on”- strategies for security in #metoo activism in sweden hansson, k.; sveningsson, m.; sandgren, m. ganetz, h. ( ): “we passed the trust on”: strategies for security in #metoo activism in sweden. in: proceedings of the th european conference on computer-supported cooperative work: the international venue on practice- centred computing an the design of cooperation technologies - exploratory papers, reports of the european society for socially embedded technologies (issn - ), doi: . /ecscw _ep copyright held by authors, doi: . /ecscw _ep permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. abstracting with credit is permitted. to copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, contact the authors. “we passed the trust on”: strategies for security in #metoo activism in sweden karin hansson , malin sveningsson , maria sandgren , hillevi ganetz stockholm university, gothenburg university, södertörn university corresponding author: khansson@dsv.su.se abstract. the #metoo movement can serve as a case for how networked online environments can provide settings for the mobilization of social movements, while also entail serious risks for those involved. in sweden, over hundred thousand people were engaged in activities against sexual harassments and abuse, where social media were used to collect testimonies and to draft and discuss petitions that were later published in print news media. while hci research on trust focus on how people trust technical systems, the authorities behind the system, or the user generated data, trust between peers in vulnerable communities is less researched. in this study, based on semi- structured interviews and a survey that involved organizers of the swedish #metoo movement, we therefore look into the question of how a secure and supportive environment was achieved among participants despite the scale of the activism. the result shows how trust was aggregated over networks of technical systems, institutions, people, shared values and practices. the organizers of the petitions used tools and channels at their disposal such as e.g. already established social media contexts that enabled the #metoo petitions to be formed easily and spread quickly. establishing a supportive culture based on recognition and shared values was central for the movement. however, when the activism was scaled up, strategies were used to increase security by clarifying rules and roles, limiting access to information, restricting access to groups, and limiting the scope of communication. introduction networked online environments can effectively serve as settings for the organization and mobilization of social movements, e.g the environmental movement early on used social media to engage a broad public around substantive issues (deluca et al., ; goodwin & jasper, ; pang & law, ). other examples of activism where social media played a role include the arab spring (alsayyad & guvenc, ; smidi & shahin, ), the occupy movement (kavada, ), and movements such as the gezi protests in turkey (haciyakupoglu & zhang, ), and ukraine's euromaidan uprising (bohdanova, ). campaigns such as #metoo show how online spaces provide opportunities for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse to come out and get support from other victims, and to participate in public debates around these issues. simultaneously, research also points at the negative and practical consequences, which may render the digital feminist activism risky, exhausting and overwhelming (mendes et al., ). what characterized the #metoo movement in sweden - is how well coordinated it was, despite being made up predominantly by grassroots initiatives. an important difference between the swedish #metoo movement and other similar movements (such as the arab spring) is that traditional media have usually been in opposition to the grassroots movements. in contrast, the swedish #metoo movement used social and traditional media in a coordinated and remarkably efficient effort. the organizers managed to mobilize large groups through social networks, and then spread their agenda nationally through the largest and most influential newspapers. judging from the public interest (zachariasson, ), as well as the number of articles published in newspapers (eklund, ), the swedish #metoo movement can be described as very successful. the movement was also able to establish a feminist agenda focusing on structural problems, beyond the individual cases (svärd, ). a broad mobilization took place in the form of lists of demands petitioned to the government, action plans by politicians and employers, as well as a large number of seminars and education organized around the country (annebäck, ; berglund, ; samordningsgruppen för metoo, ). however, the framing of the movement as a success story obscures questions of obstacles that evolved along the way, concerning for example risks for those involved. in the swedish #metoo movement, perceived risks concerned not becoming employed, or losing one’s current employment because of the participation, or facing the social stigma of being a victim of sexual abuse. there were also fears of becoming target of threats or continued harassment. these risks had to be realized and handled in order for organizers to be able to gather participants and collect their stories and signatures. this paper seeks to understand how the organizers of the #metoo petitions handled these risks and how they established a secure environment and gained participants’ trust. background: research on trust in research on human computer interaction (hci), trust is a central concept, as hci to a large extent is about making people rely on the technology to solve different tasks. when navigating the topic of "trust online", the literature is dominated by research mainly on different types of e-commerce solutions (corritore et al., ; kracher et al., ), there is also research on e- government systems (bannister & connolly, ; corbett & le dantec, a, b), and e-health systems (beldad et al., ). the focus in these areas is mainly on how consumers and citizens can feel confident in systems that handle sensitive data such as money or medical records (wang & emurian, ). when it comes to trust in people, the focus has often been on the relationship between the citizen/consumer and the authority/service, and thus not directly about the trust in peers (corbett, a). a focus that is more about trust in peers is about trusting the reliability of user-generated data. the large amount of information available online creates an information crisis where trust in informal networks, rather than central institutions, are becoming increasingly important. for example, it may be in a situation where activists do not trust the official information, such as during the gezi protests in turkey (haciyakupoglu, ). here, the technology instead created an opportunity to "aggregate trustworthiness"(jessen & jørgensen, ) from a large number of sources, where social trust and technical affordances interact (haciyakupoglu, ). another relevant aspect of online trust is personal security. within this area, the relation between the desire for self-exposure and the possibility of being anonymous has been demonstrated when for example; it applies to sensitive subjects (birnholtz et al., ), vulnerable groups such as victims of sexual abuse (andalibi et al., ), or women who miscarriage (andalibi & forte, ). at the same time, research on people's safety awareness on social media shows that even though there are concerns that sensitive information is coming out, one chooses to trust that it works, as the benefits of sharing experiences and getting support are perceived as so valuable that it outweighs the risks. this also applies to vulnerable groups such as illegal immigrants in the united states (guberek et al., ). undoubtedly, trust is something central to online communication and also a broad and multifaceted concept that means different things in different contexts, why for the sake of clarity we here would like to define it and explain how we relate to the concept in this paper. following haraway( ), technology can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, which extends our "arms" and allows us to stretch beyond our bodies and reach what we previously could not reach. in this view, trust is about trusting that the arms can reach out and carry what we expect them to do. there is always a risk that the prosthesis will fall off, but most of the time it goes well. the moment of risk means that trust is required, which is why risk and trust are closely associated. the more risk, the greater is the trust needed. when it comes to technologies such as social media, these are not primarily artifacts but consists of humans, sometimes very large amounts of people that one might not even have a personal relationship with, but it might be a common interest that brought one together. in these cases, the trust is not so much a matter of trust in technical systems, trust in authorities, trust in information, or trust in particular people, but trust in shared values and practices. for example, it may be about belonging to an idea, or a shared experience, which is sufficiently strong or revolutionary to motivate the individual to, for example, take the risk of trusting strangers in publics (wang, ). trust is also linked to distance. simplified, the greater the distance, the greater the trust required. it can be about physical distance, temporal distance, emotional or social distance (corbett, a). here, trust can be seen as a process of bridging distances, a process that can be described in various phases such as developing, building, and maintaining trust (rousseau et al., ). in the development phase, trust is about a calculated and weak confidence. trust in this phase is mainly cognitive and is about relying on clear evidence and strong external structures such as laws and systems. in the construction phase, trust is more about experience built through interactions over time. people and situations that have previously been reliable are trusted again. the third phase, maintaining trust, is less about calculations and more about belonging, and takes its point of departure in shared values and benevolence. one not only trusts that the system will work, and that people are predictable, but one trusts that this is motivated by shared values. data and method to understand how different factors such as social trust and technical affordances played a role in the organization of #metoo, this study employs a mixed methods approach, consisting of a survey and semi-structured interviews. the survey was distributed to the organizers of all petitions that were initiated between november and june . the number of contact persons varied per petition group, as well as how contact information was provided. some groups provided group-aliases that transferred e-mail to all the organizers of the petition in question, and others provided individual addresses of one or a few of the organizers. some petitions were organized by groups of people, whereas others by just one person. the petitions differed in reach as well: some gathered over participants, whereas other groups were smaller and more closely knit. we distributed the survey to organizers and got responses from organizers of petitions within two weeks. the organizers of the petitions (see appendix ) came from all over sweden, from malmö in the south to kiruna in the very north. one person lived in the neighboring finland. lived in stockholm, the capital of sweden, and in gothenburg, which is the second largest city. the remaining respondents lived in different small towns or rural areas. the organizers were between and years old with the majority ( of ) between and years old. educational levels were high, of had a college education, which is twice as many as in the general swedish population (scb, ). the seven interviewed informants ranged from being in their twenties to +. their previous experiences as organizers were mixed, from no experience at all to a lifelong experience of media activism. before becoming the organizer of a petition, many of them already had access to some sort of professional network online; they could for example serve as moderators for social media groups gathering people from their industry or be responsible for an e-mail lists that connected former classmates. the survey asked questions about how the petitions were organized, what tools and methods were used, how news media was contacted, and what role security and trust played in the petitions’ organization. as a way to get complementary information and to deepen our understanding, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven petition organizers, from a number of contexts: it industry, construction industry, the forest industry, agriculture, and equestrian sports. informed consent was gathered, and all names of participants and the petitions have been omitted to ensure anonymity. each interview lasted between and minutes and began with a brief overview of the purpose of the research, followed by a series of questions asking the informant; to describe their background and role in the organization of the petition, what ideas and values that influenced the organization, how the petition was organized, how it was distributed, about the role of security and trust, and what they had learned from the experience. the interviews were recorded and transcribed. all data were in swedish, thus the quotes have been translated into english. the interview material, as well as open-ended questions in the survey, were analyzed thematically in an approach inspired by grounded theory, where a first open-coding of the data was followed by more focused coding to develop salient categories. the paper focuses on the result of the survey of communication tools and processes and on one of the main themes that emerged from the analysis of the open survey answers and the interviews; security strategies. results communication tools and processes the tools for initiating and developing the petitions varied from irl meetings to phone calls, e-mail, collaborative writing to social media and survey tools. social media, in most cases meant facebook. facebook was used by almost all petitions. e-mail or messenger were used in half of the cases, and google docs was used in / of the petitions. twitter and instagram were foremost used in addition to facebook, as a way to distribute the petitions. after the initiating phase, testimonies were collected through e-mail, social media and survey tools. one fourth of the petitions used some sort of survey tool to collect testimonies and signatures, the other either used a facebook group, or had a dedicated e-mail address. in the final distribution phase when the result of the petition was communicated to its stakeholders, social media was central, but also irl meetings such as seminars, meetings with journalists and decision makers, became important. the smaller group of organizers usually used a facebook group, messenger group or chat as an exclusive channel to communicate among themselves. most organizing groups maintained a close and continual contact through different tools. figure . the amount of organisers that used different tools in different parts of the process; when initiating petitions, collecting testimonies, and distributing petitions. the organizer of the petitions used a combination of methods and tools to communicate, and the processes could look very different from case to case. for example, one petition started as a discussion thread in a facebook group that already gathered thousands of women from the industry. when the first #metoo petitions were published, the issue was discussed in this discussion thread and several participants asked for a petition in their own industry. in response, one of the participants in the discussion thread quickly put together a manifesto and set up a survey tool to collect signatures online and created an e-mail address that others could send their testimonies to. she posted information about the petition in the open facebook group, which meant that the petition quickly received a wide distribution. after a few hours she had enough material for drafting an article proposal aimed to a leading newspaper. the whole process from idea to draft went very fast and took no more than - hours. to get help to develop and complete the article, she asked the others in the discussion thread, and in this way a group was formed around the continued work. other petitions developed much slower. it was not uncommon that testimonies were published semi-public in closed facebook groups, which generated long discussions on each individual case. in some petitions, the text was developed collectively, not only by the organizers, but all members of the group came with opinions, and the text was examined in detail and discussed intensively before it was sent for publication. several such cases took place in facebook groups with over thousands of participants. the interviews show that later petitions learned from previous petitions’ experiences and were thus more cautious about how they e.g. used social media or with publishing their private email addresses. to sum up, the organizers of the petitions used tools and channels at their disposal such as already established social media contexts. most often different tools and channels were combined. facebook seems to have been used by almost all petitions and had a central role in the whole development of the petitions both as a way to reach out and as a forum for discussion. strategies for security while the whole idea of #metoo was to make sexual harassment visible and defy the shame of having been exposed, it meant great risks for the victims to come out with their stories. the disclosures could, for example, lead to unpleasant consequences both socially and professionally, in the form of social exclusion, threats and harassment. legally, accusations that cannot be substantiated in concrete evidence or other witnesses, can lead to the person reporting the case being sentenced and punished for defamation. on the other hand, perpetrators pointed out publicly may suffer from extreme consequences that are not proportional to the possible crime. it is therefore not surprising that one central themes in the open questions in the survey and in the interviews were about security strategies. the material points to five comprehensive strategies for security where the first emphasizes a supportive community and openness, and the other four are strategies for security with the aim to regulate and control. security through a supportive community most petition organizers emphasized the importance of a trustful environment where the participants dared to talk about their experiences and could receive support and encouragement from others with similar experiences. the study shows how they gave special importance to a supportive culture in which the victims were not questioned and were a generous culture where established through active and collective moderating. establishing safe and trusting forms of dialogue was central to the organization of the petitions. it was crucial to create a situation where people who previously might never have told others about their experiences, could get recognition for these, and open themselves up without being questioned or risking their identity coming out. the situation was based on confidence in the organizers and their ability to harbor trust. "most stories were submitted to me and [the other organizer]. some released their stories in the facebook group, which created trust so that other people also dared to share. this in turn created trust. but to send by e-mail felt more secure and we were careful to ask before posting the stories that this really was ok. i am thinking that we showed great respect, from the beginning, and that this was a good start. we as organizers set rules for what we could talk about and not in the group. i believe the security of these groups is largely based on the evidence of how widespread the problem is. if, for the first time, you feel that you are listened to and taken seriously, and if you feel for others in the group, then the interests to break the social rules is not so great." (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) being recognized, transparency, and having seen everyone else contributing, created another kind of trust, a trust in the community of a collective experience. contributing with a traumatic experience became meaningful when they got feedback from a large group and heard other share their experiences, and when they come out this contributes to more sharing. an encouraging environment for discussion characterized by generosity and without judging or blaming, was an explicit ambition that was raised by several organizers of the petitions. this supportive culture was also reproduced by the participants. several of the organisers also had a readiness to handle people who needed more support, for example by providing information about people or organizations that provide legal or psychological support. “we as administrators and coordinators took an active role and set the tone in the comment fields. there were never hatred or bullshit, instead many pointed out how good the mood was. the focus was on "thank you for telling us" and always reminding you that there was the opportunity to get more support. we worked a lot with responsiveness and for example using languages that did not exclude. from the very beginning, we created an opportunity for anyone who wanted to talk to a person in charge at our federal office if they needed more support and / or wanted to report a perpetrator, to possibly move on in some way.” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) the organizers were subjected to a lot of pressure during an intense time period, and in the questionnaire about how they did to create security and safety in the organizing group, we get many similar answers that emphasize a communicative strategy where all means are used to have close contact with the group: "we had our own whatsapp group where we supported and pepped each other all the time." "a lot of conversations, support and a constant checking with each other." “mainly through active contact and support between us. we replaced each other when there were tougher discussions in our facebook group.” "continuous communication between us, we met a lot and talked a lot about what was sent to us." "we who organized were in different places so could not meet physically but had close contact over messenger so we would always be on the same wavelength." (survey answer from five organizers of different petitions) some organizers knew each other personally before, which facilitated communication. but many were not familiar before the call, or just superficially familiar before, and found each other through the shared engagement on the issue. security through clear rules and roles a strategy that contributed to creating a trusting environment in many petition groups was the development and communication of clear rules. attitudes were also developed and disseminated between the petition groups, largely via the overall coordination group, which gathered the organizers. “clear directives on publishing in the group. we were clear about how we safeguarded anonymity and total anonymization of testimonies (no one was allowed / could publish testimonies in the group. testimonies were first sent to e-mail that we admins later published without names and places or other "disclosure" in the group). additions to the group needed to be approved by the contact person and us in admin. the group was secret and not searchable.” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) active moderation was another source of security. those who moderated the groups worked actively to ensure that the rules on anonymization and generosity were complied with, and they closed down discussion threads that didn’t follow the code of conduct. they also reminded the participants about the rules and the goal of the campaign as a way of improving the level of discussion. likewise, another safety measure was to appoint one or a few people who acted as spokesmen for the group. clearly speaking for all the anonymous voices of the petition was a way of removing focus from individual organizers, and instead emphasizing a collective voice. security by limitation of information the trust was also based on the fact that names did not spread - neither on victims nor perpetrators. technical affordance was fundamental to effective implementation. the technical security was (somewhat surprising) nothing that the organizers experienced as risky, instead it was the human factor that they could be worried about: it was crucial to be able to trust that members of the group did not spread the name and information further. a basic principle that all groups have embraced was anonymity: the right to be anonymous, but also to let others, even perpetrators, be anonymous in the testimonies. active moderators ensured that this was complied with in testimonies as well as group discussions in social media. this mainly concerns what is communicated externally and to other members, but in a few groups, there were full internal anonymity, ie those who left testimonies were anonymous also to the organizers, and that the organizers were anonymous to the participants. all groups had restricted access to information about the victims, and to the uncensored testimonies. in the relatively open groups, however, many testimonies were published directly by victims, which meant that the person then became known to the whole group which could consist of thousands of people, sometimes with serious consequences. "to avoid testimonies leaking from the group, we started collecting them in a separate document and deleting them from the facebook group. this turned out to be too late. a woman was contacted by her perpetrator after her testimony leaked." (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) following this event, members were asked to send their testimonies either directly to the organizers, or through a form that allowed full anonymity. here, different considerations needed to be taken into account and balanced against each other. while it was important that information did not leak out, the sharing of testimonies and feedback on these stories was important to develop a trustful atmosphere that made more people dare to testify. this was resolved in some petitions by making the administrators share the testimonies on social media, allowing the victims to be kept anonymous, while people still were being able to discuss the testimony and publish their support. "we had rigid rules on anonymity in the group, for having the security to share. this meant that it was mainly us administrators that shared the testimonies in the facebook group.” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) it seems that the need to be anonymous was perceived as being particularly important in tightly connected networks, where everyone knew everyone. firstly, because there was too much to lose if it came out that you participated in the #metoo activism, as there were few possible new workplaces to switch to. partly, the perpetrators, or the perpetrators' relatives, were often well known and included in their social network, which meant that they (or other people with an interest in the issue, such as human resource managers at companies), easily could access information in social media by looking over the shoulders of a partner or simply by sharing login information with a family member. some petition organizer therefore chose to be completely anonymous and did not have any named organizers or signatures at all. this approach of total anonymity, even towards journalists, could create difficulties in reaching out and gaining legitimacy, but was sometimes a necessary way to go to avoid reprisals from colleagues and family, or for fear of what the public light would entail. security by limiting access one way to ensure that information did not seep out of the group was to carefully check and limit new members. a related security issue concerns the power imbalance of the group, to ensure that unauthorized persons did not gain access to the group: ”here is the crux ... it was decided, for example, that no journalists would be allowed to join the group. then part of the admin group went in with the argument "but that's my friend" and added these people again. also industry professionals / service persons at [industry name] were added with the same argument against the group's will, even though the group assumed to be a group for [professional identity]. thus, they were expected to tell sensitive stories to their employers, who in some cases leaked information into [the industry company].” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) here they were careful about not accepting managers or employers as participants, or teachers mixed with students. a closely related dilemma is the cases where some member is closely related to a person who has power over the others in the group. sometimes participants left the group voluntarily as they experienced that their participation reduced the trust within the group. but many times, questions about power imbalance and dependency conditions could be a dilemma, which sometimes made the organizers take other paths, and use other tools than just facebook: “we didn't want to bring in some of them [who had high positions or worked as a person responsible for staff] who we knew about. so, we never arranged such a [facebook group], but instead we spread the google form via messenger and yes, we sent it to our nearest network, and so it spread. so then it became so that one could pass it around and say that it comes from a safe source. it was as if we passed the trust on.” (interview) for most petitions, the question of who would participate was simple: women in the industry. many petitions spoke in the names of women and non-binary. but in several cases, discussions arose about the question of who would be allowed to participate. the least controversial was the separatism, to exclude non-women, as including men was seen as the presence of potential perpetrators and could reduce the trust within the group. but in industries where the career paths were a little unclear, a discussion also emerged about the significance of boundary drawing and why industry-specific manifestations had an importance. "many people signed the petition, but many have a very vague connection to the industry, but more willingness to be seen and heard, and to be in the limelight that the [...] industry has. whether someone harasses you in your amateur [context] says more about how society is at large than how […] the industry looks. ” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) foremost, the issue with participation was not about professional identity but about power. since sexual harassment is seen as an expression of a power structure where those who consider themselves to have more power are those who harass them with less power, it was an important issue that the participants in the group had a fairly equal status so that they were not in different ways potentially contributing to these power schemes, e.g as a manager or client. the importance of other power structures such as age and sexuality was also a discussion that came up, and made the requirement for equality within the group complicated. the affinity with other vulnerable people collided with the affinity of colleagues, family or others of the same age or other forms of power positions. "i took the initiative to a meeting irl afterwards, it was very strengthening to meet people, but i reacted on that most of the people who came to the meeting were heterosexual white women in their s- s .... we did not recruit the young, perhaps because one of the members of the admin did not want to have students in [context] because she taught [there]. i thought we should have included the young. that is my opinion, because they are the weakest and perhaps the most vulnerable, at least it has been so historic. ”(survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) security by limitations in scope another security strategy applied by several petitions was limitations in scope. the gathering of testimonies and signatures could e.g. take place for a limited time and the group was then closed down when the petition was published. another aspect of scope concerns the size of the group. although it was seen as positive that the petition created interest and engagement, problems arose if they become too big. the challenge of scaling up a feminist supportive culture developed in smaller groups was made clear by the speed of how the calls were developed, where quick decisions must be taken without any formal leadership. the larger the group became, the more uncertain it became for the participants, as the possibilities for information leaked increased. but above all, it was labor intensive to moderate large, sprawling group discussions that went on around the clock. “our security was never a problem. the most problematic was workload and stress. ” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) it happened that groups grew uncontrollably, and some administrators felt that they did not manage to administer the group, and that they could not control that the information was not leaking. “the larger the group became, the more unsafe it became. we tried to make those who wrote in the group aware of this and think about that we became bigger and that the secrecy became increasingly difficult to maintain. however, the stories that became public were anonymized and when it was published we closed down the group for reasons of confidentiality.” (survey answer from organizer of one of the petitions) one measure taken to reduce stress was to "pause" the group for a period, when it was not possible to post, to give all participants a much needed rest from the intensive discussions in the forums. in summary, most groups started from a feeling of trust based on recognition and shared values. but especially when activism was scaled up, strategies were needed to increase security by clarifying rules and roles, limiting access to information, restricting access to groups, and limiting the scope of communication. levels of security at an overall level, the groups applied similar strategies for security, but there was a varying level of security that could be divided into three type groups. figure : illustration of information flow on three levels of security: community, where information flow in all directions between the organizers and participants, and participants and participants, and security is based on trust on shared values and community; regulation, where information flows in both directions between the organizers and participants but where the organizers acts as gatekeepers moderating the information flow between participants and participants; alienation, where information flows from participants to organizers, but participants have no means to contact other participants, and can be anonymous also for the organizers. some groups applied a light security that relied on fellowship. organization and collection of testimonies were made in closed groups on social media, to which people belonging to the defined group were invited. the invitations to the group worked according to the snowball principle so that everyone was invited by someone who knew them, so there was a social closeness and community between the participants of these expanded networks. other groups had moderate security where communications were more regulated. on facebook, they created hidden and "secure" groups that weren’t searchable, that sometimes changed names constantly so that they would be harder to find for outsiders. anyone invited was checked by the group's administrator, who in some cases also moderated posts before they were posted to ensure that no one posted names or anything else that could harm the safety of individuals. in this security strategy trust was based on common rules and leadership. some groups applied a strict security based on alienation where a (sometimes completely) anonymous organizational group collected testimonies via a survey tool. those who participated had no opportunity to contact each other or see the other participants’ contributions. here, the technology was used to minimize the risk that identifying information were spread by minimizing the possibility for the participants to communicate with each other or with the organizers. within these different levels of security, various strategies were used to promote trust and ensure security: a supportive community, clear rules and roles, limiting information, limiting access and scope. concluding discussion the results show that security was a central issue in the organization of the petitions, where various strategies were used to promote trust and ensure security: a supportive community, clear rules and roles, limiting information, limiting access and scope. the safety of the individuals was important for trust in the organization of the call, but at the same time there was a contradiction between being anonymous and feeling a sense of community and trust in the collective. the organization of the petitions employed a varying degree of security, corresponding with the degree of perceived risk from the participants, ranging from an emphasize on belonging and relationships to focusing on regulations, to a situation where the tools and methods enabled alienation as a mean to reduce risk: • from a process of trust through shared values, benevolence and belonging. here, the starting point was the trust due to social closeness and a shared interest with people from an enlarged network. information flowed in all directions between the organizers and between participants and participants. • to a process of trust based on pronounced regulation and leadership. here you have learned to not trust anyone who wants to be involved: information flow in all directions between the organizers and participants and participants, but the organizers acted as gatekeepers and censors. • to a process of trust that involves calculating and strict security where confidence is weak and the technology is used to enhance alienation between users and thus minimized risk and create a social distance. information flow from participants to organizers, but not the other way. no organizers expressed concern regarding the risk that the technology would not work or any privacy concerns of technical nature. this tendency is confirmed by previous research, that people choose to rely on technology, even though they should know better (guberek et al., ). in trust research trust is seen as a process of crossing distances, a process that can be described in various phases such as developing, building, and maintaining trust (rousseau, ), where one phase is based on the other and moves towards trust based on increased community and belonging. in the case of #metoo in sweden, one can see the different types of trust processes as an expression of the levels of trust in the different industries from which the petitions originated. but one can also see it as a reverse trust process, where trust initially was high, in the beginning when the group was smaller, and then were reduced when the organizers realized the risks and when the groups became larger and exposed to the public. the biggest risk was also experienced in situations where the participants actually came from a tightly knit network and thus knew or understood each other well. here the risk was that the participants could have conflicting loyalties. both the participants and the organizers initiated and participated in processes they seldom had control over and rarely had previous experiences of. the strength to actually implement these risky projects came from previous successful petitions that acted as role models and established a shared set of values and practical examples. technical affordance was another important factor. a number of easily available technical tools functioned as prothesis that enabled the organization to be scaled up and extended to thousands of participants. several petitions were made in horizontal networks in social media that organized women in the industry, and there were often already established networks that enabled the #metoo call to be formed easily and spread quickly. the trust that enabled so many to actually participate was 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( ). av svenskar tror att me too-uppropen kommer leda till förändring [ of swedes believe the metoo petitions will lead to change]. sweden: svt nyheter. appendix table: list of the hashtags that where included in the survey; translation, date, publisher, amount of signatures, and context. hashtag translation date publisher signatures context #tystnadtagning silence, camera action - - svenska dagbladet actors #imaktenskorridorer in the corridors of power - - svenska dagbladet politicians #närmusikentystnar when the music becomes silent - - dagens nyheter music industry #teknisktfel technical problem - - dagens nyheter technology industry #deadline deadline - - feministiskt perspektiv journalists #inteförhandlingsbart not negotiable - - etc union movement #tystdansa silent dancing - - feministiskt perspektiv, dagens nyheter dancers #akademiuppropet academics' petition - - svenska dagbladet academics #omniberättarlyssnarvi if you tell we will listen - - dagens nyheter psychologists telling about clients' experiences #vardeljus let there be light - - kyrkans tidning swedish church #sistaspikenikistan last nail in the coffin - - aftonbladet construction industry, architects #vårdensomsvek the health care that failed - - svt nyheter none patients #larmetgår the alarm is on - - aftonbladet none emergency services #sistabriefen last brief - - dagens nyheter communications industry #givaktochbitihop stand firm and suck it up - - dagens nyheter swedish defense #nykterfrizon sober free zone - - accent - sveriges största tidning om droger och nyhkterhet recovered alcoholics #visparkarbakut we are bucking - - dagens nyheter equestrian #skiljaagnarnafrånvetet to separate the wheat from the chaff - - atl lantbrukets affärstidning the green industry #utantystnadsplikt without professional secrecy - - svenska dagbladet physicians #utgrävningpågår excavation running - - dagens nyheter archeologists #vikokaröver we are boiling with rage - - dagens nyheter restaurant industry #metoobackstage metoo backstage - - svenska dagbladet television, film and stage production #slådövörattill, #byss to turn a deaf ear - - dagens nyheter deaf community #ålandockså, #högtskalldetklinga Åland also - - egen hemsida finnish citizens living on Åland #konstnärligfrihet artistic freedom - - konstnärernas riksorganisation arts and crafts #nomore no more - - dagens arena none school management #lättaankar weigh anchor - - sjöfartstidningen shipping #utanskyddsnät without safety net - - dagens nyheter none persons in addiction, criminality or prostitution #virivermurarna we are tearing the walls down - - aftonbladet prison and probition service #skrattetihalsen choking the laugher - - dagens nyheter comedians #intedinhora not your whore - - dagens nyheter persons in prostitution #nustickerdettill now it will hurt - - dagens nyheter health care employees #bortabrahemmavärst there is no place worse like home - - svt nyheter persons with experience of domestic violence #dammenbrister the pond is breaking - - astra finno-swedish citizens #inationensintresse in the interest of the nation - - uppsala nya tidning students in uppsala #obekvämarbetstid uncomfortable working hours - - handelsnytt commercial employees #inteminskuld, #påvåravillkor not my debt, on our terms - - dagens industri banking, financial and insurance industries #nostranger no stranger - - expressen victims of racism #slutvillkorat no more conditions - - feministiskt initiativ persons with normbreaking disabilities #nödvärn self-defense - - nödvärn the police #allmänhandling public document not published governmental employees #exponerad exposed not published photographers #fordonsindustriupprop et the transport industry petition not published transport industry #husfrid domestic peace not published against domestic violence #ikulturarbetarnasrum in the room of the cultural workers not published cultural workers #kidstoo kids too not published association for persons related to sexually abused children #vispelarintemed we do not play along not published game industry what are some stressful adversities in psychiatry residency training, and how should they be managed professionally? editorial what are some stressful adversities in psychiatry residency training, and how should they be managed professionally? john coverdale & richard balon & eugene v. beresin & adam m. brenner & alan k. louie & anthony p. s. guerrero & laura weiss roberts received: january /accepted: january /published online: january # academic psychiatry stress, depression, and burnout are common experiences during residency training [ – ]. depressive symptoms, for example, increase substantially with the onset of residen- cy training [ ]. in conjunction with these concerns, pub- lications have accelerated over time on burnout, well-be- ing, and wellness among medical students, residents, and physicians in the pages of academic psychiatry [ , ]. kannan et al. [ ] found a dearth of research in resident populations on the occurrence of posttraumatic stress dis- order (ptsd) and on the spectrum of stressors perceived as traumatic. consequently, they surveyed work-related ptsd symptom profiles among internal medicine resi- dents from three medical schools in the philadelphia area. with a response rate of close to %, they found that the vast majority of resident respondents experienced at least one work-related stressful event and around % screened positive for ptsd arising from the most stressful event in training when using a standard cutoff score from the ptsd checklist for the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm- ). in this study, stressful events were most commonly the death of a pa- tient, managing a critically ill patient, verbal abuse from patients or their families, medical error, academic perfor- mance, and verbal abuse by colleagues. physical assault by a patient or a patient’s family had the highest relative ptsd symptom trigger rate. psychiatry residents likely experience somewhat different stressful adversities than internal medicine residents, although they have some key experiences in common, including verbal abuse from families and patients, medical error, academic per- formance, and verbal abuse by members of the health care team. one goal for this editorial is to provide some context to the above findings by kannan et al. [ ] by discussing the prevalence of some of the stressful adversities of psychiatry training and their associated psychological consequences. for this purpose, we selected five key stressors: ( ) aggression by patients, ( ) death of a patient by suicide, ( ) mistreatment by colleagues, ( ) attendance at disasters, and ( ) working with victims of violence. we recognize, though, that other poten- tially stressful adverse experiences during residency training may include the following: & death of or occurrence of harm to a colleague [ ], & a patient’s life-threatening reaction to psychotropic medi- cations [ ], & a homicide or homicide attempt by a current patient out- side of the medical setting [ ], & threats of litigation (e.g., stemming from malpractice or a suicide), & stressors related to the learning environment (e.g., feeling underequipped and overwhelmed, receiving excessive de- mands for use of electronic medical record systems, or lacking time) [ ], & educational or emotional neglect by supervisors [ ], & observance of maltreatment of patients by other members of the team [ ], & exam failure [ ], & conflict between attendings [ ], & the inherent uncertainty characteristic of psychiatric pa- tients and their treatment (e.g., treatment of psychotic or patients with addiction), or * john coverdale jhc@bcm.edu baylor college of medicine, houston, tx, usa wayne state university, detroit, mi, usa harvard medical school, boston, ma, usa university of texas southwestern medical center, dallas, tx, usa stanford university, stanford, ca, usa university of hawai’i john a. burns school of medicine, honolulu, hi, usa academic psychiatry ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -w http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -w&domain=pdf mailto:jhc@bcm.edu & mandated reporting and potential involvement in filing abuse and neglect reports on parents (sometimes resulting in separation of children from parents). a second goal for the editorial is to discuss the role of the professional virtues in preventing and managing these adver- sities, with an emphasis on responses at the level of health care organizations and residency training programs. aggression by patients assault by a patient and suicide of a patient have been iden- tified as the two most stressful adversities of training in psy- chiatry. violence in healthcare settings appears to be rising [ ], and trainees across all of the specialties that have been studied may become a victim of assault by a patient or a patient’s family [ ]. aggressive acts may include verbal abuse, a threat or physical intimidation, observing destructive behaviors or physical aggression, sexual harassment or sexual assault, attempted assault, stalking, or being physically assaulted. estimates of the prevalence of assaults by patients against psychiatry residents range from to %, although substantial limitations to the data exist [ ]. few studies com- pare psychiatry trainees with trainees in different specialties, although those that do suggest that psychiatry residents may be at an elevated risk of experiencing many of these forms of aggressive acts, including assault [ , ]. psychologically distressing symptoms can arise from verbal threats and other forms of aggression as well as physical assaults. in one study, for example, the most distressing incident experienced was commonly a verbal threat [ ], and in another [ ], a greater percentage of respondents reported that verbal abuse impacted their ability to perform duties compared to those who expe- rienced physical abuse. aggressive acts serve to dimin- ish morale and to increase depressive feelings, difficulty at work, and thoughts of dropping out of residency training [ ]. residents in psychiatry may also report increased vigilance, take greater safety precautions, and avoid certain patient types [ ]. death of a patient by suicide according to one systematically conducted review [ ], the prevalence of psychiatry residents’ experience of the death of a patient by suicide ranged from to %. notably, only one of the eight cross-sectional studies included in this review was conducted in the usa, and this study had low numbers of psychiatrists and is now dated [ ]. one more recently pub- lished study found that of residents in one program had experienced the death of a patient by suicide [ ]. variations in study methodologies may have contributed to the discrepan- cies in estimates of rates [ ]. we do not know how often residents in specialties other than psychiatry experience the death of a patient by suicide. dealing with the suicide of a patient is likely to be emotionally less tolerable than dealing with the death of a patient from cancer, for example [ ]. perhaps the unexpectedness of the death is the most traumatizing feature [ ]: some physicians in general medical practice report satisfying experiences when caring for dying patients [ ]. responses of psychiatric residents to suicide can range from a stage of shock or disbelief [ – ] to a sense of ex- haustion, turmoil, or demoralization [ ]. residents may ex- perience an ongoing preoccupation with how the suicide could have been prevented or a sense of self-blame, guilt, and anxiety [ , , ]. some residents experience feelings of avoidance and a loss of confidence in their clinical skills [ ], and some withdraw or isolate themselves from col- leagues [ ]. attending psychiatrists also can experience low mood, poor sleep, or irritability, and some consider taking an early retirement after the suicide of a patient [ ]. nevertheless, the negative impact may be more severe during training than after graduation [ ]. intense feelings, including a strong sense of foreboding about a patient’s risk to commit suicide, can lead to cautious [ ], even overly cautious or overly zealous, protection of patients [ , ] or, alternatively, to avoiding a thorough assessment of suicidal risk and even to avoiding potentially suicidal patients altogether [ ]. while the death of a patient by suicide is highly traumatic, suicide attempts are also highly emotionally traumatic, particularly serious attempts and unexpected attempts. mistreatment by colleagues residents may become the object of detrimental or derogatory comments by peers, supervisors, ancillary staff members (e.g., nurses, social workers), and physicians from other medical specialties. a persistence of such comments is a form of ha- rassment or bullying. according to one systematic review and meta-analysis, which included cross-sectional and cohort studies, almost % of medical students and residents in all training programs had experienced at least one form of harass- ment or discrimination during their training [ ]. verbal ha- rassment was the most commonly reported form of harass- ment, with attending physicians as the most commonly cited source [ ]. this unfortunately common practice has led the liaison committee on medical education to require reporting of medical student abuse on a regular basis. similarly, the accreditation council for graduate medical education has required reporting of abuse among residents and fellows. information on mistreatment specific to psychiatric trainees is lacking, especially in american settings [ ]. four acad psychiatry ( ) : – noteworthy studies of which we are aware, all of which are now dated, originate from australia [ ], canada [ ], uk [ ], and pakistan [ ]. sizeable minorities of residents had reported being severely criticized or humiliated by an attend- ing or had observed this happening to others [ ] or had expe- rienced bullying behaviors in the preceding year [ , ]. in the canadian study, the perception of intimidating behaviors, including threats and the abuse of power, was generally low in the working environment [ ]. the australian study [ ] provided information on some of the negative consequences of being criticized or humiliated. residents felt devalued and experienced a reduction in self- confidence or experienced a sense of uselessness, fear, and distress [ ]. mistreatment or bullying has been associated with burnout [ ] and posttraumatic symptoms in medical students [ ] and surgical residents [ ]. we should note that psychiatry as a field is still highly stigmatized in modern medical culture. many medical stu- dents, residents, and fellows experience the devaluation of psychiatry as a bona fide specialty, on par with other medical and surgical specialties. this devaluation, along with low re- imbursement rates (another form of devaluation by the field and the insurance industry), is a deterrent for entry into the field and, for those in it, a form of demoralization. attendance at disasters two types of disaster are especially relevant as stressful adversities during psychiatric residency training: weather- related events and mass shootings. weather-related disas- ters including hurricanes, floods, mudslides, severe droughts, and wildfires are likely to become increasingly prevalent over time [ ]. mass shootings have become commonplace in the usa, and gun violence is an epidem- ic [ ], signifying deeply rooted cultural problems espe- cially when viewed in conjunction with the prevalence of other forms of firearm violence. psychiatry residents and especially those working in emergency departments will likely become involved in providing psychological support and counsel to survi- vors and others affected by disasters. we also know that psychiatrists are often called on to speak to the media about the consequences of what can be done, and what measures can help families and communities. while such involvement is not as intense as being directly at the scenes of disasters, residents who explore the horrors of such events may well experience trauma. we know little about residents’ emotional responses, whether pos- itive or negative, in dealing with disasters. emotional responses of relief workers to hurricanes katrina and rita, however, included shock, fatigue, sleep distur- bances, anger, and grief [ ]. working with victims of violence residents will routinely screen for and work with patients (adults and children) who have been verbally, physically, or sexually abused or who are currently in abusive relationships. a trauma curriculum can assist in promoting screening of patients for potential abuse by residents [ ]. the #metoo movement may enable victims to seek psychiatric help more easily and may lead to a surge in the use of services. other traumatized groups include torture survivors, survivors of trauma associated with refugee or migrant status, veterans of war, and patients who are current or former victims of labor or sex trafficking. the cross-national lifetime prevalence of ptsd, which is one possible psychiatric consequence of vio- lence, was . % in the world mental health surveys [ ] and . % in the national comorbidity survey [ ]. the traumas most commonly associated with ptsd in the latter survey were combat exposure and witnessing of violent acts among men and rape and sexual molestation among women [ ]. vicarious traumatization is a complex phenomenon arising specifically from dealing with victims of violence [ ]. mccann and pearlman [ ] described vicarious traumatiza- tion as occurring when therapists experience painful images and emotions associated with patients’ traumatic memories, and as a result, therapists may find themselves experiencing ptsd symptoms. the closely related concepts of burnout and compassion fatigue differ from vicarious traumatization in that they are not necessarily associated with working with victims of violence, and both are related to the job environment [ ]. we are not aware of formal measurements of vicarious traumatization in psychiatry residents, but in one study [ ], % of medical students reported experiencing vicarious trau- matization during their third year of medical school, as de- fined by a transformation leading to negative changes in the mental health of healthcare workers who encounter individ- uals who have survived a history of abuse or trauma. professional responses we chose two adversities in common with the work-related stressful adversities identified in the study by kannan et al. [ ] of internal medicine residents: aggression by patients and mis- treatment by colleagues. as we have described, the evidence suggests that psychiatry residents are more likely victims of aggression or violence by patients than are residents in other specialties to which they have been compared [ , ]. we have also shown how we know little about the prevalence of mistreatment of psychiatry residents by colleagues, and yet, harassment or discrimination in some form or another has been reported by a sizeable proportion of medical students and residents across specialty training areas [ ]. however, many are still reluctant to report abuse for fear of acad psychiatry ( ) : – recrimination. when we chose the adversity of death of a patient by suicide, we anticipated that the resulting emotional responses may share some common elements with the death of patients in medical settings by other means, although the potential for severe emotional reactions to the suicide of a patient is high. we should therefore work to optimize psychi- atric education related to suicide and suicide attempts [ ] and help residents to cope with the death of a patient by suicide [ ]. we found little information about how psychiatry resi- dents experience working in the aftermath of disasters, and how they experience working with victims of violence even though psychiatry residents are especially likely to work with these patient populations. how should the emotional responses to these potential ad- versities be managed professionally? some guidance is pro- vided by the professional virtues originating from the schol- arly work of john gregory ( – ) and which were more recently brought to light by laurence mccullough [ , ]. the four key virtues are integrity (i.e., the pursuit of excel- lence in the practice of medicine), compassion (i.e., the deter- mination to relieve patients’ pain and suffering through iden- tification with their distress), self-effacement (i.e., the putting aside of differences between physicians and patients that should not count as clinically relevant), and self-sacrifice (i.e., a willingness by physicians to take risks in their lives, within limits, in order to protect and promote patients’ inter- ests). these virtues serve to put the needs and interests of patients at the forefront of medical practice and to necessarily relegate the interests of physicians and their needs as second- ary considerations. fiduciary obligations are defined in turn by the virtues in conjunction with a commitment to practice according to evidence-based principles. adherence to these obligations enables patients to trust their physicians intellec- tually and morally [ – ]. we have utilized this framework in two recent editorials in academic psychiatry [ , ] by describing how the four fundamental virtues inform about the professional obligations of medical students and about the role of maturity in learning medicine. physician leaders along with the institutions in which resi- dents train have professional obligations to treat colleagues (and learners) with respect, not simply as a means to achieving the institution’s interests [ , ]. compassion obligates leaders to be aware of and respond with appropriate support to colleagues’ distress [ ]. residency training programs and institutions are professionally obligated to aim to provide safe and supportive environments for trainees. moreover, as is the case when ad- dressing physician burnout [ , ], healthcare organizations have an ethical responsibility to prevent adversities when rea- sonably possible and to implement remedies and promote well- being. however, the implementation of programs for well- being is not a simple task; such programs require funding, time away from clinical and academic duties (or integrated with them), and thus the need for increased coverage. it follows too that the institutional culture, in support of the clinical learning environment, should readily enable disclosure and discussion of stress or adversities. in psychiatry, it would appear that certain of the adversities presented thus far (aggres- sion by patients, death of a patient by suicide, etc.) would be appropriate to discuss and track in the context of quality and safety forums, morbidity and mortality conferences, or equiva- lent settings. moreover, we have a professional obligation to offer treatment for those who are suffering as an outcome of stressful or traumatic professional activities. mechanisms must be in place that facilitates reporting of occasions of patient aggression against residents and which actively confront a view that aggression is part of the job [ ] mechanisms should also be in place that facilitate the reporting of mistreatment of resi- dents by other professionals. identification and analysis of problems that contribute to stress are necessary first steps in their remediation. a starting point for approaching colleagues who have acted improperly to other members of the team is to also treat them with compassion on the assumption that they too may be stressed or overwhelmed. on an individual level, managing potentially suicidal or aggressive patients, uncovering trauma histories, and responding to disasters can evoke powerful emotions in phy- sicians. as we have indicated earlier, these in turn may bias and unhinge clinical judgment and behaviors or lead to an overcautious protection of patients or distancing from pa- tients, even an avoidance of certain types of patients altogeth- er. self-effacement and self-sacrifice together obligate resi- dents and physicians to tolerate strong feelings when not rel- evant to the provision of treatment and to deemphasize self- interest when doing so promotes the provision of an excellent standard of care. strategies that support the provision of ex- cellence in clinical practice include identifying strong feelings and how these may undercut care, leaning on the clinical team for their thoughtful advice and counsel, and utilizing the skills of argument-based ethics and evidence-based medicine. some methods to manage strong emotions involve ongoing forums for expressing feelings and experiences, such as balint groups, reflective discussion groups, and meditative practices. these strategies should be taught, modeled, and promoted by healthcare organizations and educational leaders. it should be noted that the very same traumatic experiences are those at- tendings endure, and the very same practices we are offering for our residents should be offered to faculty. in fact, the modeling of interventions to promote well-being and healing of trauma by faculty will tacitly give permission for residents to accept them. cultural change cannot occur solely at the resident level but by institutional offerings to residents, facul- ty, and staff alike. our comments have been directed primarily to the profes- sional culture of the practice of psychiatry. understanding organizational factors that contribute to professional behaviors or their lack is of considerable value [ ]. attention to the acad psychiatry ( ) : – learning and work environment as well as to individual be- haviors is also needed in order to promote trainees’ wellness and to help those in distress [ ]. in doing so, the goal should be to develop nurturing and supportive approaches to teaching and supervision [ ]. prevention of adversities in training is one of the most important tasks we face for the future. given the recent in- creased interest in burnout and issues such as mistreatment of residents, some programs and organizations have become pro- active. in one psychiatry residency program, for example, leadership convened an “educational climate committee” comprising faculty and residents that were tasked with exam- ining the problem of intimidation of residents and making recommendations for improvements [ ]. faculty should role model professional behaviors for residents in managing the prevention and response to clinical adversities encountered in training. heathcare organizations should provide peer sup- port to any resident involved in emotionally stressful situa- tions [ ]. indeed, the charter on physician well-being aims in part to remind physicians of their responsibility to examine the culture of medicine and how it facilitates meaning, fulfill- ment in practice, and professionalism and to encourage a sup- portive culture [ ]. we also believe that it would be a fruitful investment of teaching psychiatrists’ time to serve on hospital committees tasked with preventing and managing aggression and violence in patient care settings. in conclusion, therefore, the professional virtues inform about the prevention and management of the various adversi- ties that psychiatry residents may encounter in clinical train- ing. residency training can be emotionally challenging, and emotional responses can subvert the provision of excellent care. appreciation of the importance of attending to profes- sional culture in the practice of medicine is growing. this attention should occur in concert with supporting residents to develop their maturity and the requisite skills in managing stress and adversities during training. in particular, profession- al cultures should promote respect, dignity, compassion, and support for trainees and development of the professional vir- tues in clinical practice. compliance with ethical standards disclosure on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. references . mata da, ramos ma, bansal n, khan r, guille c, di angelantonio e, et al. prevalence of depression and depressive symptoms among resident physicians. a systematic review and meta-analysis. jama. ; : – . . dyrbye ln, west cp, satele d, boone s, tan l, sloan j, et al. burnout among u.s. medical 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business owners and only % of high tech employees are women, and another study(http://www.startupsusa.org/women-founded- venture-backed-startups/) in revealed that only about a fifth of american vc investment was going to startups with at least one woman founder. the picture isn’t pretty for women on the inside either: stories from the #metoo movement tell of rampant harassment at all kinds of businesses and a toxic “bro culture” in silicon valley, where only % of startups (https://www.citylab.com/equity/ / /women-startup s-venture-capital-investment-data-gender-gap/ /) have a woman as a member of their founding team. it’s true that established companies and newer ones have been scurrying to adopt diversity programs to add more women and minorities and attempt to change their policies and their culture. but most of these programs are focusing on the wrong things. a harvard business review article pointed out that today’s diversity programs were largely spurred by sex discrimination lawsuits. and a pwc report found that for % of north american companies, the two biggest goals for their diversity and inclusion initiatives were complying with legal requirements and attracting and retaining employees; only % reported their main goal was achieving business results. what’s overlooked here is that including women on leadership teams will pay off in the results that matter most to business and particularly to startups: innovating, making money, avoiding costly mistakes and ensuring long-term survival. from our own work and from hard numbers generated by research into this topic (https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles- around-the-ol-boys-clubs) , we know that women give companies, both new and established, competitive advantages that translate into better performance. so here are five business reasons to include women on your startup team: . companies with women in leadership roles perform better numerous studies over the past years have correlated having women as leaders with stronger corporate financial performance. a mckinsey study found that us and uk companies in the top quartile of leadership team gender diversity had higher profit margins than their national industry median. and a catalyst study of fortune firms between - found that companies with three or more women on their boards financially outperformed those with no women directors. . women encourage innovation a study by the boston consulting group surveyed more than , companies worldwide and found that having women and other diverse people on the management team generated more revenue from innovation. and a study of nearly people who worked in teams found that those with a greater percentage of women scored higher on measures of “collective intelligence,” the ability to work together effectively on a diverse set of problem-solving tasks. the study’s authors concluded that women scored higher than men on collective intelligence and were more likely to encourage all team members to contribute their knowledge and skills. this means that more potential innovative ideas have the chance to be heard. . women protect the firm’s reputation a study by three roger williams university professors found that companies whose boards have a higher percentage of women directors were more likely to be included on “most ethical company” lists. a study of nearly , environmental lawsuits in the us from copyright © the authors. entrepreneur & innovation exchange is published at eix.org. this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noderivs license, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. view eix.org authorship terms at https://eix.org/terms https://doi.org/ . / - d c e http://www.startupsusa.org/women-founded-venture-backed-startups/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/ / /women-startups-venture-capital-investment-data-gender-gap/ / https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles-around-the-ol-boys-clubs https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles-around-the-ol-boys-clubs http://eiexchange.com (brown, ) page to found that having female corporate leaders made it less likely that firms fell afoul of environmental laws. adding women to boards and the c- suite is especially important in the #metoo era, corporate investigator and former uk-based prosecutor dan nardello told the financial times recently. . women take more prudent risks a study by two universities found that gender diversity improved how a company identified acquisition targets, for several reasons. one is that diverse teams are better at assessing complex information because women and men filter and interpret their environment differently; the other is that women in general tend to be more risk-averse, and thus less likely to pursue high-risk deals. one company that i know of abandoned an acquisition after a team of junior women uncovered information that the target company had not yet disclosed. moreover, taking prudent, well-informed risks helps a company grow responsibly and stave off bankruptcy. a leeds university business school study found that a company’s likelihood of filing bankruptcy declined by % when it had at least one female director; those with more women directors did even better. . women will strengthen the pipeline of future managers to grow over the long-term, companies must have a robust pipeline of capable leaders that can execute key initiatives and navigate crises. according to consulting company korn ferry, labor shortages will cost the global economy $ . trillion by , equivalent to the combined gdp of germany and japan. research from the national association of corporate directors links talent with strategy and risk. more than / of both public-company and provide-company directors list key talent deficits as a top five trend affecting their companies over the next months, yet roughly half of directors express a low confidence in management’s ability to respond to this trend. in fact, they’ve noted that competition for talent is identified as one of the major areas of risk alongside m&a, crises, cybersecurity, ethics and compliance and culture. yet women, who could increase the pool of future leaders, are still largely absent from top management in many critical sectors, including financial services, manufacturing and even fields like health care where they predominate in lower- level jobs. startups have the chance to build an effective team from the ground up. seeking out qualified women and incorporating them into your startup team is not only the right thing to do, but also a sound business move. matt downs, co-ceo of sandbox industries, a venture capital firm that invests in agriculture and healthcare startups, puts it best: “if you say, ‘i need an african american in the room,’ or ‘i need a woman in the room,’ you’re missing it. i need a brilliant thinker with a different background than mine, who brings a different perspective, who will help us make effective decisions. and if you’re established on that philosophy, then you’re going to move in the right direction.” references running circles around the ol boys club: the unsung advantages of gender-diverse leadership teams (https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles- around-the-ol-boys-clubs) read more: advice, best practices and inspiration for women entrepreneurs(https://eiexchange.com/women) additional search terms: women, feminism, female founders, women business owners, glass ceiling, anti- discrimination, opportunity powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) copyright © karen brown, published by entrepreneur & innovation exchange eix.org ( ) doi: . / - d c e https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles-around-the-ol-boys-clubs https://bridgearrow.com/resources/running-circles-around-the-ol-boys-clubs https://eiexchange.com/women https://eiexchange.com/women http://www.tcpdf.org #metoo in pediatrics perspectives #metoo in pediatrics ann f. beach, md the explosive litany of complaints about men behaving badly that has surfaced in the past year has resonated deeply for me. i alternated between being glued to the news in fascination and refusing to watch in disgust. what am i to make of the current #metoo movement? how should i think about harvey weinstein, charlie rose, matt lauer, garrison keillor, and the circus surrounding brett kavanaugh’s nomination? i have been practicing pediatrics for . years, a woman in a man’s field. i was a young student during the years of gloria steinem and the equal rights movement. i was of women in my medical school class of students, the largest number of women who had ever been accepted to my school. i did not think much of it. my parents had always told me that anyone could accomplish anything with hard work, and my wanting to be a doctor had never seemed exceptional in my home environment. forget the fact that in kindergarten through sixth grade, when i said, “i want to be a doctor,” someone (usually a teacher) said, “oh, you mean a nurse, don’t you?” during the medical school application process, i interviewed at a high-profile, prestigious school (which shall remain nameless). the interview format was (exactly) minutes in front of a panel of physicians, not much time to make an impression. when my turn came, i faced the male doctors across the table as they looked at my application. i could feel the clock ticking while i anxiously tried to make an impression. the first doctor said, in a condescending tone, “young lady, don’t you think you’re going to have trouble being a wife and a mother and a woman and a doctor?” i figured there was no way i was going to get accepted there. so, i threw caution to the wind and countered, “don’t you have trouble being a man and a husband and a father and a doctor?” he turned red, the other doctors burst out laughing. not surprisingly, i did not get in that medical school. another interview was quite different. that medical school’s application included a blank page with instructions to write anything in the space that you felt the school should know. most people would have spent weeks crafting the perfect personal statement. i was naive and just wrote something about the summer i spent hitchhiking in europe. during my interview with an old, stern, intimidating female doctor, she said, “out of all the women i have interviewed, you are the only one who did not use this page to defend her position as a woman in medicine.” without thinking, i blurted out, “it never occurred to me! i didn’t think it was pertinent!” she smiled and said, “wonderful.” medical school was wonderful, hard, and all consuming. i just assumed everyone wanted to help each other make it through and turn into good doctors. i felt my classmates treated everyone equally. that was still naive. i guess i never saw that there were clear differences until it really was rubbed right in my face. that happened when i had a prolonged and heated discussion with a study partner (who seemed otherwise completely reasonable) about why he was sure male doctors should make more than female doctors. “c’mon, ann,” he reasoned, “i’ll be the department of pediatrics, morehouse school of medicine, atlanta, georgia; and children’s healthcare of atlanta, atlanta, georgia www.hospitalpediatrics.org doi:https://doi.org/ . /hpeds. - copyright © by the american academy of pediatrics address correspondence to ann f. beach, md, srpac, children’s healthcare of atlanta at scottish rite, johnson ferry rd, atlanta, ga . e-mail: ann.beach@choa.org hospital pediatrics (issn numbers: print, - ; online, - ). financial disclosure: the author has indicated she has no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose. funding: no external funding. potential conflict of interest: the author has indicated she has no potential conflicts of interest to disclose. dr beach conceptualized the article, drafted and edited the article, and approved the final manuscript as submitted. hospital pediatrics volume , issue , september by guest on april , www.aappublications.org/newsdownloaded from www.hospitalpediatrics.org https://doi.org/ . /hpeds. - mailto:ann.beach@choa.org breadwinner of my family and will need to make more money. you’ll have a husband to make money and take care of you.” my counterarguments that i might not get married, i might be the breadwinner, and we should all be paid on the basis of the value of the work we did, not how much we needed the money—all were totally lost on him. at the end of my first year, i taped up a couple of posters at my study desk. one said, “everything fred astaire did, ginger rogers did backwards and in high heels.” the other said, “everything a man does, a woman must do twice as well in order to be thought half as good. fortunately, this is not difficult.” perhaps i was changing during my second year of medical school, a book came out, highly recommended, that was written by of our faculty members. anesthesia for the uninterested was essentially a primer for anesthesia for students. it was livened up with photographs of playboy bunny–type women scantily clad (think bikinis and naughty- nurse outfits) in provocative poses. there were lots of innuendoes in the text. a group of women in my class was incensed. we went to the dean of the medical school. we could not go to the dean of students; he was the author! we were asked if we wanted to stay in medical school—so that was that. third-year surgery rotation was hard. the female medical students changed in the nurses’ locker room, and the men changed in the surgeons’ locker room. the guys would learn so much from the attending physicians; they talked while they were changing scrubs. the women used to stand outside the door, yelling, “stop teaching! we need to learn that, too! come out of there and teach us, too!” then my father had a myocardial infarction and was not expected to live through the night. i was halfway through a weeklong take-home examination that was a huge part of my grade for that semester. i took it to my professor, explained that i needed to race home to try to see my dad before he died, and asked if he could just accept my half-finished test as it was. i did not like this professor; he was the one who liked to fondle women’s bottoms in the packed elevators. we all knew about it and all tried to stay away from him. (did we ever tell anyone? of course not.) he began telling me how much he liked me and how much he had been wanting to get to know me better, and he made it clear in graphic terms what it would take for him to accept my unfinished test. i threw the test in his face, stormed out of the door, and went home to see my dad. did i ever tell anyone about it? of course not! it would have been his word against mine, and he was a lauded professor, and i was just a student without a witness to what had happened. pediatric residency was hard, great, wonderful, and the most difficult thing i ever did. our chief was legendary, stern, demanding, and an “equal-opportunity” meanie. we all got the same hard treatment, no discrimination there. my first job was as a small-town pediatrician in georgia. i loved my patients, and loved the small town, where everybody knew everybody. however, my pediatric partner and i were not on the same wavelength, and soon it was obvious i needed to leave. i interviewed in atlanta (i had lots of friends there) and accepted a job there. my departure was amicable. my partner and his wife took me out for a lovely goodbye dinner before i left. they handed me a going-away gift, and i opened it in the restaurant. i was expecting a nice stethoscope or a pen set. nope. i was astonished to see a black, lace negligee. they both smiled. his wife said, “well, we know you’re moving to atlanta to meet a man, and we thought this would help.” i’m still shaking my head. i have had a long, happy, and fulfilling career, and i cannot think of many times when my gender has made a difference. in fact, mothers have often given us women credit for having great maternal instinct and knowing a lot about infants that we really did not know. i was a pediatrician for years before i was a mother, yet my patients’ parents thought i was an infant expert just by virtue of my gender. sorry, guys. when my son was a little boy, his pediatrician and his dentist were both women, and he knew i took care of sick children every day. i remember introducing him to my boss, the medical director. “harrison, this is dr bruce perry, my boss. bruce, this is my son, harrison.” harrison stared up at bruce and said, “wow! boys can be doctors?” i looked at bruce and said, “oh, bruce, i’ve waited years to say this!” i knelt by harrison and said, “yes, harrison. if boys work really, really hard, they can be anything they want to be.” times were changing so now that women are the majority of medical students (table ), – does that mean the problem of discrimination against women in medical education is gone? we have progressed a long way since the s, right? equal pay, no questions about pregnancy during interviews, no discrimination on gender, no pinup calendars in the workplace, right? apparently not. table women in medicine through the years year women in medicine women comprised % of total us medical school enrollment. title ix of the education amendments was passed. this prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex for educational programs that received federal funding. women comprised % to total us medical school enrollment. women constituted % of practicing us physicians. women made up the majority of medical school classes. seventy-one percent of pediatric residents were women, and % of all practicing pediatricians were women. thirty-six percent of all practicing physicians were women. beach by guest on april , www.aappublications.org/newsdownloaded from i teach medical students and residents now, and more than half of them are women. i keep reading articles written by women physicians who are recently trained and continue to feel discriminated against. there are still articles about how much harder medical school is for women, how much gender-based discrimination there is, and although the numbers have budged some, there are still fields with few women (surgery, urology, neurosurgery, and orthopedics). these women worry about looking too feminine (or not feminine enough), about dressing and acting in a way so that they will be taken seriously, about being too emotional, or not being emotional enough. they worry about taking maternity leave and whether doing so will hamper their career path. there are still patients who only want male doctors and still think all women are nurses (even when our name tags read doctor and we introduce ourselves as such). why is it no different for these newer generations? sigh. so, has a whole generation gone by without improvement? have we really made no progress in years? did our struggles in the s and s accomplish nothing for the current young women professionals? does every generation have to start from scratch and relive the same problems over again? or is it that every generation feels the battle as strongly, although the fight is slightly different? are young women today breaking new ground or just going over the same ground again? so how do i see it after all these years? my mantra throughout my career has been, “just practice good medicine, and people will figure it out.” i have always told students and residents, women and men, to just concentrate on being really good doctors, and the rest will sort itself out. i have always believed that our skill as doctors is the only yardstick people will measure us by in the workplace. am i still naive to believe this? i hope not. references . staffcare. women in medicine: a review of changing physician demographics, female physicians by specialty, state and related data. available at: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/ uploadedfiles/mainsite/content/ staffing_recruitment/staffcare-wp- women% in% med.pdf. accessed march , . emergency medicine news. applicants to medical schools increase. available at: https://journals.lww.com/em-news/ fulltext/ / /applicants_to_ medical_schools_increase. .aspx. accessed march , . association of american medical colleges. u.s. medical school applicants and students – to – . available at: https://www.aamc.org/ download/ /data/. accessed march , . domino, kb; washington medical commission. you’ve come a long way baby, but still have further to go! available at: https://wmc.wa.gov/about- commission/medical-commission- thoughts. accessed march , hospital pediatrics volume , issue , september by guest on april , www.aappublications.org/newsdownloaded from https://www.amnhealthcare.com/uploadedfiles/mainsite/content/staffing_recruitment/staffcare-wp-women% in% med.pdf https://www.amnhealthcare.com/uploadedfiles/mainsite/content/staffing_recruitment/staffcare-wp-women% in% med.pdf https://www.amnhealthcare.com/uploadedfiles/mainsite/content/staffing_recruitment/staffcare-wp-women% in% med.pdf https://www.amnhealthcare.com/uploadedfiles/mainsite/content/staffing_recruitment/staffcare-wp-women% in% med.pdf https://journals.lww.com/em-news/fulltext/ / /applicants_to_medical_schools_increase. .aspx https://journals.lww.com/em-news/fulltext/ / /applicants_to_medical_schools_increase. .aspx https://journals.lww.com/em-news/fulltext/ / /applicants_to_medical_schools_increase. .aspx https://www.aamc.org/download/ /data/ https://www.aamc.org/download/ /data/ https://wmc.wa.gov/about-commission/medical-commission-thoughts https://wmc.wa.gov/about-commission/medical-commission-thoughts https://wmc.wa.gov/about-commission/medical-commission-thoughts doi: . /hpeds. - originally published online august , ; ; ; hospital pediatrics ann f. beach #metoo in pediatrics services updated information & http://hosppeds.aappublications.org/content/ / / including high resolution figures, can be found at: subspecialty collections rriculum_dev_sub http://www.hosppeds.aappublications.org/cgi/collection/teaching_cu teaching/curriculum development cation_sub http://www.hosppeds.aappublications.org/cgi/collection/medical_edu medical education opment_sub http://www.hosppeds.aappublications.org/cgi/collection/career_devel career development following 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http://hosppeds.aappublications.org/content/ / / women's rights v cultural rights when universalism becomes a bully: revisiting the interplay between cultural rights and women’s rights prof alexandra xanthaki brunel university london abstract: although the scope of the right to culture has never been more recognized nor clarified, culture itself is currently portrayed in some human rights narratives as a tool of oppression and an obstacle to human rights, especially women’s rights. certainly, cultural rationalizations that justify human rights violations and the misappropriation of culture by dominant (male) elites put a dent in the recognition of collective cultural rights. however, the article argues that the binary understanding of universality v culture and collective cultural rights ultimately harms women’s rights, as such understanding does not reflect all women’s experiences, priorities, and strategies. the article uses the example of indigenous women to highlight the importance of culture for some women. it suggests a paradigm shift from portraying minority and indigenous women as victims of their cultures to pushing for their empowerment through and beyond their cultures. in essence, the piece advocates for a multilayered, nuanced approach on women’s rights that addresses universalism but also considers postcolonial feminist and anthropological critiques of human rights. introduction to mark the seventieth anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights, the un special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has published a report where she puts forward ‘the cultural rights approach to the universality of human rights, and the close interrelationship between universality and cultural diversity. she enumerates current threats to universality, calling for foundational renewal and vigorous defence of this principle.’ bennoune’s report stresses the centrality of universalism in human rights, puts forward universalism as a prerequisite for cultural rights, and urges states, academics and civil society to reinforce this message. at several points in the past decades, the universality debate of human rights appeared to settle. starting with the dominance of the liberal view of human rights, critical approaches to universality were fiercely injected to the debate in the ‘ s, whereas the ‘ s saw the attention turning more on the application of human rights in particular situations. but trying to find the balance between universality and cultural diversity is no easy task, as it relates to our understanding of the human rights system; its foundations, its mandate and its priorities. on the back of the populist ‘concerns’ about migration on the one hand, and the recent emphasis on cultural diversity in international law on the other, claims to reaffirm universality as the undisputed queen of the human rights system have intensified once again. both universality and cultural diversity are at the core of human rights and making justice to both requires a nuanced, multi-layered and multidisciplinary response. this article acknowledges the catastrophic effects of using ‘cultural rationalizations’ to justify human rights abuses. yet, it urges to push back on current attempts to demonize cultures in human rights debates. it argues that the binary vision of culture v women’s rights is overly simplistic and ultimately harms women’s rights, particularly -but not only- the rights of migrant, minority and indigenous women. the misuse of culture should not deter the wave of recognition of cultural rights. the article uses the example of indigenous women to demonstrate the importance that cultural rights have for some women around the world. by bringing together scholarship from multiple disciplines and theoretical frameworks, the article employs postcolonial analysis and intersectionality to maintain that, like ‘cultures’, ‘universalism’ has also restricted rights. policies based on perceptions of ‘cultures’ as essentially detrimental to women ‘eat away’ the rights of migrant women, minority women and indigenous women, because they promote stereotypes that undermine them. but such policies also undermine the rights of majority women because they shun away from patriarchal attitudes in all environments and emphasise such pockets of patriarchy among non-european women. my approach is influenced by mccrudden’s appeal to pay more attention to ‘dialogic and dialectic processes that embrace sustained and reflexive contestation, pluralism, judicial institutions, and social activism.’ in analysing the principle of human dignity, mccrudden proposes ‘a partial détente between philosophical theories’ on human rights. ‘an analysis of international human rights law’, he maintains, ‘must take this complexity into account if a coherent and convincing explanation of the normativity of international human rights law is to stand any chance of being identified.’ mccrudden has mainly used his approach on the debate of human dignity. in this piece, i transpose this approach to the current debate on women’s rights and cultural rights and i maintain that continuing on the path of so called ‘qualified’, ‘inclusive’, ‘soft’, or ‘relative’ universalism may reflect better the current viewpoints of international human rights law. in essence, i argue that only by using both the universalist and postcolonial messages, by acquiring an understanding of all streams of feminisms, and using both legal and anthropological considerations, can we begin to get closer to realizing the rights of the wonderfully diverse women all around the world. otherwise, the universalism we attempt to implement smells of parochialism. i also use the principle of subsidiarity as put forward by carozza to help mediate the multiple approaches in human rights. the explosion of subsidiarity in eu law in the s and its use by some federal states has not transposed to international law debates until very recently. defined as ‘a rebuttable presumption for the local’, subsidiarity requires decision-making to take place at a smaller, ‘lower’ level unless good reasons exist to refer it to bigger higher authorities. i use subsidiarity to argue that decisions about the inconsistency of certain cultural practices must in the first instance be taken by the women themselves, rather than by technocrats and ‘experts’. this has of course limitations that i also discuss. the demonization of culture(s) for some time, liberalists have been reluctant to accept the collective element of the right to culture, as they emphasise the importance of human agency and autonomy. religious and cultural attachments, they argued, have no place in the public sphere and should not be acknowledged nor recognised by the state. in , howard declared ‘cultural absolutism’ as she put it, ie ‘the position that declares culture to be of supreme ethical value’ deeply problematic. to a large degree because of liberal concerns, the right to culture was ignored for many decades. in the s, minority and indigenous peoples all around the world rejoiced: the right to culture started reflecting their own experiences and needs and its collective element was recognised. the most glaring recognition of collective cultural rights came in the form of the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples which explicitly recognised the right of indigenous peoples to their own culture and cultural heritage. in a document that goes beyond the force of a mere declaration, because of its creation and approval by indigenous peoples themselves, collective rights to tangible, intangible and natural culture are clearly recognised. other instruments also expressed the need to protect the right to culture: the ( ) convention on the value of cultural heritage for society of the council of europe, opened for signature in december , also goes beyond the more traditional – individualistic- legal culture of the council of europe and emphasizes ‘the value and potential of cultural heritage wisely used as a resource for sustainable development and quality of life in a constantly evolving society’. in , the un committee on economic, social and cultural rights redefined ‘the right to participate in cultural life’ as included in art. icescr and clarified in its general comment ( ) that this right includes a collective element. the committee noted this is ‘the right of everyone –alone or in association with others or as a community- to act freely, to choose his or her own identity, to identify or not with one or several communities or to change that choice, to take part in the political life of society, to engage in one’s own cultural practices and to express oneself in the language of one’s choice’. recognition of collective aspects of cultural rights have also come from the most unexpected sources: the world bank, famous for its reluctance to refer to any human rights, now recognizes in standard of the new environmental and social framework that cultural heritage provides continuity in tangible and intangible forms between the past, present and future. the world bank talks about the importance of cultural heritage ‘as a reflection and expression of (…) constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions’. and the world intellectual property organisation, a bastion of individualistic understandings of cultural products, is currently preparing treaties for the protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions against misappropriation and misuse. alas, as human rights instruments recognised the importance of the cultural frameworks for the individual, at the same time culture is being demonized. the balance between universality and cultural diversity is most fragile when it comes to women’s rights, and the migration debate saw the re-surfacing of concerns that the emphasis on culture restricts women’s rights. media, politicians and parts of civil society continuously bombard us with the perils of ‘traditional’, ‘other’ -meaning migrant- ‘cultures’. bracke has discussed how migrant women in the netherlands are often portrayed as victims of ‘their culture’ and are told that it is in their interest that they ‘adopt western values’ and thus, integrate into dutch society to end their victimisation. also, in their work, de leeuw and van wichelen have demonstrated that the dutch state is currently employing sexual freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech and individuality as ‘emblems of dutchness’ leaving little room for cultural and religious identities. the concept of culture is seen in certain circles as opposing equality. in , the two-day trust women conference held in london in was clear: culture, the conference apparently concluded, is the main problem. ‘delegates heard speakers’ testimony, often harrowing, about the effects of ‘culture’ on women. the male guardianship system in muslim countries, forced marriage and bride slaves, female genital mutilation, acid attacks on wives by husbands and their relatives: culture was to [be] blamed for all such practices’. and some international law pockets also show a renewed reluctance to acknowledge rights to culture. peroni discusses how the recent convention on violence against women (vaw) ‘largely circumvents the stigmatizing risks that arise from framing certain vaw forms primarily as a problem of some ‘cultures’” and places migrant and refugee women in a victimhood frame. judgements of the ecthr on minority women’s clothing are also not fully in tune with discussions in the un human rights committee. particularly, sas v. france has clarified that on religious clothing, the choice of the minority woman will not be respected, no matter how educated, articulate and free she is, if not in accordance with – western- values of secularism. in contrast to what was envisaged a decade ago, stamatopoulou’s statement that cultural rights continue to evoke ‘the scary spectrum of group identities and group rights’ still rings true. the non-western woman as ‘the other’ at the same time that the liberals shout for the universality of human rights, they also proclaim that human rights values are ‘european values’. the ‘europeanisation’ discourse of human rights maintains and increases the artificial gap between ‘us, the europeans’ who represent the noble values of gender equality and female emancipation and ‘the others’. ‘we’, the europeans, need cultural rights – often in the sense of access to high arts-; whereas ‘they’, the migrants, minorities and indigenous peoples claim cultural rights to preserve their traditional practices. volpp has noted: ‘those with power appear to have no culture; those without power are culturally endowed. western women are defined by their abilities to make choices, in contrast to third world subjects, who are defined by their group-based determinism.’ in ‘critiquing the cultural engineering that has relentlessly promoted the covering of women’, the report of the un special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has noted: some restrictive garments are said in certain instances to represent a freely-chosen personal conviction that such “modesty” is required by the teachings of a particular religion. if so, this is a choice of a particular interpretation of any faith, and one which is relentlessly promoted by fundamentalists. one must respect the agency of adults. however, women’s dress may be heavily impacted by discrimination against women and fundamentalist propaganda, especially in the mass media and sermons. yet, abuses of western women’s rights are rarely seen as the consequence of their cultural frameworks. in this respect, recent campaigns for the rights of women on social media #metoo and #balancetonporc, #anakaman, #yotambien reminded the world that women’s rights violations are not only the outcome of non-european cultural traditions; and that patriarchal structures and discrimination exist in minority cultures as much as in majority cultures. and even in this case, the link with the western culture is not emphasized. in general, non-western women are seen as vulnerable, in need of strong supporters. huchings maintains: ‘postcolonial theory points to the dominance of liberal ideology and its corresponding vocabulary that articulates communicative encounters within the international sphere, and highlights its exclusiveness and its inextricability from power relations. in order to be heard, women are asked to adopt ‘western thought, reasoning and language’, use the given formal language and vocabulary to express their concerns and wishes. paul grady discusses how the experiences of victims in transitional justice settings are often lost as they try to adopt the specific format of communication that will make them heard. in order to be heard, they need to rework their stories in order to neatly fit into the categories and expectations established by transitional justice regimes.’ otherwise, they are viewed as ‘not making sense’ and western society organisations are encouraged to ‘help them’ understand the international setting of advocacy. it has been rightly argued that negative representations of the ‘others’ are ‘the main engine of current efforts to introduce neo-assimilationist policies’. as spivak notes, the ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ narrative was important for the operation of british colonialism. ahmed has discussed how the british colonial authorities in egypt relied on the rhetoric of women’ s emancipation for their colonial missions. western feminism became a ‘handmaiden to colonialism’ in this process. it has contributed to the common portrayal of non-western women as victims of ‘their cultures’. it is for their interest that they should ‘adopt western values’. and if they do not, the liberal cast doubt as to why is the case. in her mission to sweden, the special rapporteur on violence against women yakin ertürk found that ‘some circles have also tried to reframe the issue of gender inequality (…) as a problem re-imported into equal sweden through immigration from developing countries’. and although women’s rights seem to have an important place in the swedish society, the effects of structural racial discrimination and the effects of colonial remains are not at the centre of current discussions. more generally, several sociological studies support that there is today a widespread denial that race and colonialism continue to be present and relevant in europe. specifically on universality the starting point of this article is that indeed, we all need equal and universal human rights to protect us. and international law is clear that cultural diversity and cultural rights cannot infringe human rights. both the unesco declaration on cultural diversity and the un declaration on the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities (declaration on minorities) note that cultural diversity and cultural rights cannot infringe human rights guaranteed by international law. it is important to accept that human rights bind everyone and that there can be no exceptions. prohibition of discrimination, the right to expression, refugee rights, the right to an adequate standard of living are recognized rights that bind governments that have signed and ratified the relevant treaties irrespective of where they are and what are their circumstances. and many non-western scholars have demonstrated the universality of both the concept and the foundations of human rights. donnelly notes that ‘it would seem inappropriate to adopt a theory that is inconsistent with the moral experience of almost all people- especially in the name of cultural sensitivity and diversity’. ‘normative cultural relativism’ he proclaims, ‘is a deeply problematic moral theory that offers a poor understanding of the relativity of human rights’. eriksen notes ‘about cultural relativism, seen as an alternative not to morality but to moral universalism, it may be said that it stood for a radical humanism in the mid- th century, a minority view towards the late th century, and an almost impossible position to defend in the early st century.’ however, one must be very careful of parochial universalism. donnelly cautions: the fact of cultural relativity and the doctrine of methodological cultural relativism are important antidotes to misplaced universalism. the fear of (neo-)imperialism and the desire to demonstrate cultural respect that lie behind many cultural relativist arguments need to be taken seriously. indeed, often the concept of ‘universality of human rights’ is employed to serve the liberal vision of international human rights. one can see some truth in mutua’s suggestion that ‘the grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext that depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other’. he asks the human rights movement to be more self-critical and ‘come terms with the troubling rhetoric and history that shape, in part, the human rights movement’. questioning universalism, an-na’im believes that ‘the vision of universality of human rights is fundamentally challenging to all societies and all human beings’, challenged by the true dimension and the true nature of the claim of universality of human rights. ‘human beings who are the subject of human rights must be the authors of what these rights are and must be the primary actors in realising these rights. marginalising major actors of the society from this, the very pretence that we can universality is flawed.’ this is what he calls the double paradox of universality. how to realise a shared understanding of human rights are in the reality of fundamental difference that we share also. andrew sacks has also argued that what we call human rights now is a ‘variety of the civilized mission of the white man’. the inclusive, unstructured approach, one with no pre-determined grand theory of human rights that mccrudden advocates for seems to address such criticisms without rejecting the importance of universality. mccrudden notes that the structure, the content, the methods and the theoretical underpinnings of human rights; are all contested. focusing on human rights and the courts, he maintains: human rights law ‘is the result of claims involving competing and, sometimes, incompatible substantive values, each supported by credible human rights sources and interpretations. human rights, as interpreted by the courts, function in apparently contradictory ways: they look forward, but also backward; they appeal to both communitarian and individualistic values; they juggle both the particular and the universal; they struggle between continuity and change; they empower the state, and they challenge its power.’ this seems to me to be the same about international human rights in general. universalism is indeed one of the core principles of human rights. but it would be dangerous to make the recognition of cultural rights dependent on a notion of universalism, especially since the final authoritative decision maker is quite often not the affected party. when the majority of powerful, european states have repeatedly shunned collective notions of cultural rights and this seriously affects the identity of millions of persons belonging to minority and indigenous groups, recommendation to states to support universalism must be followed by equally strong messages for collective cultural rights; otherwise the quest for universalism may be used as a smokescreen for the denial of cultural rights to non-state groups. specifically on women rights: feminist considerations first wave feminist scholars have been quite vocal in emphasising the primacy of women’s rights when faced with cultural claims. it was agreed that to move away from universal claims on equality and to focus on a particular, ‘western’ understanding of equality would be detrimental to feminism; these foundations must be critically accepted. but these feminist approaches were confronted by subsequent feminist voices. ‘black feminism, critical race feminism, postcolonial feminism, and even religious feminism have staked out epistemological authority and ground in the last three decades, demanding inclusion in feminist debates and questioning dominant liberal feminist representations’. the appropriation of the experiences of subaltern women and their struggles by ‘hegemonic white women’s movements’ has been criticized. amos and parmar noted: “feminist theories which examine our cultural practices as 'feudal residues' or label us 'traditional,' also portray us as politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of western feminism. they need to be continually challenged.” unfortunately, the recent migration challenge has meant that a secular universalist trend of feminism has become more popular. göle and billaud note the irony in this given that feminism has initiated a criticism and disrupted frames of universalist ideals of gender. through deconstructing the commonly held idea that difference between sexes has been mainly due to biology, feminists have (…) shown that the abstract individualism used as the basis for citizenship and equality, especially in france, could not grant their active participation in society as autonomous citizens. on the contrary, they have argued that universalism has excluded women from the political arena. insisting on this abstract individualism as the only principle when faced with balancing of cultural rights and women’s rights is problematic. in this debate, intersectionality is a useful consideration. first coined by crenshaw, inter-sectionality has challenged the traditional belief that discrimination is a single categorical axis. crenshaw has explained that gender and racial discrimination are mutually reinforcing and intersecting in shape structural and political oppression against women of colour. owing to their many identities, minority women suffer a unique form of discrimination, which is seldom recognised and addressed within the law. it is interesting to see how this short-sighted critique of non-liberal feminism has been criticized: started by social justice bloggers, the phrase ‘check your privilege’ became a hit among especially young activists. it reflects on the reality that mainstream feminism remains dominated by voices and understandings formulated by privileged, western women. in fact, many academics, such as johanna bond and aisha davis, have advised that the protection of current international law to women predisposed to ‘intersectional’ discrimination is rather inadequate. human rights bodies are still reflecting on how to implement intersectionality in a system that is based on single ground treaties. cedaw general recommendation recognized that gender is ‘inextricably linked with other factors, such as race, ethnicity, class…sexual orientation and gender identity’ . bond has argued that cedaw offers protection to a ‘monolithic category’ of women that face only gender discrimination. campbell has also criticized cedaw for failing to ‘capture the diversity of women’. the human rights committee also noted in general comment on article that discrimination against women is often ‘intertwined with discrimination on other grounds’. in its general recommendation , cerd also addressed the relevance of gender in racial discrimination and committed to integrate gender analysis throughout their work. however, beyond these initiatives, intersectionality continues to be in the periphery of international human rights work. kuokkanen discusses how intersectionality was missing in the focused discussion on indigenous women in the permanent forum on indigenous issues. ‘neither the report not the summary explores the ways in which indigeneity and gender intersect in the lives of indigenous women and exacerbate the discrimination and subordination they may face.’ indigenous women and indigenous cultures: the undrip in ways similar to migrant, refugee and minority women, indigenous women suffer from both gender discrimination and colonial perceptions of their cultures. they are a good case study to highlight how cultural rights and women’s rights are very interwoven in some women’s experiences and cannot be separated. as coomaraswamy has noted, ‘fighting prejudice against underprivileged groups while struggling for women’s empowerment goes to the heart of the modern dilemma between the universalism of human rights and the particularity of cultural experience.’ suzack has identified three ways in which indigenous women still have an inferior status in international human rights law: the first is by international networks that require them to choose between being women and being indigenous people. second, by courts of law that apply equality jurisprudence to indigenous peoples without acknowledging the colonial law context ‘or that equality legislation may not be the most effective means of understanding their gender discrimination experiences; and third, by competing political agendas that force women to address their issues indirectly or risk dividing social movements. these considerations are at the core of a pseudo-choice they allegedly have between promoting their cultural rights or their women’s rights. attempts to improve their situation through women’s rights are bound to include remains of colonialism. attempts to ignore their gender and focus on the attacks, direct and indirect, to their cultural rights will continue their oppression. both indigenous cultural rights and indigenous women’s rights are recognized in undrip. the freedom of indigenous peoples to have their indigenous identities and cultures respected has been the main incentive for their struggle and one of the main reasons for the adoption of the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (undrip). aspects of indigenous cultural rights can be found throughout the text of the declaration; however, the articles that focus on cultural rights are articles to , together with articles and . articles to distinguish between indigenous tangible heritage (article ); indigenous traditions and customs (article ); the spiritual and religious aspects of indigenous cultures (article ); indigenous intangible heritage (article ); and inter-culturality in education and public information (article ). especially article ( ) of the declaration recognizes the right of indigenous peoples as a collectivity to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and cultures. studies have shown how the ethnocide of indigenous peoples intensified the actual domestic violence towards indigenous women. race and gender violations go hand by hand and protecting against the one but not the other leads to no real solution. the declaration includes articles that focus on the rights of women. article . calls for states to take effective measures to ensure the improvement of indigenous peoples’ economic and social conditions while paying particular attention to ‘the rights and special needs of indigenous elders, women, youth, children and persons with disabilities.’ article . reiterates the need to attend to ‘the rights and special needs of indigenous elders, women, youth, children and persons with disabilities’ in implementing the declaration. article . calls for states, ‘in conjunction with indigenous peoples, to ensure that indigenous women and children enjoy the full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination.’ finally, article states that the declaration applies equally to ‘male and female indigenous individuals.’ the tendency of the declaration to categorise women together with children and disabled persons undermines the rights of these women, as it portrays them as vulnerable individuals, victims who cannot defend themselves or cater for their needs. indigenous cultural rights often do need balancing with indigenous women’s rights. international human rights law has a clear method of balancing competing rights: first, non-derogable rights cannot be subject to any balancing: the right to life, the right to be free from torture and other inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, the right to be free from slavery or servitude and the right to be free from retroactive application of penal laws cannot be curtailed. no cultural practices and beliefs can violate these values and no real adjustment can be initiated to these rights. subsidiarity cannot be applied here. it is not up to the group to decide on these practices. they must be eliminated, even if seen as expressions of some cultures, even when accepted by the women of the group. hence, ‘family violence and abuse, [including] forced marriage, dowry deaths, [and] acid attacks’ are unacceptable practices and cannot be justified in the name of any culture and cultural right. also, the core of human rights cannot be completely squashed. therefore, one can see that the declaration does adopt universalism. it implies the existence of ‘a wider circle’, common values that are more or less common for the whole humanity. international public reason, as erin kelly called it, stems from the belief that the international community operates ‘as a society of societies, with its own public culture and conception of public reason’ and is expressed in the international decisions, including treaties, customary law, general principles, and soft law. however, at the same time, the declaration and international human rights law in general do not adopt any other kind of hierarchy. any conflicts between rights, principles, and norms are generally solved on an ad hoc basis, after taking into account various considerations. the declaration confirms the more ad hoc method of solving such conflicts by insisting that indigenous rights are firmly within the wider human rights system and as such, subject to the same restrictions as other human rights. preambular paragraph undrip links the declaration with the ‘purposes and principles of the charter of the united nations’, while article undrip links the text with the charter, the un declaration on human rights and international human rights law. article undrip notes that in exercising the rights contained within the declaration, ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms of all shall be respected. the exercise of the rights set forth in this declaration shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law, and in accordance with international human rights obligations’. the same applies for the rights of all minority women, based on article iccpr. in making these decisions, the un bodies have insisted on specific principles. in lovelace, kitok and länsman, the human rights committee asked for the existence of a reasonable and objective justification for the prevalence of one right over the other; consistency with human rights instruments; the necessity of the restriction; and proportionality. it is argued that the complete neglect of one right –be it cultural right or individual rights - for the full realisation of the competing right would in most cases violate the principle of necessity. importantly, the declaration also urges conflicts of rights to be ‘interpreted in accordance with the principles of justice, democracy, respect for human rights, equality, non-discrimination, good governance and good faith’. the declaration highlights the importance of interpreting the text and the principles that will be chosen to apply when interpreting when applying the provisions. applying the law: soft universality and subsidiarity absolute universalism was used in the elaboration of the declaration as a means to restrict indigenous rights, by employing the false dichotomy between collective rights v individual rights. the united states, the united kingdom and france ‘all (…) remained concerned about the possible confusion between individual and collective rights’. australia stated that ‘the concept of a collective right was not recognized in domestic or international legal systems at present’. after the adoption of the declaration, japan and the uk also proclaimed that they did not ‘accept the concept of collective rights in international law’. other states expressed their specific concerns with respect to women’s rights. a ‘solution’ repeatedly suggested by the usa was the adoption of a language similar to the un declaration on the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, whereby persons may enjoy human rights individually, and these may be exercised individually or in community with others, a clear restriction of the already existing indigenous rights at the time. within this framework, the reluctance of the indigenous movement to talk about the rights of indigenous women was fully justified. refusal to understand culture as one of the principal values of indigenous women would fail to redress the disrespect indigenous communities have experienced of their identities. a system of absolute universalism would put the maintenance and coherence of a liberal, individualistically perceived system of human rights above the needs of indigenous women around the world. it would mean submitting human rights to the oppression of a western jurisprudential viewpoint; and ultimately, this would not serve the quest for global justice. it would treat indigenous viewpoints and philosophies are inferior to liberal ideas. the international community refused to do so and the declaration was adopted with a very strong collective element. the ideals of justice also dictate that the voices of indigenous women, rather than all women, should be the loudest, when discussing the balancing of indigenous women’s rights and cultural rights. indigenous scholars have argued that the traditional feminist language is ‘inauthentic, un- indigenous and in other ways deeply problematic for indigenous peoples’. indigenous feminists have been complaining that not only do they have to challenge ‘patriarchy within native communities, but also white supremacy and colonialism within mainstream white feminism’. the responsibility of the non-indigenous society and the state in the emergence of illiberal practices in indigenous communities should also not be undermined. native scholars highlight the role that the western colonialism has played in the current sex-based oppression in indigenous communities. they argue that many such ideas were imported and that they derive from the hierarchical nature of western society and its valuing of all structures in a binary manner. at times, the differences between the women’s indigenous movement and the feminist movement are obvious: the fourth world conference of women in beijing saw a ‘contradictory and often conflictual relationship between feminist organisations and female indigenous representatives’, as indigenous women were pushing for a different agenda to that of feminists. scholars have highlighted that the focus of the international women’s movement on gender discrimination tends to over-emphasize individual equality and rights rather than the effects of structural violence on women’s lives. the international indigenous women’s forum (fimi) argued in that ‘flawed assumptions that operate within the global women’s movement’ mean that its strategy for gendered violence is not appropriate for indigenous women. in concluding, the undrip recognizes the value of universal values and in applying such values, it gives primary position to the particularities of indigenous individuals and communities. who will decide in each case whether the cultural practice violates women’s rights is essential in the process of balancing cultural rights and women’s rights. if the practice contravenes non- derogable rights such as torture, right to life and the core of human rights, then there is no space for particularities: the practice will have to stop. but in all other cases, subsidiarity, namely the idea that the legitimate authority of smaller communities must be protected by larger communities, is helpful. human beings flourish when they actively participate in realizing their own good, not when they are treated as mere observants of decision-making processes without their involvement. james anaya has stated that any assessment about a cultural practice must allow a certain deference for the group’s ‘own interpretive and decision-making processes in the application of universal human rights norms, just as states are accorded such deference.’ this would confirm the respect that the international community has to the indigenous group. the idea that in groups will themselves have the first say on whether their practices violate human rights has proven to be quite controversial. madhavi sunder urges the state’s or international community’s interference; she notes that many ‘women argue that their governments—and the international human rights community—have improperly deferred to traditionalists and so-called cultural leaders’ interpretations of private laws without taking proper account of modernizing views.’ the earlier discussion on indigenous feminism(s) leads to only one answer: the group that will decide in these cases must only be the indigenous women of the group. subsidiarity applied, the decision will not be taken by the international community in the first instance, not state, nor the group as a whole, but by the actual women who are affected by the practice in question. and this choice must be real. richards has noted that ‘even when indigenous women are physically present at debates about human rights, their unique positions are frequently marginalised by those who set the terms of discussion’. it is important that the indigenous women reach their decisions about the future of a practice without inappropriate interference. unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, women who have the courage to criticise their communities are sometimes seen as betraying the indigenous cause and their authenticity as indigenous is questioned. similarly, it is important that the decisions of these women about the validity of the practice and custom, their priorities and the way to eradicate such practice are respected, even if such decision goes against the ‘feminist ideal’. it is essential that they are not labelled as victims of culturally generated false consciousness in need of liberation. it has been argued in the past that real choices can only be made if the women in question have the right to leave the group, the right to exit. friedman sets a three step test to determine whether individuals within groups have made their decision freely. first, they must ‘be able to choose among a significant and morally acceptable array of alternatives.’ second, they must ‘be able to make their own choices relatively free of coercion, manipulation, and deception.’ and third, they must ‘have been able to develop, earlier in life, the capacities needed to reflect on their situations and make decisions about them.’ leaving the group is very difficult in a culture where the community is so much at the core to the identity. but even if this is out aside, the socio-economic situation of most indigenous women would not allow them to know that they can exit the group, if they wished to do so. if an indigenous woman has been denied education, literacy, and the right to learn about the world outside the group, she does not really have ‘a substantial freedom to leave because she lacks the preconditions’ (knowledge and experience) to make ‘a meaningful choice’. equally importantly, the right to exit puts the onus on the indigenous woman. it is the woman who has to leave and abandon her membership and group. ultimately, such a solution seems to sidetrack the problem as it maintains ‘a systematic and structural problem’ within the indigenous group. for these reasons spinner-halev sets some minimal standards, similar to the friedman test, that are needed to ensure that exit is really an option. according to him, ‘these standards include freedom from physical abuse, decent health care and nutrition, the ability to socialize with others, a minimal education . . . and a mainstream liberal society.’ it is for this reason that freedom from violence takes priority among indigenous women to discriminatory practices, because violence hinders any further promotion of indigenous women’s rights. also, the reality is that in several places indigenous women ‘often lack access to education, health care and ancestral lands, face disproportionately high rates of poverty and are subjected to violence, such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, including in the contexts of trafficking and armed conflict.’ at this point, the state does have an important role to play. by improving socio-economic rights of indigenous women in a culturally sensitive way, the state empowers the women to act on the illiberal practices. in contrast, by undermining the cultural rights of indigenous peoples, the state also undermines the identities of indigenous women which disempowers them and ultimately harms any real change. also, in considering the restriction of cultural rights in the name of gender equality, the above considerations will have to be taken into account in order to decide whether a pressing need exists for the interference and whether the interference to cultural rights is proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. a paradigm shift: from victimhood to empowerment the above analysis demonstrated the importance of empowerment of migrant, minority and indigenous women, women whose cultures and tradition are important to their own sense of identity. women’s empowerment was articulated in the s and s as a grassroots approach that was mainly concerned with challenging unequal gender relations. such empowerment is a game-changer. from being seen as vulnerable individuals in need for an outside voice to protect their rights, their empowerment allows us to hear their own clear voice, and allows them to make their own paths and decide on their own strategies and priorities. at the same time, we should take yuval-davies caution about empowerment narratives seriously and avoid ‘simplistic notions of empowerment based on identity politics which homogenize and naturalize social categories and groupings and which deny shifting boundaries as well as internal power differences and conflicts of interest.’ in the last few years the world bank has greatly embraced (or coopted) the human rights discourse to promote initiatives related to financial and economic inclusion of women. with respect to indigenous women, several initiatives have also recently been taken that change the narrative from victims to empowered leaders. indigenous asian women have noted in the baguio declaration of the second asian indigenous women’s conference: we accept the challenge and responsibility to address cultural renewal and revitalization to promote gender-sensitive values and structures within our communities. (…)we will speak up against abusive treatment of indigenous women in the name of custom and tradition. the world conference of indigenous women, attended by indigenous women from all over the world, asserted the right to self-determination, ‘including the vital role of indigenous women, in all matters related to our own human rights, political status and well-being’. the conference affirmed that indigenous women have knowledge, wisdom, and practical experience, which has sustained human societies over generations. we, as mothers, life givers, culture bearers, and economic providers, nurture the linkages across generations and are the active sources of continuity and positive change. in the final document emerging from this conference, adopted unanimously by the general assembly, different organs of the un system, including in particular the commission on the status of women, were expressly invited to consider the issue of indigenous women’s empowerment at a future period of sessions (paragraph ). women have a greater role to play in cultural activities. the un special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has commented on the ‘pervasive gender discrimination’ in cultural activities. women should not only be seen as the carriers of the culture but also the active participants in the development of their culture and in socially engaged cultural initiatives. interesting is the example of the mola production of the indigenous kuna women, in other words handmade appliqué panels worn on traditional blouses that are deeply tied to kuna people’s history and identity. after years of unsuccessful attempts to stop the commercial imitation mola, law was passed. however, it was men who were involved in representing the kunas in relevant disputes, whereas it was the kuna women who were producing the mola. the recent establishment of a general congress of kuna women has addressed the issue of women’s representation and hopefully strike a balance. indeed, women also change the culture of their groups through social enterprise activities that work as a way to restrict male domination within their communities. in latin america, indigenous women have renewed their commitment to political empowerment. saami women have also used their culture for their empowerment. valkonnen and wallenius-koekalo have demonstrated how ‘the relevance of the cultural practices and mental structures of sáminess as forms of resilience enables sámi women to overstep the traditional subject positions of laestadian women.’ in other words, their indigenousness has given them the tools to stand up to values that restrict their role and assert themselves. after engaging in qualitative research, valkonnen and wallenius-koekalo agree with the author of this article that ‘contextual and historical awareness calls for sensitivity, a critical realisation that one must not make any category – sámi identity, religiousness, gender – the sole frame of reference when working with the sámi’. universalistic, postcolonial feminist considerations all contribute in understanding their experiences and protecting their rights. conclusions the recent tide against cultural rights in the name of protecting women’s rights harms, rather than enhances refugee, migrant, minority, and indigenous women’s rights. this article used cross- disciplinary scholarship to address the concerns on the hegemonic and excluding nature of universalism. i used the example of indigenous women to argue that the realisation of universal human rights can only really happen if both collective cultural rights and individual rights of women are recognised. working towards the implementation of both cultural and individual rights to the degree that the specific women see appropriate is the only way that is culturally sensitive and protects women’s intersectional identities. framing discussions in the binary way of cultural rights v women’s rights neglects the real, multiple identities of women. the decolonization of international human rights law points towards accepting that rights are indeed universal, but also recognizing that the way such standards apply must take into account the particular priorities and strategies of the affected women. balancing different rights and needs can only be effective if the women in question feel strong enough to make such decisions. this may happen if they are partners in their societies and are seen as such by their wider respective societies. accepting and strengthening their identities and improving their socio-economic rights that empower them is a solid first step. united nations office of the high commissioner for human rights, universality, cultural diversity and cultural rights, report of the special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, ( ) un doc. a/ / of july , para. . g corradi, ‘introduction, human rights and legal pluralism: four research agendas’ in giselle corradi, eva brems & mark goodale, eds, human rights encounter legal pluralism, normative and empirical approaches, hart publishing, , pp. - . monshipouri, mahmood. "reza afshari and cultural relativism." human rights quarterly, vol. no. , , pp. - at . c mccrudden, ‘is the principle function of international human rights law to address the pathologies of international law? a comment on patrick macklem’s the sovereignty of human rights’( ) university of toronto law journal - at . ibid. j e bond, ‘international intersectionality: a theoretical and pragmatic exploration of women’s international human rights violations’ emory law journal at . e brems, human rights: universality and diversity (martinus nijhoff, ) sten schaumburg-müller, ‘in defense of soft universalsim. a modest, yet presumptious position’ in antonio-luis martínez-pujalte and susana sanz caballero (eds), cuademos constitutionales de la cátedra fabrique furío flores juberial vol i / universitat de valéncia ( ) - . ulf jahansson dahre, ‘searching for a middle ground: anthropologists and the debate on the universalism and the cultural relativism of human rights’ ( ) the international journal of human rights - . p g carozza, ‘subsidiarity as a structural principle of international human rights law’ ( ) the american journal of international law, - andreas føllesdal, subsidiarity and international human-rights courts: respecting self- governance and protecting human rights—or neither?, law & contemp. probs., no. , , at , . m jachtenfuchs and n krisch, ‘subsidiarity in global governance’ law and contemporary problems - ( ) at . j waldron, liberal rights: collected papers - , at - ( ). y. tamir, ‘group rights’ in l.h. meyer and s. l. paulson (eds), rights, culture, and the law (oup, ), pp. - . see jack donnelly: ‘human rights and human dignity: an analytical critique of non-western conceptions of human rights’ ( ) the american political science review ; r howard: ‘dignity, community and human rights’ in a a an-na’im (ed.): human rights in cross-cultural perspectives (university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, ), p. . b barry, culture and equality: an egalitarian critique of multiculturalism - ( ). r e. howard, cultural absolutism and the nostalgia for community, hum. rts. q. ( ). article ( ) of the universal declaration on human rights recognizes such a right. also, article of the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr); article iccpr; article (e)(vi) of the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (icerd); and article of the convention on the rights of the child (crc), all recognize the right to participate in the cultural life without discrimination. also see declaration of the principles of international cultural co-operation, adopted nov. , unesco gen. conf., th sess., th plenary mtg., art. vi, unesco doc. c/resolutions. also, the universal declaration on cultural diversity, adopted nov. , unesco gen. conf., st sess., pmbl, ¶¶ - , unesco doc. clt. /ws/ ( ). also, unesco recommendation on the safeguarding of traditional culture and folklore, adopted nov. , th sess., available at, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ / / mb.pdf. finally, convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, adopted oct. , d sess., art. ( ), unesco doc. clt/cei/dce/ /pi/ ( ) (entered into force march ). the world bank environmental and social framework ( ) in http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/ /environmental-and-social- framework.pdf. ibid, standard , page . for the latest draft texts, see http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/igc/draft_provisions.html, last assessed in april . s engle merry, ‘human rights law and the demonization of culture (and anthropology along the way)’ ( ) political and legal anthropology - . this second part of this article draws on my previous work ‘women’s rights v cultural rights: the indigenous woman’ diritti umani e diritto internazionale ( ). f.ex. see ‘migrant men and european women’ the economist, th january . d task, ‘by being tough on migration, europe can also be humane’, the guardian, april . also, see statement of the uk prime minister david cameron in the house of commons, london, november , where he referred to illiberal practices of migrants, in https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministersstatement- on-paris-attacks-and-g -summit. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ / / mb.pdf http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/ /environmental-and-social-framework.pdf http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/ /environmental-and-social-framework.pdf http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/igc/draft_provisions.html s. bracke, ‘from “saving women” to saving gays: rescue narratives and their dis/continuities’, european journal of women’s studies ( ) m de leeuw and s van wihelen, ‘civilizing migrants: integration, culture and citizenship’ ( ) european journal of cultural studies - . m bowman, ‘culture’ clash: the law, women’s rights ad real-world solutions’ in https://www.opendemocracy.net/ /marion-bowman/culture-clash-law-womens-rights-and- real-world-solutions peroni, ‘violence against migrant women: the istanbul convention through a postcolonial feminist lens’ ( ) feminist legal studies . s. berry, ‘freedom of religion and religious symbols: same right- different interpretation?’ ejil: talk ( october ) http://www.ejiltalk.org/freedom-of-religion-and-religioussymbols- same-right-different-interpretation/. e howard, ‘sas v france: living together or increased social division? ejil: talk, july , . e. stamatopoulou, ‘monitoring cultural human rights: the claims of culture on human rights and the response of cultural rights’ ( ) human rights quarterly . f banda, ‘global standards: local values’ banda, fareda ( ) international journal of law policy and the family - at . l. volpp, ‘feminism versus multiculturalism’ ( ) columbia law review ( ), - , at . bennoune , para . bennoune , para . kimberly hutchings, ‘from morality to politics and back again: feminist international ethics and the civil-society argument’, alternatives, ( ), pp. – (p. ). joanne sharp, geographies of postcolonialism (london: sage, ), p. . paul gready, ‘culture, testimony, and the toolbox of transitional justice’, peace review, ( ), pp. – (p. ). s bertrand, ‘can the subaltern securitize? postcolonial perspectives on securitization theory and its critics’ ( ) european journal of international security - at . p. holtz, j. dahinden, and w. wagner, ‘german muslims and the “integration debate”: negotiating identities in the face of discrimination’, integrative psychological and behavioral science ( ): . g.c. spivak, ‘can the subaltern speak?’, in c nelson and l grossberg (eds) marxism and the interpretation of culture, (london: macmillan, ), – . l. ahmed, women and gender in islam: historical roots of a modern debate (new haven, ct: yale university press, ). ibid, . s. bracke, ‘from “saving women” to saving gays: rescue narratives and their dis/continuities’ ( ) european journal of women’s studies . ( ) report of the special rapporteur on violence against women, para. . m mceachrane, ‘universal human rights and the coloniality of race in sweden’ ( ) human rights review… bonilla-silva e ( ) racism without racists: colour-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states (rowman and littlefield, lanham and oxford); gilroy p ( ) postcolonial melancholia (columbia university press, new york and chichester); goldberg dt ( ) the threat of race (blackwell publishing, malden and oxford); shilliam r ( ) the crisis of europe and colonial amnesia: freedom struggles in the atlantic biotope in j go and g lawson g (eds) global historical sociology (cambridge university press, cambridge and new york). universal declaration on cultural diversity, art. . for example, see y onuma: «toward an intercivilizational approach to human rights», in joanne r. bauer & daniel a. bell (eds.): the east asian challenge for human rights, cambridge university press, cambridge, , p. ; also see christopher g. weeramantry: justice without frontiers: furthering human rights, kluwer, the hague, london and boston, , p. . donnelly, j. "the relative universality of human rights." human rights quarterly, vol. no. , , pp. - at t hylland erisken, ‘global citizenship and the challenge from cultural relativism’ etnoantropološki problemi ( ) at . ibid, at m mutua, ‘savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights’ ( ) harvard international law journal at . ibid. a an-na’im, decolonizing human rights: an urgent plea for rebuttal’ july , oxford university, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an- https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an-urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/ urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/. ibid. a an-na’im, decolonizing human rights: an urgent plea for rebuttal’ july , oxford university, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an- urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/. christopher mccrudden, ‘the pluralism of human rights adjudication’ in liora la- zarus, christopher mccrudden & nigel bowles, eds, reasoning rights: comparative judi- cial engagement (oxford: hart publishing, ) . mccrudden, c. ( ). ‘is the principal function of international human rights law to address the pathologies of international law? a comment on patrick macklem’s the sovereignty of human rights’ university of toronto law journal, ( ), - at . s benhabib, ‘subjectivity, historiography, and politics’ in s benhabib, j butler, d cornell, n fraser, l nicholson (eds), feminist contentions: a philosophical exchange (new york, routledge, ) , . c a choudhury, ‘beyond culture: human rights universalisms versus religious and cultural relativisms in the activism for gender justice’ ( ) berkeley journal of gender, law & justice vol. issue , p - at . c talpade mohanty, ‘under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’ boundary , ( ) - at . p parmar and v amos, ‘challenging imperial feminism’ ( ) feminist review, - at . n göle and j billaud, ‘islamic difference and the reuturn of feminist universalism’ in a triandafyllidou, t modood and n meer (eds), european multiculturalisms, cultural religious and ethnic challenges, at . elizabeth evans ( ) what makes a (third) wave? international feminist journal of politics, : , - . k. crenshaw, ‘demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’ ( ) university of chicago legal forum, article . ibid ibid e munro, ‘feminism: a fourth wave?’ ( ) political insight, https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight- plus/feminism-fourth-wave, last assessed on april . https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an-urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/ https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an-urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/ https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/ / / /decolonizing-human-rights-an-urgent-plea-for-rebuttal-video/ https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/feminism-fourth-wave https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/feminism-fourth-wave j e. bond, international intersectionality, a theoretical and pragmatic exploration of women’s international human rights violations.’ ( ) emory law journal . p. cedaw committee, 'general recommendation no. : on the state's core obligations' ( ) cedaw/gc/c/ . bond, op.cit, p. m campbell, ‘cedaw and women's intersecting identities: a pioneering new approach to intersectional discrimination’ ( ) direito gv l. rev. , p hrc, ‘general comment no. : equality of rights between men and women (art. )’ ( ) ccpr/c/ /rev /add [ ] cerd, general recommendation no : gender related dimensions of racial discrimination, march , a/ / annex v at ('cerd, general recommendation no ') at para . cerd, general recommendation no : gender related dimensions of racial discrimination, march , a/ / annex v at ('cerd, general recommendation no ') at para . for criticism of cerd and intersectionality, see aisha nicole davis, ‘intersectionality and international law: recognising complex identities on the global stage’ ( ) harvard human rights journal and pok yin s. chow, ‘has intersectionality reached its limits? intersectionality in the un human rights treaty body practice and the issue of ambivalence.’ ( ) human rights law review . r kuokkanen, ‘indigenous women’s rights and international law: challenges of the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples’ in c lennox and d short (eds), routledge handbook of indigenous peoples’ rights ( ). r coomaraswamy, ‘identity within: cultural relativism, minority rights and the empowerment of women’ ( ) george washington international law review , . c suzack, ‘human rights and indigenous feminisms’ in c lennox and d short (eds), routledge handbook of indigenous peoples’ rights (routledge, ), pp at . c suzack, ‘indigenous feminisms in canada’ ( ) nordic journal of feminist and gender research - , where she quotes anderson, k., & lawrence, b. (eds.). ( ). strong women stories: native vision and community survival (toronto: sumach press); coates, k. s. ( , february ). aboriginal women deserve much more than an inquiry. national post. retrieved september , , from http://www.news.nationalpost.com/ / / /ken-s- coates-aboriginal-women-deserve-much-more-than-an-inquiry/; and stanton, k. ( ). intransigent injustice: truth, reconciliation and the missing women inquiry in canada. ‘violence against women’, general recommendation no. , un commission on the elimination of discrimination against women ( ), un doc. a/ / , para. . see also declaration on the elimination of violence against women ( ), u.n. doc. a/res/ / . http://www.news.nationalpost.com/ / / /ken-s-coates-aboriginal-women-deserve-much-more-than-an-inquiry/ http://www.news.nationalpost.com/ / / /ken-s-coates-aboriginal-women-deserve-much-more-than-an-inquiry/ e kelly, ‘justice and communitarian identity politics’ ( ) the journal of value enquiry . ibid. at . communication no. / ; views in un doc. a/ / ( ). communication no. / ; views in un doc. a/ / ( ). communication no. / ; views in un doc. a/ / ( ). for more discussion on these cases, see thornberry, above n , – . article of the declaration. see ‘report of the working group established in accordance with commission on human rights resolution / ’, un commission on human rights ( ), un doc. e/cn. / / , para. . ibid, para. . statement made the united kingdom, un general assembly, sixty-first session, th plenary meeting, un doc. a/ /pv. , p. ; also see statement made by japan in ibid, p. . see un doc. e/cn. / / , paras. - . ibid, paras. - ; also see e/cn. / / , para. . j green, ‘indigenous feminism’ in making space for indigenous feminism (canada, zed books, ), , . a smith, ‘indigenous feminism without apology’ ( ) new socialist in http://www.newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id= . m sunder, ‘piercing the veil’, ( ) yale law journal , ; also a smith, conquest: sexual violence and american indian genocide (new york, south end press, ) , . for the link between colonialism and current violations of indigenous women’s rights, see da mihesuah, ‘colonialism and disempowerment’ in indigenous american women, decolonization, empowerment, activism (lincoln, university of nebraska press, ), . s radcliffe, ‘indigenous women, rights and the nation-state in the andes’ in n craske and m molinaux (eds), gender and the politics of rights in latin america (palgrave, new york, ), , . http://www.mdgfund.org/sites/default/files/fimi% project% docs_ .pdf. p.g. carozza, ( ). subsidiarity as a structural principle of international human rights http://www.newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id= http://www.mdgfund.org/sites/default/files/fimi% project% docs_ .pdf law. american journal of international law, ( ), - ; also p g carozza, ‘the problematic applicability of subsidiarity to international law and institutions’ ( ) the american journal of jurisprudence - at - . sj anaya, ‘international human rights and indigenous peoples: the move towards the multicultural state’, ( ) arizona journal of international and comparative law , . see for example r alexy, ‘individual rights and collective goods’ in c nino (ed.) the ethics of human rights (oxford university press, oxford, ), . also, mc nussbaum, sex and social justice (oxford, oxford university press, ), who is in favour of individual rights, if a choice has to be made. also see sm okin, ‘feminism and multiculturalsim: some tensions’ ( ) ethics . sunder, above n . p richards, ‘the politics of gender, human rights, and being indigenous in chile’ ( ) gender and society , . s macivor et al, ‘women of action’ in j greene (ed.), making space for indigenous feminism (canada, zed books, ), . b parekh, ‘a varied moral world’ in sm okin and j cohen, m howard and mc nussbaum (eds), is multiculturalism bad for women? (princeton, princeton university press, ) . c kukathas, the liberal archipelgo: a theory of diversity and freedom (oxford university press, ) m friedman, autonomy, gender, politics, (oxford, oxford university press, ) . w kymlicka, ‘the rights of minority cultures: reply to kukathas’ ( ) political theory , . sm okin, ‘mistresses of their own destiny’: group rights, gender, and realistic rights of exit’ ( ) ethics . m malik, ‘the branch on which we sit: multiculturalism, minority women and family law’ in a diduck and k o’donovan (eds.) feminist perspectives on family law (abingtdon, routledge, ) , - . j spinner-havel, ‘autonomy, association and pluralism’ in eisenberg and spinner- havel, n , . ‘indigenous women: analysis prepared by the secretariat of the permanent forum on indigenous issues’ un doc. e/c. / / ( ), para. . mc goldrick proposes that the margin of appreciation also applies to the international covenant on civil and political rights, see d mcgoldrick, ‘a defence of the margin of appreciation and an argument for its application by the human rights committee’ ( ) international covenant on civil and political rights . osce, women as agents of change in migrant, minority and roma and sinti communities in the osce region (vienna, ). also, n girard, ‘minority and indigenous women’s right to culture: identity, gender and opportunities for empowerment’ in mrg, state of minorities (mrg, london ), pp. - . n yuval-davies, ‘women, ethnicity and empowerment’ ( ) feminism and psychology - at . baguio declaration of the d indigenous asian women’s conference submitted in the d session of the pfip. lima declaration of the world conference of indigenous women in https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/lima-declaration-world-conference-indigenous-women. ibid. un a/res/ / , sept united nations, report of the special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, un doc a/hrc/ / , th january , para . n girard, ‘minority and indigenous women’s right to culture: identity, gender and opportunities for empowerment’ in mrg, state of minorities (mrg, london ), pp. - at - . mario vazquez, gloria camacho consuelo garcia, ‘women empowerment through social innovation in indigenous social enterprises’ ( ) revista de administração mackenzie - . s rousseau and c ewig, ‘latin america’s left-turn and the political empowerment of indigenous women’ ( ) social politics: international studies in gender, state & society - . s valkonen and s wallenius-korkalo, ‘practicing postcolonial intersectionality: gender, religion and indigeneity in sámi social work’ ( ) international social work - at . 	when universalism becomes a bully: revisiting the interplay between cultural rights and women’s rights 	introduction 	the non-western woman as ‘the other’ 	specifically on universality 	indigenous women and indigenous cultures: the undrip 	applying the law: soft universality and subsidiarity 	a paradigm shift: from victimhood to empowerment cem_ _s _abstact .. p variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tom- ography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians l. salehi, md, mph, p. phalpher, md, d. levay, msc, c. meaney, msc, m. ossip, md, r. valani, mba, md, mmed, m. mercuri, msc, phd, william osler health system, brampton, on introduction: current data on utilization of ct imaging point to a trend of increasing overutilization of ct angiography for the diagno- sis of pulmonary embolism (ctpa) over time. multiple educational and institution-wide interventions addressing this overutilization have been proposed, implemented and evaluated, with mixed results in terms of long-term impact on physician ordering behaviour. the objective of this study is to examine the inter-physician variability in ordering rates and diagnostic yield of ctpa, under a working hypothesis that a small number of physicians are responsible for a dis- proportionately high number of ctpa ordered in the ed. methods: data was collected on all ctpa studies ordered by ed physicians at two very high volume community hospitals and an affiliated urgent care centre during the -year period between january , and december , . analysis was limited to those ed physicians who had a total of greater than ed visits over the course of the -year period. for each physician, two calculations were made: ) ct pe ordering rate (total number of ctpa ordered divided by the total number of ed visits), and ) ctpa diagnostic yield (total number of ctpa positive for pe divided by the total number ctpa ordered). additional analysis was carried out in order to iden- tify the highest orderers of ctpa and their diagnostic yield. results: a total of , ctpawere ordered by physicians for , total ed visits. preliminary results show a great deal of variation in order- ing rates, ranging from . to . ctpa per ed visit (median = . , iqr = . ). similarly, there was high variation in ct pe yield, ranging from % to % (median = . %, iqr = . %). those phy- sicians in the top quartile for ordering rate had a lower mean diagnos- tic yield, when compared to the lower quartiles ( . % when compared to . %, . % and . % for the physicians in the third, second, and first quartile respectively). conclusion: the findings of this study indicate a wide degree of variability in ctpa ordering patterns and diagnostic yield among physicians working within the same clin- ical environment. there is some suggestion that those physicians who order disproportionately higher numbers of ctpas have lower diag- nostic yields. however, the more interesting lessons from this initial study center on the challenges in creating an audit-and-feedback pro- gram targeting ctpa ‘overutilizers’. keywords: computed tomography, health services utilization, pul- monary embolism p geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information sys- tem analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. galway, bsc, mph, phd, a. drumm, ba, t. leach, np, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, univer- sity of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: emergency departments are a common point of access for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (sgbv), but very little is known about where survivors live and the character- istics of the neighbourhoods. the objective of this study was to use hospital-based data to characterize sexual and domestic assault cases and identify geographic distribution across the ottawa-gatineau area. methods: data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year.data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year. results: in , there were patients seen at the sapacp, had valid postal codes from ottawa-gatineau and were included in the analyses. over % of patients were female and ( . %) were below years of age. eight hot-spots were identified including in the downtown entertainment district, lower income areas, high income neighbourhood, and suburb more than km from downtown. conclusion: this study is of the first to use hospital- based data to examine the geographic distribution of sgbv cases, with key findings including the identification of high-income neigh- bourhoods and suburbs as sgbv hot-spots. alongside efforts like the #metoo movement, this evidence challenges stereotypes of assault survivors and highlights the breadth and widespread nature of sgbv. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual assault p outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon o. scheirer, md, a. leach, md, s. netherton, md, phd, p. mondal, phd, t. hillier, ma, p. davis, md, msc, university of saskatchewan, saskatoon, sk introduction: one in nine ( . %) people in saskatchewan identifies as first nations. in canada, first nations people experience a higher burden of cardiovascular disease when compared to the general popu- lation, but it is unknown whether they have different outcomes in out of hospital cardiac arrest (ohca). methods: we reviewed pre- hospital and inpatient records of patients sustaining an ohca between january st, and december st, . the population consisted of patients aged years or older with ohca of presumed cardiac origin occurring in the catchment area of saskatoon’s ems service. variables of interest included, age, gender, first nations sta- tus (as identified by treaty number), ems response times, bystander cpr, and shockable rhythm. outcomes of interest included return of spontaneous circulation (rosc), survival to hospital admission, and survival to hospital discharge. results: in all, patients sus- tained ohca, of which were identified as first nations. first nations patients with ohca tended to be significantly younger (mean age years vs. years, p < . ) and had shorter ems response times (median times . minutes vs. . minutes, p = . ). there were no differences between first nations and non-first nations patients in terms of incidence of shockable rhythms ( % vs. %, p = . ), rosc ( % vs. %, p = . ), survival to admis- sion ( % vs %, p = . ), and survival to hospital discharge ( % vs. %, p = . ). conclusion: in saskatoon, first nations patients cjem • jcmu ; suppl s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tomography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians 	geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information system analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence 	outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon sorensen, i. ( ) what sexual harassment in zentropa tells us about cultural policy post-weinstein. feminist media studies, ( ), pp. - . (doi: . / . . ) there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / deposited on: february enlighten – research publications by members of the university of glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ what sexual harassment in zentropa tells us about cultural policy post-weinstein as accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment in the film industry reverberated through hollywood in the second half of , scandinavia was also affected. norwegian and swedish cast and crew signed #metoo inspired open letters detailing unwelcome advances, sexual offences and expectations of sexual favours for career progression in the film and theatre worlds. in denmark a survey showed that % of actresses had received unwanted sexual comments and physical advances (kott, ; fejerskov, ). sexual abuse and predators, of course, also exist in countries commonly perceived as having high levels of gender equality and protected workers’ rights. however, what surprised the world were björk’s allegations of harassment by lars von trier, and revelations of systematised, organisationally condoned and everyday sexual transgressions, violations and humiliations at his award-winning film company zentropa. zentropa is denmark’s foremost internationally successful and prolific production company, with a track record of oscar, bafta and palme d’or nominations and awards for von trier films like melancholia, antichrist, the idiots and nymphomaniac. zentropa was established in by producer peter aalbæk jensen and director lars von trier. their vision was to create an alternative to film production in denmark which, according to aalbæk, was riddled with nepotism and dominated by a bourgeois, self-serving establishment. today, zentropa is owned by nordisk film, scandinavia’s largest producer and distributor, with trier and aalbæk as % shareholders. in november , nine former staff went public with stories alleging inappropriate behaviour and sexually charged ritual, public humiliations at zentropa. these centred around aalbæk, who, as part of the day-to-day running of the company, administered public spankings as punishment for mistakes. aalbæk, often naked in the office, kissed, hugged, and groped staffers as part of the zentropa “family”, and hosted obligatory skinny dipping sessions in the zentropa pool and at festivals. sexually charged games and competitions were a tradition at company parties. there were cash rewards of . d.kr. (£ ) for stripping the fastest and prizes for longest pubic hair. a zentropa logo tattoo unlocked a trip the cannes film festival (wind-friis & stockmann, b; c). most of this was directed towards the company’s’ trainees. the so-called “småtter” are on practice-based internships, working in various production roles. unpaid for the first six months, småtter can be sacked and reemployed several times a day (lundtofte, ; dr, ; ). according to zentropa’s website , småtter undergo the “hardest and best film education” to “equip them for all the challenges in film production, postproduction or distribution” and to ensure that “they never give up and can handle even the most difficult and stressful situations.” the website declares småtter to be “the eternal youth of zentropa” (author’s translation). the term can also be seen as a portmanteau of “småting” (“little thing”) and “måtte” (“doormat”). as well as objectifying and othering the trainee, the term is infantilising and derogative. http://zentropa.dk/vision/ fending off accusations of wrongdoing in the scandinavian press, aalbæk has always rejected that zentropa’s internships or work culture are problematic. aalbæk prides himself on being subversive, anti-establishment, and pushing boundaries in the films he produces, in his company and as a person. he claims that zentropa’s transgressive ethos furthers people’s creativity (dr ; ). initially, zentropa’s management backed aalbæk, and claus ladegaard, head of the danish film institute (dfi), a major zentropa funder, stated that the company’s working environment was not the responsibility of the funder. after all, the work culture at zentropa was well known in denmark, and described in the book, zentropia (lundtofte), and a documentary by the danish broadcasting corporation, dr, as early as . but, after the weinstein scandal, the revelations were taken seriously and the danish department for work and pensions was tasked with investigating. then, film i väst (fiv), the swedish regional co-producer and co-funder of zentropa’s films, announced that they would pull the production the house that jack built that was filming in their facilities unless aalbæk was removed as executive producer. anna serner, head of the swedish film institute (sfi) and enrico vannucci, deputy director of eurimages, both zentropa funders, questioned whether zentropa could now qualify for future funding (wind-friis & stockmann, a; c). finally, zentropa’s management side lined aalbæk from the company, its day-to-day management and barred him from speaking on its behalf. it is no coincidence that eurimages, fiv, and sfi threatened zentropa with funding stops, and the dfi did not. eurimages is committed to the council of europe’s priority area of gender equality with its own gender equality strategy . fiv and sfi are implementing the swedish film law that has an explicit remit of / male/female cast and crew for all funded film (kang, ). the divergent reactions highlight differences in these organisations’ perceptions and implementations of screen policy. eurimages, fiv and sfi see their remit of supporting the screen industries in a wider policy and societal context that also includes the conditions and rights of those who work within it. their objections to zentropa were effective because they extended and exerted their roles beyond a narrowly defined cultural policy remit, and linked the right to lever arts funding to satisfactory and lawful working conditions and the protection of worker’s rights. in doing so, they were able to not only call out unacceptable behaviour, but also potentially penalise this with sanctions. today, associations and unions – e.g. the danish director’s association; the british women in film and television, and the american time’s up – are lobbying for guidelines and codes of conduct to enable staff to call out abuse (ravindran, ). however, in order to empower and enable meaningful change in work cultures beyond #metoo, these need to be backed up by policy mechanism that can effectively penalise individuals, and safeguard against abusive discriminatory company cultures. what we know from zentropa and the weinstein company is that production companies are unlikely to put these policies in place or police them themselves. https://www.coe.int/en/web/genderequality https://rm.coe.int/eurimages-gender-equality-strategy- - -aiming-for- - - by- / bff https://www.coe.int/en/web/genderequality in january , the investigation of zentropa concluded that the småtte abuse was historic, and working conditions within the company had improved with new guidelines put in place by the department of work and pensions and zentropa’s management. aalbæk returned to work. the long term repercussions of #metoo and the scandals of zentropa and the weinstein company remain to be seen. the zentropa case, however, illustrates the role screen funders can play in in enabling action and countering endemic, institutionalised toxic and abusive work environments in the screen industries. references dr. . Ålens rige - zentropa under overfladen (the eel’s kingdom – zentropa under the surface) documentary. june. denmark: dr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=disysl qyvw. dr deadline. . martin krasnik interviews peter aalbæk. current affairs series. may. denmark: dr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omdo olqe ---. . niels krause-kjær interviews peter aalbæk. current affairs series. october. https://www.facebook.com/dr tv/videos/ / dr news. . peter aalbæk does not regret anything (peter aalbæk doesn’t regret anything). tv news. november. denmark: dr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcou zjcuhi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=disysl qyvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omdo olqe https://www.facebook.com/dr tv/videos/ / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcou zjcuhi fejerskov, johan moe. . ” norske skuespillere råber op om sexchikane: ’han brugte mit knæ til at tilfredsstille sig selv’ ( norwegian actors shout sexual harrasment. he used my knee to gratify himself.’)”. politiken, november . https://politiken.dk/kultur/filmogtv/art /%c %bbhan-brugte-mit- kn%c %a -til-at-tilfredsstille-sig-selv%c %ab kang, inkoo. . “how the swedish film institute achieved - funding distribution between male and female directors.” indiewire, february . http://www.indiewire.com/ / /how-the-swedish-film-institute-achieved- - - funding-distribution-between-male-and-female-directors- / kott, sarah. . ”han tog stryptag, sa att jag gör skit och han gör konst” (he stangled me, said that i made shit and he made art).” svenska dagblatet, november . https://www.svd.se/ -skadespelare-vi-har-fatt-nog-av-sexuellt-vald. lundtofte, anne mette ( ). zentropia. copenhagen: gyldendahl. ravindran, manori. . “ testimonies of abuse.” broadcast, november . wind-friis, lea & stockmann, camilla. a. ”det svenske filminstitut overvejer stop for al støtte til zentropa. (sfi contemplates stop for all funding for zentropa.)” politiken, november . https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /det-svenske- filminstitut-overvejer-stop-for-al-st%c %b tte-til-zentropa https://politiken.dk/kultur/filmogtv/art /%c %bbhan-brugte-mit-kn%c %a -til-at-tilfredsstille-sig-selv%c %ab https://politiken.dk/kultur/filmogtv/art /%c %bbhan-brugte-mit-kn%c %a -til-at-tilfredsstille-sig-selv%c %ab http://www.indiewire.com/ / /how-the-swedish-film-institute-achieved- - -funding-distribution-between-male-and-female-directors- / http://www.indiewire.com/ / /how-the-swedish-film-institute-achieved- - -funding-distribution-between-male-and-female-directors- / https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /det-svenske-filminstitut-overvejer-stop-for-al-st%c %b tte-til-zentropa https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /det-svenske-filminstitut-overvejer-stop-for-al-st%c %b tte-til-zentropa ---. b. ”ni tidligere ansatte beskriver seksuelle ydmygelser på filmselskabet zentropa. (nine ex-employees describe sexual humiliations at the film company zentropa.)” politiken, november . https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /ni-tidligere-ansatte-beskriver-seksuelle- ydmygelser-på-filmselskabet-zentropa. ---. c. “internt brev: zentropas ledelse tager al indflydelse fra peter aalbæk efter seksuelle ydmygelser. (internal correspondence: zentropa’s management removes all influence from peter aalbæk after sexual humilations.)” politiken, november . https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /zentropas-ledelse-tager-al-indflydelse-fra- peter-aalb%c %a k-efter-seksuelle-ydmygelser. https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /ni-tidligere-ansatte-beskriver-seksuelle-ydmygelser-på-filmselskabet-zentropa https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /ni-tidligere-ansatte-beskriver-seksuelle-ydmygelser-på-filmselskabet-zentropa https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /zentropas-ledelse-tager-al-indflydelse-fra-peter-aalb%c %a k-efter-seksuelle-ydmygelser https://politiken.dk/kultur/art /zentropas-ledelse-tager-al-indflydelse-fra-peter-aalb%c %a k-efter-seksuelle-ydmygelser _ - _ _ - number volume summer issn: – think philosophy for everyone a journal of the royal institute of philosophy edited by stephen law n um ber volum e sum m er think number volume summer included in this issue: introduction stephen law ontological arguments graham oppy dreams of utopia: on the absence of place julian baggini sex and sexual assault in the #metoo era benjamin h. arbour if we should not eat meat on grounds of climate change, should we have children? adrian brockless truth and the goldilocks principle john capps mixed emotions in life and art: on hume’s direct passions angela m. coventry the empathy machine: a thought experiment douglas groothuis buddha and hard eliminativism o’ryan heideman philosonnets stephen kearns words and meanings: locke’s and lewis carroll’s views on the nature of meaning converge and diverge terrence moore polo mints: gateway to existential enlightenment – philosophy of ordinary things anton sukhoverkhov and mark pharoah erratum cambridge journals online for further information about this journal please go to the journal website at: cambridge.org/thi © the royal institute of philosophy mix paper from responsible sources fsc® c ® t h in k _ - _ _ - / / : pm page cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core think . guidelines for contributors the editor welcomes accessible contributions from philosophers and other thinkers on any topic broadly related either to philosophy or to the development of thinking skills. it is anticipated that most contributors will be academics. contributions should be below , words (unless otherwise agreed with the editor). very short pieces are welcome. think welcomes submissions which are clear and to the point and in the straightforward prose characteristic of the best philosophy. at the same time, the editor would also like to encourage the use of imaginative and unusual ways of making ideas engaging and accessible, e.g. through the use of dialogue, humour, illustrations (black and white: line and photos), examples taken from the media, etc. papers engaging with some topical debate are especially welcome. contributors should presuppose no philosophical background knowledge on the part of the reader. the use of jargon and logical notation, especially where unexplained, should be avoided. please avoid including notes and references if at all possible. while the presentation of original thought is very much encouraged, a submission need not go beyond providing an engaging an accessible introduction to a particular philosophical issue or line of argument. authors are asked to include within their submissions clear and fairly thorough introductions to any debates to which they wish to make a contribution. contributors of accepted articles will be asked to assign their copyright (on certain conditions) to the royal institute of philosophy so that their interests may be safeguarded. authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. the editor has the assistance of a panel of referees drawn from the institute’s council. please include with your contribution a brief statement of your position and institution (where relevant). . submissions contributions (as word documents) and communications should be sent to: stephen law (editor) think gordon square, london, wc h oar email: think@royalinstitutephilosophy.org . format and style the editor would be grateful if final submissions were in the think house style. please use single quotation marks (double when embedded). please italicize rather than underline. where it is absolutely unavoidable that references be included, they should be incorporated into the text (preferably) or else appear as endnotes in the think style. examples: fred author, title of book (place: publisher, ), . d. academic, ‘title of paper’, a journal, . 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the case of #emptythepews: twitter hashtag between resistance and community ruth tsuria college of communication and the arts, seton hall university, south orange, nj , usa; ruth.tsuria@shu.edu received: may ; accepted: june ; published: june ���������� ������� abstract: this study explores the relationship between politics and religion, resistance and community, on social media through the case study of #emptythepews. #emptythepews was created in august after the events in charlottesville, calling users who attend trump-supporting churches to leave those churches as a form of protest. what starts out as a call of action, becomes a polysemic online signifier for sharing stories of religious abuse, and thus a format for identity and community construction. an analysis of tweets with #emptythepews revels five different uses of the hashtag, including highlighting racial, gender, and sexual identity-based discrimination; sharing stories of religious or sexual abuse; constructing a community and identity; and actively calling for people to empty churches. this twitter hashtag did not facilitate an active movement of people leaving churches, but instead created a twitter community. giving voice and space to this community, however, can be seen as a form of resistance. keywords: hashtag; activism; online communities; online social movements; digital religion; trump; evangelical churches . introduction twitter has been seen by many as a digital platform for social movements and social resistance) gaffney, ; hassan, ; dubois and gaffney, ). usually, these movements are facilitated through a specific hashtag, which calls for a type of action—for example, #blacklivesmatter or #metoo. however, as will be shown in this article, hashtags are defined by the uses users give them; not their prescribed use from the leaders of a social movement. in other words, hashtags are living, polysemic signifiers, and as such, scholars should explore how specific hashtags are used in order to fully understand the relationship between twitter and resistance. this article offers a case study of a hashtag and social movement that also brings into question the relationship between politics and religion. the vocal and constant support of donald trump by christian (majority evangelical) churches in pre- and post- election period have left many americans confused [ – ]. while the majority of white evangelicals voted for trump [ ], there were those christians (evangelical and otherwise) and ex-christians who strongly opposed the marriage between trump and the evangelical leadership [ ]. trump, who was not an explicitly religious man before and during the elections (especially when compared to some of his republican runner-ups), and the unsolicited support he received from many churches, raised questions about the relationship between politics, religion, and media in the st century, usa [ , ]. opinion pieces, tweets, posts, and memes reflected on what it means for these churches to support trump. especially after trump’s seemingly inadequate respond to the terrorist event at charlottesville, which led many business and organizational leaders to step away, resign, or disapprove of his actions, the support or silent acceptance by evangelical leaders increased the disappointment and anger some of the christian practitioners already felt. information , , ; doi: . /info www.mdpi.com/journal/information http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /info http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= information , , of this disappointment also gave birth to a twitter hashtag, which, as this article shows, blurs the lines between a social movement and an online community. #emptythepews started as a twitter hashtag by chris stroop in mid-august , shortly after the protest at charlottesville. stroop, a prominent blogger, online author, and academic, launched the hashtag with a specific goal in mind: to show evangelical leaders that their support of trump or racist, sexist, and xenophobic behaviors will lead them to lose their congregations. in his words, stroop is trying to lead people into leaving their churches in protest over the church’s support of trump: noting that almost nothing will get most evangelicals’ attention apart from declining church attendance, last night i took to twitter to exhort any wavering members of conservative evangelical churches, or indeed any churches complicit in trumpism and white supremacy, to take now as a moment to leave those churches in protest, as publicly and vocally as possible. [ . . . ] i have observed over the last couple of weeks [ . . . ] many people stating that evangelical trump support was the final straw that led them to leave evangelicalism behind. i believe that evangelical pastors need to hear their message, and so do those still in the pews who may be harboring doubt and discomfort but who are afraid of leaving. to that end, i created the hashtag #emptythepews, asking those who have left evangelicalism over bigotry to tweet their stories along with the hashtag [ ]. the hashtag elicited moderate responses from twitter community, with the original call (see: https://twitter.com/c_stroop/status/ ) for action from august th being retweeted times, and liked times (as of june ). the hashtag itself has been used daily since. the hashtag also gained some attention from online media, with stories covering it on various online news or religious websites [ , ]. this study examines this hashtag in order to answer the questions: how has this hashtag been used? what is the relationship between the originator’s intent and the uses of the hashtag? further, and even more broadly: can a hashtag move people out of church? what does this teach about the relationship between online resistance and community? to answer these questions, #emptythepews tweets were sampled between august and december and then analyzed manually. the analysis points to six unique themes that emerge from the ways in which the tweets were employed, which are: resistance, religion, politics, gender/sexuality, race, and community. these polysemic theme point to a diversity of uses for a single hashtag. the broader theoretical implications of the main themes identified in the analysis are then discussed. . hashing out what a hashtag is in order to fully understand the #emptythepews story, certain terms and ideas need to be unpacked, such as twitter hashtag, social movements, resistance, community online, and the relationship between these terms. the hashtag is a tagging system on the social networking website twitter which brings together “internet resources across web” [ ] (p. ), such as ideas, users, and concepts [ , ]. from the arab spring forward, scholars have argued for the importance of social media, and specifically twitter, for raising political awareness and mobilizing people into action [ – ]. in these texts and contexts, hashtags within twitter are imagined as having a unified meaning or connotation, which is then used to create and motivate political action. however, more recent research suggests that hashtags are complex signifiers, polysemic texts, which hold multiple, and even conflicting, meanings [ , ]. for example, yadlin-segal [ ] in her research on the hashtag #iranjeans showed how some users utilized the hashtag to highlight the similarities between iran and ‘the west’ while others used it to shed light on iranian oppressive religious customs. she argues that “the same signifiers—jeans and hashtags—were used to signify conflicting messages about iran, nationality, freedom, and western societies [ . . . ] the hashtag advances a combination of signifiers that lead to the formulation of multilayered identities through a transcultural discussion” [ ] (p. ). this scholarship highlights the complexity of hashtag meaning-making. one way to understand this complexity is through the theory of uses and gratifications (u&g), which, according to erz, marder, https://twitter.com/c_stroop/status/ information , , of and osadchaya [ ] is especially suited for “understanding behaviors relating to information systems technologies, in particular social media” (para ). this is because u&g sees users as active participant in the consumption of media, choosing to use and interpret different media in different ways based on their individual needs. erz et al. employ u&g to highlight six motive for using hashtags in general. similarly, this article will show five uses for a specific hashtag, and how the difference uses and meanings attributed to the hashtag accumulate to a form of resistance. . . hashtag activism #emptythepews starts as a clear call of action, a resistance to churches that support trump or more general, preach discriminating ideas. online resistance, or the use of a hashtag to create or sustain social movements, is currently a strong trend in western context, with movements such as #metoo or #blacklivesmatter leading to changes in legal, media, and social structures [ – ]. research on online social movements shows that often, these movements are led by multiple key players [ – ], and that unlike popular opinions about ‘slacktivism,’ online activism is tied with offline actions [ , ]. social media activism in understood mostly through the lens of networks, in which nods (leaders or key players) promote a cause that is then shared and echoed in various circles or networks. research on various online social movements has utilized network analysis to discover “patterns of information flow” [ ] (p. ), analyzing these movements or hashtags as indicator of viral messages that need to be mapped. however, one might wonder if online social activism might be better understood as operating within communities and as an online community itself, especially in the case of smaller movements. this paper shows how uses of an activist hashtag indicate a behavior of online community, through sharing stories and identities. therefore, i ask if by overlooking the human connection that a hashtag can create, we might be missing some of the story. . . hashtag and community to further understand this claim a definition of a twitter-based online community is needed. a traditional definition of a community would be that of something like ‘a high frequency of communication and interaction between interconnected people with a sense of solidarity’ [ ]. because of twitter ’s design, in which connections are labeled as ‘followers’ and not ‘friends’ and which supports asymmetrical communication, scholars tend to consider twitter communication between users as networks, publics, or movements [ ]. according to gruzd, wellman and takhteyev [ ], even though twitter is not necessarily designed to support online communities, people still use them to form social connections within the framework of a community. that is, while not all of one’s connection on twitter might be considered one’s community, twitter can be used to create and maintain a community. gruzd, wellman and takhteyev [ ] conducted both a network analysis, which pointed to key players in the network, and a content analysis, which highlighted what they call the more “personal” elements of the network. in their words: in our analysis of wellman’s community, we confirmed that his personal twitter network is more than simply “imagined”. it exhibits characteristics of both jones’s “virtual settlement” and mcmillan and chavis’s “sense of community”. using social network analysis and content analysis, we demonstrated that members of wellman’s personal community regularly meet, talk, provide support, and help each other on twitter. the content and nature of their twitter interactions suggest that they display a sense of belonging to parts of wellman’s network and that they have the ability to influence others in the network through their replies and retweeting [ ] (p. ). that is, the personal elements of the communication: sharing and supporting, are what made this community ‘real’ according to the scholars. twitter, then, while often used for viral sharing of ideas through hashtags, can also foster communities. while hashtags on twitter have been widely successful in motivating social movements, as stated above, the logic of a hashtag, even one used for resistance, can also give birth to a community. as will be seen in the analysis below, that is also the case of the #emptythepews. information , , of . method and sample the method used in this study is a thematic analysis of selected tweets with the hashtag #emptythepews. this method is deemed appropriate because it would reveal the different ways the hashtag was employed by users. the sample and the analysis were informed by a few important tweets (for example, the first tweet with the hashtag); web-articles on the hashtag; and informal communication with the hashtag creator, chris stroop. the researcher has been following stroop, the hashtag, and a few pages (on facebook and twitter) dedicated to the hashtag and movement since august in order to more deeply understand the context and various developments of the hashtag. this method can be understood as an in-depth qualitative research with contextualized data sampling based on the organic narrative development of the hashtag. i suggest thinking of this as a ‘hashtag narrative’ or ‘hashtag story’ where various systematic and academic methodologies are utilized to describe and understand the creation, meaning-making, uses, and ‘life’ of a hashtag. in terms of the informal context, the author contacted stroop via twitter shortly after his august announcement. they met in person in november for an informal interview, and stayed in touch via online communication since then. at times, stroop tagged the author into specific conversations on twitter. the author follows the twitter account for #emptythepews, and became friends with stroop on facebook. the body of the analysis is made of a sample of n = tweets with the hashtag, posted between august and december . in december , a python library (https://github.com/jefferson- henrique/getoldtweets-python) was used to retroactively retrieve any tweet that used the hashtag. this yielded n = , unique tweets that were outputted into a comma-separated values (csv) file. using microsoft excel and an online random number generator (https://www.random.org), n = tweets were selected and inputted into a new excel file. these tweets were then coded into six overlapping themes, which were constructed out of fifteen sub-themes, based on initial analysis and inductive coding. the themes originated from a manual, iterative, analysis. while reading through the entire data set of tweets, each tweet was interpreted to have a central or few central theme: for example, attacking a political figure; or sharing a sexual trauma. the tweets were analyzed in an excel tweet, where new columns were created for each theme. then, if a theme was also present in a different tweet, that tweet would have been tagged as having that idea. a single tweet could have multiple themes. once these themes were tallied, similar themes were then conceptualized as sub-themes of a larger theme, which resulted in six over-arching themes throughout the data: resistance, politics, religion, sexuality/gender, race, and community. this method included certain limitations. most significantly, because of the random selection of the tweets, the conversational aspects were difficult to follow. twitter allows for long threads with multiple participants. a random selection, as conducted in this methodology, takes tweets out of the context of these threads. to overcome this limitation, the author would, whenever possible, search for the original thread in which a certain tweet originated, and add that to their notes. the random selection of tweets was supplemented by an in-depth understanding of the contextualized nature of the tweets. thus, the sample was built by highlighting the benefits of both randomized sample (overcoming selection biases) and contextualized and nuanced supplemental sample (positioning the case at hand within its thick and entangled organic development). . making sense of emptying the pews in the first few days following stroop’s initial tweet, users took to the hashtag to call out and electronically “walk out” of church. some of the most popular tweets using the hashtags from august th follow the rationale and call for action presented by stroop. for example: “if your pastor doesn’t condemn racism tomorrow...walk out. #emptythepews”. however, emptying the pews was not the only way this hashtag was used. the following discussion outlines the polysemic uses of the hashtag. https://github.com/jefferson-henrique/getoldtweets-python https://github.com/jefferson-henrique/getoldtweets-python https://www.random.org information , , of . . resistance the most obvious use of the hashtag, indeed, its intended use, is for resistance. tweets collected under this theme (overall, n = ) were either tweets that were explicitly calling users to leave churches (n = ); or generally against religion and/or tweets in which users shared reasons why they left the church (n = ). the last two were related to resistance because, they include either stories of past resistance to the church by leaving it, or resistance to religion. however, as will be noted from the analysis below, those tweets are not adhering to the suggested call-for-action, but instead take the hashtag into a different direction. an explicit form of resistance were tweets that clearly called for action, for moving out of churches that promote hate, for example: “#emptythepews if your church supports hate don’t go” or “it’s time to #emptythepews—been time”. or make visual arguments supporting the call for action, for example: the caption following the image reads: “seems to be working. this is our local megachurch. the parking lot is not full these days” (figure ). the need to visually argue for a decline in church attendance suggests a need for the hashtag to “work” from the online to the offline world. this is further supported by the caption “seems to be working”, indicating that the call to #emptythepews is, indeed, emptying churches. information , , x for peer review of left the church (n = ). the last two were related to resistance because, they include either stories of past resistance to the church by leaving it, or resistance to religion. however, as will be noted from the analysis below, those tweets are not adhering to the suggested call-for-action, but instead take the hashtag into a different direction. an explicit form of resistance were tweets that clearly called for action, for moving out of churches that promote hate, for example: “#emptythepews if your church supports hate don’t go” or “it’s time to #emptythepews—been time”. or make visual arguments supporting the call for action, for example: figure . seems to be working. october . the caption following the image reads: “seems to be working. this is our local megachurch. the parking lot is not full these days” (figure ). the need to visually argue for a decline in church attendance suggests a need for the hashtag to “work” from the online to the offline world. this is further supported by the caption “seems to be working”, indicating that the call to #emptythepews is, indeed, emptying churches. other tweets, however, were interpreted to use the hashtag to call for action, but in an implied manner. for example: “#emptythepews when almost every christian i knew refused to denounce trump, and denounced me for not wanting him in office” or even more indirectly: “when muslims take care of americans and evangelicals won’t #emptythepews#youdontknowevangelicals https://twitter.com/gordmacey/status/ ”. this last tweet links to a different tweet that discusses joel osteen’s decision to keep his houston churches closed during harvey flooding (the tweet reads: “fyi while joel osteen refuses to open the doors of his "christian church" to victims of hurricane harvey, three mosques have opened theirs”). by adding the hashtag #emptythepews, the user is implicitly communicating that this behavior of a christian leader is a reason to empty the pews. these implicit uses of #emptythepews are nonetheless important to be considered as a form of resistance, because they tie the action of resistance—walking out—with the reasons for resistance: corruption, discriminations, etc. in that way, they use the hashtag as a call for action while at the same time explaining the rationale for this action. similarly, other users used the tweet to share their stories of why they left the church in the past. users seem to feel that sharing their reasons for leaving the church in the past corresponded with the intention of #emptythepews. this use of the hashtag tends to be personal and emotive. for example, “i left evangelicalism after being condemned to hell for being gay. #emptythepews” or “as a smart & devout yo woman, was told the only way i’d ever have leadership role in any church was to marry a pastor #emptythepews”. these examples, while showcasing different reasons for leaving, all include some reference to discrimination or trauma. by telling their stories of ‘why i left’ rather figure . seems to be working. october . other tweets, however, were interpreted to use the hashtag to call for action, but in an implied manner. for example: “#emptythepews when almost every christian i knew refused to denounce trump, and denounced me for not wanting him in office” or even more indirectly: “when muslims take care of americans and evangelicals won’t #emptythepews#youdontknowevangelicals https: //twitter.com/gordmacey/status/ ”. this last tweet links to a different tweet that discusses joel osteen’s decision to keep his houston churches closed during harvey flooding (the tweet reads: “fyi while joel osteen refuses to open the doors of his “christian church” to victims of hurricane harvey, three mosques have opened theirs”). by adding the hashtag #emptythepews, the user is implicitly communicating that this behavior of a christian leader is a reason to empty the pews. these implicit uses of #emptythepews are nonetheless important to be considered as a form of resistance, because they tie the action of resistance—walking out—with the reasons for resistance: corruption, discriminations, etc. in that way, they use the hashtag as a call for action while at the same time explaining the rationale for this action. https://twitter.com/gordmacey/status/ https://twitter.com/gordmacey/status/ information , , of similarly, other users used the tweet to share their stories of why they left the church in the past. users seem to feel that sharing their reasons for leaving the church in the past corresponded with the intention of #emptythepews. this use of the hashtag tends to be personal and emotive. for example, “i left evangelicalism after being condemned to hell for being gay. #emptythepews” or “as a smart & devout yo woman, was told the only way i’d ever have leadership role in any church was to marry a pastor #emptythepews”. these examples, while showcasing different reasons for leaving, all include some reference to discrimination or trauma. by telling their stories of ‘why i left’ rather than explicitly calling people to leave now, these users re-appropriate the hashtag for sharing personal traumas, while at the same time keeping the initial intention verbalized by stroop, by showing how discrimination can lead to lower church membership. another types of resistance were tweets in which #emptythepews was used to vocally belittle and ridicule religion. for example: “ . . . you’ve always been damaging + hurtful + cruel. your shitty theology has always been shitty theology. #emptythepews”—in this tweet the user is explicitly insulting a theological stance (‘shitty theology’) and connecting it with abuse, and as a result, the need to empty pews. or, for instance, comparing evangelical churches with cults: “this crap largely comes directly from the pulpit. believers in skygod cult easily brainwashed. #youdontknowevangelicals #emptythepews”. in other cases, empty the pew is more of an ideological stance, an atheist perspective on the subject. for example: “lovely. bragging about ignorance. if there were a god, he/she would want more for his/her creation. #emptythepews #atheist”. these tweets are resisting evangelical christianity by-and-large, not for racism or other social/political reasons, and seem to be anti-religion in general, as this tweet clearly summarizes: “#religionmakesyoustupid #religionisdarkness #religionistheproblem #religionpoisonseverything #emptythepews”. one of the most emotional uses of the hashtag was one in which users shared stories of emotional or religious abused (total of n = were coded for this sub-theme of emotional/religious abuse). for example: “this is like ‘what is #gaslighting’ on the church abuse jeopardy game show. #emptythepews” or “when the pastor pulled out a diagram from the cult leader i was raised under and i had a panic attack and fled outside. #emptythepews”. in these tweets, words like abuse, trauma, survivor or descriptions of emotional reactions are used frequently, clearly tying forms of abuse with reasons for leaving the church. some of the tweets under this category are tied to sexual abused, like: “sexual predator abused children and treated priests who did the same #emptythepews #churchtoo” while other have to do with general discrimination or other forms of power and abuse, like: “conservative evangelicals want the power to dominate others. authoritarianism is inherently abusive, and they are authoritarian through and through”. in these various tweets, stories of religious abuse in the form of, for example: gas-lighting, authoritarianism, or cutting off support systems, are shared. through sharing these traumas, users here again (re)appropriate the hashtag: while it is still used for resisting discriminating churches, this use highlights the complicities and deeper problems within the church, problems that have little explicit relationship to the current political situation. as pointed out by one tweet in this theme: “i left b -just so toxic”—meaning, this user left the church before the election of the th president, donald trump, because of the toxic and harmful environment, in other words, the various types of abuse users felt in the church. through sharing their personal traumas, users utilized this hashtag to call for resistance based on the need to protect people from these types of abuse. . . poltics this next major theme comprises of those tweets and uses that relate to usa politics and the relationship between politics and religious institutions (n = ). these tweets were coded as political because they included names of political figures, such as trump or roy moore, or refereed to political events. for example: “#emptythepews the racism & discrimination is a disgusting betrayal of the bible. people like pence who is a fake christian and defies god”. or more broadly for example: “ . . . the single greatest threat to democracy and human rights in america is the christian right . . . ”—here the information , , of user is alluding to more than just the election of trump, they are referring to the general conflict they feel exists between democracy and the christian right. furthermore, because of the time-frame in which these tweets were collected, many of the tweets reacted to the appointment of roy moore and the allegations against him, for example: “ . . . are you going to continue to support child molesters? i’m sure #roymoorechildmolester is very happy with your support . . . ” while these tweets are not explicitly discussing trump, they still highlight what they see as problematic political relations between churches and politics. in these various ways, users connect the hashtag with politics, or use it to discuss new political happenings from the perspective of criticizing evangelical support of discriminatory politics. given that stroop’s original hashtag intentionally connected religion and politics, it is of the upmost importance to understand how users reacted to and expanded this context. users also used the hashtag to more generally criticize various religious institutions for their support of trump, for example: “will evangelicalism recover from their support of the new caesar? i think they lose any credibility going forward. #emptythepews”; and other institutional behaviors that are deemed discriminatory or self-serving. one prime example was users’ reactions to joel osteen’s churches in texas not sheltering people during the harvey storm and floods. for example: “#emptythepews if there was ever a time for your church to be full...it is now @joelosteen” or “@joelosteen is your mega church only open on sundays? how about when god’s children need safe shelter? #emptythepews #whatwouldjesustweet” or, reacting to osteen’s tweet stating that he and his wife are praying for the victims of harvey, one user writes back: “because praying doesn’t cost you anything or get your floors and furniture dirty, right? #emptythepews”. in these and similar tweets, users not only criticize osteen, but also tie their criticism to #emptythepews, using the hashtag as a signifier for a larger perspective or movement. that is, in these tweets, the hashtag is not calling people to empty osteen’s churches, but rather uses the hashtag as a symbol for resistance against what users express as corrupt institutional christian behavior. other tweets in this category are not aimed at a specific person, but describe various institutional behaviors that the users find problematic. for example: “had a priest at a funeral hijack the eulogy to tell us there’s no place in heaven for the educated. family full of teachers. #emptythepews” or “the cdc is an american crown jewel, one of the institutions that truly make the us a first-world country. so naturally the christofascists and bannonites in charge are going to fuck it up because faith-based politics. #shame #emptythepews”. other users cry out against the homophobic nashville statement that was signed by multiple churches and evangelical leaders. in these types of uses, which will be further explored in the gender/sexuality theme, users connect their criticism of current church discrimination of women and lgbt+ people with #emptythepews, which, like in the osteen examples, hint at a different type of use: using the hashtag to highlight and resist systematic issues in the various institutions of the church, even without calling for the action of leaving the church or connecting it to the trump administration as initiated in stroop’s original statement. . . religion aside from making space for those who left, and amplifying stories of abuse and discrimination within churches, the hashtag also serves as a tool for religious discourse and negotiation. a total of n = tweets were coded under this theme, including the sub-themes: theology, religious institutions, and ‘anti-religious’ (some overlapping with over themes). tweets were coded as ‘religion’ if they included religious terms like bible, god, etc. (or anti-religious terms like atheism); if they discussed theology in some way; or made reference to religious meanings. while some #emptythepews users are vocally ex- and anti-religious, as discussed above, others are trying to negotiate their own understanding of a bigotry-free christianity. in fact, the @emptythepews account on twitter has in its info the following statement: “if you’re faith is important to you but you cant [sic] support your church or if you arent [sic] a christian and want to vent- join us. all are welcome” (emphasis added). this description is inviting people of faith to discuss and develop religious ideas too. information , , of that is, this theme highlights users who identify as christians, claim to care for the reputation and theology of christianity, and/or negotiate the meaning of being christian. while some use this hashtag to distance themselves (and others) from christianity at large, other use it as insiders, members of the christian community demanding change. for example, one user citing an online article writes: “to the #church: you sold #jesus out for #political power. i’m out. [ . . . ] #christian #emptythepews”. or “#emptythepews [ . . . ] this is not the jesus they taught me about. evangelicals have sold their souls”. in these examples, uses are making a theological and political polemical claims against the church. they also identify as members of the community by adding the #christian, for example. juxtaposing #christian and #emptythepews indicates that the two are not mutually exclusive—that in fact, it is christian members who are those seeking and calling for a change. some of the tweets explicitly dismiss the religiosity/theology of current evangelical institutions, by saying things like: “you must understand that they have more in common with @realdonaldtrump & #gop than they do jesus—jesus is just their mascot #emptythepews”. this was also evident when the nashville statement was discussed, for example: “exhaustive list of everything jesus ever said about homosexuality [link] #nashvillestatement #lgbtq #lovewins #emptythepews”. in these tweets, theology is negotiated to be more inclusive, and certain official stances, like the one taken in the nashville statement, are rejected as not representing the spirit of love these uses associate with jesus or christianity. a few users try to suggest that having issues with discriminatory practices within the churches does not necessitates abandoning the religion altogether, for example: “yes, #emptythepews of churches that don’t follow the gospel; however, #dontabandonthechurch! find a place that knows how to love & serve!” in this example, users are encouraged to find liberal or more supportive churches, rather than emptying the pews altogether. even more aggressively, a few users try to discourage others from leaving, for example: “‘let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit, but let us encourage one another ’. heb. : don’t #emptythepews” or “the people using the #emptythepews hashtag know nothing about true relationship with christ. i pity them, honestly. they’re missing out”. in these more explicit tweets, users object the notion of emptying the pews, and say that those who do so are “missing out”. that is, users here are not necessarily disagreeing with the criticism voiced through the hashtag; but they do disagree with the call for action—the idea of leaving churches. . . gender/sexuality tweets coded under this theme included references to men/women, sex, gender and sexual identity, and gender roles (n = ). from the first days of the hashtag, it was immediately used to share stories related to either sexual abuse, or gender/sexual identity discrimination. as the use of the hashtag developed, two events were tied to it: ( ) the nashville statement, published late august , which was explicitly against lgbt rights, and authored by the council on biblical manhood and womanhood in nashville, tennessee; and ( ) the #metoo movement and specifically #churchtoo, which emerged a few months after #emptythepews started. thus, it was clear from the beginning that #emptythepews, while not explicitly related to issues of gender and sexuality, was quickly used to discuss them. some users shared that their main reason for leaving the church was discrimination against women, for example: “#emptythepews the pews bc i attended vision forum’s father/daughter event and was told my sole purpose is to bring honor to my dad” or “because she sposta be home makin’ babies, cookin’ supper, pleasin’ her man, and stayin’ quiet in church! #emptythepews”. in these and similar tweets, users use the hashtag to express their frustration at being belittled as a woman and discriminated against. this use of the hashtag also tends to combine issues of gender inequality and sexual abuse, as those are often intertwined experiences within religious traditions. for example, one user shared that she broke with the church: “when i was told that ‘men don’t rape godly women’. #emptythepews”. other examples include: “women have never been safe in the church. women have never been protected, valued, elevated, or listened to there. we confess to being assaulted and are information , , of made to repent for impurity. #churchtoo #metoo #emptythepews”. or “countless sermons abt how wife owes husband sex anytime—is sin to deny. never one respecting wife as human being #metoo #emptythepews”. in these examples, users express how church theology enables sexual abuse through victim blaming. these experiences then led these users to leave the church and use the hashtag to share their stories online. other users do not explicitly tie church doctrine to sexual abuse, but do condemn the church for cases of sexual abuse or what users see as support of abusers, for example: “philippines to extradite ex-priest accused of abusing two north dakota boys #emptythepews #churchtoo”. or, retweeting a story about an ex-evangelical sexual abuse survivor’s reaction to trump’s election, a user writes: “stories like this are why we need to #emptythepews”. in these examples, users either explicitly argue that people should leave churches because of churches’ attitudes towards sexual abuse, or use the hashtag to condemn what they see as support of the abusers. another avenue that leads users to leave the church is the anti lgbt+ sentiments expressed by various churched in the usa. for example: “the “church” has been so bad for so long, i haven’t been in a pew in yrs, since my lesbian daughter was vilified by the vast majority!” here, the user is not sharing a current story, but rather that they left the church because of discrimination. various tweets related to discrimination against lgbt+ individuals are also shared with the hashtag, for example: “#emptythepews because the lgbt community is more accepting of others than christians are”. in total n = tweets were coded for dealing with “sexual preferences”, about % of the total sample. in both examples of gender and sexual discrimination (and in their intersection) users utilize the hashtag to share reasons for leaving, thus supporting the original use of the hashtag, but also use it to condemn and express their own pain and frustration, using the hashtag as a tool of empowerment to tell their stories, not unlike the #metoo movement. . . race the theme of racism in the church, which was the original catalyst for the hashtag, has only n = tweets that are explicitly about race. those were tweets that used words like race, racism or racial. n = tweets were implicitly related to racism because they mentioned things like, for example, trump’s support of specific racist groups. some of the tweets clearly tie the political situation with trump to racism in the church. for example, responding to a long thread, one user provides a link to a story about pastor scott, a trump supporter, who suggests that the black population is mistaken for not having relationship with trump. the tweet reads: “any pastor that supports the rhetoric of hate and divisiveness is a fake christian and a terrible human being. #emptythepews [ . . . ]” here, the user is relating a political statement about supporting trump to religious ideology (‘a fake christian’), race (‘hate and divisiveness’), and the #emptythepews hashtag. it is possible that the user is using #emptythepews to indicate this story as a reason to leave the church, or that they are referring to #emptythepews as a signifier for a movement or community. other users are clearer in the way they use the hashtag, for example: “#emptythepews if your church supports hate don’t go” or “annnnd yet another reason, of countless, to #emptythepews. #fightwhitesupremacy #klanpresident #amerikkka #klanistan https://thinkprogress.org/religious-conservatives-bannon-white-nationalists- f eaa e /” (the second tweet positioning trump’s support of racist organizations as a reason to leave the church). other tweets focus on the relation between religion and racism, omitting the political element. for example: “religious faith is chosen, skin color is not. hatefulness should always be called out, especially when coming from a pulpit. #emptythepews” or “#emptythepews the racism & discrimination is a disgusting betrayal of the bible [ . . . ]”. other tweets connect the religion, racism, and politics by pointing to the complicated history of racism, christianity and the political system in the usa, for example: “poll the average #charlottekkk marcher and you’ll find majority of christians. speak to people in #youdon’tknowevangelicals or #emptythepews” or “#trumpisawhitesupremacist—#emptythepews % of #evangelicals didn’t vote against https://thinkprogress.org/religious-conservatives-bannon-white-nationalists- f eaa e / information , , of #whitesupremacy. wikipedia kkk- ”. as can be seen from these examples, users clearly connect racism as a reason to leave churches or as part of the general discriminatory attitudes of the church. . . community tweets coded for community, total of n = , were tweets in which users used the hashtag for community building: by retweets stories, supporting one another, offering community resources, expressing their identity as ex-evangelical, or explicitly calling for a space for those who left the church because of discrimination and abuse. in other words, tweets that were analyzed to create ‘a sense of solidarity’ [ ] were coded as ‘community.’ for example: “have you experienced religious abuse? share your story anonymously here . . . https://buff.ly/ w s yb #emptythepews #exevangelical” linking to a website of an organization that wishes to “listen to and learn from those who have been marginalized by the christian community” (https://mission .wordpress.com). in this tweet the user connects to others by sharing similar stories, thus using the hashtag #emptythepews as a signifier for shared experiences, for solidarity. similarly, other tweets under this category explicitly try to form a feeling of belonging, for example “you are not alone! you matter. #emptythepews”. some are more light-hearted in forming these friendly relations between the users of the hashtag, for example: “if you need a good laugh, go follow #stupidquestionsforjesus right now. #emptythepews #asksteveaustin”. other ways of creating this sense of community is by supporting each other and encouraging people to share, for example “the #emptythepews stories and .@c_stroop are incredible”. or “i’m so encouraged by your work & the moral core at the center of it. thank you to you & to all participating in the #emptythepews movement”. in these ways, users connect to others through the hashtag and create a feeling of bonding over shared experiences. identity also plays a big role in this use of the tweet. users indicate that the hashtag helps them represent and understand their identity as ex-evangelical or people with religious trauma. for example: “if you read through the #emptythepews hashtag, i think you’ll understand after reading of people’s trauma with #evangelism”. most often, tweets that explicitly discuss identity also use hashtags like #exevangelical or #youdon’tknowevangelicals which seem to indicate the users’ own identity as an ex-evangelical. for example: “#youdontknowevangelicals if you don’t have at least one christian relative who brought home a shofar from a trip to israel. #emptythepews” or “if this surprises you #youdontknowevangelicals #emptythepews”. in some cases, users encourage other to empty the pews, even at the risk of losing a community, because they believe it will help the gain their individual freedom, for example: “[ . . . ] don’t let fear or guilt hold you back. might feel like you are losing a community but you will be gaining freedom and so much more #emptythepews”. both in the cases of those highlighting their individual identity and those trying to bring people together, tweets in this category highlight how the hashtag is used to create a shared community and identity. rather than using the hashtag to actually evacuate churches, these uses exemplify a more complex attitude toward resistance, one that is focused on creating networks of support, solidarity, and identity. . conclusions: between resistance and community this paper sought out to examine the life and uses of the hashtag #emptythepews in order to explore how hashtags related to resistance are used in a polysemic fashion. #emptythepews was created in august with the goal to “exhort any wavering members of conservative evangelical churches, or indeed any churches complicit in trumpism and white supremacy, to take now as a moment to leave those churches in protest, as publicly and vocally as possible” [ ]. this hashtag and the movement it tries to create raises questions about social media movements and moving people. indeed, the analysis of the tweets pointed to six different themes and five uses of the hashtag. the themes were: resistance, politics, religion, sexuality, race, and community. when separated and compared, it seems that the specific issues users wanted to bring up using this hashtag were, in order of frequency: sexual abuse (total of tweets), sexual identity and lgbt rights ( tweets), emotional or religious abuse ( tweets), racism ( tweets) and gender discrimination ( tweets). https://buff.ly/ w s yb https://mission .wordpress.com information , , of building on these themes and supported by u&g theory, the analysis also points out to five different but not mutually exclusive uses of the hashtag: ( ) highlighting racial, gender, and sexual identity-based discrimination and sharing stories of religious or sexual abuse, ( ) negotiating christianity, ( ) speaking against current political and religious institutional discrimination, ( ) creating a community and identity, and ( ) actively calling for people to empty churches. it seems then, that the hashtag functions as a movement and as a signifier for a community. in that way, it connects concepts of activism and online community, positioning the community itself as a form of activism. while some uses call for action or are more explicitly politically driven, and thus better understood as part of a movement, other uses have to do more with personal needs, such as sharing and supporting, classified by gruzd, wellman and takhteyev [ ] as indicators of a real community. through sharing, liking, retweeting, and commenting, users try to craft an online space for this identity and community. while this might not be the direct call of action of marching or protesting, creating this community and giving voice to this identity can be thought of as a form of activism, of resistance: creating a community is giving visibility to those who left. #emptythepews started as a verb—asking people to actually empty churches. it was an imperative, a command. but as the analysis shows, it moves from being an imperative to a symbol that represent various experiences and stances, and that happens, i suggest, because of users’ various social and emotional needs (e.g., uses and gratification theory). this is shown throughout the analysis: people seem to want to share their stories of religious abuse and discrimination, and this hashtag, while not official created for that purpose, was re-appropriated for it. as shown by scholars such as rosenbaum [ ] and yadlin-segal [ ], hashtags are polysemic and can hold multiple meanings and, i would add, usages [ ]. the hashtag sign is empty and re-interpretable and thus can be appropriated for needs that were not foreseen by the actual hashtag creators. this twitter hashtag did not facilitate an active movement of people leaving churches, did not work as a mobilization for social action, but instead facilities a twitter community. because social media is based in quantitative values (numeric counts of likes, shares, retweets, etc.), there is an inherent inclination for the signs to be interpreted in a context that affords the greatest amount of meaning to the large numbers. in the case of #emptythepews, however, it was not one shared meaning that created traction, but that the multiple meanings all contributed to a sense of solidarity, the idea of a community. further, communities are based on shared meanings and experiences. thus, through the polysemic use of the hashtag, a community was born. this use of the hashtag did not manifest in the mass leaving of multiple churches, at least not in a way that can be quantitatively proven. but it does allow for a community and identity to emerge and flourish, creating a discourse and relationships that can strengthen individuals who felt hurt by churches across the usa. by creating and strengthening ex-evangelicals this hashtag does work towards resistance—for one needs a name before they can march. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . helmke, p.; claassen, r.l. review of godless democrats and pious republicans? party activists, party capture, and the “god gap”. 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[crossref] http://dx.doi.org/ . /socrel/srw http://religiondispatches.org/i-created-the-hashtag-emptythepews-because-its-time-for-evangelicals-to-walk-out-of-toxic-churches/ http://religiondispatches.org/i-created-the-hashtag-emptythepews-because-its-time-for-evangelicals-to-walk-out-of-toxic-churches/ http://www.worldreligionnews.com/religion-news/emptythepews-advocates-quitting-church-protest-trump http://www.worldreligionnews.com/religion-news/emptythepews-advocates-quitting-church-protest-trump https://sandiegofreepress.org/ / /evangelicals-nashville-statement-promises-hell-for-homosexuals/ https://sandiegofreepress.org/ / /evangelicals-nashville-statement-promises-hell-for-homosexuals/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /meet. http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://journal.webscience.org/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /dev. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.chb. . . https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/ / / /metoo-has-changed-our-culture-now-its-changing-our-laws https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/ / / /metoo-has-changed-our-culture-now-its-changing-our-laws https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /the-butterfly-effects-of-ferguson https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /the-butterfly-effects-of-ferguson https://psmag.com/social-justice/racism-declined-during-the-black-lives-matter-campaign http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / information , , of . bruns, a.; burgess, j. twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks; rambukkana, n., ed.; peter lang publishing: new york, ny, usa, ; pp. – . . gruzd, a.; wellman, b.; takhteyev, y. imagining twitter as an imagined community. am. behav. sci. , , – . [crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	hashing out what a hashtag is 	hashtag activism 	hashtag and community 	method and sample 	making sense of emptying the pews 	resistance 	poltics 	religion 	gender/sexuality 	race 	community 	conclusions: between resistance and community 	references resisting silences: gender and family trauma in eighteenth‐century england gender & history issn - lisa wynne smith, ‘resisting silences: gender and family trauma in eighteenth-century england’ gender & history, vol. no. march , pp. – . resisting silences: gender and family trauma in eighteenth-century england lisa wynne smith the newdigates were happy in the summer of . there were four children under five, including newborn juliana and six older siblings between five and fifteen. sir richard newdigate’s diary presents an idyllic time: eating cherries with his pregnant wife mary; gorging on orchard fruit with his eldest son richard; teaching amphillis accounting; rounding up birds flying in the buttery; visiting friends and family; enjoying family meals and walks. twenty years later, the family disintegrated amid accusations of greed, madness and unspeakable acts. newdigate’s biographers link the breakdown to lady mary’s death in . whatever the cause, the decline of such a contented family was tragic. the explanation newdigate gave in his pamphlet, the case of an old gentleman, persecuted by his own son ( ), concentrates around four events. the first is a trip to france taken by newdigate, accompanied by his eldest son, richard and his sixth daughter, elizabeth, in . in newdigate’s absence, second son john looked after the estate and family. the second event was richard and john’s attempt to have their father committed as a lunatic in may – although they were initially successful, newdigate had the committal overturned. the third event was a petition to the house of lords in february by four of the daughters (amphillis, jane, elizabeth and juliana) asking for relief from their father’s cruel severities. the fourth event was the family settlement of march , which divided property and money among the children and gave guardianship of amphillis, jane, elizabeth and juliana to their maternal uncle. in his pamphlet and account books, newdigate blamed his eldest sons, richard and john, for the family problems. his published story insisted on his daughters’ innocence, but other records indicate conflicted relationships with amphillis, frances, elizabeth, juliana and jane. the remaining children – mary, anne, frank and gilbert – were faultless through absence (marriage or school) or illness. newdigate’s story is oblique on matters that reflected badly on his patriarchal control. he does not mention that his second-eldest daughter, frances (lady sedley), eloped in (aged eighteen). similar evasiveness is evident with regard to amphillis, committed as a lunatic in (aged thirty-seven), and the ‘lunacy’ from which gilbert suffered by (aged twenty-eight). newdigate discussed these instances only to the copyright line for this article was changed on th april after original online publication. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f - . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - resisting silences blame richard and john for driving them mad through ‘cruel usage’. he likewise omitted discussing his scandalous second marriage to a young woman in , which he kept secret until the bride’s family legally forced him to acknowledge it. as to his alleged lunacy, newdigate alluded to accusations of sexual improprieties, but never described the decisive event that induced his sons to commit him and his daughters to petition the house of lords. the lunacy inquisition, however, gives a date ( april ), while the petition offers details: ‘sir richard newdigate did by frequent solicitacions by threats & by force with sword in hand attempt his daughter elizabeths chastity so that she was forced to fly his presence and for the safety of her life and honour to swear the peace against him’. newdigate, unsurprisingly, denied his children’s imputations of madness and incest. these events provide the chronology for my interpretation. newdigate’s perspective is easily uncovered through his diaries, account books and pamphlet, but the children left only traces of their legal resistance. those fragmen- tary records, however, suggest a family trauma with profoundly gendered suffering. by family trauma, i mean the family’s response to an event that shattered their seem- ingly happy world. the cause of the trauma is less clear. was newdigate an old man victimised by his lying family? was he mentally ill? was the violent attack of april unique? was there long-term sexual abuse? when writing this article, i wondered whether the story should remain untold: was it my right as a historian to uncover the family’s secret? but as the #metoo movement has shown, we have an urgent duty to listen to the survivors of abuse (sexual or otherwise) and to recognise the ways in which we have enabled perpetrators’ accounts to remain dominant. attending to silences in the records can provide new ways of understanding family histories. this article considers newdigate’s account, putting the children at the centre. building on my previous work on pain narratives (or, how to find meaning in sufferers’ circular accounts of pain), i argue that the newdigates’ experiences can be read as a familial pain narrative; its gaps, uncertainties and seemingly unconnected complaints are like other eighteenth-century pain accounts on a meta-level. to identify what caused their breakdown, i situate their health problems within the context of their family history. bouts of illness occur at key narrative moments, hinting at a hidden wound of sexual abuse and/or mental illness. newdigate’s and the children’s stories reveal how illnesses and the limitations of gender and age shaped the experiences of individual family members. in newdigate’s version, an unwell, ageing patriarch pro- tected his family, despite being undermined by adult sons’ demands for independence. the children’s story involves an indebted, domineering household head, sons lacking patriarchal privileges and vulnerable daughters needing protection. either way, the case underscores the instability of patriarchy, the dangers posed by a bad patriarch and the intersection of illness, gender and family strategy. my analysis focuses on the question of why the children later concealed their trauma, despite their initial publicising of it. their act of silence, i conclude, was the most powerful act of reclamation open to them. narratives, silences and gender a gentry family, the newdigates had their main seat at arbury hall, warwickshire. they kept excellent household records, which historians have used for topics rang- ing from food to politics. steve hindle and peter edwards have examined newdi- gate’s account books to understand estate management, while elaine gooder and lady © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history newdigate-newdegate wrote detailed biographies. although hindle and newdigate- newdegate identify micro-managerial or autocratic behaviours, neither treat these as a problem. for newdigate-newdegate, newdigate’s tendencies were counterbalanced by his daughter jane’s respectful letter in , asking him to godparent her baby. only gooder discusses the family disputes, depicting newdigate as a loving father abandoned by his children. gooder’s interpretation fits with eighteenth-century understandings of familial and fatherly duty. good fathers should balance patriarchal authority with affection. this was not entirely altruistic, as tenderness stifled potential rebellion. ideal fathers were indulgent, but used education (moral training and consistent punishments) to avoid spoiling children. tyrannical and indulgent fathers were obvious opposites – yet, the truly ‘bad’ father was indifferent: parents should be involved in their chil- dren’s lives, even after marriage. a pervasive discourse of ‘natural affection’ framed parental duties in terms of love. as parents ‘naturally’ loved their children, they pro- vided care. for a man, natural love was specifically equated with supporting his family financially. children reciprocated with duty and love to their parents and siblings, creating a closely bonded unit fundamental to orderly society. children who com- mitted violence against parents were considered unnatural for transgressing familial hierarchies. typical narratives centred on greed for parental money or lack of com- passion for an elderly or ill parent. and, even in self-defence, it was inexcusable to murder a tyrannical parent (though understandable). natural affection’s dependence on a unified hierarchical family left little space to contest over-reaching authority, especially given the prioritisation of parental feelings. families might fulfil mutual obligations lovingly, but power remained vested in fathers. whatever happened between newdigate and his children, the holes in their stories hint at a shared reality: family trauma. newdigate’s pain stemmed from abandonment by his family in old age; the children’s suffering was caused by a tyrannical, possibly sexually abusive father. although elaine scarry contends that pain is inherently inex- pressible, historians have found an articulate language for pain in nuanced narratives, performed dramas and gestures. early modernists have focused on shareable, socially recognised pains and certain sources (literature, hagiography, diaries and letters) or accounts (violence, martyrdom, childbirth, surgery and chronic illness). given such rich materials, we have overlooked unwritten pain. what can we do with cases such as the newdigates’, in which suffering is central to the story, yet never explicit? my approach here reflects the common ground between work by scholars of trauma, women’s history and secrets, areas which offer usefully complementary in- sights as they regularly confront patchy evidence and confusing accounts. reading silence is not new, though it is often easier for historians to ignore absences in records. as lucy delap noted in relation to twentieth-century child sexual abuse cases, histo- rians need to confront the uncomfortable spaces in our records and not assume that absences indicate people’s inability or unwillingness to discuss difficult subjects. trauma, for example, is often concealed with silence, a survival tactic that relatively few sufferers move beyond. but silence is also a form of communication, which lis- teners can begin to hear. first, one must identify when omission is meaningful. like pain scholarship, work on trauma emphasises the elusiveness of its object. traumatic events can remain hidden from consciousness, but echo in dreams, automatic actions or performances. written on the body, they shape long-term physical and mental health © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences outcomes. there is a perpetual interpretative tension between reading the signs and inability to know. whereas memory needs a narrative, traumatic recollections, like pain, are suspended in time, without a clear beginning, middle and end. what narra- tives exist might be changeable, avoiding particulars or lacking facts, but the truth at their core is fear. looking for evidence to understand silence is necessary in other fields, too. feminist scholarship typically considers voice as agency, but silence can enable resistance, offering protection and space to negotiate difficult situations. re- searchers must be attuned to linguistic and bodily signs and alternative readings. as for work on secrecy, studies of early modern europe elucidate how secrets were a form of power. they occurred within a social context, binding those who shared them, while establishing hierarchical relations between those who knew everything, something or nothing. secrets that became open knowledge could be more subversive than concealed ones. what these different approaches foreground is that silences can be more than absences or suppressions, representing instead meaningful omissions. attending to silences, secrets and physical signs of trauma offer insight into gendered experiences of family dysfunction. this article contains multiple narratives. one motivating factor here is that i could not remain objective, being sceptical of newdigate’s claimed victimhood and sympathising with the children’s actions. by separating the voices of victim and perpetrator (and historian), i leave room for an empathic unsettlement – by which i mean the avoidance of easy closure, excessive speculation and over-empathising with one side. the children’s counter-narrative challenges and informs newdigate’s dom- inant account. reading the semi-symmetrical versions together elucidates imprecise, interlinked storylines, revealing the family’s trauma. when presenting two narratives, considering emplotment is helpful. newdigate structured his pamphlet as a romance with archetypal characters (hero and villain), along with themes of family betrayal and honour, all of which would have resonated with older members of his early modern audience familiar with restoration political romances like percy herbert’s princess cloria. william reddy’s concept of ‘emotives’ is useful for analysing newdigate’s language: descriptions that reflected and reinforced his emotional state and could create change (people’s perceptions of the family and his children’s behaviour). indeed, as i pieced the children’s story together, it seemed to me like a mid-eighteenth- century novel’s plot, centring on motives for divulging or concealing their secret. this version highlights the limits of ‘emotives’ as a concept. examining the children’s emotions points to their resistance, but their emotions emerge through silences not ‘utterances’. the siblings’ actions need to be understood in terms of gendered social expectations and the lack of opportunity to resist patriarchal authority. the family adopted multiple strategies to protect their honour, from newdigate’s creation of a more respectable narrative to the children’s legal defences against a tyrannical father. using two narratives allows me to tease out the newdigates’ hidden story of collective suffering, which briefly became public before disappearing once more. newdigate’s story newdigate’s account book d refers to the family breakdown: ‘this begins at ladyday which contains the most uncomfortable part of my life’. the newdigates’ © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history troubles became widely known: ‘the by-ward of all taverns and coffee-houses about town’. gossip rekindled in november , despite the family settlement, when twenty-four-year-old juliana repeated ‘the infamy which was thrown upon [newdi- gate] in ’. publishing a defence was common in causes célèbres and an obvious response for newdigate (aged sixty-three), who had studied law, read avidly and penned bad verse. lawyers were also renowned for telling effective emotional stories. the father deployed archetypal imagery and pain descriptions to elicit sympathy and re- inforce his innocence. three themes framed his narrative of suffering: independent manhood, loving fatherhood and vulnerable old age. although a focus on old age served to buttress his contention that he could not be guilty, it potentially destabilised his claims to masculine honour. newdigate counterbalanced this with extensive ev- idence that he remained an independent man and good father, despite his children’s bad behaviour. his defence was self-serving, but it also may have been a strategy to protect the family by replacing insinuations of incest and insanity with the trope of a father-son property dispute. newdigate needed to persuade readers that he was an independent man. early modern credibility was attached to gender and status, with independent men exercising self-mastery at the apex of a hierarchy. not obligated to anyone politically or finan- cially, independent men were loyal to the monarch and possessed moral rectitude. good citizenship was key to newdigate’s claims of masculine honour. several expen- ditures listed in his pamphlet were for the country: defence funding in and , treating with freeholders of the county of warwick when he was a knight of the shire and digging up a local traitor’s armoury in . he even loaned the king money. the newdigate daughters’ accusations of incest made proving political loyalty essential. late-seventeenth-century cultural anxieties associated unnatural behaviours (like in- cest) with rebellion and illegitimate authority, whereas good citizenship corresponded to moral uprightness. newdigate’s loyalty was a counterpoint to his sons’ failures as independent men, whom he likened to and presented as in league with catholic traitors. for example, richard was ‘persuaded by his father-in-law and priests and jesuits’ to commit his father. his sons, newdigate complained, ‘took a hint from those traitors and enemys to the state’ and followed ‘the popish maxim, cast dirt enough and some of it will stick’. newdigate emphasised his sons’ ‘treachery’, ‘villainy’, ‘ruin’ or ‘persecution’ thirty-five times and used words of conquest or violence fifteen times (e.g. danger, shield, sword, seize). if a household was the foundation of the state, then traitorous sons were dangerous to society. newdigate thus established credibility by undercutting his sons’ integrity. newdigate also emphasised his capability for estate management in contrast to his sons. in , newdigate toured france – a trip seemingly taken out of curiosity. he had been corresponding (via his second-eldest son, john, aged twenty-seven) with a huguenot, the marquis de souligné, about his book the desolation of france ( ). while newdigate was away, he left john to manage the estate. john, however, fell into debauchery, neglected the estate and ‘shut up’ his brother gilbert (aged twenty-five), ‘ma[king] him stark mad’. called to account when his father returned home, john fell ill. newdigate and richard also regularly argued about property. in his pamphlet, newdigate maintained the main issue was richard’s ‘treacherous contrivance’ to have another £ annually. part of the problem may have been richard’s ambiguous status as an independent man. he married in but returned home in (aged © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences twenty-seven) when his wife died. newdigate’s estate expenses (like his ‘mighty coal- work’), moreover, seemed to squander his inheritance. the relationship was fractious by when newdigate complained about richard’s ‘cross grained letter’. the newdigate men fought constantly about estate management. tensions escalated on april . the house of lords petition has few details of the violent attack, while the lunacy investigation provides a formulaic description (derangement with periods of lucidity). newdigate claimed that he suffered from a fever and delirium in may . john and richard allegedly used this incapacity to have him committed, attempted to poison him and organised a humiliating capture by ruffians. gooder thinks the lunacy accusations were false. first, the charge was at odds with the daughters’ withdrawn petition to the house of lords, which presumed sanity. second, newdigate legally re-established his sanity. however, newdigate’s behaviour must have been concerning and well-evidenced over a longer term. at least one well-known physician, gideon harvey, participated in the inquiry. the lord chancellors who oversaw lunacy investigations, moreover, focused on protecting individuals, particularly when family members misused the proceedings. lunacy in- vestigations were intended to restore family order, to provide care to long-term lunatics and to ensure good property management. if the lunatic was cured, a committal could be overturned. for newdigate, it was a long process to re-assert control. his diary shows un- resolved legal issues until late . in july, for example, newdigate spoke to the lord keeper (sir nathan wright), who believed newdigate was sane. however, given the evidence, ‘he could do no lesse then he did’. richard remained estranged, the situation worsening by after both men remarried. richard began evicting tenants for unpaid rents, demanding his father take a new mortgage. worse yet, richard had ‘shut [amphillis] up as a mad woman’ to control her money. in , newdigate granted richard £ , annually to reduce ‘temptation to wish or contrive his father’s death’ and proposed dividing the land to spread out debts, ensuring that ‘this noble estate be preserv’d to the family’. newdigate legally regained power, but richard contested and subverted it through contrary estate management practices. masculinity and personal character were also visible on the men’s bodies, re- flecting a wider understanding that bodily deportment bared one’s soul. newdigate stressed his embodiment of age and rank throughout the pamphlet. there are sixteen references to him as a gentleman, while his actions revealed innate gentility: caring for his family, discovering a traitor, or building lucrative coal works. ‘old gentleman’ appeared six times in the appendix, with a linkage of age and status that implied he deserved respect. this contrasted with the prodigal john and reprobate richard. bad behaviour might be forgiven, but a father needed to decide when a son was irredeemable or dangerous. for newdigate, his son’s bodies offered clues. after the french trip, john’s remorse was discernible through his fever. john reconciled with newdigate in , apologising ‘with tears and great compunction’. richard also apologised, but ‘put all the slights and affronts’ on his father. richard’s true disposition surfaced after he was widowed. for example, richard advised his father to lease some land to avoid taxes, which newdigate rewarded with a prime lease. however, the account indicates that richard’s body betrayed ill intentions, as he ‘blush’d, and then lookt pale, which his father did not take much notice of then, but has since often thought thereof’. newdigate embodied masculine gentility, while his sons were untrustworthy men. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history newdigate framed fatherhood in terms of natural affection. ‘father’ was one of the most common nouns in the pamphlet, appearing fifty-nine times. twenty-seven words referred to family or love (e.g. family, estate, duty, affection, reconciliation). he also stressed the size of his family – fifteen children, ten surviving to adulthood – and his desire to treat them equitably. newdigate spared no expense in medical care, clothing, education and travel, even giving more to his children than inheritance? settlements required. paternal benevolence emerged elsewhere. newdigate welcomed the newly widowed richard home and remained an ‘indulgent father’ despite the children’s abandonment. he was even familiar with advice literature. alluding to his daughters’ petition (‘cruel severities and unreasonable usage and practices’), he used a curious phrase (‘by reasons of his unnatural and cruel usage’) that came from a section on parental duties in a popular advice book by william fleetwood. in the passage, fleetwood exhorted parents to treat one’s children patiently, not harshly. newdigate’s point was that a father possessed of such natural affection would surely not act unnaturally to his child. the family settlement promoted a continued relationship of paternal affection and filial duty. settlements, which used the language of natural affection, aimed to strengthen family unity by preventing property disputes. for the newdigates, the set- tlement might even reunite the fractured family: ‘for the reconcileing of all differences which have unhappily arisen . . . and to the end paternall affection & filiall obedi- ences may be continued’. newdigate gave the children considerable financial support. each unmarried daughter, for example, was to receive £ , through an annual al- lowance of £ (£ after ten years), with the remainder payable at marriage. the annual amount for the first decade was paltry, but if newdigate followed the pattern of his forebears, it would be paid – contrasting with the eldest son’s indebted estate. according to newdigate, the sum was more generous than his father allowed: £ s d each and ‘ farthings to have been divided among them’ if there was no son. but the settlement also required amphillis (thirty-three), jane (twenty-one), elizabeth (twenty) and juliana (nineteen) to move to the guardianship of their maternal uncle, sir william bagot, within ten days. despite the financial settlement, the family was broken. newdigate defended the family’s honour by preserving the children’s reputations and trying to reconcile their differences. from the pamphlet’s first page, newdigate portrayed himself as a forgiving protector, promising to ‘bury all in oblivion’ and ‘never vent any thing that might tend to the disrepute of his dear children’. given the importance of maintaining family honour, newdigate’s public statement may have been part of his family strategy. for example, he tried to hide any potential indications of familial madness by insisting that gilbert and amphillis had been falsely locked up by their brothers who wanted to control their money. newdigate also confirmed his daughters’ innocence. richard, he argued, was behind the petition to the house of lords. the four ‘poor innocent young women’ had not read the petition, believing it discussed finances. newdigate’s reference to fleetwood provided an opportunity to redefine what ‘cruel’ and ‘unnatural’ meant in the petition: unjust overreaching of his authority. definition was vital, as ‘unnatural’ in this period could denote sexual immorality, wickedness or excessive cruelty. newdigate thus reframed the petition to emphasise his daughters’ purity. of course, he also claimed that the house of lords believed in his innocence (because of his good record-keeping) and that – as a good © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences father – he took the blame on the advice of the archbishop of canterbury rather ‘than utterly to ruin the reputation of his said sons’ and, presumably, daughters. indexed in account book d is a ‘family scheme for the happinesse of it’, displaying newdigate’s perpetual hope of family reunification. his attempts to maintain family unity demonstrated his good fatherhood, while connecting his masculine honour and family honour. at the same time, newdigate drew on tropes about vulnerable old age to make clear that his sons were unnatural, not him. in , fifty-seven-year old newdigate was healthy, recently returned from his european travels. the children attacked their father’s independence when he was at a stage in life that he might expect family support – a common enough tale. although newdigate did not mention it, his pamphlet recalls king lear, with madness and troubled father-daughter relationships. nahum tate’s the history of king lear (with a happier ending and less incest than shakespeare’s version) was familiar to late seventeenth-century theatregoers, including newdigate who had inherited an extensive collection of playbooks. moreover, newdigate was religious. to illustrate the horror of his situation, he referred to the account given in genesis : - of how noah left the ark to plant a vineyard, but drank too much wine and was discovered naked by the disloyal ham, who told his brothers. this brazen indiscretion contrasted with the filial piety demonstrated by shem and japhet, who covered their father. indeed, newdigate’s children ‘were so far from imitating the blessed shem and japhet, viz. covering their father’s nakedness, that they outdid cursed ham’; they ‘pretended nakedness where there really was none’. thus newdigate’s imagery vividly exploited cultural anxieties about masculinity and ageing. his papers, though, suggest that he keenly felt the pains of old age and betrayal. his diary mentions gouty spells and a steady diet of pills until his death in , while his remarriage in to an eighteen-year-old woman (henrietta wigginton), the stereotypical ‘old man’s nurse’, points to a genuine dread of loneliness. at the start of account book d, newdigate included a latin epigram with english discussion about an old man who remarried: ‘but now grown feeble, & scarce like to live, i’ve got a helper, to who no help i give’. historian vivienne larminie connects the pamphlet’s publication to renewed family hostilities after newdigate’s marriage to henrietta. but newdigate’s cancelled will of signposts another reason: justify- ing the disinheritance of unkind children in favour of his second wife. newdigate, an ageing man, feared lost independence, helplessness and isolation. newdigate encouraged readers’ compassion by focusing on illness, which he characterised as the true cost of his sons’ actions. ageing and illness appear together fifteen times in the pamphlet’s second half, with most in his illness description (five) and the appendix (six). the fifteen-page pamphlet was structured around seven illnesses, which functioned as narrative transitions and character descriptions. the first bout was that of richard (thirty-one) and elizabeth (seventeen), which forced them to return from their french trip of . it marked the end of family unity, with newdigate, who continued his tour, finding himself separated geographically from all his children. the second and third illnesses occurred after his arrival home from his travels to find that john had mismanaged the estate, destroyed his own health and driven gilbert mad. the initial ailments reflected the beginnings of familial breakdown. the main account of illness was newdigate’s, comprising two middle pages. during newdigate’s fever and delirium of , john and richard had him committed. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history the removal of power during illness played on fears about vulnerability. newdigate defended himself ‘sword in hand for five hours’, a martial image evidently intended to nullify any intimation of weakened masculinity. the subsequent poisoning attempt inadvertently cured newdigate’s fever. when a hamper from warwickshire arrived, the footman ‘suspect[ed] the drink to be poison’d’. the poison caused newdigate to vomit, curing his fever. the poisoning underscored the insidiously treacherous nature of the sons’ attacks. as a crime, poisoning typically occurred in intimate relationships and directly attacked the domestic order; moreover, it was widely associated with womanly deceit. the final two illnesses – john’s death from smallpox ( ) and amphillis’s lunacy committal ( ) – represented the family’s dissolution. illnesses signified critical moments in the family’s history and contrasted newdigate’s manliness (even in illness) with his sons’ unmanly attacks. the repetition of ‘old sick gentleman’ evoked fears about helplessness and age- ing, specifically abuse by one’s family. newdigate’s rich language of suffering had dual physical and emotional meanings. richard was presented as a ‘peccant son’, a description signifying both sinfulness and disease: like a bad humour, he infected the family. newdigate used imagery of wounds and violence such as his ‘lacerated’ repu- tation and ‘injurious’ dealings with his children. words caused damage. he blamed richard and john for hastening old age by ruining his reputation and isolating him from his family. although sudden illness could shift green old age into decrepitude, newdigate was as concerned by his defencelessness as by physical indignities. for example, in the middle section, he paralleled his physical problems (‘sick’ twice, ‘un- healthy’ once) with his sense of being attacked: ‘persecuted’ twice and ‘afflicted’ once. the sons’ humiliation of him included his physical seizure by a ‘strong ruffian, who took him in his arms’ like a child. old age’s vulnerability was a type of suffering. by , newdigate was an ‘old sick gentlemen’, a description of age, masculin- ity and power. his family’s attempts to commit him and to accuse him of improprieties could have come from a play. while the accusation brought shame, being declared a lunatic removed legal authority over his estates and person. in a story drawing on wider concerns about age and masculinity, newdigate emerges as an old man bullied or abandoned by his children. this is important. as reddy argues, ‘emotives’ have tremendous shaping power – and one can derive authority from meeting society’s emotional ideals. newdigate’s emotional language provoked sympathy, while estab- lishing his reliability. the real suffering of old age was not physical, but emotional: abandonment or victimisation by one’s family. patriarchy had limits if adult sons col- luded to subvert it, like richard, ‘indefatigable in the persecution of his own father’. newdigate used this concern to re-establish his reputation – and to protect the family honour from the scandal of a ‘very lewd’ madman accused of ‘incontinency with his own daughters’. the pamphlet turned scandalous gossip into a common domestic tragedy by shifting attention to an ungrateful son and an old man. the children’s story although newdigate’s pamphlet is convincing, there is another way of telling the story. it begins with newdigate’s lack of manly self-mastery (whether profligacy, mental illness or abuse), which destabilised his patriarchal rights. in this version, the children’s desire to escape newdigate’s excessive control shaped their decisions to © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences commit their father on grounds of lunacy, petition the house of lords and accept the family settlement. their story is one of sibling cooperation to minimise the effects of a bad patriarch and reveals the profoundly gendered nature of their actions. while it was the patriarch’s prerogative to present his anger as righteous, his daughters had no recourse but to stifle their own, and his sons express theirs cautiously. the newdigate daughters depended on fraternal support, with richard as potentially their most helpful ally, his position as heir providing the surest bulwark against an unstable patriarch. the family records hint at secrets, dysfunction and illness, but any story drawing on them – like pain narratives – is challenging to tell, filled with gaps and incoherence. and yet the silence is the story. the family records suggest that such reticence was deliberate, reflecting a collective strategy adopted by the children. rumours faded from memory, and the children’s actions were erased from family documents. the family’s deliberate excision of their father’s version of family history was a powerful act, allowing them to control their story and to protect the daughters’ reputations. when framed by social expectations for gendered roles (male hierarchies and female vulnerability), the plot of the children’s story centres on trauma, mental illness, violence, incest and escape. their version evokes, for me, family secrets of later novels such as mansfield park ( ) or eleanora; or, a tragical but true case of incest in great-britain ( ). the newdigates’ difficulties in speaking publicly about their father’s behaviour also parallels the trial of the second earl of castlehaven, who was found guilty of raping and sodomising his wife and servant. the accusations were made by lord audley, his eldest son, who was concerned about disinheritance and claimed that castlehaven had encouraged a favoured servant to impregnate lady audley. during the trial, the earl, like newdigate, was empowered through male honour to proclaim his innocence freely. the countess, like the children, had limited leeway to question publicly a patriarch’s tyranny while upholding her own honour or that of the family. the castlehaven case may have been familiar to the newdigates, as both families had estates in harefield, middlesex. an effigy of the countess of derby and her three daughters – including the countess of castlehaven – is located in st mary church, alongside newdigate family monuments. family histories could be unsettling. the newdigate children’s story begins with disquieting undercurrents during the summer of . newdigate reported eight instances of his own anger between july and august, including being ‘violent angry’ on august. protestant diarists, like newdigate, focused on spiritual self-examination. he read spiritual literature, prayed daily and struggled with his temper. in early modern england, anger was con- sidered a choice that could be nurtured or ignored. moderate anger was acceptable – at least for patriarchs who had to oversee the behaviour and reputation of their fami- lies – but excessive anger was destructive. such emotions, then, needed to be carefully monitored. although only diary fragments remain, newdigate’s pocketbooks and account books noted grievances with workmen, tenants, servants and family members. newdigate could evidently be overbearing with his staff, but does not appear to have exceeded his patriarchal privilege; he rarely noted extreme anger in his dealings with them. in , he had good reason to be short-tempered. on july, soldiers searched his household, charged with disarming whig supporters after the rye house plot in june. despite reassuring newdigate that he was no traitor, captain lacy removed all weapons including a drum used to call everyone to meals. newdigate’s honour, © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history nonetheless, had been impugned and the removal of his armoury undermined his gen- tility and masculinity. his references to violent anger suggest extraordinary outbursts in response to such a loss of face. newdigate was a hard taskmaster who managed his children through a compli- cated system of monetary rewards and penalties. he rewarded six-year-old elizabeth for finding a document and three teenage daughters for attending family prayers, but he penalised bad behaviour. when quarrelling with elizabeth, he threatened to reduce her dowry by £ , . in , newdigate fined her for two shillings, blaming her carelessness when he broke a glass. gooder sees these instances as forgiving and for- getting, while hindle thinks that newdigate’s temper did not trouble the household. financial methods of managing children’s behaviour were common, being part of moral education. at the same time, such financial monitoring was a routine ele- ment of patriarchal power, even where it was delivered affectionately. on march , for example, newdigate unusually demanded that jane (twenty-one), elizabeth (twenty) and juliana (nineteen) sign allowance receipts, just as the settlement was being reached. an increased attempt to monitor their money might imply punishment for their role in the dispute, but it could also be interpreted as an attempt to remain in their lives. affection, patriarchal control and money were entwined, a constellation rendered more problematic by the addition of a father’s bad temper. family troubles and illnesses started after lady mary’s death in . twenty- three-year-old amphillis took over her mother’s place as mistress of the household. from , her signature appears on household expense receipts. two daughters’ deteriorating health signalled other problems. eighteen-year-old frances was treated for hysteria from february , which gooder attributes to lovesickness for an un- suitable man. after frances secretly married in july, she improved quickly, with no more treatments and only two physician visits ( july and september). she gave birth in november . amphillis became ill in and went to stay with her father’s sister, anne pole. the unspecified illness lasted from january to march, likely the first of many bouts of mental illness. the breaking point came after newdigate’s family project, the tour of france. after a few weeks, richard (thirty-one), elizabeth (seventeen) and a servant became ‘extremely sick’. they returned to england while newdigate continued to the united provinces. perhaps the illnesses overlaid a family dispute, offering an excuse for richard and elizabeth to return home, although newdigate’s travel journal portrays a harmonious trip. besides noting that his ‘dear son dick’ had been ‘waiting for my arrival’ before the trip, newdigate depicted the family as a bulwark against foreign dangers. one sunday entry, for example, reported that the day was ‘miserably spent in this popish country. yet prayed & read a sermon to my small family’. but there were later strains, with the trip interrupted by ill health. the newdigates occasionally disagreed over what to see, or when and how far to travel. on august, newdigate visited the churches of évreux in ‘complaisance to [his] dear children’, but he criticised them for travelling too far that week. the day of august was ‘spent in too much altercation’. the following day, the children departed montreuil in the rain against newdigate’s advice. he smugly described their coach sticking in mud, a servant taking ill in the wet, and elizabeth falling into a watery ditch. his pamphlet indicates other tensions. for example, before embarkation richard ‘grew timorous, and express’d a great aversion’; during the trip he was ‘really uninquisitive’. there were ‘unhappy © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences differences between a father, and a son and daughter of his’, resolved by early ‘through the mediation of friends . . . at least seemingly’. however, as is apparent, the family splintered and a parallel decline of bodily and family estates began. the family’s health was poor. at the family settlement, gilbert and amphillis were mentally incapacitated and john recently ill. by , frances, anne, elizabeth, john and newdigate had died, while amphillis and gilbert had been declared lunatics. although it is unclear whether the newdigates’ mental illness was a cause or result of their wider difficulties, both mental illness and sexual abuse can cause familial health problems, including aggression, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. long- term caregiving roles, particularly of parents, can also result in family disputes, anxiety and depression. considering the number of illnesses and the family’s relatively short lifespans, it is evident the newdigates were suffering. the cause of their pain might be found in the children’s motives for accusing their father of lunacy and abominable behaviour. as families generally kept their problems private, the newdigates’ willingness to take public legal action suggests their desperation. whatever happened on april compelled richard and john to launch a lunacy inquisition. newdigate’s financial problems did not help. his ledgers show a man who accounted for everything, including emotions, but failed to keep good accounts. money concerns continued after the settlement, which the children pursued in court to enforce. after newdigate’s death, richard inherited about £ , in debts, suggesting his sons were perhaps right to worry. newdigate occasionally recorded that he could not recall paying debts or being paid, yet he also schemed ‘where & how to get mony as it occurs’ ( ) or ‘how to pay debts anno & which respite’. he justified his financial difficulties by shifting blame, as when he complained about the ‘treachery’ of the coal pit manager who allowed the deepest and most productive mines to flood. emotions figured prominently in newdigate’s accounts, in which money was associated with anger or happiness. during the dispute of – , richard (aged thirty-four) questioned his father’s management of the portion from his first marriage. newdigate refused to give him more money: ‘since my death hath been so much desired, i will part wth no reversions. if my son returns to his duty & filiall affection, i design him £ per annum: since i wrote this my son rn has been so base to me that now i will have the portion’. the accounts specified that the portion was tied up in the estate and that richard, being difficult, would not receive any more. the explicit place of emotions was similarly evident in newdigate’s indexing of his scheme for family happiness and how to make peace with richard, but noted his ‘daughters / their unkindnesse to me’ and the continuance of richard’s ‘devillish humour’. although he did not go into details regarding his children’s unkindness, it may have been linked to an ongoing dispute about amphillis’ care. in , rather than paying amphillis’ settlement, he argued that she owed him for her long-term education and maintenance, noting that her over-thinking ‘hath almost continually obstructed her health, as well as hinder’d her preferment in marriage’. this measure was particularly punitive, since education and maintenance were considered parental duties. given that men typically reinforced their paternal authority through economic provisioning, newdigate’s withdrawal of support seems to have been a rejection of family bonds. even so, he insisted on his generosity to his daughters; ‘what their grandfather intended for them if i had had no son’ was substantially less than his own © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history settlement. overall, it appears he kept better emotional tallies than financial ones – but then using controlled anger to rebuke the children was part of patriarchal privilege and duty. although emotionally manipulative and a poor estate manager, neither defect equated to lunacy at a time when gentry and noble families were typically in debt. conspicuous consumption was part of displaying one’s status. as newdigate regained control of his estates, the court obviously agreed that debt was insufficient to undermine patriarchal authority. while the tenuous character of the allegation brought by the sons raises the ques- tion of why they might try to have their father committed, it is the daughters’ petition before the house of lords in february / that intimates the reason: sir richard sexually assaulted elizabeth. newdigate described the accusations of being ‘very lewd’ and demonstrating ‘incontinency’ with his daughters as ‘abominable, malicious, false allegations’. intriguingly, newdigate mentioned ‘daughters’, although the suit only referred to elizabeth. the settlement also expressed the importance of removing the daughters from their father’s physical presence, suggesting that the incontinency was of longer duration, not one violent moment with one daughter. if newdigate was sexually abusing his daughters, the family strategy of a two-pronged legal attack makes sense. success in the lunacy inquisition would protect the family assets and offer dis- cretion for the daughters’ reputations while ensuring that amphillis, elizabeth, juliana and jane were out of his control. perhaps the daughters realised the committal was doomed to failure and petitioned the house of lords out of desperation. successful prosecutions for child sexual abuse were few and far between, espe- cially with older children. although families are the primary locus for sexual abuse, it is rare for historians to uncover clear evidence of instances. and yet, early modern people recognised its possibility. they identified two categories of rapists: everyman (typical) and monster (excessively brutal). if rape resulted from misunderstandings or being overtaken by lust, then every man – except boys and old men – was a potential rapist. rapists of children were considered particularly lewd and immoral. the line between good and bad patriarchy was also easily crossed. abusers were unfit household heads, but complaining publicly went against social order, raising ques- tions about the limits of obedience. prosecution of an elite father could be easily thwarted, as it was difficult to reconcile the image of a publicly respectable man with a domestically abusive one. newdigate’s descriptions of age, honour and fatherhood, for example, constructed him as ‘not a rapist’. when cases went to court, even children were revictimised. publicity, for one, damaged older girls’ reputations and marriageability. it was easier for (male) per- petrators to redeem reputations than it was for (female) victims. charlotte guyard, who accused her father of incest in eighteenth-century germany, ended up in jail while he went free – albeit with a tarnished reputation. although executed, the earl of castlehaven vigorously proclaimed his innocence, while the countess’ honour was damaged by her in-laws’ accusations and her mother’s lack of support. focusing on estate management, by contrast, offered more decorous means for holding a bad patriarch to account. financial records could also support allegations of misman- agement, whereas proving ‘unreasonable usage’ of the daughters was difficult. while the attempt to have newdigate committed was risky, the children might remove his power over them while retaining family honour. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences no document definitively proves long-term sexual abuse, but there is circum- stantial evidence, including ill health. the nature of amphillis’ illnesses from was not specified, though she was committed as a lunatic to the care of her sister frances in . her condition deteriorated in , with five physicians listed for payment on july. gooder links amphillis’ breakdown to newdigate’s remarriage in august , speculating that amphillis, an unmarried woman in her thirties, was troubled by losing her role as household mistress. not only was eighteen-year-old henrietta young enough to be amphillis’ sister, but newdigate had her pretend to be his daughter while they lived together in london. the new couple married and lived publicly together at arbury, but when they returned to london in november, newdi- gate inexplicably claimed it was inconvenient to have the marriage known. instead, he took lodgings and henrietta returned to her mother’s house. newdigate told his landlady that henrietta, a regular overnight visitor, was his daughter. newdigate only acknowledged the marriage in after henrietta and her family sued him in the court of arches. the scandalous marriage and amphillis’ subsequent illness point to a troubling interpretation. one might wonder whether amphillis’ illness was triggered by sexual abuse by her father after she had assumed the role of household mistress. elizabeth’s health further suggests long-term abuse. from to , she was treated for possible venereal symptoms: a whitish vaginal discharge and a weak back. in children’s sexual assault cases, such symptoms were considered decisive evidence of an assault. the physical symptoms, combined with elizabeth’s genteel, unmarried status, offer grounds for suspicion. the witnesses who would have appeared before the house of lords were inti- mately familiar with the family. three of these were entrenched within the household: obadiah key, steward and gentleman; james nash, clerk and chaplain at arbury; and mary eburne, widow and nurse. nash, as clergyman, was responsible for treating troubled souls, while eburne, their long-term nurse, would have been a trusted mother- figure. the steward, key, was familiar with the family’s daily life. key and nash – well-educated men of the gentry – were reliable witnesses, while eburne’s proximity to the children made her testimony valuable. the daughters’ suffering was written on their bodies, but they required the testimony of others to give voice to and corroborate their questioning of newdigate’s fitness as a patriarch. the daughters’ elopements provide the final piece of circumstantial evidence. although the daughters moved from the control of one man to another, it was at least to relationships they chose. unmarried daughters had few options for leaving. frances – the second eldest daughter – eloped with sir charles sedley in . newdigate was so angry that sedley’s father intervened, agreeing that the newlyweds should have ‘wayted for our consent’, but he had forgiven his son and would ‘make the yonge couple easy’. according to a page torn from the family bible, elizabeth ‘married herself’ in , as did juliana in . just as running away is a common adolescent response to abuse today, the series of newdigate elopements may have served a similar purpose. frances’s elopement might have enabled escape from an untenable situation, while for elizabeth and juliana it offered an opportunity to exert control over their own lives. although the pattern of illnesses and behaviour among the daughters cannot be conclusive, it suggests deep family problems and highlights the limited remedies available to abused daughters. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history figure : cr v , fols. - (back index), with permis- sion of the warwickshire county records office. [colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] ill health, however, made disputes observable by providing the newdigates with opportunities for self-determination. illness enabled resistance to patriarchal authority. john’s fever occurred when he was supposed to have a difficult conversation about money. during the french tour, richard’s and elizabeth’s opportune illnesses afforded escape from a trip that (apparently on richard’s end) was unwanted. amphillis’ need for constant supervision meant that she escaped the control of her father (and other male relatives) by staying with aunt pole or frances. ill health even supplied elizabeth with a fashionable physician to intervene on her behalf when needed. in , elizabeth used her poor health to marry abraham meure, a huguenot schoolmaster whom the family thought was a fortune hunter. in a letter to dr hans sloane in she complained that her siblings refused to believe that she was ill and denied her the chance to love as she chose. their unkindness caused ‘the destruction of my health if not the loss of life’. elizabeth thanked sloane for intervening with her family. significantly, she saw her siblings as valued arbiters of her life, in spite of being placed in her uncle’s guardianship. indeed, the family continued to see itself as a unit, even if at odds. illness pointed to the family’s stress-points, but also provided the children with space for defiance or autonomy. despite dysfunction, there are vestiges of the siblings’ strategy to conceal the dispute. the story’s most telling elements are absent: lunacy accusations without details and a house of lords hearing that never happened. newdigate’s diaries are also piecemeal, though that was not necessarily deliberate, as paper was re-used domestically. more noteworthy is the intentional damage to the family account book – compromising the careful itemisation of financial transactions that might be needed in the future. at some point, someone evidently tried to conceal what happened. as deborah cohen has argued in her book family secrets, secrets are sustained as much by talk as by silence, which leaves traces in the record. and the record, even as an object, is never neutral. as an object, it becomes another type of text – one communicating its creator’s emotions and eliciting or inflecting users’ emotional responses. by excising family documents to erase uncomfortable secrets, the newdigates pointed directly to them. where the indices in newdigate’s account books note that further details of the dispute were to follow, crucial parts have disappeared. for example, newdigate indexed a letter (no. ) discussing his daughters’ unkindness, a document now not to be found in the archives – leaving the nature of their unkindness unknown. an index entry for ‘daughters of mine’ has one or two words sliced out (figure ). the page listed as ‘w[ha]t i have to say to [richard]’ © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences figure : a marginal note further alludes to the lunacy inquisition. its placement suggests that it was part of a longer section, but it is also incomplete owing to the excision. cr v , p. , with permission of the warwickshire county records office. [colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] has been removed from the book altogether (figure ). in the back index, the ‘lunacy imputed discharge of’ refers to page – a page now giving regular accounts and no mention of lunacy. tantalisingly, a large section of the page, which presumably had discussed the lunacy, has been removed (figure ). gooder does not mention these careful redactions and concealments, although she thinks that newdigate tried to keep his accounts from close examination. yet it makes little sense for him to cut out these sections; if anything, newdigate’s emotional accounting stood as an admonishment to his heirs, while references to lewdness and incontinency came from his own pamphlet. richard, however, had much to gain. key sections relating to the dispute – specifically pertaining to richard and property – remain. significantly, the missing parts refer to the daughters and the accusation of lunacy. it was in the family’s interest, for the daughters and for posterity, to obscure the specifics. the intention was not to erase the whole dispute, just parts of it. the damage left a message for future readers. to early modern readers, texts and their material components were forms of embodiment with interpretative possibilities. ‘emotional debris’, such as torn pages, shaky handwriting or ink blots (intentional or not), were a recognised vocabulary. ink could be considered a hu- moral transmission. paper was skin-like, whether the actual skin of parchment or the second-skin of clothes in rag paper. the act of writing was violent, from cut- ting quills with penknives to scratching letters onto parchment. within this context, readers responded unconsciously to the object’s materiality – and its bodily parallels – beyond the text. ‘suture’ occurs when the text and material (or damage) correspond. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history in the newdigates’ case, their father wrote in his quite-literal ‘account book’, which contained the financial and emotional details of his quite-literal estate. newdigate’s relics could be experienced as an aggressive act forcing the reader to engage with his story, bridging the temporal and spatial gap between author’s and reader’s bodies. but excising the text was a violent act against an object representing newdigate. signifi- cantly, by leaving index descriptions as pointers to what had been removed, his version of events was effectively silenced, albeit, perhaps tellingly, not erased. for modern readers, suture makes visible on the excised pages the co-existence of broken family relationships, the family’s trauma and the daughters’ (potentially) wounded bodies. just as early modern cures involved the expression of bad humours or the removal of an infected part, so the newdigates’ suffering was unspoken, with the possibility of the most damaging remnants of the disease being removed to protect the family. the children’s story materialises through the attack on newdigate’s virtual body and silencing of his voice. conclusion the newdigate case is about a family’s trauma. their disputes and poor physical and mental health expose the collective pain shaping their lives. their suffering and attempts to gain autonomy were also gendered. the sons confronted their father directly about his mental capacity to control their estates and were credible enough to be initially successful. the daughters had fewer options – such as escaping by marriage or staying with a relative – and depended on the support of others. their attempts at legal recourse were precarious. despite the children’s initial willingness to speak publicly, it was their father’s story that survived. silence, however, was not about powerlessness. it was a strategy that enabled the children to protect family members, reshape their history and limit their father’s account. in a patriarchal world that valued family honour, illness and silence allowed resistance to authority, especially when dealing with an unstable head of household. although there were legal methods of removing a father’s control, these actions were likely to fail or call the family’s honour into disrepute, as the newdigate children found. the family settlement allowed the children to escape, but the act of obscuring the details enabled them to reclaim their story and their honour. less clear is the cause of family trauma: violent attack, sexual abuse, mental illness – or a combination? while newdigate’s (masculine) account is compelling and easily supported by textual evidence, the children’s (mostly feminine) version is fragmentary. whatever the truth, the case permits the historian to study long-term emotional and physical effects of trauma on a family. the newdigate case is not a straightforward one of abuser and victims. the accounts overlap to show a family in pain and collaboration to protect their collective honour. both versions reveal, too, how gender and status shaped the experience of suffering, from the unmarried daughters’ struggles to express (or escape) their pains to the father’s fears of old age diminishing his patriarchal privilege. to understand the nature of the newdigates’ trauma, i have read their case like a pain narrative – attending as much to what was unwritten as written. shifting the focus from the illness-experience of an individual to examine the family raises new questions about relationships, family health and gender in daily life. for example, reading newdigate’s pamphlet only as his illness narrative would overlook the effects © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences of his actions or mental illness on the whole family. it is common for historians to pri- oritise detailed accounts like newdigate’s over fragmentary, circumstantial evidence. but trauma is intrinsically slippery, perhaps only visible through a family’s illnesses, and we miss opportunities to uncover it when we ignore silence’s interpretive pos- sibilities. reconstructing the newdigates’ trauma affirms their experience of sexual abuse or mental illness and witnesses their unrecorded choices made within patriarchal structures. the posterity of written documents may belong to the privileged, but the silence of the marginalised is not necessarily oppression. sometimes, the act of silence is the strongest form of resistance. acknowledgements thank you to audiences at the universities of bath, birkbeck, durham and edinburgh for their questions. i appreciate deeply the comments and advice offered by joanna bourke, rosemary cresswell, amanda flather, tracey loughran, rachel rich, alison rowlands, alicia spencer-hall, keith wailoo, whitney wood and the anonymous referees. the project was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and the university of essex. notes . warwickshire county records office (wcro) cr /b , leaf from bible. . wcro cr /b , notes from a journal of sir richard newdigate, ff. a-f. . eileen gooder, the squire of arbury: sir richard newdigate second baronet ( – ) and his family (coventry: coventry branch of the historical association, ), p. ; lady newdigate-newdegate, cavalier and puritan in the days of the stuarts (london: south, elder & co., ), p. . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – , – , – . . wcro cr / , note on ‘case of uncle gill’s affairs’ that gilbert ‘was in a state of lunacy at the time of rn entering into those articles’ until his death. the national archives, london (tna) c / /n , amphillis newdigate, commission and inquisition of lunacy, june . . sir richard newdigate, the case of an old gentleman, persecuted by his own son (london, ), p. . . tna c / /n , sir richard newdigate, commission and inquisition of lunacy, may ; par- liamentary archives, london, miscellaneous papers and petitions to the house of lords, pet/ / , february . . to bear witness to trauma makes it possible, even necessary, for us to take action in the present. sue tait, ‘bearing witness, journalism and moral responsibility’, media, culture & society ( ), pp. – (especially pp. , ). . lisa wynne smith, ‘“an account of an unaccountable distemper”: the experience of pain in early eighteenth-century england and france’, eighteenth-century studies ( ), pp. – . . paul lloyd, food and identity in england, – (london: bloomsbury, ); steve hindle, ‘self- image and public image in the career of a jacobean magistrate: sir john newdigate in the court of star chamber’, in michael braddick and phil worthington (eds), popular culture and political agency in early modern england and ireland (london: boydell and brewer, ), pp. – ; vivienne larminie, wealth, kinship and culture: the seventeenth-century newdigates of arbury and their world (london: royal historical society, ). . steve hindle, ‘below stairs at arbury hall: sir richard newdigate and his household staff, c. – ’, historical research ( ), pp. – ; peter edwards, ‘horses and elite identity in early modern england: the case of sir richard ii of arbury hall, warwickshire ( – )’, in pia cuneo (ed.), animals and early modern identity (farnham: ashgate, ), pp. – , p. . . newdigate-newdegate, cavalier and puritan, pp. , – . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . joanne bailey, ‘paternal power: the pleasures and perils of “indulgent” fathering in britain in the long eighteenth century’, the history of the family ( ), pp. – . © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history . joanne bailey, ‘“a very sensible man”: imagining fatherhood in england, – ”, history ( ), pp. – , especially p. ; elizabeth foyster, ‘parenting was for life, not just for childhood: the role of parents in the married lives of their children in early modern england’, history ( ), pp. – , especially p. . . sherrin marshall, ‘dutifull love and natural affection: parent-child relationships in the early modern netherlands’, in james collins and karen taylor (eds), early modern europe: issues and interpretations (oxford: blackwell, ), pp. – ; katie barclay, ‘illicit intimacies: the imagined “homes” of gilbert innes of stow and his mistresses ( – )’, gender & history ( ), pp. – . . katie barclay, ‘natural affection, children and family inheritance practices in the long eighteenth century’, in elizabeth ewan and janey nugent (eds), children and youth in medieval and early modern scotland (london: boydell and brewer, ), pp. – , pp. – . . garthine walker, ‘imagining the unimaginable: parricide in early modern england and wales, c. –c. ’, journal of family history ( ), pp. – . . susan broomhall, ‘emotions in the household’, in susan broomhall (ed.), emotions in the household, – (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, ), pp. – , p. . . elaine scarry, the body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world (new york: oxford university press, ), pp. – . for examples: tomas macsotay, cornelis van der haven and karel vanhaese- brouck (eds), the hurt(ful) body: performing and beholding pain, – (manchester: manchester university press, ); joanna bourke, the story of pain: from prayer to painkillers (oxford: oxford university press, ); javier moscoso, pain: a cultural history (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, ); jan frans van dijkhuizen and karl a.e. enenkel, (eds), the sense of suffering: constructions of physical pain in early modern culture (leiden: brill, ); lisa silverman, tortured subjects: pain, truth and the body in early modern france (chicago: university of chicago press, ). . for examples: natalie zemon davis, the return of martin guerre (cambridge, mass.: harvard univer- sity press, ); carlo ginzburg, clues, myths and the historical method, trans. j. and a. tedeschi, (baltimore: the johns hopkins press, ). . lucy delap, ‘“disgusting details which are best forgotten”: disclosures of child sexual abuse in twentieth-century britain’, journal of british studies ( ), pp. – . . shoshana felman and dori laub, testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history (london: routledge, ), pp. – . . bessel van de kolk and onno van der hart, ‘the intrusive past: the flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma’, repr. in cathy caruth (ed.) trauma: explorations in memory (baltimore: johns hopkins university, ), pp. – , pp. – . . vincent felitti and robert anda, ‘the relationship of adverse childhood experiences to adult medical disease, psychiatric disorders and sexual behaviour: implications for health care’, in ruth lanius, eri vermetten and clare pain (eds), the impact of early life trauma on health and disease (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – . . cathy caruth, unclaimed experience: trauma narrative and history (baltimore: johns hopkins univer- sity press, ), p. ; van de kolk and van der hart, ‘intrusive past’, pp. – . . toni vaughn heineman, the abused child: psychodynamic understanding and treatment (new york: guilford press, ), p. . . jane parpart, ‘choosing silence: rethinking voice, agency and women’s empowerment’, in róisı́n ryan-flood and rosalind gill (eds), secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections (london and new york: routledge, ), pp. – . see also mark smith on the resistance of enslaved people through silence and silencing, listening to nineteenth-century america (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ), pp. – . . koen vermeir and dániel margócsy, ‘states of secrecy: an introduction’, british journal for the his- tory of science ( ), pp. – , especially pp. – ; koen vermeir, ‘openness versus se- crecy? historical and historiographical remarks’, british journal for the history of science ( ), pp. – , especially p. . . dominick lacapra, ‘trauma, absence, loss’, critical inquiry ( ), pp. – . . katie barclay, ‘narrative, law and emotion: husband killers in early nineteenth-century ireland’, the journal of legal history ( ), pp. – ; fathali moghadden, t. cairnie, d. rothbart, et al., ‘recent advances in positioning theory’, theory and psychology ( ), pp. – . . hayden white, metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe (baltimore and london: johns hopkins university press, ), pp. – . . newdigate and his peers would have been in their twenties when these stories were popular. amelia zurcher, seventeenth-century english romance: allegory, ethics, and politics (houndmills: palgrave macmillan, ), especially pp. – and – on political meanings and hierarchy in cloria. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences . william reddy, the navigation of feeling (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – . . reddy, navigation., p. ; broomhall, ‘emotions’, p. ; rob boddice, ‘the history of emotions: past, present, future’, revisita de estudios sociales (online) ( ), http://journals.openedition. org/revestudsoc/ , paragraph . . family strategy is often used loosely, but here means a way of protecting the family and its lineage. pier paola viazza and katherine lynch, ‘anthropology, family history, and the concept of strategy’, international journal of social history ( ), pp. – . . wcro cr /v account book “d”, p. . . newdigate, case, p. . . newdigate’s diaries mention reading. the pocketbook includes verse: wcro cr /a , ff. r, r. on law: gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . on another case of incest: mary lindemann, ‘aufklärung, literature, and fatherly love: an eighteenth-century case of incest’, in david luebke and mary lindemann (eds), mixed matches: transgressive unions in germany from the reformation to the enlightenment (new york: berghahn, ), pp. – . . reddy, navigation, pp. , . . this was also a common tactic for sick, old men writing early modern petitions. olivia weisser, ill composed: sickness, gender, and belief in early modern england (new haven: yale university press, ), p. . . r.w. connell, masculinities (oxford: polity press, ), pp. – ; alexandra shepard, the meanings of manhood in early modern england (oxford: oxford university press, ), pp. , ; matthew mccormack, the independent man: citizenship and gender politics in georgian england (manchester: manchester university press, ), pp. – . . newdigate, case, pp. , ; gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . ellen pollack, incest and the english novel, – (baltimore and london: johns hopkins university press, ), pp. – , , n. . . newdigate, case, pp. , . . newdigate, case, p. . . susan dwyer amussen, an ordered society: gender and class in early modern england (new york: columbia university press, ), pp. – . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. ; david agnew, protestant exiles from france in the reign of louis xiv, vol. (london: reeves & turner, ), pp. – . . newdigate, case, p. . this was probably informal, as there is no legal trace. . newdigate, case, p. . . gooder, the squire of arburye, pp. – , – ; newdigate, case, pp. – . . wcro cr /b c, fragments of a journal of sir richard newdigate, – , june . . c / /n ; james moran, madness on trial: a transatlantic history of english civil law and lunacy (manchester: manchester university press, ), p. . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . february and march , journal of the house of lords, ( – ), pp. , , in british history online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords- jrnl/vol /pp - and https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol /pp - . . both younger and elder harveys had royal support. patrick wallis, ‘harvey, gideon ( / - ) and ( – )’, oxford dictionary of national biography (odnb), https://doi.org/ . /ref:odnb/ . . moran, madness, pp. – . . cr /b b, july ; robert frankle, ‘wright, sir nathan ( – ), lawyer’, odnb, https://doi.org/ . /ref:odnb/ . . newdigate, case, p. . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . silverman, tortured subjects, p. . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . nicola phillips, ‘parenting the profligate son: masculinity, gentility and juvenile delinquency in england, – ’, gender & history ( ), pp. – . . newdigate, case, p. . john settled financially (see cr /b f, december ). . newdigate, case, p. . . newdigate’s pocketbook includes paying mr banister to teach dick and mall ( october) and buying mall a petticoat ( november) and dick a black hat (n.d.). cr /a , ff. v, r, r; newdigate, case, pp. – . © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history . newdigate, case, pp. – . . newdigate, case, p. ; pet/ / , february ; william fleetwood, the relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants (london, ), p. . the estc lists seven editions between and . . katie barclay, ‘natural affection, the patriarchal family and the strict settlement debate: a response from the history of emotions’, the eighteenth century ( ), pp. – . . cr / , copy of the articles of agreement, march / . . equivalent to . years of a skilled tradesman’s salary (source: http://www.national archives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ [accessed february ]). vivienne larminie, ‘settlement and sentiment: inheritance and personal relationships among two midland gentry families in the seven- teenth century’, midland history ( ), pp. – , p. . . cr /v , , p. . . cr / . . foyster, ‘parenting’, pp. – . . newdigate, case, pp. , ; roy porter, ‘madness and its institutions’, in andrew wear (ed.), medicine in society: historical essays (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – , especially p. . . newdigate, case, p. . . fleetwood, relative duties, p. . . ‘unnatural, adj. and n.’ oed online, https://www.oed.com/view/entry/ . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . cr /v , back index, p. . . philip collington, ‘sans wife: sexual anxiety and the old man in shakespeare’s plays’, pp. – in erin campbell (ed.), growing old in early modern europe: cultural representations (aldershot: ashgate, ), pp. – . . blago blagoev, ‘two manuscript comments by early readers in the works of john marston ( )’, early theatre ( ), pp. – ; graham holderness and naomi carter, ‘the king’s two bodies: history, text and genre in king lear’, english ( ), pp. – ; zenón luis-martı́nez, in words and deeds: the spectacle of incest in english renaissance tragedy (amsterdam and new york: rodopi, ), p. . the estc lists three tate editions ( , , ). . wcro cr /a sir richard newdigate’s pocketbook, with prayers and moral duties, ca. – . quotations from newdigate, case, p. . there are several prayer references in his diaries. . vivienne larminie, ‘newdigate, sir richard, second baronet ( – ), landowner and mining en- trepreneur’, odnb, https://doi.org/ . /ref:odnb/ . . november and may : cr /b e, l; collington, ‘sans wife’, pp. – . . epigram from thomas bastard, with newdigate’s explanation. cr /v , f. ; anthony à wood, athenae oxonienses, vol. (london, ), no. , p. ; robert vilvain, enchiridium epigrammatum latino-anglicum (london, ), p. . . larminie, ‘newdigate’. . wcro cr /c - , unnumbered folios. . newdigate, case, p. – , – , , – . ‘old’ is in the title. . newdigate, case, p. . . newdigate, case, p. . . newdigate, case, p. . . garthine walker, crime, gender and social order in early modern england (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. ; randall martin, women, murder, and equity in early modern england (new york and london: routledge, ), p. . . smith, ‘unaccountable distemper’, pp. – , . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . lynn botelho, ‘old age and menopause in rural women of early modern suffolk’, pp. – in lynn botelho and pat thane (eds) women and ageing in british society since (london: routledge, ), p. . . newdigate, case, pp. – . persecuted’ is in the title. . reddy, navigation, p. . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. , – . © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences . linda pollock, ‘rethinking patriarchy and the family in seventeenth-century england’, journal of family history ( ), pp. – (especially , , , ); see also pollock ‘anger and the negotiation of relationships in early modern england’, the historical journal ( ), pp. – (especially p. ). . pollack discusses both (see incest, chapters and ). . cynthia herrup, ‘the patriarch at home: the trial of the nd earl of castlehaven for rape and sodomy’, history workshop journal ( ), pp. – ; see also herrup, ‘“to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon”: gender and honour in the castlehaven story’, transactions of the royal historical society ( ), pp. – . . a history of the county of middlesex, vol. (london: victoria county history, ), pp. – (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol /pp - ); an inventory of the historical monuments in middlesex (london, ), pp. – (https://www/british-history.ac.uk/rchme/middx/pp - ). . tom webster, ‘writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality’, the historical journal ( ), pp. – . . pollock, ‘anger and the negotiation of relationships’, pp. , , , . . hindle, ‘below stairs’, p. . . cr /b a-f for excerpts. . newdigate’s system was similar for servants (see hindle, ‘below stairs’, pp. – ). . hindle, ‘below stairs’, p. ; gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . bailey, ‘a very sensible man’, p. ; phillips, ‘parenting the profligate son’, p. . . barclay, ‘illicit intimacies’, pp. – . . cr /v , pp. , . . gooder found evidence of amphillis taking over (the squire of arbury, pp. – ), contrary to hindle (‘below stairs’, p. ). . her husband was the illegitimate son of a libertine. wcro cr /b , sir charles sedley to sir richard newdigate, n.d. (july ?); gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . newdigate, case, pp. – . . wcro cr /b , journal of sir richard newdigate ( – ), july , f. er. . journal of sir richard newdigate, august , f. gr. . journal of sir richard newdigate, ff. b-d, g. . journal of sir richard newdigate, f. bv. . newdigate, case, p. . newdigate, case, p. . . cr / . neither gilbert nor amphillis signed. . lynn sacco, unspeakable: father-daughter incest in american history (baltimore: johns hopkins uni- versity press, ), p. ; kathleen kendall-tackett, linda meyer williams and david finkelhor, ‘impact of sexual abuse on children: a review and synthesis of recent empirical studies’, psychological bul- letin ( ), pp. – , pp. – , – ; kim mueser, lisa goodman, susan trumbetta, et al. ‘trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder in severe mental illness’, journal of consulting and clinical psychology ( ), pp. – , especially p. . . summer sherburne hawkins and sharon manne, ‘family support in the aftermath of trauma’, in don catherall (ed.), handbook of stress, trauma and the family (new york: brunner-routledge, ), pp. – , especially pp. – ; lisa wynne smith, ‘reassessing the role of the family: women’s medical care in eighteenth-century england’, social history of medicine ( ), pp. – , es- pecially pp. – ; dorothy porter and roy porter, patient’s progress: doctors and doctoring in eighteenth-century england (cambridge: polity press, ), pp. – . . pollock, ‘rethinking patriarchy’, p. . . c / /n . . tna c / / , newdigate v newdigate, june . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . . cr /v , pp. , , . . cr /v , pp. , . . cr /v , p. . . cr /v , back index, pp. , , . . tna c / / , newdigate v newdigate, . . barclay, ‘illicit intimacies’, pp. – . the only time gilbert innes withdrew financial support for any of his dependents was when a mistress stopped providing sexual services. © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd gender & history . cr /v , index, p. . he revisits this in his answer to amphillis’ petition: tna c / / , newdigate v newdigate, . . pollock, ‘anger and the negotiation of relationships’, pp. , . . lawrence stone, the crisis of the aristocracy, – (oxford: clarendon press, ), pp. – . . newdigate, case, pp. , , – . newdigate claimed this took place in july , which is contradicted by the house of lords: pet/ / , february . . sarah toulalan, ‘child sexual abuse in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century london: rape, sexual assault and the denial of agency’, in nigel goose and katrina honeyman (eds), childhood and child labour in industrial england: diversity and agency, – (farnham: ashgate, ), pp. – . . martin ingram, ‘child sexual abuse in early modern england’, in michael braddick and john walter (eds), negotiating power in early modern society: order, hierarchy and subordination in britain and ireland (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – ; sarah toulalan, ‘“is he a licentious lewd sort of a person?” constructing the child rapist in early modern england’, journal of the history of sex ( ), pp. – , especially p. ; toulalan, ‘child sexual abuse’, pp. – . . garthine walker, ‘everyman or a monster?: the rapist in early modern england, c. – ’, history workshop journal ( ), pp. – . . toulalan, ‘lewd sort of a person’, p. . . herrup, ‘the patriarch at home’, pp. , ; lindemann, ‘aufklärung’; sacco, unspeakable, p. . . herrup, ‘the patriarch at home’, p. . . toulalan, ‘child sexual abuse’, pp. – , – . . herrup, ‘to pluck bright honour’, pp. , – ; sacco, unspeakable, p. ; lindemann, ‘aufklärung’, p. . . natalie zemon davis, fiction in the archives: pardon tales and the tellers in sixteenth-century france (stanford: stanford university press, ). . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – ; c / /n . . cr /v , p. . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . . gooder, the squire of arbury, pp. – . . gloria gonzález-lópez discusses ‘conjugal daughters’, when the daughter is expected to take on the full duties of a wife. although she examines modern mexico, there are similarities with an entrenched patriarchal culture that treats women and children as inferior. gonzález-lópez, family secrets: stories of incest and sexual violence in mexico (new york: new york university press, ), pp. – ; pollack, incest, p. . . nicholas culpeper, a physicall directory or a translation of the london dispensatory (london, ), pp. , . anonymous, the ladies dispensatory, or every woman her own physician (london, ), p. ; william forster, a treatise on the causes of most diseases incident to human bodies, and the cure of them (london, ), p. . on elizabeth’s case: british library, london, sloane ms , f. , william oliver to hans sloane, july ; sloane ms , ff. – , elizabeth newdigate to hans sloane, october ; sloane ms , ff. – , elizabeth newdigate to hans sloane, november . . toulalan, ‘child sexual abuse’, p. ; sacco, unspeakable, pp. – . . march , journal of the house of lords, ( – ), in british history online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol /pp - ; cissie fairchilds, women in early modern europe – (harlow: pearson education, ), pp. – . . wcro cr /b , july , sir charles sedley (senior) to sir thomas rowe; cr /b , n.d. [probably july ], sir charles sedley (senior) to sir richard newdigate. . cr /b . . kendall-tackett et al., ‘impact’, pp. , – ; min jung kim and emiko a. tajima, ‘early child mal- treatment, runaway youths, and risk of delinquency and victimization in adolescence: a mediational model’, social work research , ( ), pp. – . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . for primary sources, see c / /n ; wcro cr c ; cr /v , p. ( september , payments to phill’s nurses); cr /v , p. ( november , payments to lady frances sedley and dr. holden); cr /v , p. (back index), for dr. p at harefield; wcro cr /v account book “b”, f. r, august . . sloane ms , f. , elizabeth newdigate to hans sloane, november . . sloane ms , f. ; sloane ms , f. . on this case, see smith, ‘reassessing the role of the family’, pp. – . © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd resisting silences . march , journal of the house of lords, ( – ), p. , in british history online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol /pp - ; c / /n . . anna reynolds, ‘“such dispersive scattredness”: early modern encounters with binding waste’, journal of the northern renaissance, ( ), http://northernrenaissance.org; helen smith, ‘“a unique instance of art”: the proliferating surfaces of early modern paper’, journal of the northern renaissance, ( ), http://northernrenaissance.org. . deborah cohen, family secrets: shame & privacy in modern britain (new york: oxford university press, ), p. . . stephanie downes, sally holloway and sarah randles, ‘a feeling for things, past and present’, in stephanie downes, sally holloway and sarah randles (eds), feeling things: objects and emotions through history (oxford: oxford university press, ), pp. – , pp. – . . cr /v , pp. – (back index), , – . . cr /v , pp. (back index), . . gooder, the squire of arbury, p. . . newdigate, case, pp. , – . . cr /v , p. . . claire canavan, ‘reading materials: textile surfaces and early modern books’, journal of the northern renaissance, ( ), http://northernrenaissance.org, par. . . diana g. barnes, ‘emotional debris in early modern letters’, in downes, holloway and randles (eds), feeling things, pp. – (especially p. ). . kristen polster, ‘the fifth humour: ink, texts, and the early modern body’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of north texas, ), pp. – , – . . smith, ‘proliferating surfaces’, par. – and – (on rags) and par. – (on bodies). . jonathan goldberg, writing matter: from the hands of the english renaissance (stanford: stanford university press, ), pp. – . . on ‘suture’, see sarah kay, ‘legible skins: animals and the ethics of medieval reading’, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies ( ), pp. – , pp. , , , ; craig ferrell, ‘the poetics of page-turning: the interactive surfaces of early modern printed poetry’, journal of the northern renaissance ( ), http://northernrenaissance.org, par. – ; alicia spencer-hall, ‘christ’s suppurating wounds: leprosy in the vita of alice of schaerbeek (+ )’ in larissa tracy and kelly devries (eds), wounds and wound repair in medieval culture (leiden: brill, ), pp. – , pp. – . © the authors. gender & history published by john wiley & sons ltd in the final analysis volume number june james j. robinson executive director jo “within tms, we have created mechanisms to address harassment situations, and we are committed to act quickly when made aware that there is an incident.” oftentimes when i write in the final analysis, i worry that my premises, references, and word play may be too “american” for many readers. relevant topic selection is another challenge in addressing a global audience. is there anything about which i could write that would be meaningful to our worldwide reader base? not many things: perhaps such universals as the importance of professional integrity in science and engineering, the value of mentorship, the power of innovation in problem solving, the criticality of resource optimization, and, unfortunately, the need to be more proactive in acting to prevent harassment in the community. the emergence of the “me too” movement almost two years ago brought light to long- hidden harassment issues, partly via social media and partly by the number of famous people being revealed as having behaved in repulsive ways in the shadows of what had been illustrious careers. the perturbation was global. for example, wikipedia states that the social media hashtag #metoo trended in at least countries and in many languages. harassment knows no international boundaries. the association community also knows no international boundaries. indeed, we in the dozens of countries at events where attendees almost universally comport themselves with professionalism, curiosity, enthusiasm, consideration, and mutual respect. there can be times, however, when someone crosses a line—saying, doing, or presenting something that others experience as harassing. perhaps an attendee is not the focus of the bad behavior him situations, and we are committed to act quickly when made aware that there is an incident. ethical conduct, climate, and culture in the science, technology, engineering, medicine, and resources and guidance to address sexual harassment, in all of its forms, in societies’ own drain the safe harbors for harassers. safe, inclusive, and welcoming environment and an experience that embraces the richness of diversity where all participants may exchange ideas, learn, network, and socialize in the code describes expected behavior by event participants, characterizes unacceptable behavior, when handling reports of unacceptable behavior. the thumbnail version: treat each other with respect; if you experience harassment or see someone being harassed, tell us; we will work hard to investigate promptly and fairly. if someone is a bad actor, the behavior will have to change immediately or he or she will be removed from the event and potentially denied access to future ones. “if you see harassment happening, speak up. being harassed is terrible; —celeste ng jom, vol. , no. , https://doi.org/ . /s - - - Ó the minerals, metals & materials society 	in the final analysis
 occurs, the appropriate secretary — the home secretary when an nas member is accused, and the foreign secretary when a member without us citizenship is accused — would examine the evidence presented as part of the complaint. if incidents being reported seem to violate the nas code of conduct, the secretary appoints a committee, which then gathers statements from the complainant and the accused, allows each to respond, and makes a recommenda- tion on what disciplinary measures the nas should take. the nas does not have the resources to con- duct its own formal investigations, unless the complaint that’s been filed is about internal nas matters, according to mcnutt. so the pol- icy stipulates that complaints must be based on public documentation of resolved cases investigated elsewhere, such as a university report detailing harassing behaviour or a state- ment that a professor has been dismissed for violating an ethics policy. the change to the nas’s by-laws, announced in early june , came amid renewed scrutiny of sexual harassment at professional institu- tions as part of the #metoo movement. before the change, the academy had no mechanism for removing members. even a prison sen- tence for child molestation did not prompt the nas to oust physician daniel gajdusek from its ranks. he was still a member when he died in . a prestigious award eighty-four per cent of the nas’s membership ultimately voted to adopt the new policy, which required only a simple majority to pass. “i was very happy to see the vote come out as it did,” says meg urry, an astrophysicist at yale univer- sity in new haven, connecticut, who became an nas member in . urry has long spoken out against sexual harassment in academia. election to the nas — a lifetime appoint- ment — is often considered one of the high- est honours a us scientist can receive. but membership of the academy isn’t just a line in a scientist’s awards list: the academy takes an active role in advising the federal government on scientific issues, so members are often recruited to serve on panels. the national academies press publishes more than reports each year that weigh in on issues such as the implications of climate change and equi- table vaccine distribution. it is problematic for someone who has committed sexual harassment to have such an influential, national role, says kathleen treseder, an ecologist at the university of cali- fornia, irvine. treseder was one of four women at the university who filed sexual-harassment complaints against ayala in november . membership of the academy is a signal that, by some measure, a person is a great scientist. but mentoring young people and fostering their growth as scholars is also part of being a great scientist, urry says, and that’s why harassers should not be allowed to stay. “it’s not just that you’ve done something bad, it’s that you’ve poisoned the well.” radio silence why no one has used the new nas system to file a harassment complaint is an open question. one possibility is that the nas has not properly communicated its new policy and process for reporting harassers to its members and to the wider community. “as far as i understand it, the process hasn’t been finalized,” urry told nature when contacted about this issue. bill kearney, a spokesperson for the nas, says that the change to the policy was widely covered in the media last year and was dissem- inated to the nas’s members. some might also question why the nas leadership can’t proactively move known harassers into the queue for consideration by a committee, even if no individual has filed a complaint. mcnutt cannot, because under the policy, she would be the arbiter if there were an appeal, presenting a conflict of interest. as for other members of the nas’s governing council or leadership, kearney confirmed that they could bring forward complaints so long as they excused themselves from the rest of the proceedings. and those who have already reported harassers to other organizations might be feeling fatigue. “do i have to do everything? i’ve already sacrificed enough,” treseder says about why she hasn’t filed a complaint with the nas. “everybody else has this information. somebody else could do it.” she adds: “i could not be more disappointed in the national acad- emy of sciences as an institution and every sin- gle national academy of sciences member who has allowed the sexual harassers to stay.” mcnutt says that the nas members who are known harassers have been keeping a low pro- file since the by-laws changed. “they are not being appointed to committees or panels or anything like that,” she says. “their influence in the academy is non-existent.” jane willenbring, a geologist at stanford uni- versity in california, who successfully pushed the geological society of america to institute a similar policy after someone who harassed her was named a fellow of the organization in , says that these scientists’ lack of partic- ipation in academy activities is not enough. their continued presence as members — even inactive ones — sends a signal that “we don’t have to take an active role in telling harassers that they have no place in science”, she says. “i don’t think that’s a healthy way to create the important change that we need to see.” jabs now in trials could stumble on safety, be subject to political interference or fail to meet expectations. concerns intensify over upcoming covid-vaccine results by smriti mallapaty & heidi ledford s everal ongoing coronavirus-vaccine trials could announce game-changing results next month. but as anticipa- tion grows, concerns are building about whether the vaccines will clear safety trials, what they will achieve if they do and the risk that the approval process will be influenced by politics, or at least seem to be. three weeks ago, the uk trial of a leading vaccine candidate developed by the univer- sity of oxford and pharmaceutical company astrazeneca restarted after a six-day pause to investigate safety concerns. halted trials of the same vaccine in south africa and brazil have also since resumed, but the us food and drug administration (fda) has not yet given the green light for us studies to start again. the trials’ sponsors have so far released few details about what caused the pause. some scientists say this lack of transparency could erode public trust in the vaccine. in the background, fears have intensified that political meddling could see a vaccine approved for emergency use without suf- ficient evidence that it works. us president donald trump has said he wants a vaccine ahead of his country’s presidential election in november. to assuage concerns, the drug companies behind the three leading coronavirus vaccines in phase iii trials — astrazeneca, pfizer and moderna — have released documents describ- ing how their tests are being conducted. these trial protocols include benchmarks for safety and success, and details that had not been made public before, including how soon the vaccines’ preliminary results could be reported and how the companies might stop | nature | vol | october news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. trials early to get fast-tracked approval. here are three areas that scientists are watching closely. safety and transparency initially, researchers weren’t too concerned when the media reported that enrolment in the uk trial of the oxford vaccine had been paused on september because of an adverse reaction in a participant. adverse reactions in clinical trials are quite common and often unrelated to the treatment — which some researchers say is probably the case with the oxford vaccine, given how soon uk regulators let the trial resume. some media outlets have reported that the participant developed trans- verse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, but astrazeneca and the university of oxford have not released information on the person’s condition. some scientists criticized this lack of infor- mation, especially when it emerged that this was the second pause in enrolment because of an adverse reaction. information sheets given to participants in july noted that the trial had previously been halted when a member was initially reported to have developed symptoms of transverse myelitis. astrazeneca says the person was later diagnosed with multiple scle- rosis, and an independent panel decided the condition was unrelated to the vaccine. if it turns out that two people have devel- oped transverse myelitis, given the relatively small number of people who have received the vaccine, that is notable, says raina macintyre, an epidemiologist at the university of new south wales in sydney, australia. “if there’s another case, it’s going to be very hard for this trial to recover from that.” to rule out a link between the vaccine and the conditions, researchers must run statistical analyses that compare rates of the conditions in participants who received the vaccines with those in people who got the placebo. this is probably what the fda is still investigating before it decides whether to allow the us trials to resume, says macintyre. more details about why the trials were paused and then later resumed should be made public, says hilda bastian, who studies evidence-based medicine at bond university in the gold coast, australia. the university of oxford did not respond to questions about calls for greater transparency. but astrazeneca chief executive pascal soriot said during a panel discussion hosted by the world economic forum on september that clinical-trial guidelines recommend against disclosing information about individual par- ticipants, to avoid compromising their privacy and the integrity of the study. role of politics public trust in coronavirus vaccines is already wavering, particularly in the united states. there, a pathway for fast-tracking urgently needed treatments — an fda emergency use authorization (eua) — has been part of the con- cern. this sidesteps the usual drug-approval process and allows treatments to be used if they “may be effective”. “in being vague and non-transparent, it’s potentially susceptible to the appearance of political influence,” says herschel nachlis, who studies health policy at dartmouth college in hanover, new hampshire. so when companies released clinical-trial protocols for the three leading vaccine candi- dates, researchers were quick to pore over the details. overall, the protocols looked normal, says david benkeser, a biostatistician at emory university in atlanta, georgia. but one feature stood out, says benkeser. in pfizer’s protocol, external experts assigned to monitor the trial’s safety are allowed to take a peek at the interim data more often than they are in the other two companies’ pro- tocols. this means that an analysis of early results could be carried out after the trial has accrued data from just people who become infected across its vaccine and placebo arms. this milestone could be reached in as little as three months from the trial’s july start date — potentially before the us election. if early analysis found that the vaccine was convincingly effective at reducing infections in that small sample size, the trial could be stopped and the company could apply for an eua. but although it would be possible to show that the vaccine meets the fda’s standard at that early stage, it would not allow for long- term follow-up to assure the vaccine’s safety, says kurt viele, director of modelling and sim- ulation at berry consultants, which advises on clinical-trial designs, in lexington, kentucky. three months is also too short to get a good sense of how long immunity from the vaccine lasts, he notes. pfizer did not respond to ques- tions about whether it plans to continue safety monitoring if a trial is stopped early. it will be crucial for the company to continue collecting safety data — and make it public — even if the trial is stopped early, says viele. the fda is rumoured to be beefing up its eua process for covid- vaccines, according to a september report in the washington post. the fda declined to comment on the spe- cifics of the news story, but trump has already said that he might block such measures. vaccine goals and efficacy even if regulators do approve the three front-runner vaccines, researchers warn that the jabs might not do what the public expect. the astrazeneca, pfizer and moderna pro- tocols revealed that the trials are designed to test whether the vaccines reduce total cases of symptomatic covid- , not just cases of severe disease, such as those that require hos- pitalization and can end in death. macintyre and other researchers say it would have been better to test whether the vaccines reduced severe disease and death. if a jab can successfully reduce the risk of seri- ous complications, then the virus might have a similar effect on vaccinated people as does the common cold, she says. the current phase iii trials are each enrolling several tens of thousands of participants. but a trial that tried to establish whether a vaccine reduces incidence of severe covid- would need more — and so would take more time, says thomas lumley, a biostatistician at the university of auckland in new zealand. the current trials chose a middle path between establishing whether vaccines prevent any infection with the virus and testing whether they prevent severe infection, he says. protesters call for an end to covid- -based restrictions in sacramento, california. s t a n t o n s h a r p e /s o p a i m a g e s /l ig h t r o c k e t /g e t t y nature | vol | october | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. microsoft word - exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company[ ]  abstract—in our research we aimed to test a managerial approach for the fuzzy front end (ffe) of innovation by creating controlled experiment/ business case in a breakthrough innovation development. the experiment was in the sport industry and covered all aspects of the customer discovery stage from ideation to prototyping followed by patent application. in the paper we describe and analyze mile stones, tasks, management challenges, decisions made to create the break through innovation, evaluate overall managerial efficiency that was at the considered ffe stage. we set managerial outcome of the ffe stage as a valid product concept in hand. in our paper we introduce hypothetical construct “q-factor” that helps us in the experiment to distinguish quality of ffe outcomes. the experiment simulated for entrepreneur the ffe of innovation and put on his shoulders responsibility for the outcome of valid product concept. while developing managerial approach to reach the outcome there was a decision to look on product concept from the cognitive psychology and cognitive science point of view. this view helped us to develop the profile of a person whose projection (mental representation) of a new product could optimize for a manager or entrepreneur ffe activities. in the experiment this profile was tested to develop breakthrough innovation for swimmers. following the managerial approach the product concept was created to help swimmers to feel/sense water. the working prototype was developed to estimate the product concept validity and value added effect for customers. based on feedback from coachers and swimmers there were strong positive effect that gave high value for customers, and for the experiment – the valid product concept being developed by proposed managerial approach for the ffe. in conclusions there is a suggestion of managerial approach that was derived from experiment. keywords—concept development, concept testing, customer discovery, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial management, idea generation, idea screening, startup management. i. introduction odern management science has a big knowledge gap in the fuzzy front end of innovation (ffe) of the new product development process (npd). the product development and management association (pdma) defines the ffe as the activities that come before the more formal and well-structured (e.g. stage-gate or pace) npd process [ ]. general concepts of ffe are in place. they give overviews of dmitry k. shaytan is with the laboratory of innovation business & entrepreneurship of the faculty of economics, lomonosov moscow state university, moscow , russia (phone: - - ; fax: - - ; e-mail: shaytan@econ.msu.ru). georgy d. laptev is with the laboratory of innovation business & entrepreneurship of the faculty of economics, lomonosov moscow state university, moscow , russia (phone: - - ; e-mail: glaptev@econ.msu.ru). process and objects involved in the ffe. however, it is still work in progress to explore and understand effective management tools of the ffe. further research focused on investigation of particular management qualities in each npd case is needed. the accumulated knowledge would help to create a pool of roadmaps for managers to establish effective process in the ffe. in our research we aim to test a managerial approach to the ffe by creating controlled experiment/ business case in a breakthrough innovation development. owners of the chosen business case work in frames of entrepreneurial startup initiative to simulate the fuzzy front end. managerial decisions in the experiment had freedom from any other institutions. the experiment was in the sport industry and covered all aspects of the customer discovery stage from ideation to prototyping followed by patent application. in the paper we describe and analyze mile stones, tasks, management challenges, decisions made to create the break through innovation, evaluate overall managerial efficiency that was at the considered ffe stage. ii. study of the ffe in a product driven startup a. what are the ffe stage issues the product development and management association (pdma) defines the ffe as the activities that come before the more formal and well-structured (e.g. stage-gate or pace) npd process [ ]. the leading researchers in management investigate and describe ffe by putting its complexities and uncertainties into various models: the customer development model [ ], lean startup [ ], and new concept development model [ ]. all of the models share in common relationship or looping back structure of iterations until the required “gate” or check point results are obtained. dr. robert cooper stated:”…many companies already have a solid idea-to-launch process or stage-gate® system in place……but a solid idea-to-launch process is not enough: what many senior executives are realizing is that there is a real shortage of strong, high-value ideas…in short, the process is robust enough, but the cupboard is bare – the pipeline feed is dry” [ ]. in a product driven business (not market driven and not-me- too) of a breakthrough innovation a huge challenge is opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection, idea screening, and concept definition. quality of the related activities and their results feed the pipeline of npd in a company. even perfect and robust management of ndp has a great chance to fail if the quality of the ffe’s results is questionable. exploring management of the fuzzy front end of innovation in a product driven startup company dmitry k. shaytan, georgy d. laptev m world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / however, by definition the ffe is less formal and less well- structured [ ] than other parts of the npd process. “less formal and less well structured” is a “politically correct statement” to outline a huge gap in management science of ffe in compare with knowledge and methods at the other end of npd process, like stage (testing) according to dr. robert cooper [ ]. b. quality of a ffe outcome or milestone to be specific in describing ffe we should define a goal or milestone that one would aim to reach through managing of activities and recourses. in our opinion this outcome/milestone can be a concept of high quality product or service for further prototyping. at this point it is also important to introduce metrics / measures of quality of the product concept or service. in our work by quality, hereinafter called q-factor, we mean that product concept is build using reliable information and analytical inferences that reflect external reality. for example, in physics and engineering q-factor is a measure of resonant circuit effectiveness; the higher q value indicates a lower rate of energy loss relative to the stored energy [ ]. we see a great value of quantitative scale for q-factors of the ffe’s milestone, of course, pre-developed underlining measuring methodologies and instruments are needed. in this sense the ffe q-factor will estimate or measure the correlation between “energy” or resources (including time) loss/expenditures and the commercial potential of the product in existing business reality. the analogy with resonation in physics is appropriate association to estimate how the product concept resonates with existing reality of stakeholders’ wants, needs, problems, and pains. in this paper we introduce and use q-factor as a measure of qualitative assessment. in our ongoing research we will focus on data analysis aiming to propose a quantitative approach for q-factor measurement and scaling. notion of idea and its relation to the ffe, q-factor, and product concept we omit possible philosophical discussion about the meaning of idea proposed by plato, rene descartes, david hume, immanuel kant, thomas jefferson, and many other outstanding minds. we would like only to stress that from human science idea construed as mental representational images of some object. a mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol [ ]. from the above definition follows that product idea is a hypothetical internal cognitive construct that represents external reality. this means that one can regard your α- prototype as an idea of the product because there is not yet customer validation and, hence, the future marketed product can have completely different features or even there might be a new “idea” for product and business. the other one can regard your product idea as a final product based on his external reality representation. the presentation of innovation to a venture fund if not based on solid statistics of sales would be considered by investment manager as the idea for product and business even if there was a “physical product” on a table. at the same time a business angel, friend, or investment manager from the other venture fund could regard it as a product for new business. here we may meet significantly different notions of what is considered an idea of product and business or as product and business among various stake holders. we can say that a product concept is a person’s mental representation based on synthesis of his/her experience in the industry, how he fathoms industry problems and priorities, industry business process and technology limitations. for sure, the q-factor of the product concept becomes a function of this external reality representation factors. if an entrepreneur or intrepreneur is responsible for high q- factor of a product concept, than as an expert he/she is responsible also to fathom corresponding industry factors, and to accomplish it in efficient way as a manager would. at a certain extend entrepreneur is not a person but a team. it is like a hypothetical human being with multiple “hands” and a pool of required competences to make things done. however, there must be a team leader that takes full responsibility for the whole startup success. the team leader’s vision and decisions play a key role for a product concept creation. our analysis shows that his role at the ffe should be an integrator of “external reality” to synthesize final version of a product concept with assistance of others. easy to say but how manager in a product driven startup can accomplish this challenging ffe stage with a high q- factor product concept. the aim of our experiment is to explore possible option in managing ffe of innovation development. c. empirical grounds for planning of the experiment authors were the managers of the development track of the intel global program “make it wearable”. our responsibilities included training, coaching, mentoring, and application composition for these projects. this work made us possible to gather the whole picture necessary to understand wide spread problems of the ffe stage in entrepreneurial startup teams that were product driven and base on engineering experiences. the development track focuses on concepts that are both excitingly innovative and feasible to execute. the goal was to identify groundbreaking new wearable technology opportunities among participants and offer entrepreneurship training to the selected finalists which would accelerate the development of disruptive wearable technology into commercial products (www.makeit.intel.com). during the development track we discovered that startup teams disregard quality of activities related (according to peter koen) to opportunity identification, opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection, and idea screening [ ]. their primary focus was on technological prototyping and testing iterations rather than investing into high value product concepts development. whilst, quality of the considered world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / concepts was rather dubious, and underlining information/data was invalid. the mentioned above approach - focusing on prototyping and testing - looks effective for market driven projects with fast growing markets or oligopoly markets with a few major players where one can find a niche with a bit “better”, a bit cheaper product /service. for example, in some market situations that could be a strategy for internet or software startups; like copy of established internet services on the other national market where this service is an innovation. strategies are often based on as fast as possible prototyping and testing cycles with a comparatively short and superficial opportunity identification, opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection, and idea screening. prototyping and testing cycles can be accomplished in less than a few weeks. thirty six npd startups of the russian part of the intel development track were product driven without fast growing or oligopoly market advantages; thanks to existing situation in wearables market. however, all of them disregarded quality of results derived from opportunity identification, opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection, and idea screening. the consequences were the unreliable base for the follow on concepts and prototypes development, or firsthand reliable information but with incorrect generalization inferences. it was found that disregard of high q-factor product concept development before prototyping is a consequence of psychological matter derived from leading positions of technology people in a team. these team members feel themselves more comfortable doing what they were trained to do for years– prototyping on the basis of technology platforms. it is worth to mention that most of these technology platforms are not for rapid prototyping. in the development track in russia entrepreneurial teams had three month of the “design thinking school” training, based on hpi at stanford and potsdam methodology [ ]. unfortunately, it appeared that knowledge and skills in “design thinking” methodologies were not of much use in such a situation of technologists leading the team. this was the result of behavioral and psychological issues why product prototype preceded a product concept derived from the design thinking approach. once the management of the intel development track shifted to the extent where the author’s personal decision was to search for a way for an entrepreneur without industry ‘stars’ in his team, to build innovation concept of a valuable product/service or product/service with high q-factor. by this time there was a clear understanding that all teams miss managerial priorities and management practices of the ffe of innovation that resulted in product driven startups being bingo games with sense of strategies to win. d. the experiment the project chosen for management, experiment and approbation was a new product development for swimming and aqua fitness. the goal of our research was to discover managerial features at the front end while developing a new product in swimming industry through entrepreneurial initiative. to simulate the ffe of innovation development and its reliability we put the following constraints and assumptions over the experiment: - owners of the business case don’t have the industry expertise, skills in technologies required to prototype the product and to manufacture it; - owners of the business case have knowledge and skills in npd; - the business case must be product driven (not market driven) and not “me to”; - the innovation must be new-to-the world; in short the owner’s “zero” industry knowledge and technology skill ensured that npd would be unstructured and not formal. the “not market driven” and “new-to-the world” assumptions ensured that there was unstructured npd process without shifts to managing development of additions to existing products or improvements /modifications. profound counselling with and assessment of master coaches of russian’s olympic swimming team gave birth to the idea of a new product and direction for experimental business case. why have we chosen coaches of the olympic team? we decided to find extreme users, and high level experts being in one when an idea generation issues appealed for the npd case development. of the highest value for our research was to find such a person, who would combine deep practical knowledge in training, have information hub for advanced innovations in the swimming field, and personal emotional relation to coaches’ and high level swimmers’ needs/problems/pains. we aimed to test the hypotheses that in pre-prototyping activities one of the ways to maximize business efficiency was to get information from a trusted person that had the following qualifications: ( ) has deep knowledge of related business process in the industry, ( ) holds a position to receive product/service offers as beneficiary or as an advocate of the beneficiary, ( ) holds a position capable of testing of developed prototypes in his/her business operations. the experience of “design thinking” classes showed a big value and efficiency of opportunity recognition and idea generation techniques. however, the results of a “manual” tool, the success of the implementation does not solely depend on the quality of a “tool” but also on a craftsman experience, and quality of material taken for processing. usually there is a prejudice that an idea itself is worth nothing. however, this statement underestimates a source of information and a person’s experience which are synthesized in the idea and product concept. our vision was to get that pre- qualified person or persons and at the first meeting get a general outline of product concepts as a mental representation of their existing reality. in contrast to them the authors had no discipline in swimming industry, and we didn’t have the luxury of time to get it. hence, the product concept generated solely by us, had a great chance of very low q-factor just like a probability to win in bingo game. so for our experiment (and npd project) it was the ffe “endeavor” with the managerial responsibility to get high q-factor prototype in a limited time frame. there was still a question: how can world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / entrepreneur deal with time–to-outcome and data reliability uncertainties in this situation? in our study idea is a mental representation of product and business. and it is a human hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external business reality. hence, entrepreneurs’ mental representation of product and business must at least fit external reality. for entrepreneurial teams “design thinking school” methodologies could help to reach that compliance but it would require unpredictable number of iterations and timeframes since the startup team members didn’t have required industry expertise needed for the chosen innovations development. in our npd case we tested the hypothesis that the projection (mental representation) of a new product, even in a general form, of a person obtaining: ( ) deep knowledge of related business process in an industry, ( ) a position to receive product/service offers as beneficiary or as an advocate of the beneficiary, ( ) a position to test developed prototypes in his/her business operations, ( ) a position of trust (no conflict of interests); would give to the entrepreneurial team a lacking perception of a new product mental representation with a compliance to external business reality. from managerial point of view it will give more predictability to timeframes required to develop the new product that could be regarded as a break through innovation. one should also take into account that building relationships with that kind of a person is a business process itself that requires time, planning of tasks and goals, and resources to be allocated for partnership development. at startup with limited recourses, including human ones, the team has always to weight and decide –what to focus on and in what timeline. instead of going into field research personally to learn industry business process, customers’ problems/pains, we decided to focus on relationship building to get through fuzzy front of innovation. comparative analysis showed that business process of relationship building would be more efficient than the field research to build authors’ own mental representation of the innovation product that fit existing reality. moreover, exactly this tactics fits university related startups/entrepreneurs very well due to the networking nature of university institutions. university networks were one of the major facilitators for us to get to and to establish working relations with coachers in the russian olympic swimming team. at the first meeting with master coaches, after rapport building, we got general overview of training processes, equipment, methodologies, hydrodynamics, and coachers’ insights of “it would great if a swimmer or a coach could”. as a result of the meeting we had several ideas describing main feature of each possible innovation and understanding of their priorities (need/problem/pain). we devoted three-four weeks between the first and the second meetings to assessment of the technical side of solutions (product concepts) prototyping and mass production; what type of a product could be and in what type of a business model it could fit. we met technologists and engineers to found possible (constraints) barriers and tech milestones of development tracks. the next management decision the authors had to take in order to answer the question «what is the pain that we can address with a prototype created just in a few months, considering the current resources and technologists available for us?”. the second meeting at the base of russian olympic swimming team was devoted to gather as many details as possible on the following point of view: how one can help a swimmer to feel water in - minutes of training”. the ability to feel or sense water is the most important sensation for good swimmers. the quality of this sense is not stable and differs with the time, becoming better or worse. even olympic level swimmers lost it regularly after hand paddles or gym trainings. attempts to find water feeling can be a long training process. sometimes it requires days and weeks. as a result of the second meeting we had a point of view formulated by the coachers that between palm and water there can be air with different pressure: - low pressure with air medium between palm and water would give swimmer ability to feel water immediately after taking the medium away; - higher pressures with air medium between palm and water would give training effect like hand paddles but with extra feature of resistance adjustments during trainings; - variations of air pressure give device capability to transfer trained swimmer’s power to swimming speed instantly. in that way the entrepreneurial team formulated the concept of a breakthrough innovation (not a product yet) just after two meetings with the right people (qualification/profile was given above) and after one month of part time work on the ndp project. the concept is as follows: “a device for training is designed as a covering, shaped to approximate the shape of a swimmer’s hand during stroke. the device is made of elastic material that hugs the entire surface of a hand and on an inner side of a hand it has at least one cavity that allows you to create overpressure of air or other gas. the device changes its volume and mechanical strain of the elastic material in the area of an inner side of a hand due to pressure changes. the device has at least one valve for pressure changing in the cavity”. the next two month after the concept formulation team worked on developing the right combination of technologies required to create the working prototype. criteria were the following: - prototyping technology is the same as for mass manufacturing; - technology lets business to fit certain direct cost; - technology minimizes number of operations for mass manufacturing; - technology provides right (desired) product features. world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / the technology quest covered about twelve weeks. it was structured in the following stages: - get to know technology through internet and follow on expert facilitation; - get basic skills for using it by creating a prototype; - test the prototype technical features, for example, resistance to chemicals in swimming pool and mechanical resistance; - test by members of the team prototype’s consumer features in a field, in our case, in a swimming pool training. through several loops there was a working prototype of the product by using technologies and chemicals that fit above technological criteria. the major managerial challenge in the “technology quest” period was supply of components for prototyping and outsourcing of some technological operations that require specific equipment. accessibility to purchase materials and equipment had barriers of time to supply and in quantities to buy. this leads to an inference that the more general product concept one has than the more time and resources will be spend for work with supply chains. each feature to prototype could regard managerial uncertainties in supply chains to overcome. when one put frames for the ffe stage there should be take into account situations when prototyping requires materials and operations with limited or no offers on the market. in our research we made an assumption that the ffe of innovation ends with the high q-factor product concept. in our paper the prototyping stage and follow on prototype testing is needed to make estimation of the q-factor of the developed concept. however, there can be cases with no infrastructure around that could support the product concept prototyping: suppliers of specific materials, components, software, equipment, technologies, or competencies. our opinion is that in those cases managers must include prototyping in the ffe of innovation development. in the research case we discovered that potential uncertainties, however, in our case they were all required to prototype on the market. issues were related to longer times-to-supply and larger min volumes to buy. before there was a prototype for α-test there were failures in technology application. the reason of all of them was the lack of knowledge in polymer materials and their applications, and nuances of their technology processing. at the third meeting with coaches of the russian olympic swimming team there was presented the working prototype of break through innovation that gave swimmers ability to gain water sensing/feeling in min of training. for olympic level swimmers it is extremely important to obtain it right before competitions. tests had outstanding results, the value was absolutely high – all swimmers got strong positive effect in minutes of training with the prototype. in terms of sizes and durability of pressure valves connection we had minor (critical) adjustments to make. first ten prototypes after the first short tests were so popular that there was rivalry to get them for further trainings. we got an instant order to produce more pares of the prototype for those who tried but didn’t get spare ones. also we got real partnership activities by putting our product development process into schedule of olympic swimmers in next team gathering in october . iii. results and discussions in the experiment to reveal the ffe managerial issues we looked at pool of companies participated in trainings and coaching sessions of the development track of the intel global program “make it wearable” in russia. all startups: - were product, not-market, driven; - had leaders with strong technology/engineering background; - look for business opportunity in radical innovation through product concept development; this research phase revealed lack of efforts those entrepreneurs devote to a product concept development before prototyping and testing (here, prototyping excludes raw prototyping like sketching, mold from plasticine or paper). product concept development for further prototyping was the most mysterious or fuzzy process from a management point of view. so there was a decision to explore a possible management approach that would give outcome - product concept for further prototyping. this assumption has an open issue whether in all cases the ffe stage is over with a valid product concept in hand. we think that the ffe can be extended to prototyping in situation when supply of required for prototyping materials, components, software, technologies are limited or none. in the experiment prototyping and testing were used to verify the product concept value for customers, or in other words, to verify that the managerial approach in the ffe created the required outcome – high quality product concept. in our paper we introduce hypothetical construct “q- factor”. q-factor is required in our study to distinguish among product concept as outcomes of the ffe management. this hypothetical construct determines quality of a product concept. we use it as qualitative measure to estimate the ffe stage outcome. the experiment simulated (imitated) for entrepreneur the ffe of innovation and put on his shoulders responsibility for the outcome with the high q-factor. the ffe situation was ensured by the entrepreneur’s knowledge in the swimming industry that prevent him from structured and formal business planning in breakthrough innovation development. the product concept was prototyped and tested to estimate quality or q-factor of the product concept. while developing managerial approach to reach high q- factor outcome there was a decision to look on product concept from the cognitive psychology or cognitive science point of view. there is interesting fact that idea is a mental representation of reality. based on this view we come to a conclusion that product concept is an idea. or product concept is a mental representation of reality. by comparing how differently humans regard the same product as an idea of product or the product one can see how perceptions of existing world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / reality is differ. in the experiment we tried to formulate managerial approach on the basis - how quick and with minimal recourses one can get a product concept that match existing business reality. the approach was formulated through development of the ideal profile of a person who had perfect mental representation of existing business reality: ( ) deep knowledge of related business process in an industry, ( ) a position to receive product/service offers as beneficiary or as an advocate of the beneficiary, ( ) a position to test developed prototypes in his/her business operations, ( ) a position of trust (no conflict of interests); so our managerial approach was to qualify persons based on this profile and to invest time and resources into relationship building. however, one can make a decision not to follow other person mental representation and to form his/her one. in the management perspective this decision required different type of activities and business process. through different opportunities there was found the qualified person. he was a master trainer in the russian olympic swimming team. this person indirectly set the industry direction for the experiment. if the qualified lead was found in the e-commerce industry the experiment can be in this field. choice for industry direction is also an interesting inference from the experiment – the qualified person determines entrepreneurial opportunity; the whole project was build around his qualification, however, he/she is not part of entrepreneurial team and could be regarded as a long-arm partner. the word “expert” or “expertise” is omitted due to more complicated partnership roles in play. following the managerial approach the product concept was created to help swimmers to feel/sense water. the working prototype was developed to estimate its q-factor. based on feedback from coachers and swimmers there were strong positive effect that gave high value for customer. the patent application was submitted in august , to set priority. its registration number is . the us patent application will be submitted during october- november . the q-factor of the product concept is regarded as high based on the following results: - validated high added value to swimmers in solving water sensing problems; - innovation from patent search is a breakthrough; - time from “zero understanding” of swimming industry by entrepreneur lead to the product concept in one month. iv. conclusions in case of a product driven startup in ffe stage we would like to suggest for an entrepreneurial team leader the following managerial frame: - your ultimate goal (primary outcome of the ffe stage) is to deliver product concept with a high q-factor; - set the profile of person in the industry you aim to do business, or use the general profile proposed in the paper; - make correct qualification of the persons, - invest time and money into relationship building, - use his/her provision of the product (mental representation of existing business reality), - prototype and give this prototype to the person for testing. references [ ] peter koen, greg ajamian, robert burkart, allen clamen, jeffrey davidson, robb ’amore, claudia elkins, kathy herald, michael incorvia, albert johnson, robin karol, rebecca seibert, aleksandar slavejkov, and klaus wagner. providing clarity and a common language to the “fuzzy front end”, research technology management journal, march—april , p. [ ] steve blank. the four steps to the epiphany, p. , cafepress; rd edition, , isbn: - - - [ ] eric rice. the lean startup: how today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses , crown business, , asin: b j xgn [ ] paul belliveau (editor), abbie griffin (editor), stephen somermeyer (editor), the pdma toolbook for new product development, part project leader tools to start the project, peter a. koen, greg m. ajamian, scott boyce, allen clamen, eden fisher, stavros fountoulakis, albert johnson, pushpinder puri, rebecca seibert, fuzzy front end: effective methods, tools, and techniques, wiley; edition (april , ), isbn- : - [ ] robert g. cooper, scott j. edgett. creating breakthrough new product ideas, p. - , , isbn - - - - [ ] robert g. cooper, scott j. edgett. creating breakthrough new product ideas, p. , , isbn - - - - [ ] james h. harlow. electric power transformer engineering, p. – , crc press, , isbn - - - - [ ] marr, david. vision. a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. the mit press . isbn - . [ ] peter koen, greg ajamian, robert burkart, allen clamen, jeffrey davidson, robb ’amore, claudia elkins, kathy herald, michael incorvia, albert johnson, robin karol, rebecca seibert, aleksandar slavejkov, and klaus wagner: providing clarity and a common language to the “fuzzy front end”, research technology management journal, march—april , page . [ ] http://dschool.stanford.edu/ world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of economics and management engineering vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) scholar.waset.org/ - / in te rn at io na l s ci en ce i nd ex , e co no m ic s an d m an ag em en t e ng in ee ri ng v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / http://waset.org/publication/exploring-management-of-the-fuzzy-front-end-of-innovation-in-a-product-driven-startup-company/ http://scholar.waset.org/ - / controversial diversity: diversity discourses and dilemmas among swedish police recruits full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=gpas policing and society an international journal of research and policy issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gpas controversial diversity: diversity discourses and dilemmas among swedish police recruits malin wieslander to cite this article: malin wieslander ( ): controversial diversity: diversity discourses and dilemmas among swedish police recruits, policing and society, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: apr . submit your article to this journal article views: view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=gpas https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gpas https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=gpas &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=gpas &show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - controversial diversity: diversity discourses and dilemmas among swedish police recruits malin wieslander department of behavioural sciences and learning, linköping university, linköping, sweden abstract diversity strategies to increase social inclusion in organisations have been a major concern in various institutions during recent decades. this article examines swedish police recruits’ talk about diversity. the study is based on data from ethnographic fieldwork at the swedish national police academy and focus group interviews of police recruits. twenty-seven recruits were interviewed in their final year at the police academy, which included a period of probationary service at a police station. using a discourse analysis, the article explores how the swedish police’s official policies for diversity and social equality are recognised, but also called into question, by swedish police recruits. one dominating discourse of difference and two controversial discourses on diversity are outlined, showing that recruits frequently draw upon multiple discourses to legitimise their claims for and against diversity. a conceptual framework is developed for understanding the discourses and dilemmas of diversity within the police, with examples provided of how social order is reproduced among recruits. article history received march accepted april keywords diversity; discourse; dilemma; police introduction diversity strategies to increase social inclusion in organisations have been a major concern in various institutions during recent decades. however, research studying how this turns out in practice shows that the way in which diversity is enacted, constructed, disciplined, and, possibly, contested by actors and institutions influences how diversity can be understood – for example, in terms of equality and inclusion, or even in terms of inequality and exclusion (ahmed , , del percio and sokolovska , urciuoli ). while management literature has shown how the language of diversity is shaped within organisations as beneficial both for the organisations’ business and for the groups pre- viously discriminated against, its authors also express scepticism concerning whether the aims of diversity approaches can be met (dick and cassell ). the police is an organisation and profession where initiatives to decrease the male dominance and under-recruitment of women and ethnic min- orities have been taken. but how are these changes met in the organisation? in this article, i explore how the swedish police’s official policies for diversity and social equality are recognised, but also called into question, by police recruits in their final year of study. the questions central for this article are: how is diversity constructed among police recruits? what identities (subject positions) do these constructions offer? and in what ways are these diversity discourses sustained and challenged? the focus in the analysis is on the discursive practices through which diversity aspects and social cat- egories are sustained and reproduced. controversial police recruits’ perspectives on diversity are © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact malin wieslander malin.wieslander@liu.se policing and society https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:malin.wieslander@liu.se http://www.tandfonline.com presented, and the way these controversies can result in dilemmas is discussed, showing diversity among swedish police recruits to be not only a complex phenomenon, but also one that contains contradictions. background since the early s, diversification has come to function as a tool of legitimacy for police authorities in many countries. policy documents, such as the macpherson ( ) report calling attention to insti- tutional racism in a british police force (see also shiner ), have recognised cultural and gendered identities, and the inclusion of police employees from diverse backgrounds has become a political priority in many european countries. through diversity recruitment and education, the police forces in many countries are striving to reform the professional conduct of their cadres, to improve their equality and anti-discriminatory performance, and increase the social inclusion of min- orities in the police force, independently of whether such minorities are based on gender, ethnic background, or sexual orientation (see, e.g. egge , white and escobar , rowe and garland , wieslander ). the swedish police adopted the term diversity in their policy documents between and . in those, diversity is said to permeate the police organisation, including its active work against intolerance and discrimination, and its promotion of ethnic and cultural diversity (e.g. swedish national police board , , national police academy ). this diversity is endorsed as a resource that contributes to improving the organisation, lending legitimacy to the police and its operations, creating a more attractive work environment, and helping make police work more efficient. various diversity action plans have been adopted with the aim of increasing diversity in the force. for instance, since swedish officers can apply for a permit to wear religious head coverings at work. the demands for increased diversity have subsequently been extended to target also recruitment, professional development, working conditions, and various types of service and accessibility within the police organisation itself. however, the latest policy documents, issued for the years – and – , do not mention the word ‘diversity’, focusing instead on ‘equal treatment’ (swedish national police board , ). in these documents, all references to ‘recruitment’ have also been dropped. in the discussion, this change is addressed further. research on diversity and the police research on the relationship between the police and the broad topic of diversity (in terms of diversity in the society, in the force, and in police work) can be described as a field that focusses on inadequacies in the police’s work and conduct (for a review, see wieslander , pp. – ). internationally, ‘policing diversity’ and ‘diversity policing’ have been used to describe the relevance of diversity for police encounters with the public. in particular, the focus has been on discrimination in policing practices that tend to restrict the opportunities for individuals, where certain groups and areas are subject to stricter controls (over-policing) but offered lesser protection (under-policing) (macpherson , reiner , holmberg , brunson and miller , sollund , , newburn and reiner , philips and bowling , ben-porat , shiner , peterson and Åker- ström ). one area of debate concerns the relationship between ethnic minorities and discrimi- nation in police work profiling practices. these practices have given rise to the term ‘racial profiling’ (‘ethnic profiling’ in the nordic context), which concerns the suspicion of criminal activity based on stereotypes of race or ethnicity (ben-porat ). in particular, the police’s practice of ‘stop and search’ – when examined to determine who is stopped and controlled by the police – has shown a similar disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities (such as roma and afro- american people) in the justice system. the term ‘driving while black’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon (harris , bowling and weber . see e.g. finstad , holmberg , m. wieslander sollund , , egge , peterson and Åkerström for a scandinavian context). the swedish police has been accused of racism and ethnic profiling in some cases, where the ‘rosen- gård-incident’ in malmö in (see rennstam ), and the ‘roma register’ that was disclosed in are some of the more noticed. in the latter, the police was found guilty for ethnic discrimi- nation (radio sweden ). in regard to debates of discrimination in policing practices, officers’ encounters with minorities in society have been part of the police’s diversity strategies in policies, education and recruitment in various countries. the official rhetoric of the policies suggests that increased diversity in the police, achieved through improved (often targeted) recruitment, will enhance its external relations with society, and improve work practices dealing with, for example, ethnic relationships in society. however, whether, and to what extent, this is accomplished in practice has remained controversial (for a review, see bullock et al. . see also reiner , rowe ). the questions of how to understand institutional racism and discrimination in the police and whether the police mistreat minorities have been burning and disputable questions in both research and within various police forces (shiner ). most argue that the treatment of minorities is to be regarded as discrimination, but it is also claimed to be unavoidable for efficient police work, for instance through an imperative of measurable controls within the police (peterson and Åkerström ). research shows that the racial practices of police work are not a one-way process, but a rela- tional one, between the police and the public (waddington a, b, sollund ). waddington suggests that white officers’ racist behaviour is not triggered by prejudice or racism, but a product of police work and crime statistics, along with the everyday pressures of police work (waddington b). others suggest that prejudices within the police reflect prejudices in society (reiner ). it has also been suggested that the suspicion with which some groups are regarded is a consequence of power structures in society, reproducing patterns of implicit discrimination (reiner , ben-porat , sollund , ). in this view, poverty and class structures interact with racism and insti- tutional discrimination (philips and bowling , loftus ). waddington ( a) also argues that the derogatory or even racist police canteen culture is not equivalent to the practices officers adopt on the street. although research has documented improvements and shifts in the police’s organisational norms in recent decades, these studies suggest that the diversity agenda also faces resistance founded on police occupational culture, in which an anti-diversity cultural dominance is preserved (mcelhinny , rowe , rowe and garland , loftus ; see also del percio ). dis- crimination and stereotyping of minorities within the force have been explored since the s and have been used to explain the under-recruitment of minorities to the police (e.g. holdaway , holdaway and o’neill a, b, frewin and tuffin , cashmore ). diversity levels within the police have remained low, and are lower in the higher levels of the hierarchy (van ewijk , haake ). strategies to increase diversity levels within the police have been met with internal resistance (dick and cassell , wieslander ). barriers and obstacles to attainting diversity, equality, and decreased discrimination are, nevertheless, multi-faceted and the result of several factors, such as the derogatory elements in police culture in both student and work environments, the relatively low status of police work, and minorities’ own perceived obstacles for being able to advance to police leadership positions (sollund , , egge , colvin , loftus , boogaard and roggeband , peterson and uhnoo , van ewijk , bjørkelo et al. , jones and williams , wieslander , ). some authors have stressed obstacles to influen- cing the diversity situation within the police through policies (cashmore , clements , wieslander ). a gap between managerial ambitions and practice (ben-porat , rowe and garland ) and the effects of official investigations and reports to counteract discrimination and racism have been termed ‘window dressing’, in both the uk (cashmore , souhami ) and in sweden (wieslander ). research has made visible the downside of what appeared to be a success when, in fact, the effects were negligible (cashmore , loftus ). one major obstacle to counteracting discrimination in the police, at least in the uk and in nordic contexts, are policing and society the police organisational cultures, which tend to stress the profession’s masculine, action-oriented, and anti-intellectual attributes, reflecting the large proportion of (white) men from working-class backgrounds in the police (manning , skolnick , lander ). diversity is often seen as threatening the police’s established occupational culture, one that is preserved by the weight of the influence of the white, male, heterosexual hegemony, and articulated through sexualised bantering and discourses of conformity and uniformity (frewin and tuffin , dick and cassell , loftus , , lander , rowe and garland , wieslander , , rennstam and sullivan ). nevertheless, although several authors have shown limitations to the concept and effects of institutional racism (souhami ), a number of studies indicate a shift in the articulation of discrimination in recent decades. they suggest that overt racism has diminished (and gone under- ground) and that derogatory and racist expressions among police officers have become less tol- erated (mcelhinny , holdaway and o’neill , a, b, loftus , , souhami , wieslander ). moreover, from being perceived as an individual problem, discrimination has been studied from an institutional and collective perspective, showing the relevance and power of discourse in the maintenance of discriminatory practices towards minorities in the police (ibid.). there remain, however, signs that suggest that an understanding of the relationships between structural, institutional, and individual forms of discrimination in relation to policing and the police force is still necessary (souhami ), and the recent #metoo movement calls for re- attention to the sexist language and practices in the police. at the same time, research into peoples’ intersecting identities has shown a positive trend regarding social inclusion, while not ignoring the obstacles to it that remain. this points to a need for further empirical research, looking at officers’ experiences within the organisation, along with their normative positions and claims (mcelhinny , boogaard and roggeband , jones and williams ). one recent study on lgb officers’ experiences on inclusion and exclusion in the swedish police has found that the policies for diversity and equal treatment facilitate organisational support and give a voice and power to the lgb officers by putting pressure onto the management when incidents occur (rennstam and sullivan ). it remains, however, necessary for lgb officers to initiate managerial action, which is why the authors use the term ‘peripheral inclusion’ of minorities. theory and methodology: the why and how of discourse analysis in police research the various, and sometimes conflicting, theories for how to understand exclusionary practices in the police argue for further studies on the matter. this study recognises that officers’ talk is not equivalent to their actions in duty. however, it does seek to reinforce the need to study what is said within insti- tutions and how this is important in order to understand structural and institutional influences in exclusionary practices. when discrimination becomes a question solely concerning police behaviour towards the public it downplays the internal relationships among colleagues and reduces police work to a patrolling practice. this article uses a poststructuralist discourse approach that regards talk as a social practice that comes with performative consequences (wetherell & potter , edley ). briefly, diversity as a concept, and individuals’ understanding of diversity, are seen as constructed through interaction and continuous negotiation between people and texts in different social contexts. moreover, when dominating patterns of talk – discourses – become taken for granted, their function is also con- structive, in the sense that they regulate and restrict peoples’ ways of understanding, acting in the world, and making sense of it. this approach brings an awareness that language is used not only to communicate, but to ‘do’ things, such as making bets, closing deals, giving praise, giving orders, or exercising discrimination. people working in the legal system also have a duty to acknowl- edge the judicial meaning of speech, especially when it concerns crimes such as libel, threat, hate crime and hate speech. thus, the performative notion of discourse as action-oriented is significant m. wieslander to understand the relationship between an understanding of diversity and the consequences of such an understanding – how police recruits’ discourses of diversity regulate their own and others’ views of inclusion and exclusion – and what practices those discourses legitimise. this theory not only gives language a more significant role in the institutional life, it also makes visible the processes by which values and practices are normalised and made taken for granted within an institution. in much of the previous research, there is an implicit point of departure that takes diversity and categories such as gender, ethnicity and sexuality to be fixed and pre-determinate as concepts. in contrast, and in line with a growing body of other research, this article directs its analysis to the pro- cesses through which these concepts are constructed, maintained, and legitimised in the police force (holdaway , frewin and tuffin , mcelhinny , dick and cassell , holdaway and o’neill a, b, loftus , , boogaard and roggeband , morant and edwards , morash and haarr , lander , hansen löfstrand and uhnoo , rennstam and sulli- van ). focusing on the processes of legitimisation renders visible how exclusionary practices are reproduced within the police, helping to find an answer to the question of how exclusionary practices based on ethnic boundaries are reproduced in a discursive climate in which diversity is officially affirmed as a guiding principle (e.g. shearing and ericson , mcelhinny , loftus , morant and edwards , souhami , uhnoo ). thus, this article looks at how police recruits’ talk constructs diversity in relation to the police force and to police work. an analysis of these discur- sive practices can reveal why and how some attitudes become legitimised not only in line with, but also in conflict with, official diversity policies. methods and data the data analysed in this article derive from ethnographic – inspired field studies conducted at the swedish national police academy in the spring of . at this time, the national police academy in stockholm was the largest educator of police officers, with two additional and smaller education pro- grammes located at a southern and a northern swedish university. the police programme consisted or four terms at the academy, and one final probationary term at a station. forty-five recruits from two of randomly selected classes were observed during a six-week course during their final term at the police academy (term four). the participants’ average age was : for the men, it was , and for the women, . approximately two thirds of the participants were men. data from field studies were drawn upon to construct an interview guide for focus group interviews at the end of the field period, and were used as secondary data in the analysis. the primary data was collected through a total of five focus group interviews with of these police recruits towards the end of their police academy training programme (term four). a further three focus group interviews were conducted with of the recruits at the end of their six-month probationary service at a police station (term five). in these contexts, the interviews covered topics such as diversity in the police force, diversity in relation to policy formulations, diversity related to police work, and diversity in regard to issues and education related to prejudices and the task of policing a multicultural society. the results obtained thus concern diversity at the interface between police education, service, and policy. focus groups were used to highlight diverse and joint con- structions in discussions about complex subjects (wibeck et al. ). the method is useful to study discussions that unfold through group argumentation, and the way in which meanings are developed collectively and used in specific cultural contexts. although the focus group discus- sions in this study could not be described as ‘everyday talk’, they were between recruits who had spent time together on a daily basis for two years, with the result that the conversations resembled those taking place in settings more informal than a classroom. all interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, with laughter, pauses, intonations, and emphasis marked. the duration of the interviews ranged from to minutes, with an average of minutes. the study was approved by the regional ethical review board and follow the ethical regulations of the swedish research council ( ). policing and society discourse analysis as theory and method for analysis the three main research questions were central for the analysis: how is diversity constructed? what identities (subject positions) do these constructions offer and how are they expressed in diversity dis- courses? in what ways are these diversity discourses sustained and challenged? while the analytical focus in the examination is on culture, religion, and ethnicity, other intersecting social categories relating to gender, sexual orientation and political affiliation are also considered. these play a role in much of the diversity talk encountered in the police academy. the data produced in the field studies and in the interviews were analysed with reference to critical discursive psychology, which sees discourse as a social practice and considers both the local accomplishment of a discourse as well as its broader social implications (wetherell and potter , edley ). this approach is a reac- tion towards cognitive approaches on attitudes within the field of psychology. instead of claiming to study the minds or intentions behind a statement, the analysis is exclusively on peoples’ utterances in situ and what language in specific settings ‘do’. analytical tools such as the notions of interpretative repertoire, ideological dilemma, subject position, and discursive/rhetorical devices stress the nature of discourse as a social practice, highlighting the devices that facilitate such practice (see also billig et al. , hall ). these devices provide a detailed view of practices in the context of police train- ing, and yield information about social interaction on a micro level. i use the concept of interpretative repertoire to identify recruits’ various and flexible use of the concept of diversity. this meso-level analytical approach enables the examination of conflicting demands formed by various repertoires. these repertoires are then clustered into discourses. the analysis enabled three central discourses to be identified. these are presented below with the respective key subject positions and interpretative repertories that constitute each one. in each discourse, certain related demands for or against diver- sity emerged, suggesting that an analytical tool such as the idea of ‘ideological dilemmas’ (billig et al. ) was needed. these dilemmas are analysed as discursive, and thus based on the inconsistency of what is said. the focus during the analysis was kept on resistance and the negotiations made to legitimise certain claims, which allowed us to analyse how discourses of diversity were sustained, and especially how they were challenged. finally, i draw upon critical theories of inclusion and exclu- sion in relation to the concept of diversity in various institutional settings in order to examine the social consequences of these discourses (archer , ahmed , , ostendorp and steyaert , del percio , urciuoli ). findings: diversity discourses and dilemmas three different meanings of diversity and three discourses related to them could be identified in the police recruits’ talk about diversity: ( ) diversity as inescapable difference (confirmation of diversity), ( ) diversity as a political goal (recognition of diversity), and ( ) diversity as potential similarity (regulation of diversity). in the first of these discourses, diversity as inescapable difference, difference was uncon- tested, constructed as natural and common-sensical, and constituted the central subject position ‘the essentially different other’. this discourse was articulated through the normalisation of differences between people using such discursive devices as ‘all people are different’. the discourse was reaffirmed through remarks such as ‘that’s a fact’ and ‘we already know that’. this naturalisation of difference (hall ) leads to prejudices appearing as natural, as illustrated by such recruits’ com- ments as ‘people who claim they’re free of prejudices are lying’ and ‘people always have a hard time with others who are different’. this talk about difference is a result of the essentialist features of the discourse linking individuals to separate social groups. at the same time, some people are viewed as more different than others, and hence more representative of the targets of police diversity strategies, namely, those coming from ethnic, religious, and sexual minority backgrounds. the stu- dents stress that a diverse society also makes increasing knowledge of ‘the other’ – how different groups in society behave and think – an important strategy in order to make police work more effective. this knowledge will enable them as officers to act in a manner that increases the trust m. wieslander and co-operation of the public. the need for such knowledge was frequently brought up in the inter- views in this study, as in the following two quotes: nick i’m thinking of domestic violence and that kind of thing; how different cultures are and how different the position of women and children is in some communities: stuff like that. and if we don’t understand them we will miss a lot of signs, signs of domestic violence, for example, and of many other things. (focus group , term ) jesper you make mistakes. you might approach a woman and greet her when you shouldn’t, for example. [sighs] with that you destroy trust and make them irritated. and it’s much harder to work with someone who’s angry with you … . if you know their customs and routines, you have gained a lot. (focus group , term ) these participants suggest that a lack of knowledge of cultural differences is an obstacle to efficient police work, and may lead to a loss of trust in the police and greater difficulties in co-operation. diver- sity here presents itself as something problematical, since the differences lead to conflicts that the police must then handle. one recurring argument in this regard was that members of different ethnic groups who immigrate to sweden continue their conflicts with one another here, implying that minorities in and of themselves are problematic. on the other hand, diversity is also constructed as a resource for the police in terms of ethnic and religious ‘matching’ (in the swedish context, see hansen löfstrand and uhnoo ), enabling the police to send out minority police officers to meet members of their own ethnic or religious group in society. diversity, in this sense, was linked to neighbourhoods dominated by ethnic minority groups. this link also highlighted the relevance of class when discussing diversity in the police. it was primarily ‘the ethnic other’ who contributed to diversity in the police, and such officers were thus referred to as the representatives of diversity recruitment to the force. paradoxically, this dis- course of difference was marked by an assumption that the ‘different’ social groups were internally homogenous: an assumption that people who represent other ethnic groups all think and behave the same way. the discourse on diversity as inescapable difference was a hegemonic discourse, since it was not contested by any of the recruits, but rather presented as a matter of common sense. the two other discourses identified (diversity as a political goal, and diversity as potential similarity) represented conflicting ways of handling and valuing diversity and difference in the police. diversity as a political goal recognised and valued diversity, while diversity as potential similarity restricted and led to smaller differences, through assimilation into a more uniform police. these two were mutually antagonistic, as they were based on incompatible rationales. the discourses diversity as political goal was based on repertoires that acknowledge diversity within the police and in policing. diversity was here viewed as a goal and a political choice, rather than as a self-evident matter of course. to increase diversity was presented as a strategy for the police to better reflect the pluralistic society and to act as a role model. the central subject position here was the police as ‘the representative police’, in which diversity in the police force was valued and seen as a way to acquire legitimacy. accordingly, the police is to be regarded as a ‘fair’ authority that represents society (cf. morant and edwards , bradford ). the following quote presents an example of this discourse as used by the police recruits in this study: hanna i thought about our credibility, that we have different religions and we have different experiences patrik it can really show that i, as a white heterosexual male, can work together with someone from another ethnicity or sexual orientation or something. … it shows to society that you don’t have to be at odds just because you have another background. [hanna: mmmh.] max not everybody has to look the same. (focus group , term ) in this discourse, efforts to increase diversity are regarded as part of a process that will help the police to develop as a modern organisation. in addition to inclusive recruitment, the recruits highlighted education about the multicultural society and education on prejudices and their consequences as important parts of this development. prejudices were constructed as the use of stereotypes, which policing and society could lead to discriminating police work, such as ethnic profiling. in line with policy in which social differences are recognised (e.g. taylor ), the recruits acknowledged democratic and group- related rights such as the freedom of religion. this, in turn, legitimised religious symbols such as wearing the hijab in uniform. this discourse on diversity as a political goal was presented by the recruits as having been pro- moted by the government through its police policies. the official rhetoric of diversity and targeted recruitment was regarded by the recruits as a mere window-dressing strategy to make the organis- ation look good, and the police were criticised by the recruits for ‘not really’ embracing diversity in the form of minority acceptance and representation (cashmore , holdaway and o’neill a). the recruits described this official policy discourse as basically just expressing political correctness, which was related to a normative (but not negative) stance on diversity. according to them, the official stance regulated what could be said and done within the police, especially among recruits and at the police academy. this, the recruits described, included a prohibition against expressing oneself in a racist, sexist, or homophobic manner, against the (open) practice of ethnic profiling, and against openly endorsing populist parties of the far right. ignoring these prohibitions brought the risk of suspension from the programme. thus, the discourse defined and reproduced what was con- sidered to be taboo and ‘politically correct’ within the police (see also loftus , souhami ). in sharp contrast to the discourse that valued diversity, the discourse on diversity as potential simi- larity was based on talk that limited diversity within the police and in police work. in this discourse, diversity was considered to be a luxury problem, and sweden viewed as society that had achieved equality, at least compared with other countries. knowledge of the diversity in the society was down- played in favour of equal treatment by the law and the recruits’ common sense. education about cul- tural differences and differences in customs was regarded as unnecessary. this discourse questioned whether prejudice as a concept exists. instead, prejudices were regarded as experiences and facts about people and groups that were useful for policing, which would this make, for example, ethnic profiling legitimate. this discourse also presented police work as ‘culture-free’ and guided by the pro- fessional values of neutrality and objectivity, obtained through assimilation into that which was con- stituted as the norm for physical appearance and behaviour. this discourse did not stress differences, but conformity and the preservation of the culture of white, male, heterosexual, and secular domi- nance. the values of homogeneity, neutrality, and assimilation were evoked to avoid potential conflicts arising from people’s differences. the central subject position here was the ‘neutral police’, which is linked to other, normative – but often unarticulated – positions, as in the following quote: dan i think there is a point to be made that the police do not represent anyone, or do not favour any specific culture [kalle and david agrees: no]. we don’t take a stance towards western culture and not towards any other culture either. we are completely neutral. [pauses] that’s a good point; you simply are who you are. the police are neutral and we don’t have any cultural – maybe that’s impossible, ’cause we might do it anyway, but it would be pretty good … to remain neutral. so you could be accepted in all segments of society. […] kalle no; i mean, in my view, where do you draw the line in that case? swedish officers with dreadlocks down to their ankles? (focus group , term ) as shown here, the idea of the ‘neutral police’ was constructed through limitations of non-neutral pos- itions. not everyone was perceived to have the ability to be neutral, especially not individuals visibly linked to a religion, nor political extremists. boundaries were drawn to ‘the other’ when the norm was visualised through statements about ‘the state’, ‘society’, and ‘people’, and it was embodied in the form of the secular, ethnically swedish, white, heterosexual male. this hegemonic position is made invis- ible, and it became a privilege to not have one’s neutrality questioned. this discourse showed similarities to the colour-blind rhetoric of white privilege, in which status within the norm provides one with the opportunity of not needing to make one’s identity relevant (mcelhinny , ahmed ). in this discourse, the uniform was used as a symbol of police conformity. following the logic of this discourse, one way to gain legitimate access to the force is to assimilate to the police norm, by, for m. wieslander example, removing the hijab. one way the recruits justified restrictions on appearance and size applied to some groups in the police was to invoke the police mandate of maintaining order in society, and not causing disorder by provoking conflicts. the norm here is to not ‘stick out’, and the importance of fitting in is linked to valued norms in police culture, such as solidarity. dilemmas of diversity tensions arise between the contradictory demands of recognising increased diversity in a police context on the one hand, as in the diversity as political goal discourse, and for regulating diversity to a normative conformity on the other, as in the diversity as potential similarity discourse. five dilem- mas originating from the tensions between these competing discourses can be distinguished: recognition of diversity regulation of diversity a diverse police force a uniform police force personal police officers neutral police officers diversity as competence diversity as differentiator work against prejudices work on the basis of prejudices regulation of speech (political correctness) need for humour in police work in this study, the discourse that recognised diversity as something politically valued and that was officially to be striven after, was expressed primarily in official documents and at the police academy by both students and teachers. differences and a diverse police force was valued, centred around officers who diverge from the secular, heterosexual, ethnically swedish, and white, male norm. none- theless, tensions arose from resistance, which was often expressed through the use of humour. this resistance was primarily articulated in the focus group discussions in relation to the police culture, and an image of the reality of police work that older officers gave to younger colleagues. these diver- sity-restricting accounts were regularly expressed under the banner of neutrality, and were grounded in the implicit normativity of a secular ‘common sense’. the police were presented as a neutral pro- fession without visual evidence of private traits. the first dilemma of the antagonistic discourses was that between the need for a diversified force and police conformity. the police are expected to represent a pluralistic society, while being a profession that requires conformity and neutrality. in relation to this dilemma, the recruits negotiated various reductions in diversity within the police and the professional status of ‘the visibly religious police officer’. the police uniform served as a symbol for conformity, and the participants argued that a police force with too high a degree of visible diversity will be experienced as provocative by many, and will thus cause disturb- ances in society. closely linked to this was the second dilemma, between the personal/private and the neutral/professional. this dilemma involved the struggle to define the borders of neutrality: what kind of personal and private traits can be permitted without threatening the neutrality of the authority? one field in which this dilemma is expressed is religious identity, while another is political opinions. recruits must negotiate both fields, and analyse the legitimacy of ‘the prejudiced police officer’. they experienced the task of counteracting discrimination as being challenged by racist or otherwise preju- diced officers, and suggested that the effects of discrimination included covert racism in police investi- gations. these two dilemmas were interrelated: the neutral and professional police officer was based on the norm of white, ethnically swedish, secular men. however, the norm was contested through accounts that suggested neutral, non-cultural preferences were problems. the third dilemma is seen in the way that diversity can at the same time make it easier to ensure the supply of competence and lead to discrimination. there is a paradox in considering the positive aspects of differences in people’s social background, while attributing subject positions to others, with discriminatory implications (cf. boogard and roggeband ). in the context of this dilemma, the subject position of ‘the successful immigrant recruit’ is under negotiation, and it can be seen that being associated with inclusive recruitment is a stigmatised position in the context of the traditional police culture (wieslander ). policing and society the fourth dilemma involves the question of whether to work against or on the basis of prejudices. this dilemma has been frequently discussed in previous police research in terms of the issue of racial or ethnic profiling (e.g. waddington a, sollund , ). the mission statement for the swedish police includes an imperative to work against discrimination and xenophobia, and it makes it clear that acting on prejudices is a discriminatory practice. at the same time, those in the police profession are also assumed to work on the basis of prejudices, so as to be able to notice more readily anything conspicuous (finstad ). the recruits in this study, for instance, negotiated their contradictory claims of representing ‘the unprejudiced police’ and of regarding roma people as representing ‘the criminal other’. the fifth dilemma was two-fold. it centred on what was described as a need for humour in police work, to counterbalance the need to regulate speech in accordance with politically correct (non- racist, non-sexist, and non-homophobic) principles. this dilemma arose from derogatory and sexist banter, a feature often found in police humour (dick and cassell , rennstam and sullivan ). such humour limits the use of certain bantering devices, such as irony, to ‘safe spaces’, in which utterances are concealed from the public and from other recruits who are critical (holdaway and o’neill b, loftus , uhnoo ). the recruits used various ways to legitimise the humour and normalise it as something important for the creation of a sense of fellowship, necessary in a dangerous and demanding profession. the question of what makes humour discriminatory was negotiated between the recruits, and even when it was suggested that the jargon was ‘raw but cordial’ and ‘shared by all’, and in this way produced parallel practices of inclusion and exclusion. one example is the recurrent humoristic use of the descriptor ‘bloody faggot’. figure shows the relationships between controversial discourses, demands, and dilemmas. the following example illustrates the relationships between conflicting discourses and their demands, and shows how they result in dilemmas. the recruits expressed an ambition to respect human rights, yet suggested that obstacles in their everyday reality stood in the way. freedom of religion, for example, are constructed in two ways: one as freedom of religion concerning religious rights, which recognises officers’ request to wear a hijab in service, while the other concerned freedom from religion, stressing the symbol-free neutrality of the police authority and restricting the use of religious headwear due to its potential provocativeness. this way of confronting ideologi- cal ideals with alleged practical difficulties was not unique, and has been previously described (e.g. wetherell and potter ). as shown by others (mcelhinny , loftus , ), police recruits use a diversity discourse that recognises differences to handle accusations of racism and their poss- ible stigmatisation as racists. at the same time, they express discursive anxiety or ambivalence in these diversity-related discussions (most significantly in discussions concerning racism, prejudice, and religious symbols among the police). several recruits described how they find the question of an officer’s right to wear the hijab in service as ‘annoying’. the following quote illustrates how the situation can give rise to a dilemma: jon this is a tough question. in part i think that, well, everyone can be whatever they want – human dignity and respectfulness and so on. [the other four recruits grin and kalle interrupts, also grinning: ‘but! … ’] and figure . the relationships between discourses, demands, and dilemmas. m. wieslander it’s a multicultural society. but at the same time you feel like ‘damn, is that alright?’. i feel very ambivalent about that. (focus group , term ) even though jon, in this quote, does not explicitly articulate the controversial discourse, the word ‘but’ and his confession to feeling ambivalent signal that opposing arguments can be made (billig et al. ). while this illustrates the inconsistencies in individuals’ reasoning and their use of multiple discourses, the same was made even more explicit in another case, that of patrik. for example, in an earlier quote above, patrik drew upon the discourse of diversity as political goal, but in the next excerpt he draws upon its opposing discourse, that of diversity as potential similarity. in it, two collec- tive ‘us-as-the-police’ notions are negotiated between patrik and chris through the conflicting reper- toires of the two discourses: patrik the police should always remain neutral. [several recruits nod in agreement] it should neither be muslim or christian or anything else. […] chris but – but the important thing is that we, as we work here in sweden – that we believe that islam and democ- racy can be compatible. patrik yes, yes, i agree.chris you can be a muslim and still work in a democratic country.patrik yeah, yeah; but then again [pauses] [raising his voice] but then how does the society look upon that when a, let’s say a christian meets a muslim officer? how does he [a christian individual] feel about that?: ‘no, you say this and that just because you think differently or have a different religion and you look down on me.’ [overlapping talk. chris argues that the same reaction occurred with women officers , years ago. they interrupt each other.] chris society is changing as long as we have democracy, so i think it’s a difficult question too.patrik i’m not saying i’m opposed to that; i’m saying society is. (focus group discussion , term ) besides the construction of religions as homogenous entities, all of which stand in opposition to each other as a source of conflict, and the construction of islam and muslims as anti-democratic by nature, what the extract here shows is how individuals in this study used contradictory discourses in their negotiations and legitimisations of a subject. what it also illustrates, however, are aspects of the struggle and boundary making involved in the construction of ‘the neutral police’, and the way in which a non-religious position is made normative. furthermore, it pinpoints how the composition of the police (the ‘us’ that is being negotiated) should be understood. in both of the last two quotes, allowing the hijab in uniform is presented as being called for by the religious rights and freedom of religion by individuals, thereby signalling inclusivity. however, this picture was also challenged by some recruits, who proposed imposing restrictions on the use of the hijab based on a notion that people should not have to meet and encounter a person with another religious identity than their own – in what could be described as a freedom from religion. the resistance to diversity and difference in the police, symbolised by officers wearing religious head- scarves, was linked to obstacles in the perceived everyday reality as officers in a secular society. ‘i’m not opposed to diversity, but society is’ was a frequently used rhetorical device. among other things, it allowed the speakers to express anti-diversity views and to regulate difference in the police, without being labelled as the source of the statement, or, in other words, a racist. hijab restrictions were justified by some interviewees who claimed that the police mandate to maintain order in society would be jeopardised if people began to feel that they were being provoked. accordingly, a regu- lation of diversity in the police force was legitimised with reference to a public that, it was assumed, opposed diversity. the police’s mandate to uphold democratic rights (and a democratic order more broadly) was downplayed and overshadowed by its mandate to maintain order in society. policing and society discussion to increase diversity in the police is part of a proactive strategy intended to increase equality and equity within the police and in society. one the one hand, diversity discourses may provide legiti- macy and serve as a resource for marginalised groups when they make demands and aim for greater inclusion and recognition. on the other hand, when the focus is placed on what distinguishes people from each other, diversity discourses may reduce minorities’ legitimacy and power within the organisation, and recreate stigmatised positions and injustice (wetherell and potter , boogaard and roggeband , del percio , urciuoli , wieslander ). the diversity discourses legit- imise giving people a value on the basis of their social background. this entails the risk of essentialis- ing people and thereby reducing them to a single category. this concerns not only the stereotyping that occurs during police work, which may give rise to legitimation of discriminatory practices (holm- berg , sollund , ), but also the stereotyping within the force. although minority pos- itions within the police are framed as providing resources for the organisation, recruits and officers with minority ethnic, female, and sexual identities can be described as only ‘peripherally included’ (rennstam and sullivan ). they continue to be victimised and depicted as outsiders in police organisations – even in the post-macpherson era (loftus , , peterson and uhnoo , jones and williams ). these signs of ‘inequality regimes’ (acker ) provide obstacles to using these symbolic frames as empowering tools to overcome marginalisation practices within the organisation. using diversity as a concept without taking into consideration the power structures and the resist- ance to change of these power structures in the context in which they are used may change very little. in contrast, increased diversity risks reproducing practices by which minorities are excluded. to increase diversity may also be reduced to a project for minorities, with diversity only needed where diversity is said to exist (certain neighbourhoods, for example). inequality may therefore be reduced to a question for those exposed to it, instead of being seen as a societal problem. categories also face the risk of being contrasted against one another, as minorities are placed into a dichoto- mous relationship to a normative belonging, where the norm is often taken for granted. moreover, enhancing diversity through inclusive recruitment may conceal unequal practices within the organ- isation, when diversity is used as evidence of the equality work performed by the organisation. infor- mation about inclusive recruitment may be used for institutional promotion (ahmed , , urciuoli ). as ahmed ( , p. ) has argued: perhaps the promise of diversity is that it can be both attached to those bodies that ‘look different’ and detached from those bodies as a sign of inclusion (if they are included by diversity, then we are all included). the promise of diversity could then be described as a problem: the sign of inclusion makes the sign of exclusion disappear. in this sense, police organisational efforts for social recognition and inclusion through the diversity discourses lack a discussion of the normative positions that are taken for granted. there is, therefore, a need to recognise the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the discourses on diversity, if one is to enhance their standing and legitimacy among the rank and file. the complexity in the question can also be addressed with a closer focus on intersecting identities, including socio-economic positions and whiteness (mcelhinny , loftus ), and a closer focus on how change towards greater inclusion is resisted. diversity awareness attained, for example, through diversity training, can also be promoted by illuminating normative positions through norm-critical perspectives, and by illumi- nating the police cultural norms that sustain the normative positions. the discursive struggles described above should be seen as relating to a ‘both-and’ situation, not an ‘either-or’ situation. the language in use in the struggles remained always situational and adjusted, in order to legitimise different versions of diversity depending on the context and the subject matter. diversity and its representatives were constructed in various, and not always compatible, ways (ostendorp and steyaert ). the recruits resorted to conflicting discourses in parallel and at the same time; as a result, their descriptions and justifications were often inconsistent. in some contexts, m. wieslander the recruits’ talk challenged racist and discriminatory practices, which, again, were reproduced in other contexts. the discourse regulating diversity was not articulated by white males only (in contrast to loftus , research); it was a discourse deployed and reproduced through the cultural norms shared and maintained at the police academy more generally (albeit by some recruits more than others). the discourse recognising diversity was articulated also by white men, not just those from minorities. indeed, the same individuals could articulate contradictory discourses, rendering questions of racism and discrimination among recruits more complex and rather misarticulated: to the extent that individuals express themselves both in anti-discriminatory and in discriminatory ways, enquiries into individual racism risk being both misleading and one-dimensional. moreover, they may conceal the focus and knowledge of institutional exclusionary practices and routines (rowe and garland , souhami ). the fact that many recruits in this study made use of both discourses suggests that the same individuals can both do, re-do, and undo diversity work. this suggests that further studies looking at institutional discourses and ways to legitimise various ‘truths’ within the police are necessary, rather than studies that focus on the individuals who use these discourses. the above analysis of talk in the police educational context contributes to our knowledge of how difference and social order are reproduced through recruits’ use of diversity discourses. how dis- courses can regulate individuals’ actions and choices is exemplified by one recruit’s explanation of how prejudices had affected him even though he had never himself encountered a roma person: ‘i think it’s interesting that i’ve got the same idea [of roma as criminals], even though i’ve never arrested a roma woman for shoplifting’. however, it is also relevant to question the role and legitimacy of diversity ambitions within the swedish police authority. the authority placed a great deal of emphasis on it between and , but has recently toned down the importance of diversity in recruitment and in employment policies and strategies. in the most recent diversity and equality work plan of the police, the term ‘diversity’ has been dropped altogether, being replaced by the term ‘equal treatment’ (the swedish national police board , ). several factors may have played a part in this de-legiti- misation of diversity, such as the questioning of affirmative action strategies in the police training programme, the criticism met by the fifty-fifty admission rate for women and men, and a court case against the police authority initiated by men claiming discrimination based on affirmative action (see wieslander ). it seems that diversity has lost its branding value for the police and is no longer trendy enough to be used even for window dressing. the ideal of equal treatment, as proclaimed in police policies, may also conceal exclusionary prac- tices, just as the concept of diversity in the police focusses exclusively on individuals’ differences, and may in this way reinforce exclusionary practices. as a result, diversity as social inclusion becomes compromised by its own legacy. the lack of accounts of equal value that accept differences and high- light human value reinforces obstacles to inclusion. the question is, therefore, whether an increased emphasis on equal value can shift the focus from ideas of deviance, and instead assign individuals a value based on their sameness as part of a shared humanity. however, the discourses on diversity in the police are part of diversity discourses in society at large, and the way in which they give a struc- turing order to various groups will probably change very slowly and meet with considerable resistance. conclusions this article has outlined three diversity discourses from the talk of police recruits in their final year at the police academy. the hegemonic discourse, diversity as inescapable difference, confirmed people’s difference as uncontested and natural. however, two additional controversial discourses also emerged in the material, focussing on the ways diversity should be handled and valued within the police: diversity as a political goal (recognition of diversity) and diversity as potential similarity (regu- lation of diversity). these contradictory discourses resulted in specific dilemmas. policing and society the contradictory nature of the diversity discourses encountered in this study reflects a struggle for a different ‘us’ that can regulate the conception of the ideal police, one’s professional conduct as an officer, and the ways in which policing ought to be performed. the discourses that were identified served to maintain a sense of social order, as exemplified by a discourse that restricted and limited minority identities, as well as other positions perceived to deviate from the dominant image of the swedish police. diversity discourses among police recruits affirmed social categories particularly associated with diversity, while a superior norm was assumed to regulate diversity efforts in the police. the analysis shows that the norm within the police is constructed in analogy with the image of a secular, ethnically swedish, white, heterosexual male. this norm gave those who were ascribed to this position a value-free neutrality, actualised as a non-problematic subject position. the subject position of the ‘neutral police’ was demarcated using specific categories such as visible religious identity, an ethnic minority background, or political activism. the diversity discourses were also hierarchical, with some social groups portrayed as more representative of diversity than others. the non-normative backgrounds attributed to police officers were frequently associated with diversity in the workforce and viewed as resources in the police’s work vis-à-vis different groups in society, such as when con- ducting ethnic and religious matching. the diversity discourses identified in this study were based on differentiating practices, which could then result in individuals fixed in stereotypical categories. this way, diversity talk – although aiming to promote social inclusion – could lead to social exclusion instead. re-phrasing archer ( , p. ), ‘the rhetoric of diversification might be better called a dis- course of stratification’. against the background of these contradictory discourses, diversity in the police emerges as a context-dependent concept in a state of flux. what a diversity discourse will and even can accomplish depends on who defines the term, how, and for whom (ahmed ). the findings of this study present how diversity can be used as a flexible rhetoric device depending on the specific topic. for example, diversity was posed as a luxury problem, since equality has already been achieved in society. this idea was juxtaposed with diversity as a politically still unachieved goal, since not every- one is fully accepted as a member of society. another example is provided by the idea of ethnic and religious matching. such matching was regarded as a positive tool for the police, except when an officer in a hijab managed to provoke members of the public by her appearance, in which case matching turned into ‘mismatching’. visible religious positions were constructed as the cause of pro- blems based on prejudices in society, not in the police organisation. in this conception, the power to determine what is permitted in the police, and by extension in society, thus lies with anti-diversity forces. that being the case, discourses about diversity can only fail to address fundamental issues of historical inequality and subordination (urciuoli ). in summary, the results from this study indicate that swedish police recruits are struggling with a need to manage contradictory demands. a discourse sustaining exclusion and inequality competes with the pursuit of increased social equality. the ideological ideal of equal rights contrasts and even conflicts with a perceived notion of a neutral authority, but also with the mandate, realities, and difficulties of police work. the police’s mandate to uphold democratic rights is compromised by the mandate to maintain order in society. resistance towards change for diversity is based on argu- ments for the sake of the society and efficient police work. notes . during the swedish police removed all policy documents concerning diversity and equal treatment from its website. . there is no international consensus on the terms ‘ethnic profiling’ and ‘racial profiling’; in some cases race is being used synonymously with ethnicity and in others they are distinguished. . the swedish equivalent to the #metoo movement among female police employees is named #nödvärn (eng: self defence) and had collected signatures from police employees up until april (https://www.skrivunder. com/upprop_nodvarn). witness testimonies have been published online in a report called #nödvärn ( ). m. wieslander https://www.skrivunder.com/upprop_nodvarn https://www.skrivunder.com/upprop_nodvarn . while loftus defines these safe places as ‘white spaces’, i.e. ‘spaces where the white majority feel comfortable enough to resist and subvert aspects of the diversity agenda’ ( , p. ), in this study this humour was repro- duced by all recruits, of all social backgrounds. however, there were also power relationships at play here, with individuals described as not conforming to the police norm sometimes only winning collegial acceptance by par- taking in and reproducing this humour (sefton , wieslander ). disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. funding the research was partly supported by karlstad university, and partly by the swedish council for working life and social research, grant number - . orcid malin wieslander http://orcid.org/ - - - references acker, j., . inequality regimes: gender, class and race in organizations. gender & society, ( ), – . ahmed, s., . the language of diversity. ethnic and 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ordningsmakten. diskurskamp, dilemman och motstånd i blivande polisers samtal om mångfald [forces within the police force: discursive conflict, dilemmas and resistance in police trainee dis- course on diversity]. thesis (phd). karlstad university, sweden. wieslander, m., . marginalised voices in the inclusive recruitment discourse: a dilemma of inclusion/exclusion in the (swedish) police. european journal for research on the education and learning of adults, ( ), – . policing and society http://euroquality.se/pdf/rapporter/m%c %a ngf% och% likabeh% polisen.pdf http://euroquality.se/pdf/rapporter/m%c %a ngf% och% likabeh% polisen.pdf https://www.polisen.se/global/www% och% intrapolis/informationsmaterial/ % polisen% nationellt/mangfald_och_likabehandling_polisens_nation._policy_och_plan_ .pdf https://www.polisen.se/global/www% och% intrapolis/informationsmaterial/ % polisen% nationellt/mangfald_och_likabehandling_polisens_nation._policy_och_plan_ .pdf https://polisen.se/global/www% och% intrapolis/om% polisen/ % nationellt/likabehandling% och% m%c %a ngfald% .pdf https://polisen.se/global/www% och% intrapolis/om% polisen/ % nationellt/likabehandling% och% m%c %a ngfald% .pdf https://polisen.se/siteassets/dokument/om-polisen/polismyndighetens-strategi-for-likabehandling- --- .pdf https://polisen.se/siteassets/dokument/om-polisen/polismyndighetens-strategi-for-likabehandling- --- .pdf 	abstract 	introduction 	background 	research on diversity and the police 	theory and methodology: the why and how of discourse analysis in police research 	methods and data 	discourse analysis as theory and method for analysis 	findings: diversity discourses and dilemmas 	dilemmas of diversity 	discussion 	conclusions 	notes 	disclosure statement 	orcid 	references msc thesis master’s programme in computer science a method for wavelet-based time series analysis of historical newspapers jari avikainen december , faculty of science university of helsinki supervisor(s) prof. hannu toivonen examiner(s) prof. hannu toivonen, dr. lidia pivovarova contact information p. o. box (pietari kalmin katu ) university of helsinki,finland email address: info@cs.helsinki.fi url: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/ faculty of science master’s programme in computer science jari avikainen a method for wavelet-based time series analysis of historical newspapers prof. hannu toivonen msc thesis december , pages historical newspapers, wavelet transform, step detection helsinki university library algorithms study track this thesis presents a wavelet-based method for detecting moments of fast change in the textual contents of historical newspapers. the method works by generating time series of the relative frequencies of different words in the newspaper contents over time, and calculating their wavelet transforms. wavelet transform is essentially a group of transformations describing the changes happening in the original time series at different time scales, and can therefore be used to pinpoint moments of fast change in the data. the produced wavelet transforms are then used to detect fast changes in word frequencies by examining products of multiple scales of the transform. the properties of the wavelet transform and the related multi-scale product are evaluated in relation to detecting various kinds of steps and spikes in different noise environments. the suitability of the method for analysing historical newspaper archives is examined using an example corpus consisting of issues of uusi suometar from – and issues of wiipuri from – . two problematic features in the newspaper data, noise caused by ocr (optical character recognition) errors and uneven temporal distribution of the data, are identified and their effects on the results of the presented method are evaluated using synthetic data. finally, the method is tested using the example corpus, and the results are examined briefly. the method is found to be adversely affected especially by the uneven temporal distribution of the newspaper data. without additional processing, or improving the quality of the examined data, a significant amount of the detected steps are due to the noise in the data. various ways of alleviating the effect are proposed, among other suggested improvements on the system. acm computing classification system (ccs) information systems → information retrieval → retrieval tasks and goals → information extraction general and reference → cross-computing tools and techniques → evaluation helsingin yliopisto – helsingfors universitet – university of helsinki tiedekunta — fakultet — faculty koulutusohjelma — utbildningsprogram — study programme tekijä — författare — author työn nimi — arbetets titel — title ohjaajat — handledare — supervisors työn laji — arbetets art — level aika — datum — month and year sivumäärä — sidoantal — number of pages tiivistelmä — referat — abstract avainsanat — nyckelord — keywords säilytyspaikka — förvaringsställe — where deposited muita tietoja — övriga uppgifter — additional information contents introduction . background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . event detection in media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . step detection using wavelet analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . thesis structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wavelet analysis . what is a wavelet transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . continuous wavelet transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . discrete wavelet transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fast wavelet transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a method for event detection using wavelet transforms . time-series generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wavelet transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wavelet product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . problems near the ends of the signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . step detection and evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . event detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . empirical evaluation . the corpus used for testing the method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . testing the method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . properties of the multiscale product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the effects of noise on the step detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the effect of data coverage on the step counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the effect of ocr errors to the step counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . results . properties of the multiscale product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the effects of noise on the step detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the effect of data coverage on the step counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . performance of the event detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . discussion . effects of noise and missing data on the system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . alleviating the effects of uneven temporal distribution of data . . . . . . . . problematic features of the method, and suggestions for improvements . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . bibliography introduction the aim of this thesis is to examine the applicability of a wavelet transform-based method for change detection in time series generated from historical newspaper data. the change detection method examined in the thesis was developed as a part of newseye†, an eu- funded‡ project that aims to provide improved tools and methods for performing historical research using newspaper archives as the source material. section . of the thesis provides background for by discussing the use of historical news- papers as a source of information in historical research. sections . and . discuss earlier research related to the topic, and section . presents an overview of the remaining sections of the thesis. . background during the last – years, digital humanities has emerged as a new and growing field that combines computational tools and techniques to humanities research [ ]. it has even been described as “the next big thing” [ ]. one of the goals of digital humanities research is to give humanities researchers the pos- sibility to access and analyse the immense amount of data available in the world from their own computers. one way of progressing towards this goal is to digitise information that currently exists only in analog format, such as microfilm archives of old newspapers. another equally important task is to provide the tools necessary for accessing the data, sifting through it, and performing various kinds of sophisticated analysis to the data. various projects to that end exist, such as the newseye project, that aims to introduce “new concepts, methods and tools for digital humanities by providing enhanced access to historical newspapers for a wide range of users.[ ]” as can be seem from the quote, the main focus of newseye is research using historical newspapers as a source. this is because newspapers, due to their very purpose of distributing information, contain unparalleled amount of information on cultural, political and social events. †newseye.eu ‡this work has been supported by the european unions horizon research and innovation pro- gramme under grant (newseye) newseye.eu in order to achieve its goals, the newseye project needs to provide improved solutions for a variety of problems, from improving the quality of the digitised versions of the newspapers to providing highly automated tools for exploratory analysis (see e.g. [ ]) of the data. the list of tasks that need to be at least partially automated in order to reach the project’s goal includes analysis problems such as named entity recognition, topic modelling and event detection. the focus of this work is event detection. in order to limit the scope of the problem, events are here defined not as things that happen in the physical world, but simply as sudden changes in the newspaper contents within short time intervals. the assumption naturally is that these changes in the data are caused by things happening in the world, but the aim is simply to pinpoint the events in the data for further analysis by other means. . event detection in media previous research on automated event detection in historical newspapers is difficult to find. the most relevant discovered paper is one by van cahn, markert and nejdl [ ], where they investigate the evolution of a flu epidemic using german newspapers. in their work they use human annotators to build a corpus consisting of articles relevant to their research question. from the resulting corpus they search for spikes in word frequencies for keywords such as influenza, epidemic, and disease. they gain additional information by examining co-occurrences of various keywords. widening the search to event detection in other types of written media we find that a lot of the research uses twitter∗ posts as source data. twitter is a microblogging service, where users communicate via short (maximum length is characters) posts, that can contain references to other users (marked using the @-character before the user-specific username), and so-called hashtags, which are specially marked keywords (e.g. #metoo, related to the me too-movement) that can be used to search for other related posts more easily. in [ ], atefeh and khreich provide a survey of techniques for event detection in twitter. unfortunately, the methods used for event detection in twitter are not easily adaptable for historical newspaper data due to few key differences in the properties of the two types of media. ∗www.twitter.com www.twitter.com an obvious one is the lack of structure in the digital versions of old newspapers. twitter posts or tweets have a clear structure, with one post consisting of limited amount of text and easily distinguishable keywords in the form of hash tags and usernames. in addition, due to the length limit for the posts, each posts typically pertains to a single topic. the digitised newspapers, on the other hand, are much more limited in regards to this sort of structure. at the most basic form, the newspaper data consists of machine-readable text produced by a more or less advanced optical character recognition (ocr) or automated text recognition (atr) method. if article separation hasn’t been performed to the data, a single text file contains a single page of the newspaper. this makes methods used with twitter data, such as topic-based clustering (see e.g. [ ], [ ]) less useful, since a single page might contain articles concerning any number of topics, and a single article might be divided between two or more pages. the newspaper data is usually also missing easily recognisable keywords similar to the hashtags, unless additional analysis has been performed on the data to produce these kinds of labels. . step detection using wavelet analysis due to the lack of structure in the newspaper data, the focus is shifted to analysing time series. time series can be produced from the digitised newspapers e.g. based on word frequencies, similar to the work by van cahn et al. [ ]. these time series can then be analysed in order to find spikes, steps, and trends in the data. mallat and zhong [ ] use wavelet transforms for characterising different types of steps. they show that wavelet transform can be used to detect and classify different variation points in signals, and describe a fast algorithm (referred from here on as the fast wavelet transform or fwt ) for computing a discrete wavelet transform [ ]. they also demon- strate that the wavelet transform can be used for encoding and reconstructing images. rosenfeld [ ] suggests a way to improve step detection performed using differences of averages, i.e. by calculating dk(i) = ∣∣∣∣∣f(i + k) + . . . + f(i + )k − f(i) + . . . + f(i−k + )k ∣∣∣∣∣ , where a high value for dk(i) indicates the presence of a step within k samples from i. rosenfeld suggests that instead of using a single value for k, better results can be achieved by calculating the differences dk(i) using multiple values for k, and examining the point- wise product of the differences. sadler and swami [ ] propose combining wavelet transforms with the idea suggested by rosenfeld. they use the fast wavelet transform algorithm by mallat and zhong [ ] to calculate the wavelet transform of a signal in multiple scales (corresponding to the difference signals dk(i) in rosenfeld’s work), and then calculate point-wise product of the different scales of the transform for performing edge detection. they call this product a multiscale product and proceed to analyse its properties and effectiveness in step detection. . thesis structure this thesis describes an experiment at using the approach proposed by sadler and swami for detecting sudden changes in the contents of historical newspapers. first, section gives a short overview of wavelet transform in general and the fast wavelet transform algorithm by mallat and zhong [ ] in more detail. section describes the method used for detecting changes in the newspaper contents. first, time series are produced from the original data using existing tools, such as the nltk [ ] and uralicnlp [ ] libraries for python. the produced time series are then processed using the mallat and zhong’s fast wavelet transform [ ], and multiscale products of the transformed time series are used for step detection similar to the analysis by sadler and swami [ ]. finally the detected steps are used to detect points in time with large number of changes in the general contents of the newspapers with the assumption that these changes are caused by some events of interest. section describes both the synthetic data and the newspaper corpus used for testing the method, and the tests that were performed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. the tests are devised in order to provide some insight into the following research questions: . how well does the step detection used in the method perform in the presence of noise? . (a) how do the features of the corpus, such as high amount of noise or missing data for certain months, affect the performance of the method as a whole? (b) can the effects of these features be alleviated? the results of the tests are presented in section . section contains discussion of the results, together with answers to the questions posed above. in addition, some additional properties of the method, and their effects on the obtained results are discussed, together with some suggestions on how the method could be improved further. wavelet analysis . what is a wavelet transform the wavelet transform is a tool for time-frequency analysis., in other words figuring out what kind of frequencies a given signal contains at different times. it was first formal- ized by grossmann and morlet [ ], and has since been used in various signal processing applications, such as ecg analysis [ , ], image compression (e.g. [ , , , ]) and anomaly detection (e.g. [ , , , ]). figures . and . demonstrate how different features of the original signal appear in the wavelet transform. sharp edges appear as spikes that have the same height and approximate location over the first four scales of the transform, after which they combine with the neighbouring features. slower changes in the signal appear only in the higher scales of the transform. the noise added to the latter part of the signal is fairly prominent in the first scale of the transform, after which the number of maxima in the transform caused by the noise rapidly decreases. figure . : an example signal similar to one used by mallat and zhong [ ] for demonstrating the features of the wavelet transform . continuous wavelet transform wavelet analysis is a way of performing time-frequency analysis with some resemblance to the better known fourier transform. the continuous wavelet transform can be described figure . : the first scales of the wavelet transform of the signal in figure . by formula twava,b (f) = |a| − / ∫ f(t)ϕ ( t− b a ) dt, where ϕ is called a wavelet function and must satisfy ∫ ϕ(t) dt = . this formula gives the value of the wavelet transform of function f(t) at time b using scale a. the a and b in the formula are the scaling and translation parameters. large values of a correspond to low frequency components of the signal, and smaller values correspond to high frequencies. at the same time, small values for a make the wavelet function more narrow, improving the time localisation for high-frequency components. translation parameter b simply shifts the center of the wavelet along the time axis [ ]. to illustrate the effect of parameters a and b, their effect on an often-used wavelet function called the mexican hat wavelet (ϕ(x) = ( − x ) exp(−x )) is shown in figure . . the figure contains three versions of function ϕ(t−b a ) with different values for parameters a and b. the solid line shows the base function with values a = and b = . the dashed line shows how increasing b shifts the function to the right, and at the same time how decreasing a makes the function narrower. the dotted version shows the opposite version: negative values for b shift the function to the left, and values larger than for a make the function wider. note that these effects on the shape of the function are separate from each other, i.e. changing only b has no effect on the width of the function, and changing only a doesn’t affect the location of the function. the continuous wavelet transform is similar to the short-time fourier transform (stft), figure . : the effect of scaling and translation parameters a and b on the shape of the “mexican hat” wavelet function [ ] which can be formulated as follows: tstfω,τ (f) = ∫ f(t)g(t− τ)e−iωt dt. here, function g(t) is a window function centered on zero. in other words, the value of g(t) is nonzero only in a limited area around the origin (t = ). this means that for a fixed value of τ, the frequency information obtained from the stft pertains only to the part of signal where the window function g(t− τ) > . a notable difference between the fourier and wavelet transforms is in the width of the analysis windows. in fourier transform, the width of g(t − τ) is fixed and therefore the time and frequency resolution are the same for all frequencies in the transform. in wavelet transform, decreasing a makes the wavelet function ϕ(t−b a ) narrower, which means that for higher frequencies (corresponding to the narrower wavelet function) the time resolution of the analysis is improved at the cost of poorer frequency resolution [ ]. . discrete wavelet transform in order to be able to work on digital signals, a discrete version of the wavelet transform is needed. to obtain the discrete form of the wavelet transform, both a and b need to be take only discrete values. the scaling parameter a is replaced with am , where a > , and larger values for m correspond to wider wavelet functions, and improved frequency resolution [ ]. since the width of the wavelet is proportional to a and therefore also to am , the discrete version of the translation parameter b needs to depend on am as well: for narrower wavelet, the shifts along the time axis need to be smaller in order to cover the whole signal. accordingly, the discrete version of b becomes nb am , where b > sets the width of the time increments in relation to the width of the wavelet and n moves the wavelet along the time axis. combining the discrete versions of the parameters, we get the discrete wavelet transform twavm,n (f) = a −m/ ∫ f(t)ϕ(a−m t−nb ) dt. the effects of changing m and n on the shape and location of ϕ(a−m t−nb ) is demonstrated in figure . using the mexican hat wavelet from figure . . figure . : the discrete version of the wavelet in figure . with a = and b = . . fast wavelet transform mallat and zhong [ ] present the fast wavelet transform (fwt), a fast algorithm for calculating a discrete wavelet transform. they use a quadratic spline wavelet shown in figure . , with scaling parameters that belong to the dyadic sequence ( j)j∈z. this corresponds to setting a = in the discrete wavelet transform discussed in section . . the following describes the fwt algorithm by mallat and zhong [ ] using slightly sim- plified notation. the input of the algorithm is the signal to be transformed, denoted as s . for each scale j, the algorithm applies a high-pass filter gj and a low-pass filter hj separately to the input signal s j (the ∗ symbol denotes convolution). the output w j from the high-pass filter is the wavelet transform of the input at scale j and is part of figure . : quadratic spline wavelet used by mallat and zhong [ ] the resulting wavelet transform. the scaling factors λj are used to counteract a distortion introduced by the discretisation of the wavelet transform, and are explained in more detail below. the output s j+ from the low-pass filter contains the remaining lower frequency components of the signal that are not included in w j , and becomes the source signal for the next scale. the output of the algorithm is formed of signals w j, ≤ j < j, which are the transformed versions of the input signal in different scales, and signal s j , which contains the remaining low-frequency components of the original signal. j = while (j < j) w j = λj s j ∗gj s j+ = s j ∗hj j = j + end while the high-pass and low-pass filters g and h corresponding to the wavelet in figure . are given in table . , together with filters g , g , h , and h , which correspond to higher scales of the transform. filters for higher scales are obtained by adding j − zeroes between each value in filters g and h . the outputs wj are scaled by λj to compensate for an error caused by the discretisation. n - - - - - - h . . . . h . . . . h . . . . g - . . g - . . g - . . table . : filters h and g for the first three scales of the fast wavelet transform algorithm by mallat and zhong [ ] if the signal contains an instant step∗, the wavelet transform should contain a maxima of equal amplitude in all scales. in their algorithm, mallat and zhong use the λj values in table . to ensure that amplitudes across scales are correct. j > λj . . . . table . : values for λj as given in mallat and zhong [ ] when calculating values near the beginning and end of the signal, some of the values needed for the convolution would be outside the actual signal. this can cause artefacts in the results, and these border effects need to be addressed somehow. if the signal has non-zero values at the ends, simply assuming that the values outside the signal are all zero effectively creates a sudden step to the beginning of the signal. this imaginary step will then show up in the wavelet analysis, and avoiding such artefacts is desirable. in order to avoid such border effects, mallet and zhong suggest using a periodisation technique. the signal with length n is basically assumed to be a part of longer, repeating signal, that has a period of n samples, and the signal is extended to that length using mirror symmetry: if the actual signal is d ≤n≤n , then for n < n ≤ n : dn = d n+ −n. as a result, there will be no discontinuities at the ends of the signal. the assumption used for periodisation also limits the number of scales needed for full analysis to log (n) + , since when the scale is equal to the period of the signal ( j = n), ∗for instance a signal consisting of values [ , , , , , , , , , , ] as opposed to [ , , , , , , , , , , ] the remainder signal s j is constant and equal to the mean value of the original signal[ ]. this gives us the time complexity of the algorithm. one iteration (calculating one scale of the transform) takes o(n) time, and since we only need to calculate o(log(n)) scales, the total time complexity of the algorithm is o(n log(n)). a method for event detection using wavelet transforms the method for event detection consists of five distinct phases, each of which is described in the following subsections. section . describes the process used to produce time series out of the raw data in the corpus. next, the time series are transformed using the fast wavelet transform algorithm by mallat and zhong [ ] (section . ). then, multiscale product used by sadler and swami [ ] is calculated for the transformed time series (section . ). steps are detected from the multiscale product using adaptive thresholding, and the detected steps are given weighted scores (section . ). finally, steps from different time series are analysed together to find large concentrations of changes in the data (section . ). . time-series generation processing the data from the raw text into token-specific time series is performed as fol- lows. first, the texts are tokenised, and tokens containing non-alphabetical characters are removed. the remaining tokens are lemmatised using uralicnlp [ ] library by mika hämäläinen. tokens that cannot be lemmatised by uralicnlp are discarded, which re- moves most of the remaining ocr-related problems, such as tokens that are segments of words (e.g. tehn, toia, sseja and so on). the number of times each lemma appears on any given day in the data is then stored in the form of lemma-specific time series. in addition, for each day, the total number of tokens before lemmatisation (i.e. the number of tokens consisting solely of letters) is stored. this number is used for calculating frequencies for the lemmas, which are stored into separate time series in the form of ipm values, i.e. the number of times the lemma appears per million tokens in the corpus. next, lemmas appearing in the whole corpus less than ten times are discarded as well, since they are too rare to provide any reliable insights into the changes in the data. in addition, time series for stopwords are retained, but stored separately from other data. . wavelet transform the first phase is to perform a wavelet transform to each of the time series to be examined in order to detect possible spikes and steps in them. the generic description of the fast wavelet transform used in the method is given in section . . sadler and swami [ ] present the matlab code for performing the transform, and this code was used as the basis for the implementation. in their implementation, sadler and swami invert the high pass filter g in table . , and the same inverted version is also used in this work. the inverted filter produces more naturally interpretable responses (positive peak for a positive step and vice versa), and therefore seems like a sensible choice. the ends of the signal are treated using mirror-symmetric extension of the signal, as suggested by mallat & zhong [ ]. this means that at each scale j, ≤ j < log ( n) of the transform, the remainder signal sd j is extended from both ends with its mirror image, producing a signal of length n. the purpose of the signal extension is to avoid introducing discontinuities into the signal, as these would then appear in the event detection as extra detected steps. the convolutions of the signal with the low- and high-pass filters are calculated using this extended version, and the results are then trimmed back to the original length, by keeping the n samples from the middle. this method results in a number of effects to the resulting wavelet transform, two of which will be discussed in more detail, since they need to be taken into account in further analysis of the signal. first of all, the method will inevitably produce some artefacts to the wavelet transform close to the beginning and end of the signal. this will be discussed more in section . . second, the transformed signal is shifted half a sample to the right (or left, depending on the implementation). since the high-pass and low-pass filters h and g used by mallat and zhong [ ] are of even length, the results from the first convolutions cannot be trimmed exactly from the middle. instead, the filtered signal is shifted half a sample to left or right, depending on which end of the signal is trimmed more. figure . demonstrates this effect on a signal consisting of four samples with a unit step at . the maximum of the transformed signal should coincide with the steepest slope in the original signal (between samples and ) but is instead shifted half a sample to the left or right. shifting the signal to the right makes more sense since that way the peaks in the transform coincide with the first sample after a step instead of seeming occur before the actual step. figure . : the first scale of the wavelet transform for a unit step as an example of a (partial) wavelet transform using real data, figure . shows a time series ( . .a.) and the first three scales of the wavelet transform for the time series ( . .b.– d.). the time series describes how well the corpus covers each month in the data. the value is the percentage of days for which there are newspapers issues in the corpus. as we can see, the distribution of the data is quite uneven, which has certain effects on the analysis. this will be discussed more in section . from figure . .b.–d. we can see how the wavelet transform behaves in the first three scales. in the smallest scale (figure . .b.) it produces the most narrow extrema, but the high-frequency noise in the data is also the most prominent. especially the minima related to the two decreasing steps in and are almost indistinguishable from the surrounding noise. on the other hand, in the third scale in figure . .c much of the noise has already been filtered out, but at the cost of wider extrema that correspond to the steps in the data. for the spike visible in the data at this means that the locations of the extrema in the wavelet transform do not accurately correspond to the location of the spike anymore. also, the step at is becoming more difficult to differentiate from the surrounding noise. figure . : a time series of newspaper coverage per month (a.) and the first three scales of the wavelet transform of the time series (b.–d.). . wavelet product there are multiple ways of analysing and processing the transformed signal further. in this work, the chosen approach is to use multiscale products, i.e. point-wise products of multiple scales of the wavelet transform. similar method has been used e.g. xu et al. [ ] in their method for filtering magnetic resonance images, and sadler and swami [ ] for edge detection. using products of different scales is inspired by rosenfeld [ ], who uses a similar method for improving the edge detection accuracy when using differences of averages at differ- ent scales. using the product of multiples scales is based on two observations. for one, sharp edges produce maxima across multiple scales in the wavelet transformation at ap- proximately same location, and therefore the multiscale products will have large values at locations corresponding to the edges. second, the number of maxima caused by noise decreases quickly for increasing scales. according to mallat and hwang [ ], the number of local maxima in the wavelet transform of white gaussian noise is halved for every scale. in addition, the locations of the maxima caused by the noise are not correlated across scales. since the value of the multiscale product is small when any of the factors are small, the multiscale product for noise tends to have small values for most of the time. the distribution for the multiscale product of gaussian noise is examined briefly in section . . the multiscale product used in this thesis is calculated using the first three scales of the wavelet transform. the decision to use the first three scales for the product similar to sadler and swami [ ] is based on the following factors. first of all, smaller scales correspond to the fastest changes in the signal, and the further along the scales we progress, the slower are the changes that are detected by the wavelet transform. since this work focuses on using steps for detecting events and not e.g. trends over larger timespans, the larger scales are not useful. using larger scales also increases the number artefacts appearing close to the start and end of the signal due to the way the fast wavelet transform algorithm described in section . works. this distortion is discussed in more detail in section . . as an example of the wavelet product, figure . .b. shows the wavelet product for the newspaper time series from figure . . it is easy to see that the resulting product indeed has minima at the locations where the original signal has the most prominent decreasing steps (i.e. around , , and ) and a maximum followed by a minimum around the location of the spike in original data at . figure . : the time series from figure . and the product of the first three scales of its wavelet transform. the dashed lines indicate the selected step thresholds, described below in section . . at the same time, the signal to noise ratio of the product is much better than in any of the three individual scales (figure . .b., c. and d.) used for calculating the product. the small increasing step at early s is barely visible due to its relatively small size. this is as expected, since the step in question has similar magnitude to the noise elsewhere in the data. . problems near the ends of the signal figure . show the proportions by which the samples in the original signal affect the value of the transformed signal. for the first scale of the wavelet transform, the value of the transformed signal at time t is affected only by the values of the original signal at times t− and t. on the other hand, for the third scale of the transform, values from the original signal are needed, from t− up to t + , with values at t− and t having the largest effect on the result. the solid line in the figure shows the mean of the three scales, corresponding to the effect that each of the samples in the original signal have on the final multiscale product. figure . : the amounts by which the surrounding samples in the original signal participate in the calculation of the first three scales of the wavelet transform. the solid line shows the mean of the values for the three scales. as can be seen from the figure, when calculating the wavelet transform and the multiscale product closer than eight samples from the start of the signal or seven samples from the end, part of the samples needed for calculating the values for at least one of the scales are located outside the actual signal. simply assuming those values to be zero (or any other fixed value) effectively assumes that the signal had the selected value before the measurements started. now, if the signal actually has a (mean) value of something else than the assumed value at the beginning, this imaginary jump from zero to that real mean value will be visible in the resulting wavelet multiscale product. as explained in section . , mallat and zhong propose using mirror-symmetric extension of the signal in order to minimise artefacts caused by the proximity of the signal borders to the wavelet transform [ ]. this approach was also used by sadler and swami [ ], and adapted to the version of the transform used in this thesis as well. it’s worth noting that even though the signal extension method does work in a way, the values for the wavelet transform and the multiscale product close to the start and end of the signal should still be taken with a grain of salt. figure . shows the proportion of assumed data (i.e. values generated by the mirror extension) used for calculating each value in the multiscale product for a signal of samples. for the first value (at index t = ), the proportion of assumed data is actually more than % due to the implementation details of the algorithm. figure . : the proportion of assumed data used for calculating the wavelet product of a time series of samples as a demonstration of the artefacts caused by the proximity of the signal borders to the wavelet transform, figure . shows the resulting wavelet products for signals that contain a single unit impulse at different locations within the signal. in figures . .a– c the minimum corresponding to the sample after the unit impulse (i.e. the decreasing step) become increasingly exaggerated when the impulse is located near to the start of the signal, while the maximum disappears completely. figure . .d shows the expected wavelet product with no interference from border effects. in figures . .e–h the maximum becomes exaggerated while the minimum disappears. . step detection and evaluation after obtaining the wavelet products as described above, the products are analysed in order to extract the step information. this process is fairly straightforward and consists of finding local extrema in the product and interpreting them as steps. when using an odd number of scales for the wavelet product, as is done here, the maxima in the product indicate increasing steps and the minima indicate decreasing steps. if instead an even number of scales is used, all of the extrema corresponding to steps will be positive, and figure . : wavelet products corresponding to unit impulses at time points – the direction of each step needs to be detected e.g. based on the highest scale used in the product. the main problem is in deciding the threshold that the extrema need to exceed in order to indicate the existence of a step. in this work a relatively simple method is used: the threshold is set to two times the standard deviation of the wavelet product being analysed. this ensures that only the extrema that exceed the signal-specific noise level are reported. an example of the automatic thresholding can be seen in figure . .b., where the dashed lines indicate the threshold selected by the step detection. for this example, the three decreasing steps at , , and exceed the threshold clearly, as does the falling edge for the spike at . the rising edge of the same spike also crosses the threshold, although not so clearly, whereas the small increase at doesn’t. if the value of the product stays outside the threshold for more than one sample, the location with the highest absolute value for the product is chosen to represent the step. this means that the step is considered to happen at the point of the fastest change. figure . shows a closer look of the decreasing step in dec from figure . . similar to figure . , . .a. shows the original time series and . .b. shows the resulting wavelet product, with the dashed lines showing the location of the step threshold. here the wavelet product is smaller than the negative threshold for three samples from dec to feb . as can be seen, values further away from zero correspond to faster changes in the originating time series. the highest absolute value for the wavelet product occurs in dec , and accordingly, that month is recorded as the time when the step occurs. figure . : a closer look to the area around the beginning of in figure . the location of each detected step is then stored, together with a base score which is set to the absolute value of the wavelet product at the step location divided by the threshold value. this score is always ≥ , since the wavelet product has to be larger than the threshold for all steps. the base scores for the steps in figure . are listed in table . . step may jan may dec jan score . . . . . table . : base scores for the steps in figure . the purpose of calculating the base score in this way is to make the steps more comparable to steps from other time series. the actual values of the wavelet product vary significantly due to the different scales in the time series, but the score calculated in this way gives a better idea on how distinctive the step is in its own time series. . event detection after obtaining a set of steps, the next step is finding events from the step information. the simplest way of doing is is by aggregating all of the steps detected per month, and using a sum of their scores as the total score for the event. the problem with this approach is that it treats all steps equally: ten steps with a score of one will result in the same event score as one step with a score of ten. groups of a few large steps are probably more interesting than times with a larger amount of really small steps. in order to account for this, the event detection used in this thesis uses only a set number of steps with the highest scores for calculating the event score. in this way, only the most significant steps for each time point affect its score, hopefully producing useful results. empirical evaluation this section presents the data and experiments used for evaluating the usefulness of the method described in section . the results of the experiments are then presented in section . section . discusses the corpus data used in latter parts of evaluating the method, and section . describes the experiments used for evaluating the method. section . . deals with the properties of the multiscale product used as part of the step detection and sec- tion . . examines the effects of noise on step detection in a single time series. finally, sections . . and . . look into the two features found in the data that pose problems for event detection. . the corpus used for testing the method the data used for testing the method consists of a collection of finnish newspaper issues from years – . the collection contains issues of uusi suometar (years – ), and issues of wiipuri (years – ). the data in the collection contains ocr data divided by page, and various metadata including the publication date. the quality of the ocr is fairly low, and the text contains a high amount of noise, misspellings, split or combined words etc. the newspaper issues are also spread quite unevenly within the time range, with approximately percent of the issues being from the -year range – whereas issues from the first years ( – ) form only percent of the collection. figure . shows for each month the percentage of days for which at least one newspaper issue exists in the data. from the figure we can see that until about halfway through s the number of newspaper issues per month stays fairly low, with especially small number of newspaper being included in the data between – , except for a clear spike in early . after the number of issues included in the data increases until a sharp drop in , and another in . the differences in the number of issues per month are mostly due to issues missing from the dataset, instead of reflecting the actual number of issues published. figure . : percentage of days with newspaper data in each month using the method for generating time series described in section . , the lemmatisation phase produced lemmas from the corpus, and discarding lemmas appearing in the corpus less than ten times reduced the number to . figure . is an example of a time series for a single token, in this case token suomi. unsurprisingly, the top graph with total token counts has a similar overall shape as the graph in figure . showing the per-month coverage of the corpus. as for the ipm (items per million) values (bottom panel), having less data seems to increase the variance in the ipm values, which again is as expected due to the lower number of available samples (in this case, newspaper issues) decreasing the reliability of the calculated mean values. figure . : time series of the token counts and ipm-values for the token suomi. the gaps indicate months for which there is no data in the corpus. . testing the method in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the method described in section , various exper- iments on synthetic and real data were performed. the experiments are described below, and their results and some suggestions based on the results are presented in section . . . properties of the multiscale product the effectiveness of the step detection technique described in section . was tested for various combinations of steps and signal to noise ratios. the purpose of these tests was to verify that the step detection itself performs as expected, and to detect possible error sources in this part of the method. test time series were created with steps of varying height and width, and precision and recall of the step detection was measured while adding increasing amounts of noise to the time series. the results of these tests are described in section . figure . .a. shows the time series used to test the effect of step width to the corresponding wavelet product. each rising step is followed by a falling step of equal height after the amount of samples defined by the step width. the step width is increased from sample to samples, with the intervals between each pair of rising and falling steps set at samples. figure . .b. shows the time series used to demonstrate the effect of increasing step heights to the wavelet transform and the resulting multi-scale product. the spaces between the steps and the step width were set to samples to prevent interference from the neighbouring steps and the step height is increased in intervals of one. the width is based on results from the previous test which agree with the analysis in section . that shows that a sample in the wavelet product at time t is affected only by samples in the original time series between times t− and t + inclusive (see figure . ). . . the effects of noise on the step detection first, a test signal consisting of samples of gaussian noise (i.e. noise sampled from the gaussian distribution) with variance σ = was generated. a wavelet transformation was performed to the signal and the wavelet product was calculated to see how the values of the resulting wavelet product are distributed. the first and last samples of the figure . : the signals used for testing the effects of step width (a.) and height (b.) to the wavelet product. wavelet product were discarded to remove possible interference caused by the proximity of the start and end of the signal. following this, precision and recall values for different combinations of signal-to-noise ratio (snr) and step width were estimated. precision is defined as the percentage of real steps in all of the detected steps, and recall is the percentage of detected real steps of the total number of real steps. precision and recall values were estimated using a test signal with five steps of equal height (see figure . ). snr was defined as snrdb = log a σ , where a is the step height and σ is the variance of the added noise. each trial consisted of the following steps. first the step height in the test signal was adjusted to produce the desired snr for noise with variance σ = , and the noise was added to the signal. then step detection as described in sections . – . was performed, and the resulting steps were compared to the known ground truth to obtain the precision and recall values. for each tested combination of step width (between – ) and snr (- – db), trials were performed, which was more than enough to obtain stable results over multiple figure . : the shape of the signal used in estimating the precision and recall of the step detection using various combinations of step width and snr repetitions. the results are reported in section . . . . the effect of data coverage on the step counts in order to get an idea on how well the step detection works using the actual corpus, the total numbers of steps found from the corpus was compared to step counts obtained from synthetic data sets spanning the same time period as the real corpus, i.e. years – . the synthetic data sets were generated as follows. for each month in the included time span, n values of gaussian noise were sampled, and the value for the month was set to the mean of those n samples. here values for n represent the number of days in each month for which the imaginary corpus contains data. the first synthetic time series was generated using the same values for n that appear in the real data. the purpose was to test whether the resulting step counts from gaussian noise would resemble those obtained from the actual corpus, and in what ways. the average number of detected steps for each month was estimated over iterations of generating the data and detecting the step locations. in addition, a second test was made using time series of steadily increasing n in order to visualise to effect of n to the number of detected steps. again, iterations were performed, and the average number of detected steps for each month was calculated. the results of these tests are presented in section . . . . the effect of ocr errors to the step counts when considering the effects of ocr errors to the results obtained with the described method, it is useful to consider how the ocr errors affect the data. a simple way to model ocr errors is to simply replace random characters in the original text with different characters. in most cases this means that using the current system from reading the data from the corpus, most words with replaced characters are discarded from the data. some changes of character simply change the word to a different valid one, but these are probably in the minority of all changes. if we have the same probability of change for each of the characters in a text, longer words will have increasingly high chance of being discarded due to one of the characters being changed. for a single time series (corresponding to a single word), this discarding of words will simply decrease the word counts throughout the document, assuming that the ocr error rate is similar throughout the corpus. this decrease will decrease the signal-to-noise ratio for that word, with results similar to those of increasing the noise level, discussed in section . . if there is a sharp change in the ocr quality, for instance caused by a change in the typeface used in the newspaper, this should result in steps being detected for a large number of words at the same time point, assuming that the change in quality is significant enough. since the effects of ocr error should be effectively the same as examined with the earlier tests, no separate tests for analysing these effects were performed. results . properties of the multiscale product figure . shows the effect of step width to the amplitude of spikes in the resulting wavelet product. the signal used for testing is depicted in figure . .a. and the resulting wavelet product is presented in figure . .b. the width of each of the steps has been marked below . .b. for improved legibility. as can be seen from the figure, the spike heights in the wavelet product increase with the step width until steps of width seven, after which the step width doesn’t affect the magnitude of the spike. the lower heights for small step widths are cause by destructive in- terference between the neighbouring rising and falling steps. in the remaining experiments, ten samples is used as a sufficient distance between steps in order to avoid interference from neighbouring steps. figure . : growth of the wavelet product for increasing step width. figure . shows a sequence of steps with increasing heights (a.) and the corresponding wavelet product (b.). the widths of the steps and the intervals between them have been set to samples based on the results of the previous test. this distance between separate steps is enough to prevent interference from neighbouring steps. the values of the wavelet product show cubic growth, which is expected: each scale of the wavelet transform should scale linearly in proportion to the original signal, and the wavelet product is the product of three scales of the transform, resulting in cubic growth in relation to the step height, other parameters being constant. figure . : growth of the wavelet product for increasing step height. . the effects of noise on the step detection figure . shows the distribution of values in the wavelet product for signal consisting of gaussian noise with zero mean and standard deviation σ = . the figure is essentially a reproduction of a similar figure presented by sadler and swami [ ]. standard deviation of the wavelet product is approximately . , and the black lines in the image show the values of σ used as the threshold for step detection. approximately . % of the samples in the wavelet product fall outside of the thresholds resulting in false positive steps. a normal distribution with the same standard deviation of . is also drawn to the image for comparison. figure . shows the effect of step width on the precision of step detection for different signal-to-noise ratios. for most of the step widths, the precision levels are pretty close regardless of snr, with higher step widths obtaining slightly better results throughout. figure . : a histogram of the wavelet product values for gaussian noise. precision for step widths of one and two is clearly worse from the others. for step width two being approximately . lower than the main group between snrs – db, and for step width of one (i.e. spikes in the signal) the precision is approximately . below the main group around snr of db. figure . : precision for different step widths with varying snr. figure . shows the estimated recall values for the step detection for various step widths and snrs. compared to the precision values, the recall values for different step widths are more spread, with distance between the steps approximately halving for each increase in step width. in terms of recall, the spikes do quite badly, staying under . even for snr of db. the poor recall results for the spikes and narrow steps are likely due to the fact that the rising and falling edges interfere with each other quite strongly, causing one of the two figure . : recall for different step widths with varying snr. to stay undetected. figure . shows recall values when detecting either edge of the step is counted as detecting the whole step. in this case, recall levels similar to the ones in figure . for snr of db are reached already at around db. especially the narrowest steps are detected significantly better when making this allowance. figure . : recall for different step widths with varying snr when detecting either edge of the step is counted as detecting the entire step. . the effect of data coverage on the step counts as mentioned earlier in section . , the coverage of the included time span in the corpus is quite uneven. for some months, only a few days worth of newspapers are included in the corpus while for others, the number goes up to thirty. in order to investigate the effect of the amount of available data on the step counts, the first test was to perform step detection for each of the words in the actual corpus, and count the the total number of steps detected for each month in the data. figure . shows the number of steps detected in the corpus for each month. figure . : the number of steps per month detected by the step detection as can be seen from comparison to figure . , repeated here from page for convenience, the number of detected steps seems to have a strong inverse correlation with the amount of data available for the month in question, with less data producing more steps. this makes sense since the monthly ipm values are essentially estimated means for the daily ipm values, and having less data points available would naturally make the estimates less accurate, and increase their variance, which results in large number of false positives. figure . : percentage of days with newspaper data in each month, repeated from page for conve- nience figures . and . show average step counts per month for two different synthetic data sets. figure . shows the result when sampling gaussian noise instead of values in the corpus, but using the same amount of samples per month as the real corpus contains. it is easy to see that the overall shapes of figures . and . are quite similar. one of the most clear differences between the graphs seem to be the spike in january , which is missing from the real data, likely due to some difference in the way how months with no data were handled. of more interest is probably the small (in comparison) spike in in the actual data (figure . ), which is missing from figure . . figure . : the step counts for synthetic data simulating the actual corpus data coverage with normally distributed word ipm values figure . shows how the number of detected steps increases when the number of samples used for estimating the monthly mean value is decreased. for this graph, values were generated using each number of samples, decreasing from to . the marks in the x-axis show the beginning of the segment with the given number of samples. it can be seen that the number of detected steps starts to slowly increase at around ten samples per data point, and especially for the last three, the rate of detected steps increases quite rapidly. figure . : the false positive rate for different amounts of issues per month it should be noted that the false positive rates are not directly tied to any certain number of samples or noise. for instance, if we generate another data set similar to the one used for figure . , but using only sample amounts from to , we get the result shown in figure . . the shape of the curve is essentially the same, but now the areas with – samples have high false positive rates compared to the others. this is caused by the fact the the system automatically adjusts the detection threshold lower due to smaller overall amount of noise, which results in smaller noise levels producing the same amounts of false steps. figure . : the false positive rate for different amounts of issues per month, with higher overall number of available data . performance of the event detection finally, the event detection was performed on the real corpus, and the resulting events and their scores were examined in more detail. figure . show the event scores described in section . for all points on the time series. the scores were calculated using four different values for the number of steps to be included in calculating the score. figure . : the event scores for different time points, using a. , b. , c. , and d. highest scoring steps for calculating the event score in all of the graphs, the overall shape of the graph is quite similar to the one in fig- ure . showing that the event detection is affected significantly by the effects described in section . . discussion . effects of noise and missing data on the system based on the results, wavelet analysis seems to be a reasonable choice for step detection, especially when it can be assumed that the steps are wider than one or two samples. for spikes, detection of both rising and falling edges in quite poor, resulting often in only one of the two being detected. this is visible in figure . , where the recall for width of one is fairly poor. in order to classify spikes correctly, some additional analysis mechanisms should probably be employed after finding the step locations using the step detection method described in this work. another feature of the step detection examined in this work is the automatic scaling employed in deciding the detection threshold for steps. selecting the threshold value based on the standard deviation in the multiscale product works reasonably well when the noise level in the data is fairly constant. when using the threshold value of two times the standard deviation, as was done in this thesis, the rate of false positives for a signal consisting of gaussian noise is around . % (see section . ). any actual steps in the data increase the standard deviation, resulting in reduced false positive rate. on the other hand, if the noise level is not constant, the parts of the signal with less noise cause the detection threshold to become smaller, resulting in increased amount of false positives in the more noisy parts. this is demonstrated in figures . and . , where cutting the noisiest parts of the data in figure . (the areas with – samples) simply drops the detection threshold and results in the curve in figure . with a really similar overall shape. ocr errors in the data have similar effects to noise, and as can be seen from figures . and . , will cause a decrease in the precision and recall properties of the step detection. especially the recall for spikes and narrow steps in the data is quite poor in the presence of noise, and ocr noise will therefore reduce the system’s ability to detect them. . alleviating the effects of uneven temporal distri- bution of data uneven distribution of the data in the corpus causes significant distortion in the detected steps, and needs to be addressed in order to improve the reliability of the system. two ways of doing this were considered, each with their own downsides. the first way is to add weights to the scores (see section . ) calculated for each step based on the amount of data available at that time point. smaller amounts of data mean that the detected steps are less reliable, and therefore should be given less weight when comparing to other steps. however, selecting the weights in a useful way is not trivial, because the difference in reliability between different amounts of available data depends on the overall levels of available data in the time series, as demonstrated in figures . and . . when the smallest amount of monthly issues in the time series is , the false positive rate for months with issues is over % (figure . , whereas for another set of data where some months have only single issues, the false positive rate for issues per month is around %. the second, easier way is to change the way the time series are formed. since the number of samples used per data point is the key factor in adjusting the noise level, it should be possible to generate the time series by forming even sized groups of samples that might span different amounts of time. in this way, it should be possible to avoid the varying noise levels caused by different number of samples. on the other hand, for time periods with less available data, this would result in poorer time resolution, since a single group would contain the data from a longer time period. also, since the time intervals would be longer, this might mean that the changes happening in those periods would seem faster and therefore more interesting than they should. still, this seems like a solution that should be experimented on in order to measure its usefulness. yet another method that would be an interesting subject of further research would be to look for ways to adjust the step threshold locally instead of having a single threshold for the whole time series. a simple example would be to calculate the step threshold separately for each time point, using only the n closest values of the multiscale product, with some large enough value for n. . problematic features of the method, and sugges- tions for improvements one of the problems detected during the testing of the system is that the signal extension at the start and beginning of the signal may cause significant artefacts in the analysis (see section . ). combined with the the way the step threshold is selected for each time series these artefacts can basically ruin the whole time series. as shown in figure . , even a small spike caused by noise can be significantly exaggerated if it happens to be located in the first sample of the time series. by itself this simply means that there will be a false positive falling edge in the analysis results, and this could be fixed by simply ignoring all steps detected within five or so samples of the start and end of the signal. however, since the proximity of the signal border causes the spike to seem ten times its real size, it will also cause the step threshold to increase, potentially causing any real steps in the data to go unnoticed. simply ignoring the step results close to the borders will not correct this problem. a simple fix would be to ignore the same samples in the multiscale product also when deciding the step threshold. in other words, instead of calculating the standard deviation of the whole multiscale product, the standard deviation would be calculated only using the parts of the product not affected by the artefacts, i.e. everything except the first seven and the last six samples. another related problem in the implementation is how the mirror extension is imple- mented. currently the mirror extension is performed separately at the start of every loop in the algorithm, and the resulting signals are then trimmed back to the original size. this means that for calculating the first three scales of the wavelet transform, the mirror extension if performed not once but three times, each time distorting the original signal. instead, it the algorithm should be modified so that it would perform the extension just at the beginning, and then use the extended signal without trimming it back down at every repetition. this should at least slightly reduce the artefacts close to the signal borders, even though removing them completely is not possible. unfortunately this improvement wasn’t added to the system due to time constraints, but it should be an easy modification for further research projects. . conclusions although the step detection works reasonably well even in a noisy environment for steps wider than a few samples, its applicability on event detection remains uncertain. addi- tional research is needed to find ways of reducing the impact of features in the data such as the uneven temporal distribution and the high amount of noise. improving the quality of the used data is one way to improve the situation, and could lead to improved quality of the detected steps and the related events. some minor improvements unrelated to the issues with the data were also suggested, but by themselves they aren’t likely to improve the overall quality of the event detection significantly. bibliography [ ] f. atefeh and w. 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( ), pp. – . issn: - . doi: . / . . https://doi.org/ . / / https://doi.org/ . / / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s ed v y icr https://doi.org/ . / . 	introduction 	background 	event detection in media 	step detection using wavelet analysis 	thesis structure 	wavelet analysis 	what is a wavelet transform 	continuous wavelet transform 	discrete wavelet transform 	fast wavelet transform 	a method for event detection using wavelet transforms 	time-series generation 	wavelet transform 	wavelet product 	problems near the ends of the signal 	step detection and evaluation 	event detection 	empirical evaluation 	the corpus used for testing the method 	testing the method 	properties of the multiscale product 	the effects of noise on the step detection 	the effect of data coverage on the step counts 	the effect of ocr errors to the step counts 	results 	properties of the multiscale product 	the effects of noise on the step detection 	the effect of data coverage on the step counts 	performance of the event detection 	discussion 	effects of noise and missing data on the system 	alleviating the effects of uneven temporal distribution of data 	problematic features of the method, and suggestions for improvements 	conclusions 	bibliography looking for a life raft: citizen voice and votes of no confidence looking for a life raft: citizen voice and votes of no confidence mae kuykendall* mich. st. l. rev. abstract the nonprofit world of the university has long segregated the approved public voices of the administrative class from the underground voices that carried a narrative about pathologies in the workings of power, an underground not suited to enter the realm of something public and serious. the no confidence vote has partially filled the gap in the management of approved internal voice, but certain traditions of secrecy have resisted exposure through unmanaged group challenge. recent scandals at major universities * professor of law, michigan state university college of law. this article is a companion to a long-term project on votes of no confidence. it contains some passages from the author’s forthcoming book (with co-author sean mckinniss), votes of no confidence: theory and practice (in draft). an early draft of this article was presented at “amending america’s unwritten constitution” at boston college school of law for panel discussion with other papers (may ), and a fragment at the law & society conference in minneapolis. i have thought about and talked about votes of no confidence with colleagues at the college of law (and witnessed two). i owe special gratitude for encouragement, chastisement, and helpful comments to texas writer james p. mccollom and michigan novelist lev raphael as well as colleagues in the academy and law, to wit, anita bernstein, david blankfein- tabachnick, adam candeub, june carbone, jeff goodwin, carmen v. harris, brian kalt, harry lewis, anne lawton, amy c. mccormick, robert a. mccormick, sean mckinniss, cyril moscow, the late marc poirier, michael sant’ambrogio, renée steinhagen, sheila teahan, and bert westbrook as well as to many of my late colleagues who passed onto me in conversations their searing experience with a vote of no confidence in the detroit college of law and who thereby preserved, for me, a part of the institutional history of the msu college of law. it is no longer possible to list all the students with whom i have discussed the paper and from whose commentary i have benefitted but i am indebted to students beyond hopes of counting. i am grateful to persons who agreed to be interviewed, often anonymously for fear of reprisal, about their experience with votes of no confidence in their institutions and to the #metoo movement for breaking silences that were too long shatter proof. the opportunities provided by my long career to witness the highs and lows of human behavior are also worth a note. tyler silvestri, a recent michigan state university college of law graduate, provided useful readings of a near complete draft of this article. i am grateful to the editors of the law review for their care and diligence. i am responsible for any errors and for all flaws of exposition or clarity. michigan state law review have helped energize an examination of administrative practices designed to insulate the university from meanings revealed by persons subjected to the abuse of power. the #metoo movement has recently burst forth into the university setting, powered by journalists and students bringing university secrets into public view. #metoo reveals to the public accountability pathologies in nonprofit institutions that have been periodically, but only partially, addressed by votes of no confidence brought by faculty or other professionals. #metoo has a primary goal that meshes with the purposes of the no confidence tradition of self-help, deployed by groups to expel bad leaders supported by an institutional hierarchy. relief from an abusive or failed leader is the short-term goal in a vote of no confidence, but the uncovering and dissemination of social knowledge that has been successfully suppressed is an epistemological enterprise as well. the effect is to rescue private shared knowledge from dismissal by administrators and others possessing a voice deemed serious and public. the methods by which #metoo and other disclosures about pathologies within the academic setting can be exposed are little analyzed or compared. this article is a preliminary examination and evaluation of the techniques by which groups composed of faculty members, and to a lesser extent, students work to bring private knowledge into a public forum for immediate response and long-term reform. #metoo presents an opportunity to compare methods for any group facing a problematic leader or other person the hierarchy will neither correct nor dismiss. the comparison addresses the comparative efficacy of expert group voice, student self-help, litigation, and investigative journalism in forcing leader exit as well as producing a long-term enhancement of social knowledge of the patterns of organizational dysfunction and abuse. table of contents introduction ............................................................................... i. framing the issue: the vote of no confidence and the search for accountability in the american nonprofit sector .............................................. ii. the vote of no confidence: definitions and features, function, origins, strengths, limitations, contexts ......................................................... a. no confidence vote: defined ......................................... b. the model: normative content, parliamentary origin, and application to private entities ...................... looking for a life raft . history of the vote of no confidence ....................... . donors, money, sex, and silence: the missing group voice .............................................................. . where votes of no confidence happen today......... iii. epic failures in the nonprofit sector: problems and responses in the university to sexual predation ................................................................ a. a preliminary overview of recent sexual scandals in universities ................................................................. b. a very sad story: leader failures and social harm at michigan state university ................................. c. case western reserve university school of law previews #metoo: individual faculty litigation as a substitute for group voice ...................................... . introduction: individual litigation in place of group voice .............................................................. . the ku lawsuit: a brief account ............................. . denouement: exit as dean, promise to return as faculty ...................................................... d. et tu, #metoo? administrators feeling ambushed ...... e. empirical treatment of votes of no confidence ........... f. limitations and alternatives to avoid epic failures ...... g. summary ......................................................................... iv. narrative black holes: losing confidence in no confidence? .......................................................................... a. narrators and their limitations—then and now, paradoxes of secrecy over time .................................... b. motives to speak? ........................................................... . inside organizations ................................................. . public attention ........................................................ c. #metoo: social knowledge in search of a voice .......... v. moving forward and navigating #metoo with votes of no confidence ..................................................... conclusion .................................................................................. introduction what do benito mussolini and lawrence summers have in common? you may be surprised to learn that the prime minister of italy during world war ii, informally known as, “il duce,” and the michigan state law review president of harvard university both suffered votes of no confidence. although the two men have virtually no similarities of either leadership or character, both were vulnerable to and ultimately ousted by the enigmatic vote of no confidence. neither vote was binding; nevertheless, both leaders resigned. two very different leaders yielded to the force of a demand that was not backed by the clarity of a formal rule and that carried with it a sense of existential risk (the lives of mussolini’s dissenters and the professional standing of summers’s). perhaps mussolini detected something more than the moral force of opinion in a body he formally led that made yielding the right choice. a courteous soldier with a machine gun may have had some persuasive force as well. in contrast to the peaceful farewell encouraged by his council and backed by the suggestion of force, his ultimate fate after two safe years in exile was death as a captive of partisans. lawrence summers remains secure in exile, with an exit package conferred on him by the governing body of harvard university. despite the differing post-service fates, the two leaders nonetheless share an experience: forced exit by means of nonviolent improvisation resorted to by groups that reach a collective judgment about their leader. the judgment is simple. he or she must go. . see christopher hibbert, benito mussolini: the rise and fall of il duce ( ) (describing the plotting to pass a resolution in the grand council, a group created by mussolini to preside over the italian cabinet, and also describing a resulting censure motion that led to mussolini’s dismissal by king emanuel of italy); see also marcella bombardieri & david abel, summers gets vote of no confidence, boston globe (mar. , ), http://archive.boston.com/news/education/higher/ articles/ / / /summers_gets_vote_of_no_confidence/ [https://perma.cc/zl f- ed z] [hereinafter summers gets vote]. . see hibbert, supra note , at (explaining that the king had accepted mussolini’s resignation); see also alan finder et al., president of harvard resigns, ending stormy -year tenure, n.y. times (feb. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /education/ harvard.html [https://perma.cc/ mba- zpq]. . see hibbert, supra note , at , (describing the capture and execution of mussolini by partisans). it is beyond the scope of this article to review historical evidence about the details of the execution of mussolini during a period of disorder in italy at the ending of world war ii. . see peter f. zhu, summers salary data released, harv. crimson (apr. , ), https://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /summers-salary-data- released-in-addition/ [https://perma.cc/ sfn-t s] (providing a summary of summers’s post-service financial compensation from harvard and other activities). though not especially lavish, the exit package provided for summers included a university professorship from which he might maintain his preeminence in national and intellectual political life. see id. looking for a life raft even with the vast differences between the two men and their settings, the underlying stories of their exits contain commonalities. groups have the ability to force a leader’s exit. the risks of forming a group and communicating within it are seen as high. the sense of danger limits the number of such undertakings. yet dysfunctions arise that prompt groups to assign responsibility to the top operating authority, whether in a government or a private institution, for bad results and/or for offensive personal behavior. given incentives to be cautious, group actions are not a complete answer to dysfunction. secrecy and caution prevent detailed after-the-fact recounting of specific cases, in wartime italy or in leafy cambridge, massachusetts. yet history can yield some facts that help fill out the story of an uncertain group power that provides one source of a check on leaders who become problematic in the eyes of their followers but whose term would continue in the absence of intervention. despite the critical role they play, a focus on leaders as a source of problems requiring an intervention does not address general accountability problems in universities and other nonprofits in the united states. leaders often are the source of a problem, and group outcry a potential resolution, but there may be recurring patterns of misconduct within organizations that groups fail to oppose with demands for the exposure of the misconduct and termination of the wrongdoer. the general subject of group dynamics that may or may not address a problematic, abusive, or immoral organizational culture, caused at the top or tolerated, is in need of comparison between votes of no confidence that focus on a leader exit and other responses to organizational dysfunction or internal misconduct. leaders can be the clear source of a problem, or there may be cultural patterns—as illuminated in the course of #metoo—that go deeper than the impact of one leader. but the vote of no confidence is a salient tool of groups to raise an outcry demanding action. leaders often do harm, and groups sometimes react with a demand for their expulsion. the formal power of dismissal does not lie with the group, but the moral power does. in western democracies, the resort to a claim of moral power by a group to demand a leader’s exit arises from a congeries of values in a free society, especially one where scholars and other commentators have identified a problem of rampant organizational corruption. yet relatively little is known about the inner dynamics and overall results of these forced exits of leaders. mussolini’s two-stage exit left a gap in social knowledge about a deeply symbolic punctuation mark to an era of italian fascism. the departure of summers from the presidency of harvard is somewhat michigan state law review better understood, but the general topic of votes of no confidence in american nonprofit institutions, including leading universities, lacks reliable narratives. for reasons less fraught than wartime intrigue, social knowledge about peaceful forced exits of leaders in american institutions is subject to dispute and misinformation. further, the departure of one person from leadership is not easily interpreted in regard to its meaning for the organization’s present or future. there is always disagreement about the process by which a group expels a leader, and there is similar uncertainty about the import of such an expulsion for the trajectory of the institution. did the leader cause a problem that needs to be solved? if so, what is it? are trends the leader may have embodied still in effect? does a leader’s forced exit transmit social knowledge that will cause change, or does it allow the institution to repackage an approach the leader sought to bring into the organization? what do votes of no confidence tell us in a particular case and in general about american institutional life? what do they teach us about our shared institutional life? does the practice of forcing out a leader because of group protest sufficiently address the types of institutional problems that recurring institutional scandals seem to reveal? what other methods might supplement votes of no confidence? what might they achieve that such votes do not? in america’s organizational life, spasms of truncated accountability appear, and after limited public disclosure of the narrative of wrongdoing, often accompanied by misleading counter commentary, the facts that prompted a spasm of disclosure disappear into a vacuum of participant reticence and institutional misdirection. though it is a leading method for groups to demand that leaders be brought to account, the vote of no confidence is vulnerable to disappearance from sight or sound. moreover, groups do not readily find the common voice needed to organize a vote demanding a leader’s dismissal. the #metoo movement has exposed the failure of mission-related groups to organize internally to raise a cry about sexual misconduct that is not perceived to affect the group or the institutional mission as a whole. those targeted by sexual misconduct have thus found outlets for exposure of misconduct that an organization fails to root out, either by command from above or by group clamor. in response, organizations have spawned new kinds of secrecy, proceedings lacking in due process, with punishment meted, and secrecy imposed. looking for a life raft those subjected to secret proceedings may succumb to the preference for silence that organizations, and those affected by the endings engineered within them, generally embrace and achieve with pressure backed by power. the latter is a concern worthy of attention and is another feature of the problem of organizational secrecy. the focus here will be on the first-order problem of primary bad conduct in organizations and the methods that groups deploy to force the exit of leaders whose conduct is a cause of group remedial demand. given the limitation of the known methods for forced leader exit as a solution to a crisis of dishonesty in institutional culture, that focus must include thinking about a basis to remedy the damage done in american organization life that has energized command logic over the citizenship logic needed for our democracy. for this article, i have devised the term “command logic” to describe the overuse in organizations of hierarchy as a means to authorize undiluted, top-down orders emanating from the person of a leader. hierarchy and the associated use of leaders in various entities is a method of coordination designed to reduce the transaction costs of contracting in a free market. as i use the term, “command logic” is an assertion of a scope of authority in a person that overpowers the economic benefit of using leadership to reduce transaction costs and enhance coordination within an organization. i also argue that such overuse and monopolization of coordination efficiencies in a single individual afforded backing from the higher tiers of an organization damages citizenship by training participants in organizations to be passive subjects rather than active partners in coordinating exchanges within the entity. #metoo fiascos do not necessarily arise from misconduct by top leaders in an organization but perhaps more problematically from the loss of democratic citizenship arising from a culture of passivity and consequent abdication of moral agency. such abdication may well be encouraged by leadership that largely supports . see eric alston et al., the logic of leadership and organizational hierarchies ( ) https://econ .sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/ / /pdf_seminar-paper_-lee-j.-alston_ -nov.pdf [https://perma.cc/xjq - tuh] (reviewing the economic analysis of organizational hierarchies). . my use of the term supports my argument that such top-down occupation by a leader of the whole organizational space for reaching optimal results, where the leader does not efficiently substitute for market exchanges, is bad for a given organization’s mission but is also critically damaging the undertaking of citizenship in a democratic society. those subjected to command logic in their organizational life are being trained to be subjects rather than fully contracting citizens in a democratic/republican order. michigan state law review lower-level administrators and thereby reinforces passivity from the ranks. finally, the broad significance of the search for accountability in nonprofit bodies is epistemological, an aspect of self-rule addressed in a recent book, democracy and truth: a short history. a critical component of “the work of democracies” is building an infrastructure for the production and dissemination of knowledge. doing the work involves broadening the shared base from which citizens understand and collaborate to produce deeper shared knowledge about the patterns that underlie and drive a common life. this work of democracies aspires to build a capacity for intervention against flawed depictions supportive of continuing wrongs in a shared civic life. where organizations suppress the production of shared knowledge, improvisation to oust incompetent or abusive leaders contributes to social knowledge. creative workarounds to undo institutional regimes of silence are voluntary gifts to democracy. they are vital but insufficient, a signal of work undone. the article proceeds in the following order. part i provides a brief overview discussion of no confidence votes in the nonprofit sector. it also presents an account of “a gap in the gap,” that is, the inadequacy of the vote of no confidence as a means of protecting students, and even faculty, from sexualized mistreatment, such as assault disguised as medical treatment, sexual licentiousness with students, retaliation against faculty members for reporting sexual . see generally sophia rosenfeld, democracy and truth: a short history ( ) (discussing epistemological conventions as an aspect of self-rule). . see id. at – . . a comparison of similar improvisation relying on a legal structure of corporate and securities law tied to the profit motive to uncover sexual misconduct in corporations has been provided by some scholars. see, e.g., daniel hemel & dorothy s. lund, sexual harassment and corporate law, colum. l. rev. , ( ). see paula loop et al., pricewaterhousecoopers llp, the changing face of shareholder activism, harv. l. sch. f. on corp. governance & fin. reg. (feb. , ), https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/ / / /the-changing-face-of- shareholder-activism/ [https://perma.cc/ s -yled] for a brief discussion of the resources of the for-profit corporation for uncovering scandal inside the organization. hemel and lund suggest that concern, though worthwhile, that profit-driven corporate shareholder monitoring of sexual misconduct creates discursive harm by foregrounding harm to shareholders rather than victims and overlooks the larger critical epistemological work of democracy to which the profit motive tied to the structure of corporate law makes a contribution. see hemel & lund, supra note , at – . . see infra part i. looking for a life raft misconduct, and sexual or gendered harassment of faculty members. part ii lays out the history, contemporary logic, and typical patterns of votes of no confidence. part iii addresses specific university shortfalls—epic failures—in which no official exercised vigilance against morally odious conduct by persons abusing the position of trust in which the institution had placed them and provides a case study of #metoo-related litigation that resembled, but also differed from, the typical vote of no confidence. part iii also examines factors that might explain failures of accountability in the nonprofit sector. part iv analyzes the failure of the vote of no confidence to serve as an internal monitor of sexual misconduct, with specific examination of the events at michigan state university involving sexual predation, and describes and assesses forms of outsider intervention. part v assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the various responses to the unique challenges of the sexual predation and the silences about it that brought #metoo into being. a conclusion notes the shortfalls in organizational culture and in outsider forces that might substitute for outcry by knowledgeable insiders. the harm of organizational silence and denial accrues to citizenship broadly conceived, and the cure, if one can be had, is civic . see id. . see infra part ii. . see infra part iii. the shortfall of collective voice and individual litigation to create general reform in nonprofit institutions provides the occasion to consider the difficulty of regular reliance on human risk-taking where the rewards are not, in the estimation of the risk taker, commensurate with the risk. that shortfall has been especially pronounced in connection with sexual misconduct mainly directed at women and girls. the shortfall reflects societal failures to respect women’s voice about harassment and even sexual violence. see rebecca solnit, the harvey weinstein verdict is a watershed—and a warning, n.y. times (feb. , ), https://nyti.ms/ wfv [https://perma.cc/ ybz- uss] (describing her experience of invisibility and the failure of her words in connection with harassment). facts circulate freely in a democracy of information that results from a democracy of voices. we have something else instead, from personal life to national politics: a hierarchy of audibility and credibility, a brutal hierarchy, in which people with facts often cannot prevail, because those who have more power push those facts out of the room and into silence or make the cost of stating those facts dangerously high. id. . see infra part iii. . see infra part iv. . see infra part v. . see infra conclusion. michigan state law review courage. the existing combination of weak but knowledgeable insider voices and external but less knowledgeable outsider voices lends itself to a failure of republican government. the health of democracy in the united states depends on aligning the governance of the university and other nonprofits with their public missions to support free inquiry, robust expression, public service, and engaged citizenship. i. framing the issue: the vote of no confidence and the search for accountability in the american nonprofit sector votes of no confidence have played an increasing role in nonprofit enterprises as a means for correcting social damage caused by the failure of oversight by boards of trustees or governmental monitoring. these self-help statements by group members fill an . see infra part iv. . the failure of accountability in a critical location for the formation and enhancement of citizenship undermines the republican health of the states and is in dire need of an intervention in the guise of a republican guarantee with clout. see melissa murray, sex and the schoolhouse, harv. l. rev. , ( ) (reviewing justin driver, the schoolhouse gate: public education, the supreme court, and the battle for the american mind ( )) (describing schools as “sites of values inculcation — places where the state may instruct a common core of citizenship values. some of these . . . values [are] associated with the project of constructing citizens. but schools . . . also inculcate values of sexual citizenship”). . the vote of no confidence is defined and analyzed in detail in parts ii and iii. part ii addresses its origins in the british parliament, describes how the logic has been transferred to organizations in the united states and in other democratic contexts, and indicates specific problems, results, and processes that typify these votes. for initial purposes, here is a definition offered by one faculty member to colleagues in a speech to explain the impact of a no confidence vote. the definition was recovered by this faculty speaker from an oral tradition and after study and distillation of certain writings to capture its essence: what is a vote of no confidence? it’s a formal declaration of non- support for a leader whose legitimacy rests partly on a core group within an organization. in a university setting, that group is the faculty. we do not have the authority to select the chancellor or to remove him from office, but he needs our confidence for the university to function. see lizabeth zack, professor, no confidence vote address at the university of south carolina upstate (apr. , ). the legal system provides remedies for proven legal injuries to individuals (and to an aggregation of individuals in some instances) and provides a system for collective bargaining by unionized employees of various organizations. corporate law permits shareholders of corporations to sue on behalf of looking for a life raft accountability gap in organizations that have missions to address critical social need yet experience internal governance failures that threaten to impair the mission, transgress ethical and moral precepts, or violate the entity’s core governance rules. as a gap filler, the vote of no confidence takes pride of place in reviewing the urgent need for improved accountability of organizations for wrongdoing, and within the organization, the accountability of leaders to the groups they claim to lead. the vote of no confidence is a response to the leadership role in certain organizational corruption, as well as the group psychology that supports assertions of command as a means of maintaining silence about a bad leader. these votes have significant strength as a safety valve but given their reliance on serendipitous inspiration within groups and on word of mouth, they cannot serve as a check on systemic patterns of bad behavior. because they often arise outside the formal processes of the enterprise and depend on improvisation loosely informed by an oral tradition, their strengths come with limitations as well. they have episodic but limited power in a the corporation for injuries to the corporation or to sue as shareholders for direct injury to the value of their shares. all of these systems are designed to identify interests for which the legal system provides protection and, where injury is proven to individual or collective interests, to provide a remedy suited to the nature of the identified protectable interest. they are part of a formal system of law by which legal remedies can follow for proven transgressions against entity interests or shared values. there are no simple counterparts for universities or, in most states, for other nonprofits to bring lawsuits for collective injuries to the institution or to individuals. the resort for accountability is primarily to the state attorneys general. see dana brakman reiser, enron.org: why sarbanes-oxley will not assure comprehensive nonprofit accountability, u.c. davis l. rev. , – ( ) (predicting that attorneys general will fail to address lapses in nonprofit governance); see also infra part ii (providing a discussion of the governance structure of american universities and the limited capacity of the boards to function as monitors over the conduct of administrators). . see infra section ii.b (addressing the origins of the term). when first used in parliament to demand the forced exit of robert walpole as first minister to the king, the concept was unprecedented and hence an improvisation drawing on the regular procedures for making motions. see infra section ii.a (describing the variation in methods by which groups undertake to organize a vote and the efforts by institutions to prevent the use of official university channels to communicate and cast votes, as well as arguments that ensue after a vote over its credibility as representing a relevant subset of the whole membership within the organization). on occasion, faculties bring a motion in a faculty meeting, though the capacity to bring motions is the sole basis of the action, not a specific provision for a no confidence motion. see id. (discussing the fraught nature of votes and the secrecy often associated with the planning). journalism about the votes can be hostile. in a wall street journal article about them that required corrections because of overstatements about their frequency, the claim was made that the votes typically occur in faculty senates, along michigan state law review societal setting that still honors dispersed voices as carriers of actionable social truth yet fears unmanaged voice from the ranks. they rely on moral suasion as a substitute for formal power. with the assertion that just one “adamant” faculty member can trigger one, an assertion that is not consistent with the case studies my coauthor and i have done on specific cases. see douglas belkin, no confidence: college faculties rebel with more votes against leadership, wall street j. (may , ), https://www.wsj.com/articles/ no-confidence-college-faculties-rebel-with-more-votes-against-leadership- [https://perma.cc/ rkw-ekds]. the pattern is one of fraught consultations among risk-averse faculty or nonprofit members before an effort is attempted. notably, the journal acknowledged that “[t]hey are purely symbolic, but they frequently carry significant weight.” see id. the concession that they are only symbolic belies any suggestion that they are a formality embedded in the governance process of an institution. as a practical matter, faculty senates and the like need not have a formal provision for a vote of no confidence. see jeremy barlow, vote of no- confidence: yea or nay?, board effect (july , ), https://www.boardeffect.com/blog/vote-of-no-confidence-yea-or-nay/ [https://perma.cc/ vzu- nql]. a good example of a no confidence motion done using existing governance rules for voting is available in an undated posting disclosing the ground rules for a vote of no confidence in the president of california state university, san bernardino, which contains a link to the general senate rules for voting. see cal. state univ., san bernadino, what is a vote of no confidence?, https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/upload/file/vnc_faq_ - rev.pdf [https://perma.cc/ jjb- ]; see also mark muckenfuss, vote goes against cal state san bernardino president tomas morales, press-enterprise (may , ), https://www.pe.com/ / / /vote-goes-against-cal-state-san-bernardino- president-tomas-morales/ [https://perma.cc/ stn-fcpz]. . see generally rosenfeld, supra note . for an abstract economic depiction of “collective conservatism” in public opinion broadly conceived outside the institutional setting, see generally timur kuran, private truths, public lies: the social consequences of preference falsification ( ). the thesis of the book does not rely on a concept of coercion from above, but from the “utility” calculations of individuals assessing the climate of opinion generally, and by comparing the “utility” to them of expressing their genuine, private beliefs against the marginal effect of adding one dissenting voice to public discourse and the cost of going against the perceived strong consensus. see, e.g., id. at – (deploying concepts of intrinsic utility, reputational utility, expressive utility, and total utility to model the process of “choosing a public preference”). using the example of attachment by lower caste persons in india to the caste system, kuran explains “collective conservatism” as a result over time of accumulating “acts of individual prudence” by persons actually skeptical of caste until many low caste persons believe in the system and participate in strengthening the status quo. see id. at – . kuran summarizes: “they have deprived one another of facts and arguments essential to defining their lot in life as unacceptable.” id. at . briefly, kuran’s explanation of societal opinion formation is somewhat at odds with the thesis in democracy and truth: a short history by sophia rosenfeld concerning the presumably positive values of an organizational epistemology of what i call “dispersion of actionable communal truth.” see rosenfeld, supra note , at (referring to aspirations in early https://perma.cc/ stn-fcpz looking for a life raft in the university setting, the effort of putting together a public expression of “no confidence” depends on forming group cohesion among risk-averse faculty members. though a vote of no confidence sends a message, individual votes neither necessarily provide rich information about the specific problems prompting such a vote nor cumulatively provide deep or wide knowledge as to why issues in enterprises cause recurring outcries. their powers lie in the simplicity of their message: no confidence in a leader. that simple but bold message has a predictably short shelf life, however. its intensity coincides with its promulgation, often conveying shock value to the attentive audience for the entity’s affairs. after a rejection by the group with formal authority to dismiss the target, a period of quiet often ensues. if an exit occurs, the institutional spokesmen ordinarily deny all connection to the group’s demand for the leader’s departure. the institution lapses into silence about the matter except on the occasion of appointing a permanent replacement, which requires acknowledgment of a vacancy by resignation. public silence by the institution then prevails publicly and inside the institution. collaboration of the kind that would support a shared authority, or epistemic democracy, goes begging for volunteers. nothing so grand as an “undogmatic but usable, communal truth” emerges from a group’s successful outcry to expel a leader. hence, even after a successful vote manages to oust a leader, the how-to disappears into the receding memories and the silences of the culture that produced the vote and the leader who prompted it. after all, the democratic development of the production of “usable, communal truth”). nonetheless, the idea of intrinsic utility provides a kernel of common analytic assumption—that personal preferences lurk and are blocked by some kind of barrier to open discourse. kuran compares how opinion formation can be influenced by the pressures that emanate from nondemocratic or democratic government forms but suggests the difference between them is only of degree. see kuran, supra note , at . kuran does not provide a model for how an organizational subculture influenced by hierarchical controls over discourse functions within a democratic political system attached, formally, to free expression. see id. at xi (describing his undertaking to “provide an integrated account of the role of preference falsification in guiding, distorting, stabilizing, constraining, and changing the social order”). for a powerful and influential treatment of how perceptions of a predominant group view affect not just willingness to dissent, but also privately held views, see generally elisabeth noelle-neumann, the spiral of silence: public opinion—our social skin ( ). . see rosenfeld, supra note , at (referring to an aspiration of republics after eighteenth century revolutions to a “fully collaborative, trusting, enlightened ‘regime of truth’” in political life). . id. at . michigan state law review institutional hierarchy possesses the greater speech capacity—the production of bland but seemingly authoritative speech routines. the group lacks the resources to mount counter speech, in public or in governing bodies, and within the group there is a sorting out of possible advantage and disadvantage. advantage is gained from bland acceptance of the public narrative of normality, and disadvantage from undue interest in maintaining, developing, and spreading for newcomers’ consumption accounts supporting institutional awareness of the ins and outs of the conflict. with relative ease, the institution typically seizes control of the public narrative of its history and erases or pushes the counternarrative into deep background, fragmenting and even erasing public memory of the episode. the result is to reinstate formal, organizational control over enterprise history. an epistemology of the organization built from internal communication and shared experience is buried with the loss of knowledge gained in the turmoil, the opening up of “talk” within the group is closed down and arrested from further development, and system-wide “organizational truth” disseminated by an ethos of collaborative production of knowledge is supplanted by the sequential work of individual enterprise narrative control. useful documentation which would provide faculties or other organization professionals a working how-to handbook is lost to history. so we see that, despite their operational impacts on the targeted leaders, votes of no confidence do not spread information into the public record about characteristic shortfalls in organization leadership, or group remedial response. what then is the larger systemic message of these episodes of group outcry? if the pattern of no confidence votes sends a decipherable message, it might be a distress signal: systemic trouble in organizational culture in certain nonprofit sectors. what other message might votes of no confidence add to the store of social knowledge about nonprofit institutional life? are there areas of concern about which we have gained knowledge but which . see id. at (suggesting that a grasp of “truths,” and hence of what is “conveyed as legitimate, reliable knowledge” arises from personal experience and “as a result of communication with those around us”); see also id. at (discussing how plain speech was a method of communication for theorists). . that gap will be filled, at least in part, by my forthcoming book with sean mckinniss. see generally mae kuykendall & sean mckinniss, votes of no confidence: theory and practice (forthcoming ). i have written this article separately, but i will refer throughout to “our work,” except where i refer to pre- collaboration work by either of us. some excerpts of the materials contained in this article may be included in the book. looking for a life raft have not produced votes of no confidence? is the silence of professional groups in some areas of misconduct also a signal about a problem in organizations that implicates problems even deeper than poor leadership? this article offers a preliminary sorting of issues that prompt outcry about organizational failures: first, problems that trigger votes of no confidence, and second, issues that become a crisis but do not prompt votes of no confidence, at least not before the crisis is made public by other means. in the #metoo era, the latter—severe failures of internal accountability not brought to light by internal group voice—becomes what might be called epic failures (hereinafter “epic failures”). these epic failures expand the scope of our work on votes of no confidence to undertake a survey of alternative methods by which voices emerge to expose suppressed social knowledge and demand accountability for pathologies in the workings of power and in the social life of organizations. in the university and other nonprofit enterprises, the problems no confidence votes address are ordinarily matters of internal academic or professional concern. though the particulars may attract some public interest, press coverage tends to be limited: little more than the printing of press releases at the beginning and, if a resolution occurs that supports an announcement, the printing of a final press release. attracting interest or concern from the general population for the issues at stake is a challenge due to lack of empathy for or understanding of faculty concerns and possible resentment over the ability of faculties to “fire their bosses.” in addition, faculties are overmatched in a public relations battle with university public relations departments that command formidable resources to shape a public narrative. faculties, who sometimes receive deferential treatment from students who address them as “professor,” find the general public simply indifferent, inclined toward support of power, or hardened against them by their perceived privilege. as will be explained, no confidence votes can succeed in dislodging a leader who has become obnoxious to the faculty, and the general message they send by their steady occurrence is that the academy has a governance problem that periodically requires unauthorized group voice to prompt action from the hierarchy. the fact of their recurring appearance both affirms the problem, and, given the structure placing institutional narrative in the hands of administrative hierarchy, falls short as a long- range solution to a culture of overreaching administrators and faculty who have lost heart for regular engagement sufficient to prevent crisis. by contrast, epic failures can confound administrative efforts to restore a sense of normalcy. certain problems may be so explosive michigan state law review that group silence prevails, but in the long run, administrative efforts at concealment fail because voices of victims emerge and are magnified by the legal process, journalism, and social media. further, epic failures have the potential to shift narrative power away from institutional control to narrators in possession of long-suppressed social knowledge about the management of voice within nonprofit institutions to protect entrenched power, even power expressed in forms that are morally odious. such a shift in narrative power moves “epistemic authority” at least a notch. yet it also cedes narrative power to outsiders who may lack a sufficient understanding of the internal culture to provide an improved body of social knowledge and may have motives to shape narratives without careful regard for evidence. if the vote of no confidence is an occasional avenue for faculties to demand an end to a period of disarray as well as fear and/or maladministration caused by an individual abusing any or all of faculty members, school resources, or academic norms, can we identify the problems that have failed to prompt faculty voice by extra- formal or nonroutine means? while proving a nonevent is difficult, my coauthor and i agree that we cannot think of faculty votes of no confidence that brought attention to sexual misconduct affecting fellow faculty members, staff members, or students. yet recent high- profile scandals that resonate with the #metoo movement have brought attention to shocking gaps in university systems for accountability to faculty targets and student victims of sexual predation. once exposed, public interest in such scandals at the intersection of sex and power is intense and sustained. moral suasion has done its own work as facts emerge—but rarely from group self-reporting. sad to say, internal means for bringing to light allegations of sexual assaults of students by university employees and sexual harassment of faculty members by more powerful faculty members have been elusive. such allegations have not been brought into the public arena by votes of no confidence. the work of breaking silence falls to investigative journalism and the voice, courage, and litigation of victims who go public. in addition, a single faculty member (or nonprofit professional) can, rarely, break silence with narrative-rich litigation about the alleged seamy conduct of a leader and also achieve . see rosenfeld, supra note , at (referring to “a struggle over people as holders of epistemic authority”). looking for a life raft personal vindication. litigation by a courageous internal speaker under attack can substitute for group voice when a group, such as a faculty aware of possible misconduct, will not speak. hence, morally fraught accountability failures can be exposed even when they are not brought to light by group voice. that story—the story of the #metoo movement as a vehicle of delayed accountability and social knowledge—is still unfolding. as noted above, the institutional response to the movement may include recourse to the kind of narrative control to which organizations are attached. a result can be, and has been in known instances and in instances not yet revealed, secret processes that subject accused individuals in institutions to violations of due process, often for an extended period, with high stakes for their constitutionally protected interests, and attendant violations of basic fairness and respect. these . see infra part iii. note that the “whistleblower” is a separate idea, one that relies on legal permissions for a single individual to expose organizational wrongdoing that may be pervasive and supported within the group as a necessity for the organization to remain secure. the whistleblower is not a carrier of group voice and may suffer severe personal harm by way of retaliation and group shunning. several recent books have addressed the whistleblower. see allison stanger, whistleblowers: honesty in america from washington to trump ( ); see also robert g. kaiser, with these two whistleblower books, read cautiously, virginian-pilot (oct. , , : pm), https://www.pilotonline.com/ entertainment/books/vp-db-book-whistleblowers- -dus gbskubaxrfnlne bcxhi u-story.html [https://perma.cc/ sp -mrtf] (commenting on the timeliness of the books but noting problems, variously, of oversimplification and factual error). see generally tom mueller, crisis of conscience: whistleblowing in an age of fraud ( ) (discussing the many cases of whistleblowing in america). see stephen martin kohn, the new whistleblower’s handbook: a step-by-step guide to doing what’s right and protecting yourself xvii ( ) (providing advice to persons considering using whistleblower protections to expose organizational wrongdoing). . see am. ass’n of univ. professors, the history, uses, and abuses of title ix – ( ) (discussing problems in university administration of its obligations under title ix of the education amendments of ). success stories about compelling colleges and universities to address problems of sexual assault are matched by reports of cases in which university administrators have failed to punish gross and repeated sexual harassment or in which title ix administrators from the department of education and within the university have sought to punish protected academic speech. these cases have compromised the realization of meaningful educational goals that enable the creation of sexually safe campuses; they have also undermined due-process rights and shared governance in unprecedented ways. id. at . michigan state law review due process issues are outside the scope of this article but are of significant concern. notably, though, institutional secrecy is usually based on a claimed concern for victims of mistreatment. this, however, is also a manifestation of the drive by institutions to manage public knowledge to the advantage of the institution, with damage to the interests served by a social commitment nurturing an epistemology of the organization produced by the “dissemination of undogmatic but usable, communal truth.” individual rights are harmed, but so is a basis in shared knowledge to address recurring problems of misbehavior, accusation, and institutional response. this article addresses the shortfalls in formal processes of accountability in nonprofit institutions. in addition, it describes and analyzes the informal interventions brought to bear by internal groups, or, when internal groups fail, by individuals who break the silence and stir public uproar. in it, i provide the first close look at a confluence of trends: ( ) frequent resort by faculties to votes of no confidence to address leadership problems and to attempt to force a leader out; ( ) the emergence of sexual scandals involving long-term abuse of students or other vulnerable persons without intervention by university or other institutional officials or outcry by faculties or group members; ( ) the #metoo movement with its insistence on revealing submerged facts about the patterns in the abusive use of power to coerce sexual favors; and ( ) a new determination to speak up exemplified by an individual faculty member’s use of litigation as a partial substitute for group voice to allege abusive sexualized conduct by an official in a law school. the approach is a description and analysis of the accountability gap in nonprofits, especially universities, with comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of techniques that have supplemented the vote of no confidence as a tool for accountability driven by disclosure. the general background, about which there is increasing scholarly and other treatment, is the pervasiveness of corruption in american institutions, including those of higher learning. recent books have addressed the spread of corruption permeating many american institutions, such as . see rosenfeld, supra note , at . . see generally larry lessig, america, compromised ( ) (arguing that american institutions, including congress, have been corrupted by a general dependence on the improper influence of money rather than “the people” or professional norms and the like). hence, lessig argues that an institution can be “corrupt” without having corrupt individuals in it. see id. an interestingly similar claim was made by a british visitor to tidewater virginia in the late s, albeit perhaps tongue in cheek. see allan nevins, america through british eyes looking for a life raft universities invaded by corporate money and “branding,” the corporate world, and the american political order writ large. the story of power used wrongfully has many chapters. it spans the most intimate dimensions of home, the workplace (including the less secluded domains of enterprises large and small), and public life encompassing the oppressions inflicted or tolerated by the political order. the constitutional dimension of the problem concerns the blight on democracy brought by entrenched power in settings not readily remitted to a zone of privacy, a problem meant (many argue) to be addressed by the guarantee clause of the united states constitution but left to fester unaddressed by either court or legislative resort to the protective meaning of the clause to safeguard a “republican” basis for our common life. much of the common life of american citizens occurs in enterprises, either formally private or loosely classified as ( ) (suggesting that planters have been harshly judged by those who blame them for sins of the fathers (those whose crimes brought slavery to virginia) and have thus “confounded the necessity of the present with the evil of the past, have let the crimes of a few discolor the many, and the iniquity of a system vouch for that of individuals. . . . unless a man has been willing to break up this system at the cost of his own utter ruin, he has been pronounced a selfish barbarian, a loathsome maggot complacently fattening on corruption”). the description of a planter’s day that follows, occupied with libations and naps attended by enslaved women, seems to belie the opening defense of the individual against the system. see id. at – . whatever the theory of the deep source of corruption—in human character or the money culture of american life of late—its scope is conceded to be vast. see kaiser, supra note (referring to tom mueller’s “extensive footnotes [that] include a remarkable catalog of books and articles that document the ‘increasing incidence of fraud and corruption in many parts of u.s. society’”). . see joshua hunt, the university of nike: how corporate cash bought american higher education – ( ) (recounting secretiveness about sources of corporate funding, concealment of sexual assault by athletes, and interference with academic judgment as a result of corporate cash). see generally robert mccollom, the last sheriff in texas: a true tale of violence and the vote ( ) (describing the risky struggle against the power of a violent sheriff to control the vote in a south texas county and thereby retain power); tamar frankel, trust and honesty: american’s business culture at a crossroad ( ) (describing the spread of corruption through corporate america). . see u.s. const. art. iv § ; luther v. borden, u.s. , ( ) (holding that whether a state government is a republican government is a political question for congress, not the courts); the federalist no. , at – (james madison). for a scholarly treatment of the guarantee clause arguing that the original meaning did not contemplate judicial enforcement, see ryan c. williams, the “guarantee clause,” harv. l. rev. , – ( ) (describing senator sumner’s view of the clause as a “sleeping giant,” suggesting the giant may show signs of awakening, and reciting the critical views of various contemporary scholars on the practice of judicial nonenforcement). michigan state law review state-sponsored (e.g., state universities), and becomes subject to forms of unaccountable coercive power. in such settings, the republican capacity to name and resist misconduct loses influence, as does the commitment to communal truth. ii. the vote of no confidence: definitions and features, function, origins, strengths, limitations, contexts in recent years, votes of no confidence have become a prominent method for groups to voice their displeasure with bad leadership. these votes have occurred in a variety of organizations, such as hospitals, medical associations, fire and police departments, and even a gaelic football team. the preponderance of notable no confidence votes, however, has occurred in higher education, particularly from faculties voting against their institutions’ presidents. this article does not incorporate a close treatment of specific cases. some of the patterns in such votes are described in subsections iii.c. and iii.c. by comparing and contrasting their forms and patterns with details of the litigation at case western reserve university school of law against the dean and the university. a. no confidence vote: defined in basic terms, a vote of no confidence announces the loss of support in a group whose support is a predicate, derived from . see eric andrew-gee, ontario medical association head resigns after no-confidence vote, globe & mail (feb. , ), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-medical-association-head- resigns-following-no-confidence-vote/article / [https://perma.cc/ umx- cg b] (reporting on a vote of no confidence on the head of a medical association); rick armon, resident physicians at summa health vote no confidence in system president, akron beacon j. (jan. , ), https://www.beaconjournal.com /news/ /resident-physicians-at-summa-health-vote-no-confidence-in- system-president [https://perma.cc/j wr- s v] (reporting on a vote of no confidence that took place in a hospital); leslie dixon, oxford fire chief resigns after members vote ‘no confidence,’ sun j. (dec. , ), https://www.firerescue .com/fire-chief/articles/ -maine-fire-chief-resigns- following-vote-of-no-confidence/ [https://perma.cc/wbj -cene] (reporting on a vote of no confidence in a fire department chief); seán moran, mayo footballers vote no confidence in joint managers-reports, irish times (sept. , ), http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/mayo-footballers- vote-no-confidence-in-joint-managers-reports- . [https://perma.cc/s ws- n] (reporting that players on a football team passed a vote of no confidence in the team’s managers). looking for a life raft democratic norms and organizational realities, of a leader’s ability to function. it occurs within the cultural setting of democratic societies, in cultures that foster an expectation, however well-articulated or neglected in a given sector, that acquiescence to a leader is required at the time of installation and during his or her term of office. in the most specialized institutions, the vote is a mechanism by which mission experts bring a group voice to force to the surface problems that, after fruitless efforts to air and attain responsive action, point toward leader exit as the solution. indeed, the premise is that the leader is the problem because of bad behavior or inability to address institutional priorities. as a collective social understanding of legitimacy and embedded norms in institutions, it is an unwritten compact for key social enterprises, maintained without legal help yet recovering procedures and restating norms in recurring patterns of self-help: a modern oral tradition. in institutions that have a form of collective social ownership that relies upon a group with both expertise and a fiduciary obligation to carry the mission of the institution by playing a governance role, the vote serves as a safety valve. the vote also occurs in membership groups with less reliance on expertise but which assert group voice against leaders who violate the . see peter schmidt, how to fire your president: voting ‘no confidence’ with confidence, chron. of higher educ. (june , ), https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-fire-your-president-/ [https://perma.cc/txn - jdv]. . faculties of law schools, at the time of a decanal appointment or a group demand for dismissal, have relied on a statement in the american bar association standards. see generally aba standards and rules of procedure for approval of law schools - ( ). law faculties cite these law school standards to describe an institutionally specific normative basis of the no confidence vote. see id. the core norm provided by the standards is the requirement, embedded in an enforceable accreditation provision, that deans not be appointed over the objection of a substantial majority of the faculty. see id. at – . (“except for good cause, a dean should not be appointed or reappointed to a new term over the stated objection of a substantial majority of the faculty.”) law faculties also have a strong expectation as lawyers that a test of continuing legitimacy will be imposed on the dean of a law school. see id. . see robert scholes & robert kellogg, the nature of narrative ( ) (describing how the absence of writings about the vote of no confidence makes those who perform them akin to the performers of primitive oral songs, who follow a grammar “learned below the level of consciousness”); see also id. at (“[in an oral tradition,] [w]e can speak of the elements of the song—the plot, the episodes, the conception of character, the knowledge of historical events, the traditional motifs, the diction—as being transmitted, but we cannot speak of the oral transmission of the song itself.”). michigan state law review group’s expectations for competence or fair treatment. the vote has no persuasive force for elected offices, which have formal removal mechanisms that match the weight of the electoral mechanic for filling the office. outside the electoral context, however, an authoritative demand for a leader’s exit, arising from a democratic ethos that respects group input, carries force even without a format given by a system of political authority that manifests the legitimacy of its role outside prescribed channels. by contrast, because of demand, the for-profit corporation has developed mechanisms that allocate a kind of republicanism to large shareholders to force board responsiveness. in the case of investment as ownership, money talks. in the absence of an investment-driven claim on ownership and associated policies to give the claim real force, internal voice relies on moral stature and group-based expertise and commitment. where money talks in the nonprofit sector, it may become a source of wrongful influence at odds with the normative ideal of a healthy bond with mission. it may also bring #metoo . see jack maskell & richard s. beth, cong. research serv., rl , “no confidence” votes and other forms of congressional censure of public officials ( ) (“except through the process of impeachment, accordingly, no action by the congress (or of either house) can have any practical effect similar to that of a parliamentary vote of no confidence.”); see also id. at (noting that some have gone so far as to argue that “impeachment was the proper, and exclusive, constitutional response for congress to entertain when the conduct of federal civil officers is called into question, rather than a resolution of censure” and citing congressional deliberations concerning a resolution in on the unfitness of office of mr. henry smyth and the resolution calling for the resignation of the secretary of the navy). . see generally jack b. jacobs, fifty years of corporate law evolution: a delaware judge’s perspective, harv. bus. l. rev. ( ) (discussing the mechanisms of for-profit corporations). in their recent article on the corporation and sexual harassment, daniel hemel and dorothy s. lund discuss (and rebut) critiques of the effort to stretch corporate law to check sexual misconduct in enterprises for the poor fit of such efforts with the task of assuring that managers adhere to making business judgments in the interests of the core corporate business purpose. see hemel & lund, supra note , at – . such a critique is a mark against deploying the term “republicanism” in connection with the role of large shareholders in extracting compensation for harm to third parties targeted by wrongful sexual power within the corporate structure. see id. yet hemel and lund conclude that avoiding harm to investors resulting from un-remedied sexual misconduct “is entirely within corporate law’s ambit.” see id. at . thus, the profit motive is not a sure response to the citizenship harms inflicted by organizational cultures that rely on top-down authority to limit internal expression, though it may prevent harms that arise from the misuse of such authority for wrongful personal gratification. see id. looking for a life raft pressures to staff responsible for what nonprofits call “development.” in part as a practical understanding, and more precisely as a normative claim, the vote of a principal group responsible for a nonprofit institution’s mission has a presumptive weight unless there is a manifest conflict of interest on the part of the group expressing lack of confidence. a vote that is part of a larger power struggle that ( ) does not concern a group’s mission-driven expertise or governance role or ( ) serves as late-stage virtue signaling by a previously passive faculty does not carry the same force as a vote arising from group knowledge gained from the group’s execution of its mission. like those of the large shareholder, the views of the mission-bonded group effectuating the work of a nonprofit carry weight. those responsible for executing the mission have motives to monitor academic managers by using their asset of firm-specific knowledge about managers’ conduct. a manager’s loss of support from the professionals he or she must lead ordinarily has a sound basis. without the support of a professional group responsible for a mission, when the problems underlying the loss of support threaten the capacity of a leader to function with any success, a formal claim on position becomes hollow. hence, a sometime shorthand conclusion—“it’s political”— obscures more than it reveals. in nonelective, nonprofit groups, the no confidence vote is the only mechanism for a solution to bad leadership that is immune to formal internal processes for correction. the resort to the no confidence motion is constrained by the social price and perceived risk of tearing down a smooth social surface, which is increased by the common absence of a codified recognition of the process. the lack of regularity, in the sense of the group action’s . see infra subsection ii.b. (discussing the #metoo movement and its role in corporate sexual harassment). . in the context of power struggles, close calls could theoretically arise in institutions with specialized missions that were established at the founding and must be maintained by the internal expert group. an example might be a law school founded to pursue a distinctively public interest mission. if the faculty attempted to redirect the school’s mission by revamping the curriculum and a dean overruled the effort, a vote of no confidence would fall within their expertise, but the weight of that expertise would be compromised by the faculty’s sabotage of an agreed-upon mission. in addition, the import of the no confidence vote would be undermined by its role as a tactic in a power struggle rather than as a statement about the fitness of a leader. in the case of late-stage virtue signaling, the internal group is situated no differently than outsiders who develop an opinion based on public information. . a particularly high social price is a factor in the entire silence of faculties—defined here by the lack of votes of no confidence to precipitate disclosure and accountability—about sexual predation of the several types. michigan state law review being unauthorized, is paradoxically a strength derived from a form of weakness. when a vote takes place, it is a signal of deep organizational distress. the group has found the wherewithal to improvise a process, despite the lack of a set of rules that guide and reassure the group of the propriety and organizational approval of their deployment of voice. voice emerges from a shared sense of crisis that brings a group to take unaccustomed risk, organize in an atmosphere of stealth and unease, and make a moral claim. as will be discussed in the comparison to litigation, however, the weakness is true weakness if the group cannot mount a successful effort, despite the existence of a seriously damaging state of affairs in the leadership of the entity. b. the model: normative content, parliamentary origin, and application to private entities first, let us address the ideal model for a process leading to a vote by faculty to reject a leader and evaluate how well it serves a core function in the academy—supporting a robust exercise of free speech and academic freedom in connection with university governance. a further function that it may serve has a tint of republican ideals in it, one of expressing public norms supportive of moral, ethical, and competent leader conduct. that function is also democratic, but the republican hue demands that the reason for the vote be more than individual interest. rather, the purpose is to hold leaders accountable by virtue of a collective voice shaped by public motives and concerns. that effort serves an epistemological purpose of . see supra note and accompanying text (suggesting the incomplete articulation in some sectors of group rights to acquiesce to a leader’s installation as well as understandings about acquiescence expressed in law school governance standards); see also infra note (regarding faculty no confidence motions’ potential use as “branding efforts” undertaken by faculty members in the wake of public scandal). . see infra part iii (recounting the lead up to, and the conduct and consequence of, a resort to litigation by a professor of law to address a sexual harassment scandal about which the faculty remained quiet). . see, e.g., emma vandelinder, mu english department votes no confidence in chancellor’s leadership, columbia missourian (nov. , ), https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/higher_education/mu-english- department-votes-no-confidence-in-chancellors-leadership/article_ c a d - - e - ef - d ec.html [https://perma.cc/jsm - hjs] (describing the university of missouri’s english department voting no confidence in the school’s chancellor, in part because of the chancellor’s “lack of transparency and cooperation in decision-making, . . . his slow response time to major issues [such as racism] and for bowing to outside political pressures”). public voices expressed through a no looking for a life raft constructing a foundation of knowledge by unearthing and disseminating knowledge about patterns of behavior in organizations that carry substantive content and create an impact on social outcomes and on the formation of citizenship as broadly influenced by the role expectations internal to the organization. the standard internal channels for issues to be debated do not lend themselves to the airing of the knowledge of deep dysfunction about which an organization successfully maintains a culture of silence. internally managed, decorous speech lacks the revelatory power of blunt description unleashed from the hesitations of the parlor, the boardroom, and the faculty meeting conference room. . history of the vote of no confidence the ideal, the name, and the model for the vote of no confidence is the parliamentary motion of censure developed in england in , arising from an attempt to dislodge sir robert walpole from a position he had gained as a leading minister for the king. because the prime minister came to be seen as the king’s agent in parliament, the vote of no confidence against the person appointed to the role was conceived as deeply controversial. therefore, it was seen as an attack confidence vote also arise from student and faculty outcry over such matters as alleged mishandling of race issues. see kyle arnold & max denning, update: ithaca college students vote no confidence in rochon, ithacan (nov. , ), https://theithacan.org/news/ithaca-college-students-vote-no-confidence-in- president-rochon/ [https://perma.cc/mx e- hbu] (describing racial incidents on campus and concern about presidential leadership); see also faith meckley & kyle arnold, ithaca college faculty vote no confidence in president rochon, ithacan (dec. , ), https://theithacan.org/news/majority-of-ic-faculty-vote-no- confidence-in-tom-rochon/ [https://perma.cc/v ad-ja m] (reporting a vote of no confidence by faculty of . % of voters in president over race issues, following a vote of no confidence by . % of students responding to a poll). . see supra notes – and accompanying text. . see john p. mackintosh, the british cabinet – ( st ed. ) (stating that robert walpole succeeded in initial resistance, though he eventually resigned and became the earl of oxford). for a thorough account of the unprecedented nature of the motion, which was called sandys’ motion after its proponent samuel sandys, and the response by walpole, as well the idea of kingly prerogative in choosing the first minister, see tapani turkka, the origins of parliamentarism: a study of sandys’ motion – ( ). the motion was later applied to lord north in after the role of a leading minister had clearly become that of prime minister. see id. . see mackintosh, supra note , at (“[a]n address to his majesty to remove one of his servants, without so much as alleging any particular crime against michigan state law review on the prerogative of the king, a figure still partially symbolic of sovereignty despite the emergence of parliamentary counterpower in the glorious revolution in the seventeenth century. though walpole had originally been a proponent of a radical view of the glorious revolution as a movement away from the existing system of monarchial rule and toward popular sovereignty, he altered his view when he gained power in parliament. he turned to a rejection of the idea that england had been transformed into a nation ruled by popular sovereignty. so the vote to dismiss walpole because of the wishes of members of parliament directly challenged a view dismissive of parliament as a representative body responsible to serve the popular will. in effect, in power, walpole began to embrace a top-down elite authority that denied absolutism but did not yield to a claim that the people ruled. the resulting no confidence debate in parliament began tentatively with rules against transcription of debate and gradually evolved into a transparent process that drew on ideas of honor and accountability to force the resignation of both a prime minister and his or her government. the british vote in parliament achieves a degree of democratic discipline from its beginnings in a heavily contested attack on what was perceived to be top-down authority. the idea of him, is one of the greatest encroachments that was ever made upon the prerogatives of the crown.”). . the history of kings in england is beyond the scope of this article. it is worth noting, however, that the idea of the king as the embodiment of sovereignty, with a color of divine authority, did not simply vanish at the time of the glorious revolution. in his book on the american revolution, eric nelson argues that there was sentiment among the american colonists to restore a monarchical rule in protest of parliament’s intrusion into colonial affairs. see eric nelson, the royalist revolution: monarchy and the american founding ( ). royalism in england, with the tint of divine authority, did not die overnight, thus lending added weight to the resistance to an effort by members of parliament to oust the king’s first minister. in an important work arguing that the glorious revolution was more radical and violent than has been thought, steve pincus addresses differing views by historians on the extent to which the anglican church retained its prerevolutionary notion of “true divine right protestant[ism].” see steve pincus, : the first modern revolution ( ); see also leanda de lisle, the white king: charles i, traitor, murderer, martyr xxvi–xxx ( ) (describing the complicated mixture of british acceptance of both the king and parliament as a source of sovereignty in a period of religious conflict). whether remnants can be found in unstated claims by university administrators to special rights immune to human interference is also beyond the scope of this article. . see pincus, supra note , at – . . see id. . see id. at . . see id. looking for a life raft honor implicates the resignation with grace of the target of the vote. the tradition long remained unwritten yet subject to norms that disciplined the use of no confidence votes by way of strong consensus within the relevant political class. as democracy emerged in great britain, the first impulse had been to suppress the circulation of information about debate in parliament, which thereby applied to the basis of the protest against walpole, as well as the arguments and counterarguments. as with votes of no confidence in contemporary organizations, the formally available mechanism for discourse was not friendly to the epistemological work that might build a new foundation of knowledge about the disputes over inner workings of an organization, in this case parliament, as a body consonant with a democratic ethos. if the debate was not known to the public, new structures of knowledge would not take form on which to build democratic practices. over time, the premises for ongoing . the resignation of lord north in response to a later vote of no confidence provides the example of an honorable concession to democratic feedback. see peter whiteley, lord north: the prime minister who lost america – ( ) (accounting the parliamentary maneuvers, lord north’s reactions, and the king’s resistance to north’s resignation); see also turkka, supra note , at (describing the argument that the exercise of power should not be contrary to the people’s will, thereby making “general satisfaction or dissatisfaction . . . the criterion in judging of the exercise of power”). . see alpheus todd & sir spencer walpole, parliamentary government in england: its origin, development, and practical operation (marston & co. ) (stating that expulsion without a reason was understood to be reserved for only extraordinary necessity, or, in the words of the treatise, “for great occasions”). . from the second half of the sixteenth century the british parliament prohibited all reporting and publishing of its proceedings. the parliament believed it should deliberate in private and regarded any attempt to publicize its proceedings as a serious, punishable offence. see about hansard, parliament of victoria (july , , : pm), https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/hansard/about-hansard [https://perma.cc/rdn -g f ] (“by the late th century dissension among more progressive members of parliament, the growing weight of public opinion and the increasingly outspoken attacks of the press persuaded the parliament to relax its stance. in the house of commons passed a resolution giving the press the right to enter the public gallery.”). . see generally william corbett, cobbett’s parliamentary history of england from the norman conquest, in , to the year ( ) (describing the various sources used to compile a parliamentary history that are thought to be accurate). workarounds defeating the formal rules seemed to have existed in published transcriptions of the debates that later have been pronounced authentic in various compilations. see id. these workarounds provide an early example of improvisation to channel protest outside the formal rules available for such voice. see id. michigan state law review epistemological work to emerge from a format for accountability were embedded in parliamentary usages, and even recorded on an information-rich website. these aspects of the ideal no confidence vote as it has developed in parliament are not realistic in private organizations in the united states. first, those participating in the vote are employees. no matter how strong their assurance of tenure and however much the entity is tied to the liberal values of open inquiry and commentary, they face danger to their security of position. constitutional law as a protective venue for faculty, either as individuals or participants in group efforts, offers weak protection to faculty whose exercise of voice often produces retaliation damaging to their standing and access to resources. for that reason, faculty whose livelihood depends on their remaining in favor with those in command of the machinery of a university, for example, perceive the risk of helping canvass sentiment against the hierarchy to be high. and in known instances of internal expression about a leader problem, they have been high. second, the circumstances that might produce open debate organized under the bylaws of a university are not common. while some votes do occur in formal faculty meetings, as took place at harvard in and was scheduled for a repeat in , the genuine debates take place in . see generally u.k. parliament, https://www.parliament.uk/ [https://perma.cc/xn -yk ] (last visited apr. , ) (displaying an information rich website for the united kingdom’s parliament). . see telephone interview with anonymous, faculty member, major univ. (july , ) [hereinafter telephone interview july ] (“my tendency is to see this fear, there is definitely fear if you want to talk about emotions, there’s definitely a deep-seated anxiety that people have about their situation should they speak up. but i think it’s fully rational. i think it’s probably fully rational to believe that. again, it would be irrational to think you would be fired perhaps, for speaking up against the university president, but again, the university can make your life miserable in myriad ways if it wants to. i think people really fear being on the outside, right? more than anything, they [feel] like, well, you want to be in the good graces of the administration, of the president, of the provost, of the dean. you don’t want to have a hostile relationship with these people because they can make life difficult. maybe you won’t get that promotion. maybe you won’t get that raise next year, if these people don’t like you. i think that’s a realistic fear which people have, and as i say, it’s really no different than any other employee has in our capitalist society.”). . see infra section iii.c (describing the retaliation against associate dean ray ku, case western reserve university school of law, when he reported concerns about the dean of the law school of case western reserve university to case western administrators, and additional retaliation against an administrative assistant to the dean). . see summers gets vote, supra note . the vote was followed by a prompt statement of approval by the harvard corporation. see sara rimer, looking for a life raft gatherings of a group with sufficient trust among the members to share views openly and without concern for negative repercussions. deciding which colleagues can be trusted to engage in open discussion is a matter of fraught discussion among those first considering a no confidence action. for that reason, the current practice in universities does not follow a tradition of open, robust debate as might occur in a parliamentary style. professors, in close vote, censure harvard leader, n.y. times, (mar. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /education/professors-in-close-vote-censure- harvard-leader.html [https://perma.cc/p nw-u tu]. for an account of the resignation by president summers to avoid an embarrassing second no confidence vote scheduled for late february , see marcella bombardieri & maria sacchetti, summers to step down, ending tumult at harvard president faced revolt; bok to be interim head, boston.com news (feb. , ), http://archive.boston.com/ news/education/higher/articles/ / / /summers_to_step_down_ending_tumult_ at_harvard/ [https://perma.cc/xvw - znl]. michigan state law review . donors, money, sex, and silence: the missing group voice the factors that prevent the vote of no confidence in american universities and other nonprofit institutions from developing the same maturity of convention and broad understanding that is possible in parliament are strongest in connection with sexual misconduct by persons with power inside the organization. the normal risk aversion to speaking against power is undoubtedly strengthened by broader cultural toleration for sexual misconduct by men, and even today women, with power. the sense of solidarity does not develop as it does when other kinds of misconduct or simple incompetence pose a direct challenge to the professional norms and mission-defined commitments of the group. it is unfortunate to say that the protection of the vulnerable from sexual predation has not been a professional norm but it appears impossible to deny the obvious. where the harm to the victims is not understood as a systemic assault on the shared professional role to advance the mission, the group is not moved to action by an altruistic duty to rescue. though i have argued that the vote of no confidence is not about mere private interest and that participating in one requires civic courage, the group’s action typically cannot be said to arise from simple altruism. further, it is always possible that knowledge of such conduct is not widespread because the conduct is surreptitious and because the disapproval of what some would call gossip about sexual behavior can be strong. the impulse to look away at an embarrassing scene is regarded as good manners, a lesson in etiquette than can be only too readily misapplied in the workforce when the embarrassment would accrue to someone in power. one properly trained in etiquette may be inclined to avert his or her eyes at the sight of the boss manhandling his secretary. the individual alarm needed to bring a group into communication about a leader problem may never be sounded, thereby making outcry a victim of the comfort afforded by manners as well as by the ease granted by ready rationalization in preference to the afflictions of civic courage. in such a moment, etiquette shows integrity the door. sadly, the possibility that unwillingness to speak can also be a feature of monetary advantage cannot be dismissed. certain nonprofits, aside from universities, may be even more subject to sexualized mistreatment of employees. in entities heavily organized around private fundraising, employees may have absolutely no recourse because of the array of incentives created by the need to cultivate donors. as anyone involved in a setting in which donors contribute significant resources would recognize, donors are spoken looking for a life raft of with something akin to reverence. a recent report concerning the lack of any power on the part of female fundraisers in nonprofits to stop sexual harassment by donors they must approach is troubling. one fundraiser said that the result is less money for the charity she is working to fund. the encouraging word is that fundraisers who know the problem have formed group efforts to change the culture. presumably, open speech about abusive donors, or litigation, is entirely impractical, so the method being used is that of education about the problem in general, rather than confrontation that would result in even greater losses of funding to charitable organizations. before the series of university sex scandals affecting students, there was already a long-standing problem involving career-damaging or -ending sexual harassment and retaliation against female faculty. strong women faculty were in some cases driven out of one university to another one, and other women left academia entirely. faculty . see debra nussbaum cohen, women in jewish fundraising say harassment is pervasive, jewish tel. agency (feb. , , : pm), https://www.jta.org/ / / /news-opinion/united-states/for-women-in-jewish- fundraising-harassment-is-an-occupational-hazard?utm_source=jta% maropost &utm_campaign=jta&utm_medium=email&mpweb= - - [https://perma.cc/d dt-bcns] (“at the end of the day, in the nonprofit world, donors hold nearly all the power. most big-money donors are male.”). . see id. . see id. . see tom bartlett & nell gluckman, she left harvard. he got to stay, chron. higher educ. (feb. , ), https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/ harvard-harassment [https://perma.cc/ag k-x dv] (describing the sexual harassment by jorge dominguez); see also james s. bikales, protected by decades- old power structures, three renowned harvard anthropologists face allegations of sexual harassment, harv. crimson (may , ), https://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /harvard-anthropology-gender-issues/ [https://perma.cc/h lj-prea] (reporting their denials); joey garrison, harvard bans ex-professor after finding ‘unwelcome sexual conduct’ spanned four decades, usa today (may , , : pm), https://www.usatoday.com/story/ news/nation/ / / /harvard-university-professor-jorge-dominguez-sexual- harassment-misconduct-metoo-title-ix/ [https://perma.cc/bmk - u e] (stating that dominguez has been asked to leave the faculty). though harassment has been and likely is still a factor in departures by talented women from the academy, those who leave should not be understood as “unworthy” of an academic post. a reader commented as follows: “[one should not imply that] flight from the unfavorable circumstance [of sexual harassment] is due to the women in question not being as ‘worthy’ to continue their academic careers, which elides the possibility of some women deciding in the wake of being harassed or worse that academia isn’t worth the headaches/doesn’t deserve them/had its chance and blew it. there’s an unfortunate tendency by academics to regard those who moved from in-group to out- michigan state law review members with sufficient power—who are often male—in many instances commanded access to significant monetary resources (rich grants or other forms of donor aid) to the university. in addition, sexual harassment of students by male faculty was far from unknown, and targets who made an issue of it were in some cases subjected to severe expressions of disapproval. the fact that sexual transgression against women occurred, and that once a woman was targeted and resisted she could not recover her standing in an academic institution against the displeasure of a powerful male, is well known by the generation who began to enter the academy as graduate students and then as junior faculty in the s. the denial of tenure was a fairly standard scenario, sometimes having been preceded by sexually inappropriate treatment of these women. heightened standards applied to their tenure case were frequently in contrast to a more forgiving standard that had been applied to the males who considered their candidacy or to the men who followed in the tenure queue. for women academics who reported sexual harassment, the regimen of federal anti-discrimination law under title ix was inadequate and even perverse. despite interpretations of changing mores as between men and women purportedly explaining behavior that was shielded from accountability and finally confronted by #metoo, toleration of male sexual predation was not a fit for much of the wider culture outside the academy or other institutional settings. were it not the case that norms of sexually group as castoffs rather than successful migrants to less-oppressive environs.” see statement of anonymous copy editor (june , ). . see, e.g., stephanie saul, harvard professor resigns amid allegations of sexual harassment, n.y. times (mar. , ), https:www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/harvard-professor-resigns-sexual-harassment.html [https://perma.cc/ ubd-d j]. . feminist writer naomi wolf provides a striking example of the deep inclination within the broad culture to rally to protect the male whom a student target “outs” for sexual harassment. in the case of wolf, she disclosed after twenty years that the eminent yale professor harold bloom had invited her to his home for scholarly interaction and had placed his hand on her thigh. see naomi wolf, the silent treatment, n.y. mag. (feb. , ), http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/ n_ / [https://perma.cc/ea j- ec] (recounting the negative commentary about wolf’s revelation about bloom and her attacks on her alma mater’s response when she complained after twenty years). . see, e.g., bartlett & gluckman, supra note . . see generally anne lawton, between scylla and charybdis: the perils of reporting sexual harassment, u. pa. j. lab. & emp. l. ( ) (describing the failure of university investigative procedures to protect the victim of sexual harassment by a fellow faculty member). looking for a life raft proper and respectful behavior exist and have existed, the predicate for #metoo would be entirely absent. hence, the record of long- standing unchecked misconduct in institutional settings must be seen as a form of institutional malfunction or systemic corruption in which many individuals are implicated, some perpetrating, others facilitating, and the many tolerating passively. if manners explain some portion of the silence about sexual misconduct, it cannot entirely account for the epic failures involving institutionally sheltered predation. these highly visible institutional failures—long-term tolerance of sexual abuse of students being the most stunning and well publicized—provide a contextual basis to examine a cultural failure in universities, one that is unaddressed by the existing formal accountability mechanisms. . where votes of no confidence happen today if faculty votes were part of the ordinary governance process in most universities, a no confidence vote might require some preliminary private consultation, but it could soon become an occasion for the faculty to join together to debate and draft a resolution against their president, vote, and, if it passes, publish it in the proceedings of the faculty body, which would be readily available to the whole community. ideally, the president would accept the verdict of her peers in the academy with grace. admittedly, the foregoing depicts the epistemic ideal. one should not underestimate the depth of fear even within regularized proceedings in a university in which the target . at harvard, the vote of no confidence in president summers was noticed for a regular faculty meeting and passed in the meeting, but it was by no means an ordinary use of the notice procedure for a meeting of the harvard faculty of arts and sciences. see summers gets vote, supra note (stating that the resolution was unheard of in harvard’s modern history). in , president james conant averted a planned motion that was understood to constitute a vote of no confidence by apologizing to the faculty at the beginning of the meeting in which the motion was to be lodged. he also pleaded that the faculty not allow his mistakes to harm harvard for years to come. jennet conant, man of the hour: james b. conant: warrior scientist – ( ). . lord north was the first british prime minister to accept the principle, upon learning of a vote of no confidence against him in parliament, to acknowledge that the government had collective responsibility for policies and hence could be attacked “as a whole” by demanding the removal of a minister. see mackintosh, supra note , at . this history, though not well known, is embedded in the oral tradition by which faculties expect the recipient of notice of a motion of censure to yield to its significance as a critical loss of needed support. michigan state law review of a vote of no confidence may be thought likely to retaliate, and in which the notion of a cultivated voice seems incompatible with an attack on a person regarded as a colleague. the tension between an elite monopoly on public reason and an attempt at input by the average person is replicated even in the rarefied precincts of harvard university. instead, many such votes in america occur in improvised private settings, such as, for small colleges, reserved meeting rooms in restaurants or a faculty member’s home. in others, members find some means of using the university system for email communication, sometimes without assurances that such a use by faculty for entity- wide communication is permissible. moreover, faculty members of american institutions must sometimes work against efforts by the university to inflate the balloting list by including in it the staff of the administration. . see richard posner, summers’ resignation and organization theory, becker-posner blog (feb. , ), http://www.becker-posner- blog.com/ / /summers-resignation-and-organization-theory--posner.html [https://perma.cc/ mf-pfrm] [hereinafter summers’ resignation] (explicitly arguing that the trustees are solely capable of assessing harvard interests for the long term). see rosenfeld, supra note , at – (describing “the history of modern democracy” as “riven with constant tension between the rule of expert truth, on the one hand, and the rule of majority instincts, on the other”). . my own law college has experienced votes over a period of many years in such locations. the use of an off-campus location can be controversial, especially if the institution is subject to open meetings laws, but in any event, the meeting can be treated by critics as clandestine and hence discreditable to the group. such responses play a role in the efforts by administrators to dismiss the vote as lacking all meaning for official action. . see telephone interview july , supra note (explaining that the faculty senate “was not interested or willing to take up the question, and they certainly weren’t willing, as it were, to call for, authorize or sponsor this kind of vote” and that the group that did a no confidence vote contained “senators with a right to send out email messages to all faculty by email [and] [s]o that’s how we did it . . . because i doubt very much that the administration would have given us the emails”). . it is a common responsive tactic after a vote of no confidence has occurred with majority support for the motion for the officials in the target’s institution to argue that the denominator is too small, because it should include certain others, including non-tenure-stream faculty members and staff. in a long-running conflict at the university of louisville regarding president james ramsey, the president seemingly took matters into his own hands, or those of his helpers. in an insider louisville reader poll, insider louisville reported significant ballot stuffing that occurred in the online poll. see joe sonka, ip addresses that skewed ramsey no-confidence poll located at u of l’s grawemeyer hall, where president office is housed, louisville future (apr. , ), https://insiderlouisville.com looking for a life raft finally, despite the provenance of the vote of no confidence in british parliamentary history, such votes in american nonprofit organizations have not developed in tandem with the parliamentary practice. unlike the british context, the typical american nonprofit group or state university is not a self-governing body that creates a government understood to be responsible to its members. in the /government/ip-addresses-of-users-who-skewed-ramsey-no-confidence-located-of- u-of-ls-grawemeyer-hall-where-presidents-office-is-located/ [https://perma.cc/ c mh-gggn]. the paper did a kind of electronic exit poll analysis, summarizing the voting patterns and locations as follows: after the first hours, well over percent of voters supported a no-confidence motion, but in the span of two hours, the results suspiciously flipped to percent supporting ramsey. of the , votes cast before the poll was taken down, percent came from ip addresses on u of l’s campus within a two-hour span on the day after the poll was posted—all supporting ramsey. based on insider louisville’s ip data, up to votes per minute were cast from the same computer, which the head of our it department said suggests a script potentially was used to subvert the survey. at the very least, a user would have had to turn off his computer’s “cookies” to override il’s intended one-vote limit and proceed to cast many votes in quick succession. nearly half of the total votes in the survey came from three ip addresses at grawemeyer hall in the same two-hour timeframe; votes came from two wireless users on the belknap campus. id. notably, the university of louisville open records administrator denied a request by insider louisville for location and user information about the respondents. see id. nonetheless, because insider louisville already had email address information, the media outlet was able to reconstruct an exit poll. see id. . see supra notes – and accompanying text. . as noted, by comparison to a parliamentary body, the governing structure of institutions of higher education in the united states have many variations in their governance, but the common factor is a governing structure that lacks an obvious logic for maintaining legitimacy in the face of negative opinion within “the body” responsible for its mission. see id.; see also colleges and organizational structure of universities, stateuniversity.com, https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages / /colleges-universities-organizational-structure.html#ixzz ponencpy [https://perma.cc/ hgw-xz p] (last visited apr. , ) (“while a private liberal arts college may have a large board of trustees, and a public research university nested in a state system no trustees of its own, the vast majority of public and private universities are overseen by an institutional or system-wide governing board. . . . a university’s governing board, also known as the trustees, regents, or board of visitors, possesses fundamental legal authority over the university. the authority of the governing board is vested in it by the state wherein the school resides or, particularly in the case of older, private institutions, by legally binding royal or colonial charters.”). notably, “[p]rivate boards are generally self-perpetuating, with new trustees chosen by the membership of the standing board.” id. though public universities have boards nominally representative of the public, the process by which michigan state law review british parliamentary context, “[a] government cannot operate effectively unless it can command a majority within the house of commons. should it fail to enjoy the confidence of a majority of the house, it has to hold a general election.” the government’s legitimacy derives from the election of the members of the representative body that continues to support the prime minister. for american nonprofit entities, there is no transparent logic as to how its governance structure makes it legitimate. rather, nonprofit bodies of the sort under discussion here typically consist of a governing board, a principal administrator named by the board, and a large body of professional members primarily responsible for the work of the entity. their basic case for the maintenance of legitimacy is such faculty opinion can be transmitted for purposes of accountability to an informed body, such as members of the house in great britain or an engaged board of trustees, lacks the obvious vigor and tight logic of a parliamentary vote of no confidence. see id. a vote by faculty expressing a loss of confidence carries some clout, though the clout is qualified by the “fuzzy” accountability logic in the university. see id. a self- perpetuating board is among the most insulated of governance structures possible, as a simple matter of logical implication from fact. see id. . house of commons information office, parliamentary elections, factsheet m , members series, ( ). . see john d. huber, the vote of confidence in parliamentary democracies, am. pol. sci. rev. , ( ) (“the confidence vote procedure is part of a broad class of institutional arrangements that formalize a prime minister’s dependence on majority support in the legislature.”). huber provides useful explanation of the phenomenon of government-initiated confidence votes, in which the government places pressure on its supporters in a parliamentary body to express confidence in specific policies or programs. see id. at . although huber calls these procedures formal, for a table of confidence vote procedures in eighteen democracies, he uses as his sources “the constitution, the standing orders of the lower house, and interviews with at least one member of the permanent staff of the legislature.” id. at . thus, the parliamentary procedures are, in a certain sense, a hybrid of formal (authorized) and informal (belonging to the body without written documentation). see id. . my coauthor and i will provide a case study of an organization with governing documents that enabled the members to elect replacements for a board after obtaining their resignation through a vote of no confidence. see kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note . the organization is the ontario medical association, a large membership group that advances the interests of ontario physicians by helping strengthen resources for their public mission but does not function as an operational body responsible to deliver services. see id. given its organizational format with governance rules that resemble corporate election practices, the association did have clarity about the ultimate source of legitimacy, but it took considerable work and the revelation by the members to recognize their capacity to supplant the board and then alter the bylaws for more responsive paths to board membership. see id. . votes of no confidence occur in certain public service organizations, such as fire departments, police departments, libraries, and health organizations. these looking for a life raft their contribution to society by adherence to their mission and to standards of decent conduct. for both of those tests, the most well- informed group to attest to the retention of legitimacy, under the governance provided by the boards and the named leaders, is the professional group responsible for the mission and for the welfare of its beneficiaries. nonetheless, given the large numbers of such organizations, the variety in form, and their dispersed locations, the understanding of the role of the professional group in attesting to or rebutting the bona fides of the organization as it is being governed by the incumbent leaders is not well formed. in the british parliament, the practice evolved away from initial outrage against an effort to oust a leader approved by the king to an understanding that the prime minister was a result of an election of the members who stood for office with him as the standard bearer. given the relatively shallow history of the american practice in nonrepresentative entities and the long history of the development and refinement of the practice in the british parliamentary tradition, the american version of the no confidence vote lacks the maturity and clarity supplied by a cohesive british political culture. the case for the vote of no confidence in the situations and cultures described above is subject to confusion and controversy. the formation and execution have members with special skills that give the members a sense of solidarity around a common calling and the requirements for them to pursue that calling competently and with the respect due to any person. id. see excerpts from ‘no confidence’ letter, hanford sentinel (dec. , ), https://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/excerpts -from-no-confidence-letter/article_b e f e- ec- e - - cc c e .html [https://perma.cc/ze l- m], for a statement, with a bill of particulars, of a group of department heads in hanford, connecticut. libraries often experience votes of no confidence and are a target of the usual critique. see john n. berry, iii, editorial, the “no confidence” vote: a new weapon for library staff, effective but dangerous, libr. j., sept. , , at (“used carelessly or too often, the no confidence vote can create the workplace equivalent of mob rule and thus undermine the credibility of the strategy and those who use it.”). . recent events in the british parliament have unusual features that are beyond the scope of this article. . the vote of no confidence that resulted in the resignation of president larry summers from his presidency at harvard university created significant confusion and antagonism at harvard within the faculty, among alumni of harvard, and on the part other observers of harvard as “a case study in the ability of college presidents to exercise management control in a historically collegial and decentralized environment.” lois romano, embattled harvard president to resign, wash. post (feb. , ), https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ / / /ar _pf.html [https://perma.cc/yu r-xz f] (quoting professor of law alan dershowitz as charging that “one group of faculty managed a coup d’etat not only against summers but against the whole harvard community”). michigan state law review of a no confidence vote is a process often fraught with anxiety about and ignorance of the process. the ignorance of the process sends those considering a no confidence action on a search for information and analysis. absence of knowledge causes anxiety by those faced with a possible need for group voice. moreover, the administrative hierarchy’s reaction to a no confidence vote is typically formulaic, indifferent, and/or brusque. in an extreme response, a law school board fired all the untenured faculty after such a vote, even though none of these junior faculty had participated. votes of no confidence . sean mckinniss, the coauthor of my forthcoming book, and i have spoken with faculty members who shared details of clandestine meetings to discuss no confidence votes at their respective institutions. one faculty member was said to have demanded to discuss a no confidence vote from his home because he thought his office telephone was wiretapped. see kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note . while some observers may view such a concern as unduly mired in conspiratorial thinking and even paranoia, facts about the atmosphere in many universities and other institutions make the fear understandable, whatever the facts of a university’s willingness to spy on faculty members. similar concerns exist regarding the use of institutional email services. see id. . some faculty members provide information for others through professional publication of accounts of a vote of no confidence in which they were involved. see zack, supra note , for a good example. the need of such information, and analysis of the reasons that such votes occur, with a basis in organizational logic, is considerable. my coauthor and i were told by a leader of a vote of no confidence by doctors in canada that our advice about consulting one’s conscience about one’s true motives—moral and ethical or simple self-interest—gave her the fortitude to proceed. telephone interview with anonymous, member physician, canadian doctors’ ass’n (oct. , ) (noting that, “[p]articularly at that point—where many of us were wondering, “do we stop, or do we keep pushing forward?”—your words really helped”). . see, e.g., martin lipton, statement from martin lipton, chair, nyu board of trustees, nyu (may ), http://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership- university-administration/board-of-trustees/statement-from-martin-lipton--chair-- nyu-board-of-trustees.html [https://perma.cc/ju y-fba ]. the president of the new york university board of trustees quickly issued a strong response to a vote of no confidence by faculty of the college of arts and sciences in the president, john sexton. see kevin kiley, not your university, inside higher ed (dec. , ), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /nyu-vote-no-confidence- highlights-divergent-views-faculty-role-governance [https://perma.cc/j tc-tddy] (“‘i have widely consulted my colleagues on the board, and their observations align with mine: john’s stewardship has been superb, he is widely and rightly acknowledged as an international leader in higher education, and he — and the strategic direction he has set for the university — enjoys the support of the board,’ said board chairman martin lipton in that statement.”). . see kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note (referring specifically to the vote of no confidence in the dean of the detroit college of law, the corporate predecessor to michigan state college of law). looking for a life raft in universities are often denounced as nothing more than the self- serving behavior of an insulated and privileged faculty. this standard attack resembles one of the methods discussed by tamar frankel in her book on trust and [dis]honesty in american’s business culture as a means by targets to debunk charges of dishonesty. the practice of graceful exit by the resignation of the target, in a concession to the notion of a gentleman’s honor, may have been lost to the mists of time in today’s american leadership culture. the result of the shallow roots in a culture quite different from the cohesive british political class is that groups struggle to understand the normative place of the vote of no confidence. in the university and other nonprofit institutions, the mixture of authority, lack of true ownership, reliance on expert groups responsible for mission, and periodic crisis caused by poor leaders leaves faculties and other professionals grasping for a guide to legitimate responses appropriate to a guardianship role for the entity’s mission. simplicity is not to be. yet an intriguing pattern of successful faculty efforts has emerged, even without the normative understandings that have given the original model its acceptance as a functional feature of democracy as practiced in the english parliament (and in many others). even so, success does not foster widely accepted norms. an oral tradition within universities and other organizations provides a poorly marked pathway through the thickets of a modern bureaucratic forest in which dangers haunt the imagination of faculty torn between the unknown dangers of speech and the continuing costs of silence. scores of faculties have held votes that resulted in leadership changes. still the process of developing and implementing a no confidence vote may . judge richard posner expressed such views in commenting on a vote of no confidence by harvard faculty members in president lawrence summers. see richard posner, the summers controversy and academic governance, becker- posner blog (feb. , ), http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ / /the- summers-controversy-and-university-governance.html [https://perma.cc/a p- vxra] (arguing that the interests of the trustees, as well as their time horizon and primary focus, are in better alignment with the interests of the university than those of the faculty); see also summers’ resignation, supra note (referring to the harvard faculty as “a faculty many of whose members are both smug and superannuated”). . see also infra part iii (discussing votes of no confidence at universities). see generally frankel, supra note (discussing methods of debunking claims of widespread dishonesty). . see sean mckinniss, no-confidence vote database, seanmckinniss.org, http://www.seanmckinniss.org/no-confidence-vote-database/ [https://perma.cc/etm -gf b] (last visited apr. , ) (displaying a database of successful votes of no confidence). . see id. michigan state law review generate dread and confusion, as well as inspire retaliation or falsehoods. we may anticipate not the oft-invoked specter of unduly frequent and poorly justified votes, but rather the likelihood of underproduction of the group statements that provide alerts to leadership pathology. from this incongruity arrives a question that is the focus of this article: what can be done when a no confidence vote is warranted, but faculty, out of fear or, worse, passivity, will not pursue it? is there a substitute for the no confidence vote? iii. epic failures in the nonprofit sector: problems and responses in the university to sexual predation in the united states, except for the for-profit corporation, accountability logic is failing in critical organizational sites in which much of the nation’s collective life occurs. nonprofit corporations depend on weakly motivated boards of directors for monitoring the leaders of the organization. in addition to the formal availability of a monitoring board, such organizations develop internal mechanisms that purport to place leaders under potential scrutiny for misconduct or general failure as leaders. unfortunately, these mechanisms have shown a pattern of failure in recent scandals. universities are the disturbing exemplar of weak internal checks that have in recent years produced near-catastrophic failures of internal oversight, with sustained social harms of an extreme nature only ended by public exposure and outcry. . the for-profit corporation has become increasingly accountable to investors who seek high returns, in part because of a reform of rules to make more efficient pressure on boards by activist shareholders seeking positions. see loop et al., supra note . the primary metric of accountability in these profit corporations is share price, which is driven mainly by decisions about the business approach. nonetheless, the access of motivated shareholders to the pressure points on boards also creates incentives for management to prevent scandals that create legal liability for money damages or regulatory financial penalties. see len sherman, why boards must step up to deter corporate scandals, forbes (mar. , ), https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/ / / /why-boards-must-step-up-to- deter-corporate-scandals/# c f b [https://perma.cc/ vfh-upxl]. it is nonetheless notably the case that money is the coin of the realm for such shareholders, not morality or ethics. see generally frankel, supra note (discussing the driving motivation of corporate shareholders). . as this article has been in draft, new revelations about cover up of widespread sexual assault of children in the catholic church has come to light. see catholic church sexual abuse scandal: excerpts from the grand jury report, n.y. times (aug. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/catholic- priests-pennsylvania-church-jury.html?action=click&module=moreinsection looking for a life raft the most recent of these scandals have coincided with the emergence of the #metoo movement, a cultural phenomenon thought to constitute a sea change in attitudes toward the right social, cultural, and legal response to sexual predation. these #metoo scandals in universities are a grim revelation of the burden of a flawed administrative environment in the american university, but they also provide a ray of hope. the public responses to the facts of sexual predation and harassment, long in duration in certain universities, demonstrate that students, as a sympathetic class of complainants, can achieve a period of sustained public accounting. it is yet to be determined whether student voice can achieve actual change in the conduct of the administrative class, in addition to one-time class settlements in compensation for injuries or a related one-time set of administrative resignations and pledges of a new determination to be accountable. the recent highly publicized and deeply damaging scandals in several universities have revealed a gap in accountability sufficient to insulate the culture of a leading nonprofit sector from scrutiny needed to prevent social damage. &pgtype=article&region=footer&contentcollection=u.s [https://perma.cc/ h s- s ]. the duration over years—seventy years is alleged—and the geographic dispersion—worldwide is alleged—portrays successful resistance to accountability in self-governed organizations, free of outside monitoring even by criminal authorities. see id. the record of such duration and persistence of abusive conduct demands renewed attention to the shortcomings of internal organizational checks implicitly reliant on a morally attuned cultural atmosphere. see id. further, some of the facts— priest pedophile rings and use of whips on children being abused—beggar the imagination as they also inform a new understanding of the extent of misconduct that organizations are capable of producing and concealing. see id. a pennsylvania grand jury wrote a -page reporting that began, “[w]e, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this.” id. . see rj wolcott, #metoo founder tarana burke speaks at msu: ‘this is a survivor’s movement’, lansing st. j. (apr. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/ / / /metoo-msu- burke/ / [https://perma.cc/ jm-zfb ]; see also kristen jordan shamus, #metoo’s tarana burke speaks at msu for survivors, not for spin, detroit free press (apr. , , : pm), https://www.freep.com/story/news/ / / / metoos-tarana-burke-appears-msu-survivors-not-spin/ / [https://perma.cc/ mk b-bx t]. . see generally vicki schultz, reconceptualizing sexual harassment, again, yale l.j.f. (june , ) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/ reconceptualizing-sexual-harassment-again [https://perma.cc/g x-fj g] (addressing the #metoo movement in connection with the broad issues raised by the sexual harassment scandals in silicon valley and hollywood). schultz develops analysis (with a resemblance to analysis i have developed) concerning the psychology of authority in certain settings. see id. she cites a number of studies on the sources of michigan state law review a. a preliminary overview of recent sexual scandals in universities the facts of the university sexual scandals can only be called damning. the revelations that a respected university gave a sexual predator access to its facilities for abuse, disguised as medical care and committed on student athletes and local teen gymnasts, have shocked and galvanized public opinion and created massive liability for the institution. one other university sustained large financial liability and saw its president imprisoned. at least two other universities await further development of the facts. the public reaction has brought a new clarity to the role demanded of university administrators and their boards: strong protection of students, faculty, staff, and visitors to a campus from sexual assault or molestation, importuning for sex, and other unconscionable treatment; timely exit of leaders not capable of, male entitlement, with implications for a psychology of unaccountable power. see id. schultz emphasizes gendered patterns in lack of accountability through a “worship” of maleness. see id. for her treatment of maleness worship, see id. at n. and accompanying text (citing noah berlatsky, it’s time to stop worshipping powerful men, quartz (oct. , ), https://qz.com/ /its-time-to-stop-worshipping- powerful-men [https://perma.cc/fk - mzz]). i have not addressed maleness but aspects of ritual in settings of power. . see marc tracy, with paterno revelations, ruling deals hit to penn state’s wallet, n.y. times (may , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /sports/ncaafootball/joe-paterno-jerry-sandusky-penn-state-ruling.html [https://perma.cc/ azh-sdww]; aria bendix, former penn state president sentenced to jail over sandusky scandal, atlantic (june , ), https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/ / /former-penn-state-president- sentenced-to-jail-sandusky-scandal/ [https://perma.cc/ v p-c ]. . facts are under investigation at ohio state regarding the impact on male victims of sexual violation, heightened by political coverage of the denials of wrestlers’ charges by congressman jim jordan that he knew and ignored the molestation of wrestlers while a coach at osu, statements by jordan calling the wrestler’s dishonest, and the filing of a lawsuit by one wrestler. see rachael bade & john bresnahan, ‘a cesspool of deviancy’: new claims of voyeurism test jordan denials, politico (july , , : pm), https://www.politico.com/story / / / /jim-jordan-harassment-ohio-state-wrestling- [https://perma.cc/ u d-d me]; see also catie edmondson, two lawsuits against ohio state keep jim jordan in the cross hairs, n.y. times (july , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/jim-jordan-ohio-state-sexual- abuse.html [https://perma.cc/qpe - puc]. the university of southern california has been facing revelations of medically abusive sexualized treatment of female students, which led to the resignation of the president of the university. see karma allen, university of southern california president steps down amid sex abuse scandal, abc news (aug. , , : am), https://abcnews.go.com /us/university-southern-california-president-steps-amid-sex-abuse/story?id= [https://perma.cc/ug y- j u]. looking for a life raft or committed to, protecting basic norms of respect for those with weak or no power in the organization; and care for institutional ethical and moral integrity throughout the institution. at the schools enumerated above, that minimum expectation is acknowledged not to have been met in connection with the safety of students. b. a very sad story: leader failures and social harm at michigan state university at michigan state university (msu), the failure of the culture during the larry nassar scandal was catastrophic, clearly and painfully on display during every step of the scandal’s timeline. on an unknown day in , larry nassar, a medical student at msu, allegedly molested a twelve-year-old under the guise of providing medical treatment at a gymnastics facility near msu. in , olympic medalist jamie dantzscher allegedly began to experience molestation under a similar pretense of medical treatment. the molestation continued for a period of six years. in , larissa boyce, a sixteen-year-old high school student, complained to gymnastics coach kathie klages that she was molested as part of medical treatment and was disbelieved. in , a student reported assault but was told that nassar was “an olympic doctor” and “knew what he was doing.” in , a student told three university athletic trainers and one staff member of sexual misconduct and was told “she was fortunate to receive the best medical care possible from a world- renowned doctor.” fourteen years later, in , the university investigated a title ix complaint and declined to find that nassar had . see letter from mich. house of representatives, law and justice comm. and appropriations subcomm. on higher educ., to tom leonard, speaker, mich. house of representatives (april , ); tim arango, women sue u.s.c., alleging sexual abuse by campus doctor, n.y. times (may , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/usc-doctor-abuse-lawsuits.html [https://perma.cc/kg d-csmn]; ken belson, abuse scandal inquiry condemns paterno and penn state, n.y. times (july , ), https://www.nytimes.com / / / /sports/ncaafootball/ pennstate.html [https://perma.cc/z qd-retf]. . see james dator, a comprehensive timeline of the larry nassar case, sbnation (july , ), https://www.sbnation.com/ / / / /larry- nassar-abuse-timeline-usa-gymnastics-michigan-state [https://perma.cc/v - h j]. . see id. . see id. . see id. . id. . id. michigan state law review violated any policy. msu president lou anna simon received notice of the resolution of an issue about an unnamed doctor. president simon did not treat it as an action item but a matter for a routine informational referral. . see matt mencarini, msu hid full conclusions of nassar report from victim, lansing st. j. (jan. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/ / / /michigan-state- larry-nassar-title-ix/ [https://perma.cc/ fnu-xr z]; see also gaslighting, npr (nov. , , : am), https://www.npr.org/transcripts / [https://perma.cc/ lap- ps]. . see dator, supra note . president simon’s account is in conformance with ordinary usage in a large university bureaucracy. the president in a large bureaucratic university receives reports and relies on subordinates to advise her whether action is required. in investigations of misconduct being undertaken by university investigatory bodies, the president’s role does not permit intervention, either to protect or harm the subject of the investigation. president simon’s account was given in congressional testimony and in an interview with detectives of the state of michigan. see infra note . the latter resulted in criminal charges against her on the grounds that, in failing to state that she knew not merely that that there was a problem with a doctor but that the doctor’s name was larry nassar, she lied to a detective. in the brief in opposition to bind over of the charges, lawyers for president simon presented testimony by the detectives acknowledging that they did not inform former president simon of specific criminal charges they were investigating, a predicate, according to the belief of simon’s attorneys, of a criminal charge. see defendant’s brief in opposition to bind over at – , michigan v. simon, no. - -fy ( -a dist. ct. ). nonetheless, the case was bound over for trial after a preliminary hearing in a county near the location of michigan state university. for an explanation of the process of bind over in michigan and the process that resulted in a bind over, see tyler silvestri, what simon’s bindover for trial does and doesn’t mean, on the banks https://onthebanksmsu.com/simon-bindover/ [https://perma.cc/ hcr-ssgn] (last visited june , ) (providing commentary at the time of the bind over and containing links to transcripts of the hearings) on may , , michigan circuit judge john d. maurer dismissed all charges against simon. see kim kozlowski, judge dismisses charges against former msu president simon in nassar case, detroit news (may , : pm) https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/ / / /judge- dismisses-charges-against-former-msu-president-simon-nassar-case/ / [https://perma.cc/m nq-thmg] [hereinafter judge dismisses] (containing an embedded opinion of judge mauer’s holding that the district court judge abused her discretion in holding there was probable cause that dr. simon committed the crimes charged arising from her responses to questions in the interview). in his opinion, judge maurer left undisturbed the finding of the lower court that the detectives informed former president simon of specific criminal charges under investigation. see id. on june , , the attorney general of michigan filed a notice of appeal. see claim of appeal of people of the state of michigan, michigan v. simon, no. - -fh (eaton county cir. ct. ), appeal docketed (mich. ct. app. june , ). . see preventing abuse in olympic and amateur athletics: ensuring a safe and secure environment for our athletes: hearing before the subcomm. on looking for a life raft on august , , the indianapolis star published a story on sexual abuse in gymnastics usa. on august , , gymnast rachael denhollander filed a police report alleging sexual assault by nassar committed on her in when she was fifteen years of age. the next day nassar was relieved of clinical duties. throughout and , multiple olympic gymnasts and medal winners announced they were molested by nassar. in march , william strampel, dean of the college of osteopathic medicine and former boss of nassar, was arrested and charged with one felony count involving misconduct of a public official (of a sexual nature toward students) and three misdemeanors, one involving strampel’s alleged personal sexual assaults (for which he was acquitted) and two for willful neglect of public duty for not monitoring nassar after the physician/predator had agreed to follow a protocol designed to protect students whom he treated. after conviction in federal court and state court, nassar listened to victim testimony for eight days in the courtroom of state judge rosemarie aquilina. as the sense of community injury and outrage mounted, president simon yielded to the drumbeat from politicians and others, including faculty members who organized a planned vote of no confidence against her. she submitted her letter of resignation consumer prot., prod. safety, ins., and data sec. of the s. comm. on commerce, sci., and transp., th cong. ( ), : : , https://www.commerce.senate.gov/ / /preventing-abuse-in-olympic-and-amateur-athletics-ensuring-a-safe-and- secure-environment-for-our-athletes [https://perma.cc/ p h-plen] (statement of lou anna simon, former president of michigan state university). . marisa kwiatkowski et al., a blind eye to sex abuse: how usa gymnastics failed to report cases, indianapolis star (aug. , ), https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/ / / /usa-gymnastics- sex-abuse-protected-coaches/ / [https://perma.cc/tmm - m ]. . see dator, supra note . . see id. . see id. . see id.; see also beth leblanc, strampel guilty of misconduct in office, not guilty of criminal sexual conduct, detroit news (june , , : am), https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/ / / /strampel- guilty-misconduct-office-not-guilty-criminal-sexual-conduct/ [https://perma.cc/ ly -a p]. . see dator, supra note . . see id. see infra note (noting the phenomenon of late faculty votes of no confidence following scandal exposed by outside investigation); see also tyler silvestri, nearly , pages of former president simon’s nassar-related emails released, https://onthebanksmsu.com/nearly- -pages-of-former-president- simons-nassar-related-emails-released/ [https://perma.cc/dm d-k xc] (last visited june , ) (describing the mixed content of outrage and affection in the emails michigan state law review as president of michigan state university, ending her term of service from until as the first woman president of msu. on june , , former president simon testified to a senate subcommittee on possible flaws in university systems that legalize bureaucratic routine: i think going forward, we have to think very seriously about how we think about the voices and how we hear them; the processes that are very bureaucratic and done for lots of reasons including legal reasons that may have cumulated into the wrong, unintended consequences; and we have to continue to try to make systems better with people and with encouragement to have the highest standards. that is our collective responsibility, that is our moral responsibility and i keep thinking about ways in which voices . . . can be heard differently. among the revelations of the long-continuing sexual abuse of msu students by a doctor for gymnasts was the impossibility of getting anyone in an administrative position to take action. the first failures occurred by supervisors of the doctor early on. they believed him and hired experts who said he provided medical treatment, not sexual predation. they did not believe young women who knew they were being molested. other failures occurred as the problem continued and higher-level administrators overlooked and gradually denied the facts and failed to act on them with the requisite urgency. toward the end of the scandal, president simon saw the problem primarily as one of legal liability and public relations. the result of the inadequacy of received by president simon during the period leading to her resignation and providing a link to them); see also rj wolcott, msu faculty call for vote of no confidence in msu president simon, lansing st. j. (jan. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/ / / /msu-faculty-call- vote-no-confidence-msu-president-simon/ / [https://perma.cc/huk - crc]. . see dator, supra note . simon’s retirement followed over a year later. see julie mack, former president lou anna simon retires from michigan state university with $ . m payoff, mlive (july , ), https://www.mlive.com/news/ / /former-president-lou-anna-simon-retires- from-michigan-state-university-with- m-payoff.html [https://perma.cc/a te- k qz]. . sexual abuse of olympic and amateur athletes, c-span, : : (june , ), https://www.c-span.org/video/? - /usa-gymnastics-president-steve- penny-invokes-abuse-hearing [https://perma.cc/ mum- ccn]. . to her credit, in senate testimony, the president acknowledged flaws in the systems of lawyering and bureaucratic routine that have been built in large universities. see preventing abuse in olympic and amateur athletics: ensuring a safe and secure environment for our athletes: hearing before the subcomm. on consumer prot., prod. safety, ins., and data sec. of the s. comm. on commerce, sci., and transp., th cong. ( ) (displaying the statement of lou anna k. simon, looking for a life raft accountability mechanisms internally was that young women were abused for years and the president, who was otherwise thought to be successful, was forced to step down. after the doctor was convicted and leadership was changed at the top, the continuing revelations mounted with shocking and cumulative effect. as noted, the dean of the medical school was arrested after having already been terminated from his deanship. the severity of the charges against him, which implicated him in personal misconduct as well as neglect of duty to protect students treated by nassar, multiplied the sense there had been unchecked predation at the president emeritus, michigan state university). that said, the msu culture in which she had made her entire career was not one of transparency, or safety for those who attempt to report misconduct upward. the university had a title ix rebuke in its record concerning the treatment of women who reported sexual assaults by msu athletes. see rj wolcott, feds: msu mishandled sexual assault complaints, lansing st. j. (sept. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/ story/news/local/ / / /msu-agrees-bolster-response-sexual-violence/ [https://perma.cc/f lq- ja ]. one response was to crack down on faculty members if they made jokes about “going postal” or “killing” someone for repeating time- consuming mistakes. the policy was called “zero tolerance” and was enforced against faculty members for jokes while dr. nassar was continuing to molest msu students, after students had complained over the years. for the rebuke, see press release, u.s. dept. of educ., office for civil rights, michigan state university agrees to changes its response to complaints of sexual harassment, sexual violence (sept. , ), https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/michigan-state-university-agrees- change-its-response-complaints-sexual-harassment-sexual-violence [https://perma.cc/mzg -xgls]; resolution agreement, ocr docket nos. - - and - - , michigan state university, (sept. , ); resolution letter from meena morey chandra, director, u.s. dept. of educ., office for civil rights, to kristine zayko, deputy general counsel, michigan state university (sept. , ), https://www .ed.gov/documents/press-releases/michigan-state-letter.pdf [https://perma.cc/qv b-m t ]; jason cody, msu improves timeliness of title ix investigations as government report is released, msu today (sept. , ), https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/ /msu-improves-timeliness-of-title-ix- investigations-as-government-report-released [https://perma.cc/jw f-p w ], for activities relating to the title ix action and response. . simon resigned on january , . see dator, supra note . for support simon had long enjoyed, see david jesse, msu board: lou anna simon to stay as president, is ‘right leader’ for msu, detroit free press (jan. , , : pm), https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/ / / /msu- simon-president-right-leader-msu/ / [https://perma.cc/ul -t u ]. shortly before her resignation, longtime trustee joel ferguson voiced strong support for president simon’s performance (since her appointment in ). see lacy & jesse, infra note . . see david jesse & gina kaufman, sources: police arrest larry nassar’s michigan state university boss, detroit free press (mar. , , : pm), https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/ / / /larry-nassar-william- strampel-arrest/ [https://perma.cc/u h-bx ]. michigan state law review largest, by enrollment, public university in michigan. the provost of the university acknowledged that she reappointed him despite a record that included facts about his vulgarity toward students and faculty. the university was reported to have invested $ , in having a company monitor the facebook accounts of the victims. c. case western reserve university school of law previews #metoo: individual faculty litigation as a substitute for group voice another epic failure in the university setting came to light in connection with the dean of case western reserve university school of law, and it involved litigation undertaken in by a faculty member as a type of one-man vote of no confidence. though the facts that prompted the lawsuit had been rumored in the law school community, with coverage in the alternative press, one faculty member, then associate dean ray ku, had a first-person experience . see cheyna roth, ex-msu dean who oversaw larry nassar is found guilty of multiple charges, npr (june , , : pm), https://www.npr.org/ / / / /ex-msu-dean-who-oversaw-larry- nassar-is-found-guilty-of-multiple-charges [https://perma.cc/ bd- ptq] (reporting that strampel “was cleared of felony second-degree criminal sexual conduct”). . see david jesse, michigan state university provost abruptly resigns in wake of nassar report, detroit free press (sept. , , : pm), https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/ / / /msu-provost-june-youatt- resigns/ / [https://perma.cc/ezw -v ap] (quoting youatt’s defense of her review of strampel and her concession that she knew of “several accounts of inappropriate remarks and a number of concerns about uncouth and sometimes offensive language during the review period”). . see msu paid firm $ , to monitor larry nassar victims during sentence hearing, guardian (mar. , , : pm edt), https://www.theguardian.com/sport/ /mar/ /michigan-state-university- consulting-fees-larry-nassar-abuse [https://perma.cc/ nr-qaqt]. . see doug brown, sex, politics and revenge: lawrence mitchell was supposed to bring stability to case western reserve university’s law school, not treat it as his personal pickup playground, cleveland scene (may , ), https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/sex-politics-and-revenge-lawrence-mitchell- was-supposed-to-bring-stability-to-case-western-reserve-universitys-law-school-not- treat-it-as/content?oid= [https://perma.cc/tq p- ynr] (reporting ku’s lawsuit against mitchell and the university); see also paul caron, shanghai law students seek to oust former case western dean, say #metoo movement should apply in china, taxprof blog (feb. , ), https://taxprof.typepad.com/ taxprof_blog/ / /chinese-law-students-seek-to-oust-disgraced-former-case- western-dean-say-metoo-movement-should-in-ch.html [https://perma.cc/ uznf j] (describing mitchell’s resignation “amidst a lawsuit alleging rampant sexual impropriety and retaliation against a professor who tried to blow the whistle”). looking for a life raft in connection with the uproar that followed the installation of a new dean in the cleveland school. the beginnings of a crisis started in august at a party held in cleveland, ohio, at the home of the newly installed dean of case western reserve university school of law, lawrence mitchell. the party was an auspicious moment for a law school that had suffered short tenures by recent deans. the new dean was a distinguished scholar with a strong track record as a scholarly entrepreneur. unfortunately, his conduct that night became an opening note in stories in the cleveland alternative press, which reported student descriptions of drunken decanal behavior at their events in bars and purported propositions by the dean for “threesomes.” what had begun with high hopes for a new leader with transformative ideas and with staying power was quickly becoming a decanal crash landing as the new dean squandered goodwill. as the august partygoers disbanded for their homes, they took impressions with them of a dean whose manners and persona raised eyebrows. they soon were aware that the word among students was more than an eyebrow raiser. it was alarming. one party attendee, associate dean raymond ku, eventually concluded that the dean’s behavior on the evening of the party was no anomaly. his concern with what he saw and experienced at the party grew quickly as he worked with the new dean. he sought help from case western administrators with respect to what the cleveland alternative press has since called “rampant sexual impropriety and retaliation.” the administrators at case western reserve university . see brown, supra note (describing an incident in which mitchell allegedly made sexual comments to ku). . see id. (stating that ku’s genitals were brought up to him by the dean at a faculty party at dean mitchell’s house). . see id. . see id. . see id. . see id. (describing the many positive changes mitchell had made at the law school before sexual behavior came to light). . see id. . see id. . see id. . sam allard, disgraced former cwru law dean lawrence mitchell is now a professor in shanghai, cleveland scene (feb. , , : pm), https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/ / / /disgraced- former-cwru-law-dean-lawrence-mitchell-is-now-a-professor-in-shanghai [https://perma.cc/rte - xz] (describing the aftermath of mitchell’s behavior at case western law). michigan state law review had, as noted, faced problems in the past with the performance of deans at the law school. in this instance, their inner response at facing a report from an associate dean about sexual harassment by a dean must have been less a vision of the recent past than a faint foreshadowing of the lament today of edgy administrators, hearing an explosive charge against a colleague: “et tu, #metoo?” the questioning exclamation would have been an anachronism when ray ku entered the office of the official at case to whom he made his first report. little did case western’s administrators know, but they were experiencing the leading edge of the coming movement for targets of sexual aggression to name their tormentor and demand recourse. unlike brutus, #metoo is not an old friend or ally, but the blow it strikes the administrative class is heavy. upon hearing from professor ku, the university conducted an investigation but announced that ku’s reports of misconduct were unsubstantiated. the next day, ku resigned as associate dean. after a sabbatical, ku returned to campus and learned that the dean had relieved him of an administrative leadership position with case western’s center of law, technology, & the arts. during this period, students also began to speak out about the dean’s allegedly inappropriate behavior, but the faculty seemingly preferred to avoid conflict. nevertheless, the whirlwind of complaints and allegations accelerated to maximum speed. ku shocked the city of cleveland, the case western community, and the legal academy by filing a no-holds- barred narrated complaint that laid out chapter and verse of alleged bad conduct. a period ensued in which case western officials and the dean strongly denied all allegations, including an allegation that ku’s report to case western officials of his concerns had led to instant retaliation by the dean. after a siege of muted warfare between the dean and ku’s lawyer, with continuing affirmation by the university . see brown, supra note . . see id. . see id. . see id. . for an extraordinary account of the alleged retaliatory conduct by mitchell against an assistant to mitchell who reported the student complaints, as well as the retaliation against ku for his reporting, see generally affidavit of daniel j.n. dubé (nov. , ) (on file with author) (alleging several instances of sexual misconduct against mitchell). . see brown, supra note . . see id. looking for a life raft of support for the dean, the parties reached a settlement. in addition, the dean announced his departure, which mitchell asserted resulted from his recognition that he could not continue in light of distractions. even after the resignation and before the suit was settled, case western law faculty members still demurred on the question of mitchell’s conduct. the ku litigation and its denouement are of interest for two reasons. first, the subject of the lawsuit is significant in light of the emergence of the #metoo movement. as is widely known, not only are current harassment problems being exposed and acknowledged by employers, but even past misconduct is subjecting individuals to accountability. an episode of litigation about sexual harassment, occurring in the relatively recent past at a major university law school, casts light on recent organizational responses to a recurring issue in the workplace, including in universities. the university is a setting that might be expected to foster a protective environment free of the sorts of concerns that result in a faculty member’s decision to file risky litigation and endure the potential fallout in recrimination and gossip. yet sexual harassment does occur in the university, and it is not necessarily confronted by administrators when they learn of complaints. second, private, individual litigation, such as ku’s, is commonly viewed as impractical for many reasons—personal cost in time and stress, the relatively small damages that a faculty member can claim for mistreatment in the absence of termination of employment, the potential difficulty of finding the right lawyer for the problem, and the resources that an institutional target can array against an individual. that individual litigation can become a functional replacement for a vote of no confidence during epic failures is an insight worth exploration. . introduction: individual litigation in place of group voice the ku litigation provides a mini case study of individual litigation as a substitute mechanism for a vote of no confidence, which depends on moral suasion rather than the potential power of a court’s . see david lat, a super salacious lawsuit, settled: what do the parties have to say about the settlement in professor raymond ku’s lawsuit against larry mitchell, former dean of case western law?, above l. (july , : pm), https://abovethelaw.com/ / /a-super-salacious-lawsuit-settled/ [https://perma.cc/ug l-a t ]. . see brown, supra note . . see id. michigan state law review mandate, including mandates requiring depositions and production of records. the ku example illustrates the institutional drive to control the narrative of an entity’s history and permits consideration of the comparative resources of administrators as against either collective voice in a no confidence vote or individual litigation. the story of professor ku’s choice to proceed alone highlights the individual courage and creativity in a faculty member’s solitary action to bring about accountability in the university setting. risk aversion is part of the story in any effort by a group or by one of its members to oppose a leader’s problematic conduct. professor ku’s lawsuit ended with the departure of the dean. the departure occurred after the public exposure of an alleged problem that, if true, rendered the dean’s continuing service objectionable on a normative and practical basis. the nature of the problem could have brought about an opportunity for faculty to cohere around a group moral voice. as discussed previously, votes of no confidence are customarily used when groups, using their collective voice and wisdom, reject their leader. at case western, no such vote occurred. nonetheless, ku’s actions, as detailed below, partially replicated the experience of a no confidence vote. the events at case western provide a striking instance of the presentation of concerns within a faculty by one individual, in litigation, as a personal demand for a judicial intervention and as a mechanism to publicize claims regarding a leadership crisis. this instance of individual litigation that served a public purpose has a resonance with litigation of individual cases by lawyers whose efforts can impose sufficient costs on those municipalities that target minority residents for the collection of revenue to finance government. individual legal defense of minor misdemeanor and even civil charges in ferguson, missouri, brought political attention to systemic injustice through misuse of the police and courts as a means of collecting fines and penalties to avoid the use of taxes to fund municipal services. . see generally former case western dean reportedly leaves shanghai university after controversial appointment, jonathon turley (july , ) https://jonathanturley.org/ / / /former-case-western-dean-reportedly-leaves- shanghai-university-after-controversial-appointment/ [https://perma.cc/r fq-j qd] (discussing professor ku’s actions in relation to the case western dean). . see id. . see supra part i. . see generally beth a. colgan, lessons from ferguson on individual defense representation as a tool of systemic reform, wm. & mary l. rev. ( ) (explaining how legal defense of minor offenses in ferguson brought nationwide attention to systemic injustice). looking for a life raft such defense brings individual relief to targets of abusive practices in the police and courts and also exposes patterns of illegal treatment of defendants and creates political discussion. while the plight of a poor population, unable to defend itself against police enforcement of minor offenses for improper purposes is a civil rights concern, with all that that portends, the persistence in universities and other organizations of sexual harassment that goes unaddressed has been recognized in the recent past as a serious problem. the sense that sexual aggression toward women, and sometimes men, was just part of the fabric of organizational and work life, has been no more justified than the understanding that poor areas have no means of defense against overly aggressive law enforcement. in both instances, lawyers have a potential role to play in making such conduct costly by imposing high transaction costs on each instance, where possible, and exposing the individual instances and the responses by administrators to efforts by targets to bring about organizational intervention. lawsuits help expose and document the pattern of mistreatment that goes unopposed by authorities with the power to intervene. the vote of no confidence is a form of pure self-help, done without legal aid. litigation applies the lever of the lawyer’s skills and resources to force public accountings. in the case of ferguson, the limitation is simply resources: the number of lawyers available to handle low-stakes offenses that become a predicate for jailing poor people and accumulating new monetary fines. in the university setting, the limitation is, similarly, the small monetary stakes, the sense within faculties that litigation is futile, and the lack of interest on the part of many lawyers in representing faculty suing a university, . see id. at – . . see, e.g., deirdre fernandes, in the wake of harassment case, harvard report finds ‘prolonged institutional failure,’ bos. globe (may , , : pm), https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/ / / /wake-sexual-harassment-case- harvard-report-finds-prolonged-institutional-failure/acxnoeklqc hajhobwltrj/ story.html. (describing a decades long siege of sexual harassment of women faculty and students by harvard star professor jorge dominguez about which harvard appeared not to care and subjecting “[h]undreds of students, staff, and junior faculty” to the consequences); see also bikales, supra note . . see supra part i. . see colgan, supra note , at . michigan state law review which limits the pragmatic possibilities of individual resort to lawsuits. so, problems of leader accountability in nonprofit institutions and similar problems of accountability by municipalities or other state institutions for wrongful use of local civil and misdemeanor enforcement against targeted groups share characteristics. they display recurring patterns of weak or unethical leadership, long periods of dysfunction or misapplication of power, an absence of means by which a public voice from those suffering from maltreatment or other systemic failure can be shaped and heard, and . for evidence of futility in tenure denial lawsuits, see robet hamill, to sue or not to sue, inside higher ed (may , ), https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/ / / /sue-or-not-sue [https://perma.cc /sr x- ub] (finding in a review of judicial opinions that “for those cases that went to trial or were appealed, the plaintiff lost nearly every time”). though american courts are not fairly lumped with courts of chancery of charles dickens’s england, dickens nonetheless provides a perennially pertinent picture of litigation against “monied might” as an invitation to endless misery. this is the court of chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!” charles dickens, bleak house ( ). . see barbara kellerman, bad leadership: what it is, how it happens, why it matters – ( ) (listing seven types of bad leaders, e.g., rigid, insular, intemperate, incompetent, callous, corrupt, and evil). . see jean lipman-blumen, the allure of toxic leaders: why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians—and how we can survive them ( ) (describing preference to retain leaders rather that to permit their casual removal). . there is ambiguity about the level of employment or other protection afforded to faculty for speech about governance rather than issues having to do with academic freedom in scholarship and teaching. see generally garcetti v. ceballos, u.s. ( ) (providing employee-speech jurisprudence opinion limiting protected employee speech declining to address the implications for academic speech). for expressions of concern, see oren r. griffin, academic freedom and professorial speech: post-garcetti world, seattle l. rev. , ( ). see generally bridget r. nugent & julee t. flood, rescuing academic freedom from garcetti v. ceballos: an evaluation of current case law and a proposal for the protection of core academic, administrative, and advisory speech, j.c. & u.l. ( ) (advocating for the clarification of garcetti’s holding to provide “[c]ore looking for a life raft the possession of considerable resources and will to suppress information and to rationalize and perfect systems of denial and evasion. for that reason, alternative means of resistance, whether in a group, as in a university faculty under a perceived siege, or among citizens subjected to governmental bad conduct, demand to be analyzed and explained to enable wider awareness of self-help tools often dismissed as impractical. in reviewing a book on lies by employers to mislead employees about rights, including rights to disclose violations of legal rules, cynthia estlund emphasizes the problem that employees lack knowledge or, if informed, fear reprisals if they speak, despite legal protections. she thus affirms that “employees’ knowledge of the law is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for their own pursuit of a remedy, and thus for enforcement of the entire edifice of employment law.” employees of universities have varying levels of sophistication, but they flounder in seeking legal redress of mistreatment, as do students subjected to assaultive behavior. despite the serendipitous character of matches between the right lawyer and an individual’s legal need that could provide knowledge- enhancing exposure of system problems, it is worth recognizing the functional role of an individual lawsuit to correct accountability shortfalls. in examining the similarities between an instance of individual faculty litigation against a law school dean and the typical pattern of a faculty vote of no confidence against a university [a]cademic [s]peech” of scholarship and teaching, but remitting “[a]dministrative and [a]dvisory [s]peech” to advocacy of internal protective mechanisms that universities may adopt). . see cynthia l. estlund, free speech and due process in the workplace, ind. l.j. , ( ) [hereinafter free speech] (asserting that in light of her careful assessment of the values of employee speech and the needs of employers that “the available evidence strongly suggests that employees continue to experience retaliation and the threat of retaliation for speech that the law purports to protect and that employee silence resounds where speech should be free”) (citing alexis de tocqueville, democracy in america (j. p. mayer ed., george lawrence trans., ) (examining the workplace meticulously as “a school for democracy”)). . see cynthia estlund, response, truth, lies, and power at work, minn. l. rev. , ( ) [hereinafter response]. for the article under review by professor estlund, see generally helen norton, truth and lies in the workplace: employer speech and the first amendment, minn. l. rev. ( ) (discussing lies told to employees by their employers). . response, supra note , at ; see also free speech, supra note , at – . . see supra section iii.b (describing the long duration of university- employed athletic doctor’s molestation of female gymnasts). michigan state law review administrator, important factors include faculty risk aversion, shortfalls of group voice for faculties who consider a vote of no confidence, and the formation of public views about a claim by faculty that a leader has engaged in conduct that should result in his dismissal. though personal litigation does not demand dismissal, as does a vote of no confidence, the urgency of a leader’s termination can be implicit in an individual legal action for personal injury. as noted, allegations of the kind brought against the case western law dean have since become far more prominent and less easily dismissed by institutions inclined to circle the wagons and target the complaining person rather than the alleged wrongdoer. the recent abuse tragedy at michigan state university was a stunning revelation of the failure of vigilance in a higher education institution. while victims were not targeted, they were chastised by msu personnel to whom they reported sexual penetration disguised as medical treatment by msu’s dr. larry nassar. the cultural cues within the ranks at msu did not bring the statements by the young women to the attention of higher administrators, and when it began to become public, the president perceived her job as that of managing university liability rather than responding with a visible demonstration of remedial action to a crisis within the culture of the university as well as immediately offering the full force of university resources to help the women victimized while in their care. the legal framework in which a university functions, as a large legal entity with resources to manage and obligations on the part of those tending to them to protect the fisc, causes top administrators to be innately cautious when facing claims that could implicate financial liability. after vigilance in the ranks has failed, the managerial effort to assess and respond to the scale of the wrongdoing is unlikely to keep pace with that demanded by the accelerating public reaction. large entities have embedded cultural dysfunctions and are often clumsy as well. . see discussion supra section ii.a. . see discussion supra section iii.c. . see kim kozlowski, what msu knew: were warned of nassar abuse, women reported abuse claims, at least one of which reached president, detroit news (jan. , , : am), http://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/ / / /msu-president-told-nassar-complaint- / / [https://perma.cc/bn s-eskg]. . see id. . see id. looking for a life raft in a smaller setting with lesser financial stakes, an institution may move more quickly, albeit after resistance, to liquidate its exposure to bad publicity and lower money stakes. as demonstrated by professor ku’s lawsuit, in an instance of wide knowledge of bad conduct but passive group behavior in a small setting, it is possible for one person to create an effect similar to that of a no confidence vote. a lawsuit for individual harm to one person can be leveraged to place on the public record a statement about an alleged pattern of behavior that is outside the norms of conduct for a leader. the situation involving professor ku, dean mitchell, the law school, and its assorted constituents is instructive because it illustrates how one person can instigate and employ a no-confidence-vote-like measure to success. professor ku was able to defy conventional thinking and prevail over the common advice against all such attempted lawsuits by faculty members experiencing uncorrected abusive behavior. it is true that, according to his legal complaint, professor ku initially faced, alone, the denigration from the hierarchy that faculty proponents bear collectively, as well as from the uninformed gossip among casual observers who assumed ku was simply a weak administrator complaining about the dean’s exercise of discretion to dismiss and replace administrators. litigation creates a high risk for an individual who undertakes it, but it also confers a communicative capacity that can overcome expressions of disdain for the motives of the faculty member while also providing a full airing of the alleged misconduct of the leader. . the ku lawsuit: a brief account after a period of absence from the law school, professor ku took action by filing his lawsuit. the litigation he filed overcame the limitation of the no confidence motion as group-improvised speech. a highly competent lawyer filed a complaint filled with explosive factual allegations, in great and disturbing detail. the complaint contained a compelling narrative, one discrediting to both the dean and . see generally brown, supra note (describing the lawsuit brought by professor ku). . see supra section iii.c. . see complaint with jury demand at – , ku v. mitchell, no. cv- - (ohio ct. com. pl. oct. , ). . see id. . see supra notes – and accompanying text. michigan state law review the university. so discrediting were the allegations about the dean that he filed a motion in court asking to have the complaint suppressed on the grounds that the charges were “immaterial, impertinent and scandalous.” because complaints are privileged from charges of slander, the motion may well have been meant to invoke a normative claim about permissible discourse and institutional manners to influence the relevant community’s response to the filing and thereby reinstate institutional protocol. but silence had been broken with the thunderclap made by a shaming burst of speech. commitments to etiquette within faculties (unlike the permission for impertinence court filings grant) are one factor in the difficulty of persuading faculty members to organize a group effort. the motion was denied by the court, thus underlining that the claims on faculty manners that constrain internal group self-help have no force within the judicial forum. the complaint also placed the university administrators’ conduct in disrepute. it alleged that rather than check the conduct of the dean, the case hierarchy instead permitted the dean to engage in reprisals against professor ku, who was frozen out of law school activities in which he would normally play a role. of particular bad odor was the charge that the retaliation began after professor ku advised the higher administration of the dean’s allegedly bad behavior toward various women as well as ku himself. the aftermath of the filing conformed, in part, to the sequence of statement and response and partial resolution often associated with a no confidence vote. first, the fact of the lawsuit became public by way of press printings of a press release and quotations from the complaint. the press release by ku’s lawyer was, however, unlike the typical announcement of a vote of no confidence. faculty groups . see generally complaint with jury demand, supra note (outlining ku’s causes of action). . defendant’s motion to strike at , ku v. mitchell, no. cv- - (ohio ct. com. pl. nov. , ). . see denial of defendant’s motion to strike, ku v. mitchell, no. cv- - (ohio ct. com. pl. nov. , ). . see complaint with jury demand, supra note , at . . see id. at – . . see id. at . . see david lat, law school dean accused of sexual harassment takes leave of absence, above l. (nov. , , : am), https://abovethelaw.com / / /law-school-dean-accused-of-sexual-harassment-takes-temporary-leave-of- absence/ [https://perma.cc/hhm - tws] [hereinafter dean accused]. looking for a life raft generally do no more than announce the fact of a vote of no confidence. they usually decline to provide a bill of particulars. reasons include the fact that such a bill of particulars merely provides targets for the administration to rebut by speaking into a void created by the inability of faculty to deploy voice in response to claims by well-staffed administrators. in addition, the faculty lacks a common understanding of what type of statement is most likely to be persuasive. there is no standard for such a statement by faculty acting in an improvised form of self-help. the fact of no confidence stands as the undeniable truth: the leader can no longer lead. with litigation, the facts can be contained in the filing and do not stand as an undeniable truth. rather, they enable a strong voice to provide chapter and verse of charges against the leader. they also provide the faculty member with a voice, that of his lawyer, for responding to counter speech by administrators. ku’s lawyer was equal to the moment. second, upon the filing of the complaint, case western promptly issued a strong denial of the allegation of retaliation, presumably based on a crimped legal view of professor ku’s protectable employment rights, in time for inclusion in the first stories about the suit: this situation is categorically not an instance of retaliation. professor ku continues to hold a full time, tenured faculty position at the school of law. the lawsuit itself includes inaccuracies, as well as an inflammatory flier that has been found to be materially false. the university will have additional comment upon more thorough review of the suit and opposing counsel’s press release. after a brief period, dean mitchell issued a standard “catch-my- breath” styled announcement of a temporary leave, expected to be brief, and a confirmation of his record as dean: to faculty, staff, and students: the past two and a half years have been a time of great progress and achievement for our law school. the recent initiation of litigation against the university and me, however, has proven to be a distraction to all of us. in order to allow us to continue the work we have begun without further disruption, i have asked the university to permit me to take a temporary leave of absence. this will allow the university to conduct its independent review of this matter. i am confident that this review will be done . rachel dissell, case law professor sues dean lawrence mitchell and university, says he was retaliated against for reporting sexual harassment of students and staff, cleveland.com (oct. , ), http://www.cleveland.com /court-justice/index.ssf/ / /case_law_professor_sues_dean_l.html [https://perma.cc/c nt- yq ]. michigan state law review expeditiously and that this review, again, will affirm that neither i nor the university have done anything wrong or improper. i am also confident that it will put this behind us. i intend to take full advantage of the legal process to seek justice. we have dramatically improved admissions efforts, broadened our global reach, and developed and implemented an innovative new curriculum. the momentum is just beginning. i look forward to continuing our work together. thank you for all that you have done, and all that you will do. best, l the case western president followed the announcement by mitchell with an email to the students, interpreted by some as placing some distance between the university and mitchell. the first paragraph established a tone of calm, with a hint of apology in the first sentence of the second paragraph: to the students of the school of law: earlier today you received an email from dean mitchell announcing that he is taking a leave of absence. we believe he made the right decision for the school, as it allows all of you to focus more squarely on the important work of learning and gives your faculty and staff greater opportunity to concentrate on guiding and supporting you in preparing for your future. it also gives the dean the opportunity to concentrate more completely on his own situation. we regret the distractions you have experienced in recent weeks, as well as the sense of disruption this new transition may create. the email closed by promoting a new, recently adopted curriculum and praising recent accomplishments of the case western law students. from november until march , the school went through the predictable interim period during which the administration states for the record that the leader will return, while those in the rank fret about whether the promise of a return is true. the delay in acknowledging the fact of a permanent removal, commonly announced as a voluntary resignation, can prolong tension among those who have feared the administrator and hoped for a departure. the time spent in an atmosphere of uncertainty is damaging to faculty . dean accused, supra note . . e-mail from case w. reserve univ. to the students of case w. reserve univ. (nov. , ) (on file with author) (regarding dean mitchell’s leave of absence). . see id. . see id. . see brown, supra note . looking for a life raft morale and perhaps to productivity but is generally not counted as a cost to the institution. it is even possible that, in some instances of group voice demanding exit, there may be a motivation to demonstrate to the rank that relieving them of uncertainty is not a priority. in those situations, group voice against the preferences of the hierarchy can be punished by indirection and unreadable delays. a determined hierarchy might even threaten to appoint a much worse leader as a means of emphasizing the lack of control by the faculty over managerial prerogative. certain features of the standard playbook in a response to a vote of no confidence were deployed by dean mitchell. generic claims of personal, discreditable motives are often made in response to a vote of no confidence by the official hierarchy’s statement against the entire group. indeed, writing by figures such as judge posner and others generically charge that all votes of no confidence by tenured faculty members are the result of an entrenched, self-serving group that has succeeded in writing its own employment rules and which lacks a needed long-term time horizon for assessing leadership. the dean’s demand for suppression of the complaint as “scandalous” was of that kind. in response to an individual lawsuit, the only target of attack is the person filing the lawsuit. the logical source of the attack is the individual defendant, in the case western instance, the dean. but the general claim in an attack on an individual is generic with some added detail about an alleged special motive of the person lodging charges. as the lawsuit freed ku to make concretely discrediting charges that would not be made in a statement of no confidence, the dean could seize upon legal filings to make damaging claims about ku of the sort that universities always decline to make about “personnel matters.” . frankel, supra note , at (“attributing bad motives to the opponent is a well-known defensive practice against the accusation of criminal behavior. . . . [t]o justify their own behavior dishonest people will attribute dishonesty to their victims . . . .”). . see summers’ resignation, supra note (referring dismissively to the perspective of the harvard faculty). . see michelle park lazette, lawrence mitchell’s attorneys file motion to strike ‘scandalous’ material from lawsuit against him, crain’s cleveland bus. (nov. , , : am), http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/ / free/ / [https://perma.cc/z - ksa]. . the dean did indeed launch an attack on ku’s motives, claiming ku was disappointed he was not chosen as dean rather than mitchell and that his lawsuit was to distract from his performance. see id. michigan state law review in the motion to strike, mitchell argued that ku made “irrelevant and salacious allegations” out of resentment for not being named dean and in order “to cover up and distract from his unsatisfactory performance” as associate dean and director of an ip program. in opposition, ku replied that “[d]efendant mitchell’s motion . . . was a publicity stunt: he used the judicial process to have his lawyers and expensive corporate public-relations consultants at dix & eaton make a media splash by impugning [p]rofessor ku’s motives for filing suit, without offering a shred of evidence supporting his ascription.” though the underlying facts remain disputed by mitchell, it is nonetheless the case that the attack on ku is similar to attacks on groups that launch no confidence votes, in that prefabricated countercharges generically and without evidence are sometimes used to impugn the motives of the group as only narrowly self-interested. yet the factors that weigh against successfully coordinated group effort, in an atmosphere of perceived risk by group members, and against an individual lawsuit sure to attract assertions of professional incompetence on the part of the complainant, render such generic claims spurious. without specific evidence that the motives for the action are merely to obtain better, more advantageous job terms for the group or for an individual, the attacks are unconvincing. . denouement: exit as dean, promise to return as faculty the denouement of the mitchell example of a lawsuit as a means of dislodging a leader reached the final stage in march , when mitchell resigned his deanship after a period of approximately three months following his leave of absence because of “distraction.” in his march resignation letter, mitchell described a lack of enthusiasm for his role as dean of the law school: upon thorough reflection, i have concluded [that] i cannot return to my job as dean with the same energy and enthusiasm that characterized my earlier service. . . . at this point, it is in the best interest of the law school for me to step down as dean. i will retain my position as tenured professor and continue to seek to serve the school however i can. . see id. (detailing specific allegations in mitchell’s attorneys’ motion to strike). . plaintiff’s opposition to defendant’s motion to strike under fed. r. civ. proc. (f), ku v. mitchell, no. cv- - (ohio ct. com. pl. nov. , ). . see brown, supra note . . id. looking for a life raft in this instance of the target’s final exit as administrator, it may have appeared that case western distanced itself from the resigning dean and let him make his own statement. in fact, though, through its regular e-newsletter, the university also issued a statement of formulaic but weak praise: “mitchell’s decision to step down to support the best interests of the [law] school is the most recent of a series of examples that demonstrate his dedication to the institution, which mitchell will continue to support as a faculty member and scholar at the school.” the article has no university official associated with it but speaks in the voice of the university. the statement devoted several paragraphs to praising accomplishments of mitchell, including praise for launching a women’s leadership initiative. given the frequency with which top officers of an institution issue a release praising the resigning official and giving a color of regularity to the departure as unrelated to any effort to dislodge or discredit him, the impersonal character of the announcement may involve some distance. the student newspaper did not detect distancing but saw the university “align[ing] itself with mitchell” and editorialized: the article published by the daily on march is an embarrassment to the university’s name and should be removed from the public view. as an editor, it is beyond me why the institution didn’t limit that post to a short announcement about the dean’s resignation—nothing more, nothing less. instead the university placed itself on the wrong side of the fence. notably, the administrative “dance” associated with mitchell’s departure was typical of a departure by a leader after a vote of no confidence. leaders depart with praise by the next level above them. the vote against them is said to have been unrelated to the exit. it is not unusual to represent that the departing leader will return to the institution as a faculty member and for the person in fact not to return. the failure of return fades into history, unannounced. . lawrence e. mitchell resigns as school of law dean, case w. reserve univ.: daily (mar. , ), https://thedaily.case.edu/lawrence-e-mitchell-resigns- as-school-of-law-dean/ [https://perma.cc/q vv- wqt]. . see id. (noting his creation of the women’s law and leadership institute). . tyler hoffman, university’s handling of dean’s departure is a disgrace, observer (mar. , ), http://observer.case.edu/universitys-handling- of-deans-departure-is-a-disgrace/ [https://perma.cc/l zw- edz]. . a resignation of the law school dean at michigan state university college of law followed that pattern. a letter from the president of the law college was released asserting that the vote of no confidence lacked any basis and indicating that the dean’s departure was not related to the vote. the letter emphasized that the michigan state law review litigation of the kind undertaken by ku disrupts, but does not suppress, the reassertion of narrative control by the administrative hierarchy over the institutional history. the specifics of ku’s allegations remain on the public record. the civic memory within cleveland is occasionally refreshed by updates in the alternative press of mitchell’s activities. d. et tu, #metoo? administrators feeling ambushed administrators who work to keep a cap on faculty reports of administrative abuse are surely shell-shocked when a slumbering public is aroused by reports of sexual abuse of students and young minors entrusted to the medical care of a doctor at the institution they administer. as #metoo gathers steam, more than one top administrator has been confronted with public outcry about long existing but somehow unprevented and unpunished sexual predation against students. institutions tend to protect those whom they have elevated to prominence and have often displayed a willingness to discount and tolerate significant dysfunction, even denying misconduct in office or by others critical to the organization or protected by customs of deference. #metoo delivers an unexpected, unwelcome blow, not from a betraying friend but from a sudden blast of disorderly speech. sexual misconduct that continued without administrative intervention has also occurred at other prominent universities, including the university of southern california, ohio state faculty lacked authority to dismiss the dean. letter from clif haley, president, mich. state univ. coll. of law, to faculty of mich. state univ. coll. of law (apr. ) (on file with author). though the dean was described as intending to return to the faculty, in fact he never returned. no announcement of that fact was ever made. for the press release announcing the resignation, see dean of college of law resigns, search to begin, mich. state univ. coll. of law: msu coll. of law news (apr. , ), http://www.law.msu.edu/news/ /releases/dean-search.html [https://perma.cc/usm -td ]. . see, e.g., supra section iii.b. . recent episodes at distinguished institutions demonstrate the gap in accountability and preference to minimize sexually charged allegations against valued researchers or administrators. see, e.g., bartlett & gluckman, supra note ; katherine mangan, rochester faculty senate censures professor accused of harassment, chron. higher educ. (feb. , , : am), https://www.chronicle.com/article/rochester-faculty-senate/ [https://perma.cc/ d- j ]. looking for a life raft university, and pennsylvania state university (penn state). each of these cases revealed a capacity within institutions of higher education to become the setting for sexual abuse of vulnerable persons, including in the case of penn state, children brought to the athletic facilities by a football coach. at the university of southern california, it was alleged that a gynecologist on the staff of the university used the pretext of medical examination to examine women without the ordinary protocols to protect them from sexualized invasion of their bodies by the doctor’s bare hands, in a manner inconsistent with any requirement of treatment. the facts of the ohio state matter are still being developed, but they involved the sexual abuse by a university physician of male wrestlers who were subjected to handling of their genitals when they were treated by the doctor for matters unrelated to their sexual organs. as described, the law dean at case western reserve university allegedly engaged in sexualized interactions involving demeaning language directed at some faculty members, inappropriate relationships with students, and retaliation against his associate dean for reporting certain of these matters to the case western administration. the court filings placed on the public record an account of institutional drama intended for erasure by case western administrators. searing dramas internalized by victims without voice found a setting for their retelling. . see scott stump, usc women share allegations of sexual abuse by school’s former gynecologist, today (june , , : am), https://www.today.com/news/usc-women-share-stories-alleged-abuse-school-s- gynecologist-t [https://perma.cc/ jsv- ps]; catie edmondson, more than former ohio state students allege sexual misconduct, n.y. times (july , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/sexual-misconduct-ohio- state.html [https://perma.cc/ rcp-ujy ]; belson, supra note . . see belson, supra note . . see stump, supra note ; matt hamilton, more women sue usc over former gynecologist as new interim president welcomes freshmen to campus, l.a. times (aug. , , : pm), http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln- usc-lawsuits- -story.html [https://perma.cc/ vnz-wynv]. . see edmondson, supra note ; catie edmondson & marc tracy, ‘it can happen even to guys’: ohio state wrestlers detail abuse, saying #ustoo, n.y. times (aug. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/ohio-state- wrestlers-abuse-me-too.html [https://perma.cc/n zc-x ew]. . see david lat, lawsuit accuses prominent law school dean of sexual harassment (and more), above l. (oct. , , : pm), https://abovethelaw.com/ / /lawsuit-accuses-prominent-law-school-dean-of- sexual-harassment-and-more [https://perma.cc/ fh- edq] [hereinafter lawsuit accuses dean]. . unfortunately, there is an inherent capacity for humans to deny or whitewash unpleasant facts, from sexual misconduct in genteel university settings in michigan state law review in the michigan state example, the courtroom became the outlet for catharsis and the airing of previously submerged social knowledge. impossible to convey in its full emotional effect, the courtroom outpouring afforded narrative power to student victims and other victims of a predatory doctor who had long [mis]treated female athletes. the testimony of victims occurred over a period of eight days. the steady drumbeat of outrage led to the resignation of the president of michigan state university after years of command over the board and the faculty. in defiance of the expressed wishes of the faculty, the university board of trustees immediately named as a replacement a former governor of michigan. in response, the faculty at the university voted no confidence in the board, a fruitless effort to dislodge the political power of elected officials. the matter did not recede from newspaper coverage or public memory. events reviving the present to past atrocities in states or to dysfunctional family disputes. see, e.g., antoon de baets, combatting crimes against history, hist. news network (feb. , ), https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/ [https://perma.cc/km u- hqq ]. . see meghan louttit, giving larry nassar’s victims their own voices, n.y. times (jan. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /insider/larry- nassar-victims.html [https://perma.cc/ atf- p ]. . see dator, supra note . . see id. the sense that simon had been a success amid the complications of a massive academic enterprise was expressed by one trustee when pressure for her departure begin to grow. see eric lacy & david jesse, as pressure grows to dump lou anna simon, of trustees remain supportive of msu president, lansing st. j. (jan. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/ / / /msu-trustee-foster-says-board-majority-supports-lou-anna-simon/ / [https://perma.cc/nay - b] (“[trustee joel] ferguson added there would be ‘terrible collateral damage’ if simon is no longer president and described her as ‘the best president we’ve had in my over years on the board.’”); see also roger groves, michigan state got it right with president lou anna simon, forbes (june , ), https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogergroves/ / / /michigan- state-got-it-right-with-president-lou-anna-simon/# ac ab [https://perma.cc/ ksx -qprt] (stating in an admiring profile that “simon has been president since january [and] i was curious about why msu experienced consistent success (albeit not always as part of the super elite) during her tenure”). . see id.; fernanda zamudio-suaréz, top faculty committee upset with michigan state’s choice of interim leader, chron. higher educ. (jan. , ), https://www.chronicle.com/article/top-faculty-committee-upset/ [https://perma.cc/g k-du z]. . see dan murphy, michigan state faculty delivers no-confidence vote on board of trustees, espn (feb. , ), https://www.espn.com/college- sports/story/_/id/ /michigan-state-faculty-delivers-no-confidence-vote- board-trustees [https://perma.cc/m r-am l] (discussing the faculty’s decision to make a no confidence vote despite having no power to remove the trustees from their positions). looking for a life raft memories of the perceived incompetence and even bad faith of msu, including after the installation of an interim president, have continued and will continue. in contrast to the types of problems brought to light by faculty votes of no confidence, sustained coverage of the aftermath, as well as the emergence of new victims, wrested control over the narrative from university officials. the story has found multiple occasions for news coverage: criminal charges against university officials, final settlements with litigants, controversial statements by the now- departed interim president, the search for a new president, and additional human interest stories about the victims, many of whom are prominent in the world of gymnastics. the loss of president simon’s well-regarded stewardship of the university on other dimensions is of considerable weight. that loss, in part, cancels the narrative that had built up around her long incumbency, celebrated in the university’s sense of history as having augmented university resources, with perceived coups such as winning large government grants for science. the need to replace her in a crisis mode rather than as a smooth transition to a new leader inflicts real damage to the university, as well as reputational injury. the erasure of the narrative of success of a first woman president at msu, with replacement by a narrative of the epic failure in connection with sexual predation, is an unusual total displacement of institutional narrative control. the effort by the interim president to maintain institutional control over “the story” and his eventual forced departure deepened the transfer of narrative control to forces beyond the university’s capacity for erasure of social knowledge and focus. the impact of all of these scandals, except the ohio state wrestling matter, was the forced departure of a top leader. as has been recounted, the president of msu resigned under pressure. at penn state, the president resigned, and, as a result of evidence of his . see matt mencarini, kara berg, & rj wolcott, ex-msu president lou anna simon charged with lying to police about nassar investigation, lansing st. j. (nov. , , : pm). in late , former president simon became one of the targets of criminal charges. id. those charges were eventually dismissed. see judge dismisses, supra note . . see, e.g., lindsay vanhulle, simon leads years of growth at msu, lansing st. j. (feb. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story /news/local/education/ / / /simon-leads-years-growth-msu/ / [https://perma.cc/le n- hn ] (providing a laudatory description of her ability to attract visionary projects and move the university into a leadership role in technology and the state economy). michigan state law review personal knowledge, he was convicted of a criminal charge. the president of the university of southern california resigned under pressure after having allowed the problematic doctor to resign quietly and receive a sum of money. the dean of the law college at case western resigned in connection with the settlement of a lawsuit brought against him and the university by the former associate dean. the extent of harm from these epic failures is incalculable—to the victims, to society in general, to the institution, and to those leaders and credulous persons whose habits of maintaining a surface of normalcy brought them loss of careers, reputation, and possibly even personal liberty. e. empirical treatment of votes of no confidence votes of no confidence are not rare, and they are not futile. such votes enjoy a degree of success but are also little documented, analyzed, or theorized with any scholarly diligence. we have found considerable evidence of their basis in a collective sense by faculty groups at many schools of a problematic culture. this type of culture works to disempower faculty, and often succeeds in rendering faculties passive, on the belief by faculty that engagement is futile, and that the fear of open dissent or critique of administrators is a normal response to the power of administrators. the culture descends into a . see aria bendix, former penn state president sentenced to jail over sandusky scandal, atlantic (june , ), https://www.theatlantic.com/news/ archive/ / /former-penn-state-president-sentenced-to-jail-sandusky-scandal/ / [https://perma.cc/c bm-zd ]. . see susan svrluga, usc president steps down, effective immediately, in wake of sex-abuse scandal, wash. post (aug. , , : pm), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/ / / /usc-president- steps-down-effective-immediately-in-wake-of-sex-abuse-scandal/?utm_term=. bdaee a [https://perma.cc/ eqp-tgpm]. . see allard, supra note . . see kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note . . id. . telephone interview july , supra note . one faculty member at a major university explained: i think we all feared that the vote of no confidence could end up being merely symbolic and would not really turn into anything more structural or substantive. that was the fear for concern all along. it never really dampened our enthusiasm to have that vote. but i think we knew that getting a vote of no confidence was going to be a whole lot easier, really than changing the university as a whole in some fundamental way. and that the latter would take a lot of energy and commitment. and in the end it just wasn’t looking for a life raft cynicism that might be regarded as antithetical to the aspirations of the university as an incubator of liberal values in a democracy. the mixture of administrator overreach and faculty defeatism cedes academic choices, the academic culture of the university, and the welfare of students to administrators guided by business models and authoritarian impulses. the result of the climate created is instances of bad conduct by university administrators that go unaddressed in the absence of faculty voice as a check, many of these being well known. in some institutions, the atmosphere has so degenerated that an overpowering tyranny has “broken” the faculty. the vote of no confidence occurs when the just-right mixture of administrative wrongdoing and residual faculty spunk meet. our research confirms that votes of no confidence in higher education perform a function, at least in the timing of leader departures. my coauthor has amassed data on nearly faculty votes there on the part of people to move forward. . . . now another thing i learned is that in a very interesting way there are a lot of faculty who are every bit as timid and cowed by authority as minimum wage workers. id. . see generally lionel s. lewis, when power corrupts: academic governing boards in the shadow of the adelphi case ( ) (addressing an extraordinary scandal that illustrated the powerlessness of a faculty as well as students against a president backed by a supine board chosen and dominated by a president bent on empire building and self-enrichment). a long running siege of adelphi university, a commuter school on long island, bled faculty, lost student enrollment, and reduced classes for students as staff numbers increased and the presidential salary ballooned and was punctuated in by a faculty vote asking for the president’s resignation. the new york times advocated new leadership in response. see the plundering of adelphi, n.y. times archives (oct. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/the-plundering-of-adelphi.html [https://perma.cc/ akn- zre]. the crisis only ended when the regents of new york removed the board and named a new board that then fired the president. id. the state regents removed of the trustees—most of whom were recruited by dr. diamandopoulos—for neglect of duty and misconduct on feb. . the regents cited the trustees for granting excessive compensation to dr. diamandopoulos, for failing to evaluate his performance and for allowing some trustees to engage in private business with the university. the old board contested the regents’ ruling for three days, and then resigned, clearing the way for the new board to take over. bruce lambert, new trustees of adelphi u. dismiss embattled president, n.y. times (feb. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/new-trustees-of- adelphi-u-dismiss-embattled-president.html [https://perma.cc/d zf-xmpl]. michigan state law review of no confidence against college presidents. leaders who receive a vote of no confidence often leave within a year of their vote. thus, the evidence supports a view of no confidence votes as an effective tool for not only voicing displeasure with leaders but also compelling a leader’s ouster. despite the part of our story that tells of success, the limitations are both ( ) probable underproduction of public statements about a leader crisis and ( ) the fact that a no confidence statement is ordinarily relatively bare of information about the leader problem. the usual choice of impromptu groups announcing a vote is to avoid a bill of particulars by a flat notice to the relevant decision group about the leader’s tenure. i offer the following formulation as a typical attempt by a group to limit the content of the statement and thereby avoid a set of allegations that would be subject to immediate contestation: “name group lacks confidence in mr./ms./dean/president name.” the reticence is rational, since the gravamen of a vote of no confidence is the simple fact that the leader lacks a capacity to lead. the institutional refusal to credit that fact . see sean mckinniss, no-confidence vote database, higher educ. governance, http://www.seanmckinniss.org/no-confidence-vote-database/ [https://perma.cc/sat -skqz] (last visited apr. , ). . see kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note . in our dataset, over half of college presidents who received a no confidence vote departed within a year of their vote, though they rarely attributed their exit to the no-confidence vote. id. . underproduction can be achieved by administrative guile. see cory weinberg, law faculty plotted to oust dean, gw hatchet (feb. , , : am), https://www.gwhatchet.com/ / / /law-faculty-plotted-to-oust-dean/ [https://perma.cc/l g -ahhu]; see also elie mystal, how to oust the dean of your law school: a law dean who says he wasn’t ‘ousted’ was probably freaking ousted, above l. (feb. , , : pm), https://abovethelaw.com/ / /how- to-oust-the-dean-of-your-law-school/. [https://perma.cc/b w-a x]. at the law school at george washington university, an effort by faculty to bring a vote of no confidence was thwarted by preemptive administration plotting—by means of elevating the target, dean of the law school, to a higher administrative position. after contentious communications with the dean concerning his leadership style and its impact on faculty governance, half of the faculty signed petitions, in accordance with faculty senate provisions, contained in sealed envelopes. were these delivered, a formal vote would occur in which a vote of half the faculty would then present the president of the university with a demand for removal of the dean. before the envelopes could be delivered, the dean was suddenly elevated to vice provost of the university. though the remedy of removal succeeded de facto, the remedial feature provided by open pressure resulting in a removal was thwarted, as was the chance for a public faculty statement of governance principles and core institutional values. the student paper refuted the cover story enabled by the sudden promotion of the dean before the vote could occur. see id. . a group formulating a vote of no confidence typically avoids any content other than the basic statement of no confidence provided above. looking for a life raft amounts to a concession that the person has been awarded a position that is one of command, even edict, not leadership. f. limitations and alternatives to avoid epic failures despite the function of no confidence votes as a gap-filling process where accountability is lacking, they are not a sure solution when a leader is creating a sense of crisis in a group, for reasons of incompetence, poor fit for the organization, or lack of ethical or moral standards. because it is sometimes impractical to organize a group response, faculties or individuals harmed by problematic leaders sometimes turn to formal legal remedies for unresolved problems affecting the proper functioning of an organization. in general, despite low frequency and uncertain effect, the picture that emerges is that votes of no confidence perform a function in specific instances in which leader exit does result. their occurrence helps add to a public record (aided by our compilation) of problematic conduct in public interest entities. among our findings are evidence of the misuse of resources to obscure forms of regular dysfunction as well as the occasional extraordinary scandal, the instinct and practice of protecting leaders and intimidating those who wish to report misconduct, and the not-unusual payout to bad leaders when a vote of no confidence results in a resignation. we also find instances of formal resignation but retention of power and emoluments. public exposure, in which the reason for departure and the reform of organizational power arrangements in which the problem leader participated, is a critical test of how a particular path to forcing a leader out contributes to long-term accountability in an institution. a leader’s exit constitutes a form of personal accountability. but, when done without a genuinely open inventory and admission of the facts surrounding the departure and the plans for remediation, if the problem appears to be symptomatic of a general organization failure, the departure is not redemptive or reparative. it is a relief, however, for the group that suffered the bad conduct. that relief is not to be minimized. votes of no confidence arise as a last resort, when a group perceives no other means of holding a leader to account for a pattern of behavior that the group sees as unacceptable, even intolerable. they do not occur in every instance of problematic leadership that causes . see supra parts ii, iii. . see supra part ii. michigan state law review group disaffection. the disincentives that prevent sufficient trust within a group fearful of the power of an administration to retaliate may well underproduce the check on leaders by collective voice. in addition, periods leading up to outcry inflict long stretches of institutional drift. the waiting game dissipates internal focus on the work of the body. attention is diverted to speculation about how a perceived crisis will end. despite concern that votes of no confidence can be overused and deployed as a form of mob rule for petty reasons, the fear factor in professional groups is likely far from trivial. faculty with a conservative temperament may disapprove of efforts to undermine or reject the authority of a hierarchy. such cautious faculty members may well discount the type of complaint against an administrator as involving an overreaction and oversensitivity to a normal range of human behavior. in the instance of sexually aggressive behavior by a male with power over women, and on occasion subordinate males, there has been, until quite recently, a cultural willingness to dismiss such conduct as expectable but somehow tolerable manifestations of human sexuality. the #metoo movement has made the extent of this problem readily apparent and insisted on ending normalization. in some instances, faculty may agree there is a problem but encounter differences among subgroups about the nature or urgency of the problem. the sensitivity of charges of sexual misconduct likely curtails open speech about a colleague. hence, many schools and other entities have failed to assure respectful treatment of faculty in connection with their right not to be subject to retaliation for speaking truthfully about seriously disabling flaws in a leader, even including failure to intervene where evidence of sexual impropriety is brought to a leader’s attention by another administrator. sexual impropriety particularly challenges the capacity of universities for self-policing and even raises an issue about the vote of no confidence as a safety valve when formal accountability mechanisms fail. . see telephone interview with anonymous, faculty member, state univ. secondary campus (may , ) [hereinafter telephone interview may ] (“i lost my cool, i just jumped up and started screaming. i was like, why y’all doing this to me because i was unable to sleep and unable to eat.”). . see supra section iii.c (describing retaliation by the dean of case western reserve university law school against the associate dean for reporting concerns about his allegedly improper sexualizing of the workplace). looking for a life raft g. summary the #metoo movement adds public momentum to the realization that sexual misconduct in university settings demands better systems of accountability—and an internal culture capable of treating power abuse involving sex as a matter of group protection of institutional integrity and even moral acceptability. the #metoo rubric makes the issue of response to poor leadership particularly salient in universities. the sexual predation scandals present powerful demonstrations that institutions have failed to respond to information requiring immediate action to protect the members as well as student athletes in the university. yet the absence of votes of no confidence also suggests the possible limitations of group commitment to the health of an institution, either due to members being unaware of misconduct or unwilling to publicly address it or even to risk private discussion and acknowledgment. these scandals are thus the tip of the iceberg in connection with university and nonprofit leadership. faculty members have often found themselves searching for a means of addressing the refusal of those who might remove a bad leader and somehow forcing the exit of the leader as immediate relief from an atmosphere associated with that person. as discussed, the vote of no confidence has often been chosen to fill the accountability gap presented by an unyielding support of a hierarchy for a bad leader. in simplest terms, the no confidence vote is a self-help public declaration, taken as a last resort by a group that has concluded it has no other recourse. since top university administrators are expected to function as a leader to the faculty, often called a first among equals, the announcement means the “leader” is no longer a leader for faculty colleagues. votes of confidence that occur because of a public scandal stand on a different footing in terms of bringing institutional self-knowledge, or bottom- up epistemological truth, to the surface. . a “vote of no confidence” is defined as “a formal vote by which the members of a legislature or similar deliberative body indicate that they no longer support a leader, government, etc.” vote of no confidence, merriam-webster dictionary ( th ed. ). this is a simple dictionary definition that refers to the origin of the organizational vote of confidence that has developed in democracies as an extension of the practice that developed in the british parliament starting with a vote against the leadership of robert walpole. see supra part ii for an account of the background of votes of no confidence, the form they typically take, and the role they play in making leaders in nonprofit bodies accountable. . notably, a vote of no confidence brought against a leader as a response to an unanticipated scandal does not fit this classic use of the no confidence vote as michigan state law review the no confidence motion has had a visible but opaque role in institutions of higher education. the no confidence vote is nonetheless controversial, to some degree, because of generic arguments made against it by administrators and others resentful or skeptical of the ability of faculties to “fire their boss.” most employees assume they have no means to fire their boss, not even a very bad boss. in a strong economy, quitting and getting another job is a solution that works for many. nonetheless, the internet produces advice to employees on what do to about a bad boss, including trying to have her fired. for those who have no say about throwing out their boss, the question can arise, “why can faculty members fire their boss?” this reaction is at its most forceful where the issues relate to faculty concerns about governance, academic values, and other less well appreciated aspects of academic culture. in our forthcoming book, my coauthor and i argue that faculty voice has force as an unregulated outlet capable of declaring a crisis of competence, ethics, or even morality. arguments against such extraordinary, unauthorized resort to public voice mistakenly presume, without evidence, the existence of a sound state of affairs the capstone of a period of unrest and disaffection about a leader. if there has been no undercurrent of a movement against a leader, a vote of no confidence brought after outside signaling of a crisis, such as a sexual scandal, is not necessarily the end point in a leader’s effectiveness because of a systemic concern by the group. in such a fact pattern, the vote is more akin to “virtue signaling,” and may or may not represent a genuine statement that the group has formed a consensus that a leader is corrupt, abusive, or ineffective. depending on the facts, the vote has an element of what is loosely called “branding,” meaning that the group wishes, by disassociating with the leader, to protect the brand. . see schmidt, supra note (discussing the lesser clarity about the function and effect of the vote of no confidence outside the original context of a representative body such as parliament). . see, e.g., william g. tierney, averting the nuclear option, academe , – ( ) (calling the no confidence process of removal of a university president “lamentable” and suggesting no confidence votes result from “communications failures”); kenneth a. shaw, a vote for confidence in college presidents, chron. higher educ. (apr. , ), https://www.chronicle.com /article/a-vote-for-confidence-in/ [https://perma.cc/j hq- fa ]; joseph petrick, no confidence in no-confident votes, academe , – ( ) (advocating that means be found to avert no confidence votes by solving leadership problems in ways that are less damaging to the institution than no confidence votes). . see sherrie campbell, effective tactics for handling a toxic boss, entrepreneur (sept. , ), https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/ [https://perma.cc/gxm -c q]; glassdoor team, how to get your boss fired, glassdoor (feb. , ) https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/boss-fired/ [https://perma.cc/h kw-th u]. looking for a life raft amenable to harmonious resolution. the view of a normal state of affairs in the typical instance of such faculty initiatives is unwarranted. the sexual scandals, long kept quiet but now being heard, have belied the notion of organizational regularity and revealed that even as certain groups, women, minorities, gay men and women, the young, and others have been brought into the academic and professional world, they have in truth been excluded from building an organizational epistemology that incorporates their knowledge. what they have known has been treated as trivial and akin to gossip that cannot inform the communal truth of the organization. if insiders with power do not tell the story for groups lacking in voice within an organization, are there outsiders capable of filling the void with compelling accounts of the organizational wrongs? iv. narrative black holes: losing confidence in no confidence? scandals that resonate with #metoo have hit universities and other institutions with financial liability and potentially corrosive reputational damage. no internal mechanism, official or improvised, has been adequate to the need for moral response. the stranglehold on epistemic authority in institutions that have adopted closed systems disempowering unmanaged voices from below the top tier of leaders shuts off open speech about sexual wrongs. the bland speech produced by the administrative class crowds out unwelcome messages. blunt naming of sexual molestation of vulnerable students or recounting the use of crude language to subordinate faculty or other professionals is off-key and harsh. the danger such speech poses to the speaker’s security of position and sense of acceptance by peers produces an excess of self-policing that maintains seeming normalcy—until a scandal erupts. after a scandal is exposed, the policing goes underground, with the same managerial impulse to maintain harmony and propriety, and with new recruits protecting surface harmony from the disruptive effects of truth. a. narrators and their limitations—then and now, paradoxes of secrecy over time before the #metoo voices brought pressure to bear on nonprofit administration, faculties, and other professional groups had long turned to the vote of no confidence to expose leaders whose misconduct or incompetence attracted their protest. these votes had michigan state law review some success, but they did not receive heavy press coverage. in light of the university’s prestige, the no confidence vote at harvard university received significant attention. but the effort at new york university, despite its location in the voracious media market of new york city, received minimal coverage. unlike the issues with which faculty and other groups are often concerned, the recent #metoo and rankly sexual scandals have brought intense national attention to an accountability shortfall in institutions with responsibility for critical social functions. religious bodies, fundraising groups, and other bodies responsible for the welfare of vulnerable persons have been found callous, unfeeling, and ruthless. without transparency in an institution’s normative superstructure, a sense of impunity can infect the institution’s administrators. time and context empower and disempower narrators within an institution. at the top, potential narrators maintain silence about what they know or fail to know. new managers do not want to know about seamy facts of occurrences before their arrival. from the ranks, social knowledge remains locked in the knowing looks or warnings from colleagues about the known but unspoken story of shared secrets, unspoken because unspeakable. the persistent deflection of institutional accountability for individual conversions of institutional power into personal sexual power poses a mystery about speech along dimensions of time, silence, fear, and motive. b. motives to speak? . inside organizations some unit leaders engage directly in wrongful conduct. others choose to protect perpetrators of wrongful conduct for reasons that resist a single explanation. motives may include personal friendship, perceived class solidarity, indifference to the effect on those subject to abusive conduct, belief in the wrongdoer’s net value to the . see, e.g., rimer, supra note . . but see goodwin, infra note (constituting one of the sole published accounts of the nyu imbroglio); see also e-mail from anonymous n.y. univ. employee to author (may , ) (on file with author) (asserting that, “[t]he vote of no confidence in sexton—or rather, the several *votes* of no confidence— received little media attention. there was a story or two in the new york times and an op-ed, but that was about it. the vote at harvard was considered much more newsworthy.”) . see supra section iii.d. looking for a life raft organization, or a preference to maintain control in the form of silence within the ranks about the empirical connection between authority and habits of abuse. the meta-message of #metoo is that there has been a widespread collective willingness to silence the targets of sexual misconduct and to protect the predators. a hackneyed response to revelations about long-past misdeeds against women has been, “it was a different era when the rules were different.” in a curious merger of a past and present perspective, self-nominated narrators of present- day revelations purport to describe knowledge from the past that was kept secret. there is a suggestion that the method of secret-keeping, underpinning the rules of power and the required submission to it, were known, with the paradox that the institution’s secrets were not known and are also known as a shared social memory. about the history of the rules, strange knowledge reigns. we learn of a retrospective on the workings of institutional knowing: the rules have been not to know. the retrospective tone hints at a new day. when . see generally memorandum from gregg l. bernstein et al., zuckerman spaeder llp on investigation of bishop michael bransfield, former bishop of diocese of wheeling-charleston to william e. lori, archbishop, archdiocese of balt. (feb. , ) (reporting sexual misconduct within the catholic church surrounding bransfield). a secret report commissioned by the catholic church and unearthed by the washington post offers a reason for silence surrounding a person given authority in a nonprofit institution, specifically an allegedly abusive catholic bishop. see id. at (“the vicar general and judicial vicar, in particular, acknowledged that they were aware of bishop bransfield’s tendencies and sexual harassment, but took no steps to prevent it based on a combination of fear and loyalty toward the bishop.”). . see elizabeth c. tippett, weinstein may be a monster, but the lawyers who enabled him are the real villains in #metoo takedown ‘she said’, conversation (sept. , , : pm), https://theconversation.com/weinstein- may-be-a-monster-but-the-lawyers-who-enabled-him-are-the-real-villains-in-metoo- takedown-she-said- [https://perma.cc/a u - naa] (describing the long running complicity of lawyers in helping harvey weinstein cover his tracks and quoting lawyer lanny davis saying, “powerful men of an older generation were changing their understanding of the meaning of the word consensual”); see also jonathan zimmerman, where does mlk fit in today’s #metoo world?, baltimore sun (apr. , , : am), https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed- op- -mlk-metoo- -story.html [https://perma.cc/zv d-t cn] (arguing that “we shouldn’t read our own values onto people like king, who operated under different norms and rules”). . “the only thing that’s surprising about weinstein’s conviction for rape is that he has actually been convicted.” hadley freeman, with harvey weinstein’s conviction, the old excuses no longer apply, guardian (feb. , , : am), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /feb/ /harvey-weinstein-rape- conviction-movie-industry-hadley-freeman [https://perma.cc/kz -btlj]. michigan state law review scandal reappears, volunteers come forward once more to explain the old rules governing institutional knowledge, and to herald a new day. despite these belated recollections, the institutional management of knowledge about dysfunction and bad conduct reduces the volume of useful history of american universities. the official institutional history is cleansed of a recounting of the moral failures and governance flaws that would inform the judgment and understanding of future faculty members and provide a comprehensive public record of governance problems in universities. the purposeful erasures support an atmosphere of moral timidity within the academy. administrators who may wish to expose the initial allegations that he raped women were so unsurprising—they felt almost inevitable, really—that as soon as they were published in , first in the new york times, followed days later in the new yorker, weinstein’s career was finished. there were no anguished discussions about giving him the benefit of the doubt, no solemn handwringing about how complicated relations between the sexes are these days. it was as if we all had always known—which, to a certain extent, many of us had. id. for a deconstruction of the rhetoric around “a new day” and what we know and have known about “yesterday,” see tim mulkern, mad men: justifying sexism and gender roles through nostalgia, global critical media literacy project (mar. , ), http://gcml.org/mad-men-justifying-sexism-and-gender-roles-through- nostalgia/ [https://perma.cc/ xxw- l] (arguing that the depiction of a time when the rules were different intentionally recreates and idealizes roles showing male dominance and romanticized sexual harassment of female careerists and treating skeptically the purported representation “of a former time period” as “normative” for the time yet presenting gender roles as models for emulation). . in a group of lectures, historian allan nevins produced eye-rolling accounts of clownishness and graft in the coming-of-age of the land grant universities. his narrative of a slice of university history in the united states departs from the bland or relentlessly celebratory tone of approved voices about the achievements of the morrill act. see generally allan nevins, the state universities and democracy ( ) (presenting a new tone about academia). delivered at the invitation of his university of illinois alma mater to celebrate the centennial of the morrill act, nevins produced prose about graft and anti-intellectualism that lacked the usual detachment of the professional historian and could have subjected him to critique for a flawed tone. a book review at the time nonetheless praised the book as inspiring and presumably not for being unsparing. see roy nichols, book reviews and book notes, pa. hist. , – ( ) (reviewing nevins, supra note ). . see debra r. comer & gina vega, moral courage in organizations: doing the right thing at work xvi (debra r. comer ed., ) (developing the argument that organizations tend to make acting on the basis of moral concerns difficult and arguing for efforts to encourage the development of great moral courage in organizations in the interests of ethical behavior). looking for a life raft morally significant poor behavior or cover-ups appreciate that their task is defined as preventing disclosures that discredit the university culture, protecting other administrators, and keeping alumni happily uninformed and generous with pledges of monetary support. faculty members learn to adopt language that conceals more than it reveals, and thus to stay in line with administrative wishes. civic courage is replaced by falseness and courtier behavior, or silence. talk among faculty members laments the futility of reports up the chain and skitters away from admitting or sharing the futility of lamentation. faculty members and epistemic democracy, unlike fools and their money, part their way by choice. in the event of a vote, the hierarchy employs standard means of controlling the public narrative and attempts to deflect, in the immediate moment and thereafter, a narrative that departs from the preferred official story and would disrupt efforts at protecting the university brand. the faculty has few means of contesting the institutional narrative set out by university press officers. as a result, the public narrative of no confidence votes is standard, brief, and, generally, false. the private, enacted narrative is not admitted into the discourse of official keepers of the institutional persona and in the ordinary case, never reaches wide circulation among those who might form a judgment about the needs of the institution for moral reform or make demands for changing its adherence to the usages of hierarchical immunity. in addition, internal discussion that would inform newcomers about the episode is discouraged and even labeled “unprofessional.” the brief moment of shared work toward an improved epistemology of the organization fades. scurrying away from the facts of the event becomes the norm as courage wanes among participants in a vote. those who might claim a share of epistemic authority to narrate organizational history retreat into silence, leaving the institutional podium to be monopolized by the administrative class. when narrators from outside the mission-bonded, professional ranks emerge to force an abrupt ending to the old rules on sexual power and the rule of silence in organizations, a new dynamic forms around the catastrophic effect of public concern about something so odious as sexual molestation of students. intensity of coverage from investigative journalism has a long-tail duration, with endless triggers for new interest. the list is long, with the opening focus with the trials of a predator, high-dollar settlements with victims, and charges against top administrators. the michigan state scandal has produced michigan state law review narrative-style books about the victims’ experience, board volatility with dismissals of an interim president, political posturing, government-issued reports summing up the claims of bad conduct, and the need for repeated administrative mea culpas and promises of reform. a critical component of success by students who have been subject to sexual predation is the adoption of their cause by journalists who provide continuing coverage in an environment of fact-rich disclosures of wrongdoing so indecent and pervasive that no defenders come forth to claim propriety or consent. a typical no confidence vote, with less sensational or easily comprehended grounds, does not sustain journalistic coverage. instead, it typically receives little more than a one-day use by a local paper of a press release announcing it, . see generally rachael denhollander, what is a girl worth?: my story of breaking the silence and exposing the truth about larry nassar and usa gymnastics ( ); abigail pesta, the girls: an all-american town, a predatory doctor, and the untold story of the gymnasts who brought him down ( ). . see rj wolcott & eric lacy, engler’s impending departure from michigan state prompts strong reactions, lansing st. j. (jan. , , : pm), https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/ / / /msu-fire-john- engler-michigan-state-larry-nassar-survivors/ / [https://perma.cc/ ql - nnnb] (“john engler told the detroit news editorial board that survivors of larry nassar’s abuse ‘who’ve been in the spotlight . . . are still enjoying that moment at times.’”). . see maya goldman, here’s why the larry nassar scandal has become part of the gubernatorial race, mich. radio npr (sept. , ), https://www.michiganradio.org/post/heres-why-larry-nassar-scandal-has-become- part-gubernatorial-race [https://perma.cc/nj z-tkqm] (“whitmer says schuette and republicans should not politicize this case. ‘i’ve had it with these guys who want to use this nassar case as a political gimmick for their own sick political gain,’ she says. schuette plans to speak about the issue at a campaign event monday.”). . see letter from meena morey chandra, reg’l director, u.s. dep’t of educ., to samuel l. stanley, president, mich. state univ. (sept. , ), https://msu.edu/ourcommitment/_assets/documents/ocr-msu-agreement- .pdf [https://perma.cc/hu h- wl]. . see, e.g., emily guerrant, stanley sets course of action following federal reviews, msu today (sept. , ), https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/ / stanley-sets-course-of-action-following-federal-reviews/ [https://perma.cc/ wd- xf]; see also samuel l. stanley, sept. , : message on u.s. department of education investigations, mich. st. u. off. president (sept. , ), https://president.msu.edu/communications/messages-statements/ _community_ letters/ _ _ _message_to_community.html [https://perma.cc/s jg-p nw]. . the term “success” is not intended to suggest that exposure of the wrong is sufficient to bring justice or erase the injury, one which lingers throughout the life of a victim of such predation. looking for a life raft with a dismissive response by an institutional spokesman. if the target eventually resigns, the newspaper will print an announcement provided by the press office of the university, typically carrying a claim that the resignation is not a result of the no confidence vote. . public attention sex changes the operative principles of media attention. the general rule of journalism applies to university scandals: sex sells. the rule within the university, before journalism enters the mix, is pretend and avoid. the story begins to sell only if someone breaks through the passivity of newspapers that cover the university as a local story or finds an out-of-town paper happy to run a scoop. years can pass with local papers declining to follow leads, until a critical cultural moment arrives. for sex to sell, a narrator must emerge, and the wall of silence must break. at ground level, the fascination with sex is expressed in the opposite of narration: a looking away that blocks revelation. these dynamics of avoidance display evidence of cultural durability, at least in the united states. nonetheless, unlike institutional votes of no confidence seeking to oust an incompetent academic or other nonprofit leader, public attention about sexual misconduct with real live victims can lead to a greater degree of publicity. this is deeply distressing to the leaders in those universities who treat it as an obstacle to the business of the university and move quickly to squelch public uproar with a mixture . see, e.g., jordan friedman, nine ‘no confidence’ votes that made headlines in - , huffington post (june , , : pm), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-friedman/nine-no-confidence-votes- _b_ .html. [https://perma.cc/k cj- dfn]; ariel kaminer, fourth no confidence vote for the president of n.y.u., n.y. times (may , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /education/fourth-no-confidence-vote-for-the- president-of-nyu.html [https://perma.cc/ec -bzlr]. . see friedman, supra note ; kaminer, supra note . . by contrast, the #metoo movement encounters significant cultural resistance in nations still protective of hierarchical prerogatives, particularly of males toward women, even on the street. see kim willsher, ‘they just don’t see us as human’: women speak out on france’s harassment problem, guardian (aug. , , : am), https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /aug/ /they-just-dont- see-us-as-human-women-speak-out-on-frances-harassment-problem [https://perma.cc/q u- b ] (describing how the #metoo campaign, sparked by hollywood producer harvey weinstein’s predatory and sexually abusive behavior with female actors, provoked a backlash in france, where cultural differences, among them french ideas of “seduction,” were cited to counter it). michigan state law review of reassurance and stonewalling. a common locution, easily found in an internet search, is “we take allegations of [fill in the blank] very seriously.” that statement cuts two ways. it can mean, “we are serious about rooting it out and holding offenders to account.” or it can mean, “the charge is extremely serious and thus very hard to prove.” reassurance and a stone wall can be made with the same building supplies. nonetheless, the standard toolbox of media handlers can fail to stop the growing outside scrutiny. the vast public interest and journalistic stamina in covering these most discrediting sex scandals differ from the scant attention given by the press to statements about faculty disempowerment and questionable decisions by the top leaders of a university. for example, the vote of no confidence in the president of new york university raised serious issues about the need for a faculty role to scrutinize disfiguring mutations of the university by expansion into authoritarian nations, in which the values of the free academy would be at risk. despite the importance of the issue, and the prominent players involved in the board’s support of the president, there was no continuing coverage of the dispute. the new york times printed little more than press releases on both sides and minimal analysis. it also ran an op-ed by professor jeff goodwin, a leading faculty proponent of the no confidence vote. by contrast, once the indianapolis star breached the silence about the abuse of athletes by a michigan state university (msu) doctor, coverage was extensive, even bringing a . see kim kozlowski, msu board backs engler as he apologizes to nassar victim, detroit news (june , , : pm), https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/ / / /engler- apologizes-criticizing-nassar-victim-email/ / [https://perma.cc/d mn- al s]. . before settling the lawsuit with associate dean ray ku of case western reserve university school of law and following considerable outcry about the university’s backing of the dean against his associate dean, with detailed allegations of retaliation against ku in the complaint, case western issued the following statement: “first, the university takes seriously all allegations of sexual misconduct.” see brown, supra note . . see kevin kiley, not your university, inside higher educ. (dec. , ), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /nyu-vote-no-confidence- highlights-divergent-views-faculty-role-governance [https://perma.cc/r jn-wjb ]. . see jeff goodwin, the war in washington square, n.y. times (mar. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/the-war-at-nyu.html [https://perma.cc/ e -y ay]. looking for a life raft washington post reporter to east lansing for on-site investigatory work. what is the result at msu? there is a new president, but whether the culture of the university’s governance has a diagnosis for recovery, improvement, or entire reformation is questionable. the new president has announced initiatives, given reassurances, and labeled the previous administration flawed. given the extent of the catastrophe, the statements are to be expected. yet how likely might it be that the culture that maintained silence for years and then slowed the response as the facts became known will be transformed by a new university functionary, recruited from the presidency of another university? could a deep cultural audit explain the resistance for years to see and report the threat to vulnerable female student athletes? would the university that failed to protect the students be capable of performing one? the removal of a president who had been honored until she was present at the time the news broke, and for whom the worst charge voiced at the time of her resignation was that she just didn’t “get it[,]” may or may not correctly address where the failure lay. skeptics are dubious. as these public spectacles erupt and produce aftershocks counted in years, the vote of no confidence remains the simultaneously dowdy and controverted primary outlet for the airing of internal organizational knowledge about nonsexual leader misconduct: the type of malfeasance or misfeasance that does not garner media interest. in local settings, the intensity of a gathering opposition to an administrator can become briefly a strong focus for local interest and opinion, spreading from faculty to a more general public. a siege involving city department heads in hanford, california that became a regular topic in local news provides a good example of the kinds of issues that a vote of no confidence seeks to address with the forced exit of a leader. though no confidence votes typically avoid a listing . e-mail from susan svrluga, reporter, wash. post, to author (jan. , , : est) (on file with author) (advising author of scheduled trip to east lansing on january , ). . see stanley, supra note . . matt friedman, column: here’s what’s wrong with simon’s resignation letter, detroit free press (jan. , , : pm), https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/ / / /lou-anna-simon- resignation-letter-msu/ / [https://perma.cc/jfy -m rf]. “the letter leaves a reader thinking that, when it comes to the sheer magnitude of the abuse crisis, that the ex-president didn’t ‘get it’ and has led a broken culture, leading to several pr missteps in recent days.” id. . see excerpts from ‘no confidence’ letter, supra note . michigan state law review of charges, where the entity seeking to oust a leader is a public service body that serves the citizenry, the group sometimes attempts to share a collective voice that produces a set of charges for public consumption. fire departments and police departments, by their character, acquire a democratic connection with a local public. they expect commonality and solidarity if they publicize problems with which a general public could identify. in hanford, california, city government employees produced a public bill of particulars against a city manager that typify the issues with which votes of no confidence are concerned. in a long-running scandal at adelphi university that eventually resulted in official action dismissing the president and the board of trustees, faculty outcry helped bring significant corruption to public attention. the alleged offenses involved bypassing the faculty’s input, diverting resources away from the core mission of teaching and scholarship, and generally misusing power to benefit the president and to replace administrators with friends and at higher compensation. the scandalous diversion of resources and mission distortion was sufficiently understandable as ordinary corruption to attract media attention, which resulted in eventual action by higher state authority. let us next consider the role of outside pressures as a possible source of useful social knowledge for society generally and for the epistemology within organizations exposed to public scandals. does public exposure, with attendant mobilization of public interest and opinion formation, build a new framework of sustainable knowledge and vigilance? does it advance the commitment of the citizens of a republican political order to develop and sustain active citizenship within organizations exposed to public scandal? or do public accountings force only a sliver of knowledge into the controlled discourse of mission-bonded institutional life? organizations today prefer control of voice from the ranks and suppression of internal input about dysfunction or wrongdoing. can open scandal alter that calculation at the top, or might it only deepen the determination to control discourse, and provide a new context for control? can it be a source for a renewed ethos in an organization situated in a nation with a democratic ethos and republican aspirations? what kind of epistemic work can scandal achieve? . see id. . see lambert, supra note . . see lewis, supra note . looking for a life raft c. #metoo: social knowledge in search of a voice with the emergence of the #metoo movement and the movement’s airing of social knowledge revealed by the particulars of misconduct within these organizations, other monitoring mechanisms join the vote of no confidence as a means of seeking relief from ongoing wrongs. these mechanisms are evolving in the #metoo context and have the capacity to command widespread, even national interest. the epistemological enterprise that the vote of no confidence has only partially fulfilled as a means of building knowledge within the organization is thus seemingly supplemented by an outside entry into the project. it gains momentum with lawsuits and public statements by student victims and the consequent required investigation by law enforcement previously unmotivated to root out sexual transgressions in local institutions. the lawsuits and the public statements convey an isolated and suppressed internal voice from the organization to the outside world. though these public revelations and voices unavoidably enter into organizational channels as well as attract attentive listeners throughout the entity, they do not instantly transform the inner workings of the managerial approach to organizational self-understanding. the preference of the administrative hierarchy to control the sources that shape the organizational epistemology does not yield to the crisis of outside voices. rather, the eruption of voices that cannot be silenced deepens institutional concern for control over public messaging, which also calls upon internal control as a go-to response. as major sexual scandals involving student molestations, faculty bodies, administrators, students, student newspapers, and boards of trustees inundate the narrative of institutional normality, the no-longer confident official narrators struggle to address the epic failure. the adequacy of the form by which epistemic democracy takes shape to absorb and make sense of the failure is unclear. an entity long devoted to restricting talk to prescribed channels while reposing epistemic authority in administrators invariably turns to administrators to make the kind of public comment that is meant to reestablish a sense of normalcy. yet the intervention of politicized outside discussants— enforcement agencies that impose fines, write damning reports, and charge administrators with crimes—is not necessarily a win for epistemic expansion pointing toward a shared moral community. government agencies and their elected heads have political motives that can produce biased reports which are then received as authoritative by outsiders while insiders may give them lip service. michigan state law review the findings may or may not be an acute or insightful account that would be produced by what might be made an ideal: an audit undertaken as an effort at psychological assessment of the dynamics that could produce extended silence about a sexual predator. outside the context of civil penalties and government reports after investigation, prosecutors may play a role with criminal enforcement. unfortunately, prosecutors have incentives to target administrators with political prosecutions, a move that may appear to be a useful form of accountability but may lack a sound basis in evidence. it may also exacerbate the internal tendency toward control over speech by risk-averse administrators. the end result may not be an advance of public knowledge about patterns of misconduct and organizational malfunction. the united states department of education is subject to crosscutting pressures that can affect the fact- finding in a report about a university, pointing either toward a hard- hitting exposé or a mild rebuke. lawsuits offer a different venue for the isolated target of sexual harassment or sexually aggressive physical contact. they also have some potential appeal for less-fraught forms of mistreatment of faculty or violation of their rights to engage in open discourse in connection with their institutional governance role. the obstacles to success are considerable. the first problem is practical: finding legal representation for cases that may have low stakes. for faculty members concerned about threats to traditional academic values or to their own personal interests, stakes tend to be too low to make the lawsuit economically viable. a faculty member investigating the prospects for a lawsuit discovers that lawyers do not consider the case to have sufficient value to agree to a contingency fee arrangement. a faculty member, however certain of the injury, is reluctant to pay from often limited funds for an uncertain result. these considerations also vary with the nature of the problem. courts do not necessarily provide an outlet for voices of individuals . i have published an op-ed arguing that the criminal prosecution of former michigan state university president lou anna kimsey simon is political and is not well-based in facts or law. see mae kuykendall, law prof: prosecuting former msu president in larry nassar scandal is unfair, detroit free press (june , , : am), https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/ / / /nassar-msu-lou-anna- simon/ / [https://perma.cc/ph s-spra]; see also judge dismisses, supra note ; claim of appeal of people of the state of michigan, michigan v. simon, no. - -fh (eaton county cir. ct. ), appeal docketed (mich. ct. app. june , ). looking for a life raft whose problem is not shared by the group and who must therefore pursue a solitary cause. lawyers look for a clear and readily explained violation of a highly specific right and for an injury with quantifiable value. unfairness or injustice alone is of minimal interest to a lawyer contemplating a contest with a large institutional target. litigators consider how a jury would respond to a client’s claim of injury. the litigator is unsentimental. does the potential client have a story of mistreatment that would garner the sympathetic interest of a jury? for a professor or other professional, much that occurs in a large institution is seamy, unfair, and unpleasant. those there know it well. communicating the institutional malaise to a jury or even a judge within the parameters of the requirements of pleading a legal injury, asserting a monetary loss, and presenting an appealing account of victimization worthy of repair is most often a near impossibility. the injury must be extreme, the facts outrageous, and the story eye- popping. as much as the atmosphere in academic settings can become and often is toxic, it is a toxicity that eludes the understanding of the outside world. v. moving forward and navigating #metoo with votes of no confidence the intervention of outsiders that follows an epic failure is episodic and the depth of coverage is often shallow, indifferent, or sensational. unlike the vote of no confidence, such outsider interventions are not built on deep knowledge of the relevant facts of dysfunction within the organization. it is not clear how much they add to the voices that emanate from within the organization on the part of the victims of sexual predation. in certain respects, they feed unoriginal, unenlightening soundbites of outrage. they do not build a body of social knowledge for organizations, though they add to the historical record memorializing epic failures. in that sense, they provide the same messaging function of recurring votes of no confidence. something is wrong in american nonprofit organizations. if media coverage of scandal provides an unstable combination of victim outcry and outsider inventions by the press and government bodies, might insider litigation, as took place as case western reserve university school of law, function as a means of forcing exits of bad leaders and thus a basis for organizational self-scrutiny through internal critique? in rare instances, a faculty member’s lawsuit against an administrator becomes an outlet for a formal exposure of wrongful sexual speech and conduct tolerated in the work setting. the obstacles michigan state law review to open speech against administrators vary depending on the nature of the issue, with sexual misconduct most protected. the forms by which voice may emerge also vary with the nature of the issue and the fear of retaliation launched by the wrongdoer or the group. for all who wish to expose the abuse of power, the first barrier is the silencing message from entrenched rules protecting power itself and from a cultural disposition to avoid trouble and to disapprove of those who bring trouble. in the case of #metoo, the barriers have been an unusually deep reticence about resisting male sexual power when it is paired with other claims to power. there has been a strong inheritance from a history that has been well recounted as part of the breaking of silence and that has been portrayed in popular culture, such as the cable program, mad men. a lawsuit by an individual seeking to act for the collective, with no buy-in or prescribed format, is unlikely. for deeply entrenched power that is structurally subversive of academic values as expressed in shared governance, the courts lack a template for intrusion into the internal politics of another institution. in the absence of legislation protecting university governance from the distortive influence of administrative aggrandizement, federal courts have no sense of any mandate or permission to referee university governance to prevent the creation of entrenched, unaccountable power. even if what is called by some “the corporatization” of the university is alleged to harm the core mission of state-funded and/or controlled universities, the federal courts are simply not a venue for litigation and exposure of the un- republican effects of trends in the university. the republican guarantee clause of the constitution has not provided a template for federal courts to claim a role in refereeing the dysfunctions of the nonprofit sector. the #metoo revelations pose a complication in discriminating a generalized culture problem from a problem caused by a leader. indeed, the aftermath of the michigan state sexual predation scandal . by comparison, for-profit corporations have a developed body of law that gives judges some mandate for review, however well, i.e., robust (or weak), one might adjudge the conventions by which judges are involved as corporate monitors. for information on this topic, see mae kuykendall, good greed: do activists shareholders force internal accountability in profit corporations? (on file with author), which provides a treatment of the incentive structure in profit corporations in comparison with the relative paucity of such incentives in non-profit corporations. . the potential of the undeveloped constitutional norm implicated in the republican guarantee clause is beyond the scope of this article. see supra note and accompanying text. looking for a life raft has shown the murkiness of the search for responsibility for a terrible harm to students that continued for years. the effort to hold the top leader—the former president—criminally responsible has foundered with a prosecution dismissed by a judge who found that no reasonable person could conclude that any evidence supported the crime charged—that of lying to the state police of michigan. because michigan state has not produced all the documents that various parties have demanded, those who wish to assign criminal responsibility to the former president cling to the view that new and telling evidence lurks in the reams of paper passed between university administrators over the years of a man’s crime spree against the female athletes trusted to his care. the criminal law process, in its search for an individual who should bear the stigma of a harsh criminal penalty for the long failure of the university culture, lacks potential to build an epistemology of organizational dysfunction. the public drama— perhaps a psychodrama—seeks a uniquely villainous individual to whom great moral blame can be assigned. yet the effort by prosecutors, under pressure to yield satisfaction to a public lacking deep knowledge but convinced that moral evil must be avenged, is poorly designed to yield either organizational self-knowledge or deeper understanding of the pathologies of nonprofit entities. communal truth goes begging once more as internal silence descends. the ongoing risk of an effort to exact such a price from administrators blocks the creation of new avenues within the entity for previously private knowledge to become embedded into the working understanding of the enterprise. current administrators retreat to the hooded language of command and caution with a performance of humility and concern, former administrators subject to vilification remain quiet at risk of their liberty, and the institution evolves in the direction of secret proceedings against those whose conduct is brought into question. developments relating to criminal proceedings . see judge dismisses, supra note ; claim of appeal of people of the state of michigan, michigan v. simon, no. - -fh (eaton county cir. ct. ), appeal docketed (mich. ct. app. june , ). . see kate wells, here’s why msu is keeping , documents from nassar investigators, mich. radio npr (dec. , ), https://www.michiganradio.org/post/here-s-why-msu-keeping- -documents- nassar-investigators [https://perma.cc/jx - jw] (describing the basis in attorney- client privilege and related insurance coverage concerns for msu’s refusal to release certain emails and quoting a new trustee: “i just met with rachael denhollander, and she was saying the same thing: short of releasing these things, people are probably never going to be completely satisfied”). . see supra note and accompanying text. michigan state law review against a former top leader are met with official statements explaining that comment is not possible. the proceedings of a criminal process, such as the preliminary hearing for former president simon, may reveal information about the involvement and interactions of other administrators with the person charged, but the likelihood that press coverage would contribute to institutional knowledge is low. with the three-factor new speech performance—command language mixed with a posture of humility, the imposed silence of former administrators with the consequent loss of their social knowledge, and the turn to secret proceedings internal to the organization for entity self-protection against scandal—the norm of silence is fully restored, command logic and fear of open speech reinforced, and passivity given a new urgency. the vote of no confidence, by contrast, is muted when it happens and thereafter remitted to the narrative erasure of the institutional officials. in a no confidence vote, history is written by those who retain power and then pass it on to the like “guardians” of authorized institutional narrative. nonetheless, for some who helped organize group voice and lodge a successful demand for a leader’s departure, a new understanding of their citizenship in the institution can arise. despite mixed views among the group and even within one person, the exercise supports the development of “citizen” agency among some faculty members. the seeds of that new awareness can grow . emily guerrant, statement on charges filed against former president, mich. st. u. (nov. , ), https://msu.edu/ourcommitment/news/ - - - simon-charges-statement.html [https://perma.cc/dk b-xp j]. . a faculty member who worked with others to bring a no confidence petition—despite being relatively pessimistic about the effect on her trust of others and the long-term impact of the effort, which caused a departure—concluded after discussion that the experience had some benefits in bringing about a greater connection with others and gaining knowledge: i am more pessimistic, i am less trusting. i did get some fabulous women friends out of it, and admiration for those women like you would not believe. i should have mentioned that earlier, cause that was the best thing for me personally, to come out of it, was the closer relationship with those women. i—i’m more—i’m way more likely to speak up on campus issues, and i have done ever since. and i never, you know i never bothered to even learn much about it before. and then i found myself, like people were asking me questions about my opinion on stuff. and that had—people i didn’t know before. and so, it changed other people’s view of me, it changed my own willingness to speak up. it changed my own desire to know stuff. statement of anonymous, faculty member, regional state univ. (june , ) [hereinafter statement of anonymous]. looking for a life raft or wither with time, die for lack of care, or find themselves among thorns that choke the tender roots of communal knowledge. the no confidence vote nonetheless provides, episodically and uncertainly, openings to a shared epistemic authority over the communal life and self-presentation of the entity. the relevance of the vote of no confidence to problems specific to ones perceived to have been brought to an organization by a leader leaves a possible doubt about its long-term efficacy. aside from issues of specific individual memory and agency, those who bring such votes sometimes are unsure whether forcing a leader’s departure provides long-term relief from problematic trends that may have been present without regard to the specific issues making the leader unacceptable to the body. but they do not regret the no confidence effort, either with or without expulsion of the leader. the strengths of the vote are mixed with weaknesses. because of the lack of a mature tradition, groups’ actions that depend on a type of volunteerism and improvisation are not reliable as a mechanism to address serious problems of leader misconduct, or cultural bad patterns. but they are a supplement, a safety valve, to the absence of good accountability practices in nonprofits. #metoo is distinctively a problem of a culture that chooses silence in the face of certain kinds of abuse within the body. whether they have direct knowledge or involvement with a specific instance of misconduct, leaders are not free of blame. leaders bear responsibility for challenging the environment that led to #metoo and creating an atmosphere that both discourages misconduct and moves group dynamics (reflective in part of the wider culture) away from a culture of silence around sexual misconduct or other abusive conduct harmful . despite uncertainty about the long-term beneficial effect on an institution’s culture, there is reason to think that that forced exits of those who perpetrate or enable such misconduct can lead to more diverse replacements for them. see audrey carlsen et al., #metoo brought down powerful men. nearly half of their replacements are women., n.y. times (oct. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/metoo-replacements.html [https://perma.cc/gg -ekvt]. moreover, the sense that one person’s departure was critical to the institution can persist, even in the face of concerns over replacements. michigan state university college of law brought a vote of no confidence against the dean in . he resigned in . in my personal experience as a faculty member, despite a divisive period that followed with a new permanent dean, no faculty member who participated ever regretted the decision. but those most committed to the expulsion of the dean also viewed the trends within the law college in terms of faculty voice as negative. michigan state law review to individuals’ dignity. a passive culture generally embedded in “command logic” is dangerous for larger reasons of citizenship development in society generally but especially dangerous for the project of building enterprise epistemology that begins to mesh the public speech of those with power with the hitherto segregated understandings of those without voice in the entity. those without power have uniquely suffered from norms of silence in organizations. those without voice have included persons with nominal stature but forms of knowledge gained from pathologies in organizational culture. those lacking in all organizational power or standing have been without voice or protection. what about the profit motive? though prone to drift and ethical laziness without something more to prick the conscience, profit organizations respond to a lever from investors over their pursuit of return. they gladly fall into patterns of comfortable, self-regarding managerial arrangements, but they face unhappy investors who demand accountability. in for-profit corporations, the matter of conscience, for the outside force, is money, and money does indeed talk. for universities, money also matters. but the imperative of fundraising, rather than investor return, changes what money can and does say to the recipients of funds. for the funding group or individual, “what’s in it for me” is not about financial return. as a result, the line between sources of money and a discipline over internal conscience is indirect at best and can be a source of pressure to protect wrongful conduct. far from checking, it can fuel #metoo bad conduct. that type of pressure is strongly associated with athletics in universities. those who contribute to the university and care about athletics can be sources of pressure to keep the athletes insulated from accountability. when scandal strikes, the outside force is the unorganized community at large, sometimes aroused, never empowered, and only on occasion . see debra nussbaum cohen, women in jewish fundraising say harassment is pervasive, jewish telegraphic agency (feb. , , : pm), https://www.jta.org/ / / /news-opinion/united-states/for-women-in-jewish- fundraising-harassment-is-an-occupational-hazard?utm_source=jta% maropost&utm_campaign=jta&utm_medium=email&mpweb= - - [https://perma.cc/v el- pxm] (“at the end of the day, in the nonprofit world, donors hold nearly all the power. most big-money donors are male.”). . see, e.g., paula lavigne & nicole noren, otl: michigan state secrets extend far beyond larry nassar case, espn (jan. , ), http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/ /pattern-denial-inaction-information- suppression-michigan-state-goes-larry-nassar-case-espn [https://perma.cc/ cxx- vj x]. looking for a life raft capable of feeding and maintaining an atmosphere of crisis. it rarely is enough. conclusion problems of accountability and seriously bad behavior within the ranks or by leaders of nonprofit institutions are real and can persist over time without oversight. in the absence of adequate designs for regular accountability, gap fillers arise, but all have shortcomings. each gap filler fails as a reliable check on bad behavior because it depends on improvisational responses, either by risk-averse or compromised insiders or by uninformed outsiders with mixed incentives, motives, and bona fides as narrators. there are no handbooks to guide groups considering a no confidence vote. without guidance, the fear factor is a high barrier. press coverage of universities and other nonprofits can be passive and then, if a scandal is broken, shallow and uncreative with stories that barely go beyond a headline new event. criminal process comes after the damage has . such an effect certainly occurred at the most salient of sexual scandals involving an abuse of authority by university staff. see, e.g., steve friess, michigan state university is botching its reputation-rehab, atlantic (mar. , ), https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /michigan-state-university- is-botching-its-reputation-rehab/ / [https://perma.cc/rl p-syy ]; see also, e.g., michael bérubé, at penn state, a bitter reckoning, n.y. times (nov. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/at-penn-state-a-bitter-reckoning.html [https://perma.cc/ e e- w]; sarah parvini, paul pringle & harriet ryan, anger, questions at usc after second medical school dean departs over inappropriate behavior, l.a. times (oct. , , : pm), http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/ la-me-usc-varma- -story.html [https://perma.cc/t xk-zd ]. but eruptions about allegations against individual athletes attract a mixed response, much of it preferring protection of star athletes for purposes of winning teams. see walt bogdanich, a star player accused, and a flawed rape investigation, n.y. times (apr. , ), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /sports/errors-in- inquiry-on-rape-allegations-against-fsu-jameis-winston.html?_r= [https://perma.cc/ hu -jfyt]. it is by no means clear that the #metoo movement will fundamentally alter the storyline in alleged student-athlete sexual abuse of other students given the intense pressure by fans—the community—for winning teams. . see supra note (“there is definitely fear if you want to talk about emotions, there’s definitely a deep-seated anxiety that people have about their situation should they speak up . . . it would be irrational to think you would be fired perhaps, for speaking up against the university president, but again, the university can make your life miserable in myriad ways if it wants to. i think people really fear being on the outside, right? more than anything, they [feel] like, well, you want to be in the good graces of the administration, of the president, of the provost, of the dean . . . i think that’s a realistic fear which people have, and as i say, it’s really no different than any other employee has in our capitalist society.”). michigan state law review occurred and is subject to the political agenda, good faith, and competence of prosecutors. individual litigation by a person targeted for mistreatment is rare because the resources to engage in a lawsuit against a well-funded institution are limited, and the courage to commence legal action is not common. the function of these gap fillers is not certain. nonetheless, without them, serious misconduct would go unchecked, with harms to citizenship broadly conceived in the context of a democratic nation, to the mission of institutions conceived to serve the public interest, and to individuals left vulnerable to abusive uses of power, and corollary secretiveness. rejected leaders would rule in the absence of support within the ranks for their leadership and inflict the damages associated with the inefficiency of lodging “command authority” in an individual whose undiluted rule destroys the beneficial effects of hierarchy and coordination that overcome the transaction costs of contracting in the free market. rather than efficient coordination, the logic of command and obedience stymies the purpose of hierarchy as a means of embedding contract into institutional arrangements in service to a mission. time with a leader who cannot achieve the advantages of hierarchy and coordination inflicts institutional loss and damages the organization as a source of models for civic capacity and engaged citizenship. the vote of no confidence enables groups to deploy their special understanding and knowledge of a bad leader to raise a claim for the person’s departure. the heart of the claim is that the leader no longer has followers and that consent by the group is an ongoing requirement for effective leadership. the claims in such votes also contain moral and ethical assertions about the type of conduct that is acceptable within an institution of mission-oriented undertakings. the voicing of norms of acceptable conduct is an important contribution of such group undertakings because it brings into light a value system that is an anchoring principle for the community—one which draws on common understandings about and supports the growth of a shared epistemic life within a genuine community. votes of no confidence do not manage to create a public history of patterns of bad leader conduct or of methods by which unmanaged voice can arise but they permit periodic glimpses of organizational citizenship and signal that american nonprofits experience recurring leadership problems. case . see supra note and accompanying text. looking for a life raft studies of such votes would preserve a greater store of public value from their periodic occurrence. though the press has brought to light problems not being addressed and scandals being covered up within organizations, journalism rarely creates public knowledge about systemic dysfunction. the press is better suited to revealing secrets than to providing deep knowledge of the entire pattern in which secrets are kept. the press’s limited function is to sound a fire bell alerting the public and the institution itself to sins of commission and omission. the result can be to bring a halt to misconduct, but the task of sorting out the inner world that fostered it is generally more than the press can achieve. criminal process aimed at higher level officials has limited value as a knowledge-producing exercise. if not aimed at their own primary bad conduct or their direct personal proximity to the primary bad conduct, criminal prosecution of top officials may be more harmful than helpful, particularly if not well founded in law and facts. a charge based on an idea of what the person could have known, should have known, or speculatively did know cuts off the development and dissemination of institutional knowledge. both the target of criminal prosecution and all others with a continuing official role or even a former role decline to speak in public or even in private. the target must not speak about the institutional flaws that led to the disaster. before she was prosecuted, former president simon testified to congress and had the capacity to be a resource about the factors that may have enabled the long-running disaster of unchecked sexual abuse by a university doctor to take place at a great state university. finally, litigation can be successful, as with the case of associate dean ray ku, who successfully sued an individual for his alleged primary bad conduct as well as the university for concealing it. ku prevailed by reaching a settlement and placed his personal knowledge on the public record, circulating a narrative of the conduct in a legal complaint. individual litigation, however, has very little chance of occurring. further, in the nature of litigation, ku has receded into public silence about the settlement and the case facts. individual litigation cannot be considered to be a significant safeguard or source of widespread public knowledge of institutional patterns and problems. the ku litigation does nonetheless provide a useful role model of civic courage by a person in such an institution where the . case studies will be available in kuykendall & mckinniss, supra note . michigan state law review leadership and the general culture are inadequate to expose and stop the alleged wrongdoing. where that is the circumstance, particularly where sexual misconduct is alleged, the core mission and aspirational ethos of the institution can be damaged. whether the #metoo movement will alter the problem of institutional love of secrecy is not yet known. there is the concern that secrecy merely takes a new form of star chamber proceedings cloaked in administrative control and, once more, antithetical to the project of nourishing an institutional self-knowledge from the whole body. institutional embrace of secrecy and management of internal voice die hard. the focus of the no confidence vote on leaders is not a cure for systemic problems in universities or other nonprofit enterprises. they occur against strong opposition from institutions, with efforts to portray them as forms of “mob rule” and forces for instability and reputational harm without benefit. yet they will always be a potential factor in any setting that has not crushed a democratic ethos that leaves room for improvised group demand for a leader’s dismissal. the strange juxtaposition of larry summers, a respected american economist only thought by many colleagues to be unsuited as a leader of harvard university, and benito mussolini, a fascist, dangerous leader to his nation and to world peace, demonstrates the function and staying power of the vote of no confidence. it occurs across dimensions of time and context and works against a misconceiving of hierarchy as undiluted command rather than coordination within a framework of consent and institutional citizenship. despite the relative absence of documentation in institutional history and public records, the practice of no confidence votes signals an unspoken crisis in the culture of american nonprofit institutions. the atmospherics and performances of institutional command logic place our common citizenship and republican values in peril. yet there is the capacity of a group to form outside the grip of a hierarchy set against open discourse. there is the oral tradition that persists without the need for permission. it cannot be talked into bureaucratic oblivion or “drowned by drops” in dickens’s court of chancery. the vote of no confidence will not disappear. with roots . for an optimistic treatment of the overall social benefits of the movement, see anna north, positive changes that have come from the #metoo movement, vox (oct. , , : am), https://www.vox.com/identities/ / / / /me-too-movement-sexual-harassment-law- [https://perma.cc/ f ul-kkgd] (noting that, among other positive changes, there is currently a trend by states to ban nondisclosure agreements about sexual harassment settlements). . see dickens, supra note , at . looking for a life raft in an improvisation in great britain’s parliament, the idea of “no confidence” has a sturdy claim on mission-bonded groups that encounter corrupt or incompetent leaders. despite the failures of groups to act altruistically to aid isolated victims of sexual misconduct, the moral core of the vote is nonetheless uniquely about institutional integrity. where leaders and groups fail, other methods of redress yield some success, and, like the no confidence vote, provide glimpses of a crisis without providing the communal knowledge that is the epistemic ideal for a well-functioning organization. only the vote achieves a small success in the quest for an enriched communal knowledge, as individuals “change [their] own willingness to speak up” and find themselves “meeting people they didn’t know before.” . see statement of anonymous, supra note . understanding how university students use perceptions of consent, wantedness, and pleasure in labeling rape vol.:( ) archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - o r i g i n a l pa p e r understanding how university students use perceptions of consent, wantedness, and pleasure in labeling rape peter j. hills  · megan pleva  · elisabeth seib  · terri cole received: january / revised: june / accepted: june / published online: july © the author(s) abstract while the lack of consent is the only determining factor in considering whether a situation is rape or not, there is sufficient evidence that participants conflate wantedness with consent and pleasurableness with wantedness. understanding how people appraise sexual scenarios may form the basis to develop appropriate educational packages. we conducted two large-scale qualitative studies in two uk universities in which participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted and pleasurable or not pleasurable. participants provided free-text responses as to whether they perceived the scenarios to be rape or not and why they made these judgments. the second study replicated the results of the first and included a condition where participants imagined themselves as either the subject or initiator of the sexual encounter. the results indicate that a significant portion of our participants held attitudes reflecting rape myths and tended to blame the victim. participants used distancing language when imagining themselves in the initiator condition. participants indicated that they felt there were degrees of how much a scenario reflected rape rather than it simply being a dichotomy (rape or not). such results indicate a lack of understanding of consent and rape and highlight avenues of potential educational materials for schools, universities or jurors. keywords consent · rape · wantedness · pleasure · sex scripts · rape myths introduction while the definition of rape is something that many people believe they understand across many countries, there is a sig- nificant amount of data that indicate misunderstandings of the practice. these misunderstandings may result from the dif- ferences between the stereotype of a rape and what typically occurs: for example, whereas the stereotypical rape is committed by a stranger (grubb & harrower, ; hockett, saucier, & badke, ; robinson, ), % of rape victims are aware of the identity of their attacker (koss, gidycz, & wisniewski, ; ministry of justice, ; muehlenhard & linton, ; national victim center, ; o’shaughnessey & palmer, ; russell, ; warshaw, ). this is acquaintance rape (black, ). survivors are less likely to label their experience as rape when there is a lack of force employed by the attacker and a lack of resistance from the survivor (wilson & miller, ), both of which are more common in acquaintance rape. because this type of attack does not match the stereotypical sce- nario, victims may rationalize their experience as not being rape (kahn, jackson, kully, badger, & halvorsen, ; littleton, axsom, breitkopf, & berenson, ). further misunderstand- ings may result from how consent is conceptualized and the conflation between consent (the only thing that defines rape) and wantedness (peterson & muehlenhard, ). here we sum- marize scientific understanding of survivors’ and perpetrators’ electronic supplementary material the online version of this article (https ://doi.org/ . /s - - - ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * peter j. hills phills@bournemouth.ac.uk department of psychology, bournemouth university, talbot campus, fern barrow, poole, dorset, bournemouth bh   bb, uk department of psychology, anglia ruskin university, cambridge, uk while there are differences in the definition of rape across jurisdic- tions, typically it is defined as intentional penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person without their consent (department of justice, ; home office, ). due to the similarities in definitions across jurisdictions, we have used evidence from several regions that have similar definitions of rape and consent. further, the issue of sexual assault in university campuses is a worldwide problem with many simi- larities across jurisdictions in terms of research findings. where there are culturally specific findings or effects, we have made these clear. though some law enforcement agencies define acquaintances differ- ently: the uk police define acquaintance rape when the offender and victim had interacted over more than  day. http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . /s - - - archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – conceptualization of consent and rape, linking this to sexual script theory. subsequently, we focus on how people might inter- pret scenarios involving pleasure. legally, consent is usually defined as the person agrees to participate by choice, with the freedom and capacity to choose (department of justice, ; home office, ). this, there- fore, means that consent can be given, but the act is rape if the consent was forced through threats, drug, or alcohol use (kahn, mathie, & torgler, ; koss et al., ; shapiro & schwarz, ; testa & dermen, ). consent can be conceptualized as either present or absent (with sex in the latter case being rape). however, some researchers consider consent to be more of a scale (panichas, ) and this may reflect how people view consent (hills et al., ). alternatively, typologies of consent suggest that it may reflect an internal state of willing- ness, explicit statements of willingness, and behaviors that may indicate willingness (muehlenhard, humphreys, jozkowski, & peterson, ). in relationships, consent is typically provided through potentially ambiguous nonverbal behaviors (beres, herold, & maitland, ) that are not always easy to read (beres, ). hickman and muehlenhard ( ) categorize consent according to whether it is direct or indirect and whether it is verbal or nonverbal. there are many nonverbal cues to con- sent—for example, reciprocation in acts (and a lack of con- sent—for example pushing someone away) and these appear to be understood by many young adults (beres, ). however, different behaviors communicate consent and these may not be universal. indeed, participants describe their “need” for consent depends on a number of factors (willis et al., ) including length of relationship (humphreys, ), sexual experience of the individual (humphreys, ), gender (humphreys, ; humphreys & herold, ), type of sexual act (hall, ), and timing within the sexual scenario (beres, ). these outward behaviors indicative of consent may not always reflect the cognitive feelings behind them (muehlenhard, ): in fact only a mild to moderate relationship between internal (feelings of consenting) and external expressions (actually showing that one consents) of consent has been demonstrated (jozkowski, peterson, sanders, dennis, & reece, ). this can lead to problems with understanding if consent has been given (hick- man & muehlenhard, ; jozkowski & peterson, ). consent is far more nuanced than can be briefly described in this short introduction. firstly, consent could be considered a process. during a sexual event, people’s initial plan will change and develop (beres, senn, & mccaw, ). the activities that one consents to will also change during a sexual act, meaning that it is an ongoing process (beres, ) subject to frequent changes. this means that there will be uncertainty and ambiva- lence around what activities one will consent to at the start of an encounter that can only be resolved through communication (muehlenhard & peterson, ). to elucidate the problem with defining consent, peterson and muehlenhard ( ) described how there is a separation of “wantedness” and “consent” when considering the labeling of sexual encounters as rape. wantedness reflects a desire to do something or believing that it is good (peterson & muehlen- hard, ). wantedness might influence consent, but it is dis- tinct from it. for example, a person may want sex (because they are highly attracted to someone, for example), but not consent to it (because they are married, for example). sexual acts can therefore fall into one of four categories: wanted and consen- sual; unwanted and consensual; wanted and non-consensual (rape); unwanted and non-consensual (rape). consenting to unwanted sex can occur for many reasons: to build intimacy, satisfy partners’ desires, flirtation, desir- ing pleasure, avoiding relationship tension, avoiding hurting partners’ feelings, maintaining a relationship, feeling obligated because of something the partner has done, or to control feel- ings associated with anxious attachment (conroy, krishnaku- mar, & leone, ; drouin & tobin, ; gilbert & walker, ; impett & peplau, ; koss et al., ; muehlenhard & cook, ; o’sullivan & allgeier, ; shotland & hunter, ; sprecher, hatfield, cortese, potapova, & levitskaya, ; tolman & szalacha, ). indeed, o’sullivan and allgeier ( ) found over a two-week period, % of partici- pants in committed relationships consented to unwanted sex. people may also not consent to wanted sex, for reasons such as not having a condom and to wait until after marriage (mue- hlenhard & hollabaugh, ; muehlenhard & peterson, ; muehlenhard & rodgers, ). peterson and muehlenhard ( ) found that . % of their participants who had been raped actually wanted the sexual act to some degree but did not want the consequences (for example, they were aroused due to flirting, but did not want to be raped). real and mock jurors tend to ignore lack of consent if wantedness is present (mchugh, ), implying the presence of wantedness medi- ates judgments of rape. peterson and muehlenhard’s data imply that pleasure may be a separable construct from wanting. in peterson and muehlenhard’s ( ) definition of wanting, they include a desire for something to happen and to believe that it is positive or pleasurable. these two aspects reflect distinct constructs. physiological pleasure is typically defined as how enjoyable intercourse is in terms of sexual arousal (basson, ) and is an autonomous mechanism that creates sexual arousal at a subcortical level (levin & van berlo, ). while tolman and szalacha ( ) suggest feelings of pleasure are a reason for wanting sex, other researchers have indicated that pleasure is not the only reason for wanting sex (cain et al., ). people often want and consent to sex not because it will bring pleasure, but because it may help build a relationship or they are trying to get pregnant, for example. within relation- ships, by managing a partner’s needs, it is possible a person might find pleasure in sexual intercourse that was not consen- sual (basson, , ). physiological pleasure is possible archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – from unwanted and non-consensual sex as it is fundamentally a physiological process, despite subjective emotional states being described as “anxiety-provoking,” “feared” and “unpleasant” (basson et al., ; levin & van berlo, ; suschinsky & lalumière, ; van berlo & ensink, ). indeed, such scenarios might make the victim feel more guilt and blame (lofgreen, ). furthermore, pleasure affects how individu- als label an experience as rape and how much psychological distress they feel afterward (basson, ; kilpatrick, veronen, & resick, ) and strongly predicts blame attribution and high judgments of rape (mccaul, veltum, boyechko, & craw- ford, ). in a recent study by hills et al. ( ), a set of sexual sce- narios between acquaintances were created that systematically manipulated consent, wantedness and pleasure. these were given to participants to rate how much they reflected the par- ticipants’ own definitions of rape (using a scalar judgment or a binary decision). surprisingly, only % of non-consensual scenarios were rated as rape (with the context that . % of con- sensual scenarios were considered rape). indeed, consent, want- edness and pleasure all affected the ratings of rape—the absence of any feature led to higher judgments of rape (despite the only requirement for rape decisions being a lack of consent). further, ratings of rape in non-consensual scenarios were moderated by wantedness and pleasure, whereby the lack of these features increased the chance that the scenarios would be rated as rape. critically, there were few gender differences found in these data: males used pleasure to moderate non-consensual and unwanted scenarios, whereas women did not show this three-way interac- tion. while only consent matters to the legal definition of rape, hills et al.’s participants conflated wantedness with consent and used subsequent pleasure to moderate their judgments. the link between wanting, consent and pleasure relates to the heteronormal sexual script. traditional heteronormal sexual scripts involve men initiating sex more than women and seeking it out (tolman, kim, schooler, & sorsoli, ). this is consist- ent with the masculine and hierarchical rape culture, particu- larly in fraternities, where women and sex are seen as goals (joz- kowski, marcantonio, & hunt, ). this means that women act as gatekeepers to sex (cannon, lauve-moon, & buttell, ). men must actively seek out and obtain sex by asking for it (kitz- inger & frith, ). however, verbal communication in sexual scripts is not typical. this creates a power imbalance in sexual scripts with men more dominating and active participants and women the passive recipients (sanchez, fetterolf, & rudman, ). indeed, women are not supposed to actively express their sexuality within this traditional heteronormal sexual script (wie- derman, ). gendered sexual scripts can become internal- ized such that both men and women consider it the norm (ward, ). indeed, females who have internalized this sexual script have been found to be more likely to engage in unwanted sex (bay-cheng & eliseo-arras, ). these sources of evidence provide avenues for future intervention strategies. while the data presented by hills et al. ( ) are interest- ing, the quantitative results do not explain why participants used other features in rating sexual scenarios as rape and whether they used sexual scripts to interpret the scenarios. indeed, all hills et al. can provide is ratings that may or not link to actual behav- ior: qualitative responses are more likely to provide better links to attitudes and behaviors. previous work indicates that consent and wantedness tend to be conflated (peterson & muehlenhard, ); however, the impact of pleasure is difficult to explain as the conflation between consent and pleasure has not been extensively researched. the present study aims to investigate why university students rate sexual scenarios between acquaintances as rape or not. uni- versity students are at a high risk for experiencing sexual assault and acquaintance rape (bachar & koss, ; daigle, fisher, & stewart, ) especially first-year undergraduate students (mccluskey-fawcett, berkley-patton, towns, & prosser, ), with % of recent graduates reporting that they had experi- ence sexual violence (revolt sexual assault and the student room, ). using the scenarios devised by hills et al. ( ), we investigated participants’ subjective opinions of sexual sce- narios. in these scenarios consent, wantedness and pleasure were varied systematically. participants read these scenarios and pro- vided their reasons as free-text responses for why they believed the scenario indicated rape or not. we applied content analysis to these as an appropriate tool to analyze written communication (bardin, ; hsieh & shan- non, ). this involves exploring the data in order to find how many times particular categories are mentioned. the intention is to identify patterns in the circumstantial, objective and/or sub- jective aspects participants took into consideration when rating the situations as rape and/or distressingness. specifically, this content analysis approach allows us to analyze the different vari- ables involved with the use of frequencies. utilizing exploratory content analysis (i.e., by not having pre-determined categories) also ensures the subjective richness of the data is not lost and might lead to the creation of new theories (krippendorff, ). two versions of the study were run. the purpose of this was to include a replication of the findings to explore the consist- ency of the results. the second was to examine the impact of the perspective taken within the scenarios had on how participants interpreted the scenarios. in study , participants freely read the scenarios and were asked to imagine themselves in the scenario. in study , participants were either instructed to imagine them- selves as the initiator of the sexual encounter or as the subject of the sexual encounter. the term subject and initiator were chosen rather than the typical objects (or survivors) and perpetrators as is typical in the literature because, in half of the scenarios, consensual sex (therefore no rape) was depicted. the term “perpetrators” has the connotations of a crimi- nal or negative act, and we felt this should be avoided when describing consensual wanted sex. archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – study method participants an opportunity sample of ( female, age range to years, mean age years) psychology undergraduates took part in this study in return for course credits. these were recruited from two universities in the uk, and % of them were studying in their first year. one hundred and fourteen self-reported they were white. participants were recruited via an online advertisement that asked participants to take part in a study “exploring people’s attitudes to sexual scenarios” and informed that some of the scenarios would depict non- consensual sexual encounters and anyone with experience of rape was advised not to take part. the main reason why more women took part in this study is likely to reflect that the advert contained the taboo word “rape” and that psychology departments in the uk consist of % female students, and this is where our sample was recruited. table  highlights the characteristics of the participants and the universities from which they were recruited. the main dif- ferences between the universities is that anglia ruskin univer- sity (aru) has a higher proportion of non-white and female students than bournemouth university (bu) and is at an urban campus compared to a suburban campus, respectively. testing at two universities allowed us to see if the findings replicated across institutions. all other characteristics are similar to other uk universities. materials twenty-four vignettes developed by hills et al. ( ) were used for this study: were consensual and were non-consensual: they are available at https ://doi.org/ . /xap . the scenarios were constructed based on the guidelines presented by barter and renold ( ). the scenarios were based on plau- sible scenarios developed from the “reasons for wanting sex and reasons for not wanting sex subscales” of peterson and muehlenhard’s ( ) wanting questionnaire. these vignettes have been extensively pretested to ensure that they adequately demonstrate the three variables of interest for this study (con- sent, wantedness, and pleasure): further they were matched for the clarity with which they displayed the key feature and clar- ity of writing to ensure they had internal validity. they were comparable in length and structure and content to those asked in a large scale yougov survey (yougov, ). when asked if they show consent or not, participants are able to determine this accurately (see hills et al., ). each is a short (two- to three- sentence) hypothetical sexual scenarios between acquaintances: none of them described any explicit imagery or words but rather focused on the build up to the sex (sex was not defined within the scenarios to allow participants to interpret this within their own script). sex was mentioned insofar as the characters had sex without graphic detail. they were written in the second person and gender neutral. they were written in such a way that they allowed for sufficient individual interpretation but were easy to table participant characteristics and comparison of the universities from which they came from data sourced from bournemouth university’s annual report for equality and diversity and anglia ruskin university’s campus snapshot bournemouth university anglia ruskin university bournemouth university (study ) participant n  n female  mean age .  years .  years .  years  age range – – –  n first-year undergraduates  n white  n single campus type suburban campus city campus university age university group million + number of students , , student demographic  % female % %  % under  years old % %  % white % %  % disabled % % https://doi.org/ . /xap archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – understand, using everyday simplistic language. these vignettes allow for an understanding of core elements within decisions of what constitutes rape. further, it allows us to directly explore the sexual script that our participants might have. for example, a consensual, unwanted, not pleasurable scenario would be: you feel uncomfortable about your body; therefore, you don’t want to engage in sex. however, when your partner suggests to have sex, you agree. nevertheless, the experience is not enjoyable to you. because there were many disparate reasons for not wanting sex (such as not having a condom or because the person in married), these scenarios were varied in terms of content. further, these vignettes capture the variability in how consent can be coerced and forced. we were careful to ensure that there was no phrase that stated consent was given during the non-consensual scenar- ios. the words “agree” and “consent” were clear in consensual scenarios and were never present in the non-consensual ones. while this means they were not completely systematic, it means they better reflect sexual scenarios between acquaintances. fur- ther, for the content analysis, this variability is largely ignored as we attempt to extract underlying themes that crossover the variability: we explore the general themes that lead people to decide if a sexual scenario is rape or not. while there is not a one-to-one relationship between vignette responding and actual behavior, well-constructed vignettes do give an indication of how participants understand situations (eifler, ). procedure the study was granted full ethical approval by the research eth- ics panels at both universities. the study was run online in order for the participants to feel comfortable giving open responses: their anonymity was ensured. after providing consent, partici- pants read through the first vignette at their own pace. they were asked to “imagine you experience the described situations.” this allowed participants to apply their own gendered sexual script to the vignette. participants wrote free-text comments regard- ing the situation explaining why they believed the situation dis- played rape or not. we used the term rape as we were specifically interested in participants understanding of the legal term “rape” rather than the more general “sexual assault.” this was chosen as we did not anticipate our participants understanding that in uk law only men can rape (indeed, evidence suggests few uk citizens are aware of this fact, yougov, ). the participant completed each vignette in turn and were not permitted to go back to a previous vignette to change their answers. the order of the vignettes was randomized across participants. participants completed the survey at their own pace meaning that participants could leave the browser open and return to the task after leav- ing it. we believe % of participants did this as they took over  h to complete the vignettes. excluding those participants, on average, participants took  min to complete the study. the amount of text for the last eight vignettes was % of the first eight vignettes indicating that there was only minimal fatigue in the study. further, because the vignettes were presented in a random order, this variation was split across all conditions equally. once participants had completed all vignettes, they were thanked and debriefed. data analysis participants’ free-text comments (as to the reasons for why they thought the scenarios were or were not rape) were ana- lyzed using content analysis. this common technique was used to reduce large quantities of data into a few meaningful categories. we followed the procedures of elo and kyngäs ( ). the unit of analysis was phrases (as opposed to single words, full sentences, or themes) as this maintains the con- text of the response and prevented fragmentation. the data were open coded (categorized) before being recoded into higher-order groups. this reduces the number of individual categories into more manageable groups. the groups were then named and described. this was done by the second and third authors under the supervision of the first author. triangulation occurred with this process being repeated blind by a research assistant. the research assistant did not have access to any information that the second and third authors produced. the theme table created was consistent with that con- structed by the second and third authors (with subtly different names for the groups). the first author checked that these were consistent and developed a code book detailing the open codes and their links into higher-order groups. once the data were coded into discrete categories, frequen- cies were devised. this was done for each condition indepen- dently and is shown in table  . throughout this analysis, we explored whether there were any differences across institutions or across participant gender. any differences are highlighted here. results and discussion the content analysis indicates that consent was used by our participants to judge whether a scenario described rape more frequently than any other category. consent (or lack of) was mentioned more frequently in the consensual scenarios ( mentions) than the non-consensual scenarios ( mentions). participants ( %) used the phrase “giving in” to highlight that as soon as consent is provided ( mentions); even if “dubious” ( % of participants), it is still consent. the notion of how consent was reached did not matter to all participants but did matter to some. this is highlighted by such quotes as “consent is still given” (bu, m, ). in % of cases, par- ticipants also indicated that without clear communication of a lack of consent, then consent was provided and these archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – table summary content analysis (full analysis presented in supple- mentary table s ) highlighting the category, a description and how it is used across conditions, and the number of mentions in the partici- pants’ responses in their reasons for appraising situations as rape or not (% male responding with this) these mentions include participants stating that the presence or absence of the category mattered and whether the category was relevant to their decision condition labels are c consent, w wanted, p pleasurable (with a lowercase n indicating it wasn’t included in the vignette) category description mentions cwp cwnp cnwp cnwnp ncwp ncwnp ncnwp ncnwnp consent participants frequently used consent to appraise the situ- ations. this was sometimes qualified by the presence of pressure or force. there was clearly some difference in whether participants felt scenarios displayed consent indicating some misunder- standing of consent ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) wanting while a key variable, partici- pants did not use the category wantedness when appraising these scenarios and quite often conflated wantedness with consent ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) pleasure pleasure was used to appraise situations as rape, especially when the pleasure was incon- sistent with consent. some participants did highlight that pleasure is irrelevant when judging rape ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) both with the more consensual and wanted scenarios, partici- pants used the word “both” to describe the interaction. this did not happen for non- consensual ones ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) they participants used more distanc- ing phrasing in the less pleas- ant scenarios ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) force force, pressure, coercion was used by participants to appraise the situations. this created much variability in how it was used with some participants indicating pres- sure is acceptable (especially in relationships), whereas oth- ers indicated that it was never acceptable ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) communication participants did consider the nature of communication between partners affected whether situations were considered rape. some partici- pants indicated that partners need to say “stop”; otherwise, it is not rape ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) consequences the stress caused by the situation was used by a few participants to appraise the situation as rape ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – situations are not rape highlighting a misunderstanding of rape. interestingly, this opinion was equally made by both females and males. specifically, consent was qualified by the presence of pleas- ure by % of participants. when pleasurable, many participants said that they lowered their ratings of rape even if the scenario did not describe a consensual scenario. some ( % of partici- pants) suggested that the enjoyment of the situation will reduce distress and mean the situation is not rape. indeed, some ( % of participants) considered that subsequent pleasure meant that retrospective consent could be given or assumed. % of the participants indicated that non-consensual (but wanted and pleasurable) situations were rape with “dubious consent:” they acknowledged that the subsequent pleasure actually made them feel better after the sex and made them less inclined to think it was rape: how you would feel would be greatly effected by whether you did actually regret it later. but the person should still have respected your wishes not to have sex in the first place. (aru, m, ) participants ( %) did indicate that non-pleasurable situations should stop (otherwise, they might be considered rape), but only if the partner was aware. this relates to the category of com- munication. a total of % of participants indicated that unless the partner said “stop” it was not rape. other participants ( %) indicated that the active partner ought to be aware of their part- ner’s feelings, but that they may not be “mind-readers” (bu, f, ). some suggested scenarios without wantedness or consent were negative and involved an uncaring partner who should have more awareness of their partner’s feelings. it can only be classed as rape if you tell your partner to stop and they don’t if they cannot tell that you are not enjoying the situation how are they to know unless you say something. (aru, f, ) pressure, force, and coercion were mentioned by % of participants in their appraisals of these situations. this category produced highly variable responses and interpretations. sev- eral participants ( %) indicated that “sometimes a little push is needed to convince someone” (bu, f, ). indeed, another participant indicated that while physical pressure would lead the situation to be considered rape, “constantly suggesting it,… then definitely not rape” (aru, m, ). several participants ( %) also did not consider non-consensual situations as rape because they often occurred within relationships, with one par- ticipant indicating that because consent had been given before, it can be assumed again. this is a typical rape myth. as a male from bu ( ) put it, “this is fairly common in relationships, from both parties.” in these situations, many participants con- fused wantedness with consent. for some, the level of coercion required to define a situa- tion as rape was violence or verbal abuse. there were some participants who strongly held on to the point that consent is all that matters: but if “you give into it” means you agree and don’t tell them to stop, then it is not rape. (bu, f, ) some of our responses ( %) were also indicative of victim blaming. one participant indicated: you need confidence to say no- and also be with some- one who respects you enough to accept your answer when you say no. (aru, f, ) this statement puts blame onto the victim somewhat, for not being with the right person and for needing to have the confidence to say “no.” this notion was repeated by % of participants indicating they might feel guilty if they had ini- tially led their partner on and then changed their mind. sev- eral participants reported that such situations were not rape because of the victim’s behavior. what matters is how you acted/what you said just before sex was initiated. if you refused then this is rape. (aru, m, ) the language used across the types of vignettes also differed suggesting much more agency in the most pleasant scenarios than in those that were less pleasant. this may indicate an aspect of psychological distancing from the participants—they may be attempting to make the negative scenarios appear to be happen- ing to other people, whereas the positive scenarios happen to themselves. it was easier for participants to imagine themselves in the positive scenarios rather than the negative ones. our final two themes highlight this. in the consensual, wanted and pleas- urable scenarios, participants used the term “both” much more ( mentions, referring to both parties in the sexual act) than in any other scenario combined ( mentions). we both agreed to have sex. (bu, f, ) indeed, it seemed like there was a trend for the use of the term “both” to decrease the more the scenario became unpleas- ant. the phrasing used indicated that there was something mutual about the situation, whereas, when the situation was less pleasant, the phrasing did not implicate mutual participa- tion. the converse was true with the use of the active voice: participants used the third person (“they”) much less in the consensual, wanted, and pleasurable ( mentions) scenarios than the other scenarios ( to mentions). they didn’t want to have sex and were uncomfortable. (bu, f, ) the use of the word “they” rather than “we” highlights that participant was writing about someone else or an event happen- ing to somebody else. we interpret this as a way of distancing themselves from the imagined scenario. archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – throughout this analysis, we have incorporated comments from both females and males. while males and females will interpret the scenarios differently, the scenarios did allow for participants to imagine themselves in the situations. partici- pants would use their gendered lens to read these scenarios. as one female from bu put it: struggling to answer these questions from a girls per- spective, but would say that its hard to have sex with a male if they didnt want to, there shouldn’t be pressure though. (bu, f, ) this comment contrasted to comments indicating how several of the scenarios are “normal” in relationships ( % of participants said this). because they are in a relationship and the partner agreed eventually. (bu, f, ) additionally, by not making the detail of the sexual activities explicit (whether vaginal, anal, or oral), it did allow both female and male participants to imagine themselves in the scenarios. indeed, there were few thematic differences across gender in this study similar to hickman and muehlenhard’s ( ) find- ings. there were no language differences across participants in how often females and males used the first person and active language. this indicates that females and males did read these scenarios similarly. further, hills et al. ( ) did not indicate gender differences in the way the scenarios had been rated. the main gender differences that we observed were that no male participant considered the emotional consequences (such as how it would make the subject of the scenario feel) during their reading of the scenario. this is consistent with participants reading the scenarios through their gendered lens: males are much less likely to report being sexually assaulted and raped than females. this means that they are less likely to need to con- sider the emotional, physical, and psychological consequences of sexual assault and rape. our data reflect this aspect of sexual assault. our second gender difference is consistent with the previous observation. our male participants made fewer com- ments than our female participants. overall, male participants mentioned things less frequently than female participants, sug- gesting that they think less about sexual assault. finally, it was worth noting that there were no discernible differences in themes across the institutions. we were able to draw highly similar quotes from both female and male par- ticipants for every theme. indeed, the results seem to replicate across these institutions indicating that rape culture (herman, ) is unlikely to be significantly different across these institutions. study study indicated that students drew on consent, wantedness, and pleasure when constructing their appraisal of sexual sce- narios as to whether they represent rape. one weakness of study was that participants were instructed to “imagine you experience the described situations.” given that two people were always described in the scenarios—the initiator and the subject—participants could have imagined themselves in either position. we might expect that our female participants imagining themselves in the subject position more than the initiator position because of gender roles and sexual socializa- tion (abrams, viki, masser, & bohner, ; buddie & miller, ; jozkowksi & peterson, ). however, because the sce- narios were written in a gender-neutral manner, all participants could have imagined themselves in either position. taking the perspective of the subject (victim) can result in rape minimization (david & schneider, ) or increased empathy for other victims of rape (weir & wrightsman, ), encourage supportive behavior (anastasio & costa, ; baker, ) and enhance altruistic behavior (davis, ). conversely, asking the participants to imagine themselves as the initiator, they might reappraise the sex as less unpleasant. we can base this supposition on beres’ ( ) findings that when participants are asked to complete a narrative in which their partner initially refuses sex but they then accept it—sce- narios of playfulness, convincing and coercion were far more commonly described than rape. as such, we re-ran the study in which participants were asked to take on either the perspective of the subject or initiator. method the methods were identical to experiment except the instructions (to imagine themselves as the initiator or the subject) and the phrasing within the scenarios. scenarios were revised for those given the initiator’s perspective (see hills et al., ). these changes were minimal and simply adjusted who was active in the scenario. for example: you/your partner feel[s] highly aroused about a pos- sibility of having sex. however, when your partner/ you tries to initiate having sex you/your partner reject because there are no condoms. your partner/you pin[s] you/your partner down and forces you/your partner to have sex regardless. you/your partner find your part- ner’s/your behavior appealing and attractive in the situ- ation and enjoy the sex. participants were a different set of ( female, age range -  years, mean age =  years) students recruited from bournemouth university who had not taken part in study . archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – participants were randomly allocated to read the vignettes from the subject’s or the initiator’s perspective. because there were so few males in study , we were unable to analyze the results by gender. nevertheless, the results from study seem to sug- gest very specific gender differences in the resultant themes. the analysis was conducted by the second author initially and verified by the first author. results and discussion the results of study were highly consistent with study . consent was mentioned more than any other theme. how- ever, there was significant disagreement between partici- pants regarding whether the scenario showed consent or not. several participants inferred consent since the participants wanted or engaged in sex. a total of % of participants viewed “giving in” as being consent, whereas % indicated this was “coerced” consent, so not true consent (table  ). whether participants felt a lack of consent led to judging a scenario as rape did depend on whether there was resulting perceived pleasure from the scenario: in % of non-consensual scenarios, pleasure was described as a justification. a few par- ticipants ( %) suggested that the enjoyment afterward implied that consent was retrospectively given. one participant indi- cated that it was “lucky” the partner enjoyed the sex: it’s a bit stressful because the partner could have gone either way once being persuaded, but luckily they enjoyed it, so even though it was slightly forced by one partner, they were only initially bored and uninterested rather than not wanting intercourse. (bu, f, ) this implies they felt the enjoyment counteracted the lack of consent: without pleasure it would be considered rape. nevertheless, the finding that pleasure played a big role in participants’ appraisals of these sexual scenarios is novel and important. wanting was often conflated with consent by our partici- pants ( %). this indicates that there is a lack of understanding that people can want sex and not consent to it. indeed, it seems that % of our participants could not “understand the context” of the scenario, whereas % indicated it was “normal in rela- tionships.” this highlights unique and highly variable expe- riences of sex within relationships. some people were more aware of consenting to unwanted sex than others. we also found that a significant portion of our participants appeared to blame the subject for “bad sex” (bu, m, ), defined as unwanted or not pleasurable sex, or non-consensual sex. % of participants indicated that the partner should refuse or communicate their displeasure and/or their lack of consent: consent wasn’t given although there is nothing to say you tried to stop the intercourse. (bu, f, ) indeed, one participant highlighted that the partner should continually refuse otherwise the scenario was not rape. they refused but then gave in and do not continue to refuse, so it’s not really rape. (bu, f, ) this indicates that there was a significant portion of our participants that were engaging in victim blaming behaviors and demonstrating a lack of understanding of some of the potential consequences of individual traits (e.g., a lack of assertiveness) or emotions (e.g., trust, fear). finally, we observed that there was a great deal of psycho- logical distancing in the language used by % of participants. this is despite the instructions to attempt to get into the mindset of the subject or the initiator in the scenarios. participants, espe- cially in the initiator condition ( versus mentions in the subject condition) and in the non-consensual scenarios, used the inactive third person tense (“they”) to describe the situation. this was interpreted as a way for them to distance themselves from the scenario and to give more responsibility to the subject of the scenario than themselves as the initiator. this occurred even though the instruction was to imagine themselves in the situation. this further highlights evidence of participants blam- ing the victim, especially if they engage in non-ideal behaviors. this was the only discernible difference in themes resulting from participants taking the subject or initiator position. an additional noteworthy comment was made by a partici- pant who indicated that: it is definitely rape because i did not consent to have sex, but i find this less rapey than if it was forced upon me by a stranger. (bu, f, ) this comment is consistent with previous work indicating that people consider acquaintance rape as less like rape and less distressing than stranger rape (mcgregor, wiebe, mar- ion, & livingstone, ), though this does not match the experience of those who have experienced acquaintance rape (divasto, ; finn, ; koss & burkhart, ; koss, dinero, seibel, & cox, ; yeater & o’donohue, ). the results replicate and extend those of study . con- sent, wantedness, and pleasure affect how a sexual scenario is appraised. our data support mccaul et al.’s ( ) assump- tion that the introduction of pleasure in a scenario that legally defines rape predicts victim blaming and consequent low labe- ling of the scenario as rape. our analysis revealed participants repeatedly referenced that aggressive rape scenarios were more deserving of higher rape scores, consistent with rape myth research regarding what con- stitutes a “real rape” (bohner, eyssel, pina, siebler, & viki, ; hockett et al., ). interestingly, % of participants integrated aggressive terminology into the vignettes, potentially archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – molding the situation into their accepted belief of what consti- tutes rape. research suggests people “fill in the gap” in rape cases to justify their answer to fit internalized rape stereotypes (krahé, temkin, bieneck, & berger, ). general discussion in both our studies, we found that consent, wantedness and pleasure all affected how participants appraised rape in sex- ual situations despite consent being the only thing that is required for a sexual scenario not to be rape. lack of consent was the biggest factor in determining whether a situation was perceived as rape with many participants ( %) stating in free-text responses consent was the only thing that mattered. however, wantedness and pleasure also influenced whether participants considered the situation as rape, despite neither being part of the definition of rape. this has important impli- cations for the development of education packages and sup- port services: if a survivor of rape is thought to want sex and get pleasure from it, our data indicate that this will less likely be perceived as rape, despite clearly being such and this may lead to negative unwanted circumstances. it has been found that jurors ignore lack of consent if wantedness is present (mchugh, ). this is further evidence that suggests it is vital to understand laypersons’ perceptions of sexual assault because they are the ones present when it happens, contribute to victimization of survivors of sexual assault, responses to victims and jury decision making (angelone, mitchell, & smith, ). table summary content analysis (full analysis presented in sup- plementary table  s ) for experiment highlighting the category, a description and how it is used across conditions, and the number of mentions in the participants responses in their reasons for appraising situations as rape or not these mentions include participants stating that the presence or absence of the category mattered and whether the category was relevant to their decision top value in each cell represents the subject position and the bottom value represents the initiator position condition labels are c consent, w wanted, p pleasurable (with a lowercase n indicating it wasn’t included in the vignette) category description mentions cwp cwnp cnwp cnwnp ncwp ncwnp ncnwp ncnwnp consent many participants used consent as a key guiding fac- tor when appraising the scenarios. there was some disagreement about whether scenarios represented consent or not, and several participants indicated a change in consent during the scenarios and that giving in may mean consent was offered wanting wanting was identified as a reason to appraise the situations as rape or not. wanting was often con- flated with consent and used synonymously pleasure pleasure was used by many participants to appraise the situations. when the situation was pleasurable, it often mitigated the lack of consent for some participants. some participants, however, did feel that pleasure was irrelevant both for the more consensual and wanted scenarios, par- ticipants made reference to “both” partners. this was not the case in the non-consensual scenarios, indicating an awareness that the scenarios were not for both partners they psychological distancing was more present in the initiator conditions than the subject conditions, as indicated by the use of the third person tense force while there was disagreement about whether force or pressure led to rape and where the line was drawn between flirting and coercion, force was a contributing factor to the appraisals communication many participants indicated that participants need to communicate their displeasure or lack of consent more frequently to ensure the situation is not rape consequences a few participants considered the potential distress in their judgments of rape archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – the use of additional information in judging whether sce- narios represent rape and some of the comments made indicate rape myths and victim blaming were present in our student sam- ple (e.g., aosved & long, ; bohner et al., ; burt, ; o’donohue, yeater, & fanetti, ): in particular, the myth that forced sex is justified if the victim appears to want sex prior to refusing (payne, lonsway, & fitzgerald, ). this finding fits with earlier reports that sexual assault is more likely if the perpetrator feels that the victim wants sex and is leading the per- petrator on (abbey, mcauslan, zawacki, clinton, & buck, ; malamuth & brown, ; muehlenhard & linton, ). the former is indicative of abuse during relationships: most sexual coercion occurs within relationships or by acquaintances (baum & klaus, ; koss et al., ; parrot & bechhofer, ; tjaden & thoennes, ). one of the most alarming findings from our study is that many of our participants thought that “giv- ing in” was always akin to consenting. this is evidence for rape myth acceptance in some of our participants. this work implies that recent campaigns and sex education to raise awareness of rape and rape myths have not reached our participants. clearly more work is required to educate the public regarding rape and sexual coercion and the importance of wanting being separate from consenting. our free-text responses indicate that many scenarios led to ambiguity with some people interpreting consent from verbal means and others interpreting consent as “giving in.” giving in may well reflect the heteronormal sexual script in which women are considered to be the gatekeepers for sex (crawford & popp, ). this means that women are supposed to act chaste and not overtly show their sexuality (interligi & mchugh, ) that in turn means they have to be chased, encouraged and potentially coerced (littleton & axsom, ). similarly, in the masculine culture, when men press women’s boundaries in order to have sex and succeed, this means that they “score” (marks & wosick, ). in our study, men and women used the phase “giving in” a roughly equivalent amount of time ( % of men and % of women used this phrase), indicating the het- eronormal sexual script is held by both females and males. this finding suggests that, within relationships, open discussions about what consent is and how to give it may lead to healthier and less distressing interactions. such a finding has important implications for relationship counseling. both partners need to want sex and give consent to maintain a healthy relationship, assuming other power dynamics are controlled. the results here indicate our participants (university stu- dents) show a fairly tolerant attitude toward acquaintance rape and that rape scripts are common in student populations (chng & burke, ; macneela, conway, kavanagh, kennedy, & mccaffrey, ). student populations typically have different acceptance of social norms and risky behavior thus are more accepting of rape myth supporting attitudes (aronowitz, lam- bert, & davidoff, ). an alternative interpretation is that our participants might be using defense mechanisms to appraise the situations as not rape. this is an important point regarding how survivors of these and similar (non-consensual) situations should be treated. while it may be a defense mechanism not to label such situations as rape (breh & seidler, ), these data clearly indicate that people still consider them distressing. therefore, it might be more appropriate to label these situations as rape in order to begin to deal with the situation emotionally (botta & pingree, ; kahn et al., ). indeed, in most counseling settings, dealing with trauma (emotional or physi- cal) requires acceptance of it (gray, koopman, & hunt, ; kübler-ross, wessler, & avioli, ; maciejewski, zhang, block, & prigerson, ; prigerson & maciejewski, ). saying this, there are clear narratives presented by survivors of such situations who do not want to label their experience as rape (peterson & muehlenhard, ). taken together, these results indicate participants do not simply use consent to appraise whether a depicted sexual sce- nario between partners is rape. many participants use as much information as they are provided to judge whether a sexual sce- nario represents rape or not. this work is important in develop- ing educational packages for the public and jurors. a lack of acknowledgement of the occurrence, severity and existence of acquaintance rape by jurors and judges (gamble, ; wilson & leith, ) may be partially responsible for the low convic- tion rate (approximately % of reported rapes result in a convic- tion; rape crisis england & wales, ; temkin & krahé, ). it is therefore important to understand how people (who could be jurors) appraise sexual scenarios that occur between acquaintances (angelone, mitchell, & grossi, ). our find- ings have important implications for the criminal justice sys- tem. if potential jurors are under the impression situations that are originally wanted or have pleasure are not rape (even though consent is not present), then potential rape perpetrators may not be convicted. further, jurors will use all the surrounding context in judging whether a scenario is rape or not, when the only question is whether the perpetrator reasonably believed that consent was given. it is therefore imperative to educate jurors and criminal justice practitioners regarding these find- ings. in addition, it is of note that even if consent is dubious as the result of “giving in,” many participants considered it as consent because of an “uncaring partner” or a lack of “explicitly saying no.” this highlights a need to improve education regard- ing consent given to university students. our results provide further evidence that beres’ ( ) assertion that sexual violence prevention needs to be cen- tered around a message of “get consent” rather than the more of course, in healthy relationships, it is conceivable that gentle per- suasion is part of a sexual script and is actually wanted. however, the evidence on token resistance suggests (sprecher et al., ) it is not as commonplace as our participants reports of “giving in” being akin to consent. archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – traditional “no means no.” the benefit of this is that it moves the responsibility from the person who was raped to the person who raped (pineau, ). our results highlight the fact that this message has not been fully received since a significant num- ber of the participants thought a repeated obvious statement of refusal was needed to prevent rape rather than the absence of consent. limitations as with all studies, the present work here has several limita- tions. firstly, the changing social context around rape cul- ture (associated with the heteronormal rape scripts held by university students) might make these results temporally and locality specific. the #metoo movement, for example, rapidly grew from the tweet by alyssa milano in october , lead- ing to half a million responses in  h to making international mainstream news in a matter of weeks. the awareness of the issue of sexual violence was raised very quickly: reports to the police increased by % in the u.s. (seales, ). how- ever, there is no evidence that the #metoo movement has led to significant changes in rape culture, suggesting a limitation of these kinds of studies in terms of generalizability. by far the most significant limitation of the present study is the use of vignettes. while vignettes are a common method of research in qualitative research (hughes & huby, ), there is the potential that they do not link well to actual behavior (carl- son, ). this is especially the case when participants are asked to adopt the perspective of the characters in the scenarios and the scenarios do not match their typical behavior (bettor, hendrick, & hendrick, ) such as would be the case in our initiator scenarios. nevertheless, the benefits of vignette studies in obtaining information about sensitive topics (finch, ) outweighs these negatives. our work was conducted at two universities in the uk: the results were highly similar across these institutions potentially because the cultures are not vastly different across the universi- ties. potentially, the increased diversity and larger proportion of women at anglia ruskin university could have led to different results to those obtained from the more homogenous population at bournemouth university (given that egalitarian cultures have less of a rape culture than non-egalitarian ones, barnett, sligar, & wang, ; williams, sawyer, & wahlstrom, ). since this was not observed and future research might explore more diverse and different university cultures. indeed, future research should examine these questions in more ethnically and sexuality diverse samples. our research suffers from a similar issue to many research papers do: the sample tested was predominantly heterosexual white middle-class people. there is no reason to believe that the attitudes expressed by our participants would replicate into non-white and non-heterosexual samples. while this work was conducted solely on university students, as these are at a high risk for experiencing sexual violence (cantor et al., ), we are aware of how this work might be applicable more broadly. throughout this discussion, we have implied other contexts where these findings might be applica- ble. indeed, we have no reason to suspect that the findings here would be different in a non-student sample, suggesting the work has implications for the criminal justice system. nevertheless, future work would need to directly explore these contexts to ensure generalizability. finally, in this study we used the term “rape” in our attempt to obtain data. this was chosen because we have a larger aim to educate the community. further, we did not feel participants would understand the difference between rape and sexual assault because of a lack of education regarding these terms in the uk (yougov, ). nevertheless, this could be explored in future. conclusion these results, in concurrence with other studies, have many implications for the training of jurors in rape cases and in extending educational programmes for rape and sexual assault prevention. a primary outcome of the present find- ings is that there is a distinct lack of understanding of what rape is and what factors contribute to people’s interpretations of whether a scenario is rape or not. perceptions and attitudes were highly variable. this, on its own, is a sufficient basis for education programmes. one theme that both females and males raised was the need for communication. while this theme included victim blaming ideas, it also included the idea that it is important to communicate in relationships. this offers a future aim of work in this field, to encourage more open discussions of consent in order that there could be more peer disclosures. this could challenge the traditional sexual scripts that seem to exist. there is evidence that the aver- age juror tends to hold a heteronormal sexual script (stuart, mckimmie, & masser, ) that can lead to a bias in the way they interpret court proceedings (rerick, livingston, & davis, ). one of our participants put it wisely: “arousal does not mean consent” (bu, f, ). yet, many jurors do tend to believe the presence of pleasure meant it was not rape: i.e., the “she liked it” effect (booth, willmott, & boduszek, ; mcgregor, ). jurors need to separate wantedness and pleasure from consent and ensure that all sex without consent are treated as rape and that unwanted but consensual sex is as damaging psychologically as non-consensual sex. alterna- tively, the instructions given to jurors might need to be altered to ensure that their discussions are less affected by their own biases and rape myth endorsements. for example, in the uk, the bench statements (maddison, ormerod, tonkin, & wait, ) include judge’s direction to be made in rape cases aimed at dispelling certain rape myths. the present work could, therefore, be utilized in updating or improving juror instructions (in the u.s.) and judge’s directions (uk), archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – given that their use, understanding and effectiveness remain a problem (bain, ). compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. ethical approval all procedures performed in these studies were in accordance with the ethical standards of the british psychology soci- ety’s research ethics code of conduct and with the helsinki decla- ration and its later amendments. all procedures were approved by both institutional research ethics boards. informed consent informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. (all participants knew they were going to answer questions about sexual scenarios and that some of them included scenarios where consent was not given—i.e., rape). further, participants were instructed that if they had personal experience with rape, that they should not take part in the study. in study , where we asked participants to imagine themselves as initiators of sex, special consideration was paid to how the study was framed and the support services offered after the study. on completion of the scenarios, the participant was presented with the legal definition of rape and a series of support services and information about the study as part of the debrief- ing information. this information explicitly pointed participants to cam- paigns running at the same time in the university regarding education students about consent. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attri- bution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. references abbey, a., mcauslan, p., zawacki, t., clinton, a. m., & buck, p. o. 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( ). public’s attitudes to sexual consent. retrieved january , from https ://yougo v.co.uk/topic s/resou rces/artic les-repor ts/ / / /publi cs-attit udes-sexua l-conse nt. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /bf https://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php https://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php https://revoltsexualassault.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /report-sexual-violence-at-university-revolt-sexual-assault-the-student-room-march- .pdf https://revoltsexualassault.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /report-sexual-violence-at-university-revolt-sexual-assault-the-student-room-march- .pdf https://revoltsexualassault.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /report-sexual-violence-at-university-revolt-sexual-assault-the-student-room-march- .pdf https://revoltsexualassault.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /report-sexual-violence-at-university-revolt-sexual-assault-the-student-room-march- .pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- https://doi.org/ . /j.jadohealth. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.jadohealth. . . https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . / https://yougov.co.uk/topics/resources/articles-reports/ / / /publics-attitudes-sexual-consent https://yougov.co.uk/topics/resources/articles-reports/ / / /publics-attitudes-sexual-consent 	understanding how university students use perceptions of consent, wantedness, and pleasure in labeling rape 	abstract 	introduction 	study 	method 	participants 	materials 	procedure 	data analysis 	results and discussion 	study 	method 	results and discussion 	general discussion 	limitations 	conclusion 	references thomas kilduff id# libraries & publishing inm city, university london may , “identity” in publishing: the new currency [modern forms of publishing include writing blogs and posting diverse content on social media. in this context, how do library and/or information services relate to questions of identity in the st century?] the fall of was a time of crisis in the analogue world. society witnessed the world trade center attacks, the spectre of cultural collision, and a rapid economic downturn. the digital world was not spared. with the storied dot-com stock market peaking in march (lowenstein, ), the following couple of years saw the dot-com disappearance. this era ushered in a whole new way of using the web; users began connecting more closely with services and with one another. (o’reilly, ) once a plaything, the internet steadily transformed into a utility. ​hyperhistorical​ is how luciano floridi, philosopher of information at the university of oxford, describes our current era which had its seeds in these years. its definition: humans would not be able to function without the daily use of ict’s (information and communication technologies). (floridi, ) the numbers are clear: a solid % of the gdp in the markets of the g countries are information-related, depending on intangible goods. (kilduff, ) a pew research survey in found that % of americans own a smartphone. (elhai, et al., ) ​hyperhistorical​ is our physical/mental/financial and logistical reality. within this infosphere, the new currency is not money nor content, reputation or character, but the idea of “identity”. the emergence of “identity” has deep repercussions for publishing and library science. what started with gutenberg and luther in the second millenium is coming into fruition now in the third millennium with blogs, vlogs, tweets, posts, podcasts, on-line manifestos, and self-published books. web publishing keeps on pushing past its saturation point. the internet is marshall mclullahan writ large: “that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. as our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it— and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.” (carr, , page ) in this paper i will extend the metaphor of how “identity” in publishing is treated as a financial currency. the irony is that extreme behaviours at each end of the spectrum, either hoarding this currency or spending it lavishly, often results in the most individual success. out of the two, the hoarding or being wise with one’s identity has the bigger pay-off. it is the underexposure or concealment of one’s true identity, i argue, that arouses the most curiosity. with vastly more people spending time online, there has been an increase in audience size. when the world was smaller, having and showing character would entail “showing up” for the divine or one’s family. not too long ago, reputation was the currency that mattered: how one “showed up” for his town, community, or career networks. in , revealing identity is how one “shows up” for the world, and its currency is rising. the danger, however, is that self-identity becomes fragile and dependent on feedback in this crowded ecosystem. (gupta, kim, zheng, ) attribute definition era audience character what one is made of; goodness and wickedness can be seen through one’s actions, efforts and personal decisions. popularity: ancient greeks through the victorian age. pleases family, pleases the divine. reputation how others see one; an outgrowth of displays of character or lack thereof. still present today but started in the pre-victorian era and peaked in the s. pleases town, social circles, and career networks.. identity "identity" is multifaceted. it first starts with self-presentation in the infosphere but also encompasses such areas as security, travel, and banking. the catch word since late s through today. the salience around identity has only grown since the technological revolution, rise in terrorism, and explosion of international travel. pleases the infosphere, the authorities, and the world at large. the secret to the rising currency of identity in the st century: identity seems to pay itself interest (think of all the celebrity cookbooks). identity is the new face of a creator in a world of billion potential readers or internet users. dishonour can stick to one’s identity but one remedy is to just create another on-line identity. there are also clean-up services now when somebody pens something foolish or inflammatory and is publicly shamed. (ronson, ) unless of course, one has become rich and famous ​based on​ the inflammatory things one has published. everybody’s a curator (a thousand ways to spend your currency): instagram influencers, youtube stars, pinterest princess and patreon success stories editors at ​time magazine​ stunned their readership in late december with their choice for person of the year. (grossman, ) the selection that year was “you”, complete with a thin vinyl mirror on its cover. many of the comments on-line and in print the following week griped that america had lost its way and had become even more self-centered and myopic. in their defense, ​time​ editors were just responding to market trends and the latest habits of the information age. a timeline of information age applications https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/ created by danielle marb time magazine​’s selection was not that unexpected when we look at the (no pun intended) timeline above. in quick succession, a number of online media applications entered the market and americans set out on a voyage of self-documentation. facebook was born in ; youtube in ; twitter in . but it was the rise of wordpress in preceded by the more important but less popular blogger in that really got the hyperlinks-sharing economy off the ground. user-generated material via blogs was easier to create, share, and distribute (i should know: i had created four of them with varying degrees of engagement). blogs became so commonplace that many journalists who spent thousands of dollars on a postgraduate education feared that these media usurpers would destroy their livelihoods by essentially writing for free. the fight was over the future of journalistic business models. (o’reilly, ) overnight, anyone with a spirited opinion, it seemed, was able to broadcast it from her self-curated cubbyhole without ever changing from her pajamas. web . required a whole new idea of learned behaviour along with a jargon that has grown around it. there is still, in some quarters, an allegiance “to more traditional professional norms of objectivity, neutrality and civic-mindedness” and many journalists have a way of concealing their personal hobbies and authentic opinions on social media. (bossio and sacco, ) this is known as a ​transitional identity​, one that separates “work” publishing sites (like linkedin, https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/ twitter, and blogger) from social media sites meant for family and friends (facebook and instagram for instance). (bossio and sacco, ) journalists who take a more casual approach show many more inner thoughts and domestic routines, blending the personal with the professional. this tack is known as having a ​social identity​ (bossio and sacco, ) and seems to be the preferred option as trends in publishing become less formal, at least in the u.s. entertainment media is how some critics might describe blogging’s offspring. it is true that in just a few short years, blogs gave way to vlogs (essentially video logs), youtube channels, instagram stories, and other upgraded formats of self-expression. influence via ​a celebrity identity​ seemed to rule supreme. there has been one happy development: the stupendous growth of audio books and podcasts. podcasts are web radio shows that fill the whole spectrum of human interest: sports, hobbies, history, how-to-guides, astrology, and lots of true crime. for more hard-hitting news, there is no shortage of journalists and political commentators who are making highly intelligent, entertaining, and addictive podcast episodes. these journalists include individuals who employ either a ​transitional identity​ or a ​social identity​. (bossio and sacco, ) the success of these podcasts may get a boost if someone is famous in the first place but success is much more likely if the host has fun ideas, good guests, and solid topics. a euphonic voice often helps. the next wave of identity’s role in publishing won’t be found in publishing at all but in broadcasting. co-operative ventures and corporate brands (credit unions): wikipedia, blogging communities, the economist, reddit not all authors or even journalists are in it for the glory. a few companies produce works in which the individual contributors are never revealed. in fact anonymity is ​the​ editorial policy in one of the anglosphere’s most prestigious weekly publications. the economist​ magazine has retained the idea of one editorial voice since its inception in . that voice is clear: no discernible author by-lines. (the economist, ) this policy and tradition refutes the contemporary zeitgeist of the superstar author or journalist taking precedence over the writing or information. (arrese, ) anonymity or not, ​the economist​ has a legacy of solid reporting and maintains a measured tone and a fair, smart, editorial voice. doing away with by-lines rids the paper of vices and platforms for self-praise. (arrese, ) the central reason for the continued tradition of anonymity was (and is) editorial consistency. (arrese, ) readers take comfort in the familiar formula. there are not many literary ventures remaining like ​the economist​ that have an esprit de corps. the magazine has certainly attracted a fair amount of writing from outside contributors: from business people in london who want to pitch progressive fiscal ideas to freelancers in communist regimes who are prohibited from publishing in their home countries. (arrese, ) the incentive for staff journalists, aside from a regular paycheck, is to be part of a strong, intelligent brand. “accordingly, articles are often the work of ​the economist​'s hive mind, rather than of a single author. the main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it.” (the economist, ) reddit​, a much younger and less formal forum in the infosphere, differs greatly from ​the economist​. one trait they do share is a vigorous defense of their respective anonymity policies. but while ​the economist​ erases individual authors for the sake of one particular editorial voice, reddit​ disguises users and authors in a much more anarchic environment. officially, ​reddit users are pseudonymous as they are free to create edgy nicknames. in essence though, users are anonymous as there are no restrictions on the number of accounts one can create. because of this veil of safety, ​reddit​ gained notoriety for the number of hate groups posting graffiti and hate speech. with enough pressure from the “free-speech” counter-movements along the likes of #metoo, leaders at ​reddit​, in , had to make some tough decisions. that year, ​reddit​ executives shut down several unsavory subreddits that violated their new anti-harassment policy. (chandrasekharan, ) users were not happy and started behaving extremely in other corners of the site. redditors can ban any members who run afoul of community guidelines but it is quick and easy for a member to create a new user account and escape punishment. troll-like behaviour still proliferates though on the many subreddits that remain unrestricted. (kligo, et al., ) researchers found that harassment ​had been​ curbed on ​reddit​ with their new anti-harassment policy. (chandrasekharan, ) exiled members of ​reddit​ or those aggrieved with the site for losing its “free speech” gravitas began to flock to ​vote​, an even more radical website that is part of “bizarro networks which brand themselves as strongholds for free speech and in practice are often used for hate speech”. (marantz, , : ) looking at both ​reddit​ and ​the economist​, we can also attribute these news outfits as having “identities” of their own. the marketing term, brand, does not do either one justice. reddit​, as an identity, wears many hats. it is the third most visited website in the united states and is a.) a social networking site, b.) a social news site, and c.) a social news aggregator. (kligo, et al., ) although extremely successful, ​reddit​ still retains its punk-rock ethos of radical democracy and anarchy. in , ​the new yorker​ stated, “to its devotees, reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last internet giants to resist homogeneity.” (marantz, , : ) the identity of ​the economist​, meanwhile, is capitalist-friendly but also fair-minded. new media mores, however, are nudging ​the economist​ to rethink some of its practices. the anonymity principle has loosened somewhat as ​the economist​ is first to admit; the magazine started using a journalist’s initials in bylines on the magazine’s blog posts. journalists of ​the economist​ are also ​fully​ identified on video and audio episodes. keeping the mystery (pseudonymous donors): elena ferrante, silence dogood, zine authors, banksy, jk rowling if identity is the new currency, then there are some groups and individuals who try to conceal how much they are worth. one of the earliest employers of a pseudonym was none other than benjamin franklin, the savant credited with many inventions and diplomatic feats in early american history and who is considered one the country’s founding fathers. ​silence dogood​ became one of benjamin franklin’s first pen names. it was “her” name that franklin wrote under after he had tried multiple times to submit work to the ​the new-england courant​, a newspaper that his brother ran and which young franklin served as a poorly-treated apprentice. (waldstreicher, ) franklin wrote more than a dozen pieces for his brother’s journal, the first blossoming of his literary gift in print. even though other contributors’ flamboyance and antiestablishment stance stimulated him, he surpassed many of them in boldness, irony, humor, and theatrical effect, a remarkable feast for a lad at sixteen. his silence dogood essays, totaling fourteen in number published between april and october , , were compelling illustrations of his mind and literary imagination during this period. (waldstreicher, , page ) constantly on the violent end of his older brother’s mood swings, franklin did have one solace: he fell in love with publishing, the industry he was learning to master. ben was also eager to see his own writings in print but his brother proved unwilling. so contrary to the tradition of the times, franklin performed a counter-gender switch to pose as a wise, older widow named silence dogood. she would frequently submit letters to the ​new-england courant​, airing her opinions on society, religion, and respectability all in a witty hand. dogood’s identity was so convincing that a few male readers grew smitten; some sent the ​courant​ letters asking for her hand in marriage. western literary history is dotted with writers taking on pseudonyms. in the th and th history, these were often talented female writers posing as men. the gendered power dynamics in publishing at that time relegated women writers to fiction that was considered frivolous. british female writers like the bronte sisters and mary ann evans (whose pen name was george eliot) all tried to pass as men in order to get their manuscripts published. in the st century, this ploy has disappeared with the exception of jk rowling. the best-selling author took a male pseudonym, robert galbraith, in order to delineate her late adult crime fiction genre writing from her popular young adult fantasy fiction genre writing. (galbraith, ) the most noteworthy pseudonymous donor to literary fiction of the st century has had a slow burn success. the question around her identity became somewhat of a literary scandal. even after being outed (supposedly), the author is still writing under her pseudonym and her growing fanclub would not have it any other way. elena ferrante is best known for her four-book series, ​the neapolitan novels​, about two young girls who grow up in post-war naples trying to survive a misogynistic culture. ferrante’s writing is a deep psychological dive into the mind of an intelligent italian woman, light years ahead of the traditional madonna-whore dichotomy. an investigative reporter, a fellow italian writer who is male, shocked the literary world by printing an expose into the supposedly true identity of ferrante. claudio gatti did so by looking through her financial and real estate records. it was investigative reporting without a moral compass. defenders of ferrante called gatti’s actions snooping, even stalking, and that it was similar to stripping a woman of all her clothes in public. the maneuvers seemed all the more public in that it happened in italy and bore hints of what ferrante wrote reflectively about; the patriarchal, chauvinist, and violent reality of neapolitan, and by extension, italian culture. “gatti’s story landed a month before donald trump defeated hillary clinton, when the righteous anger of women was very much in the air,” a writer in the atlantic asserted, “and some anglophone readers saw the ​attempted unmasking as a violation​; a few even ​compared it to an act of sexual violence​.” (donadio, ) the violation around ferrante’s chosen name and identity felt deplorable and her fans were apoplectic and rushed to her defense. other writers, including jeannette winterson, stood fiercely by ferante, calling out gatti for being offended at the success of a writer who became successful on her own terms. (winterson, ) ferrante, of course, has and had male literary admirers but none were so vehemently insulted by “the unmasking” as much as her female fans. the whole debacle, giving it thought, showed the power and sheer numbers of female fiction fans and how identity politics has real-world repercussions. several studies and surveys have shown that women are more avid readers than men overall and more likely to read fiction. one study found that women are up to . times more likely to have read a novel in the past year. (tepper, ) . women are also nearly ​four times​ more likely to be heavy readers, which is defined as reading more than fifty titles a year.​ ​(ballard, ) ]​ ​the last laugh may be ferrante herself as “my brilliant friend” has recently been adapted into a beautifully-filmed hbo series. her acclaim sees no sign of abating. to keep with our metaphor, not only is ferrante a pseudonymous donor to the pool of publishing and literature in the st century but she is at the center of the argument over how much the currency of identity is worth. conclusion: more performative than ever (conspicuous consumption) journalism and media-making continues to be an empowering way of literary expression with web . and in the st century. millions of people around the world are putting their brands and their faces onto the pages of history. as discussed, our society has seen blogging give way to even more performative reporting and infotainment via vlogs, youtube, instagram stories, podcasts, and twitter posts. the content is the marketing and the marketing is the content. identity, whether one celebrates it unclothed or conceals it like a hermit in the woods, is a hot currency. journalists, freelancers and novelists are finding that maintaining identity is a way of social purchase which will not fade anytime soon. the latest findings show that men, at least in the us, do read newspapers more regularly along with nonfiction titles such as history and biography. literacy surveys and research was surprisingly thin and out-of-date. this is one of my only current and comprehensive ones; n​early , us adults were questioned on these literacy measures on aug , . https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante http://www.theguardian.com/books/ /oct/ /unmasking-elena-ferrante http://www.theguardian.com/books/ /oct/ /unmasking-elena-ferrante bibliography arrese, Ángel ( ). ‘“it’s anonymous. it’s the economist”. the journalistic and business value of anonymity’, ​journalism practice​, march. doi: . / . . . ballard, j. 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( ) ​palaces for the people: how to build a more equal and united society​. available at: ​https://sfpl.overdrive.com/media/ ​. lowenstein, r. ( ) ​origins of the crash: the great bubble and its undoing​. new york: penguin books. marantz, a. ( ) ‘reddit and the struggle to detoxify the internet’ [audio file], ​the new yorker​, march. available at: http://​www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet (accessed april ). o’reilly, t. ( ) ‘what is web . : design patterns and business models for the next generation of software’, ​o’reilly​, september. available at: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web /archive/what-is-web- .html​ (accessed march ). robert galbraith limited ( ). available at: ​https://robert-galbraith.com/about/​ (accessed may ). ronson, j. ( ) ​so you’ve been publicly shamed​. new york city: riverhead books. summers, k. 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( ) ‘the malice and sexism behind ‘the unmasking’ of elena ferrante’, ​the atlantic​, october. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /elena-ferrante-literary-storm-as-italian-reporter-i dentifies-author​ (accessed may ). https://sfpl.overdrive.com/media/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web /archive/what-is-web- .html https://robert-galbraith.com/about/ http://www.jstor.org/stable/refuseserq. . . https://doi.org/ . /s - x( ) - https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /elena-ferrante-literary-storm-as-italian-reporter-identifies-author https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /elena-ferrante-literary-storm-as-italian-reporter-identifies-author [pdf] top things women anesthesiologists must do for academic promotion | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /aia. corpus id: top things women anesthesiologists must do for academic promotion @article{pai top t, title={top things women anesthesiologists must do for academic promotion}, author={s. pai}, journal={international anesthesiology clinics}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ – } } 	s. pai 	published 	medicine 	international anesthesiology clinics as gender equality and equity continue to progress, shining a spotlight on academic promotion for women in anesthesiology may help to ensure equal academic advancement for future anesthesiologists, regardless of their gender. academic promotion can be simply explained as the stepwise process of advancing in rank from instructor to assistant professor, associate professor, and then professor. yet, even without considering gender, the process of academic promotion is complex, with significant… expand view on wolters kluwer medschool.umaryland.edu save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	mechlorethamine 	tocopherylquinone citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency gender-based disparity in academic ranking and research productivity among canadian anesthesiology faculty 	eric n. esslinger, michael van der westhuizen, s. jalal, s. masud, f. khosa 	medicine 	cureus 	 	pdf 	view excerpt save alert research feed fostering belonging in academic anaesthesiology: faculty and department chair perspectives on supporting women anaesthesiologists. 	m. lane-fall, e. gordon, e. valentine, stephanie a black, p. kapur, l. fleisher 	medicine 	british journal of anaesthesia 	 	 	 save alert research feed peer review for the canadian journal of anesthesia in and : a retrospective analysis by reviewer and author gender 	kate goldstone, c. edgley, s. mehta, k. leslie 	medicine 	canadian journal of anesthesia/journal canadien d'anesthésie 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency twelve tips to promote gender equity in international academic medicine 	h. ibrahim, dora j. stadler, s. archuleta, j. cofrancesco 	political science, medicine 	medical teacher 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed gender disparity among us anaesthesiologists: are women underrepresented in academic ranks and scholarly productivity? 	a. pashkova, p. svider, c. y. chang, l. diaz, j. a. eloy, j. eloy 	medicine 	acta anaesthesiologica scandinavica 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed experiencing the culture of academic medicine: gender matters, a national study 	l. pololi, janet t. civian, r. brennan, andrea l. dottolo, e. krupat 	medicine 	journal of general internal medicine 	 	 	highly influential 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed recruitment, promotion, and retention of women in academic medicine: how institutions are addressing gender disparities. 	p. carr, c. gunn, a. raj, samantha e kaplan, k. freund 	medicine 	women's health issues : official publication of the jacobs institute of women's health 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed trends in gender distribution among anesthesiology residents: do they matter? 	s. rose, c. burkle, b. a. elliott 	medicine 	anesthesia and analgesia 	 	 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed the status of women in academic anesthesiology: a progress report 	c. wong, m. c. stock 	medicine 	anesthesia and analgesia 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed women in leadership: why so few and what to do about it. 	c. surawicz 	medicine, psychology 	journal of the american college of radiology : jacr 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed inadequate progress for women in academic medicine: findings from the national faculty study. 	p. carr, c. gunn, samantha a. kaplan, a. raj, k. freund 	psychology, medicine 	journal of women's health 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed career development for women in academic medicine: multiple interventions in a department of medicine. 	l. fried, c. francomano, + authors j. stobo 	medicine 	jama 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed status of women in academic anesthesiology 	c. j. wilkinson, h. w. linde 	medicine 	anesthesiology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed ... ... related papers 	abstract 	topics 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ “on anger, silence, and epistemic injustice” alison bailey forthcoming in: philosophy. supplemental volume on “the harms and wrongs of epistemic practice,” the royal institute of philosophy [draft . . ] abstract: if anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. instead, i argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. i begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. i focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. next, i use maría lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. the final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. . introduction anger is the emotion of injustice. historically, members subordinated groups have defended our anger as a morally and politically appropriate response to daily injustices. our anger surfaces quickly pulling us back into our bodies. this is how injustice feels. those of us who live in epistemic twilight zones; that is, in worlds where testimony about our lived experiences is repeatedly silenced, dismissed, distorted, or gas lighted are familiar with the ever-present anger these constant erasures trigger. historically, discussions of anger and injustice have focused on the political uses of anger; but, as kristie dotson once remarked, ‘all injustices are epistemic at root’. so, i’m curious: if anger is the emotion of injustice, and if injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? despite the question, my project is not to explain the lack of attention to anger in the epistemic injustice literature. instead i argue that a particular texture of anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustices. i begin by making visible the anger that saturates the complex silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture. i outline four silencing practices to illustrate the obvious point that social practices of silencing produce angry experiences. next, i introduce two additional silencing practices – tone policing and tone vigilance as aristotle’s says, ‘anger is an appropriate response to perceived injustice’. nicomachean ethics v. b - . alison bailey, ‘the unlevel knowing field: an engagement with dotson’s third-order epistemic oppression.’ social epistemology review and reply collective : ( ), - . online: http://wp.me/p bfg - gs ‘epistemic twilight zones’ are undefined or intermediate conceptual areas where there are insufficient or inadequate epistemic resources. here, epistemic resources are not shared as much as people think. dotson, in conversation. dotson’s claim is intentionally strong. unpacking the ‘all’ is beyond the scope of this project. i ask readers to feel the weight of the all in dotson’s claim by considering how the epistemological dimensions of violence are integral to the process of dehumanization: reducing knowing subjects to dehumanized subjects or objects (i.e. non-citizens, property, animals, savages, criminals, etc.) is the first step toward doing violence to them. charles w. mills makes a weaker claim: the historical production of the racial contract has prominent epistemic dimensions. see, the racial contract (ithaca, new york: cornell university press, ). http://wp.me/p bfg - gs http://wp.me/p bfg - gs – because they best illustrate the intimate relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. my third section uses maría lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to the histories and textures of this anger. anger is powerful resource for resisting epistemic injustice. anger does things. anger can be a claim to respect. it offers us clarity. and, it is useful for mapping epistemic terrains. anger calls attention to bad epistemic habits. it prompts us to seek out resistant epistemic communities and new worlds of sense where our epistemic confidence can be restored. . anger is a justified response to social practices of silencing social practices of silencing produce angry experiences. so, my first task is to make visible the overlooked and undertheorized resistant anger saturating the silences that epistemic injustice repeatedly manufactures. all testimonial exchanges take place on an unlevel knowing field; that is, ‘on contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance circulate with equal vigor, and where dominant groups have a deep and abiding interest in maintaining their epistemic home turf advantage’. dominant groups use silencing practices to defend their epistemic home terrain. silencing does epistemic violence to marginalized epistemic communities not only by undermining speakers’ epistemic credibility, but also by causing them to doubt their ability to make judgements about their moral worth. effective silencing practices make it difficult for marginalized knowers to hold their epistemic ground. the epistemic injustice scholarship identifies a variety of silencing practices. knowers can be silenced pre-emptively, when they are excluded in advance from participating in a testimonial exchange. miranda fricker describes this as ‘a tendency for some groups simply not to be asked for information in the first place’. consider how women have been accidently-on-purpose excluded from u.s. government committees on reproductive healthcare policy. silencing practices also treat knowers as epistemic objects, or as truncated subjects. here, knowers are treated as (re)sources, from whom so-called ‘legitimate inquirers’ glean information to produce proper knowledge. here, speakers are asked for information in the first place, but their knowledge is coopted in support of the asker’s project, undermining their capacity as givers of that knowledge. think about how universities coopt the resistant work done by gender studies programs and use it market their commitment to diversity in ways that don’t threaten institutional comfort. kristie dotson’s scholarship on epistemic violence identifies two additional silencing practices. testimonial quieting happens when an audience fails to recognize the speaker as a knower whose testimony is worth hearing. the speaker does not just suffer a credibility deficit because that would bailey, ‘the unlevel knowing field: an engagement with dotson’s third-order epistemic oppression’, . dotson distinguishes between episodic, non-repetitive instances of silencing and deeper systemic and socially functional practices of silencing that concern ‘a repetitive reliable occurrence of an audience failing to meet the dependencies of a speaker that finds its origins in a more pervasive ignorance’. i focus on dotson’s repetitive reliable occurrences. see ‘tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing’, hypatia : ( ), - . miranda fricker, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing (new york and oxford: oxford university press, ), . ‘epistemic objectification’ is fricker’s term. see, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, . the term ‘truncated subjects’ comes from gaile pohlhaus, jr., ‘discerning the primary epistemic harm in cases of testimonial injustice’, social epistemology : ( ), - . online: http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . fricker, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, . dotson, ‘tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing’, - . presuppose actually her ability to make a credibility judgment. the speaker’s credibility deficit is so severe, that her words are not heard at all. it’s as if she never spoke. consider the court scene in to kill a mockingbird. tom robinson doesn’t simply suffer a credibility deficit because he’s a black man. his testimony is ‘worth nothing to the jury. as if he did not testify at all’. finally, testimonial smothering is a coerced self-silencing that happens when ‘the speaker perceives her immediate audience as unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of proffered testimony.’ the speaker’s knowledge from previous conversations teaches her to shape or truncate her testimony to ‘insure that [it] contains only content for which [her] audience demonstrates testimonial competence’. people of color, for example, tactically limit the conversations they are willing to have with white people about race, knowing that white audiences typically lack the epistemic competence to judge those experiences accurately. so, where is the anger in social practices of silencing? it’s everywhere. silence is a condition of oppression, and part of resisting oppression is finding a voice that effectively pushes back against the weight of imposed silences. silence is saturated with anger because injustice is painful. anger is an audible expression of resistance to the sufferings of injustice. our anger pushes back against the complex silences that injustice repeatedly manufactures. when audre lorde says: ‘my response to racism is anger,’ she means that her anger is a justified response to the social and cultural habits, ideologies, institutions, and laws, that dehumanize, erase, and do violence to her. anger is a justified response to all subordination injuries, even epistemic ones. when a speaker’s testimony is smothered, silenced, or rendered inaudible, her anger is smothered, silenced, or rendered inaudible. silencing anger exacerbates the harms of epistemic injustices because silencing neutralizes or renders invisible the knowledge speakers have of the injury their anger communicates. to be angry is to make a claim on respect. silencing is disrespectful precisely because it communicates to the speaker that her testimony is not worth hearing, that she is incapable of making accurate judgements about how she has been wronged, or that the emotional injuries she sustains during a testimonial exchange are unworthy of consideration. the audience’s failure to give the speaker’s testimony and anger uptake illustrates a failure to respect the speaker as a credible knower; and, like all discredited knowers, she is denied the right to social participation. . tone management as angry knowledge management my task so far has been to make visible the resistant anger that saturates social practices of silencing. the fact that silencing practices produce angry experiences should now be evident. this section suggests that resistant angry experiences have epistemic content and that on aim of silencing is to manage resistant anger’s epistemic content. to illustrate this, i examine– tone policing and tone vigilance– two anger-silencing practices aimed at directly managing subordinate groups’ angry knowledge. my discussion highlights the epistemic and psychological harms that rachel mckinnon ‘epistemic injustice’, philosophy compass / ( ), . dotson, ‘tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing’, . audre lorde, ‘on the uses of anger: women responding to racism’, sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde (trumansburg, new york: the crossing press, ), . marilyn frye, ‘on anger’ the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory (trumansburg, new york: the crossing press, ). peter lyman, ‘the politics of anger: on silence, resentment, and political speech’ socialist review : ( ), - . tone-managing practices produce when subordinate groups are caught in anger-silencing spirals. tone policing has a prominent epistemic function. the clearest example comes from audre lorde’s account of a moment during an academic conference when she spoke out of direct and particular anger to a white woman who replied, ‘tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or i cannot hear you’. lorde comments, ‘but is it my manner that keeps you from hearing, or the threat of a message that [your] life may change’? anger is a response to injury; but, for subordinated knowers, it is treated as something to be managed. in general tone management weakens epistemic credibility by targeting, isolating, and attempting to manage the affective content (the speaker’s manner of speaking) and the epistemic content (the message) in testimony. at its core is the expectation that subordinated knowers, if they want to be heard, must calibrate the timber of their message, to fall within the audience’s comfort zone. the connections between anger and tone management are so predictable that i have come to understand them as anger/knowledge management tactics. in fact, anger’s epistemic strength can be measured in direct proportion to the amount of energy used to contain it. but, anger-silencing practices are not just about quieting uncomfortable tones as a parent hushes a child at a movie. there is power in the hush. the hush reasserts dominance: it restores the audience’s own epistemic and psychological comfort. there at least two patterns of managing this angry knowledge. in cases of direct angry knowledge management, tone policing may trigger an exhausting and familiar anger-silencing spiral. lorde’s anger at racial injustices prompts the white woman to make a request for psychological and epistemic comfort. angry demands for justice are prone to escalation. suppose that following this exchange that, sensing that she’s not been heard, lorde reasserts her message in a hotter tone. the white woman may understand the amplified tone as further evidence against lorde’s epistemic credibility and more firmly ask lorde to soften her voice. these exchanges are anger-silencing spirals: closed hermeneutical systems in which the speaker suffers a double epistemic injury– neither her testimony nor her anger get uptake, and she is left with a dense, hot, swelling rage in her chest. lorde’s story illustrates a form of tone policing that focuses directly on the audible anger in a speaker’s voice, but anger need not be heard to be managed. there is a second, more insidious, form of tone management that happens when an audience attributes anger to a speaker’s testimony (independently of her tone) simply because the speaker belongs to a group that is culturally characterized as angry. roxane gay’s description of how race complicates anger gets at the heart of attributive anger. she writes, i am an opinionated woman so i am often accused of being angry. this accusation is made because a woman, a black woman who is angry, is making trouble. she is daring to be dissatisfied with the status quo. she is daring to be heard. when women are angry, we are wanting too much or complaining or wasting time or focusing on the wrong things or we lorde, ‘on the uses of anger: women responding to racism’, . brittney cooper, eloquent rage: a black feminist discovers her superpower. (new york: st. martin’s press, ), . this is mckinnon’s ‘epistemic injustice circle of hell.’ see, ‘allies behaving badly: gaslighting as epistemic injustice’, the routledge handbook to epistemic injustice, eds. ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr. (new york: routledge, ), , and mckinnon’s ‘epistemic injustice’, . see also, sara ahmed, living a feminist life (durham, north carolina: duke university press, ), . are petty or shrill or strident or unbalanced or crazy or overly emotional. race complicates anger. black women are often characterized as angry simply for existing, as if anger is woven into our breath and our skin. here, anger is attributed to a speaker even when her tone is well within the listener’s comfort zone. listeners implicitly assign anger to speakers’ words based on their social identity. attributive anger sparks a prescient form of tone policing that i call tone vigilance. tone vigilance prompts an audience either to listen for anger a speaker’s testimony, or to fold a perceived or imagined anger into the testimony because they assume that black women always speak from an angry place. as if, recalling gay’s words, anger were ‘woven into [her] breath and skin.’ attributing anger to marginalized knowers pre-silences them. it triggers an insidious anger-silencing spiral, where reasonable judgments and observations are reduced to the angry nature of a particular group. sara ahmed explains, the figure of the angry black woman is also a fantasy figure that produces its own effects. reasonable thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes read as confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry, but also unreasonable! when anger is attributed to a speaker based on group membership, the causal relationship between reasonable claims about injustice and the speaker’s anger is reversed. it’s not that her anger makes the claim unreasonable, it’s that the perceived or imagined unreasonableness of the claim is attributed to an angry essence at the core of one’s group identity. ahmed continues, [y]ou might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. your anger is a judgement that something is wrong. but in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x. you become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of anger. you become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. in becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth ‘behind’ your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it getting through. tone-managing practices are epistemically and psychological harmful. anger-silencing spirals have different consequences for marginalized speakers than they do for dominant hearers. from the perspective of dominators, tone management serves to restore their psychological and epistemic comfort. the white woman’s request that lorde not speak too harshly is a demand to accommodate her unmet psychological need for racial comfort. tone management is a defense against ‘white fragility’ – ‘a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. these moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, or guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, or the desire to flee a stress-inducing situation. these responses, in turn, function to reinstate white racial roxane gay, ‘who gets to be angry?’ the new york times ( june ), online. sara ahmed, the promise of happiness (durham, north carolina: duke university press, ), . ahmed, the promise of happiness, . equilibrium’. the white woman is requesting not to have her epistemic confidence – that is the sense she has of herself as a good white woman who is knowledgeable about race matters – called into question. it’s easier mark lorde as an angry black woman, than it is to mark her own white ignorance. it is easier to shut down the conversation than to linger in the uncomfortable silences these conversations create. when white people chose comfort over listening to folks of colors’ testimonies, we deny ourselves the opportunity to know something important about the world – a strain of knowledge that is rarely visible to us from where we sit or stand. however, from the perspective of those silenced, anger-silencing spirals are epistemically and psychologically damaging. silenced anger faces what josé medina calls a ‘wrongful interpretive obstacle’. when anger is misinterpreted it is emptied of knowledge. instead of being taken as evidence of lived injury, trauma, or harm, the speaker’s anger is used to confirm a character flaw or personality disorder. women’s anger is bitchy, crazy, or hysterical rather than civil or righteous. we are too thin skinned. people of color’s rage is uncivil(ized), uppity, or aggressive. they have attitude. these tropes pathologize anger, robbing it of its energy, force, and epistemic content. our anger is weaponized against us. it is isolated from our testimonies, neutralized, and thrown back at us in limp unrecognizable forms. tone management tactics also have a damaging gaslighting effect, making speakers feel psychologically insecure and epistemically under-confident. gaslighting, as rachel mckinnon explains, ‘is when a hearer tells a speaker that the speaker’s claim isn’t that serious or they’re overreacting, or they’re being too sensitive, or they’re not interpreting events properly. this is used to discount the speaker’s testimony’. gaslighting is part and parcel of most anger-silencing spirals. telling a woman that she is ‘overreacting’ or ‘being too sensitive’ is code for you’d better ‘dial it back.’ it diffuses angry knowledge by quietly planting seeds of doubt that cause speakers to second-guess the legitimacy of her anger. as saba fatima explains, when anger is present, the demands for civility are almost always placed on white women and people of color. this social pattern that leads to paranoia. you begin to doubt your own experience and your own ability to judge that experience. you can never be certain if your emotional reactions are on target. you begin to feel depressed, guilty, or ashamed. you wonder if you have read too much into the situation, or if you are making a big deal out of nothing, or if you are too thin skinned. here, angry knowers are not simply mistaken about their emotions. their very ability to judge whether the injuries that their anger signals are real is called into question. she might say to herself, ‘i don’t know why i’m so angry!’ gaslighting works against the gaslighted because gaslighters are fragile beings who rabidly defend their epistemic home turf. they cannot tolerate interpretations of events that challenge their worldview. so, if their worldview reads women’s anger as an irrational , or an oversensitive response to trivial matters, then all explanations that point to anger as evidence of unjust harm must be extinguished. the disorienting nature of gaslighting neutralizes the robin diangelo, ‘white fragility’, international journal of critical pedagogy : ( ), . josé medina, the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppressions, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations (new york and oxford: oxford university press, ), . mckinnon, ’allies behaving badly: gaslighting as epistemic injustice’, . saba fatima, ‘being brown and epistemic insecurity’, hypatia conference, villanova university, may . also, ‘on the edge of knowing: microaggression and epistemic uncertainty as a woman of color’, surviving sexism in academia: feminist strategies for leadership, eds. kirsti cole and holly hassel (new york: routledge, ), - . knowledge in that anger trapping angry knowers in a hermeneutically closed system where epistemic traction is rarely possible. but, the effects tone management has on resistant anger concerns me for another reason. tone management may prompt speakers to trade our anger for the chance to either be heard or to restore our epistemic confidence. hoping to be heard we may consciously soften our voices or swallow our anger half way. like testimonial smothering, what i call affective smothering, is a form of self- tone-policing that happens when the speaker recognizes that her audience lacks either the empathy or the affective competence to make sense of her anger as she experiences it. thinking ‘they can’t understand how this anger feels….’ she swallows her anger half way and repeats herself in a ‘more appropriate tone.’ i know this feeling intimately. there are times when my own resistant anger has injured my epistemic credibility. in a panic, i circled back to restore my audience’s comfort. i softened my anger. sometimes i apologized and repeated my testimony in honey-toned restatements. but, these retreats come at a cost. the terms of exchange require trading the chance to voice injury and to consider the transformative possibilities of my anger, for the outside chance that restoring my audience’s comfort will also restore my epistemic credibility. i almost always i lose this wager. and, when i do, i become an accomplice in the dominator’s anger management project. i assume that my audience’s comfort, and not my anger, will restore my epistemic confidence. i convince myself that this is the only way to get epistemic traction. but, i lose ground and my anger is carried forward into the next conversation where there are more wagers to lose. i have, in martia golden’s words, paralyzed my anger and ‘brilliantly shaped it into the soft armor of survival’. my task in this section has been to make visible the resistant anger that saturates the social practices of silencing. i have argued that tone policing and tone vigilance are forms of angry knowledge management that injure knowers. speakers suffer a double epistemic injury – neither their testimony nor their anger get uptake. the next section focuses more intimately on the texture and distinct epistemic features of this resistant anger and sets the stage for my final discussion of anger’s transformative power. the texture and affective ancestry of knowing resistant anger the silences that tone management produces are never empty, still, or mute. angry tones are not affective embellishments that run alongside knowledge; they are woven tightly into it. silence is not the voice of submission. silencing pushes down, but resistant anger pushes back against the normalizing abuse of silencing practices. resistant anger then, is not a raw unfocused energy. it is a knowing resistant anger. ‘knowing’ because, in lorde’s words, it ‘is loaded with energy and information’ and ‘resistant’ because its vibrancy endures repeated silencing. this anger not an automatic response to silencing, it must be cultivated in the same ways that those working for social justice must cultivate a practical knowledge of how systemic barriers shape their experiences. we must understand the structural origins of our anger. without an understanding of fatima treats this as testimonial smothering in ‘on the edge of knowing: microaggression and epistemic uncertainty as a woman of color’. marita golden, migrations of the heart (new york: anchor books, ), . cited in patricia hill collins black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (boston: unwin hyman, ), . lorde, ‘on the uses of anger’, . how oppressed group’s anger is systemically silenced, resistant anger feels muddy-headed. so, it’s not that some angers have knowledge and others are empty of it, only that anger’s knowledge may not yet be intelligible to the subject because anger’s resistant possibilities are not yet apparent. i want to argue that knowing resistant anger is a source of epistemic traction. this requires that i reject the closed hermeneutical framework of the anger-silencing spiral, which is inattentive to the plurality of angry experiences. maría lugones’s pluralist account of anger offers a useful vocabulary for making visible the anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustice repeatedly manufactures. before making this case, i need to give readers unfamiliar with lugones’s work the basic gist of her pluralist view of the self and explain how this view shapes her account of angry selves. in “playfulness, ‘world’ traveling, and loving perception”, lugones develops a pluralistic feminism, ‘one that affirms the plurality in each of us and among us as richness and as central to feminist ontology and epistemology’. her pluralist view of the self is revealed through the practice of playful, loving, ‘world’ travel. the basic idea here is that outsiders to dominant cultures have acquired a flexibility in moving from mainstream constructions of life, where they are constructed as outsiders, to constructions of life where they more or less at home. for example, people of color must learn to navigate safely white ‘worlds’ where they feel ill-at-ease and are constructed as outsiders. so, their senses of self are plural because they shift across ‘worlds.’ lugones uses the term ‘world’ in a way that is purposely ambiguous and unfixed. ‘worlds’ are purposely incomplete. worlds are not utopias. they are filled with flesh and blood people. worlds need not be constructions of a whole society, they may be niches (e.g. a gay bar, a barrio, or a college campus). she is interested in how the shift from one ‘world’ (i.e. a barrio) to another (i.e. a predominantly white campus) reveals the plurality of self. in some ‘worlds’ our sense of self is intelligible, in other ‘worlds’ it is distorted. in the barrio, a chicana might be at ease, outgoing, funny, or generous. on campus she might be shy, reserved, and cautious. lugones explains, ‘those of us who are ‘world’-travelers have the distinct experience of being different in differ ‘worlds’ and of having the capacity to remember other ‘worlds’ and ourselves in them’. she calls this shift from being one self in one world to being another in another ‘world’ travel. lugones’s account of anger reflects her pluralism. if social selves are plural, then angry selves are plural. our anger is not always intelligible across ‘worlds.’ in some ‘worlds’ knowing resistant anger is a clear righteous anger against injustice. in other ‘worlds’ anger is interpreted as hostile, threatening, or crazy. ‘worlds’ have distinct epistemic terrains. so, angry experiences are ‘world’- dependent in the sense that ‘worlds’ shape the affective textures of angry experiences. this means that knowing resistant anger has particular textures and features, that it will only be intelligible in particular resistant ‘worlds’ where its use and value are clear. i’m particularly interested cultivating an understanding of how different angers feel so i can quickly identify the particular angry experiences that offer resources for resisting epistemic injustice. to do this, i need to spell out the specific texture of knowing resistant anger. lugones, “playfulness, ‘world’ traveling, and loving perception”, pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions (lanham, maryland: roman and littlefield publishers, ), . lugones, “playfulness, ‘world’ traveling, and loving perception”, . in ‘hard-to-handle anger’, lugones claims that she can ‘make more sense of anger if [she] captures it in its specificity’. her term, ‘hard-to-handle anger’ is purposely ambiguous: it contains the plurality of ways angry experiences are ‘hard’. if selves are plural, then marginalized knowers are at once oppressedresisting. as lugones remarks, ‘one eye sees that oppressed reality, the other sees the resistant one.’ plurality saturates the hardness of oppressed/silencedresisting/ angry subjects’ responses to injustice. these are angry pluralist selves. in one sense, hard-to- handle anger has a hard/heavy texture that is burdensome, exhausting, laborious, strenuous, and fatiguing. it has a heaviness born of frustration with the exhausting process of directing our anger at dominators in dominant worlds of sense where our anger gets no uptake. for example, when women experience a hard/heavy anger in response to campus sexual violence, the heaviness comes from trying to be heard in worlds of sense shaped by campus rape culture – ‘worlds’ that construct our anger as unintelligible on the grounds that women’s anger about sexual violence. in these ‘worlds’ our resistant anger pushes back: it ‘has communicative intent but it does not always succeed in getting uptake from the oppressor in the official world of sense’. women’s anger about sexual violence can only be hysteria or a delayed reaction to having sex she now regrets. this is, for lugones, a self-controlled anger ‘attentive to the official interpretation of her movements, voice, message, asking for respectability, judging those who have wronged her’. but, there is a plurality in these angry experiences. they are at once shaped by the one eye that understands oppressed reality and the other eye that pushes back against the oppression from which angry knowers must separate. hard-to-handle anger also has a hard/rebellious texture that presupposes or establishes the need to speak ‘from within separate [non-dominant] worlds of sense. separate, that is, from worlds of sense that deny intelligibility to the anger’. this anger is hard in the sense that it is messy, disorderly, complex, and difficult to manage. it resists being well-ordered, controlled, disciplined, and tidy. consider how spaces that affirm women’s testimony around sexual violence create resistant ‘worlds’ where our anger is validated. women experience a hard/rebellious anger about sexual violence when we seek out or create ‘worlds’ where our angry experiences are intelligible. i have in mind ‘worlds’ such as sexual assault survivors’ support groups or social media spaces like the #metoo movement where our safe sound collective anger gets uptake and where rape myths are dim artifacts of ‘worlds’ where our voices have been silenced. following lugones, i ask that readers hold both anger’s hard and rebellious textures in mind. angry selves have the capacity to remember those ‘worlds’ where our anger is intelligible and those ‘worlds’ where it is not. and, as i will argue in the next section, resisting silencing practices requires that, when are in dominant ‘worlds’, that we never forget those ‘worlds’ where our anger at injustice makes perfect sense. so, we must consider questions related to angry selves ‘worlds’ they occupy. we must ask, which self is angry? is the angry self the subordinate self? or, the lugones ‘hard-to-handle anger’ pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions (lanham, maryland: roman and littlefield publishers, inc., ), . lugones, ‘playfulness, ‘world’ traveling, and loving perception, ‘ . to reduce both the conceptual clutter for those unfamiliar with lugones’s pluralism, and to focus on the textures of anger. i’ve substituted hard/heavy anger for first-order anger and hard/rebellious anger for second-order anger. first-order anger sees the oppressed reality and second-order anger resists. lugones ‘hard-to-handle anger’, . lugones, ‘hard-to-handle anger’, . lugones, ‘hard-to-handle anger’, - . resisting self? is the subordinate self’s anger intelligible in dominate worlds of sense by dominators? or, is it the subordinate angry self-pushing back against dominant worlds of sense in an attempt to be heard? or, is it the fully resistant angry self, whose anger is fully intelligible in non-dominant worlds of sense? in which ‘worlds’ is her anger epistemically productive? in which ‘worlds’ is it neutralized? my account of knowing resistant anger mirrors lugones’s pluralist view of anger. knowing resistant anger is a hard/heavy/rebellious anger attentive to the epistemic terrains where it is and is not intelligible. it recognizes the hostile ‘worlds’ that make it heavy, but retains them memory of ‘worlds’ where it’s rebelliousness is intelligible. it expands on lugones’s pluralist account by highlighting the epistemic dimensions of anger, acknowledging that anger’s affective ancestry, and attending angers felt experiences. so, i will describe this expanded notion of plural angry selves as parts of oppressed/silencedresisting/angry communities. our angers never fully our own. they are partially formed by the ‘world’-dependent affective ancestries of marginalized social groups. the anger of the ages is always with us. i believe that some angers are inherited along with the historical traumas of colonized and oppressed peoples and the ‘worlds’ that gave rise to that ancestral anger. as lorde observes, ‘every black woman in america lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers’. members of oppressed/silencedresisting/angry communities have collective memories of their suffering, and that historical trauma and pain shapes the contours of their collective anger. u.s. black anger’s coherent genealogy begins with the trafficking african bodies and continues through colonizers use of enslaved labor, the convict-leasing system, jim crow, lynching, the rape of black women and girls, police violence, incarceration, and the school-to-prison pipeline. i can’t help but believe that the memories of past injustices are alive in these communities today, because these injustices continue under different names. ta-nehisi coates’s memoir offers a glimpse of black ancestral anger. he describes the moment when a white woman came up behind him in a crowded movie theater and yelled ‘come on!’ as she pushed his son out of her way. he writes, ‘i turned and spoke to this woman and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history’. anger’s abiding historical nature suggests that the differences between and among our lived identities are as affective as they are social and cultural, and that ‘various historically coherent groups ‘feel differently’ and navigate the material world on a different emotional register’. however, hard-to-handle anger’s affective ancestry does not mean that its angry energy is oriented exclusively toward the past. ancestral anger resonates in both backward- and forward-looking ways. sometimes anger requires that we dwell on the past. sometimes our anger reorients itself toward the creation and maintenance of new ‘worlds’. so, one texture of anger feels the oppressed reality and history, and the other feels the resistant reality and possible futures. the feminist literature on anger is filled with references to the visionary and transformative dimensions of anger. lorde’s visionary anger is marked by its ability to move people to act in the service of their lorde, ‘eye to eye: black women, hatred, and anger,’ sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde (trumansburg, new york: the crossing press, ), . ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (new york: random house, ), . josé estaban muñoz ‘feeling brown: ethnicity and affect in ricardo bracho’s the sweetest hangover (and other stds)’ theatre journal ( ), . collective vision. sara ahmed acknowledges anger’s bi-directional perspective when she remarks that ‘anger is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future. in other words, being against something does not end with ‘that which one is against’. anger does not necessarily become ‘stuck’ on its object, although that object may remain sticky and compelling. being against something is also being for something, something that has yet to be articulated or is not yet’. lugones describes anger’s transformative power as ‘cognitively rich, cut from the same tonality and cloth as metamorphosis.’ it’s an anger ‘driven by the weight of resistance and fully inspiring’. so, these hard/heavy/rebellious angers flicker back and forth. they hold the felt memories of communities of angry selves and their histories along with the transformative visions of future angry resistant communities. finally, knowing resistant angry experiences just feel differently. they do not feel like the angry experiences you have when you are so angry that you can’t think straight; that is, when your anger moves in unfocused, wasteful, useless, and destructive ways. unfocused anger moves in ways that diminish its energy, like water moving through the ‘shower’ or ‘mist’ settings of a garden hose nozzle. knowing resistant anger is ‘a lucid, clearly focused, and orchestrated anger that is articulated with precision’. it moves with the force and energy of water that flows through ‘jet stream’ setting of that garden hose. you are so angry that you can see straight. as lorde explains, ‘none of its energy is wasted, for it knows its object and all of its energy is focused on that object in hopes that this anger will be heard and things will change’. it is a ‘safe and sound anger’, a clear-headed anger with the power to destroy and construct, and to inspire courageous action. knowing resistant anger is dangerous not because it muddies reason, but because it pushes back against the forces that repeatedly try to rob it of its energy, clarity, and knowledge. readers should now have a sense knowing resistant anger’s plurality, texture, ancestry, and feel. attention to felt experiences is important. i find it easier to name my anger by attending to how it feels, than thinking about how it fits into a pre-determined taxonomy. i start from the body and work out. this requires attending to which self is angry, in which ‘world’, the anger’s felt texture and its ancestry. my final section explains the ways that knowing resistant anger offers oppressed/silenced resisting/angry groups a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. . knowing resistant anger as a resource against epistemic injustice feminists have long acknowledged the vital role emotions play in knowledge construction. as jen mcweeeny observes, feminist analyses are grounded in ‘the radical idea that angry experience is a kind of knowing experience’. this is not news. resistant epistemic communities have long recognized the transformative energy of anger that the literature on epistemic injustice curiously lorde, ‘the uses of anger’, . ahmed, the promise of happiness, . lugones, ‘hard-to-handle anger’, and . lorde, ‘the uses of anger’, . lorde, ‘the uses of anger’, . frye, ‘on anger’, . jen mcweeney, ‘liberating anger, embodying knowledge: a comparative study of maría lugones and zen master hakuin’ hypatia : (spring ), . overlooks. despite the epistemic wear and tear that hermeneutically closed systems place on disenfranchised knowers, anger-silencing spirals are epistemically rich spaces. the strength of lugones’s pluralist is that it points at once to the ways hard/heavy anger is neutralized and to the ways hard/rebellious anger is a resource pushing back against dominant ‘worlds’ of sense. so, where is the knowing resistant anger in epistemic injustice? it’s everywhere, but it often escapes our notice because non-pluralist views of anger train knowers to focus exclusively on how anger gets silenced, and not on how anger pushes back. if we shift our attention to the ‘world’-breaking hard/rebellious angry experiences (while also keeping hard/heavy anger in mind) we can better understand knowing resistant anger as a transformative creative epistemic resource. anger-silencing spirals are epistemically rich spaces. they are as paralyzing as they are transformative. paralyzing because our anger fails to get uptake, and transformative because this failure obliges us to sit with our anger and in lorde’s words, ‘listen to its rhythms’. sitting mindfully with our anger is transformative because it grounds us, reorients us, prompts us to move, and to seek out alternative epistemic terrains where our anger is intelligible. it brings us ‘back to our bodies, to the gut-level, signaling that we are in a situation that is unjust, damaging, cruel, or dangerous’. lorde’s image of anger’s rhythm highlights both the meter of our angry tones and the intelligibility of the unjust patterns that repeatedly evoke our anger– the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture. rhythms are patterns. patterns reveal structures. when we sit with anger’s rhythms we are made aware of the epistemically damaging effects practices of silencing have on us. in a recent interview with access hollywood, uma thurman was asked to comment on the prevalence of the abuse of power and sexual violence in the hollywood film industry. speaking slowly and deliberately, through gritted teeth, she responded, ‘i don’t have a tidy soundbite for you, because i’ve learned – i’m not a child – and i have learned that when i’ve spoken in anger i usually regret the way i express myself. so, i’ve been waiting to feel less angry. and when i’m ready, i’ll say what i have to say’. she sat with these rhythms and four months later spoke clearly and directly to the patterns of abuse she endured on and off the hollywood set. here’s the general idea. when we shift our attention from the hard/heavy texture of knowing resistant anger toward the hard/resistant texture of our anger its epistemic resources become visible. knowing resistant anger is transformative because it reorients us. this shift restores our courage and confidence: it prompts us to seek out new epistemic terrains where our anger is alive and intelligible. this intelligibility comes from the epistemic confidence of collectives of oppressed/silencedresisting/angry selves; and, is an essential ingredient in creation and sustenance of these resistant communities. this last point requires some unpacking. for starters, knowing resistant anger reorients knowers by alerting us to the fact that the dominator’s interpretations of our anger are not the only means of making sense of that anger. the consider how fricker drains anger from her paradigm example of testimonial injustice. she selects the anger-free hotel room conversation between marge and herbert in the talented mr. ripley rather than the water taxi conversation where marge’s clearly-focused anger is resistant and alive. anger is also drained from the courtroom testimonial exchanges in her to kill a mockingbird examples, even though it’s clear that tom robinson, a black man, must swallow his anger to be heard, and that mayella, a young white woman, uses anger to bolster her false rape charge against tom. lorde, ‘uses of anger’, . alison jaggar, ‘love and knowledge: emotion in feminist epistemology’, inquiry : ( ), . lindy west, ‘brave enough to be angry’, new york times, november, . non-pluralist interpretation of women’s anger as ‘bitchy’ or ‘uppity,’ is simply a privilege- protecting bad epistemic habit. becoming mindful of anger-silencing patterns creates a space in which to reorient our angry energy toward creating and sustaining ‘worlds’ where that anger is intelligible. in medina’s words, it offers us ‘a lucidity, to see things a fresh and redirect our perceptual habits, to find a way out of or an alternative to an epistemic blind alley’. reorienting angry knowledge requires resisting the socialized urges to make our anger heard in hermeneutically closed systems and to resist epistemic bad habit like falling back into making sense of our anger on the dominator’s terms. instead, we must challenge the urge to restore our audience’s comfort. our anger will never be at home in the dominator’s anger-silencing spirals. our anger needs a new home. it must move. but, for anger to move it needs traction, and traction requires that we ground ourselves in a particular kind of angry self– a knowing resistant angry self. returning to lugones pluralist view of angry selves we can now ask: which self is angry? the subordinate hard/heavy angry self or the resistant hard/rebellious angry self? on whose epistemic terrain is she angry? where does her anger get traction? where does it get silenced? knowing resistant anger helps us to move because is a useful instrument of cartography. it helps us to ‘see’ structure because we continually traverse epistemic terrains where our anger may or may not be intelligible. this is why uma thurman waits to tell her story. she knows that she needs to be less angry to be heard in the context of a live television interview. knowing where, when, and with whom our anger gets traction offers us spatial information about the ‘worlds’ where we are most vulnerable and the ‘worlds’ where we are most intelligible. i have a particular image for this practice. think about how dogs come to know the boundaries of the invisible fences that confine them by repeatedly testing the limits of their movements in any direction. a cartography eventually emerges from this exercise that identifies fissures in the fencing. if there are regions of the unlevel knowing field where injustice robs anger of its epistemic friction, then we must reorient ourselves, look for fissures, and move toward rougher terrain. we must gather on new ground where our knowing resistant anger is validated and its energy can be redirected productively toward justice-restoring projects. we must seek out new epistemic home terrains where oppressed/silencedresisting/angry selves can gather collectively to restore our epistemic confidence. there we can affirm how practices of silencing are harmful, as if to say ‘you should be angry! i’m angry too. together we will pool our anger in a place where it gets uptake, and we will hold firm to its intelligibility even when we are sucked back into anger-silencing spirals. we will keep alive the memory of epistemic terrains where our anger is heard, even when we are on the dominator’s terrain. together, we will not be silenced!’ next, seeking out or creating resistant epistemic ‘worlds’ where our anger is intelligible fills our bodies with confidence and courage. on hospitable epistemic terrains, knowing resistant anger can be a creative force for change. from the standpoint of epistemic injustice hard/rebellious anger is an epistemic confidence booster in the sense that it can restore a knower’s self-respect. as frye notes, ‘in getting angry one claims that one is in certain way and dimensions respectable. one makes a claim upon respect’. on resistant epistemic home terrains, our anger is heard, it gets traction, and we are made newly aware of our power, agency and self-worth. anger brings courage. medina, the epistemology of resistance, . lugones, ‘hard-to-handle anger’, - . see also frye, ‘on anger’, - . frye, ‘on anger’, . when we are angry enough to be brave we take risks. these acts of resistance are also acts of creation. consider how those of us who work for social justice continue to weather the anger- silencing spirals we find ourselves in during university diversity committees, city council meetings, or community forums on policing. one occasion stands out for me. i was at a semester- long series of meetings where department chairs were asked to respond to the campus climate report. at some point, i became aware that i was repeating myself. i realized that my claim that there are no safe spaces for students of color on campus was unintelligible to the committee. i gave up and sat with my anger. i listened to its rhythms. in that stillness i realized, ohhhhhh! it’s not that my argument is incoherent. it’s not that i’m not being clear. it’s not that i’ve not given enough evidence. either they cannot hear what i’m saying, or it makes no sense to them, or they just don’t want to hear it. the committee could not make sense diversity initiatives outside of the possible ways they could use them to rebrand the campus our campus as welcoming. no traction was possible in that space. once i realized this i walked out. i no longer yearned to make myself heard in these spaces or to restore the comfort of my audience. i looked for a new home for my anger. i approached allies after the meeting and asked them, ‘am i right about this? is this your experience too?’ they assured me it was. we shared our angry experiences and from our conversations emerged alternative epistemic communities and projects that focused directly on creating safe spaces where students of color could be heard. knowing resistant anger then, not only restores the collective epistemic confidence of angry selves, it is also an essential ingredient in creation and sustenance of resistant epistemic communities. it offers us beneficial epistemic friction because we can collectively direct that anger toward change. projects in feminist epistemology and epistemologies of ignorance have argued that when marginalized knowers encounter hermeneutical sink holes (i.e. anger-silencing spirals) that we would do well to remember that the unlevel knowing field contains alternative interpretive resources and resistant practices. yet, in academic philosophy, little attention is paid to knowing resistant anger as an alternative resource. this is tragic, because anger is central to the formation and maintenance of resistant communities. anger has a bonding effect– it provides the affective fuel that bring us together and helps to form cohesive social networks and organized movements. anger at injustice unites us because, in our moving, we come to realize that we are not alone in our anger. what first feels like an isolated subordinated anger is really part of a larger collective resistant angry experience. there are terrains where our anger feels at home, where it is supported by coalitions of oppressed/silenced resisting/angry selves. resistant epistemic communities must treat our collective knowing resistant anger (and its affective ancestry) as an epistemic resource because collaboratively it offers us epistemic traction. for this resource to be effective, however, it must be sustainable; that is, our knowing resistant anger must not exhaust itself. it must maintain the single-pointed ‘jet stream’ focus on the objects of injustice. we need not be angry all the time, but oppressed/silencedresistant/angry communities need to keep our collective anger hot and oriented towards transformative projects. our anger must remain alive and accessible, even if it only simmers gently below the surface. in lorde’s words, this anger ‘expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and for examples see hortense spillers, ‘mama's baby, papa's maybe: an american grammar book’ diacritics, : (summer, ), - . james c. scott, domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts (new haven: yale university press, ). maría lugones, pilgrimages/peregrinajes. patricia hill collins, black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of power, josé medina, epistemologies of resistance. strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who our allies and with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies’. knowing resistant anger then, counters the effects of tone/anger/knowledge management. the purpose of tone policing is to tame, discipline, and extinguish angry knowledge. the purpose of resistant epistemic and political communities is to affirm, nurture, and cultivate that angry knowledge as a resource. resistant communities are ‘worlds’ where we practice inoculating our anger against silencing practices. you can’t silence anger in an epistemic ecosystem that is designed to keep knowing resistant anger vibrant and visible. the trick here is to keep the communal memory and feeling of knowing resistant anger fresh within us when we find ourselves trapped in anger-silencing spirals. resistant communities keep anger hot by maintaining cultures where tone management and other silencing practices are ineffective. in this way, they can collectively take action based on their knowledge of epistemic injustice. it is difficult to silence anger in communities that come together around injustices that are transparent to them. think about how resistant movements in the united states, such as black lives matter, standing rock sioux water protectors, or national student walk-outs in response to gun violence have made their knowing resistant knowledge of police violence, water rights, and the impact of gun violence available to their communities to the point where that knowledge is so widespread and obvious that it has become woven into the very fabric of their epistemic home terrain. as if to say: we’ve had enough! we can’t be silenced! this stops now! don’t you dare tone manage us and spin our stories! there is no doubt that the collective anger of these communities justified and real. the purpose of this discussion has been to excavate the resistant uses of anger that circulate in anger-silencing spirals and to suggest that lugones’s pluralist account of anger offers a way of making knowing resistant anger visible as an epistemic resource. on a closing note, i want to circle back to the concern i raised in the introduction. i'm worried that accounts of epistemic injustice that fail to recognize anger’s plurality and power will continue the work of silencing, dismissing, and erasing angry knowledge as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. i worry that we have failed to heed kristie dotson’s cautionary tale that ‘when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression’. the failure to engage knowing resistant anger is not a simple oversight. as gaile pohlhaus’s work suggests, ignoring knowing resistant anger’s transformative power is itself an act willful hermeneutical ignorance that occurs ‘when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools (e.g. lorde’s transformative anger and lugones’s pluralism) developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally’. i fear that such oversights leave too many of us to wallow in epistemic despair: a condition that happens when epistemic communities swallow their anger, surrender to silence, and lose hope of ever being heard. epistemic despair drains off knowers’ resistant energies and consigns us to a world where epistemic traction is a matter of chance. lorde, ‘uses of anger’, . kristie doston, ‘a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression’, frontiers: a journal of women’s studies : ( ), . pohlhaus, ‘relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance’, . 	“on anger, silence, and epistemic injustice” 	alison bailey 	forthcoming in: philosophy. supplemental volume on 	“the harms and wrongs of epistemic practice,” 	the royal institute of philosophy [draft . . ] transmotion vol , no ( ) theodore c. van alst, jr. sacred smokes. university of new mexico press, . pp. isbn: https://unmpress.com/books/sacred-smokes/ intriguing are the ways in which one’s subjective perception of the content or spirit of a book may match or fail to mesh with the dominant hook by which it is summarized and marketed. in the case of sacred smokes, the university of new mexico press stresses the selling point of a “story of a native american gang member in chicago.” with such a cue, a potential reader might be tempted to begin making comparisons between sacred smokes and tommy orange’s smash hit novel, there there, published in within two months of sacred smokes, which centers on a cast of mostly deracinated, dysfunctional natives in oakland, california, and, on the whole, obsesses on the idea of d-printed firearms. however, such a superficial comparison would miss the mark since sacred smokes contains a great deal more depth, energy, and vitality. theodore van alst, jr.’s work is a raw, torrid bildungsroman about tough city kids and adolescents in the s and s, sometimes focusing on a fraught relationship between a father and longhair son—for example, “old gold couch” is a stone classic that will, if there is justice in this world, become anthologized and taught. with humor and pathos, van alst ponders inheritance and habits, friendship, masculinity (toxic and otherwise), rebellion, and forming a code of conduct. he considers what it means to be working class and indian in “the city of big shoulders,” to quote carl sandburg’s poem, “chicago.” there is much laughter here among the reader and characters, as we often hear teddy “laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth,” again sandburg’s words. in many ways, as i hope to show, benjamin franklin is a much more apt comparison point for this entertaining story of self-improvement and growth. the tone, style, and sentiment of sacred smokes, however, are more reminiscent of chicago writer nelson algren (the man with the golden arm; walk on the wild side), harlan ellison, junot díaz, bret easton ellis, and stephen graham jones, whose short fiction van alst collected and edited for the faster redder road. although ben franklin might be seen as an odd figure to compare with van alst, he was something of an ally to american indians since, in the s, franklin praised the manners and customs of new england indians, contrasting them with the ubiquitous chicanery of exploitative american settlers in “remarks concerning the savages of north america.” sacred smokes is incredibly funny and compelling, and its voice is lively and freely digressive, almost always in a good way. it is vibrant and vital, brimming with confidence and brio. these are apparently the author’s life stories which, while they may be embellished or fictionalized, seem to be derived from his impoverished upbringing in chicago. sacred smokes could be called a story cycle, or a novel, but it has the heart of a memoir. it has no evident political agenda; it just tells amazingly funny, surprising, heartbreaking, and sometimes violent stories with a sense of the joy of storytelling—and of living. it is somehow both hard-boiled and emotional, hilarious and poignant. one punchy story ends, and immediately the eye is caught by the opening line of the next, pulling the reader further. this is a great chicago book, one that recollects the edgy s and s, the street-fights and shenanigans at pottawattomie park, and gang fashion fetishes to die for, perhaps literally. van alst elaborates the semiotics of gang sweaters, which were bright, outrageously colorful varsity-style cardigan sweaters, in two categories of “war sweaters” and “party sweaters,” which became war trophies. the narrator explains: “back then https://unmpress.com/books/sacred-smokes/ michael snyder review essay: sacred smokes those cardigan-style sweaters were the shit—they were everything. those were your colors” ( ). sacred smokes shares the nelson algren vibe in its romantic celebration of those on the margins of society as the salt of the earth, and its depiction of those in power as grotesque, greedy animals. for example, older gang members who had done time were likely some of the best people the narrator had ever known, even up to the present. the book seems to implicitly echo sandburg’s challenge: “come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning” (sandburg - ). another innovative aspect that merits mention is the novel’s striking use of unorthodox typography and gothic fonts and crown icons when referring to gang names, which are often turned upside down. the university of new mexico press must be praised for the book’s design by felicia cedillos, which is hip and contemporary; the cover painting in the leger art tradition is by blackfoot artist, lauren monroe. sacred smokes, although undoubtedly a great work of contemporary native american literature, extends and updates some enduring tropes and traditions in american literature and culture. it is actually quite benjamin franklin-esque, which, again, might seem like a surprising comparison to make about an edgy, “gang-related” work of chicago fiction, but hear me out. in this book, the protagonist rises from poverty and urban squalor through initiative and hard work. through his father and other figures, such as his employer at a local italian restaurant, teddy learns diligence and practical skills, eventually lifting himself out of poverty through his intelligence and willpower. we should note that the author is a success story, an associate professor and the chair of native american studies at the university of montana, and a former assistant dean and director of the native american cultural center at yale university, among other distinctions. this book is not a vindictive gripe-fest about oppression and racism. in the book, racial antipathy flows in multiple directions; thin-skinned white readers, though i doubt they are reading transmotion, might whine that, with a couple of exceptions, every white or “whiteish” character in this book is of poor character, avaricious, repellent, grotesque, and usually worthy of the scathing, on-target satire, beating, or bullet he receives. but this is, after all, a book that begins with an epigraph from the report of an indian agent in , writing that the blackfeet (sihasapa) band of sioux, from whom van alst seems to be descended, along with the honepapas (hunkpapa), were “continually warring and committing depredations on whites and neighboring tribes, killing men and stealing horses. they even defy the great white father, the president, and declare their intention to murder indiscriminately all that come within their reach. they, of all indians, are now the dreaded on the missouri” (van alst, n.p.). however, white people are also seen as a group who generally live well, who saw something they wanted, and took it; growing up working-class, teddy is envious, and wishes to have what they have. at the same time, he does not paint the world as one that categorically denies success and its trappings to people of color, though it presents special challenges to them. rather, the world of this book is somewhat nietzschean; the world is indifferent, and can be absurd, but individuals who exhibit drive, intelligence, and the will to power find ways to improve themselves. in frigid chicago, dwelling in a marginal neighborhood, teddy would often dream of the “warm air at night” of the west coast, we are told in “push it” ( ). he imagines the trio of characters in the nicholas ray film rebel without a cause famously played by james dean, sal mineo, and natalie wood, at the griffith park observatory in los angeles: these kids could be make-believe parents too someday, less than zero parents, sure, but they’ll have kids of their own, and they’ll live in nice houses, ones with year-round azaleas transmotion vol , no ( ) and pools and tiled roofs, and they’ll have that warm air at night and, shit, well i want that too, how the fuck is it these people get that, claim that, own that, like it was left at their doorstep and they just had to take it, no questions asked? where and what, after all, is justice but someone taking some goddamn initiative any goddamn way? ( , my emphasis) it is a bit nietzsche and quite franklin in the sense that teddy learns the lessons of thrift, diligence (industry), innovation, and reading habits that are counseled by franklin in his autobiography and in his iterations of old richard’s almanac. teddy first learns a lesson the hard way in “old gold couch” when he neglects to do his chore, washing the stacks of dishes in the sink, day after day, until this negligence finally prompts his father to do something shocking and drastic. the lesson sinks in. (this story also includes a wonderful allusion to gordon lightfoot telling stories “from the chippewa on down about the big lake they call gitchigoomi” ( ); the pop culture references are wide and knowing). continuing the franklin theme, in “lordsprayer” the protagonist’s father tasks teddy with memorizing “the lordsprayer” before he can go out, and the experience of being given a new challenge, and using one’s abilities and ingenuity to meet the challenge and reach one’s desired end is another life lesson from dear ole dad, who, though often drunk and undemonstrative, yet conveys some bits of wisdom and advice to his son over the years. thanks to his “lesson in memory,” in the future, ted is able to memorize swatches of critical theory, such as the excerpt from vizenor’s manifest manners he memorized decades later (anthologized in the norton anthology of theory and criticism), which becomes a meta-commentary on the book we are reading: “postindian autobiographies, the averments of tribal descent, and the assertions of crossblood identities, are simulations in literature; that names, nicknames, and the shadows of ancestors are stories is an invitation to new theories of tribal interpretation” (qtd. in van alst ). germane to sacred smokes, vizenor also writes in manifest manners: “the postindian simulations and shadows counter the dominance of histories and the dickered testimonies of representations; at the same time, trickster stories, transformations, and the shimmers of tribal consciousness are heard in the literature of survivance” ( ). like ben franklin and sherman alexie, teddy always has his nose in a book, an avid reader who thirsts for knowledge, as seen in “great america.” (one story is about the tragedy of a friend’s illiteracy.) in “blood on the tracks/no mas,” teddy shows how he learned lessons of thrift from his father, who gave him a dollar a week. by necessity, he learns how to stretch nickels and dimes, and when pennies aren’t going far enough, he takes a job at an italian restaurant and works his ass off. he learns how to cook all kinds of things, which is a lesson he applies daily in cooking for his family, the narrator says, and he boasts that, decades later, he even pleases martha stewart with one of his scrumptious sangies (sic). in “push it,” teddy embodies the american virtues of innovation and entrepreneurship. after hitchhiking to new orleans with a friend and becoming stranded temporarily, while hanging out in a bar, a “handsome white man” with a heavy new orleans accent asks him what he’s up to. teddy says nothing much, he’s broke. the man asks if he has any skills, and teddy replies that he paints faces. the man gives teddy a twenty-dollar bill. teddy buys the face paint, hits the streets, works hard, makes a hundred bucks, and gives the handsome white man forty in thanks for his twenty-dollar loan. “i knew you be good for dis. good job, bwai” ( ). even though we see michael snyder review essay: sacred smokes teddy intermittently drinking and occasionally snorting lines, he yet embodies franklin’s virtue of temperance in the sense that he rejects the cannabis haze that many of his young peers often settled into, wishing to be more present and motivated. given that sacred smokes and there there were published within a few months of each other and are both about urban indians, it is impossible not to compare their relative merit here. there there does not compare favorably to sacred smokes, although it has been widely acclaimed by follow-the-leader book reviewers and perpetrators of “book-chat,” as gore vidal put it. although readers i know and respect, both native and non-native, have privately noted their disappointment in discovering a gap between the novel’s merit and its critical accolades, it would seem this assessment is an “incorrect” view that usually remains unuttered and that editors fear to publish. relentlessly dark, contrived, and weak in characterization, this oakland novel is notable mostly as a critical and commercial triumph for a new native american writer, not for literary or aesthetic excellence. its author seems to have been unaware of much of the rich history of native american literature that preceded his bestseller. when he was writing it, despite the fact that n. scott momaday’s house made of dawn ( ), the famous novel that kicked off the native american renaissance, is partly set in los angeles, and several later novels by writers such as vizenor, alexie, janet campbell hale, and louise erdrich had urban settings, orange believed that the urban indian experience had never been portrayed in literature, “as far as [he] could tell,” as orange told mother jones last year. the novel fortuitously benefitted from, first, good timing: its publication was contemporaneous with the decline of the #metoo-ed sherman alexie—who is referenced in sacred smokes as the subject of a talk given by the grown-up narrator at a native american literature symposium panel in the presence of his aunties. second, there there benefitted from marketing savvy and major-press muscle: a bright orange and yellow cover reminiscent of a traffic cone matches the memorable moniker “tommy orange,” which is a great brand name like tommy hilfiger, orange julius, or billy collins. such branding was instilled in orange growing up in an embarrassing way: “i very much knew i was white because my mom is white. she has orange hair, her last name is orange, we had an orange van at one point,” orange told the cbc. of course, it is not nice to make fun of someone’s name, but this is transmotion and i am liberated to do so by the spirit of gerald vizenor with his precedent of, among many other satiric depictions, mocking ojibwe aim leader and cocaine dealer clyde bellecourt as coke de fountain in his novel, the trickster of liberty ( - ). the trickster spirit of vizenor similarly flows through sacred smokes. just as the media in the early s tripped over themselves to glorify and cover the “right on” actions of aim, a group that vizenor criticized at length, so today does the media, focused on identity politics but fairly ignorant of questions of literary quality, bend over backwards to hail there there as this new literary sensation. blazoned on the cover are two big feathers (natch) that clearly signify “indian” to the potential book buyer noticing stacks of the book in an airport or barnes & noble; and an-easy-to-remember title that makes facile reference to both radiohead and gertrude stein but connotes an urban indian’s yearning for indigenous land that was expropriated and covered up with pavement and railroad tracks. although there there is well-plotted, it is ultimately a workmanlike, nihilistic novel with little in the way of a redeeming message. it seems as influenced by an episode of as much as any literary work (though the brief and wondrous life of oscar wao sometimes comes to mind), with everything closing in suspensefully on the transmotion vol , no ( ) oakland pow-wow. the novel’s cast is just as ill-fated as the crew of the pequod in moby-dick, but less memorable in that some of its multiple dysphoric narrators and characters can sometimes blend together. there there is premised in tragic victimry, to use gerald vizenor’s phrase, giving many white and other non-native readers the opportunity to submerge in guilt and despair over how fucked-up these urban indians are, and really, how degrading life is in general. that sense of tragic victimry critiqued by vizenor, who is quoted early in van alst’s book, is exactly what is elegantly avoided in sacred smokes. there there makes the reader feel bad, but many of its readers want to feel bad, as in lo, the poor urban indian! yet the literati so wanted a replacement for sherman alexie. but this kind of thinking, of there being a place for just one special american indian writer known to the mainstream, is insidious and ignorant, when currently there is a boon of talent including van alst, tiffany midge, erika t. wurth, and natalie diaz, to mention just a few. this raises the question, why is a so-so book such as there there enjoying mega success with knopf, while van alst’s markedly superior sacred smokes was published by a southwestern academic press? though it has received awards such as the tillie olsen award for creative writing, in comparison its audience is much smaller and more reliant on word of mouth. unquestionably, it deserves a much wider readership. overall, sacred smokes is an inspirational story that is simultaneously raw and poignant and, in an odd way, an instructive tale illustrating the virtues of diligence, innovation, and applying one’s native talents. theodore van alst, jr. has created an exciting, compelling, and major work of literature. michael snyder, university of oklahoma works cited cbc radio. “‘i grew up knowing what i was, was a conflict’: tommy orange writes about challenges facing ‘urban indians.’” unreserved. september . www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-new-native-renaissance- . /i-grew-up-knowing-what-i-was-was-a-conflict-tommy-orange-writes-about- challenges-facing-urban-indians- . . franklin, benjamin. autobiography of benjamin franklin. . ed. frank woodworth pine. new york: henry holt, . www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm. ---. “remarks concerning the savages of north america.” . founders online. national historical publications and records commission. founders.archives.gov/documents/franklin/ - - - . oatman, maddie. “the stars of this stunning debut novel are a long way from the reservation.” mother jones. may/june . https://www.motherjones.com/media/ / /tommy-orange-there-there-native- americans-oakland-urban-indians- /. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-new-native-renaissance- . /i-grew-up-knowing-what-i-was-was-a-conflict-tommy-orange-writes-about-challenges-facing-urban-indians- . https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-new-native-renaissance- . /i-grew-up-knowing-what-i-was-was-a-conflict-tommy-orange-writes-about-challenges-facing-urban-indians- . https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-new-native-renaissance- . /i-grew-up-knowing-what-i-was-was-a-conflict-tommy-orange-writes-about-challenges-facing-urban-indians- . http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm https://founders.archives.gov/documents/franklin/ - - - https://www.motherjones.com/media/ / /tommy-orange-there-there-native-americans-oakland-urban-indians- / https://www.motherjones.com/media/ / /tommy-orange-there-there-native-americans-oakland-urban-indians- / michael snyder review essay: sacred smokes orange, tommy. there there. new york: knopf, . sandburg, carl. “chicago.” . poetry. poetry foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/ /chicago. vizenor, gerald. manifest manners: narratives on postindian survivance. lincoln: university of nebraska press, . ---. the trickster of liberty: tribal heirs to a wild baronage. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, . http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/ /chicago rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed- methods study susan rees,   lisa simpson, clare a mccormack, batool moussa, sue amanatidis to cite: rees s, simpson l, mccormack ca, et al. believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed- methods study. bmj open ; :e . doi: . / bmjopen- - ► prepublication history for this paper is available online. to view these files, please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bmjopen- - ). received september revised june accepted july school of psychiatry, faculty of medicine, university of new south wales, sydney, new south wales, australia community health, sydney local area health district, sydney, new south wales, australia correspondence to dr susan rees; s. j. rees@ unsw. edu. au research © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re-use permitted under cc by-nc. no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. strengths and limitations of this study ► the study’s descriptive data support existing ev- idence and offer new knowledge concerning girl’s disclosure of sexual abuse to parents and family members, and the association with adverse mental health outcomes. ► the qualitative method complied with guidelines for qualitative research, facilitating the description of rich case examples that illustrated some key as- pects of the nature of mentally harmful disclosure experiences, including being ignored, not believed, and threatened. ► we acknowledge the non-representative nature of the sample which limits the generalisability of our findings to the wider population of women who have been sexually abused. ► the sample size limits the extent to which the quan- titative data could be analysed, noting, however, that the objective in using the mini-international neuropsychiatric interview was to provide an ad- junct to the clinical interview in systematically re- cording relevant common mental disorders. abstract objectives sexual abuse is a strong predictor of future psychiatric problems. a more nuanced qualitative understanding of mental health outcomes, in the context of interpersonal responses from family members towards survivors after sexual abuse, may help to better inform prevention and interventions. design a mixed-methods approach included a qualitative timeline method to map and identify contextual factors and mediating emotional responses associated with mental disorder following sexual abuse. setting participants were adult survivors of sexual abuse, seeking support from the sexual assault counselling service, sydney local health district, australia. participants thirty women years and older with current or past mental disorder or symptoms were interviewed between august and may . outcome measures a qualitative timeline interview and the mini-international neuropsychiatric interview (mini, . . ) were applied. results the mini prevalence of current post-traumatic stress disorder was . % (n= ) and of major depressive disorder was . % (n= ). more than half ( %) reported suicidal ideation at some time in their lives. women exposed to childhood sexual abuse reported being ignored, not believed, or threatened with retribution on disclosing the abuse to others, usually adult family members, at or close to the time of the violation(s). participants described experiences of self-blame, betrayal, and psychosocial vulnerability as being the responses that connected negative disclosure experiences with mental disorder. participant accounts suggest that these reactions created the foundations for both immediate and long-term adverse psychological outcomes. conclusion a more in-depth understanding of the type and emotional impact of negative responses to disclosure by parents and other family members, and the barriers to adequate support, validation and trust, may inform strategies to avert much of the longer-term emotional difficulties and risks that survivors encounter following childhood abuse experiences. these issues should receive closer attention in research, policy, and practice. introduction the #metoo campaign symbolises a belated gender revolution, potentially transforming the pervasive culture of silence and disbelief regarding the sexual abuse of women into one of open public disclosure and acknowl- edgement. in the wake of global revelations concerning the predatory behaviour of men in positions of power, including in the medical profession, there is an unprecedented oppor- tunity to break the silence for all women exposed to abuse. this potential change in public health policy will be facilitated by supporting research capable of providing more precise data concerning the impact of experiences of abuse on the mental health of survivors across the lifespan in a manner o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjopen- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access that identifies key milestones and their consequences in the aftermath, specifically in relation to the sequence of disclosure, family responses to these revelations and the impact of the latter on mental health outcomes both in the immediate and longer-term. an important ques- tion that requires more precise definition and analysis concerns the nature of interpersonal responses from family members and the extent to which negative reac- tions to sexual abuse disclosure play a role in exacer- bating adverse mental health outcomes. we applied an in-depth qualitative timeline method to plot the chrono- logical relationship of key traumatic events, interpersonal reactions to disclosure, and the mental health of the girl or young woman over her lifespan. participants were women attending a hospital-based sexual assault counsel- ling service in sydney, australia. there is ample evidence that sexual abuse is widespread among women. a meta-analysis of prevalence studies found that % of adult women globally report exposure to sexual abuse in childhood. a now substantial body of epidemiological evidence confirms a robust association between exposure to sexual abuse and the occurrence of a wide range of common mental disorders and adverse psychosocial outcomes among women victims, particu- larly related to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), and suicidal behaviour, occurring both in the short and longer term. – whereas many women are resil- ient and able to avoid the negative mental health impacts of sexual assault, epidemiological data indicate that the risk of such adverse outcomes following abuse is high. as such, preventing childhood sexual abuse represents an important focus for public mental health programmes aiming to improve mental health. a further strategy that may avert adverse mental health outcomes is to ensure that girls and young women who disclose sexual abuse are believed and supported in a manner that increases their security and safety. despite the limitations of the retrospective method, it may be possible to obtain vital information from adults concerning the chronology of events and interpersonal reactions to disclosure after childhood sexual abuse. for example, retrospective reports indicate that young girls are at high risk of sexual abuse and commonly experience the first onset of mental disorder soon after the event, in many instances a reaction that can lead to recurrent or chronic symptoms. as time progresses, the sequence and interaction of mutually reinforcing factors can become complex, particularly in relation to sexual revictimisation, exposure to other forms of trauma and stressors, and the persistence or relapse of mental disorder; a pattern that can become lifelong and lead to substantial disability. these observations suggest that early therapeutic inter- ventions, that is, soon after the first exposure to abuse, may be critical to preventing this harmful trajectory. there is some evidence indicating that when young girls and women are believed and responded to in an appropriate manner following disclosure of sexual abuse, further intervention, such as the provision of counselling, is more likely to be successful. conversely, studies have reported an association between negative disclosure experiences and higher risk of onset of mental disorder, such as ptsd. as yet, however, there are few studies that have sought to qualitatively understand the possible range of sexual assault disclosure responses from parents and relatives (the most likely confidantes), the survivor’s associated emotional reaction and subsequent mental disorder as she progresses into adulthood. in addressing this issue, it is important to specify the way key terms are applied. the term ‘sexual abuse’ in our study is used in accordance with the who’s defini- tion. it refers to all forms of sexual assault including rape or attempted rape, unwanted sexual contact, or being subjected to threats to perpetrate such acts. we use the terms ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ interchangeably according to the context. the terms ‘mediating emotional responses’ and ‘mechanisms’ are both used to describe emotional reactions following disclosure and leading to mental disorder. mental disorder and associated symptoms refer to common categories identified in the present study, as elicited by a structured diagnostic instrument, and confirmed in spontaneous accounts of symptoms and asso- ciated disability provided by participants in the course of qualitative interviews with professional counsellors expe- rienced in making these diagnoses. the reference point for recording symptoms is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders-iv given that this remained the classification system in use in clinical settings during the course of this study. reactions to disclosure from family members in principle, it would be expected that disclosure of abuse may offer the first step to emotional recovery for the girls or young women in that the emotional support and accurate attribution of culpability to the perpetrator will assist in overcoming feelings of isolation and poten- tial feelings of self-doubt and shame associated with the event. yet disclosure often evinces unsupportive reactions by others, particularly in childhood when one third of these abuses are reported. girls and young women often delay disclosure for legitimate reasons including anticipation of a negative response from confidantes, and a sense of internal resistance associated with feelings of shame or guilt. although it is recognised that parents may not provide an appropriately supportive response to disclosures by children, the precise nature and psycho- logical impact of their responses from the perspective of the survivor require further definition. by tracing the chronological sequence in narrative accounts of events and reactions, it may be possible to throw more light on the relationship between disclosure experiences and the unfolding of mental health outcomes in the short-term and longer-term following abuse. several studies have attempted to identify a measur- able relationship between disclosure experiences, mental disorder, and the risk of revictimisation. a specific focus has been on negative disclosure, the o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access woman’s experience of shame, and the risk of ptsd symptoms. – from a qualitative perspective, the focus has been on disclosure of sexual abuse to professionals and service providers, – but these studies have tended not to include sufficient details regarding mental health outcomes in victims. for example, a study identifying either supportive or hostile responses by others to disclo- sure indicated that this experience influenced the survi- vor’s future decision-making regarding making further disclosures of abuse. other qualitative studies have focused primarily on the dynamic factors that impede or promote disclosure of child sexual abuse, including victims feeling conflicted about their own responsibility for the abuse (this relates to self-blame, discussed below), and anticipation of being blamed or disbelieved. most studies examining the nature of the responses from family members during childhood have focused on their disbelief. less attention has been given to attribution of overt blame directed at the victim, and at the extreme, threats made by confidantes, for example, warning the victim that the disclosure will put the safety and the stability of the family as a whole at risk, in order to actively censor or silence the child. being exposed to, as well as anticipating, doubt from others can cause women to internalise shame and guilt relating to the event. these feelings of self-blame may be difficult to counter in counselling given victim culpability remains pervasive in society. women, for example, have had to defend themselves in court against claims of culpability because they were drunk, too trusting, or acting provocatively. self-blame, reinforced by social norms that attribute responsibility solely to the perpe- trator, may therefore act as a powerful mediator of enduring psychological and mental health outcomes in victims. it is possible that relevant pathways to self-blame, and the issues reinforcing that tendency, are not suffi- ciently explicated in contemporary counselling practices. other pathways leading from disclosure to mental disorder the experience of betrayal is a further factor that may mediate the impact of sexual assault on mental health. ‘betrayal trauma’ has been applied where the perpetrator breached trust that should have been expected in the rela- tionship with the victim. less attention has been given to a sense of betrayal experienced when it is the confi- dante, rather than the perpetrator, who ignores, blames, or silences the victim of sexual abuse. this situation may be particularly confronting to a child, for example, when the disclosure is made to a parent or other older family member in whom the young person has invested complete faith and trust. one of the recognised consequences of early childhood sexual abuse is that victimised women may also be at risk of revictimisation in later life. an important question is whether negative disclosure experiences play a mediating role in the sequence of events that lead to that outcome over the life course. using a qualitative approach based on a narrative account of the timeline of events and reac- tions therefore may assist in clarifying these issues. aims in our qualitative study, we aimed to elicit the survivor’s own spontaneous account of the responses of family members to disclosures of sexual abuse; how the survivor in turn responded emotionally to the family member’s reaction; and, the influence of that sequence to the unfolding of mental health and related psychosocial problems through later development. to better under- stand the interpersonal complexity of the survivor’s experiences, we applied a qualitative methodology that would enable survivors to explore their experiences in a confidential one-on-one setting with skilled counsel- lors; a process guided by an explicit timeline approach (described hereunder). the specific objectives of the study were to: . document the mental health profile of a cohort of women seeking support from a sexual assault service. . enable disclosure of the sequence of events and re- sponses, and underlying mechanisms, especially re- lated to the disclosure experience, that may have in- creased risk of mental harm following sexual abuse. we therefore included women experiencing at least one of the common mental disorders assessed. . generate new knowledge that would assist in promot- ing trauma-informed practice in the sexual assault and wider mental health field. methods informing theory the study complies with consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research standards for qualita- tive and mixed-methods research (coreq). in rela- tion to the substantive methodology, our study was grounded in the narrative history approach directed in this instance to issues of exposure to sexual assault and subsequent experiences of mental disorder over the course of the woman’s lifespan to date. we aimed to examine reactions and responses to disclosure within a gender-informed rather than a purely psychological framework. – a gender framework offers the capacity to combine information garnered within a clinical context with knowledge regarding the wider social factors that may lead to adverse disclosure experiences following sexual abuse, for example, negative parental responses when a child discloses, and the tendency for female victims to resort to blaming themselves. our inquiry drew impetus from and resonates with the contemporary #metoo movement which has garnered a groundswell of commitment to support the right, and indeed necessity, to speak out about the sexual abuse of women in a manner that critiques the abuse of power in male–female relationships. our intention was to extend the focus of attention to women who explicitly are neither rich nor famous. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access we also apply empirical phenomenology to value women’s experiences. the principles of empirical phenomenology hold that a scientific explanation must be grounded in the first-order meanings and experi- ences of the actors; in this case, women who have been sexually abused. these theoretically supported aims substantiate the importance of a qualitative exploration. patient and public involvement the study was designed and led by mental health profes- sionals with skills in working with sexual assault victims. patients and the public were not specifically involved in the planning and design of the study, however the research focus on disclosure was shaped by the perspec- tives of the participants in the course of the broader inquiry. this encouraged participants to explore their historical narratives from a personal and spontaneous perspective, and to offer explanations and speculations regarding the pathways leading from experiences of sexual assault to mental disorder and wider psychoso- cial difficulties over the course of their lives. women attending the sexual assault service were introduced to the study by sexual assault counsellors. the affirming process of sharing stories in the course of our study was noted by their counsellors who continued to consult with women in sessions following the research interview. participants were asked if they would like to receive information or provide feedback on the study prior to the final analysis. a final report was then sent or made available to all subscribing participants, and the current article will be shared with participants when it is published. sampling we applied a criterion-based sampling strategy to recruit participants at the sexual assault counselling service, located in the community health service of sydney local health district. women who met inclusion criteria were years or older whose last experience of sexual assault had occurred at least month earlier and were judged by their counsellors to not be in an immediate emotional crisis that could be worsened by participation. in addition, they met criteria for at least one of the current mental disorders assessed (see here- under). a woman with a current psychosis was excluded due to difficulty in obtaining a clear narrative (n= ). the team manager met with sexual abuse counsellors to request that they inform eligible clients about the study aims and its value in assisting researchers to understand more about the relationship between sexual assault and mental disorders. clients expressing agreement were then contacted either in person or by phone by research assistants who provided full information about the study and sought consent from those willing to participate. interviews and data analysis were undertaken itera- tively, with sampling ceasing when further interviews produced a high level of informational redundancy, which, in keeping with our broad predictions, occurred once interviews had been conducted. procedure two experienced mental health professionals were employed as research assistants; one was a social worker and the other a psychologist. the social worker was employed in the sexual assault service which was the recruitment site. the sexual assault service counsellors were engaged by their social work colleague to inform potential participants about the study. the social worker then followed up with clients who agreed in the pres- ence of their counsellor that they wished to be further informed about the study prior to signing consent. consenting participants were subsequently interviewed by one of the two research assistants. research assistants applied the mini-international neuropsychiatric inter- view (mini; v. . . ) via face-to-face interviews as an adjunct to clinical interviews in order to systematically document symptoms of common mental disorders. we used the timeline qualitative interview method (described below) to enable the counsellor and partic- ipant to work together to define actual timepoints where major events occurred (sexual assault, disclo- sure, the victim’s emotional response and her attribu- tion regarding the impact on the onset and course of mental disorder). interviews took place in a private room within the central sydney sexual abuse counselling service’s offices, with only the interviewer and participant present. interviews were not audio-taped, but detailed notes were written directly onto the visual timeline map and separately recorded by the interviewer (see time- line method). timeline method the qualitative method involved a timeline format aimed at facilitating the mapping and identification of contextual factors and potentially mediating emotional responses associated with the onset and course of mental disorder following sexual abuse. on a large sheet of paper, the researcher and participant worked together to plot on a visual timeline the events and emotional reactions of interest to the study, adding extensive notes regarding each element of interest relating to the sequence. the method enabled in-depth recording of interpersonal interactions and the survivor’s emotional responses and their associations with mental disorder symptoms across the life-course. a key focus was on the description of events that hindered or helped recovery after the sexual abuse, and those which may have increased the risk for mental disorder or multiple sexual assaults across the lifespan. specific disclosure experiences that were recorded occurred spontaneously with no prompting by the counsellor. this method enabled researchers to draw tentative temporal connections between the events (sexual abuse), the response of the interpersonal world and the survivor’s psychological state, allowing for an o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access box sample characteristics ► number of all participants (all survivors of sexual abuse): . ► mean age: years (n= ). ► married or in marriage-like relationships: % ( out of ). ► bachelor level or higher university degree: % ( out of ). ► paid employment: % ( out of ). ► experienced rape and/or sexual violence perpetrated by someone not previously known to them: % ( out of ). exploration of how each factor might have influenced or impacted on the others. the timeline interview method and procedure is described in an online report. within the mixed- methods approach, the qualitative interview was the primary data source because it provided an account of the descriptive and interpretive associations of women’s personal and interpersonal experiences as they affected mental health outcomes following sexual assault. to maintain a specific focus in this paper, we do not include disclosure experiences in extra-familial settings such as in schools, healthcare services or law enforcement. analysis spss version was used to derive mental disorder prevalence rates. qualitative data were managed using nvivo (qsr international). data were entered, coded and labelled as themes in nvivo. data were examined for patterns and sequences directly from large sheets of paper containing the timeline of events and notes. the following steps are consistent with the qualitative data analysis literature. we familiarised ourselves with the data, a process which involved reading and re-reading the data, writing down impressions from the quotations and notes taken during the timeline interview, looking for meaning and determining which data conferred value according to the research questions. themes or patterns that consist of ideas, concepts, behaviours, interactions and phrases were identified and a ‘code’ was assigned to those data. qualitative studies often use quotations to support themes located in the data. in our study, the histor- ical and social context associated with any quotations from participants was vital to the aim (to identify path- ways and mechanisms linking the sexual assault and mental disorder over the life course). on that basis, large transcripts that demonstrated these pathways and mechanisms were entered into nvivo, which was used to organise the data, assign the coding and explore further thematic connections. on examining the data, the researchers were able to identify illustrative vignettes that represented the themes of interest. two research assistants independently identified the themes and sequential patterns. although the domi- nant themes were those most often or most compel- lingly presented, dissonance and ambiguity in the data were judged as potentially valuable in that they helped provide a richer understanding of the contextual and interpersonal factors relevant to our research ques- tions. minimal discrepancies emerged between the two analysts and these were systematically reconciled via discussions with a third rater. in keeping with our research aims, we describe vignettes (rather than short participant quotes) to more accurately highlight the mechanisms or the sequence of significant events and related psychological responses. ethics ethics approval was granted by the south western sydney local health district human research ethics committee ( / ). personnel, training and supervision female research assistants with a master’s degree or higher in social work or psychology were selected based on their clinical expertise in counselling and advocacy for women affected by sexual violence, their capacity to reach a high level of technical proficiency and reliability in collecting data, and their commitment to strict ethical standards. data were collected by two research assis- tants, who were also investigators. the research assistants completed a -day training course on the application of research methods. the team gave priority to ensuring that the study proce- dure provided an affirming and positive experience for participants. referrals to other services, such as specialist mental healthcare, were made if the need was identi- fied during the research interview, however all patients were receiving current ongoing clinical care through the recruitment site, a sexual assault counselling service. researchers had no connection with participants’ clin- ical care, and data collected for the purposes of the study were not made available to their counsellors. results demographic and sexual abuse profile demographic characteristics of the sample of women are shown in box . mean age of participants was years and % were in paid employment. in almost half the participants, sexual abuse occurred for the first time in childhood. disclosures of child sexual abuse were most commonly made during childhood to family members. our study suggests that negative disclo- sure experiences during childhood are more strongly associated with mental disorder than those made in adulthood. mental health profile mini-international neuropsychiatric interview we derived diagnoses using the mini neuropsychiatric interview supplemented by symptoms disclosed qualita- tively during the interview, with the aim of producing a descriptive profile of the help-seeking sample’s mental o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access table distribution of disclosure experiences according to confidante/authority confidante/authority disclosures: ignored disclosures: blame or threat number (%) number (%) police ( ) ( ) parents* ( ) ( ) other close family members* ( ) ( ) fiancé/boyfriend ( ) ( ) school counsellors ( ) ( ) total ( ) ( ) *study analysis focused on parents and other close family members. health status. having any mental disorder was an inclu- sion criterion for recruitment to our study. ptsd preva- lence was . % (n= ) and major depressive disorder was . % (n= ) with substantial overlap or comorbidity as expected. qualitative interviews self-reported mental health symptoms during qualita- tive (timeline) interviews provided further insight into the manifestations and course of symptoms, and these qualitative reports provided a high degree of endorse- ment of the parallel findings obtained from the mini. sixteen participants ( %) reported suicidal ideation. almost all ( %) with suicidal thoughts reported onset of these urges following sexual violence including child- hood sexual abuse. nine women ( %) had attempted suicide. depressive symptoms occurred in ( %) of the participants at some time following sexual violence. ( %) participants described depressive symptoms prior to the sexual violence. comorbid symptoms of panic disorder and other anxiety symptoms were also commonly described. dominant themes childhood exposure to sexual abuse associated with subsequent mental health problems and risk of exposure to sexual abuse in adulthood nearly half of the cohort had experienced childhood sexual abuse, either from a family member or from someone known to them but living outside the home. in cases of childhood abuse occurring outside the home by someone previously known, there was almost universal evidence of general neglect in the care and protection of the child in the family. ten participants ( %) with early childhood sexual abuse reported revictimisation as adults. as indicated by the details provided hereunder, being ignored, overtly blamed or threatened for the abuse following disclosure appeared from analysis of the time- line interview data to be most closely associated with onset of subsequent mental disorder symptoms and future risk for sexual abuse. mechanisms linking the disclosure response to the mental disorder were provided by the participants who described feelings of self-blame, psycho- social vulnerability or betrayal as being the emotional responses that connected negative disclosure experiences with mental disorder. being ignored or not believed instances of being ignored involved either no verbal or emotional response by the confidante (adult member of the family) or lack of any action taken after the revelation was made. lack of emotional or verbal response or action by a parent or relative was commonly perceived by the victim as not being believed and/or that the parent failed to demonstrate appropriate care. a participant reported that when she disclosed the abuse to her father, he ‘went into denial and shut down’. she felt ‘very let down and hurt’ by his response. self-blame was often described as a response to being ignored or not believed at the point of disclosure. in the aforementioned case, the family members to whom the child disclosed appeared to accept the perpetrator (uncle) and his view of events. the perpe- trator’s perspective was that the victim lied about the sexual assault, and that she was ‘crazy’. the victim subse- quently blamed herself for the abuse: ‘i felt like it was my fault. like i had given him the wrong message.’ partici- pant (age at time of sexual abuse, uncle perpetrator). distribution of disclosure experiences seventeen of the participants reported negative disclo- sure experiences (table ). note that two participants reported two disclosures in the ignored category. five participants reported negative disclosures in both catego- ries ( + = ). being blamed blame by family members was often explicit and appeared to be strongly associated with subsequent feelings of self- blame, overt symptoms of mental disorder and suicidal ideation or attempts. responses of blame included confi- dante statements such as ‘it is your fault because you were drunk’ (participant ) or ‘you shouldn’t have trusted him’ (participant ). being threatened disclosure was in some cases met with a direct threat, for example: ‘if you say anything it will tear the family apart’ (participant b). the implication was that any negative impact resulting from the disclosure (particularly on the family) would be the victim’s fault. threats made by the confidante in relation to potential harm to the family were therefore associated with self-blame. participant a also experienced a deep sense of betrayal related to a breach of previously assumed trust and support from the relative who responded to her disclosure with a claim of bringing shame on the family. protective and recovery factors are described in a previously published report drawing on data from the o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access present sample. the sentinel markers for positive change, including alleviation of mental health symptoms, appeared to be exposure to empowering approaches in counselling that challenged a sense of self-blame. other helpful factors were supportive friends who provided an alternative voice that clearly located culpability with the perpetrator, finding a meaningful and fulfilling occupa- tion, effective criminal justice outcomes in the prosecu- tion of the perpetrator and, in some instances, the use of antidepressant medication to relieve mood disturbances and hence support re-engagement with social activities. vignettes timeline interviews are intentionally selected to examine temporal associations between factors, such as sexual abuse and mental disorder. data would lose its intended meaning and effect if decontextualised into short illustra- tive quotes to communicate the findings, as is common in qualitative studies. we have therefore selected two vignettes with the aim of illustrating the phenomenolog- ical mechanisms linking the key events of interest, that is sexual abuse, disclosure and mental illness. participant a in participant a’s case, sexual abuse was first perpetu- ated by a family friend and then by her uncle. common themes in this vignette were disclosure that was ignored, blame and threat of harm to family if the survivor spoke out. the participant made a direct association between negative disclosure-related experiences with those who should have been caring and supportive, and a deeply felt sense of betrayal ultimately leading to self-harm and a suicide attempt. her abuse experiences started at years of age. the participant told her father about sexual abuse by a ‘family friend’ who lived nearby. her father at the time did not respond to her disclosure. his refusal to respond was evidenced by his silence, and that he continued to be friends and socialise with the perpetrator, including inviting him into their home. participant a felt that her father did not believe her or did not want to believe her. participant a was also sexually abused by her uncle. she disclosed the abuse to her aunt at age . her aunt responded to the disclosure by not believing her story and admonishing her for the claim. the aunt then told partic- ipant a that if ‘other people knew what happened (it) would bring shame on the family.’ the participant later found out (in early adulthood) that her aunt knew of the uncle’s history of sexual violence at the time she disclosed to her. she felt deeply betrayed and uncared for. despite not having any evidence to the contrary to shape her views, the participant had a deep sense of knowing that what had happened to her ‘was wrong’. she associated the failed attempt to seek validation and support from her father and then her aunt with a profound sense of betrayal that became destructive. she said these feelings were directly related to subsequent attempts to self-harm. she left home as a teenager. the trauma and despair led her to attempt suicide. the suicide attempt resulted in hospitalisation, yet the participant did not disclose her history of childhood sexual abuse to medial authorities. she said that in hindsight she felt ‘resentment at the system that failed to protect me’. social isolation led to her being a more vulnerable target for bullies at school. she started using drugs (‘a lot of weed’) to cope with sexual abuse, bullying and isolation. one turning point in the participant’s life was the experience of feeling part of a family and valued as an individual. she was ‘taken in’ by a friend’s mother. the experience of a recovery was associated with ‘support from someone who…. reflects on the things about you that are good. someone who notices your milestones and recognizes your transitions. who also knows when you fucked up and intervenes to help you’. the effects of abuse, related betrayal and isolation continued to affect her throughout her adulthood. she described feeling ‘lost and vulnerable’ and related this to repeated bouts of depression and panic disorder. participant b participant b’s story illustrates the predominant theme of not being believed, threat of harm to the family, self- blame, substance use and mental disorder following sexual abuse. participant b was sexually abused by her brother at age . she recalls him telling her that if she told anyone it ‘would tear the family apart’. she internalised a fear of damaging the family and instead blamed herself for the abuse. at age , she told her parents about the brother’s sexual abuse. they minimised the abuse and she said there were no repercussions for him. no one mentioned it to her again. by the age of , she had developed an eating disorder which she now associates with the self-blame and self-loathing she experienced following the sexual abuse and particularly the absence of having someone to tell her that it was abuse and not her fault. the disorder involved binging and purging food, as well as restricting food intake. she was taken to a psychiatrist, who asked if she had been abused by anyone. she remembers saying no because she felt she could not share the memories she had with him. in the early teenage years, her eating disorder persisted and she started self-harming. she explained, “it was a release and it was soothing in a weird kind of way”; and, “when i cut myself, i could feel the adrenalin, and then i would feel relaxed.” she began using cannabis which she said helped her feel better. at the age of , she again told her parents about sexual assault by her brother. they quickly dismissed her revelation and told her that she was ‘having a nightmare’. following the disclosure and their response, she experienced insomnia. she said sleep deprivation compounded feelings of self-blame. in early adulthood she suffered from psychosis. the o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access participant said medication and strategies to ‘manage my overwhelming feelings’ were strengthened by under- standing the connection between the denial of abuse and the damaging effects of self-blame. she has resumed contact with her parents and has communicated more to them about the sexual abuse from this new vantage point. she said that her mother is finally ‘realising more what happened to me now’. discussion the insidious nature and high prevalence of sexual abuse have received recent media attention following revela- tions concerning violations enacted by celebrated and professionally powerful male perpetrators. these cases have generated important public discussion; neverthe- less, it is vital to ensure that the focus on sexual abuse by those in positions of power is not confined to those with celebrity and professional status—it is, in fact, a pervasive public health problem across the lifespan for women. this is the first study to undertake in-depth qualitative plotting of interpersonal experiences based on a visual timeline which allowed documenting and elabo- rating on the possible mediating factors in the sequence of sexual abuse, disclosure experiences in relation to family members and women’s mental health across their life. the qualitative data pointed strongly to an associa- tion between negative disclosure responses and adverse mental health and social outcomes over the course of the woman’s life. our sample was criterion-based in order to meet the objectives of the study, that is, the women were attendees at a specialised sexual assault service, and all had at least one lifetime common mental disorder. the novel time- line methodology facilitated the collection of in-depth and unique information that can be applied to inform future studies in the field. common responses to nega- tive disclosure experiences involving family members included being ignored, a reaction which has been described as ‘disbelief’ in other literature; and for the survivor to be explicitly blamed for the abuse at the point of disclosure. we also identified a response to disclo- sure characterised by threat from the confidante, usually the parent. threats following disclosure included that the alleged sexual abuse would bring harm to the family in some way. both vignettes described a threat of harm to the victim’s family related to the disclosure. we identified possible psychological mechanisms leading from negative disclosure experiences to mental harm. we describe a phenomenological mechanism, where self-blame and at times guilt were associated with being ignored or blamed after disclosure. our findings highlighted how feelings of betrayal, associated with the trusted parent or relative responding negatively to the disclosure, may be psychologically harmful to the survivor. previous research has focused on the sense of betrayal relating to the perpetrator being a trusted attachment figure. the present study demonstrates that a different form of betrayal arises when there is a negative disclosure response by a previously trusted family member. overall, our study illustrates the potentially important role that negative disclosure experiences play in gener- ating persisting psychosocial vulnerability in the survivor. women encountering negative disclosure experiences reported an array of adverse psychosocial outcomes in their subsequent lives including social isolation, drug- taking, recurrent or persisting mental disorder and future risk of abuse, including bullying at school. a general state of psychosocial vulnerability that persists over time may be an important foundation for understanding the risk for adult revictimisation in child survivors of sexual abuse. the period immediately following a disclosure, there- fore, may prove to be a critical window where survivors are particularly susceptible to effects of either helpful or harmful interventions by confidantes. informing communities and families promoting education and awareness relating to the risks and consequences of sexual violence against children is vital as a public health measure. parents need to better understand the importance of responding with affirming and caring responses should they be confronted with disclosures. for this to occur, public campaigns are needed to encourage society as a whole to work towards breaking the silence that protects perpetrators and obscures the pervasive harms caused by sexual abuse against children and women. our study also indicates the need for readily available legal and welfare interventions where families knowingly fail to protect or overtly intimidate or threaten children who disclose sexual abuse. early detection of at-risk chil- dren remains a challenge, particularly in families where silence in relation to abuse is the pervasive response. detection will be facilitated by achieving a high level of awareness and vigilance in identifying hidden sexual abuse and possible negative disclosure experiences across the full array of health, education and welfare profes- sionals most likely to be in contact with children exposed to these violations. trauma-informed care a trauma-informed care approach assists in ensuring that all healthcare practitioners and community agencies are uniformly aware of the psychological and social effects of sexual abuse, and providing them with the knowledge and skills to respond to the needs of the survivor. special training should be provided to identify and respond to negative disclosure experiences. our data offer frontline responders to childhood and adult sexual assault survi- vors, including social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners and police officers, a deeper under- standing of the possible experiences of survivors who may have been exposed to negative disclosure experiences. in that respect, practitioners need to be apprised of the common types of disclosure responses that their client or patient may have encountered, and to inquire into o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ rees s, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access and respond appropriately to possible feelings of self- blame, betrayal and psychosocial vulnerability. inquiring into negative disclosure experiences may be particularly important when survivors have shown a pattern of recur- rent or persisting mental disorder, for example, symp- toms of ptsd or depression, and/or show a persisting pattern of psychosocial vulnerability such as substance abuse, suicidality and a risk of revictimisation. societal change at a society wide level, cultural and institutional change are needed to overcome denial and silence as a response to sexual abuse occuring in the family. in that sense, from a feminist perspective, there is a close nexus between persisting regressive community values and the microcosm of the family in which gendered victim blaming and silencing occurs, the most likely loca- tion for a sexually abused child’s first disclosure. the contemporary focus on celebrities and professionals in relation to the global movement to speak out therefore needs to be generalised to everyday life. in summary, the contemporary public interest in sexual violence, steered by the #metoo movement, has potential power in promoting public acknowledgement of men’s culpability rather than women’s responsibility. the impetus needs to be harnessed at the community level to overcome denial and victim blaming in the home. in addition, practical responses within services, such as the adoption of a trauma-informed care model, will assist with the incorporation of more targeted inter- ventions for survivors who have been subject to negative disclosure experiences. @susanjrees study reveals negative disclosure experiences of sexual abuse to family members, and how these are linked to mental disorder. acknowledgements we thank the courageous women who shared their stories and experiences with us. we also thank the counsellors and staff at the sydney local health district sexual assault counselling service for assisting us with the study. contributors all authors meet the icmje criteria for authorship. sr had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. study concept and design: sr, ls, sa. acquisition of data: sr, ls, cm. analysis and interpretation of the data: sr, ls, bm, cm. drafting of the manuscript: sr. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: sr, bm, sa, ls, cm. obtaining funding: sr. administrative, technical or material support: sa, bm. funding australia’s national research organisation for women’s safety ltd / anrows rg . disclaimer the lead author and guarantor sr affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. ethics approval ethics approval was given for the study by human research ethics committee, liverpool hospital, nsw, australia . approval number: hrec/ /lpool/ . provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. data sharing statement data are available upon reasonable request. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, 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:e corr . doi: . /bmjopen- - corr open access correction: believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed-methods study rees s, simpson l, mccormack ca, et al. believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed-methods study bmj open ; :e . doi: . / bmjopen- – . this article was previously published with an error. reference was incorrect. the correct reference is as follows: . hegarty, k., tarzia, l., rees, s., fooks, a., forsdike, k., woodlock, d., simpson, l., mccormack, c., amanatidis, s. ( ). women’s input into a trauma-informed systems model of care in health settings (the with study) final report (anrows horizons / ). sydney: anrows. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . /. © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re-use permitted under cc by-nc. no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. bmj open ; :e corr . doi: . /bmjopen- - corr correction http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjopen- - corr &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - 	believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed-methods study 	abstract 	introduction 	reactions to disclosure from family members 	other pathways leading from disclosure to mental disorder 	aims 	methods 	informing theory 	patient and public involvement 	sampling 	procedure 	timeline method 	analysis 	ethics 	personnel, training and supervision 	results 	demographic and sexual abuse profile 	mental health profile 	mini-international neuropsychiatric interview 	qualitative interviews 	dominant themes 	childhood exposure to sexual abuse associated with subsequent mental health problems and risk of exposure to sexual abuse in adulthood 	being ignored or not believed 	distribution of disclosure experiences 	being blamed 	being threatened 	vignettes 	participant a 	participant b 	discussion 	informing communities and families 	trauma-informed care 	societal change 	references 	/content/bmjopen/vol /issue /pdf/e corr .pdf 	correction: believe #metoo: sexual violence and interpersonal disclosure experiences among women attending a sexual assault service in australia: a mixed-methods study                city, university of london institutional repository citation: blumell, l. orcid: - - - and huemmer, j. ( ). reassessing balance: news coverage of donald trump’s access hollywood scandal before and during #metoo. journalism, doi: . / this is the accepted version of the paper. this version of the publication may differ from the final published version. permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ / link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/ . / copyright and reuse: city research online aims to make research outputs of city, university of london available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. urls from city research online may be freely distributed and linked to. city research online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk city research online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk reassessing balance: news coverage of donald trump’s access hollywood scandal before and during #metoo journalism – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / lindsey e. blumell city, university of london, uk jennifer huemmer ithaca college, usa abstract sexual abuse became an important part of news coverage in the months leading up to donald trump’s presidency and continued to dominate news cycles with the emergence of the #metoo movement. yet, it remains to be seen whether the increasing amount of stories about sexual abuse have actually advanced social justice. we conducted content and textual analyses of newspaper, cable television, and online coverage of the access hollywood scandal before and during the #metoo movement (n = ) to understand how the journalistic objectivity norm of balance via issue dualism influenced reporting on sexual abuse. television and right-leaning media had the highest levels of rape myth acceptance in their coverage for both time periods. the use of issue dualism advantaged trump as bill clinton and other prominent accused men shifted focus away from trump and largely overlooked the women coming forward against trump. the objectivity norm of balance reduced and politicized this complex issue, as well as gave power to trump’s retaliation while minimizing the serious accusations that have been brought against him. keywords #metoo, access hollywood tape, donald trump, issue dualism, news coverage, objectivity, rape myth acceptance background on october , an access hollywood pre-interview tape of then reporter billy bush and donald trump was anonymously leaked wherein trump described his actions toward women, including the statement, ‘grab ‘em by the pussy. you can do anything’ (bullock, : ). within weeks of the leaked tape, some women had come forward to accuse trump of sexual abuse (jamieson et al., ). the coverage of the access hollywood scandal was mainly negative against trump, particularly in the first week after its release (blumell, ; blumell and huemmer, ). media attention to trump’s admitted and accused sexual abuse functioned as a platform for survivors to come forward, many for the first time. nonetheless, trump went on to successfully win the election and little has been heard from his accusers since. after the access hollywood scandal, several high-profile cases of various forms of sexual abuse have dominated headlines, culminating in the #metoo (france, ) and #timesup (www.timesupnow.com) movements. ‘me too’ was created by tarana burke in to give voice to survivors of sexual violence (www.metoomvmt.org). it became a popular hashtag after the harvey weinstein case (farrow, ) broke in october ( year after the access hollywood tape release). since then, several powerful men have been implicated across many sectors in the entertainment, food, sports, news, and tech industries. in politics, nine us congress members from both the republican and democratic parties have resigned so far in the wake of #metoo over allegations (cranley, ) – a number which will most likely increase. nevertheless, #metoo does not seem to have impacted trump. introduction the torrent of news stories about workplace harassment and sexual violence toward women in the last year has forced many media outlets to confront the ‘rape culture’ that continues to permeate our social structures. rape culture is a societal acceptance and justification of male sexual and physical violence, explicitly against women (buchwald et al., ). rape culture fosters strong beliefs in rape myths – both in how sexual abuse happens and who gets attacked (weiss, ). it should be noted, sexual abuse includes all forms of sexual violence (rape and assault), harassment, and misconduct. rape myths posit survivors as liars, while defending and pitying the accused for facing such allegations (payne et al., ). as a result of rape culture, sexual abuse often goes unreported, and survivors are silenced with fear of what may happen to them if they speak out (burnett et al., ). rape culture can be further exacerbated when survivors accuse someone who is in the public eye, since scrutiny and media attention usually ensues. the news industry largely espouses rape culture when reporting on sexual abuse (jordan, ; pennington and birthisel, ). even though rape is considered a serious crime, journalists often trivialize public sexual abuse cases (moore, ), exaggerate false reporting (jordan, ), and victim blame (o’hara, ). these shortcomings are, in part, because of sexist attitudes by journalists and sexism in newsrooms (e.g. fadnis, ). however, we purport further investigation is needed into the professional objectivity norms of journalists, which are used under the premise of achieving ethical, unbiased standards in journalism (tuchman, ), but in actuality contribute to a hegemonic status quo (shoemaker and reese, ) – this case, namely, the reification of rape culture. this study uniquely addresses rape culture present in news coverage by specifically looking at objectivity through the lens of balance, or the common routine of telling both sides of a story (tuchman, ) known as issue dualism (lee et al., ). we examine the case of trump’s admitted and accused sexual abuse before and during #metoo to understand how issue dualism was used and to what extent it contributes to rape culture in news coverage. two time periods are used to investigate whether news coverage changed due to the uncovering of several high-profile sexual abuse cases or the #metoo movement. for this study, we created a rape myth acceptance index consisting of five variables: negative adjectives and descriptions used in relation to those accusing trump (e.g. she is a liar), threats by trump to accusers, threats by others to accusers, negative consequences of coming forward, and whether or not sexual abuse was reported as a serious crime. the index was informed by payne et al.’s ( ) rape myth acceptance scale, which includes the following rape myths: ( ) ‘she asked for it’, ( ) ‘it wasn’t really rape’, ( ) ‘he didn’t mean to’, ( ) ‘she wanted it’, ( ) ‘she lied’, ( ) ‘rape is a trivial event’, and ( ) ‘rape is a deviant event’ (p. ). the analysis includes major cable news networks (cnn, fox news, and msnbc), national print newspapers (the new york times, the washington post, and usa today), and the most shared articles from online sources (according to online analytics tool buzzsumo.com) to show the complexities and, at times, paradoxes of news coverage. by including different media, we add to research, which is primarily focused on print only. the medium can result in different routines and coverage (shoemaker and reese, ), and accordingly, we looked at how rape culture via objectivity manifests in three different media. the sample also includes a range of partisanship (left leaning, centralist, and right leaning) to understand how political leanings can also influence news coverage. objectivity in the news objectivity as a ‘moral code’ in journalism (schudson, : ) evolved in the united states over several decades through various economic, scientific, political, technological, cultural, and social advancements (for further details, see boudana, ; schudson, , ). the introduction of the penny press in the mid- th century, for instance, commercialized newspapers – changing them from primarily serving a political party (partisan) to being a voice for the public (schiller, ). commercialized newspapers were also bigger operations, which created a need for professional standards in journalism (schiller, ) such as objectivity routines such as source use, fact checking, formatted writing or the inverted pyramid, and so forth (shoemaker and vos, ). in part, these routines developed as a defense by news organizations to avoid public scrutiny and backlash (shoemaker and reese, ). schudson ( , ), notes that the term objectivity solidified in the early th century when public relations and world war i propaganda challenged journalists’ beliefs in public institutions and the notion of truth. objectivity then became a mantra and method by which journalists claimed to detach themselves from their reporting (schudson, , ). objectivity in journalism has since been challenged in the united states. political developments such as mccarthyism and the vietnam war led to questioning detachment (boudana, ). during the civil rights movements in the s, some labeled objectivity as a veiled source of power and privilege of the press (carey, ). indeed, allan ( ) explains that emphasizing objectivity has promoted the acceptance of universal truths in journalism, which have been predominately defined by men (mostly elite and white). thus, ‘men’s orientations … constitutes the standard by which truth and falsity are to be impartially measured’ (pp. – ). so, even when accepting journalists can never be fully detached or neutral, agreeing on universal criteria in order for journalists to be objective (boudana, ) is problematic, given the hegemonic status quo cultivated in journalism (shoemaker and reese, ). nevertheless, boudana ( ) contends objectivity is a journalistic performance rather than an absolute – which journalists can better implement through self- awareness, diversity in the newsroom, and thoughtful use of language. balance tuchman ( ) identified four defensive objectivity routines of journalists: issue dualism, supporting evidence, direct quotes, and a standardized story structure (inverted pyramid). we focus on issue dualism, which is explained as a way for journalists to create balance in their reporting (lee et al., ). issue dualism can be useful, but it problematically stresses the opinions of a few (mostly politicians) who can then determine the reality of situations (beckers et al., ; entman, ; tuchman, ). issue dualism also tends to present news episodically (iyengar, ), which neglects important context to stories (applegate, ). this reductionist approach oversimplifies and polarizes issues by presenting them as only having two sides (condit, ; wahl-jorgensen et al., ). it also promotes the routine of sources telling the sides of a story so that journalists can claim detachment (tuchman, ). sources mix opinions and facts when interviewed by journalists, which limits evidence-based claims in news coverage (cushion and lewis, ). relying on ‘balanced’ opinions rather than evidence conflates issues, for example, the autism–vaccine controversy (clarke et al., ), climate change (boykoff and boykoff, ), rising sea levels (opt and low, ), and so forth. news coverage of these cases have juxtaposed overwhelming consensus of scientific evidence against opinions or political positions. as a result, achieving news balance and reporting facts are sometimes in direct conflict – to which balance often wins (hackett, ). rape culture in the news although there is a growing body of research on how sexual abuse is covered in news, more is needed on how rape culture manifests within news coverage. of course, the two are interrelated; however, focusing on rape culture within news coverage of sexual abuse can give insight into its continuous shortcomings vis-à-vis issue dualism. it is important to note that sexual abuse can happen in various combinations both between and within genders; however, we emphasize the most common dynamic of sexual abuse ( ‘victims of sexual violence: statistics’, n.d.), where a man is a perpetrator and women the survivors, since it is the scenario of our study. rape culture is upheld in the news industry through both the attitudes of journalists and the rape myths perpetrated in news coverage of sexual abuse (jordan, ). this area has limited research, but fadnis ( ) reported rape culture in indian newsrooms. for instance, there is an overemphasis on false reporting, which consequently reinforces the stereotype that women are natural deceivers (jordan, ; waterhouse-watson, ). journalists also fail to acknowledge the existence of rape culture, specifically, the power dynamics involved in rape culture, as found in the steubenville high school rape case (pennington and birthisel, ). furthermore, analysis of print coverage on sexual abuse found patterns of victim blaming and dismissing the crime (moore, ; o’hara, ). in other words, journalists use rape culture to judge the severity of sexual abuse and whether or not a victim is worthy of public support, such as ardovini-brooker and caringella-macdonald ( ) found examining popular magazines. worthington ( ) suggests news coverage of sexual abuse improves if a broader range of stories are reported on (acquaintance rape), rape myths are avoided, patriarchal power dynamics are acknowledged, and more survivor perspectives are included. carll ( ) adds more follow-up coverage on the consequences of sexual abuse against women and the different kinds of abuse women experience is also necessary. research questions we analyzed rape myth acceptance within news coverage of the access hollywood scandal by creating a five-variable index. importantly, we sought to understand whether or not the #metoo movement changed news coverage, thus decreasing the prevalence of rape culture in reporting. accordingly, the first research question sought to understand whether the greater context of change surrounding sexual abuse impacted coverage of the access hollywood scandal: rq : how does coverage differ before and during the #metoo movement in terms of rape myth acceptance? to focus on how issue dualism manifests in a case of a high-profile man accused of sexual abuse, we also examined the sample according to medium and partisanship by asking the following: rq a: how does coverage differ between tv, print, and online sources in terms of issue dualism? rq b: how does coverage differ between the partisanship of media in terms of issue dualism? methods we utilized a mixed-methods approach to answer our research questions, which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches (e.g. tashakkori and teddlie, ). mixed methods are used as a way of balancing the weaknesses of each type of method because ‘collecting diverse types of data best provides a more complete understanding’ (creswell, : ). specifically, we used explanatory sequential mixed methods which first utilizes a quantitative method, followed by qualitative exploration (creswell, ). for this study, we conducted a quantitative content analysis followed by a textual analysis. content analysis sampling to maintain equivalency between three different media, we used relevance sampling, which krippendorff ( ) explains is when researchers choose sources they determine have the highest impact in terms of circulation, prestige, and access to resources. krippendorff ( ) notes that although oftentimes overlooked, most studies include some form of relevance sampling. in this case, we used circulations of national print newspapers (‘cision’, ) to choose usa today, the new york times, and the washington post. we also used cable network ratings (joyella, ) to choose fox news, msnbc, and cnn. third, we used buzzsumo (an online analytics tool that measures facebook, linkedin, twitter, pinterest, and google+) to pick the most shared articles relating to our topic during the sampled period (shares ranged from . k to . million). the first time period spanned from october (day the access hollywood tape was released) to february ( weeks after accuser summer zervos filed a defamation lawsuit against trump). the second time period was year later, october to february . sample articles and transcripts for the newspapers and tv sources were collected by searches in lexisnexis using combinations of keywords: trump, access hollywood, sexual assault, and sexual (to include harassment and misconduct). once collected, duplicate and irrelevant articles were eliminated leaving each source with the following for the first time period: cnn ( ), the new york times ( ), the washington post ( ), msnbc ( ), fox news ( ), and usa today ( ). the same search words were then used in buzzsumo to collect the top articles (four were duplicates from traditional media and so eliminated) for a total coded sample of n = . in addition, online articles were coded by how the source self-identified politically as left-leaning ( ), moderate ( ), or right leaning ( ). the same pattern was followed for the second time period with the following results: cnn ( ), the new york times ( ), the washington post ( ), msnbc ( ), fox news ( ), and usa today ( ). the same search of top articles was made again, but reduced to after duplicates and faulty hyperlinks were removed. online articles were once again coded as left leaning ( ), moderate ( ), or right leaning ( ) for a total of n = . combined, the total sample was n = . code development an a priori design was used by first developing a codebook before coding began (neuendorf, ; riffe et al., ). to measure rape culture acceptance, five dichotomous variables were developed to form an index. the first variable relates to negative comments about the women who came forward (attacks on her character, negative points of her past, or negative points of her current actions). examples include she is lying, she is ugly, she is seeking fame, she actually wanted it, or she has an unsavory profession. this variable was created based on rape myths, which position accusers as untrustworthy or with dubious intentions (payne et al., ). a second variable measured threats from trump, which mainly consisted of promises to sue the women. third, threats from others were measured, which included melania trump’s promise that the women would be sued. for both categories, threat was defined by, ‘a statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or not done’ (oxforddictionaries.com). threats were included in the index because part of rape culture is acceptance of retaliation against survivors (burnett et al., ; weiss, ). it is expected for men to be aggressive and violent (buchwald et al., ). fourth, reported negative actions were coded such as a woman losing her job for coming forward as a way of measuring the consequences women face for coming forward. finally, a category was created to code for dismissing all forms of sexual abuse as not being a serious crime, for example, stating that the case was a distraction. this was included since a rape myth is that sexual abuse is not a serious crime (payne et al., ), one that gets repeated in news coverage with high rape culture acceptance (pennington and birthisel, ). other variables were also created including media identification, media type, mention of bill clinton, and mention of trump accuser’s name. in order to ensure validity of rape culture acceptance, a factor analysis was run after the coding was complete. results show a kaiser–meyer–olkin of . and a significant bartlett’s test of sphericity (χ ( ) = . , p < . ). factor loadings were grouped together according to . or higher levels (see table ). since, other threats and negative action to survivor were not significant, they were eliminated. the three remaining variables were then combined to form an index. intercoder reliability two coders sampled articles or transcripts from all three media sources. recal (dfreelon.org) was used to calculate intercoder reliability. after the first round, the variables ‘negative comments’ (π = . ), and ‘trump threats’ (π = . ), ‘mention of bill clinton’ (π = . ), and ‘mention of trump accuser’s name’ (π = . ) achieved acceptable levels. two other variables and categories received higher than percent agreement but low pi levels, and, therefore, after additional discussion and training, the second round of coding also included potentially more varied coding units to make up for the high percentage agreement but low coefficient level (neuendorf, ). results for the second round of coding included acceptable levels for the ‘other threats’ (π = . ) and ‘negative actions’ (π = . ) variables. after further explication, a third round of coding resulted in acceptable levels for the ‘dismiss’ variable (π = . ) and the other variables (⩾. ). textual analysis a textual analysis of the same sample was conducted once the content analysis was complete. a textual analysis examines the characteristics contained within texts, and through a qualitative approach, focuses on the meaning of the texts (frey et al., ). the two coders read each article or transcript at least twice. the first read was to code for the quantitative variables, and the second read was to highlight specific sections that related to the research questions posed. kuckartz ( ) describes the first phase of qualitative analysis as open coding, which researchers are looking for the answers to specific questions. kuckartz ( ) suggests that this phase includes a line-by-line reading by more than one coder (they should have background knowledge of the subject). given the large size of the sample, selective coding (van waes et al., ) was also employed to identify the sections of the texts that directly relate to the research questions. after the complete sample was highlighted, both researchers examined the highlighted texts and discussed their initial interpretations together. they then individually organized the highlighted texts into categories relating to the research questions and identified subsequent themes for each category. they then compared their findings and finalized the categories and themes together. while the content analysis revealed how frequently rape myths and, by extension, rape culture were perpetuated in the coverage, the textual analysis provided a nuanced understanding of how and in what ways these problematic elements manifested. for example, while many news outlets referenced bill clinton in their coverage of trump’s scandal, the textual analysis revealed how the underlying tone and intention of this coverage differed between right-leaning media to moderate and left leaning media. findings we used an integrated approach to presenting our quantitative and qualitative results, which has been done in previous communication studies in order to simultaneously answer the research questions using both methods (e.g. english, ; melki and mallat, ). some change, but not for trump rq asked whether the coverage differed before and during the #metoo movement in terms of rape culture acceptance. to answer this quantitatively, an independent t test was first run between the two sampled time periods and the rape culture acceptance index, with significant results, t( ) = . , p < . . the first time period was significantly higher (m = . , sd = . ) than the second (m = . , sd = . ). two one-way anvovas were then run to compare the three media types during the first time period and the second. for the first time period, results were significant, f( , ) = . , p < . , partial η = . . post hoc bonferroni test comparisons revealed that tv (m = . , sd = . ) had significantly higher levels than print (m = . , sd = . ) or online media (m = . , sd = . ). there was no significant difference between online and print. there was also significance for the second time period, f( , ) = . , p = . , partial η = . . interestingly, post hoc bonferroni calculations showed that while tv (m = . , sd = . ) was still significantly higher than print (m = . , sd = . ), online (m = . , sd = . ) actually increased and was significantly higher than tv and print media. qualitative comparisons further supported the results, particularly when considering the changed positioning of trump and his tail wagging tactics (which dominated news coverage). tail wagging refers to the expression, ‘tail wagging the dog’, which means a powerful organization (in this case, the press) being unduly influenced by someone (see merriam-webster.com). during the first time period, trump engaged in several public strategies that fed into rape culture acceptance and were broadcasted on tv continuously. trump’s tactics were also reported in print, but often summarized. examples include calling the women who came forward liars, threatening to sue them, insulting their appearance and character, and dismissing his recorded confessions of sexual assault. in an address at gettysburg, trump said, ‘total fabrication. the events never happened. never. all these liars will be sued after the election is over’ (quoted in diamond and scott, october ). in another example, in what trump described as an apology video, he softened the seriousness of the situation by calling the tape ‘locker room talk’ (brown, ). consequently, almost all coverage included the term (m = . ). downplaying the incident as locker room talk builds on the myth that ‘boys will be boys’ and their mischief is both inevitable and innocuous (weiss, : ). prominent trump surrogates were clear to emphasize that point, like rudy guiliani’s comment to cnn’s jake tapper, ‘men at times talk like that’ (quoted in state of the union, october ). some of the coverage clarified this was not merely locker room talk, including professional athletes like pitcher sean doolittle who argued, ‘as an athlete, i’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker room talk’ (quoted in howard, october ). nevertheless, the underlying sentiment permeated news coverage as illustrated by usa today deputy editor david mastio’s statement, ‘it’s not shocking that frat boys would talk dirty about scoring with chicks … but men should grow out of it before they are eligible to join aarp’ (quoted in mastio and lawrence, october ). however, the inclusion of the term ‘locker room talk’ fell dramatically during the second time period (m = . ) – but remained most salient in online articles, which partly accounts for its increase of rape culture acceptance ( % of total articles). another noticeable change was how the term locker room talk was used. while the first period included the term mostly as a direct quote from trump or his surrogates, it was mainly used for tv and print in the time period following the #metoo movement as a way to illustrate how the term was problematic. specifically, rachel crook, a woman who came out against donald trump, stated, ‘i shared my story last year because it was relevant’. mr. trump dismissed his words in the ‘access hollywood’ tape as locker room talk but having been the victim of such actions i knew better (quoted in cnn newsroom, december ). crook and fellow accuser jessica leeds went on to discuss the #metoo movement: ‘and it became apparent that in some areas, the accusations of sexual aggression were being taken seriously and people were being held accountable. except for our president’ (quoted in cnn newsroom, december ). overall, though the #metoo movement may have changed the context of the access hollywood scandal and exposed some high-profile abusers, the decreased level of rape myth acceptance did not mean that trump was no longer tail wagging, but rather doing so less frequently and with a shifted focus. most prominently, after the new york times reported that trump had privately said he thought the tape was fake (martin et al., ), it made headline news. in particular, percent of online news coverage focused on it. trump even claimed at one point it was actually hillary clinton’s voice (borowitz, ). illustrating that while there was a positive change in terms of a lower rape culture acceptance, trump is still able to dictate coverage. it’s a political issue first one last quantitative calculation was run to understand possible coverage differences before and during the #metoo movement: two one-way anovas between the rape culture acceptance index and partisanship. the first time period resulted in significance, f( , ) = . , p < . , partial η = . . a post hoc bonferroni test indicated that rightleaning media (m = . , sd = . ) was significantly higher than left-leaning media (m = . , sd = . ), but not moderate (m = . , sd = . ). there was no significance between left-leaning and moderate media. the second time period also produced significant results, f( , ) = . , p < . , partial η = . . this time, however, right-leaning media (m = . , sd = . ) was significantly higher than moderate (m = . , sd = . ) and left- leaning (m = . , sd = . ) media, with once again no difference between moderate and left-leaning media. not surprisingly, the right-leaning media’s use of rape culture acceptance as a justification for defending trump was also demonstrated by the qualitative findings. during the first time period, right-leaning online articles sought to disparage the women who came forward against trump. in fact, online articles from right-leaning sources specifically attempted to vilify the women who spoke out against trump. the comments often included sentiments such as, ‘isn’t it ironic that only three weeks before the presidential election, two women come forward claiming donald trump sexually assaulted them, one of which was over years ago?’ (quoted in binder, october ). in terms of traditional right-leaning media, fox news chose different strategies: avoid the subject by having little coverage, distract the audience by discussing bill clinton (more below), and dismiss the severity of the tape. these strategies are summarized by the following statement made by sean hannity on october , ‘i asked you, why would the words of donald trump mean more than the actions of bill and the smearing by bill and hillary?’ on occasions when fox news was forced to confront trump’s actions, they frequently downplayed the severity by attempting to highlight bill clinton’s actions as much more severe. tipping the scales to those in power the final research questions addressed the use of issue dualism. since the sample was based on trump’s admitted and accused sexual abuse, he is not surprisingly featured in percent of the coverage. as discussed above, trump used that to his advantage by engaging in tail wagging techniques that served to change the focus of the coverage. one such trump strategy was to point to the accused behavior of bill clinton (brown, ). the press followed suit by often including bill clinton, the husband of trump’s presidential opponent, as the ‘other side’ of the story. logically however, the reductionist approach of issue dualism ought to include those coming forward to accuse trump of sexual abuse. consequently, to understand issue dualism in this case, both the mentions of trump accusers and bill clinton were calculated to identify their prominence in comparison with trump. the medium matters rq a sought to understand to what extent bill clinton and trump accusers were covered regarding media types. chi-square statistics were run by year, with significant results (using standardized residuals with a level of at least + or − . ). table shows the percentage breakdowns. in the first time period, coverage differed in relation to featuring trump accusers, χ ( ) = . , p < . and bill clinton, χ ( ) = . , p < . . tv featured the accusers significantly less and bill clinton significantly more. online, however, featured the accusers significantly more and bill clinton significantly less. in the second time period, coverage also differed, but only significantly for bill clinton, χ ( ) = . , p < . . once again, tv featured bill clinton significantly more, and online featured him significantly less. there was no significance for coverage of the accusers in the second time period, averaging . percent for all combined media. while print coverage was less than tv, it did commonly feature bill clinton, mostly through trump’s direct quotes and reporting on trump’s predebate news conference, which featured three women accusing bill clinton of sexual abuse, and one rape survivor who wanted to expose hillary clinton for being a defense lawyer in her court case (healy and martin, ). for instance, the washington post cited bill clinton accuser juanita broaddrick as saying, ‘trump may have said some bad words, but bill clinton raped me and hillary clinton threatened me’ (quoted in delreal, october ). interestingly, bill clinton did not have strong viral appeal in the online coverage for either time period, but trump accusers and survivors generally did for the first time period. this was, in part, due to the attention that online coverage gave to social media reactions to the access hollywood scandal. the biggest being when canadian author kelly oxford asked women to share their stories of sexual assault on twitter, which received over million replies (domonoske, ). oxford’s tweet was a precursor to the #metoo hashtag that also received over million tweets (park, ) and became the label of the current movement to end all forms of abuse against women. besides the use of direct quotes on tv, that again feature trump’s tail wagging by discussing bill clinton, another reason why tv has higher percentages of featuring bill clinton is the use of panel debate on cable news. in these panel debates, trump surrogates (who were especially featured on cnn and fox news) took every opportunity to use bill clinton as a way to shift focus from trump. another reason for more discussions of bill clinton on tv is that hosts and contributors invoked issue dualism in their preambles and commentaries, but with different motivations: fox news to condemn bill and hillary clinton, cnn as a way to report ‘both sides of the story’, and msnbc to rebuke trump for using bill clinton. for example, comparing how the networks responded to trump’s first mention of bill clinton in his apology video, while all three heavily focused on bill clinton, they did so differently. fox news host sean hannity was quick to ask, ‘ … if we really care about the issue, the treatment of women … which the media has never asked hillary … why did she sit silent when her husband was doing this in the white house?’ ( october ). cnn host jon berman stated, ‘and in that statement, which they call an apology, he, of course, takes on bill clinton’ (quoted in anderson cooper , october ). msnbc host lawrence o’donnell, however, chastised trump for his tactic, ‘that is the apology of a snake trying to pretend that what he had to say on that video is somehow bill clinton`s problem’ ( october ). another msnbc host, chris hayes was perplexed that trump surrogates also used bill clinton, ‘ … they somehow think that the invocation of bill clinton is just universally exculpating’ ( october ). consequently, despite the resolve of networks such as cnn to name trump’s behaviour as ‘sexual assault’, their efforts to portray both sides of the issue often detracted from their attempts to unequivocally condemn sexual assault. by highlighting the voices of trump surrogates and concentrating on bill clinton, the voices of actual survivors of sexual assault became less compelling as the narrative was reframed to focus on the political horse race. even in the second time period, when bill clinton was not featured as prominently, other prominent men took his place that span entertainment (e.g. harvey weinstein), news (e.g. matt lauer), and politics (e.g. al franken, roy moore). like bill clinton, these men were used (mostly inadvertently) to reduce trump’s accused and confessed sexual abuse by lumping him in with others. although not originally anticipated, document searches show that harvey weinstein alone received mentions in print, in tv, and in online coverage. politics also matters (again) finally, rq b asked whether issue dualism differed between partisanship of the media. chi-square tests were again run, with significant results. for the to sample, both the accusers, χ ( ) = . , p < . , and bill clinton, χ ( ) = . , p < . , had significance. table outlines how left-leaning sources covered the accusers significantly more and bill clinton significantly less. right-leaning media conversely included the accusers significantly less. for the to sample, there was no significance for the accusers, but there was for bill clinton, χ ( ) = . , p < . . right-leaning media covered bill clinton significantly more than left-leaning and moderate media. as stated above, the qualitative analysis revealed that right-leaning media used bill clinton as one of many tactics for downplaying the severity of donald trump’s comments. this approach also served to reinforce their argument that ‘all men do it’. discussion this study focused on how objectivity contributes to the prevalence of rape culture in news coverage by examining the access hollywood tape (bullock, ) when it was first released and during the same time period a year later. significant changes occurred in the interim of the time periods, most notably trump became president, and the #metoo (france, ) and #timesup (www.timesupnow.com) movements began. a mixedmethods approach was used to analyze cable tv, print, and online sources. it can be noted that during the sampled time period, trump was not convicted of sexual abuse – though the access hollywood tape did document him admitting to sexually assaulting women (bullock, ). this study shows the use, absence, and limitations of objectivity. for instance, just as previous research has challenged the notion of so-called accepted truths in journalism as a result of objectivity (allan, ), we purport rape culture myths, such as dismissing the seriousness of sexual abuse and discrediting survivors (weiss, ), were often reported as accepted truths because of the detachment that accompanies the defensive objectivity routines of direct quotes, supporting evidence, and our primary focus of issue dualism (tuchman, ). one way rape culture acceptance was demonstrated in news coverage was through the use of direct quotes. this was especially true for tv and right-leaning media in the first time period analyzed. there is overlap between the two because fox news is both tv and right- leaning media; nevertheless, the format of playing direct quotes on a loop meant that trump’s threats and accusations were played repeatedly on all tv networks. it is, of course, expected for the press to include trump’s own perspective, but trump used that platform to deflect to others, downplay the situation, and insult and threaten his accusers. absent in the coverage, which consequently also led to rape culture acceptance, was a lack of supporting evidence (tuchman, ) on rape culture and sexual abuse statistics. in fact, only online coverage in the first time period addressed the power dynamics of rape culture, while both tv and print coverage confirmed previous research of oversimplifying and trivializing complex issues (applegate, ; wahl-jorgensen et al., ). third, this study shows the limitations of issue dualism (aka balance), which consequently resulted in overlooking those who came forward to accuse trump, and ultimately reinforced the hegemonic status quo so often found in journalism (shoemaker and reese, ). trump’s accusers should have been positioned as the other side of the debate because they came forward to accuse him of sexual abuse. this study shows that not only are prominent men’s voices featured more substantially (zoch and vanslyke turk, ), trump was in a position to dictate ‘the other side’, by continually pointing fingers to bill clinton. as a result, simplifying the debate to mostly two sides meant that other important contributors, such as the women who came forward are given less prominence in news coverage. moreover, making bill clinton’s behavior the predominant counterpoint implies that somehow trump’s guilt or innocence is predicated upon another man’s guilt or innocence, which is a false comparison. many trump surrogates excused trump because they say another man is worse (e.g. bill clinton or harvey weinstein), others excused other men because they say trump is worse (e.g. al franken). such an approach relies on evading consequences or punishing the accused based on politics and public opinion, rather than the right to individual safety. just as waterhouse-watson ( ) found that balancing sources results in overlooking greater cultural context, overall, the access hollywood tape was ultimately a political not social justice and human rights scandal. these results ultimately point to the press’ complicity in rape culture acceptance by heavily relying on direct quotes that promoted rape culture, while failing to add context to the problems of rape culture. indeed, analysis from the first time period revealed that most media outlets struggled to discuss the access hollywood scandal and sexual abuse without reducing the issue to an analysis of its political implications. this was one of the most distinct differences between the samples analyzed before and during the #metoo movement. unfortunately, that is not to credit the #metoo movement necessarily, as there was no presidential campaign to take precedence as it did in . furthermore, trump said less about the scandal, denoting that his tail wagging shifted news coverage both in terms of discussion and its amount. interestingly, it was the fall of harvey weinstein, and the galvanized #metoo hashtag, which led to a movement – not the access hollywood scandal and its associated million tweets (domonoske, ). so far, trump has escaped facing any consequences of #metoo. there are several possible reasons for this: the access hollywood scandal was so politicized, it faded once trump became president, other political scandals associated with the trump administration distract the public, most news coverage of trump no longer includes trump’s admitted and accused sexual abuse, and perhaps most of all, trump holds unprecedented power as president. this study revealed important implications about the use of news balance. however, it is not without limitations. while the study did find that the coverage of sexual abuse varied significantly before and during the #metoo movement, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of this shift in coverage. more research is needed to examine how these changes in coverage occur incrementally over time in order to better understand how political or social changes directly influence the tone of news coverage. in-depth interviews of journalists could also provide further insight. our sample also only focused on national news organizations and overlooked network and local media. despite these limitations, this study provides an important step in understanding the pitfalls of balance, particularly for important and complex social justice and human rights issues such as sexual abuse. in sum, we challenge the current conception of news balance in the greater norm of objectivity. the #metoo movement may provide various platforms for survivors to voice their stories, but their reach still is too limited and separate from news coverage. journalism gatekeepers need to reassess their approach to objectivity and recognize the ways in which the current conceptualization of objectivity continues to allow power and influence to 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framing of acquaintance rape on campus. feminist media studies ( ): - . zoch l and vanslyke turk j ( ) women making news: gender as a variable in source selection and use. journalism and mass communication quarterly ( ): - . science magazine december • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : k a il e y w h it m a n b o o k s e t a l . insights books for budding scientists from audacious space missions and quantum physics to clean cookstoves and coral nurseries, this year’s fi nalists for the aaas/subaru sb&f prizes for excel- lence in science books dare to go where few children’s titles have gone before. sponsored by subaru of america and facilitated by the american association for the advancement of science (aaas, the publisher of science), the competition celebrates high-quality children’s science books. read on for reviews written by the staf of the science family of journals and a few friends. —valerie thompson middle grades science book champion reviewed by caroline ash the american chestnut once grew straight, tall, and true in the forests of the united states. then at the start of the th century, a fatal fungus blight disease nearly made this prized tree extinct. but thanks to the persis- tence of american chestnut lovers and sci- entists in china, europe, and america, this iconic tree is on the way to restoration. in champion, sally walker tells the story of how disaster was averted, revealing the technical details of the three-pronged rescue program. the first step was to cross-breed american aaas/subaru sb&f prizes for excellence in science books trees with resistant varieties. the second ap- proach was to inoculate vulnerable trees with weakened blight fungus to stimulate their immunity. last, genetically modified saplings bearing a gene for an enzyme that reduces levels of toxic oxalic acid produced by the blight were developed. descriptions of the technical details en- tailed at each step are very clearly explained throughout the text, without shying away from complexity. the story of how the re- search unfolded is told through the voices of the dedicated scientists involved. clearly, the establishment of the breeding programs were long labors of love, spanning decades; a little more of this passion could have been transmitted in the text. still, there is a lot of inspiring biology to be learned from this case study. all in all, this is a great story for more sophisticated junior biologists. champion: the comeback tale of the american chestnut tree, sally m. walker, henry holt and co., , pp. my first book of quantum physics reviewed by jelena stajic quantum physics has an image problem. spooky, wacky, strange—the adjectives often used to describe its inner workings—paint a picture of an esoteric discipline. yet, it is the rules of quantum physics that dictate the structure of matter, that help interpret the signals from distant stars, and that make your smartphone run. this message is nicely conveyed in my first book of quantum phys- ics, an illustrated guide for children and older (and their parents). the book follows the development of quantum physics largely chronologically, ex- plaining why classical physics was not suffi- cient to describe the subatomic world. it then moves on to concepts such as particle-wave duality, the uncertainty principle, and radio- activity. a number of physicists make appear- ances, from isaac newton to marie curie, published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org insights but it is the familiar cartoon form of albert einstein that serves as a guide throughout the book (einstein’s ambivalent attitude toward quantum mechanics notwithstand- ing). the illustrations are clear, eye-catching, and consistent; the authors occasionally an- thropomorphize inanimate objects to make concepts more accessible (for example, an electron “feels comfortable” in its orbit) but largely avoid sounding condescending. most commendably, the narrative does not stop in the s. particle accelerators, the standard model of particle physics, and the higgs boson all get well-deserved mentions, but so do everyday “quantum gadgets,” such as laser pointers and light-emitting diode (led) lights. the book leaves young readers with a sense of quantum physics as a vibrant, active pursuit that has and will continue to influence their lives in very real ways. my first book of quantum physics, kaid-sala ferrón sheddad, illustrated by eduard altar- riba, button books, , pp. impact! reviewed by marc s. lavine although movies have magnified the poten- tial damage that earth might suffer from the arrival of an asteroid or comet, there are le- gitimate reasons to be concerned and there is an ongoing need to track celestial objects that could cause major damage. in starting impact! with the story of a meteor that ex- ploded over the russian city of chelyabinsk in , elizabeth rusch captures the terror and damage larger space debris can cause. even though the impact site was more than km outside the city, the shock wave it cre- ated shattered glass, rattled buildings, and caused roofs to collapse. spotting and tracking asteroids is almost as hard as finding needles in haystacks, while identifying and deciphering previous impacts requires careful detective work. this is es- pecially true when trying to analyze a large impact crater that might be kilometers in di- ameter, where the impact both compressed the ground and turned the layers of earth and rock upside down. rusch introduces us to individuals who either track celestial ob- jects or investigate past impacts and to the tools of the trade required to study them. she even reveals how amateur scientists can get involved. and if your interests veer from science to science fiction, she closes with a range of ways one might alter the trajectory of an asteroid, should the need ever arise. impact!, asteroids and the science of saving the world, elizabeth rusch, photography by karin anderson, hmh books for young readers, , pp. itch! reviewed by seth scanlon in this delightful—if slightly disquieting— work, anita sanchez artfully describes the ways in which a variety of organisms make us itch. much attention is directed toward familiar insects and arachnids that cause humans discomfort. in addition, sanchez elucidates the various ways that fungi (such as those that cause athlete’s foot) and plants (such as nettle, poison ivy, cacti, and prickly pears) can induce the urge to scratch. these pruritogenic pests also allow the author to pivot onto various historical top- ics in a fun and appealing manner. lice, for example, serve as a jumping-off point to describe the unhygienic conditions ex- perienced by soldiers during world war i, whereas fleas are introduced in the context of the hugely popular flea circuses of the th century. along the way, sanchez offers a whole host of useful tips for preventing or reliev- ing itchiness. after reading this book, you should be able to remove embedded cater- pillar bristles, soothe a nettle’s sting, avoid mosquito bites, and deodorize a pet that has encountered a skunk. this wealth of in- formation is reinforced with approachable, humorous, and eye-catching illustrations by gilbert ford. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e p h o t o : y u e n m a n c h e u n g / a l a m y s t o c k p h o t o the book concludes with a thought- provoking discussion of the neurological and immunological origins of itch. in ad- dition, sanchez discusses how scratching can (at least temporarily) allay irritation as well as other benefits it can provide. this author/illustrator team is to be commended for conveying a cornucopia of data in an en- joyable and engaging way. itch!: everything you didn’t want to know about what makes you scratch, anita sanchez, illus- trated by gilbert ford, hmh books for young readers, , pp. trash revolution reviewed by hadassah nusinovich ucko, solomon nusinovich ucko, and yevgeniya nusinovich trash revolution explains how common materials are produced and recycled and suggests solutions to various real-world problems related to resource consumption, waste management, and climate change. in addition to widely known recommen- dations such as “reduce, reuse, recycle,” the authors present many solutions made possible by cutting-edge research, such as making biodegradable plastics from stale food and using bacteria to grow composta- ble fabrics. the technical information is interspersed with humor and kid-friendly touches— “#gratitude,” for example, is associated with the invention of toilet paper. in ad- dition to general information, the authors provide handy reference charts comparing the benefits and drawbacks of different materials, as well as specific recommenda- tions for handling them. however, some of these suggestions seemed unattainable to us. for example, the authors recommend making your home “a junk-mail-free zone,” but offer no suggestions for how that could be achieved. we noted a few minor problems, such as a mistaken characterization of deute- rium as an extra molecule inside water molecules, a gratuitous negative comment about genetically modified organisms, and a surprisingly positive discussion of waste incinerators that neglected to mention any concerns about their fumes and effects on human health. overall, however, it is very informative, with thoughtful explanations of what we can all do to make environmen- tally friendly choices. trash revolution: breaking the waste cycle, erica fyvie, illustrated by bill slavin, kids can press, , pp. rewilding reviewed by sacha n. vignieri as the human population grows, we are re- lentlessly encroaching on the natural habi- tats that surround us. this book defines and describes the science and process of an increasingly important mechanism for con- servation known as “rewilding.” rewilders, we learn, want to restore habi- tats to their prehuman states, creating en- vironments that can support native species and give them room to thrive. the authors first describe the basics of this process, in- cluding why it is important, and then dis- cuss several examples of where, why, and how rewilding is happening. these include everything from the pleistocene rewilding plan, which advocates reintroducing mod- ern stand-ins for megafauna that went ex- tinct at the end of the last ice age, to the rewilding of new york city’s “high line,” an abandoned, elevated train track where lace- wing insects have been released to prevent infestations of harmful bugs. the book is well targeted toward mid- dle-grade readers because it accurately describes rewilding while remaining ac- cessible and interesting. the authors’ posi- tive tone is both refreshing and important. they present rewilding stories in a way that clearly lays out why the process is ecologi- cally important and why it is important for human society as well. rewilding: giving nature a second chance, jane drake and ann love, annick press, , pp. children’s science picture book living things and nonliving things reviewed by tage rai if we wanted to define “games,” we might say they involve competing, keeping score, following rules, and having fun. however, in some games, players cooperate and don’t keep score. and while all games have rules, so do many other activities that may or may not be fun. in this book, kevin kurtz extends this line of argument to the nature of life. are living things the only ones that move, or grow, or reproduce? kurtz elegantly re- veals that some nonliving things can do these things, whereas some living things can’t. astute readers may find themselves wish- ing for a deeper discussion of viruses. viruses lack cells of their own, but they confiscate their host’s cellular machinery to replicate themselves, thus complicating any cellular definition of life. the conceptual ambiguity of viruses underscores a deeper, albeit under- standable, omission from the book: the exis- tential quandary of death. ultimately, kurtz ends with the unset- tling realization that there is no categorical distinction between living and nonliving. instead, he proposes a family resemblance model in which something that has many of the characteristics shared by living things probably belongs to the category. the book is beautifully illustrated with high-quality photographs of nature, animals, pedestrians walk along the rewilded high line park in new york city. insights | b o o k s published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org il l u s t r a t io n : a l l is o n b l a c k a n d s im o n & s c h u s t e r and inventions. despite its simple text, liv- ing things and nonliving things is decep- tively deep and provides a valuable lesson in scientific uncertainty. living things and nonliving things: a compare and contrast book, kevin kurtz, arbordale publishing, , pp. many reviewed by jennifer sills in many, a rosy-cheeked, red-haired explorer tries to answer the question so many scien- tists have pondered: “how many different kinds of living things are there on the planet?” she discovers elephants and oak trees, mush- rooms and beetles, and mites and microbes. all of these species, she realizes, are interde- pendent, forming complex ecosystems. here, the story takes a dark turn: humans have been poisoning and destroying these ecosystems, and many living things have dis- appeared forever. we have a responsibility, our forlorn narrator warns: we don’t want to reach a point at which we have to “count down instead of up.” the story’s whimsical tone, which belies its sobering message, will engage readers, but the highlights of the book are the detailed watercolor illustrations that infuse each landscape and statistic with warmth and ap- peal. vibrant colors throughout the pages of discovery contrast with the abrupt shift to muted browns on the pages of destruction. the emotional punch the images deliver will be more effective in motivating readers to act than trivia about mushrooms ever could be. many: the diversity of life on earth, nicola davies, illustrated by emily sutton, candle- wick, , pp. what do they do with all that poo? reviewed by steve mao on any given day, an individual zoo can produce more than pounds of animal waste. so, “what do they do with all that poo?” the first part of this book makes it clear that poop comes in different sizes, shapes, and colors and that these properties are related to the distinct diets, anatomies, and physi- ologies of different animals. how animals use their waste can also affect the characteristics of their poop, as well as how and when they poop. wombats, for example, excrete upward of cube-shaped droppings every evening to mark their territory, whereas sloths de- scend from their treetop habitat to poop on the ground just once a week. how do zoos deal with animal waste? some is just sent off to landfills, but some is also used to monitor the health of the ani- mals. some is processed into compost for lo- cal gardens, and some is recycled to make useful products such as paper and fuel. although there’s no main character, every animal is easily related to. the drawings are vivid and, by and large, accurate. (wombats, however, do not build a scat-fence, as one il- lustration seems to suggest.) most of the animals highlighted in this book are mammals, but it would have been fun to read about the excretions of other spe- cies. perhaps this will be the topic of a follow- up title (book “number ,” if you will). what do they do with all that poo?, jane kurtz, illustrated by allison black, beach lane books, , pp. a house in the sky reviewed by sacha n. vignieri the sight of a common squirrel can inspire squeals of delight from young children. they might ask, “is it going home?” as the squirrel disappears up a tree. a house in the sky, steve jenkins’s lovely story on ani- mal homes, provides answers that will sat- isfy such questions while providing more detail for a similarly curious adult or older child. “some houses are made of bubbles,” reads one passage, for example. below, the author elaborates: “a siamese fighting fish takes a gulp of air and then blows it back out. it does this over and over again, creat- ing a floating nest made of bubbles to pro- tect its babies.” illustrator robbin gourley’s playful yet beautiful renderings reinforce the book’s message. “look up—a house in the sky!” reads another page. the common swift, ren- dered in muted browns against a pale blue sky, spends months on the wing, we learn, eating, drinking, and sleeping in the air. young children are naturally curious about animals. jenkins’s sweet exploration of how and where they live provides an opportunity to connect with older readers and to dig a little deeper together. a house in the sky: and other uncommon animal houses, steve jenkins, illustrated by robbin gourley, charlesbridge, , pp. the brilliant deep reviewed by julia fahrenkamp-uppenbrink with sparing words and mesmerizing, soft- colored paintings, the brilliant deep tells the story of ken nedimyer, an american fish collector and “live rock farmer” who found a way to restore the world’s coral reefs by growing coral colonies in underwater nurser- ies and then planting them onto dying reefs. nedimyer has long loved the ocean. one of the book’s most memorable images shows him as a boy, looking out over the sea, all its secrets hidden beneath the surface. on the next page, he is snorkeling through an un- derwater world teeming with life. we follow along as he learns to scuba dive and begins to collect fish to study in aquariums at home. as an adult, nedimyer uses his expertise with growing “living rocks”—rocks covered with sponges and other invertebrates that are used in aquariums—to cultivate coral. the book ends on a note of hope as nedimyer and his organization, the coral restoration foun- dation, begin to help other countries save their reefs as well. the simple scientific explanations given throughout the book are easy to understand and are woven into the story in a way that does not distract. however, the main text does not mention climate change or other human threats. a two-page spread at the end merely cites complicated reasons, including changing ocean temperatures and overfish- ing, for the decline of coral reefs. this is a missed opportunity. nevertheless, i can only recommend this beautiful and inspiring book, which shows what love for nature com- bined with human ingenuity can achieve. the brilliant deep: rebuilding the world’s coral reefs, kate messner, illustrated by matthew forsythe, chronicle books, , pp. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r e b e c c a g r e e n / k id s c a n p r e s s l t d . iqbal and his ingenious idea reviewed by jennifer sills amid monsoons and the daily prayers of ra- madan, iqbal dreams of winning his school’s sustainability-themed science contest. his mother and baby sister rupa have developed a cough from sitting inside cooking food over an open fire. with the help of his other sister, sadia, iqbal finds a way to help them by turn- ing an umbrella into a solar cooker. iqbal’s story is steeped in the customs and language of bangladesh while celebrating universal human qualities such as curiosity and ingenuity. sadia’s role is realistic; she joins her brother in school and helps him build his stove, but unlike iqbal, she is ex- pected to help with childcare and cooking. author elizabeth suneby seamlessly weaves bengali words into the text, describ- ing, for example, how iqbal offers the first serving of “semai”—a dessert made with ver- micelli noodles served at “eid al-fitr” (the holiday that marks the end of ramadan)—to sadia to thank her for her help. illustrator rebecca green’s colored pencil illustrations depict iqbal’s family and their village in vivid detail. the book’s appendices provide an ex- planation of the benefits of clean cookstoves and a glossary of bengali words. readers can also follow instructions to create their own solar cooker. the project will require a pizza box, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and a lot of patience—the stove will take or minutes to heat up in the sun. iqbal and his ingenious idea: how a science project helps one family and the planet, elizabeth suneby, illustrated by rebecca green, kids can press, , pp. hands-on science book alexander graham bell for kids reviewed by marc s. lavine alexander graham bell is best known for his invention of the telephone, but this wasn’t the work that he found most rewarding. teaching deaf students to fin- ger spell and to speak, using the visible alphabet developed by his father, was his lifelong passion. bell’s grandfather voice trained students with speech problems such as stuttering, and his mother had se- vere loss of hearing. his interest in speech and sound was critical to many of his fu- ture inventions. in alexander graham bell for kids, mary kay carson weaves together key events and influences that shaped bell’s life, and in turn how he shaped the world around him. although he was a poor student in school, bell spent his life learning from the written works of others, from ongoing tinkering and innovation, and from the many colleagues and connections he made throughout his life. bell’s invention of the telephone has largely overshadowed his many other contributions, such as his work on early versions of the phonograph and metal detectors and his work on airplanes and hydrofoil boats. these inventions often brought him into conflict with other inven- tors of the day, including thomas edison and elisha gray. the book includes many sidebars to ex- plain the scientific principles behind each invention, as well as hands-on activities, that enhance the narrative. but perhaps the true value of the books comes from all the little stories, previously unknown to me, that show the richness of his life, such as bell’s role in connecting helen keller with her teacher, anne sullivan, and bell’s role in supporting science magazine dur- ing its early years. alexander graham bell for kids: his life & inventions with activities, mary kay carson, chicago review press, , pp. light waves reviewed by marc s. lavine from the dim flicker of a candle flame to the daily illumination provided by the sun, visible light enables us to see our world. despite its presence all around us, the properties of light can be confusing and counterintuitive. why, for example, does light, which travels in a straight line, ap- pear to bend, when looking at a straw in a glass of water? or why does our reflection invert when we look at the front of a metal spoon? using a mix of illustrations and simple experiments aimed at a younger reader, david adler explains the basic com- position, behavior, and properties of light. through the casting of shadows by using a flashlight and a tower of wooden blocks, adler teaches readers about objects that are transparent, translucent, or opaque. we are shown how to divide white light into a spectrum of colors when it passes through a prism, and from this, we are taught why objects have different colors depending on which part of the visible spectrum they re- flect rather than absorb. at times, the writing seems aimed at older readers; however, a glossary at the end help- fully pulls together all the optics terminology. light waves, david a. adler, illustrated by anna raf , holiday house, , pp. awakened by his mother’s coughing—the result of cooking indoors over an open flame—iqbal contemplates how to win his school’s sustainability-themed science fair. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o : m a t t h e w r a k o l a f o r n a t io n a l g e o g r a p h ic k id s dog science unleashed reviewed by brent grocholski dogs make for the perfect assistants for the activities in dog science unleashed. this vivid volume lays out two dozen or so exercises that double as experiments, the goal of which is to better understand ca- nine senses and physiology. the experiments are well described, with step-by-step instructions and photos. most are easy to set up and only require household items. exceptional photogra- phy accompanies the instructions and helps readers to understand the activities. the wild card, as you might guess, is your pooch’s willingness to help unleash the dog science. but that shouldn’t be a prob- lem for most dogs; many of the activities involve treats and toys. in an activity called “a puzzle for your pooch,” the authors provide instructions for setting up an experiment to see whether your dog can learn to extract treats from a muffin tin. in another, readers learn how to craft a homemade stethoscope out of a funnel and an empty paper towel tube and to use it to listen to their dog’s heartbeat. some of the activities are more targeted to helping understand the particular dog you are working with. in “half bath,” for example, readers are encouraged to deter- mine whether shampoo is right for their pup by washing only one side and monitor- ing odor, dirt, and oil levels over a month. however, the book sticks to a scientific ap- proach, even for these activities. what the book does not provide are broad insights into dog behavior or social- ization. but focusing on more universal and less variable traits is probably for the best in a home experiment–driven book. dog science unleashed: fun activities to do with your canine companion, jodi wheeler-toppen, photography by matthew rakola, national geographic kids, , pp. dig in! reviewed by michael funk modern agriculture has given us seedless watermelons, tomatoes in february, and apple varieties with trademarked names and intensive marketing. however, there remains something magical about planting a seed, watching it sprout, and after a long season, tasting the fruit (or vegetables) of one’s work and dedication. dig in! encour- ages kids to get in the kitchen and rescue ne- glected stems and seeds for experimentation in the garden. the book features simple projects, some of which may be better controlled versions of events already happening in your crisper drawer. in particular, growing lettuce, onions, and potatoes from sprouts is nearly foolproof. others, such as garlic and ginger, might require some prepara- tion. growing plants from seeds requires the most patience, but the wonder of seeing sprouts emerge from soil is sure to delight kids of all ages. the projects in dig in! are simple and can be started in an old cup or newspaper pots. alongside the garden projects are recipes that can be the source of the seeds or sprout- ing material. the pairing might encourage picky eaters to give celery or herbs a chance, although i would not expect to harvest much from your sprouts and seedlings unless you have a working garden already. nevertheless, intrepid young gardeners should find these projects inspiring and will hopefully want to learn more about how their food is grown as a result. dig in!: easy gardening projects using kitchen scraps, kari cornell, photography by jennifer s. larson, millbrook press, , pp. bug lab for kids reviewed by lauren kmec how do you measure a beetle’s strength or the speed of a centipede? bug lab for kids, by entomologist john guyton, reveals the answers to these questions, among others. the book is divided into nine well- organized units, each containing several lab exercises. an introductory section pro- vides helpful advice regarding appropriate attire for fieldwork, first aid treatment for bites and stings, and the importance of keeping a field notebook. another unit of- fers a straightforward primer on the scien- tific method. would-be entomologists start by learn- ing how to make and use a collection net, as well as how to care for live critters. more sophisticated collection techniques, such as the use of an aspirator to capture very tiny insects, are also covered. readers can then embark on a variety of activities to observe insects in their natural habitat.  other labs include a spiderweb search, a papier-mâché wasp’s nest construction proj- ect, a multiweek butterfly-rearing opera- tion, and a taste test of edible insect “treats” (not for the faint of heart!). although special equipment such as a blacklight is required for some experiments, many of the neces- sary tools can be constructed from house- hold materials or purchased inexpensively. interspersed throughout the book are fun and surprising snippets of bug trivia: moths navigate by the moon, bees “dance” to com- municate with other bees, and horned dung beetles can pull times their own weight. these tidbits bolster guyton’s mes- sage that although bugs may not be cute or cuddly, they are indeed fascinating. bug lab for kids: family-friendly activities for exploring the amazing world of beetles, but- terf ies, spiders, and other arthropods, john w. guyton, quarry books, , pp.a human-pooch foot race teaches young readers how to create a repeatable experiment. insights | b o o k s published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ december • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e young adult science book rocket men reviewed by laura m. zahn the year was . protests against the viet- nam war filled the streets of america, and the united states and the soviet union were rac- ing to the moon. in , men would walk on its surface. however, before we could accom- plish this feat, we needed to be sure that they could get there and return safely. focusing on the apollo mission—the first manned mission to orbit the moon—in rocket men, robert kurson vividly transports the reader into the minds of the people in- volved, especially the astronauts and their wives, as they prepared for and underwent this perilous mission. the possibility of death is a recurring theme. kurson repeatedly re- minds the reader of the fatal fire that claimed the lives of the apollo astronauts and the experimental nature of space travel. yet, fear was not at the forefront for frank borman, bill anders, and jim lovell. instead, the book emphasizes how these brave men were will- ing to sacrifice everything for their country. this story, about a little-recalled but major move forward into space, will captivate read- ers of all ages, but as a full-length chapter book with few illustrations or pictures, older readers will have an easier time with this book. kurson’s evocative writing places the apollo mission into historical perspective and allows us to vicariously experience the launch of the saturn v rocket and the awe felt by the first men to leave low earth orbit. rocket men: the daring odyssey of apollo and the astronauts who made man’s first journey to the moon, robert kurson, random house, , pp. chasing new horizons reviewed by keith t. smith on july , the new horizons spacecraft flew past pluto, capturing headlines around the world. chasing new horizons tells the story of that mission: how it was designed, funded, built, launched, and operated. the narrative is as recalled by alan stern, the mission’s principal investigator, written up by the astrobiologist and science communicator real.” but whiz-bang technical feats alone cannot solve problems such as our water cri- ses, for example. this points to perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the book: a missing discussion of how public policy interfaces with large engineering projects and the pro- cesses by which such projects are planned, funded, administered, and maintained. in all, built is a welcome addition to the library of accessible reads on engineering. editor’s note: for a full-length review of built, see “behind the scenes of the built environ- ment,” science , ( ). built: the hidden stories behind our structures, roma agrawal, bloomsbury usa, , pp. spying on whales reviewed by sacha n. vignieri whales are massive, their habitat is enor- mous, their life spans can be much longer than our own, and their intellect is both com- pelling and mysterious. we are captivated by whales, yet they remain difficult to know. nick pyenson enters into this long affair from a paleontological perspective, being most interested in how these remarkable creatures evolved from four-legged terrestrial ancestors to marine leviathans and in the many forms they took in between. as he de- scribes his pursuit of this knowledge, we see how challenging it really is to study these ani- mals, both those that existed in the past and those with whom we share the world now. throughout the book, pyenson brings his readers where he goes, whether it be on an adventure in the atacama desert to solve a mystery involving dozens of intact fossil whale skeletons, or to an internal destina- tion—his heart—as he contemplates the fact that in a single right whale’s lifetime, the world has gone from being rich with whales to being nearly without them. in the end, the reader takes away an improved knowledge of whales, especially their history, but perhaps even more importantly, a deeper understand- ing of the intertwining of our fates. spying on whales: the past, present, and future of earth’s most awesome creatures, nick pyen- son, viking, , pp. . /science.aav david grinspoon. this provides great insider access, although it’s clearly a subjective view. a brief introduction explains how pluto was discovered in and why, in the s, planetary scientists began to lobby for a mis- sion to visit it. teenagers may struggle with the subsequent chapters, however, which describe how the mission was designed and funded. these sections are a labyrinth of nasa committees, working groups, design proposals, and advisory reports. the second half of the book is far more engaging, cover- ing the spacecraft’s launch in , its flyby of jupiter in , and the pluto encounter itself. those chapters come alive with the au- thors’ passion for exploration and the excite- ment of finally reaching the destination. throughout chasing new horizons, there is a strong sense of the team’s drive to make the most of the brief pluto flyby and the me- ticulous planning that required. the authors emphasize the important roles played by en- gineers, project managers, and mission con- trollers, reminding readers that it takes more than a good idea and talented scientists to fly a successful mission. chasing new horizons: inside the epic first mis- sion to pluto, alan stern and david grinspoon, picador, , pp. built reviewed by donna riley roma agrawal’s built is a full-throated cele- bration of structural engineering. the book nicely balances innovative new builds such as the shard in london with tried-and-true designs such as the middle eastern water transport system known as the qanat. clas- sic narratives of the brooklyn bridge and the hancock tower are interspersed with more obscure examples, including a lovely description of spider silk as bridge material. agrawal makes passing reference to work- place gender discrimination. stark in their normalcy and minimized as anomalies, her vignettes nonetheless may elicit a #metoo from many readers as they serve to remind us how far we have yet to go in building in- clusive work environments in engineering. agrawal, like many engineers, is almost ab- solute in her optimism: “the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations—for what- ever we can dream up, engineers can make insights | b o o k s the reviewer is a senior editor at science. email: cash@science-int.co.uk the reviewer is a senior editor at science. email: jstajic@aaas.org the reviewer is a senior editor at science. email: mlavine@ aaas.org the reviewer is an associate editor at science. email: sscanlon@science-int.co.uk the reviewer is a senior editor at science translational medicine. email: ynusinov@aaas.org the reviewer is a deputy editor at science. email: svignier@aaas.org the reviewer is an associate editor at science. email: trai@aaas.org the reviewer is the letters editor at science. email: jsills@aaas.org the reviewer is a senior editor at science. email: smao@aaas.org the reviewer is a deputy editor at science. email: jfahrenkamp@science-int.co.uk the reviewer is an associate editor at science. email: bgrochol@ aaas.org the reviewer is an associate editor at science. email: mfunk@aaas.org the reviewer is a lead content production editor at science. email: lkmec@aaas.org the reviewer is a senior editor at science. email: lzahn@aaas.org the reviewer is an associate editor at science. email: ksmith@science-int.co.uk the reviewer is the kamyar haghighi head of the school of engineering education, purdue university, west lafayette, in , usa. email: riley@purdue.edu published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ books for budding scientists riley and sacha n. vignieri sills, marc s. lavine, marc s. lavine, brent grocholski, michael funk, lauren kmec, laura m. zahn, keith t. smith, donna nusinovich, sacha n. vignieri, tage rai, jennifer sills, steve mao, sacha n. vignieri, julia fahrenkamp-uppenbrink, jennifer caroline ash, jelena stajic, marc s. lavine, seth scanlon, hadassah nusinovich ucko, solomon nusinovich ucko, yevgeniya doi: . /science.aav ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ university of birmingham time’s up! feminist theory and activism meets organization studies bell, emma; meriläinen, susan ; taylor, scott; tienari, janne doi: . / license: none: all rights reserved document version peer reviewed version citation for published version (harvard): bell, e, meriläinen, s, taylor, s & tienari, j , 'time’s up! feminist theory and activism meets organization studies', human relations, vol. , no. , pp. - . https://doi.org/ . / link to publication on research at birmingham portal publisher rights statement: checked for eligibility / / this is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of an article published in human relations. https://doi.org/ . / general rights unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. the express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •	users may freely distribute the url that is used to identify this publication. •	users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the university of birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •	user may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the copyright, designs and patents act (?) •	users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. when citing, please reference the published version. take down policy while the university of birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. if you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact ubira@lists.bham.ac.uk providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/times-up-feminist-theory-and-activism-meets-organization-studies(fcbd d f-c - de- a a-b ddb c ).html time’s up! feminist theory and activism meets organization studies emma bell, open university, uk susan meriläinen, lapland university, finland scott taylor, university of birmingham, uk janne tienari, hanken school of economics, finland introduction to human relations special issue ‘organizing feminism: bodies, practices, ethics’, to be published january abstract feminism is a long established, often neglected empirical and theoretical presence in the study of organizations and social relations at work. this special issue provides a space for research that focuses on contemporary feminist practice and theory. in this editorial introduction, we suggest that now is a new time for feminism, noting very recent examples of sexist oppression in social relations to illustrate why this rejuvenation is happening. we then reflect on the process of knowledge production involved in editing a special issue in an organisation studies journal such as this one, to address the issue of why feminism is so poorly represented in the journals that our academic community constructs as prestigious. we suggest that feminism provides opportunities for distinctive practices of knowledge production that challenge the patriarchal social formations that characterise academic work. we conclude with speculations about the future of feminism in organization studies. keywords: feminism; theory; activism; sexism; patriarchy; intersectionality; politics of knowledge production. a new time for feminism we are in the midst of a global renewal of feminist activism and theory. feminism is as timely now as it ever has been. new forms of feminist activism and organizing are emerging as many women (and men) demonstrate that they have had enough of sexist oppression and are engaged in resisting it. social media and other online spaces have become essential vehicles in sharing experiences and mobilizing feminism in the name of a multiplicity of women’s experiences that cut across race and social class distinctions and sexual orientations. new practices of feminist solidarity accompany these endeavours, manifest in global movements such as the everyday sexism projecti, #metooii, million womeniii, women’s marchesiv and others (see vachhani and pullen, tyler, this issue). the title of this special issue introduction invokes a message used in one of these campaigns – time’s up!v – a phrase we think succinctly conveys the urgent need for more sustained engagement with feminism in the study of organization, social relations and work. feminismvi is a political and an intellectual project, a movement for social justice and equality as well as a means of theory development (benschop and verloo, ; calás and smircich, ). it is founded on the observation that gender and gendered racial inequality shape all aspects of social and economic life. feminism’s unique perspective encourages us to explore how patriarchal social formations such as hegemonic masculinities and neoliberal capitalism oppress and exploit. feminist research asks questions that offer a unique and distinctive way of understanding social life, by ‘seeing through what is already crazy about the world, notably the cruelty and injustice with which it tends to go about organizing itself’ (rose, : x). not to ask feminist questions about gendered social relations at work, in management and through organization is, in our view, to accept the gendered inequities, inequalities and violences that affect women in particular, and ultimately all of us. the call for papers for this special issue, released in , deliberately placed feminism at the centre of analysis. we did this in part because there is proportionately very little feminist analysis published in what many colleagues categorise as the most prestigious journals in our field. just one number, , symbolises this. there are fifteen journals that constitute the ‘management and organization studies’ field in the financial times (ft ) research ranking list. this list is often uncritically used to signify ‘top’ or ‘excellent’ research, defining for some what counts as legitimate knowledge. these fifteen journals have published thousands of papers, developing a wide range of social, political, and philosophical theories of work and organization. if we examine the period from the start of to the end of , we find only published papers that refer to feminism in the title, abstract, or keywords. this is a significant body of work. however, proportionately it suggests that feminism is very much a minority interest, especially when we consider that almost half of the papers are published in one journal (journal of business ethics), and more troubling, that eight of the journals have published no work whatsoever that engages with feminism: administrative science quarterly, harvard business review, human resource management, journal of international business studies, journal of management, mit sloan management review, organizational behavior and human decision processes, and strategic management journal. human relations, present on ft list since , has published more than most (e.g. d.enbeau and buzzanell, ; essers et al., ; fotaki et al., ; gatrell, ; johansson et al, ; kirton and healy, ; linstead and pullen, ; prasad, ; runte and mills, ; simpson and lewis, ; sullivan and delaney, ). we therefore believe that this journal is the ideal location to further understanding of, and debate on, feminisms by positioning feminist theories and approaches as central to the production of knowledge in our field. we are pleased that the six pieces published here make a significant quantitative difference to the presence of feminism in these journals, and we hope that this signals an overdue step-change in how feminism is positioned within our field in a qualitative sense as well. the special issue call was provoked by the visible resurgence in the practice of feminism, a rejuvenation that continues today and shows few signs of losing momentum. the prominence of feminism in everyday life and popular debate is manifest in a range of ways. media reporting of women’s activism has increased significantly, as have accounts of the backlash that inevitably attends women raising their voices (faludi, ; jane, ). there is also increased global institutional recognition of feminism, such as in the united nations (see actor emma watson’s speech on gender equalityvii) and at elite political meetings (such as the feminist ‘w ’ summit as part of the ‘group of ’ largest global industrial economies meeting), more political and celebrity endorsement of feminist campaigns, and high levels of visibility on social media such as twitter and blogsites. a further aspect of this most recent iteration of feminism concerns (powerful) men self-identifying as feminist, such as former us president barack obama and current canadian prime minister justin trudeau, provoking renewed debate about the role of men in the feminist movement. taken together, we felt confident that early empirical indicators in provided a basis for generative theoretical developments and meaningful contributions to knowledge in our field. while manifesting the growing importance of feminism as a societal and global force, however, most of these examples also demonstrate the hegemony of whiteness within movements that continue to favour the elites of the global north. this is something that we seek to recognise in this introduction and suggest merits more attention in the future. feminisms across time and space narratives of how feminisms developed historically are often structured using the rhetorically powerful metaphor of ‘waves’. while what we call feminism has always been present in social relations in terms of action, the dominant narrative locates the roots of contemporary feminism in a ‘first wave’ positioned during the late th and early th century, then a second wave in the s and s, followed a third wave in the s and onwards, and a putative fourth wave that is currently emerging (munro, ). early north american and european feminist activists and thinkers are often categorised as focusing on suffrage and property rights, achieving considerable (if partial) success in both areas. the mid-twentieth century period, the second wave, growing alongside civil rights activism in the us and elsewhere, is usually represented as centred on the workplace and reproductive rights in the form of equal pay, access to contraception or abortion, and the right to be free from gendered violence. however, the wave metaphor is problematic because it simplifies complex realities, closing debates and homogenising experiences (gillis et al., ). it also encourages us to ignore important progress between periods of public recognition, and corresponds mostly to developments in specific locations such as north america or europe. that latter observation suggests many histories of feminism are ‘whitewashed’ narratives that simplify tensions and ignore multiple voices in different places and spaces at different times. according to the conventional linear chronological narrative, both first and second wave often assume a ‘whiteness’, provoking the development of analysis grounded in intersectional theory (crenshaw, ; cf. hooks, ) and transnational feminism (mohanty, ). intersectional theory, mostly developed by african american feminists, has provided the basis for a rich strand of critical cultural analyses showing that various matrices of oppression such as gender, race and class intersect in the experiences of women. as feminist and civil rights activist audre lorde ( : ) reminds us, ‘there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives’. transnational feminism, in turn, drew attention to how feminist solidarity, mutuality, accountability and recognition of common interests across national and other borders, might enable the decolonization of knowledge and anti-capitalist critique (mohanty, ). parallel to these developments, feminism became characterised in its third wave by more individualistic identity-oriented activism and theorising. the collectivist orientation that had long characterised aspects of feminism is often viewed as having been undermined in this period by an orientation associated with the rise of postfeminist discourses, indicating a lack of cohesion in the absence of a single cause. here the complexity of feminism expands significantly, manifest in the much contested term ‘postfeminism’ itself (lewis, ). debates surrounding this term centre on whether it denotes a historical shift, an epistemological position, or a theoretical movement (gill et al., ). empirically, postfeminism can be interpreted as an analytical object through its promotion of a ‘sensibility’ which constructs feminism in a highly specific way, as a means of empowerment through discourses of self-realisation and sexual difference (gill, ). this individualism plays out in an emphasis on choice and self over collective thinking and activism. crucially, ‘structural gender inequalities are denied in favour of transferring the responsibility to overcome sexism onto the individual’ (liu, : ). turning to contemporary feminisms it seems clear that women are no longer understood as autonomous individuals or as members of a universal social category. feminism now enables insight into how gender intersects with race and ethnicity as well as social class in all areas of political, social and organizational life (ahmed, ). it can thus help to elucidate how whiteness remains the dominant yet unspoken norm in the global north against which others are evaluated (nkomo and al ariss, ). these powerful insights have changed debates about what feminism is and what it can do. feminisms are many things and take a multitude of forms, sometimes even uniting women and men in a common fight against sexism as the patriarchal ideology that rationalizes and justifies discriminatory social relations (manne, ). at the same time, postfeminist discourses remain powerful today as cultural resources for describing the current gender regime (gill et al., ), and are prominent in popular accounts of gendered experiences of inequality at work where they are used to construct a neoliberal postfeminist subject (rottenberg, ). as such, feminisms provide many means of appreciating the everyday experiences of different kinds of women (and men) in different circumstances per se, and also a basis for recognizing emancipatory potential (walby, ). for us, a primary importance of feminisms arises from offering a language, a vocabulary and a grammar, for naming, analysing, and challenging discrimination, sexism and misogyny. discrimination is most often experienced as differential treatment based on gendered categorisation, especially when combined with attributes such as ethnicity and social class. the rationalizing and justificatory ideology that justifies such practices of unequal treatment, exploitation and oppression is sexism (manne, ). while there is diversity of experience in everyday life for both women and men, the dominant gender regime that exists today in virtually all societies is sexist in ways that result in the systematic marginalisation, oppression and exploitation of women. a further key lexical term in the language of feminism is misogyny, defined as an articulation of fear or hatred of women as a group, particularly when women demand equal rights to men in speech or action. in kate manne’s ( : - ) terms, misogyny is therefore the ‘law enforcement’ branch of patriarchy, in that it seeks to ‘police and enforce’ sexist norms and expectations in attempts to maintain male/masculine domination. discrimination, sexism and misogyny may be experienced and analysed in their material, linguistic, or symbolic forms. misogyny, for example, is often manifest in language, verbal or written, including via the social media that have provided a new platform for attacking and silencing women (jane, ; mantilla, ; poland, ). symbolically, gendered identities may be constructed and maintained through the diminution and restriction of women linguistically as ‘emotional’ or ‘sensitive’, while male and masculine identities are enlarged or extended through authoritative terms such as ‘order’ or ‘management’ (höpfl, ). feminist theory provides unique analytical insight into such gendered social relations. this has to stop! many recent media stories reporting violent sexual harassment have helped to raise awareness of male domination and suppression of women through this means in a wide range of organizational and professional contexts. one of the highest profile exposés has come in the belated acknowledgement of continuing sexist oppression in the creative arts such as the movie industry. this is echoed in many other contexts: in at an annual ‘men-only’ fundraising dinner held in london by the presidents club, a registered charity, women were employed to work as hosts and table staff at the event. the women were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned by male senior businessmen, politicians and financiersviii. while in some ways these incidents and contexts may be considered exceptional, they expose the ongoing prevalence of violent sexual harassment in and around work organizations. they also illustrate the extent to which men as a social category continue to dominate organizational structures through relations of patriarchy that lead to sexual abuse and systematic discrimination. in so doing, they remind us why feminism is urgently needed. across the global north, there is a sense that many women (and some men) have had enough of such sexism and misogyny and believe the time has come for change. ‘this has to stop!’ is the message conveyed in the everyday sexism project, quoted by sheena vachhani and alison pullen (this issue). these authors draw attention to ‘affective solidarity’ (hemmings, ) as the basis for the effectiveness of this online social movement which combines two modes of feminist organizing – the politics of experience and empathy. the stories of everyday work-related sexism in vachhani and pullen’s article are arresting in both their everyday banality and their exceptional violence. as vachhani and pullen observe, online environments can create a space between public and private domains where encounters with ‘known strangers’ as embodied others are enabled (mclean and maalsen, ). in attending to such encounters, these authors speak out against sexism and demand its cessation in solidarity with the voices of project participants. melissa tyler (this issue) offers a further example of the political organizational possibilities enabled by feminism, linking embodied recognition-based ethics with butler’s ( ) concept of assembly. tyler concentrates on the material ‘collective assembling of bodies’ (butler, : ), emphasising how feminism connects with other foci of activism. she shows how women’s marches and vigils after the mass shooting at the pulse nightclub in florida operate as collective assemblages, as a form of standing together, embodying opposition to sexism (women marches) and homophobia (post-pulse vigils). these two articles provide rich insight into the meaning and significance of new forms of feminist organizing and their theoretical significance. feminism can also be interpreted as a response to sexist attacks on women in positions of leadership and visibility in public life. research repeatedly demonstrates that media representations of women in leadership continue to focus on their bodies in ways which suggest an ‘unfitness’ for work and leadership (sinclair, ; bell and sinclair, ). in professional and working lives, women are often deemed responsible for individually managing their bodies to conceal difference from hegemonic masculine norms (kenny and bell, ). here we offer just a couple of recent examples of this. in early , new zealand prime minister jacinda ardern was interviewed by experienced australian journalist charles wooley, who treated the interview as an opportunity to communicate repeatedly how ‘attractive’ he found ardern, focusing his questions on her pregnancy and the conception of her babyix, questioning her ability to continue in her job and simultaneously grow a person. in a different cultural context, reacting to the news that the president of the republic of finland sauli niinistö had become a father aged , local media did not question in any way his authority and capability to do the job as a consequence of his new family status. this is not surprising as late fatherhood is seen to demonstrate virility, interpreted as evidence of power. these contrasting examples demonstrate the prevalence of sexist norms and values in contemporary public life in ways which impact upon lived experiences in work and organizations, and further testify to the importance of feminisms today. this special issue, we hope, contributes to reaffirming, maintaining, and developing feminism in these contexts. in its editing, we have worked as a team comprised of two women and two men. this raises specific reflexive questions about the position of the two male editors in engaging with feminist theory and activism. a key concern is that men can never experience sexism the same way as women and are therefore excluded from ‘being feminist’. some scholars see feminism as the terrain and prerogative of women, and prefer men to adopt terms such as ‘pro-feminist’ (hearn, ). feminism is thus regarded as ‘a subject for women who are, precisely, its subjects, the people who make it; it is their affair’ (heath, : - ). however, as heath further argues, ‘feminism is also a subject for me [as a man]. … feminism speaks to me, not principally nor equally but too’ (ibid). this latter position also involves acknowledgement of the risk that men can come to occupy a prominent position by treating feminism as just another theoretical position. it is always worth asking, in elaine showalter’s memorable words: ‘is male feminism a form of critical cross-dressing, a fashion risk… that is both radical chic and power play?’ ( : ). yet african american feminist scholar and activist bell hooks ( ) argues that visionary feminists have always understood the necessity of ‘converting’ men into active participants and supporters. without men as allies in struggle, she argues, the feminist movement may not progress as much as it might (see also tarrant, ). we respect the complexity of these positionalities and we understand if some consider the involvement of men in feminist theory and activism problematic. however, we hope to demonstrate here that there is space for men to be involved in the ends of feminism, even if not subject to the directly embodied experiences of sexist discrimination and misogyny. constructing (feminist) knowledge: an uncertain process feminist theory and activism are also crucial in understanding everyday experiences of academic organization and processes and practices of knowledge production (stanley, ; wolf, : phillips et al, ; pullen and rhodes, ). sexism, misogyny and patriarchy are constitutive features of academic working life (van den brink and benschop, ) that shape the academic labour process. these dynamics intersect with racism in universities and academic work (gabriel and tate, ). reviews of published work in management and organization studies show that feminisms remain marginalized and silenced as theory and praxis (benschop and verloo, ; calás and smircich, , ; harding et al, ; lewis and simpson, ; tatli and Ӧzbilgin, ). calás and smircich ( ) argue that this can be traced to the politics of gender in society, with academic interpretations of feminism often positioning it as associated more with advocacy than with legitimate knowledge. as much published research demonstrates (c.f. eagly and carli, ), it is possible to analyse sex discrimination or sexist exclusion from non-feminist perspectives. this relies on decoupling the study of gender-as-sex from feminist principles of inquiry, and is common in many articles on ‘gender’ published in prestigious management and organization studies journals (ely and padavic, ). while this research helpfully illuminates how structures, practices and processes in organizations are gendered, it often does not fulfil the feminist objectives of analysing and questioning sexist exploitation and the oppression or domination of women; nor does it address how knowledge is produced in our field in ways which marginalize and exclude women. we are therefore especially pleased that two articles in this special issue (huopalainen and satama; jack, riach and bariola) are based on empirical work in universities, using one of our own professional contexts to gain insight into the everyday, ‘ordinary’ experiences of sexism in academic organizations and how such practices might be overcome. our own contribution to this is a short (self)critical reflection on the processes and practices of knowledge production and their consequences, a topic central to feminist activism and thought. in guest editing this special issue, we sought to remain open to uncertainty as a fundamental principle of feminist social science, theory construction and ways of making knowledge claims (snitow, ). we have also approached knowledge and knowledge production as inherently political (stanley, ) and framed by patriarchal conditions of practice (walby, ). this recognition may be an additional reason why feminist theory remains in a marginal position in our field – and why it is important to reflect on feminist knowledge production in this editorial. whether focused on the university or society at large, feminist projects entail critiquing and challenging established power relations, envisioning alternatives and possibilities in terms of theory and engaging in activism for change. feminist interventions in universities can have considerable local, institutional impact (katila and meriläinen, ; ), and there is considerable unrealised potential within our field to develop different forms of critical practice informed by feminisms (ashcraft, ). the need for specifically feminist spaces in management and organization studies was demonstrated when we ran a conference track on this theme at the biennial international critical management studies (cms) conference. cms is a community that has had an ambivalent reputation in relation to feminism and wider inclusivity (tatli, ), despite the apparent obvious fit between critical perspectives and feminist thought (ashcraft, ). the track unexpectedly became one of the largest at the conference in terms of papers submitted, resulting in lively presentations and discussions. we were heartened to see more spaces for feminist research created by colleagues at the cms conference. again, the feminist track was over-subscribed, well attended and characterised by lively debate (albeit in a somewhat bizarrely ironic space, a hotel bedroom converted into a tiny conference space). feminisms are also being debated at other management and organization studies conferences, although sometimes in ways which relegate them to the peripheryx. a further development that signals the resurgence of feminist management and organization studies is demonstrated by vida, a network founded in to support the work of women, queer, trans and non- binary people working in business schools and academia, in struggles against discrimination, harassment, marginalization and exploitation (contu, ). by offering a safe space for women to share experiences, ask for advice and provide support, this community aims to put into practice intersectional feminism, encourages action according to an ethic of care, builds solidarity structures and enclaves, and seek to change our profession from within. vida’s manifesta notes ‘the tendency to machismo, incredulity, one-upmanship and acidity, as well as the continuing reliance on what one brand of feminism calls the dead white european men’ that much academic work assumes as good practice, something we also sought to be conscious of throughout this editorial process. in pursuing the idea of a journal special issue, we were reminded early on that feminism can be viewed as dangerous by the powerful. we submitted an initial special issue proposal to another prestigious journal in our field with the aim of reviving a dormant feminist conversation there. the editorial response was polite on the surface, but dismissive, calling into question the relevance of feminist theory and practice to organization studies. other reasons offered for the rejection by the male white editors included lack of editorial diversity in institutional affiliation, noting that the editorial team represented only two countries. working on ‘our hunches’ we sensed something was ‘amiss, not quite right’ (ahmed, : ) with this response, but accepted it without formal or public protest. this is how feminism works – we come up against something that feels wrong, sensing it in our bodies even if we cannot find the words for it (ahmed, ; hemmings, ). ashcraft ( ) refers to this as ‘discernment’, calling for organization studies scholars to develop their capacity to feel relations of power through the body, including those that pertain to their own work/places. it is by acquiring the words to describe what we come up against that feminism names a problem and begins the process of assembly and action. in stark contrast to our experience, we later discovered that a special issue proposal developed by a group of scholars from a single country had been simultaneously accepted. something really was not quite right, as we had sensed. by then proposing a special issue on feminism to human relations, we sought to recognize a wrong and try to redress it, enabled by the positive encouragement of then journal editor-in- chief paul edwards and the associate editor group, and then with the support of current editor-in-chief nick turner, along with managing editor claire castle and her team throughout. this process has also been greatly enabled by the generosity of numerous members of the human relations editorial board in providing developmental reviews. in retrospect, this journal is where we should have started with our proposal, and we consider ourselves and contributors fortunate to be in this space. our call for papers sought empirical evidence and theorizing on the materiality of embodied experiences of the workplace. we encouraged contributions from scholars who analyze the different contents (causes and struggles) and forms (ways of organizing) that characterize feminist activism in contemporary workplaces and policy settings. finally, we invited new empirical evidence and theorizing on connections between contemporary feminisms and different forms of workplace ethics. all of this and much more came to the journal and to us through the work submitted. editing this special issue: challenges of feminism and knowledge production the timeliness of the feminist theme was confirmed in part by the number of submissions received. we expected around twenty papers to be submitted; we received close to fifty. due to the large number of submissions and the potential burden on reviewers, we had to desk reject many more papers than we wanted to. while all of the papers were concerned with gender, often conceptualised as biological sex, the explicit focus on feminism was sometimes less apparent, and this provided a basis for excluding some papers from consideration. despite the volume of work submitted, and while the scope of the call was intended to be broad and inclusive, we also suspect that some feminist scholars may not have felt at home in the special issue call, perhaps because the (white european) guest editorial team did not embody intersectional, postcolonial, or decolonial feminist experience. we, as scholars from the global north, are mindful that we will always speak from a particular position. we are carriers of privileges and run the risk of essentializing those we seek to represent in our studies, thus contributing to a necessarily limited view of feminist theory and activism. crucial elements of contemporary feminist theory and activism remain unaddressed in this special issue. women in the global south continue to be exploited by multinational corporations and local gender orders alike (alamgir and banerjee, ; berry and bell, ; Özkazanc-pan, ). nor do we see the ‘various others’ who as nannies and cleaners enable women (and men) in the global north to focus on their careers and who usually pass unnoticed by researchers in our field (calás and smircich, ). such others leave their homes and families, travelling to do the care work that their employers do not value or are too busy to attend to. intersecting markers of difference such as gender, ethnicity and class, then, serve to legitimize different practices that produce inequalities in the division of labour on a global scale (calás et al., ). while new forms of feminism are taking issue with sexism and oppression in these working contexts, they are addressed only indirectly in this special issue. feminists in the global south remind us that women do not universally face the same experiences and that the reasons behind their inequality are varied (mohanty, ). there is thus a need to decentre the white western woman who has been the main subject of feminism, and we trust that more feminist work can be submitted to this journal to this end. in terms of process, several aspects of editing this special issue exposed the tensions between feminism and processes of producing academic knowledge. first, we experienced challenges in trying to adhere to feminist principles during the process of peer review. some papers that we found brave and thought provoking received harsh criticism from (female and male) reviewers, sometimes including reviewer comments that were surprisingly hostile in content and tone. authors were always professional with their responses and dealt meticulously with the comments, no matter how aggressive. in their last letter to us and the reviewers the authors of one paper reflected on the process: we are grateful for the mixed reviews – they make you question every word! … we’d like to thank the reviewers for their generosity which in one case doesn’t come across very generously but we really welcome their frankness. while ungenerous practice might be considered ‘normal’ behaviour in the highly competitive process of academic peer review today, we found it surprising in the context of this special issue. this reflects our perhaps naïve assumption that those who associate themselves with feminisms would exhibit support and generosity to others who do so, because they would be aware of the destructive potential of marginalization and silencing of others’ views. one hostile reviewer can make a huge difference to the outcome of the review process. in this case, we worked on the basis of the more constructive reviews that helped the authors develop their work. more generally, it seems to us that (guest) editors today are seldom prepared to take a stand, and may choose to hide behind hostile reviewers in decision making. this has repercussions that are particularly problematic for marginalized bodies of knowledge such as feminist theory in organization studies. if one hostile gatekeeper from three or four peer reviewers can rule out new or different voices, the peer review system becomes unreliable in its representation of a field. second, we were confronted with the issue of feminist citation practices. critiques of the veneration of ‘great men’ and gendered theoretical development suggests refusal to cite some works in preference to others, as a way of challenging established dogmas in academic knowledge production. citation practices were raised by one reviewer in correspondence with us (although not in their communication with the author); the reviewer was unhappy with the number of references to work authored by men cited in the paper when, in their view, feminist alternatives written by women were available. we agreed. whose work we are socialized into citing (and whose to avoid) is an important part of how knowledge is produced, and therefore of how patriarchal practices in the academy are reinforced (ahmed, ). for this reason, we follow the principle of primarily citing the contributions of women in this editorial. we suggest that citation practices and the, often ceremonial, citing of ‘canonized’ men’s work deserves more critical attention in our field. like other fields (rossiter, ), we believe that management and organization studies systematically under- recognizes research done by women (czarniawska and sévon, ). third, throughout the editorial process we were forced to think carefully about differing conceptions of what qualifies as competent academic writing. critiques of dominant forms and styles of writing within our field address what is typically left unsaid when academic writers learn to assume the normalcy of masculine vocabularies of rigor, hardness and penetrating conclusiveness (phillips et al., : ) through adherence to a grammatical logic of trajectory, strategy and purpose (höpfl, : ). in its hegemonic, masculinized form, academic knowledge production is a project oriented towards conveying certainty in a particular, sometimes violent, way (ashcraft, ). feminist scholars challenge this through their writing practices. for example, ‘dirty writing’ involves a high degree of messiness and uncertainty, especially in relation to the modernist ideal of rational progress (pullen and rhodes, ). it is unsanitized, and speaks to the readers in and through its form. writing differently (grey and sinclair, ) from a feminist perspective takes on political and emancipatory meanings, as conversations on feminine or women’s writing and writing ‘from the body’ demonstrate (e.g. bell and sinclair, ; höpfl, ; pullen and rhodes, ). feminist critique therefore begins by rendering gendered writing open for discussion, to enable a multitude of affectual voices and texts, creating spaces where different forms of expression are explored and appreciated (pullen and rhodes, ). feminist writing also seeks to challenge forms of theorizing, especially hierarchies of thought, that position some work as inferior and less worthy of attention. as hooks ( : ) warns, ‘one of the many uses of theory in academic locations is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references that may not be at all clear or explained’. these assumptions play into the ways in which scholars are socialized into practicing academic writing today. writing too easily turns into a purely intellectual and individualistic activity that seeks to demonstrate theoretical mastery, as the embodied, sensuous, emotional, social and identity-related aspects of writing are routinely downplayed and denied (kiriakos and tienari, ). one paper accepted for publication here refused to follow the traditional format of academic writing from the outset. the final published article is more conventional than earlier versions; this is mostly due to the review process. in general, however, few papers submitted to the special issue engaged in directly subversive strategies vis-à-vis malestream writing practice, or sought to produce theory that could easily be ‘shared in everyday conversation’ (hooks, : ) as they are written here. looking back, we wonder whether we might have insisted further on the need to challenge established academic conventions of writing, rather than reproducing them. could we have supported more different and unsanitized writing? pushing the boundaries of what counts as knowledge, would such papers have been accepted as legitimate by the readers of human relations? our editorial experience tells us that it is difficult to do this for ‘different’ kinds of academic text and that this presents challenges to audiences in our field, as well as to those in positions of institutional power, such as editors, associate editors and reviewers. notwithstanding, we are pleased and proud of the contributions to this special issue and the ways in which the authors have approached the complex process of feminist knowledge production. feminisms. here. now. each of the papers in this special issue brings wisdom based on unique knowledge developed through engagement with action in the social world. the first two articles deal with the embodied ethics of the body, bringing to bear theoretical perspectives imbued with diverse feminist sensibilities. in different ways they encourage consideration of the interplay between individual actions and collective responsibility by reflecting on contemporary examples of feminist solidarity. ethics, politics and feminist organizing: writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism analyses a well-known and highly influential global feminist movement with significant implications for understanding workplaces, the everyday sexism project (esp). sheena vachhani and alison pullen draw on the work of clare hemmings ( , ) to develop the idea of affective solidarity, an empathic, radical, ethical, political approach to practising and theorising feminism. more than anything their account of the esp observes how solidarity informs resistance, and vice versa. the second article, re-assembling difference: rethinking inclusion through/as embodied ethics by melissa tyler, reflects on the recent discursive shift towards the notion of inclusion in social relations at work. this conceptual paper engages closely with the work of judith butler to provoke thought on the political nature of inclusion when practised in an organizational context. tyler’s argument focuses on the embodied recognition-based ethics of inclusion, linking to assembly through the examples of women’s marches and vigils after the mass shooting at the pulse nightclub in florida in . such assemblies are premised on recognition of our shared inter-corporeal vulnerability and the basic need that we have to acknowledge that. however, tyler argues that the organizational form of assembly, inclusion, risks exploitation of the ethics of assembly. tyler suggests a different approach: an embodied ethico-politics of co-presence based on mutual recognition of inter-subjectivity, to open up the possibility of a more critical alternative to the instrumental championing of inclusion as a means to an end. the third article, splitting and blaming: the psychic life of neoliberal women by darren baker and elizabeth kelan, explores the work experiences of women in accounting and finance. this paper is based on a large empirical project that analyses women’s accounts of everyday working life in the executive and upper/middle management positions conventionally thought of as senior and gendered male. the analysis centres on women who have attained these positions and are therefore defined as successful under the current gender regime. the authors’ careful, detailed and empathetic discourse analytic psychosocial account generates considerable insight into the complex relationship between experiences of discrimination, manifest success and ambivalence as to the dominant neoliberal economic social formation they work within (and against). it suggests that understanding of (the lack of) women in powerful organizational positions has become rather one-sided, locating them as ideological carriers rather than as people, and provokes considerable thought as to future research in this area. the fourth and fifth papers in the special issue explore the generative potential of, and temporalities associated with, female bodies as they interact and intersect with the often patriarchal social relations of organizations. mothers in the making: negotiating ‘new’ motherhood within the ‘new’ academia by astrid huopalainen and suvi satama draws on the experience of working in neoliberalised academic organizations, to undertake an intersectional analysis of gestation, birth and parenthood. this autoethnographic account provides an account of the embodied negotiation of organizational novelty, which is contrasted with the distinctive temporality of maternity. it is a detailed exploration of the conflict between the construction of disembodied professionalism and the lived experience of embodied transformation. the personal, professional and political are brought together in analysis of these inherently messy, fleshy, threatening, beautiful, hopeful interactions. the fifth article, temporality and gendered agency: menopausal subjectivities in women’s work by gavin jack, kathleen riach and emily bariola, brings the lived experience of menopause at work into focus. it presents an analysis of an interview study of women working in universities and identifies temporal modalities embedded in their experiences. the researchers make two contributions to understanding social relations at work: they revive a latent debate on the ontology of time, and elaborate on the notion of a body politics of surprise when unpredictable fleshy beings are at work. through their richly contextualized account of ‘what a body can do’ they suggest that unpredictability is at the very centre of bodily experiences at work and feminist politics. the articles by huopalainen and satama and jack, riach and bariola exemplify a trend in feminist research where the female body is seen as a source of opportunities. discourses of the body, materiality and the corporeality of the lived body are all significant parts and sources of this form of contemporary feminist theorizing and writing (alaimo, hekman and harnes-garcia, ; katila, ). the final contribution to the special issue is written by amanda sinclair: five movements in an embodied feminism: a memoir. it is a relatively unusual, for our field and this journal, combination of autobiography, autoethnography, theory development, retrospect and prospect. the narrative argument has a clear central substantive purpose – to demonstrate the embodied nature of feminism in working lives and, in doing so, to remind us that there is always more to working life than can be found in research, teaching, reading and writing. as amanda emphasises, feminism offers a constant source of inspiration and a way of life at all stages of our lives. the struggles continue we have argued that the time has come, again, for feminism as a theoretical perspective to understand and challenge sexism in organization, social relations and work, taking centre stage alongside other theoretical perspectives in organization studies. like feminist activism, this project is inherently future oriented, in part because its purpose is to analyse and challenge sexist discrimination with a view to creating alternatives. ahmed encourages us to maintain such commitments, ‘holding on to the projects that are projects insofar as they have yet to be realized’ ( : ). it may be that feminism remains a project in this sense, without end but always with the clearest purpose. if that is the case, the work presented here shows very clearly how social relations at work are better understood with feminism. we trust that many readers of human relations find the contributions to this special issue worthwhile and a source of inspiration for their work and lives. alongside many feminist activists and theorists, we also retain a sense of hope that historical and contemporary injustices can be recognised, protested, analysed, and ultimately overcome. the list of contributions that feminism has made to progressive social and economic change is remarkable. the historical length and social breadth of protest, theory and change are perhaps greater than any other academic position: the extension of suffrage, equality of property rights, equal access to education, equal pay and contributions to wider social movements such as anti-racist and sexual orientation civil rights movements, can all be traced or linked to feminism. yet these are all struggles that continue, suggesting a significant future for feminism in attempts to maintain progressive change towards the end of sexist oppression. references ahmed s ( ) living a feminist life. durham, nc: 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[doi: org/ . / ] vachhani s and pullen a ( ) ethics, politics, and feminist organizing: writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism. human relations. van den brink m and benschop y ( ) gender in academic networking: the role of gatekeepers in professorial recruitment. journal of management studies ( ): - . walby s ( ) theorizing patriarchy. sociology ( ): - . walby s ( ) the future of feminism. cambridge: polity. wolf m ( ) a thrice told tale: feminism, postmodernism and ethnographic responsibility. stanford ca: stanford university press. i see https://everydaysexism.com/ [accessed . . ]. ii the hashtag was created in to convey the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, following widespread allegations made against film producer harvey weinstein. iii a movement of women and girls oriented towards ‘building a lifestyle revolution to fight the climate crisis.’ see https://www. millionwomen.com/ [accessed . . ]. iv see https://www.womensmarchglobal.com/ [accessed . . ]. v ‘time’s up’ is a feminist movement against sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace that was founded in january in response sexual abuse in the hollywood film industry. see https://www.timesupnow.com/ [accessed . . ]. vi unless stated otherwise, in this editorial we refer to feminism in the singular as political activism. feminisms in the plural refer to the multiplicity of feminist commitments, theories, and approaches. vii emma watson: gender equality is your issue too, un women, september . http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/ / /emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too [accessed . . ]. viii ‘men only: inside the charity fundraiser where hostesses are put on show’, financial times, january . https://www.ft.com/content/ d e- - e - - c ad d c b [accessed . . ]. ix ‘jacinda ardern’s ‘sexist, creepy’ minutes interview angers new zealand’ the guardian, february https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /feb/ /sexist-creepy-jacinda-ardern- - minutes-interview-angers-new-zealand [accessed . . ]. x such as the european academy of management (euram), british academy of management (bam) and us academy of management (aom) conferences, and the european colloquium for organization studies (egos) conference, which hosts women’s network meetings. https://everydaysexism.com/ https://www. millionwomen.com/ https://www.womensmarchglobal.com/ https://www.timesupnow.com/ http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/ / /emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too https://www.ft.com/content/ d e- - e - - c ad d c b https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /feb/ /sexist-creepy-jacinda-ardern- -minutes-interview-angers-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /feb/ /sexist-creepy-jacinda-ardern- -minutes-interview-angers-new-zealand jeremy c. pope: american family survey summary report summary report: identities, opportunities and challenges christopher f. karpowitz & jeremy c. pope co-directors of the center for the study of elections and democracy project committee: doug wilks (editor, deseret news), christopher f. karpowitz, allison pond (indepen- dent project manager), jeremy c. pope, and jesse hyde (indepth editor, deseret news) we thank megan davis (whose help in drafting the report was invaluable), jacquelyn asto, dani hogan, and margaret jarvis for excellent research assistance. in july of , the deseret news and the center for the study of elections and democracy at brigham young university fielded a survey on the family in america. this survey was administered by yougov to a sample of , adult respondents whose characteristics mirror those of the general population. this report details the raw results of that survey and some of the key demographic breakdowns. download the survey report at http://deseretnews.com/american-family-survey. the overall margin of error for the survey is ± . %. we are deeply grateful for the efforts and advice of our advisory committee, karlyn bowman (american enterprise institute), marcy carlson (university of wisconsin), sara mclanahan (princeton university), richard reeves (the brookings institution), and brad wilcox (the university of virginia). they provided substantial advice and comment that dramatically improved the survey and the report. errors, of course, are our own. please see section on methodology (below) for a statement about the specific protocols for this survey. http://deseretnews.com/american-family-survey american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges contents project overview & summary the state of marriage and family . the general state of marriages and attitudes about marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . relationship status and trump approval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . family relationships and parenting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . evaluations of american families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . important issues facing american families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the financial stresses facing american families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . money and the decision to have children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . family crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . family activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . parental activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . american views on the ideal marriage and family . shared values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fulfilling life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . becoming an adult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . parents and teenagers . teens and technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . what worries parents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sexual harassment social capital and support networks american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges family and public policy . national government programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . local government programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . personal experience and support for immigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . family experience and tax cuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . family background and support for planned parenthood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions appendix: statement on methodology appendix: topline report american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges project overview & summary the american family survey, now in its fourth year, is designed to understand the experiences of amer- icans in their relationships, marriages, and families and how those experiences relate to a variety of dif- ferent political and social issues. in addition to examining trends in responses to core questions that have been asked repeatedly, the survey expands to include new areas of inquiry, including how americans think about family formation, attitudes about fertility and children, concerns of parents of teenagers, and views about sexual harassment, consent, and the #metoo movement. one of the key new questions explores how a person’s identity relates to their family life. we find that people place much more importance on their identity as a parent or partner than other identities, such as their religion, political party, or career. this identity does not seem to have a large direct effect on family practices or activities. but those who are more committed to an identity as a parent or as a spouse are definitely more optimistic about their families. another theme emerging from the findings is anxiety about the cost of raising a family. these costs stand out as one of the top issues facing families today, and half of americans say the cost of raising a family is not affordable for most people. those without children rate the cost of raising a child as a significant factor in their decision about whether or not to have children. most people with children at home say they worry about their ability to pay at least one bill, and nearly half have faced some kind of economic crisis during the past months. we also used the american family survey as an opportunity to examine attitudes about sexual harassment and consent, and found that men and women think differently about these topics, with men less likely to describe behaviors such as asking for sexual favors or persisting in unwanted attention as "always" harassment. men are also less likely to define certain behaviors as harassment when asked about a woman doing it to a man rather than a man doing it to a woman. women are also more insistent on the importance of verbal consent in intimate relationships than are men. with regard to core questions about the state of marriage and family in america, we find substantial continuity with the previous iterations of the american family survey. on many core items we find little to no change at all. survey respondents continue to have positive views of their own relationships and families, though they are far less optimistic about the state of marriage and families generally. in the past, we have found that families across many demographic and ideological groups participate in family activities at similar rates, though attitudes about marriage and family may differ by demographic group. this year’s survey also finds that groups of americans differ in what they describe as the ideal sequence to have sex, cohabit, marry, and have children, but the actual sequence in which people live out in their own lives is more similar across groups. it also builds on previous findings about the impact of screens on families, with overuse of technology surfacing as one of the top issues facing teens today. families face many opportunities at this time, and in some ways we see more optimism about people’s personal relationships alongside continued pessimism about the state of marriage more generally. but it is also a time of significant challenges, whether they be economic or otherwise. below are some highlights from this year’s survey. views on marriage & family the institution of marriage is supported by a majority of americans—especially the notion that marriage is good for families and children: percent believe it makes them better off financially american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges and percent believe the institution is necessary to create strong families. few people believe that marriage is a burden or out of date. attitudes about whether or not being legally married is as important as personal commitment to a partner are mixed, but percent believe that being legally married is not as important as personal commitment. people who approve of donald trump are more likely than other americans to be married, but trump supporters can be found across all relationship types. a surprising finding is that donald trump’s support is driven not simply by education, but fairly strongly by marital status. fifty percent of married men with a college degree and percent of married men without a college degree held a favorable view of trump, much higher than the unmarried men with a college degree ( percent) or the unmarried men without a college degree ( percent). americans say being a parent and being a spouse or partner are the most important identities to them—more important than religion, race, political party, career, or community. about seven in ten of parents or married persons claim the identity is very or extremely important, compared with only percent for religion and percent for career. black and hispanic americans place an even higher premium on their parental and spousal identities than do white americans. people with a strong parental identity are more likely to undertake key family activities like eating dinner together or doing household chores together. overall, americans appear to be growing less concerned about cultural issues, such as substance abuse and sexual permissiveness. the percentage of respondents saying these types of issues are among the biggest problems facing families has dropped fifteen percentage points since . how- ever, republicans are still concerned about cultural issues far more than are democrats or indepen- dents. at the same time, concern about financial stresses has increased, and is concentrated among people with children still at home. when it comes to the prerequisites for having a child, most americans believe that three things matter: being financially stable, being in a committed relationship (but not necessarily being mar- ried), and having good health insurance. for young people who do not currently have children, the single largest consideration is the cost of raising a child, although relationship status also matters. there is a clear difference between the ideal ordering and the actual ordering of key relationship milestones including sex, cohabitation, getting married, and having children. republicans and black democrats favor a more traditional sequence (marriage before sex and cohabitation) than white democrats, who prefer cohabitation and marriage after sex. but those who prefer a more tra- ditional sequence as their ideal do not tend to realize this in their actual lives. the lived experience of these three groups is similar, with sex typically coming before cohabitation and marriage. americans believe that it is important for married couples to share similar beliefs about raising children and social values (such as honesty or hard work). they are less concerned about spouses having the same religious beliefs, education level, or political party. americans tend to emphasize financial milestones — being financially independent from parents, moving our of parents’ home, and being capable of supporting a family — as the key markers of adulthood. these conclusions are gendered, however. more americans see them as important to “becoming a man” than to “becoming a woman.” in addition, generational differences also matter for these assessments. compared to younger respondents, older americans see much larger differences between what it means to become a man and what it means to become a woman. parents & teenagers according to parents of teenagers, overuse of technology is one of the most important issues fac- ing teens today. technology concerns are cited by a majority of parents ( percent), and this is followed closely by bullying (chosen by percent of parents), but most other issues like drugs, alcohol, pressure to get good grades, and navigating sexual identity (among others) are all of far less widespread concern. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges republican parents are most concerned about overuse of technology. in contrast, democrats and independents are more concerned about bullying. republicans are also dramatically more con- cerned about the role of family breakdown and divorce in the lives of teenagers than are other respondents. parents estimated that their teenage sons spent a little more than hours a week playing video games, while parents of teenage girls estimated that their teenage girls spent a little less than hours a week on social media. a little over one-third of parents say that they are extremely concerned about their teenager’s social life, school trouble and grades, while a quarter of parents are similarly concerned about anxiety and depression. sexual harassment & consent nearly six in ten women say they have experienced unwanted sexual advances. for men, the comparable number is far lower: less than three in ten. there is also a distinct difference between the views of men and women on which behaviors count as sexual harassment in work settings. women have higher standards; men have lower standards on average. for example, in women say that “asking for sexual favors” constitutes sexual ha- rassment, compared to about half of men. most men and women say that “persisting in unwanted attention” counts as sexual harassment, but even there, we find a gender gap ( percent of women vs. percent of men). the specific nature of the action also matters for assessments of sexual harassment. in work settings, both men and women are less likely to view placing a hand on someone else’s back, making sexual jokes, or commenting on appearance as forms of sexual harassment, but even with respect to those behaviors, there are gender differences in standards. but there is another pattern of gender differences in whether conduct is perceived as harassment. we asked half of our sample about men taking certain actions towards women and the other half about women taking the same action towards men. respondents are more likely to see many actions as sexual harassment when done by men. for example, about in men and nearly in women think that asking for sexual favors counts as sexual harassment when a man behaves this way toward a woman, but those numbers drop to in men and a little less than in women when we asked about women making the request of a man. both men and women have this double standard, although men are a little more inconsistent in their standards than are women. people believe strongly in the need for consent. in the cases of intimate touching or having sex, large majorities believe the consent must be verbal, while for kissing or hand-holding it can be nonverbal. women, in particular, emphasize the need for consent. politics and policy relationship and family experiences can be powerful predictors of people’s attitudes about local policies, in contrast to some of the partisan distinctions that persist on national issues. for instance, single people and people without children are much more likely to favor spending local tax dollars on roads as opposed to schools. similarly, single people and those without children favor public transportation over spending money on pensions. on the topic of immigration, most americans agree that citizens should be able to bring non-citizen children, spouses, and parents to this country, though there are predictable partisan differences, and democrats favor giving the opportunity to siblings and grandparents as well. majorities of both parties oppose extending the circle to other extended family members. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges americans’ own family experiences shape these attitudes, too. for instance, married people with children are relatively more favorable to bringing children and spouses to the country, while single people are relatively more favorable to bringing extended family members. regarding migrant families that cross the border without a visa and request asylum, more than in americans favor keeping parents and children together. among those who feel this way, a plurality believe such families should be allowed into the country subject to an asylum hearing, although a little over a third believe they should be held together in detention facilities. sixty-eight percent of americans think the recent tax cuts will help large corporations and percent think they will help wealthy individuals. by contrast, percent of americans think that the tax cuts will help low-income individuals and only percent believe they will help their own families. women are the group that stands out as the least likely to favor the tax cuts: only three in ten women believe they will help their family. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges the state of marriage and family we begin with an overview of the state of marriage among the , respondents to the survey. table provides a summary of the current relationship status of the respondents. a little less than half of the sample is currently married, and a little over one third is not currently in a relationship. the remaining respondents report being in a committed relationship, and among that group around two-thirds are cohabiting. while these findings are nearly identical to the results found in previous years, there are distinct differences between demographic groups that are important to explain. table : current relationship status married cohabiting in relationship no relationship overall democrat independent republican - - - - + high school or less some college college graduate or more low income (under $ , ) middle income ($ - , ) high income (above $ , ) white black hispanic asian republicans are more likely to be married than are democrats, and both groups are more likely to be married than independents. because discerning causality is difficult in these contexts, these patterns may be tied to other demographic characteristics, as republicans tend to be slightly older than democrats, who tend to be slightly older than independents (the average age of each group differs about five years from the next). younger respondents are less likely to be in any relationship, while older respondents are consistently more likely to be in a relationship—more than six in ten respondents over age are married. education and income are also correlated with relationship status. those who have a college degree (or even more education) are significantly more likely to be married than those with less than a college degree. throughout, we provide numbers in both table and figure formats, but caution the reader that figures are meant to display the pattern of relative results rather than than any particular level. for ease of presentation we have omitted confidence intervals for these numbers, but they vary widely depending upon the sample discussed. occasionally they are quite small (the overall sample is , ), but occasionally they are much larger when a very small sub-group is analyzed. we encourage the reader to contact the authors or download datasets to better understand the data patterns. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges similarly, those with a high income ($ , or above) are slightly more likely to be married than middle- income respondents. but the median member of both groups is married, while among those with an income of less than $ , , only three in ten respondents are likely to be married. and it is not about the marriage contract: those who have a low income are not cohabiting at higher rates, but rather are not in any relationship at all. except among the youngest respondents, this finding remains after controlling for age. of course, those people who are cohabiting or married are likely to have a higher household income simply because there are two potential wage earners, but the economic differences are still important to note. - - - married cohabiting in a relationship not in a relationship percentage r el at io ns hi p st at us income < $ , > $ , relationship status by income figure : relationship status by age and income while we have made special mention of the correlation between income and marital status, a lot of other patterns are similar to results from previous years. among the respondents who had been married at least once, the average age at first marriage was a little over (women typically marry at , men typically marry at ). cohabitation patterns remain similar. about percent of all respondents (and percent of married respondents) reported that they had cohabited at least once prior to marriage, but this is strongly related to age. of respondents between the ages of and , percent reported cohabiting prior to marriage; a little over half of respondents between age and report cohabiting, and for those aged or older this number drops back down to percent. on average, respondents were when they first lived with a romantic partner, and this also differs by age. of those between the ages of and , the average age when they first lived with a romantic partner is . this number steadily increases, with those age and older first reporting cohabitation at . just over a quarter of the sample has experienced divorce at some point in their life. of the respondents that had been married for at least two years, percent reported that at some point in the last two years they thought their relationship was “in trouble.” among cohabiters who had been together for at least two years, nearly half indicated that they thought their relationship was in trouble at some point in the last two years. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : relationship troubles by demographics percent that thought their relationship was in trouble all women men mother continuously married mother ever divorced mother never married liberal moderate conservative high school or less some college college or more low income middle income high income - - - - + less than years together - years together - years together + years together women were more likely to believe that their relationship was in trouble than were men. the other traditional demographic category that saw a substantial difference was income, where the low-income respondents were about percent more likely to see their relationship this way. a variable we have previously found important was a mother’s marital status, and that remains true this year. finally, we note that the length of time a respondent had been married or in a relationship with their current partner was highly correlated with whether they thought their relationship was in trouble—those with longer relationships were much less likely to believe that their relationship was in trouble. this latter point is also strongly conflated by age, and younger respondents are definitely more anxious about their relationships. for those under age , more than four in ten had recently worried about their relationship. among older groups the numbers are much lower. many aspects of american family life have remained consistent over the last four years. around half of the sample is married, and the average age of marriage is , as it was in past surveys. americans generally have only one cohabitation before marriage. americans tend to first become a parent at age . the one american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges exception to this pattern of continuity is the number of children. in the american family survey, the average number of kids was . . this has steadily decreased to . . admittedly, this may not seem like a large difference, but in the area of fertility it is noticeable. if the pattern continues, the results will be quite substantial and will reflect a major change in american family life. . the general state of marriages and attitudes about marriage respondents to the american family survey express largely positive views of their own marriage. for the first time in the survey, over half of the sample felt that their marriage was stronger than two years ago, and another percent said that they were generally the same. these numbers represent the hint of an upward trend in evaluations, but are probably best interpreted as stability (see figure ). a very small percentage said that their marriage was weaker. this is the same pattern we saw in the previous three years of the survey. your marriage marriages generally year pe rc en ta ge status weaker about the same stronger evaluations of marriage figure : respondent views of marriages, both their own and of others. this pattern is almost exactly reversed when asked about marriages generally in the united states. when respondents turned their attention to marriages generally, only six percent believed that marriages had gotten stronger in the last two years. thus, americans appear to be fairly optimistic about the health of their own romantic relationships, but dramatically more pessimistic about the health of marriages generally. this pattern has held essentially constant over all four years of the american family survey. this pattern has no relationship to partisan identity, as around half of respondents in all partisan categories feel this way about their own marriages. the pattern for seeing weakness in other marriages is also broadly similar, though there is a small partisan gap here: percent of democrat affiliates claim that marriages generally are weaker, while percent of republicans claim the same. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges finally, we turn to a battery of questions we have consistently studied on people’s beliefs about the importance of marriage. in each iteration of the american family survey, we have asked respondents to consider a number of statements about the institution of marriage, questions about how it strengthens families, provides financially, or is a burden, and so forth. each of the questions is in reference to marriages generally and not an individual’s personal marriage. the trend is displayed in figure . year pe rc en ta ge statement needed in order to create strong families makes families and children better off financially when more people are married, society is better off being legally married is not as important as personal commitment more of a burden than a benefit old-fashioned and out-of-date beliefs about marriage figure : respondent beliefs about the importance of marriage. two statements stand out as being agreed to by large majorities: that marriages make families and children better off financially and that it is needed to create strong families. though a majority still agrees with the idea that when more people are married society is better off, it is not a large majority. the more controversial idea is that personal commitment is more important than being legally married. this is the number that has moved around the most in the series, but, generally, a little less than half of the sample agrees with this idea, suggesting that personal commitment is a very powerful value for a large number of people. the notions that marriage is more of a burden than a benefit or that it is old-fashioned and out-of-date are consistently not popular. only about one in seven respondents agrees with these ideas. on balance, we take these results to suggest that the public tends to feel quite positively toward marriage, even those who are not married. they suggest a pattern where, while people are reluctant to judge people’s life choices, they do agree that marriage is a positive institution and that, in general, it makes families and society better off. these results strengthen if we look only at the married. for instance, while percent of the married respondents believe that being legally married is not as important as personal commitment, the number rises to percent when looking at those in no relationship. those cohabiting (a relatively small slice of the sample) are the group most likely to agree with this statement: percent agree. there are some ideological differences, at least as far as self-labelled ideology goes. conservatives tend to like marriage more. liberals are less convinced that it is necessary. only percent of liberals believe it is needed to create strong families, and only percent believe that it benefits society. but, even among this group less positively disposed toward marriage, only percent believe that marriage is more american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges of a burden than a benefit and only percent believe that the institution is old-fashioned and out-of-date. it is fashionable in some quarters to argue that marriage is under assault. and while we agree that it is an institution that is in some respects weaker than it once was, that is not because people dislike the institution. on the whole they like it, though the meaning of that institution varies across the population. . relationship status and trump approval in the last afs we examined the relationship between family status and trump support and found indi- cations of a relationship between marriage and reported vote. this year remains broadly similar. table displays trump approval by relationship status. table : percentage approving of president trump by category all respondents republican respondents relationship status trump approvers non-trump approvers trump approvers non-trump approvers married cohabiting in a relationship not in a relationship it is obvious that trump’s core group are those that are married. this is the only group that approaches approval of trump (though even this group is best described as “split”). those in other relationship statuses all disapprove of trump at super-majority levels. the final two columns look at trump approval among republicans. among republicans, trump’s status is so high that only the cohabiting republicans (not a large group) approve of trump less than eight times out of ten. and even the cohabiters approve of trump percent of the time. it seems generally true that republicans of all stripes—regardless of family status—have broadly made their peace with trump. while many outlets have highlighted the importance of gender and education to trump support, rela- tively few note how important marriage is, especially among men. table shows the importance of this relationship. the only group that approves of president trump at percent or greater is married men— regardless of education level. all other groups are at least under percent in their level of approval (some quite a bit). while education is obviously important for predicting trump approval, marriage should not be understated. table : trump approval by gender, marital status and education men women married unmarried married unmarried college degree no college degree in , percent of the trump voters reported being married, while only percent of clinton voters reported being married. there were not enough trump approving democrats to examine the split in that group. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . identity this year’s report includes a series of identity questions. the specific wording used was, “how important are the following things to your personal identity?” figure shows the popularity of each item we asked about. the first thing to notice is that relationships and parenting are very important (though it should be noted that we only asked this question of people who were in a relationship or had children). other identities are simply less popular. religion and career are also somewhat popular, with race, political party, and community less so. spouse parent religion race political party career or job community pe rc en ta ge s ay in g `e xt re m el y' o r 'v er y' im po rt an t identity commitment figure : respondent identities we introduce it here to both explain the variable (we will mostly be focusing on the spouse and parent identities below), but also to note that one surprising finding (at least to us) was the racial difference by identity. figure displays the percentage who selected the topmost category for parent, spouse, and then (for purposes of comparison) race. the clear result is that both blacks and hispanics respond that their parental and spousal identities are “extremely” important to them, and at higher rates than whites. it is important to remember that white respondents are still choosing spousal and parental identities as their most important identities, it is just that blacks and hispanics see those identities as somewhat more important. in the case of black respondents, the importance of spousal and parental identities are equal to or more important than their racial identity. we offer no strong theoretical reason for that here, although it could be due to the importance of passing along a cultural heritage, the need to protect children or family relationships, or some other factor we cannot guess. so, the proportion of people who value an identity clearly shows that parental and spousal identities are quite important, and that these latter identities appear to be more important to blacks and hispanics than they are to whites. another way of showing this is displayed in table , which provides further analysis of american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges spouse identity parent identity race identity pe rc en ta ge s ay in g `e xt re m el y im po rt an t' respondent white black hispanic spouse and parent identity by race figure : respondent identities by race people’s identities in this survey. there, the raw number of identities claimed by respondents are shown, and the differences are instructive. white respondents are consistently below average in the number of identities that they claim relative to the other racial groups. this is true whether or not we examine the global average or simply look at the claimed identities without race included (it seems plausible, and, indeed, the data bear out the claim that whites tend not to see their race as an important identity while members of minority groups do see their race as an important identity). another group that stands out are atheists. they have more than a half point fewer identities than do the other religious groups, and this is true even when we omit religion from that category. all of this analysis should come with a significant caveat. though we asked about several different identities, we make no claim that this list is exhaustive or complete. people take their identities from many different sources, so this information should not be read to mean that atheists or whites lack an identity, merely that the identities that we chose to ask about did not appeal to them. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : the raw number of identities people believed were important to them overall average average dropping race average dropping religion overall . . . group white . . . black . . . hispanic . . . religion protestant . . . roman-catholic . . . atheist . . . . family relationships and parenting around percent of the sample reported having at least one child. among the respondents who are married, percent have at least one child. among cohabiters, percent report having a child. the average number of children in this year’s sample is . . however, when limiting the sample to those who have at least one child, this number jumps to . . while there is a large group of americans who do not have any children (around percent of american family survey respondents), those who do have children tend to have two or three. among married respondents to the survey, two-thirds have two or more children (see table ). among cohabiters, more than half have at least one child. by contrast, two- thirds of respondents who are single or who are in a committed relationship but not yet living together have no children. of respondents who have children, the average age when they became parents was : for women and for men. table : number of children all married cohabiting in relationship no relationship + though most people who are married also have kids, the experience of raising children outside of marriage is common: approximately one-quarter of the sample reported having a child out of wedlock, and percent of the women in the sample who have children are not currently married. when we restrict the findings to women who currently have a child living with them at home, less than percent are married, and of those unmarried women, just over one quarter are cohabiting with their partners. the experience of raising children outside of marriage is especially common among younger women. of women between the ages of and with a child at home, less than half are married and more than one quarter are cohabiting, compared to women between and , where nearly two-thirds are married and about percent are cohabiting. these numbers include biological, step-children, or adopted children. they do not include foster children or other unique situations, such as grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. in this table, the "in relationship" category includes those who are in a committed relationship but are not cohabiting or married. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges the relationship between marital status and parenting also differs across income categories. as shown in figure , respondents in the lowest income category (respondents with household incomes of less than $ , ) were dramatically less likely to be married and substantially more likely to be cohabiting or in no relationship at all than middle- ($ , -$ , ) or high-income (above $ , ) participants in the survey. put differently, the experience of raising children outside of marriage — sometimes with a cohabiting partner, but much more often with no partner at all — is much more common among the poorest americans. wealthier americans, by contrast, tend to raise their children within the context of marriage. this pattern can be seen among fathers and mothers, though among fathers, we see a difference between middle- and high-income respondents that is not as pronounced among mothers. for low-income mothers, raising a child on their own is almost as prevalent as raising a child with the help of a married spouse. fathers mothers married cohabiting in relationship no relationship married cohabiting in relationship no relationship relationship status pe rc en t o f i nc o m e c at eg o ry low income (<$ k) middle income ($ - k) high income (>$ k) income and parents' relationship status figure : parents’ relationship status by income of course, as we pointed out above, people in relationships are likely to have higher household incomes because there are two partners who can be wage earners, but the patterns in figure are noteworthy for precisely that reason. raising children in the context of a stable relationship also increases the likelihood that those children will be in a home with a higher income, one where parents can meet the costs associated with raising a child. in addition, among the set of parents that reported being married or cohabiting, high- income respondents were more likely than low-income respondents to choose marriage over cohabitation, though marriage was the preferred choice for all income groups. this year, we also looked more closely at those who had foster children or other children living in their home, and we found that these family arrangements are less common. around one in ten respondents reported having children living in their home that were not biological, adopted, or step-children. two percent of the respondents indicated that they had a grandchild living with them. only one percent ( total) respondents reported foster children currently living in their home. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . . evaluations of american families just as we did with marital relationships, we also asked respondents to evaluate the strength of both their own family and families in the united states more generally compared to two years ago. similar to the results for marriage, respondents of the american family survey were much more optimistic about their own family compared to families generally. when speaking about their own marriage, around percent said that their family relationships were about the same or stronger than they were two years ago, with one-third saying they were stronger. turning to families generally, one-third said that they were weaker than two years ago, and around half believed they were about the same. when we compare this year’s results to those from previous years, the clear pattern is stability (figure ). over the past four years, respondents’ views of their own families and of american families generally have not changed. your family families generally year pe rc en ta ge status weaker about the same stronger evaluations of families figure : respondent views of families, both their own and of others. . . important issues facing american families what challenges and issues are american families currently facing? as we have done in previous iterations of the survey, we asked respondents to indicate the “most important issues” facing families today from a curated list of items. they were asked to select up to three items, which were randomly displayed and were not grouped by topics as they are here. the answers for , along with the percentage change since our first american family survey in , are displayed in table . in previous years of the american family survey, the most common issue chosen by respondents has been “parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently,” and this pattern continued in (though the overall percentage choosing this item declined slightly compared to ). apparently, amer- icans worry a great deal about other parents’ ability to discipline their children. however, meaningful percentages also express concern about economic challenges, such as the costs associated with raising a family or high work demands and stress on parents. similarly, a little less than one-third of respon- american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : the most important issues facing families % selecting change from economics + the costs associated with raising a family + high work demands and stress on parents + the lack of good jobs - lack of government programs to support families + culture - decline in religious faith and church attendance + the widespread availability and use of drugs and alcohol - sexual permissiveness in our society - crime and other threats to personal safety - family structure and stability - parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently - more children growing up in single-parent homes + difficulty finding quality time with family in the digital age + change in the definition of marriage and family percentage choosing each item as one of their top three issues. bolded numbers show percentage choosing at least one item from the relevant category as one of their top three issues. dents worry about children growing up in single-parent homes and just under one-quarter of respondents express concerns about finding quality family time amid digital distractions. year pe rc en ta ge category culture economics family structure most important issues facing families figure : changing concerns about the issues facing american families. when we examine patterns across time, we find stability in the “family structure and stability” category, american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges though this is driven in part by the responses to the discipline item (figure ). within this category, we do see some signs of increased concern about children being raised in single-parent homes (a six-point increase since ). more substantial changes have occurred in the other two categories. over time, respondents have become less concerned with the issues listed in the “culture” category: compared to , the percentage of respondents choosing at least one item from this category has dropped by percentage points. there are significant declines in the percentage of respondents expressing concern about societal sexual permissiveness (an eight-point drop since ), the availability of drugs and alcohol (a nine-point drop), and crime (a nine-point decline). conversely, there has been an eight-point increase since in the percentage of respondents choosing the “economics” category. these differences have been driven by increasing concern about high work demands and stress on parents (a seven-point increase since ), lack of government programs to sup- port families (five-point increase), and especially the costs associated with raising a family (nine-point change), which is now the second-most commonly chosen item on our curated list. notably, given the economic recovery over the last several years, there has been a slight decline since in the percentage of respondents expressing concern about the lack of good jobs. the increasing concern americans feel about economics is not that parents cannot find good jobs; it is, instead, the demands in both time and money associated with raising children and supporting a family. consistent with this result, we asked elsewhere in the survey whether the cost of raising children is affordable for most people, and more than half of respondents told us that it was not, regardless of their own income status. similar to previous years, we find meaningful age and partisan differences in perceptions of the most important problems. younger respondents were more likely to identify economic concerns as being the most important issue ( percent of those under selected at least one economic item, while only percent of those or older selected at least one economic concern). for the cultural items, this pattern was reversed. only percent of respondents under selected a cultural issue compared to percent of respondents or older. older respondents are also more likely to choose items in the "family structure and stability" category ( percent of those or older), though younger respondents are also most likely to choose an item in this category ( percent of those under ). these patterns are even more striking when we look at results by self-reported partisan identity (figure ). democrats were the most likely to select an economic issue, with nearly percent of them selecting at least one. in contrast, only about one-third of republicans chose one or more economic issues, with independents between the partisans. republicans were much more likely to choose a cultural item compared to other partisans ( percent of republicans vs. percent of democrats and percent of independents). similarly, while nine out of ten republicans and eight out of ten independents selected at least one family structure or stability issue, two-thirds of democrats did. . . the financial stresses facing american families given the increasing concern we have seen among americans about the high cost of raising children, this year we also asked respondents to tell us a little more about their financial worries. specifically, we asked whether respondents were worried about paying any potential financial bills from a list we provided. this question asked respondents to report their worries about whether they can meet each of these monthly obligations, not whether the absolute cost of each item was high or low. table shows that respondents with children at home expressed substantially more concern about meeting their financial obligations than those who are not raising children. with respect to every bill on the list, larger percentages of respondents with children at home said they worried about being able to pay their bills, compared to respondents with democrats were also more likely than republicans to tell us that the cost of raising children was not affordable for most people – nearly two-thirds of democrats expressed that sentiment, compared to about percent of republicans. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges economics culture family structure type of issue pe rc en ta ge partisanship democrats independents republicans vote choice and the most important issues facing families figure : differences in concerns about issues facing american families by party. no children. overall, nearly three-quarters of respondents with children at home said they worried about paying at least one of the monthly bills on the list, compared to just over half of those without children in the home. clearly, the concern that americans expressed about the costs of raising children can be seen in the everyday financial stresses of our respondents. table : concerns about paying bills children at home no children at home utilities rent/mortgage paying credit card bills food health insurance or medical bills transportation expenses paying back loans clothes tuition or educational expenses childcare other at least one beyond self-reported stress about paying bills, we also asked respondents whether they had actually experienced several potential economic crises over the past months. again, we find that respondents with children at home faced greater economic difficulty than those without children (table ). though american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges fewer respondents told us they had actually experienced these difficulties in the past year, as compared to the percentage of those who worried about paying monthly bills, these findings, too, show the financial challenges many american families face. more than one-quarter of respondents with children at home said they had failed to pay an important bill in the past year, twice as many as respondents who were not raising children. more than one in five respondents with children at home said they had borrowed money to pay bills, compared to percent of those without children in the home. overall, percent of families with children said they had experienced a significant economic crisis in the past year, compared to percent of those without children. table : economic crises children at home no children at home did not pay the full amount of an important bill borrowed money to help pay the bills needed to go to the doctor but could not because of cost hungry but did not eat because couldn’t afford food moved in with others because of financial problems were homeless, even for one night at least one we included these same questions in every american family survey since , and despite the improving economy, reports of economic challenge have changed little over the past three years. across all survey respondents, regardless of the survey year, about four in ten told us they had experienced an economic crisis in the previous months. given the financial stresses reported by respondents to the american family survey, this year we also asked all respondents currently in a relationship if they expect their spouse or partner to work for pay. because such expectations may differ by age, the analysis below is restricted to married or cohabiting respondents who are years old or younger. figure presents the results. in every case, both men and women were more likely to expect their spouse to work for pay if they reported having children at home. more than eight in ten cohabiting women with children at home told us they expect their partners to work for pay, and among married women, the number increased to nearly nine in ten. these percentages are six to seven percentage points higher than the results among women without children at home. nearly eight in ten cohabiting men with children at home reported that they expect their partner to work for pay, compared to just over six in ten married men with children at home. these numbers fall by eight to nine percentage points among male respondents without children at home. in other words, married men were significantly less likely than cohabiting men to expect their spouse to work for pay — though nearly two-thirds of married men still expected that their spouse would work. overall, the results indicate that most men and women today expect that their partners will work for pay, and within each gender and relationship status category, those numbers are highest among respondents with children at home. we also asked our respondents how many hours they typically work for pay each week. figure presents the average number of hours worked, with results again restricted to respondents who are years old or younger and who are either married or cohabiting. in interpreting the results, we caution that there is a great deal of variation across individuals. for example, the median number of hours worked for married or cohabiting men with children at home is , so we are wary of reading too much into the differences between cohabiting and married men. in addition (and unsurprisingly, given that working for pay increases income), respondents with higher incomes generally reported working more hours. this is true regardless of gender or whether the respondent had children at home. for example, low-income american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges cohabiting married female male female male respondent gender pe rc en ta ge children at home no children at home spouse or partner work expectations figure : percentage of married or cohabiting americans (age or less) expecting their spouse to work for pay. women with children at home reported working on average about hours per week, compared to hours for middle-income women and hours for women with high incomes. despite these differences, the basic patterns in figure are instructive. women with children at home tend to work somewhat less than men, but both married and cohabiting women with children at home worked a little under hours a week, on average. a different way of expressing these patterns is that about percent of married women and percent of cohabiting women with children at home worked at least hours a week for pay. by contrast, about eight in ten married men and a little less than two-thirds of cohabiting men with children at home told us they work at least hours a week. among married and cohabiting respondents under with children at home, a little less than percent said that neither they nor their spouse works for pay at least hours a week; about percent reported that one spouse or partner works hours a week or more and the other works less than hours per week; additionally, nearly half told us that both partners work at least hours per week. in other words, most men and women raising children with a spouse or partner are also shouldering significant work responsibilities. in addition, hours spent working for pay should also be contrasted with hours spent with sole responsi- bility for the care of their children. married men (again under and with a child at home) told us that on average, they are solely responsible for their children for about six hours per day. by contrast, women reported having sole responsibility for childcare for an average of about hours per day. the numbers are slightly higher for cohabiting men — about eight hours per day — but this is, again, much lower than the hours per day reported by women. thus, among both married and cohabiting respondents, women american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges cohabiting married female male female male respondent gender a ve ra ge h o ur s w o rk ed children at home no children at home average hours worked per week figure : average self-reported hours worked per week (americans age or less). reported spending about twice as much time with sole responsibility for childcare than men. even if we restrict the findings to men and women in relationships where both spouses work more than hours per week, men report less than seven hours of sole responsibility for the children, compared to nearly hours for women. of course, these are self-reports, and are thus vulnerable to the possibility of over- and under-reporting, but even so, the results indicate clearly that women with children at home tend to feel a much greater childcare burden than do men, while still working about hours per week (on average). men tend to spend more time working for pay, but self-report considerably fewer hours with sole responsibility in caring for their children. . . money and the decision to have children financial concerns matter for decisions about having children. we asked all respondents to the survey to consider a list of potential “prerequisites” for having children and to indicate how important it is to complete each item before a person has children. respondents could indicate whether each factor was “extremely important,” “somewhat important,” or “not important at all.” figure presents the percent- age of respondents choosing “extremely important.” the upper panel shows the results by respondent gender, and the lower panel shows the results by partisanship. across all respondents, “being financially stable” is the prerequisite chosen most frequently as “extremely important.” as seen in figure , financial stability ranks third among republicans (behind being in american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges travel buy a house graduate from college get married established career good health insurance committed relationship financially stable percentage choosing `extremely important' men women by gender travel buy a house graduate from college get married established career good health insurance committed relationship financially stable percentage choosing `extremely important' democrats independents republicans by partisanship figure : prerequisites for having children by gender and partisanship. a committed relationship and getting married) and second among men (behind being in a committed relationship), but for all other sub-groups, financial stability is the most important consideration. when we analyze by household income, there are few differences between the poorest and richest respondents: financial stability is valued highly, no matter how much money the respondent makes. it is especially important for young respondents who are most likely to be in their childbearing years. three quarters of people aged to and two-thirds of respondents between and told us that being financially stable is extremely important, compared to a little more than half of the oldest age cohort. it is clear that americans count economic concerns as critical to the decision to become parents. in addition, we also asked men and women between the ages of and who do not currently have children (n = ) what factors, apart from the physical ability to conceive, would be most important to them personally as they make decisions about having children in the future. we gave respondents a list of seven possible factors, and as with the previous question, they could indicate whether each factor was “extremely important,” “somewhat important,” or “not important at all.” table shows the percentage of respondents answering “extremely important” to each item. the reason most likely to be ranked as “extremely important” by both men and woman was “the cost of raising a child,” which was a consideration named by a majority of women and just under half of men. in the aggregate, respondents placed the greater weight on the cost of child-rearing than their current relationship status or even the desire to raise children. in addition, about one-third of respondents expressed significant worries about the difficulties of balancing family and career. ranking comparatively lower in the decision to have children were age, family expectations, and religious beliefs. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : important considerations in the decision to have children all men women the cost of raising a child my current relationship status the desire to raise a child of my own the difficulty of balancing family and career the need to have a baby before i’m too old to parent the expectations of my family my religious or philosophical beliefs despite the financial stresses that families face and that prospective parents worry about, these data should not be interpreted to mean that parents with children at home generally dislike their choice to have children or find their lives unsatisfying. elsewhere in the survey, we asked respondents to tell us how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.” nearly percent of respondents with children at home expressed agreement with the statement, compared to percent of respondents who are not currently raising children. more than four in ten respondents with children expressed the strongest possible agreement with the statement, compared to only about one quarter of respondents without children. in response to a question we will discuss in greater detail below, approximately half of respondents with a child at home told us that having kids is “essential” to living a fulfilling life. and when asked how satisfied they are with their families, about percent of respondents with children at home told us they were “completely satisfied,” compared to percent of respondents with no children at home. finally, among childless respondents between the ages of and , about one quarter ( percent of men and percent of women) told us they did not want to have children, compared to four in ten (among both men and women) who said they definitely want to become parents. . . family crises in addition to financial concerns, many americans experience family crises and other life-changing ex- periences. one of the new elements of the american family survey is an exploration of the family stressors people tend to face. we presented respondents with a list of major family experiences and asked if they had experienced any of them in the past year, displayed in table . we found that a little less than one-third indicated that they had experienced some sort of family crisis. by far the most common experience was having an immediate family member die, with percent of respondents saying this had happened within the last months. around one in ten said that they or their spouse had been laid off, and seven percent said they had an immediate family member arrested. five percent or less indicated they had experienced fertility problems, been divorced or separated from their spouse or partner, or been deployed (or had an immediate family member deployed) for military service. overall, these family stres- sors are somewhat less common than the economic stresses we discussed above (though, of course, being laid off certainly counts as an economic challenge). there are, however, some meaningful racial and ethnic differences in the experience of family stressors. black and hispanic respondents were more likely in this sample to report that an immediate family when we asked how satisfied americans are with their lives generally, the differences between respondents with children at home and those without were more muted: percent of respondents with children indicated they were “completely satisfied,” compared to percent of respondents without children. the remaining one-third said they didn’t know or weren’t certain. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : family stressors all white black hispanic had an immediate family member die was laid off or spouse/partner laid off had an immediate family member arrested had fertility problems self or immediate family member deployed for military service divorced or separated at least one member had died, and they were also more likely to report that they or their partner was laid off or that an immediate family member had been arrested in the past year. hispanic respondents were also slightly more likely than white or black respondents to say that they or an immediate family member had been deployed for military service or that they had been divorced or separated recently. overall, black respondents were about ten points more likely and hispanic respondents about seven points more likely than whites to indicate a significant family stress in the past year. . . family activities on a more positive note, we asked everyone who was married, cohabiting, or who had children to report how often they took part in various activities families might do together. as shown in table , which presents the percentage of respondents reporting doing each of these activities weekly or more, the fre- quency of the activities varies widely and is difficult to capture in a single descriptive sentence. more than three-quarters of families report having dinner together weekly or more, with around half of them saying they do so daily. we also found that around three-quarters of families participate in activities together at home weekly or more, doing things such as watching a movie or playing games together. more than half do chores together regularly. more than half of the sample said they go out to movies, museums, or other such events at least a few times a year, and about the same percentage say they take time to attend the activities of another family member. around one-third of families worship together weekly, but more than half said they do so yearly or less. while families do report having arguments, around percent do so a few times a year or less. we found that family activities vary little by general demographics such as ideology, partisanship, vote choice, and whether or not you thought your marriage was in trouble. there are also no significant differences between those who experienced an economic crisis or a family crisis and those who did not. we found some mild racial and ethnic differences, with whites being more likely than blacks and hispanics to say that they eat dinner together as a family at least weekly ( percent vs. percent for blacks and percent for hispanics). hispanics were the most likely ( percent, compared to percent for whites and percent for blacks) to say that they attend the activities of family members together weekly. perhaps unsurprisingly, given different levels of religiosity, blacks and hispanics were more likely to say that they workshop together as a family. but on several other dimensions, including having arguments, going out together, and doing household chores together, racial and ethnic differences tended to be relatively small. one thing, however, that mattered a great deal to family activities was the strength of the respondent’s the exception is family worship, which is much more common among republicans ( percent say they do it weekly or more) than among democrats (only percent say they do it weekly or more). american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : family activities strong weak all parental identity parental identity eat dinner together participate in activities together at home do household chores together worship together have an argument go out together (movies, parks, etc.) attend the activities of a family member parental and spousal identity. with respect to every activity about which we asked, those with strong parental identities (respondents who said that being a parent was “very” or “extremely” important to them) were more likely to participate at least weekly, compared to those with weaker parental identities. for example, more than percent of those who were classified as having a strong parental identity report eating dinner together and participating in activities at home weekly or more. around percent of this group does household chores as a family at least weekly. however, when we turn our attention to those with weak parental identity, those rates drop significantly — in the case of household chores, by more than percentage points. most parents with a weak parental identity still report eating dinner together or participating in activities at home on a regular basis, but again much less frequently than those with stronger parental identities. respondents in this group also worship at much lower rates. notably, they have arguments less frequently than those with strong parental identities. . . parental activities beyond the family activities described above, we also tried to get a better sense of family life by asking parents how they spend their time after their children go to bed. we gave respondents a list of potential activities and asked them to indicate how often each activity occurs after their children’s bedtime. table presents the percentage of mothers and fathers who reported doing each activity at least once a week or more. responses are limited to those who currently have children in the home. table : parental activities after children go to bed fathers mothers watch television or movie use social media have sex talk on the phone or text read a book do work or homework play video games the most common activity for parents is watching television or movies. three quarters of men and more than eight in ten women report participating in this activity at least once a week or more. both men and women say that they connect with others through social media, phone, or text on a regular basis, though percentages are about ten points higher for women than for men. a little over half of respondents say that they have sex with their partners at least once a week or more, and about half say that they regularly american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges spend time reading books. a little more than one-third of respondents told us that they did work or played video games at least once a week after their children went to bed. these patterns were roughly similar across demographic categories, with a few exceptions. black and hispanic parents were about ten percentage points more likely than whites to say that they had sex at least once a week, and they were comparatively less likely (again by about ten percentage points) to say they spend time on social media or reading books. but rates of the other activities we asked about were nearly identical across racial groups. similarly, differences across income categories or partisan attachments tended to be small. the primary exception was reading books, which about percent of high-income respondents reported doing at least weekly, compared to percent of middle-income respondents and percent of those with lower incomes. all other income or partisan differences were less than ten percentage points. all in all, the experience of parents after children go to bed seems very similar for parents regardless of racial or ethnic differences, income disparities, or partisan allegiances. american views on the ideal marriage and family in the american family survey, we asked respondents a variety of questions designed to understand how americans view the ideal marriage and family and how that ideal compares with their lived experi- ences. for example, we randomly assigned half of the respondents in the sample to tell us about the actual order in which they experienced sex, cohabitation, marriage, and children in the current or most recent relationship. the other half of survey respondents were asked to indicate the ideal order in which each of the relationship milestones would occur. figure presents the results, with the average ordering for each milestone shown in the label. blue labels indicate respondents’ actual order, and gold labels indicate the ideal ordering. lower numbers in the labels indicate a preference for that milestone to come earlier in the sequence of events. respondents could also indicate that any of those relationship milestones had not yet occurred in their relationships. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . . . . . . . . sex cohabit marriage child mean order r el at io ns hi p m ile st o ne s a a actual ideal relationship sequence figure : respondent reports about their ideal and actual relationship sequences. respondents told us that the ideal sequence of relationship milestones would be sex, moving in together, and marriage occurring at roughly the same point in time, with children coming a distant fourth in the order. but respondents’ actual experience differs from the ideal. on average, respondents had sex first, followed by cohabitation, then marriage, then children. of course, these are merely averages: individuals may have experienced different orderings. nonetheless, the central tendency is informative, as is the difference between actual and ideal. we also find important differences in ideal preferences by party and race. these can be seen in figure , which presents results for republicans, white democrats, and black democrats. notably, all three groups reported similar actual relationship sequences: sex first, followed by cohabitation, marriage, and children. but the ideal orderings differ across the three groups. republicans say that marriage should come first, followed by cohabitation and sex at roughly the same time, with children fourth. this is roughly similar to the ideal ordering for black democrats, who also prefer marriage first, followed by cohabitation, sex, and then children. the group with a differing ideal ordering is white democrats: their ideal preference is sex first, followed by cohabitation, marriage third, and children fourth. in other words, white democrats are the only group for whom their ideal relationship sequence matches their actual behavior (at least at the group level). but this also means that black democrats and republicans share a similar, more traditional view of the proper order of relationship milestones, even if many do not fully live up to those self-professed ideals. in addition to these racial and partisan differences, other demographic characteristics also shaped views about the ideal relationship sequence. americans over age were more likely to say that ideally, marriage should come before sex and cohabitation, for example, while those under felt that the ideal ordering was sex and cohabitation before marriage. for all age groups, however, sex came, on average, first in their actual relationships. religious differences also mattered. for americans for who said that religion was an important part of their lives, the ideal was for marriage to come first, while respondents for whom religion we do not have enough black republicans in the sample for reliable analysis. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . republicans white democrats black democrats sex cohabit marriage child mean order r el at io ns hi p m ile st o ne s a aactual ideal relationship sequence by party and race figure : ideal and actual relationship sequences by partisanship and race. was less important told us that marriage should come after cohabitation. non-religious respondents were also much more likely than religious respondents to say that sex did come first in their actual relationships, though the average religious americans was still sex first, followed by marriage and cohabitation. overall, we conclude that while the average actual ordering of relationship milestones is similar across many different types of americans, there are still important differences in how different groups see the ideal relationship sequence. older, more religious americans still hold to a more traditional view of marriage as coming before sex and cohabitation, while norms are different among younger, less religious americans. nearly every group feels that children should ideally come after marriage, however. we also asked respondents about other ideals for relationships and family life. for example, americans indicated that the ideal number of children for a family is about — this was the median response for all sub-groups, including republicans, democrats, men, women, religious and non-religious, whites, blacks, and hispanics. there are some differences in mean preferences across the groups: the average for democrats, for example, was . , compared to . for republicans, though this difference was largely driven by white democrats, for whom the group average was . , compared to . for black democrats. as with the relationship sequence variables, the preferences of black democrats were actually closer to republicans than to their white fellow partisans. differences in the average preferences of men and women were small — . for men and . for women. the average for respondents who told us that religion was at least somewhat important in their lives was . , compared to . for those who said religion was less important to them. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . shared values as part of our focus on ideal marriages and families, we asked respondents to consider how important it is for married couples to share different commitments or perspectives, such as the same political party, level of education, political affiliation, or even hobbies and interests. table presents the results, and entries in the table show the percentage of respondents who told us that each item was either “extremely im- portant” or “very important.” overall, americans identified shared feelings about children and shared social values (such as honesty or hard work) as by far the most important considerations for couples. more than three-quarters of respondents agreed that couples should have those priorities in common. religious affiliation and other hobbies and interests comprised the second tier of important commonalities for cou- ples, with education and political party ranking last. given all the talk about democrats and republicans separating into different tribes, it is notable that most americans do not think it is especially important for married couples to share the same political affiliation. they care far more about broader values like honesty than about narrow political attachments. we find little evidence of dramatic differences in the ordering of these priorities across different demo- graphic characteristics. republicans do care far more about shared religious affiliation than democrats or independents, and black and hispanic respondents care far more about religious affiliation than do whites, especially white democrats, of whom only percent said that shared religious affiliation was an important priority. here is another indication that with respect to some elements of marriage and family, black democrats take a more traditional view and express opinions that are more similar to republicans than to white democrats. but other demographic differences were more muted. women place a greater priority on shared feelings about children and shared social values than do men, but the basic ordering of priorities is the same for both groups. in addition to the results shown in the table, we found few differ- ences across income categories, parental status (whether the respondent had children at home), religiosity (except with respect to the importance of religion), and other demographic characteristics. table : how important is it for married couples to share the same ... ? political hobbies and religious social feelings education party interests affiliation values about children overall men women white black hispanic democrats independents republicans response options were a -point scale ranging from “extremely important” to “not important at all.” american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . fulfilling life in keeping with our exploration of ideal family life, we asked respondents to consider what facets of life are most essential for fulfillment. specifically, we asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the notion that the following activities are essential to live a fulfilling life: being married, having kids, having a rewarding career or job, being part of a religious community, being engaged in the local community, gaining a good education, and making a good living. table presents the percentage of respondents who agreed that each item was essential. respondents clearly prioritized career accomplishments as being essential: making a good living, gaining a good education, and having a rewarding job. two-thirds or more of respondents said each of those milestones was essential. in the second tier, respondents identified engagement with their local or religious communities as being essential. in the lowest tier was being married and having kids, of which only three to four in ten respondents indicated they were essential. put differently, many americans believe that it is possible to live a fulfilling life without marriage or children. table : what is essential to living a fulfilling life? being having religious community rewarding make married kids community engagement job education good living overall men women white black hispanic democrats independents republicans children at home no children at home demographic differences in these patterns tended to be small to moderate. men were more likely than women to say that marriage and children were essential, and consistent with other survey results, re- publicans, blacks, and hispanics valued participation in religious communities more than democrats and whites. people with children at home were more convinced that marriage and children were a necessary part of a fulfilling life as well. but even with these differences, all groups ranked career, education, and income as the most essential aspects of a fulfilling life. . becoming an adult what does it mean to become an adult in america today? this question focuses on the developmental milestones that mark the passage to adulthood and how those markers might differ for men and women. we told respondents that “people have different ideas about what it means to become a man or woman” response options were a seven-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and for purposes of analysis, we present the somewhat agree, agree, and strongly agree responses together. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges and then asked them to indicate which of the following experiences are important to becoming an adult: completing formal schooling, being employed full-time, being capable of supporting a family financially, being financially independent of parents, no longer living in parents’ house, getting married, and having a child. respondents could indicate that each item was “extremely important,” “somewhat important,” or “not important at all.” half of our sample was randomly chosen to tell us which of these items were important to “becoming a man,” and the other half offered opinions on the importance of the items for “becoming a woman.” male respondents female respondents financially independent from parents not living with parents capable of supporting family full-time employment completing education getting married having a child percent choosing `extremely important' becoming a man becoming a woman becoming an adult figure : milestones for becoming a man or woman. figure presents the percentage of male and female respondents choosing “extremely important.” yel- low bars indicate the result in the “becoming a woman” condition, and blue bars show the“becoming a man” condition. among both male and female respondents, markers of financial success — being financially independent, moving out of parents’ home, being capable of supporting a family, and finding full-time employment — were the indicators most commonly chosen as signs of becoming an adult and especially of becoming a man. respondents saw completing an education as being more important for becoming a woman than full-time employment, and women indicated that getting married and having a child were more important for becoming a woman than for becoming a man. for both men and women, getting married and starting a family were least likely to be seen as indicators of adulthood. in addition, both male and female respondents believe there is a large gender gap when considering the role full-time employment plays in becoming an adult. more than half of respondents thought it was extremely important for becoming a man, but only about one-third of respondents thought that having a full-time job was critical to becoming a woman. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges generational differences also matter for assessments about what it means to become an adult, and these sometimes have gendered implications. as can be seen in figure , for example, about percent of young people told us that full-time employment is needed to be a man, compared to about percent who reported it necessary to become a woman — a difference of only six percentage points. among respondents over years of age, however, that difference grew to nearly percentage points. nearly three-quarters of older americans thought having a full-time job was necessary to become a man, com- pared to the percent who thought it was necessary to become an adult woman — about the same percentage as among the youngest age cohort. in other words, we find a much larger gap between what it means to become a man, as opposed to what it means to become a woman, among older americans. similar (though not quite as large) generational differences can be seen in assessments of the importance of being capable of supporting a family, moving out of parents’ home, and financial independence from parents. older respondents were also more likely than younger to say that completing education is a sign of adulthood, regardless of whether we asked about becoming a man or becoming a woman. at the same time, age mattered little for views about the importance of getting married or having a child as milestones of adulthood. having a child full-time employment completing education getting married financial independence not living with parents capable of supporting family - - - - + - - - - + - - - - + pe rc en t c ho o si ng ` ex tr em el y im po rt an t' becoming a man becoming a woman age differences in attitudes about becoming an adult figure : differences in attitudes about becoming a man or woman by age cohort. parents and teenagers one focus of the american family survey is how parents of teenagers view their children. we asked all respondents with a child between the ages of and (n = ) to tell us about their views of the most important issues facing teenagers. respondents chose from a curated list we provided them, and each american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges respondent could choose up to four issues. table presents the results. the most common concern from these parents was overuse of technology, which was the only option chosen by a majority of respondents. in addition, percent of respondents identified bullying as an important issue, and approximately one- third of respondents chose mental health issues, family breakdown and divorce, or pressure to use drugs or alcohol. all other items on the list were chosen by less than a quarter of respondents. table also shows that mothers and fathers largely agreed on these priorities. the only major differences were that mothers reported substantially more concern about bullying than fathers, but fathers expressed more concern than mothers about teens facing family breakdown and divorce. table : most important issues facing teens overall fathers mothers overuse of technology bullying mental health issues family breakdown/divorce pressure to use drugs or alcohol poor quality schools making decisions about sexual activity difficult relationships with family members dating and relationships pressure to get good grades widespread availability of pornography safety in their communities not enough meaningful work opportunities navigating sexual identity sexual abuse other larger differences can be found between republicans and democrats, however. these differing assess- ments can be seen in figure , where red bars indicate the percentage of republicans choosing the issue, blue bars indicate democrats, and purple bars show results for independents who do not lean toward either party. while overuse of technology was an important concern for respondents of both parties, republicans expressed comparatively more concern about the issue ( percent) than democrats ( per- cent). in addition, concern about the effects of divorce and family breakdown on teenagers was heavily concentrated among republicans ( percent), but of far less concern to both independents ( percent) and democrats ( percent). republicans were also somewhat more likely than democrats to express concern about teens’ decisions about sexual activity ( percent vs. percent) and the availability of pornography ( percent vs. percent). conversely, democrats expressed more concern than republicans about bullying ( percent vs. per- cent), mental health issues ( percent vs. percent), community safety for teenagers ( percent vs. percent), and work opportunities ( percent vs. percent). on other issues, such as pressure to use drugs or alcohol, dating and relationships, navigating sexual identity, pressure to get good grades, relationships with family members, and the quality of schools, we see rough agreement (defined here as partisan differ- ences that are about five percentage points or less) between partisans. notably, given that the survey was administered prior to the kavanaugh hearings, the difference between partisans in concern about sexual abuse among teenagers was small ( percent of democrats, compared to nine percent of republicans). other demographic characteristics also mattered, especially in patterns of concern about overuse of tech- american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges other sexual abuse navigating sexual identity not enough meaningful work opportunities safety in their communities widespread availability of pornography pressure to get good grades dating and relationships difficult relationships with family members making decisions about sexual activity poor quality schools pressure to use drugs or alcohol family breakdown/divorce mental health issues bullying overuse of technology percentage choosing issue party democrats independents republicans most important issues facing teenagers by parental partisanship figure : how partisans differ in their view of issues facing teens nology. though technology was the most chosen issue overall, it was far more likely to be chosen by white respondents ( percent) than by black ( percent) or hispanic americans ( percent). it was also of greater concern to high-income ( percent) than to middle-income ( percent) or low-income people ( percent). racial and income differences tended to be somewhat more muted on the other issues facing teens, though concern about family breakdown and divorce as an issue for teens was concentrated among high-income respondents, while lower-income americans were comparatively more concerned about bullying and difficult relationships with family members. . teens and technology we also asked respondents to report their own technology use and, for respondents with a teenager at home, their estimates how much those teenagers use video games and social media. for each parent of one or more teenagers, we randomly selected one of their teenage children and asked them to report their impressions of how much that child used social media and video games. it is important to remember that these are parental estimates of teens’ media use, not actual reports from the teens themselves, which might be quite different. our aim was to capture parents’ views of the time their teenagers spent online. parents when we test partisanship, race, and income together using multiple regression techniques, all three variables are statistically significant. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges could report anything between hours per day and or more hours per day. results can be found in figure . as might be expected, adults report considerably more use of social media than video games. on average, men report using social media for about . hours on a typical day and women report about minutes more at . hours. averages for video games are substantially lower – . hours for men and . hours for women. notably, if we restrict the results to only those who are parents of teenagers, use of both forms of technology is higher – . hours on social media for fathers and . hours for mothers and . hours for fathers on video games, compared to . hours among mothers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . estimates for self estimates for teens all respondents -- men all respondents -- women dads of teens moms of teens teen boys -- weekdays teen boys -- weekends teen girls -- weekdays teen girls -- weekends average hours media social media video games estimates of media use figure : adults, teens, and media use most parents offered estimates of their children’s media usage. only about . percent of parents said they didn’t know how much their children used social media, and only . percent were unable to give an estimate about video games. of those who could offer estimates, fathers tended to estimate higher num- bers than mothers for time spent on social media, but fathers and mothers offered very similar estimates of how much time their children spent on video games, especially on weekdays. in addition, parental use of technology is correlated with reports of their children’s use, though the correlation is far from perfect and larger for social media than for video games (r = . for social media and r = . for video games). parents of teenage boys estimated that their sons spent more time on video games than social media, but parents of teenage girls reported that their daughters spent far more time on social media than video games. in addition, and perhaps unsurprisingly, parents said that their children spent more time with technology on weekends than on weekdays, though the differences are not especially large. all told, parents estimated that their teenage sons spent a little more than hours each week playing video games and a little less than hours per week on social media. by contrast, parents of teenage girls said their daughters spent about hours per week playing video games and slightly less than hours a week on social media. estimates for weekly social media use are not dramatically more than what parents were able to self-report anything between - hours, so to make the reports comparable, we adjusted all parental reports above hours to a category indicating or more hours. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges parents report for themselves – in fact, mothers of teenagers actually report more time per week on social media for themselves than for their daughters. however, parental estimates of boys’ video game usage is significantly higher than fathers’ self reports. . what worries parents in addition to asking parents about one teenager’s technology usage, we also asked parents to tell us their level of concern about that same child with respect to four aspects of the teen’s life: grades and school- work, behavior at school (getting in trouble), the child’s friends and social life, and feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues. parents could report that they were “extremely concerned,” “somewhat concerned,” or “not concerned at all” about their child. table shows the percentage of parents expressing the highest level of concern about each category. table : parental concerns about their teens school social life/ anxiety/ grades trouble friends depression overall white black hispanic low income middle income high income child lives with respondent child does not live with respondent high parental identity low parental identity as the table makes clear, a significant percentage of parents reported high levels of concern about their teenage children. more than one-third of respondents said they are “extremely concerned” about their teen’s grades, behavior in school, and social life, and more than one-quarter responded that they worry about their teen suffering from anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues. at the same time, the results also show that there are large differences across various demographic categories. for example, black and hispanic parents reported significantly higher levels of concern about every category than did white parents. in addition, high-income respondents expressed lower levels of concern than those in the middle and lower income categories. parents whose teenage children do not live with them expressed exceptionally high levels of worry, and those with higher parental identities were also more likely to express concern, especially about their child’s grades. we also asked all those who reported at least some level of concern about anxiety, depression, or another mental health issue how those problems are affecting their teen’s physical, social, and educational health. specifically, we asked about schoolwork, friendships, family relationships, extracurricular activities, and physical health. figure presents the percentage of parents who said that their teens’ anxiety or depres- sion is affecting each category “a lot.” we interpret this response as meaning that the parent believes that american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges mental health issues are having a large effect. in addition, yellow bars represent parents who told us they were “somewhat concerned” about anxiety and depression, while blue bars indicate that parents told us they were “extremely concerned.” physical health extracurricular activities family relationships friendships schoolwork percent reporting large effects extremely concerned somewhat concerned parents' views of the effects of anxiety and depression figure : how parents see the effects of teen anxiety and depression. the figure shows that when parents feel greater levels of concern, they are also more likely to believe that mental health issues are having meaningful effects on school, social and family life, and even the physical health of their child. between and percent of parents who told us they were “extremely concerned” about their teen’s anxiety and depression thought that these issues were also having a large effect on their teen’s life experience. among those who said they were only “somewhat concerned” about anxiety and depression, however, parents were much less likely to report large effects. in other words, greater concern about mental health issues is correlated with greater likelihood of parents noticing that other aspects of their teens’ lives are suffering. of course, in a cross-sectional survey such as this, we do not know whether concern about grades or social life, for example, preceded worries about mental health or whether the worries about mental health prompted parents to notice school or relationship concerns. but we do know that nearly half of parents who are most worried about mental health issues in their children believe that mental health challenges have substantial effects on many aspects of their teenager’s life experience. sexual harassment on this year’s survey we asked a number of questions about sexual harassment, ranging from respondent experiences with this to respondent beliefs about the practice and how often they talk about it with their children. table displays the number of people who received unwanted sexual advances from someone in various american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges venues. the first column displays the simple number who have experienced sexual harassment in any venue, while the second and third columns display the number who have experienced sexual harassment at work or from a superior (at either work or school). focusing first on the general experience, it is noteworthy that the gender difference is so large. twenty-eight percent of men reported an inappropriate experience while nearly six out of ten women ( percent) reported an experience, suggesting a rather stark difference between the sexes. it is not, however, the only such difference. education clearly also plays a role. only percent of those with relatively less education (high school or less) reported the experience, while those with college experience had clearly experienced more. for college graduates (or more), a majority of the respondents felt they had experienced harassment. table : experiences with sexual harassment group percentage reporting an inappropriate experience from someone at the same company from someone in authority at school or at work total men women high school education (or less) some college college graduates (or more) democrat independent republican these patterns tend to broadly hold up when the question becomes more restrictive. only about two out of ten men felt they had experienced it at work, while the number for women was about twice that number. and when asked about receiving the sexual harassment from a superior, at either work or school, one-quarter of women reported this experience—with just percent of men experiencing this. no matter how the data are sliced, the experience of sexual harassment is a problem that is felt particularly keenly by women, and, typically, by women with more education. there are weak partisan patterns in the data. regardless of the nature of the question asked, more democrats report the experience than do republicans, although the differences are not as stark as the differences by gender. broadly, it appears that the experience of sexual harassment is one that afflicts many types of people that cut across society, but that it is particularly felt by women, especially those with more education. a similar gendered pattern held up when we asked about whether or not respondents were familiar with “incidents where sexual harassment happened in the” places described in table . in this case we consistently found that women were more likely to be familiar with incidents of sexual harassment regardless of the location. a majority of women were familiar with such experiences in at least one of those locations, while a majority of men were not familiar with such incidents. the differences between genders was never terribly large, typically around five percentage points, but the pattern is unmistakable. it is obvious that people are broadly familiar with sexual harassment taking place around them (though this is more true for women than for men). but how do people define sexual harassment? in an effort to better understand people’s standards we asked a series of questions about what counted as sexual harassment. the specific question wording was split into two groups. half saw the following: “would american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : percentage familiar with incidents of sexual harassment by location women men workplace religious congregation neighborhood school children’s school family none of the above you consider it sexual harassment if a man who was not a romantic partner did the following to a woman at work?” the other half saw exactly the reverse: a woman taking the action with respect to a man. for either question, people could respond that a particular action either “always,” “sometimes,” or “never” counted as harassment. figure shows the responses to this question for a range of activities (with the experiment collapsed) and is broken out by gender given the disparate experiences of men and women in this area. persisting in unwanted attention asking for sexual favors looking at private parts placing a hand on back sexual jokes commenting on appearance asking to go for a drink asking to go for lunch percentage responding the activity `always' counts as harassment gender male female attitudes about sexual harassment figure : attitudes about harassment by gender (collapsing the male to female and female to male treatments) the patterns are instructive. first, it is clear that certain actions are simply less likely to be categorized as inappropriate than other activities. asking to go for a drink, or for lunch, or commenting on some- one’s appearance are considered “always” sexual harassment by a relatively small number of people. we note that the complexities of this question make it difficult to ask simple questions about. of course, in some situations it is possible to think of versions of these actions that would count for most people, while it is also possible to think of situations that would not count. we emphasize that these are broad generalizations. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges more people consider sexual jokes sexual harassment, and the actions most consistently labelled as such were looking at private parts (presumably clothed in the workplace, although we did not specify in the question), asking for sexual favors, or persisting in unwanted attention. the second clear feature of this graph is that women simply have higher standards for behavior than do men. the only area where men felt an action was “always” sexual harassment was persisting in unwanted attention. surprisingly (to these authors) only percent of men believed that asking for sexual favors “always” counted as sexual harassment (for comparison, percent of women felt that it “always” counted). while it is dangerous to speculate about respondent motivations or explanations for their responses, it is possible that men rationalize the behavior, possibly on the grounds that it might be wanted some of the time or acceptable in some situations. and it is true that percent of men felt that persistent but unwanted attention counted as sexual harassment (compared with percent of women). that was the only category where a majority of men felt that the behavior always counted. we also examined age and racial differences and generally found that older and white respondents were more likely to believe that an activity counted as sexual harassment. for instance, percent of those aged or older believed asking for a sexual favor always counted as sexual harassment, but the number fell to only percent among those between and . broadly, when we considered the category that responded that these activities never counted as sexual harassment, there were relatively few patterns to the data, though a few things did stand out. with respect to race, of those who responded that all behaviors “never” counted as sexual harassment, only percent were white, while percent were black and percent were hispanic, suggesting that whites are underrepresented in this group, but there were not dramatic political or other patterns to the data. as a second check on how people feel about these experiences, we embedded an experiment in the questionnaire. half of all respondents were asked about men doing this to a woman, but the other half were asked about women doing this to a man. figure displays the differences in how people reacted to that experiment and it serves as important context. while there are essentially no differences between how the public perceives sexual harassment by its direction for the behaviors that only rarely count as harassment, there is a clear bias on the other behaviors: it is more likely to be considered harassment if it is a man doing it to a woman than it is if a woman does it to a man. who is it that is inconsistent? broadly, all categories were at least somewhat inconsistent in how they answered this question. men are simply more likely to be seen as harassers by everyone. however, there is a clear pattern and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, also related to gender. figure displays the three actions most commonly considered as always meeting the definition of sexual harassment: unwanted attention, asking for sexual favors, and looking at private parts. the left panel displays men and the right panel displays women. the bars display the differences between the man to woman and the woman to man conditions. the figure shows that there is inconsistency in essentially every case; the size of the inconsistency is just larger among men, who clearly are more likely to say that something is harassment when it is a man doing it to a woman, rather than the reverse. this actually changes how we might see some of the results above. we noted that a majority of men did not see asking for sexual favors as always consisting of sexual harassment. though that’s true, it is clearly dependent on the context. a majority of men do believe that when a man does this to a woman it is sexual harassment, but a majority does not believe the reverse. table takes up a slightly different, but obviously related issue. on the survey, we asked about the nature of consent. the specific question wording was, “in your view, does someone need to ask consent before initiating each of these things with a person they are interested in romantically?” in general, people do not believe that verbal consent is required for actions such as holding hands, putting an arm around american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges persisting in unwanted attention asking for sexual favors looking at private parts placing a hand on back sexual jokes commenting on appearance asking to go for a drink asking to go for lunch percentage responding the activity `always' counts as harassment including experiment direction man to woman woman to man attitudes about sexual harassment by direction figure : attitudes about harassment by experimental treatment someone, or a kiss (though that last action does display a slightly different pattern). however, the modal response for all of those categories is that consent is required, just that it could be non-verbal. the last two categories are quite different. clear majorities believe that intimate touching and sex require verbal consent. however, it should be noted that there is, again, a gendered pattern to this result. fig- ure displays the proportion of men and women who feel that consent (both verbal and non-verbal) is a requirement for different types of sexual activity. there is a bit over a ten percentage point gap between men and women for each of these two activities; the other actions displayed no such gap. taken broadly, the results suggest that people generally feel strongly about verbal consent for the more intense forms of sexual contact, but that, again, there is a gap in the intensity of this feeling for men and for women. figure explores a similar relationship, but examining trump supporters. there is a discernible, but not enormous, difference in how those who approve of trump (vs. those who disapprove of trump or table : attitudes about consent action yes, consent must be verbal yes, but consent could be non-verbal no holding hands putting your arm around someone kissing someone intimate touching having sex american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges male female persisting in unwanted attention asking for sexual favors looking at private parts persisting in unwanted attention asking for sexual favors looking at private parts `a lw ay s' c o un ts a s h ar as sm en t treatment man to woman woman to man consistency in attitudes about sexual harassment figure : reporting of discussions about sexual topics, by partisanship having sex intimate touching yes, must be verbal yes, but could be non-verbal yes, must be verbal yes, but could be non-verbal pe rc en ta ge gender male female consent and gender differences figure : attitudes about consent by gender american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges are neutral about him) think about consent. trump supporters are somewhat less likely to favor verbal consent, although both groups overwhelmingly favor consent of some kind in these two situations (the differences across trump attitudes are similar for the other categories). while it is common for partisans— or opponents and supporters of the president—to make claims about their political opponents’ lack of a moral compass, these results suggest that on the issues of sexual harassment and the need for consent the differences exist but are not large. having sex intimate touching yes, must be verbal yes, but could be non-verbal yes, must be verbal yes, but could be non-verbal pe rc en ta ge approval trump approver non-trump approver consent attitudes and trump approval figure : attitudes about consent by trump support we also discovered something of a racial aspect to these attitudes, though it is a somewhat complicated relationship. table displays the percentage of respondents replying “always” to the listed activity, but, in this case, broken out by the most populous racial categories in the sample (they are roughly listed in descending order of the percentage agreeing). scrutiny of the results reveals an interesting pattern. though there are never massive differences between any of the races, there is a pattern that whites tend to have more rigorous standards for certain categories that are most commonly listed, especially persisting in unwanted attention and requesting a sexual favor, but they are less likely to respond “always” than are blacks to some of the activities that generate a more middling response. take, for example, making sexual jokes and placing a hand on someone’s lower back. though there are differences by the experimental treatment, there is a gap roughly to percentage points, with the black respondents holding the more rigorous standard on those activities. on the answers that generate the fewest “always” responses, the differences between the two groups dissipates. hispanics tend to be somewhere between the two groups in their assessments of these activities. we will not speculate here on the broader social meaning of these findings, instead merely noting that there are interesting inconsistencies in people’s opinions, that there is a great deal of variation in how people respond to these questions, and that all of it is clearly connected to gender, and, to a lesser degree, race. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : percentages replying “always” for each of the activities listed by race activities: man to woman white black hispanic persisting in unwanted attention looking at private parts requesting a sexual favor making sexual jokes placing hand on lower back commenting on appearance asking to go for a drink asking to go to lunch activities: woman to man white black hispanic persisting in unwanted attention looking at private parts requesting a sexual favor making sexual jokes placing hand on lower back commenting on appearance asking to go for a drink asking to go to lunch finally, we also asked about whether or not people had talked about sexual matters with their children. table displays the percentage of people who have had a conversation about each of these topics with their children (the question was only asked of parents). the clear answer is that a little over half of the respondents had done this for all topics except sexual identity which is lower. table : the percentage reporting each type of discussion discussions percentage sex contraception consent sexual harassment sexual identity we examined the demographic correlates of this quite closely and turned up little of any value. there just are not any large differences across groups in the rate of reported behavior. figure shows the question broken down by partisanship, and there are effectively no differences, except on the question of identity, where republicans are slightly less likely to have had the conversation. figure breaks the question down by church attendance (where churchgoing is defined as once a month or more) and it similarly sees no distinctions of any significance. the one demographic pattern that we did find variation in was age, although we interpret this largely as a response to the fact that sexual discussions with small children are generally perceived as less needed or valuable (though we do not draw that conclusion here). other than that, we found a great deal of variation in who talks to children about sex, but very little to predict who does that. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges sex contraception consent harassment identity discussion type pe rc en ta ge partisanship democrat republican discussions about sexual topics, by partisanship figure : reporting of discussions about sexual topics, by partisanship american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges sex contraception consent harassment identity discussion type pe rc en ta ge attendance churchgoer non-churchgoer discussions about sexual topics, by church attendance figure : reporting of discussions about sexual topics, by church attendance american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges social capital and support networks in previous versions of the survey we focused our attention on measures of social capital. this year we specifically asked about networks and whether or not people relied on their family, someone else, or just on themselves. table reports the percentages of people who rely on each network. family is the key resource for help with childcare and advice about children. but after that, the most common answer is that people rely largely on themselves, though family is often important as well. the one area where the friend network takes precedence over family relationships (though it is close) is advice about relationships. table : the percentage of people who rely on the given network, or simply rely on themselves discussions friend network family network neither help with childcare advice about children advice about my relationship financial help taking care of my house or property transportation to an important appointment we looked for even small correlations with other outcomes on this survey, such as the battery of marriage activities and family activities, and found nothing to report. in general, it does not seem that relying on one’s family has much predictive power for whether or not the family is heavily engaged or not. however, the exception to this rule is that people who are quite engaged with their families tend to think their marriages (and families) are getting stronger, as can be seen in figure . rely on family don't rely on family evaluation of own marriage and family pe rc en ta ge evaluation stronger about the same weaker family connections and evaluations of personal relationships figure : family connections and evaluations of respondent’s marriage and family american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges this extended to other variables like life satisfaction, but not to personal family outcomes that we found. family and public policy one of the goals of the american family survey has been to understand the way in which family rela- tionships matter for public policies of many different sorts. in this section we take up a series of areas: national programs, local spending, immigration, the recent tax cuts, and funding for planned parenthood to see how family status predicts one’s opinions on these issues. . national government programs in previous years we have looked at several national policies. two policies we have been keeping track of for some time are medicaid (and other health subsidies) as well as food stamps. figure displays the time series for both of these policies. this is the first year that evaluations of the two programs seem to have diverged slightly. in previous years the two were essentially in lockstep, while at the moment it seems that health subsidies and medicaid have grown slightly more popular. though the difference is not large, it is a trend that bears watching. year pe rc en ta ge policy medicaid and other health subsidies food stamps evaluations of policy figure : evaluations ( = more positive) of how medicaid and food stamps affect families american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges table : a selection of local policy tradeoffs offered to respondents (a non-exhaustive list); percentages indicate the proportion that would choose the first item in the tradeoff (e.g., the first row references affordable housing against basic services. tradeoff examples democrats republicans areas of partisan disagreement affordable housing over basic services public transportation over pensions roads over basic services roads over law enforcement better schools over law enforcement affordable housing over better schools areas of agreement roads over parks roads over pensions basic services over parks affordable housing over pensions basic services over pensions affordable housing over public transportation . local government programs as part of our analysis this year, we wanted to investigate government programs that were not national but rather more local in character. spending on such items as public parks, local schools, basic services, and law enforcement (to name only a few) have a more direct impact on many people than do the national programs just discussed. to that end we asked a simple tradeoff question about “which option would benefit your family the most?” between such tradeoffs as: roads, parks, pensions, public transportation, better schools, affordable housing, basic services, and law enforcement. there is a partisan split on such concerns in some cases, though not all cases. table gives an indication of where there were the most strong partisan splits on a few of the local issues we surveyed (in the upper half of the table), as well as a few areas where the partisan splits were less stark (in the lower half of the table). some of the distinctions make strong political sense: democrats are not terribly favorable to law enforcement and republicans really like roads (although not when pitted against law enforcement). but there are potentially surprising results. neither side favors pensions very often. and even republicans want spending on affordable housing against most of the tradeoffs. keeping in mind that partisan splits matter some of the time—but far from all of the time—we now turn to an examination of the attitudes about these tradeoffs (for a few cases) broken out by some limited family status categories. figure displays the percentage choosing roads over better schools. democrats are grouped on the left and republicans are grouped on the right; however, each group is broken out by family status into four categories (that occasionally overlap): single, without children, married, and parents of kids. the difference between democrats and republicans can be seen in the height of each group of bars and it is clear that, on average, republicans are more likely to prefer spending on roads than are democrats. however, breaking out the party groups by family status, even in these broad categories, also reveals the fissures within each party and how those differences in family status are related to attitudes on this tradeoff. in both parties, it is the single and the non-parent respondents that tend to favor roads. in fact, married persons and parents in the republican party look quite similar to single and non-parents in the democratic party. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges democrat republican status single without kids married with kids percentage choosing roads over schools figure : respondent views on the tradeoff between roads and schools an exhaustive review of the tradeoffs is beyond this report, but we briefly discuss three other tradeoffs and the patterns that they show. when it comes to public transportation vs. pensions (see figure ), the group that is, by far, most strongly in favor of public transportation are democrats, but only those who are either single or without kids (the most urban group). that difference within the democratic party overwhelms any differences between the two parties and is much larger than any difference within the republican party, where it is true that, though those family status characteristics prefer public transportation more than the married and parents, the internal party disagreement is not so strong. democrat republican status single without kids married with kids percentage choosing public transportation over pensions figure : respondent views on the tradeoff between public transportation and public schools there are cases where the partisan disagreement is substantial. one of those is the tradeoff between american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges spending on public parks vs. law enforcement displayed in figure . democrats uniformly prefer spend- ing money on parks. republicans are never very enthusiastic about parks in this context. but the variation within each party follows the same pattern and the variation within the democratic party is quite sub- stantial. single democrats fairly strongly favor spending on law enforcement, while all other democratic groups are either divided on the question or (in the case of the married) prefer spending on parks. this variation within the democratic party is about as large as the variation across the two parties generally. democrat republican status single without kids married with kids percentage choosing public parks over law enforcement figure : respondent views on the tradeoff between parks and law enforcement our final example pits affordable housing against basic services. here the patterns are quite striking. single and childless democrats strongly favor spending money on affordable housing, while married democrats and those with kids are evenly split. republicans favor basic services more often, but the group that most strongly favors more affordable housing are republicans who do not have children. the point of showing these tradeoffs is that much political analysis focuses on the fissures between the parties, but the fissures within the parties are equally interesting, and sometimes more so. much of what we have shown here may also have to do with choices about where to live (urban dwellers care more about public transportation and so forth), but collectively it shows that whatever factors are driving support for various programs are strongly connected to family status. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges democrat republican status single without kids married with kids percentage choosing affordable housing over basic services figure : respondent views on the tradeoff between affordable housing and basic services . personal experience and support for immigration as in past years, on this survey we asked about immigration, but we employed a question that is original to the american family survey: “immigrants who legally become naturalized citizens can sponsor family members to come to the united states. which of the following family members should they be able to sponsor?” respondents could check off any family relationship they wished, or no family relationships at all. the aim with this question was to get beyond simple pro- or anti- stances and find the more nuanced views of respondents. figure displays the partisan pattern on this question of who should be allowed to immigrate or not. the clear distinction that democrats are in favor of more immigration can be seen in the difference across all categories. however, it should be noted that republicans are actually in favor of immigration in some cases and democrats are against it in some cases. republicans tend to favor family immigration for the immediate family—a child and a spouse are selected a majority of the time, with parents coming in right around percent. democrats favor immigration for these groups as well as siblings and grandparents, but less than a majority of democrats support immigration for aunts or uncles, nieces or nephews, and cousins (where very few republicans support immigration). partisanship was, by far, the best predictor of this type of attitude, but we did find a striking instance of how family background and experience influenced people’s attitudes. figures and show the exact same graph for republicans and democrats, but broken out by a respondent’s experience. each graph shows a similar pattern. people who are married and have kids are somewhat more likely to support immigration for spouses and children. single respondents are more likely to favor sponsorship for immigration of all of the other extended family categories. this pattern is exactly the same for both democrats and republicans (accounting for the overall partisan difference). again, while it is difficult to interpret motivations for respondents and their beliefs about questions, these results are consistent with the idea that one’s family experience leads one to think about family connections in different ways. single persons appear to place more value on the extended family relationships than do married persons with children. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges child spouse parent sibling grandparent aunt/uncle niece/nephew cousin family member pe rc en ta ge f av o ri ng pid democrat republican family immigration support figure : respondent views about which family members should a citizen be capable of sponsoring for citizenship in the u.s.; pure independents are omitted from the graph american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges child spouse parent sibling grandparent aunt/uncle niece/nephew cousin family member pe rc en ta ge f av o ri ng background married with kids single without kids family immigration support: republicans by family background figure : respondent views, among republicans, about which family members should a citizen be capable of sponsoring for citizenship in the u.s. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges child spouse parent sibling grandparent aunt/uncle niece/nephew cousin family member pe rc en ta ge f av o ri ng background married with kids single without kids family immigration support: democrats by family background figure : respondent views, among democrats, about which family members should a citizen be capable of spon- soring for citizenship in the u.s. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges since one of the key issues with respect to immigration has been family separation, we asked a series of questions about how to handle immigrant families. the questions were asked in a series as follows. all respondents were first asked, “the federal government has been dealing with the challenge of families that cross the border without a visa and request asylum. should parents and children be separated at the border or kept together?” the results of this question are in the top third of table . the results show an overwhelming preference to keep families together. for the percent of respondents who favored separation, we asked, “when families are separated, parents are detained. what should happen to the children?” most of these respondents believed that children should be placed in a detention facility, but slightly over a third responded that such children should be placed with relatives in the u.s. or in foster care if necessary (see the middle portion of table ). table : percentages of people choosing each category in the question series. should parents and children be separated at the border or kept together? overall parents of children parents and children should be separated parents and children should be kept together when families are separated, parents are detained. what should happen to the children? children should be placed in a detention facility children should be placed with family members in the u.s. or be placed in foster care, if necessary. if families are not separated, what should happen to the families? parents and children should be kept together in a detention facility until an asylum hearing. parents and children should be allowed to enter the country together, subject to an asylum hearing. finally, for the percent of respondents who favored keeping families together, we asked, “if families are not separated, what should happen to the families?” these results are shown in the bottom of table and display the closest split. forty-four percent of all respondents favor keeping the respondents together in a detention facility, while percent of all american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges respondents favored allowing the families to enter the country together subject to an asylum hearing. in this case, and it was the only one in the series, there is a slight difference by whether or not a respondent had children. for these respondents the split was perfectly even, with half of parents choosing detention and half of respondents choosing the option of letting the family enter the country. implicitly, this series of question created four policy categories. figure displays the preferences given by respondents. it demonstrates that there is a very clear preference in the public favoring keeping families together, there is more division on the appropriate policy assuming that position. almost half of the respondents favored simply letting families enter the country subject to an asylum hearing, but well over a third favor keeping families together in a detention facility. separated: children in a detention facility separated: children with relatives or foster care together: held in a detention facility together: in the country preferred immigration policy on family separation figure : policy preference on family separation these patterns were not ever very different by demographic categories, especially in the case of the first question about family separation. with respect to the second question about how a united family should be treated, younger respondents were slightly more likely to favor the option of letting united families enter the country subject to an asylum hearing, as were minority respondents, but in most such cases all demographic groups favored letting the family enter and the differences were largely of degree. the lone exception to this pattern was among those over age . this group preferred keeping family members together at a detention facility. there was a significant, and predictable, partisan split on the issue, although it does not break the overall pattern. fifty percent of all republicans favored keeping families together but in a detention facility (their preferred option), while only percent of democrats favored this option. seven out of ten democrats favored letting a family into the country subject to an asylum hearing. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges . family experience and tax cuts how do people feel about the recently passed tax cut bill? on this survey we asked how people felt that the bill affected various groups, described in table . there was a predictable partisan split on the tax bill, with republicans favoring it much more often than democrats. nonetheless, strong majorities of the respondents believe that the tax bill will help large corporations and wealthy individuals. the sample was effectively split down the middle on whether it would help small businesses. only a minority believed that the bill would help middle- and lower-income persons. the most striking feature is that by the group least likely believed to get any benefit out of the tax bill is the respondent’s own family. table : beliefs about whom the recent tax cut would “help” groups overall average large corporations wealthy individuals small businesses middle-income individuals low-income individuals your family we investigated the degree to which these attitudes varied across the key sub-populations examined in the american family survey. while it is true that higher income individuals were more favorably disposed toward the tax cut, we generally found only muted variation by group. figure breaks down support by key sub-groups: gender, marital status, and whether or not a respondent had children. the clear pattern is that the object of help was the dominant consideration for most respondents. while it is true that women tended to think that the tax cuts would help less across the board, all demographic groups we investigated followed the same basic pattern of believing that various types of business would be helped by the law, as would wealthy citizens. people are simply more skeptical that the policy will help out other groups in society. american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges your family wealthy individuals lower-income individuals middle-income individuals large corporations small businesses percentage responding the tax cut helps each group status men women married parents attitudes about the republican tax bill figure : attitudes about the republican tax bill by gender and family status . family background and support for planned parenthood a final area of public policy we explored on this year’s survey was the recent defunding of planned parenthood. predictably, there is a wide partisan split on this issue (found in many other surveys). we focused on beliefs about how this policy would affect individuals. table displays the reactions of various groups to how this policy will affect them. most respondents felt that it would not affect them at all (more than seven in ten). however, it is really subsets of the population—particularly younger women—who are probably most concerned with the services provided by planned parenthood. when we subset to those groups we discover far greater percentages who believe that the policy will affect them—or who respond that they “don’t know” if it will affect them. indeed, only percent of single women under age believe that it will not affect them at all. despite our efforts to focus on experiences rather than partisan splits, we should note that there was an ineradicable partisan difference on this question. focusing solely on the population of women under table : percentage believing that recent defunding of planned parenthood will affect them ... responses all respondents men women women under married women under single women under a great deal somewhat not at all don’t know american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges age , democrats in this group believed they would be affected at some level percent of the time, while republicans believed this only percent of the time. other control variables like marital status and income did not eliminate the difference. the pattern of answers could be due either to expressive reporting of people who were unlikely to need the services but opposed the policy, or because the democrats (perhaps because of geographic reasons) use the services of planned parenthood more often (likely both factors are in play). whatever the reason, this is not an area where partisan differences are simply muted. on the contrary, when considering planned parenthood funding, there are strong and abiding partisan differences. conclusions now in its fourth year, the american family survey reveals a great deal of consistency with previous iterations of the survey (which can all be found here). it is not the case that the american family is in steep decline, or that it is achieving new highs. instead, we find that views about relationships and families differ depending on one’s background and experiences. people like marriage. indeed, it is fair to say that people generally think it is an important benefit—though it must be noted that many people (a little less than half) believe personal commitment is more important than the formal institution. one of the key findings in this survey was the importance of identity. the evidence is clear that parents and married people derive enormous satisfaction from their identities as parents or spouses. in some ways this makes the challenges to family all the more important. when a part of people’s identities are challenged by societal changes, economic instability, personal financial stresses, or depression and anxiety, it reflects a problem that people must take seriously. and even in the midst of what by many indicators is a booming economy, we find that many families experience economic challenges and worry a great deal about them, especially about the high costs of raising children. though we did not directly ask the question of how it threatens families, the results in this survey on sexual harassment should give policymakers pause, in our opinion. the fact that such a large portion of the public—three in ten men and six in ten women—have experienced an inappropriate experience demands a significant response from society. though we did not poll on solutions, it is clear that at least part of that solution must be cultural change. the divide in attitudes between men and women merits considerable additional discussion (including discussion of the fact that standards shift when the direction of the attention shifts). despite the stresses and other difficulties of family life, this survey continues to send a clear message: that people often find deep happiness—even the sources of their identities—inside of families. to quote last year’s report: “this should underscore the value of marriage and children for society. consistently, we have found that those who enjoy marriage and children—though the latter only inside of marriage—seem better off in a host of ways, even if they perceive threats looming for families.” this year’s survey underscores that people see multiple stresses and sources of tension for families, but that the institution remains resilient in the face of these tensions. it is our aim to continue to study this institution and how it relates to politics and policy in america. we continue to believe that, despite the challenges of the research, family relationships remain one of the most important sources of meaning and happiness for most americans. last updated: november , http://national.deseretnews.com/american-family-survey http://deseretnews.com/american-family-survey http://national.deseretnews.com/american-family-survey american family survey summary report: identities, opportunities, and challenges appendix: statement on methodology yougov interviewed respondents who were then matched down to a sample of to produce the final dataset. the respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. the frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full american community survey (acs) -year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements (using the person weights on the public use file). the matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. the matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. the propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. the propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles. the weights were then post-stratified on presidential vote choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age ( -categories), race ( -categories), and education ( -categories), to produce the final weight. appendix: topline report what follows is a topline report of all survey questions asked in the american family survey. this topline report was generated by yougov. any questions about the survey or the topline should be directed to byu’s center for the study of elections and democracy (csed@byu.edu). mailto:csed@byu.edu byuc august sample us adults ( +) conducted august – , margin of error ± . % byuc august . how old were you when you first became a parent? years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - byuc august . and when you first became a parent, what was your relationship status? married . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % married, but separated from spouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % living with a partner, but not married . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % in a committed relationship, but not living with partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % not in a committed relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % unsure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . was your mother married or single when you were born? married . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % single . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . which of the following best describes what you experienced between birth and age ? my mother was continuously married to the same person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % my mother divorced and then remarried . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % my mother divorced and never remarried . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . which of the following best describes what you experienced between birth and age ? my mother never married . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % my mother married after i was born . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % my mother married after i was born and then was divorced . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . how likely is it that you will still be in the same marriage or relationship two years from now? very likely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % likely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % somewhat likely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % neither likely or unlikely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % somewhat unlikely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % unlikely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % very unlikely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . at any point in the last two years, have you thought that your marriage or relationship was in trouble? yes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . would you say that your marriage or relationship is stronger, weaker or about the same as two years ago? stronger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % about the same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % weaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . turning to marriage generally, do you feel that marriages in the united states are stronger, weaker, or about the same as two years ago? stronger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % about the same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % weaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . how much do you agree or disagree with the following: strongly disagreedisagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree agree strongly agree total disagree total agree when more people are married, society is better off. % % % % % % % % % marriage is more of a burden than a benefit to couples. % % % % % % % % % marriage is needed in order to create strong families. % % % % % % % % % being legally married is not as important as having a personal sense of commitment to your partner. % % % % % % % % % marriage is old-fashioned and out-of-date. % % % % % % % % % marriage makes families and children better off financially. % % % % % % % % % byuc august . how much do you agree or disagree with the following: strongly disagreedisagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree agree strongly agree total disagree total agree happy marriages require hard work. % % % % % % % % % personal happiness is more important than putting up with a bad marriage. % % % % % % % % % it is okay to divorce when a person’s needs are no longer met. % % % % % % % % % marriage is for life, even if the couple is unhappy. % % % % % % % % % . how much do you agree or disagree with the following: strongly disagreedisagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree agree strongly agree total disagree total agree all in all, there are more advantages to being single than to being married. % % % % % % % % % getting married is more important to me than having a successful career. % % % % % % % % % byuc august . would you say that your family relationships are stronger, weaker, or about the same as two years ago? stronger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % about the same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % weaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . turning to families generally, do you feel that family relationships in the united states are stronger, weaker, or about the same as two years ago? stronger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % about the same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % weaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . what are the most important issues facing families today? pick up to three items. high work demands and stress on parents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % lack of government programs to support families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % the costs associated with raising a family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % the lack of good jobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % decline in religious faith and church attendance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % sexual permissiveness in our society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % the widespread availability and use of drugs and alcohol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % crime and other threats to personal safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % change in the definition of marriage and family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently . . . . . . . . . . . . . % more children growing up in single-parent homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % difficulty finding quality time with family in the digital age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . what are the most important issues facing teenagers today? pick up to four items. family breakdown/divorce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % difficult relationships with family members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % sexual abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % mental health issues, including anxiety and depression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % pressure to use drugs or alcohol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % navigating sexual identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % dating and relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % making decisions about sexual activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % overuse of technology, such as texting, social media or video games . . . . % widespread availability of pornography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % pressure to get good grades or into a good college . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % not enough meaningful work opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % bullying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % poor quality schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % safety in their communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . how satisfied are you with your...? completely dissatisfied somewhat dissatisfied don’t know somewhat satisfied completely satisfied total dissatisfied total satisfied not applicable job % % % % % % % % family % % % % % % % % $mar _text % % % % % % % % life % % % % % % % % community % % % % % % % % byuc august . thinking about marriages today, how important is it that couples share the...? not at all important not too important somewhat important very important extremely important total not important total important same political party % % % % % % % same religious affiliation % % % % % % % same level of education % % % % % % % same interests and hobbies % % % % % % % same social values (i.e. honestly, hard work, etc.) % % % % % % % same feelings about having children. % % % % % % % . in the past months, did you do any of the following because there wasn’t enough money? <i>check all that apply. were you ever hungry, but didn’t eat because you couldn’t afford enough food? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % did you not pay the full amount of an important bill (like rent, mortgage, or a utility bill)? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % did you borrow or receive money from friends or family to help pay the bills? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % did you move in with other people even for a little while because of financial problems? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % did you stay at a shelter, in an abandoned building, an automobile, or any other place not meant for regular housing, even for one night? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % was there anyone in your household who needed to see a doctor or go to the hospital but couldn’t go because of the cost? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % did you decide to not have a child because it would cost too much? . . . . . . % was there anyone in your household who needed a medication and couldn’t get it because of the cost? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % none of the above . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . in your current relationship, do you expect your spouse or partner to work for pay? yes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . which of the following events have you experienced in the past year? i have experienced this within the last year i have not experienced this within the last year had an immediate family member die % % had fertility problems % % was deployed for military service or had an immediate family member deployed for military service % % had an immediate family member arrested % % was laid off or my spouse/partner was laid off % % divorced or separated from spouse or partner % % byuc august . how often do you do each of the following with your spouse or partner? never yearly or less a few times a year about once a month weekly a few times a week daily go out together, just the two of you % % % % % % % have a serious argument % % % % % % % discuss your relationship with each other % % % % % % % discuss finances with each other % % % % % % % sleep in different rooms because you were upset with one another % % % % % % % talk about political or social issues with each other % % % % % % % pray together as a couple, outside of meals % % % % % % % have sex with each other % % % % % % % do nice things for each other, such as making coffee, putting gas in the car, etc. % % % % % % % hide finances or purchases from each other % % % % % % % byuc august . when you and your spouse or partner discuss political or social issues, how often do you disagree? frequently . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % sometimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % rarely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % never . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . what kinds of issues do you and your spouse disagree about? check all that apply. social issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % economic issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % foreign policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % political candidates or elected officials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % local politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % none of the above . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . when you and your spouse or partner disagree about a political event or issue, how do you tend to resolve that disagreement? check all that apply. i come to agree with my spouse or partner’s position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % my spouse or partner comes to agree with my position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % we meet in the middle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % we agree to disagree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % we stop talking about that issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . in your relationship, which of the following topics do you regularly avoid talking about? check all that apply. finances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % extended family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % political or social issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % none of the above . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . how often does your family...? never yearly or less a few times a year about once a month weekly a few times a week daily eat dinner together % % % % % % % attend the activities of a family member (recitals, sporting events, etc.) % % % % % % % do household chores together % % % % % % % go out to movies, museums, sporting events, or parks together % % % % % % % worship together % % % % % % % have an argument % % % % % % % participate in activities together at home (watch tv, watch a movie, play games, etc.) % % % % % % % byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time do you spend using social media? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time do you spend playing video games on any platform? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . how much do you agree or disagree with the following: strongly disagree disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree agree strongly agree the cost of raising a child/children is affordable for most people. % % % % % % % children are better off if they have two married parents. % % % % % % % it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking. % % % % % % % it is important for parents to pass on their political values to their children. % % % % % % % parents should set boundaries on media consumption for their children. % % % % % % % children need both a male and a female role model in the home. % % % % % % % raising children is one of life’s greatest joys. % % % % % % % it’s morally wrong to have a child outside of marriage. % % % % % % % byuc august . how important are the following things to your personal identity? not at all important not too important somewhat important very important extremely important my role as a spouse or partner % % % % % my role as a parent % % % % % my religion % % % % % my race % % % % % my political party % % % % % my career or job % % % % % my community % % % % % . to live a fulfilling life, it is essential to __ . strongly disagree disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree agree strongly agree be married % % % % % % % have kids % % % % % % % have a rewarding career/job % % % % % % % be part of a religious community % % % % % % % be engaged in the local community % % % % % % % have a good education % % % % % % % make a good living % % % % % % % byuc august . people have different ideas about what it means to become a man or a woman. how important are each of these experiences in becoming a man? not important somewhat important extremely important complete formal schooling % % % be employed full-time % % % capable of supporting a family financially % % % financially independent from parents % % % no longer living in parents’ household % % % get married % % % have a child % % % . people have different ideas about what it means to become a man or a woman. how important are each of these experiences in becoming a woman? not important somewhat important extremely important complete formal schooling % % % be employed full-time % % % capable of supporting a family financially % % % financially independent from parents % % % no longer living in parents’ household % % % get married % % % have a child % % % byuc august . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble at school/behavior in school % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues affect their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships % % % family relationships % % % extracurricular activities % % % physical health % % % . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships % % % family relationships % % % extracurricular activities % % % physical health % % % byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % byuc august . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships % % % family relationships % % % extracurricular activities % % % physical health % % % . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . byuc august . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships % % % family relationships % % % extracurricular activities % % % physical health % % % . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships % % % family relationships % % % extracurricular activities % % % physical health % % % byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % % % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % byuc august . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % % % friendships - % % family relationships - % % extracurricular activities - % % physical health % % % . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . byuc august . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork - - % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) - - % your child’s friends and social life - % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues - - % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork - - % friendships - % % family relationships - % % extracurricular activities - % % physical health - % % . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . how concerned are you about your teenage child when it comes to...? not concerned at all somewhat concerned extremely concerned grades and schoolwork % % % getting in trouble in school (behavior in school) % - % your child’s friends and social life % % % feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues % % % . to what extent do your child’s feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues impact their...? not at all a little a lot schoolwork % - - friendships % % - family relationships % - - extracurricular activities % - - physical health % - - byuc august . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend using social media? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekday, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . on a typical weekend day, how much time does your child spend playing video games on any platform? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how would you rate each of the following government programs on a scale? place each item along the scale where items on the left mean they are not at all good for families with children and items on the right mean they are very good for families with children. respondent placed item on scale from - "not at all good for families with children" to - "very good for families with children". food stamps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . child care assistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . medicaid and other health insurance subsidies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . have you or your family ever directly benefitted from the following programs? yes no don’t know food stamps % % % child care assistance % % % medicaid and other health insurance subsidies % % % byuc august . which of the following financial expenses do you worry about paying in full each month? check all that apply. rent/mortgage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % clothes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % health insurance premiums or medical bills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % transportation expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % childcare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % paying off credit card bills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % paying back loans/interest on loans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % tuition or other educational expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % none of these . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money to build more parks % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money to improve public transportation % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money on pensions % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money to make housing more affordable % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money to have better schools % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money on local law enforcement % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to fix local roads spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money to improve public transportation % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money on pensions % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money to make housing more affordable % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money to have better schools % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money on local law enforcement % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to build more parks spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to improve public transportation spending money on pensions % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to improve public transportation spending money to make housing more affordable % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to improve public transportation spending money to have better schools % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to improve public transportation spending money on local law enforcement % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to improve public transportation spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money on pensions spending money to make housing more affordable % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money on pensions spending money to have better schools % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money on pensions spending money on local law enforcement % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money on pensions spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to make housing more affordable spending money to have better schools % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to make housing more affordable spending money on local law enforcement % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to make housing more affordable spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to have better schools spending money on local law enforcement % % byuc august . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money to have better schools spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % . local governments have to make choices about how they spend money. consider the following trade-offs. which option would benefit your family the most? spending money on local law enforcement spending money on basic services (garbage, water, etc.) % % . do you pay someone money each month for the following services? yes no not applicable childcare during the workday % % % cleaning/housekeeping % % % landscaping/yard work % % % byuc august . in december, congress passed and president trump signed a bill that cut taxes. how do you feel that these tax cuts affect the following groups of people financially? hurts a lot hurts a little no impact helps a little helps a lot your family % % % % % wealthy individuals and families % % % % % lower-income individuals and families % % % % % middle-income individuals and families % % % % % large corporations % % % % % small businesses % % % % % . immigrants who legally become naturalized citizens can sponsor family members to come to the united states. which of the following family members should they be able to sponsor? check all that apply. spouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % parents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % grandparents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % aunt/uncle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % niece/nephew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % cousins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % siblings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % any relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no one . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . do you personally know any immigrants who are here illegally, sometimes called unauthorized or illegal immigrants? (note: this survey is confidential and individual responses will never be connected to your name or shared outside the research team.) yes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % not sure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . how often do you associate with the unauthorized immigrant(s) you know? never . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % yearly or less . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % a few times a year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % about once a month . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % weekly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % a few times a week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % daily . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . the federal government has recently cut funding for planned parenthood. to what extent will this change in funding affect you personally? not at all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % somewhat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % a great deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . what do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % + . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . do you personally hope or desire to have a child someday? yes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % it depends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % don’t know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . apart from the physical ability to conceive, how important are each of these factors for your decisions about having children in the future? not at all important somewhat important extremely important the difficulty of balancing family and career % % % the cost of raising a child % % % the desire to raise a child of my own % % % my current relationship status % % % the need to have a baby before i’m too old to parent % % % the expectations of my family % % % my religious or philosophical beliefs % % % . how important do you think it is for a person to do each of these things before having their first child? not at all important somewhat important extremely important have an established career % % % get married % % % be financially stable % % % buy a house % % % graduate from college % % % travel to different places % % % be in a committed relationship % % % have a good health insurance plan % % % byuc august . outside of your family, who would you turn to first if you needed help with each of the following issues? nearby neighbors religious organizations community organizations co- workers other friends i generally just rely on myself help with childcare % % % % % % advice about children % % % % % % advice about my relationship % % % % % % financial help % % % % % % taking care of my house or other property % % % % % % transportation to an important appointment % % % % % % . and now considering both family and the other people in your life, who would you turn to first if you needed help with each of the following issues? a family member someone else i just rely on myself help with childcare % % % advice about children % % % advice about my relationship % % % financial help % % % taking care of my house or other property % % % transportation to an important appointment % % % byuc august . the federal government has been dealing with the challenge of families that cross the border without a visa and request asylum. should parents and children be separated at the border or kept together? parents and children should be separated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % parents and children should be kept together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . when families are separated, parents are detained. what should happen to the children? children should be placed in a detention facility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % children should be placed with family members in the u.s. or be placed in foster care, if necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . if families are not separated, what should happen to the families? parents and children should be kept together in a detention facility until an asylum hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % parents and children should be allowed to enter the country together, subject to an asylum hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . how many close friends do you have that you feel at ease with and can talk to about private matters? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how many relatives do you have that you feel at ease with and can talk to about private matters? mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . do you or your spouse/partner suffer from anxiety or depression? yes, i do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % yes, my spouse/partner does . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % yes, we both do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % neither of us do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . would you consider it sexual harassment if a man who was not a romantic partner did the following to a woman at work? never sometimes usually always requesting a sexual favor % % % % making sexual jokes % % % % placing hand on lower back % % % % looking at private parts % % % % commenting on attractiveness/appearance % % % % asking to go for a drink % % % % persisting in unwanted attention after asked to stop % % % % asking to go to lunch % % % % . would you consider it sexual harassment if a woman who was not a romantic partner did the following to a man at work? never sometimes usually always requesting a sexual favor % % % % making sexual jokes % % % % placing hand on lower back % % % % looking at private parts % % % % commenting on attractiveness/appearance % % % % asking to go for a drink % % % % persisting in unwanted attention after asked to stop % % % % asking to go to lunch % % % % byuc august . have you ever received unwanted sexual advances from someone __ ? yes no that you felt were inappropriate. (this can be in any circumstances, whether or not work-related.) % % who worked for the same company as you. % % who had influence over your school or work situation. % % . are you familiar with incidents where sexual harassment happened in the following places? check all that apply. your workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % your religious congregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % your neighborhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % your school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % your children’s school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % your family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % none of the above . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % byuc august . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % byuc august . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % byuc august . have you or your spouse ever spoken with your child about the following topics? yes no sex (the birds and the bees) % % contraception % % consent % % sexual harassment or assault % % sexual identity or orientation % % . in your view, does someone need to ask consent before initiating each of these things $met _insert with a person they are interested in romantically? yes, must be verbal yes, but could be non-verbal no don’t know holding hands % % % % putting your arm around someone % % % % kissing someone % % % % intimate touching % % % % having sex % % % % byuc august . what do you do after your kids go to bed? check all that apply. never a few times a year once a week more than once a week watch tv or a movie % % % % talk on the phone/send text messages % % % % play video games % % % % use social media % % % % read a book % % % % have sex % % % % work/homework % % % % . urban/rural urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % suburban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % rural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . gender male . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % female . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . age - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % + . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . race white . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % hispanic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . education hs or less . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % some college . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % college grad+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . income lt $ k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % $ -$ k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % $ k+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . employment status employed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % unemployed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % retired . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . urban/rural urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % suburban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % rural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . political party democrat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % republican . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % independent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % byuc august . religious affiliation white evangelical protestant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % white non-evangelical protestant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % black protestant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % catholics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % white non-hisp catholic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % hisp catholic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % unaffiliated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . religious attendance weekly+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % monthly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % seldom/never . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . marital status married . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % unmarried . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % . children children at home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % children not at home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % no children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . % 	project overview & summary 	the state of marriage and family 	the general state of marriages and attitudes about marriage 	relationship status and trump approval 	identity 	family relationships and parenting 	evaluations of american families 	important issues facing american families 	the financial stresses facing american families 	money and the decision to have children 	family crises 	family activities 	parental activities 	american views on the ideal marriage and family 	shared values 	fulfilling life 	becoming an adult 	parents and teenagers 	teens and technology 	what worries parents 	sexual harassment 	social capital and support networks 	family and public policy 	national government programs 	local government programs 	personal experience and support for immigration 	family experience and tax cuts 	family background and support for planned parenthood 	conclusions 	appendix: statement on methodology 	appendix: topline report from gaze to outrage: the role of group-based anger in mediating the relationship between sexual objectification and collective action original article from gaze to outrage: the role of group-based anger in mediating the relationship between sexual objectification and collective action lee shepherd & chloe evans # the author(s) abstract numerous studies have demonstrated the harmful effects of sexual objectification on well-being. however, despite the rapid growth of the #metoo movement, which has raised public awareness about sexual harassment, there has been much less research investigating the role of sexually objectifying behaviours in motivating people to try to tackle this issue through collective action (e.g., signing petitions, engaging in protests) and the process through which this occurs. across two studies, we tested whether experiencing sexually objectifying behaviours motivates women to be willing to engage in collective action against sexual objectification via feelings of anger toward women being the target of such actions (i.e., group-based anger). in studies (n = ) and (n = ), female participants rated the extent to which they had been the target of sexually objectifying behaviours, their feelings of group-based anger, and their willingness to engage in collective action against sexual objectification. we found that sexual objectification positively predicted the willingness to engage in collective action and that this relationship was mediated by feelings of group-based anger. this pattern suggests that experiencing numerous instances of sexual objectification is likely to result in women feeling group-based anger and that this anger, in turn, promotes collective action against sexual objectification. therefore, our research demonstrates one process through which sexual objectification promotes a willingness to engage in collective action. keywords sexual harassment . collective behaviour . anger . self-objectification sexual objectification involves being regarded as a sexual object rather than a human being and may occur through a variety of actions, including receiving inappropriate com- ments, sexualized gazing, or being groped. sexual objectifi- cation is commonly experienced by women (holland et al. ; swim et al. ) and is prevalent in numerous situa- tions, ranging from education and work to commuting and social settings (brinkman and rickard ; fairchild and rudman ). experiencing sexually objectifying behav- iours has led to numerous women undertaking collective ac- tion against sexual objectification, as demonstrated by the #metoo movement. indeed, across the world there have been petitions, activist organisations, social media campaigns, and protests designed to tackle sexual objectification. the aim of this research was to assess the process through which experiencing sexual objectification promotes collective action. objectification theory (fredrickson and roberts ) sug- gests that women are frequently objectified within society, either through the mass media or as targets of sexually objec- tifying behaviours. according to this theory, this constant ex- posure to objectification has the potential to cause women to internalise this perspective and evaluate themselves based on their physical appearance. this theory suggests that when this self-objectification occurs it increases appearance-related con- cerns and thus the likelihood of women developing various mental health conditions, such as eating disorders and depres- sion. although this theory focuses on the role of self- objectification on well-being, researchers have assessed the influence of self-objectification on women’s perceptions and behaviours in other domains. indeed, it has been argued that self-objectification may result in targets internalising negative * lee shepherd lee.shepherd@northumbria.ac.uk department of psychology, northumbria university, northumberland building, northumberland road, newcastle upon tyne ne st, uk sex roles https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:lee.shepherd@northumbria.ac.uk societal views of their group and thus accepting their low status position (calogero and jost ; zurbriggen ). in line with this reasoning, research has suggested that self- objectification positively predicts the belief that gender rela- tions are fair and that this belief, in turn, reduces the likelihood of women engaging in collective action against gender in- equality (calogero ; calogero et al. ). as such, this research suggests self-objectification deters collective action. it is important to note that objectification theory suggests that sexual objectification does not always result in self-objec- tification. indeed, experiencing sexual objectification may elicit a variety of responses (fairchild and rudman ; shepherd ). these studies focus on interpersonal re- sponses to sexual objectification. we aimed to extend this research by assessing collective responses to sexual objectifi- cation, such as the willingness to engage in collective action against sexual objectification. research has found that experiencing other forms of gender discrimination motivates women to engage in collective action (iyer and ryan ; leonard et al. ) and that observing others being sexually objectified motivates women to undertake action against sex- ual objectification (chaudoir and quinn ; guizzo et al. ). therefore, although self-objectification may deter col- lective action, personally experiencing sexual objectification may promote collective action. we argue that experiencing sexual objectification is likely to promote collective action through the emotions that are elicited. emotional reactions to sexual objectification emotions are elicited when the interpretation of the situation matches an emotional appraisal (frijda et al. ). indeed, anger is felt when people make the appraisal that they have been subjected to a harmful illegitimate action (smith and lazarus ). for example, targets of sexual objectification are likely to feel angry when they view this action as harmful and illegitimate (shepherd ; swim et al. ). this pre- vious research has focused on feelings of interpersonal anger following sexual objectification. however, it is also possible to experience group-based emotions through the association with a group (doosje et al. ; smith ). indeed, group- based anger is felt when people believe that their group (e.g., women) have been the target of a harmful illegitimate action (gordijn et al. ; leach et al. ). for example, research has suggested that women are likely to feel group-based anger following gender discrimination (iyer and ryan ; pennekamp et al. ). given this association, it is likely that sexual objectification also will elicit group-based anger. anger is an action-orientated emotion that motivates the individual to try to resolve the injustice (frijda et al. ). for example, feeling interpersonal anger toward sexual objec- tification motivates the target to confront the perpetrating individual (shepherd ). interestingly, when group-based anger is experienced, people are likely to confront the perpe- trating group and are therefore likely to engage in some form of collective action (van zomeren et al. ; van zomeren et al. ). indeed, numerous studies have demonstrated the role of group-based anger in promoting collective action (leonard et al. ; livingstone et al. ; tausch et al. ). importantly, these processes have been demonstrated in the objectification literature. for example, chaudoir and quinn ( ) found that witnessing sexually objectifying behaviour toward others motivates women to take action and that this is due to feelings of group-based anger. similarly, watching a video criticising sexual objectification by the media promotes collective action through feelings of group-based anger (guizzo et al. ). therefore, it is likely that sexual objec- tification will promote collective action through feelings of group-based anger. the present studies as we mentioned, previous research has assessed the role of self-objectification on collective action (calogero ; calogero et al. ) or the role of mass media objectification on collective action (guizzo et al. ). however, despite the strong theoretical rationale, to our knowledge there is little research assessing whether personally experiencing sexual objectification promotes collective action via feelings of group-based anger. this was the aim of the current research. we hypothesised that experiencing sexually objectifying be- haviours would increase feelings of group-based anger and that these feelings, in turn, would promote a willingness to engage in collective action against sexual objectification. this hypothesis was tested across three studies. a pilot study assessed whether, in line with our rationale, experiencing sex- ual objectification promoted a willingness to engage in collec- tive action. studies and then tested our hypothesised mod- el by determining whether group-based anger mediated this relationship. pilot study the main aim of our pilot study was to test whether being sexually objectified promotes collective action against the ob- jectification of women. as such, the primary variables of in- terest were sexual objectification and the willingness to en- gage in collective action. however, the collective action liter- ature suggests that people are also likely to take action when they feel others support their opinion (i.e., social opinion support; van zomeren et al. ). feeling that others have also been sexually objectified may encourage women who sex roles have experienced objectification to take action. therefore, our pilot study also aimed to see whether this relationship was moderated by social opinion support. it is also important to ensure that any relationship between sexual objectification and the willingness to engage in collec- tive action is not due to other variables. for example, people are more likely to engage in collective action when they be- lieve others will also want to take action (i.e., social action support; van zomeren et al. ). as such, it was important to determine that any effect of sexual objectification or the social opinion support variable was not due to this social ac- tion support. similarly, sexual objectification is positively as- sociated with body shame (kozee et al. ) and negatively associated with self-esteem (tylka and sabik ). therefore, it was also important to test whether sexual objec- tification predicted the willingness to engage in collective ac- tion after controlling for these variables. method participants and design participants were recruited for the present online study via adverts on social media websites and a course-credit system. the study was advertised as investigating the relationship be- tween the objectification of women and collective action. to take part, participants had to be years-old or older, female, and must not have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. a total of women started our study. twelve participants withdrew before the end of the study and were thus removed from the sample, leaving a total of women, aged between and years (m = . , sd = . ). participants were most likely to be students (n = , . %). there were sim- ilar numbers of women who were single (n = , . %) and in a relationship (n = , . %; participant was divorced/ separated). the study had a two (social opinion support manipulation: control versus experimental) by continuous variable (per- ceived sexual objectification) between-participants design. the dependent variable was the women’s willingness to en- gage in collective action against sexual objectification. the covariates were participants’ perception that other women will want to take action against objectification (e.g., social action support), body shame, and self-esteem. materials and procedure after giving consent, participants completed the interpersonal sexual objectification scale (for full scale, see kozee et al. ). this well-validated -item sexual-objectification measure assessed the extent to which participants felt that they had been objectified over the last year. this scale included items assessing sexual objectification related to both body evaluation (e.g., bhow often have you been whistled at while walking down a street?^) and unwanted sexual advances (e.g., ‘how often has someone grabbed or pinched one of your private body areas against your will?’). each item was rated on a -point scale from (never) to (almost always). ratings across all items were averaged to yield an overall measure of experiences of sexual objectification such that higher scores indicated greater levels of sexual objectification (α = . ). we then manipulated social opinion support. all partici- pants read the following information that defined sexual ob- jectification and discussed sexual objectification in the media toward celebrities: objectification is the act of viewing someone as an ob- ject rather than a human being. this often occurs in the form of sexual objectification. this involves viewing a person (usually a women) as a sex object. there are numerous factors that that been suggested to influence the objectification of women. for example, women are often objectified in the mass media through adverts, films, and television shows. indeed, a recent report assessed british newspapers and found that there was excessive sexual objectification of women in the media. moreover, jennifer lawrence, the hunger games star, has criticised the media for their objectifi- cation of women, and their criticism regarding her ap- pearance. she refers to it as "like being in high school" and suggests that the media are bad role models for young people by making them think it is "ok to point at people and call them fat or ugly." emma watson has also recently spoken out on sexualisation and objectification. in her powerful speech regarding the issue, she discussed how she had been "sexualised by certain elements of the press since the age of " and how "girlfriends dropped out of sports teams due to the fear of appearing muscular" and not fitting the social stereotype of how femininity and the female body should look. this demonstrates the objec- tification that has been felt some celebrities. participants were then randomly allocated into the control or experimental condition. participants in the experimental (but not the control) condition then read additional information that emphasised the prevalence of sexual objectification: research has found that the vast majority of women feel that they have been objectified. a recent study has found that % of female students reported unwanted sexual comments or behaviours at least once over the previous semester. similar rates of objectification are likely in the sex roles general population. this demonstrates the prevalence of sexual objectification toward women. indeed, most women seem to have experienced sexual objectification in the recent past. following this experimental manipulation, all participants completed a two-item manipulation check. these items were: bi think other women are likely to feel objectified^ and bi think other women are likely to have been objectified^ (see van zomeren et al. ). these items were rated on a -point likert scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). the ratings of these items were averaged to create a measure in which higher scores reflected a greater belief that other women had been ob- jectified (r = . , p < . ). next, we measured three covariates. first, participants completed the following two items assessing social action support: bi think other women will want to do something against the objectification of women^ and bi think other women will want to show their opposition to the objecti- fication of women^ (see van zomeren et al. ). these items were rated on a -point likert scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). ratings of these items were averaged to create an overall measure of social action support in which higher scores indicated a greater belief that other women will want to take action against sexual objectification (r = . , p < . ). second, partici- pants completed a well-validated single-item measure of self-esteem (bi have high self esteem^), rated on a scale from (not very true of me) to (very true of me) (see robins et al. ). third, this measure was followed by an eight-item body shame scale (for full scale, see mckinley and hyde ). these items included bi feel ashamed of myself when i haven’t made the effort to look my best,^ bi would be ashamed for people to know what i really weigh,^ and bi never worry that something is wrong with me when i am not exercising as much as i could^ (reverse scored). these items were rated on a - point scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). the average rating across these items was used to create an overall measure of body shame in which higher scores indicated greater body shame (α = . ). participants then rated their willingness to engage in collective action against the objectification of women. this seven-item measure assessed whether participants would wear a badge, join a facebook group, join a pro- test, begin a petition, sign a petition, buy and wear a band, and join an email list against the objectification of wom- en. each item was rated on a -point scale from (definitely not) to (definitely). the ratings of these items were averaged to create a measure in which higher scores indicated a greater willingness to engage in collec- tive action (α = . ). statistical analysis first, we used anovas to assess the effect of the social opin- ion support manipulation on the variables. following this, we used correlation and linear regression analyses to assess the relationship between sexual objectification and the willing- ness to engage in collective action. finally, the moderating role of social opinion support was assessed using the process macro (hayes ). results logarithmic transformations were applied to the manipulation check (i.e., social opinion support) and social action support variables to correct for outliers. prior to these transformations the means for the social opinion and social action support variables were . (sd = . ) and . (sd = . ), respectively. effect of social opinion support anovas were then undertaken to determine the effect of the manipulation on the manipulation check and the other vari- ables. the manipulation did not have a significant effect on the manipulation check or any of the other variables (see table ). therefore, this manipulation was not discussed fur- ther. however, in the subsequent analyses we are able to as- sess the influence of social opinion support using the mea- sured manipulation check variable. association between objectification and collective action next, correlation analyses were undertaken to assess the asso- ciation between the variables. as hypothesised, the objectifi- cation measure was positively associated with willingness to engage in collective action against sexual objectification (see table ). the objectification measure was also positively as- sociated with social opinion support and body shame. moreover, the willingness to engage in collective action was also positively associated with social opinion and social action support. by contrast, body shame and self-esteem were not associated with collective action. these results suggest that sexual objectification was positively associated with collec- tive action. however, given the association of these variables with the covariates, it was important to assess the unique pre- dictive power of sexual objectification. we used linear multiple regression analysis to assess the unique predictive power of the objectification measure on the willingness to engage in collective action after accounting for the covariates. this model account for % of the variance in the willingness to engage in collective action, f( , ) = . , p < . . importantly, the objectification measure remained a significant positive predictor of collective action sex roles after accounting for the covariates (see table ). interestingly, social action support positively, and self-esteem negatively, predicted collective action. all other covariates were not sig- nificant. therefore, sexual objectification is a robust predictor of the willingness to engage in collective action. moderating role of social opinion support although the manipulation did not have a significant ef- fect on the variables, it was possible to assess the moder- ating role of social opinion support using the manipula- tion check measure. as such, we assessed the interaction between the objectification and the social opinion support measure on the willingness to engage in collective action. this interaction was assessed using the process macro (hayes ; model ). in this analysis, there was a sig- nificant main effect of objectification (b = . , se = . , p = . ) and social opinion support (b = . , se = . , p = . ). however, the interaction between these vari- ables did not have a significant effect on collective action (b = − . , se = . , p = . ). these results suggest the relationship between objectification and the willingness to engage in collective action did not vary based on social opinion support. discussion previous research has suggested that self-objectification is negative associated with collective action (calogero ). in our study, we extended this research by demon- strating that experiencing sexual objectification was posi- tively associated with the willingness to engage in collec- tive action against the objectification of women. importantly, this relationship remained significant after controlling for a series of covariates. our findings suggest that experiencing sexual objectification motivates women to take collective action against sexual objectification. interestingly, our social opinion support manipulation did not have a significant effect on the manipulation check variable. this nonsignificant effect may reflect the table descriptive statistics and correlations, pilot study and study variables pilot study study correlations m (sd) m (sd) . objectification measure . (. ) . (. ) – . * . . . * . ** . social opinion support . (. ) . (. ) . *** – . *** −. . . ** . social action support . (. ) . (. ) . * . *** – −. . . *** . self-esteem . ( . ) . ( . ) −. −. −. – −. *** −. . body shame . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** . . −. *** – . . collective action . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . *** . *** −. . – . self-objectification – . ( . ) . −. . −. . ** −. – . perceived illegitimacy – . (. ) . * . *** . *** −. . . *** . – . group-based anger – . ( . ) . *** . *** . *** −. . . *** −. . *** – . group-based shame – . ( . ) . *** . *** . *** −. ** . ** . *** . . *** . *** – . group efficacy – . ( . ) −. . . ** . −. . ** −. . ** . ** . ** correlations above the diagonal are for the pilot study, whereas correlations below the diagonal are for study *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . table the effect of social opinion support on study variables, pilot study study variables control m (sd) experimental m (sd) fa p ηp manipulation check (social opinion support) . (. ) . (. ) . . <. objectification measure . (. ) . (. ) . . . social action support . (. ) . (. ) . . . self-esteem . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. body shame . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. collective action . ( . ) . ( . ) . . . a degrees of freedom were ( , ), except for the objectification measure and collective action ( , ) sex roles fact that the mean level of social opinion support was high. indeed, the pre-transformation mean was on a - point scale. this high mean may have made it difficult to manipulate this variable. despite this shortcoming, further analysis revealed that the measured social opinion support variable did not moderate the relationship between sexual objectification and collective action. this non-finding may reflect the fact that the prevalence of sexual objecti- fication may have resulted in the participants believing that most women are likely to have experienced sexual objectification and are thus willing to take action. given this non-significant interaction, in the further studies so- cial opinion support was treated as a covariate rather than a moderating variable. the results from our pilot study were promising. however, it was important to assess the process through which the effect occurs. as we mentioned, we hypothesised that sexual objec- tification should promote a willingness to engage in collective action via feelings of group-based anger. we expected that experiencing sexual objectification should result in women feeling anger toward the treatment they receive by men and that this group-based anger should motivate women to engage in collective action. therefore, it was important to extend the findings of the pilot study by testing this mediation model. this was the aim of study . study there were numerous differences between the pilot study and study . first, as we mentioned, study measured group- based anger to test the mediation model. second, study attempted to manipulate sexual objectification in order to es- tablish causality. based on previous research (calogero ), participants in the objectified condition were asked to describe a time when they had been sexually objectified. by contrast, participants in the control condition were asked to describe the previous day. based on research on the availability heuristic (schwarz et al. ), we expected the experimental manipu- lation to increase the ease with which such examples come to mind and thus the perceived frequency of sexual objectification. third, study further tested the robustness of the findings by including additional covariates. calogero ( ) suggested that self-objectification should deter collective action. as such, it was important to assess the role of this variable on the mediation model. previous research also has suggested that collective action is predicted by the belief that the group will be effective in making a change (i.e., group efficacy; van zomeren et al. ). therefore, we controlled for group- efficacy in study . moreover, although discrimination may promote group-based anger (chaudoir and quinn ; iyer and ryan ), the belief that this tarnishes the group’s im- age may also result in the elicitation of group-based shame (matheson and anisman ). therefore, we also measured group-based shame. finally, research has suggested that although most women are likely to view sexual objectification negatively, some women may have a benign response and instead view such experiences positively (fairchild and rudman ; liss et al. ). this reasoning suggests that it is possible that the rela- tionship between sexual objectification and collective action may vary depending on the extent to which such actions are viewed as illegitimate. therefore, we also assessed the mod- erating role of perceived illegitimacy. method participants and design participants were recruited for this online study using adverts on social media and a course-credit system. the study was advertised as looking into women’s thoughts, feelings and actions toward objectification. participants were required to be years-old or older and female. for ethical reasons, par- ticipants were asked not to take part if they had an eating disorder or were likely to feel distressed when discussing in- stances of sexual objectification. we recruited women for our study. we removed participants for not completing the study, leaving a final sample of women. their age range was – years-old (m = . , sd = . ). participants were most likely to be students (n = , . %). there were more single participants (n = , . %) than participants in a relationship (n = , . %; participant was divorced/ separated and participant selected other). the present study had a two conditions (sexual objectifica- tion: control versus objectified) by continuous moderating variable (perceived illegitimacy) between-participants design. the dependent variable was the willingness to engage in col- lective action. the mediating variable was group-based anger. the covariates were social opinion support, social action sup- port, body shame, self-esteem, group-efficacy, and group- based shame. table regression analyses assessing the role of objectification and the covariates on collective action, pilot study b (se) β objectification measure . (. ) . ** social opinion support . (. ) . social action support . (. ) . ** self-esteem −. (. ) −. * body shame −. (. ) −. *p < . . **p < . sex roles materials and procedure after giving consent, participants completed a four-item scale measuring perceived illegitimacy. the items were: bobjectifying women is wrong,^ bobjectifying women is illegitimate,^ bit is legitimate to objectify women^ (reversed scored), and bit is ok to objectify women^ (reverse scored). these items were rated on a -point scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). the rating across these items was averaged to create a measure in which higher scores in- dicated greater perceived illegitimacy of objectification (α = . ). following this assessment, participants were randomly al- located into either the objectified or control condition. participants in the objectified condition described a time when they had been objectified: we would like to know your experiences of sexual ob- jectification. please think of a time when you have been sexually objectified. this may involve being whistled at, someone staring at parts of your body, or being touched against your will. in the box below, please describe a time when you have been sexually objectified. in this description please state when this occurred, who objec- tified you, how this occurred, and how you felt and responded to this. in contrast, participants in the control condition described what they had done the previous day we would like to know about your average day. please think of what you did yesterday. in the box below, please describe what you did yesterday. in this descrip- tion please state who you met during the day, what you did, and how you felt and acted. we expected this manipulation to alter the perceived frequen- cy of sexual objectification. as such, the interpersonal sexual objectification scale that we used in our pilot study was in- cluded as a manipulation check (kozee et al. ). in line with the pilot study, the ratings across all items were averaged to create an overall measure of sexual objectification in which higher scores indicated greater sexual objectification (α = . ). this sexual objectification scale was followed by the self- objectification measure (noll and fredrickson ). participants were presented with ten traits relating to their physical self-concept. five of these traits were related to the participant’s appearance (physical attractiveness, weight, sex appeal, body measurements, and firm/sculpted muscles), whereas the remaining five were more instrumental and thus not related to the participant’s appearance (health, strength, energy level, physical coordination, and physical fitness). participants were required to rank the importance of each of these traits on their physical self-concept from (least impact on my physical self-concept) to (greatest impact on my phys- ical self-concept). typically, researchers obtain a measure of self-objectification by subtracting the sum of the instrumental trait rankings from the sum of the appearance trait rankings. however, using the sum of these traits is problematic because missing data have the potential to bias the participant’s score. unfortunately, participants often finding this measure difficult to complete (calogero ), increasing the likelihood of hav- ing missing data. although for each of our participants the number of missing items was relatively small (m = . , sd = . ), it was important to ensure that any missing data did not bias the results. to avoid this bias, we used the mean of the completed items rather than the sum of all items. we then subtracted the mean ranking for the instrumental from the mean ranking of the appearance-related traits to obtain a mea- sure in which higher scores reflected greater self-objectifica- tion. importantly, this score was highly correlated with the score obtained when using the sum of the traits (r = . , p < . ), thereby creating an appropriate measure of self- objectification that is not bias by missing data. next, participants completed the two-item social opinion support (r = . , p < . ) and social action support (r = . , p < . ) measures used in our pilot study. the measure was calculated in the same way as in the pilot study. participants then completed the group-based emotion measures. because study aimed to assess group-based emotions, the wording of the items related to the ingroup (women) rather than the indi- vidual. as such, participants were asked: bthe objectification of women makes me feel [emotion word].^ the emotion words were angry, annoyed, furious, and outraged (shepherd et al. ). the shame words were ashamed, disgraced, hu- miliated, and embarrassed (schmader and lickel ). each item was rated on a -point scale from (not at all) to (very much). an overall measure of each emotion was created by averaging the ratings of the emotion items (α = . for anger and α = . for shame). this created a measure in which great- er scores indicated higher levels of the emotion. participants then completed a four-item group-efficacy scale. based on previous research (van zomeren et al. ), the items were: bi think that together we are able to change the situation,^ bi think that we are able to stop women being objectified,^ bi think that we are unlikely to change the situation^ (reverse scored), and bi think that we will not be able to stop women being objectified^ (reverse scored). all items were rated on a -point scale from (not at all) to (very much). the ratings of these items was then averaged to create a measure in which high scores indicated greater group efficacy (α = . ). we then used the same measures from the pilot study to assess self-esteem (a single item), body shame (α = . ), and the willingness to engage in collective action (α = . ). in line with the pilot study, the average rating across sex roles all items was used to create the body shame and collective action measures. statistical analysis initially, we conducted anovas to assess the effect of the sexual objectification manipulation on the variables. correlation analyses were then used to assess the association between the variables. next, we used the process macro (hayes ) to assess the moderating role of perceived ille- gitimacy and our mediation model. results we applied an inverse transformation to the perceived illegit- imacy and social opinion support variables to correct for out- liers. for similar reasons, a logarithmic transformation was applied to the social action support variable. prior to these transformations, the means for these variable were . (sd = . ) for perceived illegitimacy, . (sd = . ) for so- cial opinion support, and . (sd = . ) for social action support. effect of objectification next, anovas assessed the effect of the objectification ma- nipulation on the objectification measure and other variables. the objectification manipulation did not have a significant effect on the objectification measure (see table ). instead, this manipulation had a significant effect on social opinion support. the manipulation did not have a significant effect on the other variables. given this manipulation only had a significant effect on a covariate and not the main variables of interest in our study, the effects of this manipulation were not discussed further. instead, the objectification measure was used to assess the influence of sexual objectification on the willingness to engage in collective action. associations between variables correlation analyses demonstrated that in line with the pilot study, the objectification measure was positively associated with the willingness to engage in collective action (see table ).importantlyforourmediationhypothesis,theobjec- tificationmeasure wasalsopositively associatedwithgroup- based anger. the objectification measure was also positively associatedwithperceivedillegitimacy,socialopinionandac- tionsupport,group-basedshame,andbodyshame.moreover, collective action was positively associated with group-based anger, further supporting our mediation hypothesis. collective action was also associated with perceived illegiti- macy,socialopinionandactionsupport,group-basedshame, and group efficacy. moderating role of perceived illegitimacy prior to testing our mediation hypothesis, it was important to assess the moderating role of perceived illegitimacy. this moderation was tested using the process macro (model , hayes ). for the collective action measure, there was a significant main effect of objectification (b = . , se = . , p < . ) and perceived illegitimacy (b = . , se = . , p < . ). however, the interaction between the objectifica- tion measure and perceived illegitimacy did not have a signif- icant effect on the willingness to engage in collective action (b = −. , se = . , p = . ). for the group-based anger mea- sure, further analysis revealed a significant main effect of ob- jectification (b = . , se = . , p < . ) and perceived illegit- imacy (b = . , se = . , p < . ). however, the interaction between these two variables did not predict group-based anger (b = . , se = . , p = . ). as such, these results found little table the effect of the objectification manipulation on study variables, study study variables control m (sd) objectified m (sd) fa p ηp objectification measure . (. ) . (. ) . . . self-objectification . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. perceived illegitimacy . (. ) . (. ) . . <. social opinion support . (. ) . (. ) . . . social action support . (. ) . (. ) . . . group-based anger . ( . ) . ( . ) . . . group-based shame . ( . ) . ( . ) . . . group efficacy . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. self-esteem . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. body shame . ( . ) . ( . ) . . . collective action . ( . ) . ( . ) . . <. a degrees of freedom were ( , ), except for self-esteem ( , ) sex roles support for the hypothesis that the role of sexual objectifica- tion on the willingness to engage in collective action was moderated by perceived illegitimacy. mediating role of group-based anger given the lack of evidence for moderation, we assessed a simple mediation model in which the relationship from sexual objectification (independent variable) to the will- ingness to engage in collective action (dependent variable) occurred via group-based anger (mediator). this model was assessed by calculating the % confidence intervals for the indirect pathway using bootstrap resamples (hayes ). the regression model from this analysis revealed that sexual objectification positively predicted group-based anger and that this anger, in turn, positively predicted the willingness to engage in collective action (see fig. ). interestingly, the direct pathway from the objectification measure to collective action became non- significant after controlling for group-based anger. importantly, the confidence intervals did not contain zero for the indirect pathway ( % ci [. , . ]). this pattern suggests a significant indirect effect from objectification to the willingness to engage in collective action via group- based anger. it was important to test the robustness of the mediation model. this is especially important given the associations be- tween the variables in this mediation model and the covariates. therefore, these data were reanalysed with the covariates and the manipulation entered into the model. importantly, the in- direct effect remained significant after controlling for these variables ( % ci [. , . ]). interestingly, in this analysis group-based anger was the only variable to significantly pre- dict the willingness to engage in collective action. given the correlational data, it could be argued that the reverse mediation model may be apparent in these studies (i.e., sexual objectification predicts group-based anger via col- lective action). therefore, it was also important to test this reverse mediation model. the indirect effect for this reverse mediation model was significant in study ( % ci [. , . ]). therefore, although there is evidence for our hypothesised model, it is also important to consider the re- verse mediation model (see discussion). discussion study supported the pilot study by demonstrating that sex- ual objectification is positively related to the willingness to engage in collective action. moreover, study suggested that this relationship was mediated by group-based anger. being objectified increased feelings of group-based anger, which in turn promoted a willingness to engage in collective action against the objectification of women. importantly, this rela- tionship remained after controlling for a series of covariates, demonstrating the robustness of the mediation model. it should be noted that we found statistical evidence for a reverse mediation model in which sexual objectification predicted group-based anger through collective action. however, de- spite this statistical rationale, there was not a strong theoretical rationale. indeed, numerous studies have suggested that harm- ful actions predict collective action via feelings of group- based anger (guizzo et al. ; iyer and ryan ; van zomeren et al. ). therefore, the hypothesised model had a stronger theoretical rationale than this reverse mediation model. unfortunately, the objectification manipulation did not have a significant effect on the manipulation check (i.e., the perceived frequency of sexual objectification). it is possible that the manipulation was effective, but that we failed to find an effect because we used an inappropriate manipulation check. we may have found that the manipulation was effec- tive if we used a different measure as the manipulation check. the absence of an appropriate manipulation check makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the manipulation. indeed, we cannot determine whether the manipulation was simply ineffective and thus did not influence group-based anger or collective action, or whether the manipulation had a signifi- cant effect on sexual objectification but not the emotions or collective action. because of this shortcoming, we used an established sexual objectification manipulation and manipula- tion check in study (teng et al. ). in study , we found little evidence that perceived illegit- imacy moderated the role of sexual objectification on the will- ingness to engage in collective action. this non-finding may be due to participants viewing sexual objectification as highly illegitimate, as demonstrated by the mean of this variable prior to the transformation ( . on a -point scale). this outcome is in line with other research demonstrating that although objectification measure group-based anger collective action b = . , se = . , p < . b = . , se = . p = . b = . , se = . , p < . fig. indirect effect from objectification measure to collective action via group-based anger sex roles some women are likely to view sexual objectification positive- ly (liss et al. ), the majority of women view such actions negatively (shepherd ). this negativity may have re- duced the likelihood of perceived illegitimacy moderating the effects of sexual objectification. although the findings from study supported the hypothesised mediation model, it could be argued that the effects may be mediated by interpersonal anger rather than group-based anger. indeed, it could be argued that participants may have experienced anger because they had personally been harmed by sexual objectification (i.e., interpersonal anger) and this experience may have promoted collective action. therefore, study extended the findings of study by testing whether the relationship between sexual objectification and the willingness to engage in collective action was mediated by group-based, rather than interpersonal, anger. study there were three main differences between studies and . first, in study , we manipulated objectification by asking participants in the objectified (but not the control) condition to read a vignette in which they had been objectified by a man (see teng et al. ). second, we altered the covariates that were included in this study. across the pilot study and study , we demonstrated that a series of covariates could not ac- count for the relationship between sexual objectification and the willingness to engage in collective action. given this dem- onstration and to simplify the design, we did not include the majority of these covariates in study . the only exception to this exclusion was the inclusion of self-objectification because this variable has been strongly implicated in such processes in previous research (calogero ). third, because study focused on the role of interpersonal and group-based anger in mediating the processes, we instead assessed emotion- based covariates. as we mentioned earlier, instances of dis- crimination may elicit feelings of shame (matheson and anisman ). therefore, in study we tested whether group-based anger mediates these processes after accounting for interpersonal anger, interpersonal shame, and group-based shame. although we used an established sexual objectification ma- nipulation in study , we also included the interpersonal sex- ual objectification scale that was used in the pilot study and study . this inclusion was because the manipulation and measure may assess different aspects of sexual objectification. for the manipulation, participants were asked to consider a single experience of sexual objectification. however, for the interpersonal sexual objectification scale participants were asked to consider numerous instance of sexual objectification that they have experienced over the last year. being asked to consider numerous instances of sexual objectification is likely to highlight numerous instances when different members of an outgroup (i.e., men) have undertaken harmful actions. this process may result in participants being more likely to view sexual objectification as an intergroup issue than when con- sidering the single instance of objectification in the manipula- tion. as such, the effects may be stronger for the measure rather than the manipulation. because of this possibility, it was important to include both the established manipulation and measure of sexual objectification. method participants and design participants were recruited through adverts on social media websites, online forums, and a course-credit system. the study was advertised to participants as looking at women’s thoughts, feelings, and actions toward objectification. to take part, participants had to be years-old or older, female, and must not have an eating disorder or be likely to feel distressed when discussing objectification. initially, participants were initially recruited for this study. we removed partic- ipants for not completing the study. we also removed one participant for being younger than years-old. therefore, the final sample consisted of women. participants were aged between and years (m = . , sd = . ) and were most likely to either be students (n = , . %) or working full-time (n = , . %). participants were more likely to be in a relationship (n = , . %) than single (n = , . %; participants were divorced/separated and participant selected other). this between-participants study had two independent var- iables: the sexual objectification manipulation (control versus objectified) and the sexual objectification measure. the de- pendent variable was the willingness to engage in collective action. the mediating variables were interpersonal and group- based anger. interpersonal and group-based shame and self- objectification were the covariates. materials and procedure after giving consent, participants were randomly allocat- ed into the control or the objectified condition. participants in both conditions were asked to imagine themselves interacting with a man. in the control condi- tion participants were asked to imagine that they had shared their opinions on an interesting topic, whereas par- ticipants in the objectified condition were asked to imag- ine that the man had suggested he liked their body (for full manipulation, see teng et al. ). all participants then completed a four-item manipulation check, adapted from teng et al. ( ). these items were: bin the sce- nario, i felt more like a body than a real person^; bin the sex roles scenario, i felt my body and my personality were separate things^; bin the scenario, i was viewed more as an object than a human being^; and bit was only my body, not my personality, that caught this man’s attention.^ all items were rated on a -point scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). the average rating across all items was then calculated to create a measure in which higher scores indicate greater feelings of being objectified (α = . ). the interpersonal emotions were then assessed. participants were asked: bto what extent would the way the man treated you in this scenario make you feel [emotion word],^ rated from (not at all) to (very much). the anger (α = . ) and shame (α = . ) emotion words were identical to study . in order to disguise the nature of the manipula- tion, participants also rated four neutral (indifferent, apa- thetic, unconcerned, and relaxed; α = . ) and four positive emotions (happy, pleased, delighted, thrilled; α = . ). although the indifference scale was not reliable, this was not an issue because these filler items were only being used to disguise the manipulation. to assess group-based emo- tions, participants were asked bas a woman, to what extent do you feel [emotion word] about the objectification of women in general,^ rated from (not at all) to (very much). the anger (α = . ) and shame (α = . ) words were identical to study . participants then completed the collec- tive action (α = . ), sexual objectification (α = . ), and self-objectification measures we used in study . for each of these scales, the overall measure was calculated in the same way as in the pilot study and study . statistical analysis we used a series of analyses to assess whether the (manipu- lated and measured) objectification variables predicted the willingness to engage in collective action and the mediating role of interpersonal and group-based anger. first, we per- formed an anova to ensure that the objectification manip- ulationhadasignificanteffectonthemanipulationcheckand other variables. moreover, we used a chi-squared analysis to ensure that attrition rates were equivalent across both condi- tions (for a discussion, see zhou and fishbach ). following these analyses, we assessed the relationship of objectification on the mediating variables (i.e., the emo- tions). for the objectification measure, this relationship was assessed using correlation analyses. if the manipulation was successful, we planned to assess the effect of this manipula- tionontheemotionsthroughaseriesofanovas.finally,we assessed the significance of the indirect pathway from the sexual objectification variables to the willingness to engage in collective action via the emotions using the process macro (hayes ). results manipulation check participants felt more objectified in the objectified than the control condition (see table ). therefore, the manipulation was successful. interestingly, the manipulation had a signifi- cant effect on the interpersonal emotions. by contrast, this manipulation did not have a significant effect on the other variables. further analyses revealed that these findings needed to be interpreted with caution. this was because there was an association between condition and withdrawing from the study after the manipulation, χ ( ) = . , p < . , cramer’s v = . , caused by people being less likely to com- plete the study in the control (n = , . %) than in the objectified condition (n = , . %). this condition- dependent attrition violated the assumption of random assign- ment and suggested that the effect of the manipulation may be bias by condition-dependent attrition (zhou and fishbach ). given this bias, we do not discuss the effect of this manipulation on the variables because these findings were questionable. instead, our analyses focus on assessing the in- direct effect of the sexual objectification measure on the will- ingness to engage in collective action via the interpersonal and group-based emotions. the effects of the manipulation were accounted for by including this variable into the analyses as a covariate. sexual objectification, emotions, and collective action correlation analysis demonstrated that the objectification, group-based anger, and the willingness to engage in collective action variables were positively associated, thereby providing preliminary support for the mediation model. these measures were also positively associated with all the other variables, except self-objectification and interpersonal happiness (see table ). interpersonal happiness was negatively associated with the willingness to engage in collective action, but not associated with objectification or group-based anger. by con- trast, self-objectification was not associated with any of the variables. therefore, although the correlation analyses provid- ed some support for the mediation model, it was important to ensure that any effects were not due to the covariates. next, we assessed the indirect effect of the sexual objecti- fication measure on the willingness to engage in collective action via interpersonal and group-based anger. the mediation model suggested that the objectification measure predicted both interpersonal and group-based anger (see fig. ). group-based (but not interpersonal) anger subsequently pre- dicted the willingness to engage in collective action against sexual objectification. the significance of the indirect effects were tested by calculating the % confidence intervals, cre- ated using bootstrap resamples (hayes ). the sex roles confidence intervals did not contain zero for the indirect effect via group-based anger ( % ci [. , . ]). this analysis dem- onstrates a significant indirect effect from objectification to collective action via group-based anger. by contrast, the indi- rect effect via interpersonal anger was not significant ( % ci [−. , . ]). importantly, the indirect effect via group-based anger remained significant after controlling for self-objectifi- cation, interpersonal and group-based shame, interpersonal happiness, and the objectification manipulation ( % ci [. , . ]). in this analysis, the indirect effect via interpersonal anger remained nonsignificant ( % ci [−. , . ]). in this analysis, the objectification and group-based anger measures were the only variables to significantly predict collective ac- tion. these results suggest that group-based (but not interper- sonal) anger mediated the relationship between sexual objec- tification and the willingness to engage in collective action. in line with study , we also tested the reverse mediation model. as such, we repeated the analyses to assess the extent to which sexual-objectification predicts group-based anger via collective action. the indirect pathway for this model was significant ( % ci [. , . ]). this finding suggested a pos- sible reverse mediation model (see discussion). discussion study replicated study by demonstrating that there was a significant indirect effect from the measured sexual objectifi- cation variable on willingness to engage in collective action via group-based anger. this mediation model suggests that sexual objectification promotes group-based anger and that this emotion subsequently promotes a willingness to engage in collective action. although we replicated study in finding statistical evidence for a reverse mediation model, there was a stronger theoretical rationale for the hypothesised model than the reverse mediation model. moreover, the inclusion of an appropriate sexual objectification manipulation check allowed us to effectively assess the influence of the sexual objectifica- tion manipulation. we found that this manipulation had a sig- nificant effect on the manipulation check and was thus suc- cessful. importantly, we found that the manipulation predicted the interpersonal emotions, but not group-based anger or the willingness to engage in collective action. in study , we also found that the sexual objectification manipulation did not have a significant effect on the group- based emotions and the willingness to engage in collective table the effect of the objectification manipulation on study variables, study study variables control m (sd) objectified m (sd) f p ηp manipulation check . ( . ) . ( . ) . a <. . objectification measure . (. ) . (. ) . b . <. self-objectification −. ( . ) −. ( . ) . a . . interpersonal anger . (. ) . ( . ) . a <. . interpersonal shame . (. ) . ( . ) . a <. . interpersonal happiness . ( . ) . ( . ) . a <. . group-based anger . ( . ) . ( . ) . b . . group-based shame . ( . ) . ( . ) . b . <. collective action . ( . ) . ( . ) . b . <. a degrees of freedom were ( , ). b degrees of freedom were ( , ) table descriptive statistics and correlations, study study variables m (sd) correlations . objectification measure . (. ) – . self-objectification −. ( . ) . – . interpersonal anger . ( . ) . ** −. – . interpersonal shame . ( . ) . * −. . *** – . interpersonal happiness . ( . ) −. . −. *** −. *** – . group-based anger . ( . ) . *** . . *** . *** −. – . group-based shame . ( . ) . *** −. . *** . *** −. . *** – . collective action . ( . ) . *** . . *** . *** −. * . *** . *** *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . sex roles action. however, it is difficult to draw conclusions from across the two studies because they have different manipula- tions. in addition, the outcome variables that were significant- ly influenced by the manipulation in study (i.e., manipula- tion check and interpersonal emotions) were not included in study . as such, any comparisons are based on nonsignifi- cant findings. such comparisons are also problematic given that we also found the manipulation is study was biased by condition-dependent attrition (zhou and fishbach ). this condition-dependent attrition may have reflected the fact that the study was advertised as investigating women’s thoughts, feelings, and actions toward objectification, but that women in the control condition were presented with a vignette that did not contain sexual objectification. as such, this group may have been more inclined to leave the study. previous research has suggested that group-based shame is likely to result in the target withdrawing from social situations (schmader and lickel ). as such, it could be argued that group-based shame should deter collective action. however, we found that group-based shame did not predict the willing- ness to engage in collective action. this non-finding may have been due to the nature of the collective action. indeed, re- search has suggested that shame promotes actions that im- prove the group’s image (gausel and leach ). however, the aim of the collective action assessed in our study was to tackle sexual objectification rather than improve the group’s image. therefore, in our study, group-based shame may have been unlikely to deter collective action. we found that attrition was higher in study than in study , likely reflecting the recruitment strategies used in these studies. for study , there was greater reliance on social media and online forms to obtain participants than in study . study ’s recruitment strategy may have in- creased attrition rates. however, it is important to note that despite the difference in recruitment and attrition, the re- sults of study replicate study in demonstrating the role of group-based anger in mediating the relationship be- tween sexual objectification and willingness to engage in collective action. as such, this difference was unlikely to bias the findings. general discussion across three studies, we demonstrated that experiencing sex- ual objectification positively predicts willingness to engage in collective action. moreover, studies and both demonstrat- ed that this relationship was mediated by group-based anger. experiencing sexual objectification promotes feelings of group-based anger. this anger, in turn, motivated women to be willing to engage in collective action against the objectifi- cation of women. importantly, these relationships remained after controlling for a variety of covariates, thereby demon- strating the robustness of the findings. the present findings have important implications for the literature. previous research has suggested that self- objectification may deter collective action against gender equality (calogero ), but that women are willing to un- dertake action when they witness others being objectified ei- ther in person (chaudoir and quinn ) or by the media (guizzo et al. ). our study extended this previous re- search by demonstrating that personally experiencing sexual objectification promotes willingness to engage in collective action against the objectification of women. moreover, recent research has suggested that experiencing interpersonal anger following sexual objectification motivates the target to under- take individualistic strategies to tackle the transgression (e.g., confronting the perpetrator; shepherd ). the current stud- ies extend this line of work by demonstrating that group-based emotions motivate the target to undertake collective strategies to tackle the transgression—specifically, by being willing to engage in collective action. limitations and future research directions although our research has implications for the literature, it is important to discuss the limitations of our studies and potential future avenues for research. given the correlational nature of our studies, further experimental research is needed to estab- lish a causal relationship from sexual objectification to collec- tive action via group-based anger. it could be argued that the relationship from sexual objectification to collective action objectification measure interpersonal anger collective action b = . , se = . , p = . b = . , se = . , p = . b = . , se = . , p = . group-based anger b = . , se = . , p < . b = . , se = . , p < . fig. indirect effect from objectification measure to collective action via interpersonal and group-based anger sex roles may be due to other variables. although we tested a series of covariates across the three studies, there may be still be some covariates that can account for this relationship. moreover, given the correlational nature of this research, it is possible that the causal direction of the model could be reversed, as suggested by the reverse mediation analyses for studies and . there is a stronger theoretical rationale for sexual objecti- fication to predict collective action than vice-versa. moreover, other experimental studies have demonstrated that manipulat- ing perceived discrimination and objectification promotes col- lective action via group-based anger (guizzo et al. ; van zomeren et al. ). therefore, it is likely that sexual objec- tification predicts collective action via group-based anger. however, additional experimental research is needed to fur- ther support these arguments. our study also could be criticised for assessing self- objectification using noll and fredrickson’s ( ) self- objectification questionnaire. although this type of measure has been used in previous studies (e.g., liss et al. ; strelan et al. ), researchers have suggested numerous problems with this measure (calogero ). self- objectification was not a central variable in our studies. however, it would be beneficial for future research to use a more reliable measure of self-objectification in order to see how this relates to group-based anger and collective action. our study could also be criticised for assessing the willing- ness to engage in collective action rather than behaviour. research has suggested that there is a gap between people’s intentions and their behaviour (sheeran ). there is some evidence that the factors that predict collective action inten- tions also predict collective action behaviour (van zomeren et al. ). however, further research is needed to determine the role of sexual objectification and feelings of group-based anger towards this objectification on activist behaviour. it is also important to determine the variables that may moderate these effects. for example, research has demonstrat- ed that feminist self-identification promotes collective action (nelson et al. ). based on this linkage, it could be argued that women high in feminist self-identification should be more likely to experience group-based anger over instances of sex- ual objectification, increasing their likelihood of engaging in collective action. moreover, research has demonstrated cross- cultural differences in objectification (crawford et al. ; loughnan et al. ). we did not measure culture in our research. therefore, it is important for future research to em- pirically test the moderating role of feminist self-identification and culture on these processes. practice implications given that women who engage in active responses to sexual objectification (e.g., reporting the perpetrator) are less likely to experience self-objectification (fairchild and rudman ) and that self-objectification is likely to have harmful effects on psychological well-being (noll and fredrickson ; szymanski and feltman ), it could be argued that it is important to encourage targets of sexual objectification to un- dertake an active response. based in this reasoning, it has been suggested that interventions need to be developed that in- crease the likelihood of targets of sexual objectification to experience interpersonal anger in order to elicit these benefi- cial active responses (shepherd ). however, one issue with this approach is that there is a cultural belief that it is not feminine to express anger (citrin et al. ). indeed, women who express anger are viewed negatively by others (brescoll and uhlmann ). the desire to avoid such neg- ative evaluations makes women reluctant to express anger (campbell and muncer ; evers et al. ; fischer and evers ). as such, it is important to find strategies that encourage targets of sexual objectification to experience and express feelings of anger. based on our research, we argue that intergroup processes may be applied to encourage targets of sexual objectification to experience anger and take action. indeed, research has sug- gested that the belief that other women feel angry about an instance of gender discrimination has been found to promote collective action intentions through feelings of group-based anger (leonard et al. ). the combination of this prior research with our studies suggests that encouraging women to share experiences of sexual objectification and their asso- ciated feelings of anger may increase the likelihood of other women experiencing group-based anger and thus their will- ingness to engage in collective action. this process highlights the importance of campaigns that encourage women to share experiences of sexual objectification (e.g., #metoo movement). by demonstrating the shared nature of such ex- periences among women these campaigns (a) emphasise that this is a group-based issue and (b) suggest it is important and legitimate for the target to share their experiences of and emo- tions toward sexual objectification. therefore, such cam- paigns help to encourage collective action and tackle the inhibiting belief that women should not share feelings of an- ger. in turn, this demystification may increase the likelihood of women engaging in collective action against sexual objectifi- cation and promote social change. conclusions in conclusion, our research assessed whether sexual objectifi- cation promotes women’s willingness to engage in collective action against the objectification of women. across two stud- ies, we found that sexual objectification was positively related to collective action and that this process was mediated by group-based anger. importantly, this indirect effect remained significant after controlling for a series of covariates, includ- ing self-objectification. as such, we extend the existing sex roles objectification literature by suggesting that experiencing sex- ual objectification promotes collective action by women and the processes through which this occurs. acknowledgments we would like to thank dr. elizabeth sillence for her comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. we would also like to thank callum watt and chez walbey for their assistance with data col- lection for study . compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the authors declare that there are no potential con- flicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica- tion of this article. ethical approval all studies were approved by the author’s institutional review board. informed consent informed consent was given by all participants. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appro- priate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references brescoll, v. l., & uhlmann, e. l. 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- - https://doi.org/ . /a https://doi.org/ . /ejsp. https://doi.org/ . /ejsp. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . /pspa https://doi.org/ . /pspa https://doi.org/ . /jspp.v i . 	from... 	abstract 	emotional reactions to sexual objectification 	the present studies 	pilot study 	method 	participants and design 	materials and procedure 	statistical analysis 	results 	effect of social opinion support 	association between objectification and collective action 	moderating role of social opinion support 	discussion 	study 	method 	participants and design 	materials and procedure 	statistical analysis 	results 	effect of objectification 	associations between variables 	moderating role of perceived illegitimacy 	mediating role of group-based anger 	discussion 	study 	method 	participants and design 	materials and procedure 	statistical analysis 	results 	manipulation check 	sexual objectification, emotions, and collective action 	discussion 	general discussion 	limitations and future research directions 	practice implications 	conclusions 	references received / / review began / / review ended / / published / / © copyright ryan et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license cc-by . ., which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. mining google trends data for health information: the case of the irish “cervicalcheck” screening programme revelations paul m. ryan , c anthony ryan . internal medicine: diabetes and endocrinology, university college cork, cork, irl . pediatrics and child health, university college cork, cork, irl  corresponding author: paul m. ryan, @umail.ucc.ie disclosures can be found in additional information at the end of the article abstract background in april , the irish cervical smear screening programme, “cervicalcheck”, came under intense scrutiny as the accuracy of hundreds of “negative” results were brought in question. aim the goal of this brief report was to assess the impact of this real-life event on public information-seeking behaviour, using google search anomalies as a proxy. irish relative search volume data for several terms relating to cervical testing/cancer and human papillomavirus were extracted for a five-year period from february to january and analysed for the presence of anomalous spikes and shifts in the mean baseline. results an unprecedented positive spike in searches relating to cervical testing/cancer was observed immediately after the cervicalcheck revelations, which remained anomalous for the month to follow (p < . ). this public interest preceded a mirroring increase in uptake of complimentary consultations offered by the department of health to the women concerned. despite this service engagement and interest in cervical health, the relative search volumes for terms “human papillomavirus infection” and ”hpv vaccine” were just and % of their maximum search volume for the five-year period. conclusions anomaly analysis revealed an unprecedented spike in information-seeking behaviour following the cervicalcheck revelations. however, this was not associated with a comparable elevation in hpv interest. this suggests that more public education and promotion of the hpv vaccine is warranted, in the context of vastly reduced uptake in recent years. finally, google trends data represents a free an open source means by which to assess information-seeking behaviour of the public in relation to health and disease. categories: epidemiology/public health, oncology, obstetrics/gynecology keywords: cervicalcheck, smear test, hpv, google trends open access original article doi: . /cureus. how to cite this article ryan p m, ryan c (august , ) mining google trends data for health information: the case of the irish “cervicalcheck” screening programme revelations. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. https://www.cureus.com/users/ -paul-m-ryan https://www.cureus.com/users/ -c-anthony-ryan introduction “cervicalcheck” is the irish national screening programme which allows women aged - years old to avail of free cervical smear test. the cytological analysis has been carried out by two irish and two us laboratories since . until recently, the programme appeared to be functioning well and, as such, garnered little attention. in april , however, it was revealed that roughly women with cervical cancer were never informed that their negative smear test results were inaccurate. subsequent inquiry into the revelations revealed that, although the laboratories contracted to perform the sample processing and testing were safe, there existed serious failures in governance and structure of the screening programme, including a grave lack of transparency with in ongoing performance audits which led to harmful delays in many diagnoses. this revelation and the lack of publicly available information combined to create a media frenzy, which further fuelled the considerable public anxiety around the issue. human papillomavirus (hpv) is found to be associated with virtually all cervical cancers and a significant proportion of sexually active individuals will come into contact with the virus at some stage [ ]. in , ireland launched their school-based hpv vaccination programme for girls aged - years and initially enjoyed impressive compliance of %, with a peak of . % in - [ ]. this success was in a climate in which mothers were found to have minimal knowledge of hpv or the vaccine, which left space for anti-vaccination lobby groups to spread misinformation [ ]. regrettably, the influence of anti-vaccination lobby groups on parental choice became a considerable issue in , resulting in a drop to ~ % compliance rate. google trends search data has proven to be a valuable complementary tool in epidemiological and public health research in recent years. most recently, google search data was used to demonstrate the increase in sexual assault and sexual harassment-related information-seeking behaviour in the wake of the #metoo movement [ ]. the present brief report aimed to utilise irish google search trends in the wake of the cervicalcheck revelations as a proxy for public interest. the authors predicted that google searches relating to cervical testing and cancer would increase anomalously. in concert, we expected that the increased public fear would, in turn, lead to increased information-seeking behaviour relating to primary prevention of cervical cancer, that is, the hpv vaccine. materials and methods data acquisition this study monitored the volume of google searches relating to the cervical smear test and hpv in ireland over a five-year period ( / / - / / ). data were extracted from the google trends website in january (https://trends.google.com/trends/). initially the term “cervical check” was investigated and several of the top related queries were then included in the analysis. these additional terms included “cervical smear test” and “cervical cancer”. in addition, trend data for “hpv vaccine” and “human papillomavirus infection” searches were assessed over the same time period. google provides relative search volumes (rsv), which outline the percentage proportion of the highest search volume in the predetermined region and period. although this limits the comparability of the data to other studies, it is entirely adequate for the purposes of the present study as it is focussed solely in the presence of positive peaks, or anomalies. finally, general practitioner (gp) complimentary consultation data in the aftermath of the cervicalcheck revelations was garnered from the cervicalcheck steering committee weekly reports to the minister for health [ ]. statistical analysis data were imported to r through rstudio (v . . ) and prepared for analysis. r packages ryan et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of “anomalize” (v . . ) and “tidyverse” (v . . ) were used for anomaly analysis and plotting, respectively [ - ]. “anomalize” allows the user to decompose time series, detect anomalies in the dataset and create bands separating the non-anomalous data from the anomalous spikes. in this analysis, an alpha of . was considered significant. in addition, graphpad prism (v for mac, graphpad software, san diego, california) was utilised for plotting of data. results the simplified timeline of the cervicalcheck revelations is presented in figure , demonstrating the initial reporting in april and subsequent commencement of general practitioner consultations the following month. several additional points of significance are represented in the timeline, including publication of the scally scoping inquiry progress report in september . this was a thorough external investigation examining the events surrounding the cervicalcheck failures, including the standards of laboratory testing and internal governance of the programme itself, led by dr. gabriel scally a professor of public health at university of the west of england and the university of bristol. finally, the timeline includes the death of a high-profile victim in october , as well as re-ignition of public discontent in january due to lack of progress. figure : major relevant events in the months following the disclosure of the cervicalcheck shortcomings gp, general practitioner until recently, trends in google searches relating to the cervicalcheck screening programme remained minimal, with modest annual non-anomalous peaks in january of each year. in response to the cervicalcheck failure disclosure, the irish public reacted by vastly increasing the relative rate of google searches with the terms “cervical check” and “cervical cancer” (p < . ; figure a). this anomalous peak in interest was short-lived ( - weeks; figures b-c), and interest in the terms did not reach anomalous heights again in the subsequent months. in turn, the minister for health announced complementary gp visits and cervical smear tests for any women concerned about their cervical screening. in line with this, almost , smear tests were ordered in ireland in , representing a ~ % increase in the annual testing rate (figure a; grey bars). ryan et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_c bd b c e bc a b d-fig .png figure : anomaly analysis of cervical smear test-related google searches and complimentary general practitioner visit uptake response [a] detailed relative search volume of "cervical check" and commonly associated terms (lines), with reactionary uptake rates of free general practitioner consultations (bars). [b-e] anomaly analysis of relative search volume for terms [b] "cervical check", [c] "cervical cancer", [d] "hpv vaccine", [e] "human papillomavirus infection", over the five year period ( - inclusive) with anomalies identified by red data points. relative search volume is standardised to the highest search volume within the timeframe for each individual plot. rsv, relative search volume; gp, general practitioner. due to the considerable media attention afforded to the anti-vaccination lobby groups in previous years, we observed a number of anomalous search weeks for “hpv vaccine” (figure d) and “human papillomavirus infection” (figure e) from august onwards. searches for both terms peaked in september and failed to reach similar levels thereafter (figure a). despite the substantial peak in cervical testing/cancer-related searches, “hpv vaccine” and “human papillomavirus infection” searches reached just % (figure d) and % of maximum search volume (figure e), respectively, in the period following the event. furthermore, hpv related search terms were never found within the top related queries for terms “cervical check”, “cervical cancer” and “smear test” for data on the five-year period. this suggests that the irish public did not seek information on hpv and cervical testing/cancer concurrently, and indicates that many may not entirely connect the two issues. ryan et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_eb c b e af a -fig .png discussion the cervicalcheck controversy was a public event which was high on emotion and low on reliable information. this, in turn, led to a media storm which propagated anxiety amongst the population, as is indicated by the results of this study. in january , a high-profile victim publicly criticised the government’s management of the issue, suggesting that there was a loss of momentum and interest in reform. indeed, the results of this study indicate that public attention for the issue dwindled relatively rapidly to baseline mean and did not reach comparable heights in the subsequent months, despite the publishing of an expert scoping inquiry into the failings of the cervicalcheck screening programme in september (figure ). however, the tragic loss of one of the acclaimed victims in october appears to stir moderate public interest, resulting in a single anomalous peak in “cervical cancer” searches (figure a; pink line). these data suggest that, although the cervicalcheck revelations triggered an increased information-seeking behaviour with regards to cervical testing and cancer, the irish public did not demonstrate a heightened awareness of the primary prevention scheme for the main etiological contributor of the disease. the hpv vaccination programme has encountered challenging times in the past two years and, as a result, the hpv vaccine alliance was established in to present the facts about hpv vaccination in the factsheet and infographic-style outreach projects. although efforts in educating the public appear to have stemmed the tide, the hangover from the anti-vaccination lobby groups is clear as uptake rates remain wholly inadequate. the present brief report suggests that vaccine advocacy groups should address the apparent understanding deficit and utilise high-profile publicity to reiterate the connection of hpv and cervical cancer to the public, in order to promote the national primary prevention scheme. this type of advocacy should be clear, factual and presented in a manner which does not detract from the suffering of those who were failed by the cervicalcheck programme. importantly, ireland has recently announced intentions to begin offering universal hpv vaccination for both males and females during the first year of secondary school education beginning in september , representing a step forward with prospective protection which should not be understated. previous knowledge and the conclusions of the present study are summarised in figure . ryan et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_cf e c e e f bd eeaca-cervicalcheck-box-_ _.png figure : current knowledge and report summary hpv, human papillomavirus google trends data is a publicly-available resource which appears to be a useful epidemiological and public health tool in assessing anomalous or seasonal information-seeking behaviour. the tool has recently been successfully applied to topics such as seasonality of several diseases, as well as public interest “cheap cigarettes” following the us states increases in cigarette taxation [ - ]. these cases demonstrate just a few manners in which such a dataset may be interrogated and demonstrate the versatility of this open-access resource. however, there are several important limitations to this brief report. firstly, google search data is an approximation of public interest and, while it does not represent the sole source of public information, it is a significant one. secondly, due to the higher rates of internet users < years of age, this metric may be biased by youth over-sampling. finally, the data released by google trends are not quantitative, but rather a representation of search volumes standardised relative to the highest search volume within the predetermined time and region. conclusions in the wake of the cervicalcheck revelations, information-seeking behaviour regarding cervical testing and cancer was vastly increased in comparison to the previous five years. this anomalous spike in public interest immediately preceded a mirroring increase in uptake of complementary gp consultations offered by the department for health to concerned women. despite this increase in cervical testing/cancer interest and healthcare engagement, we did not observe a comparable and concurrent increase in searches relating to hpv infection and vaccination. this indicates that the public currently may not conflate the two issues entirely and, therefore, further educational work is warranted to encourage primary prevention of hpv. despite this, efforts are beginning to realise, with universal hpv vaccination being offered to secondary school attendees of both sexes in ireland from september onwards. to our knowledge, this is the first study to use google trends data to examine public information- seeking behaviour in relation to cervical cancer testing and hpv, or the temporal association thereof. additional information disclosures human subjects: all authors have confirmed that this study did not involve human participants or tissue. animal subjects: all authors have confirmed that this study did not involve animal subjects or tissue. conf licts of interest: in compliance with the icmje uniform disclosure form, all authors declare the following: payment/services info: all authors have declared that no financial support was received from any organization for the submitted work. financial relationships: all authors have declared that they have no financial relationships at present or within the previous three years with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work. other relationships: all authors have declared that there are no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. references . viens lj, henley sj, watson m, et al.: human papillomavirus-associated cancers - 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https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/b a-cervicalcheck-steering-committee-weekly-reports-to-the-minister-for-/ https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/b a-cervicalcheck-steering-committee-weekly-reports-to-the-minister-for-/ https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/anomalize/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/anomalize/index.html https://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - - https://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - - https://dx.doi.org/ . /cureus. https://dx.doi.org/ . /cureus. https://dx.doi.org/ . /idr.s https://dx.doi.org/ . /idr.s https://dx.doi.org/ . /gh. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /gh. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /ntr/ntx https://dx.doi.org/ . /ntr/ntx 	mining google trends data for health information: the case of the irish “cervicalcheck” screening programme revelations 	abstract 	background 	aim 	results 	conclusions 	introduction 	materials and methods 	data acquisition 	statistical analysis 	results 	figure : major relevant events in the months following the disclosure of the cervicalcheck shortcomings 	figure : anomaly analysis of cervical smear test-related google searches and complimentary general practitioner visit uptake response 	discussion 	figure : current knowledge and report summary 	conclusions 	additional information 	disclosures 	references n_peck_thesis_final_ drawing	the	lines	of	female	sexuality		 by		 nicole	peck		 bfa	concordia	university,	 	 a	thesis	support	paper	submitted	in	partial	fulfillment	of	 the	requirements	for	the	degree	of	 master	of	fine	arts	 emily	carr	university	of	art	+	design		 	 ©	nicole	peck,	 		 abstract		 this	thesis	document	seeks	to	explore	and	expand	on	the	topic	of	gender	and	sexuality	through	 representa=onal	figura=ve	drawing.		specifically	focusing	on	the	female-iden=fied	form	in	current	 society,	this	thesis	inves=gates	the	plurality	of	ways	in	which	the	gaze,	feminist	art	prac=ces,	sexuality,	 censorship,	and	historical	events	have	shaped,	defined,	and	condi=oned	the	percep=on	of	the	female	 nude	in	art.		by	studying	and	researching	the	theories	behind	the	gazes,	the	prac=ce	intends	to	subvert	 and	refuse	the	masculine	gaze,	in	agempts	to	place	the	feminine	queer	gaze	at	the	forefront	of	ar=s=c	 inquiry.		second	wave	feminist	ar=sts	and	fourth	wave,	posieminist	disciplines	inspired	the	direc=on	and	 inten=ons	behind	the	work	produced	in	the	mfa	program.		this	thesis	paper	provides	analy=cal	support	 to	my	explora=on,	uncensored.			 i table	of	contents		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 abstract		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 i	 table	of	contents		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 ii	 acknowledgments	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 iii	 list	of	figures			 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 iv	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 introducson			 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 posison	statement	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	mulsple	feminisms	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 		 	 .	sexuality		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 													 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	navigasng	some	of	the	gazes		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 male	gaze	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 female	gaze																																																																																																																									 	 queer	gaze						 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	drawing	processes			 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 photography	+	interviews	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 live	modelling	+	mirrors		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 lines	+	layers		 	 	 	 	 	 	 																											 	 .b(r)easts	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	current	feminist	landscape		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 																																																																																																																 .	censorship	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	conclusion	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 works	cited	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 bibliography	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 ii acknowledgements	 i	have	lived	all	my	life	on	the	tradi=onal	and	unceded	territories	of	the	coast	salish	peoples,	specifically	 that	of	the	musqueum,	squamish	and	tsleil	waututh	na=ons.		from	a	young	age	i	was	introduced	to	 indigenous	culture	and	the	poli=cs	that	have	had	a	nega=ve	historic	legacy	throughout	canada.	being	 exposed	to	these	highly	relevant	conversa=ons	and	implica=ons	from	a	young	age	forced	me	to	listen	 and	acknowledge	my	self-reflexivity	as	a	canadian	segler.	my	interest	in	wan=ng	to	connect	and	engage	 in	these	colonial	histories	is	evident	by	my	involvement	in	working	in	art	spaces	that	provide	a	plaiorm	 for	indigenous	arts	such	as	the	museum	of	anthropology,	macaulay	&	co.	fine	art,	and	in	giving	or	 facilita=ng	talks	at	galleries	and	art	events	to	support	further	and	promote	the	awareness	of	indigenous	 ar=sts.		these	are	small	steps	but	a	meaningful	way	i	prac=ce	my	respect	and	gra=tude	towards	the	land,	 peoples	and	histories	that	have	come	before	me.			 i	want	to	thank	sarah	macaulay	of	macaulay	&	co.	fine	art	for	being	so	generous	and	suppor=ve	of	my	 studies	in	the	mfa	program.	through	the	gallery	i	have	met	and	worked	with	ar=sts	such	as	lawrence	 paul	yuxweluptun,	shawn	hunt,	beau	dick,	jeneen	frei	njootli,	charlene	vickers,	walter	scog,	judy	 chartrand,	tyler	bright	hilton,	barb	choit	and	jeremy	shaw.	i	am	grateful	to	have	spent	=me	with	these	 ar=sts	and	be	witness	to	their	bold	messages	of	social	jus=ce,	culture	poli=cs,	ac=vism	and	reimagined	 worlds	through	a	non-violent	protest	like	art.	it	is	ar=sts	like	these	whose	work	con=nues	to	inspire	my	 current	ar=s=c	prac=ce	and	research.			 members	of	my	family,	mom,	dad,	holly,	dayvde	and	koko,	i	thank	you	for	believing	in	me	and	again	 providing	con=nuous	support	in	=mes	that	have	proved	difficult	and	challenging.		the	lgbtq	community	 and	friends	who	collaborated	with	me	on	projects;	steven,	anita,	alison,	sophia,	sydney,	brynn,	tanya,	 jus=n,	natalie,	simone,	ma=sse,	giulia	and	ethan.		 finally,	i	would	like	to	acknowledge	my	supervisor	kyla	malleg	for	her	=me,	exper=se	and	commitment	 to	working	with	me	on	this	journey	from	knowing	to	unknowing	and	knowing	again.	i	also	want	to	thank	 faculty	members	trish	kelly,	chris	jones,	alla	gadassik,	birthe	piontek,	ingrid	koenig	and	randy	lee	 cutler	for	their	influence	and	guidance.	this	experience	has	generated	and	provided	knowledge	and	 insight	that	i	will	take	with	me	wherever	i	go.					 iii list	of	figures	 figure	 .	tom	wesselmann,	smoker	# ,	 ,	oil	on	shaped	canvas,	 - / 	x	 - / 	inches,	the	 museum	of	modern	art	©	estate	of	tom	wesselmann	/	licensed	by	vaga	at	ars,	new	york	/	socan,	 montréal	( )		 figure	 .	natalie,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 figure	 .	simone,	acrylic	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 figure	 .	install	view	of	hardcore	whimsey,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 - .	image	credit:	barb	choit	 figure	 .	holly,	acrylic	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	(detail)	 	 								 figure	 .	sophia,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	(detail)	 figure	 .	hot	wheels,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 figure	 .	install	view	of	wouldn’t	thou	like	to	live	deliciously?	cone	of	power,	and	i’ll	be	your	mirror,	 graphite	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit		 figure	 .	space	boobs,	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit	 figure	 .	acorndicktimy,	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit	 figure	 .	marilyn	minter,	cuntrol,	 .	courtesy	of	the	ar=st	and	salon	 ,	new	york	 figure	 .	bloobs,	graphite	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .		image	credit:	barb	choit		 	 iv introducson	 	 	 when	i	started	the	mfa	program	at	emily	carr	university,	i	had	over	 , 	instagram	 followers 	of	my	drawings	and	pain=ngs	which	examined	women	and	female	sexuality	in	 contemporary	society.			women	and	female	are	used	in	this	context	to	include	female-iden=fied	 and	feminine	gender	iden==es	not	exclusive	to	cis-females	or	cis-women.		this	includes	trans	 women,	trans	females,	femme	queers,	masculine	women,	genderqueer,	two-spirited	and	more. 			 my	ini=al	focus	was	to	add	my	voice	to	the	post-feminist	and	fourth-wave	movement 	by	 illustra=ng	the	power	and	importance	of	female	sexuality	as	forms	of	iden=ty,	libera=on	and	 freedom	from	male	hegemony.		my	work	depicted	hyper-sexual	in=mate	portraits	and	scenarios	 that	explore	queer	culture,	girlhood,	desire,	and	shame.		instagram	was	a	plaiorm	to	post	and	 share	stories	that	could	provoke	discussions	about	sexuality	to	a	wider	audience.		however,	 what	appeared	to	me	as	a	coherent	thesis	focused	on	the	libera=on	and	empowerment 	of	 some	women,	through	the	female	form	in	explicit	and	provoca=ve	images,	ran	afoul	with	some	 feminists	who	interpreted	my	art	as	exploi=ve	and	art	that	perpetuated	the	male	gaze.		 ques=ons	were	raised	from	members	of	emily	carr	university	as	to	whether	my	art	was	in	fact	 more	exploi=ve	than	empowering.		clearly,	there	was	a	divergence	in	interpreta=on	and	 acceptance	of	my	art	between	the	instagram	followers	and	the	academic	community.			 	since	 ,	i	have	accumulated	up	to	 , 	followers	for	my	account	@bonercandy .	 	this	is	an	expanded	defini=on	of	the	terms	woman/women	and	female.		in	this	thesis,	i	hope	to	be	respeciul	and	inclusive	in	how	i	 incorporate	the	language	behind	women	and	female	sexuality	as	i	understand	that	this	is	a	broadened	category	on	the	spectrum	of	gender	 iden=ty	and	expression. 	i	will	elaborate	about	post-feminism	and	the	forth-wave	online	movement	in	sec=on	 .	feminism	and	 .	current	feminist	landscapes.		my	 work	posted	to	instagram	gained	lots	of	momentum	in	 - ,	and	i	was	asked	to	par=cipate	in	a	post-feminist	group	exhibi=on	in	new	york	 en=tled,	“	hoger	than	july-	hands	off	my	cuntry”	curated	by	savannah	spirit.		the	exhibi=on	highlighted	women’s	rights	and	was	a	visual	 protest	against	donald	trump’s	nomina=on	to	president	of	the	united	states.		held	days	before	the	inaugura=on,	the	exhibi=on	was	well	 received	with	media	coverage	by	forbes,	huffington	post,	dazed	and	confused,	vice	and	was	men=oned	on	bill	maher’s	talk	show.	from	this	 experience,	i	connected	with	interna=onal	feminists	and	ar=sts	who	shared	similar	views	on	censorship,	ero=cs,	and	poli=cs.	 	this	word	has	various	defini=ons	and	can	mean	something	different	to	anyone	who	speaks	it.		in	this	wri=ng,	i	define	empowerment	as	 strength,	agency,	choice	and	freedom.		 	 the	agempt	to	reconcile	these	two	very	different	communi=es	required	me	to	abandon	 my	pain=ng	prac=ce	and	concentrate	exclusively	on	drawing	to	focus	on	the	various	 manifesta=ons	of	female-iden=fied	sexuality.		extensive	research	and	inves=ga=on	resulted	in	 dissa=sfac=on	and	lack	of	conclusion	but	more	insight	into	feminism,	objec=fica=on,	and	the	 contradic=ons	inherent	in	the	gazes .		as	i	con=nue	to	study	and	research	the	history	and	 philosophy	behind	feminist	art	prac=ces,	i	find	communica=ng	an	ar=s=c	message	through	the	 medium	of	drawing	is	not	only	efficient	and	effec=ve	but	valuable	to	the	furtherance	of	 experimenta=on	and	development	to	my	art	prac=ce.										 	 in	my	work	i	examine	under	what	condi=ons	the	act	of	drawing	can	empower	female	 sexuality.			i	acknowledge	that	my	interest	in	crea=ng	a	reimagined	vision	of	the	feminine	body	 can	also	be	viewed	as	reduc=ve	and	s=fling	to	the	libera=on	of	some	gender	iden==es	and	cis- women	outside	of	the	white	narra=ve.	as	a	white,	young	and	privileged,	queer	and	cis-woman,	i	 understand	what	is	at	stake	and	the	limita=ons	of	my	ar=s=c	inves=ga=on	and	representa=on	of	 sexuality.		i	recognize	that	the	ques=ons	i	ask	and	the	asser=ons	i	make	may	not	be	an	op=on	 for	all	women	in	communi=es	around	the	world.		i	am	aware	of	the	hierarchical	structures	i	am	 a	part	of	and	the	implica=ons	of	represen=ng	communi=es	outside	of	my	experience	as	this	can	 lead	to	further	exploita=on	and	disingenuous	misrepresenta=ons.		i	focus	on	my	personal	 experiences	that	have	shaped	my	understanding	of	the	world	around	me	subject	to	this	 recogni=on	and	acknowledgment.		in	my	research	i	reflect	on	my	own	body	image	and	how	 many	women	are	affected	by	unrealis=c	and	idealized	portrayals	from	a	young	age.	i	also	 acknowledge	that	my	vision	and	depic=on	of	empowerment	and	sexuality	can	perpetuate	more	 stereotypes	and	patriarchal	ways	of	"objec=fying"	female	bodies.	however,	i	hope	that	by	 	i	will	elaborate	on	some	of	the	various	gazes	i	inves=gate	in	my	work	in	sec=on	 .	navigapng	the	gazes con=nuing	to	inves=gate	sexuality	through	various	forms	of	drawing,	i	can	strengthen	my	 feminist	voice	as	an	ar=st,	and	support	other	voices	that	are	part	of	this	feminist	movement.		in	 this	thesis,	i	review	an	ar=s=c	progression	through	a	series	of	drawings	and	discuss	how	they	 differ	in	theory,	method	and	methodology,	and	form	a	connected	and	progressive	journey.	 mulsple	feminisms	 	 feminism	is	a	word	that	has	many	defini=ons,	intersec=ons	and	connota=ons.		there	are	 different	waves	and	forms	of	feminism	that	both	inspire	and	cri=que	present	and	past	 movements.			according	to	feminist	theorist	sara	ahmed,	“feminism	as	a	collec=ve	movement	is	 made	out	of	how	we	are	moved	to	become	feminists	in	dialogue	with	others.	a	movement	 requires	us	to	be	moved”(ahmed	 : ). 		my	interest	in	the	feminist	narra=ve	stems	from	 fourth-wave	feminism,	second-wave	feminist	ar=sts,	queer	and	post-feminist	disciplines.		the	 first-wave	movement	in	the	 s	granted	women	the	right	to	vote.	it	also	offered	women	 possibili=es	for	work	outside	the	domes=c	home	in	spaces	tradi=onally	occupied	by	men	while	 they	were	at	war.		first	wave	suffrageges	based	in	the	united	states	worked	and	fought	for	 poli=cal	freedom	and	equality.		however,	their	poli=cs	were	not	universal	or	intersec=onal.				 the	second-wave	feminist	movement,	also	known	as	the	women's	libera=on	movement	in	the	 - s,	provided	women	with	a	strong	poli=cal	and	social	plaiorm	to	fight	for	reproduc=on	 rights,	equal	pay,	sexual	libera=on	and	challenged	patriarchy.		this	wave	gave	rise	to	the	phrase	 “the	personal	is	poli=cal,”	which	suggests	that	women	and	their	experiences	are	entwined	with	 	ahmed,	sara.	living	a	feminist	life.	,	 .	print. power	structures. 		during	this	wave	in	 ,	begy	friedan’s	book	the	feminine	myspque	shed	 light	on	dissa=sfied	social/gender	roles,	specifically	those	of	middle	to	upper-class	white	 housewives	and	mothers	as	“the	problem	that	has	no	name”(friedan	 ). 		although	there	 were	many	pioneering	works	produced	from	feminists	and	ar=sts	at	this	=me,	they	neglected	to	 recognize	and	acknowledge	voices	beyond	the	privileged	white	narra=ve.		in	 ,	third-wave	 feminism	emerged	as	a	reac=on	and	response	to	second-wave	feminism.			third-wave	feminism	 campaigned	to	further	encourage	intersec=onality,	an=-essen=alism,	post-colonialism,	gender/ queer	iden=ty	and	fought	against	workplace	harassment	and	stereotypical	patriarchal	ideas	of	 femininity.		audre	lorde,	bell	hooks,	kimberlé	crenshaw	and	judith	butler	are	notable	figures	in	 this	movement.		their	wri=ng	on	feminism	brought	forward	and	challenged	issues	of	the	gender	 binary,	intersec=onal	diversity	and	essen=alism	perpetuated	in	second-wave	feminism.		this	 movement	gave	rise	to	fourth-wave	feminism,	which	developed	in	the	 st	century	advoca=ng	 against	sexual	harassment,	body-shaming,	slut-shaming	and	worked	to	secure	sex-worker	rights	 and	gender	iden=ty.		the	fourth-wave	became	a	global	and	broader	movement	in	that	it	pushed	 feminism	towards	suppor=ng	more	intersec=onal	causes.	post-feminism,	which	i	will	outline	in	 sec=on	 ,	is	a	type	of	feminism	that	cri=ques	past	feminisms	and	exists	online	through	hashtag	 ac=vism,	adver=sements	and	consumer	culture.		some	forms	of	post-feminism	promote	 controversial	ideas	of	empowerment,	sexual	libera=on,	and	confidence	through	online	 commercial	campaigns	(banet-weiser	 ).		although	the	various	forms	of	feminism	differ	 from	each	other,	they	share	the	common	feminist	doctrine	to	fight	against	gender	inequality,	 sexism	and	to	explore	and	examine	alterna=ve	ways	to	cri=que	patriarchy.		 	judith	butler	further	analyzes	this	phrase	in	performapve	acts	and	gender	consptupon:	an	essay	in	phenomenology	and	feminist	theory	p.	 - 	friedan,	begy.	the	feminine	mys=que.	new	york	:norton,	 sexuality		 	 	naomi	wolf,	author	of	the	beauty	myth,	misconceppons,	and	the	vagina:	a	 biography,	states	that	according	to	feminist	writer	germaine	greer, 	“women	will	be	free	when	 they	have	a	posi=ve	defini=on	of	sexuality”(wolf	 : ).		female	sexuality	presents	itself	in	 a	plurality	of	ways,	which	makes	it	unique,	elusive,	and	mysterious.		because	of	these	 complexi=es,	female	sexuality	has	been	feared,	shamed,	and	controlled	by	the	patriarchy.		in	 wolf’s	book,	the	vagina:	a	biography,	she	declares,	“female	sexual	pleasure,	rightly	 understood,	is	not	just	about	sexuality,	or	just	about	pleasure.	it	serves,	also,	as	a	medium	of	 female	self-knowledge	and	hopefulness;	female	crea=vity	and	courage;	female	focus	and	 ini=a=ve;	female	bliss	and	transcendence;	and	as	medium	of	a	sensibility	that	feels	very	much	 like	freedom.”	(wolf	 : ).		in	this	context,	i	think	about	how	my	sexuality	shapes	my	iden=ty	 and	crea=ve	expression.		sexuality	has	many	complex	connec=ons	but	can	be	effec=vely	 communicated	through	various	forms	of	art	and	ac=vism.	 	 though	the	medium	of	drawing,	i	explore	the	various	ar=s=c	techniques	in	which	 sexually	confident	and	self-determined	feminine	bodies	are	respected	and	treated	as	equals	 rather	than	objec=fied	for	male	visual	pleasure.		while	it	is	argued	by	many	feminists	that	we	 can	never	en=rely	escape	the	male	gaze	because	we	live	in	a	patriarchal	system,	i	have	 experimented	with	techniques	to	determine	if	the	male	gaze	can	be	challenged	and	subverted	 by	the	female	gaze	or	queer	gaze.		i	address	this	topic	by	asking	the	ques=on:	is	there	any	way	 to	depict	a	sexually	confident	and	liberated	female-iden=fied	nude	in	art	or	will	the	image	 always	be	subject	to	scru=ny	and	cri=cism	of	objec=fica=on	and	exploita=on?	moreover	how	 	germain	greer	was	widely	recognized	for	her	profound	book,	the	female	eunuch can	social	media	plaiorms	like	instagram	or	public	spaces	such	as	art	galleries	allow	for	the	 discussion	and	possibili=es	of	another	gaze	in	contemporary	art	and	society?					 navigasng	some	of	the	gazes	 male	gaze		 		 the	male	gaze	is	the	viewpoint	in	which	women	are	sexualized	as	objects	of	desire	by	 the	masculine	gaze.		laura	mulvey,	a	vital	film	cri=c,	coined	the	term	male	gaze	in	her	profound	 and	controversial	essay,	“visual	pleasure	and	narra=ve	cinema”	in	 .		mulvey	discusses	the	 gaze	of	the	male	spectator	from	a	psychoanaly=c	freudian	approach	in	response	to	how	mass	 media	has	depicted	the	female	form.		mulvey	structures	the	male	gaze	in	a	triangular	forma=on	 between	the	spectator	(audience),	the	person	behind	the	lens	(cameraman),	and	the	subjects	or	 objects	on	set.		mulvey	states,	“the	determining	male	gaze	projects	its	fantasy	onto	the	female	 figure,	which	is	styled	accordingly.	in	their	tradi=onal	exhibi=onist	role	women	are	 simultaneously	looked	at	and	displayed,	with	their	appearance	coded	for	strong	visual	and	 ero=c	impact”(mulvey	 : ).			these	masculine	fantasies	or	desires	manifest	from	many	film	 techniques	like	voyeurism	and	stereotyping	to	spark	responses	in	male	spectators	and	the	 fe=shized	object	on	display.	 	 john	berger,	the	author	of	ways	of	seeing,	analyzes	the	rela=onship	between	women	in	 society	and	pop	culture.	he	states:	“men	look	at	women.	women	watch	themselves	being	 looked	at…	the	surveyor	of	woman	in	herself	is	male:	the	surveyed	female.	thus	she	turns	 herself	into	an	object.”(berger	 : )	this	concept	is	especially	relevant	today	as	we	are	living	 in	an	image-obsessed	digital	era	bombarded	by	adver=sements,	social	media,	fashion	 statements	and	unrealis=c	beauty	standards.	these	standards	of	beauty	are	outlined	in	naomi	 wolf’s	book,	the	beauty	myth,	and	are	aggressively	directed	towards	women	through	the	 influence	of	mass	media.	wolf	states	that	some	of	these	beauty	ideals	are	promoted	through	 the	“mul=billion-dollar	die=ng	industry,”	a	rise	in	plas=c	surgery	(specifically	breast	 augmenta=on),	beauty	cosme=cs	(an=-aging	creams)	and	soy	and	hard-core	pornography	(wolf	 :	 , - ).	popular	culture	depends	on	the	overly	sexualized	imagery	of	women	in	 adver=sements	to	sell	their	products.		because	of	this,	some	women	have	felt	that	their	 sexuality	has	been	taken	away	from	them	and	sold	back	through	hyper-sexual	and	violent	 pornographic	content.	from	my	perspec=ve,	contemporary	ar=sts	who	incorporate	 pornographic	references	in	their	work	are	poli=cal	and	courageous.	some	important	ar=sts	that	 use	this	controversial	aesthe=c	are	lisa	yuskavage,	marilyn	minter,	sue	williams,	ghada	amer,	 marlene	dumas,	and	begy	tompkins.			 	 in	this	sec=on,	i	examine	two	ar=sts	who	exemplify	problema=c	representa=ons	of	the	 male	gaze	in	their	work.		although	the	work	of	lisa	yuskavage	and	tom	wesselmann	are	 indica=ve	of	the	male	gaze,	both	their	perspec=ves	and	pain=ngs	have	contributed	to	this	 ongoing	cri=cal	debate	in	contemporary	art.		yuskavage	paints	curious,	sexually	charged	and	 sensual	women	in	a	world	of	their	own,	oyen	in	a	state	of	dressing,	undressing	and	examining	 their	bodies.		her	hyper-sexual	portraits	of	women	are	doll-like	as	she	elaborately	distorts	their	 breasts,	bugocks,	pregnant	stomachs,	and	hips.	male	produced	pornographic	imagery	taken	 from	penthouse	magazine	makes	up	most	of	yuskavage’s	reference	material	for	her	work.		many	 feminists,	art	cri=cs	and	curators	within	the	western	art	market	argue	that	this	type	of	 representa=on	is	objec=fying	and	con=nues	to	support	male	gaze	depic=ons	of	women.		while	 some	of	her	representa=ons	of	the	female	nude	adhere	to	the	male	gaze,	it	is	her	process	and	 transforma=on	of	stereotypical	imagery	into	pain=ngs	that	open	possibili=es	towards	another	 gaze.		her	pain=ngs,	whether	created	in	gouache,	watercolour	or	oils	are	systema=cally	thought- out	through	applica=on,	colour	and	stylis=c	techniques.		yuskavage	provokes	ques=ons	about	 desire,	ways	of	looking	and	con=nues	to	walk	the	thin	line	of	unsegling,	controversial	and	 explicit	female	representa=ons	and	social	acceptance.		her	composi=ons	are	sensual,	 compelling	and	leave	the	viewer	ques=oning	if	what	they	just	experienced	was	exploita=ve,	 ero=c	or	feminist.	 	 although	many	male	ar=sts	receive	cri=cism	for	their	interpreta=on	of	the	female	 experience,	i	reference	their	artwork	in	my	own	art	prac=ce	in	an	agempt	to	challenge	the	male	 gaze.	this,	of	course,	raises	the	ques=on	how	studying	male	ar=sts	alters	the	way	female- iden=fied	ar=sts	intend	to	reclaim	their	body	in	their	own	representa=on.	wesselmann,	a	pop	 ar=st	renowned	for	his	treatment	of	colour,	form,	social	commentary	and	historical	iconography	 of	the	american	sexual	revolu=on	reveals	his	male	gaze	through	his	voyeuris=c	perspec=ve	of	 the	ideal	western	female	nude.	his	subjects	are	presented	in	the	bedroom,	nude,	with	 exaggerated	tan	lines	and	legs	spread	wide	open.		breasts	and	nipples	are	portrayed	perky,	 symmetrical	and	rose	coloured	to	signify	youth	and	beauty.		he	weaves	between	pain=ng	his	 desire	and	his	muses’	sexual	pleasure	to	both	par=es	sa=sfac=on.	many	of	his	pain=ngs	are	 close-up	and	cropped	with	open-mouthed	smiling	red	lips	signifying	an	oral	fixa=on	and	state	of	 ecstasy.			 	 furthermore,	his	smoker	series	(figure	 .)	is	a	blatant	sexist	representa=on	of	oral	 fixa=on.		wesselmann’s	use	of	contour,	outlines	and	posi=ve	and	nega=ve	space	create	bold	 methodical	forma=ons	intended	to	seduce	the	viewer.		although	his	composi=ons	are	uniquely	 original,	his	work	is	highly	problema=c	due	to	his	objec=fica=on	and	stereotypical	 representa=ons	of	female	sexuality.		his	work	glamourizes	patriarchal	dominance	over	women’s	 bodies	as	he	adver=ses	them	like	consumer	goods.		i	bring	forward	tom	wesselmann	in	this	 thesis	as	i	believe	his	work	has	provoked	extensive	commentary	from	contemporary	ar=sts	 agemp=ng	to	reclaim	their	body	and	subvert	the	male	gaze.							 (figure	 .)	tom	wesselmann,	smoker	# ,	 ,	oil	on	shaped	canvas,	 - / 	x	 - / 	inches,	the	museum	of	modern	art		 ©	estate	of	tom	wesselmann	/	licensed	by	vaga	at	ars,	new	york	/	socan,	montréal	( )		 female	gaze		 	 the	female	gaze	is	the	refusal	to	the	domina=on	of	the	male	gaze,	where	the	agempt	is	 not	to	objec=fy	the	woman	but	to	posi=on	woman	as	subject.	this	opposi=onal	gaze	 encourages	and	promotes	ways	to	portray	feminine	subjects	independent	of	the	male	gaze	in	 art	and	popular	culture.	the	feminist	challenge	to	the	male	gaze	is	an	agempt	to	re-learn	how	 to	look	at	women	in	art.	in	response	to	laura	mulvey’s	male	gaze,	jill	soloway,	writer	and	 creator	of	the	television	series	transparent,	i	love	dick	and	author	of	she	wants	it,	discusses	a	 term	defined	as	the	female	gaze	at	a	talk	at	the	toronto	interna=onal	film	fes=val	in	 .		 similar	to	mulvey’s	triangular	structuring,	soloway	deconstructs	the	female	gaze	into	three	 parts:	a	way	of	feeling	seeing;	the	gazed	gaze	or	how	it	feels	to	be	seen;	and	finally,	returning	 the	gaze	(soloway	 ).		through	an	inspiring	and	informa=onal	speech,	soloway	elaborates	 on	how	one	can	alter	the	gaze	in	represen=ng	the	female	body	in	art,	mass	media	and	 contemporary	culture. 	this	paradigm	shiy	has	resulted	in	a	rise	of	female-iden=fied	ar=sts	 depic=ng	the	female	form	on	their	own	terms	to	break	open	the	boundaries	of	the	patriarchal	 gaze.		 	 in	the	book,	girl	on	girl:	art	and	photography	in	the	age	of	the	female	gaze,	author	 charloge	jansen	interviews	 	female	photographers	from	 	different	countries.	she	focuses	 on	experiences	from	a	female	photographer’s	point	of	view	in	response	to	taking	pictures	of	 their	female	subjects.	the	photographers	interviewed	in	this	book	describe	the	varied	ways	to	 portray	complex	emo=ons,	inclusive	bodies	and	vulnerable	narra=ons.			zing	tsjeng,	editor	of	 broadly	magazine	gives	insight	on	this	book	as	she	states	in	the	forward,	“a	woman	taking	a	 	talks,	tiff.	“jill	soloway	on	the	female	gaze	|	master	class	|	tiff	 ”.	youtube,	youtube,	 	sept.	 photograph	of	a	woman	isn’t	just	performing	a	poli=cal	act;	it	is	also	a	powerful	act	of	 imagina=on”(jansen	 :	 ).		her	asser=ons	on	jansens	project	are	to	pay	agen=on	to	 inclusivity	and	agency	among	women	as	the	book	aims	to	highlight	some	of	the	different	ways	 to	look	at	women( ).		because	of	the	problema=c	history	of	women	objec=fied	as	a	desirable	 muse	for	the	male	creator,	this	book	embraces	and	celebrates	how	more	women	are	taking	 control	of	their	bodies,	iden==es	and	subject	mager	as	ar=sts.			 	 my	interest	in	photography	not	only	complements	my	prac=ce	by	adding	more	layers	to	 the	process	but	adds	more	visual	and	sensory	informa=on	to	the	work.		i	have	used	 photography	in	the	past	to	help	develop	and	correct	realis=c	propor=ons	of	figures	and	connect	 environmental	composi=ons.		through	my	experimenta=on	and	research	with	photography,	i	 can	understand	the	arguments	and	contradic=ons	that	accompany	how	female-iden=fied	ar=sts	 depict	women	through	their	point	of	view	behind	the	lens	of	the	camera.				 	 feminist	pioneer	carolee	schneemann	is	vital	to	my	prac=ce	as	her	work	deals	with	 sexual	imagery	and	the	naked	female	body.	i	connect	soloway’s	no=on	of	“seeing	feeling”	to	 schneemann's	performances	as	they	state	the	female	gaze	is“reclaiming	the	body,	using	it	with	 inten=on	to	communicate	feeling	seeing”(soloway	 :	 : ).	emo=on	and	feeling	are	 exemplified	in	schneemann’s	visceral	performances	as	she	uses	her	body	to	paint	traces 	of	 internal	movement	and	kine=c	energy	that	emanates	from	within.		in	her	acts,	schneemann	 responds	to	the	cultural	moment	of	her	=me	and	pushes	back	against	mulvey’s	male	gaze	to	 reclaim	her	naked	body.		furthermore,	she	challenges	the	male	gaze	by	celebra=ng	feminine	 sexual	power	and	pleasure	by	connec=ng	her	body	to	the	ero=c.		in	the	performance,	interior	 	schneemann	considers	herself	a	painter	as	she	came	from	a	classical	pain=ng	prac=ce	prior	to	her	performance	work	where	she	uses	her	 body	to	paint	traces	in	and	onto	her	surroundings.	she	uses	her	body	as	a	paint	brush	to	leave	markings	on	the	wall,	floor,	and	on	par=cipants	 involved	in	her	performances.	 scroll,	 ,	schneemann	uses	her	body	as	a	way	to	communicate	sacred	interior	knowledge	as	 she	reads	a	passage	from	a	scroll	pulled	out	from	her	vulva.	the	passages	wrigen	on	the	scroll	 outline	the	blatant	sexism	and	double	standards	con=nuously	faced	by	women	in	the	art	world	 (mit	press	 : ).		 	 in	my	drawings,	the	subjects	are	best	presented	naked	as	i	agempt	to	cast	a	light	on	the	 sexual	double	standards	that	patriarchal	systems	have	established	for	women.		nudity	or	 nakedness	is	an	essen=al	visual	mo=f	in	my	portrayal	of	feminine	representa=on.		similar	to	 schneemann,	i	incorporate	the	naked	form	to	challenge	objec=fica=on	in	current	society.		i	find	 schneemann’s	work	relevant	as	it	has	influenced	contemporary	ar=sts	to	respond	to	the	 feminist	environment	and	the	male	gaze	in	their	agempt	to	reclaim	their	bodies.	ar=sts	like	erin	 m.	riley,	leah	schrager,	shona	mcandrew,	stacy	leigh,	jen	mann,	ness	lee	and	bianca	nemelc	 focus	their	representa=on	on	the	naked	body	in	response	to	censorship,	the	male	gaze	and	the	 poli=cs	of	the	ero=c.		in	their	work,	they	use	the	classical	theme	of	the	reclined	bedroom	nude	 but	from	the	female	point	of	view.		some	of	the	objects	surrounding	the	bedroom	are	indica=ve	 of	the	=mes,	not	unlike	wesselmann,	and	feature	items	like	laptops,	iphones,	movie	posters,	 books,	selfie-s=cks,	feminine	products	like	birth	control	or	tampons	and	vibrators.		however,	the	 women	portrayed	in	these	bedroom	scenes	differ	from	tom	wesselmann’s	reclined	female	 nudes	in	that	they	are	represented	as	real	bodies	that	many	women	can	iden=fy	with.		for	 example,	some	scenes	feature	women	of	all	sizes,	ethnici=es	and	sexuali=es,	with	tagoos,	acne	 or	cellulite,	wearing	face	masks	or	in	a	state	of	grooming.		 the	queer	gaze		 	 the	queer	gaze	performs	on	a	similar	yet	different	level	than	the	female	gaze.		while	 some	gazes	act	as	a	response	or	denial	to	specific	ways	of	looking	others	are	deeply	rooted	and		 can	crossover	and	connect.		according	to	soloway,	the	female	gaze	is	not	strictly	=ed	to	women	 but	encompasses	“the	non-gaze,	the	other	gaze,	the	queer	gaze	and	intersec=onal	 gaze”(	soloway	 :	 : ).		in	this	instant,	soloway	suggests	that	the	female	gaze,	which	can	 also	iden=fy	as	the	queer	gaze,	can	be	taken	up	by	folks	that	do	not	necessarily	iden=fy	as	cis- females.		the	fact	that	the	female	gaze	has	been	coined	by	someone	who	iden=fies	as	non- binary	and	gender	non-conforming	also	adds	to	the	various	intersec=ons	and	intertwined	 complica=ons	of	the	gazes.			the	crossing	over	of	possibili=es	and	entangled	nature	of	feminine	 sexuality	is	inherent	in	elizabeth	wright’s	analysis	of	lacan	and	posieminism.		in	her	book	she	 states,	“biological	differen=a=ons	are	inadequate.	too	many	people	seem	to	cross	over:	there	 are	biological	males	with	feminine	structures	and	biological	females	with	masculine	 structures”. 	(	wright	 :	 )	masculinity	and	femininity	are	gender	no=ons	studied	and	 theorized	by	american	gender	theorist	judith	butler.	in	her	work,	gender	trouble,	butler	argues	 that	gender	iden=ty	is	constructed	from	“stylized	repe==on	of	acts"	and	“performa=vely	 cons=tuted	by	the	very	‘expressions’	that	are	said	to	be	its	results”(	butler	 ). 		in	this	 instant,	butler	suggests	that	iden=ty	is	produced	by	repeated	ac=on	and	behaviour	based	on	 ingrained	social	structures	and	rela=onal	models.		thus	through	conscious	performances,	 individuals	can	reclaim	their	power	and	restructure	their	gender	experience	to	create	iden=ty	 and	shiy	social	norms.	 	wright,	elizabeth.	lacan	and	posieminism.	cambridge:	icon	books	ltd,	 .	print. 	butler,	judith.	gender	trouble:	feminism	and	the	subversion	of	iden=ty.	london,	routledge:	 	(p.	 ,	 ) 	 queer	theorist	eve	kosofsky	sedgwick,	states	in	tendencies	that	“queer	refers	to	the	 open	mesh	of	possibili=es,	gaps,	overlaps,	dissonances,	and	resonances,	lapses	and	excesses	of	 meaning	when	cons=tuent	elements	of	anyone’s	gender,	of	anyone’s	sexuality	aren’t	made	(	or	 can’t	be	made)	to	signify	monolithically.” 		rather	than	responding	to	any	dominant	gaze	and	 possibly	sexual	orienta=on,	the	queer	gaze	embraces	ambiguity,	difference	and	universal	 rela=onality.	this	no=on	of	difference	deconstructs	the	absolute	binaries	and	challenges	 heteronorma=ve	structures.		 	 	as	my	prac=ce	comes	from	a	queer	perspec=ve	as	in,	how	i	define	my	sexuality,	i	must	 consider	how	my	gaze	and	depic=ons	translate	not	only	to	heterosexual	women	and	men,	but	 also	the	lgbtq	community.		i	navigate	contradic=ons	as	a	queer	cis-woman,	as	my	work	 intercepts	and	weaves	through	both	aspects	of	the	female	and	queer	gaze.		in	addi=on,	i	 incorporate	female	gaze	concepts	men=oned	by	soloway	in	artwork	where	i	intend	to	celebrate	 queer	desire	and	posi=on	woman-iden=fied	as	subject	rather	than	object.		in	sec=on	 	en=tled,	 b(r)east,	i	elaborate	on	how	this	art	series	agempts	to	capture	what	a	queer	female	gaze	 "imagines	itself”	to	be.		 		sedgwick,	eve	k.	tendencies.	durham:	duke	university	press,	 .	print. drawing	process		 interviews		+	photography	 	 ini=ally,	i	incorporated	interdisciplinary	approaches	such	as	photography,	digital	collage,	 recorded	interviews	and	perspec=ve	drawings	to	create	a	depic=on	worthy	of	the	female	gaze.		 in	the	first	semester,	i	photographed	and	interviewed	models 	with	pre-determined	ques=ons.	 the	conversa=ons	were	recorded	in	a	safe	space 	where	the	models	and	i	could	talk	freely	 about	experiences	or	issues	involving	sexual	iden=ty.	this	process	formed	a	circle	of	care,	 kinship	and	solidarity	through	the	act	of	listening	and	storytelling.	the	dialogue	was	essen=al	as	 it	deepened	my	understanding	of	the	subject	and	the	emo=ons	expressed	by	their	body	 language	and	movement.		as	i	drew	each	model	with	ink,	i	focused	on	the	shape	of	their	body,	 complex	facial	expression	and	strength	emana=ng	from	self-directed	poses.		in	a	series	of	 	 mixed-media	portraits,	i	agempted	to	depict	strong	emo=on	and	personality	alongside	the	 sexually	empowered	poses	of	each	model.		 	 	 	 the	bonding	experience	between	the	model	and	the	ar=st	was	collabora=ve; 	however	 in	retrospect,	i	portrayed	them	in	a	way	that	was	counter-produc=ve	to	what	i	originally	had	 intended.		while	i	enjoyed	working	with	women	between	the	ages	of	 	to	 	for	the	first	 	in	this	project,	i	worked	with	 	friends	and	acquaintances.	i	have	referred	to	them	as	models	in	this	paper. 	the	spaces	alternated	between	my	apartment,	a	photography	studio	in	east	vancouver,	and	the	model’s	apartments.		the	use	 of	the	word	“safe”	indicates	that	there	was	no	judgment,	shame,	or	censoring	in	the	discussion.		the	interview	was	personal	and	 vulnerable,	with	both	myself	and	the	model	sharing	the	experience. 	collabora=on,	in	this	regard,	is	outlined	through	both	par=es	involved	in	the	project.	the	poses	were	determined	and	 explored	by	the	model	with	ligh=ng	direc=on	from	the	ar=st.	ayer	the	photoshoot,	both	the	ar=st	and	model	organized	the	 pictures	together	and	picked	the	top	five,	which	the	ar=st	would	use	as	a	reference	to	draw	the	final	image.	 series,	i	was	reminded	of	the	problema=c	male-dominated	history	of	how	men	have	 photographed	or	painted	young	women	in	the	past. 		the	models	were	encouraged	to	take	up	 any	desired	posi=on	that	would	emanate	individual	empowerment	without	shame	or	s=gma.	 this	process	was	challenging	as	the	models	chose	to	pose	in	hyper-sexualized	and	self- objec=fying	posi=ons.	although	i	firmly	believe	in	sex-posi=ve 	self-expression,	i	found	myself	 confused	and	in	a	state	of	contradic=on	between	my	research	and	ar=s=c	intent	and	the	results	 of	my	work.			 	here,	i	think	about	how	ar=sts	such	as	pablo	picasso,	henri	ma=sse,	claude	manet	and	albrecht	dürer	objec=fied	and	 exploited	their	young	muses	through	pain=ng	and	drawing.		 according	to	the	interna=onal	society	for	sexual	medicine,	the	term	“sex	posi=ve”	can	be	interpreted	in	different	ways.	for	 most,	it	involves	having	posi=ve	a~tudes	about	sex	and	feeling	comfortable	with	one’s	own	sexual	iden=ty	and	with	the	sexual	 behaviours	of	others.	“interna=onal	society	for	sexual	medicine.”	accessed	january	 ,	 .	hgps://www.issm.info/. figure	 .	natalie,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 	 figure	 .	simone,	acrylic	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 live	modelling	+	mirrors		 	 in	an	agempt	to	reconcile	these	ar=s=c	results,	i	loosened	my	approach	from	a	more	 realis=c	figura=ve	representa=on	to	minimalis=c	ink	drawing.		the	figures	and	subjects	became	 less	detailed	but	more	stylized.		in	this	new	inves=ga=on,	i	used	repe==on,	live-model	drawing	 and	mirrors	in	my	agempt	to	challenge	a	pre-medita=ve	and	structured	way	of	working	with	 photography.		the	prac=ce	became	less	focused	on	the	final	outcome	and	more	centred	on	the	 free	flowing	process	of	drawing.		the	figures,	including	myself,	were	hand-drawn	numerous	 =mes	to	memorize	the	gesture	of	drawing	the	body	on	paper.		this	was	incredibly	helpful	in	my	 agempt	to	loosen	up	and	lose	control.	i	interchanged	between	two-to-five	minute	drawings,	 ten-to-twenty	minute	drawings	and	thirty	minute	drawings.	by	changing	the	speeds	of	various	 poses,	the	mo=on	became	the	focus	rather	than	refining	a	detailed	photo-realis=c	rendering.			 	 accentua=ng	the	form	and	movement	of	each	subject	became	an	effec=ve	way	to	give	 agency	to	the	body	illustrated.		the	sexuality	expressed	from	the	subjects	was	recorded	through	 overlapping	layers	of	thick	or	thin	paint	outlines	and	pagerns.		this	ongoing	series	features	 	 drawings	exhibited	as	a	constella=on	rather	than	a	linear	grid.		by	presen=ng	the	drawings	in	 this	style,	the	audience	can	make	connec=ons	with	the	drawings	without	the	influence	of	a	 linear	or	hierarchal	order.			for	me,	the	figures	depicted	in	hardcore	whimsey	(	figure	 .)	 reinforced	the	importance	of	female-iden=fied	sexual	freedom.						 	 	 figure	 .	holly,	acrylic	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	(detail)	 	 							figure	 .	sophia,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	(detail) figure	 .	install	view	of	hardcore	whimsey,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 - .	image	credit:	barb	choit lines	+	layers	 	 drawing	is	an	effec=ve	medium	to	portray	female	sexuality	as	the	process	is	in=mate,	 messy	and	personal	as	well	as	=me-efficient.		in	the	drawing	hot	wheels	(figure	 .),	i	introduce	 a	new	arrangement	of	contour	lines,	shapes,	and	styles	that	allow	for	a	more	in-depth	reading	 of	the	images.		rather	than	collabora=ng	with	models	for	this	specific	series,	i	portray	myself.		 as	i	place	myself	in	the	role	of	subject,	i	focus	on	the	curvatures	of	my	body	and	state	of	mind	 while	i	draw.		i	incorporate	accessible	and	straighiorward	materials	in	my	depic=ons,	such	as	 graphite	and	ink,	to	connect	the	viewer	to	an	adolescent	=me	in	their	life	where	they	were	 discovering	their	sexuality.	graphite	is	simple	yet	versa=le	and	depending	on	pressure	one	can	 create	smooth,	sensi=ve	shapes,	jagged,	rough	sketches	or	sharp	emphasized	lines	to	achieve	 varied	tonal	marks.		the	graphite	tonal	shading	soyens	the	harsh	contour	ink	outlines	and	gives	 weight,	density	and	dimension	to	the	lines.		 	 helene	mcdonald,	author	of	eropc	ambiguipes;	the	female	nude	in	art	examines	and	 challenges	representa=on	of	the	female	body	through	history,	feminism,	queer	studies	and	 future	specula=ons.			ambiguity,	according	to	mcdonald,	is	“an	effect	of	representa=onal	 processes,	a	complica=on,	a	blurring,	an	uncertainty	or	vagueness”(mcdonald	 :	 ).			 mcdonald	claims	deconstruc=on	of	the	female	body	though	ambiguous	representa=on	is	one	of	 the	many	posi=ve	ways	to	depict	the	body	in	contemporary	art	(mcdonald	 : , - ).	 ambiguity	in	this	case,	encourages	a	different	way	of	looking;	one	that	proposes	more	complex	 and	conceptual	interpreta=ons	of	feminine	sexuality.		her	stance	is	to	push	the	boundaries	of	 inclusivity	and	diversity	to	reject	the	idealized	and	patriarchal	vision	of	a	beau=ful	female	body.	 one	can	argue	that	this	in	fact	is	not	only	taking	up	the	aspects	of	the	female	gaze,	but	the	 difference	in	the	queer	gaze.		hot	wheels	(figure	 .)	is	influenced	by	mcdonald’s	thesis	as	the	 bodies	overlap	and	transform	from	solid	to	translucent	forms	as	they	intertwine	with	the	 architecture	of	the	background.	the	bodies	create	an	illusionis=c	effect	where	the	pictorial	 perspec=ve	breaks	in	areas	and	the	physical	form	is	reduced	to	the	line.	in	this	artwork,	the	 viewer	is	ley	to	ques=on	where	the	body	begins,	ends	and	where	does	the	connec=on	start.			 this	work	further	inves=gates	the	layered	technique	which	also	gives	rise	to	confusing	emo=ons	 that	can	be	hard	to	define	like	sexuality.		in	this	series,	i	agempt	to	reinforce	the	female	gaze	 and	queer	gaze	and	underscore	this	point	through	ambivalent,	ambiguous	but	sexual	 renderings.		 figure	 .	hot	wheels,	mixed	media	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 	 	 in	one	of	her	essays,	“the	uses	of	ero=c",	queer	feminist	ac=vist	and	poet	audre	lorde	 suggests	that	ero=c	knowledge	is	gained	through	curiosity,	acknowledging	the	feeling	of	 emo=on	and	connec=on.		audre	lorde’s	wri=ng	focuses	on	iden=ty	and	social	injus=ces,	 specifically	around	systems	of	race,	class,	gender	and	sexuality.		her	work	is	mul=-dimensional	 and	informa=ve.		lorde	claims	that	patriarchal	systems	distort	the	meaning	of	the	ero=c	and	use	 it	against	women	as	a	tool	for	oppression(lorde	 : ).			i	am	interested	in	bringing	lorde’s	 essay	into	the	work	by	inves=ga=ng	this	no=on	of	the	ero=c	and	how	it	can	be	used	as	a	 mechanism	to	“create	change.”		lorde	also	states	that,	“the	ero=c	is	a	resource	within	each	of	 us	that	lies	in	a	deeply	female	and	spiritual	plane,	firmly	rooted	in	the	power	of	our	 unexpressed	or	unrecognized	feeling”	(lorde	 : ). 		this	is	essen=al	to	my	work	as	i	 agempt	to	depict	the	desire,	emo=onal	connec=on	and	sexual	libera=on	experienced	through	 female	interac=on.			 	 b(r)east		 	 i	am	interested	in	the	parts	of	the	body	that	are	fe=shized	and	over-sexualized	by	 society,	such	as	the	female	nipple.	i	think	about	how	these	parts	of	the	body	are	constructed,	 censored	and	sexualized	to	control	ones	sexuality.			according	to	feminist	historian	marilyn	 yalom,	the	breast	“has	been	coded	with	“good”	and	“bad”	connota=ons	since	the	beginning	of	 recorded	=me”(yalom	 :	 ).		these	connota=ons	of	the	breast	can	be	seen	through	 representa=ons	of	motherhood,	goddesses,	dei=es	and	libera=on,	while	at	other	=mes	the	bare	 chest	associates	the	woman	as	a	harlot,	witch,	femme	fatale	or	monstrous	figure.		the	exposed	 breast	and	nipple	are	represented	in	historical	depic=ons	in	art	where	women	are	reclining	 lorde, audre. sister outsider: essays and speeches. “the uses of the erotics: the erotics as power”, p. . trumansburg, ny#crossing press, . nude	in	a	bedroom,	bathing	in	a	tub,	riding	a	brooms=ck,	gazing	into	the	mirror,	nursing	a	child	 or	standing	with	the	serpent	in	the	garden	of	eden.	whether	the	woman	is	passively	or	 sugges=vely	posing,	she	has	been	historically	conveyed	by	the	male	point	of	view.	yalom	states	 in	her	book,	a	history	of	the	breast,	“from	the	outside,	the	breast	represents	another	reality,	 and	one	that	varies	in	the	eyes	of	each	beholder.	babies	see	food.	men	see	sex.	doctors	see	 disease.	businessmen	see	dollar	signs.	religious	authori=es	transform	breasts	into	spiritual	 symbols,	whereas	poli=cians	appropriate	them	for	na=onalis=c	ends.	psychoanalysts	place	them	 at	the	centre	of	the	unconscious,	as	if	they	were	unchanging	monoliths.	this	mul=plicity	of	 meanings	suggests	the	breast’s	privileged	place	in	the	human	imagina=on”	(yalom	 : 	).		 this	argument	is	essen=al	to	my	recent	series	(	seen	through	figures	 - .)	as	i	explore	the	ever- so-changing	meanings	and	associa=ons	behind	the	breast.				 	 the	breast	nourishes	and	comforts	the	young	and	is	generally	the	first	form	one	will	see	 when	they	enter	the	world.	in	today's	society,	the	bare	nipple	can	immediately	result	in	 cri=cism,	scru=ny	and	objec=fica=on.	in	fact,	nipples	shared	and	posted	to	digital	and	social	 media	plaiorms	like	instagram	con=nue	to	be	censored	and	banned.	in	feminist	art,	revealing	 or	"freeing	the	nipple” 	is	a	protest	against	the	status	quo	and	an	act	of	poli=cal	and	sexual	 resistance.		by	both	examining	and	drawing	the	breast,	i	acknowledge	and	explore	my	own	 gender	iden=ty	and	sexual	experience.		in	my	work,	i	draw	the	breast	using	various	techniques	 to	alter	both	its	form	and	meaning	in	the	context	of	the	current	environment	and	by	doing	so	 change	the	gaze.			 this campaign received media attention globally in , and with the production of the movie, "free the nipple” directed by lina esco, became a viral hashtag on the internet and social media platforms. #freethenipple includes exposing one's areola in public as well as one's right and refusal to wear a bra. 	 	in	the	series	b(r)east,	i	moved	away	from	sketching	a	perfect	and	accurate	rendering	of	 a	female	body.		moving	towards	a	more	ambiguous	depic=on	of	the	nude	has	enabled	me	to	 portray	liberated	sexuality	in	a	way	that	operates	beyond	the	male	gaze.		the	change	was	 essen=al	and	necessary	for	my	prac=ce	as	i	shiy	the	focus	on	depic=ng	feminine	sexuality	from	 the	surface	or	exterior	of	the	body	towards	a	more	embodied	interior.		to	further	explain	this	 thought,	i	use	memory,	impulse	and	imagina=on	to	express	sexuality	through	surreal	figura=ve	 drawing.		by	altering	the	method,	the	narra=ve	changes	from	the	representa=on	of	a	one- dimensional	woman	to	the	various	components	that	make	up	a	woman.	one-dimensional,	a	 term	coined	by	cultural	theorist	nina	powers	in	her	book,	“one-dimen=onal	woman” 	is	based	 on	philosopher	herbert	marcuse’s	book	“one-dimensional	man”. 		she	claims	this	one- dimensional	woman	is	a	type	of	feminist	who	is	posi=ve,	upbeat,	and	superficial.		in	my	work,	 this	one-dimensional	aspect	is	seen	through	my	very	specific	and	limi=ng	representa=ons.	i	 recognize	that	although	the	bodies	i	have	drawn	in	the	past	are	sex-posi=ve	and	queer	 members	of	my	community,	they	are	white,	middle	class,	thin	and	within	the	ages	of	 	to	 .			 although	this	representa=on	is	the	closest	to	my	experience,	i	acknowledge	that	these	 depic=ons	can	s=ll	be	interpreted	and	cri=qued	within	the	queer	community	as	exclusive,	 limi=ng	and	essen=alist.		i	am	also	aware	that	many	of	the	cri=ques	i	have	received	represen=ng	 feminine	sexual	desire	and	celebra=on	have	come	from	a	heterosexual	perspec=ve.		in	the	 future,	i	plan	to	strengthen	a	deeper	connec=on	with	my	queer	subjec=vity	and	how	i	 collaborate	and	communicate	with	members	of	the	queer	community.												 power, nina. one-dimensional woman. winchester, uk: [zero] books, . print. marcuse, herbert. one-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. boston: beacon press, . print. 	 in	this	series	of	graphite	drawings,	(	figure	 .)	i	present	a	different	and	re-imagined	way	 of	looking	at	the	female	nipple.		the	breasts	are	portrayed	as	natural	body	parts	and	subjects,	 full	of	emo=on	and	personality.	by	adding	human-like	quali=es	to	the	breast,	i	agempt	to	 normalize	and	de-sexualize	the	s=gma	around	the	nipple.	giving	breasts	anthropomorphic	 quali=es	allows	the	viewer	to	feel	a	greater	sense	of	empathy	and	reflect	on	their	subjec=vity.	 the	breasts	hold	agency,	whether	they	are	looking	at	their	reflec=on	in	the	mirror,	gazing	out	 the	window,	grooming,	smelling	a	flower	or	conversing.		there	is	a	humorous	and	whimsical	 quality	to	them,	where	they	are	detached	from	bodies	and	exist	as	their	own	en=ty.		through	 my	current	drawing	process,	i	consider	how	we	can	acknowledge	the	breast	without	 objec=fica=on	or	condemna=on.		in	my	inves=ga=on,	i	think	about	why	breasts	are	considered	 so	powerful	and	threatening	that	they	need	to	be	kept	hidden.	 	 figure	 .	install	view	of	wouldn’t	thou	like	to	live	deliciously?	cone	of	power,	and	i’ll	be	your	mirror,	graphite	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	 credit:	barb	choit		 	 as	i	weave	between	different	styles	of	drawing,	i	think	about	how	my	process	and	 materials	translate	into	sexuality,	ambiguity	and	the	ero=cs.		i	look	to	american	ar=st	sue	 williams	as	she	paints	arrangements	of	strikingly	bold	and	bright	doodles	of	male	and	female	 genitalia.	these	forms	are	abstracted	with	lines	missing,	marks	smudged	and	colours	bleeding	 across	the	surface	of	the	canvas.		forms	are	distorted	through	nega=ve	and	posi=ve	space	as	a	 metaphorical	way	to	emphasize	the	division	between	what	is	visible	and	invisible.	her	poli=cal	 view	is	both	confronta=onal	and	discrete	and	is	in	direct	response	to	patriarchal	toxicity,	the	 sexualiza=on	of	women	and	the	control	of	female	bodies	(jrp|ringier	 ).	one	can	see	this	 reference	though	her	sexually	ero=c	scenes	of	violence,	harassment	and	misogyny	directed	 toward	women	in	abject	cartoon	forms.		i	am	par=cularly	interested	in	how	she	plays	with	 control,	fluidity	and	spontaneous	line-work	as	she	ques=ons	the	problema=c	representa=on	of	 gender	in	the	art	world.		 	 the	work	space	boobs	(	figure	 .)	is	drawn	me=culously	using	three	different	black	ink	 pens	on	grey	 	x	 -inch	paper.	the	rectangular	drawing	features	mul=ple	uncensored	breasts	 and	free-flowing	nipples.		this	piece	is	playful	as	it	is	poli=cal	and	is	concerned	with	maximizing	 freedom	of	self-expression	and	self-surveillance. 	the	rendered	complex	forms	seek	to	explore	 the	posi=ve	and	ero=c	power	of	feminine	sexuality.		the	hand-drawn	breasts	vary	in	propor=on	 to	acknowledge	the	difference	in	bodies	and	iden==es.		it	is	important	that	the	breast	is	 rendered	in	a	way	that	deviates	from	being	perfect,	ideal	or	gendered	to	represent	beger	the	 complex	nature	of	bodies	and	societal	diversity.	 this term is outlined in john berger’s ways of seeing. berger, john, and michael dibb. london: bbc enterprises, figure	 .	acorndicktimy,	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit	 figure	 .	space	boobs,	ink	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit	 	 in	her	book,	the	female	nude:	art,	obscenity,	and	sexuality,	lynda	nead	discusses	how	 the	patriarchy	and	western	society	control	women’s	sexuality	because	it	is	something	that	is	 feared.		there	is	a	patriarchal	system	in	place	that	is	meant	to	disempower	the	woman	and	 subjugate	her	experiences	and	or	her	sexual	desires.		in	space	boobs,	(figure	 .)	the	breasts	can	 be	seen	as	space	invaders	as	they	take	up	space	and	push	the	boundaries	of	meaning.		breasts	 intertwine,	stretch,	hide,	bounce	and	morph	into	one	another	to	create	new	forma=ons	in	 space.		in	this	work,	i	reference	mcdonald's	idea	of	ambiguity	as	she	states,	“ambiguity	is	a	both	 a	space	where	different	meanings	blur,	overlap,	and	are	conflated…”(mcdonald	 : ).			the	 forma=ons	shape-shiy	from	figura=ve	to	more	abstracted	renderings	to	signify	the	ever-present	 changing	and	varied	interpreta=ons	of	the	breast.		although	the	borders	of	the	paper	confine	 the	forms,	this	is	their	world	where	they	are	in	a	free	state	of	mind	and	reinforce	sexual	self- expression.	 	 	 the	breasts	in	acorndicktimy	(	figure	 .)	are	drawn	using	similar	ligh=ng	and	shading	 techniques,	but	from	various	angles,	direc=ons	and	posi=ons.	i	focus	on	the	exaggera=on	of	the	 image	by	zooming	in	with	cropping	techniques,	accentua=ng	the	thick	graphic	line,	playing	with	 posi=ve	and	nega=ve	space	and	layering	forms.	some	of	the	breasts	in	this	piece	are	pierced	to	 push	sexual	expression,	iden=ty	and	freedom.		these	strategies	add	a	harmonic	and	 choreographed	dimension	to	the	composi=on.		there	is	a	decora=ve	element	to	the	images	as	 they	mimic	paisley	and	feminine	and	masculine	pagerns.	the	sensuality	and	harshness	of	the	 ink	shading	enhances	the	depth	of	the	composi=on	while	giving	the	breasts	visibility,	urgency	 and	individuality.	although	the	forms	resemble	the	breast,	upon	closer	inspec=on,	one	might	 start	to	recognize	different	shapes	such	as	orcas,	finger	nails,	spaceships	or	acorns,	phallus	 objects	and	tails.		some	breasts	are	elongated	with	pointy,	claw-like	nipples,	while	others	are	 more	rounded,	tubular	or	smaller	with	pierced	erect	nipples.	other	breast	look	like	the	have	 been	taken	apart	or	detached	from	a	gendered	body.		in	these	depic=ons	the	gender	is	 ambiguous	and	shiys	between	feminine	and	masculine	iden==es.	the	lines	are	sensual	but	 harsh	as	they	leave	imprints	in	the	paper.		 current	feminist	landscape	 	 my	prac=ce	aligns	with	certain	aspects	of	fourth-wave	feminism	and	post-feminism	 par=cularly	as	i	look	at	the	current	feminist	landscape	and	the	importance	of	feminist	 campaigns	online,	such	as	the	women's	march,	#metoo,	#freethenipple,	#wethenipple,	sex- posi=ve,	and	lgbtq	movements.		this	specific	area	focuses	on	emerging	models	of	 intersec=onality,	womanhood,	queer	iden=ty,	censorship,	agency,	libera=on	and	the	ownership	 of	one's	sexuality.		through	the	internet,	social	networking	and	the	#metoo	movement,	 communi=es	are	exploring	ways	to	express	their	sexuality	and	reclaim	the	agency	of	their	 bodies	and	physical	representa=ons.		this	interna=onal	movement	pushes	towards	the	 inclusions	of	all	bodies	and	genders	for	equality,	respect	and	awareness.		more	queer,	feminine,	 and	non-binary	ar=sts	are	con=nuing	to	cri=que	patriarchal	systems	and	speak	out	against	slut- shaming,	gender	intersec=ons,	sexual	harassment	and	assault	through	art.		 	 however,	as	we	look	to	the	history	of	#metoo,	it	is	important	to	acknowledge	that	the	 popular	slogan	was	ini=ally	coined	by	woman	of	colour	ac=vist	tarana	burke	in	 .		in	her	 pursuit	to	create	awareness	for	survivors	of	sexual	violence,	burke	founded	the	campaign	“girls	 for	gender	equality,”	which	she	con=nues	to	support	today(ade=ba	 : ). 		in	an	interview	 	the	verso	report,	et	al.	“tarana	burke	says	#metoo	should	center	marginalized	communi=es.”	versobooks.com,	verso,	 ,	 www.versobooks.com/blogs/ -tarana-burke-says-metoo-should-center-marginalized-communi=es. outlined	in	the	book,	where	freedom	starts:	sex	power	violent	#metoo,	burke	talks	about	the	 deeper	issues	of	how	the	slogan	became	a	tool	used	by	hollywood	for	white	women	to	call	out	 and	shame	men	for	sexual	violence	and	harassment(burke	 : ).		this	viral	sensa=on	again	 failed	to	acknowledge	or	credit	the	origin	of	the	slogan	and	further	silenced	marginalized	 people	and	the	collec=ve	poli=cal	conversa=on	it	was	intended	for.			 	 sarah	banet-weiser	presents	and	examines	ideas	concerning	posieminism	in	her	recent	 book,	empowered:	popular	feminism	and	popular	misogyny.		her	research	outlines	a	 widespread	phenomenon	and	trend	in	feminism	that	has	found	its	way	in	the	capitalist	 marketplace	(banet-weiser	 :	 - ).		she	also	claims	that	there	is	a	rise	in	misogyny	as	more	 woman	iden=fying	as	feminists	are	becoming	outspoken	about	their	bodies	and	sexuality	 resul=ng	in	more	harassment,	anger	and	public	shaming.	banet-weiser	suggests	that	this	deeply	 problema=c	cycle	occurs	in	spaces	that	have	a	higher	economic	visibility	such	as	on	social	media	 plaiorms	where	networking	and	community	building	have	become	widely	accessible.		it	is	in	 this	contemporary	milieu	that	i	agempt	to	progress	my	artwork	to	point	out	the	ever-present	 censorship	constraints	s=ll	placed	upon	feminine	bodies.		 	 marilyn	minter	is	an	american	painter	and	important	figure	in	the	current	feminist	 movement.		as	we	are	riding	the	fourthwave	and	post-feminist	movement,	minter’s	work	is	 gaining	cri=cal	momentum	and	recogni=on.		in	fact,	minter’s	work	can	be	seen	on	her	instagram	 account	which	features	talks	and	posts	about	american	poli=cs	including	abor=on	bans,	female	 reproduc=ve	rights	and	disagreements	concerning	president	trump’s	misogynis=c	behaviour.		 her	pain=ngs	are	poli=cally	charged,	controversial	and	feminist.		minter	paints	the	female	nude	 in	popular	culture	through	ero=c	and	in=mate	interac=ons	and	seeks	to	expose	the	 commercializa=on	of	sex	and	fashion	photography	by	way	of	hyper-sexual	imagery.			 	 	 	 	 minter's	earlier	work	focuses	on	hard-core	pornographic	content	as	she	was	fascinated	 by	taking	male	produced	photographs	of	women	and	reclaiming	the	images	in	a	way	that	 celebrated	female	desire	and	sex.		she	states	in	an	interview	with	cnn,	"i	thought	it	was	=me	 for	women	to	own	sexual	imagery	and	make	sexual	imagery	for	their	own	pleasure	and	for	their	 own	amusement.	and	at	that	=me	i	was	picking	images	from	abusive	history	and	repurposing	 them.”(ko: ).		in	her	latest	work,	minter	takes	back	the	overly-used	female	bathers	mo=f	 but	with	a	contemporary	twist	in	which	her	subjects	are	abstracted	behind	steamy	shower	glass	 doors. 			 	figure	 .	shows	her	most	recent	photographs	from	a	two	part	group	exhibi=on	en=tled,	aborpon	is	normal	at	eva	presenhuber	and	arsenal	 contemporary	in	new	york,	january	 .		hgps://www.artsy.net/show/downtown-for-democracy-abor=on-is-normal figure	 .	marilyn	minter,	cuntrol,	 .	courtesy	of	the	ar=st	and	salon	 ,	new	york	 https://www.artsy.net/show/downtown-for-democracy-abortion-is-normal censorship		 	 	 extensive	censorship	regula=ons	exist	both	online	and	offline.		moreover,	digital	 plaiorms	such	as	instagram	are	becoming	widely	popular	by	many	ar=sts,	celebri=es	and	art	 ac=vists.	some	of	these	agempts	to	push	back	against	censorship	online	via	hashtag	ac=vism,	 notably	#freethenipple	have	been	through	women	organiza=ons	like	femen 	and	radical	 statements	from	ar=sts/celebri=es	like	petra	collins,	lena	dunham,	rupi	kaur,	emma	watson,	 jameela	jamil,	and	scout	willis.			although	this	agempt	to	free	the	nipple	is	a	stance	against	 patriarchal	control	and	can	be	seen	as	sexually	libera=ng	and	an	engaging	campaign	to	fight	 oppression	online,	it	s=ll	lacks	diversity.		this	lack	of	diversity	is	not	representa=ve	of	society	 and	is	recognizable	and	visible	as	one	clicks	through	the	various	photographs	posted	and	tagged	 under	#freethenipple.	shortly	ayer	this	campaign,	#wethenipple	emerged.	#wethenipple	 centres	in	on	censorship	regula=ons	against	nudity	in	contemporary	and	tradi=onal	fine	art	 circula=ng	on	plaiorms	like	facebook	and	instagram.	the	campaign	was	started	by	na=onal	 coali=on	against	censorship	(ncac)	and	american	photographer	spencer	tunick	(	robinson:	 ). 		many	of	tunicks	photographs	in	this	campaign	feature	people	of	all	ethnici=es	and	 genders	holding	up	cardboard	cut-outs	of	nipples	over	their	naked	bodies	in	a	collec=ve	protest.			 	 censorship	is	not	only	harmful	to	bodies	and	their	self	expression,	but	it	can	be	used	as	a	 mechanism	to	silence	and	diminish	needs	and	or	experiences.		i	consider	and	recognize	my	 privileges	as	a	white	cis-woman	pos=ng	online	in	my	explora=on	of	feminine	sexuality.		the	 ques=on	remains,	however,	of	what	i	can	do	to	support	and	listen	to	other	voices	that	con=nue	 	femen	is	a	feminist	ukrainian	ac=vist	organiza=on.	femen’s	radical	poli=cal	interven=ons	feature	topless	campaigns	in	mass	media	to	protect	 and	promote	women's	rights.	 	robinson,	maghew.	“facebook	to	meet	#wethenipple	campaigners	amid	nudity	censorship	row.”	cnn,	cable	news	network,	 	june	 ,	 www.cnn.com/style/ar=cle/facebook-wethenipple-protesters-mee=ng-intl-scli/index.html. to	fight	on	digital	plaiorms	for	sexual,	gender	and	racial	equality.		at	an	increasing	rate,	the	 younger	genera=ons	are	finding	ways	to	express	and	reclaim	their	bodies	in	sex-posi=ve	ways	 that	celebrate	sexuality	as	a	defiant	response	against	censorship	laws.	this	is	evident	through	 controversial	and	contradictory	approaches	like	self-objec=fica=on	through	selfie-culture 	as	a	 form	of	empowerment	and	poten=al	valida=on.		 this is a st-century phenomenon, where one takes self-portrait on a smartphone. selfie’s focus on the face, but with the help of a selfie-stick, one can capture a full-length photo to show the whole body. conclusion		 	 my	ar=s=c	journey	addresses	ques=ons	of	how	to	portray	a	sexually	strong	and	 confident	body	in	art	in	a	radical	period	of	libera=on	that	encourages	awareness	and	the	 importance	and	ambiguity	of	sexual	iden=ty.		however,	many	important	ques=ons	remain	 unresolved.		can	the	female	gaze	s=ll	objec=fy	the	feminine	body?			can	feminism	be	deemed	 poli=cally	incorrect,	if	the	end	goal	is	to	put	down	patriarchy	and	encourage	feminist	 approaches	to	art-making	or	ac=vism?	if	=mes	are	shiying	and	sexual	freedom	is	becoming	 more	fluid,	why	is	sexuality	a	threat?			lastly,	if	the	male	gaze	is	an=-feminist,	how	does	one	 portray	a	hyper-sexual	image	of	a	female-iden=fied	body	in	contemporary	society	and	art?		 	 by	promo=ng	awareness	of	human	sexuality,	one	can	think	cri=cally	and	poli=cally	about	 the	agency	of	our	bodies.		i	am	interested	in	how	these	conversa=ons	are	discussed,	viewed,	 and	interrogated	in	public	spaces	such	as	the	ins=tu=on,	instagram	and	the	art	gallery.		one	of	 the	various	ways	i	intend	to	further	my	prac=ce	is	by	nego=a=ng	how	these	spaces	can	be	 related	and	where	and	how	my	drawings	fit	in.			i	look	forward	to	reconnec=ng	with	the	online	 community	in	ways	where	i	can	encourage,	de-s=gma=ze,	celebrate	and	challenge	sexual	 representa=ons	of	women	that	exist	beyond	the	patriarchal	framework.		by	driving	feminist	 discussion	online	and	in	real	life	through	representa=onal	figura=ve	drawing,	i	intend	to	 con=nue	to	expand	my	crea=ve	expression	through	uncensored	dialogue.			i	hope	to	add	to	this	 exci=ng	and	important	field	of	ar=s=c	study	by	con=nuing	to	inves=gate	the	gaze	and	the	 unresolved	complica=ons	of	feminine	and	queer	sexuality	depicted	in	contemporary	society.		 	 figure	 .	bloobs,	graphite	on	paper,	 	x	 ”,	 .	image	credit:	barb	choit		 works	cited	 . 	ahmed,	sara.	living	a	feminist	life.	zubaan,	 .	 . 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.					nead,	lynda.	the	female	nude:	art,	obscenity	and	sexuality.	routledge,	 .	 .					power,	nina.	one	dimensional	woman.	winchester:	o	books,	 .	 .			robinson,	maghew.	“facebook	to	meet	#wethenipple	campaigners	amid	nudity	censorship	 row.”	cnn,	cable	news	network,	 	june	 ,	www.cnn.com/style/ar=cle/facebook-wethenipple- protesters-mee=ng-intl-scli/index.html.	 .				sedgwick,	eve	kosofsky.	tendencies.	duke	university	press,	 .	 .				talks,	tiff.	“jill	soloway	on	the	female	gaze	|	master	class	|	tiff	 ”.	youtube,	youtube,	 	 sept.	 ,	www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnbvppood i.		 .				the	verso	report,	et	al.	“tarana	burke	says	#metoo	should	center	marginalized	 communi=es.”	versobooks.com,	verso,	 ,	www.versobooks.com/blogs/ -tarana-burke-says- metoo-should-center-marginalized-communi=es.	 .			wolf,	naomi.	the	beauty	myth:	how	images	of	beauty	are	used	against	women.	vintage	classic,	 .	 .				wolf,	naomi.	vagina:	a	new	biography.	london:	virago,	 .	 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.			zeisler,	andi.	feminism	and	pop	culture,	“pop	and	circumstances:	why	pop	culture	magers”,	p. - 	 and	“women	under	the	influence:	pop	culture	now	and	beyond”,	p. - ,	 .		 .			zeisler,	andi.	we	were	feminists	once:	from	riot	grrrl	to	covergirl,	the	buying	and	selling	of	a	 polipcal	movement.	publicaffairs,	 .	 http://femen.org/ university of groningen sexual harassment of women leaders folke, olle; rickne, johanna; tanaka, seiki; tateishi, yasuka published in: dædalus doi: . /daed_a_ important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): folke, o., rickne, j., tanaka, s., & tateishi, y. ( ). sexual harassment of women leaders. dædalus, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /daed_a_ copyright other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). take-down policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. downloaded from the university of groningen/umcg research database (pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. for technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to maximum. download date: - - https://doi.org/ . /daed_a_ https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/sexual-harassment-of-women-leaders(df ea - e b- fa-a - f eb af ).html https://doi.org/ . /daed_a_ © by the american academy of arts & sciences published under a creative commons attribution . international (cc by . ) license https://doi.org/ . /daed_a_ sexual harassment of women leaders olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi sexual harassment is more prevalent for women supervisors than for women em- ployees. this pattern holds in the three countries we studied–the united states, japan, and sweden–where women supervisors are between to percent more likely to have been sexually harassed in the last twelve months. among supervisors, the risk is larger in lower- and mid-level positions of leadership and when subordi- nates are mostly male. we also find that harassment of women supervisors happens despite their greater likelihood of taking action against the abuser, and that super- visors face more professional and social retaliation after their harassment experi- ence. we conclude that sexual harassment is a workplace hazard that raises the costs for women to pursue leadership ambitions and, in turn, reinforces gender gaps in income, status, and voice. p icture an incident of sexual harassment. for many, this prompt brings up the image of the boss of a firm harassing his secretary. pioneering research on sexual harassment in the s was focused on exactly this type of sce- nario. women were harassed at the job while doing “womanly” things like clean- ing up the office or assisting with meetings: essentially a wife’s tasks, but in the workplace. the power component was also clear. men with power harassed wom- en without power. much has changed since the s. women are no longer relegated to the low- liest positions in the corporate hierarchy. nor are they restricted to administrative roles, but have moved into positions of leadership. a “silent revolution” has shak- en the labor market, with large increases in women’s labor force participation and many women starting to see career ambition as part of their identity. more wom- en have been advancing to positions of organizational leadership, reducing the power gap with men in the workplace. recent research has highlighted how women’s advancement may involve a “paradox of power”: rather than reducing exposure to sexual harassment, pow- er in the workplace seems to put women at greater risk. in a pathbreaking study of three hundred u.s. women in their thirties, sociologists heather mclaugh- lin, christopher uggen, and amy blackstone found higher rates of harassment ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi among women who had reached supervisory positions at this stage of their career. our research in the united states, japan, and sweden lends support to the par- adox of power hypothesis. we probe the mechanisms behind the paradox by com- paring, first, if women supervisors are harassed by different types of perpetrators and, second, if supervisors take different types of action after they are harassed. we then consider the consequences of harassment and find that, in addition to the higher prevalence of harassment against them, women supervisors also seem to suffer more professional and social retaliation after their harassment experience. across the globe and across all sectors of society, women become scarcer on higher rungs of organizational hierarchies. our study offers one reason for this baleful result: because women face increasing levels of sexual harassment as they gain workplace power. the workplace hazard of sexual harassment adds a burden for women who pursue supervisory positions, as evidenced by the hundreds of empirical studies showing that sexual harassment damages, among other things, the victim’s psychological well-being, productivity at work, and sense of belong- ingness in the workplace. the costs of growing rates of harassment for women supervisors also extend beyond the individual victim to the organization as a whole. the paradox of pow- er means that, because sexual harassment can potentially discourage women from seeking promotion, women’s leadership talents are not realized at the same rate as men’s. organizations are losing women’s skill and potential for these higher po- sitions, while women are losing the wages, status, and voice in society that such jobs can bring. w e begin with a look at our data sources and measurements of sexual ha-rassment. the swedish data come from the work environment survey, a biannual survey collected by the swedish government. this survey uses a random sample of the employed population of permanent residents, strati- fied by sex at birth, age, occupation, industry, and social class. we use five waves of this survey ( – ), each one with roughly five thousand women respondents. these respondents were fully anonymous and their workplaces were not aware that they were being surveyed. the survey contains more than one hundred questions on various aspects of working environments, meaning that the ones on sexual ha- rassment are unlikely to stand out to the respondent. there are , responses for women across five pooled surveys: , , , , and . because the united states and japan did not have comparable data, we collected original sur- vey data in these two countries, which in turn allowed us to ask more detailed ques- tions to understand the mechanisms of sexual harassment exposure and reporting. for the united states, we surveyed a convenience sample from the online pan- el of the survey company dynata in june . we oversampled employed women dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders and women with management positions for a total final sample size of , . we added a survey question to check the attentiveness of respondents, which was an- swered correctly by persons. in what follows, we use the full sample. a descrip- tion of the age, education, income, and marital status of the respondents can also be found in the web appendix for all three countries (table w ) and for attentive and nonattentive respondents of japan and the united states (table w ) (accessi- ble at https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/harassment_of_women_leaders). we surveyed employed women japanese citizens in early . the sample was drawn by the japanese survey firm nikkei research from their opt-in online panel and with an oversampling of women supervisors. the survey reached , respondents, whereof were attentive. we also conducted a semistructured in- terview with six employees (four women and two men) at a japanese firm in march to gain better understandings of the mechanisms of sexual harassment. t he swedish work environment survey contains three questions on re-spondents’ experiences of sexual harassment at work over the last twelve months. these were translated from swedish by the authors. we count a person as having experienced harassment if they answer affirmatively to any of these questions. because the questions contain examples of harassing behav- iors, but largely leave it to the respondent to recall things that happened to them, the resulting variable has elements of a list-based measurement, but is largely subjective. the first two questions are formulated as follows: “in the following questions, sexual harassment is defined as unwelcome physical actions or offensive remarks or innuendos on subject matter that is commonly associated with sex.” respon- dents are then asked if, in the last twelve months, they experienced these behav- iors ) from supervisors or colleagues, or ) from other people (for example, cus- tomers, patients, clients, passengers, or students). these questions contain exam- ples of sexual hostility as well as unwanted sexual attention. the third question is formulated as: have you been exposed to behaviors other than the ones above, which degraded you or violated your integrity, and were based on your gender? this could include conde- scending and ridiculing statements about women or men in general or in your occupa- tion. it could also include that someone, because of your gender, ignored you or what you were saying. have you experienced any such harassment from colleagues or super- visors in the last twelve months? for this question we lack information about people other than colleagues or supervisors. the question includes a typical example of sexist hostility–conde- scending and ridiculing comments–but also includes an example of selective in- civility. having your person or opinion ignored because of your gender is closer ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi to this workplace misbehavior than to sexual harassment. the inclusion of this example (in the end of ) the survey question is likely to inflate the rate of sexual harassment. there is, hence, upward bias from the inclusion of selective incivil- ity, but downward bias from the subjectivity of the questions. some downward bias might also stem from the lack of any example of sexual coercion in the sur- vey questions. for the united states and japan, we measured sexual harassment in two ways. the first is a list-based survey question, the sexual experiences questionnaire, a survey instrument that has evolved over time to capture both legal and psy- chological types of harassment. the survey presents respondents with a list of twenty-three types of behaviors and asks, “in the past months, have you ever been in a work situation where one or more individuals [behaved in this way]?” these twenty-three items are listed in table . our measurement of list-based sex- ual harassment takes the value one for women who experienced any one of the twenty-three behaviors in the last twelve months, and a zero otherwise. the second measurement of sexual harassment in japan and the united states is a subjective measure. the respondent is simply asked if they were “sexually ha- rassed” in the last twelve months. our measurement of subjective sexual harassment takes the value one for women who answer affirmatively to this question, and zero otherwise. it is well documented that such subjective questions generate lower re- ported rates of sexual harassment than list-based measures. this is because re- spondents fail to define less severe incidents at work as sexual harassment, and hence omit less severe or frequent incidents. w e used the same definition of supervisors in all three countries. re-spondents are defined as supervisors if they reported that at least some part of their job involved “leading or delegating work for other employees.” this includes all people who supervise others, from team leaders to ceos. the proportion of women who were supervisors was percent (n= , ) in the swedish data. in the u.s. and japanese data, we oversampled supervisors to increase the precision of our statistical tests. sixty-two percent of respondents were supervisors in our u.s. data (n= ) and percent were supervisors in the japanese data (n= ). we asked survey respondents to identify their precise type of leadership position, which we return to below. figure compares the rates of sexual harassment in the last twelve months be- tween employees and supervisors. across all three countries, and for both the list- based and subjective measures, we find that supervisors face much more harass- ment. the smallest difference is found in the swedish case. still, supervisors re- port a percent higher rate of harassment ( percent of supervisors compared with percent of employees report sexual harassment in the last twelve months). in the united states, we find a percent higher rate for supervisors ( versus dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders sexist hostility (insulting, degrading, or contemptuous attitudes about women) • treated you differently because of your sex? • displayed, used, or distributed sexist or sexually suggestive materials? • made offensive sexist remarks? • put you down or was condescending to you because of your sex? sexual hostility (sexual and obviously hostile behaviors) • repeatedly told sexual stories or jokes that were offensive to you? • whistled, called, or hooted at you in a sexual way? • made unwelcome attempts to draw you into a discussion of sexual matters? • made crude and offensive sexual remarks, either publicly or to you privately? • made offensive remarks about your appearance, body or sexual activities? • made gestures or used body language of a sexual nature which embarrassed or offended you? • exposed themselves physically in a way that embarrassed you or made you feel uncomfortable? unwanted sexual attention • made attempts to establish a romantic sexual relationship with you despite your efforts to discourage it? • stared, leered, or ogled you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable? • continued to ask you for dates, drinks, dinner, etc., even though you said “no”? • touched you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable? • made unwanted attempts to stroke, fondle, or kiss you? • attempted to have sex with you without your consent or against your will, but was unsuccessful? • had sex with you without your consent or against your will? sexual coercion (unwanted sexual attention is combined with various job-related pressures) • made you feel like you were being bribed with some sort of reward or special treatment to engage in sexual behavior? • made you feel threatened with some sort of retaliation for not being sexually cooperative? • treated you badly for refusing to have sex? • implied faster promotions or better treatment if you were sexually cooperative? • made you afraid you would be treated poorly if you didn’t cooperate sexually? table list of behaviors in the sexual experiences questionnaire source: for more on the sexual experiences questionnaire, see louise f. fitzgerald, vicki j. magley, fritz drasgow, and craig r. waldo, “measuring sexual harassment in the military: the sexual experiences questionnaire (seq–dod),” military psychology ( ) ( ): – . ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi percent) for the list-based measure, and nearly percent higher for the subjec- tive measure ( versus percent). in japan, supervisors report a percent high- er rate than employees using the list-based measure ( versus percent) and, similar to the united states, almost percent higher for the subjective mea- sure ( versus percent). table w in the web appendix breaks down women’s experiences across the four types of sexual harassment (as defined in table ). in both the united states and japan, where the data allow this breakdown, women supervisors are the subjects of more harassment across all four categories. before turning to possible explanations of these results, we further disaggregate the re- sults by looking at differences across higher and lower positions of leadership, and across variation in the sex-compositions of subordinates. we first compare women supervisors by the sex-composition of their subor- dinates, divided into the three categories of “mostly male,” “mostly female,” or figure rates of sexual harassment among employees and supervisors in the last twelve months note: the figure compares rates of self-reported sexual harassment in the last twelve months between women employees and supervisors. the list-based measurement of sexual harass- ment consists of a binary indicator for any affirmative response to the twenty-three items on the sexual experiences questionnaire (see table ). for the subjective measurement, the re- spondent was simply asked if they were “sexually harassed” in the last twelve months. as de- tailed above, the subjective measurements differ in sweden compared with the two other countries. the whiskers show the percent confidence interval calculated from a regression of the outcome on an indicator for being a supervisor using robust standard errors. list-based measure subjective measure list-based measure subjective measure subjective measure united states japan sweden se xu al h ar as sm en t i n th e l as t m on th s (% ) employees supervisors dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders “about half-half.” figure shows that in all three countries, women who super- vise “mostly male” subordinates face about percent more sexual harassment than those with “mostly female” subordinates. one explanation for this pattern could be mechanical, where a larger number of men in a woman’s proximity is as- sociated with a greater likelihood that at least one of them will engage in harass- ment. this follows from the insight that “not all men” harass women, but that the behavior rather is concentrated to a small number of people with a latent tenden- cy to harass. this latent tendency is also largely unrelated to traits like income or education levels. with a near-random but small risk that each male subordinate has a latent tendency to harass, having more men among the subordinates will im- ply a higher risk of sexual harassment, all else equal. it is also possible that male subordinates are particularly sensitive to women’s leadership. in free-text responses in our japanese survey, several respondents vol- unteered that women managers could be expected to experience sexual harass- ment out of jealousy. for example, one woman wrote that she “cannot escape from sexual harassment because male workers feel jealous about her supervisory position.” this mechanism of jealousy from employees toward women supervi- sors was also mentioned during the interviews at the japanese firm. another way to interpret the result is that male-dominated workplaces are more likely in male-stereotyped industries such as information technology, con- struction, or finance. women leaders in these sectors may trigger more hostile be- havior from subordinates by being viewed, more or less consciously, as a threat to male identity. sexual harassment may even become a way of gaining or equal- izing power with those women. a telling example of a hostile dynamic appears in sociologist heather mclaughlin and colleagues’ interviews with women su- pervisors. marie, a project manager at a construction site, linked her experiences of sexual harassment to skepticism about her ability to supervise, being told that “this isn’t the job for a woman.” she concluded that in the construction business, “just being a female in management is difficult, and guys don’t like it–especially the guys that work in the field.” our results suggest that power in the workplace does not protect women from sexual harassment. but how high up in the hierarchy does this problem go? in fig- ure , we subdivide women supervisors by their specific position, starting with team leaders and ending with the highest executive level. this hierarchy was de- fined with the same categories in the u.s. and japanese surveys. the comparison of harassment rates is restricted to the list-based measure (table ), but the gener- al pattern does not differ across the list-based and subjective measurements. compared with employees, sexual harassment is dramatically higher at low- er levels of leadership, but the rate drops back down as we move up to the highest leadership levels. in japan, the harassment rate for the highest executives is not higher than for employees without any supervisory role, although the extremely ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi figure subjective sexual harassment of women supervisors by the sex-composition of subordinates note: the figure compares rates of sexual harassment in the last twelve months between women supervisors with subordinates who are ) mostly women; ) about half-half; or ) mostly men. figure sexual harassment across positions in the organizational hierarchy united states japan sweden se xu al h ar as sm en t i n th e l as t m on th s (% ) mostly women about half-half mostly men non- supervisor team leader section head division head department head executive se xu al h ar as sm en t i n th e l as t m on th s (% ) , united states japan number of observations united states japan dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders small number of executives in the sample makes this comparison somewhat un- reliable. in the united states, the harassment rate is lower for the top two posi- tions than for the lower levels of leadership, but is still higher than for women em- ployees. the reverse u-shapes for both countries show that women in low- and mid-level leadership positions face the highest harassment rates. these are, of course, the women who are on the career track to top positions in the future. several additional aspects of these patterns are worthy of discussion. first, we find that women supervisors are not subject to fewer episodes of harassment (see the web appendix table w ). reports of high-frequency harassment are rare, but are in fact more common among supervisors than nonsupervisors. second, we might wonder about the role that a woman’s age plays in the rela- tionship between leadership and harassment. comparing supervisors and non- supervisors of the same age shows a larger gap because younger women are more likely to be the target of harassment and, simultaneously, less likely to be supervi- sors. controlling for age, the level of harassment of supervisors is striking. third, perhaps the most relevant critique of our analysis so far might be that supervisors are more likely than others to describe events that happened to them as “sexual harassment,” and/or to recall such events. supervisors could be more aware of harassment because of education or status, or because they themselves are responsible for workplace policies to eradicate harassment. if these differ- ences exist, the gap in harassment exposure that we find between supervisors and employees could reflect perceptions rather than actual experiences. in the united states, the nonsupervisors were, if anything, more likely to de- fine behaviors as sexual harassment when we asked respondents whether or not they considered four of the items on the sexual experiences questionnaire to be “sexual harassment.” a slightly smaller proportion of supervisors said that they would “definitely” or “probably” define the behavior of “repeatedly telling sex- ual stories or offensive jokes” as harassment ( versus percent). very similar rates were also recorded for “treating others differently because of their sex” ( versus percent) and for “staring, leering or ogling another person in a way that make them feel uncomfortable” ( versus percent). a high but slightly lower proportion of supervisors ( versus percent) said that “making another per- son feel threatened with some sort of retaliation for not being sexually coopera- tive” was “probably” or “definitely” sexual harassment. w hy do women supervisors experience more sexual harassment? sexu-al harassment is sometimes about sexual desire, but other times may be about status equalization. consciously or subconsciously, the ha- rasser may want to “put women in their place.” for example, laboratory studies have shown that men are more likely to harass feminist than feminine women. such negative treatment of women supervisors could be linked to a distaste for fe- ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi male supervision. this distaste could also grow out of unconscious bias about appropriate behaviors and social roles for women and men. leadership is gen- erally considered a male activity, making a man the prototypical manager and a woman manager a deviation from the norm. negative reactions that stem precise- ly from this type of norm deviation are a fundamental part of theory in sociology and economics about how social norms are maintained. retaliation against peo- ple who break norms, such as women leaders, helps strengthen the perpetrator’s sense of self and creates a cost for breaking social norms. notably, women supervisors may also need to break gender norms to carry out their jobs. assertive and dominant behaviors commonly associated with leader- ship may clash with the stereotypical perceptions of what women are or should be like. numerous studies have found that women who act in such agentic ways are perceived as unlikeable. animosity toward women who take charge and dele- gate work motivate higher rates of harassment against them. do supervisors have different exposure to groups of potential harassers? when a woman is promoted from employee to supervisor, her work environment is likely to change in ways that put her at greater risk of sexual harassment. super- visors are the focal point of their subordinates, and often meet with them one- on-one. (one japanese female senior manager mentioned that this kind of envi- ronment put her at risk of sexual harassment.) low- or mid-level managers also tend to interface more with top-level managers of the organization. those inter- actions with leaders might expose supervisors to higher-status men who can take advantage of their relatively junior position (following the intuition of catharine mackinnon). previous research on women supervisors also highlight the vulnerable situa- tions with high-level men that can form outside of the office. holly, the manag- er of a manufacturing firm, described harassment at a company dinner. as a cli- ent grabbed her leg and tried to unhook her bra at the table, none of her (male) coworkers–who noticed the obvious harassment–acted to stop it. holly held up the male-dominance among subordinates and clients as an underlying factor that allowed the harassment to take place and hindered intervention, pointing out that “i was the only girl there. there were no other girls.” this type of sexualiza- tion of women who are alone in their workplace roles is known as sex-role spill- over. for women who are alone in male groups, their female sex risks becoming their most salient and distinctive feature. they are viewed as a woman first and a professional colleague second. according to this logic, the power of a woman manager does not offer an escape, exposing her to harassment at male-dominated events. our data show that women employees and supervisors are harassed to some degree by different types of perpetrators, in ways that support our intuitions about the work environment. for respondents in the united states and japan, dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders those who answered affirmatively to any item on the sexual experiences ques- tionnaire were asked, in turn, to recall which incidents formed part of the most “significant event” in the last year. for this significant event, they were asked to check boxes indicating the identity of the perpetrator(s), allowing multiple an- swers. these responses are summarized in the top panel (a) of table . in the bot- tom panel, we further restrict the sample to include only women who were sub- jected to sexual harassment. in both countries, supervisors stand out as being harassed more by “a person in a higher position than your direct boss.” this perpetrator group is to percent more common among supervisors than among employees in the united states, and to percent more common among supervisors than employees in japan. another difference, which can only be detected in the u.s. survey due to the struc- ture of the survey, is harassment from subordinates. supervisors were more like- ly to be harassed by subordinates, but less likely than employees to be harassed by colleagues at the same level. the difference in perpetrator groups–with super- visors being harassed more by subordinates and higher-up managers–supports the theory that moving into a position of leadership means exposure to different types of perpetrators in the workplace. women supervisors may, paradoxically, be less likely to formally complain about sexual harassment, which could embolden potential perpetrators. this follows the intuition that a person with a latent propensity to harass will do so if the risk of punishment is sufficiently small. harassing a female supervisor would seem irrational if she can directly punish the assailant herself or readily access the internal complaint procedure within the firm. but using these tools may come at a greater cost for women supervisors. women supervisors may have more to lose, both in workplace status and in the legitimacy of their leadership. having already invested more time in climbing the career ladder in the organization, women leaders could risk more career and status losses from reporting an incident com- pared with women employees. our surveys in the united states and japan asked women to report which ac- tions they took after being sexually harassed. female supervisors, we found, were slightly more likely to take action than female workers in japan, and decidedly more likely to act in the u.s. case. japanese women supervisors were as likely or less likely to report to their boss or to a consultancy service within the firm ( ver- sus percent for list-based reporting, but versus percent using subjective re- porting). they were, however, about twice as likely to report to an agency outside the firm, where options in the survey included a labor union, a bureau of labor, a company that dispatched the worker, the police, a lawyer, the municipality, or a nonprofit organization. among supervisors, percent reported the harassment to an entity outside the firm in the case of list-based sexual harassment, and per- cent for subjective harassment. ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi table perpetrator types for employees and supervisors (multiple responses possible) direct boss person in a higher position than your direct boss colleague person from another division customer, patient, student, etc. subordi- nate a. list-based a . united states employees . . . . . supervisors . . . . . a . japan employees . . . . . supervisors . . . . . b. subjective b . united states employees . . . . . supervisors . . . . . b . japan employees . . . . . supervisors . . . . . note: the table builds on data from the sexual experiences questionnaire–significant event (seq-se). women who reported sexual harassment in the last twelve months were asked to re- call the most significant of these events, if there were more than one. they were then asked to check boxes for which perpetrators were involved in this event, with multiple choices pos- sible. the table reports the proportion of women who reported some significant event by se- lecting from a list of examples (panel a) and by also answering affirmatively to the subjective question of having been sexually harassed in the last twelve months (panel b). u.s. supervisors were more likely than employees to take all three types of action: issue a personal protest, report within the organization, and report out- side the organization. eighteen to percent of supervisors who reported harass- ment took personal action compared with approximately percent of employ- ees. nearly one-third of the supervisors took action within the firm, compared with to percent of employees. outside help was sought by to percent of dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders supervisors, compared with just to percent of employees. in sum, there is no evidence that women supervisors would be more attractive targets of harassment by being less likely to take action, either personally or using actors inside or out- side the workplace. so far, we have shown that despite having more power in the workplace to take action when they face sexual harassment, japanese supervisors are not more like- ly to do so than employees. we conducted a survey experiment to shed light on a possible reason for this. the experiment targeted third-party advice to report sex- ual harassment within organizations. by using conjoint experimental methods, respondents were asked if they would recommend that certain women, described by a list of traits, should seek organizational assistance. the methods allow us to causally isolate the impact of women’s supervisory status relative to employee (nonsupervisory) status on third-party advice to report. japanese respondents re- acted to the trait of a woman victim’s supervisory status by becoming . percent- age points less likely to advise her to seek assistance (standard error = . ). u.s. respondents, in contrast, did not differentiate between supervisors and employ- ees in this regard. these results are described in the web appendix section called conjoint analysis. they suggest that more negative attitudes among bystanders toward women supervisors’ reporting of harassment in japan could be a reason for the relative inaction of these women supervisors. japanese survey respondents explained in free-text answers why they recom- mended women supervisors not to seek organizational assistance. among three hundred such answers, a common theme was that seeking assistance would be viewed as a managerial failure on the part of the victim. responses included, for example, that “a female supervisor who reports an incident will be viewed as hav- ing low capabilities for being unable to avoid or manage the harassment” and, similarly, that “she could have avoided the harassment in advance if she is in a su- pervisor position.” i n a final set of empirical results, we turn our attention to the consequences of sexual harassment and whether these consequences differ between supervi-sors and employees. our surveys in the united states and japan contain two questions on consequences. these were divided into two types–social and profes- sional–following on the work of psychologists vicki magley and lilia cortina. professional consequences are tangible, formal, and possible to document in em- ployment records, and might include discharge, involuntary transfers, demotions, poor performance appraisals, or deprivation of perquisites or overtime opportuni- ties. social consequences that often go undocumented may include name-calling, ostracism, blame, threats, the “silent treatment,” or additional sexual harassment. respondents were given a list of professional and social consequences and asked to report which of the situations applied after their significant event of sex- ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi ual harassment. we plot the difference in the proportion of supervisors and em- ployees that reported each consequence in figure . the whiskers around each dif- ference denote a percent confidence interval for the difference in proportions. there are two main takeaways from the analysis. first, supervisors face more, not fewer, negative consequences of being sexually harassed. one reason for this could be the pattern we uncovered of who harasses: higher-level managers are more likely to be the perpetrators. another reason might be that supervisors are more likely to take action against their harassers, which could trigger the retalia- tion against them. the fact that u.s. women, and u.s. supervisors in particular, were more likely to take action could perhaps explain the differences between the united states and japan. in both countries, however, women who reported their harassment faced negative consequences. in japan, two consequences stand out: ) more harassment, and ) a greater risk of being labeled as “troublemakers” in the organization. demotions and less favorable job duties are also more severe for supervisors, although the point esti- mates are not very large. in the united states, supervisors are more likely to be af- fected by the full range of social consequences, as well as denials of promotions figure differences across supervisors and employees in professional and social consequences from sexual harassment in the workplace note: the figure shows ols (ordinary least squares) estimates from a regression of a binary indicator for each social or professional consequence on a binary indicator for being a supervi- sor. the horizontal lines show percent confidence interval for the coefficient on the super- visor variable. japan united states - - percentage-point difference between supervisors and employees i was shunned or excluded by others at work i was slighted or ignored by others at work i was gossiped about in an unkind way i was threatened i was criticized for complaining about the situation i was blamed for the situation i was considered a “troublemaker” i was harassed again i was given less favorable job duties i was unfairly demoted i was denied a promotion i deserved i was denied an opportunity for training i deserved i was given unfair poor job performance appraisals i was transferred to a less desirable job i was unfairly disciplined social consequences professional consequences dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders or training. these results suggest that in both countries, supervisors have more to lose from sexual harassment. s exual harassment is a severe workplace problem. roughly half of all wom-en can expect to experience it at some point in their work lives. this prev-alence of harassment has been highlighted by the large #metoo movement and the numerous reports and convictions of sexual harassment that followed. our evidence refutes the idea that workplace power insulates women from sexual harassment. to the contrary, power is associated with more harassment, at least for women climbing the ladder toward higher positions of leadership. one reason for this pattern could be that workplace power exposes women to different groups of potential harassers. supervisors are the focal point of subordinates and also have more interactions with higher-ups in the organization. we do not find, moreover, that supervisors are less likely to report harassment. supervisors are at least as likely as employees to confront the harasser, to report within the organiza- tion, or to report to an outside actor. perhaps it is precisely because they are more likely to report that supervisors face more negative professional and social conse- quences following incidents of harassment. women’s continued advancement to leadership roles in the labor market is a necessary pathway to economic equality between men and women. it is also a prerequisite to make good use of human capital and to maximize economic effi- ciency. our analysis strengthens the insight from previous research that sexu- al harassment is a serious impediment to increased gender equality. sexual ha- rassment disincentivizes women to take leadership positions in the workplace, on top of the many other impediments standing in women’s way outlined in this vol- ume: norms that prohibit long work hours, friction in family life, and perceptions of unlikability when women act in agentic ways. it is vital that we grasp the ex- tent to which sexual harassment deters women from seeking leadership roles. about the authors olle folke is senior lecturer in the department of government at uppsala uni- versity and visiting associate professor in the department of political science at yale university. he has published in such journals as american political science re- view, quarterly journal of economics, and american journal of political science. johanna rickne is professor of economics at the swedish institute for social re- search at stockholm university and visiting associate professor in the depart- ment of political science at yale university. she has published in such journals as ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi quarterly journal of economics, american economic review, american political science review, and social policy and administration. seiki tanaka is assistant professor of international relations at the university of groningen. he has published in such journals as economics and politics, governance, politics and gender, and european journal of political research. yasuka tateishi is a consultant at the world bank, poverty and equity global practice. she previously served as a research assistant in the department of polit- ical science at yale university while completing a master of arts in international and development economics. endnotes catharine a. mackinnon, sexual harassment of working women: a case of sex discrimina- tion (new haven, conn.: yale university press, ). rosabeth moss kanter, “some effects of proportions on group life,” in the gender gap in psychotherapy, ed. patricia perri rieker and elaine (hilberman) carmen (boston: springer, ), – . claudia goldin, “the quiet revolution that transformed women’s employment, edu- cation, and family,” american economic review ( ) ( ): – . heather mclaughlin, christopher uggen, and amy blackstone, “sexual harassment, workplace authority, and the paradox of power,” american sociological review ( ) ( ): – . women supervisors may experience higher rates of harassment ei- ther because of the mechanical reason that they find themselves in settings with more men and therefore more potential perpetrators–however small a portion these perpe- trators might be of the population–or, more insidiously, because some men use ha- rassment as a way to bring women down. not all studies point in the same direction: a survey of , u.s. federal employees did not show a differential rate of sexu- al harassment across pay grades. see u.s. merit systems protection board, sexual ha- rassment in the federal workplace: trends, progress, continuing challenges (washington, d.c.: u.s. merit systems protection board, ). maria charles, “deciphering sex segregation: vertical and horizontal inequalities in ten national labor markets,” acta sociologica ( ) ( ): – ; francine d. blau and lawrence m. kahn, “the gender-wage gap: extent, trends, and explanations,” journal of economic literature ( ) ( ): – ; and marianne bertrand, “coase lecture: the glass ceiling,” economica ( ) ( ): – . mental and physical health effects of sexual harassment range from irritation and anxi- ety to anger, powerlessness, humiliation, increased risk of alcohol abuse and eating dis- orders, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. job-related factors consistently linked with sexual harassment include absenteeism; lower job satisfaction, commit- ment, and productivity; damaged interpersonal work relationships; decreased percep- tions of equal opportunity; and employment withdrawal. see sandy welsh, “gender and sexual harassment,” annual review of sociology ( ) ( ): – ; paula mc- donald, “workplace sexual harassment years on: a review of the literature,” international journal of management reviews ( ) ( ): – ; and louise f. fitzger- ald and lilia m. cortina, “sexual harassment in work organizations: a view from the dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences sexual harassment of women leaders st century,” in apa handbook of the psychology of women: perspectives on women’s pri- vate and public lives, ed. cheryl b. travis and jacquelyn w. white (washington, d.c.: american psychological association, ), – . see statistics sweden, “the work environment survey,” https://www.scb.se/en/ finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/labour-market/work-environment/the -work-environment-survey/. in the original survey, these questions read as follows in swedish: “med sexuella trakas- serier menas i följande två frågor ovälkomna närmanden eller kränkande anspelningar kring sådant man allmänt förknippar med sex. ) Är du utsatt för sexuella trakasserier på din arbetsplats från chefer eller arbetskamrater? ) Är du utsatt för sexuella trakas- serier från andra personer på din arbetsplats (t ex patienter, kunder, klienter, passager- are)? // nästa fråga gäller om du är utsatt för andra handlingar än ovan som grundas på ditt kön och som kränker din integritet eller är nedvärderande. det kan t.ex. vara nedsättande och förlöjligande omdömen om kvinnor eller män i allmänhet eller inom ditt yrke. det kan även innebära att man på grund av ditt kön inte tar notis om dig eller din mening. Är du utsatt för trakasserier av ovanstående slag på din arbetsplats från chefer eller arbetskamrater?” lynn andersson and christine pearson have defined workplace incivility as “low inten- sity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of work- place norms for mutual respect. uncivil behaviors are characteristically rude and dis- courteous, displaying a lack of regard for others.” lynne m. andersson and christine m. pearson, “tit for tat? the spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace,” academy of management review ( ) ( ): . louise f. fitzgerald, vicki j. magley, fritz drasgow, and craig r. waldo, “measuring sexual harassment in the military: the sexual experiences questionnaire (seq– dod),” military psychology ( ) ( ): – . following a recent survey by the japanese ministry of labor, we added three addition- al items in the japan survey. these are: “forced you to pour alcohol, sing a duet or [as- signed you] where to [sit] when drinking?”; “brought [up the] subject of your ap- pearance, age, and physical characteristics in a conversation?”; and “excessively ques- tioned or brought [up] your private life (marriage, whether or not you have children).” these items are not included in the analysis in this essay, but across all three, women supervisors face more harassment than employees. margaret s. stockdale, alan vaux, and jeffrey cashin, “acknowledging sexual harass- ment: a test of alternative models,” basic and applied social psychology ( ) ( ): – ; and remus ilies, nancy hauserman, susan schwochau, and john stibal, “reported incidence rates of work-related sexual harassment in the united states: using meta-analysis to explain reported rate disparities,” personnel psychology ( ) ( ): – . we can get an idea of the size of the bias by comparing our variable to a list-based measure from the national violence against women survey. in our data, the victimization rate among women was . percent in that year, while it was . percent in the list-based measure. see olle folke and johanna rickne, “sexu- al harassment and gender inequality in the labor market,” mimeo, stockholm uni- versity, . john b. pryor, “sexual harassment proclivities in men,” sex roles ( – ) ( ): – . reviewed in fitzgerald and cortina, “sexual harassment in work organizations.” ( ) winter olle folke, johanna rickne, seiki tanaka & yasuka tateishi george a. akerlof and rachel e. kranton, “economics and identity,” the quarterly jour- nal of economics ( ) ( ): – . beth a. quinn, “sexual harassment and masculinity: the power and meaning of ‘girl watching,’” gender & society ( ) ( ): – . mclaughlin et al., “sexual harassment, workplace authority, and the paradox of power.” as discussed in ibid. jennifer l. berdahl, “the sexual harassment of uppity women,” journal of applied psy- chology ( ) ( ): – . gary s. becker, the economics of discrimination (chicago: university of chicago press, ). candace west and don h. zimmerman, “doing gender,” gender & society ( ) ( ): – ; and akerlof and kranton, “economics and identity.” laurie a. rudman and peter glick, “feminized management and backlash toward agen- tic women: the hidden costs to women of a kinder, gentler image of middle man- agers,” journal of personality and social psychology ( ) ( ): . mackinnon, sexual harassment of working women. mclaughlin et al., “sexual harassment, workplace authority, and the paradox of power.” ibid., . following, for example, barbara a. gutek and bruce morasch, “sex-ratios, sex-role spillover, and sexual harassment of women at work,” journal of social issues ( ) ( ): – ; and kanter, “some effects of proportions on group life.” conceptualizing such women as “tokens,” rosabeth moss kanter discusses their great- er risk of being sexually defined on the job, most notably by being ascribed the stereo- type of the “seductress.” although this role is a perception, independent of the wom- an’s actual behavior, “her perceived sexuality blotted out all other characteristics.” see kanter, “some effects of proportions on group life.” lilia m. cortina and vicki j. magley, “raising voice, risking retaliation: events fol- lowing interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace,” journal of occupational health psychology ( ) ( ): . fitzgerald and cortina, “sexual harassment in work organizations.” ro’ee levy and martin mattsson, “the effects of social movements: evidence from #metoo,” working paper ( ). chang-tai hsieh, erik hurst, charles i. jones, and peter j. klenow, “the allocation of talent and u.s. economic growth,” econometrica ( ) ( ): – . mclaughlin et al., “sexual harassment, workplace authority, and the paradox of power.” rudman and glick, “feminized management and backlash toward agentic women,” ; arlie russell hochschild and anne machung, the second shift (london: penguin books, ); and folke and rickne, “sexual harassment and gender inequality in the labor market.” s jra .. global health, epidemiology and genomics cambridge.org/ghg policy and society original research article cite this article: evans dp, sales jm, krause kh, del rio c ( ). you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard: a mixed- methods study of perceptions of sexual harassment, assault and women’s leadership among female faculty at a research university in the usa. global health, epidemiology and genomics , e , – . https://doi.org/ . / gheg. . received: october revised: july accepted: july key words: gender; leadership; medicine; public health author for correspondence: dabney p. evans, e-mail: dabney.evans@ emory.edu © the author(s) . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard: a mixed-methods study of perceptions of sexual harassment, assault and women’s leadership among female faculty at a research university in the usa dabney p. evans , jessica m. sales , kathleen h. krause and carlos del rio , hubert department of global health, rollins school of public health, emory university, clifton road, ne, atlanta, ga, usa; department of behavioral sciences and health education, rollins school of public health, emory university, atlanta, ga, usa and department of medicine, emory university school of medicine, atlanta, ga, usa abstract introduction. the purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of institutional pol- icies and practices for the prevention of and response to gender inequities as experienced by female faculty working in the health sciences at a us research university. methods. data from the institution’s faculty campus climate survey (n = female faculty) were coupled with qualitative interviews (n = ) of females in leadership positions, exploring campus climate, and institutional policies and practices aimed at advancing women. results. two-thirds ( %) of the female faculty respondents indicated witnessing sexual har- assment and % reported experiencing sexual harassment. several organizational themes emerged to address this problem: culture, including cultural change, transparency, and accountability. conclusions. the findings reveal the ways in which university culture mimics the larger soci- etal context. at the same time, the distinct culture of higher education processes for recruit- ment, career advancement – specifically tenure and promotion – are identified as important factors that require modifications in support of reductions in gender inequalities. introduction gender equity and related concerns of sexual assault and harassment have received notable attention in scholarship, policy, and most recently, public discourse [ ]. the #metoo movement has produced a cascade of allegations against men in positions of power engaged in sexual misconduct [ – ]. reports of sexual harassment, assault, and gender discrimination among female academicians have also been surfacing, including in the health sciences [ – ]. the dearth of women in key health leadership positions, including in global health, despite large numbers of women appointed in this domain has also been highlighted [ , ]. for those women working in these disciplines in the academy, the topic hits close to home [ , ]. the world health organization (who) defines sexual violence broadly as ‘any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting’[ ]. in the usa, title vii of the civil rights act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex; title ix prohibits sex discrimination within educational programs receiving federal financial assistance [ , ]. under these laws, university responsibilities for protection against sexual violence and gender discrimination on campus include both preventive and response measures [ , ]. campus climate surveys have been touted as best practice for determining the extent of sexual assault, including sexual harassment, on campus and assessing awareness of the issue among students [ – ]. as far as we are aware, few universities have surveyed faculty in this regard. the national intimate partner and sexual violence survey from the us centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) routinely asks about lifetime prevalence statistics for rape, attempted rape, intimate partner violence, and stalking [ ]. many colleges and universities asked students to report experiences of sexual violence since coming to campus. we asked fac- ulty about any such experience since being appointed in an academic position. in the summer of , emory university (atlanta, georgia, usa) conducted a comprehensive faculty campus climate survey (fccs) to capture the experiences of sexual harassment and training in sex discrimination, knowledge of corresponding legislation, and comfort with guiding stu- dents and colleagues through the disclosure process [ ]. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/ghg https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . mailto:dabney.evans@emory.edu mailto:dabney.evans@emory.edu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core research universities play a strong role in mentoring future scholars and global leaders in the health sciences. emory, as a research institution with considerable strengths in the fields of medicine, science, and global health, has the obligation to con- sider the ways in which its own institutional policies and practices effect the prevention of and response to gender inequities, includ- ing sexual violence, among female faculty working in these fields. utilizing a subset of data from the fccs and new qualitative data from key informant (ki) interviews, we explore the role of research universities in preventing and responding to gender inequities through the lens of one university experience. the purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of institutional policies and practices for the prevention of and response to sexual harassment, assault, and other gender inequi- ties as experienced by female faculty in the health sciences. methods study site established in atlanta, ga in , emory university is inter- nationally recognized as having excellence in the health sciences, defined for our purposes as medicine, nursing, and public health. the university is composed of nine academic units and coupled with the highest ranked health care system in the state of georgia [ , ]. emory university, including emory healthcare, is the second largest employer in atlanta with over employees and over students [ ]. data collection the emory university fccs was designed by a subcommittee of the emory university senate committee for the prevention of sexual violence to gather data similar to emory’s student-focused campus climate survey. the department of defense originally developed these measures about sexual harassment, and mit adapted them to include in their campus climate survey among students. mit was one of the first universities to conduct and publically share their survey instrument and results. we used these same measures with the idea to include the entire commu- nity in the campus climate survey, and in the absence of any guidance about how to include faculty and staff in these surveys. survey items assessed the experiences of sexual harassment during tenure at emory, as well as additional information tailored to faculty perspectives and reflections on their responsibilities under titles vii and ix. individual questions were asked about witnessing sexual harassment or experiencing sexual harassment. one question asked – in combination – was about either witnes- sing or experiencing an inappropriate comment. because this item is imprecise, we reported the results of this unique item so as not to bias the other exclusive categories. to complement the survey and further examine institutional structures, a ki interview guide was developed to explore two pri- mary domains: campus climate related to sexual assault and har- assment, and institutional policies and practices aimed at reducing gender inequities and advancing women leaders in the health sciences. while not intended to explore individual experi- ences of sexual assault or harassment, participants were asked to reflect on how these issues have been handled at emory and whether they had observed changes over time including changes in institutional policy and practice. probing, follow-up, and inter- pretive questions were used to further explore the topics that were brought up during the interviews including positive and negative examples of formal policies and informal practice. both the quan- titative survey instrument and ki interview guide are available upon request. participants all currently employed faculty and staff members were invited to participate in the fccs via email, having opportunities to com- plete it online between july and august . within a week of closing the survey, a reminder email was sent encouraging participation. out of faculty and staff contacted, fac- ulty and staff ( %) accessed the survey, and of those ( %) answered at least one question. of these respondents, % identi- fied as women, % as men, < % identified as transgender, ‘other,’ or with a preference not to respond; respondents identified as faculty and respondents identified as staff. the mean age of respondents was . years (standard deviation = . years; range – years), with . % of the respondents identifying as hispanic/latino, . % identifying as white, % as black/african american, and . % as asian. of these respondents, identified as women with faculty status. the survey data presented in this paper focus solely on these female faculty members. in january , school and university leaders were invited to participate in the ki interviews. informants were purposively sampled based on their background as faculty members in health sciences and/or their current position and its relevance to the subject matter being explored. due to time constraints, inter- views were successfully completed. participants included four university-level leaders, three of whom hold individual faculty appointments in one of the health units. additional participants were executive-level leaders from the schools of medicine, public health, and nursing, and the college of arts and sciences, which offers an undergraduate major in human health and houses several science departments. the fccs was considered institutional research and therefore exempt from ethical consideration by the emory university institutional review board (irb). emory’s irb also determined that the ki interviews were exempt from full review based upon the limited generalizability of the results. nevertheless, procedural steps were taken to protect the rights of participants and ensure confidentiality throughout data collection, management, and ana- lysis. verbal informed consent was acquired from all participants before the ki interviews were conducted and participants were informed that they could withdraw from participation at any time. there was minimal risk to the participants, as their partici- pation and the information collected from them were kept confidential. data management and analysis the survey was emailed to the staff and faculty by an external vendor. after data collection, the vendor provided emory’s office of institutional research with a de-identified dataset. descriptive analyses were performed in stata to summarize fac- ulty knowledge, attitudes, and experiences with sexual assault and harassment over their time at emory. all ki interviews were audio recorded and stored on a password-protected device. the interviewer took handwritten notes using symbols to identify salient points made in each inter- view. interview notes were transcribed and coded using dabney p. evans et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core maxqda software (verbi gmbh, berlin, germany). deductive themes originated in the semi-structured interview guide; inductive themes were derived from the codes using grounded theory [ ]. saturation for all themes was reached after interviews. demonstrative quotes for each major theme were extracted verbatim from the audio recordings. results two hundred and sixty women faculty participated in the fccs, with identifying their primary appointment in the professional schools comprising health sciences (nursing, medicine, public health, or yerkes national primate center). mean years of employment at emory was . years (range – years, n = ) with % of participants in tenure track posi- tions and % with tenure. the majority of participants identified as white ( %), % asian, % black/african american, and % identified as hispanic/latina. among qualitative participants (n = ), the average length of time at emory was . years with a range of – years. all kis identified as women; three were women of color. three core organizational themes emerged from the data: culture, accountability, and culture change. thematic network analysis was used to map the relationships between themes (see fig. ) [ ]. a global theme of institutional leadership was the unifying thread across these themes. quantitative data from the fccs relevant to each theme is presented followed by quali- tative data. culture campus climate was considered as a proxy for culture when con- sidering the quantitative data. since coming to emory, % of women faculty reported having experienced an inappropriate comment about their own or someone else’s body, appearance, or attractiveness capturing a climate of harassment. two-thirds ( %) of women faculty had witnessed sexual harassment and % experienced sexual harassment while at emory. among respondents reporting they had experienced sexual harassment since coming to emory, < % used emory’s formal procedures to report the incident. when asked in the interviews about their perceptions of how incidents of sexual harassment and assault had been handled on campus in the past, the theme of culture – both on and off cam- pus – clearly emerged. …we live in a culture that is misogynistic. let’s just be honest. so how do you fix something at a university level which in some sense, when you think about american society and american culture, is actually a very small, microcosm right? (# -sl) narrowing in on academic culture led one participant to a troub- ling comparison ‘universities are like the catholic church. they sweep things under the rug as long as they can, and when they can’t do that anymore they send the problem faculty away with a good reference. look at what is happening right now at michigan state. this happens all the time’ (# -sl). participants noted a historical culture of silence that preferred patience over action. the perception is this is an old guys problem…we should just be patient and try to quarantine people, i have witnessed a kind of reproduction of some of these behaviors and attitudes in the next generation (# -sl). a lack of onsite child care, and cultural practices like holding fac- ulty or scholarly meetings during evening hours or other times when women who are primary care givers are not typically available were noted as harmful and exclusionary. the disproportionate number of women in clinical research/non-tenure track positions in the fields of public health and medicine was also noted as an informal barrier to traditional pathways of academic leadership. when discussing culture and the sciences, one participant observed, ‘in certain departments, actually i think it’s worse in the sciences…bro culture, bro culture is alive and well’ (# -ul). women in the sciences were perceived as being held to a higher standard, ‘you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard’ (# -sl). another observed that science is inherently collaborative, requiring interdependency and understandings of hierarchy. yet, these same qualities were seen as, ‘embodying systems of patronage, favor, power dynamics that can be gendered, negatively gendered, and negatively experienced by women and very harmful’ (# -sl). variability across academic units came out strongly. it’s getting frustrating for women in the medical school at emory. the glass ceiling feels very real, very real. and you know, women might get fig. . thematic network. global health, epidemiology and genomics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core asked, women leaders might get asked to lead the search committee but they are not being asked first, ‘is this a position you might be interested in applying for?’ (# -sl) yet, these negative views were not universal. others believed that some disciplines, particularly public health, were more progressive than other science fields. one participant highlighted the differ- ence between public health and other science fields, public health is so many miles ahead of sciences—i mean hard sciences. the laboratory environment, and med school, and medicine, and that environment i think the whole, —it is a much more progressive culture. we’re much more aware and sensitive to these kinds of issues… you know, that is a culture of public health. we’re full of idealists who are more progressive politically; we’re more progressive on all fronts. and so, its not to say that we don’t have issues, it’s that i think the culture here is just miles better than either medicine or hard sciences. i think laboratory environments are very intense and problematic. um, and that that is a place where a lot of negative things can happen, uh, for women. and then, i think, medicine is often filled with cowboys who just don’t have a lot of respect for women. so, i think we are really fortunate to be in this environment relative to the others. i would never want to—to be in the other environments personally (# -sl). informal practices in support of women’s advancement included unstructured affinity groups (e.g. women in science at emory) and explicit attempts to amplify women’s voices in meetings, presence on committees, and in leadership (i.e. by nominating women for awards). accountability accountability in the context of the fccs was measured by knowledge of and experience with formal mechanisms to address harassment, assault, and gender discrimination. since starting at emory, . % of women faculty reported having received train- ing/education about sex discrimination, including sexual harass- ment/sexual violence. seventy-five percent reported they knew what title ix is and the rights it protects, yet only % knew who the title ix coordinator was or how to contact them. when asked who they would contact if they needed to report sex- ual assault/harassment, % noted they would contact their supervisor, % said police, % human resources, % title ix coordinator, % said faculty and staff assistance program, and % said another professor. overall, when asked if they felt comfortable guiding a colleague through the disclosure process, % reported they would be very uncomfortable doing so, with only % stating they would be very comfortable doing so. reasons contributing to discomfort with assisting a colleague with disclosure include % being unsure how to report issues, % difficulty of subject matter, % noting fear of misreporting, . % fear of inaction by the university, % fear of loss of confidentiality, % were concerned about how they would be treated, and % feared retaliation. both a lack of and a need for accountability featured prominently in the interviews. most often accountability was discussed in terms of interpersonal accountability between leadership and others in positions of relative power, ‘until deans and department chairs hold mentors and mentees accountable it’s [gender equity] not gonna happen…we need accountability’ (# -sl). accountability was also inclusive of formal mechanisms provid- ing protections from and recourse against gender discrimination. these included the title vii and ix federal protections and their respective mandatory onboarding trainings. while participants acknowledged emory’s actions toward compliance with federal reg- ulations, there was a perceived gap between legal compliance, a bare minimum, and true accountability, namely by key stakeholders in positions of power. the importance of implicit bias training in countering these behaviors was noted frequently as important, albeit with some caveats (table ; formal mechanisms). specific university policies affecting the faculty life course were also noted for their importance. policies related to diversity on faculty search committees and within candidate pools were viewed positively (table ; search committee composition and pools). formal processes related to hiring, tenure, and promotion came up frequently as opportune areas for improvement in considera- tions of women’s leadership in its varied and often gendered forms (table ; hiring; tenure process; promotion). parental leave, delay in tenure review following the birth or adop- tion of a child, emergency child care, and caregiver leave policies were all generally seen as positive; however, potential unintended consequences were important considerations (table ; gender bias in parenthood). numerous university programs were also tou- ted for either professional development or direct support to advan- cing women’s leadership – even if not solely directed at women. these included on- and off-campus programs such as school-level mentoring programs, the woodruff leadership academy, the academic leadership program, the oped project, and the executive leaders in academic medicine program among others. culture change the need for culture and social norms change within the univer- sity space was the perceived way forward among participants. education directed at senior school-level leadership (e.g. deans, department chairs) was notable. chairs have to be taught, educated how to interpret policies and how to talk about things like childbirth, children even let’s say breastfeeding in a way that doesn’t make it seem like it’s a burden or problem in a car- eer…i think this issue of seeing the female biological clock and biology as a kind of problem for career is part of the fundamental part of culture that we have to change (# -ul). additionally, participants recommended better data collection around women’s workplace experiences, transparency in faculty searches, the intentional mentoring of faculty, a need for ongoing conversations around diversity and power, and expectation setting for a culture of both diversity and excellence; two concepts which are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. others suggested the need to prioritize gender equity at the highest levels of leadership, setting specific diversity targets in recruitment and retention of female faculty, and ways to address the leaky pipeline. at every level we need to be thinking about what is the basis of the leaky pipeline and how do we try to not have that happen. are there ways to identify where people are stepping off the pipeline and at least provide support for staying on (# -sl). making use of faculty skill sets in the production of knowledge, ‘about systems of power and applying that to our own environ- ment’ (# -sl), was a sentiment that was echoed numerous times. what can we do within the university setting and what’s our responsibility to the larger society? part of the goal of any academic institution is to dabney p. evans et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core contribute to the common good…common good means helping to fix some of the larger societal ills around our misogynistic culture…i think our responsibility requires looking inward but also looking outward at what we can do to contribute to the common good and society. if we just look inward we’re going miss the boat (# -sl). a key feature in the likelihood of meaningful culture change was the role of institutional leadership. institutional leadership four of emory’s nine deans are women and the president is a female faculty member whose faculty appointment is in the health sciences. the thing is emory is actually doing pretty well in higher leadership and women, you know. so in many ways i am proud to say i work at emory for our particular president and at an institution that is, has placed women in leadership roles. and i think that again, is because we have someone at the top who is intentional about doing that…i think you could say that emory is a wonderful classic case of what leadership can do actually (# -ul). yet despite having achieved gender equity at the highest levels, one participant described female faculty as being ‘appalled’ that there was not a female finalist during a recent high-level search in the health sciences and several commented that the number of women chairs in the school of medicine is quite low. nevertheless, institutional leadership was seen as a key to advancing the strategy and methods to achieve gender equity for female faculty. participants acknowledged the varying needs of academic units. however, they uniformly agreed that school-level inconsist- ency and discretion in upholding gender-related policies have resulted in vastly different experiences for women across campus. one participant noted, ‘it is time to start acting like a mature uni- versity’ (# -sl). specifically, participants recommended that deans and department chairs be required to develop a diversity plan with concrete goals and metrics for accountability. in this way, school-specific needs could be respected while ensuring more uniform implementation of best practice standards for gender diversity and equity. the hiring of chief diversity officers within academic units was viewed as a positive development. accurate budgeting to account for parental leave as the standard practice was another strong recommendation. greater transparency at the school-level in terms of compensation across faculty rank and gender, and policies for search committees and tenure review were desired. table . subthemes of accountability and demonstrative quotes among female faculty key informants accountability subtheme quote formal mechanisms ‘i do know emory has made great strides in having beefed up, or maybe having created office of equity and inclusion, and they do i think good work on compliance in some respects and that is definitely an improvement. the challenge is always in the weeds. people in positions of power have to do what they need to do when they know that someone is violating the policies’ (# -ul). ‘it’s not about having best practices. it’s about applying strategies and holding people accountable…but training doesn’t really equate to moving the needle. so, we all say we’ll do better, and we go back to our units and we have a search and we forget to do better. or we do better, or we think we’ve done better because we’ve been able to check the box that we have a woman in the search and that we have a minority in the search. but to really do better, someone has to hold people accountable for that. to date we really haven’t had a robust strategy for holding departments, department chairs, search committees we haven’t had a strategy to hold them accountable. so you don’t see the needle moving’ (# -ul). faculty life course search committee composition and pools ‘we have some good guidelines for how to create a diverse pool, including gender…we need put some real teeth into our expectations, that pools are diverse and if there are not diverse then searches won’t go forward. i think there are things that we can do to implement our own expectations around hiring that would help to get more women in leadership or more women in science’ (# -ul). hiring ‘have to say i’ve never heard that mentioned about a man. about whether they have a spouse that would need accommodations in terms of employment. again, i have never heard that raised about a man that was interviewing for job. i think i hear it every single time about a woman who is being recruited…you know stuff like that still very much happens on a pretty regular basis, here and lots of other places’ (# -ul). tenure process ‘apt [appointments, promotions and tenure committee] values members in national academy of science, national academy of medicine, you look at the numbers and it is ridiculous how disproportionality male dominated it is. maybe, either we should really be trying to figure out how to get women in or we should discount these organizations that are completely, good ole boys clubs…so that would be something that the apt-level that maybe we could at least discuss’ (# -sl). promotion ‘when women become associate professors they start doing service, and they do more service than men. i think the heavy reliance on women, and particularly minority women, to do service for the university on committees, to do the kind of housekeeping of the university i think hampers their ability to get promoted…which means we end up with full professors who are largely male’ (# -ul). gender bias in parenthood ‘they see it as someone having more time, and therefore they should have gotten more done. so the bar is raised for that extra year. and that’s just crazy. it’s not uncommon that you have to remind somebody that it wasn’t an extra year’ (# -ul). ‘sabbatical under the guise of parental leave…fathers who aren’t primary care givers get an extra year and outpace the productivity of their female counterparts’ (# -sl). global health, epidemiology and genomics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core one participant summed up the role of leadership succinctly, i’m not optimistic that gender bias is ever gonna go away anytime soon. i’m not optimistic about that because i think it’s a problem that will always exist. it’s just how we deal with it that will matter. and not just how we deal with it at here at emory but how institutions in general deal with inequities (# -ul). the fccs was not mandatory, so the data reflects the experiences of those who opted to participate. to protect confidentiality, we did not capture any data on those who chose not to participate in the survey. as a result, we do not have a formal way to compare respondents to non-respondents. it is possible that respondents differed in some way from non-respondents. the qualitative inter- views are limited in that they were conducted in the months fol- lowing the #metoo movement when there was heightened attention to issues of sexual harassment, and assault. these data were undoubtedly influenced by this parallel social phenomenon. while not generalizable, the qualitative findings of this study may be transferable to similar university settings. discussion we examined the perceptions of female health sciences faculty with regards to policies and practices for the prevention of and response to sexual harassment, assault, and other gender inequi- ties. two-thirds ( %) of our respondents reported witnessing sexual harassment and nearly one-third ( %) reported experien- cing it underscoring how prevalent psychological forms of gender-based violence – like sexual harassment – are. despite widespread training on existing policies and protections ( . %), only % had ever used a formal reporting mechanism. our qualitative data revealed a culture of silence with participants expressing a range of reasons for not disclosing their experiences, not dissimilar to other forms of gender-based violence. linked to this, university response to sexual harassment was seen as driven solely by compliance requirements. variance across academic departments and units either lessened or worsened perceived gen- der inequities with medical settings and laboratories seen as more difficult environments than that of public health. there was a clear demand for institutional-wide metrics for accountability and greater transparency. campus climate survey research is a nascent field. our survey – among the first of its kind – was implemented in response to federal recommendations and designed to inform policy at the campus and federal level. these kinds of surveys make an important contribu- tion to our understanding of campus sexual violence but they have limitations. standardization of sexual violence measures and sharing results need to be implemented [ ]; still, the effort to study campus sexual violence on each campus through quantitative and qualitative methods is an important aim. discussing these data, the challenges and limitations in gathering these data, and the implications of these data are an important way to understand cam- pus sexual violence on the frontlines of where it occurs – within campuses. few colleges and universities surveyed faculty and staff experi- ences of sexual harassment and campus climate; emory’s commit- ment to include the entire campus community is a strength. the downside, however, is that it is difficult to find analogous data to compare emory’s response rate, findings, etc. the response rate for our faculty/staff survey was %. a systematic review of campus climate surveys among students found that the modal response rate was between % and % [ ]. our response rate was congruent with that of campus climate surveys among students. as expected, the percentage of respondents who have wit- nessed sexual harassment was higher than the percentage who directly experienced sexual harassment for a number of reasons. first, multiple people could report seeing the same incident, and second, it is more likely to witness sexual harassment than to be a target of it. our findings on the experiences and perceptions of female fac- ulty working in the health sciences are also consistent with other research on misogyny in the stem fields [ ]. these similarities include experiences of harassment, squandering women’s poten- tial along the ‘leaky pipeline,’ and impediments to women’s advancement in leadership [ ]. among our participants, the cul- ture within the us national context, on the university campus and within the sciences, was seen as playing a major role in creating a permissive environment for informal practices which resulted in harm to women in their career development and lives. when female faculty are experiencing harassment and gender discrimin- ation themselves, it is difficult to create a campus culture where female students are encouraged to thrive thereby perpetuating the cycle of inequity. conclusions as the training ground and future workplace of many female scientists, university settings hold the potential and responsibility for the professional development and advancement of trainees and faculty alike. our data highlight the ways in which university culture mimics the larger societal culture; they also show the ways in which culture in higher educational settings is distinct – namely the processes of faculty recruitment, tenure, and promo- tion, all of which were mentioned as processes in need of improvement. while federal anti-discrimination protections were lauded, accountability among department, school, and uni- versity leaders was seen as equally important in ensuring gender protections. specific metrics, for example, on the recruitment of female faculty and accountability for those metrics is one example of concrete action. although not an explicit topic of our study, universities should explore how to protect and promote gender, including gender non-conformity, in a way that respects the inter- sectional nature of identity. transparency and accountability for sexual harassment cases are equally important. the university bears the burden of balan- cing the confidentiality of the accuser and the accused, while sim- ultaneously guaranteeing campus feelings of justice and accountability. data about most cases are not readily available, with only the most egregious or high profile gaining media and public scrutiny. when information is sealed and cases remain confidential gossip, rather than transparent, conversation is often the result. if universities are serious about addressing sexual harassment and other gender inequities, the issues must be mea- sured, reported, and transparently discussed. at times, this may require delays pending legal actions. following investigation and legal determinations, records should not be permanently sealed. proposed legislation for increased accountability among top university administrators is likely to spur conversation within higher education about what accountability for university leaders should entail [ ]. whether mandated by legislation or not, our case study strongly concludes that university leaders must under- take measures to support mechanisms for formal and interpersonal dabney p. evans et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gheg. . https://www.cambridge.org/core accountability among senior leaders in their institutions. in this way, the intentional commitment of institutional leadership to strengthening accountability can advance the dual goals of culture change, as well as facilitate the achievement of values-based diver- sity goals to ensure the advancement of women in leadership roles both within and beyond the institution. acknowledgements. the authors are grateful to emory president claire e. sterk for her review and suggestions to the manuscript prior to submission. we would also like to thank audrey copeland, abby gates, carrie ripkey, and maryclaire regan for their editorial assistance. thanks also go to the partici- pants in the emory faculty campus climate survey and our key informants for sharing their experiences and perspectives. financial support. this research received no specific grant from any fund- ing agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors; instead, it was supported through institutional resources in the form of the in-kind support of the emory university senate committee on the prevention of sexual violence. conflict of interest. the authors are all employed by emory university, the subject of the research. ethical standards. the faculty campus climate survey was considered institutional research and therefore exempt from ethical consideration by the emory university institutional review board (irb). emory’s irb also deter- mined the key informant interviews were exempt from full review based upon the limited generalizability of the results. nevertheless, procedural steps were taken to protect the rights of participants and ensure confidentiality throughout data collection, management, and analysis. verbal informed con- sent was acquired from all participants before the ki interviews were con- ducted and participants were informed that they could withdraw from participation at any time. there was minimal risk to the participants, as their participation and the information collected from them was kept confidential. references . brown e ( ) california professor, writer of confidential brett kavanaugh letter, speaks out about her allegation of sexual assault. the washington post (internet). sept (cited oct ). available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/california-professor- writer-of-confidential-brett-kavanaugh-letter-speaks-out-about-her-allegation- of-sexual-assault/ / / / -b - e - eb- bd dfe b_story. html?utm_term=. f d c b. . zillman c ( ) me too: how 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harassment, assault and women's leadership among female faculty at a research university in the usa 	introduction 	methods 	study site 	data collection 	participants 	data management and analysis 	results 	culture 	accountability 	culture change 	institutional leadership 	discussion 	conclusions 	acknowledgements 	references women and gender in contemporary european catholic discourse: voices of faith religions article women and gender in contemporary european catholic discourse: voices of faith alberta giorgi ,* and stefania palmisano department of letters, philosophy, communication, university of bergamo, bergamo, italy department of culture, politics and society, university of turin, turin, italy; stefania.palmisano@unito.it * correspondence: alberta.giorgi@unibg.it received: august ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: catholic women’s movements, networks and initiatives have a long history of advocating for an equal role in the church—especially in the north american world. in recent years, their presence and visibility has been increasing in europe too, also in relation to a series of initiatives and events, such as the mary . campaign in germany, which led to the launch of the catholic women’s council (cwc) in . this article focuses on the emerging discourse on women and gender promoted by the developing network of initiatives related to the role of women in the catholic church in different european countries. after reconstructing the map and history of this network, the contribution explores its emerging discourse, drawing on a triangulation of data: key-witnesses’ interviews; the magazine voices; social network pages and profiles. keywords: women; catholicism; religious feminism; gender; catholic church; feminist theology . introduction in recent years, the presence and visibility of catholic women’s movements, networks and initiatives have been increasing in europe: the mary . campaign in germany, the candidacy of a woman as bishop in lyon, the resignation of the all-female editorial board of donne chiesa mondo [women church world], the monthly magazine of the vatican daily newspaper osservatore romano, gained in fact wide media coverage in the countries in which they took place. even though catholic women’s movements have a long history, the current initiatives benefit from their resonance with the wave of women’s movements all around the world, which increases their public strength and visibility. moreover, the contemporary catholic church structure is partially decentralized: even though the pope and the vatican maintain a crucial role, central authority is slowly eroded by the autonomy of ecclesial movements and initiatives, and the relevance of national bishop conferences (dobbelaere and pérez-agote ; marzano ; turina ), and it is challenged by marginal voices (campbell , ; cheong ). scholars argue that the appointment of a pope coming from the “periphery” is an attempt to address the structure crumbling and stem the peripheral discontent (ferrara ). therefore, contemporary initiatives of catholic women may be effective in their claims. in , the catholic women’s council (cwc) was launched with the aim of organizing a network of groups and initiatives related to the role of women in the catholic church in different european countries. in this paper we aim to understand the discourse of this network: by adopting classical frame analysis developed in social movement studies (benford and snow ), we explore what the issue of women in the catholic church is (diagnostic frame), what the prospected solutions are (prognostic frame) and what the reasons why the catholic church should change (motivational frame). in addition, we analyze the portraits of catholic women emerging in the discourse. religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of data stem from content and discourse analysis of the magazine voices, and key-witnesses’ interviews with the italian group affiliated to the cwc, donne per la chiesa (women for the church). the analysis that we present here is part of a larger project dedicated to the analysis of women’s activism in the catholic church. the article is structured as follows: the next section provides an overview of women’s activism in the catholic church, proposing a typology of initiatives, movements and campaigns. the third section introduces the cwc and its organization, while section four describes what emerged in frame analysis. the last section discusses the results. . women’s activism in the catholic church the relationship between women and the catholic church is particularly relevant, and the object of increasing literature (for a reconstruction, giorgi , a; korte ; woodhead ). first, women appear to be the large majority of the faithful, as shown by the analyses of catholic church attendance disaggregated per sex: even though it is declining, women’s participation in the catholic church activities is higher than men’s (voas et al. ; pew research center ). different reasons have been put forward to explain the gender gap in catholic church attendance, including cultural, such as socialization, and structural factors, such as gender differences in employment rates (for a detailed reconstruction, see palmisano and todesco ). in addition, the decline in women’s religious participation is a more recent phenomenon than male declining rates (brown ; palmisano and todesco ), which led scholars to point out the gendered understanding of the concept of ‘secularization’ (aune et al. ). in addition, many studies documented women’s role in the intergenerational transmission of the faith: the decline in women’s religiosity may heavily affect the future of catholicism (bengtson ; bengtson et al. ). hence, women play a relevant role in catholicism: yet, they have a limited role in the catholic church. catholic women’s movements, networks and initiatives have a long history of advocating for an equal role in the church —especially in the north american world. there is a wide literature on women in christian churches advocating for women’s rights, voice, and role. while some of these women then left their churches, others remained, trying to reform their institutions. in this section we propose a typology of women’s activism, in order to situate the case-study of cwc. for analytical purposes, we can identify three types of internal activism—which of course, in reality, intersect. ( ) the first type of activism focuses on theology: although internally diversified, feminist theology, thealogy (goldenberg ), and queer theology (athaus-reid ) reconsider gender normativity of religious traditions, practices and scriptures. feminist theology, in particular, deconstructs the gender paradigms in the theological realm, thus creating room for redefining women’s role. also, scholars in feminist theology seek to give voice to women theologians who have been forgotten, such as hildegard of bingen. according to radford ruether ( ), catholic feminist theology has developed especially since the late s in north america in relation to three main factors. first, the civil rights and women’s movements provided a cultural context of activism and awareness also for women in the catholic church. second, the gradual access of women to theological education and ministry, particularly in liberal protestantism, and later on, the access to ordination, contributed to catholic women’s rethinking of their role in the catholic church. also, due to a renewed ecumenism between catholics and protestants in north america, the chance was offered to catholic women to access critical theological education in protestant-led prominent universities. third, vatican council ii was enthusiastically received among sections of north american catholics and this created a climate of activism and expectation for change. progressive american nuns adopted a feminist critique, and female catholic theologians raised to prominence: “mary daly, rosemary ruether, elizabeth schussler fiorenza, who begin their feminist theological work in the late s to mid- s, we do not consider, here, outward activism, addressing the entire society (see, for example zwissler ). religions , , of to be followed by a number of others, such as margaret farley, mary jo weaver, elizabeth johnson, and susan ross” (radford ruether , p. ). in time, feminist theology diversified, and womanist (crossing black feminism), and mujerista (with specific latino voice) theologies have been established. all around the world, christian—and catholic—feminist theologians coordinate in networks and local groups that organize publications, meetings and conferences. relevant voices have developed in europe too, especially in germany and the uk, such as those of elisabeth gössmann, kari børresen, and ursula king. a uk-based scholarly journal, feminist theology, collects their voices. while in north america catholic feminist theology is an institutionalized voice, in europe feminist theologians had fewer opportunities: catholic feminist voices emerged especially in an ecumenical and academic context and are marginalized by the catholic church. ( ) a second type of activism, directly related to feminist theology, is expressed by the movements that aim at redefining the organizational structure of the catholic church, particularly with regard to women’s role. one example is the roman catholic womenpriests movement, which started in with the women’s ordination conference in detroit (michigan), then expanded to other countries (the firsts in , were canada and germany) and which is organized nowadays in a worldwide network women’s ordination worldwide (wow). the movement was actually able to find catholic bishops willing to ordain women: the first consecration took place on a ship on the danube in , when seven women were ordained to priesthood, the ‘danube seven’—and then others followed in every continent (daigler ; murphy ). the validity of their ordination is of course in debate, as the vatican does not acknowledge women’s possibility of administering liturgy and the danube seven were excommunicated: in their declaration, the seven women interpret their gesture as a prophetic sign of protest against women’s discrimination. as explored by barbara velik-franck in her analysis of the ‘danube seven’ motivations and understandings of their action, women are already in the church—yet, they are not fully visible. in the danube action, these women took a step back from the blurred visibility they might achieve in the church, to become fully visible as heterotopia, on a moving boat that constructed a symbolic counter-visibility, a counter-perspective from which to look at and be looked from the catholic church (velik-frank ). within the same frame, starting in the early s in north america and then expanding worldwide, groups of christian women also began to shape the ‘women-church movement’—autonomous feminist liturgical communities (hunt ; kautzer ). ( ) the catholic women council could be interpreted as a third type of activism, which does not aim at subverting theology or the organizational structure: it includes contemporary campaign and initiatives that locate themselves within the catholic church and it primarily aims at influencing the culture of the catholic community—which in turn would push for reshaping the catholic church organization and practice. this activism claims for the voice of women in the church to be heard, and claims for equality and recognition: also, it has developed in relation to the conservative and traditionalist turn of some catholic groups (especially catholic women’s groups). its visibility is also related to the women’s movements all around the world: the #metoo campaign, and the ni una menos (initiatives against violence against women) in particular (giorgi ). on the one side, this renewed broad women’s activism opened a window of opportunity in the public discourse and in the catholic discursive sphere for speaking about the violence, patriarchy and abuse in catholicism. hashtags like #inchurchtoo, or #nunstoo contributed to open a discussion among catholic women. on the other side, it worked as a source of inspiration and legitimation for women’s activism in different fields, including catholic associations and the catholic church. in this light, the catholic women’s council is an umbrella network that gathers all the groups working for the full recognition of the dignity and equality of women in the church, relaunching catholic women’s internal activism. . the catholic women’s council organization and network in this section, we introduce the catholic women’s council, describing its organization and demands. the cwc was created in stuttgart in , stemming from the “mary . ” initiative: during religions , , of the may devotion to virgin mary, women abstained from going to the church and from all the voluntary work (it was called ‘women’s strike’), and gathered outside the religious buildings in many german cities, celebrating and protesting. the campaign was related to the global protests against violence against women and was meant to raise awareness of abuse and sexism within the catholic church too. its demands included allowing women’s ministry and the end of priests’ celibacy (kötter ). mary . was a success, and it was supported by many local groups and organizations, including the project voices of faith (vof)—originally created to fund jesuits’ missions, the project shifted its focus on the promotion of women’s dignity and equality in the catholic church . outside of germany, groups from austria, liechtenstein and switzerland joined the movement and in november gathered under the umbrella network catholic women’s council. broadly speaking, the general relaunch and visibility of catholic women’s activism is deeply related to the vitality of catholic women’s organization in german-speaking contexts. in january , cwc organized a conference in rome, inviting groups and associations from all over the world to join the network, which then became global. founding members include groups—among which there are groups that promote women’s presence and voice in the church, also opening space for dialogue and debate and cooperation, such as the large women’s associations kdfb bundesverband and kdf—katholische frauengemeinschaft deutschlands, or the network andante or catholic women speak, or donne per la chiesa, in italy; groups advocating for the possibility for lay people to share the sacramental ministry with priests and bishops (#juniainitiative); groups advocating for opening permanent diaconate and priesthood to women (such as the small group aktion lila stola—purple stole—part of we are church in germany); there are also study groups, associations of solidarity, and monasteries; there is also one radio, based in south africa (but many groups are in germany); and we are church ireland (which, for example, want to promote a positive attitude towards sexuality and the removal of the obligation of clerical celibacy). even though it is not a mass movement, the groups included in this network are able to mobilize interest from catholic groups and grassroots movements and, in some cases, from the clergy. one of the interesting aspects of the cwc action is the public character of the initiatives: while the catholic church is the primary target, society at large is also part of the larger audience, as the network is particularly interested in public and media visibility. the groups demands are partially diverse from one another, but they all share the sense of being and the commitment to promote women’s dignity and equality in the catholic church. broadly speaking, these groups gather catholic women protesting against what they consider to be ‘churchsplaining’, heyder ( ) puts it—the patronizing explanation of church matters by the male clergy only. the criticism against the ‘clerical power’, which manifests itself in the exclusion of women from the clergy and, more broadly, the exclusion of the faithful from the catholic church decision-making is, in fact, the object or the theological and spiritual reflections of contemporary catholic women engaged with these groups (eckholt ). the main form of action of the cwc is the current pilgrimage to rome, which started in , on the international women’s day, and it was scheduled to end in november —now postponed to march , due to the coronavirus outbreak—when the network will meet in rome and will bring its reflections to the vatican. this pilgrimage is virtual and multi-sited: the underlying idea is that each group organize meetings, prayers, and discussions around the topics related to women’s equality in the church and articulates its demands, using the materials provided by the cwc alongside theirs. due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, however, many meetings took place online and reconfigured as international conversations and dialogues around six themes: sacramental life; power and participation; theology, language and representation; structures, accountability and communication; vulnerability, resistance and hope; and women in the post-covid church. information provided during the first interview with a representative of the italian group donne per la chiesa, affiliated to the cwc ( july ). religions , , of . the discourse of the catholic women’s council—voices of faith this section introduces the data selection strategy and the analytical approach, offering a preliminary overview of the results. the cwc network, as well as its members, praise the plurality of voices: apart from the demand for women’s equality in the catholic church, all the groups share the commitment to dialogue and the acknowledgment of internal diversity and pluralism. we decided to focus on voices of faith (vof)—and, in particular, on its yearly magazine voices, because not only is it one of the founding members of cwc, but it also hosts its website and digital network. hence, we posit that vof positions are representatives of those of the other groups in the network. in addition, vof is a germany-based institution: this appears to be relevant in relation to the fact that the cwc was launched in germany and that contemporary women’s activism in the catholic church is particularly developed in german-speaking countries. on its website, voices of faith describes itself as inclusive, honest and open, respectful, unapologetic, innovative and bold, and faithful. these adjectives are quite interesting as they challenge the gender stereotypes connected to womanhood. also, the voices of faith defines itself as: . . . an initiative that creates events, media outreach and international network groups to empower catholic women into decision making roles at local and global levels of the catholic church. but we don’t only focus on the current and extremely patriarchal structures of this church. we also imagine and create completely new and innovative ways women can and must be included right now—without asking for permission. started in , the magazine voices collects the voices of women in occasion of events organized by voices of faith and, particularly, the yearly conference on the international women’s day, with the aim of enhancing women’s participation and leadership through storytelling. the stories and voices are mainly those of women who are in the frontline in the church and the broader society, from all over the world: women who can be role models for action in and for the catholic church. many of the women whose stories are reported, for example, are in leadership positions in the catholic church structure, or work in charity projects all around the world, taking action against exclusion, discrimination, human trafficking or violence against women, to make only some example, and promoting women’s and children’s education or local economy. for the analysis, we collected the magazine issues: first, we generated the documents’ word cloud, in order to understand their main focus. second, we coded the texts in the document according to who was speaking, her (or, more rarely, his) country of origin, and the main topic of discussion, for a preliminary analysis of the type of stories and voices populating the magazine. third, we coded the text and performed a traditional qualitative frame analysis to understand how the role of women in the catholic church is problematized (diagnostic frame), what are the possible solutions (prognostic frame) and what are the arguments proposed in support of the action (motivational frame) (benford and snow ). lastly, we coded and analyzed the discourse on women and womanhood emerging from the multiple voices of faith collected and shared by the magazine. considering the voices dictionary, the main focus is on women in the church and their multiple roles and is shown in figure . the words emerging in the picture are “woman”, “church”, “she”, and, to a lesser extent, “our”, signaling the overarching theme of the initiative. https://voicesoffaith.org/about/. https://voicesoffaith.org/about/ religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . word cloud of the yearly magazine voices. (source: authors’ elaboration, maxqda (edited stop-word list). the organization of the issues of the magazine mirrors the yearly conference schedule: after the introductory pieces, the first section is devoted to the storytelling, in which women working all around the world tell their stories, meant to be of inspiration for the audience and the readers; the second section reports instead the debates around the future of the catholic church and the role of women in it. although working in different parts of the world, the countries of origin of women whose voices are reported are mostly european, and, more broadly, included in the global north—see figure . figure . countries of origin of the women whose voices are reported in the magazine (source: authors’ elaboration). nonetheless, vof pays particular attention to inclusion and diversity: although in different proportions, the women whose voices are included report from different parts of the world, and what emerges is a complex and nuanced mosaic of different perspectives and cultures, providing information and inspiration related to different realities, and challenging eurocentrism. in part, this is related to the aim of praising pluralism. however, it also mirrors the position, in the peripheries, and the location, on the frontlines, of women in the church. as one of the women comments: “when women were not able to move to the top of the hierarchy, i wonder if their leadership focused more on moving toward the margins.” (voices , p. ). women are not in the hierarchy structures, but are at the frontlines of the catholic church action of charity all around the world, spreading god’s word and embodying the church mission in the world europe usa latinamerica africa asia australia middle east figure . word cloud of the yearly magazine voices. (source: authors’ elaboration, maxqda (edited stop-word list). the organization of the issues of the magazine mirrors the yearly conference schedule: after the introductory pieces, the first section is devoted to the storytelling, in which women working all around the world tell their stories, meant to be of inspiration for the audience and the readers; the second section reports instead the debates around the future of the catholic church and the role of women in it. although working in different parts of the world, the countries of origin of women whose voices are reported are mostly european, and, more broadly, included in the global north—see figure . religions , , x for peer review of figure . word cloud of the yearly magazine voices. (source: authors’ elaboration, maxqda (edited stop-word list). the organization of the issues of the magazine mirrors the yearly conference schedule: after the introductory pieces, the first section is devoted to the storytelling, in which women working all around the world tell their stories, meant to be of inspiration for the audience and the readers; the second section reports instead the debates around the future of the catholic church and the role of women in it. although working in different parts of the world, the countries of origin of women whose voices are reported are mostly european, and, more broadly, included in the global north—see figure . figure . countries of origin of the women whose voices are reported in the magazine (source: authors’ elaboration). nonetheless, vof pays particular attention to inclusion and diversity: although in different proportions, the women whose voices are included report from different parts of the world, and what emerges is a complex and nuanced mosaic of different perspectives and cultures, providing information and inspiration related to different realities, and challenging eurocentrism. in part, this is related to the aim of praising pluralism. however, it also mirrors the position, in the peripheries, and the location, on the frontlines, of women in the church. as one of the women comments: “when women were not able to move to the top of the hierarchy, i wonder if their leadership focused more on moving toward the margins.” (voices , p. ). women are not in the hierarchy structures, but are at the frontlines of the catholic church action of charity all around the world, spreading god’s word and embodying the church mission in the world europe usa latinamerica africa asia australia middle east figure . countries of origin of the women whose voices are reported in the magazine (source: authors’ elaboration). nonetheless, vof pays particular attention to inclusion and diversity: although in different proportions, the women whose voices are included report from different parts of the world, and what emerges is a complex and nuanced mosaic of different perspectives and cultures, providing information and inspiration related to different realities, and challenging eurocentrism. in part, this is related to the aim of praising pluralism. however, it also mirrors the position, in the peripheries, and the location, on the frontlines, of women in the church. as one of the women comments: “when women were not able to move to the top of the hierarchy, i wonder if their leadership focused more on moving toward the margins.” (voices , p. ). women are not in the hierarchy structures, but are at the frontlines of the catholic church action of charity all around the world, spreading god’s word and embodying the church mission in the world religions , , of the majority of women whose stories are showcased, or who intervene in the debates are either part of the catholic church—nuns, or lay women working in church-related organizations—or leading charities and associations in different parts of the world. these stories report experiences of activism, challenges, and success of church women working in deprived areas or even war zones, fighting poverty, human trafficking, natural disasters and, more broadly, crisis. the other stories come from key-witnesses, usually women who have been supported by church-related initiatives and missions, who felt inspired by the actions of role-models, or businesswomen who are also involved in charities. these are stories of overcoming challenges to success, which also praise the value of education and culture, while celebrating the differences. in and , two issues were devoted to the stories of survivors to gender-based violence and sexual abuse in the catholic church. consistently, the topics touched upon are mostly related to three themes: women’s role in the church; poverty, deprivation, human trafficking; abuse and gender-based violence. in the following sub-sections, we explore the results of the analysis in relation to the diagnostic ( . ), prognostic ( . ) and motivational ( . ) frames, and in relation to the image of catholic women emerging in the discourse. . . what’s the issue with women and the catholic church? the diagnostic frame clarifies the different problematic aspects related to the role of women in the catholic church: women are excluded from the decision-making, they cannot vote at the synod and are excluded from the institutional key roles, in line with the canon law. in addition, religious women are treated differently: for example, recently issued instructions for women’s contemplative life, cor orans ( ), redacted by the congregation for institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, confirmed the old practice of putting female monasteries under spiritual control and economic supervision, while male monasteries are autonomous. moreover, the contribution of female theologians is downplayed, as well as female examples of sanctity. in addition to the core issues, which consider the whole of the women’s situation in the catholic church, there are also other problematic issues, such as the disturbing fact that the catholic church structure did not protect abused women who suffered violence from the clergy—and, there is no possibility to appeal to an independent body within the catholic church, if the system fails. also, women working in church-related organizations (such as official press agencies) have career limits, occasionally described through the glass ceiling metaphor used for women in nonreligious institutions. the problematization of women’s role in the catholic church touches upon a variety of aspects. first and foremost, the catholic church attitude and structure are described as contradictory, in terms of discourse, pragmatically, and in relation to the reality of catholic church everyday life. in terms of discourse, a member of the lutheran church, invited to intervene in one of the first debates on the topic, commented: it seems to me that the church, which emphasizes so much the differences between women and men and the complementarity of women and men, should be particularly eager to hear what women have to say for themselves and to have a balance of men and women in its governing structures. this situation seems a little bit illogical. (voices , p. ) both the pope and the catholic church hierarchies constantly recall the importance of women, their crucial role in society, the catholic community and the church structure. particularly in relation to the discourse on family, the complementarity of women and men is a relevant discursive topic (ozzano and giorgi ; paternotte et al. ; avanza and sudda ; rochefort and sanna ). however, key roles are covered by males. catholic women discussing the topic point out that they are “church”: yet, they do not have the right to have a say in how the catholic church works, and in its religions , , of decisions. the term “spiritual abuse” is also mentioned but without prominence. this framing also includes the laity, whose presence and commitment are crucial in the church structure and praised by vatican council ii. in her intervention, one theologian explained: as lay people we simply don’t have a right to have a say in our church [ . . . ] our role can neatly be summed up as follows: listen, obey and pay. that becomes even more absurd when you consider that ordained men form only a super-tiny proportion of our church: less than . percent. (voices a, p. ) this frame resonates with (and echoes) the broader campaigns on reclaiming democracy and reducing inequalities. the catholic church is criticized because its “governance” does not seem to represent the majority of the people who animate its activities. numbers are indeed another version of the framing that focuses on the church contradictions. if we consider the catholic community, women are the majority—even though their participation is decreasing (palmisano and todesco ). according to the women taking part in vof events, among consecrated people women are roughly %. moreover, women’s numbers in lay ministry are significantly higher than those of men. religious orders, in particular, are praised as positive examples of church-related organizations in which women’s (and laity’s) capacity and strength are recognized, as women are often appointed in leadership positions. this is the case, for example, of caritas internationalis, pax christi, or the jesuit refugee service and its many related initiatives . therefore, pragmatically, it is contradictory not to acknowledge women’s relevance and leadership. in addition, considering the catholic church everyday life, the situation is framed as already changing, both in the “peripheries” and in the “center” of catholicism. for example, women from india explain how feminist theology is compulsory in theology studies in many seminaries. one swiss bishop comments that: “women in my dioceses are allowed to preach, even during the eucharist.” (voices a, p. ), and likewise in many german parishes. in many contexts, women already have administrative roles, and in female religious orders, things have already changed, as one of the women points out: sisters belonging to international congregations are influenced by feminist thinking and are making changes in their attitudes and also in their governance. they are moving away from a patriarchal world view to a feminist one and are making changes accordingly. so we hear of participative leadership, team leadership, consensus in decision-making, dialogue as a way of life, etc. (voices b, p. ) even though the catholic church hierarchy does not acknowledge the change, this is already in place. on the one side, women in leading roles are positive examples for younger women and the broader catholic community. also, it can be a stimulus for the catholic church to familiarize with women’s presence and acknowledge their relevance and competence, allowing them to access key roles and decision-making arenas. on the other, even though numbers and roles of women are increasing, there is still a long road ahead, particularly considering that, in the end, the power on change is not in women’s hands: to use the words of one of the women intervening in the debates related to this topic, the ceo of an international catholic agency, there are women in leadership roles, in the catholic church, but they are an exception. women are engaged, but: “are women engaged as family, are they engaged as guests or are they engaged as guest workers?” moreover, “are the voices of women taken as a little threatening or as enriching?” (voices , pp. – ). also, in some cases, the women who gain leadership roles remain silent on the catholic church contradictions, and they neither provide role-models for catholic women, who learn instead to be silent, nor for women on the outside, who are often unaware of how the catholic church is already changing. spiritual abuse refers to the situations in which spiritual of religious beliefs are used to hurt or control, and to the situations in which religious leaders abuse of their authority. some studies on violence include ‘spiritual abuse’ in the typology of abuse (aune and barnes ; giorgi a). however, research show that women are a minority even in those leadership positions open to the laity (qualbrink ). religions , , of this is a particularly important aspect for another type of framing that, instead of contradictions, focuses on the gap between the catholic church and contemporary societies. this frame, mobilized by young women intervening in the debates, highlights the distance between contemporary women’s needs and the catholic church response—including the role it accords to women. one of the young women, for example, says that “the church felt very removed from the reality i was chasing as a young woman: autonomy, agency, empowerment. i didn’t want my conversations with god to be censored by a group of men who didn’t really want to listen to me” (voices , p. ). another young woman, raised by a multi-religious family, discusses her unease with the catholic church positions on issues such as gender and lgbt+ rights: i think ultimately it was a battle between my sense of self, my moral compass and compromising in exchange for a “purer” catholic identity, and i wasn’t ready to do that. having always been on the outside looking in, i could not in good conscience endorse a system that makes outsiders of people for their gender, sexuality, and life choices. how do reconcile that with the teaching of jesus, who hung out with “tax collectors and sinners”, basically pious society’s outcasts? (voices , p. ) another intervention is made by a catholic homosexual woman who lives in a deprived context and runs a charity: she points out her difficulties in participating in a church that doesn’t make her feel safe. again, it emerges a sense of exclusion and distance from the catholic church structure and, at the same time, an implicit request—similarly to what emerges from the analysis of the debates of christian lgbt+ people, there is not the willingness of leaving the catholic church: on the contrary, it emerges the desire to be fully recognized as legitimate church citizens (giorgi b). these excerpts also point out the change in how young people live their faith and their understanding of catholicism, for which the structure and the community are as important as the personal relationship with the divine. the issue with exclusion from the catholic church, however, is not only related to the absence from the decision-making arenas, or the limited access to key roles: it also includes a broader sense of voicelessness, for which women are not heard nor listened to, and their opinions and feelings are not taken into account. as one of the women maintains: . . . many of us are bored at listening only to male interpretations of biblical texts, ethics, and ecclesial life. sunday after sunday, we are exposed to faith experiences made only by male, or interpreted by an only male priesthood. not to talk about the exclusive male language in liturgy, prayers, hymns. (voices a, p. ) this excerpt expresses the need for feminist—or, at least, female—theology, underlining that men’s and women’s experiences of faith, as well as their interpretations of the sacred scriptures, are not the same (cfr. radford ruether ). therefore, the role of women in the church is framed as both a cultural and a structural issue, ideally merging the first two types of activism mentioned in section . . . the many ways of valuing women’s roles the prognostic frame is strictly related to the problematic aspects: considering that the problem is both a cultural and a structural issue, the solution implies a change in women’s role in the church at the structural, the theological and the cultural level, although opinions vary in relation to which is the causal relationship and what should come first. broadly speaking: “there is an urgent need for expanding the roles of women, especially at the highest decision-making levels” (voices , p. ). the structural changes that women deem as needed range from radical constitutional and law changes to small adjustment of the church practice. considering the role of consecrated women, prognostic framing focuses on the need to reaffirm their autonomy with respect to male religious orders and other forms of authority, particularly in relation to monasteries’ running. religions , , of in broader terms, demands including the possibility of voting at the synods, and the institution of female diaconate—for which a commission was organized, without reaching any agreement . while some of the women whose voices are reported would pursue female ordination, or at least maintain the ordination as a “dream”, others do not. in between, other solutions are suggested: intervening in a debate on the catholic church of the future, for example, the theologian tina beattie maintains we are told that the question of ordination is ruled out. now, if we are asked to accept that and respect it, we have to see that in every other situation there is full and equal promotion of women’s leadership, that every position that not require ordination is equally filled by men and women. (voices , p. ) more specifically, suggestions include setting up inclusive pastoral, parish and finance councils: this would value the role of women and concretely equate their roles to men’s. in addition, women’s leadership should be relevant and visible. one of the women intervening in the debates point out that some pontifical councils—such as the pontifical council for the laity and the pontifical council for the family—could be run by women, instead of the male clergy. other suggestions mention the possibility for women to give homilies and be in charge of the parish organization. occasionally, the revision of women’s role in the catholic church is framed in relation to the broader issue of the role of the laity and the youth. considering that, as it emerged in diagnostic framing, the church is mainly populated by lay people, their voices should count in the catholic church organization (it may be seen as an issue of representation, as we will discuss in the next section). therefore, the focus here is on the reception side: the voices and opinions of women, young people, and the laity should be listened to and taken into account, in order to make non ordained people fully part of the church. in this direction, suggestions include setting up spaces for dialogue on the future of the church and critical issues such as race, class, lgbt+ rights, environment, and, more broadly, contemporary societal debates. for example, considering the role of young people, a woman suggests: create spaces for the voices of young people to be heard and listen to them. get into their skins and their experience of the world. learn from them and respect their agency to change the world. they are moving ahead at a tremendous speed in a virtual world. they cannot be stopped, but they do need your steadying hand. be honest and transparent and non-judgmental. help them to live the gospel message of love, justice and peace. (voices , p. ) in addition to structural change, cultural change is deemed as crucial: in women’s voices, cultural changes include change in the catholic church discourse, in training and education. the catholic church discourse, women say, should change and proclaim the full equality and dignity of men and women, and should give “the freedom to both women and men to realize their full human potential [ . . . ] emphasize more the common humanity of women and men and less the differences.” (voices , p. ). the catholic church discourse should change at different levels—for example, it is suggested to enhance the visibility and dignity of women by revising the lectionary and valuing the forgotten history of women in the church, as well as their contribution. during celebrations, in teachings and museums, women’s contributions should be made visible and valued, in order to create a counternarrative able to shed light on women’s presence in the church. the cultural change especially works through education, starting with young children studying catechism, who should learn equality from an early age, in order to create the church of the future. at the same time, it is suggested that men in key roles in the church structure undergo equal opportunity https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/ / / /pope-francis-says-commission-women-deacons-did-not-reach- agreement. other changes include theology: for the church to be inclusive and equal, it is said, there should be the space of liberating god from gendered constructs. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/ / / /pope-francis-says-commission-women-deacons-did-not-reach-agreement https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/ / / /pope-francis-says-commission-women-deacons-did-not-reach-agreement religions , , of trainings, and that women in key roles pay attention to mentoring young women, in order to start changing the catholic church culture. being role-models, and inspiring young women to participate and engage in the church and in the change is a relevant instrument for action. in addition, the cultural education and training for the priests and bishops of the future should consider the contributions that women made to the catholic church history and structure, including theology and doctrine. imagine how a young seminarian would come out if during his preparation he studied and understood the role of women, historically. not just in the church but the role women have played in leading government, business, non-profits and movements. imagine if every young seminarian understood that voice. what might be the effect when he goes out [to a parish]? that could be a good step. if seminarians really understood the history and role of women, they would want them more engaged. (voices , p. ) this excerpt also points out the relevance of speaking to and with men, making them allies in the cultural, scriptural and structural change of the catholic church. more broadly, partnerships, networks, and solidarity are considered as crucial instruments to advance women’s demands and the catholic church change. in practice, change is conceived of as a combination of a bottom-up and top-down approach. on the one side, church hierarchies should open the space for dialogue with women and appoint women in key roles. on the other, women are required to take action and clearly ask for change. many use the scriptural analogy “knocking at the door”, to explain the type of action that is required. others are more intense, as the following quotation illustrates: so we can’t just wait for the holy spirit to rescue us. we have to look for where the holy spirit is sending along the means to do so. often, when i begin to feel, am i saying too much too loudly, i go back to martin luther king’s letter from birmingham jail where he says, “we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. it must be demanded by the oppressed.” (voices , p. ) more broadly, women are requested to adopt creative methods and imagination to find new and effective ways of being listened to and included. women need to “stir the water” and not accept the status quo. the prognostic framing also includes visions and dreams about the church of the future, which is described as “messy, free, faithful, joyful community” (voices , p. ), inclusive and welcoming, which values all the voices, open to learning from the world. in terms of organization, some imagine the catholic church of tomorrow as a synod-based sisterhood and brotherhood. the dream that many women express is for the church to accept their gifts and to make women fully-fledged citizens of the church. to sum up, for many: “women already are in the church! what is missing is only to integrate them, to accept them and value them. recognise them” (voices , p. ). . . anger and reverence—why women should be included the motivational framing expresses the arguments in favor of change. in the case of women’s role in the catholic church, a variety of arguments is mobilized. in voices articles, the importance of women’s inclusion is often framed as an opportunity to stop women—and their children—leaving the church. an inclusive church is able to include and value the visions and desires of its different members. as one of the women points out, commenting on the positive examples of women’s inclusion and their potential impact on young women: “they are no longer forced to make a decision between staying in the church and being silent or leaving. instead, they are able to see that they can stay in the church and be who they are and speak their truth” (voices , p. ). at the same time, if women stay, children would stay too: reference is made to women’s social role as a mother, who is often the primary mediator of her children’s encounter with religion. in addition, contemporary young people who perceive the catholic church as an outdated religions , , of institution might be reintegrated as they see that the church is able to include the issues that are relevant to them—such as equality. discussing the future of the church, one of the women comments: the younger generation settles for less and asks more questions. in the last years, women have woken up and realized, “i am not just happy with what is at the margin”. they will ask questions and expect answers. (voices , p. ) more broadly, women’s inclusion would give a signal to all the laity that their church is able to face the challenges and the opportunities of contemporary societies, therefore preventing people from leaving the faith. in addition to not losing participants, women’s inclusion is also framed as an incentive to attract other people to the church. in a slightly different version, the argument for inclusion would use the language of brain drain, or talent drain, to frame the waste of resources that should be ended as soon as possible, because “the church is doing itself a disservice.” (voices , p. ). women’s inclusion is framed as an investment, from which the catholic church would benefit. women’s inclusion is also framed as necessary to improve the catholic church credibility in front of its members. an institution that wants to be able to speak the truth and being heard in contemporary society, it is said, should be held accountable for what it says and for its actions. more importantly, a trustworthy institution should also be truly representative—including the voices of all of its members. the inclusion of women’s voices is framed with the language of either diversity or complementarity. in the diversity version of this framing, women’s inclusion would be an advantage because it would allow for a wider imagination, leading to diversity of thought and making the catholic church able to fully grasp the complexities of the contemporary world through multiple lenses. in the complementarity version, women’s inclusion responds to the necessity of fully taking into account the human experience of love, which stems from the union of men and women. women’s inclusion is also framed in terms of equality and fairness: women’s participation in the catholic church mission, women’s feelings and faith, women’s capacities are equal to those of men. therefore, they should be included as men are. one of the few men who took part in vof initiatives commented on the experience he had during his training to become a priest: what attracts them to ordained ministry is what attracts me: a positive experience of the church, of priests who i admired when i was younger, priests in my life as a catholic adult who i was drawn to, who i found inspiration in, who i saw making a difference in people’s lives. this is the reality that draws these women to this ministry. obviously, it puts them in a very complicated, confusing, painful situation to not have the opportunity to even explore that call. (voices , p. ) women’s inclusion, then, would acknowledge the equal relevance of men’s and women’s experiences. as equality is one of the arguments mobilized for women’s inclusion, injustice also comes into focus: women’s absence is unjustifiable and unfair and should be fought against. the first article of the first issue of voices discusses the role of anger in catholic life and identity, starting from a reading in the gospel, and the speaker points out that: we are called in this gospel today and every day to never be apathetic, to always be angry when the holy is compromised. we are called to be angry when the dignity of people is compromised. we are called to be angry when there is sexism in the world or in the church. [ . . . ] our invitation today is to claim that anger, and in emulating christ, to turn that anger into opportunities for action to reverence what god holds dear, what god sees as holy and sacred. (voices , p. ) this excerpt also summarizes the overarching tone of women’s demands and initiatives, which are described as angry and reverent at the same time. as we discuss in the next section, the use of anger contributes to deconstructing the traditional visions of “catholic women identity”. another argument for women’s inclusion considers violence and abuse: women’s exclusion from key-roles contributes to their exclusion from the institutional culture and imagination, as well as to religions , , of their subordination to men. the topic of violence in the catholic church communities, whomever the perpetrator, has been traditionally neglected, with tangible consequences on women’s capacity to recognize an abuse (aune and barnes ). in recent years it has started to be discussed, for the initiative of local communities and, also, in relation to the broader #metoo campaigns (giorgi ). introducing the initiative on abuse and violence in the catholic church, one of the women clearly affirms: “yes, i am deeply convinced about that. a hierarchical and sexist church is the one that makes men violent and allows violence”. (voices b, p. ). as a call for action, it is sometimes pointed out that the catholic church is the only major institutions that exclude women. to use the words of one of the women intervening in the debates: the empowerment of women is a sign of the times. it is not about secularization or imitating the world but it is about recognizing that excluding women from the church does not conform to the gospel. it is not what the gospel wants. (voices , p. ) therefore, women’s inclusion would fill the gap between the gospel and the catholic church practice. this frame echoes the arguments put forward by catholic lgbt+ people to advocate for recognition (see, for example, giorgi b). women’s discourse often mentions the successful stories of inclusion and the positive examples both in the church and in the outer world, pointing out the action and mobilizations are effective and may bring changes: particularly, the success of the catholic church structure in the usa, the role of women in european local parishes, or the effective action brought about by female leaders in religious orders and charities all around the world. however, women’s requests also face criticisms, from some sections of the catholic church, and silence, from the hierarchy: therefore, especially in the last issues, the voices collected also manifest some uncertainty about the real chance to trigger an effective change. consecrated women are accused of defying their vows of obedience, while lay women are accused of wanting a revolution, and to follow the wind of the secular world. nonetheless, vof, the cwc and many other initiatives continue to promote campaigns for inclusion and for change. . . portraits of women the voices of those who intervened at the various initiatives of vof also invite to rethinking stereotypical images of women, in general, and catholic women in particular. i have lost count of the number of times i have heard women addressed collectively as tender, patient, sensitive, motherly, empathic, gentle, etc. (voices , p. ) this frame of femininity is also related to the “feminine genius” mentioned by john paul ii in the letter to women issued in and criticized by many women during the initiatives of vof. the feminine genius points to the nurturing aspect of women, their role as caregivers. also, the expression normalizes and naturalizes attitudes, such as sensitivity, and behaviors, such as tending to others, turning them into innate elements of femininity. the role of women as good wives and mothers, empathetic and accommodating, obedient members of the community, is seen as limited and far from everyday reality. as one of the women comments, “women are individual persons with different characteristics, different professions, different theologies, different political views” (voices , p. ). these tensions between female stereotypes and women’s diversity echoes the traditional debates and claims of women’s movements. moreover, the world is changing, and women in the church are changing too, in their desire to speak up and to find their calling. one of the women intervening in the meetings says that: . . . there are more missions in the church than just to get married, become a nun or be celibate. in reality, with my testimony and my story i have understood that many other women feel the call to do more, but do not know how to answer. do not know how to contradict society. (voices , p. ) religions , , of the lack of role-models makes it difficult to re-imagine a significant role for women in the church, which is different from the traditional ones. during education, as well as in families, gendered roles are experienced and learned, and it requires a conscious effort of deconstruction and imagination to re-inventing different paths to femininity. the president of vof, chantal götz, comments: i am often asked, “chantal are you angry? are you angry with the world, with the church, with our religious leaders?” it seems that women are not allowed to be angry. i am sometimes even told by my colleagues that an angry tone is not particularly good for a woman. not good for voices of faith and its mission and goals. (voices , p. ) as the excerpt points out, challenging the stereotypes also leads to criticism and misunderstandings. more broadly, it underlines the strict control over gendered relationships that characterizes many contexts—including, of course, the catholic church. yet, women are of course diverse: one of the members of the cwc network, catholic women speak , clearly states on the homepage of its websites that the organization consciously chose to use “women”, instead of “woman”, to point out and value diversity and pluralism of women’s voices (see also heyder ). what about women as social critics or social activists, like dorothy day? what about women who are scandalous, like dorothy day and mary magdalene and the woman at the well? what about women who are entrepreneurial, hard-headed, persistent and sometimes even defiant? like many of the women religious who founded and sustained their congregations, and the women who followed them and went into these territories to establish works? what about those women? what about women who really take the spiritual works of mercy seriously, like catherine of siena, who wrote words urging the pope and the political leaders to change their ways? what about those women? (voices , p. ) women at the vof initiatives point out the tensions around their catholic identity and the figures of women they admire, who are scandalous, critics of the status quo and definitely noncompliant (these are “warrior women”, as one of the other interventions described them). in naming potential role-models, they also contribute to construct an alternative image of catholic women: persistent, defiant and courageous. what emerges from the voices and the texts is an idea of femininity characterized by three interrelated aspects. first, catholic female identity is not submissive nor shaped by the “otherness” of men: regardless of the “complementarity” issue, what characterizes a woman is not the opposite of what characterizes a man. therefore, women can be as courageous as men, as heard-headed as men, as leading as men. second, the relevance of women’s role in the church is not legitimized or given by men: regardless of the structure technicalities, women are as part of the church as men. equality is a right, not a concession. third, women’s voice and dignity do not derive from women’s social role as nurturing mothers or empathetic caregivers: it derives from the common humanity they share with men. in other words, the image of the good catholic woman is not shaped by her femininity. rather, it is shaped by her militant faith. . conclusions: women, equality, and the catholic church the article focused on the current wave of women’s mobilization within the catholic church gathered under the umbrella of catholic women’s council, exploring the discursive space created by contemporary catholic women, captured in-between ‘impotence’ and ‘emancipation’ (see eckholt ). the analyses explored the discursive frames of the mobilization, pointing out the problematic aspects of women’s role in the catholic church, the suggested or dreamed solutions, and the underlying arguments for structural and cultural change. broadly speaking, the case study findings point out women’s ambivalent perception of their role in the catholic church: on the one side, they consider themselves a lively part of the church, and contribute to its mission in many ways. on the other, https://catholicwomenspeak.com/. https://catholicwomenspeak.com/ religions , , of they feel excluded by the church structure, which seems to not have space for their ‘gift’. women point out the absence of female figures in the catholic church structure and narrative. at the same time, in the interventions reported in the magazine, catholic women also provide a range of possible solutions, ranging from partial inclusion in local decision-making to open the possibility of consecration to women. the reasons for which the role of women in the catholic church should change are diverse: it is a matter of equality, it is an acknowledgment of the changes in the wider world, it is the rediscovery of the original roots and teaching of the catholic church. in this direction, the analysis showed the criticism of ‘churchsplaining’ that women moved to the catholic church institution (heyder ). also, the analysis touched upon the efforts in countering the stereotypes surrounding the catholic women, showing what aspects of femininity and womanhood are praised instead. the voices of women reported in the magazine refuse the vision of the ‘feminist genius’, for which women would be ‘naturally’ inclined to care and be sensitive. on the contrary, those women reclaim diversity, and the legitimacy of feelings and behavior traditionally attributed to men, such as anger (giorgi b). the initiative voices of faith is heavily influenced by the german context: however, the women’s voices reported by the magazine voices came from all over the world, as the magazine reports the interventions made in rome during the yearly conference organized by voices of faith with other partners. these voices testify, in fact, for a diffuse interest and sensitivity towards the issue of the role of women in the catholic church. in this sense, the results are relevant to the broader analysis of contemporary catholic women’s activism. overall, the analysis contributes to the literature on women’s activism and feminism within the catholic church (e.g., giorgi ; daigler ; eckholt ; hunt ; qualbrink ), and to the studies on current women’s mobilizations in different fields. the mobilization explored in this article is significant, in spite of the small number of women involved, for at least two elements. first of all, the catholic women’s council is not a fringe mobilization organized by marginal actors: on the contrary, it channels a feeling of unease felt by women who are already active in their parishes, their communities and catholic organizations and charities. what is described here is an internal activism, which seeks to bring about institutional and cultural change. these women do not want to leave the catholic church, and their activism is not an example of detachment from the institutional authority or religion—quite the opposite, in fact: traditional religious authority emerges as particularly relevant to the women who intervene in the voices of faith initiatives. the desire emerges to be recognized and included, which may be challenging for the traditional church culture and structure, but it is not meant as a challenge to the church authority. women’s requests do not go in the direction of praising different religious authority or communities—on the contrary, traditional authority is constantly reaffirmed. there is a request for “more” institution, for “more” adherence to the gospel, and for more inclusion. following the analysis of velik-frank ( ) of the first women’s ordination in terms of ‘heterotopia’, we could advance the hypothesis that, slowly but steadily, cwc groups are working toward transforming that ‘heterotopia’ into the reality of the catholic church the second relevant element we would like to point out, which goes beyond data analysis and refers instead to the social background of the case-study, is that in contemporary european societies there is a favorable opportunity structure for women’s requests of increasing their role in the catholic church. contemporary women’s movements, which have developed all around the world managed to gain sympathetic attention, which create a favorable climate for religious women’s mobilization. in addition, contemporary women’s movements are mostly attentive to intersectionality and women’s diversity, which make them attuned to connect with different actors and unlikely allies, such as religious women—even though the intersections of religion and feminism have a long history (giorgi ), mainstream secular feminism in western european countries is often suspicious toward religious feminism or religious feminists (van den brandt ). moreover, the digital arena offers an important platform for networking and for voice and public visibility. even though religious women’s demands are nothing new, their visibility is indeed increasing, as it is the sympathetic audience. religions , , of finally, we want to underline another aspect, related to the post-covid context, to push the discussion forward: having no possibility of going to church, and yet wanting to celebrate, in many homes a “domestic” church emerged, and some women also used this time to reconnect to the church. as the theologian tina beattie pointed out, “homes become a sacred place in which women have assumed priestly duties, transforming family meals into eucharistic celebrations or finding their own ways of actively participating in or creating livestreamed liturgies. [ . . . ] during the last few months, women have become priests of the household [ . . . ] when this is over, catholic women are not going to be pushed back” . therefore, it will be interesting to explore whether the post-covid church will have room for these women and how they will creatively find their path within the catholic church. author contributions: conceptualization, a.g. and s.p.; methodology, a.g.; validation, s.p.; formal analysis, a.g.; writing-original draft preparation, a.g.; writing-review & editing, s.p. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references athaus-reid, marcella. . the queer god. new york: routledge. aune, kristin, and rebecca barnes. . in churches too: church responses to domestic abuse. a case study of cumbria. available online: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/publications/in-churches-too-church- responses-to-domestic-abuse-a-case-study-o (accessed on january ). aune, kristin, sonya sharma, and giselle vincett, eds. . women and religion in the west: challenging secularization. aldershot: ashgate. avanza, martina, and magali della sudda, eds. . rispostes catholiques. genre, sexualité & société. special issue . available online: https://journals.openedition.org/gss/ (accessed on october ). benford, robert d., and david a. snow. . framing processes and social movements: an over-view and assessment. annual review of sociology : – . 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[crossref] voices. . all voices count. international women’s day . available online: https://static .squarespace. com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd dcb b e f a / / +magazine.pdf (accessed on september ). voices. . all voices count. international women’s day . available online: https://static .squarespace.com/ static/ a b d cb /t/ dd feebed bbb e / /voices_ .pdf (accessed on september ). voices. . stirring the waters. international women’s day . available online: https://static .squarespace.com/ static/ a b d cb /t/ dd c bae d c b fed/ /voices+ .pdf (accessed on september ). http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /fsr. . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/ http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . https://unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrhs/content/titleinfo/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd dcb b e f a / / +magazine.pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd dcb b e f a / / +magazine.pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd feebed bbb e / /voices_ .pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd feebed bbb e / /voices_ .pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd c bae d c b fed/ /voices+ .pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd c bae d c b fed/ /voices+ .pdf religions , , of voices. . why women matter. international women’s day . available online: https: //issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_ _iwd_magazine_ pp_issuu?utm_campaign=transactional& utm_medium=email&utm_source=conversion_success (accessed on september ). voices. a. overcoming silence. women’s voices in the abuse crisis. available online: https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd f f c a c / / voices+magazine+ .pdf (accessed on september ). voices. b. and you sister . . . what do you say? october . available online: https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/ docs/voices_mag_ _and_you_sister_what_do_you_say_ p (accessed on september ). woodhead, linda. . feminism and the sociology of religion: from gender-blindness to gendered difference. in the blackwell companion to sociology of religion. edited by richard k. fenn. maldon: blackwell, pp. – . zwissler, laurel. . religious, feminist, activist. cosmologies of interconnection. lincoln: university of nebraska press. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_ _iwd_magazine_ pp_issuu?utm_campaign=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_source=conversion_success https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_ _iwd_magazine_ pp_issuu?utm_campaign=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_source=conversion_success https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_ _iwd_magazine_ pp_issuu?utm_campaign=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_source=conversion_success https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd f f c a c / /voices+magazine+ .pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a b d cb /t/ dd f f c a c / /voices+magazine+ .pdf https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_mag_ _and_you_sister_what_do_you_say_ p https://issuu.com/voicesoffaith/docs/voices_mag_ _and_you_sister_what_do_you_say_ p http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	women’s activism in the catholic church 	the catholic women’s council organization and network 	the discourse of the catholic women’s council—voices of faith 	what’s the issue with women and the catholic church? 	the many ways of valuing women’s roles 	anger and reverence—why women should be included 	portraits of women 	conclusions: women, equality, and the catholic church 	references volume number : editorial all rights reserved ©, mcgill journal of education ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : mcgill journal of education revue des sciences de l'éducation de mcgill volume number : editorial volume numéro : Éditorial mcgill journal of education volume , numéro , automne uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) faculty of education, mcgill university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce document mcgill journal of education ( ). volume number : editorial. mcgill journal of education / revue des sciences de l'éducation de mcgill, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mje/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mje/ -v -n -mje / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mje/ Éditorial revue des sciences de l’Éducation de mcgill • vol. no automne editorial the nine articles in this general issue provide fodder for sustained meditation on creating environments supportive of student — and teacher — learning, as seen from various levels, perspectives, and contexts. these are followed by a timely and provocative mje forum on the subject of sexual harassment in the academic workplace / environment, to which submission of responses are encouraged for publication in future issues. we conclude with two notes from the field, one from the australian context, and the second one carter’s portrait of the teaching of theatre and drama in classrooms across canada: a french translation (by popular demand) of an english note originally pub- lished in the mje in . with increasing attention to creating environments in education characterized by health and wellness, jean-pierre and parris-drummond’s literature review is timely. they searched for scholarly and professional publications published in the united states, the united kingdom, and canada between and that presented alternative, non-punitive school practices. selecting publications, they were especially interested in articles that drew on theoreti- cal frameworks emphasizing empowerment or opportunities-to-learn, and that could offer practical implications for the classroom and school. the review provides a highly useful thematic and critical analysis of the selected articles. also on the subject of health and wellness, here in higher education, meunier- dubé and marcotte surveyed college students to measure the occurrence of cognitive vulnerabilities and depressive symptoms manifested before and during their transition from secondary school to college. as of the first year, , % of surveyed students reported moderate to severe depression symptoms. although a higher number of female students reported signs of depression, there does not seem to be any significant gender-related differences in terms of academic and social adaptation. the authors discuss how cognitive vulner- abilities may predict adaptation in this context. in a somewhat related vein, leduc, kozanitis, and lepage are interested in the cognitive involvement of postsecondary students. this involvement is defined as the use of studying and learning strategies that aim for a relatively good mcgill journal of education • vol. no fall editorial understanding of notions addressed in the classroom. the authors translate, adapt, and seek to validate the cognitive engagement scale survey, widely used in anglophone settings. their questionnaire, adapted with a counter- translation method, received responses from college and university students from quebec. the research examines the quality of the survey translated and transposed to a francophone setting. for their part, administrators, policy-makers, and educators working in the ontarian context may be interested to read segedin’s evaluation of the impact of the specialist high skills majors (shsm) program on student outcomes. comprising the third phase of the student success strategy, the initiative was intended to provide students with flexible alternatives in developing their career pathways. segedin’s interest stemmed from her work in schools with students who were at risk of dropping out. the article describes the study that segedin conducted, which involved analysis across student achievement data, school visits, and interviews with teachers and administrators at selected schools. segedin concludes that the program is beginning to make a difference, even as she also flags areas for improvement. the myara article provides a historical portrait of pedagogical intervention plans used to support students with disabilities or with adaptation or learning difficulties in quebec. by drawing from a literature review, she discusses the elaboration, the implementation, and the revision of an intervention plan in order to guide new practices using this tool. indeed, practices remain varied and far from being optimal due to time and cost-related constraints related to the development, acquisition, and use of an intervention plan as well as the training and collaboration of different actors. perhaps whatever change in education needs to happen should strive to begin early on: in the primary or kindergarten classroom. villeneuve-lapointe and charron’s action-research describes second grade teachers’ implementation of invented spelling. five teachers were first trained to integrate these new practices. then, the researchers observed each teacher’s classroom twice. the results indicate that because of these new practices, the students were able to verbalize their knowledge of the language. the teachers also created numerous links with other words, notions, and spelling strategies. the authors discuss favorable conditions to spelling practices that can develop writing competencies during the first cycle of primary school. how can teachers become more attuned to the gifts not just that students but that families bring to the kindergarten classroom? preston, mcphee and roach o’keefe conducted a study with kindergarten teachers on prince edward island — a robust sample representing % of all kindergarten teachers on the island — in which they asked teachers about how parents were involved in their classrooms and challenges parents faced in becoming involved. in the article, they summarize their analysis of the teachers’ responses, positing Éditorial revue des sciences de l’Éducation de mcgill • vol. no automne “family vibrancy” as a needed approach and change in mindset for teachers to draw on families’ strengths in encouraging their involvement in their children’s learning in and outside of the classroom. professional development, in teacher education and with practicing teachers, remains a key focus — here, effective integration of new technologies using such tools as online communities of practice and the implications of research on implementing effective fsl programs. tremblay and dion routhier are interested in the professional development of teachers who seek to integrate new technologies. the authors collected their data during a university training that focused on knowledge co-creation through the use of an online forum and the subsequent establishment of a community of practice. the discussion of the results highlights engagement factors of an online community of practice for professional development. three dimensions are identified and analyzed with regards to the integration of new technologies: accessibility, participation, and recognition. arnett’s longitudinal case study examines four new french as a second language (fsl) teachers’ beliefs regarding the best and worst fsl program for english language learners and students with learning difficulties. semi-structured inter- views took place at the end of participants’ bachelor of education programs. participants preferred the french immersion (fi) program as means of gain- ing french proficiency. where participants were grounded in their beliefs of scientific concepts of pedagogy, this study revealed that these beliefs were less likely to change over time when not accompanied by lived experiences. the fact that in several of the responses, participants focused on the nature of a student’s disability as a factor in teacher decision-making revealed some areas of concern for ensuring that students with lds are meaningfully included in the fsl classroom. “call it by its name” is the advice — and title — that hurren gives to her highly useful glossary of terms (obfuscations included) tied to the perpetuation of cultures of sexual harassment among faculty members in the academic work- place. timely given the openings created through the #metoo movement, this mje forum piece represents a provocative, cogent, and creative interruption to this culture by sharing pertinent information in the form of a glossary. we at the mje (along with hurren) encourage responses, which can be published in subsequent mje issues. responses can assume various forms (see http:// mje.mcgill.ca/about/editorialpolicies#sectionpolicies). ideas include: more or different glossary terms to share? a video, cellphilm or podcast response? a book review? a story? a critique? a different analysis of the issue? hailing from monash university, russo’s note draws on experiences from the classroom, introducing cognitive load theory to outline a useful process through which students can become effective peer tutors in the classroom, especially in the area of math. http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/editorialpolicies% sectionpolicies http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/editorialpolicies% sectionpolicies mcgill journal of education • vol. no fall editorial in the notes from the field entitled “enseignement du théâtre et de l’art drama- tique au canada : un portrait,” carter exposes a highly relevant perspective on theatre and dramatic arts education in canada. the author identifies elements that warrant further reflection to enable schools to better teach this subject matter. by raising the idea that it would be wise to systematically teach theater and the dramatic arts at the primary and secondary levels, the author raises, by ricochet, the importance of properly training the next generation of teach- ers. carter’s positioning of this topic is intimately tied to her understanding of herself, to the elaboration of a community of learners, as well as to the development of its resilience. teresa strong-wilson, vincent boutonnet, jerome st-amand & mindy carter Éditorial revue des sciences de l’Éducation de mcgill • vol. no automne Éditorial les neuf articles composant cette édition régulière permettent de nourrir une réflexion soutenue sur la mise en place d’environnements favorables à l’apprentissage des étudiants — et des enseignants — telle qu’observée à différents niveaux et points de vue ainsi que dans divers contextes. s’ajoute à ceux-ci un texte à-propos et provocateur portant sur le harcèlement sexuel dans les milieux de travail et environnement universitaires présenté dans la section du forum rsÉm. nous vous invitons à réagir à ce texte afin de publier vos réponses au sein d’éditions futures. cette publication se termine avec deux notes du terrain. la première met en lumière le contexte australien. quant à l’autre, il s’agit du portrait de l’enseignement du théâtre et de l’art dramatique dans les classes au canada réalisé par carter : une note initialement publiée en anglais dans la rsÉm en et publiée cette fois en français, à la demande générale. dans le contexte de l’attention croissante accordée à la mise en place d’environnements éducatifs privilégiant la santé et le bien-être, la revue de la littérature de jean-pierre et parris-drummond arrive à point nommé. ceux-ci ont recensé les écrits académiques et professionnels publiés aux États-unis, au royaume-uni et au canada entre et et présentant des pratiques scolaires alternatives et non-punitives. pour sélectionner les publications, ils ont ciblé avec une attention particulière les cadres théoriques mettant l’emphase sur la responsabilisation ou les opportunités d’apprendre et pouvant avoir une incidence concrète en classe ou au sein d’une école. la revue offre une analyse thématique très utile et critique des articles sélectionnés. abordant également le thème de la santé et du bien-être, mais aux cycles supérieurs, la recherche de meunier-dubé et marcotte ont utilisé deux ques- tionnaires auprès de étudiantes et étudiants au collégial afin de mesurer la présence des vulnérabilités cognitives et des symptômes dépressifs avant et pendant la transition du secondaire au collégial. dès la première année, , % des étudiants de l’échantillon rapportent présenter des symptômes dépressifs modérés à sévères. en outre, il ne semble pas y avoir de différences significa- tives reliées au genre quant à l’adaptation académique et sociale même si un nombre plus élevé d’étudiantes déclarent présenter des signes de dépression. les auteurs discutent alors de la prédiction sur l’adaptation relative à certaines vulnérabilités cognitives. mcgill journal of education • vol. no fall editorial dans un même ordre d’idées, leduc, kozanitis et lepage s’intéressent à l’engagement cognitif des étudiants postsecondaires. cet engagement se définit par le déploiement de stratégies d’étude et d’apprentissage qui visent une mai- trise plus ou moins élevée des notions abordées durant les cours. cet article traduit, adapte et valide le questionnaire cognitive engagement scale largement utilisé en contexte anglophone. leur questionnaire, adapté avec une méthode de contre-traduction, ont reçu les réponses de étudiants québécois issus de différents collèges et universités. la recherche traite alors de la qualité de cet outil traduit et transposé en contexte francophone. les administrateurs, décideurs et enseignants œuvrant en contexte ontarien pourraient être intéressés par l’article de segedin, dans lequel elle évalue l’incidence du programme majeure haute spécialisation (mhs) sur les résultats académiques des élèves. s’inscrivant dans la phase de la stratégie visant la réussite des élèves, cette initiative a été mise sur pied pour offrir des alterna- tives de développement flexibles aux étudiants en termes de cheminement de carrière. segedin a développé un intérêt pour cette problématique suite à son travail auprès d’étudiants présentant un risque de décrochage. l’article décrit la recherche menée par segedin au moyen d’analyses de résultats d’élèves, de visites d’écoles et d’entrevues réalisées avec des enseignants et des directeurs de milieux scolaires sélectionnés. en conclusion, segedin souligne que le programme commence à faire une différence et soulève certains aspects néces- sitant une amélioration. l’article de myara dresse un portrait historique des plans d’intervention sco- laires utilisés pour l’accompagnement des élèves handicapés ou en difficulté d’adaptation ou d’apprentissage au québec. elle discute de l’élaboration, de la mise en œuvre et de la révision d’un plan d’intervention en puisant dans une recension des écrits afin de guider de nouvelles pratiques dans les usages de cet outil. en effet, les pratiques restent variées et loin d’être optimales en raison du temps et des coûts encourus pour le développement, l’acquisition, l’utilisation du plan d’intervention ainsi que la collaboration et la formation des différents intervenants. et si les changements rendus incontournables en éducation devaient se ma- térialiser le plus tôt possible, dans les classes du primaire et du préscolaire? la recherche-action de villeneuve-lapointe et charron décrit la mise en œuvre de pratiques d’orthographes approchées d’enseignantes de deuxième année du primaire. cinq enseignantes ont participé à une formation afin de favoriser l’intégration de ces nouvelles pratiques. les chercheures ont ensuite observé à deux reprises chaque classe de ces enseignantes. les résultats indiquent qu’en raison de ces nouvelles pratiques, les élèves sont en mesure de verbaliser leurs connaissances sur la langue. les enseignantes créent également de nombreux liens avec d’autres mots, notions et stratégies orthographiques. il est alors dis- cuté des conditions favorables aux pratiques d’orthographes approchées pour développer la compétence en écriture au premier cycle du primaire. Éditorial revue des sciences de l’Éducation de mcgill • vol. no automne de quelle manière les enseignants peuvent-ils devenir plus ouverts non seule- ment à la contribution de chaque élève à la classe de maternelle, mais égale- ment à celle des familles? preston, mcphee et roach o’keefe ont piloté un projet de recherche auprès de enseignants du préscolaire de l’Île-du-prince- Édouard — un échantillon fiable représentant % du bassin d’enseignants du préscolaire de l’Île-du-prince-Édouard. ils leur ont demandé de quelle façon les parents s’impliquaient en classe et les défis rencontrés par ceux-ci lorsqu’ils s’impliquaient. dans cet article, les auteurs résument leur analyse des réponses des enseignants et décrivent l’ouverture à la « vitalité de chaque famille » comme une orientation nécessaire. ils soulignent également que la mentalité des enseignants doit évoluer pour profiter des forces des familles, en encourageant leur implication dans l’apprentissage de leur enfant, à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur de la classe. le développement professionnel, celui des futurs enseignants comme celui des enseignants en fonction, demeure une priorité. nous nous intéressons ici à l’intégration efficace des nouvelles technologies en utilisant des outils comme les communautés de pratique en ligne et les enjeux de la recherche dans la mise en place de programmes efficaces de français langue seconde (fls). tremblay et dion routhier s’intéressent au développement professionnel d’enseignantes et d’enseignants visant à intégrer les nouvelles technologies. les auteures ont collecté leurs données dans le cadre d’une formation universitaire misant sur la coélaboration des connaissances grâce à l’usage d’un forum et la mise en place d’une communauté de pratique ultérieure. la discussion des résultats relève les facteurs d’engagement à une communauté de pratique en ligne pour le développement professionnel. trois dimensions sont identifiées et analysées au regard de l’intégration de nouvelles technologies : l’accessibilité, la participation et la reconnaissance. dans le cadre de son étude de cas longitudinale, arnett s’intéresse aux croy- ances de quatre nouveaux enseignants de français langue seconde (fls) en ce qui a trait aux meilleurs et pires programmes fls offerts aux apprenants de langue anglaise et aux élèves éprouvant des difficultés d’apprentissage. en menant des entrevues semi-structurées avec les participants à la fin de leur programme de baccalauréat en éducation, arnett a réalisé que ceux-ci préfèrent le programme d’immersion française (if) comme véhicule d’apprentissage du français. lorsque les participants croient fermement aux concepts scientifiques de la pédagogie, l’étude démontre qu’à moins qu’ils vivent des expériences, il est peu probable que leurs croyances évoluent au fil du temps. le fait que dans plusieurs des réponses les participants aient mentionné la nature des dif- ficultés d’un élève comme facteur dans leur processus décisionnel soulève des inquiétudes sur l’inclusion authentique en classe de fls des élèves éprouvant des difficultés d’apprentissage. mcgill journal of education • vol. no fall editorial « appeler les choses par leur nom » est le conseil et le titre donné par hur- ren à son très utile glossaire des termes (zones d’ombre incluses) liés à la pérennisation de la culture d’harcèlement sexuel au sein des membres du corps professoral. dans la foulée de l’ouverture générée par le mouvement #moiaussi, ce texte du forum rsÉm tout à fait opportun constitue un arrêt provocateur, convaincant et créatif à cette culture en partageant des informations pertinentes sous forme de glossaire. nous, membres de l’équipe de la rsÉm (tout comme hurren), vous encourageons à réagir à ce texte, afin de publier quelques-unes de vos réponses dans des éditions ultérieures de la rsÉm. ces réponses peuvent prendre diverses formes (voir http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/ editorialpolicies#sectionpolicies). parmi celles-ci, voici quelques idées : des termes différents ou additionnels à partager? une vidéo, un cellphilm ou une balado? une critique de livres? une anecdote? des commentaires? une analyse différente de la problématique? en provenance de la monash university, russo se base sur les expériences vécues en classe pour introduire la théorie de la charge cognitive, mettant en lumière un processus utile par lequel les étudiants peuvent devenir des tuteurs efficaces pour leurs pairs en classe, particulièrement dans le domaine des mathématiques. dans la note de terrain intitulée « enseignement du théâtre et de l’art drama- tique au canada : un portrait », carter expose un point de vue fort pertinent sur l’enseignement du théâtre et de l’art dramatique au canada, notamment en cherchant à dégager des éléments de réflexion pouvant aider les milieux scolaires à se positionner par rapport à son enseignement. en soulevant l’idée qu’il serait judicieux d’enseigner systématiquement le théâtre et les arts dramatiques au primaire et au secondaire, l’auteure soulève, par ricochet, l’importance de bien former la relève enseignante. la place que carter octroie à cette thématique est intimement liée à la compréhension de sa propre personne, à l’élaboration de communautés d’apprenants, ainsi qu’au développement de sa résilience. teresa strong-wilson, vincent boutonnet, jerome st-amand et mindy carter http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/editorialpolicies% sectionpolicies http://mje.mcgill.ca/about/editorialpolicies% sectionpolicies uajb_a_ _o swiping left on the quantified relationship citation for published version (apa): frank, l., & klincewicz, m. 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download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/swiping-left-on-the-quantified-relationship(cbd ffa - - cab-bd - a f ab).html full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=uajb the american journal of bioethics issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb swiping left on the quantified relationship: exploring the potential soft impacts lily frank & michał klincewicz to cite this article: lily frank & michał klincewicz ( ) swiping left on the quantified relationship: exploring the potential soft impacts, the american journal of bioethics, : , - to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published with license by taylor & francis© lily frank and michał klincewicz published online: feb . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=uajb http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=uajb &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=uajb &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule swiping left on the quantified relationship: exploring the potential soft impacts lily frank, eindhoven university of technology michał klincewicz, jagiellonian university john danaher, sven nyholm, and brian d. earp’s ( ) fascinating articleon potential ethical objections to the use of quantified relationship technologies contends that “there is no blanket objection to or knockdown argument against” their use ( ). although we agree with this con- clusion and with their plea for further empirical study of these technologies, we argue that their discussion of the quantified relationship does not adequately consider potential soft impacts of quantified relationship technolo- gies (qrt). relationship, dating, and “hookup” technologies, such as online dating applications and social media, are already in widespread use and they serve as a source of insight about these impacts. dating applications are a particularly suitable example for comparison because of their role in mediating intimate relationships and because objections to qrt that the authors’ consider significantly overlap with the kinds of objections that have been raised against widespread use of dating apps. we focus on a heterosexual use of tinder, but similar comparisons can be made for other apps that target other sexual orientations. conclusions based on our comparisons challenge the authors’ cautious opti- mism about qrt. instead, these conclusions suggest that qrt are likely to have negative social and moral consequences that reverberate far beyond any individ- ual relationship that they involve or facilitate. these impacts merit consideration even if one remains neu- tral, as danaher and colleagues do, on the goals, value, and limits of romantic relationships in general. three types of concerns are discussed next: ( ) opaque algo- rithms; ( ) unintended and unanticipated uses; and ( ) reification of harmful gender norms. tinder is an example of the way in which relationship technologies are far from being neutral about the quality of relationships that they promote. tinder’s algorithms favor novelty (the so-called “newbie boost”), facilitating short- term relationships over long-term ones, thus securing its continued use by its customers. other apps do things slightly differently, depending on their business model. when the structure of the app is apparent this is not neces- sarily problematic, but the business models that typically inform the apps’ algorithms are almost always obscure to users. tinder even creates a secret “elo score” for each user, a measure of their desirability. the same is true of qrt, which would inevitably come with their own algo- rithms, business models, and structures. these structures will be designed to secure continued customer engage- ment or purchase of upgrades, among other things. danaher and colleagues acknowledge that the marketing and methods of behavior change that qrt employ may take advantage of users’ “relationship” insecurities, but, the authors claim, this is not unique to qrt. we agree that this is not a unique problem, but it is a problem neverthe- less. in this case, some of the features of qrt that may mat- ter most to their users would remain obscure to them. consequently, even if users consent to the use of qrt, their hidden structure may change users’ behaviors in ways that they do not intend or approve. as with tinder, one may sign up to use a qrt with one thing in mind and end up doing another, without being aware of it. this is, at best, disrespectful paternalism. at worst, it is an unwel- comed manipulation, for largely commercial purposes, into what is central to our conception of ourselves, namely, our social relationships and our moral characteristics (strohminger and nichols ). online relationship, dating, and “hookup” apps are often repurposed for other uses. this can take place as a result of the affordances that are put in the app inten- tionally, such as those that result in gamification in tinder (hakala ). happn, a global positioning system (gps)- based dating app that intentionally uses of gamification to increase user engagement, asks users to guess which one of four users that they were spatially near during the day is their special crush. some apps allow users to “collect” their matches as if they were virtual playing cards. it published with license by taylor & francis. � lily frank and michał klincewicz. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. address correspondence to lily frank, phd, eindhoven university of technology, philosophy and ethics, eindhoven, az, the netherlands. e-mail: l.e.frank@tue.nl the quantified relationship february, volume , number , ajob http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / remains to be seen whether gamification of dating facili- tates dehumanization and light-hearted cruelty or merely facilitates flirtatious play that is already a part of dating. there are also cases of unintended repurposing. tinder can be used as a dating app and as a means for professional networking and self-promotion—for example, using brief conversations with tinder matches to promote a party or to find investors for their small businesses (froelich ). we can imagine an analogous repurposing given the affordances in qrt. a positively perceived profile of one’s quanti- fied relationship may be used to communicate an abil- ity to maintain a desirable sort of relationship, put bedroom achievements on display, or advertise one’s personal style, among many other possibilities. what is troubling about these afforded possibilities is that a potential employer, colleague, insurance specialist, partner, friend, bureaucrat, marketer, or extortionist could gain access to what can be sensitive information and do with it as they choose. with widespread use of qrt, these affordances would eventually lead to users being pressured to disclose their performance on the various dimensions that danaher and colleagues dis- cuss. similar pressure is now applied to owners of social media accounts to verify their identities, show- case their ability to network, or advertise their “safe” off-work activities. qrt will similarly contain infor- mation that a variety of stakeholders would find use- ful and may at some point ask for—you have nothing to hide, right? another likely troubling soft impact of qrt is the reification of harmful gender roles. there are two ways in which qrt is likely to result in this. on the one hand, the previous two likely soft impacts of qrt— obscure algorithms and repurposing—will provide new avenues for bringing harmful gender norms to bear on private behavior. on the other hand, there are distinct ways in which qrt would further entrench some of the most harmful gender norms, which systematically cause women in particular be harmed. in the world of dating apps women regularly receive unwelcome pho- tos of male genitalia and face intimidation through messages after they reject a potential match. when it comes to qrt, danaher and colleagues acknowledge the “gendered relationship” objection, but argue that whether or not bad consequences are created for women “depend[s] more on the general social context in which the apps are developed, as well as on the par- ticulars of the relationships in which they are used” ( ). the problem with this answer is that we already have extensive information on the context in which these and other technologies will be used, as well as on the different ways in which men and women use rela- tionship apps like tinder (tyson et al. ), and the picture is not good. evidence shows that apps are often a vehicle for systematic and institutionalized gender-based discrimination, disadvantage, and violence that is insu- lated from the larger community where such behaviors can be sanctioned. we do not have the luxury of being able to claim ignorance as to these matters, especially in light of the #metoo campaign and revelations of endemic (largely) gender-based harassment. additionally, there is significant evidence that technologies, especially algorithms, can embody gender, racial, and even metaethical biases of their designers (hajian et al. ; frank and klincewicz ). qrt are likely to be informed by stereotypical and gen- dered “scripts” of romantic and sexual behavior that are demonstrably detrimental to both partners’ sexual and personal fulfillment (verbeek ). two of the examples given in danaher and colleagues’ article illustrate these scripts: one sex app measures number and g-force of thrusts, while another, kouply, codes taking out the gar- bage as a romantic gesture. of course, qrt could be inten- tionally designed to combat these gendered scripts, but this seems unlikely, given the extent to which they are cur- rently ingrained in cultural attitudes, institutions, and other technologies. while danaher and colleagues are cautiously opti- mistic about the value and implementation of qrt, given what we already know about the consequences of dating and hookup apps, we remain cautiously pessimistic. & references danaher, j., s. nyholm, and b. d. earp. . the quantified rela- tionship. american journal of bioethics ( ): – . frank, l., and m. klincewicz. . metaethics in context of engi- neering ethical and moral systems. aaai spring workshops techni- cal reports : – . froelich, p. . business with benefits: how tinder and other dating apps double as career boosters. fortune, february . avail- able at: http://fortune.com/ / / /business-with-benefits- how-tinder-and-other-dating-apps-double-as-career-boosters hajian, s., b. francesco, and c. carlos. . algorithmic bias: from discrimination discovery to fairness-aware data mining. pro- ceedings of the nd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, – . acm. hakala, k. . how the gamification of dating apps is changing our sex lives. nerve. available at: http://www.nerve.com/love- sex/do-we-still-need-mutual-friends strohminger, n., and s. nichols. . the essential moral self. cognition ( ): – . doi: . /j.cognition. . . . tyson, g., v. c. perta, h. haddadi, and m. c. seto. . a first look at user activity on tinder. in advances in social networks analy- sis and mining (asonam) : – . ieee. verbeek, p.-p. . materializing morality: design ethics and technological mediation. science, technology, & human values ( ): – . doi: . / . the american journal of bioethics ajob february, volume , number , http://fortune.com/ / / /business-with-benefits-how-tinder-and-other-dating-apps-double-as-career-boosters http://fortune.com/ / / /business-with-benefits-how-tinder-and-other-dating-apps-double-as-career-boosters http://www.nerve.com/love-sex/do-we-still-need-mutual-friends http://www.nerve.com/love-sex/do-we-still-need-mutual-friends 	 ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... p r o f e s s i o n s p o t l i g h t : i n t e r v i e w s , r e f l e c t i o n s , a n d a d v i c e f r o m w o m e n i n l e g i s l a t i v e s t u d i e s participate in a panel or conference or some other effort and they decline, it’s a little off-putting to then ask them, “can you name some other women?” that’s not great for the self-esteem of your female colleagues. sg: on a larger scale, how do you see the current political climate and movements like metoo potentially shaping the field? fl: metoo presents some really thorny problems for the academy. this is not a legislative studies problem; this is just a problem of how universities are organized. many wonderful features of universities flow from the tenure system and the independence faculty have. the system allows faculty to work on what they’re interested in, not to be subject to the fads that administrators can be very eager to embrace, to develop an expertise because they care about it and believe that it’s important, and to keep at it even if maybe not everybody sees the value at any given time—these are great features of the system. the whole decentralized structure of universities, all of that grows out of the tenure system. if you do away with that, then you introduce new accountability relationships that would have some good features in the form of being able to better police problem behavior. but it would have many downsides for academic freedom and university organiza- tion. this is a particularly troubling set of tradeoffs for the metoo era. bad faculty behavior is not something universities are great at policing, but growing recognition of this problem highlights that bad faculty behavior is an issue for universities as well as for the victims of inappropriate behavior. sg: what about citations? do you cite someone with multiple, credible allegations? obviously, there’s not a right answer to any of this. fl: that’s an interesting question i’d never considered before. my thinking would be that you cite work that influenced you or that was foundational for your work, regardless of the source. if a piece of work was important to the development of your project or your paper, then you cite where citation is due. personnel deci- sions are another matter. if you’re trying to hire somebody for a job, then you’d absolutely want to take into account whether that person has a record of mistreating students or colleagues. but with regard to citation, that ought to be just on the basis of the academic merits of the matter. n the following discussion summarizes their conversation with professor brown. . what were your initial motivations to study black women lawmakers? furthermore, has your motivation to continue to study black women changed since then? i went to howard university for undergrad, a historically black college and university. at howard, it was black politics all the time, which was a wonderful introduction to the field and provided a solid foundation of what black politics was. but there was little scholarly attention to gender. when i went to rutgers university for my phd, my major field was women in politics. although concentrating on gender politics was really illuminat- ing, it was all about white women. what stuck out to me was the limited amount of scholarship on black women, both at the level of political elites and mass citizenship. thus, for me, it was an obvious place to conduct research. from my own lived expe- riences of seeing black women champion inclusive politics and policy, i knew that black women had a distinct voice. however, this voice was often in the shadows and was not being recognized in the scholarship. both experiences taught me that the problem was deeper than just “no one has done this before” and that there were qualitative differences that needed to be explored. . has the field changed since you started as an assistant profes- sor? if so, how? i think it has changed; i am really excited and enthusiastic about the next generation of scholars who do solid racial, ethnic, and gender politics. i used to be one of only a handful of schol- ars that did this kind of work. now i can point to a whole cohort of scholars who do women of color studies. sarah allen gershon and i published an edited volume on minority women’s politics (brown and gershon ). this captures the types of research that i would never have had the opportunity to read or to think about when i was a graduate student or assistant professor, in large part because there were too few scholars that did this kind of research. now, the field is growing. following this conversation, caballero and jackson explored how prevalent this type of intersectional research has been in the legislative studies field. demographic information on the authors, as well as the subject of publications in issues and of the legislative studies quarterly, suggests that this research is not well represented in this journal. no black scholars of any gender identification were published in these issues. there were three scholars of asian descent (two women and one male), seven latinx scholars (five male and two latinas), and two nonwhite scholars (one male and one female). moreover, we found that the majority of scholars published in these issues were white men ( ) and that the second most-published group was white women ( ). in terms of the subject of the manuscripts that were published in these two issues, only two studies mentioned race and ethnicity, one mentioned same-sex marriage, and four mentioned women. these patterns suggest that even if research in this area is grow- ing, it still may be confined to journals that focus on gender and race. . how was your experience trying to become a part of a field dominated by white male scholars? was it easy? difficult? why? community as self: an interview with nadia e. brown guillermo caballero, purdue university jasmine c. jackson, purdue university nadia e. brown, purdue university doi: . /s an interview between professor nadia e. brown and her grad- uate students, guillermo caballero and jasmine c. jackson, was conducted on november , , at the request of the editors of the legislative scholar. given the small numbers of women in the legislative studies section (lss), the newsletter editors were interested in learning more about their experiences in the legislative studies subfield. caballero and jackson used the basis of the editors’ questions to guide the interview and added two more questions focused on the intersection of gender and race. ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... i took a route that insulated myself from the gender and racial patterns in the field. i went to supportive spaces like the race, ethnicity, and politics section or the women and politics section. there are people in these sections that obviously do work on representation and legislative studies. i was looking for an intellectual community that studied women of color and that did intersectional work, but i was also looking for sup- port. i was looking for friendly faces. i was looking for people who could be that auntie figure, or that cheerleader, or that supportive kind of fictive kin throughout the discipline. that did not lead me to lss business meetings or caucuses. i was intentionally looking for spaces to get both academic and per- sonal affirmation. . in your view, what are the disadvantages women face for being part of a predominantly white male field? do you think that these disadvantages are the same, different, or parallel as com- pared to women scholars who have other intersecting identi- ties? for example, women of color, queer women, and trans women. one of the challenges facing a scholar doing work on inter- sectional identities in this field is that i am often asked how is my research universal or how can you generalize from doing research on black women? while these questions may have good analytical points, they can also be seen as gatekeeping questions because other scholars who do work that is posited to be identity free do not get asked those kinds of questions. scholars who do not work on marginalized groups do not get as many questions about whether the research is generaliza- ble or broad enough or has applications outside of one par- ticular setting. it is also my impression that doing this narrow kind of identity politics work does not get you published in top journals—something i think i have internalized, unfortu- nately. so, that is a barrier. i would say this is universal for research on other intersecting identities too, not just black women. . what strategies might be beneficial for the next genera- tion of women scholars? in your experience, what strategies have helped you in the different stages of your academic journey? good mentorship matters, and i have been extremely for- tunate to have two really exemplary mentors from my gradu- ate-school days. jane junn and alvin tillery have consistently listened to me and helped me figure out the next best move for me. they give me advice based on what is best for me as a person, not just as a scholar. jane and al are a constant source of encouragement when i had ( have) imposter syndrome. they give tough love when i am thinking about doing something outlandish. for the next generation, i think it is really important that young scholars know that they cannot do it on their own. we all need to have these kinds of guides, these mentors that can help you develop. there are also a whole host of other scholars that make up my community and are important to have. doing good scholarship is a community activity, and that means you have to be vulnerable and you have to be willing to seek community. but that also means you have to be a good community member yourself. so, it is reciprocal; you need to show up and be part of a community. . is there anything you thought of when you were speaking that you wanted to say before we end our meeting? or anything that comes to the forefront after having this conversation and thinking about your experience as a scholar? i am pleasantly surprised for the invitation from lss and i am energized by their awareness to do something to reach out to feminist scholars and women academics in particular. but i am also thinking about those that were not asked and those that are not here to tell their own stories. in my par- ticular instance, i am thinking about other women of color. were native women asked? what are latinas sharing? queer scholars? how are asian american women or first-gen women responding to these kinds of questions? it is not enough to be the token woman of color; you have to do something to make space for others and really expand the table. there should be some stuff for you at the table but also for everyone. so, i am grateful to lss for offering this opportunity for me to be in the ps spotlight. but i also want to highlight the gaps in the margins. what other constituencies are underrepresented? we need to include their scholarship and their voices. n r e f e r e n c e brown, nadia e., and sarah allen gershon. . distinct identities: minority women in us politics. abingdon-on-thames, england: routledge. doing good scholarship is a community activity, and that means you have to be vulnerable and you have to be willing to seek community. where do we go from here? tracy sulkin, university of illinois at urbana–champaign doi: . /s i consider it one of the great fortunes of my professional life to have stumbled upon the legislative studies community. i did not enter graduate school planning to study congress. instead, i knew i was interested in quantitative approaches and had some nascent interests in political behavior. in fact, i did not really leave graduate school thinking of myself as a legislative studies scholar (at least not wholly). my dissertation—which later became my first book, issue politics in congress (sulkin )— was motivated by a focus on agendas as a linkage between campaigns and governing and by a developing interest in rep- resentation and responsiveness. (on the job market, i applied denunciation and doxing: towards a conceptual model of digital vigilantism full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=fglc global crime issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fglc denunciation and doxing: towards a conceptual model of digital vigilantism daniel trottier to cite this article: daniel trottier ( ): denunciation and doxing: towards a conceptual model of digital vigilantism, global crime, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: mar . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=fglc https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fglc https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=fglc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=fglc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - article denunciation and doxing: towards a conceptual model of digital vigilantism daniel trottier department of media and communication, erasmus universiteit rotterdam, rotterdam, netherlands abstract individuals rely on digital media to denounce and shame other individuals. this may serve to seek justice in response to perceived offences, while often reproducing categorical forms of discrimina- tion. both offence taking and its response are expressed online by gathering and distributing information about targeted individuals. by seeking their own form of social and/or criminal justice, parti- cipants may supersede institutions and formal procedures. yet digital vigilantism includes shaming and other forms of cultural violence that are not as clearly regulated. they may feed from state or press-led initiatives to shame targets, or simply to gather information about them. digital vigilantism remains a contested practice: terms of appropriate use are unclear, and public dis- course may vary based on the severity of the offence, the severity of response, and on participants’ identities and affiliations. this paper advances a conceptually informed model of digital vigilant- ism, in recognition of its coordinated, moral and communicative components. drawing upon literature on embodied vigilantism as well as concurrent forms of online coordination and harassment, it considers recent cases in a global context in order to direct sub- sequent analysis of how digital vigilantism is rendered meaningful. keywords vigilantism; digital media; shaming; online justice current social and political discourse is heavily shaped through media practices in both obvious and not so obvious ways. in particular there are specific affordances and cultural expectations that shape contemporary digital media use, which direct our way of relating and coordinating among citizens. because of the ease with which users can search, solicit and disseminate personal information, these can be used to mobilise outrage for various cultural and political ends. in some cases these operate as cohesive organisations, as when the russian group lev protiv shame and call attention to individuals who seem publicly intoxicated. in other cases, high-profile criminal events mobilise civil society to identify suspects, as was the case following the boston marathon bombing in . still others are one-off incidents that nevertheless are contextualised, embedded in and rendered meaningful through contemporary media practices. as an example, in a conference attendee publicly denounced via twitter two other attendees for their sexualised comments, and uploaded a photo of the perpetrators. one of the targets lost his job. yet the denouncer, an african-american woman, also lost her job in consequence, and became the target of racist and sexist vitriol. journalists and contact daniel trottier trottier@eshcc.eur.nl global crime https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf other public figures picked up on the incident, furthering the visibility of all three primary participants, in order to advance public discourse about gendered harassment as well as ‘call-out culture’ as a viable form of social action. these examples provide a brief account of the range of social actors engaging in digitally mediated forms of vigilantism. this refers to a set of practices to scrutinise, denounce and even leverage harm against those deemed to transgress legal and/or moral boundaries, with the intention of achieving some form of justice. these practices can be understood as facilitated by media affordances that enable users to share and distribute content with each other, coupled with socio-cultural expectations that serve to reproduce and even renegotiate what is considered acceptable within a particular social context. the notion of digital vigilantism includes responses to criminal events as well as offences that transgress moral or normative boundaries. while high-profile cases include responses to criminal acts, the same tools and practices can be used in contexts where the justice sought is more social than legal or where are not aligned with normative demands. in discussing embodied forms of vigilantism, johnston notes the complexity of distinguishing legal from moral pursuits, citing cases featuring a confluence of these frameworks. likewise, moncada notes that while it is possible to consider moral vigilantism as a variant of embodied vigilantism, this risks overextend- ing such a concept, notably when other terms such as hate crime are more apt. this is indeed true, and an important task in this article is to consider the conceptual overlap of neighbouring terms. yet it remains important to consider that vigilantism serves to uphold institutionalised norms, and the status of these norms and the degree to which they are institutionalised remains contested. for instance in and beyond the anglo-american context citizens have directed public attention to longstanding forms of sexual assault and harassment. this involves unambiguous violations of laws, but also behaviour and attitudes that are insufficiently targeted in existing legal frameworks, yet remain actionable. while it has always been possible denounce others, digital vigilantism implicates the active and passive participation of other individuals as well as several types of organisa- tions. contemporary media cultures allow virtually anybody to engineer and exploit the visibility of a targeted individual for an assortment of social, cultural, economic and political ends. this is not only through the capture of original footage of a target, or the repurposing of content already available online, but also through the fabrication of image or video content made to appear veracious. despite the range of motivations and desired outcomes fuelling these practices, they are united through their denunciatory nature, in which they link particular grievances to targeted individuals. these occur in cultural contexts that seek and celebrate forms of social justice – or some form of shared values and morality more generally – through the vigilance and participation of an assembly of social actors. to be clear, these cultural practices can also serve to reproduce misogyny, racism and other forms of categorical discrimination. such practices risk being oversha- dowed in public discourse by adjacent phenomena like hate speech and cyberbullying. yet digital vigilantism is a pervasive and mobilising force, linking up with these harms, but also broader organisational logics that solicit and shape mediated activity. recent press coverage on weaponised media places emphasis on cyber security incidents such as the sony/north korea hacking incident in , ashley madison in , and of american and french presidential candidates more recently. in doing so, d. trottier they risk overlooking more routinized and accessible practices. while hacking and other cyber threats can indeed harm the social standing of those who are exposed, they involve skillsets and technologies often limited to an elite few. yet even high-tech forms of hacking enable further repurposing of this data through more vulgarised forms of data searching and distribution. social harm might not only emanate from those who first access and source compromising data from a secure location, but also from those who apply the now-public data to particular contexts, or for particular audiences. digital vigilantism may be framed as the dark side of online engagement through related practices such as vitriol or trolling. yet a key concern in this area of study is that digital vigilantism is not simply problematic or deviant. rather, it may be understood as a standardised mode of communication, and may elicit popular support under specific conditions. it is a mode or organising for individuals as well as institutions, by gaining and leveraging attention against targeted others. it is also a wilful strategy that is partly informed by (but also exceeding) tabloid culture and reality tv. likewise, social media platforms are reluctant to fully prohibit practices that are entirely dependent on their infrastructure. while mindful of social responsibility and the impact on their own reputations, platforms like youtube and twitter benefit from the frenzy of user activity emerging from denunciatory campaigns, notably as even critical engagements will occur through these platforms. as was the case with social media’s initial emergence in the mid s, digital vigilantism involves a set of reasonably accessible technologies as well as rapidly popularised cultural practices that are spread to a range of social actors. social media was rendered culturally meaningful and negotiated in terms of perceived appro- priateness in various cultural contexts. indeed, concepts such as privacy, reputation and even sharing evoke debates that are opened up anew under current conditions. this paper will advance a comprehensive understanding of the use of visibility and reputation of individuals as a means of communicating, organising, and governing by digital media users. the next section considers recent scholarship related justice seeking online. this is followed by a consideration of how such practices are manifest discur- sively by principal social actors. this paper then offers a tentative procedural model to understand digital vigilantism, including a conceptualisation of core concepts and adjacent terms, along with a consideration of key questions for subsequent research. mediated justice seeking and its scholarly challenges individuals can exploit the visibility and reputation of other individuals as a means of communicating. targeted individuals may either voluntarily post content about them- selves or their peers – though not necessarily consenting to the appropriation of that content – or may be involuntarily recorded engaged in untoward behaviour. this content becomes a means to express outrage about particular events, but also serves as convenient and tangible focal points for more abstract societal concerns. moreover, it becomes a means to draw attention to both press outlets and social media platforms. both collective outrage and the target’s reputation are leveraged for a variety of ends. while scholarly approaches to online harassment contend that the invisibility of social actors enables abusive behaviour, digital vigilantism is predicated on the amplified visibility of the person receiving abuse. the relative ease of access to a substantial audience is also a feature that is now available to those who initiate the shaming of global crime others. moreover, these audiences make take on an active role in these campaigns by re- circulating damning content, adding their own commentary or even information about targets. in some cases, the audience can be minimal, but the imagined or anticipated social impact can still harm the targeted individual as well as the broader community to which they belong. yet in many cases, individuals are the subsequent targets of actualised harassment, as well as consequences that may impact their life chances, for example, if evidence of their offence emerges during an online search when seeking employment, or while held at a border crossing. instances of digital vigilantism are typically characterised by spontaneous and unre- flexive activity as well as coordinated actions. embodied vigilantism necessitates a degree of planning, or is otherwise categorised a self-defence. yet affordances of social platforms such as their connectivity (van dijck and poell ) mean that planned coordination can follow spontaneous actions, and vice versa. in other words some related practices may be spontaneous, such as immediately capturing and uploading content as well as commenting on or sharing that content. yet other aspects require deliberate planning, such as managing a presence on a digital platform, or coordinating a denunciatory response. for states, but also media outlets, social media platforms and other organisations, such incidents may amount to a form of ‘soft’ governance, where social norms are enforced and renegotiated and expressed through digital media and through communities. given the ease through which various social actors can re- mediate content by re-posting it on any available social platform, it remains possible that an incident that one social actor first launches is then repurposed and appropriated by another, for example, when tabloid newspapers provide extensive coverage of uncivil behaviour first documented by an individual. approaching this in terms of a single category of social actor is tempting, but overlooks a broader context, notably as they take up similar devices and practices and may even sustain symbiotic relations. when considering the recent history of using digital media to monitor and discipline one another, we may speak of a mutual augmentation of shaming, as participants demand audiences, trigger responses, and produce content that are circulated by others. public discourses and social responses to denunciations and discrediting content vary tremendously, in part because assessments of these practices often have to reconcile events that vary radically in terms of ideology and intent. to some degree shaming and moralising can be socially progressive by raising awareness of social issues such as gendered forms of harassment, but are also used to reproduce privilege and asymmetrical power relations. most cases emerge in response to an offensive act, and are often expressed in criminal, ethical and moral terms. even high-profile instances of sexist and racist abuse such as gamergate attempt to frame their actions in terms of a moral high ground by invoking a concern over ethics in video game journalism. likewise, some incidents occur in context of broader cultural shifts such as #metoo, while others fail to evoke an impact to the same degree. what unites these incidents is the use of digital media to render offences, offenders – and in some cases, the denunciator themselves – visible to public scrutiny. these practices have some precedent, and to some degree this is captured through the use of the term vigilantism. this term stresses citizen-led interven- tions against other individuals, often overlapping with and even contesting institutional forms of justice seeking, while often reproducing established cultural values. d. trottier digital vigilantism is made meaningful through a range of social actors who are either directly participating in or offering commentary on events. as such, the vocabulary employed has a formative role in terms of asserting and contesting what is considered acceptable. many terms employed to describe practices are sourced from digital media subcultures (‘ownage’; ‘rekt’; ‘btfo’) and betray a juvenile and clandestine nature. terms may highlight contemporary media affordances (‘leaks’; ‘screencapping’) that underline the ease with which information can be transmitted. terms such as ‘receipts’ (denoting a proof of offence such as a screenshot of a since-deleted message) implicate an economy and legitimation of outrage. some terms used may be platform specific, such as ‘subtweeting’ (posting a critical statement about someone without directly identifying them). yet as these practices can easily spread beyond any single platform, the relevance of such terms may exceed the immediate context of (in the above example) twitter. participants may also be framed through subject positions such as social justice warriors, keyboard warriors or trolls, but also ‘reaguurders’ in the dutch context, and ‘diaosi’ in china, each of which carry connotations that appear both self- deprecating and mobilising. editorials and blog posts with titles like ‘we with the pitchforks’ (mae ) suggest an embracing attitude towards mediated vigilantism (in this case, following the denunciation of a convicted rapist). other concepts such as the ‘vampire’s castle’ and ‘weaponised autism’ both refer to collective and contextualised attempts to inflict harm upon others. we may presume that denunciations serve to explicitly and implicitly communicate desirable social values. such campaigns may also be an opportunity for a social actor to demonstrate moral or cultural legitimacy by asserting prescriptive and proscriptive cultural values and self-deputising itself as an arbiter on such matters, for example, when anti-paedophile organisations assert an ability to protect vulnerable youth. in doing so they may accumulate forms of cultural and symbolic capital, yet economic, political and social capital also shape the reception and legitimacy of such efforts. such capital may be deliberately solicited, for example, through merchandise sales online, or may be an unintended consequence of mediated exposure. we may consider how engaging and responding to mediated vigilantism in turn shape conditions of mediated visibility for individuals. digital vigilantism amounts to a coordinated attack on a targeted individual. the immediate consequences, intended or otherwise, may include damaging the public standing of the individual under scrutiny, as well as those who may share affiliations such as their family, political party, or employer. regarding the latter, recent cases in the anglo-american context suggest that job loss is a common tactic, and that employability is a common rhetorical feature when expressing targeted outrage. while an individual target may be centred in such incidents, we must consider how broader audiences are also implicated. the harm invoked is only made possible through the shared understanding that a target is rendered visible to a broader audience, whether that audience is actively watching, or is manifest primarily as an imagined potential. yet such denunciations play a disciplining role to audience members who may identify with the target, for example, as members of the same minority group. and while the target is the primary recipient of social harm, those participating may also experience unanticipated and unwanted scrutiny, as seen in one of the opening examples. for this reason many individuals and organisations employ a strategic approach to visibility, for example by using ‘throwaway’ accounts not global crime linked to any other identifiable information, as well as removing content from the internet after a limited period of time. while instances of digital vigilantism generate attention as they unfold, scholars remain unaware of longer-term consequences for those who participate or are otherwise implicated in these practices. individuals who have been exposed to denunciation cope with a compromised reputation, a process shaped both by cultural and technical features. search-engine manipulation stands as a prominent means to sanitise one’s online presence, albeit one that remains unafford- able to many. among more commonly proposed remedies to coordinated harass- ment – especially of women – is for the target to close their social media accounts. this amounts to a self-silencing, without addressing the source of harm, nor the possibility of continued abuse. we can imagine that potential remedies will in turn be shaped by public understandings of the risks and outcomes of public shaming. it is equally important to consider the broader viability of mediated denunciation for organisations, as well as the press, government branches and social media platforms, which all may in fact be direct or implicit participants. digital vigilantism is made up of mediated practices that are currently accessible to virtually any social actor. on basis of the controversy that recent incidents have generated in public discourse, one can anticipate that this may not remain the case in certain jurisdictions over time, either through legal, technical or cultural developments. denunciation and discursive relations when considering denunciation as a mediated phenomenon, one must consider dis- cursive power relations as they are manifest online and in the press, especially insofar as social actors invoke discourses when seeking various forms of capital. when considering who is permitted to speak about which individuals and which topics in the context of denunciation, several categories of relationships warrant scrutiny. first, the target of denunciation in relation to campaign initiators, who in turn invoke (a) other participants who may share content, add commentary, and even add additional information about target, (b) an often immeasurable audience of media users (social media, but also other media such as the press), and (c) a more abstract understanding of society from which the target – and the broader communities to which they belong – may be expelled. this can remain in abstract as a kind of existential dread, or as specific imagined others such as a future employer. on first pass this appears to be a largely unidirectional relation, with one party acting, others mediating (or mitigating), and another being acted upon, and possibly reacting. in practice we may anticipate a more complex set of commu- nicative relations. here we may consider if specific categories of social actors are in a more advantageous position to claim what is deemed offensive or otherwise action- able. conversely, are there conditions where targets are able to refute the denunciation levelled against them? if we accept the premise that such denunciations take place in the closest contemporary equivalent to a public sphere, and that disadvantaged com- munities have historically been and continue to be poorly served by such platforms, it stands to reason that a reliance on platforms like twitter to air social grievances may exacerbate categorical forms of discrimination. second, we can consider discursive relations between participants and the state. denunciation may be understood alongside other kinds of user-led forms of justice d. trottier seeking that together express a crisis of legitimacy of the state. mediated vigilante figures like the guardian angels, bernhard getz and even fictional characters like paul kersey (from the death wish franchise) signify a failure of public order and governance, and thus directly challenge the effectiveness and legitimacy of the state, most notably in terms of a supposed monopolisation of the legitimate force. although physical violence is a possible outcome in digital vigilantism, we need to reconsider cultural violence as it now relates to harms that can be invoked through prominent representations of the individual. these forms of violence are less explicitly regulated by governments, although we may expect this to change through law, policy and public discourse. additionally, vigilante groups may challenge states, but are also often a manifestation of hegemonic cultural values (and in some cases reinforce hegemonic economic rela- tions). in response police and other state branches may either ignore, sanction or support vigilante groups. their official position will likely differ based on characteristics of movements, which becomes difficult if public discourse contributes to a sense of equivalence among various cases of shaming. third we can consider how the press contributes to making shaming meaningful. digital media enable participants and supporters to offer their own commentary that journalists (among others) can either support or contest by integrating it into press coverage of incidents. beyond journalists, it is important to consider the discursive influence of other public figures such as politicians, academics, public intellectuals, and others who happen to command a sizeable (social media) audience, notably when commenting on controversial or otherwise culturally significant events. as was the case when social media surveillance first entered public consciousness, there is a polyphony of social actors who can collaborate or compete to make mediated denunciation meaningful. finally, we may consider social media platforms as passive venues for the above exchanges, yet platform designers shape how digital vigilantism itself is expressed when implementing and commenting on changes made these spaces. as discussed above it is also necessary to consider barriers preventing social actors to access devices and plat- forms, as well as the necessary forms of literacy and legitimacy. addressing these so- called digital divides may be regarded as a democratising force, or a levelling of the playing field. yet this may be a naive view that overlooks reproduction of discrimination not only in its effects, but even in attempts to engage in online denunciations, such that addressing systemic forms of discrimination may remain as difficult as ever. this is evident when considering feminist forms of justice seeking that aim to raise awareness and denounce pervasive forms of gender-based harassment and discrimination online. familiarity with technology is also important to consider when studying public dis- course, as any account of digital vigilantism places demands on its audience. media venues vary in terms of expectations about knowledge of terminologies, platforms, and prescribed behaviour for the audience-as-digital media user. for example, if addressing a largely non-media-savvy audience, journalists may encounter less resistance when asserting specific understandings of concepts, such as platform-specific parlance. when studying mediated vigilante campaigns, it often seems that press and other forms of reporting are much more prominent than the campaign itself. a denunciatory post on a message board may generate a few thousand views, but this visibility may be greatly amplified if a journalist covers the incident. we may even question the global crime distinction between weaponised attempts to make someone visible and press coverage of it, notably if participants are strategically seeking the attention of the press. thus journalists and others commenting on such incidents may have a bearing not only on how it is rendered meaningful, but may also contribute to harm inflicted on the target, and perhaps a broader community under scrutiny. in further questioning the distinction between platforms that propagate these campaigns, and those that claim to merely report on them, reddit and the dutch platform geenstijl are examples of venues where denunciations can occur, but also that can publish reports and editorials on such events. yet this same confluence can be found in tabloid media, which may either engage in its own denunciations or give coverage to existing campaigns. towards a procedural model of digitally mediated vigilantism we may consider how digital vigilantism as a set of practices is rendered meaningful in public discourse. moreover, who is permitted to speak about these practices? who has ‘access to or control over public discourse’ on this topic. a first step towards such an analysis is to consider how to conceptualise digital vigilantism, in order to identify concepts that inform and possibly direct media coverage of this content. the tentative model (figure ) draws on scholarly literature and empirical instances of shaming in order to consider digital vigilantism as a process consisting of distinct stages, themselves consisting of specific practices. past studies of online harassment and surveillance account for the discursive and collective dimensions of mediated shaming. this can be understood as a procedural model structured in terms of policing, discovery and denunciation of offensive content, with each step composed of specific practices. mediated policing produces conditions figure . a tentative model of digital vigilantism. d. trottier that facilitate the discovery of offences, which in turn trigger denunciatory practices. these are shaped by conditions of visibility, and in turn may re-shape these conditions through public debate, and even legislative and platform-based reforms. each practice can involve a range of social actors, and ostensibly any public figure may at least attempt to engage in these steps and attract an audience in the process, with or without formal organisational support. as a set of coordinated activities as well as a way of relating, digital vigilantism is characterised by seeking and making use of targets’ personal information, rendering them visible to public scrutiny. the study of these developments can best be addressed by considering visibility as a fundamental condition of social life, and one that is being multilaterally renegotiated through digital media use in a range of contexts, including policing as well as moral and civic practices. alongside embodied visibility, individuals are primarily known to the public through their online presence, coupled with public records and other open sources. we may consider conditions of visibility being shaped by factors including legislation, social media platform terms of use, journalistic practices and standards, and broader cultural expectations about concepts like privacy, publicity and reputation. mediated policing refers to pre-emptive potential for a campaign, but can also be understood as a more general resting state for digital media users. this denotes an awareness and consideration of steps taken in anticipation or in response to a perceived offence. it is expressed through digital and conventional media through which the audience is implored to adopt a specific predisposition. this can be accomplished by making an explicit appeal to an audience (for example, in the description of a facebook group, or in a televised program), or by the media actor implicitly prescribing an attitude through their conduct, or in press coverage of events. we can further distinguish between a reactive mode of policing, and deliberately seeking out actionable content, for example, when the russian group occupy paedophilia engages in so-called ‘safaris’. such sentiment may be expressed in press releases and journalistic coverage of cam- paigns. likewise, social actors themselves can express their motivations and experiences when engaging in mediated policing as individuals or on behalf of an institution. as a key dimension of mediated policing, vigilance entails a willingness to scrutinise social(ly mediated) life, and to act on offending events if they occur. it is partly informed by a culture of vigilantism that appeals to citizens to take matters into their own hands, but also a mediated culture of participation that solicits more active involvement from media users, albeit under specific circumstances. vigilance can be understood as steps and measures taken by participating members, including the audience. these are often found in instructions on websites, or implicitly mentioned in newspaper editorials. vigilance may be framed as passive through listening or lurking in the case of digitally mediated social interactions. participants do not initially have an active presence, but are rather positioned to catch an offensive act, or recover offensive content. other forms of activity related to mediated interfaces (‘liking’; ‘sharing’; ‘subscribing’; ‘commenting’) are both empowering by conferring agency to the audience-as-participant, but also gen- erate information about them that can be retained by group administrators, and plat- form operators more exclusively. this position in turn sets up the expectation of actions among participants later upon discovery of an offence and target. we can consider a distinction between the participation of primary media actors (witnessing events; global crime trawling through a profile archive), and of audiences (sharing and reacting to content). participation-as-vigilance serves to sustain groups in terms of membership, but also to generate diverse forms of capital. more recent forms of measuring capital like the so- called engagement economy are trialled as ways to reproduce economic and social capital, and are expressed as strategies to capitalise on social media platforms. in looking at mediated content distributed by individuals, one can work towards an account of vigilance by considering the kind of resting state that audiences are expected to take (how is their consumption of media content described? how is it related to a broader societal context, including public spaces and specific national or regional territories?). researchers can also consider the kinds of active steps participants are expected to take in the discovery of offences, for example, by noting references to how citizens are expected to perform when looking out for offences, and whether this performance is prescribed, proscribed or simply anticipated. furthermore, they may consider how the categorical affiliations and broader social status of those who partici- pate are expressed in reports on such cases. mediated policing, as represented in personal blogs, government websites or even reality television, requires an emphasis on specific moral concerns that warrant citizen scrutiny and intervention. for example, the feminist blog ‘movethefuckoverbro’ addresses the gendered use of space through its description, as well as through discus- sions in the comments section. scholars may consider whether the offence is framed as part of a broader social condition, or alternatively as an isolated incident for which the perpetrator is solely responsible. in addition to proscriptive elements, media actors may appeal to prescriptive characteristics that are deemed to be desirable or necessary to preserve through participation. recent examples are often territorial, making reference to (the qualities of) a particular country, city or region and/or a related identity or culture that needs to be actively defended. they may also make reference to nostalgic or otherwise idealised social conditions that are endangered by the perceived offence. research should consider the grounds upon which offences are framed. along with concrete territories, we can also consider how abstract values such as tradition, equality, progress, justice and even cleanliness are expressed in relation to denunciations. digital vigilantism may also reflect a troubled relation between citizen and state. practices that mobilise individuals to identify and denounce other individuals may be expressed as an explicit criticism of the ineffectiveness or unwillingness of the police to intervene in offences, or even the ineligibility of the state to govern over mediated offences. in this sense, campaigns may echo early models of self-policing online where these spaces are seen as independent of any single territory and its governance, a sentiment that is carried into certain strains of cyber-libertarianism and is further complicated through the apparent dissolution of any clear distinction between online and offline activity. it may otherwise simply be an obviation of police duties, for example in the investigation of the boston marathon bombing, or riot in vancouver. as such it is worth considering how various branches of the state are described in relation to specific offences, but also in relation to extrajudicial responses. researchers can consider references to a perceived need to defer to the police or courts, and expressions in favour of ‘due process’, as well as concepts with judicial purchase such as proportionality or privacy. relatedly, they may consider references to a lack of d. trottier confidence in the police and courts based on a variety of grounds (lack of capabilities; lack of interest; lack of funding; lack of technical expertise). during the course of mediated policing, participants may come to discover offensive conduct, either by witnessing and presumably recording and uploading an embodied offence, or by proactively searching for objectionable content in a target’s online pre- sence. they may spread this content through mobile devices onto social platforms, and may add editorial content that serves to reproduce mediated policing. for example it may be expressed to sustain awareness of an issue, or a general state of vigilance, but it also may be expressed more instrumentally through an attempt to sustain the funding and legitimacy of an organisation. if conditions allow, an event can be collectively agreed upon as offensive and actionable, and can lead to response and re-editorialising of context. yet this implies a certain amount of capital and privilege on the part of those advocating for something deemed offensive, including on behalf of the initiator. an offence may be received as not ‘offensive’ enough to warrant a substantial response. likewise, a considerable counter-denunciation may emerge if the initial participant is deemed to have breached social norms. more recent accusations of digital content being manipu- lated (‘photoshopped’), or simply being ‘fake news’ also offer opportunities to negate the validity of offensive content. in terms of responses to an offence, we may also distinguish between a first and second order form of moralising, where either the initial offence is denounced, or the response of the individual under scrutiny. to this we may consider a third order offence, in which the response of the participants in a shaming campaign (as described below) are assessed and possibly denounced. taken together, these may lead to a reconsideration of conditions of visibility that render shaming and vigilance possible. in such responses researchers may consider how visibility as a relatively evasive notion is expressed through coverage of these ordeals. for instance, what aspects of a target or participant’s social life are said to be rendered visible, and which individuals, devices or organisations are framed as being responsible for this exposure? mediated denunciation is sustained by an initial discovery, but also by circulation through digital media by a range of actors. participants impose denunciatory values and opinions upon a target, who is identified and scrutinised through their personal infor- mation, but also through their reputation. here scholars should be attentive to how the social status of a target is expressed in public discourse, as well as the grounds upon which they are being shamed (the offence in question; behaviour more generally; perceptions of their character; categorical affiliation). shaming may considered as either reintegrative or stigmatising depending on the tone through which the editorialising against them is expressed, as well as whether there is an expressed possibility or actualised rehabilitation and reintegration of the target. likewise, participants engage in doxing to render a target visible in a multifaceted and lasting way by gathering and publishing any available information about them and inviting audiences to do the same, as well as to circulate any available information about the target. scholars should consider the categories of information that participants may seek out (medical; financial; employment; family; location; digital media history), as well as any that may seemingly be excluded from scrutiny, especially in the case of information that may render others visible, such as relatives or members of a shared community. scholars should also consider how information gathering and distribution global crime practices are described in, for example, guidelines for groups on social platforms that identify offensive individuals (ex: reddit group descriptions). denunciation may provoke other forms of mediated and embodied activities, including harassment and bullying, threats, and physical violence, often overlapping with gendered persecution and racism. as for longer-term outcomes, researchers can also consider how the reputation and broader social standing of the target and participants are understood and expressed both in news reports as well as accounts by participants. here the reputation of the target may both be compromised through denunciatory coverage, but also explicitly reported on in references to the aftermath of the campaign. they may consider references to detrimental life events for targets, for example, an inability to sustain employment, being excommunicated from their community, in addition to physical interventions. discussion researchers may take into account a broad range of data that renders mediated vigilante campaigns meaningful. this includes media produced by campaigns them- selves, commentary by individual unaffiliated actors, as well as commentary generated by other participants in reaction to initial posts. likewise, journalistic coverage often features prominently when searching cases, including platforms that straddle a boundary between reporting the news and utilising social media to propagate campaigns. still other social actors may seek to comment on these cases and phenom- ena more broadly through guides and reports. in the context of gender-based harass- ment, online resources provide direction for those on the receiving end of vitriol, and in turn shape public perception of such incidents. digitally mediated vigilantism constitutes a troubling set of practices that combines the scrutiny of targeted individuals with denunciation and a range of social harms. as such, researchers should remain attentive that even supposedly user-led activities inform and in turn are informed by other institutions. the press have historically engaged in citizen shaming, which begins to overlap with digital media practices as content from these venues attract digital media users. this amounts to a kind of hybrid media system that not only involves individual user input, but may also shape relations between individuals, states, and organisations. while journalism more broadly involves rendering people visible through (as one example) crime reporting, the concern with digital vigilantism is the combination of a denunciatory tone with the possibility of audiences further participating in retaliatory activities. contemporary denunciations amount to a proliferation of editorialising, coupled with volatile and harmful data handling practices. the press are composed of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers with an affiliated digital media presence such as the daily mail, but also media agencies that have been established and operate entirely online, such as geenstijl.nl, breitbart and therebel.ca. other organisations may also participate in mediated shaming. these include citizen-led initiatives, civil society organisations, as well as profit-oriented groups. such groups may cultivate their own mediated visibility through branding strategies on social media. they often leverage audience cynicism in order to capitalise on the visibility and denunciation of targeted individuals. as well, police and other state agencies adopt diverging strategies towards mediated shaming. in some instances d. trottier they advocate for and enforce privacy and data protection laws as legal mechanisms against coordinated attacks on an individual’s social standing. campaigns may cross legal thresholds if threats are uttered, and may warrant police intervention. yet in a global context states are also making use of mediated denunciations as a potential form of ‘soft power’, for example, in response to unpaid taxes. it is not always clear if citizens are self-mobilised, or operating with the implicit deputisation by the state. finally, digital vigilantism occurs through social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, reddit and vkontakte along with other telecommunication and digital media services. these services provide specific affordances for the above social actors to engage in shaming as well as generate various forms of capital. and while they may take measures to minimise harmful outcomes such as doxing and harassment, their business models benefit from viral spikes in online engagement following controversial shaming campaigns, to the extent that they may tolerate or even cultivate such coordinated forms of social harm. notes . scott, “in defense of call-out culture.” . trottier, “digital vigilantism.” . treem et al., “social media use in organizations”; and van dijck, et al., “understanding social media logic.” . nhan et al., “digitalantism”; schneider et al., “social media and the vancouver riot.”; jane, “online misogyny and feminist digilantism.” . johnston, “what is vigilantism?” . moncada, “varieties of vigilantism.” . see note above. . vitis et al., “dick pics on blast.” . blitz, “lies, line drawing, and (deep) fake news.” . haggard, “north korea and the sony hack”; mansfield-devine, “the ashley madison affair”; persily “the u.s. election”; and ferrara “disinformation and social bot operations.” . see https://abc .com/news/social-media-users-help-id-philadelphia-gay-bashing-suspects / /. . kohm, “naming, shaming and criminal justice.” . trottier, 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age”; dahlberg, “cyber-libertarianism . .” . nhan et al., “digilantism”; and schneider et al., “social media and the vancouver riot.” . c.f. thompson, “the new visibility.” . braithwaite, crime, shame and reintegration. . douglas, “doxing: a conceptual analysis.” . solove, the future of reputation. . see http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/ /what-to-expect-when-youre- expecting-the-internet and https://arstechnica.com/security/ / /anti-doxing-strategy- or-how-to-avoid- -qurans-and- -of-chick-fil-a/. . chadwick, “the political information cycle.” . c.f. fieschi et al., “trust, cynicism and populist anti-politics.” . see note above. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. funding this work was supported by the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo) [ - - ]; notes on contributor daniel trottier is an associate professor at the department of media and communication of erasmus university rotterdam. his current research considers the 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( ): – . doi: . / . wall, d. s., and w. matthew. “policing diversity in the digital age: maintaining order in virtual communities.” criminology and criminal justice ( ): – . doi: . / . witteborn, s., and q. huang. “diaosi as a way of relating in contemporary china.” in the handbook of communication in cross-cultural perspective, edited by d. carbaugh, – . new york: routledge, . global crime https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / 	abstract 	mediated justice seeking and its scholarly challenges 	denunciation and discursive relations 	towards aprocedural model of digitally mediated vigilantism 	discussion 	notes 	disclosure statement 	funding 	notes on contributor 	bibliography $ € £ ¥ social sciences article postfeminist masculinity: the new disney norm? michael macaluso institute for educational initiatives, university of notre dame, notre dame, in , usa; mmacaluso@nd.edu; tel: + - - - received: september ; accepted: october ; published: november ���������� ������� abstract: a recent trend in disney scholarship attends to postfeminist readings of disney film and media. this paper contributes to that conversation by focusing on the representations of masculinity that accompany postfeminist sensibilities in and through disney media and its reception. with a sociological focus on postfeminist masculinity, this article reviews several disney characters to argue for a new model of postfeminist masculinity advanced in recent disney films, with a particular focus on the incredibles films, and examines how this representation has been received in popular media. keywords: disney; postfeminism; masculinity; gender; cultural studies . introduction a recent trend in disney scholarship, in the wake of the blockbuster animated film frozen, attends to postfeminist readings of disney film and media (e.g., frasl ; macaluso ; stover ) and public reception of these films. because of disney’s questionable history of perpetuating dangerous gender stereotypes on film (e.g., bell et al. ; giroux and pollock )—and perhaps because of its implicit acknowledgement of this history, as evidenced by a recent string of movies with female leads—this postfeminist line of inquiry seems especially apt. this paper contributes to that burgeoning conversation but focuses mainly on the representations of masculinity that accompany postfeminist sensibilities in and through disney media and its reception. though much work has been done to examine cinematic depictions of postfeminist masculinities in general (e.g., abele and gronbeck-tedesco ; gwyne and muller ), this paper looks specifically at disney and pixar (hereafter, only “disney”) films’ constructions of this concept, as previous conversations have typically concentrated on the portrayal of women and girls. as traditional or stereotypical versions of masculinity and masculine power continue to be supported and reaffirmed (through political and sports figures, superhero movies, and a plethora of gendered cultural practices and representations) but also challenged and dismantled (with such cultural movements like #metoo), many have begun to wonder as to the criteria of and for masculine success. what role models might young boys—and adolescent and adult men—aspire to? with this question in mind, recent scholarship examines disney films to offer more productive critical discourse around masculinity (e.g., davis ; wooden and gillam ). towards that same effort, i ask: how are recent disney men discursively positioned through and by discourse? more specifically, how do disney movies, as important texts of cultural production, reinforce a model of postfeminist masculinity? to answer these questions, i review several disney characters to push back against simplistic categories of disney men and to argue for a vision of masculinity that disney seems to promulgate in its most recent films. then, i illuminate the discourses and inherent meanings in and around incredibles and its popular reception. in the process, i will argue that a postfeminist masculinity sensibility pervades these disney cultural texts, signaling a new era—and yet another troubling model—of disney masculinity. with a sociological focus on masculinity in particular, this paper responds to rumens ( ) call for “more engaged research in the complicated ways in which discourses of postfeminist masculinities are historically patterned and intermingle with cultural . . . discourses” (p. ). soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= soc. sci. , , of . postfeminism and postfeminist masculinity before i discuss the conceptual tools that guide this paper, i find it necessary to briefly revisit the broad construct of postfeminism, as it can be employed and mis/used in a variety of ways. as i understand and use it, postfeminism (e.g., mcrobbie ; tasker and negra ; butler ; munford and waters ) refers to a range of contradictory gender discourses generally tied to, reified in, and arising from cultural and contemporary media. postfeminism, in general, highlights narratives of achieved gender equity and sentiments that the goals of feminism and feminist equality and representation have been achieved or actualized or are no longer necessary. these “success narratives” tend to take cultural shape in media as “instances of typically heterosexual, white, middle-class [female] achievement in male-dominated workplaces, women’s ability to treat men as sexual objects and the seemingly unfettered freedoms women enjoy in respect to career choice, parenting and domesticity” (rumens , p. ). as a result, these narratives signify or indicate the end, fulfillment, or passing of feminism—and hence, an era of post-feminism where traditional feminist goals of gender equality, equal rights, and collective action are replaced by discourses and depictions of female empowerment, choice, and independence. part of its contradiction stems from the inherent link or entanglement (mcrobbie ) between postfeminist and feminist discourses: postfeminism celebrates the perceived successes of feminism. further, because of its perception of feminist actualization, postfeminism can also perpetuate a general backlash against feminism, by men and women, because of its—again, perceived—threatening, extreme, or difficult expectations for both men and women (tasker and negra ). as postfeminism is linked more broadly with gender, culture, and power (tasker ), it also employs its own discourse of and around masculinity. tasker and negra ( ) theorized postfeminist masculinity, the focus of this paper, as a discourse that “celebrates women’s strength while lightly critiquing or gently ridiculing straight masculinity” (p. ). in other words, postfeminist masculinity represents straight masculinity as foolish or comedic, perhaps even immature or incapable, in order to highlight capable, independent women. as gill ( ) describes it, postfeminist masculinity is personified “in the repeated depiction of men as somewhat hapless, bumbling ‘victims’ or ‘losers’ in the ‘sex wars,’ alongside the presentation of feminism as extreme, old-fashioned and unnecessary/superfluous” (p. ). the classic example of this trope can be seen in ray romano, the character from the popular television series everybody loves raymond. on the show, ray’s wife regularly refers to him as an “idiot” while she is portrayed as strong, confident, capable, and demanding. more often than not, the comedic timing of the show comes at ray’s expense, as his words and actions—sometimes tied to his understanding of what it means to be a man or dad—tend to get him in trouble. this trope portrays the gendered-opposite formula of the classic television sitcom i love lucy—rather than lucy and ethel’s antics, it’s ray’s; and he, his brother, and his father seem to be the butt or subject of the show’s jokes. postfeminist masculinity can take on other forms, including vulnerable men in crisis, supportive husbands, and/or caring and inclusive male-figures, but the ridiculed depiction of masculinity seems most prevalent in disney films of late. . models of disney masculinity it seems that disney, as a producer of knowledge and culture, (implicitly or explicitly) recognizes certain traits and types—or fixed attributes—of masculinity in many of its male protagonists. for example, davis ( ) has analyzed a broad swath of films to posit three broad depictions of disney men—boys, heroes (both princes and non-aristocratic), and villains. but discussions around disney masculinity problematically tend to stop here and attempt to pigeonhole characters into one category. in this section, i expand upon these categories—what i call “models of masculinity” (table )—and offer a new model based upon recent disney films. soc. sci. , , of table . models of disney masculinity. boy hero/prince villain pinocchio miguel prince charming prince phillip prince eric tarzan hercules gaston ratcliffe judge frollo shan yu jafar dr. facilier aladdin peter pan john smith quasimodo the traditional depiction of disney masculinity comes in the form of a dashing prince or hero. for example, early films like snow white and the seven dwarfs and cinderella depicted relatively passive princes (the nameless “prince charming”) who served as secondary characters and objects of affection for the despondent or trialed female protagonists. once these female characters were free of their wicked stepmother, they were able to escape to a “happily ever after” with this prince. the trope of the sidelined prince changed with movies like sleeping beauty and the little mermaid with named princes phillip and eric, respectively, who, though still an object of affection, played a vital role in heroically vanquishing the villain and, thus, more actively saving the princess in distress. the brave actions of these princely heroes essentially superseded those of both aurora and ariel—princesses in their own right by birth. other non-prince characters also serve as heroes in disney movies, including tarzan, hercules, and aladdin. aside from heroes, disney also tends to advance the trope of the boy-turned-man by way of some attainment of knowledge and/or personal understanding (i.e., moving from innocence to experience). this is classically personified in pinocchio who learns what it means to be a “real boy” after a series of shameful and sinful associations with the likes of lampwick, honest john, stromboli, and even monstro the whale. in the end, pinocchio learns that nothing can replace the value of family. other disney boys who experience some type of coming of age or bildungsroman include miguel from coco, who comes to much the same conclusion as pinocchio, and even peter pan and, again, aladdin. though peter could also fall into the hero category, he does come to realize the importance of the darling children and their safe return to london. aladdin, too, by the end of the film, understands the importance of being honest to himself and others about who he really is. in the words of the blue fairy, all of these characters prove themselves to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish” as they come to their personal understandings over the course of their respective films. other “boy” archetypes may include characters like john smith (pocahontas) and quasimodo (the hunchback of notre dame). finally, disney’s memorable line-up of male villains constitutes another category. more often than not, these villains tend to take on a position of masculine authority—or, in more nuanced terms, hegemonic masculinity (woloshyn et al. )—until they are defeated, usually by the hero/prince who takes on a lesser or more acceptable form of hegemonic masculinity. hegemonic masculinity is a type of masculinity where men dominate and subject other men and women. because of this subjugation, hegemonic masculinity is strongly linked to heterosexuality and a hyper-masculine presence. this depiction of masculinity is classically characterized in gaston from beauty and the beast. he is strong, tough, handsome, and dominates every scene he is in, most clearly by subjugating those around him, as evidenced by his treatment of his sidekick lefou (more on this below). the song “gaston” (ashman and menken ) further highlights the hegemonic and masculine features of gaston the character: he has a thick neck and cleft chin, no one is as “burly and brawny,” he has “biceps to spare,” and, of course, “every last inch of me’s covered with hair.” aside from the song, gaston narcissistically and readily points out these features to belle, accented by his suave smile and perfect hair, throughout the movie. the rest of the song notes that he’s “intimidating” and “a man soc. sci. , , of among men” who uses “antlers in all of my decorating.” these “manly man” features are associated with traditional—and even stereotypical and dated—aspects of masculinity. in short, “no one says no to gaston,” which is indicative of a typical response to hegemonic masculinity. similar villains of this type may include shan yu (mulan), jafar (aladdin), ratcliff (pocahontas), frollo (the hunchback of notre dame), and dr. facilier (the princess and the frog). though some of these villains may not have many of gaston’s stereotypical, “manly” attributes (like burly, brawny muscle), the way they act and treat others seems indicative of their intention to rule, dominate, or maintain power over others. certainly other depictions and versions of masculinity exist in the disney universe, as postmodern theory acknowledges that masculinity may take many forms and exist in relation to other subject positions (i.e., that which is not masculine), but these versions seem to be outliers rather than recurring representations or tropes. or, they tend to be overlooked for one of the categories detailed above. for example, dundes and streiff ( ) have analyzed the character chi fu from disney’s mulan for his masculinity tropes and specifically as the antithesis of hegemonic masculinity—a man who, like lefou, is indicative of effeminate, homosexual, or even hyposexual masculinity. but i would like to offer another category or model that i argue is recently recurring: that of post-feminist hero, whose features fall somewhere in between these versions of hegemonic masculinity and the effeminate or absence of masculinity. or, perhaps rather, whose features index the man who fails to perform, inhabit, or actualize a hegemonic masculinity. more specifically, the postfeminist version of masculinity is a disney man who experiences some type of crisis or vulnerability, usually in relation to his understanding or performance of masculinity connected to work, family, partner, expectation, etc. in the first the incredibles movie, mr. incredible, having been forced to conceal his superhero identity, takes on the trope of the worn-down masculine businessman who hates his job. this portrayal of the struggling bob parr (mr. incredible’s alter-ego) indicates a postfeminist sentimentality, where men are depicted “as clinging on by a thread to their tenuous ‘careers.’ they are usually doing something boring for which they are overqualified” (gill , p. ). in the incredibles, this portrayal is further exaggerated by bob’s relationship with his boss, a literally diminutive but overbearing, strong, and seemingly more successful insurance businessman. bob’s revival comes through a renewal of his “primitive” masculinity (ashcraft and flores )—through an invitation from a mysterious stranger to don his mr. incredible persona once again, use his super-strength, tone up his physique, and take down a villain. in this sense, his crisis of masculinity is resolved by reverting to a stereotypical, normalized version of manhood and masculinity—brute strength and physicality. in incredibles , mrs. incredible—under her previous and un-wedded identity (that is, her identity without a male/masculine attachment) as elastigirl—accepts an offer from a corporation to fight crime in order to rebuild the public’s trust in superheroes. the leaders of the corporation make it clear that they want elastigirl specifically for this job because she, unlike her husband, creates less of a mess in collateral damage, hence her disassociation from her mrs. incredible title—an important post/feminist message, for sure. she, simply put, has not messed up enough or created as much collateral damage (literally and figuratively) as her husband. (on a side note here: the ease with which elastigirl attains this position—without barriers or structures—and the success and ease with which she carries out the job also speak to the postfeminist nature of the film as a whole.) to support this endeavor, mr. incredible takes on the role of stay-at-home dad. in some of the funnier scenes of the movie, mr. incredible reaches breaking points when he cannot figure out dash’s new methods for completing his math homework, and the only way he knows how to manage the erratic behavior of his youngest son jack-jack, who is in the process of developing his own superpowers, is to feed him cookies. because of his sheer exhaustion at one point, he quickly and desperately passes off jack-jack to a babysitter. even from this short description, the postfeminist themes are clear, as elastigirl, the successful, independent, and empowered woman-at-work, literally saves the day on a daily basis, while mr. incredible struggles at home. a simple binary is established between the empowered, successful woman (who succeeds perhaps at the expense of a man/men) and the vulnerable, downtrodden male. soc. sci. , , of this role reversal marks an important cultural change from the first incredibles movie fourteen years prior, when mrs. incredible/elastigirl gave up her superhero career to care for the house and kids while mr. incredible performed his superhero duties to satisfy his mid-life crisis. the difference now, though, is that mr. incredible is gently ridiculed for his inability to parent and domesticate whereas mrs. incredible handled these duties perfectly fine in the first movie—and even managed to rescue mr. incredible at one point. there are other, recent disney movies that seem to reify the post-feminist hero. wooden and gillam ( ) have noted brave’s “animal to imbecile . . . depiction of men as buffoonish thugs, amid its supposedly bold stride forward toward gender equality in children’s film” (p. xii). i have written before about the ways in which both hans and kristoff from the enormously popular and critically respected frozen abide by the tropes of postfeminist masculinity (macaluso ). both characters are portrayed as immature or offer some comic relief in the film in ways similar to flynn rider from tangled and prince naveen from the princess and the frog. in fulfilling many of the same postfeminist tropes, flynn and naveen are often portrayed as the butt of jokes (with frying pans to the face, in flynn’s case) and as the female protagonists’ unwilling and unwittingly travel partners who eventually fall for her charm and charisma. even héctor from coco—a film which i admit has mostly positive and generative depictions of its characters overall—seems naïve and hapless, the bumbling victim of a cruel plot, who is only redeemed once the truth about his disappearance is revealed. upon that reveal, he is welcomed back into his family, which is comprised of many strong women who have largely driven the plot of the movie. without a postfeminist understanding, these characters may be hastily categorized as a hero or sidelined/passive prince, but table takes into account this new model of disney masculinity, which seems to be indicative of disney films of late (again, perhaps to compensate for its history of passive female heroes). table . revised models of disney masculinity. boy hero/prince post-feminist hero villain pinocchio miguel prince charming prince phillip prince eric tarzan hercules mr. incredible kristoff héctor prince naveen flynn rider gaston ratcliffe judge frollo shan yu jafar dr. facilier aladdin peter pan john smith quasimodo prince hans ralph kuzco maui the beast one interesting exception, as noted in the chart, is the beast from beauty and the beast. he could potentially blend across all of these models, as he gains new knowledge and understanding over the course of the film, he makes the ultimate sacrifice in defeating the villain, and he shows authoritative and domineering behaviors, all while being gently ridiculed and chastised for these behaviors in generally comedic ways (e.g., he is groomed with bows and curls, he is shown how to properly eat soup and dance, he is hit with snowballs, etc.). in short, the beast character “helps to forward the image of unloved and unhappy white men who need kindness and affection, rather than criticism and reform, in order to become their ‘true’ selves again” (jeffords , p. ). this depiction proves that a post-feminist hero need not be confined to its own box or set of traits—just like ralph (wreck-it ralph), kuzco (the emperor’s new groove), and maui (moana). soc. sci. , , of while postfeminist masculinity marks a relative change in the overall representations of men and masculinity in disney films, it should not necessarily be thought of as a new, temporal masculinity that has displaced older or other versions of masculinity. i rely on notions of postfeminist masculinity as a sensibility (gill , ), allowing for an analysis of its discursive constructions and structure of feeling (gill ) as one of many models of masculinity. however, it is interesting that the models of the postfeminist hero tend to come later in the disney canon (the earliest in and most after )—perhaps indicative of “the time and place” in which these films were created and produced. in considering the postfeminist work that these movies, and especially the most recent incredibles movies, do and perform, one must remember that a cultural text like a disney movie shapes the social imagination and can, thus, “articulate gendered possibilities for social actors” (rumens , p. ). therefore, one must ask about the apparent affect, effect, or uptake of these postfeminist themes—what ideological work around masculinity does this movie and overall sensibility do? on the one hand, this brief analysis of disney men affirms that “disney’s male characters have been affected and shaped by the discourse surrounding feminism and ‘post-feminism’ just as much as their female characters” (davis , p. ). on the other hand, postfeminist masculinity must also implicitly reinforce or challenge male power or do something else entirely. in other words, ideology indeed “does” something. the next section of this paper considers this point and the potential effects these discourses have on viewers and how those discourses may interpellate male and female subjects. to do this, i briefly examine popular online media—through movies reviews and the social discussion website reddit—for its popular reception around incredibles , specifically, to see how average viewers negotiate the film’s messages and postfeminist sensibilities. . postfeminist uptake of incredibles naturally, “everyday critics” and average movie-goers alike picked up on the perceived feminist themes of the film, noting the active and independent role elastigirl carries this time around, and as a result, reviews were and have been mixed (and generally along gendered lines). for example, several critics touted and celebrated its feminist message. paige ( ) argues, “feel free to yell from the rooftops that incredibles is hella feminist . . . it’s simply a reflection of our changing times and work . . . ” (para. ). smith ( ) from the guardian calls the film “a feminist triumph” (para. ) in the post-weinstein era. rey ( ) of the online women’s magazine bustle agrees, noting that the film’s “premise had a sense of female empowerment [that] couldn’t be more timely” (para. ). though these soundbites hearken to postfeminist discourses (such as the empowered, feminine yet feminist, white woman), these critics see the elevation of elastigirl as the featured protagonist as incredibly significant in contemporary times. what seems to be somewhat lost in these reviews is the important—and similarly elevated—role this character played in the first film by actually saving mr. incredible from death and a formidable villain—in addition to being a good mom. this is not to say that one film does a better job than the other but to point out how (post)feminism can be easily reduced to simply having a strong female-lead. others critics, even while praising the film, expressed their frustrations with the “political” (i.e., perceived feminist) messaging of the film. for example, one critic (adams ) from the online magazine slate notes, “bob parr stays at home and plays bumbling househusband, fumbling violet’s adolescent emotional crises, furrowing his brow at dash’s math homework, and frowning at jack-jack’s superpoopy diapers” (para. ). another critic (knowles ) from opinion website the daily wire, in critiquing this representation, actually compared the film to everybody loves raymond, sarcastically noting that mr. incredible “hilariously bungles” his parenting duties because “wives are just so much more competent than their idiot husbands” (para. ). but what he calls “fashionable feminism” (para. ) is, in actuality, indicative of a postfeminist—and specifically a postfeminist masculinity—sensibility. these reviews that do focus on the portrayal of the male characters see that portrayal as problematic, and rightly so. fatherhood-on-film has been linked to postfeminist masculinities for decades now (hamad ), and incredibles is no exception, as these reviews critique mr. incredible’s struggles to soc. sci. , , of juggle and manage the parenting demands of his three children, accounting for much of the movie’s comic relief. but, importantly, the cultural reception around the “feminist” message of the film has extended to “everyday critics” of the internet as well. for example, reddit can be a good data site for analyzing public reception because it acts as a moderated, digital bulletin board of important topics and discussions for registered users. these users, or members, can post content on various themed pages—or subreddits—of interest to them. one user, kc_weeden ( ) on the “men going their own way” subreddit, a forum dedicated to men “forging their own identities and paths to self-defined success,” posted the following about incredibles : “ . . . it was chock full of feminist ideology and tropes that all movies/shows seem to have these days. i swear, it’s not hard to make a good movie without a political agenda” (n.p.). of the comments that follow, of them focus on the “feminist political agenda” of contemporary movies, with comments like, “it seems every movie is really pushing this feminist, misandric, pro woman bullshit” (constantchinner , n.p.) or “it’s a sad thing that everything nowadays has to be politically driven. music, movies, videogames, paintings, theatre. everything has to have a ‘deep’—i.e., feminism—meaning, or else it’s not up to par...”. only two of these comments mention the representation of masculinity. one user only mentioned that “they changed the male characters for no reason, to be dumb assholes, completely different from the first movie, while they kept the female characters the same”, while the other commented positively on the portrayal of mr. incredible, saying, “it was at least balanced with a father (mr. incredible) bonding with his kids and supporting them, and men playing the roles they play anyway, as involved responsible men rather than overgrown children”. aside from the one positive comment, these reviewers overall seemed more frustrated with the—again—strong, female protagonist than with the specific representation of the main male character and the implications for masculinity and fatherhood that come with it. as a result, they blame the “political” construct of feminism. this backlash appeared on other subreddits as well, though to a lesser degree. for example, similar messages were posted on the “pixar” subreddit, where user coxk ( ) asked, “i’ve heard people calling the incredibles [sic] ‘feminist propaganda.’ what do you think?” (n.p.). of the ten responses, only one of them seemed to think so, by saying, “to be fair there was a lot more impact by the female characters in this movie. elasti-girl, evelyn, violet, edna, the senator. mr. incredible, dash, frozone and the other males felt like supporting characters” (lajidwayem , n.p.). in this more generic subreddit (one about all pixar films compared to one about men and men’s issues), the responses seemed more generic and open-ended. what’s interesting to me across all of these cases—from both critics and everyday critics/users—is that the apparent feminism/feminist ideology incurs misguided praise or criticism. on the one hand, some seem to be more angry at the depiction of a strong female lead than at the ridiculed male subject; on the other, some seem to celebrate shallow versions of feminism. in either case, “feminism” is celebrated for portraying “girl power” in the form of a strong female character paired with a weak or foolish male character—the very definition of a postfeminist sensibility. in the end, these disney cultural texts serve no one because popular reception seems, at most, to reinforce traditional male power as a backlash against perceived feminism, and at the least, to repudiate feminism and further divide the sexes. in either case, postfeminism as a construct or sensibility is reaffirmed and lauded under the guise of feminism. . implications this paper began by asking: how are disney men discursively positioned through and by (postfeminist) discourses? how do disney texts, as important sites of cultural production, reinforce postfeminist masculinity sensibilities? i have attempted to show how recent disney men, with a particular focus on the recent incredibles films as representative of current examples, have been represented and how that representation has been received or taken-up in popular media with film critics and average consumers of texts (i.e., redditors). overall, the striking “finding” here is that soc. sci. , , of postfeminism exists, and it extends itself across texts and media by men and women. while i agree with giroux ( ); giroux and pollock ( ) that popular texts, and especially disney texts, act as teaching machines and serve as producers of ideological, cultural knowledge, i also acknowledge that today’s abundant digital discourse plays that role as well. disney is not necessarily solely to blame for the proliferation of these discourses—they did not create them, and they will not be the last to proliferate them. rather, disney produces and recycles and reinforces the sensibilities that we create and are created by. we, in other words, live in an era of postfeminist discourses because we are the producers of postfeminist sensibilities. postfeminism—in its various forms, discourses, and sensibilities—is all around us, whether we see it or not. on a much more practical level, any type of media runs the risk of intentionally or unintentionally, implicitly or explicitly, reifying cultural messages. in the case of some of the most recent disney films, there seems to be a message that men must be weak in order for women to thrive. this message is dangerous to both sexes, as it subtly suggests that women and men cannot successfully coexist as strong, independent individuals together. moreover, the incredibles films further imply that two successful working parents simply do not and cannot exist; one parent must sacrifice a career or gendered expectations for the other to thrive. this is the real work of postfeminism. moving forward, i do wonder if a positive postfeminist representation of men and masculinity can exist in the disney universe or what that model would even look like. for example, could disney produce a film that portrays positive depictions of men and women in pursuit of common goals and desires, or does that lead to bland storytelling and movie-making? might a hypothetical incredibles feature the family united in their fight against the villain the underminer, building off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and finding comedic timing in just being a not-so-average family? finally, this paper offered a new model of disney masculinity, the idea or trope of the postfeminist hero, as a potential new norm. the intention in proposing this model is, again, not necessarily to criticize disney for their representations of men, women, and masculinity—though representations do matter, whether fiction or not, and especially those with and from a corporate and cultural producer like disney, with its emphasis on family and children’s entertainment. rather, i propose the model as a new norm of disney masculinity, and, thus, as a way to recognize and—importantly—to resist postfeminism in one of its many forms. if we are the cause for the circulation of these postfeminist discourses, then we must be ever present in heading them off and challenging the ways in which they call us to be and believe in the real world. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflicts of interest. 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[crossref] wooden, shannon r., and ken gillam. . pixar’s boy stories: masculinity in a postmodern age. lanham: rowman & littlefield. © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijsss.v i . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	postfeminism and postfeminist masculinity 	models of disney masculinity 	postfeminist uptake of incredibles 	implications 	references “fantastic tricks before high heaven,” measure for measure and performing triads religions article “fantastic tricks before high heaven,” measure for measure and performing triads emily bryan department of languages and literatures, sacred heart university, park avenue, fairfield, ct , usa; bryane@sacredheart.edu received: january ; accepted: february ; published: february ���������� ������� abstract: reading measure for measure through the logic of substitution has been a long-standing critical tradition; the play seems to invite topical, political, and religious parallels at every turn. what if the logic of substitution in the play goes beyond exchange and seeks out a triadic logic instead? this insistent searching for the triad appears most notably in the performance of measure for measure by cheek by jowl ( – ). cheek by jowl’s strategies of touring, simplicity, movement, and liberation create a dynamic and ever-evolving performance. this article puts cheek by jowl’s performance of measure for measure in conversation with c.s. peirce’s (and subsequent theorists) explorations of triadic logic with puttenham’s rhetoric of traductio (repetition with variation, and "tranlacing"), in addition to critical work on substitutions in the play. tracing the superfluity of substitutions in rhetoric and performance of the play allows us to see how the play refuses binaries, and energizes triadic logic as a means to liveness in performance. both shakespeare’s play and the cheek by jowl production use a triadic structure which suggests the trinity, foregrounding the body as a site of mediation and liveness. keywords: measure for measure; cheek by jowl; performance; the body; the trinity; christology; rhetoric; repetition; triadic logic; semiotics i say móre: the just man justices; keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; acts in god’s eye what in god’s eye he is— chríst—for christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the father through the features of men’s faces. gerard manley hopkins, “as kingfishers catch fire.” life is mysterious and transcends logic, so the living thing can never be fully analysed, taught or learned. but those things that apparently cut out life or seem to conceal or block it, are not nearly so mysterious as they pretend. these ‘things’ are bound by logic and may be analysed, isolated and destroyed. the doctor may explain why the patient is dead, but never why the patient is alive. declan donnellan, the actor and the target placing these two epigraphs together at the start of this article, i hope to put the infused language of poetry in conversation with the lived experience of the theatrical creators, especially in relation to the sign systems that produce meaning in theatrical performance. following theatre semioticians like keir elam, patrice pavis, and fernando de toro, i recognize in cheek by jowl’s production a triadic structure which i will argue evokes the holy trinity (elam ; pavis ; de toro ). comparing hopkins’ poem to donnellan’s advice exposes a potential connection among the trinity, triadic logic in religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of performance, and liveness. hopkins’ poem, “as kingfishers catch fire,” reveals in its second stanza a theatrical and performative idea of christ’s relationship to humanity. donnellan’s advice to actors unpacks the complicated process of creating or re-creating the live experience. in hopkins’ poem, “the just man” “acts in god’s eye what in god’s eye he is—christ—for christ plays in ten thousand places” (emphasis mine). the language of performance provides a way for hopkins to understand the presence of christ in humanity. when donnellan advises actors that removing the “blocks” to human experience enhances the actor’s performance and allows the mystery of life to be revealed, he describes a process that shows theatrical creation as a dance between the analytical and the mysterious. hopkins’ affinity for the language of poetry as a way to encounter christology aligns with his desire that his poems be performed; in a letter to his brother he explains that his poetry, “must be spoken, till it is spoken, it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself” (goss , p. ). here hopkins elides the performer with the text itself. if the poem itself is a performative act, then the interpretation of christ who “plays in a thousand places,/ lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his,” must be an act of transference, of movement. the very nature of performance, for hopkins, requires a christological worldview where the performance of god is always present, if a moving target. deeply connected to hopkins’ idea of performance is the rhythm and rhetorical development of his poetry. having his poems spoken fans them out to breath and to the body. speaking and enacting his poetry allows the poem to be closer to “itself.” declan donnellan’s advice to actors also underscores this idea of closeness. in fact, he argues that when actors are “blocked” they experience “paralysis and isolation—an inner locking and an outer locking. and, at worst, an overwhelming awareness of being alone, a creeping sense of being both responsible and powerless, unworthy and angry, too small, too big, too cautious, too ... me” (donnellan , p. ). this feeling of being alone, being too much “me,” is counter to being alive. as the epigraph above articulates, the doctor can analyze the dead, but cannot account for life. the theatrical experience depends upon liveness, which, for hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of god,” but for performance theorists might be described another way. andrew quick, in “taking place: encountering the live,” advances a description of live art that intersects with the tension between the “blocks” donnellan describes and the electricity of experience in hopkins’ poetry: the live troubles because it cannot be completely tied down. in order to experience its very liveness we are compelled to be open to the moment-by-moment of the live’s happening before applying the rules through which we might presume to understand what is taking place around us. consequently, ‘being live’ displaces, if only for an instant, the constellations that bind knowledge and representation together to fashion the narratives and structures that presume to describe and organize phenomena into concrete formations. (quick , p. ) though “live art,” which quick is analyzing, has a particular definition of the combined practices of research and performance by artists, his formulation of the way ‘liveness’ forces the audience to put on hold the organizing principles that it commonly uses to understand the world corresponds to hopkins’ performative approach to poetry and donnellan’s work as a director of the company, cheek by jowl. i am interested in bringing together this verse of hopkins and donnellan’s approach to theatre because it reveals to me an interest in the liveness of performance that theatre and religion share which is manifest in the triadic logic that many see supporting the system of signs in the theatre, and in the christian understanding of god as the holy trinity. i will argue that theatre and christianity are inextricably bound up in triadic logic and representations through repetition, substitution, and liberation as demonstrated in both cheek by jowl’s production and shakespeare’s text, measure for measure. . triads, liveness, measure for measure, and cheek by jowl my first-hand experience as an audience member of measure for measure at the brooklyn academy of music in transformed my interpretation of the play because it made me ask these questions: religions , , of what happens in performance to the logic of substitution in the play? how does performance interfere with the fulfillment of the sign? why does measure for measure (cbj, ) seem to stage an absent presence that is then over-filled? why would a production that seems so political and secular feel overdetermined in its representation of the trinity and christ? why does this production feel deeply spiritual in a play that has so long been read as a debate among religious factions or about kingship in a religio-political moment? as an audience member, i felt the “liveness” of performance described by andrew quick, in that a “constellation of narratives and structures” were constantly circulating, and my expectations as an audience-member kept changing. donnellan’s techniques for producing a live event, one that always feels new for the actors and for the audience, reside in an attentiveness to the immediacy of shakespeare’s language and to the actor’s bodies on the stage. movement and stillness are balanced in equal measure in the production staging, but every moment is engaged and resonant. both the actors and the text feel fully present and their concentration demands the audience’s concentration. my theatre-going experience, as well as my survey of criticism around the problem of substitution in measure for measure, spur me to question how the representation of the trinity through triadic structures could be shaping the theatrical experience. a description of donnellan’s relationship to religion points to this possibility: “donnellan is no longer religious in the denominational sense of the word, but there is something of the polish director jerzy grotowski’s ‘holy theatre’ cult about him, the idea of theatre being a sacramental art where the collusion of actor and audience will spark an event that, rooted in a celebration of shared humanity, might always carry the potential of divinity” (coveney ). the tension in this description between concepts that feel static (“idea of theatre,” “sacramental art”) with the terminology of combustion—“collusion,” “spark,” “potential”—points to the very danger that donnellan works hard to avoid—a dead, empty or disconnected performance. shakespeare trades on this tension throughout measure for measure, and cheek by jowl capitalizes on this tension in performance. images of three appear throughout the performance in a provocative and ostentatious way. three red boxes dominate the stage, variously opaque, transparent, closed and open. (all photographs are by johann persson, and can be located at the cbj site) https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure- for-measure/#imagegallery- - . before turning to the consideration of how the production coalesces around triads and suggests the trinity, a consideration of the way in which the system of signs in the theatre hinges on triadic logic is important. as patrice pavis describes in “performing texts,” “performance is the synchronic confrontation of signifying systems, and it is their interaction, not their history, that is offered to the spectator and that produces meaning” (pavis , p. ). the interaction of signifying systems in a theatrical production is difficult to capture and re-envision for a reading. instantly, those who write about performances run the risk of flattening out the experience and disembodying it. also, retaining the details of an audience member is subject to the unreliability of memory, and the uniqueness of each performance cannot fully be articulated. in the case of cbj, the effort to write about and analyze the performances of measure for measure is even more wide-ranging, as the production run spanned six years, venues, and over countries. the production is also in russian with english subtitles, with a very pared-down script. fortunately, the company created a professional, theatrical film of the production for educational purposes; however, like many recorded theatrical performances the frisson with the audience is absent. nevertheless, the recording, coupled see, for example, (beckwith ; besteman ; goossen ; smith ; shuger ; schleiner ; knight ; whalen ; bradizza ; rust ). i recognize that the description of the theatrical experience above is subjective; however, whether each individual felt the ‘engagement’ of the performance, does not undermine that the intent of the design and staging was to engage the audience. this was especially true because the house lights were frequently turned on during the production so that the audience was aware of itself as an audience, and the actors stared directly at the audience, as if they were another character in the performance. (birksted-breen) birksted-breen notes, as do others, that there are five boxes on the stage, but in the production at the brooklyn academy of music, as well as the theatrical film of the production, only three are really visible. the two side boxes are effectively used as walls. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - religions , , of with theatrical photography, and many reviews and critical analyses, allows the researcher to present a fuller picture of the stage interactions. when interpreting the play, measure for measure, many critics rely on the moral, religious, or political stances of the characters, but the lived experience of the characters moment-to-moment is elusive. if we consider the way a very fine critic like anthony dawson writes about the characters in the play, we can see that there would not be a lot of air in the room for an actor’s interpretation. dawson writes, for example, “isabella and angelo are both moral tyrants; both are rigid and cold” (dawson , p. ) and later: “the tendency [to abstraction] is reflected in the language of the play, when a recurrent use of the concrete creates a sense of disembodiment, of dissociation of mind and body, feeling and action” (p. ). in such an appraisal, the characters are flattened out; there is no friction between isabella and angelo if they are disembodied. perhaps part of the problem is what joshua daniel describes, in an essay entitled, “the human body and the humility of christian ethics,” “our bodies are more humble than our narratives” (daniel , p. ). the actors’ work has to then be incredibly specific and truthful to fill the imaginative space of our stories. simon shepherd writes about bodies in the theatre: “theatre is not simply an art of bodies, but an art of bodily possibility” (shepherd , p. ). in approaching the work of a theatre company like cheek by jowl, it is important to foreground this idea of bodily possibility. however, as anna kamaralli brilliantly explains in her essay on performance/criticism of isabella, there is also a history of bodily and critical violence towards the character of isabella because she “has the audacity to behave as if she owns her own body” (p. ). there is a long history of violent stagings of measure for measure that kamaralli interrogates, and which cheek by jowl’s production participates in, and readers should be aware that some of the links to images included in this text depict violent scenes. kamaralli wonders whether these violent scenes really elicit audience empathy or rather feed into a desire for spectacular violence toward women. this observation is an important critique of this production and is also one of the reasons that reviews of the production called attention to the span of time in which it has been performed. the era between and witnessed an incredible shift in america, at least, from a nation that was poised to have its first female president to the #metoo movement. laura kolb argues in “the very modern anger of shakespeare’s women” that measure for measure’s reception in our culture has shifted in just those few years in the rise of productions, and the changing nature of way she teaches and writes about the play (kolb ). for cheek by jowl, the performance of the play over this time could leave traces of these political controversies with its audiences. the lived experiences of cbj as a company inform its performances; the voices, gender, race, identity, and languages inform its performances; its mise en scene inform its performances; its varied audiences inform its performances; and the change in historical moments during the company tour inform its performances. above all the company is actor-focused, while driven by the vision of declan donnellan, director, and nick ormerod, designer. cbj tours more than most theatre companies, and they often collaborate with the pushkin theatre, moscow. declan donnellan claims that russian actors who are trained to be more comfortable with movement, provides a different experience than working with their “text-reared british counterparts” (prescott , p. ). the idea that russian actors have a greater comfort with movement and gesture than actors who focus more on text may be part of the reason that this production drew so heavily on triadic structures that theatre semioticians have long acknowledged as underpinning the theatrical experience. c.s. peirce’s triadic logic has greatly influenced the study of theatrical semiotics. for peirce, the world is a system of signs in three parts, which he explains as the object, the representamen, and the interpretant, and the sign of the object itself has three modes: the index, the icon, and the symbol. peirce argues that signs and the creation of meaning are triadic, not binary (chapman and routledge , p. ). peirce’s complex and recursive descriptions of triadic relationships in language and thought are fertile see also (aebischer ). religions , , of concepts to apply to theatrical representation. ann berthoff, in a chapter called “triadic remedies,” explains peirce’s further articulation of triadic logic as “firstness is quality, secondness is event, and thirdness is mediation” (berthoff , p. ). berthoff explains that for peirce thirdness is “the bridge” to meaning making, the method of interpretation, the idea that other meanings can make meaning (berthoff , p. ). fernando de toro explains the significance of peirce’s triadic logic, arguing that binary models are an insufficient way to think about the theatre: “in theatre, unlike literary discourse, objects do have a real existence, a real presence, although in the end it only takes the form of the presence of the voice and body of the actor” (de toro , p. ). as soon as de toro articulates the idea of a real presence, however, he replaces it with the “form of the presence,” and umberto eco also beautifully reveals the ephemeral nature of the sign, describing it in a reading of peirce as akin to a “dynamic object,” and that “semiosis dies at every moment. but as soon as it dies it arises again like the phoenix” (eco , p. ). eco’s revelation that the sign and its interpretation are constantly in flux corresponds to the way he interprets peirce as being “interested in objects, not so much as ontological properties of being, but as occasions and results of active experience” (eco , p. ). the activity and energy present in peirce’s triadic structures is perfectly suited to cheek by jowl’s performance of measure for measure. the constant shifting of meaning, the use of one sign in relation to another to create meaning, the necessary absent presence of the dynamic object on the stage, and the critical role of the audience as interpretant coalesce in this production. reviewers of the production mainly conceived of it as a response to authoritarian rule and oppressive regimes. russian critics saw the production as “a shattering portrait of contemporary russia” (novaya gazeta). most uk reviewers mentioned the topical reference to putin’s government, but according to noah birksted-breen, the russian reviewers did not make direct reference to putin (birksted-breen , p. ). by the time this production alighted at the brooklyn academy of music in , the #metoo movement association was relevant. laura collins-hughes’ review in the new york times recognizes the association: “this production had its premiere in moscow in , long before the #metoo movement emerged as a cultural force. but in a play that examines the vicious abuse of power that people commit when they think nobody’s watching, the timeless impossibility of isabella’s position could hardly be more sympathetic, or more central” (collins-hughes ). the unusually long touring cycle for this production, allows for the permeability of meaning. like eco’s phoenix of semiotics, the production’s resonance with a russian government “with a regressive law on treason, censorship which bans swearing in the arts, anti-lgbt laws and so on” (birksted-breen , p. ) gained momentum in the wake of its tour during the #metoo movement and brett kavanaugh’s senate confirmation hearing. keir elam masterfully describes how this transaction occurs in the theatre, “the performance text, to summarize, is characterized by its semiotic thickness or density, by its heterogeneity and by the spatial and temporal discontinuity of its levels” (elam , p. ). elam describes how spectators come into the theatre in tacit agreement with a number of different codes, theatrical and interpretive, but audience members also bring a system of signs derived from their own experiences and context to apply to the performance (elam , p. ). the political and cultural backdrop of the cbj production skews in a decidedly secular way, from critiques of oppressive regimes to highlights of a violent patriarchal culture. donnellan’s own statement on the play, while indicating the heterogeneity of meaning that elam discusses, nevertheless marries personal and political themes: “measure for measure is about many different things; it always strikes me as a very modern play. it’s a play about control and how one of the ways that we are controlled, by not only governments, but by churches and other institutions that seek to control us, is shame. we are controlled by shame. it starts with parents and it develops, and it is an extremely good way of controlling people” (https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/). donnellan sees a larger emotional mechanism driving the play that is wielded by institutions and see also (burkhardt ) for peirce’s triadic logic in a reading of measure for measure. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/ religions , , of interpersonal relations, as well. however, the design of the production, the performances of the actors, the mise en scene (which for cheek by jowl usually involves the audience directly), coupled with shakespeare’s text, which revolves around religious questions of sin, forgiveness, and redemption, uses triads in a way that insistently evokes the trinity. . triadic viewing in watching the production, i was struck by how often the visual images land on three distinct characters or dimensions of the stage. using the three red boxes to indicate three different kinds of “cells” the prison, the cloister and the brothel, nick ormerod visually supplies the triad that underlies the play. in this first image, the audience can distinctly see the three red boxes that dominate the stage. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . this second image depicts the three boxes in a more obvious allusion to what they are. claudio sits in an electric chair, awaiting execution on the left; isabella stands transfixed in a kind of cloister; and pompey shags a prostitute in the brothel. that the brothel and the prison bookend the cloister is a powerful commentary on the institutionalized way culture polices and encounters sexuality: https: //www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . the production radiates energy and movement. it begins with the ensemble standing between two of the boxes, a tight group. they all look out at the audience with trained intensity, looking to catch the audience’s eye. their gaze stays trained on the audience for an uncomfortable amount of time. their facial expressions were unwavering, defiant. by training their gaze on the audience, and using partial house lights on the audience, the actors seem to implicate or invite the audience in whatever journey they are taking. these are not historical bodies, representing a past or some kind of literary tradition; they are in the moment of a lived experience that seems to be happening at that particular moment. as a group, the actors quickly walk around the stage, encircling the boxes; gradually one breaks off, stands too long looking up at a light into the wings of the theater as if staring at the sun, and the others leave him. this is the duke, not a confident, control-freak, but an introverted, confused man. when we meet claudio, he is framed by three officers and three boxes loom behind him. the title “fornicator” hangs on a placard around his neck. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - as the brothel and the prison frame the ends of the stage, we realize that claudio’s crime of sleeping with his fiancée will cost him his life. in addition to the looming red boxes, both transparent and opaque, donnellan and ormerod deploy the actors to create the setting of the performance. in his book-length study of cheek by jowl’s productions, peter kirwan uses this production of measure for measure as his final example because it exemplifies donnellan’s philosophy that “everyone is human, and that change—and theatre—come from the understanding that other people are different to me . . . .cheek by jowl’s concept... is to treat characters as humans with stakes, and thus to allow something ‘alive’ to emerge” (kirwan , p. ). not only does this production attend to the moral and emotional life of the characters, but all of the actors also function as a mob, a crowd, the walls of a prison, etc. as noah birksted-breen observes, “at the centre of this production was the human body as an element of stage design” (birksted-breen , p. ). the actors are onstage almost throughout the entire production, witnessing and judging the actions of the other players. the audience is also implicated in the production, as the characters often gesture to the audience as if it were “the people.” the transformability of the actor’s body is emphasized in a way that resonates with de toro’s explanation of the theatre sign (which rests on peirce’s triadic logic): “the transformability of the theatre sign is at the very essence of theatricality: in theatre, any sign has the potential of losing its own substance and acquiring another without losing its effectiveness in the process” (p. ). the very nature of this transformability is at the heart of peirce’s triadic logic. as umberto eco and ann berthoff both point to in peirce’s work, it is the idea of transmission, process and interpretation that is not static, but evolving that corresponds so well to thinking about the theatrical sign. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - religions , , of . the logic of substitution and figures of repetition it is not surprising, given all the work on semiotics in the theatre using peirce’s triadic logic, that a modern production of measure for measure, would resonate with the process of transformability of the sign in the way i have described above. but i think that the play is uniquely responsive to triadic logic and lends itself ultimately to trinitarian and religious iconography in a deep structural way that cheek by jowl, with its emphasis on “liveness” and the transformability of the human experience, could hardly avoid. before turning to the moments in the cbj production that most dynamically enact the rejection of the binary, the lure of the triad and the resolution of the trinity, i argue that the critical reception of the play text corresponds to this move as well. using a play that has long been featured in critical analyses as an example of substitution (from g. wilson knight and william empson on), i interrogate the varied critical responses to the play’s logic of substitution and displacement, and offer as an alternative reading that the rhetorical figures of repetition and substitution in the play point to a triadic rendering of these forms that eschews traditional binary formations the play tries to set up in favor a strident call for more, just as hopkins begins the last stanza of his kingfisher poem: “i say more.” encoded in the smallest rhetorical figures in the play is a demand for excess, for replacement that never satisfies. as debra shuger points out in her book on the political theologies of measure for measure, it is the only play with an overtly biblical title, referencing the sermon on the mount, matthew : , “for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (tyndale). the repetition in the bible passage, which shakespeare simplified, is itself a figure of repetition that george puttenham identifies in the art of english poesy. he calls it traductio or the “tranlacer,” writing: then haue ye a figure which the latines call traductio, and i the tranlacer: which is when ye turne and tranlace a word into many sundry shapes as the tailor doth his garment, & after that sort do play with him in your dittie. the art of english poesy: a critical edition , p. . the repetition of terms with slight syntactical changes shows the poet, like a tailor, stitching together language to create something new. “play” with language is a key feature of puttenham’s description of repetition. in the title of his play, shakespeare takes the sermon on the mount and streamlines the repetition to create a balanced syntax. this title represents the beginning of shakespeare’s engagement with repetition in the text. in the title of the play, we can read a simple exchange and repetition, but as the drama unfolds, that repetition is anything but simple. in fact, the play is more likely to “turn” and “tranlace” a word, in spite of the way it asserts the opposite. as many critics have observed, measure for measure begins with an attempted erasure of power. duke vincentio decides to step down in favor of his deputy, angelo. but vincentio’s self-imposed exile hardly mirrors a retirement from public life; instead vincentio plans to return in disguise to survey his deputy’s performance. in turning over the keys to his kingdom, he surmises to escalus, “what figure of us think you he will bear?” ( . . ). duke vincentio already imagines angelo replacing him—“supply (ing)” his “absence.” a measure for measure; a vincentio for an angelo. by using the language of rhetoric and art, “figure,” vincentio foregrounds the idea of representation, and this is, in many ways, a false representation because angelo’s governance is temporary. the duke imagines him enforcing the laws that the duke has failed to uphold, and then the duke believes that he will eventually reassert his own power. critics have seen in this the play’s debate over contemporary many critics have written on shakespeare and the use of repetition, see (brown ; sears ; hoy and hibbard ; rauh ; culler ). all references to measure for measure are from (shakespeare ). religions , , of religious debates between the puritan and anglican assertion of civil government and authority. also, the binary between private morals and public justice is often asserted in criticism of the play. however, through the figures of repetition in the play, these binaries are constantly challenged, and the language of over-fulfillment is asserted. consider that while the characters of government—angelo, escalus and the duke—construct a “balanced” transfer of power, the comic characters—lucio, pompey, and elbow—exert a verbal wordplay of repetition and misdirection that quickly leaves the “balance” of “measure for measure” behind. when we first meet lucio (described as a “fantastic”), he debates with two gentlemen about the nature of grace. after tossing the word about as the prayer before the meal, lucio declares, “grace is grace, despite all controversy: as, for example thou thyself art a wicked villain, despite of all grace” ( . . – ). like puttenham’s tranlacer, shakespeare plays with “grace.” the controversy is over one kind of grace (by divine appointment), with another (by good works), and yet lucio inserts a third kind of grace, which the gentlemen is surely lacking. this kind of repetition with a difference is often merged with a third term in measure for measure. shakespeare often sets his clowns to do this work; much like dogberry, the constable in much ado about nothing, elbow misplaces his words through repetition and a malefactor becomes a benefactor. pompey, a bawd and a tapster, uses repetition to assert authority, especially speaking to escalus and angelo: pompey: and i beseech you look into master froth here, sir, a man of fourscore pound a year, whose father died at hallowmas. was’t not at hallowmas, master froth? froth: all hallow eve. pompey: why, very well: i hope here be truths. . . – after the repetition that confirms his error, pompey searches for truth, as if the initial incorrect repetition is fully supplied and corrected by the right one. this is a comic turn of the tricolon, where the third term in the repetition bears the humor through deflation, confusion, irony or rejection. though shakespeare’s clowns rely heavily on figures of repetition, so too do his more serious characters, isabella, angelo, and the duke. at the beginning of the play, isabella, a novice of st. clare’s, encounters angelo and immediately resorts to the kind of repetitive structures we see in the comic character’s banter. pleading for her brother’s life to angelo, who is carrying out a sentence of death on all fornicators (claudio, isabella’s brother, has impregnated his fiancee, juliet), isabella frames her pleas like the tranlacer of puttenham’s poesy: there is a vice that most i do abhor, and most desire should meet the blow of justice, for which i would not plead, but that i must, for which i must not plead, but that i am at war ‘twixt will and will not. . . – . isabella, like the clowns, plays with repetition and language in a way that makes puns available to angelo’s ears. the doubleness of language kindles in her speech: abhor/abwhore, blow (to strike)/blow (to breathe). throughout this scene, as isabella begs for her brother’s life and angelo suddenly finds himself attracted to her, they repeat each other, bouncing back and forth the words, “honor,” “fault,” “forfeit,” “brother,” “pity,” “sense.” angelo, too, structures his thoughts through repetition, “what’s this? what’s this? is this her fault or mine?/the tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?/ not she, nor doth she tempt; but it is i? ( . . – ). not only does he play with these different iterations of see especially: (diehl ; shuger ; magedanz ; lorenz ). religions , , of tempt, but he is picking up isabella’s language from a few lines above, “temporal” and “temptation.” across characters, the poet turns the words, their roots and extensions around in the aural space of the scene. in a final example, out of the many repetitions and “tranlacings” that happen in the play, when isabella accuses angelo in front of the duke of trying to barter her virginity for her brother’s life, she does so with a double repetition that resolves in a third repetition of superfluity: angelo: and she will speak most bitterly and strange. isabella: most strange, but yet most truly, will i speak: that angelo’s forsworn; is it not strange? that angelo’s a murderer; is ‘t not strange? that angelo is an adulterous thief, an hypocrite, a virgin-violator; is it not strange and strange? vincentio: nay, it is ten times strange. isabella: it is not truer he is angelo than this is all as true as it is strange: nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth to the end of reckoning. . . – . in the middle of this speech, isabella accumulates the evidence against angelo, and in the third repetition, the exhibition of his crime overflows. shakespeare uses repetition for humor and emphasis, but also to demonstrate excess. rarely do we find in the text a single repetition, more often there is always a third term, as in this moment that overflows and is overdone (signified even in mistress overdone, herself). on the level of the word, shakespeare heightens the drama and the stakes by investing the language with repetitive structures, and his use of the third level of repetition suggests that the play’s initial negotiation of “measure for measure” may not be the whole story. . measure for measure and the attraction to substitution stitching together variant word forms may be what shakespeare does all the time as a poet; his ability to play with words is not singular to measure for measure by any means; however, he is investing a lot into those repetitive structures in the play on the micro-level, and when we couple that with the logic of substitution that dominates the play and criticism about the play, the draw to substitution seems inevitable. there are really two kinds of substitution happening, one within the context of the play and one without. in the context of the play, the first substitution is angelo for the duke, the second is isabella’s chastity for her brother’s freedom, the third is mariana for isabella in the bed trick that lures angelo to sleep with his rightful bride and tricks him into thinking he’s violated isabella. the fourth major substitution within the play is the triple swap of claudio for barnardine for ragozine. perhaps the most influential essay on the substitution is alexander leggatt’s piece in shakespeare quarterly, which argued that there is a kind of “gremlin of substitution” that haunts the play. leggatt articulates more thoroughly than any critic the substitutions happening within the play, spending the most time on the substitution of mariana for isabella, as the only successful substitution in the play in the sense that it at least “rights the wrong” committed by angelo when he broke off his engagement to mariana. however, leggatt ultimately concludes that all the substitutions are inadequate, and he resolves that shakespeare’s comic turn in measure for measure was to write an imperfect play. he writes that shakespeare “faced the gap between conception and embodiment, his imagination generated see especially aebischer and kamaralli who argue that angelo is the one character in the play who is “technically raped” (kamaralli , p. ). religions , , of image after image of representations that are vivid, but not quite adequate” (leggatt , p. ), and earlier in the essay he claims that scholars have a hard time rendering the play as anything more than a morality drama (leggatt , p. ). leggatt’s essay is important because it articulates the discomfort with a simple binary substitution. the play has long invited this kind of analogical thinking, especially in terms of finding god in the play. in , richard levin published an essay in pmla on measure for measure entitled, “on fluellen’s figures, christ figures, and james figures.” aligning the character traits from a character in henry v with scholarship on measure for measure, levin uses fluellen’s penchant for seeing comparisons and figures in all things to flog fellow critics for looking for christ figures in the play. levin, grumpily, fails to acknowledge in any conventional way the critics who attempt to find biblical parallels in the play. he simply enumerates, critic # , # and so on—in doing so, of course levin de-values the work of many admirable critics: g wilson knight, who saw the duke as a figure of god; roy battenhouse, who read the play as a commenting on the christian idea of atonement and anticipated a criticism of lousie schleiner’s reading of the play in the context of the parables. the problem with levin’s biting criticism is that it corrals and dismisses the deeply complicated work of analyzing shakespeare’s plays; of course they are never simply correlative constructions. shakespeare was generating work to be read and appreciated on the stage by an audience with living, breathing actors whose very embodiment would change the nature of the productions and performances every single time. however, the limitation of levin’s criticism, and the reason even more essays have been generated trying to locate shakespeare’s religious iconography and underpinnings of the play is that measure as we have seen in the proliferation of repetitive rhetorical structures, and in the multiplicity of substitutions always seems to be generative and repetitive at the same time. levin’s frustration suggests something deeper about the religious iconography in the play, and by refusing to name these critics he accumulates more repetitive structures. taking the idea of proliferating or generating substitutions, huston diehl suggests that the play’s flaws are actually part of a strategy to represent the religious controversies of the time. diehl finds that the play leans towards the calvinist sentiments that were defining james’ church, arguing with those who find more in common in the play with catholic notions of atonement and with the somewhat positive representations of monks and nuns. but he pushes his analysis of the play in a direction that i think is very helpful in terms of recognizing the play’s investment in substitution and embodiment. for diehl, the play constructs a thematic understanding of these substitutions that corresponds to calvinist distrust of idolatry, and the catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. diehl reframes angelo’s succumbing to desire for isabella from a lapse into sin, but rather a confusion of loving virtue and the divine with carnal, idolatrous love. diehl writes, “the bed-trick does not only trap angelo in his own perverse lust, hypocrisy, and betrayal; it also reveals his central epistemological error, an error that he is in danger of repeating endlessly: mistaking his limited power for absolute power and confusing his asceticism with perfection, as well as desiring isabella in place of god” (diehl , p. ). diehl’s historicist reading of the play leads him to conclude that the unsatisfactory substitutions are a fault of not knowing. however, this reading portrays angelo’s response to isabella as a theological problem that seems disembodied, and potentially leaving isabella unfairly responsible for angelo’s behavior. it also leaves isabella playing a substitute for god, which diehl acknowledges she avoids, when she refuses to sacrifice her maidenhead for her brother’s life. recent readings of the theological/political arguments in the play acknowledge the overflowing nature of the significations in the play. in matthew smith’s search for a common example of religious experience in the play as a “world-making or socializing institution,” he finds that religion in the play is both “within and beyond the law” and that isabella seeks a “moral identity beyond the law” (smith , p. ). bethany besteman’s analysis of the play also demonstrates the collapse of a binary (levin ; schleiner ; knight ; battenhouse ). religions , , of system, explaining, “reformed belief in the limitations of the human will point to the collapse of the theory of the king’s two bodies,” (besteman , p. ). perhaps the most relevant analysis for the way i am thinking about how the cheek by jowl performance interacts with the play text of measure for measure is an article by devin byker on the intercessory language of the play. like so many critics, byker’s analysis is driven by a dissatisfaction with substitution in the play; “in measure for measure, the conceptual tool of substitution alone fails to elucidate the complex extension and retention of self upon which intercessory speech and action hinge” (byker , p. ). byker argues that the play is structured on intercessory speech (one character pleads for another), and byker’s reading of the play ultimately addresses the difference between catholic and protestant approaches to intercession and posits angelo and isabella on competing sides of substitutionary logic. by claiming a mode of speech for the play that uses triadic logic—the first person pleads on behalf of the second to the third—byker exposes that substitutions in the play always invite a third term that is not always directly present, but hovers over the exchange. the other strain of “substitution” criticism on the play looks to correlatives outside the context of the play. when debra shuger wrote political theologies on measure for measure, linda tripp was wiretapping monica lewinsky, and more recently when brett kavanaugh was confronted by christine blasey ford, twitter recognized the way angelo and isabella’s story fits squarely in the #metoo movement. https://twitter.com/maeschaplin/status/ https://twitter.com/wtsfan/ status/ . when angelo presents his diabolical plan to isabella that he will free her brother in exchange for her chastity, she responds: isabella: little honor to be much believed, and most pernicious purpose! seeming, seeming! i will proclaim thee, angelo, look for’t. sign me a present pardon for my brother, or with an outstretched throat, i’ll tell the world aloud what man thou art. angelo: who will believe thee isabel? my unsoiled name, th’austereness of my life, my vouch against you, and my place i’the state will so your accusation overweigh, that you shall stifle in your own report and smell of calumny. . . – . the series of threats and exchanges:—isabella’s chastity for her brother’s life, claudio’s pardon for isabella’s silence—are perverse scales of justice. in tweets about the brett kavanaugh hearing, “who will believe thee, isabel?” became a kind of rallying cry. the idea that the psychosexual power dynamics of four hundred years ago would be unfurling in the congress in drew people to the play. but the play also always invites comparisons; i believe the logic of the substitutions is that the repetitive structures spill over in excess in the play. this kind of energy imbues the play with a power that sustains it beyond its own historical moment and speaks to the kind of combustion discussed earlier. at the beginning of my discussion of substitutions, i mentioned the first one which really inaugurates the triadic logic in the play: angelo for the duke. that first substitution is carefully constructed by shakespeare not to be an even exchange, but a triumvirate. the duke’s first lines are not to the man replacing him, but to escalus, explaining that he knows escalus is so well-versed in government that he can give no advice. the duke tells escalus: “then no more remains/but that though i am thinking primarily of exchange and substitution in relation to triads and the trinity, many critics have looked at the play in terms of other exchanges, gendered, legal, and economic. see for example, (gillen ) and (meyler ) https://twitter.com/maeschaplin/status/ https://twitter.com/wtsfan/status/ https://twitter.com/wtsfan/status/ religions , , of to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,/and let them work. the nature of our people,/our city’s institutions and the terms/for common justice, you’re as pregnant in/ as art and practice hath enriched any/that we remember” ( . . – ). from the audience’s perspective it seems that escalus is being handed control of the government. the question that follows about angelo must come as a surprise to escalus and to angelo; if escalus has already been given the commission to govern and is “pregnant” with his knowledge and understanding of vienna and common justice—what do we need angelo for? the duke explains to escalus: “for you must know, we have with special soul/elected him our absence to supply,/lent him our terror, dressed him with our love/and given his deputation all the organs/of our own power” ( . . – ). the slipperiness of the substitutions begins from the first lines of the play. who is really “replacing” the duke and why does there seem to be a kind of false equivalency—escalus is already “sufficient” and angelo is being “lent” terror and being “dressed in love”? angelo is supplying an absence, but he seems to be lacking himself. this is clearly a triumvirate of leadership. angelo is being put to the test more than he is functioning as a substitute. he is not in the place of the duke; rather, he is being tested to be in the role of the duke. this three-headed government constructed by the duke also mirrors the structure of the theatrical performance of the play. at the end of the introduction to the play in the norton shakespeare, brett gamboa adds a performance note, “productions of measure for measure can convince audiences that any of the play’s three leads—the duke of vienna, isabella, or angelo—occupies its central position and each role can be played so as to deserve sympathy or condemnation, so performances can feel revelatory even to those who know the play” (shakespeare , p. ). in a performance that pull of the triad is felt, with different balances depending on the performance. in an essay on twelfth night, paul dean argues that shakespeare uses triads to reveal the trinity, responding to both plato and augustine. dean demonstrates that many critics have looked to his poetry to convey a triadic and ultimately trinitarian reading of love (dean , pp. – ). the love triangles in twelfth night always resolve two into one, as do triadic renderings in the poetry. at the end of isabella’s first scene of pleading her case to angelo to save her brother, she explicitly invokes the trinity: alas, alas, why all the souls that were were forfeit once, and he that might the vantage best have took found out the remedy. how would you be if he, which is the top of judgment should but judge you as you are? oh, think on that and then mercy then will breath within your lips, like man-new made. . . . the language here of “forfeit” or debt of remedy or healing, of judgment, of mercy, of breath and of a man “new made” opens up the play to seeing the trinity. the judgement of the father—which angelo is called upon to rise to, but at which he will fail; the sacrificial nature of atonement by christ, the spirit breathing life into the newly created man. isabella is asking him to imagine himself relationally like the trinity. this moment corresponds to the way augustine describes the trinity as a relationship, not a substance. augustine writes that god, the father, son and holy spirit are known and understood in relation to each other (augustine and mckenna , p. ). in book of his treatise on the trinity, augustine teases out the metaphor of three gold rings, made of the same substance, but individual in characteristics, writing, “it is just as if you were to make three similar rings from one and the same gold, yet they are related to one another in that they are similar, for everything similar is similar to something” (augustine and mckenna , p. , emphasis mine). here augustine anticipates c.s. peirce’s description of a triadic sign system where the sign requires interpretation and that we can only understand the system by means of mediating structures of signification. angelo explicitly rejects isabella’s claim to the trinity, asking him to imagine himself in a triadic relationship where he might religions , , of be able to look inward to interrogate his cruelty towards claudio. he says, “be you content, fair maid. it is the law, not i” ( . . – ) and there, angelo sidesteps the role she wants him to adopt. it is the law, not i. isabella always complicates the substitutions that angelo would like to make when she almost anticipates his bargain: “we cannot weigh our brother with ourself” ( . . ). isabella rejects any false equivalence to judge others, whereas angelo seems comfortable in that role. while isabella rejects this philosophical exchange early on in the play, she accepts the morally questionable bed trick later, allowing mariana to stand in for her with angelo, and this is ultimately an unsatisfying exchange because angelo does not stop her brother’s execution but only hastens it. in philip lorenz’s reading of the play, the issue of the bed-trick is put in the context of the trope of bodily exchange. lorenz’s interpretation of the play links these bodily exchanges to the ideas of transplantation and transfer. he writes that the play works as “a representational paradigm of theologico-political sovereignty in which the ‘absence’ created by the departed sign creates an institutional desire that can only be satisfied by the substitution of another sign” (p. ). lorenz argues that the play depends on the movement of metaphor from “the proper to something else” (p. ). his articulation of the way substitutions work in the play as creating an institutional desire corresponds to the way i see the logic of the trinity working on the play, and which cheek by jowl’s production incorporates. . the lure of three in cheek by jowl’s production, the character of barnardine, played by igor teplov surfaces in an extra-textual way as he haunts the duke (alexander arsentyev) dressed as a convict. in this image from the performance, he hangs on the duke in a parasitical clasp. https://www.cheekbyjowl. com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . donnellan’s use of barnardine in this production responds to shakespeare’s creation of important triads in the play, the three heads, three deaths, and three executions. when the exchange of mariana’s body (as isabella) fails to elicit the release of claudio, the duke has to supply another head to satisfy angelo’s order. the sacrifice of these three “convicts” (claudio, barnardine, and ragozine) recalls the three crucifixions on mount golgotha, with christ flanked by two thieves. to complicate this simple substitution of one convict’s head for another, shakespeare presents us with the comic moment of barnardine—a convicted murderer too drunk to agree to die. barnardine has been languishing in the prison for nine years, spending most of it in a stupor, with very little interest in ever leaving the confines of the prison. the provost describes barnardine in a comic way reminiscent of puttenham’s tranlacer, “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep: careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality and desperately mortal” ( . . – ). when the duke tells barnardine that he will hear his last confession, barnardine cannot stomach it: “i have been drinking all night—i am not fitted for it” ( . . – ). surprisingly, the duke agrees: “a creature unprepared, unmeet for death;/and to transport him in the mind he is were damnable” (pp. – ). to save claudio, the provost of the prison comes up with a third head—one ragozine who happened to have died that morning of a fever. they agree that ragozine even bears a closer resemblance to claudio. the storyline of barnardine is completely superfluous as it turns out, and critics are divided as to why shakespeare included it, many arriving at the comedy of the moment as its true instigator. stephen greenblatt, in shakespeare’s freedom, sees barnardine as an emblem of autonomy—his willful refusal to be directed into death symbolizes, for greenblatt, shakespeare’s desire for artistic freedom (greenblatt , pp. – ). however, i see more echoes in the story of barrabas and narratives of releasing a prisoner or even more importantly in the drive of the play to have three substitutions. like the triumvirate of the duke, escalus and angelo at the beginning of the play, shakespeare gives us the three convicts—claudio, ragozine and barnardine. in his essay on substitutions, leggatt points out that “god acts on humanity byker describes angelo’s position as an “anti-representational stance” (byker , p. ). https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - religions , , of through a series of substitutions: the incarnation, the eucharist, and the priesthood” (p. ), but leggatt ultimately does not see the trinity as a driving force in the play. beyond the visual representation of threes in the cbj production, the textual creation of triads in the play, and the substitutions that always seem unsatisfying, there is finally an inescapable draw in the production to triads that the audience can see in the movement of the characters. the resolution of three in the performance often reveals itself in the way the company constitutes presence on the stage. cormac power’s book on presence in the theatre provides a useful way to think about how cheek by jowl’s approach to the playtext invites triadic logic and the trinity. power explains that “theatre affirms its presence by making its ‘presence’ enigmatic” (power , p. ). in the performance of measure for measure by cbj, there are several moments when presence is made enigmatic in a way that signals the compensatory logic of the triad. first, in isabella’s first scene with angelo, the provost hovers on the edges of the scene, ostensibly involved in paperwork. when angelo tells her “your brother dies tomorrow. be content,” isabella falls to her knees, facing the audience, saying the “our father.” angelo, discomfited, but attracted to her faith and/or her innocence or an inexplicable pull, drops to his knees next to her. the provost slightly shifts standing above them; angelo looks to him, and in a comic moment, the provost slowly descends to his knees until the three of them stare out silently praying in front of the audience. this pull of the provost to join the prayer seems inescapable, and is also a turning point for angelo, as his attention to isabella shifts at that point. he had barely noticed her, prior to this moment. there is an enigmatic presence that pulls the actors into three. when isabella returns to plead for her brother’s life, the production enacts another moment of an absent presence that demonstrates again how the logic of the triad—not just substitution—fuels the sense of liveness and tension in the play. prior to isabella’s entrance to their next scene together, angelo prowls agitatedly around the stage. isabella, ignorant of his change in tone and energy, kisses his hand to beg for her brother’s life, and it is as if she ignites a powder keg. he pushes her back to the table and gropes her. in this image you can see her anguish as he asserts power over her both physically violent, and chillingly abusive. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . just after this moment, he takes off her shoes and sucks on her toes. part of her body stands in for the whole, as he possesses and caresses her foot while gazing under her skirt. he grabs her to force himself on her, but she bites him, stopping the attack. he leaves her with the unholy bargain that she rejects. when she leaves, angelo sniffs and caresses her chair in a haunting, possessive way that signals the surging desire for the absent presence that courses through the play. the chair becomes a representation of isabella, and the kind of shifting signifying from actor’s bodies, to set pieces and back again is energized. later, when isabella tells claudio of the bargain, and he tentatively suggests that she might agree to it, donnellan and the company choose to stage an attempted assault on isabella by her own brother, recalling, as birksted-breen notes, an enactment of isabella’s suggestion that this is a kind of incest on his part. these two images show the way the production stages substitutions in a triadic way. in the first image, the company holds claudio (petr rykov) aloft over isabella. https://www. cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . and when this assault is disrupted by the company, claudio turns violently to play the bass fiddle, replacing the body with the instrument, https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . these moments trade on the triadic logic of the theatre’s signifying system that reveal the danger in the instability of the substitutions. the chair and the bass fiddle as the erotic substitutions for isabella in the production demonstrate the objectification and dehumanization of isabella. the constant use of substitutions and exchanges, coupled with the repeated gesturing to the audience inviting them into the performance, as mob, as the people, as witnesses, and as judges gives the production its dynamism and its terror. finally, i come to the most striking moment of all which draws us into the christology of the play in a decidedly secular production. barnardine, the prisoner who is too drunk to die, who is, as i have mentioned, the doppelganger of this duke, stalks the duke, and he dances a dance of death with him. the bare-chested, thin, dirt-covered barnardine is almost a stand-in for https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - religions , , of the duke, physically. they are similar in height and stature, but barnardine is the completely unaccommodated man. shorn of his hair and most of his clothing, he is the most basic of human beings. when the duke pardons him, after a tense waltz/drunken dance, barnardine collapses onto the lap of the duke. for a moment, the two freeze under a spotlight and they become a framed, theatrical pieta. barnardine is draped across the duke, cradled by the him like christ, in mary’s arms. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . in the fifth act of the production, the duke strolls forward with angelo and escalus on the red carpet; they cross the single red carpet and join at the singular microphone, but the image of the three politicians is backlit so that three shadows loom forward. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/ measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - . this image brings together what the play sets out in the beginning, the triad of male leaders. i want to suggest that even in a production that seeks the explicitly political themes in the play, the christian imagery, and especially the iconography of the trinity finds a way in because it really is underpinning the logic of the play through the signifying system of triadic logic. theresa coletti, in her book, mary magdalene and the drama of saints: theater, gender, and religion in late medieval england writes that christian drama in the west begins with the recognition of a lost body.... accounts of the marys who seek, but do not find, the body of christ at the tomb” (coletti et al. , p. ). that barnardine becomes an image of christ in this production is disconcerting, but also on some level absolutely right. if the play hinges on the logic that repetition (and therefore, performance) cannot be about a dead imitation, but a lively variation, then taking barnardine, synonymous with one of the thieves on golgotha, and transforming him into a christ figure upends and fulfills the triad. in an essay on mercy and the creative process in the play, dayton haskin articulates the ethical implications of the way the play invites the trinity in: “to imagine the needy brother as an alter christus presupposes a basic respect for and gratitude to christ himself” (haskin , p. ). though not a theatre company invested in christian iconography, cheek by jowl, in its articulation of empathy, the ability to imagine another person’s perspective, allows barnardine to “act in god’s eye what in god’s eye he is—christ,” as hopkins wrote. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references aebischer, pascale. . silence, rape and politics in ‘measure for measure’: close readings in theatre history. shakespeare bulletin : – . [crossref] augustine, saint, and stephen mckenna. . the trinity. washington: catholic university of america press, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). battenhouse, roy w. . measure for measure and christian doctrine of the atonement. pmla : – . [crossref] beckwith, sarah. . shakespeare and the grammar of forgiveness. ithaca: cornell university press, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). berthoff, ann e. . the mysterious barricades: language and its limits. toronto: university of toronto press, scholarly publishing division, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https: //search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on november ). besteman, bethany c. . bondage of the will: the limitations of political theology in measure for measure. religions : . [crossref] birksted-breen, noah. . review of shakespeare’s measure for measure (directed by declan donnellan for cheek by jowl and the pushkin theatre) at the silk street theatre, barbican centre, london, april . shakespeare : – . [crossref] https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imagegallery- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /shb. . https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . religions , , of bradizza, luigi. . christian ethics and political moderation in shakespeare’s measure for measure. in the soul of statesmanship: shakespeare on nature, virtue, and political wisdom. edited by khalil m. habib and l. joseph hebert. lexington: lexington books, available online: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= (accessed on february ). brown, penelope. . repetition. journal of linguistic anthropology : – . [crossref] burkhardt, louis. . spectator seduction: measure for measure. texas studies in literature and language : – . byker, devin. . bent speech and borrowed selves: substitutionary logic and intercessory acts in measure for measure. journal of medieval and early modern studies : – . [crossref] chapman, siobhan, and christopher routledge. . key ideas in linguistics and the philosophy of language. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https: //search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). coletti, theresa, bodies theater, and sacred mediations. . mary magdalene and the drama of saints. pennsylvania: university of pennsylvania press, pp. – . available online: http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc. org/stable/j.ctt hjkht. (accessed on september ). collins-hughes, laura. . sex, lies and vindication in a most timely ‘measure for measure. available online: https://nyti.ms/ qwy ro (accessed on september ). coveney, michael. . “as he likes it: profile of declan donnellan.” the guardian. available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ /feb/ /theatre (accessed on february ). culler, jonathan d. . theory of the lyric. cambridge: harvard university press. daniel, joshua. . the human body and the humility of christian ethics: an encounter with avant-garde theatre. journal of the society of christian ethics : – . [crossref] dawson, anthony b. . measure for measure. in indirections. toronto: university of toronto press, pp. – . available online: http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/ . /j.ctt h hpm . (accessed on september ). de toro, fernando. . theatre semiotics. toronto: university of toronto press, available online: www.jstor.org/ stable/ . / . (accessed on december ). dean, paul. . ‘comfortable doctrine’: ‘twelfth night’ and the trinity. the review of english studies : – . [crossref] diehl, huston. . ‘infinite space’: representation and reformation in measure for measure. shakespeare quarterly : – . [crossref] donnellan, declan. . the actor and the target. available online: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= (accessed on september ). eco, umberto. . peirce’s notion of interpretant. mln : – . [crossref] elam, keir. . the semiotics of theatre and drama. methuen: second floor-books, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=cat a&an=slc. &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on september ). gillen, katherine. . chastity and the ethics of commercial theatre in measure for measure, pericles and the revenger’s tragedy. in chaste value. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, pp. – . available online: www.jstor.org/stable/ . /j.ctt pwt f. (accessed on february ). goossen, jonathan. . tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth’: reconsidering political theology in shakespeare’s ‘measure for measure’. christianity and literature : – . [crossref] goss, erin m. . ‘almost unmade’: hopkins and the body apocalyptic. victorian poetry : – . [crossref] greenblatt, stephen. . shakespeare’s freedom. chicago: university of chicago press. haskin, dayton. . mercy and the creative process in measure for measure. texas studies in literature and language : – . hoy, cyrus, and g. r. hibbard. . the language of fletcherian tragicomedy. in mirror up to shakespeare. edited by j. c. gray. toronto: university of toronto press, pp. – . available online: http://www.jstor.org. sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/ . /j.ctt vgw p. (accessed on february ). https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= http://dx.doi.org/ . /jlin. . . - . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctt hjkht. http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctt hjkht. https://nyti.ms/ qwy ro https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ /feb/ /theatre http://dx.doi.org/ . /sce. . http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/ . /j.ctt h hpm . www.jstor.org/stable/ . / . www.jstor.org/stable/ . / . http://dx.doi.org/ . /res/ . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an= http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat a&an=slc. &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat a&an=slc. &site=eds-live&scope=site www.jstor.org/stable/ . /j.ctt pwt f. http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /vp. . http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/ . /j.ctt vgw p. http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/ . /j.ctt vgw p. religions , , of kamaralli, anna. . putting on the destined livery: isabella, cressida, and our virgin/whore obsession. in a feminist companion to shakespeare. edited by dympna callaghan. hoboken: wiley blackwell, available online: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p= (accessed on february ). kirwan, peter. . shakespeare in the theatre: cheek by jowl. london: bloomsbury arden. knight, george wilson. . the wheel of fire: interpretations of shakespearian tragedy. abingdon-on-thames: routledge. kolb, laura. . the very modern anger of shakespeare’s women. electric literature. available online: https://electricliterature.com/the-very-modern-anger-of-shakespeares-women/ (accessed on february ). leggatt, alexander. . substitution in ‘measure for measure’. shakespeare quarterly : – . [crossref] levin, richard. . on fluellen’s figures, christ figures, and james figures. pmla : – . [crossref] lorenz, philip. . reanimation: the tears of sovereignty: perspectives of power in renaissance drama. bronx: fordham university, pp. – . available online: http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/j. ctt x cvt. (accessed on september ). magedanz, stacy. . public justice and private mercy in ‘measure for measure’. studies in english literature, – : – . [crossref] meyler, bernadette. . dramatic judgments: theaters of pardoning. ithaca: cornell university press, pp. – . [crossref] pavis, patrice. . from text to performance. in performing texts. edited by michael issacharoff and robin f. jones. pennsylvania: university of pennsylvania press, pp. – . available online: www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctv rw. (accessed on december ). pavis, patrice. . theatre at the crossroads of culture. abingdon-on-thames: routledge, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). power, cormac. . presence in play: a critique of theories of presence in the theatre. leiden: brill|rodopi, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). prescott, paul. . declan donnellan. in the routledge companion to directors’ shakespeare. edited by john russell brown. abingdon-on-thames: routledge. quick, andrew. . taking place. in live: art and performance. edited by adrian heathfield. abingdon-on-thames: routledge. rauh, sister miriam joseph. . shakespeare’s use of the arts of language. abingdon-on-thames: routledge. rust, jennifer r. . religious and political impasses in measure for measure. in the cambridge companion to shakespeare and religion. edited by hannibal hamlin. cambridge: cambridge university press. schleiner, louise. . providential improvisation in measure for measure. pmla : – . [crossref] sears, donald a. . the translacer: a rhetorical thread of a shakespearean sonnet. cea critic : – . shakespeare, william. . the norton shakespeare, rd ed. edited by stephen greenblatt, walter cohen, suzanne gossett, jean e. howard, katherine eisaman maus and gordon mcmullan. new york: w.w. norton & company. shepherd, simon. . theatre, body and pleasure. abingdon-on-thames: routledge, available online: https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed on december ). shuger, debora k. . political theologies in shakespeare’s england: the sacred and the state in measure for measure. london: palgrave. smith, matthew j. . “at war ‘twixt will and will not”: on shakespeare’s idea of religious experience in measure for measure. religions : . [crossref] whalen, benedict j. . private conscience, public reform, and disguised rule in the malcontent and measure for measure. ben jonson journal : – . [crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p= https://electricliterature.com/the-very-modern-anger-of-shakespeares-women/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctt x cvt. http://www.jstor.org.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctt x cvt. http://dx.doi.org/ . /sel. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ctvrf b z. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv rw. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv rw. https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=eds-live&scope=site http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site https://sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an= &site=ehost-live&scope=site http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjj. . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	triads, liveness, measure for measure, and cheek by jowl 	triadic viewing 	the logic of substitution and figures of repetition 	measure for measure and the attraction to substitution 	the lure of three 	references the personal is the (〰ちcademic)〰〠political: why care about the love lives of theologians? this is a repository copy of the personal is the (academic) political: why care about the love lives of theologians?. white rose research online url for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ / version: accepted version article: muers, r ( ) the personal is the (academic) political: why care about the love lives of theologians? scottish journal of theology, ( ). pp. - . issn - https://doi.org/ . /s © cambridge university press . this article has been published in a revised form in scottish journal of theology [https://doi.org/ . /s ]. this version is free to view and download for private research and study only. not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse items deposited in white rose research online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. they may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. the publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. this is indicated by the licence information on the white rose research online record for the item. takedown if you consider content in white rose research online to be in breach of uk law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the url of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ the personal is the (academic-)political: why care about the love lives of theologians? introduction: ways of contextualising theology what might be learned, for theology, from the recent flurry of interest in the complex love triangle of nelly barth, charlotte von kirschbaum and karl barth に and is that flurry of interest any more than デｴw デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ ┘ﾗヴﾉsげゲ wケ┌ｷ┗;ﾉwﾐデ ﾗa iwﾉwhヴｷデ┞ ｪﾗゲゲｷヮい following the release in the early s of archival material relating to those relationships, chriゲデｷ;ﾐw tｷwデ┣げゲ presentation to the karl barth society of north america, and its subsequent publication in theology today, raised a storm in certain sections of the english-language theological blogosphere. this was perhaps surprising, since, as many have acknowledged, the basic shape of the story had been known for many years. the purpose of this article is not to re-examine that story, either for itself or for what it tells us about any of the three main characters. m┞ ｷﾐデwヴwゲデ ｷゲ ｷﾐ デｴw けゲデﾗヴ┞ ﾗa デｴw ゲデﾗヴ┞げ に how and why it is told, and what that tells us about contemporary theology. why would, and why should, anyone care about the love life に or to be more precise (as the narrators often are) the sex life に of theologians? in what follows, i explore some features of how the story has been told, in and since the tietz presentation and article に as a starting-point for asking what can be learned, for and about the discipline of theology, from the sudden (if localised) upsurge of interest in the barths and von kirschbaum. before engaging in detail with any retellings of the story, however, it is worth asking whether there are good reasons in principle why theologians might care about the love lives and domestic arrangements of the fellow theologians whose work they study and cite. stephen plant, in his recent article on the subject, offers a prima facie plausible and important starting-point; in this, incidentally, he differs from tietz, who discusses in her paper whether it is morally justifiable for her to read the personal correspondence that is the basis of her article, but does not ask why she or anyone else would think it was worth doing so. plant writes, in the introduction to a section on the church dogmatics and other textsぎ けi take the view that ideas don't generate themselves, and that therefore any history of ideas that does not take into account the material conditions of their ｪwﾐwヴ;デｷﾗﾐ ┘ｷﾉﾉ デwﾐs デﾗ aﾉ┞ ﾗaa ｷﾐデﾗ ;hゲデヴ;iデ ｷsw;ﾉｷゲﾏげ. spelled out, the claim advanced here is not unusual, and indeed is rather widely assumed in contemporary theological work に certainly in any theological work that has learned anything from liberation and contextual theologies, from the nouvelle theologie, or from a myriad of other ﾏﾗ┗wﾏwﾐデゲ ゲwwﾆｷﾐｪ デﾗ ヮ;┞ s┌w ;デデwﾐデｷﾗﾐ aヴﾗﾏ ; デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ ヮwヴゲヮwiデｷ┗w デﾗ デｴw けﾏ;デwヴｷ;ﾉ iﾗﾐsｷデｷﾗﾐゲげ of ideas. in order to be good readers, we need to recognise に so the implied argument goes に that intellectual work is produced by flesh-and-blood people in particular locations and situations, and these locations and situations shape what can be said and how it can be said. more to the point, christian theologians should be particularly attentive to this materiality, this flesh-and-blood character, of theology just because at the heart of their endeavour is the logos of god made flesh and blood. various accounts would be possible of what difference (in general) such awareness might make to the reading of theology に ┘ｴ;デ ｷデ ┘ﾗ┌ﾉs ﾉﾗﾗﾆ ﾉｷﾆwが ｷﾐ pﾉ;ﾐデげゲ デwヴﾏゲが ﾐﾗデ デﾗ けaﾉ┞ ﾗaa ｷﾐデﾗ ;hゲデヴ;iデ fﾗヴ ; swデ;ｷﾉws ;iiﾗ┌ﾐデ ﾗa ┘ｴｷiｴが ゲww cｴヴｷゲデｷ;ﾐw tｷwデ┣が けk;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ﾐs cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが theology today, / ( ), pp. - , here pp. - . i acknowledge with gratitude invaluable discussions with ben fulford, tom greggs, mike higton and susannah ticciati, as well as the advice of the sjt editor and the anonymous reviewers. i take full responsibility for the views expressed here, and for the defects of the finished article. “デwヮｴwﾐ pﾉ;ﾐデが けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗぎ tｴw oヴｷｪｷﾐゲ ;ﾐs cﾗﾐゲwケ┌wﾐiwゲ ﾗa k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ヴwﾉ;デｷﾗﾐゲｴｷヮ ┘ｷデｴ cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが scottish journal of theology / ( ), pp. - , here pp. - . ｷsw;ﾉｷゲﾏげ ┘ｴwﾐ ヴw;sｷﾐｪ デｴw church dogmatics; but all that we need to accept in order to follow the argument thus far is that we might understand a theological text better if we read it as a text produced in a specific context. that being so, ｷa ┘w i;ヴw ;hﾗ┌デ ┌ﾐswヴゲデ;ﾐsｷﾐｪ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞ ;ゲ fully as possible に and clearly at least some of us do, if けweげ are the guild of systematic theologians に we should also care about understanding his life, the context in which that theology was produced. if theology is, to use the commonplace metaphor, a conversation, we want to know something about the person with whom we are talking. once this is admitted, there is, we might think, no good reason why our interest in the context of theology should stop with the けヮ┌hﾉｷiげ social, political and academic context. after all, the domestic and familial context is for the most part more on a デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐげゲ mind, more significant on a day-to-day basis, than the larger canvas of her or his world. specifically, there are many reasons to think that feminist theologians, and those wishing to take the ｷﾐゲｷｪｴデゲ ﾗa awﾏｷﾐｷゲﾏ ゲwヴｷﾗ┌ゲﾉ┞が ゲｴﾗ┌ﾉs ┘wﾉiﾗﾏw デｴw w┝デwﾐゲｷﾗﾐ ﾗa ; デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐげゲ けiﾗﾐデw┝デげく ‘ws┌iｷﾐｪ けiﾗﾐデw┝デげ デﾗ ヮﾗﾉｷデｷiゲ ;ﾐs ヮ┌hﾉｷi ﾉｷaw, and disregarding specific domestic contexts, reinforces the gendered public-private split; colludes in making ┘ﾗﾏwﾐげゲ ┌ﾐヮ;ｷs ﾉ;hﾗ┌ヴ ｷﾐ┗ｷゲｷhﾉwき and helps to preserve the myth of a self-standing and self-sustaining male-sﾗﾏｷﾐ;デws けヮ┌hﾉｷiげ ゲヮｴwヴw ﾗa ｷsw;ゲ ;ﾐs arguments that rises effortlessly above localised emotions and material needs. arguably, to counteract both the disembodiment of theology ;ﾐs デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞げゲ iﾗﾉﾉ┌ゲｷﾗﾐ ┘ｷデｴ ヮ;デヴｷ;ヴiｴ┞, we should hw ┘ｷﾉﾉｷﾐｪ デﾗ デ;ﾉﾆ ;hﾗ┌デ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐゲげ sﾗﾏwゲデｷi ;ヴヴ;ﾐｪwﾏwﾐデゲ に even when they are not as tabloid- friendly as the barth-von kirschbaum situation. it might also be argued that a reluctance even to acknowledge the sex lives of great theologians に the visceral distaste that the sex-related speculation in blogs and articles respondinｪ デﾗ tｷwデ┣げゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆ will produce in some readers (including, i admit, in me) に is itself the result of a theologically- inflected negative attitude to sexuality that needs to be overcome as part of the feminist liberationist project. perhaps my problem is really that i am unaccustomed to dealing with any association between theology and bodily fluids; or perhaps i am just being too british. either way, if that is the problem, i and others should get over it, if for no other reason than because this anti-sex attitude is so strongly associated with theological misogyny. all of this appears to suggest that the project undertaken by plant, and differently by tietz, in uncovering and examining the barth-von kirschbaum story, should be welcomed by theologians and not only by historians. in later sections of this article, i will argue that the attention paid to this story is, at best, a symptom of a problem in theology that will not be overcome by further work of this kind. there may be nothing wrong with being inteヴwゲデws ｷﾐ けk;ヴﾉが nwﾉﾉ┞ ;ﾐs lﾗﾉﾉﾗげが h┌デ it is important to be aware how that interest に like, indeed, the celebrity gossip industry に tends to reinforce rather than to critique the gendered power structures within which it sits. before continuing that discussion, one rather different possible reason for wanting to tell this story should be noted. both tietz and plant in their articles explicitly distance themselves from any wish to pass definitive moral judgement on the characters involved に although of course there is moral judgement at work throughout, not least in the decisions about which issues to discuss and how to or perhaps i ｴ;┗w ゲヮwﾐデ デﾗﾗ ﾉﾗﾐｪ ヴw;sｷﾐｪ dｷwデヴｷiｴ bﾗﾐｴﾗwaawヴが ┘ｴﾗ swawﾐsws デｴw ┗ｷヴデ┌wゲ ﾗa けeﾐｪﾉｷゲｴ ぷゲｷiへ hyヮﾗiヴｷゲ┞げ ﾗ┗wヴ けgwヴﾏ;ﾐ さｴﾗﾐwゲデ┞ざげ on these matters. see bonhoeffer, letters and papers from prison (dbwe ) trans. isabel best et al (fortress: minneapolis, ), pp. - . for the recent upsurge of interest in bﾗﾐｴﾗwaawヴげゲ ﾗ┘ﾐ ゲw┝ ﾉｷawが ゲww ﾏﾗヴw ﾗヴ ﾉwゲゲ ;ﾐ┞ ヴw┗ｷw┘ ﾗa cｴ;ヴﾉwゲ m;ヴゲｴが strange glory: a life of dietrich bonhoeffer (new york: knopf, ). for an extended recent discussion of the relationships between misogyny, fear of the body and negative attitudes to sex and sexuality in christian theology, see tina beattie, theology after postmodernity: divining the void ʹ a lacanian reading of thomas aquinas (oxford: blackwell, ); see the summary on pp. - . frame them. some of those who re;s tｷwデ┣げゲ ;ヴデｷiﾉwが swゲヮｷデw ｴwヴ ﾗ┘ﾐ ┘ﾗヴsゲ ﾗa i;┌デｷﾗﾐが had no qualms about passing judgement on karl barth - and drawing conclusions from this about how and even whether k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆ ゲｴﾗ┌ﾉs hw ヴw;sく for some, then, it would seem that there is an argument for telling the けk;ヴﾉが nwﾉﾉ┞ ;ﾐs lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ ゲデﾗヴ┞ ;ﾆｷﾐ デﾗ デｴw けヮ┌hﾉｷi ｷﾐデwヴwゲデ swawﾐiwげ ┌ゲws ┘ｴwﾐ ﾐw┘ゲヮ;ヮwヴゲ ヮ┌hﾉｷゲｴ ;iiﾗ┌ﾐデゲ ﾗa デｴw けヮヴｷ┗;デwげ ﾉｷ┗wゲ ﾗa ヮﾗﾉｷデicians. we, the public, have an interest (so goes the defence) in knowing as much as possible about the lives and actions of key individuals whom we are collectively asked to trust, so that we can make informed decisions about whether they are trustworthy people. cwヴデ;ｷﾐﾉ┞ ゲﾗﾏw ﾗa デｴw ヴwゲヮﾗﾐゲwゲ デﾗ tｷwデ┣げゲ ;ヴデｷiﾉw spoke in terms of the betrayal or loss of trust. this dimension of the debate raises, again, a number of issues about how theological authorship and authority is understood, to which i will return below. i note simply at this point that this kind of defencw ﾗa デｴw ゲデﾗヴｷwゲ ヴwケ┌ｷヴwゲ デｴw ヮヴｷﾗヴ swiｷゲｷﾗﾐ デｴ;デ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげs personal status as a theological authority is the main point at issue に and this is likely to have implications for how the story is told and how the characters in it are represented. encounterｷﾐｪ けlﾗﾉﾉﾗげ ;ﾐs けnwﾉﾉ┞げ ｷﾐ けb;ヴデｴげゲげ sデﾗヴ┞ in this section, as the beginning of a critical consideration of how to attend to デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐゲげ domestic and familial contexts, i discuss two interconnected problems with how the story is presented in pﾉ;ﾐデげゲ article けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ. i argue that at key points this telling of the story adopts uncritically, and hence reinforces, the patriarchal male gaze directed at its female characters; and that there are real tensions around acknowledging the agency, and in particular the theological agency, of the women in the story. these problems, i shall go on to suggest, are not incidental; rather, they expose deep-seated issues in systematic theology and the way in which the lives and works of theologians are written about. first, then, the patriarchal male gaze に not simply ; ﾏ;ﾐげゲ ヮwヴゲヮwiデｷ┗w ﾗﾐ デｴw ┘ﾗヴﾉsが h┌デ デｴw ｪ;┣w that fixes a woman as an object of male evaluation (and possibly of desire and possession) is most ﾗh┗ｷﾗ┌ゲ ;ﾐs wｪヴwｪｷﾗ┌ゲ ;デ ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ aｷヴゲデ ;ヮヮw;ヴ;ﾐiw ｷﾐ デｴw ;ヴデｷiﾉwく “ｴw ┘;ゲが ┘w ﾉw;ヴﾐが けゲﾉｷｪｴデﾉ┞ h┌ｷﾉデげが w┗wﾐ けwﾉaｷﾐげ ｷﾐ ;ヮヮw;ヴ;ﾐiwく tｴw ｪ;┣wが ｷﾐｷデｷ;ﾉﾉ┞ k;ヴﾉげゲが hwiﾗﾏwゲ デｴw ｪ;┣w ﾗa a wider circle ﾗa ﾏwﾐが ;ﾉﾉ ﾉﾗﾗﾆｷﾐｪ ;デ ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏが swゲｷヴｷﾐｪ ┘ｴ;デ デｴw┞ ゲwwが ヴwﾏ;ヴﾆｷﾐｪ ﾗﾐ ｴwヴ け;デデヴ;iデｷﾗﾐゲげき けhwﾉﾉﾏ┌デ gﾗﾉﾉ┘ｷデ┣wヴ ┘;ゲ ｴ;ﾉa ｷﾐ ﾉﾗ┗w ┘ｷデｴ ｴwヴげが ;ﾐﾗデｴwヴ ;i;swﾏｷi ﾏ;ﾐ proposed marriage to her. we ｴ;┗w ﾐﾗ ｷsw; ┘ｴ;デ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ aｷｪ┌ヴw ┘;ゲ ﾉｷﾆwが ﾗa iﾗ┌ヴゲwが nor whether he was physically attractive; at this point the author and the implied reader are ﾉﾗﾗﾆｷﾐｪ デｴヴﾗ┌ｪｴ ; ﾏ;ﾐげゲ w┞wゲ ;デ デｴw ┘ﾗﾏ;ﾐ ｷﾐ aヴﾗﾐデ of him, agreeing with the men of the s theological fraternity that charlotte von kirschbaum is に as they might say now に hot. it is almost impossible to imagine the equivalent discussion of a male theologian - or for that matter, a female theologian who did not happen to feature in the love life of a male theologian に finding its way into print. if we had more grounds to be confident that women in seeが hﾗデｴ aﾗヴ w┝;ﾏヮﾉwゲ ﾗa iﾗﾏﾏwﾐデ;デﾗヴゲ sｷゲi┌ゲゲｷﾐｪ デｴw ヴwﾉw┗;ﾐiw ﾗa ﾏﾗヴ;ﾉ ﾃ┌sｪwﾏwﾐデゲ ﾗﾐ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ behaviour for evaluations of his theology, and for a window into the controversy around the tietz article, the series of blog entries by bobby grow indexed under https://growrag.wordpress.com/ / / /an-index-to- the-karl-barth-and-charlotte-von-kirschbaum-posts-and-some-closing-thoughts-on-the-whole-ordeal/ ; and m;ヴﾆ g;ﾉﾉｷが けwｴ;デ デﾗ m;ﾆw ﾗa k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ “デw;sa;ゲデ as┌ﾉデwヴ┞いげが christianity today, october https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/ /october-web-only/what-to-make-of-karl-barths-steadfast- adultery.html?utm_source=ctweekly- html&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term= &utm_content= &utm_campaign=email . they are also, i should add, neither unique to this article nor uniformly characteristic of it. けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげが ヮヮく ヱンヲ- . https://growrag.wordpress.com/ / / /an-index-to-the-karl-barth-and-charlotte-von-kirschbaum-posts-and-some-closing-thoughts-on-the-whole-ordeal/ https://growrag.wordpress.com/ / / /an-index-to-the-karl-barth-and-charlotte-von-kirschbaum-posts-and-some-closing-thoughts-on-the-whole-ordeal/ https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/ /october-web-only/what-to-make-of-karl-barths-steadfast-adultery.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term= &utm_content= &utm_campaign=email https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/ /october-web-only/what-to-make-of-karl-barths-steadfast-adultery.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term= &utm_content= &utm_campaign=email https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/ /october-web-only/what-to-make-of-karl-barths-steadfast-adultery.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term= &utm_content= &utm_campaign=email academia were never judged on their appearance these days, it might be possible to be more relaxed about it. beyond this straightforward example, adoption and reinforcement of the patriarchal male gaze affects the presentation of the lives of nelly barth and charlotte von kirschbaum at several key points. we ;ヴw デﾗﾉs デｴ;デ nwﾉﾉ┞ b;ヴデｴ け;ヮヮw;ヴゲ デﾗ ｴ;┗w hwwﾐ ｷﾐ ﾏ;ﾐ┞ ┘;┞ゲ デｴw ｷsw;ﾉ ヮ;ゲデﾗヴげゲ ┘ｷawげく now, it is presumably the case that nelly barth was, during her lifetime, frequently judged according to her apparent value to the man to whose vocation she was a useful appendage. here, however, ゲｴw け;ヮヮw;ヴゲげ ｷﾐ デｴｷゲ ﾉｷｪｴデが ﾐﾗデ ﾗﾐﾉ┞ デﾗ ｴwヴ iﾗﾐデwﾏヮﾗヴ;ヴｷwゲが h┌デ ;ﾉゲﾗ デﾗ デｴw ｴｷゲデﾗヴｷ;ﾐ ;ﾐs ｴｷゲ ヴw;swヴゲき we ;ヴw ｷﾐ┗ｷデws デﾗ ﾉﾗﾗﾆ ;デ ｴwヴ デｴヴﾗ┌ｪｴ デｴw けヮ;ゲデﾗヴげゲげ w┞wゲが ;ﾐs ﾏ;ﾆw ﾃ┌sｪwﾏwﾐデゲ ;hﾗ┌デ ｴﾗ┘ ┘wﾉﾉ ゲｴw is doing from his point oa ┗ｷw┘く tｴヴﾗ┌ｪｴ デｴwゲw w┞wゲが デｴw a;iデ デｴ;デ ゲｴw け;デデwﾏヮデws デﾗ ヴw;s デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞げ ｷゲ interesting only because, like her musical gifts and training, it made her more valuable ;ゲ ; ヮ;ゲデﾗヴげゲ wife. similarly, in the next section of the article, charlotte von kirschb;┌ﾏげゲ ;hｷﾉｷデ┞ デﾗ ﾉw;ヴﾐ nw┘ testament greek, latin and typing is interesting because it fits hw;┌デｷa┌ﾉﾉ┞ ┘ｷデｴ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ けヮﾉ;ﾐげ デﾗ けtrain her as his swiヴwデ;ヴ┞ ;ﾐs ヴwゲw;ヴiｴ ;ゲゲｷゲデ;ﾐデげ. while the patriarchal male gaze is held, the question of whether nelly barth had any original ideas about the theology she studied in safenwil に let alone the question of whether karl barth was in any way the ideal violinｷゲデげゲ husband に cannot even be asked; we only see nelly in terms of her value to karl. it is important to emphasise again that this gaze is not held consistently throughout the article; but the fact that it operates at key points in the early sections is significant, because intentionally or otherwise it sets up the frame within which the reader will interpret the relationships. the reader ｴ;ゲ hwwﾐ ｷﾐ┗ｷデws aヴﾗﾏ デｴw ゲデ;ヴデ デﾗ ゲww デｴｷﾐｪゲが ﾐﾗデ ﾗﾐﾉ┞ aヴﾗﾏ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ヮﾗｷﾐデ ﾗa ┗ｷw┘が h┌デ aヴﾗﾏ デｴw point of view of the patriarchal-male subject who assesses women according to their value and significance for men. one of the inevitable conclusions of such an assessment is, of course, that charlotte von kirschbaum was of enormous value and significance to karl barth. this way of looking at it, her value to karl barth, becomes particularly problematic when we consider the treatment of her theological work. in his careful reconstruction of life in the household, plant paints a vivid and compelling picture of von kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆｷﾐｪ ﾉｷaw s┌ヴｷﾐｪ デｴw ヮヴﾗs┌iデｷﾗﾐ ﾗa デｴw church dogmatics. it is apparent in the story he tells that von kirschbaum was a significant contributor to the church dogmatics に effectively a co- author. however, this powerful swヮｷiデｷﾗﾐ ﾗa ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ ヴw;ﾉ s;ｷﾉ┞ ┘ﾗヴﾆ に and later of the oﾐ ┘ｴｷiｴ ゲww aﾗヴ w┝;ﾏヮﾉw fヴ;ﾐiwゲi; “デ;┗ヴ;ﾆﾗヮﾗ┌ﾉﾗ┌が けfwﾏ;ﾉw ;i;swﾏｷiゲぎ sﾗﾐげデ ヮﾗ┘wヴ sヴwゲゲが aﾗヴｪwデ ｴwwﾉゲ に ;ﾐs ﾐﾗ aﾉﾗ┘ｷﾐｪ ｴ;ｷヴ ;ﾉﾉﾗ┘wsげが the guardian th october (https://www.theguardian.com/higher- education-network/blog/ /oct/ /-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing- hair-allowed). p. . ibid. tietz notes that nelly hoffmann (as she then was) was a violinist trained at the geneva conservatory に けk;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ﾐs cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが ヮくΒΑく p. . clearly this is very complex territory. it is not the purpose of this piece to resolve the debates about von kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ ゲヮwiｷaｷi ｷﾐデwﾉﾉwiデ┌;ﾉ iﾗﾐデヴｷh┌デｷﾗﾐが ;ﾐs ヮ;ヴデｷi┌ﾉ;ヴﾉ┞ ｴwヴ ヮヴwiｷゲw ヴﾗﾉw ｷﾐ デｴw けゲﾏ;ﾉﾉ ヮヴｷﾐデげ ゲwiデｷﾗﾐゲ ﾗa the church dogmatics に for an overview of which, ゲww tｷwデ┣が けk;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ﾐs cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが ヮく ヱヰΑく see also for von kirschbauﾏげゲ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ ┘ﾗヴﾆ ;ﾐs ヮ;ヴデｷi┌ﾉ;ヴﾉ┞ aﾗヴ ｴwヴ iﾗﾐデヴｷh┌デｷﾗﾐ デﾗ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ anthropology, renate koebler, in the shadow of karl barth: charlotte von kirschbaum, trans. keith crim (louisville, ky: westminster john knox, ); suzanne selinger, charlotte von kirschbaum and karl barth: a study in biography and the history of theology (university park, pa: penn state university press, ). i merely observe here that most contemporary academic conventions would mean von kirschbaum was credited as a co-;┌デｴﾗヴが w┗wﾐ ｷa ゲｴw けﾗﾐﾉ┞げ sｷs ┘ｴ;デ pﾉ;ﾐデ swゲiヴｷhwゲ に that is, extensive and essential primary https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/ /oct/ /-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing-hair-allowed https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/ /oct/ /-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing-hair-allowed https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/ /oct/ /-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing-hair-allowed personal cost she incurred に makes it all the more disturbing that, in the latter sections of the article, the church dogmatics is discussed siﾏヮﾉ┞ ;ゲ けぷk;ヴﾉへ b;ヴデｴげゲげ ┘ﾗヴﾆく it is mined for evidence of exactly ┘ｴ;デ けb;ヴデｴげ デｴﾗ┌ｪｴデ ;hﾗ┌デ ┗;ヴｷﾗ┌ゲ デﾗヮｷiゲが ;ﾐs ヮヴwゲwﾐデws ;ゲ ｷa ｷデ ┘wヴw wﾐデｷヴwﾉ┞ デｴw ヮヴﾗsuct of けb;ヴデｴげゲげ ｷﾐデwﾉﾉwiデ┌;ﾉ iヴw;デｷ┗ｷデ┞ ;ﾐs ﾉ;hﾗ┌ヴく vﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ ﾉｷawデｷﾏw ﾗa ┘ﾗヴﾆが ;デ デｴw ﾆw┞ ヮﾗｷﾐデ ｷﾐ デｴw ;ヴデｷiﾉw ┘ｴwヴw デｴw sｷゲi┌ゲゲｷﾗﾐ ゲ┘ｷデiｴwゲ デﾗ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞が ｷゲ ;hゲﾗヴhws ｷﾐデﾗ けb;ヴデｴげゲげ ┗ﾗｷiwく the absorption of ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげゲ ┗ﾗｷiw ｷﾐデﾗ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ is not only what happened in the story that is told; it happens in the way this article presents the story. in a particularly telling phrase quoted in the article, a housekeeper describes the barth-von kirschbaum household as けﾗヴswヴws ;ヴﾗ┌ﾐs デｴw demands of デｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆげが ;ゲ ｷa けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげ was the only one who worked, or the only one whose work mattered. that is not surprising in context; what is more troubling is the contemporary replication, even in the face of the evidence, of the idea that all the work of the church dogmatics was simply and solely けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆげく tｴw iﾗﾐデヴ;ゲデ hwデ┘wwﾐ デｴw ｷﾏヮﾗヴデ;ﾐiw ;iiﾗヴsws デﾗ けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげゲげ ┘ﾗヴﾆ ﾗﾐ デｴw ﾗﾐw ｴ;ﾐsが ;ﾐs デﾗ that of the two women on the other, is underlined even by decisions about naming and terminology. only karl に despite the title of the article に is referred to frequently by his surname, wﾏヮｴ;ゲｷゲｷﾐｪ ｴｷゲ ゲデ;デ┌ゲ ;ゲ ;┌デｴﾗヴ ;ﾐs ;┌デｴﾗヴｷデ┞き ｴw ｷゲ けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげが ┘ｴﾗ ヴwヮヴwゲwﾐデゲ デｴw wﾐデｷヴw household and its work in the male-sﾗﾏｷﾐ;デws ヮ┌hﾉｷi ゲヮｴwヴwく nwﾉﾉ┞ b;ヴデｴ ｷゲ iﾗﾐゲｷゲデwﾐデﾉ┞ けnwﾉﾉ┞げく vﾗﾐ kirschbaum, once she enters the barth household, is almost always diminished to her diminutive に けlﾗﾉﾉﾗげ に w┗wﾐ ┘ｴwﾐ ゲｴw ｷゲ ゲｷデデｷﾐｪ ﾗﾐ ; ゲデ;ｪw ﾐw┝デ デﾗ けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげ ;ゲ ｴw selivers the lectures they have both worked on. the household arrangement, meanwhile, is referred to by the term karl chose for it に a notgemeinschaftが ; け┌ﾐｷﾗﾐ ﾗa ﾐwiwゲゲｷデ┞ ;ﾐs デヴﾗ┌hﾉwげ デﾗ ┌ゲw tｷwデ┣げゲ デヴ;ﾐゲﾉ;デｷﾗﾐく tｴｷゲ デwﾐsゲ デﾗ elide the very different levels of power and agency exercised by the three protagonists at its ｷﾐiwヮデｷﾗﾐが ;ﾐs ;ｪ;ｷﾐ ｷﾏヮﾗヴデゲ k;ヴﾉげゲ ;ゲゲ┌ﾏヮデｷﾗﾐ デｴ;デ デｴw けﾐwwsゲげ ﾗa ｴｷゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆ ┘wヴw hﾗデｴ ゲwﾉa-evident and self-evidently primary. the crucial issue that emerges here is the characterisation of, and the value attached to, certain kinds of theological authorship. it is not simply that the church dogmatics is the main focus of interest (that would not be surprising) に it is that this work is so closely bound up with its named author, who is heard as a single authoritative voice presenting a single theological vision, and then presented biographically as the agent around whose vision and work everything and everyone revolves. iﾐ デｴｷゲ iﾗﾐデw┝デが pﾉ;ﾐデげゲ ;ヴデｷiﾉw ｷﾐ a;iデ ﾗaawヴゲ the opportunity to think very differently about the church dogmatics project and the different contributors to it. thanks to the extensive new archive work we doが ┌ﾐ┌ゲ┌;ﾉﾉ┞が ｴw;ヴ nwﾉﾉ┞ b;ヴデｴげゲ own voice に even occasionally her theological voice; and we hear it in conversation, supported and challenged by perspectives from her female friends and relatives. it is thus disappointing when this voice is marginalised or belittled by negative judgements on nelly, mostly made by karl barth and his male friends, with which the reader is frequently encouraged by the structure of the article to concur. for example, at the fateful moment when von kirschbaum moves into the barth household, we learn from edward thurneysen に elsewhere acknowledged as a research in the history of theology, and sustained discussion of the emerging theゲwゲ ┘ｷデｴ けﾉw;s ;┌デｴﾗヴげ k;ヴﾉ barth. and this again points to the fact that the story raises wider にpolitical に issues that cannot be resolved by digging deeper into the feelings and actions of the individuals involved. tietz claims, on the basis of evidence from correspondence, that von kirschbaum was happy with her anonymity (けk;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ﾐs cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが ヮく Γヱ); whether or not that is a fair representation of her state of mind and her personal preferences, it has no bearing on the question of the fair representation of her work. i am grateful to ben fulford and susannah ticciati for suggestions developed in this paragraph. although it should be acknowledged that not as need in the sense of trouble ふけhwｷﾐｪ ｷﾐ ﾐwwsげぶ ;ヴｪ┌;hﾉ┞ applied equally to all three. complex and potentially unreliable witness, but here allowed to speak unchallenged に that it was all nwﾉﾉ┞げゲ a;┌ﾉデ hwi;┌ゲw ﾗa ｴwヴ けswwヮ ;ﾐs ｷヴヴwﾏwsｷ;hﾉw ゲwﾉa-abゲﾗヴヮデｷﾗﾐげ ふﾗa ┘ｴｷiｴ デｴwヴw ｷゲ, incidentally, little evidence offered in the articleき ヮwヴｴ;ヮゲ nwﾉﾉ┞げゲ ゲwﾉa-absorption at this point stands for her ヴwﾉ┌iデ;ﾐiw デﾗ ｴ;┗w ｴwヴ ﾐwwsゲ ;ﾐs ┘ｷゲｴwゲ ;hゲﾗヴhws ｷﾐデﾗ k;ヴﾉげs project). similarly and decisively, at the end of the article に ｷﾐ ﾗヴswヴ デﾗ ;iｴｷw┗w けヴwiﾗﾐiｷﾉｷ;デｷﾗﾐげ に we are invited to accept, or at least to sympathise strongly ┘ｷデｴが k;ヴﾉげゲ iﾉ;ｷﾏ デｴ;デ nwﾉﾉ┞ けｴ;ゲ ﾐw┗wヴ ヴw;ﾉﾉ┞ iﾗﾏw デﾗ terms with the realities of the world, preferring to live in her imagination and in a brittle, old- a;ゲｴｷﾗﾐws ﾏﾗヴ;ﾉｷデ┞げく now, there are obvious and probably cheap retorts to this に for example, that デｴw けヴw;ﾉｷデ┞げ nwﾉﾉ┞ ┘;ゲ ヴwﾉ┌iデ;ﾐデ デﾗ iﾗﾏw デﾗ デwヴﾏゲ ┘ｷデｴ ┘;ゲ k;ヴﾉげゲ hwｴ;┗ｷﾗ┌ヴ; that her imagination was possibly a more comfortable and rewarding place to live than the barth-von kirschbaum ｴﾗ┌ゲwｴﾗﾉs ;デ ゲﾗﾏw ヮﾗｷﾐデゲき ;ﾐs デｴ;デ ｴwヴ けhヴｷデデﾉwが ﾗﾉs-a;ゲｴｷﾗﾐws ﾏﾗヴ;ﾉｷデ┞げ w┝デwﾐsws デﾗ ゲ┌iｴ ﾗﾉs- a;ゲｴｷﾗﾐws ヮヴ;iデｷiwゲ ;ゲ ﾆwwヮｷﾐｪ ｴwヴ ﾏ;ヴヴｷ;ｪw ┗ﾗ┘ゲ デﾗ k;ヴﾉが ﾉﾗﾗﾆｷﾐｪ ;aデwヴ k;ヴﾉげゲ iｴｷﾉsヴwﾐが ;ﾐs i;ヴｷﾐｪ aﾗヴ a very ill woman who happened to have been karﾉげゲ ﾏｷゲデヴwゲゲく hﾗ┘w┗wヴが デｴw ヮﾗｷﾐデ ﾗﾐiw ;ｪ;ｷﾐ ｷゲ ﾐﾗデ to start an argument with the elderly karl barth, but rather to observe what the use of this material in the article does to the presentation of nelly barth. in the end, insofar as she has an independent theological and ethical perspective に emerging in fragments in the letters, and even hinted at in this aｷﾐ;ﾉ ヴwawヴwﾐiw デﾗ ｴwヴ けﾏﾗヴ;ﾉｷデ┞げ に it is undermined in the interests of a textually performed けヴwiﾗﾐiｷﾉｷ;デｷﾗﾐげ hwデ┘wwﾐ iﾗﾐaﾉｷiデｷﾐｪ ┗ﾗｷiwゲ デｴ;デ wﾐsゲ ┌ヮ ;ゲ ;ﾐ ;ﾏヮﾉｷaｷi;デｷﾗﾐ ﾗa k;ヴﾉげゲ ┗ﾗｷiw. karl has the last word, and he says that nelly does not really know what she is talking about. overall, then, the effect of this telling of the story is to keep karl barth firmly at the centre of the picture に not only as the object of study, but as the authoritative and trustworthy subject. it is not that no other voices, perspectives or actions are given space, but that these voices, perspectives and actions, and the women whose voices, perspectives and actions they are, are read from a perspective very close to (what we learn was) k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ﾗ┘ﾐ に the perspective from which everything in his ﾉｷawが ｷﾐiﾉ┌sｷﾐｪ w┗wヴ┞ﾗﾐw ｷﾐ けｴｷゲげ ｴﾗ┌ゲwｴﾗﾉsが ｴ;ゲ デﾗ hw ゲ┌hﾗヴsｷﾐ;デws デﾗ けｴｷゲげ academic project. now, of course it is not surprising or problematic when a biographical piece about a famous author interprets everything, including the lives of others, in relation to its implications for the biographical subject and his or her literary oeuvre; we would expect that to happen, for example に albeit probably without the asymmetric comments on physical appearance and sexual attractiveness に in articles about charlotte brontë and (けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげ) constantin heger. the critical issues for theologians in relation to the telling of the barth-von kirschbaum story are, i suggest, not about accuracy of biography, nor even narrowly about how specific biographical details might relate to swデ;ｷﾉゲ ﾗa ;ﾐ ;┌デｴﾗヴげゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆが but rather about how biography is used to present or reinforce certain visions of what theology is, how it is done, and how authority and authorship work. tｴw pﾗ┘wヴ ﾗa けb;ヴデｴげ けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげが ヮく ヱンヴく nﾗデ ﾗﾐﾉ┞ デｴｷゲが h┌デ ;ﾉゲﾗ デﾗ ;iiwヮデ デｴ;デ デｴｷゲ ｷゲ けﾐﾗデ ; iヴｷデｷiｷゲﾏ に ﾃ┌ゲデ ;ﾐ ﾗhゲwヴ┗;デｷﾗﾐげく ibid., p. . this comparison might bear further reflection に not least because of the odd parallels in the subsequent histories of the relationships, involving in each case the posthumous publication of an intimate correspondence that at least one of the parties appears to have wished to destroy. on the suggestion that karl barth wanted his correspondence with cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏ swゲデヴﾗ┞wsが ゲww tｷwデ┣が けk;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ﾐs cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏげが ヮヮくΓヱ- . see for an example of a heger-focused article about brontë, sue lonoff, けtｴw tｴヴww f;iwゲ ﾗa cﾗﾐゲデ;ﾐデｷﾐ hwｪwヴげが brontë studies / ( ), pp. - ; there is in fact a brief reference ｴwヴw デﾗ hwｪwヴげゲ physical appearance, albeit quoted directly from bヴﾗﾐデ¥げゲ own words without authorial comment. karl barth, after all, is for theologians not merely a figure in the history of ideas, an object of study に as charlotte brontë is for scholars of english literature. he is also an exemplar, perhaps for some the exemplar, of (a certain kind of) academic theological practice. tｴw デヴw;デﾏwﾐデ ﾗa デｴw けk;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ story, not only in this article, has the net effect of reinforcing the image ﾗa けb;ヴデｴげ as one of the theologians whose status, as author and authority figure, is not to be challenged. according to the unwritten rules of the discipline, at least in certain sections of the academy (including, to be clear, ┘ｴwヴw i ﾉﾗi;デw ﾏ┞ゲwﾉaぶが けb;ヴデｴげ i;ﾐ hw ;ヴｪ┌ws ┘ｷデｴが iヴｷデｷiｷゲwsが ﾃ┌sｪws デﾗ hw i;デ;ゲデヴﾗヮｴｷi;ﾉﾉ┞ ┘ヴﾗﾐｪ に but he will always be one of the voices in the conversation, and nobody will be asked to justify citing or discussing his work. the unspoken assumption that けb;ヴデｴげ に and others in the succession of theological patriarchs に will retain space at the centre of the conversation means that the contextualisation of theology, as expressed ｷﾐ pﾉ;ﾐデげゲ ヴwiﾗｪﾐｷデｷﾗﾐ デｴ;デ けｷsw;ゲ sﾗ ﾐﾗデ ｪwﾐwヴ;デw デｴwﾏゲwﾉ┗wゲげが ｷゲ ﾉｷﾏｷデws ｷﾐ ｷデゲ ヮﾗゲゲｷhﾉw ゲiﾗヮw ;ﾐd in how it is presented. ideas do not generate themselves に but in order to hold this disciplinary space, to retain the unquestioned authority to swﾏ;ﾐs w┗wヴ┞ﾗﾐwげゲ ;デデwﾐデｷﾗﾐが they still have to have a clear authorial pedigree that is trusted and recognised by the community. tｴw┞ ゲデｷﾉﾉ ｴ;┗w デﾗ hw けb;ヴデｴげゲげ ｷsw;ゲ, and けb;ヴデｴげ ゲデｷﾉﾉ ｴ;ゲ デﾗ hw ┘ﾗヴデｴ listening to. beyond this, however, it is important to acknowledge that the focus on individuals as sole creative originators of coherent theological systems makes deep and important に perhaps indispensable に sense for the discipline of systematic theology. prosaically, it reflects the common に though not universal に experience of writing as a form of intellectual production; the author, unlike, say, the research scientist, does usually need け; ヴﾗﾗﾏ ﾗa ぷｴwヴ ﾗヴ ｴｷゲへ ﾗ┘ﾐげく aデ ; swwヮ ﾉw┗wﾉが ｴﾗ┘w┗wヴが ｷデ ヴwaﾉwiデゲ ; iﾗﾏﾏｷデﾏwﾐデ デﾗ デｴw ヴwﾉ;デｷﾗﾐ;ﾉ ┌ﾐｷデ┞ ﾗa デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞げゲ ゲ┌hﾃwiデ ﾏ;デデwヴく tｴw デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐ ゲwwﾆゲ デﾗ understand how any given claim might make sense as part of a larger exercise of reasoning about けgﾗs ;ﾐs ;ﾉﾉ デｴｷﾐｪゲ ｷﾐ ヴwﾉ;デｷﾗﾐ デﾗ gﾗsげき ;ﾐs ゲｴw ﾐwwsゲ デﾗ デ;ﾆw w;iｴ ﾗa デｴw デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐゲ ゲｴw ヴw;sゲ デﾗ hw engaged in such an exercise, in order to be able to evaluate their claims. doing justice to theology ;ゲ けゲ┞ゲデwﾏ;デｷiげ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞ ヴwケ┌ｷヴwゲ デｴw ヴw;swヴ デﾗ ﾏ;ﾆw iﾗﾐﾐwiデｷﾗﾐゲ hw┞ﾗﾐs ┘ｴ;デ ｷゲ ゲwデ ﾗ┌デ ﾗﾐ デｴw page に to recognise that theological writing is, by virtue of its subject matter, both systematic and unfinished. if theology does any part of its job well, it repays the trust of the reader who attempts to follow the sense it makes, beyond what is set out on the page. けb;ヴデｴげ ｷゲ ヴw;s ゲ┞ゲデwﾏ;デｷi;ﾉﾉ┞ ゲﾗ デｴ;デ his writings can be the basis of further critical and constructive work in systematic theology. thwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ ヴw;swヴゲ ;ヮヮﾉ┞が w┝デwﾐsが デｴｷﾐﾆ ┘ｷデｴ ;ﾐs デｴｷﾐﾆ hw┞ﾗﾐs けb;ヴデｴげ ｷﾐ ﾗヴswヴ デﾗ ヮ┌ヴゲ┌w デｴw ﾉ;ヴｪwヴ task of systematic theological reasoning in which he is also engaged. complex questions arise at the confluence of these two dynamics に the establishment of authority through authorial and citational pedigrees, and the need to read and reason systematically (or at least, in terms of multiple ｷﾐデwヴiﾗﾐﾐwiデｷﾗﾐゲぶ ｷﾐ ﾗヴswヴ デﾗ sﾗ ﾃ┌ゲデｷiw デﾗ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞げゲ ゲ┌hﾃwiデ-matter. what happens when we set the story of the story ﾗa けk;ヴﾉが nwﾉﾉ┞ ;ﾐs lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ in the context of the politics of theological authorship and authority? in this context, the article by plant discussed above に and the real internal tensions to which i have alluded に draws attention to a wider problem. the discipline of theology, as karl barth inhabited and helped to shape it, ﾏ;ﾆwゲ けb;ヴデｴげ simultaneously an object of study for theologians; an authoriser and identifying marker for デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐゲげ ┘ﾗヴﾆ; and the label for a unified, coherent and in principle indefinitely extendable pattern of theological reasoning. iﾐゲﾗa;ヴ ;ゲ ｴw ;ﾐs ｴｷゲ ┘ﾗヴﾆ ;ヴw けﾗﾐﾉ┞げ ;ﾐ ﾗhﾃwiデ ﾗa ゲデ┌s┞, the questions discussed in my first in other subdisciplinary circles, of course, his name provokes a strong negative reaction. on the systematic character of theological claims and arguments, and the sense in which this character might be inherent in the nature of theology and hence independent of the historically-ゲヮwiｷaｷi ｪwﾐヴw ﾗa けゲ┞ゲデwﾏ;デｷiゲげが see a.n. williams, the architecture of theology (oxford: oxford university press, ). section about the lived context from which his writings arise can come into play. however, insofar as he ｷゲ ;ﾐ ;┌デｴﾗヴｷゲwヴ ﾗa デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐゲげ ┘ﾗヴﾆ, these questions about the lived context of his writings are liable to be pulled into a different and more politically charged question about whether his theological voice remains authoritative and trustworthy; and insofar as he is the originator of a theological けゲ┞ゲデwﾏげが デｴwヴw is a perhaps inevitable tendency to return to his voice and perspective as soon as theological judgements need to be made. tｴw w┝wヴiｷゲw ﾗa けﾏ;ﾆｷﾐｪ iﾗﾐﾐwiデｷﾗﾐゲ hw┞ﾗﾐs ┘ｴ;デ is set out on the pageげが ┘ｴwﾐ ┘ｴ;デ ｷゲ ゲwデ ﾗ┌デ ﾗﾐ デｴw ヮ;ｪw ｷゲ デｴw デｴﾗ┌ｪｴデ ﾗa ; ゲヮwiｷaｷi ;┌デｴﾗヴが ;ﾉゲﾗ デwﾐsゲ デﾗ ﾉw;s ｷﾐデﾗ けﾏ;ﾆｷﾐｪ iﾗﾐﾐwiデｷﾗﾐゲげ デﾗ デｴw ;┌デｴﾗヴ に reading all things in relation to barth. some of these general, and ostensibly gender-neutral, points about how the systematic-theological canon works might seem unremarkable if the canon were not dominated by men に if the focus on individuals に who happen to be men に as the originators of theological systems did not mirror so neatly the (history of ideas) focus on men as heroic inventors and innovators, the (ecclesial) focus on male-dominated preaching and teaching offices as the guarantee of orthodoxy, or the mid- twentieth-iwﾐデ┌ヴ┞ ﾏ;ﾉw ;i;swﾏｷiげゲ assumption that the household would revolve around his work. in fact, however, with the canon as it is, we end up with a situation in which understanding theology hwデデwヴ ｷﾐ┗ﾗﾉ┗wゲ デwﾉﾉｷﾐｪ ﾏwﾐげゲ ゲデories from a male-centred point of view; and these stories, in turn, reinforce the gendered structure of theological authority. this becomes particularly clear when the subject matter of the stories relates to the politics of sex and gender. questioning けtｴw q┌wゲデｷﾗﾐげぎ on the sex lives of theologians iﾐ けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ says of the question of whether karl barth and charlotte von kirschbaum had sexual intercourse that it is けthe ケ┌wゲデｷﾗﾐ デｴ;デ b;ヴデｴげゲ sﾗﾏwゲデｷi ゲｷデ┌;デｷﾗﾐ ｴ;ゲ ｷﾐw┗ｷデ;hﾉ┞ ヮﾉ;iws ｷﾐ the minds of his readeヴゲげ. there has indeed been much agonising over this question in certain sections of the blogosphere に although not everything that is an interesting question on the internet is an interesting question in real liawく iﾐ デｴw hﾉﾗｪﾗゲヮｴwヴwが けデｴw ケ┌wゲデｷﾗﾐげ has generally been posed in specific terms: did karl barth do something naughty? in online discussions following christiane tｷwデ┣げゲ ヮ;ヮwヴが cｴ;ヴﾉﾗデデw ┗ﾗﾐ kｷヴゲiｴh;┌ﾏ hwi;ﾏw デhe forbidden woman with whom karl barth might or might not have had sex; the question was about what sex with von kirschbaum would in theory have meant for him, for his theology, for his trustworthiness or otherwise as an author. looking at the story, even briefly, from another perspective might place a different question in the mind of the reader: did charlotte von kirschbaum have any choice about whether to have sex with karl barth? as plant explains, her reputation and social situation was already that of a mistress. her family had rejected her; despite this, she was comfortably off, for just as long as she remained in the b;ヴデｴ ｴﾗ┌ゲwｴﾗﾉs ;ﾐs ┘;ゲ ｷﾐ ; ヮﾗゲｷデｷﾗﾐ デﾗ ﾉｷ┗w ﾗﾐ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ﾏoney. she was, in other words, entirely dependent for her basic livelihood on a man who found her work useful, and who was also sexually attracted to her. she was in a position of extreme structural vulnerability. if karl barth had decided unilaterally that this should be a sexual relationship, it is hard to see what choice charlotte von kirschbaum would have had in the matter. needless to say, this aspect of the story に the severe limits placed on ; ┘ﾗﾏ;ﾐげゲ ゲw┝┌;ﾉ iｴﾗｷiwゲ h┞ ｴwヴ lack of economic and social power, combined with on the cultural history of which see christine mcleod, heroes of invention (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). i am grateful to graeme gooday for discussions of this point. for a theological critique of which see tom greggs, dogmatic ecclesiology volume (baker academic press ), chapter . けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ ﾏwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげが ヮく ヱヴヱく plant, unlike other authors as far as i can see, does allude to some of the possible consequences for von kirschbaum when he refers to the けヴ;┘ a;iデげ that von kirschbaum was never pregnant. obviously nobody could know that to be a fact except に possibly に von kirschbaum herself. the sexual double standard に exemplifies a structural injustice that repeats, mutatis mutandis, across multiple historical contexts, with #mwtﾗﾗ ;ﾐs けsex for rentげ as only its most recent manifestations. arguably, this structural injustice deserves at least as much attention as the possibility that a famous male theologian had sex with someone other than his wife に not least because there is rather more firm ground on which to build constructive theological responses. before anyone panics, the point here is not to level any accusations against karl barth に there would be no evidential foundation for them. i am trying to draw attention to the crucial fact that there is a politics of sex and gender at play, both in the story of the barth-von kirschbaum household and in how that story is told. the personal may be theological に but it is certainly political. jumping straight from the personal to the theological, while missing out the politics に moving from けデｴw ケ┌wゲデｷﾗﾐげ ﾗa kaヴﾉ b;ヴデｴげゲ ゲw┝ ﾉｷaw either デﾗ けb;ヴデｴげゲげ デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪ┞ ﾗa ﾏ;ヴヴｷ;ｪw ;ﾐs ゲw┝┌;ﾉｷデ┞ or to broader questions ;hﾗ┌デ デｴw デヴ┌ゲデ┘ﾗヴデｴｷﾐwゲゲ ﾗa けb;ヴデｴげ デｴw デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷ;ﾐ に not only leads rather directly to the troubling questions about voyeurism and moralism with which tietz, plant and other wrestle, but also tends to reproduce uncritically the gendered public/private split discussed above. if we ignore the societal, political and economic context that framed the relationships, all we have to talk about is what went on in the bedroom. it suited karl barth, and his generation of theologians, very well for sex に and for that matter, reproduction and child-rearing に to be a domestic matter, carefully segregated from both the professional and the political world, its own discrete けiﾗﾐデw┝デげ ┘ｷデｴ ｷデゲ ﾗ┘ﾐ sｷゲiヴwデw ゲwiデｷﾗﾐ ﾗa デｴw church dogmaticsく iデ ﾆwヮデ ; ﾉ;ヴｪw ﾐ┌ﾏhwヴ ﾗa ケ┌wゲデｷﾗﾐゲ デｴ;デ ;aawiデws ┘ﾗﾏwﾐげゲ ﾉｷ┗wゲ ;ﾐs ﾉｷaw iｴ;ﾐiwゲ (such as the sexual double standard, the economics of marriage, ;ﾐs デｴw h;ヴヴｷwヴゲ デﾗ ┘ﾗﾏwﾐげゲ wﾐデヴ┞ into public life) firmly off the agenda, and maintained the position of the male theological subject for whom sex was a - pleasant, foolish, disturbing, transgressive に distraction from the weighty questions of life. telling the karl barth-nelly barth-charlotte von kirschbaum story as a domestic drama centred on a dysfunctional love triangle に a soap opera with three main characters に makes it, in turn, a piece of humanising background or interesting emotional texture, without ongoing implications or lessons for a coﾐデwﾏヮﾗヴ;ヴ┞ ;┌sｷwﾐiw hw┞ﾗﾐs ｷデゲ ヮﾗゲゲｷhﾉw waawiデゲ ﾗﾐ けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげ ;ﾐs ｴwﾐiw ﾗﾐ けｴｷゲげ ┘ﾗヴﾆく a particular way of managing gender and sex, focused on male sexuality and the heteropatriarchal family structure, is thus safely insulated against (for example) the theological critique that karl barth himself levels at systems of government. without minimising the vast difference between the stories themselves, i note at this point that the けゲデﾗヴ┞ ﾗa デｴw ゲデﾗヴ┞げ ﾗa jﾗｴﾐ hﾗ┘;ヴs yﾗswヴげs serial sexual harassment and abuse に as it still reverberates around the theological circles within which yoder was (or still is) an authorising voice に reveals, in a much more extreme way, the problems that arise for theology when sex and gender are デヴw;デws ;ゲ けヮヴｷ┗;デwげ ;ﾐs ヴws┌iws デﾗ questions of individual behaviour. as karen guth has shown, a ｪヴﾗ┌ヮ ﾗa w;ヴﾉ┞ ヴwゲヮﾗﾐゲwゲ デﾗ デｴw sｷゲiﾉﾗゲ┌ヴwゲ ﾗa yﾗswヴげゲ ;h┌ゲｷ┗w hwｴ;┗ｷﾗ┌ヴ aﾗi┌ゲws on the question of whether (and how) yoder could possibly be rehabilitated or preserved as a theological authority に and ignored what the story had to say about けデｴw ゲ┞ゲデwﾏｷi ┗ｷﾗﾉwﾐiw ﾗa ゲw┝ｷゲﾏが ﾏｷゲﾗｪ┞ﾐ┞が ゲw┝┌;ﾉ ;h┌ゲw ;ﾐs ;h┌ゲwゲ ﾗa ヮﾗ┘wヴが ｷﾐiﾉ┌sｷﾐｪぐ the ways academic and ecclesial structures and practices oﾐ デｴw ｴｷゲデﾗヴ┞ ;ﾐs iﾗﾐデw┝デ ﾗa デｴw aﾗヴﾏwヴが ゲww aﾐﾐ pwﾉﾉwｪヴｷﾐｷが けセmwtﾗﾗぎ bwaﾗヴw ;ﾐs aaデwヴげが studies in gender and sexuality, / ( ), pp. -ヲヶヴく oﾐ デｴw ﾉ;デデwヴが ゲww h;ヴ┗w┞ jﾗﾐwゲが け“w┝ aﾗヴ ヴwﾐデぎ デｴw ヴﾗｪ┌w ﾉ;ﾐsﾉﾗヴsゲ ┘ｴﾗ ﾗaawヴ aヴww ヴﾗﾗﾏゲ ｷﾐ ヴwデ┌ヴﾐ aﾗヴ さa;┗ﾗ┌ヴゲざ けが the guardian nd april https://www.theguardian.com/money/ /apr/ /sex-for-rent-accommodation-rogue-landlords-campaign as developed, for example, in the work of the shiloh project: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/siibs/sresearch/the-shiloh-project. see also johanna stiebert, rape myths, the bible and #metoo (london: routledge, ). https://www.theguardian.com/money/ /apr/ /sex-for-rent-accommodation-rogue-landlords-campaign https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/siibs/sresearch/the-shiloh-project ﾏ;┞ a;iｷﾉｷデ;デw デｴwゲw ヮヴﾗhﾉwﾏゲげ. a particular attitude to yodeヴげゲ ゲw┝┌;ﾉ hwｴ;┗ｷﾗ┌ヴ に as the (appalling) transgressions of an individual behind closed doors に shut off a set of questions about the power structures, academic politics and organisational practices that facilitated that abusive sexual behaviour, and shut them off, inter alia, from theological critique. it also, of course, ensured that the story as told and discussed was about yoder に his motives, his work, his status as sinner and recipient of forgiveness に and not about the female survivors; privatisation and individualisation of the issue goes along with the preservation of male privilege, in that the powerful and authoritative man is still the subject of the story. so, should we be retelling the story of the barth-von kirschbaum household arrangement, and the relationships within it, not as a dysfunctional love story, but as a story about the contradictory pressures of an ecclesially- and socially-sanctioned system of patriarchal marriage, and about the relationships between professional status, economic security and sexual morality? such a reading would presumably have theological implications に including implications for the interpretation of the church dogmatics, for those who are mostly focused on such things. to reiterate a point already made, it might draw critical attention to the way in which the discussion of sexuality in the church dogmatics is insulated from questions of community or of political life に and contribute to conversations about the relationships between different sections of the work. it might produce a reading that uses church dogmatics に ゲﾗﾏw┘ｴ;デ け;ｪ;ｷﾐゲデ デｴw ｪヴ;ｷﾐげが h┌デ ﾗﾐ ﾉｷﾐwゲ ;ﾉヴw;s┞ ｴｷﾐデws ;デ h┞ plant に デﾗ iヴｷデｷケ┌w デｴw ﾗhゲwゲゲｷﾗﾐ ┘ｷデｴ けゲw┝┌;ﾉ wデｴｷiゲげ ふh┞ ┘ｴｷiｴ ｷゲ ┌ゲ┌;ﾉﾉ┞ ﾏw;ﾐデが ┘hat one man chooses to do with his sexual organs) in certain church circles. it might even set up the possibility of ; ┘ｷswヴ iﾗﾐ┗wヴゲ;デｷﾗﾐ ;hﾗ┌デ ｴﾗ┘ けゲw┝┌;ﾉ wデｴｷiゲげ ヴwﾉ;デwゲが デﾗ ﾐ;ﾏw h┌デ ; aw┘ ﾗh┗ｷﾗ┌ゲ w┝;ﾏヮﾉwゲが デﾗ economics, to work, to power and authority within and outwith the churches に and to theologies of the incarnation and to ecclesiology. what might the church dogmatics, read with and beyond itself, ｴ;┗w ゲ;ｷs ｷﾐデﾗ ; ゲｷデ┌;デｷﾗﾐ ｷﾐ ┘ｴｷiｴ ふﾏ;ﾉwぶ ヮヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴゲげ ヮヴﾗﾃwiデゲ iﾗ┌ﾐデws aﾗヴ w┗wヴ┞デｴｷﾐｪい wｴ;デ ﾏｷｪｴデ ｷデ h;┗w ﾗaawヴws aﾗヴ デｴw iヴｷデｷケ┌w ﾗa ; ゲｷデ┌;デｷﾗﾐ ｷﾐ ┘ｴｷiｴ ; ﾏ;ﾐげゲ ゲw┝┌;ﾉ ;iデｷ┗ｷデ┞ ｷゲ に within certain well- understood limits に ｴｷゲ ヮヴｷ┗;デw h┌ゲｷﾐwゲゲが ;ﾐs ; ┘ﾗﾏ;ﾐげゲ ゲw┝┌;ﾉ ;iデｷ┗ｷデ┞ swデwヴﾏｷﾐwゲ デｴw iﾗ┌ヴゲw ﾗa ｴwヴ life? what about a contemporary situation in which inclusion and seriousness within a theological discipline can be judged, inter alia and even if only as a shortcut, by the frequency of name-checks given to one of a select list of men? concluding thoughts: can we avoid telling the story? there is a risk, however, that the sort of rereading of barth-von kirschbaum towards which i am gesturing might exacerbate rather than alleviate some of the problems already identified with recent discussions of these relationships. it might, for example, lead readers to lay even more ;ii┌ゲ;デｷﾗﾐゲ ;ｪ;ｷﾐゲデ k;ヴﾉ b;ヴデｴ ;ゲ ;ﾐ ｷﾐsｷ┗ｷs┌;ﾉ ふｴw ┘;ゲ ; ゲw┝ｷゲデ w┝ヮﾉﾗｷデwヴ ﾗa ┘ﾗﾏwﾐげゲ ﾉ;hﾗ┌ヴ ;ゲ ┘wﾉﾉ ;ゲ an unfaithful husband!) and to respond with even more contorted defences of karl barth as an individual (he made sure that charlotte von kirschbaum and nelly barth were much better off than most women of their time!) indeed, outwith theology, tｴw awﾏｷﾐｷゲデ ｷﾐゲｷｪｴデ デｴ;デ けデｴw ヮwヴゲﾗﾐ;ﾉ ｷゲ ヮﾗﾉｷデｷi;ﾉげ has frequently been inverted in practice to make politics personal に to demand from individuals a flawless ヮwヴゲﾗﾐ;ﾉ ヮwヴaﾗヴﾏ;ﾐiw ﾗa デｴw けiﾗヴヴwiデげ ヮﾗﾉｷデｷiゲ ふｴﾗ┘w┗wヴ ﾏ┌iｴ ┘w ﾆﾐﾗ┘が ﾗヴ k;ヴwﾐ g┌デｴが けdﾗｷﾐｪ j┌ゲデｷiw デﾗ デｴw cﾗﾏヮﾉw┝ lwｪ;i┞ ﾗa jﾗｴﾐ howard yoder: restorative justice resources in wｷデﾐwゲゲ ;ﾐs fwﾏｷﾐｷゲデ eデｴｷiゲげが journal of the society of christian ethics / ( ), pp. - , here p. . けwｴwﾐ k;ヴﾉ mwデ lﾗﾉﾉﾗげが ヮくヱヴヲく ought to know, about the impossibility of doing that) and to condemn out of hand the words and ;iデｷﾗﾐゲ ﾗa デｴﾗゲw ┘ｴﾗ けa;ｷﾉげ. this focus on attacking and defending the great theologian に with its parallels in political movements に takes us back to the questions raised earlier about the authority of the author in theology, and the ﾏ┌ﾉデｷヮﾉw ;ﾐs iﾗﾐデヴ;sｷiデﾗヴ┞ wﾐゲ┌ｷﾐｪ ヮヴwゲゲ┌ヴwゲ ﾗﾐ けb;ヴデｴげ ;ﾐs ｴｷゲ ﾉwｪ;i┞. it pushes us to ask what is at stake in attacking or defending a visible individual に and whether it is perhaps the honour and security of an in-group that knows itself to be a threatened minority, ;ﾐs デｴ;デ ｪヴﾗ┌ヮげゲ iﾗﾉﾉwiデｷ┗w sense of the right to assert superiority (moral, political or theological) over others. the context in ┘ｴｷiｴ けb;ヴデｴげゲげ ﾐ;ﾏw i;ヴヴｷwゲ ;┌デｴﾗヴｷデ┞ ;ﾐs ヮヴﾗ┗ｷswゲ ゲwi┌ヴｷデ┞ に or alternatively is ridiculed and rejected に is, after all, one in which theology itself holds a precarious institutional position in the academy, the churches and the public sphere, while maintaining the audacious claim to speak truthfully about god and all things in relation to god. perhaps karl barth, like the celebrity who finds himself the unwilling centrepiece of a tabloid story, or like the revered leader of an aspiring-to-be revolutionary movement, has been set up to fail by a public that has become too reliant on the great achievements of a few great men. iデ ｷゲ ｷﾏヮﾗヴデ;ﾐデ ｷﾐ デｴｷゲが ｴﾗ┘w┗wヴが ﾐﾗデ デﾗ ｷｪﾐﾗヴw デｴw デｴwﾗﾉﾗｪｷi;ﾉ ヴw;ゲﾗﾐゲ ┘ｴ┞ けb;ヴデｴげ に and other individual theologians に assume such importance. a focus on the work of individuals is, i have suggested, not only a matter of maintaining in-groups and securing intellectual pedigrees; it is also part of how we recognise and do justice to the coherent and open-ended character of theological thought, which in turn arises from the subject matter of theology. i have suggested here that the systematic character of theology can, but does not need to, lead to an account or mode of theological work in which all lines (in history or in thought) point back to the individual author of the system. my concluding suggestion is that the best response デﾗ デｴw けk;ヴﾉが nwﾉﾉ┞ ;ﾐs lﾗﾉﾉﾗげ ゲデﾗヴ┞ ｷゲ デﾗ take it as a cue to follow the lines of connection from the church dogmaticsが ﾐﾗデ ｷﾐ┘;ヴsゲ デﾗ けデｴw pヴﾗawゲゲﾗヴげ ;ﾐs ｴｷゲ けヮヴｷ┗;デw ﾉｷawげが h┌デ ﾗ┌デ┘;ヴsゲ デﾗ デｴw complex, conflicted and multiply failing ecclesial and academic communities within which theology was and is done. it should be possible to engage in critical and constructive theological conversation about how these communities are formed, the assumptions on which they rest and the different forms of labour that sustain them に using these stories about the historical contexts of theology to help us to recognise situations and concerns in which contemporary theology is implicated. aゲ sｷゲi┌ゲゲwsが a;ﾏﾗ┌ゲﾉ┞が ｷﾐ jﾗヴwwﾐ ふjﾗ fヴwwﾏ;ﾐぶが けtヴ;ゲｴｷﾐｪぎ tｴw d;ヴﾆ “ｷsw ﾗa “ｷゲデwヴｴﾗﾗsげが ms. april , pp. - , - ; available at https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm personal infidelity and professional conduct in settings personal infidelity and professional conduct in settings john m. griffina, , samuel krugera, and gonzalo maturanab amccombs school of business, university of texas at austin, austin, tx ; and bgoizueta business school, emory university, atlanta, ga edited by george a. akerlof, georgetown university, and approved july , (received for review march , ) we study the connection between personal and professional behavior by introducing usage of a marital infidelity website as a measure of personal conduct. police officers and financial advisors who use the infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. results are similar for us securities and exchange commission (sec) defendants accused of white-collar crimes, and companies with chief executive officers (ceos) or chief financial officers (cfos) who use the website are more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct. the relation is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, execu- tive, and cultural variables. these findings suggest that personal and workplace behavior are closely related. police | financial advisors | ceos | fraud | personal conduct by ensnaring leaders in entertainment, politics, business, me-dia, education, and the law, and highlighting the magnitude of workplace sexual misconduct, the #metoo movement has generated renewed interest in personal conduct. however, there is substantial disagreement as to how personal and professional conduct relate to one another. while many argue that affairs should not affect employment, some have recently questioned whether the personal behavior and attitudes of executives con- tribute to corporate cultures that tolerate sexism and sexual harassment. in the language of the literature on the economics of information ( ), the relevance of personal conduct to pro- fessional conduct depends on whether personal conduct is an informative signal about professional conduct. this debate plays out in a practical way every time a senior executive or candidate for a high political office is involved in a personal scandal. public reactions vary with the situation and are informed by little, if any, empirical evidence.* there is a long-standing debate in philosophy and psychology regarding the extent to which behavior and ethics are situational. the classical view is that character traits such as honesty and faithfulness drive personal actions. in contrast, “situationism holds that in practice what in some times and places we call right is in other times and places wrong. norms are contingent, have no transcendent status” ( ). hence, it is common to assume that there are different standards for private relationships compared with “business ethics” ( , ). in psychological terms, individual behavior is often thought to be highly contingent upon context and situation, thereby calling into question the existence of character traits ( – ). however, others critique this view and argue that personal traits influence one’s thinking and interact with the situation across diverse contexts ( , ). a large literature in psychology assesses the relative importance of individual, or- ganizational, and situational factors in ethical decision making ( , ). potential individual influences include cognitive moral development ( ), moral disengagement ( ), machiavellianism ( ), relativism ( ), and religion ( ). this literature typically assesses the relation between survey results or experimental shocks to individual characteristics and experimental evidence of behavior. recent economics literature analyzes the relations between personality traits and firm actions ( ) and between personal legal infractions and corporate conduct ( , ). we focus on the relation between observed personal infidelity and forms of observed professional misconduct.† methodology the biggest challenge to understanding the connection between personal conduct and business decisions is that personal conduct is typically un- observed. we construct a proxy for personal marital infidelity using data from ashley madison (am) users. operating under the slogan “life is short. have an affair,” am is an online service that advertises itself as a dating service for married people to have “discreet encounters.” am’s website and service description as of june , pictured in si appendix, fig. s and discussed in si appendix, are clearly focused on marital infidelity, and we find evidence that at least % of the chief executive officers (ceos) and chief financial officers (cfos) in our sample with paid am usage are married. despite promises of discreetness, the data were put in the public domain through a hack in that included data on million user accounts, including . million paid users in the united states. am usage was widespread across the united states and included professionals and executives from a wide range of industries (si appendix, figs. s and s and table s ). the am data generated widespread public attention, and am has publicly confirmed that its data were compromised. the broad consensus is that the am data are accurate ( , ). however, some am profiles may be fake, particularly for female users ( ). we have discussed the use of the data with many people, including attorneys, who confirm that the data are permissible to use for research purposes because the data are now in the public domain and available for research use in the same way that they are available to and used by the press. we believe it is also ethical to use the data, and the use of hacked data has become common both by the press and in academia. significance the relative importance of personal traits compared with context for predicting behavior is a long-standing issue in psychology. this debate plays out in a practical way every time an employer, voter, or other decision maker has to infer expec- ted professional conduct based on observed personal behavior. despite its theoretical and practical importance, there is little academic consensus on this question. we fill this void with evi- dence connecting personal infidelity to professional behavior in different settings. author contributions: j.m.g., s.k., and g.m. designed research, performed research, an- alyzed data, and wrote the paper. the authors declare no conflict of interest. this article is a pnas direct submission. this open access article is distributed under creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives license . (cc by-nc-nd). to whom correspondence may be addressed. email: john.griffin@utexas.edu. this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental. *for example, alleged affairs derailed the careers of john edwards, mark sanford, eliot spitzer, herman cain, anthony weiner, and others but did seemingly little to affect the political careers of bill clinton and donald trump. †this approach differs from the previous literature both by considering different pro- fessional settings and by exploring a dimension of personal behavior that is of wide- spread interest and practical importance, and that is intimately connected to personal trust and honesty. in contrast to previous research ( , ), our measure of personal mis- conduct captures behavior that violates trust but is not illegal. analyzing police officers, financial advisors, and sec defendants allows us to observe the connection between per- sonal and professional conduct beyond the managerial settings previously analyzed. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pnas latest articles | of ec o n o m ic sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:john.griffin@utexas.edu https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. we examine professional behavior in settings: chicago police officers with substantial complaints, financial advisors engaging in misconduct, us securities and exchange commission (sec) white-collar criminals, and ceos and cfos of firms that engage in misconduct. in all settings, we measure the relation between professional misconduct and personal usage of am by matching data on individuals in the professional setting to am transaction data. the first settings demonstrate the link between personal am usage and professional misconduct. the fourth setting goes a step further by linking the personal conduct of ceos and cfos to corporate outcomes. detailed firm-level data allow us to examine this last setting most thoroughly. first, we collect detailed data on chicago police officers from the citizens police data project. the data include complaints from citizens and other police officers, work histories for all police officers, and identifying in- formation. we analyze a sample of male misconduct police officers, defined as officers with at least sustained complaint (i.e., a complaint resulting in discipline or a reprimand) or at least total complaints in to . we match these police officers to a control group of police officers working in the same police district within chicago with similar ages and years of experience who have never had a sustained complaint and had no more than overall complaint in to . second, we collect detailed information on financial advisors from fi- nancial industry regulatory authority brokercheck data, which identify employment history and potential misconduct for all us financial advisors ( ). we analyze a sample of , male financial advisors who have a record of misconduct in or .‡ we compare these individuals with misconduct-free male advisors who work for the same firms in the same counties and have similar experience. third, we identify and collect data on defendants to civil litigation initiated by the sec in federal court, which are available in the sec’s litigation release archives. these are civil lawsuits alleging criminal activity such as insider trading ( observations), ponzi schemes ( observations), pump and dump operations ( observations), and other financial fraud ( ob- servations). we compare the am usage of sec defendants with that of the general population (controlling for gender and age) and with matched samples, financial advisors working in the same county with the same gen- der and similar ages and a second matched sample of ceos and cfos working for companies headquartered within miles with the same gen- der and similar ages. fourth, for our largest sample, we examine , ceos, , cfos, and , other top executives of public companies between and based on execucomp data. as discussed in si appendix, a large and growing finance literature shows that senior executives significantly affect firm de- cisions ( – ). we find ceos, cfos, and other top executives who were paid am users.§ we then compare the corporate conduct of firms with and without executives who are am users. we also analyze county-level am usage as a potential measure of regional culture, motivated by a growing literature showing that firm misconduct is related to culture ( – ). as an indicator for corporate misconduct, we use a measure of whether a firm was the subject of a securities class action lawsuit or engaged in a financial misstatement, both of which are common measures used in the accounting and finance literatures ( , – ). we identify am users based on name and address. to avoid possible false matches, we focus on am users with paid transactions, which can be matched to individuals in professional settings based on both names and credit card billing addresses. to identify residential and mailing addresses that can be matched to am, we use detailed public records searches based on names, locations, and employment information. while our methodology for finding professionals in the am data is entirely based on publicly available data, we believe we may be the first to systematically perform this match. in particular, news searches for “ashley madison” and the executive names in our sample do not find any press mentions, and we find no evidence of stock return reactions when the am data were released (si appendix, fig. s ), whereas stock prices generally react negatively to news of scandals ( ). concurrent research matches am data to geographic areas and company employees more generally as measures of firm culture ( , ).{ additional details on the data sources and matching procedures are included in si appendix. while am usage is a big step forward for empirically investigating marital infidelity, we recognize that, like any empirical proxy, it is imperfect. am usage represents a subset of overall marriage infidelity and could reflect different personal traits than other types of infidelity.# on the other hand, the same thing is true for any evidence of marital infidelity and for most other empirical proxies. inferences are made for a particular person with a particular behavior, detected by a particular means. despite its limitations, am usage provides us with a unique large-sample measure to empirically analyze an important question that has previously been addressed solely with speculation and anecdotes. results if am usage is associated with professional misconduct, we ex- pect am usage to be related to behavior across different pro- fessional settings. we start by investigating police officers, financial advisors, and defendants to sec litigation alleging fraud and white-collar crime. these settings are interesting both because of their importance to public policy and investors and because they involve professional conduct that is captured at the individual level. we then consider whether am usage by corporate execu- tives is related to corporate misconduct. table . matched sample comparisons variable misconduct matched t-statistic panel a: police officers am trans. . % . % . am overall . % . % . experience . . . age . . − . n panel b: financial advisors am trans. . % . % . am overall . % . % . experience . . . age . . − . n , , panel c: sec defendants compared with financial advisors am trans. . % . % . am overall . % . % . age . . . male % % n panel d: sec defendants compared with ceos and cfos am trans. . % . % . am overall . % . % . age . . − . male % % n misconduct professionals are matched to control professionals based on detailed employment data. am trans. and am overall are the percentage of the sample with paid am transactions and any am usage, respectively. experience and age are mean years. male is the percentage of the sample that is male. the t-statistics test the null hypothesis that means of the populations are equal, with ses that are clustered by police district in panel a, by firm and county in panel b, and by lawsuit in panels c and d. ‡misconduct is defined as customer disputes that result in a settlement or award, employ- ment separation after allegations, final regulatory judgments, final criminal actions, or final civil actions. §including matches to unpaid am usage (i.e., matches to am user data based on zip code and personal email addresses found in public records in addition to transaction matches), we find ceos, cfos, and other executives in the am data. {our paper and a working paper by grieser et al. ( ) are the first users of the am data in finance and economics applications, but the papers have different focuses and use dif- ferent data. the working paper by grieser et al. ( ) analyzes company culture through the number of email addresses in am’s user data with a company’s domain name. in contrast, we match executives to am transaction data based on names and addresses from detailed public records searches. of the executives we match to am transaction data, only use their corporate email addresses for am. parsons et al. ( ) consider regional geographic differences in am usage. #studies suggest that to % of men and to % of women have an extramarital affair at some point in their lives ( ). of | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. griffin et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. police officers. to assess whether the personal conduct of police officers relates to their professional conduct, we compare the am usage of police officers with misconduct to the matched control sample of police officers without misconduct. panel a of table compares the samples. the matched misconduct and control samples have nearly identical ages and years of experi- ence. in the control group of police officers without misconduct, . % of police officers have paid am transactions. among po- lice officers who engaged in misconduct, the am transaction usage rate is . %, which is over twice as high, and the difference is highly statistically significant, with a t-statistic of . based on ses clustered by police district. significance levels and p values reflect -sided tests here and throughout our paper and tables. overall am usage, which includes all am transaction users and additional matches based on email address matches to am’s user data, is also over twice as high for misconduct officers compared with matched control officers, with a t-statistic of . . table reports results from case–control logistic regressions of police misconduct on am usage controlling for age and years of experience. as reported in column ( ) of table , am paid transaction usage has an odds ratio of . with a z-statistic for the regression coefficient of . , implying that police officers with paid am accounts are over twice as likely to engage in misconduct as other police officers. results are similar for overall am usage in column ( ) of table . fig. plots overall am usage for misconduct and matched nonmisconduct police officers by number of complaints for the misconduct officer. am usage is elevated for all misconduct officers, but the differences increase as the number of complaints increases. for officers with to complaints, am usage is . percentage points higher, but the difference is not statistically significant. am usage is . percentage points higher for mis- conduct officers with to complaints and . percentage points higher for misconduct officers with at least complaints. both differences are statistically significant at the % level. in sup- plementary analysis, we find that am usage is elevated for misconduct officers with and without sustained complaints and that elevated am usage is concentrated in officers with the most severe complaints, which include use of force, criminal mis- conduct, domestic abuse, bribery, and official corruption (si appendix, fig. s ). we also find that the results are robust to dropping domestic abuse and other off-duty complaints (si ap- pendix, fig. s ). financial advisors. panel b of table compares financial advisors with a record of professional misconduct in or with a matched sample of financial advisors with no record of mis- conduct to assess whether the personal conduct of financial ad- visors relates to their professional conduct. age and years of experience are nearly identical for the misconduct and control samples. misconduct and control advisors are also similar on other examination and state registration characteristics consid- ered by past research ( ) (si appendix, table s ). in the control group of financial advisors who did not engage in misconduct, . % of financial advisors are paid am users. among financial advisors who engaged in misconduct, the am transaction usage rate is . %, which is over twice as high, and the difference is highly statistically significant, with a t-statistic of . based on ses clustered by firm and county. similarly, the overall am us- age rate is . % for the control sample compared with . % for misconduct financial advisors, which is large and highly signifi- cant, with a t-statistic of . . to check that these differences are not due to characteristic differences that we did not match on, si appendix, table s reports results for regressions that control for experience, age, examinations, and state registrations, with nearly identical results. we also find no evidence that firm-level am usage relates to misconduct (si appendix, table s ), which reinforces that am usage captures personal conduct as opposed to firm culture. columns ( ) to ( ) of table report case–control logistic regressions of misconduct on am usage. the regressions control for age, years of experience, examinations the financial advisor has passed, and an indicator for advisors who are registered in more than states. as reported in column ( ) of table , the table . regressions of misconduct on am usage for police officers and financial advisors variable ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) sample police police fin. adv. fin. adv. fin. adv. (r) fin. adv. (r) am transaction usage . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) overall am usage . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) n , , , , , , pseudo-r . . . . . . each column reports odds ratios and z-statistics (in parentheses) from separate logistic regressions of mis- conduct on an indicator variable for the specified type of am usage. the police regressions in the first columns control for age and experience, with ses clustered by police district. the financial advisor (fin. adv.) regressions in the remaining columns control for age, experience, indicators for major examination qualifications (series / , , , , and ), number of other qualifications, and an indicator for registration in more than states, with ses clustered by firm and county. the restricted sample analyzed in the last columns consists of misconduct– control pairs in which the misconduct financial advisor had no misconduct before . ***p < . . fig. . am usage of police officers by number of complaints. this figure plots overall am usage rates for misconduct and matched nonmisconduct police officers. misconduct police officers have at least sustained complaint or at least total complaints in to . the figure splits misconduct police officers by number of complaints in to . differences be- tween misconduct and matched advisors are significant at the *** %, ** %, or * % level, with ses clustered by police district. obs, observations. griffin et al. pnas latest articles | of ec o n o m ic sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental odds ratio for paid am usage is . , indicating that paid am users are more than twice as likely to engage in misconduct, with a highly significant z-statistic of . for the coefficient. the odds ratio for overall am usage in column ( ) of table is . , with a z-statistic of . . to control for past misconduct, we restrict the sample to the matched pairs in which the misconduct financial advisor had no misconduct before . by design, all control financial advisors have no prior misconduct. as reported in columns ( ) and ( ) of table , am usage is even more predictive of misconduct in this subsample, with odds ratios of . for am transaction usage and . for overall am usage, both of which are significant at the % level. previous research finds that past offenders are -fold more likely to engage in misconduct ( ). am usage is less predictive of misconduct than past misconduct but is still highly informative, particularly in the subsample with no past misconduct. we conclude our analysis of financial advisors by examining different types of misconduct in fig. . financial advisors with misconduct associated with customer disputes, employment sep- aration, regulatory proceedings, and criminal violations all had elevated am usage compared with their matched nonmisconduct counterparts. the differences are statistically significant in all but the criminal group, which has only observations. si appendix, fig. s plots am usage for high and low financial damage awards and by amount of misconduct before . across all subpopu- lations, misconduct financial advisors have higher am usage than their control group counterparts, and most of the differences are statistically significant. sec defendants. panel c of table shows that . % of sec defendants accused of white-collar crimes have paid am trans- action usage. expanding our am matching criteria to include email matches to am user data in addition to the transaction matches, we find that . % of sec defendants have am accounts. these rates of am usage are high relative to am transaction usage by the general population, which is . % after controlling for the gender and age of sec defendants. because am usage varies by age, geographical location, and other personal characteristics, for comparison purposes, we turn to the matched financial advisor and ceo/cfo samples. matching to financial advisors and ceo/cfos with similar characteristics gives us useful points of comparison with populations of profes- sionals in the same geographic area with the same gender and similar age. only . % of matched financial advisors and . % of matched ceos and cfos have am transactions, and overall am usage is . % and . %, respectively, for the matched samples. thus, sec defendants are roughly twice as likely to be in the am transaction data and -fold as likely to be am users compared with the matched control samples. the difference in am transaction rates is significant at the % level for financial advisors (with a t- statistic of . ) and at the % level for ceo/cfos (with a t- statistic of . ). differences in am usage more generally are sig- nificant at the % level for both control samples (with t-statistics of . and . , respectively). ses are clustered by lawsuit, which can have multiple defendants. fig. plots sec defendant and matched financial advisor am usage rates by type of infraction alleged in the sec complaint. am usage is elevated relative to matched financial advisors in general. however, due to the small sample sizes, the differences are independently significant only for insider trading and the other fraud category, which includes general securities and accounting fraud. am usage by type of infraction for matched ceos and cfos is plotted in si appendix, fig. s with similar results. corporate infractions. to assess the impact of personal ethics on corporate outcomes, we compare firms with a ceo or cfo who has used am with firms without ceo or cfo am usage at the firm-year level. si appendix, table s and fig. s describe the data. we use a logistic regression framework to control for ex- ecutive and firm characteristics that may be related to corporate infractions. we first focus on the combined corporate infraction indicator and estimate logistic regressions in which the de- pendent variable is a dummy that takes the value of for the firm-years affected by a class action lawsuit or a financial state- ment restatement. the main explanatory variables of interest are am ceo/cfo, a dummy that takes the value of in firm-years in which a firm’s ceo or cfo is a confirmed am transaction user, and am paid usage (county), the per capita paid am usage rate of the county in which the firm is headquartered. in our baseline regressions, we pool together ceo and cfo am users because this gives us a larger population, and we hypothesize that ceos and cfos matter more than other executives. our analysis is at the firm-year level, and we consider ceos and cfos to be am users only if they are matched to a transaction that occurred before or during the firm-year being considered. table reports marginal effects from the logistic regressions (ordinary least squares regressions with similar results are reported fig. . am usage of financial advisors by type of misconduct. this figure plots overall am usage rates for misconduct and matched nonmisconduct financial advisors. misconduct advisors have misconduct on their financial industry regulatory authority records in or . the figure splits misconduct financial advisors by type of misconduct. differences between misconduct and matched advisors are significant at the *** % level, ** % level, or * % level, with ses clustered by firm and county. obs, observations. fig. . am usage of sec defendants by infraction type. this figure plots overall am usage rates for sec defendants and matched nonmisconduct financial advisors by type of infraction alleged in the sec complaints be- tween and . the types included are insider trading, ponzi schemes, pump and dump schemes, and other fraud (e.g., securities or accounting fraud). differences between misconduct and matched advisors are signifi- cant at the *** % level, ** % level, and * % level, with ses clustered by lawsuit. obs, observations. of | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. griffin et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. in si appendix, table s ). column ( ) of table shows that the probability of infraction is . percentage points higher for firms with am ceos or cfos than for firms without an am ceo or cfo, after controlling for executive age, ceo tenure, executive gender, firm size (log of book asset value), return on assets, tobin’s q, market leverage, and year fixed effects. the unconditional probability of infraction in the sample is . %. thus, having an am ceo or cfo doubles a firm’s infraction probability. the marginal effect is strongly statistically significant, as indicated by the z-statistic of . (implying a p value of less than %), with ses clustered by firm. in column ( ) of table , we include the county-level paid am usage rate as an additional explanatory variable. county-level am usage is useful as a control for any regional differences re- lated to am usage and helps to isolate the direct effect of ceo/ cfo am usage. adding county-level am usage has almost no impact on the am ceo/cfo coefficient, which is . percentage points. county-level am paid usage is somewhat associated with corporate infractions, with a z-statistic of . . while this is con- sistent with county-level am usage being a proxy for cultural dif- ferences that influence corporate conduct, the effect is modest and sensitive to what control variables we include in the regression. to control for potential differences across states or industries, column ( ) of table adds fixed effects for states and -digit standard industrial classification codes, with similar results. in si appendix, table s , we control for ceo and cfo legal infrac- tions to distinguish am usage from personal legal infractions studied in previous research ( ), with similar results. in si appendix, tables s –s , we separately consider the types of infractions and the separate impacts of ceos and cfos, with similar results. additional details and alternative specifications are discussed in si appendix. interpretation the influence that am ceos and cfos have on firm mis- conduct is consistent with the large impact that executives have on firm decisions more generally ( ). nonetheless, one potential concern is that the relation between infidelity and misconduct could be driven by omitted firm characteristics, potentially reinforced by endogenous matching of executives to firms. as an alternative empirical strategy, we perform a propensity score matching of am firms to non-am firms in the same industry and year, with similar results (si appendix, tables s and s ). our results are also robust to controlling for a wide range of firm characteristics, including local culture, executive optimism, multiple corporate governance measures, returns, return volatility, and accounting patterns potentially associated with misreporting, as well as alternative variable definitions and data samples (si appendix, tables s –s ). to assess the role of corporate culture, we analyze am usage by top executives other than ceos and cfos. if firm culture is the driving force behind our results, we would expect infraction firms to attract and hire am users throughout the executive ranks. instead, we find that non-ceo/cfo executive am usage is unrelated to corporate infractions (si appendix, table s ). this is consistent with the interpretation that either the cheating of ceos and cfos is a much better measure of firm-level cul- ture than the cheating of other firm executives or that ceos and cfos who cheat in their personal life are more prone to allow or promote cheating in the corporate context. the latter interpre- tation is supported by our finding that the am usage of indi- vidual financial advisors, but not firms as a whole, is related to financial advisor misconduct. the relation between ceo/cfo am usage and corporate infractions is also robust to controlling for a wide range of culture-related regional control variables that are largely uncorrelated with county-level am usage (si ap- pendix, table s and fig. s ). additionally, am usage has little relation to firm performance and corporate decisions that are not typically associated with misconduct (si appendix, tables s and s ). as discussed more extensively in si appendix, we cannot fully rule out all reverse causality and endogenous se- lection of unethical ceo and cfo possibilities. nonetheless, even if these channels drive part of the results, this still implies a strong relation between personal and professional conduct, consistent with our findings for police officers, financial advisors, and sec defendants. conclusion it is increasingly clear that corporate fraud is both widespread and costly ( ). however, because it is difficult to measure per- sonal conduct, we know little about the extent to which intimate personal behavior is relevant to professional misconduct and fraud. we introduce a measure of personal conduct by examining marital infidelity, which is intimately connected to personal trust and honesty. our analysis spans settings, including police mis- conduct, financial advisor misconduct, white-collar prosecutions, and corporate infractions, and explores a dimension of personal behavior that is of widespread interest and practical importance. while am usage predicts professional conduct across multiple settings, we recognize that it is an imperfect proxy. am usage represents a subset of overall marriage infidelity and excludes many other forms of unethical personal behavior. most people make serious mistakes at some point in their life in various forms, and personal character attributes, judgment, and values can change significantly over time. given these data limitations, the strong empirical findings are even more compelling evidence that personal conduct is closely related to workplace actions. more broadly, our findings suggest that personal and pro- fessional lives are connected and cut against the common view that ethics are predominantly situational. this supports the clas- sical view that virtues such as honesty and integrity influence a person’s thoughts and actions across diverse contexts and has po- tentially important implications for corporate recruiting and codes of conduct. a possible implication of our findings is that the recent focus on eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace may have the auxiliary effect of reducing fraudulent workplace activity. acknowledgments. we thank paul gendreau, shane johnson, stefan lewellen, joseph stover, ivo welch, and luigi zingales; as well as seminar participants at the american finance association annual meeting, the catholic university of chile, the lone star finance conference, the wake table . am ceos/cfos and corporate infraction likelihood variable ( ) ( ) ( ) am ceo/cfo . *** . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) am paid usage (county) . * . ** ( . ) ( . ) state and industry fe no no yes n , , , pseudo-r . . . mean of dependent variable . . . each column reports marginal effects and z-statistics (in parentheses) of separate logistic regressions. marginal effects are computed as the derivative of the response with respect to the explanatory variable. the dependent variable is corporate infraction, an indicator variable for firm- years affected by a class action lawsuit or a financial statement restate- ment. am ceo/cfo is an indicator variable for firm-years in which a firm has either a ceo or cfo who is a paid user of the am website. am paid usage (county) is the per capita paid am usage rate in the county of the firm’s headquarters. all regressions control for year fixed effects, ceo age, ceo gender, ceo tenure, cfo age, cfo gender, firm size, return on assets, tobin’s q, and market leverage. state and industry fixed effects (fe) are included in the regression. ses are clustered by firm. ***p < . ; **p < . ; *p < . . griffin et al. pnas latest articles | of ec o n o m ic sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental forest corporate social responsibility conference, the center for account- ing research and education conference, the midwest finance association annual meeting, the sec, and the university of texas at austin for helpful comments. mark albin, vedant batra, esha dewan, akshat gautam, melissa hall, ziqian ju, cliffe kim, jangwoo lee, murray lee, marc luettecke, felix olazaran, kush patel, nicolas savignon, surya raviillu, and daniel smarda 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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/ / / /how-to-see-if-you-or-your-spouse-appear-in-the-ashley-madison-leak/ https://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database- https://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. philosophies , , ; doi: . /philosophies www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies opinion freud’s oedipus complex in the #metoo era: a discussion of the validity of psychoanalysis in light of contemporary research renée spencer , melbourne school of psychological sciences, university of melbourne, parkville, victoria , australia; rsspe@student.unimelb.edu.au school of medicine (mental health - art therapy), university of queensland, herston, queensland , australia received: june ; accepted: september ; published: october abstract: the oedipus complex is a child development construct developed by sigmond freud that asserts that all children experience sexual desire towards their opposite sex parent, and failure to accept this “truth” can lead to mental health issues. freud also asserted that children are not harmed by acts of sexual violence. in contrast, the #metoo movement is a global incentive aimed at creating an awareness of the harm that sexual violence can cause. in many regards, #metoo is a reaction against a systemic failure to prevent sexual violence from occurring in the first place. by contrasting freudian ideas with #metoo, i argue that the enduring popularity of freud and his psychoanalytic ideas is a negative influence on culture. in the light of contemporary research from cognitive psychology, psychosocial considerations, child development, and trauma-informed practices, freudian ideas can be proven to be fallible. moreover, dispelling misleading assumptions about sexual desires is a beneficial endeavour towards reducing the likelihood of future sexual violence. additionally, i explore freudian interpretations of mythology and propose that he misappropriated ancient belief systems. keywords: freud; oedipus complex; #metoo; psychoanalysis; child development; symbol interpretations; art appreciation; mythology love him or hate him, sigmond freud ( – ) has had an enduring influence on psychology and society since the turn of the twentieth century [ ]. he is acclaimed for developing psychoanalytical practices and providing explanations of unconscious meanings in dreams, art, speech, and human behaviours [ , ]. the oedipus complex, which is inspired by an ancient greek myth with the same name, is a foundational construct for many of freud’s other theories [ ]. allegedly, the oedipus complex is a universal child development stage in which young children experience unconscious sexual desires toward their opposite-sex parent [ , ]. the construct is unsupported by empirical research [ ], nevertheless, it is still taught at universities under the pretence that it has some significance [ ] in the following, i scrutinise the validity of the oedipus complex by reviewing it in relation to contemporary understandings of cognitive psychology, psychosocial considerations, child development, and trauma-informed practices. by doing so, i challenge the premise that the oedipus complex is an appropriate framework for therapy; moreover, i suggest that its cultural adoration is harmful. the oedipus complex as a construct presents misleading assumptions about sexual desires which are important to address, especially in our the teaching of the oedipus complex in universities can occur across disciplines, e.g., psychology, literature, visual arts, etc. mailto:rsspe@student.melbourne.edu.au mailto:rsspe@student.melbourne.edu.au philosophies , , of current era of #metoo, in which collective efforts around the globe are being made to raise awareness of the negative impacts of sexual abuse [ ], additionally, i explore broader issues of psychoanalysis, such as how symbols are interpreted, and i propose that freud misappropriated ancient belief systems. . #metoo #metoo is a social movement incentive that was originally organised by tarana burke in america in the early s [ ]. it began as a means of creating awareness for women of colour who have survived sexual violence; however, it has extended to represent atrocities of sexual exploration amongst men, women, children, adults, and everyone, everywhere [ ]. acts of sexual violence includes rape, use of sexual coercion, unwanted sexual comments or advances, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, forced prostitution, and human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation; it can occur in any setting and by any person regardless of the relationship status between victim and perpetrator [ ]. in many regards, the #metoo movement is a reaction against cultural and institutional systems that have failed to prevent the occurrence of sexual violence [ ]. psychological research influences how survivors of sexual violence are perceived and the types of therapy available to recover from trauma [ ]. consecutively, psychological research influences culture and institutional systems through a range of activities such as education, politics, law, and the arts [ – ]. for roughly a hundred and twenty years, freud has played a highly influential role in psychological research [ ], thus, he has influenced the development of therapies and sociocultural attitudes and behaviours. given that freud′s hypotheses largely revolved around sexual themes [ ], examining how his influence interrelates with #metoo survivors′ disappointment in a systemic failure to prevent sexual violence is worthy of discussion. . freud and psychoanalysis freud categorised psychological functions into three categories: the superego, id, and ego. thurschwell explains that these titles represent a mapping of the mind as follows: the superego is a self-critical part that governs one′s conscience and sense of morality [ ]. in contrast, the id is concerned with sexual drives, otherwise known as the libido, and is driven by pleasure principles. the ego is one′s image of their conscious self, a combination of conscious and unconscious drives afflicted with the superego and id. in order to develop a healthy ego state, freud believed that unconscious drives of the id needed to be acknowledged [ ]. he believed this could be achieved by interpreting symbols as expressed through art, i.e., myths, paintings, artefacts, drama, and literature, plus dreams and spoken words [ ]. he distinguished between individual and socially construed symbolism [ ]; however, he maintained that a primordial system of symbolism existed across time and cultures that differed to cultural uses of metaphor and allegories [ ]. the proposition of the existence of universal symbols is reminiscent of plato′s theory of forms, and it is possible plato′s philosophies influenced freud on this matter [ , ]. comparisons between plato and freud have been made by many (see [ ]; also [ ]), and it is universally accepted that he was inspired by ancient greek mythology in several ways from using “eros”, a divine character associated with love, as the basis for his theories of sexual desire [ ], to the applying the term “narcissist”, a character in ancient greek who fell in love with himself, to define pathological states of self-grandeur [ ]. while it is clear that freud appropriated some ancient greek ideas, such alignments do not authenticate psychoanalysis principles, especially if he misinterpreted their original meanings. freud created psychoanalysis as a talking-based cure for mental health conditions that operates by reconciling unconscious desires of the id, with conscious thoughts of the ego by having a client lie on a couch and speak automatically in a technique called free association [ ]. through the act of talking automatically, the therapist is able to identify unconscious themes via symbols identified in their speech [ ]. thus, by bringing an awareness to the client that they are expressing certain messages, they can become conscious of “hidden” desires [ ]. philosophies , , of the interpretation of symbols in the psychoanalysis process is underpinned by freud′s hypotheses regarding the psychosexual development of children in the oedipus complex [ ]. the oedipus complex is tied to theories of the id and, in turn with sexual desire [ ]. sexual desire is commonly considered to be an emotional state that is accompanied by mental representations and body sensations that motivate a person towards sexual activity [ ]. . the oedipus complex and its controversies the oedipus complex purports that all children around the ages of three to six experience psychosexual attraction to their opposite-sex parent, however, due to an inability to act upon their feelings, the experience becomes repressed [ ]. in boys, the complex is associated with assumptions that their penis gives them superiority, whereas, in girls, it is associated with assumptions of inferiority which leads to penis envy [ ]. the naming of the developmental stage as the “oedipus complex” was inspired by a play called oedipus rex [ ], which was originally written in ancient greece by sophocles [ ]. the basic storyline is that of a son who accidentally killed his father and married his mother [ ]. upon reflection of the story, freud recognised that he had feelings of affection towards his own mother when he was young and extrapolated that the ancient myth was proof of universal oedipus′ traits [ ]. he extended his rationale by stipulating that when oedipus blinds himself with pins from his mother′s garments, he is demonstrating symbolic evidence of being blind to his guilty desires [ ]. throughout academia, there are references to incestuous relationships being an unthinkable act, however, freud re-interpreted evidence of the taboo as hiding a natural instinct [ ]. therefore, regression to the child state was required so as “the sense of guilt would be satisfied” [ ] (p. ). in this context, the aim of therapy is not to heal hysteria, rather, it is to alleviate feelings of shame associated with oedipus traits so as to improve a client′s affect [ ]. freud further asserted that sexual enlightenment of children was normal and that societal suppression of incestuous desires should be acknowledged and accepted [ ]. while some people may praise freud for breaking victorian era moral constraints regarding the discussion of sexual matters, if he was incorrect about his theories, then the direction in which some of those discussions have steered may be perceived as having had a negative impact on psychological therapies and cultural attitudes. to demonstrate, freud′s belief in the universality of the oedipus complex was so strong that he was inclined to dismiss clients′ claims that they had been genuinely sexually abused as children as fantasy under the pretence that they were lying in order to hide their “guilty” desires [ ]. there is a blurred line between freud′s belief in unconscious sexual desires that children have towards their parents and how these may manifest in actual sexual behaviour. given that sexual desire implies a motivational urge towards wanting to engage in intimate activities with another, the oedipus complex is clearly stating this is what children fantasise about experiencing. while freud does not directly discuss children having sexual relations with their parents he does say: ‘we do wrong to ignore the sexual life of children entirely; in my experience, children are capable of every physical sexual activity, and many somatic sexual ones as well’ [ ] (p. ). likewise, psychoanalysts trained under freud, like carl jung, were very firm in the belief that if real sexual activity did occur, it was done with a child′s cooperation; moreover, it was ‘prepared and brought about by the child itself [italic emphasis given by jung]’ [ ] (p. ). the above quotes from freud and jung imply that children are capable of adult sexual desires and activities. such attitudes do not correlate with contemporary psychological research focused on cognitive and behavioural development. these factors shall be discussed in more detail later, however, presently, an example to illustrate potential errors in the oedipus complex is that of a young girl who says she wants to marry her father. traditional psychoanalytic theory may interpret such a statement as proof of a child demonstrating sexual desire. however, a child between the ages of three and six is not capable of understanding complex implications associated with the word “marriage”. while to an adult, marriage may symbolise sexual behaviour, it is unlikely that a child would consciously or unconsciously view their statement in the same manner. children within the philosophies , , of oedipus age are generally still learning how to run without falling over, and their cognition skills are at a level of learning how to differentiate between birds and planes [ ]. thus, projecting adult sexual concepts of desire onto children is unrealistic and could be viewed as a perversion of innocence. there are no accurate records of instances of parent–child sexual activity for freud′s era compared to today. therefore, to suggest that freud is a direct influence on #metoo sexual violence that occurred in this manner cannot be substantiated. it is, however, alarmingly, that the oedipus complex offers legitimacy to sexual perpetrators who claim their victims are not harmed because they supposedly have sexual desires that are equivalent to adults [ ]. freud′s rationalisations of childhood sexual desires are comparable to cognitive distortions of rapists and child molesters who believe they have done nothing wrong [ ]. it is therefore a peculiarity that cultural approval can be given to freud′s theories that excuse sexual abuse of children, whilst at the same time those acts are culturally condemned. freud′s assertion that incestual activity does not harm children, rather it is an absence of acknowledging sexual desire for one′s mother/father, transcribes to therapeutic situations in which clients, mostly women with hysteria, are persuaded into believing they need to acknowledge their so-called natural oedipus traits [ , ]. in order to facilitate acceptance of this notion, freudian psychoanalysts proclaim that symbolic associations as presented in dreams, speech, and art, are to be interpreted in accordance to sexual connotations; for example, trains, swords, and snakes are allegedly phallic symbols, and pockets, caves, and boxes are allegedly vaginal symbols [ , , ]. if clients refuse to accept the “truth” of such matters, then they are understood to be displaying defensive or resistant traits [ ]. predominantly, psychoanalytic processes put clinicians in a position of authority to which clients are expected to submit [ ]. this power imbalance raises questions regarding the extent to which clients are truly free to explore their conscious and unconscious thoughts in order to identify the root cause of their issues, or if they are unduly guided by a clinician′s pre-made assumptions that they have unresolved sexual desire for their opposite-sex parent. prior to “discovering” childhood sexuality as expressed in the oedipus complex, freud suggested that hysteria and neuroses in adults were the results of real childhood sexual trauma, however, this hypothesis was not met well by his peers [ , ]. hysteria and neuroses were relatively common conditions, especially in women, so rejection of freud′s suggestion is generally understood to stem from disbelief and horror that so many girls could experience sexual violence [ ]. it is an unfortunate turn of events that freud did not continue this hypothesis and/or explore the possibility that non-sexual trauma may also disturb a person′s wellbeing. contemporary psychological research now supports the premise that sexual violence towards anyone, of any age or gender can lead to the development of hysteria and neurosis symptoms; albeit, they are now referred to as post-traumatic stress symptoms [ ]. speculatively, if freud had pursued his original line of research, then our contemporary understandings of sexual violence, and trauma in general, may have been known sooner. alas, events did not pan out that way. instead, freud altered his ideas to emphasise child– parent sexual desires as being universal fantasies [ ]. subsequently, psychoanalysis theories became sensationalised [ ] and can be viewed as a factor in the maintenance of clinical and cultural ignorance towards the harmful effects of sexual violence and other forms trauma. freud′s oedipus complex, and accompanying psychoanalytical theories, have been significant influences for over a hundred years [ ]. psychologists are trained to give credence to freud′s prominence [ , ], and he has influenced culture twofold: firstly, by encouraging retrospective analysis of the arts through the lens of the oedipus complex, for example cave paintings and literature, such as hamlet [ , ], and secondly, by inspiring filmmakers and artists, thus giving rise to movements like surrealism [ , ]. the promulgation of freudian theories through artistic mediums has potentially lead to more credible evidence-based psychological theories being culturally recognised. over the years, freudian philosophies have ebbed and flowed in popularity alongside contributions from other psychoanalysis who have diluted the emphasis on sex as an unconscious drive of all human behaviours [ , ] nevertheless, freudian ideas appear to have an endurance [ ]. it is difficult to quantify the extent to which the popularisation of the oedipus complex has philosophies , , of contributed to cultural misunderstandings of sexual exploitation of children. however, in recognition of #metoo claims that there has been a systemic failure to prevent sexual violence in children and adults alike [ ], scrutinising freud′s legacy and its inclination to silence sexual abuse survivors is worthy of examination. freud′s popularity is more pronounced than any other psychologist. he is frequently acknowledged as one of the top three most cited and eminent psychologists of the twentieth century [ ]. in a sociocultural capacity, he may be viewed as being number one. a demonstration of his international fame is notable via an online project titled small world of words in which word associations are gathered in multiple languages as means of gathering scientific data for research purposes [ ]. participants are invited to report associations that they have with a topic and visitors to the site can view the results. in multiple languages (e.g., english and mandarin ) “freud” is the only psychologist whose name is associated with “psychology”. therefore, it stands within reason that freud′s influence on culture is not only immense, but it is an influence that is thwarted with inaccurate assumptions that could be potentially harmful if it is not clearly understood that many of his theories are fallible. the oedipus complex as a child development construct lacks empirical support [ ] and contradicts contemporary empirical research that reveals devastating effects of childhood sexual abuse [ ]. in order to ensure mental health practice and research moves forward in empirical directions and, in turn, sociocultural spheres are influenced by accurate psychological information, reviewing criticisms of freudian psychology is an appropriate measure to take. to this end, the following discussion focuses on three areas of interest; ( ) trauma-informed perspectives, ( ) symbolism and psychoanalysis, and ( ) the symbolism of the oedipus myth within a historical and cultural context. . trauma-informed perspectives contemporary views towards trauma acknowledge that stressful occurrences such as neglect, bullying, verbal abuse, physical assault, and sexual violence, disrupt nervous system regulation and can lead to mental health conditions akin to what was previously known as hysteria [ ]. trauma experts van der kolk and van der hart have conducted extensive research into the history of trauma, and their investigations reveal that pierre janet was the first psychologist to apply the term “subconscious” alongside clinical observations of the impact that traumatic memories can have on the conscious mind [ ]. whilst janet′s work in the late nineteenth century marks a significant point, it is useful to be aware that his research is built upon previous investigations that recognise mind and body connections to hysteria/trauma that extend back to at least the renaissance era via scientists such as thomas willis and thomas sydenham [ , ]. fitzgerald reports that janet developed “cathartic psychotherapy”, which was a technique involving automatic talking, seven years prior to freud developing free association [ ]. there are several other points in which janet′s and freud′s works are similar; however, freud is reported to have withheld appropriate acknowledgment of janet′s influence. this is not a one off occurrence; freud has other critics who have also remarked on his unethical scholarship by not referencing sources of information accurately [ , ]. a key difference between janet and freud is that janet disagreed with the suggestion that all neurosis had sexual origins [ ]. hence, janet is viewed by some as being the starting point for modern day understandings of trauma [ ]. trauma-informed practices recognise that a variety of adverse experiences can produce post-traumatic stress symptoms in adults; that said, childhood i am a native english speaker and my knowledge of other languages is limited; however, in my explorations of word associations in other languages on small world of words, i was able to identify the following: in dutch, “psychologie” (psychology) has associations with freud; in spanish, “psicologia” (psychology) has no association with freud; and in german, “psychologie” (psychology) also has no association with freud, but it is associated with “couch” (couch), which may be viewed as an indirect association with psychoanalysis processes. my insight into “freud” being associated with psychology in mandarin is informed by qualified translators. philosophies , , of sexual abuse is prevalent [ ]. forms of child sexual abuse can range from physical touching and completed sex acts to noncontact assaults such as verbal harassment and exposure to pornography; the victim may or may not be aware violations are taking place [ ]. trauma-informed approaches to recovery stipulate that survivors require empathy and validation [ ]. belittling, and/or denying a client′s experience is associated with re-traumatisation symptoms such as distress, dissociation, anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic manifestations [ ]. the focus of psychoanalysis on getting clients to admit oedipus traits is invalidating and potentially re-traumatising, subsequently, these may be reasons why clinical trials assessing psychoanalytical approaches indicate that its efficiency is weak [ , ]. in our present era of #metoo, mammoth amounts of historical sexual violence are being exposed [ , ], and victims are coming forth with clear statements that they did not desire sexual relations with their parents (or anybody else ) when they were young and when it did occur, it was severely psychologically damaging [ ]. it is becoming very clear that projecting adult sexual attitudes onto children hinders the experience of childhood innocence and is traumatising [ , ]. further, victims of childhood sexual assault are at risk of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, suicide idealisation, and borderline personality disorder, just to name a few [ ]. contemporary research indicates that child abuse is a widespread, intergenerational problem that is under-reported; further, it impairs healthy physical and emotional development [ ]. once victims reach adulthood, they often try to deal with their anguish with denial and minimisation strategies which can then lead to substance abuse and other unhealthy behaviours [ ]. problems with identity, goal setting, trust, interpersonal relationships, and attachment can also occur [ ]. an alternative to freud′s ideas regarding the sexual enlightenment of children [ ], is research provided by jean piaget that suggests children display attitudes and behaviours to which they are exposed to or, in other words, they imitate [ ]. therefore, if a child displays adult sexual traits at a young age or superior/inferior attitudes towards penises, it is likely to be because they have either directly or indirectly been influenced by those around them: siblings, peers, adults, and the media. a child′s ability to imitate adult sexuality, as described by freud and jung, does not mean it is a natural part of development. recalling, interpreting, and coming to terms with childhood abuse are common elements of psychoanalysis and contemporary trauma treatments [ , ]. however, trauma-informed approaches focus on reassuring victims that they are not to blame for what happened and that their feelings of being violated are valid [ ], which is a stark contrast to psychoanalysis clients being encouraged to take on responsibility for their abuse experiences by admitting their so-called natural oedipus traits [ ]. in light of contemporary research, if a clinician overlooks child expressions of sexuality (either directly from a child or an adult exploring childhood memories) because they believe freud′s oedipus complex has some validity, they may overlook indications of abuse and, in turn, do more harm than good by triggering post-traumatic stress symptoms. the possibility that some children may genuinely experience sexual desires needs to be examined with consideration of their cognitive stage of development and life experiences. empirical evidence supports individualised treatment goals for survivors of sexual violence such as trauma-focused cognitive-behavioural therapy or eye movement desensitisation [ , ]. expressive art therapies directed at processing trauma, such as drawing, music, visual arts, drama, dance, writing, and narrative work, are also considered beneficial [ , ]. ultimately, prevention is better than a cure, which can be achieved by building an awareness of the harmful effects of sexualising children; moreover, informing institutional systems of the need to provide safe, secure environments free of abuse [ ]. if, historically, freudian theories have dominated education, politics, law, the media, and the arts, then this may explain why sexual exploitation has not been adequately addressed in sociocultural sectors sooner. . symbolism and psychoanalysis nor did anyone ever want to experience sexual violence under any circumstances. philosophies , , of the oedipus complex forms the basis for psychoanalytic processes and symbol interpretations, therefore, exploring fallacies of freud′s theories is useful for reducing its influence in therapy and broader cultural contexts. freud′s discovery of hidden sexual symbols in the unconscious includes things such as trees [ ]. trees could have cultural and/or personal significance of representing growth, strength, endurance, the life cycle, or perhaps fear if someone has had an adverse experience with a bushfire. additionally, freud asserted that all trees (or any elongated object) are phallic symbols, and it is this hidden meaning that psychoanalysts need to focus on [ ]. if a female client repeatedly refers to trees in free association, a traditional psychoanalysts may perceive this to be a sign of penis envy. conversely, if a male client mentions a tree being chopped down, it could be perceived as castration anxiety. early psychoanalysis theory purported that hidden meanings have a biological connection to consciousness [ ], while later psychoanalytic theories are more inclined to attribute the origins of symbols to a mystical, semi-religious realm, or what jung called the collective consciousness [ ]. either way, symbols are believed to have unchanging, universal meanings that impact the mind [ ]. in freudian tradition, regardless of the symbol, the interpretation almost always leads back to sexual connotations [ ]. in jungian tradition, there is less emphasis on sex, however, symbols continue to reflect misogynistic values such as the virgin mary being affiliated with vulture characteristics [ ]. just as aristotle (and others) disagreed with plato′s theory of forms [ ], i disagree with psychoanalytical theories of an unseen dimension of ubiquitous archetypes. proving the non- existence of an invisible realm of universal symbols has its challenges; however, the premise can be recognised as flawed when research from cognitive psychology is considered. research from various sources indicates that symbols are not innately present in new-born children, rather, they are learnt through life experiences [ ]. charles peirce ( – ) investigated the process of perceiving symbols prior to and during freud′s era [ ]. peirce developed a model for explaining symbolic representations in a threefold manner that recognises interactions between language, life experiences, and cognition development [ ]. the three categories peirce defined are ( ) iconic, in which one thing brings to mind another, for example, a bird represents a bird, ( ) indexical, in which one thing can co-occur with significance of another, for example, a bird can co- occur with the representation of flying, and ( ) symbolic, in which a thing can be a reference to multiple representations that are grounded in iconic and indexical interpretations, for example, birds can symbolise animals, tweeting sounds, and movement through the air, and abstract concepts such as freedom. peirce′s theory is supported by other researchers who have proposed similar frameworks to explain the role of symbols in language development. for example, in piagetian psychology, the complex process of developing symbolic cognition is referred to in the learning of schemas [ ]. a schema is a mental representation that can relate to an object, person, situation, or other cues [ ]. like peirce′s iconic, indexical, and symbolic model, schemas can be used as a building block for memory and/or learning processes. as such, a child may learn what a bird is, and, then, when they see a plane in the sky for the first time, they may call it a bird because they associate all things that fly with what they know of birds [ ]. hence, once taught that planes are different to birds, children learn a new word and a new schema; the previous schema of a bird still exists, however, it served as a building block for new knowledge, and it has contributed to building up symbolic cognition. over time, schemas can become increasingly complex, and the symbolic representation of an item, like a plane, could become associated with excitement, freedom, and adventure, and they can intermingle with other schemas so as their associations include things like recalling a trip to vanuatu or the money needed to afford a plane trip. the learning of symbolic representations is a psychosocial process connected to the learning of language (spoken and artistic) via social interactions with others [ ]. it is a constructive process based on the idea that meaning is given to symbols in accordance with collective acceptance and stereotypical inferences [ , ]. in accordance with peirce or piagetian symbol theories, an object like a pumpkin pie does not necessarily have any innate symbolic meaning, however, if a child is taught that pumpkin pies represent sexual desire, then they will add this meaning to their existing philosophies , , of knowledge of pumpkin pies. likewise, if every culture agreed that pumpkin pies have this hidden meaning, then that idea will become part of a global collective consciousness. contemporary research on word associations, like the previously mentioned small world of words, supports the premise that symbolic significance of things are influenced by sociocultural influences, i.e., while “freud” is associated with “psychology” in many languages, it is not universal [ ]. a further example is the word “dog” which has an extensive semantic network that includes bone, collar, love, and walk; however, these english associations are not affiliated with the german equivalent of “hund” (dog). moreover, german associations with hund includes words not identified in english, such as maus (mouse) and wolf (wolf) . therefore, the premise of freud′s psychoanalytical process of getting clients to free associate so as analysts can identify unconscious desires via so-called universal symbols [ , ] is not supported by language development research which suggests that cultural influences play a significant role the forming of mental representations. in contrast to psychoanalytic theories of symbolism, disciplines like expressive arts therapies offer a broader understanding of how symbols, as expressed in artistic objects or spoken ideas, can be interpreted. a jewellery box, for example, is not automatically presumed to be a reference to a vagina like it is in traditional psychoanalysis [ ]. instead, it could be a container for precious thoughts, emotions, memories, identity, and so forth. if it is closed, then it does not automatically signify sexual frigidity (like it may be in psychoanalysis), rather, it could indicate protection, self-care, defining personal boundaries; any mark, line, symbol, or gesture is open to meaning whatever the creator wants it to mean [ ]. the use of symbols and their potential associations with unconscious thoughts and desires can be useful in addressing wellbeing issues [ ]. metaphors, allegories, and signs are capable of intertwining with personal experiences, which may be reflective of myths, cultural innuendos, and social norms [ , ]; however, they are not necessarily part of an invisible realm of universal symbols. in accordance with research that dates back to peirce through to today, people are the creators of the symbols, opposed to psychoanalysis conjecture that symbols have deterministic qualities. the logic behind constructive attitudes towards symbols is that it recognises creativity and the capacity for symbolic meanings to change and vary between individuals and groups. for example, a pearl can be a symbol of a special occasion to one person, while to drug users, it could be a symbolic code for cocaine [ ]. psychoanalytic interpretations of symbols is a narrow-minded practice that can lead to misunderstandings between individuals and groups. symbols are complex mental representations that develop over time [ , , ]. returning to the example of a young girl saying she wants to marry her father, it is likely she is giving an expression of affection, and her use of the word “marriage” is as distorted as a child who calls a plane a bird; young children simply do have enough life experiences to develop a complex understanding of sexual desire in association with marriage. feelings of love and affection can be experienced with or without sexual desire [ , ]. theoretically, a child can only have fantasies about incestuous relationships if they have learned how to mentally represent sexual desire though language, life experience, and symbolic cognition. the freudian suggestion that sexuality begins at infancy is a bit like saying that learning how to drive a car begins at infancy. the capacity to learn the skills required for the adult embodiment of sexuality or car driving are present at birth, however, development of mental, emotional, and physical attributes needs to occur. during the oedipus stage, a child is learning about language, feelings, and their body, which forms the basis for sexual desire and the ability to engage in intercourse later in life. likewise, a child between the ages of three and six is learning about basic road rules, spatial awareness, and how to operate simple tools like levers which form the basis for advanced driving skills later in life. whilst children in the oedipus stage could have sexual desire, perform sexual intercourse, desire to drive a car, and actually operate a vehicle, this does not mean they should be encouraged to do so nor that these traits are universally experienced. essentially, children need to be nurtured and guided by adults and their the comparison of dog and hund word associations is accurate as of the september . further differences or similarities may be notable over time via the collection of data from more participants and/or changes in sociocultural attitudes towards dogs/hunde. philosophies , , of broader community in age-appropriate ways so as to build the capacity to have appropriate sexual relationships when they are old enough to do so, in much the same way as they need to develop appropriate skills before they are allowed driving freedoms. timing variations as to when individuals are ready to partake in adult activities like sex and driving are to be expected in accordance with personal circumstances. given that psychoanalysis interpretations of the id and its unconscious desires, as revealed in symbolism and gestures, have a cultural reputation as being potentially valid, there is cause to correct that perception so as to prevent further sociocultural misunderstandings, especially in regard to sexual issues. reports from sexual abuse survivors reveal notorious difficulties within the legal systems in regard to their experiences being belittled and/or disbelieved [ ]. from professionals in positions of power to armchair-experts who believe psychoanalysis has some validity, there are dangers in interpreting the unconscious desires of others without applying critical thinking skills. in the context of the oedipus complex, this presents the potential to inspire some people to behave sexually inappropriately, like sexually grooming young children, or worse, sexually violating them because it supposedly does them no harm. . the symbolism of the oedipus myth within a historical and cultural given that freudian influence has disseminated beyond academic psychological research and into culture via the arts, literature, and media, it is useful to explore how the oedipus complex could be detrimental to understanding symbolic communication in these contexts. art appreciation strategies emphasise the importance of taking into consideration sources of inspiration when analysing creative products [ , ]; however, this consideration is not detectable in freud′s interpretation of the oedipus myth. as previously mentioned, upon viewing the play oedipus rex, he projected his subjective experience of the creative drama, i.e., it triggered reminisce of his love for his mother [ ] onto everyone, including the ancient greeks, under the pretence that it was an objective interpretation [ , ]. freud′s interpretation of oedipus rex is curious in that his conclusions do not match the themes presented in the actual play. for example, there are no indications of oedipus having sexual fantasies towards his mother as a child, and the overt response to realising an incestual connection had occurred is one of disgust and anguish [ ]. by solely focusing on hidden sexual symbols of the drama, freud overlooks the possibility that the ancient greeks were using condensed social and cultural influences in their symbolic representations [ ]. a review of the context in which the original oedipus tale as told by homer, in approximately bce, provides the basis for a thought- provoking alternative to psychoanalysis interpretations. the following is homer′s verse from the poetic epic the odyssey that inspired sophocles′ drama four hundred years later: “i saw the mother of oidipous [oedipus], epikastê [jocaster], whose great unwitting deed it was to marry her own son. he took that prize from a slain father; presently the gods brought all to light that made the famous story. but by their fearsome wills he kept his throne in dearest thebes, all through his evil days, while she descended to the place of death, god of the locked and iron door. steep down from a high rafter, throttled in her noose, she swung, carried away by pain, and left him endless agony from a mother′s furies.” (homer, the odyssey, ch , v [ ]) both homer and sophocles were affiliated with the ancient greek eleusinian mystery school [ – ]. little is known about the underlying belief system of the cult because initiates were sworn philosophies , , of to secrecy; moreover, revealing secrets was punishable by death [ ]. henceforth, it stands to reason that while the oedipus story is known to have an association with sacred rituals [ ], its exact meaning is encoded with symbolism which few are privy to [ ]. by applying research about the culture and belief systems of eleusinian mysteries from the writings initiates, such as iamblichus, porphyry, and emperor julian, it is possible to interpret the oedipus myth as being symbolic of a trinity, which is consistent with many mystery school beliefs [ – ]. the three core principles of the trinity can be described as follows: nous (mind/intellect), psyche (soul/emotion), and logos (product/order/reason/word). in ancient greek grammar, nous is masculine and is referred to as the father or universal spirit, psyche is feminine and is referred to as the mother or universal soul, and logos is masculine and represents the son of nous and psyche. intricate details of beliefs that extend from the concept of the trinity are complex, suffice to say for the purpose of this paper, all humans (whether male, female, or other) were believed to have the psychological components of nous, psyche, and logos. symbolically, the interaction of the energies of father and mother needs to be in harmony in order to achieve a perfected child. if the allegorical concept of a trinity is applied to oedipus, then the poem may be interpreted as describing a person who is unbalanced. the death of oedipus′ father represents the absence of intellectual thought (nous), and the marriage to his mother represents living in accordance with emotional drives (psyche); thus, the results are an “evil” child (logos). the overall moral of the story may be interpreted as the spirit (nous) needs to be in a harmonious union with the soul (psyche) to produce a healthy ego state (logos). ironically, freud′s interpretation of the oedipus myth suggests emotional, sexual drives, in other words, the id, naturally take precedence over moral, intellectual reasoning or the superego. the end result of which, according to the myth itself and contemporary understandings of sexual trauma, is disastrous for the ego. freud had an avid interest in ancient cultures, and, in addition to being interested in mythology, he is reported to have collected at least artefacts from ancient egypt, asia, rome, and greece [ ]. it is therefore within reason to propose that freud may have appropriated some of the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors without clearly crediting his sources, just like he did to others [ , , ]. therefore, the superego, id, and ego may be representative of nous, psyche, and logos. ancient greek texts describe nous as having elements of morality; likewise, psyche has elements of desire, and logos elements of ego [ ]. if it is correct that freud appropriated these greek concepts, his representations are obscured adaptations of their original symbolic meanings. thus, i further propose that freud′s interpretations of ancient greek philosophies are misappropriations; moreover, they are misappropriations that do not provide any value to the interpretation of art and literature, child development, or psychological constructs. in the context of contrasting freud’s theories with #metoo, the essence of the oedipus myth could be perceived as there is no excuse for sexual violence because sexual desires should always be mediated with moral, ethical-based thinking. the ancient greek term “nous” differs from contemporary usage, i.e., in contemporary english, nous is a philosophical term that means ‘[t]he mind or intellect, reason, both rational and emotional. common sense; practical intelligence. in neoplatonism [nous means], the divine reason, regarded as first divine emanation’ [ ] the meaning of the word “psyche” has transformed many times throughout history; however, its use as a reference to soul, breath, and life force [ ] makes it suitable to be used in the context of this discussion. the word “pneuma” is also an ancient greek reference to the breath of life and the soul [ ], and it is acknowledged that this term could also be used in reference to the second principle. like psyche, the third principle can vary in the manner in which it is described throughout texts, however, for simplicity's sake, the term logos has been selected for use in this discussion to represent the overall concept. many ancient belief systems have distinctions between “spirit”, “soul”, and “body” qualities, for example, the ancient egyptians referred to “anh”, “ka”, and “ba” [ ]; therefore, to say with certainty that freud’s appropriations were solely based on greek mythology may be inaccurate. philosophies , , of . limitations the oedipus complex is credited as being one of freud′s most significant discoveries, and it is the cornerstone of all of his other psychoanalytic hypotheses [ , , ]. throughout this paper, i have attempted to demonstrate that both the oedipus complex and psychoanalytical theories in general can be proved to be fallible, and it is inappropriate to continue giving credence to their claims. contemporary psychoanalysis principles and practices may have advanced and differ from freud′s original work; however, ultimately, these are still based upon flawed premises. a limitation of the current discussion is that it has not fully explored differences in types of sexual desires, for example, unconscious desires, desires that are yet to be learned or experienced, and the acting upon desires with appropriate moral conduct such as respecting another person′s free will. likewise, the distinction between sexual desire and feelings of affection has not been fully explored. another limitation is the examination of the evolution of instincts from childhood to adulthood, i.e., a child′s instincts are not necessarily the same as adults. additionally, topics not covered include the white male supremacist culture of freud′s era [ ], psychoanalysis roots in hypnotherapy [ ], issues of memory and repression [ ], transference and personality biases [ ] and freudian rape fantasy theories [ ]. . future directions the practice of symbolically representing spirit qualities as masculine and soul qualities as feminine that has been mentioned in this paper can be identified in several ancient religious contexts [ – ], however, this is yet to be extensively researched in relation to ancient greek mystery schools and the communication of concepts within their myths. further exploratory research directed at understanding the ancient greek′s use of symbolism may shed light on more errors in psychoanalytic interpretations of ancient artworks, literature, myths, and archetypes. additionally, investigations directed at exploring freudian attitudes towards adult sexuality and its potential influence on behaviour in relation to #metoo issues could be conducted. studies focused on examining cultural attitudes could include reviewing the influence that psychological constructs have on societies and individual′s sense of identity by contrasting freudian inspired constructs, such as womb envy and the joseph–gigolo complex with traditional freudian constructs of penis envy and the madonna–whore complex. . conclusions when viewed from multiple angles, the oedipus complex can be identified as fallible. as a treatment methodology, it runs the risk of re-traumatising sexual abuse victims and provides child molesters with excuses for inappropriate behaviour, thus causing more harm than good. as a means of understanding personal expression, it conflicts with contemporary evidence that suggests symbolic communication is based upon language, word associations, life experiences, and schema formations. as a means of understanding literature, it perverts historical and cultural contexts. as a framework for understanding child development, its premises are at odds with research from cognitive psychology, and it lacks trauma-informed considerations of children needing to be nurtured in a safe environment. with our present understandings of the effects of child abuse and the global significance of the #metoo movement, continuing to give credence to the oedipus complex is unethical. putting it simply, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic approach based upon misunderstandings of symbolic communication. on one hand, freud′s errors may be viewed as being of little consequence because psychology has developed beyond his ideas, and trauma-informed practices are increasingly influencing education, policing, and communities [ – ]. however, on the other hand, if the errors of the freudian theories are not duly recognised, there is a risk that the plights of sexual violence survivors may continue to be inappropriately recognised. above all, dispelling freudian theories and thus reducing his influence on culture has the potential to prevent some future acts of sexual violence. philosophies , , of funding: this research has received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest in production of this paper. references . thurschwell, p. sigmund freud. london; routledge: new york, ny, usa, . . arlow, j.a. 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academic medicine: ten strategies to use every day anna geagea, md, frcpc . sangeeta mehta, md, frcpc received: april / revised: july / accepted: july / published online: july � canadian anesthesiologists’ society women are well represented in medical schools and increasingly so in academic medicine. nevertheless, there remains a significant gap in the representation of women as professors, as leaders, , on guideline panels, as conference speakers and chairs, , in scholarly publications, and as grant and award recipients. , there is also a significant pay gap between men and women physicians. these gender disparities are particularly evident in disciplines such as critical care medicine and in surgical specialties. , , there are many reasons for gender disparity in medicine, including implicit bias that contributes to stereotypes that associate men with leadership, unequal mentorship and sponsorship, all added to the disproportionately greater familial responsibilities for women. sexual and gender harassment of women faculty and trainees is widespread in medicine. , all of these challenges may also result in lower retention of women in academia. we suggest ten ways that both men and women can support women faculty and trainees, ensure that women’s voices are heard, and reduce the overall gender disparity in academic medicine. . be aware of your implicit bias and check your gender stereotypes we all have implicit biases, which are unconscious prejudices towards a certain group of people. while implicit gender bias appears to be more prominent in older faculty and in men, both men and women hold stereotypical notions of how a woman physician looks and behaves. identifying this implicit bias is especially important for leaders and educators. to evaluate your implicit biases, one can self-administer the implicit association test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/) ; and consider implicit bias training. stereotypical beliefs that revolve around women’s intellectual capabilities, ambitions, personality traits, or work-life priorities can influence ones expectations and treatment of female colleagues. for example, one should not assume a woman is uninterested in an opportunity because she has young children. indeed, in younger generations, men seek work-life integration as much as women. , while statements such as ‘‘women are more compassionate than men’’ or ‘‘women are better communicators’’ may seem positive, such ‘‘benevolent sexism’’ sets expectations for women’s behavior by reinforcing stereotypical beliefs. unlike men, women face expectations of ‘‘communal’’ behavior, including likeability and nurturing, and are penalized for exhibiting ‘‘agentic’’ traits such as assertiveness. consequently, women are assigned disproportionately more of the traditionally uncompensated responsibilities that may adversely impact their academic productivity. ensure that committee membership, educational responsibilities, and social organizing (e.g., holiday parties) are assigned equally to women and men. . speak up about inequities achieving gender equity is a collaborative venture. regardless of your gender, talk to your colleagues about equity, speak up about unfairness and harassment, and advocate for transparency in hiring, compensation, and a. geagea, md, frcpc sunnybrook health sciences centre, toronto, on, canada north york general hospital, north york, on, canada interdepartmental division of critical care medicine, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada s. mehta, md, frcpc (&) interdepartmental division of critical care medicine, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada e-mail: geeta.mehta@utoronto.ca department of medicine, sinai health system, university ave, toronto, on m g x , canada can j anesth/j can anesth ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://orcid.org/ - - - https://implicit.harvard.edu/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&amp;domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z awards. committees with broad and diverse representation may decrease inequalities in candidates’ selection processes, and ensure that the most qualified and meritorious candidates are selected. if you witness gendered comments, simply stating ‘‘i’m not comfortable with what you said’’ calls out the perpetrator and validates the victim. . be a mentor academic faculty who are mentored are more productive, have greater career advancement, and superior career satisfaction. while it is not evident that women are mentored less, women find it challenging to find a mentor that ‘‘fits it all’’ in terms of work-life integration. consequently, women may be less satisfied than men with their mentorship experiences. as a potential mentor, seek opportunities to guide junior faculty, regardless of their sex. if you are a man, do not let the #metoo movement and fears of accusations about harassment prevent you from helping advance a woman’s career. , . be a sponsor sponsorship—distinct from mentoring—is defined as the promotion of a junior colleague by a more senior individual with influence and a network of connections. sponsorship can increase visibility and is associated with success. women are less likely to be sponsored than men, and less likely to benefit from the associated career advancement. if you are in a position of authority, introduce women to senior people in their scholarly areas, suggest women for committees, for panels, as conference and grand rounds speakers, and nominate women for leadership roles and awards. . ensure women’s voices are heard, and use their professional titles be generous about echoing women’s suggestions, providing attribution, and crediting their viewpoints. ‘‘amplification’’ is a strategy whereby women’s comments are echoed by others, particularly when their voices have not been adequately heard or acknowledged. for example, within president obama’s office, amplification resulted in more women being invited to share their views and increased their contributions to policy-making. women are interrupted far more often than men—even among supreme court judges! refrain from interrupting women, unless it is primarily to gain clarity on her statements. if the interruption is to opine or to disagree— politely wait your turn. call out others who interrupt with ‘‘why don’t we let her finish her thoughts?’’ women grand-rounds speakers are less likely than men to be introduced using their professional titles, and are more often introduced by their first names, particularly when introduced by a man. withholding a professional’s formal title has been associated with lower recognition of her expertise, lower satisfaction in the workplace, and feelings of alienation. use formal professional titles for women and men in their work environments, particularly around trainees and patients. . gender balance at conferences and scholarly activities—have a policy despite the increasing presence of women in academia, they remain underrepresented as grand-rounds speakers, on the podium at professional conferences, as guideline panel members or authors, , and on editorial boards. , formalized strategies which incorporate quotas improve gender equity. if you are on a conference organizing committee, have an equity policy for panels, chairs, and speakers, and aim to achieve better gender balance. recruit more women on the organizing committee, as this has been shown to improve speaker gender balance. publish your gender data; if you fail to meet your quota, have a plan in place to address it. consider whether you wish to participate in gender- imbalanced events; some invitees have politely declined to attend unless there is gender equity. to address the perception that women decline invitations more than men, collect data on declinations and their reasons. consider providing onsite childcare and a family room to support attendance of those with family needs. . support women trainees despite similar evaluations early in training, women emergency medicine trainees achieve milestones later than peer men, leading to a gender gap in evaluations. other studies have reported lower evaluation scores for women anesthesia trainees during their critical care rotations ; and inferior cardiopulmonary resuscitation performance in women. failure to show stereotypical leadership characteristics may explain the perception of lower performance in women, particularly in specialties such as emergency medicine that expect traditionally male- defined behaviors (e.g., independence, assertiveness). , paradoxically, women who assume such leadership characteristics may be penalized for their behaviour. , for both women and men trainees, anticipating and adhering to gendered behavioral expectations is stressful and distracts from clinical work. hold both women and men trainees to the same performance standards and seek equitable and objective evaluation processes. a. geagea, s. mehta . avoid gendered letters of recommendation stereotypical gender expectations impact women through gender-based descriptions of their performance in reference letters. women applicants are less likely to be described as ‘‘bright’’ than men applicants, or to have their leadership potential addressed. they are also more likely to have physical appearance mentioned, particularly by referee men. , referees are more likely to describe women using communal terms such as compassionate, calm, and delightful. avoid stereotypical adjectives when writing reference letters for women, and consider having a women colleague screen your letter. . ensure all scholarly activities are inclusive and safe scholarly activities provide important opportunities for education and networking. junior faculty with young children or those who are single parents may not be able to attend early morning or evening events. since women generally have disproportionate childcare and eldercare responsibilities, and the partners of men physicians are less likely to work outside the home, this particularly excludes women. ensure scholarly activities are inclusive and scheduled in a family-friendly manner to enable all faculty to attend, and avoid social activities which might be primarily attended by men. a code of conduct can help create a safe, harassment-free environment for women and men. . address the gender pay gap in the united states, women in academia earn less than their men counterparts. the pay gap results from multiple factors, including implicit gender bias, the perceived impact of familial leave on productivity, and less assertive negotiation by women. if you are in a position of authority, ensure transparency and standardization of compensation based on the job description and responsibilities. including women and under-represented minorities on the economic committee may help reduce the pay gap. offer negotiation skills training to all junior faculty. including women in all academic activities enriches our community, and benefits everyone. achieving gender equity is possible, but only if we all act as allies and champions of change. this means that both men and women need to support and elevate women, notice and call attention to inequities, and propose constructive solutions. these ten strategies can promote systemic change and the success of women in academia. the only way is forward! acknowledgement the authors would like to express their appreciation to dr. deborah cook for her generous review of the manuscript. conflicts of interest none declared. editorial responsibility this submission was handled by dr. hilary p. grocott, editor-in-chief, canadian journal of anesthesia. references . association of american medical colleges. the state of women in academic medicine: the pipeline and pathways to leadership, - . available from url: https://www. aamc.org/members/gwims/statistics/ (accessed july ). . jagsi r, guancial ea, worobey cc, et al. the ‘‘gender gap’’ in authorship of academic medical literature—a 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women in academic medicine: ten strategies to use every day 	references media industries . ( ) book review: never done: a history of women’s work in media production hill, erin new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, . ana salzberg university of dundee a.salzberg [at] dundee.ac.uk in an essay on the work of film history, vivian sobchack comments on the “productive unreliability and partiality of lived and invested memories, murmurs, nostalgias, stories, myths, and dreams” that shade modern-day explorations of the past. in an era defined by on-demand access and myriad viewing platforms—and suffused with fictional representations of historical events—our con- temporary relationship to the past is defined by, as sobchack notes, “multiple layers of unrelenting media- tion.” from the studio era to the present day, the “dream factory” of hollywood has always been uniquely active in generating such phenomena, especially regarding its own place in the cultural imagination. yet the recent attention to the industry’s endemic problem with sexual harassment reveals that today hollywood’s history is written in tweets, facebook posts, and blogs—a testimo- nial discourse that allows the individual to speak for themselves and, simultaneously, identify with others (the #metoo campaign, for instance). in her illuminating book never done: a history of women’s work in media production, erin hill engages with still other issues of solidarity, personal agency, and myth-making in studio- era hollywood. where feminist scholarship has tended to focus on more high-profile women in the industry, including stars, screenwriters, and directors, hill traces the contributions of media industries . ( ) female workers far behind the scenes. from secretaries to commissary workers, screenwriters to seamstresses, among many other roles, hill revisits the complex hierarchies and everyday experiences of women often omitted from hollywood’s grander historical narratives. as she sets forth, [f]emale workers, so often segregated and devalued under the studio system, should not suffer the same fate in media history by being considered only for what they could not do as casualties of unjust gender politics. examining the types of work women could and did do [ . . . ] reveals their agency [ . . . ] and helps frame an understanding of contemporary gendered labor. indeed, hill crafts a lineage of female labor in the entertainment industry from its earliest days to the contemporary moment, taking readers from the s (in which, for example, women hand-colored films for edison’s studios) to hollywood in the s (characterized in part by the “dues-paying mythology” surrounding the role of assistant). grounding her commentary in a wealth of sources including studio archives, popular press coverage, mem- oirs, and her own experiences working in hollywood, hill crafts a compelling account that directly acknowledges, even as it draws from, the “multiple layers of unrelenting mediation” so characteristic of film (and) history. a key strength of the book is hill’s emphasis on the mapping out of women’s places in the studio, which is effective in giving spatial/concrete representation to the various accounts of creative opportunities (or the lack thereof) open to women. particularly striking is the inclusion of a map of the lasky studio from , in which the sites of film production occupy the center of the lot with areas devoted to clerical work, associated with female employees, skirting along the edge. through reference to such maps and footage from studio tour films, hill highlights how “women in general had been rooted to a specific, peripheral place at stu- dios, literally and figuratively.” in chapter , for instance, she points to the “fluid, heteroso- cial work environment” that enabled early filmmakers such as lois weber and margaret booth to contribute to the bourgeoning industry, and yet with the greater success of the studio system came an entrenchment of normative gender distinctions. as explored further in chapter , women were discouraged from more high-profile roles in production and direc- tion and instead found themselves steered to jobs in screenwriting, reading, and research which were located, in the case of mgm, in a separate writers’ building. although these roles were themselves enormously valuable and creative, hill notes that the “agency of female movie makers was now confined to paper, along with all of its pejorative association with clerical work.” indeed, hill does much throughout her study to highlight the significance of such ostensibly commonplace work in an industry preoccupied with the production of glamorous images. in chapters and , the clerical worker emerges as a key player both in popular culture of the time and in the day-to-day running of the studio. hill argues convincingly that the role of secretary was itself “creative service”: a term meant to convey the complexities of a job that demanded both the efficient execution of clerical tasks to support the “creative vision” of studio personnel and a great deal of emotional labor. the latter relates to the ability to project particular emotions to engage most effectively with others, a skill encapsulated in a telling quote from mervyn leroy: “[a secretary’s] real value is that she can make friends for me, or enemies, just by the ways she handles a phone call, a letter, a visitor to my office.” case studies of professionals including ida koverman, louis b. media industries . ( ) mayer’s executive secretary, and peggy robertson, alfred hitchcock’s assistant, reveal the logistical and personal demands of these roles and offer still more unexpected insight into the ways these film legends worked. the closing chapters explore women’s evolving presence in fields such as casting, publicity, and script continuity, tracing both early-cinema and modern-day iterations of these jobs. indeed, the epilogue offers more personal commentary from hill as she reflects on her own career in the film industry. rather than read as overtly subjective, her remarks add another facet to the myriad perspectives chronicled throughout the work; so attentive is hill to the voices of those women sidelined in film history that her own, when it appears, blends well into the overarching tone of the book. at a time in which revelations about industry sexism and brutal power games emerge on a seemingly daily basis, hill’s book stands as a valuable chronicle of not just the struggles but also the successes of studio-era hollywood women. enhancing our understanding of the past while helping to place present-day crises in their historical context, hill demonstrates that a woman’s work in hollywood is, indeed, never done. ana salzberg is lecturer in film studies and visual culture at the university of dundee. her monograph beyond the looking glass: narcissism and female stardom in studio-era hollywood was published by berghahn books in . vivian sobchack. “what is film history?, or the riddle of the sphinxes,” in reinventing film studies, eds. christine gledhill and linda williams (london: arnold, ), – , . ibid., . erin hill, never done: a history of women’s work in media production (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), . ibid., ; ibid., . sobchack, “what is film history?” . hill, never done, . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., – . ibid., . ibid., – . quoted in ibid., . bibliography hill, erin. never done: a history of women’s work in media production. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, . sobchack, vivian. “what is film history?, or the riddle of the sphinxes.” in reinventing film studies, edited by christine gledhill and linda williams, – . london: arnold, . 	 . . passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie all rights reserved ©, phillipe volpé ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : acadiensis journal of the history of the atlantic region revue d’histoire de la région atlantique passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie phillipe volpé volume , numéro , automne uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) department of history at the university of new brunswick issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article volpé, p. ( ). passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie. acadiensis, ( ), – . https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ -v -n -acadiensis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ philippe volpé « passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (automne/autumn ), p. - . passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie sur l’agora se croisent, s’affrontent mais aussi se reflètent toutes les composantes de la cité. (jean-françois sirinelli, ) depuis une dizaine d’annÉes, les rétrospections sur la production historiographique acadienne sont monnaie courante . des bilans critiques ont été rédigés , des limites ont été soulevées mais, hormis quelques rares exceptions , peu de projets prospectifs ont clairement été énoncés. nous avons certes pu observer des plaidoyers en faveur d’une histoire politique – tantôt consubstantielle à une histoire culturelle et intellectuelle – ou sociale, selon les cas, mais il a bien souvent semblé se dégager de ces positions une attitude défensive où il importait davantage de se réclamer d’un champ pour préserver sa dénomination que de dessiner les contours d’une entreprise, d’une posture, d’une méthode, bref d’un projet historiographique. ce n’est pas notre intention ici de revenir sur cette « attitude » – pour ne pas dire « ces débats » qui, eux, nourrissent la pensée critique – dont l’esprit qui s’en dégage nous paraît contraire à l’avancement des connaissances; comme si « un » champ pouvait répondre à toutes les questions de l’humanité : « la réalité historique, par essence multiforme, est forcément à entrée[s] multiple[s] ». d’autant plus que nous sommes d’avis, avec l’historien martin pâquet, que les frontières entre les champs sont beaucoup moins étanches qu’on ne le laisse souvent jean-françois sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora. pour une histoire culturelle du politique », vingtième siècle. revue d’histoire, no (janvier-mars ), p. . l’auteur tient à remercier julien massicotte pour ses commentaires et suggestions. patrick d. clarke (dir.), clio en acadie: réflexions historiques, québec, presses de l’université laval, ; julien massicotte, « histoire et pertinence : notes sur l’historiographie acadienne récente », dans martin pâquet et serge dupuis (dir.), faire son temps : usages publics du passé dans les francophonies nord-américaines, québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. - . joel belliveau et patrick-michel noël, « Éléments pour une rétrospection et une prospection de l’historiographie acadienne », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (hiver ), p. - . jean-françois sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora : pour une histoire culturelle du politique », vingtième siècle, no (janvier-mars ), p. . histoire des sujets en action entendre, d’où la nécessité d’entreprises plurielles et de leur interrelation . enfin, concluons à ce sujet qu’il est à souhaiter que nous assistions au cours des prochaines années à une plus grande ouverture envers la complémentarité des approches af in d ’éviter qu’un gouffre ne se creuse en raison d ’une tendance générationnelle et de dialogues de sourds qui viendraient scléroser la production historiographique acadienne pour ou ans. le bien de la recherche fondamentale et de la formation universitaire en dépend. notre intervention est donc d ’un autre ordre. nous voulons proposer une posture de recherche pour répondre à d’importantes lacunes en histoire de l’acadie contemporaine. Évidemment, notre perspective nous apparaît nécessaire pour combler de sérieuses lacunes mais, précisons-le à nouveau, elle n’en demeure pas moins une approche parmi d ’autres qui doivent se poursuive ou être mises en œuvre. si, comme tout le monde, nous prêchons pour notre paroisse, nous n’avons néanmoins pas la prétention de la présenter comme la seule qui vaille. À ce sujet, on trouvera de stimulantes perspectives, complémentaires à la nôtre, dans le forum de discussion du présent numéro d’acadiensis. considérations préliminaires partons d’une considération générale. l’acadie contemporaine nous place d’abord, lorsque nous entreprenons son étude comme petite société, devant sa dimension politique. reconnaissons qu’une telle affirmation pourrait en étonner quelques-uns puisque, étant sans État et dépourvue d’un territoire précisément délimité, la réalité acadienne peut sembler antinomique avec l ’idée même du politique. appréhender la problématique ainsi, ce serait toutefois méprendre « le » politique – la détermination d’un futur pensable et les gestions du social – pour « la » politique – la politique politicienne . le politique n’implique pas nécessairement l’existence d’un État ou d’un territoire, mais relève plutôt de « l’action collective », au sens où l’entendaient déjà dans les années les sociologues michel crozier et erhard friedberg, selon qui martin pâquet, « histoire sociale et histoire politique au québec : esquisse d’une anthropologie du savoir historien », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . ivan carel, martin pâquet, stéphane savard et jean-philippe warren, « les principes du bulletin d’histoire politique », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . pour une typologie distinguant « le politique » de « la politique », voir joseph yvon thériault, « l’acadie politique et la politique en acadie », dans l’identité à l’épreuve de la modernité : écrits politiques sur l’acadie et les francophonies canadiennes minoritaires, moncton, Éditions d’acadie, , p. - . volpé l’action collective, qui est construite et non naturelle, « n’est finalement rien d’autre que de la politique quotidienne ». comme les autres sociétés de ce monde, l’acadie n’est pas naturelle, mais construite. suivant en cela le paradigme du « constructivisme identitaire », nous soutenons que l’action collective est constitutive des sociétés et nations, petites ou grandes . ces dernières prennent donc sens par l’action sociale d’acteurs qui s’emploient à en élaborer les déterminants dans l’espace public, à en définir la référence pour parler comme le sociologue fernand dumont, soit une mémoire historique – chargée d’idéologies – à laquelle des gens se reconnaissent et acceptent d’adhérer et dont ils se font les dépositaires . malgré cette centralité des acteurs dans l’édification et le façonnement de la petite société acadienne, la production historiographique s’est peu attardée à contextualiser et à interpréter les fondements idéologiques et axiologiques de leurs mobilisations. déjà, au début des années , l ’ historien léon thériault relevait que les travaux de ses prédécesseurs, les historiens dits « traditionalistes », avaient surtout porté sur l’étude des « structures » de la petite société acadienne, soit sur l’ensemble de ses composantes matérielles – institutions, associations, établissements –, dans un projet affirmé de tracer un état des lieux de la collectivité nationale : une histoire « comptable » et faible en interprétations, au dire de l’historien michel roy . bien que thériault propose à ce moment de surpasser les limites de ce prisme par une étude des « mécanismes internes » des structures de la société acadienne, une bonne part de ses travaux et de ceux de ses contemporains – les historiens critiques des années - – ont maintenu ce cadre d’analyse largement orienté vers l’étude des structures et des institutions dans une temporalité longue; les travaux de thériault sur les « structures ecclésiastiques » en constituent des exemples éloquents. michel crozier et erhard friedberg, l’acteur et le système, paris, seuil, [ ], p. . benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, londres, verso, ; eric hobsbawm et terence ranger, the invention of tradition, cambridge, cambridge university press, . fernand dumont, genèse de la société québécoise, montréal, boréal, . léon thériault, « pour une nouvelle orientation de l’histoire acadienne », revue de l’université de moncton, vol. , no ( ), p. - . michel roy, l’acadie des origines à nos jours : essai de synthèse historique, montréal, québec/ amérique, , p. - et - . léon thériault, « l’acadianisation des structures ecclésiastiques aux maritimes, - », dans jean daigle (dir.), l’acadie des maritimes, moncton, chaire d’études acadiennes, , p. - . histoire des sujets en action cet angle des études acadiennes fait à nouveau l’objet de critiques au tournant des années , alors qu’une génération de jeunes historiennes et historiens sont à définir un nouvel axe de recherche pour répondre aux lacunes et aux limites des travaux des générations précédentes. inf luencée par la nouvelle histoire sociale, cette cohorte de chercheuses et de chercheurs revendique notamment le délaissement de l’histoire nationale acadienne en faveur d’une histoire sociale parcellisée, brisant ainsi avec la tradition des synthèses de longue durée en faveur d’études thématiques et rejoignant les débats canadiens sur l’histoire pluraliste – limited identities . appelants à l’étude de nouveaux sujets et à l’introduction de nouvelles méthodes – notamment les enquêtes quantitatives et orales –, les nouveaux historiens de l’acadie proposent une réorientation des études acadiennes – jusqu’alors centrées sur la « nation » – par une analyse des réalités socio-économiques de la « société » acadienne, contribuant par le fait même à montrer la « normalité » de l’acadie. sans passer en revue tout le mérite et l’originalité des contributions des « normalisateurs » d’acadie , retenons pour notre propos que dans leur entreprise de « dépasser l’obsession du discours » pour étudier l’acadie dans « sa substance même », dans sa réalité matérielle en un sens, ils se sont par le fait même distanciés de l’histoire politique et culturelle. comme le remarque le sociologue julien massicotte, sous la plume des « normalisateurs » des années , une certaine dépersonnalisation – regrettée de notre point de vue – j.m.s. careless, « “limited identities” in canada », canadian historical review, vol. , no (mars ), p. - . l’entreprise de « normalisation » du passé acadien rejoint celle poursuivie par des historiennes et des historiens du québec aussi influencés par la nouvelle histoire sociale, qui dans leurs initiatives pour déboulonner le mythe de la grande noirceur québécoise ont su montrer la « normalité » – surtout dans ses dimensions libérales et laïques – de la société québécoise d’avant la révolution tranquille. À ce sujet, voir ronald rudin, faire de l’histoire au québec, trad. de pierre r. desrosiers, sillery, septentrion, . pour un aperçu de leurs travaux et de leur projet historiographique, voir jacques paul couturier et phyllis e. leblanc (dir.), Économie et société en acadie, - , moncton, Éditions d’acadie, ; jacques paul couturier, « tendances actuelles de l’historiographie acadienne, - », historical papers/communications historiques, vol. , no ( ), p. - . au milieu des années , l’historien jacques paul couturier souligne que la production de sa génération, dans ses aspirations à débusquer de nouveaux chantiers, « s’est surtout préoccupée d’être sociale ou économique avant d’être acadienne », ayant par le fait même « négligé de proposer son propre modèle d’interprétation de l’histoire acadienne ». pour couturier, la limite est à ce moment perçue – « quel est le modèle d’interprétation des nouveaux historiens? » – et il est entendu que lui et ses collègues doivent travailler à y répondre : « mais les nouveaux historiographes, s’ils veulent que l’expression colle, devront expliciter leur projet historiographique et lui donner corps. » ce prisme initial des « normalisateurs » d’acadie nous semble par ailleurs avoir été largement revu au cours des années . l’historienne nicole lang affirme en ce sens, à l’occasion d’une entrevue, qu’aux côtés de ses champs de spécialisation plus « précis » – histoire des femmes, du travail, etc. – se trouve aussi « la volpé du sujet acadien s’est opérée, les acadiennes et les acadiens se retrouvant bien souvent « fragmentés » au point de ne former qu’une langue, un sexe, une profession, un métier, etc. Évacuant de leurs travaux une bonne part des aspects politiques et culturels – perceptions et représentations – ou encore des idées – ces « discours » auxquels aucune portée « créative » et aucune fonction « performative » ne sont attribuées –, les « normalisateurs » des années produisent largement « une histoire de l’acadie en l’absence d’elle-même », ajoute massicotte, soit une histoire d’aspects qui ont lieu « en » acadie plutôt qu’une histoire « de » l’acadie . par ailleurs, cette posture « initiale » des « normalisateurs » acadiens – parce qu’elle a évolué depuis –, bien qu’affirmant vouloir produire une histoire de l’acadie « au ras du sol » – en écho au célèbre plaidoyer de l’historien edward thompson en faveur d’une histoire « du bas vers le haut » de la culture ouvrière –, demeure, pour une bonne part, axée sur les structures : l’État, les entreprises, le développement urbain. ainsi, le prisme initial de leurs travaux, largement vidés d’aspects sociopolitiques et culturels, les conduit à rédiger une histoire toujours désincarnée, sans acteurs et sans mobilisations. les trop rares travaux en histoire des mouvements de femmes – du féminisme – et des ouvriers – du syndicalisme – en font foi, ces sujets occupant normalement une bonne place dans les travaux des spécialistes d’histoire sociale . de cette vue d’ensemble, beaucoup trop lapidaire nous en conviendrons, il nous est possible de conclure que la production historiographique acadienne, jusqu’à la dernière décennie, s’est montrée largement désincarnée, étant question nationale, qu’on ne peut évacuer, qui est omniprésente ». voir julien massicotte, « histoire, engagement et militantisme en acadie. entrevue avec nicole lang », histoireengagée. ca, novembre , http://histoireengagee.ca/entrevue-nicole-lang/; jacques paul couturier, « la production de mémoires et de thèses en histoire acadienne, - : analyse et conjectures », dans couturier et leblanc, Économie et société en acadie, p. . roger chartier, au bord de la falaise : l’histoire entre certitudes et incertitudes, paris, albin michel, . comme l’affirme le sociologue pierre bourdieu à la suite du linguiste john l. austin, « dire, c’est faire ». pierre bourdieu, ce que parler veut dire : l’économie des échanges linguistiques, paris, fayard, . julien massicotte, « les nouveaux historiens de l’acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - ; julien massicotte, « l’historien et la question du politique en acadie », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . edward palmer thompson, the making of the english working class, new york, pantheon books, . de récentes études ont commencé à répondre à ces manques. voir nicole lang, « les acadiennes et le marché du travail : les revendications et les stratégies des militantes ( - ) », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - ; david frank, « une acadie qui bouge : la présence acadienne dans l’histoire de la fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du nouveau-brunswick », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action davantage centrée sur l’étude des structures et des institutions au détriment d’une analyse contextualisée des acteurs qui y œuvrent, une « subject-less history », pour reprendre l’expression du sociologue anthony giddens . nous pourrions ainsi conclure avec le sociologue alain touraine que la production historiographique acadienne, peu versée dans l’étude des acadiennes et des acadiens en mouvement et dans la contextualisation de leurs motivations, a elle aussi connu, à sa façon, sa « mort du sujet ». certes, la production scientifique acadienne ne s’est pas butée au raz-de-marée paradigmatique du structuralisme que réprouve touraine et qui, dans sa recherche d’invariants et de permanences, avait objectivé les sociétés au point d ’y supprimer la subjectivité et l’autonomie créatrice des acteurs – alors présentés comme de simples marionnettes des mécanismes de contrôle social –, ou encore du déterminisme économique de la sociologie marxiste qui avait pulvérisé toute compréhension d’un sujet libre et conscient en dehors de ses réalités matérielles, voire de dynamiques de classes. néanmoins, que ce soit pour avoir fait la grande part à l’étude des structures exemptes de contributions humaines, comme dans l ’histoire-bilan et institutionnelle menée par les historiens traditionalistes et critiques, ou encore pour avoir contribué à la décomposition et à l ’évidement culturel du sujet acadien à la suite du positivisme et de l’objectivisme des « normalisateurs » du début des années , il nous faut admettre que les acteurs, pourtant au centre des mobilisations qui donnent sens à la petite société acadienne, occupent rarement le devant de la scène. en définitive, il se dégage de l’historiographie acadienne l’image d’une société désincarnée où les acteurs et leurs mobilisations retiennent peu l’attention. il y a du monde dans la salle, mais « la scène est vide », pour ainsi dire . retour sur une histoire incarnée de l’acadie dans son ouvrage programmatique le retour de l’acteur, alain touraine propose un renversement de paradigme pour supplanter le structuralisme déshumanisant en détournant l’angle d’analyse des structures, ce « monde froid [dans lequel] l’acteur – avec ses croyances, ses projets, ses rapports sociaux, sa capacité d’action proprement sociale – est éliminé », pour justement le réorienter vers les acteurs, ces sujets agissants, conscients et créateurs qui sont anthony giddens, politics, sociology and social theory: encounters with classical and contemporary social thought, cambridge, polity press, , p. . alain touraine, critique de la modernité, paris, fayard, , p. . alain touraine, « acteurs et analystes », dans alain touraine (dir.), mouvements sociaux d’aujourd’hui : acteurs et analystes, paris, Éditions ouvrières, , p. . volpé au centre des dynamiques constitutives des sociétés. touraine nous explique la légitimité du sujet comme objet d’étude par le fait que ce dernier peut contrôler son historicité : l’acteur social, capable d’agir de manière autonome par lui- même sur lui-même, peut être le maître d’œuvre de son histoire. touraine propose, à la suite de cette thèse de la capacité de choix rationnels du sujet, l’étude des mouvements sociaux comme lieux privilégiés où nous sommes à même de saisir comment les acteurs sociaux, dans leurs rapports et conf lits, « luttent précisément pour la gestion de [leur] culture et des activités qu’elle produit ». ne nous méprenons pas, touraine n’est pas à formuler un projet opposant les acteurs à la société. il précise d’ailleurs que, s’il s’en prend au structuralisme comme « système qui exclut tout acteur », la posture qu’il est à définir ne se rallie pas davantage à l’ethnométhodologie, qui étudie l’« acteur en dehors de tout système » . c’est donc des acteurs et des mouvements sociaux « en » société, enracinés dans une culture et un milieu, que touraine nous invite à étudier. l’heure n’est donc plus, comme le soutient l’historien françois dosse, à reproduire la fausse dichotomie « entre divinisation et dissolution du sujet » qui avait marqué les débats en sciences sociales entre structure et sujet, mais plutôt à saisir l’interrelation entre les deux objets : les acteurs en société qui la composent, la façonnent et s’y définissent. cet appel en faveur d’une étude des sujets en action résonne depuis le tournant des années dans nombre de plaidoyers en faveur d’une histoire culturelle des sociétés. c’est en ce sens que l’historien français jean-françois sirinelli propose, après que l’historien michel vovelle eut invité les historiennes et les historiens « à passer de la cave de l’échange économique au grenier des opérations mentales de saisie du réel », de passer « de la demeure à l’agora » , soit à une analyse contextuelle et socioculturelle des personnes dans l’espace public, ce lieu de définition des sociétés. en plaidant pour une histoire politique revigorée par la dynamique histoire culturelle, sirinelli ne cherche pas à touraine écrit sur l’historicité et le rapport qu’elle postule entre acteur et société : « j’appelle historicité, précisément, l’ensemble de ces modèles culturels qui commandent les pratiques sociales, mais seulement en passant à travers des rapports sociaux qui sont toujours des rapports de pouvoir. pareille conception interdit de centrer encore l’analyse autour de l’idée de société : tout comme les théories de l’organisation, elle ne reconnaît à l’ensemble social, ou à tel ou tel de ses sous-ensembles, qu’un faible niveau de stabilité et même de cohérence. » alain touraine, le retour de l’acteur : essai de sociologie, paris, fayard, , p. . touraine, le retour de l’acteur, p. . voir aussi alain touraine, penser autrement, paris, fayard, . françois dosse, l’empire du sens : l’humanisation des sciences humaines, paris, la découverte, , p. . sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora », p. - . histoire des sujets en action proposer une nouvelle doxa mais, bien au contraire, à saisir le politique dans ses contextes qui ne peuvent être compris en dehors des dynamiques sociales : « au demeurant, une approche par le culturel est probablement l’une des façons de maintenir des liens entre le politique et le social. » l’historien français propose en ce sens de dépoussiérer l’histoire politique pour la « désenclaver » de ses assises « par le haut » afin de se rapprocher de l’étude des acteurs, de leurs réseaux de sociabilité, itinéraires, perceptions et représentations, bref de l’ensemble des composantes qui donnent sens à leur engagement dans l’agora. il importe pour sirinelli d’analyser et de mettre en relation « la double dimension, agissante mais aussi pensante » des acteurs et non pas de les opposer dans la fausse binarité « idées » et « réalités ». il rappelle à ce sujet qu’il est commun que l’agir humain soit conditionné par des visions du monde : c’est la « perception qui est motrice et non la réalité ». il est en ce sens pertinent de mettre en évidence et de contextualiser l’ensemble « des aspirations, des craintes et des espérances collectives » qui, ayant été crues jadis ou naguère, ont justifié le programme d’action, voire le projet collectif élaboré par les acteurs des collectivités . c’est en somme tout un projet d’histoire culturelle et intellectuelle des sociétés – ou de la culture politique – qu’il nous est possible de lire dans le plaidoyer de sirinelli. le projet proposé, invitant à « aller plus avant sans se soucier des frontières », se veut toutefois moins une entreprise aux contours bien définis qu’une posture épistémologique avant tout « compréhensive », dans le sens wébérien , des phénomènes sociaux. compréhensive, cette approche se veut aussi contextualiste. il n’est en ce sens pas question de choisir entre l’approche internaliste de l’étude des œuvres – comme une histoire des marc angenot, l’histoire des idées : problématiques, objets, concepts, méthodes, enjeux, débats, liège, presses universitaires de liège, . de façon analogue, fernand dumont faisait remarquer que « [c]omprendre une idéologie ne consiste pas à se demander si elle se trompe ou non mais à la replacer dans le contexte dont elle est à la fois le produit et le complément ». fernand dumont, « du début du siècle à la crise de : un espace idéologique », dans fernand dumont, jean-paul montminy et jean hamelin (dir.), idéologies au canada français, - , québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . sirinelli définit la culture politique comme « l’ensemble des représentations qui soude un groupe humain sur le plan politique, c’est-à-dire une vision du monde partagée, une commune lecture du passé, une projection dans l’avenir vécue ensemble ». sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora », p. - . le sociologue max weber définit la sociologie comme « une science qui se propose de comprendre par interprétation l’activité sociale et par là d’expliquer causalement son déroulement et ses effets », faisant en cela de la « compréhension » l’exercice de saisie des fondements et des significations de l’action. max weber, Économie et société, paris, pilon, , p. . volpé philosophies politiques déracinée de leur ancrage social d’énonciation et de réception – et l’approche externaliste des réseaux de sociabilité, mais plutôt un enchevêtrement entre les deux, qui sont en fait, comme le fait remarquer françois dosse, complémentaires : l’histoire intellectuelle pratiquée de la sorte, entre contextualisme et herméneutique, entend « rendre compte des œuvres, parcours, itinéraires, par-delà les frontières disciplinaires ». suivant ce modèle théorique, il importe en ce sens non seulement de « reconstru[ire] des catégories indigènes de l ’intérieur », mais aussi de reconstituer « l’ensemble des chemins possibles ouverts à un certain moment du passé ». soyons clair : l’historienne et l’historien ont le privilège d’étudier un objet dont le présent et le futur relèvent pour eux du passé. ils doivent néanmoins se garder d’adopter une position de surplomb et d’étudier ce passé de manière linéaire à partir de finalités connues ou qui leur ont été prêtées ultérieurement. pour comprendre le passé dans toute son épaisseur, l’historienne et l’historien doivent rendre compte du « champ des possibles [de ce] passé en s’insérant dans ce moment en tant que moment présent ». nous n’aspirons pas, pour notre part, à reconstituer l’histoire à partir d’un point d’arrivée et à chercher des prémisses présentant les couleurs d’une conclusion déterminée. il ne faut pas penser qu’un programme, un projet, une idée, etc., se présentent dès leur origine avec les contours circonscrits de leur forme aboutie. le philosophe michel foucault a vu juste à ce sujet en relevant dans un texte sur la généalogie des choses que « [c]e qu’on trouve, au commencement historique des choses, ce n’est pas l’identité encore préservée de leur origine, – c’est la discorde des autres choses, c’est le disparate ». le sociologue jean-philippe warren fait une remarque similaire dans sa biographie du jeune fernand dumont, où, en marge d’une invitation à l’étude des « intentions primordiales » des acteurs, il avance qu’« une pensée ne s’accouche jamais tout armée, elle connaît ses louvoiements et ses tâtonnements, ne s’épargnant ni les volte-face, ni les palinodies, encore moins le doute ». françois dosse, la marche des idées : histoire des intellectuels – histoire intellectuelle, paris, la découverte, , p. . françois dosse, « l’irréduction dans l’histoire intellectuelle », espaces temps, nos - ( ), p. . michel foucault, « nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire », dans suzanne bachelard et al. (dir.), hommage à jean hyppolite, paris, presses universitaires de france, , p. . jean-philippe warren, un supplément d’âme : les intentions primordiales de fernand dumont ( - ), québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . histoire des sujets en action c’est à la suite de ce projet d’une « histoire incarnée », tournée vers l’étude des acteurs en mouvement et compris dans leurs contextes, que s’inscrit notre projet historiographique. il est pour nous question d’analyser et d’interpréter le bagage idéologique et axiologique au fondement de l’engagement des sujets en acadie, de rendre compte des « visions du monde » qui les animent et qui se font justificatrices de leur action. nous nous intéressons en ce sens à l’étude des mouvements, des tensions et des débats qui animent et, par le fait même, définissent la petite société acadienne. parce qu’il importe pour nous de contextualiser l’action sociale des acteurs en acadie, il est de notre point de vue nécessaire de tenir compte des réalités, certes externes, voire internationales, mais aussi internes de notre sujet, c’est-à-dire de chercher à comprendre l’acadie en soi et pour soi et non pas à négliger la conjoncture intérieure, avec ses particularités, au profit d’une trame uniformisante suivant un pseudo- schème internationalisant. comprenons-nous bien : il n’est pas question en ce sens de présenter l’acadie comme une société autarcique et isolée du monde. bien au contraire. l’acadie des provinces maritimes, dont la « normalité » a été maintes fois montrée, est pour nous tout autant exposée aux courants multiples des époques que les autres sociétés du monde occidental. néanmoins, comme toutes les sociétés, elle est aussi aux prises avec des réalités économique, politique, culturelle, géographique, démographique, etc., particulières et s’inscrit ainsi dans un contexte qui lui est propre. l’acadie des provinces maritimes fait en ce sens partie de l’histoire du canada et de l’amérique du nord, sans pour autant que l’histoire de ces espaces géographiques soit entièrement la sienne, pas plus que celle du québec d’ailleurs. ainsi, afin d ’éviter de gommer les réalités acadiennes au profit de généralités tirées d’autres espaces de recherche, notre posture nous mène à saisir la façon dont les acadiennes et les acadiens comprennent, vivent, s’approprient, perçoivent, etc., les réalités auxquelles ils sont exposés en eux-mêmes, ne serait-ce, suivant une certaine démarche étapiste, que pour mieux les comparer par la suite. soulignons sur ce point que nous ne sommes pas sans rappeler toute la pertinence du projet porté par acadiensis qui, dès ses origines, mettait les chercheuses et les chercheurs en garde contre les écueils téléologiques des approches partielles émanant d’un prisme exclusivement national, qui privilégient souvent l’étude de quelques métropoles – montréal, toronto, etc. – philippe volpé, « autour de l’éducation : plaidoyer pour une histoire incarnée de l’acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - . volpé au détriment des réalités « périphériques », locales, régionales . s’il est pour nous certain que l’universel n’est pas antinomique avec les réalités locales – parce qu’il faut partir du particulier pour arriver au général –, nous sommes d’avis qu’acadiensis est toujours d’une grande actualité dans le contexte actuel où les plaidoyers stimulants en faveur d’études transnationales et comparées – qu’il faut absolument engager – n’appellent pas moins à certaines prudences devant les possibilités d’un ressac des régions, des petites sociétés, bref des « marges », au profit de l’étude des grandes agglomérations à l’histoire mieux connue et aux fonds d’archives plus volumineux, accessibles et invitants. l’étude de la petite société acadienne, inscrite dans ses contextes particuliers et partagés, soit dans l’interrelation entre ses réalités locales et internationales, nous permet notamment de contribuer à la décentralisation des entreprises et de proposer des points de vue distincts et complémentaires, notamment par la prise en considération de son contexte minoritaire, sur un ensemble de phénomènes sociaux qui traversent les sociétés canadienne et nord-américaine. sortir des lieux communs de la connaissance de notre point de vue, notre posture permet de répondre à certaines des initiatives qu’étaient soucieux de concrétiser les historiennes et historiens « normalisateurs » en travaillant à placer la production historiographique acadienne en dialogue avec les historiographies d’autres espaces géographiques – les mouvements sociaux d’acadie ne sont pas sans avoir des équivalents ailleurs dans le monde – et également de surpasser les limites strictes d’une histoire nationale, sans toutefois la délaisser puisque celle-ci cimente en déf initive la collectivité; à ce point-ci, on aura compris notre réticence devant les entreprises de table rase. c’est dire que notre approche se propose notamment de sortir des lieux communs de la connaissance en histoire acadienne en défrichant de nouveaux chantiers de recherche ou en proposant d’en aborder des plus anciens suivant de nouvelles perspectives. retenons trois axes de recherche en lien avec nos travaux récents. nous l’avons déjà évoqué, l’histoire des mouvements sociaux est l’une des avenues qu’il nous semble urgent d’emprunter pour redynamiser la production historiographique acadienne et pour être à même de mieux comprendre les changements sociaux survenus au sein de cette petite société dans toute son épaisseur, dans son pluralisme. l’histoire des mobilisations et de la prise david frank, « acadiensis, and », canadian review of american studies, vol. , no ( ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action de parole des femmes acadiennes nous semble, à ce propos, éloquente. peu d’études ont cherché à analyser l’engagement des femmes dans l’espace public acadien . nous connaissons certes le cas de marichette – l’institutrice Émilie leblanc – qui, à la fin du e siècle, a publié des lettres d’opinions dans le journal l’Évangéline pour revendiquer le droit de vote et de meilleures conditions de travail pour les femmes. au-delà de ce cas connu de la suffragette acadienne, par ailleurs étudié par des littéraires , les travaux ont surtout porté sur le statut politique et juridique des femmes, avec de faibles prises de vue sur la question de l’engagement des femmes francophones, donnant en somme l’impression que, de marichette à la seconde vague du féminisme des années - , les femmes acadiennes sont demeurées largement passives. les quelques notices biographiques de « grandes femmes » acadiennes dont nous disposons suffisent néanmoins à contester cette impression en nous laissant entrevoir les mobilisations de certaines dans l’espace public : pensons aux chroniques de marguerite michaud dans l’Évangéline, à la participation acadienne dans le women’s institute, cette « université de la femme rurale », ou encore aux mouvements d’action catholique tels que la jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine. sou lignons quant à ce dernier exemple que les mouvements d’action catholique sont eux aussi largement inconnus en acadie . bien que la professeure en sciences de l’éducation simone leblanc-rainville ait laissé entendre, à la suite d’études analogues au québec , que leur rôle ait pu être notable dans les mobilisations réformistes, féministes, néonationalistes et socialistes des années et au-delà , la production historiographique acadienne, encore largement héritière des préjugés qui avaient conduit à déclasser l ’ histoire religieuse suivant le positionnement iconoclaste des philippe volpé, « “soyons orgueilleuses, mesdemoiselles, sachons nous suffire” : femmes, genre, travail et espace public au tournant du e siècle », revue de la société historique du madawaska, vol. , nos - (juillet-décembre ), p. - . pierre gérin et pierre m. gérin, marichette : lettres acadiennes, - , sherbrooke, naaman, . thérèse lemieux et gemma caron, avec la collaboration de madeleine cyr, silhouettes acadiennes : biographies de femmes, s. l., s. n., . philippe volpé, « de l’acja à l’acjc ou de l’action nationale à l’action catholique : associations jeunesse et mobilisations collectives en acadie, - », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/ automne ), p. - . e.-martin meunier et jean-philippe warren, sortir de la « grande noirceur » : l’horizon « personnaliste » de la révolution tranquille, sillery, septentrion, ; michael gauvreau, the catholic origins of quebec’s quiet revolution, - , montréal-kingston, mcgill-queen’s university press, . simone leblanc-rainville, corinne gallant : une pionnière du féminisme en acadie, moncton, institut d’études acadiennes, . volpé historiens critiques qui en condamnaient l’idéologie, a marginalisé le champ, abandonnant par le fait même de grands pans de l’histoire acadienne dans lesquels les dimensions catholiques ont longtemps été omniprésentes . une histoire des mouvements jeunesse qui va au-delà de l’étude des jeunes qui manifestent pour s’intéresser à l’ensemble de leurs mobilisations, lesquelles témoignent et permettent bien souvent de rendre compte des changements sociaux qui caractérisent les sociétés de différentes époques, nous semble par ailleurs tout aussi porteuse. nous pourrions ajouter à ces exemples celui d ’une histoire des mouvements de solidarité internationale. pensons aux congréganistes d’acadie de la première moitié du e siècle qui œuvrent en côte d’ivoire, au pérou et aux philippines, aux succursales acadiennes de groupes d’appui au « développement » du tiers-monde – les succursales de l ’entraide universitaire mondiale du canada et du ser vice universitaire canadien outre-mer –, aux comités de lutte pour la décolonisation dans les années – acadie-chili, acadie-angola –, ou encore à la pléthore d’ong fondées à la suite des années – oxfam-acadie, réseau acadien de solidarité internationale . sans que ces divers mouvements constituent des microcosmes de la petite société acadienne, il demeure que, dans leur contexte, chacun témoigne d’une partie des préoccupations acadiennes de leur temps. qui plus est, que des mouvements de solidarité, à vocation internationaliste, s’affublent de référents acadiens, cette société sans État, rappelons-le, est un phénomène pour le moins intéressant qui invite à étudier leur interrelation avec la petite société acadienne. notre posture accorde également un intérêt à l ’étude des itinéraires individuels. il n’est pas ici question de proposer un retour à la biographie « classique », dont on a maintes fois critiqué le caractère téléologique de saisie d’un parcours de vie dans une dimension linéaire, mais plutôt, suivant le modèle énoncé, d’étudier l’acteur en société, dans ses rapports à soi et à la collectivité, soit dans ses tensions et ses louvoiements qui mettent en évidence À ce sujet, les travaux de régis brun et de michel roy, qui à leur façon ont contribué à la marginalisation de l’histoire religieuse et à construire, à la suite des historiens modernistes du québec, le mythe de la grande noirceur acadienne, viennent en tête. régis brun, de grand-pré à kouchibougouac : l’histoire d’un peuple exploité, moncton, Éditions d’acadie, ; michel roy, l’acadie perdue, montréal, Éditions québec/amérique, . pour des critiques de cette marginalisation de l’histoire religieuse en acadie, voir pierre trépanier, « les récollets et l’acadie ( - ) : plaidoyer pour l’histoire religieuse », les cahiers de la société historique acadienne, vol. , no (mars ), p. - ; pierre trépanier, « remembrement de l’Église d’acadie », dans guy-marie oury (dir.), la croix et le nouveau monde : histoire religieuse des francophones d’amérique du nord, chambray/montréal, cld/cmd, , p. - . euclide chiasson et marc johnson, « organismes d’acadie et tiers-monde », Égalité, no (automne ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action une partie du contexte dans lequel se situe la société d’une époque et qui marquent et caractérisent le changement social . mentionnons par exemple la pertinence d’une biographie intellectuelle de mathilda blanchard, cette coiffeuse devenue figure de proue du syndicalisme et des mouvements citoyens en acadie des années . autour de mathilda blanchard, de son parcours individuel, c’est toute l’histoire de la participation des femmes à la politique provinciale et municipale, de la syndicalisation des pêcheurs, des revendications des chômeuses et des chômeurs et même de certains événements comme la grève de la cirtex – paradoxalement méconnue dans l’historiographie malgré sa place dans la mémoire acadienne – qui est interrogée. enfin, il est selon nous nécessaire, suivant les plaidoyers des historiennes et des historiens « controversialistes », d’amorcer une histoire des polémiques, des conf lits et des débats en acadie. par leur caractère événementiel, les controverses nous permettent d’effectuer un arrêt dans le temps et de poser un regard synchronique sur l’ensemble des acteurs d’un moment qui sont à débattre d’un enjeu et, par le fait même, de mieux rendre compte des idées, croyances et valeurs au fondement de l’argumentaire de chacun. il est en ce sens question d’étudier les configurations d’idées des différents protagonistes, non pas dans une position de surplomb pour en noter les contradictions ou l’irrationalité, mais plutôt pour chercher à saisir le sens qu’elles prennent et la façon dont elles sont appropriées et crues dans leur contexte précis. cette approche nous permet non seulement de rendre compte des enjeux qui préoccupent la petite société acadienne d’un temps donné, mais également, lorsque nous inscrivons les controverses dans la durée – la diachronie –, de comprendre l’évolution de sa culture politique en mettant en évidence ce qui se perpétue et ce qui change à la suite des conf lits. nous pouvons ici penser aux apports d’une enquête sur les débats eu égard au bilinguisme dans les provinces maritimes, un sujet perpétuellement polémique en acadie depuis la confédération puisqu’il touche à la définition même de la collectivité. que ce soit les composantes du projet collectif acadien, les rapports de la petite société acadienne avec les communautés autochtones, anglophones et immigrantes, ou sur la pertinence de la biographie intellectuelle, voir michel bock, « de la pertinence historiographique d’une trajectoire individuelle : lionel groulx, la confédération et le canada français », canadian historical review, vol. , no (juin ), p. - . mathilda, la passionnaria acadienne (documentaire), canada, réalisation de ginette pellerin, production de l’office national du film, , min. ann thomson, « l’histoire intellectuelle : quelles idées, quel contexte? », revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no ( / ), p. - . volpé encore la place de l’acadie au sein du canada, de l’amérique du nord, voire du monde occidental, toutes ces questions sont liées à la langue, qui « remplit et circonscrit le lieu politique » des sociétés. par-delà les travaux qui cherchent à étudier l’enjeu dans ses composantes juridiques, qu’en est-il de la perception des acadiennes et des acadiens des différentes provinces, régions, classes sociales et époques sur cette question? quels arguments évoquent-ils pour justifier leur position vis-à-vis du bilinguisme et comment les expliquer ? Étudier l’agora, penser la cité notre plaidoyer pour une histoire incarnée de l’acadie se veut, en somme, en faveur de l’étude des acteurs et de leurs mouvements – de femmes, de jeunes, religieux, ouvriers, de gauche, de droite, etc. –, en cherchant notamment à contextualiser leurs actions et à en saisir les fondements idéologiques et axiologiques. il est pour nous question de mettre à l’avant-scène les personnes qui sont souvent dissimulées, englouties ou réduites à des questions statistiques ou structurelles dans les sociétés, institutions et associations au sein desquelles elles sont pourtant les architectes et animatrices. ce passage à l’agora, à l’étude des mobilisations dans l’espace public qui donnent sens à la collectivité acadienne, nous semble doublement à propos dans la conjoncture actuelle, non seulement pour répondre à des lacunes sur le plan des connaissances, mais aussi pour éclairer des enjeux contemporains. ne nous méprenons pas, l’histoire n’est pas une science morale et elle doit conserver une certaine autonomie pour poser un regard à froid sur ses objets suivant ses diktats historiographiques et épistémologiques. alors que nous sommes à l’heure des mouvements idle no more, #metoo, black lives matter et occupy, que le regroupement féministe du nouveau-brunswick fait la promotion de « l’analyse inclusive selon le genre » afin de progresser vers l’égalité des genres, que la fédération des jeunes francophones du nouveau-brunswick milite pour l’abaissement de l’âge du droit de vote à ans afin de soutenir l’engagement michel de certeau, dominique julia et jacques revel, une politique de la langue. la révolution française et les patois : l’enquête de grégoire, paris, gallimard, [ ], cité dans marcel martel et martin pâquet (dir.), légiférer en matière linguistique, québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . sur cet exemple précis des polémiques linguistiques en acadie, certains travaux menés par des sociolinguistes sur les « idéologies linguistiques » ont amorcé une partie du travail. voir, notamment, annette boudreau et Émilie urbain, « la presse comme tribune d’un discours d’autorité sur la langue : représentations et idéologies linguistiques dans la presse acadienne, de la fondation du moniteur acadien aux conventions nationales », francophonies d’amérique, no (printemps ), p. - ; laurence arrighi et Émilie urbain, « le bilinguisme officiel au nouveau-brunswick : surface paisible, fond polémique », transcanadiana : polish journal of canadian studies/revue polonaise d’études canadiennes, no ( ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action des jeunes dans l’espace public, que les autorités gouvernementales posent de sérieux défis eu égard au respect des « droits » des collectivités francophones, que nombre d’acadiennes et d’acadiens sont à décrier le manque de chefs de file et de projets prospectifs en acadie, il nous semble qu’une histoire des acteurs et des mouvements sociaux ne peut qu’intéresser, non pas pour offrir des leçons ou des modèles mais, à tout le moins, pour engager des réf lexions, susciter des questionnements et leur offrir un fond d’historicité. philippe volpÉ philippe volpÉ is a postdoctoral fellow at l’institut d’études acadiennes de l’université de moncton. his research in cultural and intellectual history focuses on social movements, youth, and social and ideological transformations in acadie. he is the co-author, with julien massicotte, of au temps de la « révolution acadienne » : les marxistes-léninistes en acadie (ottawa: presses de l’université d’ottawa, ). philippe volpÉ est chercheur postdoctoral à l’institut d’études acadiennes de l’université de moncton. ses travaux en histoire culturelle et intellectuelle portent notamment sur l’histoire des mouvements sociaux, de la jeunesse, et des changements sociaux et des transformations idéologiques en acadie. il est coauteur, avec julien massicotte, de l’ouvrage au temps de la « révolution acadienne » : les marxistes-léninistes en acadie (ottawa, presses de l’université d’ottawa, ). societÀmutamentopolitica ( ): - , issn - (online) | doi: . /smp- societàmutamentopolitica r i v i s t a i t a l i a n a d i s o c i o l o g i a citation: cosimo marco scarcelli ( ) un’intervista a karen ross: dodici domande su genere e partecipazione (ma non solo). societàmutamentopo- litica ( ): - . doi: . /smp- copyright: © cosimo marco scar- celli. this is an open access, peer- reviewed article published by firenze university press (http://www.fupress. com/smp) and distributed under the terms of the creative commons attri- bution license, which permits unre- stricted use, distribution, and reproduc- tion in any medium, provided the origi- nal author and source are credited. data availability statement: all rel- evant data are within the paper and its supporting information files. competing interests: the author(s) declare(s) no conflict of interest. l’intervista un’intervista a karen ross: dodici domande su genere e partecipazione (ma non solo) a cura di cosimo marco scarcelli karen ross è professoressa di gender e media presso la school of arts and cultures della newcastle university (uk). i suoi ambiti di ricerca si focalizzano soprattutto sul- la relazione tra genere, media e società con un’attenzione particolare ai social media e alla comunicazione politica. studiosa appassionata e sempre attiva, karen ha scritto saggi fondamentali riguardo ai temi in questione; è d’obbligo ricordare gender, politics and news: a game of three sides  ( , wiley blackwell), la curatele gender equali- ty and the media. a challenge for europe ( , routledge; con claudia padovani) e a handbook of gender, sex and media ( , wiley blackwell) e il suo lavoro come principal editor: the international encyclopaedia of gender, media and communication  (wiley, ). tra gli articoli più recenti si segnalano: facing up to facebook: politi- cians, publics and the social media(ted) turn in new zealand ( , in «media, culture & society» con fountaine s. e comrie m.); scaling social movements through social media: the case of black lives matter ( , in «social media + society», con mundt m., burnett c.m.) e women, men and news: it’s life, jim, but not as we know it ( , in «journalism studies»; con boyle k., carter c., ging d.). karen è stata lead rese- archer per il progetto agemi (advancing gender equality in the media), dal al . È stata responsabile dell’european institute for gender equality (eige) dal al . È stata anche coordinatrice per uk e per l’europa del global media monito- ring project. a cura di cosimo marco scarcelli d. karen, intanto grazie mille per aver accettato di rispondere alle mie domande e per il contributo che potrai dare a questa special issue di «societàmutamentopoliti- ca» che si concentra su genere e partecipazione. sei una delle più importanti studiose nel campo di gender & media e lavori da molto tempo su diversi argomenti in questo settore. cosa ti ha spinto a iniziare a concentrarti su questi specifici temi? r. all’inizio degli anni novanta, mi sono candida- ta alle elezioni del consiglio comunale e, grazie a questa esperienza, mi sono improvvisamente resa conto che i media inquadravano le donne che lavoravano in politica in modi molto diversi dagli uomini. dopo l’elezione (che ho vinto!), ho deciso di spostare i miei interessi di ricer- ca dalle tematiche relative alle rappresentazioni etniche, a qualcosa che mettesse al centro le donne, impegnate in politica, ma non solo, considerandole come oggetto e soggetto dei discorsi creati nella cronaca. nel corso del tempo questo interesse si è espanso fino a includere il mio interesse attuale: i social media e il loro utilizzo da parte delle donne in politica. ma non mi occupo soltanto di questo, per esempio, sto anche lavorando con una collega statunitense a un progetto nel quale stiamo esaminando in che modo i mezzi di infor- mazione in tre paesi (stati uniti, finlandia, regno uni- to) inquadrano l’esperienza della violenza da parte del partner. d. dal tuo, speciale, punto di vista cosa significa lavorare oggi sul rapporto tra genere e media e come è cambiato questo tipo di ricerca negli ultimi anni? r. ho lavorato in questo campo di studi per quasi tre decenni e posso affermare che capire il modo in cui i media inquadrano le donne è fondamentale ora, così come lo è sempre stato. se prendiamo in considerazione le notizie, possiamo affermare che il discorso è decisamente cambiato in que- sto periodo e che gli esempi di rapporti sessisti espliciti sono sempre meno. ciò non toglie, però, che continuia- mo ad assistere ad una banalizzazione delle donne attra- verso le più disparate modalità e che ci sia un’articola- zione del discorso molto dissimile se si ha a che fare con gli uomini o con le donne. la svolta politica alla quale stiamo assistendo in tutta europa e a livello globale, che evidenzia una certa tendenza verso destra, è accompagnata da una reazione avversa al progresso della condizione femminile. non solo, c’è il pericolo di un possibile ribaltamento dei dirit- ti per i quali le donne (e gli uomini) si sono battuti per molti anni, pensiamo, ad esempio, al diritto a un aborto sicuro. queste tendenze politiche retrograde non hanno risparmiato l’accademia. in alcuni paesi, come l’un- gheria, è stato vietato l’insegnamento delle discipline che stanno sotto al termine ombrello women studies. accadimenti del genere ci dimostrano la minaccia che le analisi femministe e di genere possono rappresentare per alcune società e le loro istituzioni. e i media? i media rappresentano delle istituzioni molto importanti. un altro cambiamento all’interno del campo di stu- di è quello relativo all’oggetto di ricerca, un mutamento spinto dall’esplosione dei media digitali e in particolare dei social media. assistiamo, in altri termini, a un cre- scente interesse al modo in cui le disuguaglianze pre- senti nella società, così come vengono rappresentate dai media tradizionali, vengono sfidate (o, potrei dire, sem- plicemente replicate) dalle tecnologie digitali. gran par- te del lavoro contemporaneo su genere e media, incluso il mio, si concentra ora su piattaforme come instagram, facebook e twitter. in breve, si può osservare che la promessa della tecnologia come forza emancipatrice per le donne si è dimostrata in realtà un’arma a doppio taglio. da un lato, alcune piattaforme consentono alle donne di avere una voce e di parlare con chiunque voglia ascoltarle senza essere filtrate dai media mainstream, dall’altro, quelle stesse piattaforme stanno consentendo una proliferazio- ne di abusi, specialmente contro le donne. d. pensi che gli studi su genere e comunicazione rap- presentino oggi un campo di ricerca riconosciuto nel mon- do accademico? r. dipende… come ho accennato in precedenza, anche se nella maggior parte dei paesi è possibile tro- vare corsi di insegnamento dedicati a genere e media e talvolta perfino interi corsi di laurea ad hoc, in alcuni paesi questi studi sono sotto attacco. la partita si gioca su un campo più politico che pedagogico, come se l’in- segnamento potesse essere considerato come un mero argomento accademico separato dai mondi reali in cui avviene la pratica politica; come se la politica non fosse personale o non fosse pedagogica. d. in termini generali, qual è – a tuo parere – la con- nessione tra il ruolo dei media, il genere e la partecipazio- ne nella società contemporanea? r. un modo ovvio in cui i media digitali hanno stimolato il coinvolgimento delle donne (e degli uomi- un’intervista a karen ross: dodici domande su genere e partecipazione (ma non solo) ni) nella società è evidenziato dalle modalità in cui le piattaforme digitali come twitter, facebook e whatsapp vengono utilizzate sui dispositivi mobili come meccani- smi per riunire le persone per protestare in modo rea- le e su strade reali; come testimoniano i (letteralmente) milioni di donne in tutto il mondo che hanno partecipa- to a manifestazioni e proteste contro il presidente trump nei giorni successivi al suo insediamento. un altro esempio evidente è l’attivismo femminista dell’hashtag #metoo e la creazione di spazi digitali per combattere il sessismo e consentire alle donne di riunirsi in comuni- tà di interesse che possono anche dare forma all’azione. infine, un altro aspetto interessante è quello legato allo sviluppo di e-business di proprietà delle donne, compre- se aziende focalizzate sui media e siti web femministi come jezebel. d. pensi che, in termini di media, genere e parteci- pazione, potrebbe esserci un ruolo specifico delle giovani generazioni, in particolare delle giovani donne? r. sì! le giovani donne sono “native digitali”, sono cresciute su instagram e non solo usano la tecnolo- gia esistente per fare campagne su temi particolari, ma stanno anche sviluppando i propri strumenti tecnologi- ci, imparando a programmare e gradualmente prenden- do piede all’interno di un’industria tecnologica ancora troppo maschile. d. concentrandoci sulla pandemia e su ciò che, a partire da gennaio , sta accadendo nel mondo, abbiamo visto che diversi leader mondiali hanno seguito varie strategie per combattere la diffusione del virus e per comunicare con i cittadini. pensi che il genere dei leader in questione abbia influito in qualche misura sulla loro comunicazione? r. sì, in una certa misura sì. ho anche scritto qual- cosa di recente su questo. farei in questo caso un esempio in particolare e cioè quello di jacinda ardern, una delle donne elogiate per la sua leadership durante la pandemia. ricordiamo che il suo successo non è dovuto solo al suo sesso, ma anche a ciò che è, a ciò in cui crede, ai suoi valori. basti pensa- re a margaret thatcher, imelda marcos o anche theresa may, per riconoscere che essere donna non è garanzia di efficacia, in una crisi globale o in qualsiasi altro momen- to storico. ciò che è interessante, e un po’ ironico in termini di discorso giornalistico, è che gli stessi identici trat- ti di leadership che vengono attribuiti a un leader poli- tico come jacinda ardern, come compassione, empatia, umiltà e ascolto attivo, sono stati convenzionalmente intesi come “femminili” e quindi incompatibili con una leadership propriamente detta (quella, per inteso, classi- camente collegata al così detto “uomo forte”). tuttavia, sembrerebbe che in una crisi globale siano invece carat- teristiche che rendono la leadership dav vero efficace. naturalmente, tali tratti non sono realmente connessi ad un solo genere. ma dobbiamo ricordare che, come la storia ci insegna, le donne non hanno praticamente mai avuto l’opportunità di diventare leader politici. anche ora, nel , ci sono solo capi di governo donne su nazioni che sono membri dell’unione interparla- mentare. d. rimaniamo ancora un attimo sull’attualità e sul- la politica e muoviamoci verso un altro grande tema degli ultimi giorni, le elezioni statunitensi e kamala harris come prima donna vicepresidente della storia americana. pensi che questo potrebbe rappresentare un cambiamento importante? r. sì, spero davvero che questo cambiamento rap- presenti un punto di svolta in termini di chi può essere considerato un politico efficace. È già chiaro dai recenti annunci di harris e biden che le donne giocheranno un ruolo significativo nella loro amministrazione. la prima nomina di harris è stata karine jean-pierre come suo nuovo capo di stato maggiore. jean-pierre è un’attivista accademica haitiana-americana, lesbica. lei è stata una figura chiave in tre campagne presidenziali, inclusa la storica vittoria di barack obama nel . inoltre, il novembre, joe biden ha messo, per la prima volta, delle donne a ricoprire ruoli senior nel cam- po della comunicazione. tuttavia, essere “solo” una donna, “solo” una don- na afro-indiana americana non conterà nulla se harris non userà la sua posizione per spingere sul cambiamen- to, non solo per ciò che concerne le donne, ma anche per quel che riguarda la promozione attiva di un programma di equità. d. vorrei ora parlare di uno dei tuoi ultimi lavori, the international encyclopaedia of gender, media and communication che hai recentemente curato per wiley. perché hai deciso di avviare un progetto così complesso e quale può essere oggi il ruolo di questa enciclopedia? r. ottima domanda! sono un membro dell’advisory board per la serie international encyclopaedia di wiley e alcuni anni fa, quando consideravo le nuove proposte sui differenti argomenti, ho chiesto perché nessuno si facesse avanti con una proposta riguardante il genere e i media. a cura di cosimo marco scarcelli a quel punto tutti hanno rivolto il loro sguardo verso di me e qualcuno ha detto “ottima idea, perché non lo fai?”. quindi, dopo un anno o due in cui ho pensato che fosse un progetto troppo articolato e, per questo, scoraggiante, mi sono detta “no, se qualcuno deve farlo, devo essere io”, così ho iniziato la mia avventura. ho avuto la grande fortuna di poter coinvolgere nel progetto un team di bril- lanti associate editor, tra cui il mio intervistatore, il mio buon amico cosimo marco scarcelli. questo gruppo ha reso il progetto più facile per me, ma poi devo ammette- re che la collaborazione ha anche portato a un risultato migliore di quello che avrei potuto ottenere da sola. sono immensamente orgogliosa di ciò che abbiamo ottenuto con l’enciclopedia e spero che si riveli una fonte utile per docenti, colleghi ricercatori e studenti. d. quali sono stati i momenti più difficili che hai affrontato in questo lavoro? qual è stata la soddisfazione più grande? r. forse la sfida più grande, come per qualsiasi acca- demico, è stata iniziare, ottenere il primo lavoro, pub- blicare il primo articolo. ma sono stata fortunata perché all’inizio c’era un mercato del lavoro abbastanza vivace, ci si poteva muovere con più facilità e non si avevano carichi di insegnamento pesanti nei primi anni. que- sto mi ha permesso di strutturare bene il mio curricu- lum sin dall’inizio. un’opzione, bisogna dirlo, che non è disponibile per la maggior parte dei giovani studiosi che iniziano ora e che devono affrontare una situazione lavo- rativa molto più complicata. immagino che la mia più grande soddisfazione professionale sia stata ottenere una cattedra. però devo dire anche che ogni dottorando che vedo completare il suo percorso formativo per me rappresenta una meravi- gliosa soddisfazione. so bene che ciascuno di loro si sta lanciando verso un futuro incerto e precario. ma sono sicura che, grazie alla loro tenacia e alla loro bravura, sopravviveranno. d. so che sei una studiosa molto attiva e quindi immagino che tu abbia un nuovo progetto nel cassetto... vuoi parlarci di qualcosa in particolare? r. ho molti progetti in corso in questo momento, ciascuno con obiettivi e stadi di avanzamento differen- ti. sono il coordinatore britannico ed europeo del global media monitoring project e presto esaminerò i dati che abbiamo raccolto nell’ultimo periodo di monitoraggio per iniziare a ragionarci e scrivere a riguardo. sto anche lavorando con due colleghi in nuova zelanda a un progetto incentrato sulle elezioni neozelan- desi di ottobre e sui post di facebook dei due prin- cipali leader del partito, jacinda ardern e judith collins. poi…ho una collaborazione con una collega statu- nitense sulla rappresentazione delle notizie sulla violen- za di genere. infine, sto lavorando con i colleghi del mio dipartimento, a un progetto su piccola scala che coinvol- ge i residenti in due case di cura locali per supportarli nelle riprese del loro “corona winter”: produrremo un cortometraggio con le riprese che hanno fatto, con l’o- biettivo di mostrare la resilienza, l’umorismo e la creati- vità delle persone anziane che vivono in strutture di case di cura, come correttivo all’insistenza dei media sul fatto che le case di cura sono i luoghi dove vai a morire. d. un’ultima domanda, quali sono i tuoi consigli per un giovane studioso che vuole iniziare a lavorare in que- sto specifico campo? r. innanzitutto le/gli direi: assicurati di volere dav- vero intraprendere la carriera accademica. se è quello che vuoi, preparati a essere flessibile. il tuo primo lavo- ro potrebbe non essere davvero quello a cui aspiravi: il settore specifico potrebbe non essere il tuo preferito e il contratto durare solo per un periodo breve, potrebbe richiedere molte ore di insegnamento, magari di argo- menti con cui non hai una grande familiarità. ma pren- dilo! devi prima mettere il piede nella porta e accumu- lare esperienza. trova altri studiosi che ammiri e rispet- ti e chiedi se puoi fare due chiacchiere con loro. fai in modo che alcuni colleghi intorno a te ti nutrano intellet- tualmente e ti sostengano. fai attività volontarie, come organizzare panel di conferenze e rivedere articoli e pro- posal. sii audace! invia e-mail alle riviste nelle quali vor- resti pubblicare un giorno e offriti volontario per scrive- re la recensione di un libro. renditi visibile. ma attenzio- ne...sii gentile con te stesso, coltiva sempre l’amore per i tuoi amici e la tua famiglia. e ricordati di assaporare ogni istante della tua vita. (traduzione di cosimo marco scarcelli) 	sulle tracce della partecipazione 	simona gozzo, elisa lombardo, rossana sampugnaro 	quale genere di astensionismo? la partecipazione elettorale delle donne in italia nel periodo - 	dario tuorto, laura sartori 	partecipazione e genere in europa: una questione di contesto? 	simona gozzo 	partiti populisti, diritti e uguaglianza di genere 	marilena macaluso 	il collo di bottiglia della rappresentanza di genere. le elette nel parlamento italiano nel nuovo millennio ( - ) 	rossana sampugnaro 	che genere di diritto? il controverso rapporto tra movimenti delle donne e trasformazioni dell’ordinamento giuridico 	delia la rocca 	meccanismi di riproduzione del gender gap nella sfera politica e nei media 	marinella belluati 	the ties that fight. il potere integrativo delle reti online femministe 	elena pavan 	sharing a meme! questioni di genere tra stereotipi e détournement 	roberta bracciale 	quando gli adulti negano agency sessuale e partecipazione alle ragazze e ai ragazzi. adolescenti, sexting e intimate citizenship 	cosimo marco scarcelli 	il corpo desiderato: differenze di genere 	maria fobert veutro 	lavoro gratuito e disuguaglianze di genere 	rita palidda 	le politiche di genere tra «ridistribuzione» e «riconoscimento». un percorso di lettura 	franca bonichi 	oltre le specificità di genere. cura e diritti nella prospettiva relazionale di amartya sen e martha nussbaum 	valentina erasmo 	prostituzione e sfruttamento tra vulnerabilità, familismo e segregazione sociale: il caso delle donne rom 	emiliana baldoni 	dentro i confini simbolici del gender order nel volontariato: pratiche e narrazioni della partecipazione delle donne 	stella milani 	il ruolo delle donne nell’accoglienza e nell’inclusione dei migranti. tratteggi di un’agency al femminile 	ignazia batholini 	un’intervista a karen ross: dodici domande su genere e partecipazione (ma non solo) 	a cura di cosimo marco scarcelli 	la mia amica vittoria 	giuseppe vecchio 	le trame della ricerca sociologica: ritratto di vittoria cuturi 	rossana sampugnaro 	leadership e gestione della complessità* 	vittoria cuturi 	una questione complessa 	simona gozzo 	complessità politica e complessità sociale (ma non solo) 	gianfranco bettin lattes 	l’intuito di vittoria cuturi 	roberto segatori 	una lezione di metodo 	rossana sampugnaro 	il leader minimo 	andrea pirni 	leadership e democrazia: il contributo di vittoria cuturi alla sociologia politica 	lorenzo viviani 	complessità e leadership 	antonio costabile 	leadership e radici sociali del potere legittimo 	pietro fantozzi 	ripensare le politiche di salute nell’era neoliberista. welfare mix e sofferenza psichica. quali spazi d’intervento per la società civile? 	antonella cammarota, valentina raffa* 	the european elections on twitter between populism, euroscepticism and nationalism: the case of italy 	carlo berti, enzo loner* 	storie di ordinaria radicalizzazione: fattori causali e trigger events nelle narrazioni inconsapevoli dei giovani italiani di seconda generazione 	gaia peruzzi, giuseppe anzera, alessandra massa 	nota introduttiva 	lorenzo viviani 	forme del ‘collettivo’ ai tempi del corona virus 	franca bonichi 	vecchie e nuove rimozioni: rileggendo la solitudine del morente di elias alla luce della pandemia 	andrea valzania 	un teorema (quasi) perfetto il libro di giulio moini, neoliberismo, mondadori, milano, 	roberto segatori 	appendice bio-bibliografica sugli autori medical education too: sexual harassment within the educational context of medicine – insights of undergraduates research article open access medical education too: sexual harassment within the educational context of medicine – insights of undergraduates eva schoenefeld * , bernhard marschall , berit paul , helmut ahrens , janina sensmeier , jan coles and bettina pfleiderer abstract background: assessment of the presence and characteristics of sexual harassment in academic medicine is a global issue. only limited international data are available so far. methods: aim: to assess the extent of sexual harassment and identify the perpetrators in the student population of the medical school of münster, germany. a survey was undertaken, using the medical women’s international association sexual harassment questionnaire translated into german. the anonymous online questionnaire was sent as a link to all medical undergraduates at münster medical school via a mailing list between october and november . identifying or potentially identifying data were not collected. data were analysed by descriptive statistical methods such as categorical variables. baseline characteristics, e.g. answers by male or female medical students, were correlated with their individual sexual harassment experiences and perpetrator groups by means of univariate analysis. results: a total of medical students were asked to participate, with ( . %) completing the survey. sexual harassment is a significant issue among medical students at münster medical school with over half ( . %) of all undergraduates being exposed to sexually harassing behaviour. in total, . % of all participants reported having experienced unwanted physical sexual contact such as unwanted physical touching, with . % of the victims being female. overall, . % personally experienced verbal sexual harassment of which . % were female. furthermore, . % of undergraduates faced forced sexual contact such as oral, anal or vaginal penetration, intercourse and rape, with all victims being female. perpetrators in these cases were mostly male medical superiors ( . %) and male patients ( . %). in general, most perpetrators were patients, followed by medical superiors and educators, and less frequently by colleagues. conclusions: sexual harassment in medical education and the medical workplace is a significant problem in a german medical school. most students experiencing sexual harassment are females. female students also experience the more serious forms of sexual harassment more often. keywords: sexual harassment, gender inequalities, discrimination, undergraduate education © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: eva.schoenefeld@ukmuenster.de institute of medical education and students’ affairs, medical faculty, westfalian wilhelm university of münster, malmedyweg - , münster, germany full list of author information is available at the end of the article schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -y&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:eva.schoenefeld@ukmuenster.de background this study investigates the prevalence of sexual harass- ment among undergraduate medical students in a german medical school. the world health organization (who) definition of sexual harassment was used, namely that ‘sexual harassment means any unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours, or other verbal or physical con- duct of a sexual nature, when it interferes with work, is made a condition of employment, or creates an intimidat- ing, hostile or offensive work environment’ [ ]. sexual harassment results in physical and psycho- logical suffering [ – ] such as depression, social isola- tion, fear and associated cardiovascular symptoms. four out of ten female physicians from the uk reported simi- lar findings [ , ] and physicians at the charité in berlin (germany) further corroborated this [ ]. moreover, when sexual harassment occurred, it was often not re- ported [ , ]. the goal of our study was to determine the occurence sexual harassment in undergraduates at the medical school in münster, germany, where – % of medical students are female. münster medical school is one of the largest in germany. confronting individual stories of sexual harassment in münster medical school was the driver for this study. a questionnaire on this topic was conducted among medical undergraduates to better de- scribe the problem with baseline data to assist and in- form future educational practice and policy. methods a validated sexual harassment questionnaire in the med- ical working environment is not available in german speaking countries. we translated an international ques- tionnaire from the medical women’s medical association (mwia) into german (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ regdata/etudes/stud/ / /ipol_stu( ) _en.pdf). the mwia drafted the questionnaire for their own global survey in . the original english ver- sion of the survey can be found in the supplementary ma- terial. the mwia study and questionnaire used was approved by the monash university human research eth- ics committee, melbourne, australia (project id ) and was designed by an international team of experts in medical education led by prof. jan coles. the german version of the questionnaire was anonymous and did not collect any identifying or potentially identifying personal data. for this reason, human research ethics committee approval was not required after discussion with the local ethics panel. the german questionnaire was distributed via a mailing list of all our medical students as a link. we started, after asking for gender affiliation, with definitions and legal as- pects concerning sexual harassment and bullying as well as equality under public law in germany. the definition of sexual harassment was in accordance with the who definition outlined in the section headed “background” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs- needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors- union/) [ – ]. we also applied definitions from the german penal code. the penal code in germany starts with an anti-discrimination statement [ ]: . prohibition of discrimination under civil law ( ) any discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnic origin, sex, religion, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be illegal when founding, executing or terminating civil-law obligations [ ], and further refers to employer and employee duties and rights. . penal law: enforcement ( ) where a breach of the prohibition of discrimination occurs, the disadvantaged person may, regardless of further claims being asserted, demand that the discriminatory conduct be stopped. where other discrimination is to be feared, he or she may sue for an injunction. ( ) where a violation of the prohibition of discrimination occurs, the person responsible for committing the discrimination shall be obligated to compensate for any damage arising therefrom. this shall not apply where the person committing the discrimination is not responsible for the breach of duty. the person suffering discrimination may demand appropriate compensation in money for the damage, however not for economic loss. ( ) claims in tort shall remain unaffected. ( ) the person responsible for committing the discrimination shall not be permitted to refer to an agreement which derogates from the prohibition of discrimination. ( ) any claims arising from subsections ( ) and ( ) must be asserted within a period of months. after the expiry of the time limit the claim may only be asserted when the disadvantaged person was prevented from meeting the deadline through no fault of their own.” a total of medical students, females, at the westfalian university of münster were asked to partici- pate deliberately and anonymously in the online survey between october and november . the survey was divided into two sections: one contained ten statements on general and individual ex- periences and different forms of sexual harassment, including verbal and sexual contact, and forced physical sexual contact. the second section detailed the frequen- cies of specific sexual harassment experiences and perpetrator groups. each part finished with a free text option on personal narratives, consequences and ideas schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/etudes/stud/ / /ipol_stu( ) _en.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/etudes/stud/ / /ipol_stu( ) _en.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/etudes/stud/ / /ipol_stu( ) _en.pdf https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ for intervention. inclusion criterion was completed data set. incompletely answered surveys were excluded. demographic data solely concerned gender affiliation. agreement or disagreement with ten different state- ments followed in part of the questionnaire. answers could be given with a five step likert scale. part : statements to (dis-)agree with included: ‘did you observe sexual harassment against males/females within your medical educational field?’ response options ranged from: i agree completely; i agree partially; i do not know; i disagree partially; and i disagree completely. statements in part contained: ‘have you ever felt that your job or your future job was dependent on you performing an unwanted sexual behaviour?’ they could choose between ‘never’ to ‘once’, ‘two to five times’ and ‘more than five times’. in part , questions concerning people who were responsible for sexual harassing actions including ‘man- ager or supervisors?’, ‘colleagues?’, ‘patients?’ or ‘other group of people’ were asked. a contingency plan was put in place to help survey re- spondents deal with the potential for emotional and/or psychological distress resulting from completing the sur- vey and reliving potentially traumatic experiences. the medical faculty in münster has a helpdesk for students and the leading psychologist, mrs. janina sensmeier, is a co-author of this manuscript. in addition, a special sup- port consultation was available in case of need as part of the study. statistical analysis continuous data are presented as the mean ± standard deviation (range) and categorical data are presented as the frequency (percentage). continuous data were analysed using the mann–whitney u test. paired con- tinuous data were compared using the wilcoxon signed rank test. proportions were compared using the chi- square or fisher-exact test, as appropriate and as neces- sary. examples of qualitative data are presented but the formal analysis of the free text is yet to be completed. data of partial and complete agreement were collapsed, as were partial and complete disagreements. results victims six hundred twenty-three ( . %) of the medical students answered the online questionnaire completely. four hundred sixty-seven ( . %) of them were female, ( . %) were male. none defined themselves as ‘diverse’. in germany, the category of gender affiliation ‘diverse’ means lesbian-gay-, bi-sexual and transgender or queer individuals (lgbtqs). eighty-nine surveys were excluded for being incomplete; of them ( . %) were from female participants. nearly a quarter ( . %) observed different forms of sexual harassment (table ). the same proportion ( . %) was aware that sexual harassment is present in medicine in general. when asked about personal experi- ences of sexual harassment, the percentage increased to . % of the responding. the key results are sum- marised in table . of note, those who experienced physical sexual harass- ment and/or forced sexual contact were all females. in the free text answers, further descriptions of physical sexual harassment such as ‘unwanted touch’ were found. physical assaults were ‘unambiguous’ for the female un- dergraduates, but they reported being unable to say ‘no’ or ‘stop’. perpetrators over % ( . %) of our students experienced inappro- priate sexual comments on their appearance, clothing, sexual orientation or behaviour. less frequently, offend- ing verbal assaults occurred electronically via email ( %) or short messaging ( . %). only . % experienced offending phone calls. in . % of cases, patients were involved, in nearly % educators/superiors ( . %) or colleagues ( . %) were involved (table ). analysis of the free texts showed that, in the case of patients acting as perpetrators, the majority were ‘over -year-old males’ asking for repetitive intimate examin- ation or exhibitionism ( . %). however, victims were not always sure this behaviour was inappropriate: ‘maybe he touched my breast accidentally’. free texts revealed mis- behaviour of a male surgeon and educator towards his female student trainees several times. he came ex- tremely close, so that the female trainees and students were caught between him and the or table. legally punishable acts according to the german penal code [ ]were reported in . % of cases in this survey with . % of the students willing to describe the assaults. enforced sexual intercourse was reported in eight ques- tionnaires ( . % of the collective) without free text input. the perpetrators which were reported were, in three cases, medical superiors ( . %) and educators ( . %), respectively and in one case, a male patient ( . %). ‘other’ perpetrators were not further specified in the free text section. discussion this survey shows that sexual harassment in medical education and the medical environment exists as an im- portant problem among undergraduate education at a large german medical school in münster. medical edu- cation contains clinical workplace-based teaching and assessment and simulation, skills training, and summa- tive and formative assessment settings where sexual har- assment may take place. those who reported having schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of personally experienced some form of sexual harassment ( . %) were mostly female ( . %), while perpetrators are mostly males ( . %) and also included patients ( . % for sexually harassing behaviour). we observed an increase when items and questions were repeated or triggered the individual perspective on that item. this is in accordance with findings of a large national survey on violence against women in germany in [ ]. our results in undergraduates corroborate similar findings concerning physicians from a german hospital in berlin, other european countries and the us [ , ] (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs- needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors- union/). the issue of sexual harassment in medicine is a long-standing problem, and the potential negative impact on a patient’s treatment and physician’s well-being is recognised [ , ]. american psychiatrists reported that women who experienced sexual harassment struggle in isolation in their working environment and were not able to achieve their potential in their career and research fields [ ]. in those women with trauma symptoms, only – % had filed a formal complaint; possibly due to a lack of role models or anticipated lack of success. the symptoms caused by the sexual harassment were stress, depression, obesity, chronic illness, an increased absence from the workplace and even cardiovascular diseases. fifty per cent were bullied by a colleague, % by a patient. fort per cent experienced sexual harassment by superiors in ireland. our results are further supported by a position paper of the irish medical organisation (imo) (https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo- moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/). they also asked for experiences and differentiated female and male responses: . % suffered from gender-based table various forms of sexual harassment reported from undergraduates stratified by sex of our münster medical school statements answers of (partial) agreement (n) females (partial) agreement (n%) males (partial) agreement (n%) observed sexual harassment in the medical field in general . . observed sexual harassment at the educational settinga . . personally experienced sexual harassment . . job and career advancement was coupled with behaving in the desired way e.g. wearing clothes with deep neckline . . physical sexual harassment, e.g. unwanted touching . . verbal sexual harassment, e.g. sexualized comments, jokes . . comments on sexual orientation . . unnecessary intimate examinations . . forced sexual contact forced sexual intercourse aeducational setting encompasses the non-clinical setting in seminars and simulation-based assessments and trainings, as well bed-side teaching at muenster medical school explanation: data of disagreement and “i do not know” are not shown table total percentage and percentage of different forms of experienced sexual harassment and statement results stratified by sex key results totala femaleb maleb reported personally experienced verbal sexual harassment . . . reported personally experienced physical sexual harassment . . . reported personally experienced forced sexual contact/intercourse . . . statement : our undergraduates are aware of sexual harassment within the medical field. . . . statement : our female students have personally experienced sexual harassment in general. . . . statement : physical sexual harassment and forced sexual contact is experienced by our female students. . . . perpetrator groups as mentioned by students in the survey and sex of victims of sexual harassment stratified by patients . . . superiors . . . arelated to the total number of respondents (n = ) brelated to the total number of those who have personally experienced either verbal, physical or forced sexual contact the first three items present prevalence of personally experienced forms of harassment, while the statements combined several responses to one item schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /nhs-needs-metoo-moment-stamp-sexual-harassment-doctors-union/ harassment in the last years ( . % were females and . % were males). sexual harassment occurred in . % within the last years. they found that discrimination and sexual harassment influenced specialty choice. sur- gery was the only specialty in this study where the respon- dents felt that gender had career implications. concerning the perpetrator groups, irish doctors showed a different impact. fifty per cent of the females were bullied by col- leagues; % by patients and less by superiors. our data also indicate that the more severe forms of sexual harassment such as unwanted physical contact and forced physical contact have patients as the main perpetrator, while sexual assault has superiors and educators as the main perpetrators. this suggests that different strategies for education may be needed targeting patients, staff and supervisors and not limited to students. to the best of our knowledge no other study concern- ing undergraduates has been published so far in germany [ , ]. our data clearly demonstrate that the problem exists from early on; starting at undergraduate level and is not confined to those working as physicians. this problem exists not only in germany but globally and warrants a raised awareness, reaction and reflection on this challenging issue to better support and educate undergraduates. it may be assumed that, following sex- ual harassment, undergraduates will suffer similar symp- toms as reported by physicians [ , , ]. moreover, we believe that the incidence of sexual harassment is under- reported and that measures must be put in place to interrupt the vicious cycle of silence. interventions, pol- icies and recommendations must be put in place to instil sustainable change. this study highlights that sexual harassment is an issue at our faculty, but the main limitation of this trial may be some pressure of time in achieving awareness. we omitted conducting a pilot test of the questionnaire; especially concerning its translation. another limitation that may cause bias is the rela- tively low response rate of . %. at münster medical school, as a consequence of our findings, an independent voluntary task force of important stakeholders at the medical faculty was formed. main and consensus goals of the task force were based on the outcomes of this survey among undergraduates and in accordance with the three key recommendations of the irish position paper [ ]. after the identification of the extent, a first meeting with managers of all levels had already been con- ducted and next measures discussed. we plan training related to sexual harassment on all levels, including physicians as well as students and nursing staff. com- munication and reflection on sexual harassment will increase an awareness campaign as started by our task force. awareness of sexual harassment and its preven- tion will be emphasised as a part of the development of professional behaviours among our medical stu- dents. we are their role models as medical educators and supervisors, and we must work towards eliminat- ing sexual harassment amongst our students by awareness, reflection and communication. conclusion sexual harassment is an issue within our local medical educational settings due to a lack of awareness, reflec- tion and communication. it is an interprofessional chal- lenge, and female students experience most assaults. our task is to take care and create transparency and eliminate sexual harassment. table distribution and percentages of perpetrators of different forms of sexual harassment forms of sexual harassment group of responsible perpetrators answers from female medical studentsa n (%) answers from male medical studentsa n (%) overall answers “yes”b n (%) verbal sexual harassment superiors, educators ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) patients ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) colleagues ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) physical sexual harassment superiors, educators ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) patients ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) colleagues ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) forced sexual contact superiors, educators ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) patients ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) colleagues ( ) ( ) ( . ) arelated to the total number of those who had experienced a particular form of sexual harassment brelated to the total number of respondents (n = ) explanation: data “no assault or contact” and “i do not know” are not shown schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of supplementary information the online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi. org/ . /s - - -y. additional file . mwia sexual harassment survey. ifas fragebogen zu sexismus und sexueller belästigung. acknowledgments none. authors’ contributions all authors have read and approved the revised manuscript. concept and design: es, bm, bpf. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: es, ha, bp, js. drafting of the manuscript: es, bpf, jc. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: es, bpf, ha, js, bp, jc, bm. statistical analysis: es, bpf. administrative, technical, or material support: ha, js, es. supervision: es, bpf, bm. authors’ information no other disclosures and no previous presentations. funding open access funding enabled and organized by projekt deal. availability of data and materials the datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to anonymous request of the survey and deliberate participation but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. ethics approval and consent to participate applicable. the mwia study and questionnaire was ethically approved by the monash university australia (project id ) and was designed by an international team on experts in medical education led by prof. jan coles. re-approval at the local ethics committee was deemed to be not necessary as participation was anonymous and deliberate. the communication with our local ethics committee is attached. if personal data are collected, which was not the case in our study, aggregated data analysis of students’ questionnaires, educational evaluations, performances, videos and assessments are based on a general written consent at our medical faculty. the decision of the ethics committee was published: hertel-waszak, a., brouwer, b., schönefeld, e., ahrens, h., hertel, g., marschall, b.( ). medical doctors’ job specification analysis: a qualitative inquiry. gms j med educ, ( ):doc .doi:https://doi.org/ . / zma ,urn:urn:nbn:de: -zma . consent for publication all authors (es, bpf, jc, bm, bp, ha, js) have read and approved the manuscript. the views expressed in the submitted article are our own and not an official position of the involved institutions. competing interests there is no conflict of interest. author details institute of medical education and students’ affairs, medical faculty, westfalian wilhelm university of münster, malmedyweg - , münster, germany. münster medical students, westfalian wilhelm university of münster, münster, germany. women’s health mmed women’s health, mbbs dch gchpe, monash centre for scholarship in health education, faculty of medicine, nursing and health sciences, monash university, clayton, victoria, australia. institute for clinical radiology, medical faculty, westfalian wilhelm university of münster, medical women’s international association, münster, germany. received: april accepted: january references . who definition on gender harassment: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ osagi/pdf/who.pdf . pinholster g. national survey conducted by aaas and science confirms continuing obstacles to women in science: american association for the advancement of science; . https://www.aaas.org/news/national-survey- 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( ) lebenssituation, sicherheit und gesundheit von frauen in deutschland. . https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/index.html#gl_p : german penal code: § - j stgb: https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ . html versus https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html or https://dejure.org/ gesetze/stgb/ .html publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. schoenefeld et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /zma ,urn:urn:nbn:de: -zma https://doi.org/ . /zma ,urn:urn:nbn:de: -zma http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/who.pdf http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/who.pdf https://www.aaas.org/news/national-survey-conducted-aaas-and-science-confirms-continuing-obstacles-women-science https://www.aaas.org/news/national-survey-conducted-aaas-and-science-confirms-continuing-obstacles-women-science https://doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . https://doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . https://www.imo.ie https://metoomvmt.org https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/index.html#gl_p : https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html https://dejure.org/gesetze/stgb/ .html 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	methods 	statistical analysis 	results 	victims 	perpetrators 	discussion 	conclusion 	supplementary information 	acknowledgments 	authors’ contributions 	authors’ information 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note $ € £ ¥ social sciences review one step forward, two steps back: the struggle for child protection in canadian sport gretchen kerr *, bruce kidd and peter donnelly faculty of kinesiology and physical education, university of toronto, toronto, on m s w , canada; bruce.kidd@utoronto.ca (b.k.); peter.donnelly@utoronto.ca (p.d.) * correspondence: gretchen.kerr@utoronto.ca received: april ; accepted: april ; published: may ���������� ������� abstract: millions of children and adolescents around the world participate in organized sport for holistic health and developmental benefits. however, for some, sport participation is characterized by experiences of maltreatment, including forms of abuse and neglect. in canada, efforts to address and prevent maltreatment in sport have been characterized by recurring cycles of crisis, public attention, policy response, sluggish implementation, and active resistance, with very little observable change. these cycles continue to this day. achieving progress in child protection in canadian sport has been hindered by the self-regulating nature of sport, funding models that prioritize performance outcomes, structures that deter athletes from reporting experiences of maltreatment, and inadequate attention to athletes’ recommendations and preventative initiatives. the culture of control that characterizes organized sport underpins these challenges to advancing child protection in sport. we propose that the establishment of a national independent body to provide safeguards against maltreatment in canadian sport and to address this culture of control. keywords: sport; child; athlete; protection; canadian; safe sport . introduction concerns about the safety of young athletes in sport are as old as modern sports themselves. in the early th century, as teachers, social reformers, and players transformed the rough and ready games of the late medieval period into the rule-bound sports we know today, they sought to reduce the amount of unnecessary violence and injury, as well as to introduce the concept and rules of fairness to ensure that all participants could benefit from the experience (elias ; mangan ). with the rapid growth of youth sport in post-ww canada, efforts to make sport safer intensified. we have seen concerted campaigns to prohibit fighting and other forms of violence in hockey, eliminate boxing from schools and universities, teach coaches about injury prevention and fair play, discourage early specialization, mandate protective equipment, establish post-concussion return-to-play guidelines, outlaw doping, and recognize children’s rights. however, none of these efforts has enjoyed complete success. when information about the injury or abuse of a young athlete is publicized, it results in an immediate flurry of media attention and public outrage. sport organizations respond with changes to policies and practices, but attention often wanes; eventually, so does adherence to the new practices and policy changes, at least until the next case emerges. for decades, the canadian sport landscape has been characterized by these recurring cycles of crisis, policy response, lethargic implementation, and resistance, with very little ultimate change. they continue to this day. until the past three years, there has never been a concerted effort to combat the full spectrum of maltreatment in canadian sport—the subject of this paper. here, we review the cycles of concern, response, and indifference that have characterized the struggle for the protection of young athletes in the canadian sport system from physical, psychological and sexual abuse, and neglect. we argue that soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= soc. sci. , , of one major obstacle to reform is the concerted attempt by some leaders in sport to resist independent oversight in favour of self-regulation. we also suggest that the funding model for sport has been a contributing factor to maltreatment, and we highlight the struggles by canadian athletes to have their experiences and recommendations included in the policies that affect them. . the canadian context in the olympic sector, canadian sport is directed, financed, and monitored by sport canada, a federal agency with legislative authority from the physical activity and sport act (government of canada ). the mission of sport canada is to enhance opportunities for all canadians to participate in and excel at sport. sport canada supports the national sport organizations (nsos) and multi-sport organizations (msos, e.g., canadian olympic committee, canadian paralympic committee), provides financial assistance to high-performance athletes, and helps canadian organizations to host sport events that create opportunities for canadian athletes to compete at the national and international levels (government of canada n.d.). the physical activity and sport act states that: “the government of canada’s policy regarding sport is founded on the highest ethical standards and values, including doping-free sport, the treatment of all persons with fairness and respect, the full and fair participation of all persons in sport, and the fair, equitable, transparent and timely resolution of disputes.” sport canada policies and programs are coordinated with those of the provincial and territorial governments through the canadian sport policy, an agreement between federal, provincial, and territorial governments. the provincial and territorial governments support provincial and territorial sports organizations in much the same way sport canada supports the national bodies. in response to the public concern expressed during previous crises, sport canada has created or assisted the development of a number of new organizations for the purpose of protecting and strengthening the values and fairness of canadian sport. these include the coaching association of canada (established in ), canadian women and sport (formerly the canadian association for the advancement of women and sport or caaws, ), the canadian centre for ethics in sports (established in ), and the sport dispute resolution centre of canada (established in ). athletes’ struggles to have representation on decision-making bodies in canadian sport resulted in the establishment of the canadian athletes association, which later changed its name to athletescan. athletescan is an independent association of national team athletes that seeks to provide a collective athlete voice in major decision-making and to bring about an athlete centred sport system (https://athletescan.com/en/about). the masculinist, capitalist, continentalist sports sector (e.g., national hockey league, national basketball association, major league baseball, and canadian football league) operates outside this framework. with respect to child protection, sport is the only child-populated domain in canada that is completely autonomous and self-regulating. unlike other domains in which children engage, such as day care and educational settings, sport lacks a regulatory body to oversee the health and well-being of children, which ensures persons in positions of authority and trust over young people are sufficiently trained and adhere to scope of practice, and apply sanctions to those who violate codes of conduct. instead, sport organizations regulate themselves. . a note about terminology the first policies developed to address the maltreatment of athletes focused exclusively on sexual maltreatment using the terms ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘sexual abuse,’ which were often used interchangeably. many researchers have conceptualized harassment and abuse as existing on a continuum of harmful behaviours, with harassment referring to what may be considered less severe behaviours such as sexist comments or remarks and abuse used for more severe behaviours such as sexual assault (brackenridge ). in practice however, distinguishing harassment and abuse on the https://athletescan.com/en/about soc. sci. , , of basis of severity is very difficult. for example, when does harassing behaviour become abusive? do less severe harassing behaviours become abusive if cumulative or repeated over time? how do we account for individuals’ interpretations of severity? furthermore, researchers and athletes have advocated for a perspective on harassment and abuse that extends beyond sexual misconduct to include other forms of harmful experiences such as psychological misconduct, physical misconduct, and neglect (crooks and wolfe ; miller-perrin and perrin ). canada has responded to these calls by using the term ‘maltreatment.’ maltreatment has been defined by the world health organization ( ) as “( . . . ) the abuse and neglect that occurs to children under years of age. it includes all types of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence, and commercial or other exploitation which results in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development, or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power.” in this way, maltreatment is an all-encompassing term that includes sexual, physical, and psychological abuse; neglect; bullying; harassment; and discrimination. safe sport is a term that has recently emerged to encompass approaches aimed at promoting the holistic health and well-being of sport participants. though a consensus on a universal definition is lacking, safe sport is typically used to refer to the prevention of harassment and abuse, as well as the promotion of the physical and psychological welfare of athletes (e.g., https://www.olympic.org/ athlete /library/safe-sport/). the u.s. center for safe sport describes safe sport as “safeguard[ing] athletes from bullying, harassment, hazing, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct.” this term is also used in canada despite of the absence of a generally agreed upon definition. . theorizing safe sport in theoretical terms, it is important to understand two related themes: the characteristics that render sport unsafe in terms of athlete maltreatment and the characteristics that sport shares with other institutions where child maltreatment has been found. as bruyninckx ( ) pointed out, “sports ( . . . ) take place in a sort of separate [autonomous] sphere, detached from normal rules and regulations in society.” organizations at all levels of sport, from the international to the local, professional and non-professional, have consistently asserted their autonomy, a right of self-governance and exemption from oversight by governments and judiciaries. gruneau ( ) argued that the claim to autonomy in sports emerged alongside similar claims in the visual arts in the midst of the turbulent class and ideological conflicts of th century britain. they are thus historically contingent and open to change. nevertheless, despite the intervening transformations to sports, especially the worldwide assumption by publicly accountable governments for their financing at the highest levels of performance, sports bodies continue to assert their claims to autonomy. such claims increase the risk of maltreatment to the athletes involved. several researchers (e.g., donnelly and young ; atkinson and young ) have described organized sport as sharing many characteristics with total institutions (goffman ) and greedy institutions (coser ) with their implicit and explicit cultures of control (donnelly and young ; garland ). the culture of control exists mainly in prolympic sports, high performance and professional sports, but it also exists in the youth/developmental levels of many sports (donnelly ). prolympic sports are defined by: an increasing emphasis on outcome (success, victory, excellence, etc.), an increasing emphasis on control (grounded in the paternal notion that athletes would not be as committed to outcomes without some external controls), and a decreasing ability on the part of athletes to determine the form, circumstances, and meanings of their participation. control has become a central organizing principle for prolympic sports and provides a context in which sports-related violence (young ) and the threat of violence may come to be approved, youth/developmental levels of sport are frequently linked to prolympic sport by means of the widely-used long-term athlete development system. available online: https://sportforlife.ca/long-term-development/ (accessed on april ). https://www.olympic.org/athlete /library/safe-sport/ https://www.olympic.org/athlete /library/safe-sport/ https://sportforlife.ca/long-term-development/ soc. sci. , , of normalized, routine, and/or rewarded. this is not to argue that the culture of control causes sports-related violence; rather, certain forms of violence are employed to maintain the culture of control, and, in turn, the culture of control creates a climate in which certain forms of violence are facilitated, expected, and accepted. thus, the outcomes of power relations in this culture of control are sometimes violent, abusive, exploitive, and otherwise dehumanizing. in the culture of control of modern prolympic sports, sports-related violence and the threat of sports-related violence is routine. it includes various forms of self-abuse, as well as abuse imposed by authority figures (psychological, physical, occasionally sexual) that is disturbingly out of step with most modern western educational and work places (e.g., worker and student rights, workplace health and safety regulations, principles of due process). control is justified in various ways. for example, there is a paternalistic aspect of control (e.g., athletes cannot be trusted, so control stands in contrast to trust); howe ( ) asked, for example, “... whether the athlete or the administrator has more control over the body of the sportsperson.” control techniques are sometimes used and justified in total institutions such as prisons, the military, and sport to establish an overall climate of control, as well as to assert rank and authority. additionally, control techniques are also used and justified to sanction behaviours that are defined, sometimes arbitrarily, as not contributing to ‘success.’ the increasingly high-handed treatment of athletes is sometimes paired with increasing rewards for success. as a result of this climate of control, many sports are quite regimented, authority is clearly delineated, and athletes are motivated by fear and punishment (e.g., being benched, traded, demoted, dropped, ridiculed, and losing pay or funding). thus, athletes are manipulatable in this climate; they are controlled by fear of ostracism, disrepute, stigma, identity loss, career loss, isolation, and so on. the exploitation often persists because athletes are expendable as a result of the “reserve army of athletes attempting to play at the elite level” (connor , p. ). michael robidoux ( ) exemplified this with his literal description of the american hockey league as a ‘farm system’ for the national hockey league (nhl): “[t]he players are literally cultivated on the farm; only those with suitable qualities are ‘picked’ to be used in the nhl market. the cultivation period, moreover, is limited, and those who do not develop sufficiently are eventually replaced with new ‘stock’” (p. ). thus, in the ideologically isolated, autonomous, conservative, and control culture of modern sport: • sport maintained its conservative nature throughout the liberation movements of the s in north america and elsewhere, despite some athlete resistance. • sport has remained a bastion of masculinity when patriarchy faces serious challenge in many other areas of social and cultural life. • sport has maintained its ‘right’ to employ violent and abusive behaviours when such behaviours are now more severely controlled in other parts of society. • athletes submit to treatment by coaches, administrators, clinicians, and others that they would never dream of tolerating from authority figures in other areas of their lives. the human rights of athletes are routinely violated, albeit at times with their consent. much more egregiously, as donnelly and petherick ( ) and others have pointed out, up to half of the articles in the un convention on the rights of the child are occasionally or routinely violated in elite organized sports for children (those under years of age in the un definition). during discussions of recent years, we have regularly heard that punishments we defined as ‘maltreatment’ were considered ‘just sport’ by many of the coaches and officials in attendance. the autonomous and self-governing nature of sport raises the question of why sport organizations themselves, rather than organizations mandated to ensure child welfare and protection (such as the children’s aid societies in canada and national soc. sci. , , of society for the prevention of cruelty to children (nspcc) in the uk ) or the police, deal with cases of illegal and inappropriate behaviour (maltreatment) in children’s and adult sport, respectively. given these characteristics, it is unsurprising that the maltreatment of children continues to occur in sport and that—according to many sources—it is rarely reported because the only means available to report maltreatment is to the organization within which the maltreatment was perpetrated. additionally, in terms of the culture of control, it is evident that sport shares that characteristic with other institutions (e.g., the catholic church and boarding/residential schools) that are frequently identified for their involvement in child maltreatment. the remainder of this paper addresses the struggle for safe sport in canada with a particular focus on child protection in sport. this struggle is characterized by recurring cycles of resistance by athletes and others to the prevailing culture of control on the one hand and reinforcement of this control by sport leaders on the other. in support of athletes’ calls, we propose changes to the sport context that reflect congruence with the standards, norms, and approaches seen in other child-dominated contexts. . one step forward, two steps back in the s, several international, high-profile cases emerged detailing experiences of sexual abuse of athletes at the hands of their coaches—persons in positions of authority who are entrusted with responsibility for athlete safety. in , a british olympic swimming coach was charged with counts of sexual assault and the rape of two teenaged swimmers (reid ). two-time olympic rower heather clarke alleged that her long-time coach had sexually abused her, her sister, and two other rowers for many years. additionally, at that time, sheldon kennedy, a player in the national hockey league, revealed that he had been groomed and sexually victimized by his coach, graham james, beginning when kennedy was just years of age (kennedy and grainger ; the canadian press ). in subsequent years, other hockey players coached by james also disclosed sexual victimization (e.g., fleury and day ). the arrest of former maple leaf gardens (toronto) equipment manager, gordon stuckless, preceded the announcement that a ‘pedophile ring’ had been operating at the gardens between the mid- s and the early s (vine and challen ). in response to these revelations, there was an outbreak of public concern by canadians. how could sport, an endeavour assumed to be healthy and growth-enhancing for young people, become a place where such harm could occur? the government at the time responded by engaging in a consultation process that led to new policies and systems of compliance that represented one of the most progressive examples in the world at that time to deal with harassment and abuse in sport. specifically, in , all national sport organizations that received public funding were mandated to: (i) develop and disseminate a publicly accessible harassment policy (the term used at the time), (ii) to designate arm’s length trained harassment officers (one male and one female) with whom athletes and/or their parents and others could raise queries and to whom they could address complaints without fear of reprisal from coaches or other sport officials, and (iii) to annually report to sport canada on their compliance with these directives as a condition of continued funding (christie ). these federal initiatives began to spread to provincial ministries responsible for sport and to provincial sport organizations (psos), and they also began to be considered internationally. a progressive policy guide was produced by canadian association for the advancement of women and sport (caaws) ( ) that assisted sport organizations through the development and implementation of mandated harassment policies. this guide continues to form the basis of policies used today in canada and internationally. the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children (nspcc) established, with sport england and others, the child protection in sport unit in . however, that unit has advisory and educational functions, and it does not violate the autonomy of sports to carry out their own investigations and impose discipline in cases of child maltreatment. soc. sci. , , of . . a failed policy twenty years after these advances, donnelly et al. ( ) conducted a study to assess the extent to which canadian sport organizations complied with these requirements. by reviewing sport organizations’ websites and contacting the heads of these organizations, they found that % and % of the nsos and psos, respectively, had harassment policies. of these, less than half were publicly accessible as required. the existing policies focused primarily or exclusively on sexual maltreatment, with far less content on psychological and physical maltreatment, neglect, bullying, harassment, and hazing. only % of psos and % of nsos addressed the inappropriateness of sexual relations between a coach and an of-age athlete. only % of pso and % of nso policies mentioned a harassment officer, and far fewer stated that these positions included one male and one female who were trained, as recommended in the original caaws ( ) document. of particular note is that none of the pso and nso policies identified the harassment officer as being at ‘arm’s-length’ to the sport organization; instead, the ceo or another staff member of the sport organization was identified as a recipient of harassment/abuse concerns, contrary to the policy directives to have neutral, third party individuals receive concerns. we are not aware of a single sport organization that was denied funding for a lack of compliance with the sport canada mandates. clearly, the policy to advance safety for athletes was not implemented effectively; sport organizations did not meet the requirements for funding, and sport canada did not ensure compliance. what had emerged since the policy was a system of self-regulation riddled with conflicts of interests. in attempting to account for their failure to meet sport canada’s requirements, sports organizations cite their lack of capacity—not their lack of will. they told us that they found it next to impossible to recruit, train and retain willing and qualified individuals to address complex cases of maltreatment. potential investigators and adjudicators were discouraged by the difficult issues involved and the likelihood of costly legal proceedings. given these difficulties and the lack of oversight by sport canada, sport organizations quietly ignored the requirements, with many regressing to a pre- state without harassment policies or systems in place to address complaints. at the same time, the emphasis on performance outcomes, reinforced by the existing system of funding of sport organizations in canada, has been a significant barrier to addressing and preventing harassment and abuse. sport organizations are funded primarily based upon the results (international medals, records, top- performances, and so on) attained by their athletes. as such, sports in which athletes earn high international standings are funded to a greater extent than those sports in which athletes do not perform as well; in fact, teams that drop in international rankings may experience funding cuts. for example, significant funding comes from a sport canada-funded organization, own the podium, which “( . . . ) drive(s) canada’s high-performance sport system forward in a quest to help more athletes and coaches win more medals in future olympic and paralympic games” (https://www.ownthepodium.org/en-ca/about-otp/vision,-mission,-mandate-goals). since the winter olympic and paralympic games in vancouver/whistler, canada, the pressure for medals has intensified. we suggest that own the podium, driven by the relentless expectations of international success, pays inadequate attention to the means by which medals are earned and thus may enable athlete development methods that are inconsistent with athletes’ rights and welfare. a vast body of literature in sport addresses the potential consequences of such a win-at-all-costs approach to sport, including overuse injuries, sport withdrawal, eating disorders, and maltreatment (coakley ; donnelly ; stirling and kerr ). . . the next wave a series of international and high-profile cases between and stimulated another flurry of activity and policy directives. in the united states, the penn state university child sex abuse scandal emerged; this involved offences committed by a football coach, jerry sandusky, over a period of years (smith ). in , larry nassar, a usa gymnastics team doctor was charged and convicted of sexually assaulting more than minors over a period of two decades; he was subsequently https://www.ownthepodium.org/en-ca/about-otp/vision,-mission,-mandate-goals soc. sci. , , of sentenced to up to years in prison (levinson ). at around the same time, barry bennell, a football (soccer) coach in the u.k. was convicted of sexual abuse of numerous boys from the s to the s. bennell was sentenced to a prison term of years. he was found to be part of a pedophile ring in u.k. football that victimized over boys at different football clubs ( bbc news ). between and , canadian sport was also shaken by cases of sexual abuse of athletes in the sports of alpine skiing, gymnastics, wrestling, speed skating, and swimming, amongst others (heroux ; heroux et al. ). . . recognizing the role of bystanders these cases, in contrast to those in the s, drew attention to and consideration of the role of bystanders. specifically, they highlighted the complicity of adults in positions of power and authority who are entrusted with the care and safety of athletes. we find it hard to countenance that perpetrators can harm so many individuals over such an extended period of time without someone knowing about the abuse or, at a minimum, suspecting abuse may be occurring. in fact, in the penn state university child sex abuse case, evidence indicated that at least four other adults in positions of authority at the university were aware of the allegations and had “total and consistent disregard...for the safety and welfare of sandusky’s child victims” and “empowered” sandusky to continue his acts of abuse by failing to disclose them (freeh sporkin and sullivan ). similarly, in the larry nassar case, the athletes did in fact disclose their abusive experiences to others, but their disclosures were ignored or dismissed based upon the prestige and reputation held by nassar and the performance success of the u.s. women’s gymnastics team (raisman a; b). their complicity enabled nassar to continue with his abuses. the critical role of bystanders in abuse cases was poignantly summarized by mitch garabedian , a lawyer for some of the survivors of abuses by catholic priests in boston, who stated, “if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” the focus of sexual abuse cases had clearly shifted from a sole focus on the perpetrator to inclusion of the critical role of bystanders, as well as the failure of adults in positions of responsibility for the care of young people to enact their duty to act when knowledge or suspicions of child abuse emerge. as a consequence of their failure to act on their responsibilities to care for these young people, the president, athletic director, and executive director of alumni relations of michigan state university where nassar was employed either resigned or were required to leave. the university also agreed to a settlement of $ million (jesse ). as a result of the nassar case and associated legal costs, usa gymnastics—a powerhouse of a sport organization—declared bankruptcy (axon et al. ). in contrast to cases that emerged in earlier years, the trial of nassar included seven days of testimonies from athletes who were survivors of nassar’s abuses (raisman b). this represented a shift in sexual abuse cases, with survivors having an opportunity to tell their stories and call for changes— a shift that was inevitably influenced by the broader #metoo movement. . . renewing a failed policy at the same time, canada was dealing with cases of sexual abuse of female teenage alpine skiers by the national coach bertrand charest, who was sentenced to years imprisonment upon appeal (the canadian press ); infractions within wrestling (bennett ); and the allegations of sexual misconduct by the olympic women’s artistic gymnastics coach, david brubaker. in response to the nassar case in the u.s. and the charest and brubaker cases in canada, there was, again, a flurry of public and scholarly attention paid to the abuse of athletes. the federal minister of science and sport at ‘mitch’ garabedian is a boston lawyer who represented a number of victims of catholic church sexual abuse. the words in this quote, referring to the code of silence in the catholic church, were spoken by actor stanley tucci, who played garabedian in the film spotlight. soc. sci. , , of the time, kirsty duncan, herself a former athlete, drew additional attention to the abuse of athletes by declaring that addressing abuse of athletes was a priority of her office. she announced that: “national sporting organizations will lose their federal funding if they don’t immediately disclose to her office any allegations of abuse or harassment that occur within their ranks” and “effective immediately, funding agreements also require sporting associations to establish an independent third party to investigate all allegations of abuse and have mandatory prevention training in place as soon as possible and no later than april ” (rabson ). though these mandates caused a flurry of activity in sport organizations, the minister ’s requirement to report cases and to establish an independent third party to investigate allegations of abuse or harassment were hardly new. on the contrary, these requirements had been in place since and had simply not been implemented or enforced. despite the stirring words of priority, these mandates represented a retreat to a -year old policy that neither the sports bodies nor sport canada had been able to implement; this was two steps back. the commitment to address abuse, harassment, bullying, and discrimination in sport was explicitly reinforced by the red deer declaration for the prevention of harassment, abuse and discrimination in sport (sport information resource centre ). led by the federal minister, the group of federal, provincial, and territorial ministers responsible for sport, physical activity and recreation, met to endorse the declaration. specifically, they agreed to work together to reinforce and build on the existing work and commitments to activate the values of the canadian sport policy; to foster a collaborative and coordinated relationship with sport organizations, participants, and stakeholders; and to engage relevant experts to identify effective approaches to prevent and respond to incidents of harassment, abuse, and discrimination. the minister also directed the development of a universal code of conduct for stakeholders in sport. the code was written to identify prohibited behaviours and be applicable to all members of the national sport community. as part of the process of developing this code, a series of safe sport summits were held across the country in . these summits gave stakeholders the opportunity to contribute to the definition of prohibited conduct and potential sanctions for egregious behaviour. disturbingly, the summits, which were led by the coaching association of canada, were framed by the assumption that sexually abusive behaviours were the most egregious behaviours, ignoring the compelling evidence from the vast body of research on child maltreatment indicating that all forms of maltreatment are deleterious to a child’s health and wellbeing (glaser ; matthews ; mccoy and keen ). in spite of the evidence that psychological abuse, physical abuse, and neglect are just as, or in some cases, more damaging than sexual abuse to a child in the short- and long-term (horwath ), many in the sport community insisted on limiting the scope of their responsibility to sexual abuse. it could be said that the preoccupation with sexual abuse was justified given the media focus at the time. in addition to a long history of media attention on sexual abuse in sport, a study by the canadian broadcasting corporation indicated that at least coaches involved in amateur sports in canada were convicted of sexual offences in the previous years, involving more than victims under the age of years. cases involving another accused coaches were before the courts at that time (ward and strashin ). the focus on sexual misconduct at the national summit was reflected in the heated discussions and a lack of consensus on whether or not sexual relations between athletes over the age of years and a person in a position of authority should be prohibited. regarding this specific scenario, athletes were clear in their responses that the power differential was so great between athletes and persons such as coaches, sport administrators, and sport science personnel that consent was not possible, and sexual relations should therefore be prohibited. the views of other stakeholders were not as consistent. at the time of writing this paper, we have yet to see whether the athletes’ recommendations will be implemented. soc. sci. , , of . . expanding the focus beyond sexual abuse the exclusive focus on sexual abuse by many in the sport community was challenged by the release of a prevalence study of maltreatment among canadian national team athletes that highlighted the frequency of experiences of various forms of maltreatment (kerr et al. ). these findings provided a new understanding of the experiences of athletes. specifically, they broadened the focus on sexual abuse to include the psychological abuse and neglect of athletes. of athletes, % of current athletes and % of retired athletes reported repeated experiences of psychologically harmful behaviours, and % of current athletes and % of retired athletes reported repeated experiences of neglect. these were followed by sexual harm ( % of current athletes and % of retired athletes) and physical abuse ( % of current athletes and % of retired athletes). despite the preoccupation of the media and sport organizations with cases of sexual abuse of athletes, these findings signaled that other forms of maltreatment are far more prevalent and may be just as damaging to athletes’ health and well-being. the preponderance of psychological abuse has been supported by other prevalence studies conducted in the uk (alexander et al. ) and the netherlands and belgium (vertommen et al. ). more recently, the prevalence and impact of psychological abuse has been highlighted by several male, high-profile national hockey league players who have described training in psychologically toxic environments (prewitt ). the findings of the canadian study also indicated that statistically significant relationships existed between all forms of maltreatment—psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect—and disordered eating/eating disorders, depression, and suicide ideation. as causality cannot be ascertained from this analysis, the short and long-term effects of maltreatment on athletes remain a direction for future research. . . the athletes’ voices a particularly disturbing finding from the canadian prevalence study was that fewer than % of the responding athletes who had experienced maltreatment submitted a formal report of their experiences; furthermore, less than half of the current and retired athletes ever told anyone about the harmful experiences. the athletes shared that they did not report because they did not know who to report to, they did not have a safe and confidential place to report their concerns without fear of negative repercussions for their athletic careers, and they did not have confidence in their sport organizations to address their concerns in a fair and transparent manner. in the words of some of these athletes: “i would never feel comfortable going to my national sport organization if i were harassed in any way and would % need an independent body to report the harassment to. i would be far too scared to say anything to my coach or my hpd [high performance director]” and, “asking sport organizations to deal with abuse in their ranks is like asking them to incriminate themselves.” the athletes’ widespread fear of reprisal makes ‘self-regulation’ an inadequate policy response. canadian women wrestlers were very public in their concerns about the self-regulating nature of sport: “( . . . ) at times it doesn’t feel safe or comfortable for an athlete to come forward because we don’t want to put our goal, our lifelong dream of making an olympic games, in jeopardy. sometimes it’s this fear of keeping the status quo, because there’s been no independent body that we can go to and feel safe;” “we want the minister to know that athletes support an independent body to handle safe sport issues,” jasmine mian, a olympian and chair of wrestling canada’s athlete council, said in a press release. “it’s not only in the best interest of athletes but also in the best interest of the nso. what constitutes safe sport should be consistent across canada” (ewing ). the findings of the national prevalence study, together with discussions at the safe sport summits held across the country, culminated in a national safe sport summit in , which was led by the coaching association of canada (coaching association of canada ) and included over stakeholders in sport. informed by the individual summits and the national prevalence study data, recommendations were presented for all egregious conduct to be included in the universal code of conduct. the most powerful moment of the national summit came in response to the athletes’ soc. sci. , , of presentation of their recommendations to advance safe sport, a presentation that was met with a standing ovation. the athletes clearly and courageously argued for the canadian sport community to: . address all forms of maltreatment. . implement mandatory education for all stakeholders. . prohibit sexual relations and forced intimacy between athletes and persons in positions of authority. . enhance the focus on athletes’ holistic wellbeing. . strengthen accountability measures. . ensure that supports and resources are available for victims of maltreatment. . implement an independent body to receive, investigate, and adjudicate complaints, as well as to apply sanctions. the peer solidarity demonstrated by the athletes in communicating a common message to the canadian sport community was a display of resistance against the dominant culture. athletes exerted agency in voicing their demands for healthier sport experiences and more opportunities to contribute to the decisions that affect them. their unified call for an independent safe sport agency was a public challenge to the existing culture of control. . . development of the universal code of conduct for addressing and preventing maltreatment after the national summit, work began on a universal code of conduct designed to be applicable to all stakeholders in sport—athletes, coaches, sport administrators, officials, sport science personnel, and volunteers. progress was achieved in expanding the focus to include all forms of maltreatment, as the athletes had insisted. additionally, advances were realized in terms of holding adults in positions of authority and trust over young people accountable for reporting knowledge or suspicions of maltreatment. in addition to reinforcing the legal duty to report any suspicions of child maltreatment, the code also makes persons in positions of authority responsible for reporting inappropriate conduct that may not reach the threshold of a criminal offence. this latter addition was important for prevention given the known trajectory from inappropriate conduct to all forms of maltreatment (canadian centre for child protection n.d.). the development of the universal code of conduct to prevent and address maltreatment in sport was not without its challenges. some members of the sport community insisted that the following clause be included in the code: “conduct and coaching methods that are acceptable to canadian standards for skill enhancement, physical conditioning, team building, rule enforcement, or improved athletic performance [would be exempt from descriptions of maltreatment.]” given the research evidence illustrating the normalization of harmful practices such as the use of degrading, threatening, or humiliating comments, as well as the use of exercise as punishment, this clause was viewed by both athletes and researchers as problematic and indicative of efforts to maintain a punitive culture of control. more than experts were consulted; they represented a broad range of organizations and areas of expertise, including child protection, criminal law, police, under-represented groups, gender equity and gender-based violence, lgbtq+ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangender/queer/plus), parasport and persons with disabilities, athletes and coaches, human rights advocates, and academics with expertise in child maltreatment and intimate partner violence. the goal of the consultation was to leverage extensive and diverse knowledge from independent experts and researchers to create an evidence-informed code that could protect all participants in sport in canada from maltreatment. in response to the clause above, one researcher of child abuse stated, “the biggest risk factor to experiences of abuse in sport are that the practices are normalized as standard professionally-accepted methods for athlete development. i strongly suggest deleting this sentence as it completely undermines the purpose of the code of conduct and the expectation that this code will serve to safeguard athletes soc. sci. , , of from these harmful experiences.” the normalization of some harmful practices, especially with respect to psychological abuse, have been well-documented in the academic literature (jacobs et al. ; stafford et al. ). another reviewer stated, “often, longstanding customs demonstrate the failure of a profession or class of defendants to keep up with modern developments. the tainted blood cases in canada illustrate this well. the red cross’ customary practices were found to be out-of-date in comparison to standards in the us. i would not rely on accepted practice in coaching/training methods to defend allegations of misconduct without making sure the conduct is a best practice.” an athlete added, “as long as this clause remains, abuse will continue unchecked.” the code was released in without the inclusion of the contentious clause (sport information resource centre ). . . establishment of a helpline and offering independent investigators in , the minister of science and sport also established a canadian sport helpline at http://abuse-free-sport.ca/en/. this was intended to provide a triage service, guiding people with concerns to either the police and child protection services or to their sport organization. while this initiative may have the appearance of representing progress in child protection, the fact that most complaints fall under the criminal threshold means that most complaints are directed back to the sport organization for resolution. again, this leaves the complainant facing a system that is ill-equipped to address complaints, in addition to athletes’ complaints being forwarded to persons who are in conflicts of interest. the value of the helpline is thus questionable. in , the minister at the time also contracted an existing body, the sport dispute resolution centre of canada, to provide independent investigators to assist sport organizations in addressing complaints. some of the larger, better-funded national sport organizations appointed their own ‘independent’ investigators. while incorporating independent investigators was undoubtedly a step forward, the complaint system remains riddled with conflicts of interest. employees of sport organizations, in most cases the ceo or the ‘independent’ safe sport officer, make the initial decision about whether or not a complaint warrants an investigation. furthermore, the report completed by the independent investigator is typically submitted to the sport organization itself for implementation and the application of sanctions. if the independent investigator recommends that the complaint proceeds to a hearing, the sport organization is responsible for selecting the members of the hearing panel, again representing a conflict of interest. finally, if sanctions are recommended, the sport organization bears responsibility for their implementation—or not. in the words of one ceo of a large sport organization that has been through this process, ‘the lawyer for [the respondent] is claiming conflict of interest as the independent investigator was paid for by [sport organization] and the hearing panel itself is not independent because [the sport organization] pays those bills as well!’ (kerr ). numerous problems exist in the current system of complaint management in addition to the conflicts of interests identified above. most importantly, the current system fails to address the athletes’ concerns and recommendations for a truly independent system that exists outside of and without the involvement of the sport organization. in our view, no new mechanism for realizing safe sport in canada should be developed without the direct involvement of athletes in each stage of the process, nor should one be approved without the full support of elected athlete representatives, as represented by athletescan. it is instructive that the canadian anti-doping policy implemented in the wake of the ben johnson scandal in the early s was only implemented after it was approved by a special meeting of elected athlete representatives convened by athletescan. . the next steps currently, a coalition of athletes, researchers, sports bodies, and other organizations is pushing for a truly independent body, one that ensures due process for all parties involved and involves four fundamental components. first, in an independent system, a complaint would be filed with a body that is completely separate from the sport organization and sport canada. there would be no conflicts of interest between the recipient of the complaint and the sport organization. this independent http://abuse-free-sport.ca/en/ soc. sci. , , of body would serve a triage function, determining whether the complaint should be directed to the police or child protection services, to an independent investigator, or to another body if the complaint is not relevant to maltreatment. second, an independent investigative process would be created. any complaint that is identified as a potential violation of the universal code of conduct would be directed by the independent body to an independent investigator to initiate an investigation. the independent investigator would have no relationship with the sport organization or any other conflicts of interest, perceived or otherwise, in relation to the complainant, respondent, or any other member of the sport organization. third, independent adjudication processes would be created. if the independent investigator concludes that a complaint should be examined through a hearing or adjudication process, members of the hearing panel must have no relationship with the sport organization or any conflicts of interest, perceived or otherwise, in relation to the complainant, respondent, or any other member of the sport organization. the adjudication of sanctions appropriate for findings of a breach of the universal code must occur without input or involvement from the sport organization. fourth, anyone affected by experiences of maltreatment should have access to educational, legal, and psychological supports and resources, including clear information about the expectations of the universal code of conduct and the process of reporting a complaint (kerr et al. ). it should be noted that the canadian government, through sport canada, has already established two independent agencies where athletes and sport organizations are able to realize due process: the sport dispute resolution centre of canada, which functions as a national version of the international court of arbitration for sport, and the canadian centre for ethics in sport, which manages canada’s anti-doping system. in our view, and those of the athletes, the safety and protection of children in sport warrants a similar independent agency (donnelly et al. ). a single, independent, pan-canadian body for safe sport would investigate, adjudicate, and ensure compliance with and consistency in the application of the universal code of conduct to address and prevent maltreatment in sport. fair, transparent, independent, and accessible processes would be assured to all athletes, regardless of sport, geographical location in the country, or the availability of external supports and resources. furthermore, such a body would provide consistent, equitable support and expertise to sport organizations, both large and small, thus freeing capacity and resources within sport organizations to pursue their primary endeavours. finally, it would have and deserve the trust of all participants in sport and be able to deliver on the promise of safe sport in canada. to advance safe sport, we also need to address sport leaders’ concerns about the challenges to their leadership presented by an independent body to address complaints. funding will be required to establish such a body, and sport leaders are concerned that this funding will be extracted from funding otherwise allocated to performance enhancement—which remains their primary mandate. finally, we will need to address the ‘issue fatigue’ that many sport leaders experience. over recent years, sport leaders have been challenged to, in addition to pursuing their core mission of achieving performance outcomes, adapt to drug testing, be more inclusive of athletes with diverse identities, concussion prevention and intervention, and, now, maltreatment. supporting sport leaders through these adaptations will be necessary to achieve progress in advancing safe sport. however, we are confident that these concerns can be fully addressed. to date, the efforts to advance child protection in sport have been devoted to articulating egregious behaviours and identifying complaint mechanisms to address these behaviours when they occur. the current landscape of safe sport in canada may be best characterized at this time as being reactive—addressing maltreatment once it occurs but remaining relatively silent on prevention and the underlying influences that encourage or enable maltreatment in sport. specifically, the efforts to-date have failed to address the culture of sport as it relates to healthy child development, including the development of athletic talent in young people. nor have the funding structures that encourage performance success over all else been addressed in any substantial manner. important opportunities to realize the potential and promise of sport will be lost without attention to these underlying cultures and structures. researchers have problematized the autonomy of sport, funding models connected to soc. sci. , , of performance success, win-at-all costs attitudes, and authoritarian coaching and leadership; however, their critiques have not altered the culture of sport in significant ways. to advance child protection in sport, we need to challenge the prevailing culture of control that perpetuates the autonomous nature of sport, as well as associated assumptions that the sport context is somehow different from other domains in which young people reside. in fact, sport is the only child-populated domain in canadian society that is completely autonomous and self-regulating. traditionally accepted and prevalent coaching methods, such as the use of punishments, degrading and humiliating comments, and environments characterized by one-on-one interactions with young people, would not be tolerated in other domains populated by young people, such as educational settings. normative conduct in sport needs to be aligned with the standards and norms of society at-large, including the adoption of the assumption that optimal performance results from health and well-being, not at the expense of health and well-being. as illustrated in educational settings for youth, traditional authoritarian teaching styles and the use of punitive strategies have been replaced with child-centred approaches, recognizing that when teaching is based on the child’s developmental needs and when children feel supported, optimal learning occurs. youth in sport would benefit from a similar shift in approach. abandoning traditional approaches to coaching and leadership for approaches that have, at their core, the developmental needs and rights of young people would not only help to prevent experiences of maltreatment but would also facilitate performance. ideally, funding structures need to reflect such a focus. imagine the outcomes for young people if coaches and sport administrators were evaluated on the basis of their athletes’ physical and psychological health, as well as athletes’ assessments of the quality of their sport experiences, both during and after their athletic careers. with such a funding model, adults in positions of trust for the care of young people would have an extended responsibility to consider the influence of sport experiences on young people long after sport participation has ended. furthermore, we posit that optimal athletic performances are realized only when athletes are healthy, have a strong sense of self, exert autonomy, and feel well-supported. in conclusion, only with independent oversight and a funding model and educational programmes that prioritize the promotion of athlete development, health, and well-being will we advance safe sport and realize the potential and promise of sport. author contributions: 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(accessed on january ). vertommen, tine, nicolette schipper-van veldhoven, kristien wouters, jarl k. kampen, celia h. brackenridge, daniel j. a. rhind, karel neels, and filip van den eede. . interpersonal violence against children in sport in the netherlands and belgium. child abuse & neglect : – . vine, cathy, and paul challen. . gardens of shame: the tragedy of martin kruze and the sexual abuse at maple leaf gardens. vancouver: greystone books. ward, lori, and jamie strashin. . sex offences against minors: investigation reveals more than canadian coaches convicted in last years. toronto: canadian broadcasting corporation, available online: https: //www.cbc.ca/sports/amateur-sports-coaches-sexual-offences-minors- . (accessed on february ). world health organization. . child maltreatment. available online: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/child-maltreatment (accessed on february ). young, kevin. . sport, violence and society. new york: routledge. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://globalnews.ca/news/ /a-timeline-of-graham-jamess-legal-history/ https://globalnews.ca/news/ /a-timeline-of-graham-jamess-legal-history/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/appeals-bertrand-charest- . https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/appeals-bertrand-charest- . https://www.cbc.ca/sports/amateur-sports-coaches-sexual-offences-minors- . https://www.cbc.ca/sports/amateur-sports-coaches-sexual-offences-minors- . https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	the canadian context 	a note about terminology 	theorizing safe sport 	one step forward, two steps back 	a failed policy 	the next wave 	recognizing the role of bystanders 	renewing a failed policy 	expanding the focus beyond sexual abuse 	the athletes’ voices 	development of the universal code of conduct for addressing and preventing maltreatment 	establishment of a helpline and offering independent investigators 	the next steps 	references s .. celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power alfred archer, amanda cawston, benjamin matheson, and machteld geuskens what, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? while a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics, none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. we will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. we will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. this is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. we will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems. doi: . /s march | vol. /no. © american political science association . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /), which permits non-commercial re- use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same creative commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. the written permission of cambridge university press must be obtained for commercial re-use. alfred archer is assistant professor of philosophy at tilburg university and a member of the tilburg center for logic, ethics, and philosophy of science (a.t.m.archer@uvt.nl). his primary research interests are in moral philosophy and moral psychology, particularly supererogation, the nature and ethics of admiration, and the ethics of fame. he also has research interests in applied ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of sport. his work for this paper was supported by the nwo (the netherlands organisation for scientific research; grant number .veni. . ). amanda cawston is assistant professor of philosophy at tilburg university and a member of the tilburg center for logic, ethics, and philosophy of science (a.m.cawston@uvt.nl). she had a wide range of interests within political philosophy and applied ethics, including the ethics of violence and non-violence, feminist philosophy, migration ethics, and topics in animal ethics. she has written on pacifism, the feminist debate on pornography, competition, and self-sacrifice. her current research explores how mechanisms of alienation support forms of violence, and subsequently call for new forms of non-violent resistance. benjamin matheson is a postdoctoral fellow in practical philosophy with the stockholm centre for the ethics of war and peace at stockholm university (benjamin.matheson@philosophy.su.se). he has research interests in ethics, metaphysics, moral psychology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of emotions, and social and political philosophy. his published work has covered issues related to free will, moral responsibility, manipulation, immortality, heaven, shame, regret, and admiration. his work has appeared in philosophical studies, journal of the american philosophical association, canadian journal of philosophy, and american philosophical quarterly. machteld geuskens is assistant professor at the department of sociology, theory and methodology of the erasmus school of law, erasmus university rotterdam (machteldgeuskens@hotmail.com). she recently completed her doctoral thesis on epistemic justice at the department of philosophy, tilburg university. in her work she seeks to connect the fields of epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and law. thanks to audiences at ludwig maximilian university of munich, the open university (uk), and tilburg university for helpful comments on the ideas in this paper. special thanks to the editors and four anonymous referees for incredibly helpful and detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper. this work was supported by the nwo (the netherlands organisation for scientific research; grant numbers .veni. . and . . ) and the knut och alice wallenbergs foundation (project number ) special issue article https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:a.t.m.archer@uvt.nl https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:a.m.cawston@uvt.nl https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:benjamin.matheson@philosophy.su.se https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:machteldgeuskens@hotmail.com https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core t he election of donald trump to the presidency of the united states has brought to the fore the role of celebrities in politics. this discussion only intensi- fied with the suggestion that talk show host oprah winfrey should run against trump in the election. some hold that winfrey’s celebrity makes her the ideal candidate to oppose trump (kohn ). for others, winfrey’s nomination would be a disaster for american politics. for example, thomas chatterton williams claimed that “the idea that the presidency should become just another prize for celebrities . . . is dangerous in the extreme” (williams ). celebrity involvement in poli- tics is not a new phenomenon. in the s, former hollywood actor ronald reagan served as president of the united states. similarly, fellow actor arnold schwarze- negger served as governor of california from to . concerns about the influence of celebrities in politics are also longstanding. c. wright mills, for example, criticized the central role that celebrity played in american life in the s, arguing that entering the world of celebrity was necessary to obtain a position of prestige and power ( , ). neil postman ( ), on the other hand, claimed that the increased link between celebrity and politics has transformed the political sphere into a branch of the entertainment industry—a problematic result, as it means candidates are selected for their presentation rather than for their political talent or viewpoints (meyer , ). we might also worry that this emphasis skews political debate towards the interests of the rich and powerful, as they have the best access to celebrity networks (west and orman , ). a number of theorists have explored the connection between celebrity and power (e.g., meyer ; mills ; postman ; marshall ). yet no one so far has examined this issue using the tools of social episte- mology—that is, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. here, we utilize these resources to develop a novel critique of celebrity involvement in democratic politics. specifically, we argue that celebrity brings with it an important and underexplored form of power, epistemic power. recognizing this link reveals new resources for identifying problems with celebrity involve- ment in democratic politics. we begin the next section by outlining our account of the link between celebrity and epistemic power. we then draw on this account to develop a new critique of the role of celebrities in democratic politics and of the ability of democracies to live up to the ideals articulated by democratic theory. we conclude by suggesting potential avenues for future work in political science and democratic theory in light of our analysis. celebrity and epistemic power before outlining the connection between celebrity and epistemic power, we will first explain these two concepts. many subtly different accounts of celebrity have been proposed. according to boorstin’s influential definition, a celebrity is “a person well-known for their well-known- ness” ( , ). alternatively, rein, kotler, and soller, define a celebrity as someone, “whose name has attention- getting, interest-riveting and profit generating value” ( , ). van krieken, meanwhile, defines celebrity as “a quality or status characterized by a capacity to attract attention, generating some ‘surplus value’ or benefit derived from the fact of being well known (highly visible) in itself in at least one public arena” ( , ). while we do not intend to provide a full definition of celebrity here, these accounts reflect what we take to be a core feature of celebrity: the ability to capture attention. many different groups of people are able to attract attention. to varying degrees, all government ministers are able to attract attention simply as a result of being important public figures. there may even be a sense in which celebrity is an integral part of political representa- tion (street ). for our purposes though, we intend to use celebrity to refer to those to whom large amounts of attention is paid on subjects that are unrelated to their career, talent, or expertise. for example, while george clooney became famous as an actor, public interest in his life is not limited to his acting. of course, many politicians also fit this description. public interest in barack obama, for example, was not limited to his political role but also extended into his personal life. that said, we here use the term to pick out those who have become famous primarily for something other than politics. we make this stipulation to clarify our subject: we recognize that there is a need to investigate the phenomenon of political representatives seeking to be- come celebrities, but this will not be our focus here. rather, we will concentrate on celebrities who draw on their existing public profiles to become politicians or political campaigners: donald trump is one, as are celebrity activists, such as bono and george clooney, who use their position to campaign or express support for specific issues, parties, or politicians. the concept of epistemic power we will now explain the form of power that is our focus of concern, epistemic power. epistemic power is the power one possesses in one’s capacity as an epistemic agent. epistemic power is best understood in terms of two related abilities. first, is the ability to influence what others believe, think, or know. a teacher, for example, possesses this ability in relation to her students. the second is the ability to enable and disable others from exerting epistemic influence. this is done by way of believing others (“giving them credence”) or by discrediting them. by trusting and hence validating a person or institution as a proper source, we enable that person or institution to have influence. for example, a teacher might praise a student’s mathematical perspectives on politics special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ability, leading others to believe that student when they provide answers. here, the teacher has increased that student’s epistemic power. in contrast, by disabling a person or institution we preclude that person or in- stitution from having influence. for example, we might publicly denounce a news outlet as “fake news.” when this public denunciation is successful, the effect will be a de- crease in the epistemic power of the news outlet. to summarize, our account of epistemic power is the following: epistemic power: a person has epistemic power to the extent she is able to influence what people think, believe, and know, and to the extent she is able to enable and disable others from exerting epistemic influence. almost everyone possesses some degree of epistemic power, though some have more than others. there are different sources of epistemic power, some of which are entirely legitimate: an articulate person who possesses detailed knowledge of a particular subject may be able to influence what people believe simply by providing clear explanations to others. institutional positions may also bring epistemic power. professors, for example, possess epistemic power by virtue of their position as a professor, which grants them a special status as experts on their topic. ideally, this institutional source of epistemic power will only be granted to those who deserve it. however, this will not always be the case. someone could be granted an institutional position that brings epistemic power without possessing the relevant expertise. for example, a corrupt university could appoint an under- qualified candidate to a professorship. similarly, we can imagine cases where someone’s expertise in one area could allow them to bypass the normal procedures by which someone is granted the position of an expert. for example, a leading chemistry professor may use his prestige and profile to make public statements about how to treat cancer that are unrelated to his field of expertise (ballantyne ). this professor uses his title and the platform it provides to exert epistemic power, whilst venturing into a scientific field that is not his own area of competence. of course, people are allowed to give their opinion, but they should ensure that it remains clear when they speak from personal conviction, rather than a position of expertise. the worry with this kind of procedure-skipping is that there is a danger that people will be placed into institutional positions that bring epistemic power without possessing the relevant expertise. credibility one source of epistemic power is perceived credibility. the extent to which someone is perceived to be credible has a major impact on how much epistemic power that person possesses. our focus will be on credibility excesses, cases where people are perceived to be more credible than they really are. all else being equal, the more credible someone is perceived to be, the more power they have to influence what people think, believe, and know, and to influence who else can exercise epistemic influence. so when someone pos- sesses a credibility excess, they will possess a greater degree of epistemic power than is warranted by their epistemic abilities and expertise. do celebrities possess higher levels of perceived cred- ibility than other people? the idea that celebrities are taken as reliable sources on topics for which they lack expertise is certainly familiar and seems to be accepted by a number of commentators. for example, traub de- scribed singer bono’s position in his political campaigning in the following way: “bono offered decision makers an implicit bargain: do the right thing, and i’ll say so in public. his currency was not just his fame but his credibility” ( ). the long-running use of celebrities in advertising and political campaigning might seem to provide further evidence for this link. however, despite the popularity of this technique, the connection between celebrity and credibility is a complex one. in a comprehensive meta- analysis, knoll and matthes ( ) found that celebrity endorsements had a positive effect on consumers’ atti- tudes, but no average effect on their behavioral intentions. the effectiveness of the celebrity endorser appears to depend on a variety of other factors, such as their gender (male celebrities performed better than females), their profession (actors outperformed models, musicians, and tv hosts) and the fit between celebrity and product ( , ). people’s willingness to accept celebrity endorsements is not restricted to trivial matters. in angelina jolie wrote a widely read editorial in the new york times about her decision to undergo a mastectomy after discovering she faced a high chance of developing breast cancer. jolie urged women to investigate their own chances of developing breast cancer. an observational study found a % rise in american women undergoing the same genetic test in the fifteen days following the article’s publication (desai and jena ). further, freed et al.’s ( ) study into who parents view as credible sources of information on the safety of vaccinations found that, while parents were most likely to trust their doctor, % of parents gave some credibility to what celebrities had to say on the topic, with % giving celebrities a lot of credibility (freed et al. , ). while these numbers may seem low, they do show that there are people who are willing to trust the word of celebrities on important matters like the health of their children. relatedly, celebrities have been claimed to have a major influence on political opinion. garthwaite and moore’s ( , ) study of the effects of oprah winfrey’s endorsement of obama in the presidential primary estimated that winfrey’s intervention was responsible for march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core over one million votes for obama. similarly, a study by jackson and darrow ( ) into the impact of celebrity political endorsements among anglophone canadian youths found that celebrity endorsement influenced the extent to which respondents were willing to endorse certain political opinions. however, as the authors note, the link between celebrity endorsement and political opinion is a complex one, dependent on an interaction between the celebrity, audience, and endorsed opinion (jackson and darrow , ). veer, becirovic, and martin’s study of the effects of celebrity endorse- ment among uk voters also found these endorsements to be influential but far more so amongst those who spent little time thinking about politics. harvey’s ( . chap. ) research on people’s credibility ratings of celebrities and politicians found that in most cases the ratings between the two groups were indistinguishable. finally, becker’s ( , - ) research into the effects of political endorsement found that they were effective with young people (especially women) and democrats, especially on social rather than economic issues. these results suggest clear evidence for a link, albeit a complex one, between celebrity and perceived credibility in the political domain. one important factor in the effectiveness of a celebrity endorsement is whether the respondents are fans: as jackson and darrow ( ) noted, while some celebrities were capable of influencing their entire sample of cana- dian political science students, others were only effective over fans of their music style. this suggests that some celebrities possess a credibility excess only amongst their fans. one way to explain this is that admiring someone in some way can often lead us to admire him or her in other ways as well. another, complementary explanation is that the fan/celebrity relationship is one of “intimacy at a distance” (horton and wohl , ; van krieken , ), where interaction with celebrities involves coming to know them “in somewhat the same way they know their chosen friends” (horton and wohl , ). this may lead people to attribute greater credibility to celebrities than they would to unknown strangers. , in summary, there is good reason to think that some celebrities will be subject to credibility excesses in the political arena among certain groups of people, especially those who admire and are familiar with them, and those with little interest in politics. the processes by which these credibility excesses are constructed will take place without the conscious awareness of the person making the credi- bility judgement. however, the celebrity/credibility con- nection is complex, and highly context dependent. in the next section, we will explain a more general connection between celebrity and epistemic power. attention another source of epistemic power is attention. celebri- ties are often the focus of people’s attention. this forms a core part of the economic value of celebrity, especially in an information-rich society. of course, celebrities often also have economic value stemming from their talents. however, the economic value that celebrities possess by virtue of being a celebrity comes from their ability to capture attention. importantly, the attention people pay to celeb- rities distinguishes them from ordinary people: celebrities are paid attention to in a way that ordinary people are not (van krieken , ). they are, in marshall’s words, “a voice above others” ( , xlviii). moreover, the attention paid to celebrities often outweighs that paid to politicians or to those with relevant expertise. as the former united states senator arlen specter said, “when hollywood speaks, the world listens. sometimes when washington speaks the world snoozes” (cited in ross , ). politicians also pay attention to celebrities in a way they do not to other people. activist han shan explained his movement’s decision to utilize celebrity campaigners in the following way: “if a celebrity backs your cause, then immediately the public and the media and even policy-makers will sit up and pay attention” (cited in duncombe ). a number of high-profile celebrities have leveraged this fact. for example, when natalie portman became concerned about the israel- palestine conflict, she contacted queen rania of jordan to see if she could help (traub ). non-celebrities are unlikely to be able to command the attention of those in power in the same way. being the focus of attention is a source of significant epistemic power for celebrities. this point may not be immediately obvious, as being the focus of attention does not necessarily enhance credibility. for example, amer- ican terrorist ted kaczynski (aka the unabomber) captured attention for his anti-technology manifesto industrial society and its future by stating that he would continue his bombing campaign until it was published in a major newspaper. however, the attention this brought to kaczynski’s views is unlikely to have increased many people’s perceptions of his credibility. nevertheless, this case shows why attention is a source of epistemic power distinct from credibility. attention by itself is unlikely to change people’s credibility perceptions about ideas they are already aware of. but it can alert people to ideas they had not heard of before. for those disposed to find kaczynski’s ideas appealing, exposure to these views may well lead them to start accepting these ideas. while attention may not boost the speaker’s credibility, it does provide a platform for one’s testimony to be heard. this is crucial, as it does not matter how credible someone would be perceived if he or she does not have a means of being heard in the first place. having a platform provides new opportunities to influence what people think, believe, and know. in other words, attention can increase one’s epistemic power without one’s perceived credibility increasing. special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core being the focus of attention can also work to redirect attention towards others, with celebrities using interviews or social media to encourage people to pay attention to other people’s ideas. for example, during a appear- ance on the today show, robert de niro encouraged people to watch the controversial anti-vaccination film vaxxed. in this case, de niro did not use his platform to get his own testimony accepted. rather, he directed attention towards the testimony of people who would not have received anywhere near the same levels of attention without his assistance. in doing so he enabled others to exert epistemic influence, and hence increased their epistemic power. another way in which being the focus of attention can be a source of epistemic power is through providing people with the tools to set political agendas. agenda setting is the process by which the media shape which issues are deemed to be of political importance. mccombs and shaw ( ) developed their theory of agenda setting based on their studies of us presidential elections, arguing that: in choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of in- formation in a news story and its position. ( , ) according to mccombs and shaw, the media do not simply reflect political reality, they also structure and shape it. the more attention the media gives to a certain issue, the more likely people will consider it important. as cohen says, the media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” ( , ). the ability to shape the political agenda is therefore also a source of epistemic power for those to whom attention is paid. it enables them to influence the topics people think about and, as a result, what people come to believe and know. one way celebrities set the political agenda is through traditional forms of media. as harvey’s ( , ) research shows, a celebrity’s intervention in a political cause can raise the media visibility of that cause. addi- tionally, the rise of social media has allowed celebrities to reach large numbers without having to navigate the gatekeepers of the traditional media. social media also allows celebrities and politicians to influence the shape of the coverage of the news media (parmelee and bichard ; parmelee ). a simple indicator of social media’s power is that in the estimated combined print and online daily newspaper circulation in the united states was million on weekdays and million on sundays (pew research center ). in comparison, donald trump has . million twitter followers, at the time of writing (january , ). trump utilized this platform to great effect in his presidential election campaign, gaining far more attention than his opponent hillary clinton. trump’s posts were retweeted , times on average, compared to clinton’s average of , (pew research center ). as several commentators observed, this provided trump with extraordinary power to set the news agenda. in the words of trump’s former press secretary sean spicer, “whatever he tweets is going to drive the news” (cited in borchers ). a large-scale analysis of mainstream and social media coverage of the election campaign highlighted the success of trump’s agenda setting. although the study found that coverage of both candidates was mostly negative, it “largely followed donald trump’s agenda” (faris et al. , ). in summary, attention is a source of epistemic power for celebrities. first, attracting large amounts of attention provides a platform for their testimony to be heard. second, it allows them to redirect people’s attention to other sources of testimony. third, it allows them to set the political agenda. of course, celebrities are not the only people to garner attention in the political arena. leading politicians receive attention even if they were not pre- viously celebrities, and economists, sociologists, psephol- ogists, geographers, and other experts all receive attention on issues relevant to their expertise. this attention is a source of epistemic power as well. and these experts may even achieve a level of celebrity themselves. the difference is that, in these cases, epistemic power is granted to people with some legitimate claim to it. in the case of politicians, it is focused on those making the decisions and asking them to account for their actions; in the case of experts, attention is given in light of their expertise. this is not the case with celebrities, who receive attention even when they may lack any relevant expertise. celebrity and democracy as we have shown, celebrities possess a substantive amount of epistemic power that is not linked to expertise. we now examine how recognition of this introduces concerns regarding the role of celebrities in politics. in particular, we explore the ways in which existing theories of democratic legitimacy fail to recognize the importance of the epistemic power possessed by celebrities (which we term celebrity epistemic power), and show that the challenge facing any actual democracy attempting to meet the standards of legitimacy set out by these theories is more formidable than previously appreciated. democratic theory we begin by considering how celebrity epistemic power may interact with two standard approaches to democratic theory: deliberative and epistemic democracy. these terms denote a vast array of distinct views, and we will not attempt here to examine epistemic power alongside each. nor will we survey other influential theories such as pluralism, agonism, or elitism. rather, we will identify march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core some core commitments of selected standard approaches, broadly conceived, and analyze how they survey the importance of celebrity epistemic power. moreover, we will argue that celebrity epistemic power creates challenges for grounding the legitimacy of democracy by appealing to these democratic ideals. we end with a brief discussion of an emerging democratic theory, namely green’s ( ) plebiscitary democracy. while plebiscitary democracy may avoid some problems facing the traditional accounts, it is perhaps even more vulnerable to some of the concerns associated with the workings of celebrity epistemic power. we provide here a brief introduction to deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy. deliberative models of democracy ground the legiti- macy of democratic rule in public debate (i.e., the public giving and receiving of reasons) informed by citizens’ mutual respect for others as moral equals. in contrast to aggregative models, which interpret moral equality as the requirement of giving one equally weighted vote to each citizen, deliberative democracy pairs equal formal influ- ence with deliberative ideals that are intended to protect equal opportunity to participate in and influence political outcomes. protecting this equal opportunity to influence is taken to have both procedural and substantive require- ments. procedurally, participants are required to advance claims solely on the force of argument and reason, and not trade on power inequalities (knight and johnson , ). in habermas’s words, “no force but that of the better argument is exercised” ( , ). substantively, asym- metries of power or resources should not unfairly (dis) advantage participants in deliberation; participants should not be prevented from deliberating as a result of a lack of resources or power and should not be subject to coercion. in response to accusations that these ideals are un- realistic and over-demanding, some have developed a re- lated, systemic model of deliberative democracy that aims to retain the original deliberative values while allowing for more expansive notions of deliberative processes. systemic models acknowledge a variety of interactions and associ- ations as forms of deliberation which can be treated as component parts of a larger deliberative system. such systems are characterized by the distribution of delibera- tion across components, and a division of deliberative labor. as a result, no individual component or interaction must itself meet the full and rigorous criteria for de- liberative democracy. pure deliberative models ground the value and legiti- macy of democracy in its relation to these deliberative ideals, independently of the epistemic value of the out- come. conversely, epistemic models of democracy suggest that in addition to protecting equal opportunity to in- fluence political outcomes (i.e., its procedural fairness), democracy’s legitimacy lies in part in its epistemic value. estlund ( , ), for instance, argues that the typical dichotomy between procedural fairness and (epistemic) quality of outcomes is a false dilemma ( , ). rather, appropriately rigorous democratic procedures can be described as having (modest) epistemic value, tending to “track truth” to a sufficient extent to ground democratic legitimacy. recent work in this area has revisited the core epistemological assumptions, developing further criteria for legitimate democracy. peter ( ) for instance, offers an alternative (pure) account of estlund’s rationalist epistemic proceduralism. rather than evaluat- ing democratic outcomes against a procedure-independent standard of correctness, we can think of knowledge as the product of a deliberative process and focus our efforts on defining “the conditions that knowledge producing prac- tices should satisfy” ( , ). these conditions support epistemic fairness, and can include “criteria that regulate public deliberation at the fact-gathering and analysis stages of the processes of policy formation” ( , ). similarly, young ( ) characterizes democracy as a form of practical reasoning aimed at finding correct and just solutions. while different social groups have access to different forms of situated knowledge, it is a mistake to think that enjoying “epistemic privilege”—in the form of having first-hand knowledge of the experience of subordination—yields epistemic power. marginalized groups may lack perceived credibility or suffer from deficits of attention. young therefore advocates inclusion as a normative ideal of democratic communication. inclusion describes not only formal opportunity to participate in deliberation, but also effective opportunity to influence others and to contest dominant notions of the common good that underpin deliberations. this effective opportunity could be read as enabling appro- priate degrees of perceived credibility and paying attention to all participants. in addition to deliberative or epistemic accounts of democratic legitimacy, there are mixed theories that draw on the insights of both in various ways. some theorists propose drawing on a deliberative stage to produce a considered set of options that are then voted on. this model is defended on epistemic grounds, wherein in- corporating a deliberative stage in the generation and vetting of possibilities produces a list of options that is better able to capitalize on the epistemic power of aggregative methods. landemore ( ) for instance, advocates an inclusive form of deliberation characterized by cognitive diversity. when combined with a “stopping rule,” such deliberation is best able to produce intelligent answers to collective problems. analysis of democratic theory and celebrity epistemic power we turn next to the question of how celebrity epistemic power creates challenges for those wishing to ground the special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core legitimacy of democracy by appealing to these democratic ideals. we introduce three points of critique, namely the illegitimate ability to set political agendas, the relative immunity from familiar checks on power, and the undermining of democracy’s epistemic qualities as a result of the disconnect between expertise and epistemic power. importantly, we do not argue that celebrity epistemic power always works to undermine democratic goals or epistemic value. particular uses of this power could compensate for systemic failings elsewhere. moreover, we do not suggest that celebrity epistemic power poses the biggest problem for democracy as compared to more familiar threats tied to inequalities of wealth, education, or leisure. we aim primarily to highlight existing democra- cies’ vulnerability to unchecked epistemic power, which we have argued that celebrities tend to enjoy, and therewith to show important lacunae in how deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy understand attention and influence. agenda setting our first point concerns the potential for celebrity epistemic power to influence the subject of deliberation: the greater attention that celebrities attract could translate into greater attention for the causes or issues they find important, thus influencing the public agenda. agenda setting can refer to the setting of the objects of public interest (i.e., what people think about), but also the attributes or framing of a debate (i.e., the terms in which people think about the subject). much research has demonstrated the influence of the news media on both levels of the public agenda and thus as constituting an important subject of democratic concern (mccombs , ). as mccombs writes: influencing the focus of public attention is a powerful role, but arguably, influencing the agenda of attributes for an issue or political figure is the epitome of political power. determining the way that an issue is framed—setting the ground rules for deliberation, if you will—can significantly influence the ultimate outcome. ( , ) while celebrity power to attract and direct attention arguably does not (yet) rival that of the news media, it can function in similar ways to influence the objects of public debate and their attributes. that is, it can transmit the salience of a subject, or of particular attributes of the subject, through volume of attention. for example, it is likely that the celebrity profile of individuals subjected to sexual harassment in hollywood played a large role in the recent rise in awareness of the issue of sexual harassment reflected in the #metoo and #timesup movements. a pervasive but previously seldom discussed issue has in a short time come to occupy a more substantive position on the political agenda. as brooke notes, “[#metoo] brought the idea of sexual harassment and assault into the public consciousness” (in seales ). it has also been described as challenging the dominant “crisis” framing of sexual assault and related policies (abrams ). placing sexual harassment on the political agenda is a positive achievement and could be described as an instance of celebrity epistemic power working to supplement the credibility and attention deficits that have wrongly kept this issue off the agenda for so long. but while the phrase “me too” was first used to highlight the prevalence of sexual assault by activist tarana burke in , it only became the focus of widespread attention when high-profile celebrities such as alyssa milano began to use it. the way this issue has (finally) been brought to the fore, i.e., via the attention-directing dimension of celebrity epistemic power, seems contrary to central de- liberative ideals of fairness and equal opportunity to influence. as such, this example illustrates how celebrity epistemic power has influenced the public agenda in a way that, at least on one level, weakens the legitimacy of existing democracy and shows just how far away existing democracies are from meeting deliberative ideals. granted, neither the news media nor celebrities fully determine the public agenda. the influence of news media partially depends on an individual’s level of media reliance or need for orientation (mccombs ). how- ever, as yang and stone ( ) show, the media agenda is also able to indirectly influence others via their interper- sonal connections with those who do follow the news media (described as “opinion leaders”). this raises two concerns: first, to the extent a celebrity echoes the news media’s agenda, they may function as an opinion leader in ways that further the news media’s agenda-setting power, and second, the special attention-directing power of celebrities likely amplifies this indirect means of agenda- setting. such methods of agenda-setting are problematic for grounding a democracy’s legitimacy in the deliberative ideals of procedural fairness and the equal standing of citizens. procedurally, viewpoints may be excluded not as a matter of having been formally rejected, but because our limited capacity for attention has been devoted to some issues over others, resulting in a de facto setting of the agenda. regarding standing, it seems celebrities likely enjoy a higher effective status in deliberative contexts (as opinion leaders) by virtue of their epistemic power. consequently, any democracy seeking to appeal to ideals of procedural fairness and equal standing to ground their legitimacy ought to find a way of addressing these power imbalances. substantive equality and checks on power plausibly, we ought to add epistemic power to the list of inequalities deliberative democrats ought to be concerned with. in particular, inequalities in epistemic power seem likely to threaten the (substantive) requirement that participants have equal opportunities to influence others. march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core while the simple existence of an inequality in power is not itself a threat to a deliberative democracy’s legitimacy, substantive controls are required to prevent this inequality leading to unequal opportunities to influence deliberation. and such controls do seem to be lacking with celebrity epistemic power currently lying outside the familiar mechanisms for checking power. first, unlike with eco- nomic power, there are no formal mechanisms aimed at regulating or monitoring celebrity contributions to polit- ical campaigns whether in the form of explicit endorse- ments or indirect political commentary via the media (social or traditional). second, there are problems with relying on informal mechanisms such as public debate as a way of identifying and contesting power. such measures may prove impotent in the case of celebrity epistemic power. to the extent that an issue becomes affiliated with a celebrity, any debate on that issue is likely to be linked to its celebrity advocate. thus, attempts to challenge celebrity statements may work to draw further attention to the celebrity. in other words, the attention tied to publicity can bolster, rather than check, a source of celebrities’ epistemic power. recognition of a similar point has led some journalists to advocate ignoring rather than contest- ing provocative comments (borchers ). additionally, the deliberative process should be driven by engagement with, and reflection on, reasons rather than the imposition of power. thus, the political process ought to be protected from coercive or manipulative influences, but also from unequal opportunities to influence that derive from wealth, educational, or other social inequal- ities. deliberative theorists are keen then to distinguish between these improper sources of unequal influence and proper sources tied to the persuasive power of good argument and evidence. however, as our analysis of the sources of epistemic power shows, these forces cannot be neatly separated—the very force of reasons can be tied to workings of epistemic power. in such cases, non- epistemic reasons (such as being the subject of greater attention) influence the extent to which some reasons are deemed legitimate or some reasoners are thought credible. to return to the previous #metoo example, it is largely because of the collective action of a handful of celebrities that widespread sexual harassment and assault in the workplace—and particularly the entertainment industry —has come to be taken seriously. while not speaking on issues outside their expertise, the actors who advanced the #metoo movement plausibly enjoyed greater perceived credibility than women generally receive when reporting sexual harassment. moreover, their capacity for persuasion was not tied to greater abilities to reason or present evidence (proper sources of influence), nor to economic or educational resources. and, such influence seems of a different type than the forms of manipulation enabled by economic or educational inequalities. instead, recognition of celebrity epistemic power reveals the ready notion of autonomous influence, understood as deliberation resulting from “free reflection on what one takes to be relevant reasons” (kolodny , ), may be too simplistic. again, in this case, epistemic power may have helped advance democratic goals (i.e., social equality), though this will not always be the case. thus, to the extent that deliberative democratic theory is ignorant of this form of informal influence, it will be ill-equipped to determine when no force but that of the better argument is in play, and hence when deliberative outcomes are legitimate. there are two points to draw from this. first, the prospects for deliberative democratic theory are tied in part to whether its proponents can offer a satisfying account of how to distinguish and control for this influence. second, the phenomenon of celebrity epistemic power presents a real challenge to anyone seeking to ground the legitimacy of any actual democracy by appealing to deliberative democratic theory. defenders of systemic accounts of deliberative democ- racy might reply that there are ways in which democracies could respond to the challenges posed by celebrity epistemic power. first, even if celebrity epistemic power risks violating deliberative ideals in traditional delibera- tive interactions (as argued earlier), the systemic approach suggests that other institutions or associations could counter this influence and thus neutralize its anti- deliberative effects. moreover, this countering could work as an opportunity to assert valuable epistemic norms and practices and thus drive the revaluing of an important deliberative virtue. finally, by not relying on specific static institutions and defined checks and balan- ces to define deliberative democracy, the systemic ap- proach might be less vulnerable to the criticism that celebrity epistemic power largely bypasses, or falls out- side, the traditional means of protecting against undue influence. while not accounted for explicitly, a systemic approach retains the possibility of identifying counter- vailing practices or norms that serve to check celebrity epistemic power where it threatens to undermine the deliberative system. it may be true that any anti-deliberative effects of celebrity epistemic power may be neutralized by other systemic components, or even work to prompt the re- assertion of valuable deliberative norms. there is evi- dence, for example, for thinking celebrity influence in the domains of health and science has prompted experts to publicly respond to pseudo-science and to emphasize the value of scientific literacy. however, while scientists have increased engagement and publicly supported valued epistemic norms, it is unclear whether the scientific experts are winning. this is despite the well-established and widely endorsed role of science in society. this gives reason for worry that the deliberative systems in the political domain, which are less well established or endorsed, may be comparatively vulnerable. special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core it is also important to consider what kinds of practices or institutions could counter any anti-deliberative effects of celebrity epistemic power, as it is not obvious how this could be done. for example, even if relevant experts respond to celebrity comments, their response could work to establish an issue as a subject of public debate. responding to issues selected by celebrities enables celebrities to set the agenda. these worries relate to the ability to identify and manage (anti)deliberative compo- nents within a democratic system, though again, in theory, it may be possible to achieve this. the task then for proponents of systemic accounts of deliberative de- mocracy is to acknowledge the ways in which celebrity epistemic power could interact with other components of a deliberative system and to conceptualize its potential anti-deliberative effects. celebrity epistemic power thus poses a potential practical challenge for democracies striving to achieve the ideals of deliberative democratic theory by insulating the deliberative process from power inequalities, partic- ularly as active efforts to contest celebrity statements could increase their power. in addition, deliberative theories of democracy need more robust notions of autonomous influence that can account for the ways in which attention and perceived credibility affect the force of reasons. decoupling one important feature of celebrity epistemic power is that it frequently extends beyond the celebrity’s legitimate area of expertise. that is, celebrities are routinely perceived as credible on subjects outside their relevant expertise. the problem is not simply that some individuals have greater epistemic power than others, as this may be entirely legitimate. scientists, for instance, may be due more epistemic power than anti-vaxxers on the subject of vaccine safety, due to their relevant expertise and creden- tials. the problem is that epistemic power should be tied to relevant expertise if democracy is to be defended on its ability to generate better choices. the decoupling of epistemic power and expertise then creates additional problems for those seeking to ground the legitimacy of a democracy by appealing to epistemic theories of de- mocracy. first, the gap between expertise and epistemic power can threaten a democracy’s potential for truth-tracking. for rational epistemic proceduralists such as estlund ( ), to the extent that celebrity epistemic power undermines the tendency of democratic procedures to track the truth, the epistemic value of democracy could be undermined. and there seems particular cause for worry on this issue given the nature of celebrity epistemic power. granted, this is not to say that celebrities will necessarily lead us further from truth, but to the extent that celebrity epistemic power is not tied to systems of credentials, training, and expertise which are meant to aid truth- tracking, it is more difficult for someone like estlund to claim that the democratic procedure is sufficiently episte- mically rigorous to support claims of legitimacy. this point is also worrisome for pure epistemic proceduralists like peter ( ) and young ( ). on peter’s account, democracy contributes to the produc- tion of knowledge. again, strict equality of epistemic power is not necessarily desirable, as we can also recognize the distinct expertise that social groups have in certain areas. catala ( ) makes a similar point when she argues that dominant majorities ought to epistemically trust a minority group on a relevant issue by virtue of their expertise. that is, on some issues, minority groups are epistemically privileged such that special, rather than equal, status is due ( , - ). thus, pure epistemic proceduralists also have reason to be concerned that epistemic power aligns with relevant expertise—namely epistemic privilege tied to one’s social group. as noted in the earlier discussion concerning rationalist accounts, celebrity epistemic power is not the product of, nor is it reliably connected to, relevant forms of expertise, and thus is worrisome. to the extent that pure epistemic proceduralists characterize democracy as a site for the production of knowledge, unchecked celebrity epistemic power that contradicts or crowds-out relevant expertise threatens democracy at a more fundamental level. moreover, turner warns that despite the growing appearance of celebrity diversity, “celebrity still remains a systemically hierarchical and exclusive category” largely under the control of media industries driven “to operate this economy in the service of their own interests” ( , ). alongside the obvious issue here regarding substantive equality, there is also the concern that such dominant interests translate to a homogenization of perspectives and interpretations that undermine the epistemic value of landemore’s deliberative component. finally, this credibility-creep could be problematic for those seeking to appeal to systemic accounts of demo- cratic legitimacy. mansbridge et al. ( ) describe the related defect of decoupling as a possible threat to a de- liberative system. decoupling occurs when “parts of the system become decoupled from one another in the sense that good reasons arising from one part fail to penetrate the others” ( , ), such as when politicians fail to acknowledge scientific data on climate change. the spreading features of celebrity epistemic power represent the complementary defect (encoupling), where reasons arising from one part of the system fail to remain isolated. celebrities are taken to have expertise even when they lack credentials and stand outside the peer communities that help support legitimate expert authority. in many ways, celebrity epistemic power is distinctly contrary to the systemic components that support healthy expert march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core contribution. thus, given the potential for celebrity epistemic power to lessen the tendency of democratic procedures to track truth, or to undermine democracy’s contribution to the production of knowledge, it should be of concern to those aiming to ground democracy’s legitimacy in its epistemic value. plebiscitary democracy we end this analysis with a discussion of an emerging model of democracy that reduces the emphasis on the traditional deliberative and epistemic values noted earlier, namely jeffrey green’s ( ) theory of plebiscitary de- mocracy. green argues that theorists must acknowledge that very few citizens in today’s existing democracies are empowered to influence politics via expression of preferences —that is, via their voice—but are better described as spectators in the democratic system. he rejects the view, however, that this condition is a lamentable one of powerlessness. rather, via recognition of three central shifts in focus he develops an alternative, ocular paradigm that identifies a new source and object of democratic power. first, rather than aiming to shape legislation, plebiscitary democracy is concerned with leaders; that is, the character and conduct of political leaders are of primary rather than secondary instrumental importance. second, rather than exercising power via speech, citizens are empowered via the gaze: a “hierarchical form of visualization that inspects, observes, and achieves surveillance” ( , ). finally, the third shift replaces the critical ideal of autonomy with that of candor. this is the institutional (rather than personal) requirement that leaders should not have full control over their appearances and presentation. the people ought to secure “control of the means of publicity” ( , ) such that public appearances are spontaneous rather than scripted, rehearsed, or managed and are thus “worthy of being watched” ( , ). green’s emphasis on the gaze as the new site of people’s democratic power partly aligns with keane’s ( ) account of monitorial democracy. for keane, contempo- rary democracy is being redefined as a system of comple- mentary monitory measures that work to identify and challenge power, rather than a system of popular self-rule ( , ). enabled by a media revolution that has produced a communicative abundance, “every nook and cranny of power becomes the potential target of ‘publicity’ and ‘public exposure’” ( , ). these monitoring bodies can be thought of as providing material for green’s plebiscitary gaze and thus as a source of empowerment. as plebiscitary democracy does not aim to produce decisions, it avoids many of the concerns that applied to epistemic and deliberative models of democracy. how- ever, celebrity epistemic power raises problems for this view, too. first, while green identifies the spectator gaze as a site of empowerment, our analysis of celebrity epistemic power and attention suggests this relationship is more fraught. increasing scrutiny and surveillance of celebrities can be cast as increasing the attention directed towards them and thus increasing their epistemic power. but, green might object, this result is less damaging for his model, as the related agenda-setting effects of attention that worried us on other accounts of democracy lose their bite on the plebiscitary model. in the world of issueless politics that characterizes plebiscitary democracy, the object is not to decide on options (i.e., engage with an agenda), but to observe the leader’s character and personality ( , ). however, this only deepens the concern. today’s celebrities are well equipped to manage their image and thus control the public’s knowledge, not (only) of issues and facts, but of the celebrity’s personality and individual qualities. many have ready access to public relations consultants and media experts, and moreover, as private individuals, celebrities can retreat behind calls for privacy to more fully control information about themselves. the private world not only lacks some of the powerful monitoring capacities of the political realm—for example, being subject to freedom of information requests, or being required to disclose sponsorship sources—it also enjoys certain protections explicitly against such monitor- ing. furthermore, celebrity publicity does not seem subject to green’s ideal of candor. while the public may value authenticity in celebrities, this does not translate to an institutional call for the public to control the means of celebrity publicity. without this institutional dimension, celebrities retain control and are able to create the appearance of authenticity (click, lee, and holladay ). thus, on plebiscitary democracy, celebrity episte- mic power to control the public’s knowledge of them as individuals is increased (via attention) while avoiding the institutional requirement for candor and the checking potential of the gaze. in sum, celebrity epistemic power poses a variety of challenges to a democracy’s ability to realize its normative ideals. this power threatens provision of equal opportu- nities to influence political outcomes in both procedural and substantive respects. the source of celebrity epistemic power is of particular concern given its potential to come apart from relevant expertise and hence derail productive and epistemically fruitful deliberative practice, including the knowledge-production capacities of democracy. more- over, the deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy examined here were shown to be lacking in their respective abilities to address the workings of celebrity epistemic power. the analysis given here represents only an initial examination of the relationship between celebrity episte- mic power and selected models of democracy. there are additional models that merit analysis, and further inter- actions within our selected theories to consider. one such issue concerns how celebrity epistemic power relates to special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the problem of “constituting the demos” (goodin , ). in particular, celebrities can, and do, engage in international deliberation: they are free to endorse, com- ment, and exercise influence at a global level. examples include american actors susan sarandon, lena dunham, and mark ruffalo expressing support for jeremy corbyn in the uk’s snap election and british singer adele endorsing hillary clinton. celebrity epistemic power, then, could result in illegitimate forms of deliberative influence that undermine democratic legitimacy. finally, more work is needed to determine the relative magnitude of the threats posed by celebrity epistemic power to existing democracies as compared to other phenomena such as economic inequality, apathy, corporate interest lobbying, or educational deficits. this work will require substantive empirical research to determine the extent of celebrity epistemic influence, particularly when interacting with these other phenomena. while we have identified a number of serious con- cerns, we do not take any of these points as proving fatal to the legitimacy of existing democracies or to the related democratic theory. rather, we take this discussion to have revealed gaps that could help inform future developments in democratic theory and practice. in particular, if green and keane are correct that contemporary democracy is increasingly characterized by spectatorship and a politics of publicity, democratic theorists ought to pay special attention to celebrity epistemic power. future directions our analysis aimed to scrutinize the interaction between celebrity epistemic power and democratic ideals, and thereby indicate themes that future democratic theorizing could pursue on this issue. in this section, we offer some speculative comments concerning the directions this theorizing could take. responsibility one avenue of inquiry is to revisit the subject of responsibility and the importance of robust moral- epistemic norms for checking celebrity epistemic power. we have identified three immediate domains for which such norms seem essential. the first includes the role of media companies in facilitating and shaping what gets attention and thus (among other things) in setting the political agenda. there is a case to be made that those companies have a moral and social responsibility to oversee who gets to use their services—in particular, they have responsibility to prohibit the spreading of falsehoods or “fake news.” some companies seem to have begun to recognize this responsibility. for example, conspiracy theorist alex jones was banned from youtube, apple, and facebook in august (newton ). our point is not that jones is a celebrity (in fact he may not be by our definition) but rather to point to this as an example of a case where media companies have recognized and responded to a misuse of epistemic power. given this, it seems reasonable for these companies to also consider the ways in which celebrities might misuse their epistemic power. of course, this leaves the question of what counts as a misuse. while some cases are clear, we need a more substantive standard to determine what counts as a misuse of epistemic power. a future project for political scientists, alongside social epistemologists, is to investigate whether such a standard can be determined. the second domain of responsibility concerns celebri- ties’ responsibility for the use of their epistemic power. their responsibilities would involve, most minimally, doing adequate research before they speak out about a topic. this might involve contacting relevant experts and checking the credentials of those experts with other experts, such as when bono consulted professor jeffrey sachs at harvard to learn more about developing world economics (harvey , ). the final domain of responsibility concerns ordinary citizens. citizens effectively give celebrities their episte- mic power by paying attention to them and, as van krieken notes ( , ), citizens can stop paying attention at any point. this relation resembles the role of citizen voters in empowering government that beerbohm ( ) discusses. for beerbohm, citizens share responsibility for their country’s actions by virtue of their relation as voters. he builds on this point to develop an ethics of justified political belief and to map the contours of this responsi- bility. beerbohm’s views could theoretically be expanded to acknowledge that ordinary citizens endow celebrities with their epistemic power and are thus partly responsible for its existence and exercise. his ethical program could similarly be extended to citizen responsibility for directing attention. in order to combat the unwarranted epistemic power of celebrities, we must therefore hope that citizens, celebrities, or media companies, upon seeing their re- sponsibility in creating this power, will help to control its use. one avenue for investigation, then, is for political scientists to garner insights from contemporary episte- mology about which intellectual and moral virtues should be developed in citizens, celebrities, and media compa- nies. whether this can be done by citizens, celebrities, or media companies individually or must be done collectively is a question that requires further investigation. however, even if an adequate solution is found, it seems somewhat naïve to think that each or any of these groups will in fact do this. this presents a serious challenge for political scientists and highlights the limits of this line of research. celebrity creation a different direction to pursue concerns the creation of celebrity. it is important to recognize that celebrities are march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core not inevitable; as products of profit-driven media in- dustries, political ideologies, and technological develop- ments, celebrity is a contingent category that could theoretically be dissolved. the history of the american film industry provides a nice example of the contingent nature of celebrity culture. in the beginning of the twentieth century the edison trust monopolized the industry and prevented actors from gaining celebrity status by banning artistic credits and denying licenses for films featuring star-making performances (wu , - ). thus, one approach is to challenge the forces that produce celebrities and eliminate (or reduce) the very existence of celebrity epistemic power. conversely, one could advocate exploiting this category rather than elimi- nating it. perhaps the better strategy is to promote the creation of celebrity experts and diverse celebrity voices in order to counter the effects of an exclusive celebrity population and to help foster informed deliberation. physics professor lawrence krauss advocates a related strategy, claiming that scientists have a responsibility to inform the public and are at least as worthy of helping to steer public debate as other celebrity figures ( , ). others, including keane, worry that media saturation can negatively affect democracy by overloading citizens with demands for their attention. “profusion breeds confu- sion,” thinks keane, and can lead to escapism, disaffection, or cynicism ( , - ). ethics and politics of attention implicit in our study is a focus on attention and publicity. in this way, our analysis shares similarities with green’s insights concerning the role of publicity (or candor) in democratic theorizing. green gave candor—that is, the people’s institutional control over the means of publicity —a central place in his democratic theory. he also emphasized the people’s gaze as an alternative source of power in place of their voice. future research in demo- cratic theory could build on these insights in light of the connections we have drawn between epistemic power, attention, and credibility. green’s concern could be framed as one regarding the allocation of epistemic power—namely, for the reallocation of the power to influence belief, to citizens via control over the means of publicity. but we ought also be concerned with how epistemic power is used—that is, how citizens use their epistemic power to allocate credence. moreover, these distributive and ethical questions might be fruitfully framed in terms of attention as well as in terms of publicity. for instance, concerns about opportunities to influence deliberation via speech could be supplemented with opportunities to be the focus of attention. one possible outcome of this study is to consider publicity and attention as a subject of justice. a related line of research concerns the ideal of equal opportunity for influencing political outcomes. this ideal presumed a clean distinction between the legitimate influence of reason and evidence and the illegitimate influence of economic or educational advantage. but as discussed in the section on substantive equality and checks on power, celebrity epistemic power represents a form of influence that resists description in these terms. thus, theorists could revisit the ideal and explore ways to address forms of influence that trade on attention and perceived credibility. expertise and power a final direction to pursue would be to investigate exactly what kind of link should exist between expertise and epistemic power. it is important for political scientists and political theorists to acknowledge both the epistemic power celebrities have and that this power is often unaccompanied by relevant forms of expertise. thus, the ideal distribution of epistemic power would be one in which someone’s epistemic power regarding a particular subject was proportional to their expertise. however, such an approach runs the risk of leading to a society governed by technocratic experts. an ongoing project in political science and political theory is to investigate how the seemingly anti-democratic phenomenon of expertise can be legitimately incorporated into democratic decision- making. for example, alfred moore ( ) recently defended a form of “critical elitism” in which expert authority can be made democratically legitimate by being made subject to public contestation. our discussion can contribute to future theorizing on this topic, first by emphasizing the importance of epistemic power, and second by raising the question of whether there is a legitimate role for those whose epistemic power is disconnected from expertise, such as with celebrities, to play in this process. conclusion celebrities are involved in politics and increasingly so. we have set out to show that celebrities have a distinctive form of epistemic power that is not connected to expertise. we have focused on this form of epistemic power because we think that in the future, it is a form that political scientists ought to investigate more. impor- tantly, we intend our contribution to act as a framework for future research rather than for it to have the final word on these complex and difficult matters. we end with a word of warning, given recent events, for political parties that wish to profit from celebrity epistemic power. while many politicians become celeb- rities by being politicians, there are also those celebrities who harness their celebrity to become politicians—e.g., ronald reagan, arnold schwarzenegger, or donald trump. one explanation for this is that they are already the focus of attention, which saves the party some work. however, this risks the celebrities themselves becoming special issue article | celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the ones who control the party’s line. the case of donald trump may illustrate this as his epistemic power seems to have become greater than the republi- can party’s in terms of agenda setting. it is troubling when a person with no political experience not only lands the highest political office in the world, but also radicalizes the direction of that party. we think that investigating unwarranted and unchecked epistemic power will be helpful for understanding the particular influence that celebrities can have in politics and for avoiding further problems with democracy. moreover, such investigations could promote wider study of the ways that epistemic power can interact with the corner- stones of democratic legitimacy. notes see street for a response to this worry. the account of epistemic power given here is based on geuskens . dotson offers another account of epistemic power characterized in terms of power relations that engender epistemic privilege and domination. our account follows allen’s understanding of power in terms of abilities or capacities (power to), which is compatible with acknowledgment of non-dominating forms of power (i.e., power with). whereby knowledge requires that what has come to pass as knowledge is also true. this case could also involve the manifestation of a professor as a celebrity, though this form of celebrity will depend in part on the epistemic power gained through being a professor. this point raises the question of what kind of procedures for the granting of institutional positions that bring epistemic power would be justified. we cannot address this question here but it is worth noting that even the best such procedures will not be foolproof and even the worst procedures may occa- sionally get things right. according to medina , credibility excesses can constitute a form of epistemic injustice. archer and matheson suggest that this spreading tendency of admiration can be seen as a specific form of the halo effect. knoll and matthes’ meta-analysis provides some support for this explanation, as they found actors to be the most effective endorsers and suggest that this may be down to the stronger relationships actors have with consumers. both processes may stem from the affective power possessed by celebrities. investigating the significance of this power in relation to politics would be a worth- while project but we cannot do so here. thanks to manuel dries, carolyn price, and andré grahle for discussion of this point. see watson’s discussion about the importance of agenda-setting and narrative shaping in the brexit referendum in the uk. proponents of classic pluralism include dahl and lasswell and kaplan , while mouffe and connelly advocate agonistic models of democ- racy. elitist theories of democracy are advanced by putnam and bottomore . these can include, for instance, “everyday talk,” non- profit organizations, the media, judicial and legislative bodies, and advocacy groups; mansbridge . by procedural fairness, estlund does not mean procedures that protect equal opportunities to in- fluence (which could be achieved via a coin toss), but rather procedures that support fair treatment (as in the procedures involved in ensuring a fair trial). see gledhill and peter , . peter points to longino’s related account of the production of scientific knowledge, including her requirement for “tempered equality . . . of intellectual authority, a criterion that warns of illegitimate asso- ciations between social, political, and economic priv- ilege and power, on the one hand, and epistemic privilege and power, on the other”; , . epistemic fairness takes into account when unequal opportunities to contribute are requirements of jus- tice. see goodin and landemore . by cognitive diversity, landemore means a variety of perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models (rather than individual ability). importantly, diverse values or goals undermine problem-solving abilities. see the related discussion in archer and matheson . to the extent that the political system cannot be insulated from these factors, deliberative democracy may require these socioeconomic inequalities in soci- ety be reduced; brighouse . see also cohen and kolodny . see brighouse , , , and knight and johnson , . as kolodny notes, the social equality relevant for the democratic goal of being ruled by none is not satisfied when claims to means are given equal concern; , . mansbridge et al. argue, for instance, that parliamen- tary heckling seems anti-deliberative at the micro-level but could be defended as promoting virtues of contestation and questioning that work in other contexts to support deliberation; , . see, for instance, timothy caulfield’s is gwyneth paltrow wrong about everything? ( ), and the charity sense about science that promotes scientific literacy and debunks celebrity claims on health or commercial products (senseaboutscience.org). march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://senseaboutscience.org https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core other qualities such as wealth or education could also be associated with being perceived as credible on subjects outside one’s expertise and thus also a cause for concern if they undermined estlund’s ( , ) epistemic democratic procedures. estlund’s theory may also be threatened by other epistemic deficits such as voter ignorance or misinformation campaigns. thus, celebrity epistemic power is only one of several potential threats to the epistemic function of a democracy. however, celebrities possess a particularly effective combination of perceived extra- expertise credibility and attention that could increase their epistemic effects relative to others. kolodny , , also argues that in non-ideal conditions, social equality may be advanced by granting a threatened group greater opportunity to influence political decisions. however, it is possible that on some issues, a celebrity will have the relevant knowledge. this does not lessen the effect of celebrity influence on subjects where they lack expertise. to the extent that scrutiny, surveillance, and attention create celebrity, green’s emphasis on the gaze in the political sphere could result in greater celebritization of politicians. see for instance criminal convictions related to hack- ing personal phone messages as part of the news international phone hacking scandal; halliday . watson , - , makes this point with respect to the media and citizens in the context of the disinformation campaign that led the 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........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m reflecting on the profession ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ introduction: reflecting on the profession susan m. sterett, university of maryland, baltimore county jennifer a. diascro, university of california washington program (ucdc) “a complexity of messages implied in our being.” (williams ) this is how patricia williams, the legal scholar, closed her path-breaking essay, “on being the object of property.” in it, she reflected on her place in law and the legal academy as an african american woman, as a law professor, and as the descendant of an enslaved woman. storytelling illuminates how people experience their lives in professions and how professions mark belonging. in this symposium, writers draw on their professional experiences to reflect on universities and their practices. the purpose of this symposium is to tell stories of the academic profession, reflecting on problems of structure, agency, gender, and race. articles offer advice for both universities and faculty mem- bers. beyond the advice, though, each piece is valuable for reflecting on experiences in universities. we invite readers to think about how they would tell their own stories. in recent years, political science has been fostering discus- sion of strategies for advancing women in the academy. data on tenure, on publication in the canonical journals, and on who advances to full professor by gender demonstrate that the profession and its pathways remain gendered (claypool et al. ; hesli, lee, and mitchell ; teele and thelen ). experiments on differences in teaching evaluations in online classes reveal systematic gender bias by students (mitchell and martin ). advice to women on how to suc- ceed highlights gendered strategies (chenoweth et al. ). academics in political science have not often publicly shared stories of how strategies exclude, or of the work required for people to fit themselves into the model of success advice implies (see, however, anonymous and anonymous [sally kenney and susan sterett] ; givens ). advice to individuals takes the profession’s practices as fixed. using advice to figure out how to fit within institutions as they exist replicates defining individuals who do not fit as failures. feminist scholarship on political success advancing women’s interests informs advice for collective advancement, and that could make it possible to change the institution (mershon and walsh ; ; ). alternatively, telling stories of how people craft their lives in the profession could lead to questioning institutions. turning to the institution itself and the limits of what it defines as successful can bor- row from queer theory. drawing on stories, queer theory has questioned what it means to fail at being straight. stories can critique institutions as setting the wrong standards: the met- ric for a life well lived is not a straight life well lived (sjoberg ; stacey and biblarz ). a professional life well lived also could be too narrowly defined. reflecting on the acad- emy’s exclusions requires animating data with individual stories to help with rethinking meanings of success and insti- tutional failures. narrow metrics that universities use influence advice about how to improve the status of women, or how to advise anyone on how to succeed. advice takes conditions as given. for example, if women do too much service, they should say no to service. advice to women to turn down unrewarded service work avoids the question of how that work gets done. an alternative approach would be to recognize the work. for example, the public-administration scholar shannon portillo argued that she does not want to follow the common advice to women to take on less service work. instead, she argued, of finding ways to get women to cut back, some men could contribute more (portillo ). advice also assumes con- ditions will not change, so the rewards for different kinds of work will not change if women change strategies. advice or analysis of tenure rates also ignores the increasing number of people who work in more contingent positions, or in admin- istrative jobs, or who have left the profession, with varying degrees of joy or sorrow. accomplishing change that does not only accommodate existing standards is difficult. how to manage family life also is central to advice. advice holds that women need to hire help for more of the care work at home and count on a partner to do a lot of it (chenoweth et al. ). that advice has a version of family life that does not fit everyone. parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews need care, not only children. many children are raised without a second parent or partner. the advice also denies the value of a life apart from the profession. denying the importance of family and community life is a hallmark of a “greedy institution,” one that demands undivided loyalty (sullivan , following coser ). participants get the exclusive benefits of that voluntary loyalty. as the president of the university of virginia, teresa sullivan, argued, universities have become greedy instititutions (sullivan ). electronic connections step up work demands. describing a university as an institution that asks for one’s devotion highlights the costs to our- selves, our families, and our communities implicit in some of the advice about how to succeed on the profession’s own terms. ............................................................................................................................................... 	 ps	•	january p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m : r e f l e c t i n g o n t h e p r o f e s s i o n ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ analyses based in patterns of outcomes—tenure denials, or promotion, or salary—may give all the information anyone needs to decide within constraints. however, people make sense of information in the context of their and others’ expe- riences. stories allow people to turn from the decisions they must make to the decisions organizations make. stories also can include the whole person, not only what metrics measure. telling stories about costs, successes, and strategies allows new ways of seeing a place in the world. james pennebaker, a psychologist of language and stories, has argued that tell- ing stories helps people to reach a resolution once they can change perspectives. he argued that being aware of ourselves and aware of others in the story gives stories a more coher- ent structure (pennebaker ). ways of seeing social power also inform how people tell stories. linking stories to broader structures shows patterns beyond any one individual’s con- trol. alternatively, stories without a context and a link beyond immediate circumstances can reinforce power (ewick and silbey ). political scientists have written about how sto- ries that social movements tell can promote or discourage action (beckwith ). stories that make failures contingent rather than necessary can encourage people to “fight another day” (beckwith ). in summary, anyone can tell stories about professional experiences in multiple ways. shifting per- spectives could make it more possible to name problems as collective rather than individual. irreverent stories of the profession are becoming increas- ingly available via blogs, podcasts, hashtags, and social media. gatekeeping through controlling publication does not work when twitter handles are not subject to peer review. fragments have gained new currency, evidenced by the #metoo hashtag. although neither nor characters allows con- text, reflection, and perspective shifting, that hashtag and a spreadsheet about the academy (kelsky ) have promoted awareness that was not previously public. the recent turn to recognizing problems of sexual harassment and assault is wel- come in raising issues long ignored and underreported. because discrimination on the basis of sex has long been illegal and uni- versities have long had policies against it, stories illuminate fail- ures of law as a remedy. as recent news about legal settlements demonstrates, people often do not complain, or complaints remain unaddressed, or cases settle and settlement means insti- tutions do not acknowledge problems as systemic (sterett ). therefore, this symposium comprises reflections on build- ing careers in political science. each piece draws from experi- ence and offers insight for both insitutions and individuals. we began this project with jennifer diascro’s own reflections on tenure denial in her blog and responses it generated. we held a workshop on advancement through stories in october . the organizers’ goal for the workshop was to bring together scholars to share their experiences of the academy. partici- pants were diverse by gender, age, disability, sexuality, race, and ethnicity; academic rank and appointment; type and loca- tion of university; career paths in and out of the academy; and family responsibilities. in the following pages, contributors reflect on changing conditions in the academy. many people entered expecting stability, recognizing that stability was not what other careers offered and included tradeoffs. most of the essays touch on how careers were not as stable as expected. perhaps instability is not surprising, but advice that takes conditions as fixed can- not make sense of things that do not go as promised. if universities are greedy institutions (sullivan ), they impose costs on work choices, self, and community. in response to universities’ greed for initiates’ loyalty, nikol g. alexander- floyd, renée a. cramer, and taneisha means appeal to living with integrity and abandoning the concept of balance. stephen bragaw writes about how his career was upended in the blink of an eye when his university closed. he reflects on his own jungian “night sea journey,” rethinking his life’s purpose in the face of such dramatic change. the focus of universities and the profession on tenure does not structure later career reflections. like stephen bragaw, c. scott peters takes on changing demands in the university. he argues for the importance of lining up rewards, including promotion, with the work that needs to be done. increasingly, this work includes assessment, curriculum planning, and service learning. only some univer- sities consider these in promotion decisions, yet the work is increasingly central to the mission in higher education. changing contexts also shape how christopher h. foreman, jr. began his career and how it progressed. think tanks, where he spent much of his career, once rewarded reflec- tive books. changing finances mean they do not anymore, and foreman writes that such books do not always fit with what uni- versities want anymore either. he recognizes the importance of friendships throughout his career, a lesson that does transfer to new contexts. he recognized good questions and opportunities when he saw them, leading to creative books on congressional oversight and environmental justice. working in government inspired some of his scholarship; he watched for opportunity. lee demetrius walker tells of persistence and mentoring as he worked with a manuscript of his that journals turned down. he reflects on this story—which ends with two man- uscripts published in peer-reviewed journals—in light of scholarship on sensitivity to rejection. as one reviewer of this piece noted, anyone who finds rejection devastating can quit the profession. however, sensitivity in a profession built on rejection when not everyone knows that rejection is ordinary can contribute to patterns of exclusion. getting beyond indi- vidual perceptions could contribute to changing persistence. advice to individuals takes the profession’s practices as fixed. using advice to figure out how to fit within institutions as they exist replicates defining individuals who do not fit as failures. ps	•	january ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ the greediness of universities affects fatherhood and mas- culinity as well, just when many in the united states recognize that both require rethinking. offloading care work to partners does not only implicate women’s care work. foreman, gould, and lovato all include their experiences of fatherhood and the meaning of masculinity in the academy. as the writer michael ian black ( ) argued, the world would benefit if we had more complex conversations about masculinity. these articles contribute. jennifer diascro and valeria sinclair-chapman interpret tenure denials. universities often describe the tenure process in rules and handbooks and guidelines. decision points are multiple and appeals are possible: the extensive bureaucratic process described in handbooks does not include the people who are the subject of evaluation. diascro and sinclair-chapman describe experiences in the process, not the rules. sinclair- chapman powerfully describes what it is like to be a black woman in a historically white institution. diascro comple- ments sinclair-chapman by identifying the institutional failures in the tenure process, illustrating with her own experience. for both, the trappings of rational bureaucracy implied that there are no surprises. yet, for diascro and sinclair-chapman and many others, the outcome was sur- prising and devastating, not least because universities portray tenure denial as a matter of individual responsibility. both argue that departmental and university power dynamics are central to tenure. the stories that are not told in this symposium are myriad. people who have the least security and a great deal to say had little reason to write. people who are on term-limited contracts, or getting advice from lawyers, or very junior and on the job market did not see writing as a good idea for them. even so, workshop participants raised questions that are per- vasive in the profession and more evident in blogs and tweets than in reports. people decide about jobs within constraints not captured by a model of autonomous individuals that still inform advice. for example, people cannot always accept positions that require moving every couple of years, which the profession increasingly requires of young academics. the pro- fession can fault individuals for not moving, but it is a level of commitment that poses a problem for families and communi- ties. in addition, people are not always fully physically able, which feminist theory has long stated but professional liter- ature misses. missing that point mistakes what people bring to the job, including empathy with students’ struggles and insight into fundamental political processes (andersen ). in the current moment, we note that this symposium does not include any #metoo stories. the proliferation of frag- ments using that hashtag, the controversy over #metoo and gatekeeping in political science (bartlett and gluckman ; midwest women’s caucus for political science ), and the google sheet on which people can enter their fragments (kelsky ) have named exclusion. even without linking individual fragments to broader narrative arcs about insti- tutions and power, reporting has made sexual misconduct in the academy less isolating. the hashtag, spreadsheet, and workshop at the apsa annual meeting all allow ques- tions about how the workplace is sexualized in the academy. a report from the national academies of sciences ( ) found that universities have done little to address sexual harassment. so, tell your own stories. shift perspectives. find ways to incorporate a dominant framework and ways that do not. learn, and learn with colleagues, and draw your own lessons about individual and collective problems. acknowledgments the authors are grateful to the editors of ps: political science & politics, to judith grant, to laura mateczun, and to the partici- pants in the workshop funded by national science foundation grant # . n r e f e r e n c e s andersen, ellen ann. . “unruly bodies: my life as an academic with disabilities.” available at https://thewpsa.wordpress.com/ / / /unruly- bodies-my-life-as-an-academic-with-disabilities. accessed july , . anonymous and anonymous [sally kenney and susan sterett]. . tenure in a chilly climate. ps: a journal of political science ( ) (march): – . bartlett, tom, and nell gluckman. . “she left harvard. he got to stay.” chronicle of higher education. available at www.chronicle.com/interactives/ harvard-harassment. accessed july , . beckwith, karen. . “narratives of defeat: explaining the effects of loss in social movements.” journal of politics ( ): – . black, michael ian. . “the boys are not all right.” new york times, february . available at www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/boys- violence-shootings-guns.html. accessed june , . chenoweth, erica, page fortina, sara mitchell, burcu savun, jessica weeks, and kathleen cunningham. . “how to get tenure (if you are a woman).” foreign policy, april . available at http://foreignpolicy.com/ / / / how-to-get-tenure-if-youre-a-woman-academia-stephen-walt. accessed march , . claypool, vicki hesli, brian david janssen, dongkyu kim, and sara mclaughlin mitchell. . “determinants of salary dispersion among political science faculty: the differential effects of where you work (institutional charac- teristics) and what you do (negotiate and publish).” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . coser, lewis a. . greedy institutions: patterns of undivided commitment. new york: free press. ewick, patricia, and susan s. silbey. . “subversive stories and hegemonic tales: toward a sociology of narrative.” law & society review ( ): – . givens, terri. . “truths to be told.” https://www.terrigivens.com/ / / /truths-to-be-told/ april . accessed august , . hesli, vicki l., jae mook lee, and sara mclaughlin mitchell. . “predicting rank attainment in political science: what else besides publications affects promotion?” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . so, tell your own stories. shift perspectives. find ways to incorporate a dominant framework and ways that do not. learn, and learn with colleagues, and draw your own lessons about individual and collective problems. https://thewpsa.wordpress.com/ / / /unruly-bodies-my-life-as-an-academic-with-disabilities https://thewpsa.wordpress.com/ / / /unruly-bodies-my-life-as-an-academic-with-disabilities http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/harvard-harassment http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/harvard-harassment http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/boys-violence-shootings-guns.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/boys-violence-shootings-guns.html http://foreignpolicy.com/ / / /how-to-get-tenure-if-youre-a-woman-academia-stephen-walt http://foreignpolicy.com/ / / /how-to-get-tenure-if-youre-a-woman-academia-stephen-walt https://www.terrigivens.com/ / / /truths-to-be-told/ https://www.terrigivens.com/ / / /truths-to-be-told/ 	 ps	•	january p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m : r e f l e c t i n g o n t h e p r o f e s s i o n ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ kelsky, karen. . “a crowdsourced survey of sexual harassment in the academy.” available at https://theprofessorisin.com/ / / /a- crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy. accessed july , . mershon, carol, and denise walsh. . “introduction.” politics & gender ( ): – . mershon, carol, and denise walsh. . “introduction: how political science can be more diverse.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . mershon, carol, and denise walsh. . “diversity in political science: why it matters and how to get it.” politics, groups and identities ( ): – . midwest women’s caucus for political science. . “letter to mpsa.” available at http://mwcps.org/letter-to-mpsa.html. mitchell, kristina, and jonathan martin. . “gender bias in student evaluations.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . available at doi: . /s x. national academies of sciences. . sexual harassment of women: climate culture and consequences in academic sciences and medicine. washington, dc: national academies press. available at http:// sites.nationalacademies.org/shstudy/index.htm. accessed june , . pennebaker, james w. . the secret life of pronouns: what our words say about us. new york: bloomsbury press. portillo, shannon. . “white men must learn to say yes.” inside higher education, august . available at www.insidehighered.com/advice/ / / /white-men-should-do-more-campus-service-work-essay. accessed april , . sjoberg, laura. . “queer failure for diversity seekers?” paper presented at workshop on advancing diversity in the profession (ses- ). manuscript in possession of the authors. stacey, judith, and timothy biblarz. . “(how) does the sexual orientation of parents matter?” american sociological review ( ): – . available at www.jstor.org/stable/ . sterett, susan. . “law’s presence, law’s absence: reporting stories of employment discrimination in the academy.” politics and gender. available at https://doi.org/ . /s x . sullivan, teresa. . “greedy institutions, overwork, and work–life balance.” sociological inquiry ( ): - . teele, dawn langan, and kathleen thelen. . “gender in the journals: publica- tion patterns in political science.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . williams, patricia. . “on being the object of property.” signs: journal of women in culture and society ( ): – . s y m p o s i u m c o n t r i b u t o r s nikol g. alexander-floyd is associate professor of women’s and gender studies and political science at rutgers university, new brunswick. she has published in leading journals, such as signs: journal of women in culture & society, frontiers, feminist formations, and the national political science review, among others. she is the author of gender, race, and nationalism in contemporary black politics (palgrave macmillan ) and is coeditor, along with julia jordan-zachery, of black women in politics: demanding citizenship, challenging power, and seeking justice (suny press ). her current book project is liminal subjects: black women, melodrama, and postfeminism in the new millennium. she may be reached at ngaf@womenstudies.edu. stephen bragaw is a visiting professor in the department of politics at washington and lee university, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, american politics, and statistics. a graduate of wesleyan university, he earned his phd at the university of virginia in american government and public law. he is currently working on a project “the rise of the almighty dollar” that examines the political and legal development of monetary power in the american constitutional system. he may be reached at bragaws@wlu.edu. renée a. cramer is a professor of law, politics, and society at drake university. after having served as chair for seven years, she is about to begin a term as faculty senate president. her current research, funded by the national science foundation, the iowa state historical society, and a small grant from the american political science association, is on the legal mobilization of home birth midwives and their advocates in the united states. she can be contacted at renee.cramer@drake.edu. jennifer a. diascro is associate academic director at the university of california washington program (ucdc). she teaches seminars on research design and implementation, law and society, and judicial process. most recently, she is coauthor of “a retrospective on obama’s judges: diversity, intersectionality and symbolic representation” (in politics, groups, and identities, ) and co-pi on national science foundation grant # , “advancement through narrative: understanding and navigating success and failure in the academy.” she blogs about tenure denial and other things at www.jenniferdiascrophd.com and can be reached at jennifer.diascro@ucdc.edu. christopher h. foreman, jr. is professor in the school of public policy at the university of maryland. he is at work on a book about the evolution of twentieth-century american politics. he may be reached at cforeman@umd.edu. jon b. gould is professor of public affairs and law at american university in washington, dc. he has held positions as a us supreme court fellow, in the us department of justice, and at the national science foundation. professor gould writes on questions of law and justice. he may be reached at gould@american.edu. brian lovato is visiting assistant professor at augustana college. his research focuses on social movements, identity politics, and critical marxist theory. he is the author of democracy, dialectics, and difference (routledge, ). he may be reached at brianlovato@augustana.edu taneisha means is assistant professor of political science at vassar college in poughkeepsie, new york. she specializes in judicial politics, and race, ethnicity, and politics, and is currently finishing a book manuscript on black state court judges’ identities and decision making. she can be contacted at tmeans@vassar.edu. c. scott peters is professor and head of the department of political science at the university of northern iowa. his research interests focus on questions of judicial selection and retention in us state courts, particularly judicial elections. his book, regulating judicial elections (routledge, ) examines the effect of state codes of judicial conduct on state supreme court elections. valerie sinclair-chapman is associate professor of political science and the director of the center for research on diversity and inclusion at purdue university. her research interests include american politics with a focus on legislative studies, political representation, and political participation. current projects examine the effects of diversity in a range of contexts including congress, political participation, and social movements. she can be reached at vsc@purdue.edu. susan m. sterett is professor and director of the school of public policy at university of maryland baltimore county. since being denied tenure in she has been a faculty member at the university of denver and at virginia tech before joining umbc. most recently she is the author of “law’s presence, law’s absence: reporting on employment discrimination in the academy” (politics and gender), and “data access as regulation” ( forthcoming in american behavioral scientist). coediting the journal law and society review has taught her that being risk averse about rejection is unhelpful. she may be reached at ssterett@umbc.edu. lee demetrius walker is associate professor of political science and associate chair of the department of political science at the university of north texas. his teaching and research interests focus on the areas of comparative judicial politics, latin american politics, comparative democratization and political methodology. he has published his work in journal of politics, comparative politics, political research quarterly, electoral studies, law and society review, party politics, latin american research review, and others. he may be reached at lee.walker@unt.edu. https://theprofessorisin.com/ / / /a-crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy https://theprofessorisin.com/ / / /a-crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy http://mwcps.org/letter-to-mpsa.html https://doi.org/ . /s x http://sites.nationalacademies.org/shstudy/index.htm http://sites.nationalacademies.org/shstudy/index.htm http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/ / / /white-men-should-do-more-campus-service-work-essay http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/ / / /white-men-should-do-more-campus-service-work-essay http://www.jstor.org/stable/ https://doi.org/ . /s x mailto:ngaf@womenstudies.edu mailto:bragaws@wlu.edu mailto:renee.cramer@drake.edu http://www.jenniferdiascrophd.com mailto:jennifer.diascro@ucdc.edu mailto:cforeman@umd.edu mailto:gould@american.edu mailto:brianlovato@augustana.edu mailto:tmeans@vassar.edu mailto:vsc@purdue.edu mailto:ssterett@umbc.edu mailto:lee.walker@unt.edu s .. the cost of doing politics? analyzing violence and harassment against female politicians mona lena krook and juliana restrepo sanı́n violence against women in politics is increasingly recognized around the world as a significant barrier to women’s political participation, following a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female politicians. yet conceptual ambiguities remain as to the exact contours of this phenomenon. in this article, we seek to strengthen its theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. we propose that the presence of bias against women in political roles—originating in structural violence, employing cultural violence, and resulting in symbolic violence—distinguishes this phenomenon from other forms of political violence. we identify five types of violence against women in politics—physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic—and three methodological challenges related to underreporting, comparing men’s and women’s experiences, and intersectionality. inspired by the literature on hate crimes, we develop an empirical approach for identifying cases of violence against women in politics, offering six criteria to ascertain whether an attack was potentially motivated by gender bias. we apply this framework to analyze three cases: the assassination of benazir bhutto, the impeachment of dilma rousseff, and the murder of jo cox. we conclude with the negative implications of violence against women in politics and point to emerging solutions around the globe. r ecent years have seen a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female politicians (krook a). bolivia was the first state to respond with legal reforms, passing a law crimi- nalizing political violence and harassment against women in . in and , global and regional organ- izations began to raise awareness and take action: the national democratic institute (ndi) launched the mona lena krook is professor of political science at rutgers university (m.l.krook@rutgers.edu). she has written widely on the diffusion and implementation of electoral quotas for women, including several award-winning books and articles. her current research explores mechanisms of resistance and backlash against women’s greater inclusion in the political sphere. in , she was named an andrew carnegie fellow to research and write a book on violence and harassment against politically active women. since , she has collaborated with the national democratic institute on its #notthecost campaign to stop violence against women in politics. juliana restrepo sanín is assistant professor of political science at the university of florida (julireposan@gmail.com). she completed her phd in political science at rutgers university in with a dissertation titled “violence against women in politics in latin america.” in – , she was a postdoctoral fellow at the sié chéou-kang center for international security and diplomacy, josef korbel school of international studies, university of denver, and one earth future foundation. she has published articles in politics & gender and política y gobierno and is author of mujeres y participación política: el fenómeno de la violencia contra las mujeres en política. the authors would like to thank sandra pepera, caroline hubbard, julie ballington, brigitte filion, rebecca kuperberg, mary nugent, gabrielle bardall, elin bjarnegård, and jennifer piscopo for their sustained engagement with our work. an early version of this article won the apsa women and politics section best paper award in . subsequent versions have benefited from feedback during presentations at columbia university, rutgers university, brigham young university, johns hopkins university, the college of new jersey, emory university, sewanee: the university of the south, oklahoma state university, the university of bucharest, the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, and princeton university. fieldwork for this project was supported by a national science foundation career award (ses- ), a chancellor’s scholarship at rutgers university, and an andrew carnegie fellowship. article © american political science association perspectives on politics doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:m.l.krook@rutgers.edu mailto:julireposan@gmail.com https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core #notthecost campaign to stop violence against women in politics; the inter-parliamentary union (ipu) under- took a global study of sexism, violence, and harassment against female members of parliament (mps); and the inter-american commission of women published a model law to combat violence against women in political life. in , the #metoo movement led to the suspen- sion or resignation of male mps and cabinet ministers in north america, western europe, and beyond. available statistics indicate that violence against women in politics is not uncommon. the ipu finds that, globally, nearly all female mps have experienced psychological violence in the course of their parliamen- tary work. approximately one-third have suffered eco- nomic violence, one-quarter some type of physical violence, and one-fifth some form of sexual violence (inter-parliamentary union , ). these patterns are confirmed at country and local levels. of women who ran for office in malawi in , quit before the elections were over because of harassment and intimida- tion (semu-banda ). in afghanistan, nearly all female candidates interviewed in the elections had received threatening phone calls (national democratic institute ). in peru, % of female mayors and local councilors had been subjected to violence (quintanilla ). in bolivia, % of women had been victims of violence more than once (rojas valverde ). despite emerging global attention, several conceptual ambiguities remain regarding the contours of this phe- nomenon. first, definitions used by ndi and the ipu focus on women, suggesting that these acts target women because of their gender—but without comparing their experiences to those of men (krook ). second, terminology varies. un women and the international foundation for electoral systems (ifes) highlight vio- lence against women in elections, rather than in political life, whereas debates in latin america distinguish between political violence and harassment. finally, sources diverge in recognizing different forms of violence: the bolivian law names two, ifes identifies three, and the ipu lists four. this article seeks to resolve these ambiguities to lay the foundations for improved global research and program- ming. to make the concept of “violence against women in politics” more theoretically, empirically, and method- ologically robust, we draw on literatures in multiple disciplines, a large collection of new stories and practi- tioner reports, and interviews we conducted in asia, latin america, north africa, western europe, and sub-saharan africa between and . in the first section, we propose that the presence of bias against women in political roles distinguishes this phenomenon from polit- ical violence and violence against politicians. we argue that violence against women in politics originates in structural violence, is carried out through cultural vio- lence, and results in symbolic violence against women. the second section maps empirical manifestations, emphasizing continuities across a broad range of behav- iors falling under the umbrella of violence against women in politics. recognizing that definitions of violence are contested, however, we introduce a distinction between violence, the use or threat of use of force, and harassment, the creation of a hostile work environment. we combine research and practitioner work on political violence and violence against women to identify four types: physical, psychological, sexual, and economic. based on trends in women’s experiences emerging in our news and interview data, we theorize one additional form: semiotic. the third section addresses methodological challenges in studying this phenomenon: the problem of underreporting, the value of comparing men’s and women’s experiences, and the need to take intersectionality into account. seeking to resolve these issues, the fourth section considers how to identify cases of violence against women in politics. inspired by the literature on hate crimes, we present six criteria to help ascertain whether an attack was potentially motivated by bias. to illustrate how these elements might inform empir- ical analysis, the fifth section applies our framework to three cases: the assassination of benazir bhutto, the impeachment of dilma rousseff, and the murder of jo cox. these acts targeted female politicians performing their political roles and as such ultimately violated their political rights. based on our framework, we determine that the rousseff and cox cases constitute examples of violence against women in politics, but the bhutto case does not. ambiguities in the cox data, in particular, show why a bias event approach is crucial for judging the broader significance of a given case. the final section outlines the negative implications of violence against women in politics and discusses emerging solutions around the globe. theorizing the phenomenon political scientists have long been troubled by political violence, defining it as the use of force— or threatened use of force—to achieve political ends (della porta ). it poses a challenge to democracy when one side gets “its way through fear of injury or death,” rather than “through a process in which individuals or groups recognize each other. . . as rational interlocutors” (schwarzmantel , ). recent studies on violence against politicians and on violence against women in politics extend this agenda to consider threats and intimidation toward those who run for and hold political office. similar to existing work on political violence, these literatures show how violent tactics seek to distort the collective will, with added impact when they specifically target members of particular groups. violence against politicians violence against politicians has captured the attention of both practitioners and scholars working across disciplines. september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the ipu committee on the human rights of parlia- mentarians recently renewed its efforts to pressure governments to investigate murders and disappearances and achieve redress for mps unduly excluded from their mandates (inter-parliamentary union ). govern- ments have also taken a keener interest in this issue. in , the italian parliament commissioned a survey of murdered politicians. in , british prime minister theresa may called for a review of abuse and intimidation of candidates, and the swedish government launched a plan to tackle threats and hate directed at officeholders. most academic research on this topic has been con- ducted by forensic psychiatrists studying “aggressive/ intrusive” behaviors toward public figures, including physical attacks, threats, stalking, property damage, and inappropriate communications. between % and % of mps in new zealand and the uk report experiencing at least one of these forms of harassment (every-palmer, barry-walsh, and pathé ; james et al. ). more than one-quarter of canadian politicians described these intrusions as “frightening” or “terrifying” (adams et al. , ), and more than % of british mps increased their security measures at home and work as a result (james et al. , ). for these scholars, intrusive behaviors “stand apart from what might be seen as the mp’s working role” when they “interfere with his or her function, or cross the border into what is perceived as threatening” ( ). political scientists and economists have taken a different approach, seeking to explain when, why, and how groups use violence against politicians—and with what effects. evidence from italy indicates that violence is most likely to occur after elections to influence policy, rather than being committed before elections to affect electoral outcomes. it is usually directed at local politicians and most often takes the form of arson and threatening letters (daniele and dipoppa ). its aim is generally to provoke their removal or render them less effective in pursuing agendas that the group dislikes (dal bó, dal bó, and di tella ). country factors may facilitate such violence; for example, in mexico the number of narco-assassinations has increased since as a result of growing criminal fragmentation and political pluralization (blume ). gender features in only a marginal way in these literatures, despite observations in passing that the majority of perpetrators are male (james et al. ) and that murdered politicians also tend to be male (daniele ). yet incorporating a gender lens into the study of violence against politicians does more than just highlight the gendered identities of victims and perpetra- tors. it also points to a related but distinct phenomenon, whereby the origins, means, and effects of violent acts specifically aim to exclude women from the political sphere, disrupting the political process as a means of reinforcing gendered hierarchies. violence against women in politics in september , british mps held a debate on the abuse and intimidation of political candidates, agreeing that the problem affected all parties and posed a serious problem for democracy. yet, numerous interventions in the debate by both male and female mps noted that women were often specifically targeted. work on online abuse makes a similar observation: whereas “generic trolls” aim to annoy, upset, or anger people, “gender trolls” engage in harassing and threatening behaviors— often using graphic sexualized and gender-based insults— to inspire fear and drive women to withdraw from online discourse (mantilla ). although the technology is new, maligning a woman’s character, often by reference to her sexuality, has been a recurring strategy historically to discredit women’s ideas and inhibit their participation in traditionally male-dominated spaces (spender ). violence against women in politics thus entails viola- tions of both electoral and personal integrity (bjarnegård ). it stems from misogyny, a system that polices and enforces patriarchal norms and expectations. misogyny distinguishes between “good” and “bad” women, punish- ing the latter for perceived violations of appropriate gender roles (manne ). political scientists have largely over- looked this phenomenon because they tend to define violence in a minimalistic way, as an act of force. sociologists and many feminist theorists, in contrast, tend to define violence more comprehensively as an act of violation (bufacchi ), thereby uncovering behaviors that otherwise remain hidden or “naturalized.” inspired by this work, we propose that violence against women in politics originates in structural violence, is perpetrated through cultural violence, and results in symbolic violence against women (figure ). violence against women in politics begins with struc- tural violence, involving the stratification of access to basic human needs based on ascriptive group member- ship. built into the social structure, this stratification enacts harm in the form of unequal life chances (galtung ), “leav[ing] marks not only on the human body but also on the mind and the spirit” (galtung , ). the structural origins of women’s political exclusion stem from ancient and modern political theories associating men with the public sphere and women with the private (okin ). this divide limits women’s mobility even in figure violence against women in politics article | violence and harassment of female politicians perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core countries where women’s movement in public spaces is not legally restricted. structural violence inspires and rationalizes hostility against women leaders stemming from their perceived status violations (eagly and karau ). cultural violence provides the means for perpetrating violence against women in politics. it refers to cultural norms used to justify mistreatment, thereby “changing the moral color of an act from red/wrong to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable” (galtung , ). rooted in dynamics of structural violence, cultural vio- lence creates a double standard by tolerating violence when perpetrated against members of particular groups. rape myths are one form: blaming survivors, they suggest that rapes are provoked by women’s personal choices in clothing and behavior (suarez and gadalla ). sexist jokes are another form of cultural violence, expressing antagonistic attitudes toward women under the guise of “benign amusement” (ford ). sexual objectification is a third common vehicle, reducing women to physical attributes and thereby denying their competence and full emotional and moral capacity (heflick and goldenberg ). symbolic violence is the intended outcome of violence against women in politics. according to bourdieu ( ), masculine domination is the quintessential form of symbolic violence, seeking to put women who deviate from prescribed norms back “in their place.” what makes symbolic violence so powerful is “misrecognition,” whereby the “dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination” ( ). these dynamics can be seen in cases of sex-based harassment: men and women alike may punish individuals who deviate from gender norms to defend their own status in the existing system of gender hierarchy (berdahl ). backlash against agentic women maintains stereotypes and rewards perpetrators psycholog- ically, increasing their self-esteem (rudman and fairchild ). mapping empirical manifestations a minimalist conception of violence as force focuses on the deliberate infliction of physical injury, highlighting the intentions of agents who commit acts of violence at single moments in time. in contrast, a more comprehen- sive view of violence as violation recognizes a wider range of transgressions, privileging the experiences of victims and the temporally indeterminate “ripples of violence” affecting survivors, their families, and society (bufacchi ; bufacchi and gilson ). reflecting the latter approach, research and activism on violence against women go beyond physical violence to emphasize a con- tinuum of violent behaviors (kelly ). international and national frameworks thus enumerate various forms of violence against women. article of the un declaration on the elimination of violence against women names physical, sexual, and psychological violence, to which article of the council of europe’s istanbul convention adds economic violence. world bank data from countries indicate that all four forms appear in national laws, with varying degrees of recognition: physical violence is criminalized in states, psychological violence in , sexual violence in , and economic violence in (world bank ). we propose two modifications to these prevailing frameworks. first, recognizing that political scientists without a foundation in gender studies may hesitate to adopt a broad concept of violence, we propose retaining the umbrella concept of violence against women in politics, under which we can distinguish between acts of violence, involving the use of force, and harassment, actions creating a hostile work environment. second, we theorize a fifth form of violence against women in politics, semiotic violence, which captures dynamics not reducible to the four other types. figure illustrates how the five types of violence form part of the same field of behaviors, but may nonetheless be distinguished from one another. physical violence and harassment physical violence involves efforts to inflict bodily harm and injury. in , a mexican mayoral candidate, guadalupe Ávila salinas, was shot dead in broad daylight by the sitting mayor while holding a meet- ing with women from the community (jarquín edgar figure types of violence against women in politics september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ). other women have been kidnapped, such as afghan mp fariba ahmadi kakar, who was abducted by taliban rebels in (graham-harrison ), or severely beaten, as was kenyan parliamentary candidate flora terah in (terah ). physical harassment entails touching, jostling, or other forms of unwelcome physical proximity, as experienced by an activist in uganda who was stripped naked by police at a party rally in . it might also involve involuntary confinement; for example, a candidate in tunisia was locked in her home by her husband to prevent her from attending a campaign event. the tangible nature of physical acts makes them the most widely recognized and least contested forms of violence against women. they tend to be relatively rare, however, with perpetrators opting for “less costly” means of violence and harassment before escalating to physical attacks. psychological violence and harassment psychological violence inflicts trauma on individuals’ mental state or emotional well-being. examples include death and rape threats, carried out in person or online. laura boldrini, speaker of the italian parliament, received bullets in the mail, saw “death to boldrini” scrawled on city walls, and was burned in effigy (feder, nardelli, and de luca ). rape threats against british mp jess phillips on twitter became so common that she was forced to block her twitter accounts and report the abuse to police. psychological harassment occurs inside and outside of official political settings. malalai joya, an afghan mp, was called a prostitute and had water bottles thrown at her in parliament; in she was ejected by a show of hands, in violation of official procedures for suspending an mp (equalitynow ). ayaka shiomura, a japanese local councilor, was taunted by male colleagues, who yelled “go and get married” and “can’t you give birth?” at her while she was making a speech on increasing the number of women in the workforce (lies ). in sierra leone, men in secret societies have sought to scare off female candidates (kellow ). sexual violence and harassment sexual violence comprises sexual acts and attempts at sexual acts by coercion. stigma prevents many women from coming forward to report their experience of sexual violence. for example, it was only in , during debates on sexual violence in canadian politics, that former deputy prime minister sheila copps disclosed she had been sexually assaulted by a male provincial parlia- ment colleague in (cbs news ). in , monique pelletier revealed she was assaulted by a male senator in while serving as the french minister of women’s rights. sexual harassment entails unwelcome sexual comments or advances. in recent years, elected men who have lost their positions because of such allegations include mbu- lelo goniwe, chief whip for the african national con- gress party in south africa in ; massimo pacetti and scott andrews, liberal mps in canada in ; silvan shalom, interior minister of israel in ; and denis baupin, vice president of the french national assembly in (krook b). the rise of the #metoo movement in has accelerated similar disclosures in countries as diverse as britain, canada, korea, russia, and the united states. economic violence and harassment feminists theorize economic violence as abuse seeking to deny or control women’s access to financial resources (un women/undp , ), whereas definitions of elec- toral violence include injuries inflicted on “person or property at any stage of the long electoral cycle” (norris, frank, and martínez i coma , ). we define economic violence as property damage, ranging from petty vandalism to attempts to undermine a woman’s economic livelihood. extremists defaced and tore down women’s campaign posters in iraq (abdul-hassan and salaheddin ), and british mp angela eagle had a brick thrown through the window of her constituency office (perraudin ). in india, the land and crops of a local councilor were destroyed (asian human rights commission ). economic harassment involves withholding economic resources to reduce women’s capacity to perform their political responsibilities. in bolivia, local officials refused to pay the salaries of elected women (corz ), and in peru, the husband of a local councilor prevented her from having access to the family’s money after she was elected (quintanilla ). in costa rica, el salvador, mexico, and peru, locally elected women, but not their male colleagues, were denied offices, telephones, and even travel expenses (krook and restrepo sanín ). semiotic violence and harassment semiotic violence is perpetrated through degrading images and sexist language (krook ). sexual objec- tification is one strategy of semiotic violence. after the election of croatian president kolinda grabar-kitarović in , national news outlets published stills from an alleged sex tape of her; in , photos supposedly of her wearing a bikini went viral (“ok ladies” ). symbolic annihilation is another strategy. this con- cept, which was developed in media studies, proposes that excluding or trivializing particular groups transmits a message about the societal value of the members of those groups (klein and shiffman ). symbolic annihilation occurs in politics in at least two ways. first, opponents seek to erase women as actors in the political imagination. in , ultra-orthodox newspapers in article | violence and harassment of female politicians perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core israel altered photos of the cabinet to exclude its female members (huffington post ). second, rules of language and grammar are deployed to resist gendered transformations. in , a conservative male mp in france repeatedly addressed the president of the national assembly as madame le président (using the masculine form of “president”), despite her telling him multiple times to use madame la présidente, the feminine form (cotteret ). a third strategy is to employ highly negative gendered language to characterize female politicians and their behaviors. misogynistic merchandise featuring slogans like “trump that bitch!” was widely sold at donald trump rallies during the u.s. presidential elections (bellstrom ), and trump famously called hillary clinton “a nasty woman” during the final presidential debate. in the philippines, president rodrigo duterte described senator leila de lima as “immoral” and an “adulterer” when she challenged his leadership, actions that female colleagues condemned as “slut-shaming” (sherwell ). interrelated violence analytically distinguishing between these five types does not mean that they are clearly distinct in practice. sexual assault, for example, may have both physical and psy- chological components. similarly, when distributed to a larger public, photoshopped images constitute semiotic violence; when sent to the woman in question, they entail psychological and sexual harassment. these overlaps do not undermine our classification, we argue, but rather bolster the case for thinking about these acts as part of a shared field of practices. interrelations are perhaps best illustrated, however, by cases where different forms of violence appear in an escalating pattern over time. for juana quispe, a local councilor in bolivia, psychological and economic harassment culminated in physical violence. even though quispe and her male party colleagues were critical of the mayor, she was singled out for mistreatment. the mayor, his supporters, and various local councilors first pressured her to resign. when she did not do so, they changed the council’s meeting times and refused her entrance to the sessions. they then falsely accused her of corruption, suspending her from her position. she waged a seven-month legal battle that resulted in her being reinstated, but the council then denied her a salary for those seven months, arguing that she had not attended its sessions. one month later, she was murdered (corz ). tackling methodological challenges documenting violence against women is notoriously difficult. many women are reluctant to report violence because of feelings of shame and stigma, fear of re- taliation, and perceived impunity for perpetrators (palermo, bleck, and peterman ). normalized in many societies, violence against women is rarely seen as a problem in need of intervention. in the case of violence against women in politics, political dynamics further disincentivize speaking out. additionally, calls to in- corporate gender and intersectionality raise questions about the robustness of research if men are not included as subjects and how diversity among women should be recognized and taken into account. reporting instances of violence perhaps the number one barrier to studying this phe- nomenon is the tendency to dismiss violence as “the cost of doing politics.” while some of this resistance appears to stem from a hesitance to be viewed as “victims,” many elected women acknowledge that female colleagues have been targeted for gender-based violence (cerva cerna ). a best practice strategy for collecting statistics on violence against women is to avoid the word “violence,” giving rise to varied subjective interpretations, in favor of asking a list of questions about specific acts (united nations ). using this approach, the ipu ( ) finds that violence and harassment against women parliamen- tarians is widespread. silence on these issues is not merely a cognitive question, however. it may also be a strategic decision. in interviews, women admit frankly that speaking out would be a form of “political suicide.” one reason is that most perpetrators are members of the woman’s own political party (national democratic institute ; un women ). insiders may justify suppressing women’s accounts out of concerns about negative publicity that could be exploited at election time. another concern is that women may believe that it will reflect badly on themselves, as in tanzania where demanding sexual favors for political positions is widespread. silence may also be the result of staff decisions to read and delete abusive correspondence, so that mps are not fully aware of the extent of harassment (committee on standards in public life ). in cases where women are willing to speak out, moreover, it is rarely clear to whom they should report. in , sexual harassment allegations against canadian mps from different parties led to the discovery that there were no procedures in place to handle such claims. in the wake of the #metoo movement, women in several countries have created anonymous reporting mechanisms to fill this gap. in mexico, where the problem is well recognized but no legal framework yet exists, women have lodged complaints with diverse state institutions. open- ing up about sexual violence or harassment may backfire, however, causing female politicians to be portrayed as overly emotional, as occurred after australian prime minister julia gillard’s misogyny speech in parliament in (wright and holland ). women may also september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core simply not be believed: when kim weaver stood down as a candidate in an iowa congressional race against in- cumbent steve king, citing “very alarming acts of in- timidation, including death threats,” he tweeted in response, “death threats likely didn’t happen but a fabri- cation” (fang ). comparing men’s and women’s experiences a second challenge in studying this topic stems from calls to take “gender” seriously in political research. some scholars argue that it is vital to study men and women together, recognizing that men are gendered beings and that comparison is essential for ascertaining whether or not gender plays a role (bjarnegård ). bolstering the case for this approach, a review by ifes of its electoral violence data finds that men are more often victims of physical violence, whereas women are more likely to face psycho- logical violence (bardall ). some male politicians have also been targeted for gender-based attacks: harvey milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office in the united states, was assassinated in by an antigay colleague. emphasizing that men also experience gender-based political violence, however, risks theorizing a false sym- metry between men’s and women’s experiences. within the broader field of violence against women, emphasis on the fact that most victims of gender-based violence are women gave rise to a counternarrative—based not on facts but driven by broader political agendas—claiming that men and women were equally victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. this equivalence perspective, however, is easily disproved when types and severity of violence are taken into account (berns ). in the political world, some male politicians do claim to be equally or more abused than their female counter- parts. yet many male mps reject the notion of equiva- lence; for example, british mp martin whitfield stated, “i fully accept that my experience. . . is but a mere toe in the water compared with the vile abuse received by other. . . members, especially women.” focusing on mere num- bers also can distort perceptions of gender and political violence. a study of mafia assassinations of italian mayors observes that all victims were male, without noting that women are severely underrepresented in these positions. taking intersectionality into account the emphasis on violence against women in politics, finally, seems to suggest that gender is the only source of abuse. however, the concept of intersectionality theorizes that different facets of identity interact to shape life opportunities and experiences (mccall ). although intersectionality has not yet been incorporated widely into theorizing about violence against women in politics (kuperberg ), it is present in news coverage and emerging data on this phenomenon. an analysis of twitter abuse against female mps in the united kingdom finds that nearly half of the abusive tweets were directed at diane abbott, the first black woman to be elected to the british parliament; when abbott was taken out of the sample, black and asian women still received % more abuse than their white counterparts (amnesty interna- tional uk ). these interactions are not limited to gender and race. in the united kingdom, sexism combined with anti- semitism against luciana berger, a jewish mp, and homophobic slurs were made against angela eagle, the first openly lesbian mp. poor and lower-caste women are more vulnerable than other groups in india, nepal, and pakistan (un women , - ), whereas younger women are more prone to violence and harassment according to global data from the ipu ( ). women who challenge gender roles in multiple ways—being outspoken feminists or ascending to prominent leader- ship positions (davies )—also seem to experience more numerous and more vitriolic attacks. the in- tersectional nature of this violence, however, does not undermine bias against women as a key driver. rather, it substantiates the intuition that structural, cultural, and symbolic violence against women and members of other marginalized groups lie at the heart of this phenomenon. identifying bias events due to dynamics of structural, cultural, and symbolic violence, bias against particular groups is often highly naturalized. as a result, perpetrators may not be aware of their prejudice, and targets may accept mistreatment as simply the normal course of affairs. this creates serious challenges to identifying acts of violence against women in politics. to move beyond this impasse, we draw on the hate crimes literature to conceptualize violence against women in politics as “bias events.” translating this into a strategy for empirical research, we pull from existing legal guidance to create six indicators for identifying cases of violence against women in politics. consistent with legal applications, this holistic approach does not require that all six criteria be met. rather, it calls for pieces of evidence to be weighed in relation to one another to determine whether, on balance, they would support a finding of bias against women in political roles. the concept of hate crimes hate crime laws impose a higher class of penalties when a violent crime targets victims because of their perceived social group membership. these crimes are deemed to be more severe because they also involve group-based discrimination. used to reassert privilege on the part of dominant groups, their impact “goes far beyond physical or financial damages. it reaches into the community to create fear, hostility, and suspicion” (perry , ). these “message crimes” thus aim to deny equal rights to article | violence and harassment of female politicians perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core group members and heighten a sense of vulnerability among other members of the community (iganski ). one critique of hate crime legislation is that it punishes “improper thinking,” violating the right to free speech (jacobs and potter ). yet the aim of these laws is to ensure that all members of society are free to exercise their civil rights without public or private interference (weisburd and levin ). perpetrators’ actions seek to diminish free speech on the part of the harassed and other members of their group (mantilla ). women have not fully benefited from existing hate crime laws because of the frequent exclusion of gender as a category (mcphail ). this stems not only from structural and cultural violence naturalizing the mistreat- ment of women but also from the existence of other laws on violence against women (walters and tumath ). a further challenge relates to the word “hate,” given that perpetrators rarely, in fact, hate all women. manne critiques this “naïve conception” of misogyny in favor of thinking about it as a property of social systems, in which women face hostility “because they are women in a man’s world” ( , ; emphasis in original). weisburd and levin advocate using the term “bias crime,” arguing that it more accurately captures this discriminatory, group-based hierarchical component. as civil rights violations, the hateful intent of the perpetrator is less important than the discriminatory use of violence against those who are seen as “transgressors” against their “proper role” in society ( , ). focusing only on “crimes,” we argue, is also too limited. we expand our focus, therefore, to include what police in england and wales label “hate incidents” or “any non-crime perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate” (ask the police ). with these modifications, we propose the umbrella concept of “bias events” as the broader category drawing lines around what does and does not constitute an act of violence against women in politics. a bias event approach has numerous advantages over a hate crime framework for analyzing violence against women in politics. first, it avoids unduly restricting the focus to criminal behaviors, recognizing that legal stand- ards vary across countries, as does state capacity to enforce laws. second, this approach decenters the state and the police as the only actors relevant to tackling violence against women in politics, opening up opportunities for other actors, such as international organizations, political parties, and civil society, to be active on this issue. third, it displaces a focus on perpetrator intentions, which can be misunderstood or denied, in favor of the perspectives and experiences of victims and society at large. criteria for ascertaining bias to develop criteria for identifying bias events, we start with the guidelines in the fbi’s hate crime data collection guidelines and training manual. the fbi notes that because it is difficult to ascertain an offender’s subjective motivation, a crime should be deemed to be motivated by bias “only if investigation reveals sufficient objective facts to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by bias” ( , ). these guidelines list various types of evidence that— particularly when combined—might support a finding of bias. we focus on five of these, fleshing out how they might be used to analyze potential acts of violence against women in politics and establish the presence of bias against women in political roles (see table ). first, the offender made oral comments, written statements, or gestures in- dicating bias. this might include using sexist or sexualized language—in-person, in print, or online—objectifying or otherwise denigrating women. second, the offender left bias-related drawings, symbols, or graffiti at the scene. perpetrators, in this case, might post degrading images of female politicians, or paint sexist insults on campaign posters, homes, or constituency offices. third, the victim was engaged in activities related to his or her identity group. political women in this scenario might be outspoken feminists, but they may also simply have sought to speak up for women. fourth, the offender was previously involved in a similar incident or is a hate group member. the perpetrator might have harassed other female politicians, or might participate in men’s rights networks or other groups seeking to defend patriarchy. fifth, a substantial portion of the community where the event occurred perceived that the incident was motivated by bias. table six criteria for detecting bias . the offender made oral comments, written statements, or gestures indicating bias. . the offender left bias-related drawings, symbols, or graffiti at the scene. . the victim was engaged in activities related to his or her identity group. . the offender was previously involved in a similar incident or is a hate group member. . a substantial portion of the community where the event occurred perceived that the incident was motivated by bias. . the victim was evaluated negatively according a double standard. note: all six criteria need not be met to reach a conclusion of bias. september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core evidence for this might include speeches, opinion pieces, or demonstrations —especially by other women—which explicitly attribute the attack to a woman’s gender. not all acts of bias are so transparent, however. in cases of unconscious bias, people believe that they are not prejudiced, but nonetheless think or act in biased ways. unconscious bias may appear in the form of micro- aggressions: everyday indignities that communicate hos- tile, derogatory, or negative views toward members of certain groups (sue ). a more purposive approach masks prejudiced views by claiming other forms of wrongdoing, for example through “judicial harassment,” whereby individuals are targeted with baseless legal charges that divert time, energy, and resources away from their work (frontline defenders ). to detect these forms of bias, we propose a final criterion: the victim was evaluated negatively according a double standard. this might include attacking female politicians in ways and for reasons not used for male politicians. this hate-crimes-inspired approach goes far in re- solving the three methodological challenges described earlier. first, the analysis does not require that the perpetrator or victim recognize the act as an instance of violence against women in politics. second, this approach is case based and thus does not require comparisons with other populations to establish that sexism and misogyny played a role. third, attention to bias as a larger category enables intersectional experiences to be taken into ac- count, while also presenting a framework for ascertaining bias against members of other marginalized groups. by emphasizing the need for analysis, finally, this approach opens up the possibility that some incidents against female politicians may not be attributable to bias. applying the framework according to a bias event approach, ascertaining the meaning of particular acts requires placing them in their broader context, using information about their content, targets, perpetrators, and impact. consistent with the fbi handbook, this approach does not require that all six criteria be met in full. recognizing that many cases will be ambiguous, with potentially conflicting or competing sources of information, our framework uses these criteria as guidance to explore whether, on balance, the available data would support a finding of bias. illustrating how to gather and weigh evidence through this lens, we analyze three cases from different parts of the world to determine whether – or not – they constitute violence against women in politics. benazir bhutto benazir bhutto served as prime minister of pakistan from to and to . after years living abroad, she returned in october to contest parlia- mentary elections. upon her homecoming, she survived an assassination attempt when her motorcade was bombed on its way to a campaign rally in karachi, killing hundreds of bystanders. on december , after months of a tense political and security situation, she was killed as she stood up in her car, waving from the open sunroof, while leaving a rally at liaquat bagh park in rawalpindi. the next day, the ministry of the interior announced the cause of death and identified who was responsible for the attack. this quick resolution raised more questions than it answered. in , her widower, asif ali zardari, the new pakistani president, requested support from the un for a fact-finding mission to establish the circumstances surrounding her assassination. conducting more than interviews over the course of nine months, the un team noted the lack of data available for evaluation: the crime scene was hosed down within an hour of the attack, only pieces of evidence were collected, and an autopsy on the body was not permitted. the team ultimately concluded that these failures were deliberate (united nations committee of inquiry ). after the initial arrests, police abandoned their efforts to identify the suicide bomber, leaving his motives unclear. as a result, there is no evidence regarding ( ) comments, statements, or gestures and ( ) drawings, symbols, and graffiti that might support a finding of gender bias. evidence that is available, however, strongly points to political motivations for the attack: bhutto was placed under house arrest before the assassination, there were curious security lapses on the day of her assassination, and government officials behaved suspiciously in the wake of the attacks (farwell ; hussain ; united nations commission of inquiry ). the longer trajectory of bhutto’s career, nonetheless, provides ample testimony of hostility to her leadership due to the fact that she was a woman. when she returned to pakistan in the late s, she was constantly asked in media interviews why she was not married, leading her to consent to an arranged marriage so she could continue her political activities. in , her party won the elections, but religious leaders opposed her leadership, arguing that a woman could not serve as head of an islamic state (zakaria ). empowerment of women formed a key part of her party’s manifesto, and one of her first actions as prime minister was to free many female prisoners, sym- bolically releasing women from the “social prisons” they had suffered during the military dictatorship (weiss ). while this suggests she ( ) was engaged in activities related to her identity group, her government subse- quently failed to overturn some of the most discriminatory laws against women (suvorova ). by , her focus on women’s issues was much reduced, appearing in the second half of her party manifesto in a mere half-page of a -page document (pakistan peoples party ). because of the botched police investigation, many theories flourished regarding her assassins and their article | violence and harassment of female politicians perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core potential motivations. government officials attributed the attack to al-qaeda. the un team noted that bhutto did worry that al-qaeda and the pakistani taliban might seek to harm her because of her strong stance against religious extremism. during her last few months in pakistan, however, she came to believe that then- president pervez musharraf was the main threat to her safety (united nations commission of inquiry ). she was also deeply suspicious of the military and in- telligence communities, calling out by name three senior musharraf allies whom she believed were planning to murder her (farwell ). while she believed that the dangers were real, bhutto was convinced that threat warnings passed to her by the government were intended to intimidate her to stop campaigning (muñoz ). although al-qaeda and the taliban were ( ) previously involved in similar violent incidents, these additional considerations indicate that all potential suspects were driven overwhelmingly by questions of policy and political power. in terms of ( ) reactions of the community to the question of gender bias, commentary to this effect was relatively minimal. the al-qaeda leader accused of plan- ning the assassination strongly denied assassinating bhutto, explaining: “tribal people have their own customs. we certainly don’t strike women” (lamb ). similarly, in an otherwise extremely detailed, single-spaced, -page report, the un team devoted only one line to gendered motivations, stating that “ms. bhutto’s gender was also an issue with the religious extremists who believed that a woman should not lead an islamic country” (united nations commission of inquiry , ). among the three musharraf allies identified by bhutto, only one was explicitly said to “not like women meddling in politics” (farwell , ). finally, the response of international leaders largely focused on violence as a threat to democracy, with gendered content restricted to noting she was a woman or calling her ms. bhutto (hussain ). regarding whether bhutto ( ) was punished according to a negative double standard, evidence again points to a lack of gender bias. she was not the first political figure in pakistan to die in an untimely fashion. her father, zulfiqar ali bhutto, who served as president and as prime minister, was executed in . even more tellingly, pakistan’s first prime minister, liaquat ali khan, was assassinated in , in the same park bhutto was leaving as she was killed. when she arrived at the hospital after the october suicide bombing, the staff was busy treating victims of a shooting at a rival candidate’s rally earlier that day. the only discriminatory treatment uncovered by the un team was a letter in which the interior ministry instructed provincial governments to provide stringent and specific security measures for two male ex-prime ministers; no similar directive was issued for bhutto, also an ex-prime minister. the reason, however, appears to be political: both men were members of the ruling party and close allies of musharraf (united nations commission of inquiry ). based on this analysis, we conclude that bhutto’s assassi- nation entailed political violence and violence against politicians, not violence against women in politics. dilma rousseff dilma rousseff was elected as the first female president of brazil in and reelected in . her reelection was challenged by the main opposition party, and in may , opposition groups presented the party with a peti- tion to impeach rousseff. senior leaders did not accept this petition, although they made clear their intention to search for grounds of alleged wrongdoing (chalhoub et al. ). in december , the president of the chamber of deputies, eduardo cunha, accepted a formal denunciation claiming that rousseff had committed administrative infractions in the presentation of govern- ment accounts and budgeting practices. the chamber voted in april to move ahead with impeachment proceedings. four weeks later, the senate voted to suspend rousseff’s powers during the trial, and her vice president, michel temer, became the acting president. in august , the senate removed rousseff from office, finding her guilty of breaking the budget law. on their face, impeachment proceedings do not appear to constitute a form of “violence,” nor do they seem like a particularly gendered form of attack. a deeper probe into this case, however, reveals patterns consistent with a bias event seeking to violate women’s political rights. those who promoted the process and voted in favor of impeach- ment made numerous ( ) comments, statements, or gestures indicating bias. soon after being elected in , rousseff indicated her preference to be referred to as presidenta (the feminine form). latin american news outlets overwhelmingly called her presidenta, as did female politicians and members of her own party. in contrast, those voting for impeachment, as well as conservative media outlets, persisted in calling her presidente, the masculine form (dos santos ). this semiotic violence was accompanied by less gendered but clearly violent language. deputy jair bolsonaro notably dedicated his vote for impeachment to colonel carlos brilhante ustra, who tortured political prisoners, including rousseff, during the military dictatorship (chalhoub et al. ). from the time that she first entered the political scene, rousseff’s appearance—her age, short hair, and profes- sional attire— were seen as an affront to traditional brazilian standards of femininity (encarnación ). emphasizing these differences, the magazine veja pub- lished an article a day after the chamber vote, praising marcela temer, the -year-old wife of the vice president, as “beautiful, maidenlike, and ‘of the home.’” a cover story in isto É! magazine portrayed rousseff as hysterical, drawing parallels with queen mary i of portugal and brazil, known as maria a louca (mary the crazy; cardoso september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and de souza ). in july , members of the general public began to place stickers showing rousseff with her legs spread apart around their gas tank openings, sexually violating her image every time they filled up (saliba and santiago ). a final set of ( ) bias-related drawings and symbols include signs reading tchau, querida! (bye-bye, sweetheart!) held up on the chamber floor by mainly male legislators, taunting rousseff as they voted for her im- peachment. on the day she was inaugurated, rousseff ( ) proclaimed, “my greatest commitment, i repeat, is to honoring our women, protecting our most vulnerable people, and governing for everyone.” actions during her presidency confirm that she ( ) was engaged in activities related to her identity group. she continued to advance policies for women implemented under her predecessor and expanded the government’s work to end violence against women and support women’s financial autonomy. she appointed far more women to cabinet positions than previous presidents and elevated the secretariat on policies for women to the status of a full-fledged ministry (jalalzai and dos santos ). after her removal, the interim government moved immediately to reverse these gains. temer appointed the first all-white, all-male cabinet since the military dictatorship. he collapsed the work of the women’s ministry into the ministry of justice, and between and , he discontinued the majority of policies for women initiated under rousseff and her predecessor (rubim and argolo ). the two other main protagonists of impeachment, cunha and bolsonaro, are well known for ( ) their sexism and misogyny. cunha sponsored a bill in to restrict access to abortion in cases of rape and to increase penalties for abortion. in , he criticized the inclusion of “gender ideology” in the national plan of education, seeking to prohibit the use of terms like “gender” and “sexual orientation” in the classroom in favor of emphasizing “natural sexual roles” and the “natural family” (biroli ). bolsonaro was described by journalists in as “the most misogynistic, hateful, elected official in the democratic world” (greenwald and fishman ). in response to congresswoman maria do rosário, who denounced the military dictatorship for using sexual violence against dissidents, he took the floor and stated, “i would not rape you. you don’t merit that.” the supreme court ruled in her favor when she filed a complaint for libel and slander, which she argued was tantamount to promoting rape culture (carta capital ). the reaction of women suggests that ( ) a substantial portion believed the impeachment was motivated by bias. in an article published in the guardian in july , one activist wrote, “almost all feminists agree that her im- peachment was sexist and discriminatory,” observing that thousands of women had come together to express solidarity with rousseff in a “confrontation with the patriarchy, with male chauvinists” (hao ). female politicians echoed this message. senator gleisi hoffman stated that it was undeniable that misogyny played a role in the impeachment process (chalhoub et al. ), whereas senator regina sousa remarked during the trial, “the message they are sending in this process is also directed at all women. with their blocking actions they are telling us: women cannot” (amorim ). rousseff acknowledged this support during her speech in the senate: “brazilian women have been, during this time, a fundamental pillar for my resistance.. . . tireless companions in a battle in which misogyny and prejudice showed their claws” (rousseff ). finally, ample evidence indicates that rousseff ( ) was punished according to a negative double standard. her stated offense was using funds from the central bank to conceal a budget deficit before the elections, which she later reimbursed. this budgetary practice, known in pedaladas fiscais, was made illegal in , but had been employed by two previous presidents without penalty. moreover, many legal experts agreed that it did not amount to a “crime of responsibility,” the only type of crime that justifies removing an elected president (encar- nación ). in addition, most governors and many mayors engage in pedaladas, including a former governor who served as the rapporteur for the senate’s special commission on impeachment. further, more than of the deputies themselves were under formal in- vestigation for some kind of criminal activity at the time of the impeachment vote, including cunha (chalhoub et al. ). corruption probes were eventually ordered against more than one-third of the members of temer’s cabinet (democracy now ). rousseff, in contrast, stands out as one of the cleanest politicians in brazil (chalhoub et al. ). together with the other evidence, this leads us to classify her impeachment as an instance of violence against women in politics, with psychological, sexual, and semi- otic components. jo cox jo cox became a member of the british house of commons in , representing the labour party. on june , , she was fatally shot and stabbed while arriving at a routine constituency surgery (a weekly walk-in session for constituents to meet with their mps) in birstall, west yorkshire. the last sitting british mp to be killed was conservative mp ian gow, who was assassinated by the provisional irish republican army in ; the last politician to die in an attack was county councilor andrew pennington in . cox’s murder occurred one week before the contested brexit referendum, in which she was a vocal advocate for britain to remain in the european union. she also spoke positively about immigration and campaigned on behalf of refugees from syria. article | violence and harassment of female politicians perspectives on politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core witnesses reported that the assailant, thomas mair, yelled during the attack, “britain first, keep britain independent, britain will always come first. this is for britain” (cobain, parveen, and taylor ). the uk independence party leader, nigel farage, among other politicians, had made immigration one of the central issues of the brexit campaign. adding to these tensions, in may the extremist britain first political party pledged that it would target muslims holding elected office in the united kingdom, not stopping until all the “islamist occupiers” were driven out of politics (york ). this context indicates that mair ( ) made comments, state- ments, or gestures indicating bias. however, the bias in this case appears to be driven by race rather than gender. mair’s “death to traitors” outburst during his first court appearance further shows that he viewed cox as betraying her own race through her policy stances. a search of mair’s house and computer records following the attack uncovered ( ) bias-related drawings and symbols. he had books on the nazis, german military history, and white supremacy. he also kept newspaper clippings about anders breivik, who murdered mem- bers of the norwegian labour party in . mair’s internet searches included information on the british national party, apartheid, the ku klux klan, white supremacy, and nazism (cobain, parveen, and taylor ). these clues, again, point to racial prejudice, rather than gender bias, as a motivating factor. in his sentencing, however, the judge did make brief mention of a potential gender element when addressing mair: “you even researched matricide, knowing that jo cox was the mother of young children” (wilkie , ). cox herself was ( ) was clearly engaged in activities related to her identity group. on twitter, she had shared a picture of herself and a group of labour mps holding up signs saying #imafeminist. she disclosed to friends that she was concerned about the “increasing nature of hostility and aggression” toward female mps (hughes, riley- smith, and swinford ). she had personally contacted police after receiving a stream of malicious messages over the course of three months, which led to the arrest of a man who was given a warning in connection with his conduct in march . because of this online harassment, at the time of her death police were considering implementing additional security both at her constituency surgery in birstall and at her houseboat in london. they found no links between this harasser and mair, however. based on the first three criteria of the bias event approach, it thus appears that cox’s murder is best understood as a case of violence against politicians. considering the next two criteria shifts the picture somewhat. mair was ( ) a supporter of hate groups who attended gatherings of far-right political groups like the national front and the english defence league and purchased publications written by extremist groups in the united states and south africa. ideas about white supremacy and male supremacy are inextricably linked, according to prominent antihate organizations (adl ). within the white male supremacist worldview of “naturalized and hierarchized differences” (ferber ), elements of misogyny are as integral as racist beliefs, with intense rage being generated by the prospect of a white woman challenging racism (shaw ). following the attack, ( ) a substantial portion of the community perceived that the incident was motivated by gender bias. female mps in particular viewed the murder through a gender lens. diane abbott stated, “it is hard to escape the conclusion that the vitriolic misogyny that so many women politicians endure framed the murderous attack on jo” (hughes, riley-smith, and swinford ). cox’s friend, jess phillips, published numerous editorials in the ensuing months, writing at the time of mair’s sentencing that “for me and for many of my colleagues— particularly female mps—fear has also become real and present” (phillips ). these perceptions were echoed by male politicians. labour mp chris bryant, vocal in calling for these threats to be taken more seriously, remarked, “i think women mps, gay mps, ethnic minority mps get the brunt of it” (mason ). these perceptions are borne out by data: while women make up % of mps, the parliamentary liaison and investigation team, established after cox’s murder, estimates that approximately % of the cases it received concerned female mps. viewing her murder in terms of challenges to women’s political presence, the labour party launched the jo cox women in leadership programme. drawing parallels with suffragettes who “had to contend with open hostility and abuse to win their right to vote,” prime minister theresa may, a conservative, opted to make her first public statement on a review of abuse and intimidation of candidates on february , , the centenary of women’s suffrage (may ). evidence that ( ) the victim was evaluated negatively according a double standard is less clear. the police review of mair’s internet search history revealed that he had looked at the wikipedia page of william hague (cobain, parveen, and taylor ), a conservative politician also from yorkshire who had served as an mp, party leader, and leader of the opposition before being appointed to the house of lords in . like cox, hague was a supporter of the remain campaign. the work of the fixated threat assessment centre (ftac), which assesses and manages risks from mentally ill individuals who harass, stalk, or threaten public figures, suggests that mair most likely targeted cox because she was his local mp. according to ftac staff, every mp has a group of resentful constituents who channel their frustrations to- ward their local mp. it thus may have been a mere coincidence that mair’s local mp was a young woman with pro-immigration views. september vol. /no. | https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core given this mixed evidence, we find classification of this case to be the most challenging of the three. a bias event approach does not require that all six criteria be met, however: each simply provides potential clues as to the presence and significance of the bias that informs the commission of the event. weighing each piece of in- formation and how they fit together as a whole, we determine that the discussion in relation to criteria ( ) gives new meaning to the evidence considered under criteria ( ) and ( ), indicating that the racist language and symbols also have an underlying misogynistic compo- nent. the reactions mapped under criteria ( ) also lend greater substance to the evidence presented under criteria ( ), and vice versa, by explaining why female politicians, particularly feminist ones, may experience a heightened sense of vulnerability to violence and harassment. on this basis, we argue that the murder of jo cox is a case of violence against women in politics, with physical and psychological elements. conclusions violence against women in politics is increasingly recog- nized around the world as a significant barrier to women’s political participation. this article seeks to strengthen its theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations, recognizing that shared concepts and language are vital for building a cumulative research agenda. conceptualizing this phenomenon in terms of structural, cultural, and symbolic violence, moreover, lays bare what is at stake by allowing violence against women in politics to continue. first, accepting abuse as “the cost of doing politics” raises questions about the robustness of democracy. even without equality concerns, interfering with election cam- paigns or preventing officials from fulfilling their mandates violates the political rights of candidates as well as voters. second, tolerating mistreatment due to individuals’ as- criptive characteristics infringes on their human rights, undermining their personal integrity and sense of social value. third, normalizing women’s exclusion from polit- ical participation relegates them to second-class citizen- ship, threatening principles of gender equality. acknowledging the varied manifestations of violence against women in politics, in turn, points to the importance of developing multifaceted solutions. adopt- ing new legislation or revising existing laws is one approach that has been used extensively in latin america to combat physical, psychological, and economic vio- lence. providing guidance for electoral observers in detecting and reporting violence against women during elections, especially physical, psychological, and sexual, has been piloted in africa and latin america. in north america and western europe, parliaments are developing stronger codes of conduct and procedures for reporting sexual harassment. to track and respond to the online abuse of politically active women, social media companies are partnering with civil society organizations to address psychological, sexual, and semiotic violence. the effec- tiveness of these strategies is not yet known, highlighting the need for further research and the continued de- velopment of countermeasures. a crucial first step for academics and practitioners, however, is to begin raising awareness that violence and harassment should not be the cost of women’s engagement in the political sphere. notes interview in tunisia, september . interviews in uk, january and . tweet in french at https://twitter.com/pelletiermoniqu/ status/ ?lang en. interviews in bolivia, august . interviews in zambia, march , and india, june . interview in bolivia, july . interviews in tanzania, august . interviews in canada, february . platforms include https://labourtoo.org.uk/, https:// www.wesaidenough.com/, and https://metooep.com/. interviews in mexico, may . interview in uk, january . hansard, september . interviews in uk, january . interviews in uk, january , and sweden, sep- tember . although actors may have incentives to play up or play down the presence of bias, 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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the promise and peril of sexual harassment programs the promise and peril of sexual harassment programs frank dobbina, and alexandra kalevb adepartment of sociology, harvard university, cambridge ma ; and bdepartment of sociology and anthropology, tel aviv university, tel aviv, israel edited by susan t. fiske, princeton university, princeton, nj, and approved may , (received for review november , ) two decades ago, the supreme court vetted the workplace harassment programs popular at the time: sexual harassment grievance procedures and training. however, harassment at work remains common. do these programs reduce harassment? pro- gram effects have been difficult to measure, but, because women frequently quit their jobs after being harassed, programs that reduce harassment should help firms retain current and aspiring women managers. thus, effective programs should be followed by increases in women managers. we analyze data from companies over y to explore how new sexual harassment programs affect the representation of white, black, hispanic, and asian-american women in management. we find support for several propositions. first, sexual harassment grievance proce- dures, shown in surveys to incite retaliation without satisfying complainants, are followed by decreases in women managers. second, training for managers, which encourages managers to look for signs of trouble and intervene, is followed by increases in women managers. third, employee training, which proscribes specific behaviors and signals that male trainees are potential perpetrators, is followed by decreases in women managers. two propositions specify how management composition moderates program effects. one, because women are more likely to believe harassment complaints and less likely to respond negatively to training, in firms with more women managers, programs work better. two, in firms with more women managers, harassment programs may activate group threat and backlash against some groups of women. positive and negative program effects are found in different sorts of workplaces. sexual harassment | workforce diversity | grievance procedure | harassment training in , the supreme court vetted the two most popular cor-porate sexual harassment programs, sexual harassment griev- ance procedures and training. by then, % of companies had grievance procedures and % had training ( ). it is hard to know whether these programs have helped, because harassment program effects, and harassment itself, are notoriously difficult to measure. training and grievance systems may appear to backfire because, by increasing recognition of harassment, they increase complaints ( , ). surveys may not pick up harassment in workplaces where it is common because rampant harassment can foster psychological denial ( ). while harassment is hard to measure, and thus program effects are hard to gauge, some studies suggest that grievance procedures and training may not reduce harassment. early evidence came from surveys of federal workers in , , and . training and grievance proto- cols were virtually unknown in , but, by , three-quarters of federal workers had completed training, and, by , four- fifths knew how to file a grievance. did harassment decline? when asked about six specific forms of harassment, % of women reported in both and that they had been harassed in the past y. in , % reported the same ( – ). much of the subsequent research also suggests that sexual ha- rassment grievance procedures and training may be managerial snake oil. we review this research to develop predictions. to assess whether harassment grievance procedures and training for managers and employees have reduced harassment we estimate the effects of these programs on the share of women in management. because it often causes women to leave their jobs ( , , ), harassment should reduce women in management. programs that reduce harassment should increase women in management. we develop five predictions based on laboratory and field studies. the first concerns sexual harassment grievance proce- dures, which give victims a formal avenue for filing complaints. survey research points to four problems. first, women distrust grievance procedures and rarely file complaints ( ). second, formal complaints rarely lead to the transfer or removal of the harasser ( , ). third, women who do file complaints face retaliation— % of them, according to one survey of federal workers ( ). finally, the adversarial grievance process itself can harm victims; studies comparing women who file complaints to women who keep quiet show worse career, mental health, and health outcomes for those who file ( , ). grievance procedures should make it more likely that women will leave their jobs, re- ducing women in management. the second prediction concerns sexual harassment training for managers which, while little studied itself, resembles bystander intervention training in important ways. it treats trainees as victims’ allies, reviewing how to prevent harassment, recognize its signs, intervene to stop it, and use grievance processes ( ). “if you see something, say something” curriculum has been studied extensively among college students and military personnel. a metaanalysis of campus field studies finds that it increases reported trainee efficacy, intention to intervene, and helping be- havior ( ). one study showed increased intention to intervene and significance do corporate sexual harassment programs reduce harassment? those that do should boost the share of women in management, because harassment causes women to quit. sexual harassment grievance procedures incite retaliation, according to surveys, and our analyses show that they are followed by reductions in women managers. sexual harassment training for managers, which treats managers as victims’ allies and gives them tools to intervene, are followed by increases in women managers. training for em- ployees, which treats trainees as suspects, can backfire. programs work better in workplaces with more women managers, who are less likely than men to respond negatively to harassment com- plaints and training. employers should select managers—men and women—committed to eradicating harassment. author contributions: f.d. and a.k. designed research, performed research, and wrote the paper. the authors declare no conflict of interest. this article is a pnas direct submission. this open access article is distributed under creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives license . (cc by-nc-nd). data deposition: our stata code and the blinded survey data have been deposited in the inter-university consortium for political and social research (icpsr) database, http://doi. org/ . /e v . to whom correspondence may be addressed. email: frank_dobbin@harvard.edu. this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental. published online june , . www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pnas | june , | vol. | no. | – so c ia l sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://doi.org/ . /e v http://doi.org/ . /e v mailto:frank_dobbin@harvard.edu https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. confidence about intervening after a year ( ). four months out, army trainees were more likely to report having intervened to stop sexual assault or stalking ( ). we expect manager training to provide managers with tools to address harassment, and thus to be followed by increases in women in management. the third prediction concerns employee training, which typically reviews harassment law, specifies verboten actions, and outlines complaint processes and punishments ( ). the message is that employees are potential perpetrators, not victims’ allies. most lab- oratory experiments examine this type of training. it can improve recognition of harassment and knowledge about employer policy and complaint processes ( , ). however, men who score high on “likely harasser” and “gender role conflict” scales—the men trainers hope to reform—frequently have adverse reactions to this sort of “forbidden behavior” training, scoring higher afterward ( , ). thus, any positive training effects may be reversed by backlash. we expect employee training to be more likely than manager training to have adverse effects. two final predictions address how the gender composition of management moderates program effects. the fourth concerns how managers respond to harassment grievances and training. research shows that men often don’t believe women who com- plain of harassment, thinking they have overreacted or have extortion in mind. women are less likely to buy into to these “harassment myths” ( – ). thus, we expect that women managers will handle reports of harassment better than men, which will improve the efficacy of grievance procedures. men may also respond poorly to sexual harassment training. training has been shown to make men less likely to see coercion of a subordinate as sexual harassment, less likely to report harassment, and more likely to blame the victim ( ). this is not so for women. training can also incite backlash against women and activate gen- der stereotypes ( ). training, like grievance procedures, should be more effective in workplaces with more women managers. the fifth prediction modifies the fourth and concerns group threat. for blalock, when members of the dominant group feel threatened, they may resist the group perceived as a threat ( ). he describes a tipping point beyond which the majority group resists. where might that tipping point be? kanter argues that, when women hold to % of jobs, they overcome the disad- vantages of being “tokens”—they can create alliances, for instance—but that, above %, they become a “potential subgroup” ( ). we do know that, where sex ratios are highly skewed (below % women, or above %), gender salience is high and so is harassment ( , ). cohen, broschak, and haveman find that increases in women in upper management improve matters for women in lower and middle management up to a point; the peak is about %, at the midpoint of kanter’s range ( ). thus, increases in women managers, up to about %, may improve harassment program effects. do all groups of women activate group threat? research on intersectionality suggests that perceived threat may depend on a group’s location in the race/gender hierarchy. white women carry one dominant status (white) and one subordinate status (female). minority women carry two subordinate statuses, and, in certain contexts, they elicit less backlash for dominant behavior than white women do ( , ). moreover, white women hold more manage- ment jobs than any other group of women, and their sheer numbers may activate threat ( ). thus, we expect group threat to affect white women more than black, hispanic, or asian-american women. in sum, we expect positive effects of manager training and negative effects of grievance procedures and employee training. we do not expect the negative effects to simply wipe out the positive effects, because these effects are conditional on women in management, and thus these effects should appear in different workplaces. higher numbers of women managers should catalyze positive effects of manager training and prevent adverse effects of grievance procedures and employee training. this should hold for the three groups of minority women, because they are less likely to activate group threat. however, for white women, group threat should reverse this pattern—higher numbers of women managers should prevent the positive effects of manager training and activate the negative effects of grievance procedures and employee training. data and methods we assess effects of the introduction of harassment grievance and training programs on women in management by combining data from two sources, a retrospective survey of corporate policies and programs and an annual de- mographic census of employers. data cover the period in which employer harassment programs spread ( – ), which makes it possible to esti- mate the effects of program adoption ( ). this was before the widespread use of online training. data on establishment harassment programs, and other management practices and policies, come from our own retrospective survey, administered by the princeton survey research center in . the survey provides time- varying information for a national sample of private sector employers. princeton’s institutional review board for human subjects approved the research protocol (the authors were, respectively, professor of sociology and doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at princeton at the time). each respondent received a letter covering the purpose of the study; the topics to be covered; and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the principal investigator and survey research center. the letter explained that participation was voluntary and could be terminated at any time, and that all data would remain confidential. phone interviewers asked for verbal consent to participate before starting the interview. the survey covered organizational practices—no personal information was collected. the equal employment opportunity commission’s (eeoc) annual census of private sector workplaces with more than workers provides gender, race, and ethnic composition for surveyed workplaces by occupational cat- egory ( ). the eeoc data are confidential, by statute, but the eeoc makes them available to academic scientists through intergovernmental personnel agreements. time series data on external labor market characteristics come from bureau of labor statistics (bls) surveys. our stata code and the blinded survey data are available through inter-university consortium for political and social research. we will provide the key for matching establishments with the eeoc’s workforce data to researchers with access to those data. fig. reports the prevalence of sexual harassment grievance procedures, sexual harassment training for managers, and sexual harassment training for employees for the employers in our analysis. by , % of employers had grievance procedures, % had training for managers, and % had training for employees. only % of the observations (workplace years) have all three practices, permitting us to disentangle their effects. p er ce nt o f w or kp la ce s w ith e ac h pr og ra m sexual harassment grievance procedure sexual harassment training for managers sexual harassment training for employees fig. . percent of workplaces with sexual harassment grievance procedures, training for managers, and training for employees. maximum n = . the figure is based on employer years included in the analysis. not all workplaces are represented in each year because ) some workplaces were established during the period and ) some crossed the eeoc reporting thresholds ( workers, or workers for federal contractors). | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. dobbin and kalev d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. fig. reports change over time in the representation of each group of women in management jobs in the sample of employers. in the average sampled workplace, white women made up % of managers in and % in . black women rose from . to . %; hispanic women rose from . to . %; and asian-american women rose from . to . %. these fig- ures understate national gains for women in management because the sample excludes several groups of employers that saw greater gains in women on average, including newly established firms and public sector workplaces. we examine changes in the share (log odds) of white, black, hispanic, and asian-american women in management following the adoption of sexual harassment grievance procedures, training programs for managers, and training programs for employees. coefficients estimate the average effects of new programs across all of the postadoption years that we observe. the number of years observed depends on when an employer adopted. for each program, we have an average of a least y of postadoption data (fig. ). we report panel data models with fixed effects and robust ses (see si appendix for a detailed methodological discussion). the fixed-effects specification accounts for organizational features that do not vary over time, such as industry. in the models, we control for a host of human resources, diversity, work−life, and general harassment policies and programs, as well as for demographic characteristics of the focal workplace and of the state and the industry workforces. to capture environmental changes not covered by variables in the models, we include a time trend, interacted with both state and (two-digit) industry (see si appendix for full models). results results are presented in figs. – . fig. shows average change in the share of each group in management, over the years each program was in place, for workplaces that created grievance procedures, manager training, and employee training. the bars represent % confidence intervals around the point estimates. following the creation of sexual harassment grievance procedures, the share of asian-american women in management declines. coefficients for other groups are not statistically significant— confidence intervals cross the threshold. sexual harassment training programs for managers are followed by significant in- creases in white, black, and asian-american women in man- agement. sexual harassment training programs for employees are followed by significant reductions in white women in man- agement. while these results are broadly consistent with pre- dictions, if program effects are moderated by women in management, as we predict, the noninteracted effects tell only part of the story. to assess how harassment program effects are moderated by women managers, we interact program variables with binary variables representing the second, third, and fourth quartiles of total women in management. the first quartile has observations with to . % women managers; the second, . to . %; the third, . to . %; and the fourth, . to %. in fig. , we report the point estimates for changes in the share of white and minority women in management following the introduction of sexual harassment grievance procedures in workplaces at different quartiles of women in management. we show noninteracted program coefficients for workplaces in the first quartile of total women managers. for those in the other quartiles, we report the linear combinations of the program co- efficients and the program × quartile interaction coefficients (as described in si appendix). for white women, effects of sexual harassment grievance pro- cedures are negative and marginally significant (p < . ) among workplaces in the fourth quartile of women managers. this is consistent with the group threat thesis. for all three groups of minority women, grievance procedures show significant negative effects in workplaces with few women managers—those in the first quartile. these negative effects decline as women in management rise. for black and hispanic women, the negative effects disappear after the first quartile, and, for hispanic women, the effect turns positive in the fourth quartile. for asian-american women, nega- tive effects persist through the third quartile. management allies, then, appear to help minority women. where men dominate, grievance procedures make matters worse for all three minority groups. however, where women hold more management jobs (the fourth quartile begins at . %), negative effects disappear for black and asian-american women, and positive effects appear for hispanic women. in fig. , we present the estimates of changes following the creation of sexual harassment training programs for managers, by each quartile of total women in management. for white women, manager training shows positive effects in workplaces with few women in management that decline in the higher quartiles. positive effects are significant among workplaces in the first two quartiles of total women managers (p < . ). this lends support to our predictions that ) manager training will reduce harassment but, ) at high levels of women in manage- ment, harassment programs catalyze group threat. . . . p er ce nt b la ck , h is pa ni c, a nd a si an -a m er ic an w om en p er ce nt w hi te w om en white women black women hispanic women asian-american women fig. . average percent of women managers, by race and ethnicity, among the sampled workplaces. data come from the eeoc’s annual workforce census, the eeo survey. the figure is based on employer years included in the analysis. see fig. note for inclusion criteria. − . − . . . . grievance procedure manager training employee training workplace sexual harassment programs e st im at ed c ha ng e in s ha re o f g ro up in m an ag em en t white women black women hispanic women asian−american women fig. . estimated changes in the share of white and minority women in management following the adoption of sexual harassment grievance pro- cedures, manager training, and employee training. values on the vertical axis represent change in the log odds of the group in management. ninety- five percent confidence intervals are shown. dobbin and kalev pnas | june , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental for black, hispanic, and asian-american women, training shows significant positive effects only in workplaces in the fourth quartile of women in management. this finding is consistent with our prediction that, for groups of women least likely to activate group threat, according to the intersectionality literature, man- ager training is most effective in organizations with large con- tingents of women managers, because women are less likely to respond negatively to training than men. we consider an alternative mechanism—that manager train- ing signals that employers favor equality and thereby increases manager commitment to hiring and promoting women ( ). if that were the main mechanism, we would expect manager di- versity training to show the same effect as harassment training. it does not (see “diversity training” in full models in si appendix). it might be that we do not observe positive effects for white women among workplaces in the fourth quartile because there is no room for white women to grow. however, few workplaces in the fourth quartile have reached the limit— . % of observa- tions have % women managers. thus, in fig. , we find the predicted positive effects in the fourth quartile for the three minority groups. in any event, the noninteracted coefficient for the fourth quartile should pick up any limits on further growth, and the interaction should pick up the unique effect of women in management in the presence of manager training (full results reported in si appendix). note that linear interactions between total women managers and all three harassment programs pro- duced significant negative coefficients for white women (si appendix). manager training shows the greatest promise of the three pro- grams we examine. in the average workplace in the first quartile of total women managers, manager training is followed by an esti- mated % increase in white women in management. for black, hispanic, and asian-american women in workplaces in the fourth quartile of women managers (more than . %), manager training is followed an estimated to % increase in each group. sexual harassment training for employees, which typically re- lies on forbidden-behavior curriculum, shows none of the posi- tive effects that training for managers shows. this is consistent with research finding that, while such training can improve knowledge about harassment, it can exacerbate gender role hostility and propensity to harass among men. in fig. , without quartile interactions, we saw a negative effect of employee training on white women in management. in fig. , we see that employee training is followed by reductions in white women managers in workplaces where women hold the most manage- ment jobs. employee sexual harassment training in workplaces with more women managers appears to trigger backlash against white women. can manager training improve the effects of grievance pro- cedures? we tested this possibility by interacting grievance procedure with manager training and found no effect. nor did we find an effect when interacting grievance procedure with employee training (si appendix). it does not appear that either kind of training improves grievance procedure effects. conclusion sexual harassment remains a cancer on the workplace despite the widespread adoption of grievance procedures, manager training, and employee training. figuring out whether these programs actually reduce harassment, and whether they can be tweaked to work better, should be a priority. to that end, we build on a long tradition of research in psychology and sociology that has, as yet, had little impact on employer practice. we ask, in particular, whether harassment programs make workplaces more hospitable to women, increasing their numbers in management. previous studies suggest that grievance procedures may backfire, that manager training may help, and that employee training is un- likely to do much. first, surveys show that people who file griev- ances frequently face retaliation and rarely see their harassers fired or reassigned. we find that new grievance procedures are not fol- lowed by increases in white women in management, and are fol- lowed by reductions in black, hispanic, and asian-american women. second, field research on the type of training that best approximates manager training—bystander intervention training— suggests that it increases the intention to intervene, confidence about intervening, and actual intervention. we find that new manager training programs are followed by increases in white, black, hispanic, and asian-american women in management. third, field and laboratory studies of training for employees, typically with forbidden-behavior curriculum, show some positive effects on men’s knowledge about harassment, but also some adverse effects— increasing victim blaming and likelihood of harassing. we find that − . − . . . . st quartile nd quartile rd quartile th quartile workplaces by percent total women in management, quartiles e st im at ed c ha ng e in s ha re o f g ro up in m an ag em en t white women black women hispanic women asian−american women fig. . estimated changes in the share of white and minority women in management following the adoption of sexual harassment grievance pro- cedures, for workplaces in the first, second, third, and fourth quartiles of total women in management. values on the vertical axis represent change in the log odds of the group in management. ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown. − . . . . st quartile nd quartile rd quartile th quartile workplaces by percent total women in management, quartiles e st im at ed c ha ng e in s ha re o f g ro up in m an ag em en t white women black women hispanic women asian−american women fig. . estimated changes in the share of white and minority women in management following the adoption of sexual harassment training for managers, for workplaces in the first, second, third, and fourth quartiles of total women in management. values on the vertical axis represent change in the log odds of the group in management. ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown. | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. dobbin and kalev d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. new employee training programs are followed by reductions in white women in management. research also suggests that these programs will be more ef- fective in workplaces with more women managers—women are more likely to believe harassment complaints and less likely to react negatively to training. we find that, for minority women, women managers improve the effects of grievance procedures and manager training. however, research also shows that, when women’s gains in management threaten men’s dominance, group threat can lead men to resist efforts to accommodate women. white women are most likely to activate group threat, and not only because of their numbers in management. intersectionality studies also show that dominance by white women more often elicits backlash than dominance by minority women. we find that, for white women, positive effects of manager training dis- appear, and negative effects of grievance procedures and em- ployee training appear, in workplaces with the most women managers. in further analyses, we found that growth in women managers up to about % improved harassment program ef- fects for white women, but growth beyond that did not (see decile analysis results and full discussion in si appendix) ( , ). taken together, the findings indicate that the positive effects of manager training are not counteracted by the negative effects of grievance procedures or employee training, because the effects appear in different sorts of workplaces. for all three groups of minority women, in workplaces with more women managers, manager training helps; in workplaces with fewer women managers, grievance procedures hurt. for white women, in workplaces with more women managers, grievance procedures and employee training hurt; in workplaces with fewer women managers, manager training helps. it appears that harassment programs have made things worse for certain groups of women in certain workplaces, and better for other groups of women in other workplaces. the findings hold implications for employers, pointing to both problematic and promising program features. they reinforce victim surveys suggesting that grievance procedures incite re- taliation and rarely satisfy victims. even in workplaces with manager training, which is generally effective, grievance procedures do no good. how might employers improve complaint handling? on surveying the research, the eeoc’s select taskforce on the study of harassment in the workplace recommended that employers offer alternative complaint systems less likely to blow back on victims, such as independent ombudspersons who can hear complaints confidentially and talk through victims’ options ( , ). tech start- ups have devised their own alternatives, including virtual ombuds- persons and reporting systems. online reporting may address a common #metoo and #whyididn’treport criticism—employer confidentiality clauses prevent victims from learning that their ha- rasser has done it before. online, victims can report harassment when they choose to but embargo reports until others complain about the same harasser. the findings point to the promise of harassment training that treats trainees as allies rather than as potential perpetrators. our comparison of manager and employee training is key here. manager training, like bystander intervention training, gives trainees the tools to recognize and address harassment. it has the broadest positive effects. by contrast, employee training, which most often uses legalistic forbidden-behavior curriculum, shows null or adverse effects. training is where the lion’s share of the corporate antiharassment budget goes. employers might do better to offer bystander training to everyone. in studies on college campuses and in the military, this approach has been shown to increase the intention to intervene and self-reported interventions among college students and enlisted men ( , ). bystander training may offer the best hope for avoiding the demonstrated adverse effects of forbidden-behavior training. the analyses point to the promise of putting more women in management, and many firms have replaced men felled by #metoo with women. however, men still dominate the middle and upper echelons. as long as managers at the top come from the middle, change may be slow. for now, employers might consider research suggesting that male managers with the right attitudes can, like women managers generally, improve program effects. the us armed forces implemented a multipronged strategy to fight sexual harassment and assault. women who reported that their unit leaders made an “honest and reasonable effort to stop harassment” found both grievance handling and harassment training to be more effective. those women also reported reductions in personal experiences of harassment and in overall workplace harassment ( ). that study, in a context where virtually all leaders are men, suggests that leaders with the right stuff can prevent harassment programs from backfiring. employers might select managers for promotion up the ranks, be they men or women, who have proven records as allies to harassment victims. the findings don’t suggest a clear path to countering group threat. where women have made inroads in management, all three programs appear to incite backlash against the group of women whose dominance most threatens men: white women. in workplaces in the top quartile of total women managers, back- lash wipes out positive program effects or creates negative effects. again, management allies may be the key. perhaps selecting male managers who will believe harassment victims and respond positively to training will help, because these may be the very men who won’t react negatively to group threat. however, we clearly need more research on group threat and how to prevent it. women in leadership could spark a virtuous cycle, in which women leaders make harassment programs more effective, and effective programs help employers to retain and promote women. however, that virtuous cycle may never get underway in the face of group threat. the lessons we draw from the corporate world hold implications for harassment programs in academia, which is second only to the military in rates of harassment. a national academies of sciences report on harassment suggests that the problems with corporate sexual harassment grievance procedures and training are mirrored in the academy ( ). there, as in the corporate world, women rarely file grievances, because they distrust procedures and fear retaliation. there, as in the corporate world, training can − . − . . . st quartile nd quartile rd quartile th quartile workplaces by percent total women in management, quartiles e st im at ed c ha ng e in s ha re o f g ro up in m an ag em en t white women black women hispanic women asian−american women fig. . estimated changes in the share of white and minority women in management following the adoption of employee sexual harassment training, for workplaces in the first, second, third, and fourth quartiles of total women in management. values on the vertical axis represent change in the log odds of the group in management. ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown. dobbin and kalev pnas | june , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental backfire, leading to backlash among men. while it may not be surprising that the corporate world has not built sexual harassment programs on the knowledge base that academia has produced, it is surprising that academia itself has not done so. acknowledgments. we thank the national science foundation for funding. we thank bliss cartwright and ron edwards of the eeoc for making the eeo- data available through an intergovernmental personnel 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academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine (national academies press, washington, dc, ). | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. dobbin and kalev d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://doi.org/ . /e v https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. ecscw instructions hansson, karin; cerratto pargman, teresa; dahlgren, anna ( ): datafication and cultural heritage: provocations, threats, and design opportunities. in: proceedings of the th european conference on computer-supported cooperative work: the international venue on practice-centred computing an the design of cooperation technologies - workshop proposals, reports of the european society for socially embedded technologies (issn - ), doi: . /ecscw _ws copyright held by authors, doi: . /ecscw _ws permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. abstracting with credit is permitted. to copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, contact the authors. datafication and cultural heritage: provocations, threats, and design opportunities. karin hansson*, teresa cerratto pargman, anna dahlgren stockholm university khansson@dsv.su.se, tessy@dsv.su.se, anna.dahlgren@arthistory.su.se abstract. increasing digitization and the emergence of new data sharing practices are likely to change how our understanding of history is negotiated. the curation of data is always culturally and ideologically inflected. accordingly, archiving practices are not only fundamental for our understanding of the past but vital in navigating the present. we have to pay particular attention to the consequences of the interfaces that curate history, especially in relation to big data. crowdsourcing, social media, linked open data, and other participatory and open science practices challenge the archiving practices in cultural heritage institutions due to the character of the networked publics involved and the established structures between and within institutions. however, they also open up new opportunities and practices when it comes to understanding and defining our shared culture. in this workshop we will bring together researchers who have studied these issues or are working to develop critical perspectives on archiving practices. background the digitization of cultural heritage, increased datafication in all areas of society, and new infrastructures for sharing data within research and with the wider public are likely to change our views of the production of history. participatory practices such as citizen science are, for example, enabled and further developed in projects that includes a broad public in crowdsourcing projects (borowiecki, forbes, & fresa, ; cameron, kenderdine, ; cerratto pargman, joshi and wehn, ; manzo, kaufman, punjasthitkul, & flanagan, ). digitization entails an increased datafication and development of data-driven practices in diverse societal sectors, which results in more and more human activities being monitored, analyzed, quantified, archived, classified, and linked to other data (boyd & crawford, ; lyon, ). easier access to large-scale and linked datasets have opened up new possibilities to explore and create value from data and have enabled the development of more evidence-based quantitative scientific practices. this quantitative turn has influenced new research fields such as digital humanities, digital social science, e- learning, e-business, learning analytics, etc., where access, storage, and analysis of data drives the development of new infrastructures and methodologies. this creates changes not only at the level of data techniques and methods but also for researchers’ practices. for instance, some of these changes include increased standardization, development of shared infrastructures, and direct publication of research data, which changes the preconditions for research not only in the natural sciences but also in the humanities (borgman et al., ; carusi & jirotka, ; de la flor et al., ; ribes & lee, ; schroeder, ). increasing datafication of research practices and their infrastructure create opportunities to nurture an open research culture, enabling researchers to share their results through open access (kidwell et al., ; nosek et al., ; roche et al., ). datafication and increased measurement practices are also reflected in areas such as education (biesta, ), journalism (coddington, ), and politics (milan & velden, ). such practices are not only possible through the access, storage, and analysis of people’s data but via the tools for gathering and analyzing data. the proliferation of results is democratized through easily accessible infrastructures of people, survey tools, opinion polls and petitions, visualization, and dissemination to the public. this scientification, in which research methods are increasingly developed and integrated with everyday working practices, also creates expanded demands for a digital literacy. not only is it necessary to understand how information is created and disseminated (boyd, ), but it is also necessary to foster deeper insights into research methodologies and archiving processes. the critics of datafication claim that the belief in quantification poses dangers. for example, transparency decreases (it is often unclear on what grounds the data have been curated) (andrejevic, ; boyd, ; bunnik et al., ; driscoll & walker, ), important values are lost if they are not easy to compile as numbers, and threats to personal integrity increase as data collections are disseminated, linked, and combined (schradie, ). efforts to generate, collect, identify, and classify data and data collections risk obscuring the multifaced work practices around history production, including reward structures, authority structures, formalization of knowledge, interdependencies among groups, trust mechanisms, and the transitional quality of data collections (borgman, ). datafication can also be seen as an increased commodification of various aspects of human practices, especially due to the datafication of our life-worlds. people's opportunities to express themselves and organize themselves through the use of social media also contributes to new forms of surveillance and sources for consumer research (hansson et al., ). in the context of the humanities, there are critics who think that the qualitatively founded criticality that is at the core of contemporary research in the humanities is threatened and downplayed by, for example, politically controlled funding (belfiore & upchurch, ). also, the majority of crowdsourcing and open science projects are within the realm of the natural sciences and areas where data is easy to quantify (burke, ; de león, ). in the humanities, scientific processes are often different, and they demand other considerations. research in the humanities is more about creating heterogeneity and differences than collaborating around one shared common goal (anderson & blanke, ). furthermore, critics have pointed out that when archiving practices are distributed and maintained broadly over diverse sectors and groups in society, enabling a multifaced and fragmented notion of history, cultural heritage institutions might need to reevaluated their role in society (fredheim, ). however, the developers of infrastructure and the critics rarely meet. few academic studies or commercial design processes take criticism seriously by developing practices and tools that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches in a self-reflexive way. furthermore, while areas such as e-research, cyberinfrastructure, and crowdsourcing, are generally well covered by the ecscw community, the intersection between these areas and the increasing digitalization processes and datafication in the humanities is less explored. in this workshop we bring together researchers from hci and cscw who have studied these issues or are working to develop critical perspectives on technology, design, and research practices. we particularly welcome empirically-based research that looks into digitizing and digitalization processes in cultural heritage institutions. we also welcome theoretical contributions that put research practice into a philosophical and historical context while also questioning established norms of what constitutes cultural heritage. suggested topics and inquiries for the workshop in this workshop we are inviting – researchers to discuss common issues. topics and inquiries for the workshop can for example be: the transformation of cultural heritage institutions in the age of datafication:  how do we make sense of the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics underlying various types of archiving practices? what are the design challenges?  what happens when data structures become central for how a cultural heritage institution operates? what are the unintended consequences?  how are critical archiving practices supported in cultural heritage institutions? o what are the cultural and ideological aspects of data curation? o how do we adopt intersectional perspectives in classification systems? quantification of research practices:  what are the crucial design decisions when developing sharing platforms for research in the humanities? what are the opportunities and new practices in relation to understanding and sharing culture?  how do we navigate infrastructures, rewards structures, and social structures when designing systems that help preserve and share the cultural heritage?  what are the consequences and opportunities when using crowdsourcing, usually developed for micro tasks, in more qualitative research practices? participation in archiving practices:  how is participation constructed and enacted in citizen science and crowdsourcing practices? how is participation constrained, for example, by infrastructural arrangements, technological affordances and social norms?  what are the implications for transparency, surveillance, and trust when designing for participation in the development of the cultural heritage sector?  what are the coping strategies and resistance to or appropriation of datafication?  what are the tactics, structures and normative foundations necessary for supporting participatory metadata practices? what are the challenges? how do we negotiate standardization versus complexity when developing metadata practices?  what are the implications of the (lack of) transparency and accountability of data practices in different sectors? what are the challenges this poses for users’ data literacy?  what are the new asymmetries and power relations that data practices may bring between memory institutions and audiences, or between different segments of audiences? we are especially interested in bringing together researchers and practitioners working with digitizing and digitalization processes. description of the workshop activities this one-day workshop will explore the topics through prototyping and brainstorming sessions. the workshop is divided into two sessions. the first half consists of participant presentations of their research topics. the second half will be a brainstorming session where the topics of the workshop are further explored through collaborative prototyping. in human-computer interaction (hci) design we are used to co-design methods such as sketches, prototypes, cases and scenarios to achieve a more informed design, grounded in the reality of potential users. artistic techniques are also used to involve participants as informants and co-designers such as probes, scenarios, and role-playing. however, unlike most problem-focused design research, the aim with this workshop is not to use these methods to achieve a more informed design. instead, we use the design process as a method to collaboratively materialize our own understanding of our research. information on the workshop will be disseminated through our website (https://dataficationandculturalheritage.blogs.dsv.su.se) and via emailing lists relevant for the ecscw community as well as a broader interdisciplinary research community. accepted papers will be circulated beforehand to prepare attendees for discussions at the workshop. beyond the themes highlighted here by the workshop organizers, other themes for the workshop that emerge from the position papers will be posted on the website. a key discussant, identified among the workshop attendees, will be assigned to each position paper to facilitate interaction and engagement in the workshop. the participants will prepare a - minute presentation to be delivered in the introduction of the workshop, but focus the will be on developing our ideas through collaborative prototyping. we will take the workshop as an opportunity to explore future collaboration (e.g., a mailing list and/or collaborative research projects). the results from the workshop may be developed further for a special issue or anthology. organization the workshop is organized by an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the fields of human computer interaction and digital humanities. karin hansson, associate professor in computer and systems sciences at stockholm university, has written extensively about technology-based participation from a design perspective. she is currently part of a research project on the development of #metoo activism in sweden, and part of the “metadata culture” research group at stockholm university. she has previously organized workshops on cscw themes such as: the morphing organization – rethinking groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork at acm group , sanibel island, usa; examining the essence of the crowds: motivations, roles and identities at ecscw , oslo, norway; toward a typology of participation in crowdwork at acm cscw , san francisco, usa; crowd dynamics: exploring conflicts and contradictions in crowdsourcing at acm chi , san jose, ca, usa; ting: making publics through provocation, conflict and appropriation, the th participatory design conference , aarhus, denmark. together with thomas ludwig, she recently edited the special issue: crowd dynamics: conflicts, contradictions, and cooperation, the journal of collaborative computing and work practices (jcscw), volume , september . this si started in a previous workshop at chi. right now she is co-editor together with shaowen bardzell, malin sveningsson, and teresa cerratto pargman on another si of jcscw called “materializing activism”, which is a result of a workshop with the same title at ecscw . teresa cerratto pargman, associate professor in human-computer interaction (hci) at the department of computer and systems sciences at stockholm university. her work contributes to the study of how digital technologies and applications reflect and configure socio-material practices and how emerging practices shape the development and design of digital technologies. in particular, she has published on design and appropriation of emerging technologies in the educational sector and on the epistemic, value-laden and social infrastructures, such technologies make possible but also disrupt. she coordinates the research area of technology-enhanced learning and leads the critical computing group at the department of computer and systems sciences at stockholm university. anna dahlgren, professor of art history at the department of culture and aesthetics at stockholm university, has published on different aspects of photography and vernacular visual culture including the digital turn, print culture and archives and museum practices. right now she is managing the research project metadata culture (http://metadataculture.se) at stockholm university, an interdisciplinary research project that investigates and develop methods for obtaining qualified and extensive metadata for images in digitalized cultural heritage collections. references anderson, sheila, and tobias blanke. 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( ). e-sciences as research technologies: reconfiguring disciplines, globalizing knowledge. social science information, vol. , no. , pp. – . doi: . / title ix and “trauma-focused” investigations: the good, the bad, and the ugly uc irvine uc irvine previously published works title title ix and "trauma-focused" investigations: the good, the bad, and the ugly permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ n p sr journal journal of applied research in memory and cognition, ( ) issn - authors davis, deborah loftus, elizabeth f publication date - - doi . /j.jarmac. . . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ n p sr https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ journal of applied research in memory and cognition ( ) – contents lists available at sciencedirect journal of applied research in memory and cognition j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / j a r m a c commentary title ix and “trauma-focused” investigations: the good, the bad, and the ugly deborah davis ∗ university of nevada, reno, united states elizabeth f. loftus a r t a i c f c a s s a e m p m t p a c r p t e h v i r o nia, p n p t u c t ( e c f c p c e a o e e t d r “ a p g university of califor beginning in earnest during the obama era, campus, state, nd federal authorities have struggled to find title ix rules, egulations, and investigatory procedures that would balance he needs and rights of those who allege sexual harassment or ssault against those of the accused. the “dear colleague” letter ssued in (us department of education, ) reminded ampuses of requirements under title ix and issued guidelines or their enforcement, including those concerning the nature of ampus policies, the operation of title ix offices and officials, nd the process of resolution of complaints. although the letter pecified—as does title ix itself—that “equitable” procedures hould be used, it did not require that due process protections be dopted (such as allowing lawyers to participate, access to all vidence), but merely stated that if allowed at all, both parties ust be able to use them. it specified that due process must be rovided for the accused, but at the same time, these protections ust not restrict or unnecessarily delay title ix protections for he complainant. it also required that the relatively lax “pre- onderance of the evidence” standard of proof be employed to ssess any claim, thereby making it easier to find in favor of the omplainant. in september of , education secretary betsy devos escinded obama era regulations. in november of devos roposed changes designed to eliminate restrictions in the inves- igations, to bolster the rights of the accused, to encourage more quitable investigations, and to allow the option to choose a igher standard of proof for allegations (such as “clear and con- incing” rather than “preponderance of evidence”). changes ncluded options that either had not been mentioned or not equired in title ix regulations or doe guidance, or not adopted r permitted in specific campus regulations. these included the author note. deborah davis, university of nevada, reno, nv, united states. elizabeth f. loftus, university of california, irvine, united states. d i s t irvine, united states reviously absent or restricted right to cross-examine the wit- esses during mandatory live hearings, equal opportunity to resent witnesses and to examine evidence, and separation of hose who investigate the complaint from those who make the ltimate finding. even as devos proposed such changes, some ourts had begun to order colleges to offer due process pro- ections for the accused, such as the right to question accusers watanabe, ). title ix itself, the “dear colleague” guidance, and subsequent fforts to revise relevant regulations and procedures have evoked onsiderable controversy and criticism. reflecting this dissatis- action, our society has seen a growing number of individual and lass action lawsuits brought against universities by alleged per- etrators who claimed that their rights were violated by unfair ampus regulations and investigatory procedures, and by biased xecution of these procedures (watanabe, ). while some re ongoing, nearly half of these plaintiffs have won their suits r settled their claims with the schools (gersen, ). appar- ntly, the doe ( ) title ix guidance has had the unintended ffect of spawning procedures that violated many of its own dic- ates regarding equity and fairness. we regard the widespread iscussion, airing of divergent views, and efforts to continually evise and improve the relevant regulations and processes as the good” associated with title ix. but despite these efforts, s we write this article, title ix campus investigatory rules and rocedures are still hotly debated. campus title ix offices have scrambled to comply with new uidance, regulations, and court rulings, and to offer increas- ∗ correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to deborah avis, university of nevada, reno, united states. contact: debdavis@unr.edu. ng due process protections to defendants while still offering upport and protection to alleged victims. on the one hand, here is no question that alleged victims of sexual assault have https://doi.org/ . /j.jarmac. . . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jarmac http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.jarmac. . . &domain=pdf mailto:debdavis@unr.edu foc h c c t l s t t o u h r t r p k i s t r a i p a g t c c t n v o m o w a ( i m e d i t c i r t t o l f t fl i n b e i d t t h c i t “ a i h g r p c i t e a b m a p e o e d m c e t a n n m a i m e a h b title ix and trauma istorically faced extraordinary scrutiny and doubt of their laims, greater than that faced by victims of any other rime (see rerick, livingston, & davis, in press, for review). his fact has been brought home once again by a recent engthy investigation documenting the widespread, and—in ome jurisdictions—almost complete failure of law enforcement o take claims of rape seriously. “seriously” means enough even o test rape kits or to otherwise pursue thorough investigation f reported rapes (hagerty, ). hagerty suggested such fail- res reflect an “epidemic of disbelief” of victims of rape that as led to an overwhelming societal failure to catch and convict apists. likewise, the social science literature has documented he many factors contributing to failure of victims to report ape, disbelief of victims who do report, and failure to convict erpetrators (e.g., allison & wrightsman, ; reddington & reisel, ; ward, ). here we do not question these real- ties, nor do we suggest that the problems facing real victims of exual assault have ceased. on the other hand, it is also clear that in an effort to counter hese problems for the victim, title ix investigatory rules and egulations—and how they are enacted—have placed many ccused in jeopardy. in practice, there is a presumption of truth n claims of rape, and an adoption of investigatory training and rocedures that may bias findings in favor of the complainant nd against the accused, to the point that some schools’ investi- ators or adjudicators have been trained to “start by believing” he complainant (gersen, ). while we recognize the many hallenges facing real victims of sexual assault in having their laims taken seriously and prosecuted fairly, we also suggest hat a system that tends to presume guilt of the perpetrator is o better than one that refuses to recognize valid claims of the ictim. and, as meissner and lyle ( ) note, any presumption f guilt or other bias toward one party can set in motion confir- atory processes leading to biased collection and interpretation f evidence. in the sections to come, we discuss the basis of these concerns, ith focus on title ix investigations, including (a) some flawed ssumptions that may directly promote judgments of guilt; b) investigatory procedures that can produce evidence biased n favor of complainants; (c) incorrect assumptions regarding emory and behavior that encourage interpretation of available vidence as favoring the complainant (but nevertheless may pro- uce biases against them in some cases); and (d) omission of nformation in training and in collection of evidence in inves- igations that would importantly inform judgments. we devote onsiderable attention to the nature of trauma-focused interview- ng and the way in which these four categories of concerns are eflected in the training for such interviews and in the interviews hemselves. title ix investigations and the presumption of guilt there has long been an argument among prosecutors and vic- im advocates that the base rate of guilt among those accused f sexual assault is extraordinarily high. that is, many in the egal system make the assumption that almost no allegations are alse, and trial testimony by purported experts citing statistics o t p t used investigations o this effect is common (despite fundamental methodological aws in studies attempting to establish rates of false allegations). n effect, just as carl sagan famously asserted that extraordi- ary claims require extraordinary evidence, (sagan & druyan, ), prosecutors invite jurors to presume a false allegation to e extremely unlikely (extraordinary), and therefore to require xtraordinary evidence of innocence to vote to acquit. notwithstanding admonitions to conduct fair and equitable nvestigations, we suggest that title ix regulations and proce- ures reflect this assumption of low base rate innocence among he accused, and that they may well infuse this assumption into he minds of those who must investigate and judge rape or sexual arassment complaints. there are numerous reasons for such a laim. first, the renewed emphasis on title ix concerns was nspired in part by widely publicized statistics on campus rapes. he doe “dear colleague” letter ( ) stated at the outset that the statistics on sexual violence are both deeply troubling and call to action for the nation” and proceeded to report statistics ndicating that % of college women and % of college males ave experienced sexual assault (p. ). though the methodolo- ies for assessing rates of sexual assault and the accuracy of such ates have been contested (see krause et al., ; muehlenhard, eterson, humphreys, & jozkowski, for reviews), they ontinue to be presented in multiple contexts, including in title x training. the evolution of title ix regulations and procedures has con- inued in the context of the #metoo movement. the movement mphasizes the pervasive nature of sexual harassment and sexual ssault and the extent to which reporting these actions has long een discouraged, and disbelieved when reported. widespread edia coverage and discussion related to #metoo encourages cultural zeitgeist suggesting claims are to be believed and erpetrators brought to a long overdue reckoning. second, though even the obama era doe letter ( ) mphasized the importance of fair and equitable procedures at ne level, it and subsequent regulations have simultaneously mphasized the importance of student safety on campus, and in oing so have disadvantaged the accused. their specific state- ents regarding safety and associated rules and procedures oncern the safety of alleged victims, not of the accused. for xample, an accused may be subject to exclusion from any con- act with the accuser (including being removed from dormitories nd classes, or being suspended) even prior to any determi- ation of guilt. due process protections for the accused must ot interfere with provision of safety for the accuser. active easures must be taken to prevent revenge of the accused gainst the accuser. moreover, remedies for the complainant can nclude escorts to ensure safety from the accused, counseling or edical services, academic support services such as tutoring, nsuring that class withdrawals do not affect the complainant’s cademic record, and reviewing the complainant’s disciplinary istory to assess whether any problems may have been caused y the actions of the accused. but none of these apply the ther way around (doe, ). these reflect an assumption hat the accuser is indeed a victim, though it is clearly also ossible that the accused may be the victim of a false allega- ion. foc t v f f c “ t e f f e v p m a n r w t a e t r a e b b t d o o f o i d p i f a t j p d e p a c t r t a t r a m i o m f i w f i e e c u d r i w e v n a t r p i t p “ d a t o a p c t t o i e c title ix and trauma third, we suggest that a presumption of guilt is reflected in he very notion of “trauma focused” or “trauma informed” inter- iews and investigations. as meissner and lyle ( ) note, the irst report of the white house task force to protect students rom sexual assault ( ) tasked the justice department’s enter for campus public safety with the development of a trauma-informed” training program for investigation of allega- ions of sexual misconduct. this focus on trauma was further ncouraged during the obama administration and later the task orce’s second report in . this focus is reflected in the orensic experiential trauma interview (strand & heitman, ) and in many statements and training materials for law nforcement, statements posted on campus websites, those of ictim advocate organizations, and others (e.g., webb et al., ). though there is much “good” about the recommended rocess of the interview and many accuracies in portrayal of emory processes, the “bad” consists of additional incorrect nd unstated assumptions and specific assertions about how the ature of interviewee memory reports informs judgments of the eality of their claims, and the “ugly” consists of the way in hich these fallacies can mislead judgments: mostly favoring he complainant, but in some cases inappropriately favoring the ccused. it is worth noting at this stage that training for feti ncourages the assumption that the accuser is traumatized (and herefore was raped), and encourages the interpretation of all esponses as consistent with that trauma. problematic investigatory tools: the case of feti (forensic experiential trauma interview) as meissner and lyle ( ) discuss, the procedures of feti re largely empirically supported, in that they essentially adopt lements of the widely tested cognitive interview, developed y fisher and geiselman ( ; ) and since shown to e effective in eliciting true information and minimizing false. hese include developing rapport and demonstrating empathy, eveloping the interviewee’s interest in the interview, use of pen-ended prompts, active listening, and avoidance of leading r suggestive questions, for example. differences lie primarily in eti’s emphasis on asking about emotions and sensory mem- ries, though such questions are also used with the cognitive nterview. we find little fault with the recommended interview proce- ure itself, though we do note that there is much less attention aid in campus procedures and by promoters of feti to what s the appropriate way to interview the accused. instead, we ocus here on several problematic assumptions and on question- ble assertions concerning the meaning of responses obtained hrough use of feti and the way in which they may mislead udgment, primarily in favor of the complainant. roblematic assumption : sexual assault necessarily pro- uces trauma sufficient to disable cognition feti training suggests that sexual assault will be experi- nced as severely traumatic (see strand & heitman, ; and resentation of strand posted at https://vimeo.com/ ), s does the general exhortation of title ix guidance to t p m h used investigations onduct trauma-informed investigations. from this assumption, he training goes on to discuss how memory works when expe- iencing trauma and what this will mean for the nature of raumatized persons’ accounts. derivations concerning memory nd the meaning of memory reports are based on the presump- ion that cognition will be profoundly affected. such claims aise the question of the extent to which the experiences of ll or most victims of sexual assault (nevermind sexual harass- ent) include negative emotions rising to the level presumed n feti training. that is, the training materials present effects f extreme trauma on stress hormones, cognition, behavior, and emory rising to the level of disabling frontal lobe executive unctions and exerting debilitating effects on memory formation. f the event in question does not create such extreme emotions, hat does this mean for the remainder of the training speci- ying what to expect victim accounts to look like and for the mplications of either conforming or not conforming to those xpectations? it is highly unlikely that all sexual assaults result in such xtreme emotional reactions (particularly in many disputed ases of acquaintance rape) and even more unlikely that all sex- al harassment does so. the level of negative emotion that will isable cognition to the extent proposed by feti training is a elatively high standard. many of the same considerations raised n the repressed memory literature are relevant in cases of rape as ell (e.g., clancy, ; mcnally, ). how extreme were the motions at the time it occurred (even when blunted by alcohol), ersus experienced later upon reflection, for example? when do egative emotions cross the line to become sufficient to dis- ble cognition to the extent feti training suggests? we suggest hat the extreme trauma assumption itself and related theories egarding effects of trauma on memory and behavior are both roblematic, and, as we explore below, can lead to inappropriate nculpation of the accused as well as inappropriate disbelief of he alleged victim. roblematic assumption : trauma is a one-way street generally, title ix investigations are tasked with being victim-centered” and “trauma-informed.” this exhortation irects much of the effort toward care and handling of the lleged victim (including greater victim-focus in interview raining). the theory and training of feti, for example, focuses n how to interview the alleged victim. where the alleged ssailant is mentioned in the training, it is to contrast the resumed status of the victim and assailant brains and pro- essing status (disabled by emotion vs. calm and rational), and herefore the likely types of memory reports they will be able o offer (disorganized, fragmentary and difficult to access vs. rganized and more accessible). the import of the discussion s to suggest that the assailant will not likely experience intense motions and therefore will not experience impairments of ognition or memory—at least not impairments approaching hose experienced by the alleged victim. purportedly, the erpetrator will be calm and unemotional, in part because ost are repeat offenders who plan assaults and find them abitual and enjoyable in most instances (https://www.bwjp. https://vimeo.com/ https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html foc o t t n m t f a c r c h s t t a a i t a p a l m e s a m m b a a i r t p d z t e a t a r a b t s w i u t t i p c n a t v p r t t a b r b r s e o e t h n m a w t a t p r d o c v l c t o c u t t e e title ix and trauma rg/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential- rauma-interview-feti.html). but in a fair process, shouldn’t consideration of emotion and rauma extend to the accused? if a person is innocent, strong egative emotions are not likely relevant until an accusation is ade. but once an accused becomes aware of the accusation, hey are undoubtedly common. one of us (loftus) worked on the amous case of cardinal bernardin of chicago, who himself was ccused of sexual misconduct by a former seminarian, stephen ook. writing in his memoir, the cardinal talked about his initial eaction: he was “startled and devastated” (bernardin, , p. ). he would also tell others that the false accusation and the ancer that ultimately killed him were the worst things that had appened to him in his life. fortunately, before bernardin died tephen cook dropped the case, making clear by his comments hat he was convinced of bernardin’s innocence. but how might he terrible emotional devastation bernardin felt because of the ccusation have affected his reports during relevant interviews? strong emotions can affect the encoding of events. but they lso impair retrieval. feti training notes that the potential for ntense emotions and re-traumatization is present for alleged vic- ims, even during a supportive feti interview—and these may ffect memory reports. a more everyday experience is when eople cannot remember something while nervous in front of an udience or while taking a test, but remember as soon as they eave the stressful situation. such processes likely also affect emory reports for respondents. in addition to effects of strong motion, an innocent accused may also be distracted by the truggle for answers. he may be confused by the unexpected ccusation and struggle to understand why the accusation was ade, or how his behaviors might have been misreported or isinterpreted. to the extent that a feti interviewer expects the accused to e able to provide a linear “who, what, where, when, and how” ccount and the accuser to provide a disorganized, incomplete nd sometimes inconsistent account (as suggested by feti train- ng: e.g., strand webinar presentation: https://www.bwjp.org/ esource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential- rauma-interview-feti.html), that interviewer may inappro- riately interpret normal failures of memory as indicators of eception by the accused, while interpreting similar disorgani- ation or mistakes as indicators of truth for the accuser. in short, here are many potential explanations for failures of frontal lobe xecutive functions, and for memory disorganization, errors nd omissions of the sort anticipated by feti for victims. hese include alcohol or drug impairment, stress during recall, nd lying. such report characteristics cannot be assumed to eflect the validity of either party’s account. other inequities regarding interviews or their interpretation re also important. for example, given that the accused may also e traumatized, the same considerations of safety and accep- ance should apply as for accusers. moreover, as feti trainers uggest, asking open-ended questions about what the person as thinking or feeling during an event can trigger important nformation for the investigation. these techniques should be sed to give respondents the best chance to retrieve poten- ially exculpatory information, just as they are recommended t s c c used investigations o give the accuser the chance to retrieve accusation supportive nformation. roblematic assumption : reliable differences exist in haracteristics of memory reports for traumatic versus on-traumatic events feti materials outline the way in which trauma is expected to ffect the manner of encoding, and therefore memory reports, for raumatic events. space does not permit full exploration of the alidity of all such claims. however, many are correct: for exam- le, claims that intense emotion can impair frontal lobe function, educe control of attention, focus attention more strongly on he perceiver’s central concerns or the most salient aspects of he event, reduce attention to peripheral concerns, and others. s a result, the accounts of victims of trauma will purportedly e disorganized, focus on feelings and sensations, be inaccu- ate regarding timing, order, and other contextual details, and e inconsistent within and across tellings. normal pathways of etrieval are expected to be impaired due to peritraumatic dis- ociation, which prevents normal associative pathways between lements of the event from being formed and makes retrieval f relevant memories more difficult. in contrast, the accused is xpected to provide much more organized accounts, better able o satisfy demands of investigators for “who, what, when, where, ow” information. as meissner and lyle ( ) review, however, evidence does ot support the predicted stark differences in accounts of trau- atic versus non-traumatic memories, or between accused and ccuser. the feti training fails to acknowledge the many path- ays to any given failure or characteristic of memory. moreover, here is almost no mention in feti training of the way in which lcohol may alter the emotional experience of sexual assault or he interaction of alcohol and emotion on memory processes. roblematic assumption : characteristics of memory eports can be taken as “evidence” of whether trauma id occur an issue of considerable importance is that of whether mem- ry reports taken with feti procedures and judged under feti laims regarding traumatic and non-traumatic memories and ictim-perpetrator differences in memory characteristics will ead to more accurate conclusions regarding the truth of the laims. several issues are relevant to this question. is there really a “profile” of a true report? the unfor- unately “ugly” result of feti-related mistaken assumptions f whose memory reports should look how and under what onditions is the risk of mistaken judgments. a particularly gly feature of feti training is that it specifically suggests hat if memory reports of alleged victims fit the “profile” of hose expected from a trauma victim, this fit should serve as vidence that the report is true: “good solid neurobiological sci- nce routinely demonstrates that, when a person is stressed or raumatized, inconsistent statements are not only the norm, but ometimes strong evidence that the memory was encoded in the ontext of severe stress and trauma” (strand & heitman, p. ). learly, given that evidence does not show that trauma is the https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html foc u a a ( f c t r n i t b h r f p o w n t s t o p f n p o f a m t c m c i e ( l e m h s f t k r d w a v o b i c t a i t p p i a t c b c j a d b n i d d t t r p r a s i h a b h o j h t r o i a u j s i h a t c u title ix and trauma nitary cause for such memory reports (see next section), such n assumption poses considerable risk of an overly confident ttribution of truth to an accusation. feti developer strand made other such claims in his webinar https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the- orensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html). one such laim might disadvantage actual victims. that is, strand stated hat he would be suspicious of alleged victims who were able to emember too much peripheral detail (because trauma should arrow attentional focus to central aspects of the event). it s notable, though, that he also made the contradictory claim hat because victims often dissociate during rape, they may e focusing on peripheral details to avoid focus on what is appening. strand also claimed that when alleged victims eport expected emotional/behavioral reactions (e.g., terror, reezing), these reactions (which he clearly presumes true) can rovide support for required elements of proof for prosecution f rape claims, such as fear, force, or nonconsent. in other ords, the victim’s reported reactions are considered proof that onconsensual or forcible sex did occur. what other explanations exist for memory features feti raining attributes to trauma? the claims above adopt logic uch as the following: if men have four appendages, then all crea- ures with four appendages must be men! just as there are many ther creatures with four appendages, there are also many factors otentially responsible for the types of memory accounts that eti training offers as evidence of trauma (or against). promi- ent among them is intoxication, which, at high levels tends to roduce fragmentary memories, myopic focus impairing mem- ry for periphery, and other effects similar to those specified by eti training (see davis & loftus, , for review). gener- lly, one might ask how the purported memory effects of trauma ight be different from what happens when one is asked about hings (or is trying to remember things) that were never encoded learly for any reason, or when one is lying. but even truth tellers ay provide less coherent or complete reports when under the ognitive load imposed by the stresses of an accusation, the nvestigation, interviews, and worry over consequences. mod- rn studies of lie detection have focused, as meissner and lyle ) review, on what happens when one imposes a cognitive oad on would-be deceivers. a liar will have trouble with periph- ral details, and with unusual requests for information or unusual anners of retrieval (such as reverse order; see vrij, ; vrij, artwig, & granhag, ). combined with the effects of other tressors, the cognitive load imposed by efforts to lie success- ully can produce memory reports sharing many features with hose feti training attributes to trauma. does sex-related trauma = sexual assault? one thing to eep in mind while considering the issue of “traumatic” memo- ies is that a person may experience fear, high stress, or “trauma” uring a sexual encounter, even though objective judgment ould not suggest the encounter should be viewed as sexual ssault. this scenario might occur, for example, if the alleged ictim found the encounter highly aversive, but provided no vert indicators of nonconsent, or engaged in overtly voluntary, ut actually unwanted, sex. in such circumstances, the advice nherent to the feti training (strand & heitman, ) to m l a c used investigations onsider evidence of trauma (in the form of memory charac- eristics and reports of emotions) as evidence of truth of the ccusation can lead to misleading inferences that these feelings ndicate assault. one of us (davis) served as expert witness in a case illus- rating perfectly the problems with such an assumption. the articipants, who we will call jane and john, were both inex- erienced: she a virgin and he a near virgin. they were both nterested in one another, and arranged a late meeting at his partment to watch a movie. jane had told john early in the visit hat she wasn’t ready for sex yet (the primary argument for non- onsent). yet, as the evening progressed she engaged in many ehaviors that suggest consent. her cross-examination at trial onsisted in essence of the following: did you get in bed with ohn? [yes.] did you make out with him with clothes on? [yes.] t some point, did he begin to remove your shirt [bra]? [yes.] id you say no or try to stop him? [no.] at some point, did he eing to remove your shorts [underwear]? [yes.] did you say o, tell him to stop, or try to physically stop him? [no] did you n fact raise your buttocks as he tried to remove them? [yes.] id he then move to position himself between your legs? [yes.] id you spread your legs voluntarily? [yes.] did you at any ime tell him not to insert his penis, say no, or in any way try o physically stop him? [no.] nevertheless, jane immediately eported the incident as rape to authorities. she made a recorded hone call at their behest to attempt to get john to admit to the ape on the record. during the call she talked about her feelings nd the fact that she had early on told him she wasn’t ready for ex, and tried to get him to admit that he knew she didn’t want t. for his part, john was obviously excited at first to hear from er, talked about when they could get together again, and clearly ssumed the previous night was the beginning of a relationship. ut as jane disclosed her feelings, cried, and talked about how e had to have known she didn’t want it, john exclaimed “jane! h my god! jane! i raped you! oh my god! i didn’t realize! ane! i’m so sorry. i’m so sorry. what can i do? i didn’t want to urt you!” nothing could have been clearer from their accounts and their rial testimony. jane really hadn’t wanted to have sex. she expe- ienced intense negative emotions, arguably trauma, as the result f the interaction. she exhibited strong distress, and cried often, n her initial report, hearings, and trial, and upon news of john’s cquittal. and yet, john clearly had no clue that she felt this way ntil the call the day after their encounter. his surprise was clear. ane had not overtly made clear her very real desire not to have ex. feti trainers and others may assume that jane experienced ntense fear as it became clear to her that john might attempt to ave sex with her, and as a result experienced “tonic immobility” nd the inability to marshal resistance, and indeed she reported hat she wanted to resist and didn’t know why she didn’t or ouldn’t. but this does not justify a finding of rape when it was nambiguous that john received no cues of resistance, and he ade a genuine “mistake of fact” regarding consent. confusion, ack of experience, and a poorly developed repertoire for negoti- ting potentially sexual interactions among naïve young people an produce many similar scenarios among college students. https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html foc p o f a t m w t a v t r t s t d c q s c m c p t e i t p t r o m r s g i t t l t i n i u m r i i s d a r f t l a g s ( t t t l g m i p ( r r i o t r r n t o d a c o t h fi ( e a t n p c c whether each interpreted the other correctly. it is truly a diffi- title ix and trauma roblematic assumption : feti’s focus on emotion has nly positive effects the story of john and jane raises another question regarding eti. that is, great emphasis is placed on asking the accuser bout the emotions and sensations she experienced during he event. the assumption is that such emotions and sensory emories are stronger than memory for “who, what, when, here, and why” details. emotion and sensory-focused ques- ions purportedly build rapport with the interviewee and can lso trigger associative pathways by which the traumatized ictim may be able to retrieve memories for other aspects of he event (strand & heitman, ; https://www.bwjp.org/ esource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential- rauma-interview-feti.html). we agree. but emotion focus, pecifically, is likely to have other effects as well, raising he question of whether feti’s emotion focus may be a ouble-edged sword. in particular, two important issues deserve onsideration. what of the effects of emotion priming? emotion related uestions and prompts to relive emotions and sensations clearly erve a priming function. for a complex event, such priming ould lead to preferential retrieval of emotion-consistent infor- ation at the expense of the contradictory, as shown by mood onsistent retrieval effects. moreover, as shown in the affective riming literature, emotion at retrieval can serve as context for he information that is retrieved, causing it to be interpreted in an motion-consistent fashion (e.g. bower & forgas, ; forgas, ; gibbons, seib-pfeifer, koppelheie-gossel, & schnuerch, ). finally, fuzzy trace theory (e.g., brainerd & reyna, , p. ) would predict that strong emotion memories, particularly n the absence of clear verbatim memories, would likely lead o constructive memory errors consistent with the emotion. the erson might remember things that would be consistent with he emotion, even if they didn’t happen (such as attempts to esist, or coercive actions by the accused), and fail to remember, r reinterpret actions that were inconsistent with the emotion. ore generally, fuzzy trace theory suggests that when memo- ies are unclear, one’s general knowledge of what is likely in uch circumstances will lead to memory errors consistent with eneral knowledge or expectations. in this way, if feti training s correct regarding the lack of clarity in traumatic memories, his lack of clarity leaves open greater opportunity for memory o be distorted in the direction of expectations. or, as davis and oftus ( ) put it, we tend to remember based on “who we hink we are and what we think we did.” john and jane were not ntoxicated during their encounter. but how much more opportu- ity for expectation-based errors is imposed by alcohol, or other mpairments to memory clarity? how good is memory for emotion itself? the feti theory nderlying its recommended procedures implies that emotion emory will be accurate and strong. these emotion memo- ies can be used as pathways to retrieve accurate event-related nformation. but what if the person remembers the emotions ncorrectly? a substantial literature exists to document incon- istencies in memories for emotion over time, and sources of c c t used investigations istortion in memory for emotion comparable to those for other spects of event memory. notably, like other memories, memo- ies for emotions are “functional,” and alter over time in ways to acilitate one’s current needs or goals, and they generally change o be consistent with current beliefs and appraisals (see levine, ench, & safer, , for review). given that emotion memories re malleable, and particularly toward consistency with current oals, it is quite possible that when interviewees are asked to tart with how they felt during an event, the emotions they report and that serve as associative cues or as primes) may not reflect hose experienced during the event, and as such, will not serve o prompt accurate memories or interpretations of the event. sexual behavior and sexual consent communications: a glaring area of omission in title ix training our story of john and jane raises other issues that are crucial o judgment of sexual assault. that is, there is a large scientific iterature on how sexual consent is conveyed and interpreted, ender differences in perception of the meaning of behaviors that ight or might not indicate consent, sources of misunderstand- ng of consent, effects of alcohol use on consent processes and erceptions, and other individual differences in these respects e.g., see davis & loftus, ; davis & villalobos, ; erick et al., in press; villalobos, davis, & leo, ; wood, ikkonen, & davis, in press, for reviews). whereas the case of john and jane is relatively clear regard- ng whether jane displayed cues of nonconsent once the making ut began, and many others are similar, it is also often the case hat the clarity of consent is more difficult to judge, and cor- espondingly, the defense of reasonable mistake of fact. in this espect, greater training concerning norms of how consent or onconsent tends to be communicated and interpreted in prac- ice would be very useful. did the accuser fail to convey cues f nonconsent widely recognized among students as such, or id the accused fail to recognize them if they occurred? did the ccuser engage in behaviors that she felt had nothing to do with onsent, but that are widely considered to indicate consent? to ur knowledge such issues are not covered in title ix trainings. unfortunately, issues of interpretation complicate the task of hose who must judge even further. feti advocates strand and eitman ( ) noted that “what many in the criminal justice eld have been educated to believe people do when they lie e.g., changes in body language, affect, ah-filled pauses, lack of ye contact, etc.) actually occur naturally when human beings re highly stressed or traumatized” (p. ). it is indeed clear that here are many confusions regarding both what may or may ot indicate accuracy, subjective truth, or lying, as well as how erceivers understand and use such cues. the issue of consent ommunications adds to this the task of judging whether such ommunications conveyed each person’s intentions clearly and ult and error-fraught enterprise to judge who interpreted events orrectly in the first place, who remembers accurately, who is elling the truth as they know it, and who is lying. https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html https://www.bwjp.org/resource-center/resource-results/the-forensic-experiential-trauma-interview-feti.html foc o “ p c i “ q t t i v p t t h v o r i q s o e i r a w e t t v a v c r a b b b c d d f f f g g h k l n m m r r title ix and trauma conclusions and caveats meissner and lyle ( ) clearly lay out the case that much f what is taught to title ix investigators—whether basic facts,” recommended procedures, or the theory underlying such rocedures—lacks empirical tests or is unsupported or directly ontradicted by existing research. we agree. we have pointed to some problems with the training of title x investigators and the specific procedure of feti and other trauma-focused” interviewing. this discussion leaves open the uestion of how the investigations tend to be performed in prac- ice. as meissner and lyle ( ) review, there are no formal raining or minimum qualifications for those tasked with enact- ng recommended procedures, although such training may occur oluntarily, and many title ix officials and investigators may ossess important relevant qualifications. assuredly, however, here will be significant variability in the manner and compe- ence with which investigations are carried out. such problems ave been manifest in lawsuits against many colleges and uni- ersities based on failures of due process. more development f specific guidelines for how to conduct the investigations or ecommended procedures (versus broad instructions such as to nterview both parties) is needed. it is also safe to assume that few investigators have ade- uate training in the many relevant areas of scientific knowledge uch as detection of deception, interviewing, suggestion, mem- ry, sexual behavior, sexual consent communications, and the ffects of trauma on thinking, memory and behavior. this miss- ng knowledge makes the task of making sense of the many eports and claims more fraught with error. meissner and lyle ( ) point to the need to develop nd employ evidence-based best practices for interviewing. we ould add to this the need to provide more comprehensive ducation to those who must judge the complaints. such educa- ion should cover evidence-based recommendations about how o interpret the information elicited through improved inter- iewing practices. additionally, such education should convey ccurate information about trauma and memory, as well as pro- ide needed information about sexual behavior, sexual consent ommunications, and other topics. conflict of interest the authors declare no conflict of interest. author contributions the authors discussed this and conceived it together. keywords: sexual assault, memory, title ix, forensic expe- iential trauma interview, feti, rape references llison, j. a., & wrightsman, l. s. 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) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-devos-sexual-misconduct-rules- -story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-devos-sexual-misconduct-rules- -story.html https://www.latimes.com/california/story/ - - /california-universities-face-class-action-suits-by-students-accused-of-sexual-harassment https://www.latimes.com/california/story/ - - /california-universities-face-class-action-suits-by-students-accused-of-sexual-harassment https://www.latimes.com/california/story/ - - /california-universities-face-class-action-suits-by-students-accused-of-sexual-harassment http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref 	title ix and “trauma-focused” investigations: the good, the bad, and the ugly 	title ix investigations and the presumption of guilt 	problematic investigatory tools: the case of feti (forensic experiential trauma interview) 	problematic assumption : sexual assault necessarily produces trauma sufficient to disable cognition 	problematic assumption : trauma is a one-way street 	problematic assumption : reliable differences exist in characteristics of memory reports for traumatic versus non-traumat... 	problematic assumption : characteristics of memory reports can be taken as “evidence” of whether trauma did occur 	problematic assumption : feti's focus on emotion has only positive effects 	sexual behavior and sexual consent communications: a glaring area of omission in title ix training 	conclusions and caveats 	conflict of interest 	author contributions 	references global constitutionalism ( ), : , – © cambridge university press, doi: . /s editorial donald trump as global constitutional breaching experiment j o n a t h a n h a v e r c r o f t , a n t j e w i e n e r , m a t t i a s k u m m a n d j e f f r e y l d u n o f f the publication of this issue of global constitutionalism comes a little over a year since donald trump was sworn in as president of the united states. over the ensuing months it has become commonplace to observe that the actions of this president are ‘not normal’. examples of his abnormal behaviour are numerous, but for a quick refresher consider the following (very incomplete) list. calling the director of the national parks service to find photos of the inauguration to disprove media claims that president obama’s inauguration had a larger audience. launching an investigation into voter fraud over the election he won, without any actual evidence of voter fraud. hanging up on the australian prime minister because he did not like a pre-existing refugee agreement between the us and australia. pressuring the director of the fbi to stop investigating michael flynn for his undisclosed dealings with russia and turkey. banning major media outlets from white house press briefings because he did not like the coverage he received from these organisations. accusing president obama of wire tapping trump’s ‘donald trump personally called national park service director about those inauguration photos’ the independent ( january ) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ americas/donald-trump-national-park-service-michael-reynolds-inauguration-crowd-size- photos-proof-a .html>. a parker, ‘trump says pence will head investigation into voting irregularities, despite no evidence of fraud’ washington post ( february ) post politics, <https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-says-pence-will-head- investigation-into-voting-irregularities-despite-lack-of-evidence-of-fraud/>. ‘donald trump and malcolm turnbull’s phone call: the full transcript’ abc news ( august ) <http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-malcolm-turnbull- refugee-phone-call-transcript/ >. s siddiqui, ‘trump press ban: bbc, cnn and guardian denied access to briefing’ the guardian ( february ) us news, <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /feb/ / media-blocked-white-house-briefing-sean-spicer>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-national-park-service-michael-reynolds-inauguration-crowd-size-photos-proof-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-national-park-service-michael-reynolds-inauguration-crowd-size-photos-proof-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-national-park-service-michael-reynolds-inauguration-crowd-size-photos-proof-a .html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-says-pence-will-head-investigation-into-voting-irregularities-despite-lack-of-evidence-of-fraud/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-says-pence-will-head-investigation-into-voting-irregularities-despite-lack-of-evidence-of-fraud/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-says-pence-will-head-investigation-into-voting-irregularities-despite-lack-of-evidence-of-fraud/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-malcolm-turnbull-refugee-phone-call-transcript/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-malcolm-turnbull-refugee-phone-call-transcript/ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /feb/ /media-blocked-white-house-briefing-sean-spicer http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /feb/ /media-blocked-white-house-briefing-sean-spicer https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff offices in trump tower. attacking courts and judges who have ruled against him on the ‘muslim travel ban’. leaking classified intelligence from a us ally (widely reported in the press to be israel) to the ambassador of russia. firing the director of the fbi because of an ongoing investigation. withdrawing the united states from the paris international climate agreement. criticising the muslim mayor of london (via twitter) for his response to a terrorist attack on london bridge. delivering a speech at the boy scouts jamboree full of angry political rhetoric. refusing to condemn a neo-nazi rally that resulted in three deaths and thirty-eight injuries. threatening north korea with ‘total destruction’ during his inaugural speech to the un. ending the highly popular daca (deferred action for childhood arrivals) programme. endorsing a candidate for senate who was facing numerous accusations of making sexual advances dj trump, ‘terrible! just found out that obama had my ‘‘wires tapped’’ in trump tower just before the victory. nothing found. this is mccarthyism!’ tweet, @realdonaldtrump (blog), ( march ) <https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?ref_ src=twsrc% etfw>. j fabian, ‘trump attacks judges weighing travel ban’ the hill ( february ) <http:// thehill.com/homenews/administration/ -trump-attacks-judges-weighing-travel-ban>. g miller and g jaffe, ‘trump revealed highly classified information to russian foreign minister and ambassador’ washington post ( may ) national security, <https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to- russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/ / / / c a- - e - e - c f b _story.html>. m haberman et al., ‘‘‘enough was enough’’: how festering anger at comey ended in his firing’ new york times ( may ) politics, <http://www.nytimes.com/ / / / us/politics/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html>. b chakraborty, ‘paris agreement on climate change: us withdraws as trump calls it ‘‘unfair’’’ fox news ( june ) politics <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/ / / / trump-u-s-to-withdraw-from-paris-climate-pact-calls-it-unfair-for-america.html>. dj trump, ‘pathetic excuse by london mayor sadiq khan who had to think fast on his ‘‘no reason to be alarmed’’ statement. msm is working hard to sell it!’ tweet, @realdonaldtrump (blog) ( june ) <https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?lang=en>. ‘trump boy scout jamboree speech angers parents’ bbc news ( july ) us & canada, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada- >. m oppenheim, ‘neo-nazis and white supremacists applaud donald trump’s response to deadly violence in virginia’ the independent ( august ) <http://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia- charlottesville-a .html>. j borger at the united nations, ‘a blunt, fearful rant: trump’s un speech left presidential norms in the dust’ the guardian ( september ) us news, <http://www. theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-un-speech-analysis-north-korea>. md shear and j hirschfeld davis, ‘trump moves to end daca and calls on congress to act’ new york times ( september ) politics, <https://www.nytimes.com/ / / / us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/ -trump-attacks-judges-weighing-travel-ban http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/ -trump-attacks-judges-weighing-travel-ban https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/ / / / c a- - e - e -c f b _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/ / / / c a- - e - e -c f b _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/ / / / c a- - e - e -c f b _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/ / / / c a- - e - e -c f b _story.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/ / / /trump-u-s-to-withdraw-from-paris-climate-pact-calls-it-unfair-for-america.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/ / / /trump-u-s-to-withdraw-from-paris-climate-pact-calls-it-unfair-for-america.html https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?lang=en https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ?lang=en http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia-charlottesville-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia-charlottesville-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia-charlottesville-a .html http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-un-speech-analysis-north-korea http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-un-speech-analysis-north-korea https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial on young teenage girls. one could certainly provide far more examples. a common thread in the public and media response to all of these different episodes is that trump’s behaviour defies public expectations of what is normal, standard and expected. as martin wolf, writing in the financial times, puts it, trump’s actions and statements ‘violates the behaviour and attitudes the world expects of a us president’ on a regular basis. translated into the language of social science, the trump presidency’s basic pattern has been one of violating norms; the social expectations that guide appropriate behaviour for actors in a given context. one concern frequently expressed by critics of president trump is that the constant breaking of norms could result in trump and his political movement undoing the foundations of democracy through disruptive action. indeed, steve bannon, the president’s former chief advisor, openly embraced disruption as both modus operandi and political goal. this strategy and goal implicitly recognises what scholars of political institutions have long argued: because written rules cannot govern all aspects of human behaviour, many institutions require that participants in their processes abide by implicit norms in order to sustain their basic practices. the same accounts for the implementation of legal regulations that depend on social recognition within a wider socio-cultural context for interpretation. there are, for instance, no written laws that dictate that the president must give a daily briefing to the press, or that all major media outlets be given white house press credentials. but when the trump white house began to threaten to pull credentials for reporters whose coverage they did not like, this violated a basic democratic norm that the press have access to the office of the president and be able to ask challenging and probing questions. without a press that is able to confront the government m vazquez, ‘trump calls roy moore to offer his endorsement’ cnn ( december ) <http://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/trump-moore-endorsement-twitter/index.html>. m wolf, ‘the new world disorder and the fracturing of the west’ financial times ( january ). ‘will donald trump destroy the presidency?’ the atlantic ( december ) <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /will-donald-trump-destroy-the- presidency/ />; e bazelon, ‘how do we contend with trump’s defiance of ‘‘norms’’?’ ( july ) <https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/how-do-we-contend-with- trumps-defiance-of-norms.html>; a gopnik, ‘norms and cliffs in trump’s america’ the new yorker ( august ) <https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/norms-and-cliffs- in-trumps-america>; h farrell and m finnemore, ‘trump’s no hypocrite’ foreign affairs ( may ) <www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ - - /trump-s-no-hypocrite>. m finnemore and sj toope, ‘alternatives to ‘‘legalization’’: richer views of law and politics’ ( ) international organization ( ) <https://doi.org/ . / >. a dahl, polyarchy: participation and opposition (yale university press, new haven, ct, ). h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. http://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/trump-moore-endorsement-twitter/index.html http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/ / http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/ / http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/how-do-we-contend-with-trumps-defiance-of-norms.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/how-do-we-contend-with-trumps-defiance-of-norms.html http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/norms-and-cliffs-in-trumps-america http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/norms-and-cliffs-in-trumps-america http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ - - /trump-s-no-hypocrite https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff on a daily basis, modern mass democracy would simply not function. the concern expressed by many commentators critical of trump’s norm-breaking habit is that as he has systematically violated so many basic norms on so many fronts, this behaviour may lead to an unravelling of the very institutions necessary to sustain democracy. for global constitutionalists, this raises the question whether this kind of disruptive action triggers a ‘critical juncture’ that is constitutive for long-lasting effects on what is considered as acceptable behaviour in a democracy. as it becomes taken for granted, in the long term trump’s disruptive action might constitute a change in the ethics of democratic norms. in this editorial, we argue that even though from the global constitutionalist perspective trumpism represents an attack on the three foundational features of the global constitution – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, the ultimate effects of that attack are yet to be determined. it is possible that, in some instances, the effect of trump’s actions – and the response to trump’s behaviour – may be to more deeply anchor and stabilise constitutionalist commitments. that trump’s behaviour constitutes an attack on constitutionalist norms is straightforward enough. consider his behaviour with respect to norms surrounding democratic practice. while the mueller investigation is ongoing, and no definitive conclusions have been reached, the central allegation that launched the investigation is that the trump campaign colluded with agents of the russian government to hack the email accounts of the dnc and the clinton campaign, and to launch a social media campaign using information gained from those hacks to influence the behaviour of voters. whether or not this campaign happened as alleged, or had the impact on the election that trump critics occasionally claim, the larger ethical issue is: did this possible collaboration with a foreign power violate basic norms about how to conduct open elections? does collaborating with a hostile foreign power to gain information to embarrass one’s opponent and to distort the information that voters receive about a candidate violate basic norms about what type of information voters receive during an election? many democracies place strict limits on how much media exposure campaigns can have, and put in place rules to regulate how campaigns can see g capoccia and rd kelemen, ‘the study of critical junctures: theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism’ ( ) world politics ; a wiener, ‘trump and the end of taken-for-grantedness: when exception becomes the rule’ ( december ) duck of minerva blog <http://duckofminerva.com/ / /wptpn-trump-and-the-end-of-taken- for-grantedness-when-the-exception-becomes-the-rule.html>; we also touched on this theme in last year’s editorial: m kumm et al., ‘editorial: the end of ‘‘the west’’ and the future of global constitutionalism’ ( ) ( ) global constitutionalism <https://doi.org/ . / s >. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. http://duckofminerva.com/ / /wptpn-trump-and-the-end-of-taken-for-grantedness-when-the-exception-becomes-the-rule.html http://duckofminerva.com/ / /wptpn-trump-and-the-end-of-taken-for-grantedness-when-the-exception-becomes-the-rule.html https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial advertise, precisely because of fears about how propaganda, falsehoods, and unbalanced media coverage can unfairly influence the election. yet trump’s and his surrogates’ response to the allegations has been twofold: first to deny the validity of the story, and when caught with incontrovertible evidence of collaboration, to dismiss the findings as irrelevant because nothing was illegal. the second rhetorical manoeuvre is more damaging to democracy in the long term, because if the public does not treat this sort of behaviour as unacceptable, it may become accepted practice to disseminate falsehoods on social media with the aim of distorting the outcome of elections, and it could become increasingly acceptable for foreign powers to offer assistance to a candidate in conducting propaganda campaigns in exchange for political favours should the candidate win. while the actual act of voting may not end, the norm that voters be given as much factual information on the issues on which they are voting may be eroded, leading to a kind of authoritarian democracy where the powerful few use advanced algorithms and sophisticated social media campaigns to distort voter behaviour. as is the case in many authoritarian regimes, the government may continue to hold elections, but by ensuring that they are neither free nor fair, the few ensure the outcome of the election before it is even held. undermining norms about how campaigns fight an election threatens not only the integrity of a specific election, but to undermine democracy itself. in the case of human rights, trump has been dismissive of the torture prohibition, and his tendency to subvert due process by tweeting against criminal suspects, as well as his public encouragement of police brutality are all cases of him challenging long-settled norms around human rights. attempts by the trump administration to reopen cia black sites and permit torture of cia detainees is an attempt to return us government practices to the darkest days of the bush administration. yet the crucial difference between trump’s approach and bush’s is that the bush administration went to great lengths to conceal the scope of its torture a serwer, ‘can trump bring back torture?’ the atlantic ( january ) <https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /trump-torture/ />. ‘trump may have just destroyed the legal case against the new york terror suspect’> the independent ( november ) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ us-politics/new-york-attack-donald-trump-tweet-sayfullo-saipov-legal-case-destroy-damage- terror-suspect-death-a .html>. ‘donald trump seemingly endorses police brutality’ the independent ( july ) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-long-island- brutality-police-suffolk-a .html>. ‘trump may reinstate secret cia ‘‘black site’’ prisons: u.s. officials’ reuters ( january ) <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-prisons/trump-administration- could-reinstate-secret-overseas-cia-prisons-washpost-iduskbn l>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /trump-torture/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /trump-torture/ / http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/new-york-attack-donald-trump-tweet-sayfullo-saipov-legal-case-destroy-damage-terror-suspect-death-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/new-york-attack-donald-trump-tweet-sayfullo-saipov-legal-case-destroy-damage-terror-suspect-death-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/new-york-attack-donald-trump-tweet-sayfullo-saipov-legal-case-destroy-damage-terror-suspect-death-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-long-island-brutality-police-suffolk-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-long-island-brutality-police-suffolk-a .html https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-prisons/trump-administration-could-reinstate-secret-overseas-cia-prisons-washpost-iduskbn l https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-prisons/trump-administration-could-reinstate-secret-overseas-cia-prisons-washpost-iduskbn l https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff programme by shifting the focus from the moral reach of the torture prohibition norm towards the effect of interrogation technologies. (one of the main claims of the constructivist literature in international relations is that moments of hypocrisy by government officials – i.e. moments when governments attempt to conceal behaviour that they know is wrong – is a sign of a norm’s ‘robustness’. from this perspective, the bush administration’s attempt to conceal its torture programme was a tacit admission that it knew the practice was wrong, or at the very least violated international norms. trump conversely attacks the very norm itself by calling for practices such as extrajudicial killings, the suspension of due process in cases of terrorism, and torture of suspected terrorist to be normalised. in other words, trump is not simply seeking to violate the norm for expediency sake (as the bush administration was); rather trump is trying to end the norm itself. with respect to the rule of law, president trump has repeatedly expressed his frustration that he is not, as president, permitted to directly interfere in the us judicial system. trump has pressured the fbi to pursue cases against his political adversaries such as hillary clinton. he has made public complaints that he is not able to direct fbi investigations. he publicly criticised the conviction of sergeant bergdhal and has called on twitter for new york terrorist suspect sayfullo saipov to get the death penalty. trump’s public frustration at not being able to direct the american judicial system to enact his particular whims, strikes at the heart of the principle of the rule of law. the principle behind the rule of law is that the law, rather than the whims of individual rulers, should govern the state, and that all should be equally subjected to the law. trump’s actions in the first year in office show that he is at the very least open to an authoritarian form of government, where the decisions of leaders govern a society. vc keating, ‘contesting the international illegitimacy of torture: the bush administration’s failure to legitimate its preferences within international society’ (february ) ( ) the british journal of politics and international relations <https://doi. org/ . / - x. >; b steele, ‘broadening the contestation of norms in international relations’ (january ) ( ) polity <https://doi.org/ . / >; me newell, ‘interstitial rules and the contested application of human rights law and the laws of war in counterterrorism’ ( ) ( ) global constitutionalism <https://doi.org/ . /s >. a schmidt and s kathryn, ‘explaining the impact of us contestation of the torture ban’ ( ) unpublished manuscript. ‘new york truck attack: trump urges death penalty for sayfullo saipov’ bbc news ( november ) us & canada, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada- >; d diaz cnn, ‘trump on bergdahl decision: ‘‘complete and total disgrace’’’ cnn ( november ) <http://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/donald-trump-bowe-bergdahl-twitter/index. html>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada- http://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/donald-trump-bowe-bergdahl-twitter/index.html http://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/donald-trump-bowe-bergdahl-twitter/index.html https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial when we consider the pattern of trump’s behaviour in aggregate his actions as president present a disturbing pattern of repeatedly challenging the settled norms of liberal democracy. he aims to challenge some of the basic rules of fair elections to ensure he has a better chance of winning. he finds norms about human rights and the rule of law inconvenient obstacles to him being able to use the instruments of state to punish his political enemies and those (such as latino and muslim immigrants) to whom he has repeatedly expressed a strong aversion. trumpism represents a decisive threat to democracy, human rights, the rule of law and individual freedoms as the fundamental norms of global constitutionalism. yet, as we argued in last year’s editorial, despite recent geopolitical events, we need not consider the global constitutional order dead, let alone severely debilitated. considered from a different perspective, trump’s constant attacks on basic norms of liberal democracy may not be undermining the system so much as re-energising it. one way of thinking of trump’s behaviour is as a global ‘breaching experiment’. the sociologist harold garfinkel argued, for example, that our conduct in everyday affairs rested on shared background understandings that constituted the invisible structures of everyday life. most participants in any social institution are unable to articulate the social rules, norms, and shared understandings that guide their behaviour. garfinkel proposed a simple way to make these implicit rules explicit was for the ethnologist to engage in breaching experiments. in one instance, garfinkel asked his students to go home and act as if they were a boarder in the family home for an hour. the students would behave far more politely than normal, and be inquisitive about what the normal customs of the household were. what the students discovered is that this behaviour in almost every instance elicited a negative response from the family, and the students also discovered that the family setting was often far less friendly and cordial than they imagined (many students, in fact, protested that the family structure revealed through the af lang and a wiener (eds), handbook on global constitutionalism (edward elgar publishing, cheltenham, ). m kumm et al., ‘editorial: the end of ‘the west’ and the future of global constitutionalism’ ( ) ( ) global constitutionalism <https://doi.org/ . /s >. while not discussing trumpism, other scholars have noted how moves that might seem to undermine global constitutionalism, such as independence movements, might actually end up reinforcing cosmopolitan tendencies. km fierke, ‘introduction: independence, global entanglement and the co-production of sovereignty’ ( ) ( ) global constitutionalism <https://doi.org/ . /s >; s benhabib, ‘the new sovereigntism and transnational law: legal utopianism, democratic scepticism and statist realism’ ( ) ( ) global constitutionalism <https://doi.org/ . /s >. h garfinkel, studies in ethnomethodology ( nd rev edn, polity press, cambridge, ) ch . h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff experiment was not their ‘real family’). garfinkel’s point was that by acting in a manner that contradicted the implicit rules of a social encounter, one could demonstrate that those shared, invisible norms, actually existed. norm violation demonstrated the existence and validity of a norm, and so long as those not participating in the breaching experiment reacted with hostility to norm violation the experimenter could assume that these hidden rules of shared understanding were shaping social conduct. while garfinkel called for intentional and inauthentic violations of implicit norms, we could view trump’s behaviour as a kind of natural breaching experiment. trump is not deliberately trying to breach norms for the purposes of social scientific discovery. his precise motives, and the question of whether his repeated pattern of norm violation is part of a brilliant political strategy or the result of an individual who is normatively incompetent, are not questions that need detain us here. from the perspective of the study of global constitutionalism, however, this natural breaching experiment is doubly useful. first for those who are sceptical about both the existence and the influence of norms in global politics, trump’s repeatedly breaching of these norms, and the hostile reactions these breachings elicit from the global public, are at the very least evidence that most actors in the global polity abide by a widely held set of implicit background assumptions. second by making the implicit, explicit, trump has made these norms a ‘site of contestation’: each time and place where a fundamental norm is contested, a novel site is constituted. according to recent international relations theory, such on-site contestations are conceptualised as a condition for enhancing global justice, as long as affected stakeholders are granted access to them. here is the catch – and the ultimate long-term effect – of trumpism, however: while using social media and inviting individual stakeholders around the globe to comment, his disruptive politics relies on the president’s ultimate control over who says what when and how. the publicly stated objective of right-wing populists such as trump, farage and bannon is j tully, public philosophy in a new key: vol , democracy and civic freedom ( st edn, cambridge university press, cambridge, ) ; m hofius, ‘community at the border or the boundaries of community? the case of eu field diplomats’ ( ) ( ) review of international studies <https://doi.org/ . /s >. a wiener, contestation and constitution of norms in global governance (cambridge university press, cambridge, ); a wiener, ‘agency of the governed in global international relations: access to norm validation’ ( july ) third world thematics: a twq journal <https://doi.org/ . / . . >. j havercroft and r duvall, ‘challenges of an agonistic constructivism for international relations’ ( ) ( ) polity <https://doi.org/ . / >. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial to challenge these norms with the goal of ending them. yet each norm violation has also provoked a significant global backlash, mobilising advocates to protect (and in some cases further develop and entrench) basic norms that are now under attack. let’s consider three examples to examine this dynamic: trump’s public boastings of sexual harassment and the rise of the #metoo movement; trump’s withdrawal from the paris climate accord and a counter mobilisation to promote greenhouse emission reductions; and trump’s attempts to roll back legal immigration leading to a counter mobilisation in support of migrant rights. one of the central critiques of donald trump during the presidential campaign was his long and well-documented sexist behaviour towards women. this attack culminated in the release of a tape from access hollywood where donald trump boasted about sexually assaulting women. this in turn led to numerous allegations by women claiming that they had been sexually assaulted by trump in precisely the ways that he described in the video. while trump and his campaigned dismissed the tape as ‘locker room talk’ and the allegations as ‘fake news’ the issue has not gone away. as recently as december the accusations against trump have been front-page news in the us. while the cynical response may be that despite all the mounting evidence against trump of his history of sexual harassment and sexual assault none of it seems to matter, this ignores several factors. first the lowest point in trump’s poll numbers during the presidential campaign was in the weeks immediately following d weigel, ‘steve bannon’s rise points to aggressive, anti-‘globalist’ trump media strategy’ washington post ( november ) post politics, <https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /steve-bannons-rise-points-to-aggressive-anti-globalist- trump-media-strategy/>. da fahrenthold, ‘trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in ’ washington post ( october ) politics, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in- / / / / b ce - cb - e -bf a- d eeed _story.html>. a parker, m berman, and fs sellers, ‘three women reassert allegations of sexual harassment against president trump’ washington post ( december ) politics, <https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/three-women-reassert-allegations-of-sexual-harassment- against-president-trump/ / / / aa a -de - e -bbd - dfb e a_story.html>. cbs/ap, ‘‘‘i never said i’m a perfect person’’ trump says about lewd comments’ ( october ) <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-defends-lewd- - conversation-about-women-as-locker-room-banter/>. a parker, ‘trump seeks to dismiss sexual harassment allegations as ‘‘fake news’’’ washington post ( december ) post politics, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-seeks-to-dismiss-sexual-harassment-allegations-as- fake-news/>. parker berman and sellers (n ). h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /steve-bannons-rise-points-to-aggressive-anti-globalist-trump-media-strategy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /steve-bannons-rise-points-to-aggressive-anti-globalist-trump-media-strategy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /steve-bannons-rise-points-to-aggressive-anti-globalist-trump-media-strategy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in- / / / / b ce - cb - e -bf a- d eeed _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in- / / / / b ce - cb - e -bf a- d eeed _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in- / / / / b ce - cb - e -bf a- d eeed _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/three-women-reassert-allegations-of-sexual-harassment-against-president-trump/ / / / aa a -de - e -bbd - dfb e a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/three-women-reassert-allegations-of-sexual-harassment-against-president-trump/ / / / aa a -de - e -bbd - dfb e a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/three-women-reassert-allegations-of-sexual-harassment-against-president-trump/ / / / aa a -de - e -bbd - dfb e a_story.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-defends-lewd- -conversation-about-women-as-locker-room-banter/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-defends-lewd- -conversation-about-women-as-locker-room-banter/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-seeks-to-dismiss-sexual-harassment-allegations-as-fake-news/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-seeks-to-dismiss-sexual-harassment-allegations-as-fake-news/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /trump-seeks-to-dismiss-sexual-harassment-allegations-as-fake-news/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff the release of the access hollywood tape. to call the us presidential campaign a messy affair would be an understatement. while the tape was not the decisive factor in how the campaign ended, it did have a negative impact on trump’s image. and that negative image continues into his presidency, as trump has consistently been the president with the lowest approval numbers for a first-year president in the history of polling. yet to only focus on how the controversy affected candidate trump is to miss its larger significance. the election of donald trump has galvanised the feminist movement in a way it hasn’t been in decades. the trump’s inauguration was met by the women’s march, a day of global protests attacking the presidency of donald trump and demanding greater recognition of women’s rights. the march in washington, dc was the largest demonstration since the anti-vietnam war protests of the s and s. this was followed by a series of exposés of workplace sexual harassment and assault leading to the public shaming and dismissal of celebrities such as harvey weinstein, louis c.k., and matt lauer. whereas in the past celebrities facing serious allegations of sexual assault, such as woody allen and roman polanski, have been able to dismiss these types of allegations as untrue and continue on with successful careers, in the post-trump era allegations of sexual assault amongst the famous and powerful are career-ending. furthermore, the focus on high-profile cases in the mass media has led in turn to a social media campaign called #metoo where women have used platforms such as twitter and facebook to call out everyday sexual harassment in the workplace. from a breaching experiment point of view we could see trump’s violating the implicit norms against sexual assault as provoking a backlash that is confronting the problem more forcefully and systematically. prior to trump a norm had developed against sexual harassment, yet actual incidents of sexual harassment – especially by powerful men – were not treated seriously. we can see that the norm existed as the response to an accusation was to deny the charge – why deny doing something if one did not think the action one was accused of was wrong after all? as walzer, quoting la c kahn, ‘trump trails clinton by points after tape scandal, debate: reuters/ipsos poll’ reuters ( october ) <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/trump- trails-clinton-by- -points-after-tape-scandal-debate-reuters-ipsos-poll-iduskcn b pv>. j calfas, ‘president trump’s approval rating is lower than any modern president’ time ( november ) <http://time.com/ /donald-trump-approval-ratings-low-poll/>. e chenoweth and j pressman, ‘this is what we learned by counting the women’s marches’ washington post ( february ) monkey cage: analysis interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /this-is- what-we-learned-by-counting-the-womens-marches/>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/trump-trails-clinton-by- -points-after-tape-scandal-debate-reuters-ipsos-poll-iduskcn b pv https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/trump-trails-clinton-by- -points-after-tape-scandal-debate-reuters-ipsos-poll-iduskcn b pv http://time.com/ /donald-trump-approval-ratings-low-poll/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /this-is-what-we-learned-by-counting-the-womens-marches/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /this-is-what-we-learned-by-counting-the-womens-marches/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial rochefoucauld observed, ‘hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue’. if one acts one way, but then denies the behaviour, one is implicitly saying that one recognises the action as wrong. in the case of trump he is dismissive of accusations that his behaviour is wrong. he is not a hypocrite, because he does not deny doing the activity. in breaching the norm, he is contesting it, with the hope of rolling it back. yet various feminist movements have pushed back against both trump’s behaviour in particular, and the manifestations of sexual harassment and assault in general. by breaching the norm, trump generated a counter-movement to defend and extend the norm. similarly donald trump’s decision to withdraw from the paris climate agreement prompted a global backlash. in this instance the agreement itself was new only being signed in . president trump gave notice of the united state’s intention to withdraw from the treaty in august . because of the structure of the agreement, the us cannot actually withdraw until november . so there is the possibility that should a more environmentally friendly candidate win the next us presidential election the withdrawal could be undone. more significant, however, is the fact that every other signatory to the agreement remains party to it, making the us an isolated outlier when it comes to the agreement. furthermore within the us state-level governments, major corporations and mayors of major cities have all signed separate agreements to implement key aspects of the paris climate agreement despite the us withdrawal. so while the headline may be that president trump is threatening the planet by leaving the paris agreement, in practice the global commitment to the norm that carbon emissions pose an unacceptable threat to life on the planet and must be reduced is so robust that even major petrochemical producers protest when trump withdraws from the agreement. one major policy area where donald trump has had the most success so far in implementing campaign promises is in the area of immigration. while the courts initially blocked his so-called ‘muslim ban’, the supreme le duc de la rochefoucauld, maxims, trans j heard (international pocket library, boston, ma, ) maxim . for a development of la rochefoucauld’s maxim as it applies to the laws of war see m walzer, just and unjust wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations (basic books, new york, ny, ) – . ‘u.s. submits formal notice of withdrawal from paris climate pact’ reuters ( august ) <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-climate-usa-paris/u-s-submits-formal-notice-of- withdrawal-from-paris-climate-pact-iduskbn ak fm>. ‘us cities and companies declare ‘‘we are still in’’ paris agreement despite trump’ the independent ( november ) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/paris-agreement- trump-us-cities-still-in-defiance-coalition-a .html>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-climate-usa-paris/u-s-submits-formal-notice-of-withdrawal-from-paris-climate-pact-iduskbn ak fm https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-climate-usa-paris/u-s-submits-formal-notice-of-withdrawal-from-paris-climate-pact-iduskbn ak fm http://www.independent.co.uk/news/paris-agreement-trump-us-cities-still-in-defiance-coalition-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/paris-agreement-trump-us-cities-still-in-defiance-coalition-a .html https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms havercroft, wiener, kumm and dunoff court has since permitted the administration to implement significant portions of the revised travel ban. the trump administration has ended deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca), but given congress six months to develop an alternative. the administration has also greatly restricted the number of refugees it admits, and escalated the rate at which immigration control and enforcement (ice) is ordering the removal undocumented migrants. it is interesting to note that trump has been most successful in the domain where he uses the rhetoric of ‘illegality’ – that is the argument that those he pushes to deport entered the us without legal documentation, or his claim that banning entrants from muslim- majority countries is within his powers as president. he is most able to accomplish things as a leader when he uses existing constitutional norms to achieve his policy aims. yet even in these instances there is significant political pushback. the muslim ban sparked mass global protest when it was first implemented because it was seen as patently xenophobic and discriminatory on religious grounds. similarly the ending of daca has led to cross-party proposals in congress for passing some type of immigration reform to give legal immigration status to those undocumented immigrants who arrived in the us before they were years old. the dream act has been stalled in congress since despite major support from the obama administration, ironically enough; trump’s actions may end up leading to some type of legal recognition for the , ‘dreamers’. even during the election campaign, when donald trump called for a ‘total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states’ he was widely condemned md shear and j hirschfeld davis, ‘trump moves to end daca and calls on congress to act’ new york times ( september ) politics, <https://www.nytimes.com/ / / / us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html>. e shugerman, ‘trump administration has ordered deportations of , people since he took office’ the independent ( august ) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/americas/us-politics/trump-deported- -immigrants-department-of-justice- undocumented-immigration-a .html>; y torbati and m rosenberg, ‘trump administration proposes to cut refugee cap to , ’ ( september ) <https://uk. reuters.com/article/uk-usa-immigration-refugees/trump-administration-proposes-to-cut- refugee-cap-to- -idukkcn c sg>. the term ‘dreamer’ refers to undocumented migrants who entered the united states as children. deferred action for childhood arrivals was a programme set up by the obama administration to offer the temporary right for these migrants to live, work, and study in the us. j walters, ‘what is daca and who are the dreamers?’ the guardian ( september ) us news, <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-what-is- daca-dreamers>. j johnson, ‘trump calls for ‘‘total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states’’’ washington post ( december ) post politics, <https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown- of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/>. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deported- -immigrants-department-of-justice-undocumented-immigration-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deported- -immigrants-department-of-justice-undocumented-immigration-a .html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deported- -immigrants-department-of-justice-undocumented-immigration-a .html https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-immigration-refugees/trump-administration-proposes-to-cut-refugee-cap-to- -idukkcn c sg https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-immigration-refugees/trump-administration-proposes-to-cut-refugee-cap-to- -idukkcn c sg https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-immigration-refugees/trump-administration-proposes-to-cut-refugee-cap-to- -idukkcn c sg http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-what-is-daca-dreamers http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /donald-trump-what-is-daca-dreamers https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms editorial for speaking in racist and incendiary tones. his attempts to racialise immigration discourse breached the norm that us immigration policy should be colour-blind – at least in theory, if not in practice. and that rhetoric, combined with regressive immigration polices has mobilised pro-immigration forces in both the us and globally to push for greater protections of mobility rights. what we see in all of these instances is a pattern of trump breaching a widely accepted norm, and a massive backlash to defend the norm when that breach occurs. much of the coverage of the trump administration from his first year in office has focused on how his actions might be destroying existing norms and in the process undoing liberal democracy. while we should not underestimate the threat that trump poses to the global order, by treating trump as a natural breaching experiment we can see that the controversies he causes actually point to widely shared understandings of what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. through challenging global norms trump is actually exposing the bedrock of the global constitution. this does not mean that trump is no threat to constitutionalist norms. but it does mean that such a threat can be effectively countered to some extent by activists around the globe mobilising to protect these threatened norms, potentially leading to a deeper more self- conscious embrace of these norms. the activists in the #metoo, immigrants rights, and environmental movements in all demonstrated that by mobilising against trump when he breaches a norm, not only is it possible to resist trump implementing a policy, but that such resistance may actually lead to more widespread acceptance and implementation of the very norm that trump sought to undermine. in a sense, trump’s pattern of norm breaching also points a path towards a dialectic of norm contestation. while there is no guarantee that this pattern will continue, or of the outcome of any particular instance of norm contestation, the fact that trumpism has mobilised such a strong defence of norms of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law is a highly significant development. in twilight of the idols, the german philosopher friedrich nietzsche famously wrote ‘[t]hat which does not kill us makes us stronger’. the constitutional dialectic that donald trump’s actions have sparked provides an opportunity to discover – and to strengthen – the resilience of national and global constitutionalism. f nietzsche, twilight of the idols or how to philosophize with a hammer, trans d large (oxford university press, oxford, ) section . h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ ja lt f o c u s ja lt p r a x is a r t ic le s the language teacher . • january / february readers’ forum sexual harassment: a critical issue for efl in japan robert o’mochain ritsumeikan university since the end of , many controversies and social media campaigns, especially the “#metoo” movement, have kept the issue of sexual harassment in the public eye. while the #metoo movement has impacted many in the united states and elsewhere, its impact in japan has been considerably less. this is surprising as sexual harassment inflicts very negative effects on victims and the problem is prevalent in many social spheres in japan, including in educational institutions. this article outlines the extent of the problem and provides sug- gestions on classroom activities and educational initiatives to raise awareness for the transformation of currently toxic con- ditions. 年末から、多くの論争やソーシャルメディアによるキャンペーン、特 に「#metoo」運動により、セクシャルハラスメント問題に世間の関心が向 けられている。「#metoo」運動は米国などで影響を与えた一方、日本で の影響は少なかった。これは驚くべきことである、何故なら、セクシャルハ ラスメントはその犠牲者に多大な否定的影響を与えるものであり、日本に おいても教育機関を含め多くの公共の場で蔓延しているからである。本 論ではこの問題の広がりについて概要を述べ、現在の弊害を変えるため の意識を高める、教室でできるアクティビティおよび教育主導に関しての 提議を行う。 in the early s, around a number of us univer-sity campuses, such as mit and cornell, groups of activist women began to recognize, name, and an- alyze a social problem that had long gone unnamed and unchallenged: sexual harassment (seagrave, ). they shared their stories, recognized patterns and commonalities, and identified two main types of harassment: “quid pro quo,” when an employer or work colleague demands sexual favors for work benefits, promotion, or being spared dismissal; and a “hostile work environment”, when colleagues habitu- ally do physical, verbal, or non-verbal acts of a sexual nature that other employees find offensive (mckin- non, ). sexual harassment also came to denote situations outside of the workplace. for example, when classmates stigmatize their peers as sexually promiscuous or engage in homophobic bullying, this can be seen as a type of sexual harassment, as it draws on social prejudice and affects our individual sense of sexual identity. sexual harassment can also occur between people who are in intimate relation- ships. in japan this is referred to as “dating violence” and is a phenomenon that affects large numbers of students (mainichi japan, ). in addition, “street sexual harassment” usually occurs when men believe they have impunity to do a range of inappropriate acts, such as shouting out offensive comments or epithets on the street, groping women on crowded trains or buses, or “upskirting” (taking photos of a person’s lower body without his or her consent) on escalators and stairs. all of these offensive behaviors receive varying degrees of social approbation, in spite of the deleterious effects on the psychological well-being of victims. negative effects a recent mainichi shimbun news article (miura, ) details the story of ninomiya saori, who experienced sexual harassment from her boss years ago and even today still suffers from a stress disorder due to the long-term effects of the abuse. she works in programs to reduce incidents of sexual assault in japan but feels that society still tends to lay blame and shame at the door of the victims much more than that of the perpetrators. negative effects on students are also an issue for concern. in their research into the effects of sexual harassment on junior high school students in the u.s., gruber and fineran ( , p. ) argue that sexual harass- ment “activates sexist and heterosexist stereotypes, erodes school engagement, alienates students from teachers, and adversely affects academic achieve- ment, to a greater degree than bullying does.” this realization lies behind recent research initiatives in east asia, such as the study by yuan-shan, dih-ling, hung-shen, and bai-syuan ( ) in high schools in taiwan. they found that over half of junior high school students had experienced sexual harassment within the previous year and that this was a source of psychological distress. extent of the problem over the past years, many laws have criminalized workplace sexual harassment and employers who do nothing to prevent sexual harassment. between and in the u.s., law courts heard ten the language teacher online • http://jalt-publications.org/tlt the language teacher • readers’ forum different cases that tightened federal law provisions against workplace sexual harassment (conte, ). in addition, two civil rights acts and equal employ- ment opportunity laws improved the situation during the s and s. while positive legal developments also occurred in japan from the mid- s onwards, they were not as extensive as in the united states. the doubtful efficacy of provisions made during this period can be discerned from the fact that , people filed cases with the japanese ministry of labor in (huen, ). in a recent government survey, % of employees in japan reported being sexually harassed at work (japan times, ). justice ministry figures estimate that only % of cases of sexual harassment actually get reported to police (yamasaki, ). research data for educational institutions are also a cause for concern. a survey by japan’s edu- cation ministry reported that teachers had to be dismissed from public schools due to sexual assault (the japan times, ). in total, school staff members were found culpable of offences including secret filming or peeping, touching of a victim’s body, and sexual intercourse. a general union ( ) survey found that % of female instructors in japan, as well as % of men had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. other findings from the survey were equally worrying. appropri- ate action was taken against culprits in only % of cases and many respondents did not feel confident enough in the institutional system to report the incidents. many who did report sexual misconduct found there were no procedures in place for them to pursue justice and to prevent perpetrators from re-offending. in fact, representatives at lower-man- agement level usually discouraged victims from tak- ing any further steps to deal with the situation. the survey also indicated that sexual harassment occurs in a wide range of educational institutions, from the largest to the smallest, and that many instructors feel unsafe in their work environment. accounts of the language conversation school gaba (general union, ) also indicate that language instruc- tors in the eikaiwa (english language conversation school) sector may be vulnerable to sexual harass- ment. the principal causal factors may include short-term contracts, immigration status, language ability issues, cross-cultural miscommunication, and a lack of managerial support (cf. currie-robson, ). more empirical research needs to be done in japan to determine the extent to which sexual harassment is happening in conversation schools and in other educational institutions. social norms and educational institutions recent studies in japan have focused on social and cultural factors that hinder anti-harassment initiatives. in a review of measures against work- place sexual harassment in japan, huen ( , p. ) argues that the reason why this problem is so extensive in workplaces in japan is due to societal attitudes of acceptance, with unhelpful gender stereotypes that construct sexual harassment as part of a “normal” workplace. in her analysis of sexual harassment in japanese culture, kazue ( , p. ) argues that deep-rooted cultural values of wa (social harmony) and respect for fatherly authority often constrain institutions from initiating effective measures to protect individuals. each social institution has its own culture of gen- der relations, and this is often embodied in a culture of silence regarding sexual harassment (seagrave, , p. ). educational institutions are not excep- tional in regard to cultures of silence surrounding sexual harassment, and this also applies in the field of language education (waldron, ). teachers and researchers can be targeted in diverse locales, including conference sites. in her review of sexual harassment at conferences in the elt industry, unlu ( ) reflects on widespread concerns about unwritten codes of negative values and further suggests that perpetrators often take advantage of circumstances at conferences to carry out abusive behavior. physical proximity overnight in hotels is an obvious factor, but another factor regards the power relations of people involved. in some cases, senior academics who play a pivotal role in the awarding of masters and doctoral degrees to young graduate students see conferences as opportunities to carry out abusive behaviors. concern for the well-being of language practitioners at conferences lie behind recent initiatives within jalt, which now has a code of conduct to deal with harassment at conferences (jalt, ) and is currently working on more online resources. author’s classroom activities engagement with the difficult issues raised by sexu- al harassment should be seen as a vital concern for all language educators who share a commitment to critical applied linguistics and its “broader political and ethical visions that put inequality, oppression, and compassion to the fore” (pennycook, , p. ). this ethical imperative motivates me to do what i can as an educator to challenge a disturbing social malaise. i have had positive experiences in my own efforts to challenge the culture of silence sur- rounding sexual harassment and to raise awareness ja lt f o c u s ja lt p r a x is a r t ic le s the language teacher . • january / february o’mochain: sexual harassment: a critical issue for efl in japan of the gravity of the issue. in a content-based course on western culture which i conducted with a small group of students in a national university in west- ern japan in early , i made use of a wide range of materials that students found motivating. simple key word searches on major internet search engines yielded fruitful results. for example, we used role plays and real-world scenarios from the university of exeter’s ( ) pedagogical resource toolkit, the intervention initiative. activities in the toolkit un- derline the responsibility of bystanders to help pre- vent the continuation of acts of sexual harassment which are often ignored due to the influence of toxic campus cultures. the scenarios and role-plays provide realistic conversational texts with many casual register vocabulary items that students may well hear when they travel abroad. i also employed another text from the u.k., the thames valley police force’s ( ) instructional video clip on the issue of consent. this is a three-minute, animation clip tea and consent, which succinctly and clearly explains the very complex and sensitive issue. a particularly effective dramatization of a case of workplace sexual harassment is provided by the u.s. actor david schwimmer who produced six dramati- zations of everyday instances of sexual harassment, with all clips available online. the vignette, the co- worker, was particularly helpful, as we had access to a new york times article (miller, ), which pro- vides the transcript of the video dialogue as well as a range of insightful comments from gender scholars and activists. students could also easily access video clips from human resources wesbites and workplace training programs, such as those from u.s. media companies, kantola ( ), and j. j. keller ( ). we debated the various merits of different types of video dramatizations, as well as key points raised by ted talk speakers. we also discussed clips from an interview (youtube, ) with the journalist ito shiori, a woman who has come to be seen as the face of sexual harassment issues in japan. ito argues that high levels of rape and serious sexual assault will continue in japan as long as broader social and cultural norms see sexual harassment as a relatively trivial issue. ito’s case, and other sexual harassment issues, have been elaborated in many newspaper articles in japan and other countries, and these real-world texts proved a valuable resource in the classroom. at the end of the semester, students were given a choice between a short essay on what they had learned about western culture or what they had learned about sexual harassment issues. eight out of eleven students chose the latter. end-of-term written comments from students which reflected high levels of awareness included the following: “i think japan has a lot to work to do in terms of sexual harassment”; “victims need to raise their voice and tell others”; “we do not learn about sexual harassment at school. we need to learn more about it”; “in the beginning of the class . . . i assumed that the problem was not so serious. actually, i have never seen someone being sexually harassed. i thought the problem was not related to me too. but the class changed my thought.” overall, my limited experience incorporating sexual harassment issues into a content-based curriculum indicated that these issues can be motivating for students and can make a difference from a critical perspective. ideally, in the future, many language educators will incorporate sexual harassment issues into their teaching as these issues can involve trans- formative engagement with timely real-world topics that are of interest to many students initiatives within education some recent initiatives are aimed at proactive- ly empowering young japanese women who are vulnerable to sexual harassment. organizations like chabudai gaeshi joshi akushon (table-turning women’s action group) are visiting universities and schools in japan to conduct empowerment training and to educate students about issues of sexual harassment and consent (ito, ). in the case of chabudai gaeshi, women turn the tables on male oppressors as they act out an expression of anger and defiance, strengthening their resolve to break the culture of silence that has shielded their harassers from justice. the group holds discussions that focus not only on empowerment of women, but also on transforming men and the models of masculinity that keep them tied to self-limiting and impoverished personae like “the classroom bully” or “the office harasser.” as well as raising awareness in the classroom, lan- guage instructors can also lend support to those ini- tiatives which aim at eliminating sexual harassment from their schools, campuses, and all other social sites. vocal support may be necessary if the inter- ests of the institution’s reputation are seen as more important than the pursuit of justice for victims. creaser ( , p. ) shows that when concerned stakeholders try to initiate policies that proactively challenge sexual harassment offenders in japanese universities, they are often met with a lethargic response, as avoiding rocking-the-boat and bad publicity seem to be the fundamental priorities. yet, it is only when organizations and schools provide and implement clear guidelines and procedures that the task of seeking justice is made feasible, both for victims and for those who want to report the language teacher online • http://jalt-publications.org/tlt the language teacher • readers’ forum suspected breaches of conduct. if we see students being silenced in our classes because of sexually suggestive or abusive comments or behaviors, we should intervene and follow the guidelines that are designed to protect vulnerable individuals. when work colleagues have been victimized, our practical and moral support may prove invaluable, especially if the victims feel reluctant to pursue justice and challenge the perpetrators. a desire to encourage victims to break their silence has led to the set- ting up of a website for efl practitioners, elttoo ( ). the site provides a forum for survivors of sexual harassment to share their stories and to raise awareness of the extent of the problem in the world of english language education. final reflections from a critical perspective, educators are complicit in the maintenance of unjust power structures in society if their classroom practices and institu- tional choices leave inequalities unaddressed. the seriousness of problems like sexual harassment urges us to acknowledge that praxis should involve problematizing all unjust power structures that are based in cultures of sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and all ideologies of discrimination. these ideologies often lead to the creation of an atmo- sphere in social institutions that allows people to be targeted due to their less powerful positioning, and issues of power are relevant whenever sexual harassment occurs. research data indicates that sexual harassment is an issue of concern in many educational institutions, especially as the negative effects of harassment on young survivors are inten- sive and long-term. my own teaching experiences with undergraduate university students indicate that sexual harassment issues can be of interest to language learners in japan and that a range of ac- cessible multi-media resources exist to incorporate related issues into broader content-based curricula. by making use of a wide range of materials to raise these issues and promote lively, empathetic class- room discussion, we can help break the culture of silence which perpetuates a grave social injustice. references a turning point in the war on sexual harassment? 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( , decem- ber ). the japan times. retrieved from https://www. japantimes.co.jp/news/ / / /national/record- -school-stfe rs-japan-punished-obscene-acts-sexu- al-harassment-fiscal- /#.wm xyoj ljiu seagrave, k. ( ). the sexual harassment of women in the workplace: from to . jefferson, nc: mcfarland. survey finds male students in osaka prefecture suf- fer more dating violence than females. ( , february ). mainichi japan. retrieved from http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/ / p a/ m/ na/ c#csidx cd ce afb de- b ef thames valley police force ( ). consent is everything. retrieved from https://www.thamesvalley.police. uk/police-forces/thames-valley-police/areas/c/ / consent-is-everything/ university of exeter ( ). the intervention initiative. retrieved from https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/ research/interventioninitiative/ unlu, v. ( ). some like to say ‘what happens at confer- ences stays at conferences.’ elt gazette. retrieved from http://digital.elgazette.com/december-january- / some-like-to-say-what-happens-at-conferences-stays- at-conferences.html waldron, h. ( ). speak out, but he heard: against sex- ual harassment in elt. efl magazine: the magazine for english language teachers. retrieved from http://www. eflmagazine.com/speak-heard-sexual-harassment-elt/ yamasaki, a. ( , november ). in japan too, we need to talk about sexual misconduct. the japan times. retrieved from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/ community/ / / /voices/japan-need-talk-se xual-misconduct/#.wgjouihphiu you tube ( ). shiori ito broke japan’s silence on rape – the outcome was brutal. retrieved from: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=zcotpmicqe yuan-shan, c., dih-ling, l., hung-shen, l., & bai-syuan, h. ( ). psychological distress and experiences with sexual harassment among junior high school students in keelung city. taiwan journal of public health, ( ), – . robert o’mochain has been teaching english in japan for the past twenty years. he is a graduate from temple university japan’s language education programs and is currently employed as an associate professor at ritsu- meikan university’s college of international relations. he is involved in the activities of gale (gender awareness in language education). jalt • teacher efficacy, learner agency — call for proposals— hello jalt community! a big proposal deadline is coming soon—february , for vetted proposals (may , for unvetted proposals). this year’s conference theme is “teacher efficacy, learner agency” and will be cochaired by catherine littlehale oki and steven herder. we have so much more to bring you. always view https://jalt.org/conference/ call-proposals for the latest news regarding conference proposals, and see https://jalt.org/conference for all things jalt , which will be at the winc aichi in nagoya from november – !!!! what zombie feminist bouffons can offer applied theatre: seduction and provocation in death married my daughter all rights reserved ©, theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : theatre research in canada recherches théâtrales au canada what zombie feminist bouffons can offer applied theatre: seduction and provocation in death married my daughter yasmine kandil et michelle macarthur volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) graduate centre for the study of drama, university of toronto issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article kandil, y. & macarthur, m. ( ). what zombie feminist bouffons can offer applied theatre: seduction and provocation in death married my daughter. theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article partant d’une déclaration par adrian jackson, chercheur en théâtre appliqué, selon laquelle un mélange de séduction et de provocation est essentiel au succès du théâtre d’intervention authentique, yasmine kandil et michelle macarthur cherchent au-delà du théâtre-forum traditionnel un modèle pour cette pratique. dans leur analyse de la pièce bouffonne death married my daughter de danya buonastella et nina gilmour, kandil et macarthur se servent de recherches en théâtre appliqué et en études féministes pour se demander à quoi peut ressembler l’engagement et l’intervention du public en cette époque troublée qui est la nôtre. le jeu bouffon employé par les interprètes leur permettrait de séduire et de provoquer l’auditoire, de faire ressentir de l’empathie pour les personnages, d’exposer la présence d’idéologies néolibérales et postféministes dans le quotidien des femmes et de faire participer le public à un projet de changement sociopolitique. kandil et macarthur font valoir que les praticiens du théâtre appliqué pourraient tirer des leçons du théâtre qui n’appelle pas à l’intervention directe dans l’action sur scène mais qui oblige tout de même son auditoire à sortir de son rôle confortable et passif d’observateur. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ -v -n -tric / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ articles zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac what zombie feminist bouffons can offer applied theatre: seduction and provocation in death married my daughter yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur starting from applied theatre scholar adrian jackson’s assertion that a combination of seduction and provocation is crucial to the success of authentic intervention in theatre for social change, this article looks outside of traditional forum theatre for a model of this practice. using danya buonastella and nina gilmour’s bouffon clown show death married my daughter as its case study, this article draws on scholarship in the areas of applied theatre and feminist theory to examine what audience engagement and intervention might look like in the unsettling times in which we live. the performers’ use of bouffon seduces and provokes their audience in order to elicit empa- thy for the characters, expose the presence of neoliberal and postfeminist ideologies in women’s lives, and implicate their audience in a project of socio-political change. the article concludes by suggesting what applied theatre practitioners could learn from theatre that does not require direct intervention in the action on stage but nevertheless pushes the audience out of a com- fortable, passive spectatorship. partant d’une déclaration par adrian jackson, chercheur en théâtre appliqué, selon laquelle un mélange de séduction et de provocation est essentiel au succès du théâtre d’intervention authen- tique, yasmine kandil et michelle macarthur cherchent au-delà du théâtre-forum traditionnel un modèle pour cette pratique. dans leur analyse de la pièce bouffonne death married my daughter de danya buonastella et nina gilmour, kandil et macarthur se servent de recherches en théâtre appliqué et en études féministes pour se demander à quoi peut ressembler l’engagement et l’in- tervention du public en cette époque troublée qui est la nôtre. le jeu bouffon employé par les interprètes leur permettrait de séduire et de provoquer l’auditoire, de faire ressentir de l’empathie pour les personnages, d’exposer la présence d’idéologies néolibérales et postféministes dans le quotidien des femmes et de faire participer le public à un projet de changement sociopolitique. kandil et macarthur font valoir que les praticiens du théâtre appliqué pourraient tirer des leçons du théâtre qui n’appelle pas à l’intervention directe dans l’action sur scène mais qui oblige tout de même son auditoire à sortir de son rôle confortable et passif d’observateur. s yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons “life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” —desdemona, death married my daughter while desdemona’s conclusion at the end of death married my daughter might sound famil- iar to audience members versed in second wave radical feminism, valerie solanas’s famed scum manifesto (for society for cutting up men) takes on new meaning when recited within the context of young performers danya buonastella and nina gilmour’s bouffon clown show. set in present day, death married my daughter finds desdemona and ophelia returning from the afterlife to settle old scores. it is hard to ignore their physical appearance: two women who seem to be disfigured in some way, crawling across the stage for their entrance. they are missing teeth, and their hair is a jumbled mess (the performers wear several wigs that are mangled to create the effect of looking decrepit). their clothes are torn and worn out. they look as though they have been plucked from the earth, where they had been rotting for hundreds of years; they are effectively zombie incarnations of their shakespearean selves. using parody, mockery, and other techniques of bouffon clown, these two women take the audience on a wild journey denouncing men, patriarchy, and the sexist world that has permitted their tormentors (othello and hamlet) to become the heroes of their respective tragedies. premiering in at the toronto fringe festival and touring ontario in the years that followed, death married my daughter reacts to the swelling conservative sentiment of the s and invokes the spirit of social-political movements from decades earlier. calling itself a “catharsis,” the show enlists its audience’s help in seeking justice and relief for its shakespearean heroines and toppling the structural causes of their oppression. in a promo- tional youtube video for a performance in hamilton, ontario, the clowns ask, “why should hamiltonians come to see us? well, if you care about humanity, about time and place, about women and men—and desdemona and ophelia of course—you must come!” though defying generic confines, in its appeal to empathy, its performance strategies, and its call to action, death married my daughter recalls practices of both applied theatre and feminist theatre. yet, as a show produced by emerging artists during “a new moment in political life” marked by “waves of misogyny, racism, homophobia, islamophobia and xenophobic nationalism,” its employment of these practices is markedly distinct (gill, “the affective” - ). members of a generation described by rosalind gill as “young women raised on stories of ‘girl power,’ ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’” ( ), buonastella and gilmour use their art to work through the contradictions pervading these “dangerous and fright- ening times” ( ), when the gains of social justice movements are increasingly eroded by neoliberal economics and conservative politics, and when messages of empowerment circu- late alongside oppressive discourses and policies. in this article we examine the production through the intersecting scholarship of applied theatre and feminist theory, two approaches to engaging with theatre for social change that we believe are vital in addressing the times we live in at present. we argue that while death married my daughter does not conform to the typical makings of an applied theatre production, it serves as a model for how theatre yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac of this kind can do the work of social change, specifically through the show’s realization of adrian jackson’s concept of seduction and provocation. using bouffon clown to draw the audience’s empathy before rousing their discontent, the play exposes the harmful inter- twining of postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies in women’s lives and positions feminist collective action as an antidote. after establishing the importance of applied theatre and feminist theory to the immediacy of this work, we examine how buonastella and gilmour skillfully use mockery, parody, and irony to implement jackson’s notions of seduction and provocation. we conclude by suggesting that tackling issues in a playful, unapologetic manner (essentially invoking the method of bouffon) might offer a new passage for applied theatre makers to master the skill proposed by jackson, and in so doing, present a method of active engagement with the audience. where applied theatre and feminist theory intersect the practice of applied theatre has a long history of creating opportunities for theatre prac- titioners, consumers of the theatre, non-theatre folk, and community members to come together to dialogue, respond to an issue, celebrate an event or a group of people, or become informed about a topic of importance to those performing or those witnessing the perfor- mance (audiences). a great power of this practice is its ability to connect people who might have never come together otherwise and who might have never thought to encounter the arts in this manner. james thompson addresses this practice’s potential for social change, in particular when it involves marginalized communities: applied theatre is a participatory theatre created by people who would not usually make theatre. it is, i would hope, a practice by, with and for the excluded and mar- ginalised. it is, at its best, a theatre that translates and adapts to the unfamiliar. it is a theatre wedded to vital issues and one that values debate. in circumstances where celebratory escapism is dominant, it can be the theatre of serious enquiry. ( - ) one of the most prolific genres of applied theatre is theatre of the oppressed, cre- ated by brazilian director augusto boal ( ), and based on paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed ( ). as a practice, theatre of the oppressed (to) is concerned with bringing to the surface dynamics of oppression that exist in participants’ lives but that they have stopped questioning or felt too powerless to fight back against. both to and its central technique forum theatre have been widely used around the world to challenge injustice by awakening people’s spirits to resist oppression. as applied theatre scholar ann elizabeth armstrong points out, in its commitment to social justice and implicit “understanding that oppression can be transformed and that victimhood is not inevitable” ( ) to shares common ground with feminist theory. gesturing to the rich history of theatre for social change work by feminist practitioners and scholars, armstrong argues that “[t]he work of feminism and to relies upon the analysis of contradiction, a marxist dialectical process in which transformation occurs through struggle and conflict” ( ). both to and feminist theory offer important tools to examine oppressive dynamics and move toward transformation through collective action. indeed, in this “new moment in yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons political life” (gill, “the affective” ), to’s emphasis on mobilizing groups of “spect-ac- tors” offers an antidote to the individualizing forces of neoliberalism, while feminist theory offers a way to analyze and challenge the gendered power dynamics that emerge from this paradigm. as feminist scholars such as rosalind gill and christina scharff have pointed out, neoliberalism is not just a political-economic theory—broadly defined as “a mode of political and economic rationality characterized by privatization, deregulation and a rolling back and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (gill and scharff )— but a form of governmentality that “extends [its reach] far beyond the market” and requires individuals to be increasingly self-reliant and self-governing (butler ). this has particular effects for women and other marginalized groups. jess butler, citing gill and scharff, notes, “increased individualism and autonomy often reinstate hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class and breed new forms of power” ( ). it follows that scholars such as butler, gill, and scharff have identified resonances between neoliberalism and postfeminism, the latter defined as an ideology that subtly undermines feminist activism by shoring up ideals of individualism, choice, and empowerment. we take-up these resonances in more detail shortly in our analysis of the play. as theatre scholars coming from respective backgrounds in applied theatre and feminist theory, we feel a renewed sense of urgency to use our practice to fight insidious neoliberal structures that are eroding our values and the place of the arts in our lives. we find adrian jackson’s work on the performer-audience relationship particularly useful in shedding light on how we might do this. one of boal’s closest supporters, jackson writes about the chal- lenge of forum theatre as a methodology, and specifically the challenge of inviting authentic audience participation that is not coerced or forceful: “[…] sometimes one sees forum theatre in which intervention is solicited (or even begged) for all the wrong reasons and by all the wrong methods” ( ). he proposes the notion of “seduction and provocation,” which he considers to be vital in the success of any forum theatre experience. he writes, the best forum theatre acts with this combination of seduction and provocation to release the innate dissatisfaction in its audience members so that, without coer- cion, they feel an overwhelming urge to make their thoughts and feelings known by taking action; in the form of intervention. ( ) in death married my daughter, the creators skillfully illustrate the technique that jackson is pointing to above. ironically, this piece was not created as an “intervention” in the boalian sense, so, by all academic definitions, it does not conform to the makings of an applied the- atre piece; that said, it is compelling in its uncanny ability to seduce and provoke its audience. seduced by zombie feminist bouffons tim prentki writes, “[…] change itself arises from a dialectical encounter between the under- standing developed through lived experience and the capacity to construct alternatives; that inherently theatrical process of an encounter between reality and imagination” ( ). seduction in the context of applied theatre responds to an audience’s investment in that lived experi- ence; this breeds connection and ultimately investment in the narrative that is taking place yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac on stage. the danger is when applied theatre initiatives that aim to provoke end up glossing over this element of seduction, which ultimately could lead to works that have not taken into account the nuances that create dynamics of oppression and/or that perpetuate simplified understandings of our world, ones of victims and heroes, black and white narratives without the tensions born from the ambiguity and confusion that exist in gray areas. but authentic seduction lives in those gray areas, in places where audiences do not expect themselves to develop empathy towards characters on stage, and in turn to believe in their cause. in death married my daughter, audience members are first encouraged to develop empathy, then to see their implication, and finally to understand their complicity. buonastella and gilmour elicit audience investment in their cause to find closure for desdemona and ophelia, recognizing that due to their tragic deaths neither has truly experi- enced “catharsis.” the heroines have felt arrested, suspended in their suffering, and travelled for over four centuries to find this closure. but—and here is where they tap into how to create that audience investment—they solicit the audience to complete their narrative. they claim that what has been missing for them is “dear audience. you.” and with this assertion, they not only invite the audience to become part of the narrative, they also empower spectators by giving them an active role in helping these wretched souls reach catharsis. the following is an excerpt from their opening scene, which shows the mastery of how they seduce their audience into their world: ophelia: good evening ladies and gentlemen. desdemona: good evening. my name is desdemona. ophelia: and i’m ophelia. both: ever heard of us? no? you know…it’s us. at this point the two quickly mime ophelia’s drowning scene and desdemona’s death by strangulation. desdemona: the real ones. ophelia: the originals. desdemona: we have been traveling four-hundred and ten years. ophelia: we dragged our bodies across land and up mountains. desdemona: we swam oceans and crawled through deserts. ophelia: because our souls could not rest peacefully. desdemona: we could not free ourselves from the shackles of the past. ophelia: we kept playing our deaths over and over. desdemona: but there was no release. we were tormented. ophelia: we could not find closure. desdemona: we could not attain catharsis. ophelia: something wasn’t right. desdemona: something was missing. both: you. desdemona: yes, dear audience. you. (they point to everyone in the audience.) desdemona: well, now that you are here and we are here, let us begin. yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons nina gilmour as desdemona (left) and danya buonostella as ophelia (right) introduce themselves to their audience, just before they replay their famous “death” scenes in their respective shakespearean roles. photographer: johnny hockin after this introduction ophelia and desdemona enact desdemona’s death scene, with ophelia playing othello. the scene lasts a few minutes, as they play out the confrontation between othello and desdemona to the soundtrack of verdi’s opera otello. what starts as a playful, comedic mockery of the seriousness of othello and the vulnerability of desdemona quickly turns into a gruesome scene where othello strangles desdemona with his bare hands (no pillow used to soften the blow). in the respective performances we attended, at this point the audience was no longer laughing; they were transfixed as desdemona let out her last breath. perhaps the audience’s shock comes from how quickly they develop empathy towards these clowns, and how suddenly they are confronted with a very painful death of someone who is innocent. what comes afterwards is another skillfully crafted seduction, but with a twist. after desdemona’s death scene, she springs to life taking her applause, prompted by ophelia, still posing as othello. then it is othello’s turn to take the applause. desdemona ges- tures towards othello, saying, in complete mockery, “the tragedy of othello.” she applauds with exaggeration. othello basks in his glory, sheepishly trying to look humble. ophelia/ othello then takes his/her helmet off, and both women proceed to kiss it, continuing with the praise: (desdemona gets up and kisses othello’s helmet and all over his body. they begin caressing and kissing the helmet.) desdemona: poor othello. he was so beautiful. ophelia: he made me cry. desdemona (moving her butt): he really touched me. ophelia: he loved her so much. yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac desdemona: she made him jealous. ophelia: he really took me on an emotional journey desdemona: he played the entire palette of human emotions. ophelia: he loved her so much (they both kiss the helmet and both spit to the ground and fixed point to the audience.) in this moment ophelia and desdemona parody the audience and how much they are impli- cated in this dysfunctional dynamic through their misguided idolatry of powerful men. the performers draw attention to the audience’s passive role as spectators, whereby watching and celebrating these representations of violent masculinity on stage they tacitly endorse them. on audience implication jackson writes, “much forum [theatre] intervention does work on those lines, implicating the audience in the action of the piece by stimulating the essential, but often dormant, human urge to put right injustice” ( ). by then, the audience might have reached the point of wanting to correct this “injustice,” but with this careful seduction the performers are only beginning to plant the seed of implication. for the dura- tion of the show the clowns move between seduction and provocation as they gently reveal the audience’s complicity in the structures they are exposing and confront them with their façade of self-righteousness. key to their ability to seduce and provoke their audience is the performers’ use of bouf- fon. bouffon, as adapted for the theatre by jacques lecoq and his student philippe gaulier, aims to foreground “the social dimension of human relations, showing up its absurdities” and expose “hierarchies of power, and their reversal” (lecoq ). in developing his prac- tice, lecoq drew inspiration from medieval performance traditions, wherein those who were exiled from society due to physical deformities or other “ills” were invited back during special festivities to perform for the village elite, where they would playfully parody their audience “in a sweet and pandering manner” and temporarily upset the social order (derksen ). like the king’s fool who “was licensed to express truth in all its forms,” lecoq’s bouf- fon “can say the unsayable, going so far as to mock what ‘cannot’ be mocked: war, famine, god” (lecoq ). by occupying grotesque, transformed bodies—the bodies of outsiders— contemporary bouffon performers find freedom to parody, mock, and critique those who hold power. the use of the bouffon to speak back to power, to correct social wrongs, and to denounce those who have oppressed marginalized people finds parallels in applied theatre practice. paulo freire offers an analysis of how oppressed people are regarded by “healthy society,” but instead of treating them as outcasts like the bouffon, in this case their oppres- sors try to repair them in some way: “the oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these ‘incompetent and lazy’ folk into its own patterns by changing their mentality” ( ). in both conceptions, the oppressed represent a threat to society, one which must be addressed by exile or repair. in death married my daughter ophelia and desdemona resist the fate that has been given them as helpless victims and come back not only to show the audience that their conventional notions of victim/hero, pathological society/healthy society are skewed, but also to claim their power as women in a male-dominant culture. they join the ranks of the “outcasts” in order to position themselves as oppressed, and they use that to fuel their rage against the system. they also expose their own seduction into the system, as reflected yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons in their idolization of othello in the helmet kissing scene. bouffon not only provides the means to critique the patriarchal institutions that oppress them, but also to mock myriad subjects that “cannot be mocked,” from war to god, as lecoq suggests above, and from aborted fetuses to roasted dead babies, as demonstrated in the show. these functions of bouffon are powerfully illustrated in a drawn-out sequence that begins when a sudden thunder storm leaves ophelia and desdemona scrambling to find cover offstage. a moment later they waddle back on stage visibly pregnant and look up to the sky. “i think we really pissed him off this time,” says ophelia, alluding to a non-consen- sual immaculate conception. the women are soon in the throes of labour and squat to give birth to baby boys, using their index fingers to confirm the anatomy of the dolls they hold up to the audience. “it’s a boy,” desdemona says. “it sure is,” ophelia replies with relief. “phew!” desdemona exclaims. using the dolls as puppets, the performers take on the perso- nas of the baby boys, who introduce themselves as infant versions of famous politicians and public figures, including the following: “i’m going to be putin and persecute pussy riot!,” “i’m gonna be steven harper and privatize all natural canadian resources,” “i’m going to be kim jong un and stock pile nuclear weapons!,” “i’m going to be rush limbaugh and call feminists what they really are, feminazis!” the last baby to introduce himself is conspiracy theorist/alt-right radio host alex jones; after his introduction, the dolls start pleasuring themselves as they quote gun lobby rhetoric. the babies climax repeating “infowars.com, infowars.com!” (jones’s website), the lights shift again, and the clowns return to cradling and doting on their baby boys: “stalin’s teeny tiny eyelashes,” “adolf’s little dimples,” ophelia and desdemona coo. through the grotesquery of the bouffons and their puppets, buonastella and gilmour elicit laughter as they draw connections between patriarchal religion, the cultural veneration of boys, abuse, sexual assault, environmental destruction, misogyny, and fascism. mocking men from different times and places, the performers also underscore the omnipresence of patriarchy and critique the abuses of power that stem from it. the baby climax—one of the most taboo moments in the play—positions violence and alt-right rhetoric as demonstra- tions of virility and products of masculine self-pleasure. a way out of this seemingly endless cycle of destructive patriarchy is presented later, in the penultimate moment of the play. desdemona and ophelia roast the baby dolls in a barbeque and eat them, taking near-or- gasmic pleasure in their grotesque feast. in “mocking what cannot be mocked” (in this last instance, baby cannibalism), the clowns advance a clear message: radical feminist action is the path to radical social-political change. in production, this moment is, unsurprisingly, quite polarizing, leaving some audience members offended and upset, but many others ener- gized and responsive to the underlying message of the provocation. as céleste derksen argues, the bouffon’s liminal role as an outsider who, within the con- text of performance, is able to temporarily “upset normative physical and social standards” ( ) holds great potential as a feminist performance strategy. in her study of karen hines and her bouffon clown alter ego pochsy, derksen argues that hines’s performance is polit- ically and physically subversive in two ways: “first, because it endeavors to make audience members aware that gender is a means of social and physical control; and second, because it provides a model of the kind of performative playfulness that can expand gender possibili- ties” ( ). though derksen does not use jackson’s language of seduction and provocation yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac in her study, these tools are clearly integral to hines’s approach, which the artist describes to derksen: bouffon has played a huge part in determining the physicality of pochsy—it is very politically and socially conscious when you break it down, but as a style it is as simple as pretty feet […] move prettily, entertain the audience, keep them visually entranced. and if you can accomplish that, you will be able then to accomplish your task of hurling the slings and arrows. it’s almost like a decoy. (hines qtd. in derksen ) hines’s virtuosic performance as the ultrafeminine pochsy is deliberately used to seduce the audience, reflecting jackson’s emphasis that seduction happens through the “power of the nar- rative and the quality of the theatrical experience” and that the art “must be good enough” given the circumstances and resources available ( ). though hines does not require her audience members to directly intervene on stage in the way that applied theatre artists do, provocation still occurs within the conventions of her bouffon performance in many ways: through the dis- junction between persona and performer, through hines’s use of parody and “direct verbal and visual address,” through her subversion of the gaze and her “looking-at-being-looked-at-ness” (derksen ). in other words, provocation manifests in what hines calls “the hurling of the slings and arrows” and the “attack behind the invitation” (qtd. in derksen ), which aim to make spectators aware of the cultural construction of gender and see new possibilities for it. buonastella and gilmour’s approach in death married my daughter relies on a similar doubleness: they play out recognizable tropes of both masculinity and femininity only to undercut them with parody and irony. desdemona and ophelia dress their decrepit bodies in delicate nightgowns and lipstick and charm the audience with their attempts to move gracefully across the stage and their comic reenactments of their deaths. like hines’s pochsy, whose pretty feet act as a decoy for the slings and arrows she hurls, buonastella and gilmour’s desdemona and ophelia endear themselves to the audience as they ridicule the standards of their patriarchal, neoliberal society. moreover, by taking on iconic, centuries-old characters and placing them in a contemporary world alongside figures from stalin to ann coulter, the creators interrogate the notion of progress upon which they—young women belonging to a generation born after the second wave of feminism and told to “be confident, to lean in, to just be empowered” (banet-weiser)—were raised. they remind us that underneath or perhaps co-existing with what sarah banet-weiser calls the spectacular visibility of popular feminism lies an even more powerful popular misogyny, which “folds into state and national structures with terrible efficiency” (banet-weiser). moreover, by enacting familiar tropes of femininity and vignettes of empowerment only to explode these ideas and expose them as the by-products of patriarchy, the performers highlight the harmful effects of postfeminism and neoliberalism on women’s lives. provocation and postfeminism the term postfeminism has become a significant critical framework within feminist scholar- ship in the past three decades, but its meanings and applications remain contested. rosalind gill sums-up some of the major uses of the term: “a time ‘after’ (second wave) feminism; to yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons capture a sense of an epistemological break within feminism, suggesting an alignment with other ‘post’ movements (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcoloniality); and to propose connections to the third wave” (“post-postfeminism?” - ). angela mcrobbie, another key theorist of postfeminsim, defines the term as “an active process by which fem- inist gains of the s and s come to be undermined” ( ). this process occurs through what she calls a “double entanglement,” wherein feminism is taken into account and then repudiated ( - ). this might manifest in, for example, a return to “traditional” family values under the guise of choice afforded by feminist victories of the past. both theorists understand postfeminism to be a way of displacing the work of feminism as a radical and collective political movement demanding equality and structural change, and instead shift- ing the focus to ideas of individualism, choice, and empowerment. in this shifting, there are clear resonances between postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. citing the work of scharff and gill, butler summarizes: [b]oth are structured by a “current of individualism” that undermines notions of the social or political; both demand an autonomous, self-regulating, active subject; and, perhaps most importantly, both call upon women—more so than men—to “work on and transform the self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to present all their actions as freely chosen.” ( ) in drawing these comparisons, butler is also careful to note the complex ways in which both ideologies reinstate hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality and rely on norma- tive conceptions of identity. in other words, “the idealized postfeminist subject is a white, western, heterosexual woman” ( ). even as popular feminism experiences a moment of increased visibility—as seen in, for example, pink pussyhats, the #metoo movement, and the number of celebrities taking-up the cause—these iterations of feminism often centre the experiences of privileged women while ignoring those of marginalized women as well as the broader socio-political structures that sustain these power differentials. in analyzing death married my daughter through the lens of postfeminism, we consider the complex co-existence of feminist, misogynist, and anti-feminist discourses in the current cultural moment and examine how they intermingle in the play and in its relationship with its audience. following the legacy of two celebrated plays by canadian women—ann marie macdonald’s goodnight desdemona, (good morning juliet) ( ) and djanet sears’s harlem duet ( ), both produced by nightwood theatre, canada’s self-proclaimed “foremost feminist theatre”—death married my daughter interrogates the representation of gender and sexuality in shakespeare and connects these literary representations to women’s lived experiences in the “real” world. but, unlike these other two works, it moves beyond a fem- inist reading of the bard’s heroines by integrating what gill calls postfeminist sensibilities within its dramaturgy. it also, significantly, directly engages the audience, breaking the fourth wall in direct address and pushing their boundaries of comfort through its bouffon-fueled depictions of sexuality, violence, and misogyny. in death married my daughter, postfeminist sensibilities are deployed as ironic performance strategies that work to seduce and provoke, elicit empathy and alienate, and raise awareness and incite action—strategies that align it with applied theatre praxis. yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac the themes of female sexuality and pleasure are explored at multiple points in the play. after the performers re-enact the tragedy of ophelia for the audience, the repetition of ophelia’s line “pray you, love, remember” builds into a chant, and the performers, as the script instructs, “switch to sweet little girls” and take communion. as they consume the body and blood of christ, desdemona and ophelia take increasing pleasure in the catholic rite. they crawl, roll, writhe, and gyrate on the stage; desdemona thrusts up and down over an imagined lover on the floor and ophelia does a back bend in an impressive move signaling both the kama sutra and the exorcist; the flowers they gathered in their re-enactment of act four, scene five of hamlet moments earlier become sexual props and parts (at one point, ophelia holds her bouquet between her legs and desdemona dives in head-first; at another, desdemona bends over and ophelia whips her with her bouquet). “mmmmmm, corpus christi,” desdemona moans. “the body of christ,” ophelia says longingly. then, a beat, and the performers drop the “sweet little girl” voices, straighten-up, and address the audience in monotone: “daddy’s girl. passive, adaptable, respectful, and in awe of the male. trained from an early childhood of niceness, politeness, and dignity in pandering to the male needs.” nina gilmour as desdemona (left), and danya buonostella as ophelia (right) in death married my daughter. in this section the two performers are about to combine their communion rituals with their expressions of sexual pleasure, all as a satirical display of the contradictions that lie in both. photographer: johnny hockin yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons in this moment, threads of feminism, postfeminism, and misogyny intersect. on one level, it is a moment of pure pleasure, as ophelia and desdemona’s growing gratification— and the exaggerated bouffon performance thereof—elicits laughter from the audience, pulling them in with each ridiculous thrust and breathy moan of communion. a prelimi- nary feminist reading of this moment might suggest that the characters are asserting the agency over their lives and bodies that they are denied within the contexts of hamlet and othello respectively, countering their dramatic deaths with the sexual pleasure of their “little deaths.” the references to catholicism unleash a simultaneous critique of the paternalism of the church and its control over women’s bodies. this feminist strategy of “rescuing” or re-appropriating shakespeare’s women and turning them from victims to heroes in their own stories is employed in macdonald’s goodnight desdemona, (good morning juliet), where the titular characters are imbued with agency, active desire, and fluid sexuality, and comedy is used to expose and challenge gender roles in shakespeare and in contemporary society. on another level, however, ophelia and desdemona’s sexual revelry also enacts a perva- sive postfeminist trope, wherein women, once portrayed as sexual objects, become desiring sexual subjects. gill identifies this sensibility as a shift in the way power operates in popular culture, from an external male gaze to one that is (dangerously) internalized (“postfeminist media” ). she writes, in this regime, power is not imposed from above or the outside but constructs our very subjectivity. girls and women are invited to become a particular kind of self, and are endowed with agency on condition that it is used to construct oneself as a subject closely resembling the heterosexual male fantasy found in pornography. ( ) this sensibility is found everywhere in contemporary media, from gill’s example of wonderbra advertisements equating cleavage with power, to kim kardashian’s pioneer- ing use of the selfie to turn the gaze on herself, and her subsequent capitalization of it in her coffee table book selfish. this sensibility is found in theatre too, such as in the persistent objectification of women in contemporary theatre written and directed by both men and women. in death married my daughter, however, the schism between the “hetero- sexual male fantasy” women fashion themselves to be and their (gendered) reality is made visible through ophelia and desdemona’s parodic performance and grotesque appearances. ophelia and desdemona are not victoria secret models claiming their sexual prowess on a runway or billboard: they are ugly clowns defiling the catholic mass. here, the act of “self-objectification” is exposed through its failure. in derksen’s words, bouffon perfor- mance is employed “to make audience members aware that gender is a means of social and physical control” ( )—control imposed on women through an external gaze but also by women through an internal gaze. this ironic use of a postfeminist sensibility then works to deconstruct the gaze and open-up a feminist reading of patriarchal imaginations of women on stage and women’s complicity in upholding them. the sharp transition to the “daddy’s girl” speech signals this reading, as they reveal a process of socialization that trains women to “pander to male needs” and internalize their submissive roles. returning to the frame- work of seduction and provocation, the representation in this moment of ophelia and desdemona as liberated sexual beings works to seduce the audience—through pleasure, yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac through silliness, through titillation—before undercutting this representation by exposing its misogynistic underpinnings. immediately following the “daddy’s girl” speech, the lights change and we are trans- ported to the conservative political action conference (cpac) featuring guest speaker ann coulter, who is here “to shed light on a question that is important to all of us: how can you be a woman and a conservative at the same time?” desdemona, transformed into coulter, welcomes us and launches into a diatribe that points its finger at feminism as the root of all of women’s problems, offering a sweeping analysis that connects the dots between dating, sex, voting, birth control, gun control, health insurance, and abortion. repeating verbatim sections of a speech given by coulter at the cpac conference, desdemona- as-coulter declares, i think it’s the feminist movement that has set us back. i mean, i don’t write about feminism, it seems so manifestly obvious that it doesn’t need my stunning skills or analysis. but i mean, the reason unattractive, i suppose, well, liberal women are liberal is because they have to date liberal men. you know, as we’ve seen with bill clinton, dominique strauss-khan, and anthony weiner, we see how liberal men treat women and if i were them, i’d be angry too. […] i mean i’ll take cents on the dollar, or whatever the current feminist myth is about how much money we make, just so i never have to pay for dinner again. like lecoq’s bouffon, who uses “corporeal transformation” to create the critical space nec- essary to mock his/her subject’s “deepest convictions” ( ), gilmour’s transformation into zombie desdemona allows the performer to make a monster out of the conservative icon (a task her detractors might argue is not at all difficult) and draw attention to the anti-fem- inism and misogyny underlying her rhetoric. but there is a doubling to the mockery occurring in this parodic performance, as gilmour-as-desdemona-as-coulter mocks ann coulter mocking liberal women and fem- inists. coulter’s performance itself at the cpac, which can be viewed on youtube, is bouffonesque minus the grotesque physicality, as it reads like a stand-up routine by an insult comic attempting to shock her audience—like lecoq’s bouffon, she says the unsayable and mocks what cannot be mocked. a notorious provocateur, coulter’s outrageous views seem to be equally rooted in earnest convictions and in neoliberal goals of selling books, building her celebrity brand, and increasing her profile and influence. coulter’s cpac speech epit- omizes the backlash against feminism described by susan faludi two decades earlier in the s—“a concerted, conservative response to the achievements of feminism” (mcrobbie )—and deploys several postfeminist sensibilities, particularly what gill labels as “irony and knowingness.” gill writes, “in postfeminist media culture, irony has become a way of ‘having it both ways,’ of expressing sexist, homophobic, and otherwise unpalatable senti- ments in an ironized form, while claiming this was not actually meant” (“postfeminist media culture” ). we can make taboo jokes or circulate nostalgic images of femininity because sexism is understood to be a thing of the past, and feminism is understood to have done its work. people who oppose these types of representations are constructed as humourless, ugly, stupid, or members of the “feminist thought police” ( ). coulter’s use of irony is meant yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons to defer criticism, even while her jokes about pay equity, and later, healthcare and repro- ductive rights, are made against a political backdrop where women’s rights continue to be threatened and dismantled. desdemona-as-coulter’s last line in her diatribe—“you know taxes are like abortions, grotesque procedures supported by the democrats”—though deliv- ered in the manner of a stand-up comedian, highlights the dangerous connections between neoliberalism and postfeminism, wherein deregulation, austerity, and a rolling back of gov- ernment services threatens to erode feminist gains of the past. in repeating coulter’s postfeminist performance, gilmour-as-desdemona foregrounds the real danger of the pundit’s words by making them strange. it is no accident that this scene comes immediately before the birthing scene described earlier, connecting the seemingly laughable discourse of a figure like coulter to the rhetoric of male political and corporate leaders past and present and the broader workings of patriarchy, violence, and neoliberal- ism. in laughing at the former scene, the audience becomes implicated in the latter: just as desdemona and ophelia give birth to baby patriarchs, the play points to our culture’s complicity in nurturing the oppressive systems it critiques. danya buonostella as ophelia (left) and nina gilmour as desdemona (right) go into a kind of hypnotic trance and play out the ritual of men going to war, killing, and dying. photographer: johnny hockin yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac lived experience and creative imagination highlighting the meaning of the word “applied” in applied theatre, thompson writes “[it refers to] an act that takes theatre practices out of the obscure black boxes and brings them back to the ‘open air’” ( ). implied in this definition is this practice’s power to take what is hidden, buried, and masked, and expose it, much like lecoq and derksen’s description of the bouffon. at first glance, one might assume that the majority of scenes in death married my daughter are provocative, seeing as most of these scenes employ a heavy-handed approach to exposing and parodying issues that range from capitalism to war crimes. but a closer, more careful examination of the layout and structure of these scenes reveals that there is a meticulously crafted ebb and flow, push and pull, where the characters solicit the audience’s empathy and “buy in” every time they are about to provoke them to the point of pushing them too far. jackson writes, the theatre must provoke, if the target is truly to move people beyond the norma- tive conventions which keep the spectator passive, the citizen obedient. of course if you simply provoke, you run the risk of meaningless outrage—the question is what you do with that provocation and the resulting release of energy. ( ) since the inception of theatre of the oppressed in the late s, this genre of applied the- atre has been on a journey of trying to give voice to those who are invisible by exposing the injustices that these groups experience. applied theatre researchers and practitioners have been doing that for the past four decades, and in this last stretch, especially since donald trump made it into the white house, our art has had to take a step back to re-evaluate our goals and the means by which we arrive at those goals. feminist theory finds itself at a similar point of reflection. how, asks sarah banet-weiser, are young women raised on the notions of girl power, choice, and empowerment meant to make sense of the election of a president who is unabashedly sexist and racist? what does feminist activism look like in a time when organizations dedicated to empowering women and girls co-exist with men’s rights and alt-right groups who position feminism as an oppress- ing force? how can movements like #metoo and black lives matter sustain momentum in the face of devastating cuts to social programs and education? death married my daughter, a performance created by a generation of women theatre artists grappling with the contradictions of these dangerous and frightening times, pro- vides a model of artistic resistance to fight dominant forces of oppression. through parody, mockery, and irony, the clowns demonstrate how to skillfully seduce an audience in order to authentically engage them in collective outrage. though this outrage may not manifest in a direct intervention in the performance itself, as in a forum theatre production, it still pushes the audience, in jackson’s words, “beyond the normative conventions which keep the spectator passive, the citizen obedient” ( ). in so doing, the play also encourages its audience to question, reflect upon, and also resist the individualizing forces of postfeminism and neoliberalism that it exposes. yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons the play’s reclaiming of female power and denouncing of patriarchy also allow the performers to access hope. these young women are forcing the audience to see the world through their eyes: a world fueled by greed and corruption, one that results in not only the oppression of vulnerable people, but the dominance of a capitalist neoliberal agenda that serves the interests of a few at the expense of the majority, one that has celebrated women’s empowerment only to claw back their rights. they use their “lived experience” to inform their “creative imagination,” as described here by prentki and pammanter: the subversive potential of theatre is located within the dialectical interaction between lived experience and the creative imagination. if we cannot imagine change, what hope is there for the billions oppressed by neoliberalism? but such a change will be mere fantasy unless it emerges from an analysis of reality informed by the lived experience of those who are hungry for such change. ( ) although at first it might appear that the performers are re-affirming the victimhood of ophelia and desdemona by replaying their death scenes, yet a few moments later they parody the male heroes of these tragedies and those who idolize them. they mockingly con- firm “[t]he tragedy of othello” amidst fake tears, alluding to the fact that it was desdemona who was murdered by her lover, and not the other way around. julie salverson points to the value of embracing the contradictions that lie in the depiction of tragedy through joy and pleasure, and how we can perceive, and in turn play out, the heroes in these narratives: the clown is not a hero but she is heroic in her courage, in being available to the possible, no matter how absurd and unlikely. pleasure, joy and fun in this context are not spectacle or escape, but rather the deadly game of living with loss, living despite failure, living even despite the humiliation of trying endlessly. ( ) perhaps the ingredients of seduction employed by the creators of death married my daughter are used to make the experience so much more powerful through the courageous embrace of loss, rather than a collapsing of one’s agency through a tragic depiction of that loss. it is, there- fore, no coincidence that boal titled his first chapter of theatre of the oppressed “aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy.” buonastella and gilmour’s parody of the aristotelian tragedy is in fact an embrace of boal’s methodology of implicating the audience in the structure of the narrative, through seduction and provocation, the push and pull, the lived experience and creative imagination, until we are able to perceive a solution to our oppression. while the scum manifesto may sound radical when recited in the third or post-third wave of feminism, when delivered by zombie feminist bouffons at the conclusion of a whirl- wind performance featuring ann coulter’s political speeches and birthing and eating baby fascists, valerie solanas’s second wave battle cry does not sound so absurd. beyond its provoc- ative language and imagery, the scum manifesto makes an urgent and compelling case for overthrowing patriarchy, capitalism, and government and starting a new order. it also offers a long-awaited catharsis to ophelia and desdemona, who declaim passages from the text before declaring, “oh—i feel so much better” and “what a relief” and beginning their exit. yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur zombie feminist bouffons • pp - • / . • tric / rtac this same catharsis, however, is not extended to the audience, who are reminded that there is much work to do to reverse the deep-seated causes of oppression identified in the play. in the final lines of the play, ophelia says, “i cannot go on,” to which desdemona replies, “we must go on.” however, unlike their beckettian counterparts vladmir and estragon, who utter similar last lines but remain motionless, ophelia and desdemona laboriously crawl away, emboldening their audience as spect-actors in these postfeminist times. notes yasmine attended two performances of death married my daughter, at the in the soil festival in st. catharines ( ) and at brock university’s department of dramatic arts ( ); michelle attended a performance at the theatre center in toronto ( ). buonastella and gilmour provided us with video footage of another performance. both buanastella and gilmour are graduates of École philippe gaulier. they co-wrote death married my daughter with theatre smith-gilmour co-founders dean gilmour and michele smith, who also directed the production. while postfeminism has been debated extensively in the fields of feminist media and popular culture studies, it has garnered less interest within theatre and performance studies (tps). see harris for a survey of the limited body of work on this topic in tps. see harris, and also melissa poll’s “when little is said and feminism is done? simon stephens, the critical blogosphere, and modern misogyny.” works cited armstrong, ann elizabeth. “negotiating feminist identities and theatre of the oppressed.” a boal companion: dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. ed. mady schutzman and jan cohen-cruz. new york and london: routledge, . - . print. banet-weiser, sarah. untitled. culture digitally (us election special issue), nov. . web. july . boal, augusto. theatre of the oppressed. . trans. charles mcbride and maria odilia leal. new york: theatre communications group, inc., . print. buonastella, danya and nina gilmour. “cbc hamilton—this is why hamiltonians should see death married my daughter.” youtube, july . web. aug. . ---. death married my daughter. n.d. unpublished. ---. death married my daughter. in the soil festival, saint catharines. june . ---. death married my daughter. marilyn i. walker school of fine & performing arts, brock university, saint catharines. jan. . ---. death married my daughter. theatre centre, toronto. apr. . butler, jess. “for white girls only?: postfeminism and the politics of inclusion.” feminist formations . ( ): - . web. july . coulter, ann. untitled speech. conservative political action conference . youtube, july . web. oct. . yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur tric / rtac • . / • pp - • zombie feminist bouffons derksen, céleste. “the ‘attack behind the invitation’: gender parody in karen hines’s pochsy’s lips.” performing gender and comedy: theories, texts, and contexts. ed. shannon hengen. amsterdam: gordon and breach, . - . print. freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed. trans. myra bergman ramos. new york: the continuum publishing company, . print. gill, rosalind. “the affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility years on.” european journal of cultural studies . ( ): - . web. july . ---. “postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility.” european journal of cultural studies . ( ): - . web. sep. . ---. “post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times.” feminist media studies . ( ): - . web. sep. . gill, rosalind and christina scharff. “introduction.” new femininities: postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity. ed. rosalind gill and christina scharff. london: palgrave macmillan, . - . proquest ebook. web. july . harris, geraldine. “post-postfeminism? amelia bullmore’s di and viv and rose, april de angelis’s jumpy and karin young’s the awkward squad.” contemporary theatre review . ( ): - . web. sep. . jackson, adrian. “provoking intervention.” the applied theatre reader. ed. tim prentki and sheila preston. oxon & new york: routledge, . - . print. lecoq, jacques. the moving body (le corps poétique). trans. david brandby. london: routledge, . print. mcrobbie, angela. “post-feminism and popular culture.” feminist media studies . ( ): - . web. aug. . nightwood theatre. “mission and values.” nightwood theatre, n.d. web. oct. . o’connor, peter and michael anderson. “research in a post-normal world.” applied theatre research: radical departures. ed. michael anderson and peter o’connor. london and new york: bloomsbury, . - . print. poll, melissa. “when little is said and feminism is done? simon stephens, the critical blogosphere, and modern misogyny.” contemporary theatre review, . web. aug. . prentki, tim. “history and origins of theatre for development.” applied theatre: development. ed. tim prentki. london and new york: bloomsbury methuen drama, . - . print. prentki, tim and david pammenter. “living beyond our means, meaning beyond our lives; theatre as education for change.” applied theatre research . ( ): - . print. salverson, julie. “clown, opera, the atomic bomb and the classroom.” the applied theatre reader. ed. tim prentki and sheile preston. oxon and new york: routledge, . - . print. thompson, james. applied theatre: bewilderment & beyond. bern: peter lang publishers, . print. miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | guerre en poésie, poésie en guerre the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh performance review william c. boles electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi: . /miranda. issn: - publisher université toulouse - jean jaurès electronic reference william c. boles, “the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh ”, miranda [online], | , online since april , connection on february . url: http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi: https://doi.org/ . /miranda. this text was automatically generated on february . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh performance review william c. boles factual information about the shows the cane by mark ravenhill–royal court theatre downstairs, december , director: vicky featherstone designer: chloe lamford lighting designer: natasha chivers sound designer: david mcseveney fight director: bret yount cast: alun armstrong, maggie steed, nicola walker the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | fig. maggie steed as maureen and nicole walker as anna. credits: johan persson. the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | fig. alun armstrong as edward. credits: johan persson. fig. maggie steed as maureen and alun armstrong as edward. credits: johan persson. a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh–bridge theatre, december , the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | director: matthew dunster designer: anna fleischle lighting designer: philip gladwell sound designer: george dennis music: james maloney illusions: chris fisher video designer: finn ross fight directors: rachel bown-williams and ruth cooper-brown, rc annie ltd. cast: tom waits, johnetta eula’mae ackles, jim broadbent, lee knight, paul bradley, ryan pope, graeme hawley, kundai kanyama, phil daniels, elizabeth berrington fig. jim broadbent (hans), james roberts (charles jr), regan garcia (walter), audrey hayhurst (kate), elizabeth berrington (catherine), and phil daniels (dickens) (left to right). credits: manuel harlan. the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | fig. johnetta eula'mae ackles (marjory) and jim broadbent (hans). credits: manuel harlan. fig. johnetta eula'mae ackles (marjory) and jim broadbent (hans). credits: manuel harlan. the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | review during the heydays of cool britannia in the mid- s, the theatre world had numerous voices appearing on the stage, but two of the most successful figures amidst this burgeoning talent of new playwrights were mark ravenhill and martin mcdonagh. ravenhill, who immediately caught the attention of the theatre world and international press, became the “it” writer because of the notoriety of his play shopping and fucking, which, due to refurbishments at the royal court, ran in the west end at the ambassadors theatre, placing his e-taking, rim giving, and phone sex selling characters on the same dramatic plane as the phantom of the opera, agatha christie’s the mousetrap, and the students guarding the barricades in les misérables. its title, too, bestowed on it a sense of notoriety and prurient attraction, especially to the younger theatre goers, an age group that theatres were trying to (and are still trying to) attract into their spaces. the experience, a tub-thumping, techno-filled, stampede to your seat when the doors opened, brought in the crowds, brought the press coverage, provoked outrage from just about everyone under the age of , and made the theatre lively and rebellious once again. martin mcdonagh’s play, in some regard, existed on the other end of the spectrum from ravenhill’s. the beauty queen of leenane was a one set, well-made play that harkened back to an ireland of old, featuring a wind-swept landscape, lilting language, limited television reception, and bad biscuits, but with a twinge and a twinkle of violence, depravity, and dangerous family skirmishes. the play hinged on secrets being revealed, revenge being enacted, love being lost, and a murder leading to madness. while ravenhill’s play was embedded in the contemporary moment of the s, mcdonagh’s was not. it could have been set just about at any time in ireland since the end of world war ii. more than twenty years later both playwrights have continued to maintain active careers as playwrights, unlike some of their theatrical peers from the s, who disappeared from the boards after the in-yer-face movement ended. fortuitously, in the winter of both writers had productions on at the same time in london, and, interestingly, the one-set, well-made play was now being offered by ravenhill, while a far more playful, time-travel jumping, tom waits narrated, multiple set piece play was mcdonagh’s latest work. mark ravenhill’s the cane, which finds him back at the royal court theatre, is invested in two areas of interest, a bankrupt family dynamic between daughter and parents and dramatic changes taking place in the british educational system, and by the play’s end both are intermingled. the play’s premise is that anna, the prodigal daughter, has returned home to visit her mother maureen and father edward just as protestors have begun picketing her parent’s house. the reason for the demonstration is that edward, when it was legal in the past, wielded the cane at his school, providing corporeal punishment to misbehaving boys. on the verge of a celebratory retirement from his school position this information about his former punitive actions against former students has been discovered and students have now begun to protest, sometime vociferously and vituperatively against him. while the students gather outside his home, he is trying to write a report defending his school’s poor performance during its latest evaluation in hopes of it not being taken over by an educational consortium, for whom his daughter works and which is why she has returned to her childhood home after a many year absence. the piece, a -minute slow burn of revelatory secrets and the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | recriminations, is driven through ravenhill’s attention to character development and the strength of the actors. i must confess that being an american some of the politics behind the educational sub- plot of the rescinding of the school’s independence was a bit foreign to me. but the comments i overheard from my fellow audience members as we left the theatre indicated that ravenhill had captured the troubling contemporary dynamics of british school politics. despite my ignorance on these details, the play’s focus on the institutional regard for paperwork for the sake of paperwork, the glomming on to a systemic language that has no intrinsic meaning, and the ultimate uselessness of fighting the system when the fix is in is something clear to any audience member, british or not. however, the main story line deals with the cane and its use as well as the role of violence in regard to punishments, whether it be familial or institutional. more specifically, ravenhill is interested in violence and its lasting repercussions. the set displays that power as on the back wall there are slash marks cutting through the wall paper and wall, which we later learn happened when anna took up an axe and went after her father in a fit of rage when she was younger. the parents, citing financial reasons, have never had the wall repaired; hence, the anger inherent in the family dynamic has remained impaled there and become a constant in edward and maureen’s life. the director vicky featherstone frames the characters effectively against these slashes, as the rising linguistic violence between the family members echoes the past physical violence that occurred in the same room. the slashes on the wall, while perhaps a bit heavy handed and maybe a bit unbelievable in a practical sense, as the attack happened almost twenty-five years earlier, is effective though when considered in the light of the cane itself, which leaves behind welts on the punished student’s hand. the attack on the skin parallels with the attack on the wall. ravenhill’s play cannot be watched without recognizing its connection to the #metoo and time’s up movements, where a white male’s previous privileged actions come back to haunt him through angry recriminations and vocal protests. ravenhill though posits a slightly different situation. the caning of students, when edward performed the punishments, were legal and part of the institutional rules of the school system. he was not striking the students out of his own whims and a need to exact power, which is unlike the situations of the #metoo movement where authority figures misused their power to prey on the weak. instead, ravenhill goes to great narrative lengths to justify the action of the caning. edward has spirited a book away from the school which lists every caning he did. while the list is extensive, what is stressed is the fact that each beating was signed off by edward’s headmaster and the child’s own parent. these punishments then were not conducted in a vacuum. in this case edward was merely an actor in a much larger system of discipline. his argument though falls on the deaf ears of his wife and daughter, who blame him for his involvement in those acts. the question then becomes at whom is ravenhill aiming the play’s ire? is it the children outside who are protesting without understanding the context of edward’s actions? is the play attacking anna who is angry about her father’s role in the use of the cane and manipulates him to cane her at the play’s end, prompting her to go outside to show the broken, bloody skin of her hand to the mob? is it edward who has kept this secret from his wife all these years and secretly secreted the cane in the attic for years instead of destroying it? or is it maureen who refuses to acknowledge the the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | truth of the dire situation in which her husband finds himself through the growing protest outside their home? ultimately, the choice is up to the audience based on their own perspective as they approach the play’s subject matter. in doing so, ravenhill provides a tantalizing dilemma that provokes the audience to dig beyond our usual knee-jerk reactions to #metoo headlines because the deeper we dig into this family’s story, the more complex the relationships and actions become with no guide to the right answer. at one point in the cane edward climbs a ladder into his attic to bring down the cane that he has hidden there for many years. in martin mcdonagh’s a very very very dark matter an attic also hides a potent secret, the exposure of which will cause not only professional damage to its owner’s career but also to the world’s geo-politics when it comes to nineteenth century colonialism in the congo. while ravenhill’s play is a thoughtful treatise on contemporary issues, mcdonagh’s play is darkly fun and an exercise in, at times, stinging silliness. a very very very dark matter’s premise is quite simple in that it posits that hans christian anderson never wrote any of his child pleasing stories. instead, locked in his attic in a three by three by three-foot box is a congolese pygmy woman named marjory, who writes all his stories, to which he makes the occasional superficial changes. (for example, as the play opens we discover that her most recent piece of writing for him was “the little black mermaid,” which he has changed to “the little mermaid.”) anderson, written by mcdonagh to be part simpleton, part homosexual, part torturer, and part bad carpenter, relishes the successes her stories bring him, even though he cannot always correctly pronounce the words she uses to craft the stories. (the play opens brilliantly with anderson clearly reading one of her stories for the very first time, as he shares it haltingly and at times with befuddlement before his adoring public.) the play fractures into two narratives shortly after the play’s premise is established. the first involves anderson, who learns that charles dickens also has a congolese pygmy in his attic who writes all his novels. he travels to london to confront dickens, leaving marjory with a few week’s rations of sausages. some of mcdonagh’s best comedic and acerbic writing occurs between the linguistic struggles of anderson and dickens to communicate, as anderson speaks only a hilarious pidgin english as he strives to get dickens to admit to also having a pygmy in his attic. jim broadbent’s performance as hans christian anderson was a marvel of comedic and zany energy and strikingly different from the last time he appeared in a mcdonagh play, as the interrogator tupolski he played in the pillowman at the national theatre. the connection to broadbent’s previous performance is telling because one cannot help but think of the pillowman while watching a very very very dark matter. both pieces share the same focus on authors and the power of storytelling, while also offering a darker secret behind the literary inspiration of the writers. whereas anderson never writes his stories but relies on marjory, katchurian had his own inspiration in the attic in the form of his tortured brother, and both authors keep their inspirations under lock and key. an oppressive government is also present in both plays. whereas ariel and tupolski, representing an unnamed, fictional totalitarian government, interrogate katchurian to discover why kids are being murdered just like in his stories, in a very very very dark matter the belgian government and its role in the mass murder of almost ten million congolese drives the action of the second plot of the play, which involves marjory. the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | while the idea that anderson might have a congolese pygmy woman hidden in his attic seems ridiculous, mcdonagh ups the quotient of unpredictability by also presenting her as a time travelling congolese pygmy woman, who has travelled to the past after having seen her family and village massacred by the belgian invaders. she travels to the past, so that she can arm herself and return to her present to enact vengeance on those who killed her family. during her travels, though, she was unfortunately detained by anderson and imprisoned in his attic. also time travelling are two dead belgian soldiers who have pursued marjory to anderson’s attic to prevent her from murdering them in the future. (they fail, in a hail of bullets that leaves a blood splattered set). it is worth pointing out that mcdonagh does not worry about explaining how this time travelling scenario works. the audience just has to accept the convention. if they do not, then it will make for a long evening for them. mcdonagh even makes a joke about the confusion scenario he has created with the time travelling element, as anderson tells marjory that he gets confused whenever he tries to understand how she ended up in his time period. race has played a part in mcdonagh’s films—with the discussion of a race war in in bruges and racial tensions as a driving force in three billboards outside ebbing, missouri. of mcdonagh’s plays a very very very dark matter is the first play of his to embed itself in the issue of race, specifically in the nature of the oppression of the african population by european imperialists who looked to conquer the continent and its people in any manner possible, including the genocide of a population. in addition, he highlights the appropriation of a congolese culture by anderson and dickens, who both use their congolese prisoners’ ability to tell mesmerizing stories to better themselves financially. and yet, through his use of the time travelling device, mcdonagh’s play suggests a possible rewrite to the mass murder of ten million congolese citizens. after facing off with the two, time travelling assassins, marjory escapes her bondage from anderson and wielding the weapons she has taken from the two dead soldiers, she walks out of anderson’s attic with the expressed purpose of returning home and taking on the belgian imperialists and saving the congo. in a play filled with incredibly funny set pieces, perhaps the most memorable moment is this tarantino-esque ending as she departs fully armed, seeking a potential future that will erase the cruelties enacted by king leopold the second’s troops, much like quentin tarantino’s django unchained offers a violent revision of the american south in the nineteenth century. unlike in the cane, where the past can return and punish those in the present, a very very very dark matter offers the possibility that the past can be revisited with the opportunity for the future to be changed, as those who previously experienced oppression at the hands of the privileged will be given another chance to write the wrongs done to them. abstracts theatre reviews of the cane by mark ravenhil, directed by vicky featherstone ( december – january , royal court jerwood theatre downstairs–london) and a very very very dark the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | matter by martin mcdonagh directed by matthew dunster ( october - january , the bridge theatre–london). critiques théâtrale de the cane by mark ravenhil, directed by vicky featherstone ( december – january , royal court jerwood theatre downstairs–london) et a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh directed by matthew dunster ( october - january , the bridge theatre–london). index subjects: theater keywords: family, gender, stories/history, politics, british theatre mots-clés: famille, genre, histoire/histoire, politique, théâtre britannique author william c. boles professor rollins college, florida (usa) the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh miranda, | 	the cane by mark ravenhill and a very very very dark matter by martin mcdonagh sharing knowledge and “microbubbles”: epistemic communities and insularity in us political journalism https://doi.org/ . / creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). social media + society april-june : – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sms original article though a critique of “eastern liberal media” generally dates to barry goldwater in the s (hemmer, ), the accu- sations in the united states against the “elite media” and “coastal elitism” have reached a fever pitch in the trump era. journalists widely predicted that hillary clinton would win the election. the aftermath prompted renewed interest among journalists and scholars focused on the united states as to whether political journalists, particularly those in washington, were in a “media bubble.” in fact, benkler et al. ( ) found that journalists on twitter had almost no expo- sure to trump supporters. us journalists are more likely to be insulated in liberal political bubbles in big cities that are growing “bluer” (shafer & doherty, ). in washington, often referred to as “the beltway,” journalists are overrepre- sented at times the density and are paid more than any- where else in the united states (bureau of labor statistics, ). normatively, there is reason to be concerned that insularity leads to blind spots, perhaps worsening what frank ( ) calls “intrusive reporting and excessive coverage” in “the face of public disaffection” (p. ). however, scholarly research on elitism and insularity in political communication tends to be largely theoretical (e.g., bennett, ; entman, ; scheufele, ), descriptive at small scale (bennett et al., ; davis, ), and often demonstrated via content analysis (e.g., dunaway & lawrence, ; zhou & moy, ), rather than as explanatory accounts of work routines, knowledge production, and sense-making. new research that uses twitter data augments these insights (e.g., freelon & karpf, ; mcgregor & molyneux, ; molyneux & mourão, ), though this work tends to be functionalist, focusing on how practices are normalized into work routines, leav- ing critiques of power on the periphery. given the current context of record distrust in news media both in the united states and abroad (pew research center, ), the case for a contemporary inquiry into the “power elite” (mills, ), and more specifically, what s. lichter et al. ( ) called the “media elite” is warranted. of particu- lar interest is the knowledge-generation and sense-making processes in the “beltway bubble.” in this article, we focus on us political journalists’ interactions among themselves, rather than their role in larger system of information flows. we apply research on communities of practice (cops), and the closely related concept of epistemic culture, widely established in management and sociology research (knorr cetina, ; lave & wenger, ), to understand the smsxxx . / social media <span class="symbol" cstyle="mathematical">+</span> societyusher and ng research-article university of illinois at urbana–champaign, usa corresponding author: nikki usher, college of media, university of illinois at urbana– champaign, urbana, il , usa. email: nusher@illinois.edu sharing knowledge and “microbubbles”: epistemic communities and insularity in us political journalism nikki usher and yee man margaret ng abstract this article examines the peer-to-peer dynamics of washington political journalists as communities of practice (cops) to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge. we employ inductive computational analysis that combines social network analysis of journalists’ twitter interactions with a qualitative, thematic analysis of journalists’ work histories, organizational affiliations, and self-descriptions to identify nine major clusters of beltway journalists. among these are an elite/legacy community, a television producer community inclusive of fox producers, and cnn, as its own self-referential community. findings suggest washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots. keywords media elites, political journalism, communities of practice, epistemic communities, twitter, social network analysis https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms mailto:nusher@illinois.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - social media + society mechanisms through which political journalists engage with each other to develop shared practices and knowledge. cop research has often been used in the context of social learning with the aim to improve how knowledge and resources can be shared within and across organizations (brown & duguid, ; mørk et al., ). when epistemic cultures become fragmented or closed, the consequences can be catastrophic, from space shuttle disasters (vaughan, ) to disruptions in global financial markets (knorr cetina & preda, ). how political journalists make sense of what news to cover and how to cover it, particularly as peers across news organi- zations, stands to shed insight into the contours of the insu- larity long observed in political communication scholarship (harcup & o’neill, ). we employ an inductive computational approach that seeks to bridge qualitative inductive approaches with big data (usher, in press) to examine a purposive sample of , beltway jour- nalists. we conducted a social network analysis of , tweets along with analyses of word clouds, biographical, and employment data. empirically, we find that beltway journal- ism should not be generalized as a monolith, and instead should be understood as multiple cops tied together by distinct types of shared knowledge practices, norms, and routines. in short, the beltway’s “media bubble” looks more like a collection of “micro bubbles,” suggesting beltway journalism may be even more insular than previously thought. cops and epistemic culture zelizer’s ( ) theoretical insight that journalists form “interpretive communities” is fundamental to discussions about in-group identity formation, claims to cultural author- ity and institutional legitimation, and the ways in which jour- nalists mediate events. metajournalistic discourse, a closely related concept, reflects how journalists and those interested in journalism engage in a process of critique and reflexivity about journalistic practice (carlson, ). the cop approach extends these concepts focusing on what mørk et al. ( ) identify as “the relationship between practice, learning and innovating” (p. ). this is intentional, as cops help reveal why knowledge production and transfer stalls, why openness to innovation and new ideas breaks down, and what facilitates building networks of intra- and cross-organi- zational knowledge (orlikowski, ; wenger, ). moreover, considering epistemic cultures within cops reveals what knorr cetina ( , ) calls “machineries of knowledge production”—that knowledge cultures are mechanistic, produced through, and constituted by practice. cops are based on mutual engagement that brings together actors of different abilities bound by a “shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocab- ulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time” (wenger, , p. ). members involved are presumed to engage in shared goals or beliefs and have a sense of joint enterprise and identity (wenger, ). as such, these concepts help us think more generally about how journalists come to know about particular sub- jects, who they engage with, and help us uncover tacit under- standings of purpose, practice, and identity. in a collection, the practice turn in contemporary theory, knorr cetina et al. ( ) bring scholars together to think about the connection between practice, power, and knowl- edge. schatzki ( ) offers a general gloss on “practice” as a form of non-regularized knowledge organized by practical understandings and rules. the connection between shared practices and knowledge generation has distinct power dynamics; as barnes ( ) explains, “to engage in practice is to exercise a power . . .” (p. ). in addition, fox ( ) argues that cops are also subject to peer-established disciplinary forces. indeed, knorr cetina’s ( , ) closely related con- cept of epistemic culture (a.k.a., epistemic communities) suggests devastating consequences for insular cops filled with elites. knorr cetina ( ) argues that epistemic cul- tures emerge “when domains of social life become separated from one another—when they curl up upon themselves,” which in turn suggests “rich and potentially complex internal environments with warped geometries” (p. ). amin and roberts ( ) characterize epistemic communities as char- acterized by “collaborations involving experts with substan- tial egos, high expectations, frequent turnover, rudimentary rules and procedures, tight deadlines, and considerable ambi- guity and uncertainty” (p. ). knorr cetina’s research on high-frequency traders has many parallels to beltway journalism. these traders see themselves as engaged in specialized knowledge production and are constrained by tacit and explicit norms that limit input from outsiders. similarly, their peer-to-peer relation- ships are distributed across loose networks, facilitated via internet communication technologies. shared sense-making and knowledge production becomes increasingly important as traders work faster and faster with diminished opportuni- ties for independent research. imbued with a sense of power, privilege, and invulnerability, the more insular and confident these “masters of the universe” (wolfe, ) become, the harder they can fall. existing research on cops and epistemic culture in jour- nalism is sparse. however, this is a missed opportunity; cops complement the findings of early newsroom ethnographers (gans, ; tuchman, ), who examined how the knowledge production process was influenced by actors inside and outside journalism who ordered practices of knowing. more recently, garcía-avilés ( ) discussed how online newsrooms constituted cops, while borden ( ) used cops to explore the tacit understandings of jour- nalists’ “virtue ethics.” husband ( ) and matsaganis and katz ( ) consider how ethnic media operates as cops, suggesting a rationale for considering other beats/media spe- cializations. overall, cops are united by a common material point of inquiry, object, or concern, but epistemic cultures usher and ng are vulnerable to collapsing inward, resulting in knorr cetina’s warped geometries. beltway insularity and twitter political journalists are high-ego actors whose loose connec- tions to each other are facilitated by instant communication (in particular, twitter). like most journalists, they are asked to do more with less time (hamby, ), which can lead to shortcuts and imitation (boczkowski, ). yet even in a hybridized media environment, washington political jour- nalists still have outsized power, status, and influence in shaping what the public knows about politics. part of this power comes from washington’s clubby insularity, in which national media and political elites engage in a process of mutual influence and dependence (cf., bennett, ; davis, ; entman, ) and drive each other’s agendas as well as the public’s (mccombs et al., ). the regular and ongoing informal socialization and formal professionaliza- tion, long hours on the job (often in places exclusively desig- nated for the press), and underlying pressures of competition among news organizations can also lead to conformity and homogenized coverage (cook, ; davis, ). as bennett ( ) finds, this type of socialization leads “national news organizations to the same information sources and, as a result, to much the same stories” (p. ), which in turn can “naturalise” the perspectives of powerful elites (hall, ; harcup & o’neill, ). the consequences of the insularity observed among the beltway elites are significant for the kind of knowledge pro- duced. research on pack journalism suggests evidence of journalistic “groupthink,” which matusitz and breen ( ) define as “a consensus-seeking propensity in certain groups” (p. ). they point out the danger of pack journalism, defin- ing it as “a practice whereby large groups of reporters cluster around a news site, engage in copycat reporting by using and sharing news information, and lazily refrain from confirming the data through independent sources” (p. ). similar trends have been observed among other elite beats, such as science journalism. in , dunwoody observed how a small “inner club” of writers of science journalists who knew each other and cooperated over a long period had outsized influence on shaping science coverage for us readers (p. ). brüggemann and engesser ( ) observed this among contemporary cli- mate journalists, noting the practice of knowledge sharing and production reifies powerful journalists and establishes consensus. moreover, berkowitz and terkeurst ( ) sug- gest a geographic community’s culture and power structure can shape news decision-making processes—supporting the importance of inquiry into the knowledge-generation prac- tices of journalists within the beltway. similar concerns are present where large concentrations of journalists gather to cover political power (e.g., the “brussels bubble,” “westminster village,” or berlin’s “spaceship”; cornia, ; hanusch, ; nielsen, ), though political journalism is “no one thing, not in the united states and certainly not across all of western europe” (nielsen, , p. ). overall, previous research into offline political journal- ism practices highlights proclivities toward groupthink, insu- larity, the silencing of divergent perspectives, and limitations in knowledge production, suggesting the importance of a cop analysis of beltway journalism. however, there is a paucity of in situ observational research on how political journalists work in the contemporary environment (though see davis, ; lawrence, ). the classic the boys on the bus (crouse, ) and more contemporary memoirs by journalists (e.g., chozick, ) tell us a bit about the peer- to-peer knowledge production processes of political journal- ists. however, academics have distinct challenges to accessing these settings, and while not a replacement, explor- ing peer-to-peer dynamics of journalists on twitter functions as a proxy for observational studies. the ability to observe these dynamics at scale through social network analysis pro- vides a different, possibly more ecologically expansive per- spective than the fieldwork of a single scholar. if there is one academic occasion, when it is appropriate to say that twitter is representative of the lived experience of the people using it, the case of beltway journalists would be it. for political journalists, twitter functions as a synchronic, digital extension of political journalists’ offline lives as they do their work and engage with each other (kreiss, ; mcgregor & molyneux, ). twitter serves as a virtual “watercooler” (hamby, ); lawrence ( ) quoted one journalist who said, “the people i know who are on twitter are other journalists” (p. ). in the contemporary agenda- setting process, journalists and news organizations play an outsized role on twitter and are more influenced by twitter, “indicating processes of monitoring, imitation, and co-orien- tation between different media outlets” (harder et al., , p. ). in fact, as mcgregor and molyneux ( ) show via an online survey experiment, the more time journalists spend on the platform, the more that journalists’ news judgment changes to normalize twitter with more standard forms of newsgathering. of course, this is not to say that journalists do not engage in more varied mechanisms for enhancing their reporting, editing, and analysis, such as traditional sourcing and in-person interviews. indeed, the cops of journalists that exist offline are thus facilitated by twitter. journalists tweet to and about other political journalists more than they engage with any other type of user (molyneux, ; molyneux & mourão, ); twitter can make or break the reputations of political jour- nalists jockeying for hierarchy and prestige (mourão, ). twitter is now the primary place to break and spot breaking news, to demonstrate humor, snark, and insider knowledge, and to be validated by journalism peers (freelon & karpf, ; hamby, ; mourão et al., ). twitter use by journalists can also reinforce predominant interpretations of ongoing events (thompson, ). in fact, as jürgens et al. ( ) argue, political journalism twitter has a “small world” social media + society effect that is highly influenced by a small number of users critically positioned in the structure of the network. insular tendencies and power dynamics observed offline are also present, and in some cases, amplified on twitter, as shown by research on gender disparities in beltway journalism (usher et al., ). mcgregor ( ) found that journalists rely on twitter as a standard bearer for public opinion. still, we do not know as much about how journalists use each other, via engagement on twitter, as a site of knowledge generation, despite the sig- nificant consequences for news production. thus, to better understand how political journalists engage with each other as cops in an era of twitterified journalism, we pose the fol- lowing research questions: rq . what are the peer-to-peer dynamics in political journalism? rq . why might these community dynamics occur? rq . what kind of knowledge is shared by/among politi- cal journalists? method data collection we identified a purposive sample of journalists who could all be described as elite political journalists, drawing from the list of , credentialed congressional correspondents (in categories of daily press, periodical press, and radio/tv) found in the congressional directory for the th congress of the united states. to be credentialed, a journalist is vet- ted by the standing committee of correspondents, which consists of five journalists elected by their peers. journalists must permanently reside in washington, dc, work full-time as a journalist, and be “editorially independent of any institu- tion, foundation or interest group that lobbies the federal government, or that is not principally a general news organi- zation” (congressional directory, , p. ). this cre- dentialing is a requirement for joining the white house correspondents association, and most news outlets will also pro-forma apply to credential their washington journalists. as such, the list is among the most comprehensive of washington journalists. from this list, we identified journalists with active twitter accounts and updated the list, eliminating journalists who were identified as no longer working for a news organization or residing in washington and confined our sample to english-language outlets. this list-building process took months and was completed on may , . though this list inevitably changes, it is nonetheless a sample of journal- ists living and working in washington who share key mea- sures of occupational prestige: elite political journalists doing work considered worthy of permanent credentials to cover congress. our purposive sample started with , credentialed washington journalists with twitter accounts. using twitter’s timeline application programming interface, we collected , tweets posted by , accounts from february to march , , a -month timeframe that gave us both enough data and temporal specificity about sig- nificant news stories/events, giving us a better sense of the content beltway journalists were talking about with each other on twitter. to set the network boundary, we further narrowed our data set to only tweet conversations among the beltway journalists. that included retweets, replies, and original tweets where a beltway journalist directly refer- enced another beltway journalist. excluded tweets were those from accounts outsides of our sample that referenced beltway journalists, as well as tweets from beltway journal- ists that engaged with accounts other than those journalists in our sample. the final data set consisted of , tweets from , journalists (one-third of all credentialed con- gressional correspondents). close to one fifth ( . %) of these tweets were interactions with other beltway journal- ists in the sample; if we included not just beltway journal- ists, but all the journalists our sample engaged with, extant research suggests this percentage would likely be greater (table shows the percentage of in-group tweets within the specific communities). we imported the final data set gephi (bastian et al., ) to visualize the internal patterns of clustering and inter-clus- ter relations among the beltway journalists (figure ). ties were formed based on three types of relationships, namely, mentions, retweets/quote tweets, and replies. a directed tie from user a to b was established when user a either men- tioned user b in an original tweet or when user a retweeted or replied to user b’s twitter posts. in total, there were , directed ties (separate ties were drawn when one single tweet mentioned or replied to multiple beltway jour- nalists). edges in the network were then “weighted” based on the number of ties between two beltway journalists. inductive computational analysis of communities our work proceeds through a methodological innovation called inductive computational analysis (usher, in press), which helps us address a methodological difficulty: the inability to understand at scale the enduring patterns of inter- action among political journalists. asking more than , washington journalists, how they engage with peers, who they think they talk to the most, and how they use insights from others to develop their story frames and ideas is impos- sible to do given limited resources and still would have the limitation of only providing individual perspectives on peer- to-peer relationships. observational work is also particularly challenging as regular access to spaces within the corridors of political power is difficult to obtain. therefore, the aim of inductive computational analysis is to answer questions often usher and ng t ab le . d es cr ip ti o n fo r ea ch p ro m in en t c lu st er . c lu st er # o f jo ur na lis ts c o lo r fi g. m aj o r ne w sr o o m s in e ac h cl us te r t o p # ha sh ta gs t o p @ m en ti o ns pr o po rt io n o f in - gr o up in te ra ct io n w o rd c lo ud e li te /l e g ac y ( . % ) r ed w as hi ng to n po st . % pa us at o da y . % n b c n ew s . % am r re al d o na ld t ru m p n at io na l p ub lic r ad io . % m ar ch fo ro ur liv es a p n ew y o rk t im es . % o ly m pi cs pr es ss ec po lit ic o . % sy ri a sp ea ke rr ya n c o n g re ss io n al jo u rn al is m ( . % ) c ya n b lo o m be rg n ew s . % ph ar m a w sj . % po lit ic o . % bi o te ch a p a ss o ci at ed p re ss . % fd a cs pa n w al l s tr ee t jo ur na l . % o pi o id cr is is dc ex am in er c q r o ll c al l . % cd c re al d o na ld t ru m p c –s pa n . % t h e c n n cl u st e r ( . % ) g re en c n n . % aw sh o w c n n po lit ic s . % t ho m so n r eu te rs . % aw t he le ad c n n t im e m ag az in e . % pa c n n cn ns o tu re al d o na ld t ru m p cp ac pr es ss ec t e le vi si o n (p ro d u ce r) ( . % ) g re y a b c n ew s . % fo xn ew s re al d o na ld t ru m p . % fo x n ew s . % su pe rb o w l a b c c b s n ew s . % br ea ki ng c b sn ew s go o dd ay ch ar lo tt e o ly m pi cs po t u s fo x n ew s l o ca l p o li ti ca l n e w s ( . % ) b ro w n w r c –t v / n b c – . % w m at a nb cw as hi ng to n . % w u sa –t v . % br ea ki ng w us a w t t g –f o x t v . % m ar ch fo ro ur liv es w t o p w jl a –t v / n ew sc ha nn el . % o ly m pi cs fo x dc w t o p r ad io . % o sc ar s a b c n ew s (c on tin ue d) social media + society c lu st er # o f jo ur na lis ts c o lo r fi g. m aj o r ne w sr o o m s in e ac h cl us te r t o p # ha sh ta gs t o p @ m en ti o ns pr o po rt io n o f in - gr o up in te ra ct io n w o rd c lo ud r e g u la to ry jo u rn al is ts ( . % ) b lu e b lo o m be rg b n a . % sc o tu s ee n ew su pd at es . % e& e n ew s . % o sh a ep a s& p g lo ba l m ar ke t in te lli ge nc e . % o m ni bu s b lo o m be rg la w ep a ep a sc o tt pr ui tt o o tt bl o o m be rg bn a f o re ig n a ff ai rs ( . % ) o ra ng e v o ic e o f a m er ic a . % ru ss ia m ili ta ry do tc o m . % si gh tl in e m ed ia g ro up . % sy ri a w as hb la de fe de ra l n ew s r ad io a m . % is is po t u s ch in a no rt hk o re a d av id la rt er lo sa ng el es b la de l o n g fo rm / e n te rp ri se ( . % ) pu rp le m cc la tc hy . % sc o tu s po t u s . % b uz zf ee d . % pa pe w tr us ts t he a tl an ti c . % o sc ar s pr es ss ec st at el in e. o rg . % tr um p do m in ic ho ld en t ho m so n r eu te rs . % m et o o b uz zf ee dn ew s s o ci al i ss u e s ( . % ) g re y b b c ed uc at io n w ee k . % . % m ar ch fo ro ur liv es ed te ch pu er to ri co cp ac pa rk la nd ed uc at io nw ee k re al d o na ld t ru m p sm it hs o ni an m ag b et sy d ev o se d b b c w o rl d . % n = , ; m o du la ri ty = . ; a c hi -s qu ar e te st f o r in de pe nd en ce s ho w ed a s ig ni fic an t re la ti o ns hi p be tw ee n ne w sr o o m s an d cl us te r as si gn m en t, χ ( , ) = , , p < . ( ef fe ct s iz e us in g c ra m er ’s v = . ). t a b le . (c o nt in ue d) usher and ng posed by a qualitative researcher by “interviewing” and “observing” big data sources instead of (or in addition to) interviewing and observing a population of interest. as we were interested in understanding how cops of beltway journalists interact and engage, we applied network community detection to identify clusters of journalists that have strong within-group connectivity versus between-group interactions. one of the pertinent properties in real-world social networks is their community structures. generally, a community is defined as a group of nodes (i.e., journalists in this study) having similar affiliations different to the rest of the network (yang et al., ). community detection identi- fies cohesive subgraphs of users that are more densely con- nected to each other than to the rest of the network (papadopoulos et al., ). we specifically used the louvain modularity algorithm (blondel et al., ) to examine the community structure, where a zero modularity score repre- sents randomly connected networks and a score greater than . infers networks with substantial community structure (newman & girvan, ). this algorithm performs particu- larly well on large and weighted networks (blondel et al., ; lancichinetti & fortunato, ) as well as networks based on social media (e.g., haynes & perisic, ). the output of community detection usually results in networks with hundreds of identified clusters with many clusters only containing a few users; however, little research has provided an appropriate cut-off number to analyze clusters (guo et al., ). as such, we chose to analyze clusters that contained at least % of the network’s total users. our inductive computational process was iterative; we looked for key trends and used extant theory to guide our interpretation, a process similar to more traditional qualitative coding. in addition to investigating the network structure, we also studied the degree of professional connectiveness/insu- larity among beltway journalists by examining the types of interactions that connected users within a community and which newsrooms these interactions came from. we took the output of the community detection analysis and used these network graphs, along with a frequency analysis of top hashtags and top mentions in each community, as well as a word cloud analysis of most frequently occurring words within the corpus of journalists’ twitter bios to help us posit why certain patterns of interactions might be observed. we also looked at prominent accounts in each community and figure . twitter network graph between , dc journalists. note. nine major clusters are highlighted (colors can be referred in table ); node size depends on in-degree centrality. social media + society referenced our original list of journalists, which contained additional information about journalists’ beat specializations, past work history, educational background, and time spent in washington. while we did not specifically examine the semantic and sentiment content of tweets, frequent hashtags and mentions allowed us to compare whether these communi- ties exhibit strong single-mindedness, giving us insight into how knowledge is exchanged and among whom. this inter- pretative process added an additional, explanatory layer to the social network analysis. results our research questions are intentionally broad—we do not expect to be able to definitively describe, in detail, specific instances of how journalists are sharing knowledge and establishing consensus on or off twitter, though asking why their communities form the way they do on twitter gives us a sense of patterns of interaction at scale. we find that beltway journalism, long presumed to be insular and con- ventionally understood as a monolithic journalistic culture, instead consists of nine major cops, each with its own epis- temic culture. findings suggest that journalists do seem to be in communities with those working at the same news outlets, but organizational affiliation alone does not explain the het- erogeneity. rather, based on our analysis, these epistemic communities can be explained by different rationales, such as shared media format, a reputational association, or com- mon orientations in news coverage. rq . what are the peer-to-peer dynamics in political journalism? community detection revealed nine major clusters. the modularity value was . , indicating strong community structure (newman & girvan, ). figure provides a visualized network of twitter interaction among beltway journalists with nodes and edges colored according to the group that the nodes belong to. each community reflected several distinct dominant news outlets (table ). a chi-square test for independence reflected a very strong relationship between newsrooms and cluster assignment (χ ( , ) = , , p < . , cramer’s v = . ), confirming that beltway journalists indeed clustered accord- ing to their professional affiliations, though this alone did not tell us much about underlying logics of the clusters themselves. rq . why might these community dynamics occur? rq . what kind of knowledge is shared by/among politi- cal journalists? using inductive computational analysis, we relied on bio- graphical data, word cloud insights, and hashtag/mention analysis to interpret these nine communities. an assessment of in-group interactions provided us with a measure of “insu- larity” for each cluster. we identified those nine communities as elite/legacy; congressional journalism; cnn; television (producers); local political news; regulatory journalism; for- eign affairs; longform/enterprise; and social issues. in the following section, we further describe our rationale for assigning these characterizations to each community (rq ). we use top hashtags, mentions, and the community charac- terization from rq as indicators of the types of sense-mak- ing processes at work within these clusters (rq ). as the analysis was inductive, analysis of rq and rq worked recursively, with insight from one query informing the other, and thus are discussed together. the elite/legacy community based on our analysis, cluster was the largest community. it can be thought of as the elite/legacy community: it con- tained the largest grouping of legacy news outlets, suggest- ing a dense clustering of the most esteemed news brands among each other. outlets included the washington post, npr, the new york times, and nbc news, and a smaller but still notable portion of politico journalists. word clouds helped reveal trends in the twitter bios of these journalists, with “politics” and “white house” being the dominant self- descriptions of coverage areas, suggesting that these journal- ists are more likely to be covering general interest political news and may spend most of their time at the white house. rq queries what kind of knowledge is being discussed. proxies such as top hashtags and mentions suggest this clus- ter is focused on general interest political news. top hashtags include a pennsylvania house of representatives special election, the march for our lives, the olympics, and syria. this is further bolstered by the fact that the presssec handle is among the top five mentions, suggesting that these jour- nalists are on hand to cover the press secretary or are other- wise concerned with reporting information from the white house. notably, this is the largest cluster ( . % of our sam- ple) and also highly insular—of the tweets from journalists in this group, . % are to other journalists in this cluster, providing further support for rq and our concern about insular epistemic communities. the congressional journalism community cluster , the second largest community of journalists, included journalists from bloomberg, politico, the ap, the wall street journal, cq/roll call, and c-span. findings suggest this epistemic community was organized around peer-to-peer relationships of journalists who were “inside beltway journalists” with topical beats and whose mandate it is to cover what it is happening in congress (rq ). further support for this analysis emerged from the top five hashtags. the top hashtags were “wonky”—pharma, biotech, fda, usher and ng opioid crisis, and cdc, giving us a sense that the knowledge being exchanged was subject-specific (insight into rq ). while the hashtags might suggest a health policy focus, the word cloud and bio data revealed a wider range of reporting responsibilities, such as tech, banks, trade, health, and busi- ness (rq informed by rq ). “policy” jumped as a weighted word; the weighting of “politico pro” reflected the presence of politico journalists who work for a separate, subscription- only service focused on niche issues; these journalists are paid to be beat experts covering congress. but it was not so niche that it was detached from broader conversations, and top mentions are primarily of other media organizations and the president’s twitter account. this builds support for jour- nalists building knowledge (or at least discussing it) from the work of other journalists, with over % of the tweets in this cluster directed at the in-group (rq ), and for specific atten- tion paid to congressional developments (the ap and cspan, both of which provide gavel-to-gavel coverage; rq ). the cnn cluster cluster can be defined as the cnn cluster. while the clus- ter was not entirely homogeneous, cnn journalists were over % of the cluster’s composition (rq ) notably, jake tapper, the most influential journalist in our network as mea- sured by weighted in-degree, promotes and is promoted by the cnn community. the following top three mentions sug- gested a preoccupation with organizational branding: @ cnnpolitics, @theleadcnn (the show hosted by jake tapper), and @cnn itself. top hashtags included references to tapper’s weekend show, cnn state of the union, a spe- cial election congressional race in pennsylvania, and the cpac conference that happened outside washington during data selection. the presssec account also appeared as a top mention, perhaps indicative of cnn’s highly public “battle” with the trump white house. overall, in assessing rq , this cnn cluster suggests a dense peer-to-peer network where cnn content is amplified and reamplified, as well as a focus on “inside the beltway” interests such as cpac and, possi- bly, cnn’s relationship with the white house, a “cnn twitter,” that was highly self-referential and insular ( . % of the tweets were within and among the cluster). the television (producer) cluster in community , the three biggest news organizations repre- sented were abc news, fox news, and cbs news. interestingly, two other tv networks were in different clus- ters: cnn (on its own) and nbc (in a mix of primarily leg- acy, newspaper outlets). this is likely because nbc has multiple platform divisions, namely, broadcast, cable (msnbc), and a large digital team responsible for text-based reporting; its correspondents may have more common ground within the elite/legacy cluster with the other tv net- works. while one might presume fox news journalists would not be engaged with news organizations that the net- work accuses of left-wing bias, this was not the case. in try- ing to unpack the inclusion of fox journalists in the television community, we considered additional factors, such as whether or not there were strong ties like past shared work history. the most notable explanation for peer-to-peer rela- tionships within this community was that these journalists mostly self-described as tv news producers (rq ). hashtags reflected interests in topics beyond just political news, such as the super bowl and the olympics, suggesting television specific-news judgment with an eye toward entertainment (lotz, ). notably, this was the only cluster to have #breaking as a top hashtag. this may reflect the importance of the producers’ role in flagging emerging news stories and considering their merit for possible segments on their news shows. inquiry into the cop of producers, wherein twitter facilitates surveilling other producers’ possible booking and segment-planning decisions, could provide additional evi- dence of mimicry and consensus formation (rq ). community of longform/enterprise cluster is a longform/enterprise cluster. members’ twitter bios contained a nuanced mix of specialty political beats. the word “investigative” was featured prominently, as were other words, such as “justice,” “immigration,” “security,” and “national security,” “supreme”(court), and, amusingly, “nerd.” top hashtags, while reflecting dominant issues in the news, also suggested more thematic rather than episodic cov- erage; this was the only cluster that had #metoo and #scotus as top hashtags. similarly, “pew trusts” appeared as a top mention, which was the only top-ranking reference to a thinktank across our data set, suggesting that these journal- ists may be sharing knowledge about these thematic stories relevant beyond the day’s news (rq ). the outlets that were most represented in this cluster were buzzfeed, mcclatchy, and the atlantic, all of which self-described as avoiding “the stories of the day”-type of reporting and instead focus on impact-driven scoops or insight analyses (critchlow, ; mcclatchy dc correspondent, personal communication, march , ; rq ). the “local” political news community cluster is a washington local news cluster. washington local news, which serves the largest concentration of fed- eral employees in the united states, also anecdotally may provide more political news adapted for a local level. not surprising for locals who were experiencing ongoing frus- tration over dc’s subway, the @wmata metro account was a top mention. one of the top hashtags was #marchforour- lives, which reflects local interest in political news. as with most other clusters, the top mentions outside the net- work of beltway journalists’ accounts were self-referential to the most-represented news outlets. this community of social media + society washington journalists within the larger washington polit- ical journalism beltway was the most insular, as . % of these tweets were in-group. communities of regulatory journalists, foreign affairs, and social issues clusters , , and also showed coherence in their topical connectivity. cluster was dominated by bloomberg bna ( . % of the cluster) and also included specialty news out- lets such as s&p global market intelligence and e&e news. the top hashtags reflected regulatory concerns such as #osha (occupational health and safety), #epa (environmental pro- tection agency), and #omnibus (a reference to an infrastruc- ture bill). cluster journalists were predominantly focused on issues in foreign affairs and the us military. members’ twitter bios included “pentagon,” “foreign,” and “military.” top hashtags all reflected a preoccupation with foreign affairs (#isis, #china, etc.). finally, cluster , the smallest cluster, included outlets concerned with social issues, such as education and gun violence. each of these three clusters showed smaller, topically specific rationales for peer-to-peer engagement; biographical data and outlets offered a clue to their composition and community rationale, while key men- tions and hashtags served as proxies for knowledge exchanged (rq and rq ), overall, this analysis of cops gives us an understanding of some of the organizing logics of the various beltway jour- nalism twitter communities. we cannot answer what each journalist happens to be learning from twitter and how her engagement on twitter informs her work. however, we can see peer-to-peer engagement at scale. within an already insular system of knowledge production and sense-making, we find concentrated clusters that are more variegated than a single version of “beltway journalism.” nonetheless, these cops show smaller silos, or microbubbles, of high-ego actors who have tremendous power to shape public information but who are also vulnerable to groupthink, blind spots, and the warped logic that results when an epistemic community folds in on itself, as knorr cetina warns. discussion this project offers two interventions to augment our under- standing about the news production processes of elite politi- cal journalists. first, it introduces the productive potential of a cop approach, which can illuminate not just how peer-to- peer dynamics influence social learning, consensus, and shared practices, but also provides an entry-point for critical inquiry into the consequences of powerful actors inhabiting insular epistemic communities. second, the article suggests a way to use big (or biggish) data from social media platforms in ways that can be conducive to more qualitative, humanis- tic questions of the kind we have asked here. indeed, research questions approached from this perspective do not have to have definitive answers resolved by the case. our approach shows how loosely distributed networks of powerful political journalists self-organize in different cops (rq ) and then explores the different logics for these cops (rq ) to consider what kinds of knowledge-generation and shared practices might emerge (rq ). our findings suggest even smaller, more insular communities of journalism that function as silos or even “microbubbles” with their own sets of concerns. we know from existing research that these jour- nalists are engaging in story ideas, joking around, and bur- nishing their own careers (kreiss, ; mourão, ). they are doing so, however, within even smaller communi- ties of like-minded journalists that have been previously con- sidered. if journalists are talking to even smaller groups of journalists who share similar orientations, there is a real con- cern about the limitations of these epistemic communities in generating knowledge and information for the public. in these insular epistemic communities, newness is controlled and incorporated within these power domains (barnes, ), and critique that veers outside the norm of general banter or the emerging consensus may be disregarded. indeed, these microbubbles risk folding in on themselves, as knorr cetina ( ) suggests. in particular, it is concerning that cnn journalists are tweeting mostly to other cnn jour- nalists about cnn. even if this is an organizational mandate, it nonetheless serves as a powerful echo chamber that leaves cnn’s internal sense about what news matters unchecked and reconfirmed by those who work there. on twitter, a plat- form absolutely integral to the political journalism news pro- duction process, cnn journalists have limited engagement with other beltway journalists. previous research has suggested that journalists care more about their own branding than their organization’s; this self- branding tactic is a hedge against the precarity of the news industry (molyneux, ; usher, ). however, across all clusters, we find that top mentions are often referential to the top media organizations represented in each cluster, which suggests beltway journalists prioritize branding the organization they work for. organizational affiliation is not a sufficient enough explanation for the heterogeneity of the communities, but these organizational ties provide an impor- tant counterpoint for previous presumptions about self- branding practices among journalists. would these communities look different given a different temporal slicing of the data? perhaps. while the specific con- centrations of the makeup of journalists might change, the underlying rationale for each epistemic community’s prac- tice orientation around specific knowledge production would likely be consistent, given what we have observed based on the biographical details of twitter bios, the range of organi- zations represented, and thematic consistencies among hashtags and mentions. here, we focused on a single net- work in isolation, but the triangulation of several network usher and ng structures (e.g., of follower networks) might illuminate other insights. we acknowledge our normativity in suggesting that media diversity in washington should be desirable. however, these patterns on twitter may be suggestive of an even more self-reinforcing journalistic experience than research has previously acknowledged. normativity aside, this research reveals that washington journalism is far more nuanced than it might seem. in addi- tion to the sub-communities of journalists, the epistemic foundations for their clusters suggest the importance of remembering there are multiple audiences and multiple stakeholders outside the generally accepted waterfall sche- matic of press–politics–audiences (entman, ). these sub-clusters within washington may be less immediately vis- ible but they are not necessarily less important, and their potential influence on political actors and other journalists, not to the public, deserves our attention. this research calls for more detailed analyses of media elitism in the united states and elsewhere. the dangers of journalists having limited perspectives are real. while this study does not purport to show possible worsening over time, it does provide support that shows siloed communities of journalists and thus offers an important, empirically grounded caveat about their vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots. while political journalists have been tradition- ally explored as part of the source-journalist “tango” (gans, ) and examined within a broader political communica- tion structure (cf., entman, ), to stretch a metaphor, we argue it is important to consider what happens when journal- ists are dancing with other journalists, who they pick as part- ners, and the songs they dance to. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank matthew s. weber, peter van aelst, laura wrubel, suzy khimm, and daniel wagner for their feedback and assistance. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article. orcid id nikki usher https://orcid.org/ - - - notes . we sidestep the problematizing of “knowledge” and “com- munity” as concepts in this article, as knorr cetina and oth- ers have made this central to their point of inquiry in the area literature. . data from https://www.journalism.org/ / / /the- numbers-overall/ . github link: https://github.com/margaretnym/beltwayjournalists . the list of top hashtags also surfaces amr, which stands for andrea mitchell reports; 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( ). parsing framing processes: the interplay between online public opinion and media coverage. journal of communication, , – . https://doi.org/ . / j. - . . .x author biographies nikki usher (phd, usc annenberg school of communication) is an associate professor in the department of journalism and faculty affiliate in communication and political science at the university of urbana-champaign. she is the author of two books, making news at the new york times ( ) and interactive journalism: hackers, data, and code ( ). yee man margaret ng (phd, university of texas) is an assistant professor in the department of journalism and department of computer science (faculty affiliate) at the university of illinois urbana–champaign. her research interests include computational social science, journalism, and communication technology. https://doi.org/ . /kpm. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . 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/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast- https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d xamx/journalists-and-trump-voters-live-in-separate-online-bubbles-mit-analysis-shows https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d xamx/journalists-and-trump-voters-live-in-separate-online-bubbles-mit-analysis-shows https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d xamx/journalists-and-trump-voters-live-in-separate-online-bubbles-mit-analysis-shows https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x a feminist coven in the university full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cgpc gender, place & culture a journal of feminist geography issn: - x (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc a feminist coven in the university araby smyth, jess linz & lauren hudson to cite this article: araby smyth, jess linz & lauren hudson ( ): a feminist coven in the university, gender, place & culture to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / x. . published online: nov . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cgpc https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cgpc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cgpc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - a feminist coven in the university araby smytha, jess linza and lauren hudsonb ageography, university of kentucky, lexington, ky, usa; bearth and environmental sciences, cuny graduate center, new york, ny, usa abstract inspired by sara ahmed’s call to study what is near to you, we write about our sometimes-joyful, sometimes-furious, always passionate struggles as graduate students in the academy. as a site of imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, the university grinds especially hard on women, people of color, black, indigenous, queer, disabled, and otherwise oppressed scholars. out of a desire not just to get by or get ahead in this hostile space of competition and scarcity, we write about a feminist praxis that subverts the academy. using collaborative auto-ethnography, asynchronous online interviews, and co-theorization, we conjure a network of rebels - what we call the feminist coven. we solicited contri- butions from feminist graduate students in response to three prompts about forms of communication, emotional labor, and imaginaries. our findings show a vibrant land- scape of creativity, love, rage, and longing for academia to be a more hospitable place. we and our contributors, whose voices pepper this article, offer ideas for how to summon new worlds and ways of being through small actions and everyday practices, subverting the violence of the academy by being the storm that blows through it. article history received july accepted september keywords feminism; affect; materialism; university; emotional labor; witches introduction i graded and hustled. i wrote, i coordinated, i created, i was challenged, and i defended my work. and when it all came crashing down, when everything broke and i asked for help, there wasn’t any. only more traps, cryptic lectures from administrators about my ‘vulnerability’ as a young scholar, and more grubby fingers … today, i have my phd [but] my job now is to reclaim my self-worth, face my debt, and heal. my job is also to let you know, dear academic, that you’re not crazy, you are not alone, and you will not be bullied or degraded. say it with me … – contributor in theory, graduate school fosters intellectual and professional growth. however, it often feels personally and politically stunting. some claim that contact araby smyth arabysmyth@uky.edu geography, university of kentucky, patterson office tower, lexington, ky supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/ . / x. . . � informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group gender, place & culture https://doi.org/ . / x. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://doi.org/ . / x. . http://www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com academia has become a zombified permutation of the idealized liberal uni- versity (whelan, walker, and moore ). from destructive reforms to ram- pant discrimination and epidemics of depression, many have documented, analyzed, and prescribed solutions to the deplorable state of things (berg, huijbens, and larsen ; bianco ; gill ; hanke and hearn ; mountz et al. ; ovetz ). the #metoo movement brought to light even more dark corners of higher education (kelsky ; chu ; doherty et al., ). but you know this. you probably read about the crisis of academia several times in the last week alone. nevertheless, the current situation is not new, or rather, it is not new for everybody. the deeper problem is that academia has long been a vio- lent site of imperialism, racism, and patriarchy (meyerhoff and noterman ; wilder ; meyerhoff ). it was constructed on an uneven play- ing field meant to exclude. we will not repeat the discoveries in the exten- sive literature of the patriarchal and colonizing practices of the university beyond the citations above. rather, this article describes our backlash to the catastrophe of the neoliberal university, in the form of a feminist coven. the coven is both a theoretical space and material relationships between graduate students. it is not a formal group or an institutionalized entity that seeks recognition from the university. the feminist coven is a pack, a band, a swarm: something admittedly imperfect itself, which carves spaces out of larger structures for alternative conventions to incubate. influenced by feminist writer sara ahmed ( ) to do a project that is close to the world we inhabit, this article introduces and welcomes you into our experi- ments with autonomous feminist spaces inside academia. according to ahmed, who resigned from her position at goldsmiths, university of london in protest over the university’s failure to deal with sexual harass- ment, ‘we need to work on the university when we work at the university,’ (‘sara ahmed,’ n.d.). in she published living a feminist life, describing collective feminist strategies to surviving and resisting (ibid; zetterlund et al. ). we are three cis women graduate students in geography in the united states. this article pulls together the rebellious experiences of feminist graduate students who support and care for each other as we subvert the norms of the neoliberal university. as a feminist coven, we praise boldness by having each other’s backs when one of us speaks out. we stubbornly cul- tivate norms of trust, ditching competition, sharing material resources, and collaborating on ideas. our willfulness to love and resist conjures moment- ary, inhabitable spaces, where we dream of alternative futures and nurture our energies for revolutionary change. we won’t settle for the few comforts our professionalization affords us or for promises of respect that may never be fully granted. the success of some of us comes on the backs of our more a. smyth et al. precarious colleagues. we will not leave them behind. our agenda is to shake up academia as long as we can. we imagine others are out there, and we offer this article as an invitation for you to raise your hands. these words can’t tell the whole story or solve the problems and we hope you will start more covens, write articles, and teach us too. we call ourselves a coven because we are conjuring the caring and threatening energy of witches. during the feudal-era before capitalism, witches in europe and the americas held knowledge about health, cared for people, and their spells were a form of extralegal power when margi- nalized people lacked the right to adjudication (schlau ). witches were thus perceived as threatening to the emergence of capitalism and patriarchy. therefore, witch-hunts punished witches and people perceived as witches, disciplined women’s bodies, and ultimately confined women to reproductive work under capitalism (federici ). we call ourselves a coven because we fiercely care for our fellow graduate students, we refuse the current terms that dictate how the university functions, and we mobil- ize on the offensive. what follows is a tour through the feminist coven’s rituals and spaces. first, we describe our methodology, which is rooted in co-theorization and collaborative ethnography. this paper has dozens of authors. the voices of contributors echo through the three empirical sections that follow, illustrat- ing how the feminist coven communicates, works, and imagines. we conclude with a call for feminist graduate students to transform the academy, not by ‘leaning in’ or being practical, but through subversion. a word on theory this article does not have a standard conceptual framework. rather than front-load it with a discussion of scholarly literatures, we put thinkers in con- versation with the voices of graduate students so their ideas intermingle throughout the empirical sections. we pull from a broad range of work across disciplines and outside of academia. this is part of the feminist cov- en’s praxis: intertwining voices to wring new ideas from between their fibers and frazzle the structures that keep them segregated. the section on com- munications is heavily influenced by queer, feminist, and anarchist theory and activism, while the section on labor draws significantly from activist thought and black and feminist re-envisionings of marxism. the section on imaginaries looks toward future possibilities with the help of minor theory and deleuzian becomings. by writing in this manner, we wish to speak not only to experts in a rigorous dialogue about academia, but also to create a space that invites new voices and readers into this conversation about theory, politics, and the academy. gender, place & culture conjuring as method we conjured the feminist coven in spaces of our universities. araby and jess are doctoral candidates at the university of kentucky in the southeastern united states. lauren is a doctoral candidate at the cuny graduate center in new york city, which is part of the largest public urban university system in the united states. the concept of conjuring stems from the view of friend- ship and gossip as political postures, where theory emerges interstitially from wayward conversations between peers (federici ). what we present is a collaboration of graduate students living in the united states, mexico, canada, and the united kingdom. between july and february , we circulated an open-ended online questionnaire via twitter and facebook using the hashtags #feministcoven, #femgeog, and #gradstudents, and received responses from people. the majority of the contributors are women (in this text the words woman/women and man/men refer to any and all people who identify as women and men), though the call for contri- butions stated that we wanted to hear from feminist graduate students, not female graduate students. since the questionnaire was distributed online, its reach was limited to those in and just beyond our own social networks. the responses represent those who felt comfortable sharing their experiences, as well as those who felt that the concept of a coven was applicable to them. it is for these reasons that conclusions from these responses should not be taken as a survey of academia, but as a valuable window into the ways graduate students strategize to enact care and rebellion. although we cannot be certain about why more people didn’t participate, we would like to take a moment to consider possible reasons for silences (gibson-graham ; faria and mollett ; kobayashi ; nast ). the questionnaire was not anonymous. responses had to be emailed, thus revealing the sender’s identity. issues of our own representation factor in, given that we are three cis women in the united states, and the call was cir- culated in english mainly by araby and jess who are white. some of the men wrote in their responses that they initially assumed the project was just for women. we would have loved to receive submissions from more people who are not women, but as a window into one small corner of graduate stu- dent life, we also hope that this project sparks more projects, and we invite others to write about their own covens that begin to speak into the admit- tedly big questions this project leaves unanswered. the questionnaire circulated online as a public google doc, a form of asynchronous online interview, which allowed contributors to receive the link and reply via email to the questions on their own time (o’connor and madge ). first, the questionnaire asked participants for contributions in the form of favorite gifs, memes, and hashtags. these objects are a window into our affective environments; they show how the coven materializes. the a. smyth et al. images from contributors appear throughout the text and are discussed in the section called communications. then, we asked participants to write their reactions to a feminist invoice that we created. the invoice and contrib- utors’ responses to it are in the section called labor. finally, we asked partic- ipants to describe their vision for a home in a hostile world. using these responses, we analyze how contributors think about how they are living now and how they might live in the future in the section called imaginaries. collaborating with peers to reach different networks of graduate students resulted in this project being a piece of collective theory. contributors could not see each other’s content, but as their responses came in, we shared (anonymous) quotes, memes, and gifs online, and circulated early versions of this article via email. more than % of respondents replied with add- itional contributions. the data collection and writing process were influenced by co-theorization and pl�aticas as methodology. co-theorization emphasizes collaboration between researchers and participants at every step of the pro- cess and is a tool for producing knowledge outside the confines of the acad- emy and across activist networks (rappaport ). while also stressing reciprocity between the researcher and researched, pl�aticas is a chicana/ latina feminist methodology that emphasizes how the stories shared in everyday talk are a crucial part of knowledge construction that merge experi- ences in personal and academic spaces (bejarano, carmona, and hamzeh ; fierros and delgado bernal ). in writing this paper, we looked to the fem-mentee collective et al. ( ), who argue for the value of collective biography for analyzing and challenging the individualizing tendencies of neoliberal subject disciplining, as well as cvetkovich’s ( ) call for per- formative writing in the face of daunting hegemonic structures like capital- ism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. the result: in the following three sections on communication, labor, and imaginaries our writing style winds the everyday experiences of graduate students into a chorus, stressing that our experiences in the university are both unique and shared. communication i think that if the coven were here, there would be a way to signal membership … that’s an old feminist and queer tradition isn’t it? handkerchief in the back pocket, flower in the lapel, a badge, a patch, a handshake, a big filthy wink. maybe we could all wear the same perfume, or grow our moustaches and curl them at the tips with wax. maybe we could buzz cut ‘join the fucking union’ into our scalps, and spray paint it across the fucking oil paintings of male academics that seem to asexually reproduce across the campus’ ancient buildings. the coven would be an elaborate everyday performance of secret signs, and the atmosphere of togetherness they create. - contributor the feminist coven’s dms are wide open (dm is short for direct message: private messages sent between users on social media platforms like twitter, gender, place & culture instagram, and facebook). we form groups on whatsapp, signal, facebook, twitter, and instagram. we video chat via facetime, skype, google hangouts, instagram, marcopolo, and facebook. these forums play important roles in our daily emotional and political lives by bringing us together when we are physically alone. in the hallways before oral qualifying exams, during the delirious walk home after defending a proposal, from our desks as we write grants, from the bathroom stalls at conference happy hours, and out- side the classroom during a break, we use these mediums to send signals of solidarity to each other. using autoethnographic methodologies, we analyze data from the digital communications among groups of feminist friends. the content of our mes- sages varies as much as the tone, but something we have noticed is the marked use of affective forms of communication: images and other non- verbal messages (photos, gifs, emojis), as well as tone-setting messages (memes, songs, videos) bring each other into the immediacy of another’s world (sedgwick and frank ; stark and crawford ). in the survey that we circulated online, we asked people to submit the media and hash- tags that they use for coping. we experience with each other as we vent, strategize, and support. this is how we lighten the burden of a heavy day while cultivating emotional bonds and building political subjectivities that turn toward, not away from the struggle - a digitally inflected killjoy survival strategy (ahmed ; mclean, maalsen, and prebble ). unread messages this is what a witch’s phone screen looks like (see figure ): of importance is the blue app in the center called signal, an encrypted messaging application. the number of unread messages in the red notifica- tion badge on signal is a temperature gauge on how one particular coven is doing. twenty-five is a small fire, to means something real is going on: family, professional, or relationship issues, perhaps. but more than that is not normal. this screenshot was taken after we (accidentally) left the messages unread for hours. one witch’s neglect of her phone gave way to a helpful piece of quantitative data. so, what is inside the messages? they follow a trajectory. welcome to the tour. vent are you fucking kidding me? - contributor i often feel like an observer of calamities and idiocy. - contributor the first message touches down, conveying a moment of confusion and con- frontation. we can’t think. we are frozen. #metoo has highlighted the difficult a. smyth et al. settings in which (mostly) women find themselves without warning and only sometimes with a moment to make a potentially career-changing decision. confronted with microaggressions and hostility, we throw up our hands and send the problem off to our covens. the witches respond, some within seconds and others later. one of the benefits of the online group chat is that at least one person is always available. while we are spread across campuses, cities, and countries these technologies bring us together. the responses from everywhere help us to get direction when we are disoriented. figure . iphone screenshot – original. gender, place & culture figure . gold trash bag (j k ). figure . venus de milo (chack ). a. smyth et al. strategize [text messages] help provide affirmation. sometimes i even forward the shitty, petty, exhausting emails i get from fragile ass white men. - contributor when i am super-duper pissed, number one is always the video call. i call a close friend (often too far away to see in person) and i tell them how frustrating the world is. - contributor as the coven responds, notifications light up screens and phones buzz in pockets. two hundred and twenty-three unread messages. a simple text snowballs into an intervention, a rush of care. taken together, the responses offer solutions to the situation that one of us has found themselves in, from a passive aggressive email to a violent memory. nestled between text explanations that offer concrete solutions are various images like the ones in this paper: emojis and memes. these visual objects, or words put in new contexts, are incomplete narratives, but they convey feeling. each is an figure . stay monstrous goddess – original. gender, place & culture ‘affective parcel’ that communicates the mood of the interlocutors, illustrat- ing the tone of the topic being discussed (hardesty, linz, and secor , ). ‘it is from difficult experiences, of being bruised by structures that are not even revealed to others, that we gain the energy to rebel’ (ahmed , ). our communications blast us out of our initial frozen state, redistribut- ing our rage. they help us throw down our bags for others to carry while we muster courage and raise our fists again for another blow. they are our resilience. support < to show solidarity, camaraderie - contributor so much of what we offer friends and on social media is a protrusion, when what we really need to offer them is a shaped void that they are welcomed to fill. we need to create a social medium that allows for the affirmative expression of listening/receiving/accommodating. - contributor recent work in geography has detailed how intimate relationships are not inconsequential sites for political action (pain and staeheli ). as walsh ( ) and wilkinson ( ) show, friendships are essential sites of intimacy that only grow in importance as jobs require more mobility and people com- municate more technologically. according to bunnell et al. ( ), entering an unknown space is easier when we are with our friends. as we theorize the role of digital communication for the feminist coven, we consider the figure . two girls with bunny ears (woman with bunny ears emoji, n.d.). a. smyth et al. way that a friend is with you through their virtual presence in difficult moments. this is especially important for marginalized people as they enter the hostile environment of the academy. within oppressive structures, friend- ships are important sites for politics: they are the source of energy for sur- vival, and they are full of possibility for changing larger structures. friends make uncertainty less uncomfortable (secor and linz ). the texture of our communications builds new orientations for how we act in difficult situa- tions. we consult group threads when we’re not sure whether to be bold or play it safe. in academia, resistance and solidarity through friendship feed one another: feminist killjoys find each other through their rebellion and sus- tain their revolt through the relationships they have found by rebelling. it is a teleological circle. two hundred and twenty-three unread messages are not unwieldy because in a time of stress the words of our friends are pleas- ingly engulfing. therefore, we consider these communications a new form of feminist organizing that fosters friendship, solidarity, and love (clementine and associates from the infinite venom girl gang ; harris-perry ). skeptics might object to our proposal of friendship for subversion. the ‘old boys club,’ after all, is founded in friendship too. we don’t disagree about the potential problems that this poses, and we recommend taking stock of your own power as you consider using these practices in your life. that said, we also envision friendships to work somewhat differently: ones that lovingly chal- lenge us to only use the power of the coven for taking risks that may gain something, not for managing the risks of losing (finney ). in other words, the feminist coven imagines friendships that support taking risks for the strength of the collective, not for maintaining the comforts that hierarchical relationships tend to produce for the individual (willey ; tallbear ). the goal is to cultivate bonds of trust and care so that we can hear criticism and confront our more shameful acts with courage and integrity. labor one contributor describes the problem: who stuffs their face and who brings and cleans up the food, the dishes, the fridge in the department? who decides who is invited and who shuttles guests from airports, trains, and hotels? who shows up for [students] after class, outside the university? … which grievances are properly political, and which are rendered merely complaining? who organizes when abusers of various kinds lash out and who shrugs and walks away? it’s not only that this shit ‘adds up’ (which is part of the performative power of the invoice) but that it also bleeds together in the lives that women, people of color, international, disabled, queer, and indigenous students live and experience and endure in and as the university. - contributor these demands come at us all the time. our attention and time is expected to be available right now and forever, and always for free. gender, place & culture inspired by piepzna-samarasinha’s ( ) call for a fair trade emotional labor economy and the ideas of #giveyourmoneytowomen initiated by chief elk-young bear, lourdes, and smith ( ), we wonder what it would be like if people were compensated for all of their labor. we created what we call a feminist invoice (see figure ), which illustrates different types of unpaid labor and pushes the reader to imagine invoicing and being compensated for it. figure . feminist invoice (smyth, linz, and hudson ). a. smyth et al. while one of our contributors observed that the invoice is a ‘mockery of the calculative logics of capitalism’, and that it might be limited to being simply a reflection of the world as it stands, we push back on the idea that the invoice can be reduced to satire. the invoice draws attention to import- ant gendered and racialized labor inequalities that go beyond the pay gap in the waged workplace and into unrecognized forms of labor that marginal- ized people perform for free. it forces the reader to consider how they do this labor or benefit from it. the invoice is a useful tool for reimagining how work is defined and compensated, and for moving towards a future where power is no longer primarily consolidated in the hands of cis-white, hetero- sexual men. every day is pay day when you add it all up, the pay gap between men and women is staggering. white women’s full-time salaries are around % lower than men’s in the us, and the salaries of women of color and trans women are significantly lower (selenite ). yet, pay raises and more diverse hires alone won’t solve this problem. unmeasured amounts of emotional labor are performed daily and play crucial invisible roles in workplace geographies (mcdowell ). we smile and laugh to ease uncomfortable moments in department meetings, we share our work, we ease anxieties of people in less precarious positions. these daily occurrences are expected of us even if they are not quantified in our evaluations for promotion and do not directly contribute to our own well-being. the feminist invoice experiments with making these extra contributions legible to waged exchanges because with or without pay, emotional labor props up the university system around us (wright ). women are expected to constantly oil relationships and when men imagine that they aren’t receiving the labor they think they deserve, they act indifferent, look elsewhere, cause harm, get irritable and angry, and take it out in aggressive ways. hochschild ( ) argues the gendered emotion work women do in private becomes a mandatory part of public work life, pointing out that while women may not benefit for doing extra labor, they bear a cost for not doing it. of course there are exceptions to these norms: the ‘good men’. however, while not all men demand the labor of women, a common assumption is that all women will provide it automatically. those who work against the expectation of unrecognized and uncompensated labor intentionally do so in order to undermine it. the unequal division of material and emotional labor is still the referent that we are either working against or in service of. gender, place & culture i absolutely love the idea of a feminist invoice. it acknowledges the burden placed on women like my mother, my sister, my friends. they are often asked to give everything and then blamed when they can’t give any more … it’s fucking infuriating. - contributor the amount of emotional and physical labor that women/femmes/female identified people conduct is immediately constructed as altruistic and often detrimental to their status. whereas if the same … was conducted by men/male identified people it bolsters their status. which just fucks me off. - contributor as women experience burnout, blame, and estrangement for not perform- ing the emotional labor demanded of them, men are mostly excused from this kind of duty. to compound this, the aggressive characteristics of self- promotion in academia serve more masculine traits (bagilhole and goode ) while they are maligned in the cultural construction of femininity. salesmanship, careerism, and pushiness look different on bodies that are not cis-white-hetero-male, which makes them less easily classifiable as positive, leaving the othered in a catch- with demands on their shoulders and few avenues for drawing attention to their accomplishments. re-envisioning the invoice in our radical imaginaries for the future, we do not want to reproduce capit- alist relations. however, we are not content to wait for change; we want redistribution that goes in multiple directions right now and we see the invoice as a tool for demanding the material wealth that has been denied to so many. while the invoice is useful, it is also flawed. like the response above, another contributor wrote that the invoice ‘reproduces capitalist and masculinist logics and spreads them into new arenas’. however, capitalism is not all-encompassing and the gender binary is false (gibson-graham ; butler ). leveraging privilege aids revolutionary change (selenite ), so whether in the form of reparations (coates ; robinson ), return- ing stolen lands (finney ; simpson ), giving black trans people money (selenite ), men giving up positions of power in academia (walters ), compensating families impacted by the war on drugs (garza ), or something not yet imagined, shifting wealth around would make dramatic material differences in the lives of millions of people right now, and doesn’t forestall the possibility for a different future. i’m concerned that this chart seems to dualize things only according to what each group does. - contributor who are ’we?’ who are ’they?’ can we have a nonbinary invoice? - contributor every invoice is a binary: services rendered and payment owed. this invoice was written with care to not stress the gender binary and it does not include a. smyth et al. feminine and masculine pronouns, as unequal divisions of labor can exist between people of any gender. the focus is meant to be on tasks and remuner- ation, which is why the invoice is feminist not feminine. however, it is clear that the ‘things we do’ section reads as feminized labor and ‘things they do’ as male beneficiaries. the gendering of labor has historically pushed unpaid and invisible work onto women, and it is a condemnation of our current societies that more men fail to take responsibility: to step up and pay up while simultaneously lean- ing out and forfeiting power (federici ; weeks ; walters ). next project: is there a queerer version of this that could more directly implicate patriarchy and gender binaries in the world’s shittiness? that contains both critique and forward motion? - contributor the labor relations the feminist invoice stages could be both expansive and more specific. - contributor several contributors wrote that they want to print the invoice and hang it everywhere - their workplaces, social spaces, and homes. the invoice is our contribution to the above-mentioned movements against the public/private boundary of where and when social reproductive and emotional labors are vis- ible. what is visible is quantifiable, and therefore valuable (gallant ). acts of emotion management are not private. and we want politics of care and responsibility to be on public display (bergman, montgomery, and alluri ; lawson ; raghuram, madge, and noxolo ; askins and blazek ) so that the people who extract emotional labor without reciprocity must reckon with their positions of power. ‘i want to lay down this work, this burden, and let it be picked up or falter … to forge something new’ writes one contributor. resistance to using the invoice in traditional ways is telling: what we actu- ally seek is the circular return on our invested emotional labor, not flat remu- neration for the execution of a joyless act. we want to stop feeling like we are emptying ourselves into vacuums that swallow our labor and keep it from flowing back into circulation. like nast ( ), we affirm emotional labor as beautiful and life-giving and resist its de-sacralization through quan- tification. we want to explode the need for invoices someday, and for freely gifted care to go in all directions, appreciated by responsible parties who reciprocate ten-fold. for now, the invoice is one step on the path to a more careful future and we look forward to the possibilities it sparks. imaginaries what kind of utopia can come out of these margins, negations, and obscurities? who will even recognize it as a utopia? - le guin ( ) quoted by a contributor another exercise we use is that of imagining a home in a hostile world. dreaming up and building new worlds is work of endurance, kept alive by gender, place & culture the alchemy of slick slippage between the two ends of that process. it is a persistent act of space-time travel out of and back into the known ‘imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy’ (hooks , xv) in search of the otherwise. we follow gloria anzald�ua, the combahee river collective, silvia federici, jk gibson-graham, luce irigaray, ursula le guin, audre lorde, doreen massey, and others who refuse to believe that this world is the best we’ve got. our intention is for the coven to open doors into new imaginaries. beginning in the middle the birth of the feminist coven is by fire. it is coping mechanisms and tem- porary moments of recharge in an abyss. it starts from a less-than-ideal point, somewhere lost in the middle. it is a call to act in new ways as if the future’s already here. using creative tactics, we engage in politics of the impasse that assume no future, use everything within grasp as tools, make homes in temporary spaces, and redefine our power as well as our power- lessness (secor and linz ). these impasse politics build orientations toward imaginaries of being otherwise (berlant ). call up from within you the tone you wish existed. we know that your becoming part of this group was never a personal choice, but we are so glad you’re here. this commune is a matter of survival, but it can be a beautiful survival, and besides, it’s the only way to change, or, in a manner of speaking, to begin to choose. so let us help one another survive in delightful and tantalizing and loving ways. - contributor childless and forty, i didn’t plan it this way. this is where i am. - haiku from a contributor the imaginaries of the feminist coven are a deleuzian becoming that begins in the middle (deleuze and guattari ; mott a). there are so many entrances into the coven - it may even be entered without notice. it might be shocking, cathartic, desperate, full of rage, soaked in tears, or it might happen quietly without fanfare. it’s the realization that this world won’t work and things have got to change. dire need is what conjures the coven out of thin air. refuge in a hostile world for some bodies engaging in theory about those (particular) bodies, the learning process is difficult not only because learning theory can be a goddamn chore. there is also the additional work of feeling it (trapping or freeing, depressing or a. smyth et al. hopeful) because of one’s particular personal connection to the material. my [coven] is a place to unwind. to relax. to release, at least in part, from learning, processing, remembering and reflecting. it’s a place to share collective moments of joy and spontaneity … taking a break from material that affects me. - contributor batteries can’t recharge on their own. the subversion and rebirth of the academy takes everything we’ve got and recuperation is necessary, but the temporary home we make to fend off the spikes of the world’s hostility is not one of escapism. it is a comforting space for nursing wounds, soothing aches, building each other up, gaining strength to lean into the trouble rather than away from it (haraway ). we sit on the back stoop, pouring cups of tea and shots of whiskey. we talk about things and we go back to work. women who have encouraged me to be more outspoken and bold in my feminisms. women who do brilliant work, but also share their self-doubts. women who scream at the night sky and venture into fields before dawn to see the moon. women who dance – not dance like nobody is watching, but dance like everybody is watching because why the fuck not. women who make me feel welcome. women who make me feel not alone. these women, and these ideas of community, are what have propelled me through this last year of graduate school. - contributor being the problem this is a beautiful scene: people being bold, caring, jumping back in the ring like feisty boxers. but what does it mean? in some ways, it’s not com- plicated. from the community norms written by a contributor, rule # says, ‘if you are handed a baby, please hold it and play with it, it is very normal as child-rearing activities are often shared’. mothers are often denied access to important adult social and professional spaces (johnson ). we hope to see many more babies being held by our colleagues in depart- ment meetings, seminars, and conference rooms because mothers are in academia. they are our friends, teachers, students, and collaborators. but even this simple act may be met with incredible resistance, so how do we bring the force in a hostile world? one contributor shared her practice of literally embodying ahmed’s wall ( ) on the campus sidewalks of her university. walking around campus, i began to move straight down my side of the sidewalk without adjusting my body to accommodate anyone walking the opposite direction. this meant that people, mostly men, would physically run into me – most often a side swipe, but sometimes a full on running into … occasionally, if it seems like a person is not going to make any room for me, i just stop walking, bend my knees and brace for the hit, so that it is clear to the person that he ran into me. men usually seem pretty apologetic and confused when this happens, like they actually just didn’t see me there, right in front of them. most of the time, i gender, place & culture don’t like being run into, but if i’m in the right mood it can feel great. it makes physical the many frustrations that i often keep either in my head or in stayed, rational critiques. - contributor refusal to sidestep the crash takes practice and is mostly unpleasant. our accommodations of the unaware enables their ways of being in the world. being a wall is a corporeal manifestation of the conceptual work that the feminist coven does on those long days in the academy. we brace our knees for the hit, and most of the time it sucks, but sometimes it can feel great. the shelter of the feminist coven is what gives us the strength to go back out to the sidewalk and brace our knees another day. our minor practices of being walls on the sidewalk translates to not accommodating the abrasive flow in seminar rooms, conferences, and office hallways. we practice squaring our stance in conversations that otherwise sideswipe us. this is not easy; many of us were trained our entire lives to get out of the way. but minor opposition wears on dominant orders, unsettling them, opening new possibility (faria ). you might be thinking this is a dangerous proposition and not everybody has the strength, privilege, and heft to take every blow. we agree fully. it’s important to choose your battles wisely, and we don’t purport to believe we can all go charging through every obstacle that comes hurdling our way. we do suggest that the feminist coven will have your back if you test to see what bounces off you. small moments of spontaneous resistance are very important, but we are also interested in the planned ways that work can be done institutionally to make structural changes. i want grad student squats. i want grad student unions to force tenured faculty to purchase homes and provide rent-free living. i want grad student unions period. i want to rebuild the monastery as a territorial/academic form that preserves knowledge through economic and ecological collapse. i want intergenerational ‘men dealing with our shit’ collectives on every campus. – contributor what if graduate students stopped trying to eke out a living on our near- poverty wages and we moved into abandoned buildings or the buildings under construction on our campuses? what if faculty and administrators donated a percentage of their wages towards purchasing graduate student housing for permanent use? this might seem absurd, but so is living under our current circumstances. other structural changes seem easier than getting people to turn over their wallets, but we want to question that notion. as the #metoo movement blasted its way into academia, mott ( b) tweeted ideas for beginning to make change (see figure ). we wait with bated breath for our colleagues to take up her suggestions. a. smyth et al. mott’s thread suggests beginning by reading kelsky’s spreadsheet ( ), moves on to listening, making reading groups, and doing the work of seeing oppression that does not affect you personally. she shares nine simple ways men can pragmatically take action. this is the other side of bracing for the sidewalk blow: men teaching each other to walk without running into women. will they do it? they have liked and retweeted mott’s tweet, but have they inaugurated any reading groups? imagining this kind of traction is much like imagining administrations supporting graduate student squats, therefore we reiterate: this might seem absurd, but so is living under our current circumstances. people with power are increasingly calling for their tenured peers to take the lead in changing higher education, to step out figure . carrie mott twitter screenshot (mott b). gender, place & culture of line, find the current conditions intolerable themselves, and put their comforts at risk to change them (mohanty ; oluo ; oswin ). the power of the coven we’re visible. we would cause raucous. - contributor our power comes from the ability to cry for others. - contributor there is the potential to live in badassness everyday. - contributor my feminist coven involves a world where women run the nobel committee (see figure ), so i’ve photoshopped the faces of women scientists over the men on the committee. i was angry when i started this project, but now i’m livid with the amount of time it’s taken me to do this because there are so many men to erase. - contributor what makes the feminist coven unique is that it is not only powerful, it is emotive. it is fun, sentimental, elegant; it does politics differently. it does the hard work of being a wall, being a killjoy, being angry and unhappy, being sticky and full of energizing friction. in that sense, we really do become the wall. we don’t perform wall. a wall walls effortlessly, and this is what the feminist coven gives to the long fight to subvert the university. the coven absorbs and redirects the friction of not fitting in context and alchemizes it into fuel. these are minor tools for minor politics (katz ). minor theory is a major threat. figure . nobel committee – original. a. smyth et al. conclusion: be there for each other the feminist coven is a call for people to face the catastrophe of the univer- sity together and reject its spurious terms of play. the time for respectability politics, patience, and practicality is over. be hideous in the face of patriarchy and protect each other when it strikes back. make unreasonable demands that push past the solutions we are used to. abandon appropriate behavior: be loud, disruptive, impatient, and impractical. at the same time that the feminist coven is a cry for fierce and creative new forms of resistance, it is also a call to fall in love with your friends and colleagues. ferocity requires muster, so make time to feed and com- fort one another to banish loneliness and isolation. back each other up when the guardians of the academy dare to discipline us away from illegible forms of care. the feminist coven is ‘redefining, restructuring, and creating new languages … it’s falling in love with your best friend and then redefining what that love means and looks like’ writes a con- tributor. make new spaces where rebels construct the discourse. we must be loud enough to expose the secrets of our departments and institu- tions, and strong enough to protect the speakers. if we are going to make it through what universities … are becoming, i think we’re going to have to do work around reimagining what relationships mean, and build new ways to support each other. - contributor be there for each other because shit is hard enough in grad school. - contributor assemble each other in new non-hierarchical relations to subvert the norms of thought and action. send feminist invoices. burn your student loan notices, campus parking tickets, and wack peer reviews. acquire and recog- nize new public engagement skills for your cv like spray-painting, skate- boarding, and wheat pasting. gather a crew and drive out to a vacant field to watch the full moon fade at dawn. if we wait until the work is done or we’ve achieved a more secure status, we’ll lose half of those on the road with us. let’s live with our beloved friends in the glimpses of a radical future that we create where we are in this very moment. as we change minor spaces, we transform the major along with them (katz ). as we hand babies to our colleagues in meetings, kiss our friends and brace our knees when it’s clear that we are going unseen, we are becoming coven, bringing it to the here and now. as both a theoretical space and real, material relationships, the coven cultivates a caring and threatening force powerful enough, we hope, to challenge the dehumanizing practices of the academy. so when you hang your head on the shoulder of the road where you didn’t mean to stop at all, lift your chin, dear academic. the feminist coven gender, place & culture begins exactly where you wouldn’t expect anything to begin. from this in- between we conjure new imaginaries. keep your eyes peeled. we out here. acknowledgements we would like to thank tad mutersbaugh, marianna pavlovskaya, sue roberts, and anna secor for their unwavering support. we are grateful to the dozens of people who contrib- uted ideas to the feminist coven and provided encouragement and critique at various stages of the project. to those who live the essence of the feminist coven and who have inspired us to write about these practices, we are indebted. we hope this work invites kindred spirits into the fold. finally, we thank katherine brickell and three anonymous reviewers at gpc for their feedback. disclosure statement there are no conflicts of interest involved in this research. funding this research was not supported by any grants or awards. supplemental online material this research includes associated materials that are located online. please see the follow- ing url: a call for contributions to the project “a feminist coven in the university”: https://docs. google.com/document/d/ opw lgwi wecfysyk krqw wvkjw qkg twizfpw g/edit notes on contributors araby smyth (phd candidate in geography at university of kentucky) is a feminist eco- nomic geographer broadly interested in the gendered dimensions of economic and polit- ical practices. her dissertation examines the impact of migration and remittances on family networks and women’s political participation in oaxaca, mexico. her master’s research on the solidarity practices of remittance sending among mexican immigrants in new york city was published in geoforum ( ). jess linz (phd candidate in geography at university of kentucky) is an urban geographer studying residential displacement in mexico city, where gentrification and earthquakes coincide to reduce housing availability. her research examines displacement on affective terms, with an aim of understanding the orientations and attachments that underpin log- ics of development and play a role in how activists, developers, and the state negotiate struggles over limited urban space in the wake of the earthquake. lauren taylor hudson (phd candidate in earth and environmental sciences at the cuny graduate center) is an urban geographer who writes about anti-capitalist organizing among women in new york city. her dissertation research focuses on how collective work between women changes the urban landscape, ultimately creating a sense of a. smyth et al. https://docs.google.com/document/d/ opw lgwi wecfysyk krqw wvkjw qkg twizfpw g/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/ opw lgwi wecfysyk krqw wvkjw qkg twizfpw g/edit ‘movement space’ for solidarity economy practitioners. she is also a 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references smyth, araby, jess linz, and lauren hudson. . “a feminist invoice.” may , . https://docs.google.com/document/d/ vdqjjhbadmklrssqktx laoz o fg jvwpcomq ebo/edit. chack, erin. . “guy: where’s my hug me:” tweet. @erinchack. september , . https://twitter.com/erinchack/status/ . j k. . “are you a golden bag of trash?” observations (blog). august , . https:// medium.com/irregardless/are-you-a-golden-bag-of-trash- cb d . mott, carrie. b. “how can this be done? i offer several suggestions:” tweet. @mott_carrie. december , . https://twitter.com/mott_carrie/status/ . woman with bunny ears emoji. n.d. unicode . emoji . , filed . https://emoji- pedia.org/woman-with-bunny-ears/. gender, place & culture https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://docs.google.com/document/d/ vdqjjhbadmklrssqktx laoz o fg jvwpcomq ebo/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/ vdqjjhbadmklrssqktx laoz o fg jvwpcomq ebo/edit https://twitter.com/erinchack/status/ https://medium.com/irregardless/are-you-a-golden-bag-of-trash- cb d https://medium.com/irregardless/are-you-a-golden-bag-of-trash- cb d https://twitter.com/mott_carrie/status/ https://twitter.com/mott_carrie/status/ https://emojipedia.org/woman-with-bunny-ears/ https://emojipedia.org/woman-with-bunny-ears/ 	abstract 	introduction 	a word on theory 	conjuring as method 	communication 	 unread messages 	vent 	strategize 	support 	labor 	every day is pay day 	re-envisioning the invoice 	imaginaries 	beginning in the middle 	refuge in a hostile world 	being the problem 	the power of the coven 	conclusion: be there for each other 	acknowledgements 	disclosure statement 	funding 	supplemental online material 	references 	figure references #metoo: the role and power of bystanders (aka us) editorial #metoo: the role and power of bystanders (aka us) rashi aggarwal & adam m. brenner received: december /accepted: december /published online: december # academic psychiatry the medical profession is not immune to the phenomenon of sexual violence [ – ]. more than % of women faculty and students in medicine have reported being sexually harassed [ , ]. we in medicine have been aware of gender discrimination and the differential when it comes to salaries, promotions, funding, and publications for some time now [ – ]. the #metoo movement [ ], however, served as a catalyst for the outpouring of call-for-action commentaries [ – ] and the sharing of personal stories about sexual harassment in our workplaces [ – ]. it is clear that we have not done enough to address sexual harassment in our profession. in the february issue of academic psychiatry, four articles examine different aspects of sexual harassment. mcadams [ ] shares a personal account of being sexually harassed as a trainee and describes the trauma and growth from the lens of a psychiatrist who now works with patients who are survivors of abuse. michael et al. [ ] highlight both the high prevalence of inappropriate sexual behavior of pa- tients toward trainees and the lack of training on how to handle such behavior. coverdale et al. [ ] discuss that sexual vio- lence against women with psychiatric disorders has been miss- ing from the conversations related to #metoo. finally, wainberg et al. [ ] propose that a takeaway lesson from the #metoo movement is to teach about sexuality as a mental and physical health issue. these articles shine a light on the fact that we in medicine might have been naïve in thinking that we are less susceptible to the problem, but if one looks at the underlying circum- stances that favor sexual harassment, such as gender imbal- ances, uneven power structures, and promotional tracks, they are clearly present in medicine [ , , ]. attending physicians and senior leadership hold tremendous power over trainees and junior faculty. many of the reports about sexual harassment are from trainees (current or former), although sexual discrimination permeates medicine at all levels [ , , , ]. we must recognize that our professional environment is not that different from other professional environments and therefore is subject to similar issues. corporate america is taking action to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace, and medicine can follow its lead and take similar actions. in , the supreme court put forth the title vii standards of employer liability for supervisors’ conduct in sexual harassment hostile environment cases [ ], clarify- ing that to avoid liability, organizations must train their em- ployees on their anti-harassment policies. harassment and dis- crimination training programs have been rolled out across workplaces to different degrees. it is unclear how effective they are because while it is one thing to educate people about harassment, it is another to facilitate the reporting of harass- ment in a safe manner and yet another to actually follow through and address the concerns. unfortunately, some work- place training programs are not only ineffective but may ac- tually be detrimental [ , , , , ]. the #nowwhat movement [ ] is a follow up to #metoo and aims to bring into the open the discussion about how to address and prevent sexual harassment. wide-scale, compre- hensive reforms to reduce sexual harassment in medicine have been proposed [ , , ]. the medical field is based on mea- surement and observability. if we bring the same rigor that we apply to medical research to this issue, we can implement programs that are actually effective at combating sexual ha- rassment. we will be successful if we commit to eliminating harassment from our workplaces. it will not happen if, instead, we only commit to meeting legal standards to reduce work- place liability. one prominent aspect of wide-scale organizational changes that has not received as much attention in medicine but has proven to be highly successful elsewhere is bystander inter- vention [ – ]. members of academic departments should all be educated about the reporting requirements of their insti- tution and any legal reporting obligations that may be specific to their local or state environment. these requirements can vary by institution, by jurisdiction, and over time. for * rashi aggarwal rashi.aggarwal@rutgers.edu rutgers new jersey medical school, newark, nj, usa university of texas southwestern medical center, dallas, tx, usa academic psychiatry ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:rashi.aggarwal@rutgers.edu example, texas recently tightened its reporting requirements for all employees of state universities [ ]. in this editorial, we highlight bystander intervention since it is the single most effective evidence-based intervention and can help change the culture and potentially have wide scale impact. definitions first, here are some definitions of terms we are using in our editorial. sexual harassment sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, re- quests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harass- ment of a sexual nature in the workplace or learning environ- ment [ ]. victim/survivor a victim or survivor is the person at the receiving end of sexually harassing behavior. we use the term survivor in this editorial because for many women physicians the narrative of being a victim does not align with being a physician leader. the perspective in this issue [ ] highlights this viewpoint. perpetrator a perpetrator is the person who initiates sexually harassing behavior. bystander a bystander is a person who is present when an event takes place but is not directly involved. bystanders might be present when sexual assault or abuse occurs, or they could witness the circumstances leading up to these occurrences. for example, if a person makes a sexually suggestive joke about women in general, the person who makes the joke is the perpetrator of sexual harassment, the women present are the survivors, and everyone other than the perpetrator is a bystander. why do bystanders play an important role? there are a small number of perpetrators of sexual harass- ment, a relatively large number of survivors, and a larger number of bystanders. the above definitions drive home that last fact: anyone who witnesses the circumstances leading up to an unwelcome sexual advance or who is present when a negative comment about women as a group is made is a by- stander. in any given sexual harassment situation, therefore, there are likely to be a large number of bystanders. here is where the importance of the bystander comes in, both posi- tively and negatively. perspective articles [ – ] about sexual harassment al- most always refer to the presence of peers and colleagues (bystanders) during sexual harassment situations. it is very troubling to read of instances when bystanders invalidated the survivors [ ]. it is one of the most potentially negative influences of bystanders: not only do they witness the occur- rence, but also they may actually dismiss it, absolve the per- petrator, and put the blame on the survivor. bystander intervention training has proven effective on college campuses [ , ] but has not been widely implement- ed in medicine. in the sections below, we discuss why by- standers may not intervene and what they can do to help. once people understand how they can help and that helping does not necessarily require confronting or reporting the per- petrator, they may be more likely to intervene. further, train- ing and learning from examples might give us the confidence to start a dialog about the prevalence of sexual harassment in our workplaces and how to prevent it. why do bystanders not intervene? barriers to bystander intervention fall into three categories: ( ) not recognizing that help is needed; ( ) not knowing how to help; and ( ) worrying that helping will result in negative consequences to self and the accused. not recognizing help is needed the first barrier to bystander intervention, not recognizing help is needed, is essentially a reflection of the cultural cli- mate. it includes not recognizing situations where harassment is taking place, not recognizing something inappropriate as inappropriate and a form of sexual harassment, and not feeling a responsibility to intervene [ – ]. this lack of identifica- tion of problematic behavior may be a reflection of personal beliefs, based on stereotypes about sexual violence, or due to lack of knowledge about the wide scale prevalence of sexual harassment in one’s community [ , ]. the bystander also may not understand the intent of the perpetrator and default to innocence. the bystander may not understand the impact of the perpetrated act on the survivor or not understand the survivor’s underlying intent. for exam- ple, if a perpetrator makes a sexually suggestive comment, it may be viewed as a joke and also may not be clear to a bystander if there is an underlying relationship between the perpetrator and the survivor that makes the joke acceptable. the perspective by jagsi [ ] led to comments posted by women physicians who recounted personal experiences of sexual harassment. one describes how when the woman acad psychiatry ( ) : – shared an incident with a male colleague, he laughed because he thought that the inappropriate behavior of the intoxicated colleague-perpetrator was funny. to adequately address the barrier of not recognizing sexual harassment, one of the first steps, as proposed by wainberg et al. in this issue [ ], is to discuss and teach about sexuality, especially during psychiatry residency, as a health and a men- tal health issue. making sexuality a topic that is openly discussed in the medical community can be a good starting place. education should ideally also include the data and facts about sexual violence against women at large, against women with psychiatric disorders [ ], and against trainees and col- leagues. in addition, education should include open and hon- est dialog about changing norms [ ]. one of the negative reactions to the #metoo movement has been concerned about what is acceptable, leading some to distance themselves from interactions with people of other genders as a protective measure [ , ]. the reaction may seem exaggerated, but it highlights the need for dialog about societal norms, power differentials, and the varying signifi- cance of situations to different people. recognizing the mis- match in perceptions of a situation between a person with power and a person without power is essential to recognizing the difference between harassment and simple collegial inter- actions [ , , , ]. here is a simple guideline: if you find yourself making an excuse for someone’s behavior by saying, “they didn’t mean anything by that” or “oh, they are harm- less” or “they were just joking,” it may be time to stop and think if you are absolving a perpetrator and invalidating a survivor. not knowing how to help the second barrier to bystander intervention is not knowing how to help or feeling helpless in a problematic situation [ , ]. the first step to overcoming this barrier is to know the legal and institutional requirements for reporting sexual ha- rassment, the prescribed steps to follow, and any possible pen- alties or liabilities from failing to report. a bystander who may recognize sexual harassment may not know how to intervene. studies have found that a large number of people do not know what to do [ , ] and want guidance about what to do [ ]. reports from survivors [ , ] show that well-intentioned friends and colleagues might actually make unhelpful sugges- tions and comments that increase the difficulty of coping and recovery, whereas a helping hand by an observer may diffuse a situation and protect the survivor [ ]. we believe that this feeling of helplessness might be one explanation for the lack of preparedness of psychiatry trainees to address inappropriate sexual behavior by patients as report- ed by michael et al. in this issue [ ]. they found a very high prevalence of sexual harassment from patients toward trainees. echoing the findings from studies outside medicine, % of the trainees wanted training on how to manage harassing behavior from patients. sadly, only % of the trainees in the sample consistently sought help after such en- counters; most chose to not do so. the study found that % of the trainees had received no teaching either in a classroom setting or by supervisors on how to handle inappropriate be- havior from patients. this finding is not surprising because most faculty have never received such training. however, as we will see in the subsequent section, simply talking about the problem is a powerful form of intervention. worrying about consequences the third barrier to bystander intervention is concern about the impact of intervention to self and the perpetrator. even if by- standers recognize that an act is inappropriate, they may not be willing to take action such as reporting it to a third party. reporting inappropriate behavior can carry with it the fear of retaliation, both overt and covert [ ]. a large number of women choose not to report sexual harassment because of the fear of the consequences of reporting [ , – ]. in an aca- demic environment where people in power can both directly and indirectly (e.g., via negative comments) impact someone’s career, the fear of retaliation holds for both survivors and bystanders. unless the workplace leadership is serious about and committed to addressing sexual harassment in a way that protects the survivors and bystanders, reporting inappropriate behavior may come back to haunt the survivor or reporting bystander. lack of clarity about the consequence of reporting inappropriate behavior can be a powerful deterrent too. clear organizational policies of zero tolerance with a culture and climate of follow-through result in a significant increase in the willingness of survivors and bystanders to report sexual harassment [ ]. we also may not want to label peers or colleagues as per- petrators because of the potential impact to them. if we wit- ness a single inappropriate act, or even a few inappropriate acts, it may be easier to let the act(s) slide than to potentially incriminate someone we know or work with [ ]. statistics show, however, that the downstream impact of reporting sex- ual harassment is typically extremely negative for survivors and almost always negligible for perpetrators [ , , , ]. furthermore, studies have found rates of false reports of sex- ual assault between and % [ ], whereas a survey found that only % of rapes and sexual assaults were actually reported to the police [ ]. thus, it is much, much more likely that someone will simply not report sexual harassment than make up false accusations. a person coming forward with a complaint likely means that the person has been receiving such a significant amount of inappropriate behavior that the person is finally willing to risk very negative professional impact to report it. the least we can do as humans and colleagues is to take the person seriously. acad psychiatry ( ) : – the sad reality is that we probably do not have to worry about our perpetrator-colleague; often, no action will be taken against the person, even if guilty, and the person will most likely escape unscathed [ , , , ]. what can bystanders do? bystander intervention training addresses the issues raised in the barriers to bystander intervention section above. various trainings and models exist [ – ] and have similar princi- ples. along with any potential mandated reporting, bystanders can help in one or more of the following three ways: ( ) diffuse the situation; ( ) empathize with and support the sur- vivor; and ( ) directly address the perpetrator. diffuse the situation the first intervention is to distract the survivor or perpetrator or diffuse the situation. a bystander who observes that some- one appears to be uncomfortable in a situation can step in to distract the perpetrator. this does not require an overt inter- vention, which can feel intimidating, but it can be as simple as changing the subject, interrupting the encounter, or distracting the survivor or perpetrator with a side conversation. another option is to engage the person who appears harassed and help the person leave the situation [ ]. social events lend them- selves more to this form of intervention. a woman astronomer, having gone through the repeated experiences of being harassed at conferences, formed an or- ganization called astronomy allies [ ]. members are poten- tial bystanders who have volunteered to help. they follow the lead of the survivor, whether simply to be an empathic ear or a distracter or a diffuser of an inappropriate situation or an ally to help someone get out of an inappropriate situation. they are not active reporters or enforcers; they are there to listen and provide safety. members wear an “ally” badge, providing potential harassers a reminder that harassment is not welcome and assuring everyone else that they have an ally nearby. bystanders play an important role in everyday workplace encounters and situations, such as when someone makes de- meaning or derogatory comments toward a specific gender or race. addressing these micro-insults and micro-invalidations directly or indirectly can prevent an accumulation of insults to the survivors or intended groups. addressing them might also prevent macro-assaults by changing what is acceptable in the culture [ , ]. support the survivor the second intervention is to empathize with and support the survivor. when a survivor talks about a situation or situations, simply be present and listen actively. if the situation is actively occurring, let the survivor tell you what is needed. if it is not an active, acute situation or when a survivor is willing to share, listening to the survivor and validating the concern is of par- amount importance. validating the survivor’s experience does not mean judging the perpetrator. being present for our col- leagues the way we are trained to be present for our patients is an important gift that has been described by many survivors [ – ]. address the perpetrator the third intervention is probably the most difficult. it is to directly confront the perpetrator during a sexual harassment encounter. some of the strategies recommended by the national sexual violence resource center include being re- spectful but honestly labeling what is being seen [ ]. for example, you can say, “what you just said made me uncom- fortable” or “that did not sound appropriate to me.” a by- stander who does not belong to the target group being harassed, while possibly feeling uncomfortable, is still in a stronger and safer position to speak up than the targeted person. what can you and i do? it can be difficult to acknowledge that we live in a society where in women and in men are raped at some point in their lives [ ], that the perpetrator is usually not a stranger [ ] and that % of rapes occur at work [ ]. as recently as [ ], a survey found that % of women and % of men reported sexual harassment at work. it may be tempting to wonder in what workplaces such incidents occur (“they certainly cannot be any like ours”). in fact, academic work- places have the second highest rate of sexual harassment, sec- ond only to the military [ ]. one of us (ra) has spoken ex- tensively about gender and leadership in medicine and psychi- atry, and what brought these facts home for both of us was the perspective published in this issue that describes how sexual assault was experienced by one of our own—our colleague— while she was in training [ ]. that is why each of these stories, while difficult to tell and difficult to read, is an essen- tial part of the #metoo movement in medicine and psychiatry. much of the discussion about bystander intervention is gen- erally applicable and not limited to the field of medicine. we bring the conversation to medicine and psychiatry because hu- man health and behavior are our very job. the #metoo move- ment shone a light into our backyard and what we found is not flattering. we understand human beings; we understand sexu- ality, power dynamics, biases, emotions, and feelings. yet, we have fallen short in protecting our own and those we serve. yes, we need organizational changes and interventions, but we can also bring about change as individuals much more directly—by acad psychiatry ( ) : – recognizing power dynamics, by realizing that in most inappro- priate situations we may be bystanders and, therefore, we have the power to reduce and eliminate sexual harassment. we have to accept and be prepared for our roles as bystanders. the more we do, the easier it becomes. studies have found that an in- crease in confidence in their skills leads to an increase in the likelihood of bystanders intervening [ , ]. we can extend the individual responsibility and take it on in our professional societies. if at each meeting, conference, or social event, we follow the example set by astronomy allies [ ], we will not have to wait for our individual workplace organizations to take action—we can bring about the change to the culture of medicine ourselves. we hope that the articles in this issue of the journal inspire our readers to be open to the presence of sexual harassment in our field. and we hope that you choose to do something about it as individuals. further, we hope that the articles inspire you to bring the hallmark of our profession—scientific inquiry— to better understand sexual harassment in our field and find solutions to eliminate it. compliance with ethical standards disclosures on behalf of both authors, the corresponding author states that there are no conflicts of interest. references . the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine. consensus study report. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. washington, dc: the national academies press; . https://doi.org/ . / . available at accessed december . fnais n, soobiah c, chen m, lillie e, perrier l, tashkhandi m, et al. harassment and discrimination in medical 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/publications_nsvrc_tip-sheet_bystander-intervention-tips-and-strategies_ .pdf https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/ - /publications_nsvrc_tip-sheet_bystander-intervention-tips-and-strategies_ .pdf https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/ - /publications_nsvrc_tip-sheet_bystander-intervention-tips-and-strategies_ .pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv .pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv .pdf https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/metoo/ https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/metoo/ https://rainn.org/articles/steps-you-can-take-prevent-sexual-assault?_ga= . . . - . https://rainn.org/articles/steps-you-can-take-prevent-sexual-assault?_ga= . . . - . https://rainn.org/articles/steps-you-can-take-prevent-sexual-assault?_ga= . . . - . https://oavi.tcnj.edu/green-dot/the- -ds-of-bystander-intervention/ https://oavi.tcnj.edu/green-dot/the- -ds-of-bystander-intervention/ http://www.astronomyallies.com/astronomy_allies/welcome.html http://www.astronomyallies.com/astronomy_allies/welcome.html http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report -a.pdf% http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report -a.pdf% https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vw .pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vw .pdf http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace-metoo-women-men-and-the-gig-economy- . . - .pdf http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace-metoo-women-men-and-the-gig-economy- . . - .pdf http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace-metoo-women-men-and-the-gig-economy- . . - .pdf http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace-metoo-women-men-and-the-gig-economy- . . - .pdf 	#metoo: the role and power of bystanders (aka us) 	definitions 	sexual harassment 	victim/survivor 	perpetrator 	bystander 	why do bystanders play an important role? 	why do bystanders not intervene? 	not recognizing help is needed 	not knowing how to help 	worrying about consequences 	what can bystanders do? 	diffuse the situation 	support the survivor 	address the perpetrator 	what can you and i do? 	references _ - .indd a quarterly review of new music editorial: how do we know what we know? introduction: towards gender diversity in new music practice louise devenish feministing free improvisation hannah reardon-smith, louise denson and vanessa tomlinson from the other side: feminist aesthetics in australian musicology talisha goh teaching tertiary music in the #metoo era louise devenish, cecilia sun, cat hope and vanessa tomlinson content targets work: a practical example of changing behaviours and processes in programming women composers naomi johnson and matthew dewey towards the summers night: a mentoring project for australian composers identifying as women cat hope, nat grant, gabriella smart and tristen parr reclaiming the performer’s voice and body in musical analysis phoebe green of body, of emotion: a toolkit for transformative sound use shoshana rosenberg and hannah reardon-smith pixercise: piccolo performance practice, exercise and female body image kathryn williams reviews: first performances, cds, and books profile: andrew ford artwork: larry goves vol. no. - april issn - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core editor christopher fox tempoeditor@cambridge.org reviews editor heather roche temporeviewseditor@gmail.com advertising email (uk and rest of the world) ad_sales@cambridge.org email (us) usadsales@cambridge.org subscription enquiries tel: email: journals@cambridge.org advisory board amy c. beal university of california, santa cruz, usa davinia caddy university of auckland, new zealand jonathan cross university of oxford, uk mark delaere ku leuven, belgium kyle gann bard college, usa james gardner auckland, new zealand gisela gronemeyer cologne, germany anna höstman toronto, canada peter hill university of sheffield, uk nicholas jones cardiff university, uk gerard mcburney london, uk françois-bernard mâche paris, france olivia mattis huntingdon, new york, usa david metzer university of british columbia, canada tim rutherford-johnson london, uk howard skempton leamington spa, uk mission statement as a ‘quarterly review of new music’, tempo exists to document the international new music scene while contributing to, and stimulating, current debates therein. its emphasis is on musical developments in our own century, as well as on music that came to prominence in the later twentieth century that has not yet received the attention it deserves. subscriptions tempo (issn - ) is published four times a year in january, april, july and 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improvisation hannah reardon-smith, louise denson and vanessa tomlinson from the other side: feminist aesthetics in australian musicology talisha goh teaching tertiary music in the #metoo era louise devenish, cecilia sun, cat hope and vanessa tomlinson content targets work: a practical example of changing behaviours and processes in programming women composers naomi johnson and matthew dewey towards the summers night: a mentoring project for australian composers identifying as women cat hope, nat grant, gabriella smart and tristen parr reclaiming the performer’s voice and body in musical analysis phoebe green of body, of emotion: a toolkit for transformative sound use shoshana rosenberg and hannah reardon-smith pixercise: piccolo performance practice, exercise and female body image kathryn williams https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core first performances deutsche oper berlin: chaya czernowin, heart chamber edmund hunt wiener konzerthaus: klangforum wien roger heaton new york city: for/with; the story of one of my follies ian power hcmf//: ellen arkbro, marcus pal, claudia molitor sam ridout hcmf//: georgia rodgers alex de little hcmf//: hanna hartman max erwin cds and dvds rebecka sofia ahvenniemi: tacit-citat-ion george k. haggett kaija saariaho: graal théâtre, circle map, neiges, vers toi qui es si loin caroline potter malin bång: structures of light and spruce neil t. smith maija hynninen: dawn breaks alex huddleston ben melsky: ben melsky alex huddleston joanna bailie: artificial environments thierry tidrow wolfgang von schweinitz: klang ian power books collaborative and distributed processes in contemporary music-making by lauren redhead and richard glover jessica aszodi artwork: larry goves profile: andrew ford contributors corrigendum https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	ofc.pdf 	ifc.pdf 	tem_ _ _contents.pdf frontiers | a needs-based support for #metoo: power and morality needs shape women’s and men’s support of the campaign | psychology impact factor . | citescore . more on impact › 	 frontiers in psychology 	 gender, sex and sexualities toggle navigation section 	 (current)section 	 about 	 articles 	 research topics 	 for authors 	why submit? 	fees 	article types 	author guidelines 	review guidelines 	submission checklist 	contact editorial office 	submit your manuscript 	 editorial board 	 	 	 article alerts articles edited by natasza kosakowska-berezecka university of gdansk, poland reviewed by georgios papanicolaou teesside university, united kingdom soledad de lemus university of granada, spain the editor and reviewers' affiliations are the latest provided on their loop research profiles and may not reflect their situation at the time of review. table of contents 	 	abstract 	introduction 	research question and hypotheses 	the present research 	discussion 	conclusions and practical implications 	data availability statement 	ethics statement 	author contributions 	funding 	conflict of interest 	supplementary material 	references 	appendix suggest a research topic > 	 download article 	 download pdf 	 readcube 	 epub 	 xml (nlm) 	 supplementary material 	 export citation 	 endnote 	 reference manager 	 simple text file 	 bibtex 	 total views 	 view article impact suggest a research topic > share on 	 	 	 	 open supplemental data original research article front. psychol., march | https://doi.org/ . /fpsyg. . a needs-based support for #metoo: power and morality needs shape women’s and men’s support of the campaign anna kende *, boglárka nyúl , , nóra anna lantos , márton hadarics , diana petlitski , judith kehl and nurit shnabel 	 department of social psychology, elte eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary 	 doctoral school of psychology, elte eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary 	 the school of psychological sciences, tel aviv university, tel aviv, israel 	 department of psychology, university of osnabrück, osnabrück, germany the #metoo campaign mobilized millions of women around the world to draw attention to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment. we conducted an online survey in hungary (n = , ) immediately at the campaign’s onset, and two subsequent studies in israel and germany (ns = , ) after it peaked, to reveal the motivations underlying people’s support for, or criticism of the campaign. integrating the assumptions of the needs-based model of reconciliation and system justification theory, we predicted and found that, in all three samples, lower gender system justification was associated with (a) women’s perception of the campaign as empowering, and men’s (b) higher perception of the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement, and (c) lower perception of the campaign as wrongfully staining men’s reputation. as expected, in all three samples, (a) perceptions of the campaign as empowering among women, and an opportunity for moral improvement among men, were associated with greater campaign support, whereas (b) men’s perceptions of the campaign as wrongfully staining their moral reputation were associated with lower campaign support. thus, the link between system justification and campaign support was mediated by women’s empowerment needs, and men’s morality-related needs. in addition, perceptions of the campaign as disempowering their ingroup (i.e., presenting a status threat) predicted reduced campaign support among men in the hungarian and israeli samples, but not the german sample. we discuss the practical implications of these results for gender equality movements in general, and sexual harassment in particular, by identifying the psychological obstacles and catalysts of women’s and men’s support for social change. introduction the phrase “me too” was coined by tarana burke, an african american civil rights activist, who began using it in to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society. when actress alyssa milano used the hashtag #metoo in a twitter post in october , she had a similar goal in mind: emphasizing the structural aspect of sexual harassment embedded in gender relations in society. the #metoo campaign against sexual harassment went viral globally. the campaign was successful in terms of awareness raising, actual charges against perpetrators of sexual assaults, and support for victims to come forward with their personal stories (rhodan, ; seales, ). nevertheless, #metoo was also heavily criticized, suggesting that the campaign hampers due process, might increase false accusations (piacenza, ), fails to distinguish between rape and harassment, and collectively blames all men and victimizes all women (arceneaux, ; o’connell, ). the purpose of the present research was to examine the psychological motivations that underlie peoples’ support for, or opposition to the campaign. one thing in common for both supporters and opponents is that they evaluated #metoo through a gendered perspective on sexual harassment, embracing or criticizing the fact that, within this campaign, women appeared as collective victims of sexual harassment, implying that men were the collective perpetrators. we therefore reasoned that the theoretical framework of the needs-based model (shnabel and nadler, ), according to which victims and perpetrators have different power- and morality-related psychological needs, can be of relevance for understanding the motivations underlying campaign support. recent research within the framework of the needs-based model (hässler et al., ) has shown that women’s and men’s power- and morality-related needs, resulting from the perception of their ingroup as a victim or a perpetrator group, are influenced by their system justification motivation (i.e., the motivation to accept and legitimize the societal status quo, jost and van der toorn, ). thus, we examined whether and how participants’ gender system justification (i.e., the motivation to justify existing gender arrangements) predicts their perception of the campaign as addressing their power and morality-related needs which, in turn, determines their support of or opposition to the #metoo campaign. group members’ needs for empowerment and morality: the perspective of the needs-based model the main tenet of the needs-based model is that following transgressions, victims and perpetrators experience different psychological needs (shnabel et al., ). members of victim groups feel weak and disrespected, and therefore experience a need for empowerment: they wish to enjoy a better status and have more influence in society. in contrast, members of perpetrator groups experience a threat to their ingroup’s moral reputation and are motivated to restore their positive moral identity. this motivation can manifest in two distinct forms (allpress et al., ): perpetrators may experience essence shame due to the violation of moral values, and consequently wish their ingroup to acknowledge its culpability and behave more morally. alternatively, they may experience image shame, which signifies the defensive need for restoring their ingroup’s moral reputation, without changing its moral conduct (e.g., by having outgroup members acknowledge that they do receive fair treatment). whereas earlier research examined the needs-based model in contexts of direct violence, in which the roles of “victim” and “perpetrator” groups is consensual and clear-cut (e.g., the holocaust; shnabel et al., ), subsequent research examined it in contexts of so-called ‘structural violence’ (i.e., group-based inequality, galtung, ), which is characterized by ambiguity with regard to the advantaged group’s “culpability.” aydin a. l. et al. ( ) revealed that the psychological needs of advantaged and disadvantaged group members (e.g., members of higher and lower social classes; aydin a. et al., ) correspond to those of victims and perpetrators. whereas disadvantaged group members experience threat to their status and identity as competent and are therefore motivated to gain respect (bergsieker et al., ), advantaged group members experience threat to their moral identity (e.g., they may be perceived as prejudiced and bigoted, fiske et al., ) and therefore seek moral-social acceptance (bergsieker et al., ). furthermore, whereas disadvantaged group members were found more willing to engage in collective action toward equality following an empowering, competence-reassuring message from their outgroup, advantaged group members were more willing to engage in social change action following an accepting message that reassured their moral identity (shnabel et al., ). further evidence that concerns about their moral identity play a critical role in determining advantaged group members’ support of social movements comes from research findings that advantaged group members’ support for different forms of collective action was primarily influenced by the extent to which these actions affect their ingroup’s image as moral (which was even more important for them than the actual effectiveness of these actions in reducing inequality, teixeira et al., ). however, besides group affiliation (i.e., advantaged vs. disadvantaged) the experience of power and morality-related needs also depends on the extent to which group-based disparities are perceived as legitimate or illegitimate (siem et al., ). in the particular context of gender relations, in response to information about group-based inequality and societal discrimination against women, women reported a higher need for power (e.g., wish that their ingroup would have more influence in society) compared to men (hässler et al., ; study ). however, women’s and men’s power needs also depended on their motivation to justify the gender system, such that system justification predicted a lower need for power among women and higher need for power among men. in terms of the need to restore the ingroup’s moral essence, compared to women, men reported more moral shame and wish that their ingroup would act more morally toward the outgroup. system justification was negatively related to men’s wish to restore their ingroup’s moral essence (e.g., men who were high on system justification reported less moral shame), yet it was unrelated to women’s need for moral essence. also, system justification was positively related to men’s wish to defend their ingroup’s moral reputation (e.g., men who were high on system justification wished women to acknowledge that they receive fair treatment from men), yet it was unrelated to women’s need to defend their moral reputation. besides the potential threat to their moral identity, the societal debate about gender inequality might threaten men’s status. studies have shown that social movements of advantaged groups (e.g., conservative movements or men’s rights movements) often demand the restoration of their rights, because they experience threats to their status and feel victimized (e.g., blee and creasap, ). based on these findings, we reasoned that the needs-based model may be applicable to the context of sexual harassment in general and the #metoo campaign in particular, in which the groups of women and men were associated with victim and perpetrator groups. the relevance of a needs-based approach for the #metoo was echoed in accompanying viral hashtags: reflecting women’s need for empowerment, #timesup suggested that women should take more action against sexual harassment; #howiwillchange (see vagianos, ) suggested that men could consider the movement as an opportunity to show moral improvement; and #notallmen (initiated earlier, but resurfaced in this context) became a counter-campaign to reject accusations that stains the moral reputation of men. in addition, because the #metoo campaign has questioned the structural inequalities of gender relations, and consistent with hässler et al.’s ( ) findings, we expected women’s and men’s system justification motivation to determine their power and morality-related needs, their resulting perceptions of the campaign of addressing or threatening these needs, and consequent support for, or opposition to the campaign. system justification shapes people’s view of gender equality movements the original statement of the #metoo campaign – “if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem” – pointed to the notion that sexual harassment, although realized mostly in interpersonal encounters, is a group-based grievance of women (tangri et al., ; wayne, ). group-based grievances and the perception of injustice can contribute to the development of a politicized collective identity of group members, and to engagement in the struggle to change existing intergroup relations (see simon and klandermans, ). the #metoo campaign was therefore a case of collective action mobilizing women to raise awareness about the phenomenon of sexual harassment and change the status quo of existing social arrangements. however, not all women, and certainly not all men, are ready to change the status quo. according to system justification theory (jost and banaji, ), the perception of the social system as legitimate satisfies basic epistemic, existential, and relational needs. therefore, people are motivated “to defend, justify, and bolster aspects of the status quo including existing social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements” (jost and van der toorn, , p. ), even if their own ingroup suffers from these arrangements. the tendency to justify existing social arrangements may be particularly strong in the context of gender relations (as compared to other contexts of intergroup relations, such as the relations between different racial, religious, or ethnic groups). one reason is that the gender status asymmetry is universally present in all societies, and therefore, seem inevitable (sidanius and pratto, ). moreover, the relations between men and women are characterized by high interdependence in a social, economic, and emotional sense due to reproductive needs (guttentag and secord, ), and the cultural histories of human societies creating socio-economic interdependence (wood and eagly, ). consequently, both women and men are motivated to maintain harmonious relations, and avoid open conflict (jackman, ). this motivation is an obstacle to social change because when intergroup relations are characterized by a desire for harmony, people make efforts to maintain social cohesion, while hindering the motivation to expose group-based inequality and engage in collective action for changing it (wright and lubensky, ). this process has been observed in various contexts, including the one of the #metoo campaign (kunst et al., ). while it may be difficult for women to perceive their own disadvantages within gender relations due to the motivation to justify the system, it may be even harder for men to recognize these inequalities and get involved as allies. naturally, men have fewer chances to get first-hand experience of gender-based inequalities in general and sexual harassment in particular. moreover, as members of the advantaged group, they are less likely to recognize their own privileges (becker and barreto, ) both because advantaged group members are generally motivated to uphold the status quo and disregard information challenging their social status (leach et al., ) and because criticism of unearned privileges may appear as a threat to their moral standing (maass et al., ). men’s engagement in the struggle against sexual harassment is therefore dependent on their moral convictions (van zomeren et al., ) and efforts to improve their own moral reputation (hopkins et al., ) – both of which are hindered by men’s tendency to justify the existing system. thus, in the present research we predicted that people’s general tendency to justify the existing social system regarding gender relations, would be associated with less support for, and more opposition to, the #metoo campaign (see kunst et al., ). based on our conceptualization of the #metoo campaign as a form of collective action, this prediction is consistent with previous findings about the negative association between system justification and collective action tendencies, among both the advantaged and the disadvantaged (osborne et al., ). as explained in the previous section, we further predicted that the effect of system justification on support for (or opposition to) the #metoo campaign would be mediated by the extent to which the campaign is perceived to address women’s and men’s differential needs for power and morality. in sum, evidence shows that women are almost exclusively harassed by men, while men can fall victim to both men and women, which means that men are in an overwhelming majority among sexual harassers (european union agency for fundamental rights, ). nevertheless, we reasoned that, depending on their motivation to justify the existing gender system, some men and women would view themselves as members of perpetrator and victim groups (respectively), whereas others would reject this view. the endorsement or rejection of the social roles of “victims” and “perpetrators” would in turn influence women’s and men’s perception of the campaign as an opportunity for empowerment and moral improvement or as wrongfully accusing all men as perpetrators and weakening and victimizing all women. gender inequality is closely connected to attitudes toward sexual harassment gender inequality in education, employment, financial status, political representation, the prevalence of sexual harassment and rape, and the perception of violence against women greatly vary across countries (world economic forum, ; european institute for gender equality, ). apart from historical, cultural, and economic reasons, gender inequality is maintained by attitudes supporting it (chapleau and oswald, ). sexual harassment and rape disrupt the harmony ideal between men and women and can draw attention to these inequalities (see searles, ) while gender system justification prevents the recognition of transgressions by men and the gendered characteristic of rape (chapleau and oswald, ). the paradoxical connection between gender equality and reported rape (i.e., higher reported rape in more equal countries) underlines that in countries with greater inequalities, women are less likely to report rape because of more hostile attitudes to rape victims (sable et al., ). for example, within europe, reported rape is lowest in hungary and greece, the two lowest ranking countries in terms of gender inequality and highest in sweden which is the highest ranking country (european union agency for fundamental rights, ). consequently, people living in countries with more unequal gender relations tend to be more accepting of the gender status quo (glick et al., ), consider rape and sexual harassment as a less significant problem (yamawaki and tschanz, ; yamawaki, ), and therefore less likely to see the connection between sexual harassment and the gender status quo. we can assume that the global #metoo campaign which aimed to address precisely the prevalence of sexual harassment and its connection to gender relations would be differently received in countries with different degrees of gender equality. for this reason, although we conducted our research originally in hungary, we replicated it using smaller samples in israel and germany to increase external validity of our research. these two additional countries have higher gender equality than hungary according to the global gender gap index (world economic forum, ), but they are quite different from one another too. the world economic forum ranks countries based on four fields affecting gender equality: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. germany is placed th, israel th, and hungary rd in the ranking. research question and hypotheses our research hypotheses were based on previous theorizing about the connection between gender system justification (similarly to kunst et al., ), and the different psychological needs of members of perpetrator and victim groups. we expected that people with higher gender system justification would support the #metoo campaign less than those with lower gender system justification, and these effects were expected to be mediated by the perception of the campaign as addressing or thwarting the different needs of men and women as members of perpetrator and victim groups (as visually presented in figure ). figure figure . path-models of support for the #metoo campaign. relationship strengths are indicated by unstandardized regression coefficients. ∗∗∗p < . , ∗∗p < . , ∗p < . . hu, hungarian sample; il, israeli sample; de, german sample. in particular, because receiving acknowledgment for the injustice caused to one’s ingroup is a central component of empowerment (shnabel and nadler, ), we expected that women who are lower on system justification, and generally endorse the view of their ingroup as a victim of unfair disadvantage, would consider the #metoo campaign as more empowering. perceptions of the campaign as empowering, in turn, would predict support the campaign. consistent with hässler et al.’s ( ) findings that system justification was unrelated to women’s moral needs, we expected that women’s system justification would be unrelated to their perceptions of the campaign as addressing or threatening their moral reputation and the opportunity for moral improvement, and that these morality-related perceptions would not be associated with women’s campaign support. this is because, regardless of the general level of motivation to justify the gender system, women do not see themselves as members of the perpetrator group (or the advantaged group in the context of gender relations). as for men, we expected that lower gender system justification would predict viewing the campaign as an opportunity to behave more morally toward women, which would in turn predict greater support. on the other hand, higher gender system justification would predict viewing the campaign as wrongfully accusing and morally staining men, predicting less support to the campaign. based on hässler et al.’s ( ) findings that system justification predicted men’s greater need for power, we expected system justification to predict men’s perception of the campaign as disempowering for their ingroup (as it might threaten their advantaged status), would in turn translate into reduced campaign support. testing these hypotheses has theoretical and practical importance. from a theoretical perspective, the novelty of our research is that we integrate system justification and the different needs of advantaged and disadvantaged groups with support for a social change campaign in the context of gender relations. previous research has highlighted the relevance of the needs-based model for supporting social change among advantaged and disadvantaged groups (see shnabel et al., ), and the relevance of system justification and the needs-based model for understanding gender relations (see hässler et al., ). however, no research has analyzed how the connection between system justification and support for social change is mediated by the different needs of advantaged and disadvantaged groups so far, and therefore, our findings can shed light on the ways in which social change can become acceptable for groups with different status in society. from a more practical perspective, understanding the psychological motivations of both men and women in a campaign about gender relations and sexual harassment is quintessential, as social movements benefitting disadvantaged groups are dependent on advantaged group allies to effectively change existing social relations (thomas et al., ). campaigns against sexual harassment cannot achieve their goals without men’s engagement. furthermore, our research can contribute to sources for misunderstandings related to the problem of sexual harassment and specifically to the #metoo campaign. intergroup misunderstandings constitute a major obstacle to constructive intergroup relations (demoulin et al., ). for example, the fact that men view discussions about sexual harassment through the prism of morality (e.g., wishing to define what constitutes inappropriate behavior toward women), whereas women view such discussions primarily through the prism of empowerment (e.g., wishing to identify ways in which women can gain more control when encountering such behaviors) may be a source of miscommunication. moreover, identifying the underlying psychological motivations for support or opposition to the #metoo campaign can help design effective interventions and specific communication strategies to recruit people, men and women, to the struggle against sexual harassment. the present research in the wake of the #metoo campaign, a hungarian actress came forward with a story of sexual abuse by a theater director, making the global campaign a locally relevant phenomenon. a year after the campaign started, two thirds of the hungarian population had heard about the campaign (kovács and szémann, ). although many previous stories about sexual abuse and rape had been ambiguously presented in the media (nyúl et al., ), following the #metoo campaign, sexual harassment cases were treated more severely, resulting in harsher consequences for the perpetrators. these results came about despite the fact that hungary scores poorly on gender equality (world economic forum, ), and the rate of reporting rape is very low compared to other countries, indicating the pervasiveness of victim blaming attitudes (european union agency for fundamental rights, ; wirth and winkler, ). we conducted our first data collection in hungary, immediately after the #metoo campaign started. an advantage of this was that it enabled us to recruit a large and diverse sample and tap the initial reactions to the campaign. in order to check the generalizability of our conclusions, we collected more data a few months later in two different cultural contexts: israel and germany. the #metoo campaign received much attention in these additional two countries too. in israel, accusations about a local media mogul were made shortly after the launch of the campaign, receiving broad public attention (lieberman, ). in germany no specific revelations were made about public figures around the peak of the global campaign, therefore the campaign focused on the general phenomenon of sexual harassment and gender equality first. however, in january , accusations against a film director were published in die zeit (simon et al., ), which led to responses in support of and against the campaign that were similar to other countries. although we did not make different predictions across the three contexts, we expected that men with more experience of gender equality would find the campaign less threatening to their position (for a comparison of men’s engagement in gender equality globally, see ipsos, ). participants we relied on a large convenience sample of n = , in hungary. participants were recruited by posting the link of the online questionnaire on facebook. it was widely shared by individual people and various groups beyond our control. therefore, we do not have information about the dominant opinions in the groups in which the link was shared. our call for participants was picked up by online journals, and posted on the websites of hvg.hu and index.hu, two of the most widely read online news portals in hungary. the final sample in hungary included , ( . %) men, and , ( . %) women. respondents had the opportunity not to use the binary distinction to identify their gender but indicate “other” or their wish not to answer, but the questionnaire was designed differently for men and women, therefore these respondents could not complete the questionnaire and were debriefed. the mean age of participants was . years (sd = . ). the level of education was higher than average: % held university or college degrees, . % were enrolled in a university education at the time of the data collection, and . % had secondary education or lower. for nationality, . % indicated they were hungarian. in the two other contexts, we relied on smaller convenience samples (israel: n = ; germany: n = ). data was collected with the help of university students who recruited respondents on social media. sample sizes were calculated based on the results of the hungarian data that was collected earlier. sample size was adequate based on g∗power calculations detecting % power for a multiple regression analysis based on the large effect sizes (faul et al., ), but the subsamples of men were below the suggested min. participants for mediation models using scale means (see e.g., ding et al., ). therefore, these results need to be treated with caution. there were ( . %) men, and ( . %) women in the israeli sample and ( . %) men and ( . %) women in the german sample. the average age of respondents in israel was m = . years (sd = . ) and in germany m = . years (sd = . ). most respondents either had a university degree (israel: %; germany: %) or were university students at the time of the data collection (israel: %; germany: %). in the israeli sample . % indicated that their nationality was israeli and in the german sample all respondents had a german nationality. as shown in table , the majority of respondents reported that they did not post any personal stories as part of the #metoo campaign. posting own story was highest in hungary ( . %; women: . %, men: . %), followed by israel ( . %; women: . %, men: . %), finally posting own stories was rather low in the german sample ( . %, women: . %, men: %). there were more respondents who posted or commented in support of the campaign than against it and overall posting in support was over % in the samples from hungary and israel, and % in germany. in the hungarian sample women participated more and more positively than men, but there was no difference in the amount of critical posting and comments among men and women in israel and germany. table table . participation of respondents in the #metoo campaign by gender. procedure the language of the questionnaire was hungarian, hebrew, and german corresponding to the national contexts of the data collection. all items were translated to the respective languages from english, and back-translated by an independent translator, unless previously published in the respective language that we indicate when describing the measures of the survey. we collected data using the online survey platform of qualtrics. we included all respondents who reached the last question block about the items of the needs-based model. answers were requested and not forced, but missing data was negligible on all variables used in the analysis. in hungary, missing data was below . % in the women’s sample, and below . % in the men’s sample, there was no missing data in the israeli sample and < . % in the german sample. we collected data between november nd and th, , in hungary, between january and september, , in israel, and between june and october, , in germany. we report all measures and data exclusions related to the hypotheses of this paper. for exploratory purposes, we measured other variables, but their discussion falls outside the scope of this paper (such as perceived efficacy, rape-myth acceptance, opinion-based identity, inclusiveness of the campaign toward men). data regarding these additional variables are included in our published dataset at osf.io/rj d. we conducted the research with the irb approval of eötvös loránd university. measures we measured gender system justification (gsj) by seven items based on the original -item scale of jost and kay ( ) adapted and shortened to the context of gender by hässler et al., , we relied on the german translation for the data collection in germany). respondents were requested to express their agreement with the listed items on a -point scale from = completely disagree to = completely agree, as in all other scales of the questionnaire (unless noted otherwise). an example item is “in general, relations between men and women are fair.” (one item “most policies relating to gender and the sexual division of labor serve the greater good” was omitted from the analysis because of it reduced the internal consistency of the scale to. in the hungarian sample). information on scale consistencies are shown in table . mean scores were used in the analysis for gender system justification and all variables in the study. higher scores represented greater level of system justification beliefs regarding gender relations in society. variables measuring the satisfaction (or thwarting) of power- and morality-related needs through the campaign were developed based on previous research about the needs-based model in the context of gender relations (hässler et al., ). this research measured group members’ actual needs, that is, their wish that their ingroup would have more power and influence, their feelings of shame, the wish that their ingroup would behave more morally, and their wish to protect their ingroup’s moral reputation (e.g., by having the outgroup acknowledge that it receives fair treatment from ingroup), reflecting a defensive moral need. adapting these scales to fit the context of the #metoo campaign, we measured the extent to which group members felt that the campaign satisfies these power- and morality-related needs; that is, the extent to which the campaign empowers (or disempowers) their ingroup, provides (or fails to provide) the ingroup with an opportunity to behave more morally toward the outgroup, and cleans (or stains) their ingroup’s reputation. items were identically phrased for men and women, but the words “men” and “women” were switched for the two gender groups. perceptions of the campaign as empowering the ingroup was measured by four items (e.g., “this campaign empowers women/men”), higher scores represented greater perceived empowerment by the campaign (whereas lower scores represented perceptions of the campaign as weakening one’s ingroup). perceptions of the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement (stemming from guilt) was measured by three items (e.g., “the campaign makes me wish that women/men would treat men/women in a nicer manner”), relying on previous research that guilt can function as a source of motivation for moral improvement (e.g., iyer et al., ). higher scores reflected the perception that the campaign was an opportunity for the ingroup to behave more morally toward the outgroup. perceptions of the campaign as staining the ingroup’s moral reputation by four items (e.g., “the campaign unjustifiably stains women’s/men’s moral reputation”). higher scores indicated that respondents perceived the campaign as more damaging to the moral reputation of the ingroup. items of the subscales are presented in the appendix. finally, we generated four items to capture support intentions related to the #metoo campaign that were context-specific and directly asking about intentions of participation and intentions to express or generate support for the campaign (for items see appendix). analytic procedure data analysis comprised of two parts. first, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis and tests of measurement invariance following the procedures outlined by vandenberg and lance ( ) to check whether the theorized structure of the three variables derived from the needs-based model would fit our current data. second, we tested the indirect effects of gender system justification on support for the #metoo campaign mediated by the variables of the needs-based model for men and women separately in each national subsamples using process macro (hayes, ). additionally, we reran all mediation analyses with actual behaviors controlled for, and report changes in the patterns of regression weights in the controlled models to investigate whether the identified effects are simply due to justification of actual behavior (pro- or contra the campaign). we also compared model fit information of the original model (with the direct path between gender system justification and the dependent variable removed) with support for #metoo and the variables of the needs-based model reversed. we conducted this analysis in order to offer indirect empirical support for the sequence of effects, and to rule out the possibility that support for the #metoo campaign led to the perception that the campaign can fulfill power and moral needs, rather than what we originally assumed that the perception of the campaign fulfilling these needs predicts support for it. both of these additional analyses were conducted using amos (arbuckle, ) and are presented in the supplementary material. results factor analyses the confirmatory factor analysis of the psychological needs items underlined that for both men and women the expected three-factor solution shows the best fit to the data, significantly better than the one- or two-factor models in all three samples (see table ) distinguishing between empowerment, moral reputation and moral improvement. considering that we tested culturally embedded psychological constructs, this method did not guarantee equivalence across the samples (see van der vijver and tanzer, ). although the three-factor model was the best factor structure for both men and women, different covariances were needed to achieve the best model fit as specified in table . therefore, we can assume structural equivalence of the scales, but not further levels of measurement invariance. the lack of invariance may very well stem from the different meaning associated with the reversed wording of the scales for men and women that we will explain in the discussion. for this reason, we refrained from direct comparison of the data of men and women, but treat the variables as reflecting the same three underlying constructs of the needs-based model. table table . fit indices for the different factor structures of the needs-based model for women and men. descriptive statistics descriptive statistics were calculated for the full sample, and for men and women separately, and shown in table . women supported the campaign more than men, and gender system justification scores were higher among men than women (in line with previous research e.g., hässler et al., ). consistent with the logic of the needs-based model, means of empowerment on the women’s scale were higher than the means on the men’s scale in all samples, while on both morality-related scales, men scored higher than women. table table . mean and standard deviation scores on all the study variables and a comparison of men and women. correlations and hypothesis testing for the subsamples of women correlations (shown in table ) suggested that support for the campaign was negatively associated with gender system justification in all subsamples, and strongly positively associated with perception of the campaign as empowering. we also found an association between moral reputation, moral improvement and support for the campaign, but the association for both variables was negative in all subsamples. this means that those who felt that the campaign was an opportunity for moral improvement toward men (based on feeling guilty about women’s behavior in connection with sexual harassment and the campaign), as well as those who were concerned about the moral reputation of women in connection with the campaign supported the campaign less. in line with this, correlations between gender system justification and the two moral variables indicated a similar pattern. we found that higher system justification was associated with more concern about women’s moral reputation within the campaign and with the belief that the campaign offered an opportunity for women to show moral improvement. table table . correlations between the study variables on the subsamples of men and women. to test our hypotheses about indirect effects, confidence intervals were calculated using bootstrapping with , re-samples (hayes, ) in each national sample, resulting in three models for women. gender system justification was entered in the model as the input variable, the three variables related to the needs-based model were mediators, and support for the #metoo was tested as the output variable. information about the models are presented in table and the models are visually presented in figure . table table . information about the mediation analysis among men and women participants in all three subsamples. in all three samples, as expected, we found that empowerment mediated the connection between gender system justification and support, suggesting that women with lower gender system-justification considered the campaign more empowering which in turn predicted higher support for the campaign. for hungarian women the explained variance was % (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ), for isreali women it was % (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ), and for german women it was % (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ). in two additional analyses, we tested whether the pattern of connections remain the same after controlling for actual participation in the campaign in order to rule out that support was merely a justification of either actually participating in the campaign or supporting the campaign in online posts and comments, or on the contrary, lack of support for the campaign was justification for criticizing the campaign online. we found no changes in the patterns after controlling for these affects, however, all regression weights became somewhat smaller. secondly, we reran all analyses by reversing the order of the variables of the needs-based model and support for the campaign in the model and by removing the direct path between gender system justification and the dependent variable (which already resulted in deteriorated models). in the hungarian and israeli samples, we found substantial decrease in model fit, however, in case of the german subsample, the reversed model showed actually better fit than the original. results of the controlled models and information about model fit changes in the reversed models are presented in the supplementary material. correlations and hypothesis testing for the subsamples of men as shown in table , gender system justification was negatively associated with support for the campaign similarly to the women samples, and positively associated with empowerment. perceptions of the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement and as a threat to moral reputation were strongly associated with support for the campaign in the expected direction: moral reputation negatively and moral improvement positively. a further analysis of correlations between the study variables showed that gender system justification was strongly positively associated with moral reputation and strongly negatively with moral improvement in all samples, suggesting that those endorsed more system critical ideas about gender relations felt that the campaign was an opportunity for moral improvement stemming from guilt, but were not concerned about the campaign staining the moral reputation of men. results of the mediation analyses for men were less similar across the samples than for women (see table and figure ). in the hungarian sample, explained variance was % (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ) and all three psychological needs variables mediated the connection between gender system justification and support for #metoo. this is less surprising, considering the large sample size, however, power-related needs were even stronger predictors than either of the moral needs. similarly, in the israeli sample of men where explained variance was % (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ), power-related needs were the strongest predictors of support, whereas moral reputation was not a significant predictor here. this means that male participants (in these two contexts) who were concerned about potential loss of power due to the campaign, supported it less. however, the need for empowerment was not a significant mediator of the effect of gender system justification on support for the campaign in the german sample, where only moral reputation and improvement mediated this connection. explained variance was % here (r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . ). we ran the two additional analyses for men too. again, we identified a similar pattern when actual behavior was controlled in the models, but effects were somewhat smaller. reversing the order of the variables of the needs-based model and support for #metoo led to worse model fit in all three samples of men. results of the controlled models and information about model fit changes in the reversed models are presented in the supplementary material. discussion relying on an unusually large sample in the case of hungary, and on follow-up surveys in two other national contexts, israel and germany, we investigated whether support for #metoo can be understood by looking at women’s and men’s satisfaction of (or threat to) different psychological needs, as members of victim and perpetrator groups, respectively. our hypothesis was based on the assumption that sexual harassment is not an interpersonal issue, but it is embedded in gender relations in society (searles, ) as the campaign itself suggested. in support of our hypothesis, we found that higher gender system justification predicted less support for the campaign among both women and men. this suggests that the campaign was more positively evaluated by those who were generally more critical of the existing gender arrangements – similar to patterns observed in research on the predictors of collective action tendencies related to gender issues (calogero, ) and sexual violence (chapleau and oswald, ). these findings demonstrate, in line with previous research on the #metoo campaign (kunst et al., ), that support for the campaign should be evaluated as an intergroup issue related to gender relations. furthermore, based on the needs-based model (shnabel et al., ), we hypothesized that for women the debate about sexual harassment – as it is embedded in the broader context of gender relations – would be perceived through the prism of empowerment (i.e., it would be conceptualized as a struggle about control and agency). for men, by contrast, it would be mainly perceived through the prism of morality (i.e., it would be conceptualized as a struggle about who is “good” and who is “bad”), as well as by their fear to lose status and privilege. our findings supported the idea that women who were more critical of the existing gender arrangements viewed the campaign as more empowering, which in turn predicted their support for it. this connection (between system justification and campaign support) was not mediated by concerns about moral reputation or by the opportunity for moral improvement. this suggests that for women, the satisfaction of (or threat to) moral needs was irrelevant for whether or not attitudes toward gender relations would translate into support of (or opposition to) the #metoo campaign. for men, supporting our hypotheses, concerns for moral reputation negatively (except in the israeli sample) and perceived opportunity for moral improvement positively predicted support for the campaign – mediating the effect of gender system justification on campaign support. these results are consistent with previous findings, observed in contexts of direct violence (e.g., abuse of war prisoners), that guilt and concerns about the ingroup’s moral conduct are associated with positive outgroup attitudes, whereas concerns about the ingroup’s moral reputation are associated with negative outgroup attitudes (allpress et al., ). also, the finding that the more men viewed the campaign as an opportunity for their ingroup to improve its moral conduct the more they supported it, is consistent with the theorizing that for members of perpetrator groups the opportunity for satisfying moral needs increases reconciliation efforts (shnabel et al., ). it is also consistent with findings that system-critical attitudes can be predictors of collective action intentions among allies who are striving to improve their moral identity by behaving more morally (hopkins et al., ; brambilla et al., ). in line with some previous findings about men’s status threat (see hässler et al., ) and our hypothesis, men’s perceptions of the campaign as disempowering was negatively correlated with support for the campaign in all samples and it also mediated the connection between gender system justification and opposition for the campaign among men in the hungarian and israeli samples, but not in the german sample. in fact, in these two samples, support for the campaign was more strongly predicted by a threat to their ingroup’s status and power than by the satisfaction or thwarting of either of the moral needs. the link between men’s concerns about gender power relations and their attitudes toward sexual harassment are in line with previous findings. for example, men are more likely to engage in sexual harassment when their masculine identity (hitlan et al., ) or social status is threatened (berdahl, ), when they feel that the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the current status quo is under threat (maass et al., ), when they are afraid to be perceived as incompetent (halper and rios, ), and toward women who express egalitarian, rather than traditional gender-role attitudes (dall’ara and maass, ). although women identifying as feminists experience as much sexual harassment as other women, women engaging in feminist activism suffered more gender-based harassment (holland and cortina, ). this finding also fits with recent research suggesting that advantaged group members’ opposition to policies that empower disadvantaged groups stems both from moral motivations (i.e., the wish to defend their ingroup’s positive moral identity, in the face of accusation that they enjoy unearned privilege), and from their wish to maintain power (kahalon et al., ). however, contrary to our hypothesis, this connection was not present in the german subsample of men, where only moral needs mediated the connection between gender system justification and support for #metoo. this finding, which is consistent with our original theorizing based on the needs-based model, may stem from the different cultural contexts of the data collection in terms of gender (in)equality. it seems that in the german context men’s support for #metoo was not undermined by men’s power related concerns. this finding is consistent with research suggesting that gender equality and attitudes toward sexual harassment are interconnected (chapleau and oswald, ). consequently, in the german context which is characterized by greater gender equality compared to the other two countries, men have less privilege to lose and may consider gender equality as beneficial for both men and women. we wanted to rule out the possibility that the connection between gender system justification and support for the campaign was mediated by the psychological needs of the needs-based model merely as a justification for actual participation in the campaign either in the form of posting one’s own story using the #metoo hashtag or posting a supportive or critical comment about the campaign online. therefore, we reran all analyses with these behaviors controlled for. in all six samples we found models that were highly similar to the original one, suggesting that the connection was not simply the result of justifying their own behavior. for the purpose of controlling whether our assumptions about the sequence of predictions was supported by the data, we also tested the models by reversing the order of support for #metoo and psychological needs. in five out of six models, model fit decreased compared to the original models supporting our original hypothesis about the order of effects. however, among german women, we found an increase in model fit, suggesting the possibility that within this subsample higher support for the campaign was the reason participants perceived the campaign as a source of empowerment (e.g., as a form of justifying their support), rather than the perception of the campaign as an empowering movement led to its support. finally, we need to reflect on the finding that the correlations between moral improvement and support for #metoo among men and women were in opposite directions. women who viewed the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement showed less support for the campaign, whereas the opposite association was observed among men. we interpret these findings as suggesting that as members of the perpetrator group, men may seek ways to improve their moral identity, and if this campaign is perceived to offer this opportunity, they show higher support. however, women who viewed the campaign as an opportunity to improve their moral behavior likely believed that women should stop seducing men into sexual harassment or refrain from falsely accusing men in the campaign (in line with the myth that women lie about rape, see lonsway and fitzgerald, and with the hostile sexist belief that women use their sexuality to exploit men; glick and fiske, ). as a result, they view the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement (e.g., if it leads women to stop seducing innocent men). previous research has revealed that due to stigma internalization processes, members of disadvantaged groups (e.g., sexual minorities; górska et al., ), including women, may adopt negative views about their ingroup’s morality; alternatively, they may be aware of this stigma and try to refute it. for example, women’s engagement in competitive victimhood (i.e., effort to prove that their ingroup suffers more injustice than men) were partially driven by their need to defend their ingroup’s moral reputation (sullivan et al., ; kahalon et al., ). similar processes of stigma internalization have been observed in sexual minorities: respondents who were high in system justification wished that their ingroup would behave more morally (hässler et al., ) because they adopted the view of sexual minorities as morally deviant (herek and mclemore, ). therefore, the different results may stem from the different associations with the items measuring moral improvement for men and women and therefore not entirely surprising or contradictory to previous research. however, they clearly demonstrate that these victim-blaming beliefs among women can become an obstacle for women to support social change action to reduce sexual harassment. limitations our research was conducted in the context of a real-life campaign while the topic was timely and widely discussed. this overwhelming interest in the topic allowed us to collect an unusually large sample in hungary. however, despite the large sample size, it was not representative of the hungarian population. therefore, conclusions regarding the hungarian society in general, such as women being more supportive of the campaign than men, should be drawn cautiously (as for the israeli and german samples as well). also, while problems related to small sample sizes have been extensively discussed in social psychology and other disciplines (e.g., wolf et al., ), large sample sizes can create statistical challenges too. for example, such a large sample can enlarge biases embedded in the sampling method (kaplan et al., ). specifically, our call may have attracted participants in hungary with a stronger opinion about the campaign either pro or contra, resulting in stronger connections between the variables than we would have found among the general population using probability sampling. however, the similarity of the results across the contexts suggests otherwise and strengthens the study’s conclusions. the cross-sectional data of the current research cannot offer evidence for causal connection between the variables. in order to offer indirect support for the order of the effects, we reran the models with the variables in a reversed order which generally supported our theorization about causality, however, it remains plausible that the connection between these variables is circular, rather than one-directional, and that besides the perception of needs-satisfaction leading to higher campaign support, higher campaign support leads to higher perception of the campaign as fulfilling these psychological needs. for example, women who support this campaign (e.g., due to their feminist identification, kunst et al., ) may in turn perceive it as more empowering (as a form of post hoc justification) as we identified it among german women. future research, relying on longitudinal data could offer a definite answer to that. also, as the needs-based model captures the psychological needs of perpetrators and victims in dyadic conflicts, we could not integrate the perspective of respondents outside the gender binary. we acknowledge this as a shortcoming of our research, especially considering the relevance of sexual harassment in the lives of sexual minorities (stotzer, ). future research should capture the psychological needs that are specific for these groups in predicting the support for social movements in the area of sexual harassment. furthermore, respondents completed the questionnaire based on perceptions of need satisfaction of their own gender ingroup in the context of the #metoo campaign, while we can expect that perceived need satisfaction of the other gender group may have affected support too. for example, men who considered the campaign disempowering to women and women who considered the campaign as unjustifiably staining men’s moral reputation may have shown less support. testing these connections is an interesting direction for future research. finally, collecting additional data in israel and germany was intended to increase the validity of our conclusions based on the results from hungary. in collecting these two additional samples, our main focus remained the analysis of psychological motivations in supporting the campaign, rather than offering cross-cultural comparisons or a broader sociological understanding of support for the campaign. this approach allowed us to draw conclusions regarding some of the psychological mechanisms that motivate people to engage in collective action in support of social change in connection with sexual harassment. however, an analysis of demographic variables and political ideology would be needed to offer a description of the level of campaign support across different segments of society. conclusions and practical implications previous studies (e.g., becker and barreto, ) have outlined the different obstacles men and women have in recognizing gender inequality and joining social change efforts of feminist movements. in line with this, our research corroborated the importance of awareness of structural injustice by highlighting the connection between support for #metoo and low gender system justification and sexual harassment (similarly to the findings of kunst et al., ). we further showed that these general attitudes, which influence the extent to which men and women view of their ingroup as a perpetrator and a victim group (hässler et al., ), can translate into support for the campaign if it seemed to fulfill the power and morality needs resulting from these social roles. these findings point to a potential source of misunderstandings (demoulin et al., ) between men and women about the phenomenon of sexual harassment, because besides a power struggle per se; such that (some) women want to gain power through the campaign, whereas (some) men are afraid to lose power through it, women and men interpret this phenomenon through different prisms. women who are more critical of gender status differences view the problem of sexual harassment and the related campaign through the lens of empowerment, whereas men with similarly critical attitudes perceive it also through the lens of morality. while the campaign was undoubtedly extremely successful in reaching millions of people globally, our findings allow to identify the reasons why some men and women feel reluctant to support it. these findings provide insights as to which communication strategies can effectively promote support for the struggle against sexual harassments, which can be taken into account when mobilizing men and women for mass protests, as well as when designing intervention programs or educational preventions challenging gender relations. for example, the finding that system justification is negatively and directly related to less campaign support among both women and men suggests that to increase support among high system justifiers it may be beneficial to use system-affirmation strategies (e.g., brescoll et al., ). for example, anti-harassment activists may highlight that nowadays women receive treatment that is fairer than in any other historical period, yet eliminating sexual harassment is required to further strengthen the existing system. such strategies, which highlight the positive aspects of the system rather than condemning it, may satisfy high system-justifiers’ strong need to feel that the existing system is legitimate and increase their support for fighting against sexual harassment. specifically with regards to men, our findings suggest that presenting current awareness of the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment as a unique opportunity for repentance, which can restore harmonious gender relations, should increase men’s support for the struggle against sexual harassment. moreover, the finding that men’s moral reputation concerns are associated with opposition to the campaign implies that men’s defensiveness and consequent opposition can be reduced through the affirmation of their ingroup’s morality, for example, by highlighting that harassment is not a typical male behavior as most men treat women with respect. similar moral affirmation strategies were found to be effective in increasing white americans’ willingness to address grievances of black americans (ditlmann et al., ). in the context of gender relations, the positive portrayal of feminist men increased men’s solidarity with women that in turn translated into collective action intentions (wiley et al., ). finally, the finding that men’s support for the campaign in hungary and in israel was negatively influenced by their power concerns implies that one strategy to increase support, at least in countries characterized by relatively low gender equality, would be to counter perceptions of gender relations as a zero-sum situation. that is, use communication strategies that argue that empowering women does not mean disempowering men, as both groups have common interests. similar strategies effectively increased readiness to support policies to empower immigrants among host members (esses et al., ). as for women, our findings suggest that their support for the struggle against sexual harassment would increase if they believe that it strengthens their ingroup. hence, a possible route to increase support would be conveying the message that receiving acknowledgment of one’s victimization does not imply that one is weak and humiliated, rather, such acknowledgment is the necessary first step toward greater agency (such steps are described in the literature on the effects of apologies for example, see hornsey et al., ). moreover, the negative association between women’s view of the campaign as an opportunity for moral improvement and support for the campaign implies that at least some women have a preference for less confrontational campaigns (e.g., as they believe that women too should improve their moral conduct). such campaigns against sexual harassment could mobilize men and women by emphasizing shared ideals and values rather than intergroup differences (for a similar strategy in the context of racial relations in the united states see ditlmann et al., ). in conclusion, the insights gained through our findings promote a deeper understanding of the factors that facilitate men’s and women’s support for the struggle against sexual harassment, and allow to identify strategies to remove the psychological obstacles that hinder such support. data availability statement the datasets for this study can be found in the open science framework site at osf.io/rj d. ethics statement the studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by faculty of education and psychology, eötvös loránd university. the patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. author contributions ak contributed the research idea and the general design of the study and was responsible for data analysis and the preparation of the manuscript. ns contributed to the idea, the design of the study and the preparation of manuscript. bn and nl contributed to the design of the study, data collection in hungary, data analysis, preparation of the figures and tables. mh contributed to the statistical analysis. dp and jk translated the questionnaires to hebrew and german, respectively, and collected the data in israel and germany. funding this research was supported by supported by the Únkp- - new national excellence program of the ministry of human capacities. ak was also supported by the jános bolyai research scholarship of the hungarian academy of sciences. conflict of interest the authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. supplementary material the supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/ . /fpsyg. . /full#supplementary-material references allpress, j. a., brown, r., giner-sorolla, r., deonna, j. a., and teroni, f. 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( ). rape perception differences between japanese and american college students: on the mediating influence of gender role traditionality. sex roles , – . doi: . /s - - - crossref full text | google scholar appendix needs-based items empowerment: . in the long run, campaigns like this weaken women/men as a group (reversed item). . in the long run, campaigns like this make women/men more vulnerable (reversed item). . this campaign empowers women/men. . this campaign increases women’s/men’s control over their lives. moral improvement: . the campaign makes me wish that women/men would treat men/women in a nicer manner. . the campaign makes me feel ashamed of the unfair behavior of women/men toward men/women. . the campaign makes me feel guilty about what men/women have to put up with due to women’s/men’s immoral behavior. moral reputation: . the campaign unjustifiably stains women’s/men’s moral reputation. . the campaign might unjustifiably create an image of women/men as immoral. . the campaign wrongfully presents women/men as bad people. support for #metoo items: . assuming that you were personally affected, would you share your own story within the #metoo campaign? . regardless of whether you are personally affected, would you express support for the #metoo campaign on social media? . would you express support for the campaign outside social media (for example to your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances)? . would you encourage others to share their own personal stories within the campaign? keywords: #metoo, collective action, gender equality, needs-based model, sexual harassment citation: kende a, nyúl b, lantos na, hadarics m, petlitski d, kehl j and shnabel n ( ) a needs-based support for #metoo: power and morality needs shape women’s and men’s support of the campaign. front. psychol. : . doi: . /fpsyg. . received: september ; accepted: march ; published: march . edited by: natasza kosakowska-berezecka, university of gdańsk, poland reviewed by: georgios papanicolaou, teesside university, united kingdom soledad de lemus, university of granada, spain copyright © kende, nyúl, lantos, hadarics, petlitski, kehl and shnabel. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). the use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. no use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. *correspondence: anna kende, kende.anna@ppk.elte.hu commentary original article people also looked at suggest a research topic > doi: . /ijcv- ijcv: vol. ( )/ sexual violence victimization among undergraduates at a chilean university laura saldarriagai laura-ssr@hotmail.com carolina rochaii carocha@uc.cl diego castroii drcastro @uc.cl gloria jiménez-moyaii gjimenezm@uc.cl héctor carvachoii hectorcarvacho@gmail.com gerd bohneri gerd.bohner@uni-bielefeld.de i department of psychology, bielefeld university, germany ii department of psychology, pontifica universidad católica de chile, santiago, chile vol. ( )/ the ijcv provides a forum for scientific exchange and public dissemination of up-to-date scien - tific knowledge on conflict and violence. the ijcv is independent, peer reviewed, open access, and included in the social sciences citation index (ssci) as well as other rele - vant databases (e.g., scopus, ebsco, proquest, dnb). the topics on which we concentrate—conflict and violence—have always been central to various disciplines. consequently, the journal encompasses contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including criminology, economics, education, ethnology, his- tory, political science, psychology, social anthropology, sociology, the study of reli- gions, and urban studies. all articles are gathered in yearly volumes, identified by a doi with article-wise pagi- nation. for more information please visit www.ijcv.or g suggested citation: apa: saldarriaga, l., rocha, c., castro, d., jiménez-moya, g., carvacho, h., & bohner, g. ( ). sexual violence victimization among undergraduates at a chilean university. international journal of conflict and violence, ( ), - . doi: . /ijcv- harvard: saldarriaga, laura, rocha, carolina, castro, diego, jiménez-moya, gloria, carvacho, héctor, bohner, gerd. . sexual violence victimization among under- graduates at a chilean university. international journal of conflict and violence ( ): - . doi: . /ijcv- this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution—noderivatives license. issn: – mailto:laura-ssr@hotmail.com http://www.ijcv.org/ mailto:gerd.bohner@uni-bielefeld.de mailto:hectorcarvacho@gmail.com mailto:gjimenezm@uc.cl mailto:drcastro @uc.cl mailto:carocha@uc.cl ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization sexual violence victimization among undergraduates at a chilean university laura saldarriagai carolina rochaii diego castroii gloria jiménez-moyaii héctor carvachoii gerd bohneri i department of psychology, bielefeld university, germany ii department of psychology, pontifica universidad católica de chile, santiago, chile as part of a campus-wide prevention program, the pontificia universidad católica de chile (puc) implemented a cross-sequential survey on sexual violence. in this article, we report data from the first wave ( ; n = , ) from three cohorts of undergraduates (year , n = ; year , n = ; year , n = ). we found an overall twelve-month prevalence for victimization experiences of . percent ( . percent by force or threat of force; . percent while unable to resist; . percent by verbal pressure; multiple responses allowed). women ( . per - cent) were victimized more frequently than men ( . percent). among women, victimization rates were highest for year students ( . percent), intermediate for year ( . %), and lowest for year ( . percent). only . percent of reported incidents happened in a university context. in most cases, perpetrators were male ( . per - cent) and known to the victim ( . percent); . percent were partners, . percent were friends. we present additional data on risk factors and attitudinal correlates. we also discuss our findings in relation to previous re - search suggesting higher prevalence rates at chilean universities, considering differences in methodology and implications for future research. keywords: chile, prevention, rape, sexual violence, undergraduates over the last decades, numerous scandals and debates have brought to light issues related to sexual violence, revealing a discouraging panorama.* in particular the #metoo movement, launched in with a state- ment from us actress alyssa milano, has spurred one of the most important debates about sexual violence. milano’s aim was to encourage women (and men) around the world to disclose their experiences with sexual violence, in order to communicate the mag- * this research was conducted by laura saldarriaga in par- tial fulfilment of the requirements of a phd degree in psy- chology, which was supervised by gerd bohner. nitude of the problem (khomami ). the move- ment’s repercussions were diverse, with consequences on many levels in different countries. in sweden, for example, it prompted the introduction of new sexual assault legislation, under which engaging in sexual acts without clear affirmative consent (either verbal or non-verbal) constitutes a crime, even in the absence of evidence of physical coercion (bbc news ). in chile, the #metoo movement overlapped with the emergence of a strong feminist movement, whose ac- tions included large-scale strikes, occupations of pub- lic buildings, and protests against sexual harassment ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization and discrimination within the country’s universities (bartlett ; jiménez-moya, manzi, and cheyre ; sepúlveda-garrido ). despite persistent eco- nomic and social inequalities between men and wo- men in chile, important changes are taking place. a growing interest in and commitment to scientific re- search on sexual violence is becoming apparent, which places chile ahead of other latin american countries in this regard. a systematic review of sexual violence research in chile (schuster and krahé ) identified twenty- eight studies on the prevalence of sexual aggression victimization among women and men. the reported prevalence rates varied greatly across samples, which may be attributed to differences in definitions, meas- urement instruments, and time period assessed. inter- estingly, however, even studies with similar defini- tions of sexual violence, with similar samples (univer- sity students between and years of age), and ad - dressing identical time periods yielded very different prevalence rates (lehrer et al. ; lehrer, lehrer, and koss ; schuster et al. ). for example, schuster and colleagues found much higher preval- ence rates of sexual violence victimization over a twelve-month period ( . percent for women, . percent for men) as well as since the age of ( . percent for women, percent for men), than the rates found by lehrer and colleagues ( percent over the last twelve months and percent since the age of among women; percent since the age of among men). one possible explanation for these discrepancies may lie in the number of items used to assess victim- ization (bolen and scannapieco ; cook et al. ; de graaf and de haas ; fisher ). lehrer and colleagues ( ) used five comprehensive items as- sessing attempted rape, rape using three different co- ercive strategies (physical force, verbal pressure, tak- ing advantage of the victim being unable to resist), and unwanted sexual contact (such as touching or kissing). for example, one item read “someone forced me to have sex using physical force”, with response options “yes” and “no.” by contrast, schuster and col- leagues ( ) used thirty-six highly specific items fourteen years is the legal age of consent for heterosexual activities in chile. that combined three coercive strategies (use or threat of force, verbal pressure, exploitation of an incapacit- ated state), three relationship constellations (partner, acquaintance, stranger), and four specific sexual acts (touching, attempted intercourse, completed inter- course, other). specifically, after a lead-in that spe- cified the coercion strategy (“has a man ever made you – or tried to make you – have sexual contact with him against your will by threatening to use force or by harming you?”), several items specified both the relationship constellation and the specific sexual act (“my current or former partner in a steady relation- ship … to engage in sexual touching”) with response options “never”, “once”, “twice”, and “three or more times.” we will return to the implications of this huge discrepancy in item number and specificity in the dis- cussion section. research questions and hypotheses the present study represents the first wave of data collection (april ) within a five-year cross-sequen- tial panel survey on sexual violence at pontificia uni- versidad católica de chile (puc) in santiago. it will establish a baseline for the evaluation of future inter- ventions (which are not the subject of the present contribution). for present purposes, the main research questions concerned ( ) assessing sexual violence vic- timization experiences among puc undergraduates in a differentiated yet economical form, and ( ) examin- ing how these experiences correlate with other vari- ables that potentially represent risk factors for or con- sequences of victimization. although many analyses were exploratory, we did have a-priori hypotheses re- garding some correlations, which are outlined below where applicable. established risk factors for sexual violence victimiza- tion addressed in the survey include the age of onset of sexual activity, the number of previous sexual part- ners (krahé ; leenaars, dane, and marini ; mandoki and burkhart ), and short-term mating orientation, which includes a preference for uncom- mitted sexual encounters (perilloux, duntley, and buss ). all of these variables affect the likelihood of getting into high-risk social situations and exposure to potential perpetrators. thus we hypothesized victim- ization to be positively correlated with number of ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization partners and short-term mating orientation, and neg- atively correlated with age of onset. also, based on the majority of prior prevalence studies, we hypothe- sized that female students would report higher vic- timization rates than male students. we also considered a number of possible conse- quences deriving from sexual violence victimization. thus, we hypothesized that victimization would be re- lated to increased fear of being victimized, and would negatively impact life in general, academic life, and self-assessed health. such consequences of victimiza- tion have been frequently described (for example, krug et al. ). additionally, we examined how attitudinal variables might affect the perception of victimization experi- ences. previous research has shown effects of ambiva- lent sexism and sexual aggression myths on the per- ception of a victimization experience (lemaire, os- wald, and russell ). ambivalent sexism (glick and fiske ) encompasses both hostile attitudes toward women and benevolent attitudes toward women, which may subjectively appear positive but also rein- force gender inequality (“women are good mothers”) (jost and kay ). sexual aggression myths, which are prejudiced beliefs about sexual violence victimiza- tion (burt ; lonsway and fitzgerald ; gerger et al. ), have a wide range of negative conse- quences for victims of sexual violence, as they deny, downplay, or justify sexually aggressive behavior (bohner et al. ). indeed, the endorsement of sex- ual aggression myths may reduce the likelihood that a victim identifies their own victimization experience as rape, and the same has been demonstrated in relation to benevolent sexism (lemaire, oswald, and russell ). we therefore hypothesized that both sexist atti- tudes and the acceptance of sexual aggression myths would be related to a perception that the conse- quences of victimization experiences are less negative. further, we assessed two related general inter-group attitude variables, namely right-wing authoritarianism (rwa, altemeyer ) and social dominance orienta- tion (sdo, pratto, sidanius, stallworth, and malle ). these are positively related to a wide range of unfavorable attitudes toward members of disadvan- taged groups, including sexism and homophobia (ku- gler, jost, and noorbaloochi ; süssenbach and bohner ). it therefore seemed plausible that both rwa and sdo would also be related to a perception that the consequences of victimization experiences are less negative, which we explored in the current study. method the survey was conducted in april , approxi- mately six weeks into the chilean academic year, which starts in march. it assessed victimization, per- petration, bystander experiences, and related issues, such as knowledge, risk factors, attitudes, and beliefs regarding sexual violence. all undergraduate students at the university were invited by e-mail to participate. they were fully informed about the purpose of the survey, accessed through the online platform ques- tionpro. students who completed the survey were en- tered in a raffle of gift cards worth , chilean pesos (about euros). to preserve respondents’ anonymity, the e-mail addresses are kept separate and are not accessible to researchers analyzing the data. after completing the survey, respondents re- ceived a debriefing message that included information on support for victims and bystanders of sexual vio- lence. all procedures were approved by puc’s rele- vant ethics committee. . respondents , undergraduate students took part in the survey. they were from three cohorts (year = , year = , year = ), and were between the ages of and years (m = . , sd = . , percent between and ) . percent identified as female, . per- cent as male, and . percent as non-binary. . per- cent identified as heterosexual, . percent as lesbian or gay, . percent as bisexual, and . percent re- ported other sexual orientations. . percent of the respondents had chilean nationality and . percent were still living with their parents. in , the total number of undergraduates enrolled at puc was , ( . percent female). of these, , were in year , , in year , and , in year . ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization . materials . . victimization experiences to avoid overburdening respondents with a long list of items, we adapted the sav-s (krahé and berger ), which was also used by schuster and colleagues ( ), condensing the specific information from their thirty-six items into three main items, each address- ing one coercive strategy. we did not at this stage provide specific items for each combination of rela- tionship constellation and sexual act within each co- ercive strategy. otherwise, we used the same spanish wording as schuster and colleagues ( ). respon- dents who reported at least one victimization experi- ence in the three main items were asked to give addi- tional details. the english wording of the victimization measure read as follows (spanish text available from the first author): please tell us if, during the last twelve months, one or several person/s has/have had sexual contact with you or attempted to do so (for example kissing, touching, co- itus, oral sex) against your will or without your consent by … (i) … threatening to use force or hurting you (for ex- ample, causing you pain because you were held or threatened). (ii) … taking advantage of you being unable to resist (for example, after you had consumed a lot of alcohol or drugs). (iii) … verbally pressuring you (for example, threatening to end the relationship or questioning your sexual com- petence). for each item there were three response options: “never,” “once,” and “more than once.” respondents who reported at least one relevant experience were then asked further questions relating to the (latest) incident; all others moved on to the items described in the next section. for victims, eighteen items were used to assess details including the number of perpe- trators (“one,” “two,” or “more than two”); perpetrator gender (“male” or “female”); whether the victim al- ready knew the perpetrator (“yes” or “no”); what rela- the authors would like to thank isabell schuster for pro- viding access to her materials. in addition to the instruments reported in this section, the survey contained questions on well-being, management of stress, empathy, self-esteem, recognition and attiitudes con- doning sexually aggressive behavior, consent, and bystander behavior. these issues are outside of the scope of the present article. unless stated otherwise, response options of scales were from = “totally disagree” to = “totally agree.” tionship the perpetrator had to the victim (for exam- ple partner, friend, university member); the level of ac- quaintance ( = “not close at all” to = “very close”); whether the incident occurred within a university context (for example on campus, during a student party, during a class assignment or excursion, “yes” or “no”); whether the respondent had told anybody about the incident (“yes,” “no,” or “prefer not to say”); if not, why not (twelve possible reasons such as “i didn’t think it was something serious” could be select- ed; see table ); for those who told someone about the incident, how the support received was perceived ( = “not satisfactory at all” to = “very satisfactory”); whether victim or perpetrator had consumed drugs or alcohol (“me,” “the other person,” “both,” “nobody”); how serious the incident was for the respondent ( = “not serious at all” to = “very serious”); whether it had negative consequences on the respondent’s (aca- demic) life ( = “not at all” to = “very much”); whether the respondent had thought of leaving the university (“yes” or “no”); and whether the respondent had received psychological help related to the inci- dent (“yes” or “no”). . . knowledge about and satisfaction with university policies and protocols to assess how well students were informed about and satisfied with puc policies relating to sexual violence, ten items addressed respondents’ familiarity with specific action protocols and university contact points, whether they knew whom to contact accord- ing to the circumstances (for example if the perpetra- tor was a fellow student, if the incident happened on campus, if the perpetrator was a professor), and how satisfied they were with support offered by the uni- versity. internal consistency of the policy satisfaction scale was very high (cronbach’s α = . ). . . sexual experience three items addressing sexual experience were adapted from schuster and colleagues ( ): “have you ever had sexual intercourse?” (“yes,” “no,” “do not wish to answer”); “at which age did you have your first sexual intercourse?” (drop-down list with options starting at “under ” and increasing in one-year steps); and “with how many persons have you had ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization sexual intercourse during the past months?” (“none,” “one,” “two,” “three,” “four,” “ to ,” “ to ,” “ to ,” “more than ”). . . fear of victimization on the basis of work by ferraro ( ) and merrill ( ), we formulated three items to measure fear of victimization (for example “i fear that a fellow student might sexually assault me”), and three items to mea- sure avoidance behaviors related to this fear (for ex- ample, “how often have you done the following? … take different paths or routes on campus to avoid be- ing sexually assaulted”; = “never or almost never” to = “always or almost always”). these six items were adapted to the puc context by incorporating key ele- ments that had come up in pilot discussions with stu- dents. internal consistency for this scale was good (α = . ). . . short-term mating orientation to assess short-term mating orientation, we selected two items from a measure by jackson and kirkpatrick ( ): “i can easily imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying ‘casual’ sex with different partners” and “i could easily imagine myself enjoying one night of sex with someone i would never see again”. internal consistency for this scale was good (α = . ). . . health to explore the possibility that victimization experi- ences might affect respondents’ health status, two items addressing self-assessed health were taken from the us centers for disease control and prevention health related quality of life measure (cdc hrqol- , , cited in khan et al. ): “how would you describe your physical health?” and “how would you describe your state of mind?” ( = “poor” to = “excellent”). internal consistency for the health condition scale was modest (α = . ). . . ambivalent sexism to assess ambivalent sexism, six items from the span- ish ambivalent sexism inventory (mladinic et al. ) were selected on the basis of their factor loadings in a chilean sample (jiménez-moya, manzi, and cheyre ). three items each represented hostile sexism (for example, “women exaggerate problems at work”) and benevolent sexism (for example, “women should be cherished and protected by men”). internal consis- tency for this scale was acceptable (α = . ). . . sexual aggression myths on the basis of expert analysis, six items from the ac- ceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression scale (gerger et al. ; spanish version by megías et al. ), were selected and adapted for use with a chilean sample (for example, “many women tend to exaggerate the problem of male violence”). internal consistency for this scale was good (α = . ). . . conservative attitudes two items from the sdo scale (ho et al. ; for ex- ample, “some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups”) and two items from the rwa scale (funke ; for example, “what our country really needs instead of more ‘civil rights’ is a good stiff dose of law and order”) were translated and adapted on the basis of their adequacy for the chilean context and their fit within the survey, as previous research had shown that they were strongly linked to hostile be- havior. internal consistencies for these scales were ac- ceptable (α = . for sdo and α = . for rwa). . results . prevalence rates overall, . percent of respondents reported at least one experience of nonconsensual sexual contact over the previous twelve months ( . percent by force or threat of force; . percent while unable to resist; . percent by verbal pressure; multiple answers were possible). responses for the three coercive strategies were positively intercorrelated (rs ranging from . to . ; cronbach’s alpha = . ). women ( . percent) were victimized more frequently than men ( . per- cent). taking sexual orientation into account, victim- ization was lowest for heterosexual men ( . percent), followed by homosexual women ( . percent) and homosexual men ( . percent). among the group of males, the highest victimization rate was reported by bisexuals ( . percent). heterosexual ( . percent) and bisexual women ( . percent) reported the high- est rates of victimization. ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization among women, victimization rates were highest for year students ( . percent), intermediate for year ( . percent), and lowest for year ( . percent). this is a significant linear decrease from y to y , χ ( , n = ) = . , p = . . among the men, no comparable trend emerged. in most cases, the perpetrators were male ( . per- cent) and known to the victim ( . percent); . per- cent were partners, and . percent were friends. in . percent of cases, both parties had consumed alco- hol, in . percent only the victim, and in . percent only the perpetrator. in . percent of the cases both parties had consumed other drugs, in . percent only the victim, and in . percent only the perpetrator. alcohol or drugs were almost always involved when the victim was unable to resist ( . percent) but less frequently when the perpetrator used (threat of) force ( . percent) or verbal pressure ( . percent). when intoxication was involved (vs. not involved), the victim was less likely to know the perpetrator ( . percent vs. . percent). only . percent of the reported cases occurred in a university context. of interest, in- toxication was involved more frequently in university contexts ( . percent) than in other contexts ( . percent). at least . percent of reported perpetrators were university members, of whom percent were fellow undergraduates. . consequences of victimization although more than half of the victims ( . percent) rated the incident as at least “somewhat” severe, many did not perceive major negative consequences (see also figure ). a majority reported that the inci- dent had little or no impact on their personal life ( . percent) or on their academic life ( . percent) (points and on a scale from = “not at all” to = “very much”). . percent of the victims reported having received psychological help and percent had thought about leaving the university. . percent of the victims reported having told someone about the incident. in a majority of cases, they talked about the incident with friends ( . percent) and/or fellow students ( . percent), and the support received was the item format with exclusive response options did not allow us to distinguish if perpetrators reported as friends, family members, etc. might also have been university mem- bers. rated as “rather satisfactory” in most cases. very few victims had reported the incident to the police ( . percent) or to the university ( . percent), and those who had done so rated the support received as rather unsatisfactory. figure shows in detail whom victims told about the incident, and the associated level of satisfaction with the support received. the most common reasons for not reporting the in- cident were “i didn’t think it was something serious” ( . percent), “i didn’t know with whom or how i could talk about what happened” ( . percent), and “i couldn’t decide if it was appropriate or not” ( . percent). all reasons and their respective percentages are listed in table . an exploratory analysis showed that respondents who had talked about the incident reported more severe consequences (m = . ) than did respondents who had not talked about it (m = . ), t( . ) = . , p = . . further, respondents who had experienced sexual violence (m = . ) were less satisfied with puc policies on sexual violence than those who had not (m = . ), t( . ) = - . , p < . . we will return to these findings in the discus- sion. . correlation and regression analyses on risk factors and consequences in bivariate correlation analyses (see table ), the number of sex partners, short-term mating orienta- tion, age of onset of sexual activity, and the fact of be- ing sexually active were identified as significant corre- lates of sexual violence victimization, supporting our hypotheses regarding risk factors. furthermore, as hy- pothesized, self-assessed health was negatively corre- lated, and reported fear of victimization was posi- tively correlated with victimization experiences. atti- tudinal factors, such as sexist attitudes, acceptance of sexual aggression myths, and conservative attitudes, were all negatively correlated with victimization. as can be seen in table , although significant, all of these correlations were small in magnitude. ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization figure : consequences of victimization by type of coercion note: percentage of victims by type of coercion who (i) rated the incident as at least “somewhat” severe (points to on a scale from = “not severe” to = “very severe”), (ii) said the incident affected their personal lives at least “somewhat” (points to on a scale from = “not at all” to = “very much”), (iii) said the incident negatively affected their academic lives at least “somewhat” (points to on a scale from = “not at all” to = “very much ”), (iv) had thought of leaving the university (“yes” in a yes/no answer format), (v) or received psychological help (“yes” in a yes/no answer format). type of coercion did not significantly affect the reporting of consequences. figure : communication of the incident and satisfaction with support note: percentage of victims who are not satisfied (darker bars) and at least somewhat satisfied (lighter bars) with the sup - port offered. the number of victims telling the incident to each specific target is shown in parentheses. for example, victims told friends about the incident, and over percent of these found the support given at least “somewhat” satisfac - tory (points to on a scale from = “not at all satisfactory” to = “very satisfactory”). ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization table : reasons for not reporting sexual violence victimization reason percentage of vic- tims reporting this reason for not telling anybody i didn’t think it was something serious . % i didn’t know with whom or how i could talk about what happened . % i couldn’t decide if it was appropriate or not . % i have/had an intimate or close relationship with the person responsible . % the person responsible was somebody i liked/like . % i felt that i provoked what happened to me . % i am/was worried about what other people would think if i reported . % i didn’t/don’t think that the perpetrator/s would suffer any kind of consequences . % what happened to me was something common and accepted among my acquaintances . % i didn’t/don’t think that i would receive the support i needed . % i didn’t/don’t think that other people would believe me . % the person responsible was in a powerful position and could have retaliated afterwards . % note: the reasons offered were based on previous research (vanselow ; woodzicka and lafrance ). table : correlates of victimization correlation with victimization potential risk factors number of sex partners . ** short-term mating orientation . ** being sexually active . ** age of onset of sexual activity -. * potential consequences health status -. * fear of victimization . ** attitude variables ambivalent sexist attitudes -. ** acceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression -. ** right-wing authoritarianism -. ** social dominance orientation -. ** note: ** p < . ( -tailed); * p < . ( -tailed). ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization we also conducted a multiple regression analysis with victimization as the dependent variable and the following predictors: respondent gender and age, number of sex partners, short-term mating orienta- tion, and age of onset of sexual activity (the main risk factors), as well as sexism, sexual aggression myths, rwa, and sdo (the attitudinal variables). this analy- sis yielded an overall r of . , p < . ; in the same analysis, respondent gender (β = . , p < . ), number of sex partners (β = . , p < . ), and short-term mat- ing orientation (β = . , p = . ) remained significant individual predictors, all other p > . . further significant negative correlations were found between the perceived consequences of victimization on the one hand, and ambivalent sexism, acceptance of sexual aggression myths, and conservative attitudes on the other (see table ). this means that, as hypoth- esized, respondents endorsing those attitudes were less likely to perceive experiences of sexual violence as having a severe impact on victims’ lives. again, al- though significant, all correlations were small. a mul- tiple regression analysis that included all of the pre- dictors listed in table as well as respondent gender and age yielded an overall r of . , p < . ; in the same analysis, respondent gender (β = . , p < . ) and age (β = . , p = . ) were significant individual predictors, but none of the attitudinal variables (all p > . ). discussion the purpose of the survey was to assess rates of prevalence of sexual violence victimization among un- dergraduates at pontificia universidad católica de chile (puc) and to identify correlates in terms of risk factors and personal consequences. we were also in- terested in attitudinal correlates that had been previ- ously identified as noteworthy with regard to sexual violence victimization and the perception of its conse- quences. our analyses will support the planning of preventive measures at puc. in general, the findings of our survey are compatible with previous research. regarding prevalence, the re- sults resemble those obtained among students in chile using shorter instruments (lehrer et al. ), but differ considerably from the rates obtained by schuster and colleagues ( ). as stated in the intro- duction, schuster and colleagues used a much longer questionnaire, which could explain the very high rates of victimization reported in their study. studies that have analyzed victimization rates in re- lation to questionnaire length usually report a positive correlation between the two variables (bolen and scannapieco ; de graaf and de haas ; fisher ). it has been argued that instruments with multi- ple behaviorally specific items, such as the sav-s, which yield the highest prevalence rates, are also the most valid (cook et al. ). this may be true to the extent that such instruments are better at cueing spe- cific memories of incidents that a respondent may otherwise not have recalled or not labeled as sexual violence. however, we should also consider the possi- bility that a long, multi-item instrument may increase the reporting of false positives, as the content may subtly provide normative information about its topic (schwarz ). thus, a respondent going through thirty-six items that repeatedly ask if they have been sexually assaulted (combining three coercive strate- gies, three victim/perpetrator constellations, and four table : correlates of the consequences of victimization correlation with perceived consequencesa ambivalent sexist attitudes -. ** acceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression -. ** rwa -. ** sdo -. ** note: a perceived severity of the incident, negative consequences on personal life, and negative consequences on academic life averaged into one scale (cronbach’s α = . ). ** p < . ( -tailed). ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization sexual acts) may get the impression that it is norma- tively expected to have had such experiences – why else would such similar questions be asked over and over again? this could conceivably lead a respondent to tick a positive response option once or twice to comply with the perceived norm. given that the true answer to each specific item is more likely to be “no” than “yes,” even random errors in responding (inad- vertently ticking the wrong response category) would systematically increase the number of false positives. in light of these considerations, we kept the number of items asking about whether the respondent had been victimized to three, but otherwise used the wording of the sav-s. nonetheless, the question of optimal questionnaire length and specificity needs further research. our data also revealed important differences to the results of schuster and colleagues ( ) regarding gender differences in victimization. whereas they sur- prisingly found higher twelve-month prevalence rates for men ( . percent) than women ( . percent), in our study more than twice as many women ( . per- cent) than men ( . percent) reported victimization. our finding is in line with previous studies also re- porting higher prevalence rates among females in stu- dent samples (cantor et al. ). this highlights the gendered nature of sexual violence, which is widely recognized. the world health organization ( ) de- scribes sexual violence as a major public health prob- lem that violates the rights of women, limits their par- ticipation in society, and damages their health and well-being. nevertheless, male college students also report relatively high rates of victimization (cantor et al. ). this could also be observed in our findings. the most commonly reported coercive strategy was taking advantage of the victim being unable to resist, often facilitated by the use of alcohol or drugs. the use of these substances has been outlined as an im- portant risk factor (abbey et al. ; krahé and berger, ), and this was also observed in our data: in most of the victimization cases reported, alcohol (and drugs to a lesser degree) was used by both victim and perpetrator. the role of intoxication was particu- larly pronounced for assaults in a university setting, those perpetrated by strangers, and those where the perpetrator(s) took advantage of the victim’s inability to resist. this points to the possibility that such inci- dents happened at parties or student gatherings, which are also the scenarios where sexual advances (especially from men toward women) are encouraged. as we hypothesized, significant correlations with health status (negative) and fear of victimization (pos- itive) point to consequences of victimization. these re- sults are in line with extensive literature (see krug et al. for a review). correlation and regression analyses also supported our hypotheses regarding risk factors for sexual victimization. specifically, we identi- fied the number of sexual partners, the age of onset of sexual activity, being sexually active, and a short-term mating orientation as predictors of victimization. all these factors are associated with frequent sexual in- teractions, which increase the probability of encoun- tering a sexually coercive person and thus the risk of being victimized (see also perilloux, duntley, and buss ). it should be noted, however, that in our data only respondent gender, number of sexual partners, and short-term mating orientation remained signifi- cant individual predictors when the other variables and age were controlled for in a multiple regression analysis. certain groups were identified as being more vul- nerable than others. specifically people with a sexual interest in men (heterosexual and bisexual women, bi- sexual and homosexual men) appear to be at higher risk than those with no such interest (homosexual women and heterosexual men). this suggests that prejudiced expectations and gender stereotypes might encourage coercive behaviors among men, and that men are more likely to misinterpret, disregard, or ig- nore cues regarding (non)consent in sexual interac- tions. according to reed, gupta, and silverman ( ), regardless of the victim’s gender, male-perpe- trated sexual violence appears to be linked to gender norms that promote male dominance and control (for a multi-country study supporting this, see fulu et al. ). previous research has also shown a link be- tween acceptance of sexual aggression myths, tradi- tional gender roles, and hypermasculinity on the one hand, and sexual violence perpetration on the other hand (for a review, see greathouse et al. ). one possible protective factor that emerged is the fact of being at university. the significant drop in ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization women’s reported victimization from year (where most of the reported experiences would have hap- pened before entering university) to year suggests that the university might be a safer environment than where students came from. but other factors could also explain the reported decrease in victimization. the change could reflect maturation and growth, rather than merely the fact of being at the university. another consideration inconsistent with the idea of the university being a protective environment is that some activities commonly taking place in university contexts (such as parties, student gatherings) are also known as settings where sexual violence is more likely. in any case, it is inadvisable to draw definite conclusions from a trend based only on the first wave of a panel survey. future waves, and the possibility of analyzing longitudinal data, should bring greater clar- ity. negative correlations were observed between am- bivalent sexist attitudes, acceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression, rwa, and sdo on the one hand, and victimization experiences on the other. it is possible that victimization experiences change attitu- dinal dispositions toward sexual violence and may also decrease unfavorable group-related attitudes. the fact of being directly confronted with sexual violence, which is very often counter-stereotypical (for example the perpetrator is not a stranger and the coercive strategy is not physical force), reduces rape-related stereotypes (see bohner ). conversely, students who have never experienced sexual violence may be more likely to enjoy the “illusion of invulnerability” that comes with high levels of rape myth acceptance and, to a lesser extent, conservative attitudes (bohner, siebler, and raaijmakers ; bohner et al. ). this highlights the importance of communicating vic- timization experiences, in order to give people a sense of how widespread sexual violence really is and what it actually looks like. however, further research is needed to replicate the correlations discussed here, given that their magnitude was small and regression analysis showed that they may be explained by inter- correlations with other variables such as sexual expe- rience, gender, or age. the attitudinal variables were also negatively corre- lated with perceived consequences of victimization, where they jointly (but not individually) predicted a small proportion of variance. victims who scored higher on sexist attitudes, acceptance of sexual ag- gression myths, rwa, and sdo reported that they perceived the consequences of victimization as less se- vere. the endorsement of such attitudes appears to normalize coercive behaviors, reducing the willingness to acknowledge their severity (papendick and bohner ). this complements results by lemaire and col- leagues ( ), who found that endorsement of benev- olent sexism and sexual aggression myths reduces the likelihood that a person will label their victimization experience as rape. our results point to the possibility that this link between attitudes and labeling a victim- ization experience as rape might be mediated by a vic- tim’s perception of the consequences associated with that experience as less severe. nonetheless, further re- search is needed to explore the underlying causal process. our results highlight the relevance of identifying factors that may lead victims to underestimate the personal consequences of sexual violence, which seems to occur frequently. although most victims of sexual violence in our sample reported that the inci- dent did not have much impact on their personal life, we also found that sexual violence experiences were associated with judgments of poorer health and an in- creased fear of victimization. we suspect that atti- tudes that legitimate sexual violence and, more gener- ally, conservative attitudes may prevent respondents from consciously linking their experiences of sexual violence with negative consequences, even though these consequences exist. furthermore, the perceived consequences of the in- cident seem to have an effect on the willingness of the victim to talk about it, as respondents who perceived milder consequences were less likely to talk about the incident to others. indeed, the most common reason for not reporting a victimization experience was thinking that it was not something serious. most victims preferred to talk about the incident with friends or family, rather than reporting it to uni- versity or public authorities. it should be of special in - terest for puc that out of the minority ( . percent) who reported a victimization experience to the univer- sity, more than two-thirds were dissatisfied with the ijcv: vol. ( )/ saldarriaga, rocha, castro, jiménez-moya, carvacho, bohner : sexual violence victimization support received. one reason for this high level of dis- satisfaction could be that university policies were in their first year of implementation when the data were collected, and may have been limited in their effec- tiveness. additionally, during data collection, the local feminist movement, in which many female students were participating, was asserting that chilean univer- sities’ efforts to address sexual violence within their institutions were inadequate. this perception may have been especially salient to victims who had had direct experience of the existing institutional support. however, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from the satisfaction data, as our data also show that the less severe assault cases were shared mostly with friends, whereas only the more severe cases were re- ported to authorities, and talking to friends may gen- erally be a more gratifying experience than talking to strangers. further data on this issue should be gath- ered in future waves of the panel survey; also, in- depth interviews with service users may provide a clearer picture of future needs. . strengths and limitations one major strength of the current study is that it was possible to invite all undergraduates at puc to partic- ipate, and a substantial proportion did so (more than percent of students in years to ). as the first analysis in a five-year cross-sequential study, it marks the starting point of the largest assessment of sexual violence ever conducted in the chilean university con- text. we note that female students appear to be over-rep- resented in the sample. the same may be true for peo- ple who have been victimized: the topic of the survey may have attracted students who felt a need to report their own experience. another obvious limitation at the current stage is that only cross-sectional, correla- tional data are available, which means that any causal interpretations must be treated with caution. also, considerations of research economy demanded that many constructs be assessed with very short versions of existing instruments, which means that reliability may have been compromised. on the other hand, the adequate participation rate suggests that the survey instrument was not too large. . open questions and outlook as discussed above, one tricky issue that merits fur- ther attention is the optimal length and specificity of the victimization part of the survey. this issue needs to be addressed in order to explain the diverging find- ings for chilean prevalence rates (especially between the present study and schuster et al. ). new theo- rizing and specific methodological studies will be needed to tackle the question of potential under- and over-reporting. references abbey, antonia, tina zawacki, philip o. buck, a. monique clinton, and pam mcauslan. . sexual assault and al- cohol consumption: what do we know about their re- lationship and what types of research are still needed? 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( ). from trust in the system to trust in the content. internet policy review, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / . . keywords: trust, internet, association of internet researchers abstract: the internet is the digital reincarnation of a greek agora or a roman forum. it works as a “place” for public and private life. as such, it requires reliable, trustful rules to govern the daily routine of its visitors/users. the governance of the internet has gone through a significant (if not tectonic) change since its standardisation. this is clearly reflected by the changes in the concept of trust as well. historically, trust reflected the concerns of internet users regarding the intrusion of governments into the neutral functioning of this “place”. as of now, concerns regarding trust are equally present at the macro and micro level. trust in platforms and in the content made available through the internet is at the centre of disputes nowadays. this editorial intends to provide for a selected introduction of the macro- and micro-level aspects of trust in the system and trust in the content, including content moderation, copyright law, fake news, game-making, hateful materials, leaking, social media and vpns. issue https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /de/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /de/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /de/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /de/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /de/deed.en papers in this special issue arrow_downward editorial: from trust in the system to trust in the content péter mezei, university of szeged andreea verteș-olteanu, west university of timișoara expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates tarleton gillespie, microsoft research patricia aufderheide, american university elinor carmi, university of liverpool ysabel gerrard, university of sheffield robert gorwa, university of oxford ariadna matamoros-fernández, queensland university of technology sarah t. roberts, university of california, los angeles aram sinnreich, american university sarah myers west, new york university vpns as boundary objects of the internet: (mis)trust in the translation(s) luke heemsbergen, deakin university adam molnar, university of waterloo combating misinformation online: re-imagining social media for policy-making eleni a. kyza, cyprus university of technology christiana varda, cyprus university of technology dionysis panos, cyprus university of technology melina karageorgiou, cyprus university of technology nadejda komendantova, international institute for applied systems analysis serena coppolino perfumi, stockholm university syed iftikhar husain shah, international hellenic university akram sadat hosseini, university of stuttgart platformisation in game development aleena chia, simon fraser university brendan keogh, queensland university of technology dale leorke, tampere university benjamin nicoll, queensland university of technology reddit quarantined: can changing platform affordances reduce hateful material online? simon copland, australian national university trusted commons: why ‘old’ social media matter maxigas, university of amsterdam guillaume latzko-toth, laval university internet policy review ( ) | https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . editorial from trust in the system to trust in the content introduction back in , the cyber libertarian political activist john perry barlow published his declaration of the independence of cyberspace. he started his declaration as follows: “governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, i come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. on behalf of the future, i ask you of the past to leave us alone. you are not welcome among us. you have no sovereign- ty where we gather” (barlow, ). we shall agree with van dijck and rieder that “[w]hile the mythos of cyberspace as a new frontier has long faded, common terms like ‘internet culture’ or even ‘online shopping’ signal that there is some kind of elsewhere in the clouds behind our screens” (van dijck and rieder, , p. ). the internet is such an elsewhere: a digital reincarnation of a greek agora or a roman forum. it works as a “place” for public and private discussions, debates, meetings, rendez-vous. it is a marketplace. and such a place requires reliable, trustful rules to govern the daily routine of its visitors/users. what makes barlow’s declaration a relevant reference point for this editorial is nothing else than to signal that it was a clear warning to the governments of the world that users of the new medium, the internet, do not trust them. users feared that governments intend to limit the use of the internet just as they posed signifi- cant limitations to the liberties of children for example. he continued: “you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of cy- berspace” (barlow, ). the internet has since transformed into a more robust system that can only be analysed in an interdisciplinary way (consalvo and ess, ). likewise, trust in the system has transformed into a more complex metaphor: covering not only (dis)trust in governments, but (dis)trust in other users, intermediaries, platforms, data, information and news etc. in sum, trust in the con- tent. the association of internet researchers (aoir) is a leading global organisation to en- hance the interdisciplinary research of internet studies. it organises its annual con- ferences since two decades, and centres these events around a specific topic since . the latest edition of this conference series took place in brisbane, australia. the october event intended to “explore the question of whether we can still have, or how we might regain, trust in the system: in a world of unscrupulous ac- tors and dubious data, how can we know what and whom to trust? indeed, how might we change the system itself–rethinking, redesigning, rebuilding, repurpos- mezei, verteș-olteanu ing it – to provide a more trustworthy experience for a broader, more diverse, more inclusive community of internet users?” (association of internet researchers, ). hundreds of excellent papers analysed the macro and micro level aspects of trust in the digital environment. internet policy review, a leading open access journal for interdisciplinary internet research, collaborates with aoir since to publish hand-picked peer-reviewed articles by participants of aoir conferences. this special issue is the third in this row (dutton, ; van dijck and rieder, ), and trust in the system, as a topic, fits perfectly into the mission of the journal: it is inherently interdisciplinary, policy oriented and it is a really hot topic of internet research. this editorial is structured as follows. first, we’ll address trust at a macro level: its meaning and its relevance in our digital society. second, we’ll introduce three cherry-picked micro level aspects of trust (in the system): fake news, leaking and copyright law. the selection of these aspects is twofold. on the one hand, they meet the scientific interest of the authors of this editorial. on the other hand, this editorial intends to work as an addendum to the papers selected and peer-re- viewed for this special issue. more precisely, the editorial discusses aspects of trust that the selected papers mainly miss to analyse. third, the editorial ends with the short introduction to the six contributions presented originally at aoir , and developed later into peer-reviewed articles. trust law is a fiction (fuller, ; del mar and twining, ). unlike rules of nature (e.g., gravity, h o and so forth), laws are created and recreated by humans in order to describe and reflect social realities. ideally, the final goal of law is to guarantee the functioning of the whole society. legal concepts reflect physical realities (e.g., ownership is historically bound to tangibles) and metaphysical phenomena (e.g., some countries guarantee ownership interests over intangibles). the legal reflec- tion of these concepts might change from time to time. what is lawful today might become illegal later on and vice versa. brand new social, economic and technologi- cal challenges lead to regular reformulations of the law. laws do not only aim to guarantee social stability and reliability, but they shall pursue the goal of benefiting all humans (not to mention others, e.g., animals or the environment in general) rather than discriminating against minorities. the fate of the rules is heavily affected by the fact of whether or not they are accepted and followed by their subjects. the best laws are those that we follow since we under- internet policy review ( ) | stand and agree with them - we trust in them. some of the laws are obscure, they are based on flawed policy arguments, outdated or simply unnecessary. noone de- nies that parents shall be liable for the damages caused by their infant children. it, however, changes from time to time what an infant might be able to do: stealing daddy’s car seems to be physically more troublesome (and hence more control- lable) than texting a bully on a smartphone. similarly, while the majority of society understands why stealing a car is against the law, a significant part of society thinks it is unfair to prohibit (and also criminalise) the unauthorised downloading of copyrighted contents through p p file-sharing platforms. if laws regulate against social norms, the acceptance and the following of, as well as the trust in law, erodes or disappears. metaphors are commonly used in law (larsson, ). they are capable of defining realities (lakoff and johnson, , p. ) and helping “the imaginary become re- al or true” (wyatt, , p. ) metaphors “create cognitive bridges between dis- parate subjects, mapping existing knowledge about a familiar and concrete source domain onto unfamiliar, abstract, or novel concepts” (gill, , p. .), and their main task is to persuade people (fuller, , p. ) metaphors strengthen the ra- tionale of any given rule, or support the understanding of a norm by attaching an already existing expression (often legal terms) to a phenomena, and hence provid- ing existing knowledge to emerging legal questions. as gill explained, “[t]he metaphors chosen by a court or legislature will effectively determine the validity of certain arguments, delimit the boundaries of acceptable debate, and reshape what we understand to be both ‘logical’ and legal in a given situation” (gill, , p. ). metaphors have a vital role to describe technological challenges, too. this is mainly due to the constant development of technology and the pace of it, as well as to the fact that “the digital” is formless, that is, metaphors are more neces- sary to describe realities than tangible/material/analogue elements of society (gill, , p. ). notable metaphors - including “skeumorphs”, that is the reused versions of old concepts (larsson, ) - in the digital domain of law are for instance cyberspace, information superhighway, singularity, the cloud, transparency, net neutrality, pira- cy, big data, raw data, data mining, harvesting, artificial intelligence, domain (name), platform, (safe) harbour, bulletin board, torrent, search engine, magnet link, swarm, virus, trojan horse, leak, or - as discussed in this special issue - ‘going dark’ to describe the risks of end to end encryption (heemsbergen and molnar, ). metaphors are also used to link new technologies to existing rules (gill, , p. ). as tim hwang and karen levy noted, “[a]s technology advances, law evolves mezei, verteș-olteanu (slowly, and somewhat clumsily) to accommodate new technologies and social norms around them. the most typical way this happens is that judges and regula- tors think about whether a new, unregulated technology is sufficiently like an ex- isting thing that we already have rules about—and this is where metaphors and comparisons come in” (hwang and levy, ). the main purpose of such metaphors in law and technology is to guarantee that the conceptualisation, the regulation, the administration and the use of the new technology goes smoothly. trust is an important metaphor. in some sense, trust means the freedom of giving up the obligation of experimenting, learning and acting individually. at the same time, it also represents the acceptance of the specialised society, that is, that we are neither able nor obliged to know and do everything on our own; we can rely on others who have the relevant knowledge or who are able to do the given task, and we shall trust in and follow their decisions. balázs bodó defines trust on an in- terpersonal level “as the willingness to cooperate with another in the face of un- certainty, contingency, risk, and potential harm” (bodó, , p. .) trust in the system has its own metaphorical meaning. in conjunction with trust’s metaphorical meaning, it requires internet users to accept and follow the rules of the web, and, for the less e-literates, to stick to the options available online (in- cluding but not limited to platforms). the ‘barlow fears’ from government misuses gave place to cybersecurity concerns in the early years of the internet. the financial motives of cybercriminals as well as the pure dangers of cybercrime grew along with the economic growth of the inter- net. frederick chang noted that “[h]umans must defend machines that are at- tacked by other humans using machines” (chang, ). cybercrimes and informa- tion security thus evolved together (bauer and van eeten, , pp. - ). the growing popularity of cyber attacks was mainly due to their cheap, convenient and less risky nature (jang-jaccard and nepal, , p. ). viruses, trojan horses, worms, bots or spyware pose a significant threat to reliability of and trust in the system by, just to name a few, online identity or data thefts, phishing or industrial espionage (moore, , pp. - ). it is, of course, not only illegal financial motives that might threaten the trust in the system. web . led to a hyper-atomised internet: the actors and their possibil- ities of data creation, dissemination and access were multiplied and polarised. in- termediaries/platforms emerged and provided the means and space of participato- ry culture (e.g., on youtube’s role see burgess and green, ). these platforms turned to be the main engines of the internet economy and platform capitalism. internet policy review ( ) | they, however, do not intend to solely serve social interests. corporate financial motives are in the end the drivers of decisions by platform operators. the internet has become the forum of personal opinions, the “elsewhere” of artistic, spiritual and political life. as data has become a leading source of revenue and power, the reliability of data, its creator and disseminator has become a preemi- nent concern. trust in the system started to include trust in the content, its creator and its disseminator. at the same time, platforms are the new capitalistic enter- prises, with their own values and private norms. trust in these platforms is the foundation of their reliability and functioning. how they react to social events be- comes crucial. the role that platforms played during the arab spring, the #metoo or #blacklivesmatter campaigns; how twitter labelled president trump’s tweet as misleading (and how facebook disagreed with the rival platform for a while) fol- lowing the outrage sparked by the death of george floyd jr. (newton, ); or how president trump proclaimed a regulation to punish social media platforms for such labelling (heldt, ) are excellent examples for the role that platforms play in deteriorating, preserving or strengthening trust in the system and content. the issue of trust in the system is present in the micro-level of the internet, too. this editorial, before turning to the actual papers selected for this special issue, in- tends to highlight the importance and the consequences of (the lack of) trust in three micro-fields of the internet: fake news, leaking and copyright law. fake news good and ethical journalism is based on trust, developed from the assumptions that the communicated news reports are true and the information is reliable, accu- rate and trustworthy. the basic responsibility of a journalist is to seek, publish, and, above all, respect the truth. however, in an ever-growing digitalised world, media consumers are involved in an unprecedented transfer of information and, as a result, the trust paradigm is in considerable danger. truth is being replaced by post-truth, and story news by fake news (palczewski, ). ‘journalistic deception’ was defined as an act of communicating messages not only by lying, but also by withholding information, so as to lead someone to have a false belief (elliot and culver, ). however, despite its deeply troubling recent online development, the spread of false news and journalistic deception dates back to antiquity. mitchell stephens offers the example of acta diurna, a proto- newspaper of ad, where the author of disinformation was none other than pliny the elder, the renowned roman savant, naturalist and natural philosopher mezei, verteș-olteanu (stephens, , p. ). in , benjamin franklin did the same, in an article writ- ten for the london general advertiser. he published the statement of a young moth- er, polly baker, accused of extramarital sex. the speech was supposed to have made such an impression on the jury, that they acquitted her of the charges. thirty years later, franklin admitted that he had invented polly baker (kitty, , p. ). false news existed before the gutenberg press and flourished afterwards, simply because, just as information wants to be free, so does misinformation. the printing press empowered reformers alongside hawkers, profiteers, and bigots. the inven- tion of the printing press simply shifted the problem of the gatekeepers of truth, aka the information: the old gatekeepers were princes and priests. the new ones were entrepreneurs such as gutenberg or caxton (marantz, ). despite the coining of the term fake news in the mid- s, propaganda, misinfor- mation, disinformation, and all types of news hoaxes have for long been present in the history of the world and called bias, spin or lies. they caused, not always di- rectly, international incidents, even wars, such as the spanish-american war of , the gleiwitz incident of , vietnam, the second iraqi war (palczewsi, ), and often originate with totalitarian dictatorships, though one can easily spot politically driven hoaxes even in democratic countries, especially when faced with electoral campaigns (e.g., viktor orbán in or boris johnson in ). in a nutshell, fake news is intentionally fraudulent, aimed to deceive the receiver, often with an underlying objective to achieve a certain material, political, personal, or group gain or simply to entertain or excite. from a theoretical point of view, there are seven identifiable types of fake news: false connection (when headlines or visuals do not support the content), false con- text (when genuine content is shared with false contextual information), manipu- lated content (when genuine information is manipulated to deceive), satire or par- ody (no intention to harm), misleading content (misleading use of information), im- poster content (when genuine sources are impersonated) and fabricated content (content that is % false, designed to deceive and do harm) (wardle, ). ad- ditionally, we have melissa zimdars’ classification of fake information, which deter- mines which category a website may occupy: fake news, satire, extreme bias, con- spiracy, rumour mill, state news, junk science, hate news, clickbait (zimdars, ). irrespective of the form, today’s online platforms totally reshaped the spread and potential impact of fake news on people’s lives, behaviour and mentality. it be- came an indispensable element of the digital landscape. its influence on public opinion is considerably bigger than that of real news stories and the explanation is internet policy review ( ) | simple and bitter: . large dissemination equals authenticity and . the influence of lies exceeds that of the truth. “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is a manipulation principle misattributed to nazi politician and reich minis- ter of propaganda, joseph goebbels (schultze, bytwerk, , p. ), but still ac- curate, irrespective of its true author. fake news reports are, in the digital age, re- peated, processed, tweeted and propagated through various online channels and end up acquiring the markers of ‘authenticity’ (palczewsi, ). they have a tremendous potential to mobilise people. furthermore, we must admit that they tend to be more seductive. in the words of friedrich nietzsche, “the champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring” (nietzsche, ). or, to put it bluntly, “there is nothing as boring as the truth” (bukowski, ). fake news draws the public’s attention through its attrac- tiveness; it lures the receivers by offering them something that matches their views, beliefs and expectations. the fact that fake news has become a constant element in the media-created landscape is also linked to the fact that not only the media have changed, but also their audiences. the public for news and information is now hyper-atomised, far beyond the traditional media, in the form of billions of one-person audiences that often double as disseminators of the same information (gross, ). we are the furthest away from bertolt brecht’s “literature without consequences” (as he per- ceived radio to be: „radio is one-sided when it should have two sides. it is a pure instrument of distribution; it merely hands things out.”), which fails to make con- tact with its audience, and in which the public is, in fact, a mass of people, voice- less and inactive (brecht, , p. ). the digital (just like brecht’s ideal theater) allows for a multi-way conversation, in which the audience creates a liquid com- munication world, as part of the ‘liquid modernity’ described by zygmunt bauman. the individuals live fragmented lives, with the institutions and social forms around them constantly changing and providing little in terms of frames of reference and long-term plans (bauman, ). the internet revolution has transformed the consumer of information into a gener- ator of content. this shift has brought along another change as well: as we enter the post-trust era, facts and evidence have been replaced by personal belief and emotion. consequently, the nature of news, and what people accept as news, is slowly but steadily transforming into an emotion-based market. the truth of the story no longer matters. what matters is that the story falls in line with what a person wants to hear. fake news no longer means factless, libellous or simply false news, but rather news that is seen to attack a person’s pre-existing beliefs. mezei, verteș-olteanu this is the truth of the post-truth era (rochlin, ). this danger goes hand in hand with the audience’s ease to accept, embrace and readily disseminate this new ‘truth’: nick rochlin goes on to show that the majori- ty of people don’t read beyond an article’s headline (rochlin, ). moreover, a study by maksym gabielkov and colleagues ( ) showed that % of the news articles that are shared on twitter aren’t even read before they’re shared (ga- bielkov et al., ). yoonmo sang and colleagues recently highlighted that “there is a positive correlation between frequency of news use and interest in news and trust in news. (...) not only do perceptions of trust influence a person’s news con- sumption, studies show it also has an impact on how they interact with it. based on a large-scale survey on news consumption in countries, (...) showed that those who had low levels of trust in the news media were more likely to share or comment on online news and prefer non-mainstream news sources, such as social media outlets, blogs, and digital native sources, such as the huffington post, than people with higher levels of trust in news” (sang et al., , pp. - ). unlike tradi- tional media sources, the social platforms allow their users to create a bubble of news stories that strike a chord only with their own pre-defined beliefs and opin- ions. and since the majority of users trap themselves in their own bubbles, full of niceties and one-sided points of view, contemporary society is faced with peril of yet ever more rigid beliefs and deep societal fissures. this inclination to select the media outlet which best aligns with their preconceived attitudes is in line with joseph t. klapper’s selective exposure theory, which suggests “the individuals’ ten- dency to favour information that reinforces their pre-existing views while avoiding information that is contrary” (klapper, ). when a mismatch of contradictory beliefs occurs, individuals find it ‘inherently dissatisfying’ and so they seek out in- formation that is based on their own beliefs, perspectives and attitudes (hart et al., ). in the age of social platforms, people are no longer inclined towards emphatic receptivity; they are losing their openness and availability to listen to others’ different opinions. the gatekeepers have changed, once more. the agenda setting is no longer in the sole hands of owners, publishers, editors and directors. the digital media are not the gatekeepers of old (gross, ). groups and individuals, with direct access to audiences, have taken control of the terms of public discussion and their criteria for the selection of information is based entirely upon their own interests and bi- ases. jürgen habermas’ public sphere (traditional and bourgeois) is gone. today’s curators of information are individuals and technology companies. the controller has changed, but the problem remains the same, namely the threat to liberal internet policy review ( ) | democracy everywhere. while waiting for possible solutions to counterbalance the effects and influences of digital media on our day-to-day existence, negative emo- tions, (political) thoughts and social behaviour, on- and offline, we must acknowl- edge the fact that fake news is already part of our reality, one with which we will have to learn to coexist. leaking democracy means (indirect) self-government by the people. for such a system to work, an informed electorate is crucial. democracy cannot work if those in power manipulate the electorate by withholding information and suppressing criticism. freedom of expression is intimately linked to political debate and the concept of democracy. free speech is multifaceted, and includes the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas (milton, ). in a democracy, people need access to information (be it political, social or economic in nature) in order to decide whether their elected officials are acting in the public interest or not. however, far too often, politicians evade such scrutiny, allowing fraud and abuse of power to go unhampered. so we ask ourselves: how far can the freedom of expression go so as not to infringe national interests? in the end, which of the two prevails, the free- dom of the press or national security? can the “need to know” cross boundaries and break laws? ever since its foundation, wikileaks, a website devoted “to bring- ing important news and information to the public” (according to its own descrip- tion), has become a major source of freedom of knowledge and, due to its alliance with major print publications, a credible source for leaked information. whistle- blowing platforms (the roots of which are to be found in wikileaks) are increasing- ly becoming a common tool in journalism, and are one of the strategies that jour- nalists can adopt in communicating with whistle-blowers in a safer way and to ob- tain data and information without exposing sources to the risk of being identified, tracked, exposed or put in danger (di salvo, ). yet, several questions remain, questions of both moral and ethical nature, that deserve close attention: whistle- blowing and leaking obviously come from our desire to know the truth, but does mankind actually deserve full “transparency”? and, in this scenario, are the leakers of information to be perceived as heroes or villains? state secrecy is enshrined in probably all constitutional texts. etymologically, ‘se- cret’ comes from secretum, that which is separated. this separation is between those-who-know and those-who-do-not-know but suspect something (horn, ). but does secrecy actually threaten democracy? it is the fear brought by the aware- ness of not knowing, rather than the content of the secret itself, which matters and jeopardises liberal democracies. state secrecy is vital for national security, but it mezei, verteș-olteanu can also be used to conceal wrongdoing. are there means to ensure that this pow- er is used responsibly? the problem arises when establishing the instruments that might be used in order to check that such secrets are handled in a responsible manner by those in power. the aim is to ensure that the official justifications for secrecy are sufficiently reasonable and detailed in order to deter overzealous con- cealment. the abuse of secrecy and leaking are nothing new; the phenomenon is merely augmented by the immense dissemination possibilities of the digital age. however, also characteristic for this new era are conspiracy theories, misdirection, power plays, deflection, allegations of fake news, and fears of pervasive govern- ment surveillance (marcus, ), which conclude in any scandalous information and which are then being received by the public with great skepticism. rahul sagar, in his book secrets and leaks: the dilemma of state secrecy, asks himself (and answers) the following question: when can whistle-blowing and leaking be a legitimate means of guarding against the possible harms of executive secrecy? it is important first of all to try and distinguish whistle-blowing from leaking. whistle-blowing is usually defined as the activity of calling attention to wrongdo- ing, an act intended to call out, but also to halt wrongdoing. it is a distinct act of dissent (elliston et al., ), a special form of dissidence in which “a member or former member of an organization goes outside the organization or outside nor- mal organizational channels to reveal organizational wrongdoing, illegality, or ac- tions that threaten the public” (petersen and farrell, , p. ). it typically in- volves inside informants who want to expose “actual nontrivial wrongdoing” by collaborating with the media (johnson, , pp. - ). the term, coined by us civic activist ralph nader in , was meant to avoid the negative connotations asso- ciated with words such as informant, squealer, tattletale, betrayer, traitor, rat, weasel, etcetera. however, whistle-blower is not a universally recognised denomi- nation, easily translatable into other languages. the colloquialism, invoking old- fashioned images of a police officer chasing after a lawbreaker, has evolved to mean someone who speaks up when most people do not. yet, the difficulty in translating the term into other languages has led to problems regarding the whis- tle-blowers’ public perception. in many eu countries, alternative terms such as “in- formant”, “denunciator” and “snitch” are still commonly used by citizens and the media alike, continuing to cast whistle-blowers in a false or negative light. the following are some of the translations used throughout the eu, negatively conno- tated terms being prevalent: práskač–snitch–negative (czech), sladrehank–snitch–negative (danish), vilepuhuja–whistle-blower (“piper”)–nega- tive (estonian), nestbeschmutzer–one who dirties their own nest–negative (ger- internet policy review ( ) | man), corvo–crow–negative or delatore–leaker–very negative (italian), chibo / bu- fo–snitch–negative (portuguese). in contrast, we have the italian sentinella civi- ca–civic sentinel, and the term introduced by the romanian legislation in the field, avertizori de integritate–those who give integrity warnings (worth, , p. ). whistle-blowers are “born, not made” and generally driven by moral conviction or moral narcissism (sagar, ). a whistle-blower is usually cast in a positive light. as daniel ellsberg, the former us military analyst who released the ‘pentagon pa- pers’ to the new york times, puts it this way: “telling the truth, revealing wrongly kept secrets, can have a surprisingly strong unforeseeable power to help end a wrong and save lives” (ellsberg, , p. ) (thorsen, sreedharan, and allan, , p. ). most big whistle-blowing stories involve a revelation: fraud, where it may not have been suspected; systematic waste unseen by the public and unnoticed by over- seers; abuse of power that we couldn’t have even imagined (gessen, ). in the book crisis of conscience, the author tom mueller - a journalist - traces the evolu- tion of the whistle-blower in the american imagination, “from squealer to hero” in roughly half a century. but the repercussions of whistle-blowing, whether in the nineteen-sixties or the two-thousands, as described in the book, are similar: whis- tle-blowers are fired, ostracised, libeled, stripped of security clearances, denounced as anti-american, and threatened with lifetime imprisonment (mueller, ). we have as examples the arrest and incarceration of bradley/chelsea manning (the us soldier who leaked a video of a us apache helicopter murdering several afghani citizens and two reuters news reporters) and the further development of how a leaker’s mental health and sexual orientation can become the focus of the media and public debate. edward snowden (nsa administrator and ex-cia employ- ee who leaked information regarding the agency’s misuse of power by collecting data from several us cellular carriers) was granted temporary asylum, first in hong kong, then in russia, after his global surveillance disclosures ever since , with the us constantly asking for his extradition. julian assange, the australian editor and publisher who founded wikileaks in , took refuge in in the embassy of ecuador in london, where he remained for almost seven years. in , in addi- tion to other accusations, the us government charged assange with violating the espionage act of . as of april , he has been incarcerated in a london prison, where he is alledgedly exposed to “psychological torture or other cruel, in- human or degrading treatment or punishment”, according to nils melzer, un rap- porteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punish- ment (melzer, ). even before the digital age, deep throat, the informant be- mezei, verteș-olteanu hind the watergate scandal, and daniel ellsberg, the leaker of the pentagon pa- pers, represent two major figures in the us espionage and leaking history, either vilified or heralded for their actions. europe has its own examples. in , the european court of human rights passed judgment on heinisch v. germany ( / ) and ordered germany to pay damages of € , to ms heinisch for infringing her right to freedom of expres- sion, after the german courts upheld her dismissal without notice on the grounds that she lodged a criminal complaint against her employer. the case of nurse brigitte heinisch, fired from her job at a nursing home in after she exposed poor care of some of the residents, illustrates how germany’s legal system does not go far enough to protect whistle-blowers. the case did trigger a political dis- cussion in germany regarding a statutory whistle-blowers’ protection, but although all political parties agreed that whistle-blowing could be a valuable instrument to fight corruption, no actual steps were taken (thüsing and forst, , p. ). in another oft-quoted example, dating back to , an estimated million litres of caustic red sludge poured out of a reservoir at a hungarian alumina pro- cessing plant, in what is known as hungary’s worst environmental catastrophe. at least seven people died, hundreds were injured or forced from their homes in sev- eral villages, and tens of millions of euros in private property was destroyed. some employees at the plant knew about impending problems with the reservoir, but the company’s manager threatened to fire them if they appealed to the authorities. hungary still lacks an agency where whistle-blowers can report wrongdoing (worth, , p. ). although romania became one of the first countries in europe to pass a stand- alone and innovative piece of whistle-blower legislation ( ) and is, therefore, very strong in theory, it is equally weak in practice. in , whistle-blowers re- ported to the national integrity council and transparency international romania alleged irregularities involving (ironically) four managers of the national integrity agency (ani). among the allegations was that ani’s chairman was in a conflict of interest by also owning two private companies. following the report, two whistle- blowers were dismissed from ani. one prevailed in a court case and was reinstat- ed, but was later dismissed again (worth, , p. ). despite the specific value of whistle-blowers in exposing and preventing corrup- tion, only four eu countries have legal frameworks that are considered to be ad- vanced: luxembourg, romania, slovenia and the united kingdom (uk), notwith- standing their flaws in application, as seen in the previous example. in order to internet policy review ( ) | overcome this problem and to guarantee a eu-wide standard for the protection of whistle-blowers, the european union adopted a regulation for whistle-blower pro- tection in december , the whistle-blowing directive or directive (eu) / of the european parliament and of the council of october on the protection of persons who report breaches of union law. the eu member states will be obliged to implement the directive into their own national laws until . continuing rahul sagar’s thought, and as seen in the eye-catching examples men- tioned above, we should also take into account the ‘retaliation’ aspect. though whistle-blowers act as a sort of institutional ‘fire alarm’, is it reasonable for us to depend only on those whistle-blowers courageous enough to expose themselves to the public, as well as the authorities, and thus subject themselves to various forms of scrutiny (from their employer/‘the state’, the judicial, the media, the pub- lic, etc.)? therefore, the more realistic scenario is one involving anonymous leak- ers. the difference, thus, between a whistle-blower and a leaker is that the identity of the latter is not revealed. the direct result is that, generally, leakers don’t suffer the kind of reprisals whistle-blowers do. and since some leaks may be vexatious in nature and not necessarily in the public interest, the issue of trust emerges once more. in the practice of leaking, trust appears two times: firstly, associated with (and trig- gered by) the lack of trust in politicians and secondly, the trust in the voluntary disclosure of a whistle-blower whose main motive is altruistic, with the only aim of halting some wrongdoing. the problem with trust is that it is extremely difficult to establish and maintain and perhaps nearly impossible to recover once violated. leaks nowadays are no longer limited to big stories. they have gradually become an essential element of journalism, especially political and corporate. the strong reliance on anonymous sources has intensified the public mistrust of leaking, as well, corroborated with the fact that, if in the recent past, leaks were just a first step in the long and tiresome process of investigative journalism, it is now part of a hyperactive daily news cycle (marcus, ). just like in the case of fake news, previously discussed, we obsessively return to the idea that what the public needs is well-trained, deontological journalists, capable of gate-keeping information in order to guarantee the availability of accurate in- formation to the public and to prevent undue harm. to put it briefly, trust in the media is only accomplished when media independence is achieved, meaning free- dom from any external control or the influence of others (political power, sources of information, media owners, internal constraints, financing sources, pressure groups, etc.). trust requires a moral component - the fiduciary duty - that develops mezei, verteș-olteanu between professionals who can provide a social good (in this case, the delivery of information) and members of a society who desire that particular good. further- more, trust becomes cardinal in this equation when the goods to which we want predictable access (freedom of expression and of information) are increasingly im- portant, as is the case here. and trust is gained when exercising one’s profession with ‘virtue ethics’ (that is morality and fairness, competence, objectivity and accu- racy, lack of bias, etc.) and ‘being aristotelian’, namely learning to correctly apply aristotle's golden mean or golden middle way (quinn, ). to return to rahul sagar’s initial question, there are certain instances in which offi- cials, reporters and publishers should put themselves in harm’s way by infringing the law and disclosing classified information. sagar envisages five conditions that must be met simultaneously in order to justify such an act. first, the disclosure must reveal the violation of ‘shared interests’ insofar as the executive has exceeded lawful authority or established norms. second, the evidence for wrong doing should be ‘clear and convincing’. third, the threat of this wrong doing must be ‘specific and immanent’. fourth, the official should use the ‘least drastic means’ of revelation by, in the first instance, whistle-blowing within the organization. finally, the whistle-blower must be willing to disclose her identity. this is essential to ensure that the whistle-blower is not ‘the partisan or the zealot’ acting to further sectional or personal interests. (sagar, , pp. - ) in order to summarise the role and importance of wikileaks, and leaking in gener- al, in today’s world, we can look at a brilliant interview given before a live audi- ence in london, in , by the slovenian philosopher slavoj Žižek, “the elvis of cultural theory” in the words of the new york times. maybe we learned nothing new, but it’s the same as in that beautiful old fairytale, the emperor’s new clothes. we may all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody publicly says, ‘the emperor is naked’, everything changes. this is why, even if we learned nothing new–we did learn many new things–but even if nothing is learned, the forum matters. (…) you [wikileaks] are–that’s why it aroused such an explosion of resentment–not only violating the rules, disclosing secrets. let me call it in the old marxist way: the bourgeois press today has its own way to be transgressive. its ideology not only controls what one says, but even how one can violate what one is allowed to say. so you are not just violating the rules. you are changing the very rules how internet policy review ( ) | we were allowed to violate the rules. this is maybe the most important thing you can do. (brevini et al, , p. ) we must learn to accept the constant battle between state secrecy and unautho- rised leaks. the proper security of a country can be guaranteed only with an ade- quate balance between keeping secrets in order to protect the population from various types of threats and uncovering secrets in order to guard against those powers which have acted ultra vires. copyright law copyright law perfectly indicates the complexities and fallacies of trust in the sys- tem. this field of law arose at the junction of technological development (the moveable type printing press developed by gutenberg), the rise of individualism (especially during the italian renaissance) and the growing social demands for cul- tural expressions. for a long period of time, copyright law has developed at a constant pace, but lim- ited the entering of ‘disseminators’ territory. the ‘read-only’ culture, as coined by lessig ( ), dominated copyright’s domain until the late th and early th century. since then, with the advent of ‘read/write’ culture, the rapid technological developments (especially those related to audio- and audiovisual works, the me- chanical dissemination of contents, e.g., radio, television, and later on digital tech- nologies, especially the internet) as well as society’s instant adherence to the new tools and features, has forced copyright law to face its greatest challenge ever. the trust in the social value and relevance of copyright protection is at stake. copyright law’s structure, logic, policy considerations, and its exact rules (especially the term of protection, or the balance of exclusive rights and their limitations) are constant- ly questioned. one of the most important reasons for the decrease of trust in these norms is that copyright law is viewed, defined, exercised, enforced etc. in the digital age mostly the same way as in the analogue age. a notable illustration for this is connected to the concept of property and ownership (notions that used to be the least fictional legal concepts). ownership rights generally exist over tangible goods, however, with the advent of electric, electromagnetic and digital technologies, the need to control intangibles has sharply risen. some countries, like austria, do accept own- ership rights over intangible consumables, like electricity. assets on a bank ac- count might be owned as well. in copyright law, the same question is painfully mezei, verteș-olteanu problematic. owning the tangible copy of a work is as ‘natural’ as owning the ap- ple we purchased at the market. but owning a digital file incorporating s and s that represent a copyrighted expression is far less settled. this conflict is perfectly evidenced by the tensions surrounding the concept of exhaustion (or first sale doc- trine in the us legal terminology). exhaustion allows for the resale of lawfully ac- quired copies of protected subject matter - as long as the given copy is tangible (mezei, , pp. - ). exhaustion itself originates from the late th century, and it is inherently connected to tangible objects. with the advent of online dissemina- tion methods and channels and the rise of downloadable copies (e.g., itunes that had a significant role in this respect), the notion of ‘digital exhaustion’ posed a new challenge to this ‘analogue interpretation’ of exhaustion around the begin- ning of the current millennium. many argued that the lawful acquirers of digital copies shall be granted equal ‘rights’ to resell those digital copies to new users (mezei, ; sganga, ). such a demand has been refused by various court rulings in the european union and the united states. such a conclusion might be in line with the words of law, but it completely disregards the ways of digital con- sumption of media. a great example for the growing mistrust in copyright law is related to the arche- type of accessing contents via the internet, namely, hyperlinking. on the one hand, ‘hyperlinks are the synapses connecting different parts of the world wide web. without hyperlinks, the web would be like a library without a catalogue: full of in- formation, but with no sure means of finding it’ (collins, , para. . ) on the other hand, in terms of copyright law, hyperlinks allow users to communicate or make available to the public copyright protected subject matter. hyperlinks are therefore double-edged swords: they are inevitable for a properly functioning in- ternet, but they also help people disobey the existing rules and infringe valuable ip rights. the concurring roles of hyperlinks are fairly reflected by tim berners-lee: ‘myth: »a normal link is an incitement to copy the linked document in a way which infringes copyright«. this is a serious misunderstanding. the ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. making the reference with a hyper- text link is more efficient but changes nothing else’ (berners-lee, , n.p.). the requirements of lawful linking are still not settled (mezei, ; quintais, ; frosio, ). the many options of musical/audiovisual platforms as well as social networking sites, including embedding functions, autoplay features, sharing possibilities, complicate the question further. indeed, the european union’s recent copyright reform (namely, directive / on copyright in the digital single internet policy review ( ) | market - the cdsm directive) intended to settle the boundaries of commercial linking activities (while missing to touch upon non-commercial or “private” linking by end users, and hence accepting the permissive approach of court of justice of european union). article (originally known as article ) is, however, coined as “linking tax”. this term perfectly reflects society’s negative attitude towards any plan to regulate the normal flow of information over the internet. more important- ly, article itself deserves criticism due to the mere fact that it was introduced without any clear empirical evidence to its positive effects. indeed, recent research indicated that (free) link aggregation is beneficial for the linked site (roos et al., ). even more worrying, due to the conflicting rulings regarding embedding of images posted on social media platforms, service providers (at least instagram and facebook) plan to amend their api terms and conditions to allow users to exclude the ‘embeddability’ of their posts by other users (lee, ). such private ordering mechanisms would render linking (and the many supportive court rulings) mean- ingless - and once again destroy trust in the system. another - and maybe the best - example for the significant gap between legal and social norms as well as trust in copyright law is related to p p file-sharing. due to various technological developments at the end of the s (e.g., the standardisa- tion of mp conversion and the growing internet bandwidth), peer-to-peer ex- change of digital files turned out to be the social default for (hundreds of) millions of internet users globally. although the excess of negative effects of p p file-shar- ing on the copyright holders income is questionable, the negative effects them- selves are unquestionable (danaher and waldfogel, ). the copyright industry (especially the american one), however, reacted with an ‘analogue mind’ to these problems; and intended to destroy the p p ecosystem (compared to e.g., the nap- ster and grokster rulings), which led to the exact opposite result. the reaction of end users was similarly the opposite as expected. major labels and publishers were not treated to be ‘rights holders’ anymore, but greedy capitalists limiting on- line freedoms of end users. the excessive rulings against private users that or- dered the payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars (e.g., in the thomas-ras- set or the tenenbaum cases); the proceedings against year old children (see the brianna lahara ‘incident’) or dead grandmothers only increased the fury of end users, and seriously harmed the legitimacy of copyright law in general, as well as . a&m technology inc. et al. v napster inc. et al., f. d ( ). . metro-goldwyn-mayer studios inc. et al. v grokster ltd. et al., u.s. ( ). . capitol records inc. et al. v jammie thomas-rasset, f. d ( ). . sony bmg music entertainment et al. v. joel tenenbaum, f. d ( ). mezei, verteș-olteanu the enforcement tools specifically. indeed, current debates surrounding private ordering mechanisms, that is, enforce- ment by intermediaries, especially automated law enforcement, lead to concerns related to the use of fundamental freedoms (e.g., freedom to receive and impart information; artistic freedom) over the internet. private ordering might be the most effective solution to tackle online infringements, its excess and the exact methods used raise serious concerns, too; that again led to the depreciation of trust in copyright law. as sebastian felix schwemer noted, “[p]rivatized enforce- ment has generally been associated with a variety of issues related to, for exam- ple, the rule of law, legal certainty, accountability, democracy deficit, presumption of innocence, right to due process, and potentially right to privacy and freedom of speech and communication” (schwemer, , p. ). a notable plan to regulate platforms’ liability that fit into the concept of “online content sharing service providers” is to be found in article of the copyright in the digital single market (cdsm) directive. it requires the clearance of rights related to those protected sub- ject matter that are uploaded to the platforms’ servers by their users [article ( )]; or, alternatively, in the lack of authorisation, it requires the removal (filter- ing) of the contested contents [article ( )]. whether this solution will be suc- cessful at all, will be seen in the coming years, after the cdsm directive is imple- mented by the member states of the european union. it is, however, telling to see that society (fueled by many politicians as well), including scholars, fear wide- spread “censorship” of data online (senftleben, ). papers in ‘expanding the debate about content moderation’ (gillespie et al., ), a group of researchers develop their arguments in the form of a roundtable essay. as high- lighted by tarleton gillespie and patricia aufderheide in the introduction, re- searchers of content moderation have traditionally focussed on high-profile inci- dents, as for instance related to us presidential elections, pornography or hate speech; and/or on us based (but global leader) platforms, for example facebook or youtube (see e.g., jacques et al., ). content moderation is, however, a much broader and deeper concept, and, in reality, it affects all jurisdictions, more than the biggest platforms, and the topics involved are similarly more complex and ex- pansive. this essay offers a great variety of short contributions by patricia aufder- heide, elinor carmi, ysabel gerrard, tarleton gillespie, robert gorwa, ariadna matamoros-fernández, sarah t. roberts, aram sinnreich, and sarah myers west, ranging from concerns over encryption (a topic further discussed by heemsbergen internet policy review ( ) | and molnar, in this special issue); the challenges of regulating social media start-ups; the collaboration of platforms regarding content moderation (or “content cartels”); the alleged neutrality of content moderation; algorithmic content moder- ation and the risk of false positives and negatives; the regulatory politics of con- tent moderation or the political consequences of commercial content moderation. the editors agree with the conclusion of the authors: “we need more thorough study of the impact of content moderation on different geographical, political and cultural communities” (gillespie et al., ). one of the most natural reactions of internet users to the challenges posed by massive online surveillance, concerns of privacy and protection of (personal) data over the internet was the general use of encryption services. measures that intend- ed to strengthen the trust in online solutions cover for instance virtual private net- works (vpns), switching to hypertext transfer protocol secure (https) and volun- tary data management terms and conditions of online service providers. luke heemsbergen and adam molnar’s contribution to this special issue, titled ‘vpns as boundary objects of the internet: (mis)trust in the translation(s)’ provides for a look in- to how one of the technological solutions to secure internet use is understood by australians, and how vpn service providers construct their products and their gov- ernance. heemsbergen and molnar’s paper combines existing literature on bound- ary objects and internet studies in an empirical way and addresses the political and legal implications of freedoms and controls over how users encounter and ac- quire vpn services, how vpn service providers represent and develop their ser- vices, and how ultimately regulators reflect these social realities. on of the most telling findings of the paper regarding trust in the system is a quote from a site that reviewed vpn services: “[i]t is important to keep in mind that when you are using a vpn, you are effectively transferring trust from your isp to the vpn provider” (heemsbergen and molnar, ). the paper ‘combating misinformation online: re-imagining social media for policy- making’ (kyza et al., ) is part of the interdisciplinary research project “co-cre- ating misinformation-resilient societies”, meant to develop online tools and poli- cies to support the civil society and professionals in mitigating the threat of misin- formation on social media. the authors, eleni kyza, christiana varda, dionysis panos, melina karageorgiou, nadya komendantova, serena coppolino perfumi, syed iftikhar husain shah and akram sadat hosseini, collected data from par- ticipants (citizens, journalists, and policymakers) based in austria, greece and swe- den, in order to find answers to questions such as what do real-world policy makers identify as challenges to combating misinformation on social media? and which plat- mezei, verteș-olteanu form policies are suggested to create a more misinformation-resilient environment on social media? their analysis resulted in the identification of four important themes, having implications for platform policies and contemporary policymaking: creating a trusted network of experts and collaborators; facilitating the validation of online information; providing access to visualisations of data at different levels of granu- larity, and increasing the transparency and explainability of flagged misinformative content. platforms and platformisation, especially in the videogame industry, have always been in the frontline of technological progress. in ‘playing with platforms: game- making under platform governance’ (chia et al., ), the authors - aleena chia, brendan keogh, dale leorke and benjamin nicoll - examine this phenomenon through the lens of two platforms: unity and twine, which have transformed videogame creation and distribution. platformisation is neither a singular, monop- olising, or technologically deterministic ‘logic’ of cultural production, nor a ‘one- size-fits-all’ concept for describing current technological transformations in the production, distribution, and consumption of media content. on the contrary, the paper argues that videogame development is undergirded by a plurality of plat- forms and platformisation techniques, some of which counter the top-down vision of platformisation to envision an alternative politics of game-making from the ground-up. the authors have chosen the videogame industry as a key site for analysing the effects of platforms and platformisation on cultural production. since the mid- s, an explosion of different game-making tools, practices, and communities have challenged the conventional formulas of the blockbuster or ‘triple a’ industry. today, videogame development is just as, if not more, likely to be conducted by a team of a few precarious independent workers as it is by hundreds of full-time employees in a campus-sized studio. the paper provides an ample def- inition of key terms such as ‘platform’ and ‘platformisation’ in order to outline con- ceptual blindspots in the scholarly discussion and deployment of these terms, and suggest how critiques of game-making tools can help illuminate these blindspots. through the case studies, the authors convincingly illustrate how the narratives of platform capitalism and imperialism do not manifest uniformly and could not be assimilated to an all-encompassing conception of either platforms or platformisa- tion. next we have simon copland’s paper ‘reddit quarantined: can changing platform af- fordances reduce hateful material online?’ (copland, ), which proposes an ana- lytical reflection on the question: how can a digital platform known as a bastion of free speech, one of the last giants to resist homogeneity (which comes with the in- internet policy review ( ) | herent price of having to “stomach” the occasional troll reddit, in the words of erik martin, former reddit ceo) respond to the increasing pressure to regulate abusive language and online behaviour? reddit was imagined as a place for open and hon- est conversations; however, these days, the ‘trolls’ seem to be winning. according to the ranking service alexa, in , reddit occupies the th place among us sites (with google, youtube and amazon as the top three). ever since (with a total revamp in ), reddit has slowly changed its ‘anything goes’ policy, imple- menting a unique approach - the quarantine function. quarantined users of the platform cannot generate revenue, and their content does not appear on the front page, nor can be found via search. the function does not ban the content altogeth- er, but simply discourages the spread of abusive material and encourages positive behaviour change. copland’s paper seizes the opportunity to examine the efficacy of the use of platform bans in limiting hateful content. the author uses two case studies (r/theredpill and r/braincells), data analysis and misogynistic language analysis in order to conclude that the quarantine has mixed results: reddit indeed saw a drop in hateful activity, but the content and its creators were simply pushed away towards less restrictive (and, therefore, more dangerous) platforms, making it someone else’s problem. finally, maxigas and guillaume latzko-toth discuss how commons were replaced by platforms, or, as the authors state it, “digital interactive media based on open protocols and free software got superseded by proprietary applications embedded within platforms” (maxigas & latzko-toth, ). based on desktop research, data collection and interviews, the paper ‘trusted commons: why ‘old’ social media matter’ convincingly evidences, how irc (internet relay chat) survived the emergence of capital-driven platforms, and how it became an example of resistance or recupera- tion against these platforms these days. based on the multidisciplinary analysis of free software projects, hackerspaces and anonymous hacktivists’ political move- ment, maxigas and latzko-toth show that the “oldness” of irc is indeed the source of its users’ trust in this protocol, and will indeed survive proprietary platforms, too. acknowledgements we would like to thank frédéric dubois and the entire internet policy review team for their tremendous help and support in publishing this special issue. we especially thank the international peer-reviewers for their deep and thorough support to develop the selected papers: raluca bercea, dan-adrian cărămidariu, glen fuller, klára gellén, istván harkai, aphra kerr, katja lindroos, norbert mezei, verteș-olteanu merkovity, gábor polyák, joão pedro quintais, jonathan roberge, nicoleta rodica dominte and yoonmo sang. we would like to wish all the best for the organising committee as well as all participants of the forthcoming aoir conference. we are looking forward to reading the fourth special issue of internet policy review including excellent aoir papers in . references association of internet researchers. 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(eds.). ( ). whistleblowing: a comparative study. springer. https://doi.org/ . / - - - - wardle, c. ( ). fake news. it’s complicated. [blog post]. first draft. https://medium.com/ st-draf t/fake-news-its-complicated-d f c worth, m. ( ). whistleblowing in europe. legal protections for whistleblowers in the eu. [report]. transparency international. https://images.transparencycdn.org/images/ _whistleblowingineur ope_en.pdf worth, m. ( ). whistleblower protection in southeast europe: an overview of laws, practice and recent initiatives[report]. blueprint for free speech; regional anti-corruption initiative. http://rai-se e.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /whistleblower_protection_in_see.pdf) wyatt, s. ( ). danger! metaphors at work in economics, geophysiology, and the internet. science, technology, & human values, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / zimdars, m. ( ). false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ‘news’ sources. https://d m dpf wgl.cloudfront.net/wp/ / /resource-false-misleading-clickbait-y-and-satirical-%e % % cn ews%e % % d-sources- .pdf cases a&m records, inc. v. napster, inc., f. d (united states court of appeals for the ninth circuit february ). capitol records, inc. v. thomas-rasset, f. d (united states court of appeals for the eighth circuit september ). metro-goldwyn-mayer studios, inc., et al. v. grokster, ltd., et al., u.s. (supreme court of the united states june ). sony bmg music entertainment, et al., v. joel tenenbaum, f. d (united states court of appeals for the first circuit september ). p ublished b y in c ooperation with internet policy review ( ) | https://doi.org/ . / - - - - https://doi.org/ . / - - - - https://medium.com/ st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d f c https://medium.com/ st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d f c https://images.transparencycdn.org/images/ _whistleblowingineurope_en.pdf https://images.transparencycdn.org/images/ _whistleblowingineurope_en.pdf http://rai-see.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /whistleblower_protection_in_see.pdf) http://rai-see.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /whistleblower_protection_in_see.pdf) https://doi.org/ . / https://d m dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/ / /resource-false-misleading-clickbait-y-and-satirical-%e % % cnews%e % % d-sources- .pdf https://d m dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/ / /resource-false-misleading-clickbait-y-and-satirical-%e % % cnews%e % % d-sources- .pdf 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system to trust in the content 	introduction 	trust 	fake news 	leaking 	copyright law 	papers 	acknowledgements 	references 	cases a cheme grows in brooklyn ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : carol k. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering a cheme grows in brooklyn carol k. hall chemical and biomolecular engineering department, north carolina state university, raleigh, north carolina , usa; email: hall@ncsu.edu annu. rev. chem. biomol. eng. . : – first published as a review in advance on march , the annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering is online at chembioeng.annualreviews.org https://doi.org/ . /annurev-chembioeng- - copyright © by annual reviews. all rights reserved keywords molecular thermodynamics, phase transitions, protein aggregation, protein design, hydrogen in metals abstract i profile my personal and professional journey from being a girl of the s, with expectations typical for the times, to a chemical engineering professor and still-enthusiastic researcher. i describe my family, my early education, my college and graduate school training in physics, my postdoc years in chem- istry, and my subsequent transformation into a chemical engineering faculty member—one of the first women to be appointed to a chemical engineering faculty in the united states. i focus on the events that shaped me, the people who noticed and supported me, and the environment for women scientists and engineers in what some would call the “early days.” my initial research activities centered on applications of statistical mechanics to predict phase equilibria in simple systems. over time, my interests evolved to focus on ap- plying molecule-level computer simulations to systems of interest to chem- ical engineers, e.g., hydrocarbons and polymers. eventually, spurred on by my personal interest in amyloid diseases and my wish to make a contribution to human health, i turned to more biologically oriented problems having to do with protein aggregation and protein design. i give a candid assessment of my strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. finally, i share the most valuable lessons that i have learned over a lifetime of professional and personal experience. a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . mailto:hall@ncsu.edu https://doi.org/ . /annurev-chembioeng- - https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/ . /annurev-chembioeng- - ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : introduction some people, like my partner, sheldon, or my friend francis arnold, charge through life. they are brave, know where they want to go, and do what they need to do to get there. not me! i was brought up to be good, sweet, and pretty—–to get married, and to have children. those were the expectations for girls growing up in brooklyn, new york, in the s. my teachers wrote in my ps elementary school yearbook, “ever so pretty, smile so bright, carol makes sunshine, come out at night” (figure ). (i still feel good about that!) drive, determination, and ambition were for boys. competition made me uncomfortable; it never occurred to me to be ambitious. i excelled at meeting the expectations of my era. i went to college because everyone went to college. i majored in physics because my physics teacher told my mother, “girls can be physicists too.” i got married shortly after college graduation because that was what you were supposed to do. i went to graduate school because my husband was going and i wasn’t ready to start a family. figure carol m. klein; childhood portrait, age unknown. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : nevertheless, a few things happened over the subsequent half century, and i wound up having a wonderful career, acquiring drive and determination (slowly), and making a mark of sorts in the world. (note the modesty—good little girls of the s who bragged eventually had no friends.) i agreed to write this autobiography, even though it could be construed as bragging, because i thought it might reassure younger people, particularly women, that it is possible to have a suc- cessful career even if you don’t start out as the most confident or driven person in the world, or have a clear career path in mind. growing up in brooklyn, new york my father, harris j. klein, was a big shot. though ’ ”, he was a larger-than-life character—the kind of person that people liked to be around (figure ). the fifth of six sons of a jewish couple figure harris and celia klein. www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : who emigrated from galicia (a region in the austro-hungarian empire) to the united states around the turn of the twentieth century, he grew up on the lower east side of new york city. he was an amateur boxer; hawked canaries on the bowery, assuring customers that the females could sing (they can’t); and held his own in a world of tough guys. he went to brooklyn law school, started his own law firm and other businesses, and got involved in politics. a lifelong democrat, he was the campaign manager for estes kefauver (adlai stevenson’s vice-presidential running mate in ) and for new york city mayors robert wagner and abe beame. i remember accompanying my dad on a nighttime trip to gracie mansion when i was . i conversed politely with mayor wagner’s son while our fathers shouted at each other in the next room. my father was the dinner chairman for president kennedy’s birthday dinner at madison square garden in new york city, where marilyn monroe, in a skintight dress, sang, “happy birthday, mr. president.” i was in the audience, and even i (a naive -year-old) sensed that something was going on between them. i also liked the dress! daddy was a nyc transit commissioner, one of five men who ran the subways, and he ran (unsuccessfully) for brooklyn borough president in in the democratic primary. his campaign promise was to keep the fare at a nickel. my mother, celia reitman klein, was the daughter of an immigrant jewish couple, also from galicia, who arrived in new york city at the turn of the century. her father, abraham, had de- serted from the czar’s army, fleeing to the united states because jews did not last long in the military. “papa” was a highly skilled tailor who worked for a time in the saks fifth avenue ladies department. the depression was brutal for him, my grandmother, dora (“mama”), and their nine children, punctuated by brief periods of hunger and of homelessness. my mother, celia, and her siblings all went to work once they were old enough to hold a job. a tall girl, my mother was proud of her ability to run fast, her academic abilities, and her street smarts. she graduated from high school with a secretarial degree and went to work in my father’s law office when she was and he was . she married him years later, after he divorced his first wife (the mother of my two half-sisters). my mother was very smart and read constantly but, being a good wife of the s, did not work outside of the home while my younger brother mitchell and i were growing up. she went back to school in her sixties, earned a liberal arts degree from brooklyn college, and then went to work for the probation department in the nyc prison system. i went to the local public elementary and high schools in brooklyn. my parents wanted me to attend private school, but i resisted because it was an all-girls school and i liked boys (figure ). when left on my own, i played “school,” teaching my dolls how to read even before i knew how to do it. every sunday we drove to mama and papa’s house, where my younger brother, mitchell, and i played with our many cousins and kibitzed (kidded around) with my aunts and uncles. in summer, i went to a jewish girls’ sleepaway camp, where i worked to earn stripes for table manners, sportsmanship, and character. my favorite grade was the fifth grade—my recollection is that we mainly sang, danced, and painted pictures. according to my mother, we also learned math. it was around then that i surpassed my parents’ ability to do math—when i explained to them that to divide fractions you had to turn the denominator upside down and then multiply, they declared me wrong. in the afternoon, after school let out, i was educated in the arts. i took ballet and modern dance lessons twice a week (from marjorie mazia, a martha graham dancer who was married to famed folk singer woody guthrie), piano lessons every sunday morning, and oil painting lessons every wednesday night (the only child in the class). five boys asked me to the elementary school prom—probably a record. (maybe i was already channeling the s girl’s expectation to “get married,” or maybe i just liked boys.) neil sedaka, a ps alum, sang at our prom. sputnik, which was launched by the russians when i was in seventh grade (in ), had a big impact on my education and on my life. the first man-made satellite, sputnik caught everyone in the united states off guard. people were afraid of the russians. the atmosphere was exacerbated hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure on road to meeting expectations (?) for girls of the s. by in-school air-raid drills where we were instructed to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. sputnik galvanized the teachers in the new york city public school system, who saw it as their mission to urge their brightest students to become scientists so that we could “beat the ruskies.” i had no interest in science at the time (i mainly liked singing, dancing, and painting), but by the ninth grade (my first year in high school), some of the science message must have sunk in. i had a recurring dream. i was in gym class, wearing the required ugly green gym suit, when it was announced on the school loudspeaker that all students would be sent to the gas chamber unless they pledged that they would go into science. in the dream, i immediately leaped up to grab the nearest wall phone and called my parents to tell them not to worry—i would go into science. the dream occurred several times each night and lasted for months. i have no idea how my subconscious amalgamated science with the holocaust. perhaps it was that i had made new friends in high school whose parents were holocaust survivors. i was very aware that all of the members of my extended family who had not emigrated to the united states died in the concentration camps. i am not saying that i made a decision to be anything at the time—girls were not expected to have careers—but somewhere along the way this dream must have influenced my career choice. my high school, abraham lincoln high school, was near coney island in brooklyn and boasted more than , students. the teachers were dedicated to providing a superb educa- tion. lincoln boasts three nobel prize winners (two in chemistry); two pulitzer prize winners; and a host of celebrities, including mel brooks, neil diamond, and arthur miller. most of the children were jewish, a minority were italian, and a few were african american. in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades, i did my best to blend into the background. the only time i stuck my neck www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : out was to try out (unsuccessfully) for cheerleaders and for pom-pom girls—those were for the prettiest and most vivacious girls. i made new friends with smart girls who were serious about academics and did very well in all my classes, except french. i loved the math class—math came easily to me and i thought it was a beautifully logical subject—nearly as much fun as dancing and art. i took physics in my junior year from dr. herman gewirtz and advanced physics with him the next year. one open school night, he told my mother that in college i should major in physics. when my mother expressed skepticism, he assured her, “girls can be physicists too.” during my senior year, i had a bit of a personality change. i was tired of being a follower, so i ran for vice president of our senior class. (girls were not allowed to run for president, a position reserved for boys.) my campaign promise was that the senior class would sponsor an underprivileged child living in china, named chan sing lee, through the foster parents plan. my opponent was a basketball player, jeffrey, who was very tall and about as shy as i was. i am not sure why i won—maybe jeffrey missed too many baskets. i enjoyed being senior class vice president and became more outgoing. i still sponsor children through the foster parents plan. college cornell was a completely new world for me—intimidating at first and frankly, later on as well. although there were a fair number of jewish students there, they (we) were not in the majority; this was an atmosphere that i was not used to. some of the students were from wealthy “high society” families, and i could tell that they were in a different league than me. my very first date (they were very big on dating there) was a boy i met in the campus bookstore who walked me back to my dorm room and asked me if jews really had horns. my second date, a junior my dorm counselor fixed me up with, took me to a fraternity party and urged me to drink a large glass of whisky (i did), causing me to spend the evening in the bathroom being sick. at the convocation for my entering freshman class, the then-new cornell university president, james perkins, said, “look to your left, look to your right—one of you won’t be here for graduation.” he was right. being the good girl that i was, i did as my mother advised and majored in physics. there were physics majors at cornell in my freshman class ( girls and boys) and physics majors at graduation ( girls and boys). having such a large number of female physics majors was completely unheard of then and is still far from the norm. the reason we girls stayed the course was that we supported each other and bonded. the math classes were my favorite classes—i did well in those. the physics classes were hard—i was a b to b+ student, which was respectable in those days. timed tests made me anxious—i did not (and still do not) think fast and did not work well under pressure. however, when the tests were very hard and i sensed that the other students thought it was hopeless, i relaxed and did well. for the most part, my classmates and i were ignored—the physics faculty were mostly interested in their research. nobel prize winner hans bethe threatened to fail our entire modern physics class but was talked out of it by the department head. one bright spot was my freshman physics advisor, david lee, who cooed to his young children on the phone during my advising appointments with him and reassured me senior year that all would be okay after i did badly on his statistical mechanics final. david lee won the nobel prize in physics. and i became a statistical “mechanician.” how much did i care about grades? they were somewhat important to me, but not a lot. i was much more interested in boys, which is where the competition was. we girls essentially competed with each other to have dates and to find boyfriends who were “cute.” i dated in my first two and a half years; met my (now-former) husband, tom hall, in a physics class during junior year; became engaged at the end of my senior year; and married the august after graduation. as a matter of fact, most of the girls who had been on my freshman dorm hall married their boyfriends that hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : summer. many of those marriages ended in divorce. tom and i divorced years ago after years of marriage and three children. graduate school tom and i went to graduate school in physics at the state university of new york at stony brook. stony brook was a fairly new university with an excellent physics department, boasting c.n. yang, a nobel prize winner, on the faculty. i did better in my physics classes as a grad student than i did as an undergraduate. maybe they were better taught and more math oriented—or maybe i was just growing up and allowing myself to be more interested. after all, i had already fulfilled the s girl’s expectation of getting married; there was nothing left to prove. physics majors took classes in their first and second year and were assigned to thesis advisors at the start of their third year. professor x (who shall remain nameless) invited me to join his group. he was doing experiments on critical phenomena (the behavior in the vicinity of the critical point of a phase transition), and the subject interested me. i had heard a seminar on critical phenomena ( ) by michael fisher (a cornell professor and later one of my postdoc advisors) and loved that the peculiar behavior in the vicinity of the critical point applied to so many seemingly unrelated systems: liquids, ferromagnets, binary mixtures, etc. the other benefit of working in professor x’s group was that i could improve my experimental skills, which were weak. i joined professor x’s group at the beginning of my third year at stony brook. we conducted experiments on critical phenomena, shining laser light through a transparent cell containing argon gas while its temperature was raised from below to above its critical point. by monitoring the change in the index of refraction, we could measure the critical exponent beta. many a day was spent in our basement lab in a darkened room watching laser beams flash around as the more senior grad student took measurements. eventually, professor x asked me to write programs to automate the recording and analysis of optical data. that was fun. the music stopped, so to speak, about a year later. tom and i were at a graduate student party at the home of professor and mrs. x. music was playing, there was a fair amount of drinking (not by me) and dancing. professor x asked me to dance, danced me into a nearby room, and kissed me full on the mouth, which was a big surprise. i realized immediately that this was a bad situation and that my days in professor x’s group needed to be over. i contacted the director of graduate studies, professor max dresden, one of my favorite professors, and he helped me to find another advisor. today, as a result of the #metoo movement ( ), professor x would be disciplined and likely fired, but in those days his failed attempts at flirtation/seduction were a source of amusement. the department was not a hostile environment for women, because most people were nice (although one of my mechanics homeworks did ask us to model the simple harmonic motion of a woman’s breasts). they were just insensitive and oblivious like the rest of society at the time. professor dresden suggested that i talk to a new professor, george stell ( ), who had just been hired by the department of mechanics at stony brook and whose subject area was statistical mechanics (figure ). stell came from the polytechnic institute of brooklyn, where he had been an associate professor, and had not had a graduate student before. a big, friendly man, with a scruffy beard, thick glasses, and a ready laugh, stell was what we called a hippie in those days. i went to see him, described what had happened with professor x (which he found amusing), and explained that i was looking for a new advisor. he described his research at great length, and much to my delight, it was about phase transitions, which seemed to be in the scientific neighborhood of critical phenomena. at the end of our conversation, i blurted out that he probably wouldn’t want me as a graduate student because i “wasn’t very smart.” instead of saying the usual, “of course you’re smart, you are a fourth-year student in physics,” he asked me, “how do you know?” when www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure george stell. i responded, “i don’t do that well on tests,” he replied, “i don’t give a f___ how you do on tests, can you do research?” i said, “i don’t know,” and he replied, “well, let’s find out.” stell agreed to take me on as a provisional student. my first research meeting with stell was memorable. we met at his house because, as he ex- plained, he had a home office and all of his papers were there. i drove to his house and we met in a back room, complete with desk, bookshelves, and a bed. (his wife was not home at the time.) i was a little concerned, but he seemed fine and the research was interesting. at the end of our long meeting, in which he overwhelmed me with his research ideas, he jumped up and announced with a smile that he had something to show me. i was instructed to wait in the office, and he left the room. given my previous experience, part of me expected him to come back minus his clothes. i was trying to figure out how to make my escape when he returned a few minutes later playing a big trombone and entertaining me with his jazz compositions. meeting stell was probably the best thing that ever happened to me professionally. he didn’t care that i was a girl or how well i did on tests; he just wanted to do research. instead of competing with classmates to see who could solve a test problem first or fastest, i got to compete with the hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : science. it was up to me to figure out how to tackle a problem that no one had ever solved before. i was even allowed to be creative! i fell in love with research. my phd thesis, “phase transitions in systems with competing interactions,” examined how the relative strengths and ranges of re- pulsions and attractions in lattice gas models of fluids determine the types of phases (solid, liquid, and vapor) that will appear ( – ). george stell became a lifelong friend. sadly, he died in . i was one of the trustees of his estate. i, and the many others with whom he worked, still miss him. postdoc after graduate school, it was time to find a job. a complicating factor was finding two postdoc positions in the same place—one for me and one for tom, who had defended his phd thesis the same day i did. i have a file of rejection letters from that time. i applied for and received a national research council fellowship to work at the national bureau of standards, but tom’s fellowship application was not successful. he got a job offer at brandeis university, but i did not. my dream was to postdoc with ben widom at cornell, who was working in critical phenomena, but he was looking for an experimentalist who could measure tri-critical behavior. when tom got a postdoc offer at cornell’s materials science department, we decided that i would do a “voluntary postdoc” in the widom group, which meant i would work full time but not get paid. some people thought i was foolish—why work if you don’t get paid?—but i considered it a golden opportunity to learn from the best. our first child, katie, was born the december after we arrived. i took a couple of months off after katie’s birth and then hired a full-time caregiver so that i could go to the office and learn to be a postdoc. the widom/fisher lab was awe-inspiring. widom’s office was next door to that of michael fisher (a world-famous statistical mechanician), and they and their groups closely interacted. the grad students and postdocs were brilliant (not a word i often use) and deeply immersed in their subjects. the main topic of interest was critical phenomena: how to explain the nonclassical critical exponents that are found in nature. a frequent visitor to the group was ken wilson, a young professor in the physics department. i got to witness lively conversations between widom, fisher, and wilson about a new idea, renormalization group theory, which won wilson the nobel prize in physics. my research with ben culminated in two papers, one of which ( ) was pretty esoteric: “scaling in the ideal bose gas” in greater than four dimensions. note that that’s four spatial dimensions! bell labs our next positions were at bell laboratories; i worked in the economics modeling department in murray hill, new jersey, and tom worked in the device development department in allentown, pennsylvania. i stayed at bell laboratories for months and days. the work was interesting, but i couldn’t figure out the politics there. my department head seemed to enjoy keeping me off balance and, when i left the labs, told me that i would “never amount to much.” i did like my supervisor, bernie, and learned about industrial engineering from him. under his direction, i developed pricing strategies for bell system products using a combination of markov models and commonsense decision making. i found out later that my model was adopted by the bell system. princeton two weeks after i joined bell laboratories, i got a call one evening from barry royce, a professor at nearby princeton university. “would i be interested in interviewing for an assistant professor www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure leon lapidus. position in the aeronautical and mechanical engineering department at princeton?” they had “heard that i was in the area.” here is where i showed uncharacteristic boldness and wisdom. instead of saying, “i’m sorry, i just started working at bell labs and couldn’t possibly think of moving after only two weeks,” i told royce i would be happy to visit. a month later, i gave a rousing seminar on my research in a large room to an audience of three people, one of whom left in the middle. i then met with the head of the aeronautical and mechanical engineering department, and we discussed ways that i might fit in. (there weren’t any!) afterward, i informed my host, dean of engineering robert jahn, that i did not think it would work out. jahn understood and asked only that i accept his periodic invitations to lunch at the nassau club, a gentleman’s club reserved for “old tigers.” although women could not be club members, they could come to lunch. because the food was good and bob was fun to talk to, i accepted and joined him for lunch on several occasions over the next year. eventually, dean jahn introduced me to leon lapidus, the head of the chemical engineering department (figure ). leon was jewish (we had that in common) and enthusiastic about hiring women faculty. his view was that if we can’t grow our own, we ought to adopt them. in april, i again gave a seminar at princeton, but this time to the chemical engineering department. there was a sizable audience, and they asked good questions and seemed to like me. i met with most of the faculty and was offered a job as a tenure-track assistant professor, the first female professor in the princeton college of engineering and the third female chemical engineering faculty member in the nation. leon told me not to worry about my lack of training in chemical engineering; chemical physics (which was what i studied) was close enough. he said he would teach me the jargon and hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure princeton faculty and grads, april , one month before adam’s birth. help me to fit in. sadly, on may , , two months before my arrival, he suffered a massive heart attack in the office and died. he was only years old. i joined the princeton chemical engineering department on august , . i was years old. i remember walking alone into my office on my first day and finding it cold and barren, except for an ancient stapler on the desk and an ashtray in the shape of a rubber tire. there was a buzzer on the wall, and when i pressed it (bumpety bump bump—bump bump), someone in the building buzzed me back. this exchange continued during my entire stay at princeton. i would play a little rhythm on the buzzer when i had the urge, and someone would answer back. i never figured out who. welcome to princeton! what was it like being the first female professor in the cheme department at princeton (figure )? challenging! i had been hired and championed by leon (evidently a dominant fig- ure), but he was no longer there, and i was on my own. i was different from the types of assistant professors that my colleagues were used to. (suggested supplemental reading: hans christian andersen’s famous fairy tale, “the ugly duckling.”) although a few of the senior professors were quite welcoming to me, most were cool or ambivalent. i think they didn’t know what to make of me—this strange female person who was trained in physics (“not one of us”) and who, for goodness’ sake, got pregnant just after she was hired. when rumors that i was pregnant started to circulate, the executive secretary, who ran the department, declared to all who would listen, “she [meaning me] wouldn’t dare get pregnant.” surprise! (my son adam was born in may of www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : that year, and my daughter norah was born in april of my fifth year at princeton). one se- nior colleague, professor y, made disparaging remarks about my gender (e.g., “everyone knows women can’t do science”) and my field [“the only applied mathematics worth doing is in xyz (his field)”]. the grad students were reluctant to work with me; i didn’t get my first one until my third year. when i asked the new department head, bill schowalter, for his help and guidance, he de- murred by saying he had to treat all of the assistant professors alike. i needed coaching (today we would call it mentoring) because i was different than the other assistant professors, but schowalter seemed genuinely baffled by that concept. he finally suggested that i prove postulates in thermo- dynamics instead of working in statistical mechanics. i did receive advice from john prausnitz, who visited during my first year. he expressed delight that princeton cheme now had a thermody- namicist (me) and suggested that i do research on polymers and supplement my theoretical work with experiments. when i told him that i was not good at experiments, he pointed out that it’s the grad student, not the advisor, who does the experiments. when i asked him what i should do if the experiments didn’t work, he said (with a twinkle in his eye), “ask the student if it is plugged in.” i eventually found a mentor: keith gubbins, a professor at cornell university who is now my colleague at north carolina state university (nc state) (figure ). i had called him because he had just written a textbook, applied statistical mechanics ( ), for chemes, and i was planning to teach a graduate course in statistical mechanics. keith was very friendly, sent me his course notes, advised me to go to aiche (american institute of chemical engineers) meetings, and invited me to give a seminar at cornell. keith continues to mentor me, although i don’t think he would call it that. teaching chemical engineering was an adventure. my first year, i was assigned to teach staged operations—i had no idea what that was. fortunately, a kind colleague, joe calo, shared his course notes with me. staged operations was so different from physics! the mccabe–thiele diagrams tickled me because you needed to sharpen your pencil to get the most accurate answer. i was also assigned to teach the undergraduate laboratory and had responsibility for the double-effect evaporator, in which water was circulated through a huge (and ancient) system of pipes while being heated and cooled at different stages. one semester, i was even in charge of the whole lab. (thank goodness for teaching assistants!) after a couple of years, i was asked to apprentice-teach the thermodynamics i and ii classes. professor richard toner, a beloved princeton professor who had taught that class for nearly years, was about to retire. i became his head teaching assistant and taught problem sessions. the undergraduate students were incredulous, writing (for example), “how could a physicist possibly teach thermodynamics?” once toner retired and i took over thermo i and ii, i did well in my teaching evaluations. my favorite evaluation: “like john glenn, professor hall has the ‘right stuff.”’ i still love teaching thermodynamics to undergraduates. i tried to “fit in.” my strategy was sensible—be friendly, pleasant, and interested in others—but one of my efforts was, in hindsight, comical. on seminar days, wednesdays, i would walk over to the faculty club with a bunch of other professors to eat lunch with the speaker. i noticed that nearly all of my colleagues were tall, lanky, and athletic (they played squash) and that they wore blue blazers and khaki pants. well, i couldn’t do much about my height, and squash was not in my skill set, but i could change the way i dressed. maybe that would help me fit in? so, i went out and bought a lovely blue blazer and a khaki skirt and wore them on wednesdays. and nobody but me noticed! it became easier to fit in when the department hired four new assistant professors: robert prud’homme, jay benziger, sundar sundaresan, and jeff koberstein. although there was a little good-natured ribbing at first about who worked the most hours per week (all had stay-at-home wives who took care of their children), we all became friends rather quickly. i am still friends with them all. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure hall with keith gubbins and geoff (a papier-mâché tiger). why am i so grateful that i had the opportunity to spend time at princeton, and why am i dwelling on it in this autobiography? there are two reasons. first, it was a defining moment in my career—it shaped me. princeton gave me an entrée into a new field, chemical engineering, that really suits me. it was, and still is, a gold mine of interesting problems that are crying out for the kinds of research techniques that i know how to do: molecular modeling, statistical mechanics, and computer simulation. second, i got the freedom to explore my own research ideas and to do this with some great grad students, postdocs, and collaborators. my first research project at princeton was on modeling the behavior of hydrogen in metals. metal hydrides, e.g., niobium hydride, are a physical realization of the types of lattice gas models that i investigated as a graduate student. they exhibit gas-like, liquid-like, and solid-like phases, depending on the amount of hydrogen that is absorbed. the phase transitions are a thermody- namic consequence of the effective attraction between the hydrogen atoms in the metal induced by the stretching/distortion of the host metal lattice. metal hydrides were of interest because of the “hydrogen economy,” the idea that hydrogen gas (which burns to produce water) could replace petroleum in cars and that it would be stored in a metal. our approach was to use computer simu- lations, which were new to me, to predict these phase transitions. my first phd student, mauricio futran, and i learned how to do monte carlo simulations together ( ). he and the students that www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : followed him at princeton and later at nc state contributed to that field in a way that makes me proud ( – ). mauricio is now a vice president at janssen pharmaceuticals and is a member of the national academy of engineering. he remains a good friend. my second research project at princeton was a joint effort with my colleague, then–associate professor bill russel, in the area of colloids. bill was doing experiments on the flocculation (pre- cipitation) of colloids by the addition of polymers and wanted to model this phenomenon. asakura & oosawa ( ) had shown that adding polymers to a colloidal solution induced an effective at- traction between the particles. i proposed that we model this effect using the statistical mechanics techniques that i had learned as a graduate student. our student, alice gast (now president of imperial college london), was quite sharp and quickly learned the theory and how to apply it. that work is considered significant (a citation classic) because it showed that statistical mechan- ics could be applied to systems that are not molecules and that it could predict the gas, liquid, and solid phases exhibited by colloid–polymer solutions ( ). it also showed that the range of the colloid–colloid interaction, which can be changed by adding polymer, dictates whether or not the gas–liquid coexistence curve and accompanying critical point will be observed or be metastable. the latter point has been rediscovered by many investigators over the years, as it has relevance for the crystallization of globular proteins as well as colloidal suspensions ( , ). experiments in the russel lab verified our predictions and our approach ( ). an interesting sidelight to my research at princeton was my collaboration with bell labora- tories scientist eugene helfand. because my home was closer to bell labs than to princeton, i sometimes spent time in their theoretical chemistry offices, where i met gene, a theorist working in the polymers field. i asked him if he had any interesting mathematical problems to work on, and he put me to work. the result, after pages upon pages of equations, was an exact expression for the time correlation for polymer conformational relaxation. the hall–helfand correlation function has since become a standard against which to compare nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy measurements. this is one of my most cited papers ( ). interestingly, i did not think it was a very good paper at the time. on november , , i learned that the senior faculty at princeton had voted to deny me tenure. this was a blow and a surprise to many who knew me. when i came up for tenure, i had papers in refereed journals, had raised nearly half a million in research dollars, and had a $ , grant pending and a total of seven students. why do i think i was denied tenure? two reasons. first, the not-one-of-us syndrome: i was a female and a physicist, and my research did not seem like chemical engineering to most of the faculty. second, i was competing against my friend bob prud’homme, who was a strong scholar and the best fundraiser the department had ever seen. the scuttlebutt at the time was that if the department recommended both of us, the university would promote only one, and that would have had to be me because the university had been criticized for its treatment of women faculty. i spent my last year at princeton searching for another academic job. interestingly, some of the people in the academic community who had been supportive of me earlier seemed to forget who i was. in contrast, distinguished professors bob reid from the massachusetts institute of technology and keith gubbins from cornell wrote unsolicited letters to the university president protesting the tenure decision. in the end, i wound up with five job offers, and i chose nc state because i liked the faculty and the direction in which the head, hal hopfenberg, was taking the department. the move to north carolina had minimal impact on my children (the schools and community are great), but it did take a toll on tom and ultimately on our relationship. instead of seeking a job in north carolina, he decided to work full time on the stepper motor controller business that he had been pursuing in his spare time. this turned out to be tougher for him than anticipated. he eventually sold that business and went to work at a small engineering firm in the research triangle area. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : in hindsight, being denied tenure at princeton was not all bad; it had a positive impact on my drive and ambition. i had been a hard worker at princeton, but underneath it all, i hadn’t felt like i was competing against anybody. i just needed to do great work. however, after being denied tenure, i felt i had to prove that they made a mistake. this kind of motivation was new for me. i felt misjudged and angry, and this fueled my work. i would show them! as time went on, i realized that i was even more capable and creative than i had thought. eventually (maybe five years later), the anger went away, but the ambition and enhanced passion for research stayed. ten years later, i was invited to give a seminar in princeton’s chemical engineering department by my good friend and former colleague pablo debenedetti (we had overlapped for six months). i got a chance to converse with my former colleagues, including bill schowalter and professor y. bill told me that he regretted the department’s decision and had come to realize that it was a mistake; i told him that i forgave them and that it had turned out to be a good thing for me. i even forgave professor y, whose disparaging remarks had been so demoralizing to me at the time. he had clearly changed and volunteered that he wished he had done better. shortly thereafter, i was invited to serve on the department’s advisory council. i enjoyed that assignment enormously. north carolina state nc state has been a breath of fresh air. the chemical engineering department was, and still is, an exceptionally collegial department. my faculty colleagues accepted me from the start and seemed comfortable with my physics background. i became “one of them” as soon as i arrived. there were a few exceptions at first, but those relationships improved over time. the all-female support staff were particularly kind and taught me the basics of southern manners. i loved when they called me miss carol (figures and ). at nc state, i began a new chapter in my research: development of equations of state for chain-like molecules, a project that was mainstream chemical engineering but was amenable to a statistical mechanics approach. the keys to the success of that project were ron dickman, a very talented postdoc trained in physics, and kevin honnell, a princeton grad student who came with me to north carolina to complete his phd. ron came up with a clever way to construct an figure hall’s favorite undergraduate thermodynamics class, spring . www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure north carolina state university faculty, . all-purpose equation of state for systems of chain-like molecules such as alkanes and polymers: generalize the probabilistic assumptions underlying the flory and flory–huggins lattice theo- ries to flexible chain-like molecules moving in continuous space ( ). the resulting equation of state was in excellent agreement with monte carlo simulations of flexible hard chains. kevin took that ball and ran with it. his idea was that equations of state for chain-like molecules could be assembled by judiciously combining the equations of state for the segments (e.g., monomers) and groups of segments (e.g., dimers) along the chain ( ). this fundamental idea was considered a major leap forward at the time. prior to that work, most equation-of-state development in the chemical engineering community was based on a semiempirical approach, as researchers tried to add terms to the famous van der waals equation of state that would do a better job of matching experimental data. over the next decade, we extended the generalized flory dimer (gfd) ideas to more complex fluids, devising equations of state for polymer solutions, melts, and blends ( , ). grad student arun yethiraj (now at the university of wisconsin) performed simulations and developed integral equations for a variety of chain fluids in bulk and at surfaces ( , ). gfd’s main competition (very friendly, i might add) was the statistical associating fluid theory (saft) equation of state developed by keith gubbins and his associates walter chapman, george jack- son, and mac radosz ( ). the saft people continued developing and refining their equation of state long after we stopped working on gfd, making saft a superb state-of-the-art correlation for the properties of all kinds of industrial fluids. should i have tried to push gfd to be practical as keith’s associates did? i don’t think so—that was not interesting to me. we each have to go with our strengths. in the late s, i turned my attention to much more complex chain-like molecules: proteins. there were two reasons for this move. the first is that to me proteins are just very complex and hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : interesting chain-like molecules. the second is that protein aggregation is a cause or associated symptom of pick’s disease, which led to the death of my father in , and of alzheimer’s disease, which may have caused the dementia that my mother experienced toward the end of her life. indeed, assembly of normally soluble proteins into ordered aggregates, called amyloid fibrils, is a cause or associated symptom of more than human disorders, including alzheimer’s, parkinson’s, and the prion diseases ( ). another sign that it was time for me to get into biology (my last biology course was in ninth grade) was a prediction that appeared in a fortune cookie: “you will succeed in medical research.” why not? and then hung nguyen, another strong graduate student with a can-do attitude, came along. he developed prime, a moderately coarse-grained (four spheres per residue) model of protein geometry and energetics for use with the very fast discontinuous molecular dynamics simulation technique. this allowed us to simulate the spontaneous formation of fibrillar structures in a system containing -residue polyalanine peptides in approximately h on a fast computer—orders of magnitude quicker than atomic-level simulations ( ). [polyalanine had been found experimen- tally to form fibrils in test tubes ( ).] this was a major breakthrough. although progress toward understanding the molecular-level mechanisms driving protein aggregation had been made via experiments on particular proteins, studies of fibril assembly based on traditional atomic–level techniques, which follow the motions of every atom on every protein, were impossible because of the long aggregation timescales (microseconds to milliseconds) involved. later, a talented postdoc, mookyung cheon, expanded prime to become prime , a protein force field with a unique description of each of the possible amino acids ( ). this allows us to simulate the fibrilization of specific peptides ( – ). recent work with grad student yiming wang, leeds university theorist stefan auer, and experimentalists sheena radford and andy wilson has allowed us to calculate, for the first time, a truly equilibrium phase diagram for a system of peptides, in this case a fragment of the alzheimer’s peptide a-beta (also called beta amyloid) ( ). our simulation-based work on peptide aggregation is starting to be accepted by the protein aggregation community, which is populated almost entirely by experimentalists. hopefully, our research can help them come up with therapeutic strategies to combat protein aggregation diseases like alzheimer’s and parkinson’s. a recent research interest of mine is computational protein design. i got into this area when a friend, paul agris, formerly of the nc state biochemistry department, asked if i could design peptides that bind to specific targets. his goal was to design a peptide that could mimic the ability of the hiv protein, ncp , to bind to the human anticodon stem and loop (asl) and thereby block hiv replication. fortunately, i had a very smart postdoc, xingqing xiao, who knew how to make the computer sing. xiao developed a monte carlo algorithm that searches through tens of thousands of peptide sequences to discover those that bind more strongly to a target biomolecule than a known peptide ligand, the “initial guess” peptide (in this case, the peptide discovered via phage display) ( ). we used this approach to identify a peptide binder to human asl with a binding affinity that is times higher than the original phage-display peptide identified by agris ( ). this discovery resulted in my first and so far only patent. not bad for a physicist, right? since then, in collaboration with peter mirau and rajesh naik at the air force research laboratory, we have designed a peptide that recognizes a biomarker for heart attacks, cardiac troponin i; the level of detection achieved is better than that of the high-sensitivity commercial assays that require a clinical lab and hours to develop ( ). more recently, along with my young nc state colleague stefano menegatti, we designed a peptide that shows promise for becoming a synthetic mimic for protein a, the workhorse ligand that is used in industry for monoclonal antibody purification. this is a whole new world for me—fascinating! www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure hall group reunion at the american institute of chemical engineers annual meeting, fall . conclusion as you can see, my research interests and approaches have evolved over time to become more down-to-earth and practical. i seem to be even more excited about doing research now than i was earlier in my career (figure ). one of the things that makes it so much fun is working with nice and smart people and discovering new ideas and thinking up new ways to do things together. i have had the pleasure of working with some great students and postdocs. a major ongoing concern for me, and for most of the research community, is funding, which has gotten much harder in recent years. so, i am trying harder (and hopefully smarter). wish me luck! i have been asked when i will retire. my plan is to continue working as long as my health, energy, brainpower, and ability to do my job effectively hold out. young women that i meet have asked how i cared for my children while working full time, and how that affected them, me, and my work. the answer is that tom and i hired nannies to take care of the children in the daytime, and we took care of them the rest of the time. when i was at home, my focus was on my children, and when i was at work, my focus was on my work. this seemed natural to me; it never occurred to me to stop work to raise my children. i do remember a now-famous professor who visited princeton when i was pregnant with adam asking me who was going to raise my child. (in those days, most mothers stayed at home.) in retrospect, i and my children feel i did the right thing. i asked. katie, adam, and norah turned out just fine. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure hall and newman families together at the beach, . life of course has its ups and downs. i have had some tough times since coming to nc state. in , i was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment for about nine months. in , tom and i separated, and in , we divorced. that was a difficult time for me, but i eventually concluded that it was for the best. after a period of adjustment, i started to date using online services like match.com. this was, in many ways, hilarious; i could write a book about those times titled, dating after : a comedy. in september , on erev rosh hashanah, the evening before the start of the jewish new year, i met my partner, sheldon (shelley) newman, a widower trained in electrical engineering who lights up my life. shelley has been the ceo of some large health-care companies, is still working, and is comfortable with me being me. my three wonderful children—katie (a singer in new york city), adam (an artist in new orleans), and norah (a teacher in raleigh)—are making their way through life, and my three fine grandchildren make me smile. life is good for now, and i am grateful (figures and ). my professional and personal lives have been enormously enriched by my interactions with various people in the community. at nc state, i have had a long research collaboration with orlin velev on colloidal particles and with jan genzer, saad khan, and benny freeman on polymer ma- terials. my research interactions with my former students and postdocs who are now academics— aysa akad, ronald dickman, david faux, daniel forciniti, alice gast, barbara hacker, arthi jayaraman, monica lamm, harry ploehn, christine soteros, andrew schultz, qing shao, arun yethiraj, and yaoqi zhou—were particularly rewarding. i have also enjoyed research collab- orations with colleagues elsewhere, including martin cohen-stuart, marc donohue, amparo galindo, gregory hudalla, george jackson, sabine klapp, maria kula, raquel lieberman, anant paravastu, ted randolph, martin schoen, and yara yingling. i am fortunate to have had the www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : figure sheldon newman and carol hall, . friendship and support of the senior members of the cheme thermo crowd: peter cummings, eduardo glandt, keith gubbins, david kofke, john o’connell, thanos panagiotopoulos, john prausnitz, stanley sandler, anneke sengers, and jan sengers. i have benefited over the years from funding by the national science foundation and the national institutes of health. i am particularly indebted to aiche, which has served as my professional home organization; i am proud of having been the meeting program chair for the aiche centennial celebration in . in , i was elected to the national academy of engineering, a big surprise for me and extremely gratifying. that honor more or less puts the seal of approval on my adoption into the chemical engineering community, which was leon lapidus’s intention. i will not mention any other honors, because good girls of the s do not brag. what message do i want to convey to young people? that even though i started out with no particular direction, i did some things right. i kept an open mind, took some risks, was not quick to close doors, allowed myself to fall in love with research, didn’t stay down for too long, and was open to new ideas, new opportunities, and new friendships. it helps to be passionate about what you do, and to have a sense of fun when you can. hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : disclosure statement the author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. acknowledgments i am grateful to the following people who commented on early drafts of this manuscript: maria burka, peter cummings, michael dickey, richard felder, eduardo glandt, keith gubbins, adam hall, katherine hall, norah hall, clare mccabe, sheldon newman, david ollis, robert prud’homme, and gregory reeves. jay lapidus kindly provided a photo of his father. literature cited . stanley he. . introduction to phase transitions and critical phenomena. oxford, uk: oxford univ. press . gilbert s. . the movement of #metoo: how a hashtag got its power. the atlantic, oct. . ciach a, hall ck, kahl g, lomba e. . george stell ( – ). j.phys.condens.matter : . stell g, narang h, hall ck. . simple lattice gas with realistic phase changes. phys. rev. lett. : – . hall ck, stell g. . phase transitions in two-dimensional lattice gases of hard core molecules with weak, long-range attractions. phys. rev. a : – . hall ck, stell g. . decorated lattice model of a metamagnetic or host-impurity system. phys. rev. b : – . hall ck. . scaling in the ideal bose gas. j. stat. phys. : – . reed tm, gubbins ke. . applied statistical mechanics: thermodynamics and transport properties of fluids. chem. eng. ser. oxford, uk: butterworth-heinemann . kalos mh, whitlock pa. . monte carlo methods. hoboken, nj: wiley. nd ed. . futran m, coats sg, hall ck, welch do. . the phase-change behavior of hydrogen in niobium and in niobium-vanadium alloys. j. chem. phys. : – . shirley ai, hall ck, prince nj. . trapping of hydrogen by oxygen and nitrogen impurities in nio- bium, vanadium and tantalum. acta metall. : – . soteros ce, hall ck. . niobium hydride phase behavior studies using the cluster variation method. phys. rev. b condens. matter : . asakura s, oosawa f. . on interaction between two bodies immersed in a solution of macromolecules. j. chem. phys. : – . gast ap, hall ck, russel wb. . polymer induced phase separations in nonaqueous colloidal sus- pensions. j. colloid interface sci. : – . rosenbaum d, zamora pc, zukoski cf. . phase behavior of small attractive colloidal particles. phys. rev. lett. : – . tenwolde pr, frenkel d. . enhancement of protein crystal nucleation by critical density fluctuations. science : – . gast ap, russel wb, hall ck. . an experimental and theoretical study of phase transitions in the polystyrene latex and hydroxyethylcellulose system. j. colloid interface sci. : – . hall ck, helfand e. . conformational state relaxation in polymers: time correlation functions. j. chem. phys. : – . dickman r, hall ck. . equation of state for chain molecules: continuous-space analog of flory theory. j. chem. phys. : – . honnell kg, hall ck. . a new equation of state for athermal chains. j. chem. phys. : – . wichert jm, hall ck. . generalized flory equation of state for chain-monomer mixtures of unequal segment sizes. chem. eng. sci. : – . gulati h, wichert jm, hall ck. . generalized flory equations of state for hard heteronuclear chain molecules. j. chem. phys. : – www.annualreviews.org • a cheme grows in brooklyn a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch ch _hall arjats.cls may , : . yethiraj a, hall ck. . monte carlo simulation of polymers confined between flat plates. macro- molecules : – . yethiraj a, hall ck. . integral–equation theory for the adsorption of chain fluids in slit-like pores. j. chem. phys. : – . chapman wg, gubbins ke, jackson g, radosz m. . saft: equation of state solution model for associating fluids. fluid phase equilib. : – . knowles tpj, vendruscolo m, dobson cm. . the amyloid state and its association with protein misfolding diseases. nat. rev. mol. cell biol. : – . nguyen hd, hall ck. . molecular dynamics simulations of spontaneous fibril formation by random- coil peptides. pnas : – . forood b, perezpaya e, houghten ra, blondelle se. . formation of an extremely stable polyalanine β-sheet macromolecule. biochem. biophys. res. commun. : – . cheon m, chang i, hall ck. . extending the prime model for protein aggregation to all twenty amino acids. proteins : – . cheon m, hall ck, chang i. . structural conversion of aβ – peptides from disordered oligomers to u-shape protofilaments via multiple kinetic pathways. plos comput. biol. :e . wang y, latshaw dc, hall ck. . aggregation of aβ( – ) in the presence of naturally occurring phenolic inhibitors using coarse-grained simulations. j. mol. biol. : – . bunce sj, wang y, stewart kl, ashcroft ae, radford se, et al. . molecular insights into the surface- catalyzed secondary nucleation of amyloid-β( ) by the peptide fragment aβ( – ). sci.adv. :eaav . wang y, bunce sj, radford se, wilson aj, auer s, hall ck. . thermodynamic phase diagram of amyloid-β ( – ) peptide. pnas : – . xiao x, agris pf, hall ck. . designing peptide sequences in flexible chain conformations to bind rna: a search algorithm combining monte carlo, self-consistent mean field and concerted rotation tech- niques. j. chem. theory comput. : – . spears j, xiao x, hall ck, agris p. . amino acid signature enables proteins to recognize trna. biochemistry : – . xiao x, kuang z, slocik jm, tadepalli s, mirau pa, et al. . advancing peptide-based biorecognition elements for biosensors using in-silico evolution. acs sens. : – hall a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch _toc ari may : annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering volume , contents a cheme grows in brooklyn carol k. hall � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � life and times in engineering and chemical engineering j.f. davidson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � biological assembly of modular protein building blocks as sensing, delivery, and therapeutic agents emily a. berckman, emily j. hartzell, alexander a. mitkas, qing sun, and wilfred chen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � bioprivileged molecules: integrating biological and chemical catalysis for biomass conversion jiajie huo and brent h. shanks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � cellular automata in chemistry and chemical engineering natalia v. menshutina, andrey v. kolnoochenko, and evgeniy a. lebedev � � � � � � � � � � � � � � computational fluid dynamics for fixed bed reactor design anthony g. dixon and behnam partopour � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � covalent organic frameworks in separation saikat das, jie feng, and wei wang � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � how do cells adapt? stories told in landscapes luca agozzino, gábor balázsi, jin wang, and ken a. dill � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � hydrolysis and solvolysis as benign routes for the end-of-life management of thermoset polymer waste minjie shen, hongda cao, and megan l. robertson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � life cycle assessment for the design of chemical processes, products, and supply chains johanna kleinekorte, lorenz fleitmann, marvin bachmann, arne kätelhön, ana barbosa-póvoa, niklas von der assen, and andré bardow � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch _toc ari may : mechanistic modeling of preparative column chromatography for biotherapeutics vijesh kumar and abraham m. lenhoff � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � molecular modeling and simulations of peptide–polymer conjugates phillip a. taylor and arthi jayaraman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � multiscale lithium-battery modeling from materials to cells guanchen li and charles w. monroe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � n -glycosylation of igg and igg-like recombinant therapeutic proteins: why is it important and how can we control it? natalia i. majewska, max l. tejada, michael j. betenbaugh, and nitin agarwal � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � numerical methods for the solution of population balance equations coupled with computational fluid dynamics mohsen shiea, antonio buffo, marco vanni, and daniele marchisio � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � positron emission particle tracking of granular flows c.r.k. windows-yule, j.p.k. seville, a. ingram, and d.j. parker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � possibilities and limits of computational fluid dynamics–discrete element method simulations in process engineering: a review of recent advancements and future trends paul kieckhefen, swantje pietsch, maksym dosta, and stefan heinrich � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � process control and energy efficiency jodie m. simkoff, fernando lejarza, morgan t. kelley, calvin tsay, and michael baldea � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � quorum sensing communication: molecularly connecting cells, their neighbors, and even devices sally wang, gregory f. payne, and william e. bentley � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � separation processes to provide pure enantiomers and plant ingredients heike lorenz and andreas seidel-morgenstern � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � unconventional catalytic approaches to ammonia synthesis patrick m. barboun and jason c. hicks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � water structure and properties at hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces jacob monroe, mikayla barry, audra destefano, pinar aydogan gokturk, sally jiao, dennis robinson-brown, thomas webber, ethan j. crumlin, songi han, and m. scott shell � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . ch _toc ari may : water treatment: are membranes the panacea? matthew r. landsman, rahul sujanani, samuel h. brodfuehrer, carolyn m. cooper, addison g. darr, r. justin davis, kyungtae kim, soyoon kum, lauren k. nalley, sheik m. nomaan, cameron p. oden, akhilesh paspureddi, kevin k. reimund, lewis stetson rowles iii, seulki yeo, desmond f. lawler, benny d. freeman, and lynn e. katz � � � � � � � � � � � � � errata an online log of corrections to annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering articles may be found at http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/chembioeng a nn u. r ev . c he m . b io m ol . e ng . . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . f or p er so na l us e on ly . emerald_ijhg_ijhg .. editorial women’s lives matter… unfortunately more in some places than others an international perspective on investing for health four priority areas for action are identified in a recent report by the committee on global health and the future of the usa, board on global health, health and medicine division, national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine (national academies, ). these are to achieve global health security, maintain a sustained response to the continuous threats of communicable diseases, save and improve the lives of women and children and promote cardiovascular health and prevent cancer. this national academies report is worthwhile reading. specific recommendations under these four areas are fully in alignment with governance topics that we have featured and will continue to feature in the international journal of health governance. “the landscape of global health is vast, and with new and sometimes disparate priorities across the health sector, considering each issue or disease in its own silo can be counterproductive” (national academies, ). sustained return on investment for mutual security and benefit requires an international and interdisciplinary perspective among governance leadership. it may become more difficult to properly inform action on those priority areas if words like vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and science-based are all banned from use in any american official document being prepared for next year’s federal budget (sun and eilperin, a, b; kaplan and mcneil, ; branswell, ). prohibition guidance like that recalls a previous era in canada when its harper administration silenced their government scientists (learn, ; maron, ), a muzzle removed as soon as his political party was decisively voted out of power. from my years working in a state government agency, i can remember annual orientation sessions prior to bill review assignments during legislative season, which included advice to avoid pejorative phrases like “naïve expectation” or “well-intentioned but […],” to avoid jargon where plain language would suffice, and to comment objectively on strength of evidence rather than, just say, evidence-based. however, where precision of language was needed we never were advised to avoid scientifically correct wording in favor of politically oriented wording, and we never were encouraged to allow a community belief to overshadow scientifically documented fact. good public policy benefits from being informed by institutional memory, and that memory is lost when bad governance drives out dedicated senior-level public service professionals. shortly after this journal’s theme issue on maternity care was published in the first quarter of , it was reported that the usa has the highest, and uniquely increasing, rate of maternal deaths among countries of the developed world (martin and montagne, ). the majority of these deaths are preventable, as evidenced by declining maternal mortality rates in some regions of america and sharp differences between states like california (where programs have achieved low rates) vs texas (texas having the highest rates in the developed world) (novack, ). although there is more than one root cause and several changes would be required to address the problem in places like texas, addressing the lack of adequate universal access to health care is one of that state’s own commission’s recommendations. america, a country founded on a principal of separation between church and state, has in past years been divided in opinion on abortion but generally has been generous about funding reproductive health services for women in impoverished countries. this impacts maternal mortality (haddad and nour, ). however, america is today being criticized by other developed nations because the political power of america’s religious right international journal of health governance vol. no. , pp. - © emerald publishing limited - doi . /ijhg- - - ijhg , has now reached a point of curtailing, nationally and internationally, federal funding for women’s health programs that provide or even counsel about abortion (agence france-presse, ; anonymous, ; york, ). america remains the only developed country where large numbers of its people do not receive adequate care because they cannot afford it, despite america paying the most per capita for care. this situation may be worsened by the recent us tax law revisions, which likely will reduce health insurance coverage by removing individual penalties for not purchasing insurance. apart from ideological arguments about whether health care is or is not a basic human right of citizens, about what it should or should not include, the best policy decisions are those informed by sharing and fully understanding the outcome experiences all around our changing world. women have diverse political views, but women’s rights are fundamentally human rights. as special envoy for the un high commission for refugees, angelina jolie has worked to end rape as a weapon of war and at the peacekeeping summit again called upon senior officials “to muster the political will to crack down on sexual violence” (devlin, ). iceland recently became the first nation to deal universally with the issue of pay inequality (tarr, ). time magazine’s person of the year recognition of “the silence breakers” (http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/) and impact of the #metoo movement have raised the profile of these human rights. through social media, blogs, dedicated non-stop news channels and expanding international travel, people in one country are becoming aware of changes in other countries more rapidly than ever. information and misinformation propagate through the internet. whether this leads to divisiveness and civil unrest, or to better outcomes through collective effort, depends upon the ability of good governance to stay informed, act responsibly and share knowledge. the international journal of health governance strives to be a valued vehicle for that sharing. to help ensure that our journal maintains currency with international developments and perspectives, the co-editors maintain contact with a cadre of editorial advisory board members and regional editors. with this issue, we are pleased to introduce our newly appointed regional editor for europe and regional editor for latin america, irina ibraghimova in croatia, and moacyr roberto cuce nobre in brazil. we also will continue to expand the editorial advisory board in to have representation from as many parts of the world and as many of the world’s inter-related population health perspectives as possible. david birnbaum and michael decker references agence france-presse ( ), “brussels to host fundraising conference after trump’s anti-abortion move”, pri, february , available at: www.pri.org/stories/ - - /brussels-host-fundraising- conference-after-trumps-anti-abortion-move (accessed january , ). anonymous ( ), “ ‘global gag rule’ reinstated by trump, curbing ngo abortion services abroad”, the guardian, january , available at: www.theguardian.com/world/ /jan/ /trump- abortion-gag-rule-international-ngo-funding (accessed january , ). branswell, h. ( ), “cdc director tells staff ‘there are no banned words’, while not refuting report”, stat, december , available at: www.statnews.com/ / / /cdc-chief-science-forbidden- words/ (accessed february , ). devlin, m. ( ), “angelina jolie speaks at peacekeeping summit in vancouver”, ctv news, november , available at: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/angelina-jolie-speaks-at-un-peacekeeping- summit-in-vancouver- . (accessed january , ). haddad, l.b. and nour, n.m. ( ), “unsafe abortion: unnecessary maternal mortality”, review in obstetrics & gynecology, vol. no. , pp. - , available at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/pmc / (accessed january , ). editorial http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ www.pri.org/stories/ - - /brussels-host-fundraising-conference-after-trumps-anti-abortion-move www.pri.org/stories/ - - /brussels-host-fundraising-conference-after-trumps-anti-abortion-move www.theguardian.com/world/ /jan/ /trump-abortion-gag-rule-international-ngo-funding www.theguardian.com/world/ /jan/ /trump-abortion-gag-rule-international-ngo-funding www.statnews.com/ / / /cdc-chief-science-forbidden-words/ www.statnews.com/ / / /cdc-chief-science-forbidden-words/ https://bc.ctvnews.ca/angelina-jolie-speaks-at-un-peacekeeping-summit-in-vancouver- . https://bc.ctvnews.ca/angelina-jolie-speaks-at-un-peacekeeping-summit-in-vancouver- . kaplan, s. and mcneil, d.g. jr ( ), “uproar over purported ban at c.d.c. of words like fetus”, the new york times, december , available at: www.nytimes.com/ / / /health/cdc-trump- banned-words.html (accessed february , ). learn, j.r. ( ), “canadian scientists explain exactly how their government silenced science”, smithsonian, january , available at: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scientists-open-about- how-their-government-silenced-science- / (accessed february , ). maron, d.f. ( ), “trump administration restricts news from federal scientists at usda, epa: the curb echoes what happened in canada six years ago”, scientific american, january , available at: www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-restricts-news-from-federal- scientists-at-usda-epa/ (accessed january , ). martin, n. and montagne, r. ( ), “the last person you’d expect to die in childbirth”, propublica, npr, may , available at: www.propublica.org/article/die-in-childbirth-maternal-death-rate- health-care-system; www.npr.org/ / / / /u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal- deaths-in-the-developed-world (accessed january , ). national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine ( ), global health and the future role of the united states, the national academies press, washington, dc, available at: https://doi.org/ . / ; www.nap.edu/ (accessed february , ). novack, s. ( ), “texas’ maternal mortality rates: world in the world, shrugged off by lawmakers”, texas observer, june , available at: www.texasobserver.org/texas-worst-maternal-mortality- rate-developed-world-lawmakers-priorities/ (accessed january , ). sun, l.h. and eilperin, j. ( a), “cdc gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity”, the washington post, december , available at: www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/ / / /f a-e cf- e - e -edec _story.html?utm_term=.f a cb bf (accessed february , ). sun, l.h. and eilperin, j. ( b), “words banned at multiple hhs agencies include ‘diversity’ and ‘vulnerable’ ”, the washington post, december , available at: www.washingtonpost.com/national/ health-science/words-banned-at-multiple-hhs-agencies-include-diversity-and-vulnerable/ / / / fa -e d- e - -a c_story.html tarr, t. ( ), “how icelandic women really feel about the new equal pay law”, forbes, january , available at: www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/ / / /how-icelandic-women-really-feel- about-the-new-equal-pay-law/# c ac f (accessed january , ). york, g. 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/u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-the-developed-world www.npr.org/ / / / /u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-the-developed-world https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / www.nap.edu/ www.texasobserver.org/texas-worst-maternal-mortality-rate-developed-world-lawmakers-priorities/ www.texasobserver.org/texas-worst-maternal-mortality-rate-developed-world-lawmakers-priorities/ www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/ / / /f a-e cf- e - e -edec _story.html?utm_term=.f a cb bf www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/ / / /f a-e cf- e - e -edec _story.html?utm_term=.f a cb bf www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/ / / /f a-e cf- e - e -edec _story.html?utm_term=.f a cb bf www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/words-banned-at-multiple-hhs-agencies-include-diversity-and-vulnerable/ / / / fa -e d- e - -a c_story.html www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/words-banned-at-multiple-hhs-agencies-include-diversity-and-vulnerable/ / / / fa -e d- e - -a c_story.html www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/words-banned-at-multiple-hhs-agencies-include-diversity-and-vulnerable/ / / / fa -e d- e - -a c_story.html www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/ / / /how-icelandic-women-really-feel-about-the-new-equal-pay-law/# c ac f www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/ / / /how-icelandic-women-really-feel-about-the-new-equal-pay-law/# c ac f www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canada-gives- -million-to-replace-trumps-contraception-cuts/article / www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canada-gives- -million-to-replace-trumps-contraception-cuts/article / knudsen | changing masculinity, one ad at a time | westminster papers in communication and culture 	 	login | register 	home 	news 	articles 	articles 	issues 	special collections 	about 	about 	research integrity 	become a reviewer 	author guidelines 	editorial team 	editorial team 	submission 	contact 	 start submission 	 account 	login 	 register 	 research articles changing masculinity, one ad at a time authors: gry høngsmark knudsen (ucl business academy and university college) , lars pynt andersen (university of aalborg, copenhagen) options 	share: 	 	 	 	  	a- 	a+ 	 	dyslexia 	 	view harvard citation style 	view vancouver citation style 	view apa citation style abstract this paper takes a rhetorical perspective on how ads address the current debate of toxic masculinity and attempt to change its hegemonic ideals. we compare rhetorical strategies in two purpose branding campaigns, lynx’s is it ok for guys ( ) and gillette’s the best a man can be ( ), to demonstrate how respective uses of formal and narrative tropes create vastly different narratives about masculinity and therefore also very different audience agency. we argue that gillette repeats older versions of hegemonic masculinity ideals and call for men to take responsibility and act as protector of the weak, whereas lynx invites the audience to embrace and identify with less stereotypical identities. we suggest that gillette’s polemical rhetorical approach may generate more public debate on the issue of toxic masculinity, while lynx’s approach builds on a more embracing strategy that encourages the audience to empathise with non-stereotypical forms of masculinity. keywords: brand narrative, purpose branding, rhetorical analysis, masculinity, advertising and gender how to cite: knudsen g. & andersen l., ( ) “changing masculinity, one ad at a time”, westminster papers in communication and culture ( ). p. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /wpcc. views downloads published on jul peer reviewed license creative commons attribution . introduction in this paper, we address how brands participate in discourses on toxic masculinity through advertising. specifically, we analyse and compare the new brand narratives from gillette and lynx to understand the rhetorical strategies these two brands use in their communication on toxic masculinity. historically, both lynx and gillette have had strong brand narratives that portrayed masculinity in particular and stereotypical ways. since , gillette has portrayed the dependable, yet sexy man through their slogan ‘the best a man can get’. however, in , gillette turned its brand narrative upside down and began a conversation on toxic masculinity and men’s responsibility to change it through their new slogan ‘the best a man can be’. similarly, lynx had a well-known brand narrative focused on ‘laddish’ charm and ‘getting the girls’ (feasey, ), yet in lynx changed their brand narrative to addressing less stereotypical masculinities (radley, ). recently, more and more brands have engaged in different societal debates, a phenomenon called ‘purpose branding’ (holt , godin ). this phenomenon is a concept mainly propagated by marketing practitioners, for example seth godin ( ), but aligns somewhat with strands of consumer culture theory and approaches such as ‘cultural branding’ (holt , ). purpose branding based on societal issues have been employed with varying results: in some cases, the brands have been critiqued for not being sincere. in other cases, the purpose strategy has backfired because a campaign missed the point of the purpose. this happened with dove’s campaign real beauty sketches ( ), where the attempt to convince women that they are more beautiful than they think was met with critical perspectives: whether beauty is still the most important characteristic to women. thus, when brands engage in societal causes and debates, it is fraught with good intentions but also complications. in this paper, we analyse how two brands (lynx and gillette) both participate in the current societal debate on toxic masculinity and how they construe a new brand narrative to eliminate it. we show the rhetorical strategies employed in the ads and the possibilities for audience agency (just and christiansen, ) these rhetorical strategies facilitate. finally, we discuss their potential in motivating behavioural changes among men and facilitating changing definitions of masculinity. we contribute to the area of ideology and advertising and discuss the value and interventionist perspectives of two opposing communicative strategies: the polemical rhetorical approach that gillette engaged with, and the open and exploratory rhetorical strategy of lynx. the motivation of this paper is to understand the transformative potential of advertising’s call to action and how different rhetorical strategies inscribe different subject positions for the audience to enter into. theory in this paper, we work with a social constructivist understanding of masculinity (connell, ). that is, masculinity is a construction that emerges in the meeting of a variety of discourses and ideologies. as such, masculinity in itself does not exist, but is ‘constructed, reproduced, and contested at structural, interactional and individual levels’ (scheibling and lafrance, ). building on connell’s definition of hegemonic masculinity, thomas ( ) explains how ideas of masculinity emerge in contradiction and juxtaposition to other ideas of gender, as well as other identity categories, such as colour and class. thus, hegemonic masculinity is the construction of an ideal, the most powerful form of masculinity (connell, ), and it only exists as a construct that defines and is defined by other constructions of masculinity and femininity. thus, ideas of masculinity are socially, culturally and historically situated (risman, ). yet, changes to masculine ideals emerge slowly and with resistance. advertising as vehicles of cultural myths (kenney and scott, ) is one genre where ideals of masculinity are particularly visible. advertising, especially for large brands, are shared cultural texts where pervasive cultural ideas are used to communicate dreams and wishes of better lives. thus, advertising is a genre where ideals and stereotypes come together to portray culturally acceptable versions of desirable lives. as such, advertising campaigns ‘are a visual presentation of a version of gendered behaviour’ (smith, , online only). advertising is, therefore, a specific place to observe ideas about masculinity because it is both ‘aesthetic and political’ (schroeder and zwick, , ). asserting the social constructivist perspective on masculinity, advertising as a genre both constructs and reproduces ideals of masculinity, where the inherent promise is that through consumption, men can come to embody the hegemonic type of masculinity portrayed in advertising (kimmel, ). thus, advertising discourse feeds on the experience of inadequacy that real living men (and women) experience, and promises to help ameliorate this lack through consumption choices. in recent years, several advertising campaigns have developed a critical perspective on female stereotypes and ideals. a couple of very prolific examples are dove’s campaign for real beauty (lachover and barak brandes, ; windels et al, ) or always’ like a girl (abitbol and sternadori, ). these, and similar campaigns have entered a feminist discourse on women and representation, suggesting how advertising participates in the construction of ideals of femininity. where these ads have been criticised for commercialising feminism in an effort to sell more products (windels et al., ), they have also been celebrated for raising questions about negative stereotypes of women (castillo, ). thus, there has been a strong debate about the effects of advertising stereotypes on women (rudloff, ) and advertising’s role in changing those stereotypes (abitbol and sternadori, ). the same, however, cannot be said for the masculine stereotypes portrayed in advertising (kimmel, ), even if the ideals of masculinity have changed over time. in advertising, masculine ideals are reproducing old stereotypes that are visible already in the s. men should be middle or upper class, educated and worldly (kervin, ). for a long time, whiteness and heterosexuality were unquestionable parts of the ideal, so much so that the only way black masculinity was portrayed in advertising was as a ridiculous and childish juxtaposition to the white ideal (thomas, ). homosexuality was even more invisible until , when virgin cola presented a gay male couple kissing (tsai, ). even if there have been changing tendencies such as ironic advertising, these campaigns still emphasised that the ironic shift was only motivated by addressing a younger segment, yet still maintaining the middle-class, white heterosexual male (smith, ). thus, ‘new lad’ advertising (benwell, ; cortese and ling, ) may employ irony to address men in a different way, but still maintain a hegemonic version of masculinity that is contradictory to homosexuality and femininity (benwell, ). sexism is, therefore, still a pervasive quality of the stereotype portrayed in more recent developments of advertising masculinity (cortese and ling, ). furthermore, ads portray the male body as slim yet muscular, and (hetero)sexually attractive (Östberg, ). a particular area is grooming advertising: these ads invert the male gaze onto men themselves (patterson and elliott, ) with their attention to the male body, thereby invoking the allure of male-male desire. since the s, hegemonic masculinity has been defined by four characteristics: ‘no sissy stuff’, ‘be a big wheel’, ‘sturdy oak’, and ‘give ‘em hell’ (brannon, ). these characteristics are not specific to the s, but rather reflect the main ideals of masculinity throughout the th century that are both produced and reproduced by advertising. traditional advertising portrays hegemonic masculinity in a rather limited number of ways. the mythological marlboro man with his ‘virtues of individualism, autonomy, and self-sufficiency’ (white et al, , ) is one major stereotype in advertising. yet, before the marlboro man came heroic doctors (white et al, ), heroic soldiers (grandstaff, ) and confident, successful, sturdy sportsmen (kervin, ). the early stereotypes continue alongside the marlboro man, and as such the marlboro man is primarily an addition to existing stereotypes, demonstrating an emphasis on particular values of independence and freedom (white et al., ). more recent advertising stereotypes reflect a stronger focus on male sexuality (bordo, ), but also have a younger presentation than previous masculinity ideals (cortese and ling, ). moreover, where these new images of men add layers of being carefree, boyish playfulness and male bonding to our ideals of masculinity, they do so in a way that distances men from women in humorous ways (smith, ). however, even if these new images seem to share an ironic disposition, irony only works on surface level to allow for an even stronger stereotypical and sexist discourse (benwell, ). similarly, next to the ironic discourse on masculinity, traditional stereotypes such as the heroic sportsman are still prevalent (wörsching, ) and more nostalgic images of men and traditional masculine behaviour are also widespread (gee and jackson, ). further, where companies might be perceived to engage in ‘gender-bending’ of traditionally male products such as the porsche, part of the consumer base actively address and counter the gender-bending in favour of more traditionally male categorising (avery, ). thus, the idea of hegemonic masculinity in advertising does not seem to change but rather strengthens its adoption of traditional male virtues of strength, sexual potency, competence, freedom and heroism. recently, however, there have been changes in how masculinity is construed in advertising and how consumers participate in this construction. for example, in a recent paper, zayer et al. demonstrate that consumers on a global scale resist and delegitimise masculine stereotypes in advertising (zayer et al., ). we argue that this change in the consumer response to advertising is also visible in few but important examples of advertising campaigns. therefore, in this paper, we analyse two campaigns that both address masculinity in new ways. both of our examples represent major international brands, and as such they are highly visible in large parts of the world. these ads actively engage in a discussion of what masculinity is and how it is performed by men. as such, both campaigns present a new direction in advertising presentation and the construction of ideal masculinity, yet their presentations employ very different strategies and the public response has been equally different. below, we detail how we methodologically approached the analysis of the respective rhetorical strategies that lynx and gillette adopt, and what the results of their strategies are. methods we approach the advertising texts through a rhetorical perspective (scott, ) and analyse how the texts construe and communicate masculinity ideals. scott’s perspective on rhetorical analysis rests on an idea of rhetoric that addresses more than the formal elements of a text. rather, she includes the context and the historical situation of a text in the rhetorical analysis: the rhetoric of a specific text is construed to elicit particular responses and is therefore designed in a way that is meaningful to the audience (littau, , ). the implication of our methodological perspective is that we analyse, compare and contrast the specific advertising texts and their respective rhetorical structures. however, we do not subscribe to a ‘stimulus-response’ reductionism based on an isolated analysis of specific texts and responses, but rather consider an ad or brand video as polysemic fragments of larger contexts and discourses (mckerrow, ; mcgee, ). thus, we also discuss the text in relation to previous campaigns by the same and other brands, the intertextual relations (to related youtube responses as video or texts in traditional media) and the historical context they are part of (mckerrow, ). clearly, the situated analytical strategy poses analytical challenges of where to set the boundaries of ‘text’ and context. we draw on a wide selection of popular cultural, symbolic and formal traditions to demonstrate how these texts have shaped the particular advertising and what the implications are for the particular expressions of masculinity. glocalised audiences we consider both campaigns to be part of a global discourse on masculinity because both brands are part of a glocalised ‘brandscape’ (thompson and arsel, ). drawing on appadurai, jenkins et al ( ) argue that media consumption is becoming increasingly ‘glocalised’ by transnational audiences appreciating, curating, discussing and dissipating local media globally, even disregarding copyrights. as the brand videos are appreciated and recirculated by a global media audience, these texts (to some degree) transcend their original time and place. the brand videos are intended to engage online media users; they are designed to be what jenkins et al ( ) term ‘spreadable media’, and engagement by circulation and recirculation is considered part of the media strategy (jenkins et al., ; holt, ). this is not to say that the local contexts of the uk and us are irrelevant, but too much analytical focus on understanding the texts in relation to the local cultural contexts might misconstrue the rhetorical potential of the brand videos. for example, when a young american male watches the gillette video online, he might become part of a global audience and choose to comment on a post by commentators from brazil or the uk. he may even be reflecting on his masculinity as ‘american’, ‘rural’, ‘globalised’, ‘anti-lbtg’ or ‘toxic’, but he would do so as part of a globalised discourse on masculinity. if he were then to subsequently discover the lynx brand videos on youtube, he would experience these also in light of #metoo discourses that were not present at the time of the production of the lynx videos. thus, in global media, culture, time, place, meaning and authorial control is ephemeral and constantly negotiated (jenkins et al., ). while our approach may be of pragmatic interest to marketers, we will also follow mckerrow ( , ) in suggesting that rhetorical criticism offers potential to ‘unmask or reveal the ways in which discourse helps to create social and/or political oppression, thereby establishing the conditions for emancipation’. building on scott and kenney ( ), we argue that brands are cultural products that communicate with a specific voice that consumers come to recognise and are familiar with. for example, when a brand changes their core message on masculinity, audiences have to participate in re-establishing the familiarity and shared construction of masculinity (schroeder and zwick, ). further, the way a brand addresses an audience is in itself an ethical act: it is a central point to understand the communication’s potential for audience agency (campbell, ) because the address has implications for the audiences’ co-construction of ideals and worldviews. thus, in our analysis we focus both on gender stereotypes and also on how the text constructs advertiser-text-audience interrelations (just and christiansen, ). data material and analytical strategies the lynx campaign (is it ok for guys, [video ]) is developed in a british context and marks a distinct break with lynx’s previous brand narrative of young, free and (hetero)sexually aggressive masculinity (feasey, , ) in an effort to address toxic masculinity (fleming, ). similarly, gillette (the best a man can be, [video ]) breaks with their long-standing narrative of stereotypical masculinity (bui et al., ). gillette’s campaign was constructed by grey london as part of a wider effort to become more relevant to younger segments (bedo, ). however, the american context of a polarised gender debate and #metoo in particular posed a challenge to the reinvented brand narrative. where we, and previous advertising researchers, consider western media culture to reach beyond national borders (jenkins et al., ), the changes in space and time between the reception of lynx’s and gillette’s campaigns (with developments of #metoo beginning in october and donald trump’s instatement as president in january ), were locally different. where gillette’s campaign followed up more directly on #metoo, lynx responded more generally to toxic masculinity. video the ‘boys will be boys will be boys’ mantra in ‘the best a man can be’, gillette ( ). [video--inline] download video video ‘is it ok … – to have long hair?’ real questions posed in ‘is it ok for guys?’ lynx ( a). [video--inline] download video the campaign strategies were different, and the response to the campaigns have also been vastly different. below, we analyse the textual communication and the visual structure to understand how they influence the communication of hegemonic masculinity. visual analysis entails both analysing visual composition and formal aspect (schroeder, ) of the campaign videos and the symbolic and discursive aspects (carroll, ). however, we only broadly address the reception of the campaigns through media reports and other written accounts. due to the changes to youtube algorithms, it is highly difficult to systematically collect the audience response from viewers. thus, we decided to draw on traditional media texts reporting on the issue. the difficulty here is to weigh the response properly, as it would be in relation to comments on youtube. several studies report a tendency for stronger perspectives and emotions to create more attention and spreading than less strong expressions (kozinets, patterson and ashman, ; kramer, ). therefore, reporting on both online and traditional media response might not reflect the variations in responses, but only those (strong) responses that work with algorithmic logics. analysis the following analysis will compare the gillette and lynx campaigns. first, we will describe and analyse each of the central brand videos of these campaigns as visual rhetoric, unpacking persuasive strategies, ideologies, and stereotypes. second, we will discuss how each of the videos facilitate audience agency. in the gillette campaign, one communication is pivotal: the ‘we believe: the best a man can be’ youtube ad that runs at one minute and forty-five seconds. a companion website ‘thebestamancanbe.org’ was also set up with testimonials from a diverse set of men on a wide range of subjects such as men working with firefighting, mentoring kids, dealing with addiction, abuse, suicide, etc. gillette description the ad is a long and highly complex montage of situations and visual metaphors held together by a male voice-over. the basic overall structure of the ad constitutes a formulation akin to classic detergent ads of the informational ‘problem-solution’/’problem-avoidance’ format. this is a format designed as a pertinent communication strategy in cases of problem oriented motivational structure in the target group (percy and rosenbaum-elliott, , ). the problem element presents the audience with an emotional compelling scenario of a recognisable problem, for example: ‘oh no – a stain on my new shirt’. the second part is the solution element, which demonstrates (often with hyperbolic visual evidence) the solution to the problem ‘wow – the stain is all gone’. this second part needs to convey the feeling of relief, but the evidence does not have to be rationally convincing or credible in simple, low involvement product categories such as detergents or personal hygiene products (percy and rosenbaum-elliott, ). this structure is reflected in the gillette ad, beginning with a montage of men looking at themselves in the mirror whilst a chorus of voices presents problems of bullying, sexual harassment and #metoo. a voice asks: ‘is this the best a man can get?’. the classic gillette jingle with a male choir singing the slogan ‘the best a man can get’ can be heard the background. then follows a series of situations that show toxic masculinity unfolding: bullying by text messaging, boys fighting, catcalling, a man groping a woman, mansplaining and a long line of men barbecuing saying ‘boys will be boys’. all these scenes constitute a presentation and information of the problem of toxic masculinity. around seconds in, the video shifts to presenting the solution, which occurs when the voice-over states ‘something finally changed’ and switches to a newscast about the #metoo movement. the newscast turns into a visual mosaic of many newscasts about #metoo while the voice-over states: ‘there will be no going back, because we believe in the best in men’. then, a montage of similar situations in the presentation of the problem-montage follows, and this time the problematic toxic behaviour is interrupted by other men, thus avoiding that the situations escalate into toxic masculinity. the ad concludes with a series of blank male faces looking into the camera. a text in white capital letters appears over the face of a young boy: ‘the best a man can get’. then, the final sign off is presented on a blue background: ‘it’s only by challenging ourselves to do more that we can get closer to our best, we are taking action at thebestamancanbe.org join us’. analysis formally, the gillette ad begins with a visual metaphor, that we could call ‘tearing up the gillette of the past’. when the voice-over asks, ‘is this the best a man can get?’, referencing the long running slogan of gillette, the visuals are also quoting classic gillette ads by showing a man being kissed on the cheek by a woman next to the gillette logo and slogan. the image suddenly appears to be projected on a (cinema) screen and is abruptly torn by a horde of boys jumping through the screen and running diagonally towards the viewer, screaming, and chasing a boy trying to escape. this constitutes the first part of gillette’s depiction of the problem of toxic masculinity. the informational advertising using hyperbolic emotional reactions to ‘the stain on the shirt’ problem is abiding to codes of realism. here, the modality of the metafiction is more complex: it is a visual trope in which the author (gillette) presents a self-quote on ‘a screen of the past’ (the old tv ad projected on a cinema screen), a central piece of brand-identity, and ‘tears it up’: it is destroyed in front of the audience. it is a speech act of self-correction or self-reformation as the iconic quote destroyed was once pivotal to gillette’s brand identity. in contrast to this overt symbolism and self-commentary, the following montage is constructed of emblematic scenarios of toxic masculinity, abiding to the conventional codes of realism. the key axis of the ad is the climax of the problem ( seconds): a realistic scenario of boys fighting in a back yard, where men watch passively and shrug it off with a ‘boys will be boys’ comment. this scene breaks the realism by subtly sliding into a visual trope: it is not just one or a few men, but a long row of men barbecuing. the men are all striking the same pose, arms crossed, and speaking their mantra as a choir ‘boys will be boys will be boys will be boys…’ (ad lib). the camera pans the row of men and their barbecues in a movement that is diagonally extending the line of men beyond visibility, seeming endless. in the same way, the mantra of toxic masculinity, ‘boys will be boys will be…’ is a rhythmic repetition, anchoring a trope of circular eternity. this segment draws on the cinematic style of the s hollywood musicals of busby berkeley. building on his experience in military propaganda, berkeley became a master of producing escapist entertainment in hollywood (pattullo, ). his classic hollywood musicals were spectacular displays of chorus girls dancing in elaborate geometric formations constructed by their bodies, or often just body parts (legs, smiling faces). these visual schemes (visual rhyme) and tropes (women as flowers, fireworks, fragmented body parts as geometric or figurative shapes) is a mode of objectification still in use in music videos (hansen, ). they echo schemes and tropes made infamous through other historic and iconic examples of visual propaganda, from soviet agitprop to leni riefenstahl’s nazi hymn triumf des willens ( ): lines of soldiers or groups of factory workers marching in accord, shouting or singing propaganda slogans as ‘a representation of the people’ (haskins , ). the visual composition of a diagonal line extending beyond sight, and the camera moving along the seemingly endless number of soldiers, athletes, or workers, is almost a cliché, a grand manifestation of ‘the power of the masses’ or ‘the power of the people’ or, in the case of gillette’s ad, the (toxic) power of male hegemony. we suggest, that by invoking the visual trope of ‘the people’ and the stylistic cues of visual hyperbole, gillette is turning the male individual into a faceless toxic mob by building on the same visual language that the classical hollywood musical used for objectifying the female individual into the anonymised category of ‘women’ (hansen, , ). the most common effect of this visual trope is as a gesture of tribute (by/to the people) of grandness, spectacle and excess (fischer ). yet, in this context, it seems almost sarcastic as a hyperbolic manifestation of ‘excess of toxic masculinity’. the choir of toxic men is interrupted by other voices. these voices are coming from a multitude of images of media reporting, the #metoo movement and prosecutions, when the voice-over states that ‘something finally changed’ ( seconds). again, this is a ‘mass-movement’ of protest indicated by split screen display forming the ‘flood of mass-media’ about #metoo. the flood of images signals the start of the solution part of the advertising. we are revisiting previous scenarios to see how men can solve the problems of toxic masculinity by ending toxic behaviour of other men and boys. just as in detergent ads, gillette offers visual evidence of how to make the problem vanish, and how men can become better men by intervening when catcalling, bullying or sexism unfolds around them. at the end of the brand video, the call to action is to ‘join’ by participating on the campaign website. this website is a highly branded gillette space, with a menu offering information on gillette products and shaving tips. the site also contains links to instagram posts of gillette, more specifically, a series of highly curated video-portraits of traditionally masculine men working to help other men become ‘the best men can be’. the video on youtube also presents the user with a link to the same brand video in a shorter version. lynx description the lynx ad is also a montage of scenarios presented in the visual style of handheld point of view-camera (pov). pov is a cinematic convention whereby the camera functions as the eyes of a main character of a narrative, suggesting a closure of the gap between the viewer and depicted world (morgan, ). the advert states the theme and the following montage in a text message in white all capital letters on a black background: ‘ % of guys have been told how a real man should behave’. the montage starts with a pov shot looking down at legs of a man putting on a pair of jeans. the camera tilts up to reveal a mirror, and in the mirror is a skinny young man getting dressed, looking at himself and his naked torso. a voice-over asks, ‘is it ok to be skinny?’. the next shot is a pov looking at a group of young men playing football. the pov character kicks the ball, but it heads in the wrong direction. a different voice-over asks, ‘is it ok to not like sports?’. the next shot is of a young girl walking down a narrow hallway: she turns around, walking backwards while looking into the camera (eyes of pov character). she reaches her hand out and the pov character takes her hand (the camera tilts down to the hands). a new voice-over asks, ‘is it ok to be a virgin?’. the next shot is a matching image of two people holding hands. the camera tilts up to reveal a young man looking into the camera whilst smiling and holding the hand of the pov character, walking backwards down a narrow alley. yet another voice-over says, ‘to experiment with other guys?’. continuing, the editing is accelerating in pace with pov-shots and voice-over questions in rapid sequence: ‘is it ok to wear pink? – to be nervous? – to have long hair?’. this culminates with a black frame and a text message in all caps: ‘these are the real questions guys are searching every day.’ the image then changes to a computer screen with a search bar (similar to that of google). someone off camera is typing ‘is it ok for guys to…’ into the box, and the dropdown suggestions to complete the sentence are changing rapidly with multiple ways to finish it. a voice-over says, ‘go online to search for yourself’. then follows a brand sign off with logo ‘lynx – find your magic’. two thumbnail images of videos with men reacting to ‘is it ok for guys’ questions appear. these are links to some of the follow up videos with lynx ambassadors (for example, boxer anthony joshua) discussing different ‘is it ok’ questions. in these videos, men look into the camera, share their opinions and air any potential doubt about the question, although the final answer is always that ‘sure it is ok for men’. they also encourage the viewer to respond to the video by commenting, but few actually do, even if there are tens of thousands of views. almost all comments are in the line of ‘sure it is ok’, yet there are comments that underline the questions to be real and problematic issues. for example, on the video ‘is it ok for guys to wear skinny jeans?’ (lynx b), one user writes ‘one of my friends wears skinny jeans and gets called gay, i like them but i dont want to get made fun of like that.’[sic]. analysis in the lynx video, the emphasis is put on an open and exploratory way to understand masculinity. rather than defining ideal types of masculinity, the ad employs different voices to investigate many ways to be masculine. these are often in opposition to traditional ideals such as the sportsman (wörsching, ) or the sexually aggressive masculinity that was previously part of the lynx brand communication (feasey, ). the video consistently uses pov which construes the viewer as the subject of the video, creating the experience of presence within the narrative (cummins, ; cummins et al., ). that is, pov structures the video and its different open questions about masculinity as questions that might as well have been posed by the viewer (himself). thus, pov in this case creates the possibility for identification with the search for a masculine identity that goes beyond the stereotypical versions. further, asking variations of the same question in many different voices means that the stereotypical understandings of masculinity are undermined slowly but surely. where the voices are all male, the ad validates their enunciations of doubt by exploring what constitutes masculinity and challenging traditional definitions. pov is a mechanism that creates the possibility for empathy, what is often labelled ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’ (jones and dawkins, , ). pov allows the audience to see the world through the eyes of another person. at the end of the video, where it introduces new ways of learning about what it means to be a man, the advert has the potential for the viewer to feel the insecurity and self-doubt that the search represents. the online search for whether or not something is ok for guys highlights the way new media has changed socialisation. where previously mainstream media and local communities were the main sources for finding role models to mirror yourself in, today peer groups also form online and the possibilities of meeting liked-minded individuals has expanded. thus, the video echoes how online communities have become a source of freedom and liberation for likeminded people to meet and share their identities. where one’s local community was the place where possible and passable identities were learned, the possibilities of meeting other people online means that minorities and subcultures have found new reference groups (bennett, ), and thus, online participation has also had the effect of expanding ways of performing identities. by reiterating the way younger segments find information and investigate identity questions, the advert suggests that this is a legitimate way of looking for alternative role models. through the pov camera, the video also enables the understanding of other groups and their struggles with forming identity. as such, the video portrays young people in a vulnerable state and shows the audience how to empathise and maybe open up passages of support for non-stereotypical masculinities. thereby, more ways of identifying have become imaginable, eliciting empathy and support for these non-stereotypical identities. discussion the lynx and gillette campaigns seem different in many respects, but they both claim to address the issue of ‘toxic masculinity’. for example, rik strubel, the lynx global vice president at unilever, discusses the ‘is it ok for guys’ campaign: ‘we want guys to see there’s no holds barred on what men can or cannot be. we need to help more men by tackling toxic masculinity, head on’ (hinde ). toxic masculinity as a theme has emerged out of current debates about feminism in society: how genders have different opportunities and can engage in distinct patterns of practice. these themes have long been part of the address of women, for example in dove’s campaigns for real beauty, but also in older campaigns that less directly discuss female empowerment yet show women in non-stereotypical ways (bremer, ). the discussion of toxic masculinity has long been a part of the societal debate on feminism and gender equality but has not to the same degree been a part of the address in advertising. brands have addressed issues of masculinity, for example in dove ran the father’s day campaign #realstrength, however did so with reliance on very traditional gender norms where men are categorised as ‘sturdy oaks’(connell, ; brannon, ). dove did not in particular change the masculine ideal, rather they underlined the positive aspects of the existing ideal. with lynx and subsequently gillette, the discussion of masculinity in advertising has changed significantly. with the differences in time and space between the two campaigns, gillette became the poster for more than a cultural change in the way masculinity is portrayed, whilst also seeming to become a participant in the #metoo movement. thus, the brand purpose seemed to take sides in an already dichotomous debate. gillette and lynx both address the question of what it means to be a man in their changed brand narratives, however, as the analysis demonstrates, the ads’ rhetorical structure, formal properties and expressive capacities are notably different. where both campaigns address young segments, lynx is sympathetic to questions and insecurities about being a man and embodying masculinity. gillette, however, is less supportive of the viewer and their issues of masculinity but confronts and accuses men of being representatives of toxic masculinity or passive bystanders. the gillette video only offers participation in a highly controlled and self-referential mode: the video is referencing and commenting on previous gillette advertising; the video’s call-to action is a url to a product-oriented website; and all links refer back to the gillette branded platforms on youtube and instagram. this seems a mode of discursive closure – a branded echo chamber of well-groomed gillette masculinity. even before the ‘is it ok for guys’ campaign, lynx’s use of laddish, sexist humour could be seen as exploring male insecurities in the grotesque and exaggerated effects of ‘spraying more to get more’ (feasey, , ). compared to the ‘straightforward’ metonymical approach of depicting a specific male ideal by gillette, the dream world of lynx advertising is far more open, ironic and polysemic. both brands seem to extend these modes of advertising rhetoric in their approach to toxic masculinity. building on the perspective, that choices of film style are also expressions of ideology, we argue that the choice of style in brand videos that pose as critique of toxic masculinity are clearly harnessing marketing techniques for the benefit of this cause. nevertheless, these choices of visual rhetoric are themselves ideological choices that may function as a ‘symptomatic form of ideological maintenance in its own right’ (blakesley , ). both campaigns are offering agency to their audiences, though of vastly different kind: while the explicit justification of both videos are to challenge toxic masculinity, only lynx seems to embrace a more diverse (re)construction of masculine ideals. the pov-style is a manifested expression of the identification(s) offered: the multitude of voices, insecurities, questions and invitations to explore these and the doubt of others. in contrast, gillette is maintaining a classic ‘heroic’ ideology of masculinity as an ‘authoritative problem solver’, gillette is stepping in to confront evil through physical intervention. gillette is setting itself centre stage, and the ‘problem-solution’ structure of the video echoes the decades of advertising strategy where the ‘product-as-hero’ solves domestic problems, often backed by authoritative (male) voices (percy and rosenbaum-elliott ). the gillette video is a representation of ‘the right masculinity’ and an explicit call to join the brand in the action against ‘the wrong masculinity’. a mode of instructive visual rhetoric directing the audience to see themselves as part of a movement: as ‘one people’ under the leadership of gillette. lynx, on the other hand, is acknowledging the many different anxieties of the individual and the right to interpret masculine ideals. in all the different segments and follow up videos of the lynx campaign, there is never anyone who is correcting the wrong masculinity of other men. thus, in the lynx video, the laddish voices of the audience are questioning masculine ideals. in contrast, in the gillette video, the deep, fatherly voice of gillette is performing the masculine ideal by correcting masculinity. where lynx experienced growth following their campaign (fleming, ), gillette experienced a veritable backlash (godin, ). according to brian weston from grey, the backlash to gillette’s campaign was unexpected (bui et al., ). both brands were aiming at younger demographics with their campaigns, yet it is hard to know whether they were successful in getting their messages against toxic masculinity across to these segments. arguably, the two campaign strategies inscribe different subject positions and possibilities for identification. however, in terms of addressing toxic masculinity on a societal level, gillette has most likely had a more visible impact on the current debate, whereas lynx probably impacts on a more individual level. thus, from a social constructivist perspective, both campaigns influence and create some change to the current image of hegemonic masculinity. conclusion before we conclude this paper, we must outline the limitations of this study. first and foremost, this is a rhetorical investigation into the communicative strategies employed in two purpose branding texts. this suggests that, where we can speculate as to the audience agency inscribed in the campaigns, we cannot detail actual audience responses. future research into purpose branding could investigate the ways in which different segments respond to different kinds of purpose branding and how these campaigns translate into changed understandings of masculinity. further, these campaigns were early adopters of a trend that had previously been targeting primarily women (lachover and barak brandes, ; abitbol and sternadori, ; windels et al, ), adopting a feminist perspective to address and change the stereotype of toxic masculinity. thus, longitudinal studies of the changes that masculinity ideals undergo will shed more light on the level of success that these campaigns achieve, and how they influence future campaigns addressing hegemonic masculinity. the value of a rhetorical analysis is to demonstrate how audience agency is inscribed in texts, thus allowing us to anticipate part of the response to texts like the above. the contribution of this study is to demonstrate the combination of rhetorical analysis and a text-agency perspective (just and christiansen, ) in explaining both the inherent ideology of the campaigns and the potential value to society. our point is that the societal value is not simply seen as a functional and measurable communication-effect on society or specific groups, but is inscribed in the text-agency of the rhetorical strategies in the texts themselves. we have shown how purpose branding can work at different levels depending on their communicative strategies. that is, gillette may not change our core concept of the hegemonic masculine ideal of reliable father figures that take responsibility for society’s weaker member (brannon, ). however, gillette did manage to bring the discussion of toxic masculinity and #metoo to new societal levels and attention. further, gillette also firmly put responsibility to address and change toxic masculinity in the hands of men, which has been a feminist agenda for years – now men’s own brand adopted that agenda. compared to this, the purpose branding strategy of lynx was less outspoken, however changing the image of masculinity into masculinities on an individual level. further, the strategy lynx employed enabled empathy and openness between different generations and different enactments of masculinity. both of these campaigns attempt to address and change masculine stereotypes and they each accomplish raising awareness and creating debate at different societal levels. thus, the arena for masculine performances has widened, bringing new (less toxic) ways to identify and do masculinity to the table. acknowledgements we thank marketing lecturer toms kreicberg for making us aware of the lynx campaign. competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. references abitbol, a., & sternadori, m. 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( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: vancouver citation style | apa citation style × vancouver-style citation knudsen, g & andersen, l. changing masculinity, one ad at a time. westminster papers in communication and culture. ; ( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: harvard citation style | apa citation style × apa-style citation knudsen, g & andersen, l. ( , ). changing masculinity, one ad at a time. westminster papers in communication and culture ( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: harvard citation style | vancouver citation style × non specialist summary this article has no summary × | - | published by university of westminster press | 	privacy policy 	sitemap 	contact 	login cem_ _s _abstract .. termination of resuscitation and those records which were unavail- able) were identified through review of all patch records from january , to december , for paramedic services in our region. written ambulance call reports (acrs) and audio recordings of paramedic patches were obtained and reviewed. results: patch records were identified and screened for inclusion. acrs and audio patch records were included in the analysis. of ( %) patch requests were granted by the bhp. of the paramedic requests that were not granted, the most commonly cited reason was close proximity to hospital ( / ; %) followed by low likelihood of the intervention making a clinical impact in the prehospital setting ( / ; . %). requests for certain interventions were more likely to be granted than other requests. all requests to perform needle thora- costomy for possible tension pneumothorax, administer atropine for symptomatic bradycardia and treat hemodynamically unstable hyper- kalemia were granted ( / , / and / , respectively), while requests for synchronized cardioversion ( / ; %) and transcutaneous pacing ( / ; %) were approved less than half of the time. conclu- sion: this retrospective review suggests that requests to perform cer- tain critical and potentially time sensitive interventions are more likely to be granted which calls into question the requirement for a manda- tory patch point for these procedures. furthermore, the interplay between proximity to hospital and the decision to proceed with an intervention potentially informs future modifications to directives to facilitate timely, safe and efficient care. keywords: mobile communication, online medical control, prehospital mp evaluating factors related to quality of audio transmission during mandatory paramedic patches and technical barriers to efficient communication in the prehospital setting d. kelton, bsc, md, s. doran, ba, bsc, md, bed, m. davis, md, msc, k. van aarsen, msc, j. momic, bsc, western university, london, on introduction: delegation of controlled medical acts by physicians to paramedics is an important component of the prehospital care frame- work. where directives indicate that physician input is needed before proceeding with certain interventions, online medical control (a “patch”) exists to facilitate communication between a paramedic and a base hospital physician (bhp) to request an order to proceed with that intervention. the quality and clarity of audio transmission is paramount for effective and efficient communication. the aim of this study was to examine the impact of audio transmission quality on the results of paramedic patch calls. methods: prehospital para- medic calls that included a mandatory patch point (excluding requests exclusively for termination of resuscitation and those records which were unavailable) were identified through review of all patch records from january , to december , for paramedic services in our region. written ambulance call reports (acrs) and audio recordings of paramedic patches were obtained and reviewed. pre- specified patch audio quality metrics, markers of transmission quality and comprehension as well as the resulting orders from the bhp were extracted. differences between groups was compared using chi-square analyses. results: records were identified and screened initially. acrs and audio records were included in the analysis. at least one explicit reference to poor or inadequate call audio quality was made in / ( . %) of calls and on average, . times per call. of the audited call records, of ( . %) patches experienced an interruption of the call. each time a call was interrupted, re-initiation of the call was required, introducing a mean [iqr] delay of [ - ] seconds to re-establish verbal communication. order requests made by paramedics in calls with no interruptions were approved in of patches ( %) while those requests made in calls with one or more interruptions were approved in only of cases ( %) (Δ . %; %ci . - . %, p = . ). conclusion: this retrospective review suggests that audio quality and interruptions of patch calls may impact a physician’s ability to approve orders for interventions in the prehospital setting. focus on infrastructure and technology underlying this important mode of communication may be a fruitful avenue for future improvements in systems where this may be an issue. keywords: mobile communication, online medical control, prehospital mp implementing rural advanced care community paramedics in rural and remote british columbia: a qualitative research approach f. besserer, md, msc, d. banner-lukaris, phd, j. tallon, md, msc, d. kandola, bhsc, mhsc, university of british columbia, prince george, bc introduction: community paramedicine is well-established with an increasing evidence base to support its role in improving healthcare delivery in canada and across the world. in british columbia (bc), the bc emergency health services (bcehs) community paramedi- cine program provides an avenue to expand the advanced care para- medic (acp) role in underserved rural and remote communities across the province. methods: we undertook stakeholder consulta- tions using purposive sampling to better understand the barriers and facilitators impacting the integration of rural advanced care com- munity paramedics (raccps) in bc communities and to evaluate stakeholder perspectives of the implementation and impacts of the raccp. in-depth interviews were completed with a diverse range of stakeholders. the interviews were analyzed using a qualita- tive descriptive approach and the theoretical domains framework. results: a number of key facilitators and barriers to implementation of the raccp were identified. facilitators included the raccp bridging significant gaps in existing community-based healthcare ser- vices including palliative care, harm reduction, and home-based assessment. the raccp also provides leadership within their com- munities by actively engaging in the delivery of informal and formal debriefing, mentorship, and education. identified barriers to raccp implementation included confusion over the scope of the raccp role, lack of shared health data, and various regulatory chal- lenges. several priority areas for ongoing development were also iden- tified including workforce planning, addressing regulatory requirements, developing a strategic and systematic activation and dis- patch process, providing continuing mentorship and supports for raccps, and the importance for ongoing engagement with end-users to determine the impact of the raccp role for community health services. conclusion: this research provides a strong founda- tion for addressing healthcare delivery in rural and remote bc by identifying the unique challenges communities face in healthcare pro- vision and is a leading initiative for the ongoing development of pro- fessional paramedic practice across the province. keywords: community paramedicine, health service delivery, rural cjem • jcmus ; s résumés scientifique https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms mp what to do with #metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence a. sobiesiak, bhsc, k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. shipeolu, ba, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, university of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: the #metoo social media movement gained inter- national status in october as millions disclosed experiences of sexual and intimate partner violence. people who experience violence from a former/current intimate partner may not present for care for many reasons, among them not knowing where to go for care, or not realizing they were experiencing abuse since the behavior was por- trayed as ‘normal’. empirical research identified increased police reporting, internet searches, and new workplace regulations on sexual assault/harassment after #metoo. less is known about how #metoo has influenced hospital-based care, particularly among ipv cases. we aimed to investigate if the #metoo social movement influenced pat- terns of ipv cases presenting for emergency care. methods: this study took place at the sexual assault and partner abuse care pro- gram (sapacp), within the emergency department of the ottawa hospital. patients seen from november st, through to septem- ber th, was considered pre-#metoo and those seen novem- ber st, to september th, was considered post-#metoo. all patients seen in october were excluded. analyses compare the proportion and characteristics of ipv cases seen pre- and post-# metoo. log-binomial regression models were used to calculate rela- tive risk and % ci. results: cases were seen by the sapacp during the total study period, of which ( %) were ipv cases. ipv cases were seen pre-#metoo and ipv post-#metoo. the clinical presentation for ipv cases was similar between both per- iods where approximately % of ipv cases presented for sexual assault, % presented for physical assault. an increase in frequency and proportion of ipv cases was observed post-#metoo. post-# metoo there were additional cases of ipv, corresponding to almost a % increase in risk compared to the pre-#metoo period. (rr: . , % ci: . - . ) post-#metoo, there were more pre- senting cases of ipv among male/trans cases ( vs ) and youth cases ( vs ). conclusion: #metoo is a powerful social move- ment that corresponded with a significant increase in ipv cases pre- senting for emergency care. while the assault characteristics among ipv cases remained similar, an important contribution of this research is the increase in youth, male/transgender patients who presented for care post-#metoo. continued investigations into pre- post-#metoo trends is needed to understand more about the changing clinical population and to inform resource and service allocation. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, trauma mp clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage follow- ing minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study e. mercier, md, msc, t. o’brien, mbbs, b. mitra, phd, mbbs, n. le sage, md, phd, p. tardif, msc, m. emond, md, msc, m. d’astous, md, phd, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: the primary objective of this study was to determine the incidence of clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemor- rhage (t-ich) following minor head trauma in older adults. second- ary objective was to investigate the impact of anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapies on t-ich incidence. methods: this retrospective cohort study extracted data from electronic patient records. the cohort consisted of patients presenting after a fall and/ or head injury and presented to one of five ed between st march and st july . inclusion criteria were age ≥ years old and a minor head trauma defined as an impact to the head without ful- filling criteria for traumatic brain injury. results: from the , electronic medical records evaluated, cases were included. the mean age was . (sd . ) years. one hundred and eighty-nine ( ) patients ( . %) were on an anticoagulant (n = ), antiplatelet (n = ) or both (n = ). twentypatients( . %)developedaclinically significant t-ich. anticoagulation and/or antiplatelets therapies were not associated with an increased risk of clinically significant t-ich in this cohort (odds ratio (or) . , % ci . - . ). conclusion: in this cohort of older adults presenting to the ed following minor head trauma, the incidence of clinically significant t-ich was . %. keywords: head injury, intracranial haemorrhage, traumatic brain injury mp factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review g. genois, i. vlahovic, l. moore, phd, b. beck, md, msc, p. blanchard, md, phd, m. Émond, md, msc, b. mitra, md, phd, mbbs, p. cameron, md, mbbs, a. nadeau, phd, É. mercier, md, msc, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: trauma care is highly complex and prone to medical errors. accordingly, several studies have identified adverse events and conditions leading to potentially preventable or preventable deaths. depending on the availability of specialized trauma care and the trauma system organization, between and % of trauma-related deaths worldwide could be preventable if optimal care was promptly delivered. this narrative review aims to identify the main determinants and areas for improvements associated with potentially preventable trauma mortality. methods: a literature review was performed using medline, embase and cochrane central register of controlled trials from to a maximum of months before submission for publication. experimental or observational studies that have assessed determinants and areas for improvements that are associated with trauma death preventability were considered for inclusion. two researchers independently selected eligible studies and extracted the relevant data. the main areas for improvements were classified using the joint commission on accreditation of healthcare organizations patient event taxonomy. no statistical ana- lyses were performed given the data heterogeneity. results: from the individual titles obtained by the search strategy, a total of studies were included. each study included between and trauma patients who had sustained mostly blunt trauma, frequently following a fall or a motor vehicle accident. preventability assessment was performed for to patients using either a single expert assessment (n = , , %) or an expert panel review (n = , . %). the definition of preventability and the taxonomy used varied greatly between the studies. the rate of potentially preventable or prevent- able death ranged from . % to . %. the most frequently reported areas for improvement were treatment delay, diagnosis accuracy to avoid missed or incorrect diagnosis and adverse events associated with the initial procedures performed. the risk of bias of the included studies was high for studies because of the retrospective design and the panel review preventability assessment. conclusion: deaths occurring after a trauma remain often preventable. included studies cjem • jcmu ; s s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	evaluating factors related to quality of audio transmission during mandatory paramedic patches and technical barriers to efficient communication in the prehospital setting 	implementing rural advanced care community paramedics in rural and remote british columbia: a qualitative research approach 	what to do with &num;metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence 	clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage following minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study 	factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review beyond the big city: the question of size in planning for urban sustainability procedia environmental sciences ( ) – - © the authors. published by elsevier b.v. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of healthy cities doi: . /j.proenv. . . available online at www.sciencedirect.com sciencedirect international conference on geographies of health and living in cities: making cities healthy for all, healthy cities beyond the big city: the question of size in planning for urban sustainability henry waya,* ajames madison university, carrier drive, harrisonburg, virginia, , usa abstract this paper develops a theory of size (distinct from scale) as a means to better understand how urban contexts shape and are shaped by various aspects of sustainability and livability. after considering the question of size in a broad conceptual way, the analysis turns to how size has been considered within urban geography. the paper then explores the opportunities and challenges for a size- based analysis of urban livability and sustainability and the questions posed by the experience of smaller cities. this discussion is a prospectus of potential areas of consideration and research on the issue of size, sustainability, and livability. © the authors. published by elsevier b.v. peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of healthy cities . keywords: urban geography; city size; small cities; sustainability . introduction this paper introduces the question of city size to the consideration of urban sustainability, livability, and associated agendas. seemingly neglected, or at least under-explored and under-theorized, the ways city size might contextualize and shape urban policies and development in these areas is worth examining. the proper consideration of the potential effects of size (in a range of forms) might add a further dimension to the ways in which these sustainability and livability-related agendas might be better spatially contextualized and locally grounded. it may help avoid some of the pitfalls of applying policies generated “elsewhere,” transferred problematically to cities of different sizes, and could contribute to a more locally developed sustainability plan better contextualized by the urban environment in which it * corresponding author. tel.: + - - - ; fax: + - - - . e-mail address: wayha@jmu.edu © the authors. published by elsevier b.v. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of healthy cities http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.proenv. . . &domain=pdf henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – is deployed. more broadly, this paper develops robinson’s argument that “the spatial imagination adequate to capturing cityness – in its diverse forms – must necessarily be multiple and sophisticated”i by adding this further spatial dimension, size, to the consideration of urban processes. in posing the question of how size matters to urban environmental and quality of life agendas and policies, this paper offers three related discussions. first, size itself as an epistemological and ontological spatial element will be considered, especially in relation to questions of the idea of “scale”. the intersections of size, cities and urban geographical research will then be discussed, with a particular focus on how medium and small sized cities have been investigated. as an example of how size, urbanism, and sustainability and livability interact, the paper then suggests a range of ways and potential questions for how sustainability and livability agendas might be shaped by the size variable in smaller and mid-sized cities, drawing additionally on the author’s research in a small city. this paper is very much an opening discussion of the question of “size”, highlighting potential areas for further examination, and possible routes for more active research and future sustainable urban planning. . theorizing “size” in their broadside against the concept of “scale” in human geography, marston et al reveal one of the factors underlying the opacity of “size” in the spatial understanding. their first rationale for doing away with the scale concept is that “there is substantial confusion surrounding the meaning of scale as size – what is also called a horizontal measure of ‘scope’ or ‘extensiveness – and scale as level – a vertically imagined, ‘nested hierarchical ordering of space’” size is obscured in two ways: broadly, by the lack consensus about what is meant by scale, and the conflation of these two orientations (horizontal and vertical); and more particularly by the hierarchical (vertical) conception of scale being the dominant frame in geographical analyses. geographical (rather than cartographic) scale, in its variegated conceptions, has been a central organizing, analytical, and critical idea in human geography, but one which may have hidden the ontological (and perhaps epistemological) role of size. marston et al draw on the works of brenner, agnew, smith, thrift and others to illustrate how two of the fundamental understandings of scale might be inconsistent. they introduce scale as a “hierarchical scaffolding”, a set of vertical differentiations, a spatial “level”, but also as something that does not exist (an “intuitive [fiction]” to quote smith), not an ontological structure, but an “epistemological one – a way of knowing or apprehending” . these juxtapositions may illustrate the confused notion of what scale may be, but together they also represent the way size might be thought of as fundamentally different from scale. size, commonly defined as physical magnitude, extent, bulk, or relative or proportionate dimensions, is primarily not generated from vertical differentiation, hierarchical scaffolding or nesting. “size” instead starts first with intrinsic quantities (such as area, population, volume, etc.). scale, as commonly framed in geography, emerges relationally (the “local” is local in relation to the “global”, for instance), whereas size has an autonomous foundation based on absolute measures, the relative component (large, small, etc.) only defined secondarily by that primary quantitative foundation. size, one could say in short, is foundationally intrinsic; scale, essentially relational. the second differentiation of size from scale is illustrated by the second set of descriptions cited by marston et al. whereas scale can be quite easily construed as an epistemological lens, an analytical framework, or conceptual fiction, (or heuristic, if we’re being more charitable), size does have an ontological dimension. it is typically very material (number of people, volume of objects, territorial extent, etc.),† and that that materiality can be seen as a fundamental shaping context for social and environmental processes in a given place. size is certainly not merely an abstract conception helping organize the understanding of the human world. it is a human creation in the sense that measurement is a human artifice, and to the extent that dimensions have to be defined and delineated (which, as geographers, we know is not a straightforward task). but, at its core, size describes a set of material, measurable circumstances in which things and processes exist. † one can also argue that it can be produced immaterially: visions, ideas, etc. can be “sized” too; size can certainly exist as a mental construct. this paper will address these ideas in a partial way, but a consideration of the imaginative or discursive creation of “size” remains forthcoming. henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – in conceptually disentangling size from scale, i have tried to demonstrate that size is something worth explicitly considering when trying to understand the human world. it should not be merely subsumed under the more common analyses and interpretations of scale. accordingly, this prospectus is also attempting to develop jessop et al’s assertion that we should broaden or combine our use of spatial dimensions in our research. stronger theorization occurs, they argue, when we go beyond using a single spatial dimension (such as territory, place, scale, or network), but consider interconnection, combination, and the more complex development of these “sociospatial relations”. developing this understanding of the potential importance of size, and clarifying the relationship between scale and size adds, i would argue, another spatial dimension as a theoretical starting point. it at least refines our consideration of scale, in a way that might have value when we address issues of environmental change and twenty-first century urbanization and planning. a further reason to consider more clearly the size dimension can be seen in the limitations of the traditional global- local scalar binary, often deployed in analyses of urbanization and environmental challenges. an illustration of one weakness at each end of the binary will suffice here. first, the global. olwig, in his critique of the “globalism” perspective demonstrates how “thinking globally, acting locally” can be a notably unproductive, often counter- productive, strategy. with a particular focus on landscape, he illustrates how environmental issues, when conceived globally and with the assumption that there is a “scalar spatial relation between the global and the local,” cannot be properly addressed at the local scale because “the earth cannot be reduced to the common denominator of scalar isotropic space.” he offers a compelling case study of a community in denmark (samso) where a thriving, small- scale wind energy system was superseded by a much larger scheme by a globally minded government in an attempt to support the power industry and offer a more significant global environmental impact. the result was that while before the windmills were popular, they are now strongly resisted and many fewer have been constructed. the limitations of “global” thinking, echoed elsewhere, should make us thoughtful about prioritizing scale when considering environmental issues, especially when reaching down to the level of cities or smaller communities. the crudeness of interpolating the global into the local can also be seen in the relative neglect of fully considering what the local actually is. the “global” side of the binary is relatively straightforward, however problematic globalist thinking may be – it is, in theory, the finite, full earth. what is the local, however? where does it end? it would be crude to think of it as anything at a lower level than the global scale, but the use of “local” as a scale across the literature has been diverse. apropos the critiques and case studies provided by olwig, it seems valuable to be more robust about what is meant by “local,” and a consideration of size might be a way of addressing this apparent lacuna. i would posit that how big the “local” is may have some bearing on the human or human-environmental processes found in that analytical category. . cities and size a strong case can be made to foreground the spatial dimension of size in the examination of human geographies. extracting “size” from its concealed place in the confused epistemologies and ontologies of scale should help us explore more explicitly how factors of size might provide important contexts and settings for human processes. to bring this spatial sensitivity into our particular geographical realm, the intersection of cities and size should be discussed, before we examine the opportunities for sustainability and quality of life questions. this consideration of the interplay of cities and size will also help demonstrate that when including size as an explicit socio-spatial dimension, we can avoid approaching it as naively “given,” as some simple, empirical “container” for action. the organization and ordering of cities by size has received analytical attention from urban theorists and urban geographers for some time. the “rank size” model of christaller, for instance, is perhaps one of the earliest and best known theories of urban systems . more recently, and more mathematically, various considerations of zipf’s law offer new insights into the patterns of city size and rank relationships. size, complexity and growth and the consideration of fractal dimensions to cities have also been recently examined. such analyses and models offer quantitative insights into isotropic or theoretical urbanism, but have less to say about the way size operates as a place, rather than space, context. the global and world cities literature offers more in the way of a (often implicit) role for size in the connection between urbanization and globalization. from early discussions of world city hierarchies, to world city systems and networks, to the seminal elucidation of the “global city” type, the fusion of global (primarily) economic flows with henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – command-and-control metropolitan centers has added a more qualitative dimension to the role of city size. it is not just size that matters, but how their particular agglomerations of power, professional services, infrastructure, and administrative consolidation offered by that large size enable these cities to steer flows of global capital. the attention lavished on such “global cities” has prompted some to call for a refocusing of urban scholarship to include what some have characterized as “ordinary cities”. robinson, for instance, has written at length about the need to consider cities outside the “west”, and move away from hierarchies that prioritize these global cities. she advocates for an approach “without categories and more inclusive of the diversity of experience in ordinary cities.” robinson critiques the “league table,” approach to world city categorization, and the way it excludes many cities from attention, including detailed analysis of the prioritized major cities themselves. the more “cosmopolitan” approach she outlines draws attention to the “broad economic potential of all cities” not merely those anointed as global and the danger of the aim to be a formulaic global city by other places, which “may well be the ruin of most cities.” elsewhere she advocates for an urban studies “which is drawn to learn from cities everywhere – from a world of diverse, distinctive cities – and which is not limited to or fixated by the processes and places of the powerful.” beyond avoiding a “developmentalist” conception of city size and economic power, this would seem to open the door to considering cities at a range of sizes, avoiding, in the avocation of walker, the “oversight of smaller cities” the global and world cities literature, and the “ordinary cities” response, highlight two things. one, that the categorization and hierarchicization of cities can offer a heuristic to understanding how cities interact in different ways with processes beyond their immediate boundaries, but that this organizational device can also obscure and exclude. two, size, as an explicit spatial dimension, is largely implied or ignored in this literature and seems ripe to be explored as a spatial factor in a more “cosmopolitan” urban studies and not just assumed as a given or subsumed under an economic proxy. the primary gap that these studies present, wrapped though they are in the apparent logic and interplay of spatial scale and based on an implicit assumption of the power of size, is the question of how size actually plays a role in shaping urban economic, social, and environmental processes and outcomes. size is typically presented as incidental; can it be foregrounded as contributing to the variegated trajectories of diverse cities or offer an alternative heuristic to understanding contemporary urbanism? can an understanding of the role and context of size offer insights into the opportunities and challenges of sustainability and quality of life in present-day cities? . smaller/mid-sized cities and sustainability and livability the focus on size as a variable factor and not just an incidental outcome of urbanism can be seen in the still-nascent “small cities” research agenda. i wish here to briefly review this literature and its opportunities, before examining more closely the way a size-based approach might shape questions of city sustainability and livability. taking the dimension of size explicitly, the “small cities” literature seeks to foreground the particular experience of urban areas typically overlooked by the large metropolitan focus of much of urban geography. these works posit that rather than being incidental, the fact of a city’s size matters and profoundly shapes their processes, opportunities and challenges. most comprehensively, bell and jayne’s edited collection offers not only a compelling rationale for considering the “urban experience beyond the metropolis,” but a valuable collection of case studies that draw out the author’s thematic focuses. their argument is that a city’s size, in this case its relative smallness, has an important influence on four areas: political economy, the urban hierarchy and competitive advantage, cultural economy, and identity, lifestyle and forms of sociability. size, to them, is not in the background, but a key variable in the urban patterns and processes that shape cities. in their assessment here and elsewhere they demonstrate the confusing state in which small and mid-sized cities find themselves. policies and initiatives often have to undergo a degree of “re- scaling” and translation from the larger metropolitan areas from which they typically originate, exemplifying a “me- too-ism” inter-urban competition generates, with a fixation on “upward mobility” for these middle sized cities. citing gray and markusen, they talk of “would-be cities,” offering a “kind of emulation mixed with jealousy mixed, contrarily, with often obsessive parochialism.” the “love/hate” relationship between the small and the large city poses, they argue, “all kinds of problems.” in particular, “the adaptation of big-city policies and ideas in small-city contexts” is challenging: “lofty ideals and policy promises are translated into ineffectual practical outcomes as a result of a variety of local cultural factors such as staunch localism, conservatism, risk aversion, traditionalism and lack of ambition.” henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – the work of bell and jayne, and others (such as ofori-amoah, and norman in the u.s. context, and a range of other studies ) has brought some attention to the particular characteristics of smaller cities and the qualitative effect size may have beyond simply its quantitative character. scholarship that takes as its frame and focus the question of size, and in particular “small” cities, however, remains limited in extent. part of the issue may be the uncertainty of determining and (though robinson and others would resist) categorizing “size” in urbanization. what is a “small” city? what is a “mid-sized” city? when does a large city start? part of the problem lies in the different ways of bounding cities and accounting for urban areas around the world, of course. but with the emphasis on small city visions and conceptions articulated by bell and jayne and others, we can more broadly cast “small urbanity” as a state of mind, set of cultures and processes rather than merely being simply about numbers. the quantification of size is a starting point, but the qualities, features, and forces of that size are the principal focuses of study. i would suggest that a comparative urbanist approach might offer a useful starting point for deepening the understanding of size categories and the various effects of size in different geographical circumstances. little is to be found on the urban geography side of the small/mid-sized city literature about size and questions of sustainability and livability. sustainability theorists and environmental scientists have posited some assessments about how various “environmental” outcomes might differ as city size changes, or, intriguingly, how quality of life and city size might be related, but have principally focused on comparing larger metropolitan areas. small and midsized cities have received growing attention in recent years. building on previous studies that found that small to mid- sized cities (in this case , to , in population) were less likely to have implemented clean energy initiatives than larger cities, pitt and bassett examine how such cities adopted and these policies. they acknowledge, however, that “[r]elatively little research in planning or urban studies has used small to mid-sized cities as a focused unit of analysis.” citing bell and jayne ( ) and their discussion of the ways policy in small cities has been marginalized or ignored, they support the call for a small cities research agenda. while most studies on small cities have focused on economic development issues, “some of their findings and recommendations provide interesting parallels for our work on planning for clean energy”. similarly, the livability agenda as it connects with city size has been little engaged within urban geography. “livability”, referring to questions of quality of life and human appeal – prioritizing vitality and viability -- within the city (as distinct from “sustainability” with its greater environmental focus and impacts beyond the individual city), can be seen as a critical component of urban performance, and has engendered a diversity of analyses. the vitality, “legibility,” and appeal of even “sustainable” urban areas is essential to their success in drawing in residents; people, after all, have to actually want to live in sustainable settings in order for them to deliver on their goals. the limits of density or compactness, absent a broader human/social dimension, as defining features of a “sustainable” city have been discussed. but the opportunities or challenges for, particularly, smaller sized cities to provide more livable city environments as they intersect with sustainability has been less explicitly explored. building on these beginnings, one can identify three directions in which city size and sustainability/urban livability studies might be developed further: city size (overall) as an explicit focus or consideration in sustainability and livability research; the particular consideration of sustainability and livability in small/mid-sized cities; and the consideration of how size (in particular, city small-ness, perhaps) effects environmental or quality of life policies and initiatives. . directions and questions for small to mid-sized city sustainability and livability small and mid-sized cities are important to consider in terms of sustainability planning. as pitt and bassett point out, small to mid-sized cities in the u.s. contain almost million people, nearly % of the u.s. population. in their numerousness, they also, as municipal entities, contain a very large number of government and planning units through which much environmental and community planning takes place. moreover, in terms of urban livability, smaller cities have sometimes been held up as models: perhaps howard’s , -person “garden city” is the ur- example, but one can see in the theories and built developments of the new urbanist movement a similar tendency to emphasize a more compact “community” size of settlement (as well as the even smaller sized “neighbourhood” scale of consideration). some of the more recent lauded case studies in urban design and sustainability embody this sub- metropolitan size: freiburg, and in particular the vauban district; bedzed in south london, and various other henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – european examples seem to offer relatively small-sized models for highly livable and potentially sustainable urban living. i will bring this prospectus for integrating size and urban livability and sustainability to a close by drawing on my own research on urban planning and policy-making in a small city (harrisonburg, in virginia in the u.s., population around , ) to pose some questions and considerations for sustainability and livability planning in smaller cities. this concluding collection will hopefully point toward some critical directions for future research in these areas. i group these notes under five related areas of concern: placemaking and identity; governance and citizenship; policy rescaling; ecology and local food; and geographical issues. . . livability: placemaking and identity do smaller cities have a stronger (collective) sense of place and identity? how does this stronger (or weaker) sense of place inform urban planning and policy-making? does it make it more conservative, or more focused with greater community engagement? my experience in harrisonburg suggests that smallness has meant that when demographic change has come (the city contains a significantly growing latino population, for instance), political divisions do seem to get more acute and municipal planning becomes more modest. how do smaller cities respond to the “lifestyle urbanism” and creative class focuses of contemporary urban culture? how do urban distinctiveness efforts such as downtown renewal work in a smaller setting? what are the particular challenges to urban sustainability agendas for “college towns”? how can one overcome town/gown division in a smaller city setting? how different are the economics of urban livability in small cities versus larger cities? how can we ensure economic and social equity in a smaller community? do smaller and mid-sized cities offer “sweet-spot” urbanism: offering the social, cultural amenities of larger places, but the reduced (collective) environmental impact and healthy cities opportunities of smaller places? how can mid-sized cities develop the opportunities of their “in- between” status? how can “compactness” be made more livable in smaller cities? . . engagement: governance and citizenship the potential conservatism or parochialism of smaller cities has already been mentioned, but one should ask how the politics of a smaller city – perhaps at a point between deep rural conservatism and entrenched urban progressivism (such as harrisonburg) – can be marshalled to develop appropriate strategies for sustainability and livability. further, does the smaller sized city offer another “sweet spot” of political engagement, as seems to be the case in harrisonburg, for example: the city is large enough to offer the opportunity for funding and supporting reasonably impactful initiatives, but small enough to allow the individual citizen to access and participate in municipal planning and governance with some ease. the city government of harrisonburg, for instance, is not some remote or politically entrenched bureaucracy, but still something very immediate and accessible. the trends toward dialogic democracy, engagement with knowledgeable communities, and associative democracy seem particularly vivid in smaller cities. in smaller cities, the nature of the bureaucracy itself might be a focus of research: harrisonburg, for example, seems to demonstrate a highly personalized (managers and planners within the city government work very closely together, across departments) and closely networked approach – perhaps necessarily, given the relative limits on funding, and the small size of that bureaucracy. does this lead to more “holistic” planning and more integrated policy agendas? . . policy rescaling how can agendas relating to environment and livability set elsewhere (typically larger metropolitan areas) be “rescaled” or translated to the small city? what are some essential “best practices” for translating sustainability best practices to the smaller city? should the agendas even be the same? what can smaller cities do better than larger ones? how do policy mobilities work between smaller cities? how much should these networks be developed? how should particular principles or agendas, such as “smart growth” or traditional neighborhood design be reworked for the smaller city? how might sustainability indicators be tailored to the smaller city? henry way / procedia environmental sciences ( ) – . . ecology and local food in a way that fuses both livability and sustainability, smaller cities would seem to have some advantages in the “local food” movement: those located in more rural areas would seemingly have a closer and deeper connection with a surrounding agricultural hinterland (depending on the regional environment). in recent years harrisonburg has deeply invested in its agricultural roots, supporting local food production, and embellishing its more progressive (and distinctive) urban culture, features that can then be used in tourist and business promotion. a large famers’ market has been developed, city ordinances have been loosened to allow more commercial urban horticulture and backyard chicken keeping, and various local community supported agriculture efforts have emerged. the analysis of and investment in landscape ecology in smaller cities might pose both challenges and opportunities. restricting development spatially can be challenging with a strong developer community and a more conservative polity, but smaller cities also have the opportunity to maintain and develop green infrastructure that connects even quite central parts of the city to the outside environment, simply because of their smaller size. in a similar way, how might biophilic design elements vary between large and small cities? are there particular aspects of biophilic design that would be most effectively deployed in smaller cities? . . geographical issues there are a range of more explicitly geographical questions that might shape the experience and processes of smaller cities. how does the potential for “walkability” work in a smaller city: is it too large to be entirely walkable, but not big enough for an efficient transit-and-pedestrian system? how is density related to smaller cities? does density work in different ways in smaller places than larger? how does the location of the small/mid-size city matter? does geographical location have a greater effect the smaller the city? how is the experience of smaller cities in rural areas different from that of smaller cities in suburban regions? the experience of harrisonburg as a small city in the rural shenandoah valley, for instance, is economically, politically, and culturally different from a city of the same size in the northern virginia/washington dc metropolitan area. how does size intersect with those different geographical settings and modify them? does size become less important as a variable the closer a city is to another city? . conclusion this paper has sought to elevate the spatial dimension of size as an epistemological and ontological focus for research into urban sustainability and quality of life. it has been an introductory discussion of the potential theorization and deployment of size as a concept, indicating some directions for future research. as with other socio-spatial dimensions, it should not be considered in isolation, but carefully examined for how it interacts and shapes other variables, such as economic processes, political forces, cultural issues and the non-human environment. urban size, and in particular the contexts, opportunities, and challenges 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harrisonburg. in: ehrenpreis d, jones r, editors. in the heart of the shenandoah valley: visions of harrisonburg, - charlottesville: university of virginia press; forthcoming, . . amin a, graham s. the ordinary city. transactions of the institute of british geographers ; : . . beatley t. biophilic cities: integrating nature into urban design and planning. washington, dc: island press; . . aristotle. politics. book , chapter . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ pléyade revista de humanidades y ciencias sociales número | julio-diciembre online issn - / issn - x introducción alejandra castillo feminismos en américa latina. introducción feminisms in latin america. introduction artículos sayak valencia el transfeminismo no es un generismo transfeminism is not a genderism valeria flores febriles alquimias del cuerpo. una poética excrementicia febrile alchemy of the body. an excremental poetics maría belén rosales ciberactivismo: praxis feminista y visibilidad política en #niunamenos cyber-activism: feminist praxis and political visibility in #niunamenos marina alvarado feminismos del sur. alusiones / elusiones / ilusiones natalia fischetti southern feminisms. allusions / elusions / illusions panchiba f. barrientos sexo, género y mujeres: tensiones y quiebres desde la filosofía feminista sex, gender, and women: tensions and disruptions from the feminist philosophy márgara millán la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista the eclosion of feminism’s subject and the critique of capitalist modernity entrevista verónica schild contingencia, democracia y neoliberalismo: reflexiones y tensiones a partir luna follegati montenegro del movimiento feminista en la actualidad contingency, democracy, and neoliberalism: reflections and tensions from the feminist movement today reseñas valentina stutzin judith butler, zeynep gambetti y leticia sabsay, eds.vulnerability in resistance. lieta vivaldi durham nc: duke university press, . pp. isbn nicolás ried judith butler. notes toward a performative theory of assembly. cambridge ma: harvard university press, . pp. isbn pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - issn - x / pp. - . la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista márgara millán universidad nacional autónoma de méxico recibido: de abril de aceptado: de junio de resumen comprendo al feminismo como un movimiento abierto y en curso, tanto teórico como práctico, hacia la emancipación desde el posicionamiento del sujeto denominado “mujer”; un movimiento que afecta y atañe a la sociedad que lo comprende. creo por ello que es mejor hablar de los feminismos, ya que éstos no pueden comprenderse fuera del contexto en el que emergen: su crítica es siempre relacional y situada. este ensayo explora la eclosión del “sujeto del feminismo” como parte de esa singularidad e historicidad del movimiento de las mujeres de frente a la crisis contemporánea. la “intencionalidad crítica” que emana desde estos feminismos multisituados es cada vez más una intencionalidad antisistémica frente a la crisis civilizatoria en que la modernidad capitalista nos sitúa. palabras clave modernidad, crisis civilizatoria, feminismos, transformación social, sujeto del feminismo. profesora titular de la facultad de ciencias políticas y sociales de la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (ciudad de méxico, méxico). correo electrónico: margara.millan@ politicas.unam.mx. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista the eclosion of feminism’s subject and the critique of capitalist modernity abstract i understand feminism as an open and ongoing movement, both theoretical and practical, towards emancipation and from the position of the subject called “woman”; a movement that affects and concern society as a whole. i rather use “feminisms” to enhance its plurality and historicity, for they cannot be understood without the social context in which they emerge. this essay explores the emergence of the eclosion of the “subject of feminism” as part of such singular, historical women’s movement facing the contemporary crisis. the “critical intentionality” that emanates from the multi-positioned feminist movements is increasingly anti-systemic, challenging the civilizational crisis in which capitalist modernity situates us. keywords modernity, civilization crisis, feminisms, social change, subject of feminism. pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán diagnóstico del presente: modernidad capitalista y crisis civilizatoria lo que está en el mundo me pertenece, en el sentido de responsabilidad josé saramago el momento presente parece uno de bifurcación frente una crisis civilizatoria que no deja de profundizarse. la caída del “socialismo real” que orientó a la crítica en los pasados dos siglos abrió primero una época de desánimo y aparente rendición de las luchas por la transformación emancipatoria, para después dar paso a una complejización sobre el significado de la revolución, el sentido pluridimensional de la transformación social . a fines de siglo xx el discurso crítico es relanzado desde una perspectiva renovada, descolonial y antipatriarcal como dimensiones de la lucha anticapitalista, y con una forma que propongo llamar diseminada, no vertical sino desde y por las bases, desde “abajo y a la izquierda”, como el espacio y territorio “cambiar la vida” . el “hecho” capitalista se presenta como totalizador; la globalización y la era neoliberal se presentan como el único mundo posible tanto del mundo material como subjetivo. sin embargo, la persistencia de formas concretas de vida que se resisten a ser totalmente subsumidas por la lógica del valor abstracto está ahí, interpelándonos continuamente, defendiendo sus formas de vida, sus territorios, sus maneras de relacionarse con su entorno. y también, los movimientos bien asentados en las lógicas de la modernidad prefiguran un sentido no capitalista de la misma, con propuestas de producción no depredador y de consumo acotado y sustentable. raúl ornelas coord, crisis civilizatoria y superación del capitalismo (ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, instituto de investigaciones económicas, ). la idea de bifurcación es tomada aquí en el sentido en que se anuncia en esta compilación: estamos frente a un cambio civilizatorio donde la superación del capitalismo puede llevar tanto a la barbarie como a una forma societal más complementaria con su entorno. la idea de crisis civilizatoria se refiere, en este texto, a la crisis de la civilización material capitalista, sus límites en tanto forma de reproducción social que pone en riesgo al planeta, que es tratado como arsenal de recursos, y a la vida de seres humanos y no humanos, frente a quienes se comporta como seres dispensables. coincido con susan buck-morss, quien plantea que la caída de mundo socialista –del socialismo realmente existente– en realidad fue el inicio del fin de la narrativa de la modernidad capitalista en tanto modernización e industrialización masiva. socialismo y capitalismo compartían una misma forma de comprender la riqueza social como productivismo, desarrollo sin fin de las fuerzas productivas. la producción y el consumo masivo no conducen a ningún bienestar de las mayorías, sino al enriquecimiento del %. susan buck-morss, mundo soñado y catástrofe. la desaparición de la utopía de masas en el este y el oeste (madrid: a. machado libros, ). el zapatismo mexicano es sin duda un elemento central en este relanzamiento global de la crítica desde el mundo indígena y con una clara agenda de género, un anticapitalismo de “abajo y a la izquierda” que fue inspiración para una rearticulación de movimientos de resistencia al mundo neoliberal. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista el terreno de la crítica se ha ampliado en ese sentido, acumulando la experiencia de la lucha socialista pero también su crítica, y resistiendo a un capitalismo cada vez más depredador y cínico. sería impensable una intencionalidad crítica feminista que no enfrentará en términos radicales esa constitución del mundo, que supone la enajenación de nuestra politicidad; mundo que se nos presenta cosificado y donde se nos asigna el lugar de víctima, victimario y/o espectador . el feminismo es hoy una llamada para la acción –en el hacer y en el pensar– por cambiar el estado de cosas presente, reconociendo y visibilizando la conexión y el encabalgamiento de capitalismo y “patriarcado”, es decir, del valor abstracto que domina sobre el mundo de la vida concreta a través de la forma de poder en masculino, que domina el orden simbólico y de la ley, y que subordina y desvaloriza lo femenino y su haceres . el orden de género de la modernidad capitalista. a contramarcha de la idea generalizada de que el mundo moderno ofreció la liberación de las mujeres, constatamos por el contrario que el reforzamiento del capital y la masculinidad genera una liberalización de los cuerpos (masculinos y femeninos) en tanto cuerpos, y una dominación de las subjetividades en tanto sujetos del consumo, de la competencia y de la sobrevivencia, en el marco de lo que bien podemos considerar una guerra generalizada contra los sujetos autónomos en lo general y contra las mujeres en particular . el momento presente es paradoxal. por un lado, el dominio del capital y su movimiento de valorización del valor va en contra y se enfrenta a los principios básicos que sostuvieron a la modernidad capitalista: justicia, democracia, libertad, estado de derecho. estos valores que fueron la base de la construcción institucional de la modernidad capitalista son valores insostenibles hoy por la misma dinámica del capitalismo depredador. las mutaciones del capitalismo lo han vuelto “improductivo” en un doble sentido: cada vez depende menos de la producción y rita canto, “el deseo, un semblante de lo político”, en prefiguraciones de lo político, comp. margara millán (ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, ), en prensa. sobre esta clave de configuración de la modernidad capitalista se pueden revisar varios registros: la crítica al valor, sobre todo los trabajos de roswitha scholz acerca de la disociación del valor y la disociación sexual; los trabajos de silvia federici sobre las mujeres y lo femenino en el proceso de acumulación originaria; y, desde la antropología, los trabajos de françoise heritièr sobre los masculino y lo femenino en el orden simbólico occidental. ver roswitha scholz, “a teoria da dissociação sexual e a teoria crítica de adorno”, , consultado en julio de , disponible en http://obeco.planetaclix.pt/roswitha-scholz .htm, silvia federici, calibán y la bruja. mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria (buenos aires: editorial tinta limón, ), y françoise heritièr, masculino/ femenino (buenos aires: fondo de cultura económica, ). sobre la violencia estructural de género en la modernidad capitalista y sus formas revisar el trabajo de rita segato, las nuevas formas de la guerra y el cuerpo de las mujeres (buenos aires y méxico: editorial tinta limón / pez en el árbol, ) y las estructuras elementales de la violencia (buenos aires: editorial prometeo, ). pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán más de las ganancias de la llamada financiarización de la economía y de los negocios ilegales; cada vez puede ofrecer menos soluciones positivas a su propia reproducción: no puede ampliar el empleo, ni mantener una tasa de crecimiento que se refleje en el nivel de vida de las mayorías. para seguir aumentando la acumulación de las ganancias, el capital ha recurrido al negocio ilegal, a la corrupción, y ha necesitado cada vez más de un estado totalitario, garante de las corporaciones y en contra de la ciudadanía que le ha dado el poder ; cuando esto ha peligrado en un ápice, los regímenes se vuelcan hacia los golpes de estado “blandos” que han impuesto un estado de excepción notoriamente en américa latina, como resultado de los llamados gobiernos progresistas. saskia sassen documentando tanto hacia la crisis ecológica como la nueva esclavitud de las modernas prisiones, sobre todo en estados unidos, habla de “estructuras depredadoras” que son formaciones a través de las cuáles el capitalismo se expande, generando aridez y muerte humana y de la naturaleza a su paso, promovidas por una intencionalidad de ganancia rápida y sin escrúpulos ; las poblaciones somos para esta maquinaria algo renovable, desperdiciable. quizás justamente por la crudeza del modo de operar del capital hoy tenemos mayor consciencia de la imposibilidad de seguir viviendo como su modelo nos ofrece. la crisis civilizatoria no sólo es una crisis de sentido, sino de los límites de la vida misma a los que estamos llegando. la crisis ecológica silenciosa que día a día extermina vidas, depreda regiones, y que es producto directo del modelo de producción en su diario devenir, es obliterada sólo por el ánimo guerrerista que domina ya nuestra época. el resultado del tribunal permanente de los pueblos realizado al estado mexicano en el año habla de “desvió de poder”, en tanto el poder del estado es un poder que debe usar para proteger a sus ciudadanos; se reconoce un desvío de poder cuando por acción directa y omisión, el estado deja de proteger a la ciudadanía que le ha dado el poder que tiene para gobernar. ver “libre comercio, violencia, impunidad y derechos de los pueblos en méxico ( - )”. audiencia final. ciudad de méxico, - de noviembre de . sentencia. es el caso del retorno al poder de las facciones más racistas e intolerantes en brasil y en argentina. pero este límite en la transformación por la vía institucional también se vivió en grecia en el , con el golpe de estado de los bancos que impidieron la transición pacífica que siryza proponía en su negociación de la deuda y en el plan económico con objetivos sociales. saskia sassen, expulsiones. brutalidad y complejidad en la economía global (buenos aires-madrid: katz editores, ). es en este sentido también en que la economista loretta napoleoni ha caracterizado como “economía canalla” a esta fase del capitalismo global, donde ocurre un avasallamiento total de la dimensión de la política por la racionalidad económica. el término “economía canalla” da cuenta del control absoluto de la economía sobre la política a nivel global tras la incorporación del bloque exsocialista al mercado: tráfico de mujeres, de órganos, piratería, lavado de dinero, industria de estupefacientes y psicotrópicos, tráfico de niños, industria de la extorsión, todo lo offshore, comercio snuff, turismo sexual, y más, acompañado de nuevas formas de esclavitud en la producción de todo lo que consumimos. ver loretta napoleoni, economía canalla. la nueva realidad del capitalismo (madrid: editorial planeta, ). / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista por otro lado, las subjetividades que se han ido creando en los tiempos del neoliberalismo, son subjetividades precarizadas, volcadas hacia el consumo de valores de uso degradados y monstruosos. esto ocurre en todas las clases sociales, como “modo de vida” basado en el individualismo, el presentismo, y el consumismo y con un modelo exacerbado de género donde la hipermasculinidad violenta domina . con todo el aparato mediático dirigido a no problematizar este estado de cosas, sino al contrario, a entronizar la imagen del yo como subsidiario del consumo. todo ello enrarecido y magnificado en amplios territorios donde los negocios globales implican una guerra de despojo, extermino y mayor precarización de las poblaciones, con su subsecuente desplazamiento. es en este tiempo histórico donde la bifurcación hacia la barbarie ya está presente: en méxico se habla de más de treinta mil desaparecidos en un aguerra que no tiene nombre porque no se reconoce. pero al mismo tiempo, la crudeza y profundidad de la crisis ha producido una consciencia anticapitalista sin precedente. hace apenas una veintena de años, nombrar al capitalismo era tildado de ideología . terminábamos el siglo xx celebrando el fin de la historia y de las ideologías con la caída del “socialismo realmente existente”. sin embargo, la década de los noventas marca un retorno de la crítica. una crítica que se compone de un léxico distinto al anterior. los movimientos antisistémicos, una revuelta de los tiempos lentos y de las prácticas cotidianas se conjugan con revueltas sin precedentes que muestran el rechazo al estado vigente de cosas, aunque muchas veces no tengan una clara orientación política. es dentro de este contexto de crisis civilizatoria, de pérdida de sentido, de reorientación básica de la forma de la reproducción social donde los feminismos y los movimientos de mujeres adquieren una singular importancia por su radicalidad. es en ese contexto, en esa guerra en curso, que el feminismo tiene una responsabilidad y una presencia cada vez mayores. el sujeto del feminismo y su eclosión la emergencia del feminismo afroamericano, chicano, indígena, descolonial, trans, todo lo cual arroja también la categoría de “feminismo blanco”, es un síntoma indicativo de la pluralidad, ambigüedad y contradictoriedad del sujeto ver el trabajo de sayak valencia, capitalismo gore (madrid: editorial melusina, ). la autora usa la palabra “endriago” para referirse a identidades monstruosas, mitad humanas y mitad fieras, para hacer referencia a los géneros hipermasculinizados y sobre cosificados que son puestos a andar en el dispositivo de la distopía social de la cultura del narco, por ejemplo en méxico. hoy, la economía misma, la gran ciencia del capitalismo, tiene a dos premios nobel indicando la insostenibilidad del modelo –joseph stiglitz y paul krugman–, y a autores como thomas piketty indicando que dentro del sistema no hay solución posible. pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán del feminismo. un primer registro de estos feminismos es sin duda la visibilización de la cadena de subordinaciones expresada justamente a través del concepto de “interseccionalidad”, que deja ver cadenas de opresiones, de sujeciones y privilegios entre las mujeres por su condición de clase, raza, etnia, religión, edad, preferencia u orientación sexual. los “feminismos emergentes” o los “nombres del feminismo” indican más una cartografía que una genealogía. no son “olas” que se desenvuelven unas de otras, o caracterizaciones de adscripción política, aunque estas funcionen (feminismo liberal, socialista, radical); las emergencias de los feminismos nos indican la pluralidad y diversidad del sujeto que se enuncia, muchas veces sin siquiera nombrarse feminista. se trata de cartografiar la agencia, la acción, la reacción frente al estado de cosas vigente, que mujeres de muy diferentes lugares desarrollan. la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo que refiere a su multiplicidad, también indica que, en toda relación social, económica, política, el feminismo puede hablar, porque hay un componente del ordenamiento de género en y para cada uno de estos vectores. más allá de la visibilización y desnaturalización de la estructura de poder y dominio que configuran al género (relación entre hombres y mujeres / relación entre lo masculino y femenino), la intencionalidad crítica del feminismo se encuentra abierta a la pluralidad interpretativa que se desprende de lo que algunas hemos llamado su proceso descolonizante: se trata del proceso de “transcrítica”, de la crítica que una cultura ejerce sobre otra en un proceso de comunicación o traducción . desde mi punto de vista, el primer acto colonizador es el que el valor hace sobre el valor de uso, el que las relaciones abstractas y homogenizadoras que impone a la vida en general el valor valorizándose, está ahí para ser deconstruido desde las culturas materiales concretas de la diversidad humana. y, agregaríamos ahora, con una intencionalidad crítica feminista. salir del discurso de la modernidad capitalista es ir más allá de los ideales igualitarios y de derechos que el feminismo ha planteado, y que no dejan de ser válidos para visibilizar la desvalorización social de lo femenino. sin embargo, sigue resultando descriptivo o fenomenológico si no apuntamos hacia la esencia de la forma de la reproducción social moderna capitalista. por ello, más allá de que el trabajo doméstico y del cuidado de la reproducción de la vida, que continúan tomo el concepto transcrítica de la lectura que propone luis tapia del trabajo del filósofo japonés kojin karatani. tapia propone la trascrítica como procesos de conocimiento de otras matrices culturales donde se propicia un proceso que permite generar un mundo en común, sin que una cultura domine sobre la otra. Él lo dirige a una normativa de derechos que permitan un núcleo común de vida política; karatani a su vez usa el concepto como una crítica interteórica que él establece entre kant y marx. me parece que el procedimiento es fértil para pensar procesos de descolonización culturales hechos a partir del conocimiento y la interpelación de unas culturas a otras. podemos pensar que los feminismos emergentes o adjetivados son esas culturas que al conocerse y dialogar se transforman entre sí. ver luis tapia, la invención del núcleo común (la paz: muela del diablo editores, ) y kojin karatani, transcritique. on kant and marx (londres: mit press, ) / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista siendo una responsabilidad de las mujeres, sea un trabajo no pagado, lo que importa señalar es cómo esa disociación del valor (abstracto/concreto) que fundamenta la reproducción social también necesita o se vehicula con la disociación de lo femenino en lo general. esto ha sido desarrollado sobre todo por roswitha scholz, para quien la crítica a la forma valor conlleva a la crítica de la disociación-valor: la disociación de lo femenino en general resulta ser una precondición para que el mundo de la vida, lo científicamente intangible, lo contingente, sean despreciados y permanezcan en la oscuridad en los dominios de la connotación masculina de la ciencia, la economía y la política en la modernidad… desde otro registro la historiadora feminista joan w. scott plantea dos ideas esenciales para comprender la imbricación del ordenamiento de género y la forma social. se trata del hecho de que la diferencia de género es una de las primeras significaciones de poder en términos de la cultura humana, es decir, es una forma arcaica donde la diferencia se despliega en relaciones de poder masculino-femenino; y en segundo lugar, la idea de que el género es siempre de naturaleza recíproca a la sociedad . en tanto significante de relaciones de poder, la disociación sexual (el hecho de la desvalorización de uno de sus polos) da pie a una serie de nuevas disociaciones valorativas, como la que corresponde a la clase y a la raza, siendo un modelo donde la diferencia se traduce y expresa como discriminación y subordinación. y en tanto su ser de naturaleza recíproca a la sociedad significa que en sociedades complejas y multisocietales como la sociedad moderna, distintos ordenamientos y despliegues relacionales de género y del género con la naturaleza adquieren presencia y son simultáneos. lo femenino se encuentra multisituado, articulado a varios vectores roswitha scholz, (a teoria da dissociação sexual e a teoria crítica de adorno), consultado en http://obeco.planetaclix.pt/roswitha-scholz .htm. traducción mía del texto en portugués que dice: “a dissociação do feminino em general torna-se uma pré-condição para que o mundo da vida, o cientificamente inapreensível, o contingente sejam desprezados e permaneçam na obscuridade nos domínios de conotação masculina da ciência, da economia e da política na modernidade.”. presentación en el seminario sobre la obra de roberto schwarz en la universidad de são paulo en agosto de . joan w. scott, “el género, una categoría útil para el análisis histórico” en el género: la construcción cultural de la diferencia sexual, comp marta lamas (ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, programa universitario de estudios de género, ). es decir, el significado del género en la modernidad capitalista contemporánea no es unívoco ni homogéneo, ya que la misma modernidad capitalista no totaliza y domina la multitud societal contemporánea, por ejemplo, el género en las comunidades y pueblos indígenas en américa latina, en las culturas de África o asia pueden ser no sólo dispares sino contrarias al género como se articula en el capitalismo tardío en las grandes ciudades. el género se corresponde a las cosmovisiones que lo sostienen. utilizo el concepto de multisocietal como lo señala el boliviano luis tapia en su lectura de rené zavaleta, planteando que las sociedades latinoamericanas son sociedades donde conviven distintas formas civilizatorias pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán de poder y opresión como bien muestra el análisis interseccional, pero en tanto precondición de la forma social determinada por el valor, lo femenino interpela de manera radical al propio proceso de reproducción social. esta crítica se despliega desde lugares distantes pero confluyentes, desde los cuáles los feminismos descolonizan el mundo de la cultura material y simbólica del capital, y su contenido patriarcal o masculino. el ecofeminismo, los feminismos comunitarios, la crítica feminista desde la construcción de lo común, el feminismo marxista, el feminismo zapatista, la defensa del territorio hecha por las mujeres frente al despojo, son algunas de las trayectorias de la “eclosión” del sujeto del feminismo. el feminismo se encuentra entonces en un campo de batalla, donde para hablar de sí, es decir, del lugar de las mujeres y su potencial para “hacer mundo”, debe hablar del todo social, que nos contiene y configura. y lo hace desde múltiples lugares. el reto que los feminismos contemporáneos enfrentan hoy día para conseguir tejerse, articularse políticamente, desde la perspectiva expuesta hasta acá, es el de “hablar la lengua de la otra”, sin renunciar a la voz propia. comprender el sentido de las emancipaciones en contextos situados y contradictorios. comprender las tensiones y las diferencias dentro de un feminismo que se disemina en la lucha por mantenernos vivas al tiempo que dar otro sentido al mundo. pongamos un ejemplo de lo que esto significa: el derecho a decidir sobre nuestro propio cuerpo es ya parte del léxico feminista, pero es hablado de múltiples formas según el contexto cultural en que esto se produce. no hay en ese sentido una agenda feminista universal que se imponga a todas las mujeres. hay agencia feminista situada . la diseminación del feminismo implica que las mujeres en muy distintas situaciones discuten con el poder –del varón, del estado, del capital, de la norma. el re/conocimiento de la otra se va convirtiendo así en una ontología feminista, que descoloniza la mirada imperial y la mirada subimperialista, haciendo posible la interpelación cultural, la traducción de mundos inconmensurables, la dialéctica distópica y la transcrítica. es así como el poder de las mujeres para deconstruir los dispositivos de la modernidad capitalista aparece de múltiples maneras en diversos “casos” o acontecimientos, movilizaciones o pronunciamientos, luchas refiriendose a la presencia y actualización indígena. ver luis tapia, la condición multisocietal. multiculturalidad, pluralismo, modernidad. (la paz: muela del diablo editores, ). ver chandra talpade mohanty, “bajo los ojos de occidente.: academia feminista y discursos coloniales” y saba mahmood, “teoría feminista y el agente dócil: algunas reflexiones sobre el renacimiento islámico en egipto”, ambos en liliana suárez navaz y rosalva aída hernández comps., descolonizando el feminismo. teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes (valencia: ediciones cátedra, ). raimon panikar, mito, fe y hermenéutica (barcelona: editorial herder, ) y boaventura de sousa santos, “universalismo, contextualización cultural y cosmopolitismo”, en ed. héctor silveira gorski, identidades comunitarias y democracia (madrid: editorial trotta, ). / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista legales o luchas dentro de prefiguraciones autónomas y de las cuáles daré cuenta a continuación. los feminismos emancipatorios de las mujeres en lucha los materiales que citaré a continuación conforman distintos posicionamientos de mujeres que luchan contra distintos interlocutores en varios países. considero que es importante recolectar su palabra, sus declaraciones y manifiestos porque son parte de la actual teoría feminista. muestran otra forma de teorizar de mujeres indígenas, rurales, urbanas, jóvenes y mayores, fundada en la potencia de la palabra, en la fuerza de la oralidad. los casos que proponemos son ejemplares en el sentido de mostrar la complejidad de la lucha feminista contemporánea, su carácter procesual y relacional, su manera de abordar la totalidad desde las parcialidades de sus propias alocuciones. a través de estos testimonios / documentos que son palabras en el centro del torbellino de la resistencia y la lucha se va formando un nuevo archivo feminista, un archivo que caracteriza al estado, la violencia, el orden heteronormativo, el capitalismo patriarcal, la codificación del mundo contemporáneo. es vital conservar estos documentos porque son parte de las subjetividades que al resistir prefiguran otra forma de convivencia. en ellos se establece la experiencia en tanto crítica multisituada. también se establece agenda, guía de lucha, formas de articulación y propuestas para el encuentro. se regresa el carácter vivo y fluido del pensar y hacer desde la lucha. son, en ese sentido, mucho más potentes que cualquier teoría. hoy nos chingamos al estado tras haber sido falsamente acusadas de privar de la libertad a seis elementos de la entonces agencia federal de investigación (afi) y haber pasado tres años presas por el estado mexicano con base en pruebas falsificadas, el de febrero del la procuraduría general de la república (pgr), dio una disculpa pública a tres mujeres hñahñus: jacinta francisco marcial, alberta alcántara y teresa hernández cornelio. era la culminación de once años de lucha para que el estado reconociera la arbitrariedad e ilegalidad con la que sus aparatos de investigación policial y jurídicos habían actuado en este caso, uno más de tantos, donde se culpa y encarcela, como lo dijeron estas mujeres, a los pobres en recursos y en conocimientos legales. esta es la segunda ocasión que el estado mexicano es obligado pedir una disculpa pública y reparar el daño del cuál es responsable. las mujeres hablaron el primer caso fue el de inés fernández ortega, indígena me’phaa, violada por tres militares frente a sus hijos en la costa grande del estado de guerrero, méxico. ella interpuso demanda ante el ministerio público el de marzo de , sin resultado alguno más que el maltrato y pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán fuerte, haciendo del acto un emblemático reclamo por el racismo del estado y sus aparatos manifiesto en la negligencia y omisión en su proceso. estas mujeres se transformaron en la lucha a la que su decisión de demandar al estado las condujo. “la detención injusta nos cambió la vida y también la de nuestras familias… hoy quisiera darle un mensaje a mujeres víctimas como nosotras: que luchen, que no se queden calladas hasta que las autoridades las escuchen y la sociedad sepa la verdad. sí se puede. a veces es por miedo que nos quedamos calladas” manifestó en su alocución teresa gonzález cornelio . alberta alcántara terminó su intervención diciendo: después de salir de la cárcel no fue fácil volver a la sociedad; algunos no te comprenden. no se queden callados. hablen, busquen apoyo de las organizaciones, siempre hay alguien que nos puede ayudar, siempre hay una pequeña luz en el camino. señor procurador: espero no sea la primera disculpa pública. hay muchas víctimas como nosotras. espero que sus colaboradores trabajen bien. con la disculpa no me devuelven el tiempo perdido . por su parte, jacinta francisco marcial dijo: yo digo que seamos escuchadas y que se respete nuestro derecho como indígenas, nada más. que nos hablen y que nos digan: ‘‘tenemos mucho apoyo para los pueblos indígenas”. a mí, aunque no me den apoyo, aunque no me den un peso, con tal de que se haga justicia con todo lo que hay en este momento, porque ahorita yo ya la viví y me duele mucho escuchar a otros y verlo en otras personas (…) . la burla; acompañada por la organización indígena de pueblos tlapanecos (opit) y el centro de derechos humanos de la montaña “tlachinollan” (cdht), y por la organización de los pueblos indígenas me´phaas (opim), presentó denuncia en junio de ante la comisión interamericana de los derechos humanos, (cidh) y ganó. este caso que referimos acá fue acompañado por el centro de derechos humanos miguel agustín pro juárez, prodh. “la detención injusta cambió mi vida y también la de nuestras familias”, periódico la jornada, miércoles de febrero de , p. , consultado en abril del , disponible en http://www. jornada.unam.mx/ / / /politica/ n pol. “la disculpa no devuelve el tiempo perdido” periódico la jornada, miércoles de febrero de , p. , consultado el de abril del , http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ / / / politica/ n pol “que ya termine la injusticia”, periódico la jornada, miércoles de febrero de , p. , consultado el de abril del , http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ / / /politica/ n pol. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista fue la poderosa intervención de estela hernández, hija de doña jacinta, la que resume cuál es la politicidad creciente dentro de las mujeres indígenas en méxico y cómo develan la colonialidad del poder. su palabra resuena aún. transcribo in extenso: es lamentable, vergonzoso e increíble que a seis meses de cumplirse años del caso , hoy por fin la procuraduría general de la república (pgr) reconoce de manera forzada, no por voluntad, que el caso citado fue un error. la disculpa es por funcionarios mediocres, ineptos, que fabricaron el delito de secuestro e inventaron que jacinta era delincuente (…) la investigaron los mismos policías demandantes, la encarcelaron con mentiras, sin decirle que tenía derecho a un abogado de oficio y a un traductor (…). el caso es un simple ejemplo de tantas de las muchas arbitrariedades ilegales que cometen las autoridades que tienen título, nombramiento, reconocimiento oficial en este nuestro país que es méxico (…). este largo proceso de desgaste económico, emocional, físico y psicológico, dejó una gran experiencia de la realidad. hoy se sabe que en la cárcel no necesariamente están los delincuentes, están los pobres que no tienen dinero, los indefensos de conocimiento, los que los poderosos someten a su voluntad. los delincuentes de mayor poder, de cuello blanco, no pisan la cárcel. no conocimos en querétaro a ningún rico que estuviera en la cárcel (…) preguntarán si es suficiente la disculpa pública y la aclaración de inocencia de jacinta, pero jamás lo será. no basta la reparación de daños para superar el dolor, la tristeza, la preocupación y las lágrimas ocasionadas. ¿quién va a devolver la vida de mi hermano josé luis, que no pudo estar tres años con su mamá y que hoy, a seis días de cumplir siete años que falleció, seguimos recordando que sólo estuvo meses con su mamá? a los que sólo piensan en el dinero de reparación de daños, no se preocupen, no nacimos con él ni moriremos con él. nuestra riqueza no se basa en el dinero, pueden estar tranquilos. lo destinaremos y lo haremos llegar a donde tiene que llegar en su momento justo (…) en este sentido, nuestra existencia hoy tiene que ver nuestra solidaridad con los estudiantes normalistas que nos faltan, con los miles de muertos, desaparecidos y perseguidos, con nuestros presos políticos, con mis compañeros maestros caídos, con mis compañeros cazados por defender lo que por derecho nos corresponde. pido por ellos, porque por buscar mejores condiciones de vida y trabajo, es el plato que recibimos (…) a las víctimas actuales, a mis hermanos luchadores sociales, a los maestros que estamos en pie de lucha, a los caídos, los desaparecidos, encarcelados, exiliados, perseguidos, aterrorizados que defienden, luchan a favor de los derechos humanos, quiero decirles que después de vivir este pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán terrorismo de estado, asumimos el dolor y vencimos el miedo para que la victoria fuera nuestra. hoy, como dijo una compañera (…) hoy nos chingamos al estado. la ignorancia, el miedo no puede estar encima de nadie. (…) hoy la historia la podemos escribir gracias a las personas que nos atrevemos a levantar la voz, los que nos atrevimos a hacer uso de la palabra, los que todavía tenemos principios humanos. estamos orgullosos de que esta historia, aun cuando en los tiempos actuales está de moda enaltecer la corrupción, la estupidez y la ignorancia, no se las dejamos (…) hoy queda demostrado que ser pobre, mujer e indígena, no es motivo de vergüenza. vergüenza hoy es de quien supuestamente debería garantizar nuestros derechos como etnia, como indígenas y como hermanos (…) este caso nos cambió la forma de ver la vida. hoy sabemos que no es necesario cometer un delito para ser desaparecido, perseguido o estar en la cárcel. por los que seguimos en pie de lucha por la justicia, la libertad, la democracia y la soberanía de méxico, para nuestra patria, por la vida, para la humanidad, quedamos de ustedes, por siempre y para siempre, la familia jacinta, hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre. gracias . la teorización de esthela hernández sobre lo aprendido en el caso de su madre apunta hacia una caracterización del papel del estado y sus personeros dejando ver su mezquindad e ignorancia, su ceguera y sumisión al dinero. la frase “hoy nos chingamos al estado” muestra con claridad la nueva certidumbre del poder que hoy saben que tienen las mujeres pobres e indígenas, un poder que no dejarán de ejercer hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre. para que nada siga como está: tomar las calles, llenar las plazas, reinventar los discursos #ni una menos y #nos queremos vivas son llamados hermanos, en argentina el primero, españa y muchos otros países después. a partir del , estamos presenciando el #ya basta! de las mujeres del mundo. indignación ante el asesinato de mujeres, la violación y escarnio del cuál somos víctimas, y sobre todo, de la impunidad que circunda esta guerra soterrada. el de junio del abre un parteaguas por el el texto íntegro de se puede encontrar en el sitio web desinformémonos, consultado en abril del , disponible en https://desinformemonos.org/hoy-nos-chingamos-al-estado-dicen- indigenas-agraviadas-ante-la-solicitud-de-perdon-de-la-pgr/. también pueden consultarse los siguientes videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qszagf l oa, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rnb pkhccje. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista éxito de la movilización en muchas ciudades en la argentina, y la diseminación que a partir de ahí vivimos. en méxico, el de abril del , # a, se producen manifestaciones en más de ciudades; mujeres jóvenes, de mediana edad y adultas mayores, acompañadas de miles de hombres protestaban y dejaban ver su rabia y hartazgo. parte de su manifiesto declara: hoy, de abril de , nosotras, mujeres feministas, mujeres sin partido, mujeres de todas las diversidades, estamos aquí frente a la historia reciente de méxico para gritar, exigir, denunciar que estamos hartas de todos los tipos de violencia machista a los que sobrevivimos día a día, desde la más directa hasta la que proviene de las partes más obscuras de este sistema económico, político y cultural heteropatriarcal capitalista; de este estado fallido e indolentemente feminicida, que nos reconoce como sujetas fiscales, como mano de obra, como capital intelectual y manual para acrecentar su riqueza, pero nos desconoce como personas, que nos quita la identidad en todos los sentidos, condenándonos a una fosa común en la historia. hoy mujeres obreras, campesinas, indígenas, mestizas, estudiantas, militantes, maestras, activistas, trabajadoras sexuales y trabajadoras del hogar, artistas, cocineras, lesbianas, bisexuales, heterosexuales, mujeres trans, disidentas sexogenéricas, mujeres de todas las corporalidades, mujeres con discapacidades, mujeres de todas las clases, profesionistas, analfabetas, encarceladas, guerrilleras, presas políticas, parteras, chamanas, mujeres en situación de calle…, tenemos un propósito común: manifestar nuestro absoluto hartazgo, nuestra rabia acumulada en contra de la violencia estructural, cultural e institucional que crecientemente provoca cifras alarmantes de feminicidios, el extremo más grave de estas violencias, que convierte las desapariciones forzadas y asesinatos de mujeres en manifestaciones brutales de odio y amarillismo. hoy nos manifestamos multitudinariamente para visibilizar estas violencias machistas, pero no queremos dejar esta movilización como un mero acto de rechazo y condena, sino que es nuestra vía para denunciar y exigir. en esta movilización contra las violencias machistas, buscamos que la denuncia y la exigencia se conviertan en un inmenso, hondo y duradero grito colectivo que haga temblar las instituciones gubernamentales y privadas, económicas, culturales, de medios de comunicación. un grito que fracture las columnas sobre las que descansa el heteropatriarcado capitalista que nos domina, oprime, explota y violenta. pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán lo que en este pronunciamiento exigimos no debe ni puede quedarse en el archivo de lo postergable, de lo que pueda olvidarse. cada exigencia a la que aquí llamamos es también una vía de solución que ya incorporamos en nuestras luchas y propósitos” . recuperar el de marzo el llamado a #nosotras paramos le da un nuevo y beligerante contenido al de marzo. inicia en el , para el su convocatoria es internacional y las respuestas son al menos en países del mundo . “entonces, el de marzo haremos huelga por el encarcelamiento masivo, la violencia policial y los controles fronterizos, contra la supremacía blanca y las guerras imperialistas estadounidenses, contra la pobreza y la violencia estructural en nuestras escuelas y hospitales, que envenena nuestras aguas y alimentos y nos niega una justicia reproductiva. y vamos a parar por los derechos laborales, la igualdad de derechos para todxs lxs migrantes, por un salario digno y equitativo, porque la violencia sexual en el lugar de trabajo puede agravarse cuando no tenemos una protección colectiva. el de marzo de será un día de feminismo para el %: un día de movilización de las mujeres negras y morenas, de las cis y bi, de las lesbianas y las mujeres trans, de las pobres y las de bajos salarios, de las que hacen trabajos de cuidado no remunerados, de las trabajadoras sexuales y de las migrantes.” “pronunciamiento de la movilización # a #vivasnosqueremos edomex-cdmx”, en sitio web centro de medios libres, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https:// www.centrodemedioslibres.org/ / / /pronunciamiento-de-la-movilizacion- a- vivasnosqueremos-edomex-cdmx/. cursivas mías. mariel martínez, “paro internacional de mujeres: que nada siga como está”, sitio web notas periodismo popular, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en sitio web: https:// notasperiodismopopular.com.ar/ / / /paro-internacional-mujeres-nada-siga-como- esta/. parte del manifiesto firmado por linda alcoff, cinzia arruzza, tithi bhattacharya, rosa clemente, angela davis, zillah eisenstein, liza featherstone, nancy fraser, barbara smith y keeanga-yamahtta taylor, “un feminismo para el %: por eso las mujeres haremos huelga este año”, en ctxt revista contexto, de enero de . consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://ctxt.es/es/ /politica/ /angela-davis-nancy-fraser- linda-alcoff-cinzia-arruzza-tithi-bhattacharya-rosa-clemente-zillah-eisenstein-liza- / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista estas movilizaciones tienen en común formarse en “nodos”, a través de grupos y colectivas que se van vinculando en red, construyendo un llamado, una declaratoria, que hace sentido a muchas más que ellas mismas, y finalmente llenando la calle de protesta. la convocatoria transita por varios estratos sociales y generacionales. vincula distintas luchas, por ejemplo, en latinoamérica las madres de las desparecidas. impresiona la fuerza, belicosidad, de estas mujeres aguerridas, que se forman en defensa personal, y transitan por un feminismo hetero/homo/trans, así como comparten con las feministas “históricas” y con las académicas, espacios de interlocución. se trata de un nuevo movimiento de mujeres, translocal, transnacional, popular y callejero, afincado en una pluralidad de comunidades diversas basadas en la afinidad que a su vez están en red con otros tantos movimientos sociales: por la defensa de los territorios, contra la desaparición, black lives matter, contra el neoliberalismo, por la despenalización del aborto, contra la precarización de la vida, y por la vida. un feminismo desbordado que contagia el gesto insumiso al tiempo que acuerpa las demandas de un cambio de época. sin dejar las demandas “sectoriales” centrales que han definido a la lucha feminista en los últimos años, su posicionamiento se abre a la crítica del sistema global, usando un nuevo lenguaje . producto de una mayor politización de la sociedad, este feminismo callejero contribuye a profundizar esa misma politización de la vida cotidiana, y en las movilizaciones autoconvocadas lo que sucede es el ejercicio de producción discursiva que impacta al sentido común. ¿se trata de un movimiento de masas, como sugieren algunas de las participantes? precarización de la vida, contra los proyectos neoliberales, son enunciados que no pueden ya separarse de la lucha contra la violencia hacia las mujeres. una alianza multiidentitaria da mayor contenido a un feminismo que ya no puede definirse a través de una agenda estrecha. se trata del feminismo lanzado al proyecto societal totalizante, desde la experiencia y los deseos de las mujeres. dicen en el manifiesto del # m : featherstone-barbara-smith-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor-feminismo-strike-huelga- -de- marzo-lucha-machismo-metoo-timesup.htm. consultar el sitio español hacia la huelga feminista, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en http://hacialahuelgafeminista.org/?page_id= . en el sitio argentino notas periodismo popular de febrero , , julia de tito escribe: “florencia alcaraz, del colectivo ni una menos, asegura con contundencia que ‘estamos asistiendo a una cuarta ola dentro del feminismo’. ‘uno del %’, agrega, en referencia a un artículo escrito por nancy fraser, angela davis y otras académicas y activistas estadounidenses. manuela castañeira, de las rojas, prefiere hablar de un ‘nuevo momento del movimiento de mujeres’, incluyendo también a aquellas que participan de acciones y debates pero no se reivindican feministas”. julia del tito, “¿una nueva ola de feminismo?”, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://notasperiodismopopular.com. ar/ / / /nueva-ola-feminismo/. pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán el nuestro es un grito global, transfronterizo y transcultural. somos un movimiento internacional diverso que planta cara al orden patriarcal, racista, capitalista y depredador con el medio ambiente, y que propone otras vidas y otro mundo radicalmente distinto. formamos parte de las luchas contra las violencias machistas, por el derecho a decidir sobre nuestro cuerpo y nuestra vida, por la justicia social, la vivienda, la salud, la educación, la soberanía alimentaria, y la laicidad, contra el extractivismo y los tratados de libre comercio, la explotación y muchas otras luchas colectivas. unidas por otra forma de entender y organizar la vida, la economía y las relaciones. porque somos antimilitaristas y estamos contra las guerras, y las fronteras, contra los estados autoritarios y represores que imponen leyes mordaza y criminalizan la protesta y la resistencia feminista. unidas a las mujeres que defienden los derechos humanos y la tierra, arriesgando sus vidas. formamos parte de un proceso de transformación radical de la sociedad, de la cultura, de la economía, de las relaciones. queremos ocupar el espacio público, reapropiarnos de la decisión sobre nuestro cuerpo y nuestra vida, reafirmar la fuerza política de las mujeres, lesbianas y trans y preservar el planeta en el que vivimos. y por eso el m pararemos nuestro consumo, el trabajo doméstico y los cuidados, el trabajo remunerado y nuestros estudios, para demostrar que sin nosotras no se produce, y sin nosotras no se reproduce” . los movimientos de mujeres que se han autoconvocado protestan desde el núcleo del feminismo histórico hacia un feminismo transfronterizo en el sentido literal y metafórico. no dejar nada fuera, ir construyendo a manera de un gran tejido, que fluya de forma horizontal, que aprenda de la lengua de “la otra”, que movilice el sentido en sus tres órdenes: el sentir, el significado y la dirección. el sentido general de la vida en común. es en estos gestos del feminismo contemporáneo donde podemos encontrar inspiración y prefiguración de un “otro mundo posible”. la fuerza discursiva que encontramos en estos últimos manifiestos dejan ver las marcas de distintas experiencias, sin duda se reconoce el zapatismo y su impacto en la reconfiguración de la crítica, y todo lo que las luchas feministas ya llevan en su propio proceso de deconstrucción: transcultural, transclasista, y muy importantemente, callejero; y por callejero entiendo el que la teoría recorra la calle, se anude en las pintas y grafitis, se posicione en la palabra de todas. no necesitamos permiso para ser libres “manifiesto m”, en sitio web la huelga feminista, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en http://hacialahuelgafeminista.org/?page_id= . / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista el movimiento insurgente zapatista es, sin duda, un referente en el fin de siglo que marca el derrotero de la comprensión y la práctica de la lucha anticapitalista, desde las nociones del ya basta!, de la dignidad, de la fuerza de los más pequeño, y dentro de ellos, de las mujeres. el primer encuentro internacional político, deportivo, artístico y cultural de mujeres que luchan, convocado por el ezln del al de marzo del , continúa con mucha más fuerza lo que me parece ha sido una la política cultural que en torno al género que ha mantenido este movimiento desde su inicio en el año . la convocatoria llega sin duda en un tiempo distinto. si bien el zapatismo siempre ha tenido redes y vínculos internacionales, esta vez la convocatoria con exclusividad para y hacia las mujeres fue muy bienvenida. se mostró la organización de cientos de mujeres zapatistas, de cinco distintas etnias e idiomas, abriendo el espacio del encuentro bajo un mensaje certero contra el sistema capitalista patriarcal. acababa de terminar la campaña de maría de jesús patricio, vocera del concejo indígena de gobierno. de este encuentro sólo quisiera relevar el mensaje final, que tras de agradecer el que miles de mujeres de muchos lugares del mundo hallan ido a un lugar retirado y sin comodidades, agradecer también a los hombres que se quedaron cuidando a los niños y los hogares, y disculparse por los errores de organización que un evento de esa magnitud pudo tener, despiden a las participantes con un regalo que acá transcribo: porque pensamos que lo más importante es, primero, que estén un poco bien aquí y que se sientan a gusto. pero también es importante que miramos y escuchamos a todas, porque si no de balde hicieron la chinga de venir hasta acá y pues lo justo es que escuchemos y miremos a todas. aunque estemos o no estemos de acuerdo con lo que dicen. entonces pues no basta un colectivo para organizar todo eso. por eso llegamos aquí más de mil mujeres zapatistas de los cinco caracoles. y tal vez no bastó, porque ustedes son como cinco mil, aunque algunas dicen que mil y otras dicen que mil (…). viera que sabemos que son tanto así, pues tal vez llegamos más mujeres zapatistas y así podríamos abrazarlas a todas y cada una y poder decirles en personal lo que ahora les decimos en colectivo. vendríamos seis mujeres zapatistas para cada una de ustedes: una pichita (que así les decimos a las que acaban de nacer), una niña, una jóvena, una adulta, una anciana y una finada. todas mujeres, todas indígenas, todas pobres, todas zapatistas que te abracen fuerte, porque es el único regalo que podemos darte de vuelta (…). hermanas y compañeras: este día de marzo, al final de nuestra participación, encendimos una pequeña luz cada una de nosotras. la encendimos con una vela para que tarda, porque con cerillo rápido se acaba y con encendedor pues qué tal que se descompone. pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán esa pequeña luz es para ti. llévala, hermana y compañera. cuando te sientas sola. cuando tengas miedo. cuando sientas que es muy dura la lucha, o sea la vida, préndela de nuevo en tu corazón, en tu pensamiento, en tus tripas. y no la quedes, compañera y hermana. llévala a las desaparecidas. llévala a las asesinadas. llévala a las presas. llévala a las violadas. llévala a las golpeadas. llévala a las acosadas. llévala a las violentadas de todas las formas. llévala a las migrantes. llévala a las explotadas. llévala a las muertas. llévala y dile a todas y cada una de ellas que no está sola, que vas a luchar por ella. que vas a luchar por la verdad y la justicia que merece su dolor. que vas a luchar porque el dolor que carga no se vuelva a repetir en otra mujer en cualquier mundo. llévala y conviértela en rabia, en coraje, en decisión. llévala y júntala con otras luces. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista llévala y, tal vez, luego llegue en tu pensamiento que no habrá ni verdad, ni justicia, ni libertad en el sistema capitalista patriarcal. entonces tal vez nos vamos a volver a ver para prenderle fuego al sistema. y tal vez vas a estar junto a nosotras cuidando que nadie apague ese fuego hasta que no queden más que cenizas. y entonces, hermana y compañera, ese día que será noche, tal vez podremos decir contigo: “bueno, pues ahora sí vamos a empezar a construir el mundo que merecemos y necesitamos”. y entonces sí, tal vez, entenderemos que empieza la verdadera chinga y que ahorita como quien dice que estamos practicando, entrenando pues, para ya estar sabedoras de lo más importante que se necesita. y eso que se necesita es que nunca más ninguna mujer, del mundo que sea, del color que sea, del tamaño que sea, de la edad que sea, de la lengua que sea, de la cultura que sea, tenga miedo. porque acá sabemos bien que cuando se dice “¡ya basta!” es que apenas empieza el camino y que siempre falta lo que falta. hermanas y compañeras: aquí, delante de todas las que somos aquí y las que no están pero están con el corazón y el pensamiento, les proponemos que acordemos seguir vivas y seguir luchando, cada quien según su modo, su tiempo y su mundo (…) como ya lo vimos y escuchamos que no todas están contra el sistema capitalista patriarcal, pues respetamos eso y entonces proponemos que lo estudiemos y lo discutamos en nuestros colectivos si es que es cierto que el sistema que nos imponen es el responsable de nuestros dolores. si es que sale que sí es cierto, pues entonces, hermanas y compañeras, saldrá otro día el acuerdo de que luchamos contra el patriarcado capitalista y contra cualquier patriarcado. y claro decimos que contra cualquier patriarcado, no importa qué idea tenga, no importa cuál sea su color o su bandera. porque nosotras pensamos que no hay patriarcado bueno y patriarcado malo, sino que son lo mismo contra nosotras como mujeres que somos. si sale que no es cierto, bueno, como quiera nos vamos a estar viendo para luchar por la vida de todas las mujeres y por su libertad y que ya cada quien, según su pensamiento y lo que mira, pues va construyendo su mundo como vea mejor. ¿están de acuerdo de, en sus mundos y según sus modos y tiempos, estudiar, analizar, discutir y, si se puede, acordar nombrar quién o quiénes son los responsables de nuestros dolores que tenemos? (…) les proponemos el acuerdo de volver a reunirnos en un segundo encuentro el próximo año, pero no nada más aquí en tierras zapatistas, sino que también en sus mundos de cada quien, de acuerdo a sus tiempos y modos. o sea que cada quien pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán organice encuentros de mujer es que luchan o como le quieran llamar… (in) conclusiones quisiera poner en contrapunto dos temas centrales que sin duda sostienen la praxis feminista en lo últimos tiempos: el tema de la violencia contra las mujeres y el tema de la revolución, la transformación social. rita segato, una de las voces que con más precisión establece las raíces que vuelven inteligible el feminicidio y la violación, plantea la masculinidad como algo que no está dado, sino que ocurre como potencia, siempre con relación a un eje horizontal o de pares. la masculinidad se forma, y se exige, en la cofradía. es un mandato de la manada, un mandato de crueldad, de formarse para la crueldad, de tener el poder de ser cruel. la masculinidad comprendida así, conlleva el contenido de poder y de guerra que hasta el día de hoy se le atribuye y que se le exige socialmente. en contextos de exacerbación de la violencia, en contextos de guerra entre comunidades, en la guerra actual del estado y el capital contra la vida, segato plantea que se instituye una violencia expresiva, es decir, una violencia que ocurre para expresar algo más que el acto mismo de violencia. en ese contexto, los cuerpos femeninos son medios para la violencia expresiva. es en el cuerpo de la mujer donde se actúa la violación del territorio, la destitución del poder del otro. hay acá dos claves de comprensión del vínculo entre capitalismo, masculinidad y violencia. en primer lugar, la constatación de que la estructura de la masculinidad es análoga a la estructura del pacto mafioso, el pacto entre pares que exige “no tener escrúpulos”. y, en segundo lugar, el que en el cuerpo de las mujeres se inscribe el poder jurisdiccional . se le viola y mata por ser mujer, porque se puede y porque se busca mostrar y demostrar ese poder. una vez que el “lenguaje expresivo de la violencia” se instituye es muy difícil desmontarlo, cambiarlo: se vuelve paisaje, dirá segato, se estabiliza. esto la lleva a iluminar la paradoja de que nunca antes ha habido tantas leyes y regulaciones contra la violencia hacia las mujeres, y esta violencia no deja de aumentar. segato tiene muy presente al género como relacional, y su naturaleza recíproca a la sociedad. plantea que hay un tributo que fluye de lo “palabras de las mujeres zapatistas en la clausura del primer encuentro internacional, político, artístico, deportivo y cultural de mujeres que luchan en el caracol zapatista de la zona tzotz choj”, de marzo del . consultado en marzo de , disponible en http:// enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/ / / /palabras-de-las-mujeres-zapatistas-en-la-clausura- del-primer-encuentro-internacional/. segato realiza una larga investigación entrevistando a violadores presos, de donde concluye su hipótesis del mandato de violación, que es un mandato social; y la tesis de la violencia expresiva y su soporte en el cuerpo de la mujer, viene tras el análisis del feminicidio en ciudad juárez, méxico. ver segato, las estructuras elementales de la violencia y las nuevas formas de la guerra y el cuerpo de las mujeres. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista femenino a lo masculino, que construye la masculinidad. cuando esto no ocurre en la paz, se hace mediante la guerra. ¿podríamos sugerir que quizá el aumento de la violencia hacia las mujeres es la violencia expresiva de un mandato amenazado? ¿qué la hegemonía del capitalismo empieza a ser desestabilizada, y que uno de los efectos de este desmontaje de capital- masculinidad-violencia es la exacerbación de la violencia exprevia? ¿podemos leer en la guerra actual contra las mujeres un síntoma del derrumbe de la alianza masculinidad-violencia-heteronormatividad-capitalismo? la otra deriva que quisiera señalar es la de la transformación social. entendida bajo la estela de la revolución, el imaginario moderno de la transformación social tuvo su auge con las grandes revoluciones sociales del siglo xx. el derrumbe del “socialismo realmente existente”, no inauguró el mundo sin ideologías a la fukuyama, sino el inicio del derrumbe de la narrativa de la modernidad en tanto industrialización y progreso, a la susan buck-morss. es así como se abre un período, de apenas una treintena de años, de radicalización profunda de la crítica. esa radicalización de la crítica se ha recorrido hacia abajo y se ha expandido horizontalmente. su figura es muy otra al imaginario del cambio social que emana de la revolución, pensada esta desde arriba, por las dirigencias, a través de las vanguardias ilustradas, a través de cortes con el pasado. la revolución hoy está en búsqueda de imágenes otras, a ras de tierra, con discontinuidades, que recupera la noción de lo pequeño y lo cercano, en un mundo donde lo distante es próximo, y lo pequeño contiene el todo. fernández-savater lo propone así: imágenes adecuadas para ver y pensar un cambio social complejo, no lineal, con sus mareas altas y bajas, procesos y eventos, continuidades y discontinuidades. capaces de dar valor y visibilidad a las transformaciones invisibles y silenciosas, intersticiales e informales, imprevisibles e involuntarias, micropolíticas y afectivas, bastardas e impuras. imágenes en las que encontremos compañía, valor y potencia” . desde su punto de vista, ocurre hoy lo que denomina una revolución cultural de las mujeres señala tres fuentes generadoras de imágenes de esa otra forma de la revolución: la guerra de posiciones en gramsci, la “revolución social” de la filosofía anarquista, y la praxis feminista del siglo xx, y agregamos, del siglo xxi. la tercera fuente de inspiración posible son los movimientos de mujeres durante el siglo xx (como movimientos y como pensamiento: el feminismo). sin organización única o centralizada, sin toma alguna del palacio de amador fernández savater, “reimaginar la revolución”, lobo suelto! consultado en septiembre de , disponible en http://lobosuelto.com/?p= . pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán invierno, los movimientos de mujeres han desencadenado transformaciones político-antropológicas de una magnitud inaudita, redefiniendo radicalmente las relaciones hombre-mujer y, con ello, el orden masculino de lugares, funciones y cuerpos: lo público y lo privado, lo personal y lo político, la producción y la reproducción (…) . referencias bibliográficas buck-morss, susan. mundo soñado y catástrofe. la desaparición de la utopía de masas en el este y el oeste. madrid: a. machado libros, . de sousa santos, boaventura. “universalismo, contextualización cultural y cosmopolitismo”. en identidades comunitarias y democracia, compilado por héctor silveira gorski, - . madrid: editorial trotta, . del tito, julia. “¿una nueva ola de feminismo?”. notas periodismo popular. consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://notasperiodismopopular.com. ar/ / / /nueva-ola-feminismo/. canto, rita. “el deseo, un semblante de lo político”. en prefiguraciones de lo político, compilado por márgara millán. ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, , en prensa. federici, silvia. calibán y la bruja. mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria. buenos aires: editorial tinta limón, . fernández savater, amador. “reimaginar la revolución”. lobo suelto! revista digital. consultado en septiembre de , disponible en http://lobosuelto. com/?p= . heritièr, françoise. masculino/ femenino. buenos aires: fondo de cultura económica, . hernández, estela. testimonio recogido en el artículo “‘hoy nos chingamos al estado’, dicen indígenas agraviadas ante la solicitud de perdón de la pgr” en sitio web desinformémonos, de febrero de . consultado en abril del , disponible en https://desinformemonos.org/hoy-nos-chingamos-al-estado- dicen-indigenas-agraviadas-ante-la-solicitud-de-perdon-de-la-pgr/. karatani, kojin. transcritique. on kant and marx. londres: mit press, . ibídem. / pléyade julio- diciembre ( ) / online issn - / issn - x / pp. - la eclosión del sujeto del feminismo y la crítica de la modernidad capitalista la jornada. “la detención injusta cambió mi vida y también la de nuestras familias”. miércoles de febrero de , . consultado en abril del , disponible en http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ / / /politica/ n pol. mahmood, saba. “teoría feminista y el agente dócil: algunas reflexiones sobre el renacimiento islámico en egipto. en descolonizando el feminismo. teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes, compilado por liliana suárez navaz y rosalva aída hernández, - . valencia: ediciones cátedra, . martínez, mariel. “paro internacional de mujeres: que nada siga como está”. sitio web notas periodismo popular. consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://notasperiodismopopular.com.ar/ / / /paro-internacional- mujeres-nada-siga-como-esta/. mohanty, chandra talpade. “bajo los ojos de occidente: academia feminista y discursos coloniales”. en descolonizando el feminismo. teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes, compilado por liliana suárez navaz y rosalva aída hernández, - . valencia: ediciones cátedra, . napoleoni, loretta. economía canalla. la nueva realidad del capitalismo. barcelona: editorial planeta, . ornelas, raúl coord. crisis civilizatoria y superación del capitalismo. ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, instituto de investigaciones económicas, . panikar, raimon. mito, fe y hermenéutica. barcelona: editorial herder, . scott, joan w. “el género: una categoría útil para el análisis histórico”. en el género: la construcción cultural de la diferencia sexual, compilado por marta lamas, - . ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, programa universitario de estudios de género, . segato, rita. las estructuras elementales de la violencia. ensayos sobre género entre antropología, el psicoanálisis y los derechos humanos. buenos aires: editorial prometeo, . ______. las nuevas formas de la guerra y el cuerpo de las mujeres. (buenos aires y méxico: editorial tinta limón y pez en el árbol, . scholz, roswitha. “a teoria da dissociação sexual e a teoria crítica de adorno”, . consultado en julio de , disponible en http://obeco.planetaclix. pt/roswitha-scholz .htm. tapia, luis. la condición multisocietal. multiculturalidad, pluralismo, modernidad. la paz, muela del diablo editores, . ______. la invención del núcleo común. la paz: muela del diablo editores, . valencia, sayak. capitalismo gore. madrid: editorial melusina, . pléyade / julio-diciembre ( ) online issn - / issn - x / pp. - márgara millán vv.aa. “palabras de las mujeres zapatistas en la clausura del primer encuentro internacional, político, artístico, deportivo y cultural de mujeres que luchan en el caracol zapatista de la zona tzotz choj”, de marzo del . consultado en marzo de , disponible en http://enlacezapatista.ezln. org.mx/ / / /palabras-de-las-mujeres-zapatistas-en-la-clausura- del-primer-encuentro-internacional/. ______. “manifiesto m”. en sitio web la huelga feminista. consultado en septiembre de , disponible en http://hacialahuelgafeminista.org/?page_id= . ______. “un feminismo para el %: por eso las mujeres haremos huelga este año”. en ctxt revista contexto, de enero de . consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://ctxt.es/es/ /politica/ /angela- davis-nancy-fraser-linda-alcoff-cinzia-arruzza-tithi-bhattacharya-rosa- clemente-zillah-eisenstein-liza-featherstone-barbara-smith-keeanga- yamahtta-taylor-feminismo-strike-huelga- -de-marzo-lucha-machismo- metoo-timesup.htm. ______. “pronunciamiento de la movilización # a #vivasnosqueremos edomex-cdmx”. en sitio web centro de medios libres, consultado en septiembre de , disponible en https://www.centrodemedioslibres. o r g / / / / p r o n u n c i a m i e n t o - d e - l a - m o v i l i z a c i o n - a - vivasnosqueremos-edomex-cdmx/. márgara millán. profesora titular de la facultad de ciencias políticas y sociales de la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (ciudad de méxico, méxico). doctora en antropología y magíster en sociología por la misma casa de estudios. sus áreas de investigación se enfocan en los estudios culturales y de género, la teoría feminista, los movimientos sociales y la crítica a la modernidad. ha dirigido desde el el proyecto de investigación “modernidades alternativas y nuevo sentido común: anclajes prefigurativos de una modernidad no capitalista”. ha publicado el libro derivas de un cine en femenino (ciudad de méxico: miguel a. porrúa editor, ), des-ordenando el género, ¿des-centrando la nación? el zapatismo de las mujeres indígenas y sus consecuencias (ciudad de méxico: editorial del lirio / universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, ). coordinadora del libro más allá del feminismo, caminos para andar (ciudad de méxico: editorial pez en el árbol, ), modernidades alternativas (ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, ), y del libro en prensa prefiguraciones de lo político (ciudad de méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, ). correo electrónico: margara.millan@politicas.unam. mx. the values of culture? social closure in the political identities, policy preferences, and social attitudes of cultural and creative workers edinburgh research explorer the values of culture? citation for published version: o'brien, d, taylor, m & mcandrew, s , 'the values of culture? social closure in the political identities, policy preferences, and social attitudes of cultural and creative workers', the sociological review. https://doi.org/ . / digital object identifier (doi): . / link: link to publication record in edinburgh research explorer document version: publisher's pdf, also known as version of record published in: the sociological review general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-values-of-culture( ad b c- f- - a-fa b c a ).html https://doi.org/ . / the sociological review – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sor the sociological review the values of culture? social closure in the political identities, policy preferences, and social attitudes of cultural and creative workers siobhan mcandrew university of bristol, uk dave o’brien edinburgh college of art, uk mark taylor university of sheffield, uk abstract cultural consumption and production are both characterised by multiple dimensions of inequality. research in cultural stratification has highlighted the links between the exclusivity of cultural production, the type of cultural works created, and the audiences and public receptions for culture. we contribute to this agenda by examining a hitherto unexplored area: the cultural values and political identities of workers in the creative industries and cultural sector. analysis of the british social attitudes ( – ) surveys and british election study internet panel ( – ) surveys demonstrates that creative and cultural workers have distinct cultural values. they are among the most left-wing, liberal and pro-welfare of any occupations and industries. this sets them apart from the average respondent who is relatively more right-wing, authoritarian and more in favour of welfare control. when examining their non-electoral participation, we also find they are highly civically engaged in terms of contacting elected representatives and government officials, signing petitions, political volunteering, political donations, participating in demonstrations, ethical consumption and boycotts, and industrial action. moreover, they are more likely to report that they supported remain in the eu ‘brexit’ referendum, to report unhappiness with the leave result, and to identify with remain voters. we conclude that distinct occupational cultures are particularly corresponding author: siobhan mcandrew, university of bristol, . , priory road, clifton, bristol, bs tu, uk. email: siobhan.mcandrew@bristol.ac.uk sor . / the sociological reviewmcandrew et al. research-article article https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sor mailto:siobhan.mcandrew@bristol.ac.uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - the sociological review ( ) significant in the case of the cultural and creative sector, given creative workers’ role in representing society and the civic realm via the products of their work. we also argue that occupational cultures constitute an important, under-recognised source of social and cultural division. keywords cultural and creative industries, cultural workers, left-right politics, liberalism, social attitudes, social closure, values introduction cultural production is currently the subject of high-profile media and policy discus- sion, in particular the connection between who produces and who is represented on stage, page and screen. exclusion from key cultural industries, such as film, television and theatre, indicates a need for change and reform. there are numerous examples: longstanding campaigns such as #oscarssowhite drawing attention to the lack of diversity within the academy of motion picture arts and sciences (and associated award nominations and winners); focus on how the film industry is structured and who is represented following #metoo (banet-weiser, ); recent criticism of arts organi- sations in the uk, such as the national theatre and royal opera house, for failing to deliver on promises of gender parity in productions; and public policy responses from institutions such as the british film institute and the uk’s department for digital, culture, media and sport to the dominance of arts and cultural occupations by those from middle class social origins (department for business, energy and industrial strategy [beis], ; draper, ). two lines of thought prevail in such debate. on the one hand, there is concern regard- ing careers ruined and destroyed, or never begun, as a result of biases around who is assumed to be the right ‘type’ to be a director, lead a major theatre production, or work in particular sections of the media. these systemic biases are well-established by a long- standing academic literature (gill, ; wreyford, ). secondly, there is a broader sense that the characteristics of those who do enter the sector are connected to the repre- sentations created, and in turn the demographics of the audience. a different demography of production might create different representations and audiences. this latter point has been well-critiqued from both a political economy of culture perspective (gray, ; mellinger, ), and by critical race theorists of media (saha, ). however, impor- tant questions remain around aspects of cultural production in the context over debates on representation and consumption. this article develops this literature by focusing on the values of those working in the cultural sector, who are thus an important component of artistic, literary and media pro- duction. currently, we have almost no empirical understanding of cultural workers’ val- ues beyond bespoke industry surveys (creative industries federation [cif], ) and high-profile public statements (harkaway et al., ). sociological research can make a vital intervention here, by clarifying the values and attitudes of cultural workers and how they are patterned (campbell, o’brien, & taylor, ). this article contributes to explaining the continued inequalities identified by current sociological research on the mcandrew et al. creative industries, as well as making an intervention into public debates regarding ine- quality and cultural production. we begin by situating our interest in attitudes and values within the literature on the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and social inequality (brook, o’brien, & taylor, ; o’brien, allen, friedman, & saha, ; oakley, laurison, o’brien, & friedman, ; oakley & o’brien, ). in doing so we con- nect, for the first time, research on cultural production and inequality to research on values. considered together, these literatures indicate the importance of understanding the cultural dimensions of values and value divisions, and the under-researched role of values and attitudes in cultural production. to understand the values of those occupations producing culture, we move in two stages. first, we use british social attitudes (bsa) survey data to examine the values of those producing culture, including those working in the arts and media. we demonstrate a major gulf in values between people producing culture and the nation at large, not sim- ply explained by these cultural producers’ relative youth and high education. we find that cultural sector workers exhibit unusually liberal, pro-welfare and left-wing attitudes. secondly, to validate this analysis, we use british election study (bes) data to explore basic values alongside measures of political behaviour in the form of reported eu referendum vote choice and political repertoires, as well as attitudes towards the referendum result and identification with leavers and remainers. we identify important values-related differences between cultural workers and others in both datasets, along with differences in their political participation. these two analytic stages build on exist- ing findings regarding the social closure of occupations associated with cultural produc- tion (o’brien, laurison, miles, & friedman, ; oakley et al., ). how different occupations foster different attitudes and values has been important for theories of a ‘creative class’ (florida, ). until recently, such research tended to celebrate the ‘open’ and meritocratic attitudes of cultural workers, rather than relating these values to questions of inequality, theorised recently by littler ( ). in demonstrating the cohe- siveness of cultural occupations around specific values distant from much of the rest of the population, we identify a further dimension whereby cultural production in the uk is socially closed. this position is mirrored by work on the labour force of the sector in terms of class, gender and ethnicity (o’brien & oakley [ ] provide a summary). this analysis has implications for the literature on cultural production, the primary frame for our article. it also has implications for discussion of contemporary social divi- sions perceived as ‘cultural’ or values-based. our analyses indicate that the values of britain’s cultural workers are relatively distant from the population that they claim, and are expected, to represent. accordingly, understanding the values of cultural workers is an important public, as well as academic, area of concern. cultural production, inequality and the problem of values culture is marked by inequality. here, we focus on culture in terms of arts and media par- ticipation and consumption, in turn distinguished from education, religion and everyday cultural practices such as language or food cultures (miles & leguina, ). sociological work has identified how the production of culture is characterised by significant the sociological review ( ) inequalities. numerous authors highlight the exclusion of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class origins, noting the employment conditions and hiring practices underpinning these problems (alacovska, ; ashton & noonan, ; banks, ; conor, gill, & taylor, ; hesmondhalgh & baker, ; mcrobbie, ; saha, ). of particular interest is the attempt to connect these inequalities in production with those in consumption. for example, recent work on consumption for england suggests that ‘about . % of the english population is highly engaged with state-supported forms of culture . . . this fraction is particularly well-off, well-educated, and white’ (taylor, , p. ). this ‘middle class’ domination of cultural consumption (for example theatre, dance, visual arts and even cinema) is matched by middle class social origins’ overrepresentation in the cul- tural workforce (o’brien et al., ; oakley et al., ). the overlap between cultural production as a set of occupations dominated by the middle class, and that same middle class dominance of audiences for state-supported cultural forms, has important social implications (hanquinet, ). knowledge of arts and culture, whether classical or contemporary, has been highlighted as crucial in gain- ing access to other middle class professions, such as financial services and senior mana- gerial occupations (friedman & laurison, ; rivera, ). indeed, rivera’s conception of ‘hiring as cultural matching’, where leisure pursuits and taste patterns play a role in employment decisions, is a good example of the importance of cultural con- sumption in reproducing social inequalities (bourdieu, ). in the creative industries, koppman ( ) has similarly demonstrated that shared tastes and cultural socialisation are crucial to individuals being viewed as the right ‘sort’ of creative worker. whilst this literature is extensive, with rich empirical and theoretical contributions, the question of shared values and socio-political priorities, as opposed to shared patterns of cultural tastes, backgrounds, or demographic characteristics, is under-examined. indeed, values tend to be implicit in discussions of cultural workers’ commitment to long hours and exploitative working conditions (mcrobbie, ), rather than the subject of formal investigation. moreover, this empirical question has particular significance given recent theorisation of the connection between cultural production, cultural representation and cultural consumption (hesmondhalgh, ; o’brien et al., ; o’brien & oakley, ). the values of cultural workers might both account for some of the social closure of cultural occupations, and have wider importance for social division more broadly. relatedly, social and political division has been discussed recently in terms of values divides (jennings & stoker, ), in which context the match or otherwise between cultural producers’ values of cultural production and those of the rest of the population raises questions about these occupations given their role in imagining the nation-state (anderson, ; elgenius, ; hobsbawm & ranger, ). this task has a long history, with contemporary cultural production and consumption central to new identities and the formation of citizens’ values and attitudes (bennett, ). understanding culture, understanding values the role of cultural production in shaping values has particular salience given current social and political divisions. these are most obviously crystallised in the example of the uk’s referendum on eu membership, whether in the form of media ascriptions of mcandrew et al. ‘winners and losers’ of social change, or generational and educational contrasts (livermore & clarkson, ). they have been addressed in recent political science research relating to brexit (clarke, goodwin, & whiteley, ; farrell & newman, ; glencross, ; hobolt, ), westminster politics (allen & cairney, ; evans & tilley, ), and the emergence of ‘two englands’ divided by values as much as economics and class (jennings & stoker, , ). sociology has also responded in the form of a social media series (the sociological review, ), a recent edited collection (outhwaite, ), a special issue (dodd, lamont, & savage, ), as well as monograph treatments (e.g. seidler, ). whilst much of this literature has referred to ‘cultural’ differences or ‘cultural’ explanations for social divisions (following alexander, ), attention has tended to focus on those exhib- iting cultural backlash (goodhart, ; norris & inglehart, ) rather than those ‘lead- ing’ cultural change (although jennings & stoker [ ], from a political science perspective, have explored the values of higher-status professionals). while findings have emerged regarding associations between cultural consumption and euroscepticism (chan, henderson, sironi, & kawalerowicz, ), there has been no formal assessment of the role of the cultural sector in current social divisions of the type exemplified by ‘brexit’. at the individual level, values can be understood as ‘an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable’ (rokeach, , p. ); as ‘conceptions of the desirable that guide the way social actors (e.g. organi- sational leaders, policy-makers, individual persons) select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their actions and evaluations’ (schwartz, , p. ); ‘internal cri- teria for evaluation’ (hechter, , p. ); and as higher-order preferences over specific preferences, relating to longer-range goals, ideals, moral values and identities (frankfurt, ; hirschman, ; sen, ). such meta-preferences are involved in self-con- struction and vision of the future, and consideration of themes including ‘solidarity, fair- ness, prudence, and nationalism’ (fischer, , p. ). we know that values are primarily formed and embedded during formative years, with cultures changing due to cohort replacement (mannheim, / ; ryder, ). it has been found that those born between and have significantly different basic values compared with older cohorts due to their experience of the recession of the late s, with ‘increases in the importance of security-conformity values during hard times . . . concen- trated among the economically vulnerable and the young’ (austin, , p. ). values are also thought to be patterned by occupation, with those of public sector workers different from those in financial services, for example. in the following analysis, we first investigate the basic values and attitudes of cultural producers, comparing them with other occupational groups. we use measures of values relating to some of the most polarising political questions: from left to right, liberal to authoritarian, and pro-welfare to anti-welfare. we validate findings using a second dataset including relevant values and attitudinal items, which moreover incorporates measures of political behaviour. cultural producers and cultural values: data and analysis first, we consider the values of cultural workers, in light of their advantaged social back- ground as established in the previous section (o’brien et al., ; oakley et al., ). the sociological review ( ) there has however been little to date on the social attitudes and values of these workers, particularly from a quantitative perspective (florida’s [ ] work on america notwith- standing). variation in basic values by occupation forms a lacuna in the literature on values, with one exception being broockman, ferenstein, and malhotra’s ( ) pio- neering study of the values and policy preferences of silicon valley’s elite. we accordingly draw upon the bsa survey, a long-running, high-quality survey fielded annually since (save the / election years). it involves a multi-stage stratified random sample, with respondents interviewed face-to-face. each year it asks respondents of their position on basic values, from which are calculated values scales provided with the dataset. balanced left–right and libertarian–authoritarian values scales were first devised by heath and evans with others in the s. in a paper validating these scales, they con- cluded that: ‘[w]hen measured suitably, these form consistent, stable and consequential elements of british political culture’ (evans, heath, & lalljee, , pp. – ). we analyse three values dimensions: libertarianism–authoritarianism; welfarism; and left–right values, with details of the items making up each scale specified in online appen- dix table a (see note on access at end of article). to check scale reliability some two decades following their original validation, we calculated cronbach’s alpha for each val- ues scale, finding . for libertarianism-authoritarianism, and . for each of the wel- farism and left–right scales (see table a in the online appendix). we then treat each scale measure as the dependent variable, modelling values positions in terms of occupation to assess whether cultural workers are distinctive, first by comparing them with other work- ers at different levels of occupational status, and then in terms of occupational sector. for the first, we draw on the national statistics socio-economic classification (ns-sec), which categorises occupations across sectors. we use a five-fold categorisa- tion: managerial/professional, intermediate, employers in small organisations, lower supervisory and technical, and routine. secondly, we use the standard industrial classification (sic) , which classifies businesses by type of economic activity. twenty-one sectors are categorised as well as those who have never had a job and those whose work is ‘not classifiable’. ‘arts, entertainment and recreation’ includes those employed in creative, arts and entertainment activities; in libraries, archives, museums and other cultural activities; those employed in gambling and betting activities; and those employed in sports, amusement and recreation activities (prosser, ). this is a little broad, but other sectors are likewise – for example, the categorisation of health practition- ers in sic covers surgeons and health care assistants alike. indeed, any differences we find between cultural workers and other sectors might well be attenuated by the inclu- sion of those employed in gambling and sports. using both occupational status and indus- trial classification allows us to be more certain as to whether any differences are sectoral rather than down to occupational position per se. ideally, we would distinguish sector and occupational status within a single set of analyses. the key difficulty is that many sectors are relatively concentrated in terms of occupational status, and sample sizes are not suf- ficient to identify occupational versus sectoral effects. accordingly, we provide both sets of analyses so that cultural workers can be compared with members of other sectors of equivalent occupational status, followed by an exhaustive set of sectoral comparisons. because the percentage of arts, entertainment and recreation workers in each wave of the bsa is very small (between . % and %), we boost our sample by combining six https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / mcandrew et al. waves of the bsa, pooling the – datasets. we make the strong assumption that there are no period effects on values over this timeframe. descriptive statistics are avail- able in the online appendix (table a ). we run an identically specified set of models to examine whether cultural workers are distinctive, taking the same set of additional variables associated with values differences into account. we first treat libertarian–authoritarian values as the outcome of interest (where higher indicates greater authoritarianism); secondly, support for welfare (where higher indicates greater anti-welfarism); and finally, left–right values (where higher indi- cates more right-wing values). we examine how scores on each scale vary by occupa- tional class (comparing cultural workers with managerial, intermediate and routine workers not based in the arts); and then by industrial code. in both cases, we restrict the comparison to bsa survey respondents aged between and , to exclude student-age respondents and those of retirement age. this yields a sample size for our analyses ranging from , to , . despite this relatively large sample size, given the small proportion of respondents who are cultural workers, we do not restrict the analysis to those who are currently employed: those identifying with a particular sector are likely to retain a connection via shared worldview and per- haps intend a return to work. figure illustrates the distribution of scores on each scale: lower scores represent more left-wing, more liberal and more pro-welfare values respectively. figure . distribution of scores on left-right, liberal-authoritarian, and welfare scales. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / the sociological review ( ) explaining this relationship: occupational values in the cultural sector the data show that arts workers are the most liberal on average of all industrial sectors in the bsa. we next examine whether they are more liberal on average than each of the other groups once socio-demographic confounders are taken into account, modelling values as a function first of occupational class, then of sector. in the first case, we catego- rise managerial/professional and intermediate/working class cultural workers separately, to test whether the cultural sector is distinct when taking account of its heavily profes- sional composition. we could also theorise that those with particular values self-select into different fields, with values further reinforced by the sectoral environment. given that we are working with cross-sectional survey data, we discuss associations between variables rather than making a strong causal argument. in models taking account of occupational class summarised in figures , and , we set routine workers as the reference category. in each, unadjusted (raw) means and confidence intervals are presented in grey, and adjusted (predicted) means and confidence intervals in black. in our second, sectoral set of models (with results presented in figures , and ), we include terms for each economic sector, setting arts, entertainment and leisure workers as the reference category, comparing workers in other sectors to our key sector of interest. because of the importance of education for basic values (surridge, ) we control for differences in educational attainment, distinguishing graduates, those with some higher education, a-level or equivalent, the old o-level or equivalent, cses, ‘foreign qualifica- tions’, no qualifications, and don’t know/refused to answer (a relatively large group). we also control for gender, social generation, marital status, ‘home nation’, ethnicity and reli- gion of upbringing (see online appendix tables a –a for full details). we find that the effects of socio-demographic control variables on libertarian–author- itarian values are consistent with the established literature (see tables a –a in the online appendix). with regard to education, every educational group is found to be more liberal than those with no qualifications, except for those providing a ‘don’t know’, refusal or ‘not applicable’ response. the sizes of the effects are as expected, being largest for those with the highest credentials. turning to occupational class in figure , comparing each group in turn to routine workers, we find (via the confidence intervals presented in black) that managerial and professional workers are significantly more liberal than routine workers, lower supervi- sory and technical significantly less so, while there are no statistically significant differ- ences between those in intermediate occupations, small business owners and routine workers. those who have never worked appear significantly more liberal, perhaps com- prising a group of those travelling or still in study. we also find that those in the ‘arts: managerial and professional’ and ‘arts: intermediate and routine’ groups are significantly more liberal than routine workers. moreover, they are more liberal than members of the managerial and professional group, although the difference is not statistically significant. the difference between the two categories of arts workers is also not significant, sug- gesting they share a sectoral rather than class-based values profile. nevertheless, these results imply that the ‘arts worker’ difference holds even after accounting for education, gender, ethnicity and religion of upbringing. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / mcandrew et al. these results can be compared with those from a model including a full set of sectoral terms (table a ), to investigate whether the arts remain distinctive. all sectors were sig- nificantly less liberal than the arts sector at the % level, including educators, health work- ers and public administrators, save for information and communication (where p = . ), households as employers, extraterritorial organisational workers (such as diplomats and organisations such as the united nations), and those who have never worked, where such workers were all predicted to be less liberal but where differences were not significant. to simplify presentation of the model results, we calculated predicted scores for each sectoral group assuming mean values for each control in figure . to reiterate, arts work- ers remain the most liberal even when socio-demographic controls have been taken into account, with differences that are statistically significant from all other groups except ict workers (the second-most liberal group before taking other variables into account), domestic workers, and people who have never had a job or who work in extraterritorial roles (both very small in number). this leaves us confident that there is indeed a sectoral difference in worldview. turning to welfarist values, in terms of occupational status, those with managerial or professional status are more anti-welfare than those of routine or semi-routine status; so are intermediate workers, and small business owner-employers, and those of lower supervisory or technical status (figure ). by contrast, those who have never had a paid job are clearly more pro-welfare. however, arts managers and professionals are more figure . mean scores on libertarian–authoritarian scale by occupational classification. the sociological review ( ) pro-welfare than even this group, while intermediate arts and entertainment workers are more pro-welfare than routine workers, if a little less than those who have never worked. we see similar patterns when examining the model with a full set of terms for eco- nomic sector (figure ). the arts and entertainment sector is the most pro-welfare of all sectors at the % level except for, again, domestic workers, people who have never had a job, and those in extraterritorial roles. finally, we model left–right values. considering occupational status (figure ), those of managerial or professional status, intermediate status and small business owners were all more right-wing than routine and semi-routine workers once other socio-demographic controls were taken into account (table a ). lower supervisory workers and those who had never worked were not significantly different. in this model, cultural workers were predicted to be slightly more right-wing on average in their political values than routine and semi-routine workers. however, differences were not significant, and even with a larger sample unlikely to be very large in size. the final model using bsa data predicts left–right values in terms of industrial sector (see figure ). arts, entertainment and lei- sure workers are predicted to be the most left-wing of all sectors, but differences are generally smaller than in the earlier models, and in many cases not statistically signifi- cant. specifically, workers in the water, transport, hospitality, administration, education, health, services, domestic service, extraterritorial, never-worked and unclassifiable sec- tors are not predicted to be significantly more right-wing (table a ). figure . mean scores on libertarian–authoritarian scale by occupational sector. mcandrew et al. taking the three values measures together, compared with workers of equivalent occupational status, cultural workers are the most liberal on average, and the most pro- welfare (except for the ‘never worked’ sector). differences in terms of left–right values are less pronounced at a sectoral level, but cultural workers are more left-wing than managerial and professional workers, regardless of their own occupational status. moreover, it does not appear that the liberal, pro-welfare and left-wing orientation of the arts sector is simply a result of cultural workers being more educated or professionally dominated: differences between arts workers and people working in other sectors increase once other variables are controlled for. these results suggest that cultural pro- ducers, tasked with interpreting and representing cultural memory and the cultural pre- sent, share a distinctive worldview setting them apart from much of the british public. the differences are admittedly not large given the noise in the data, relating in turn to the small size of the cultural workers group (n = ) in our sample. validating the analysis to further validate the results from the bsa analysis, we incorporate analysis of data from the bes online panel administered by yougov. the most recent ( th) wave of the bes at the time of our analysis, collected in june , has , respondents, of whom , also participated in the previous wave, and of whom , have participated in all waves from february . cases are weighted to resemble the national population. figure . mean scores on welfare scale by occupational classification. the sociological review ( ) the bes is particularly valuable in offering a combination of attitudinal and behav- ioural variables: in addition to asking the types of attitudinal questions typical of the bsa, respondents are asked about their behaviour, including voting, and non-electoral behaviours such as signing petitions and taking industrial action. we can therefore iden- tify whether occupational groups’ attitudes are similar in the bes and in the bsa, and how political behaviours vary by occupation. we thereby triangulate between the two sources to counter the problem of the cultural sector being small in terms of workforce, and to take advantage of robust data at the sectoral level where such sources tend to be lacking. while the bsa is noted for its high-quality sample, drawn from the postcode address file, the bes, in having a number of waves available for the post-june period, allows us to relate the values of cultural and creative workers explicitly to eu referendum vote choice. its key drawback is its online panel design meaning responses are likely to suffer from associated biases, for example regarding poor representation of the digitally disadvantaged. further, the range of values measures available is smaller. measures of workforce composition also differ. accordingly, the bsa and bes are best used in combination to compare cultural workers to others. together, they offer comple- mentary topic coverage as well as the opportunity for model validation across datasets. we use the following measures for comparison. first, we investigate the left–right and libertarian–authoritarian scales available in the bes to assess whether similar patterns in values exist across the two surveys. note that these scales run – rather than – as in figure . mean scores on welfare scale by occupational sector. mcandrew et al. the bsa. we then extend our analysis with two attitudinal variables directly relevant to brexit, of importance given its relation to cultural divides and as a new source of identi- fication. first, on a – scale, respondents were asked ‘how happy or how disappointed are you that the uk voted to leave the eu?’, where is ‘extremely disappointed‘, and is ‘extremely happy’. secondly, on a – scale, they were asked ‘how much do you think you have in common with people who want to remain in the eu?’, where is ‘nothing’ and ‘a great deal’, with this latter measure drawn from wave . these two attitudinal variables thereby capture two elements of people’s attitudes towards the eu referendum, both around an affective response to the result, and a measure of how closely people identify with remain voters. finally, we examine two behavioural variables. the first is whether respondents reported having voted to leave the eu, or remain a member. to simplify, we set those who report not having voted aside. the second is a measure of non-electoral political participation. this is an additive scale made up of whether respondents reported having undertaken the following within the last months, drawn from wave : •• contacting a politician, government or local government official •• signing a petition on the internet •• signing an offline petition •• volunteering for a political party or action group figure . mean scores on left–right scale by occupational classification. the sociological review ( ) •• giving any money to a political party, organisation or cause •• taking part in a public demonstration •• buying – or refusing to buy – any products for political or ethical reasons •• going on strike or taking industrial action. the cronbach’s alpha for the eight items is . , indicating reasonable internal consist- ency. taken together, these measures capture a broader repertoire of political behaviours and attitudes than available in the bsa, relating directly to the eu referendum and broader civic engagement. as with the bsa, the fraction of people in cultural occupations in the bes is small. there are further compromises for comparative purposes. unlike the bsa, there is no variable capturing industrial classification, and fine-grained standard occupational codes are also not available. however, the bes team does include a varia- ble for whether respondents work in occupations classified as the cultural and creative industries (cci), following the dcms definition (department for digital, culture, media and sport [dcms], ). this group is significantly larger and broader than that in the bsa, at around . %. it comprises advertising and marketing; architecture; crafts; design; film, tv, video, radio and photography; it and software development; publishing; muse- ums, galleries and libraries; and music, performing and visual arts. neither the sic nor cci definitions should be viewed as capturing only the subsidised arts sector. however, again, these broader definitions are more likely to reduce rather figure . mean scores on left–right scale by occupational sector. mcandrew et al. than enhance any sectoral differences we might identify. the bsa cultural workers sam- ple includes gambling and sports (mostly retail betting staff and gym and recreation centre staff), while the bes cci sample includes those who might otherwise be catego- rised as private sector professional services workers. indeed, % of cci workers in the bes sample are in managerial and professional occupations, meaning that given our sample sizes, the confidence intervals around estimates for intermediate and routine cci workers are large. this reflects the occupational basis of the dcms definition, in which the majority of cci occupations are located in ns-sec i and ii. otherwise, our modelling strategy is similar to that for the analysis using bsa data. we use linear regression where the variables are measured on – and – scales, and logistic regression for the model of referendum vote choice (leave support = , remain = ). again, we restrict analysis to those aged – , with identical control variables as for the bsa models, save for religion of upbringing, which is unavailable (using current religious affiliation radically reduces the sample size and so was rejected as an alternative). again, detailed model results are available in our online appendix (see tables a –a ). figure displays predicted outcomes for each of the models using the bes, again with (weighted) raw means and confidence intervals in grey, and means and confidence intervals after adjusting for control variables in black. consistent with figure , those working in ccis in managerial and professional jobs are found to hold significantly more liberal values than any other group, save for those non-managerial cci workers figure . predicted outcomes for each of the models using the bes. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / the sociological review ( ) (where the confidence interval is very wide, perhaps reflecting the small sample). unlike in figure , however, those working in ccis are not here estimated to be significantly more left-wing than the remainder of the population. in this dataset, those in managerial and professional jobs in the ccis hold similar economic left–right values to those in managerial and professional jobs outside the ccis. this discrepancy may partly arise due to its being an online panel, with participants particularly well educated and politi- cally engaged, for which sample weights cannot entirely adjust. it further suggests that the left–right differences identified in the bsa sample are likely to be small in the popu- lation if they do exist. the results for our other attitudinal variables are, however, largely consistent with the hypothesis that cultural and creative industry workers hold different attitudes from the rest of the population about the decision to leave the eu. this is particularly the case in terms of happiness with the referendum result. cci workers in managerial and profes- sional jobs are significantly less enthusiastic about leaving the eu than any other group, although note that intermediate and routine cci workers have attitudes indistinguishable from their comparators. by contrast, while those working in the ccis identify more strongly with remain voters, these differences are not significant when other variables are taken into account – intriguing given the prominent emergence of ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ as new political identities (curtice, ). we also find differences in political behaviour. behavioural measures are particularly valuable in indicating active commitment to engagement (pattie, seyd, & whiteley, ). those who are highly engaged behaviourally are likely to have greater political agency and efficacy (sewell, ) and symbolic capital (bourdieu, ), even if their political aims are dissensual. moreover, behavioural choices provide potentially inform- ative contrasts with values-based measures. the former require explicit choices among strategic alternatives, while the latter relate to instinctive reactions to morally infused questions, to capture the culture–action link (vaisey, , p. ). regarding the referendum, only % of those working in managerial and professional jobs in the ccis who reported voting said that they supported leaving the eu in the bes, compared with % of the total population who voted in the referendum. our model shows that even after accounting for socio-demographic variables, a statistically significant difference persists between those working in cultural and creative jobs and people working in other managerial and professional jobs (see table a ). while a large literature on eu referendum vote choice now exists, this occupational effect is a novel finding suggest- ing avenues for further research. in addition, managers and professionals in the ccis have significantly higher rates of non-electoral political participation than managers and professionals in non-cci jobs, likely capturing both greater volume of participation and more diversified participation, even taking into account other relevant variables. this may reflect homology between activism for an arts organisation in sourcing funding and support and citizen activism: they involve similar skills and resources (verba, schlozman, & brady, ) in translating effort into political outcomes. civic engagement also reflects access to civic networks of political activists and others who are politically engaged (putnam, ), as well as hav- ing trust in other people and institutions as a basic value (uslaner, ). our model pre- dicts that compared with otherwise demographically similar managers and professionals, mcandrew et al. creative workers engage in about a quarter of an activity more on average, a difference approaching half the size of the effect of being a graduate compared with having no quali- fications. this is of note since in values-related research the ‘graduate effect’ is generally considered large (see table a ). further research would allow us to identify the extent to which this reflects cultural workers’ closer proximity and access to state institutions. in sum, we find that key political attitudes and values of professional and managerial cci workers appear quite distinct from other workers of equivalent occupational status: significantly less likely to have voted leave, significantly unhappier with the referendum result, and with significantly broader political repertoires indicating an additional dimen- sion of social advantage and status. for intermediate and routine cci workers, differ- ences with other workers of the same occupational status are less distinct, leaving open the possibility that the intersection of sector and occupational status accounts for value and behavioural divergence, although we remain cautious regarding likely mechanisms due to small sample size. conclusion cultural production is rightly considered an important area for understanding and explaining contemporary british society. there is extensive evidence that cultural pro- duction is marked by significant forms of exclusion, with associated exclusions found in patterns of cultural consumption. the role of values and attitudes in these exclusions has yet to be fully understood. our research provides a first contribution in demonstrating that cultural production is characterised by distinct values. we find that cultural workers exhibit values that are unusually liberal, pro-welfare and left-wing by comparison with those of similar occupational status and, in terms of liberalism and welfarism, with cognate sectors. they are also relatively unhappy about leaving the eu, while also reporting having voted remain to a higher degree than the rest of the population. they also appear to possess greater political efficacy, so that their position in governing the ‘cultural conversation’ is reinforced by their more extensive civic engagement. this suggests a divergence in worldviews between those tasked with representing the nation to itself, and those who inhabit it. it reflects elements of the ‘two englands’ high- lighted by jennings and stoker ( ) more overtly pronounced in cultural occupations, themselves largely urban-based (oakley et al., ). this divergence has also been noted for britain, france and the us by piketty in his ( ) analysis of new cleavages and multidimensional inequalities. this divergence relates to a more general question on the relationship between values and practices. there is a longstanding research tradition concerned with how media frame particular social issues and thus shape and influence society’s values and attitudes. recent examples include work on austerity and politics (wren-lewis, ); perceptions of welfare recipients (reeves & de vries, ); and factual welfare television (de benedictis, allen, & jensen, ). while extremely valuable in describing and prob- lematising representation, our contribution is novel in providing the first large-scale empirical analysis of the values and attitudes of cultural workers – with findings which suggest why particular frames might be chosen, and which indicate avenues for further the sociological review ( ) research. that cultural workers tend to be liberal, pro-welfare and relatively left-wing may not be wholly surprising. the question that follows, then, is the distance between the attitudes and values of the sector’s workers and the academic analysis demonstrating bias in reporting or representation, as seen in theatre (rogers & thorpe, ), and pub- lishing (ramdarshan bold, ). we are hopeful this discussion will prompt new research to help understand this somewhat paradoxical divergence between values and representations. are cultural workers’ values irrelevant to the type of culture produced, because the political econ- omy of production is more influential? here the work of saha ( , developing gray, ) demonstrates that costs, ownership and funding models are more impor- tant than ‘demography and representation’ for explaining poor representation and lack of diversity. if this is so, then we might see liberal attitudes as a key criterion for entry to cultural work (as friedman & laurison [ ] have observed regarding television commissioning), while indicating that these same attitudes and values are insufficient for challenging and changing the inequalities underpinning the public concerns increasingly voiced. acknowledgements the authors thank aveek bhattacharya, will jennings, jonathan mellon and the british election study team, michael rushton, participants at the university of leicester cameo annual conference and at the understanding everyday participation colloquium (manchester, june ), michaela benson and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and assistance. we also gratefully acknowledge our collaboration with arts emergency, create london, and the barbican centre via the panic! project. funding this work was supported by ahrc grant ah/p / , ‘who is missing from the picture? the problem of inequality in the creative economy and what we can do about it’. online supplementary data survey question wording and tables of descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, model results and postestimation tests are available at http://bit.ly/cw_paper_supplementary_data notes . to guard against type i error, we also conducted a range of postestimation tests, reported in the online appendix (table a ). we tested whether the categorical variables capturing occupational status and industrial classification were jointly significant in the separate values models: in other words, whether the set of dummies capturing (a) occupational status and (b) sectoral membership added explanatory power to the relevant models compared with not being included. we also tested whether being a cultural worker was statistically significant taking the three values measures as joint dependent variables, nesting items within individu- als. of the postestimation tests reported in the online appendix (table a ) all are signifi- cant at the % level of significance and all but one at the % level. . this item was fielded on waves – , but survey attrition was particularly high between waves and , hence our use of the earlier response. http://bit.ly/cw_paper_supplementary_data https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/ . / mcandrew et al. references alacovska, a. 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( ). gender inequality in screenwriting work. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. www.thesociologicalreview.com/news_stories/tagged/the-sociology-of-brexit www.thesociologicalreview.com/news_stories/tagged/the-sociology-of-brexit we, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in china full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cgpc gender, place & culture a journal of feminist geography issn: - x (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc we, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in china mindi schneider, elizabeth lord & jessica wilczak to cite this article: mindi schneider, elizabeth lord & jessica wilczak ( ): we, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in china, gender, place & culture, doi: . / x. . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / x. . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: jun . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cgpc https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / x. . https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cgpc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cgpc &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - we, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in china mindi schneidera , elizabeth lordb and jessica wilczakc asociology of development and change, wageningen university, wageningen, the netherlands; benvironment and society, brown university, providence, rhode island, usa; cfaculty of social and political sciences, university of lausanne, lausanne, switzerland abstract this paper contributes to a feminist politics of fieldwork by elevating narratives that have been pushed to the periph- ery of academic and methodological debates, particularly in china studies. inspired by feminist geographers’ under- standings of positionality, as well as the global #metoo movement, we detail how china’s current historical moment—when patriarchy, the market, and growing authoritarianism intersect to commodify bodies and quell dissent—shapes gendered and sexualized fieldwork rela- tionships. drawing on our own experiences, as well as interviews with other china studies researchers, the paper engages specific sites where researchers’ bodies are sexual- ized and sometimes threatened. this includes banquets, karaoke bars, and the virtual spaces of messaging platforms and social media. we explore methodological implications of such relationships and share strategies that researchers have adopted as they attempt to make grim tradeoffs between personal security and ‘getting the data.’ the paper calls for more frank discussions of the sexual politics of field-based research, particularly with early-career research- ers, and for a valorization of less-than-heroic approaches to fieldwork. article history received december accepted may keywords banquets; china; gender and sexuality; politics of fieldwork; sexual harassment; #metoo sunny girls and heroic fieldwork ‘if you have some time, you’re welcome to come sit in my office! you’re such a sunny girl.’—text message sent by a local official in a chinese city to a foreign female researcher (translated by the authors from mandarin). this paper is about the sexual politics of fieldwork in china. while the paper is years in the making, our motivation to publish it now sits at the contact mindi schneider mindi.schneider@wur.nl sociology of development and change group (bode ), wageningen university and research, p.o. box , wageningen ew , the netherlands. � the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. gender, place & culture https://doi.org/ . / x. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://doi.org/ . / x. . http://www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com conjuncture of three primary forces. first, from the authors’ personal experi- ences, and from conversations over the past decade with other researchers who work in china, we have found remarkably similar stories about navigat- ing gendered and sexualized power relations in the field. stories include responding to invitations like the text message quoted above, reacting to commentaries on the researcher’s physical appearance, being pressured to drink alcohol to intoxication at banquets, visiting spaces of sex work like kara- oke bars and massage parlors with gatekeepers, and fending off unwanted and sometimes violent sexual advances from gatekeepers and informants. while some of these stories are shared by both male and female researchers, for women in particular, fieldwork has regularly included sexual harassment (unwanted flirtation, verbal sexual advances, sexual propositions, and sexually motivated or gendered jokes), and for some, sexual assault (unwanted physical contact, forced kissing, attempted rape, and rape [nelson et al. ]). second, although banquets, karaoke bars, alcohol, and sex/sexualized relations are ubiquitous in informal accounts of china-based fieldwork, they are largely hidden, excluded, or marginalized in formal accounts where we work in china studies (a multi-disciplinary field including geographers, sociolo- gists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians and others). for the three authors, we discovered shared experiences among ourselves and others only in private conversations on the periphery of conference panels and workshops. given the ‘institutionalized notion of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage or an exercise of one’s endurance’ (berry et al. , ), this is perhaps not surprising. discussing how gendered and sexual encounters during fieldwork shifted or shaped the research project can carry a sense of shame, feelings of failure, and fears of damaging one’s professional standing and reputation (moreno ; diprose, thomas, and rushton ; nelson et al. ). this bring us to the third convergence: #metoo. we are inspired by the flood of women who have publicly shared their experiences of sexual harassment and assault, and by the difficult and necessary conversations that tarana burke’s movement has sparked. as the movement spreads in universities, we feel encouraged to examine our experiences in print, and to understand them as part of patriarchal power relations—and their contestations—that connect us to women everywhere, though unevenly. particularly relevant for this paper, in the #metoo movement was taken up by women in china, prompting both public denunciations of sexual miscon- duct by men in power, and subsequently, further suppression of feminist activ- ism (parkin and feng ). as researchers based in north american and european universities—and as white women, in the case of the three authors— we recognize that ours is a #metoo of privilege (watt ; williams ). at the same time that these three forces have propelled us to write the paper, they also reveal tensions between our disciplining as ethnographic m. schneider et al. researchers and our experiences in the field. as graduate students in the early s in north america, our primary concern as we embarked on long- term field-based research was not to abuse our positions of power as white, english-speaking researchers. in graduate seminars we were cautioned to acknowledge the power differential between us—the ‘powerful western researcher’—and research participants (said ; chakrabarty ). we were not, however, equipped with approaches to power that could simultan- eously account for our systemic privilege at a structural and ‘global’ levels, and the recurring moments of powerlessness and vulnerability we experi- enced in the field as female-presenting researchers. instead, the implicit model in our research methods seminars was a white, male, able-bodied researcher: the ‘heroic fieldworker’ (rose , ) as described by a con- tributor to this paper, within anthropology, these [ethnographic] methods often produce the ‘heroic fieldworker’ trope, moving effortlessly from place to place, making connections with a wide range of people and gaining their trust, and presenting your work as the product of your ability to navigate these spaces without inflicting harm on yourself and your research subjects/interlocutors. to the extent that we ‘fail’ to do this (ex. being the victim of an assault or unwanted attention in the field) and our failure does not produce new brilliant insights, we are understood to have failed in acquiring the necessary knowledge to be in the field. we internalized the sanctions against those who fail to ‘conquer’ the field. what’s more, unlike scholars who work in explicitly sexualized spaces like ktvs (karaoke bars, called ktvs in china, are entertainment spaces for sing- ing that often host or facilitate female sex work. see, e.g., [zheng , , ]), bathhouses (eg. bain and nash ), swingers clubs (eg. de craene ), and around sex work (eg. grenz ), we didn’t develop sophisticated analyses of gender, sexuality, and power in preparation for our research, nor did we fully conceptualize our own gendered and sexualized positionalities as we moved through research sites (newton ). we knew that our work on food politics (schneider), urban planning (wilczak), and environmental protection (lord) would take us into male-dominated domains, but we did not anticipate that our bodies would figure so centrally in our research experiences. this, too, reflects our privilege. positionality, sexuality, and unwanted sexual encounters in fieldwork as feminist geographers have shown, the heroic fieldworker trope is a reifica- tion of positivist, masculinist epistemology that flattens positionality. it feigns objectivity, while hiding the tensions, inequalities, assumptions, and erasures that shape the production of knowledge (rose ; sundberg ), and it conceals how the social positions of researchers and research participants shape questions, methods, and findings (england ; mullings ; rose ). gender, place & culture reflexivity, a strategy to situate geographic knowledges and the researcher’s social location and background, has become commonplace in feminist geog- raphy to avoid these false claims of neutrality and universality (rose ). yet sexuality and unwanted sexual experiences during fieldwork remain scarce within discussions of reflexivity and positionality. exceptions in the lit- erature include considerations of how sexual and erotic subjectivities shift in the course of research (e.g. cupples ); exploring how the sexual desires of the researcher and the sanctions against recognizing or engaging such desires impacts research trajectories (e.g. de craene ); the impacts of ‘innocuous sexualizations’ like flirting during data collection (kaspar and landolt ); and analyzing how unwanted sexual encounters affect the research process and bring feelings of shame for the researcher (eg. diprose, thomas, and rushton ). in addition to the still nascent literature on sexuality and positionality, scholars have discussed the ‘afterlives’ of fieldwork’s sexual subjectivities. for example, cupples ( ), kulick and willson ( ), and sharp ( ) note the omission of sexual encounters and desires in written research accounts, which has served to perpetuate myths of sexual neutrality and heroic field- work. moreno ( ) both exemplified and challenged this omission, sharing her experience of rape in the field while writing under a pseudonym, and detailing the patriarchal sanctions that prevent scholars from including sex- ual violence in research accounts. more recently, nelson et al. ( ) studied how sexual harassments and assaults in fieldwork negatively impact espe- cially female scholars’ career trajectories, highlighting the failure of univer- sities to consider the field as a workplace and to extend institutional rights and protections to people working ‘off campus.’ in this paper, we are trying to understand our own experiences of sexual harassment and assault during fieldwork, as well as the shared and recurring experiences we have identified through conversations with colleagues in china studies. like diprose, thomas, and rushton ( ), we are concerned with understanding the personal, professional, and methodological impacts of such ‘unexpected sexual encounters’ ( , ). at the same time, we are concerned to situate these shared experiences and implications in the broader sexual politics that mark chinese social life today. as cupples argues, especially in cross-cultural contexts, researchers encounter stereotyp- ical sexualities and unfamiliar gender and sexual norms in the field site, around which they must constantly negotiate positionality ( , ). in other words, the sexual politics of the particular place and time of fieldwork are crucial for unravelling the expectations and norms that shape the condi- tions under which research is done and positionality is negotiated. in the disciplines that make up china studies—particularly those that engage ethnographic methods—discussions are beginning about sexual m. schneider et al. harassment and assault during fieldwork (hanson and richards ; kloß ; pollard ). there are few accounts, however, of the specific sexual politics that shape fieldwork in china (with the exceptions of mason ; gaetano ). to further this discussion, in the sections that follow we briefly trace the historical roots of the sexual politics of present-day china, intersections of gender and sexuality in fieldwork, and the emotional and methodological consequences of sexual harassment and assault for female- presenting researchers in particular. narratives material in the paper is drawn from the authors’ personal experiences and narra- tives from other researchers who do fieldwork in china. the three authors are white, cisgender, heterosexual women from middle class canada and the us. each of us has conducted ethnographic research for periods of one to two consecutive years in male-dominated contexts in china during our phd and postdoctoral stud- ies. in addition to examples from our own fieldwork, we purposively interviewed, discussed with, and solicited written and oral testimonials (in english) from col- leagues in the social sciences and humanities who have conducted, or are cur- rently conducting, fieldwork in china. contributors come from universities in five countries, and are variously women ( ), men ( ), chinese citizens, non-chinese citi- zens, ethnically han, white, brown, heterosexual, and queer. contributors work in different provinces, and in both rural and urban spaces. all of us work primarily in mandarin chinese, and some of us work with assistants. two contributors are ten- ured; others are phd students, postdocs, or assistant professors. to protect the anonymity of our contributors, we have removed identifying details about their identities, research topics, locations, and disciplines. although we cannot be anonymous as authors, to protect our own research sites and relationships, we do not distinguish our own narratives from those of our colleagues. instead, we attri- bute all quotations to ‘contributors’ as an undifferentiated category. the vulner- ability of discussing this topic, particularly in print and at early career stages for most contributors, requires this practice. we focus on gender, sexuality, and power in this paper, and briefly engage with what whiteness means in our research sites, and how whiteness intersects with the other categories we explore. as an initial treatment of these issues in china, we do not fully explore the heightened vulnerabilities of nonwhite, queer, or differently abled researchers. we hope that the paper contributes to further discussions. positioning sexual politics in china’s market economy china’s current political moment and history offer unique challenges for field researchers. for the purpose of our analysis, four dynamics are key: gender, place & culture worsening gender inequality within china since the market reforms of the late s; the rise and repression of non-state feminist activism; the renego- tiation of gender and sexual norms in the context of global neoliberalism; and the country’s elite-oriented sexual economy. first, like many social reformers in china in the early th century, members of the communist party saw improving the status of women as key to the project of re-assessing feudal/confucian values, modernizing the nation, and building a more just society. after the party’s accession to power in , the equality of women was enshrined in the constitution and their social, eco- nomic and political status was elevated. although real improvements were achieved during this time, including bringing women into the workforce, this often resulted in women shouldering the double burden of labour inside and outside the home (zheng ). the market reforms that began in the late s eroded earlier gains in gender equality, as women’s participation in gov- ernment declined and workplace discrimination increased (rofel ). in the average salary of an urban woman in china was about . % that of a man, and by this figure dropped to . % (hong fincher ). meanwhile, state agencies such as the national all-china women’s federation have supported the resurgence of so-called traditional values, including the stigmatization of unmarried career women in their late s as ‘leftover’ women (hong fincher ). the rise of market logics has also instigated an increasing sexualization and commodification of women’s bodies, including a shift in ideal womanhood from the strong, androgynous socialist worker idealized in mao-era propaganda posters, to the slim, hyper- sexualized female body that animates reform era (post- ) media and advertising (chen et al. ; hanser ). in the face of dismantling many state socialist institutional mechanisms for addressing gender inequality, china’s current generation of feminist acti- vists (there are, of course, multiple feminisms in china; see, e.g., spakowski [ ]) have adopted creative ways of making their voices heard (zheng ). most visibly, in the early s, a group of young activists later identi- fied as the ‘feminist five’ began organizing public protests and performance art to draw attention to domestic abuse and sexual harassment. in , they planned an anti-harassment campaign on public transportation for international women’s day but were arrested two days before the scheduled action. their detention sparked international outcry, and, ironically, ensured their global visibility. the feminist five were eventually released (on bail) and the government pursued its crackdown. in , other feminist activists were forced out of their homes for planning to distribute anti-sexual harass- ment placards, and in , with the #metoo movement rising, censors deleted a petition against sexual harassment at universities (hong fincher ; ). m. schneider et al. the suppression of public discussion about sexual harassment is particu- larly conspicuous in the context of china’s widely acknowledged sexual economy. the sexual economy is dominated by wealthy and politically powerful men who purchase sexual services from women in a variety of roles, ranging from prostitutes, to ego-massaging karaoke hostesses, to rela- tively stable, long-term mistresses (zurndorfer ). as we discuss below, conducting research with government officials and businesspeople often requires entering into the arenas where the transactions of the sexual econ- omy take place. for all researchers—regardless of gender identification, sexu- ality, ability, age, or race—this means that gender and sexuality come to the forefront of social interactions. in our research sites in urban and rural china—especially, but not only at banquets and when visiting ktvs and massage parlors with gate keepers— we experienced binary and heteronormative constructions of gender and sexuality, and a conflation of the two under the notion of men as strong and forceful and women as yielding and passive (see evans [ ] for a his- tory of constructions of gender and sexuality across th century china). scholars argue that this active-male/passive-female construction is applied variously to public (business, government) and private (romantic, familial) relationships in china, as well as to the booming sex economy, where busi- nessmen and government officials who consume commodified female bodies are the core customer base (zheng , , ; zurndorfer ). according to zheng tiantian, ‘in the patriarchal state where resources are in the hands of males, what is left for females is to find a sexual niche—that is, to decorate an essentially male world’ ( , ). gender and sexuality also intersect with race and geopolitics in the field. the authors of this paper were confronted with the shifting meanings of whiteness (faria and mollett ) during china’s current geopolitical moment, or what farrer ( ) describes as the ethnosexual politics of ‘a dominant but fading global whiteness and a rising global chinese racial identity’ ( ). the rise of ‘traditional’ norms of femininity for chinese women as passive has been accompanied by the proliferation of hypermasculine, hypersexual stand- ards for chinese men that are both influenced by, and in tension with, euro- american models of masculinity (liu ; zhang ). in this context, achieving perceived sexual dominance over a non-chinese woman can take on a new significance as a marker of status and virility. we were often invited to lavish, high-level social events far beyond our typical experience as gradu- ate students or postdoctoral researchers, simply because our presence as white foreigners lent a certain status and cosmopolitanism (yan ). at the same time, we often felt uncomfortable or threatened by the overt sexualiza- tion and objectification our (white, female) bodies elicited. this was particularly evident at banquets and post-banquet events. gender, place & culture rites of passage: banquets, karaoke bars, massage parlors although often translated into english as ‘connections,’ the mandarin word guanxi more accurately denotes deliberately cultivated and affectively charged bonds built on the foundation of long-term obligations. under the centralized economy, actively cultivating good guanxi through performing reciprocal favors was key to accessing important goods and services (yang ). market reforms have changed the nature of relationship-building in china, but guanxi continues to be important in government and business spheres as a means of obtaining things like market information, bank loans, and state contracts (yang ; chen ). in china today, guanxi-building banquets are a regular and central part of business, government, and many forms of non-governmental professional life, including research. alongside meetings and other formal activities, insti- tutions (or individuals) host banquets as midday lunch events and as evening dinners. banquets are spaces where attendees who aspire to rise through the ranks of their institution can connect with people in positions of power outside the formality of the workplace. almost always, an invitation from a gatekeeper to attend a banquet is a required step towards building the guanxi that leads to research contacts and sites, and as such, these invita- tions cannot be easily refused. guanxi-building at banquets is lubricated by heavy consumption of food and alcohol. toasting, usually with grain-based distilled alcohol called baijiu, is essential and follows a protocol. a host first toasts the highest-ranking guest, and the two empty their glasses. other guests then toast the guest of honor, before embarking on a trip around the table to toast each banqueter individually. toasts must be reciprocated, such that at a banquet with people, the norm is that each person engages in a minimum of toasts. intoxication is the common result, accompanied in some cases by a feeling of warmth and connection, and in other cases, by illness and marginalization. men especially are goaded to drink more, often having their ‘manhood’ questioned if they opt not to (osburg ). several contributors to the paper did not anticipate the centrality of ban- queting in their research, and how often it replaced data-gathering expedi- tions. as one contributor puts it, i often set out in the morning for what i thought was a site visit for interviews and observations [ … ] i would end up returning home after midnight (or the next day after a hotel stay), following a lunch banquet, a half-drunk interview i conducted in the afternoon, a dinner banquet with more drinking, and a trip to the ktv. i learned very early in my fieldwork that banquets were key to access and relationship building, and that even if i didn’t make it to the ‘field sites’ i was aiming for, i always learned something about social hierarchies and power in the institutions i was studying by being a participant observer at banquets. m. schneider et al. take your position(ing) cupples’s notion that we are positioned by those whom we research ( ) is acutely true at banquets in china, where, as attendees, we are literally positioned by others who tell us where to sit. banquet space is prescribed, and invitees sit around circular tables, following seating protocols based on rank: the most important guest sits facing the door, and others are arranged around him/her (typically male) according to their relative importance. a young woman may be seated next to an important male guest to act as his personal hostess—’the girl,’ as yan ( ) describes the role. researchers may be seated as guests of honor or unwitting hostesses near the highest- ranking attendee, or further down the pecking order. in some cases, women are relegated to women-only tables (mason ). being positioned by others can also include being shoehorned into some- times unfamiliar or uncomfortable gender roles and sexualizations. for for- eign non-han (especially white) women working in china, stereotypes can include being easy sexual targets, being less threatening than male research- ers, and being trustable. foreign (especially white) male researchers may be stereotyped as knowledgeable, fierce drinkers, or sexually opportunistic. as a foreign male contributor explains, ‘i don’t have to work to get respect. china is a patriarchal society in which it is taken for granted that men should be in roles of authority, knowledge and power, so we do not have to establish that.’ another foreign male contributor shares, performing masculinity is [ … ] an important part of making connections and navigating certain spaces in china, even (or especially) among marginalized groups [ … ] it’s easy for me to make connections with men under the guise of ‘making connections’ that might be beneficial to all parties involved [ … ] it’s more difficult, but not impossible, to make connections with women who are younger than me, though it sometimes leads to joke-making or speculation about my intentions [ … ] sometimes i worry that people think i am a lecherous foreigner. at the same time that we are positioned by others, we also position our- selves, in part by learning (or perhaps subverting) gendered and sexual scripts and behaviors. as researchers—and indeed as people—we regularly make choices about how we will perform gender and sexuality. will a male researcher drink to intoxication at a banquet, even if he doesn’t like to drink alcohol? will gay and lesbian researchers flirt with members of the opposite sex in order to meet informants’ expectations? will a female researcher ‘play dumb’ or demure to elicit detailed explanations, even if she is accustomed to spirited debates? will a single female researcher wear a wedding ring to avoid unwanted advances? while there is a degree of agency in how we position ourselves vis-a-vis stereotypes in the field, these choices have impli- cations for our research in terms of access, relationship-building, the kinds and quality of information we are able to glean, and ultimately, our gender, place & culture methodological decisions. as we discuss later, these choices also impact our- selves and our bodies, and they reflect a tension between the power we can gain from choosing how to represent ourselves, and the vulnerability we experience when dragged into other people’s expectations. drinking—or not—at banquets encapsulates this tension well. to drink or not to drink banquets are often occasions for ‘male bonding,’ where men perform mascu- linity through drinking (loubere ). for a female-presenting researcher, the first question to ask when looking at banquet culture is, where do women fit in these male-dominated, booze-soaked events? the simple answer is that women fit where they are placed. this can mean being placed at a separate women’s table. katherine mason, a foreign, white, female anthropologist working in china, decided that she ‘would banquet as “one of the women” rather than attempting to become “one of the men”‘( , ). this decision meant that while she could be excused from drinking to intoxication—since women are not held to the same standards of drinking—she would also be exiled to the women’s table, and largely excluded from building guanxi with those (men) partaking in trust-through-binge-drinking at the power tables. mason’s decision not to drink brought her closer to the women with whom she shared tables and led her to write about how they operated ‘outside’ of ban- quet drinking culture. the choice not to drink can have other benefits, as a female contributor says, on a few occasions i’ve had the sense that i’ve been ignored by officials in a way that helps me do more of the listening i want to do. not as much pressure to drink alcohol, which is helpful for a total teetotaler. but the choice to drink can also be beneficial for women researchers. one contributor states, ‘when my hosts were men (which was most of the time), i found that drinking [alcohol] helped “grease the wheels” of the relationship. after a drunken banquet, i was often invited to other events and meetings.’ in some ways, the choice of whether or not to drink is thornier for male researchers. for men, the norm is to drink, ideally to intoxication. according to a foreign male contributor, ‘there is an expectation that i drink based on my gender. i can’t get out of it because i am male.’ pressure to drink can be both overt and unspoken. nicholas loubere ( ) writes that a researcher’s ability to ‘play the game’ of drinking with hosts can determine his or her ability to make connections with important gatekeepers and access research sites. similarly, graduate students in china regularly receive coaching on how to drink and toast as part of their informal research training. as one con- tributor observes, being able to drink is sometimes presented as an ‘essential m. schneider et al. research skill;’ and a gendered one at that. according to a foreign male contributor, drinking [ … ] seems necessary. and it is clear that women are often not included in the drinking. or at least, sometimes there is more drinking when women aren’t present, and the drinking is part of my ability to get closer to the folks that provide me with access to material. there are hazards to playing the drinking game: the researcher may become too drunk to interview or observe effectively, or may endanger their health and safety. loubere ( ) missed an interview because he was too ill after a banquet. a female contributor similarly shared that she missed an important interview after a night of heavy baijiu drinking. she was never able to fix the relationship with her research contacts or recover the ‘face’ that she lost from trying (and failing) to banquet as one of the men. ktv: sing for your data when all have been toasted and dinner is finished, banquets are often fol- lowed by a trip to the ktv (karaoke bar) where more guanxi is built through song. groups reserve private rooms with big screens, couches, microphones, musical selections, and an attendant for food and drink. guests can also reserve hostesses as part of the room cost. women who work at ktvs may be assigned to one or multiple men to keep them company, drink, sing, and/or have sexual interactions onsite or outside the ktv (zheng ). in these situations, men bond and compete through the bodies of women who are paid (usually by the banquet host) to keep their company in the ktv room, or afterwards in a massage parlor, sauna, or hotel room. as anthro- pologist mayfair yang ( ) describes, in china’s male-dominated business culture, guanxi is built through ‘a long night sharing the pleasures of mascu- line heterosexuality and giving women’s bodies and sexual services as gifts’ (yang , ; see also zheng ). male sex workers who cater to women (known as yazi, or ducks) and to men (known as ‘mbs’ or money boys) are on the rise (minichiello and scott ), though we didn’t encoun- ter them in our research. banquets, and particularly post-banquets, are common sites where women are sexually harassed, in part because they are exuberant events that encour- age excess eating and drinking and are typically a bonding/power match between already powerful men. one contributor describes her experience, a contact i had been trying to work with for months invited me on a -day research trip. during the day, i was one of two women in a group of , attending meetings and touring facilities. between our meetings and tours, we had a lunch and a dinner banquet, where i became drunk [ … ] things were going well, and i was invited to join the group (including a local party leader) at the ktv. when we gender, place & culture got to the room, there were eight women waiting there [ … ] it became clear that they worked at the ktv, and were there for singing and dancing and some kissing with the men. as time went on, i felt my position shift from ‘colleague’ to ‘one of the women’ in the room. one man who had been flirting with me all day became physically aggressive. he kept touching me and trying to kiss me. at the end of the night, he followed me to my hotel room, where i had to push him away by slamming the door of my room. he banged on the door and yelled for several minutes telling me to let him in, like he felt entitled to me. the next day, he invited me to visit his company on a subsequent research trip, which is exactly the kind of opportunity i was looking for, if not for the groping. i didn’t go. this anecdote clearly illustrates the shifting positionality of the researcher from ‘honored guest’ to ‘sexual conquest.’ similarly, gaetano shares about her fieldwork in china, as a woman i felt uncomfortable in the private space of the (men’s) ktv club, where other women offered sexual services, and where i was susceptible to inebriated men acting on libidinous impulses ( , ). gaetano, too, fended off a post-banquet advance from a colleague by clos- ing and locking her hotel door ( ). male researchers also have to contend with sexualization and sexual expectations. foreign or local male researchers might be expected to per- form their masculinity by engaging with female sex workers during karaoke, or afterwards at a massage parlor. to refuse sexual relations with a sex worker may be insulting to the host who has ‘offered’ a woman to the researcher as a sign of good relations, and who is often a gatekeeper. for male-presenting researchers, the failure to comply with gendered and sexual- ized expectations for heavy drinking and participation in the sex economy can result in a loss of face for himself or his host, and potentially, the loss of research relationships. everyday sexualization and intimacies in the wake of recent anti-corruption campaigns, government banquets have become less lavish (xinhua ). they remain, however, important sites for guanxi-seeking researchers, and trips to ktvs and massage parlors continue. while the post-banquet trajectory takes researchers into overtly sexualized spaces that host sex work, ‘everyday’ professional spaces—including ban- quets themselves—are also rife with gendered and sexualized encounters. for example, anthropologist li zhang ( ) discusses interactions with research participants, [o]ften times, simply because i was alone and eager to talk to people, migrant businessmen mistook me as interested in sex trafficking because women were not supposed to interact with unfamiliar men alone in their local cultural milieu. [ … ] despite my repeated explanations that i was a student researcher interested in m. schneider et al. migrant lives for academic purposes, many thought that i was simply too embarrassed to tell the truth. even as an ethnographer, i could not escape the local assumptions about gendered boundaries and moral codes ( ). this is to say that while female researchers are eager to present themselves as experts, they are often seen through a sexual filter. one contribu- tor shares, in one bizarre incident during fieldwork, the women sitting at a banquet were asked to stand up for the pre-toasting speech given by the host, who happened to be the highest-ranking official in the locality in which we hoped to conduct research. the official started by celebrating women’s participation in this project. he then appraised each woman one at a time, highlighting her intellectual and physical attributes, and how generally pleasing she was to him, before asking her to sit down. he did this until only one woman was left standing. the young chinese graduate student who stood as the great ‘pageant’ winner was his girlfriend, and this might have been a way to impress other men with his romantic ‘conquest.’ after toasting, and as everyone sat down, one of my male chinese colleagues jokingly criticized the leader for this unusual speech and implied it might have been ‘uncivilized’ (bu wenming) and disrespectful of women, but the criticism was brushed aside, and we started eating. in this particular instance, the initial intention of the local official might have been to sincerely celebrate female researchers, but it rapidly shifted into sexualization and objectification. it illustrates how researchers may be more ‘accepting’ of powerfully gendered and sexualized hierarchies if they’re eager for data and research relationships. without wanting data, one could decide not to participate in such charades, and could perhaps openly dismiss the official as a clumsy patriarch; but a researcher who needs data is more likely to accommodate these incidents, avoid confrontation, smile awkwardly, and tacitly accept being objectified. text messaging and digital intimacy new complications arise with mobile phones and text messaging as everyday sites of sociality. as varis ( ) describes, online and offline contexts can become blurred in qualitative digital research, and communications online are held to different standards than what is acceptable in physical, offline contexts. in the contemporary chinese context, most qualitative research is at least partly digital: in order to build social networks and stay in contact with informants, researchers must use wechat (weixin), china’s dominant online messaging and social media platform. before wechat, it was common to formally exchange name cards. this has been replaced by a markedly more casual, ‘let’s add each other on wechat.’ such interactions give even newly established relationships a veneer of informality and intimacy that can be advantageous to researchers, but also presents new challenges. gender, place & culture wechat allows users to post status updates and photos, send messages among individuals and groups, and transfer money. this means that the researcher can maintain direct contact easily with informants, and also culti- vate goodwill in other ways by liking or commenting on people’s statuses or providing informants with a more well-rounded (albeit curated) sense of the researcher’s personality. although this form of digital intimacy can help build a sense of trust and warmth between both parties, the ambiguity of ‘likes’ and emojis is slippery. the quote at the outset of the paper is a text message one of the contrib- utors received from a government official that she had met once, and had spoken with briefly in the presence of other officials. the topic of discussion was a recent local policy—nothing that would seem to invite a ‘sunny girl’ kind of tone. the researcher felt a mild panic upon receiving the message. this official’s approval was necessary for the project to continue, so she didn’t want to offend him. but, having had to fend off overtures from offi- cials previously, she didn’t want to encourage the flirtatious tone either. her response was to wait a day before replying with a brief and formal, ‘thank you,’ and subsequently turning down an invitation to dine with the official and his friend, pleading busy-ness. prior experience in the field meant that the researcher was able to make a decision weighing an elusive ‘closeness’ in the relationship and her own personal comfort and safety—a topic we dis- cuss in the following section. wechat can extend the roles and relations that dominate the banquet scene. a contributor states that her fieldwork involves being hit on, con- stantly, including when chatting with informants online. it is therefore important to attend to tone and nuance in this digital sphere where per- sonal and professional boundaries become perhaps even more blurred than is standard for contemporary chinese social interactions. about online inter- actions with a male contact, another contributor shares, [t]he fact that he is a man makes the relationship feel more complicated. when he wechat’s ‘i miss you,’ [in chinese] i worry what he means. and then i worry that i am ‘leading him on’ or taking advantage of possibly romantic feelings on his part in order to advance my research. bodily threats in addition to wading through gendered expectations and fending off unwanted advances online and in person, many contributors note cases of sexual harassment and assault during fieldwork, particularly around banquets and post-banquet activities. researchers develop what are essentially ‘tradeoff analyses’ to calculate potential risks and determine how much they are willing to bear to develop a relationship that might lead to data. m. schneider et al. because this compromise is felt most acutely by people with less power (often women) who find themselves in precarious positions in unfamiliar environments, it is important to reflect on the methodological impacts of these realities. ‘how much risk am i willing to take for data?’ is a personal question shaped by expectations that are at once self-imposed, disciplinary, and cultural, and influenced by what researchers around us are producing. at stake is a negotiation between the professional and the personal. more specifically, researchers must consider how to incorporate (gendered and sexualized) risk into research designs and reflect on what methodological sacrifices they are willing to make to stay safe. uncertainty is part of research. many research stories start with the simple fact that securing fieldwork is much more difficult than anticipated. snowballing falls flat, connections dwindle, and field sites close off. with fieldwork comes anxiety, compelling us to take risks we might not entertain in our everyday lives in hopes of securing solid relationships and data. contributors to this paper narrated gendered and sexualized risks including drinking hard liquor to intoxication with gatekeepers, negotiating personal (sexual) boundaries with inebriated people (officials, informants, gatekeep- ers), negotiating with hotel clerks to secure one’s own hotel room (after real- izing that hosts have not made such arrangements in advance), dancing with informants and gatekeepers at ktvs, being groped (or being expected to grope) at ktvs, and using all means necessary to push an assailant (informant/gatekeeper) out of one’s hotel room. without being equivalent, these events are symptomatic of the intersection between gendered and sexualized expectations and how positionalities and risk are negotiated dur- ing fieldwork. methodological implications and coping strategies in china, the bonding that is foundational to building research relationships often takes place at banquets under inebriation where women are often (albeit not always) marginalized and/or objectified. in these situations, when a ‘researcher’ becomes a ‘mein€u’ (a widespread title meaning ‘pretty lady,’ but used as a more generic ‘miss’), or when interactions swing from profes- sional content to sexual expectations, what are the methodological implica- tions for conducting fieldwork? what choices can researchers make? for one contributor, being groped and feeling unsafe during fieldwork led her to disengage from ethnographic research altogether and focus instead on secondary data. for another, continued sexual harassment from a gate- keeper led her to consider abandoning her field site. beyond these radical options, contributors shared other coping strategies. one contributor adapted her research approach to seek out primarily female research gender, place & culture participants and gatekeepers, including women in positions of power, and populations of mostly women (see also mason ). another changed her research questions so that she could answer them by working with and observing groups that were not hogtied to the culture of banqueting. having a close, long-term female friend from a host university was key to another contributor’s research. as she explains, [m]y research buddy forcefully elbowed me out of the room post-banquet as one inebriated official with whom we were trying to establish a research relationship suggested moving the party to the massage parlor. she also cleverly turned a visit by a drunk official to our hotel room (who claimed he was looking for his coat) into an interview. it’s unethical to interview someone inebriated, but it was also a survival mechanism to de-escalate a situation where we both felt at risk. some contributors adopted expected behaviors during participant observa- tion to ‘blend in’ at banquets, ktvs, and elsewhere, including drinking alco- hol and smoking cigarettes, or not drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, depending on the context. others made a point to discuss spouses and part- ners or invented a spouse and wore a wedding ring to ward off unwanted attention or harassment during interviews and observations. while these strategies might be useful in some cases, in others, the messi- ness of fieldwork is too difficult to anticipate. for instance, if an official who holds the strings to your fieldwork asks you to kiss him on the cheeks, ‘as they do in the west’ (one contributor tells), what should you do? if you are on the highway in a car with three men, and the discussion turns to how adorable (ke’ai) you are and why you are alone in china, with the men snick- ering after slipping into local dialect that you don’t understand (as another contributor reports), how do you respond? although there is no single strat- egy for dealing with these situations, knowing that they might arise can help researchers develop personal boundaries and further coping strategies. conclusion unwanted sexual encounters in the field have personal, professional, and methodological implications (diprose, thomas, and rushton ). some impacts are immediate, while others emerge more slowly, and with a longer affective horizon. several contributors to this paper spoke of a ‘post-field- work hangover’ when they felt exhausted from negotiating power relation- ships, and sometimes from heavy alcohol intake and sexual violence. for many, the ‘post-fieldwork hangover’ is a lingering feeling of shame and fail- ure related to experiences like those shared above. contributors have been reluctant to share these encounters and feelings, even with academic advi- sors and mentors, much less in publication. to the question of whether she m. schneider et al. engages gendered and sexualized experiences in her writing and analysis, one contributor responds, i wish i could do so. however, i often do not because many of my experiences involve potentially dicey situations such as partaking and observing women’s heavy alcohol use during fieldwork, or being non-consensually touched during participant observation in bars. for example, if i were to publicly disclose that i was intoxicated during some of my fieldwork, i would expect others to question the veracity of my observations. that would probably be the least of it, too, given potential legal liabilities, irb-related complications, and professional and ethical norms in my discipline. however, i wish there was a way to have these conversations on ethics and gender during fieldwork, because in a lot of ways, fieldwork is unlike any other social interaction, and there are so few resources on surviving these encounters, acting ethically, and thinking through the impact on one’s work. feminist scholarship on sexuality and positionality, and the emotional turn in geographic (and other social) research, are creating more space for these conversations. for instance, feminist scholars are challenging the power of shame, and the fallacies of the masculinist, sexist, heteronormative, heroic fieldworker trope (e.g. berry et al. ). others are theorizing what critical engagement with emotions can reveal about power relations, reflexivity, and positionality (e.g. laliberte and schurr ). this paper contributes to these expanding literatures by offering narratives of how researchers experience and negotiate the intersection of gender and sexuality during field research in china, and how unwanted sexual encounters, shame, and exhaustion impact the research process. we situate personal experiences within the broader sexual politics that mark social life in china today in order to bring historical and political economic relations more centrally into our analysis of power and positionality. we hope that this paper is useful for early-career researchers, especially those initiating fieldwork for the first time. when we began our own long- term fieldwork, we were unprepared and, frankly, naïve, about how gender and sexuality would influence our research. even as we became more aware of the risks of sexual harassment and assault, the specter of ‘failing’ to collect meaningful data combined with the ever-increasing push for research outputs in the unevenly precarious neoliberal university (caretta et al. ), led us to prioritize ‘getting the data’ over personal safety and emotional well-being. we want to contribute to conversations in the literature and in informal spaces (e.g. huang et al. ; watt ; williams ) that urge researchers to consider the possibility of unwanted sexual encounters in the field, to think through coping strategies (including some that we’ve suggested here), and to build systems of support with peers (smyth, linz, and hudson ) and through relationships with mentors. for china field- work in particular, a crucial first step is for researchers and mentors to know the rules and expectations for guanxi-building banquets and post-banquet gender, place & culture events, and to anticipate methods for navigating power relations and shift- ing positionalities when attending them. finally, this paper is situated in the #metoo moment when sharing stories of sexual harassment and assault is becoming part of a collective conversa- tion, in universities and otherwise. the #metoo movement is hopeful and it raises new questions. for instance, how can institutions deal with the sexual harassments that many researchers face as part of their regular off-campus work, including fieldwork? how do discussions about the impacts of sexual harassment and assault on the research process become more central when institutions (universities, colleges, departments) remain patriarchal, neoliberal, and research-output-obsessed? how do feminist ethnographers avoid essen- tialist representations and universalizing claims when theorizing and writing about sexual politics in field sites? and how do geographers, anthropolo- gists, sociologists and others critically engage the #metoo of the privileged and the #metoo of the marginalized, in ways that make space for the voices of both without reproducing racial, gendered, sexual, class or ableist power hierarchies and inequalities? this last question applies to inequalities between and among researchers, as well as to uneven relationships between and among researchers and the people with whom they work in the field. an important piece in settling these questions must involve striving for less-heroic fieldwork, where scholars acknowledge and communicate the emotional and bodily vulnerabilities they face conducting fieldwork, while reflecting deeply on their positionality in the field and their social positions and privileges more generally. acknowledgements we are grateful to the colleagues who shared their experiences with us for writing this article, as well as several others with whom we have discussed these issues informally over the years. we appreciate the careful and insightful comments from three anonymous reviewers that greatly improved the manuscript. and we want to express our heart-felt gratitude to tarana burke for starting the #metoo movement, and to the feminist activists who are engaged in similar struggles in china and elsewhere. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). notes on contributors mindi schneider is assistant professor in sociology of development and change at wageningen university in the netherlands. she is a development sociologist with special- ization in food politics, agrarian political ecology, and commodity studies. she has pub- lished extensively on the politics of food and farming and on rural activism in china. m. schneider et al. elizabeth lord is postdoctoral research associate in environment and society at brown university. she is a human geographer who works on china’s environment. she examines how environmental protection policies and pollution affect rural communities, and more specifically whether china’s dream of ‘building an ecological civilization’ is reproducing rural-urban inequality. she also studies the making of environmental knowledge in con- temporary china, looking at how environmental research is shaped by economic, institu- tional, political, and social forces. she draws on political ecology, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies, and regularly conducts fieldwork in china, most recently in the qinling mountains. jessica wilczak is senior researcher at the university of lausanne. she is a human geog- rapher with specialization in critical disaster studies, political ecology, chinese urbanism, and agrarian transformations. she has published on the politics of post-quake reconstruc- tion in chengdu, and on urban renewal, race-relations, and migrants in guangzhou. her current project examines public goods provisioning in urban china. orcid mindi schneider http://orcid.org/ - - - references bain, alison l., and catherine j. nash. . “undressing the researcher: feminism, embodiment and sexuality at a queer bathhouse event.” area ( ): – . doi: . /j. - . . .x. berry, maya j., claudia 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/ /c_ .htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/ - / /c_ .htm https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /white-people-wanted-peek-chinas-booming-rent-foreigner-industry https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /white-people-wanted-peek-chinas-booming-rent-foreigner-industry https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/women-chinese-banquets.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/women-chinese-banquets.html . /s x . /s x . / . / x. . . / . . . / . . 	abstract 	sunny girls and heroic fieldwork 	positionality, sexuality, and unwanted sexual encounters in fieldwork 	narratives 	positioning sexual politics in china’s market economy 	rites of passage: banquets, karaoke bars, massage parlors 	take your position(ing) 	to drink or not to drink 	ktv: sing for your data 	everyday sexualization and intimacies 	text messaging and digital intimacy 	bodily threats 	methodological implications and coping strategies 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	disclosure statement 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ pag_ _ _reviewsymposium .. ———. . “gender equality as smart economics: a world bank group gender action plan, – .” https://siteresources.worldbank.org/intgender/resources/ gapnov .pdf (accessed september , ). bell hooks: years from margin to center doi: . /s x , e zenzele isoke university of minnesota it would be something of an understatement to say i owe an immeasurable intellectual debt to bell hooks. her vision of black women as central to feminist scholarship is foundational to my craft as a black feminist educator and urban ethnographer. i have no fewer than of her titles in my personal library. i return time and again to bell hooks for wisdom, inspiration, clear and indisputable definitions of feminism, and pedagogical insight and technique. since being tenured, i have devoted two freshman seminars entirely to the study of bell hooks. without a doubt, these have been some of the most rewarding teaching experiences of my life. both times, more than half of the enrolled have gone on to either major or minor in feminist studies! with that said, feminist theory: from margin to center is among my least favorite books written by her. this may sound harsh, but allow me to explain. i find that from margin to center is most useful for white people who desperately need to learn and unpack how racism and sexism inform both their understanding and their application of feminist theory. the first time i read the book was in . i was a doctoral student taking an undergraduate class on feminist politics at rutgers university. i was one of two black bodies in a sea of whiteness. i listened to white women refer to bell hooks as “angry,” “mean-spirited,” and “intellectually sloppy.” i watched them cry crocodile tears as they were challenged by other students and pointedly checked by my white female instructor. i watched as the other black woman student in the class called out our instructor for her patronizing tone and problematic phrasing. that particular class was like getting a tooth pulled. i remember thinking: when we will get to the good stuff? i wanted to talk about how hooks’s definitions of feminism intersected with my own experiences and review symposium terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://siteresources.worldbank.org/intgender/resources/gapnov .pdf https://siteresources.worldbank.org/intgender/resources/gapnov .pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core how they could inform the production of culturally relevant feminist praxis in african american communities. instead, the class reaction to hooks ushered me into an excruciating awareness of how isolating and creatively stifling an educational environment drenched by white women’s guilt, defensiveness, and ignorance can be. how was it, i remember thinking, that nobody wanted to talk about one of the most gorgeous and, for me, life-changing passages in the whole book, sitting right there in the preface to the first edition. knowing me, i probably read this passage aloud: living as we did — on the edge — we developed a particular way of seeing reality. we looked both from the outside in and the inside out. we focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. we understood both. this mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of the whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary part of that whole. (hooks [ ] b, xviii) i guess hooks did not make it particularly easy. the concept of black women’s marginality is perhaps the one idea that gets the least amount of explicit in-depth analytical treatment in the monograph. truly, for this, one would need to read ain’t i a woman ([ ] a), talking back ([ ] ), yearning ([ ] d), sisters of the yam ([ ] c), bone black ([ ] ), or rock my soul ( ). in from margin to center, hooks walks the reader through a nearly exhaustive analysis of the “narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence” of the mainline white feminism of the second wave. beginning with betty friedan and moving through a multidisciplinary body of feminist thinkers and critics of feminists, hooks patiently shows how “racism abounds in the writing of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries” ([ ] b, ). thirty-five years after from margin to center, we live in an era in which young americans are being educated to be “color-blind” by majority white female teachers in our public school system. one consequence of this is that white-woman-centered understandings of feminist history and feminist activism prevail in the minds of young people. and, i think it is one reason why this book, while painful, should be essential reading for all undergraduate students in american universities. thanks to skyrocketing tuition costs, mass incarceration, shrinking wages for the politics & gender, ( ), terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core poor and working classes, and other structural forces of the twenty-first century, cisgender middle-class white womanhood still takes up entirely too much intellectual and interpersonal space on college campuses. alongside the mainstreaming of white nationalism, many white feminists have become even more emboldened and self-righteous about centering their own victimhood while co-opting theories by black women. the fact that tarana burke, a longtime community activist, journalist and independent image maker, has had to reclaim #metoo as a black woman’s movement is a case in point. in this passage, hooks’s prescience on the continuing issue of co-optation is on full display: the ideology of “competitive, atomistic . . . liberal individualism” has permeated feminist thought to such an extent that it undermines the potential of radical feminism. the usurpation of feminism by bourgeois women to support their class interests has been to a very grave extent justified by feminist theory as it has so far been conceived. any movement to resist the co-optation of feminist struggle must begin by introducing a different feminist perspective — new theory — one that is not informed by the ideology of liberal individualism. ([ ] b, ) ironically, white women’s cooptation of black feminist theory has become so pervasive that there are now black women and other women of color who publicly distance themselves from “intersectional feminism” because the term is associated with white female college students. i would be remiss here if i did not mention that a tenured professor in the feminist studies department on my campus did not know that kimberlé crenshaw, the law professor who coined the term “intersectionality,” was a black woman and that her theory of intersectionality was based on early articulations of black feminism as much as on her analysis of relevant case law. this practice of divorcing black feminist theory from the lived experience of black female marginality helps to explain how studying “intersectionality” in american culture, politics, and society is much more fashionable and palatable than studying the nuances of “white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy.” interestingly, today’s racial climate on campus is one reason why the first- person testimonials featured in from margin to center that recount hooks’s experiences of being attacked and criticized by white women when she was a student in the s remain valuable. feminism both inside and outside of the academy is still most often represented and practiced as a politics of review symposium terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core selfing and self-victimizing based on a one-dimensional understanding of gender. she describes this approach as a form of adopting a “feminist lifestyle,” which, for hooks, ultimately “lacks teeth” ([ ] b, ). she differentiates this from “feminist movement,” which she argues is rooted in a collective political commitment. she even goes as far to suggest that “we could avoid using the phrase ‘i am a feminist’ (a linguistic structure designed to refer to some personal aspect of identity and self-definition) and could state, ‘i advocate feminism’” ( ). such a challenge remains timely, necessary, and uniquely instructive for students in feminist theory classrooms. most black women of my generation did not encounter bell hooks and her ideas in a feminist theory classroom. we learned about her work through word of mouth and in community debates about the “f” word, date rape, and in black feminist protests of the million man march. i first heard about her work in a debate in a west african – centered sister circle called nzinga way back in . for me, what bell hooks had to say about white women and academic feminism was always less important than what she had to say to people of color. here is one of the underlined and starred passages in my second-edition copy of from margin to center: “women of color must confront our absorption of white supremacist beliefs, ‘internalized racism’ which may lead us to feel self-hate, to vent anger and rage at one another, or to lead one ethnic group to make no effort to communicate with another” (hooks [ ] b, ). today, young people come to bell hooks by way of quotes on black twitter and facebook, youtube videos, zines, blogs, and books written by other black women for a general readership. her analysis of white supremacy in american culture remains keenly relevant for activists who organize to confront issues like police brutality, state-sponsored police killings, the continued hypersexualization of women in hip hop culture, and sexual predators such as r. kelly who target black women and girls. her writing is instructive for those who seek to create autonomous spaces for people of color to work through how white supremacy and racial trauma have devastated our communities and how we can heal by learning how to love our blackness. bell hooks’s insistence that feminism be a commitment to ending all forms of violence, oppression, and domination by upending the status quo is one of the more overlooked insights of her work. her fearless commentary on topics as varied as rape culture, parenting, teaching, sexual politics, academic racism, motherhood, media literacy, family and politics & gender, ( ), terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core relationship violence, class consciousness, love, work, and movie-going practices is what has made her such a beloved and cherished intellectual figure for so many. her eloquent and impassioned calls for each of us to strive to envision teaching, writing, theory making and education, and life itself as the practice of freedom are one of the reasons why i am able to spiritually survive as a black woman in the academy today. when things get hard, i crack open a random page of bell hooks like protestants do the bible. with hooks, i always learn something new, and i always have a bit more courage to approach my scholarly craft with integrity, love, and a commitment to tell and live the truth. there is a holistic and energizing quality to all of hooks’s writing. now, more than ever, we need to deeply consider hooks’s pleas for us to adopt a new system of values based on the principles of love, mutuality, and compassion for others. we all stand to benefit from her deeply felt and uncompromising sense of optimism that feminism is not only possible but that it can serve as the basis to fulfill core human needs such as “longing for community, connection, a sense of shared purpose” (hooks [ ] b, ). these are the core values that are meticulously braided throughout from margin to center, alongside her spirited critiques of culture and theory. i am always eager to come back to her work and overjoyed to assign it to new generations of students in my classes. zenzele isoke is associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the university of minnesota: isoke @umn.edu references hooks, bell. . rock my soul: black people and self-esteem. new york: atria books. ———. [ ] . bone black: memories of girlhood. new york: henry holt. ———. [ ] . talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. nd ed. new york: routledge. ———. [ ] a. ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism. nd ed. new york: routledge. ———. [ ] b. feminist theory: from margin to center. new york: routledge. ———. [ ] c. sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery. rd ed. new york: routledge. ———. [ ] d. yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. nd ed. new york: routledge. review symposium terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:isoke @umn.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core 	bell hooks: years from margin to center 	references prologue marking the th anniversary of publication prologue marking the th anniversary of publication this issue of the japc, volume , no. ( ), a special issue of the japc on developments in diglossic settings in the asian pacific region guest edited by marinus van den berg, marks a significant milestone for the japc. it is the jour- nal’s th year of publication. the japc was conceived on a rainy and humid afternoon in wanchai, in what was then british colonial hong kong, more than thirty years ago by two of its present chief editors. over the years the editors have been joined and assisted by an eminent assembly of scholars on the japc edi- torial board, especially björn jernudd and marinus van den bergin. initially, the japc was planned as a single volume of studies focused on language and com- munication in the asian pacific. however, encouraged by its first publisher, mul- tilingual matters ltd., the japc has matured into a bi-annual peer-review journal with an academic mission to bring together specialists from diverse scholarly dis- ciplines to discuss and interpret language in communication issues as they pertain to people of asian pacific regions and in their diaspora immigrant communities worldwide. to attain this goal, the japc is most grateful to the staff and editors at john benjamins publishing company of amsterdam for their support and help. we express special gratitude to kees vaes and susan hendriks of john benjamins. from the onset the academic orientation of the japc has been generalist in character, focused on interdisciplinary approaches to language in communication studies linked to people in and from asian pacific regions. in its years of exis- tence, the japc has brought together promising young as well as well-established scholars in the asian pacific and elsewhere to publish research on language and communication. this it has done in regular general issues and in special guest edited issues focused on specific topics of language and communication germane to asian pacific communities. in the past decade special issues have been devoted to such topics as: – television discussion discourse in the asian pacific – the roles of communication on regional conflict – cultural china in discursive transformation – media and communication in malaysia – asian perspectives on english as a lingua franca – restructuring chinese speech communities https://doi.org/ . /japc. .pro journal of asian pacific communication : / ( ), pp. – . issn - | e‑issn - © john benjamins publishing company https://doi.org/ . /japc. .pro http://localhost: /exist/apps/journals.benjamins.com/japc/list/issue/japc. . - – strategic communication beyond nations – animation in asia – language contact in a globalizing world – language management – commonalities in asian pacific communication the topics of forthcoming special issues of the japc will focus on: – language and communication of asian diaspora communities in the west – islam and language in the asian pacific – preparing teachers for addressing the sociocultural issues with asian pacific immigrants and refugees – reconsidering language and gender in contemporary japan and among the japanese diaspora amid the #metoo movement. – issues in asian linguistic anthropology the japc welcomes individual manuscripts along the lines of its mission statement, which to repeat, is to discuss and interpret language in communication issues as they pertain to people of asian pacific regions and in their diaspora immigrant communities worldwide. the japc encourages scholars in the asian pacific and elsewhere to take advantage of the journal’s policy to publish guest- edited issues on specific topics of investigation. the japc is refereed according to rigorous criteria of evaluation. howard giles, university of california at santa barbara marinus van den berg, shaanxi normal university / leiden university herbert pierson, st. john’s university prologue marking the th anniversary of publication 	introductionprologue marking the th anniversary of publication individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime: a scandinavian study case http://www.diva-portal.org this is the published version of a paper published in . citation for the original published paper (version of record): ceccato, v. ( ) individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime: a scandinavian study case international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, issn - , eissn - https://doi.org/ . / . . access to the published version may require subscription. n.b. when citing this work, cite the original published paper. permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva- full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcac international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcac individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime: a scandinavian study case anna yates & vania ceccato to cite this article: anna yates & vania ceccato ( ): individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime: a scandinavian study case, international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: jan . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcac https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcac https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcac &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcac &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime: a scandinavian study case anna yatesa and vania ceccatob ageography department, university of newcastle, newcastle upon tyne, uk; bdepartment of urban planning and built environment, school of architecture and the built environment, kth royal institute of technology, stockholm, sweden abstract using insights from criminology and urban geography, this article seeks to investigate individual and spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime, in particular amongst women who declare to feel the most unsafe. this study is based on three waves of data of the stockholm safety survey using exploratory data analysis and binary logistic regression. informed by an intersectional framework, the study shows how individual attributes including gender, age, and previous victimisation affect women’s percep- tion of safety. modelling results indicate how the neighbourhood context affects women’s behaviour in face of fear (functional and dysfunctional fear). among the most fearful women, poor social contacts in their neigh- bourhood, rather than fear of crime itself, lead to place avoidance. article history received november accepted january keywords safety; intersectionality; public space; functional fear; dysfunctional fear; stockholm . introduction in , a gallup poll revealed that % of women reported feeling unsafe when walking alone in their neighbourhood at night compared to only % of men. whilst such statistics which emphasise broad gender disparities in perception of safety are far from uncommon (valentine, ; pain, ; whitzman, ; fox, nobles, & piquero, ; franklin & franklin, ; gallup, ), the characteristics shared by women who declare being fearful are significantly lesser known. although there has been quantitative research into the characteristics shared by women who report feeling unsafe such as their age, socio-economic status, previous victimisation (warr, ; ferraro & la grange, ; krulichová, ), this research tends to treat these individual characteristics as distinct in spite of their pivotal interconnections (pain, ; may, rader, & goodrum, ; liu & polson, ). we submit here that those who are fearful are not a homogenous group. they significantly vary on their degree of fear, in turn a function of who they are and the environments they are exposed. knowing about women’s various degrees of fear helps us to predict its impact, from mild precautionary measures (avoid certain routes and/or times) to mobility impairment and isolation but also engagement on local safety issues (ceccato, ). in the era of #metoo! movement, fear of sexual harassment and violence seems to be a global concern. in order to improve the understanding of the nature of women’s fear of crime and its impact, this article also considers the spatialities of their fears, in other words, how their degree of fear affects women’s usage of the public realm. the attention of this article will thus be focused on (but not be limited to) the most fearful women in the context of a scandinavian city. using theories of intersectionality (crenshaw, ; davis, ), this study hence aims to understand the contact anna yates annafyates@gmail.com geography department, university of newcastle, armstrong building, newcastle upon tyne ne ru, uk international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice https://doi.org/ . / . . © school of criminal justice, michigan state university http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - dimensions of women’s fear, namely the ways in which gender, ethnic background, age, and other aspects linked to where women live shape their varied levels of declared fear of crime. this paper will investigate: ( ) the nature of fear among women who fear the most, in particular, by assessing how gender intersects with other individual characteristics, such as age and ethnicity. ( ) the spatial characteristics of women’s fear and how this compares across women and impacts on their mobility in public space. ( ) whether the most fearful women tend to engage in activities understood to prevent crime, in comparison to the sample of women who declare feeling safe. despite the abundance of research on safety and perceived safety, the intersecting characteristics of the most fearful women have been identified as a significant gap (pain, ). owing to its reputation as being both safe and perceived such, stockholm, the capital of sweden, has been subject to limited research on fear in comparison to western european and north american cities (hummelsheim, hirtenlehner, jackson, & oberwittler, ). recent findings have denounced stockholm as a place where high rates of sexual violence and place where are recorded and where an increasingly high percentage of the female population avoid going out in the evening (eurostat: statistical office of the european communities, ; brÅ, ). learning from this, the afore- mentioned limited research proves problematic and justifies further study. it is also in sweden where the #metoo movement has had a major media impact (e.g., aftonbladet, ). for these reasons, the study first explores levels of fear and women’s characteristics in stockholm using cross-tables. then, regression models are used to assess the impact of women’s fear of crime on their behaviour, controlling for individual characteristics. the structure of this article is as follows. first, the relevant literature on perceived safety and the main important aspects that may affect fear are discussed, followed by the hypotheses. the case study and methodology are then presented, followed by a discussion of results. the article concludes with commentary on the implications for both research and practice. . fear of crime at individual level: theory and hypotheses . nature of fear of crime given that the emotional and physical reactions to crime are unique to each individual, the concept of fear of crime has inherited a diverse range of definitions which pain ( ) argues acts as a limitation in comparative studies. empirical results collated from surveys on fear of crime are highly varied, given that in some cases, they do not access the same underlying construct (hale, ; lorenc et al., ). fear of crime suffers from conceptual confusion and hence, researchers need to develop a better, more united conceptual understanding (yin, ; jackson, ; semmens, ; de donder, ). for this reason, we emphasise that the most successful definitions are those that appreciate the way in which fear of crime continuously acts to constrain activities in everyday life. contributing to pivotal ongoing research on the conceptualisation of fear of crime, this article will employ gordon and riger’s ( , p. ) definition of fear of crime as a “sense that one must always be on guard, vigilant and alert”. the attention of this research will be confined to those women who express the highest fear of crime owing to the fact that the consequences of their perception of safety are the most serious and restrictive in their everyday life (stanko, ; henderson & bialeschki, ; may et al., ). nevertheless, of great concern is the increased realisation that fear of crime’s extent and con- sequences are far from evenly distributed. amongst current surveys, the finding that women report a higher fear of crime than men is consistent (valentine, ; pain, ; tjaden & thoennes, ). this is in part believed to be due to their fear of sexual violence and harassment, a phenomenon that a. yates and v. ceccato ferraro ( ) refers to as the “shadow of sexual assault”. however, it is essential to refrain from stereotyping all females as equally fearful. how a woman perceives her safety is not a sole function of her gender and a plethora of factors ranging from age, ethnic background, relationship status, or any previous personal experiences (gordon & riger, ; stanko, ; pain, ; ceccato, ); but her safety is embedded in a network of moral political geographies, that involves old and newer types of fears (alexander & pain, ; pain & smith, ). previous research has most commonly examined the relationship between fear of crime and individual-level characteristics such as gender and age (warr, : ferraro & la grange, ). within these studies, it is reported that those who declare feeling the most unsafe – women and elderly – were less likely in reality to become a victim. this phenomenon has been referred to as the “vulnerability perspective” whereby individuals who understand themselves to be at a greater physical disadvantage when facing a threat consequently report a higher fear of crime (scarborough, like- haislip, novak, lucas, & alarid, ). the vulnerability perspective is commonly used to explain the relationships between particular demographic characteristics and heightened fear of crime. significant among these demographic characteristics are gender and age and to a lesser degree, relationship status and ethnic background (ethnic minorities, for example, feeling more fearful than the rest of population) (scarborough et al., ). gender status – lgbtqi – is also recognised as an important factor in defining different levels of fear given varied levels of victimisation (ceccato & loukaitou-sideris, in press). associated with relationship status is the concept of “altruistic fear” (warr, ). this refers to where an individual may fear that a person other than themselves will be a victim of crime. this notion can hence be applied to understand why individuals who are married and/or with children report an elevated fear of crime. based on past research, it can be hypothesised that older women, married with children or grandchildren and of immigrant background are likely to be the most fearful (warr, ; ferraro & la grange, ; scarborough et al., ) irrespective of the type of individual characteristics studied, former studies have tended to superficially treat these aspects of an individual’s social identity as separate and distinct. for this reason, we shall now draw on crenshaw’s ( ) concept of intersectionality. since its emergence in the black feminist movement, intersectionality has been used in feminist research on fear of crime to investigate how different aspects of social identity work together in distinct ways to determine the nature and geography of fear (day, ; pain, ; zhao, ). this reiterates the crucial point that neither a person’s gender, race nor class, for example, can explain fear of crime alone (pain, ; lewis, ). despite its evident potential in research on fear of crime, its increased usage in feminist research is matched with a rising number of critiques that must be addressed. one criticism targets the “identities” examined in intersectional analysis. zhao ( ) critiques the limited number of “identities” invoked in classic intersectional analyses. to develop the analytical potential of intersectionality, she maintains the paradigm must be open to development and thus, include new categories alongside the conventional “race”, “gender” and “class” debate. learning from theories of intersectionality (crenshaw, ; davis, ), we must understand how an indivi- dual’s perception of crime is a function of a complex interplay of individual and area-level factors. ortega and myles ( ), for example, report how elderly females report a higher fear of crime than elderly males. however, the fear of elderly african american women is far higher than that of elderly white males and females (ortega & myles, , in the swedish context, see ceccato & bamzar, ). similarly, skogan and maxfield ( ) discuss how lower-income ethnic minorities living in urban areas report higher feelings of unsafety than those living in rural communities (in sweden, see ceccato, ). learning from the results of previous studies, it is evident that intersections between demographic characteristics and spatialities must be considered. . spatial mobilities and fear research indicates that women are more fearful in public than private space. this proves somewhat paradoxical given most attacks against women occur in the domestic sphere by individuals known international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice to them (koskela & pain, ). this spatial paradox is the result of a long-standing gender division of space whereby women learn to understand public space as exclusively masculine whilst the home is perceived as a feminine “safe haven” (valentine, ). in the public realm, women attach fears to specific environments at both micro-scale, such as high-rise environments (newman, ; gifford, ) public transport nodes (ceccato, ; uittenbogaard, ), or retail environments (ceccato & tcacencu, ), and macro scale – entire neighbourhoods and entire areas (brunton-smith & jackson, ). in response to their fears, women may avoid particular spaces or neighbourhoods to reduce their risk of potential victimisation (stanko, ). they understand themselves at risk due to poor lighting and presence of “nooks and crannies” (crowe, , p. ) that restrict their ability to survey the environment for potential threats and increase the possibility of a potential perpetrator to attack unnoticed (valentine, ; hale, ). it is important to review the relationship between fear of crime and the physical and social conditions of the local neighbourhood (sampson, ). this may explain why women may report a higher fear of crime in some neighbourhoods. looking at the physical conditions of the neighbourhood, one must draw upon kelling and wilson ( ) broken window theory. visual signs of disorder such as graffiti, public drunkenness, or litter indicate to potential perpetrators that locals are unresponsive to misconduct in the neighbourhood, potentially lacking the social cohesion needed to prevent any crime. socially integrated neighbourhoods generate self-help networks and support are generally understood to alleviate an individual’s fear of crime, as they feel more confident in their ability to cope with potential risks (valentine, ). based on this, it is anticipated that those who are more fearful live in neighbourhoods with limited social cohesion and evidence of physical incivilities. that being said, however, some research has questioned the validity of these findings, emphasising the presence of strong social bonds in run-down neighbourhoods and weak social bonds in gated communities (valentine, ; wacquant, ). in response to this mixed picture, this study will thus contribute to ongoing research investigating the relationship between social contacts and physical visual cues in the neighbourhood environment. whilst the physical conditions of neighbourhoods are predominantly understood and analysed at a local scale, the aforementioned social factors operate at a much broader scale, associated with wider processes. one example of this is the process of “othering” (sandercock, ; lemanski, ). fuelled by the media (castell, ) and the police (palidda, ), individuals’ fears at local scale are often closely tied to their wider fears of encountering and living in close proximity to individuals of different ethnic backgrounds. . fear and its effects on behaviour those individuals who report to be the most fearful are the most likely to change and adapt how they move in space. at this point, it is important to draw upon jackson and gray ( ) concept of functional and dysfunctional fear. in some cases, place-time avoidance – including the aforemen- tioned – should be perceived positively as they are in fact “functional” (gray, jackson, & farrall, ). by that, it is meant that their actions successfully reduce both their fears and likelihood of victimisation without negatively affecting their quality of life. in some cases, fear becomes the main motivation for them to take action by supporting activities that make crime and victimisation more difficult to occur, such as participating in night patrols or neighbourhood watch schemes (gray, jackson, & farrall, ). on the other hand, for some, their fears do not solely manifest in a restricted use of public space but in self-confinement, making them “prisoners in their own homes” (henderson & bialeschki, , p. ). in this case, this is a clear example of what jackson and gray ( ) refer to as “dysfunctional fear” whereby their fears reduce their quality of life. what thus emerges from the literature is that fear of crime is a function of a complex interplay of factors at various scales. what is less clear, however, is what these dimensions precisely are, and how they intersect. this study will therefore build on current studies that investigate the relationship between fear of crime and individual and area-level characteristics. however, the attention of this research will be almost exclusively focused on women and those who perceive themselves to be very a. yates and v. ceccato unsafe given the consequences of their perception of safety can be the most restrictive and detrimental (stanko, ; henderson & bialeschki, ). influenced by previous research on fear of crime and its dimensions, we have proposed the following hypotheses: ( ) women vary in their expression of fear, with some expressing fear more than others. informed by an intersectional framework (crenshaw, ; davis, ), the women who declare themselves to be the most fearful exhibit particular individual characteristics that are intertwined with one other. ( ) the women who report to be the most fearful are the most likely to adapt their behaviour such as restricting their mobility in public space (stanko, ; henderson & bialeschki, ; jackson & gray, ) ( ) women who report to be the most fearful are the most likely to convert their concerns into constructive action (jackson & gray, ) . framing the case study . the study area the study area is stockholm municipality, the capital of sweden. the attention of this study is confined to the municipality, which covers an area of km and has a total population of , . it is an archipelago that is well connected in terms of infrastructure in the form of bridges, roads, subways, tram, commuting trains and buses. the municipality performs well in measures of well-being in comparison to other capital cities in terms of health, income and wealth, jobs and earnings, housing, education and safety (stockholm stad, a). on average, the percentage of residents who are non-swedish nationals is % (stockholm stad, a). however, in its peripheral suburbs, this figure rests at – %. in these suburbs, general unemployment rates are times higher and average income is times lower than in comparison to the rest of the city (stockholm stad, a). like many other european cities, stockholm is thus affected by social, economic and spatial segregation. this affects the declared perceived safety and the consequently the housing market (ceccato & wilhelmsson, , ). more significantly for this study however, according to eurostat ( ), is that % of the population agreed or somewhat agreed that their neighbourhood was safe. high percentages were also recorded in other scandinavian capitals. in non-nordic capitals, around % of the population on average declared feeling safe in their neighbourhood. the lowest levels were reported in greek, italian and bulgarian cities where the percentage of the population who reported feeling safe dropped below %. in sweden overall, the proportion of women that declare feeling unsafe is %, which can be compared with % of the men. women also avoiding going out to a much greater extent than men; % of the women in the population avoid going out alone late in the evening in their residential area because of fear of being attacked. the corresponding figure for men is %. the proportion of those who declared feeling unsafe is particularly large among the youngest and oldest women in the survey; among men, on the other hand, there are significantly smaller differences between the age groups (brÅ, ). den nationella trygghets undersökning: om utsatthet, otrygghet och förtroende ( : ) four out of five stockholm residents feel safe (stockholm stad, b). fear regarding going out into their own residential area in the evening is unevenly distributed across space and by types of residents. figure illustrates the overall percentage of respondents declaring feeling fearful in different districts. . data and methods the safety survey datasets from , and were imported into spss after a process of data cleaning (e.g., excluding missing values, outliers). the overall aim of each survey adheres with the international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice city council’s goal of creating a safer city, thus the data can be compared with results of previous surveys. data are collected through a mail survey with a random sample of registered domicile – years (not longitudinal). in , there was a random sample of , . , responded to the survey, giving a response rate of . %. this has been fairly constant since when the survey started. pre-analysis the three datasets were merged to form one large dataset that thus contained the survey question and responses from every year. there were two main reasons for doing this. first, the focus of our paper is confined to the most fearful women. if using cross-sectional data, of year only, these women would compose a very small proportion of the population. the three datasets were therefore collapsed into one to increase the data robustness. second, the focus of this paper is also confined to investigating the impact of fear on women’s behaviour, avoidance places, for instance. if using cross-sectional data, of year only, the limited data would make difficult to discuss the potential variety of types of places that this group of women avoid. whilst we do not wish to denigrate the importance of considering the temporal dimensions of women’s fear, this aspect is outside the scope of this study and our respective focus on the spatiality of women’s fear. due to some differences between each survey’s format, each dataset was reorganised to ensure that the survey questions and their respective responses were aligned with one another. for example, perceived safety in one’s residential area was originally categorised on a scale from to , from “very safe” to “very unsafe” (how secure or insecure do you feel collectively in your neighbourhood?). since the focus of this research is predominantly confined to women who report figure . stockholm by respondents who declare feeling fearful in the neighbourhood (%). data source: stockholm safety survey, response rate is %. a. yates and v. ceccato to feel “very unsafe”, a dichotomous variable was generated that split responses between , , , (safe) and (very unsafe). ten other variables were similarly transformed to improve analysis (see appendix table a ). they were transformed to produce fewer but broader categories. data points with missing values were filtered out for the analysis. cross-tabulation using chi-square tests were then used to generate comparisons between distributions of two or more variables, for example, the difference between men and women in terms of their fear of crime. before investigating the common attributes shared by women who reported to feel most unsafe, women’s and men’s fear of crime were first compared on the basis of results collected from the safety survey in , , and (section . ). analysis using cross- tabulation thus in part investigated the strength of relationship between women who reported to feel very unsafe compared to the remaining female participants in terms of their individual characteristics: age, relationship status, number of children, ethnic background and whether they had been previously victimised. in order to evaluate hypotheses of variables in contingency tables, the chi-square test was used or, in the case of small expected frequencies, fisher’s exact test. the pearson correlation coefficient was used in order to test independence between variables after some basic descriptive data analysis to identify remaining outliers and missing data. it must be appre- ciated that cross-tabulation does not indicate causality. therefore, to test hypotheses and , we modelled women’s fear and behaviour using binary logistic regression. modelling women’s fear three sets of models were applied: the first model assessed the nature of women’s fear. the dependent variable y is (a) women who declared most fearful ( = yes, very unsafe, often unsafe, no = ). the second model tests whether fear affects behaviour, namely through place avoidance (table ). the dependent variable y indicates whether they engage in avoidance behaviour ( = yes, keep away from certain places/streets, using the alternatives: always, often, do not go out fear of being a crime victim), among most fearful women and among (b) all unsafe women, no = ). the third model tests functional fear, for instance, expressing a pro-active behaviour such as asking help from neighbours to watching out their homes (table ). the dependent variable y indicates whether they engage in pro-active behaviour ( = yes, we have neighbours looking out for the residence when we are absent, among (a) most fearful women and (b) all unsafe women, no = ). . results . . gendered fear and the most fearful women consistently reported a higher fear of crime than men (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). whilst % of men respondents declared feeling “unsafe” in their neighbourhood, the figure stood at . % amongst women. this difference is fairly stable in all years. although women declare feeling more fearful than men, they are far from being a homogenous group. among them, % felt very safe, . % felt safe, . % felt quite unsafe, . % felt unsafe (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). however, the attention of this article is confined to the most fearful women which represents . % of all women. below we discuss women’s profile in terms of safety perceptions. amongst women who reported to feel “very unsafe”, most female respondents tended to be single (χ ( , n = , ) = . , p < . ) with children (χ ( , n = , ) = . , p < . ). the most fearful women tended to have between to children. concerning their ethnic back- ground, the vast majority were not born in sweden (χ ( , n = , ) = . , p < . ). finally, most female respondents who declared feeling “very unsafe” had been a victim of crime in the last months (χ ( , n = , ) = . , p < . ). in summary, women who reported to feel the international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice most unsafe were below the age of years old, with – children, non-native born (born in a country other than sweden) and had been previously victimised. . women’s fear, neighbourhood context and effects on behaviour: exploratory analysis women who report to be “most unsafe” are also the most likely to adapt and restrict their mobility in public space. findings show that . % of women who declared feeling “very unsafe” in their neighbourhood reported that if the opportunity arose, they would move away from their current residential area due to the perceived extent of crime. only . % of the remaining sample felt the same (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). in order to better understand women’s fear of crime, the level of social cohesion in respondents’ neighbourhoods was also investigated. compared to the rest of the women in the sample, women who felt unsafe tended to have a more negative picture about neighbours and their own neighbourhoods. findings show that although . % of respondents felt that neighbours helped each other, only . % of women who declared feeling “very unsafe” witnessed neighbours supporting one other χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). in the same way, . % of female respondents who reported to feel “very unsafe” in their neighbourhood felt that they could trust people in their residential area, whereas, the figure stood at . % for the remaining population. they also tend to live in neighbourhoods where physical incivilities are present and where they are victimised by it. whilst . % of very fearful women observe some form of vandalism where they live, only . % of the remaining population had been a victim of vandalism (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). fear is not homogeneously distributed across the neighbourhood and appears to be triggered by certain environmental features in the neighbourhoods. amongst women that declared feeling most fearful, % worried about spending time close to the metro or train station, however, only . % of the remaining population felt the same (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). similarily, . % of women who reported to feel “very unsafe” overall, expressed worry when walking home from/to the aforementioned metro and/or train station, whilst only . % of the remaining population felt unsafe (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). what emerges is a stark difference between how very fearful women and the remaining population express their safety in public places, in particular transport nodes and on the way/from to them. although the most fearful women express higher levels of fear of crime in their neighbourhood than the rest of women in the sample, it is still unclear whether and to what extent this fear affects their mobility through public space. however, results from the cross tables and chi-square analysis indicate significant associations between an indivi- dual’s perceived safety and their mobility in their neighbourhood. amongst those women who reported feeling “very unsafe” in their neighbourhood, . % reported that they actively kept away from certain places and streets to avoid being exposed to any violence or threats (χ ( , n = , ) = , , p < . ). there are indications that women who report these events are the most fearful and are more likely to convert these concerns into action. amongst those who report being the most fearful, , % among those who declare being most fearful ask neighbours to keep an eye on their property (and vice-versa), against , % of the rest of female sample. in the next section we identify both individual and neighbourhood level factors affecting women’s fear. then, we assess whether fear helps explain women’s behaviour controlling for individual and neighbourhood factors. . modelling fear, neighbourhood context and effects on behaviour: confirmatory analysis table shows the modelling results of the binary logistic regression for two groups of women: (a) most fearful women (composed of very unsafe, often unsafe, or those who do not go out in fear of being a crime victim) and (b) all unsafe women (composed of women who declared that they felt sometimes unsafe or expressed some degree of fear plus (a)). this means that (b) it is constituted by a. yates and v. ceccato all women in the sample who declared some level of fear, from mild to severe levels of fear, including (a). . . . individual characteristics the most fearful group of respondents tend to be women born abroad. they also tend to live by themselves, were crime victims (in the last months) and are older than the rest of the sample. for example, if the person was born abroad, her odds of belonging to the most fearful group of women increases by , %. age affects those women who express more moderate levels of fear. in terms of age, for every unit in increase in age, the model estimates show an increase by less than % for the most fearful women and , % for all unsafe women (the odds ratio is . for an additional year in table . results of binary logistic regression, y = (a) women who declared most fearful (very unsafe, often unsafe, do not go out fear of being a crime victim), (b) all unsafe women. (a) most fearful women (b) all unsafe women coef. st. dev. exp(b) coef. st. dev. exp(b) individual attributes age . *** . . . *** . , alone . *** . . . * . . family (number of children) . . . − . . . born abroad . *** . . − . *** . . victimised last months . *** . . − . . . social environmental attributes wish to move out, if could . *** . . . * . . chat with neighbours − . * . . − . ** . . exchange favours neighbourhood . . . − . *** . . neighbours get along well . *** . . . . . recognise people neighbourhood − . ** . . − . . . constant − . *** . . . . . nagelkerke r square . . cox & snell r square . . sig. , . , . * significant at % level; ** significant at % level and *** significant at % level. table . results of binary logistic regression, y = (a) avoidance behaviour (keep away from certain places/streets (always, often, do not go out fear of being a crime victim), among most fearful women and among (b) all unsafe women. place avoidance: dysfunctional fear (a) most fearful women (b) all unsafe women coef. st. dev. exp(b) coef. st. dev. exp(b) individual attributes age . . , . *** . . alone . . , . *** . . family (number of children) . . , . . . born abroad . . , − . *** . . victimised last months . *** . , − . *** . . fear in the neighbourhood . . , − . . . social environmental attributes wish to move out, if could . *** . . . *** . . chat with neighbours − . *** . . − . *** . . exchange favours neighbourhood − . . . − . *** . . neighbours get along well . . . . . . recognise people neighbourhood . . . − . *** . . constant − . . . − . *** . . nagelkerke r square . . cox & snell r square . . sig. , , , international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice age). after controlling for all variables in the model, if the person lives alone, her odds of being fearful increases by . % among the most fearful women (a) in comparison to only . % for the remaining unsafe women (b). . . . the neighbourhood context the neighbourhood context is also relevant to explain differences in declared fear among female respondents; in particular for the most fearful women ( out of variables are significant). among the most fearful women, they rarely exchange favours or chat and struggle to recognise people in their own neighbourhood. unexpectedly, controlling for all other variables in the model, for every extra neighbour that they along with, the odds of them declaring being fearful increases by %. for both groups, fear levels are associated with the desire to moving away from where they currently reside, that is, if they had the economical resources. there are indications that among those women who declare a moderate level of fear, the fact that they do not exchange favours with neighbours negatively affects their perceived safety. however, among the most fearful women, their declared levels of fear are not affected by whether they exchange favours with neighbours. . . . fear impact on behaviour: dysfunctional and functional fear table shows results of the binary logistic regression that after controlling for other variables, women’s fear in the neighbourhood does not lead to place avoidance. the dependent variable in this model is an indicator of women’s place avoidance in the neighbourhood (keep women away from certain places/streets, always, often, or do not go out fear of being a crime victim), while the covariate is fear in the neighbourhood among (a) most fearful women and among (b) all unsafe women. place avoidance is triggered by poor social contact with neighbours rather than actual fear of crime experienced in the neighbourhood. those who avoid places and declare some degree of fear (b), exhibit signs of poor contact with neighbours (do not recognise people in the neighbourhood, do not chat or change favours with neighbours) and wish to move out from the area if possible. yet, neighbourhood context variables are more important to explain place avoidance for the overall table . results of binary logistic regression, y = (a) we ask neighbours to look out for the residence when we are absent, among (a) most fearful women and (b) all unsafe women. ask neighbours to look out for the residence: functional fear (a) most fearful women (b) all unsafe women coef. st. dev. exp(b) coef. st. dev. exp(b) individual attributes age . *** . . − . *** . . alone − . . . − . *** . . family (number of children) . *** . . . *** . . born abroad − . *** . . − . *** . . victimised last months . ** . . − . *** . . fear in the neighbourhood . , . − . *** . . social environmental attributes wish to move out, if could . . . . *** . . chat with neighbours − . . . − . *** . . exchange favours neighbourhood − . . . − . *** . . neighbours get along well − . *** . . − . *** . . recognise people neighbourhood − . . . − . * . . constant − . . . . . . nagelkerke r square . . cox & snell r square . . sig , , , * significant at % level; ** significant at % level and *** significant at % level. total sample = , . a. yates and v. ceccato female population than amongst those who fear the most (only two neighbourhood variables came out significant for most fearful women (a) and four out of five for all unsafe women (b)). for the overall sample, being a victim of crime sin the last months appeared to not have an impact on whether they showed signs of dysfunctional fear. however, for the most fearful group of women, victimisation leads to place avoidance. this is the only individual factor affecting dysfunc- tional fear among the most fearful women (table ). age, ethnic background and relationship status (family) are significant individual factors that help explain the variation of dysfunctional fear among women declaring some degree of fear (b). this group tend to be native swedes, older, live by themselves and non-crime victims. there are clear differences between the most fearful women and the unsafe women with regards expressions of functional fear. asking neighbours to look out for ones’ residence when one is absent (as a measure of agency against of crime) only happens in neighbourhoods by women with low or moderate levels of fear (table (b)). for the most fearful women, fear experienced in the neigh- bourhood does not lead to action or engagement, contrary to what was initially expected in hypothesis . here again, poor social contact in the neighbourhood may lead to precautionary behaviour, in particular amongst those that show low or moderate fear levels. overall, women ask neighbours to look out for their residence when they are absent, most often when they are young individuals with families, than the most fearful ones. they are often swedish born that have not being victimised by crime and do not show high levels of fear where they live, even when they would prefer to live somewhere else and experience poor levels of social cohesion. note that all variables that indicate social interaction in neighbourhoods show a negative sign (table ), which indicates the overall low levels of social engagement in precautionary measures. amongst those who fear the most, being older, having kids and experiencing victimisation increases the odds of showing functional fear when compared with the rest of women. asking neighbours to look after their homes is a decision influenced not only by women’s individual characteristics but also by how one feels about their neighbourhood. however, this is more likely to happen among women who declare low or moderate degree of fear than for those categorised as most fearful ones. finally, individual characteristics such as victimisation and age play a bigger role in determining functional fear than the neighbourhood social characteristics tested in this study. . discussion of results it is no surprise that fear of crime is gendered. our findings indicate that women reported a higher fear of crime than men. this result resonates with previous research (e.g., valentine, ; ferraro, ; lee, ; macassa et al., ) and acts to justify this paper’s specific focus on women’s fear of crime that aims to investigate fear as a function of multiple individual characteristics and neighbourhood contexts. the implications of findings for future research and policies will be discussed in the conclusion. informed by intersectional analysis, our exploratory analysis indicates that the most fearful women were relatively young, single with children, from an immigrant background and had been previously victimised. drawing on warr’s ( ) notion of “altruistic fear”, women with children tend to report a higher fear of crime than women without children, as they fear for not only their own safety but for the safety of their children. albeit individual characteristics are a significant determinant of a women’s perception of safety, it is of equal importance to review the relationship between women’s fear of crime and their respective neighbourhood (sampson, ). confirming what is reported in mainstream literature, women who feel most unsafe tend to live in neighbourhoods that show signs of both physical and social incivilities, poor social contact, poor social cohesion and/or low collective efficacy (kelling & wilson, ; sampson, ). when modelling fear as a function of individual and neighbourhoods characteristics, the picture becomes more mixed. although most individual characteristics remain important in explaining fear international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice of crime among all types of women, the neighbourhood context is the most relevant when explaining variation of declared fear among the most fearful women ( out of variables are significant) than for those with moderate fear. this thus reiterates the importance of including neighbourhood variables in future intersectional research investigating women’s fear of crime. nevertheless, whilst this model does not include socio-economic status, one can hypothesise that the most fearful may live in segregated areas, often suffering from social and economic deprivation. in order to gain a better insight into the spatiality of their fear of crime, our level of analysis must shift from a broad scale to a finer scale. within the neighbourhood, transport nodes and the way to/ from them are a point of concern when examining women’s victimisation and transit fear (ceccato, ; uittenbogaard, ; ceccato & loukaitou-sideris, in press). the initial hypothesis that women’s fear of crime would lead to place avoidance (jackson & gray, ) does not hold in this case (table ). for the most fearful group of women, previous victimisation leads to place avoidance but not fear of crime. moreover, amongst women who are less fearful, poor social interactions (such as not recognising people in their neighbourhood, having poor contact with neighbours, not exchanging favours) in the neighbourhood increases their odds of exhibiting signs of dysfunctional fear, including place avoidance behaviour. similarly, fear does not affect women’s agency by promoting constructive action (indicated here by asking neighbours to look for their homes while absent). this finding also refutes hypothesis that expected some expression of functional fear. more interestingly, not being able to recognise people in one’s neighbourhood – an indicator of poor social bonds – is a strong predictor of functional and dysfunctional fear. the mechanisms linking local social bonds and women’s precautionary behaviour are difficult to disentangle using our current modelling strategy. however, we can argue that whilst poor social bonds help explain variation in women’s precautionary measures, it is possibly fear of crime (that turned out non- significant) which indirectly affects women’s behaviour. as suggested by sandercock ( ), fear of crime can translate into “fear of others” which leads to poor social bonds that often causes animosity between individuals and gives expression to the “fear of the unknown”. rapid changes in an area especially with rapid population inflow – in the form of waves of different types of immigration – are argued to have an impact on residents’ sense of safety, regardless of whether crime levels change or not (hunter, krannich, & smith, ). the perceived social distance between different types of residents, in this case, because of their ethnic background, can be maximised by people themselves. this can give expression to us-them feelings (as part of othering process, namely when one transforms the difference into otherness). further research needs to investigate the relationship between the community changes (expressed by changes in their environment), quality of social interactions and women’s functional and dysfunctional fear regardless of its levels. . conclusions and recommendations this study sought to examine the nature and the spatial dimensions of women’s fear of crime. findings show that the most fearful women share a number of similarities: they are often previously victimised and born abroad. whilst elderly women are commonly recognised as more fearful than younger individuals, attention should turn to equally consider the fearful, young, single mother, whose fears are often lesser known and deemed less worthy of intervention. further research could consider intersections between age, family structure and socio-economic status to compare how fears operate for differently situated young women. findings also show that the most fearful women were most likely to restrict their use of public space through avoiding certain places, confirming what has been previously established in previous research (stanko, ; henderson & bialeschki, ; bastomski & smith, ). however, contrary to what was initially expected, for the most fearful women, fear experienced in the neighbourhood does not lead to place avoidance or acts of functional fear (e.g., asking neighbours to look out for ones’ residence when one is absent). instead, poor social contacts at neighbourhood level are more closely associated with behaviour changes. these results have important theoretical implications. a. yates and v. ceccato fear should not be understood as an enduring, fixed trait that is inherently gendered but rather a phenomenon that every individual can experience to a varying degree at different points in their life (fattah & sacco, ). some of them are related to individual characteristics and others intertwined with the environment that individuals are exposed to. this calls for a holistic approach to safety that encompasses an understanding of the intersectionality of victimisation and fear, in a frame that goes beyond age or gender and look for intersections of an individual’s characteristics and environmental contexts. through implementing a combination of individual and neighbour- hood policies, we can hope women’s fear of crime can be better tackled, and a more inclusive and equitable use of public space can be achieved. in practice this demands, for instance, mobility policies that are non-gender neutral, sensitive to the mobility needs of individuals and that encompasses a whole journey perspective to women’s safety. another important theoretical contribution is the fact it is difficult to disentangle fear of crime (as a measure of safety) from closely related theoretical constructs. multifaceted aspects that go beyond individual characteristics and neighbourhood conditions determine what causes fear. the fact that most fearful women seem to respond (by expressing functional and dysfunctional fear) to the quality of the social environment but not to fear is an example of such complexity. one could speculate that poor contact with neighbours leads to fear of others and in turn, place avoidance. however, the scope of this paper does not permit us to make any further speculations on the direction and relationship between these factors. this thus emerges as a limitation that could be further explored in future research. future studies should explore new strategies when modelling women’s fear in relation to individual and environmental characteristics where women live, perhaps using, for instance, multi- level models and testing theoretically driven interaction factors. moreover, the analytical framework could have involved other control variables, such as socio-economic conditions of respondents and the temporal dimension of fear of crime. another limitation of this study is that it has focused on women’s victimisation only, and therefore neglected fear among men and those who are potentially more at target from hate crimes such as those belonging to lgbtqi community. data permitting, future research should aim at gathering evidence about fear gay and transgendered persons, for example – a group that are often targets of harassment and sexual violence (gekoski et al., ). finally, learning from ditton, chadee, and khan ( ), the data utilised and analysed in this paper could be combined with qualitative methods in future research. combining these methods is believed to better uncover and identify clear explanations for perceptions of safety. this in turn would contribute to ongoing discussions regarding the conceptualisation of fear of crime, com- monly identified as an issue in contemporary literature. despite these limitations, this article has contributed to a better understanding of women’s fear of crime in a scandinavian capital. unlike previous research, which has tended to solely concentrate on one dimension (often individual factors), this article has attempted to explore women’s fear of crime by investigating and mapping its various dimensions. furthermore, this research has also provided a unique perspective on women’s fear of crime by focusing on women who reported to feel the most unsafe. the fact that women’s safety is closely tied to the quality of social interactions at the neighbourhood level lead us to think about the need of social programs or schemes that focus on establishing and building strong social ties. this, in turn, can alleviate women’s fears, maximise their agency and improve their navigation through public space. acknowledgments this research was undertaken while anna yates was a visiting fellow at the department of urban planning and the built environment, royal institute of technology, sweden. the authors would like to express their thanks to nicklas roth from stockholm municipality for providing the dataset used in this analysis. international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice notes on contributors anna yates is a geography phd student at the university of newcastle. she completed her undergraduate degree in geography at the university of cambridge and is currently investigating women's fear of crime in stockholm as part of her phd. vania ceccato is a professor at the department of urban planning and environment, school of architecture and the built environment, kth royal institute of technology, stockholm, sweden. references aftonbladet. 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( a). statistisk årsbok för stockholm.retrieved from http://statistik.stockholm.se/attachments/ article/ /statistisk% %c % %c %a rsbok% f%c % %c %b r% stockholm% .pdf international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice https://www.stockholm.se/trygghetsmatningen http://statistik.stockholm.se/attachments/article/ /statistisk% %c % %c %a rsbok% f%c % %c %b r% stockholm% .pdf http://statistik.stockholm.se/attachments/article/ /statistisk% %c % %c %a rsbok% f%c % %c %b r% stockholm% .pdf tjaden, p., & thoennes, n. ( ). extent, nature, and consequences of rape victimization: findings from the national violence against women survey. washington, dc: u.s. department of justice. uittenbogaard, a. ( ). assessing guardianship opportunities at underground stations. security journal, , – . valentine, g. ( ). the geography of women’s fear. area, , – . valentine, g. ( ). women’s fear and the design of public space. built environment, , – . valentine, g. ( ). images of danger: women’s sources of information about the spatial distribution of male violence. area, , – . wacquant, l. ( ). urban outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality. cambridge, uk: polity press. warr, m. ( ). fear of rape among urban women. social problems, , – . whitzman, c. ( ). stuck at the front door: gender, fear of crime and the challenge of creating safer space. environment and planning a, , – . yin, p. ( ). fear of crime among the elderly: some issues and suggestions. social problems, , – . zhao, y. ( ). intersectionality, the production of difference and norwegian transnational adoptees’ identity work. nora - nordic journal of feminist and gender research, , – . appendix table a . dataset of the study. data type variable description unit dependent variable perceived safety how secure do you feel in your neighbourhood? categorical individual attributes gender gender of the respondent categorical age age of the respondent categorical relationship status relationship status of the respondent categorical children how many the children the respondent has categorical ethnic background ethnic background of the respondent binary previous incidents of victimisation whether the respondent has been a victim of crime over the last year binary spatial dimensions satisfaction with neighbourhood if you could choose freely, would you move from your current neighbourhood? categorical social cohesion in neighbourhood agree or not with the following statements about your neighbourhood categorical public transport nodes perception of safety at/on the way home from the metro station categorical perceived safety in the residential area if you go out alone late in the area you live, do you feel safe or unsafe, or do you worry about being exposed to a crime of any kind in your neighbourhood categorical functional and dysfunctional fear whether the respondents avoid places. categorical a. yates and v. ceccato 	abstract 	 . introduction 	 . fear of crime at individual level: theory and hypotheses 	 . nature of fear of crime 	 . spatial mobilities and fear 	 . fear and its effects on behaviour 	 . framing the case study 	 . the study area 	 . data and methods 	pre-analysis 	modelling women’s fear 	 . results 	 . . gendered fear and the most fearful 	 . women’s fear, neighbourhood context and effects on behaviour: exploratory analysis 	 . modelling fear, neighbourhood context and effects on behaviour: confirmatory analysis 	 . . . individual characteristics 	 . . . the neighbourhood context 	 . . . fear impact on behaviour: dysfunctional and functional fear 	 . discussion of results 	 . conclusions and recommendations 	acknowledgments 	notes on contributors 	references 	appendix news.pmd indian pediatrics volume __december , n e w s i n b r i e fn e w s i n b r i e fn e w s i n b r i e fn e w s i n b r i e fn e w s i n b r i e f sitting is the new smoking there is emerging data that prolonged sitting can increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, musculoskeletal diseases and early death. the first inkling that sitting can be injurious came when it was noticed that london bus drivers were twice as likely to have myocardial infarction as their colleagues who were conductors. a recent systematic review showed that the relative risk for mortality due to a sedentary lifestyle was high (rr . - . ), and was just lower than the relative risk of mortality due to smoking (rr= . ). an analysis of six studies seems to suggest that prolonged sitting more than minutes at a time and overall more than hours of daily sitting can be injurious to health. there is a linear relationship between type- diabetes and sitting time, suggesting that any reduction of sitting time will reduce the risk of diabetes. a recent study (the smart study – stand more at work) conducted on employees of the national health services in the uk has tried to evaluate whether certain interventions can reduce prolonged sitting times. participants received a height- adjustable work-station, coaching sessions and motivational aids. duration of sitting was monitored using an accelerometer taped to their thigh. they were encouraged to change from sitting to standing posture after every minutes of continuous sitting. evaluation revealed a reduction of sitting times by up to minutes by one year, better work performance and mood, lower anxiety, and less musculoskeletal pains. office workers, including doctors, spend upto - % of their time in sitting posture. the writing on the wall is clear. we must break up our sitting times with intermittent standing, walking or other actions to improve long-term health. (bmj. ; :k ) zika virus in india as of early november , out of samples tested for the zika virus in rajasthan, have tested positive with a little more than in pregnant women. most patients were asymptomatic. around % have no specific symptoms of fever, headache, rash, muscle and joint pains, or conjunctivitis. zika virus was first isolated from a monkey in the zika forests of uganda in . there was a huge epidemic in central and south america in . it was then noticed that about % of infected pregnant women delivered babies with microcephaly. in , detailed studies in mice brain suggested that somewhere around , the virus mutated resulting in a single change of serine to aspargine (s ) in the viral polyprotein. this resulted in a strain that can infect and damage mouse and human neural progenitor cells. however, this has not been corroborated in further studies. a lancet study published in also identified another mutation a v to be linked to fetal microcephaly. the icmr team which has completed genetic studies in the virus currently isolated from jaipur has confirmed that the a v mutation is not present in the current indian strain; though, the s mutation is present. meanwhile efforts to contain the infection in jaipur and surrounding areas are continuing on a war footing, more than lakh households have been screened with teams deployed to identify and eliminate the aedes mosquito larvae. (the hindu october, the economic times october ) #metoo in medicine since october , the #metoo movement has swept the fields of cinema, politics, journalism and academia. in medicine, the most widely quoted figures came from a survey of clinicians/researchers in the us by reshma jagsi and colleagues. in this study, % of women reported having experienced sexual harassment as compared to % of men. a balanced discussion in the canadian medical association journal suggests that unprofessional behavior in medicine affects not just women but permeates the entire hierarchical structure. authors further stated that: “a work climate that enables bullying, harassment, discrimination and micro- aggressions can negatively affect a person’s health and career pathway.” another editorial in the nejm discusses the indirect consequences of the movement. consequent to all the media attention, some men in power in turn say they are afraid to be in mentoring relations with women. what will that mean? already women in leadership positions in medicine are few and far between. in the us, though nearly half of medical school graduates are women, only % of college deans are women. not only are there fewer women at the top, they earn less than men even after controlling for specialty, seniority, and number of work hours. they are less likely than men to have mentors who actively foster their careers and leave academic medicine at a higher rate than men. now efforts are being made to address these issues the article discusses several ways in which these tricky problems can be addressed with real-life examples. it concludes with some recommendations to improve gender equity such as transparency in compensation, encouraging mentorship, and providing flexibility in structuring career paths. 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f e f f f e> /suo <feff b e e e e e b c b e c f f d f b d e a c a f b f b a f a e c f e e e e d e a c f d e e c f d f b d e f e f c c a f e a c c a d d c c e> /sve <feff e e e e e e c c e e e f d c c b f d f b d e f d f c c f c c e e f b e f b d e e b d f b d e b e f e f f f e f e e> /enu (use these settings to create adobe pdf documents suitable for reliable viewing and printing of business documents. created pdf documents can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader . and later.) >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice why the west could not hear beale street: baldwin’s world-sense of female sexuality humanities article why the west could not hear beale street: baldwin’s world-sense of female sexuality amy yeboah department of afro american studies, howard university, washington, dc , usa; amy.yeboah@howard.edu received: july ; accepted: january ; published: january ���������� ������� abstract: while scholars have noted james baldwin’s revisionary and transformative literary approach to social constructions of race, class, gender, and crime, there has been very little conversation in that vein regarding if beale street could talk ( ). upon its publication, many critics issued negative reviews of the novel, failing to recognize how baldwin’s view of female sexuality both embraced notions of the body and constructs from an african-centered world-sense. using a range of theoretical resources from africana studies, this paper analyzes how moving beyond western frameworks regarding knowledge, sexual discourse, and behavior offers a new interpretation of baldwin’s aims that reclaims and re-imagines black sexual politics. keywords: sexuality; love; beauty; africa; black love; intimacy; spirituality; worldview; world sense; sex . introduction for centuries, literature has been a forum for not merely highlighting controversies and tensions over sexual politics and behavior in american society but furthering the conversation about these complex issues. yet, the experiences of people of african descent with respect to gender, sex, and sexuality, and particularly black women, have typically been unseen, unanalyzed, and untheorized (higginbotham ; hammonds ). a notable if often overlooked exception is james baldwin’s novel if beale street could talk. against the one-dimensional cultural backdrop of the s blaxploitation films featuring pimps, prostitutes, and street hustlers stooped in plots of sex, violence, and drugs, baldwin would have the temerity to publish a romance set in the “poor, black world of streets and stoops and store-front faith”, which he proclaimed to his brother david to be “the strangest novel [he had] ever written”—one that gives voice to the black female sexual experience from a distinctively non-eurocentric vantagepoint (baldwin ). multiple scholars acknowledge baldwin’s unique and transformative literary approach in grappling with the tensions surrounding the social constructions of race, class, and even law (gounard ; mcbride ; balfour and balfour ; miller ). however, little has been said about baldwin’s african-centered presentation and analyses of sex, sexuality, and black womanhood. critics that have commented on baldwin’s treatment have done so from an unreflective eurocentric perspective, one that privileges the black body over black beauty, focuses on black control over black freedom, and sees black sex rather than black intimacy. yet, with the surge of scholarship within the field of africana studies, the cultural and institutional recognition of the importance and diverse experiences of black women (encapsulated in the intersection of the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements), and even the recent film treatment of the novel by director, producer, and screenwriter berry jenkins, the time appears ripe to revisit baldwin and examine his approach. this essay analyzes the cultural tropes and rhetorical strategies baldwin uses to depict a modern africana sense of sexual philosophy, discourse, humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of and behavior. i argue if beale street could talk takes the reader on a journey through the voice and perspective of a black woman to reimagine sexual politics for people of african descent. . reception: a rejection of baldwin baldwin had not published a novel in five years when if beale street could talk emerged in , and many mainstream white reviewers of baldwin’s novel dismissed it out of hand. writing for the new york times, anatole broyard declared that regarding the experience of members of the african diaspora in america, baldwin had already “picked that particular bone clean” (broyard , p. ). he launched a full-throated assault against the novel, seeing only a text riddled with clichés wrapped around a “vehemently sentimental love story”: fonny and tish are planning to get married and move to the garbage-piled streets of the lower east side, when fonny is framed on a rape charge by a white racist policeman. while fonny fights off real rapists in “the unimaginable inferno” of a city prison, tish reveals that she is pregnant . . . her dual predicament–fonny in jail and the baby in her belly–sets everybody to moralizing. the most banal remarks are pregnant, too, with philosophical overtones . . . after visiting fonny in jail, tish hopes “that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass”. (broyard , p. ) broyard doesn’t stop his critique of the prose there, going on to observe that “tish talks as if love had alienated her from her normal speech patterns” and describing baldwin’s prose as “stale jazz”. his final verdict dismisses baldwin as “so dated”. (broyard , p. ) reviewers outside of america were equally unkind, with peter ackroyd complaining in the spectator about baldwin’s “mawkish” style, “cardboard” characters, and plot lines where “[w]hite policemen and spinsters are always very bad” (broyard , p. ). his complaints echo earlier reviews of baldwin’s novel tell me how long the train’s been gone, where critic mario puzo (of godfather fame) observed of that earlier effort that “[baldwin] has not been successful; this is a simpleminded, one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard characters..”. and described him as “not a true or ‘born’ novelist”, but instead just a race spokesman (puzo , p. ). ackroyd’s view of baldwin’s skills as a novelist are revealed by his unsubtle hesitancies: “i suppose” fonny being sent to jail adds “depth to their romance”; “apparently” baldwin’s vision of experience of black america “remains untarnished with the passing of his years”; his manner is fervour “(if fervour is an advantage)”; and so on (ackroyd , p. ). his critique of baldwin’s writing equally lays bare his westernized prejudices: baldwin fails because he uses “the same impassioned prose” as in earlier novels “as if” it were “the hallowed container of sacred meanings” (ackroyd , p. ). ackroyd’s review appears to recognize the inventive and destabilizing effect of baldwin’s choice of narrator when he remarks that “baldwin is a professional fugitive; he is always on the run . . . his final trick [is] he escapes from his own sex in if beale street could talk”, but he refuses to recognize baldwin’s choice as theoretically important, citing it as the “last straw” of a failed novelist (ackroyd , p. ). needless to say, the fact that baldwin’s story “disobeys the conventional laws of narrative” is not said with praise (ackroyd , p. ). overall, many reviewers considered if beale street could talk as a “flop” (nishikawa ). even fellow author joyce carol oates’s overall positive review did not escape from framing baldwin’s novel as a “very traditional celebration of love” whose prose contained no “tricks” and whose characters are portrayed simply as victims: “blacks constantly at the mercy of whites [who] have not even the psychological benefit of the black power and other radical movements to sustain them . . . ” (oates , p. ). yet, on my reading of the text, the novel’s contemporaneous critical reception was blind to baldwin’s intensions. there is nothing traditional about baldwin’s presentation of black love, his narrative style, nor his characterization of the female protagonist tish (and the central voice of the humanities , , of novel). reading these reviews, one would think that the novel was written by a rank amateur rather than an accomplished writer like baldwin—just another miserable love story about a pregnant black teenage girl and her unlawfully criminal black boyfriend. however, a closer look at reviews like broyard’s reveals the blinders and biases through which he and others read the novel. for example, instead of discussing the love story that forms the core of the narrative, the word “love” is strangely absent in his review, referred to just twice (and in scathing terms). instead, broyard’s take on the novel is replete with mention of words like jail, chains, pregnancy, baby, and even tish’s belly, consistently revealing a western framework that centralizes black bodies. such criticisms align with dorothy roberts’ ([ ] ) analyses of historical reproductive oppressive images and language used to infringe and criminalize black women’s bodies. as i will argue below, critics frame baldwin’s text using western standards that view bodies and sexual politics as sites of conflict, disharmony, and power relations. such lenses systemically misinterpret and devalue the views and behavior of black people and black writing about them. to counter such readings, this paper positions baldwin’s writing within an africana studies paradigm. methodologically coming from an african world-sense, this is a process of “tracing and re-tracing the african experience from its [long-view] origins in africa to the present” (carr ). like many black writers in the decade of the harlem renaissance and black arts movement, baldwin centers black thought, life, and experiences. through the prism of baldwin’s novel and specifically his protagonist tish, baldwin’s focus was not in narrating difference or sameness with the west, but i will argue, rather speaking about, with, and to a complex black experience. as a result, his approach challenges common assumptions grounded in western notions of a worldview and visualizations of the body, especially black women’s bodies being sites of control and distress. once re-examined, baldwin’s sexual politics in if beale street could talk reveals his writing as centering cultural and social norms about the black body and especially black women. this approach systematically connects back to an african world-sense. through the gaze of a black woman narrator, baldwin radically reconceptualizes what the love between tish and fonny might be in terms of invisible familiarities and silent symbolic representations. tish is brave, bold, loving, smart, and protective, unlike stereotypes of being a sexualized jezebel. despite growing up in the harsh conditions of new york city, her dialogue is heartfelt, metaphorical, poetic, and funny, not the overly vulgar, combative, and manipulative language of the street. although she grapples with being sexually assaulted and the historical legacy of slavery and racism within the criminal justice system, baldwin’s presentation of tish’ imagination is authentic, romantic, dramatic, and dynamic, making love the true hero against white supremacy. if read through this lens, upon reaching the end of baldwin’s novel, the reader is left with a radically african-centered world-sense of a black woman’s sexual experience. . philosophy: the world-sense of presence there are a number of sources where one might look to discover a historical understanding of the western worldview of the body. for instance, thomas laqueur’s making sex: body and gender from greeks to freud catalogues the numerous ways the western worldview encapsulates a view that biology is destiny ( ). from the outset, it was understood that “man is the measure of all things” and the body was determined (laqueur , p. ). bryan turner’s the body & society in would extend the conversation to observe that the body in the west is a “sign of the good life and an indicator of cultural capital” (turner , p. ). such views elevated the body into the realm of transcendental knowledge, rooted and grounded in the interplay of property, wealth, justice, religion, and marriage. women’s bodies, according to this outlook, are the primary mechanism through which one can view the political struggle over the economic, social, sexual, racial, and even technological understanding of what it is to be a woman. anna clark’s desire: a history of european sexuality would extend the the disciplinary term african studies in this context refers to the study of africans and african-descended communities. humanities , , of same central conversation about the body and control as it pertains to sexuality and desires in the west ( ). these works spell out the manifold ways in which information and understanding is encoded in the importance of the body, especially for women in a variety of somatic encounters. baldwin plainly rejected the western categories associated with the body, and in particular with how women’s bodies are constructed in the west. in a conversation with audre lorde in , baldwin said, we get confused with genders–you know, what the western notion of woman is, which is not necessarily what a woman is at all. it’s certainly not the african notion of what a woman is. or even the european notion of what a woman is. (lorde and baldwin , p. ) in baldwin’s publication of notes of a native son, baldwin also states, i love america more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, i insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. i think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. (baldwin , p. ) a closer look at his novel if beale street could talk reveals that baldwin opted for an outlook and moral center far more african than western. through the emergence of black studies (also known today as africana studies) as a discipline in the s, multiple scholars have offered useful theoretical lens from which to view baldwin’s challenge to the notion that a western worldview is the only way of understanding, and that the bodies of women are the primary site of contention for understanding their sexuality. for example, nigerian scholar oyèrónké oyěwùmí, in her the invention of women: making an african sense of western gender discourses, challenges western notions of “worldview”, a construct that privileges the biological visualization of the body (i.e., skin color, sex, gender, etc.) through a universal gaze. oyěwùmí suggests the term “world-sense” as a more inclusive way of describing the diverse forms of knowing beyond sight, especially for african people. in using yorúbá society as a model, oyěwùmí argues that the body is not the only basis for social classification and understanding. unlike in western cultures, in yorúbá society, historically “the social categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ were nonexistent, and hence no gender system was in place” (oyěwùmí , p. ). like oyěwùmí, baldwin constructs a narrative “world-sense” in his novel whose expressions of sexuality, gender, and desire seem to explicitly and implicitly reject a western worldview. take, for instance, how baldwin’s narrative first opens up the question of “who are they” through tish’s complex description of her and fonny’s childhood. as the reader wonders about how deep this love story is, baldwin invites the reader to enter into tish’s perspective and re-live what it was like to be a part of their love. in doing so, he radically undercuts the western picture of bodily love in favor of something much more african in its outlook: i dumped water over fonny’s head and scrubbed fonny’s back in the bathtub, in a time that seems a long time ago now. i swear i don’t remember seeing his sex, and yet, of course, i must have. we never played doctor—and yet, i had played this rather terrifying game with other boys and fonny had certainly played with other girls, and boys. i don’t remember that we ever had any curiosity concerning each other’s bodies at all—due to the cunning of that watching moment which knew we were approaching. fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. we were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought of the flesh. he had legs, and i had legs—that wasn’t all we knew but that was all we used. they brought us up the stairs and down the stairs and, always, to each other. (baldwin [ ] , pp. – ). even at a young age, tish focuses not on fonny’s flesh but her strong sense of connection to him. baldwin eloquently describes tish’s desire and love for fonny without placing it in sexual terms, humanities , , of and fonny freely expresses his love for her. their love is not conditioned on their bodies—“i don’t remember that we ever had any curiosity concerning each other’s bodies at all”—and rather than inhabiting separate bodies they share a sense of their world that transcended being individuals. baldwin’s love story drives this point home by reconceptualizing the language of genesis : . whereas the bible states “this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man”, positioning woman as secondary to and an extension of man, baldwin puts tish and fonny’s connection on an equal footing: “flesh of each other’s flesh” (baldwin [ ] , p. ). tish and fonny’s love in tish’s telling is so much more than two physical bodies joining together—baldwin frames it as transcending the physical through an emotional and spiritual lens. within the text, baldwin centers an african world-sense of the body by introducing the concept of a “presence” that authentically guides and gives the reader a deeper sense of tish and fonny’s desires. this type of expression and understanding of personhood is found in the akan peoples of ghana. for the akan, the “presence” of an individual is a composition of many factors—of mogya (blood) and honam (body), which represent the physical components, and kra (life force/soul), honhom (breath of divine life), and sunsum (spirit), which represent the spiritual components. children, for example, are conceived when the mogya of the mother comes together with the sunsum of the father (gyekye ), and the other components of the child’s “presence” are added over time, with no fixed universal “essence” that defines the individual. such a world-sense of personhood reflects a deeper sense of how tish views herself and her relationship with fonny. separated by prison bars and a wall of glass, baldwin articulates a deeper understanding of his protagonists’ love. instead of asserting her individuality or focusing on her bodily existence, tish speaks of her “presence” as the essential part of her in their relationship: my presence, which is of no practical value whatever, which can even be considered, from a practical point of view, as a betrayal, is vastly more important than any practical thing i might be doing. every day, when he sees my face, he knows, again, that i love him—and god knows i do, more and more, deeper and deeper, with every hour. but it isn’t only that. it means that others love him, too, love him so much that they have set me free to be there. he is not alone; we are not alone. (baldwin [ ] , p. ) tish’s “presence” is an articulation less of her honam (body), but rather of her kra (life force/soul). her life force and soul are “vastly more important” than her physical face, liberating her from negative stereotypes around the black body. to focus on her body would be a “betrayal” because what is beautiful about her is the love she has for him—a love that only god can fully plumb the depths of. but that love is not bounded by her alone—her “presence” carries with it the “presences” of others who love him as well, enveloping him—and by extension them (“we”)—in an all-encompassing love. that sense of collective unity that baldwin captures when tish reflects that “it means that others love him, too . . . ” (baldwin [ ] , p. ) can be seen in how fonny and tish’s family to take part in what fonny sees as attractive about tish. the love her family has for fonny moves them to work exceptionally hard to bail him out of jail, find him a good lawyer, and even travel to puerto rico to convince his accuser that fonny did not rape her. such actions reflect what africana psychologist azibo ( ) articulates as the shared world-sense families have of “how a people see their reality [and] how things should be” (p. ). this african-centered ideology connecting others is reflected in her actions and the actions of her family—actions that transcend the fact that fonny is imprisoned and literally cannot physically be present. baldwin drives home the point of the body’s irrelevance when it comes to how tish recounts her sexual experience with fonny. characterizing their union as a “sacrament”, and their baby as “best thing that ever happened” tish states “ . . . the effect was as of some strange anointing . . . and fonny’s body was a total mystery to me” (baldwin [ ] , p. ). rather than ruminating over whether fonny had sex with tish, or what kind of sexual contact they had—which privileges their humanities , , of bodies—baldwin redirects his readers attention to the kind of love tish and fonny have—the kind of love that is “a miracle”. doing so breaks away from western assumptions of sexual behavior, control, and possession of the body, steeped in degrading mythology about black women and mothers (roberts ). perhaps most striking of all is when tish first recognizes fonny’s body. for a long time, tish does not see fonny’s body, yet when she does, instead of seeing him, she recognizes her own body: his face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face. he smiled: a little smile . . . it’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. it means that you have a body, too. you will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life. (baldwin [ ] , p. ) this passage works to destroy oppressive social discourses against the black body. when tish visualized fonny’s body, she does not see society’s negative stereotypes, with the female body being an inverted and weaker version of the male body (laqueur ). instead, baldwin develops a deeper conversation about the sexual connection between men and women with the moment of realization triggering in herself as a positive human reflection. when tish sees fonny’s body, she sees herself, and in the transcendent power of his smile, discovers an equality that the west twice denies black women on the basis of their race and gender. from this moment of recognition, baldwin sees tish using the “language” of the life and love she has for fonny to fashion a distinct non-western discourse to explain the deeper world-sense of the love they have for one another. . discourse: beauty and silence over the span of western history, language about sex has reflected concepts of dominance, aggressiveness, and even shame and humiliation in many cases (skinner ; winkler ; davidson ). western playwrights, artists, philosophers, and writers have depicted this power through male control, stemming as far back as the greeks. for example, austin and olson’s ( ) analysis of the stage directions for aristophanes’ play thesmophoriazousai showcase the pervasiveness of the attitudes surrounding sex and domineering discourse used in describing it: . . . the narrator has sex with her boyfriend in the street rather than going inside somewhere is further proof of her shamelessness . . . this is the first of three crude verbs inlaw uses to describe intercourse, all of which tacitly endorse the notion that what women want out of sex is simply to have an erect penis thrust into them as hard as often as possible. (p. ) austin and olson find no descriptions of gentle embraces, consensual foreplay, or even just sweet words passing between lovers. even as the discourse regarding sexual desire evolved from the greek “force of nature” to the christian “temptation of the devil” it still remained centered on control and dominance (clark [ ] , p. ). in contrast, according to jomo kenyatta in facing mount kenya: the tribal life of the gikuyu, in order not to suppress entirely the normal sex instinct, the boys and girls [after their rites of passage rituals] are told that in order to keep good health they must acquire the technique of practicing a certain restricted form of intercourse, called ombani na ngweko (platonic love and fondling). this form of intimate contact between young people is considered right and proper and the very foundation stone upon which to build a race morally, physically and mentally sound. (kenyatta , p. ) as the emergence of romanticism took place in the end of the th century, conversations around love would continue to marginalize or even deny the existence of alternative discourses of sex, love, desire, beauty, and romance rooted in the africana experience. in the words of paul youngquist and frances botkin, “the whiteness of romantic studies is a symptom of amnesia” humanities , , of (youngquist and botkin , p. ). the west’s inability to recognize or understand alternative sexual discourses, especially regarding black women, leads to marginalizing or misunderstanding their world-sense. in if beale street could talk, baldwin offers a corrective to this amnesia, presenting the reader with an intoxicating african-centered narrative regarding the love shared between tish and fonny, tapping the resources of multiple africana perspectives to express his vision through words and silences. baldwin’s novel is a romance, so it comes as no surprise to discover him using the language of love. there are over instances where he employs variations on the word “love”, with tish repeatedly stating how she “loves” fonny/him, even saying “love you fonny” multiple times. however, underneath those declarations of love is an understanding of what love constitutes. instead of an infatuation with fonny’s body, what tish repeatedly states is how much she loves his beauty, which is intimately linked to his innocence: “i know [fonny has] never committed any crime and he is a beautiful person” (baldwin [ ] , p. ). over and over baldwin uses the terms “beauty” and “beautiful” to describe tish and fonny’s relationship, making tish circle back to mention fonny’s beauty (a very un-masculine description in the west) two dozen times in the novel. however, it is clear that baldwin does not mean that tish primarily sees fonny’s physical beauty. instead, tish sees his “presence”: “he’s beautiful. they beat him up, but they didn’t beat him—if you see what i mean. he’s beautiful" (baldwin [ ] , p. ). baldwin’s views are in alignment with black feminist theorist, historian, and scholar hammonds ( ), who sees black women “engaged in a process of fighting to reclaim the body—the maimed, immoral, black female body—which can be and is still being used by others to discredit them as producers of knowledge and as speaking subjects” (p. ). tish’s voice, emotions, and perspective dominates the narrative and centers her as a producer of her own knowledge. the idea that beauty can mean more than just the physical is encapsulated by “ẹwà”, the yoruba word for beauty. according to hallen in the good, the bad, and the beautiful: discourse about values in yoruba culture, the term’s “most common usage was emphatically with regard to persons” associating not with material items or physical characteristics but a person’s inner beauty (hallen , p. ). for baldwin, it is this inner beauty this is the focus. it is the hinge upon which tish’s love for fonny rests. indeed, because their physical encounters are limited due to fonny’s jail sentence, both able to experience their love on a profoundly non-physical plane. within african culture, non-verbal expressions are as equally important as verbal expressions. just as oral literature is as equally important as written literature, silences are not seen as absences but as on par with the spoken word (okpewho ). this outlook stands in stark juxtaposition with the west. patrick hogan in philosophical approaches to the study of literature presents a convincing body of evidence to illustrate the western belief in the inherent superiority of sounds and speech ( ). central to that paradigm is the marginalization of the voices of women: “it is part of the discursive history in which the speech of women and the status of that speech is contested” (hogan , p. ). unlike in an african-centered context, where silences can signal profundities, the silence of women in the west is a sign that they have nothing of worth to say. baldwin also incorporates profound silences, thoughts unsaid, and metaphorical allusions in the lack of words that pass between tish and fonny to signal the depth of their love: i was so happy to see him, after so long, that i was ready to cry. and everything was different. i was walking through streets i had never seen before. the faces around me, i had never seen. we moved in a silence which was music from everywhere. perhaps for the first time in my life, i was happy and knew that i was happy, and fonny held me by the hand. (baldwin [ ] , pp. – ) then, he stopped grinning and a kind of stinging silence filled the room and filled my ears. it was like nothing was happening in the world but us. i was not afraid. it was deeper than fear. i could not take my eyes away from his. i could not move. if it was deeper than fear, it was not yet joy. it was wonder. (baldwin [ ] , p. ) humanities , , of . . . in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing with each other. we are laughing for many reasons. we are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. (baldwin [ ] , p. ) the silence they experienced was “music”, triggering feelings of “wonder”, and culminating in the ineffable experience of joyous laughter that transported them to a realm not even prison bars can touch. despite the crush of the physical world impinging on fonny’s body, tish remains tethered to him, their bond strong despite the obstacles the western world sets against them. baldwin captures their connection in the absence of words—and absence that signals not a lack, but a profundity. as many scholars debate the silencing of black women in literature, tish’s silence in baldwin’s if beale street could talk speaks volumes. the phrases “we moved in a silence”, moments of “stinging silence”, and “complete silence” exemplify the strong nonverbal connection tish and fonny hold—that their love transcends the need to be communicated with words, speech, and bodies. for baldwin, silence is a not the absence of presence, but an active component of human discourse. yet, of course, tish is the narrator of the novel as well, and placing a young black female’s voice at the center of the work is to turn the west’s marginalization of those voices on its head. the discourse tish employs in if beale street could talk is intimate, vibrant, and dynamic. with the most ordinary words being delivered with such reverence and meaning, baldwin’s aesthetic choices carry a purposeful tone set against the dialogical structures of the west. despite having a child out of wedlock, being young and black in new york city, struggling to build a family, and dealing with a racist criminal justice system, line by line tish and fonny’s deep emotional connection remains at the forefront. baldwin does not hold back in having tish express the intensity of the love she has fonny, but does so in ways the defy the claims of critics that their love is a “very traditional celebration of love” or worse “a vehemently sentimental love story”. the evidence, in fact, is quite to the contrary, but only if one breaks free of the western paradigms of discourse about sex and love. . behavior: intimacy over sex as the reader plumbs the depth of tish and fonny’s love, it becomes clear that baldwin does not run away from sex. in a charged moment, the reader is invited to lean in and witness a private sexual encounter between a young black couple. in a lengthy scene, baldwin reveals the raw beauty of an intimate sexual experience that allows the reader to hear, identify, feel, and become emotionally involved in tish’s world-sense. by taking us deep into tish memory, baldwin prepares the reader for the profundity of her love for fonny and how their physical connection contributes to, but does not define, the love she has for fonny: “ . . . i need you. i love you”. he smiled. “is that all right, tish?” “of course it’s all right with me”, i said. i had more to say, but my throat wouldn’t open. he took me by the hand, then, and he led me to the pallet on the floor . . . he kissed my face all over, and my neck, and he uncovered my breasts and put his teeth and tongue there and his hands were all over my body. i knew what he was doing, and i didn’t know. i was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. i was in his hands: i was being changed; all that i could do was cling to him. i did not realize, until i realized it, that i was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him. if his arms had not held me, i would have fallen straight downward, backward, to my death. my life was holding me. . . . when he came back, he was naked. he got under the shawl, with me, and stretched his long body on top of mine, and i felt his long black heavy sex throbbing against my navel. he took my face in his hand, and held it, and he kissed me. “now, don’t be scared”, he whispered. “don’t be scared. just remember that i belong to you. just remember that i wouldn’t hurt you for nothing in this world. you just going to have to get used to me. humanities , , of and we got all the time in the world”. it was getting to be between two and three: he read my mind. “your mama and daddy know you’re with me”, he said, “and they know i won’t let nothing happen to you”. then, he moved down and his sex moved against my opening. “don’t be scared”, he said again. “hold on to me”. i held on to him, in an agony; there was nothing else in the world to hold on to; i held him by his nappy hair. i could not tell if he moaned or if i moaned. it hurt, it hurt, it didn’t hurt. it was a strange weight. a presence coming into me—into a me i had not known was there. i almost screamed, i started to cry: it hurt. it didn’t hurt . . . a singing began in me and his body became sacred—his buttocks, as they quivered and rose and fell, and his thighs between my thighs and the weight of his chest on mine and that stiffness of his which stiffened and grew and throbbed and brought me to another place i wanted to laugh and cry. then, something absolutely new began, i laughed and i cried and i called his name. i held him closer and closer and i strained to receive it all, all, all of him. he paused and he kissed me and kissed me . . . i said, “it was a little bit like being hit by a truck”—he laughed again—“but it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me”. (baldwin [ ] , pp. – ) the preceding passage demonstrates just how far baldwin distanced himself and the character of tish from western discourse regarding the black body. from a western standpoint, sexual behavior is a form of domination, exploitation, and regulation to maintain power, but for baldwin, this was just the opposite. particularly frightening to the west was their conceptualization of the sexuality of the peoples they conquered. clark, in desire: a history of european sexuality, suggests that “to justify their conquests, imperialist often portrayed colonized people as sexually barbaric” and controlled their bodies through rape and castration (clark [ ] , p. ). patricia hill collins, in black sexual politics, also suggests, “western religion, science, and media took over years to manufacture an ideology of black sexuality that assigned (heterosexual) promiscuity to black people and then used it to justify racial discrimination” (collins , p. ). baldwin’s description defies the stereotypes imported to justify such violence: fonny is the furthest thing from a mandingo black buck (mitchell et al. ; bogle ; anderson et al. ), and the innocent and gentle affection tish experiences defies categorizing her as an asexual mammy, a rude and malicious sapphire, or a lascivious jezebel—all types used in the west to distort and silence the experiences and voices of black women (mitchell et al. ). indeed, instead of the western characterization of sex as rooted in domination and violence, baldwin’s narrative reveals only sexual liberation. the reader repeatedly encounters a mutual respect for the “presence” of the other person, and instead of viewing bodies being held hostage, the reader encounters mutual understanding and a sense of shared security. as salacious as the text may read, in between the lines—following nash’s ( ) the black body in ecstasy: reading race, reading pornography research—baldwin’s narrative does not represent racialized pornography but an articulated, amplified, and practiced moment of agency and political freedom. tish’s first physical encounter with sex is transformed into a sacred spiritual and emotional experience of pleasure that honors the reality that she was a virgin. the topic of sex and sexual behavior is not a new theme for baldwin ( , , ), although it takes on different directions in each of his novels. in giovanni’s room ( ), there are both homosexual and heterosexual sex scenes, whereas in go tell it on the mountain ( ), baldwin shares limited details of florence and her husband’s intimate sexual encounters. in another country ( ), rufus and leona share a dramatic and powerful sexual encounter, and richard, cass, and eric become entwined in a violent extramarital love affair. the literary critic lorelei cederstrom has observed that “[i]t should be evident by now that baldwin is concerned with all aspects of human love and all the possibilities for human relationship” (cederstrom , p. ). i agree, and maintain that in if beale street could talk, baldwin mines a distinctly female african-centered perspective regarding the love tish has for fonny. of all the human love stories by baldwin, i see in this novel an elevated conversation regarding intimacy and gender norms of what a black female can experience. baldwin uses this middle-class humanities , , of black couple as a literary device to confront gendered and sexual stereotypes. his narrative aligns with collins’s narrative of rejecting images “depicting african american women as bitches; the sexual use of african american women’s bodies by circulating images of black women’s promiscuity; [and] derogating the reproductive capacities of african american women’s bodies” (collins , p. ). tish’s sexual experience was both liberating and transformative instead of oppressive and controlled. right before our eyes, we experience tish emerge into the beauty of womanhood with her family’s support. in just a few pages, she grows from a timid and delicate young girl into a mature woman, making the novel a coming-of-age story in addition to a love story. tish’s account of this transformative experience takes on even deeper meaning when ernestine, tish’s sister, who jokingly refers to tish as “jezebel” because of her perfume store job, boldly tells tish to “unbow your head, sister” for she is a woman proudly making her own choices. instead of violence and domination, instead of words and understanding, tish is left with an experience of fonny’s body that “was a total mystery to me” and a world-sense that is not defined in physical terms (the loss of her virginity) but rather the discovery of “the gravest mystery of one’s life”—that knowledge of another is always out of one’s grasp (baldwin [ ] , pp. – ). from this initial sexual experience, tish and fonny’s relationship will continue to develop. they would later work towards marriage, secure a home together, and conceive a child. however, regardless of their outward conformity to western standards, inwardly tish will always be in a process not of knowing fonny but of re-discovering his beautiful “presence” again and again. baldwin’s approach aligns with bell hooks’s understanding of liberating black love for black women. hooks argues “black females must constantly assert our full humanity to counter the impact of dehumanizing forces. expressing our full range of emotions is healing to the spirit and engages us in the practice of self-acceptance” (hooks , p. ). baldwin dictates this love scene through tish’s gaze and her desires. the intimate and honest love of a black women taking up space on multiple pages for many seems insignificant, yet tish is not a victim or survivor; she is a loud and outspoken active participant. as tish narrates the moment as fonny led the way, what was happening was not controlled or regulated. at the end, tish states, “it was a little bit like being hit by a truck . . . but it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me" (baldwin [ ] , p. ). in the end, tish confers the language of beauty on herself, recognizing that her “presence” has been transformed as a result of the encounter. . conclusions baldwin explicitly states that “our real responsibility is to endlessly redefine each other” (lorde and baldwin , p. ). although upon its publication critics were unable to see baldwin’s vision to liberated black bodies, since then times have changed. a shining testament of the corrected interpretation i am proposing in this note can be seen in barry jenkins’ recent cinematic treatment of the novel, where critics finally heard tish’s voice and grasped baldwin’s project. “jenkins has adapted beale street in the spirit of its author’s vision”, wrote kinohi nishikawa in slate. “most notably, he emphasizes, rather than diminishes, tish’s point of view”. he goes on to observe that “jenkins’ film takes the young heroine at her word against a tradition of reading her suspiciously”. writing in the new york times, manohla dargis also rejected the earlier simplistic readings of the novel: “this romantically swoony vision of the beloved seems like a reverie from a bohemian fantasy . . . except that fonny and tish are loving while black, an existential truth that is turned into a nightmare”. (p. c ). she goes on to recognize how jenkins used tish to guide the viewer through the narrative and compliments his recognition of the silences in the novel as communicating meaning: in “beale street”, jenkins is inviting you to look deeply at these men and women, to see how they look to, and at, each other. he does this primarily through an expressionist visual style that can make words superfluous. (dargis , p. c ) humanities , , of indeed, dargis seems to channel the language of africana studies in her description of fonny in tish’s eyes: “fonny looks beautiful, holy . . . sanctified . . . by the love of a woman” (dargis, p. c ). her summation of the romantic plot captures the sense of how tish and fonny’s love embarrasses an african-centered world-sense of love: in most white screen romances, the love between a man and a woman (and its tests) tends to be framed in personal terms, as a matter of individual will, of good or foolish choices of the heart and head. the greater world always presses in on the star-crossed lovers even when the movie pretends otherwise, shaping or just quietly tugging at their story. here, the world—white, pitiless, punishing—comes down like a hammer on fonny and tish. because no matter the purity and grace of their love when they wander the village, or eat in a friendly spanish restaurant that was a baldwin favorite, they are never simply two people in love but also an affront to the power of the white world. other critics complimented jenkins for visually capturing baldwin’s expressions of black sexuality rather than responding to or repeating stereotypical western norms of the black body. “the film’s fidelity to its source material points to an appreciation for what was there all along” (nishikawa ). writing and filming against this western backdrop of biological determinism, if beale street could talk rejects centering black sexual politics as grounded in the physical body. the reader and viewer become enmeshed in the world-sense discourses of sex and sexuality, rooted instead in spirituality, love, and wonder. in multiple moments, bodies are not seen and words are not spoken, yet sexual feelings are expressed though motion, dreams, silence, and even a simple gaze. “in ‘beale street’”, dargis writes, “jenkins is inviting you to look deeply at these men and women, to see how they look to, and at, each other”. nishikawa declared the film “a revelation” in how it illuminated what was previously “neglected” in baldwin’s novel. both the book and the film “refuse to appeal to the white gaze. it’s a story of black love, and of black struggle, that doesn’t wait for viewers who need catching up” (nishikawa ). in his writing, baldwin illuminates the tensions surrounding the social constructions of race, class, gender, and even law. however, it is in the ideas of love and sex that i believe baldwin is the most revolutionary. emerging at a time in society when progress dominated black culture, if beale street could talk charts a course for the reclamation and re-imagination of black sexual politics. as a homosexual black male writer, baldwin articulated a visual and invisible, spoken and unspoken sexual discourse, philosophy, and behavior represented through the gaze of a heterosexual black woman. yet, in the wake of the #metoo movement and allegations of sexual harassment, black women today continue to face the marginalization of not being seen and heard. one of the most depressing scenes in the novel is when tish’s mother sharon, in somewhat of a shameful and hesitant manner, insists to fonny’s accuser victoria that fonny did not rape her. in that moment, it is revealed that the white police officer told victoria to pick fonny out, leaving sharon helpless and silent, with systematic racism silencing black women’s voices. to the extent that if beale street could talk employs an african world-sense notion of black love, the novel still remains stuck in the social dilemma of american racism and patriarchy. black love is real, evident, and long lasting, yet still is a struggle. existential struggles offer no comforting promises—love prevails, but justice does not in baldwin’s fiction. however, as baldwin writes in another letter to his brother david, “i think we have to try. innumerable human beings are being destroyed, in silence. we can’t unlock the prison gates, but perhaps we can begin to break the silence” (baldwin ). funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. humanities , , of references ackroyd, peter. . a little black magic. the spectator, july , p. . anderson, joel r., elise holland, courtney heldreth, and scott p. johnson. . revisiting the jezebel stereotype. psychology of women quarterly : – . [crossref] austin, colin, and s. douglas olson. . aristophanes thesmorphoriazusae. oxford: oxford university press on demand. azibo, daudi ajani ya. . articulating the distinction between black studies and the study of blacks: the fundamental role of culture and the african-centered worldview. the afrocentric scholar : – . baldwin, james. . if beale street could talk. edited by vintage international movie tie-in. new york: vintage international. first published . baldwin, james. . go tell it on the mountain. new york: grosset & dunlap. baldwin, james. . notes of a native son. boston: beacon press. baldwin, james. . giovanni’s room. new york: dial press. baldwin, james. . another country. london: penguin books. baldwin, james. . letters of james baldwin. atlanta: stuart a rose manuscript archives & rare book library. balfour, katharine lawrence, and lawrie balfour. . the evidence of things not said: james baldwin and the promise of american democracy. ithaca: cornell university press. bogle, donald. . toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks: an interpretive history of blacks in american films, th ed. london: bloomsbury academic. broyard, anatole. . no color line in clichés: books of the times sentimental love story adverbs stalk menacingly. new york times ( -current file), may , p. . carr, greg. . teaching and studying the africana experience. school district of philadelphia africana studies curriculum. – . available online: https://web.archive.org/web/ /http://webgui.phila.k . pa.us/offices/c/curriculum/curriculum-supports/course-african-american (accessed on december ). cederstrom, lorelei. . love, race and sex in the novels of james baldwin. mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature : – . clark, anna. . desire: a history of european sexuality. new york: routledge. first published in . collins, patricia h. . black sexual politics. new york: routledge. dargis, manohla. . love is forced to live in a nightmare. the new york times, december , p. c . davidson, james n. . the greeks and greek love, st ed. new york: random house. gounard, jean-françois. . the racial problem in the works of richard wright and james baldwin, st ed. contributions in afro-american and african studies. westport: greenwood press, vol. . gyekye, kwame. . an essay on african philosophical thought: the akan conceptual scheme. philadelphia: temple university press. hallen, barry. . the good, the bad, and the beautiful discourse about values in yoruba culture. bloomington: indiana university press. hammonds, evelynn m. . toward a genealogy of black female sexuality: the problematic of silence. in feminist theory and the body, st ed. london: routledge, pp. – . higginbotham, evelyn brooks. . beyond the sound of silence: afro-american women in history. gender & history : – . hogan, patrick. . philosophical approaches to the study of literature. gainesville: university press of florida. hooks, bell. . salvation: black people and love. london: women’s press. kenyatta, jomo. . facing mount kenya: the tribal life of the gikuyu. new york: vintage books. laqueur, thomas walter. . making sex: body and gender from the greeks to freud. cambridge: harvard university press. lorde, audre, and james baldwin. . revolutionary hope: a conversation between audre lorde & james baldwin. mosaic literary magazine : – . mcbride, dwight a. . james baldwin now. new york: new york university press. miller, d. quentin. . a criminal power: james baldwin and the law. columbus: ohio state up. mitchell, roland w., heidi r. lewis, takiyah nur amin, velva boles, catherine m. pears, jean gumpper, kate leonard, sha’condria sibley, karen riley simmons, and claudine taaffe. . beyond mammy, jezebel & sapphire: reclaiming images of black women. portland: jordan schnitzer family foundation. nash, jennifer. . the black body in ecstasy: reading race, reading pornography. durham: duke university press. http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://web.archive.org/web/ /http://webgui.phila.k .pa.us/offices/c/curriculum/curriculum-supports/course-african-american https://web.archive.org/web/ /http://webgui.phila.k .pa.us/offices/c/curriculum/curriculum-supports/course-african-american humanities , , of nishikawa, kinohi. . james baldwin’s beale street flopped in . here’s how barry jenkins’ film reveals it as a timely masterpiece. slate magazine. available online: https://slate.com/culture/ / /beale-street- baldwin-jenkins-book.html (accessed on june ). oates, joyce carol. . if beale street could talk: by james baldwin. new york: the dial press, p. okpewho, isidore. . african oral literature. bloomington: indiana university press. oyěwùmí, oyèrónké. . invention of women: making an african sense of western gender discourses, new ed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. puzo, mario. . his cardboard lovers: tell me how long the train’s been gone. edited by james baldwin. new york times, june , p. . roberts, dorothy. . killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york: vintage books. first published . skinner, marilyn b. . sexuality in greek and roman culture. malden: wiley blackwell. turner, bryan s. . the body & society, nd ed. los angeles: sage. winkler, john j. . the constraints of desire: the anthropology of sex and gender in ancient greece. london: routledge. youngquist, paul, and frances botkin. . introduction: black romanticism: romantic circulations. in circulations: romanticism and the black atlantic. edited by paul youngquist and frances botkin. boulder: university of colorado boulder, pp. – . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://slate.com/culture/ / /beale-street-baldwin-jenkins-book.html https://slate.com/culture/ / /beale-street-baldwin-jenkins-book.html http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	reception: a rejection of baldwin 	philosophy: the world-sense of presence 	discourse: beauty and silence 	behavior: intimacy over sex 	conclusions 	references media industries . ( ) time’s up (again?): transforming hollywood’s industrial culture kate fortmueller university of georgia kf [at] uga.edu abstract in the s, almost fifty years before the “time’s up” movement, women in hollywood unions organized “women’s committees” to counter institutional sexism and address rampant underemployment. while the unions supported the general motive behind these committees’ efforts, women activists struggled to gather information about hiring practices and enact policy changes. to understand gender inequity in contemporary hollywood, i argue that we need to reexamine hollywood infrastructure and consider how it continues to inform labor practices. using the american federation of television and radio artists (aftra) women’s committee as a case study, this article shows how employment insecurity, a problem that has plagued male and female actors, and the inability or unwillingness of hollywood institutions to address the precarious work culture inhibited women’s activist efforts in the s. keywords: labor, aftra, time’s up, precarity, gender on january , , female actors, directors, and producers in hollywood collectively declared “time’s up”! in their letter posted in the new york times and la opinión, the women explained, “the struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly.” detached from unions and established professional organizations, the unique structure of time’s up brings together several working groups to tackle issues with a multi- pronged approach rather than a central hierarchy. these groups include a commission to develop steps to end sexual harassment, a group focusing on parity in hiring, and a legal defense fund for victims of sexual harassment. the time’s up activists approach the industry’s gender problems as systemic rather than anomalous, advocating for industry transformations that impact workers both above and below the line. media industries . ( ) a group such as time’s up offers an innovative avenue for challenging industrial practices and improving hollywood labor conditions, but it does so by detaching labor advocacy from long-existing unions and guilds. in previous decades, the guilds, in addition to their primary function as negotiators in collective bargaining agreements, provided venues for workers to voice concerns and strategize answers. solutions provided by unions catered to the fact that women from different employment sectors below and above the line face different forms of discrimination and occupational challenges. in theory, women could find opportunities within guild membership to address their career-specific problems. while most guilds and unions represent media laborers who share a common place within the industry’s hierarchy, screen actors guild-american federation of television and radio artists (sag-aftra) is a counterpoint with its membership extending from the lowliest bit player to the biggest movie star. the wide array of workers stems from sag-aftra’s rela- tively low barrier to membership in comparison with the directors guild of america (dga) or the writers guild of america (wga). prior to the merger, sag was often character- ized as the union for film actors and aftra as the union for television actors and broadcast- ers, but in practice both sag and aftra had contracts which spanned media venues across film, television, and radio broadcasting. the actors’ unions, both aftra and sag, respec- tively, were unique among the guilds because they represented a wide array of different types of screen talent, some of whom work regularly and others who struggle to work suf- ficient days to qualify for health care. as such, sag and aftra provide a unique example for considering how media industry organizations have approached a stratified group of strug- gling and public-facing workers. in , both sag and aftra performers formed national women’s committees to address women’s employment struggles in the industry. aftra’s committee was organized out of los angeles and is the focus of this article. it is worth noting, however, that aftra’s efforts were national in scope and that its national women’s committee also reached out to women around the united states to collect data on regional local chapters and to start new regional chapters. if time is up for existing models of power in the current moment of industry reck- oning, it is worth understanding these past attempts at intervention in order to learn from failures or missteps. guild activity in the actors’ unions often provides unique insight into the experience and concerns of the working actor. in the case of aftra specifically, activism reveals the union’s uneven priorities and the unique challenges of working with a profes- sionally diverse group. while all of the major guilds had women’s committees, recovering the specific findings or written reports presents an archival challenge. my reasoning for focusing on historic activ- ism efforts on behalf of women stems from my broader interest in the relationship between labor and the politics of on-screen representation. the focus on aftra specifically is a result of archival access to correspondence that offers a more nuanced understanding of commit- tee practices. many of the aftra records are housed at new york university’s tamiment library, but most other unions maintain their own historical records. few guilds have desig- nated archives, and occasionally, as is the case with the sag women’s committee meeting minutes, documents have gone missing. oral histories can likewise be problematic; as for- mer sag-president kathleen nolan noted in our conversation about the sag women’s committee, memories can be hazy. media industries . ( ) the guild material that scholars use to understand labor practices and history are often liv- ing documents moving between contemporary union workers to shape decisions. while his- torical work typically looks at the past in its historical context and actively limits present understandings of culture from seeping into analysis, industrial history and historical docu- ments have a different function and life. some historical records, such as those that track income, production costs, and specific labor practices, are still used by guilds to help build their cases in negotiations. institutionally speaking, labor’s past is in continuous dialogue with its present in union offices and negotiations. the continued relevance of union histo- ries and data for contemporary actions and future decisions is precisely why this material should be of interest for all scholars of industry and should encourage us to think dynami- cally about the relationship between the past and the present. aftra’s efforts were not isolated, but part of a wave of activism in the hollywood unions in the s as women organized to combat underemployment in the film and television indus- tries. as maya montañez smuckler and miranda banks have demonstrated in their respective work on the dga and the wga women’s committees, these histories reveal where women have hit cultural roadblocks in their efforts to transform the system. in order to do effective work against inequality, the women’s committees often found that they needed to first edu- cate the union membership that discrimination against women was a cause that merited union advocacy and resources. as the embodiment of diversity or its lack, actors often feature prominently in discussions of representation even if they seldom control casting, the content of roles, or the number of roles available for women or people of color. the efforts of aftra’s women’s committee, from showcasing progressive on-screen media representations to lobbying for the equal rights amendment (era), engage with these characteristics of actors’ labor, specifically their visibility and relative empowerment with respect to hiring practices. even when these efforts fail to enact meaningful changes in hollywood, they reveal how screen performers made sense of the gender politics of the industry, understood the nuances of institutional power and their own agency, and fashioned feminist politics and practices within industry com- munities that were not gendered female. for women in hollywood, widespread sexism com- bines with other cultural and structural conditions to create unique and sometimes unanticipated challenges for gender parity. i argue that employment insecurity, a problem that has plagued both male and female actors, and the inability or unwillingness of hollywood institutions to address the precarious work culture inhibited women’s activist efforts in the s. women’s struggles in hollywood, especially for those working on screen, were and continue to be connected to and exacerbated by the competition and insecurity that char- acterize hollywood labor. precarious employment in a union town “precarious work” is any kind of work defined by the lack of continuous employment, job security, or workforce protections. as scholars such as andrew ross, christian fuchs, and guy standing have stressed, precarious work applies to a broad spectrum of employment sectors worldwide, ranging from factory work in china, retail and hospitality in england, media industries . ( ) and media work in the united states. the observation of problems across workforces indicates broader economic and social changes that have created a crisis for workers. for workers and activists, noting the similarities across workforce sectors has been essential for coalition building. the letter from alianza nacional de campesinas, a group devoted to fighting exploitation and harassment of women farmworkers, to members of “times up” shows how workers understand these common experiences and have tried to create alli- ances across class to recognize contemporary workplace insecurities. the alianza nacional de campesinas writes, even though we [farmworkers and hollywood workers] work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. theoretical and political work that seeks to unite workers who share the experience of sporadic work bridges class and professional boundaries and often does so to underscore the absence or dwindling presence of government protections that formerly offset employ- ment insecurity. although much of the work on precarity focuses on the twenty-first century and often tac- itly assumes this to be a recent change in worker cultures, hollywood workers have experi- enced many of these conditions since the end of the studio era. media production is project-based, meaning that groups of workers come together for a discrete period of time on a creative project. focusing on media workers within project-based careers, sociologists have termed this mode of existence the “boundaryless career.” the notion of the boundary- less career encapsulates both how workers move across firms and the way a worker’s value is determined by her value in the market, which is demonstrated by continuous employment (perhaps by many employers) rather than the ability to rise through the ranks. essential to understanding the core characteristics of these kinds of precarious careers is the role of the personal networks that workers build in order to help them sustain employment. characterizing precarity in relation to on-screen performers is tricky, because in hollywood not all employment insecurity is seen equally. like many workers in hollywood, on-screen performers work under short-term contracts or on a part-time basis. as angela mcrobbie stresses, many creative workers often rely on jobs in the service economy as a primary source of income. actors are unique among hollywood workers because they experience a particularly high percentage of unemployment or underemployment. although even stars might work infrequently, they are well-paid and can live comfortably off their income. earnings data from sag give a general indication of how many people make a living as actors in a given year. in (when both sag and aftra formed their women’s commit- tees),  percent of sag actors made less than us$ , for acting work during the year. while the extremely successful are uniquely visible to a mass audience, they represent only a small fraction of the on-screen population. those further down the hierarchy might only be able to sustain a living as an actor for a brief period of time. for many sag and aftra members, there is often a strong desire to simply get work at any cost. robert castels and isabell lorey point out that underemployment in creative circles is more socially accepted than in other professions. while i agree with castels and lorey, socially media industries . ( ) acceptable bouts of unemployment can quickly extend to untenability. for example, pro- longed unemployment can cause actors to fail to qualify for health benefits, thus pushing them into an even more precarious existence. despite the divergent work experiences across classes of actors, harassment has proven to be an equalizer. many of the abuse allegations against producers, directors, executives, and other actors have revealed that star power does not protect an actor from harassment or secure her from the criticism and negative publicity that often accompanies allegations. for women, opportunities for roles decline precipitously after they turn thirty—sag-aftra has been forthcoming about this trend. understanding that careers often have early expiration dates and that women need to take advantage of opportunities early in their careers when they might not have as much knowledge or experience about the profession contributes to their vulnerability. in this sense, women in hollywood might need to be prepared for a sig- nificant decline in work or even plan for a different career later in life. men and women often have different experiences building and sustaining their profes- sional networks. as michael curtin and kevin sanson have noted, women are often “excluded from the homosocial rituals of the workplace.” success for women in hollywood often requires the accumulation of “soft skills” or the emotional efforts of managing inter- personal relationships. in hollywood (as in other towns or industries), these interactions frequently cross a line from professional to inappropriate. securing employment might require a worker to skillfully appease a supervisor or co-worker rather than to acknowl- edge harassment. unseemly behavior is so common that many assume harassment as the status quo or a necessary hardship on the path to one’s desired career. speaking of a dif- ferent segment of the industry, john t. caldwell explains in his analysis of career narra- tives and books offering advice for breaking into the industry: “workers tell stories that affirm constant interpersonal flexibility, quid pro quo networking, and mutual exploitation as a vocational skill-set.” the specific sexual behaviors and advice these books offer, such as encouraging aspirants to prepare for “the hookup as both networking opportunity and index of job performance,” put women in particularly vulnerable positions. in , caldwell’s discussion of this kind of career advice situates it alongside other types of career “genesis” myths; however, the public reckoning that has accompanied #metoo and #timesup indicates these stories and advice should be more central to how we theorize precarious work. the culture of quid pro quo networking is emblematic of what angela mcrobbie identifies as a move away from trade unions “to the nebulous notion of the network.” mcrobbie stresses how when people rely on personal connections, friendships, or even liaisons as a means to find work and grow a career, the role of unions in workers’ lives and well-being is diminished. speaking of the problems inherent in informal networks, michael curtin and kevin sanson have also pointed out that “informality can prove to be a breeding ground for new forms of inequity and laddish behavior.” for actors, informality has always been part of the hiring process—unions have never had any influence over hiring, so actors have relied on connec- tions and introductions in order to meet agents, managers, and casting directors. in this sense, actors have a hybrid labor identity, with some union protections, but many persistent insecurities, especially in relation to the hiring process. media industries . ( ) for hollywood workers, historic conditions of precarity continue to inform labor relations with management, degrees of solidarity between unions, and intra-union relations. understanding the specificity of insecure working conditions is foundational for thinking about how women have developed practices and behaviors to respond to the lack of job opportunities, unequal pay, and harassment. while hollywood workers share many of the characteristics of the precarious worker, the continued existence of unions makes this an industry with unique working conditions that combine insecurity with some forms of insti- tutional support—indeed, the union memberships have steadily grown despite the contin- ued precarity of work for individual members. thus, the unique precarity of hollywood workers who are also union members is a negotiation. on the one hand, many lack worker protections, but on the other they often have benefits and a pension plan. using actors as a case study i will show how their feminist strategies were hindered by their status and limited power as precarious workers. union diversity committees and the politics of data collection the diversity committees organized in the s by several of the hollywood unions reflected an implicit understanding that women and people of color faced unique challenges in hollywood. the wga formed a women’s committee in as a means for women to net- work and discuss opportunities in the industry. the two actors’ unions, sag and aftra, fol- lowed suit with women’s committees in . minority committees, including one at sag, also formed during the same period to address structural discrimination in hollywood. some of these committees, like the (sag) ethnic minorities committee, came together in explicitly “. . . to create and implement positive and constructive goals and objectives for minority problems . . . ,” whereas others, like the dga’s women’s steering committee, formed in to research employment opportunities and problems. all of these committees represent institutional recognition of discrimination as well as efforts to understand and improve industry practices and culture around race and gender. these committees in some ways contradicted the overarching mission of unions to support all members. as vicky ball and laraine porter have pointed out, the existence and impor- tance of women’s groups that only serve a portion of the membership in the media guilds are surprising. yet performers’ unions might be the one exception to ball and porter’s charac- terization. unions often coalesce around a socioeconomic class identity, but performers’ unions have a wide array of members and notoriously high percentages of unemployment and underemployment. in the case of aftra, the union represented radio performers, broadcasters, hosts, and actors in narrative television shows. as a result of the diverse and often divergent needs of performers, smaller subgroups within the union have always formed to address specific contract needs or interests. although these unions have a history of recognizing the many differences between performers within the same union, there was backlash against these efforts to differentiate women and minorities. union members who media industries . ( ) felt that unemployment was a systemic problem and not a product of structural racism or sexism voiced their concerns to the sag ethnic minorities committee. although the complaints were not directed at a women’s committee itself, some actors expressed concern that because underemployment affected all actors equally there was no reason for women or minorities to get access to special resources. writing to the sag ethnic minorities committee, one actor proclaimed, [. . .] where are the jobs for minorities or majorities? the proposed minority opportunities be it acting or technical will have no more effect in getting you a job than you have today. if a member of the minorities is hired it is because his or her type was needed and you and we know it. not because our concentrated effort. aftra’s women’s committee did not have an open period for responses like the sag ethnic minorities committee, but the rhetoric in their efforts belies a certain concern for this type of backlash. rather than making an argument about systemic injustice, the aftra women’s committee took special care to position gender equality as an issue that affected all mem- bers of the union. although some union members felt these committees granted members access to more resources, in reality this was not completely true. the women’s committees were sanc- tioned by the guilds, but their efforts were not always supported. the lack of full support is visible in the committees’ stymied efforts to collect data on membership. women in these committees knew that there was a tremendous gender disparity in employment, but they did not have data to support their anecdotal evidence. as correspondence between union leadership and members demonstrates, collecting data on employment was a politi- cally charged request that was difficult at best and impossible at worst. at times, leaders tried to confirm existing data that had no clear source. for example, when the aftra women’s committee asked the president of the associated actors and artistes of america (the as) to confirm that   percent of its members were women, he responded that he could not confirm that number and had no idea where that estimate came from. the wga, as miranda banks explains, produced the first union study on gender and diversity. when the women of the wga committee requested access to membership records, they were met with reluctance since they needed to search through income information in individual member files, although they later received permission from the guild board. members of the sag women’s committee were flatly denied access to records that would help them make this case with the simple explanation: “nothing in the guild’s constitution and by-laws and nothing in the applicable law and cases, requires the guild to make all of its records available to a member.” although data are only one tool to understand ineq- uity in the media industries, they can help illuminate broader trends. taken on its own quantitative data does not provide sufficient context to systemic problems, but it is an important piece of the larger picture and one that can be difficult to collect. although women had the ability and space to organize, the failure to provide access to internal data indicates a combative process in which dismissive institutions doomed women’s commit- tee efforts from the start. media industries . ( ) union earnings data, even in aggregate, are guarded as proprietary information not only out of deference to the privacy of its membership but also out of the desire to occlude hollywood’s labor instability. when the data are made publicly available, they are often released in inter- vals that mask the realities of industry labor and underemployment. in the late s, actor alan hewitt, a long-time member of actor’s equity, sag, and later aftra, attempted to mount a full study of actors’ earnings. it was hewitt’s hope that a more detailed study of earnings would be useful for determining a fairer dues structure for underemployed actors and help the unions in their dealings with government agencies and unemployment insur- ance. after a series of letters between hewitt and sag representatives, sag executive secretary john dales rejected hewitt’s offer for help conducting a study. dales explained, even with all figures compiled it would be difficult to draw general conclusions beyond the fact that acting is a precarious economic choice of profession, and that there are a great many more persons desiring to be actors than are able to make the grade. for the union, a common-sense understanding of employment rates was sufficient. they were not looking to make available the raw unemployment numbers or change policy and practice in a way that might serve these workers more effectively. by extending this logic to the women’s committees in the s, it seems clear that accessing income information for women to transform policy and practice would force hollywood and its unions to address broad and long-standing issues of unemployment and underemployment relevant to both gender discrimination and systemic labor concerns. union studies did not help women gain any traction to improve hiring practices in the long term. for writers, the change, as banks notes, “led to micro-changes during the following [television] season, but not sweeping institutional change.” members of the dga women’s committee recall that they spent three years meeting with studios over their findings and eventually leaked the data to the news media. absent actual union pressure or a threat to financial bottom lines, hiring managers had no incentive to change practices or develop industry pipelines. women in sag, aftra, wga, and dga all worked to gather evidence to substantiate their experiences, but they struggled because data collection of industry labor was often at odds with other union objectives. in hollywood, taking up structural inequity around gender or race rather than trying to reduce the overall surplus of labor (which is itself a structural problem) is controversial for members. as the example of the sag data collection efforts demonstrates, members of the performance unions particularly struggled to address their employment issues. when women did manage to collect data, they did not necessarily have sufficient clout to change policies and practices because the hollywood guilds did not have hiring power, nor were they considering ways to apply pressure to change hiring practices. while all women in these above-the-line unions struggled to improve their working condi- tions, they did succeed in maintaining union leadership roles to support the existence of such committees. this was not true in all sectors of hollywood labor. organized efforts for women in craft or below-the-line careers came much later—international alliance of theatrical stage employees (iatse) did not form a comparable women’s committee until , and the american society of cinematographers (asc) only launched its vision committee focused on diversity in . this comparison indicates that this type of camaraderie and collective action media industries . ( ) was not organizationally possible for all women in hollywood. the culture of competitive and inconsistent labor underscores many of the problems women have faced, and continue to face, in trying to establish that the gender problems in hollywood are systemic. aftra’s women’s committee: a case study the aftra women’s committee formed at a general meeting with two clear goals: to promote equal rights for female industry workers in hollywood and to improve women’s on- screen representations. like the other guilds, aftra wanted to collect membership data about women in hollywood to draw attention to gendered inequities, but struggled to access those data. for the aftra women’s committee, the challenge featured the added obstacle of the geographic sprawl of its members. aftra represented a wide range of screen per- formers, including television actors, broadcast journalists, hosts, and radio personalities. because these performers live in cities across the united states, committee leadership found itself sending letters to local branches and struggling to obtain even basic information about the number of men and women in each local. the geographic diversity of aftra’s members also posed a set of unique organizing challenges that differed from those experienced by unions centered in los angeles and new york. while the other unions had to negotiate var- ied degrees of professional success and financial stability, the aftra women’s committee had to build alliances across diverse careers in radio and television, as well as negotiate dis- tinct regional attitudes. the language employed by the women’s committee to explain its organizational goals dem- onstrates a sensitivity to aftra’s broader unemployment problem and a reluctance to alien- ating male union members. rather than stating a desire to advance conditions for women, the women’s committee suggests that improving conditions for women will benefit all actors. its statement declared, the aftra national women’s division, in exploring and determining the “equality of employment opportunity” for women will seek “equal rights” and “equal opportunity” for all members of aftra, and when inequities or infractions are uncovered, whether . . . women or men, they will be called to the attention of the aftra national board. although this language sought to temper any outrage from male union members, including both women and men in the committee’s statement about inequities undermines any argu- ment that gender bias might be institutional. this discussion of accountability also fails to provide a clear actionable solution. like the wga, aftra could encourage better hiring practices, but as the union did not participate in the casting or hiring process, there was little they could do. the second part of the committee’s stated goals focused on the politics of on-screen repre- sentations, yet a similar committee statement softened the discussion of strict gender bias. the statement proposes, “regarding ‘images’, the committee will call attention to debase- ments, stereotypes, distortion. when women’s ‘images’ are upgraded to the realities of life today, it is hoped that men’s images will also, in the new awareness of the value of human dignity for all.” by continuing to reach out to men, the committee again undercuts its role media industries . ( ) as an advocate for women. what is perhaps most noteworthy about this statement is that it does not explicitly link the quality of representation to the industrial inequities such as the number of on-screen roles or the amount of available jobs. in essence, the two objectives of the committee were positioned as separate rather than related industry phenomena. in addition to the women’s committee’s two primary goals, they outlined eight key proce- dures and actions which ranged from collecting data about employment, wages, and on- screen representations to strategies for communicating activities to members. but labor insecurity impacted committee members’ ability to work as activists and advocates. members of the women’s committee had to balance their own auditions and acting work with their unpaid activism. speaking of this very problem, alice backes explained in a letter: as a free-lance actress who must continue to earn my living in this business, my challenge continues to find enough hours each day. i am, also, increasingly aware that this responsibility, which i did not seek out, is probably the most important volunteer effort i’ve ever taken on. the depth of what needs to be done and the responsibility of the media in shaping the mores and expectations of women in our society and around the world . . . in this letter, backes identifies her struggles to make a living as separate from the job of transforming representations through her committee work. members of the women’s committee such as backes were aware of the importance of their efforts on a larger scale, but still struggled to balance the unpaid labor of advocating for social mobility with the struggle of making a living as a professional actor. as much as backes views them separately, the work of the committee was inseparable from her existence as an actor. one of the greatest limitations of the aftra women’s committee was its inability to demand accountability in hiring practices. given the prevailing conditions, it is perhaps unsurpris- ing that the committee worked in concert with more widespread national efforts for work- place equality. in the s, the era provided a potential solution for some of the problems that the women’s committee identified. the era was a constitutional amendment that would provide a basis for enforcing equal rights and legal protections for women. from to , women around the united states organized and advocated to get three-fourths of us states to ratify this amendment. in , the american federation of labor and congress of industrial organizations (afl–cio; the federation of us trade unions and aftra’s parent union) decided to support ratification of the era. for media workers, this amendment would help guarantee equal workplace protections and provide what the women’s committee ultimately needed, which was an external body that could enforce equal rights in hiring practices across broadcast industries. implementation of the era would have required some policies and oversight to ensure equality, thus making sense that the women’s committee would “. . . promote the ratification of the equal rights amendment in unratified states in every way possible.” although the efforts to support the era did not help to sup- port their internal organizational priorities, these efforts were a tangible way for the women’s committee to advocate for equal employment opportunity and connect with the women’s movement more generally. efforts centering around representation involved separate initiatives and events for the women’s committee. concurrent with their efforts to support the era, the women’s committee scheduled events in los angeles and new york to celebrate progressive media industries . ( ) on-screen representations. showcasing works which highlighted the experiences of women and people of color during their program entitled “celebration,” the committee explained, “we were reminded that of the network programming done under aftra’s juris- diction, shows such as ‘maude’, ‘all in the family ‘the jeffersons’, ‘chico and the man’ are among the highest rated shows in television.” of course, several of the examples lauded for their progressive representations could also be criticized from the perspective of hiring diversity. for example, in the wga found that only  percent of all in the family’s ( – ) teleplays were written by women, a number lower than the rest of the industry at the time. furthermore, the presence of a diverse staff does not guarantee that all voices are weighted equally during the creative decision-making process. with respect to shows with predominantly black casts, herman gray has noted that while african american writers con- tributed to stories, they were ultimately not responsible for the creative vision. from an industrial standpoint, the celebration of existing progressive on-screen writing reifies the industry structures that produced them, even if the number of roles for women is far fewer than that offered to men. the aftra committee worked to encourage ratification of the era, but over many years, anti-era sentiment grew, especially in states that still needed to ratify. when the amendment failed, the union was left with a void as to who would be able to enforce fair hir- ing practices. given aftra’s lack of a role in hiring, even if the committee reported its results to union leadership, it would be difficult to act upon their grievances. with the era’s failure, the women’s committee lost the means to systemically agitate for employment opportuni- ties and shifted its focus. during the earliest years of the aftra, women’s committee efforts focused on hiring parity and quality of representation, but these dual goals were not explicitly connected. when the women’s committee lost its best chance at gaining hiring leverage, priorities shifted and the women’s committee sought instead to recognize and honor progressive representations and on-screen achievements. the shift toward on-screen representations was not only a “safer” cause for the precarious workforce, but it also reflects the limited agency of the committee and its union more broadly with respect to hiring practices. even though women organized, raised awareness, and worked for concrete change, industry infrastructure lim- ited the potential impact of these efforts. conclusion in its very name, the “time’s up” movement seems to signify a rupture in the historical time- line of discriminatory workplace structures, biased hiring practices, and sexual assault in hollywood. “time’s up” also signals a break from the unions as the central advocate for workers as women in media form new coalitions to transform hollywood. operating outside of the guilds allows “time’s up” to take a more forceful position against harassment and bias. while the women’s committees in the s struggled against hollywood’s desire to create an illusion of industrial unity, “time’s up” can embrace women across class and craft. the stories of the various union women’s committees indicate how a culture of precarity can undermine feminist politics and activism and function to maintain the status quo. the women’s committees struggled to make progress working within the established systems media industries . ( ) and networks. although “time’s up” provides a new approach to addressing some of the sys- temic challenges of hollywood, as an organization it is dealing with problems in hollywood that have been consistent through many eras, mainly that insecure employment results in a culture of disenfranchised workers who are reluctant to advocate for themselves for fear of finding their next jobs. despite the many breaks indicated by the phrase “time’s up,” the group’s existence does not indicate a fundamental restructuring of hollywood institutions. as michael curtin and kevin sanson explain, “labor relations are a historical phenomenon—over time they inevitably adapt and transform.” the shift from advocacy work within the unions to organizing out- side and across worker groups may be an inevitable outgrowth of the contemporary culture of shared precarity. “time’s up” does not have the institutional history that anchors the rela- tionship between management and unions, which can be essential for creating space for conversations about inequities. in the case of “time’s up,” workers adapted in a way that breaks away from the longer histories of struggle. the question for the future is whether or not studios, networks, and producers can be made to adapt to the invigorated demands of women in hollywood. the relationship between hollywood’s business practices, institutional norms, and its treat- ment of women has long been intertwined. hollywood stories from the past hundred years indicate that exploitation is not only endemic but also structurally enabled. as film histori- ans know, abuses of power against vulnerable hollywood aspirants are as old as hollywood itself. not only are these histories resonant with many contemporary discussions surround- ing hollywood labor, these histories have often informed present cultures and conditions. for media scholars, declaring “time’s up” should include a willingness to look at the cultural history of hollywood and to develop an understanding of its development as a male- dominated industry. rampant inequity and harassment are not the result of anomalies or “bad apples”; they are enabled by institutional structures and empowered by cultural norms. when we look at the relationship between infrastructure and culture, and we explore histo- ries of industry diversity work, we will be better equipped to understand the possibility of gender equity and how to advocate for change in hollywood. kate fortmueller is an assistant professor in the department of entertainment and media studies at the university of georgia. her research explores historical and contemporary issues for people working in film, television, and digital production. her work appears in film history, the historical journal of film, radio, and television, journal of film and video, and television & new media. cara buckley, “powerful hollywood women unveil anti-harassment action plan,” new york times, january , . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / / movies/times-up-hollywood-women-sexual-harassment.html (accessed february , ). for an example of this type of correspondence, see: alice backes, “letter to elsa ransom of euclid, ohio,” april , , aftra papers, tamiment library, ny. miranda banks, “unequal opportunities—gender inequities and precarious diversity,” feminist media histories ( , fall ): – , and maya montañez media industries . ( ) smuckler, “thirty years of women directors,” ucla csw update newsletter, january , . https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ pd t m . for a more general discussion of precarious work, see: ruth milkman and ed ott, ed., new labor in new york (ny: cornell university press, ); guy standing, the precariat: the new dangerous class (ny: bloomsbury, ); leah vosko, managing the margins: gender, citizenship, and the international regulation of precarious employment (ny: oxford university press, ). christian fuchs, digital labor and karl marx (london: routledge, ) and andrew ross, nice work if you can get it: life and labor in precarious times (ny: nyu press, ); and standing, the precariat. alianza nacional de campesinas, “dear sisters,” printed in “ , female farmworkers say they stand with hollywood actors against sexual assault,” november , . http://time.com/ /farmworkers-solidarity-holly wood-sexual-assault/?utm_campaign=time&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_ medium=social&xid=time_socialflow_twitter (accessed february , ). candace jones, “careers in project networks: the case of the film industry,” in the boundaryless career: a new employment principle for a new organizational era, ed. michael b. arthur and denise m. rousseau (ny: oxford university press, ), – . ibid., . “sag—earnings of actors, - ,” sag-aftra negotiating files, los angeles, ca. isabell lorey, state of insecurity: government of the precarious, trans. aileen derieg (ny: verso, ), . this information was presented in graph form, but lacked specific salary numbers. duncan crabtree-ireland, “labor, entertainment, and sports: an intersectional and interdisciplinary inquiry” (paper presented at labor, entertainment, and sports: an intersectional and interdisciplinary inquiry conference, beverly hills, ca, april , ). michael curtin and kevin sanson, “listening to labor,” in voices of labor: creativity, craft, and conflict in global hollywood, ed. michael curtin and kevin sanson (berkeley: university of california press, ), . john t. caldwell, production cultures: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television (berkeley: university of california press, ), . ibid., . angela mcrobbie, be creative (cambridge: polity, ), . curtin and sanson, “listening to labor,” . mollie gregory, women who run the show: how a brilliant and creative new generation of women stormed hollywood (ny: st. martin’s press, ), xiv. for more on the founding of the ethnic minorities committee, see: press release from screen actors guild, february , , folder —screen actors guild-ethnic minorities committee, robert doqui papers, margaret herrick library, los angeles, ca. for more on the dga women’s steering committee, see: “about the women’s steering committee.” https://www.dga.org/the-guild/committees/diversity/ women.aspx (accessed february , ). media industries . ( ) vicky ball and laraine porter, “editors’ introduction: gendered patterns of discrimination,” feminist media histories ( , fall ): . anonymous (signed “one of the minorities”), “letter to robert doqui and the ethnic minorities committee, march , , folder —screen actors guild—ethnic minorities committee (member responses), robert doqui papers, margaret herrick library, los angeles, ca. frederick o’neal, “letter to alice backes,” march , , folder —committee: women’s, general, aftra papers, tamiment library, ny. gregory, women who run the show, . charles kahn, “letter to lisabeth hush and shirley mandel,” november , , folder —screen actors guild—statistics, lisabeth hush papers, margaret herrick library, los angeles, ca. banks, “unequal opportunities,” . alan hewitt, “letter to byron ellerbrock,” august , , box , folder: sag income survey, – , alan hewitt papers, new york public library special collections, ny. john dales, “letter to alan hewitt,” december , , alan hewitt papers, box , folder: sag income survey, - , new york public library special collections, ny. for more on the struggles of the dga’s women’s steering committee see rachel syme, “the original six: the story of hollywood’s forgotten feminist crusaders,” pacific standard magazine, february , . https://psmag.com/social-justice/ the-original-six-and-history-hollywood-sexism (accessed march , ). banks, “unequal opportunities,” . the objectives were reprinted in a later document, see carol bell, “spring status report,” march , , folder , aftra papers, tamiment library, ny. ibid. alice backes, “letter to ms. joan m. goodin (asst. director international affairs, brotherhood of railway, airline and steamship clerks, freight handlers, express and station employees), april , , folder , aftra papers, tamiment library, ny. ibid. alice backes, “winter overview,” womenews—aftra national women’s committee, january , aftra papers, tamiment library, ny. wga women’s committee, “women’s committee statistics report,” november , , archives, writers guild foundation shavelson-webb library, los angeles, ca. herman gray, watching race: television and the struggle for blackness (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), . for more on changing sentiments around the era see: donald critchlow and cynthia stachecki, “the equal rights amendment reconsidered: politics, policy, and social mobilization in a democracy,” the journal of policy history ( , ): – . michael curtin and kevin sanson, “precarious creativity: global media, local labor,” in precarious creativity: global media, local labor, ed. michael curtin and kevin sanson (berkeley: university of california press, ), . media industries . ( ) for more discussion of these scandals, see: hilary hallett, go west, young women! the rise of early hollywood (berkeley: university of california press, ) and denise mckenna, “the city that made the pictures move: gender, labor and los angeles, - ” (phd diss., new york university, ). bibliography ball, vicki, and laraine porter. “editors’ introduction: gendered patterns of discrimination.” feminist media histories , no. (fall ): – . banks, miranda. “unequal opportunities—gender inequities and precarious diversity.” feminist media histories , no. (fall ): – . caldwell, john t. production cultures: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. berkeley: university of california press, . critchlow, donald, and cynthia stachecki. “the equal rights amendment reconsidered: politics, policy, and social mobilization in a democracy.” the journal of policy history , no. ( ): – . curtin, michael, and kevin sanson. “listening to labor.” in voices of labor: creativity, craft, and conflict in global hollywood, edited by michael curtin and kevin sanson, – . berkeley: university of california press, . curtin, michael and kevin sanson. “precarious creativity: global media, local labor.” in precarious creativity: global media, local labor, edited by michael curtin and kevin sanson, – . berkeley: university of california press, . fuchs, christian. digital labour and karl marx. london: routledge, . gray, herman. watching race: television and the struggle for blackness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, . gregory, mollie. women who run the show: how a brilliant and creative new generation of women stormed hollywood. new york: st. martin’s press, . hallett, hilary. go west, young women! the rise of early hollywood. berkeley: university of california press, . jones, candace. “careers in project networks: the case of the film industry.” in the boundaryless career: a new employment principle for a new organizational era, edited by michael b. arthur and denise m. rousseau, – . new york: oxford university press, . lorey, isabell. state of insecurity: government of the precarious. translated by aileen derieg. new york: verso, . mckenna, denise. the city that made the pictures move: gender, labor and los angeles, – . phd dissertation, new york university, new york, . mcrobbie, angela. be creative. cambridge: polity, . media industries . ( ) milkman, ruth, and ed ott, eds. new labor in new york. new york: cornell university press, . miller, toby, nitin govil, john mcmurria, richard maxwell, and ting wang. global hollywood . london: british film institute, . ross, andrew. nice work if you can get it: life and labor in precarious times. new york: nyu press, . smuckler, maya montañez. “thirty years of women directors.” ucla csw update newsletter, january , . https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ pd t m . standing, guy. the precariat: the new dangerous class. new york: bloomsbury, . vosko, leah. managing the margins: gender, citizenship, and the international regulation of precarious employment. new york: oxford university press, . 	 _mij_ . microsoft word - segal interview .docx                city, university of london institutional repository citation: segal, l. and littler, j. orcid: - - - ( ). democracy in the making. soundings, , pp. - . doi: . /soun: . . this is the accepted version of the paper. this version of the publication may differ from the final published version. permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/ . /soun: . . copyright and reuse: city research online aims to make research outputs of city, university of london available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. urls from city research online may be freely distributed and linked to. city research online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk city research online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk democracy in the making lynne segal talks to jo littler ‘the audacity is to dare to hope when there seems so little reason to hope.’ why did you write radical happiness? good question, i’ve wondered myself! speaking about my last book, out of time: the pleasures & perils of ageing, i was often asked what i’d write about next. death? one person grinned. no, i said, perhaps the opposite. that’s when i started thinking that what i’m always trying to address, for myself as much as anyone else, are our attachments to life. what promotes this and creates our well-being, i thought, is not really individual pursuits, such as pumping muscles at the gym, it’s having friends and contacts; it’s making life meaningful, together with others. confronting the ubiquitous neoliberal rationality, endorsing only endless competitiveness - individual or corporate - we need to hold on to alternative ways of connecting with each other. surely it is mainly our ties to others that make life worth living. this makes the work some people are doing around the notion of ‘the commons’ so important - the idea that we need shared spaces, quite outside the commercial arena, for us to be together, if only to ponder what life is about. radical happiness was written against what is known as ‘the happiness industry’. it connects with what became the interest of our national governments in measuring ‘happiness’: an interest which in my view stemmed from and served to obscure their covert worry about the high, and increasing, levels of personal stress, anxiety and depression. all the statistics indicate that it is actually misery that’s really on the rise. our government’s solution to this has been to put money into cbt (cognitive behavioural therapy) in order to get people back to work as fast as possible. but what is this thing called happiness anyway? we’d hardly agree on its definition. i suggest, like all emotions, happiness is not best seen as an individual, quantifiable trait, but has a social or public dimension as well. personal happiness is not separable from our relations with others, which is why i am interested in exploring those obviously shared moments of pleasure or delight, occasions of collective joy. the dominant idea of happiness today rotates around an idea of the individualised self: that we are responsible for our own happiness, and for our own care, or ‘self- care’. which brings us to your next book, which is on care; and to how, there, you’re continuing to write against neoliberal individualism. i usually say that all my books have a common thread: i just get a new peg to weave them around! the mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. this is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. for instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. according to the sutton trust, there was a per cent cut in early years day care provision between and , and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it’s all so short sighted. state endorsed neoliberal market fetishism has involved the commercial outsourcing of welfare and public resources, but this goes along with an underlying contempt for dependency, indeed for anything that is not about ‘productivity’ in terms of money- making. the extraordinary crisis of care we’re now facing is one of the most important issues at the moment. the north american feminist historian laura briggs argues that today all politics would be better seen as reproductive politics; i we can’t get our basic needs for survival met properly, and that’s just not factored into what we are talking about when we reduce politics to economics and gdp (gross domestic product). even those of us who have young children or other dependents in need of our care are so often not in the position to provide it. instead, we must often rely upon what is called ‘the global care chain’. this involves women travelling from the ‘third’ world to care for those in the ‘first’ world who don’t have the time to do our own caring work, even when wanting to. this includes both women and men, but of course it is women who are still deemed mainly responsible for either providing or arranging for the care of children and other dependents. moreover, the appalling combinations of enduring sexism and racism mean care work remains, for the most part, extremely poorly paid and precarious. we can observe people, mostly women, having to abandon those who need them in their own communities to traverse the globe to meet caring needs elsewhere. it is surely a crazy situation. your book slow motion: changing masculinities, changing men has been through three editions since it was first published in . how would you update it today? there’s one question i was always asked about that book: have men changed? and of course men are changing all the time, along with the very different situations men face. i wrote slow motion as part of my attempt to hold onto a socialist feminist agenda, as distinct from an increasingly popular radical feminist one, which endorsed the manichean view of women as the ‘solution’ for everything, and men as always the ‘problem’. in our socialist-feminist vision, we began by thinking that gender issues would recede more into the background as we struggled to create a more egalitarian world for all. we hoped that men and women together would be sharing both the world of caring and commitment in domestic intimacies, at the same time as women would be out there with men in the workforce and the cultural and political arena. we started from wanting shorter working hours in paid employment, hence making caring work and intimacies more compatible with the workplace. this was the feminist agenda that faced most defeat, being completely at odds with the ongoing rise of a neoliberal agenda exclusively focused on productivity and profit. second-wave feminism was interested not just in changing the world to facilitate women’s entry into the workforce and public life, with some having equal power alongside men; we wanted more fundamental social change, rethinking how we conceive of life itself, placing economic production and social reproduction on an equal footing. in the harsher economic and ideological climate from the s, this more utopian thinking was side-lined. a greater feminist focus on shifting subjectivities and men’s violence overshadowed the question of how we transform domestic, social and working lives to enable men and women to be equally engaged in them all. my concern with masculinity came from that project of transforming family and working lives: suggesting that there was intrinsically no reason why we had the public/private split lined up with gendered or sexual difference. so i was concerned with the construction and maintenance of gender hierarchy. masculinities and femininities are performative categories in which differences become socially embodied. but when the book was published some feminists criticised me for not beginning, and more or less ending, with the issue of men’s violence against women. these critics suggested that the relationship between men and violence parallels the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. i rejected this for ignoring both the huge diversity within genders, as well the complex dynamics underlying existing gender contrasts. only later, post-queer, would i also be criticised for ignoring female ‘masculinity’, and later again, trans issues. the main thing that has changed since i completed that book at the close of the s is women’s ever more entrenched role in the labour market. more women, including mothers of young children, are working very long hours, with some professional women acquiring significant managerial authority alongside men. indeed, women’s lives have been transformed more than men’s, although men’s lives have often become more precarious, their position in the workforce more vulnerable. this can at times increase the pathological manifestations of manhood, at least for those men trying to cling to the difference manhood supposedly promised, with violence against women used to shore up a fragile sense of masculinity, or assuage personal failure. do you still would push for a four-day week, and shorter working day? definitely! don’t we need it?! it’s almost ninety years since john maynard keynes predicted that technological advances would enable us to work a fifteen-hour week. yet, we have all been pushed in the opposite direction, and are now working longer hours than ever, if often in pointless pursuits. as keynes forecast, we probably do now only need the equivalent of two or three days in paid work from each of us - or else four-hour days - especially once we have automatons doing even more of the work that they could be doing! instead, paid work is absurdly unevenly distributed, as working days lengthen. the question should be, what work is significant, consequential and useful? as david graeber writes, so many jobs are ‘bullshit jobs’ - they are not producing anything of any worth, and the world might be a better place without them.ii there was a real groundswell of interest in studying masculinity in the s, which perhaps isn’t being quite as vigorously pursued by academics at the moment, even though we have so many regressive masculinities occurring in public life. i’m thinking about trump, breitbart, top gear, jordan peterson … yes. going back to the s: with the emergence of women’s liberation, you did find a significant minority of men wanting to support women and be involved in caring. there were men against sexism groups which produced magazines such as achilles heel and organised creches at conferences. there’s a lovely photo of stuart hall doing the creche at the very first women’s liberation conference in ruskin college in february . then, when gay liberation blooms alongside feminism, you have a lot of gay men re-thinking and theorising ‘masculinity’. they reveal that there have always been hierarchical groupings amongst men themselves, which are usually racialised and sexualised. men falling in love with other men, or enjoying gazing at men’s bodies as well as women’s bodies, was seen as a terrible threat to hegemonic masculinity. this is something alan sinfield wrote about in the wilde century, where he noted that ‘the feminine boy’ was deemed ‘despicable’ simply because he was ‘girlish’ rather than because he was homosexual.iii we see this particularly at the close of the nineteenth century, when gender contrasts are seen as bedrock - and imperial britain is trying to maintain the imperial status it’s about to lose in the world - that the archetype of the tough, manly man is being vigorously policed. sinfield’s work was part of the broader flourishing of queer scholarship, which often had a particular interest in hegemonic masculinity, alongside the growth of men’s studies, with writers such as r.w. connell and michael kimmel key figures, both of whom supported feminist goals. however, masculinity is still policed today, as you say, despite being so visibly more diverse. i think it is very much in keeping with these harsh economic times that we have the return of the most absurdly domineering representatives of the supposedly tough, independent, autonomous man - recalling the idiocy of george bush junior in flak jacket, launching the second tragic invasion of iraq - despite all the ways in which this sham phallic persona has been critiqued by feminism and by gay men. so in terms of transforming society, we still have far to go in undoing the gender binary - - tough man/gentle woman. most women aren’t gentle, most men aren’t tough: they are not so very different from each other. but somehow the binary lives on, in almost every hollywood movie, in cartoons, in magazines, in children’s games. insofar as it’s challenged, it is usually by creating the tough girl rather than the gentle man, which is rather sad. how do those gender dynamics relate to contemporary feminism? i think we are now in a strange place in relation to feminism. whilst some people say there hasn’t been any change in men’s violence against women, there has been an enormous change insofar as women everywhere are talking about it. when women’s liberation was still brand new in the s we had to think up new words for sexual harassment, rape in marriage, and so on, because they didn’t exist. now sexism, and violence against women, and the demeaning of women’s bodies, is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. that’s a huge difference. i absolutely welcome all these campaigns, whether it’s #metoo or global marches against rape and violence against women. i especially welcome women’s slightly more playful and provocative engagement with sexism - such as the slutwalks, which became a very big movement only a few years ago, and which said ‘we will present ourselves however we want in the world and we are still in charge of our own bodies’. i noticed that a lot of gay men and trans folk, together with women, were very much involved with dancing and singing in the streets in slutwalks, all around the globe. i would also stress that violence against women needs also to be seen in relation to underlying structural inequalities, in the home and workplace, enabling gender violence, and impeding women’s escape from it. as i’ve said, i came into british politics at the start of second-wave feminism, when we were going to transform the world so that both men and women could together find our place in the sun. third-wave feminism was more focused on the differences between women; the voices of black women, lesbians and disabled women came more to the fore, and difference of all kinds became a more important issue. and it is very important that it did - though, for me, a problem with thinking about subjectivities and distinct belongings is that we always also need some broader transformative politics to unite us in solidarity to improve the lives of all. this means that building coalitions across all our differences will always be central. in the s we didn’t just hear about the proliferation of differences; there was also a questioning of whether there is anything fixed at all underpinning those differences. in the footsteps of judith butler, eve sedgwick, and all, the whole point of queer was to challenge the idea of there being any serious underpinning unity between women, or within gender, that wasn’t performative, imposed through diverse linguistic reiterations. that led to a plethora of symbolic and performative subversions suggesting ‘we can display ourselves however we like’. important as that is, there is the slight problem of too neat a fit with neoliberal seductions promising (though never delivering) choice for everybody. we do want people to have some sense of autonomy and choice in their lives; but this is problematic if we don’t begin from noting how appallingly uneven and unequal are the choices people can make. nowadays most people have less, not more, choice over their lives. there was also a slight tension over how to keep queer theory really radical. as soon as you have the category, queer, it tends (like any label) to become an identification in itself, and we surely know how quickly anti-normative identities can themselves become normative … another debate surrounding gender that’s dividing feminists now is all the discussions and arguments about transgender politics. trans people are absolutely right to say that they have been amongst the most ignored, as well as some of the main targets of violence (sometimes deadly), for not slotting into the normative gender binary. and it’s only been in the last ten years that trans issues and the assertion of their rights have to come to the fore. but here we immediately face a problem over what we are talking about when we talk about trans. for some people, trans is a gender category: individuals can see themselves as being born into ‘the wrong gender’ (‘i am really a woman - or a man - so i need to trans sex in order to become my true self’). indeed, trans people used to have to assert, almost rigidly, a distinct, even exaggerated, gender identity in order to be allowed the hormones or surgical interventions they desired to change gender from the one they found it too painful to inhabit. but other trans identifications vigorously reject gender binarism, taking us back to the ebullient transsexual lesbian, kate bornstein, who wrote gender outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us, later saying that ‘i’m probably the only lesbian to have successfully castrated a man and gone on to laugh about it on stage, in print and on national television’.iv so these issues are immensely complex. those who are focused on rejecting what they see as transphobic discourses within feminism – at its worst describing militant trans activists as conducting a ‘war on women’ – are in conflict with other feminists who oppose legislation allowing people, in this case men, simply to ‘choose’ to change genders and thereby enter ‘women-only’ spaces or shortlists reserved for women. given the history of trans oppression, i support, though not without hesitations, the diversity of trans rights. after all, norway has had gender choice legislation for years, without any subsequent serious problems. moreover, feminism has always been full of paradoxes. these connect with joan scott’s classic description of gender as at once ‘empty and overflowing’. there is nothing that ultimately defines all women or all men, without stifling ‘alternative, denied or suppressed definitions’.v but at the same time, gender categories remain invested with deep psychic and erotic meanings, alongside enduring, if nowadays somewhat more open, social structures shaping our sense of what men and women ought to be doing - especially in relation to reproduction and childcare. symbolically, power remains aligned with men, on the side of the phallus, that thing men are supposed to possess, which forever escapes them. thus feminism remains a contested domain. the socialist feminist wish that gender might in itself become a less significant issue has yet to happen. but it is why i feel sympathetic to a trans politics wanting to transcend gender binarism. i doubt we will ever completely obliterate sexual difference, as some hope. i think we are always likely to create stories about our embodied selves that elaborate upon anatomical contrasts, however loosely. these are always, as butler would say, regulatory fictions. but we need social fictions, however diverse, for identifying ourselves and acquiring some sense of belonging. at birth it is hard to distinguish between infants when all they are doing is wailing and feeding, but it is usually possible to observe genital difference. so i suspect some acknowledgement of that difference will remain, though its elaborations will hopefully become ever more fluid. in why feminism? you discuss the necessity of not reducing biology to culture or culture to biology. how do you think gender studies is progressing in that regard? it’s interesting how the trans debates highlight that strange paradox. biology and culture, biology and environment, are never in any way separable. donna haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an ‘endless resource’ of ‘multiple possibilities’. similarly, the neuroscientist steven rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. so when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men - if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into - the complexity is quite phenomenal! the idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. and yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as richard dworkin, providing ‘biological’ explanations for why women wear high heels and tight dresses. however laughable, the media presents these biological musings as the gold standard of science. thus popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists. there have been more serious attempts by artists and scientists to work together, engaging with the nuance and richness each can offer the other in their tales of life, today with added input from cybertechnology - and the welcome institute in london encourages such initiatives. they have done some interesting work around gender. on the one hand, we exist within mortal, material bodies, and in that sense are never outside of the biological. that was one of the criticisms some theorists, such as r.w. connell, made of what they saw as some of the excesses of social constructionism, or of foucauldian thinking and the theoretical turn to language. the corporeality of the body disappeared into discussion about the metaphors and language through which it is mapped and spoken. on the other hand, it’s also true that the body is only mapped and spoken through language, so there’s no teasing the two apart: there’s only possible exploration of the very interesting ways in which body and language fit together, or remain, perhaps, unmarked or repudiated in discourse. jeremy corbyn is your mp in islington. what is your relationship to the labour party? in the s i was not in the labour party, but attached to community activists who saw ourselves, rightly, as far more radical than reformist social democracy! for a while i joined big flame, which described itself as a revolutionary socialist feminist movement, trying to unite grass-roots community and industrial struggles. but then when margaret thatcher loomed on the parliamentary horizon, with her brand of right-wing populism, the political landscape looked more ominous. the first book i was involved in writing was beyond the fragments: feminism and the making of socialism, in which sheila rowbotham (the lead author), hilary wainwright and i argued that the organised left overall needed to abandon its sectarian vanguardism or bureaucratic complacencies, and start listening to and learning from the diversity of feminist, anti-racist and other forms of movement politics. we had achieved a lot through local movement coalitions, extending community resources and working against the cuts (already beginning under callaghan). now was the time for broader left coalitions across all our differences in order to defeat thatcher and the march of corporate capital. we needed the most progressive government in power if we were not to lose the ground we had gained. so i joined the labour party. that was the end of big flame, because half of us went off and joined the labour party and the others didn’t. the labour party in the early s was an exciting place to be, at least in islington. jeremy corbyn was put forward and elected to stand as labour’s candidate, and my house served as the ward committee room for the general election in . many non-party activists came along to help us get jeremy elected. suddenly, as today, there were complaints about radicals coming into the labour party and ‘taking over’! i so vividly recall the night and day of that election, when we just worked, literally non-stop, from am to pm, racing around the streets, in the end pulling people out of bed to get them to vote … (i remember an old irish neighbour putting his hands up just before pm: ‘i give up! i give up! i’m going!’). jeremy was duly elected and we were so excited. yet i also recall him warning us, ‘you know there is not going to be a lot i can do!’ he was right, when of course thatcher was re-elected, so the night was somewhat catastrophic, despite our cheering that we had got jeremy elected. it had all been quite a struggle, because the sdp/liberal alliance was strong in islington, which had previously been represented by a right-wing labour candidate, michael o’halloran. he had been working hand-in-glove with the rather notorious murphy construction firm, which refused to allow workers to unionise, and i don’t think o’halloran had ever opened his mouth in parliament. so from the beginning it was a huge battle to get a left labour person elected; quite how this labour outsider got into the position he’s in now is one of the amazing stories of our time. how has your relationship to the labour party changed over the years? we stayed in the labour party - me and my left friends, feminists and socialists alike - until the end of the s. we started leaving under kinnock. this was not so much because of his attack on militant (we shared little with that form of sectarian trotskyist entryism), but simply because not much seemed possible in relation to advancing a progressive agenda. of course it got worse under blair. i would not say that i was right to leave, for just as i think everyone should be in a trade union, however limited their vision of change, it also makes sense to join whatever we see as the most progressive party of the moment - although one can of course always try and influence party politics from the outside. i’ve never been a member of the green party, although i support much of their agenda, and have sometimes voted for them. in fact i’ve swapped votes tactically, so i’ve sometimes had a green and a labour poster up - knowing that nowadays corbyn would get elected here. i’ve voted green as a swap, to get someone in hampstead or somewhere else to vote labour, where labour is more marginal. since we don’t have proportional representation, it’s an attempt to try and create it. my politics has not shifted far from my outlook at the close of the s: i still see it as very important for movement politics to flourish, which of course has become ever more difficult with everybody working longer hours and there being so few public spaces to congregate. this is such a contrast with the era of livingstone’s glc, when ken was determined to open the council grounds as a sort of commons. there were open air concerts and endless other projects sponsored by the glc during that period, which, while it lasted, were all so significant in supporting trade union resistance as well as a rainbow of creative, political aspirations. thus, despite leaving the labour party, i remained committed to ideas of movement solidarity and coalition building, as well as the formation of regional and global alliances of the left, all working to oppose much of what has happened over the last thirty years: the deregulation of finance, the privatisation of state resources and the outsourcing of care, largely to the same few corporate companies. almost all relevant research has highlighted the wretched misery created by these policies. studies commissioned by trade unions and charities have for years been highlighting the drastic deterioration of service provision, which has not only led to greater job insecurity and worsening conditions for workers, but has inevitably resulted in an altogether more fragmented and poorer quality of care at almost every level for those in most need. all this alan white, among others, covers in book, shadow state.vi so for me an anti-state position remains extremely problematic, despite the enduring need to democratise state resources. for a long time you’ve been, simultaneously, an activist and an academic. how have these different roles worked together for you? i’ve often joked that throughout the s i was an underground academic, and an out revolutionary! many people i knew thought i worked at the islington community press, which operated from a squatted building and produced an alternative community paper, the islington gutter press. as a radical resource centre, it facilitated the campaigns of progressive groups working around almost anything at all, globally, nationally and locally. it was a hub of activity: there were people active in support of eritrean liberation, the anti-apartheid movement, peace in cyprus, as well as all the diverse feminist and anti-racist work of the s. i was also active in essex road women’s centre, and a local socialist centre which we began at the close of the s in the upstairs of a pub, the hemingford arms. there were also festivals on highbury fields organised for community activists, all contributing to a collective spirit that continued from the s into the s. we had a vague sense of ourselves as revolutionaries; although as feminists we always had a more complex relation to the state, calling for increased resources, and the democratic sharing of its resources. at the same time i was also teaching in the psychology department at enfield college of technology, later middlesex polytechnic and finally middlesex university. it’s where i got my first job, and where i stayed for thirty years, until i was asked to apply for a position at birkbeck, university of london, in . they were at the time appointing a few ‘anniversary’ professors to celebrate birkbeck college having existed for years, originally having been founded to give working men - and quite early on also working women - access to higher education. i was lucky enough to be chosen as a cross-disciplinary scholar because i had started writing about contemporary feminist and left politics at the close of the s, when political activism was dying down. i was influenced by and remained very close to sheila rowbotham, who had worked at the glc, producing the magazine jobs for a change in the first half of the s. however, by the second half of the s, without a doubt, much that we had been fighting for was facing defeat, and the glc itself had been abolished. community resource centres could hardly survive. the s loomed as, and became, a decade of mourning for many former radicals. the only exciting politics was queer activism - with the challenges of hiv and aids generating a culture of resistance and politics of care to deal with the disease - and the fight back against rising homophobic abuse or neglect. certainly, thatcher’s anti-union legislation meant that trade unions were declining rapidly; they had lost nearly half their membership by the close of the s. meanwhile, deep divisions had arisen in movement politics, with socialist feminism, for instance, practically disappearing, as the emphasis shifted to the protection of women from men’s violence. so i began writing more, and completed is the future female? troubled thoughts on contemporary feminism in the late s, as a defence of socialist feminism. i think all my books practically end with the very same sentence, whether it is that first one, why feminism?, my political memoir, making trouble, out of time, on ageing, or the most recent, radical happiness; they all reflect upon my generation, with its high hopes for a transformative politics, and end up wondering what hopes remain today. each book is about that question really - how we keep hope alive. by the late s i had managed to become a senior academic, because i had been writing these political books. and by then i had also come to see higher education itself - now under significant attack, especially in my own field of the humanities - as a significant political terrain in a way i didn’t fully appreciate in my younger academic life. i saw that we teachers had the enormous privilege of being able to be pedagogic activists. this was definitely the case with my very dear friend alan sinfield - mentioned earlier - who died recently and whose obituary i have just written for history workshop. a charismatic gay theorist and literary scholar, alan was always concerned with pedagogy: how to prevent the cultural clout of the elite from undermining the educational possibilities of those who don’t possess similar cultural authority. he addressed, for instance, how you could teach shakespeare, overturning patrician readings that had served to justify colonialism and imperialism, racism and sexism. and i also realised that i had always had mentors - stuart hall was another - for whom radical teaching, radical pedagogy, was so very important. that became clear to me eventually in my middle age. your work is marked by interdisciplinarity. how do you work through and around different academic disciplines? what have been some of the challenges of transdisciplinarity, and why do we need it? my work always had to be interdisciplinary, because i was trained as a psychologist at sydney university in the s. the main thing psychologists did then was to run rats through mazes and imagine that they were learning something about universal learning patterns, via their observations of rodents in restricted, artificial situations. it had next to nothing to do with human behaviour, which is meaningful and rule-bound (or rule resistant!). when i did my phd in the s, conceptual confusions in experimental psychology, that’s what i pointed out: it was written as a critique of behavouristic psychology. pure psychology was then, and often remains, a science of experimental methods and conceptual confusion, because the descriptive categories it uses to encompass human behaviour are inadequate for the task - lacking any historical, cultural or political focus on the accounts we give of human behaviour, with their distinct specificity at any moment in time. is that man expressing his great love for woman, or harassing her? pointing that out in my phd meant that i was not going to get a job in australia, especially as there were only a few universities in sydney back then. so i slunk off to london (bringing along my baby son, born soon after i completed my doctorate) - where r.d. laing was popular at the time, with his views about the madness underlying our perceptions of sanity, and vice versa - not knowing quite who i was, or what i would be able to do. however, this was exactly when universities were expanding in the uk, so i snuck into enfield college of technology by the back door (someone was on maternity leave), and stayed there for thirty years, since that job gave me time and space as a feminist and community activist. i was in the psychology department as a licensed educator, although i certainly wasn’t going to teach any mainstream psychology, except to critique it. but again, fortunately for me, under the shelter of ‘social psychology’, i could address gender, class and race. i was often in slight trouble because external examiners would say ‘this is not social psychology! this is all about political issues!’. so i changed the title to ‘psychology and social issues’. then there would be one or two progressive psychologists, alongside the young women who were now entering the discipline as feminists. michael billig was the external examiner one year, and he said: ‘the only course where student responses were really interesting was lynne segal’s. i want everybody who did her exam paper to be raised up a degree mark!’. (i believe this happened, though it seems rather like a dream.) so my teaching had to be interdisciplinary because otherwise i could not have incorporated the social issues my courses covered, relating them to the politics of the day. that type of interdisciplinarity became easier as feminist scholarship was gradually more accepted in the academy. in radical happiness you say that ‘even trying to envisage how we might help create a more equitable, peaceful and fairer world brings a certain audacity and energy to life, at least in the process of sharing such imaginings’. ‘audacity and energy’ seem like appropriate keywords for you and your work … it’s so easy to feel to bored and enervated today. one just has to have mentors, friends and other people who can help to guide you, even if you feel you are living in the ruin of past hopes, or with the rubble of words, when surveying the devastation of neoliberal ‘reforms’ or national disdain for the plight of the vulnerable and displaced. for instance, as a person of jewish descent, i’ve been involved in ongoing peace work in relation to justice for palestinians. there we have only seen conditions deteriorate for the palestinians - i mean we have really got nowhere, as yet - but at the same time, one keeps going, one has to keep going, in solidarity with all those other people still involved in that struggle, saying ‘we are just not going to accept this’. it is always possible to envisage something different, and to be supportive of each other in a range of ways. the audacity is to dare to hope when there seems so little reason to hope. that’s also why green politics is so important now. to talk about genuine sustainability and to think about a feminist, green economics, for instance, is where we have to begin nowadays. it is the absolute opposite of neoliberal rationality, concerned only with the production of profit. how do we create a better, more sustainable lives for all? how do we stop devastating the environment? we have to begin from those questions. this involves rethinking the state, locally and nationally; building coalitions and global ties that have to be continuously knitted together anew. we begin in different places, whilst working for greater equality, peace, care and environmental sustainability. so if ‘the one long book’ you are writing, which you mentioned earlier, is about hope, then it is also about how the personal is political and the political is personal? yes, yes, it is about how to keep hope alive, dare i say, how to keep affirming love and solidarity. how do we relate to the world? how and where can we find the most imaginative, interesting and progressive thought and action? there are identifications that we make quite early on, and the identifications that i made, where i belong, is with the radical egalitarianism of s politics, as it morphed into s socialist- feminism. of course, we will stay blind to so many issues, and fail to hear the most fragile of collective voices - we know some people will remain excluded, smeared, or mocked, as the diversity of trans people were until very recently. yet there is as well always the potential for greater openness, for democracy in the making. this is what i am hoping for. a type of political uncertainty is inevitable, even necessary, yet at the same time we can keep arguing, as passionately as we can, for politics to remain as inclusive as possible: knowing that we could, together, achieve something far better than the world as it is. we have to. thanks to gabriel bristow for transcribing this interview and for the gender and sexuality research forum and the department of sociology at city, university of london for funding it. lynne would like to thank jo littler, for all the interesting questions, and sally davidson for editing suggestions i laura briggs, how all politics became reproductive politics, university of california press . ii david graeber, bullshit jobs: a theory, penguin . iii alan sinfield, the wilde century, cassell , p . iv kate bornstein, ‘transsexual lesbian playwright tells all!’, in amy scholder and ira silverberg (eds), high risk, serpent’s tail , p . v joan wallach scott, gender and the politics of history, columbia university press . vi alan white, shadow state: inside the secret companies that run britain, oneworld publications . feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ article – speaking the unspeakable? nicola lacey’s unspeakable subjects and consent in the age of #metoo chiara cooper* abstract in the midst of the #metoo movement, a woman named grace came forward describing an experience – that she had labelled sexual assault – with actor/comedian aziz ansari. this encounter did not reflect a clear and dichotomous giving or withholding of consent in line with a yes or no to sex. because of this ambiguity, grace’s assault became somewhat of a catalyst for #metoo. the movement was divided into critics on the one hand, who argued her evening with ansari was no more than an episode of bad heterosex, and supporters on the other, for whom grace’s account resonated and who subsequently backed the need for deeper conversations on the topic of sexual consent. considering these debates and grace’s experience, this paper looks to the work of nicola lacey in unspeakable subjects to analyse how current ideas of sexual consent, in the sexual offences act and beyond, fail to reflect a nuanced understanding of sexual harms, consequently neglecting ambiguous experiences in heterosex – like grace’s – of consented to unwanted sex. through an exploration of lacey’s concept of sexual integrity, scholarship in the area of bdsm and other sociolegal approaches to considering consent and sex more ethically, this paper advocates expanding our view of consent to involve a critical analysis of how multiple power dynamics can intersect to affect individuals’ abilities to freely and meaningfully consent in heterosex. introduction nicola gavey observes that, ‘to say that women often engage in unwanted sex with men is paradoxically both to state the obvious and to speak the unspeakable’ (gavey, : ). it is undoubtedly complex to analyse the ‘wantedness’ of women’s sexual experiences (bay-cheng and bruns, ; muehlenhard and peterson, ). to explore the wantedness of sex involves an exploration of consent, which is often considered in line with a binary of yes or no, while sexual encounters are thought to exist in isolation from their wider cultural, political and social context (muehlenhard and peterson, ; beres, ). in law then, consent (or lack thereof) is often grounded in the protection of the individual to make free choices as to one’s sexual relationships and contacts (cowan, b: ). but, should consent be considered as something to be measured against a liberal, individualised standard as this one? as nicola lacey asks: ‘why should it be that the contemporary criminal law dealing with sexuality has such an oblique relationship with social attitudes about what is valuable about sexual experience and what is wrong with certain forms of sexual behaviour?’ (lacey, : ). with this considered, i will illustrate that given consent exists as a central part of english rape law, nicola lacey’s writing on consent is as important and relevant in the #metoo era as it was years ago. unspeakable subjects offers a foundation to explore whether sexual consent, as framed within the uk sexual offences act, has a valuable place when thinking specifically about consented to unwanted sex in heterosexual relationships. this phenomenon * doctoral candidate, edinburgh school of law, university of edinburgh, uk. email chiara.cooper@ed.ac.uk mailto:chiara.cooper@ed.ac.uk cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ is more ambiguous than a traditional understanding of sexual misconduct, albeit potentially as harmful. looking to the present day, i use the allegation against us actor/comedian aziz ansari, which came to light as part of the #metoo movement as an example of consented to unwanted sex. the problem may well be that the most vocal – or at least the most heard – part of rape and sexual assault discourse, is one that draws on the law for much of its language and concepts. this then makes it difficult to persuade anyone that instances involving sexual abuses that are profoundly normalised occurrences for women (like consented to unwanted sex), but that are not recognised under or in the law as assaults, include the same absence of respect found in other gender-based violence. to examine this, the analysis that follows will consider whether and how consent can be ‘authentically’ given. lacey’s view of sexual integrity and other modern approaches to conceptualising consent and sex will be reflected upon here. these examples will be put forward as ways to better understand the everyday workings of heterosexual consent while simultaneously offering a way to acknowledge the wrongfulness of certain forms of sexual behaviour, which may not be thought of as constituting rape or sexual assault but may reflect the actuality of heterosexual women’s experiences. the argument in this paper will unfold first by exploring how consent is reflected in the law in england and wales, going on from this to analyse the aziz ansari allegation and locating this within a broader discussion of consented to unwanted sex. following on from this, i will examine how some of the criticisms aimed at the ansari story mirror the anti-victim feminist sentiments of the s and s. the paper continues to examine the literature in relation to the reasons one might consent to unwanted sex and concludes by considering ways to reconsider the concept of sexual consent, bringing in nicola lacey’s notion of sexual integrity and the work of authors in the area of bdsm, as well as others. . consent – the law in england and wales the uk sexual offences act – based on the home office review, setting the boundaries – has offered the latest contribution to reforming and evaluating the offence of rape, in england and wales at least (sharpe, ). section ( ) of the sexual offences act grounds the foundations of the actus reus of the offence of rape, defining it as non- consensual penile penetration (vaginal, anal or oral) of another person in circumstances whereby the defendant does not reasonably believe in consent (finch and munro, ). in each of these elements, lack of consent is a key ingredient (lacey, ). section ( ) explores the mens rea, stating that the reasonableness of the defendant's belief in consent will be determined by reference to the surrounding circumstances including the steps taken to ascertain whether the complainant was consenting. under this legislation, consent follows a statutory definition found in section of the act, which defines consensual sexual activity as: ‘if he [sic] agrees by choice and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice’. in addition to this, the act seeks to impose guidelines for decision making on the presence or absence of consent (finch and munro, : - ). for example, under section , the act gives an exhaustive list of circumstances in which consent and reasonable belief in consent is presumed to be absent. these circumstances include (i have not covered the full list here), whether the complainant is asleep or unconscious, whether force or threats of force were used against the complainant and whether physical disability impairs the complainant’s ability to communicate consent. the aim of this list was to clarify and explain the law, ‘setting clear boundaries for society as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour’ (temkin and ashworth, : ). alongside this and under section of the act, two circumstances are stated in which the presumption that consent is absent is conclusive: where the defendant has intentionally deceived the complainant as to the nature or purpose of the act or has intentionally induced the feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ complainant to consent by impersonating someone known to her (see r v jheeta [ ] ewca crim and r v tabassum [ ] cr app r for discussion of the former circumstance) (finch and munro, : ). working all together, the definition of consent under section , the exhaustive list of presumed circumstances of non-consent under section and the two conclusive circumstances of non-consent under section have been considered to represent a ‘three pronged approach’ to consent (finch and munro, : ). of course, the view that individuals have freedom when it comes to choosing sexual partners has positive beginnings. to recognise women in particular in this way means to acknowledge their independence as human beings, to make choices and decisions as they wish, free from criticism or punishment (day, ). this personal autonomy is then, to an extent, progressive. it involves women’s self-governance and dissolves the idea of women as dependent individuals (reynolds, ). policies which invoke broad notions of choice and freedom may also be useful in the context of sexual violence, particularly when we think about increasing the impact of gender-based, structural challenges and calls to reform (munro, ). yet these provisions have also come under considerable criticism (temkin and ashworth, ; laird, ; rumney, ). some have questioned the way in which the act seems to set up a ‘hierarchy of rape’, implied in this three-pronged approach to consent (finch and munro, ; temkin and ashworth, ). there too have been apprehensions in regard to the practical application of these provisions. for example, it is not clear what freedom and/or capacity looks like; as temkin and ashworth point out, all questions about how much liberty of action satisfies the definition of freedom and capacity under section remain unclear (temkin and ashworth, ; finch and munro, ). also, even if factual situations seem to fit squarely within the section list, it is not certain that these provisions will have an effect on the outcome of the case – it depends on how they are interpreted and applied to the circumstances in every individual case (finch and munro, ). additionally, the provisions continue to operate by placing the complainant, and her freedom and capacity, at the centre of judicial scrutiny (finch and munro, ; rumney, ). although this greater emphasis on the complainant’s right to sexual autonomy might be viewed in line with attempts to strive for equality for cisgender women, sharpe rightly asks what it means for transgender and other gender non-conforming defendants, particularly when considering the law pertaining to consent obtained by fraud (sharpe, ; see further: r v mcnally [ ] ewca crim ). the notion of ‘free agreement’ would be unproblematic here if sexual communication were always clear and unambiguous, where men accepted the clear communication of non-consent and if sexual consent was not assumed (rumney, ). indeed, the setting the boundaries review states that: ‘in today’s world it is important to recognise that sexual partners are each responsible for their own actions’ (emphasis added) (home office, : ). as rumney observes, this is potentially problematic as it might bolster a belief that women are in some way to blame for rape when they have not communicated their non-consent clearly (rumney, : ). it is in light of this that many have criticised the decision to make the list of circumstances in section of the act exhaustive, lamenting the failure to include situations which involve more dubious negotiations of consent, for example where the complainant has been subjected to pressure other than that of a violent nature (finch and munro, ; temkin and ashworth, ). i will explore this failure in more detail shortly, looking at the allegation against aziz ansari as part of the #metoo movement. the uk act more broadly establishes that issues of capacity and coercion, for example, are connected to consent, yet it fails to acknowledge questions relating to freedom (cowan, a: cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ ). i take issue with this here as the question becomes, what counts as free consent, particularly in those non-violent but subtly coercive situations? as robin west observes, consent, though perhaps an adequate legal framework for distinguishing rape from sex, leaves under-theorised sex that is consensual but may not be desired (west, ). west notes this experience can implant in one’s body ’the truth that one’s subjective pleasures and interests don’t matter’ and can alienate women from their desires as a result (west, ; gong, ). the instinctive response here may well be that sex in these situations is not experienced through a free choice, however it seems unlikely that cases of this type would ever reach a court or be considered as such in court (cowan, a: ). in addition to this, to assert that consent should be regarded as an individualised notion detaches it in its entirety from the social, relational and affective conditions under which choices can be embarked upon meaningfully. clearly, the right of each individual to have bodily agency is positive, it involves equality and the capacity to choose, as observed above. but under this view, sexual abuse is determined through an emphasis on the lack of consent which is regarded as abstract and asymmetrical and which reflects a set of arrangements to be initiated (lacey, ). as lacey notes in unspeakable subjects, to ignore issues of power and oppression while perpetuating stereotypes of active masculinity and passive femininity through such a consent lens, reflects a certain sense of legal ignorance (lacey, : ). what that means here is while the law emphasizes the value of autonomy, ideas of self-expression, connection, intimacy and relationship – things which surely should underpin understandings of what is valuable about sexuality – are absent from this definition of consent (lacey, : ). conversely, the violation of trust, infliction of shame and humiliation, objectification and exploitation find no expression in the legal framework, albeit they surface insistently in argument at the sentencing stage, often used as a means to blame the victim (lacey, : ). lacey observes then that rape victims are effectively silenced with respect to the range of harms they have experienced while giving evidence in court. she notes that victims are caught between the discourse of the body as property, which is framed by legal doctrine but incapable of accommodating their experience, and the narrative of the feminine identity as body, which pre- judges their experience by equating it with stereotypical views of women’s sexuality (lacey, : ). as a result of this, rape victims are denied the status of personhood and the chance to acknowledge their trauma (lacey, : ). taking this further, we can explore how this way of thinking about consent and autonomy exists beyond the court setting. particularly if we look to the ways in which wider society comprehends sexual consent and responds to women’s experiences of sexual assault, we can observe how women’s traumas and experiences are supressed publicly while stereotypical views of femininity and masculinity are upheld. . the #metoo movement in october , the new york times and the new yorker published articles which detailed decades of allegations of sexual abuse against hollywood film mogul, harvey weinstein (bbc, ; davis and khomami, ). since then a significant number of women have come forward – it is considered to be more than – alleging similar instances of rape, sexual harassment and sexual assault against weinstein (bbc, ; davis and khomami, ). this exposé sparked a seismic shift in conversation about sexual misconduct in the workplace, prompting other women, and men, to come forward with accusations against high profile public figures in hollywood and beyond (bbc, ; davis and khomami, ; almukhtar, gold and buchanan, ; moniuszko and kelly, ; criss, ). not long after the allegations against harvey weinstein came to light, actor alyssa milano began a social media call-to- feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ action, asking women to disclose their experiences of sexual abuse by using the hashtag #metoo on social media (khomami, ). soon this became a movement, with women worldwide posting the phrase on various platforms to draw attention to their familiarities with sexual assault and harassment and to push for the de-stigmatisation of speaking out about such instances (khomami, ; brinded, ). however, ‘me too’ existed long before milano sparked its use on social media more recently. tarana burke, an african american activist and founder of youth organisation, just be inc, began the first me too campaign in (vagianos, ; rottenberg, ; khomami, ; brinded, ; democracy now, ). for burke, this was a grassroots movement to aid sexual assault survivors, in particular women of colour and those in underprivileged communities where there were few, if any, rape crisis centres (vagianos, ; rottenberg, ; khomami, ; brinded, ; democracy now, ). as burke puts it, ‘me too’ is about ‘using the power of empathy to stomp out shame’ (vagianos, ; rottenberg, ; khomami, ; brinded, ; democracy now, ). in the midst of the movement, a woman came forward with an account which described how she had been sexually assaulted by us actor and comedian aziz ansari following a date they had in . the woman, who went by the name grace, detailed how ansari had forced her into sexual behaviour that was well beyond her boundaries, ignoring her verbal and non-verbal attempts to put a stop to the sexual encounter (harmon, ; way, ; filipovic, ; north, a; shih, ; escobedo shepard, ). she went on to state that the experience with him was the ‘worst night of her life’ (harmon, ; way, ; filipovic, ; north, a; shih, ; escobedo shepard, ). this account garnered significant media and public attention, in part because of the original reporting of the story which was heavily criticised, and rightly so, for being careless in its telling of grace’s experience; but, also perhaps because ansari has long claimed to be a feminist and uses feminist concepts in both his comedy and literary endeavours. grace’s experience became somewhat of a turning point for the #metoo movement as ansari’s actions did not mirror the allegations against harvey weinstein, allegations which all had similar elements to them. the latter were regarded as clear instances, described by many different women, which fitted the traditional perception of rape and sexual harassment. but the former, the experience that grace had with ansari, was thought of by some as blurred, a grey area that, as a result, did not belong in the movement. many took issue with the framing of the evening and labelling of it as sexual assault. an overwhelming amount of people questioned whether it was a real assault or just simply bad sex with miscommunication between two individuals. those who felt unconvinced of grace’s account penned countless op-ed pieces which advocated that this experience was emblematic of ‘a woman scorned’; suspected her of regretting the sexual encounter after ‘not getting what she wanted’; lambasted grace for ‘harming the me too movement’; and blamed her for destroying ansari’s career (harmon, ; way, ; filipovic, ; north, b; shih, ; escobedo shepard, ; anderson, ). . sex wars revisited the sexual assault verses bad sex debate that became evident in response to grace’s story resonates with an earlier set of debates around sex and regretted encounters. i am thinking here of the campus sexual assault debates of the s, in which activists who were seeking to make the prevalence of date rape visible, were met with the likes of katie roiphe insisting that women take responsibility for their sexual choices (cossman, ). echoing the same arguments, rene denfeld, christina hoff summers, camille paglia and naomi wolf, all launched themselves in staunch opposition to what they considered to be ‘victim feminism’ cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ (cole, ). naomi wolf notes this type of feminism casts women as ‘beleaguered, fragile, intuitive angels’ and encourages them to ‘seek power through an identity of powerlessness’ (cole, : ). as a result, some have considered roiphe et al. to be ‘anti-victim feminists’ or avfers (cole, ). cole observes that avfers became prominent in the early part of the s on the tail of a string of public debates over topics such as date rape and sexual harassment on college campuses (cole, : - ). in the morning after: sex, fear, and feminism on campus roiphe ( ) claims that feminists have gone too far in their ‘fascination’ with date rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual oppresion (lacey, : ). for rophie, anti-rape activists of the time had manipulated statistics to frighten college women with a non-existent ‘epidemic’ of rape, date rape, and sexual harassment, and had encouraged them to view ‘everyday experience’ – sexist jokes, professorial leers, men’s straying hands – as intolerable insults and assaults (pollitt, ). roiphe infers that by offering protection to women against this male behaviour, the movement against sexual harassment curtails women’s personal power and in turn paints them as defenceless (roiphe, in cole, : ). discrediting the assumptions that women are in need of constant protection and that women have (heterosexual) sex only when men impose it upon them is particularly vital to the avfers’ challenge to victim feminism (cole, ). in roiphe’s world then, overwrought fears of men and sex have created this victim culture and as a result such a culture, not date rape or sexual harassment, poses the real threat to women (lacey, : ). camille paglia adds to this, attacking what she regards as the feminist obsession with date rape, a concept she rejects as self-contradictory, stating that ‘a girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool, a girl who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot, feminists call this “blaming the victim”. i call it common sense’ (cole, : ). roiphe echoes paglia’s thoughts, by upholding that individual women must learn to assume responsibility for their sexual behaviour: ‘regardless of our level of self-esteem, the responsibility for our actions is still our own’ (roiphe, : in cole, ). christina hoff sommers espouses the same sentiment, contesting in who stole feminism that ‘it used to be fun to be a feminist’, however those involved in ‘victim feminism’ and anti-rape activism have commandeered a movement which now consists of ‘male-bashing, being a victim, being bitter and being angry’ (hoff sommers, in cole, ). the solution to the victim frame of mind identified by avfers comes in rebuilding individual character to one of a strong, resilient individual who, regardless of what she may experience, refuses to make her suffering the centre of her being (cole, ). to create this, a host of qualities are promoted: individualism, self-advancement, responsibility and autonomy, for example (cole, : ). because of this, wolf instructs feminists to imitate successful businessmen, affirming that women should behave as men do, as combative and self- interested achievers (cole, ). to an extent, this particular sentiment is not too dissimilar to the more modern feminist principles surrounding the ‘lean in’ discourse, promoted by facebook coo, sheryl sandberg in . more pertinently, the sentiment expressed by the avfers of the s certainly strikes the same tone as those criticising the ansari story and the #metoo movement more generally, particularly if we consider the ideas of choice and freedom as they relate to sexual consent. caitlin flanagan suggests that ansari has been ‘assassinated in a professional sense’ on the basis of one woman’s (grace’s) anonymous account (flanagan, ). she goes on to accuse grace, and the women revealing similar experiences to her, of being ‘angry and temporarily powerful’ (flanagan, ). much like roiphe, flanagan questions these experiences, boldly putting them down to women ‘who don’t know how to call a cab at the end of the night’ (flanagan, ). bari weiss meanwhile picks up on a similar argument of the avfers. through her writing she asserts that the allegation against ansari transforms a movement for feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ women’s empowerment (#metoo) into an ‘emblem of female helplessness’ (weiss, ). weiss says that encoded in grace’s story are ‘deeply retrograde ideas about what constitutes consent’ (weiss, ) hinting perhaps to a link with the campus rape movements of the s. in this, she assumes the same ‘common sense’ position as paglia, bluntly explaining that ‘if you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you’ (weiss, ). beyond the ansari story, these avf-esque attitudes are evident in the women (including french actress catherine deneuve, who has apologised since) who have signed an open letter denouncing the #metoo movement as a ‘witch-hunt’ against men (willsher, ). the similarity between the disagreements with the #metoo movement and the feminist sex wars of the s, s and s is what brenda cossman dubs the sex wars . (cossman, ). cossman notes that the feminists involved in the sex wars . are not necessarily in favour of sexual harassment and sexual assault, but rather they contest that these behaviours be labelled sexual assault (cossman, ) and we can see this quite noticeably in the debates around whether the ansari allegation was a true case of sexual assault. . consent, wantedness and violating sex when considering sexual consent here, there are two concepts – wantedness and consent – which often become conflated rather than thought of as distinct from one another (drouin and tobin, ). for example, consensual participation in unwanted sexual activity refers to situations in which a person consents to sexual activity with a partner without experiencing an associated desire for the initiated sexual activity (o’sullivan and allgeier, : ). there is considerable empirical evidence which suggests this phenomenon of consented to unwanted sex is common among young adults (o’sullivan and allgeier, ; sprecher et al., ). in sprecher et al.’s cross-cultural study, approximately one third to one half of non-virgins in three different countries reported having engaged in unwanted consensual sex (japan, %; russia, %; and the us %) (drouin and tobin, ; sprecher et al., ). impett and peplau asked their sample of college students in dating relationships whether they had ever been in a situation in which they agreed to have sex although they did not want to – % of women but only % of men answered ‘yes’ to this question (impett and peplau, , ). more recently, vannier and o’sullivan’s employed a diary method as well as in-depth interviews to assess occasions of consenting to unwanted sex for young people aged - years old in committed heterosexual relationships (vannier and o’sullivan, : ). their study showed % of participants reported at least one occasion in which they had consented to unwanted sex. (vannier and o’sullivan, : ). more broadly and not just in relation to dating partners, consenting to unwanted sexual activity may happen for a number of reasons. robin west notes that this may be the type of sex that is consented to in order to avoid a hassle or a foul mood from a partner, to ensure financial security, to lessen the risk of future physical attacks, or sex that is consented to by women in heterosexual relationships from simple altruism (west, ). this is the particular phenomenon of interest here. i think it has best been described most recently, and in relation to the ansari allegations, as sex that feels violating even when it may not be deemed criminal in a legal sense (gray, ). indeed, grace indicated that she specifically asked ansari to slow down and gave cues that she was not comfortable with the sex (cossman, ; way, ). therefore, as sexual communication is complex, and situational factors often impair people’s ability to express willingness or unwillingness, much of sexual interaction may fall into the space between ‘no’ and ‘yes’ (schulhofer, : ). arguably, the allegation against ansari fits in this space. cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ however, there is a nuance that should be noted here. an experience whereby a woman has consented to unwanted sex (as outlined in the above statistics) does not mean, in every instance, that this experience was inherently bad. the phenomenon of consented to unwanted sex is not synonymous with a bad experience; after all, what constitutes bad? the answer to this question is something that is lacking significantly in the current literature, which creates confusion. perhaps bad sex can parallel an encounter in which women get little to no pleasure, which is not uncommon, as research has long documented an orgasm gap in heterosexual relationships, with % of women compared to % of men usually or always experiencing orgasm in partnered sex (wade et al., ; laumann et al., ). if this is the case, it cannot be definitively stated that all consented to unwanted sex is bad and consented to unwanted sex cannot be conflated with bad sex. instead it can be recognised that there may be, albeit a minority, of experiences which are consented to but unwanted which involved some element of pleasure. we can establish that the ansari narrative revealed a sexual interaction that may not meet the criminal, non-consensual standards, but nevertheless was not entirely wanted or desired by the woman involved (cossman, ). consent was not given following a linear and dichotomous yes or no in this incident and to an extent the experience does not reflect one of the exhaustive examples of presumed non-consent under section . with this considered, the view of consent (in line with freedom and choice) under section fails to acknowledge how prevailing discourses about sex, gender and sexuality limit some people’s ability to exercise agency and bodily freedom to meaningfully negotiate consent (gavey, ). grace’s experience is not emblematic of a miscommunication of sexual signals between two individuals. that is not to say that miscommunication does not ever occur with regards to sexual intent and interest; in some situations it does. but, we should be mindful here to note that what may seem to be miscommunication, may not actually be an accurate reflection of experience (kitzinger and firth, ). rather, perhaps the experience outlined by grace is the result of social structures that value some individuals’ sexual expressions (cis, heterosexual men) over other people’s bodily autonomy (gavey, , ; pateman, ; armstrong et al., ; reynolds, ). gavey observes that our dominant discourses about sexuality provide subject positions for women which prescribe compliance with or submission to male demands (gavey, : ). this compliance or submission, for gavey, is an effect of what she calls, the ‘technologies of heterosexual coercion’ (gavey, : ). these technologies of heterosexual coercion reproduce relations of power and dominance in the domain of heterosexual sex such that men’s interests take precedence (gavey, : ). the effect of gavey’s technologies of heterosexual coercion is evidenced in grace’s experience. the man dominated, expected the woman’s submission and his sexual interests were at the fore. the legal understanding of consent, rape and sexual abuse, fails to reflect this often-experienced nuance of consented to unwanted sex, or ambiguous sex. under the statutory view of consent, there is little accounting for women’s ability to actually give consent and have it respected, how this consent is defined, when it begins, what it looks like, or how gendered norms and (hetero)sexual scripts – the effect of technologies of heterosexual coercion – impact the negotiation of sexual consent (jozkowski, ). the current emphasis on individual freedom and choice as it relates to consent obscures and depoliticises, as phillips observes, the socially gendered reality of sexual violence and sexual consent (phillips, : ). with this considered, it is little surprise perhaps that in holland et al.’s study focusing on young people’s sexual experiences they concluded that ‘heterosexuality is not, as it appears to be, masculinity-and-femininity in opposition: it is masculinity’ (gavey, : ; holland et al., : ). the same authors refer to a ‘male dominated, institutionalised heterosexuality’, feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ in which there is little room for women’s pleasure and desire (gavey, : ; holland et al., : ). as lacey states, the idea of autonomy as independence seems directly relevant to the wrong of rape, but it dominates at the expense of the development of a positive conception of the kinds of sexual relationships which are valuable and matter to personhood (lacey, : ). furthermore, to use ideas of freedom, choice and capacity in this area is to be overly-protectionist and unrealistic (munro, ). after all, as munro observes, none of us – perhaps with the exception of wealthy, white, cisgender, able-bodied men – navigate our lives with absolute freedom in the choices we make, whether about sex or any other matters (munro, ). . next steps? so, when consent is used in rape law under the guise of freedom and capacity to choose, it leads to a certain failure to account for the contextual factors – gender roles, gender stereotypes about sexual behaviour, sociocultural expectations and influences regarding appropriate sexual communication – that impact the expression and interpretation of consent. this creates a view of consent which lacks nuance in that it neglects sexual violations which are less explicitly coercive, like grace’s experience, and those which involve consented to unwanted sex. here, consent is bound within gendered norms of sexuality, femininity and masculinity. so, what can be done, in relation to the law and beyond, to offer a more sophisticated view of consent which accounts for the actuality of women’s experience? rather than viewing consent as a binary, a yes or no with a certain person at a certain time, perhaps we can could look to understanding consent more as a negotiation of social expectations, a way of expressing a social identity, or of fitting in to a certain social world (muehlenhard and peterson, ; beres, ). the set of practices known as bondage, discipline and sadomasochism (bdsm or sm) – and the individuals writing and theorising in this area - provide a unique context to further explore sexual consent (beres and macdonald, ). within the sm context, consent is not merely the absence of ‘no’, but a far more qualitative conversation that involves negotiation, the sharing of fantasies and the setting of limits (hanna, ). indeed, consent is so vital to bdsm communities that safe, sane and consensual – ssc – has been referred to as their mantra (beres and macdonald, ). however, as beres and macdonald point out, this does not mean that bdsm communities are free of instances involving violence and/or coercion, but rather that they establish guidelines with the intention to minimise the risk of experiencing unconsented to violence (beres and macdonald, ). consent norms advocated within bdsm communities are composed of two main practices: pre-negotiation of allowed activities, and the use of safe-words or pre-arranged, non-verbal signals to indicate the withdrawal of consent (beres and macdonald, ). as one participant noted in taylor and ussher’s qualitative study with self-identified sadomasochists: ‘sm is about consent, if there’s no consent it’s not sm, it’s sexual violence . . . it’s as simple as that’ (taylor and ussher, : ). taylor and ussher observe that consent in these communities involves use of careful ‘limit negotiation’ and safe words to create a ‘scene’ carefully contrived and from which extraction is easily requested and never denied (taylor and ussher, : , ). beres and macdonald note that within heteronormative sex, discussing sexual activities in detail with others is somewhat unusual, yet more open communication about intimate behaviours appears to operate in other communities based around common sexual interests, like bdsm (beres and macdonald, ). taylor and ussher give evidence of this, uncovering that dominants who have gone beyond established consent rules around sexual interactions have subsequently become known as ‘dangerous’ by the sm community and as a result have become ostracised cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ by potential partners (taylor and ussher, ; beres and macdonald, ). livingston suggests, consent here is more than negotiating pleasure and danger (livingston, : ). it means negotiating the practical elements of boundaries, limits, power, privilege, disclosure, risk, respect, community responsibility, and community accountability (livingston, : ). taking this further, it is crucial to examine the scholarship around the notions of ‘sex critical’ ideologies and consent cultures to make the case that consent cannot be understood fully without a comprehension of how it works in a particular cultural and social context. i would like to do this by now exploring the work of meg-john barker, most notably their study which compares the understanding of consent in fifty shades of grey (james, ) to that in the bdsm blog world (barker, ). in this work, one observation that barker makes is that in some bdsm blogs authors challenge these simplistic, neoliberal notions present in the yes/no models of consent. barker’s work shows that writers in this area explicitly address the common tendency of discussions around consent to polarise into either an agency feminist position where everyone is regarded as free and autonomous, or a radical feminist position where freedom is considered impossible under conditions of patriarchy (barker, ). the former argument can be tied back to the criticism of the ansari story as well as elements of the debates between the date rape campaigners and anti-victim feminists of the / s. in response to this liberal understanding of consent, barker observes that in the bdsm blogosphere, there is an active search for a more ‘sex critical’ position (barker, ). such a position rejects the freedom/choice rhetoric and acknowledges the multiple intersecting power dynamics within which agency operates (barker, ; downing, ). for example, for lisa downing, sex critical means that all forms of sexuality should be equally susceptible to critical thinking about the normative ideologies they uphold (downing, ). barker points out this movement emerged as a result of conversations amongst bdsm writers about the fact that abusive situations can – and do – occur within kink communities, despite their emphasis on consent (barker, ). barker uses the work of millbank here who points out that ‘yes’, or ‘enthusiastic consent’, which is often used by sex positive communities, is arguably not as straightforward as we envision as women are encouraged to respond enthusiastically in all kinds of contexts when they might not really feel enthusiasm (barker, ). in line with this, some bdsm authors employ a foucauldian understanding of freedom in which people have options, albeit limited ones, to act within a field of power (barker, : ). under this view, consent is possible, but liberal understandings of consent are questioned as the focus shifts to what actions are really possible given the ways in which people are shaped by their contact with others and with the world around them (barker, ). millbank takes this further, suggesting that people ‘have a responsibility equal to the social power they possess to care about and bring about a state of consensuality in their sexual relations’ (millbank, in barker, ). such considerations lead to the suggestion, which i am in full agreement with, that intersections of power and awareness of wider cultural conditions need to be explicitly included in negotiations and conversations about consent, such that limitations and constraints on capacity to consent are recognised (millbank, in barker, ). barker notes the work of another writer in this space, pervocracy, who suggests that this ideal of consent can be fostered through making narratives available in which communication and negotiation happen in both sexual and non-sexual contexts, making a relational practice of tuning in to one’s feelings and communicating them honestly to others (barker, ). this thought has encouraged writers in this space to raise questions as to whether consent is possible in sex if people are engaging in non-consensual practices in the rest of their relationships (barker ). feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ so how can wider cultures be cultivated which make consent more possible? many authors in this area point out the normalising forms of force, control and pressure in other aspects of relationships, e.g. to use barker’s example, in everyday street harassment when men attempt to engage women in unwanted conversations (barker, ). this move would acknowledge the culturally gendered pressure on people to perform enthusiasm when they do not feel enthusiastic about things (barker et al., ). taking inspiration from these sex critical and consent culture movements then, perhaps it would be meaningful to encourage individuals to consider consent across all kinds of relationships, not just those that are sexual in nature, as well as recognising structural oppressions and power dynamics which exist to make it difficult for people to freely consent or not (barker et al., ; barker and hancock, ). i am in agreement with millbank who proposes that when it comes to sexual consent, we must consider freedom but not in the way that it exists in most contemporary definitions of consent (the uk act is an example here). the notions of consent which advocate for freedom and capacity to choose, as well as ones which promote enthusiastically giving a yes to sex, subsequently view consent as a one-off moment rather than an ongoing process (barker et al., ). rather, to quote millbank, we need to think about how much freedom a sexual partner has to execute the responsibilities we have assigned them, and also consider our own responsibilities to offset the pressure we place on consent through the systems of domination in which we participate (millbank, in barker, ). michelle anderson’s negotiation model of consent offers a useful foundation to consider if we are to explore ways to consider consent. writing from a us perspective, anderson notes that a negotiation model of consent requires consultation, reciprocal communication, and the exchange of views before a person initiates sexual penetration (anderson, ). the negotiation model asks, ‘did the person who initiated sexual penetration negotiate with his or her partner and thereby come to an agreement that sexual penetration should occur?’ (anderson, ). as a standard, then, it seeks to maximise the opportunity for sexual partners to share intentions, desires, and boundaries, something which is totally lacking under the current understanding of consent (anderson, ). it is important to also note heidi matthews’ ideas of liminal trust in relation to consent here, which arguably can offer a certain extension of anderson’s thinking. matthews starts by putting forward the thought that unwanted, or partially wanted, sex can still be ‘sexy and transformative’ insofar that experimenting with pain or fear can shift previously anticipated sexual boundaries precisely because it engages vulnerable states of being (matthews, ). she gives the example of choking, stating that one can imagine the appeal of choking, for example, as it resides at least partly in the ‘genuineness of the fear that it provokes’ (matthews, ). i accept the premise of matthews’ argument here as she continues to state that this does not mean that there are no limits in sex, but rather that perhaps we devise limits that align with the erotic potential of the sexual encounters (matthews, ). however, i take issue with and reject the example of choking that she gives, as choking has the potential to be dangerous and fatal. a more appropriate example might be spanking, which allows for a shifting of sexual boundaries, as matthew’s explores, but does not hold such an extreme element of unsafety as choking. with this considered, liminal trust works as a space in which partners can explore the value of sexual experiences precisely because they directly engage the line between permissibility and impermissibility (matthews, ). cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ in sum, the promise of such contemporary sex debates, like the one that matthews highlights, is that it offers a new area in which to theorise the limits of truly adventurous and fulfilling sex (matthews, ). when thinking about new conceptualisations of sexual consent, lacey’s contextualised notion of sexual integrity becomes vital to discuss. this is an idea which maintains that the project of personhood requires a more active, positive and embodied view of the sexual self than autonomous consent has allowed (lacey, ). lacey’s idea of sexual integrity is derived from the work of drucilla cornell and the imaginary domain (lacey, : ). this domain generates the psychic and political space within which sexual equality is realised (lacey, : ). central to this space is the fact that a crucial part of existence for all humans is our status as sexed and embodied beings, our sexual desire, access to the means of expressing such desires and having our sexuality accorded with respect (lacey, : ). so, lacey’s notion of sexual integrity stemming from cornell’s argument, puts bodily and affective aspects of sexual life more directly in issue (lacey, : ). operationalising and conceptualising integrity – as a way to rethink freedom and the capacity to choose – means that consent is reconsidered in broader terms, ones which assume mutuality of relationship and responsibility between individuals (lacey, : ). this reflects anderson’s negotiation model and matthews’ liminal space to an extent. within this language of integrity, the real damage and range of sexual abuses might be expressed more fully, recognising the way in which they violate victims’ capacity to integrate psychic and bodily experiences (lacey, : ). the conversations initiated through #metoo and sexual consent more generally create the possibility for the rethinking of sexual harms, as well as of women’s agency and the role of law (cossman, ). when we reflect on the future of law in relation to consent and these unwanted consented to experiences, it is important to note as cowan does, that focusing only on the law does not address the fundamental social inequalities, particularly those which relate to stereotypes of gender and sexuality; these must be addressed to see change (cowan a: - ). the critique around the ansari allegation was that it did not constitute, for some, sexual harassment or sexual assault and therefore was not legally actionable (cossman, ). and, as cossman indicates, if there is no legally actionable harm then there must not be a harm at all (cossman, ). i am not advocating for this action of ambiguous, consented to unwanted sex to become legally actionable. in fact, i am influenced by the work of ummni khan, who criticises carceral and governance feminism for giving rise to more narrow definitions of sexual harms and consent and in turn strengthening and making the criminal justice system more punitive, a system that consistently harms those most marginalised (khan, ; cossman, ). rather, i, like others who have written about #metoo and the ansari story (nwenevu, ; silman, ; north, a; gray, ) contend that experiences like those had by grace need to be part of a collective conversation – and reckoning to an extent – about consensual and ethical sex (cossman, ). osita nwanevu writes that these experiences need to be subject to criticism (nwanevu, ), but as cossman states, the law’s power to define sexual harm makes a wider discussion almost impossible (cossman, ). it is for this reason that i am in agreement with cossman and take inspiration from her work here, particularly as it relates to opening up a different conversation about sexuality by moving beyond the either/or of legally accepted sexual harms (cossman, ) to uncover harms which have long gone unrecognised and expand our ideas around sexual consent. this approach mirrors lacey’s idea of sexual integrity in unspeakable subjects. sexual misconduct in such a conversation need not be understood as criminal but rather could be reframed in terms of the ethics of sexual interactions; in the language of respect feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ and desire (cossman, ). as a result, questions of consensual but unwanted or ambivalent sex can come into view (cossman, ). to think about legal approaches, restorative justice work in sexual violence cases may be worthy of further exploration (del gobbo and illesinghe, ; koss et al., ; cossman, ). research shows that a survivor-centred method reduces reoffending and can help to transform the wider conditions that fostered the acts of violence (del gobbo and illesinghe, ; koss et al., ). in addition to this, it might be worthwhile to develop an alternative model for distinguishing sex from sexual violation, one that does not rely on asking whether consent was given at a particular moment in time (palmer, ), thus moving beyond the idea of freedom and capacity to choose. palmer advocates for replacing the legal standard of ‘consent’ with one of ‘freedom to negotiate’ (palmer, ). in essence, this ‘freedom to negotiate’ looks at the context within which any agreement to have sex was given (palmer, ). palmer asks, for example, was the person free to say no? did they have an equal say in what kind of sexual activity took place or was it all on somebody else’s terms? (palmer, ). however, i want to exercise some caution with this suggestion here as i understand this idea may contribute to an expansion of the criminal justice system and thus create more severe rates of incarceration, although at the same time, i am aware that in the context of rape and sexual assault, conviction rates are low, and sentences tend to be short. nevertheless, fischel notes here that it is possible to protest a racialised and classed criminal justice system while making the consent standard for sexual assault more than silent acquiescence (fischel, : - ). perhaps the solution then is to advocate for such ethical sex and ‘freedom to negotiate’ models societally and culturally, in policy as opposed to legally – in education for example – so as to allow for an affirmation of sexual harm, without endorsing a carceral state (cossman, ). to conclude, i think the most fundamental part of unspeakable subjects, particularly in relation to this topic, is that only if we find new ways to allow women to tell their stories and ensure that these will be heard, will we transcend their experiences and allow a space for recovery rather than continued victimisation (lacey, : ). this then offers a path to a more inclusive sexual politics and a deeper, nuanced understanding of the sexual harms and abuses that individuals face (lacey, : ). with an inclusive sexual politics, a shift will be generated from the neoliberal understanding of consent to one which acknowledges gendered power relations, environments and societal structures. and this means that consideration will be given to how these factors can affect an individual’s ability to meaningfully negotiate consent. bibliography almukhtar, s, gold, m and buchanan, l ( ) ‘after weinstein: men accused of sexual misconduct and their fall from power’. new york times, november. available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct- weinstein.html (last accessed december ). anderson, j ( ) ‘the allegations against aziz ansari should not surprise us – just because men call themselves feminists doesn’t mean they are’. the independent, january. available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aziz-ansari-master-of-none- sexual-misconduct-allegations-feminism-a .html (last accessed december ). anderson, m ( ) ‘negotiating sex’. southern california law review. . - . http://policyoptions.irpp.org/?post_type=authors&p= http://policyoptions.irpp.org/?post_type=authors&p= https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aziz-ansari-master-of-none-sexual-misconduct-allegations-feminism-a .html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aziz-ansari-master-of-none-sexual-misconduct-allegations-feminism-a .html cooper consent in the age of #metoo __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ armstrong, ea, hamilton, l and sweeney, b ( ) ‘sexual assault on campus: a multilevel, integrative approach to party rape’. social problems. 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[ ]. - . ama journal of ethics, june ama journal of ethics® june , volume , number : e - medicine and society should art about child abuse be exhibited in corridors of health professional schools? paul r. abramson, phd and tania l. abramson, mfa abstract imagine an exhibition—on a topic like child sexual abuse, dementia, or epilepsy, for example—not typically considered by museums or galleries. the question, then, is where might such an exhibit be displayed? how about a medical school, for instance? an exhibition of this kind might include visceral psychological portraits and explanatory text tailored to the learning activities of medical students. this article examines these curatorial and ethical considerations. exhibitions on sensitive topics? it was shop talk. four people were sitting around a table at leiden university in the netherlands speaking earnestly about the psychological sequelae of child abuse— symptoms and their duration, the impact on brain structures, the deficiencies of treatment. the conversation then turned to the second author’s new art book, shame and the eternal abyss. it features images of spinning outpourings of anguish that embody the perplexing sequelae of child sexual abuse. “it’s curious,” one of our dutch colleagues remarked; “i just had a conversation with a good friend who is a curator at the stedelijk museum amsterdam. we came to the conclusion that the time might be right to create an exhibition about child abuse, one that incorporates visual artworks no less than research symposiums.” many delightful conversations ensued, although the exhibition has yet to materialize. what would it take to bring to fruition an exhibition on a sensitive topic like this? the question is neither rhetorical nor specific to child abuse. any medically relevant subject matter that’s taboo for any reason, or that’s overlaid with halting inhibitions, might suffice as a representative example: epilepsy, facial disfigurement, and dementia, to name a few. although each topic has been profoundly represented through artworks, these categories nonetheless don’t easily lend themselves to museums’ and galleries’ priorities, such as marketability. that caveat notwithstanding, how might an exhibition of this nature be made more feasible? and where might it best be displayed? narrowing the focus of an exhibition to child sexual abuse, for instance, would make its implementation more practical because it would allow the subject matter to be rendered www.journalofethics.org more minutely, thereby facilitating greater viewer comprehension and increasing the subject matter’s relevance to social advocacy. exhibiting child abuse there are categories of child abuse: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. each is further partitioned by intuited or factual differences. for example, child sexual abuse is subdivided into prepubertal and postpubertal classifications. , , if, indeed, a more circumscribed exhibition on child abuse could be designed—again using the example of child sexual abuse—the more fundamental question is why would anyone want to feature an exhibit devoted to this issue? sexual abuse is a crime that is an unfathomable harm to a child, and, although this point is clearly of justifiable concern given the potential for adverse viewer reactions, what poses a greater danger, we believe, is censorship. child sexual abuse is unquestionably a pediatric and public health crisis of epidemic proportions. , , , , finding an optimal place to display an exhibition of this scope that is informed by trauma more broadly is arguably also a public health priority. such an exhibition would surely be a conspicuous health initiative if these artworks and their accompanying narration effectively increased emotional engagement with victims of this dreadful ordeal. sensitive exhibitions in medical schools what about medical schools? there is certainly precedent for bringing a topical exhibition to a professional audience; the photographer richard ross’s assemblage of photographs, juvenile-in-justice, is a case in point. his depictions of incarcerated adolescents were exhibited in in the hallways of harvard law school. immersive by default, the photographs were manifest declamations of injustice, especially befitting for law professors and their students. it should also be noted that displaying artworks in the corridors of medical schools is hardly original. the harvey cushing/whitney medical library at yale school of medicine routinely hosts exhibitions, such as the aids suite, hiv-positive women in prison and other works by artist/activist sue coe in - . , that said, it still might be useful to consider yet another departure from traditional curatorial norms, like a mixed-media exhibition on child sexual abuse—artworks, documentation, symposiums, and performances linked to learning activities created, choreographed, and performed by medical students. students could wear surgical masks to class, for instance, emblazoned with the letters csa (for child sexual abuse). such an activity could serve as both a collective witnessing of csa survivors who have been shamed into anonymity and a tribute to csa victims pressured into silence. the corresponding dynamics of shame and silence are also represented in figure , in the form of self-punitive introspections and their erasures. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/art-therapy-exhibitions-exploitation-or-advocacy/ - https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/out-darkness-light-drawing-and-painting-margeaux-gray/ - ama journal of ethics, june figure . i’m bad, by tania love abramson, courtesy of the artist. media pencil, erased, on paper, " x ". although this exhibition need not be limited to corridors, it is nonetheless important to keep in mind that these architectural spaces derive their psychological meaning from their ambiance as much as their structure—most notably, their potential for advancing communication and association among those who traverse them, like the proverbial gathering around the water cooler. the main instrument for engagement with an exhibition on child sexual abuse would be the alliance between the institutional setting and the fervent artworks themselves. why hasn’t something of this scope been realized previously in a medical school? why hasn’t there been an exhibition of artworks—allegorical in character, for instance—of children in the aftermath of sexual abuse—visceral portraits of unrelenting torment no less than resolute courage? we envision something on the order of an exhibition titled www.journalofethics.org portraits of abiding despair and steadfast determination. assuredly, there’s been no lack of attention from the media, which has vividly portrayed child sexual abuse scandals for decades. perhaps the gatekeepers in the world of art have deemed child sexual abuse too offensive to the sensitivities of viewers—a synergistic repression of the unacceptable, as it were. that supposition, if true, is especially hard to reconcile with the curatorial practices of holocaust memorials—for example, the dachau concentration camp memorial site (see figure ). challenging the amnesia around a vast, horrendous crime is the first priority in documenting, and thereby fully comprehending, the nazi final solution. piercing the veil of comforting illusions would serve the same function for child sexual abuse while also reinforcing mohandas gandhi’s adage that “truth never damages a cause that is just.” figure . crematorium ovens, dachau concentration camp memorial site photo by paul r. abramson, . purpose of child sexual abuse exhibit although the alarming atrocities of child sexual abuse are bad enough, their concealment by the art world is even worse. it’s imperative to stage exhibitions of this nature because their existence alone affirms the putative value of art in connecting dots, including its intrinsic power to rankle. failing to exhibit artwork of child sexual abuse would also unduly constrict not only survivor narratives but also the language of art more generally—manifest in metaphor, allegory, storyline, and history—or of any linguistic form that can enlighten without constraint and educate without evasion, no matter how indirectly its subject matter is represented or chronicled. , , , one example of indirect representation is an image of a crashing helicopter decimated by a ama journal of ethics, june spiraling abyss that is meant to symbolize the emotional tailspin experienced by victims of child sexual abuse (see figure ). figure . lapse of consciousness, by tania love abramson, courtesy of the artist. media paint pen on found photograph, " x ". in the best-case scenario, one would want to create an exhibition capable of inducing a transcendent experience, , whereby viewers recognize all of the ramifications of child sexual abuse. for this reason, we have suggested the need for active participation of viewers, symposia, performances, and catalogues in addition to static artworks. it’s even possible to create a playlist of songs that reference child sexual abuse, such as the girl child network worldwide’s avantwana-children being abused (tribute to betty makoni) and crying kafka’s fuck mom/fuck dad. only through identification can someone begin to understand and empathize with the fact that the sexual abuse of a child is an inconceivable trespass, an emotional annihilation in many respects. , if adult women struggle to report a sexual assault to law enforcement and name their perpetrator, as the #metoo movement has made abundantly clear, imagine how a child must agonize going through the same criminal process. what credibility does a child have when an adult perpetrator denies the charge? how does a child navigate the legal hurdles? the obstacles to disclosure and resolution are nearly insurmountable for a child (see figure ), which is why the crime of child sexual abuse so often goes unreported and the psychological fallout, in combination with the long-term health consequences, becomes so entrenched. www.journalofethics.org figure . it’s always the elephant in the room, by tania love abramson, courtesy of the artist. media pencil on paper, " x ". although we have emphasized the need for this exhibition to be candid, we also believe that the curated artworks and the choreographed performances should be allusive enough to depict countervailing emotions—outrage and shame, vulnerability and courage or tenacity—as well as empathy and concern, all without ever being willfully antagonistic to viewers. while survivors’ nightmares of abiding despair and their steadfast determination are obviously part of this picture (see figure ), so, too, are the stubbornly docile or actively conciliatory bystanders who unconscionably acquiesce to the reassurances of perpetrators of sexual abuse. ama journal of ethics, june figure . exhibition poster mockup, by tania love abramson, courtesy of the artist. media ink on paper, . " x ". if indeed an exhibition of this nature ever makes it past the customary barriers to whisper through the corridors of medical schools, the hope, ultimately, is that it propels physicians and their students to act upon what they have experienced. child sexual abuse is an emotionally debilitating crime. overcoming the reluctance to report suspected cases of child sexual abuse, particularly when the evidence is subtle, would be an especially significant outcome. active involvement in organizations dedicated to https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/report-or-not-report-physicians-dilemma/ - www.journalofethics.org the prevention of child sexual abuse, such as darkness to light, would be an equally meaningful consequence. references . abramson tl. shame and the eternal abyss. joshua tree, ca: asylum renegades press; . . abramson pr. sarah: a sexual biography. albany, ny: state university of new york press; . . abramson pr. screwing around with sex: essays, indictments, anecdotes, and asides. joshua tree, ca: asylum renegades press; 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( ): - . paul r. abramson, phd is a professor of psychology at the university of california, los angeles. he is the author of books, including sex appeal: six ethical principles for the st century (oxford university press, ) and screwing around with sex: essays, indictments, anecdotes, and asides (asylum renegades press, ). he is also the lead singer and lyricist of the band crying kafka. tania l. abramson, mfa is a visual and conceptual artist, performer, videographer, writer, and poet who also serves as a lecturer in the honors collegium at the university of california, los angeles. she is the author of art books: shame and the eternal abyss (asylum renegades press, ), concern (asylum renegades press, ), and truth lies (asylum renegades press, ). she is also the cocreator and coinstructor of the ucla course, “art and trauma.” https://music.apple.com/au/album/avantwana-children-being-abused-tribute-to-betty-makoni/ ?i= https://music.apple.com/au/album/avantwana-children-being-abused-tribute-to-betty-makoni/ ?i= https://soundcloud.com/crying- -kafka/fuck-mom-fuck-dad https://soundcloud.com/crying- -kafka/fuck-mom-fuck-dad https://www.d l.org/ http://content.time.com/time/health/article/ , , , .html www.journalofethics.org citation ama j ethics. ; ( ):e - . doi . /amajethics. . . acknowledgements we’d like to thank gregory a. miller and sue spaid for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. conflict of interest disclosure the author(s) had no conflicts of interest to disclose. the viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the ama. copyright american medical association. all rights reserved. issn - _ _ _article .. editorial moving towards gender equality in medical toxicology meghan b. spyres & elizabeth c. moore & anne-michelle ruha & ayrn d. o’connor received: august /revised: august /accepted: august # american college of medical toxicology keywords gender equality . promotion . women in medicine . women in toxicology the unique struggles of women in academic medicine are re- ceiving heightened attention thanks in part to the rise of the #metoo and timesup™ movements which received global attention in . that same year held other important land- marks for women in medicine. a jama publication demon- strated improved outcomes for patients cared for by female physicians, and for the first time women surpassed men in matriculation in us medical schools. (https://news.aamc.org/ press-releases/article/applicant-enrollment- /). with increased numbers, heightened attention, and demonstrated quality, we would expect to see women advancing into leadership and senior positions in academics. instead, we find fewer women than anticipated in the academic rank of associate or full professor [ , ]. moreover, despite being more often fellowship trained, women are less likely to become core faculty or department chairs, are less likely to take on administrative roles, and mostly report experiencing some form of gender discrimination [ , ]. one of the more influential factors affecting women’s careers in academic medicine is parenthood. all four authors of this commentary are in different stages of parenthood from dealing with infertility, breast-feeding a newborn, raising young children, and parenting a teenager. each stage brings unique challenges to achieving a successful career in medicine. the impact of motherhood on career is apparent before the first child is even born. fatigue, nausea, and complications during pregnancy have stalled our projects and made career- advancing academic activity beyond the minimum required feel unmanageable at times. honors and opportunities, such as invitations to speak at national conferences, time-sensitive publications and projects, or even key meetings that provide crucial networking relationships, have been reluctantly turned down during peripartum periods. after birth, many of the same struggles remain as you try to navigate availability for academic engagements as well as for your children’s mile- stones, school events when they are young, and activities as they grow. the desire to be present for your children conflict- ing with the drive to advance your academic medical career can feel like an unsolvable occupational hazard. these conflicts are made more difficult when women en- counter sexism in the workplace. in a survey of physician mothers, % reported experiencing maternal discrimination, frequently attributed this to maternity leave, and % reported discrimination surrounding breast-feeding [ ]. women returning from maternity leave report being perceived as less interested in leadership positions due to family responsibilities, being passed over for promotions and projects, and being re- quired to make up time without pay [ ]. some choose to leave academics entirely due to these struggles. for those who stay, they face an uphill battle. challenges include lack of alternative scheduling options and difficulty finding childcare for unusual or extreme work hours [ ]. additionally, specialty conference attendance, an important aspect of career advancement for ac- ademic physicians, can be difficult for primary caregivers of small children as childcare is not readily available [ ]. motherhood is not the only challenge women face. implicit bias against women is pervasive and difficult to combat and may begin to affect women’s careers as early as medical school and residency. studies find gender-based differences in evalua- tion descriptors and scores to negatively reflect on female stu- dents and trainees [ , ]. this bias continues once women be- come faculty and may impact disparities in career previous presentation of data this data has not been previously presented. supervising editor: mark b. mycyk, md * meghan b. spyres mspyres@gmail.com division of medical toxicology, university of southern california department of emergency medicine, n state st. rm , los angeles, ca , usa banner-university medical center phoenix, university of arizona college of medicine phoenix, e willetta st. nd floor, phoenix, az , usa journal of medical toxicology https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ( ) : – /published online: september http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://news.aamc.org/press-releases/article/applicant-enrollment- / https://news.aamc.org/press-releases/article/applicant-enrollment- / mailto:mspyres@gmail.com advancement. in a survey to assess barriers to promotion, em departmental chairs noted that women faculty may dispropor- tionately be assigned or assume task-oriented or citizenship roles that are beneficial for the department but are less likely to lead to promotion. female faculty were noted to have fewer peer-reviewed publications which was attributed to competing family obligations, and they were less likely to come forward for promotion despite being qualified. additionally, women are erroneously perceived as being less interested in leadership po- sitions particularly if they necessitate off-hour obligations [ ]. women also tend to be underrepresented as speakers in aca- demic conferences, missing these key opportunities for broader exposure and academic advancement [ , ]. what can be done to mitigate these obstacles? support through networking, mentorship, and sponsorship is essential for women to succeed. a recent study found strong networks to be predictive of male business school graduates attaining leadership positions. for women to gain similar job place- ment, they had to have not only a strong school network but also a separate female-dominated inner circle [ ]. in another study, women across multiple professions who attended “conferences for women,” a leadership and networking con- ference, were found more likely to be promoted and to receive a raise than women who had not yet attended (https://hbr.org/ / /do-womens-networking-events-move-the-needle- on-equality). when specifically looking at medicine, one published survey of nih grant recipients found that sponsorship was associated with greater rates of success and that men were more likely than women to report a sponsorship experience [ ]. in response to the need for systemic change, women across multiple specialties and organizations have created initiatives to bring awareness to gender equity. in this spirit, women in tox (wit) was formed as a section of acmt in . since its formation, the group has developed several successful ini- tiatives to promote gender equality including the creation of a speaker’s bank to increase the presence of female speakers at national conferences, the curation of semi-annual web-based discussions on strategies to promote women’s voices and achievements, and cultivation of a social media presence. in addition, wit has held career development workshops and recruited nationally recognized speakers to discuss gender bi- as, mentorship, and faculty development. through wit, we hope to equip and inspire both men and women in medical toxicology to break down barriers to gender equality in our field. in order to achieve this goal, we sought to better understand how acmt is doing, evaluating both our strengths and op- portunities for improvement. we conducted a review of the acmt website, archives, and roster to assess women’s stand- ing in the college with regard to speaking events, presentation of research, awards, grants, and leadership positions. a review of acmt membership for reveals that % are women. the current president and vice-president of the college are women, and women comprise . % of the board of directors. from to , % (range – %) of speakers for invited lectures or panel discussions were wom- en, with women representing % of individual lecture roles but only % of panelists or group discussants. during the same years, women presented % of platform research studies. with the gender composition of the membership in mind, acmt appears to be doing well, although review of acmt awards reveals there is still room for improvement. notably, women received only % of reported awards in the last years. in the -year history of acmt’s most prestigious award, the ellenhorn award, only one woman has ever been given this honor: dr. carol angle in . however, women have received the significant majority of acmt grant awards ( %) since . acmt benefits from a diverse group of physicians with strong female leadership and supportive male allies. engaging men in these initiatives is essential to making meaningful change. when women shatter the glass ceiling, it creates more opportunities and pathways for everyone, regardless of gen- der. wit would like to harness these strengths to continue to advance women in the field of medical toxicology, and there- by advance the specialty as a whole. given % of medical toxicology fellows are now women, we hope to see growth in the number of female conference speakers and to see an in- crease in the proportion of women award recipients in coming years. through conscious attention and focus on gender is- sues, medical toxicology as a specialty has the opportunity to lead in creating a more gender-balanced framework for career advancement in academic medicine and a more equitable en- vironment for all. funding information dr. meghan spyres, dr. elizabeth moore, dr. michelle ruha, and dr. ayrn o’connor have no financial disclosures to make. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest none. references . nonnemaker l. women physicians in academic medicine: new insights from cohort studies. n engl j med. ; ( ): – . . bennett cl, raja as, kapoor n, kass d, blumenthal dm, gross n, et al. gender differences in faculty rank among academic emergency physicians in the united states. acad emerg med. ; ( ): – . . madsen te, linden ja, rounds k, hsieh yh, lopez bl, boatright d, et al. current status of gender and racial/ethnic disparities among academic emergency medicine physicians. acad emerg med. ; ( ): – . . the state of women in academic medicine: the pipeline and path- ways to leadership - . https://wwwaamcorg/members/ gwims/statistics/ accessed february , . j. med. toxicol. ( ) : – https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims/statistics/ https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims/statistics/ https://hbr.org/ / /do-womens-networking-events-move-the-needle-on-equality https://hbr.org/ / /do-womens-networking-events-move-the-needle-on-equality https://hbr.org/ / /do-womens-networking-events-move-the-needle-on-equality . adesoye t, mangurian c, choo ek, girgis c, sabry-elnaggar h, linos e, et al. perceived discrimination experienced by physician mothers and desired workplace changes: a cross-sectional survey. jama intern med. ; ( ): – . . halley mc, rustagi as, torres js, et al. physician mothers’ expe- rience of workplace discrimination: a qualitative analysis. bmj. ; :k . . kass d, datta p, goumeniouk nl, thomas k, berger zd. are children allowed? a survey of childcare and family policies at ac- ademic medical conferences. acad emerg med. ; ( ): – . . mueller as, jenkins tm, osborne m, dayal a, o’connor dm, arora vm. gender differences in attending physicians’ feedback to residents: a qualitative analysis. j grad med educ. ; ( ): – . . dayal a, o’connor dm, qadri u, arora vm. comparison of male vs female resident milestone evaluations by faculty during emer- gency medicine residency training. jama intern med. ; ( ): – . . madsen te, heron sl, rounds k, kass d, lall m, sethuraman kn, et al. making promotion count: the gender perspective on behalf of the society for academic emergency medicine equity research taskforce. acad emerg med. ; ( ): – . . casadevall a. achieving speaker gender equity at the american society for microbiology general meeting. mbio. ; ( ): e . . johnson cs, smith pk, wang c. sage on the stage: women’s rep- resentation at an academic conference. personal soc psychol bull. ; ( ): – . . yang y, chawla nv, uzzi b. a network’s gender composition and communication pattern predict women’s leadership success. proc natl acad sci u s a. ; ( ): – . . patton ew, griffith ka, jones rd, stewart a, ubel pa, jagsi r. differences in mentor-mentee sponsorship in male vs female recip- ients of national institutes of health grants. jama intern med. ; ( ): – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. j. med. toxicol. ( ) : – 	moving towards gender equality in medical toxicology 	references science magazine february • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e p h o t o : m a r c e l o h e r n a n d e z / g e t t y i m a g e s features the fight against harassment in latin american science gains strength #metoo moves south f or decades, from his base at the university of los andes (unian- des) in bogotá, colombia, biologist adolfo amézquita torres made his name studying the diverse, jewel- like poisonous frogs of the andes and the amazon. but on campus, he compiled a darker record, former and current students have alleged in dozens of complaints. they say he mis- treated women, including by favoring and emotionally abusing female students he was dating and retaliating against those who rejected his advances or complained about his behavior. earlier this month, university officials concluded he was guilty of sexual harassment and misconduct and fired him in a watershed moment for the university— and for a growing effort to fight sexual mis- conduct on campuses across latin america. amézquita torres, who until recently was head of uniandes’s biology department, tells science he did have consensual relationships with students, but claims that such dating was long considered acceptable and that he didn’t knowingly violate any university rules. he denies harassing, favoring, or retaliating against anyone, and says he will challenge the february verdict, claiming the process was flawed and unfair. he vows to “use all available legal tools to recover as much as i can of my dignity.” the firing marked a dramatic turn in a twisting, nearly -month-long controversy, which deeply divided one of latin america’s most prestigious private universities and was closely watched by colombia’s media and women’s rights groups. many applauded the university’s decision. “this is going to send a huge message … i think instructors are go- ing to be much more careful,” says ecologist ximena bernal, a native of colombia who earned her undergraduate degree at unian- des and now works at purdue university. but she and others complain that the uni- andes investigation was marred by bureau- cratic bungling and a lack of transparency. they say those missteps, which included re- versing an earlier decision to fire amézquita torres, highlight how universities across latin america are struggling to protect women within cultures that have long toler- ated, and even celebrated, male privilege and a set of attitudes known as machismo. “there is a lot of variation from univer- sity to university, but some places exhibit rampant and almost institutionalized ma- by lindzi wessel and rodrigo pérez ortega published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ february • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org chismo,” says juan manuel guayasamin ernest, a herpetologist at san francisco uni- versity of quito in ecuador. and although women have gained ground in employment and status at latin american universities in recent years, most research institutions are still “dominated by men surrounded by more men,” he says. such masculine demography has helped promote a sometimes toxic atmosphere for women in academia—including faculty and students in the sciences—according to doz- ens of researchers from across latin america who spoke with science. machismo can ac- tively deter women from pursuing a career in scientific research, bernal says. “we have lost a lot of scientists because of this.” many universities in the region lack for- mal policies for reporting, investigating, or punishing abuse or sexual misconduct, or don’t rigorously enforce the policies they do have. and campus administrators have long winked at potentially problematic behaviors, such as male faculty members dating their fe- male students. women who speak out about such issues can face retaliation and public vilification. “it’s very common to hear … ‘oh yeah, those feminazis, they’re just crazy people,’” says jennifer stynoski, a herpeto- logist from the united states who works at the university of costa rica, san josé. now, the tide might be turning. at unian- des and elsewhere, administrators are prom- ising to adopt stronger policies and enforce them. in some countries, leg- islators and agencies are mov- ing to enact new, nationwide standards for reporting sexual harassment at campuses and research institutes. in , more than researchers signed a letter, published in science, urging “scientists and institutions across latin amer- ica to be aware of the damage that machismo, and its denial, inflicts on women and the en- terprise of science as a whole,” and to take stronger action to deter misbehavior. and an emerging constel- lation of advocacy groups has been ratch- eting up the pressure for reform through social media campaigns, legal challenges, and other tactics—including marches and even the takeover of university buildings. “in latin american countries in the last years or so, we’ve had this movement against gender-based violence and harass- ment,” says mario pecheny, a political science researcher at the university of buenos aires. “it’s raised a huge mobilization of women.” nations in latin america have some of the world’s highest reported rates of violence against women, according to a united nations report. university campuses are no exception. the national university of colom- bia, bogotá, surveyed of its female stu- dents and found that more than half reported experiencing some kind of sexual violence while on campus or during university-related activities. (the survey was first reported by vice colombia.) verbal harassment and dis- crimination are at least as prevalent. but when victims go to university officials to report harassment or an assault, they often meet with indifference or confusion. in part, that’s because many administra- tors have no guidebook. in , journal- ists ketzalli rosas, jordy meléndez yúdico, and a team of reporters at distintas lati- tudes, a digital news platform that covers latin america, surveyed universities in latin american nations and found that % lacked policies for handling sexual ha- rassment complaints. janneke noorlag, a dutch immigrant to chile, got a firsthand look at the conse- quences of such gaps when she was a master’s student studying environmental sustain- ability at the pontifical catholic university of chile (puc), santiago. in , noorlag’s husband and a faculty member, acting on her behalf, filed a sexual assault complaint against one of noorlag’s classmates and a second man. puc declined to investigate be- cause it “lacked the competence and techni- cal means to investigate properly,” according to a letter it sent to noorlag’s husband. the university ac- knowledges that, at the time, it had no “specific protocols on sexual violence.” instead, university officials told noorlag to pursue the matter with local law enforce- ment. (she did; they declined to pursue charges.) noorlag says she ultimately dropped out of puc because of the university’s lapses, including allowing one of her alleged at- tackers to continue to attend classes and serve as a teaching assistant. (a university spokesperson says it did ulti- mately suspend the alleged attacker from teaching, adding that puc now has a policy against allowing complainants and alleged perpetrators to attend the same classes.) now, noorlag says, “i really have no trust in university authorities.” even a formal policy “doesn’t guarantee anything,” says meléndez yúdico, who is di- rector of distintas latitudes. some policies can be difficult to implement because they lack important details, he says, such as a clear deadline for filing complaints, defini- tions of ambiguous terms, and procedures for protecting an accuser’s identity. and the existence of a policy “doesn’t mean the will is there to use it,” meléndez yúdico says. uni- versities have let cases drag on indefinitely, without communicating a timeline for reso- lution, says isadora fragoso, an undergradu- ate student at the national autonomous university of mexico (unam), mexico city, and a member of the feminist student move- ment rosas rojas (red roses). “although women go to the appropriate authorities to make complaints … they simply remain ar- chived,” she says. “they never proceed.” when universities do take action against alleged harassers, the punishment can seem mild. in , austral university of chile scrambled to develop a sexual mis- conduct policy for professors after multiple allegations emerged against a prominent national movements, like the one behind this demonstration in santiago, chile, have helped drive changes on campuses. n e w s “some places exhibit rampant and almost institutionalized machismo.” juan manuel guayasamin ernest, san francisco university of quito published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ n e w s | f e at u r e s february • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e faculty member, biochemist alejandro yáñez cárcamo. complainants alleged he had ha- rassed a female administrator working under him, assaulted a female student, and made inappropriate comments toward women. (yáñez cárcamo did not respond to requests for comment.) in april , after an inves- tigation, the university suspended him from teaching for years, but allowed him to con- tinue his research at a field station. protests by those who felt the school’s actions weren’t strong enough erupted throughout chile. at austral, faculty and stu- dents took over a building and went on strike. the university then moved to fire yáñez cárcamo, but a court reinstated him, ruling he could not be punished twice for the same misbehavior. in september , the case received renewed attention when yáñez cárcamo attended a cam- pus event—defying a request from the university’s president to stay away— and was confronted by ecologist olga barbosa, then a professor at the univer- sity, who respectfully asked him to leave. a photograph of the confrontation went viral, and the incident made barbosa, now the southern regional secretary for chile’s ministry of science, technol- ogy, knowledge and innovation, an icon for antiharassment activists. (yáñez cárcamo remains on the faculty and was allowed back on campus last year.) at uniandes, the contentious case of amézquita torres put the challenges facing latin american universities in the #metoo era on very public dis- play. administrators at the university, which enrolls nearly , under- graduate and graduate students and is considered one of latin america’s top training institutions, first began to examine the allegations against the herpetologist in november , according to documents obtained by science. that was just years after uniandes became one of the first universities in colombia to adopt rules on reporting and investigating allega- tions of abusive behavior and sexual mis- conduct. by then, amézquita torres, who arrived at uniandes as an undergraduate in , had established an active interna- tional research program and become head of the biology department. as word of the complaints against amézquita torres spread, some stu- dents and faculty rallied to his defense, praising him as a skilled mentor and re- searcher and arguing he was being at- tacked for behavior—particularly dating students—long considered acceptable. oth- ers took a decidedly different view. female and male complainants, as well as more than people familiar with the case in- terviewed by science, paint amézquita torres as a charismatic but mercurial person- ality who fostered divisiveness. “you go from being on his good side to being on his bad side, and then you kind of have this verbal abuse wrath,” says one man, a former uni- andes student who worked with amézquita torres and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “he’ll start not reading your man- uscripts, he’ll start neglecting you.” mónica pinzón, a former student of amézquita torres who is now a filmmaker, wrote to the university last year to describe how he targeted her for retribution. in , he made sexually charged remarks and subjected her to “unmeasured rage” after she camped in an unapproved site during a field trip, she wrote. after that, “his treatment was horrible. … he wouldn’t read my thesis. … he made the rest of my time in the lab very bitter,” she says. pinzón was also distressed by what she describes as controlling and manipulative behav- ior by amézquita torres toward his then- girlfriend, who was a student. the experi- ence led pinzón to leave academia. “the only thing i regret,” she says, “is not speak- ing up when these things were happening.” in interviews with science and in lengthy statements sent to the university, amézquita torres flatly denied many of the specific allegations against him, including that he retaliated against students. “i don’t do that … i am not aggressive to the stu- dents,” he told science prior to the univer- sity’s announcement that it was firing him. many of the accusations, he said, were the result of a “witch hunt” led by one person who had a conflict with him over “politics and money.” “having relationships with the students,” he said, “makes you vulner- able to people with evil intentions.” such defenses ultimately did not sway university officials, but the process that produced their verdict was chaotic. in early , after an initial investigation, the uni- versity fired amézquita torres for failing to disclose his sexual relationships with stu- dents, ruling that such ties constituted con- flicts of interest. but he won reinstatement after arguing the university hadn’t followed proper procedures. the university then removed him as head of the biol- ogy department and barred him from teaching, but allowed him to continue his research, while a special faculty panel conducted a new investigation. in march , fearing that the uni- versity was burying the case, the com- plainants and their allies used public demonstrations and other tactics to press their demands for more infor- mation and action. on social media, users widely shared a video of a stu- dent reading aloud from a statement written by a woman who claimed that amézquita torres had harassed her. nearly alumni of the biology department signed a letter to univer- sity officials, urging them to clarify where the investigation stood. allies of amézquita torres responded by con- demning the pressure campaign, and the researcher himself went to court in a bid to silence media outlets cover- ing the case and students sharing the video on social media. he failed. amid the escalating public battle, uniandes got a new president: econo- mist alejandro gaviria uribe, a former min- ister of health in colombia. when he arrived in july , gaviria uribe recalls promising to bring the case to “a fair and quick” resolu- tion. “unfortunately, the process [took] lon- ger than i expected,” he told science earlier this month. now, students and faculty on all sides are digesting the verdict. “before, [such be- havior] was normalized,” says a member of the university’s faculty who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “but now, with the #metoo movement and the various other movements of female students, it has stopped being normal. the spark has ignited so that this case would finally explode.” “this isn’t just about him. … it’s an ac- tion against bad behavior in science,” adds one of the complainants, who asked to remain anonymous because of fears of sc r e e n s h o t : t w it t e r in an image that went viral, ecologist olga barbosa confronts alleged harasser alejandro yáñez cárcamo on a chilean campus. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ february • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org retaliation. “it took us literally years, but something finally happened.” gaviria uribe has vowed to fix the bu- reaucratic problems exposed by the case. although the sexual misconduct policy uni- andes adopted in “has no precedents in colombia and only a few in latin america … we still have much to learn,” he says. the university plans to offer legal resources to complainants, he says, and add courses on gender issues. officials will also need to define what constitutes appropriate rela- tionships between students and professors, gaviria uribe notes. many hope the campus can now start to heal. uniandes officials will be moving stu- dents who had been studying with amézquita torres to new supervisors. but biologist catalina palacios, a uniandes doctoral stu- dent who aided some of the complainants, says, “we expect rough days ahead in terms of trying to rebuild the community here.” the uniandes case underscores how far universities in latin america have yet to go in addressing sexual harassment issues. one needed step, bernal says, is for universi- ties to step up training and awareness. she recalls that it wasn’t until she left colombia for the united states in that she realized behaviors long tolerated at latin american universities weren’t ok. recently, she spoke to a group of female ecuadorian students who characterized their university as free of harassment—until bernal started to ask specific questions about whether their pro- fessors dated their students and made sexist remarks. “they were like, ‘oh yeah, well, guys are guys,’” she says. “when you think this is the norm, you don’t realize there’s a problem.” in , such experiences led bernal to circulate the letter eventually published in science ( february , p. ) that called for obliterating that norm. “latin american women scientists … are immersed in a society where culturally ingrained mas- culine pride (‘machismo’) is normalized and deeply intertwined with the scientific endeavor,” bernal and her cosigners wrote. “machismo promotes sexist attitudes that often pass unnoticed,” they added. they urged scientists in the region to become “proactive about recognizing, confronting, and penalizing inappropriate behaviors.” bernal and others see signs of progress, including a recent uptick in the number of universities adopting policies on sexual misconduct. unam, which adopted its pol- icy in , says it has now fielded more than complaints and ousted about alleged perpetrators—albeit sometimes after student protests that included building takeovers. mexican academics campaign- ing against harassment have even adopted a popular hashtag: #metooacademicos (#metooacademics). and across latin amer- ica, students have taken to social media un- der the hashtag #mepasóenlau (it happened to me in the university). the campus-based movements echo broader campaigns against gender violence. brazil has #nãoénão (no is no), argentina #niunamenos (not one less), and chile educación no sexista (nonsexist educa- tion). in many countries, activists have rep- licated a chilean mass protest anthem and performance, called “un violador en tu camino” (“a rapist in your path”), which includes women donning blindfolds and chanting against impunity for aggressors. science groups and governments are also moving to address sexual misconduct in re- search. in recent years, major conferences held in the region—including those spon- sored by the latin american conference of herpetology and the colombian national conference of zoology—have added sym- posiums on the issue. in august , the chilean senate approved a bill requiring all government-sponsored institutions to de- velop detailed sexual harassment policies; the bill now awaits action in its house of representatives. and the country’s science ministry recently announced a gender equal- ity policy. argentina’s national scientific and technical research council is working to es- tablish similar policies at its research centers. in many latin american nations, inac- tion remains the norm. yet barbosa is en- couraged by what she is seeing. the rising challenge to machismo, she says, has helped her realize that she’s “not crazy” for envi- sioning a better future for female research- ers in latin america. those who commit harassment and abuse are beginning to face consequences, she says, which is what is needed “to make sure that this will not hap- pen to anyone else.” j lindzi wessel is a journalist in santiago, chile. rodrigo pérez ortega is science’s news intern. ph o t o : j a v ie r t o r r e s / a f p / g e t t y i m a g e s in santiago, chile, women demonstrate against impunity for aggressors in a public performance piece that has since been replicated in many other nations. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ #metoo moves south lindzi wessel and rodrigo pérez ortega doi: . /science. . . ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ book review notices of the american mathematical society volume , number emille davie lawrence is a term associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the university of san francisco. her email address is edlawrence@usfca.edu. communicated by notices book review editor stephan ramon garcia. for permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission @ams.org. doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /noti a variety of courses with the essays and modules written by math faculty who have experience on the topic. i was happy to see that the authors took the time in the introduction to describe exactly what is meant by “teaching mathematics for social justice”: all mathematics instruction that aims to improve human well-being. who could possibly deny the importance of improved human well-being!? this preemp- tively thwarts any social justice eye-rolling as well as sets the tone for the book. they also give the reader advice on how to use the text and extend an invitation to reach out to the contributing authors directly. the first essay is by kira hamman, and she is the only contributor who has both an essay and a module in the book. in “mathematics in service to democracy” she out- lines how she had an aha moment after seeing people’s reaction to social disparities in new orleans after hurricane katrina. she writes that she came to a personal realization that teaching mathematics must be about more than teaching students the chain rule, for example. we have a responsibility to help build an informed, civically engaged society. as a result, she developed courses on mathematics and democracy and quantitative information in the media. she spares all detail of the courses; rather, she stresses the importance of quantitative literacy in the k– system. dave kung makes a similar case for designing a math class to promote a mindful citizenry in “math for social justice: a last math class for responsible citizens.” he is guided by the question, “what mathematics do i want the person next to me in the voting booth to understand?” (motivated by an exchange in an obama-mccain political debate). my favorite essay is from victor piercey. in “quantitative ethics,” piercey describes his experiences in developing courses surrounding the moral and societal implications of how we use quantitative information. piercey writes that in his course he challenges the students to place themselves into the decision-maker role instead of the consumer role by posing should questions: should lenders reveal the implications of continually making only the minimum mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom by gizem karaali and lily s. khadjavi i think we can all agree that we are currently living in a time of tectonic social and political shifts. movements like #metoo and black lives matter have rightfully increased popular awareness of issues of inequity and marginal- ization. in the immortal words of bob dylan, “the times, they are a-changin’.” and for good reason. i’ve noticed some similar shifts in mathematics over the past few years. not that connecting mathematics and social justice is a new concept, as this book attests by paying homage to bob moses’s radical equations: math literacy and civil rights in its first sentence. but one can also not deny the recent swell in scholarly activity surrounding the subject, which is why mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom is such a timely and important tool. the cover of the book woos you, with its array of fists of different hues holding pencils in front of a backsplash of mathematical equations. the sheer brilliance of this image, which conjures resistance, unity, and mathematical rigor all at once, should not be lost on anyone. the contents of the book are divided into three parts: an introduction to the book by the authors, five essays that make the case for introducing topics of social justice into the math curricu- lum, and fourteen course modules that can be adopted into mathematics for social justice reviewed by emille davie lawrence a m s/ m a a p re ss , , s o ft co ve r, p ag es . is b n : - - - - book review april notices of the american mathematical society you will find suggestions for homework assignments, worksheets, group projects, discussion topics, paper topics, final projects, and much more throughout. the book is also full of outside resources like readings, videos, websites, and such to make it easier to expand the modules in different or deeper directions. the utility of mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom is undeniable. with this book, the editors and contributors have provided the mathematics community a toolkit for challenging students to use math- ematics to improve our world from many different angles. i would have liked to see a module focusing on overpolicing and criminal justice, since khadjavi herself is versed in this topic, but perhaps that will come in the second volume that karaali and khadjavi are working on, mathematics for social justice: focusing on quantitative reasoning and statistics. the current volume effectively makes the case that courses that include social justice themes should be a part of the curric- ulum in every math department in our country. i, for one, am personally energized and excited to implement these ideas at my institution. with this book as a guide, we can not only teach our students how to do math but also how to use math for the common good. credits author photo is courtesy of the author. payments on credit card debt? should effective annual interest rates be required by law to be disclosed to consum- ers? should environmental impacts to the community be considered when a company opens a store? how should the government intervene in ponzi schemes? students learn how questions like these are informed by data analysis and mathematical modeling. this ethical point of view feels to me like a fresh spin on things. even the term quantitative ethics juxtaposes two ideas that i’d never before realized were compatible. reading his essay gave me that “of course this works” feeling, like eating peanut butter and jelly for the first time. of all the essays, lisa marano’s essay is the one i didn’t realize that i needed. she outlines in great detail how she has over the years dealt with student resistance to uncom- fortable topics. since finding dy/dx is pretty noncontrover- sial, most math professors are unpracticed in dealing with issues in the classroom that stir up emotion. she gives class- room policies, assignment suggestions, and other general management strategies in preparation for “vocal, silent, and absent” resistance from students. most effective is her use of real-life anecdotes to suggest how to guide students in heated discussions. one powerful example was how she dealt with some students’ personal trauma surrounding credit card debt. she explains that as the conversation began to unfold, she scrapped her planned discussion and yielded to the needs of the students. this is a reminder that since emotions can run high when digging in to social issues, being in the moment is key. then come the modules. these are prepackaged and ready-to-go lesson plans that can be implemented in the classroom. i was really happy to see such a nice array of topics. there were definitely some usual suspects, such as modules on voting methods and electoral districting. how- ever, the majority of the topics feel cutting-edge and mod- ern, ranging from the graph theory of human trafficking to modeling the rise in acceptance of same-sex relationships. although on different themes, every module has the same structure. each starts with an abstract and is then divided into six sections: mathematical content, context/back- ground, instructor preparation, the module, additional thoughts, and an appendix. having this uniformity is quite helpful to the reader who wants to compare one module to another. however, i would have also liked to see some note on the intended duration of each module right up front, perhaps in each abstract. some modules seem more appropriate for just a handful of class meetings, while others could be implemented over the course of an entire academic term. readers are left to figure this out for them- selves. the cherry-picking reader will be happy to know that in the postscript the modules are sorted by mathematical content, such as college algebra, quantitative reasoning, and introductory statistics, and then again by social justice themes, such as finance, environmental justice, and labor. the content of each module is pedagogically thorough. emille davie lawrence _april_ea_ .indd . aastal möödus aastat südame ultra- helidiagnostika juurutamisest eestis. ehhokardio- graafiline uurimismetoodika, mis lääne maailmas oli nii praktikas ja ka teaduslikes uuringutes kasutusel juba üle aasta, sai eesti kardioloo- gidele kättesaadavaks alles . aastal, kui üleliidulise jaotuskava alusel eraldati tolleaegse eesti nsv tervis hoiuministeeriumi käsutusse ehhokardiograafi. aparaadid aloka ssd , mis olid toodetud jaapanis, said tallinna vaba- riiklik haigla ja vabariiklik tartu kliiniline haigla. ehhokardiograaf oli ühetasapinnaline ja südant oli võimalik uurida nn m-skänni (m-mode) meeto- diga, mis annab ülevaate aordi- ja mitraalklapist, vasakust kojast, vasaku vatsakese kahest seinast ja osaliselt paremast vatsakesest. piiratud võima- lustele vaatamata avas uus metoodika väga olulise etapi kardio loogilises diagnos tikas. esi- mese ehhokardiograafilise uuringu eestis teostas tolleaegse eesti nsv eksperimentaalse kliinilise meditsiiniinstituudi (ekmi) kardio loogia osakonna juhataja ja kauaaegne tallinna vabariikliku haigla kardioloogia osakonna juhataja meditsiini- kandidaat boris liberman. tallinna vabariiklikus haiglas hakkasid uurin guid tegema kardioloogid maie kalev, helgi jaagus ja valentina garshnek. tartus alustas uuringuid Ümpi kardioloogia sektori vanemteadur, meditsiinikandidaat kardioloog inge liiv. esmane algõpe saadi tallinnas aparaati tööle- seadvalt jaapani insenerilt ja uurijalt. kardioloogid inge liiv ja allakirjutanu olid täiendusõppel . a oktoobris moskva Üleliidulise kardioloogia keskuse kolmkümmend aastat ehhokardiograafiat eestis helgi jaagus – ida-tallinna keskhaigla ehhokardiograafia, ajalugu, eesti artikkel annab ülevaate ehhokardiograafia kasutamise algusaastatest eestis ning põhineb autori ja kol- leegide dr eevi maiste ning dr silvi saretoki mälestustel. (Ükk) funktsionaalse diagnostika laboratooriumis, mille juhatajaks oli professor n. m. muhharljamov. sealse ehhokardiograafi smith-kline instruments (samuti ainult m-mode, ühetasapinnaline metoo- dika) eeliseks oli kujutise jäädvustamise võimalus paberile, mis meie aparaa tidel puudus. tuleb tänuga meenutada professor n. m. muhharljamovi ja tema assistentide j. n. belenkovi (praegu sama kardioloogia instituudi direktor) ja o. j. atkovi (hiljem . aastal kosmoselaeva sojuz t- kuulisel lennul viibinud kosmonaut-uurija) abi- valmidust uuringute juhendamisel ning kirjanduse soovitamisel, nende sõbralikkust ja kollegiaalsust. moskva kolleegide pakutud enesetäiendamise võimalus olid hulk seminare, mida viisid läbi euroopa, usa ja jaapani teadlased ning mis kulmineerusid ix ülemaailmse kardioloogide kongressiga moskvas . aastal. kongressil peeti ka ettekandeid ehhokardiograafiateemal. huvi uue diagnostilise metoodika vastu oli arstide seas üleüldine. nii käisid tallinna vabariiklikus haiglas uuringu võimalustega tutvumas nii tallinna teiste haiglate kui ka rajoo- nide kardioloogid ja terapeudid. dr b. libermani initsiatiivil esitati regulaarselt toimuvate kardioloogia- seminaridel ka ehhokardiograafia-ettekandeid. siin kohal tuleb mainida dr maie kalevi loenguid ehhokardiograafia metoodika ja selle võimaluste tutvustamisel tartu arstidele. erialasest kirjandusest õnnestus alla kirjutanul saada tutvuste kaudu ameerikas . aastal kordustrükina välja antud indiana Ülikooli professori harvey feigenbaumi monograafia “echocardiography”. selle mono- graafia . a kordustrüki kinkis autor koos pühendusega dr inge liivile ja kolmele tallinna eesti arst ; ( ): – Ülevaated kardioloogile Ükk seminaril moskvas . aastal. ehhokardiograafi aloka ssd ostsillo- graafi ekraan oli x cm, kalibree ri tud vertikaalil , cm ja , sekundit horisontaalil, anduri diameeter oli mm ja fookuse kaugus , cm. aparaadi töösagedus oli , mhz. ehhokardiograafilist kuju tist oli ostsillograafi ekraanilt võimalik mõõta ja praktilises töös kasutati peamiselt ehhokardioskoopiat. täpsemaks ana- lüüsiks ja dünaamiliseks võrdluseks foto grafeeriti kujutis. kujutist analüüsiti kas filmi negatiivilt vas- tava suurendusaparaadiga või ilmutatud fotodelt. analüüs nii filmi negatiivilt kui ka fotodelt oli väga töömahukas ja aegavõttev. filmi negatiivide ja fotode säilitamine nõudis eraldi ruumi püsiva tempe- ratuuriga. raskustele vaatamata oli kardioloogide- ehhokardiografistide entusiasm suur, tööd tehti sageli hiliste õhtutundideni. kahtlemata olid dr inge liivi ehhokardiograafilised uuringud hindamatuks abiks kardiokirurgidele omandatud ja kaasasündinud klapirikete diagnoosimisel. meetod võimaldas diag- noosida mitraalstenoose, mitraalprolapse, aortaal- stenoose, vasaku koja müksoomi, hüpertroofilist ja dilatatiivset kardiomüopaatiat, eksudatiivset peri- kardiiti, müo kardiiti ja isheemilist südamekahjustust (viimast metoodika võimaluste piires). esimesed stress-ehhokardiograafilised uuringud eestis teostas allakirjutanu ühe tasapinnalise mee- todiga . a jaanuaris tallinna vabariiklikus haiglas. Õppides alates . a novembrist ekmi kardioloogia osakonna aastases mitte statsio naar- ses aspirantuuris, alustas h. jaagus uurimistööd tee- mal “ehho kardiograafiline hinnang nonahlasiini ja obsidaani toimele südame isheemiatõvega haigete müokardile“. teaduslikuks juhendajaks oli Ükk pro- fessor n. m. muhharljamov. ehhokardiograafiliselt jälgiti beeta-adrenostimulaatori toimet nii ishee- miliselt kahjustatud kui ka kahjustamata müokardile akuutses katses, ravikuuri ajal, rahuloleku ja velo- ergomeetrilise koormuse tingimustes ning võrreldi seda beeta-adrenoblokaatori toimega haigetele samadel tingimustel. töö tulemused vormistas alla- kirjutanu kandidaadiväitekirjaks, mille kaitsmine toimus . aastal moskvas. kahetasapinnalise südame-ultraheliaparaadi mark- sai ekmi kardioloogia osakond . aastal, see jäi kuni . aastani ainult instituudi käsutusse. . aastast alus tasid aparaadil tööd ka tallinna vabariikliku haigla kardioloogid. metoodika võimal das reaalse kujutise saamist kõigist südameosadest. -tasapinnalist ultraheli meetodit kasu tades kaitses meditsiini kandidaadi väitekirja ekmi nooremteadur kardioloog alla udras kau- nases . aastal teemal “kahe dimensionaalse ultraheli ja angiokardiograafilise uuringu võrdlus segmentaarse kontraktiilsuse ja vasaku vatsa kese funktsiooni hindamisel müokardi infarki põdenud ja steno kardiaga haigetel”. esimese kahetasapinnalise mustvalge doppler- metoodikaga kardioloogiline südame-ultraheliapa- raadi mark (firma atl) sai vabariiklik tartu kliiniline haigla . aastal, kuni . aastani töötas sellega ainult dr inge liiv. dr inge liivi ja dr jaan eha juhendamisel valmis tartu riikliku Üli- kooli arstiteaduskonna . kursuse üliõpilasel arvo rosenthalil üliõpilaste võistlustöö ehhokardiograafia ja angio kardiograafia andmete võrdlusest isheemia- tõvega haigetel, mille eest ta sai . aastal nsvl ta kuldmedali. hiljem hakkasid tartus mark- -l töötama kardioloogid ljubov keis, silvi saretok ja meditsiinikandidaat eevi maiste. doppler-metoodika laiendas oluliselt diagnoosimisvõimalusi. paljude aastate vältel jäi dr silvi saretok peamiseks ülaltoodud südamerikete ulrahelimeetodil diagnoosi- jaks, pühendudes eriti vastsündinute ja laste südame kaasa sündinud patoloogiale. oma erialaseid teadmisi ja metoodilist juhatust on ta jaganud paljudele arsti- dele ja üliõpilastele, eriti praegusele tartu lastehaigla ehho kardiografistile dr silvia virrole. dr eevi maiste uuringud olid suunatud antropo loogi liste normide välja- töötamisele noorukitel ja hüper tensiooniga noortele. temalt ilmusid tartu Ülikooli väljaandena ka esimesed eestikeelsed ehho kardiograafilised õppe materjalid: “kliiniline ehhokardiograafia” . ja . aastal. Ülevaated . aastal alustas nsvlis toodetud ühe- dimensionaalsel ehhokardiograafil uskar tööd tallinna pelgulinna haigla kardioloog ene pullisaar. . aastast alates saadi neid aparaate eestisse mitmeid ning need jaotati haiglatele ja polikliiniku- tele linnades ja maal. uskaril tegid oma esimesed ehhokardiograafilised uuringud . aastal kardio- loogid silja pilv, ilja lapidus, ly anton, urve kirotar ja terapeut mart lintsi. mõne aasta pärast paranesid eestis parema ultra- heliaparatuuri saamise võimalused. tallinna kiir- abi haiglale saadi . aastal -dimensionaalne mustvalge doppler-süsteemiga ultraheli skanner, millel alustasid tööd kardioloogid ants lõhmus ja arvo rosenthal. tallinna meremeeste haigla sai aloka ssd dimensionaalne ultra heli aparaadi . aastal ja sellel töötas aastaid kardioloog ljubov kolesnikova. täie nes ka ehhokardiografistide kaader. vabariiklikus tartu kliinilises haiglas alus ta- sid tööd . aastal dr tõnu loog, . aastal dr külliki karu ja dr krista kure soo. tallinna kiirabi- haiglas asus ehhokardiograafilisi uuringuid tegema . aastast töö käigus metoodika omandanud kardioloog maire tiivel, tartus tegeles . aas tast laste kaasasündinud südamerikete ultra- helidiagnostikaga pediaater mae pind maa. diag- nostika võimalusi parandas tartus ka . aastal saadud värvi dopleriga ultra heli aparaat hi-tachi eub (jaapan) ja . aastal firma hewlett-packard sonos- . moodne aparatuur võimaldas kasutu- sele võtta söögitoru kaudse (tee) ja trans torakaalse (tte) ehho kardiograafia meetodid. tartus tegid . aastal esimesed tee-uuringud kolleegid tõnu loog ja sirje kõvask. dr rosenthal teostas samal aastal esimese tee tallinna kiirabi- haiglas ühetasapinnalise anduriga. . aastal naasis soomes täiendustel viibinud olar pullisaar tallinna kiirabi haiglasse kardiokirurgide töörühma. ta oli soomes omandanud tte ja tee metoodika. . aastal asus silja pilv ehhokardiografistina tööle tallinna diagnostika keskuses. seal hakkasid ehhokardiograafilisi uuringuid tegema . a dr silja pilv, dr maire tiivel ja dr anneli voitk ning . aastal dr maire kiitam ja dr rita janušauskaite. . aastast töötab tallinna kiirabihaigla kardiokirurgiaploki ehho kardio grafistina kardio- loog sirje sulling. . aastast töötab ida-tallinna keskhaiglas kardioloog svea sildmäe, kes on oman- danud nii tte, tee kui ka stress-ehhokardiograafia metoodika, ning . aastast maire kiitam. . aastast on perhi ehhokardiografistideks kardioloogid anita liiver, maire tiivel, Ülle planken ja . aastast ly anton. lääne-tallinna keskhaiglas jätkavad tööd ehhokardiografistid ene pullisaar ja svetlana sadovskaja. alates eesti taasiseseisvumisest . aastal on kõik ülal nimetatud spetsialistid viibinud erialastel täiendustel väljaspool eestit, kättesaadavaks on muutunud rikkalik eri alane kirjandus. paar aastat viibis eestis usast õpingutelt naasnud noor karis- maa tiline kolleeg priit jaagosild, kelle korraldatud seminarid-koosviibimised tõid uusi tuuli meie ehhokardiografistide perre, kuid kahjuks siirdus jaagosild tagasi ameerikasse. laienenud on ehhokardiograafiavõimalused, kasu- tusel on meetodit, millest enamik on m-mode’i- meetodile lisandunud viimastel aastatel. euroopa ehhokardiograafia assotsiatsiooni juures on akredi- teeritud maire tiivel, priit jaagosild, svea sildmäe, ly anton ja anita liiver. uue esmaklassilise aparatuuri on saanud kõik haiglad. enamik kardiolooge valdab vabalt ehho kardio graafilist metoodikat, m-mode on jäänud siiani ehhokardiograafiliste baasmeetodite hulka. echocardiography has been used in estonia more than thirty years. this article describes the development of summary thirty years of echocardiography in estonia echocardiography in estonia concentrating mainly on its early decade. helgi.jaagus@itk.ee Ülevaated pericles wet presented by portland shakespeare project at artists repertory theatre (review) elizabeth e. tavares shakespeare bulletin, volume , number , fall , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press for additional information about this article no institutional affiliation ( nov : gmt) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ shakespeare bulletin discrepancy which might be further interrogated. notwithstanding these questions, it is refreshing to see that this production not only reflected on the potential blind spot in dutch society but also became an active participant in the debate on institutional racism. while undoubtedly this othello was long overdue in the netherlands, it remains to be seen how far-reaching its influence will turn out to be. works cited janssens, sander. “othello is zwart, en dat doet er wel degelijk toe.” het parool, february . kunst, p. . n pericles wet world premiere presented by the portland shakespeare project at artists repertory theatre, portland, oregon. december – , . by ellen mar- golis. directed by michael mendelson. props design by karen hill. scenic design by sarah kindler. costumes by sarah gahagan. lighting design by ronan kilkelly. with ben newman (pericles), alex ramirez de cruz (hes- perides), david bodin (antiochus/simon/andy), shannon mastel (thaisa/ marina), murri lazaroff-babin (chorus, sailor, diana), samson syharath (thaliard/cerimon/chorus), and andrea white (dionyza/chorus). elizabeth e. tavares, pacific university what happened to the “fair hesperides” ( . . )? this is the ques- tion behind ellen margolis’s pericles wet, an adaptation of pericles pro- duced for its world premiere by the portland shakespeare project. an act of recovery, the play is organized around the lives of female characters pericles meets, or the sequence of punishments he suffers. having “built a life on the wreckage” of the incest of antiochus’s daughter, hes, i was still (productively) uncertain, after two viewings of this production, as to whether this was a play about a hero or about the victims such ostensible paragons leave in their wake. the playwright, at least, was not “interested in punishing pericles,” as she noted in a post-show discussion in early december. instead, the play seemed invested in the classical concept of bloodguilt, a notion dif- ficult for contemporary audiences, accustomed to humanist notions of individual responsibility (or lack thereof ), to grasp. yes, says the play, we are all culpable for the violence suffered by others regardless of whether we were alive or not, related or not to the perpetrator. the morality of performance reviews bloodguilt on which margolis’s play meditates derives, interestingly, not from renaissance england or ancient greece, but rather the bible. reit- erated across no fewer than ten books is the suggestion that the shedding of another’s blood generates consequences that pollute the soul, attaching themselves not only to the family of the guilty for generations, but also to their city and nation. for americans, this is a particularly uncomfortable moral code, suggesting that we all carry around stains unresolved for the harm done to indigenous and enslaved communities. for oregonians, citizens of a state held as the epitome of settler colonialism, questions of hereditary blame are all the more entangled in national identity. pericles wet critiqued widespread cultural ambivalence toward sexual violence precisely because audiences could understand its arc as a se- quence of punishments or a series of recovered women’s stories. take, for example, the role of david bodin, who doubled as two kingly fathers, one (antiochus) driven by incestuous lust for hesperides, and the other (simon) by the opposing impulse: “i kept [thaisa] intact until her wed- ding day [with pericles]. my job is done.” as thaisa’s father, he offered a heartbreaking what-if doppelgänger to antiochus, but one who does not abuse his daughter. pericles’s decision to marry thaisa, whose life could for all intents and purposes have brought her to the same end as hes, seemed a damning indictment of his character; by this choice, he suggested that hes was unmarriageable and unsalvageable because she had been spoilt by her father, while thaisa, her mirror in all things but this, was a desirable partner. thus, margolis invented the persona of hes in order to demonstrate how it is that pericles’s inaction in and of itself affirms systemic male privilege even after he leaves her with her predator. these kinds of mnemonic echoes, what marvin carlson calls ghosting, were triggered not only by such doubling, but also in costume repetitions. both thaisa and then her daughter marina (both played by shannon mastel) wore a yellow dress that visually symbolized those intangible things we pass down through generations. when marina was forced into sex work, the yellow dress evolved into a crop-top, suggesting something between generations had been shorn, perverted. repetitions of actors and costumes buoyed playgoers through the disorienting elements that at times signaled timeliness and at others timelessness. for example, in pericles’s seasick hallucinations, iambic pentameter was deployed in allu- sions to a range of popular seafaring icons. “a pop-eyed man with fore- arms the size of pigs”; “a mad whale hunter, squinting into the distance, hollering for his harpooneers”; “a talking sponge, a crocodile with a clock in its belly”: a list for every generation of audience member. shakespeare bulletin it is this oscillation between the timely and timeless that the late bar- bara mowat argued, in the dramaturgy of shakespeare’s romances, was the cornerstone of the genre’s aesthetic experience: early modern romances “expand the implication of tragic and comic perspectives, juxtapose tragic and comic effects, include death and weddings, throw open the world to gods, spirits, beasts, and monsters, and force the spectator to oscillate between (or to experience simultaneously) sentimentally naive responses and a sophisticated awareness of the ironic” ( ). while at times this simultaneity proved challenging in the scope of a relatively bare stage performance (which is to say, without culturally specific costumes, music, props, or other set elements to indicate the rules to which the fiction of the play adhered), margolis’s play ultimately employed that oscillating experience in the spirit of her source to successful effect. upon the death of thaisa, pericles could not stand the sight of his newborn, marina. cradling her, the ship’s skipper (murri lazaroff-babin) suggested they might sell the baby. the skipper then abruptly returned marina to pericles in order to be swept offstage in a comic swordfight smacking of popeye the sailor man. then, just as quickly, the scene shifted to cerimon, a wise woman haunted by the desires of abused women, such as “i wish he would be lost at sea” and “a room with a lock would be a heaven,” whis- pered by the chorus offstage. in the span of two minutes we shifted from a conversation about human trafficking, to a stage feat fit for the pirates of penzance, to the exigency of the #metoo movement still trending on twitter the week of the premiere. thus, an ideological point about the gradual enculturation of women into socially accepted sexual violence came in gradual waves: ebbing by allusion to childhood cartoon, cresting on timely timelessness of slavery, and retreating on the naiveté of body comedy. if playgoers had not the point at first, they could not have missed it by the conclusion of this sequence. these oscillations were clever insofar as they tricked one into thinking that the moments of comedy (and in margolis’s efficient eighty-five- minute script there are many) were a relief, a respite. really, they seemed to force one to remain uncomfortably between emotional states, jarred by the sudden transitions in tone. the design of the play reinforced this as none of the sound effects or props were themselves stable signifiers. in a satisfying nod to period techniques, tin was used for thunder, pouring out a pitcher summoned the mental image of a bath tub, and an elegant hand-operated wind machine stood for all of the literal and figurative open oceans between moments of child endangerment. the only real backdrop was several floor-length curtains used interchangeably as pillars of a palatial hall, ship sails, and a parched seacoast. performance reviews doubling and instability proved to be key techniques, serving as the lynchpin to the denouement. marina was picked up while hitch-hiking by the actor lazaroff-babin, who had already played several different char- acters by this point. the position of his one moveable piece of clothing, which had signaled a lord’s sash and a pirate’s bandana, was now arranged as not to clearly mark anything specific about this new character. when he offered marina a place to stay, she panicked, thinking this was another predator, and asked to be let out of the truck. as far as the audience had been trained to expect from his previous roles, this was another poten- tially predatory man. then, as diana, he explained: her place to stay was a convent. this moment exposed audiences’ own expectations, clarifying how acculturated to and anticipatory of male violence we are. in the play, we were made to realize how easily we would see another pedophile in the habit of a nun. director michael mendelson, margolis, and managing director karen rathje expressed in the talk-back their own shock at the relevance of the production. when the first act was commissioned two years ago, sexual assault seemed too timely. rehearsing for a spare three weeks in the fall- out of the harvey weinstein allegations and opening in tandem with the fig. . chorus (andrea white), samson syharath, and murri lazaroff-babin in pericles wet, dir. michael mendelson. portland shakespeare project, . photo by david kinder, courtesy of portland shakespeare project. shakespeare bulletin dustin hoffman accusations, the timeliness seemed all the more tragic. had no progress really been made in the intervening time from concep- tion to performance? all of the male-identifying performers confessed grappling with this issue. in the opening moments of the show, hesper- ides told the audience the word we would hear the most was “water.” the textual heartbeat of the play, however, was the phrase “it’s not your fault.” when asked about this, ben newman, who played pericles, pointed out that while many characters say this to him, he never says it to anyone else. that phrase began to echo outside rehearsal; he was realizing how often we say this to one another, as if words can excuse the bloodguilt we carry around, generation after generation. what happened to hesperides? as a matter of happenstance, none of the female-identifying actors joined the discussion, and so the playgoers ended up asking questions around their absence, primarily in relation to hes, played by alex ramirez de cruz. samson syharath revealed ramirez de cruz had “found” a special skill for this production: the ability to cry like a newborn. she produced the sound effect live offstage for the two prop infants in the show. audiences were only made aware it was her when pericles held baby marina, for the last time, over his dead wife. ramirez de cruz, as adult hes, would at this point step just into the edge of the spotlight, uncannily mewling. her voice created a sonic community of one-time girls whose absence after the show—rendering them unable to describe developing a performance about abuse from a woman’s perspective—was felt all the more keenly. works cited mowat, barbara a. the dramaturgy of shakespeare’s romances. university of georgia press, . negative stereotypes, fear and social distance: a systematic review of depictions of dementia in popular culture in the context of stigma research article open access negative stereotypes, fear and social distance: a systematic review of depictions of dementia in popular culture in the context of stigma lee-fay low and farah purwaningrum * abstract background: literature, film and news media reflect and shape social perceptions of dementia which in turn impact on dementia stigma. the aim of this paper is to systematically review papers on the depiction and frames for dementia in literature, film, mass media and social media in order to better understand cultural stigma related to dementia. methods: a systematic search of electronic databases was undertaken combining phrases relating to dementia, popular culture and representations, and phrases relating to dementia and stigma. we searched for scientific english language papers which included original analysis on the representation or depiction of dementia in popular culture (i.e. in film and television, literature, news, social media and language). articles published between – were included. the search was conducted in december and updated in january . inductive thematic synthesis was undertaken. results: a total of articles were included from an initial sample of . dementia was almost always depicted in conjunction with ageing, and often equated with alzheimer’s disease. common frames for dementia were biomedical - dementia involves the deterioration of the brain for which there is no current cure; natural disaster or epidemic - dementia is a force of nature which will overwhelm mankind; and living dead – people with dementia lose their brains, memories, minds and consequently their personhood and human rights. there were examples of more positive depictions of dementia including expressing love and individual agency and experiencing personal growth. feelings commonly associated with dementia were fear, shame, compassion and guilt, and depictions often resulted in a sense of social distance. conclusions: depictions of dementia in popular culture are associated with negative images and feelings, and social distance between people with dementia and those without. these correspond to dementia stigma in the public and as experienced by people with dementia. further research is needed into the impact of literature, news and social media on dementia stigma and these cultural mediums might be used to reduce stigma. keywords: stigma, dementia, alzheimer’s disease, systematic review, culture, media © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: fara.arum@gmail.com; farah.purwaningrum@sydney.edu.au the university of sydney, faculty of arts and social sciences, room old teachers college, manning road, lidcombe, australia full list of author information is available at the end of the article low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:fara.arum@gmail.com mailto:farah.purwaningrum@sydney.edu.au background dementia stigma is a key concern of dementia advocacy [ ]. stigma is defined as negative stereotyped beliefs, feelings and behaviours [ – ]. cultural stigma is society’s shared negative beliefs, prejudices and discrim- inatory structures [ ]. examples of dementia cultural stigma include public fear of dementia [ , ], therapeutic nihilism [ ] and locked dementia care units [ ]. demen- tia stigma contributes to delayed help-seeking [ , ], a reluctance by health professionals to give a dementia diagnosis [ ] and human rights violations of people with dementia [ ]. dementia stigma means that people with dementia frequently feel denied and ignored and experience discrimination in healthcare [ ], perceived stigma by people with dementia is associated with de- pression, anxiety and lower self-esteem, personal control and activity participation [ ] and with depression in care partners [ ]. culture is our learned system of shared ideas, rules and meaning that influence how we act on and view the world [ ]. popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and materials that embody the shared meanings of a so- cial system and includes news and social media, books and television, and linguistic conventions [ ]. popular culture reflects and influences attitudes and behaviour, for example the #metoo movement [ ]. in order to be able to intervene to decrease dementia stigma, we need to understand cultural stigma related to dementia [ ]. current dementia awareness raising cam- paigns describe dementia biomedically or alternatively depict a highly positive image of living well with demen- tia. these may have unintended consequences of exacer- bating stigma through highlighting the neuropathological ‘otherness’ of people with dementia, or by insufficiently showing the difficulties experienced by people with dementia so that those who did not live well might feel they have failed [ ]. pescolido et al. [ ] suggest that the portrayal of dementia in the media in- fluences and reflects cultural stigma. stereotypes of de- mentia in the media are that people with dementia are old and severely impaired, passive, and have no quality of life [ , ]. when news and entertainment media reinforce negative stereotypes, this perpetuates stigma [ ]. frame analysis is one method of describing cultural stigma. a frame is “a central organising idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events” ([ ], ) that impacts on how information is inter- preted [ ]. frames may be suggested through slogans, analogies, pictures and connect the issue with deeper values [ ]. this paper approaches the description of cultural stigma through the lens of popular culture. our aim is to systematically review and synthesise research on the depiction of dementia in popular culture, focusing on the view of healthcare, humanities and social sciences. a qualitative systematic review of academic papers was chosen to bring together academic analysis across differ- ent types of media, as analysis of original sources over the many media types was assessed to be too broad in scope. methods scoping search an initial search of scopus was undertaken (search terms were ‘dementia and media’, and dementia and stigma) followed by an analysis of the title, abstracts, mesh and index terms of relevant articles. this was used to inform our final search terms. systematic search a search was conducted in december and updated in january . databases searched were scopus, pubmed, psychinfo and embase. title, abstract and keyword searches were conducted, restricting results to english language articles, published between and . this time period was chosen to capture the arti- cles on the last two decades of media depictions because more recent media is more likely to impact on current perceptions of dementia. search terms were chosen re- lated to dementia and representation in film or artistic media, and dementia and stigma (see fig. ). search results were combined in endnote and dupli- cates were removed. both authors independently reviewed the titles and abstracts for inclusion. full texts of potentially eligible papers were obtained and inde- pendently reviewed, with disagreements resolved through discussion. the reference lists of included arti- cles, book chapters, and relevant reviews were hand searched. inclusion criteria (i) original analysis on the representation or depiction of dementia in popular culture (e.g. film, literature, social media, language) between s and the present; (ii) research paper and not a review, book review or film review; (iii)full paper and not abstract or poster; (iv)published between and ; (v) written in english. data extraction descriptive data was extracted by one reviewer and checked by a second (see table ): ) authors, date, title and journal; low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of ) material analysed (e.g. news websites, novels); ) country of origin of materials; ) analysis methods. a quality rating tool was not used as the criteria used to judge quality in health research are less appropriate indicators of quality in arts and media studies. analysis thematic synthesis of the whole text of included papers was undertaken [ ] using nvivo software. both au- thors identified descriptions of dementia or themes (first-order data) and frames including values, assump- tions, conceptualisations and cultural context underlying the semantic content as reported by paper authors (sec- ond-order data). initial descriptive themes were identi- fied independently by the two researchers, discussed and refined. descriptive themes were jointly scrutinised to identify how dementia was being framed including the emotions elicited by those frames then all material was recoded into the agreed themes and frames. saturation was reached, with no new themes or frames emerging in later coded articles. throughout the analysis we self-reflected and dis- cussed our own assumptions and frames regarding de- mentia. these included the impact of our experiences as a psychologist in dementia research, and a health soci- ologist with minimal experience and pre-conceptions in relation to dementia. results characteristics of included papers the search identified , articles, full texts were obtained, articles were determined as eligible, and an additional article was identified based on hand searching (see fig. ). the main reason for exclusion during the title and abstract screening was that papers were not fig. flow chart indicating inclusion of articles in the review low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of table included articles author (year) title material analysed methods country or culture literature . johnson ( ) [ ] images of relational self: personal experiences of dementia described in literature books, articles written by the person diagnosed with alzheimer’s or a care partner narrative analysis western . vassilas ( ) [ ] dementia and literature books: j. bernleff ‘s out of mind ( ), michael igniateff’s scar tissue ( ), john bayley’s iris ( ), linda grant’s remind me who i am ( ) netherlands, ua, uk, usa, . behuniak ( ) [ ] the living dead? the construction of people with alzheimer's disease as zombies books (multiple) analysis of ideas and themes- literature searched for references to seven zombie characteristics western . sakai, carpenter,and rieger ( ) [ ] “what's wrong with grandma?": depictions of alzheimer's disease in children's storybooks. english-language children’s storybooks about ad information presented was coded english language . goldman ( ) [ ] urging the world of the whore and the horror: gothic and apocalyptic portrayals of dementia in canadian fiction. books: michael ignatieff’s scar tissue ( ), david chariandy’s soucouyant ( ) canada . kruger- furhoff ( ) [ ] narrating the limits of narration: alzheimer’s disease in contemporary literary texts books and short story: thomas debaggio’s in losing my mind: an intimate look at life with alzheimer’s ( ), jonathan franzen’s my father’s brain ( ); arno geiger’s der alte könig in seinem exil (the old king in exile, ), j. bernlef’s hersenschimmen (out of mind; ) usa, usa,austria, netherlands . sako and falcus ( ) [ ] dementia, care and time in post- war japan: the twilight years, memories of tomorrow and pecoross' mother and her days books: sawako ariyoshi’s the twilight years ( ); film: yukihiko tsutsumi’s memories of tomorrow ( ); manga book: yuichi okano’s pekorosu no haha ni ai ni iku (pecoross’ mother and her days; ). japan . wearing ( ) [ ] deconstructing the american family: figures of parents with dementia in jonathan franzen’s the corrections and a.m. homes’ may we be forgiven books: jonathan franzen’s the corrections ( ), a.m. homes’ may we be forgiven ( ) usa . cuadrado, rosal, moriana, and antolí ( ) [ ] alzheimer's disease representation in the picture books picture books for children (multiple) framing analysis spain . l. burke ( ) [ ] missing pieces: trauma, dementia and the ethics of reading in elizabeth is missing books: catherine malabou’s ( ) the new wounded: from neurosis to brain damage and emma healey’s ( ) elizabeth is missing comparative discussion usa, uk . hussein ( ) [ ] representations of dementia in arabic literature novella: ghazi abdel- rahman al- qusaibi’s alzheimer’s, uqsusa (alzheimer’s, a tale, ); poetry collection: hanadi zarqa’s alzheimer’s ( ) saudi arabia, syria . raquel medina ( ) [ ] who speaks up for inés fonseca? representing violence against vulnerable subjects and the ethics of care in fictional narrative about alzheimer's disease: ahora tocad música de baile ( ) by andrés barba. book: andrés barba’s ahora tocad música de baile (now play dance music, ) spain low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of table included articles (continued) author (year) title material analysed methods country or culture . schilling ( ) [ ] looking after iris: john bayley’s elegy for the living. book: john bayley’s elegy for iris ( ) uk . simonhjell ( ) [ ] beyond shadow and play. different representations of dementia in contemporary scandinavian literature book: henning mankell’s the troubled man ( , karl ove knausgård’s my struggle ( ), cecilie enger’s my mother’s gifts (mors gaver) ( ), merethe lindstrøm’ dager i stillhetens historie (days in the history of silencem, ), sunniva lye axelsen’s følge meg alle mine dager )follow my all my days, ), thomas chr. wyller’ en dements dagbok (a demented’s diary, ), costance Ørbeck- nilssen and akin duzakin’s, jeg vil følge deg hjem (i’ll follow you home, ), stian holes’ garmannssommer (garman’s summer, ). norway . zimmermann ( ) [ ] alzheimer's disease metaphors as mirror and lens to the stigma of dementia books by people with dementia or care partners: jeanne lee’s just love me: my life turned upside- down by alzheimer’s ( ), floyd skloot’s a world of light ( ), claude couturier’s, in puzzle: journal d’une alzheimer (jigsaw: diary of an alzheimer’s patient, ), thomas debaggio’s losing my mind: an intimate look at life with alzheimer’s ( ), andrea gillies’s keeper: living with nancy— a journey into alzheimer’s ( ), ruth schäubli- meyer’s alzheimer: wie will ich noch leben—wie sterben? (alzheimer: how will i continue to live— how will i die? ), diana friel mcgowin’s living in the labyrinth: a personal journey through the maze of alzheimer’s ( ) western . venkatesan and kasthuri ( ) [ ] magic and laughter": graphic medicine, recasting alzheimer narratives and dana walrath's aliceheimer's: alzheimer's through the looking glass book: dana walrath’s aliceheimer’s: alzheimer’s through the looking glass ( ) usa film and television . segers ( ) [ ] degenerative dementias and their medical care in the movies fiction films, tv films, or shorts released before coded for each person with dementia name, age, sex, marital status, domestic situation (home alone, with a family member, or institutionalized), professional help at home, medical follow-up, and the use of medication, and scores on gds, behave-ad majority from us but also included italy, japan, argentina, sweden, netherlands, belgium . asai, sato, and fukuyama ( ) [ ] an ethical and social examination of dementia as depicted in japanese film films: shirô toyoda’s koˆkotsu no hito (the twilight years, ) and yukihiko tsutsumi’s ashita no kioku (memories of tomorrow, ) japan . capp ( ) [ ] alzheimer’s at the movies: a look at how dementia is portrayed in film and video films (multiple) western . cohen- shalev and an insider’s view of alzheimer: cinematic portrayals of the films: nicolas boukhrief’s cortex ( ), yesim ustaoglu’s pandora france, turkey, chile low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of table included articles (continued) author (year) title material analysed methods country or culture marcus ( ) [ ] struggle for personhood ‘ninkutusu (pandora’s box, ), pedro peirano and sebastian silva’s gatos viejos (old cats, ) . swinnen ( ) [ ] everyone is romeo and juliet! staging dementia in wellkåmm to verona by suzanne osten film: suzanne osten’s wellkåmm to verona ( ) sweden . casado- gual ( ) [ ] unexpected turns in lifelong sentimental journeys: redefining love, memory and old age through alice munro's 'the bear came over the mountain' and its film adaptation, away from her. short story: alice munro's the bear came over the mountain ( ) and film adaptation, sarah polley’s away from her ( ) spain . r. medina ( ) [ ] alzheimer's disease, a shifting paradigm in spanish film: ¿y tú quién eres? and amanecer de un sueño films: freddy mas franqueza’s amanecer de un sueño, ( ), antonio mercero’s ¿y tú quién eres? ( ) spain . swinnen ( ) [ ] dementia in documentary film: mum by adelheid roosen film: adelheid roosen’s mum ( ) netherlands . wearing ( ) [ ] dementia and the biopolitics of the biopic: from iris to the iron lady films: richard eyre’s iris ( ) and phyillida loyd’s the iron lady ( ) uk . gerritsen, kuin, and nijboer ( ) [ ] dementia in the movies: the clinical picture movies with release dates between january and march usa, uk,netherlands . raquel medina ( ) [ ] from the medicalisation of dementia to the politics of memory and identity in three spanish documentary films: bicicleta, cullera, poma, las voces de la memoria and bucarest: la memoria perduda films: carles bosch’s bicicleta, cullera, poma (bicycle, apple, spoon, ), Àlex badia (co- director), dani fabra las voces de la memoria (the voices of memory, ), albert solé’s bucarest: la memòria perduda (bucharest: memory lost, ) spain . capstick, chatwin, and ludwin ( ) [ ] challenging representations of dementia in contemporary western fiction film: from epistemic injustice to social participation television series ( - ), and films ( - ) western . capstick ( ) [ ] intercorporeal relations and ethical perception portrayals of alzheimer’s disease in away from her and en sång för martin. films: sarah polley’s away from her ( ), bille august’s en sång för martin (a song for martin ) canada, sweden . kamphof ( ) [ ] in the company of robots. health care and the identity of people with dementia. film: jake schreie’s robot & frank ( ) . graham ( ) [ ] the voices of iris: cinematic representations of the aged woman and alzheimer's disease in iris ( ) film: richard eyre’s iris ( ) uk . adelseck ( ) [ ] losing one’s self: the depiction of female dementia sufferers in iris ( ) and the iron lady ( ) films: richard eyre’s iris ( ) and phyillida loyd’s the iron lady ( ) uk . byrne ( ) [ ] representations of senescence in tony harrison's black daisies for the bride. film-poem: tony harrison's black daisies for the bride ( ) uk . jutel and jutel ( ) [ ] 'deal with it. name it': the diagnostic moment in film films: richard glatzer and wash westmoreland’s still alice ( ) comparative textual analysis usa . taylor ( ) [ ] engaging with dementia: moral experiments in art and friendship film: richard glatzer and wash westmoreland’s still alice ( ) usa low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of table included articles (continued) author (year) title material analysed methods country or culture . bloom ( ) [ ] maternal food memories in lin cheng- sheng's °c: loaf rock and eric khoo's recipe: a film on dementia films: lin cheng-sheng's °c: loaf rock ( ) and eric khoo's recipe: a film on dementia ( ) taiwan, singapore . drott ( ) [ ] aging bodies, minds and selves: representations of senile dementia in japanese film films: hisako matsui's oriume (broken branch of plum blossoms; ), hideki wada’s watashi no michi: waga inochi no tango (my way of life; ), hirokazu kore- eda's film wandafuru raifu (after life, ), azuma morisaki’s pekorosu no haha ni ai niiku (pecoross' mother and her days, ) japan . inthorn ( ) [ ] representations of intergenerational care on bbc children’s television bbc children’s television involving children and their grandparents: mr alzheimer’s and me ( ), hope, topsy and tim ( -) and katie morag ( - ). in-depth qualitative analysison whether show provided opportunities to learn the meaning of “good care” uk . rincón, cuevas, and torregrosa ( ) [ ] the representation of personal memory in alan berliner’s first cousin once removed film: alan berliner’s first cousin once removed ( ) usa news media . mccolgan, valentine, and downs ( ) [ ] concluding narratives of a career with dementia: accounts of iris murdoch at her death newspaper obituaries and other accounts after iris murdoch's death scotland . clarke ( ) [ ] the case of the missing person: alzheimer's disease in mass print magazines - articles on alzheimer’s disease from high circulation print american and canadian english- language magazines published in , , and analysis of the dominant discourse/frame used in the portrayal of the disease (i.e., the medical, political– economy, or lifestyle perspective) usa and canada . kirkman ( ) [ ] dementia in the news: the media coverage of alzheimer's disease items from new zealand newspapers to interpretive approach that focused on the use of language, particularly in headlines, visual imagery and the major topics and actors receiving attention new zealand . kang, gearhart, and bae ( ) [ ] coverage of alzheimer's disease from to in television news and information talk shows in the united states: an analysis of news framing television: tv news transcripts on alzheimer’s disease (ad) from tv news networks during a - year period ( - ) constant comparative method western . doyle et al. ( ) [ ] media reports on dementia: quality and type of messages in australian media australian newpapers, television and radio items from march to february and items from september to august extracted identifying and descriptive information based on the media guidelines for reporting suicide and mental illness australia . kessler and schwender ( ) [ ] giving dementia a face? the portrayal of older people with dementia in german weekly news magazines between the years and articles containing photos depicting people with dementia and social partners from german weekly newspaper magazines - characters with dementia in the photos rated according to age, gender, emotional expression, physical functioning, physical surroundings, and social context. germany . peel ( ) [ ] the living death of alzheimer's' versus 'take a walk to keep dementia at bay': representations of dementia in print media and carer discourse articles from british print media october to september social constructionist approach to the newspaper coverage uk . cuijper and van lente ( ) [ ] the meanings of early diagnostics for alzheimer’s disease in dutch newspapers: a framing analysis. articles addressing alzheimer’s disease or dementia and early diagnosis or early diagnostic instruments in dutch national newspapers published between framing analysis netherlands low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of table included articles (continued) author (year) title material analysed methods country or culture january and january . inthorn and inthorn ( ) [ ] respect for autonomy? the contribution of popular magazines to the public understanding of dementia care articles published in the british magazines saga magazine, yours, and choice between january and august analysis on whether persons with dementia are shown to be making decisions free from external influence from family members, medical experts, or others uk . werner, schiffman, david, and abojabel ( ) [ ] newspaper coverage of alzheimer's disease: comparing online newspapers in hebrew and arabic across time. articles published in seven national online newspapers ( hebrew, arabic) between – and – information coded about objective characteristics of the articles as well as regarding the portrayal of the disease and of persons with ad israel . brookes, harvey, chadborn, and dening ( ) [ ] “our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the british press articles from uk national published on - november covering british office for national statistics press bulletin that dementia had replaced cancer and heart disease as “the leading cause of death in england and wales” multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis (cda) uk social media . oscar et al. ( ) [ ] machine learning, sentiment analysis, and tweets: an examination of alzheimer's disease stigma on twitter , english language tweets, collected continuously for days in early english-speaking language . george ( ) [ ] overcoming the social death of dementia through language language western . chiu et al. ( ) [ ] renaming dementia - an east asian perspective language – words for dementia asia mixed media . brijnath and manderson ( ) [ ] discipline in chaos: foucault, dementia and aging in india indian-english media, film: sanjay leela bhansali’s black ( ) application of foucauldian theory india . van gorp and vercruysse ( ) [ ] frames and counter-frames giving meaning to dementia: a framing analysis of media content books ( ), audiovisual material ( ), public health care brochures ( ) from belgium, and articles, % in dutch and % in french from belgian newspapers between march st and july st . inductive framing analysis belgium . johnstone ( ) [ ] alzheimer's disease, media representations, and the politics of euthanasia: constructing risk and selling death in an ageing society news, film (multiple) western (majority australian examples) . lane, mclachlan, and philip ( ) [ ] the war against dementia: are we battle weary yet mixed western . zeilig ( ) [ ] dementia as a cultural metaphor newspaper accounts, political speeches, and documentary and feature films western . lucy burke ( ) [ ] the locus of our dis-ease:: narratives of family life in the age of alzheimer’s government communications regarding dementia; book: margaret forster’s have the men had enough? ( ) uk . zeilig ( ) [ ] what do we mean when we talk about dementia? exploring cultural representations of dementia media reports, films: mike leigh’s high hopes ( ), ashgar farhadi’s a separation ( ) uk, iran low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of about the representation of dementia. reasons for exclu- sion from full-text results are depicted in fig. . the cultural material examined in included papers (see table ) were television and movies ( papers), newspapers and television ( papers), literature ( pa- pers), language ( papers), and a mixture ( papers). two papers included material produced by people with dementia and care partners [ ]. analysis methods included quantitative coding of how dementia was depicted, used more commonly with news media [ , , , , ], framing analysis [ , , , , ], discourse analysis [ ], and foucauldian analysis [ ]. quantitative studies were more likely to describe their methods, whereas papers from arts and media dis- ciplines were less likely to explicitly describe method- ology. hence, some papers provided inclusion criteria or justification and context for the material which was chosen for analysis, however many papers did not ex- plain how or why material was selected. the majority of articles were published in ageing or mental health jour- nals with a few in sociological and humanities journals. descriptive themes the descriptive themes were that ageing and old age is depicted concurrently with dementia, dementia was often equated with alzheimer’s disease, people with de- mentia were depicted as having memory difficulties, be- ing disoriented, and experiencing decline and death, treatments or cure were not typically shown, and posi- tive depictions of dementia occured rarely. ageing and old age is depicted concurrently with dementia people with dementia were almost always portrayed as being old or ageing. for instance, kessler’s quanti- tative analysis of photos in german weekly news magazines reported that judges (clinical psychologists) rated % of characters with dementia as “older than years”, % as “between and years” and . % as “younger than years” [ ]. the characteristics of ageing portrayed in relation to people with dementia were physical (wrinkles, grey hair, age spots, weakened, frail and vulnerable bodies, physical incapacity), social (retired, inactive, contributing less to society, having less friends), and psychological (living in the past, passivity). for example, in their descriptions of newspaper images accompanying newspaper stories on dementia brookes et al. wrote: “the hands … reveal not only conspicuous features such as bruises and liver spots, but also creases and wrinkles in the skin and even the bones and joints beneath. these are images of vulnerabil- ity” [ ]. in books and film, the decline with age of people with dementia was often emphasised through juxtaposition with more positive depictions of younger people, some- times their younger selves. dementia is often equated with alzheimer’s disease papers showed that alzheimer’s was the most commonly depicted type of dementia [ , ], and the media often used the terms dementia and alzheimer’s interchange- ably or together ([ , ], brookes et al. ). the interchangeability of the terms dementia and alz- heimer’s disease was also apparent in the research pa- pers themselves. the titles of papers suggested that they focused on the depiction of alzheimer’s disease [ , , , , , , , , , , , – , – , , , , ]. however, some of these used the terms de- mentia and alzheimer’s interchangeably (e.g [ , , , , ]). the paper on “alzheimer’s at the movies”, as an illustration, included a film about margaret thatcher who had vascular dementia without mentioning this fact [ ]. other types of dementia were rarely mentioned in the reviewed papers. of the included papers, vascular de- mentia was mentioned in two papers [ , ], lewy body dementia in two papers [ , ], and frontotemporal de- mentia in one paper [ ]. depiction of people with dementia memory difficulties were reported in every paper as a characteristic of people with dementia, often presented as an early symptom foreshadowing future difficulties. in the novel iris [ ], this was shown as forgetting to come out with the right words: “she suddenly finds it difficult in front of a large audience to come out with the words to reply to questions, something with which she has pre- viously been quite at ease” ([ ], p. ). gerritsen et al. [ ] analysis of fictional movies with a theme of de- mentia reports that films showed memory problems, and showed word finding difficulties. disorientation to time, place, or person was also com- monly reported as a characteristic of people with de- mentia. they were depicted as being confused, thinking that the present is the past. consequently, they were not able to find their way out of familiar places, not recog- nising familiar people, and getting lost. gerritsen et al. [ ] paper reported that of films showed disorien- tation to time, place or people. people with dementia were also depicted as acting outside social norms, or in deviance [ ]. examples are: “walked into her office in pink pajamas and beige high heels” [ ], “he cannot find his keys, he gets a hammer and screwdriver and prises the front door open” [ ], and “shigezo eats his wife’s ashes in the middle of the night” [ ]. in response to these behav- iours others were shown as reacting with indifference, shock, anger, aggression, and by shaming them. low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of “when grandma urinates on the carpet in his mother’s living room, murat, his aunt and uncle re- spond with uncontrolled laughter” [ ]. books and films about dementia almost all told a story of progressive decline and death, ending in institutionali- sation [ , , , ], or the death of the person with dementia [ , , , , , , , , , , , ]. many books and films depicted the progression of de- clining ability to comprehend the world, and conduct self-care. flashbacks were commonly used to show the person earlier in their life, emphasising losses and decline. people with dementia were shown as wanting to die: “as a mother, i just want to die while i still remember my son.” [ ]; or trying to kill themselves [ ]. corres- pondingly care partners were shown in constant be- reavement [ ]. where the character with dementia was alive at the end of the story, the suggestion is that this is still the end of that person’s life narrative: “death’s got the only door code out of whernside ward” [ ]. treatments or cure over years of us television news, treatment was the top issue comprising . % of all coverage [ ]. people with dementia, nonetheless, were not shown typically shown as receiving treatments. in a review of movies, only three characters are depicted as taking medications for dementia, albeit not accurately [ ]. positive depictions of dementia there were reports of positive depictions of dementia, though these were in the minority in terms of numbers of academic publications and mentions within those publications. rather than suffering, people with dementia were depicted as being happy [ , ], sometimes having for- gotten all the bad memories or responsibilities of life [ , ]. the most frequent emotional tone coded in photographs related to dementia from german weekly news magazines was positive ( %), followed by neutral ( %) and negative ( %) [ ]. people with dementia were shown as exercising agency. in of movies, the person with dementia is shown as having something to contribute socially [ ]. fictional characters were shown as solving crime cases [ ], committing planned burglaries [ ], starting new romantic relationships [ , ], directing and performing in a play [ ]. people with dementia including in the later stages of dementia were shown as expressing love through words, hugging, kissing and other physical signs of affection [ , , , ]. documentaries showed a prominent politician with dementia setting up a research foundation to research dementia, and people with de- mentia performing in a choir [ ]. people with dementia were telling their own stories, and by describing their own experiences, contributing actively to discourse on dementia as well as demonstrating their personal agency and identity [ , ]. people with dementia were also depicted as personally growing in that they develop socially, emotionally or spiritually [ ]. for instance, they were dealing with grief at the loss of a spouse [ ], overcoming prejudices [ ], and embracing a previously rejected cultural heritage [ ]. the writings of people with dementia include de- scriptions relating their personal journeys and shifts in outlook about themselves and dementia [ ]. frames for dementia frames for dementia were typically negative including the biomedical, natural disaster and epidemic, military and fighting, the living dead and burden of care frames. dementia was also framed more neutrally with the alter- native mind-body frame. biomedical frame dementia was commonly explained as a biomedical dis- ease involving brain deterioration. this biomedical frame was often accompanied by digital illustrations of disinte- grating heads or brains or neuroimaging scans, which serve to de-personalise the disease and emphasises a re- ductionist biological viewpoint [ ]. dementia the dis- ease was presented as a complex scientific puzzle, that can only be addressed through research. van gorp and vercruysse [ ] describe this frame aligning with a com- munity value of ‘faith in science’ wherein we trust in sci- ence and commit funding to research which offers the promise of a cure. the biomedical frame was prominent in news cover- age with scientists or doctors often featuring as experts [ , ]. a review of news reports found that doc- tors and researchers were the most interviewed sources ( . %), followed by patients/families ( . %), politicians ( . %), and other supporters ( . %) [ ]. natural disaster and epidemic frames natural disaster and epidemic frames were also com- monplace in news coverage of dementia. the rise in the global prevalence of dementia the disease was described as a force of nature which will overwhelm mankind. ter- minology used includes “rising tide,” “dementia tsunami” and “silent epidemic” [ , , , ]. the dementia dis- aster is vast “one of the greatest threats to humanity” [ ] and “the disease of the century” [ ]. within this frame people with dementia were labelled as sufferers of unspeakable horror, passive victims of apocalyptic dem- ography. ‘epidemic’ suggests that dementia is contagious [ ]. the natural disaster frame was often presented in low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of conjunction with a biomedical frame with science to the rescue of the disaster. military and fighting frames dementia was personified as a killer - “deadly”, “claiming lives”, “responsible for deaths”, “inflicting a death toll”, ‘kills slowly”; “attacks speech and mem- ory”, “invades the brain”, “strikes victims” [ , ]. public campaigns relating to dementia were described in similarly militaristic terms “obama’s war on alz- heimer’s”, “alzheimer’s society: leading the fight against alzheimer’s disease”, and “fight dementia save australia’ [ , , , ]. in personal stories, people with dementia were sometimes represented as fighting their condition. for instance, in the spanish documentary “bicicleta, cullera, poma” former polit- ician maragall was depicted as an extraordinary hero who struggles to beat dementia [ ]. although the language suggested that the world was at war against dementia the disease, no examples were pro- vided in included papers for victories in this war. lane et al. [ ] suggested that the military metaphor may be unhelpful in that someone who was not winning their individual battle against dementia may be perceived as not fighting hard enough or failing. the living dead frame people with dementia were depicted as the living dead consistent with the disease being a killer in entertain- ment and news media. descriptions for dementia in- cluded ‘death before death’, ‘funeral that never ends’, ‘social death’, ‘psychological death’, ‘already dead’ ‘death that leaves the body behind’, ‘vegetable’, ‘there is nobody there’, and ‘withered shells ’[ , , , , ]. book ti- tles included “alzheimer’s disease: coping with a living death”, and “a curious kind of widow: loving a man with advanced alzheimer’s” [ ]. interestingly, writing by people with dementia also included the living dead frame [ ]. following on from the notion that they are dead, people with dementia were also described as sub- human - ‘self that unbecomes’, ‘nonpersons’, ‘not human’ [ , ]. she was just an animal. an animal with a stomach to be filled to continue alive, who needed to drink at least one litre of water a day, who defecated and uri- nated … (barba : – , cited in [ ]. the living dead frame was associated with a western cartesian hypercognitive view of the self. western phil- osophy posits that mind and body were separate, with the mind being the seat of identity. when the brain/ mind deteriorated, then the self deteriorated. memories were a source of identity, so as memories were lost then so was personhood. ‘without memory there are no experiences … there is nothing but void … the vacuum that is death’ ([ ], p. cited in [ ]. as people with dementia lost their minds, they became crazy or mad. even in cultures where mind-body dual- ism was not a dominant world view, dementia was still seen as a form of madness, such as in asian and middle eastern cultures. ‘chi dai zheng’ is the term for demen- tia used in china, hong kong and singapore which has negative connotations of insane and idiotic [ ]. junun ‘atah was an arabic term for dementia, which would mean losing one’s mind and for one to be acting in crazy ways [ ]. a corollary of being seen as the living dead was that the viewpoint of the person with dementia was usually not depicted. an analysis of articles on ad from high circulation canadian print magazines found that almost nothing was presented from the perspective of, or about the needs of the person with dementia [ ]. consistent with people with dementia being depicted as not fully human, they were also shown as not having self-determination. analysis of articles from british magazines found that articles presumed that people with dementia were not autonomous agents who could make decisions without external influence [ ]. in the films “black daisies” and “mum” participants did not give in- formed consent regarding their participation [ , ]. the ethics of releasing the film “the iron lady” (marga- ret thatcher) and the novel “iris” (iris murdoch) while their central characters were still alive, but not able to consent or comment have been called into question [ , ]. the reduction of the human rights in depictions of people with dementia included their right to life. this hermeneutical injustice was evident in standard texts on dementia [ ]. people with dementia were shown as be- ing killed by their loved ones in an act of ‘beneficent eu- thanasia’ because they would be ‘better off dead’ [ ]. in andrés barba’s novel “ahora tocad música de baile” inés fonseca, a character with later stage dementia was killed by her son. the reader was left to judge whether she has been murdered, assisted to die with dignity or sacrificed [ ]. burden of care frame the stories in the majority of films and books were about the impact of dementia on the relationship be- tween the person with dementia and their families, with the care partner sometimes depicted as the main protag- onist [ , , ]. a review of films found that most low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of characters with dementia were unable to complete activ- ities of daily living without assistance, with care partners bearing the burden of care [ ]. care partners were shown doing housework tasks, providing physical help with bathing, eating and toileting, and being ‘on watch’ constantly [ , ]. care partners were depicted as in a constant state of bereavement for the person who is already lost to them [ ]. alongside the personal stories of caring, were news de- scriptions of the economic and societal costs of care [ ]. media articles suggested there was a moral obliga- tion to provide good care and that good care partners are brave, self-sacrificial and heroic [ , , ]. alternative frames a few articles discussed the representations of dementia within a counter-frame of body-mind unity. within this frame people with dementia engaged with the world through sensory and physical interactions and express themselves through their bodies – embodiment of ex- perience. so rather than having lost self-identity and agency, their identity, emotional connections and influ- ence on others were through the power of their bodies [ , ]. for instance in the picture book la abuela necesita besitos ( ) by ana bergua, the grandmother with alzheimer’s disease kissed and hugged her grand- daughters and is emotionally connected with them [ ]. interestingly, this frame was shown in material from in- dian, japanese and spanish cultures. “in japan, selves are understood to be formed out of interactions with others, exemplifying the so-called relational or sociocentric self. furthermore, in japan the self is understood to be defined not so much by one’s cognitive acuity but more by the embodied habits that allow the graceful performance of socia- lised selfhood “[ ]. feelings elicited by dementia depictions the way dementia was depicted and framed elicited negative emotions and a sense of social distance between people with dementia and the audience. negative emotions the common frames for dementia were depicted in as- sociation with negative emotions. fear (terror, horror, dread) was the most common emotion associated with dementia for instance in relation to the living dead frame [ ]. news reports described or implied that the public should be fearful of dementia the disease, some- times with an ‘undercurrent of hysteria’ [ ]. in books and film people with dementia and care partners were shown as frightened of the disease – they fear of loss of abilities, independence, memories, themselves, relation- ships, and the unknown. “at night when it is total blackness, these absurd fears come. the comforting memories can’t be reached” davies, , cited in [ ]. shame was another emotion commonly shown in as- sociation with dementia. people with dementia were rep- resented as ashamed of having dementia [ , , , , , ] though the moral premises underpinning shame was not clear. “he is not dying of alzheimer’s disease, he’s dying of shame” (reiter cited in ([ ], p ). guilty, pity and compassion were other feelings related to dementia. care partners were sometimes depicted as feeling guilt in relation to the care they provided or were expected to provide [ , , ]. pity and compassion were suggested as being elicited in relation to dementia [ , ]. social distance academics wrote that the way dementia was depicted in- creased affective and normative social distance. affective social distance was higher when we felt less sympathetic understanding towards another, normative social dis- tance was higher when distinctions between us (my in- group) and them (their out-group) were felt more strongly [ ]. the biomedical and living dead frames for dementia distinguished between healthy and diseased brains, and human and subhuman, emphasising the otherness of people with dementia. this difference was increased through other ways. for instance in stock pho- tographs of people with dementia commonly used in the press, images were selected in which the people with de- mentia were looking away from the viewer, or depicted as a set of disembodied hands which reduced the possi- bility for emotional connection [ ]. depictions of de- mentia which highlighted the oddities of their social behaviour (i.e. without allowing the viewer insight into the reasons behind those behaviours) also create a sense of distance [ ]. the stories were not told from the viewpoint of the person with dementia [ ], which also reduced the ability of the viewer to relate to people with dementia. discussion this review found that the prevalent cultural depictions and frames around dementia were negative. the stereo- typical depiction of a person of dementia was of an old person with alzheimer’s disease, who loses their mem- ory, mind and identity, behaves unpredictably and is low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of suffering. this stereotype was framed so that the person is not fully human and does not have a voice. the soci- etal narrative was that dementia is an overwhelming medical epidemic that brings a burden of care onto indi- vidual families, societies and governments. the predom- inant emotion associated with dementia was fear. dementia was usually depicted in a way that generated social distance between those with dementia and the audience – ‘us’ and ‘them’. these depictions of dementia are consistent with stigma as observed or expressed in the public, health professionals and people with demen- tia [ ]. the public is afraid of dementia, health profes- sionals treat people with dementia with less respect after diagnosis and people with dementia experience ‘other- ing’ in society [ , ]. these findings support the use of dementia language guidelines that suggest avoiding words like ‘sufferer’ and ‘demented’ (dementia [ ]). dementia, old age and symptoms of mental illnesses were regularly co-depicted. people with dementia may be additionally stigmatised because of this intersectional- ity. ageist views are were that older people do not con- tribute and are a burden, mental health stigma includes stereotypes of violence and incompetence [ ]. this review found that there were positive depictions of dementia, though these were less common. people with dementia were shown to be happy, exercise agency and experience personal growth. people with dementia were represented within a mind-body unity frame, con- sistent with notions of personhood and embodied self- hood [ ]. other counter-frames for dementia are that dementia is a natural part of ageing, carpe diem, family reciprocity of care, and a moral duty to provide loving care [ ]. dementia friendly communities present a posi- tive frame by showing people with dementia actively participating in the movement, the dementia friendly ap- proach has been shown to reduce stigma [ ]. other participatory approaches where people with dementia are seen as equal and active participants in the project have been shown to reduce stigma in others involved [ ]. dementia awareness campaigns should be consid- ering and testing how dementia is framed within cam- paign messages in order to decrease stigma. the impact of positive frames on dementia stigma need to be inves- tigated further. strengths of this paper are that we took a systematic approach (a health methodology) to synthesising find- ings from papers that used arts and health methodolo- gies and that analysed a range of cultural media. it allowed us to produce a broad, novel, systematic descrip- tion of cultural stigma of dementia. however, some of the papers were difficult to include within our review ap- proach. for instance, many of the included papers did not explicitly state how material were selected or their analysis approach as this is not a convention in arts research. this made critique and commentary on meth- odology difficult. we were not able to analyse differ- ences over time in cultural depictions, or differences in depiction by media type, genre (fiction versus non- fiction) and styles (realists, for instance). this kind of analysis was not possible due to the heterogeneity in the papers in the media types described and country/culture. further the review was limited to english language pa- pers, and has a western bias, although there were some papers describing non-western cultural media. future research may be able to link the depiction of dementia directly to measures of dementia stigma. it could also include searching of the arts and humanities literature, investigating depictions of dementia in social media and blogs, framing analysis, cross-media and cross-cultural comparisons, and investigation of changes in depictions over time. it would be helpful if future pa- pers on depictions of dementia were contextualised within cultures and analysis approaches were explicitly stated. experimental studies might test the depiction of dementia using alternate frames and the impact of ex- posure to these frames on attitudes, feelings and intended or actual behaviour towards people with de- mentia. research also needs to be conducted on how to influence media portrayals of dementia (e.g. through media guidelines). the way that health and social care practitioners frame dementia during clinical and support interactions might impact on how people with dementia and care partners see themselves, this needs further in- vestigation. the influence scientists and health profes- sionals discourse in popular culture on dementia stigma could also be investigated. conclusion in conclusion, depictions of dementia in popular culture including how dementia is framed may influence demen- tia stigma and needs to be considered when working to decrease dementia stigma. when talking about and depicting people with dementia, we need to be mindful about the social impact of the words, images and mes- sages that we use. “i repeat: “please don’t call us sufferers” [ ]. abbreviation ad: alzheimer’s disease acknowledgements we are thankful for the comments and discussion with simone hausknecht and annica barcenilla-wong during the writing-up and analysis for this paper. authors’ contributions lfl and fp undertook scoping search, main database search which included medline, scopus, pubmed, embase, psycinfo, and hand search. both lfl and fp carried out analysis using nvivo and discussed findings. lfl drafted the introduction, method, results and discussion. fp drafted the abstract and low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of contributed to the discussion and conclusion. fp assisted lfl with endnote references. all authors read and edited the paper. the author(s) read and approved the final manuscript. authors’ information lee-fay low (bsc psych (hons), phd), is associate professor in ageing and health and head of behavioural and social sciences in health in the faculty of health sciences, university of sydney. she is a registered psychologist with a phd in psychiatric epidemiology. a/prof low conducts research that she hopes will make a difference in the world. her main areas of expertise are in home and residential care for older people, wellbeing in people with dementia, dementia risk factors for dementia, dementia literacy, and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. she is particularly interested in developing and evaluating interventions to improve the quality of life of older people. she has methodological skills in population studies, systematic reviews, clustered randomised trials, instrument development and evaluation, and translation of research into practice. she has authored over peer-reviewed articles, six book chapters as well as two books on dementia. she is an active advocate in improving how older people are treated and cared for. lee-fay thinks that research is great fun, and even admits to liking statistics. second author: dr. phil. farah purwaningrum is honorary associate at school of social and political sciences – the university of sydney. farah is a sociologist with an interdisciplinary background in law. she attained her phd from rheinische friedrich universität bonn, germany in december . she has a keen interest in research areas of the sociology of health, comparative studies, and sociology of knowledge. in these research areas; her papers have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as international journal of health governance (forthcoming), international so- cial science journal, south east asia research, the international journal of health planning and management, international sociological association (isa) -e symposium. she is a steering board member of international sociological association (isa) research committees rc on sociology of health and rc no. on visual sociology. funding this work was supported by a national health and medical research council boosting dementia research leadership fellowship. availability of data and materials not applicable. ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. consent for publication the authors consent for publication. competing interests the authors declare no competing interests. author details the university of sydney, faculty of health sciences, room m b, m block, east street, lidcombe, nsw , australia. the university of sydney, faculty of arts and social sciences, room old teachers college, manning road, lidcombe, australia. received: december accepted: september references . alzheimer's disease international. world alzheimer report : attitudes to dementia. london: alzheimer’s disease international; . . corrigan pw, kerr a, knudsen l. the stigma of mental illness: explanatory models and methods for change. appl prev psychol. ; ( ): – . . goffman e. stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. new york: simon & schuster; . . martin s, fleming j, cullum s, dening t, rait g, fox c, katona c, brayne c, lafortune l. exploring attitudes and preferences for dementia screening in britain: contributions from carers and the 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( ). "i repeat: “please don’t call us sufferers”." retrieved th feb, , from https://kateswaffer.com/ / / /i-repeat-please-dont- call-us-sufferers/. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. low and purwaningrum bmc geriatrics ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . / https://kateswaffer.com/ / / /i-repeat-please-dont-call-us-sufferers/ https://kateswaffer.com/ / / /i-repeat-please-dont-call-us-sufferers/ 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	methods 	scoping search 	systematic search 	inclusion criteria 	data extraction 	analysis 	results 	characteristics of included papers 	descriptive themes 	ageing and old age is depicted concurrently with dementia 	dementia is often equated with alzheimer’s disease 	depiction of people with dementia 	treatments or cure 	positive depictions of dementia 	frames for dementia 	biomedical frame 	natural disaster and epidemic frames 	military and fighting frames 	the living dead frame 	burden of care frame 	alternative frames 	feelings elicited by dementia depictions 	negative emotions 	social distance 	discussion 	conclusion 	abbreviation 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	authors’ information 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note sexual harassment in the field of sexuality research vol.:( ) archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x g u e s t e d i to r i a l sexual harassment in the field of sexuality research debby herbenick  · sari m. van anders  · lori a. brotto  · meredith l. chivers  · sofia jawed‑wessel  · jayleen galarza received: july / accepted: january / published online: february © springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature introduction our field has a problem with sexual harassment, and we need to talk about it. though sexual harassment is currently at the forefront of discussions taking place within major social move- ments, professional societies, and disciplines (see, for example, clancy, nelson, rutherford, & hinde, ; dzau & john- son, ; national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, ), the discipline of sexuality research has—to this point—been largely absent from these discussions. there are some exceptions, however, with a few sexuality research- ers in sociology, psychology, and gender studies among those who have faced or made public accusations or formal reports alleging sexual misconduct or harassment (e.g., flaherty, ; grollman, ; mondon, ). with this guest editorial, we aim to begin that discussion, articulating that #timesup too in sexuality research, and present a collective united front against sexual harassment in our field and workplaces. our goal in this guest editorial is to articulate: ( ) the scope of the problem of sexual harassment within our fields, espe- cially sexuality research, including its consequences; ( ) the gendered basis of sexual harassment; ( ) the exacerbation of these experiences for people of color and those in lower posi- tions of power, including students and/or other minoritized social locations; and ( ) suggestions toward stopping sexual harassment within sexuality professions, including sexuality research. while sexual harassment can occur between profes- sionals and their clients, patients, and research participants, we will focus here on sexual harassment within research, aca- demic, and professional spaces. in doing so, we draw on our own experiences and those of colleagues who have shared their experiences with us as well (either anonymized/grouped or with their permission). as we all live and (mostly) work in north america, we note the cultural limitations of our perspectives. sexual harassment in context what sexual harassment is and is not historically, sexual harassment was defined by men, with those targeted largely absent from the power structures that allow phenomena to be defined and acted upon. this power imbal- ance works in concert with majority group members who per- petrate other forms of group-based injustice, like white people deciding what is or isn’t anti-black racism or settler colonialists deciding what is or isn’t anti-indigeneity. those who experience injustice have always pushed back, and societal discussions about sexual harassment are a visible example of this right now. thus, while some may argue that claims of sexual harassment are largely overblown, hysterical, censorious, or simple “mis- understandings,” those of us who have experienced sexual har- assment are inserting ourselves into a conversation that should have centered the voices of those affected from the start. what is sexual harassment? although its name might sug- gest otherwise, sexual harassment is a form of gender-based maltreatment or violence that may or may not be sexual and may or may not manifest as frank sexual overtures or acts. sex- ual harassment includes, and is, gender-based harassment (see national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, drs. debby herbenick and sari m. van anders are co-first authors. * debby herbenick debby@indiana.edu department of applied health science, ph , indiana university school of public health, bloomington, in  , usa departments of psychology and gender studies; program in neuroscience, queens university, kingston, on, canada department of obstetrics and gynecology, university of british columbia, vancouver, bc, canada department of psychology, queens university, kingston, on, canada department of health and kinesiology, university of nebraska, lincoln, ne, usa department of social work, shippensburg university, shippensburg, pa, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – ; schulz, ). to be more specific, sexual harassment may be “sexual,” as with unwanted sexual attention or requests to engage in sexual acts. however, sexual harassment is more often gender-based, or “nonsexual.” this includes derogating someone on the basis of their gender/sex or violations of their gender/sex norms, as with sexual minorities, nonsexual hetero- sexual men, or sexually agentic women, etc., and gender-based insults, jokes, and discrimination. sexual harassment may be physical or verbal, in-person or electronic, isolated or repeated, or occur in groups or one-on-one. in our experience, sexual harassment can also be reflected in colleagues seeing/treating women or feminine people (especially young ones) at confer- ences as only one of two things: potential sexual partners or irrelevant. though sexual harassment perpetrated by heterosexual men against heterosexual women typically receives the most atten- tion, sexual harassment is also perpetrated by and against people in a variety of minoritized social locations. as just a few exam- ples (after all, anyone can harass or be harassed), some white women sexualize or exoticize women of color, some gay men sexually harass bisexual or other gay men, some cisgender lesbi- ans undermine trans women, and so on. indeed, because sexual harassment involves attempts to gain power through policing others’ gender, many individuals who themselves are suspected of violating gender norms access power by policing others, as when some gay men sexually harass heterosexual women. sexual harassment is different from consensual sexual interactions and flirtations that occur between adults. we acknowledge that consensual sexual interactions can include power differentials and enjoyable ways that people play with power. indeed, sexuality researchers are adults who are able to choose, consent to, and engage in sexual interactions with others, including colleagues. yet we cannot deny how power imbalances and precarious social positions make choice and consent murky at times. in the context of power imbalance, such as senior/junior colleagues and professor/student rela- tionships, consent is not always as simple as “doing what one wants” but may include concerns about consequences if one rejects advances from someone with more real or perceived power. some of us (and you!) are or have been editors, society officers, program committee chairs, members of hiring commit- tees, student advisors, clinicians, and/or respected or admired authorities. our actions carry all the weight of our positions of power, such that some people may reasonably fear negative repercussions should they wish to reject unwanted attention or address someone’s problematic behavior. recent publicized examples of sexual harassment in the media from bill cosby to harvey weinstein, bill o’reilly to roger ailes, jian ghomeshi to kevin spacey, recent examples of celebrities’ alleged sexual harassment or violence show that it is largely described as being committed by men and most often against women. it occurs in variable ways, including coercion, persistence in the face of repeated rejection, abuses of power, threats, and even physical incapacitation, physical violence, and rape. what has been astonishing to some, while long-known to others, is that ( ) the sexual harassment is an open secret, with many harassers known to numerous people, ( ) many people and levels of administration supported the harassers while silencing or undermining the victims, ( ) the women and other people who have gone public have been widely vilified and harassed, and ( ) the harassers have by and large experienced no consequences, and certainly almost no legal ones. indeed, as victims know that they are unlikely to be believed, going public is one of the least likely options. going public, including to judicial or official sources when deemed appropriate, often only feels available to those who occupy extreme positions of privilege or when sufficient numbers of victims come together to speak out against an alleged perpetrator, as with the cases involving dr. larry nassar or harvey weinstein, or with social movements such as #yesallwomen and #metoo. each of us who has co-authored the present guest editorial has experienced sexual harassment within our field; none of us have named the harassers publicly, though we have made other efforts. some of us have named our harassers in other ways (e.g., by reporting to our advisors, mentors, or programs) or spoken to the harassers directly (by explaining the situa- tion and asking for changes in behavior). in the majority of our experiences, however, people have relied on sharing informa- tion through informal “whisper networks” as a way to support or protect others. choosing to come forward means risking reprisal, disbelief, and further trauma. after already enduring the humiliation of sexual harassment, many are not in a position to make them- selves more psychologically vulnerable or further compromise their physical safety. in an academic context, we face the real fear that coming forward will compromise our careers. some of us, even as established academics, have feared personal per- secution and negative impact on our careers. this often kept us silent, in some cases for many years. for some, we did not ini- tially recognize certain behaviors as sexual harassment, despite ourselves being embedded in the research, education, and/or clinical practice related to sexual harassment and abuse. one of us was told directly by their harasser, a person with significant academic power over them, that they should never disclose the incidents in question to others in our field, with the understood unspoken message being that it would tarnish her reputation (not his). as is typical of rape culture, instead of the perpe- trator being subject to just consequences for their actions, the victim is blamed and further persecuted. when we do choose to come forward, the reception is rarely supportive, and often includes questioning that is either irrelevant or suggests culpa- bility. despite these challenges, some of us do come forward, archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – working for change to help and protect others, hoping that, by reporting, others might not have to suffer through what we did. by writing this guest editorial, and starting this conversation within our field, this is what we hope to do. sexual harassment in academic and research environments sexual harassment is a ubiquitous issue permeating our soci- ety, including academic cultures, as our experiences clearly indicate. yet, there are academic contexts within which sexual harassment is more or less likely to occur. some contexts are more public or regulated than others (e.g., a classroom vs. a professor’s office), although some of us have experienced frank public sexual harassment even in classroom settings. many researchers and professors see themselves as experts in top- ics—including sexual harassment—that go far beyond their actual area of expertise, knowledge, or lived experience. in our experiences, some sexuality academics can be particularly, if ironically, resistant to accepting scientific research related to sexual harassment and their complicity in sexual harassment being a problem in our field. conferences tend to provide spaces that, unlike universities, clinics, and institutes, often have no managers, human resource guidelines, or clearly stated sexual harassment policies (though more are developing these). many events mix the social with the professional and are designed for networking, encouraging junior academics to socialize with senior ones. the mixture of alcohol and more casual attire at conference social events may, for some, further blur the lines between social and professional contexts, further emboldening those who would cross bounda- ries. to be clear, this is the fault not of casual attire or alcohol, but of those who would or do use them as a pretext to cross boundaries and engage in sexual harassment. professional and academic listservs and email discussions are other spaces where sexual harassment may occur. even with adequate moderation, which is often a minimum that is not met, posts that frequently and ideologically question the legiti- macy of research about women and/or minorities undermine the insights this scholarship provides to sexuality research. it also attempts to undermine the researchers themselves who are often women and/or minoritized. it is gender-based, and sometimes an underappreciated form of sexual harassment. victims and targets utilize a number of strategies for dissuad- ing a harasser in a professional context. these include moving away to create distance, inviting someone else into a conversa- tion, making broad gestures so someone else’s hand must fall away from one’s body, and redirecting the conversation. people concerned about the potential for sexual harassment by a col- league may explicitly request meetings in public, ask to leave the door open during meetings, and find ways to avoid one-on- one meetings. these are all common tactics used to prevent or end an uncomfortable interaction; however, sexual harassers often ignore these cues. as sexuality researchers, we (should) know that communication is both verbal and nonverbal and that gender scripts should not drive interactions at the expense of some people’s autonomy. western culture does, however, teach men and masculine people to keep going at all costs in the face of “coy” femininity. social cues are typically quite easy for most people to discern and, when unclear, can be clarified such as by asking if a certain touch or statement was (un)welcome. verbal communications are usually the last resort, after all clear but ignored physical cues have been given. the gender breakdown resulting from generations of explicit and implicit gender discrimination means that senior individuals tend to be men, whereas junior people tend to be more mixed. and, in most academic spaces, people of color, working class individuals, first-generation scholars, sexual and gender minorities, and people with disabilities, among other locations, are present in low numbers, if at all, and the isola- tion can compound the probabilities of sexual harassment (via othering, exoticization, undermining, etc.) and its effects. like many majority group members, some majority academics may be loath to acknowledge or legitimize the voluminous evidence demonstrating that their positions of power accrue, in part, from discrimination and not only merit, contributing to a culture of downplaying social determinants of success, social location, and thus sexual harassment and its inequities. sexual harassment in sexuality research and professions how the “sex” in our fields can contribute to a culture of sexual harassment as discussed earlier, our field is not immune from the problem of sexual harassment and, we believe, may have certain features that make it ripe for a disproportionate amount of it. we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that some of the most well- known and/or earliest sex researchers have problematic histo- ries attached to them. these histories may have influenced some of the working styles present in our field today. for example, the sexual openness that characterized alfred kinsey and his team can be seen in both positive and challenging lights. kinsey’s biographers, using firsthand accounts and oral histories of staff members, described how the interview team spoke openly at work about their personal sex lives, that it was not unusual for the researchers to request personal “sex histories” of those seeking to work at the institute for sex research (as well as their spouses), and that kinsey asked his research team to keep records of their own personal sexual experiences (e.g., col- lins, ; gathorne-hardy, ; jones, ; pomeroy, ; winther, ). some of kinsey’s biographies also included accounts of sexual behavior occurring between members of the research team (and their spouses) and highlight how some archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – may have at times felt maneuvered into such sexual behaviors (gathorne-hardy, ; jones, ). we feel that the kin- sey team’s inclusion of reports about infant and child genital response provided by one or more adults is especially egregious and concerning, for its time and ours. kinsey is the most written-about, but other leaders in our field engaged in practices we now see as problematic, includ- ing some that were seen as problematic in their time as well. for example, a senior colleague shared that a well-known psy- chologist (now deceased) would not allow otherwise-enrolled women students to take his classes. other senior colleagues have recalled (some positively, others negatively) nude massage and sexual behavior occurring openly at sex research, educa- tion, and therapy conferences just a few decades ago, and (only negatively) a milieu that was rife with explicit, unwanted sexual attention. some of our mentors have shared stories about their and others’ earlier efforts, within our professional societies, to address sexual harassment. these important parts of the history of sex research cannot and should not be ignored because, in our view, they are still very present. our field would do well to grapple with the dif- ficult aspects of researchers’ and clinicians’ behavior, includ- ing—maybe especially—those who are sometimes put on ped- estals. put simply, we wish to address people as whole, complex human beings. we are comfortable admiring some aspects of sex researchers’ work while finding other aspects unethical or problematic. we are also comfortable examining our own styles of teaching, researching, practicing, and/or mentoring as we collectively create the kinds of professional communities we hope will engage new generations of bright, creative scholars. our field should consider whether or how some of our sex research or clinician “forefathers” used their power to gain sexual access and the ways this has influenced present behav- ior in our field. to what extent have some people used the sex researcher card to gain sexual access, whether to students, col- leagues, or even research subjects? let’s continually consider who we are and what standards make sense for our offices and laboratories. for example, one of us had the experience of a faculty member requiring students to disclose their personal sexual behavior. we also know of at least two instances where participants in contemporary sexual attitude reassessment (sar) workshops were asked to share details about their own personal sexual behaviors; one of us experienced this firsthand. how do we/you feel about this? decades ago, sars and even some university-based sexuality classes were often conducted in the nude. sar participants were sometimes invited to touch, smell, and/or taste one another. irvine ( ) chronicled this history as well as the pushback, led largely by women sexolo- gists, against such required experiences, in her book disorders of desire: sexuality and gender in modern american sexology. working in sex research or in sexuality professions (therapy, counseling, education, etc.) does indeed require some level of sexual openness and comfort. sexual liberalism might inhere more openness to sexuality, but it also can implicitly inhere an expectation of sexual expression. for example, a predominant assumption within sexuality research is that sexuality is natural, good, and/or desirable, what many asexual people have identi- fied as “the sexual assumption.” in this way, the belief that sexuality is natural can sometimes translate into the belief that people should be open to any sexual opportunity (e.g., if you are sexually liberated, you’d be sexual with me!). but our pro- fessional sexuality spaces are about our work, not our personal sexualities. in the same way, we would not expect that people who study aggression or treat people with aggression problems should be open to anyone’s expression of aggression, the expec- tation that any sexuality researcher or professional should be generally open to sexual advances at a sexuality-related confer- ence is misguided and naïve. as we noted above, this belief, that a sexuality researcher must be open to sexual advances and opportunities, may have been facilitated by the precedents set by earlier workplace conduct of certain celebrated sexuality researchers. experiences of sexual harassment in our field too often, sexual harassment is seen only in its most egregious enactments, like those that involve sexual assault or threats. but sexual harassment takes many forms. indeed, some of the forms people might misinterpret as “minor” can be uniquely devastat- ing, because victims and targets end up questioning their own experiences and thereby access or receive less social support to work through them. as noted earlier, individuals within our field have long shared with one another, through informal net- works, their experiences of sexual harassment. this includes information passed down from faculty to graduate students, as when we warn our trainees and new colleagues to be on guard for harassment from particular senior members (nearly all of the examples of which have been, for us, men). it also includes the other direction, from trainees and early career people (largely women) communicating harassment experiences to more established people (mostly women) who may be recognized as feminists in the field. for example, at one recent confer- ence, eight students and early career sexuality researchers came individually to one of us to share their experiences of sexual harassment at that conference. it can include horizontal shar- ing among groups of women, as when one of us was part of a circle of five women (then all graduate students) who were all sexually propositioned by the same heterosexual senior man in a professional context, while this man never discussed any profes- sional or research issues with the women. sometimes graduate students warn others of certain faculty known to sexually harass students, along with advice about how to best manage and/or endure the sexual harassment. sometimes the harassment itself takes place within social set- tings like cocktail hour, where discussions about one’s research are mere covers for sexual intentions. one of us, as a graduate archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – student, watched as senior men denigrated a senior woman’s appearance for looking too much like a “grandmother,” and then was met with stares upon asking what was bad about looking like a grandmother anyway. established faculty, women like us or otherwise, are also not immune to the experiences of sexual harassment within our fields. some mid-career women have reported experiencing harassing comments and behavior when they were considered for senior and leadership positions within their societies, such as reference to rising the ranks more on the basis of their “sex appeal” than merit. informal networks or “rumor mills” are helpful and impor- tant, but they exist when people believe they cannot, without repercussion, directly target sexual harassment itself or its perpetrators. this is rational: people often feel (or know) that coming forward with accusations of sexual harassment can negatively impact their career development in a culture where victims are rarely believed (at best) and consequences to harass- ers are minimized (if even present). in this guest editorial, we are taking the opportunity to talk more openly about the prob- lem so we can create more equitable professional opportunities within our field, and to eliminate sexual harassment—not just mitigate it. each of us who co-authored this guest editorial has experi- enced sexual harassment from within our field. although there are many commonalities, experiences of sexual harassment are as diverse as the people who experience them. most of the people we know who are not white, heterosexual men have experienced sexual harassment within our field; our students, our students’ friends, our friends and colleagues are examples of those who have shared their own stories or whose sexual harassment we witnessed firsthand. these experiences include: a senior heterosexual man slowly and pointedly looking an early career woman up and down, settling on her breasts; a senior sexual minority man in a position of power kissing an early career sexual minority man without any relational or sexual context; senior heterosexual men giving extensive attention (including long and intimate touches) to conventionally attrac- tive female students and ignoring men and other women; a senior heterosexual man kissing his graduate student, without her interest or consent; a senior sexual minority man offering to include an early career sexual minority man on grants and publications in exchange for oral sex; a senior white hetero- sexual man cornering a female graduate student in an elevator and kissing her without consent; a senior heterosexual man asking a pregnant researcher how her orgasms changed with pregnancy; and multiple examples of senior men making sexu- ally inappropriate comments to junior career women in public during the q&a following their talks or in semi-public at poster sessions. indeed, most of these examples are so common that we could cite multiple instantiations of them. the reputations that senior researchers or other profes- sionals acquire from being known sexual harassers can also have further consequences for junior scholars or trainees and for science more generally. these reputations can extend from the harasser to their professional networks, tarnishing the reputations of the harassers’ collaborators and trainees. for example, some will make assumptions that their students exchange sexual favors for career advancement, given that their advisor is known to harass students for just this. this can lead to others targeting these students for more harassment, including debasement of their achievements on the basis of these assumptions. reputations can extend to collaborators and trainees in other ways, too, for example, suggesting that these individuals don’t have a problem with (sometimes egre- gious) sexual harassment. as sexuality researchers, educators, and clinicians, we can also experience sexual harassment in our public engagements, including with the media. one unfortunately common experi- ence among sexuality researchers is being sexualized by the media, portraying sexuality researchers as “sexy scientists” who embody sexual stereotypes. for example, one of us was described in a book as wearing unprofessional and sexually suggestive clothing in a professional context as a (fabricated) device to entice readers, thereby perpetuating the stereotype. upon confrontation with this false portrayal, the journalist dis- missed the concerns and suggested the portrayal should be flat- tering. another of us had a male journalist express deep sexual attractions to a student in our lab as he was interviewing her for an article about the lab research, and she was worried how push- ing back would affect the public discussion of her supervisor’s lab. still another of us had a journalist make inferences about our sex life, in print, based on an “off the record” conversa- tion when the interview was over. and, though some sexuality researchers and professionals enjoy being sexy in their style of dress or presentation, some do not, and others are shamed for not meeting the fabricated norm of the “sexy scientist” or “sexy therapist,” a norm that can be limited to women in our field. depending on the context, sexuality researchers may also be desexualized: another of us had the experience of having her breast cleavage digitally erased in a university publication. shortly thereafter, illustrating the tendency to sexually sensa- tionalize sexuality researchers’ and professionals’ appearance, she saw a magazine portrayal of her in which the magazine illustrator had greatly enhanced the size of her breasts. that both publications focused, albeit in differing ways, on altering the breasts of a woman scientist is striking. consequences of sexual harassment for our field sexual harassment has serious adverse consequences for us as sexuality researchers and professionals, and for the larger field. in addition to compromising mental and physical health and well-being, sexual harassment minimizes the contribu- tions of people who are already marginalized within the field by sending the message that they are only or primarily valued for their sexuality rather than their expertise or insights or archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – are devalued because of their sexuality. sexual harassment isolates people, shames people, and sometimes makes them question their academic worth. we are individuals who, at times, have questioned our worth as sexuality researchers, educators, or clinicians because of the sexual harassment we have experienced. each of us has heard from multiple indi- viduals—students, women, sexual minority men, trans indi- viduals, nonbinary individuals, and/or people of color—who told us they stopped coming to sexuality research conferences because of the sexual harassment they experienced. this is a problem for us as faculty mentors, it’s a problem for those of us who are responsible to organizations we serve, and it’s a problem for any of us who wishes to engage and include strong scientists and talented colleagues in the important work we do. sexual harassment needs to stop. ending sexual harassment in our field immediate steps we can take to end sexual harassment in our field fortunately, there are steps we can take to end sexual harass- ment. the first step is obvious: sexual harassers need to cease their sexual harassment. too often, ending sexual harassment is seen as incumbent upon victims, which means additional labor put upon those already experiencing victimization. but harassers likely make up a heterogeneous group. many who sexually harass do so with the conscious intent of causing harm and/or discomfort. these people are unlikely to stop on their own without external pressure, changes in social norms, or consequences. some people who sexually harass likely do so while ignoring their own doubts about or discomfort with their own behavior, because social scripts (or friends or colleagues) encourage sexually harassing behavior. some people who are committing acts of sexual harassment may therefore stop with more education and explicit naming of sexual harassment in all its forms as a social problem that our professional community seeks to end. some people may actually be ignorant of the ways their behavior is sexually har- assing. here, the impact of sexual harassment is present even if the intent is not. again, education and clear articulation of community norms will be useful, so long as community members center the importance on ending sexual harassment and its harms, and not the feelings of those who (even inad- vertently) enact it. a second step is to transform existing, at-risk spaces into ones where sexual harassment is not tolerated. too often, faculty receive little training in pedagogical strategies or best practices in management, even though many faculty man- age lab of research assistants who are often students. thus, faculty may approach their interactions with their students in much the same way their mentor(s) approached working with them. in many cases, this works well. but in others (as noted earlier), behaviors may be rooted in problematic historical approaches. there are some aspects of history that don’t need to be repeated or reproduced; taking stock of one’s leadership style and lab culture is key to moving forward in a positive way. we believe that there are opportunities for posi- tive change in our field’s structures, including professional societies and journals. a third step is to create new, safe(r) spaces that open up room for discussion of how to transform more recalcitrant spaces. most of us have been a part of the feminist sexuality research receptions one of us has occasionally organized at the inter- national academy of sex research (iasr) annual meetings, and this has been one way to catalyze those of us dedicated to making sexuality research a space where we recognize and address issues around equity. others, including ellen laan and leonore tiefer, have held gatherings for feminist sexu- ality researchers at iasr over recent past decades. feminist spaces, though a clear improvement on anti-feminist, feminist- unfriendly, or even feminist-neutral spaces, are not enough in themselves since they often center questions of women and gender over intersectionality and issues of class, race/ethnic- ity, sexuality, gender identity, nationality, religiosity, and more. given that women of color, trans individuals, gender noncon- forming people, and others are especially likely to be targets of sexual harassment, we need spaces that are committed to issues of power and equity even within feminism. we need the feminist spaces, and mainstream sexuality research and profes- sional spaces, to be committed to speaking openly and hearing about sexual harassment and its complexities. we also see these spaces, and anti-harassment efforts, as part of broader efforts to create professional communities that attend to feminist values and inclusive principles—for example, supporting childcare sponsorships at conferences (calisi and a working group of mothers in science, ), letting students bring their infants/ children to class, ensuring access to education and conference spaces for people of a range of disabilities, and making pronoun stickers available for conference badges. what would education, cultural change, and consequences around reducing or eliminating sexual harassment in sexual- ity research and professions look like? below we provide a (non-exhaustive) list of recommendations: . sexual harassers need to cease their sexual harassment. just stop it. this should go without saying, but perpetra- tors are often not told that they can and should stop. what does this mean in practice? people who feel the desire to stroke a student’s lower back should refrain from doing so. comments that sexualize non-partner colleagues’ or students’ bodies (e.g., “all the female graduate students in my department have huge breasts”) or link appearance and work (e.g., “push your boobs up so they’ll fund your research”) need to stop. each of these are real examples archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – from our own experiences. we understand that many positive, consensual romantic relationships and/or sex- ual interactions have started at conferences, at work, or even between professors and graduate students. yet, as sexuality researchers, we also know that there are better, more creative, non-harassing ways to convey romantic or sexual interest than the sexual harassment people so often describe. . comments or “jokes” that a person should have sex with someone else to access funding or professional oppor- tunities need to stop. we know of instances where male mentors and colleagues encouraged women and sexual minority men to engage in sexual behaviors or endure sex- ual harassment with people who held the key to funding or professional opportunities. even if intended as a joke, no one should be put in the position of judging whether they might need to engage in unwanted sexual behavior to further their career. . create conversations about codes of conduct and shared values. while it is important to address the kinds of behavior that are unacceptable, it is also important to speak to the kinds of academic and professional envi- ronments we wish to create: for example, environments that are intellectually invigorating, civil, respectful, inclusive, and supportive (see clancy, ). some lab or organizations may choose to articulate these in published codes of conduct, or even in aspirational statements, so as to communicate shared values within a group. . reinforce that sexuality research and professions are not about individual colleagues’ sexualities. individu- als may sometimes bring their own sexualities into their own work directly or through lived experiences, but this should not be assumed nor should students or professionals be asked to articulate how their personal sexuality relates to their work, as some of us have expe- rienced or seen happen to others. communications oth- erwise—including pressure to be “sexually liberal” and thereby receptive to sexual advances—needs to cease. pressuring colleagues or students to be “sexually open” or not “prude,” comments we have repeatedly heard and some of our mentors described as occurring when they were trainees, is a tactic used to coerce sexual access. openly discussing sexuality can be done without mak- ing unconsented-to self-referential comments in lab, research groups, listservs, and at conferences. using solely colloquial terms—e.g., “jerking off” versus “masturbation”—may also personalize sexuality when done for no professional reason. this is not a call to respectability politics (always a concern for our field) nor is it to preclude people from discussing their own sexuality when others are interested and the circum- stances are appropriate. we simply suggest that we all (again, including ourselves in this) be mindful of our language and intentions. . sexuality research and professional organizations need to develop sexual harassment policies that include clear guidelines, reporting policies, and articulated conse- quences. as sexual harassment disproportionately affects women, people of color, and/or sexual and gender minor- ity individuals (see national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, ), we believe these individuals should make up a majority of the commit- tees that are charged with drafting such policies or other ways of addressing harassment. these policies should apply to face-to-face interactions as well as online com- munications, should be voted on and adopted into societal bylaws, procedures, and records, and must be fully acces- sible to members (e.g., on society websites, in conference programs and apps). and, these policies need to be fol- lowed; continued inaction will only empower harassers. it may seem paternalizing, as adults, to have “professional behavior” explained to us, but the sexual harassment many sexuality researchers and professionals perpetrate starkly illustrates just how needed this guidance is. indeed it is paternalizing to be told that these policies are not needed, when our and many others’ experiences show that they clearly are. that said, we also know that targets rarely report, and for many reasons; thus, we don’t see policies as the “answer” to sexual harassment, but just as one piece that should be in place as we change the culture of our academic and professional communities. . anonymous questionnaires and conference evaluations should include questions about experiences of sexual harassment as well as intersecting issues such as experi- ences of racism or ableism. conferences routinely include some sort of evaluative materials, and it is important that these address ongoing problems beyond merely technical issues. societies might also evaluate other aspects of their work such as listserv climate in regard to sexual harass- ment or sexist comments or behavior, and should share aggregated, anonymized findings to members through usual communication channels (e.g., listserv postings, annual business meeting). it is critical, however, that this is done with expertise, recognizing that some individuals are more empowered to share, even anonymously, than others. . expand opportunities for professional development. sexual harassment may be more likely to occur in work- places that are rife with other uncivil or disrespectful behaviors. thus, universities, clinics, and professional societies might consider making trainings or workshops available on civility promotion programs, de-escalation, or on creating inclusive, supportive workplaces (clancy, ). archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – . as a matter of routine, share organizational policies and reporting mechanisms. professors should include sexual harassment, assault, and/or misconduct policies and reporting mechanisms on their syllabus; in the u.s., some guidance may be offered from campus title ix offices or other university policies. within research or clinical groups, clarify to students, lab managers, post- doctoral fellows, colleagues, and anyone else what the sexual harassment policy at your organization is, how you support it, and what people should do should when policies are violated. at the annual meeting of the american association of sexuality educators, counse- lors, and therapists, some of us led an effort to include such guidelines in the printed program and on our app; these were also highlighted in the letter from the confer- ence co-chairs. . recognize that sexual harassment can happen anywhere; at social events, during poster sessions, in coffee breaks, on listservs, in private meetings, during meals, etc. often, the most common advice is to avoid private or hotel room meetings; however, some important events can take place in these spaces. we do discourage asking for or going to private meetings separate from public spaces, as these spaces could be particularly difficult to navigate if sexual harassment does happen, but the trope of private spaces being assault-prone seems to prevent people from realiz- ing that sexual harassment is still happening during public events. so, though physical location can affect the ability to mitigate sexual harassment, we want to remind our col- leagues that the behavior is the problem, not the location. . name sexual harassment. if you see a colleague engag- ing in inappropriate or “creepy” behavior, name what the person is doing in the moment or afterward. the harasser is usually subjecting another person to the sexual har- assment because that person holds (or is seen to hold) less power than the harasser or the harasser would like to undermine the power the target does hold. intervening in this dynamic is important to the target (communicating that they and the behavior are being seen), to bystanders (communicating that harassment will not be tolerated), and to the harasser (putting them on notice). although we use strong language in describing these processes, we are not actually calling for people to shout “that’s sexual harassment!” there are many ways to intervene, some of them educational, some of them humorous, but all of them critical to ending sexual harassment. if you see someone comment on a young woman’s appearance, you can say “hey, i think we should hear about her research.” if you see someone touching someone else in inappropri- ate ways, you can say “wow, handsy today? are we just stroking strangers now?” if you hear someone exoticiz- ing a person of color, you can interrupt with “why are you bringing up racist stereotypes? let’s talk about their work.” if you see a student uncomfortably reciprocating sexual flirtations you can politely ask the student “do you want to come walk with me to speak to that other researcher about their work?” the person can always say no but our experience tells us that our guts are often cor- rect and people are often grateful for a nonconfrontational way to escape these kinds of situations. you have our permission to make fun of these examples, certainly, but only if you come up with your own. . model appropriate behavior. do not engage in sexual- izing, lewd, and/or sexist comments or acts. this should, but clearly does not, go without saying, as does our repeated clarification that sexual harassment is not the same as any attempt at initiating sexual interactions, talk- ing about sex research or therapy, etc., or humor (which is only humor, remember, when all parties find it so). . educate yourself about enthusiastic consent and put this into practice. again, we acknowledge and appre- ciate that many meaningful friendships, romantic rela- tionships, and sexual connections were first formed in academic spaces. people can flirt and assess others’ romantic or sexual interest; indeed, assessing others’ interest is a major aspect of flirting. but do pay attention to social cues and—if you’re not sure your comments or behaviors are welcome—ask or step back. . remember: sexist acts are not just sexualizing but reduce people to their gender or sex. this can include, for exam- ple, only asking new mothers about their babies, pregnan- cies, or breastfeeding, in a professional context, to the exclusion of their work or without consent. for exam- ple, while some may want to connect with others around breastfeeding, many people want to discuss it with those who have themselves breastfed. several of us have had our breastfeeding pointed out at conferences (a few of us have even had this happen from the podium speaker), or had men at conferences who were mere acquaintances ask if we were pumping milk while away from our babies. one male acquaintance, unforgettably, used hand gestures to illustrate. these conversations may be well-intentioned attempts to connect about parenting but—in isolation, out of context, and by acquaintances rather than friends or colleagues—can have the effect of reducing parents (almost always mothers) to their sex or breastfeeding sta- tus. many people re-entering work spaces after having a baby are eager to talk about their work, particularly if they are worried about being perceived as being on a “mommy track” (i.e., shifting their life priorities away from work), and this is mostly targeted at mothers. please ask us about our work and follow our lead in whether we want to discuss pregnancy, parenting, or breastfeeding. . take responsibility for your actions. when someone tells you that your behavior toward them is inappropri- ate, understand that this is their experience, and believe archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – them. do not offer excuses. then, apologize and move on to a professional, work-related topic. if you need clarifi- cation, help defuse the moment by apologizing now and asking for details later. if someone contacts you about your behavior, be thankful they both care enough to act and imagine that you have the potential to change, and apologize regardless of your original intention. if you see yourself in any of the examples we’ve provided above, contact someone to apologize. . stop participating in the culture of sexual harassment. some of us have perpetuated the problem by telling stu- dents, “he’s creepy but if you can put up with his behav- ior, it’s an interesting class.” and similarly we have nodded our heads in understanding when colleagues or mentors have told us about someone who touched others inappropriately, “but otherwise does excellent research.” we need to take these instances seriously. if we’ve had students complain about a colleague’s sexual comments or advances, let’s take it upon ourselves to tell that col- league that we would love to continue recommending their class or training opportunities, but we need some assurance about their ability to create and maintain a professional climate. if someone advises us on how to tolerate a colleague or mentor’s harassing behavior, let’s address that person’s behavior rather than feel like we have to put up with harassment. if someone harasses us or someone we know, let’s ask the person to stop. harass- ment has continued because, obviously, people harass, but also because too many of us (again, even most of us here) have tolerated it, figured out how to adapt to it, and taught others how to adapt. for many of us, this is how we’ve become accustomed to navigating and, in some ways, sur- viving professional spaces. these same skills, however, also inadvertently serve to perpetuate a culture of shame and secrecy, and embolden sexual harassers. of course, the main responsibility is with those who harass, but we can help by ending a culture that supports or tolerates harassment. longer‑term approaches to ending sexual harassment in our field ending sexual harassment within our professional spheres is not a trivial task. we included suggestions above that could be actioned “immediately,” however, some will take work and time to implement. sexuality-related professional societies should allocate funding to people committed to ending sexual harassment to conduct research, develop and then evaluate best practices for policies, and adapt these for organizations, societies, and research groups. researchers might investigate the development of new methods that would help us all better understand issues related to sexual harassment, whether in our own workplaces or other spaces. longer-term approaches should center marginalized groups in their efforts, including people of color, gender and sexual minorities, women of various social locations, and/or students. this means centering these groups in terms of perspectives, representation, and power to enact change toward ending sexual harassment (without asking for unpaid labor). it also means attending to issues, outside of but also related to sexual harassment, about racism, white supremacy, ageism, ableism, transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, misogyny, femmephobia, settler colonialism, postcolonialism, and many more. main- stream sexuality research, education, and therapy are fields with overrepresentation of white majority individuals. look, for example, at the board members, conference co-chairs, and journal editors connected to most u.s. and canadian socie- ties—including some of us and the organizations we belong to or lead. leaders of sexuality research and professional organizations need to grapple with this and develop ways to remediate it. this includes building deeper, meaningful, and mutually beneficial connections with sexuality research and professional communities of color that already exist, like the women of color sexual health network and the associa- tion of black sexologists and clinicians. it also includes pro- viding structured opportunities—like questionnaires and/or interviews—to understand minoritized experiences within our field. we cannot draw more people into an inhospitable place, and it is imperative on us all to make clear what it is about sexuality research and professions that are driving minoritized people out and to work toward spaces that are meaningful for potential and actual sexuality researchers. professional organi- zations might also consider surveying those who do not renew their memberships, or who stop attending conferences, to bet- ter understand individuals reasons for doing so, as companies and universities sometimes do with exit interviews. as sexual harassment tends to be marked by an abuse of real or perceived power as well as longstanding power differentials, another long-term approach might be to create opportunities for more people to hold positions of power. we might consider more frequently rotating directors, deans, department chairs, membership on grant review committees, and journal editor- ships, as most societies already do with term limits for officers and board members. ideally, this would lead to more diverse perspectives being reflected, as well as more people having the ability to demonstrate national and/or international recog- nition, which is often key to tenure and promotion decisions. by proactively making power temporary, we might cultivate a sense of more people with power rather than power being primarily placed in a few individuals and potentially “forever.” this could have a positive ripple effect with sexual harassment issues. a strategy recommended in the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine consensus study report on the sexual harassment of women has to do with diffusing power structures (national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, ). in practice, this may involve archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – utilizing mentoring networks rather than individual mentors, group rather than individual advising, and pooled funds in a department for graduate students rather than funds coming from relationships between principal investigators and their students. how the “sex” in sexuality research and professions can also contribute to a culture of ending sexual harassment we cannot list every instance of sexual harassment or uncom- fortable sexual attention that we, or people we know, have experienced, much less experiences of people we haven’t heard from. we know that our failure to include or know about the sexual harassment experiences of our colleagues and students of social locations we don’t share might lead to further feelings of isolation and frustration. we hope our sincerity and seriousness in working and being resources with people of any social location who have experienced sexual harassment comes through regardless. as we move to open this conversation, we include ourselves in that process and target group, as a work-in-progress toward ending sexual harassment. we conclude by noting that, though the “sex” in our fields contributes to the particular challenges of sexual harassment in our field, the “sex” in our fields also offers us uniquely promis- ing opportunities for change. we already discuss sexuality and are comfortable doing so—this is a strength to be capitalized upon. we already navigate personal-professional boundaries around sex by dint of existing in larger culture as sexuality researchers, educators, and clinicians. many of us are clini- cians and have the skills available to guide on best practices for professional conduct in regard to sexuality. many of us are researchers and can contribute to evaluating best practices, as well as developing new and relevant methodologies and measures for research related to sexual harassment broadly as well as specifically in our field. we are committed to authen- tic, positive, engaged, and meaningful sexualities. we can use our unique and valuable strengths as sexuality researchers and professionals to work toward ending sexual harassment in our field; please join us. acknowledgements authorship listings are always a challenge, as ordi- nal listings don’t do justice to how papers unfold—who comes up with initial idea(s), who has time or energy to write at a given moment, how the ideas evolve as they bounce among co-authors, and all the emails, outlines, conversations, and edits that move a paper forward. we benefit- ted from a collaborative process. references calisi, r. m., & a working group of mothers in science. ( ). how to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, ( ), – . clancy, k. ( ). ok, so a few first thoughts on how to handle this. lead- ership has to give a shit and want to try something different than policy. prof societies can fund conflict engagement & bystander intervention trainings. prof societies can run workshops on creating lab codes of conduct. retrieved from https ://twitt er.com/katec lancy /statu s/ . accessed dec . clancy, k. b. h., nelson, r. g., rutherford, j. n., & hinde, k. ( ). survey of academic field experiences (safe): trainees report of harassment and assault. plos one, ( ), e . https ://doi. org/ . /journ al.pone. . collins, d. c. ( ). an oral history interview with dorothy craig col- lins/interviewer: james h. jones [ - ]. bloomington: center for documentary research and practice, indiana university. dzau, v. j., & johnson, p. a. ( ). ending sexual harassment in academic medicine. new england journal of medicine, , – . https ://doi.org/ . /nejmp . flaherty, c. ( ). sociology facing harassment ‘rumors’ defers award. inside higher ed. retrieved from https ://www.insid ehigh ered.com/quick takes / / / /socio logis t-facin g-haras sment -rumor s-defer s-award . accessed dec . gathorne-hardy, j. ( ). sex the measure of all things: a life of alfred c. kinsey. bloomington: indiana university press. grollman, e. ( ). a call for sociology’s #metoo mo(ve)ment. retrieved from https ://egrol lman.com/ / / /metoo -socio logy/. accessed dec . irvine, j. m. ( ). disorders of desire: sexuality and gender in mod- ern american sexology. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. jones, j. h. ( ). alfred kinsey: a public/private life. new york: w.w. norton & company. mondon, m. ( ). penn professor resigns following allegations of inappropriate relationships with students. philly voice. retrieved from https ://www.phill yvoic e.com/penn-profe ssor-kurzb an- resig ns-sexua l-misco nduct -alleg ation s-relat ionsh ips-stude nts/. accessed dec . national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine. ( ). sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. washington, dc: the national academies press. https ://doi.org/ . / . pomeroy, w. b. ( ). dr. kinsey and the institute for sex research. new haven, ct: yale university press. schulz, v. ( ). reconceptualizing sexual harassment, again. yale law journal forum, , – . winther, m. g. ( ). an oral history interview with mary g. winther/ interviewer: james h. jones [ - ]. bloomington: center for documentary research and practice, indiana university. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://twitter.com/kateclancy/status/ https://twitter.com/kateclancy/status/ https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://doi.org/ . /nejmp https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /sociologist-facing-harassment-rumors-defers-award https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /sociologist-facing-harassment-rumors-defers-award https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /sociologist-facing-harassment-rumors-defers-award https://egrollman.com/ / / /metoo-sociology/ https://egrollman.com/ / / /metoo-sociology/ https://www.phillyvoice.com/penn-professor-kurzban-resigns-sexual-misconduct-allegations-relationships-students/ https://www.phillyvoice.com/penn-professor-kurzban-resigns-sexual-misconduct-allegations-relationships-students/ https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / 	sexual harassment in the field of sexuality research 	introduction 	sexual harassment in context 	what sexual harassment is and is not 	recent publicized examples of sexual harassment in the media 	sexual harassment in academic and research environments 	sexual harassment in sexuality research and professions 	how the “sex” in our fields can contribute to a culture of sexual harassment 	experiences of sexual harassment in our field 	consequences of sexual harassment for our field 	ending sexual harassment in our field 	immediate steps we can take to end sexual harassment in our field 	longer-term approaches to ending sexual harassment in our field 	how the “sex” in sexuality research and professions can also contribute to a culture of ending sexual harassment 	acknowledgements 	references journal of mason graduate research volume number year © author issn: - pages: - assault and accusation without agents: verb voice in media narratives of campus sexual assault rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez george mason university previous studies of sexual assault have analyzed the connection between the narrative of events surrounding sexual assault allegations and the agency of the narrative’s characters, especially the assailant and the accuser. to contribute to this growing literature, we conducted a mixed methods word-level content analysis, testing whether the voice of verbs associated with the actions of the assailant and the accuser indicated an absence of agency. this study found that verbs associated with assailants were primarily written in passive voice and verbs associated with accusers were primarily written in active voice in both campus and non-campus sexual assault news reports. implications for the research and practice of mass media reporting of sexual assault are discussed. keywords: agency, sexual assault, grammar, mixed methods introduction news reports of sexual assault cases are frequently accused of engaging in victim blaming—assigning more responsibility for the assault to the victim than to the assailant. victim blaming is visible at the macro level of news stories, such as in the construction of the narrative and the representation of the characters, or agents, in that narrative (barnett, , ; worthington, ; a, b). perhaps more subtly, victim blaming also appears at the micro level of a news story, in the choice of words and grammar of the sentences comprising the story. a common micro device associated with victim blaming is the use of passive voice when describing the assault. when someone writes that “a victim was attacked,” readers disassociate the assailant with the action and will even hold the subject of the phrase—a victim—responsible rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez for the action—attacked (bohner, ; henley, miller & beazley, ). although victim blame is generally accepted as a common rape myth—a prevailing but false belief associated with rape causes and factors—the appearance of victim blame changes when applied to news stories about campus sexual assaults. campus sexual assaults—assaults that occurred on a college campus, almost exclusively involving students enrolled at the college—have become a focus of national concern in the united states in recent years. politicians have formally addressed the campus sexual assault as a problem that requires new policy solutions (the white house, ; mccaskill, ). not only have campus sexual assault trials gained national media coverage, but criticism of how news reporters cover these trials has also gained national attention (beck, ; hargis, ; henneberger, ; lachance, ). in a particularly controversial news report of a campus sexual assault, rolling stone published the story “a rape on campus” which was retracted within months and led to lawsuits against rolling stone (haag, ; sisario, ). to better understand the news reporting of campus sexual assault, a study of campus sexual assault stories in the washington post found that most news stories diminished or dismissed the agency of both victims of assault and assailants (lawrence, stabile & fernandez, ). that is, when referring to the actions—or even the ability to act—of the primary actors in the story, most media narratives failed to account for the assailant’s agency in the action of the assault or the victim’s agency in reporting the assault or accusing the assailant. for this study, we extend the work of the study to determine whether the use of verb voice in the news reporting of sexual assault and campus sexual assault ascribes agency to the assailant or the victim when referring to actions associated with either the assault or the accusation. furthermore, we analyze whether the frequency of active or passive voice use in news reports of sexual assault changed before or after the publication of the rolling stone article “a rape on campus,” which highlighted and politicized campus sexual assault and the way it is reported. finally, we offer recommendations for future research in the area, including other avenues of research that might help illuminate how media narratives of sexual assault and campus sexual assault are currently constructed. literature review national response to campus sexual assault assault and accusation without agents in the last several years, campus sexual assault has become the focus of increased government and media attention in the united states. with the “dear colleague” letter of , the u.s. department of education’s office for civil rights (ocr) notified all institutions subject to title ix, including school districts, colleges, and universities, that ocr would consider the sexual harassment of students, including acts of sexual violence, a form of sex discrimination prohibited by title ix of the civil rights act of (us department of education). in september , the obama administration formed the “task force to protect students from sexual assault.” in , the campus accountability and safety act, championed by senator mccaskill (d-mo) was passed. also in , the association of american universities (auu) conducted a survey of campuses, which collected , responses and concluded that “more than percent of female undergraduates at an array of prominent universities said this year they were victims of sexual assault and misconduct” (anderson & svrluga, ). these initiatives and activities demonstrate a growing public awareness of the problem of campus sexual assault and a demand for greater accountability on the part of universities in preventing sexual assault crimes. in addition to the increased focus from the highest levels of the federal government, high- profile sexual assault cases at harvard, columbia, princeton, the naval academy, and james madison university brought renewed attention to the institutional responses of universities in cases of sexual assault. recent high-profile cases, such as brock turner’s conviction and subsequently lenient criminal sentence for the assault he committed at stanford university (meixler, ), have highlighted not only how universities respond to sexual assault allegations but also how the judicial system can fail to adequately respond to cases of campus sexual assault. while many argue that universities and judicial systems do not do enough to prevent and deter campus sexual assault, others have claimed that universities are ill-equipped to handle sexual assault. in her article, “the college rape overcorrection,” emily yoffe argues that the methodologies used to compile commonly used statistics are flawed and require more attention. yoffe also argues that the foundational studies that are often used to characterize perpetrators are methodologically flawed and give an exaggerated impression of perpetrators. this exaggeration leads universities to overreact, by decreasing evidentiary standards and adjudicating cases in ways that violate the rights of the accused and do not address the needs of rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez the accuser. similarly, in an editorial in the washington post, george will suggested that the problem was exaggerated (will, ). media narratives of sexual assault media attention to high-profile sexual assault cases, particularly with scandals involving universities, such as the duke lacrosse case, is not new; reporting of campus sexual assault cases has been previously studied, particularly in communication and feminist studies. barnett ( ) and worthington ( ; a, b) found that media narratives of campus sexual assault describe university administrators as covering up incidences of sexual assault to protect the reputation of their campuses. worthington ( ; b) also shows that the universities’ mishandling of cases and the inadequate punishment of male perpetrators are common themes in media reporting. research has been conducted on the role that fraternities and athletic teams play in the perpetuation of rape culture (krakauer, ; sanday, ) and on the role that the race of the perpetrator plays in sexual assault narratives (patton & snyder-yuly, ). several studies trace the narratives of sexual assault that are prevalent in media coverage. barnett ( ) shows that news reports portray women as innocent and victimized or as wanton and deserving, while men are portrayed as sex fiends. in addition, barnett ( ) finds that news accounts of rape are often selective and superficial, which adds to the confusion surrounding the terminology used to cover rape stories, for example, when reporters use terms for lovemaking to describe assaults (barnett, , p. ). worthington ( ) describes some of the constraints investigative reporters face when reporting on campus sexual assault stories; for example, a college’s litigious reputation might impact how the story is represented (p. ). however, worthington ( a, b) states that reporters can meet the requirements for progressive journalistic reporting of gender violence by applying four criteria that emerge from critical feminist literature: a) the story selection reflects the types of crimes that occur, especially an emphasis on acquaintance rape, which is more prevalent than stranger rape; b) the narrative avoids stereotypes that either blame the victim or mitigate suspect responsibility; c) more attention is given to the role of social structures in causing and normalizing gender violence; d) and the perspectives of victims and advocates are more fully incorporated. building on this literature of media narratives in sexual assault and with the goal of informing campus sexual assault policy, lawrence et al. ( ) conducted a narrative analysis of assault and accusation without agents two years of sexual assault reporting within the washington post. lawrence et al. compiled articles focused on sexual assault and analyzed the rhetorical narratives of campus sexual assault stories. they found that these stories consistently de-emphasized the agency of both the assailant and the accuser in the sexual assault, while emphasizing the agency of the university as bearing both blame and responsibility. that is, the study found that universities were either praised or blamed for how they addressed sexual assault allegations and that there was an expectation for universities to take action. in most news reports, there was no similar expectation of the students—either assailants or victims—to take action. verb voice and agency whereas the lawrence et al. ( ) study analyzed how agency in sexual assault stories is represented in narrative, other studies have analyzed how agency is represented at the language level, such as verb voice. henley et al. ( ) explained how the use of passive voice in descriptions of attacks upon women influences readers’ perceptions of victim responsibility in the attack. in “syntax, semantics, and sexual violence agency and the passive voice,” henley et al. described three studies they conducted as a part of an overarching project that examined the prevalence and impact of verb voice in reports of violence against women. the first and second study analyzed the content and semantics of news stories about violence against women, published in two six-month periods in a major u.s. newspaper. these two studies found that descriptions of sexual violence and nonsexual violence committed by male perpetrators were predominantly constructed with passive voice. the third study in henley et al.’s ( ) research was an experiment that tested the influence of verb voice in mock news stories on readers’ perceptions of violence and its effects. this study found that when news stories about sexual violence predominantly used passive voice, readers were more likely to assume lower levels of harm suffered by the victim and to assign lower levels of responsibility to the perpetrator than to the victim. the findings of these studies suggest that the grammar used in news stories about violence against women can and do perpetuate negative conceptions of victim responsibility in cases of sexual assault. in addition to analyzing the influence of verb voice upon the reader, a study by bohner ( ) correlated the use of passive voice to describe sexual assault with the writer’s own beliefs about the responsibility of the victim in the assault. bohner ( ) conducted an experiment and survey rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez that found that writers who primarily use passive voice to describe sexual assault are more likely to believe in rape myths about the responsibility of the victim in the rape. this experiment also found that participants used passive voice when referring to the rape itself significantly more often than they used passive voice to describe other actions by either the perpetrator or the victim immediately before or after the rape (bohner, ). although the participants in the bohner ( ) experiment were not professional journalists, it is worth noting that a writer’s bias influences the writer’s grammatical choices in the reporting of sexual assault, which can then contribute to the development of bias among its readers. it is also worth noting that the style guide for american journalists, the associated press stylebook and briefing on media law ( ), provides no guidance for which verb voice to use when reporting on sexual assault, except that leads be written in active voice. our study, therefore, sheds light on an important topic that has been understudied in the literature. although previous studies have analyzed the major narrative elements of news coverage of rape and sexual assault, both generally and specifically for campus sexual assault, and while other studies have analyzed linguistic characteristics of sexual assault narratives, no study has yet used the same dataset to analyze both macro and micro features of media narratives of sexual assault. in addition, although there have been linguistic analyses of sexual assault generally, there is no study of verb voice in media narratives specific to campus sexual assault. methods we conducted a word-level content analysis of the dataset from study by lawrence et al. ( ), with a focus on both general and campus-specific sexual assault stories, in order to provide a more nuanced analysis of media narratives of sexual assault. understanding how media narratives construct agency at the macro and micro level can provide additional insight into how this reporting shapes public perceptions of victims and assailants. four hypotheses guide our study. the first hypothesis tests whether the results consistent in the literature on verb voice in sexual assault descriptions can be replicated in the dataset of articles on sexual assault from the washington post: assault and accusation without agents h : in the news reporting of sexual assault, verbs associated with assault will primarily be written in passive voice. the second hypothesis seeks to confirm whether the results of the macro-level analysis are visible in a micro-level analysis as well. that is, because verb voice indicates the assignment of agency at a micro level, and because the previous study found that the narrative of campus sexual assault elided the agency of both the assailant and the accuser, this hypothesis tests whether the dataset of the washington post articles on campus sexual assault predominantly use passive voice for verbs that describe the actions of the assailant and of the accuser: h : in the news reporting of campus sexual assault, verbs associated with assault and accusation will primarily be written in passive voice. furthermore, to analyze a gap in the literature on verb voice in sexual assault, the following hypothesis tests whether the lack of agency ascribed to accusers in the campus sexual assault narrative is particular to campus sexual assault: h : there will be a difference between news reports on campus sexual assault and news reports on non-campus sexual assault in the use of passive voice for verbs associated with accusation. finally, to continue a line of inquiry from the lawrence et al. study, the following hypothesis tests whether the frequency of passive voice changes around the time of publication of the rolling stone article “a rape on campus”: h : when describing actions associated with either the assault or the accusation, news reports published in two periods preceding and two periods following the “a rape on campus” article will use passive voice to different extents. rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez data we use a dataset compiled from articles on sexual assault and campus sexual assault in the washington post from january , , to january , because the news outlet has national readership and covers both national and international news. we selected the dataset used for this study for two reasons. first, this study sought to confirm findings from a previous study using the same dataset, which found that for the subset of campus sexual assault, blame and responsibility were often assigned to the university, while the assailant and accuser often were not assigned agency. rather, the assailant and accuser were acted upon, primarily in their role as students (lawrence et al., ). therefore, this existing dataset provided the opportunity to extend prior research on media narratives of sexual assault. second, uva, the basis for the rolling stone article, is located about miles from the washington dc metropolitan area, and researchers expected that the story would receive consistent coverage from the washington post. the articles used in the dataset were published a little more than a year before and after rolling stone published “a rape on campus.” the key terms used in the dataset were rape, sexual violence, sexual assault, and campus sexual assault. excluded from this dataset were police crime reports, articles that included the phrase sexual assault but did not cover instances of sexual assault, and ap-generated reports. the remaining dataset consisted of articles about sexual assault. the researchers categorized these articles according to the main focus of the story, including campus, uva/rolling stone (uva/rs), military, and international. to complete our analysis on campus sexual assault articles, we combined two categorized subsets: campus (non-military) and uva/rs. these combined subsets consist of articles that dealt directly with campus sexual assault. analytic procedure to supplement the findings of the previously conducted narrative analysis, we applied quantitative tools and concepts derived from sociolinguistic and communication scholarship. we used an excel macro to identify words associated with the assailant and the accuser and much of the literature on sexual assault and verb voice uses the term victim to refer to the person who is assaulted and reports the assault. however, for this study, the authors use the term accuser, to clarify the agency enacted by this character in the campus sexual assault narrative. consistent with the literature, the authors use the term assailant to refer to the person who commits the assault and is accused of the assault. assault and accusation without agents searched the dataset of articles on sexual assault for six target verbs. we searched for three target verbs associated with the actions of the assailant: assaulted, raped, and attacked. we also searched for three target verbs associated with the actions of the accuser: accused, reported, and claimed. drawing on the study by henley et al. ( ), this study limited target verbs to the past tense form because this form remains the same regardless of verb voice. we conducted word-level content analysis to determine whether the identified verbs appeared in passive voice, active voice, or other (e.g., participles). see table for examples of identified and coded phrases. we inputted the data into ibm spss , noting the coded verb voice type for each target verb. we also categorized the target verbs by three additional variables: ● agent type: whether the target verb referred to the action of an assailant or accuser. ● campus focus: whether or not the target verb originated in a story specific to campus sexual assault. ● period of publication: whether the verb originated in an article published in the first or second half of the time preceding or following nov. , , the date of publication of “a rape on campus.” we then used ibm spss statistics software to analyze the frequency of passive and active voice usage and to determine whether verb voice correlated with agent type, campus or non- campus focus, and period of publication. in addition, we noted the number of target verbs that appeared in each of the articles. results of a quantitative word-level content analysis of the articles in the dataset, articles contained between one and uses of at least one of the six verbs, with a total of , words identified. of these, words were coded as active (n = ) or passive (n = ) and as assailant (n = ) or accuser (n = ), for a total of four agent and voice combinations: active assailant verbs (n = ), passive assailant verbs (n = ), active accuser verbs (n = ), and passive accuser verbs (n = ). rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez table examples of coded sentences voice verb example active assaulted “...he overcame her and sexually assaulted her…” raped “...took her to a remote spot and raped her…” attacked “he allegedly attacked outland three months later.” reported “...this person reported the assault soon after the incident…” accused “...victims have accused high-profile men…” claimed “...two women claimed he had sexually assaulted them...” passive assaulted “...one in five women will be sexually assaulted...” raped “...how jackie was raped…” attacked “...the victim was attacked after being followed…” reported “fifteen assaults were reported…” accused “...they had been falsely accused.” claimed n/a the coders identified the remaining words as other: words that were not used as verbs (including participles, gerunds, and adjectives) or verbs enacted by an agent other than the assailant or accuser (such as police officers, lawyers, university staff, and news sources). table details the frequency of each of the six coded verbs. table frequency of six verbs agent verb n percent assailant assaulted . raped . attacked . accuser reported . accused . claimed . total . to test whether verbs associated with assault were primarily written in passive voice (h ), we compiled descriptive statistics on the assailant verbs. descriptive statistics showed that % of assailant verbs were in passive voice, whereas % of assailant verbs were in active voice. assault and accusation without agents to test (h ), we analyzed descriptive statistics to determine whether assailant and accuser verbs in news reports of campus sexual assault were primarily written in passive voice. of the verbs in this data set, ( . %) were active verbs associated with the assailant, ( . %) were active verbs associated with the accuser, ( . %) were passive verbs associated with the assailant, and ( . %) were passive verbs associated with the accuser. furthermore, a chi-square test was conducted to assess whether the different uses of active and passive and assailant and accuser verbs were significantly different than expected for a random distribution. the result for this test was significant: x ( , n = ) = . , p < . . to test h , we conducted a chi-square test to determine whether news reports on sexual assault use passive voice for verbs associated with accusation to a different extent than news reports on campus sexual assault. the result for this test was not significant, demonstrating that there is no significant difference in the use of passive voice for accuser verbs among all stories on sexual assault: x ( , n = ) = . , p > . . to test h , we conducted a chi-square test on all verbs, categorized by their publication within one of four periods of time: • period : january , to december , • period : december , to november , • period : november , to june , • period : june , to january , combined, these periods mark the total timespan of publication of the news reports in our dataset. we divided this timespan by the date of publication of “a rape on campus,” november , , and we then divided these two halves of the timespan by half again. the chi-square test was significant. that is, the rate of active and passive voice for both assailant and accuser verbs in these four time periods was significantly different than what one would be expect from a random distribution (x ( , ) = . , p < . ). more importantly, using bonferroni-adjusted z tests, we found that passive accuser verbs were less likely to appear in the third period and passive assailant verbs were more likely to appear in the third period than in any other period (see figure ). there were no other differences in proportional verb use for rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez any of the active verbs in the four time periods. this indicates that the greatest discrepancy between the actual and expected counts occurred in the third period, when passive assailant verbs were most frequent and passive accuser verbs were least frequent. this result is meaningful because the third period includes all of the relevant dates for the publication of “a rape on campus,” including when the investigation of the article began and when rolling stone officially retracted the piece. figure shows the rate of usage of each agent and voice type over the four time periods, highlighting the sudden changes in passive and active voice usage in the third period. figure . percentage of verbs by agent and voice type over four time periods. the impact of verb voice in media narratives of sexual assault to extend the research of verb voice and agency in stories of sexual assault, this study examined a larger dataset over a longer period of time than previous studies, the last of which was conducted more than years ago (bohner, ). in testing h , the results of this study assault and accusation without agents aligned with previous studies, finding that most news reports of sexual assault primarily write about the actions of assailants in passive voice. in fact, the difference between the use of passive and active voice for verbs associated with actions of the assailant was greater than to . this finding is meaningful in part because the results of our larger dataset align with previous smaller studies, and because the finding demonstrates that the patterns of verb voice usage in writing about sexual assault have not changed in more than years. it is understandable, to a degree, that journalists writing about sexual assault avoid using active voice when they do not know or do not assuredly know (that is, without a legal conviction) who committed a sexual assault. however, there are ways to write about sexual assault in active voice without directly assigning blame to a specific individual (such as, “the assailant attacked”). in addition, as previous literature shows, the preponderance of passive voice usage to refer to the actions of assailants leads readers to assign more blame to victims of assault than to assailants (henley et al., ). the findings of the previous studies and this current study indicate that there is a problematic trend in the grammar of news stories about sexual assault. while it is important that more attention be paid to the grammar used to depict assailants, a micro-level analysis provides further insight into the implications for use of voice for both the assailant and the accuser in campus sexual assault narratives. while the macro-level analysis of campus sexual assault media narratives showed an absence of agency of both assailants and accusers (lawrence, et al., ), in this micro-level analysis, we find that the accuser is assigned agency through use of active voice. this finding (h ) demonstrates that the micro-level analysis of the same dataset differs in a very specific way from the macro-level analysis; writers do assign some level of agency to accusers. the actions of assailants are still overwhelmingly depicted with passive voice, which confirms findings from previous studies (henley et al., ; lawrence et al., ). however, at the word level, the depiction of accusers is more problematic and might indicate a degree of victim blaming that is not captured by the macro-level analysis of the narrative. furthermore, from a methodological standpoint, this nuanced but important difference between the findings of the narrative analysis and the word-level content analysis supports the claim of sandberg and ugelvik ( ) that narrative analysis can benefit from an increased use of sociolinguistic and quantitative methods. because the findings from testing h did not align with the findings from the macro-level rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez analysis (lawrence et al., ), the findings from testing h are meaningful because they continue to highlight this discrepancy between what the narratives in sexual assault stories reveal and what the grammar of sexual assault stories imply about the agency of accusers. ultimately, in an attempt to address a gap in the literature on the agency of accusers, this finding suggests that both campus sexual assault stories and non-campus sexual assault stories assign agency to accusers in much the same way. further research is needed to determine whether non-campus sexual assault stories elide the agency of the accuser at the narrative level (as campus sexual assault stories do, according to the study by lawrence et al.) despite assigning agency at the word level. such research would indicate the extent to which implicit victim blaming happens in the reporting of sexual assault stories. finally, the findings from testing h indicate that a controversial article on sexual assault seems to impact how other stories on sexual assault are written. in their investigation of the reporting failures in “a rape on campus,” coronel et al. ( ) expressed concerns that the issues surrounding the faulty reporting of the story would negatively impact the extent to which readers believe claims of sexual assault: “[t]he magazine’s failure may have spread the idea that many women invent rape allegations” (p. ). although this current study did not investigate how readers perceive the responsibility of assailants and accusers, previous studies show that when writers assign less responsibility to assailants and assign more blame to accusers, these biases are reflected in the writers’ uses of verb voice (bohner, ). therefore, because the findings from testing h indicate that a change in grammatical choices of sexual assault reporting was associated with the publication and retraction of “a rape on campus,” one can infer that “a rape on campus” impacted how writers perceived assailant and accuser responsibility, which ultimately influences how readers perceive assailant and accuser responsibility. limitations while this study has shown the importance of conducting micro-level analysis that informs and expands on macro-level analysis, and while it has confirmed that assailants are overwhelmingly depicted in passive voice, the study has at least three limitations. first, the dataset is large but not comprehensive. further studies that include a wider variety of publications, a different time period, or news reports on different types of crime might shed light assault and accusation without agents into variations in the use of passive and active voice in news reporting. second, although journalistic standards recommend writing in active voice, we have no way of knowing whether passive voice is used in similar ways for reporting of non-sexual assault crimes. future research is needed to understand and compare verb voice in general reports of crime to reports of sexual assault. third, the coding scheme used in this analysis must also be carefully analyzed, as the verbs chosen to indicate actions of the accuser—attacked, reported, and claimed—might have generated a higher number of instances of active voice, because the words themselves are more easily constructed when using active voice. this is most true for claimed. for example, “the rape was claimed to have happened” is an awkward phrase but one of the few ways in which the verb claimed could appear in passive voice. then again, there were so few instances of claimed, relative to the rest of the verbs in the dataset, that the impact of this verb on the analysis is likely minimal. additionally, although the assailant is always the assailant, the accuser is not always the victim, as in the case of someone who was assaulted and then murdered. given the nature of passive voice, we could not definitively say who completed the action of accusing in every instance. however, this actually lends more credence to the findings, because it suggests that some of the passive actions of the accuser were not in fact the actions of the victim. therefore, if those instances were controlled for, active verbs associated with the victim as accuser would constitute a higher percentage. conclusion this study expands on previous studies on narrative analysis of crime by using quantitative methods to uncover nuanced but enduring patterns in the reporting of sexual assault crimes. this study also expands on previous studies of verb voice in sexual assault stories by using the largest dataset for this type of analysis yet. we believe that applying a quantitative method to the study of narratives of sexual assault crimes provides a more complex picture of how journalism reporting practices participate in the construction of problematic narratives of sexual assault crimes. the findings of this study show that the way news reports on sexual assault are written now retains journalistic habits that cross decades. that is, practices for reporting on sexual assault have not changed in the more than years since the research conducted by henley et al. ( ) and bohner ( ). despite calls to reduce victim-blaming in news reporting rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez (worthington, a, b), the grammar of the sentences that describe sexual assault cases— which has been shown to influence readers’ perceptions of victim and assailant responsibility in the crime (henley et al., )—also has not changed. in addition, this study shows that the publication of “a rape on campus” may have affected how journalists used language (either consciously or subconsciously) to characterize the agency of both the assailant and the accuser in sexual assault news stories. further research must examine more closely the impact of salacious narratives on subsequent reporting of related stories. when victims of sexual assault are already so frequently discredited, it becomes that much more important that the people communicating these stories do so with care—from the nature of the story itself (for example, journalists must accept the challenge of reporting on complex and nuanced accounts rather than seek narratives with easily identifiable villains), down to the grammar of the sentences. finally, the impact of social media in representations of crime, and particularly sexual assault, has been studied extensively in recent years (dodge, ; powell, overington, & hamilton, ; salter, ). while studies of new media provide important insight into the narrative constructions of victims, perpetrators, and sexual violence, the findings from this study show that we must continue to analyze traditional news coverage to trace how sexual assault narratives construct the victim and the assailant. the year represented a pivotal moment in the conversation surrounding sexual assault in u.s. media outlets and in media outlets around the world. notably, the #metoo campaign brought attention to the stories of women from many different backgrounds, and the silence breakers were named time’s person of the year. although the trending #metoo hashtag was itself a social media phenomenon, the exigency for the trend was the traditional news coverage conducted by american journalists throughout the year as well as the publication of high-profile survivor stories in the new york times and other news sources. this movement shows the relevancy of professional journalism for american perceptions of sexual assault and sexual harassment. given the importance of news coverage for cultural shifts in attitudes toward sexual assault, it is critical that the news coverage of sexual assault avoid victim-blaming patterns themselves, patterns that this and previous studies have shown to be deeply ingrained in the way sexual assault news stories are reported. furthermore, this relevancy of traditional news assault and accusation without agents coverage of sexual assault shows the importance for researchers in criminology, media, and cultural studies to continue to investigate the impact of this medium on the public and on social media movements. references anderson, n. & svrluga, s. ( , september ). what a massive sexual assault survey found at top us universities. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ barnett, b. ( ). framing rape: an examination of public relations strategies in the duke university lacrosse case. communication, culture & critique, , – . doi: . /j. - . . .x barnett, b. ( ). how newspapers frame rape allegations: the duke university case. women and language, ( ), – . beck, l. ( , march ). here’s what cnn should’ve said about the steubenville rape case. jezebel. retrieved from https://jezebel.com/ bohner, g. ( ). writing about rape: use of the passive voice and other distancing text features as an expression of perceived responsibility of the victim. british journal of social psychology, , – . doi: . / coronel, s., coll, s., & kravitz, d. ( ). the rolling stone report. columbia journalism review, ( ), – . dodge, a. 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( , september ). media continues to refer to brock turner as a “stanford swimmer” rather than a rapist. the intercept. retrieved from https://theintercept.com/ / lawrence, h., stabile, b., and fernandez, l. ( ). the rhetoric of campus sexual assault: media constructions of student advocacy and campus citizenship. poster presentation: association of teachers of technical writing conference, houston, tx. meixler, e. ( , december ). brock turner is trying to get his sexual assault convictions overturned. time. retrieved from http://time.com/ patton, t. o., & snyder-yuly, j. ( ). any four black men will do: rape, race, and the ultimate scapegoat. journal of black studies, , – . retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/ powell, a., overington, c., & hamilton, g. ( ). following #jillmeagher: collective meaning-making in response to crime events via social media. crime, media, culture, advance online publication. doi: . / . salter, m. ( ). justice and revenge in online counter-publics: emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media. crime, media, culture, , – . assault and accusation without agents sanday, p. k. ( ). fraternity gang rape: sex, brotherhood, and privilege on campus. new york, us: nyu press. sandberg, s., & ugelvik, t. ( ). the past, present, and future of narrative criminology: a review and an invitation. crime, media, culture, , – . sisario, b. ( , september ). rolling stone faces revived lawsuit over campus rape article. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ the associated press. ( ). the associated press stylebook and briefing on media law. new york, ny: basic books. the white house, office of the press secretary. ( , september ). remarks by the president at “it’s on us” campaign rollout [press release]. retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/ / / /remarks-president-its- us-campaign-rollout/ mccaskill, c. ( , july ). bipartisan bill takes aim at sexual assault on college and university campuses [press release]. retrieved from https://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/media-center/news-releases/campus-accountability- and-safety-act u.s. department of education ( ). dear colleague letter. retrieved from http://www .ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague- .html. will, g. ( , june ). george will: colleges become the victims of progressivism. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ worthington, n. ( ). negotiating news representations of rape: reporting on a college sexual assault scandal. media report to women, ( ), – . worthington, n. ( a). encoding and decoding rape news: how progressive reporting inverts textual orientations. women’s studies in communication, ( ), – . doi: . / . . rachael graham lussos & lourdes fernandez worthington, n. ( b). progress and persistent problems: local tv news framing of acquaintance rape on campus. feminist media studies, , – . doi: . / yoffe, e. ( , december ). the college rape overcorrection. slate. retrieved from http://www.slate.com/ 	literature review 	data 	results of a quantitative word-level content analysis 	the impact of verb voice in media narratives of sexual assault 	conclusion hed_ _ -toc.tex headache issn - c© the author doi: . /j. - . . .x journal compilation c© american headache society published by blackwell publishing nih funding for research on headache disorders: does it matter? migraine disorders and the epilepsies have much in common. both are highly prevalent paroxysmal neurological disorders that have peak incidence prior to adulthood and may be life-long. they are also often co-morbid. both appear to share important pathogenic mechanisms involving the same genes and electro- physiological events, and they are often responsive to the same medications. both are associated with huge economic costs and profound disabilities. while pro- longed seizures may be fatal, the far higher prevalence of migraine leads to > % more lost years annually from death or disability than the epilepsies. given the close parallels between these disor- ders, why then, over the past years, have new medications been fda-approved for the treatment of epilepsy, whereas only new medication (plus “me- too” drugs) has been approved for migraine (table)? one possibility is that research efforts have been sim- ilarly aggressive for both groups of disorders but that comparatively more migraine trials failed. it is also conceivable that fewer headache clinical trials were performed due to a lack of interest on the part of the pharmaceutical industry, though this is unlikely given the enormous size of the migraine market. regardless, these possibilities are beyond investigation given the absence of a comprehensive national registry of clin- ical trials. there is, however, a much more plausible and simple explanation for the discrepancy in drug ap- provals: there were fewer promising compounds avail- able to test in migraine clinical trials. why might this be so? abundant evidence shows that the seminal stud- ies that lead to innovative pharmaceuticals are most often performed in publicly funded research laborato- ries, not those of the pharmaceutical industry. federal funding of research on epilepsy has always hugely out- paced that for migraine. over the past several years, mean annual nih expenditures for epilepsy have been ∼$ m compared to ∼$ m for migraine, with a comparable disparity in funding every year since — the earliest year of available records for nih grants (figure). what did the federal funding for epilepsy pur- chase? fundamental research beginning in the s led to the development of epilepsy animal models that enabled the screening of drugs for anticonvul- sant properties. the nih then funded and provided oversight of a program of accelerated screening of table—new molecular entities approved by the fda since by indication priority review standard review epilepsy felbamate fosphenytoin gabapentin topiramate lamotrigine tiagabine pregabalin levetiracetam oxcarbazepine zonisamide migraine sumatriptan zolmitriptan naratriptan rizatriptan almotriptan frovatriptan eletriptan an nme is defined as a drug that contains no active moiety that has been approved by fda in any other application submitted under section (b) of the federal food, drug, and cosmetic act. a priority review by the fda is accorded drugs that are believed to represent a significant improvement compared to marketed products, in the treatment, diagnosis, or prevention of a disease. a standard review by the fda is accorded drugs that appear to have therapeutic qualities similar to those of or more already marketed drugs. july/august figure—nih funding for migraine versus epilepsy. the relative funding for each disorder is obtained by comparing the number of documents retrieved for the keywords “migraine” and “epilepsy” from the computer retrieval of information on scientific projects (crisp) database of u.s. federally funded biomedical research projects. crisp includes a document for every year of every federally funded (mostly nih) biomedical research grant, and an analysis of the relative number of crisp documents provides an approximation of the relative weight of u.s. federal funding for each disorder. compounds developed by academia and industry. thirty years later, patients with epilepsy have a con- siderably wider set of therapeutic options. headache medicine is also on the threshold of new insights into the pathogenesis of the primary headache disorders. animal models relevant to drug screening are beginning to appear. what is needed now is a commitment to headache medicine from federal agen- cies similar to that which has been appropriately ex- tended to epilepsy. headache medicine requires and deserves a . -fold increase in nih funding to bring it to parity with the epilepsies. such a funding boost would dramatically increase the number of laborato- ries in this field and ensure the training of an expanded generation of dedicated clinician-investigators. more- over, newly funded laboratories would be welcomed into academic neurology departments where they would provide visibility for headache medicine and a nidus for headache specialty clinical training programs. based on the example of the epilepsies, real benefits will likely be felt by headache patients over time in the form of improved access to specialty care and the development of novel effective therapies. no one should expect the nih to spontaneously increase headache research funding to >$ m annu- ally. any such funding increase will be the hard-won consequence of vigorous and persistent advocacy on the part of the community of headache medicine spe- cialists and headache disorder patients. as a part of this process, we are developing a program to bring this issue to the close attention of federal lawmakers. we are working to mobilize headache patients to advo- cate for their interests. furthermore, on september and , , headache medicine clinicians from across the country will participate in an event in washington, dc, that we call “headache on the hill.” at that time, we will meet with our senators and representatives and press them to take congressional action to in- crease nih funding. we welcome, and strongly urge, all u.s. headache specialists to join us. the success of this initiative depends on large numbers of participants coming from widespread congressional districts. for headache information on participation in this event, please email me at robert.shapiro@uvm.edu. the lack of nih funding for headache research is an injustice that receives no media attention. its repercussions limit the therapeutic options and hope for women who suffer in greater numbers from mi- graine or chronic daily headache, as well as for men who may preferentially suffer from cluster headache or posttraumatic headache. the nih is mandated to improve the health and welfare of all americans, how- ever, its expenditures do not reflect the societal dis- tribution of disease-related economic costs and dis- abilities. disabled headache patients have been de- nied equal access to the benefits of publicly funded research. redress of this inequity should have a trans- formative beneficial effect on the practice of headache medicine. robert e. shapiro, md, phd department of neurology university of vermont college of medicine burlington, vt references . calabresi p, galletti f, rossi c, et al. antiepilep- tic drugs in migraine: from clinical aspects to cellular mechanisms. trends pharmacol sci.. ; : - . . murray cjl, lopez ad, mathers cd, stein c. the global burden of disease project: aims, methods and data sources national institute on aging grant -p -ag . . zinner de. medical r&d at the turn of the millen- nium. health affairs, september–october ; . . nih estimates of funding for various diseases, con- ditions, research areas. available at: http://www. nih.gov/news/fundingresearchareas.htm. . shapiro re, goadsby pj. the long drought: the dearth of public funding for headache research. cephalalgia. (in press). . porter rj, hessie bj, cereghino jj, et al. advances in the clinical development of antiepileptic drugs. fed proc. ; : - . . ayata, c, jin h, kudo c, et al. suppression of cortical spreading depression in migraine prophylaxis. ann neurol. ; : - . . computer retrieval of information on scientific projects. http://crisp.cit.nih.gov/. deadly exceptionalisms, or, would you rather be crushed by a moral superpower or a military superpower? lable at sciencedirect political geography ( ) e contents lists avai political geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo deadly exceptionalisms, or, would you rather be crushed by a moral superpower or a military superpower? david jansson department of social and economic geography, uppsala university, box , uppsala, sweden a r t i c l e i n f o article history: received december accepted december available online january keywords: exceptionalism nationalism ideology racism u.s. sweden e-mail address: dj @cornell.edu. https://doi.org/ . /j.polgeo. . . - /© the author. published by elsevier l a b s t r a c t in this essay, i consider the ways in which nationalism in both the u.s. and sweden relies on notions of exceptionalism, and i discuss what this means materially for their own populations and for the world. the analysis consists of two lines of attack against both these assumptions of exceptionalism e one focusing on psychological processes and the other political economy processes. i examine the historical development of the ideas of u.s. and swedish exceptionalism, and consider the roles of ignorance, denial, and projection in maintaining these problematic ideas. through the use of a materialist definition of racism, i show how the nationalist ideology of exceptionalism in these two cases harms the well-being of their own citizens as well as citizens of other states. i argue that a combination of the psychological and political economy approaches are necessary if we are to both understand the power and impact of exceptionalism as a nationalist ideology and to be able to effectively work against their tendency to “crush” marginalized groups. © the author. published by elsevier ltd. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). introduction in this essay, i consider the ways in which nationalism in both the u.s. and sweden relies on notions of exceptionalism, and i discuss what this means materially for their own populations and for the world. the analysis consists of two lines of attack against both these assumptions of exceptionalism, where i review the processes at work behind the production of exceptionalism, the others which are involved in the construction of these national identities, and the material forms of racism that haunt both the u.s. and sweden and betray their claims to exceptionalism. i argue that we need to combine a psychological analysis with a political economy analysis if we are to understand the power and impact of exceptionalism as a nationalist ideology. while the majority of the academic literature on national exceptionalism focuses specifically on “american exceptionalism”, in an important sense, assumptions of national exceptionalism are in fact an inherent element of the ideology of nationalism. as tom nairn ( ) argues, “nationalism” is composed of two elements: nationalism and nationalism, the former referring to the general ideology of the naturalness of nations and the ideal of the nation- state (where each nation has its own state), the latter emphasizing td. this is an open access article u the uniqueness of each nation, the qualities that make each nation special. there is hardly a nation on earth that doesn't think of itself as exceptional in some way. indeed, when marine le pen, the leader of the national front in france, was recently caught plagiarizing a speech by one of her political rivals (breeden, ), it was revealed that the sections that she plagiarized articulated specifically some of the ways in which she understands france as special or exceptional. but while most nations can make a claim to being “exceptional” in some way, in the political geography and international relations literature, “exceptionalism” is primarily associated with the u.s. this is not inevitable; for example, k.j. holsti ( ) considers excep- tionalism to be a type of foreign policy, one that is both rare and not limited to the experience of the u.s. but “american exceptionalism” is the default “exceptionalism” in the academic literature, and it is with this version of exceptionalism that we begin. “american exceptionalism” as a nationalist ideology while the usage of the term “exceptional” as a characteristic of the u.s., as a set of governing institutions or as a people, was un- common until the s, the belief that “america” is exceptional in various ways has had “tremendous staying power” (roberts & di cuirci, : ix), emerging even before there was a united states and still thriving in the st century. starting in the th century, “american exceptionalism” came to be understood as consisting of nder the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:dj @cornell.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.polgeo. . . &domain=pdf www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/ . /j.polgeo. . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://doi.org/ . /j.polgeo. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.polgeo. . . d. jansson / political geography ( ) e two elements, exemplary and missionary (restad, ). the u.s. (i prefer to avoid using “america” as much as possible, since there are “americas” beyond the u.s., and furthermore, my focus is on “america” as an idea or ideology) is thus exceptional as an example for others to follow (i would call this “passive exceptionalism”), or, as exceptional, it has a responsibility to reshape the world in its image (missionary or “aggressive exceptionalism”). another common di- chotomy in the literature relates to whether scholars conceptualize exceptionalism as simply an objective reference to difference (that is, what makes the u.s. different from other countries (e.g. lipset, ; lockhart, )), or whether exceptionalism is meant to convey a normative claim of superiority (why the u.s. is better than other countries (see, e.g., kattenburg, ; much of samuel hun- tington's work)). there is a symptomatic elision between these two perspectives, as restad ( : ) points out: “the very idea of an objective e as opposed to ideational e definition of exceptionalism is nonsensical. why use the term “exceptional” if one does not mean normatively superior? american exceptionalism cannot simply mean different, because all nations are different.” the nonsensical nature of the conceptualization of “american exceptionalism” (and “exceptionalism” in general) is a hint that what is at work here is ideology e and in particular, the ideology of nationalism. natalie koch ( : ) is correct in seeing “the normatively-laden idea of american exceptionalism as a staple of the country's nationalist ideology”. the literature on exceptionalism is impossible to under- stand without reference to both ideological nationalism and meth- odological nationalism e both of which contribute to a state-centric analysis and an inclination to “buy” the nationalist narrative of exceptionalism. so how can we work around these problems of ideology and methodology? restad, for example, productively focuses on excep- tionalism as a belief system. she considers the belief in american exceptionalism to be a foundational element of the (dominant) national identity in the u.s. this identity consists of three main ideas: first, the u.s. is distinct from the old world, not only different but better, and this superiority is crucial because it underpins the second idea, which is that the u.s. has a special and unique role to play in world history. the third idea is that the u.s. will resist the laws of history by remaining a superpower indefinitely, in contrast to the ultimate downfall of all previous world powers. these three ideas are interconnected, and the last idea suggests that there may be an underlying anxiety surrounding the maintenance of the u.s.'s superpower status, as a future decline of the u.s. would undermine all three elements of the belief in its exceptionalism. we can fruit- fully connect restad's analysis with holsti's ( ) typology of exceptionalism as a type of foreign policy, in particular with regard to holsti's claim that exceptionalist states understand the world as hostile to their interests, indeed that such states need external en- emies, even if they have to be fabricated. these ideas support the argument that a psychological perspective on the idea of “american exceptionalism” (and exceptionalisms in general) is critical to un- derstanding the function of this nationalist ideology. so in the next section i will show how a psychological analysis can be applied. the psychology of exceptionalism the importance of the psychological approach is actually hinted at from the beginning of the idea of “american exceptionalism”, which is typically traced back to john winthrop's characterization of the massachusetts bay colony in the early s as a “city upon a hill”. the reference is to jesus's call for his people to be a light in the darkness in the new testament (matthew : ). the verse actually reads: “ye are the light of the world. a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid” (di cuirci, : vii, my emphasis). as di cuirci points out, this is a double-edged message: the city on the hill is, because of its geographical position, both a beacon to the world and vulnerable to hostile agents from this world. thus, at the heart of this particular notion of u.s. exceptionalism lies a fundamental psychological tension: this new nation serves as a beacon of hope, a superior people working on behalf of god, but that beacon is vulnerable to attempts to both hinder its message and topple its physical embodiment. i would argue that this sense of threat to the security of the nation is intimately bound to the sense of excep- tionalist superiority that is part of the ideology of u.s. exception- alism. the idea is that “we” are always under threat precisely because we are exceptional. as holsti ( : ) puts it, excep- tionalist states “portray themselves as innocent victims. they are never the sources of international insecurity, but only the targets of malign forces ….they are exceptional, in part, because they are morally clean as the objects of others' hatreds”, and it is this moral cleanliness that is insufferable for the malign forces that would destroy the city upon a hill. this perceived vulnerability generates fear, but interestingly in the u.s. case, it is not only (or perhaps even primarily) external malign forces that frightened the citizens of the north american colonies; it was internal forces that dramatically affected the col- lective psyche of the european settlers. robert parkinson ( a), for example, argues that the writers of the declaration of inde- pendence were motivated more by “racial fear and exclusion” than by concern for “inalienable rights”. in parkinson's analysis of the era of independence, the european settlers felt severely threatened by the possibility of uprisings of the enslaved as well as attacks by the native american nations. these fears were immortalized in the language of the declaration, which cited the twin threats of “do- mestic insurrections” and “merciless indian savages” (parkinson, b). one can simply not ignore the psychological dynamics that were present during the origination of the idea of “america” and the founding of the “exceptionalist” u.s. state. so while i clearly argue for the relevance of a psychological understanding of exceptionalism, i would part with restad when she gives causal power to u.s. national identity (and by extension the belief in exceptionalism) to shape u.s. foreign policy. the psy- chological approach is particularly important with regard to the public consumption of the narrative of exceptionalism, but i wish to refrain from giving these dynamics too much credit for the deter- mination of foreign policy. instead, i think we need to complement the psychological approach with a political economy perspective if we want to be able to evaluate the material drivers of u.s. foreign policy. for help here we can turn to an analysis by john agnew in this journal from . the political economy of exceptionalism giving causal explanatory force to the ideology of american exceptionalism on u.s. foreign policy is, for agnew ( : ), to accept the transcendental idealism of the exceptionalists, “to abandon any pretense at history and instead engage in a propa- ganda exercise”. in other words, it is to mistake the rhetoric for the reality. doing history instead of propaganda means taking a polit- ical economy perspective. but agnew certainly does not ignore the discursive aspects of u.s. exceptionalism, as one of the first ques- tions that he takes up is that of the origins of the assumptions of exceptionalism. according to jack greene ( ), there was a rather widespread hope in the th and th centuries that “america” would represent the regeneration of european civilization, a reference to the exemplary or passive form of exceptionalism, where “america” constitutes a model for the world to follow. what made it possible for the idea of “america” to hold this position was its newness; as james robertson ( : ), describing one of the major nationalist myths, puts it: “americans are a new people, d. jansson / political geography ( ) e formed out of a migration of people seeking freedom in a new world”. so this idea of newness is key, and we might say that the discourse of newness propels the u.s. from passive to aggressive exceptionalism, from exemplary to missionary (while not exactly replacing the exemplary). to quote robertson ( : ) again, the american sense of uniqueness has come also from the belief that the mission of its people was to create a nation where a nation did not exist. nationalism included expansion, but it was expansion into the wildernessdinto a wilderness which was part of the nation and at the same time had to become part of the nation. so americans were crusaders, bringing civilization and freedom to the wilderness. in order to realize its destiny, the u.s. had to expand its territory. at least, that is the ideological interpretation. but agnew does not stop there, since a political economy approach requires attention to factors that provide the material impetus for state expansion. for even if political leaders in the u.s. have often explained the state's aggressive exceptionalism as an inevitable outgrowth of its divinely-ordained passive exceptionalism, political-economic in- terests have always lurked in the shadows, preferably unnamed, though occasionally admitted to openly. so while the secretary of the treasury might claim in that the country's past expansion was guided by a “higher than any earthly power”, a power which “still guards and directs our destiny, impels us onward, and has selected our great and happy country as a model and ultimate centre of attraction for all the nations of the world” (agnew, : ), president mckinley could admit in the late s, discussing the need for the u.s. to control the philippines, that “we could not turn them over to france or germanydour commercial rivals in the orientdthat would be bad business and discreditable” (agnew, : , my emphasis). agnew traces the transition in u.s. foreign policy from its early colonialism to imperialism, which represents a shift from territorial expansion (in north america and abroad) to a focus on getting the upper hand in the web of inter- national networks and relations in the global capitalist economy. and here is where we find more explanatory power for the un- derstanding of the pattern of u.s. interventions around the world. indeed, roberts ( : xxviii) even argues that the “early excep- tionalism of america meant the unique opportunities of its re- sources” rather than referring to a characteristic of the people who lived there (whether indigenous or european) – according to this view, a materialist perspective on “american exceptionalism” is actually endogenous to the very concept. the rapid industrialization of the u.s. after the civil war brought an increasing reliance on globally-sourced inputs and global mar- kets for u.s. products. “wracked by economic panics, recessions, depressions, and booms, the u.s. capitalist economy had no choice but to become global” (mitchell, : ). while i do not have room for a thorough review of the political economy of u.s. foreign policy, there are various sources that provide this perspective (agnew, ; domosh, ; mitchell, ; smith, ). the reader may now justifiably wonder how i would reconcile the psychological approach for which i argued earlier with the political economy approach described here. i do believe that both perspectives are necessary, but they operate at different levels and interpellate different agents. the psychological approach is particularly necessary to understand how, and why, u.s. excep- tionalism is communicated to ourselves and to others, and to appreciate why certain discourses and narratives resonate with (certain segments of) the (heterogeneous) general population. the psychological approach thus helps us to understand the public reception of the ideology of american exceptionalism (and nationalism generally) as well as its ongoing reproduction. the political economy approach, on the other hand, provides better (though not necessarily exclusive) explanatory power for the pattern of u.s. foreign policy and international “interventions” (a euphemism for military actions such as invasion). the psycholog- ical perspective is not irrelevant for the understanding of the decision-making of political and economic leaders, but i would argue that its effect on the actual conduct of foreign policy is less than many believe. in other words, political economy shapes the overall contours of foreign policy while psychology illuminates the processes of its justification. this is clearly an oversimplification but it expresses the general point i am trying to make. one practical problem with this analysis, though, is that in mainstream scholarship as well as in the public discourse, it is considered rather unseemly to state that u.s. foreign policy is based to a large degree on the advancement of u.s. corporations in the global economy. the historian david potter ( : ) perhaps unwittingly provides some support for this assertion, when he writes that “we have been historically correct in supposing that we had a revolutionary message to offer but we have been mistaken in our concept of what that message was. we supposed that our revelation was “democracy revolutionizing the world”, but in reality it was “abundance revolutionizing the world”. the reference to abundance connects to the political-economic foundation of u.s. foreign policy, but the language with which potter expresses this idea is still trapped by the ideology of exceptionalism. a more candid formulation of the reality behind the rhetoric was offered in by u.s. diplomat george kennan, who when dis- cussing the strategic position of the u.s. after world war ii, had this to say in a previously classified memo: “we have about percent of the world's wealth, but only . percent of its population.” the challenge facing the u.s. leadership then, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity” (robinson, : ). kennan can say this for internal consumption, but publicly the justification of u.s. foreign policy is typically done with reference to the exalted ideals the u.s. is supposed to stand for. while the control of resources is a fundamental drive behind u.s. foreign policy, it is the advancement of freedom, democracy, respect for the rule of law, and universal human rights that always gets top billing when selling u.s. interventions. to a significant extent, then, the ideology of u.s. exceptionalism is built upon a denial of the materialist basis of u.s. foreign policy, and thus we come back to psychology. we will return to this and related problems for a clear- eyed discussion of the nationalist ideology in the u.s. later, but having now sketched out the dynamics of a “psycho-political economy” approach to the understanding of the ideology of u.s. exceptionalism, we now turn to the case of “swedish exception- alism” to see how well this perspective holds up in another context. swedish exceptionalism and the folkhem compared to the long history of the idea of “american excep- tionalism”, the origins of a belief in “swedish exceptionalism” are more recent. when john winthrop was writing about “america” being a city on a hill in the s, the swedish state was at the height of its power, having established a regional empire including parts of what are today norway, finland, russia, estonia, latvia, germany, and denmark. not to be outdone by the other european empires, it also actively sought to establish colonies abroad, and during john winthrop's life sweden had, for a few years, a colony called new sweden on the delaware river, as well as small colonies in the caribbean and in west africa (naum and nordin, ; weiss, ). (added to this history of external expansionism is the (ongoing) internal colonialism of s�apmi e the territory of the indigenous sami people.) the loss of finland to russia in marked the definitive end of sweden's expansionist history, and d. jansson / political geography ( ) e sweden experienced widespread poverty for much of the s into the early s, which was the primary reason behind the emigration of millions of swedes to the u.s. during this period. while we can say that, during the era of colonialism, the swedish leadership was certainly influenced by the missionary discourse that sought to justify the establishment of empires and the spread of european civilization, there was, in this regard, nothing excep- tional about sweden as a european empire. rather, “swedish exceptionalism” is grounded primarily in the idea that the country is a “moral superpower”, and this reputation has its seeds in the establishment of the welfare state (sometimes referred to as the “swedish model”) from the s onward. scholars tend to consider the publication of marcus childs' book sweden: the middle way as an originator of the idea of swe- den as an exemplary state. for a world on the cusp of a second devastating world war in a generation, childs portrays the swedish welfare state as an effective compromise between communism (or socialism) and capitalism, a “middle way”. thus from a political economy perspective, the swedish model e which is included in a “scandinavian model” for some observers (musial, ) e repre- sents the ultimate compromise between social democracy and global capitalism. the swedish model protected the interests of swedish workers through centrally-negotiated, industry-wide col- lective bargaining agreements, while at the same time providing advantageous conditions for swedish and global corporations (lundberg & tyd�en, ). and in an era where we are allegedly experiencing the “end of history”, it might be hard to appreciate how urgent such questions would have felt for people in the s (see, e.g., greif, ). after dealing with war and depression many people had serious doubts about the viability of any of the existing models, and along comes sweden with what appeared to some to be a new, rational, and stable solution to the eternal tensions between labor and capital: a strong, centralized (capitalist) state with a comprehensive welfare system. as winston churchill put it in a message accepting the nobel prize for literature, the world “looks with admiration … to scandinavia where … countries, without sacrificing their sovereignty, live united in their thought, in their economic practice and in their healthy way of life. from such fountains new and brighter opportunities may come to all mankind” (musial, : ). so this marks the beginning of an exemplary swedish exceptionalism, with a strong external component e it was the views of people outside sweden that originally established the idea of swedish exceptionalism (ruth, ), whereas in the u.s. it was a combination of external and internal perspectives that gave birth to that country's exceptionalism. in fact, as arne ruth ( : ) points out, this international attention sometimes made swedish politicians uncomfortable: during world war ii, the swedish intellectual gunnar myrdal noted that swedish officials visiting the u.s. “went to a great deal of trouble to refute the image of sweden as a real-life utopia, pointing out, among other things, that very many swedes were still extremely poor by american standards”. but if it was initially international observers who artic- ulated the notion of swedish exceptionalism, this idea was adopted fairly quickly by swedish elites and the general public alike, such that over time “the collective sense of being exceptional” consti- tuted a mythology that was “the very backbone of the national consciousness” (ruth, : ). in terms of the defining characteristics of swedish exception- alism, we have already pointed to the social democratic welfare state and the idea of the swedish model as the mythology's key early components. gradually other characteristics were merged into the mythology. for example, the fact that, since , the country had been officially neutral and successfully avoided (active) participation in war contributed further to the idea of sweden as a peaceful state that respected international law and human rights, even though the country has been neutral more in rhetoric than in reality (e.g., holmstr€om, ). other components of the more contemporary version of swedish exceptionalism relate to the perceived stability of its political system, an official emphasis on economic and gender equality, and a general anti-racist attitude in society. finally, there is a critical underlying factor supporting the rele- vance of sweden's exemplary exceptionalism, and one that connects to the ideology of “american exceptionalism”: the idea of “newness”. as seen in the above quote from robinson, it was the idea of the newness of america that made it possible for europeans in both north america and europe to project their grandest hopes onto this space. there is an interesting parallel here to the swedish case, because the original foundation of swedish exceptionalism, the folkhem, is notable for its discursive newness. folkhem literally means “people's home”, although that term fails to capture the nuances associated with the concept. the term folkhem most typi- cally refers to the swedish welfare state, but i consider folkhem as consisting of five interconnected projects: ) an ideological project (promoting equality, solidarity and collectivism); ) a state-building project (the creation of a strong, centralized welfare state); ) an economic project (an attempt to provide economic security against the disruption caused by industrialization); ) a social project (freeing individuals from their historical dependence on the family and other (local) social bonds e this has been referred to as “swedish state-individualism”; see berggren & tr€agårdh, ); and ) a nationalist project (an attempt to create a modern (and gendered) swedish nationality, as imagined by experts and tech- nocrats). the link to modernity here is very powerful, swedish identity is nothing if it is not modern, and new. the folkhem was in part about creating a new swedish nation. as jan larsson ( : , my translation) writes: the folkhem was not only a question of building the country. it was also a question about shaping the modern human. so- phisticated techniques of domination [h€arskartekniker] were introduced in order to implement the modern “system change”. the new modernity demanded that society's organization went through an institutional renewal as well as a break with tradi- tions that stood in the way of a modernization of sweden and the creation of the new human. the power of tradition also constituted an obstacle for the scientific standardization of techniques that had the capacity to “l€agga livet till r€atta” and mold the new community around “the good life” for all. l€agga livet till r€atta is a difficult phrase to translate. the closest we can come in english is probably “make life right”, in the sense that it refers to the project whereby “social engineers” and planners would scientifically discover and devise the most efficient and best ways to do things, particularly in the sphere of reproduction. it is important to appreciate the enormity of the folkhem and its asso- ciated projects, as it was about nothing less than the creation of a new, modern nation. while sweden was not alone in this regard among western countries (greif, ), the swedish state was able to capitalize on its history of professional administration to suc- cessfully realize the folkhem's projects. however, in contrast to the u.s., the important role of the idea of newness did not compel an expansionary period for the swedish state, as its modern borders had long since stabilized and its small size did not present an op- portunity for expansion. the psychology and political economy of swedish exceptionalism so newness is a key element of the supposed exceptionalism of both sweden and the u.s. but what we also see in my conceptu- alization of the folkhem are the connections to the psychological d. jansson / political geography ( ) e and political economy perspectives discussed earlier. the folkhem is in part a project involving the creation (we might say engineering) of a new, modern, swedish subjectivity. it is in some respects a utopian nation-building project that seeks to shape how swedes both behave and think (hirdman, ). this nexus of attitude and agency was in the minds of some international observers when they praised the “swedish model”. some commentators, on the other hand, associated sweden's exceptionalism with the state's efforts to navigate the global political economy of industrial capi- talism. a major priority of the folkhem was to soften the disruptive capacity of capitalism while assuring its continued reproduction. i claim that this fateful compromise of the folkhem with capitalism is also what incapacitates the contemporary swedish state as capi- talism matures into what we now call “globalization”, but i do not have the space here to develop that argument. suffice it to say, both the psychological and political economy perspectives are necessary for a nuanced understanding of the folkhem, both as practiced in sweden and as understood by swedish citizens and international observers. if we come back to the concepts of exemplary or passive exceptionalism and missionary or aggressive exceptionalism, we can see that the initial understanding of swedish exceptionalism clearly resided in the notion of sweden as a model that other countries could emulate if they would so choose. but would it not be a stretch to say that sweden's expression of exceptionalism mirrors that of the u.s. also in the case of the missionary or aggressive aspect? sweden's foreign policy has by necessity not been charac- terized by anything close to the aggressiveness of the u.s. in the international arena. there is, however, an interesting strand of swedish exceptionalism that positions sweden as a small state that can have an disproportionately large impact on the world due to its agitation for and promotion of human rights in global organizations and its reputation as a “moral superpower”. for example, the swedish prime minister olof palme once wrote: “as a small state we have as our goal a world in which the principles of sovereignty and non intervention are fully respected. this has also made it possible for sweden, albeit to a modest extent, to build bridges between south and north in a period marked by crisis and the risk of po- larization” (ruth, : ). the political economy perspective is actually relevant here, because as a small country with a limited domestic market, sweden's high-tech economy is very dependent upon global trade. indeed, the government's foreign policy state- ment of , stressed “the importance of sweden's commercial and industrial relations with the developing nations, thus giving further cause for the suspicion, sometimes voiced by sweden's industrial competitors, that the rhetoric of international solidarity is only the pursuit of commerce by other means” (ruth, : ). hence the cognitive dissonance of the country that embraces a “feminist foreign policy” (barry, ) while at the same time cultivating and maintaining relationships with patriarchal dictatorships such as saudi arabia (sweden's “most important export market in the middle east” according to business sweden). as aftonbladet polit- ical columnist katrine marçal ( ) writes (my translation): there is a hypocrisy inbuilt in swedish social democracy. in its relationship to the world and its image of itself and sweden internationally. on the one hand, sweden wants to be the “world's conscience.” … a “moral superpower” ….on the other hand, swedish social democracy has constructed a welfare state that is built on exports. swedish products that need to be sold. to the world. a world that does not only consist of rainbows and https://www.businesssweden.se/export/marknader/mellanostern/ saudiarabien/. gummi bears, but also dictators ….money that swedish com- panies earn goes toward fair wages to swedish workers as well as taxes to the swedish state. that's the way you finance a welfare state ….it's just that the concept “export” also includes “weapons exports”. i would argue the term “hypocrisy” does not quite capture the full truth of the incongruity that marçal describes here, because different social agents have different relationships to the material realities of the relations between sweden and the rest of the world, and to the processes that built the folkhem. indeed, a similar point can be made about u.s. exceptionalism. for some, the problem is ignorance of these material realities. for others, it is denial. in both the u.s. and swedish examples, the political-economic realities reveal the disconnect between the exceptionalist rhetoric and the “deadly” reality. in the following section, we will thus consider some of these questions of ignorance, denial, and hypocrisy. deadly exceptionalisms here we will review in some degree of detail the processes that produce these ideologies of exceptionalism and the blind spots that facilitate their longevity. we will also ask the question: in what ways are u.s. and swedish exceptionalisms deadly? the deadliness of american exceptionalism the term “deadly exceptionalisms” is not intended as a rhetor- ical flourish. i refer specifically to mortality and more generally to diminished life chances and degradation of material living stan- dards, and i would also include under this umbrella any harm to psychological well-being. in this analysis, i employ a materialist definition of racism. in the next section i will look at the mecha- nisms by which u.s. exceptionalism increases the fatality and harms the living standards of certain populations inside and outside the borders of the u.s. historical ignorance, repression, and denial, and the deaths of external others one central contributor to this problem of deadly exceptionalism is that the understanding of the country's history is undermined by the nationalist ideology's warping of the version of u.s. history that is taught in schools (loewen, ). this produces an ignorance of key aspects of u.s. history that would offer a divergent picture of the country's history than that of a beacon for freedom and human rights for all (see, e.g., zinn, ). in some cases, the problem is the ignorance of, for example, the original presence and then genocide of the indigenous population, or the brutal reality of slavery. but in those cases where there is indeed adequate knowledge and awareness of genocide and slavery, one can seek refuge in the sanctity and security of the privileged american exceptionalist national identity. as kemmelmeier and winter ( : ) write, “darker aspects of american history, such as the enslavement of black americans or the genocide of native americans, are virtually never viewed as relevant to the essence of what it means to be an americandan identity that is inherently good”. an additional alternative is, of course, (for the majority white population) to live in denial and repress these uncomfortable and inconvenient facts. consider the fact that “america” is supposed to be exceptional because it represents from the very beginning a break from historical oppressions and a new freedom for its people, at the same time that it is built upon the twin horrors of slavery and genocide (not to mention the relegation of women to second-class status, as well as http://www.businesssweden.se/export/marknader/mellanostern/saudiarabien/ http://www.businesssweden.se/export/marknader/mellanostern/saudiarabien/ d. jansson / political geography ( ) e the reservation of democratic rights to the property-owning class). i would suggest that the experiences of genocide and slavery amount to a considerable trauma for the collective psyche of the nation. repression and denial of this trauma lead to a state of ignorant innocence that enables the foreign policy establishment to so successfully flag “american exceptionalism” as it formulates and justifies u.s. actions in the global arena. this kind of deadliness effects people who are u.s. citizens (through institutional racism, police brutality, job discrimination, and so on), but “american exceptionalism” is also deadly for people outside the u.s. (as in the case of the untold number of civilians who have been killed over the years in u.s. bombing raids). part of the reason for this is, again, ignorance e ignorance of geography in general and specifically of the actions of the u.s. internationally. the irony about the mainstream reaction to the allegations of russian meddling in the u.s. presidential election is that the u.s. has been meddling in foreign elections for decades. the list of “in- terventions” in the affairs of other countries by the u.s. just since is very long e blum ( ) lists dozens of such interventions, by the cia or the u.s. military, ranging from interference in elections to outright invasion. there is very little awareness of many of these events among u.s. citizens and scarcely any reporting. to some extent the reaction to accusations of russian meddling is hypocrisy, but at the same time it is difficult to argue that people are being hypocritical when they are not even aware that their own country has done such things. what explains this ignorance? as noted above, it is in part due to an education system that ignores much of these interventions, and paints the ones that are covered in the most positive terms possible (loewen, ). it is also partly a problem of “fake news”. i agree with donald trump that something like fake news is a problem (see e.g. hedges, ), but of course i do not define it in the same way, because trump's definition does not seem to have anything to do with the veracity of news reporting. the problem is that the mainstream media in the u.s. has for a long time been quite protective of “state secrets” and international “in- terventions” by declining to report on certain activities or hiding their true nature when they are mentioned. a classic account of this foreign policy subservience of the media can be found in herman and chomsky ( ) where the authors introduce a “propaganda model” that is based on a political economy perspective. ignorance of the interference of the u.s. in the democratic institutions of other countries, not to mention more heinous crimes such as “secret” bombings in places like cambodia, undermines the ability of u.s. citizens to demand accountability for past actions and more re- straint in the state's future actions. as a result, more civilians die. this is not to say that there is no opposition to such actions by the u.s. state abroad, but it is certainly difficult to question the notion of “american exceptionalism” or the assumption of the foundational goodness of the u.s. so when trump (of all people) replied “what, you think our country's so innocent?” to a question about vladimir putin being “a killer”, the mainstream media and the political establishment professed to being shocked and insulted (e.g., the new york times, ). it is perhaps telling that the obituary of historian marilyn young, a “feminist, antiwar historian who challenged conventional interpretations of american foreign policy” (roberts, ), was titled “historian who challenged u.s. foreign policy” e as if challenging u.s. foreign policy was note- worthy and unusual enough to be the headline of one's death notice. so there is a significant challenge to those who would seek to make u.s. exceptionalism less deadly. spatial projection and the deaths of internal others a psychological alternative to repression and denial is to project traumas such as slavery onto others. much of my own work has focused on what we can call the spatial projection involved in in- ternal orientalism in the u.s., where the idea of racism is projected onto “the south” and thus confined there in the national imagi- nation (jansson, , ). i call this discourse that creates a moral landscape of uneven racism “southering” e racism is un- derstood as being an inherent part of the social fabric in “the south” in a way that does not apply for the rest of the country (jansson, ). southering makes an important contribution to the repro- duction of u.s. exceptionalism, in part through the way it un- derstands the region as a stage for the (internal) practice of the state's exceptionalism (jansson, ) e the cure for the region's problems is to make “the south” more like “america”. the importance of southering is not only that it helps us to deny the horrors of the past, but also that it blinds us to the horrors of the present. for example, racial segregation is in many parts of the north worse than it is in the south (allen & turner, ; sugrue, ; theoharis and woodard, ). overall in the u.s., african americans, latin@s and native americans live shorter lives and are less healthy than whites (kolata, ; smith, ). in order to sidestep the discourse of southering it is useful to have a materialist, rather than a discursive, definition of racism. ruth gilmore ( : ) defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” this kind of definition foregrounds the material conditions of the lives of individuals and allows for comparisons across group categories, in a way that does not start from assumptions about place or region. so u.s. exceptionalism is “deadly” due to its contribution to group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, thanks in part to the denial and ignorance it facilitates. sweden's deadly exceptionalism let's now move to the swedish case e surely swedish excep- tionalism must be free of much of what i am critiquing in u.s. exceptionalism? the answer to that question is clearly “no” when approached from a materialist perspective. the “deadliness” of sweden's exceptionalism is obviously much more limited than that of the u.s., given the small size of the country and its two-century long lack of (direct military) involvement in foreign wars. even so, we can identify similar kinds of problems with the nationalist ideology of exceptionalism as found in the u.s. case. historical ignorance, projection, and the deaths of internal and external others we saw above the problems with denial and the production of an ignorant innocence, and there seems to be a general agreement that most swedes have very poor knowledge of the era of swedish empire and the country's involvement in colonialism (e.g. weiss, ). (this is consistent with my own experience teaching polit- ical geography at the university level in sweden.) whether this will change as a result of some excellent recent scholarship remains to be seen. past studies of colonialism have been criticized in recent years for whitewashing sweden's colonial experience, romanti- cizing this era in swedish history and emphasizing the contribution of swedish “adventurers” (fur, ). it is indeed fitting that fur ( : ) characterizes the relationship between colonialism and swedish history as “unthinkable connections”; a major obstacle to an increase in the level of knowledge and understanding of swe- den's colonialism is the very self-image of swedes as a humani- tarian superpower. even an otherwise clear-eyed observer such as arne ruth ( : ) can write that sweden has “no colonial past”. a colonialist history fits very uncomfortably with the modern swedish identity produced by the folkhem. indeed, according to one study of history textbooks used in swedish high schools, sweden is d. jansson / political geography ( ) e portrayed as best in the world in terms of freedom, peace, gender equality, welfare and democracy (danielsson malmros, ). this historical ignorance makes it difficult for white swedish citizens to appreciate the capacity for their society to participate in problem- atic activities in the present. a case in point is the swedish gov- ernment's ongoing repression of the sami, in part through legal challenges to their internationally-recognized rights as an indige- nous people. at the same time, i would hesitate to claim that swedish colonialism constitutes a trauma for the collective psyche in quite the same way that slavery and genocide do in the u.s., as in sweden there appears to be less general awareness of this aspect of their history. but i am clearly arguing here in support of a psy- chological approach to understanding swedish exceptionalism. this leads us to the more “deadly” aspects of swedish excep- tionalism, in the sense that i suggested above that it is especially white swedes who are subject to this ignorant innocence. there is not space here to summarize the many excellent studies of racism in sweden; some focus more on the discursive aspects of racism (hirvonen, ; hübinette, ; hübinette & lundstr€om, ; yngvesson, ) while others approach racism from a more materialist perspective (ald�en & hammarstedt, ; arora- jonsson, ; dahlstedt & hertzberg, ; schierup & Ålund, ; schierup, a ̊ lund, & kings, ). it is abundantly clear that sweden is profoundly immersed in racism, a fact that, while it certainly does not make sweden unique, still betrays the excep- tionalist idea of sweden as an explicitly anti-racist society. one's life chances in sweden are to a significant extent determined by corporeal appearance and place of origin (or the place of origin of one's parents). the job market is particularly closed to “swedes of color” and recent immigrants or refugees from (e.g.) africa and the middle east, even when such individuals are highly educated with impressive credentials (alatalo & ostapenko, ; blomqvist, , p. ; goks€or, , p. ). many swedes of color speak of the difficulty of living in a country where one is constantly reminded (due to one's “deviant” skin color) that one does not really belong here (kalonaityt�e, kawesa, & tedros, ; sawyer, ; yngvesson, ), at least not on the same level as white swedes. research on the materialistic outcomes of racism is somewhat hampered by the fact that the swedish government does not collect ethnic or racial data in its surveys (as in, e.g., the u.s.), but satisfies itself with geographical information (i.e., country of origin). this data can still be useful to the extent that geography can be associated with ethnic/racial classifications, but it is not perfect. in fact, based on my own discussion with anti-racist and post- colonial researchers in sweden, it is clear that there is a fairly heated debate regarding the wisdom of advocating for the collec- tion of ethnic/racial data. but existing studies (such as those cited above) clearly show the presence of discrimination in the job and housing markets, and also with regard to scores for secondary school students (hinnerich, h€oglin, & johannesson, ). add to this the violent attacks on refugees, immigrants of color, muslims, and swedes of color that have been occurring lately in sweden. it is not much of an exaggeration to say that “sweden is burning”, given the large number of fires that have been set at already occupied or soon-to-be occupied refugee housing (majlard, a, p. ). swedish children and teachers of color have been targeted for murder by a white swedish terrorist (bilefsky, ), and the country has an active nazi movement that regularly attacks swedes of color and anti-racist marchers (majlard, b, p. ). “afro-swedes” are especially vulnerable, having experienced a i do not want to overemphasize the distinction between “discursive” and “materialist” as there is not necessarily a clear line between these two perspectives in actual research. percent increase in hate crimes since according to one report (kushkush, ). and with regard to the issue of gender, in spite of the country's international reputation as an advocate for women's rights, sweden falls short on many quantitative measures of gender equality. amanda lundeteg, the director of a non-profit that works on improving gender equality in private industry, notes that in serbia about % of corporate ceos are women. in sweden the figure is % (johansson, , p. ). she also notes that there are still significant wage gaps between men and women in sweden. and the over- whelming response of swedish women to the #metoo campaign has revealed that many, many swedish men do not really take the issue of gender equality very seriously at all (see nordberg, ). as in the u.s., spatial projection plays a role in assisting the reproduction of ignorance and denial of social problems such as racism and sexism. madeleine eriksson ( ; ) has written about internal orientalism in sweden, which represents the north of the country alternatively as either an empty wilderness that has resources that the metropolitan south needs to exploit, or as a place where white, male swedes are the opposite of sophisticated urban swedes in the south e they are sexist, racist against their sami neighbors, backwards, violent, lazy, etc. we can also identify a kind of spatial projection that portrays the most southern part of sweden as “where the racists are”, as allan pred ( ) pointed out in his book even in sweden. this projection leads white swedes to the convenient belief that “only the physical violence and fascist sym- bolics of skinheads and right-wing extremist groups have racist consequences” (pred, :. ). these varieties of internal orien- talism help reproduce the swedish exceptionalist ideology that hides the long history of national racism and racialized thinking in sweden, from carl von linn�e (linneaus) in the th century to the state institute for racial biology at uppsala university in the th century, to today's still racialized imagined community of the nation. at the same time, it is important to point out that there is an exclusionary dynamic in sweden that is not exclusively about race, ethnicity, or gender. for example, it is not only swedes of color who face higher unemployment rates; even white swedes who received advanced degrees at prestigious universities outside of sweden are often at a disadvantage in the job market (blomqvist, , p. ). corporeal appearance is not the only important factor in defining in- groups and out-groups in sweden, even if it is a central one. i find it justified to call sweden an “insider society”, where “outsiderness” is determined by a range of factors. there are various mechanisms by which the insiders ensure that only “people like them” are admitted to the in-group. the problem is particularly evident in swedish academia, which is characterized by a system of formal hiring pro- cedures that would seemingly discourage “inbreeding” in the constitution of the tenured faculty in swedish academic de- partments, only to find that inbreeding is rather the norm than the exception (alvesson & rothstein, ; kalantari, ). indeed, certain universities have even repeatedly violated the law so as to ensure that they can hire internal candidates without open competition ( eliasson, ). it is difficult to reconcile the extent of the insider society in sweden with the country's reputation for tolerance and openness, but i would argue that this exclusionary dynamic can be connected back to the folkhem, to the extent that one of the primary goals of the folkhem was to provide different kinds of trygghet for the population. trygghet can be translated as “security”, but the nuances of this term are difficult to capture in translation. it relates to economic security, bodily security, and not least, psychological security. psychological security is understood as being “guaranteed” in part by homogeneity, and thus there is an intense fear of difference in swedish society (which is not helped by the fact that the folkhem can actually never really deliver on its promise of trygghet). and while difference is not only measured d. jansson / political geography ( ) e through racial/ethnic and gender elements (i.e., as inhering in the body), these are certainly the most important exclusionary factors in contemporary sweden. this ignorance, denial and projection have direct consequences for the material and psychological well-being of internal others in sweden. external others are also at risk. the ideology of swedish exceptionalism is based in part on the assumption that sweden works for international peace and human rights. but a key contra- diction to this belief is presented by the swedish weapons industry. sweden is the third-ranked country in the world, behind israel and russia, in terms of arms exports per capita, and ranks around th to th in terms of the total value of exports (jackson, ). about , people are employed in the swedish weapons industry (sullivan, ). the arms industry overall is very corrupt, and sweden has had serious problems with corruption in it own arms sales (braw, ). sweden previously had a successful land mine industry, and mines made in sweden (or manufactured elsewhere using swedish explosives) have been responsible for killing an un- known number of people around the world (physicians for human rights, ). no less than desmond tutu ( , p. ) has criticized sweden for not addressing the contradictions of a public stand for peace at the same time that the government assists swedish cor- porations with the goal of selling weapons systems abroad e often through questionable methods. as indicated earlier in katrine mar- çal's comments, the realities of the global political economy provide incentives for economic gain that are difficult to resist, even for the vaunted swedish folkhem with its feminist foreign policy. to return to the question posed in the title of this essay, it surely matters little to the victims of u.s. or swedish fighter jets, bombs, or land mines that the manufacturer of their particular vector of death is globally hailed by some as a great economic/cultural/military superpower or a moral superpower. just as it matters little to those in the u.s. and sweden who face discrimination and premature death that they theoretically have access to the “american dream” or the swedish folkhem. to be “crushed” is a fate that is hardly ameliorated by the national or international reputation of one's state as a superior model for the world to follow. concluding comments i have argued here that exceptionalism needs to be understood as an outgrowth of the ideology of nationalism, that the idea itself is an ideology that acts to obscure the ways in which the states in question harm people inside and outside their borders. a combi- nation of psychological and political economy approaches illumi- nates the roles of various actors within the nationalist ideology of exceptionalism, from the general public to the political and corporate leadership. i should emphasize that the shortcomings i have criticized in the u.s. and sweden are by no means unique to these countries. as a citizen of both these states, and a scholar, i feel a particular re- sponsibility to both raise political awareness of these problems and offer theorizations of these phenomena that facilitate their analysis. i certainly do not mean to shrug off the very real achievements of both countries, but we still need to be able to critically assess even those achievements that are held most dearly. for example, i would argue that the great success of the swedish welfare state in raising living standards has resulted in the attainment of a “hyper- legitimacy” for the swedish state. thus in sweden, the problem is not a lack of legitimacy of the state but rather an excess of legiti- macy. there are certainly exceptions to this, but the hyper- legitimacy of the state feeds directly into swedish exceptionalism and makes it harder to deal with various problems that directly impinge upon democracy, human rights, and welfare in the coun- try. the idea is that because sweden has great rules on paper, we can conclude that problems like corruption are minimal at best, when in fact they are much deeper than the country's leaders want to admit. in contrast, in the u.s. there is absolutely no foreseeable risk that the state will become hyperlegitimate, rather the problem is more the reverse, such that some things would improve if state intervention in certain areas within the country would be seen as more legitimate than it currently is. it is indeed difficult to strike the right balance in a political system. it may in fact be impossible. this is especially true because we have no strictly political systems, but instead a global political- economic system. it is also true because the entities that inhabit the world political-economic system are human beings, which means that our psychological processes are also key factors in reproducing our local and global injustices. this is why i do not believe in “the revolution”. and yet, the survival of our species is entirely dependent on the realization of multiple revolutions (cf. tazzioli, ). my message is this: “the revolution” is impossible, and we will die without revolutions. this is our human paradox. declarations of interest none. acknowledgements i would like to thank phil steinberg and the editors at political geography for inviting me to give the political geography plenary address at the nordic geographers meeting in stockholm, june . thanks are also due to the participants in that session for their many insightful and valuable questions and comments and to joseph nevins for helpful comments on the manuscript and for productive interrogations. this research was 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http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref 	deadly exceptionalisms, or, would you rather be crushed by a moral superpower or a military superpower? 	introduction 	“american exceptionalism” as a nationalist ideology 	the psychology of exceptionalism 	the political economy of exceptionalism 	swedish exceptionalism and the folkhem 	the psychology and political economy of swedish exceptionalism 	deadly exceptionalisms 	the deadliness of american exceptionalism 	historical ignorance, repression, and denial, and the deaths of external others 	spatial projection and the deaths of internal others 	sweden's deadly exceptionalism 	historical ignorance, projection, and the deaths of internal and external others 	concluding comments 	declarations of interest 	acknowledgements 	references some things are rarely discussed in public – on the discourse of corruption in healthcare comment on "we need to talk about corruption in health systems" some things are rarely discussed in public – on the discourse of corruption in healthcare comment on “we need to talk about corruption in health systems” peter stiernstedt* id abstract in an editorial titled “we need to talk about corruption in health systems” the authors hutchinson, balabanova, and mckee hope to encourage a wider conversation about corruption in the health sector. such conversations are difficult to hold for at least five reasons; it is hard to define corruption; corruption may allow some fragile health systems to subsist, shifting blame – are those involved in anti-corruption research colluding with corrupt officials; the legitimacy of studying corruption; and, that far too little is known about how to tackle corruption. this commentary explores those reasons and concludes that the authors make a strong case for a more open and directed discussion about corruption. keywords: corruption, anti-corruption, governance, healthcare copyright: © the author(s); published by kerman university of medical sciences. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: stiernstedt p. some things are rarely discussed in public – on the discourse of corruption in healthcare: comment on “we need to talk about corruption in health systems.” int j health policy manag. ; ( ): – . doi: . /ijhpm. . *correspondence to: peter stiernstedt email: peter.stiernstedt@uwl.ac.uk article history: received: april accepted: june epublished: june commentary school of law and criminology, university of west london, london, uk. http://ijhpm.com int j health policy manag , ( ), – doi . /ijhpm. . the title of this commentary is borrowed from the opening sentence of an editorial by the authors; hutchinson, balabanova, and mckee. in it the authors wish to address the health communities’ dirty secret with the intention to encourage a wider conversation within the health sector. the editorial opens broadly establishing the nature of some aspects of our lives and discourse that we wish to keep private. an example given is how sexual abuse traditionally remained secret, and how the #metoo movement has not only empowered victims to speak out but has also progressed the overall discourse of a sensitive topic. they stipulate that talking about abuse of different kinds facilitate the process of addressing and changing things for the better. the focus under consideration here is the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” – to use the definition of corruption by transparency international. thus, by shedding light on why conversations about corruption in the health sector are difficult to hold, the authors strive to nurture the conversation within and among the many national and international stakeholders. this is a laudable ambition which receives complete concurrence also from this author, a scholar with similar interests as a corruption researcher. the lingering question is; who benefits from long, technical discussions over why something that should work in theory but does not work in practice? breaking the status quo would mean to question it, and in doing so talking openly about and problematizing corruption. to that end, corruption is established as a problem also in the health sector where the authors lean on the findings from the corruption barometer by transparency international. here it was reported that in of countries surveyed, over % citizens viewed their health systems as corrupt or very corrupt. a member of the general public with little or no insight in to previous research into the measurement of corruption might be astonished at such a result, or sceptical, particularly around the inherent difficulties with measuring corruption using perceptions based indices. the figures, albeit from , are striking and might inspire a detailed read of the whole editorial. despite methodological flaws, the survey by transparency international achieved a significant raising of awareness of the issue in the sector. however, when an academic or professional with a vested interest in corruption research suggests the importance of the findings, warning bells go off – or at least they should. to what end are these figures used; are we talking about just raising awareness or is it something more, like design and implementation of anti-corruption measures or even policy-making? the authors, who have worked as researchers on an international project on corruption, have witnessed how when describing achievements health ministers rarely discuss the role of corruption and the weaknesses of governance that often underlies it. to that end the authors have identified five reasons to why fruitful conversations on corruption are difficult to hold; it is hard to define corruption, corruption may allow some fragile health systems to keep going, blame shifting – are those involved in anti-corruption research http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /ijhpm. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - stiernstedt international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – colluding with corrupt officials, the legitimacy of studying corruption, and, that far too little is known about how to tackle corruption. first, it is hard to define corruption. it is here that conversations on corruption can get stuck – or at least lose their full potential of achieving some meaningful change where definitions proliferate and contradict or are noticeable by their absence. as pointed out by the authors the united nations convention against corruption does not even try to define its subject, instead, is merely lists a number of corrupt practices. acknowledging the many interpretations of the concept of corruption, the editorial also contains a definition developed by the cochrane collaboration as “the abuse or complicity in abuse, of public or private position, power or authority to benefit oneself, a group, an organization or others close to oneself; where the benefits may be financial, material or non-material.” while there are no arguments for this particular definition being more viable than any of the other more established versions it does present something more tangible and add to the overall understanding of the phenomenon. in terms of nurturing an open discussion perhaps this is the most appropriate approach as corruption can take many forms, not all of which may be recognized as corruption by everyone. the transformation from definitions to effective anti-corruption instruments and policy is obviously another question. second, corruption may allow some fragile health systems to keep going, and if corruption is removed without addressing other potential weaknesses in the health system an equitable delivery may suffer. an unintended consequence of the eradication of corruption to support the most vulnerable (in need of a functioning and equitable health system) could thus end up hurting them even more. this idea of corruption fundamentally constructed as problem-solving is dealt with in-depth by marquette and peiffer in their examination of why anti-corruption initiatives fail. they recognise that corruption can in fact offer a way of dealing with socio- economic problems, particularly in weak institutional environments. the proposed solution is that anti-corruption interventions need to better understand the functions that corruption may serve, and find alternative ways to solve the problems that people face. this approach resonates well with the overall objective of nurturing an open discussion to increase mutual understanding. third, blame shifting, where it is easy for those involved in corruption to blame other, less powerful actors as corrupt and in doing so deflect attention from themselves. the question of how to conduct research on corruption is not easily answered. research can present the individual with the unexpected moral dilemma as to whether or not immediately to act upon what is being discovered but thereby risk losing valuable access to information. this information could perhaps not benefit those already affected but, over a period of time lead to both better policy and effective legislation. alternatively, the researcher also runs the risk of becoming the target and effectively blamed for negatively influencing the delicate power balances. this may involve not just a risk for career and reputation but also to life and limb. fourth, there is a concern over the legitimacy of studying corruption and the risk of diverting attention from other, possibly more important, issues. this fourth reason is supported by a article by a turkish scholar claiming that corruption may be a manifestation of a neoliberal attack on the state. neoliberal is here interpreted as a politicised definition of corruption, where efforts are concentrated on fighting against legally definable forms of corruption. it should be noted, however, that when looking at the work of this scholar one is struck by the author’s own opposition of the ideas encapsulated in neoliberalism. in itself this anti-neoliberal stance is not an argument for neglecting to question the legitimacy of corruption studies, but rather a call for a more nuanced picture. the authors of the editorial clearly evidence that the dismantling of the public health system in anglo-western societies in the reagan-thatcher era noticeably failed in terms of preventing corruption in the health sector. nevertheless, questioning the legitimacy of corruption studies should arguably not be confined to any one governance system. instead and in line with the overall message of the editorial such studies actively encourage an open and broad discourse of corruption. fifth and finally, despite years of efforts to uphold good governance, far too little is known about how to tackle corruption. the authors cite the cochrane report on interventions to reduce corruption in the health sector that found no studies exist which provide empirical evidence of successful strategies reducing corruption. going beyond the health sector, this seems to be true also on a general level, as u research show that most anti-corruption initiatives fail. regardless of sector the causes of failure and success however seem to be similar; failure occurs because of “design-reality gaps,” a mismatch between the expectations built into the design of the anti-corruption initiative as compared to on- the-ground realities. conversely, success can be achieved by minimising or closing those gaps, but beyond that it is the politics of the situation that determines success. the intricacies of such politics are recognised by the authors, partly due to the reluctance to speak openly about corruption. the authors argue that even if an agreement is reached to address corruption there is still an issue of effectively triaging the problem. priorities must be balanced between what is practically achievable and politically viable. the authors deduce the importance of understanding the reasons behind why corrupt practices thrive in the health sector. such understanding is created by constantly asking questions about who benefits and in what way, as this could shed light on the underlying causes. further, and perhaps most importantly, the more that is understood about the causes in general the more is also understood about the extent to which they can be changed. from here it becomes possible to develop pragmatic solutions. it is suggested that the sustainable development goals (sdgs), committed by the governments of the world to be achieved by , could be leveraged to tackle corruption in the health sector. hence, even if corruption may not yet be spoken about fully and openly in the halls of power at least it is shown that there is scope to incorporate the subject in the sdgs. there stiernstedt international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – are arguably many stakeholders within countries and the international community when it comes to health-related sdgs. those could be unified through having a more open debate about corruption and how research can help bridge any design-reality gap. through the work of zyglidopoulos et al the authors outline four broad paths of corruption research; individual, organisational, national and cultural. while the paths are not claimed to be presented in order of importance, perhaps they are or at least should be treated as. in doing so the authors not only make a strong case for an open discussion about corruption but also provide a direction for that discussion. a direction that would allow policy- makers, academic researchers and health sector professionals to discuss some things that are rarely considered in public. ethical issues not applicable. competing interests author declares that he has no competing interests. author’s contribution ps is the single author of the paper. references . hutchinson e, balabanova d, mckee m. we need to talk about corruption in health systems. int j health policy manag. ; ( ): - . doi: . /ijhpm. . . jain a, nundy s, abbasi k. corruption: medicine’s dirty open secret. bmj. ; :g . doi: . /bmj.g . transparency international - what is corruption? https://www. transparency.org/what-is-corruption. accessed april , . . transparency international. global corruption barometer report. https://www.transparency.org/gcb . accessed october , . published . . andersson s, heywood p. the politics of perception: use and abuse of transparency international’s approach to measuring corruption. polit stud. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j. - . . .x . united nations. convention against corruption. new york: united nations; . . gaitonde r, oxman ad, okebukola po, rada g. interventions to reduce corruption in the health sector. cochrane database syst rev. ( ):cd . doi: . / .cd .pub . marquette h, peiffer c. corruption and collective action. u research paper . https://www.u .no/publications/corruption-and- collective-action. published . . bedirhanoğlu p. the neoliberal discourse on corruption as a means of consent building: reflections from post-crisis turkey. third world quarterly. ; ( ): - . . heeks r, mathisen h. understanding success and failure of anti- corruption initiatives. bergen: chr. michelsen institute (u brief); . . khan mh. introduction: political settlements and the analysis of institutions. afr aff (lond). ; ( ): - . doi: . / afraf/ady . mackey tk, vian t, kohler j. the sustainable development goals as a framework to combat health-sector corruption. bull world health organ. ; ( ): - . doi: . /blt. . . zyglidopoulos s, hirsch p, martin de holan p, phillips n. expanding research on corporate corruption, management, and organizations. los angeles, ca: sage publications; . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . https://doi.org/ . /bmj.g https://www.transparency.org/what-is-corruption https://www.transparency.org/what-is-corruption https://www.transparency.org/gcb https://doi.org/ . % fj. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . % fj. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . / .cd .pub https://www.u .no/publications/corruption-and-collective-action https://www.u .no/publications/corruption-and-collective-action https://doi.org/ . /afraf/ady https://doi.org/ . /afraf/ady https://doi.org/ . /blt. . microsoft word - . . with name revisions licking planets and stomping on buildings.docx 	 licking planets and stomping on buildings: children's interactions with curated spaces in virtual reality dylan yamada-rice, school of communication, royal college of art introduction this visual essay draws upon data from a commercially-funded project on which i was a lead researcher (yamada-rice et al, ). the study was undertaken to develop a set of best practices for the production of virtual reality (vr) content for children. the project combined large-scale quantitative data from a global survey with qualitative methods used to observe and interview a smaller sample of - year-olds. there was also a health and safety element that tested for changes in vision and balance pre and post vr use. this article draws from the qualitative dataset that investigated children’s interaction with a range of vr content and devices, the aspects that engaged them and how easy it was to use. like the graphic work of jones & woglom ( ) this visual essay is a ‘mutating text’ (p. ) that uses varied visual forms (graphic narratives, screenshots of vr content, line drawings and photography) to connect with and make visible aspects of children’s engagement with spaces and objects in vr. the varied visual media i produced (of which only some are contained in this essay) provided insight into the meaning of the data through their use as either transcription, analysis or as a means of exploring its connection with theory. it is believed that the findings gained from these experimental ways of exploring the data could not have been achieved by using only one visual means. thus it is my intention to present and discuss some of the variety of visual methods used in order to show how the combination provided ‘material- discursive analysis…a materially rich and complex manner of inquiring into and analyzing’ (ibid, p. ) children’s use of virtual spaces. the findings of which ultimately link with theories of children's geographies that highlight how: ...investigations of people’s sense of place remain an important avenue of inquiry to help understand how people develop relationships with their selves and with their environment. (bartos, , p. ) this special issue of children’s geographies explores this in relation to the specific context of young children in museums. this visual essay makes a contribution to this field by providing knowledge of children's meaning-making and engagement with virtual environments. children’s use of vr is both directly and more abstractly related to deepening our understanding of young children within curated spaces. firstly, the museum sector has a growing interest in immersive technologies. vr is already used in a range of ways both to offer virtual experiences within the physical museum (e.g. the franklin institute) and to widen participation by offering off-site virtual museum tours (e.g. the british museum). additionally, emerging g technologies show early signs of making it possible to augment virtual three-dimensional objects into physical spaces. thus illustrating a possible future in which knowledge about how children engage with virtual curated spaces might need further consideration by the museum sector. at a basic level parallels can be drawn between children’s experiences of traditional museum spaces and that of some vr content explored in the study presented here. 	 for example, google earth vr, like many museum spaces, has not been designed specifically for children and the space is highly curated. the google content takes the user on a tour of famous world landmarks. like the decisions made by museum curators as to how to group objects within a designed space (mcdonald ), so too the google creators have decided which cities the user should visit, and within them which landmarks specifically. at the other end of the spectrum the vr game job simulator (owlchemy labs) has been designed to encourage interaction with content and appeal to a younger audience. in this way it is comparable to museum collections that have been designed to include hands-on experiences for children. while reflecting on vr content such as that above this article provides insight into how the findings about young people’s engagement with virtual environments from the study i conducted are similar to those of studies that have considered children’s interaction with physical museum spaces. for example, dick’s ( ) work has shown: …that discovery centres are highly social spaces in which cognitive processing is only one aspect…[and] that the twin dimensions of the social and the sensory are also paramount in governing children’s responses to exhibits. (dicks, , p. ) the remainder of this article is divided into two sections to provide more in depth illustration and discussion of how the vr study findings support those of dicks ( ) that as with physical spaces ( ) social and ( ) sensory means were also paramount to the ways in which children engaged with virtual spaces and content. sensory meaning-making the body, its movement and related senses has been documented as a means by which humans understand new experiences (see e.g. longhurst et al, ). also hackett ( ) suggests movement is a ‘key element’ of young children’s multimodal communicative practices, which includes ‘place making activities’ to understand museum spaces and their exhibits (p. ). in order to comprehend the role of movement to children’s meaning-making in vr i produced a series of line drawings of a child’s body when using google earth vr. these were traced at periodic intervals from screenshots of the video-recorded observations. the drawings were used to analyse the extent to which children’s movement in vr was similar/ different to how they interact in other spaces. simplifying the data by removing colour, sound and background details showed similarities with hackett’s ( ) work in museums that children were ‘zigging and zooming all over the place’. when i animated the line drawings using stop-motion it further visualized how children’s movement in vr is not dissimilar to how a dancer might communicate (figures and ): insert figure 	 figure : line drawing used to understand children’s movement in google earth vr © dylan yamada-rice insert figure figure : movement in dance. image © laurent ziegler 	 the transduction of the video data into lines also drew on ideas from ingold ( ) who writes that lines are an output of a vast variety of human communication practices from sound, to walking and writing. in relation to this ingold writes: …as walking talking and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go. ( , p. ) thus the production of a series of line drawings placed one on top of the other also made it possible to explore further ingold’s ideas. by highlighting how the lines of the child’s body moved within the confines of a physical space (depicted by the confines of the page on which i drew) i concurred that as with engagement in other spaces movement, and the lines that appear as a result, are an important parts of human meaning-making endeavors in vr too. additionally, i produced a comic strip style form of data transcription (figure ) that combined children’s specific interactions with virtual elements in the vr content with either their hands or feet. to do so i used varied visual media that included line drawings of hand/ feet gestures, speech bubbles and screenshots of the vr content. this formed a type of multimodal transcript that drew to the fore the importance of sense to children’s meaning-making practices in curated vr spaces. it could be argued that the full-bodied nature of this type of engagement necessitates a certain type of materiality of data analysis and that ‘this and other graphica texts make something possible… [such as] the ways in which different mode of texts [bring about] different ways of thinking’ (jones & woglom, , p. ). for as bennett ( ) writes: ...seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. these material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, enable or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even "respect". (bennett, p.ix) graphica production are one way of giving attention to these aspects. insert figure google earth interactions 	 	 	 during the observation sessions of children using google earth vr several children showed a desire to taste the virtual planet earth. this caused children to walk around the physical environment (in which they were using the vr device) with their tongue out, something that was confusing for their parents watching on. replaying the video- recorded observations and simultaneously conducting a literature review i began drawing graphic narratives related to this data to make better sense of theoretical ideas (e.g. dewey, ; longhurst et al, ; tuan, ; bennett, ) about the ways in which children experience new materials in order to explore why this was happening: insert figure graphic narrative ( pages) 	 	 	 	 	 	 taken out of context the page of the graphic narrative with the dip dab sweet seems strange, surreal even. this is exactly how parents reacted when they saw their child’s interaction with earth in the vr environment. as children crawled, stomped and walked around the room with their tongue out trying to the lick the virtual planet their parents said things like "they don't normally act like this", "i am so sorry, i don't know what has happened to them”, and "make them stop doing that". the newness of the technology and the perceived separation of the user’s sensory experience to the parent sat outside the immersive virtual environment seemed to exemplify that the way in which adults and children interact with spaces and materials are fundamentally different from one another. drawing the dip dab sweet narrative made it possible to think more deeply about the importance of memory to sense and meaning making: what is more important is that this structure being created in the brain uses as its building materials not only the external input supplied by the sensory organs but also memories that are invoked by this input…memories not only lead the recipient to voluntary ruminate on the past but called upon in succession as the brain receives outside stimuli also act to hash out an image for understanding new information. (hara, , p. ) thus the process of producing a graphic narrative allowed me to realise how the medium can be an important way of exploring the connection between data and theory. like sousanis ( ), i found that comics are a suitable medium for understanding and displaying complex ideas and stories. the final section explores visual means that were used to understand the importance of social interaction to children’s meaning-making practices in vr. social meaning-making drawing on falk and dierking ( ), dicks ( ) writes that: …there is now a consensus in visitor research that visitors experience museum environments in highly social ways, in which personal, social and physical context overlap. (dicks, , p. ) likewise, contrary to what might be perceived as an isolated experience, the children in this study engaged with virtual environments in very social ways. once again comics were used as a medium for understanding the nature of these social interactions. for as, sousanis ( ) writes the aesthetics of comics can be used for research analysis because ‘the visual form is never a secondary pursuit- from the start, form and meaning are united and equally inform one another’ (p. ). figure shows how the form of the comic below made it possible to gain insight into two children’s social interaction while one played on the vr game job simulator. firstly, by colour coding the speech bubbles so that white represented the child wearing the vr headset and black for their friend watching their play on a computer monitor while joining in the role-play from outside the virtual environment. additionally, the decision to include screenshots of the vr content made it possible to comprehend how social interaction was encouraged by the aesthetic style of the game. thus in combination with the interview data from the child-participants i was able to draw conclusions that the low-modality (unrealistic) images contained in job 	 simulator encouraged more role-play than in higher modality content with more realistic imagery. insert image job simulator 	 	 	 such examples show the extent to which children's use of virtual environments are very social and that this was particularly the case with open-ended vr content that used less realistic images. this ties with theoretical ideas of comic artist and scholar mccloud ( ) that has shown how more simplistic imagery allows viewers to transpose their own narratives onto that of the artist’s. conclusion this visual essay has shown how, as with studies into children’s meaning-making in physical spaces such as museums, but also, educational settings, green spaces and play areas (hackett et al ), young people’s interactions with virtual spaces, objects and texts within them are also experienced through sensory and social means. the findings were represented to allow the reader to contemplate the similarities and differences between how children embody and engage with the 'nonmaterial' of virtual curated spaces as opposed to physical museums and their material objects, and also how this manifests in physical interactions and experiences. finally, the article sought to show how the combination of ‘drawing and writing facilitated understandings that couldn’t be attained otherwise’ (sousanis, , p. ) and as such there remains a need to continue to push for new methods to make sense of data about children’s geographies. dedication i dedicate this visual essay to my good friend and creative ally lisa procter. lisa gave me feedback on an initial draft but took her life before it was accepted. at a pertinent time when there is widespread concern about the abuse of early career actors in hollywood and the proceeding #metoo campaign, i would like to pay testament to the way that lisa spoke out about the psychological and physical harm that exists in universities. thus i call to arms senior academics to help protect those more junior from all forms of academic abuse of power. 	 references bartos, a. e. . “children sensing place.” emotion, space and society : – . bennett, j. . vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham,usa: duke university press. dewey, j. / . art as experience. los angeles: perigee books. dicks, b. . “interacting with…what? exploring children’s social and sensory practices in a science discovery centre.” ethnography and education ( ): – . falk, j. h, and l. d dierking. . the museum experience. washington, d.c.: whalesback books. hackett, a. . “zigging and zooming all over the place: young children’s meaning making in the museum.” journal of early childhood literacy ( ): – . hara, k. . designing design. zurich: lars muller. ingold, t. . lines: a brief history. london & new york: routledge. jones, s., and j. f. woglom. . on mutant pedagogies: seeking justice and drawing change in teacher education. rotterdam. boston/taipei: sense publishers. longhurst, r., l. johnston, and e. ho. . “a visceral approach: cooking ‘at home’ with migrant women in hamilton, new zealand.” transactions of the institute of british geographers : – . macdonald, s. . behind the scenes at the science museum. oxford: berg. mccloud, s. . understanding comics: the invisible art. new york: william morrow. seymour, j., a. hackett, and l. procter. . “introduction: spatial perspectives and childhood studies.” in ( ) children’s spatialities embodiment, emotion and agency, edited by j. seymour, a. hackett, and l. procter. palgrave mcmillian uk. seymour, j., a. hackett, and l. procter (eds). . children’s spatialities embodiment, emotion and agency. basingstoke: palgravemacmillan. sousanis, n. . “thinking in comics: an emerging process.” in ( ) arts-based research in education: foundations for practice, edited by m. cahnmann-taylor and r. siegesmund, – . new york & london: routledge. chapter . tuan, y. . space and place: the perspective of experience. yamada-rice, d., f. mushtaq, a. woodgate, d. bosmans, a. douthwaite, i. douthwaite, w. harris, et al. .children and virtual reality: emerging possibilities and challenges. accessed january . www.digilitey.eu yoshitake, s. . it might be an apple. translated from japanese. london: thames & hudson. nvs- - - -d-burkhard; neo-victorian studies : ( ) pp. - doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction and on her neo-victorian novel set in stone denise burkhard (university of bonn, germany) abstract: linda newbery, an acclaimed writer of historical fiction for children and (young) adults, won the costa children’s book award for her neo-victorian novel set in stone ( ). in this interview, linda newbery answers questions regarding set in stone, as well as more general questions on writing historical fiction. she elaborates on topics such as intertextual relations and inspirations, research before writing a historical novel, narrative voice and her twenty-first century position as an author. she furthermore answers questions regarding polly’s march ( ) and until we win ( ), which are both set at the beginning of the twentieth century shortly before the outbreak of wwi and focus on the suffragette movement. keywords: historical fiction, linda newbery, neo-victorian fiction, set in stone, young- adult fiction. ***** linda newbery’s ya (young adult) neo-victorian novel set in stone won the costa children’s book award in . in this “[neo-]victorian gothic mystery” (costa book awards : n.p.), she addresses the powerless position of girls and women in a patriarchal victorian society and explores incest as well as child sexual abuse and its traumatic repercussions. these thematic foci resonate with those of “[t]he neo-victorian” more generally, which, “after all, demonstrates a prurient penchant for revelling in indecency and salaciousness, as well as exposing past iniquities” (kohlke : ), and make her novel a relevant contribution to the field. the fact that newbery’s novel is marketed at ya readers deserves particular attention, because it seems that, in recent years, neo-victorian literature for this target audience has increasingly gained popularity and critical acclaim. for instance, frances hardinge’s ya the lie tree ( ) won the prestigious costa book of the year award and is only the second children’s/ya novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded in https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd . in this respect, newbery’s award-winning set in stone, published almost ten years prior to hardinge’s novel, can be regarded as a comparatively early contribution to the field of neo-victorian ya literature, which has grown exponentially ever since. set in stone’s thematic focus on child sexual abuse is particularly appropriate to the text’s setting in the nineteenth century, in which the age of consent was only gradually raised, with incest not recognised as a criminal offence until the passage of the punishment of incest act in . the main story of set in stone takes place in , a time when the age of consent had already been raised to with the criminal law amendment act of . in the course of the story, the governess charlotte agnew and the art tutor samuel goodwin uncover that juliana, the eldest daughter of the farrow family, has been sexually abused and impregnated by her father ernest farrow. even though charlotte finds out “that juliana must have been barely seventeen at the time of the child’s conception” (newbery : ), the suicide letter by juliana’s mother suggests that the sexual assaults started much earlier: “she [juliana] told me that my husband – not once but many times over the last year – has visited her at night in her bedroom” (newbery : , original italics) to abuse her. both juliana and her sister marianne, who apparently witnessed the sexual abuse of her elder sister, are left deeply traumatised. like other neo-victorian novels, set in stone thus addresses and explores various concerns (sexual abuse, victimisation, incest and trauma) that, despite mounting social and legal attention paid to children and child protection over the course of the intervening twentieth century, still remain topical today. despite the success of set in stone, this text remains linda newbery’s only novel-length neo-victorian publication to date. however, her neo-victorian children’s story mr darwin and the ape boy ( ), illustrated by dave hopkins and currently out of print, addresses disability in the context of charles darwin’s theories on human evolution. while some of her novels are set in the twenty-first century, many of her numerous other children’s fictions and ya novels feature historical settings in the twentieth century, frequently during the two world wars. her novel the shell house ( ), for instance, which juxtaposes two time levels, being set during wwi as well as in the present, was shortlisted for the carnegie medal in as well as for the guardian children’s fiction prize. sisterland ( ), set both during wwii and the present, was also https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd shortlisted for the carnegie medal in the year of its publication. her novels written for middle-grade readers have been equally successful, with several of her novels being nominated for the carnegie medal, including the brockenspectre ( ), the treasure house ( ), at the firefly gate ( ), and the sandfather ( ). meanwhile her novel catcall ( ) is the silver medal winner of the nestlé children’s book prize (for readers between and years), as well as having been shortlisted for both the lincolnshire young people’s book award and the calderdale book of the year award. the beginnings of linda newbery’s career as a writer can be traced back to her childhood, when she was only eight years old and extremely fond of an abridged and illustrated version of anna sewell’s black beauty ( ). she remembers that she read sewell’s story on her own and that it has influenced her deeply: “from then on”, she writes on her website, “i was a secret writer – filling exercise books with stories which i hid in my wardrobe” (newbery n.d.: n.p.). despite her early interest in stories and her childhood writing exercises, it took some time before she submitted a longer text for publication. her first novel, run with the hare, targeting a ya readership, that, similar to black beauty, thematically revolves around animal welfare and rights, was published in : her writing career was about to begin. since then, she has become a prolific writer, whose texts address a wide range of topics: among them, for instance, the suffragette movement in polly’s march ( ) and until we win ( ) and mental health issues in the damage done ( ). the following interview, in which linda newbery answers questions concerning set in stone as well as questions regarding writing historical fiction more generally, was conducted in two parts via email in and . *** burkhard: what attracted you to the victorian era when writing set in stone? was there anything particularly intriguing about it for you? newbery: set in stone grew from a writing exercise i did with students in a workshop, during which i began writing my own story opening without https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd thinking about it much. in about fifteen minutes i wrote what turned into the first pages of set in stone – a lone traveller, on foot, approaching a remote house in moonlight. everything else sprang from that. unusually for me, i’d started in first person – i usually favour third – but found that i liked it, and had immediately started using victorian diction. the next spur was shortly afterwards, in tate britain, where i saw relief carvings by eric gill. so it wasn’t so much a decision – more that promising ingredients started to come together. that’s how i usually begin a book. burkhard: how much research do you conduct before writing a historical novel (either for children or adult readers)? do you, at some point, develop a ‘feel’ for the particular historical period you are writing about? or are you more interested in parallels and continuities between different historical periods? newbery: it’s very important to develop a ‘feel’ for the period, by immersing myself in fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, art histories and suchlike, and visiting places where possible (for instance i went to blackwells near windermere as a fine example of an arts and crafts house of the exact period of set in stone). and of course parallels and continuities are important, such as the women’s movement in the early twentieth century and now. in until we win, lizzy dislikes fox-hunting, which i knew would chime with the feelings of many readers as well as with my own; and there’s a sort of #metoo moment, set against her mother’s assumption that she should be grateful for whatever male attentions she’s offered. burkhard: your novel set in stone bears an interesting title, which indirectly refers to the stone carvings that are central to the story. the cover of the definitions edition ( ), however, focuses more strongly on painting and implicitly refers to samuel godwin’s occupation as art tutor at fourwinds. painting as an occupation and (female) accomplishment is, of course, often referred to in victorian novels, whereas stonemasonry is a less common topic. why have you decided to include both painting and stonemasonry in your novel? is there anything that you find particularly intriguing about stone carvings? https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd newbery: sometimes the themes and meanings in a novel emerge through the writing, rather than in advance. i first thought of making a stone-carver central to the story because of the caryatid photograph i sent you – i wondered who had carved it, whether the face was real or imagined, etc., and what skill it would take to carve so beautifully. then, in tate britain, i saw the work of eric gill (who i’d always liked) and began to explore his work more thoroughly, especially his four winds. (he actually post-dates gideon waring in my novel, but i had in mind a style for gideon that approaches eric gill’s). as i wrote the book i realised that at its heart is the question of what people want to leave behind them – how they want to make a mark on the future. for samuel, as a young man, he wants to achieve fame as a painter – though in maturity he changes his mind about fame and notoriety. ernest farrow has built a beautiful house – but also he wants to live on through his descendants, and especially wants a son. what i found interesting about stone-carving is that it is largely anonymous, yet highly skilled and dedicated work, so i wanted to set gideon and his work against the more obvious ambitions of the other two. (gideon’s words to samuel in chapter sum up a lot of this. ) gideon takes pride in his work and sees it lasting into the future, but has no drive for personal or worldly success. working in stone is also humbling, because of the time-scale – working a material that is million years old, in the case of portland stone, and following traditions dating back to medieval and even roman times. the skills and techniques, and even the tools, have hardly changed (apart from electric cutters and grinders, of course). and the work can’t be hurried or skimped. this interests me so much that in my new current work in progress, set in the eighties and the present, one of the characters is a female stone- carver who specialises in letter-cutting and has set up her own workshop. burkhard: it has been argued that the woman in white ( ) was one of the precursor texts to set in stone (see cox : ). how would you describe the intertextual dialogue between your novel and wilkie collins’s text or the victorian era and its literary productions more generally? have you also been influenced and/or inspired by neo-victorian novels or audio- visual adaptations? https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd newbery: the influence of the woman in white is evident, i think, in the opening episode where samuel sees marianne wandering by the gates of fourwinds. but i was actually more influenced by collins’s no name ( ) – a wonderful novel, in my view, which deserves to be ranked alongside the woman in white and the moonstone ( ) – and in particular its use of letters to carry the plot forward and to skip over periods of time. also, by the situation of the sisters in no name when, because of their father’s sudden death, they are left dispossessed. this influenced the two sisters in my novel who know that they would never be believed, when their father is so respectable, plausible and authoritative. i was interested by the ‘sensation novel’ rather than by the gothic, although there are gothic elements in my book: the deceptions and betrayals and misdeeds in the story all come about through human agency, not from anything supernatural. the only hint of the supernatural is in marianne’s intuition about the sculpture in the lake. burkhard: in the clip on set in stone that was shown at the costa book of the year awards ceremony in february , you said that power plays an important role in your novel and that the female characters essentially have none and are completely helpless (see costa book awards : n.p.). their position, as inferior to and dependent on men, is often already (in)directly addressed in victorian novels featuring female middle-class characters. it has, however, been argued by critics that “neo-victorian fiction’s representation of the victorian past is also the lens through which a variety of present concerns are examined” (carroll : , original emphasis) and that “neo-victorian texts will one day be read for the insights they afford into twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural history and socio-political concerns” (kohlke : ). when you wrote set in stone were there also contemporary events that influenced your depiction of women as well as your decision to address sexual abuse in your novel? newbery: well, i suppose so. i was thinking that juliana, as well as constance, know that they simply wouldn’t be believed if they related what had happened. an influential man like ernest farrow would easily be able to dismiss any claims of abuse as female hysteria or delusion. contemporary events – well, as i write this, the report on the [jimmy] savile enquiry has just been released ... victims feeling ashamed https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd and even guilty for their own abuse is possibly a feature of every age, though things have changed/are changing in recent years as it begins to come to light just how prevalent child/sexual abuse has been in various contexts. burkhard: most of the plot of set in stone is set in the late nineteenth century. however, the prologue, the epilogue and also the fictional times article at the end are set in the twentieth century, the former two in , the latter in . why did you choose to frame your story by these dates? do they have a special significance either politically or socially? newbery: i was interested in arts and crafts architecture and decor, which was what made me decide to set the main part of the book in – so that fourwinds, a beautiful architect-designed house, would be state of the art (with electricity!) and new. that meant that the first world war wouldn’t be far off, though i didn’t think of either the coda involving thomas being shell-shocked or of samuel’s obituary until i neared the end of the novel. also, of course, both coda and obituary allowed me to skip forward and reveal what had happened to the characters after the main part of the story. burkhard: in your epilogue, which is set in , you give glimpses at the lives of the main characters and which paths they have chosen for their lives. in this context, you also disclose what happens to thomas, the child resulting from the sexual abuse of juliana by her father. why was it important for you to include his fate? why can he not be the heir to fourwinds that ernest farrow wanted him to be? newbery: this was something i hadn’t worked out at the start, but through the writing it came to me as the perfect way to end. ernest farrow has gone to extreme lengths to provide himself with a son to inherit fourwinds. he does have a son, and the son does inherit, but with this twist. i liked the irony of things working out just as ernest farrow wanted, yet not. also, though this isn’t explained, it gives thomas a kind of protection against knowing the irregularity of his conception. he is quite happy. this also gave me the chance to show marianne presiding over the fourwinds community as an artist in her own right, and to provide that continuity. if thomas had https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd been killed in the war, the house would have passed to a more distant relative, or been sold. burkhard: marianne is totally obsessed with the idea of finding the missing west wind and putting it in its proper place on the west wall of fourwinds. why is she so keen on finding and putting the wind on the wall and what does the west wind stand for? newbery: well, she’s seen the work in progress, and either the stone itself (the one that ends up in the lake) or a drawing of it. she is aware of the injustice to gideon waring and respects him as an artist. i think she has made a kind of superstition of the wind carving, as you suggest – that while the west wall is blank, the wounds imposed by her father are still open and raw. but i wanted her feelings to be confused and inarticulate – she even expresses resentment that her father didn’t turn his attentions to her. burkhard: once the west wind carving is recovered from the bottom of the lake, it becomes apparent that gideon waring delivered the carving as promised but decided to carve the distorted face of mr farrow into the stone. this, of course, is a deliberate choice that prompted ernest farrow to plunge the stone carving into the lake in the first place. is ernest farrow’s face on the carving only meant to represent his true face to himself or is there even more to it? newbery: gideon waring is an honest man and felt compelled to keep his side of the bargain, in this twisted way. rendering mr farrow’s true nature in a stone carving would, he knew, give ernest farrow a problem – how to hide or dispose of it. it had to go into the lake, but it has a brooding presence there which i wanted to hint at in samuel’s swimming episode. and it refers to the set in stone of the title: ernest farrow’s sinfulness has been carved indelibly. burkhard: your story is told using samuel godwin and charlotte agnew, the girls’ governess, as homodiegetic narrators. samuel and charlotte are very interesting choices for the alternating perspectives informing set in stone. why have you chosen two characters to narrate the story and why in particular these two? you could also have given one voice or even both https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd narrative voices to marianne and/or juliana. why have you not given them a voice? newbery: actually, it never even occurred to me to have marianne or juliana as narrators. (the interspersing of letters inspired by collins’s no name does in a way introduce other narrators.) samuel and charlotte are both in similar positions – closely involved with the family, but in terms of status they are not quite servants, not quite family. i wanted to have clear differences between them: e.g., there are differences in punctuation style, which probably no one but myself would ever notice. samuel is quite gullible/romantic, and will believe whatever he’s told, at first especially; he could easily be drawn into mr farrow’s plans. charlotte is much less forthcoming, and has secrets from everyone, even the reader. she thinks she understands everything, yet doesn’t. burkhard: from the start of her occupation at fourwinds, charlotte was aware of her familial relation to marianne and juliana. and yet, it takes her quite some time to discover what has happened to both of them, i.e., that marianne’s condition is more than “‘a malaise of adolescence’” and that juliana is not just “convalescing from illness” (newbery : , ) but that her indisposition has been caused by being sexually abused, giving birth to a son and having him taken away from her. why does charlotte’s finding out the truth take so long, in particular when both girls are extremely dear to her? newbery: i think what has happened is so shocking that it simply would not occur to charlotte to suspect that ernest farrow had sexually abused his own daughter. there are plenty of red herrings, too, to make her suspect that gideon was the father, even when she realises that juliana gave birth to a child. burkhard: after all that has happened and after the truth has finally been uncovered, samuel proposes to juliana, who courteously declines to marry him. why is juliana unable to accept samuel’s marriage proposal, especially considering that he knows about her past and her child and, nevertheless, wants to marry her? https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd newbery: well, i liked that. in the position she’s in, she decides for herself, rather than falling in with her father’s plan, or what seems expedient. ernest farrow had tried to control her actions even after his death, through the stipulations in his will. by that time, she suspects that samuel might be becoming close to charlotte, whom of course he does marry. juliana rejects any possibility of him marrying her from a sense of duty. i felt that the obituary for samuel was a good way of moving forward in time and briefly indicating what happened to various characters – so juliana did find a fulfilling role for herself. i didn’t want to abandon her at the end – she had to be more than a victim. burkhard: when you write historical fiction, you adopt a historical voice or even multiple historical voices. to what extent does your position in the twenty-first century play into the (re-)construction of these voices? how authentic and true to the period you are writing about can or should they be? conversely, to what extent do you feel that some degree of presentism is unavoidable when writing about the past, so that the very notion of ‘authenticity’ is called into question? newbery: this is difficult to say. how authentic is any kind of narrative, really? for example, dialogue is very rarely rendered exactly as spoken; it would be very irritating for the reader if it included hesitations, repetitions, interruptions and all the things that constitute conversation. with set in stone i wanted the dialogue to sound authentically victorian – in its rhythms as well as its diction and mannerisms – without being over-wordy and off-putting. it’s a balance between readability and authenticity that always has to be struck in one way or another. burkhard: in her article ‘perverse nostalgia: child sex abuse as trauma commodity in neo-victorian fiction’, marie-luise kohlke argues that “the neo-victorian facilitates a symbolic righting/writing of wrong” (kohlke : ). is this idea also manifest in your own writing? do you have any ethical intentions in mind when you write historical fiction? newbery: i don’t think i began with any ethical intention (possibly that would be the enemy of fiction?), but as the story progressed i felt strongly that juliana ought to be heard and understood, and also – in spite of her https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd awful situation – in a position to make a decision, and not simply to accept what’s provided for her. hence her robust dismissal of samuel when he proposes marriage. i couldn’t say that there’s any kind of ‘righting of wrong’ as there is no way to do that – beyond the fact that ernest farrow has met his fate. there is no way in which juliana can fully recover from what’s happened to her or shrug off the shame, even though it isn’t her fault at all. i don’t think i could have written such a story with her as the central viewpoint character – or would have wanted to. burkhard: kohlke also argues that there are ethical risks associated with commodifying child trauma, especially sex abuse, for neo-victorian consumption (see kohlke : - ). did you encounter similar concerns when writing set in stone? what specific strategies do you employ when deciding on how to represent difficult and disturbing subject matter, especially to young-adult readers? newbery: i don’t think i have any strategies at all – beyond what i’ve just said in my answer to the previous question. again this wasn’t exactly a rational decision – i went where the story took me, with some misgivings about representing incest in a story for young adult readers. several of my young adult novels have been influenced by the work of aidan chambers – the toll bridge ( ), postcards from no man’s land ( ) and other titles – which in my view are at the upper end of young adult or teenage fiction. the problem with ya is that it covers such a wide span – from readers of or so up to adult. chambers’ novels make no compromise in subject matter or treatment and expect their readers to be intelligent and alert – i’d have loved them when i was or so (and love them now). i think in my novels the shell house, sisterland and set in stone i was imagining a similar kind of readership – i.e., people not quite adult but who are accustomed to adult subjects and concerns. commercially, that’s disastrous, as i have come to realise. aidan chambers, although he has an international reputation, has never been widely read. set in stone was a controversial winner of the costa children’s prize, because it can hardly be described as a children’s book – perhaps it shouldn’t have won! burkhard: neo-victorian novels display a keen interest in women and female identity, and the images of women are varied and multifaceted. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd indeed, as ann heilmann and mark llewellyn observe, “multiple studies in essay or book form have attended to issues of gender and sexuality in the representation of female characters and feminist self-construction”, while the “engagement with neo-victorian masculinity has been sparse” (heilmann and llewellyn : ). in your opinion, could or should the same degree of attention be paid to male characters, not just by critics but also by writers, to achieve a greater appreciation of the diversity of masculinity, male roles, and their literary representations? newbery: that’s a very interesting point. neo-victorian fiction does seem to attract women writers, and there’s certainly a lot of interest in female characters at present and for the foreseeable future – i’m sure because authors feel that their roles and potential and secret lives have traditionally been under-explored, though with notable exceptions of course. but it’s just as important that all characters should be rounded individuals, not types – the interest in females shouldn’t be at the expense of males. i have recently read sarah perry’s the essex serpent ( ), in which the male characters are certainly as well-drawn and full of interest as her heroine cora. burkhard: you, ann turnbull and adèle geras collaborated on ‘the historical house: no. , chelsea walk’ series, which re-imagines the occupants of no. , chelsea walk at different times in history (see https://usborne.com/browse-books/catalogue/series/ / / -chelsea- walk/). can you tell me more about this project and how it came into being? newbery: i suggested to editor megan larkin, then newly in post at usborne children’s books, that she publish a series of short novels with girl characters set at different periods in the past. it was megan’s idea to link the stories by having them all take place in the same house – which was a clever idea. i knew at once that i’d like to write about the votes for women campaign, and we thought of asking ann and adèle to contribute what started off as a three-book series. later we each wrote a second book, for which i bagged and the moon landing. burkhard: polly’s march, which is your first novel in ‘the historical house’ series, was first published in and then republished in , most likely to engage in the centenary celebrations of the women’s vote. in https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://usborne.com/browse-books/catalogue/series/ / / -chelsea-walk/ https://usborne.com/browse-books/catalogue/series/ / / -chelsea-walk/ linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd this context, the original title was changed to girls for the vote. why has the title been changed? were you involved in this decision? newbery: it was a decision taken by usborne to relaunch the books under a different series title and individual titles, and yes, to coincide with the centenary of the first women’s vote (and other significant anniversaries for the other titles). adèle, ann and i weren’t involved in the initial relaunch decision but we have been consulted about individual titles, though told that each must begin with girls. the new title for andie’s moon ( , now girls on the up [ ]) was the most difficult and it’s not a title i’m particularly pleased with, but it had to fit with the others. burkhard: polly’s march and until we win are both about children/young adults who are introduced to suffragettes and the suffragette movement at the beginning of the twentieth century shortly before the outbreak of wwi. the young protagonists in these novels display a high degree of agency and are deeply affected by the cause as well as by the idea of (female) emancipation. is their agency linked to the ideas promoted by the suffragette movement or would you endow a child protagonist growing up in the nineteenth century with a similar degree of empowerment and agency? would the depiction differ if you wrote a novel targeting an adult readership rather than a child readership? newbery: i wanted both characters, polly and lizzie, to be influenced by the events going on around them – to be slowly drawn in. in both cases they’re aware that the adults closest to them won’t approve, and that they will be in trouble if found out (polly from her strict father; lizzy from her employer or her brother’s hunt employers who wield such influence locally). in both cases the actions they take part in are, i hope, realistic. whether or not i’d give a nineteenth-century protagonist a similar outlook and experience would depend entirely on the circumstances. if writing for adults i would undoubtedly have shown characters taking part in more extreme actions – polly’s participation in a march, against her father’s instructions, would seem very tame, given reader knowledge of actual events. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd burkhard: you won the costa children’s book award for set in stone, but to date it remains your only novel-length neo-victorian publication. instead you have gone on to publish a substantial number of historical novels set in the twentieth century. why did you leave the nineteenth century behind and refocus on later periods in your writing? can we expect or hope for more neo-victorian novels in the future? newbery: in fact most of my twentieth-century historical novels (some other war [ ] and sequence; the shell house; sisterland ) pre-dated set in stone. and i think of set in stone as a one-off, which i greatly enjoyed writing. what i wanted was to include several of the typical elements of the sensation novel, ingredients which many readers would find familiar (remote country house, attractive widowed owner, beautiful daughters, sleepwalking, besotted young artist, buttoned-up governess, a mysterious disappearance) in a story that wouldn’t seem like a pastiche but would be quite serious. i don’t imagine i will do anything like it again, especially as i’m now writing adult fiction set in the present. burkhard: in that case, i very much hope – as no doubt will many of this journal’s readers – that perhaps one day you will also write a neo-victorian adult novel. acknowledgement i would like to express my deepest gratitude to linda newbery for taking the time – twice – to answer my numerous questions. notes . examples can be viewed on the tate website: see, e.g., ‘crucifixion’ ( ) at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gill-crucifixion-n , ‘ecstasy’ ( - ) at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/eric-gill- , and ‘the east wind ( ) at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gill-the-east-wind-n . . the cover i am referring to in my question can be found at: www.penguin.co.uk/books/ /set-in-stone/ .html (accessed october ). https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gill-crucifixion-n https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/eric-gill- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gill-the-east-wind-n http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/ /set-in-stone/ .html linda newbery on writing historical fiction _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd . in particular the beginning of chapter offers a rich commentary on stone carving as an occupation, when gideon waring relates his career path: “i was given the opportunity to work as apprentice to a fashionable sculptor, and my ambition was first to follow and then to surpass him. after several years of this, working on elaborate statuary for rich patrons, many of them with more money than appreciation, i took what many would regard as a backward step, and became instead a stonemason, cutting letters for gravestones, sometimes memorial tablets, heraldic work and the like. to handle stone is to handle the stuff of life and death, and of time and change, and the mysteries of the earth itself; there is something humbling and moving and immensely satisfying in it. and thus i preferred to earn my living” (newbery : - ). the issues addressed in this short excerpt – commemoration, aesthetics, durability and art for art’s sake – foreground the significance of the material dimension in the victorian era while implying that material remnants cover a huge spectrum, including those whose artists might not have achieved fame and recognition. . in a.s. byatt’s the children’s book ( ), the pots made by the potter benedict fludd similarly evidence his perverted incestuous desire for both of his daughters, imogen and pomona, which reaches back to a time when they were children. as much becomes apparent when the housekeeper elsie finds the key to the locked pantry and discovers a number of vases: “the pots were obscene chimaeras, half vessels, half human. they had a purity and clarity of line, and were contorted into every shape of human sexual display and congress” (byatt : ). she then comes to realise that “[s]ome of them [the figures on the pots] had imogen’s long face and drooping shoulders: some of them were plump pomona. the males were faceless fantasms. elsie crunched towards them over the destruction of other versions, and saw that the wavering arms and legs, the open mouths and clutching hands were not all the same age, went back years, into childishness” (byatt : ). at this point, it might even be speculated whether eric gill’s work, and in particular his sculptures, might also have served as an inspiration for the plastic art in the children’s book. for instance, gill’s ‘ecstasy’, one of his erotic sculptures, displays a male and female body interlocked during sexual intercourse, which is an image that is evocative of benedict fludd’s vases. . as it turns out, charlotte knew that she is the half-sister of juliana and marianne when she accepted her position as a governess in the farrow household. her mother violet was employed as a maidservant when the farrow family still lived in belgravia and was in love with ernest, who was https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. denise burkhard _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd nineteen at the time. to avoid anyone noticing that she was pregnant, she left her employment and never told ernest about the child. charlotte was hence born out of wedlock and the fact that her mother gave birth was concealed (see newbery : ). bibliography byatt, a.s. . the children’s book [ ]. london: vintage-random house. carroll, samantha j. . ‘putting the ‘neo’ back into neo-victorian: the neo- victorian novel as postmodern revisionist fiction’, neo-victorian studies : , - . costa book awards. ‘linda newbery – winner of costa children’s book award’, uploaded by costabookawards, february , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvachjy q m (accessed october ). cox, jessica. . ‘narratives of sexual trauma in contemporary adaptations of the woman in white’, in boehm-schnitker, nadine and susanne gruss (eds.), neo-victorian literature and culture: immersions and revisitations. london & new york: routledge, - . heilmann, ann and mark llewellyn. . ‘introduction: to a lesser extent? neo-victorian masculinities’, victoriographies : , special issue: neo- victorian masculinities, - . kohlke, marie-luise. . ‘introduction: speculations in and on the neo- victorian encounter’, neo-victorian studies : , - . –––. . ‘perverse nostalgia: child sex abuse as trauma commodity in neo-victorian fiction’, in wesseling, elisabeth (ed.), reinventing childhood nostalgia: books, toys, and contemporary media culture. london & new york: routledge, - . newbery, linda. . set in stone [ ]. london: definitions-random house children’s books. –––. ‘about’, linda newbery author, n.d., https://www.lindanewbery.co.uk/about- / (accessed january ). https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvachjy q m https://www.lindanewbery.co.uk/about- / masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) © alix e. masters. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics alix e. masters abstract feminist scholarship has remained similarly engaged in questions surrounding consent, with particular focus on sex and sexuality. this year, in the wake of the #metoo movement, we have witnessed a cultural shift towards a willingness to address the perils of sexual consent under patriarchy. in the context of this cultural reckoning, i see no better time to apply feminist epistemology to the fraught nature of consent to a bioethical framework. feminist bioethicists, such as susan sherwin, have long argued for a wider consent model that privileges justice over a focus on autonomy. using radical feminist theorist catherine mackinnon’s work on consent and sexual harassment, i will support sherwin’s claim by arguing for a more nuanced understanding of power and structural social hierarchy that exists in every aspect of our society, including research. keywords: feminism, autonomy, informed consent, justice introduction informed consent has remained one of the more debated topics within research ethics. many scholars and bioethicists have wondered the best way to obtain it, who should give it, and if it is even necessary at all. feminist scholarship has remained similarly engaged in questions surrounding consent, with particular focus on sex and sexuality. this year, in the wake of the #metoo movement, we have witnessed a cultural shift towards a willingness to address the perils of sexual consent under patriarchy. in the context of this cultural reckoning, i see no better time to apply feminist epistemology to the fraught nature of consent to a bioethical framework. feminist bioethicists, such as susan sherwin, have long argued for a wider consent model that privileges justice over a focus on autonomy. using radical feminist theorist catherine mackinnon’s work on consent and sexual harassment, i will support sherwin’s claim by arguing for a more nuanced understanding of power and structural social hierarchy that exists in every aspect of our society, including research. analysis it should be noted i am not trying to conflate engagement in sex/sexual violence with engagement in research. however, i am attempting to find useful parallels to dissect the broader issue that applies equally to both, which is an issue of meaningful agreement across power differentials. there is a false idea, within research ethics and our society at large, that consent is the gatekeeper of a just and masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) reciprocal experience. as feminist theorist catherine mackinnon writes, “the presence of consent does not make an interaction equal. it makes it tolerated, or the less costly of alternatives out of the control, or beyond the construction, of the one who consents”. a new model incorporating radical feminist scholarship and focusing on structural inequality as opposed to individual choice is necessary to ensure truly ethical research practices. informed consent is a widely discussed topic in research ethics, one that presents many challenges. according to u.s. law and the principles of bioethics, physicians, scientists and researchers are required to obtain the informed consent of their patients or subjects before initiating treatment or collecting scientific data. true informed consent, as defined in bioethics, requires the disclosure of all relevant information to a competent participant who is capable and permitted to make a totally voluntary and educated choice. typically, as paul appelbaum writes, “such disclosure includes the nature of the patient’s condition, the nature and purpose of the proposed treatment, and the risks and benefits of the proposed treatment and of alternative treatments, including the option of no treatment at all” [ ]. in other words, the participant is supposedly free to utilize their full autonomy in determining what they do, and do not, want to be done with their body. informed consent in research ethics is often framed under the specific lens of the preservation of autonomy, and, consequentially, autonomy is usually heralded as the most important of bioethical principles with regards to consent. there are obvious cases in which informed consent, as defined, cannot be reasonably given due to limited autonomy. traditional bioethics tends to focus on cases of limited autonomy as individual circumstances of language barrier, cognitive impairment, or mental instability. as appelbaum writes, “when patients lack the competence to make a decision about treatment, substitute decision makers must be sought. hence, the determination of whether patients are competent is critical in striking a proper balance between respecting the autonomy of patients who are capable of making informed decisions and protecting those with cognitive impairment”. typically, the determination of limited autonomy is defined on individualistic terms based on a subject’s specific health limitations. i propose this is not a useful enough starting point, as this idea of individualistic autonomy has many limitations, namely, the exaltation of autonomy assumes falsely that every individual has the same operational ‘access’ to it. we need to be considering autonomy in a structural, rather than individualistic framework. furthermore, the recognition on the part of traditional bioethicists that autonomy is not universally equally distributed already reveals a soft admission to the fact that autonomy is not the best model upon which to rely. however, by choosing to focus only on the more ‘obvious’ examples of limited autonomy such as dementia, and mental capacity, as opposed to larger social determinants of a type of compromised autonomy such as in the case of gender, race, and class, traditional bioethics reveals an unwillingness to address larger societal issues of justice and power. arguably, the space in which the most prolific theorizing on the role and perils of consent and autonomy in society has been feminist theory. radical feminist theory, a line of thought emerging out of the second-wave feminist movement, specifically has grappled with the concept of “consent” and “free-choice” under uneven power structures. as radical feminist scholarship considers the mechanisms underlying rape and sexual harassment, the notion of consent as a fraught concept is brought into unique focus. catherine mackinnon, one of the most prominent radical feminist and legal scholars, and the inventor of the term “sexual harassment” has written prolifically on this subject. in her work, mackinnon theorizes on the illusion of female choice under patriarchy given gender oppression and uneven power structures and argues that the presence of consent is not a robust enough concept to differentiate rape from sex because women are not truly free to make unencumbered choices with regard to their sexuality. she writes, masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) the law of rape presents consent as free exercise of sexual choice under conditions of equality of power without exposing the underlying structure of constraint and disparity…if rape is less a question of unwanted sex than of unequal sex, if equality not autonomy is its primary issue, if internal psychology is less determinant of these criminal acts than leverages external conditions and gendered social behaviors, the existing conceptual framework together with its lexicon of examples, has been fundamentally beside the point all along”. according to mackinnon, the concept of consent is beside the point: in order for consent to even be possible, the two actors entering into an agreement must be equal in power. since this equality is non-existent, the discussion should instead involve the levelling of the playing field before we can worry about coming to an agreement. these ideas from second wave feminist theory have recently re-emerged as a way to discuss the fallout from the revelations of the #metoo movement. as brit marling published in the atlantic in response to the harvey weinstein sexual assault scandal, “the things that happen in hotel rooms and board rooms all over the world (and in every industry) between women seeking employment or trying to keep employment and men holding the power to grant it or take it away exist in a gray zone where words like ‘consent’ cannot fully capture the complexity of the encounter. because consent is a function of power. you have to have a modicum of power to give it”. this reiterates mackinnon’s claim that obtaining consent is inadequate in addressing inequality across power differentials. without an equality of power positions, consent is not only meaningless, but presents a red herring. even if we falsely accept the equality of the two parties, consent as a concept inherently implies a differential in power, as one agent necessarily initiates as another acquiesces. in fact, the oxford english dictionary defines consent as the “voluntarily acquiesce in what another proposes or desires” [ ]. similarly, black’s law dictionary defines consent as “voluntarily yielding the will to the proposition of another” [ ]. therefore, using consent as a marker for an equal exchange is a fundamental misconception. as mackinnon writes, “intrinsic to consent is the actor and the acted-upon, with no guarantee of any kind of equality between them, whether of circumstance or condition or interaction [ ]. while some may argue discussions of sexual consent are too specific to be applied to issues of research consent, this is not the case. research, like gender dynamics under a patriarchal social system, is rife with inequities of power. doctors and researchers similarly occupy a traditionally masculine role of paternalism and authority over their subjects, just as men hold power over women under patriarchy. it is also important to note the history of colonial abuses in academic and biomedical research that has contributed to this contemporary power imbalance. as indigenous theorist lina tuhiwai smith writes, “from the vantage point of the colonized…the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to european imperialism and colonialism” [ ]. she continues: research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized. it is regulated through the formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state). it is realized in the myriad of representations and ideological constructions of the other in scholarly and ‘popular’ works, and in the principles which help to select and re-contextualize those constructions in such things as the media, official histories and school curricula. research is not a neutral truth-seeker, but rather a historically situated institution built off the values of imperialism. much of the establishment of research as a field has relied heavily on the stratification of the colonizers (researchers) from the colonized (subjects). masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) while the goal of this paper is not to argue for the conflation of sexual consent with research consent, it should be noted that there are meaningful historical and contemporary examples of patients, particularly women, who have been taken advantage of in the name of science in manners that are sexual in nature. consider the performance of pelvic exams by medical students on anesthetized women without their consent: according to an article published in , women undergoing gynecological surgeries were asked to give consent to allowing medical students be involved in their care, but not explicitly allowing them to do educational exams on them while unconscious. as a medical student stated, “for three weeks, four to five times a day, i was asked to, and did, perform pelvic examinations on anesthetized women," whom had only given implicit consent to his presence during surgery [ ]. according to the united states department of justice the legal definition of rape is "penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with anybody part or object without the consent of the consent of the victim”. accepting this definition, what these patients endured was ostensibly a form of rape. in the united states, there are only four states (hawaii, california, illinois and virginia) “where doctors are legally required to obtain specific consent for pelvic exams under anesthesia”. furthermore, a study found that medical students who had completed a clerkship in obstetrics or gynecology did not believe consent for pelvic exams under anesthesia were warranted. these attitudes suggest that while issues surrounding sexual consent and research consent are distinct, there are important overlaps that point to a larger structural problem in society. research is not created in a vacuum. it is created by and for the culture in which it is produced; in this case, the same culture that also permits and encourages gendered sexual abuse. taking a cue from feminist theory, we can see that by focusing only on autonomy and ignoring issues of structured oppression and violence, the current model of informed consent in medical research is fundamentally skewed in favor of the powerful. as feminist bioethicist susan sherwin writes, “autonomy language is often used to hide the workings of privilege and mask the barriers of oppression”. by choosing to focus only on issues of autonomy we artificially make research ethics an individualistic issue rather than a systemic one. like mackinnon, sherwin too argues that the idea of choice under systems of oppression is illusory. she writes, the “illusion of ‘choice’ in the context of informed consent can operate as a mechanism to insure compliance with care provider’s preferences”. not only is the ontology of choice illusory, the framework of emphasizing autonomy often serves to blame victims for their own mistreatment. according to sherwin, in emphasizing choice as the gatekeeper of impartiality, advocates “not only fail to deflect responsibility from victims, but rather attribute it to them”. this phenomenon can be clearly seen in the recent discussion surrounding the prevalence of sexual assault in the work place. in response to harvey weinstein’s outspoken victims, many have asked questions to the tune of, “if she felt uncomfortable, why didn’t she just leave” or “why didn’t she tell anyone?” not only does this unimaginatively ignore the realities of power differentials, it also serves to blame victims for being victimized. focusing on the victims’ choices as if they were as free and unencumbered as weinstein’s is wrong, and misses the point entirely. the emphasis on women’s autonomy here insidiously and paradoxically serves not to embolden, but rather undermine, their subjectivity. sherwin writes that “the concept of autonomy, rather than working to empower the oppressed and exploited among us, in practice often serves to protect the privileges of the most powerful”. additionally, sherwin writes that “theories that place priority on autonomy—at least as the concept is commonly interpreted—must be understood as primarily protecting the autonomy of those who are already well-situated, while sacrificing the necessary prerequisite for autonomy for others”. assuming both parties have ‘equal’ access to autonomy in this situation is not only callously inappropriate, it also relies on clumsy reasoning that serves only to bolster power differentials rather than level them. and this, of course, does not merely apply to women subjects but to other marginalized groups be they based on race, class, sexuality, etc. masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) an emphasis on autonomy not only serves to unfairly place blame on the victim, it also obscures structural oppression that limits autonomy in the first place. as sherwin explains, this individualistic approach to autonomy makes it very easy for people of privilege to remain ignorant of the social arrangements the support their own sense of independence, such as the institutions that provide them with the exceptionally good education and a relatively high degree of personal safety. encouraged to focus on their own sense of individual accomplishment, they are inclined to blame less well-situated people for their lack of comparable success rather than to appreciate the cost of oppression. this familiar sort of thinking tends to interfere with people’s ability to see the importance of supportive social conditions for fostering autonomous action. our project as bioethicists should rely less on maintaining and bolstering what is ultimately the golden rule of autonomy myth, and focus rather on enlightening and unmasking the various power structures at play that limit various groups’ access to power. rather than a focus on individual choice, “we need to question how much control individual patients really have over the determination of their treatment within the stressful world of health care services” [ ]. conclusion overall, the current model of informed consent as it is currently understood at best misses the point, and at worst promotes damaging neoliberal notions that place blame on individuals rather than on structural inequality. in the case of research ethics, consent and its function as a measurement of autonomy fails because the power between the researcher and subject is inherently unequal. this is not to suggest that in this scenario autonomy is actively stripped from the subject by the researcher, but rather that the dice were loaded before either entered the room. autonomy, regardless of the efforts of bioethics, is simply not equally accessed in our society as it stands today. the incorporation of feminist theory serves to challenge the current model by accurately and forcefully confronting the realities of our unequal world. not only does this application reveal parallels in how power is negotiated similarly throughout different realms in society, it also helps to illuminate the larger ethical issues that warrant attention. as sherwin writes, “feminist health care ethics does not only change the way we handle traditional bioethical problems; it also changes the agenda of the discipline by making visible a whole range of new ethical problems [ ]. taking a feminist approach to bioethics reveals a need to move toward a justice model and away from an autonomy model in order to more vigorously account for structural inequality within biomedical research. mackinnon, catherine. “rape: on coercion and consent .” www.julietdavis.com, www.julietdavis.com/oldsite/wst /rape.pdf. appelbaum, paul s. “assessment of patients' competence to consent to treatment — nejm.” new england journal of medicine, www.nejm.org/doi/full/ . /nejmcp . mackinnon, catherine. “rape redefined.” http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/ / / . _ _mackinnon.pdf. marling, brit. “harvey weinstein and the economics of consent.” the atlantic, atlantic media company, oct. , www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /harvey-weinstein-and-the-economics-of-consent/ /. smith , linda tuhiwai. “decolonizing methodologies.” google books, books.google.com/books/about/decolonizing_methodologies.html?id=nad afstdr c. rowan, karen. “pelvic exams while under anesthesia sparks debate.” livescience, purch, oct. , www.livescience.com/ -pelvic- exams-anesthesia-medical-students.html./.latest_citation_text http://www.julietdavis.com/oldsite/wst /rape.pdf http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/ . /nejmcp http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/ / / . _ _mackinnon.pdf masters, feminist theory reveals a need for justice over autonomy in research ethics, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) “an updated definition of rape.” the united states department of justice, jan. , www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated- definition-rape./.latest_citation_text ubel, peter a.; jepson, christopher; silver-isenstadt, ari. “don't ask, don't tell: a change in medical student attitudes after obstetrics/gynecology clerkships toward seeking consent for pelvic examinations on an anesthetized patient, american journal of obstetrics and gynecology.” deepdyve, elsevier, feb. , www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/don-t-ask-don-t-tell-a-change-in-medical-student-attitudes- after-ty xbcuea./.latest_citation_text humphreys, janice. “family violence and nursing practice, second edition nd edition.” family violence and nursing practice, second edition: : medicine & health science books @ amazon.com, www.amazon.com/family-violence-nursing-practice- second/dp/ . berg, jessica w. “informed consent: legal theory and clinical practice nd edition.” informed consent: legal theory and clinical practice: jessica w. berg, paul s. appelbaum, lisa s. parker, charles w. lidz: : amazon.com: books, www.amazon.com/informed- consent-theory-clinical-practice/dp/ . sherwin, susan. “the politics of women's health.” google books, books.google.com/books/about/the_politics_of_women_s_health.html?id=xlsup -zmenkc. http://www.amazon.com/family-violence-nursing-practice-second/dp/ http://www.amazon.com/family-violence-nursing-practice-second/dp/ http://www.amazon.com/informed-consent-theory-clinical-practice/dp/ http://www.amazon.com/informed-consent-theory-clinical-practice/dp/ 	abstract 	introduction 	analysis 	conclusion professional ethics in academia: defining the categories of behavior spectrum in matters of unethical conduct professional ethics in academia: defining the categories of behavior spectrum in matters of unethical conduct niraj shenoy # the author(s) the problems of bullying and other unethical behavior in science are known to most researchers. victims are most often young investigators and trainees. defining the categories of human behavior spectrum in academia in matters of unethical conduct may help facilitate change. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - category a: engages in criminal/ illegal offense category b: engages in unethical behavior (intellectual theft, abuse, scientific misconduct). both initiators and facilitators belong to the same category. variation in magnitude. category c: is not directly involved in the offense but knows of it well. however, not only looks the other way but engages in active collaboration and continues to receive favors from those involved. may even help those in category b during an investigation or aid their retaliatory efforts. category d: is not directly involved in the offense. tries his/ her best to stay away from the situation. no significant moral dilemma even if the offense is reprehensible. may try to stop collaborating with those involved in the offense but also tries to minimize contact with those wronged. maintains neutrality. category e: has a moral dilemma whether to help the wronged or not (or challenge the offender if personally wronged) but decides against. lacks willingness, courage and know-how. perceived potential loss to self through retaliation is much greater than the ethical conscience to speak up. category f: has severe moral dilemma, advises the wronged with noble intentions and provides moral support, but is not willing to speak up. perceived potential loss to self through retaliation is still greater than the ethical conscience to speak up. category g: is willing and courageous, but lacks the know-how to help the wronged against the offender (or to challenge the offender if personally wronged). may act in haste. category h: is willing, courageous and possesses the know-how to help the wronged against the offender (or to challenge the offender if personally wronged). * niraj shenoy niraj.shenoy@einstein.yu.edu department of medicine (oncology), albert einstein college of medicine, montefiore medical center, morris park avenue, chanin a, bronx, ny , usa international journal of ethics education ( ) : - published online: april http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:niraj.shenoy@einstein.yu.edu academic professional ethics needs to be a part of scientific curriculum regardless of discipline. students need to be taught to recognize the different categories throughout their academic careers and to aspire to belong to category h. the color spectrum (red to green) position of the leadership determines that of the institution/ organization, given the direct influence of leadership on the proportion of each category. it is nearly impossible for an organization to be ethical with an unethical leadership. bystanders far outnumber the oppressors and victims in most situations of abuse/ intellectual theft/ scientific misconduct in academia. the lack of bystander guilt from inaction enables unethical behavior and leadership. the above categorization of behav- ior spectrum would hopefully impress upon bystanders, their critical role in ensuring justness within an institution. the problem of unethical behavior in academia cannot be solved unless there is a widespread acceptance of its presence, and a willingness to confront it. policies preventing institutions from conducting sham investigations need to be implemented by regulatory bodies (nik-zainal and barroso ). perhaps science needs a #metoo movement. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro- duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. reference nik-zainal, s., and i. barroso. . bullying investigations need a code of conduct. nature : . https://doi.org/ . /d - - - . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. shenoy n. https://doi.org/ . /d - - - 	professional ethics in academia: defining the categories of behavior spectrum in matters of unethical conduct 	reference vlc_ _ - _bookreviews .. love’s knowledge: essays on philosophy and literature (new york: oxford university press, ). . rachel hollander, narrative hospitality in late victorian fiction: novel ethics (london: routledge, ), . . talia schaffer, romance’s rival: familiar marriage in victorian fiction (new york: oxford university press, ), . . rachel ablow, marriage of minds: reading sympathy in the victorian marriage plot (stanford: stanford university press, ), . . hollander, narrative hospitality, . . hollander, narrative hospitality, . . rebecca n. mitchell, victorian lessons in empathy and difference (columbus: ohio state university press, ), . . mitchell, victorian lessons, . duc dau, touching god: hopkins and love (london: anthem press, ). . gerard manley hopkins, the sermons and devotional writings of gerard manley hopkins, ed. christopher devlin (london: oxford university press, ), . . luce irigaray, to be two, trans. monique m. rhodes and marco f. cocito-monoc (london: athlone press, ), . evolution kathleen frederickson charles darwin famously does not use the word “evolution” in thefirst edition of on the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life ( ). only with the sixth edition of does origin mention the word. reflecting on evolu- tion’s altered status as a legitimate scientific principle, darwin writes that “things are wholly changed, and almost every naturalist admits the great principle of evolution.” as a younger man, he had seen both naturalist and non-naturalist friends be skeptical, dismissive, or wary of earlier evo- lutionary hypotheses; by , among naturalists at least, natural selec- tion might be contentious, but evolution itself was not. ethics, evolution https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the use of the word “evolution” as a term for what was also known as the transmutation of species was of comparatively recent vintage. first appearing in french in , the usage migrated into english the follow- ing year in charles lyell’s influential principles of geology. lyell uses the word “evolution” to describe the ideas of the french naturalist jean-baptiste lamarck, who was, by then, well known as a proponent of the view that species transmute as a result of adaptation and the inheri- tance of acquired characteristics; for lyell, lamarckian “evolution” evoked a procedural uniformity and temporal gradualism that he prized in his own analysis of geological processes. lamarck, though, was not the sole progenitor of such views. notable among lamarck’s predecessors in the transmutation hypothesis was darwin’s grandfather erasmus darwin, a figure who was simultaneously, as devin griffiths insists, a “crank” and “the most important british advocate of evolution” in the pre-origin years. though there is no evidence that lamarck encountered it, erasmus darwin’s zoonomia anticipated many of lamarck’s claims, especially with respect to how the use and disuse of organs might factor in species change. erasmus darwin, lamarck, and lyell all provided the backdrop for darwin’sprivate musings on speciation in the so-called transmutation note- books of the late s. when he began writing these notebooks in , darwin had read zoonomia at home as a teenager, lamarck’s systême des animaux sans vertèbres as a hapless medical student in edinburgh, and lyell’s principles (as well as lamarck’s philosophie zoölogique) aboard the hms beagle on its now famous – voyage. darwin would later also grapple with the contentious reception of robert chambers’s wildly popu- lar vestiges of the natural history of creation. darwin found vestiges to be facile and unscientific, butthe manyand sometimeshostile reviewsof italso inflected his thinking about whether to announce his views on the species question. only the fear of being scooped on the theory of natural selection spurred darwin to overcome his trepidation. darwin completed origin hastily after alfred russel wallace sent darwin his paper “on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type” in . in this paper, wallace articulates his own (independent) conclusion that species evolve through a tendency to variation “by minute steps, in var- ious directions,” with varietiesthat exhibit “slightly increased powers of pre- serving existence” persisting in the face of a malthusian struggle for life. many contemporary readers are used to thinking about darwinian natural selection as coterminous with evolution, even though, as the historian of science peter bowler points out, “much evolutionary vlc • vol. , no. / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core thought has been non-darwinian in character.” some of evolution’s best-known popularizers were as indebted to lamarck as to darwin. herbert spencer—the coiner of the influential phrase “the survival of the fittest” —is representative of many nineteenth-century appropria- tions of evolution: though spencer was happy to adopt natural selection into his notorious advocacy of a brutal laissez-faire economic philosophy, he retains key lamarckian principles around adaptation and inheri- tance. similarly, with very different political commitments, the anarchist and russian émigré peter (pyotr) kropotkin likewise defends elements of lamarckian theory, though he draws most heavily on darwin in his description of evolutionary cooperation and “mutual aid.” this is not, though, to suggest that darwinian natural and sexual selection does not shape the sociobiological imaginary of the nineteenth century. this influence becomes especially pronounced after the publication of the descent of man and selection in relation to sex. gillian beer’s now classic account of the uses of evolution as a narrative para- digm stresses that darwin’s later writing on sexual selection turned to “the individual or communal will” as a “shaping influence.” this empha- sis on sexual selection as a basis for social policy seemed to license the eugenic theories put forward by his cousin francis galton—theories that darwin himself found compelling. from the late nineteenth century onwards, darwin’s work becomes frequently invoked in a white supremacism under which, as sylvia wynter writes, “all the people of black africa” appear as “an undeserving race because dysselected-by- evolution within the logic of the darwinian paradigm.” but though scholars debate how and when darwin’s thought becomes drawn into eugenic thinking and scientific racism, the associa- tion between them is neither wholly determined, nor entirely inciden- tal. both nihad farooq and cannon schmitt write about darwin’s time aboard the beagle with respect to, in farooq’s words, his “alternat- ingly relativistic and imperial manner of looking at the natural world.” without discounting, for instance, darwin’s blithe comments about genocide in the descent of man, or the appropriation of the theory of natural selection for eugenic racism, recent scholarship also seeks to emphasize the uses that anticapitalist, feminist, and anticolonial thinkers have been able to draw from evolutionary thought. marwa elshakry argues that, after a first wave of more individualist glosses, arab intellec- tuals developed theories of evolutionary socialism at the turn of the twen- tieth century that included a “growing international critique of western capitalist and imperial expansion outside of europe.” for a number of evolution https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core nineteenth- and early-twentieth century readers, that is, this ability to deploy evolution as an argument against european rule could take a number of forms, some of which also entailed emphasizing, like kropotkin did, evolutionary mutualism as a model for anticapitalist anar- chism or socialism. notes . charles darwin, on the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, th ed. (london: john murray, ), . . on the history of the use of the word “evolution,” see especially gillian beer, darwin’s plots: evolutionary narrative in darwin, george eliot and nineteenth-century fiction (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), ; robert j. richards, “evolution,” in keywords in evolutionary biology, ed. evelyn fox keller and elisabeth a. lloyd (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), . . devin griffiths, the age of analogy: science and literature between the darwins (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ), . . alfred russel wallace, “on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely form the original type,” zoological journal of the linnean society – ( ): , . . peter j. bowler, the non-darwinian revolution: reinterpreting a historical myth (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ), . . herbert spencer, the principles of biology, vol. (london: williams and norgate, ), . . naomi beck suggests that spencer often failed to distinguish salient differences between darwinian and lamarckian accounts of evolu- tionary processes. naomi beck, “the origin and political thought: from liberalism to marxism,” in the cambridge companion to the “origin of species,” ed. michael ruse and robert j. richards (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), . . beer, darwin’s plots, . . darwin writes to galton in response to galton’s “hereditary improvement” that “though i see so much difficulty, the object seems a grand one; & you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet i fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race” (darwin, january , ). george levine notes that galton’s work “impressed” darwin (george levine, darwin the writer [oxford: oxford university press, ], vi). in an earlier book, levine also vlc • vol. , no. / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core seeks to emphasize that darwin responds to galton by noting that “men did not differ much in intellect” (george levine, darwin and the novelists [chicago: university of chicago press, ], ). . sylvia wynter, “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/ freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation —an argument,” cr: the new centennial review , no. ( ): – , . . diane paul notes that “few professional historians believe either that darwin’s theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated” (diane b. paul, “darwin, social darwinism and eugenics,” in the cambridge companion to darwin [cambridge: cambridge university press, ], ). . nihad farooq, undisciplined: science, ethnography, and personhood in the americas, – (new york: new york university press, ), . cannon schmitt highlights that “victorian science and empire are inextricable” at the same time as the theories that evolutionary scien- tists developed also could “disallow . . . the solidity necessary for easily held conviction as to their difference, superiority or right to rule” (cannon schmitt, darwin and the memory of the human: evolution, savages, and south america [cambridge: cambridge university press, ], ). . marwa elshakry, reading darwin in arabic, – (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . feminism alison booth is there a scholar who does not dream of shaping public discourse, ofchanging the history of a discipline, and more, of society? as we deplore the marginalization of the humanities and the silencing of pub- lic intellectuals, it might help to take a longer view of predecessors who had that coveted impact over time. i’m certainly not saying, “recover the worthies.” we can see the blind spots of reform movements s– s, and again in the s– s. but in the #metoo moment, we should hit the refresh button. in this brief contribution, i want to remind victorian evolution, feminism https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	evolution 	notes 	feminism miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | guerre en poésie, poésie en guerre in interview with american playwright mark safranko john s. bak electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi: . /miranda. issn: - publisher université toulouse - jean jaurès electronic reference john s. bak, “in interview with american playwright mark safranko”, miranda [online], | , online since april , connection on february . url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi: https://doi.org/ . /miranda. this text was automatically generated on february . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / in interview with american playwright mark safranko john s. bak introduction to mark safranko and to the ariel project fig. mark safranko credits: projet ariel born december in trenton, new jersey, mark safranko is one of the last renaissance men. writer, painter, musician, safranko is also a playwright, whose one- act and full-length plays date from the early s to and have been produced at home in new york and connecticut, as well as abroad in londonderry (northern in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | ireland) and cork (eire). in , his one-act play the bitch-goddess was selected best play of the village gate one-act festival in new york. safranko is currently in nancy, france, where he is writer-in-residence at the université de lorraine as part of its ariel project for - . ariel, the acronym for “author in international residence in lorraine,” offers a four-month residence to an international artist who conducts master classes with university students and interacts with the general public by giving readings and occasional lectures. the program, run by the university’s ufr all-nancy and iut nancy-charlemagne, was created to bridge the artistic gap between university and general publics, to showcase lorraine’s cultural heritage, and to support the grand est region’s efforts to diversify its international interests. the ariel project carries three main goals: creativity and reflection on the creative process, translation, and mediatization. the following interview, which took place in nancy on november , was intended to address all three project goals with respect to mark safranko’s career in the american and international theatre. for more information on the ariel project: http://residence-ariel.fr/ in interview with mark safranko john s. bak: being of man of many talents, where does playwriting fit into the hierarchy of what you see as your main artistic focus? can you talk about your formal training in the theatre and how it prepared you to become a playwright? mark safranko: there was no formal training. my training consisted of spending time in the theatre, watching and studying plays, reading plays and trying to figure out what makes them work. i regard writing for the theatre as an essential part of the fabric of my entire writing life. it’s just another thread, so to speak. j.b.: your plays have been produced both in america and abroad, sometimes in translation. could you talk for a few minutes about your international experiences? do you find that european audiences respond to your work differently than american audiences and, if so, why is that the case? safranko: i actually haven’t ever seen one of my plays produced on foreign soil, so i’m not at all certain how european audiences responded. the reviews of the productions have been positive, i can say that. j.b.: have you worked closely with your foreign translators? what were the major obstacles you encountered in the translating process? were they more linguistic- or culture-based hurdles? safranko: the single instance of one of my plays being translated was seedy, or minable, into french. the play remains unproduced either in the u.s. or in europe, but it was published in france. i had no contact whatsoever with the translator, which is highly unusual in my experiences with translators. j.b.: your plays are frequently situated in the east of the u.s., often new york city. and yet, the west coast is referenced, usually hollywood, which leaves the impression that you find that there exists an antithetical relationship between film-culture los angeles and theatre- culture new york (or even fake versus real). both sharon striker in the promise and eddie tilsen in seedy, for instance, refer to film casting directors as looking at “strips of raw meat” when they select actors for roles. many are the names of serious writers who have been in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | http://residence-ariel.fr/ seduced by hollywood’s allure. do you see yourself as being strictly a playwright, or would you accept scriptwriting offers were hollywood to come calling? safranko: of course the money of a screenwriting gig would be too tempting to turn down. i’ve written several spec scripts based on my own work, but none has been produced, which is not an unusual occurrence in the film world. i’m fond of saying that when you insert an electrical plug on a film set it costs a million dollars, and therein lies the rub. the money involved in film production makes a finished product mostly a fantasy. as far as the antithetical relationship is concerned, it’s been my observation that in the past new york actors liked to think that doing “pure” theatre was somehow superior to falling for the allure of hollywood, but i’m not sure that’s still the case. the boundaries between the worlds have grown more muddled, especially since “stars” are often needed to make new york theatre productions stay afloat and turn a profit. j.b.: hungry actors and actresses populate your plays, willing to do near anything to get a part, like wendy in the promise or eddie in seedy. both eddie and sharon hound talent agents, like harvey gillman in the promise, and the message that comes across is that actors are “cold” until they get a part, and then they need to stay “hot” and in the limelight, no matter what it takes. is this your experience with the theatre? safranko: my experience is that most actors stay cold! the truth is that very, very, very few actors ever get to a significant place in either theatre or film. it’s about as brutal a business as there is. and when you think about it, the barriers to entry are few. you don’t have to play an instrument, you don’t have to write something, you don’t have to be able to paint a picture. all you have to do is say the lines that someone else wrote, and you’re an actor. so anyone can do it. this generates a lot of hope on the part of the dreamers and wannabes. and once you do it, you have to hope that you’re well connected, or look good in front of the camera, or have a certain charisma that makes people want to look at you. and that you are very, very lucky. j.b.: prostitution is a common theme in your plays, the way we all sell ourselves to make ends meet, whether it is the exotic dancer tracy sinnett (esmeralda) with eddie in seedy or edwin reaves with john campbell and his company in incident in the combat zone, or the actors eddie and sharon just discussed. life is learning about the limits and consequences, to ourselves and others, of our self-prostitution, no? safranko: i think that since we are all victims to at least some extent, it’s a matter of learning how to reconcile oneself to the form of prostitution we’re trapped in. j.b.: because self-prostitution intimates self-preservation in your plays, and the stage or screen are often the media in which this financial transaction takes place, false appearances becomes a key theme in your work. as eddie says about tracy/esmeralda: “it’s hard to tell with you what’s real and what’s not” when she is no longer wearing her wig. acting is about appearances, of course, but are we all just play-acting in life in order to survive? safranko: i think yes, to a greater or lesser degree. it’s unavoidable. i think it’s why it so often happens that we don’t know who is lying right next to us in bed, so to speak. j.b.: you are a painter as well as a playwright, and art figures at times in your plays, as in seedy, for instance, where eddie points out the original fischls, dalis, and saint johns to tracy/esmeralda: “some collection, huh? hank’s ‘investments.’” since your plays are often in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | about power struggles, and money nearly always plays a part in that equation, what is your take on the marriage of art and money? safranko: on one level it’s complicated, and on another it’s quite simple. very few artists make money at their profession. we all want it, we all need it, but the rewards go to only a small percentage of the people working at it. nowadays, it seems to me that genuine art is further and further removed from what is commercially successful, especially in the u.s. anything that doesn’t earn significantly–regardless of its artistic worth–is considered beneath contempt and will have a very difficult time finding an audience. j.b.: because money is such a major concern with your characters, some for survival and others for excessive pleasure, your plays contain frequent attacks on hypocrisy, often against conservative “family values” that are false fronts for greed. as jean simonsen admits in incident in the combat zone: “all of you at the top, you’re all the same aren’t you? and all this ridiculous propaganda about country, and family values, and touching one another’s lives, it’s all just trash, just a pile of lies.....” can you elaborate on this, since playwriting is itself inherently hypocritical? i mean, it offers up pretense as reality, and pursues artistic results, but still desires box-office success? safranko: well, you’ve found me out! and yes, you are correct: we can uncover hypocrisy in ourselves at practically every turn. j.b.: fame is another common theme in your plays, from wendy to eddie to the suspect in interrogation # , who says: “we have no identity without fame.” this last play was written in , before the likes of a kim kardashian or a youtuber, who today seek out fame at nearly any cost. is celebrity an american phenomenon, or least different from other cultural notions of fame, and who is ultimately responsible for this mad push, the individual him- or herself, the media machine, the consumer? safranko: it looks to me that the mad pursuit of celebrity is a peculiarly american disease. not that it probably doesn’t exist elsewhere, but it seems particularly rabid in the u.s. why? what this signifies is a profound emptiness in the psyche and soul of the american. what else but a void would account for such a powerful urge to be seen and known? when you think about it, it’s extraordinarily sad. and the disease has progressed to the point where some skill or talent isn’t even required for notoriety. i mean, look at who many of the most famous people in the world are. j.b.: one of the recurrent messages in your plays is honor thy benefactor, a common theme in georgian theatre. the idea is that, in the entertainment business at least, it is all about being loyal to and paying back those who have lent you a helping hand. as eddie says of hank’s generosity: “payback, he said, for helping him out way back when. that’s the way this business is supposed to work for people with any kind of memory.” eddie utters something similar in seedy, reaves confesses it to john and to jean in incident in the combat zone, and we find harvey saying it to wendy in the promise. and yet, eddie won’t show tracy the grace that hank showed him when he was down and out. does this justify his murder in the end the play, a sort of instant karma or poetic justice? safranko: i would say probably yes. j.b.: let’s talk a bit about your philosophy of life. in your play the promise, the pro/ antagonist harvey says, “you know when free will operates? in–what’s the word?– retrospect. that’s when. in re–tro–spect. the free-will fairytale has caused more unnecessary guilt than any other idea in the history of the world.” is this your philosophical musing or just a casual line spoken by an opportunist? safranko: you know, it is actually largely what i believe, i suppose. i’m something of a determinist. once character is set, do we have much choice about anything? how does the cliché go? character is destiny. in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | j.b.: i’d like now to turn to the relationships between genders in your play, surely one of their dominant themes. you have two strippers, esmeralda (tracy sinnett) in seedy and wendy la brava (josie kamenitski) in the promise. many of your female characters, from wendy to tracy to the suspect’s victim, bear tattoos and piercings. and many of your male characters are openly misogynistic and see women as sexed or sexual objects, such as jack and paul in the bitch-goddess, who are both relentless in their criticism of irene as a former partner. even the suspect in interrogation # says bluntly: “i wouldn't fuck her with your dick.” would you care to elaborate? safranko: well, this is the characters speaking, not me. many men have this outlook on women, though not often to such an extreme. i happen to be honest enough to record those words and thoughts–not that i’m looking for credit. as far as the body markings are concerned, it makes for a dramatic sight on stage, doesn’t it? j.b.: and yet, despite your male characters’ rather abusive views about women, you are critical of predatory sexuality, as seen with harvey in the promise. written in , the promise is certainly relevant today, nonethemore given that the lead character’s name is harvey, an eerie premonition of harvey weinstein. however, in spite of harvey’s obvious despicable treatment of his female clientele, it is wendy who says: “sometimes people have to be used on the way up, but that’s just the way it is.....” do you see the couch audition culture of hollywood as a simple quid pro quo, given the “glut” of actors and the “damn few parts” available for them all? safranko: i think many actors–especially attractive women–would agree with your assessment. j.b.: is gender equality possible then, at least in the entertainment business? or is infidelity, another recurrent theme in your plays, unavoidable? i mean, the list of the unfaithful in your plays runs long. harvey cheats on his wife and lies to her in the promise, just like eddie in seedy: “well, with the wife and kid gone, what’s to stop me?” the character ferdy venturi lived up “in the valley before his wife caught him with the neighbor’s daughter and kicked him out.” john campbell cheats on his wife with young boys in incident in the combat zone. even irene is far from the perfect partner for either jack royko (any reference to mike?) or paul tenucci in the bitch-goddess. is fidelity, like the stage itself, an illusion? safranko: i would think so. but people are wired differently. some people are made for fidelity. however, when a person becomes more and more famous, or rich, or prominent, perhaps fidelity is difficult because the opportunities for extracurricular activity increase exponentially. j.b.: in the promise and in no…?, you seem to be searching for gender complicity to the sexual problem confronting americans (and even the french) that differentiates mutual desire from sexual harassment or abuse. again, given the #metoo movement, was no…? your response to the many accusations sweeping through various male-dominated industries and was it, perhaps, even influenced by david mamet’s oleanna, a similar response nearly three decades earlier? are you taking sides in the debate or do you just want to show how all incidents have two perspectives, and that both genders need to see things from the other’s side? after all, even eddie is propositioned in seedy: “merle moonaker wanted to get into our pants, see? and he looked into my eyes, and he knew right away he wasn’t getting my cock–no way–see what i mean? that’s what it really was.” for you, it is not simply a female issue, but one that affects all who must bow to power, though surely women have historically been more abused than men, no? safranko: while i did see oleanna many years ago, the play was not at all in my mind when i wrote no...? it was inspired by a different experience altogether, and i did want to show that such incidents can have different perspectives, though by no means always. because absolutely, women have been more abused than men. in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | j.b.: your plays often paint a fine line between sexual consent and rape, as with john and liz in no…?, and, to a certain extent, with eddie and tracy/esmeralda in seedy and john campbell and his young trade brent in incident in the combat zone. rape, power, money and business are all uncomfortably intertwined here. as reaves tells campbell, “i made it clear to my contact at the times that we would consider substantially cutting our advertising, if not pulling it altogether. and why strain a mutually profitable relationship?” is america ultimately responsible for the current gender war being waged because it has always equated sex, power and money in the workplace? or are individuals alone to blame for not keeping it in their pants? or, again, are we all complicit? safranko: that’s an incredibly complex question. and i don’t know the answer to it. i will say, however, that another old saw applies here as well: absolute power corrupts absolutely, i believe it goes. j.b.: let’s lighten up the discussion a bit now. humor in your plays often serves a dual function: to coax a laugh out of the audience and to carry a fairly dark double entendre, such as with the naked john campbell running down the streets in incident in the combat zone and being told “and the people who called the police couldn’t tell you from adam.” or again, with paul tenucci in the bitch-goddess turning away from his wife irene’s casket and saying “goodnight, irene, i’ll see you tomorrow,” a close echo of the refrain from the popular lead belly song “goodnight, irene” ( ) about the singer’s distraught past with his faithless love irene and his desire to get even with her in his dreams. do you see yourself as a writer of dark comedies, social dramas or human tragedies? safranko: that’s a very good question, and i realize now that you’ve made me think about it that much of the humor in my writing surfaces in my plays. is it intentional? i don’t know. but i would say that humor notwithstanding, i’m probably a writer of human tragedies. j.b.: finally, as you know, i’m a big tennessee williams fan, and i noticed in your plays many references to his life and work. your plays are often cut into scenes, as were a few of his, mostly notably the glass menagerie and a streetcar named desire. there is also a specific reference to streetcar and an “inconsistent southern accent” in the promise and the allusion to the “kindness of strangers” in seedy. in her long monologue at the opening of scene seven of the promise, sharon muses: “many talented people have been rejected, i remind myself of that every single morning when i wake up alone in my bed out in jersey. think of them: van gogh. strindberg. tennessee williams in his later years.” could you discuss a bit your interests in williams and in his work? safranko: well, it began when i played stanley in streetcar back in on a college stage. i was twenty years old at the time. the play had a strong effect on me, and i got interested in williams as an artist, and, as you know, there was a lot to become acquainted with. i became a particular fan, ironically, of several of his early short stories. streetcar remains a favorite, as well as the story and screenplay of one arm. i’m also fond of kingdom of earth, the red devil battery sign, suddenly last summer and many of the one-acts. and i also love the novel the roman spring of mrs. stone. he left quite a legacy. j.b.: thank you so much, mark, for our talk. i think it is safe to say that i, and all the readers, have learned a lot about your artistic vision and your theatrical talents to project that vision on the stage. i wish you the best in all your future playwriting endeavors. in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | abstracts interview with mark safranko, writer in residence in nancy for the projet ariel. entretien avec l’auteur mark safranko en résidence à nancy dans le cadre du projet ariel. index mots-clés: acteurs/actrices, argent, the bitch goddess culture du monde du cinéma/théâtre, gloire, humour, incident in the combat zone, inégalités de genres, interrogation # , the promise, prostitution, public, seedy, traduction subjects: theater keywords: actors/actresses, audiences, the bitch goddess, fame, film/theatre culture, humor, gender inequalities, incident in the combat zone, interrogation # , money, the promise, prostitution, seedy, translation author john s. bak professeur université de lorraine john.bak@univ-lorraine.fr in interview with american playwright mark safranko miranda, | mailto:john.bak@univ-lorraine.fr 	in interview with american playwright mark safranko maquetación buena.indd dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - doi: . /zenodo. [http://www.revistas.cenaltes.cl/index.php/dorsal] ¿philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal journal. at the beginning of your career you take over foucault’s work and use it and develop it constantly, both as a starting point to your own reflections, as well as for criticizing other positions. in the past ten years, conversely, it is noticeable how your interest in other analyses has replaced this constant use of foucault. this has become apparent, for instance, in your last book notes toward a performative theory of assembly ( ), in which you talk about the theory of assembly. it is so even in senses of the subject ( ), although, surprisingly enough, its subject matter seems to be quite close to foucault’s philosophy, and yet he does not feature as prominently as one would have expected (other than your resorting to him in the introduction where you showed the possible and “faltering” unity of the collection). what lies behind your gradual abandonment of foucault’s reflections? is it maybe an assumption of foucault’s analyses, which nevertheless produces in silence? are you on the lookout, perhaps deliberately, to find fresh and new reflections that could be helpful to tackle these subjects? judith butler. i am not aware of having abandoned foucault. in the tanner lectures that i gave at yale in which will be published in revised form with verso next year, i spend quite a lot of time with society must be defended. so he remains important to me. i was aware, though, that he could not answer some questions about psychoanalysis that i continue to have. i was also aware that he could not provide a political philosophy of collective action, and have turned to arendt increasingly in recent years for that purpose. foucault offered me an important way to think about subject formation within discourse and power. i pursued that as much as i could in the psychic life of power, and found that he could not account for the unconscious or for forms of self-destruction that required psychoanalytic perspectives. and though his idea of the subject is certainly not the same as the individual, there seemed to be no way to think about forms of acting in concert or forms of world-making that happen in among people – social las preguntas y las traducciones han sido preparadas por víctor conejo abril, oscar quejido alonso y ana velasco lázaro. queremos agradecer la revisión de las traducciones a danfeng jin y a eduardo valls oyarzun. ¿ philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - forms. i have been searching for a theoretical vocabulary to strengthen my critique of individualism, especially in light of a popular reading of my early work as restricted by ideas of individual freedom. self-making is an important notion, but does it ever happen without the pull of self-destruction, or a potential of undoing. d. j. when it comes to reflecting on the task of philosophy, what the notions of living and thinking really mean, you seem to rely on the foucaultian notion of “critique” as virtue (or the nietzschean notion of “free spirit”); also, you seem to refer to it as an impulse that cannot be relinquished, a desire to push your own thinking, and the rules that allow us to become subjects, to the limits. for some years you worked along these lines, in keeping with foucault’s, in connection to ideas of performativity and gender. where do you stand, right now, in relation to the importance of philosophy, when philosophy is understood as performative, that is, as a form of resistance and re-appropriation? j. b. my sense is that foucault’s notion of critique continues to be important insofar as it exposes the limits of any field of intelligibility. he does not do this in order to celebrate the unintelligible, as some critics have argued. rather, the limits of one field can become the opening to another form of thought, one that is not yet established as a field of intelligibility, but remains critical - mindful - of the normative dimensions of any such field. critique, though, also has to do with an engaged form of thinking that seeks to understand the historical conditions of our own thinking. this is to be found in the frankfurt school, but also in hegel and marx. as we practice philosophy in the contemporary world, we are continually registering the historical world and its demands within the terms of our thought. how do we respond to those demands – demands to understand and to criticize – without reproducing the historical categories that constitute the problem? and further, how do we do this without acting as if we can escape history? i continue to think we need to understand how forms of thought become naturalized and normalized, but as we use those words, we have to be clear that we do not discount nature or normativity (‘becoming natural is bad’ or ‘all norms have to be opposed’). indeed, global warming is one such historical demand upon us, one that demands the development of norms that might make for a more liveable life, and a thriving environment. critique remains negative to the extent that it is focused on the dismantling of forms of power that oppress, subjugate, and efface, but it is not finally negative: destruction is not its aim. it is an affirmative exercise that opens up a form of freedom within and beyond subjugation. tony negri and michael hardt suggested to me that perhaps it is the performativity of politics that we should be thinking about. d. j. you have argued, following and polishing foucault’s arguments, at the course mal faire, dire vrai. fonction de l’aveuen justice (leuven, ) that performative speech-acts about oneself, specifically about the truth of oneself,unravel the way subjects ¿ philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - bind to their own selves, by resorting to discursive forms power produces.do you think helps show the continuity between, on one hand, reasoning about power analytics and the process of subjectivation that characterized his thought at first, and, on the other, reasoning about this very issue in the s? is it possible he breaks with or changes theoretically all along this process of reasoning? j. b. my sense is that foucault engaged in provocative and productive exaggeration in early pieces such as “the death of the author.” the author was regarded as the effect of writing; the subject, the effect of discourse. but he came to think more carefully about the mechanism and manner of that production with time. indeed, with the hermeneutics of the self, we see a more elaborated account of reflexivity. if discourse/power produces the way a subject comes to regard or treat itself, if it enters into a reflexive process, then we are talking about the way reflexivity is formed. that is one aspect of subjectivation. if the subject also engaged in self- constitution, as it clearly does in forms of self-care and self-cultivation, then is it at once acted on by discourse/power and acting? is its acting not the site or process of a reformulation or rearticulation of discourse/power? he becomes increasingly interested in the confessional, forms of self-disclosure, and self-exposition whether in religion or law, and this gives us a new sense of what subjects can do – and what they can, on occasion, refuse to do. it also gives us a sense of how forms of authority enter into our own modes of action, not as deterministic powers, but as ways of crafting the subject as it crafts itself. d. j. in many passages of your work you argue with nietzsche, whom you sometimes identify as the first reference for the denaturing discourse, that is, a discourse in which certain constructivism or logic of the production of power operates (animal capable of making promises) or, rather, as one of the first authors that see correctly the construction of identity, inexcusably passing through “the other” (vulnerability of the “sovereign individual”). however, in your reflection on power you always regard foucault’s analytical power as the starting point of analytical power, so much so that it seems that the foucaultian conception of power is not indebted, in general terms, to the nietzschean line (the “will to power” ontologically understood as a relational field of forces, actually as a plexus of dynamic relations from which different configurations of meaning and value constantly arise, and in which we can understand the idea of force as something essentially precarious). what is, in your opinion, the relationship between both authors? in what does foucault’s analytic of power surpass that of nietzsche’s? and, in this sense, is it possible to draw a line that runs through nietzsche-foucault- butler? j. b. i am less sure than you that i argue with nietzsche. nietzsche’s reflections on bad conscience are infinitely interesting to me, though i think sometimes that his versions of affirmation might be understood as manic. it is clear that foucault’s ¿ philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - discipline and punish draws a great deal from nietzsche’s book entitled dawn or daybreak in english. there we find a brilliant analysis of legal punishment as creating the conscience upon which it depends. my own analyses depend on nietzsche’s in this way: the doer comes after the deed, is itself a construction of the deed. my worry about discipline and punish is that discipline works too well. in the late reflections on law that foucault provides, he shows us more clearly how a subject is formed and forms itself in relation to the discursive and theatrical demands of the law. but resistance is also possible there, as it is in the domain of sexuality. but students, as i am sure you know, are startled to find that for foucault where there is sexuality there is resistance, but where there is law or discipline, there is not. that changes as he proceeds. more recently i am interested in trying to think about moral philosophy that does not depend upon the self- lacerations of conscience or the aggressions of the super-ego. when ethics depends on a relation to the other, then it is a relational problem, and not an internal struggle against a potentially annihilating aspect of one’s own psyche. that strikes me as a more productive way to think. d. j. in your doctoral dissertation, released in , although later published in as subjects of desire. hegelian reflections in twentieth-century france ( ), you tackled foucault’s notion of power from a perspective that critically approaches hegelian postulates specifically the dialectics of master and slave. thenceforth, up until the early s, we have witnessed other approaches to this notion of power in your work. what types of variations has the concept of power undergone or from which perspective can we understand the variations of the use of foucoultian concept in your work? j. b. i think this is probably a question for critics and commentators. i do not track my own usages and do not strive for consistency. since i am, sadly or not, a living author, i am engaged with thinking, which means i do not stay with the same thought or try to produce a consistent or systematic body of thought. it all depend on what i am trying to think. d. j. most of your work can be construed as sets of reflections on concepts like vulnerability, interpellation, recognition and subjectivation. these notions are marked by the conception of power and the possibility of critique of foucault, as we have already mentioned. to what extent the differences between your theory of recognition and that of axel honneth’s reproduce the discussion between foucault and habermas? what can you tell us about the possibility of synthesis or mutual enrichment between critical theory and your work? j. b. there is a strong alliance between my work and the critical theories to which you refer insofar as we all start with the primary hegelian thesis that the ¿ philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - self is constituted socially in its relation to others, and that without this social mediation there can be no self. if we try to derive a normative theory from this hegelian condition, we may take different paths. honneth sets aside the theory of determinate negation and negativity in general in his reading of hegel. for me, the life and death struggle remains central. our ethical relations have to come to terms with the potential for destruction that resides in every social bond. ambivalence is a feature of human relationality and of social bonds. in this sense, i am closer to linking hegel with freud. but honneth links hegel more closely with winnicott. the relational dimension of winnicott is important for my work, to be sure, but i worry there that problem of aggression and violence is left to theorists such as klein. d. j. there is currently a controversy between feminist movements in spain in relation to surrogacy. the dispute mostly focuses on the limits of the autonomy of the body. some feminists assert that surrogacy poses a means of control over women’s sexuality and it should not be regulated in any case. they argue that in a context of economic vulnerability one could never be able to choose freely. however, other feminists believe that claiming this means denying the ability of decision-making to women with low incomes. this question recalls the debate about whether prostitutes are, actually, free to decide or not. what is your opinion on this matter? j. b. i do not have a settled view. in my view, a woman has the right to decide what to do with her own body as long as it does not hurt another. many who oppose surrogacy base their views on traditional notions of the family, heterosexual reproduction, and romantic ideas about biological ties that tend to devalue other ties of kinship, especially adoption. so we need to examine the reasons people give for objecting to a choice that another woman makes about how to use her body, how to make money, or how to lend a service. do we have the same objections to sperm donors? they are also lending a service. in general, i am suspicious of views that seek to discount the choices of women and keep them in a position of structural powerlessness. that does not seem helpful. d. j. the opposition to political correctness has always been a critical and subversive attitude on behalf of the left; lately, however, the right has used this concept to attack disadvantaged groups, like women or immigrants (the clearest example being trump’s victory). moreover, the left seems to have abandoned that critical attitude which featured prominently in the nineties. in , jack halberstam published a post in which he denounced the rise of a certain rhetoric within queer communities that produces an atmosphere of censorship. he compared the current situation with the context of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism of the s and s, which typically saw people with poorly managed or easily susceptible traumas and who constantly ¿ philosophy or activism? interview with judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - claimed to feel hurt because of other’s poorly phrased questions or inappropriate choice of words. in this context, people had to make adjustments: they tried to avoid patriarchal language; they had to think before speaking and spent their time sharing painful experiences. halberstam affirmed they ended up turning into psychosomatic, anti-sex, anti-fun and anti-porn subjects. he points out that there is a revival of this type of behavior, and denounces difficulties to organize any type of activity without complaints about the use of language nowadays. in most cases, groups that feel offended demand apologies, as well as actual elimination of the offensive part of the discourse, work or event. we have reached a point whereupon even the use of a reclaimed word by queer subjects produces this kind of response. he does not hesitate to qualify this as censorship. considering the present-day context, it seems that it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry out queer politics of re-appropriation of insults whilst the right gains ground with rhetoric of ‘political incorrectness’. do you think queer communities have been influenced by an atmosphere of political correctness? in that case, does this mean the right is setting the political agenda nowadays? j. b. i wonder whether “political correctness” is the right word here. i think that there is an ongoing struggle for recognition on the left, and ongoing concern about being effaced by the terms that define the left. what if we started with socialism, and asked what kind of unity it presupposed? who was left out? who wanted to be included? as soon as “women” become a new category, we learn that that category also has to be thought about carefully since surely trans women are women as well. i think that we have to move beyond the subject of politics as an end itself to focus on the general aims of equality, justice, and freedom. as we gather to realize those ideals, we will come into conflict about who “we” are. but that conflict is only useful if the reason we want to sort it is to move forward with a broader politics, so that the politics of identity is not its own end. d. j. after the success of the #metoo campaign, devoted to denounce sexual harassment, a controversy arose due to a manifesto signed by a hundred french artists and intellectuals, thereby accusing this movement of promoting a climate of puritanism and victimization. are we facing a conservative reaction against feminism or a legitimate denounce against a moralist trend? do you think the debate informs a cultural battle between france and usa regarding sexuality? j. b. it seems to me that the signatories of that letter lost their common purpose within a day or so of its publication, so it makes sense to ask why. there is a difference of opinion on how deep and systematic the oppression of women is, and whether that oppression is rightly named as seduction, for instance, or whether it should be restricted to harassment and rape. in the us, it appeared as if the ¿filosofía o activismo? entrevista a judith butler dorsal. revista de estudios foucaultianos número , junio , - issn: - allegations were supposed to count as evidence; otherwise, it would seem that we, too, were not taking the claims of women seriously. and yet, allegations can never suffice as evidence of a crime there has to be due process, and some allegations are wrong or distorted, and that needs to be considered in a way that draws upon evidence and insure due process. every gay or lesbian person has known about the “homosexual panic” defense in which someone who is homophobic accuses a lgbtq person of trying to seduce them. it is most often hallucinatory. what are the protections against the reanimation of that monstrous legal alibi that has justified acts of violence against lgbtq people? some feminists say that the courts have failed us so that now men should be tried in the media. but that is the wrong way to approach the media. it makes it into a theatre of cruelty. so the paradox that we are left with is how to acknowledge the pervasive character of sexual harassment and violence at the same time that we make sure legal processes do not allow for the destruction of those falsely accused. both sexual violence and false accusation are real harms. so let’s start with that agreement and see where we end up. the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers invited commentary | medical education the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers virginia a. brown, ma, phd; rené salazar, md; elizabeth a. jacobs, md, mpp we live in an era of profound cultural change. during the past several years, the #metoo movement has brought attention to how women are harassed across society, and unfortunately, academia is no exception. frequent calls for change and a growing body of empirical literature have focused on gender discrimination and sexual harassment against women academics by other academics, including the covert ways in which women are denied opportunities for advancement. most recently, the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic and the deaths of george floyd and breonna taylor, as well as riah milton and dominique “rem’mie” fells, both transgender women of color, have laid bare the discrimination and harassment that black, latinx, asian, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex (lgbtqi) communities experience. racial/ethnic discrimination and harassment are common in academia as well; asian health care professionals have recently reported being spat on by patients and being told to go back to china, and the black lives matter movement inspired the sharing of the frequent macroaggressions and microaggressions that black health care professionals and academic professionals experience at #blackintheivory. viglianti and colleagues investigated whether hospitals affiliated with the association of american medical colleges address patient-perpetrated sexual harassment in patient bills of rights and responsibilities and how clear and targeted the language is regarding harassment. the authors empirically affirmed that the right of patients “to receive care free of harassment” was foundational across the hospital patient bills of rights sampled. however, the authors found that “the same emphasis on zero tolerance of harassment toward health care workers was rarely included in the patients’ responsibilities.” despite the numerous calls for action and the delineation of specific recommendations academic institutions can take to end the harassment that women, people of color, and lgbtqi individuals experience, the findings of viglianti and colleagues underscore how far we still have to go to undo the structures of racial/ethnic and gender discrimination so that actionable and enforceable policies can be put in place. they also raise important questions. first, how can we say our academic hospitals are places where patients can be treated with respect and be free from harassment when only those who seek care can expect that treatment? is it not more powerful and convincing to state to our patients and colleagues that harassment in any form will not be tolerated? second, how can we increase the diversity of the medical profession when we allow the types of behavior that create a hostile environment for health care professionals who are women, individuals of underrepresented races/ethnicities, and lgbtqi go unaddressed? only % of active physicians in the us are from racial/ethnic groups that are historically underrepresented in medicine. moreover, discrimination and harassment toward health care workers based on their race/ethnicity or gender identity has become a substantial barrier to making the medical profession more diverse and inclusive. as medical schools and academic medical centers across the us work to increase the diversity of their workforce, they must prioritize creating inclusive workspaces that take into account the many elements of identity, including race/ethnicity, abilities, gender identity, and sexual orientation. clear policies and procedures including zero tolerance of harassment toward health care workers is a step that academic medical centers must take toward developing an inclusive, diverse, and respectful work environment. the wielding of power by any group is morally wrong and ethically + related article author affiliations and article information are listed at the end of this article. open access. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) september , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . unacceptable. the need to ensure that all individuals are free from such assaults, including verbal, physical, and psychological abuse, demands institutional restructuring and expansion of protection for all to be free from such discrimination and harassment. ethical conduct is professional conduct. as the american medical association code of medical ethics states, physicians are obligated to “respect the rights of patients, colleagues, and other health professionals.” organizations need to support and encourage ethical conduct by all individuals. article information published: september , . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . open access: this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. © brown va et al. jama network open. corresponding author: elizabeth a. jacobs, md, mpp, dell medical school, the university of texas at austin, trinity st, room . , austin, tx - (liz.jacobs@austin.utexas.edu). author affiliations: dell medical school, the university of texas at austin. conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. references . johnson pa, widnall se, benya ff, eds. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. the national academies press; . doi: . / . chen ha, trinh j, yang gp. anti-asian sentiment in the united states—covid- and history. am j surg. published online may , . doi: . /j.amjsurg. . . . @drshardedavis. #blackintheivory. june , . accessed august , . https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/ status/ ?s+ . viglianti em, meeks lm, oliverio al. patient-perpetrated harassment policies in patient bills of rights and responsibilities at us academic medical centers. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . / jamanetworkopen. . . association of american medical colleges. diversity in medicine: facts and figures . accessed august , . https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active- physicians-race/ethnicity- . osseo-asare a, balasuriya l, huot sj, et al. minority resident physicians’ views on the role of race/ethnicity in their training experiences in the workplace. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . . american medical association. ama principles of medical ethics. updated june . accessed august , . https://www.ama-assn.org/about/publications-newsletters/ama-principles-medical-ethics jama network open | medical education the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) september , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/pages/instructions-for-authors#secopenaccess/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . mailto:liz.jacobs@austin.utexas.edu https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.amjsurg. . . https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/status/ ?s+ https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/status/ ?s+ https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity- https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity- https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://www.ama-assn.org/about/publications-newsletters/ama-principles-medical-ethics tropmed .. am. j. trop. med. hyg., (suppl ), , pp. – doi: . /ajtmh. - copyright © by the american society of tropical medicine and hygiene mentorship and ethics in global health: fostering scientific integrity and responsible conduct of research elizabeth a. bukusi, , , * yukari c. manabe, , and joseph r. zunt , , , center for microbiology research, kenya medical research institute, nairobi, kenya; department of global health, university of washington, seattle, washington; department of obstetrics and gynecology, university of washington, seattle, washington; division of infectious diseases, department of medicine, school of medicine, johns hopkins university, baltimore, maryland; infectious diseases institute, makerere university college of health sciences, kampala, uganda; department of neurology, university of washington, seattle, washington; department of epidemiology, university of washington, seattle, washington; department of medicine (infectious diseases), university of washington, seattle, washington abstract. addressing ethical issues through mentorship is key to encouraging scientific integrity and increasing research capacity. across the global health arena, mentorship requires helping mentees understand and negotiate the regulatory aspects of research—which can substantially differ even between countries with similar resources. mentorship support spans across the research framework from obtaining ethical approval and ensuring scientific integrity, to de- termining authorship and disseminating study results—providing multiple opportunities to model ethical behavior for mentees. the power imbalances between the global north and south in accessing funding resources produce further challenges in setting the research agenda and for ensuring equity in the dissemination of research findings. gender further complicates the aspiration for equity; the proportion of women in high administrative or research positions remains low. this study explores four specific mentoring case scenarios commonly encountered in the global health research field in low- and middle-income institutions. introduction the increasing globalization of commerce, education, and research has resulted in increasing collaboration across countries. one manifestation of increased collaboration in academia is the rise in number of scientific publications. be- tween and , the number of scientific manuscripts published in any of the more than , peer-reviewed sci- entific journals monitored by scopus increased from . million to nearly . million. over this same timeframe, sci- entists from low- and middle-income country (lmic) institu- tions increased their percentage of scientific and technical publications from . % to . %. in addition, between and , coauthorship by authors from more than one country increased from % to % and u.s. and chinese scientists have reached approximate parity in total number of publications, with each country contributing . % and . % of the world’s total science and engineering publica- tions in , respectively. with this increase in publications, has come increasing reports of scientific misconduct, as well as attention to how institutions and mentors can monitor for scientific misconduct and provide role modeling and training in the responsible conduct of research (rcr) to reduce mis- conduct in trainees, especially in countries that have limited infrastructure to detect, investigate, or penalize scientific misconduct. providing research trainees with a framework of ethical standards for conducting research, especially in the global multidisciplinary and multinational arenas, is essential to en- sure that research findings are reliable, that future scientists conduct science in an ethical manner, and that research ad- vances our understanding of the world and its inhabitants while respecting and protecting human and animal subjects used in research. responsible conduct of research is based on ethical behavior of scientists toward their research subjects and colleagues. scientific integrity and institutionalization of research oversight includes monitoring, and training. the national academy of sciences, engineering and medicine, in their consensus study report on fostering integrity in re- search, noted: “practicing integrity in research means plan- ning, proposing, performing, reporting, and reviewing research in accordance with the values described above [objectivity, honesty, openness, accountability, fairness and steward- ship].” perhaps equally important to practicing integrity, is providing a structure through which scientific misconduct can be identified, reported and addressed. the inter- academy council, a multinational organization of science academies, stated “while procedures and institutions [are necessary] to effectively investigate allegations of irrespon- sible research conduct and act on the results, efforts aimed at preventing irresponsible conduct and ensuring good practices through mentoring and education are ultimately more important.” historical perspectives the world medical association developed the declaration of helsinki adopted by its assembly in helsinki in . this guide was specific for physicians regarding engagement of their patients in research. subsequently, in the council for international organizations in medicine, using the decla- ration of helsinki as a reference, provided guidelines for the conduct of biomedical research involving humans conducted in lmic settings, where greater disparities in health care are encountered than in more developed countries. before the s, few institutions in the united states had adopted in- stitutional review boards (irbs) to oversee research involving humans or animals to respond to concerns of scientific mis- conduct and had instead relied on independent monitoring and regulation of scientific activities. in the s, the emer- gence of several cases of scientific misconduct in the press led to u.s. congressional hearings that resulted in the creation * address correspondence to elizabeth a. bukusi, center for microbiology research, kenya medical research institute (kemri), p.o. box , nairobi , kenya. e-mail: ebukusi@rctp.or.ke mailto:ebukusi@rctp.or.ke of federal and institutional standards to reduce scientific mis- conduct. in , to ensure “that attention be directed toward scientific integrity in the conduct of research,” the u.s. national institutes of health (nih) revised national research service award institutional training grants “to require that a program in the principles of scientific integrity be an integral part of the proposed research training effort.” since this revision, guide- lines have beenupdated butsome experts suggestthatdespite these guidelines, transgressions in scientific integrity continue to occur and consensus is lacking regarding how to teach rcr or measure the effectiveness of such teaching. globalization of research the globalization of research and publishing has also resulted in increased awareness of the disparity of rcr training opportunities in many countries. with the advent of aids, the fogarty international center increased research training support for international scientists to build capacity to respond to epidemics through new programs, such as the aids international research training program, first offered in , and the international research ethics education and curriculum development award, first offered in . with the implementation of these international training programs came increased attention to strengthening didactic and interactive rcr education for trainees conducting research in different international settings. although many of the early diaspora of fogarty research training programs have risen to leadership positions and have facilitated increased availability of rcr training at their universities and institutions, successive gen- erations of trainees continue to struggle with many of the same issues touching multiple facets of research—from design to implementation, analysis, and dissemination of results. one recent study of researchers in lmics reported that a common perceived factor associated with high prevalence of research misconduct was the lack of institutional structures or systems to support and promote research integrity—such as offices to promote research integrity, develop and dissemi- nate policies on research misconduct, and provide channels for whistleblowing when misconduct was detected. many universities and training institutions in resource-rich countries have evolved over centuries and have thus had opportunities to refine teaching methodologies to maximize the benefits of teaching for different stages of the educational cycle. through academic partnerships, which have typically been closely aligned with research training grants, some of these advances have trickled down to institutions in lmics, where the time since the countries achieved independence has been shorter and as a result the opportunities in many countries to refine teaching methodologies are less plentiful. in addition, these institutions have limited resources and may not prioritize the development of such offices and systems. , regardless of the maturity of teaching, training, and research regulation programs, recent evaluations suggest that education in the rcr for science and engineering students, especially for undergraduates, remains inadequate—and poorer perfor- mance by international trainees on measures of baseline rcr knowledge suggest these trainees are even less exposed to rcr training in their home countries. to further complicate thisissue, codes of responsible conduct differ across countries, although efforts in the past decade have resulted in increased international consensus on the basic principles of rcr. realizing that addressing all aspects of rcr is beyond the scope of this manuscript, we chose four common areas for misconduct noted in the international literature , that each of us has encountered while mentoring trainees in our pro- grams: ) plagiarism, ) determining authorship, ) the ap- propriate useof anirb, and ) imbalances of power, especially across genders. these four common concerns are encoun- tered frequently when mentoring undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral trainees and represent areas where good men- torship can decrease scientific misconduct in new trainees and encourage the next generation of trainees to become leaders. we provide case studies to illustrate each topic area and discuss how mentoring and institutional structures can be harnessed to detect and address transgressions and, when instituted early enough, prevent scientific misconduct from arising. the literature review was guided by the delphi method. through a series of phone and in-person conversations with the authors involved in all chapters of this manual, we dis- cussed potential content of each chapter. for our chapter, we initially defined the four most common or challenging sce- narios associated with mentor–mentee relationships across our international settings. through identification of key articles by the panel of authors, pubmed search of key terms asso- ciated with each scenario, and review of relevant articles listed in the references of these articles, we arrived at a list of relevant articles for our chapter; these articles were then vetted by the panel of authors and relevant observations were included in this chapter. plagiarism case study . the student had published one paper and needed a second to graduate. this was a requirement of the university adopted by the accreditation body to encourage publication and research output. after copying and pasting whole sections of the first paper into the second, he was surprised when he was notified after submission that this was self-plagiarism and was not acceptable. shocked, the student wondered how he could be accused of plagiarism because he had written the first paper. one of the most common issues affecting the integrity of science is plagiarism. the interpretation of plagiarism is nu- anced across cultures, and current definitions include not only the copying of another person’s work without citation, thus implying it is one’s own work, but also “self-plagiarism,” or repeating portions of one’s prior work (some exception is made for repeating sections of previously published materials and methodology sections). in countries where english is typically a second language, many graduate students are re- quired to write in english for purposes of thesis or manuscript publication; in this context, copying text is sometimes con- sidered a compliment to the original author of the plagiarized text. in addition, the type of publication may influence the likelihood of plagiarism; one study in india noted that plagia- rism was highest in review articles and was not detected in any of the case reports reviewed. one study that interviewed chinese supervisors about rea- sons for students copying text and how to remedy this issue concluded there were four major reasons for text-based pla- giarism: ) insufficient understanding of academic writing, ) difficulty with the english language, ) “shortage in intellectual mentorship ethics and cognitive depth needed for handling a subject matter,” and ) lack of training in the ethical conduct of research. reasons given by students for plagiarizing included: the “normalcy of plagiarism” in their home environment; vague or nonexistent policies regarding rcr and plagiarism; and, for non-native english speakers, difficulty expressing oneself in english. the emergence of online programs to check for plagiarism, such as ithenticate, turnitin, and crosscheck, have resulted in increased ease of assessing copied text; it is used by teachers and students from secondary school through uni- versity and professional levels. after the initial use of crossref plagiarism screening service, one prestigious scientific journal in china detected ( %) of , submissions with “un- original material” and noted that “in ancient china. . .students were typically encouraged to copy the words of their mas- ters.” however, these programs are not free and can have high levels of “false positives”—they will detect similarities in text in any section of a manuscript, including the reference section. one study that examined the frequency of detection of similar text in two entire issues of their journal found that sensitivity for fraud detection was improved, and false positive reports were decreased by adjusting the software to exclude review of bibliography, materials and methods sections, and reporting only similarity of sources greater than %. to successfully reduce the incidence of plagiarism among postgraduates, one group developed a module that included a didactic presentation about plagiarism followed by discussion of an anonymous paper that contained plagiarism detected by turnitin software. in this scenario, students were asked to discuss if plagiarism had occurred and what action should be taken against the student at that time or if similar reports of plagiarism occurred in the future with the same student. in a review of randomized interventions that attempted to improve rcr, the likelihood of committing plagiarism was reduced through practical exercises and integration of software to detect text matching. other effective methods for de- creasing the occurrence of plagiarism include scientific writing courses, modules on plagiarism in rcr courses, incorporating discussion of scientific integrity into the culture of working groups, and adhering to internationally recognized guidelines for scientific writing. gasparyan and others provided a thoughtful review of plagiarism in the scientific setting and note that adherence to guidelines for authors and editors published by the committee on publication ethics and the international committee of medical journal editors (icmje) could lead to marked reductions in plagiarism. one laboratory director noted that he posted a page containing an “ethical code of research conduct for university academics” in his laboratory, thus establishing an expectation for scientific behavior in his labo- ratory. mentors can encourage responsible writing through teaching as they edit by providing trainees with written and oral feedback on written materials during one-on-one sessions, and explicitly discussing appropriate citation of others’ work during group meetings. with consideration for the yearly turnover of trainees,thesetypesofdiscussionsmustberepeatedwitheach new cohort. authorship case study . nearing the completion of a thesis, a post- graduate student received upsetting news. the student’s work had led to excellent findings that would add to the field of knowledge, but the supervising professor had recently in- formed the student that the work was to be published with the supervisor as first author. the supervisor needed first author papers for promotion. the student, they argued, only needed to publish for purposes of graduating and be done with the work. the supervisor rationalized that the student intended to focus on clinical work anyway and was not on an academic track. regardless, the postgraduate scholar had put in the most work, from conceptualizing the research idea, to col- lecting and analyzing data, and drafting the manuscript. true, the guidance provided by the supervisor was key to comple- tion of his training and yes, even the publication of the paper. but was it enough for the supervisor to take away the first authorship? the icmje has created a widely accepted definition of au- thorship that is “intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their roles in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.” they propose that authorship be based on four criteria: . substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work . drafting the work or revising it critically for important in- tellectual content . final approval of the version to be published . agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. in a questionnaire study of corresponding authors from lmics, % reported that guest authorship, or adding an author who had not substantially contributed to the manu- script, took place at their institution, despite awareness of icmje recommendations regarding the responsibilities of authorship. this same publication noted that ghost au- thorship, or omitting an author who had contributed sig- nificantly, such as a professional writer, although less common, occurred at slightly more than % of their institutions. the challenge with authorship of publications then is not the lack of clarity on who or what participation should qualify one to be an author, but the implementation of existing authorship guidelines. fairness and integrity when attributing authorship should be guiding principles, especially when considering the unequal relationships of mentor and mentee and the lack of role models who not only talk the talk but walk the walk. mentorship that upholds and encourages appropriate attri- bution of authorship can produce a critical mass of the next generation of scientists who will continue to uphold these values, as well as disseminate these same values into envi- ronments where inappropriate attribution still exists. one method to increase the likelihood of appropriate attribution of authorship is to ask mentors to provide guidance on author- ship, from the initial design stage through the analysis and writing phases; discussions should include internationally recognized criteria required for authorship, author order, as well as guest and ghost authorship. in addition, traditional rcr courses often include sections on authorship. bukusi and others conflicts in authorship are best avoided through early dis- cussions and authorship contracts—which should be based oninternationallyrecognizedguidelinesandincludeauthororder. when authorship conflicts do arise, they are often affected by perceived repercussions that might occur—especially if the junior scientist is raising the concern. resolution of conflicts canoccur through direct dialogue between authors, mediation via an ombudsman office (if present at the university), or peer panels. appropriate use of irbs case study . a graduate student sought consultation on a matter concerning research sites. the scholar had been given approval from an accredited ethics review committee (erc) to conduct research in a certain facility. however, at the time of data collection, they realized that the facility no longer had the patient flow or number of specimens needed for the study. on consultation with the graduate supervisor, the supervisor told the student that it was fine to go ahead and collect the data from a different location and when the thesis was written up, an explanation could be provided regarding reasons for the change in location. the supervisor noted there was no po- tential harm to any participants because the experiments were carried out on left over specimens after the tests needed for clinical care had been completed. research integrity laws that make research illegal without the approval of an irb have been lagging in many lmics. although there has been a strengthening of research regulatory systems, not all lmics have robust systems for continuing education of researchers, clear mechanisms or guidance for review of re- search protocols, or mechanisms for monitoring the imple- mentation of research with corresponding procedures for dealing with violations of ethical guidelines for human subject protection. there is general global consensus on the need to obtain ethical clearance from an irb or research erc for investiga- tors developing and implementing a research protocol, es- pecially when it involves human or animal subjects. there has been clear guidance from the u.s. public health service re- garding expectations of how research is defined and what expectations are required to receive research funding from the u.s. government, but these may not be applicable to funding awarded through other sources. although research is highly valued for innovation and find- ing new solutions to challenges, an additional benefit are the facilities and administrative, or “indirect” costs that are pro- vided with nearly all research grant awards to institutions in the united states and europe. these indirect funds provide in- stitutions with financial resources to administer grants and strengthen institutional programs to support research, such as irbs and integrated programs in grant writing and rcr training. as grants directly awarded to institutions in lmics are relatively new, similar indirect costs have unfortunately not been available to support the development of similar research infrastructure or the human resources required for research regulation and administration. training and mentoring on conduct during the imple- mentation of research therefore remains important. examples of potential breaches of irb/erc approval include but are not limited to: change in an approved location of study imple- mentation, change in the type of sample needed for the research procedures, change in wording used for the con- senting of participants for prospective studies, or the amount of compensation provided for participation in research. the standards of expectations on the appropriate use and com- munication with the irb/erc continue to evolve. when mentors are not well versed with the current local and relevant international regulations governing biomedical research, mentees can find themselves in the crosshairs between the mentor and the irb/erc. imbalances of power case study . a junior female scientist who was a regional expert in a particular area, was asked to be the in-country principal investigator (pi) for a research study for which a grant had already been written and funded by an international funding agency. the in-country pi worked hard to obtain the necessary bioethical approvals, enlist staff, conduct study training, and ultimately recruit participants and collect study data. ultimately, the final paper was written and the in-country pi was included as a middle author, after never being asked to comment on the content of the paper other than to provide final approval. here, the in-country pi was being treated as solely an im- plementer and had no role in the design of the study nor of the original research question—which may or may not have had any significant local or regional relevance. because the in- ternational pi had brought the funding, there was a clear im- balance of power that was antithetical to the “collaborative partnership.” although the in-country pi was included as a coauthor, she did not have a scientific voice, was being held to a low scientific standard, and was recognized only for field implementation. the opportunity for a more equitable scien- tific role in this situation was absent largely due to failure to provide a venue for scientific exchange and collaboration. the tokenism of the authorship in this example is also subliminally condescending and displayed a lack of trust. importantly, the in-country pi likely had to negotiate resource limitations, so- cial, and political contextual complexities without which the project may never have been completed and are, therefore, equally important to the success of the project. this case study highlights the need for mentors from both the global north and global south to ensure that, “[a re- searcher’s primary ethical obligation in. . .global health expe- riences is to improve the health and well-being of the individuals and communities they visit.” , often as a result of funding imbalances, because researchers in the global south still do not have sufficient access or experience to ac- quire local or international research funding, mentors must include lessons on the importance of the integration of local relevance to balance decision making in a way that empowers local investigators. an additional aspect of this case study that may have also played a role is gender. as the percentage of women who enter medicine and science increases, many seek to also enter academic research. in a survey of , new recipients of nih career development (k) awards, ( . %) of the female respondents reported having experienced sexual harassment including: sexist remarks or behavior, unwanted sexual ad- vances, subtle bribery to engage in sexual behavior, threats to engage in sexual behavior, or coercive advances. to com- pound this issue, nearly all countries have gender inequity in mentorship ethics leadership positions, and women in many countries still ex- perience outright hostility, sexual harassment or marginali- zation in the offices, clinics, and hospital environments in which they strive to work. these issues tend to be magnified in lmic research settings where the roles of women have not traditionally included the position of pi, dean, or rector. a growing number of activities to increase the visibility of women in scientific leadership positions, such as women leaders in global health, and the l’oreal-unesco for women in sci- ence awards, are increasing recognition of women’s leader- ship potential and providing opportunities for women to develop networks of female mentor leaders to assist the transition to more equitable leadership of research and sci- entific programs. although the #metoo movement has af- fected many areas of commerce and entertainment, attention to sexual harassment within science has lagged behind. dr. kathryn clancy, author of this article, noted “many science workplaces use legal definitions of sexual harassment to set the standard for workplace conduct. if that is the bar that has to be met for a disgusting behavior to be considered action- able by a university, research institute, or field station, it is a high one. an enormous range of disrespectful and even frightening behavior can slip under that bar, even though it damages the careers of victims and bystanders, holding back scientific advancement.” the national academies of sci- ences, engineering, and medicine recently released a con- sensus study report detailing the extent to which women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine have been affected by sexual harassment and identifies methods to ad- dress harassment in these settings. to increase equity across collaborations, institutions must change existing research and training cultures to bolster the ability of collaborators to participate in all stages of research— from development of research ideas and protocols to implementation, analysis, and dissemination of study re- sults. increasing global awareness of gender inequity and sexual harassment should also lead to change—through pressure on institutions and individuals to enforce existing rules and regulations that are relevant to gender equity and anti-harassment or to implement new rules and regulations in places where none currently exist. in conclusion, the need for research integrity as a core part of mentoring is an important undertaking that should be implemented from the conception of the research idea, through the development, implementation, and dissemination of study results. there is a great need for mentors to be aware of and deal with the challenges that mentees are likely to face throughout the research process. the mentoring compe- tency manuscript in this supplement includes other core— and key—competencies that mentors should strive to achieve to ensure their trainees receive outstanding men- toring. ethics in research is not just a question of following the letter of the law, but represents a way of conducting oneself with integrity and as a scientist who provides a model that sets an ethical course for others to follow. we need a critical mass of mentors who model ethical conduct along the entire cascade of research and who insist on the conduct of locally relevant research. the mentorships workshops were not designed to evaluate the before or after practice within the institutions where they were conducted. this is a limitation which will be addressed in future workshops where specific attention will be focused on pre- and posttest evaluations on specified domains of practice with regards to ethical conduct. if education is a life-long process, then mentoring and ethics are key pillars of this journey, and both can be harnessed to increase scientific integrity and research that moves the needle of public health toward equality for all. received july , . accepted for publication october , . published online november , . acknowledgments: we received support from the fic global health program for fellows and scholar consortia, including the university of california glocal health fellowship (fic d tw ), the vanderbilt-emory-cornell-duke consortium for global health fellows (d tw ), the unc-johns hopkins-morehouse-tulane fogarty global health fellowship program (d tw ), the northern pa- cific global health research fellows consortium (d tw ), the harvard-boston university-northwestern university-university of new mexico fogarty global health training program (d tw ), and the yale-berkeley-fiu-stanford global health equity scholars program (d tw ). additional support was provided by fogarty international center d ’s for y. c. m. ( d tw , d tw ). authors’ addresses: elizabeth a. bukusi, research care training program, center for microbiology research, kenya medical research institute, nairobi,kenya,e-mail:ebukusi@kemri.org.yukari c. manabe, department of medicine, johns hopkins university, baltimore, md, e-mail: ymanabe@jhmi.edu. joseph r. zunt, department of global health, university of washington, seattle, wa, e-mail: jzunt@u. washington.edu. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. references . nsb, . science and engineering indicators. arlington, va: national science foundation. . altman l, broad w, . global trend: more science, more fraud. new york, ny: new york times. . national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, . fostering integrity in research. washington, dc: the national academies press. doi: 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discrimination experiences of academic medical faculty. jama : – . . clancy k, . have the sciences had a #metoo moment? not so much. washington, dc: national geographic. . committee on the impacts of sexual harassment in academic sciences e, and medicine, . sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering and medicine. washington, dc: national acade- mies press. . hamer dh, rispel l, nxumalo n, . global health research mentoring competencies for individuals and institutions in low and middle-income countries. am j trop med hyg (suppl ): – . mentorship ethics http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/ -cfr- /index.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/ -cfr- /index.html grace ese-osa idahosa dr grace ese-osa idahosa, centre for social change, university of johannesburg, south africa; e-mail: idahosagrace@ gmail.com vanessa bradbury vanessa bradbury, institute of development studies, university of sussex, united kingdom; e-mail: vanessabradbury @ gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi. org/ . / / aa i /sp issn: - e-issn: - acta academica • ( ): - © creative commons with attribution (cc-by) challenging the way we know the world: overcoming paralysis and utilising discomfort through critical reflexive thought first submission: october acceptance: june published: august reflexivity has been foregrounded as an important practice in scholarship regarding the scrutiny of ethical research and knowledge production. what is at risk, however, is reflexivity becoming counter-productive and consumed within the hegemony of western practice, ultimately making little contribution towards disrupting power asymmetries. in this paper, we ask, at what point can critical self-reflexivity become productive, rather than self-indulgent and paralysing? reflecting on the assumptions that underpin our scholarship, we ask, how can we utilise emotions of paralysis, discomfort and contradiction towards positive social change? drawing on our experiences, we highlight the messy nature of reflexivity and argue that these emotions are important and entail a constant re-examination of the assumptions embedded in our pedagogy, scholarship and motives for engaging with the world. in so doing, we show how challenging the ways we know the world through reflexivity and critical thought are vital in the process of decolonising knowledge. mailto:idahosagrace@gmail.com mailto:idahosagrace@gmail.com vanessabradbury @gmail.com vanessabradbury @gmail.com http://dx.doi.org/ . / /aa i /sp http://dx.doi.org/ . / /aa i /sp http://dx.doi.org/ . / /aa i /sp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /za/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /za/ acta academica / : ( ) keywords: critical reflexivity; contradiction; paralysis; knowledge production; decolonisation. introduction decolonisation has entered the forefront of the university agenda as social movements (such as #blacklivesmatter, #metoo) and student protests and #mustfall movements (#rhodesmustfall, #luister and #rhodessowhite) in universities across the world, seek to renew the struggle for the decolonisation of colonial legacies . but what does it mean to be in this space of decolonisation, transformation and social justice? when calls for the decolonisation and transformation of academia and society have prompted for ‘reflexivity,’ (see for instance romano ; idahosa ; idahosa and vincent ) how can we ensure our engagement with the decolonisation and transformation process is not just a tick-box exercise, but rather informs our whole process, our being, our practice beyond academia, and how we come to ‘know’ the world? in an academic space, particularly, where there is an obsession with packaging ideas neatly, how do we ensure we hold onto the ‘messiness’ (resistance, alienation, paralysis, emotions) that comes with the struggle for change? our critical self-reflections on the intersections between our identities and our social positions vis-à-vis our contexts, formed the data for this paper. our reflections on the contradictions, disjunctures and tensions in our engagement with the knowledge production and change process were coded for patterns (saldana ). in south africa, some of these dimensions are currently being addressed by academics (see for instance gqola ; khunou et al. ). kezia batisai ( ) in particular, engages the politics of identity and exclusion in transformation discourses and the realities of being black and foreign in the south african academy. given our different identities (see next section), contexts and positionalities, interrogating the intersections in our experiences revealed an identical process of questioning our positionality within our contexts, our role in the knowledge production and change process and the tensions and paralysis that arose as a result. drawing on the contradictions, disjunctures, absences, silences and ruptures in our experiences of fear, discomfort, isolation, crisis and paralysis (that occurred as a result of our movements between different fields and sub-fields, see bourdieu and wacquant ; mcnay ), we discuss how a critical reflection on these contradictions can on the one hand be limiting, but can also provide the conditions for change. in so doing, we argue for ‘reflexivity’ as a these movements brought to fore the work of scholars like angela davis; bell hooks; maria lugones; gayatri spivak; frantz fanon; w.e.b. dubois; edward said; walter mignolo, to name a few. idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world crucial foundation in addressing, challenging and dismantling power asymmetries. edward said ( : ) highlights the need for ‘continual self-examination’ and ‘reflexively [submitting] one’s method to critical scrutiny’ to avoid ‘degenerating into dogmatic slumber’. in delving into our own narratives and experiences, we warn against the distinction between critical and soft reflexivity; and why the former is fundamental in creating change. situating the ‘self’ in the process of decolonisation avoids academia’s tendency to externalise things as outside of the ‘self’, for instance, by addressing problems as ‘over there’ or ‘back then’ (see jones : ). our journey to this process has been fraught with internal questions, and feelings of alienation brought on by closed off spaces within ‘traditional’ academic practice that does not recognise the grey area between the personal, political and academic, and the constant mediation involved in advocating for change. an alienation that, without space to reflect and confront, could have eventually stagnated our calls to action by silencing our voices for fear of getting it wrong, or being excluded for saying or doing the wrong thing. while our positionalities and identities differ, interrogating the intersections in our experiences enabled us to work through the common tensions that arise in the struggle for decolonisation/ transformation. it also enabled us to realise that reflexivity is generative, that is, while the emotions that arise during reflexivity have the potential for the reproduction of oppressive structures, cultures and practices, particularly when these tensions and discomfort are not interrogated, they also provide the conditions for transformation. in this paper, therefore, we unpack two central questions: how can we utilise feelings of discomfort and contradiction towards positive social change? at what point can critical self-reflexivity become productive, rather than self-indulgent and paralysing? reflexivity in the way we operationalise the concept, is an embodiment – a personal and internal and constant consciousness. it is deeply embedded in the process towards a decolonial future and understood as the ability to reflect, learn, unlearn, and dismantle overt and subtle legacies of oppression in the process of knowledge production and practice. it is a process of uprooting and uncovering intertwined layers of the personal and political. specifically, it enables a critical consciousness of the systems, structures, rules, discourses and assumptions that operate to reproduce eurocentrism at the individual and systemic level. in that sense, we do not see reflexivity as isolated to the personal, political or intellectual, but rather, a tool to enable the self to understand or see the link between the agent, structures and change. critical reflexivity should make us hyper-sensitive to the multiple ways of knowing, being in and understanding the world. this type of embodied thinking destabilises linear ways of knowing, upturns logic acta academica / : ( ) for complexity, and celebrates perception and experience over rationality and objectivity. that said, as reflexivity becomes a part of academic life, lumped into the rhetoric of decolonisation, we examine how we can move beyond self-reflexivity being used as a token gesture and how we can avoid engaging in soft/superficial forms of reflexivity that work to reproduce, rather than transform, oppressive structures. this will be explored in greater depth throughout this paper, but the following briefly introduces what we mean by critical and soft reflexivity. it is important to note that while we make this distinction (a methodological rather than an ontological one), we do not intend to re-inscribe binaries by making a distinction between critical vs soft reflexivity, but rather, we acknowledge that it operates on a continuum depending on specific contexts and conditions, hence the need for a process of constant self-evaluation. at its simplest, soft reflexivity is a surface-level recognition that things are unjust, but not necessarily engaging with the way in which the ‘other’ experiences the space, and therefore distancing oneself from that injustice. to engage in soft reflexivity is to resist opening oneself up to the discomfort of asking what the impact of one’s political subjectivity has in perpetuating and reproducing relations of domination. to engage in soft reflexivity is to rationalise, make linear, neatly package and categorise difficult and complex ideas – occupying a comfortable space, distanced from action. at a subtle level, this type of reflexivity recognises unjust conditions but employs a strategy of distraction and deflection when issues of oppression and inequality are tabled. an example is the ongoing black lives matter vs all lives matter discourse which works to deter a deeper engagement with the structural and embedded nature of the oppression of black people – by shifting the focus from black oppression to other challenges, which works to weaken the movement. by taking a business as usual approach, soft reflexivity reinforces the hegemony of white and eurocentric powers. on the other hand, engaging in critical reflexivity is a hard and messy process but to attain change we all, regardless of our identity and positionality, need to do the hard work of confronting our raced, classed, gendered and heteronormative privilege and our complicity in un/intentionally reproducing relations of domination. this paper is for those who have begun the journey of working on themselves by questioning the contradictions and discomfort they experience in the struggle for change; but may be stuck in ‘paralysis’ and don’t know what to do about it. drawing on the contradictions in our knowledge of the world and experience of it, we offer a starting point for working through the implications of challenging and changing oppressive relations within our social context. idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world the paper is divided into four sections. we begin the paper with a ‘prologue’, addressing our individual reflections and the difficulties experienced in our scholarship with decolonisation and transformation. the second section teases out the similarities and differences in our self-reflections, knitting our experiences together to reveal the contradictions, similarities and ruptures in our narratives. drawing on these similarities, in the third section, we show that whilst our contexts differ, the contradictions and paralysis we both experienced, revealed the dilemmas and limits of reflecting on one’s identity and positionality as we move between different fields and sub-fields (mcnay ). in the last section, we provide a discussion on why paralysis, contradiction, and discomfort, are important conditions for decolonial practice. we conclude that, if utilised critically (i.e. non-superficially), critical reflexive thought can be instrumental in the decolonisation and transformation process. prologue vanessa: questioning my role as a non-indigenous academic producing knowledge on indigenous peoples’ rights i am a mixed race, half filipina-english woman working towards indigenous rights and decolonisation from the uk. i first began to explore the question of epistemic change through critical self-reflexivity four years ago. taking part in a ‘building indigenous knowledge’ course in aotearoa, new zealand, and undertaking my undergraduate dissertation research with māori scholars thereafter, i fell into the deep and perpetual questioning of my positionality. it was a unique experience – a course led by māori scholars and leaders; a shared space with indigenous peoples from across the globe, and an opportunity not many (and especially final- year undergraduates) have such a privilege to experience. i had arrived with two other students from the uk; we were anxious – but excited, not knowing what to expect, but ready to take further our own research interests voiced in our applications that had led us to receiving a place on the programme. a strange sensitivity to our own identities emerged on our first day. after the powhiri (traditional welcome) at a marae , we engaged in introductions around a circle. as students from the uk, we became acutely aware, and almost began to question, whether we were meant to be there at all. our positions felt acute alongside māori, aborigines, first nations and native americans; especially coming from the geo-political context where colonialism violently affected the ancestral lands and livelihoods of those with whom we were surrounded. i was worried a communal meeting place where greetings, discussions, formal traditions such as funerals, and more take place. acta academica / : ( ) that we were overstepping our place there, broaching space that felt reserved for the shared, differing but collective, experiences of colonialism; nervous about the weight of responsibility to listen, respect and acknowledge these experiences far from our own. we felt a deep sense of gratitude for being in such a space that exposed a range of issues guided by the voices of indigenous peoples themselves: something not afforded by our own learning experience back in the uk, and an issue that i began to question and feel deeply uncomfortable with. while my anthropology lecturers had considerable experience of working with indigenous peoples and highlighting the ethical responsibility towards indigenous knowledge, it troubled me that we never heard these experiences from the voices of indigenous peoples themselves. i began to reflect – in the academic sphere, who speaks for whom? what responsibility does anthropology hold to its own colonial past? these reflective questions became focal after an evening over half-way through the course. we – the uk students – were asked to sit down by some of the indigenous leaders who were over with the students from some of the universities. we were questioned about what we thought our role there was as researchers, asked about ethics and how much we knew about the detrimental impact of non-indigenous research on the lives of indigenous peoples. at the time, it felt like the implication was that we had no role to be there, to be engaging with these issues, not to mention to be doing research. it was at that point we felt the heavy burden of carrying the responsibility for colonialism’s uncomfortable past, and its suffocating legacy into the present. our doubts as british students surfaced; stiffening and putting into tension our roles there. what was my place there as a non-indigenous person studying indigenous knowledge? likewise, how would i direct my specific area of study in an appropriate way? how could i conceptualise the full extent of what i had learnt on the programme, the challenges i faced, and articulate these experiences to a wider audience? i was caught grappling with the experiences and consequences of colonialism i had learned, cautious of not wanting to contribute any further to the implicating tendencies of western research, while also questioning whom must bear the burden of change. nevertheless, decolonisation and indigenous rights have become focal to my academic career. i have worked tirelessly to advocate for indigenous self- determination, and to dismantle colonial frameworks. i have since gone on to do a master’s degree in the uk; only to be disappointed that anti-colonial and indigenous thought seem to remain side-lined in mainstream development studies. at times, i have felt utterly lost, questioning whether i should even be focusing on this at all – but recognising that this feeling is probably more symbolic of the alienation of working against a system that seems to treat eurocentrism lightly. tied in with that idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world alienation, those paralysing questions remain: what is my place here, advocating for indigenous rights as a non-indigenous person? especially in a context where i am disconnected physically from indigenous peoples? to summarise it simply, i have felt pulled by a great weight of contradiction: passionate about advocating for indigenous rights, but worried that i am somehow perpetuating that very idealism that indigenous scholars have worked fervently to be rid of . instead, how can i use these experiences and reflections productively? grace: who speaks about and contributes to transformation and decolonisation? my process of self-reflection began during my doctoral research in south africa, which focused on transformation, in particular, the agency for individuals to effect transformation within their institutions. an angle of that research examined the question of who drives transformation? and who can contribute to it? during this time, the student protest began in and one of the arguments that emerged during this process was the limits to the extent to which privileged groups could contribute to the transformation processes. the tendency was to question the contribution those who occupy a position of privilege can make to transformation processes and their commitment to effecting change. this presented a dilemma for me. my position was that factors like race, class and gender, though important, cannot be the sole determinant of an individual commitment to change . my issue with this type of argument was that there is a tendency on one hand to give too much power to structural factors like our social positions (race, class, gender) and our administrative position. on the other hand, it essentialises experience and uses that as a universalising mechanism to determine what is good for others. for instance, i cannot say that because i am black and i have experienced oppression, i understand what liberation means or what it means to bring about transformation. the problem with scholars who advocate for this approach is that they fall into the trap of positioning the african identity as homogenous, without critically examining the contextually diverse nature of ‘african’ cultures and identities and the implications for knowledge production, legitimation and representation. i argued against a pessimistic politics and approach towards transformation. my approach hence countered the argument that white men, for instance, cannot contribute to transformation. i presented this idea at a colloquium, but see link to vanessa’s reflection here. the massive student-led two-year rebellion which led to a shutdown of universities in south africa, began in and brought to the fore the institutionalised nature of racism, sexism and eurocentric knowledge forms and practices within universities (omarjee ; booysen ). see link to grace’s reflection here. https://www.convivialthinking.org/index.php/ / / /how-do-we-know-the-world-blog-series-looking-back-to-walk-forward-decolonisation-as-self-determination/ https://www.convivialthinking.org/index.php/ / / /how-do-we-know-the-world-series-part-iv-what-are-the-limits-of-identity-and-positionality-in-the-decolonisation-debate/ https://www.convivialthinking.org/index.php/ / / /how-do-we-know-the-world-blog-series-looking-back-to-walk-forward-decolonisation-as-self-determination/ https://www.convivialthinking.org/index.php/ / / /how-do-we-know-the-world-series-part-iv-what-are-the-limits-of-identity-and-positionality-in-the-decolonisation-debate/ acta academica / : ( ) my argument was not well received. from the reception at the presentation and feedback from the piece, i could see that when speaking, those who occupied the position of privilege nodded, while those who occupied a ‘marginalised’ position, either had blank expressions or expressions of disapproval. any idea that suggested the possibility of a politics where the privileged can be part of the transformation process was absolutely denied and flattened. in particularly tense situations, i was told that i had been colonised and was complicit in my oppression. as a black, nigerian woman, this reaction forced me to take a step back. i did not want privileged groups, the so-called progressives, to use my position to reinforce their own notions of morality. the ‘nods’ received when making this type of argument and the accusation of being a ‘white apologist’ led to a feeling of betrayal. i wondered if i was arming the so-called ‘progressives’ with the tools to further entrench my oppression. my argument could be misinterpreted as eliminating the type of critical and epistemic reflection and engagement needed for transformation to occur. to reiterate, i argued for a link between consciousness, reflexivity and transformation (idahosa and vincent ). given the responses to my argument, i began thinking about my identity and positionality and wondered if i was complicit in my own oppression. i asked, to what extent does this argument reinforce the oppression of black people in south africa? what role does my outsider positionality (my nationality) play in the position taken? this process of reflecting on my identity and positionality and its implication for my scholarship, led to paralysis. i decided to stop speaking and writing on that issue. i felt i did not have the ‘right’ tools to make such an argument, the process of constantly reflecting on myself in relation to my politics and its implication for the transformation discourse in south africa was constraining. i did not know how to frame my argument in a way that fosters inclusive transformation and if it would be useful to do so. at the centre of this paralysis was the tension between an internalised aspect of the social world, which made me feel like making such an argument as a black person was a betrayal, and the part of me that felt there was something wrong with an essentialising and universalising discourse. i seem to have internalised the very ideology i was arguing against and this produced tension and paralysis. contradictions in the way we know the world and our experience of it one issue that emerges from the reflections above is the questioning of our positionalities in relation to our contexts, the knowledge production and legitimation process. the central issue inherent in the narratives is the question of legitimacy. who has the legitimacy to speak for and about the other? who idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world has the legitimacy to speak about and advocate transformation/decolonisation? and what conditions are necessary to reconcile these tensions and struggle for legitimacy as the marginalised/privileged and outsider/insider? undeniably, both of our experiences led us to move beyond questioning our experience of the world, towards challenging how we come to know the world. the resistance we both experienced, while in different contexts and for contrasting reasons, raised some difficult dilemmas that provoked a re-assessment of power/knowledge production and promoting transformative change. while evaluating these dilemmas is incredibly important, our own scrutiny had stagnated the possibility for our own contributions towards the decolonisation process. given the different contexts, one similarity in our narratives is how questioning our complicity created the conditions for recognising the contradictions and discomfort we experienced. for instance: vanessa began questioning her role as a researcher upon being challenged by indigenous people about the historical consequence of western researchers researching indigenous peoples. as tuck & yang ( ) argue, when the misappropriation, misrepresentation and violation of indigenous worldviews have sustained epistemological and ontological violence, questions of power and privilege in the knowledge production process are raised. she reflected on the ethics of her research vis-à-vis her positionality and identity, especially as a british woman. as her narrative reflects, it was this weight of responsibility to ‘get it right’, (given that she was implicated in the structures she was trying to critique), that sprung that paralysis (hotere-barnes ). similarly, grace’s doctoral journey and the contextual conditions during that journey (i.e. the student protests and the resistance against her stance on transformation) not only shaped her views on transformation but also created the conditions for her paralysis. in particular the contextually specific responses to her argument against a universalising and essentialising discourse led to the questioning of her positionality and legitimacy to speak about transformation (see spivak ). an intersection of her quest to understand what role individuals play in the change process and the conflicting conditions in south africa at the time revealed the contradictions in her knowledge of the world and experience of it. not that she had not questioned this previously, but her prior questioning never put into tension her identity and positionality, particularly in relation to knowledge production. the response grace received from some scholars and colleagues led her to question the way she knows the world, particularly in a context where the relations of domination rendered certain groups powerful/ less. it brought to the fore the reality of anti-colonial scholars who voice a fervent refusal of colonial recognition (simpson ; coulthard ; flowers ; fanon ). specifically, the point at which grace felt as though her argument was an ‘act of betrayal’ speaks to fanon’s impulse of self-awareness acta academica / : ( ) (fanon : xiv). the ‘nods’ from those in privileged positions, and disapproval from the marginalised and ‘oppressed’ groups, triggered an uncomfortable awareness that perhaps she had internalised the very ideology she was arguing against. the intersecting point at which she received colonial recognition and resistance against her argument brought an uncomfortable self-awareness. wondering if she was complicit in her oppression, grace was at once responsible for her body, race and nationality. as fanon so eloquently states: it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person … i was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors (fanon : ). given the oppressive nature of power relations, how do we advocate a discourse of hope , a way of moving past essentialisms to foster change without reproducing oppressive tendencies? by coming together with both of our reflections, we reveal that the tensions of knowing where to place oneself within the debates on who can contribute to the transformation process exists on both sides. unsettling these essentialising barriers, our reflections reveal that paralysis stems from similar questions – what is the right course of action to take? how can we ensure we are not being complicit in reinscribing structures of power/oppression? these questions undeniably forced us to confront the politics of knowledge. rather than solely critiquing western knowledge for its impact on marginalised communities (fanon ; memmi ), our dilemmas on both sides have brought into focus that the ‘political is personal’ when calling for a decolonising lens (kovach : ). moving beyond merely challenging western ‘epistemicide’ (de sousa santos ) from a distance, we were forced to re-evaluate our own personal choice of epistemology (see kovach ), and the contradictions and discomfort entangled in that process of critical consciousness; and our own responsibility in knowledge production. in that respect, the recent trend to ask ‘whose knowledge counts’ in postcolonial and post-development literature (see for instance, rahnema & bawtree ; sylvester ; matthews ) feels slightly contrived and superficial to any momentous change in the process of knowledge production . this is not to disregard the movements towards dismantling the domination of western knowledge, but to reveal that the reality on the ground is lagging behind scholars like paulo freire ( ), yusef waghid ( ) and wilson akpan ( ) have written on the importance of hope and its link to attaining transformation. asking ‘whose knowledge counts’ in the discipline is an attempt to include other perspectives, rather than disrupt and dismantle the structural nature of the western/eurocentric knowledge production, hence nabudere’s ( ) argument for the need to question and interrogate the purpose of knowledge production. idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world the bubble of the academic sphere. we can state this with confidence because, while our contexts differ hugely, it is our own feelings of contradiction that have revealed this gap between decolonisation, knowledge production and practice. for example, vanessa’s own dilemmas of feeling ‘lost’ lends to an alienation of working against a system that seems to continue to treat eurocentrism lightly, where there is little space to meaningfully discuss the impacts of colonialism. grace’s contradiction stemmed from promoting an argument of transformation that includes the agency and possibility for the privileged to contribute to change, but at the same time, feeling limited by her own agency and ability to speak within a context where there is a deep mistrust of the powerful and privileged. thus, how can we go further than simply asking ‘what knowledge do you privilege?’ (boyd : ), towards legitimating a plurality of knowing? what personal responsibility do we hold in the knowledge production process? while we raise some pertinent questions about identity politics, it is not the scope of this paper to tackle that head-on. rather, as we will unpack in the following section, we wish to highlight how challenging the ways we know the world through reflexivity and critical thought are vital in the process of decolonisation and knowledge production. paralysis, embodiment and the limits of reflexivity as noted in the introduction, reflexivity is understood here as ‘an emotional, embodied and cognitive process in which social actors have feelings about and try to understand and alter their lives in relation to their social and natural environment and to others’ (holmes : ). reflexivity is, however, much more than thinking about one’s positionality in relation to the research subject and context, it entails moving beyond our contextual positionality to questioning the assumptions that shape our interactions on a personal, intellectual and social level – challenging knowledge production and practice in the process. as de sousa santos et al. ( : xxi) note, ‘self-reflexivity, viewed as the discovery of hetero- referentiality, is the first step towards the recognition of the epistemological diversity of the world’. the narratives discussed here highlight the emotional and messy nature of reflexivity – thinking about affecting or contributing to change in relation to one’s identity and positionality is paralysing. akram and hogan ( ) have argued that ‘achieving reflexivity and change is a difficult and fraught process, which has emotional and moral consequences’. while reflexivity and the contradictions it makes bare amplify feelings of isolation, they also highlight the fluidity, complexity, non-linearity, personal and emotional intricacies not often voiced in academia. acta academica / : ( ) to elaborate, reflexivity enables the individual to challenge traditional and eurocentric knowledge production by subverting objectivity for subjectivity and recognising the transformative potential of agency (brydon-miller et al. ; bradbury-huang ). engaging this type of reflexivity may lead to paralysis as one literally comes to a point where one realises the contextually generated limits to one’s agency to contribute to change. it is paralysing because there are inevitable social tensions in knowledge production, evidenced by the resistance grace experienced. kovach ( : ) highlights the difficulty with ‘advocating an alternative view in the classroom, meetings, and hallways’, which she describes as a persistent intellectual challenge that is ‘exhausting and potentially futile’. akram and hogan ( ) further note how discontinuities in our experience and understanding of the self can lead to an awareness, and a shift between how we previously saw the world and how we see it now. the contextually embedded and corporeal nature of our paralysis stem from our unease about our identities and positionalities, and fear of the consequences of choosing to go against the grain. while grace worries about betraying ‘the group’, being labelled a ‘sell-out’ and internalising the very ideology one is trying to work against, vanessa worries whether the actions she takes meet the fulfilment and needs of the people with whom she is co-producing knowledge. while self-reflexivity can feel isolating, it is clear in the literature that we are not alone in these paralysing feelings brought on by reflecting on our identity and positionality. akram and holgan ( ) note the difficult and emotional nature of engaging in reflexivity, hence our paralysis. indeed, the term ‘pākehā paralysis , refers to the ‘emotional and intellectual difficulties that pākehā can experience when engaging in social, cultural, economic and political relations with māori because of a fear of getting it wrong’ (hotere-barnes : ). but, why does paralysis happen? how do we overcome the self-indulgent tendencies of reflexivity, towards transformative change that is not paralysed by essentialist framings of positionality and identity? through the reflexive process, those hidden assumptions and presuppositions about researching, speaking and writing for the other are brought to the fore. paralysis and discomfort thus become a vital tool for examining the conditions of social interactions that privilege one way of knowing and being over another, thus, undoing the reproduction of power asymmetries. thus, the way out of paralysis is to go through the discomfort and contradictions to enable change. while reflexivity is paralysing, and one may choose to ignore such discomfort, changing would often mean acknowledging and pushing past the discomfort as it opens up the possibility for change. augusto boal urges reflexive practice to ‘reinforce our the term pākehā refers to a new zealand settler of european descent. idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world grasp of the complexity of a situation, but not let that complexity get in the way of action or frighten us into submission or inactivity’ (boal : xix-xx). one has to feel the weight of the past, its impact on the present and the implications for the future in relation to how knowledge about the privileged and marginalised is produced, reproduced and transmitted (watkins & shulman ; boal ). it is this that opens up the possibility for challenging a universalised and essentialising way of knowing the world. the discomfort and contradiction discussed here is a condition towards critical consciousness, which can be likened to tuhiwai smith’s ( : ) use of the concept of ‘struggle’ – ‘an awakening from the slumber of hegemony, and the realisation that action has to occur’. paralysis and the contradictions that it makes bare opens up not only the possibility for change, but the urgency for change. reflexivity, understood as a generative mechanism, thus emerges as both the cause of paralysis (hence its limiting nature), and the condition for challenging the way we know the world. while the persistent scrutiny of our personal and disciplinary presuppositions may lead to paralysis, it also opens up the possibility for change. the contradictions and discomfort produced by critical reflexivity forces the individual to recognise alternative ways of knowing the world and challenge how and in what contexts other knowledges are produced and represented. for example, simpson ( : ) highlights the selective nature of indigenous knowledge in the western academy, which has done little to unsettle the ‘colonial infrastructure and mentality’ within institutions. critical reflexivity also forces the individual to question how the knowledge they produce in their teaching, research and in the collaborative process challenges relations of domination. that said, it must be noted that while the potential for reflexivity is always implied in crisis, contradictions and discomfort, the implication for change is influenced by the ‘particular configuration of power relations’ within that context (mcnay : ). thus, experiencing, discomfort and paralysis does not necessarily lead to change, it only opens up the possibility to initiate change when opportunities to do so present themselves. adams ( ) notes that even when such opportunities present themselves, there may be structural constraints that prevent the individual from acting to transform. the capacity for reflexive transformation is thus not only dependent on individual factors but also on structural and contextual conditions that influence who has access to power and to resources to effect change. that said, the question remains, how do we move beyond complacency towards transformative change? feeling lonely, lost and experiencing discomfort, crisis and paralysis are all part of the reflexive process. the embodied nature of reflexivity exposes the tensions and contradictions in our everyday interactions on a personal, acta academica / : ( ) intellectual and disciplinary level (see mcnay ; akram and hogan ). thus, the emotional and paralysing aspects of reflexivity reveals the embodied and social nature of reflexivity as it involves ‘bodies, thought, talk and action’ taking place within specific structural and contextual constraints (holmes : ; see also, anderson ). by coming to think, feel and do ‘from the inside out’, the living, attentive body becomes attuned with the world, accepting the inevitable complexity of life (anderson : ; abram ). the experiences discussed in the prologue highlight the emotional, embedded and social nature of reflexivity that emerged from our embodied sense of the world. in the end, the dialogue resulting from reflecting on our individual experiences not only enabled us to make sense of our experiences, it also provided the lever for moving beyond our paralysis by discussing and writing about it. reflexivity and dialogue thus act as a counter-memory, enabling us to voice concerns together to address silence, fear and isolation. without the possibility for dialogue, ‘history hardens and freezes into repetitive patriotic narratives’ (watkins & shulman : ). but how do we move beyond reflexivity being used as a token gesture? there is a difference between the kind of soft and superficial reflexivity that a lot of academics engage in today (see emirbayer and desmond ), and the kind of critical reflexivity that is the subject of our argument. this type of critical reflexivity involves not just examining one’s social position (race, class, gender, sexuality) and administrative position (student, vice chancellor (vc), lecturer, professor, manager) vis-à-vis the context – but also interrogating the assumptions and presuppositions that frame our approach to engaging and interacting with the world. it is about critically asking: whose interests does our research/teaching serve? who will benefit from it? who is silenced and given a voice? who is othered? (smith ; mukherjee ; liamputtong ). it would mean for instance, moving beyond the ideas of reflexivity taught in methodology courses which advocate for reflexivity (acknowledging the self within the research process) being used to establish legitimacy. instead we must amplify research approaches that promote a genuine concern for the production of ethical knowledge where action and reflection, theory and practice, are brought together (reason & bradbury : ). in this regard, lewis gordon ( ,) warns of the ‘danger of disciplinary decadence marked by the fetishisation of method’. another example of soft reflexivity is an individual saying, ‘i am progressive, i have reflected on my teaching and research process’, without necessarily questioning the assumptions that underpin such processes and how they de/legitimise and privilege one way of knowing and being over others. the problem with this idea is that such reflexive practices ‘often mistake brief instances of self-evaluation with authentic practices of reflexivity’ (emirbayer and desmond : ). as tuhiwai smith ( : - ) warns, although ‘struggle’ is ‘an important tool in the idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world overthrow of oppression and colonialism’ it can also be a ‘blunt instrument’ when used to reinforce hegemony. to battle against soft reflexivity, we must acknowledge and utilise emotions of discomfort, loneliness and paralysis because they are personal, embodied, political and critical to the reflexive process. critical reflexive praxis thus entails a constant (re)examination of the assumptions embedded in our motives for teaching, researching and engaging with the other. to engage in critical reflexivity is to challenge the way we know the world, to critique the ‘presuppositions inscribed’ in thinking, and acting on the world (bourdieu and wacquant : ) and to question how knowledge is produced, circulated, legitimised and utilised. the implication of this is that we not only question our positions within the university, but we also question how those assumptions inherent within our discipline, shape our teaching, research and collaboration choices. this type of reflexivity acts as a guiding principle in our engagement within and outside the university as discussed in the next section. the transformative potential of paralysis, contradictions and discomfort: critical reflexive thought as decolonial practice what is perhaps significant about our reflections is that, while we reflect from different identities and positions, it is clear that similar tensions and contradictions exist in our journey towards change. reflecting on the discomfort brought on by the contradiction in our experiences is perhaps what decolonisation advocates for. it necessitates unpacking questions about who owns decolonial practice? who is the legitimate purveyor of decolonised knowledge? to come to challenge the way we know the world is not just to reflect on our identities, we have to engage in both cognitive and epistemic reflection, where we examine the intersections and contradictions that occur as a result of the difference between our experience of our context and our knowledge of it. these contradictions are also brought on by our movement between different fields and sub-fields (bourdieu and wacquant ; mcnay ). in unpacking the rules of engagement within our disciplines and institutions, we reflect on our identity and social positions within our context. because these different aspects of the social world have their own logic, they will often yield contradictions and disjuncture (mcnay ). our own self-reflexivity and paralysis ruptured our consciousness, providing a heightened sensitivity to the responsibility attached to knowledge production. acknowledging these contradictions influences the way we see and know the world and has transformative potential. reflexivity is thus understood as destabilising western notions of validity and legitimacy to appreciate the subjective and embodied nature of knowledge acta academica / : ( ) production (romano ). fundamentally, that means critiquing notions of objectivity derived from western science, where the emphasis on ‘external evidence, testing and universal laws of generalizability’ narrows the possibility of what counts as knowledge (kovach : ). the reflexive paralysis we experienced reveals the dilemmas involved in upsetting and uprooting entrenched power. it is the tensions, contradictions and discomfort that enables one to challenge and shift the way one knows and interacts with the world (mcnay ; adkins ). it enables the individual to challenge the way knowledge is produced and who is legitimised/ delegitimised in the process of knowledge production. this will invariably have implications for decolonial practice – how the actor engages with the world. decolonial practice is thus a disruption of the normative frameworks that sustains eurocentric order (de sousa santos et al. ; gudynas ; scott- villiers ; sarmiento barletti ). far from the rationality imbued in western research, decolonial practice is what fanon ( : ) describes as a ‘program of complete disorder’. by evaluating our values, biases, assumptions, we take the creative leap (bolton ) into reflexive practice and move beyond treating decolonisation as a watered-down project (chambers ; gaudry & lorenz ). decolonial reflexive practice thus refers to the process of challenging the ways we know the world, towards an acceptance and promotion of the multiple and plural ways of knowing. engaging in critical reflexive decolonial praxis, would mean for instance, questioning the foundations of disciplinary practices that present themselves as self-evident. while our disciplines may teach us critical thinking, they do not necessarily teach us to question how we know the world. they present themselves as natural and self-evident, thus we come to accept all we have been taught and learn how to critique without necessarily questioning the foundations of, or inserting ourselves in, our critique. an example is positivist knowledge claims and other schools of thought which advocate objectivity over subjectivity and a socially dis-embedded and disembodied self (emirbayer and desmond ). as highlighted in the previous section, knowledge production and legitimation is embodied – our presuppositions, which lie at the level of the subconscious, invariably influence the way we analyse and interpret the subject and if not reflected on, may reproduce universalised knowledge structures. thus, lewis gordon ( , ) advocates for the importance of moving beyond one’s discipline in the production of knowledge, what he terms ‘a teleological suspension of disciplinarity’. this way we can move beyond those disciplinary methodological rules (noted in the previous section), that may carry colonial legacies. another instance is the notion of the insider/outsider discourse, where one can legitimately produce knowledge on a group because one belongs to that idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world group, while the outsider can never understand the experience of the other (see metron in emirbayer and desmond ). in many ways, questioning this position is what we try to do here, as we ask who speaks about change and who produces knowledge on the marginalised? variants of this discourse pervade the south african transformation discourse, where privileged groups are thought of as incapable of speaking for, understanding, researching, teaching and writing about black experiences, transformation and decolonisation. vanessa’s narrative echoed similar sentiments as she questioned her privileged positionality in the knowledge production process. while we understand that this position stems from scholars’ misinterpretation and the violent and unequal representation of marginalised groups, this approach is based on a presupposition that ‘an insider’s vantage point in and of itself leads to scientific discoveries unavailable to the outsider’ (emirbayer and desmond : - ). in the history of knowledge production such practices legitimise the position that marginalised groups are incapable of reproducing oppression. the problem with these approaches is that they advocate the replacement of one form of domination, culture and practice with another, thus knowledge structures and the occupants of powerful positions are merely replaced, thus reifying the very same structures they sought to change. paulo freire ( : ) has argued that ‘if the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles’. another assumption inherent in this argument is that the experience of oppression automatically leads to a politics of liberation, but there have been instances where assimilation occurs either out of fear of the consequences of fighting the structures or a recognition of some form of benefit from the current order of social relations (see adams ). the danger of this position is that it works to also absolve marginalised groups of the need for ‘genuine [critical] reflexive practice’ (emirbayer and desmond : ). what is central here is that reflexivity is and should not be limited to one group, as it represents a way out of the limitations of one’s position and the paralysis that comes with engaging in critical reflection. engaging in critical reflexivity reveals the contradictions in the world and our context, it creates a discomfort and it is this that creates the conditions for change. if the academic project is aimed at affecting some kind of change on the social world, this invariably leads all who engage with the change process to question: who drives such change and who is empowered/disempowered by our actions? we live in a world of contradiction – but this contradiction and the discomfort it produces is a useful tool for reflecting on our identity and positionality vis-à-vis the context and grasping the particular issues that need to change. to engage in acta academica / : ( ) this type of reflexivity and open up the possibility of epistemic change, we must ask ourselves : •	 what contradictions and discomforts are raised in the process of unsettling power? •	 what are the hidden assumptions and presuppositions that influence our social and intellectual enquiry and how does it reproduce/challenge knowledge structures? •	 whose experiences, knowledges and identities are being foregrounded or elided in knowledge production and legitimation processes? •	 what are the disciplinary principles (how our disciplines discipline us), the mechanisms of legitimation, validation and universalisation that influence our knowledge production? carefully examining, weighing and reflecting on these questions are vital if we are to develop an approach that recognises the plurality of experiences, knowledges and ways of being. if our current discipline disciplines us into distorted modes and ways of knowing, then it stands to reason that the only way out is to interrogate the taken for granted aspects that present themselves as self-evident. we must ask, what social, cultural and intellectual relations underlie the production of eurocentric knowledge. this form of reflexivity must occur at the level of the disciplinary, social and intellectual and is necessarily embodied, emotional and personal. ultimately, this is a call to break from traditional academic processes, instead welcoming the fact that complexity, uncertainty and struggle is ‘energising and full of possibilities’ (brydon-miller et al. : ) in attaining epistemic change. epilogue in this paper, we draw on our experiences of fear, discomfort, loneliness, crisis and paralysis in arguing for critical self-reflexivity, and an awareness of discomfort and contradiction, as a starting point for decolonised practice. we interrogate issues of discomfort, contradiction and paralysis that arise in the process of reflexivity. we show how our experiences and the scrutiny of our own positionality at the level of the body, social and intellectual, fundamentally challenged how we ‘know’ the world, and opened up the debate for critical reflexive thought as a lever for epistemic change. in so doing, we emphasise the embodied and emotional nature of critical reflexivity. we argue that critical reflexivity, discomfort and paralysis we address these questions at various points in the paper. idahosa & bradbury / challenging the way we know the world are central to transcending the indulgent tendencies of superficial reflexivity, in the struggle for transformative decolonial practice. this paper, i.e. writing about reflexivity, discomfort and paralysis, represents one aspect of our response to the experiences discussed above. while the scope for changing oppressive structures and practices is limited given our ‘early-career’ positionality, as well as other identity and contextually related challenges, we are able to find alternative spaces. on a personal level, for grace, engaging in this type of reflexivity meant choosing to challenge the dominant conceptions of what transformation means within her context. for example, challenging the tendency to treat africa as a unified entity in the arguments for transformation and being critical of whose voice is silenced and legitimised in the transformation process – rather than abandoning such arguments to avoid exclusion and isolation, and where her initial inclination and response to accusations that she was complicit in her own oppression was to take a step back and completely avoid it. reflexively examining her positionality enabled her to accept the paralysis and discomfort of challenging and questioning the unequal processes of legitimation and modes of silencing inherent in the transformation discourses. this meant recognising that even those who occupy a marginal and oppressed position do have to engage in critical reflexivity so as to ensure they are not reproducing the very structures and practices they aim to change. for vanessa, this meant a realisation that the superficial nods as the common response to her work on indigenous rights reveals the amnesia that britain has on these issues. on a deeper level – although lonely, uncomfortable, and somewhat isolating – engaging with indigenous rights while being in the uk has shaped her critical consciousness to see, viscerally, the ways in which colonial legacies are imprinted and entrenched in the current british landscape. these imprints range from political decisions based on colonial undertones (such as brexit); to policies, practices and everyday narratives that continue to have a disproportionate impact on black people, and people of colour. situating the self has helped her move past the paralysing question of what her role is in being a non-indigenous person advocating for indigenous rights. this has led to an understanding that her role is not and should not be to ‘speak for’ indigenous peoples’ experiences, but to re-centre the problem of whiteness, ‘britishness’, and the colonial legacies that underlie these personal feelings of discomfort, contradiction, alienation, and isolation. the process of reflecting on our experiences and writing about the messy, paralysing, emotional and embodied nature of reflexivity, enabled us to embrace the contradictions in our experiences and resolve, at least in part, our issues with our positionality and legitimacy in the knowledge production and change process. it must however be noted that the process of reflexivity is never complete, it is a https://www.convivialthinking.org/index.php/ / / /brexit/ acta academica / : ( ) constant and continuous process. while we cannot say we have completely moved past our paralysis, one consequence of engaging in critical reflexivity and recognising its messy nature, was the decision to continue writing and challenging dominant and unequal power 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	_heading=h.g kzcot nz 	_heading=h.n rbw cmxqy microsoft word - dorringtonp_supplier led new product development.docx supplier led new product development process improvement in the uk fast moving consumer goods industry mark francis , peter dorrington† and peter hines‡ lean enterprise research centre, cardiff university, cardiff, uk francism@cardiff.ac.uk; †dorringtonp @cardiff.ac.uk; ‡hinespa@cardiff.ac.uk little has been written about new product and packaging development processes within the fast moving consumer goods (fmcg) industry. while often taking on the status of apocryphical folklore, branded fmcg product development failure rates as high as %– % have appeared in the popular and consultancy press. however, no rigorous study has addressed the commercial success/failure rates of private-label products in this context; an area in which the leading uk supermarket (grocery) retailers are acknowledged to excel. using a case study-based approach that involved asda and six of its leading privatelabel suppliers, this paper details empirical findings of the operational and commercial performance of the focal asdanpd(new product development) process, along with initial insights into the key determinants of this performance. it also produces the first description of the origin, composition and operation of a supplier association within the uk fmcg industry and details the new npd process mapping method and tool that was developed to conduct this study. keywords: fmcg; private-label; suppliers; success rates; npd; process mapping. introduction the fast moving consumer goods (fmcg) industry is important within the uk economy. fmcgs are low-priced items that are used with a single or limited number of consumption occasions (baron et al., ) and are also sometimes referred to as consumer packaged goods or groceries. fmcg is composed of three major product segments: food, beverage and household (key note, a). this industry employs . million people in the uk,which represents % of the total workforce. it is responsible for £ billion of consumer expenditure and contributes over % of gdp (bourlakis and weightman, ). the leading uk supermarket fmcg retailers are among the largest and most concentrated in the world in terms of retail floor space, net sales and market share (kuipers, ). they are also among the most profitable (op cit.). for example, in the year ended th february tesco made a pre-tax profit of £ . billion on a turnover of £ . billion. they have in excess of % of the uk grocery market share (key note, b) and command over £ in every £ of all uk retail sales. this performance makes tesco the market leader in the uk and the th– th largest retailer in the world, depending upon how this is calculated. asda, the retailer reported upon in this paper, employed , people and had uk turnover of £ billion in the same period. this performance gave asda over % of the uk grocery market share, making it the second-largest uk grocer after tesco (op cit.). private-label (own brand) products make an important contribution to the success of these leading uk retailers, and involve development volumes that are typically measured in the thousands of new products per retailer per annum (francis, ). by way of illustration, the uk private-label food and drink market in was worth £ . billion, and this was forecast to grow to £ . billion by (mintel, ). in fact, since the mid- s the uk has led europe in private-label market share as measured by both volume and value. it has also led in advanced private label concepts (maarse, ), with the private-label to brand ratio for grocers such as tesco and asda reaching approximately % (mintel, ). an effective product development capability is mooted within the general management and technical literature as an important strategic asset because of its role in establishing product sales, competitive advantage and organic company growth (shetty, ). nevertheless, existing evidence indicates that firms are generally poor at the process of designing and launching commercially successful new products. for example, while often taking on the status of apocryphical folklore rather than rigorous academic research, product development failure rates as high as % have appeared in the popular and consultancy press (cooper, ). however, citing crawford’s ( ) study of durable business- to-business developments, cooper ( ) suggests that a more accurate marketplace failure rate for new product launches lies between % to %, with this figure varying depending upon how “new product” (newness or novelty) and “failure” are defined. relatively little has been written about new product and packaging development within the fmcg industry, and the literature that does exist is mainly derived from consultants rather than academics (francis, ; grunert et al., ). there is even less written about private-label new product development (npd) process performance, the topic of this paper. unlike durable goods there have been few studies that have attempted to address the classification of relative novelty and associated commercial success/failure rates for the fmcg context. of those studies that have touched upon this issue, and in a parody of the folklore mentioned earlier, the consultancy firm ernst & young llb cite “[historical] conventional industry wisdom…” (ernst & young llb/progressive grocer, , p. ) as evidence for a % failure rate for the , + new products introduced in american supermarkets every year. commenting upon the european grocery and fmcg market, ernst & young/acnielsen ( a, p. ) similarly state that “…it is said that around % [of all products launched] fail within two years”. if true for private-label, such failure rates represent a dichotomy for the world class uk fmcg retailers, and enormous product development costs for all the firms involved in each project. this burden is especially onerous for the contracted product manufacturers who typically bear the brunt of the ingredient, packaging and tooling write-off costs (francis, ) as well as the costs associated with the disruption of integrating these doomed products into their production schedules; an activity described by one of the informants involved in the project reported upon in this paper as “… like trying to enter the flow of motorway traffic at mph during the rush hour”. for both academic and practical reasons, there is consequently a need to conduct a study to validate the actual failure rate and factors that influence private-label npd performance within the uk fmcg industry. the aim of this paper is to detail the empirical findings from the first, pilot phase of such a study. this was designated the supplier association new product development (sanpd) project and was initiated by the newly launched and innovative asda supplier association (sa) initiative in july . the sanpd project adopted a case study-based research strategy that involved asda and six of its leading private-label suppliers that were all drawn from the sa. it also involved asda’s single- source reprographic agency that was responsible for coordinating all packaging development within its standard private-label npd process called bullseye that was the focus for this study. the paper is presented in six parts. first, the sa initiative and sanpd project are described in more detail for contextual reasons. next, the relevant literature is reviewed to enable the project findings to be related to the wider dialogue. this is followed by the research methodology along with an explanation of the new npd process mapping technique that was developed to conduct this study. the empirical findings that were derived using these methods are then presented and analysed. in the last sections, practical recommendations for process improvement are made and then conclusions are drawn. asda supplier association and new product development project in , asda had , private-label suppliers who represented £ billion annual cost of goods sold (cogs). the top firms accounted for £ . billion of this spend. each of these had grown on average % year-on-year over the preceding five years and half were in the overall top of asda suppliers. in early , a board-level decision was taken to form a supplier association (sa) from this group as part of a lean thinking (womack and jones, ) initiative to help improve asda’s supply chain processes and practices. hines defines a supplier association as: “a mutually benefiting group of a company’s most important [suppliers] brought together on a regular basis for the purpose of coordination and cooperation as well as to assist all the members to benefit from [process improvement activities]” ( , p. ). such a mechanism for process improvement is well established in industries such as automotive and consumer electronics (op cit.). however, this asda sa represents the first reported scheme of its type within the uk fmcg industry, and is hence an innovation. membership of the association was solicited by asda, and seventeen of the top thirty-five suppliers that collectively represented £ . billion annual cogs joined the programme. the chief executive/financial officer and supply chain director of each of these firms attended the formal sa launch event at asda house on th april . this was chaired by the asda deputy trading director who acted as the programme sponsor. at the end of the event, each supplier was tasked with generating one or more project proposals that would yield significant commercial benefit for itself, the other sa members and asda. each proposal was to be submitted within two weeks and in a structured format that was to detail the deliverables, costs and benefits for all concerned. this scheme and the wider sa initiative were administered by the asda commercial support team. ninety-two proposal documents were duly received, using cluster analysis the team organised these into five “just do it” and eight “transformational” improvement projects. these two categories were differentiated by the size of their estimated benefit and perceived ease of implementation. transformational projects also required significant cross-functional co-operation to realise their project goals. the first of the transformational projects to be implemented was suggested by six of the sa firms (table ) and was designated the supplier association new product development (sanpd) project. it proposed to improve the success rate and time-to- market performance of the standard asda bullseye private-label npd process. table – suppliers involved in the sanpd project note: the names of the firms have been made anonymous for reasons of commercial confidentiality. these six sanpd firms exemplified both the sa and wider private-label supply base. they represented £ . billion cogs, supplied ambient and fresh/chilled product categories and had asda-related turnover ranging from % to %. their individual number of asda stock keeping units ranged from to and their npd activity with asda in the year preceding the project ranged from to new product lines launched. prior to the launch of the bullseye npd process in , asda took approximately weeks to develop and introduce a typical new product (from supplier brief to finalised product and packaging development). bullseye was introduced to increase the flexibility of the standard development process and significantly reduce development lead times to enable a faster reaction to market trends (asda, ). while undoubtedly partially successful there was widespread discontent among sa members regarding the perceived performance of this new process. however, there was no centralised performance measurement system upon which to base this assertion. following discussion, there was also no consensus regarding how the bullseye process was actually configured and used in practice, even though a standard procedure in the form of a user guide (op cit.) had been circulated and supplier training provided. the nucleus of the resultant sanpd project team was formed from the most senior product development manager at each of the six sanpd suppliers. the director of client services from asda’s single-source reprographic agency subsequently joined the team. this was because his firm was universally criticised by the sanpd suppliers regarding the number of packaging errors and “long” (ten week) inviolate packaging development lead time that it was responsible for managing. the authors adopted the role of facilitators and change agents in reciprocation for the research access, making this an action research project (eden and huxham, ). this sanpd team agreed the project’s practical terms of reference, which were to reduce the established new product launch failure rate by % and time-to-market by % to derive forecast benefits that ranged between £ to £ million per annum. literature review a number of research reviews and evaluations have been written to summarise and characterise the very extensive literature that exists on organisational innovation. among these, wolf ( ) identifies a distinct stream of research he calls [npd] process theory that aims to establish the processes that organisations adopt and factors they consider when implementing innovations. this stream contains a large technical component that is characterised by its focus on the product development phase of the wider innovation process, along with the applied nature of the underlying research (francis, ). the quantification of new product success rates and isolation of the key factors or determinants that are associated with the probability of launching a successful new product (“separating the winners from the losers”) forms an established research topic within this body of technical npd literature (chroneer, ). authors such as barclay et al. ( ) in the uk have adopted such an approach. however, it is the cadre of academics associated with the us-based product development management association (pdma) that have been particularly influential on this topic, with notable contributions by cooper ( ), cooper and edgett ( ), cooper and kleinschmidt ( , ), griffin ( ), griffin and page ( ) and rosenau et al. ( ). this pdma-school agree on the importance of a strong market orientation to all development projects, which need to be market driven and customer focused; the most important success factor being the need to commercialise a “unique and superior product” developed in response to the “voice of the customer” in order to achieve widespread market acceptance. clearly, categorisation of the newness (novelty) and definition of relative success or failure of developed products forms an important adjunct to such work. within the innovation literature, newness is typically expressed as ranging between incremental to radical or transformational (tidd et al., ) and has been used as a basis of typologies for classifying individual npd project types. the most influential such typology within the technical npd literature is that proposed by booz allen and hamilton ( ). this considers the perceived newness of the product to both the market and innovating company and has been used repeatedly as a framework for research design (griffin and page, ). using this in their influential study of measures of new product success and failure, griffin and page (op cit.) conclude that determining the level of success of an individual npd project is a multi-faceted exercise that must consider the measurement of three independent dimensions. their first two dimensions of npd performance are based respectively on consumer performance (was it a marketplace success in terms of demand and longevity?) and financial performance (was it profitable?) and amount to that project’s commercial success. the third dimension is technical or process-based. this involves measuring intrinsic, operational performance criteria such as time-to- market and development cost. pdma-school research is premised upon the existence of an underlying stage gate process model (cooper, ) whereby “go” (proceed downstream) and “kill” (drop the project) decisions are made at formal review points throughout the process. two particular performance measures have been emphasised. the first is the success and failure rate as a percentage of all products launched. the second is the percentage of all development projects that are killed per process stage, along with the ratio of developed projects per resultant commercial success (“winner”). these measures reveal the influence of the boozallen and hamilton ( ) mortality of new product ideas curve, whereby an attempt is made to screen-out the new product ideas and concepts that are likely to result in commercial failure (“losers”) at the earliest possible process stage, and hence influence the profile of the mortality curve. the underlying logic of this conventional approach is that the most expensive npd mistake is the selection of an imperfect opportunity, and this is best avoided by adding more review points to the fuzzy front end (opportunity identification through concept development) portion of the process (smith and reinertsen, , p. ). the wider technical npd literature is rich with examples of projects from large manufacturers of branded durable goods particularly from the us and japanese automotive, electronics and it industries. by contrast, little research has been conducted that has dealt specifically with the fmcg industry or retailer private- label npd processes and their performance levels (francis, ).most process-oriented studies in this area involve comparisons of the food with other, typically higher technology industries (grunert et al., ). however, some studies related to the focal topic do exist. hughes ( ) compares the organisation of retailer private-label npd processes of the food industries of the uk and us. he highlights their marked difference and concludes that these originate in the contrasting balance of power relations at the retailer-manufacturer interface that favour the uk retailers more so than those in the us; helping to explain the strength of retailer private-label products in the uk. also notable is nijssen’s ( ) study of the success factors involved in developing line extensions (new secondary product characteristic such as flavour, size or format) in fmcg, although he addresses manufacturer branded products rather than retailer private-label. another manufacturer brand-oriented study is the survey that was conducted by the consultancy firm group efo and reported in griffin ( ). this involved polling firms that manufactured new consumer packaged goods and found that on average ideas or concepts were required to be developed to produce one commercially successful product. this % failure rate would seem to support the apocryphical forecasts suggested in the introduction to this paper. of more direct relevance is the study by francis of the tesco standard product development process ( , ) and stage model design within the uk fmcg industry ( ), although this study did not address private-label success rates. the only attempt to quantify such private-label npd performance is the pdma-inspired efficient product introductions (epi) project. this was designed and managed by the consultancy firm ernst & young in conjunction with the market intelligence firm acnielsen. the epi project set out to ascertain the npd success/failure rates for all types of project within the european fmcg sector and contained a distinct stream of research on the uk (ernst & young/acnielsen, a, b). while it also aimed to establish the underlying explanatory success factors, it omitted operational performance criteria such as time-to-market. , european article numbering (ean) code records from the uk were extracted from the acnielsen database of new european fmcg product registrations. the sample encompassed all the new products launched between st june to th june from representative food, beverage and non-food (household) product categories. each was first classified into its relative type of innovation project by reference to a typology of newness that could trace its ancestry to booz allen and hamilton ( ). next, that product’s distribution coverage data thirteen months after its launch was extracted from the database. contrary to the advice of griffin and page ( ) on the necessity for multi-dimensional measurement, this was the single measure used to assess its relative success or failure. distribution coverage meant the proportion of all possible national retail outlets at which the product was still being sold, with a coverage of % or more deemed a successful new product. the thirteen month period was designed to include the typical one month post launch promotional support, followed by a twelve-month unsupported period. epi classified all retailer private-label products as belonging to the me-too project type (copies of existing products). it found that nearly %( , ) of the uk sample were me-too products, of which approximately % ( , ) were retailer private-label. clearly the use of the single, distribution coverage measure introduced a bias against private-label success because such a product can by definition be sold only in the host’s outlets. with this reservation in mind the failure rate for the me- too category as a whole was between % to % whilst failure rates for the other types of innovation project were found to vary between % to %. in direct accordance with the pdma-school, epi concluded that the single factor most strongly correlated with commercial success was the selection and development of a highly innovative (“unique and superior”) underlying product concept (ernst & young/acnielsen, a). research methodology to paraphrase yin ( ), a case study-based research strategy was adopted because of the desire to conduct an empirical enquiry to explain a contemporary phenomenon in a real-life context, using multiple sources of evidence. the sanpd case addressed the following research purpose: “to understand the configuration and current level of performance of the asda bullseye private-label npd process as a precursor to informed intervention into the key factors influencing this performance and hence realise significant process improvement”. the resultant research design had three distinct phases. the first phase was the pilot project and was conducted by a core team drawn from the sanpd group that involved representatives from asda, the reprographic agency and two volunteer supplier firms. it sought to explore some of the perceptions that had grown up regarding the bullseye process and establish how it was actually configured and used in practice. in the absence of a centralised performance measurement system it also sought to establish the current commercial and operational performance level associated with the focal process, and to provide some preliminary insight into the factors that might be influencing this performance. it is this pilot phase that is the subject of this paper. having validated the findings of this pilot phase with the wider sanpd team, the second phase will quantify the general npd performance of the bullseye process by means of a baseline performance questionnaire to the sanpd group. this exercise will classify each individual project developed over the preceding year by each of the six sanpd suppliers into its appropriate npd project type. it will also quantify the commercial success/failure rate, development lead-time and cost data at this same level of granularity. analysis of the collective first and second phase findings will then affirm the factors that most strongly influence the performance of this npd process. this understanding will, at that stage, be used to make informed interventions to redesign the process and its accompanying performance measurement system. the third phase will be to implement this improved process to achieve the sanpd project’s terms of reference. the improved npd process will first be rolled out to the sanpd group and then after their feedback, disseminated to the wider sa followed by the whole asda private-label supply base. case sampling criteria and data collection procedures the first task of the pilot phase was to quantify the commercial success/failure rates for the sanpd suppliers to ensure that the project’s terms of reference were indeed based upon a real rather than perceived problem. this was conducted at an aggregate level for the whole group of six suppliers. having established that a real problem did exist, an initial project-planning meeting was held that involved the whole sanpd team. the objectives of the meeting were to define clear project deliverables, timescales and resource allocations. they were also to identify two volunteer core team suppliers, and diarise the subsequent fieldwork events. it was agreed that all core team members were to attend all subsequent sanpd project events to ensure the maximum transparency of the data collected. purposive case selection based upon some feature of interest to the study, as opposed to a random or convenience selection, can form the basis for a strong justification of the representativeness of that study and hence ability to generalise from it (silverman, ). the “typical” (stake, ) case sampling credentials of the sanpd team were established in the previous section. suppliers a and b were subsequently selected to act as the two core team participants because they represented polar extremes (after eisenhardt, ; pettigrew, ) and in two dimensions. first, they developed ambient versus fresh/chilled product types.more importantly, the new product launch performance data derived at the outset of the project had indicated that they were respectively the best and worse within the sanpd team in terms of npd launch success rates. reflection upon the subsequent findings established that they also represented two distinct product development process routes: termed supplier technology-push and retailer need-pull (see the following discussion section). the core team convened at asda house to establish an overview of the bullseye process stages that were actually used in practice. these were found to indeed approximate to the standard stages detailed in the bullseye manual. the team then started document collection and recorded the main issues confronting participants in this process. an issue was defined as an example of a significant problem or symptom of a wasteful or sub-optimal activity. last, the specific focal innovation projects to map out during the agreed fieldwork events were identified by suppliers a and b. these were recently developed new products that exemplified best, worst and “normal” performance of the bullseye process from the perspective of these two suppliers; hence again satisfying purposive sampling criteria for typicality and polar extremes. a series of one-day structured data collection workshops were subsequently held at asda, suppliers a and b and then the reprographic agency (which included a design agency representative). each workshop involved mapping the host firm’s respective part(s) of the process and adding detail to the bullseye stages established at asda house. care was taken in each case to capture and use the organisation’s specific terminology, with a glossary of terms and synonyms being built to support this. with the permission of all involved, all of these workshops were audio taped for subsequent transcription and analysis and numerous photographs were taken at each event. a new npd process-mapping method and fm tool each data collection workshop was standardised and oriented around a newly developed npd process mapping tool (fig. ). this tool was produced in response to the suggestions made by francis ( ) for supplementary techniques to convey the structure and dynamics of npdprocesses for improvement and control purposes. he suggests that the stage model convention that conceives such processes as a series of linear-sequential discrete stages and tasks (wolf, ) needs to be supplemented by additional forms of representation that convey inter-firm boundaries, workflow pathways, capacity information and cycle time data per process stage. the resultant tool is a derivative of the four fields cross-functional process mapping technique popularised by dimancescu ( ),which is so called because it integrates four “information” fields within its form. this new tool embodies both a lean thinking approach (hines et al., ) and much of the supplementary requirements suggested by francis. it achieves this by modifying and extending to eight the number of information fields contained within it; hence the designation eight fields map ( fm). figure – the eight fields npd mapping process mapping tool ( fm). prior to each data collection workshop the core team member for that firm identified all the stakeholder departments involved on the critical path for their portion of the bullseye process (such as finance, technical, purchasing, production), and invited the relevant managers to participate in the workshop. a long piece of brown paper was marked with horizontal “tram lanes” (rows) and the names of these internal stakeholder departments were added and colour coded green. external departments at customer and supplier firmswithwhom these stakeholders interacted on the critical path were also added. these were colour coded red. this completed the first field of the map, with the horizontal layout ensuring that the map could be displayed around the walls of a suitably sized room. the morning of the event itself was devoted to completing the first three fields and the afternoon the last five fields of this map. the day started with a brief presentation of sanpd project aims, personal introductions and confirmation of the stakeholder (field ) details. next, the participants were asked to identify all of the process stage names (field ). for reference purposes these names were listed on post-it notes and added in chronological sequence along the top of the brown paper. these were to form a series of delineative columns across the map; each of which had a constituent task workflow and typically ended in a decision gate. the remainder of the morning was dedicated to detailing this workflow (field ). for reference purposes the official product code, name and packaging of the previously identified best, worst and normal focal products were now appended to the brown paper. with a specific focus on the normal example, the assembled participants were asked to map out the most important aspects of the work flow through each of the process stages. this exercise was conducted in a highly interactive manner by placing colour-coded post-it notes in the relevant stakeholder lanes and drawing connecting arrows using a green marker pen to represent downstream flow. four task-type symbols were used; formal meeting (yellow), document (blue), activity (green) and decision gate (red). the latter included any formal review point or multi-person panel tasked with making a “go”, “kill” or “rework” (back upstream) decision. where multiple stakeholders were involved in a meeting or decision gate, multiple concurrent post-its were used and joined by a dashed line. for each decision gate, the probability of each exit route was captured and annotated. go routes were again marked in green for consistency, while kill or rework routes were marked in red. for each of the (blue) document symbol on the map, a copy of the source documentation was collected and appended to the brown paper for reference. the afternoon session started by completing the performance measurement baseline data (field ) for each process stage. first, the elapsed hours (lead-time) was established for the normal project. this was then repeated for the best and worst case projects to reveal the range of time-based performance per process stage. again with specific reference to the normal project, the participants were asked to agree the cycle time that each of the activity (green) tasks had taken. an estimate was necessary because no such task-level cycle time data was maintained by any of the firms. an indicative value added metric (after hines et al., and womack and jones, ) was now calculated by establishing the sum of the activity cycle times as a proportion of the total lead-time for that stage. similarly, a non-value added metric (op cit.) was calculated as the balance of time as a proportion of this total. the remaining fields were then completed, with a distinct post-it note shape and colour being used to differentiate each. participants were asked to identify the good points (field ) of the existing process in order to embrace its existing strengths. each suggestion was captured on a post-it note, prefixed “gp” plus a unique reference number and appended to its relevant location on themap. using the same procedure, the assembled participantswere subsequently asked to identify potential bottlenecks (capacity constraints) that were prefixed “bn” (field ), followed by issues (field ) that were prefixed “i”. last, an opportunity was provided for all participants to review all the maps and notes made during the day to validate their accuracy. off-site, the researchers compiled these issues into a list and then conducted a cluster analysis based upon their causality or similarity to establish a smaller number of thematic headings. these were termed big issues (field ), prefixed “bi” and again located on the map. the resultant diagram was at this point transcribed using a computerised drawing tool and circulated to all workshop participants who validated its accuracy and applicability to themselves. due to the length of this map (three metres), all of the diagrams that follow in this paper are represented in schematic format. however, a segment of the original fm is provided as an appendix for illustrative purposes. in summary, this data collection procedure entailed man-days of direct participant support (direct attendance at fieldwork events). the evidence that was collected included hours of audio, photographs, company documents and reports and the identification of separate issues/opportunities for improvement. preliminary analysis by the researchers of this body of evidence was followed by a review workshop involving the whole sanpd team. this was designed to disseminate the findings of the pilot project and to validate their applicability among the wider group of six suppliers; hence improving construct validity and reliability (yin, ). the findings were subsequently accepted as both accurate and representative and formed the basis for launching the second phase of the project. feedback was also sought on the new fmtechnique. this was assessed to be a useful and systematic approach for generating data about the structure, dynamics and performance of an npd process. it also received plaudits for the way it revealed improvement insights. chief among the limitations recognised were the resource intensity and discipline of approach required to produce the map. discussion commercial success/failure rates the findings of the new product success/failure rate assessment exercise undertaken at the outset of the project affirmed the overall performance of the current bullseye process (fig. ). in the twelve- month period leading up to the study, the six sanpd manufacturers were found to have collectively developed new private-label product lines for asda of all innovation project types. contrary to the advice of griffin and page ( ) on the need for tri-dimensional measurement of new product performance, the bullseye process used only a single metric; if the new product was still available on the shelf (“listed”) twelve weeks after its launch date it was deemed to be a “success”. if it was not listed after this period it was deemed to be a “failure”. no data was available to establish the longer- term viability or financial performance of a new product, although this twelve-week period was intended to convey some nominal point for the break-even of development costs. % ( ) of all developed lines were classified as successful using this survival-based metric. however, there was a significant difference between the highest and lowest performing suppliers with supplier a having an % success rate compared with % for supplier b. figure – sanpd suppliers – product launch success/failure rates ( ) source: asda commercial support team, june . of the failures, % ( ) of the developed products were withdrawn within twelve weeks due to a lack of demand. in an anathema to the pdma-school and mortality curve concept (booz allen and hamilton, ) the figure also reveals that a surprising % ( ) of products were fully developed but not launched. this raises the interesting questions ofwhether this issue existsmorewidely in the fmcg industry and/or whether it is under-reported in other industries. discussion with the sanpdteammembers established that therewere two reasons for this phenomenon. first was a lack of shelf space. each new product launch entailed the removal of at least one existing product as shelf space was finite. this decision was the remit of asda’s merchandising and ranging functions, who were not involved until the end of the bullseye process. second was event-specific products such as those developed for halloween missing their planned launch date and hence becoming “obsolete”. the twelve-month rolling planning mechanism explained in the next section stipulated specific quarterly launch dates for all new products developed in that period. these were called key moments. sanpd informants confirmed that this philosophy was driven by the in-store performance measurement system that elevated the importance of constraining store managers’ budgeted hours for all product merchandising and ranging activity. the logic was to minimise in-store workload (cost), disruption and layout changes by focusing all range-related activity (including new product launches) into four days throughout the year. this of course stimulated the processing of large batches of new products within the bullseye process. the conceived bullseye process configuration the bullseye process is made up of two broad phases. these are called planning and development. planning takes place through a system of rolling quarters. for example, if a development request is submitted in quarter the process is designed for approval by the end of the same quarter, development to start in quarter and the product to arrive in store in quarter of the following year. according to its conceived configuration, the development phase has four stages (asda, , p. ). to achieve the lead-time targets stipulated in the bullseye manual for npd projects, these stages are designed to embody the level of concurrency illustrated in fig. . on this diagram, all stages and their constituent activities are represented true to their relative starting point in time, and in proportion to their relative duration. however, specific activity/stage cycle time durations are omitted for reasons of commercial confidentiality. the product development stage starts with the selected supplier being briefed by asda regarding their product specification and critical path dates for the project. a food product for example is then developed by the supplier on kitchen-scale equipment before submission to asda for approval. figure – conceived bullseye process configuration source: adapted from asda bullseye user guide ( ). note: specific activity/stage cycle time durations are omitted for reasons of commercial confidentiality. if approved, factory trials ensue to demonstrate that the kitchen sample results can be achieved on full-scale production equipment. this culminates in the product being sent to an external laboratory (lawlabs) for microbiology and nutritional information tests. on final sample sign-off, it is taken to the product (brand) panel for tasting and examination by the innovations chef, head of product development and head of technical. if approved, it advances to the six person naming panelwho agree the legal name and marketing descriptor, icons (claims such as “nut free”), storage, cooking/preparation instructions and anymeal ideas. for convenience these panels are usually conducted consecutively. pack copy is all the creative (marketing) and informative words printed on the packaging. pack copy information is collated by the supplier during the product development stage and culminates in the naming panel information. using the reprographic agency’s web-based project management and tracking system called odin (on-line digital information network), all copy text is then converted into a legally binding specification that details nutritional and recipe information. the content is first checked by a copywriter then passed to a trading standards officer to check that it conforms with legislation. after any amendments by the supplier, the pack copy is converted into a digital file and placed on the extranet in preparation for the artwork stage. design is where the look and feel of the product packaging emerges, and in accordance with the concurrent engineering principle of seeking the maximum parallel processing of previously sequential activities (stevens et al., ) it should occur concurrently with product development and pack copy. the first step is for asda to request the cutter guides from the supplier. these are the flat pack outlines of the packaging to be run on the supplier’s packaging equipment and indicate all the print, non-print and fold areas. once received, a design brief meeting is convened to discuss the guidelines provided to the commissioned design agency and agree the subsequent schedule dates. multiple design concepts are generated by the agency and then formerly reviewed by asda at the design stage panel. the chosen concept is developed by the agency and subsequently presented for approval at the design stage panel. the stage ends with the production of a photograph of the product, along with a design trace (accurate flat version of the final packaging); both of which need to be signed-off by the reprographic agency. the artwork and reprographics stage starts when this approved design material is made available with the pack copy. artwork comprises of embedding the front, back and side panel text copy and photograph within the packaging design of which two such activities of increasing refinement are designed into the process. once the resultant artwork has been approved by all parties involved in the project the digital artwork files are posted onto the extranet for reprographics. this involves producing print-ready files from which the printer can make printing plates. as part of this process a full-colour proof called a cromalin is produced that illustrates exactly what the final packaging will look like when it is printed. once approved the print-ready files are sent to the printer for the packaging material to be physically produced and shipped to the supplier in time for their first production run. actual bullseye process configuration and operational performance the new fmprocessmapping technique was employed to establish how the current bullseye process was actually used in practice rather than how it was conceived in the user guide. it was also used to explore the rework, lead-time and development cost performance of the two core team supplier firms. figure summarises the findings. it adopts the “leaky pipe” analogy (anon.) whereby any deviation from downstream workflow in the form of a kill or rework decision is represented as a teardrop-shaped leak with its concomitant development cost and lead-time implications. the size of each teardrop icon is proportional to the size of that leak. for a rework icon the relative thickness of its border-line infers the typical number of rework iterations before work is accepted to progress downstream with the thickest line representing four iterations. this figure reveals six observations. the first is that compared with the conceived process (fig. ) and the product development stage is actually y-shaped. while all packaging development involves the same sequence of activities, there are two distinct and co-existing product development routes. figure – actual bullseye process configuration the route undertaken by supplier a is entitled supplier technology-push because it reflects the innovation process model advanced by carter andwilliams ( ). thismodel is characterised by an emphasis on the proactive role of the r&d department (freeman, ) and the passive role of the user/customer (rothwell, ) by assuming that advances in basic science give rise to applications that eventually find their way into the marketplace. supplier a’s internal research or technological capability yields a concept and specification that is then developed into a factory-scale product and associated financial quotation. at this point it is offered (“pushed”) to the supermarket retailers along with the aspired profit margin. if asda accepts this proposal, it enters their conventional sample sign-off then panel review activities. bullseye did not recognise this route. by contrast, supplier b was indeed found to follow the previously explained standard development process whereby they responded to the retailer’s product specifications. this route was consequently entitled retailer need-pull in recognition of the innovation model attributed to economist jacob schmookler and his premise that the market signals a need that stimulates the production (“pull”) of an innovation in response (saad, ). given the respective success rates of supplier a ( %) versus supplier b ( %) it is therefore possible to speculate that merely developing in response to the “voice of the supermarket customer” is no guarantee of marketplace success. the second observation is that the design stage does not actually start until after the pack copy has been finalised. the process is therefore configured linear sequentially for product and packaging development and not concurrently as conceived suggesting a significant impact on expected development lead-time. feedback from staff at the reprographic agency indicated that the reason they had reconfigured this part of the process was their lack of trust in the accuracy of the pack copy and other information originating from suppliers. third is the very different workflow [leak] profiles of the two suppliers. supplier a makes all of its kill decisions very early in the process and before any rework is conducted, as directly espoused by booz allen and hamilton ( ) in the principles underlying their mortality curve. in contrast, supplier b kills a similar total percentage of its development projects. however, it conducts very significant levels of rework activity often to subsequently kill the project. follow-up interviews to explore these profiles revealed that supplier a benefited from being responsible for producing its own initial product concept and specification documentation, which was comprehensive and expressed in terms of objective criteria. it also benefited from its products being chemically engineered rather than produced in a kitchen. as a result there was a disinclination for non-expert staff outside the firm to instigate subjective changes during the panel reviews. taken in conjunction these attributes amounted to a “freezing” of the product specification — a fuzzy front end practice associated with superior npd performance in the literature (smith and reinertsen, ). the fourth observation is that no projects are killed after the product development stage. naming panel approval acts as a pivot after which projects seem to be “made to work” and forced through the packaging development stages. the fifth is the particularly high levels of rework experienced in the artwork and repro stage, suggesting that these activities are either inherently error-prone and/or that these decision gates are acting as quality control points (crosby, ) for upstream variation and errors. observations four and five might therefore be related. the sixth observation is the relatively large number of formal decision gates designed into the process. given this plenitude, the magnitude of rework and the linear-sequential process configuration of the actual lead-time was unsurprisingly found to be on average %– % longer than the standard stipulated in the bullseye manual. turning lastly to the cost aspect of operational performance, it was found during the mapping procedure that individual development project costs were not formally recorded or used for npd performance measurement purposes. corroborating the findings of francis ( ), it was also found that it was the suppliers that bear the majority (although not necessarily all) of the ingredient, packaging and tooling write-off costs associated with failed new products. good points, bottlenecks and big issues validation by the full sanpd team of the last four fields of the fmduring the final review workshop revealed further insight into the most important factors believed to influence the performance levels noted above. a number of good points (strengths) of the current bullseye process were affirmed. the team agreed that it was appropriate in its scope of coverage and was structured logically; although they also acknowledged the inflexibility of the stage gate approach and hence supported this same conclusion by cooper ( ). they also complemented the twelve-month horizon of visibility of development projects that bullseye provided, and the benefits this offered to stakeholders for planning purposes. the reprographic agency’s odin extranet-based tracking and reporting system received particular plaudits. the general accessibility and approachability of asda staff was likewise valued. for example, the ability to talk to the innovations chef before the product panel. three potential bottleneck (bn) areas were highlighted for their influence on npd lead-times. bn- was the key moment mechanism, as failure to meet its deadline resulted in a de facto three month launch delay. bn- occurred after the supplier factory trial. bullseye mandated the single sourcing of all asda- related external laboratory work with a firm called lawlabs, who were also used by a number of other large supermarkets. periods of high demand on lawlabs such as pre-christmas or on the run up to an asda keymoment could consequently result in significant delays. bn- was the availability within the product development stage of all the asda staff members necessary to conduct the panel reviews. of the numerous and interrelated big issues (bi) revealed on the fm, it was agreed that five had the most influence on the amount of rework and hence unnecessary development cost and lead-time. bi- was the most influential and was called “going off half cocked” by the sanpd team. in contrast to the practice of supplier a, this referred to the lack of a standard or comprehensive product concept specification document. consequently, new products often lacked objective specification or were started before all criteria were agreed and signed off by all stakeholders, resulting in subsequent specification changes and rework profiles akin to those demonstrated by supplier b. bi- compounded this and was called “gilding the lily” by the team. this referred to an asda tendency to instigate constant improvement changes of an in-progress project in the pursuit of “perfection”. the team characterised bi- as “too many unqualified fingers in the pie”. they believed that too many formal participants were required at the product development panels, contributing to the bottleneck situation noted above. it was also strongly believed that some of these participants were too junior or unqualified to be making these decisions. a commonly cited example was the taste test at final sample sign-off that involved the asda marketing manager. this position was typically occupied by an employee in their first role with the firm and who had received no formal training in such a highly specialised skill. in many ways bi- was an outcome of the first three big issues. it referred to indecisive or subjective decision making at many decision gates, especially the panels. such decisions were claimed to result in much unnecessary rework or even prematurely killing some projects. last, bi- caste further insight into the high pack copy rework rate and other downstream rework rates noted on fig. . it emerged that in response to the ongoing specification changes and the inviolate ten week lead-time for packaging development that was enforced by the reprographic agency, suppliers often entered knowingly inaccurate “dummy” pack copy data into the odin system to instigate the design work in the hope of realising the unmoving launch deadline anchored at the outset of the project. this affirms the reprographic agency’s quality control role, particularly at the pack copy decision gate. given the unanimous criticism levelled at the reprographic agency by all sanpd suppliers at the outset of the project, this yielded the surprising reflection from supplier a’s core team representative that “it seems that the repro agency is the hero; not the villain!” however, they were not completely blameless as they were indeed found to preside over some inherent packaging errors. they were also partly responsible for constructing a vicious circle, as their linear- sequential process reconfiguration of the pack copy and design stages had increased the time pressure on the suppliers and hence stimulated the use of the dummy data rouse. fascinatingly, a subsequent interview with the director of the agency established that the mandate for this ten-week period had initially been granted to hedge against the levels of rework typically encountered during packaging development. therefore if such rework could be reduced, so could this ten-week period. practical recommendations the pilot phase of the sanpd project was designed to establish how the asda bullseye npd process was configured, used and performed in practice. it was also designed to reveal some preliminary insights into the factors that influence this performance. the implications of this applied research project are consequently of particular relevance to asda and its private-label supply base. an ability to generalise beyond the scope of the participant organisations is a limitation of the case study method (silverman, ; yin, ). however, given the case sampling criteria and validation procedures detailed in the researchmethodology, the following recommendations and conclusions are expected to have applicability for the wider uk fmcg private-label supply base. the previous discussion of the bullseye process, and particularly that regarding the bottlenecks and big issues, highlighted a number of concerns and their causes. ten resultant recommendations follow (table ) for addressing these findings and therefore helping to achieve the sanpdproject’s performance improvement objectives. the last two columns of the table indicate the difficulty of implementation and likely performance impact of each recommendation as perceived by the research team. the table provides a suggested change agenda by presenting these in highestlowest performance impact sequence within ascending level of implementation difficulty. conclusions and future research this paper aimed to contribute to the body of knowledge on private-label npd failure rates within the world class uk fmcg industry. it produced the first description of the origin, composition and operation of a supplier association within the uk fmcg industry. it also detailed a new npd process mapping method and fmtool that was developed to conduct the study and revealed that a -week shelf space survival metric was used as the uni-dimensional measure of success. no equivalent measurement of commercial success has been detailed elsewhere in the npd literature, making a comparison of these findings difficult. however, this is a meaningful success measure to asda and its development supply base and therefore should not be regarded lightly. table – summary of preliminary recommendations from sanpd phase- . with this caveat in mind, the % bullseye private-label failure rate found in this study is in marked contrast to the apocryphical %– % fmcg failure rates reported by cooper ( ) and prophesised in ernst & young llb/progressive grocer ( ). it also contravenes the findings of the epi project (ernst & young/acnielsen, a); either the failure rate is significantly lower than epi and/or the bullseye portfolio was composed of more highly innovative product concepts than attributed to private-label by that study. it is therefore concluded that either (a) %– % failure rates in the fmcg industry are folklore (b) private label success rates are generally better than those for branded products or (c) retailer aspiration of private-label success is generally lower than manufacturer aspiration of success for its branded products, as reflected in their respective measurement criteria. there is clearly a need to conduct future research to clarify these points. there is also a need to validate npd performance levels within the uk fmcg industry more generally, including the issue of fully developed but un-launched products. however, the immediate future research will be to complete the two remaining phases of the sanpd project. first, a baseline performance questionnaire will be created and sent to the sanpd group to establish npd performance at the individual project level of granularity. analysis of the resultant data along with the findings reported in this paper will be used to confirm the factors that most strongly influence this performance level and hence redesigned the bullseye npd process accordingly. this will then be rolled out to the asda private- label supply base and studied longitudinally. 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new york: simon & schuster. yin, rk ( ). case study research: design and methods. london: sage publications. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ policy, governing and politicality policy, governing and politicality robert hoppe science, technology, society and public policy, university of twente, enschede, the netherlands this forum contribution takes a critical look at “policy”, “policymaking” and “governing” as key concepts in policy studies. i briefly peruse the historical etymology of “policy” to unearth root mean- ings that, jointly, make up the “signature” of policy in the language used by observers, practitioners and citizens. next, i discuss the relation between “policy” and “governing”. in a normative conclu- sion i reflect on the possibility of problematisation as source for a less depoliticised, more democratic post policy centered way of governing. key words: policy, governing, politicality, depoliticisation, european union we do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the ‘will to govern’, fuelled by the constant registration of ‘failure’, the dis- crepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time. (rose & miller, , p. ) introduction this forum contribution intends something quite unusual in policy studies. i will not take the meanings of “policy” and “governing” as self-evident and beyond the pale of critical inquiry. both concepts slip easily off the tongue and, apparently, fit smoothly into the analysis of the contemporary world of mobilizing and organizing for collective action, especially by the state or public organiza- tions. the concepts are widely used not only by academic and non-academic observers (e.g., professors of political science, public administration, or policy studies, but also political journalists and commentators in the social media), by practitioners (e.g., civil servants, politicians, ministers, mayors, consultants, etc.) © the author. european policy analysis published by wiley periodicals, inc. on behalf of policy studies organization. this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /epa . european policy analysis, vol. , no. , https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % fepa . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - but also by “the governed” or “recipients of policies” (i.e., citizens in general, or “target groups” like pensionados, the middle class, etc.). yet, it is not at all self-evident that concepts like “policy,” “policy process,” “policy-oriented learning,” “policy diffusion,” and many others in the same theo- retical idiom give “good accounts” of what is going on in the world. after all, concepts are not politically innocent; they function as “containers” to make the world legible, one way, or another (agamben, ; lakoff & johnson, ). also, depending on historically shifting contexts, concepts with positive connota- tions one day may acquire negative meanings later. for example, after bad refer- endum results, the dutch government quickly reframed the eu from a project of “integration (of states)” into one of mere “cooperation (between states).” using a specific concept may even come to mask or hide what is actually going on: “the meaning of old terms change behind the fac�ades of continuing locutions” (bray- brooke & lindblom, , p. ). a superficial perusal of uses of the concept “pol- icy” in history and in different countries shows that this positive-negative, revealing-hiding switch may indeed be observed with “policy.” policy these days no longer has mainly positive connotations but is criticized by presidents who rather “make deals” that “shape policies,” and by journalists and citizens who see “policies” as intractable, unintelligible, incommunicable com- promises, very different from the campaign slogans of politicians; policies as signs of meaningless talk and stagnation, instead of decisive political courses of action with empowering consequences for their daily lives. all in all, “policy” has lost its innocence and lure as an innovative political concept. like “the government,” “bureaucracy,” “representation,” (m€uller, ) and “politics” itself (hibbing & theiss-morse, ), it has acquired negative connotations in the public mind, with grave repercussions for the practice of governing. repercussions that in the scholarly community of policy studies have not yet been fully reflected in the the- orizing of public policy and policymaking. this essay is an attempt to demon- strate these developments. it may also be read as an ex post account of why hal colebatch and i, at least in my view, chose to title our recent handbook as dealing with “policy, process, and governing” (colebatch & hoppe, ) and not, for example, “and intelligence in collective action,” or “problems,” or “political order,” to mention just a few alternatives. the structure of this essay goes as follows. in the second section, i tap into the wisdom (or stupidity) of the crowds on “policy” by brief excursions into the historical etymology of this concept for several countries. in the third section, i derive from these ordinary usages five root meanings of “policy” as, jointly, con- stituting the signature of policy in the language of academic observers and practi- tioners. in the fourth section, i explain what i mean when i discuss “governing” in relation to “policy” through contrasting orren and skowronek’s ( ) thesis of the “policy state” to van middelaar’s reflections on the different degrees of politi- cality of governing in the european union ( ). this is followed by a fifth sec- tion that reflects on the (im)possibilities of a no longer policy-centered style of governing. hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal meanings of “policy” in the historical etymology of some different countries if policy scholars take the trouble of reflecting on the meanings of “policy,” they usually immediately cite definitions by renowned scientific peers. they disre- gard that the word “policy” has been used in the past and is also used in every- day, contemporary nonacademic discourse. in doing so, they miss out on two important aspects of discourse. first, most abstract concepts like “policy” are metaphorical, in the sense that the function of metaphor is to project inference patterns from a source domain to a target domain: “conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible. . . . conceptual metaphor is one of the greatest of our intellectual gifts” (lakoff & johnson, ). for example, speaking of “the ship of state” or “the body politic” allows one to reason about statecraft in terms of “navigation” and politics in terms of the “head” as enabling the working of the economy and society as the “limbs.” immediately jumping to definitions of "policy" by peers also fails to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. choice of words frequently used in ordinary language is usually for a good reason. therefore, tracing key metaphors in concepts in ordinary language use is a good first step in scientific concept formation. and tracing the dominant metaphors in scientific concept formation over time allows one to map the history of an entire discipline (ziman, ). as students of public policy we should realize that we are like generals commanding a standing army of metaphors. turning to meanings documented in historical etymology through analysis of dictionaries, in the anglophone world, the concept of “policy” means “plan of action” or “way of management” or, more precisely, “line of argument rationaliz- ing the course or action of a government.” this meaning dates back to c. – . its etymological lineage clearly shows politics, the state or government as its domain of application: “polis” (city, state, in greek), “polites” (citizen, in greek), “politeia” (state, administration, government, citizenship, in greek), “politia” (the state, civil administration, in late latin), “policie” (political organization, civil administration, in old french), “policie” (way of management, study or practice of government, good governance, in middle english, fourteenth century). it has a secondary meaning, “written insurance agreement” or “written evidence of trans- action,” going back to the italian “polizza,” which itself derives from the greek “apodexis,” meaning “proof” or “(solemn, explicit) declaration” (wiktionary, accessed august, ). compounding the principal meanings, you get something like “policy is a principle of behavior, conduct, thought to be desirable or necessary, especially as formally announced in writing by a government or other authoritative body.” the desirability of the “policy” is expressed in a separate but derived meaning of “pol- icy” as “wise” or “advantageous conduct,” “prudence” (from the latin “pruden- tia” and the greek “phron�esis”), or “political shrewdness, cunning” or “statecraft.” in the anglophone sphere, “policy” is always directly connected to the state, government, or politics. in its ordinary use it is a thoroughly political concept. its other properties of explicit formal recording and well delineratedness are perhaps traceable to the dominance of social contract political thought in the european policy analysis, : english isles. in the united states especially, the qualification of state power by well-deliberated “policy” appears to be explicitly rooted in enlightenment think- ing from its very birth. not for nothing jill lapore opens her magnificent recent history of the united states with this statement: “(the constitution) was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made pre- dictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. the origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of american history” (lapore, , p. ix). the idea of “policy” fits such a state project hand-in-glove. the historical etymology of its only one-to-one equivalent, the dutch concept of “beleid,” is less directly linked to the state or government or politics, but more to “management” as generalized leadership or being “in charge” (etymolo- giebank.nl, accessed august ). in the thirteenth century, “beleid” is used in its meaning of ordinary “management” (“beheer”) or “way of conduct” (“wijze van handelen”). other uses of “beleid” mean “direction, command, rule, being in charge of,” “in the lead.” ca. , one finds uses of a verb “be-leiden” (from the root “leiden” = “to lead towards,” “to command”) as “to administer” or “to rule, regulate.” interestingly, in the late-medieval and early-renaissance low coun- tries, the government(s), hardly a “state,” was governed by an oligarchy of aristo- crats or of wealthy merchants as city governors (“regenten”), which was constructed as hierarchically “above” the citizen. this definitely authoritarian and non-contractarian idea still lives on in more egalitarian modern times, where the “state” or “state apparatus” is called, curiously, “de overheid” (literally, “a body placed over you”). so hierarchically conceived leadership in general was the dom- inant meaning of “policy” as “beleid.” only in later centuries an additional mean- ing would emerge: deliberation, cautiousness, circumspection (as in “met beleid” = “with policy”). the link to politics, state and government has a curious etymological history in the netherlands. at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, dutch ety- mologists declared the word “policy” in its old meaning as “general manage- ment” or “leadership by the state,” obsolete. but kuypers ( ), a political scientist turned policy scholar, has shown that in everyday dutch political dis- course, briefly after the second world war, the word “policy,” due to its positive connotations of deliberation and circumspection, came to be preferred over, and competed with, “politics.” the latter concept had acquired negative connotations of “partisanship,” “politicking,” “dishonesty,” and mere “shrewdness.” for exam- ple, the same set of financial guidelines promulgated by the government would be referred to as “(good) financial policy” by parties in power, but as “(bad) financial politics” by opposition parties. thus, in the second half of the twentieth century the entire spectrum of meanings mentioned above, and its links to the state, government and politics, was restored. in his most prominent book, “begin- selen van beleidsontwikkeling,” or “principles of policy design,” kuypers could build on ordinary word use and phenomenologically define “politics” as “struggle over policies” (kuypers, ). hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal it is telling that in other indo-european languages there is no one-to-one equivalent for “policy” or “beleid.” in the anglosphere and the netherlands, the crowds in their wisdom somehow started to distinguish between “raw” political power and authoritative state action, and “policy” as near-synonym, but with a pinch or a lot of deliberation and rational calculation. in other european lan- guages the link to politics, state and government remains more straightforward; at least, the need to qualify governmental action as “policy” did not lead to new concept formation. instead, it leads to “adjectival” politics. in german, if one distinguishes politics (“die politik”) from policy, one speaks of “politische planung” (literally “political planning,” b€ohret, ; luhmann, ; waterkamp, ) or “politische steuerung” (literally “political steering,” mayntz & scharpf, ); “policy analysis” becomes “politikfeldanalyse” (literally: political domain analysis; schubert & bandelow, ). for example, “die finanzpolitik” stands for politically defined “finanzielle richtlinien” or “leitung” (= “guidelines,” “directions,” “instructions”). but, as adjective, “politisch” also has both mild connotations of prudence (“klugheit”), tact, and circumspection (“vor-/umsicht”), and as bigotry and self-servingness (e.g., meier, : ). maybe that is the reason this connotation did not compete with, let alone replace, “poli- tics,” as it did in dutch. in french (larousse, consulted august ), one distinguishes between “le politique” or “politics” (that which concerns the organization and exercise of power in and through the state, or what politicians do) and “policy” as “la poli- tique” (the set of options chosen collectively or individually), prefixed by an adjective (“�economique, �etrang�ere,” etc.). zittoun circumnavigated the “la/le politique” problem by consistently speaking of the plural, “les politiques publi- ques,” literally “public politics” but in the sense of “public politics” (zittoun, ). similarly in italian and spanish, for example, the colombian, spanish- speaking policy and sts-scholar ord�o~nez-metamaros ( ) speaks of “pol�ıticas p�ublicas.” interestingly, in these concepts, “rationality” or “prudence” is absent; instead, “policy” is squarely placed in “the political” as dealing with power, especially the power of the state. the same appears to be true for arabic. the notion of “policy” in the anglophone/dutch sense of the word is expressed as “assiyassah al amma,” which in its literal translation reads “public politics.” “(a)siyassah,” the nearest equivalent in arabic to “politics,” literally means “tak- ing charge of a matter (in making it better)” (hoppe, , pp. – ). the affinity with notions of hierarchically conceived leadership, initiative, and rule by the state are clear. recapitulating this cursory and superficial perusal of historical etymology of several languages in search for the meanings of “policy,” we arrive at three con- clusions: . only in english and in dutch, the concept of “policy” has been invented, in the late middle ages and early renaissance, as meaningful sub-category of actions by leaders or other initiating actors using political, state and/or gov- ernmental powers to initiate and organize collective action. european policy analysis, : . most other languages (but see footnote ) do not make this distinction; they do without the conceptual innovation of “policy,” but have found other, more cumbrous or wordy means to articulate more or less the same idea. . what distinguishes “policy” from “ordinary” uses of the power to initiate and enact collective action through political, state or a governmental power is its (relatively more) articulated, documented character, implying that it is also assumed to be (relatively more) rational, prudent or well-deliberated. take notice of the fact that, in the spirit of renaissance and enlightenment thinking, “policy” was judged in a positive light. it reflected the typical cartesian dualist mind-set: thought precedes speech precedes action; thus, action is instru- mental, and is hierarchically subjected to direction by thinkers. like very explicitly in dutch where the concept of “beleid” achieved a triumphant twentieth-century comeback, “policy” had positive connotations compared to “politics” or “rule” or “political control.” all the more curious that recently cracks show up in the for- merly shining blazon. read this verdict on “policy” by a renowned dutch political commentator of eu and international politics: politicians frequently say there are no simple solutions. they point towards the complexity of a globalized world. ‘policy’, it is usually a ser- ies of difficult to trace compromises that strongly deviate from politicians’ campaign slogans. citizens primarily see stalemate. but if they raise the issue, they hear the words. . .’there is no alternative’. (de gruyter, nrc- handelsblad, august, ). here vices formerly ascribed to “politics” (intransparency, compromise, imposed solution) are attributed to “policy” as well. or read what martha nuss- baum recently had to say about how presidential candidate dukakis lost his race for the us presidency (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /martha-nussbaum-anger/ / – accessed august , ) i suppose you’re too young to remember michael dukakis’s failed cam- paign for president. he had furloughed certain prisoners, and one of them raped someone while on parole. he was asked, “what if this willie hor- ton raped your wife?” and he thought about it, and he gave a very rational reply, about how he thought the policy was, on the whole, well thought-out, and that this was an unfortunate consequence. that was not what the american public wanted. they wanted him to get really, really angry, and to display the rage of a man defending his wife. that was one of the major reasons he lost the election. here a former virtue of “policy,” its quality of being well-thought out or rational, was seen by the public as a vice. unintended consequences as inevitable collateral damage of policy were not tolerated. and the same public nowadays sees emotions like fear and anger as a legitimate source of “policy.” listen to hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /martha-nussbaum-anger/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /martha-nussbaum-anger/ / what former model sara ziff has to say on #metoo in modeling: “we need more than a hashtag. we have to turn our anger into policy to have lasting impact on the sector.” or the waco herald tribune editorial ( july ): “republicans can’t turn anger (over obamacare) into viable health care policy.” it looks like policy has to be an expression of the passion of the moment to be accepted as legitimate by the public. and finally listen to german philosopher j€urgen habermas’ praise of french president emmanuel macron: . . .it is not these individual proposals, some of which have been around for years, that distinguish this politician’s demeanor, initiative and speech from that which we have become used to. three characteristics stand out: the courage to shape policy; the commitment to restructuring the euro- pean elite project to subject it to the democratic control of its citizens; and the convincing manner of a person who believes in the power of words to articulate thoughts. (spiegel online, october , ) what is remarkable here is that habermas sets macron apart as special and praiseworthy by mentioning qualities that once belonged to the common sense properties of “policymaking”: shape policies (which nowadays obviously needs an unusual degree political courage), commitment to a project (as if politics and governing are not anymore about creating and announcing public commitments), and believing in the power of words to articulate thoughts (a standard view of european enlightenment thinking). what was self-evident about policy and poli- cymaking, obviously no longer is. it is this observation to which i will return as the core message of this essay. metaphors and the “signature of policy” in academic discourse in converting “policy” from a term in everyday political discourse into a sci- entific concept, policy scholars have followed different strategies, one of which is to point to some of the many common sense usages but leave the concept unde- fined (sabatier & weible, , pp. - ). this is less than satisfactory because, as cairney ( , ) points out, the ways public policies are studied by academic observers has changed significantly since its emergence in the united states in the s. to make sense of the indeed bewildering range of uses of “policy” the key is that all scholars start off from, surprisingly, the folk theory of essences: “every thing has an essence that inheres in it and that makes it the kind of thing it is. the essence of each thing is the cause of that thing’s natural behavior” (lakoff & johnson, , p. ). “things,” in the sensori-motor experiences to which all human beings are subjected in growing up, as origin of even their most abstract and complex thinking, are bounded regions in space (“containers”), with an inter- nal and external structure that identifies its boundary. so “policy” too, metaphori- cally, is considered an “object” with inherent properties that distinguish it from what it is not. from this socio-cognitive framing perspective, definitions of european policy analysis, : “policy” build from root metaphors selected as particularly apt in listing key properties of this “object.” and because we think about “objects” as things we can “make” by endowing them with their typical properties, scholars and practi- tioners easily speak of “policymaking” as the process through which we fabricate the object “policy.” zittoun ( ), more explicit than most, aptly titled his book “the political factory of public policies” (“la fabrique politique des politiques pub- liques”). i will return to this metaphor’s aptness later when discussing distinctions between “politics” as action and “policy” as making. from the policy studies literature, we cull five such key or root metaphors for “policy”—the standing “army of metaphors” at the disposal of policy scientists (colebatch & hoppe, ): . policy as governmental choice or decision; . policy as ordering through documentation; . policy as problem solving; . policy as practice(s); . policy as body of expertise. the trouble with these properties is that because, in their analytic and research use over time, they become so normal, if not hackneyed, that policy scholars no longer notice that they are still metaphors that originate in source domains different from their application in their target domains (of policy and policy-making). they become conceptual blends (lakoff & johnson, , p. ) in which a or some selected properties are mistaken for “policy” as a pre-existent phenomenon. to diminish the risk of committing this reification error, agamben ( ) suggests it is helpful to see these “properties” (a metaphor itself, deriving from seeing attributes of an object as its “possessions” (lakoff & johnson, , p. ) as constituting no more than a “signature” of “policy,” enabling an observer to allocate some situation, discourse, or practice to “policy” as a category. how much each property will be “seen” by the observer in any particular case is vari- able, but these “properties” are the sources that allow an identification of a phe- nomenon or set of phenomena as “policy.” how this works is easily illustrated by taking one definition of “policy,” by orren and skowronek ( , ): “policy is ( ) a commitment to a ( ) designated goal or course of action, ( ) made authoritatively on behalf of a given entity or collectivity, and ( ) accompanied by guidelines for its accomplishment.” by designating policy as “commitment,” it is viewed as a choice (stopping the creation of new options) or a decision (which in latin literally means: “cutting off,” in this case stopping deliberation and puzzling). “commitment” also implies that the choice or decision is meant to endure or persevere, as it follows, not from caprice, but from a formed, deliberated will. in this meaning it makes sense to convert a fleeting emotion like fear or anger into enduring policy. adding that the choice or decision is “made authoritatively on behalf of a given entity or collectiv- ity” places the choosing and deciding in the sphere of politics, the state or hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal government. so here we have our first “definition” of policy as “governmental choice or decision”—dye’s ( ) more than -year-old definition as “whatever governments decide to do or not to do.” but why are such choices and decisions “documented,” or publicly recorded? well, if “policy” is an object to be pointed out to another observer, governments do produce a lot of documents (as objects) that contain officially promulgated or announced policy to nongovernmental actors like citizens, and lots of other recorded statements that are “not yet policy” used by governmental insiders and outsiders. once authoritatively and formally promulgated as official, usually through some dramatized, politically staged event (like adoption of a new law, the broadcasting of a prime minister’s annual speech and dissemination of its text) that publicizes or makes visible a government’s commitment to a sustained course of action, the policy’s text or document starts on its journey through society and all governmental institutions as an effort to order society and internal governmen- tal relations. dramatizing the political commitment by creating official texts or recordings is part of making policy authoritative and on behalf of a larger com- munity, and ordering society through controlled discourse. the third property of policy stressed in the literature is that it is about “prob- lem solving”: policy supposedly means having a “designated goal” or “a course of action” leading toward that goal. seeing policy and policymaking as about problem processing—that is, correcting, solving or resolving and dissolving prob- lems—is perhaps the dominant conception of policy in the entire modernist litera- ture (turnbull, ). it immediately invokes many other, generic metaphors on which lots of human thinking, speaking, and acting necessarily rely. the basic level, primary metaphor mobilized by the “policy is a solution” metaphor is the source-path-goal schema (lakoff & johnson, , pp. – ). in this schema, there is a trajector (in this case, a policymaker, problem solver) that moves (as self-propelled action); a source location or starting point (in this case, a situation judged to be problematic); a goal or intended destination for the trajector (in this case, a desirable and projected consequence of action resulting in a situation or event of public value); a route from source to goal; the actual trajectory or motion followed; the position of the trajector at any given time (in this case, monitoring and evaluation of progress toward the goal); the direction of the trajector at any given time (also for monitoring and evaluation); the actual final location of the trajector, which may or may not be the intended destination (allowing for adjust- ment according to performance). the final part of orren and skowronek’s definition of policy refers specifically to its being “accompanied by guidelines for its accomplishment.” stating a goal and course of action alone is not enough, guidelines are also required. this prop- erty of a policy mobilizes both remaining metaphors, policy as practice(s) and as (body of) expertise. “practices” because a lot of policy as sustained effort in goal achievement, as a journey or longer term process, requires “the ordinary and situ- ated and embodied activities which policy actors routinely enact in the course of participating in the policy process” (bartels, , p. ). it is well recognized that sustained policy efforts require organization and new routinization, or the european policy analysis, : mobilization of already routinized activities. curiously, such activities are concep- tualized, umbrella-like, as implementation and instrument use (both interesting metaphors by themselves). but what these instruments and functional and routine activities that policy workers perform really are not well researched (barzelay, ; capano & galanti, ; hoppe & colebatch, ). “expertise” is needed simply because in a complex and technology-suffused world no problem can be attacked without expert knowledge in the many senses of domain-specific but generalized causal-technical knowledge (knowledge how and why), and situation- or location-specific, contingent action-process knowledge (knowledge who and when). now remember that in explaining the folk theory of essences lakoff and john- son also claim that “(t)he essence of each thing is the cause of that thing’s natural behavior.” if one conceives “natural behavior” of a thing as the implied destina- tion of a trajectory governed by the metaphorical logic of a property, then for “policy” the following five “natural behaviors” may be listed: a preoccupation with authoritative choice and decision by the state leads nat- urally to autocracy, authoritarianism, centralization, power maintenance and expansion (de jouvenel, ): “l’�etat c�’est moi.” if policy is conceived as nothing but (ordering through) documentation, legalism, bureaucratization, going by the book, and red tape inexorably follow. if policy were nothing but problem solving, as implied in lasswell’s intelligence function as pivotal for all other functions, intellectual hubris, faith in comprehensive rationality, joint-up governance, and narrow, merely instrumental solution thinking (turnbull, ) and policy goal achievement thinking in policy evaluation (furubo, ) would follow: “faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desir- able in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realisation, is our sal- vation.” (italicized by rh) (dewey, quoted by max horkheimer, , p. and ). if policy is seen to emerge and accumulate from practices, we would get bureaucratization, policy capture by organizational routines (allison, [ ]), and street-level bureaucrats (lipsky, ) or inertia. if policy relies on expertise too heavily it also leads to intellectual hubris, and its calls for more technocracy (fischer, ), evidence-based policy (strassheim, ), and epistocracy (estlund, . in stressing the metaphorical nature of human thinking and speech, lakoff & johnson wisely stress metaphorical pluralism, that is, there is never one single “right” metaphor. thus, for a rich and important domain as policy and policy- making, a single conceptual mapping will never do the job of reasoning about the subject as a whole. looking for the one “omnibus” model for the policy process (e.g., howlett, mcconnell & perl, ) will always be in vain—and moreover, it will impoverish analysis and critical thinking. this allows us to say something more about agamben’s hint to forget about the single “properties”/metaphors of policy, but to consider them jointly as a “signature.” the meaning of “signature” here is something like a reflexive equilibrium. looking for the one-and-only “om- nibus” model for policy and policy processes will always be in vain—and more- over, improving analysis and critical thinking. as illustrated above, becoming hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal captive to a single or just a few metaphors drives one to the logical extremes of their application—both theoretically and practically. we will always need more than one conceptual mapping to understand policy and policymaking; and should attempt to understand their mutual relations and causal connections in our theo- rizing. as hal colebatch and i have argued, the task for policy studies is not to construct the “best” theory of policy and policy processes. it is rather to compre- hend and explain the way in which different theoretizations are constructed and mobilized by academics, practitioners, and citizens in the process of governing others and ourselves. as will become clear in the next sections, mainstream policy studies have stressed the problem processing and expertise metaphors, paid too little system- atic attention to practices, and due to these foci under-researched and theorized important political changes of authority and documentation, that is, those parts of the signature of policy that are crucial in communicating with and getting feed- back from the citizens. citizen participation in policymaking has to some extent been studied by policy scientists interested in deliberative democracy (dryzek, ; hoppe, ). but deliberation, of course, has strong affinities with an intel- lectualized policy science. modes of governing and their degrees of politicality modern politics in the western world usually manifests itself as contestation about governmental policies. this has not always been the case; how governments conduct governing has changed over time (dean, ; de jouvenel, ; orren & skowronek, ; zittoun, ). practices of governing are all about the con- duct of conduct, that is, “any more or less calculated and rational activity, under- taken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of various actors. . . “ (dean, , p. , following foucault). governing, after all, is the quintessential political activity of institutionalized instigation or “sparking off” contributory actions by fellow men: “government could not come into existence, as its very existence depends upon habitual compliance to its biddings. . . (n)othing is more inherent in human nature than the give and take of bidding and compliance” (de jouvenel, , ). for a very long time governing was organized as territorial, legal, and admin- istrative sovereignty by feudal kings and their vassalage relations with lower aris- tocracy, combined with mental discipline instilled in these ruling �elites through military, religious, and educational practices (de jouvenel, , p. ff). only since, roughly, the eighteenth century, governing focused on the population and its economy as a whole, concerned with health, welfare, prosperity and happiness of “each and all.” since then there has been a shift in the major forms of govern- ing. at first, during the formation of republics with representative government and rule-of-law, politics and governing were about “nomomachy,” that is, parlia- mentary contestation about laws, meant to order and stabilize society for longer european policy analysis, : periods of time. during america’s new deal and great society years, and the for- mation of european welfare states, the primacy of legislation and laws gradually receded to be supplanted by policy and policymaking, much better trimmed to continuous short-term adjustments, openness to alternatives, and issue flexibility required of government in light of ever changing situations and future perspec- tives (de jouvenel, , pp. – ; braybrooke & lindblom, , pp. – ). “nomocracy,” governing through legislation and rule-setting and enforcement turned into “telocracy,” political competition about policy, and the right to policy- making. to the state was attributed a policy motive comparable to the profit motive of private enterprise: good government no longer consists of an executive faithfully applying ‘sensible rules’ drawn up by an elected legislature. instead, every govern- ment is now obliged to formulate policies that attempt to shape the direc- tion of society and to promote socially desirable goals. . . .the modern prince is less an executor of laws than a ‘field commander’ who relies on his civil service to conduct ‘operations with a given goal, taking the initia- tives and decisions which seem necessary, adjusting measures to circum- stances’. (mahoney, , p. —referring to de jouvenel) laws and decrees lost their status as “trumps” overriding policy considera- tions in the day-to-day job of controlling and steering society. henceforth, they were merely “chips” in the maelstrom of pragmatic policy considerations of social and economic control for the near future (orren & skowronek, , pp. - ). thus, “policy” and “policy process” or “policymaking” are concepts that, since the - s, reflect the way academic observes and practitioners of policy- making in the west have understood “governing.” this brought along an “epis- temization” of governing. originally, this became visible already in the cameral sciences serving the mercantilist interests of absolute monarchs. later, in the uni- ted states, it developed in public administration as an academic discipline (wil- son, ); and, in the immediate follow-up of the second world war, as the policy sciences (lasswell, ). the policy sciences are perhaps the high point of modernist ideas about governing as the political use of intelligence to bring about “progress.” in lasswell’s definition of the policy science’s paradigmatic core, the circuitry of seven required policymaking functions for good government, “intelli- gence” is the rock without which all other functions become useless (dunn, ) this intellectualization of the governing process triggered a permanent con- cern among practitioners and academicians about the extent to which these novel policymaking practices were deviating from older practices of exercising state power. this question was mainly framed as: to what extent is governing-new- style more about “puzzling” (“how to think out policy?”), and skills and capaci- ties for “knowledge use” in “policy design”; than about old-style “powering” (“how to fight about policy?”), that is, agonistic activities and skills and capacities to do with political will formation, now projected upon “policy agenda setting” and “policy adoption” and the authority of “mandates” and statutes in enabling hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal novel practices during “policy implementation” (lindblom & woodhouse, ; sabatier & mazmanian, ; wildavsky, ). even lindblom, who always was skeptical about the possibilities of a professional policy analysis, and argued for a more generous space for randomness and power (lindblom, ), did not escape this intellectualization of governing when he was writing about “evaluation as social process” (braybrooke & lindblom, ) and “the intelligence of democracy” ( ). quite recently, howlett and mukherjee ( ) have strongly reiterated the intellectualization and depoliticization of governing. typical for contemporary “epistemized” policy science, they systematize the different contexts for policy- making and basically dichotomize them in environments favorable for “policy design” as pure puzzling and “non-design” as pure powering, which they define as traditionally political activities like bargaining, log-rolling, electoral oppor- tunism, or clientelist practices (howlett and mukherjee, , p. ). for them, as for many policy scientists, traditional politics, as non-design, is an obstacle and a risk to high-quality policymaking. but this point of view strips “policy” and “policymaking” of all politics. and thereby from its own “raison d’être”! in his magisterial book, “the pure theory of politics,” de jouvenel ( ) argues that “(t)he smallest identifiable component of any political event, large or small, is the moving of man by man. that is the elementary political action” ( ). and what he calls the technology of politics and the occupational trait of the politician is “designing”: “he seeks to bring about a certain eventus requiring actions from other persons, and therefore he seeks to eli- cit the adequate contributory actions, and for this purpose makes the moves likely to elicit these actions: all of this constitutes the design of the politician. . .” ( ). in the small and informal, like a “dirty” quid-pro-quo proposal made in passing between two politicians during a phone conversation; or in the large and formal, like a year-long special project for a large team of civil servants and stakeholder advisers to design and write a fundamental policy document on how a govern- ment is to deal with climate change during the next years —they are both designs—and they are both deeply political. they both intend to spark off contrib- utory actions by instigating compliance from others. the still overbearing influ- ence on governmental decisions of politics or powering or “non-design” compared to evidence-based design or puzzling, is illustrated by the experience of dutch mp (labour party), mei li vos ( , p. ), who was trained as a policy scientist and wrote a phd in policy science: if you break down a decision by politicians into the ingredients like in a recipe for baking a cake, those ingredients are as follows: one part ideals, a pinch of ideology, five parts of emotions, a half part of financial consid- erations and a half to a full part of scientific insights, thickened with a quart liter of power thinking and another quart liter of polls and electoral considerations. (translation by rh) the depoliticization ingrained in policy science misses out on another impor- tant practitioner’s experience. van middelaar ( ), a long-time speech writer for european policy analysis, : a chairperson of the european commission before moving to a professorship on the principles and practices of the eu, demonstrates that a governing system based on well-institutionalized and sophisticated, but depoliticized, policymaking may stand in the way of necessary high politics. analyzing eu politics and poli- cymaking, he constructs the following typology of modes of eu governing (see figure ). using “euspeak” by practitioners as baseline, van middelaar makes two basic distinctions: the first one, decisions arise from rule application in a given policy framework, or from unique and contingent, unpredictable but politically upsetting events. asked by a journalist what did push governments off course and off policy, former prime minister harold macmillan supposedly answered: “events, boy, events.” political sovereignty and authority manifest themselves most conspicuously in the judgment that events warrant a state of exception or emergency (schmitt, ); and can no longer be handled from previously estab- lished policy and administrative frameworks. the second distinction is between politicized and depoliticized processes. the latter form of decision making is a rule-factory run by specialist civil servants and other experts, and in eu practice tellingly designated by terms like “policy” and “governance”; and the former is constituted through swift, intuition-like but decisive action by political leaders through “politics” and “governing.” in making this distinction, van middelaar explicitly relies on the way hannah arendt ( ) separated “making” (crafwork, “poi�esis,” and thus: policymaking) from “politics” as acting and speaking together (rhetorics, “phron�esis,” and machiavellian “virt�u,” or in contemporary politicos- peak, “chefsache”) on how to respond to the concerns of a political community figure . four modes of governing. hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal (“polis”). depoliticization occurs in many ways (van middelaar, , - ): as technical, when the politics hides in the details of policy design and implementa- tion technicalities; as legal/constitutional, when policy content or the salvation message is set in stone by the law or a constitution (like free trade and a level playing field is written into the european treaties from day one); as procedural, when decision making becomes untransparent and illegible to ordinary citizens and even dedicated observers because rules have developed in an inextricably twisted knot; and as executive, when political leaders find no other reason for decisive action than “there is no alternative” (tina). what the eu modes of governing teach policy scholars is that expansion of routine policy, even if tending to the nonincremental, is not a persuasive and credible substitute for decisive political action. page has addressed this by distin- guishing between “hum-drum” and “heroic policy.” rule-based politics as “hum- drum” policy (page, ; ff) works well when problems have goals that are at least moderately clear and consensual, and the solution space is well-delineated, but needs some fine-tuning and puzzling. applied to “wicked” or unstructured problems, this style of policymaking or governing entails that top bureaucrats overreach, and roam into “terra incognita” where all kinds of unintended conse- quences quickly erode whatever legitimacy rule-based decisions by bureaucracy appeared to have. vice versa, asks page, do political leaders or politicians “have the skill and the capacity to identify key political issues in humdrum pro- cesses. . .and effectively manage and intervene in them. . .” (page, , ; cf. roe, ). page does acknowledge that from time to time, and recently more and more frequently, politicians are called upon to decide on issues of “heroic pol- icy”—or what dror ( , - ) probably would label as “mega-” or “meta- policymaking.” here one should think of, for example, how to respond to the financial and the refugee crises. van middelaar shows how in these cases the european council of ministers, the elected heads of states of the eu member countries, indeed banded together as executive function of the eu, and managed to find beginnings of a solution. it is questionable though if this is indeed “heroic policy.” seen in the light of the signature of policy, event-driven political decisions do cutoff possible endless debates with authority. but whether or not this exercise of short-term authority gels into durable problem processing, changes the prac- tices of policy workers and is able to withstand the scrutiny of expertise remains to be seen. the limits of policy: toward post-policy–centered governing? in the previous sections, we have begun to depict the fall from grace of “pol- icy” as an innovative concept in understanding governing. “policy” was postu- lated as “real” in order to understand what we mean by “governing.” and “governing,” even if understood as “the will to govern” (rose & miller, : ) or “(la) pr�etention du politique �a gouverner” (zittoun, , loc. in kindle edi- tion), ought to be postulated as “real” in order to understand attempts at direct- ing collective action in mass societies. successfully introduced after the second european policy analysis, : world war in the practice and observation and theorizing of governing, it has lost its lure and attraction since the - s. as of , it is still the key concept of a scientific subdiscipline called “policy sciences” or “policy studies.” but it is telling that a canadian practitioner, discussing the most recent handbooks by sabatier and weible, cairney, and colebatch and hoppe during a special session of the icpp conference in montreal, candidly admitted that in reading these scholarly works he wrestled with a completely new vocabulary that he had hardly come across in his decade-long career as a civil servant! how could this possibly be? it is well beyond the possibilities of this forum contribution to come up with an exhaustive explanation. it is clear that policy and policymaking are running into their own limits (spink, ). van middelaar’s lucid analysis of governing practices and their depoliticizations shows that incremental policymaking has exhausted itself; but is effectively slowing down the punctuations of decades-long policy equilibria (true, jones & baumgartner, ) and the political turning-point decisions demanded by this age of “interregnum” (gramsci, ). the “great regression” (geisselberger, ) toward illiberal forms of governing in large parts of the world points in the same direction: important segments of the citizens of many nations, paradoxically instigated by politicians strongly suggesting that the state and its apparatus were not the solution but the problem, appear to have lost a belief in the agency of the state as initiator and conductor of change for the better (gibson, ). what appeared as citizen apathy and indifference first, has clearly developed into distrust and hostility. there are many possible explana- tions, but the one we like to stress is what in the literature has been embraced as the “governance turn”; that is, the view that “ ‘government’ by authoritative direction had been replaced by negotiation by self-organizing networks” (cole- batch, , p. ); and that this was a desirable development. it is to be feared that the realities on the ground of this governance turn are an important reason for the present aversion towards politics and policy among citizens. following peter mair’s ( ) prescient analysis, the abdication by politicians and civil ser- vants of representative democracy and party politics, gradually ushered in the labyrinthine complexities of multi-level, multi-actor and multidimensional gover- nance. this allowed only “an expert public (and corporate lobbyists—rh) (to) trace who participates as player and where the ball is; (but) supporters. . .have no clue where to raise their voice” (van middelaar, , ). in other words, the political game became illegible to the public, and irrelevant to the experts playing their own game. expertocracy and populism both detest pluralist politics, albeit for different reasons. if the policy sciences desire to regain their political relevance, they will have to figure out how reason can somehow “tame” raw political power and its ten- dency to autocracy and despotism, without depoliticizing politics itself, and thereby feed the pernicious depoliticization tendencies of autocratic and populist governing, often in tandem. in an apt metaphor, bruno latour ( ) pictures political activity as an endless circle where politicians and political activists, by their seemingly repetitive and boring speeches, continuously assemble and hoppe: policy, governing and politicality: policy studies journal reassemble a phantom public (lippmann, ) around ever changing public con- cerns and issues. only by turning the multitude of individuals in hyperpluralist modern societies into the repetitive temporary unity of political coalitions around concrete political issues, as communities of the affected, citizens are mobilized as active agents, enabled to participate in policymaking processes. without such a political action as mobilizing publics around issues citizens simply lack “the capacities and/or means required for effective awareness of or action upon the issues in which (they) are implicated”(marres, , p. ; also see harman, , p. ff). this makes modes of problematization and meaning giving—more than the imagined instrumental rationality of expert-informed authoritative decision mak- ing, or the imagined networks of managed and structured interaction in multilevel governance structures—the key to a democratic and truly “political” politics: out of the disorder, conflicts and struggles of an irreducible diversity in society it cre- ates order as necessary for peacefully living together, without suppressing the reemergence of diversity and its disorder that is a precondition for continued free- dom and democracy (arendt, referred to by zittoun, ; locus kindle edi- tion). david dery ( , - ) addresses the problem of combining the analytics of problematization (as puzzling) and its politics (as powering) as a chal- lenge that can nevertheless be solved: “understood as the conversion of moral dilemmas and controversies that can- not be solved into problems that can be resolved (over and over again, rh), the politics of problem definition appears as the dominant force in learning to live together. . . . issue selection and problem definition taken together may account for the ways in which society lives and gradually renews its values and its visions of the good life.” the question about democracy thus changes from “what do ‘we-the-people’ want our government to do?” to “how is the polity’s problematic identified and brought to public attention? and is authority—whatever its source in the state apparatus, political parties, or civil society associations, corporate business, the media or individual citizens—democratically and legitimately invoked?” by per- sistently and systematically recording answers to this question, policy studies may help urgently needed new forms of political and democratic legitimacy to be born. in this way policy studies will avoid becoming an instrument of depoliti- cization; but remain politically self-aware and self-critical of its role in politics and society. robert hoppe is emeritus professor of knowledge and policy at the university of twente’s department of science, technology, society and public policy. his research interests are policy process theories and their applications, the role of expertise in public policymaking, and deliberative democracy. his most recent book publications are the handbook on policy, process and governing (chel- tenham: edward elgar, ) (with hal colebatch), and women, civil society and policy change in the arab world (cham: spinger/palgrave macmillan, ) (with nasser yassin). european policy analysis, : notes . policy studies badly need similar historical etymological analyses of the slavic languages, including of course russian with its rich history of communist state rule and ‘planning’; but also of asian lan- guages like hindi, chinese, japanese, korean and bahassa indonesia. african languages too need such scientific analysis; see e.g. bayart, / , who posits the root metaphor of “politics is eat- ing” or “the politics of the belly” as constitutive for african notions of government and political leadership. lakoff and johnson ( , p. ) mention that, metaphorically, achieving a purpose (a desired object) is “getting something to eat.” in , elias canetti, in his anthropological and social-psychological study on “mass and power,” devotes a section to the “psychology of eating” in a chapter on “the biological organs of power.” . the example is taken from dutch political practice in the – period. . one does not nececessarily subscribe to schmitt’s contestable definition of the political as cotermi- nous with the friend/foe distinction, the see the merit of his argument that the judgment of excep- tion or emergency is the hallmark of political authority and decision making. references agamben, giorgio. . the signature of all things: on method. new york: zone books. allison, g. t. . essence of decision: explaining the cuban missile crisis ( , nd ed.). boston: little brown. arendt, h. 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for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: “no eclipse lasts forever”: confronting gendered violence in stephen king’s gerald’s game and dolores claiborne submitted by kohlbey ozipko in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of master of arts in english. dr. jodey castricano, faculty of creative and critical studies supervisor dr. lisa grekul, faculty of creative and critical studies supervisory committee member dr. jennifer gustar, faculty of creative and critical studies supervisory committee member dr. ilya parkins, faculty of arts and social sciences university examiner iii abstract gendered violence, particularly violence against women, is an issue that continues to haunt north american society today as demonstrated by the fact that #metoo, a social movement dedicated to increasing visibility of the issue of violence against women, has gained astounding attention over the past three years. similarly, the novels of american author stephen king also aid in increasing the visibility of violence against women as a real issue, specifically his set of novels gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, king draws out his most striking representations of gendered violence thus far through protagonists jessie burlingame and dolores claiborne, respectively. in the novels, jessie and dolores experience sexual, physical, and domestic violence enforced by their husbands, fathers, and the patriarchal society in which they live. as a means of revealing the inherently violent nature of the technologies which construct and police gender norms along with the internal trauma that often results from patriarchal violence, king connects the two novels intertextually by invoking an element of the gothic tradition: a solar eclipse. between the two novels, the eclipse represents and thus opens up a psychic, liminal space between jessie and dolores uniting them in their shared traumas and encouraging the reader to reflect upon gendered violence as being an experience shared by many women. while jessie and dolores resort to using violence to retaliate against their abusers, it is only used as a last resort. as with #metoo, rather than condoning violence as an appropriate response to patriarchal oppression, the novels advocate acknowledging, sharing, and eventually rewriting narratives of trauma as methods of non-violent retaliation. in this sense, king’s novels are a feminist intervention that might work alongside #metoo to further emphasize the issue of violence against women as a contemporary issue and, perhaps, open up the space necessary for invoking social change. drawing from the theoretical works of kate manne, laurie collier hillstrom, judith butler, cathy caruth, and greg forter, this thesis seeks to examine the significance of the eclipse in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne in relation to gender and its historically heteronormative construction in north american society, individual and social trauma, and the violence that results. iv lay summary american author stephen king is known for his chilling narratives of possession, hauntings, madness, and murder; these are the types of narratives that king’s massive cult following has grown to expect since the publication of his first novel, carrie. however, what is perhaps more frightening than the typical scenes of possession, hauntings, madness, and murder that we encounter in king’s works are the uncanny parallels that can be seen between king’s ‘fictional’ world and our own. in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, king exposes the harsh reality that violence against women is still an issue in north american society. interestingly enough, king manages to do so by connecting the two novels with the figure of a solar eclipse. rather than obscuring the issue, the eclipse works to expose the violent underbelly of north american society and the systems that continue to perpetuate violence against women. v preface sections of this thesis, specifically the discussion of judith butler’s work on gendering and gendered violence located in “king’s gothic representations of trauma, the repressed, and gendered violence” and the discussion of how gendered violence is treated as a social norm on little tall island located in ‘“…and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya’: navigating social trauma in dolores claiborne,” have been adapted into an article set for publication. the article is to be published in the humanities graduate student anthology published by the university of british columbia (okanagan) and is titled “when the lights go out: panopticism in stephen king’s dolores claiborne.” vi table of contents abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... iii lay summary ............................................................................................................................................. iv preface .......................................................................................................................................................... v table of contents ....................................................................................................................................... vi acknowledgements..……………………………………………………………………………………..vii dedication ................................................................................................................................................. viii chapter : front matter ............................................................................................................................. . gendered violence in contemporary north american society and its representation in literature ............................................................................................................................................... . king’s gothic representations of trauma, the repressed, and gendered violence ............... . why gothic and not realism? ................................................................................................ chapter : refusing victimhood in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne ........................................ . the eclipse: bridging shared traumas…………………………………………………….. . “how absolutely freudian, my dear!”: subjective and objective trauma in gerald's game………………………………………………………………………………………………… . “…and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya”: navigating social trauma in dolores claiborne .. chapter : conclusion .............................................................................................................................. . using the gothic to create feminist space ............................................................................. . gendered violence: illuminating the issue……………...………………..………..………… works cited ............................................................................................................................................... vii acknowledgements i want to thank my committee members, dr. jodey castricano, dr. jennifer gustar, and dr. lisa grekul, for pushing me to step outside my comfort zone and write something worth sharing. all of the feedback and edits were very much appreciated. i want to thank my supervisor, dr. jodey castricano, for not only providing me with the opportunity to analyze gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, a set of novels that has been weirdly close to my heart since i first encountered them as a teenager, but also for encouraging me to read and analyze them with new eyes. i want to thank dr. jennifer gustar for offering such an inspiring class, “writing as resistance: contemporary women’s fiction in the uk,” during my first year of graduate school. it was during this class where it became clear to me that writing and rewriting are, perhaps, the most powerful methods of combatting gendered violence, misogyny, and patriarchal oppression. i want to thank dr. lisa grekul for her optimism and kind words of encouragement throughout my writing process. i surely would not have made it this far without them and i am so grateful to have had the opportunity to have her as a member of my committee, as well as a ta supervisor during my first two years of graduate school. viii dedication for my dad, dale, who fostered my love of reading, writing, and, of course, stephen king, from an early age. for my mom, diane, who instilled in me the values that i admire so much in her: independence, strength, and the heart to press-on in the most difficult of circumstances. for myself, because, hey, i wrote the damn thing… chapter : front matter . gendered violence in contemporary north american society and its representation in literature #metoo began as a small grassroots movement in led by activist tarana burke; over the last three years, it has evolved into a global movement because of the astounding attention it has received on social media platforms such as twitter and facebook. in “#metoo, white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy,” penny griffin goes so far as to claim that #metoo is now a “behemoth social media movement capable of shaking entire industries” ( ). #metoo became popular in october when several celebrities including rose mcgowan, ashley judd, and asia argento made accusations against hollywood movie mogul, harvey weinstein, exposing his gross sexual misconduct. dubravka zarkov and kathy davis note that “[w]ithin days after the first accusations against weinstein…women who had had similar experiences began to use the #metoo platform to tell their story. since then #metoo has become a global phenomenon, spreading from the us to the uk, canada, australia, israel, india and beyond. the end is nowhere in sight” ( ). although other celebrities came forward regarding their experiences with weinstein, women in general began using the hashtag to tell their stories of day-to-day experiences with sexual assault, abuse, and harassment. thus, the movement created a space necessary for fostering solidarity among women while also exposing the patriarchal skeleton upholding the flesh of north american society. although #metoo opened up a space for women to respond non-violently to patriarchal systemic oppression in north american society, there are also a number of women who never had the opportunity to voice their experiences and instead resorted to using violence to retaliate against their abusive circumstances. “battered women’s syndrome,” a term that lenore walker coined in , describes the throughout this thesis, i will be using the term north american society as a general term for the united states and canada. although gendered violence is not an issue limited to north american society, i am choosing to restrict my scope in this manner because gerald’s game and dolores claiborne are set in the united states and, as a result, reflect issues common to that geographical area. i am grouping canada together with the united states because the canadian judicial system is equally as problematic when it comes to handling cases of violence against women, particularly when battered women’s syndrome is a point of consideration as we shall see. phenomenon of abused women killing their abusers (typically their partner or spouse) because they feel they have no other route of escape (fine ). in “hear me now: the admission of expert testimony on battered women’s syndrome-an evidentiary approach,” matthew fine notes that battered women’s syndrome “has since been used in many domestic violence cases and as part of self-defense claims when victims turn on their batterers” ( ). one case is that of betty hundley. in the state of kansas in , hundley shot and killed her husband after he “subjected her to ten years of abuse” including instances where he “[k]nocked out several of her teeth, [broke] her nose…threatened to cut her eyeballs out and her head off, kicked her downstairs, and…[broke] her ribs” (bunyak ). when one reads the circumstances under which hundley killed her abuser, it is obvious that she acted in self-defense as her options for escape were limited: her husband threatened her life and put her life in danger on multiple occasions. although battered women’s syndrome was a major point of consideration during hundley’s trial, she was charged with manslaughter signifying that battered women’s syndrome is not always used successfully in court (bunyak ). unfortunately, hundley’s case is not unique. similar cases include the ontario case of margaret ann malott ( ) and the new york case of barbara sheehan ( ). both women shot and killed their (ex) husbands due to repeated domestic abuse. similar to hundley, malott and sheehan were tried with battered women’s syndrome as part of their defense but were charged for killing their abusers: malott with second-degree murder (geddes) and sheehan (although acquitted of the murder) for possessing a gun (bilefsky). when considered together—#metoo and the disappointing employment of battered women’s syndrome in the north american courtroom—it is clear that there is still work to be done in the area of violence against women and the appropriate actions that must be implemented to prevent it. perhaps there is such difficulty with responding to and preventing gendered violence because gender itself is an inherently violent construct and therefore difficult to dismantle. the act of gendering an individual, by which i mean expecting an individual to occupy a certain social role based on their appearance as either a man or woman, opens up a space for violence to ensue if an individual does not conform to their expected gender role, particularly if that individual is a woman. in down girl: the logic of misogyny ( ), kate manne provides some insight pertaining to questions of gender, its construction, and the violence it embeds: “[m]isogyny…functions to enforce and police women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance against the backdrop of other intersecting systems of oppression and vulnerability, dominance and disadvantage, as well as disparate material resources, enabling and constraining social structures, institutions, bureaucratic mechanisms, and so on” ( ). the reason that gendered violence continues to be an issue, as manne suggests, is because it is ingrained in a set of intersecting systems of oppression that have historically regulated north american society. the intersecting systems to which manne is referring might include legal systems (the courtroom), economic systems (financial institutions and the workplace), marriage, and the home, which can be seen in the cases of hundley, malott, and sheehan. with this in mind, #metoo serves as a reminder that violence against women is a more substantial issue than we may initially realize. gendered violence is a subject with which american author, stephen king, is quite familiar; his representations of gendered violence, particularly violence against women, are eerily similar to the narratives of hundley, malott, and sheehan. in this thesis, i will be examining representations of gendered violence in two novels by stephen king: gerald’s game ( ) and dolores claiborne ( ). in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, king imagines jessie burlingame and dolores claiborne, respectively, in similar situations to those of hundley, malott, and sheehan. jessie and dolores are continuously subjected to sexual, domestic, and social abuse, which eventually pushes them to kill their abusers who also happen to be their husbands. while there are countless works of fiction that deal with the issue of violence against women, king’s works are significant due to the author’s popularity. king’s massive cult following allows him to reach an audience that less established authors are not quite capable of reaching. consequently, the social issues that king sheds light upon and critiques with his works—the social issue revealed and critiqued in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne is violence against women resulting from systemic patriarchal oppression—become more visible to his readers and open up space for social activism to occur. the research questions that will be guiding my analyses of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne are the following: how is gendered violence represented in the novels? what do these representations indicate and achieve from a feminist perspective? and, finally, what relevance do these representations have whilst considering how and why gendered violence continues to haunt contemporary north american society? i will be arguing that, although jessie and dolores use violence to physically escape their abusive circumstances, the novels do not condone violence as a viable solution to gendered violence; rather, jessie and dolores use violence only as a last resort when either their own lives or their children’s lives are in danger. the representations of violence provide evidence for manne’s idea that the intersecting patriarchal systems that regulate north american society are violent in and of themselves as demonstrated by the domestic and sexual abuse jessie and dolores endure in the home, the sexual discrimination they experience within their communities, and their final acts of killing their husbands. at the same time, the intertextual figure of a solar eclipse—a well-known trope in the gothic tradition—connects the issues that jessie and dolores experience across texts and raises the potential of non-violent resistance: acknowledging and ultimately rewriting experiences of trauma induced by gendered violence. much in the same way that #metoo has recently opened up a space for women to share their narratives of abuse and foster female solidarity, the trope of the eclipse creates a psychic space for jessie and dolores to connect with one another across space and time through their shared traumas. this thesis will analyze how king’s use of the figure of the eclipse reveals the trauma that results from acts of gendered violence produced by historically heteronormative social structures including the home and family, marriage, financial institutions, and the justice system. perhaps more importantly, the eclipse reveals that gendered violence must be combatted by acknowledging one’s self as a victim of systemic patriarchal oppression, sharing narratives of abuse to foster solidarity, and rewriting those narratives as a means of reclaiming agency. . king’s gothic representations of trauma, the repressed, and gendered violence stephen king is well-known for his thrilling, bone-chilling, and violent works of fiction. indeed, the climax of his first novel, carrie ( ), is a literal bloodbath as carrie white’s peers drench her in pig’s blood at their high school prom. carrie then retaliates against her bullies by using her telekinetic powers to burn down the school with many of her peers still inside. a number of king’s other works feature similar narratives of abuse and retaliation including firestarter ( ), it ( ), and rose madder ( ). yet king’s most striking narratives of abuse and retaliation are arguably found in his set of novels, gerald’s game ( ) and dolores claiborne ( ). similar to carrie, gerald’s game and dolores claiborne feature female protagonists—jessie burlingame and dolores claiborne, respectively—who endure physical, sexual, and social abuse that eventually leads them to kill their abusers who, in both novels, are represented by their husbands. i am choosing to analyze gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, in particular, not only because they are explicit narratives of abuse and retaliation but because king joins them with the intertextual figure of an eclipse. the eclipse connects jessie and dolores across texts, as well as across space and time, signifying that the systemic patriarchal violence they experience is not restricted to the novels, nor to a specific time or place. violence against women is an issue that extends far beyond the boundaries of kashwakamak lake and little tall island, the settings of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, respectively. thus, by analyzing gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, i am helping increase the visibility of gendered violence as a real issue in north american society, a goal that the #metoo movement is currently working toward. gerald’s game and dolores claiborne have not received the scholarly attention that many of king’s earlier works have received. theresa thompson and carol senf engage with gerald’s game and dolores claiborne quite extensively in imagining the worst: stephen king and the representation of women ( ). additionally, kimberly beal and rachel turnage discuss king’s representations of women in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne in their graduate theses. however, in comparison to king’s other works like carrie, pet sematary ( ), the shining ( ), and it, the extant criticism written upon gerald’s game and dolores claiborne is scant. perhaps one of the main reasons that gerald’s game and dolores claiborne have received less scholarly attention is because they represent a shift away from king’s usual engagement with the overtly supernatural. while most of king’s works are rooted in the gothic tradition in the most typical sense—they tend to include instances of possession, the undead, apparitions, and entirely other worlds—gerald’s game and dolores claiborne offer only a glimpse of the supernatural in the form of an eclipse linking the two protagonists. nonetheless, king’s implementation of this gothic detail is crucial when analyzing representations of individual and social trauma, repression, and gendered violence in the novels as an eclipse tends to play on the ideas of light and dark, revealing and obscuring. ironically, the darkness of the eclipse, and the violence that ensues during the eclipse, sheds light upon violence against women as an issue rather than obscuring the issue. before i begin my analyses of the novels, i will provide brief summaries of the narratives beginning with gerald’s game. gerald’s game begins with jessie and her husband, gerald, taking a trip to their cabin on kashwakamak lake to indulge their latest sexual fantasy, which involves gerald handcuffing jessie to their bed. in a rush to get to the bedroom, gerald and jessie forget to close their front door. once handcuffed to the bed, jessie realizes she does not want to play the game and repeatedly asks gerald to release her. gerald refuses, believing that jessie’s pleas are part of the game. to avoid being raped by gerald, jessie kicks him in the stomach and groin. the blow to the stomach gives gerald a heart attack and leaves jessie chained to the bed with no means of escape. while chained to the bed, jessie receives several unwanted visits, the first of which is from a dog named prince who proceeds to eat parts of gerald. prince is eventually scared away by jessie’s second visitor, a gangly figure she calls the “space cowboy” ( ). he does not let her go; he only watches her. still handcuffed to the bed, jessie is forced to relive, through memory, her childhood experience of being molested by her father, tom, during an eclipse that took place in . although jessie does not “want to remember,” the imaginary, or ghostly, voice of her old college roommate, ruth neary, and several other voices who return to jessie from her past internally urge her to remember ( ). while entrapped in her memories, jessie recalls a moment that occurred immediately after she was assaulted by her father: she went to her room to change out of her clothes and found herself thinking “[t]he other woman is on her knees, too” ( ). the other woman is dolores claiborne. after reconciling her past, jessie is psychically liberated from her childhood trauma; she then externalizes her psychic liberation by violently freeing herself from the handcuffs. the novel ends with jessie confronting the space cowboy in court who is revealed to be necrophile and serial killer, raymond andrew joubert. significantly, joubert’s phantom-like appearance is a result of a medical condition: acromegaly. after jessie confronts joubert, she attempts to reconnect with the voice of her ghostly visitor, ruth, by writing her a letter in which she reveals her experiences with both joubert and her father. at the same time that jessie is being assaulted by her father, dolores claiborne is using the darkness created by the eclipse to lure her abusive and alcoholic husband, joe, to his death on little tall island. in dolores claiborne, dolores narrates her story to a pair of local police officers. to clear her name—dolores has been accused of murdering the old, senile woman she worked for, vera donovan, who was oftentimes frightened by the sight of “dust bunnies” in her home—dolores must first tell the officers the story of how and why she killed her husband ( ). dolores reveals that joe physically abused her repeatedly during their marriage such as when “[joe] got a chunk of rock maple out of the woodbox and whacked [her] in the small of the back with it” ( ) or on the second night of their marriage when he “grabbed [her], and turned [her] over his knee, and paddled [her] with his shoe” ( ). after tolerating joe’s abuse for years, dolores discovers that joe has also been sexually assaulting their teenage daughter, selena. according to dolores, “joe st. george’s days were numbered from that moment on” ( ). before dolores resorts to killing joe, however, she attempts to run away with selena and her two other children only to find that joe drained their bank account. after facing several other social barriers, dolores finally decides to kill joe during the eclipse by getting him drunk and luring him toward an abandoned well on their property. joe falls down the well and struggles to escape, which ends with dolores finally smashing a rock over his head and killing him. after killing joe, dolores “[has] the funniest thought: that little girl is doin [sic] this, too” ( ). the little girl, of course, is jessie. although dolores liberates herself, selena, and the other children from joe’s abuse, the relationship between dolores and selena becomes strained as selena blames both herself and dolores for joe’s death. the novel ends with a newspaper clipping stating that selena, who left little tall island and became estranged from dolores after joe’s death, “will be making her first visit in over twenty years” ( ). as the summaries indicate, the eclipse serves as an intertextual bridge between gerald’s game and dolores claiborne and blurs the boundaries between the two texts therefore opening up a psychic space where jessie and dolores can connect with one another. it is critical to note that the connection between jessie and dolores is one born out of trauma and that this trauma is transgenerational. the fact that jessie and dolores connect through trauma is significant because it is an experience common to many women. as cathy caruth notes in unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative and history ( ), trauma is “much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. this truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” ( ). according to caruth’s discussion of trauma, although a traumatic experience is unconsciously repressed by the victim, the repressed cannot stay repressed and, once it does surface, it reveals a reality or truth that is not otherwise available; such is the case in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne when jessie and dolores respond to their violent circumstances using violence themselves. in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, the truth revealed is that the historically heteronormative construction of gender—and the technologies and systems that continue to divide men from women and, overall, favor men—is violent. this is proven by the fact that, even when jessie and dolores retaliate against their abusers, they retaliate using violence; violence produces violence even when stereotypical gender roles are reversed. the effects of transgenerational trauma are especially predominant in dolores claiborne since dolores witnesses her father abusing her mother at a young age. i will explore the topic of transgenerational trauma in more detail during my individual analyses of the novels. the abuse and trauma that jessie and dolores are expected to endure solely because of their gender also applies to women more generally in north american societies; the violence is a consequence of the male-female binary that regulates social and personal relationships. in the #metoo movement ( ), laurie collier hillstrom notes that “misogyny—characterized by contempt, hostility, denigration, objectification, and violence aimed at women—served as an organizing principle throughout u.s. history and is still reflected in a patriarchal system of male dominance and female subordination in politics, business, and popular culture” ( ). according to hillstrom, american society was built upon a patriarchal foundation, and its distinct features of dominance and subordination still underpin much of american society today. male domination and female subordination, to borrow hillstrom’s phrasing, are directly related to the historically heteronormative construction of gender in north american society. heteronormativity is a subject that gender theorist judith butler explores in great detail in her foundational work gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity ( ). in gender trouble, butler examines the role that heteronormative gendering plays in an individual’s personal, cultural, and social experiences. butler states that: gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self—and desire—where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. the internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. that institutional heterosexuality both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system. ( - ) butler exposes several glaring issues in this passage, all of which contribute to the argument that heteronormative gendering is, in fact, violent. first and foremost, butler reveals that there is an issue with directly associating an individual’s sex with their gender as it automatically places an individual into a pre-determined social role. second, butler suggests that gender is related to the psychic and/or cultural designation of the self; an individual’s assigned gender affects how they view themselves, which ultimately limits the social role that the individual is able to occupy. if an individual occupies a role that is not designated to their assigned gender, they are considered abnormal—outside the norms of gender. furthermore, heteronormative gendering is also violent as it excludes queer individuals or the ‘other’; gendering depends upon the binary between only men and women. lastly, butler recognizes that gender necessitates institutional heterosexuality or, as she refers to it in other instances in the work, “compulsory heterosexuality” ( ) or “naturalized heterosexuality” ( ). as it stands, heteronormativity produces and normalizes the idea of ‘men’ and ‘women’—a male-female binary—and determines the social relationships that are considered acceptable, namely heterosexual relationships. all of these fundamental issues with heteronormative gendering open up a space for gendered violence to occur. the violence that occurs in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne is, at least in part, a result of the arbitrary male-female binary that both hillstrom and butler outline as problematic. the male-female binary depends upon a system of domination (by men) and subordination (by women), which, in the novels, is enforced with violence. the intertextual element of the eclipse helps reveal the complex relationship between the male-female binary, the personal and social trauma caused by heteronormative gendering, and the violence that results; these themes tie back to the genre from which king often borrows from in his works: the gothic. as with many genres, the gothic reflects issues encountered in everyday life. unlike other genres, however, the gothic extends past ‘reality’ to reveal a psychic reality not quite visible in material social relations. in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, material reality is reflected in the form of patriarchal institutions and systems including the courtroom, financial establishments, marriage, and the home. the psychic reality revealed in the novels is the fact that these patriarchal institutions and systems gain their oppressive power from a historically constructed male-female binary that ultimately works to physically, jessie and dolores also challenge the male-female binary using violence when they kill their husbands, which i will be addressing in further detail in my individual analyses of the novels. emotionally, and socially traumatize women. from a psychoanalytical perspective, the contrast between these two realities might signify both a collective fear of and desire to confront gendered violence and patriarchal oppression on a systemic level because of how deeply ingrained the issues are into north american society; the issues are much more complex than they initially appear in material reality. these two realities, material and psychic, are especially pronounced in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne because of the trope of the eclipse, which reveals the destructive nature of material, patriarchal systems in dolores claiborne as well as the traumatizing, personal effects that patriarchal systems have on the self in gerald’s game. . why gothic and not realism? one could easily argue that, due to the scant presence of the supernatural in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, they are not works of gothic fiction but represent a shift in king’s writing toward realism. in fact, carol senf, in “gerald’s game and dolores claiborne: stephen king and the evolution of an authentic female narrative voice,” argues just that. senf claims the novels represent a shift in king’s writing toward “mainstream realistic fiction” where king has “eliminated chance, fate, or supernatural intervention” ( ). although king has reduced the role of the supernatural in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, it has not been eliminated altogether as demonstrated by the appearance of the eclipse in both narratives. contrary to senf, heidi strengell, in “the ghost: the gothic melodrama in stephen king’s fiction,” suggests that “the gothic provides the background” for many of king’s novels and “[i]n combining elements of the gothic tale with other genres—such as realism, literary naturalism, myths, fairy tales, romanticism, and other elements of the fantastic—king enriches his fiction at the same time as he challenges the traditional limits associated with these genres” ( ). of course, strengell is correct in noting that king often combines multiple genres in his writing; this is true of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. in both novels, king tackles issues common to both gothic fiction and realism including madness and murder, domestic and sexual violence, and personal and social oppression, repression, and trauma. but, with king, there is a difference. king’s precise employment of the gothic tradition in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne brings the gothic to the foreground rather than simply having it reside in the background. although there are elements of realism in the narratives, the supernatural connection generated between jessie and dolores during the eclipse works alongside those elements of realism to reveal the absolute horrors of patriarchal oppression. the novels are especially gothic when read together as the eclipse does not only join jessie and dolores on a supernatural level, but also opens up a psychic space to bridge the two novels themselves; this interconnection between the novels signifies that gendered violence is not a contained issue, but one that crosses boundaries of space and time. thus, for the sake of my argument that the eclipse in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne is key in revealing the violent nature of gender and the technologies which construct and enforce gender norms, i will be treating both novels as part of the gothic tradition rather than works of realism. prior to the rise of the gothic genre in the latter half of the eighteenth century, works such as samuel richardson’s pamela ( ) and clarissa ( ), as well as henry fielding’s joseph andrews ( ), dominated the literary sphere in britain; novels such as these are well-known for their depictions of verisimilitude and virtue, particularly when it comes to a woman’s expected social position. patricia meyer spacks summarizes the fiction that arose in the s as follows: instead of knights and ladies of high birth, novels now concerned themselves with men and women who might work for a living, whose origins might be indeterminate, whose fate depended not on heroic combat but on providence as well as their own effort–effort that could prove, as often as not, misguided. like the popular romances on our newsstands today, these fictions customarily had happy endings, but their protagonists typically faced arduous struggles, against internal as often as external obstacles. they thus educated their readers in the nature of moral endeavor, as well as in its proper goals, and they suggested the kinds of problem one might face in the world. ( ) although the above passage describes fiction published in the s—more than two decades before the publication of the first gothic novel—most elements outlined above could easily be applied to the plotlines of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne: jessie and dolores both ultimately depend upon their own effort to escape their abusive circumstances, they face internal and external struggles while doing so, and their struggles represent the kinds of problems one might face in the world. it would be difficult to pick up a novel that does not include a combination of these elements. however, phrases like proper goals and moral endeavor pose a problem as they present, as natural, the strict social conducts that regulated eighteenth-century british society, including social conducts related to gender. this was especially true when it came to an individual’s social role because it was directly linked to their sex. in monstrous motherhood: eighteenth-century culture and the ideology of domesticity ( ), marilyn francus notes that: eighteenth-century british society insisted upon domesticity as the most appropriate venue for the fulfillment of a woman’s duties to god, society, and herself. conduct manuals, educational tracts, and political tracts prescribed the image of the domestic woman, particularly as a wife and mother: caring for her children, supervising the servants, and deferring to her husband; dutiful, religious, economical (but not parsimonious), modest, chaste, well-behaved, charitable, and sensitive to the needs of others. ( ) as indicated by the list of ideal female traits, women’s reproductive capacity and motherhood were highly valued in eighteenth-century britain. in this context, francus describes the problematic power dynamic that existed between men and women as relying on the view that a wife must defer to her husband. in regards to literature, francus goes on to suggest that “[w]orks of fiction reinforced the gender code of the period, valorizing women who embodied the characteristics of the domestic woman and demonizing those who did not” ( ). according to francus’ argument, then, a novel like pamela that includes women of both types, the domestic and the demonized, may be misconstrued as upholding rather than challenging prescribed gender roles, which is where realism and gothic fiction diverge. whereas defined gendered roles are presented as natural in works of realism—which could be interpreted as upholding strictly defined gender roles—the gothic introduces elements of the supernatural that disrupt preconceived notions of what is considered natural or unnatural, normal or abnormal. in other words, the gothic utilizes the supernatural to question and challenge what is considered normal in our own material reality. the gothic extends past the verisimilitude, or likeness to life, represented in works of realism through its evocation of the supernatural allowing it to be an outwardly transgressive genre. indeed, in gothic and gender: an introduction ( ), donna heiland claims that the gothic is “at its core…about transgressions of all sorts: across national boundaries, social boundaries, sexual boundaries, the boundaries of one’s own identity” ( ). these boundaries of which heiland speaks are often challenged by the supernatural; such is the case with horace walpole’s the castle of otranto ( ), the novel credited with starting the gothic tradition. in the castle of otranto, walpole describes a patriarchally-centered society that mimics the social structure of eighteenth-century britain much in the same way that works of realism had done previously. however, heiland notes that the redeeming quality of the castle of otranto is that “walpole…use[s] an overblown supernatural to…hint that patriarchy could be seen as a comically imaginative construct” ( ). heiland is suggesting that walpole’s novel satirizes patriarchal systems—the patriarchal systems that dominate walpole’s novel and eighteenth-century british society include marriage and the home—by surrounding said systems with elements of the supernatural: monstrous suits of armour and ambiguous apparitions. works of realism cannot satirize patriarchal systems to the same effect as the gothic due to “the limitations of [the] form” (senf ). while the gothic can question the natural by drawing out comparisons to the supernatural, comparisons that might leave the reader feeling uneasy or disturbed, it is more difficult for works of realism to achieve this same type of overblown comparison because they cannot invoke the supernatural. this is not to say that works of realism do not challenge social norms; of course, they do. i am only suggesting that it is the contrast between walpole’s overexaggerated representations of women as “innocent damsels in distress” and the supernatural that ultimately reveals and challenges the problematic, arbitrary, and seemingly unreal nature of gender and the social roles attached to it, particularly in walpole’s time (williams ). the gothic tradition grew in britain—with authors such as mary shelley and charlotte brontë publishing works that further challenged the problematic nature of gender—and made its way into american fiction. walpole’s apparitions from the castle of otranto, shelley’s manmade creature from frankenstein ( ), and brontë’s psychic interactions from jane eyre ( ) found their way into works by edgar allan poe, shirley jackson, and, eventually, stephen king. the supernatural connections established in jane eyre between jane and rochester appear to have had an especially significant effect (perhaps inadvertently) on king’s writing as similar supernatural connections can be seen in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. the psychic connection drawn out between jessie and dolores allows the novels to move beyond the boundaries of material reality and expose what cannot be seen: the trauma that jessie and dolores suffer simply because they are women living in a patriarchal society, as well as the abusive circumstances that provoke their violent outbursts. it is often the case that we only see the violent aftermath of abusive circumstances when it is too late to provide the victim with support (as with hundley, malott, and sheehan), rather than the circumstances that elicited the violent responses in the first place. to this end, in landscape of fear: stephen king’s american gothic ( ), tony magistrale suggests that “king’s fiction, to be understood accurately, must be viewed as contemporary social satire, revealing collective cultural fears and fantasies which go unspoken in everyday life. king’s fiction mirrors the current maladies of our social relationships” ( ). as with walpole’s novel, gerald’s game and dolores claiborne serve to critique current patriarchal systems, an aspect of north american society considered natural and normal, by placing the systems alongside the supernatural or abnormal; just because patriarchy has been constructed as normal does not necessarily mean it is right, which is proven by the fact that gendered violence is used to maintain patriarchal power in the novels. furthermore, as magistrale suggests, king’s works do in fact mirror the issues that haunt contemporary north american society, but the eclipse also shows us what lies beyond the frame of the mirror: the trauma, the repressed, the inherent violence, the horrors. chapter : refusing victimhood in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne . the eclipse: bridging shared traumas although the eclipse is the metaphor that links gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, it is one that scholars have overlooked when analyzing the two novels together. in imagining the worst: stephen king and the representation of women, perhaps the most detailed analyses of king’s representations of women to date, theresa thompson and carol senf both address gendered violence and its representation in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. yet, they do not elaborate on the significance of the eclipse. in “rituals of male violence: unlocking the (fe)male self in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne,” thompson briefly discusses the eclipse in relation to the “feminine mystique,” a “myth that dominated the s and s cult of the domestic,” but neglects the presence of the eclipse and how it might be linked to the violence jessie and dolores experience and eventually participate in themselves ( ). in “gerald’s game and dolores claiborne: stephen king and the evolution of an authentic female narrative voice,” senf acknowledges that jessie and dolores connect with one another during the eclipse, but sees the eclipse primarily as a reference point to outline the chronology of progress women have made in achieving “greater political power, economic equality, and personal autonomy” between and the mid s ( ). in both articles, the supernatural elements of the eclipse—the psychic connection it produces between jessie and dolores, the power that jessie and dolores gain as a result of the psychic space, and the intertextual connection it creates between the novels themselves—are basically left unexamined. this is curious as an analysis of the eclipse is crucial when it comes to discussing representations of gendered violence in the novels, a subject that governs both articles. the eclipse is a complicated phenomenon in the novels, to say the least. in addition to revealing the violence produced by gender norms, the eclipse also works to dissolve the boundary between the novels and unite jessie and dolores in their mutual ordeals. in this section, i will be exploring the significance of the eclipse in relation to gendered violence, creating solidarity through shared psychic space, and the connections it manifests. the connections to which i am referring include both the psychic connection that the eclipse creates between jessie and dolores, as well as the intertextual connection between the novels themselves. although i have been referring to gerald’s game and dolores claiborne as a set up to this point, they were not actually advertised as such upon publication; they were released as stand-alone novels. the novels do, of course, work well individually, but they have a greater effect in terms of the critique of patriarchal social systems when read together. the eclipse urges us to read them together. the focal point of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne is a literary symbol well-known for its connection to the feminine: the moon. according to min shen in an article titled “‘quite a moon!’:the archetypal feminine in our town,” “[a]part from the cyclic phases associated with menstruation, life, and rebirth, the moon’s trek across the night sky also promises creative inspiration and qualitative timing, which lead to feminine wisdom” ( ). here, shen directly associates the moon with feminine qualities. however, it is not simply a moon that connects the novels, but a solar eclipse during which the moon overtakes the sun: a celestial body typically linked to the masculine in traditional iconography. if one considers that the moon represents the feminine and the sun the masculine, then a solar eclipse represents a brief moment where the feminine overpowers the masculine. this appears to be the case in the most literal sense in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne as the eclipse is the point in time for both jessie and dolores where their tolerance for abuse is exceeded and they refuse to remain victims. jessie and dolores retaliate against their abusive circumstances with violence therefore reversing the male-female power dynamic stereotypical of north american society, a dynamic that has been, according to kate manne, “entrenched, indeed deeply internalized by both men and women” ( ). it must be noted that even when gender roles are reversed, the outcome is still violent; this suggests that men and women alike have been institutionalized according to a male-female binary to accept and even expect violence in their social and personal lives, the workplace and the home, physically and psychically. in dolores claiborne, dolores states that she “grew up with the idear [sic] that when women and children step off the straight n narrow, it’s a man’s job to herd them back onto it” ( ). from dolores’ statement, it is clear that men are taught to dominate and women to submit on little tall island, and that this herding she speaks of takes the form of violence against women and children. so, when jessie and dolores finally retaliate against their husbands after years of enduring domestic and sexual abuse, it should not be a surprise that they do so with violence: it is what they know and are accustomed to. the eclipse cannot be interpreted as an entirely negative phenomenon, though, as it produces the psychic connection between jessie and dolores; this connection actually initiates jessie’s and dolores’ final, non-violent responses to patriarchal oppression in the novels: rewriting their narratives of trauma. this is the subject with which i will be concluding my thesis. however, an idea directly related to rewriting trauma—and one that can be seen during the eclipse—is the sense of victim solidarity necessary for initiating the rewriting process. the psychic connection produced by the eclipse emphasizes the vital role that creating solidarity plays in dismantling the gendered systems that (re)produce violence. manne notes that sharing one’s experiences has the ability to “foster solidarity” among victims and that “[o]ne may…be able to get one’s injuries taken seriously, or at least gain the solace of having them recognized by others who are similarly vulnerable” when experiences are shared ( ). the eclipse serves a similar purpose: it connects jessie and dolores through shared trauma and provides each woman with the knowledge that she is not suffering alone. jessie and dolores never actually meet face-to-face; their connection is strictly psychic and dependent upon the space opened up by the eclipse. yet it is this psychic space that arguably creates a sense of solidarity between jessie and dolores and contributes to saving jessie’s life. finally, king maps out the psychic connection onto the novels themselves using the eclipse, which emphasizes the necessity of creating space in which victims can foster solidarity. one might recall donna heiland’s claim that the gothic is “at its core…about transgressions” ( ). king elevates this fundamental, transgressive element of the gothic by using the eclipse to transgress and dissolve the boundaries between gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. as a result, a permanent psychic space is the context in which manne makes this claim is worth noting here as she recognizes the importance of fostering solidarity between victims of patriarchal and misogynistic systems but also cautions against simply accepting victimhood since this might lead to “accepting present and future passivity, as opposed to recognizing past or present disempowerment and humiliation, in a way that often requires and evinces agency in courage” ( ). the solidarity fostered between victims can only invoke change to oppressive, patriarchal systems if it is transformed into action. opened up between the novels. it is impossible to know whether or not this space fosters a sense of solidarity in the reader as it does between jessie and dolores. however, the fact that this space exists is worth noting because—as demonstrated by jessie’s dependence upon the psychic connections—this space becomes imperative when confronting violence and trauma induced by oppressive, patriarchal systems. it is to personal and social trauma that i will now be turning to in my individual analyses of the novels. . “how absolutely freudian, my dear!” : subjective and objective trauma in gerald’s game in gerald’s game, one of the voices that occupies jessie’s psychic space is that of ruth neary, an old college roommate, who insightfully reveals the following to jessie: “[t]he total solar eclipse lasted just over a minute that day, jessie…except in your mind. in there, it’s still going on” ( ). indeed, jessie’s childhood experience of sexual assault affects her later in life; she is haunted by sexual violence well into adulthood as her husband, gerald, assumes the role of abuser previously occupied by her father. according to greg forter’s discussions of trauma in “freud, faulkner, caruth: trauma and the politics of literary form,” jessie’s experience might be classified as what he refers to as punctual trauma: “historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system” ( ). although forter notes that punctual trauma often describes events of collective, historical trauma such as the holocaust, he also suggests that “[c]ritics have marshaled it to illuminate a range of important social phenomenon, from rape and child sexual abuse to certain experiences of racist violence and even of class domination” ( ). although punctual obviously refers to a specific point in time during which an event—in this case a traumatic experience—takes place, punctual also implies that the event occurs on time. so, the phrase punctual trauma might also indicate the unfortunate truth that trauma is something that is to be expected and is not an abnormal occurrence. in jessie’s case, her punctual trauma occurs during childhood on dark score lake when her father, tom, molests her during the eclipse. there is a distinct point in the novel when jessie directly links her present circumstances—being handcuffed to her bed on kashwakamak lake with no means of escape—to the king, gerald’s game sexual assault as she wonders, “[h]ow many of the choices…made since that day had been directly or indirectly influenced by what had happened during the final minute…she had spent on her daddy’s lap, looking at a vast round mole in the sky through two or three pieces of smoked glass? and was her current situation a result of what had happened during the eclipse?” ( ). this statement, in combination with forter’s definition of punctual trauma, describes the paradox of trauma itself; with trauma, one is attempting to simultaneously reveal and conceal the experience suffered. the choices that one makes may well be linked to this paradox even if one is unconscious to this fact; this is demonstrated in gerald’s game when it is revealed that jessie’s husband, gerald, is a well-off lawyer like tom whose smile “reminded her of her father’s smile” ( ). similar to how jessie married a man with traits comparable to her father’s traits, jessie’s ‘choice’ to kick gerald in the stomach and provoke his heart attack when he attempts to rape her may also be linked to the assault that took place during the eclipse; jessie’s repressed rage from the childhood assault is released in the form of violence toward gerald. although the act of killing gerald leaves jessie physically restrained to her bed with no means of escape, it also forces her to subjectively relive, through memory, her childhood experience of being assaulted. this subjective reliving allows jessie to finally come to terms with the fact that she was victimized and manipulated by her father, which, in turn, leads to jessie achieving agency by physically liberating herself from the handcuffs restraining her to her bed and psychically freeing herself from the shackles of her childhood trauma. i am arguing that jessie’s subjective reliving of the eclipse, through memory, aids in reinstating a sense of agency in jessie—one lost during her objective experience of the eclipse as a child—by allowing her to connect not only with dolores but to reconnect and communicate with other female figures from her past including an old college roommate, her therapist, and her adolescent self. the subjective (re)connections encourage jessie to free herself physically from the handcuffs and psychically from the traumatic memory of the assault. furthermore, the relationship that king draws out between jessie’s physical and psychic liberation suggests that one must acknowledge that they have, in fact, been victimized before refusing victimhood becomes possible. after jessie accepts that she was victimized by her father, it then becomes possible for her to challenge the oppressive, patriarchal systems responsible for her victimization in the first place; this is demonstrated during her final face-to-face confrontation with raymond andrew joubert, a figure who, i will be arguing, represents patriarchy itself. in order to support my argument, i will briefly discuss another gothic archetype and its significance in king’s works: the double. in gerald’s game, there is the obvious doubling of the eclipse for jessie as she has both an objective, physical experience of the eclipse as a child and a subjective, psychic reliving of the eclipse as an adult. i will be discussing the doubling of the eclipse throughout this section. however, i first want to explore the idea of jessie’s physical double: dolores. although the double may be more complex in gerald’s game than in, say, the dark tower series ( - ) , its presence cannot be ignored as it works alongside the eclipse as metaphor to expose the problematic nature of gendering and its relationship to trauma. the double will provide the foundation necessary for analyzing jessie’s objective and subjective experiences of trauma in gerald’s game and how they relate to her eventual reclamation of identity and agency. though i do not have the space in this thesis to provide an in-depth history of the gothic double, i will provide the basic definitions from which i am working so i can examine king’s use of the archetype in gerald’s game. fred botting discusses the double as representing “gothic dynamics of internalisation and externalisation” ( ). in double trouble: the doppelgänger from romanticism to postmodernism, eran dorfman suggests that: …the double [is] used to represent an undesired element or trait of the protagonist, such as immorality, greed, or sexual desire. this element is projected outside onto an external figure, which is identical or attached to the protagonist (mirror image, shadow, etc.). but this figure, the double, gradually takes over and finally destroys the protagonist through a last moment introjection, in which the undesired element returns to the latter at the moment of death. ( ) one of the central characters in the dark tower series is susannah dean, a woman with a split personality: one good and the other evil. from the above definitions, it is clear that the double is heavily invested in the internal and external. it is also clear that the double has negative connotations attached to it as demonstrated by dorfman’s repeated use of the phrase undesired element. however, what is considered an undesired element in some cases may not be undesirable in other cases. social norms establish desirability and its other, and these norms of desirability also attach to gendered norms. for instance, it may not be desirable for a woman to retaliate against her abuser, speak openly about experiences with her abuser, or refuse to remain a victim, especially if her abuser is seeking to maintain power, which is the case between jessie and her father in gerald’s game as we shall see. the relationship that king draws out between jessie and dolores leads me to believe that dolores is, to a certain extent, jessie’s double, and the undesired element internalized and repressed by jessie and simultaneously externalized and expressed by dolores is fear. the fear that links jessie and dolores aids in revealing a fundamental flaw within society as represented in the novel that mirrors a social reality for women: it is considered innately wrong, unwarranted, or even dangerous for a woman to expose their abuser. out of fear, a woman may choose to remain silent rather than reveal an instance of sexual or physical abuse. it is this fear that drives jessie to repress tom’s assault rather than expose his sexual wrongdoing. jessie is only a child when the eclipse occurs and, consequently, she responds to the assault as a child might be expected: she is confused and repulsed by her father’s actions, but “[tries] to smile” through the incident ( ). tom does not only sexually assault jessie, but also emotionally manipulates her afterward by saying that, if he tells her mother about the incident, he’s “sure—well, fairly sure—that [jessie]” will not be held responsible ( ). the use of italics on fairly suggests that tom is trying to manipulate jessie into believing that she will, in fact, be held responsible for the assault as he is only fairly sure. jessie’s fear of being exposed and potentially blamed for the assault causes her silence, which enforces the gendered power imbalance between jessie and her father. dolores, who is an adult during the eclipse, uses the eclipse as an opportunity to murder joe and escape her abusive circumstances. dolores’ actions are also fueled by fear: the fear that joe will continue to assault selena if she does not act. similar to jessie’s non-response to tom’s abuse, dolores’ violent actions have consequences; they create a strained relationship between herself and selena while also making dolores a social outcast on little tall island. thus, the use of the gothic double reveals that, whether a woman internalizes or acts upon her fear, there are always consequences. this social flaw might easily be mapped out onto north american society. in fact, i have already done so using the cases of betty hundley, margaret ann malott, and barbara sheehan as examples. it is worth noting that king deviates slightly from dorfman’s definition of the double in gerald’s game. rather than fear, the undesired element, destroying jessie—which should be the case according to dorfman’s definition—jessie’s fears are subverted during her subjective reliving of the eclipse by several voices also occupying the psychic space created by the eclipse. while handcuffed to her bed, jessie does not only connect with dolores but with several other voices including “the voice she had over the years come to think of as goodwife burlingame” ( ), the “no-bullshit voice” belonging to ruth neary ( ), the voice of nora callighan, “assorted ufos” ( ), and “the little girl her father had called punkin” ( ). ruth, nora, and punkin (jessie’s adolescent self) represent individuals with whom jessie previously had relationships. conversely, the voices of goodwife and the ufos do not belong to any one person in particular. the diverse range of voices that jessie communicates with and the fact that some are familiar and others unfamiliar contribute to her physical escape in different ways. the first set of voices that inadvertently contributes to jessie’s escape is goodwife burlingame and the ufos. i use the word inadvertently because goodwife and the ufos do not encourage jessie’s escape. quite the opposite, actually. goodwife and the ufos typically discourage retaliation of any kind. at the beginning of the novel, goodwife even advises jessie to let gerald “shoot his squirt…just lie there and wait until he’s got it out of his system” ( ). this is both significant and problematic because, based on theresa thompson’s analysis of gerald’s game in relation to the “feminine mystique”—which might be summarized as the conservative housewife associated with s and s american popular culture due to the fact that jessie does not actually speak to dolores in the way that she speaks to the other voices, i will be focusing on jessie’s interactions with the other voices rather than with dolores here. jessie and dolores interact purely through visuals and only have a psychic knowledge of one another’s existence, whereas jessie has actual discussions with the other voices that aid in her physical escape. such as june cleaver of leave it to beaver—goodwife could represent women from an entire period of time who were expected to be homemakers, mothers, and to just wait until he’s got it out of his system ( ). the ufos are perhaps even more dangerous than goodwife as they could potentially represent anyone or anything, though they do lean toward a misogynistic, sometimes even derogatory, line of thinking. in fact, the first line that jessie hears from a ufo voice is: “what’s a woman…[a] life support system for a cunt” ( ). the ufo voice’s word choice is worth noting here because it is so blatant, unfiltered, and offensive to women. the voice also reduces women down to the biological function of reproduction, a concept which contributes to male domination and female subordination. at another point in the novel, one ufo voice indirectly blames jessie for the sexual assault because she began menstruating at a young age and “[m]aybe that was the problem. maybe [her father] smelled blood…[m]aybe it made him frantic” ( ). the ufo voice blames jessie for tom’s assault upon her because of a biological function, one connected to her sex that she has no control over. the ufo voice’s implication that jessie’s trauma resulted from a natural bodily function is indicative of how violent heteronormative gendering and the systems used to enforce the male-female binary actually are because the ufo voice is suggesting that trauma, too, is natural or normal. although goodwife and the ufos should deter jessie from escaping the handcuffs, they do not. instead, the voices appear to represent the issues jessie has since encountered following the eclipse: the assault itself, emotional manipulation, her marriage to an abuser similar to her father, and the disciplining social forces that continuously maintain gender norms that are at the root of gendered violence. it is the other set of voices, the familiar voices of ruth, nora, and jessie herself, that work with jessie to overcome the obstacles presented by goodwife and the ufos. the familiar voices of ruth, nora, and jessie’s adolescent self, punkin, provide jessie with the means of acknowledging and confronting her past sexual trauma; this, in turn, allows jessie to act upon her newly discovered strength and literally free herself from the handcuffs and reclaim agency. it is the voice of ruth neary, the feminist, the activist, the anarchist, who initiates jessie’s subjective reliving of the eclipse by refusing to let her repress the memory any longer and declaring that “the time for shutting up is over, running away is out of the question, and waking up is not an option,” at which point jessie’s “day begins to darken” and “[t]he time of the eclipse…come[s]” ( ). in regard to feminism and as evidenced by jessie’s eventual acknowledgement of her victimization and refusal to stay a victim, a voice such as ruth’s is necessary for instigating the transition from passive victim to active victim. when one becomes active in their role as victim, the issue of systemic patriarchal oppression gains visibility; this visibility opens up space for invoking social change. nora’s voice, on the other hand, is more subdued than ruth’s voice and takes on the role of mediator and therapist as jessie revisits her memories. it is nora’s voice that poses the critical question to jessie: “when you finally lost your temper yesterday afternoon—when you finally kicked out—who were you kicking at? was it gerald?” ( ). jessie does not know how to respond to this question immediately, but the question at least encourages her to consider why she is in her present circumstance. perhaps the most significant voice of all in jessie’s escape is that of punkin, as she represents both a childhood endearment as well as the victim of a parental assault. punkin’s presence reminds jessie that she was a victim of tom’s abuse and, furthermore, that she must recognize this fact before she can refuse to stay a victim. although jessie initially has trouble placing punkin’s voice, it is punkin who tells jessie that she needs to “[j]ust go for it before [she] lose[s] [her] courage” ( ). by giving jessie no other choice but to confront her sexual trauma and providing her with the strength to do so, the voices create the foundation necessary for jessie to physically liberate herself from the handcuffs. while jessie’s subjective reliving of the eclipse ultimately results in her physical liberation and reclamation of agency, king also includes instances in the novel where jessie attempts to confront her sexual trauma but fails; the purpose of including such failed instances of confronting trauma is to emphasize the fact that trauma cannot be dealt with on solely an objective level, but must also be acknowledged on a subjective, personal level in order to free one’s self from the emotional or psychic effects of trauma. there are suggestions that jessie refused to discuss her sexual trauma with her therapist, nora callighan, throughout the novel. yet the most apparent example of jessie’s failed attempt at confronting trauma occurs when she attends a “women’s consciousness group” as a college student ( ). jessie attends the meeting by request of ruth neary and recalls the following: there had been twenty women in the living room of the cottage attached to the neuworth interdenominational chapel…twenty women between the ages of eighteen and fortysomething. they had joined hands and shared a moment of silence at the beginning of the session. when that was over, jessie had been assaulted by ghastly stories of rape, of incest, of physical torture. if she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the calm, pretty blonde girl who had pulled up her sweater to show the old scars of cigarette burns on the undersides of her breasts. ( ) in the above instance, jessie is confronted and overwhelmed by narratives of abuse. for jessie, this method of sharing trauma—hearing the stories and witnessing physical scars—does not permit her to confront her own trauma in a productive manner as demonstrated by the words assaulted and ghastly. instead, jessie is retraumatized by this form of therapy; she will never forget the calm, pretty blonde girl with a story of incestual abuse similar to her own. jessie’s resistance to participate is solidified when she “sprint[s] from the room” before it is her turn to speak ( ). at this point in the novel, when jessie is experimenting with personal and group therapy, she has not yet confronted or accepted her sexual trauma on a personal level and, consequently, cannot bear to be reminded of it, either. it is not until jessie is physically handcuffed to her bed with no means of escaping her memories that she finally confronts and acknowledges her past sexual trauma. significantly, jessie’s circumstance—being chained to her bed and forced to relive, through memory, tom’s assault upon her—is an instance where she must simultaneously confront trauma both objectively and subjectively: she is chained to her trauma physically and psychically. in relation to the gothic, the fact that jessie achieves physical freedom after finally confronting her trauma subjectively through her memories of the eclipse suggests that subjective and objective experiences of trauma cannot be treated separately and the boundary between the two is porous. it is this porous boundary between jessie’s objective and subjective experience of the eclipse that allows her to reclaim agency, albeit quite violently. the main argument i introduced regarding gerald’s game at the beginning of this section is that jessie’s subjective reliving of her childhood trauma reinstates a sense of agency and identity in jessie, one lost during the eclipse. however, the only way jessie is fully able to achieve agency, at least in a physical sense, is to slit her wrist and practically deglove her hand to slip out of the handcuffs. as jessie so eloquently puts it, “i’m peeling my hand…oh dear jesus, i’m peeling it like an orange” ( ). although king does include instances in the novel where jessie uses non-violent means to achieve self-liberation, namely his inclusion of the voices of ruth, nora, and punkin, he also includes this instance of extreme self-violence. this is significant because it proves the inherent violence that results from patriarchal systems and technologies: jessie does not only have to inflict violence upon gerald to escape her abusive circumstances but must resort to using violence upon herself, as well. this is not to say that the novel advocates self-harm as jessie is literally in a life or death situation; rather, jessie’s act of self-violence is motivated by her desire to escape a circumstance created by the patriarchal society in which she lives. if gerald had respected jessie’s request to be released from the handcuffs, or, perhaps, if her father had not assaulted her in the first place, it might well be the case that jessie’s act of self-violence would not be necessary for saving her life. at the same time, it is also worth noting that jessie inflicts the violence upon herself rather than tom or gerald doing so. so, to a certain extent, jessie does manage to dismantle traditional male-female power dynamics by stripping tom, gerald, and, eventually, raymond andrew joubert, of any ability to physically harm her. only jessie has the ability or agency to do so. while using violence upon one’s self is obviously not the ideal method of reclaiming agency—above all, king advocates for confronting trauma and creating the psychic space necessary for accepting and finally rewriting trauma—it does allow jessie to achieve physical agency. this brings me to my final figure of interest in gerald’s game: raymond andrew joubert or, as jessie calls him, the “space cowboy” ( ). joubert is a figure that has received little attention from scholars since the novel’s publication. theresa thompson suggests that joubert “connects so readily to jessie’s and our own conceptions of female hysteria and hallucination” that he is “an apt symbol for the ways the feminine mystique still controls the social scripts behind the legal system” ( ). i wish to take thompson’s interpretation one step further by proposing that joubert might represent patriarchy itself. i am arguing that joubert is representative of patriarchy because of his physical appearance (his grossly enlarged hands, arms, and face are caused by acromegaly), his silent encounters with jessie, and the fact that jessie mistakes joubert for her father when he first appears in the corner of her bedroom: “‘daddy, is that you?’” ( ). if joubert is interpreted as a representation of patriarchy, then jessie’s confrontations with him have much wider social implications than they initially appear. jessie is not only coming face- to-face with joubert in the courtroom, but with patriarchy on a much larger, systemic scale. aside from the fact that jessie literally refers to joubert as daddy, a patriarch, the combination of his physical appearance and methods of instilling fear into jessie through his gaze might be interpreted as patriarchy externalized. during one instance, joubert is described in the following manner: [jessie] could see his dark eyes gazing at her with fixed, idiotic attention. she could see the waxy whiteness of his narrow cheeks and high forehead, although the intruder’s actual features were blurred by the diorama of shadows which went flying across them…her first terror of him began to abate a little, but what replaced it was somehow worse: horror and an unreasoning, atavistic revulsion…it had crept in here while she slept and now merely stood in the corner…staring at her with its strangely avid black eyes…they reminded her of the sockets in a skull. ( ) the first indicator that joubert represents a nonhuman, immaterial system is that he is described as both him and it. although joubert is defined as male through the use of his, the repeated use of it or its also indicates joubert is not only human. in fact, there is an instance where joubert’s non-human nature is directly revealed: “[jessie] couldn’t stop it, because this was no dream…she had become increasingly sure that the figure standing in the corner, as silent as frankenstein’s monster before the lightning-bolts, was real” ( - ). joubert is compared to frankenstein’s monster, a man-made figure. patriarchy, too, is man-made. in the above passage, joubert also relies on his gaze to instill fear into jessie as he stares at her with strangely avid black eyes. joubert’s gaze frightens jessie to such an extent that she is willing to let him assault her in the same way tom did during the eclipse, as long as he’ll “unlock [her] and let [her] go” afterward ( ). this exchange between jessie and joubert mimics the “gendered social relations within a patriarchal culture” that perpetuate “women’s subordination” so-much-so that it becomes normal (manne ). thus, the relationship set out between jessie and joubert represents the disturbing power-imbalances often used to maintain patriarchal power. yet it is absolutely critical to note that joubert’s ghostly appearance, his narrow cheeks, high forehead, and avid black eyes, as well as his elongated limbs, are eventually attributed to a medical condition: acromegaly. according to botting, the purpose of including such visible irregularities in the gothic is to “make negative attributes visible” so they may “be seen for what they are and be condemned or destroyed” ( ). joubert’s medical condition may serve a similar purpose in gerald’s game. by concretizing this abstraction—patriarchy—in the figure of joubert, king allows us to see the disease that inhabits the system. while this interpretation might appear to demonize the disabled—or disability—it is intended to align patriarchy with a disorder that, if left untreated, can be life-threatening. when left untreated, acromegaly can lead to complications such as high blood pressure, vision loss, cancerous growths, and, finally, death. with patriarchy, these complications take the form of social and political inequality, domestic and sexual violence against women, and, as confirmed by jessie killing gerald to escape marital rape, death. perhaps king ascribes acromegaly, in particular, to joubert because the main symptom of acromegaly, the elongated limbs, forehead, and jaw, results from excess growth hormones in the body produced by an overactive pituitary gland. the fact that joubert’s physical irregularities are caused by excess growth hormones may very well be representative of the gendered technologies and systems that continue to perpetuate, and aid in the growth of, patriarchy in north american society. jessie physically confronts joubert on two separate occasions, the first of which occurs as she is escaping the cabin after she degloves her hand. before jessie escapes, she encounters joubert in gerald’s study “holding his case open, as if it expected her to admire the contents” ( ). the case contains “golden glitters and diamond flashes amid [a heap] of bones” ( ). it is worth noting that, in this particular scene, joubert is physically occupying a space belonging to gerald. i have already established that jessie associates joubert with her father when she mistakenly refers to him as daddy. here, joubert steps into the space of jessie’s second abuser, her husband, thus strengthening my argument that joubert is a representative patriarch. rather than becoming paralyzed with fear at the sight of joubert, jessie instead “grasp[s] her own rings, the ones on the third finger of her left hand” and “[throws] the rings at the open case” ( ). by throwing her wedding bands in joubert’s case, jessie is symbolically rejecting a fundamentally patriarchal system: marriage. marriage is a system that joubert, patriarchy, appears to depend upon for maintaining control as demonstrated by his reaction to jessie shedding her wedding bands: “[t]he smile on its pudgy, misshapen mouth faltered into some new expression which might have been anger or only confusion” ( ). joubert’s anger or confusion may indicate a loss of power: jessie already freed herself physically from the handcuffs but, by shedding the wedding bands associated with her dysfunctional and outrightly abusive marriage, jessie is also attaining a form of social agency. additionally, because jessie volunteers her wedding bands, she also deprives joubert of the opportunity of taking them by force. in other words, jessie is denying joubert the opportunity of violently robbing her, which, as we shall see, is an act that provides him with great pleasure. jessie’s second and final physical confrontation with joubert takes place in a courtroom after he is arrested for several cases of grave robbery, necrophilia, and murder including the murder of his own parents. it is significant that the confrontation takes place in a courtroom because, unlike jessie’s first confrontation with joubert that occurs in the seclusion of her cabin, the second confrontation occurs in a public space that (theoretically) has a sole purpose of achieving justice, equality, and retribution for victims regardless of gender. of course, there are countless exceptions to this supposed purpose of the justice system in north american society, but the fact that the final confrontation between jessie and joubert occurs in a courtroom is still worth noting because of the public visibility it achieves. when recalling the courtroom scene in a letter to ruth neary at the end of the novel, jessie refers to her final encounter with joubert in the courtroom as “the total, final eclipse” ( ) and insists that she had “to do something that would matter, that would make a difference, that would show [her] that no eclipse lasts forever” so she “leaned forward and spit into [joubert’s] face” ( ). because jessie associates joubert with her father, the action of her spitting in his face confirms her acknowledgement and refusal of victimhood. moreover, jessie is not only spitting in tom’s face but is spitting in the face of patriarchy itself. that is, if we choose to accept joubert as a physical representation of patriarchy. jessie’s personal narrative of suffering at the hands of an abusive father and husband, her battle with accepting her past sexual trauma, and her eventual psychic and physical refusal of the patriarchal systems that ensnared her during the eclipse are represented on a much larger scale on little tall island, the setting of dolores claiborne and the novel that i will be turning my attention to now. . “…and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya” : navigating social trauma in dolores claiborne while the focus in gerald’s game is jessie’s journey to acknowledging, accepting, and eventually retaliating against her childhood trauma, dolores claiborne describes the patriarchal institutions and social systems that dolores must navigate in her day-to-day life. indeed, dolores experiences trauma on a daily basis on little tall island. greg forter refers to this type of gradual, everyday trauma as “social trauma” ( ) or “traumatogenic social processes” ( ), which he defines as traumas that are “not punctual, that are more mundanely catastrophic than such spectacular instances of violence as the holocaust” such as “trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism” ( ). dolores’ experiences of social trauma are significant because, as amy canfield notes in “stephen king’s dolores claiborne and rose madder: a literary backlash against domestic violence,” little tall island is a “compelling microcosm of…larger society” ( ). therefore, the social trauma that dolores experiences extends well beyond the confines of little tall island and, perhaps, into north american society, which has been demonstrated as of late by the growth of the #metoo movement. in dolores claiborne, dolores is haunted by four specific institutions and/or systems that contribute to the formation of her social trauma: a school system that neglects her daughter’s subtle cries king, dolores claiborne for help after being sexually abused by joe; a bank that awards all financial power to joe rather than dolores purely because joe is male; legal authorities that perpetuate domestic violence by refusing to handle it as a real issue; and marriage, which, on little tall island, upholds the cyclical nature of sexual and domestic violence. although dolores attempts to escape joe’s abuse using alternate means, she is ultimately failed by her community and left with no other choice but to resort to violence; murdering joe is dolores’ final act of self-defense in a patriarchal society that has been designed to work against her. one of the first systems to fail both dolores and selena is the school system. although the school plays only a minor role in perpetuating gendered violence, it plays a role, nonetheless. the school system disappoints both dolores and selena by failing to acknowledge selena’s apparent change in demeanor and appearance after she is assaulted by joe. it is not uncommon for a young adult to change their appearance, become more reserved, or act out in response to a traumatizing event. with this in mind, dolores notes the changes in selena claiming that she had “drawn away from joe” ( ); “[h]er color was off, and her appetite, too” ( ); “she’d changed her whole style of dressin [sic], and all the changes were bad” ( ); and she “pretty much quit talkin [sic] to everybody” ( ). these changes in selena are drastic enough to elicit a response from dolores. however, when dolores goes to selena’s school to inquire about selena, she is disappointed: …i just stepped right up n [sic] asked [selena’s home-room teacher] if she knew any particular reason why selena was stayin [sic] for the late ferry this year…the home- room teacher said she didn’t know, but she guessed it was just so selena could get her homework done. well…she was getting her homework done just fine at the little desk in her room last year, so what’s changed? i might have said it if i thought that teacher had any answers for me, but it was pretty clear she didn’t…she was probably scat-gone herself the minute the last bell of the day rung. ( ) in this statement, dolores exposes a school system that pays no attention to a young woman who undergoes radical physical and emotional changes in a negative manner. instead, the school only “praise[s] selena” for good grades ( ). this interaction demonstrates that the school places emphasis upon the test results that students produce rather than their emotional well-being. as a result, selena suffers much longer than she would have if the school system paid her proper attention. obviously, the abuse selena suffers is not the fault of the school, but it is possible that the school extends her suffering by neglecting her subtle calls for help. after the school disappoints dolores and selena, dolores is then failed by an economic system— the bank—that refuses to treat her as equal-owner of a shared bank account between herself and joe. the bank is representative of only one of many “institutions that favor men over women” on little tall island (senf ). when dolores discovers that joe has been sexually assaulting selena, her initial plan is to run away with selena and her other two children using money she saved up for their college educations. by the time dolores reaches the bank, she learns that joe already drained the money from their shared account, which should technically be impossible without both dolores’ and joe’s permissions. joe gains access to the savings in their shared account by claiming he lost the associated passbooks and receiving new passbooks so he can withdraw the savings without dolores knowing. when dolores discovers this, she confronts the bank manager and asks, ‘“if it’d been the other way around…if i’d been the one who started drawin [sic] out what took eleven or twelve years to put in…wouldn’t you have called joe?”’ ( ). joe’s gendered social status allows him to take ownership over shared property with no questions asked whereas dolores’ gendered social status does not signify; this leaves her with no means of escaping her abusive circumstances or ensuring selena’s escape, either. in their introduction to women and the gothic: an edinburgh companion, avril horner and sue zlosnik note that, even now, “despite changes to legislation and social practices, women still struggle for equal status with men economically, politically, and socially, and misogyny remains deeply ingrained in almost all cultures” ( ). the case is no different for dolores. even though both she and joe opened the bank account together and, therefore, should have equal access to the account, joe still holds sole power over the account simply because he is “the man of the house” ( ). perhaps even more disturbing than the bank’s mistreatment of dolores is the role that legal authorities play in normalizing gendered violence on little tall island by failing to address domestic abuse as a real issue. dolores claiborne highlights the problematic public-private divide that regulates legal intervention on the island, particularly from the local police. because abusive behaviors are generally restricted to the home on little tall island—including joe’s murder as it occurs on private property—the violence is not considered an issue worthy of law enforcement; this neglect normalizes domestic abuse on the island. canfield describes the role that the local police play in perpetuating domestic violence in dolores claiborne, as well as in north american society in general, by noting that “[p]olice [are] less likely to halt domestic violence situations because the ‘privatization’ and near adulation of the home preclude[s] any outside involvement” and that “[t]his theme is echoed in dolores claiborne, when no one intervene[s] even though everyone [knows] of joe’s violent tendencies” ( ). it is public knowledge that joe abuses dolores. yet, because the abuse occurs in the private sphere, it is not a concern of the local police. although canfield attributes this neglect of domestic violence to “larger society’s…apathy towards domestic abuse victims” ( ), i am suggesting that the neglect is a result of little tall island’s societal construction rather than apathy: the violence is constructed as normal on little tall island and, therefore, there is no need to resolve cases of domestic violence because they are not seen as problematic in the first place. the lack of response from the local police is mimicked by island residents themselves, which further perpetuates gendered violence as an accepted social norm rather than an issue requiring attention. for instance, as a young woman, dolores accidentally bruises her arm while at work and another local resident, yvette anderson, sees the bruise and assumes that it is a result of domestic abuse: “[yvette] looked at the bruise on my arm, and when she spoke to me, her voice was just drippin [sic] with sympathy. only a woman who’s just seen something that makes her happier’n [sic] a pig in shit can drip that way. ‘ain’t men awful, dolores?’ she says” ( - ). although king writes that yvette is similar to eighteenth and nineteenth-century britain, in dolores claiborne, the private sphere describes domestic space (traditionally considered feminine) while the public sphere describes basically every space beyond the domestic (traditionally considered masculine). it appears that women on little tall island are expected to occupy the same domestic roles that marilyn francus describes in monstrous motherhood: eighteenth-century culture and ideology, which is referenced in the introduction to this thesis. sympathetic, the fact that yvette is happy to see dolores’ bruise suggests that she is anything but sympathetic. yvette is glad to see that there is another woman suffering through domestic abuse as she reveals to dolores that “‘[she’s] been through it and [she] know[s]’” ( ). when yvette witnesses another woman with marks of abuse, she is happy because it verifies that her own marriage is not dysfunctional but normal when compared to other marriages on little tall island. if domestic abuse is seen as the norm, then there is no need to take action against it; this is confirmed when, at the end of their exchange, dolores and yvette simply walk away from one another rather than actually offering sympathy to one another or reporting the abuse to the local police. based on the fact that the local police fail to respond to cases of domestic disturbance, reporting either dolores’ bruise or yvette’s direct confession of abuse would not have a significant effect on their circumstances, anyway. without the assistance of the local police or other members of the community, domestic abuse continues to dominate little tall island, which is significant whilst considering perhaps the most problematic system of all in dolores claiborne: marriage. as demonstrated through the interaction between dolores and yvette, domestic abuse is considered a normal aspect of married life or, as dolores puts it, “a man hittin [sic] his wife from time to time [is] only another part of bein [sic] married” ( ). not only is domestic abuse considered a normal aspect of married life, but there is also evidence in the novel that gendered violence is a transgenerational issue: children learn abusive behaviors from their parents and apply them to their own relationships later on in life. dolores admits that she was exposed to abuse at a young age when she witnessed her father administering what she refers to as “home correction” to her mother ( ). dolores says, “[m]y own dad used his hands on my mum from time to time, and i suppose that was where i got the idear [sic] that it was all right—just somethin [sic] to be put up with” ( ). as dolores reveals here, she accepts joe’s violent actions because she witnessed them in her own home as a child where, again, no action was taken against the abuser—neither by dolores’ mother herself nor by legal authorities. although dolores does not believe that her father abusing her mother “[is] right,” she is socialized at a young age to believe that abuse within the home and marriage is normal ( ). as a result of witnessing domestic abuse as a child and interpreting it as normal, dolores’ marriage and home are also saturated with violence thus highlighting the cyclical nature of violence. however, on more than one occasion (not including joe’s murder during the eclipse) dolores also retaliates against joe’s violence by using violence herself. this is worth noting because it suggests that dolores is interrupting the transgenerational trend of violence against women within the home. for instance, when joe “hit[s] [dolores] with [a] stovelength” ( ), her response is to “hit him with [a] cream- pitcher” ( ). another instance is when dolores confronts joe about him sexually assaulting selena. joe gets out of his chair to presumably harm selena for revealing his secret to dolores, but dolores “[takes] one hand and shove[s] him back down again” ( ). significantly, both instances occur in the home. as canfield suggests, the home is not an area of interest to local police, so dolores uses the home as a space to gradually reclaim a sense of agency for both herself and selena. the only way that dolores is able to do so is through violence. according to canfield, the violence is only used as a last resort and thus “illustrate[s] how few options women possess when…confronted [with] domestic violence” ( ). dolores’ lack of options for putting a stop to joe’s abuse becomes obvious when she resorts to killing him. dolores reaches a point after being failed by selena’s school, the bank, legal authorities, and her husband—a set of events that results in social trauma based on dolores’ violent method of retaliation— where she is left with only two choices: she can either continue to suffer within the confines of the oppressive society within which she lives, or she can take matters into her own hands to physically liberate herself and selena from joe’s abuse. dolores chooses the latter. when the rest of the island is occupied by the eclipse and the children away with family, dolores lures joe into a dried-up well in their backyard as a means of killing him. although joe does not die immediately upon falling into the well and attempts to climb out multiple times, dolores finally kills him by smashing a large rock against his skull. similar to jessie, dolores relies upon herself for liberation and rightfully insists that “it was self defense, no matter what the law might say about it; i know, because i was there and the law wasn’t. in the end i was defendin [sic] myself, and i was defendin [sic] my children” ( ). again, dolores highlights the absence of law enforcement when it comes to issues of domestic violence. the radical actions that dolores implements in order to reclaim agency are not ideal. they are, in fact, quite frightening. the purpose of having dolores partake in such violence is to emphasize how serious the issue of domestic abuse within north american society was and still is today. for that matter, betty hundley, margaret ann malott, and barbara sheehan did not kill their abusive partners because it was the easiest way out of those relationships; they killed their partners because it was necessary for their own survival. dolores’ traumatic experiences with the patriarchal institutions and social systems on little tall island might just shed some light on what hundley, malott, and sheehan experienced prior to killing their partners. like hundley, malott, and sheehan, dolores’ violent actions are not without consequence. to reclaim physical and sexual agency for herself and selena, dolores sacrifices both her physical proximity to selena, as well as her internal connection with selena. selena physically distances herself from dolores when she graduates high school and leaves little tall island behind to become “famous magazine scribe selena st. george” ( ). additionally, dolores inadvertently creates an internal disconnection from selena after the eclipse when she lies to selena claiming she did not contribute to joe’s death; this makes their relationship almost unsalvageable: that was when the coldness started to come in, though, that afternoon in the garden. and [t]hen the first crack in the wall families put between themselves n [sic] the rest of the world showed up between us. since then it’s only gotten wider n [sic] wider. she calls and writes me just as regular as clockwork, she’s good about that, but we’re apart just the same. we’re estranged. ( - ) while dolores and selena disconnect emotionally as demonstrated by the coldness and estrangement outlined in the above passage, the eclipse simultaneously opens up a space for dolores to connect with jessie—a young girl whose circumstances are comparable to those of selena. so, although dolores’ the internal connection to which i am referring is any kind of meaningful or normal mother-daughter relationship. selena disconnects herself emotionally from dolores as a result of joe’s murder as we shall see in the passage that follows. relationship with selena becomes strained, the eclipse reconnects dolores to another victim who requires support, guidance, and, ultimately, a connection to help cope with and overcome her own abusive circumstances. as i’ve discussed previously, it is this connection—this psychic space—that jessie depends upon as a means of liberating herself. king also leaves the relationship between dolores and selena open-ended at the end of the novel as a newspaper clipping claims that selena “will be making her first visit” to little tall island “in over twenty years,” which could potentially lead to a reconnection between dolores and selena, as well ( ). the final point i wish to address in dolores claiborne before turning to my conclusion is one i’ve already touched on with gerald’s game, which are the wider social implications that dolores’ actions have for women in north american society. although dolores claims that she killed joe primarily for selena’s sake, there is also evidence that dolores’ response to domestic and sexual violence corresponds to a reality that extends beyond herself and little tall island. when selena reveals to dolores that joe has been sexually assaulting her, dolores thoughtfully replies with ‘“[s]weetheart, did you think you were the first girl this ever happened to?”’ ( ). based on the fact that jessie experiences a similar type of incestual abuse in gerald’s game, the answer to dolores’ question should be obvious. it is common for instances of child sexual abuse to be swept under the rug, especially with an abusive parent like tom or joe who may threaten to do something worse if the truth were to be exposed; this idea connects to the last statement that dolores makes in the novel. dolores says, “[i]n the end, it’s the bitches of the world who abide…and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya” ( ). the dust bunnies that dolores is referring to is a reference to her late boss, vera donovan, and her seemingly arbitrary fear of the dust bunnies that haunted her house in her old age. in a more general sense, when one considers the number of patriarchal, social obstacles that dolores confronts just to escape her abusive circumstances, the dust bunnies she’s referring to could very well be the dust bunnies that are still being swept under the rug on little tall island, as well as in north american society: the institutions that continue to favor men over women for no apparent reason other than the fact that social systems were historically constructed to be sexist, the abusive spouses who rely on violence as a means of maintaining power in a shared household, and the trauma that results from daily exposure to such social violence. chapter : conclusion . using the gothic to create feminist space king does not only contribute to the gothic tradition with gerald’s game and dolores claiborne but to a feminist tradition, as well. indeed, the two traditions are interconnected. king contributes to the feminist tradition by ultimately having jessie and dolores narrate their own stories. in this regard, carol senf notes that: gerald’s game is narrated first by a third-person narrator who sees the story through the eyes of the middle-class college graduate, jessie burlingame, and ultimately by jessie herself, whereas dolores claiborne is narrated entirely by the elderly dolores claiborne in her own words and voice. thus the narrative structure becomes king’s version of femaleness, and the novels also give increasing power and articulation to those women’s voices. ( ) as senf observes, gerald’s game is eventually narrated by jessie herself; her narration takes the form of a letter to none other than ruth neary, one of the voices who aided in jessie’s escape on kashwakamak lake. in the letter, jessie finally admits to ruth what she was unable to during their college years: her father sexually abused her as a child. the fact that jessie is writing out her sexual trauma is significant because it suggests that the psychic space first established during the eclipse has become material reality for jessie. moreover, the psychic connection between jessie and ruth has become material reality as jessie attempts to reconnect and rebuild her relationship with ruth through the letter. as for dolores claiborne, senf notes that the novel is narrated entirely by dolores; she is doing so by verbally relating her traumatic experiences to a pair of local police officers and—perhaps more importantly—a stenographer who is recording the narrative. the recorded narrative will presumably be heard by residents of little tall island or extend beyond the borders of the island, as it will likely be used in court when determining the circumstances surrounding vera donovan’s death. therefore, dolores’ narrative has a much wider audience than the pair of local police officers and stenographer sitting in front of her. by reclaiming and rewriting their narratives, jessie and dolores are refusing to remain victims of the patriarchal institutions, systems, and social norms that regulate their fictional society. i am suggesting that the act of acknowledging one’s self as a victim and representing one’s self as such can actually empower the victim. for women in particular, acknowledging victimization is a form of refusing victimhood and reclaiming agency in that it exposes the abuser responsible for the victimization in the first place. the abuser in this case may be an individual, an institution or system, or a social ideology such as patriarchy. kate manne confirms my argument by claiming that “playing the victim—in the sense of accepting or even embracing one’s status as such—can sometimes be an act of protest or resistance, rather than an act of passive resignation to one’s victimization. in actively performing one’s role as victim, or trying to draw attention to it, one is not in fact passive” ( ). in this statement, manne draws a clear distinction between active and passive victim. the latter does not act on her victimization—perhaps because she does not realize that she is in fact a victim—whereas the former recognizes herself as a victim and uses such recognition as a method of retaliation. the transformation from passive to active victim is necessary for interrupting established social norms of gendered violence and misogyny. by the end of gerald’s game and dolores claiborne, jessie and dolores become active in their roles as victim as demonstrated by their refusal to stay silent regarding their experiences of sexual and social trauma. however, jessie and dolores do not simply rewrite their own traumas but create a space similar to the psychic space king creates when connecting the novels themselves. by sharing their narratives of abuse, jessie and dolores open up the space necessary for other women to acknowledge and share their own stories of patriarchal abuse and violence. in this sense, gerald’s game and dolores claiborne serve a similar purpose to that of #metoo, the goal of which is to encourage women to become active rather than passive in their roles as victim and expose their abusers. king’s novels and although i suggest that king’s works serve a similar purpose to that of #metoo, gerald’s game and dolores claiborne were published long before the #metoo movement began. in this sense, king’s works actually anticipate #metoo when it comes to challenging gendered violence, patriarchal oppression, and misogyny. #metoo ultimately work to provide the broader intelligibility necessary for confronting the gendered violence that continues to haunt north american society today. . gendered violence: illuminating the issue in my introduction, i posed a set of questions i intended to explore throughout this thesis: how is gendered violence represented in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne? what do these representations indicate and achieve from a feminist perspective? and, finally, what relevance do these representations have whilst considering how and why gendered violence continues to haunt north american society? while these questions are open to debate, of course, my reading offers some interesting conclusions. in response to the first of these questions, king utilizes the gothic in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne and reveals the violent underpinnings of north american society while also representing violence against women in a disturbingly realistic manner. the gothic element of the eclipse reveals horrors that are not always visible in material reality: the abusive circumstances that cause the acts of extreme violence, the repression of individual and social trauma and the internal suffering that often accompanies said repression, and the power that might be obtained from acknowledging and rewriting narratives of patriarchal oppression. also, the flawed gender norms revealed during the eclipse encourage the reader to draw an uncanny parallel between the society represented in the novels and north american society. jessie and dolores respond to their repeated domestic, sexual, and social abuse with violence much in the same way that hundley, malott, and sheehan responded to their abusive circumstances. the parallels that king draws between the texts and north american society, particularly regarding gendered violence, may allow the reader to recognize social issues present in her own society. as for the second question of what king’s representations of gendered violence in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne indicate and achieve from a feminist perspective, king combines—perhaps inadvertently—aspects of feminist and gothic traditions into the eclipse, which ironically sheds light upon violence against women as a real issue rather than obscuring the issue. although gerald’s game and dolores claiborne are not as overtly gothic as king’s earlier works, the eclipse reveals the violent nature of gender and its historically heteronormative construction. gender has been historically constructed to uphold a male-female binary, which, as we’ve seen, tends to result in violence against women, while also completely excluding queer individuals and the “other.” moreover, king’s raw, unfiltered writing style leaves nothing to the imagination for the reader: he lays the violence bare for the reader to see. indeed, the most terrifying part of gerald’s game is not joubert’s ghostly presence, but the father who preys on his adolescent daughter while she is wearing a “new sundress, the one that was pretty…but too tight” and a “fresh application of peppermint yum-yum lipstick” ( ). when tom sees jessie dressed in this manner on the day of the eclipse, he says, “[y]ou look very pretty today, punkin. in fact, if it doesn’t sound too yucky, you look beautiful” ( ). king’s representation of a sexualized child and a father’s inappropriate, even revolting, response to the sexualization in combination with the scene of incestual abuse that follows asks the reader to feel extraordinary discomfort or unease. last is the question of how gerald’s game and dolores claiborne are relevant whilst considering the issue of gendered violence in contemporary north american society. king’s representations of gendered violence shed light upon a system of male dominance and female subordination that still regulates much of north american society today. similar to #metoo, the novels open up space for victims of patriarchal oppression to connect with others who have had similar experiences, even if those women are only the fictional characters of jessie, dolores, and selena. similar to how jessie and dolores transform from passive to active victims by rewriting their traumas, the novels open up a feminist space revealing the power that might be attained by rewriting patriarchal-induced trauma; the process of rewriting aids in finally reclaiming agency from a patriarchal society that has been historically constructed to steal women’s agency. king’s works have the ability to reach an extensive audience due to the author’s popularity. although tony magistrale states that “[t]here is little doubt that king’s enormous popularity has damaged his reputation among academicians and literary scholars,” it is this enormous popularity that gives king such power in his writing. interestingly enough, king’s representations of women, in particular, have been consistently criticized since carrie was published. in “women, danger, and death: the perversion of the female principle in stephen king’s fiction,” gail burns and melinda kanner argue that “women occupy particularly horrible roles in king’s fiction” ( ). and, according to mary pharr in “partners in the danse: women in stephen king’s fiction,” the horrible roles to which burns and kanner may be referring are the “traditional role[s] of [women] as supportive helpmate…loving mother,” or complete madwoman ( ). although king’s repertoire of female representation over the course of his career is not without flaw, his representations of women are far from horrible and more all-encompassing than helpmate, mother, or madwoman as proven in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne. king’s representations of women in gerald’s game and dolores claiborne are frightening, real, and raw, yet they also provide an attainable and non-violent method of retaliating against the patriarchal foundations of north american society, the narratives themselves, which is a feat worth noting in and of itself. indeed, by acknowledging and rewriting their personal and social traumas, jessie and dolores 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https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/ . / . . . heiland, donna. gothic and gender: an introduction. blackwell publishing, . hillstrom, laurie collier. the #metoo movement. abc-clio, . horner, avril, and sue zlosnik. “introduction.” women and the gothic: an edinburgh companion, edited by avril horner and sue zlosnik, edinburgh university press, , pp. - . king, stephen. dolores claiborne. . pocket books, . ---. gerald’s game. . gallery books, . magistrale, tony. landscape of fear: stephen king’s american gothic. popular press, . manne, kate. down girl: the logic of misogyny. oxford university press, . pharr, mary. “partners in the danse: women in stephen king’s fiction.” the dark descent: essays defining stephen king’s horrorscape, edited by tony magistrale, greenwood press, , pp. - . senf, carol. “gerald’s game and dolores claiborne: stephen king and the evolution of an authentic female narrative voice.” imagining the worst: stephen king and the representation of women, edited by 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pp. - . zarkov, dubravka, and kathy davis. “ambiguities and dilemmas around #metoo: #forhowlong and #whereto.” european journal of women’s studies, vol. , no. , , pp. - . sagepub, doi: . / . cem_ _s _abstact .. p variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tom- ography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians l. salehi, md, mph, p. phalpher, md, d. levay, msc, c. meaney, msc, m. ossip, md, r. valani, mba, md, mmed, m. mercuri, msc, phd, william osler health system, brampton, on introduction: current data on utilization of ct imaging point to a trend of increasing overutilization of ct angiography for the diagno- sis of pulmonary embolism (ctpa) over time. multiple educational and institution-wide interventions addressing this overutilization have been proposed, implemented and evaluated, with mixed results in terms of long-term impact on physician ordering behaviour. the objective of this study is to examine the inter-physician variability in ordering rates and diagnostic yield of ctpa, under a working hypothesis that a small number of physicians are responsible for a dis- proportionately high number of ctpa ordered in the ed. methods: data was collected on all ctpa studies ordered by ed physicians at two very high volume community hospitals and an affiliated urgent care centre during the -year period between january , and december , . analysis was limited to those ed physicians who had a total of greater than ed visits over the course of the -year period. for each physician, two calculations were made: ) ct pe ordering rate (total number of ctpa ordered divided by the total number of ed visits), and ) ctpa diagnostic yield (total number of ctpa positive for pe divided by the total number ctpa ordered). additional analysis was carried out in order to iden- tify the highest orderers of ctpa and their diagnostic yield. results: a total of , ctpawere ordered by physicians for , total ed visits. preliminary results show a great deal of variation in order- ing rates, ranging from . to . ctpa per ed visit (median = . , iqr = . ). similarly, there was high variation in ct pe yield, ranging from % to % (median = . %, iqr = . %). those phy- sicians in the top quartile for ordering rate had a lower mean diagnos- tic yield, when compared to the lower quartiles ( . % when compared to . %, . % and . % for the physicians in the third, second, and first quartile respectively). conclusion: the findings of this study indicate a wide degree of variability in ctpa ordering patterns and diagnostic yield among physicians working within the same clin- ical environment. there is some suggestion that those physicians who order disproportionately higher numbers of ctpas have lower diag- nostic yields. however, the more interesting lessons from this initial study center on the challenges in creating an audit-and-feedback pro- gram targeting ctpa ‘overutilizers’. keywords: computed tomography, health services utilization, pul- monary embolism p geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information sys- tem analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. galway, bsc, mph, phd, a. drumm, ba, t. leach, np, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, univer- sity of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: emergency departments are a common point of access for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (sgbv), but very little is known about where survivors live and the character- istics of the neighbourhoods. the objective of this study was to use hospital-based data to characterize sexual and domestic assault cases and identify geographic distribution across the ottawa-gatineau area. methods: data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year.data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year. results: in , there were patients seen at the sapacp, had valid postal codes from ottawa-gatineau and were included in the analyses. over % of patients were female and ( . %) were below years of age. eight hot-spots were identified including in the downtown entertainment district, lower income areas, high income neighbourhood, and suburb more than km from downtown. conclusion: this study is of the first to use hospital- based data to examine the geographic distribution of sgbv cases, with key findings including the identification of high-income neigh- bourhoods and suburbs as sgbv hot-spots. alongside efforts like the #metoo movement, this evidence challenges stereotypes of assault survivors and highlights the breadth and widespread nature of sgbv. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual assault p outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon o. scheirer, md, a. leach, md, s. netherton, md, phd, p. mondal, phd, t. hillier, ma, p. davis, md, msc, university of saskatchewan, saskatoon, sk introduction: one in nine ( . %) people in saskatchewan identifies as first nations. in canada, first nations people experience a higher burden of cardiovascular disease when compared to the general popu- lation, but it is unknown whether they have different outcomes in out of hospital cardiac arrest (ohca). methods: we reviewed pre- hospital and inpatient records of patients sustaining an ohca between january st, and december st, . the population consisted of patients aged years or older with ohca of presumed cardiac origin occurring in the catchment area of saskatoon’s ems service. variables of interest included, age, gender, first nations sta- tus (as identified by treaty number), ems response times, bystander cpr, and shockable rhythm. outcomes of interest included return of spontaneous circulation (rosc), survival to hospital admission, and survival to hospital discharge. results: in all, patients sus- tained ohca, of which were identified as first nations. first nations patients with ohca tended to be significantly younger (mean age years vs. years, p < . ) and had shorter ems response times (median times . minutes vs. . minutes, p = . ). there were no differences between first nations and non-first nations patients in terms of incidence of shockable rhythms ( % vs. %, p = . ), rosc ( % vs. %, p = . ), survival to admis- sion ( % vs %, p = . ), and survival to hospital discharge ( % vs. %, p = . ). conclusion: in saskatoon, first nations patients cjem • jcmu ; suppl s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	introduction of an ecpr protocol to paramedics in atlantic canada; a pilot knowledge translation project 	in situ simulation: a team sport? 	variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tomography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians 	geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information system analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence 	outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon why ‘normal’ feels so bad: violence and vaginal examinations during labour – a (feminist) phenomenology article why ‘normal’ feels so bad: violence and vaginal examinations during labour – a (feminist) phenomenology sara cohen shabot university of haifa, israel abstract in this article, i argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. i address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inher- ent difficulty of recognising violence that happens in an ‘essentially benevolent’ setting such as the medical one, but also, and mainly, due to the pervasive sexual reification of women under patriarchy and the pervasive shame to which women are subjected. my argument is that the practice of vaginal examinations is indeed experienced – bodily apprehended – as violent by many women, but that full epistemic recognition of this violence is frequently obstructed because the experience perfectly coincides with the normal phenomenological situation of women within patriarchy and thus cannot really be framed as violent. a phenomenological analysis presenting the embodied experience of women under patriarchy as always already essentially tied to sexual availability and commodification, and to shame, will explain this epistemological impairment. a phe- nomenological take on judith butler’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘apprehen- sion’ informs my analysis: i deploy it to provide a richer, more nuanced response to the question of why vaginal examinations are not fully recognised and expressed as violent – even when they are, frequently, apprehended as such. furthermore, butler’s ideas about the epistemic ‘framings’ through which we make sense of different kinds of lives (griev- able versus ungrievable) will help me to explain how the patriarchal sexual reification of corresponding author: sara cohen shabot, the women’s and gender studies graduate program, university of haifa, haifa , israel. email: scohensh@univ.haifa.ac.il feminist theory ( ) – ! the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/fty https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:scohensh@univ.haifa.ac.il http://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions http://dx.doi.org/ . / journals.sagepub.com/home/fty http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - women in fact already frames sexual violence as not-violence – which ultimately also prevents labouring women (and obstetrics staff) from recognising vaginal examinations during labour as violence. keywords butler, childbirth, embodiment, epistemology, labour, obstetric violence, phenomenol- ogy, sexual violence, shame, vaginal examinations the feminist theorisation of violence has worked to reveal the integral and essen- tial masculine elements that structure and form violence as we understand it (butler, , ; schott, ; butler, , ; karhu, ), making it clear that many forms of gender violence are misrecognised or remain unseeable, since they do not correspond to mainstream concepts of violence (bergoffen, ; karhu, ). feminist theory has done much to broaden the spectrum of what is considered violence and to illuminate how state violence is normalised or made invisible (lokaneeta, ), but much more needs to be done. in this article, i deal with one particular kind of violence that still has not been fully acknowledged or adequately articulated, whether by medical authorities or by birthing subjects themselves: obstetric violence. obstetric violence has been defined as physical and psychological violence per- formed by medical staff against women giving birth (sadler, ; cohen shabot and korem, ). researchers have recognised this violence as structural (bohren et al., ; miller and lalonde, ) and as causing serious short- and long-term damage to many women; it is sometimes related to postpartum posttraumatic stress disorder (pptsd) (beck, ; thomson and downe, ; elmir et al., ; harris and ayers, ; simpson and catling, ). it has been recognised as gender violence, not simply medical violence (cohen shabot, ; sadler et al., ; cohen shabot and korem, ), and as being experienced very dif- ferently by white, euro-american, middle-class women (like myself) than it is by marginalised, poor or minority populations, a difference defined as ‘too much too soon’ versus ‘too little too late’ (miller et al., ). ‘too much too soon’ refers to medicalisation and the overuse of technology in labour, which has been shown to diminish labouring women’s self-image and sense of control and agency (wolf, ; behruzi et al., ; smeenk and ten have, ). ‘too little too late’ refers to a lack of technology and basic medical attention. racism itself is also now recognised as meaningfully affecting how obstetric violence is performed and the gravity of its harm. davis ( ) explores racism in medicalised childbirth in detail, providing us with the useful concept of ‘obstetric racism’ — the structural racism feminist theory ( ) present at the core of medicalised childbirth that produces differential reproductive outcomes — a concept that helps to reconceive obstetric violence in the light of medical racism, showing that neither ‘obstetric violence’ nor ‘medical racism’ alone can explain the differences in harm done to non-white women in childbirth regard- less of their socioeconomic status. the present investigation does not aim to explore differences in how obstetric violence affects various populations. the epistemic problematic explored here concerns the capacity to identify a particular kind of obstetric practice as violent. however, this analysis will show that class and race differences influence these epistemic capacities, as obstetric systems reproduce racist and classist discrimination. the case of vaginal examinations one constitutive feature of my own experience of obstetric violence was my con- stant subjection to vaginal examinations during labour. but i did not understand that then, nor even much later. the fact that doctors, residents and midwives frequently inserted their hands into my vagina without asking my permission, claiming that they needed to in order to understand why my dilation remained stuck for hours at eight centimetres, seemed to me just another painful ‘fact of nature’ – not something i imagined questioning or refusing. as with many elements of obstetric violence, vaginal examinations during child- birth are mostly unquestioned, seen as a ‘natural’, ‘normal’ part of ‘labour man- agement’. some labouring women experience vaginal examinations as intrusive and violent at the time (some, in fact, refuse them), but many more – like myself – experience them as just another part of the unquestionable blur of childbirth’s ‘typical’ discomfort, pain and shame. i argue that many women lack the epistemic resources to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent, unnecessary and potentially declinable. throughout this article, this lack of recognition of and epistemic resources for understanding vaginal examinations as obstetric violence will be noted as being the experience of many, but not all, women. i will not claim that no women are equipped for such a recognition; some women do experience these interventions as violent at the time, even resisting or refusing them – this is how we know that these interventions are, in some important sense, actually violent. but this article addresses the reasons for the apparent under-reporting and under- recognition, both by birthing women and by the medical community, of vaginal examinations in childbirth as violent interventions. vaginal examinations during labour as currently performed in most medical settings are indeed experienced as violent in some important sense and have been described as sexual or obstetric violence in a number of cases: many reports of ‘birth rape’ emphasise descriptions of vaginal examinations or other vaginal procedures (such as episiotomies). in her graphic narrative of ‘birth rape’, for example, s. richland writes: ‘i was drugged and knocked unconscious. i was sexually assaulted: my vagina was cut and a cohen shabot man’s tool (forceps) was inserted into my body’ ( : ). another example is the now-infamous ‘kelly’s story’, a terrifying case of ‘birth rape’ caught on camera in its entirety (hayes-klein, ).this is why i am interested precisely in the massive silence and the inability to epistemically grasp the violence present in vaginal examinations, on the part both of very many women and, generally, of medical staff. the issue is not consent, because this analysis, addressing epistemic hin- drance and impeded recognition, precedes the question of consent: the analysis undertaken here is necessary as a foundation, upon which any later analyses involving consent – our actual agency (or lack thereof) in granting or refusing to others our permission for them to act upon us – must then build. the specific case of the unrecognised violence of vaginal examinations in child- birth constitutes part of the general problem that obstetric violence is frequently not fully recognised as such by women ourselves. but vaginal examinations are more clearly related to childbirth’s sexual dimension and the sexual self in general. a new discussion of the practice, deploying the frames used to address sexual violence, besides those addressing the difficulty of considering medical, benevolent scenarios as capable of displaying violence, is most needed; that is what i under- take here. because it involves vaginal penetration, with all its surrounding sexual mean- ings, the violence in vaginal examinations is much more clearly related to sexuality than are other violent practices in labour, such as, for instance, the kristeller manoeuvre; forcing labouring women to lie down on their backs or physically restraining them; verbal threats; or the denial of anaesthesia or other medical help as retaliation when labouring women refuse to follow the medical staff’s orders (as described in silva et al., and bohren et al., ). this close rela- tionship with sexuality is precisely why, i argue, the violence embedded in the performance of vaginal examinations during labour is so much more ‘invisible’ and ‘hard to grasp’ – to conceptually grasp as violence. the difficulty lies not only in looking at systems (like the medical one) that are seen as essentially benevolent and reframing them as being capable of perpetrating violence, but also in simply framing sexual violence as violence in the first place. even if we imagine a context in which a kristeller manoeuvre is finally recognised as a clearly violent obstetric practice, vaginal examinations might nevertheless continue not to be recognised as such. that will not change as long as sexual violence is not ‘framed’; as long as it goes unrecognised as violence; and as long as women’s sexual availability and the existence of our bodies as shameful objects continue to be just a normal part of our being-in-the-world. because vaginal exams are a case more of sexual violence than simply of violent medical intervention, they remain much harder to recognise as violence. there is an important distinction to be made between different kinds of obstetric violence. while obstetric violence is gender violence, gender violence may take different forms, some involving physical control of women and verbal and physical disciplinary practices but less directly related to sexuality, and others, such as the violence in vaginal examinations, more clearly related to sexual violence. this distinction will be critical as we examine the epistemic mechanisms that feminist theory ( ) prevent both labouring women and obstetrics staff from seeing the violence in obstetric violence. both sexual and obstetric violence have been normalised under oppressive patri- archal systems and frequently made unrecognisable, unseeable. in order for some- one to fully recognise this as violence, it must first of all be named and reclaimed as such. my argument begins from a lack – a silence. many labouring women never consider that they could question or refuse vaginal examinations. the practice is so normalised that it is not really seen as an intervention and hardly protested against. this analysis is difficult to make because the argument relies precisely on silence, resulting from the lack of the epistemic resources women would need to fully recognise the practice’s violence. but then how do we know that this constitutes a violent practice? many women do indeed bodily apprehend vaginal examinations as violent, but full epistemic recognition of this violence is obstructed, partly because the experience perfectly coincides with women’s phenomenological situa- tion within patriarchy and thus cannot really be framed as violent. we must first examine this situation that renders sexual and obstetric violence invisible, nour- ishing the epistemic silence. a phenomenological analysis of women’s embodied experience under patriarchy as always already essentially tied to sexual availability and commodification, and to shame, is crucial for explaining this epistemological impairment. i use a phenomenological take on judith butler’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘apprehension’ to provide a more nuanced response to why vag- inal examinations are not fully recognised and expressed as violent – even when they are, frequently, apprehended as such. furthermore, butler’s ideas about the epistemic framings through which we make sense of different kinds of lives, as grievable versus ungrievable, help explain how the patriarchal sexual reification of women frames sexual violence as not-violence, ultimately preventing labouring women and obstetrics staff from recognising vaginal examinations during labour as violence (butler, ). first, i present some existing investigations into the experience of vaginal examinations in labour, together with recent questions concerning their real bene- fits and how they might be considered part of a specific, medicalised understanding of childbirth and perhaps as ‘a symptom of a cervical-centered birth culture’ (reed, ). these examinations, frequently experienced by labouring women as painful, uncomfortable and embarrassing, could in fact be greatly curtailed, even replaced. i then reflect on the lack of denunciations of this practice as violent, showing the silence to result not from labouring women’s failure to apprehend the practice’s violence but from the epistemic deficiency deriving from women’s situ- ation under patriarchy and their phenomenological experiences within the context of sexual reification and shame. finally, using butler’s framing of grievable and ungrievable lives, i offer a possible explanation for why both obstetrics staff and many labouring women are epistemically impeded from recognising this practice – and, probably, obstetric violence more broadly – as violence. i end with reflections on a paradox that arises in the course of this investigation: the realisation of the reverse connection between privilege and the epistemic ability to recognise cohen shabot obstetric violence, in that those who suffer most bluntly from obstetric violence sometimes appear to be best equipped for identifying it as such. vaginal examinations during labour: desperately seeking women’s experience vaginal examinations in labour are mainly used to measure cervical dilation, in an attempt to assess the progress of labour. several studies have pondered the prac- tice’s benefits and risks, the frequency with which it should be used and how best to teach it to new midwives or obstetricians without unnecessarily harming women (enkin et al., ; letic, ; who, ; jha et al., ; hassan et al., ; roosevelt et al., ). these studies have generally found that the practice is used much more frequently than medical evidence would recommend (stewart, ; shepherd and cheyne, ). discussions are currently taking place about how to perform the examinations in a way that is as respectful to and comfortable for labouring women as possible, and studies are being developed on how to signifi- cantly reduce their use, even replacing them with less invasive practices (stewart, ; hassan et al., ; shepherd and cheyne, ). it is important to recognise that vaginal examinations are not an indispensable part of labour: we can give birth without undergoing vaginal examinations at all. labouring women should know that even for measuring progress in labour, vag- inal exams are not the only, perhaps not even the most informative, option. reed ( ) describes the practice as embedded in a ‘cervical-centered birth culture’ that understands the labouring body as a predictable machine (see also martin, ) and that makes a direct, unquestioning connection between cervical dilation and labour progress. referring to downe et al. ( ) and ferrazzi et al. ( ), reed reminds us that cervical dilation is not easily predictable or linear and that the evidence does not support routine vaginal examinations during labour. vaginal examinations, she notes, belong to a specific, entrenched labour culture and are as hard to get rid of as many other practices belonging to the medicalised perspective on childbirth. reed also discusses the disadvantages of vaginal examinations, arguing that they might be ‘inaccurate and misleading’: again, unnecessary, and more about controlling the labour process than providing valuable information. vaginal exams may also increase infection and/or result in rupture of the amniotic sac. but the most significant downside of the practice is probably the way that many women experience it: as a painful, invasive practice that may cause severe embarrassment, sometimes even ptsd (dahlen et al., , in reed, ). yet we know little about women’s experiences undergoing vaginal examinations. the search for stud- ies reporting such experiences unearths a considerable silence; very few such stud- ies have been carried out (broadmore et al., ; bradby, ; ying lai and levy, ; lewin et al., ; ortega-loubon et al., ; swahnberg et al., ; hassan et al., ; bonilla-escobar et al., ), and while this scarcity has been feminist theory ( ) noticed (reed, ; bonilla-escobar et al., ), it has hardly been explained or theoretically tackled. this scarcity might be explained in part by a common reluc- tance on the part of clinicians to use patients’ experiences as a central data point when evaluating the need to perform a given practice. cook and brunton argue that ‘clinicians’ training requires them largely to discount patients’ narratives in pursuit of the primary goal of a biological diagnosis’ ( : , referring to good, ). the paucity of studies is not, however, the main problem. in the present envi- ronment, even further studies might not reveal women’s voices recounting their authentic experiences, their true apprehension of the vaginal examination. the experiences of labouring women in general – and concerning vaginal examinations in particular – are strongly linked to women’s everyday experience in patriarchal society of deep sexual objectification and reification. our bodies are experienced not as truly our own; as vehicles of our selves, but as alienated from our subjec- tivities. this experience of the body as fragmented, as not ‘in concert’ with the self, is also tainted with profound shame (young, ; bartky, ). and this ‘normal’ phenomenological experience of women under patriarchy precludes women from truly recognising the actual invasive, even violent character of the practice of vaginal examinations, at least as currently performed in most medical scenarios – even though they may in fact apprehend the violence. ‘the water we swim in’: the pervasiveness (and invisibility) of sexual violence cohen shabot and landry comment on the unique offerings of feminist phenom- enology for observing and dealing with supposedly normal experience, which it presents as always already sexed and gendered. they analyse the #metoo move- ment, showing how feminist phenomenology’s insights into the ‘normal’ situation of women in patriarchy, embedded in sexual reification, shame and sexual violence, apply from the publication of beauvoir’s the second sex through to today – this is ‘the water we swim in’: ‘that sexual objectification is just part of the humdrum of women’s everyday lives reveals much about how women experience being-in-the- world’ (cohen shabot and landry, : ). reflecting on some of the #metoo movement’s viral texts, cohen shabot and landry show that sexual availability, passivity and a continuous predisposition towards, or readiness for, discomfort, even pain, are the essential imprint of women’s condition – even for presumed sexually liberated millennials. they cite loofbourow’s ( ) analysis of roupenian’s ( ) ‘cat person’, elaborating on why, in roupenian’s text, ‘con- sent’ need not be the significant question at all. the #metoo movement’s greatest contribution to the discussion on sexual violence is probably this: showing that before there can be debate over consent, there has to be a discussion of the per- vasive normality and thus invisibility of sexual violence. it has become women’s nature to be subjugated to men’s desires and remain epistemically obstructed from cohen shabot seeing our own. women have learnt not to see our own pain while becoming men’s objects of pleasure. in loofbourow’s words: women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. they’ve gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of ‘bad sex’. they’ve worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously . . . i wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies’ pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. it would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman’s pain abnor- mal; better still if we understood a woman’s discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man’s pleasure short. but those aren’t actually the lessons society teaches – no, not even to ‘entitled’ millennials ( , cited in cohen shabot and landry, : ). loofbourow’s reflection can be directly imported into the discussion of obstetric violence, and vaginal examinations in childbirth in particular: discomfort, even pain, is simply women’s normal experience of their being-in-the-world. black women’s experience in this regard, as we know, differs: their pain is not even considered normal but is simply non-existent. the racist idea that black women are less civilised, more animal-like (hooks, ) and thus less likely to suffer pain – that their bodies are more resistant than white women’s bodies (davis, ) – makes black women even more prone to being quotidian victims of pain. shame women have also experienced their bodies under patriarchy as inherently shame- ful. this omnipresent shame has allowed structural mechanisms of violence and domination to obtain a strong grip on women and their bodies. bartky ( ) argues that people from oppressed groups might experience a pervasive shame connected not with their own deeds but with their entire existence as objects for the other. this shame is paralysing and unproductive, a direct consequence of inhabiting the world under a disciplinary gaze that requires bodies to persistently experience themselves as scrutinised objects (bartky, : ). bartky’s lucid anal- ysis of pervasive shame and of women existing as permanent victims of shame belongs to a rich tradition of feminist phenomenological scholarship on female embodiment conceived under patriarchy as a shameful, defective body in constant need of being tamed and rescued from itself (described in young, ; rich, ; beauvoir, [ ] ; bartky, ; hooks, ; dolezal, ; cohen shabot, , in the context of black women’s bodies; and lyerly, , in the context of childbirth). dolezal, for instance, writes: women’s bodies . . . are continuously positioned as inadequate or inferior when com- pared to these elusive body ideals; shame, and body shame in particular, becomes a feminist theory ( ) permanent possibility . . . women are already attuned to the feelings and contours of body shame; they expect their bodies to betray them and to deviate from the diffuse and invisible cultural standards of what a body ‘ought’ to be. failing to achieve the ideal body signals a deeper failed mastery of the body and corporeal control. this attunement to shame is so pervasive and indeterminate that it is often beyond the reach of reflective consciousness ( : – ). home midwife and birth activist jacqueline vejlstrup ( ) writes about the normalisation of obstetric interventions in childbirth and the cultural construction of the female body as defective: ‘as long as the “dangerous, sickly, female body” appears scarier to us than the vast number of serious injuries caused by labour interventions, patriarchy’s medicalized imprisonment will falsely appear safer to childbearing women’. this suggests a correlation between patriarchal conceptions, often shared by women themselves, of inherently sick, weak, polluted women’s bodies, and the assumption that medical interventions in childbirth – even violent, even non-consensual ones – are necessary and unavoidable. thus, the epistemic obstacle to full recognition of the violence inherent in vaginal examinations in childbirth might also involve the essential shamefulness of women, women’s bodies being ‘dirty’ bodies, existentially prone to continual shame. indeed, shame has been thoroughly investigated and pinpointed as one important mecha- nism for perpetuating obstetric violence by making it invisible: the ‘gendered shame’ permeating women’s existence allows for the hyper-medicalisation and unquestioned control of women’s ‘dirty’, ‘shameful’ bodies by medical staff. obstetric violence is perpetuated because both labouring women and their doctors frequently see it not as violence at all but as the only way to ‘save’ women’s overly sexual, polluted, shameful, untamed bodies from themselves (cohen shabot and korem, ). vaginal examinations might be the epitome of this taming of the polluted: the medical domestication of an inherently contaminated body that might otherwise go astray. one investigation considers how vaginal examinations are ‘sanitised’ by midwives who unnecessarily clean vaginas with various hygienic substances before or during vaginal examinations and use euphemisms when talking to women about their vaginas and these procedures. in ‘“i’m just going to wash you down”’, stewart ( ) argues that vaginal examinations during labour are a significant cause of embarrassment not only for birthing women but for the staff, who recognise this frequent, unquestioned part of the labour process as being very awkwardly intimate. paradoxically, in attempting to address the embarrassment by ‘desexualising’ the practice, they actually sexualise it in a shameful and objectifying way: not naming the vagina, hiding it behind euphemisms, disconnecting it from a woman’s embodied self (thus fragmenting her body) or even unnecessarily and literally sanitising the examination, as if the vagina were truly polluted. on such cleansing procedures – for which medical evidence provides no basis – as more than simply a way for midwives to counter cohen shabot embarrassment, stewart comments: the wash-down procedure described by midwives can be seen as a ritual to deal with their own discomfort about performing such an intimate examination. however, the fact that there was a wide range of practices suggests that the procedure is more than a means of dealing with embarrassment. midwife f clearly perceived the woman’s genitals to be dirty and in need of cleaning. the highly ritualized washing procedure she described and her use of a sterile pack mark the procedure as a professional event, and avoid any suggestions of a sexual encounter . . . however, such a performative wash-down can also be interpreted as an overt display of professional power and part of a disciplinary regime which aims to contain women’s ‘leaky’ bodies within a stable and controllable framework ( : ). in what follows, i use butler’s framing of grievable and ungrievable lives (butler, ) to elucidate how this phenomenological normalcy of women existing as shameful sexual objects for themselves and for others – resulting in an episte- mological blindness, again, in women themselves as well as in others – is produced and nourished by power, a political framing that marks lives as either liveable or non-liveable and thus distinguishes between what may and may not be legitimately recognised and named as violence. butler on (politically) framing violence in frames of war: when is life grievable? butler argues that in the context of war, certain losses are not mourned because they are never really considered lives to begin with: in targeting populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved from those whose lives are dispensable . . . ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. to destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth . . . thus, there are ‘subjects’ who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are ‘lives’ that are not quite – or, indeed, are never – recognized as lives ( : locations – ; – ; – ). taylor ( ) uses butler’s framing to show how sexual violence against women is not truly recognised as violence, neither by the perpetrators nor, all too frequently, by the victims. she argues that because women’s bodies are constructed in patriarchy as ambivalent – presumed to be both inviting sex (essentially available for others’ sexual pleasure) and vulnerable, in need of feminist theory ( ) constant surveillance – sexual violence against women is framed not as violence but as an expected, legitimate response to women’s ‘nature’, at least when the victim does not submit to strict gender regulations and rules of bodily scrutiny. taylor writes: with respect to sexual violence against women, the normative distinction at stake is not so much whether sexual violence is morally acceptable or reprehensible, but rather whether sexual violence is or is not properly violence at all . . . if simply being embod- ied as a woman is ‘to ask for it’, then any degree of male sexual attention directed at women cannot by definition be unwanted and, hence, a violation. this in turn calls into question whether such attention can be the sort of forcible and injurious action that constitutes violence ( : ). mardorossian ( ) provides another useful account of sexual violence, argu- ing that rape is only an extreme case, a particular form of – not qualitatively different from – violence within patriarchy. all violence, she contends, is sexual, that is, gender-coded. the victim of violence (not necessarily or always a woman) is feminised, while the perpetrator occupies the masculine position. this economy of violence is so entrenched in patriarchy that – again – it becomes normalised and in many ways invisible. the invisibility is enhanced, however, within western societies where there is an illusion that the law regulates violence, seen mainly as violence between individuals – not between the state or institutions and the individual. mardorossian ( : – ) cites how rape is contested, resisted and protested against in india, while in the united states the same phenomenon, of the same magnitude, is not protested as a phenomenon of social importance but is seen as isolated, unfortunate cases of violence between individuals. it is not only sexual violence that is not framed, politically, as violence: it is important to note that medical violence – and specifically obstetric violence – is also difficult to frame, at least prima facie, as violence. this has to do, largely, with how violence is frequently conceptualised: as requiring intention, and as oxymoronic in spaces perceived as essentially benevolent or involving practices understood to be in the individual’s best interest. human childbirth is not a natural act; it is culturally constructed, and part of its medicalised construction is that it is a highly risky event in which women need rescuing by medical authorities (katz rothman, ; chadwick and foster, ; katz rothman, ). therefore, defining what medical authorities do in childbirth as violence can seem puzzling, at the least. butler reminds us, however, that lives framed as ‘ungrievable’, as ‘non-lives’, by particular operations of power ( : location ) are not really experi- enced as dispensable or valueless by those who live them. this remains true even when the attempt to recognise and formulate them as lives, or at least as lives that might be mourned when they are lost, is epistemically (or even onto- logically) challenged. butler formulates a distinction between ‘apprehension’ and cohen shabot ‘recognition’, apprehension being a much more elusive, less conceptual, more experiential – and, i would say, ‘embodied’ – way of knowing than full recognition: ‘recognition’ is the stronger term, one that has been derived from hegelian texts and subject to revisions and criticisms for many years. ‘apprehension’ is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition. if it is a form of knowing, it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are not always – or not yet – conceptual forms of knowledge. what we are able to apprehend is surely facilitated by norms of recognition, but it would be a mistake to say that we are utterly limited by existing norms of recognition when we apprehend a life ( : locations – ; emphasis mine). when we bring butler’s explanation of the invisibility of sexual violence and taylor’s take on butler’s explanation into the discussion of obstetric violence, the question that arises is how women can epistemically frame this familiar, routine reality of violent obstetric practices as violence. how can women perceive obstetric violence as actual violence, rather than as a normal part of the ‘essentially benev- olent’ medicalised and medically managed childbirth process? butler’s distinction between apprehension and recognition is helpful here. even when particular, polit- ically loaded frames forbid us from fully conceptualising certain kinds of violence as violence, a more sensitive, perceptual knowledge is available to us as a way to know differently, to challenge and even shatter existing frames. butler does not elaborate much on what this ‘knowledge through apprehension’ is like or how it is constituted, but phenomenological insights, particularly those resulting from feminist phenomenological analyses, can clarify the meaning of this distinction. young ( ), for instance, lucidly explains how even though women’s condition is one of profound objectification within patriarchy, women are never turned into absolute objects; a seed of subjectivity is always present. this also explains women’s alienation from their own bodies: insofar as they perceive their own bodies as objects, women-as-subjects become alienated from those bodies: the objectified bodily existence accounts for the self-consciousness of the feminine relation to her body and resulting distance she takes from her body. as human, she is a transcendence and subjectivity, and cannot live herself as mere bodily object. thus, to the degree that she does live herself as mere body, she cannot be in unity with herself, but must take a distance from and exist in discontinuity with her body (young, : ). thus, women apprehend their subjectivity even under extreme oppression and reification, even without any epistemological or ontological frames for recognising or fully articulating this subjectivity. this is an embodied apprehension, through the lived body. feminist theory ( ) the facebook page ‘birth monopoly’ quotes a doula who describes witnessing ‘birth rape’ against one of her clients: the doctor walked in, put on gloves, and stuck both hands into the laboring mom’s vagina. there was no consent. he didn’t tell her he was going to do that or ask if she was okay with it. moments later, he announced, ‘oh, she is tearing already.’ i had to look away because i could not physically handle what i was seeing. my body began shaking. i felt lightheaded; i felt frozen in place. [i felt] complete helplessness and fear and anger and grief. i walked away from that feeling responsible in a way for what had happened, and knowing that this mom had just experienced something that shouldn’t have happened, that something was really wrong. and that there was this visceral response in my body to what i was seeing. i just kind of remember being back in that place and feeling like there was nothing that i could do to change what was happening to this mom in that moment. [i knew] my body was responding to something . . . even though i wasn’t the person that it was happening to, i was still having this response and i needed to do something to work through it. i knew i didn’t want to be in that position again, feeling so helpless and frozen (clark, ; emphasis mine). this description is illuminating because it presents the moment when the doula’s ‘body speaks’, even though she cannot, in that moment, articulate what is going wrong, or why, or how to respond. she can apprehend it, though: her horror is visceral. her description perfectly exemplifies the phenomenological apprehension of subjectivity notwithstanding oppression that young ( ) discusses. conclusion: vaginal examinations as (misrecognised) sexual violence – and a note on the paradox of who knows best vaginal examinations in labour might constitute a case of misrecognised sexual violence – frequently phenomenologically apprehended as violence but not episte- mically recognised as such. paradoxically, this lack of epistemic resources for fully identifying and possibly refuting the violence may be more pronounced among privileged women with access to advanced technologies and care than among marginalised, poor or mistreated women, as there is overall a strong illusion of choice and of evidence-based care and treatment in wealthy western hospitals and their maternity wards. mardorossian ( : – ), for instance, discussing vio- lence in childbirth, argues that the illusion of choice and the medical institution’s essential benevolence and nonviolence that prevailed in her own birth (and that cohen shabot prevails within medicalised childbirth in the united states) prevented her from seeing – until much later – how violent her labour actually was. birth experiences are deeply grounded in a concretely sexist, patriarchal reality and particular operations of power. this is crucial in explaining why certain populations are better suited to recognising obstetric violence: when medical attention is already recognised as threatening and untrustworthy, obstetric violence is more easily recog- nised as violence. in other words, women who suffer blunt disrespect in childbirth, poor medical care and evident verbal or physical violence during labour may be able to articulate more clearly what is wrong with medicalised childbirth, and with vaginal examinations in particular. previous childbirth experiences outside of obstetric wards and medicalised facilities – such as home births or midwife-attended labours – also provide women with a sharper perspective on what is or is not ‘normal’, often allowing them to articulate how various obstetric practices might be wrong, sexually violent or unnecessary, and even giving them the power to refuse and resist those practices. bradby ( ) gives an example of this in her study of rural bolivian women’s reac- tions to medicalised childbirth. the participants in bradby’s study, rural women who migrated to the city, perfectly articulated how vaginal examinations performed within medicalised hospital labours unnecessarily sexualised their births, filling them with shame, fear and anger. these women, who had previously experienced home births, exclusively cared for by traditional midwives, understood and expressed that the fre- quent vaginal examinations they experienced as part of medicalised labour were unnecessarily painful, dangerous, embarrassing and humiliating – and they often successfully resisted them. one woman explains: ‘i was in the maternity hospital and there were lots of medical students, and they were putting their hands up me a lot, and i said, “don’t be poking me like that. i’m a person too. do i look like a peasant woman for you to be poking me like that?”’ (bradby, : ). this paradox raises complex questions about how access to better epistemic resources does not always coincide with privilege and how marginalised popula- tions suffering from lack of proper care, mistreatment or even blunt violence might be more epistemically able to recognise this violence. this does not mean that they are somehow better off – it just says something about how epistemic mechanisms develop. this definitely requires further exploration within investigations of the recognition of violence, in particular of obstetric violence. i have discussed vaginal examinations during labour and the difficulties in fram- ing them as violence. many labouring women fail to conceptually and epistemically recognise them as violent. women may, however, apprehend them as violent, and their embodied experiences might provide them with knowledge that could eventu- ally be articulated and conceptualised, as we have seen here, for instance in the account of birth rape. the measure to which this is possible – resulting in full knowledge, but which could also lead to resistance – may also depend on the degree to which women are offered true choices, including exposure to alternatives to the medicalised model, in the form of home births or exclusively midwife-led births, as shown in bradby ( ) and discussed in mardorossian ( ). the women in bradby’s study, for instance, had been exposed to alternatives to feminist theory ( ) medicalised childbirth, which clearly affected their understanding of, and sometimes even resistance to, hospital practices. bradby concludes: ‘it is precisely because of this transitional state . . . where two cultural systems are in articulation with each other, that it is possible for women to articulate what for them becomes the extreme- ly problematic nature of sexuality in childbirth. their messages are clear and need to be taken into account in future policymaking’ ( : ). a further question involves the obstetrics staff’s ability to recognise these prac- tices as violent. it is unclear how the staff, inserted into a political and cultural frame that fails to recognise sexual or medical violence as proper violence, might fully and responsibly recognise this violence and thereby become accountable for it. until labouring women both recognise and speak up about this violence, others may not begin to recognise it. alas, the #metoo movement has shown that even when women raise their voices to denounce violence, powerful epistemic denial mechanisms nevertheless prevent the recognition of that violence on the part of perpetrators. thus, it might require much more – a radical deconstruction of patriarchal values and medical hierarchies – for labouring women to truly be heard, for this kind of violence to finally be recognised and for its eradication to be called for not only by its victims but, finally, by its perpetrators. acknowledgements i deeply thank the anonymous reviewers of this article and srila roy for their illuminating recommendations. the first version of this article was written to be presented at a seminar in oxford on vaginal examinations in childbirth and the question of consent, in february . the seminar was funded through the british academy postdoctoral fellowship programme (awarded to camilla pickles) and the oxford faculty of law’s research support fund. i want to warmly thank camilla pickles, as well as her advisor jonathan herring, for their kind invitation to participate in this seminar. i also thank the ’philosophy of birth - rethinking the origin from medical humanities’ project (philbirth) for its support and marie f. deer for her helpful comments. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article: this research was supported by the israel science foundation (grant no. / ). orcid id sara cohen shabot https://orcid.org/ - - - notes . this article deals exclusively with obstetric violence in medicalised settings. women also experience mistreatment, even trauma, in midwife-led births outside medicalised settings – as in home births (baker, ; charles, ). however, violence experienced in these contexts is not recognised as ‘obstetric violence’ in the research, and is beyond the scope of this article. cohen shabot https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - . initially, this distinction was thought to characterise the differences between affluent and low-to-middle-income countries. miller et al., however, propose that in fact the two extremes coexist globally because of social and health inequities within countries. thus, they argue, ‘a global approach to quality and equitable maternal health, support- ing the implementation of respectful, evidence-based care for all, is urgently needed’ (miller et al., : ). . the recent case of serena williams – who suffered from obstetric violence mainly in the form of testimonial injustice performed towards her by the medical staff during her childbirth – is enlightening. williams’s is a clear case of ‘obstetric racism’, since she was vulnerable to this damage in spite of her wealth and prestige. elizabeth dawes gay ( ) reports: ‘when discussing williams’s maternal-health emergency, it’s vital to address the role played by racism and racial discrimination—a requirement to sustain- ably address the united states’ growing maternal-health problem. black women are nearly four times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth than white women, and are also more likely to experience a severe maternal morbidity such as a heart attack, hemorrhage, sepsis, or blood clots like williams did, regardless of their level of education or income. in fact, data from the new york city department of health show that black college-educated women were more likely than white women who hadn’t completed high school to experience adverse maternal-health outcomes. knowledge and money aren’t enough to save black women, because racism trumps all’. . for a more detailed analysis of the phenomenon of birth rape and the feminist questions it raises, see cohen shabot ( : – , mainly footnote ). in these cases, vaginal manipulations were fully recognised as sexual violence. here, however, as noted, i deal with the absence of recognition. . the mere notion of consent is itself problematic. regarding the specific case of gynae- cological examinations, see cook and brunton; for instance: ‘the cartesian mind–body asymmetry in western medicine educates clinicians to privilege verbal consent, not to navigate contradictory ‘body talk’ whereby bodies are legitimated as conveying needs contrary to those articulated . . . ethical dangers include, for example, the ever-present possibility that consent will blur towards non-consent, with or without women voicing this shift. another danger is that women may voice their assent but the clinician reads their body language as dissent’ ( : – ). furthermore, the authors recognise the enormous difficulty of framing ‘consent’ within asymmetrical power relations like those between doctors and patients. . throughout this article, i deal with the idea that within patriarchy, women and their bodies are conceived as available for sexual exploitation and consumption and as inher- ently shameful. there are significant differences in how non-white and white women’s bodies are conceived in these contexts: both sexual availability and shame are also racially constructed. black women’s sexuality is much more often defined as promiscuous and lascivious than white women’s sexuality, and shame and denigration are provoked and interiorised according to these conceptions (hooks, ; davis, ). for the sake of my argument, however, it is enough to recognise that sexual availability and shame are essential components of patriarchal conceptions of women and are therefore importantly present in women’s embodied experience within patriarchy, albeit in different forms. . reed ( ) reminds us that even women labouring within less mainstream scenarios have internalised this measurement culture. they, too, often want the ‘number’, the ‘clear measure’, to be confident of their progress – sometimes even when they truly understand that the duration of labour after a given measurement is very unpredictable. feminist theory ( ) . ‘cat person’ describes a typical, consensual heterosexual relation, insightfully revealing implicit violence and the objectification of women as our normal. cohen shabot and landry write: ‘this is not a fictional piece on sexual harassment, on sexual assault, or on any other kind of extraordinary experience . . . to borrow from beauvoir, this is simply women’s “situation”. margot is reduced (women are reduced) to a body-object: hesitant and inhibited in her (our) intentionality. this curbing of our being-in-the-world as subjects of agency and action has the deleterious effect of causing us to forgo our own desires for the sake of those of others’ ( : ). . #metoo thus appears to be relevant mainly for describing and denouncing heteronor- mative framings of sex and sexuality; it has certainly been criticised for this reason by queer theorists. see, for instance: rodriguez-cayro ( ); small ( ); ison ( ). . these gender norms are by definition impossible to satisfy; thus, even when the victim appears not to have ‘deserved’ violence, sexual violence elicits no authentic surprise (taylor, : ). . the apprehension here of course belongs to a bystander rather than the labouring woman herself. this opens up questions – about the power of solidarity, alliances and intersubjective experience within labour and beyond – that have been developed in la chance adams and burcher ( ) and that call for further research. . it will be interesting to explore this idea under two aspects: first, as an example of feminist standpoint theory, according to which the socially disadvantaged might in fact be epistemically privileged and the most capable of spotting oppressive patriarchal structures (hartsock, ); and second, as challenging some recent scholarship on epistemic injustice, especially fricker’s ( ) notion of hermeneutical injustice, which contends that oppressed groups 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( ) deliver me from pain: anesthesia and birth in america. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. ying lai, chit and valerie levy ( ) ‘hong kong chinese women’s experience of vaginal examination in labour’. midwifery, : – . young, iris marion ( ) ‘throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality’. human studies, ( ): – . cohen shabot https://hyperallergic.com/ /conversation-with-emma-sulkowicz/ https://hyperallergic.com/ /conversation-with-emma-sulkowicz/ addressing sexual violence at ontario universities in the context of rising anti-feminist backlash all rights reserved ©, emily m. colpitts ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice addressing sexual violence at ontario universities in the context of rising anti-feminist backlash emily m. colpitts volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article colpitts, e. ( ). addressing sexual violence at ontario universities in the context of rising anti-feminist backlash. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article dans cet article, je soutiens que la réaction antiféministe dans les universités canadiennes est alimentée par les efforts de lutte contre la violence sur les campus et a un impact significatif sur ceux-ci, en particulier sur la question de savoir si et comment ces efforts mobilisent les étudiants de sexe masculin et les constructions normatives de la masculinité. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal
 issue . / special section: speaking freely and freedom of speech research addressing sexual violence at ontario universities in  the context of rising anti­feminist backlash emily  m.  colpitts  is  a  postdoctoral  fellow  at  the  centre for feminist research at york university. fo­ cusing on the context of canadian universities, her  research  addresses  the  struggle  over  the  power  to  define gendered and sexualized violence and how this  struggle informs prevention efforts and responses. abstract:  in  this  paper,  i  argue  that  anti­feminist  backlash at canadian universities  is  fuelled by, and  has a significant  impact on, anti­violence efforts on  campus and, in particular, whether and how they en­ gage with male students and normative constructions  of masculinity. keywords:  anti­feminist  backlash,  canadian  uni­ versities, men’s rights, sexual violence introduction over the past decade, sexual violence has become the  subject of heightened public attention and calls  for  action  in canada and beyond, as evidenced by  the  popularity of #metoo (bogen et al.  ) and the  response to high profile cases such as jian ghomeshi  (d. phillips  ). is momentum has been partic­ ularly  visible  at  canadian  universities  and,  in  the  context  of  ongoing  student  activism,  five  provinces  have  recently  passed  legislation  mandating  the  cre­ ation of sexual violence policies and expanded insti­ tutional response mechanisms. during the same time  period, there has been a rise in anti­feminist and so­ called  “alt­right”  backlash  that  also  has  a  growing  presence on canadian campuses. anti­feminist back­ lash exists on a spectrum and ranges from threats of  violence against feminists (hopper  ) and highly  visible examples, such as university professor jordan  peterson’s characterization of women’s studies as an  “indoctrination cult” (cbc radio  , para.  ), to  more subtle resistance in everyday academic settings  that serves to maintain existing institutional inequit­ ies. in this paper, i argue that anti­feminist backlash  is not simply part of the context in which contem­ porary anti­violence activism is unfolding in canada  but rather that it is fuelled by, and has a significant  impact on, anti­violence efforts on campus, and,  in  particular, whether and how they engage with male  students and normative constructions of masculinity.  in other words,  the  threat of backlash  shapes what  can be said and done about the gendered nature of  sexual violence perpetration at canadian universities.  conceptualizing backlash anti­feminist  backlash  is  not  a  new  phenomenon.  while misogyny and resistance to feminism are on­ going and persistent, the concept of backlash refers to  periods of acute resistance that generally correspond  atlantis journal
 issue . / to  the  perception  that  specific  feminist  efforts  are  threatening the status quo (faludi  ). in this pa­ per, i argue that contemporary anti­feminist backlash  conforms  to  this definition  to  the extent  that  it  re­ sponds,  at  least  in  part,  to  the  perceived  success  of  feminist  activism  in  raising  public  awareness  and  passing provincial  legislation on the issue of campus  sexual violence. sarah banet­weiser ( ) claims that  while anti­feminist backlash is a reactive response to  feminism,  it  is not  linear or unidirectional.  instead,  she conceptualizes this backlash as a form of popular  misogyny, which she defines as a normative social and  political  structure  that  is  networked  across  multiple  sites and  is  in a constant dynamic relationship with  feminism.  according  to  banet­weiser  ( ),  both  feminism and misogyny are continually reconfigured  through this relationship. is paper explores this re­ lationship with respect to efforts to address sexual vi­ olence on campus. while  there  are  ideological  differences  among  anti­ feminist groups, they are generally united by a sense  of aggrieved entitlement rooted in the perception that  feminist gains have eroded white male privilege (ging  ).  ese  groups  include  men’s  rights  activists  (mras), who have  taken up a variety of  issues,  in­ cluding  divorce  law,  child  custody,  men’s  mental  health, and domestic violence, and posit the suppres­ sion of feminism and revalorization of normative con­ structions of masculinity as the solution to what they  perceive  to  be  a  “crisis  of  masculinity”  (blais  and  dupuis­déri  ).  by  contrast,  involuntary  celib­ ates,  commonly  known  as  “incels,”  are  more  con­ cerned  with  violent  retribution  than  with  the  recuperation  of  traditional  masculine  norms.  al­ though incels often identify with subordinated “beta”  masculinities  and  strategically  distance  themselves  from dominant “alpha” masculinity, which they asso­ ciate with sexual  success,  they simultaneously main­ tain hierarchies of power through their violence (ging  ). rather than framing mras and incels as anomalous  “fringe” movements, they must be understood as ex­ isting on a spectrum with more subtle mainstream ex­ pressions  of  popular  misogyny  (banet­weiser  ;  dragiewicz  and  mann  ).  michael  messner  ( ,  ) points to the emergence of a more insidi­ ous version of anti­feminism that is grounded in neo­ liberalism and maintains male privilege by “skirt[ing]  analysis of  structural  inequalities  in  favor of a com­ mon­sense celebration of individual choice for women  and  men.”  neoliberal  anti­feminism  tends  to  be  masked  in  depoliticized  equality  rhetoric  and  is  the  version that is most likely to resonate with educated,  middle­class, white men and influence policy (mess­ ner  ). as banet­weiser ( ,  ) points out, be­ cause “the legacy of patriarchy legitimates misogynistic  arguments as common sense,” they can be converted  into  policy  and  legal  discourse  “with  terrible  effi­ ciency.”  examples  of  this  version  of  anti­feminism  abound,  ranging  from  opinion  columns  in  main­ stream canadian media (i.e. kay  ; wente  a)  to public policy, as illustrated by the harper govern­ ment’s restructuring of status of women canada and  the family violence initiative (mann  ). as i will  demonstrate  in  this  paper,  neoliberal  anti­feminism  influences  canadian  universities’  responses  to  sexual  violence in ways that serve to maintain existing insti­ tutional power arrangements. anti­feminist backlash  intersects with white suprem­ acy, heteronormativity, and other  systems of oppres­ sion to the extent that it has been called a “gateway  drug to the alt­right” (futrelle  , para. ). e term  “alt­right” refers to those who ascribe to a variety of  nationalist, conservative, and far­right ideologies and  became  popularized  as  a  descriptor  for  a  faction  of  trump  supporters  (perry,  mirrlees,  and  scrivens  ). while there are notable exceptions, the major­ ity of mras and incels are generally understood to be  white, heterosexual, cisgender men and, as such, their  entitlement to power and sex  is  framed as emerging  from  normative  constructions  of  white  masculinity  (marwick and caplan  ). racism  is  rampant  in  these communities; for example, in the manifesto re­ leased  prior  to  his  shooting  rampage  in  isla  vista,  california,  elliot  rodger  complains  about  black,  mexican, and asian men who date white women and  argues that he “deserves it more” as someone who is  “half  white”  and  “descended  from  british  aristo­ cracy” (as quoted in paradkar  , para.  ). ese  intersections also shape the impact of this backlash; as  the twitter attack on comedian leslie jones (madden  atlantis journal
 issue . / et al.  ) illustrates, women of colour often experi­ ence specific racist and misogynist backlash. further,  when  backlash  informs  policy,  marginalized  women  and trans folks generally bear the brunt of the impact  (faludi et al.  ). as such, it is important to analyze  anti­feminist backlash from an intersectional perspect­ ive. canadian universities are not immune to anti­feminist  and alt­right backlash. in the remainder of this paper,  i examine the specific ways in which backlash is circu­ lating on campus, as well as how it has been fuelled by  recent efforts to address sexual violence. i also delin­ eate its impact on anti­violence efforts, ranging from  threats and violence against individual activists to how  it affects policy and prevention efforts. i conclude that  this backlash shapes what can be said and done about  sexual violence on university campuses, and in partic­ ular, about its gendered nature, in ways that may ulti­ mately  impact  the  potential  effectiveness  of  anti­violence efforts. methods is paper draws on the findings of a qualitative study  that  i  conducted  between    and  ,  which    analyzed how ontario universities have responded to  sexual violence through the theoretical and methodo­ logical  framework  of  intersectionality  (hill  collins  and bilge  ; ornton dill and kohlman  ).  under the leadership of the previous liberal govern­ ment, ontario became the first canadian province to  pass  legislation  on  campus  sexual  violence  in  .  is legislation requires post­secondary institutions to  develop sexual violence policies and, as such, i con­ ducted a discourse analysis of these policies at all of  the  public  universities  in  ontario.  is  analysis  ap­ proached  the  policies  as  sites  where  “truths”  about  sexual violence—how it is defined, whose experiences  are  valued  and  in  what  ways—are  (re)produced  (strega  ). to better understand how these policies translate into  practice, i conducted semi­structured interviews with   stakeholders from three ontario universities that i  selected as case studies. e selected institutions are all  located in urban areas in different geographic regions  of ontario. two of the institutions are large, while the  other is medium­sized. e stakeholders that i inter­ viewed included student activists, faculty and staff in­ volved  in  anti­violence  efforts  on  campus,  and  members of community organizations whose anti­vi­ olence work impacts the selected universities. my recruitment strategy was informed by the desire to  centre the voices of those who are typically marginal­ ized in mainstream research and public debates about  campus sexual violence. while i did not collect demo­ graphic data, many of my participants addressed as­ pects of their identities during our interviews. of the   participants,   identified as male; at least   identi­ fied  as  indigenous  or  métis;  at  least    identified  as  black; at least   identified as survivors of sexual viol­ ence; and at least   identified as lesbian, gay, or queer.  as  the  following  discussion  of  my  research  findings  demonstrates,  their  experiences  with  anti­violence  efforts and anti­feminist backlash underscore the im­ portance of analyzing these  topics  through an  inter­ sectional perspective. findings and discussion how backlash responds to anti­violence efforts in  the  context  of  ongoing  student  activism,  heightened public attention, and the recent provincial  legislation directing canadian universities to develop  specific sexual violence policies, anti­feminist backlash  appears in a few different but interrelated forms, in­ cluding the characterization of this heightened atten­ tion as a “moral panic.” for example, margaret wente  ( b, para.  ) mobilizes a sense of moral panic to  argue  that  the  problem  of  sexual  violence  is  being  overstated “by lumping together genuine assault with  trivial misbehavior.” wente’s argument is certainly not  new  and  echoes  so­called  “postfeminist”  katie  roi­ phe’s  ( )  earlier  assertions  that  feminist  research  exaggerates the prevalence of sexual violence by defin­ ing rape and sexual harassment too broadly. similarly,  laura  kipnis  ( )  characterizes  campus  anti­viol­ ence efforts as a moral panic that threatens to regulate  sexuality and reproduce patriarchal notions of femin­ inity as vulnerability. however, these arguments prob­ lematically  assume  that  there  is  a  consensus  on  the  atlantis journal
 issue . / nature and scope of sexual violence, and that current  remedies are not only adequate but excessive (n. phil­ lips  ).  sara  ahmed  ( ,  para.  )  cautions  against framing student allegations of sexual violence  against  staff  and  faculty  as  a  moral  panic,  as  it  “al­ low[s]  a  critique of power  to be  reframed  (and dis­ missed)  as  an  imposition  of  moral  norms”  and  therefore  risks  reproducing  dominant  structures  of  power  and  the  normalization  of  sexual  harassment  within academia. related to the notion that the prevalence of sexual vi­ olence  is  overstated  is  the  argument  that  feminists  have created an environment that encourages false re­ porting (lonergan  ). lise gotell and emily dut­ ton  ( )  argue  that  anti­feminist  groups  have  strategically  mobilized  this  argument  to  attract  new  members by capitalizing on young men’s fear of being  falsely  accused. for  example,  in  , men’s rights  edmonton launched the don’t be at girl campaign  in response to the don’t  be  at  guy anti­rape cam­ paign,  which  was  popular  on  campuses  across  canada. e counter­campaign  featured posters un­ dermining the credibility of sexual assault allegations  with  statements  such  as  “just  because  you  regret  a  one­night  stand,  doesn’t  mean  it  wasn’t  consensu­ al” (as quoted in gotell and dutton  ,  ). is  discourse is also visible in anti­feminist threats posted  online  in  september  ,  which  included:  “next  week  when  a  feminist  at  the  university  of toronto  tries to ruin your  life with false sex rape allegations,  rent a gun  from a gang and start firing bullets  into  these  feminists  at  your  nearest  women’s  studies  classroom” (as quoted in hopper  , para.  ). al­ though the  false  reporting discourse may succeed  in  mobilizing mras, it ignores the overwhelming evid­ ence that sexual assault is grossly underreported (con­ roy and cotter  ) and is more likely to be deemed  “unfounded”  by  police  than  other  crimes  (doolittle  ). anti­feminist backlash also manifests in the argument  that  free  speech  is  under  threat  on  canadian  cam­ puses. is argument is premised on the notion that  in the era of “political correctness,” controversial per­ spectives, particularly far­right perspectives, are being  censored by feminists and so­called “social justice war­ riors”  (pang  ).  in  the  canadian  context,  uni­ versity of toronto professor jordan peterson is one of  the most vocal proponents of the view that free speech  is  under  threat.  peterson  became  (in)famous  for  ar­ guing  that  being  asked  to  use  gender­neutral  pro­ nouns and protections against discrimination on the  basis  of  gender  identity  and  expression  constitute  threats to his free speech (pang  ). in a new york  times  interview,  peterson  reportedly  questioned  the  existence  of  patriarchy  and  suggested  that  existing  hierarchies are the natural result of differing levels of  competence (bowles  , para.  ). he has referred  to  women’s  studies,  ethnic  studies,  sociology,  an­ thropology, english literature, and education as “in­ doctrination cults”  (cbc radio  , para.  )  that  are  invested  in  producing  “the  next  generation  of  pathetic whining radicals” (pang  , para.  ). he  also discussed plans to create a website cataloguing all  “postmodern  neo­marxist  cult  classes”  (cbc  radio  ,  para.  )  to  discourage  enrollment,  which  is  fairly hypocritical for someone so concerned with free  speech. e characterization of feminists and student  anti­violence activists as overly sensitive and censori­ ous  is a means by which their claims are dismissed,  and  existing  institutional  inequities  are  maintained  (ahmed  ). anti­feminist and alt­right groups have deployed free  speech arguments to legitimize their presence on cam­ pus. for example, in  , the men’s issues awareness  society  (mias)  at  ryerson  university  filed  a  joint  lawsuit with two anti­abortion groups against the stu­ dent union  for allegedly discriminating against  their  right to free speech after they were denied official stu­ dent group status (kivanc  ). e canadian asso­ ciation  for  equality  (cafe),  a  well­known  men’s  rights group, supported mias members in launching  their  lawsuit  (kivanc  ). while  the  lawsuit  was  dismissed  in early  ,  the mias  founder warned  that  the  verdict  would  not  succeed  in  “silenc[ing]  men” and that “it’s going to create even more people  who are willing to fight  for  these causes and they’re  going  to  be  angrier  than  i  am,  so  be  prepared”  (as  quoted in binning  , para.  ). student­led  free  speech  clubs  have  also  emerged  at  canadian universities. while they tend to frame their  atlantis journal
 issue . / mission  in  politically  neutral  terms,  this  framing  is  quickly betrayed by their choice of  invited speakers.  for example, the students in support of free speech  (ssfs) group at the university of toronto has hosted  right­wing  speakers  including  peterson,  lauren  southern, ezra levant, and ben shapiro (pang  ).  ey also held a rally in support of members of the  white nationalist proud boys, which was attended by  paul fromm, the director of the council of conser­ vative citizens, a white supremacist group with ties to  the ku klux klan (pang  ). ese incidents must  be contextualized within broader white nationalism at  canadian  universities.  in  the  wake  of trump’s  elec­ tion, posters appeared on campuses nationwide bear­ ing  statements  such  as  “it’s  only  racist  when  white  people do it” and “tired of anti­white propaganda? it’s  time  to  make  canada  great  again!”  (as  quoted in perry, mirrlees, and scrivens  ,  ). as  these  examples  demonstrate,  the  argument  that  free  speech is under attack on campus is inherently linked  to the same sense of aggrieved white masculine enti­ tlement that animates anti­feminist backlash. by contrast, there are serious limits imposed on what  can  be  said  about  sexual  violence  at  canadian  uni­ versities.  for  example,  clea  schmidt,  an  education  professor at the university of manitoba, reported fa­ cing  increasing pressure  to  resign after  she critiqued  the university administration’s handling of sexual vi­ olence  cases,  including  her  own  substantiated  com­ plaint  of  sexual  harassment  against  a  colleague  (botelho­urbanski  ). by drawing attention to the  issue of campus sexual violence, schmidt might thus  be described as an “institutional killjoy,” who “poses a  problem  because  she  keeps  exposing  a  prob­ lem” (ahmed  ,  ). meanwhile, high­profile fac­ ulty  members  may  be  protected  from  sexual  assault  allegations based their perceived value to the institu­ tion  as  “the  patriarchal  impulse  to  shield  privileged  men is  intensified by the fact  that  the reputation of  the perpetrator operates as a proxy for that of the uni­ versity” (phipps  ,  ). for example, some cana­ dian  universities  have  signed  non­disclosure  agreements  as  part  of  their  settlements  with  faculty  who perpetrate sexual violence to avoid long arbitra­ tion processes. ese agreements often prevent surviv­ ors from knowing the results of the investigation and  allow the offending professor to seek employment at  other  institutions  without  disclosing  this  history  (ward  and  gollom  ).  workplace  health  and  safety regulations may also limit institutions’ ability to  reveal  information  about  complaints  against  faculty  and  staff,  including  the  fact  that  they  have  been  named in a formal complaint (jones  ). some  institutions’  sexual  violence  policies  place  re­ strictions  on  survivors’  ability  to  discuss  their  com­ plaints,  which  have  been  described  as  “gag  orders” (jones  , para.  ). while the policies also  typically  include  provisions  that  prohibit  retaliation,  one of my research participants described experiencing  “major bullying” after her complaint against a class­ mate was dismissed: “i have heard things behind my  back: ‘oh, we don’t want to be in a group with her be­ cause  […]  this  happened.’  i  get  looks.  i’m  the  girl  who cried wolf” ( ). as a result, she said that she  felt like she had no choice but to switch to a different  major. further, there is a risk that those who file com­ plaints will be sued for defamation (kingkade  ).  for example, after he was fired by the university of  british columbia, steven galloway filed defamation  lawsuits against a former student who accused him of  sexual assault and over   others who are alleged to  have repeated the accusations (lederman  ). un­ surprisingly,  these  issues have not been  taken up by  the supposedly politically neutral campus free speech  advocates. how responses to campus sexual violence are shaped by  backlash while  it may be  tempting  to dismiss expressions of  anti­feminism on campus as fringe concerns, it is im­ portant  to  recognize  their  ability  to  influence  how  universities are responding to sexual violence. at the  level of policymaking, debates about due process and  the  rights  of  accused  students,  which  are  legitimate  concerns, can become a vehicle to advance anti­femin­ ist interests. in the united states, education secretary  betsy devos invited mra groups, including the na­ tional coalition for men, who have been accused of  publishing the names and photos of sexual assault sur­ vivors  and  of  promoting  misogynistic  violence  (kreighbaum  ; scheinman  ), to participate  atlantis journal
 issue . / in a summit on campus sexual violence in  . fol­ lowing the summit, the trump administration intro­ duced  new title  ix  regulations  that,  among  other  things, encouraged post­secondary institutions to ad­ opt  the  higher  “clear  and  convincing”  standard  of  evidence and guaranteed the right of accused students  to cross­examine  their  accusers  (green  ). ese  american debates have the potential to influence how  canadian  institutions  respond  to  sexual  violence.  i  noted,  for  example,  that  some  ontario  universities’  policies avoid using the terms “victim” or “survivor,”  which is consistent with the critique that the use of  these terms pre­supposes the guilt of the respondent  (kipnis  ).  ree  ontario  universities  included  clauses  stipulating  that  “vexatious”  complaints  or  complaints made in “bad faith” can result in sanctions  against  the complainant. while  such clauses are not  unique to sexual violence policies, their inclusion has  the effect of  reproducing  the  fear of  false  reporting.  further, ontario’s conservative premier, doug ford,  passed  legislation  shortly  after  taking  office  that  re­ quires  all  post­secondary  institutions  to  implement  free speech policies and threatened to cut the funding  of noncompliant institutions, which was widely inter­ preted as a gesture to appease his far­right constituents  (jeffords  ). ese examples clearly  illustrate  the  potential for anti­feminist backlash to inform policy. e  neoliberal  university  is  deeply  invested  in  pre­ serving their public reputation as a means of securing  scarce tuition dollars and research funding (gray and  pin  ). allegations of sexual violence are therefore  perceived as threats to the institution’s reputation that  must be carefully managed or silenced (phipps  ).  yet  as  institutions’  sexual  violence  policies  and  re­ sponses are publicly ranked and evaluated in the me­ dia and by student activist organizations such as our  turn ( ), they have become a significant measure  of post­secondary institutions’ performance. as such,  “university  branding  becomes  entangled  with  sexual  assault prevention […] to  further  the public reputa­ tion of  the university as proactive  in enhancing stu­ dent safety […] as a component of institutional efforts  to attract prospective students” (gray and pin  ,  ­ ).  post­secondary  institutions  must  project  the  public  image  that  they are committed  to addressing  sexual  violence  while  simultaneously  avoiding  back­ lash and accusations of bias and infringement on free  speech, particularly in ontario. my  research  suggests  that  some  of  the  more  subtle  forms of backlash are present in institutional policy­ making processes, particularly with respect  to whose  voices and perspectives are represented. at two of the  three institutions that i studied, participants described  these  process  as  being  driven  by  administrative  in­ terests, which caused tension among committee mem­ bers who questioned their priorities: “are you working  to  support  survivors or are you here  to  support  the  university and worry about  liability and tuition dol­ lars?” ( ). one participant, who teaches in gender  studies,  felt  that  feminist  faculty  were  excluded  be­ cause “the university sees feminists on campus not ne­ cessarily as allies [but] more as people that they have  to keep away”  ( ). similarly,  after being asked  to  join the policymaking committee at the third institu­ tion, a faculty member who researches campus sexual  violence  said  that  she  felt  “relieved  because  i  know  that at many universities, the people who actually had  most  expertise  were  not  put  on  the  commit­ tees” ( ). participants also raised concerns regarding  the  shallowness  of  consultations  with  students  and  community anti­violence organizations. further, par­ ticipants at one institution said that their policymak­ ing  committee  was  chaired  by  a  “white  male”  administrator  who  exercised  his  privilege  to  silence  other  committee  members:  “it  was  a  committee  of  strong women, strong voices, [and] sometimes those  voices  were  not  being  heard,  specifically  racialized  voices” ( ). ese examples illustrate the ways that  subtle forms of backlash serve to maintain existing in­ equities and silence those who are perceived to be in­ stitutional killjoys (ahmed  ). given these dynamics, it is unsurprising that my ana­ lysis of universities’ sexual violence policies revealed a  tendency  to  frame  sexual  violence as  a depoliticized  interpersonal  issue.  of  the    public  universities  in  ontario,   have policies that are completely identity­ neutral. is depoliticized framing may represent an  attempt to expand the definition of sexual violence to  include the experiences of those who do not conform  to the “ideal” survivor, who is typically understood to  be a white, middle­class, heterosexual, cisgender wo­ atlantis journal
 issue . / man (richie  ). nevertheless, this framing fails to  address the gendered nature of sexual violence, as well  as how vulnerability to violence and access to support  are shaped by its intersections with systems of oppres­ sion (harris and linder  ). by contrast, the other  universities’ policies include references to intersection­ ality and name those who experience heightened vul­ nerability, which is significant. however, my findings  suggest that these references to intersectionality rarely  translate into practice in a way that meaningfully ad­ dresses  the experiences of marginalized  survivors. as  such, i conclude that these references must be under­ stood as a reflection of the institutional incorporation  of intersectionality rather than a genuine commitment  to addressing the underlying power relations that give  rise  to  sexual  violence.  importantly,  none  of  the  policies explicitly address the fact that cisgender men  perpetrate the overwhelming majority of sexual viol­ ence  (conroy  and  cotter  )  or  how  normative  masculinities contribute to violence. my research participants suggested that this depoliti­ cized framing may be motivated, at least in part, by a  desire to avoid backlash. as one participant explained,  if university responses to sexual violence  speak  to  these more political aspects,  […] the  administration feel[s] like they are going to get  a lot of complaints. ey are going to be in the  media.  ere’s  going  to  be  a  whole  uproar  about it because there are people who are very  committed  to  upholding  a  cis,  heterosexual,  patriarchal structure. ( ) similarly, another participant said that the recent free  speech legislation “shifted the culture on our campus  away  from  intersectionality  in  the  sense  that  […]  it  became this space that was so heavily focused on free­ dom of speech and not saying things that could kind  of  spark  this contentious debate”  ( ),  such as  the  confrontations  that  occurred  at  the  university  of  toronto in response to peterson (pang  ). adopt­ ing depoliticized anti­violence efforts may allow uni­ versities  to  avoid  these  heated  debates  and  preserve  their public reputation and image. beyond the content of these policies, my research sug­ gests that the desire to avoid backlash also informs ap­ proaches  to  sexual  violence  prevention.  as  one  participant explained, when prevention efforts are ex­ plicitly linked to feminism, they risk being perceived  as inherently “man­bashing” ( ). similarly, another  participant  argued  that  “because  these  issues  are  so  visible and so contentious and so divisive, there’s a lot  of hostility  at  times  to  the  idea  that  ‘oh great, here  comes a feminist’ and […] the notion of [the] ‘social  justice warrior’” ( ). again, this contributes to the  implementation of depoliticized approaches. consent campaigns illustrate this depoliticized fram­ ing by  (mis)representing  sexual violence as an  inter­ personal issue resulting from miscommunication and  a  lack  of  knowledge  about  consent  (beres  ),  which fails to acknowledge the power relations inher­ ent in sexual violence and, in so doing, resembles the  insidious  neoliberal  version  of  anti­feminism  that  messner ( ) describes. representing consent as a  negotiation between equal  individuals who have  the  capacity to “just say no” (or yes) and have their “no”  respected (burkett and hamilton  ) leaves white  masculine sexual entitlement unaddressed. it also fails  to account for how certain populations are construc­ ted as sexually available and always already consenting  (crenshaw  ) while others are constructed as in­ herently threatening (davis  ) based on the inter­ sections  of  privilege  and  oppression.  as  one  participant explained, “it’s not so much that this per­ son didn’t say no or that you thought that they had  said yes or whatever, it’s that in many cases people feel  entitled  to  sex”  ( ).  as  this  example  illustrates,  while depoliticized approaches may be less likely to at­ tract backlash, their potential impact may be limited if  they fail to address the underlying social and structur­ al causes of sexual violence. despite the gendered nature of sexual violence perpet­ ration,  few  canadian  universities  have  implemented  prevention efforts  focused  specifically on masculinit­ ies. when male  students  are  included  in prevention  efforts, there is a tendency to make them palatable by  framing male participants as “real” men, “good” men,  or as protectors while those who perpetrate sexual vi­ olence are othered (masters  ; scheel et al.  ).  for example, as one participant explained, “some ver­ sions of  the bystander  […]  [are]  about  encouraging  men to stand in their hero space with their capes and  atlantis journal
 issue . / these poor women who can’t do anything for them­ selves and who need them” ( ).while this framing  is often deployed as a strategy to encourage male par­ ticipation,  it  falls  short  of  addressing  the  ways  in  which  normative  constructions  of  masculinity  con­ tribute to sexual violence (katz  ). as such, one of  my participants said: i  want  to  see  more  initiatives  targeting  men  […]  [that]  talk  about  how  they  are  a  part  of  problem, whether  they are perpetrators or not  and  how  they  have  this  opportunity,  possibly  the most opportunity, in different situations to  prevent  it  from happening  […] ere  is  a  lot  value  in  them  being  uncomfortable  and  ac­ knowledging their complicity. ( ) is argument is supported by research that suggests  that prevention efforts  that  target men and boys are  most  effective  when  they  challenge  normative  con­ structions  of  masculinity  (jewkes,  flood,  and  lang  ).  e impact of anti­feminist backlash while  the  examples  discussed  above  illustrate  how  anti­feminist  backlash  shapes  responses  to  campus  sexual violence in policy and in practice, it is equally  important to recognize its impact on individual anti­ violence activists and practitioners. as one of my re­ search participants explained,  i’ve never had death threats, but i would be ly­ ing to say that i’m not sometimes fearful of ex­ treme  right­wing  men’s  groups.  […]  ere  sometimes is a real fear of being branded or be­ ing the target of hate because  it’s  real and the  more i do this work, the more i see how vulner­ able we are to that. […] i probably don’t dwell  in that space for too long because it would be  paralyzing. ( ) e fear of harassment compounds the emotional la­ bour  inherent  in  campus  anti­violence  work,  which  tends to be performed by those who are already mar­ ginalized within academic institutions (ahmed  ). moreover,  a  fear  of  harassment  is  well­founded  (wunker  ).  after  gotell  publicly  responded  to  men’s  rights  edmonton’s  don’t  be  at  girl  cam­ paign, they circulated a poster featuring an illustration  of her face that read: “just because you’re paid to de­ monize men doesn’t mean rape is gendered. don’t be  that  bigot!”  (gotell  and  dutton  ,  ).  in  fall  ,  an  instructor  at  the  university  of  british  columbia, marina adshade, reported receiving threats  of  sexual  violence  after  she  tweeted  allegations  that  several  female  students  were  drugged  at  a  fraternity  party  and  questioned  whether  fraternities  should  be  permitted on campus (pathak  ). in  , a stu­ dent who was involved in opposing an event held by  the  men’s  issues  awareness  society  at  queen’s  uni­ versity was threatened and violently attacked outside  her  home  (canadian  press  ).  after  protesting  against peterson during a  rally held by ssfs at  the  university  of toronto,  trans  students  reported  that  their personal information was published online and  that they were subsequently subjected to harassment  (pang  ). at the university of ottawa, a student  journalist faced threats of violence after exposing the  science  students  association’s  pub  crawl,  which  al­ legedly awarded participants points for performing or­ al  sex  and  eating  doughnuts  off  of  a  judge’s  penis  (schnurr  ). in response, racist, sexist, and islamo­ phobic  threats  were  posted  to  her  social  media  ac­ counts,  including:  “i  will  be  laughing  when  your  father murders you in an honor killing. you terrorist  breeder”  and  “don't  spoil  it  for  everyone  else,  you  filthy  f***ing  sand******.  i  hope  your  imam  rapes  you” (schnurr  , para.  ). ese examples demon­ strate  not  only  the  real  and  present  threat  faced  by  those working to address violence on campus, but also  the importance of analyzing these threats from an in­ tersectional perspective. while these examples of harassment were targeted to­ ward specific individuals, the impact of such backlash  must be understood as an attempt to silence activists  and  discourage  others  from  becoming  involved  in  anti­violence efforts. is silencing directly contradicts  anti­feminist groups’ claims of being invested in free  speech. by exacerbating the emotional labour required  to address sexual violence within the neoliberal insti­ tution, this backlash may also contribute to the high  levels  of  burnout  and  job  turnover  that  i  have  ob­ served among  those working  to  facilitate prevention  and support survivors. ultimately, this turnover may  impact the consistency of these efforts to prevent and  atlantis journal
 issue . / respond to violence. however, as one of my research  participants pointed out, the existence of this backlash  can also be reframed as a sign of progress. as she ex­ plained, i would say that what we’re doing is radical be­ cause  most  people  would  prefer  that  we  just  shut up and go away. in fact, the more traction  we make  in challenging social norms and get­ ting  institutional  responses  and getting people  fired and showing them that  this behaviour  is  unacceptable and won’t be tolerated, the more  backlash there is. ( ) although  it  is  unlikely  to  be  of  any  consolation  to  those  who  are  experiencing  threats  and  harassment,  the idea that backlash is an indicator of progress may  serve as motivation to continue pushing to make these  changes.  conclusion while this  is by no means an exhaustive account of  anti­feminist  backlash  at  canadian  universities,  this  paper  begins  to  unpack  the  dynamic  relationship  between  backlash  and  efforts  to  address  sexual  viol­ ence on campus. i have argued that heightened public  awareness of campus sexual violence and the resulting  legislation has fuelled anti­feminist backlash, which is  often  disguised  in  the  depoliticized  rhetoric  of  due  process and free speech. my research findings demon­ strate that this backlash is impacting what can be said  and done about campus sexual violence and, in partic­ ular,  about  the gendered nature of perpetration and  how normative constructions of masculinity contrib­ ute to violence. my research focused specifically on how ontario uni­ versities  are  responding  to  sexual  violence  and,  as  such, my findings are not necessarily representative of  universities in other provinces. similarly, my research  focused on universities and did not examine responses  to violence or the presence of anti­feminist backlash at  canadian colleges. i am currently working to expand  on these findings by researching anti­violence efforts  explicitly targeted toward male students at canadian  universities,  which,  as  i  mentioned  above,  are  relat­ ively  uncommon.  by  interviewing  the  facilitators  of  these  programs,  as  well  as  male  students  who  have  participated  in  them,  i  am hoping  to better under­ stand  how  they  engage  with  constructions  of  mas­ culinity  and  how  this  work  is  impacted  by  anti­feminist backlash. because this backlash is diffuse  (banet­weiser  ) and often masked using depoliti­ cized  rhetoric  (messner  ),  it  can be difficult  to  identify. as such, i am also planning to undertake re­ search to map the scale and scope of this backlash at  canadian post­secondary institutions. ultimately, while the present moment must be char­ acterized as one of significant momentum toward ad­ dressing  campus  sexual  violence,  it  must  also  be  characterized as one of  substantial  anti­feminist  and  alt­right backlash at canadian universities. e over­ arching  impact of  this backlash can make any gains  toward preventing or addressing violence on campus  feel  like  a  fragile  victory.  however,  at  a  time  when  university  community  members  who  are  racialized,  muslim, feminist, queer, and/or trans are being sub­ jected to harassment and violence, this backlash only  increases  the  urgency  of  ensuring  that  responses  to  sexual violence are intersectional and address the un­ derlying social and structural roots of violence.  atlantis journal
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( ). health economic evaluation in japan : a case study of one aspect of health technology assessment [online]. london: lse research online. available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/ available online: may lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. this document is the author’s final manuscript version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. some differences between this version and the publisher’s version remain. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk contact lse research online at: library.researchonline@lse.ac.uk http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ mailto:library.researchonline@lse.ac.uk http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/a.j.oliver@lse.ac.uk/ http://www.elsevier.com/locate/healthpol health economic evaluation in japan: a case study of one aspect of health technology assessment adam oliver correspondence to: adam oliver, lse health and social care, london school of economics and political science, houghton street, london wc a ae, uk. tel: + ( ) ; fax: + ( ) ; e-mail: a.j.oliver@lse.ac.uk abstract there is a burgeoning literature in health economic evaluation, with this form of analysis becoming increasingly influential at the health policy making level in a number of countries. however, a search of the literature reveals that in japan, the world’s second largest health care market, very little health economic evaluation has been undertaken. the main reason for the lack of interest in economic evaluation is that the fee-for-service and strict price regulation that characterises the system of health care financing in japan is not conducive to this form of analysis. moreover, the government and many researchers are satisfied that the current organisation of health care has given long life and low infant mortality at low cost. even if it is accepted that low health care costs and good health prevail in japan, slower economic growth rates, an ageing population and the development of new medical technologies will place increasing pressure on health care resources and will necessitate a more rational use of these resources. good economic evaluation, by weighing benefits against costs, has an important role to play. key words economic evaluation, health technology assessment, japan, fee-for-service, provider budgets introduction one aspect of health technology assessment that is becoming increasingly influential at the health policy making level in a number of countries is health economic evaluation (e.g., ministry of health, ; commonwealth of australia, ; norwegian medicines control agency, ; sickness funds council, ; nice, ). health economic evaluation, by weighing benefits against costs, can help decision makers to allocate scarce health care resources more efficiently. by informing the decision maker of the most efficient ways to use health care resources, health economic evaluation is potentially more useful than aspects of health technology assessment that merely assess the effectiveness of health care interventions, which only offers information on whether an intervention is clinically beneficial without any reference to cost. the purpose of this paper is to review the state of health economic evaluation in japan, the world’s second largest health care market, with a view to uncovering whether japan can offer any lessons with respect to this highly important aspect of health technology assessment. review of japanese economic evaluation from a search of the literature, we can obtain some idea of the state of health economic evaluation in japan. a search of the health economics evaluations database (heed) was undertaken. this search included cost, cost-consequences and cost of illness analyses, in addition to the more accepted forms of economic evaluation (i.e. cost-minimisation, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility and cost-benefit analyses). before going further, two caveats concerning the use of this database should be noted. first, the database provides comprehensive coverage of only the post- published literature. however, other studies, some with a particular emphasis on pharmacoeconomic analyses, have undertaken searches that extend to the pre- literature, and have found very few studies directly applicable to japan (moriga et al., ; ikeda et al., a; hisashige, ; hamashima et al., ; kishimoto, ). second, heed does not adequately cover the japanese language literature. the articles detected as relevant from the search of heed were all written in english. however, the few japanese researchers active in economic evaluation aspire to publish their work in english language journals, and there are currently no established japanese journals to which economic evaluations can be submitted (ikegami, ). whilst the search criteria used in this article does not provide an exhaustive search of post- japanese economic evaluation, it is assumed that the search detected a sufficient sample of published economic evaluations to enable some conclusions to be made concerning the state of economic evaluation in japan. the search was narrowed to japanese authors undertaking original applied economic evaluation in japan. twenty-five articles were detected. by international comparison, this number is low. for example, using identical search criteria applicable to each country, the number of applied economic evaluations included on heed for the remaining g countries of canada, france, germany, italy, the uk and the usa measured , , , , and , , respectively. moreover, with respect to the number of published economic evaluations, many countries with relatively small health care sectors appear to be more active in the field of economic evaluation than japan. for example, , and applied studies were detected for sweden, the netherlands and finland, respectively. if it is assumed that the number of published applied studies gives some indication of the development of this discipline, it is perhaps notable that japan appears to be grouped with countries such as belgium ( studies) and thailand ( studies) rather than with the larger industrialised nations. a technical appendix of the studies detected from the search of heed is available from the author on request. to summarise the results of the search, there has been a small, steady number of economic evaluations published by japanese researchers over recent years, but there is no sign of an increasing trend in the number of studies published over time. most of the studies tend to adopt a cost-consequence design. no author(s) dominates the applied economic evaluation literature, and most received their formal training in the clinical sciences. in terms of medical intervention, screening and diagnostics are the main foci of interest, and cancer is the most frequently analysed disease. the biggest single source of funding for these economic evaluations was the japanese government. with reference to these results, i shall now attempt to offer some explanation for the current state of economic evaluation in japan. the disincentives for undertaking economic evaluation the main disincentives for undertaking economic evaluation in japan arise from the way in which the health care financing system is organised. the financing structure is described in more detail elsewhere (e.g., ikegami, ; ; ikegami et al., ; ikegami and campbell, ; ; oliver et al., ), but its salient features are that it is a fee-for-service system based on a tightly controlled fee schedule, where across the board reductions in fees - irrespective of an intervention’s effectiveness or value for money - are regularly imposed by the government. the ways in which the system of health care financing, together with other factors, serve to restrict the incentives for the government, purchasers, providers, manufacturers and universities to commission and/or undertake economic evaluation, will now be detailed. government and purchasers several research groups have been organised by the government and academia over recent years for the partial purpose of considering economic evaluation (hisashige, ). moreover, there have been calls from the government about the need to establish economic evaluation in the field of health care, particularly for pharmaceuticals (hisashige et al., ). however, the extent to which these calls will be heeded, and the degree of commitment that the government has in developing an environment that gives the appropriate incentives for high quality economic evaluation, is not clear. through the tight control of the fee schedule, the financial strain of reimbursing new medical procedures is suppressed. universal insurance coverage entitles everybody to the same health care treatments, theoretically facilitating access to the latest, and, assumed, highest quality interventions. the low cost and perceived equity of access has removed the urgency within the government and insurers to actively pursue evidence of cost-effectiveness for the purpose of prioritising health care. also, since insurance enrolment is based on employment or residence and not choice, there is no competition between insurance plans, and an extensive system of insurer subsidisation and cross-subsidisation by the government has weakened the incentives for the insurers to weigh the outcomes of medical interventions against costs. unfortunately, it is likely that the strict control of prices without reference to incremental clinical efficacy, effectiveness and/or value for money has a distorting and detrimental influence on provider services and manufacturer production. providers the fee-for-service nature of the system allows the health care providers to be reimbursed for their activity without direct reference to a budget, and removes the incentive for them to balance outcomes against costs. in some areas of health care the fee-for-service system and the suppression of reimbursement prices motivates the providers to increase their volume of service, possibly to a level where the marginal benefit falls below zero. this is particularly evident in pharmaceuticals and diagnostic procedures (hisashige, ; oliver et al., ). the decision to introduce high-tech health care is often based on the perception that the latest or seemingly more sophisticated developments in medical technology are necessarily highly effective. this perception is particularly pertinent in the larger hospitals, the administrators of which invest in high-tech health care in order to maintain prestige, which is then used to attract both physicians and patients (ikegami, ). the view that ‘new is best’ may be culturally ingrained. therefore, the removal of the perverse financial incentives offered by the current system may not immediately or entirely discourage the hospital administrators from investing in and administering the latest interventions before incremental clinical efficacy, let alone cost-effectiveness, is established. nevertheless, separating revenue generation from health care provision may well introduce the incentives for the providers to assess health care interventions with more care. manufacturers the lack of consideration of an intervention’s quality (in terms of its degree of efficacy, effectiveness and/or cost-effectiveness) in the fee schedule weakens the incentives for the manufacturers of health care interventions to demonstrate the usefulness of their products. this is particularly evident in the pharmaceutical industry. pharmaceutical reimbursement prices are regularly reduced irrespective of quality. this gives the incentive for the manufacturers to continually introduce new drugs, which are generally priced slightly higher than existing comparable therapies (ikegami et al., ). also, physicians are eager to prescribe new drugs for reasons of profit (due to relatively high margins between the reimbursement and market prices) and prestige. in , the mhw issued guidelines stating that innovative drugs would be priced at a premium level, though between may and november , only of the new drugs introduced onto the market was priced as ‘innovative’ (ikeda et al., b). furthermore, the pricing decisions made during negotiations between the ministry of health and welfare (mhw) and the japan medical association (jma) are closed, which makes it difficult for the manufacturers to determine exactly what is required for their products to be classified as innovative. most japanese pharmaceutical manufacturers generally forgo the risk and expense of attempting to develop innovative products and restrict themselves to producing ‘me- too’ drugs. these products differ very little in their chemical compound from existing drugs and offer only limited improvements in therapeutic benefit. however, they are relatively inexpensive to develop, can be marketed as ‘major innovations’ and, as noted above, are priced above existing medicines in the same therapeutic category. japanese pharmaceutical companies are sure that their me-too products will enter the market at a relatively high price, but are unsure of what they have to prove to attain a premium price. they are certain that whatever they produce, the reimbursement price will be subjected to regular reductions. in this environment there is little incentive for the manufacturers to undertake economic evaluation in order to prove a product’s worth. universities of the articles detected from the search of heed, gave author contact details. sixteen corresponding authors were based in university medical departments, in cancer institutes, in a national hospital, in a clinic and in an american hospital. the large majority of the authors of these studies are physicians. it appears that those in japan who undertake studies of health care interventions that contain some consideration of costs are predominantly university hospital-based physicians. a possible reason why those with medical backgrounds tend to dominate health economic evaluation is because the medical profession in japan is highly paternalistic, and medical doctors are resistant to what they may consider to be outside influences over their decisions (feldman et al., ). that physicians undertake the few economic evaluations that are published has important implications. first, the extent to which many physicians fully understand the principles of good economic evaluation is unclear. very often, studies tend to include cost data almost as an afterthought rather than as an integral part of the analysis. this is associated with the physicians’ main concern with demonstrating the clinical consequences of medical interventions. where physicians do venture to focus upon more formal economic analysis, it is often the case that they lack the training to incorporate the appropriate requirements necessary for good quality evaluations. another implication of university-based physicians predominantly undertaking economic evaluation is that existing analyses may reflect their own medical research interests rather than any fundamental drive to estimate the most rational use of resources across the whole health care system. these research interests are likely to be partly determined by the forms of health care that are readily available. for example, mass screening for stomach, cervix, endometrium, lung, breast and colon/rectum cancers is available in japan at government subsidised rates or at no charge for the employees of most companies (oshima, ). screening for a host of other conditions, such as paediatric renal and heart diseases, are also widely available (hisashige, ). screening practices and the installation of diagnostic equipment may be relatively common because of the revenue that can be derived from voluminous diagnostic testing, and/or because the hospital administrators feel that investing in the latest diagnostic equipment is effective in attracting both patients and doctors. alternatively, the popularity of screening and diagnostics could be based on a cultural preference for non-invasive techniques (ikegami, ; hisashige, ). the above factors may explain why screening, diagnostic procedures and cancer appear to be the foci of interest with respect to economic evaluation. overall, the incentives for the government, purchasers, providers, manufacturers and universities to involve themselves in economic evaluation are currently weak. but is more economic evaluation really warranted? the case for more economic evaluation it is well documented that the japanese spend a relatively low proportion of their gross domestic product (gdp) on health care (e.g., ikegami and campbell, ; ikegami, ). it is also well documented that despite this seemingly well controlled health care expenditure, the macro health indicators of life expectancy and infant mortality are among the best in the world (e.g., ikegami and campbell, ; oliver et al., ). many researchers have drawn attention to these facts, which has somewhat deflated the pressure for reform that would introduce incentives for the various parties to focus on economic evaluation. health care spending as a percentage of gdp though health care expenditure as a percentage of gdp is low by international comparison, japan’s economic performance over recent years has been poor. hence, the growth in gdp has been slow and the percentage of gdp spent on health care might be expected to rise. whether japan’s economy will ever fully recover to the position the country had become accustomed to before the s is an open question, but a relatively low proportion of gdp spent on health care should not be taken for granted, and the lower levels of economic growth necessitate a more careful utilisation of health care resources. poor economic performance is not the only factor that is contributing to the increasing pressure for a more rational use of health care resources. japan has a population that is ageing more rapidly than those of most other countries. this will possibly place an increasing strain on the health care budget due to the possible higher prevalence of age-related diseases (hisashige, ; oliver et al., ; hisashige et al., ). also, the higher ratio of retired to people of working age within the population diminishes the insurance premium and tax base. finally, the development of new medical technology continues at an ever increasing rate (hisashige, ). this will place more financial strain on certain providers, specifically those where the investment in the latest technology is deemed necessary due to the pervading attitude that ‘new is best’. current macro indicators many researchers frequently mention that japan has very good life expectancy and infant mortality indicators and that, therefore, the japanese are a relatively healthy population. the first point to note regarding this, as acknowledged by many of the researchers themselves, is that the health care system is not the sole, or even the main, contributor to these good macro indicators. it is probable that many other factors influence life expectancy and infant mortality rates, including income growth, income distribution, diet, housing etc. (hisashige, ; oliver et al., ). thus, the good macro indicators are not an adequate reason to be complacent with respect to the benefits accruing from the current organisation of the health care system. there is also the question regarding the extent to which the macro indicators accurately reflect the health status of the population. it may well be that the members of a society, on average, live a long time, but their quality of life is at least as important. moreover, it is worth noting that favourable international comparisons should not give grounds for complacency, as there is always likely to be room for improvements within any country. introducing incentives for economic evaluation the japanese government has been successful in containing health care costs (oliver et al., ). however, cost-containment alone is not a measure of a successful health care system, and an environment ought to be created where there are incentives to measure the value for money of new and existing health care interventions. the decision maker will then be in a better position to prioritise health care interventions. how might this environment be created? introducing provider budgets the most important reforms necessary to encourage economic evaluation are to change the fee-for-service nature of reimbursement and remove the regular across- the-board reductions in the fee schedule. a system needs to be introduced that takes away the revenue-based incentives for the providers to undertake and administer unnecessary procedures and services. the widespread introduction of health care provider budgets could provide incentives for economic evaluation to be undertaken, and would also continue to facilitate health care cost control. concurrently, the price reduction policy should be replaced with a price recommendation system that accords with each health care intervention’s value for money. in a budget-based system, the insurance funds would negotiate contracts with clinics and hospitals to provide appropriate care for their insured populations over a fixed period. currently in japan, there are hundreds of insurance funds, and therefore this initiative may require many of the funds to merge. also, contracting with specific providers may initially prove unpopular with many insurance fund enrolees since people currently enjoy the freedom to attend any hospital they wish. however, a budget-based system with purchaser-provider contracting may give the government and the insurers the incentive to commission economic evaluation on new and existing interventions and disseminate the results to the health care providers in an attempt to encourage the use of the most beneficial care for each unit of health care cost. the providers would also have an incentive to commission economic evaluation in order to help provide the best possible care inside their budget constraint. this may place them in a strong negotiating position regarding future health care contracts by, for example, helping them to maximise population health status gains, subject to equity considerations. the manufacturers of health care interventions would be faced with more appropriate incentives to commission and undertake economic evaluation precisely because they would want to demonstrate that their products represent the best value for money. this could be reinforced if the government demanded the submission of good economic evaluation to help them in their pricing recommendations. moreover, the method by which the government considers the results of economic evaluation ought to be overt. this may pose a particular problem as the confidential aspect of decision making is embedded in japanese tradition. however, attempts to persuade the mhw and the jma to publicly disclose the information that they draw upon during their negotiations are necessary in order to enable the manufacturers to scrutinise and, if necessary, appeal against the government’s decisions. if the government employs assessors with expertise in economic evaluation the health care manufacturers may have more confidence that their products are being subjected to price recommendations that reflect value for money, and would thus be given the incentive to produce high quality, internationally competitive products. establishing the necessary expertise in economic evaluation although changes to the structure of health care financing are necessary to remove the disincentives to commission and undertake economic evaluation, there are currently an insufficient number of experts able to undertake good economic evaluation in japan. the government should invest in the training of a large number of experts who would remain independent of government and/or industry influence. maintaining the independence of the experts will help ensure that the influence of those with a vested interest in the results of the analyses is kept to a minimum, and that each interested party is as confident as possible in the validity of the results. although the government, insurers, providers and manufacturers may require experts to undertake and assess economic evaluation, the majority of the research should be commissioned from and undertaken within an independent academic environment. it is advisable that specific centres of excellence be established within the universities. lessons from japan? as the countries of the european union form closer economic and political ties, it is becoming increasingly important to assess which health care systems ‘work’ (and why they work). however, we ought to guard against constructing an isolationist european union point of view. assessing the health care systems of non-european union countries is also important, not just with the view of ascertaining what we can learn from them, but also with a view to offering advice on what they can learn from us. recent world events have served to underline the importance of maintaining a global perspective with respect to many aspects of policy development. in terms of developing health care systems that facilitate both investment in health economic evaluation and the incentives to act upon their consequent recommendations, the countries of the european union, or indeed anywhere else, have very little to learn from japan. in fact, i have argued that a budget-based system similar to those that exist in the uk countries ought to be introduced in japan. conclusion in many countries, economic evaluation is an increasingly influential aspect of health technology assessment, but in japan relatively little health economic evaluation has been undertaken. the main reason is that the current system of health care financing does not provide the appropriate incentives to stimulate a powerful interest in this type of research. many japanese are nevertheless satisfied that good health care indicators are being achieved at low cost. however, due to slower economic growth, a rapidly ageing population and the increasing development of new medical technologies, health care resources are likely to be subjected to ever increasing pressures. a more rational use of health care resources to maintain and improve the health of the japanese people is warranted. concerning these considerations, economic evaluation, by weighing the benefits of medical interventions against their costs, has an important role to play. acknowledgements i am grateful for comments from richard cookson, akinori hisashige, naoki ikegami, alan maynard, adrian towse and aki tsuchiya. references commonwealth of australia ( ) guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry on preparation of submissions to the pharmaceutical benefits advisory committee: including submissions involving economic analyses. australian government printing office, canberra. feldman, e. a. 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( ) personal communications, march, april, may, september. ikegami, n. and campbell, j. c. ( ) medical care in japan. new england journal of medicine : , - . ikegami, n. and campbell, j. c. ( ) nihon no iryou. chuokoronsha, tokyo. [in japanese] ikegami, n., mitchell, w. and penner-hahn, j. ( ) pharmaceutical prices, quantities and innovation: comparing japan with the us. pharmacoeconomics , - . kishimoto, a. ( ) the cost-effectiveness of lifesaving interventions in japan: do the variations found suggest irrational resource allocation? proceedings of the second international workshop on risk evaluation and management of chemicals, yokohama, january . ministry of health ( ) ontario guidelines for economic analysis of pharmaceutical products. ministry of health, toronto. moriga, m., ikeda, s. and reich, m. r. ( ) an analysis of pharmacoeconomic studies in japan. iryo keizai kenkyu , - . nice ( ) http://www.nice.nhs.uk norwegian medicines control authority ( ) norwegian guidelines for pharmacoeconomic analysis in connection with application for reimbursement. norwegian medicines control authority (slk), oslo. oliver, a. j., ikegami, n. and ikeda, s. ( ) japan’s aging population: implications for healthcare. pharmacoeconomics : , - . oliver, a. j., ikegami, n. and ikeda, s. ( ) effect of japanese government policy on hospital pharmaceutical profit levels. journal of health services research and policy : , - . oshima, a. ( ) a critical review of cancer screening programs in japan. international journal of technology assessment in health care : , - . sickness funds council ( ) dutch guidelines for pharmacoeconomic research. ziekenfondsraad, amstelveen. 	health economic evaluation in japan: a case study of 	one aspect of health technology assessment 	adam oliver( 	abstract 	key words 	economic evaluation, health technology assessment, japan, fe increasing operational and scientific efficiency in clinical trials comment increasing operational and scientific efficiency in clinical trials deirdre kelly , anna spreafico and lillian l. siu operational and scientific inefficiencies in clinical trials represent roadblocks that need to be identified and circumvented to advance drug development in oncology. the collaboration of key stakeholders to advance this agenda is crucial to accelerate clinical research and ultimately benefit patient care through the optimal allocation of time and resources. british journal of cancer ( ) : – ; https://doi.org/ . /s - - - main clinical trials represent one of the most important mechanisms to translate scientific discoveries into clinical knowledge, evaluate new diagnostic or therapeutic regimens, and advance practice beyond the standard of care. the financial cost for conducting pivotal clinical trials of novel oncology therapeutic drugs that formed the basis for the united states food and drug adminis- tration approval in – was estimated at . million (med- ian cost per trial). the time and efforts expended on clinical trials by trial participants and study teams are much more difficult to quantitate. these tangible and intangible costs rise as clinical trials become increasingly more complex and arduous, underscoring an urgent need to examine the ways in which their efficiency can be optimised. from concept development to protocol activation in , dilts et al. demonstrated that, based on phase studies conducted under the auspices of a cooperative group, it took > distinct processes and a median duration of days (range – days) to activate a trial from the initial concept. in , the united states national cancer institute (nci) established an operational efficiency working group (oewg) to identify the strategies to expedite trial activation, including setting target timelines for each step, promoting developmental processes to occur in parallel, and streamlining the contract and financial review procedures. the nci invested in transformative measures such as centralised infrastructure and biomarker support to enhance drug development processes. for instance, a central institutional review board initiative enabled a coordinated approach to human subject protection for national multicentre cancer treatment trials. currently, the oewg clock starts from the actual initial concept evaluation and stops at trial opening to enrolment, with absolute deadlines of – days for phase or concepts and days for phase concepts. the start-up timelines for industry-sponsored trials are less transparent to the public, but are closely scrutinised internally within pharmaceutical companies due to financial pressures such as those arising from the competitive environment and concerns regarding patent expiry. the urgency to speed up clinical trial processes has led to the launch of transcelerate biopharma in , a non-profit organisation that aims to address critical challenges and establish harmonisation and sharing of the data, with prime examples being a shared investigator database and a common investigator curriculum vitae template that is accepted by all of its biopharmaceutical members. enrolment stage multiple factors can lead to slow and inefficient enrolment of research subjects into clinical trials, such as unnecessarily strict eligibility criteria, burdensome trial requirement for visits and investigations beyond what would be appropriate for safety monitoring and endpoint evaluation, and the inflexibility of trial stipulations. recruitment of under-represented patient populations into clinical trials represents an important strategy to accelerate study completion, but outreach efforts to fulfil this mandate must be prioritised and sustained. in the contemporary artificial intelligence era, tools that can match potentially eligible subjects to clinical trials are emerging as a reality. some adaptations made during the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic may become permanent considerations to increase the clinical trial efficiency, while maintaining the principles of good clinical practice and pharmacovigilance. processes and procedures amenable to mod- ifications include the application of validated electronic signatures to replace wet-ink signatures, administration of parenteral trial treat- ments associated with low adverse event risks in local medical centres, and remote study monitoring. enrolment completion, follow-up and closure stage perhaps the least attention has been paid to increasing the clinical trial efficiency at the stage when enrolment has been completed. typically, after the recruitment activity has ceased, study participants are followed for a specific period of time for their vital status, and ultimately the final database lock and trial closure ensue. in a retrospective review of the early-phase clinical trials conducted by our princess margaret cancer centre phase trials programme from to , trials had patients in active survival follow-up. of these, ( %) trials mandated prolonged surveillance till death. of the patients enrolled in these trials, ( %) were in active survival follow-up with a median duration of . (range – ) months and had a median of follow- up encounters (range – ). these data demonstrate that clinical trial protocols often remain open for prolonged periods of time despite all patients having completed the study treatment, thus substantially increasing the administrative burden at the trial sites. one approach to enable appropriate tracking is to transfer all www.nature.com/bjc received: may revised: june accepted: june published online: july princess margaret cancer centre, university health network, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada correspondence: lillian l. siu (lillian.siu@uhn.ca) © cancer research uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:lillian.siu@uhn.ca patients to a single institution-based follow-up protocol, thus minimising the need to keep numerous study files active and repeatedly renewed. some pharmaceutical partners have adopted such a practice to establish “roll-over” protocols to consolidate the follow-up requirements of multiple studies that shared the same sponsor. lastly, the storage of clinical trial documents to fulfil regulatory requirements should be replaced by digitally scanned electronic formats. this conversion from paper into bytes would not only save time whenever access to archived files is needed in the future but also constitute an environmentally friendly solution. scientific efficiency in addition to the abovementioned ways to improve the operational efficiency of clinical trials, scientific strategies must be in place to maximise their chances of success while utilising the least patient resources and infrastructure. only the most promis- ing drug candidates should be selected for clinical testing, duplicative efforts without a strong justification (such as “me- too” trials) should be discouraged, and a high bar must be set for go-no-go decisions to launch large randomised registrational studies. innovative clinical trial designs such as adaptive studies have pre-specified allowances to alter their enrolment criteria, and thus offer unique advantages by adjusting dynamically to changes in the existent therapeutic landscape. biomarkers, especially those of sensitivity or resistance, are critical in accelerating clinical research by selecting patients who are most or least likely to benefit; yet, the current pace of biomarker discovery and validation is slow. to a large extent, the scientific inefficiency in clinical trials is attributable to the lack of data sharing of pre- competitive and post-competitive information, such as early nonclinical evaluations and individual patient-level clinical and biomarker results in published clinical trials, respectively. conclusion the optimisation of operational and scientific efficiency in clinical trials requires concerted efforts from investigators and study teams, sponsors, regulatory agencies, and other key stakeholders. the elimination of bottlenecks is critical to conserve resources and time, and, importantly, to accelerate progress in cancer research. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank xuan li, patrick marban, and all data coordinators at the princess margaret cancer centre phase clinical trials programme for their assistance with this paper. author contributions concept: l.l.s. data collection, data analysis and interpretation, paper preparation, and paper approval: d.k., a.s., and l.l.s. additional information ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. consent to publish not applicable. data availability not applicable. competing interests d.k.—travel grants: astrazeneca. a.s.—stock ownership or equity: none. employee, office, directorship: none. leadership in: none. consultancy/ advisory arrangements: merck (compensated), bristol-myers squibb (compensated), novartis (compensated), oncorus (compensated), janssen (compensated). speaker’s bureau for: none. grant/research support from (clinical trials for institution): novartis, bristol-myers squibb, symphogen astrazeneca/medimmune, merck, bayer, surface oncology, northern biologics, janssen oncology/johnson & johnson, roche, regeneron, alkermes, array biopharma, gsk. travel grants: none. intellectual property rights: none. l.l.s.—stock ownership or equity: agios (spouse). employee, office, directorship: none. leadership in: treadwell therapeutics (spouse=co-founder). consultancy/advisory arrangements: merck (compensated), pfizer (compensated), celgene (compensated), astrazeneca/medimmune (compensated), morphosys (compensated), roche (compensated), geneseeq (compensated), loxo (compen- sated), oncorus (compensated), symphogen (compensated), seattle genetics (compensated), gsk (compensated), voronoi (compensated), treadwell therapeutics (compensated), arvinas (compensated), tessa (compensated), navire (compensated), relay (compensated), rubius (compensated). speaker’s bureau for: none. grant/ research support (clinical trials for institution): novartis, bristol-myers squibb, pfizer, boerhinger-ingelheim, glaxosmithkline, roche/genentech, karyopharm, astraze- neca/medimmune, merck, celgene, astellas, bayer, abbvie, amgen, symphogen, intensity therapeutics, mirati, shattucks, avid. travel grants: none. intellectual property rights: none. funding information l.l.s. holds the bmo chair in precision cancer genomics. note this work is published under the standard license to publish agreement. after months the work will become freely available and the license terms will switch to a creative commons attribution . international (cc by . ). publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. references . hsiue, e. h., moore, t. j. & alexander, g. c. estimated costs of pivotal trials for u.s. food and drug administration-approved cancer drugs, – . clin. trials , – ( ). . dilts, d. m., sandler, a. b., baker, m., cheng, s. k., george, s. l., karas, k. s. et al. processes to activate phase iii clinical trials in a cooperative oncology group: the case of cancer and leukemia group b. j. clin. oncol. , – ( ). . national cancer institute: report of the operational efficiency working group of the clinical trials and translational research advisory committee. compressing the timeline for cancer clinical trial activation. oewg-report.pdf march . . . massett, h. a., mishkin, g., moscow, j. a., gravell, a., steketee, m., kruhm, m. et al. transforming the early drug development paradigm at the national cancer insti- tute: the formation of nci’s experimental therapeutics clinical trials network (etctn). clin. cancer res. , – ( ). . enhancing the diversity of clinical trial populations—eligibility criteria, enrollment practices, and trial designs guidance for industry. draft guidance. https://www. fda.gov/media/ /download. accessed june , . . woo, m. an ai boost for clinical trials. nature , s –s ( ). increasing operational and scientific efficiency in clinical trials d kelly et al. () ;,: https://www.fda.gov/media/ /download https://www.fda.gov/media/ /download 	increasing operational and scientific efficiency in clinical trials 	main 	from concept development to protocol activation 	enrolment stage 	enrolment completion, follow-up and closure stage 	scientific efficiency 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	author contributions 	additional information 	references em-gmjj .. guest editorial leadership in an age of #metoo: global perspectives introduction we begin by sharing a story that concerns a roundtable discussion on global perspectives on leadership, gender and #metoo, which took place at an international conference. one of the roundtable participants said she assumed #metoo was an american movement. from the nodding heads around the table, this seemed to be the general consensus. although it is true that the #metoo movement began in america, it was not the tweet from the actress alyssa milano that sparked this movement but rather the community-based activism of tarana burke that began over a decade earlier in . today, it is apparent that the effects of #metoo are felt across the globe. in this special issue, we share different narratives from diverse places and organizational spaces to demonstrate how the effects of #metoo are global, rather than confined to the usa. the original purpose of this special issue was to consider how leadership and the #metoo movement challenges organizational practices and policies in diverse cultural arenas. the lead editor originally became interested in this topic because of a research project she is engaged in. this research considers how well policies on gender-based violence translate into organizational change. in conversation with another editor, the idea of a collaboration on leadership and #metoo was initially developed. we invited the other two editors to join us and, collectively, develop our initial proposal to encourage a global conversation on leadership and #metoo, one cognizant of intersectional identity and cultural difference/s. thus the plan for this special issue was born, and we can think of nowhere better than this journal to embark on this international conversation. we had three main aims. the first aim was to provide new lenses with which to view the impact of #metoo on organizations. the second aim was to expand discourses beyond a narrow heteronormative focus and our final aim was to highlight the global impact of the #metoo movement. in what follows, we consider how well we achieved these aims alongside a discussion of some key components of the literature studies. in addition, we discuss how this special issue contributes to setting an agenda for future research in gender, management and leadership research that examines how organizations are responding to #metoo. before discussing each article in this si, we provide some background on some of the scholarly conversations around #metoo movement, as it relates to organizations, gender and leadership issues. we focus on three main strands: the global impact of the #metoo movement, the importance of collective action and leadership and organizational culture. global impact of the #metoo movement the #metoo movement is a global phenomenon that took social media by storm. the reaction to the initial tweet by the actress alyssa milano in was staggering; within h the hashtag had been used million times (fileborn and loney-howes, ), and people from countries soon became involved in the movement (gill and orgad, ). across the world, the #metoo movement has encouraged many people to share their stories, and also led to other social movements. in europe, french women adopted the hashtag #balancetonporc (“name your pig”), while, in italy, #quellavoltache proved a popular hashtag for sharing stories about sexual and gender-based violence (fileborn and loney- howes, ). in japan and south korea, hashtags #wetoo and #withyou have become popular (hasunuma and shin, ). furthermore, lin and yang ( ) argue that the guest editorial gender in management: an international journal vol. no. , pp. - © emerald publishing limited - doi . /gm- - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /gm- - - chinese #metoo movement has resulted in individual and collective levels of empowerment. the #metoo movement has also received significant coverage in the mainstream press (de benedictis et al., ). yet there is much variation in that coverage based on the different ideological platforms of the media. to date, most media coverage focuses on white female celebrities. this approach reaffirms the idea that some bodies are more worthy of attention than others (joyrich, ). from media stories, it can seem as if white, female and heterosexual bodies are the only intelligible subjects in conversations about sexual violence. our aim in this special issue is to make space for other narratives and to spark new conversations. collective leadership action through hashtag activism before #metoo became a social movement, hashtag activism had provided alternative fora for those who wanted to speak out against violence. for example, #notokay emerged during the us presidential election to voice concern at trump’s actions (jenkins and mazer ( ). during times of crisis, these hashtags are a form of resistance, enabling marginalized individuals to launch a discursive protest through social media platforms (mccauley, bonomi and leija, ). these platforms not only help people organize more efficiently but also allow for the rapid exchange of information beyond geographical borders (xiong et al., ). the #metoo movement has shown how individuals can work collectively to mobilize and motivate organizations to address gender-based violence. indeed, when organizations are slow to change, collective action may prove a powerful catalyst to shine a light on organizational inaction (gardiner et al., ; ozkazanc-pan, ). further, paying attention to the gaps between what organizations purport to do through mission statements, policies and protocols, and what is actually occurring in many organizational settings is important (ahmed, ). yet this global conversation is not only secular; #churchtoo hashtag saw christian women joining the conversation to highlight the silencing of clergy sexual abuse. in perhaps the most widely reported case, the founder and senior pastor of the mega church willow creek community church – a church that boasts a congregation of , people – bill hybels was accused by several women of long-standing sexual harassment and abuse. church leaders refused to believe the accusers, eventually relenting owing to public pressure. leadership, #metoo and organizational cultures although much of the scholarship on the collective action underpinning the #metoo movement has been positive, some scholars question why it took until for many societies to turn their attention to issues surrounding gender-based violence, given its prevalence in many cultures and workplaces (gibson et al., ). and despite the global nature of the #metoo movement, in organizational cultures, there is often a resistance to address systemic issues arising from gender-based violence (mackinnon and mitra, ). until recently, many survivor/victims suffered in silence because in most workplaces, there is a lack of organizational will to deal with these issues. this triggered further hashtag activism with #silenceisnotspiritual, a global movement started by women clergy and leaders in evangelical churches, in recognition of intersections of gender, economic status and power differentials in which clergy sexual abuse takes place – and how that silences victims and observers alike. gm , in many organizations, fernando and prasad ( ) contend that employee silence regarding gender-based violence is due to acquiescence by some senior managers and leaders. the overall effect of this silence is the maintenance of the status quo around violence in the workplace. some female employees reported feeling unable to fight the system if their issue was perceived as commonplace (fernando and prasad, ). moreover, penalties for self-reporting allegations of sexual harassment are commonplace in some countries (hart, ). in reviewing us national survey data, hart ( ) also observes organizational bias against those who self-report. in short, negative consequences can affect those employees who had the courage to speak out about instances of gender-based violence and can lead to ostracism in the workplace (brown and battle, ). experiencing negative co-worker reaction can have a detrimental effect on job performance, causing further isolation (hamilton, park, carsey, and martinez, ). to counteract workplace ostracism, brown and battle ( ) urged employers to create targeted programming to challenge negative behaviors. such programming must acknowledge how people of color, persons with disabilities or gender minorities may be more likely to experience harassment in the workplace. moreover, there is a need to move beyond a gender binary in workplace discussions of what constitutes harassment (flores, ). employers must be careful of placing marginalized folk in a singular category by acknowledging the complex nature of lived experience. although some forms of harassment may not meet legal definitions of assault, this does not mean they are not worthy of leaders’ attention (flores, ). in short, when senior leaders fail to address various forms of workplace harassment, this makes organizational change unlikely. leaders interested in effective organizational change need to consider systemic workplace problems and commit to addressing structural injustices. one systematic problem in many workplaces is toxic masculinity. ely and kimmel ( ) maintain that organizational practices that shore up a toxic form of masculinity are damaging not only to workers but also have a negative impact on organizational outcomes. wherever masculinity contest cultures flourish then so, too, does toxic leadership. any leader who wants to use the #metoo movement as a catalyst for changing workplace culture must therefore be prepared to challenge business as usual. this means being willing to offer employees training that teaches them to have difficult conversations. leaders interested in propelling cultural change need to be willing to listen and learn so as to understand which organizational norms are detracting from change (ely and kimmel, ) and work to address structural power inequities that negatively affect gender-based violence and other forms of workplace harassment. leaders have the power to create and sustain the conditions in which people work in every organizational type, a power that palmer ( ) refers to as either illuminating with light or casting hellish shadows. in the case of gender-based violence and harassment, leaders must use their power for good rather than for evil. many of the famous cases such as bill hybels, harvey weinstein and bill cosby point to an abuse of power by the individual perpetrators and a failure to take responsibility by the bystanders and those who enabled their misconduct. the individual actions of abuse of power, failure to assume responsibility and misplaced loyalties intersect with the organizational cultures and structures that silence bystanders. such cultures and structures must be deconstructed, shining a light on their pathological perpetuation of abuse with more just alternatives constructed in their place. creating effective institutional procedures to deal with structural injustice means taking the complexities of intersectional identity into account. yet, while many scholars and practitioners recognize gender-based violence as a recognized problem in institutions, there is still widespread institutional indifference to solving this issue (mackinnon and mitra, guest editorial ). in short, despite having a plethora of policies meant to address harassment, there is little cultural change toward lessening its severity or frequency. ahmed’s ( ) notion of nonperformatives is relevant here. that is, workplace policies that purport to be about establishing safe spaces are often nonperformative in the sense that the institutional sexism and racism that underpins many organizations remains the same. finally, ensuring due process is fundamental to the creation of procedures that work to eliminate all forms of harassment, but this requires organizational leaders to alter their approach to gender-based violence. intervention from bystanders is one important aspect of organizational reform (monroe, ), but there is much more work still to be done, as the articles in this special issue show. leadership in an age of #me too: global perspectives turning to the special issue, we are impressed by the breadth and depth of the four articles that follow. the articles selected provide new lenses from which to think about the concept of #metoo in the workplace and beyond, expanding the discourse in diverse ways: across multiple national, gender, sexual, professional and embodied contexts. this diversity was important to us, as we wanted to develop a special issue that was not only international but also intersectional in scope. we are delighted that the countries represented (canada, el salvador, spain and the usa) offer such different socio-cultural and organizational perspectives. in terms of gender and sexuality, there is new research here. different kinds of organizational perspectives on leadership and #metoo are also present. readers can learn about the complexities of gender in football organizations in spain through to problems with sexual violence complaints in higher institutions. the first paper is lisa maniero’s “workplace romance versus sexual harassment: a call to action regarding sexual hubris and sexploitation in consensual workplace romances.” this conceptual paper tackles the complex issue of sexual relationships, hierarchy and power in organizations, painting a familiar landscape of the workplace fraught with power imbalances. these power imbalances lead to abuses of power and can result in general acceptance of sexual harassment as an organizational norm. maniero argues that, in some cases, passive leadership can create toxic masculinist cultures. advocating for greater transparency, less concern about privacy and enforcement of policies through proactive leadership, the author provides some valuable recommendations on how to develop meaningful workplace romance policies. the issue of toxic masculinity is sticky in many workplaces; changing the workplace culture may prove particularly challenging in organizations where there are few women in senior leadership positions. our second article examines some of the gender imbalances in leadership in spanish football organizations while also exploring how the effects of #metoo in this arena. in “gender and the #metoo effect in professional football organizations: an exploratory, qualitative approach,” a team of authors from spain, henriettte klavenes, alicia orea-giner, fernando garcía-muiña and laura fuentes-moraleda consider this question by examining experiences and perceptions of managers, male and female, in spanish football organizations. through their use of in-depth interviews with men and women in senior organizational positions, the impact of #metoo on gender equality issues is explored. many of the well-known issues associated with gendered organizations are described including the ill effects of the “ideal leader” prototype as male, white and old. gender bias in hiring decisions is evident as is the “queen bee” effect (mavin, ). what is illuminated is a toxic, gm , masculinist culture where sexual harassment is an accepted norm. the football industry in spain appears to remain unchanged, as yet, by the #metoo movement. the third article, “#metoo and lgbtqþ salvadorians: social and leadership challenges,” uses the lens of the global #metoo movement to explore some of the sociocultural, organizational and leadership issues that prevent gender and sexual minority people in el salvador from being full participants in society. using qualitative techniques, randall thompson and sofia figueroa conducted interviews with respondents which illustrate how movements such as #metoo parallels and contrasts with the lived experiences of lgbtqþ salvadorians. even though many participants were not aware of #metoo when asked, thompson and figueroa found that many leadership lessons overlap with both the struggle for queer salvadorian acceptance and efforts to combat sexual assault: confronting organizational patriarchy; mobilizing stakeholders and building community, particularly online; and advocating for just, inclusive workplaces. they use both the #metoo movement and their respondents’ stories to advocate for a new social imaginary that permits multiple social actors to be seen, be heard and fully participate in organizations. the final article takes a new approach to thinking about #metoo, that of peace- building. in “perils of conversation: #metoo and opportunities for peace-building,” nancy ross and sue bookchin explore how a community might use a holistic leadership approach to promote healing and restore justice. their case study, set in rural canada, explores what happened when a group of teenage boys distributed nude photographs of female classmates without the girls’ knowledge or consent, and how community members begin online, anonymous and damaging attacks of all parties. by using peace- building strategies, such as fostering conversation, avoiding blame, giving voice and educating one other, these authors contend that the community simultaneously could give space for the targets of harassment to heal while changing social conditions to foster a culture of sexual consent. moving forward so what are some of the key messages for leaders and managers in the workplace? first, policies alone are insufficient; we need leaders to show courage in addressing ongoing institutional bias in racism and sexism. it is no longer enough to deal with the problem through nondisclosure agreements or by talking about “bad apples.” research shows that there are systematic organizational problems that need to be rectified if organizational change is to occur. there is no quick fix; rather, what we need are leaders and managers who are prepared to work on effective change strategies over the long term. furthermore, because this problem is so intractable in many workplaces across the globe, each and every one of us needs to be willing not only to speak out but also to challenge systematic injustices. an additional “take away” from our special issue’s global/intersectional ethos is that leaders should consider the connections between gender-based violence and organizational change in a global context and thus encouraging more consideration of diverse stakeholders. greater interrogation is needed regarding problems with organizational structure and culture to ensure diverse, disadvantaged and global voices are included in conversations, solution construction and coalition building whenever and wherever appropriate. finally, the editors would like to thank all the reviewers and the editor, adelina broadbridge, for her assistance in guiding us through the process. the lead editor would guest editorial also like to thank brittany cox for her research assistance. finally, we thank all those brave individuals who have the courage to step forward and speak out about organizational injustices. in exposing institutional wrongdoing, wherever and whenever it occurs; you are exhibiting leadership-in-action. rita gardiner department of women’s studies, university of western ontario, london, canada wendy fox kirk department of business administration and marketing, weber state university, ogden, utah, usa leigh fine honors program, university of connecticut, hartford, connecticut, usa, and faith ngunjiri department of business, concordia college moorhead, moorhead, minnesota, usa references ahmed, s. ( ), on being included, racism and diversity in institutional life, duke university press, durham, nc and london. ahmed, s. ( ), living a feminist life, duke university press, durham, nc and london. brown, s.e.v. and battle, j.e. ( ), “ostracizing targets of workplace sexual harassment before and after the #metoo movement”, equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal, vol. no. , pp. - . de benedictis, s., orgad, s. and rottenberg, c. ( ), “#metoo, popular feminism and the news: a content analysis of uk newspaper coverage”, european journal of cultural studies, vol. nos / , pp. - . ely, r. and kimmel, m. ( ), “thoughts on the workplace as a masculinity contest”, journal of social issues, vol. no. , pp. - . fernando, d. and prasad, a. ( ), “sex-based harassment and organizational silencing: how women are led to reluctant acquiescence in academia”, human relations, vol. no. , pp. - . fileborn, b. and loney-howes, r. ( ), #metoo and the politics of social change, palgrave macmillan, london and new york, ny. gardiner, r.a., shockness, m., almquist, j.m. and finn, h. ( ), “politics versus policies: fourth wave feminist critiques of higher education’s response to sexual violence”, journal of women and gender in higher education, vol. no. , pp. - . gibson, c., davenport, s., fowler, t., harris, c.b., prudhomme, m., whiting, s. and simmons-horton, s. ( ), “understanding the ‘me too’ movement’s timing”, humanity and society, vol. no. , pp. - . gill, r. and orgad, s. ( ), “the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo”, sexualities, vol. no. , pp. - . hart, c.g. ( ), “the penalties for self-reporting sexual harassment”, gender and society, vol. no. , pp. - . hasunuma, l. and shin, k.y. ( ), “#metoo in japan and south korea: #wetoo, #withyou”, journal of women, politics and policy, vol. no. , pp. - . jenkins, a.s. and mazer, j.p. ( ), “#notokay: stories of sexual assault in the midst of the us presidential election”, qualitative research reports in communication, vol. no. , pp. - . gm , joyrich, l. ( ), “affronting stardom/confronting sexual violence”, camera obscura, vol. no. , p. . lin, z. and yang, l. ( ), “individual and collective empowerment: women’s voices in the #metoo movement in china”, asian journal of women’s studies, vol. no. , pp. - . mackinnon, c.a. and mitra, d. ( ), “ask a feminist: sexual harassment in the age of #metoo”, signs: journal of women in culture and society, vol. no. , pp. - . monroe, k.r. ( ), “ending sexual harassment: protecting the progress of #metoo”, journal of women, politics and policy, vol. no. , pp. - . ozkazanc-pan, b. ( ), “on agency and empowerment in a #metoo world”, gender, work and organization, vol. no. , pp. - . palmer, p.j. ( ), let your life speak: listening for the voice of vocation, jossey-bass, san francisco. xiong, y., cho, m. and boatwright, b. ( ), “hashtag activism and message frames among social movement organizations: semantic network analysis and thematic analysis of twitter during the #metoo movement”, public relations review, vol. no. , pp. - . further reading #silenceisnotspiritual ( ), “about us”, available at: https://silenceisnotspiritual.org/about-us/ andrews, b. ( ), “the #churchtoo movement just scored a major victory for victims of sexual abuse”, available at: www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/ / /the-churchtoo-movement-just-scored-a- historic-victory-for-victims-of-sexual-abuse-willowcreek-community-church-bill-hybels rottenberg, c. ( ), “#metoo and the prospects of political change”, soundings, vol. no. , pp. - . wilder, c. ( ), “revelation and testimony in the age of #metoo and #churchtoo”, word and world, vol. no. , pp. - . about the guest editors rita gardiner is an assistant professor, critical policy, equity and leadership studies, in the faculty of education at western university. rita has published extensively on diverse topics such as authentic leadership, organizational ethics and questions of gender. publications include gender, authenticity and leadership: thinking with arendt (palgrave macmillan, ), and articles in business ethics quarterly, leadership, organization studies and gender, work and organization. currently, she is working on a sshrc-funded project that examines the implementation of gender- based violence policies in ontario universities and a monograph, with dr katy fulfer, on questions of home and belonging in the work of hannah arendt. wendy fox kirk is an assistant professor and department chair for business administration and marketing in the goddard school of business and economics. her leadership research considers gender, power and identity aiming to address issues of disadvantage with a focus on women’s careers and the gendered organization. her phd from the university of birmingham (uk) examined the career journeys of senior women in elite the uk universities, and she was selected as the outstanding emerging scholar by ila’s women’s leadership affinity group. publications include articles in journal of strategic management studies and advances in developing human resources, and book chapters in madsen, s. r. (ed.) ( ), handbook of research on gender and leadership (edward elgar) and in storberg walker, j. and haber curran, p. ( ). theorizing women and leadership: new insights and contributions from multiple perspectives (iap). she is also a consulting editor for the journal of education for business. wendy fox kirk is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: wendyfoxkirk@weber.edu leigh fine is an assistant director for the honors program at the university of connecticut. his research interests include queer theory, social construction, leadership pedagogy, assessment of leadership programs, higher education organizations and intersections of gender and sexual identity. guest editorial https://silenceisnotspiritual.org/about-us/ http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/ / /the-churchtoo-movement-just-scored-a-historic-victory-for-victims-of-sexual-abuse-willowcreek-community-church-bill-hybels http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/ / /the-churchtoo-movement-just-scored-a-historic-victory-for-victims-of-sexual-abuse-willowcreek-community-church-bill-hybels mailto:wendyfoxkirk@weber.edu he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses related to multicultural leadership, ethics in leadership, peer leader development and foundations of leadership. faith ngunjiri is a director, lorentzsen center for faith and work, and an associate professor, ethics and leadership at concordia college, minnesota. her research interests include women and leadership, spirituality in organizations and spiritual leadership. she is particularly interested in storying the lives of black women leaders at the intersections of their gender, race, ethnicity, national origins and other identities. she served as series co-editor of the seven volume book series women and leadership: research, theory and practice, with susan madsen and karen longman, for the international leadership association. gm , 	outline placeholder 	leadership in an age of #metoo: global perspectives 	introduction 	global impact of the #metoo movement 	collective leadership action through hashtag activism 	leadership, #metoo and organizational cultures 	leadership in an age of #me too: global perspectives 	moving forward 	references microsoft word - accepted_manu_tchs_ _ .r _final young people’s sexual readiness: insights gained from comparing a researchers’ and youth advisory group’s interpretation templeton, m., lohan, m., kelly, c., & lundy, l. ( ). young people’s sexual readiness: insights gained from comparing a researchers’ and youth advisory group’s interpretation. culture, health & sexuality. https://doi.org/ . / . . published in: culture, health & sexuality document version: peer reviewed version queen's university belfast - research portal: link to publication record in queen's university belfast research portal publisher rights © informa uk limited trading as taylor & francis. this work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the queen's university belfast research portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the research portal is queen's institutional repository that provides access to queen's research output. every effort has been made to ensure that content in the research portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable uk laws. if you discover content in the research portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact openaccess@qub.ac.uk. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/young-peoples-sexual-readiness-insights-gained-from-comparing-a-researchers-and-youth-advisory-groups-interpretation( - - - - ce e c ce).html accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . young people’s sexual readiness: insights gained from comparing a researchers’ and  youth advisory group’s interpretation  michelle templeton*a, maria lohana, carmel kellya, laura lundyb  school of nursing and midwifery, queen’s university, belfast, northern irelanda; school  of  social  sciences,  education  and  social  work,  queen’s  university,  belfast,  northern  irelandb  *corresponding author: michelle templeton     email: mtempleton @qub.ac.uk      abstract    this  study  explored  young  people’s  understandings  of  sexual‐readiness  and  what  influenced  their  decision  to  initiate  first  sex.  in‐depth  interviews  conducted  with    heterosexual young people aged  ‐  years attending sexual health clinics in northern  ireland,  were  analysed  using  a  combined  approach.  this  included  comparing  researchers’ and a youth advisory group’s interpretations of the same data. thematic  analysis  was  used  to  enable  the  comparison  and  to  draw  out  insights  across  both  interpretations. three themes emerged from each analysis that aligned closely with one  another: self/socio‐cultural  influences; people/peer influences; and mental/intimate  contact.  one  additional  theme:  namely,  that  of  adult  control,  emerged  from  the  researchers’ understanding alone. results suggest that young people actively deliberate  about sex as inevitable and find it difficult to resist the peer and social influences that  regulate their lives; many initiate sex ‘to‐get‐it‐over‐with’. gender ideologies influence  the context in which first sex occurs, expectations, motivations and relationship status.  sexual‐readiness was informed by whether the experience was ‘good, not so good or  bad’. findings highlight the need for the health, law and education sectors to provide  young people with relevant information that reflects the reality of first sex and its links  to  gender  equality,  and  related  concepts  such  as  respect,  rights,  responsibility  and  resilience, in everyday life.    keywords: young people, sexual readiness; sexual competence; gender inequality;  shared perceptions    accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . introduction  globally, young people’s sexual behaviours are considered risky and problematic due to  the  moral,  social,  medical  and  legal  consequences  of  being  unprepared  for  sexual  relations, e.g., early age of sexual debut, casual partners, unintended pregnancy and  sexually  transmitted  infections  (stis)  (world  health  organization  regional  office for  europe  ;  ). these outcomes are key health indicators in the global strategy for  women’s,  children’s  and  young  people’s  health  ( ‐ )  and  key  priorities  for  young people’s health promotion policies and programmes (wellings et al.  ; dick  and ferguson  ; ingham and hirst  ; inchley et al.  ; public health england  ). research evidence shows that early sexual debut (i.e. before the age of consent  ‐   years in uk) is more likely to be unprotected, the result of peer pressure or coercion,  and  associated  with  regret.  this  is  because  young  people  lack  the  competence  to  negotiate safety within their sexual relationships (wellings et al.  ; dixon‐mueller  ;  hawes,  wellings  and  stephenson  ;  templeton  et  al.  ).  it  is  also  recognised that unhealthy sexual behaviours developed early in life may continue to  impact  on  relationships,  opportunities,  and  health  and  well‐being  into  adulthood  (hawes,  wellings  and  stephenson  ;  templeton  et  al.  ;  wight  et  al.  ;  mercer et al.  ).   irrespective of age, a number of authors (hawes, wellings and stephenson  ;  templeton et al.  ; hirst  ; public health england  ; buston and wight  )  report  that  social  influences  also  affect  young  people’s  sexual  competence  and  likelihood  of  engaging  in  risky  behaviours.  they  stress  the  need  to  consider  competencies  related  to  relationships  and  the  circumstances  in  which  sex  usually  occurs, e.g., communication with sexual partners, particularly when under the influence  of alcohol/drugs. therefore, a sole focus on sexual competence as defined by age alone  or even the four factors presented in the wellings et al. ( ) model to assess the  appropriateness  of  timing  of  sexual  debut:  namely,  ‘absence  of  duress  and  regret,  autonomy of decision, and use of a reliable method of contraception’ ( ), is limited.   the world health organization (who  ) suggests a broader view of what  should  constitute  competent  sexual  relationships  which  is  consensual,  positive,  empowering experiences based on healthy and safe sexual decisions and practices that  are free from violence, grooming and coercion. yet despite the risks associated with  early sexual debut, limited attention has been paid to exploring young people’s own  perspectives on their readiness for sexual relations, and how they deliberate on the  benefits and risks of sex. thus, a critical perspective is missing, stressing the need to  include  their  voices  (templeton  et  al.  ;  hirst  ).  this  paper  describes  the  inclusion of youth voices in a study about their sexual readiness, but crucially, by not  only collecting data from them, but also supporting them to analyse the data and put  forward their own interpretation of the meanings inherent within it.       methods    participants and procedures    this study sought to engage with these concerns. it focused on heterosexual first sex  and  exploring  gender  relations  between  young  men  and  women,  as  well  as  gender  relations between women and men more generally.  it benefited from the input of a  accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . young people’s advisory group (ypag; n= ,   young women (f),   young men (m),  aged  ‐  years) that worked alongside the researchers from the outset. members of  the group were recruited via two local children’s networks that operate across northern  ireland. the networks forwarded a recruitment call, which included a link to a text‐based  information sheet and a short informational video about the project, to their member  organisations. these included a diverse range (in terms of social class, religion, sex) of  young people from all over northern ireland to join projects and have their voices heard  on  issues  that  affect  them.  a  core  group  of  six  members  attended  the  majority  of  meetings and activities throughout. at each stage, the group received capacity‐building  support to prepare and support them to engage effectively with the research activities.  they  designed  youth‐friendly  ethical  procedures  and  research  documents  and  suggested specific prompts to include in the interview schedule for the researcher to  use when interviewing   heterosexual participants for the substantive phase of the  study.  the  ypag  also  carried  out  an  independent  analysis  of  the  data,   which  was  compared  with  the  researchers’  analysis  to  inform  the  overall  interpretation  and  findings.  the researcher gathered data during one‐to‐one interviews with   male and    female  young  people  who  presented  at  three  national  health  service  sexual  health  clinics within one health trust in northern ireland. table   shows the age and sex of the  research participants. participants were asked if they would like to share their mobile  phone number to allow the researcher to contact them   hours post‐interview. this  strategy  was  informed by  a  suggestion  from  the  advisory  group  and  was  deemed  a  youth‐friendly and ethical way to engage with participants. it also facilitated ‘checking‐ back’  with  them  to  ensure  they  were  in  good  spirits  and  reconfirm  their  consent/withdrawal wishes after sharing their stories. ethics approval for the study was  obtained from the office for research ethics committee’s (ni) (ref:  /ni/ ).     [table   here]    eligible participants were sexually active  – ‐year olds. interviews of  ‐   minutes duration that took place in the clinics over four months were audio‐recorded  with  permission  and  transcribed  verbatim.  interview  content  focused  on  the  young  people’s retrospective stories around the circumstances of first sex, e.g., age at first sex,  whether  contraception  was  used,  where  it  took  place,  with  whom,  whether  it  was  planned etc. demographic data were collected from participants during the initial stages  of interviews to construct a proxy social status measure  relevant to access to resources  such as health services, education and work opportunities (oakes and rossi  ). using  this  measure,    participants  were  deemed  to  be  working  class  (wc);  four,  upper  working  class  (uwc);  and  six,  middle  class  (mc).  see  table    for  a  summary  of  participants responses.     [table   here]     see online supplemental material for details of the process by which the ypag went about its  work.   see online supplemental material for details of this measure. accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . data analysis    thematic analysis was used by both researchers and young people to make sense of the  data, and to compare perspectives (braun and clarke  ). the research team had  experience conducting and analysing qualitative research in relation to sexual health  and  wellbeing.  both  analyses  progressed  through  three  stages:  from  iterative  descriptive review (inductive coding), searching for symbolic meaning (categorising), to  deeper  reflection  and  conceptual  understanding  (themes).  during  the  researchers’  analysis, transcripts were independently coded by mt and checked by ck. discrepancies  were resolved through discussion with the other team members (ml & ll).   the ypag (n= ,  f and  m) analysis was conducted during a one‐day workshop  facilitated by mt who was there primarily to take notes and document how the group  interpreted the data. the group was provided with a selection of individual quotations  (   data  units)  which  ranged  from  a  few  words  to  more  sizeable  chunks  of  text,  approximately   per transcript. their preferred method was to read extracts aloud,  discuss, and agree on coding as a group. during the process, the group was encouraged  to share their thoughts and experiences. when   data units had been analysed in this  way, the group chose to stop as no new codes were emerging, and members were  beginning to discuss patterns and relationships in the data. details of the procedure  used are available from the first author on request. occasionally initial coding caused  disagreement among the group, which was resolved by members stating their case for  a code, discussing it as a group and agreeing how to categorise.     results      for  participants  in  the  study,  first  sex  typically  happened  at  a  house  party  with  alcohol/drugs available or at a free‐house when young people had no adult supervision.  twelve participants reported experiencing sexual debut before the legal age of consent  ( f,  m) with young men reporting more than young women, to be under the influence  of alcohol/drugs ( f,  m), having unprotected first sex ( f,  m) and stating that ‘it just  happened’ ( f,  m) (table  ). relationship context at first sex ranged from a one‐night  stand for half of the participants ( f,  m), to one young woman who had been with her  boyfriend for one year before they had sex. those who planned their first sex tended to  be in established relationships ( f,  m). of these, all of the young women claimed they  were in love while only one male participant spoke of love for his current girlfriend and  interest in having a family ( f,  m).  a number of participants ( f,  m) reported regretting their first sex, especially if  it took place on a one night stand with a friend. the majority of young women who  experienced sexual debut in this way regretted their first time (  out of  ), as did two of  the young men. these participants tended to report feeling pressurised by their peers  to have sex. only two young men and two young women had first sex with someone  they had just met, which for one young woman led to a two‐year relationship, and only  one  young  woman  was  still  with  her  first  sexual  partner.  the  remainder  of  the  participants continued to have sex after their first time but with other partners. one  accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . young  woman  ( .  f ),  who  was  currently  living  in  a  secure  unit,  stated  that  her  intention had been to get pregnant when she had first sex, as friends around her were  getting pregnant and she felt the odd one out.   elements of the two thematic maps are presented in figure  , which details how  the researchers analysed the data and how the youth advisory group made sense of it.   it  is  clear  when  comparing  both  that  the  researchers’  analysis  incorporated  more  multiple layers of initial coding owing to a longer deeper involvement in data collection,  transcription and analysis and working with complete transcripts. however, the remit of  the advisory group was not to become so involved in data collection but to provide an  interpretation of what was going on from their perspective. nonetheless, both analyses  generated three similar themes that aligned well. the advisory group theme named  ‘mental’  mapped  closely  to  the  researchers’  theme ‘intimate  contact’.  the  advisory  group theme ‘people’ mapped onto the researchers’ theme ‘peer influence’, and their  theme  ‘self’,  mapped  on  to  the  researchers’  theme  ‘sociocultural  influences’.  the  notable difference in analysis was an additional theme ‐ ‘adult control’ ‐  which emerged  from the researchers’ analysis but was completely absent from that of the advisory  group.     [figure   here]  mental – intimate contact  in this theme, the researchers’ and advisory group interpretations were similar, as both  focused  on  age  and  understandings  of  consent,  difficulties  managing  intimate  relationships, and whether first sex was regretted. both interpretations suggested that  young men understood consent as permission to transition to sex, cared little about the  law, especially when influenced by alcohol/drugs, and favoured reducing the age of  consent to reflect their current practices.     i think it should be lowered (age of consent) because i think society is changing  but the law isn’t if you get me, cause there’s more and more young people having  sex now and it’s still   like. i know there’s a part where, no you’re not having  sex you’re too young, but it’s like you know maybe even a year off ( . m ).    young women by contrast, understood the age of consent as providing protection from  abuse and reputational worries and suggested raising it.    you’re still just making a name for yourself because some girls nowadays just  think oh well, i can do it now cause i’m  , but they’re not thinking about what  people are saying about them behind their backs, and what people think of them,  or even you know what that fella is going to think of them ( . f ).   coding denotes participant number, sex and age, e.g.,  .f  signifies participant   who was  a   year‐old young woman. table   provides additional information about each  participant.   additional details of the researchers’ and the ypag’s thematic maps are available in online  supplemental information. accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . .   in both interpretations, young men sought to avoid relationships, preferred casual  sex  and  looked  for  signals  that  indicated  young  women’s  desire.  however,  female  participants described this as pester‐power and associated it with disloyalty and lying to  get sex. young women claimed that this made it difficult for them to gain commitment  and emotional connection, which affected their feelings of self‐worth after sex.    there was a fella in school texting me at the time and he kept on asking me to come  down to his house and i wouldn’t go cause i knew what it was going to be, and i  didn’t want to do it at that time ( .f ).    it was clear that the majority of young men were more concerned about their sexual  performance and first sex provided a sense of achievement.     i actually remember going into the bathroom after, i was like ‘i did it’ laughing at  myself in the mirror and celebrating about it, which is so stupid looking back...it was  just a big deal for kids to do it ( . m ).     young  women,  however,  were  emotional  and  some  were  tearful  afterwards  for  having  chosen  the  wrong  partner  or  hoping  for  an  emotional  connection  that  was  missing.     oh, i felt like shit. i felt awful. i just cried for   days. i felt awful. i just felt really low.  i don’t know, i can’t describe it, i just felt really really low…. a couple of months later  my sister was talking to me and told me about it and she said she was exactly the  same too. she just cried ‘cause she did it in exactly the same circumstances as me.  like, it was a mistake ( . f ).     most young men did not wish to deal with young women’s emotions, did not care,  or valued sex as more important. however, the few young men who had experienced  sexual debut with a friend reported more concern for their partner and their wellbeing  before and after they had sex.  people ‐ peer influences  in  this  theme,  the  researchers  and  advisory  group  interpretations  focused  on  the  influence of peer pressure and its relationship to risky sexual behaviours, drugs, alcohol,  popularity, status and respect. most of the young women claimed they felt pressure to  pursue men who showed an interest  in them. when not  in a relationship, they felt  undesirable and lonely, were laughed at by friends, and envied those with boyfriends.   starting a sexual relationship required them to lose their female friends and move  to their boyfriend’s friendship group, which created reputation rumours and conflict. by  giving up their female friends in favour of spending time with their boyfriend and his  friends, they isolated themselves and risked losing potentially supportive female social  networks. masculine norms within male peer groups focused on casual sex, oblivious to  health risks, and young men found it easier to maintain their peer friendships when  beginning sexual relationships.     accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . i think at the time i was feeling pressurised into it by my friends because i was turning   and everyone was like just hurry up and get it over and done with ( . f ).     if you’re running about single everyone’s going, aye you’re forever alone, and like  just take the piss out of you ( . f ).     the majority of participants in the study went to local bars and nightclubs and held  house  parties  when  unsupervised.    ‘party‐sex’,  characterised  by  consuming  lots  of  alcohol and/or drugs, was distinct from ‘romantic‐sex’. sexist attitudes were evident in  how young men spoke about and treated women, while male banter, myths, mocking  and  lying  about  sexual  prowess  regulated  and  enforced  heteronormative  masculine  ideals. a few young men claimed this was just ‘guy talk’ that meant no harm, without  considering the impact on their female partners.     from a lad’s point of view, see from a kids’ point of view, like adults kind of think it’s  like a whole kinda love thing, but see for kids now‐a‐days like teenagers will have sex  with anyone, like anyone who comes along ( . m ).    men need to know how to respect women when they’re having sex, some do some  don’t, they just really discriminate, but like it’s not like against, like women are bad,  but it’s like as a joke ( . m ).  self – sociocultural influences  in this theme, both interpretations focused on the difficulty young people experience  negotiating the conflicting messages they receive and the reality of sex. all participants  had access to information about sex through pornography on their mobile phones and  computers but had less access to formal structures such as good, relevant health and  education  advice.  the  majority  had  received  some  sex  education  while  at  school,  typically a one‐off talk at the age of  , which in their view came too late and did not  address relationship issues like negotiating consent and safe sex.     we got like very brief and pointless talk, like we were getting a talk in  th year (   years) but it was the same one the  st years (  years) were getting and it wasn’t  very detailed, and you know it was pointless because the principal didn’t want it too  detailed, or something like that, so it was useless ( . m ).    all  participants  had  access  to  contraception,  which  they  associated  with  preventing  pregnancy rather than preventing the spread of stis. most said that having to go to  doctor’s  surgeries  and  clinics  to  get  prescriptions  was  off‐putting  and  affected  the  regularity and frequency of their contraception use.   social media was available and accessed by all participants who said that  it was  ‘flooded’ with pornographic information. young men viewed porn as a useful learning  tool but through experience, soon discovered that porn depicted a distorted reality of  sex. the majority of young women disliked pornography and thought it influenced how  men view sex and how they treat women.     accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . it’s good yeah (pornography). i would search it up like i suppose for performance to  pick up a few tips but yeah that’s about it. well it helps me ( . m ).    i don’t like it at all, it’s just like dirty and disgusting. i don’t think people should be  watching it…the way like men grab them and wee fellas are obviously thinking that’s  ok and i’ll go home and slap my girlfriend. ( . f ).    most of the young men said that young women presented themselves on social  media as ‘fake’ and ‘sexually available’. young women viewed this as harassment and  felt victimised on social media by young men. they expressed anger at being compared  to unrealistic beauty standards and sought to challenge men’s’ views.     boys put up pictures of girls and go ohh she’s nice looking and all, and you’re like  nobody looks like that. they expect girls to be like that and it’s just not like that  ( . f ).  adult control  with respect to this theme, the researchers clustered information that described the  effect of adults on young people’s lives. the youth advisory group however, did not  recognise  adult  involvement  in  their  understandings  at  all.  in  the  researchers’  interpretation, adults, either directly or indirectly, exposed young people to risk through  lack of guidance or withholding knowledge needed to help them make positive, healthy  choices. this included restricting information on sexual consent legislation and quality  sex education, and flaunting licensing laws, which young people easily circumvented.    sometimes you have fake id (identification) but in [this town] they don’t really  care they’re really bad about  it  ‘cause i  look about   and i get  in [to clubs  underage] ( . f ).      while advisory group members were aware of risky behaviours, poor quality sex  education, age in/appropriate sexual relations and paedophilia, and had concerns about  the sexualisation of younger children via social media and pornography, during their  analysis  of  the  data,  they  did  not  reference  adults’  influence  or  accountability  in  connection with these issues.   insights gained from comparative analysis  the  youth  advisory  group’s  interpretation  of  the  data  focused  much  less  on  adult  accountability  in  relation  to  law,  health,  safety  and  education,  which  was  more  dominant  in  the  researchers’  interpretation.  both  analyses,  however,  highlighted  gender differences inherent in the experience of first sex that emphasised how young  men avoided criticism, punishment or injury to reputation for initiating sex, and how  young women were in general, better prepared to invest in and manage relationships.  yet, in the advisory group analysis, there was greater acceptance of gender inequality  than in the researchers’ interpretation.   importantly, the advisory group distinguished a way to assess sexual readiness  which was based (retrospectively) on how first sex made them feel. that was, i) ‘good  accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . sex’‐ feeling good after sex; ii) ‘not so good sex’‐ feeling used by their partner; and, iii)  ‘bad sex’‐ feeling bad due to inappropriate sex or feeling mistreated. combining their  own experience with their interpretation of the data they said that the ‘right time’ for  first sex and therefore being ‘sexually ready’, regardless of the circumstances, was when  a good experience was had, whether it was planned or not, and associated with feelings  of  love.  a  ‘not  so  good’  encounter,  mostly  experienced  by  young  women,  was  understood as being the participant’s own fault for choosing an immature or insincere  partner. a ‘bad’ experience was due to feeling disrespected for being vulnerable, needy  and sending out the wrong signals. the onus for vulnerability and capacity to consent  was placed firmly on young women, who they thought should control their behaviours.   a more pervasive feature the advisory group raised was on ‘fitting‐in’ with peers  in an effort to gain respect. members explained that young people might be more likely  to behave in ways valued by peers than by their family and described this as a ‘splitting‐ of‐the‐self’  to  emphasise  the  ‘pull’  felt  between  these  two  powerful  yet  conflicting  sources of influence on their lives. sex was viewed as a ‘rite of passage’, which confirmed  that one has transcended childhood and crossed over into adulthood, a position they  believed that was envied by peers. in contrast, the researchers’ analysis focused mainly on the impact of gender  differences in relation to female agency and how young men’s sexist and disrespectful  behaviours affected young women’s experience of ‘good’, ‘not so good’ or ‘bad’ sex.  nonetheless,  the  group  maintained  that  time  and  energy  spent  by  young  women  pursuing monogamous relationship, regardless of how they are treated, was a sign of  maturity  and  perseverance  as  opposed  to  disrespectful  treatment  and  unnecessary  pressure,  control  and  isolation  from  their  friends,  which  was  how  the  researchers  interpreted this information.     discussion    this study has described insights gained from combining a young people’s analysis with  that of researchers to inform the overall interpretation of the findings. for the young  people in the study, sex was a social act focused on status with peers (lavie‐ajayi, jones  and russell  ) that resulted in them having sex with friends and acquaintances just  to  ‘get‐it‐over‐with’.  this  has  important  implications  for  how  young  people’s  sexual  relationships are framed in sexual health promotion, policy and sex education, which  tends to focus on monogamous relationships (lavie‐ajayi, jones and russell  ; byron  ; hendry et al.  ). the current gender system plays a huge part in normalising  sexism, which greatly affected young people’s behaviours and their ability to manage  intimate  relationships  (mellgren,  andersson  and  ivert  ).  while  youth  advisory  group  members  acknowledged  the  impact  of  peer  pressure,  gender  and  power  inequalities,  they  justified  and  accepted  the  status  quo  more  readily  than  did  the  researchers. as a result, learning about sex via the media and peers related to being less  ready for the impact of gender inequalities on young people’s sexual wellbeing. the  interplay between gender dynamics and friendship relations on first sex was highlighted  in relation to whether the experience was ‘good’, ‘not so good’ or ‘bad’. this was how  the advisory group conceptualised notions of sexual readiness (hawes, wellings and  stephenson  ; templeton et al.  ) and draws attention to the information young  people actually need to know, if they are to deal with sexualised situations effectively,   accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . this study, like others (kågesten et al.  ; ashburn et al.  ) challenges the  notion that it is young women’s responsibility to regulate their sexual behaviour, rather  than young men to address theirs. this is echoed in recent social media campaigns like  #metoo,  #heforshe;  #timesup  and  #everydaysexism  and  calls  for  an  end  to  the  widespread  prevalence  of  gender  inequality  in  everyday  life.  based  on  this  greater  awareness of everyday sexism the time is ripe to capture the attention of youth and  include them in the conversation about relationships and sexuality. however, rather  than a focus on ‘extreme’ sexual behaviours such as paedophilia, rape and the abuse of  power of the rich and famous, the inclusion of young people in this dialogue can draw  attention to everyday sexual behaviours in sexual interactions in everyday life. including  young people’s voices more fully will also add a much‐needed dimension of expertise  previously  missing  from  the  debates  and  studies  about  sexuality  and  sexual  health  (dworkin, fleming and colvin  ; templeton et al.  ; hyde et al.  ).   health promotion, education and laws related to sexual interactions could do  more to  include the specifics of gender  inequalities for both sexes. strategies could  inform young people’s understanding on the building blocks of respect (for self and  others),  rights  and  responsibilities,  and  develop  their  resistance  to  social  and  peer  pressures associated with sexuality (svanemyr et al.  ; unesco  ; haberland  ; looze et al.  ; templeton et al.  ; eckstrand et al.  ). according to the  youth advisory group in this study, the challenge for adults lies in knowing how to help  young people handle the tensions between their family values and the peer and social  pressures they face (randell et al.  ) ‐‐ in effect, to better prepare young people to  make  positive  and  healthy  choices  and  say  ‘no’  to  unwanted  conduct  of  any  type,  without looking like a ‘loser’.    limitations    this was a qualitative study of young people living in one health trust area in northern  ireland. participants were recruited from three sexual health clinics and only those who  felt comfortable to participate were interviewed, which may have biased our sample.  despite this, we recruited participants from a range of backgrounds, although all were  white. the sample size was small (  participants;   ypag) and can only provide insights  from personal experience and self‐report. the researcher’s involvement in the young  people’s analysis may have caused a degree of reactivity. this may have helped some  young people be more confident talking about these issues but may also have influenced  what was said especially when asked to provide additional contextual information about  an excerpt.     conclusion     analyses of participants’ reports of their first sexual experience suggest that some have  sex before they are ready and have a negative experience that affects their health and  wellbeing. first sex for the young people in this study was rarely about the anticipated  pleasures associated with sex itself; rather it is about imitating adulthood, losing the  stigma of virginity or trying to gain affection and status from peers. getting it over with,  to fit‐in with peers, was the main reason for this and a possible explanation for their  vulnerability to harmful outcomes.   accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . including  the  realities  of  young  people’s  experience  of  how  they  understand  competent  sex  could  inform  the  development  of  more  context‐based  sexual  and  reproductive  health  strategies.  these  should  go  beyond  health  concerns  to  include  critical  engagement  with  traditional  masculine  and  feminine  gender‐identities  and  media representations of cultural stereotypes (templeton et al.  ; ashburn et al.  ; kågesten et al.  ; svanemyr et al.  ). young people’s notions of ‘good sex’  in this study were multi‐faceted and provide a basis from which to begin a discussion  with  them  about  being  ‘ready’  or  ‘not  ready’  for  sex.  this  type  of  dialogue  would  acknowledge youth agency while also acknowledging the social norms that regulate this  agency. in particular, it may be valuable to create opportunities for young people to  explore and actively challenge the impact of gender norms and friendships and how  these relate to their (and their partners) health and wellbeing (svanemyr et al.  ;  byron  ; looze et al.  ;).   in agreement with others (dworkin et al.  ; kraft et al.  ; lohan et al.  ;  ; ruane‐mcateer et al.  ; tanton et al.  ; weissbourd, peterson and  weinstein  ; haberland  ; unesco  ) a gender transformative or gender  informative  approach  to  sexual  health  promotion  and  education,  which  seeks  to  encourage a change in male attitudes and behaviours and an increase female sexual  agency may prove promising. to improve young people’s sexual health outcomes, policy  makers must also engage with the social and cultural context in which young people  experience  their  first  sex.  including  their  voices  in  intervention  and  programme  development through processes of co‐production will ensure interventions are relevant  to their lives and thus more informative, sustainable and effective.    funding statement    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tanton, c., jones kg, macdowall w, clifton, s., mitchell, r., datta, j., lewis, r., field,  n., sonnenberg, p., stevens, a., wellings, k., johnson, am., mercer, c.  .  "patterns and trends in sources of information about sex among young people in  britain: evidence from three national surveys of sexual attitudes and lifestyles."  bmj ppen   ( ): e .   templeton, m. lohan, m., kelly, c. lundy, l.  . "a systematic review and  qualitative synthesis of young people’s views of sexual readiness." journal of  advanced nursing   ( ):  – .   unesco.  . international technical guidance on sexuality education. an evidence‐ informed approach. paris: unesco.  weissbourd, r., peterson, a., weinstein, e.  . "preparing students for romantic  relationships." phi delta kappan   ( ):  – .   wellings, k., nanchahal, k., macdowall, w., mcmanus, s., erens, b., mercer, c.,  johnson, a., copas, a., korovessis, c., fenton, k., field, j.  . "sexual behaviour  in britain: early heterosexual experience." the lancet   ( ):  – .  wellings, k., jones, k., mercer, c., tanton, c., clifton, s., datta, j., johnson, am. ( ).  "the prevalence of unplanned pregnancy and associated factors in britain:  findings from the third national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles (natsal‐ )." lancet   ( ):  – .   wight, d., henderson, m., raab, g., abraham, c., buston, k., & scott, s., hart, g.  ( ). "extent of regretted sexual intercourse among young teenagers in  scotland: a cross sectional survey." bmj   ( ):  – .   world health organization regional office for europe.  . evidence for gender  responsive actions to prevent and manage adolescent  pregnancy. copenhagen:  who (euro).  world health organization.  . defining sexual health: report of technical  consultation on sexual health.  ‐  january  . geneva: who.  world health organization regional office for europe.  . health  : a european  policy framework supporting action across government and society for health  and well‐being. copenhagen: who (euro).                                    accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . .           table  : research participants                                              sex/age        total  male          female          total          accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . table   ‐ summary of participant responses  key:  uic=unique identifier ( f , participant  , a   year old young woman)  su=secure unit    u n iq u e  i d e n ti fi e r  s o ci a l  cl a ss   a g e  a t  fi rs t  se x    r e a d y   r e la ti o n sh ip    (l e n g th )  r e g re t  p la n n e d   c o n tr a ce p ti o n   d ri n k in g   r e a so n  g iv e n   fo r  h a v in g    se x   .f   mc    y   mth  n  n  y  n  love  .f   uw c    y   mth  y  y  y  n  love  .f   uw c    y   mth  n  y  y  n  love  .f   wc  /   n   night  y  n  y  y  curious  .f   wc    n   night  y  n  y  y  drunk  .f   mc    y   mth  n  y  y  n  love  .f   wc    n   night  y  n  y  y  spontaneous  .f   wc  /   y   night  n  n  y  n  for the experience  .f   wc    y   wks  n  n  y  n  curious  .f   wc :su    y   mth  n  n  n  n  to get pregnant                      .m   mc    y   night  n  n  y  n  for the experience  .m   uw c    y   mth  n  y  y  n  love  .m   wc :su  /   y  / mth  y  n  n  y  spontaneous  .m   uw c    y   night  n  n  n  y  spontaneous  .m   uw c    y   night  y  n  y  y  spontaneous  .m   wc    y   mth  y  n  n  y  spontaneous  .m   mc    y   night  n  y  y  n  for the experience  .m   mc    y  / mth  n  y  y  n  in a relationship  .m   wc    n   night  y  n  n  y  spontaneous  .m   mc    y   night  n  n  y  y  spontaneous                accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . .                                                 accepted manuscript: culture, health and sexuality when published available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . figure  . the researchers and ypag thematic maps    researchers’ analysis    ypag analysis  themes  categories  themes  categories  adult control    health & safety        parental values    intimate contact    age and understandings  of the age of consent  mental    forethought & preparation    managing intimate relationships    emotions & feelings   pleasure & regret  peer influence  popularity & status building  people    social perceptions      drugs & alcohol    social circles   peer group & peer influence  socio‐cultural  influences  sex education  self    lack of knowledge /ignorance      pornography    physicality  information & communication  technologies    original citation: cinpoes, nicoleta and valls-russell, j. ( ) craiova international shakespeare festival, april– may . cahiers Élisabéthains. issn - (in press) https://doi.org/ . / permanent wrap url: https://eprints.worc.ac.uk/id/eprint/ copyright and reuse: the worcester research and publications (wrap) makes this work available open access under the following conditions. copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. to the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in wrap has been checked for eligibility before being made available. copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or url is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. publisher’s statement: this is an accepted manuscript of an article published by sage publications ltd in cahiers Élisabéthains on august , available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / copyright © by cahiers Élisabéthains and sage publications. a note on versions: the version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. please see the ‘permanent wrap url’ above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. for more information, please contact wrapteam@worc.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . % f https://eprints.worc.ac.uk/id/eprint/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / selection of reviews co-written by nicoleta cinpoeş from play reviews craiova international shakespeare festival, april– may edited by nicoleta cinpoeş university of worcester, uk and janice valls-russell cnrs, university paul-valéry montpellier , france midsummer night’s dream, dir. cristian pepino for ‘Ţăndărică’ animation theatre (bucharest, romania), buia auditorium, faculty of agronomy, craiova, april . reviewed by: nicoleta cinpoeş (university of worcester) and janice valls-russell (cnrs, university paul-valéry montpellier ), with contributions from the panel. a midsummer night’s dream, shakespeare’s most popular comedy, is usually a safe bet with festival goers. in craiova, its attraction was doubled by the fact that it was a ‘Ţăndărică’ animation theatre production, under the direction of cristian pepino, a name who has become synonymous with this theatre (which he joined back in ) and, indeed, with romanian puppeteering tradition. in pepino’s interpretation – as director, stage designer, translator and script adapter – this sixty-minute dream delivered on the programme’s promise: ‘overflowing with humour, gags after gags, a nuanced play [read: performance], masterly harmonised with highly expressive puppets, who emerge and fade away, a simple décor; all configured to round this bittersweet picture’. the prospect of a ‘puppet dream’ in the cosy and cool pocket theatre in the faculty of agronomy was an irresistible lunch-time invitation, even more alluring in the midsummer-like heat of this end of april. the small venue was turned into a black box by yards of black canvas which nestled the play’s set at its centre: a puppet theatre framed with red curtain atop a five-metre wide and one-metre tall wooden wall structure, complete with artificial vegetation growing up it. this miniature set delineated the space on and behind which the main performance took place. in ‘Ţăndărică’’s dream, all athenians – rank regardless – were white wooden-faced and soft-limbed puppets, the tallest just reaching one metre, manipulated by humans. theseus and hippolyta looked identical as two puppets clad in red military dress – war decorations, parade hats and all – and sporting sun-shades like any celebrity. from their interaction, it became clear that theseus may have been sporting the moustache, but in this marriage hippolyta would be wearing the trousers. the young lovers were easily distinguishable, unlike in other dream productions: the smallest of puppets, hermia and lysander wore denim jackets and eloped into the woods on an old harley davidson; one third taller, helena towered over hermia in stature; her elegant white empire dress may have hinted at helena of troy, but rendered her completely out of place both in this production’s athens and even more so in its woods. demetrius was a lanky, bespectacled figure, taller than lysander and hermia but almost a head shorter than helena. this production’s egeus didn’t exert any authority, just hilarity through the mismatch between his northern transylvanian shepherd outfit, complete with hat and big staff, and his southern (wallachian) accent. as a result, his real concern for the safety of his daughter when in lysander’s company: ‘take your hands off her!’, had the spectators in stiches as he repeated it in his regional (ungrammatical) delivery ‘ia mâna dupe ea!’ the mechanicals came in all shapes and sizes, with bottom visibly the more substantial puppet. the customary comedy of their scenes was enhanced by a lot of stage business/busyness; what clearly distinguished the mechanicals from the other characters in the production, who spoke in rhymed couplets, was that they used contemporary romanian and their raucousness poked fun at recognisable old and new romanian issues. magicked up with yards of black fabric, blackout and incense smoke, the woods outside this athens were akin to a camera obscura in which illusions and delusions were equally at home. in this realm, royal fairies oberon and titania were humans dressed in black with enhanced qualities. in oberon’s case, these amounted to his inflated ego and his ‘pre-raphaelite’ long and waiver red hair he let down with theatrical self-consciousness. titania, on the other hand, had not two but four hands (like an indian goddess), whose slow movement accompanied by incense smell and smoke increased the psychedelic effect her presence had on all. in the sexual encounter with bottom, she grew ginormous thighs and legs – a clear sign that she was turned, by magic, into oberon’s puppet. this was clearly his payback for not relinquishing the indian boy, in this production also a human character, highly bi-sexualised and equally happy to be with titania and oberon. this dream was as funny as it was uncanny – as warned by the + certificate in the programme. the war of the sexes and characters’ dreams of success lost their light comedy touch and turned into a more sinister affair. the key agent in this was puck: smallest of puppets, this puck was a brown furry small toy-goat-like puppet, as vicious as he was cuddly, his enlarged eyes and child-like voice at times uncannily reminiscent of gollum (of tolkien’s cinema saga). he delighted in getting things wrong, almost raped hermia, used his magic to inebriate all the mechanicals to the point of literally losing their heads; excited by this disturbing dance of floating heads and headless bodies – which threatened the individuals’ identities – puck proceeded to try the ass’s head on each of the mechanicals before finally settling it on bottom’s. throughout the performance, the fact that the humans behind the puppets were dressed in black (clothes and caps) enhanced the comedy of the situations and played with our perceptions. with only their hands (and occasionally faces) visible in the darkness of this production, the difference between puppet and puppeteer became blurred: was it the actors ventriloquizing the puppets or was it the puppets embodying the (audible but spectral) actors? the relationship between the heard and the seen – key in this shakespeare play – was thus tested not only on the characters but also on the audience to this production. identity, the other trademark of the play, was called into question: the individual puppeteer’s voice was the only way in which spectators could distinguish between the athenians in the play; conversely, the individual puppeteers were acted out through the expressive physiognomies of the puppets, whose personalities were enhanced through the mobility of their mouths. who was animating whom ran – metatheatrically – alongside who was manipulating whom in this athens. having explored the darker issues of the plot in the woods, the production switched on the lights on the comedic finale. in its version of pyramus and thisbe, humans, gods and puppets interact in an ensemble that worked well together. thisbe asked for a sword and said ‘thank you’ upon receiving it; then a human attendant held the sword point up and she spiked herself on it (this reminded one of us of some medieval representations of thisbe’s death). to dispel the lingering darkness of the play’s pursuits, all broke into a jig to pitbull’s fireball – puppets and puppeteers joining in as they broke the fourth-wall convention and took their bow to the delight of the audience who gladly joined in. ------------ a midsummer night’s dream, an itinerant performance, directed by philip parr for the craiova international shakespeare festival, parrabbola and teatrulescu company, craiova, april . reviewed by: nicoleta cinpoeş (university of worcester), lawrence guntner (technical university of braunschweig) and janice valls-russell (cnrs, university paul-valéry montpellier ), with contributions from the panel. ‘a storyteller’: that is how parrabbola, the brainchild of artistic director philip parr and writer, actor and researcher brian abbott, describes itself on the company’s website. parrabbola’s agenda, as presented on the home page, is centred on working with communities in the united kingdom and the rest of europe who are ‘celebrating and developing confidence and self-expression’, regardless of age or background; ‘building shared values and a sense of place to create community identity’; and ‘looking to develop their own expressive voice and talents’. the midsummer night’s dream that parr directed for the craiova international shakespeare festival in , after romeo and juliet in , certainly met all of those criteria. this was a site-specific, promenade production, designed and performed so that everyone in the audience can understand the action even if they have little or no experience of theatre and do not understand every word. even though the script was prepared beforehand, it was adapted during the rehearsals and the decision to perform in english and romanian was taken with the actors, in accordance with linguistic skills, the ‘feel’ of a phrase or line in the original or in translation, and individual wishes and talents: thus the young man cast as oberon turned out to be an exceptional singer, who felt more comfortable singing his lines than speaking them. everyone who volunteered to participate was accepted. the eighty-strong cast included children, acting students, office employees, housewives, and retired people: everyone had a specific role, name and lines, so that each felt individually considered and involved, and not just a member of a crowd. this was clearly established from the outset, in the opening market scene, with its differentiated craftsmen, craftswomen, street performers and market-goers, with whom the audience mingled. puck was performed by a ‘collective’ of actors, similarly dressed but with individualised features and actions even when they performed together. promenade performances cast new light on spaces. audiences new to craiova were led into areas of the city they ignored while residents discovered places they walked through every day without really taking notice. dream moved from the carpark of craiova’s university into its spacious and elegant hall, which served admirably for the court of athens. theseus, in nineteenth-century formal imperial dress, came down the majestic staircase to welcome the english- speaking hippolyta and her retinue of amazons in romanian, communicating with the her through a translator – thereby giving the scene the diplomatic formality of an arranged wedding. he then turned his attention to egeus, who approached him, with hermia in tow, through the throng of athenians – members of the cast and the audience. everyone then moved down a main street through a small, tree-shaded square where fairies perched in the foliage, and from there through a garden overlooked by apartments where people could watch the mechanicals’ rehearsal below. a fountain in a pedestrianised street proved ideal for the quarrel between the lovers who splashed around as they lunged out at each other. on reaching a church, the show literally walked into a wedding – serendipity, in such cases, being a director’s best friend – before finishing on a street lined with bridal shops, where a long table with drinks awaited the whole wedding party – performers, spectators and passers-by. from there everyone walked a couple of hundred yards to a square lined with crowded cafés where a makeshift stage had been erected, with a painted backcloth, on the back of a lorry. theseus, hippolyta and the four lovers watched from a balcony over one of the cafés, throwing out loud mocking comments about the moon and the other performers, to the irritation of those watching the play below who called to them to be quiet. one of the challenges when performing in this kind of production is that there is no backstage where actors can withdraw, however briefly: they have to stay in character – and find ways of making it to the next location without stepping out of their roles. how do you do that when you fall asleep in a part of the woods that is in fact a lawn in front of an apartment building and wake up in another part of town? the problem was solved by having the lovers fall asleep in wheelbarrows; they were then wheeled to the next location and ‘parked’ in a courtyard until their next scene, just behind members of the audience who were watching another scene. residents came and went, past the four actors who remained ‘asleep’ in their barrows. the goal is also to promote spectatorship for audiences with little experience of theatre-going, accepting that for some experience may be partial, limited to just the one scene they may see in their part of town, from their apartment window or balcony, without necessarily following the whole show. involvement was encouraged from the outset: in the market on the carpark, then in the crowd thronging in the university for the opening court scene, so that it seemed only natural that audience members should point out demetrius to helen as he hurried along the opposite pavement, that children should tell hermia that lysander had gone off with another girl, or that someone should call out ‘no te uccide!’ when pyramus drew his sword. indications of a show’s ‘success’ include whether there are more spectators at the end of the show than at the beginning and, as parr puts it, whether there is a dog – someone out walking their dog who gets pulled into the audience and follows the show instead of returning home. by the end of the play, on that hot afternoon, the dogs, ice-cream eating children and adults were out in force, most of them gathered in one large circle of hand- holding dancers for the final jig while others cheered from the café terraces or sought out a corner in the shade. ------------ athens by night [timon of athens and a midsummer night’s dream], directed by charles chemin for the national theatre, amza pellea main auditorium of marin sorescu national theatre, craiova, may . reviewed by: nicoleta cinpoeş (university of worcester), charlène cruxent (university paul-valéry, montpellier ), nora galland (university paul-valéry montpellier ), dana monah (university of iaşi) and janice valls-russell (cnrs, university paul-valéry montpellier ), with contributions from the panel. athens by night, the production commissioned by the festival and created by the french director charles chemin for the craiova national theatre, imagined dream as an extension of timon, taking the same ensemble to explore different facets of human interaction. in its revisiting of shakespeare’s construction of athens and its woods, the production’s journey backwards from the later tragedy to the earlier comedy also rewound the chronology of the two play’s translations into romanian. the language of performance travelled from george volceanov’s contemporary translation of timon of athens, part of the new complete works and hitherto unheard on a romanian stage, to george topârceanu’s translation of a midsummer night’s dream, a play that is as familiar to romanian audiences, mainly in this poetic version, as timon of athens is unfamiliar: the play’s performance history in romania is largely limited to two performances in the s and another two in the s. the double bill plunged spectators into timon’s universe of celebrity culture, social masquerade, consumerism and personal disintegration, leading them out again into what should have been the more reassuringly recognizable world of dream. the playfulness around the mechanicals was there, but the devastation experienced by timon and athens had left its mark. this was a barren, grey, lunar world. nothing could grow in the defamiliarised woods. the twists and turns in the labyrinths of self-knowledge retained a darker side on this sunless side of the moon and the poetry of topârceanu’s translation clashed with the environment: seeing and listening created two, dichotomic experiences. chemin cut the two plays back for a performance that lasted three hours and twenty minutes, including intermission. airing them jointly in this way was something none of the members of this reviewing panel had seen before. the design (by adrian damian) used the space imaginatively. the darkened wings were open to view. this expanded the depth and width of the performance space, and drew attention to the illusion of the action, as when the director helped an actor with his makeup. continuity between the two athens was established through a lighting design (aliberto sagretti) that explored a chromatic palette of nocturnal nuances to create an environment that enclosed the action in timon and played on different layers of clarity in dream. the design further engaged with ideas of entrapment and fluidity: a perspex screen created distancing effects in timon; fine-mesh netting partially obscured the view of the stage after the interval, materialising a threshold beyond which lay the world of fairies and magic in dream. as if challenging from within the production’s play on distancing effects, characters broke through the fourth wall and overflowed into the foyer during the interval, interacting with an audience which responded on multiple levels, since it was composed of people who knew the company and the festival well and others who were not in on all the jokes. although chemin was not a local director, his play on manipulation could be received as a metaphor of the social and political realities of today’s romania. the notion of instability and impermanence, with implications that went well beyond the frontiers of romania, was further conveyed by the floor of the set, initially laid out with golden tiles which were stripped away to reveal sand or grey soil (clay beads, in fact) through which characters floundered; the language of the translation was as unforgiving and immediate in timon. this suggested both a world built on instability, lacking foundations, and a gravitational pull which, in the first part of the play, threatened to bury illusions and self, and in the second, to prevent characters from taking off and living airy dreams. the morphing of setting and characters from timon into dream gave the comedy a sinister ambiance: theseus (adrian andone, who also played apemantus) came across as an autocrat, in military uniform, with the dangerous bonhomie that goes with the job. after failing to orchestrate his own life, timon (claudiu bleonţ) went on to play quince who at one point had a rant on the microphone about wanting to play timon. servant to oberon after being timon’s steward flavius, puck (george albert costea) was a frustrated stage manager, calling for lights, trying to organise matters, rather like a rival of quince – some of his jokes harked back to previous editions of the festival. timon’s athens was a world of satin gowns, italianate elegance and golden floors. upstage stood a long banquet table that also served as a catwalk for characters who struck isolated poses, like models being photographed for a glossy magazine. this was a world of parading individuals, of banking, with assets piled high, in the form of presents wrapped in golden gift paper – a world which we viewed from afar as if gazing into a rich home through an immense bay window. as the play progressed, the design materialised the stripping of assets: the glow and colours of the earlier scenes were snuffed out; a slanting shaft of light lit up a senatorial figure dressed in red, one of the creditors, while two others, bailiff-like, dismantled the floor until timon was left stranded on a single panel. the illusion of munificence shrank back to a tomb-like space as timon, trudging in the heavy soil, was forced into it, trapped between the upstage neon screen that advanced and the downstage perspex screen that moved back. the slow, choreographed acting style created a distanced relationship with this old play which the audience (re)discovered in a very new version. the uneasiness was compounded by a blurring between theatre and ‘real life’ as well as a blurring of literary references. when timon stepped out of the play to invite a female spectator to join him on stage, a woman stood up. audience expectations of comic relief abruptly changed gear when timon insulted her, calling her ‘a whore’. she stormed off, saying she had paid to see a play and had dressed up for the occasion. as she left the auditorium, she yelled ‘#metoo’. we later saw her on stage again, resuming the role of a dissatisfied spectator. in another extra-textual intrusion, the senator, who had come across as a tyrant-like figure, stepped forward to read heiner müller’s ajax, for instance ( – ), a poem in which ajax muses over the irrelevance of heroes and the death of tragedy, viewing the twentieth century through the prism of ancient myths and history. this disruption invited the spectators to associate müller’s disillusioned protagonist with shakespeare’s – and chemin’s – timon, while at the same time drawing attention to the function of intersecting narratives and open-ended borrowings in contemporary performance. this in turn reconnected with apemantus in the position of raisonneur at the beginning of the play, addressing the audience from a front-stage microphone. timon ended abruptly with a loud gunshot and a messenger falling down as the lights went out. the audience started clapping. when the lights came on again, two people stepped out of the audience voicing their appreciation. they proved to be hippolyta (monica ardeleanu) and theseus: this was a play staged for them, turning timon into a play-within-the-play, on a par with the mechanicals’ version of pyramus and thisbe (quince later announced that the mechanicals would be performing the tragedy of an athenian, which reflected contemporary society). the messenger who had dropped dead at the end of timon promptly stood up to start performing lysander (cătălin vieru). the audience trooped out of the auditorium after theseus and hippolyta for the interval – this was also choreographed so that actors and spectators were cast in a wider performance. progressively, the crowd in the foyer drifted towards a raised, dais-like area, which had been used by officials for the opening of the festival. on the dais was a large bed on which theseus stood, hearing the lovers’ cases. as members of the audience edged forward, they were constantly interrupted by men asking for directions to the toilets – those, of course, were the mechanicals, one of whom had already drifted around the foyer before timon, asking people in romanian and english if they had seen his dog. finally, the mechanicals jumped onto the bed taking selfies, while helena – outside, on the theatre balcony – could be heard as a voice over, talking about love to hermia and lysander, inviting comments from the mechanicals: ‘what a super text’. the actors then led the spectators back to the auditorium, where they found a lunar stage with rocks, behind a mesh screen that partially veiled a bright crescent moon. this grew to a full moon by the end of the play, extending the three days and three nights into a lunar month. once on stage, the actors floundered in the soil of clay beads, their movements belying the airiness usually associated with fairies. in contrast with the first half of the performance, though, and in keeping with the generic switch, the acting was very physical, with assertive body language, as when helena pushed demetrius to the ground and in the later fights between the lovers, with mutual hitting, kicking and attempted strangling. moments of grace invited themselves onto the stage as when oberon, after casting the spell on titania, lovingly stroked her head, taking no notice of hermia and lysander who entered in a playful mood. titania lay asleep front stage throughout the remaining scenes until she awoke. popular language, invective, references (to the americans landing on the moon) and jokes (one on coca-cola) lent the play a more contemporary tonality that complemented the poetic style of the translation and raised laughs, mainly with the romanian members of the audience. acting as chemin’s mouthpiece, bottom, who was renamed funduleţ (the romanian for little botty) and performed by a female actor of no mean size (raluca păun), announced that the mechanicals’ ‘comedia tragica’ would be ‘living’ rather than stanilavskian theatre. props included a hand shower and a coat hanger. audience members were brought onto the stage to serve as a wall. the mechanicals also asked spectators seated down the centre of the auditorium to stand up and hold hands in order to create a wall that partitioned the audience between a pyramus team and a thisbe team – as if materialising the hostility between their two houses and assuming that all communities, including audiences, were bound to experience division? by the end of the performance, the moon was full and the spectators were invited to travel to the world of dream, or to believe that they were a part of it, by playing with huge moon- or planet-like balloons which were sent into the auditorium and floated over their heads. speaking with some panel members after the performance, chemin explained that he had wanted to play with the patience of the audience, and on their nerves, taking them through the dark story of timon of athens to involve them in the world of a midsummer’s night’s dream. athens by night sought to draw everyone – actors and spectators – into the theatrical illusion, even while actively challenging it, as when one of the lovers declared on awakening, unaware of oberon and titania’s presence on stage, ‘i will never believe in fairies’. ------------ shylock, written by gareth armstrong and translated by marian popescu, adapted and directed by horațiu mălăele for teatrul de comedie (bucharest), colibri theatre for children and young adults, craiova, may . reviewed by: christie carson (royal holloway university), nicoleta cinpoeş (university of worcester) and guillaume foulquie (university of worcester), with contributions from the panel. in horațiu mălăele’s directorial take, gareth armstrong’s shylock was not a one-man show but a play for eight actors and a disembodied voice, and as such harked back more to its source, the merchant of venice, shakespeare’s only too familiar play to international and romanian audiences alike. its adaptation status – as ‘repetition without replication’ (to borrow hutcheon’s definition) – was overt. it announced itself as ‘shylock after armstrong’ (marian popescu’s translation); its synopsis advertised ‘a show that proposes a journey into the history of jewishness and anti- semitism, a sad history of intolerance, hatred and ample suffering, told with a bitter smile by tubal, the only friend shakespeare gives to the jew in the merchant of venice’; the logo of the bucharest city hall/mayor’s office on the programme cover hinted at the production’s educational stance (and anti-discrimination agenda) – ripe stuff for colibri, craiova’s venue for children and youth theatre. with tubal as the guide, ‘this fascinating journey into an old and absurd world whose truth still haunts us’ (festival programme) compressed armstrong’s script into seventy intense minutes (no interval) in which a lot of the historical commentary was delivered visually (by video designer dilmana yordanova) while shylock’s english stage history was relegated to the programme notes. the performance started, as in armstrong’s, with a reminder of the pound of flesh, and a man (george mihăiță) alone on stage saying ‘shylock! i am shylock!’ and delivering shakespeare’s character’s speech – ‘’tis mine and i will have it. / if you deny me, fie upon your law’ – in which shylock explains his reasoning as a challenge to the fundamentally racist and segregationist institutions of venice. cued by armstrong’s stage directions, ‘light brighten[ed] as the figure turn[ed] to address the audience’ no longer as shylock but as tubal, he explained or, rather, the actor playing tubal. this retreat from the centre of the action invited the audience to take a necessary critical step back as tubal proceeded to explain shakespeare’s creative process, his sources, his imagination completing and/or editing existing narratives. in this production, armstrong’s lesson in the history of jews in europe from the roman empire to the renaissance was short but poignant, vividly illustrated with video projections and with an added dose of romanian history of anti-semitism for good measure. the history of the badge was explored, with the papal decision compared to a ‘european directive’, and the very name of pope innocent iii presented as ironical; two fleeting images in the fast-paced commentary would haunt the production: the yellow pointed hat and the ghetto boxes, key identifiers of jewishness and anti-semitic stances. the design of the production (by iuliana vîlsan) helped to support the vision of a black and white world of right and wrong, inside or outside venetian society. the clown-like costumes reflected the commedia dell’arte theatrical tradition but also suggested a world of stereotypes and visual humour. the masks worn by the venetian characters resembled both the enduring image of the venice carnival and the heads of birds with elongated fierce black beaks, ideally suited to pecking their prey. shylock and tubal stood out from the extravagant and wasteful christians because of the plainness of their costumes but also because of the natural tones of their voices and their everyday demeanour. the earnestness of the central, older characters acted as a comment on the exuberant youngsters. this sense of a new world of wealth and excess seemed to be a comment that was directed at the new theatre tradition as well as the audience. tubal, at one point, descended into the audience to speak directly to several people in the front row. when the actor began to struggle with this forced interaction, he blamed the director who, he said, ‘thought it was a good idea’. the scene on stage and off seemed to reflect a rapidly changing cultural world that those in the audience could easily recognise. on his first entrance, shylock (horațiu mălăele) had a comic, stereotypical exchange with tubal. his accent, gestures, demeanour embodied tubal’s earlier remark on the role’s history: ‘this is what was required of a stage jew: comedy and villainy’; the fact that the audience laughed only confirmed that old habits die hard. old and new – worlds, views, acting styles – were pitched against each other. the christian characters provided a sense of contemporaneity: antonio (bogdan mălăele) was king of bling, a flamboyant gangster of poor taste, dressed in fur adorned with gold chains; all the others’ masks supplied an anonymity reminiscent of the impunity of internet bullying and trolling. after their onstage violence against shylock, whom the young christians pushed to the ground and kicked, tubal returned to unpack the scene as one in a long lineage of jewish stereotyping. he introduced the audience to christopher marlowe’s barabbas, the jew of malta, as a theatrical monster the dramatist knew would attract crowds, and proceeded to perform barabbas briefly only to point out the absurdity of the character. the first sighting of jessica (ruxanda grecu) was of a young woman locked inside a glass box the size of a small room, jam-packed with belongings. the crowded space, a reference to the low-ceiling apartments of the venice ghetto, (re)presented jessica’s sense of imprisonment – misdirected at her father rather than the ghetto as an institution. her elopement only led to her moving into another glass box, with lorenzo (lucian ionescu). that he was dexterously counting (aloud!) the notes stolen from shylock while making love to jessica clearly showed his priorities. shylock’s reaction on his return home to discover his daughter’s elopement followed armstrong’s playscript (not shakespeare’s): instead of prioritising the importance of his ducats and jewels over his daughter, the two losses were separated and inspired different emotions. he was sad about jessica, and angry about the theft, but more importantly the play’s ambiguity was removed: jessica was not to blame, and the theft was entirely attributed to the christian characters – shylock saw it all, tubal explained, as ‘bassanio’s conspiracy’ against him. the ‘hath not a jew eyes’ speech (the opening of act in armstrong) also marked a shift in this production: in terms of depth of introspections and plot delivery, both touching on brechtian conventions in the quick succession of cameos. shylock performed his speech in front of a broken mirror – a metaphor for a fractured sense of self as a result of racist abuse. by this point shylock had lost everything: he was no longer a father, his daughter had rejected their religion and defrauded him, so where was he supposed to find his identity? in the trial scene, the duke’s disembodied voice (voice over constantin codrescu) addressed the audience from large speakers at the back of the auditorium, creating the impression of an unattainable authority, impossible to challenge, change or question. tubal’s comment ‘is that partial or what?’ (disambiguated in romanian by using both ‘partial’ and ‘racism’) pointed out that the duke’s first words towards the jew were racist, and stressed further the corruption of venetian justice. when shylock changed his mind and asked for the money, portia (mirela zeța) laughed cunningly; when shylock kneeled for the duke’s mercy, tubal repeated portia’s mercy speech, which stressed the double standards of this justice, the hypocrisy of the christian characters. in the production’s ending, the last possible ambiguity of the text (both shakespeare’s and armstrong’s) was removed. shylock’s words ‘i am content’ were spliced together with his ‘please let me go, i am not well’; and when delivered as one line, emphasised the exact opposite. in an attempt to reveal the awkward difference between the endings of acts and in shakespeare’s play, shylock’s ending, rewritten as his emigration from italy, was delivered simultaneously to the happy ending of the christian characters, creating a blatant contrast. their dancing and singing in belmont (stage fore) left shylock seated, surrounded by his belongings, almost blocked him from view. this contrast was also evident in the simultaneous use of a happy, classical tune for the christians’ dance, and a violin playing a melancholy jewish tune. once again, height as well as colour marked out who the winners and losers were in this biting monochrome world. the sincerity of the central character was made more dramatic and effecting when contrasted by the meanness and frivolity that surrounded him. in a final departure from armstrong’s monologue, the scene gave no words to either shylock or tubal. the lights faded, and the audience started to clap; when the lights returned, the christian characters, now the actors bowing down at the front of the stage, revealed the tableau of shylock’s emigration starkly. this amplified further the disparity, to the point of forcing the audience to clap while shylock was still suffering. this was a shylock for our times, and the laughter that greeted the performance was laced with irony and sadness. the uncomfortable paradox also anchored the story in a historical materiality which survived the fall of the curtain and worked to keep the audience aware of the reality of discrimination and hate. the production achieved an impressively beautiful combination of empathy for shylock and awareness of the mechanisms of social injustice which shylock fell victim to. by assuming the role of a commentator, knowing the historical context of the narrative and its writing, tubal became an agent of disambiguation of the play, a necessary exercise for such a problematic topic. through his comments, the systematic nature of prejudice emerged, with the hypocrisy of the christian characters and of the laws of venice highlighting the institutional dimension of hate. ------------ hamlet, collectively directed and performed by alina berzunţeanu, richard bovnoczki and peter kerek for ‘unteatru’ (bucharest), i. d. sîrbu studio of marin sorescu national theatre, craiova, may . reviewed by: christie carson (royal holloway university), nicoleta cinpoeş (university of worcester) and guillaume foulquie (university of worcester), with contributions from the panel. working with just three actors, two men and one woman, in a collectively devised performance delivered in the round in the black box i. d. sîrbu studio of the craiova national theatre, this hamlet put before its audience a meditation on a play that has meant many things to romanian audiences. the most translated of shakespeare’s plays into romanian, hamlet has a long history of political dissidence, of stellar casts and a strong directorial (male) lineage. for unteatru (literally ‘a theatre’), an independent company that sees itself as a ‘host theatre’ which aims to provide young artists with an alternative creative space to the ‘impenetrable state theatre system’ and audiences alternative participatory experiences in the resulting ‘cultural showcases’, hamlet became ‘a state of mind’ (festival programme notes). this radically reduced version of the play (running at fifty minutes with no interval) eliminated many of its characters: there was no horatio, no laertes; rosencrantz, guildenstern, fortinbras and the ghost did not appear. it did away with props and costume change, and more importantly, with plot linearity and character individuality. key to this approach were not (just) the customary textual cuts, line splicing and doubling, but the versatile ventriloquizing of the core issues in hamlet – which were not surveillance, secrecy or celebrity, the staple of most staged hamlets elsewhere. state politics out of the way (the production began at . and saw no army returning to claim ‘rights of memory’), the focus of this three-person, barely one-hour essay on the play was squarely on the triangular inter- generational and inter-gender relationships. the three actors achieved this sometimes through morphing from one character into another, sometimes through partaking in soliloquies, chorus-like, sometimes through a cacophony of competing views. the ‘visitors’ (as the company prefers to see its audiences) entered the black box to find the three- strong cast – dressed in black and barefoot – on a raised circle that made up the stage space: one woman kneeling, two men standing. the performance began with each actor sending their energy into the audience through a simultaneous tossing motion and foot stamping on the hollow raised stage. once the audience settled, the music stopped, the woman stood up and joined the older man in performing the mourning words of claudius and gertrude from . ; the other man – hamlet? – performed the ‘to be or not to be’ speech ( . ) simultaneously, the three cutting in and out of each other’s speech. he followed it with ‘o that this too too solid flesh would melt’ ( . ), whose accusatory lines directed at gertrude and joined by claudius (or was he the ghost come to chide his wife?) reduced the woman to tears, makeup streaming down her face. hamlet’s violent gestures during this first scene, as if angrily throwing a ball against an invisible wall, stressed the depth of claudius and gertrude’s inability to understand him – and the scene once again stressed the woman’s precarious position: trapped in these conflictual dynamics. the surprising and direct interaction with the audience, right from the start of the play, made it clear that there were expectations of the viewers. with the audience on four sides, no one watching had the same perspective. this physical manifestation of the premise of the performance forced an instant realignment of the actor-audience contract. the argument of the play would be read differently depending on the positioning of the spectator physically but also in terms of their gender, age and cultural background. this was to be a hamlet for an international, educated audience that knew not only shakespeare’s text but also its many manifestations and manipulations, and was willing to partake not so much in the textual lego for connoisseurs but in the physical triangulation intensified further by the round stage just over two meters in diameter. the physicality of the actors formed a key element of the interpretation since lines were often shared, reassigned or ventriloquised. the parts of ophelia and gertrude were both played by the one woman on stage, dressed in a black and white school girl dress which was crowned by bleach blond hair. the current obsession with remaining young but also the long tradition of casting inappropriately aged actresses as hamlet’s mother were both highlighted. hamlet was played by a red-haired man of similar age, pointing out the trend for older actors to play this role and a tendency to see the play as a process of self-discovery for an arrested adolescent. claudius was played by the only actor to look his age, with grey hair and a beard but also a strong physical presence, tinged with a hint of menace. with all three performers often stomping loudly on the raised wooden o, and even polonius using sign language with ophelia, the actors’ bodies became the characters’ prominent mode of emotional and psychological expression of fear, pain, anger and desire. this radical embodiment of the characters’ inner experience was made more explicit in priam’s slaughter ( . ), which was not merely told, but fully performed: pyrrhus and priam were embodied silently by the two men as the woman narrated their story. after pyrrhus killed priam (with heavy slaps on the neck), the woman became hecuba and pyrrhus took over as narrator. ‘oh what a rogue and peasant slave am i!’ ( . ) followed not as hamlet’s speech, but as a common reflection on affect and empathy in which all three actors and characters had a share (in an interesting allocation of lines, some individual, others choric). while transitions from one scene to the next were made clear by the actors’ changing positions on the stage, sometimes it was only the audience’s recognition of familiar words that cued the identification of the scenes and the characters’ reincarnations. this contributed to a sense that the performance was either for an audience familiar with hamlet or that the plot itself was less important than the staging of family relations. in some cases, textual recognition was reliable as it dispelled ambiguity; in others, it only perpetuated it and as a result intensified the discomfort at what was being performed. scene after scene, the gendered casting – almost surprising for a three- actor experimental performance – seemed to criticise patriarchal family structures. after the first scene and the first role transition, hamlet became polonius while gertrude became ophelia, and polonius slapped his daughter’s behind, bringing incest into the themes the production explored; later, when entering to tell the royal couple about hamlet’s “madness”, polonius found them sexually engaged. in the closet scene, dead polonius served hamlet’s speech both as claudius, the ‘king of shreds and patches’ ( . ) and as the ghost come not to ‘chide’ his son but to rape gertrude – an uncanny enactment of hamlet’s sexualised vision of ‘the incestuous bed’ made all the more disturbing by gertrude’s denial that she perceived anything. the physical violence was enhanced but revealed to the audience with a sense of secrecy more than privacy. throughout the performance, the violence, at times sexual, staged in a small and confined space, expressed the troubled desires occurring within a dysfunctional family – whether hamlet’s or ophelia’s. this spare and bare production used no props, so when hamlet asked his mother to look at the picture of his father, he indicated his own face; when ophelia gave away flowers they were kisses. her final madness scene ( . ) was a textual ‘document in madness! thoughts and remembrance fitted’ in a collage of snippets from the play: ‘to be or not to be’, ‘how should i your true-love know?’, ‘are you fair?’, ‘i loved you not’, ‘to sleep, to sleep, to die’, ‘like a camel’, ‘i was honest’, ‘a piece of flesh’, ‘tragedy, comedy, historical’, ‘kissed me at the window’, ‘where is my father?’, ‘where is hamlet?’. continuing, as gertrude (?), with ‘ophelia has drowned’ – addressed to hamlet (not laertes) – this production clearly disambiguated the suicide. this mixing of lines, characters, positions and perspectives created a central family picture that was deeply entwined and troubling. this clear focus was not without issues for spectators caught in character identification dilemmas: did hamlet turn into polonius or has claudius just become ophelia’s abusive father? or as in the final scene, in which – given laertes’s absence – was it claudius that hamlet had to fight till death? when the three characters eventually die on stage, this intermingling is complete: this twisted family (or was it two families?) cannot live together or apart. down to its last image, of gertrude crucified and hamlet fallen on her lap (both a pieta and the missing scene of hamlet lying in ophelia’s lap before the dumb show), this production was a powerful statement about the psychology of this master text and international audiences’ obsession with it. ------------ 	cover sheet_reviews_nicoleta_cinpoes 	aam_reviews_nicoleta_cinpoes_without_cover a larger ecology of family sexuality communication: extended family perspectives on relationships, sexual orientation, and positive aspects of sex international journal of environmental research and public health article a larger ecology of family sexuality communication: extended family perspectives on relationships, sexual orientation, and positive aspects of sex jennifer m. grossman * , anmol nagar, linda charmaraman and amanda m. richer wellesley centers for women, wellesley college, wellesley, ma , usa; anagar@wellesley.edu (a.n.); lcharmar@wellesley.edu (l.c.); aricher@wellesley.edu (a.m.r.) * correspondence: jgrossma@wellesley.edu received: january ; accepted: february ; published: february ���������� ������� abstract: extended family can be a resource for conversations about sex, but extended family perspectives have been largely left out of existing research. the present study investigates how extended family, such as aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, perceive communication with teens in their families about sex. a thematic analysis was conducted with data from interviews in the u.s. with extended family members, primarily siblings, who reported talk with teens in their families about sex. the analyses identified one theme focused on perspectives surrounding what is most important for teens to know about sex and relationships and seven themes focused on the content of conversations with teens about sex. the most prevalent content areas were: healthy and unhealthy relationships ( %), sexual orientation ( %), sexual behavior ( %), and protection ( %). the findings highlight extended family members’ unique roles in supporting the sexual health of teens in their families, which include providing information and support about issues other family members may not address, such as sexual orientation and the positive aspects of sex. the findings suggest the need to include extended family in sex education interventions to reflect the broader ecology of teens’ family relationships and access an underutilized resource for teens’ sexual health. keywords: teenage reproductive health; extended family; family sexuality communication; adolescent health . introduction communication with parents about sex can support teens’ health through delayed sex [ ] and more frequent safer sex behaviors [ ]. however, teens and their parents are often reluctant to talk with each other about sex, and only half of teens report talk with their parents about this topic [ ]. extended family members often serve as resources for teens’ communication about sex [ , ] and initial research suggests that this communication may be protective against adolescents’ risky sexual behavior [ ]. despite these findings, both sexuality communication research and practice largely focus on teen–parent relationships. extended family members’ perspectives are important, as they can help to understand how extended family support can complement teens’ communication with parents or address gaps when parents and teens don’t talk with each other about sex and relationships. conversations about sex and relationships provide a way for families to share sexual values with teens [ , ]. sexual socialization theory explains a process through which individuals gain understanding about ideas, beliefs and values related to sex [ ]. parents are often seen as the primary source of sexual socialization messages for teens. however, teens also identify extended family as key sources of sexual information and support [ ], suggesting the need to explore extended family roles in teens’ sexual socialization. other sources, such as media, can also shape teens’ sexual socialization [ , ], but this exploration is largely beyond the scope of this study. int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of research shows that many teens talk with extended family about sex. a recent quantitative study of family communication about sex among diverse teens found that almost half of teens ( %) reported talking to an extended family member about sex, with the most sexuality communication reported with older sisters ( %), older female cousins ( %), older brothers ( %), and aunts ( %) [ ]. stepmothers have also been found to be sources of support for young people’s sexuality communication [ ]. a study of teens’ perceptions of family communication about sex found that teens were more likely to describe extended family than parents as sharing valuable life experiences and being easy to talk to about sex [ ]. a qualitative study of african american teens found that the largest variety of messages about dating and relationships came from mothers and siblings, followed by fathers, aunts/uncles and cousins [ ]. a survey study of parent and grandparent caregivers found that grandparents were more interested than parents in having open conversations with teens about sex [ ], although other studies suggest that few teens identify grandparents as a key source of sexuality communication [ ]. some studies explore the content of teens’ conversations with parents and extended family about sex. a qualitative study found that teens were more likely to report that parents, when compared to extended family, shared messages about delaying sex and avoiding teen pregnancy, but reported similar communications, when compared to extended family members, about protection, staying focused in school, and being careful in relationships [ ]. a frequent gap in teen–parent communication about sex relates to sexual orientation. studies show that less than half of parents talk with their teens about sexual orientation [ , ]. parents’ communication with teens often includes assumptions of heterosexuality, such as only discussing potential partners of the opposite gender, rather than addressing sexual orientation directly [ , ]. however, a more recent study suggests that parents share more positive than negative messages with teens about sexual orientation [ ]. studies suggest that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (lgbtq) teens often talk about their sexual orientation with their siblings [ , ], who are frequently seen as a source of support in the context of this disclosure [ , ]. other female extended family members also serve as resources for lgbtq teens’ communication about sexual orientation [ ]. research is needed to further explore the content of extended family communication with teens about sex, particularly regarding sexual orientation. communication with extended family might become particularly important as teens begin to explore relationships and sexuality. teens may avoid talk with their parents about sex based on concerns that parents will disapprove of their sexual choices or worry about their sexual behaviors [ , ]. extended family may provide a less judgmental alternative for teens to talk about sex and relationships and an opportunity to ask questions about sexual issues [ ]. furthermore, parents often focus conversations about sex on delaying sex, which is protective for teens’ initiation of sex [ ], but is less relevant for sexually active teens. the current study extends existing research by investigating extended family members’ perspectives on what they think teens should know about sex and the content they discuss with teens related to sex and relationships. we define an extended family to include the larger family context of non-parental sexuality communication: grandparents, uncles, aunts, older cousins and siblings. we include siblings as extended family because studies show that siblings play more of a peer role in talking with teens about sex than parents do [ , ] and teens’ communication about sex is similar with siblings and cousins [ , ]. however, since the research suggests that siblings play a unique and important role in teens’ sexuality communication [ , ], we include a preliminary assessment of whether sibling participants talk with teens about topics related to sex and relationships compared to non-sibling participants. this study can help to understand how extended family members fit into the larger family support system for sexuality communication with teens. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . materials and methods . . recruitment and participants the data for this study came from extended family members who identified a high school-aged teen in their families with whom they talk about sex and relationships. all participants gave their informed consent for participation in the study. each participant was offered a $ gift card to amazon, target or cvs in appreciation of their participation in the study. the study was conducted in accordance with the declaration of helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the wellesley college institutional review board ( december ). this convenience sample was recruited through local schools and organizations, social media and national sites such as amazon, mechanical turk (mturk) and facebook. to determine whether a person qualified for interview participation, individuals were asked three questions in a screening survey: ( ) do you have a younger sibling, cousin, niece or nephew or grandchild in high school? ( ) do you talk with them about dating, sex, or relationships? ( ) are you or older? if individuals answered “yes” to all three questions, they were provided with the consent information and invited to participate in the study. all participants were told that the purpose of the study was to understand how teens and their families talk about sex and relationships to better understand families’ experiences and support teens’ health. participants were also told about the protection of their privacy and the costs and benefits of survey participation. participants self-identified as % female, % male, and % transgender. participants’ ages ranged from – , with the largest group of participants ( %) at – years old. participants identified their racial/ethnic backgrounds as white ( %), hispanic/latinx ( %), black ( %), biracial/multiracial ( %) and asian american ( %). half of participants ( %) completed some college, % completed college and % had high school or less education. fifty-three percent identified as older sisters to the teens they talk with, % as older brothers, % as aunts, % as uncles, % as cousins, and % as siblings (two non-gender binary participants). eighty-five percent of participants reported they “sometimes” or “often” talk with the teen in their family about sex or relationships. all participants described the teens they talked with as high-school aged. . . interview protocols and procedures the interviews took approximately min each and were conducted over the phone. before starting the interview, all participants were reminded that the purpose of the study was to better understand how teens and their families talk about sex and relationships. participants were reassured that it would be normal to feel a bit embarrassed or uncomfortable and that they could choose not to answer any questions. they were asked to create pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality; those pseudonyms are used in this article. the interviews were audio recorded, then later transcribed. to start the interview, participants were asked to describe their relationship with the teen they identified in the screening survey and report how often they talked with the teen about sex and relationships. they were asked about what they believed the teen needed to know about sex and relationships, “in your opinion, what are the most important things that [teens’ name] should know about sex and relationships? tell me about that”. participants were asked whether they talked with the teen in their family about the following topics related to sex and relationships: dating, healthy or unhealthy relationships, sexual behavior, protection from stis, protection from pregnancy, teen pregnancy, sexual orientation, misconceptions about sex, sexual orientation, and positive aspects of sex. if they answered “yes” to having talked about a topic with the teen, they were prompted, “tell me about a conversation you had about this topic”. participants were also asked about their age, gender, racial/ethnic background and education. after the interviews, all participants were e-mailed a resource list with contact information for organizations supporting youth social, emotional, and sexual health. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . data analysis we used thematic analysis to analyze the content of these conversations by coding for overarching themes related to participants’ perceptions of talk with teens in their families about sex that came up in multiple responses [ ]. the first and second authors summarized the preliminary reflections on each interview and, together, developed the initial descriptive and interpretive codes. we then coded the study data, reviewed, revised, and defined themes. themes are not mutually exclusive, because a single response could be coded under more than one theme. we did a preliminary comparison of sibling versus non-sibling participants’ responses based on the percentage of participants from each group who discussed each theme. nvivo . , manufactured by qsr international in melbourne, australia [ ] was used to facilitate coding. to guard against investigator bias, the first and second authors conducted reliability checks by coding the same data, then comparing responses to address coding inconsistencies, resolve differences in the perceived meanings of themes, and recode data as needed. the interrater reliability was calculated using miles and huberman’s formula, in which reliability equals the number of agreements divided by the total of agreements and disagreements [ ]. the intercoder reliability of % represented a high level of agreement between the two coders. . results . . interviews we identified themes; one theme, importance, focused on family members’ ideas about what they thought the teens should know about sex and relationships, and the remaining seven themes focused on the content of conversations. the most prevalent topics of conversation with teens described by extended family members were: relationships ( %), sexual orientation ( %), sexual behavior ( %), and protection ( %). participants also described conversations with teens about teen pregnancy ( %), misinformation about sex ( %), and positive aspects of sex ( %). see table for the percentages of extended family members’ reports of the themes and subthemes. in discussing many of these topics, participants described how they talked with the teens about personal experiences related to their own relationships, the teens’ relationships, and relationships of other family members or people they knew. during the interviews, participants also discussed their motivations to talk with teens about issues of sex and relationships. based on these two threads of participants’ responses, we created two subthemes that were identified across multiple topic areas: ( ) personal talk includes conversations between the participant and the teen about personal experiences and ( ) self-reflection addresses when, during an interview, a participant discussed what motivated them to talk about the topic with the teen. table . identified themes and subthemes of conversations between extended family participants and teens (n = ). theme participant response (%) importance % safer sex % consent % delaying sex % okay to talk about sex % relationships % healthy relationships % unhealthy relationships % personal talk % self- reflection % sexual orientation % openness and support % gender identity % personal talk % self-reflection % int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . cont. theme participant response (%) sexual behavior % give advice % personal talk % protection methods % use protection % sexually transmitted infections (sti) prevention % pregnancy prevention % access to protection % teen pregnancy % give advice % personal talk % self-reflection % misinformation about sex % sources of misinformation % give advice % positive aspects about sex % . . importance the theme, importance, addresses what extended family members identify as the most important things they think teens in their families should know about sex and relationships. this theme gives context to participants’ descriptions of different topics discussed with teens and frames their priorities for what they wanted the teens to know about sex and relationships. importance was coded regardless of whether the teen and relative discussed the topic. all participants ( %) answered this question. it has four sub themes: safer sex ( %), consent ( %), delaying sex ( %), and okay to talk about sex ( %). the safer sex subtheme includes talk with teens about the importance of using protection methods to avoid sexually transmitted infections (stis) and teen pregnancy; for example, sara talked about what she wants her sister to know about safer sex, “what i would want her specifically to know is that you can be safe and you can protect yourself from pregnancy and stds. you can have a really loving, joyful, satisfying, and happy, caring relationship, while still protecting yourself”. meghan described what she wants her niece to know about sex “i’m all about erring on the side of caution, trying to be as safe as possible . . . obviously using condoms or other kind of sti protection”. the consent subtheme addresses the importance of a mutually and willingly consensual relationship and red flags if consent is not present, such as physical and emotional abuse, partner pressure to have sex, and domestic violence. phil described conversations with his brother as a supplement to conventional sex education, because “i really think consent is number one. i think that he knows to wear a condom and that kind of thing. that sort of thing doesn’t worry me as much, because they teach it in school and he has a sense of it. but in terms of consent stuff, there really isn’t any sort of education about it and his friends don’t prioritize it in the same way”. mary talked about the importance of consent. “my sister and i don’t want our brother to end up being this jerk that treats women like crap. unfortunately, we have been examples to him in a lot of cases in which he’s learned what consent is and what consent should look like because we’ve been with people who haven’t understood that and we’ve made examples out of that to him”. the subtheme of delaying sex addresses waiting to become sexually active until the teen feels ready. for example, rebecca described what she wants her sister to know about sex, “i would want her to know that she doesn’t have to feel pressure to do anything she doesn’t want to do. it’s okay to say no if you feel uncomfortable. i would want her to know that it’s okay to wait because boys are not going anywhere—they’ll be here forever”. similarly, ashley talked about her sister, “i know she kind int. j. environ. res. public health , , of of feels pressured and stuff into it. and i just want her to know that it’s okay to wait and she doesn’t need to—she doesn’t need to rush anything”. the last subtheme was okay to talk about sex and includes extended family members’ emphasis on why it’s important to talk about sex and to ask trusted adults questions about sex despite taboos about these conversations. for example, alex shared that he wants his younger brother to know that “he can talk to adults about it (sex) and not be afraid to bring something up or worry that it’s going to be uncomfortable”. likewise, aunt nina described wanting her niece to not “feel like its taboo or like wrong or shameful to ask questions, because no one knows—no one is born knowing”. . . relationships the theme relationships was the most frequent topic of discussion reported by participants. it includes conversations between teens and extended family members regarding the components and qualities that make up healthy and unhealthy relationships. this theme was discussed by % ( / ) of participants. it included four subthemes: healthy relationships ( %), unhealthy relationships ( %), personal talk ( %), and self-reflection ( %). the healthy relationships subtheme includes discussions between the teen and the extended family member about what makes a healthy relationship, such as mutual and willing consent, trust between partners, and supporting your partner. brother john discussed that, in a healthy relationship, it is important for partners to “spend time, be compassionate, patient, and do fun activities that they both enjoy”. similarly, kathleen described explaining to her younger sister that the “most effective thing you can do in a relationship is be as open as possible, even if it’s uncomfortable for you”. the subtheme of unhealthy relationships encompasses discussions about the characteristics of unhealthy relationships, such as being controlling, mean, or physically or emotionally abusive. for example, jane told her brother that “it’s not healthy to scream at someone. if you love somebody, you shouldn’t be having shouting matches regularly. you shouldn’t want to hit each other”. jennifer described to her cousin what an unhealthy relationship looks like, “i tell her that the things that are not healthy in a relationship is like being with someone that’s abusive and that always knocks you down verbally, physically, whatever. you’ve got to watch out for that, because that’s not a healthy kind of relationship”. participants described personal talk with teens about their experiences. for example, maria described a conversation with her nephew in which she “asked him how his girlfriend is doing, he tells me some stories about the last time they hung out. then i asked him if she’s pressuring him into doing something he’s uncomfortable with, to make sure he’s not pressuring her to do anything”. seven described a conversation with her younger sister “explaining to her my first time, a situation where i felt like—i mean like afterwards—i realized i was definitely coerced”. participants also described self-reflection during the interviews. anna j described discussing relationships with her cousin, “we come from a family that had a lot of physical abuse growing up in terms of partners. so growing up having been around that, i really wanted her to know it is not healthy”. sara talked about how her past relationship informed how she talked with her sister, “i’ve talked to her about if someone seems like they’re controlling. i just know because i’ve been in that situation personally, where i kind of saw some abuse flags coming and i got out of that relationship really quickly. and so i did kind of warn her, ‘if someone tries to keep you from seeing your friends, you know, that’s really something that you should be worried about’”. . . sexual orientation the second most frequently discussed theme, sexual orientation, includes conversations between extended family members and teens regarding lgbtq issues as well as extended family members’ reflections on how their own or others’ experiences shaped their conversations with teens about this topic. eighty-two percent ( / ) of participants discussed this theme, which included four subthemes: openness and support ( %), gender identity ( %), personal talk ( %), and self-reflection ( %). int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the subtheme openness and support includes the extended family member expressing support and acceptance for lgbtq identities whether or not the teen or the extended family member identifies as lgtbq. for example, jose described a conversation with his niece that reassured her that if she identified as a sexual minority, he would support her, “i had that conversation about orientation because she seemed to have her identity pretty well figured out, but that can change, especially in college years . . . i wanted to make sure that she understood that i was open to her feeling differently and maybe talking about it possibly, you know? and not just being a heterosexual female”. alex described a conversation with his brother, in which he provided advice regarding sexual identity and resisting pressure to assign labels prematurely, “he’s talked to me about ‘i don’t know if i like girls or boys’. and i told him, you know, ‘well you don’t have to know. in fact, you never have to decide. you can just be interested in whoever you’re interested in and that doesn’t mean you have to pick boys or pick girls’”. the subtheme gender identity describes talk with the teen about defining or exploring gender identity/trans issues. at times, these conversations were in response to a family member dealing with a gender identity issue, such as when maria gave an example of a time when she discussed this topic with her nephew, “recently a member of our family came out as transgender. we had to talk about what that means and how it affects the person and the family. it was me doing a lot of talking and him asking a question or two, mostly asking for me to explain stuff to him like, ‘what do you mean?’”. alex recalls a conversation with his sister in which he felt honored to have the opportunity to learn more about his sister’s non-binary-identifying community, “so i asked her questions like how do i refer to her friends, what are their favorite pronouns, etcetera. i thought that was a real bonding moment, because she was able to tell something to me that meant something to her. but it also served as a heads up (from the teen) of, ‘hey, i’m queer’”. participants described personal talk with the teens. rachel discussed conversations with her sister about how she identified with her sister’s struggle of being out during adolescence and the accompanying sense of alienation, “we’ll often talk about what it’s like to be . . . out in middle and high school because i was out in high school and she’s been out in middle school. we’ll talk about . . . what it’s like to . . . be in health class when none of the material being presented is relevant to you”. amy talked about a conversation with her sister about appropriate pronoun usage with her sister’s non-binary friend, “ . . . she doesn’t know if she’s transitioning or not. she was just asking me how to use the right pronouns and stuff. she was asking me, ‘how should i ask this girl? what’s offensive, what’s not offensive? i just said, ‘well, you’re her friend, so of course you would be interested. you should just ask her like, ‘what pronouns do you want me to use? i don’t think they would get offended by that.’ and she was like, ‘oh okay’”. participants shared self-reflections related to their conversations with teens about lgbtq issues. for example, alex described why he talked with his brother about sexual orientation, “of the kids in my family, i’m like the only one who’s gay—or at least out as gay. so when i talk to him, i make sure that he knows that he can talk to me about his sexual orientation if he wants to. i’ll try to kind of keep that door open with him”. another example of one’s family context shaping conversations about sexual orientation was when kathleen commented about her own and her younger brother’s family experiences, “our parents are gay and that was always something our parents would bring up and i openly discussed about myself when i was in college with them. and the kids in our family, even my cousins and stuff, have always like had lgbt friends. so that is just sort of something that comes up naturally”. . . sexual behavior the theme sexual behavior includes any substantive talk between extended family and teens about sexual behavior, including teens’ readiness for sex, teens’ or extended family member’s sexual experiences, and extended family feedback on teens’ sexual behavior and decision making. this theme int. j. environ. res. public health , , of was discussed by % ( / ) of participants. we identified three subthemes: give advice ( %), personal talk ( %), and questions about sex ( %). the subtheme, give advice, includes extended family members’ suggestions for teens about having sex, often emphasizing that the teen should decide when they’re ready and not be pressured to have sex. many conversations started with teens’ questions about how they would know if they’re ready to have sex, or the relative recommending that teens wait to have sex. for example, ashley recalls telling her younger sister “that she wants to be like % sure, because when she does lose her virginity, like there’s no taking it back. when she’s ready, just make sure it is the guy”. similarly, phil described telling his younger brother that “there’s nothing un-masculine or anything about not wanting to have sex this early on”. participants described personal talk with teens about sexual behavior. anna j talked with her cousin about “that journey that i had to go through to know that i wanted to have sex with my partner the first time i did have sex with him, and how i knew i was ready”. these conversations often included teens’ questions about sex, such as what to expect from sex, or how they feel about sex. elizabeth recalled that her sister “called (her) after the first time and just said, ‘do i need to take plan b? should i be worried about the fact that we did have sex or that i’m sore or anything like that?’”. . . protection methods the theme protection methods includes extended family members’ conversations with teens about pregnancy and sti prevention methods. seventy-four percent ( / ) of participants discussed this theme and it included four subthemes: use protection ( %), sti prevention ( %), pregnancy prevention ( %), and access to protection ( %). the subtheme use protection was applied when relatives described advising the teen to use protection or asking whether the teen was using protection. jennifer cautioned her cousin, saying that “if you’re going to engage in something like that, make sure you always use protection no matter what, even if the guy says, ‘no, it’ll be okay.’ if he says that, then just back away from him and don’t talk to him”. john described checking in on his younger brother about his girlfriend regarding whether “he’s been using condoms lately”. the subtheme sti prevention references condoms or other ways (e.g., delaying sex) to protect against sexually transmitted infections. peter told his brother “there are lots of things and some are curable, but also there are diseases . . . that you’re going to have more or less indefinitely”. likewise, lucy described how she and her sisters made a slideshow for their younger brother “about the different sexually transmitted diseases and infections...to get the point across of why i buy (him) condoms every month”. the subtheme pregnancy prevention references condoms and other methods to protect against pregnancy. alex talked to his sister about condoms “‘you may want to go with the spermicidal ones if you’re hooking up with a guy like you haven’t known too long. and even you were, it’s still a good idea of try to get the higher quality ones that are less known for ripping. don’t ever store them in your pockets. don’t use double ones’”. maria addressed the theme in a humorous way with her sister, reflecting that “every time we’re listening to music, like we’ll joke about rubbers and stuff. like it’ll be like, ‘wrap it up,’ you know, because it’s a song or whatever and it’s talking about, you know, having sex. you’re not trying to get pregnant and you’re not trying to get anybody else pregnant”. the final subtheme is access to protection and includes extended family members and teens discussing where to get protection and/or the extended family member offering to get protection for the teen. mary recalled telling her younger brother “if you ever need more condoms, just like let me know and i can get you some”. alternatively, ava directed her nephew to where he could get condoms, “you’ve got to make sure you use condoms. you can get them for cheap at the convenience store, but most schools nowadays even have them for free or the doctors even sometimes have them for free. so don’t ever feel like you can’t access them. they’re cheap, accessible, and it saves you a lot of worry later—later on”. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . teen pregnancy the theme teen pregnancy includes conversations between extended family members and teens regarding teen pregnancy or parenthood, as well potential teen pregnancy (scares). it was discussed by % ( / ) of participants and included three subthemes: give advice ( %), personal talk ( %), and self-reflection ( %). the subtheme give advice focuses on advice from the extended family member to the teen about avoiding teen pregnancy through methods such as abstinence or birth control. anna j talked about a conversation with her cousin “she asked ‘why can’t i be a teen mom? and why’s everybody stressing it?’ i was like, ‘well, you haven’t fully developed yet in any way. not to say that, ‘oh my goodness, teen moms are horrible,’ but it is to say that you don’t finish developing and you don’t finish learning who you are before you have a child, and what if you didn’t want kids? or what if you’re someone who doesn’t want children and you don’t even know that about yourself yet?’”. megan described the advice she gave her niece, “the first time she had sex, she thought she was pregnant and had nobody to talk to. first thing we did was figure out if she was or not—which she wasn’t. but then i just told her that it’s the last thing she needs right now. ‘i understand if you’re going to do it, you’re gonna. i’m not going to tell her not to have sex or anything like that. just be more careful . . . it’s not as glamorous as they make it on tv’”. personal talk included participants’ talk with teens about their own experiences of teen pregnancy or pregnancy scares or those of other people they knew. gerald talked with his niece about her pregnancy scare, and “told her like, ‘hey, these things happen. it was a mistake.’ and i asked her if she regretted it and she said, ‘yes.’ and i was like, ‘what would you do different?’ and she was like, ‘well, i wouldn’t do it’”. jenny reyes described a conversation with her younger brother, “i was pregnant when i was a teen, so he remembers a little bit of the struggle. he asked, ‘how hard is it to like keep up with school while being a parent?’ i explained to him, everything is harder but not impossible. like a kid doesn’t really cut down your wings. you can still do a lot of things’”. self-reflection includes participants’ discussions during the interview about personal experiences with teen pregnancy. ava reflected on how her own experience as a young parent informs her conversations with her nephew, “i have a daughter who’s one year old. i got pregnant at and so it was definitely a journey. i’m so glad i have my daughter and she’s such a blessing, but it was definitely tough. and you know, i don’t want him to go through that same situation until he’s ready, you know?” shawn talked about how her family history shapes her conversations with her nephew, “his sister had a baby at , his mom had a baby at , and we’re trying to break the generational curse. so, wrap it up. i mean it’s that simple. if i’ve got to send you $ for ear buds, who’s going to pay for the pampers?” . . misinformation about sex the theme misinformation about sex includes conversations where relatives talked with teens about sources of misinformation, myths, or inadequate information about sex and clarified potentially incorrect information (specifically, friends and media/porn were referenced). this topic was discussed by % of participants ( / ) and included two subthemes: sources of misinformation ( %) and give advice ( %). the subtheme sources of misinformation includes when teens or extended family members talked about misconceptions about sex conveyed by community, media/social media, school and faith-based organizations and peer sources. for example, tina described talking with her brother “earlier this week [we] talked about pornography and how that’s a really bad place to get information about sex”. elizabeth mentioned a peer source of misinformation to her sister, “i know that her one friend was pressuring her to take plan b after she had sex, even though she was on birth control. and i definitely had to give her some education on why she shouldn’t take it”. the subtheme give advice includes feedback from extended family members advising teens to be educated about where they get their information from and to be critical of dubious information they may encounter. for example, seven told her sister, “how sex on tv is not real and they exaggerate int. j. environ. res. public health , , of certain facial expressions and like sounds and stuff. and how it shouldn’t be a model of what sex should be”. shawn told her nephew “i think your mom was pulling out when she had your sister at , so you might not want to follow her advice”. . . positive aspects about sex the theme positive aspects about sex includes discussions about sex in a positive light. for example, saying that it “brings you closer together” or referencing the physical pleasure derived from it. fifty-four percent of participants ( / ) discussed the positive aspects of sex in their conversations with teens. for example, meghan described sex to her niece as “a thing that’s pleasurable, it is something to be enjoyed. and it’s great if you’re in a loving relationship, but it’s okay if you’re not, too”. similarly, sara shared with her sister, “‘sex is really positive if you’re comfortable and happy with the person. you don’t need to be worried and as long as you’re safe and you protect yourself, it’s really a joyful thing.’ i think she sees it as just like a scary thing that will happen to her inevitably. and i’m like, ‘no, like it’s a thing that you’re in control. you set the boundaries that you’re comfortable with, and as long as you work within those, you can be really joyous and happy about it’”. however, a few participants expressed discomfort with discussing positive aspects of sex or expressed concern that they might encourage teen’s sexual activity by talking about the positive aspects of sex. for example, rachel described her apprehension about talking with her sister about this topic, “i don’t want to be even inadvertently telling my sister that maybe she should be sleeping with people. i feel like those pressures are around enough already”. . . preliminary comparison of sibling and non-sibling participants’ responses the initial comparisons suggested that siblings may be more likely to report talk about sexual orientation, while non-siblings were more likely to talk about protection methods, teen pregnancy and misinformation about sex. there were fewer differences between siblings and non-siblings in whether they reported talk about relationships, sexual behavior and positive aspects about sex. see table for the percentages of sibling and non-sibling reported themes. table . identified themes for sibling (n = ) and non-sibling (n = ) participants. theme sibling (%) non-sibling (%) importance % % relationships % % sexual orientation % % sexual behavior % % protection methods % % teen pregnancy % % misinformation about sex % % positive aspects about sex % % . discussion this is one of the few studies that explores extended family members’ perspectives around sexuality communication with teens in their families, with the exception of studies of grandparents’ attitudes and approaches to family sexuality communication [ , ]. this study explores what extended family members view as important to discuss with teens, what topics they discuss and how they approach talk with teens about sex and relationships. it provides an opportunity to understand a largely unrecognized resource for teens’ sexual health which may complement parents’ roles in teens’ sexuality communication or fill gaps in teens’ sexuality communication resources. these findings provide a window into how extended family members may be uniquely positioned to support teens’ health. extended family members’ descriptions of their conversations with teens highlight their engaged role in teens’ sexual socialization. participants often addressed topics such as safer sex, stis, sexual int. j. environ. res. public health , , of orientation and the positive aspects of sex, which parents and teens may hesitate to discuss with one another and are often left out of sex education programs. for example, while parents frequently focus their communication with teens on delaying sex [ , ], many participants in this study described conversations with teens about safer sex and stis. parents may avoid these conversations due to fears that communication about safer sex will encourage teens’ sexual behavior [ ], while teens may be reluctant to talk with parents about sex and protection due to worries that parents will judge them or be disappointed in their behaviors [ , ]. sexual orientation is another topic that parents may avoid discussing or see as taboo [ ], as less than half of parents talk with their teens about sexual orientation [ , ]. in contrast with parents’ reluctance to talk with teens about this issue, % of participants reported talking with teens about this topic. similarly, some participants discussed the importance of discussing issues of consent with teens, in part because they are often left out of sex education classes [ ]. the prevalence of consent in these conversations may also reflect a growing awareness of this issue due to the #metoo movement and the prominence of consent issues in the public sphere [ ]. discussions about media influences, particularly pornography, which may provide false or misleading ideas about sexuality, was another focus of extended family conversations with teens in this study. parents may avoid talking with teens about this topic due to fear and discomfort around addressing it [ ]. extended family members’ engagement with teens on topics that are often missing from other sources of sexual information and may be perceived as uncomfortable or taboo for other family members to discuss suggests the potentially unique contribution of extended family to teens’ understanding of sex and relationships. in contrast to prior findings that parents often don’t talk with their teens about sexual orientation [ , ] and may pass on implicit messages with a heterosexual bias [ ], participants in our sample expressed an overall willingness to be a positive and supportive resource for teens regarding sexual orientation. this ranged from expressing messages which countered shame or stigma toward their teen family member should they come out as lgbtq, to conversations about questioning and non-binary identities in both hypothetical terms and from personal experience. it is difficult to conclude to what extent high levels of engagement and support regarding lgbtq issues stems from a growing public acceptance of sexual minorities, qualities of extended family members (particularly from younger generations), such as greater openness to lgbtq issues, and the unique aspects of our sample, which may be unusually lgbtq-friendly compared to the general population. regardless of a teen’s sexual orientation, their attitudes and beliefs about sexual minorities are shaped by sexual socialization processes both within and beyond the nuclear family, such as other family members, media, school, and cultural or religious groups [ ]. extended family may provide one of the few positive sources of sexual socialization on this issue. about half of participants discussed positive aspects of sex—the lowest response rate for any of the seven sexuality themes. the comparatively small number of participants who discussed this topic, as well as the concerns expressed by a few participants that talking about positive aspects of sex would encourage the teen to have sex, suggests that a focus on the positive aspects of sex may push the boundaries of comfort for extended family. however, the inclusion of the positive aspects of sex in some conversations with teens indicates that extended family may be more open than parents in talking with teens about sexual issues. conversations about the positive aspects of sex may be health-promoting for teens. however, teen–parent sexuality communication largely focuses on the risks involved with sexual activity, leaving out discussions about the positive aspects of sex [ , ]. ideas about relationships and sexual activity in adolescence can be carried over to adulthood [ ]. therefore, it is important that teens learn about the positive aspects of sex as well as its risks. a focus on personal talk emerged across many content areas. personal experiences served as a point of reference and connection in participants’ conversations with teens. some participants expressed a hope that teens would learn from personal examples and either make use of these instances as positive models for relationships or conversely be less likely to repeat participants’ or other family members’ past mistakes. studies show that parents describe their own personal experiences as int. j. environ. res. public health , , of a way to discourage teens from teen pregnancy and hiv-related risk behavior [ – ]. this suggests ways in which parents and extended family may use similar approaches to talking with teens about sex. however, communication about personal experiences related to sex, relationships, and sexual orientation as a way to support teens’ health has not been explored among extended family. in the interviews, participants also reflected on how their own negative experiences motivated them to talk with teens about sex and relationships. for example, participants often described a desire to prevent teens from going through negative experiences based on their relationship histories or those of others in their families. these dual processes of reflection on their own experiences and talk with teens about these experiences show the importance of going beyond the assessment of topics of conversation to understand the motivations for and processes of these family conversations. an initial exploration of the themes for sibling and non-sibling participants suggests similarities and differences for these two groups. the high frequency of siblings’ reported talk with teens about sexual orientation fits with prior research that shows siblings as a key source of family support for teens’ talk about sexual orientation [ , ] and lgbtq teens’ disclosures about coming out [ , ]. it may be that the combination of a peer-like relationship with teens [ , ] and close family connections make siblings feel like a safe resource to discuss topics which teens may experience as taboo to share with other family members. the lower frequency of discussion about protection methods and teen pregnancy for siblings, when compared to non-siblings, suggests that non-sibling family members may act in a similar way to parents in addressing traditional topics related to avoiding risky sexual behavior. siblings may also believe that teens already have this information and it, therefore, doesn’t need to be a key topic for discussion with teens. the small number of cousins in the study ( ) is a limitation and did not allow for separate exploration of this group. quantitative research would be useful to statistically compare teens’ sexuality communication with different types of extended family members and what drives the topics of these conversations. this sample was primarily made up of extended family members from the same generation as the teens (siblings and cousins), considered horizontal relationships, which often show high levels of mutual disclosure when compared to vertical ones, such as the kinds of relationships teens have with their parents [ ]. grafsky and colleagues suggested that aunts (the other highly represent sub-group in our sample) may also have a special role in teens’ sexuality communication, due to relationships that are both emotionally close and have the authority to give direction and advice [ ]. the lack of grandparents in this study is a limitation, particularly given studies that suggest their involvement in sexuality communication with teens [ , ]. however, the younger generations of extended family members included in this study are similar in age and generation to those teens typically report as their primary extended family communication partners [ ], and may serve a more differentiated role than extended family in general. future studies would benefit from comparing communication across different types and generations of extended family. this study uses a convenience sample of extended family members who are highly engaged in sexuality communication with teens in their families, in order to access the perspectives of a group that is rarely included in studies of family sexuality communication. we expect that people who volunteered to join this study are more engaged and comfortable in talking about sexual issues than many extended family members. finding ways to include less engaged extended family members would help to clarify how generalizable this study’s findings are to a broader population. in addition, it would be useful, in future studies, to pair teens’ perspectives with those of extended family members, especially given findings that parents and teens are often inconsistent in their reports of how they talk with each other about sex [ ]. given the high level of engagement of extended family in this sample in talking with teens about sexual orientation, it would be beneficial to explore the potential supportive roles for extended family in talking with lgbtq teens about sexual issues. a paired study would also allow for teens to identify which extended family members are the most influential to them for family sexuality communication. our inclusion of participants who identified as transgender makes a unique contribution, but future research would benefit from a sample with more men, to enable int. j. environ. res. public health , , of assessment of whether and how gender differences often found in teen–parent sexuality communication research [ , ] may apply to teens’ communication with extended family. further, we did not ask demographic questions about the teens with whom extended family members talked about sex and relationships and, therefore, do not have information about their gender identities. this information would be useful in exploring gender differences in extended family–teen relationships. most sex education programs that include family outreach focus on parents [ , ]. this study’s findings suggest that teens’ extended family may also be potential resources for their sexuality communication. extended family outreach may be particularly valuable for teens who identify as lgbtq. topics that seem taboo and are less frequently discussed by parents may be areas where extended family can contribute to family conversations about sex, such as sexual orientation, safer sex, the positive aspects of sex, and pornography. perhaps, rather than asking teens to identify a single family member they talk with about sex and relationships, educators or counselors could talk with teens about the larger set of family resources they have access to for conversations about sex and relationships, and explore possible variation in who they might talk to about different sexual topics. . conclusions the high number of teens who talk with extended family about sex [ , ] and the associations of this communication with teens’ sexual behavior [ , ] suggest the need to understand extended family roles in sexuality communication. this study is one of the first to provide an in-depth exploration of extended family perspectives on family sexuality communication. these findings suggest that extended family members may engage with teens on topics that parents rarely discuss with their teens or see as taboo content for conversations, and that siblings may play a key role in this communication. this study shows that extended family members are highly invested in sexuality communication with the teens in their families. their conversations are often personal and connected, and reflect close relationships with the teens in their families. more exploration is needed to understand how extended family members fit within the larger ecology of teens’ family sexual socialization and how this communication can support teens’ sexual health. author contributions: formal analysis, j.m.g. and a.n.; funding acquisition, j.m.g.; investigation, j.m.g.; project administration, a.m.r.; supervision, j.m.g.; validation, a.n.; writing—original draft, j.m.g.; a.n. and l.c.; writing—review & editing, l.c. and a.m.r. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development: r hd conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . bersamin, m.; todd, m.; fisher, 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[crossref] [pubmed] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . .tb .x https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/ / / /sexeducation_update- .pdf https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/ / / /sexeducation_update- .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://dx.doi.org/ . / x http://dx.doi.org/ . /jpepsy/jsn http://dx.doi.org/ . / x http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x-i http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jadohealth. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	recruitment and participants 	interview protocols and procedures 	data analysis 	results 	interviews 	importance 	relationships 	sexual orientation 	sexual behavior 	protection methods 	teen pregnancy 	misinformation about sex 	positive aspects about sex 	preliminary comparison of sibling and non-sibling participants’ responses 	discussion 	conclusions 	references microsoft word - _materializing activism_workshop_ecscw.doc hansson, karin, teresa cerratto pargman, shaowen bardzell, hillevi ganetz, malin sveningsson, maria sandgren ( ): materializing activism in: proceedings of the th european conference on computer-supported cooperative work: the international venue on practice-centred computing an the design of cooperation technologies - workshop proposals, reports of the european society for socially embedded technologies (issn - ), doi: . /ecscw _ws copyright held by authors, doi: . /ecscw _ws permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. abstracting with credit is permitted. to copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, contact the authors. materializing activism karin hansson *, teresa cerratto pargman , shaowen bardzell , hillevi ganetz , malin sveningsson & maria sandgren * stockholm university, indiana university, gothenburg university, södertörn university khansson@dsv.su.se, tessy@dsv.su.se, selu@indiana.edu, hillevi.ganetz@gender.su.se, malin.sveningsson@gu.se, maria.sandgren@sh.se abstract. net activism shows how easily available tools allow the organization of social movements to be scaled up and extended globally. these media ecologies enable new forms of power. this one-day workshop gathers researchers focusing on the collaborative efforts within social movements, looking into the socio-technical systems; the organization of activism; the relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies and aesthetics underlying various types of activism. the workshop consists of brainstorming sessions where we materialize the intangible and develop our theories and ideas further through a collaborative design process. background social activism consists of efforts to promote, or intervene, with the goal of bringing about social change. networked online environments can effectively support the infrastructuring of social movements, and have the potential to enable more inclusive and decentralized power structures. in this regard, the popular appeal of social media has made such online environments central for social activists’ communicative strategies (askanius et al., ; neumayer et al., ). the environmental movement has, in the past, made use of social media to engage a broad public around substantive issues (deluca et al., ; goodwin & jasper, ; pang & law, ). other examples of activism where social media has played a central role include the arab spring (alsayyad & guvenc, ; smidi & shahin, ), the occupy movement (kavada, ), and the #metoo movement (askanius & hartley, ; eilermann, ). more locally situated examples are movements such as the gezi protests in turkey (haciyakupoglu & zhang, ), ukraine’s euromaidan uprising (bohdanova, ), indignados movement in spain (anduiza et al., ), the umbrella movement in hong kong (chan, ; lee et al., ; tsui, ) and the save kpk movement in indonesia (suwana, ). all these dynamic movements are characterized by a liquid organization, where membership is performative and informal, and where leadership is value- based rather than based on institutional structures (gerbaudo, ). a salient aspect of such social movements lies in the technologies and cultural practices that are involved, what in design contexts can be called the infrastructuring (björgvinsson et al., ; dantec & disalvo, ), describing the socio- technical setting that supports, for example, a public. in this article we show how the infrastructure arrangements serve to circumvent hierarchies, strategize and act horizontally toward inclusion, while also lowering the cost of political participation (dahlberg-grundberg, ; earl & kimport, ). rather than being part of a formal structure, political participation is here seen as a way to work in parallel towards shared goals and issues that are articulated by a scattered public and communicated broadly through shared manifests (milan, ). another aspect of these movements is the way transnational activism intersects with the national configuration of political work, such as, for example the feminist movement, where shared values can unite diverse national contexts (sadowski, ; scharff et al., ). while these socio-technical arrangements often use a hybrid of media and methods to organize and reach out, some elements of the technologies in use are more dominant in their action repertoires (dahlberg-grundberg, ). social media has also made the quantification of data easier by putting that data to new uses (milan, ; milan & velden, ) or by providing activists with new forms of arguments when surveys can extend to millions of people enabling a “rhetoric of collection” (pickard & yang, ). #metoo demonstrates how activists crowdsourced data that made a massive impact on the public sphere. this has also been labeled as a scientization of activism (kimura, ), and provides an interesting link between activism and citizen science (paulos et al., ). furthermore, campaigns such as #metoo also show how online spaces provide opportunities for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse to come out and receive support from other victims, and also to participate in public debates around these issues. simultaneously, research also points at the negative consequences, which may render digital activism risky, exhausting and overwhelming (mendes et al., ). yet activism has always been risky and those who make a stand put themselves in harm’s way one way or another. in particular, digital media may amplify such vulnerability that characterizes activism, by exposing and surveilling and contributing at times a digital panopticon, or a means to spread disinformation about activisms (bradshaw & howard, ; pickard, ; uldam, ). social media exposition makes it easier for companies and authorities to monitor activists’ activities (dencik et al., ; trottier and fuchs, ; uldam, ). through technological affordances, user regulations and social norms these platforms are shaping and controlling the ways in which we communicate (klang & madison, ), such as by censoring lbtq activism, or through breastfeeding activism on facebook. most often, social media users are aware of the limitations of the technology, but less aware of the potential social implications (klang, ). the system of metrics that measure success in the number of friends, likes, retweets and shares, the reach of a message, helps to effectively map out the network of supporters by creating a perfect overview of the activism range and participants. activism in social media thus creates new sorts of risks: the risk of relying on a technology that also is a mean for surveillance; the risk of relying on a crowd you might never meet face to face; the risk of disinformation especially linked to the unreliability of user-generated data. this might include, for example, a situation where activists mistrust official information, such as during the gezi protests in turkey (haciyakupoglu, ). in this particular case, the technology created instead an opportunity to “aggregate trustworthiness” (jessen & jørgensen, ) from a large number of sources, where social trust and technical affordances are interdependent (haciyakupoglu, ). following haraway ( ), technology can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, which extends our “arms” and allows us to stretch beyond our bodies and reach what was previously unreachable. looked at this way, trust is about trusting that the arms can reach out and carry what we expect them to do. there is always a risk that the prosthesis will fall off, but most of the time it goes well. the moment of risk means that trust is required, which is why risk and trust are closely linked. the more risk, the greater is the trust needed. dahlberg-grundberg ( ) suggests the concept of media ecology as a lens to capture the coexistence of, and interdependence, between human actors and technologies and to point out the dynamic and fragile interrelations of people, processes, practices and artifacts. from a media ecology perspective, the technology involves not just extensions or prostheses through which activists operate; they also embed us and define the range of actions possible, indicating that media structure our actions, just like cultural norms and practices. these media ecologies are thus not primarily artifacts but also consist of social beings structured by cultural norms – sometimes very large numbers of people who might not even have a personal relationship, but who share a common interest that brings them together. in these cases, trust is not so much a matter of trust in technical systems, trust in authorities, trust in information or trust in particular people, but trust in shared values and practices. for example, it may be about belonging to an idea, or a shared experience, which is sufficiently strong or revolutionary to motivate the individual to, for example, take the risk of trusting strangers in publics (wang & emurian, ). against this background, the question is how we can understand and conceptualize these media ecologies, while also contributing to the development of useful tools for activism. suggested topics and inquiries for the workshop in this workshop we are inviting – researchers in the area net activism and online participation, to discuss their epistemologies and methodologies. the purpose is to explore the large-scale collaborations that take place in social activism. • how do we make sense of the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies and aesthetics underlying various types of activism? • what happens when social media becomes central for how a social movement operates? what are the unintended consequences? • how do we conceptualize the mutual constitution of a movement or network of activists and their technological strategies? • how can certain media ecologies hinder organizational developments? • how can we understand coordination without formalized leadership when the participants are situated in different countries and time zones? • how is scientization transforming the way social movements operate? • how is participation constructed and enacted in bottom-up data practices? • how is participation constrained, for example, by infrastructural arrangements, technological affordances and social norms? • what are the tactics, structures and normative foundations necessary for supporting liquid organization and value-based leadership, while supporting a strong democracy? we are especially interested in research that mixes qualitative and quantitative studies of activism and presentations focusing on research methodology. description of the workshop activities this one-day workshop will explore the topics through prototyping and brainstorming sessions. the workshop is divided into two sessions. the first half includes the participants’ presentation of their research on the topics. the second half consists of a brainstorming session where the topics of the workshop are further explored through collaborative prototyping. in human-computer interaction (hci) design we are used to co-design methods such as sketches, prototypes, cases and scenarios to achieve a more informed design, grounded in the reality of potential users. also, more artistic techniques are used to involve participants as informants and co-designers such as probes, scenarios and role-playing. however, unlike most problem-focused design research, the aim with this workshop is not to use these methods to achieve a more informed design. instead, we use the design process as a method to collaboratively materialize our own understanding of our research. the workshop will be communicated through our website (https://materializingactivism.blogs.dsv.su.se) as well as via emailing lists relevant for the ecscw community, but also more broadly to attract an interdisciplinary research community. accepted papers will be circulated beforehand to prepare attendees for discussions at the workshop. beyond the themes highlighted here by the workshop organizers, other themes for the workshop emerging from the position papers will be posted on the website. a key discussant, identified among the workshop attendees, will be assigned to each position paper to facilitate interaction and engagement in the workshop. the participants will prepare a -minute presentation to be delivered in the introduction of the workshop, but focus in the workshop will be on developing our ideas through collaborative prototyping. we will take the workshop as an opportunity to explore future collaboration (e.g., a mailing list and/or collaborative research projects). the results from the workshop will possibly be developed further for a special issue or anthology. organization the workshop is organized by an interdisciplinary group of researchers covering topics such as computer and systems sciences, gender studies, media and communication studies, and social psychology. karin hansson, associate professor in computer and systems sciences at stockholm university, has written extensively about technology-based participation from a design perspective. she is currently part of a research project on the development of #metoo activism in sweden, and part of the “metadata culture” research group at stockholm university that investigates and develops methods for obtaining qualified and extensive metadata in digitalized cultural heritage collections. she has previously organized workshops on cscw themes such as: the morphing organization – rethinking groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork at acm group , sanibel island, usa; examining the essence of the crowds: motivations, roles and identities at ecscw , oslo, norway; toward a typology of participation in crowdwork at acm cscw , san francisco, usa; crowd dynamics: exploring conflicts and contradictions in crowdsourcing at acm chi , san jose, ca, usa; ting: making publics through provocation, conflict and appropriation, the th participatory design conference , aarhus, denmark. together with teresa cerratto pargman and shaowen bardzell she recently edited the design issues special issue, “provocation, conflict and appropriation,” focusing on participatory design methodologies. teresa cerratto pargman, associate professor in human-computer interaction (hci) at the department of computer and systems sciences at stockholm university. her research interests include educational and collaborative learning technologies, sustainable hci and digital civics. shaowen bardzell is professor of human-computer interaction design in the school of informatics and computing at indiana university bloomington. her research areas include feminist hci, domestic computing, intimate interaction, affective computing and virtual worlds for collaboration. hillevi ganetz, professor in gender studies at stockholm university, is a media researcher with a cultural studies perspective, focusing on gender and popular culture. currently she is leading an interdisciplinary research project on feminist net activism at stockholm university. malin sveningsson, professor in media and communication studies at the university of gothenburg, is the author of several books and research articles in areas such as digital media, computer-mediated communication, virtual worlds, social interaction, popular culture, youth culture, gender and identity. she takes part in the interdisciplinary research project on feminist net activism at stockholm university. maria sandgren, phd in psychology and registered psychologist, is a researcher in political psychology at södertörn university. her field of knowledge is primarily social psychology with a focus on political psychology. she is one of the researchers in the interdisciplinary research project on feminist net activism at stockholm university. references alsayyad, n., & guvenc, m. 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( ). an overview of online trust: concepts, elements, and implications. computers in human behavior, ( ), – . doi: . /j.chb. . . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ coffee and controversy: how applied psychology can revitalize sexual harassment and racial discrimination training focal article coffee and controversy: how applied psychology can revitalize sexual harassment and racial discrimination training theodore l. hayes* , leah e. kaylor, and kathleen a. oltman federal bureau of investigation, washington, dc, usa *corresponding author. email: tlh @gmail.com (received july ; revised july ; accepted july ) abstract training has shown little effectiveness in altering harassing or discriminatory behavior. limitations of prior intervention efforts may reflect poor conceptualization of the problems involved, poor training intervention design, approaches that engender cynicism, or misunderstanding psychological principles of attitude and behavior change. interventions should capitalize on behavioral science models and tools at multiple levels from a broad array of disciplines to explain harassment and bias, and then to defeat these behaviors. measures to ensure fair treatment should focus on leadership socialization, organizational culture and climate, increased professional competence, and integration with organizational approaches to corporate social responsibility and performance. keywords: unlawful racial discrimination; sexual harassment; applied psychological interventions; training; professional practice in late may , over , employees in more than , starbucks-owned coffee and tea stores within the united states received training following an incident in a philadelphia starbucks store in which two african american men were arrested for no apparent behaviorally based reason (starbucks, ). starbucks founder and executive chairman, howard schultz, said the training would take place because the company’s founding values were based on “humanity and inclusion.” according to the same press release, the training was “designed to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a starbucks store feels safe and welcome” (starbucks, ). behavioral science researchers and observers were unimpressed by this announcement. jefferson and lewis ( ) noted that while praiseworthy in intention, the starbucks program was designed without a program evaluation component. chabris and brown ( ) suggested a randomized control design to study the training treatment intervention as compared to making the training a universal starbucks imperative within its corporate-owned, us-based stores. the views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the federal bureau of investigation or of any branch of the federal government of the united states. we contributed roughly equally to this paper and are listed here in alphabetical order. our thanks go to, in alphabetical order, patrick forscher, liz hayes, lisa kath, calvin lai, neil lewis, jr., patrick mckay, michelle motta, kristin saboe, rich tonowski, and two anonymous reviewers for their responsiveness, thoughtfulness, and generosity both before and while we put this paper together. finally, we thank mark poteet for his careful and tenacious editing. © society for industrial and organizational psychology, inc. . the entire training program is available at https://starbuckschannel.com/thethirdplace/. industrial and organizational psychology ( ), , – doi: . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:tlh @gmail.com https://starbuckschannel.com/thethirdplace/ https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core belluz’s ( ) review of implicit bias training literature showed that training may not be a cure-all for starbucks. cumulated evidence has shown that implicit bias training has mixed results in reducing bias (lai, marini, et al., ), with “improvement” rarely lasting a week post-training. furthermore, forscher et al. ( ) showed that implicit bias training could lead to more bias, a finding consistent in both sexual harassment training (blakely et al., ; robb & doverspike, ) and racial bias training (hussey & de houwer, unpublished manuscript). this article summarizes eight practice topics and associated research questions for investigation and implementation from the scientist-practitioner perspective regarding how applied psychology could be useful to organizations seeking to mitigate or react to unlawful racial discrimination and sexual harassment. contextual factors that could enhance the effectiveness of applied psycho- logical interventions are discussed. advances in training science and behavior change will be reviewed. practice perspectives regarding applied psychological interventions will be reviewed at the individual and unit or organizational levels, to include organizational training commit- ment; increasing training impact; training content; training medium; organizational and indi- vidual behaviors along a continuum of harm; professional competence and beliefs about change; bystander programs; and incorporating corporate social responsibility and reputation management as part of an intervention strategy. unlawful racial discrimination and sexual harassment are well-publicized, cross-organizational problems that are possibly the most common and pernicious examples of counterproductive work behavior (sackett, ). we emphasize that not all negative behavior exhibited toward individ- uals in identifiable or protected classes (i.e., women, asian americans, the lgbtq community, faith communities, etc.) meets the legal definitions of discrimination or harassment, even if the behavior is provocative, and that these events must be dealt with within organizations themselves. the behavioral science databases for these issues are growing apace (e.g., aksoy et al., ; hebl et al., ; lai, haidt, & nosek, ; u.s. merit systems protection board, ). importance unlawful racial discrimination fundamental to the nature of racism is the view that people can be sorted based on inherent and accidental characteristics such as ethnicity or regional origin, and that some groups are superior to others because of these between-group characteristics. subjugation of the minority group by the majority group arises from this perceived superiority (brewer, ; leidner et al., ). countries vary in the extent to which racial discrimination is legally prohibited in terms of contractual matters, business practices, education, and service provision. in the united states, for example, the civil rights act of (pub. l. - , stat. ) prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin regarding interstate commerce, voting, education, and employment, the latter under title vii ( u.s. code section e- ; the act outlines narrow exceptions to all these prohibitions). private and public organizations may have their own prohibitions in their codes of conduct or ethical standards. the implications of racial bias can be assessed across a broad range of outcomes. at the indi- vidual employee level, a meta-analysis by triana et al. ( ) regarding the impact of perceived racial bias on organizational outcomes found that perceived racial bias had consistent negative correlation with individual-level job attitudes (rho = –. ), perceived support for diverse employees (diversity climate; rho = –. ), psychological health (rho = –. ), and organizational citizenship behaviors (rho = –. ). mckay et al. ( ) found that diversity climate perceptions were a significant correlate of the individual’s intent to quit the organization. at the organizational level, consequences of unlawful racial discrimination can range from legal action (e.g., the griggs v. duke power company decision; u.s. ) to social criticism and resultant public theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core contrition (e.g., the starbucks training situation). at the federal government level, the u.s. equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc, n.d.) reported that the number of civil rights act claims brought under title vii, which would primarily affect employers, has increased for claims of violations based on employee color from fiscal year (n = , claims) to fiscal year (n = , claims), decreased for claims based on national origin from fiscal year (n = , claims) to fiscal year (n = , claims), and decreased for claims of violations based on race from fiscal year (n = , claims) to fiscal year (n = , claims). in line with increased reports of violations of title vii based on race, there have been a variety of social movements reflecting a rising public awareness of issues around unlawful racial discrim- ination. from the starbucks incident to recent shootings of unarmed african american men, the need for effective race-based bias interventions at all levels of society is clear. nearly one-third ( . %) of all complaints filed with the eeoc in fiscal year were based on race (eeoc, n.d.). organizations may be particularly motivated to address illegal race discrimination, as there are multiple direct and indirect costs associated with such accusations. attrition due to race dis- crimination costs institutions millions in lost profits and opportunities, as well as increased time for recruitment and training (e.g., kapor center for social impact, ). many organizations rely on their good reputation both for new employees and for sales figures, which can be dimin- ished by having a reputation for condoning apparently racist behaviors (goldman et al., ; kapor center for social impact, ; sickler, ). thus, there are short- and long-term consequences for not preventing and addressing unlawful racial discrimination in the workplace. sexual harassment although there are various forms of sexual discrimination, this article will focus specifically on sexual harassment in the workplace. sexual harassment can involve intimidation or actions taken against a single individual based on gender characteristics. sexual harassment does not require evidence that a practice, such as not promoting women, affects a certified class of affected individuals; this is covered in the united states by the civil rights act. a classic formulation of sexual harassment (u.s. code of federal regulation, title ) involves either a quid pro quo work arrangement (coercion to perform sexual acts in exchange for favorable organizational outcomes) or the existence of a hostile work environment that unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance. johnson et al. ( , p. ) differentiate the hostile workplace con- cept into gender harassment (e.g., derogatory comments about a gender) or unwanted sexual attention. it is notable that while coercion involves volitional behavior targeting a particular per- son, creation of a hostile work environment might not target anyone in particular. alternatively, the person engaging in actions deemed by others as harassing may not be aware that others find the behaviors harassing. statistics regarding the incidence of sexual harassment and assault are dependent upon report- ing comfort and definitions of harassment. defining sexual harassment only in terms of coercion will result in a lower incidence rate than defining harassment in terms of the more extensive con- cept of gender harassment. where or when the harassment or assault occurs—in an educational setting, at work, in the military—also enters into consideration. for example, anderson ( ; see also burns et al., ) claimed that about % of women have been sexually assaulted based on studies of collegiate settings, but that the rates of unreported incidents are likely much higher. however, fedina et al. ( ) reviewed studies of college campus assault from through and found wide variation in assault incidence based on how these incidents were categorized, for example, as physical contact or coercion to engage in unwelcomed behavior. a comprehensive rand study of sexual harassment in the u.s. military (jaycox et al., , table . ) found that prior to joining the military, . % of female respondents to its survey had experienced a sexual assault while . % of male respondents had experienced a sexual assault, but since joining the military those proportions had risen to . % of women and . % of men. jaycox et al. ( , industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core table . ) also studied reporting rates. they found that % of all respondents who had experi- enced a sexual assault while in the military indicated that they had not reported the event as a means to minimize its impact (e.g., they thought it was not serious enough to report), while another % feared retaliation or thought reporting it would make the reporting service member look bad, etc. analyses of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and quid pro quo prevalence were also included in the rand study (farris et al., ). in this analysis, . % of female respondents and . % of male respondents reported being the target of a quid pro quo attack (table . ); . % of females and . % of males reported experiencing sexual harassment (table . ); and . % of females and . % of males reported experiencing gender discrimination (table . ). at the federal government level, the eeoc (n.d.) reported that the number of civil rights act harassment claims brought under title vii, which would primarily affect employers, has varied in a small range over time from fiscal year (n = , claims) to fiscal year (n = , claims). finally, psychologists at the u.s. merit systems protection board (mspb; a, b) aggre- gated u.s. government employee survey data from and regarding discrete behaviors indicative of sexual harassment. these behaviors can be categorized into one of three dimensions: sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment. in , mspb estimated that . % of female u.s. government employees and . % of male u.s. government employees reported having experienced any of these behaviors; in , those figures had dropped to . % of women experiencing any of these behaviors and . % of men having experienced any of these behaviors. recent societal trends, such as #metoo and #timesup, show that interventions for workplace sexual harassment and assault are timely and needed. harassment and discrimination are costly for organizations (e.g., litigation, blemished company reputation, etc.; brown et al., ) and victims (e.g., higher turnover, decreased job satisfaction, and increased absenteeism, etc.; bergman et al., ; kaylor & weaver, ; offermann & malamut, ) alike. according to the eeoc (n.d.), approximately $ . million in fines was awarded in fiscal year for cases that were not resolved before trial, a nominal . % increase on a per-resolved-case (reasonable cause, successful conciliations, unsuccessful conciliations, merit resolutions) basis since fiscal year . this illustrates the financial importance of preventing and addressing workplace sexual harassment and assault for organizations. revitalizing sexual harassment and racial discrimination training training is a natural starting point for applied psychologists in organizations seeking to address unlawful racial discrimination and sexual harassment. science-based analysis supports an organ- ization’s investment in training while pointing to how an organization can enhance its own training investment. the question is whether training “works” effectively to address racial discrimination or sexual harassment behaviors. what are the prerequisites for effective training? salas et al. ( ) published a systematic review of training research indicating five broad prereq- uisites of effective training programs: identifying workforce and organizational training needs, careful training content and program development, establishing leadership’s support of training, meanwhile, the eeoc reported that the number of complaints received based on sexual orientation or identity (i.e., lgbtq) harassment issues increased from about in fiscal year to , in fiscal year . mspb increased this roster of discrete harassing behaviors from eight to in its analysis (u.s. merit systems protection board, a, b). theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core integration of technology into training without overreliance on technology, and promotion of ongoing integration of training and on-the-job functions. campbell et al. ( ) summarized their integrative review of the training literature by stat- ing that four key issues (pp. – ) must be addressed for training to be effective in improv- ing or altering behavior: ( ) development of a model of training design, implementation, and evaluation; ( ) the nature of the aptitude by training treatment interaction, which is presumed to exist for any human attribute; ( ) a definition of the outcomes to be altered by training and assessed in training evaluation; and ( ) instructional system design that is built on known mod- els of how people learn. medeiros and griffith ( ) elaborate on some of these topics and processes specifically within the context of training for sexual harassment and assault preven- tion. campbell et al. ( ) concluded that training evaluation science shows that while training “does work” (p. ) from the perspective of overall measurable changes in outcomes pre-/post- training, there are many caveats and cautionary boundary conditions on this overall conclusion. for example, salas et al. ( ), after arthur et al. ( ), noted that regardless of training pro- gram feature, training effects decay if the job does not afford the opportunity for practice. lacerenza et al. ( , tables and ), in a review of manager training literature, found that while management-oriented training “works,” it is less effective when trainee participation is involuntary and when interpersonal, rather than intrapersonal or business skill, knowledge is trained. does anti-harassment or anti-racial discrimination training work? organizations that implement high performance work programs such as skills-oriented training may get return on investment by having better human resource practices overall (e.g., huselid, ; kim & ployhart, ). arthur et al. ( ) showed that training for interpersonal skills results in significant organizational outcomes (average d-prime of about . ), even though improvement in behavior for individual employees via transfer of training to the job is variable (average d-primes varying from . to . ; see also lacerenza et al., , on training outcome definitions). arthur et al. ( , p. ) concluded that this variability shows that the “favorability of the posttraining environment play[s] an important role in facilitating the transfer of trained skills to the job.” however, while harassment and discrimination might be signs of poor interper- sonal skills, and while training might effectively improve skills in general, damage to the organ- ization’s reputation (and the well-being of employees) arises from the behavior of individual employees irrespective of the organization’s liability protection from training. one criterion of effective training (campbell et al., ) is a definition of outcomes to be tar- geted through training. the criteria and concepts of typical antidiscrimination or antiharassment training may be ill-defined. employees may be unaware of their tendencies to treat persons from minority communities unfairly, or that their attitudes toward people from distinct demographic backgrounds could be negative. organizational decision-makers might harbor unconscious biases regarding individuals from identifiable subgroups or minority communities and thus potentially act negatively toward these individuals (e.g., ghumman et al., ; hebl et al., ; state of new south wales, department of premier and cabinet, behavioral insights unit, ). unconscious biases among organizational decision-makers might limit promotion or participation of minority individuals in leadership roles. in terms of attitudes and beliefs about training, employees may not know or believe, or have realized, that certain behaviors or attitudes are harmful or illegal. they may believe that what matters at work is task performance, that some people are simply more prone to feeling harassed, or that some people file false harassment or discrimination claims. finally, employees may believe that efforts designed to defeat discrimination and harassment a priori assume all majority group/nonprotected members are perpetrators, leading to a defensive or defiant attitude before training. without assessing and addressing these beliefs and behaviors, industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core training may focus on the wrong outcomes. for example, what would constitute “humanity and inclusion” as an outcome of starbucks’s training? sexual harassment training empirical reviews of the efficacy of sexual harassment training have found limited to no positive behavioral effect. williams et al. ( ) studied the relative influences of harassment consequence policy, making resources available to raise awareness of sexual harassment, as well as sexual harass- ment training on incidence of sexual harassment in a military context. only implementation of consequences by managers significantly curtailed incidence of experience of sexual harassment; there was no effect of training on reduction of harassment. antecol and cobb-clark ( ) assessed attitudes about what constituted sexual harassment using federal employee survey data gathered in by mspb ( a, b). antecol and cobb-clark ( , p. ) found that when survey respondents reported having ever attended sexual harassment training, “[s]exual harassment training is associated with between a four and five percentage point higher probability that women employed in the federal government have a definition of sexual harassment that includes co-worker initiated, unwanted sexual gestures, sexual remarks, and pressure for dates,” while men were more willing to label supervisor-initiated behaviors as harassing (unstated but presumably when directed toward women). however, . % of women and % of men reported being more skeptical about the efficacy of sexual harassment training after being trained. anderson and whiston ( ) conducted a meta-analysis of university campus-based sexual assault prevention programs. these authors reported that assault-related attitudes and knowledge changed based on training, but there was little evidence of behavioral-related outcome changes such as decreases in sexual assault (a criterion few studies examined). goldberg ( ) reported no effect of sexual harassment training on cognitive outcomes (i.e., understanding that someone has done something wrong), attitudinal outcomes (changed attitudes about sexual harassment being injurious or wrong), or skill-based outcomes (change in prevalence of engaging in sexual harassment), though harassed women were more likely after training to have the skill to confront perpetrators after some types of harassment. pina et al. ( ) concluded that there is a lack of program evaluation evidence regarding the efficacy of sexual harassment training programs. pina et al. ( , p. ) noted that sexual harassment training might be irrelevant because “[t]hese programs do not address the essential issues that surround the occurrence of the phenomenon, such as sexism at work, power misuse and abuse, hierarchical issues, gendered environments, and individual p erpetrator characteristics.” (o’leary-kelly et al., , provide an integrative review of these construct and process issues.) this sentiment was echoed and reinforced by degue et al. ( ) and by a systematic literature review from marquis et al. ( ), who concluded that sexual harassment training has failed to meet criteria for effectiveness based on rigorous program evaluation standards. they concluded that the lack of effectiveness was likely due to the typical program’s focus on changing attitudes and knowledge rather than focusing on changes in behavior at either the individual or organization level. unlawful racial discrimination training marquis et al. ( , p. ) adopted the framework proposed by pager and shepherd ( ) to distinguish among organizational phenomena reflecting behavior (discrimination), attitudes (prejudice), beliefs about groups (stereotypes), and “ideologies that support the status quo between groups.” marquis et al. ( , p. ) further noted that “[d]iscrimination can occur without pre- judice, and prejudiced people do not always discriminate.” finally, marquis et al. ( , p. ) clarified the distinction between implicit prejudice, which reflects justification mechanisms but not necessarily overt behavior, and explicit prejudice, which reflects overt behavior. these differentiations theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core do not include contextual or process factors. it is likely that interventions seeking to “train away” biases, such as that offered at starbucks, blur these distinctions. organizational science and practice regarding racial, national origin, or ethnic group differences has taken a different path than work on gender, in part because of historical injustice (e.g., the violent legacies of slavery, colonialism, or ethnicity-oriented suspicion) and in part because industrial and organizational (i-o) psychology as a field has historically been more interested in selection-oriented issues than in the challenges minority individuals face in the workplace. research regarding social perception and race-/national origin-/ethnicity-oriented bias assessment was taken on more quickly and fully by social psychologists. meta-analyses have supported different perspectives on the efficacy of unlawful racial discrimination training from this social psychology tradition. a meta-analysis by forscher et al. ( ) assessed the quantitative results of interventions designed to change implicit bias test scores. they found that implicit bias was reduced or elimi- nated when targeted interventions sought to weaken the associations between negative attributions and group membership. interventions that instructed or motivated respondents to respond in a less- biased manner, what forscher et al. termed “goals to weaken bias” such as making antiracism norms salient, also reduced implicit bias scores. the same approaches to reduce implicit bias also reduced explicit bias (responses to questions such as “how do you feel about black people?”) somewhat. unfortunately, forscher et al. ( ) reported that minimizing or eliminating implicit bias did not change explicit bias-related behaviors. systematic literature reviews arrive at conclusions consistent with forscher et al. ( ). paluck and green ( ) reported on efforts to battle explicit bias, not implicit bias. while some explicit bias debiasing training such as cross-cultural training and peer learning was successful, according to paluck and green ( ), approaches such as diversity training or intergroup conflict management were lacking in empirical support mostly due to lack of a theoretical basis as to why they should work or result in changed behavior. paluck et al. ( ) meta-analyzed recent studies of the “contact hypothesis,” which stipulates that having people from differing racial/ethnic groups collaborate should reduce prejudice. their review found significant mod- erating conditions—no studies with people over years of age, smaller effects for larger studies —that gave cause for considerable doubt about this approach to debiasing. other quantitative studies about bias point to features and limitations of debiasing interventions. forscher et al. ( ) found that ethnic stereotyping could be countered by replacing biased opinions and habits with positive messages, thus creating a nonbiased habit of thinking about minority-group individuals. review of organizational diversity training intervention research several meta-analyses and systematic reviews have been published regarding diversity training interventions that might be used in organizations. systematic literature reviews kulik and roberson ( ) noted that behavioral change was difficult to assess in diversity train- ing because studies typically use self-report, and people are poor evaluators of their own behavior. kulik and roberson ( , p. ) concluded, “the research suggests that adult learners usually perceive themselves as having higher skills after diversity education, but there are few studies p. forscher and c. k. lai (personal communication, may , ) noted that these interventions are not the type of training one would find in a corporate or educational setting. the interventions in their meta-analyses were lab-based and frequently involved inducing positive attributions toward minority-group individuals or negative attributions of majority-group individuals. finally, they noted that interventions targeting bias against one group (e.g., african americans) would not produce a “spill-over effect” such that bias against a different group, for example women, would also be reduced while bias reduction against a target group was desired. industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core examining objective skills, and those studies have produced inconsistent results.” curtis and dreachslin ( ) also found lack of behavioral evidence. they noted (p. ) that while train- ing improves attitudes, “evidence that training actually changes behavior in a significant way is lacking.” phillips et al. ( ) reviewed literature on training about disabilities in organizations and found only three publications; these authors reported a wide gap between practice and research on integrating those with differing levels of ability into the workplace. alhejji et al. ( ) conducted a systematic literature review of diversity training theories, methods, and contexts, as well as outcome-oriented studies focused on learning, return on investment, and attitudes. they found a significant amount of variability in approaches to diversity training, leading them to conclude (p. ) that available research was atheoretical and “methodologically flawed and fragmented.” meta-analyses kalinoski et al. ( ) meta-analyzed studies using an outcome taxonomy of attitudinal outcomes, cognitive outcomes, and behavioral skill-based outcomes. while results indicated a robust result for the behavioral skill-based outcome category (sample-size weighted mean effect size = . ), there was no further fine-grained analysis of what behaviors had changed. bezrukova et al. ( ) included studies with program evaluation components in the study’s intervention design in their meta-analysis. the goals of these studies included increasing awareness of minority racial/ethnic/national origin groups, knowledge of diversity principles, and training on appropriate/nondiscriminatory behaviors. bezrukova et al.’s ( ) results show that training increased knowledge-based outcomes and positive reactions to training more, and for longer amounts of time, than did interventions targeting attitudes or stereotypes. bezrukova et al. ( ) claimed that their results meant that diversity training improved trainee bias-related behavioral outcomes. however, their operationalization of behavioral outcomes (p. and p. ) mixed self-report of behavioral change, self-reported knowledge (e.g., measured by situational judgment tests; hauenstein et al., ), and independent observer behavioral ratings. thus, bezrukova et al. ( ) showed that diversity training could have positive cognitive outcomes in terms of understanding other people and in terms of knowing the right behavior to perform, and that trainees would not reject diversity training out of hand; both their meta-analysis and the meta-analysis by kalinoski et al. ( ) were not definitive in demonstrating that trainees acted differently toward minority group individuals post-training as opposed to, for example, knowing which behaviors were more appropriate. interventions in both lab and field settings to eliminate or weaken biased behaviors in organ- izations have been successful for short durations in improving attitudes toward target individuals, and in improving target trainee knowledge about bias and about less biased ways to act. a key moderator of the training or intervention was duration of training. meta-analyses of interventions to address racial bias have found that longer training intervals (in kalinoski et al., , training that lasted more than hours; bezrukova et al., , p. , also reported greater amount of change with longer training intervals) are more effective for outcomes such as attitudes and cog- nitions. however, lai et al. ( ) found that the change due to implicit bias interventions is short-lived, possibly lasting under hours. knowledge of the impact of training duration on behavioral change is clouded by means of behavioral change measurement. work by forscher, lai, and their colleagues (e.g., forscher et al., ) suggests that wholesale attitude change is not a typical outcome of de-biasing training; that when de-biasing works, it is because one (positive) attribution or stereotype has been substi- tuted for another; and that any effect even when training “works” may be fleeting. we conclude that the diversity knowledge base and training meta-analysis literature shows that the lack of alignment between training content, goals, and effectiveness criteria has led to training that positively changes attitudes and knowledge, but not necessarily behavior. theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core how could applied psychology re-focus research agendas to help organizations seeking to mitigate discrimination and harassment? psychologically trained practitioners in organizations, including i-o psychologists, social psychol- ogists, clinical psychologists, and consulting psychologists, are in positions to implement behav- ioral interventions designed to mitigate or eliminate unlawful racial discrimination and sexual harassment. organizational goals and applied psychologist goals should be aligned for training to demonstrate effective outcomes. we introduce these approaches and propose key research questions. topic : organizational training commitment training is the most obvious intervention option for addressing sexual harassment or unlawful racial discrimination: it is scalable from the work group to the organization, it is a face-valid process, and it is within the i-o and applied psychology skill set. we suggest that more attention is needed to align training goals, learning theory, and expectations. kath and magley ( , p. ) conceptualized sexual harassment training as a form of orga- nizational socialization rather than skill building. while socialization conveys expectations of organizational values and normative behavior, skill-oriented training creates an expectation of attainment of minimum proficiency. kath and magley noted that trainee motivation depends in part on wanting to apply what was learned in training on the job. another concern is not being cynical about the rationale for training. if the rationale seems largely to focus on minimizing orga- nizational liability, then trainees are likely to be unmotivated and disengaged. in contrast, meta- analysis has established the positive role of training motivation (colquitt et al., ) in achieving organizational goals and behavior change. it seems possible that training to reduce harassing or biased behavior might be more effective if it is framed as under the individual’s control (colquitt et al., , p. ) or integrated into an effort to increase morale rather than as a mandatory con- dition of employment (dobbin & kalev, ; holladay et al., ). for both sexual harassment and racial discrimination, training that has follow-ups or lasts longer should be more effective than short-duration training (devine et al., ). kath and magley ( ) noted that as with any change-oriented initiative, ongoing executive commitment to a workplace free of harassment and discrimination, and organizational support for key nonharassment values are required for training to be effective. research question # : will unlawful racial discrimination or sexual harassment training oriented toward development (e.g., learning or mastering a new skill), as opposed to being oriented toward compliance, be effective in changing behavior? topic : increasing training impact an organizational climate that is intolerant of sexual harassment and assault can lead to lower levels of sexual misconduct (bergman et al., ; fitzgerald et al., ; glomb et al., , ; wasti et al., ). offerman and malamut ( ) found that female service members who perceived that their supervisor made efforts to stop sexual harassment reported feeling sig- nificantly freer to report the misconduct and felt more satisfied with the reporting process com- pared to service members who felt their supervisor was tolerant of sexual harassment. when an organization expresses to its employees that sexual harassment is considered to be a serious mat- ter, employees are more willing to report the sexual misconduct (brubaker, ). not only can this attitudinal change improve the climate of the workplace, it may also lead the organization to take reports of sexual misconduct more seriously (bergman et al., ). this literature suggests that changes within the organizational climate and leadership response to these behaviors may industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core help to prevent sexual harassment and assault from occurring by increased reporting at earlier stages and improving how sexual misconduct reports are handled (kaylor & weaver, ). trainee receptivity may be distributed as power functions rather than normal distributions (e.g., o’boyle & aguinis, ). bezrukova et al. ( ) reported uneven meta-analytic modera- tion based on whether training was mandatory or voluntary, with better results for behaviorally oriented outcomes in mandatory training but more favorable reactions to training in voluntary attendee conditions. rather than have all employees regardless of enthusiasm attend the same training, typical organizational tools such as surveys or assessments can be used strategically to anticipate predisposition to escalation of violence or harassment behaviors among business units or individuals. psychologists can use this form of insider threat practice to devise interven- tion strategies aligned with the training or remediation needs of individuals or areas prone to escalation. similarly, there may be employees who are enthusiastic about antidiscrimination or harassment initiatives who could help design intervention programs or processes on a peer-to- peer basis (see kulik et al., ). research question # : how can interventions, such as efforts to build a climate of intolerance for harassment or surveys to anticipate predisposition to escalation, be engineered to increase both participation in and receptivity to necessary changes in behavior resulting from training? topic : training content the typical training model presumes that aside from their motivation, trainees know how to be trained and transfer the training to work. adler et al. ( ) tested this presumption in a random- ized study of mental skills training. their study focused on creating “mental skills,” which were specifically cognitive control (learning how to learn more effectively) and emotional regulation (including reduced anxiety and effective allocation of emotional resources; adler et al., , p. ), among soldiers in basic training. the goal was to establish the extent to which learning these skills led to improved training performance. adler et al. found that soldiers in the mental skills conditions relative to those in a control condition were significantly better able to learn and eventually performed better in some basic training tasks through instilling better learning and transfer habits. social psychology research on resilience training and attitude change might also be relevant. cialdini et al. ( ) found that training using injunctive norms (“don’t do this”) was more effec- tive in stopping unwanted behavior than was training using descriptive norms (“this is what other people do”). cacioppo et al. ( ) examined a training intervention for social resilience, defined by cacioppo et al. ( , p. ) as “the capacity to foster, engage in, and sustain positive relationships, and to endure, recover from, and grow as a result of life stressors and social isola- tion.” an ability to empathize with others also defines social resilience. cacioppo et al. ( ) found that social resilience training was effective in creating empathy and perspective- taking. in summary, cialdini et al.’s ( ) results show that sexual harassment or unlawful racial discrimination training should focus on what not to do—maybe along the lines of do n t harass, bully, or otherwise discriminate against people—while cacioppo et al.’s ( ) results suggest that additional training components could replace the negative behavior (bias, bullying, harassment) with positive target behavior (using social resilience to build empathy, perspective-taking, and community). the meta-analysis by forscher et al. ( ) and further work by lai ( ) demon- strate that changes in bias-related attitudes occur through substituting negative attitudes with pos- itive ones. models of sexual harassment and unlawful racial discrimination training generally focus on the trainee as the source of the behavior that should be mitigated. however, sexual harassment training has shown positive results for those who have been harassed (traditionally, women or racial minorities; o’leary-kelly et al., ; pina et al., ; walton & cohen, ). theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core alternative training content might focus on training employees to intervene in a harassing or demeaning/biased setting as bystanders (e.g., kleinsasser et al., ). intervention or self-advocacy might also increase a sense of community and self-efficacy, which itself could have reinforcing effects on reducing bias and harassment. taken together, social psychological research seems to suggest that training regarding specific attitudes and correspondingly specific behavior may reduce bias and discrimination. training also benefits targeted individuals. a challenge for organizational practitioners is identifying the specific attitude–behavior linkages amenable to training for both discrimination targets and those who might exhibit harassment or bias. research question # : how can training content be scaled to the needs of an organization that seeks to avoid discrimination and harassment, while also supporting its members who may have been targets of harassment and discrimination? topic : bystander programs by influencing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding sexual harassment and assault, bystander programs encourage and train individuals to intervene when they witness situations of harassment (berdahl & raver, ; buchanan et al., ; burns et al., ). some bystander programs even boast empirical support, such as “green dot” (coker et al., , , ), “bringing in the bystander” (banyard et al., ; senn & forrest, ), and “one in four” (foubert & perry, ). although bystander intervention programs have been found to be broadly effective in high school and college students (coker et al., , , ; lee et al., ; senn & forrest, ), future research should analyze these programs and how they can be tailored for prevention of sexual harassment and assault within the workplace. another disadvantage of the current research on bystander intervention is that it has been primarily researched using caucasian populations and focused on sexual harassment (e.g., diamond-welch et al., ; kleinsasser et al., ; see mulvey et al., , and nelson et al., , for exceptions). there is very little research examining bystander interventions regarding race/ethnicity bias; those few studies are primarily composed of student populations and have shown mixed results (nelson et al., ). additional areas for exploration within bystander programs are both harassment and unlawful racial discrimination, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality (edwards et al., ; mccall, ; settles & buchanan, ; shields, ). current studies on race-based bullying and bystander intervention show reason to suspect that bystander intervention programs could have a powerful impact on reducing incidences of racial and sexual harassment in the workplace (mulvey et al., ). research question # : is indirect training, such as bystander intervention, potentially more effective than direct behavioral modification training? topic : training medium campbell et al. ( , p. ) warned that training via gamification or virtual reality may be well- received by trainees but could suffer from poor design and operationalization of parameters. at the same time having a gamification intervention might be a way to monitor trainee progress and have more time spent on a “fun” activity. the effectiveness of this training regimen would need to be evaluated carefully, but psychologists have been successful modifying behavior with a we thank k. saboe for this suggestion though she might not phrase it exactly as it is here. industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core gamification approach (weir, ). it is difficult to balance engagement with training with effec- tiveness in changing behavior; as bezrukova et al. ( ) showed, voluntary participation (i.e., engagement in training) is related to positive attitudes about training but not necessarily behav- ioral change. because training engagement is not a reliable indicator of training effectiveness, there should be alignment of program goals with implementation. research question # : how can training programs be made both more engaging and more effectively aligned with program goals? topic : how can academic research clarify, and how can practitioners utilize, a continuum of harm approach for interventions? instead of starting with a method or program of training or organizational change, researchers and practitioners might start by defining a continuum of targeted behaviors including sexual harass- ment or unlawful racial discrimination behaviors, etiologies, and protective factors. a continuum implies that the negative behaviors start in one form or level of intensity, maybe as jokes, then escalate, possibly as threats. codifying the target behaviors that comprise harassment or bias along a continuum presents an opportunity to confront these behaviors via training and policy, and to clarify consequences. policy is not the forte of organizational practitioners and scientists, but organizational science and practice inform policy. applied psychologists have already begun to investigate this notion of a continuum (lim & cortina, ). other efforts (cortina et al., ) have sought to define and clarify the scope of issues at stake by coining the term “perpetrator predation” to distinguish those who are targets from those who commit the discriminatory or harassing acts. organizational practitioners should leverage insights from peers in domains such as social psychology and public health. for example, analysts at the u.s. government accountability office (gao; ) surveyed behavioral etiology, incidence, and protective factors surrounding sexual violence in the u.s. department of defense. this report drew heavily on work by public health scientists at the centers for disease control and prevention (basile et al., ; centers for disease control and prevention, ; wilkins et al., ) that placed sexual harassment within a continuum of harm including non- contact unwanted sexual behaviors, sexual harassment, and physical sexual assault. in an approach reflecting this continuum, organizational practitioners might work with the organization’s equal employment opportunity office or insider threat office (or some equivalent) to develop strategy, intervention goals, means to identify organizational culture or managerial “problem spots,” and metrics to evaluate progress. the objective might be to identify issues at a lower level of development (e.g., incivility) before they flare into incidents of discrimination or harassment. the gao report’s main lessons are that organizational phe- nomena, such as culture, leadership, and team, and intra-individual processes can inform inter- ventions, performance management, and training in organizations, which are not the forte of policy makers. applied psychologists might expand awareness of the continuum of harm by building from previous research demonstrating the negative organizational consequences of culture and climate surrounding harassment and bias. meta-analysis (willness et al., ), individual studies (e.g., antecol & cobb-clark, ; lim & cortina, ; mckay et al., ; sadler et al., ), and systematic literature reviews (johnson et al., ) have documented the impacts that harassment or bias have on organizations and employees, frequently in terms of increased quit rates from organizations or careers. these studies have specifically found that the perpetuation of these harassing or discriminatory behaviors is enabled when organizational culture and climate do not clearly address harassment and bias. research on employee misconduct (kish-gephart et al., ) shows that employee conduct codes that are not reinforced are flouted, and unethical theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core behavior becomes more likely. from a continuum of harm perspective, if there is not intervention for harassment and bias at early stages of the continuum, one might wonder what other organizational problems also have not been addressed. the same research (mckay et al., ; porath et al., ; ruggs et al., ) shows that strong management action endorsing the value of diversity, or simply setting expectations for treating people well, leads to increased retention, performance, and ethical behavior. a continuum of harm model implies a dynamic process. some might prefer a dimensional one (e.g., gelfand et al., ). academic research could clarify whether harassment or unlawful discrimination is dynamic and continuum-based, where unlawful racial discrimination behaviors seem innocent or vague at first but then escalate in intensity or type, or dimensional and construct-oriented, where unlawful racial discrimination behaviors do not escalate in inten- sity or type. we suggest that practitioners favor a continuum of harm model. leaders and practi- tioners should treat identification and mitigation of these issues preferably at an early stage as part of the criteria of being a good leader. organizational survey research (mckay et al., ; medeiros & griffith, ; rubino et al., ) can identify problem areas at the team or division/ department level, as harassment and discrimination are signs at some point on a continuum of counterproductive behavior. research question # : how can practitioners develop the skill sets to work with managers to coordinate monitoring, policy, and mitigation regarding discrimination and harassment? topic : professional competence and beliefs about change part of the answer to research question # concerns graduate training and development. if unlawful racial discrimination or sexual harassment behavior is a continuum of harm, there should be a commensurate continuum of intervention. the model i-o graduate psychology cur- riculum (society for industrial and organizational psychology, inc., ) does not include train- ing on how to understand or address harassing or discriminatory behavior. sexual harassment is mentioned once in the document, in passing, as a subset of occupational health psychology, and unlawful racial discrimination is not mentioned anywhere in the document. the graduate curriculum guidelines state, under general knowledge and skills, part , ethical, legal, diversity, and international issues, that “i-o psychologists should have knowledge of and should behave in accord with relevant ethical guidelines when consulting as well as conducting research” and then cites as an example the american psychological association’s ( , amended ) ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct for reference. it is fair to conclude that applied psychologists are expected to maintain personal integrity and have general knowledge about sexual harassment and unlawful racial discrimination, but not to be educated in how to identify or provide guidance on how to intervene when organizations turn to them for expertise in dealing with these issues. we call for an intentional focus from graduate curriculum or professional development per- spectives in addressing issues of sexual harassment and unlawful racial discrimination. consulting psychologists have developed methods and models of behavioral change (e.g., bar-haim et al., ; osatuke et al., ) that could serve in part as the bases for intervening with those at risk “continuum of harm” in this sense is not consistent with the term “vicious cycle” used by jones et al. ( ). a continuum of harm as used here and as defined by the cdc refers to a dynamic process in which small behaviors or incidental attitudes escalate to become problematic for the individual or target personnel (e.g., having negative affect to engaging in counterpro- ductive thoughts to engaging purposefully in negative behavior). the “vicious cycle” in jones et al. ( ) referred to the qualitative nature of biased behavior falling along the continua of subtlety, formality, and intentionality. https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx industrial and organizational psychology https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core of engaging in these behaviors; there is a similar lack of a curriculum knowledge base or practice guidelines for building resilience among those affected. applied psychologists and organizational practitioners should believe people can change and that professionals can intervene effectively to create the conditions for change for individual contributors, work groups, and leaders. at the very least, training research, as bleak as its lessons are regarding transgressor behaviors, seems to show positive impacts in terms of improving the coping behavior of people who have been affected by harassment or unlawful racial discrimination. research question # : what impact would mandatory sexual harassment or unlawful racial discrimination training for practitioners have on practitioner beliefs and practices? topic : incorporating corporate social responsibility and reputation management as part of an intervention strategy applied psychologists should consider that leadership attention put toward reducing discrimina- tion and harassment might fit well within a corporate social responsibility (csr) framework (aguinis & glavas, ; morgeson et al., ) as part of the intervention continuum approach. csr research and practice has had an outward-facing “macro” perspective (morgeson et al., , p. ) in which it has been studied and practiced from a strategy perspective (aguinis & glavas, , p. ). yet improved intergroup relationships and “strengthening communities” are points of pride for some organizations. we propose that ongo- ing bias and harassment training for employees will integrate bias-free behavior as an aspect of embedded csr. current efforts at many organizations regarding harassment and unlawful racial discrimination might be described as peripheral to a true csr approach, that is, something that is ongoing but “not integrated into an organization’s strategy, routines, and operations” (aguinis & glavas, , p. ). an example of antidiscrimination and harassment efforts that are part of an organization but are not truly embedded in a csr framework might include diversity reporting by google (brown, ) or by the u.s. department of justice ( ): while it is good that the orga- nization supports awareness, it is unclear how the organization will use the information to inform its practices. an embedded csr approach to reduction of discrimination and harassment would form the basis of a continuum-based intervention and better mobilize the workforce. embedding antiharassment training and diversity programs into a csr framework would be further effective in helping to shape cultures of diversity and acceptance within an organization, which has been shown to be distinctively effective in reducing harmful behaviors in a variety of contexts (kalev et al., ; miller & prentice, ; tankard & paluck, ). by embedding ongoing training into a csr framework, organizations would take a step toward creating a cultural norm of inclusion and openness. organizations with a strong cultural norm against biased and harassing behaviors have fewer incidences of such behaviors, and find that people are more willing to speak out when such behavior does occur (buchanan et al., ; keenan, ; mckay et al., ; porath et al., ; ruggs et al., ). research question # : do organizations that make normative behavioral expectations and injunctions regarding discriminatory or harassing behavior part of their embedded csr find positive empirical outcomes? practitioner guidance initial guidance for practitioners seeking to address issues of harassment or unlawful discrimina- tion would include asking what current higher-performing managers and leaders do to defeat or at least mitigate harassment and discrimination. leadership should make it a point to learn about the social and cognitive psychology of discrimination and harassment. on the individual level, those theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core concerned about bias and harassment should look for allies among organizational attorneys or the training department or hr or employee affinity groups interested in these issues. for those work- ing in areas of inclusion and diversity, try to frame the proposed diversity and inclusion initiative as part of leadership development consonant with better csr. practitioners should remember not to get enamored with the “bright shiny object” of cool training technology but instead look under the hood at how it could help track changes in participant attitudes, behavior, or cog- nitions. at the team or organization levels, the use of climate surveys or internal audits of harassment or discrimination claims can be used to measure training effectiveness. finally, on both the individual and organizational levels, do not expect to rid your organization entirely of discrimination or harassment, but do not employ training as a “check the box” liability- waiver activity either. encourage leaders to broaden their own thinking and challenge them to believe that, and act as if, no one should have to choose between being treated with respect and achieving the organization’s mission. concluding remarks an organization’s reputational risk from discriminatory or harassing behavior has the potential to harm, shock, and outrage. professional practices at different organizational levels could influence the organization’s microlevel (changing the behavior of individuals) to the mesolevel (survey data identifying work group “hot spots” of incivility or occurrences of negative behavior) and the mac- rolevel (managerial focus on changing organizational climate as part of a csr initiative). applied psychologists, starting with leadership of siop and its partner societies, should make antidiscrim- ination and antiharassment education and development a mandatory component of graduate edu- cation and provide ongoing continuing education experiences through conferences; maybe siop committee membership should be contingent upon completing training. this article’s literature review found scant evidence for the potential of one-time debiasing or antiharassment training to mitigate harassing or discriminatory behavior, let alone attitudes or organizational climate. yet we argue that it is incumbent upon applied psychologists and organizational researchers to approach these issues with energy and optimism grounded in both proven and potential means of remedi- ation and mitigation. the questions and guidance we have provided here are simply starting points. we should act as if campbell et al.’s ( ) summary claim that “training works” is correct and endeavor as a field to test and support that claim with theoretically grounded, empirically verified practices. we have more to offer organizations, employees, and the general public than stale training programs and free coffee. references adler, a. b., blies, p. d., pickering, m. a., hammermeister, j., williams, j., harada, c., : : : ohlson, c. 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( , july/august). psychological testing and assessments are going high-tech. monitor on psychology, ( ), . retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/ / - /ce-corner.aspx. wilkins, n., tsao, b., hertz, m., davis, r., & klevens, j. ( ). connecting the dots: an overview of the links among multiple forms of violence (technical report). atlanta, ga: national center for injury prevention and control, centers for disease control and prevention. williams, j. h., fitzgerald, l. f., & drasgow, f. ( ). the effects of organizational practices on sexual harassment and individual outcomes in the military. military psychology, , – . willness, c. r., steel, p., & lee, k. ( ). a meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of workplace sexual harass- ment. personnel psychology, , – . cite this article: hayes, t.l., kaylor, l.e., and oltman, k.a. ( ). coffee and controversy: how applied psychology can revitalize sexual harassment and racial discrimination training. industrial and organizational psychology , – . https:// doi.org/ . /iop. . theodore l. hayes et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.commpro.biz/what-does-a-bad-business-reputation-cost/ https://www.commpro.biz/what-does-a-bad-business-reputation-cost/ http://www.siop.org/instruct/siop_et_guidelines_ .pdf http://www.siop.org/instruct/siop_et_guidelines_ .pdf https://news.starbucks.com/press-releases/starbucks-to-close-stores-nationwide-for-racial-bias-education-may- https://news.starbucks.com/press-releases/starbucks-to-close-stores-nationwide-for-racial-bias-education-may- https://bi.dpc.nsw.gov.au/ https://bi.dpc.nsw.gov.au/ https://doi.org/ . /sipr. https://doi.org/ . /job. https://oig.justice.gov/reports/ /e .pdf#page% d https://oig.justice.gov/reports/ /e .pdf#page% d https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/ / . https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/ / . https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/ https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/ https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://www.apa.org/monitor/ / - /ce-corner.aspx https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	coffee and controversy: how applied psychology can revitalize sexual harassment and racial discrimination training 	importance 	unlawful racial discrimination 	sexual harassment 	revitalizing sexual harassment and racial discrimination training 	what are the prerequisites for effective training? 	does anti-harassment or anti-racial discrimination training work? 	sexual harassment training 	unlawful racial discrimination training 	review of organizational diversity training intervention research 	systematic literature reviews 	meta-analyses 	how could applied psychology re-focus research agendas to help organizations seeking to mitigate discrimination and harassment? 	topic : organizational training commitment 	topic : increasing training impact 	topic : training content 	topic : bystander programs 	topic : training medium 	topic : how can academic research clarify, and how can practitioners utilize, a continuum of harm approach for interventions? 	topic : professional competence and beliefs about change 	topic : incorporating corporate social responsibility and reputation management as part of an intervention strategy 	practitioner guidance 	concluding remarks 	references << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain %) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /warning 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/vsamples [ ] >> /grayimagedict << /qfactor . /hsamples [ ] /vsamples [ ] >> /jpeg grayacsimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /jpeg grayimagedict << /tilewidth /tileheight /quality >> /antialiasmonoimages true /cropmonoimages false /monoimageminresolution /monoimageminresolutionpolicy /ok /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /bicubic /monoimageresolution /monoimagedepth /monoimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k - >> /allowpsxobjects true /checkcompliance [ /none ] /pdfx acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier (cgats tr ) /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname (http://www.color.org) /pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) ( . ) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) ( . ) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /allowimagebreaks true /allowtablebreaks true /expandpage false /honorbaseurl true /honorrollovereffect false /ignorehtmlpagebreaks false /includeheaderfooter false /marginoffset [ ] /metadataauthor () /metadatakeywords () /metadatasubject () /metadatatitle () /metricpagesize [ ] /metricunit /inch /mobilecompatible /namespace [ (adobe) (golive) ( . ) ] /openzoomtohtmlfontsize false /pageorientation /portrait /removebackground false /shrinkcontent true /treatcolorsas /mainmonitorcolors /useembeddedprofiles false /usehtmltitleasmetadata true >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /bleedoffset [ ] /convertcolors /converttorgb /destinationprofilename (u.s. web coated \(swop\) v ) /destinationprofileselector /usename /downsample bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements true /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles true /marksoffset /marksweight . /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) ( . ) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /usename /pagemarksfile /romandefault /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /usedocumentprofile /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice languaging in digital global south– north spaces in the twenty‑first century: media, language and identity in political discourse sangeeta bagga‑gupta * and aprameya rao introduction “some philosophers […] have defined humans as essentially linguistic animals [oth- ers] as political animals […] both definitions contain a germ of truth […] political discourse analysts would probably claim […] that the one definition necessarily involves the other” (chilton and schaffner : ). the study presented here builds upon cross-disciplinary analysis of “languaging” (linell ) or the meaning-making and deployment of semiotic resources in con- temporary political mediascapes in the nation-states of india and sweden (henceforth abstract drawing inspiration from two theoretical framings: a sociocultural perspective on languaging and writings on a decolonial‑turn, the study presented in this paper center‑stages issues related to the need to engage analytically with, (i) social actions of political parties, citizens, including netizens in web . settings, and (ii) alternative epistemologies where issues from the global‑south are privileged. a central concern of decolonial linguistics enables asking new questions that destabilize established eurocentric models of language. thus, peripherally framed sociocultural premises contribute to critical social‑humanistic perspectives that allow for (potentially) unpack‑ ing northern hegemonies and contributing to global‑north challenges. building upon an analytical design, this paper presents cross‑disciplinary analysis of languaging in contemporary political mediascapes of the nation‑states of india and sweden. bringing to bear that language does not only mirror reality, but is also a constitutive cultural‑ tool, the study aims to highlight the contrastive ways in which the dominating political parties and citizens engage with languaging (i.e. the deployment of semiotic resources across language‑varieties, modalities, including imagery). the study unpacks similari‑ ties and differences in salient issues related to the nature of social media and language and identity‑positions in political discourse, highlighting dimensions of the participants voices. thus, patterns that emerge from the contrastive analysis of political discourses, including the features of social media are highlighted and discussed. data includes social media pages of two political parties from both the nation‑states across a ‑week period at the end of . keywords: global‑south, global‑north, sociocultural perspective, decolonial, languaging, identity‑positions, political discourse, new social media, ethnography open access © the author(s) . this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. r e s e a r c h bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s ‑ ‑ ‑z *correspondence: sangeeta.bagga‑gupta@ju.se school of education and communication, jönköping university, p.o. box , jönköping, sweden full list of author information is available at the end of the article downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://orcid.org/ - - - x http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : in and sw). far from being only a system of signs that express ideas or mirror intent, language-use or languaging (and discourse more broadly) is itself a constitutive cul- tural-tool (berger and luckmann ; säljö ; wertsch ). going beyond a nar- rower understanding of language and taking a performatory stance on doing language, “communication = languaging = meaning-making” (bagga-gupta and dahlberg ) irrespective of the number of language-varieties or language-modalities (oral, written, signed, etc.) participants deploy across time and physical-digital practices (bagga-gupta a, b, c, ). recognizing that languaging/discourse “is what makes human cul- tures possible and unique” (keating and alessandro : ), the present study aims to raise issues regarding mundane political “ways-of-being-with-words” (bagga-gupta ) across global-south–north (henceforth gsn) spaces. more specifically, we focus on how new social media enable (or curtail) the participation of political parties, lead- ers and netizens. more specifically, the study looks at the ways in which the two largest political parties in in and sw, including their citizenship (and other potential internet users), “language”, i.e. participate in mediascapes. by focusing upon the mundane nature of languaging across a -week period, the study unpacks similarities and differences with regards to the nature of the media itself, languaging and identity-positions in political discourse. in addition to a sociocultural perspective on languaging and discourse, this study draws upon issues of hegemony and colonial framings (“sociocultural perspectives and decoloniality as complementary analytical lenses” section) by focusing upon ide- ologies related to identity, nation-states and language. global-south spaces are either overshadowed by global-north ideologies or deprived of agency in much of the schol- arship on languaging and discourse. the contrastive design of this study, including our backgrounds, i.e. experiential histories (vis-à-vis knowledge about language- varieties, political and cultural experiences from in and sw), allow for problematizing mainstream center-periphery assumptions in the scholarship. in addition to recog- nizing that alternative epistemologies are marginalized across time–space, the socio- culturally oriented, decolonial perspective on media, identity and language presented here, also call for encompassing geopolitical spaces like sw that are not commonly associated with colonial ninetieth and twentieth century powers (bhabha ; has- nain et al. ). inspired by maldonado-torres ( ) and others’ writings on a decolonial-turn, this study center-stages issues related to the need to engage analytically with alternative epis- temologies where concepts and issues from the global-south are privileged. following khubchandani ( ) and some of our own previous writings (see particularly bagga- gupta a, b, ), this means, for instance, that a central concern of decolonial linguistics asks new questions that can potentially destabilize established eurocentric models of language, media and identity. this is one way for scholarship to go beyond issues of northern hegemonies (gramling ; makoni ). another point of departure for the study presented here is acknowledging the increas- ing role that new mediascapes play across the globe, including the paucity of research that systematically studies the ways in which digitalization shapes human existence in downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : global-south spaces in general (narayan and narayanan ), and the political playing field across gsn more specifically. this means that social actions of political parties, its members and netizens in web . settings are relevant sites of engagement for analysis. the rest of this introductory section further elaborates on the theoretical framing used here (“sociocultural perspectives and decoloniality as complementary analytical lenses”) and discusses media-types (“media-types across spaces. some perspectives on india and sweden”) before presenting methodological framings and the nature of the datasets deployed in this study (“methodological framings and data”). the central “dis- course and mediascapes” section presents the analysis under three overlapping themes: nature of the media (“media features, convergence and participation spaces”), identity- positionings in political mediascapes currently (“identity-positionings in political social media”) and, the nature of language in political social media (“languaging features in social media”). the final section presents reflections on salient issues regarding the ways in which mediascapes enable and curtail new ways-of-being-with-words across gsn. sociocultural perspectives and decoloniality as complementary analytical lenses a key premise in sociocultural perspectives is that communication or languaging or par- ticipation is a situated and distributed process (lave and wenger ; vygotsky ; wertsch ). this means that languaging—irrespective of whether the communica- tion deploys one or more language-varieties/modalities (bagga-gupta , , , a, b; gynne ; messina dahlberg )—is (i) collaboratively achieved, and (ii) constitutes a significant dimension of the construction of human realities; communica- tion is not a conduit that in some neutral sense transfers knowledge or mirrors reality. a key theoretical idea that frames such an action oriented, sociocultural perspective builds also upon the mediational role attributed to cultural-tools that have emerged across time and are appropriated by humans individually (säljö ; wertsch ). the symbiotic relationship between cultural-tools and people in inter-action with one another, has resulted in scholars hyphenating concepts (as can be seen in our own writ- ing here and previously). this points to the significance of a social lens and the irre- ducible inter-connections of people and tools. however, while the rich potentials and dimensions of communication in concert with intellectual and material tools (like paper-pencils, calculators, computers, the internet, etc., including language itself ) are recognized, attention in data analysis of social-practices in the global-north (at least) has been dominated by an “oral language bias” (bagga-gupta , a, b) and by a “monolingual bias” (gramling ). this means that complex, multilayered languag- ing behaviour is marginally emphasized in the study of meaning-making. focusing upon data from digital mediascapes across the gsn, (potentially) enables going beyond both these biases since web . sites are de facto not “merely” oral or monolingual in charac- ter (crystal ; jewitt ). furthermore, power differentials in social practices are centre-staged empirically in this study from a decolonial framing (abu-lughod ; comaroff and comaroff ; connell ; mignolo ; quijano ). this represents a call for a new reflexivity where the need to engage in empirically framed research is highlighted (bagga-gupta ; hasnain et al. ). this enables a move away from philosophically and/or auto- biographically oriented colonially framed discussions and towards the illumination of downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : the many ways-of-being-with-words from across settings. here social practices that are—in global-north contexts—glossed as mono/bi/multi/trans-lingualism, mono/bi/ multimodality and nation-state aligned identity-positions, including super/hyper-diver- sity, can potentially be studied from alternative perspectives (bagga-gupta and dahlberg ; hasnain et al. ; pavlenko ; santos ; savransky ). such alternative perspectives need to be cognizant of the fact that participation in contemporary medi- ascapes is completely contingent upon access to technological and digital tools. this means that participation and access issues can be both including and excluding across gsn spaces. cultivating a decolonial imagination (savransky ) implies going beyond the hegemonies of (i) namism where references to key postcolonial texts in the anglo-saxion scholarship circulate, and (ii) “academic branding” (pavlenko ) where some neolo- gisms have gained currency in the twenty-first century (bagga-gupta and dahlberg ). namism, including other “isms of oppression” (rivers and zotzmann ), have tended to fix issues of power differentials in terms of historically colonized places. such strategies however risk cementing ideologies. going beyond such framings, we argue for the need to recognize decolonial perspectives in terms of a paradigm where it is the here and now in all spaces—east/south and west/north, including physical-virtual—that are worthy of empirical scrutiny (bagga-gupta a, ). such a stance implies that ana- lytical units-of-analysis cannot be reduced to bounded entities based upon “imagined” boundaries that demarcate and create communities, nations, individuals or language- varieties/modalities (andersson ; see “methodological framings and data” section). while the idea of a language being a bounded unit and monolingualism, inherent in the eurocentric one-nation-one-language ideology, have been challenged repeatedly, they are particularly difficult to dislodge in global-north discourses where it gets nor- matively mapped onto a one-language-one-individual norm. this means that while “cit- izens” in sw are designated a default monolingual identity-position, “immigrants” get positioned as bilinguals (irrespective of their language-repertoires). while the fallacy of such reasoning is increasingly acknowledged in some global-north scholarship, bi/ multi/translingualism (as well as translanguaging) at the individual level continues to be marked in terms of the exotic, not “normal”. the study presented here focuses upon the ways in which both individuals and institutions like political parties’ language in public mediascapes; it points towards the performative work that participants and institutions “do” with semiotic resources across gsn settings. media‑types across spaces. some perspectives on india and sweden digital technologies, including the advent of the internet, have had major consequences for citizens and institutions like political groups, schools, etc. (narayan and narayanan ). different media—newspapers, radio, television, social media and web . —have expanded the scope and nature of engagement between political parties, politicians and citizens, including netizens (saleem and stephan ). new media has opened inter- actional spaces that allow for the creation of new types of “affinity spaces” and assem- blages (gee ). communities with different interests assemble in open and closed groups without ever having to meet in-real-life (henceforth irl). while there is recog- nition in a general sense that already existing communities/institutions (like political downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : parties) participation in mediascapes has transformed their discourses, there is little theoretically pushed empirical scholarship that substantiates this. “theoretical research in understanding issues related to the new media environment […] may help create sys- tems of knowledge that may be conducive to generalization of findings” of relevance to lives across the gsn (srivastava and enakshi : ). contributing to this gap is an explicit aim of the study presented here. digitalization generally and web . platforms specifically have changed not only engagement patterns, but also how democracy plays out in everyday life (narayan and narayanan ). while participation is contingent upon access to digitalization tools in a very tangible sense, issues of engagement do not follow a linear, foreseeable, develop- mental trajectory. such issues of access and participation have seen the emergence of an interest in the study of alternative digital political spaces (schroeder ); here affinity spaces are potentially open for politicians, citizens and political parties, anywhere / . this does not mean, however, that openness automatically results in universal access or inclusiveness. openness implied in digitalization is simplistic and reductionist and tech- nology cannot be viewed as an agent that makes individuals, institutions or nation-states more democratic. given that technologies have “implications for patterns of sociality” (ingstad and whyte : ), it is necessary that research recognizes both the affor- dances and constraints that digitalization gives rise to. such a stance calls for the scru- tiny of the mundaneness of contexts of participation. in terms of the volume of users, asia and europe account for double the number of users as compared to the rest of the world combined. internet penetration in in and asia ( %) are considered to be an issue as compared to the economically developed europe (where it stands at around %). however, in terms of volume, asia is estimated to have the highest number of netizens (over . billion), with europe at million. internet penetration currently stands at about % ( million users) in in up from % in the first decade of the twenty-first century (crystal ); this is below the world average of %. social media sites have exploded in both in and sw and statistics indicate that there is almost a % connectivity across the lifespan in sw: % of -year olds and over % of + year olds use the internet regularly for a wide range of activities. social media has not only become a significant tool for political communication and campaigning in in, but is reported to have also led to a rise in young peoples’ political awareness (rahul ). it is also reported to have “reshaped the way people access political information” (saleem and stephan : ). “though the digital divide remains a stark reality of the indian new media environ- ment, it is not a static, one-dimensional disparity between those with access to new media technology and those without access” (srivastava and enakshi : ). for instance, in is ahead of the united states with a reported million users of facebook. however, this constitutes one of the lowest figures across the globe since this adds up to internet world statistics. http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. accessed january . internet world statistics—asia. http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm. accessed december . swedes and the internet (in swedish). https://www.iis.se/fakta/svenskarna-och-internet- /. accessed december . downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm https://www.iis.se/fakta/svenskarna-och-internet- / page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : only % of the nation-states population (june ). while in is the largest market for facebook, facebook constitutes the most popular internet platform in sw. in addition to issues of penetration, language constitutes a key feature that shapes openness and access. a mere language-varieties are reported to occupy over % of the internet (crystal ). while english is reported to be the most popular internet language ( million), hindi, gujarati and swedish—three of the four language-varie- ties in the datasets analyzed in this study (english is the fourth)—are part of the category “other” language-varieties used on the internet ( million) (ibid). while the entry of multinational corporations into in in the s led to the launch of several news channels, it was the internet boom, which provided platforms for direct communication between politicians and citizens (bali ). the digital revolution had a similar impact in sw. “social media can serve as a new form of more targeted com- munication in order to capitalize on its interactive potential. therefore, social media’s main power can be seen in the inclusion of targeted communities with a possible ele- ment of feedback (through likes, comments, etc.)” (saleem and stephan : ). hav- ing direct (potential) access to citizens, political parties and politicians no longer need to rely (only) on traditional media (bali ). at the same time, new media potentially gives citizens direct access to political parties and politicians (narasimhamurthy ). today, mediascapes like facebook and twitter have become the first sources of informa- tion about a politicians’ day-to-day activities across the globe. web . platforms like facebook enable anyone with an internet connection and a facebook membership to participate both as consumers and as online producers of con- tent. the virtual spaces of facebook support pictures, videos, different scripts, emoti- cons/emojis, comments (depending on the “openness” of the specific page), etc. (fig.  ). facebook page owners can curate who can participate in terms of reading content and posting comments and reactions. data generated on a social media platform like face- book allows an analyst to “see” the volume of (i) consumption (through the number of “views”) and (ii) production (through the number of reactions—in terms of “likes”, and other emoticons/emojis, and top comments) every post receives; the nature of this con- sumption can be gauged primarily by the volume of reactions. other members of web . platforms can only be assumed to be in close symbiosis with one another, and post comments or click reactions for other potential readers (including the specific page host) in ways that supports such consumption. these media features shape the methodologi- cal framings of the data focused upon in this study. methodological framings and data the significance of everyday mundane languaging in social practices, including the insti- tutions in which people are embedded, have consequences for what is analysed as data. here both the impact of new media and the need “to adopt a critical stance” for analy- sis is a key challenge (flewitt et al. : ). putting the analytical gaze on languaging constitutes renewed attempts to sidestep monological static understandings that mark essentialist, bounded notions of language and identity (see “sociocultural perspectives and decoloniality as complementary analytical lenses” section). since it is within the matrix of mundane interactions of everyday life that conventions are established (berger downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : and luckmann ), there exists a need to address the complex nature of languaging itself. the analytical-methodological framings drawn upon in this study build upon a unit- of-analysis marked by a “boundary-turn” (bagga-gupta ) and other associated turns like the colonial turn and the mobility turn (landri and neuman , sheller and urry ) in the literature on language and identity since the s (see also bagga- gupta ; clifford ; hasnain et al. ; scollan and scollan ). through anal- ysis of empirical data, the case is made that a comparative framing where languaging is scrutinized from emic perspectives enables going beyond accounting of language as the sole property of communities or nation-states or individuals. the data used here has been generated as part of the larger el project (everyday life archives, ) at the ccd research group. using an ethnographic design that focuses upon “natural” datasets, our objective has been to map the nature of contemporary languaging and political discourse in the mediascape facebook. analysis in ethnography, including project everyday life archives. http://www.ju.se/ccd/el. accessed january . research group communication, culture and diversity, ccd. http://www.ju.se/ccd/. accessed january . fig. first/opening pages of the four political parties: bjp, congress, moderaterna and socialdemokraterna downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://www.ju.se/ccd/el http://www.ju.se/ccd/ page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : netnography, calls for making available accounts “of human social activity out of which cultural patterning can be discerned” (wolcott : ). this means that while datasets have been systematically generated, we have mapped events in in and sw in order to cre- ate local and cross-cultural understandings within which to situate the analysis and pre- sent accounts of cultural patterning. thus, sociocultural framings of the nation-state contexts are taken into account in order to make sense of the social media data. the data includes all posts across a six-week period— / to / —on the official facebook pages of four political parties. these include two dominant politi- cal parties in in: bharatiya janta party (henceforth bjp) and the indian national con- gress (henceforth congress), and sweden: new moderates (henceforth moderaterna) and social democrats (henceforth socialdemokraterna). all four party facebook pages display maximum openness and access. this means that anyone with an internet con- nection can potentially access their pages. while the bjp is the largest party in the in parliament currently and has formed the government at the national level, the congress is the largest opposition party. socialdemokraterna is the largest party in the coalition- led government in sw currently, and moderaterna is the largest party in the opposition. the dataset covers all posts and includes videos, live-videos, infographics and pho- tographs posted on the official pages and comments and reactions by political party members and netizens. a first level of analysis included a day-by-day scrutiny of the entire data. this was categorized into number of videos, live-videos, infographics, pho- tographs, likes, emoticons/emojis, etc. (table  ) and included the creation of thematic patterns. a second level of analysis attempted to create an overarching picture of the patterns by identifying themes across every seven-eight-day period. screenshots of sali- ent themes were compiled for further analysis. table  illustrates the total posts uploaded by the four political parties across the six- week period. the frequency of posts is higher in the in-dataset as compared to the sw- dataset. furthermore, the volume of posts differs across the parties: socialdemokraterna have the fewest posts. while a total of videos were posted by in political parties, the total number of videos posted in the sw-dataset was only . this gap is also valid for infographics: in political parties posted infographics, and sw parties posted infographics. in the data regarding live-videos, the total numbers posted by the bjp was table quantitative overview of the indian and swedish facebook datasets of four politi‑ cal parties b bjp, c congress, s socialdemokraterna, m moderaterna political party/time period videos infographics live‑videos photographs b c s m b c s m b c s m b c s m – october – october – october – october – november – november total grand total b&c + s&m + + + + downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : over three times those observed in the sw-dataset. a sharp contrast can also be noted with regards to photographs: the in parties posted six times the total uploaded by the sw parties. facebook algorithms allow users to check the top comments for a given post. using this system, the top comments of some posts were chosen (based on the themes identified and the total reactions and comments they had received—for instance, as noted during the week-by-week analysis) for further systematic analysis. here the focus was on the emerging themes and the nature of languaging. the next section presents our ethnographically framed analysis. discourse and mediascapes three clusters of themes that overlap in different ways emerged in the systematic analy- sis of the datasets. these are discussed and illustrated in this section. media features, convergence and participation spaces the specific features of facebook enable different types of affordances in terms of the type of discourse and participation that is possible. four issues related to these features contribute to the first theme that has emerged. common facebook features facebook verifies pages belonging to well-known institutions/organizations or individu- als. facebook page “owners” can present a cover photograph and a profile picture on their “main” page. credentials of the person or the institution/organization that “owns” the pages are available here (unless the owner does not add such information or decides to keep this information closed for non-“friends”). these include contact details and the “about” section on the homepage presents biographical data about the individual or institution/organization. most institutions/organizations also have a “sign up” option here. three of the four political parties—congress, moderaterna and socialdemokra- terna—offer netizens the “sign up” feature on their homepages (fig.  ). the congress and socialdemokraterna have an “apply for membership” link on their pages, while the bjp and moderaterna don’t. facebook pages also allow internet users to post links on a political parties’ official website. homepages in the datasets included hyperlinks to pho- tographs, videos (including live-videos) and other messages posted by the party. convergence and re‑cycling many messages or items that are uploaded on the political parties’ pages have been picked up from elsewhere. for example, short tv-footage from other media channels by political parties on facebook (fig.  ). this constitutes an instance of convergence or re- cycling in mediascapes. such convergence allows political parties to actively publicize a political leader’s tv appearance or other messages across different media. this can also be seen in the use of hashtags, which was originally invented for the microblogging web- site twitter in and which entered the realm of facebook in . online users cre- cnn hashtags http://edition.cnn.com/ / / /tech/social-media/facebook-hashtags/index.html. accessed january . downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://edition.cnn.com/ / / /tech/social-media/facebook-hashtags/index.html page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : fig. re‑cycling of media content by political parties bjp ( / ) and congress ( / ) on their facebook pages fig. re‑cycling of politicians’ personal posts on political parties’ facebook pages ( / / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : ate hashtags to discuss specific events and relevant issues (figs.  , ). in comparison to the sw-dataset, the in-dataset displays generous usage of hashtags (see “languaging fea- tures in social media” section). figure  displays a screengrab of a video (bjp page) where the in finance minister mr. arun jaitley is speaking to a tv-channel regarding structural reforms like gst (goods and services tax; implemented in july ) and the structural overhaul of the entire monetary system called “demonetization” (implemented in november ). a second screengrab in fig.  (congress page) illustrates the use of footage from tv-media as well as a hashtag highlighting the rss’s (the parent organization of bjp) alleged anti-woman mindset. participants and participation patterns while sw political leaders’ posts on their individual facebook pages were at times re- cycled on their party pages (fig.  ), this was never the case in the in-dataset. addition- ally, there were no instances of any politicians directly interacting with the netizens in the commentary sections of the posts. this is interesting given that two politicians who appear frequently in the in-dataset—the prime-minister mr. narendra modi and the bjp party head mr. amit shah—are active users of facebook (and other mediascapes). figure  displays two posts—that of the sw foreign minister ms. margot wallström and prime-minister mr. stefan löfven from their individual facebook pages—that are picked up and presented in the official pages of their party, the socialdemokraterna. in both cases the message has a clear relevance to prominent events in society: the first is wallström’s participation in the #metoo movement that strongly impacted institutions/ organizations and public arenas, and the second is sweden’s qualifying for the foot- ball world cup, after they beat strong favorites italy. both these re-cycled posts also display hashtags—something that is not common in the sw-dataset: #metoo and #viärs- verige (we are sweden). in addition to the participation of political leaders in discourses in mediaspaces, fig.  highlights an important theme related to identity-positions (see “identity-positionings in political social media” section) i.e. discourse where politicians and parties display an allegiance with the citizens and their concerns. this is one way in which new media constitutes an affinity space where assemblages are formed. firstpost.com demonetisation http://www.firstpost.com/business/demonetisation-anniversary-a-year-later-heres- what-prime-minister-narendra-modi-had-said-on- -november- - .html. accessed january . du är välkommen a� ställa frågor! vi försöker svara så mycket och så snabbt vi kan på frågor om vår satsning på cancervård. kommentarer som handlar om annat eller som kränker andra tar vi bort. om du vill ha svar om andra ämnen är du välkommen a� skriva �ll socialdemokraterna eller regeringen via respek�ve hemsida. tack för bra samtalsklimat! /klara you are welcome to ask ques�ons! we try to answer as much and as quickly as possible with regards to our work in the area of cancer support. we will remove comments that are related to other issues or that discriminate. if you wish to have a response about other issues, you are welcome to write to the party or the government via their respec�ve pages. thank you for a good conversa�onal tone! /klara fig. party representatives’ participation in the commentary flow on facebook pages downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://www.firstpost.com/business/demonetisation-anniversary-a-year-later-heres-what-prime-minister-narendra-modi-had-said-on- -november- - .html http://www.firstpost.com/business/demonetisation-anniversary-a-year-later-heres-what-prime-minister-narendra-modi-had-said-on- -november- - .html page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : party representatives from socialdemokraterna also regularly comment on their party facebook page (fig.  ), responding to comments by netizens in the comments section. they often address the person who has put up a post with a “hi” and sign off using their first names. the party specifically urges participation on their webpages in a civilized manner and asks comments to be issue-specific with a good tone. netizens participation on party facebook pages in terms of uploaded comments and reactions (emoticons/emojis, shares) opens up the political dialoguing arena for (poten- tially) everyone. a number of themes emerge in the analysis of this type of engagement. while the sw-dataset consists of posts and comments that are only presented in swedish (including digital languaging; see moderaterna and socialdemokraterna screengrabs and “languaging features in social media” section), the in-dataset displays the use of at least the easiest job in the world . is to cri�cize… you can point out mistakes made by modi too….. you can definitely do so.. modi is not god.. modi can also make mistakes.. maybe he is a big-�me actor.. may be modi is a casteist person…… may be modi is benefi�ng the rich... may be modi is under pressure from america and pakistan…… you can tell him anything... anyways who is he??.. he is ul�mately only the prime-minister for years…. jnu people also call him a "pimp"..... kejriwal calls him a thief….. sonia calls him "the dealer of death"…. yuvraj calls him someone who makes tall promises…… mamata calls him dictator…. lalu has called out modi for him tantrums….. all together what is the level of modi??... in independent india, you can abuse a man si�ng on the chair of prime-minister............ but you cannot steal one thing from him.. because that cannot be stolen as it is in born... and that modi's love for the country….. thanks indian na�onal congress for exposing lies of jumla regime, keep the good work going the biggest mistake of the congress party is that it could not break the indian dalit and communist people from the hindu religion and bring them into the fold of islam or buddhist faith. mayawa� and all other dalit and communist people always threaten to leave hinduism and embrace islam or buddhism. but that did not happen. congress is destroying itself everyone telling congress what did in last - years. i just want u to see our honorable sushma swaraj speech in un. she has beau�fully describe what development were made a�er the independence. she is from bjp but yet she knows what were the development and we common people can't see it. vote anyone u like its our rights but what has been done we cannot dismiss. fig. citizens participation on political parties’ mediascapes ( / ; / ; / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : three language-varieties (english, hindi, gujarati) and two scripts (latin, devanagari), including digital languaging (fig.  ; see bjp and congress screengrabs and “languaging features in social media” section). access to the comments is dependent on participants (or any reader’s) knowledge of these scripts and the ways in which they are “chained” in languaging (see “languaging features in social media” section). the long hindi comment in fig.  in the devanagari script criticizes the opposition parties and detractors in in for criticizing the prime-minister. the next two screengrabs in fig.  illustrate the use of both english and hindi in the latin script. while the regu- lar font illustrates english, italized text marks hindi/gujarati in our translations. how- ever, one can ask whether the english marked text, primarily nouns like congress, dalit community, islam, buddhist, hindu religion, or mayawati (a politician’s name) belongs only to english or to both the language-varieties in use here. the term “party” is simi- larly fuzzy in that it can be understood as both hindi and english. similarly, issues can be raised for proper-nouns like modi, kejriwal, sonia, yuvraj (a moniker for mr. rahul gandhi), mamata and lalu (names of senior politicians in different parties), and names of two countries—america and pakistan; the salient issue here is that it cannot be taken for granted that these terms are part of only one or the other language-variety. the com- mentators’ use of the latin script, albeit in small case letters, to present the name of a well-known university is interesting here: “jnu” (jawaharlal nehru university). this rep- resents digital languaging (see “languaging features in social media” section). a commentator uses the word “jumla”, a negative term that points to the sorry state of affairs in the country. while this lexical item is not new in hindi, its present con- notation with respect to the government makes it a neologism in in political discourse. furthermore, composite words that build upon english and hindi morphology and syn- tax are used by the authors, pointing to web . participants knowledge of such usage. we see two examples of such languaging in fig.  : “feku” (originating from the hindi term “phekna”, to throw) and “pappu” (a dumb person)—terms used here to describe the in prime-minister and the congress party chief. the last screengrab in fig.  illustrates another feature common in digital languaging (see also “languaging features in social media” section): the use of the short form “u” for you, small-case letters for politicians’ names (sushma swaraj). netizen comments are very diverse across the six-week period that the datasets cover. many of these are related to issues of identity-positions (fig.  ; see “identity-position- ings in political social media” section). participants in the in-dataset often focused on corruption and related terminology “corrupted”, “corrupt”, “scam”, “brashtachar” (hindi: corruption). this focus on corruption as a socio-economic problem stood out from the rest of the themes in the in-dataset. a number of these comments relate to the demon- etization drive that was initiated by the bjp government in november . another striking theme that emerges in the in-dataset commentary is what can be called “leader- debasing” or “hero-worshipping”, including nationalism (see “identity-positionings in political social media” section). referring to the leader of the congress party, mr. rahul gandhi (son of the former leader ms. sonia gandhi and son and grandson of the late prime-ministers mr. rajiv gandhi and mrs. indira gandhi respectively), the comment is negatively framed and ridicules the political leaders’ actions (regarding visiting religious places). the final participant comment presented in fig.  not only marks the leaders downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : name by adding the respectful “ji” (modiji), but hails the prime-minister as a great leader. here the commentator signs off with a patriotic “jaihind” (hindi: hail india; a salutation to the nation-state). comments to the party posts in the sw-dataset are often either negative comments directed towards the opposition or direct questions aimed at specific posts (modera- terna, / ) or a positive post (moderaterna, / ); these often elicit a response by a party representative (fig.  ) or other like-minded netizens. the first participant com- ment on the socialdemokraterna posts are often by a party representative who invariably recommends participants to keep their comments focused, requests for good etiquette and presents further links, photographs to support the main post ( / ; fig.  ). a mis-match between the party posts and comments that participants write below them are common. figure  illustrates this issue: while the caption clearly criticizes the gujarat state-government for ignoring the health of children in the state, the comment below it is concerned with issues in another state (himachal pradesh) in northern-india. fig. some themes in citizen participants’ comments ( / ; / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : fig. mis‑match between message and captioning of post and participant comments ( / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : the participant, using abusive language, chides the congress. the explicit message pre- sented by socialdemokraterna party representatives (fig.  ) asking citizens to only write comments relevant to the post and present other issues in other sites also illustrates this issue of mismatch. this highlights a possible loss of opportunities for dialoguing between citizens and politicians. captions and slogans some type of a caption or slogan accompanies every facebook post in the dataset. some of these are simple; for instance, use of rhetorics or puns are limited in bjp captions. in fig. rhetorical captioning by opposition parties ( / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : contrast, congress pages regularly incorporate wordplay, rhetorics and puns: targeting prime-minister mr. narendra modi for allegedly favoring corporate houses, fig.  uses humor to criticize the governments’ policies. the last three words in the caption, “trust pm modi to teach you a lesson on how to give gifts for lifts” rhyme and taunt the prime- minister, whose caricature holds a helicopter in one hand and a banner, in the other, that reads “i love freebies”. the hashtag “#jankibaat” (hindi: people’s thoughts) furthermore, plays with the prime-minister’s popular monthly show on all india radio, titled “man ki baat” (hindi: private thoughts). while moderaterna and socialdemokraterna posts implicitly call attention to one another’s lack of achievement during their governance, they uncommonly target one fig. recycling of messages in political party posts ( / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : another’s leaders in such a manner. posts of the socialdemokraterna were simpler as compared to posts by moderaterna. recycling of captions and slogans with other mes- sages in the posts is a common feature in the dataset (fig.  ). many posts or infographics/pictures sections that are re-cycled display elements of slogans. slogans constitute a common feature of the swedish party posts. slogans call- ing on citizens to join as members are common in the sw-party posts: “bli medlem du också” (swedish: become a member you too). figure  a presents two common types of pictures used with slogans. in the first, three slogans are presented together with a now we will make sweden safer with the help of more powerful reforms. you are also needed in this work – become a member at (web address) increased child allowance and reduced taxes for re�red people the swedish model will be developed, not undone reforms for a safer sweden. become a member you also swedish pay will be in place in the swedish workplace foreign companies can currently send their employees to sweden without having to pay them even close to swedish pay- levels. we are put�ng a stop to that! people who compete for work in sweden will have to do it on swedish terms. do you agree? share this picture! same pay for same work will be the case for everyone the swedish model will be developed, not undone it takes nine years before even half of all newly-arrived immigrants have any type of work. we want to improve integra�on: - entrance-work for more people into work - maximum-support levels so that it is more lucra�ve to work rather than receive state-support - integra�on-duty for newly-arrived immigrant adults… see more a hopeful future for sweden integra�on will increase, segrega�on will reduce. today you get your pay-check! but despite löfvens elec�on promise about not increasing taxes for ordinary workers, over have had to pay higher taxes. we want to revive the work line with reduced taxes on work. it should always be beneficial to shi� from state-support to work, only in this manner can exclusion be stopped! - like and share if you agree! read more here (web page address) have had to pay higher taxes. we want to revive the work line with reduced taxes on work with increased support to work. now we will make sweden safer with the help of more powerful reforms. you are also needed in this work – become a member at (web address) increased child allowance and reduced taxes for re�red people the swedish model will be developed, not undone reforms for a safer sweden. become a member you also swedish pay will be in place in the swedish workplace foreign companies can currently send their employees to sweden without having to pay them even close to swedish pay- levels. we are put�ng a stop to that! people who compete for work in sweden will have to do it on swedish terms. do you agree? share this picture! same pay for same work will be the case for everyone the swedish model will be developed, not undone it takes nine years before even half of all newly-arrived immigrants have any type of wf ork. we want to improve integra�on: - entrance-work for more people into work - maximum-support levels so that it is more lucra�ve to work rather than receive state-support - integra�on-duty for newly-arrived immigrant adults… see more a hopeful future for sweden integra�on will increase, segrega�on will reduce. today you get your pay-check! but despite löfvff ens elec�on promise about not increasing taxes for ordinary workers, over have had to pay higher taxes. we want to revive the work line with reduced taxes on work. it should alway s be beneficial to shi� from state-support to work, only in this manner can exclusion be stopped! - like and share if you agree! read more here (web page address) have had to pay higher taxes. we want to revive the work line with reduced taxes on work with increased support to work. fig. slogans in swedish political social mediascapes (a / ; / ; b / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : faceless embodiment where two hands can be seen (the younger hand is caringly placed above an elderly hand holding a walking stick): i. “höjt barnbidrag och sänkt skatt för pensionärer” (swedish: increased child allow- ance and reduced taxes for retired people) is centered; ii. “svenska modellen ska utvecklas inte avvecklas” (swedish: the swedish model will be developed, not undone) in the left lower corner; and iii. “reformer fÖr ett tryggare sverige. bli medlem du också” (swedish: reforms for a safer sweden. become a member you too) on a round button in the right lower corner. in addition to the messages and pictures, color schemes reinforce political party identity-positions. the messages associated with socialdemokraterna in fig.  a are in red while the color associated with moderaterna (blue) is used to present the negative message here. figure  b from the moderaterna pages are similarly presented in tones of blue, the party color. the bjp and congress posts are also color-coded with saffron and a white lotus, including a green vertical ribbon on the left (bjp) and the orange- white-green horizontal bars (representing the in national flag) with a white upright hand (congress). the second type of picture associated with slogans, presents a leading politician or an unknown individual (fig.  a). two women, one staring at the viewer and one whose head is covered in a shawl (and is almost not visible) are presented with texts regarding equality of pay in the workforce. unequal pay for men and women on the one hand, and for foreign investors on the other, are targeted in the slogans here. in fig.  b, a woman worker is presented as a backdrop to the information regarding the need to get people off state-support and back into the labor-market. an important feature of infographics where slogans are presented is the re-cycling of messages. this re-cycling appears in all four examples presented in fig.  a, b, reinforcing political messages and ideologies. identity‑positionings in political social media many aspects that are relevant to the theme of identity-positions have already been touched upon in “media features, convergence and participation spaces” section. the second theme (of three) that emerge in our analysis relates to identity-positions more specifically. three issues contribute to this theme that in itself overlaps with the other two themes that have emerged in the analysis. aligning to scholarship that goes beyond traditional understandings that regard identity as “a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories” (bucholtz and hall : ), our point of departure is that identity relates to dimensions of a person, group or a phe- nomenon that is stable in some sense over time (bagga-gupta et al. ; gleason ; wetherell ; wetherell and mohanty ). allegiance with the nation-state (or states in the in sub-continent), religions, party ideologies, or other communally consti- tuted fractions, or key politicians are relevant dimensions of identity-positionings in the discourse that plays out on mediascapes. downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : religion and secularism citizens in both in and sw have the right to freedom of religion. while the in-consti- tution explicitly frames the nation-state as a secular country, sw is officially a kingdom whose constitution builds upon a parliamentary democracy. while the state and the church in sw went separate ways in , christianity remains a part of the public realm in that—in comparison—expressions of other religions that are practiced by the citizen- ship are marginal in official or medial discourses. while an amendment to the in-consti- tution incorporated the word “secular” over four decades ago (in ), interpretation of secularism in in has been a matter of debate. however, what is relevant for the present analysis is that all religions are part of the public realm and four world religions acknowl- edge the geopolitical spaces of in as their birth site. hindu festivals dominated the data generation months of october–november, and the in-dataset shows that both parties greeted citizens on different occasions (fig.  ). for instance, both parties greet netizens on diwali that is celebrated across the sub-conti- nent. the imagery in these posts showcases lighted diyas (lamps), since diwali is the “festival of lights”. the lexical item “diwali” is presented in the latin script with the hori- zontal line of the devanagari script across the top. in addition, the in-dataset includes photographs of the two main leaders of bjp and congress visiting temples (fig.  ). such actions by the politicians and the prominence they receive on social media platforms highlight efforts to align the party-political discourse towards different groups in society. in other words, an act of identity-politics, the greetings, the temple-visits and the pres- entation of such events, are important dimensions of political discourse. for instance, fig. political party greetings on festivals ( / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : mr. rahul gandhi’s visit to several temples in gujarat in october coincided with his campaign in the state (for the december elections). these temple visits have been discussed in terms of a possible bid to woo hindu voters to the congress. the saffron color associated with hinduism is also the color of bjp’s party emblem. in addition to religious festivities, giving recognition to significant dates and anniversaries connected to a political party also creates identity-positionings for party leaders and the party itself. figure  is a re-cycled post from the sw prime-ministers page where he congratulates the youth wing of the socialdemokraterna on their th anniversary. the post includes a youtube video especially created to commemorate the occasion for the party congress in . this highlights the convergence (see “media features, conver- gence and participation spaces” section) and re-enforcement of the party’s history, ide- ologies and identity-positionings. patriotism and nationalism patriotism and allegiance expressed towards the nation-state, regional-states or commu- nal groupings, and their symbols and important dates are prominent identity-markers in the datasets (see above). figure  highlights identity-positions in terms of sub-nation- alism related to the gujarat state-elections (held in december ). here both bjp and congress use hashtags, videos and infographics that explicitly express such an allegiance. while the bjp’s post presents its core message in the devanagari script, its hashtags are presented in english in the latin script: #proudtobegujarati and #proudtobeindian. in contrast, while the congress post presents its core message in english in the latin script, its hashtags are presented in hindi albeit in the latin script: #garvsegujarati (hindi: indian express gujarat elections http://indianexpress.com/elections/gujarat-assembly-elections- /gujarat-elec- tions- -rahul-gandhis-devotion-to-temple-politics-catches-bjp-off-guard- /. accessed january . fig. political party leaders visiting religious sites ( / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://indianexpress.com/elections/gujarat-assembly-elections- /gujarat-elections- -rahul-gandhis-devotion-to-temple-politics-catches-bjp-off-guard- / http://indianexpress.com/elections/gujarat-assembly-elections- /gujarat-elections- -rahul-gandhis-devotion-to-temple-politics-catches-bjp-off-guard- / page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : fig. identification and allegiance to own party ( / ) fig. identification and allegiance to different groups: “proud to be gujarati”, “garv se gujarati”, “proud to be indian”, “garv se congressi” ( / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : proud to be from the state of gujarat) and #garvsecongressi (hindi: proud to be mem- ber of congress). while both parties highlight ethnic-linguistic pride vis-à-vis gujarat as a significant dimension of their political agendas, the bjp highlights an in national identity while the congress highlights membership in their party as a significant dimen- sion of a voters’ identity. this can be understood in terms of the fact that the prime- minister and bjp leader are from this state, while the congress party and its leader (who is presented in the photograph) need to make their identification to citizens in this state explicit. similar issues can be seen in fig.  (“media features, convergence and participation spaces” section) where the socialdemokraterna party page shared prime-minister ste- fan löfven’s post. the national flag covering the entire post can be regarded as an unu- sual photograph given the concerted efforts by the government and socialdemokraterna to distance themselves from nationalism. however, in the context of sports, expressing exhilaration at the nation-states qualification for the football world cup legitimizes such a post. in contrast, the congress party’s symbol, an upright-hand superimposed on the tricolors of the national flag, has a clear nationalistic connotation. cult of personality the dataset shows that all four parties forefront their leaders (see “media features, con- vergence and participation spaces” section). however, there appears to be a stronger personality-centric approach in the discourse of the in-dataset. this is visible through the uploaded photographs, hashtags, live-videos and videos. the prime-minister is omnipresent in the in-dataset (as can be gleamed from the figures presented so far; see also rao ). while the first screengrab in fig.  is text-centric and presents the headlines of different international print-media, his picture is part of the infographic. the title of the infographic is also the main message of the post: “world bodies stick to their endorsement of pm modi’s reform measures”. in addition to the omnipresence of the prime-minister, this can be understood as an instance of “local-chaining” (see “lan- guaging features in social media” section) where reinforcement of key messages and a strong identification with the prime-minister is salient (even in data where his picture is not present). while the bjp uses their leaders’ surname in their posts, the congress uses their lead- ers’ first name (second screengrab, fig.  ): the hashtag #navsarjanwithrahul also high- lights a personality-driven approach to electioneering in gujarat. navsarjan, a gujarati lexical item presented in the latin script, means revival or new beginnings. while the sw-dataset also has examples of a personality-driven political discourse, either full names or no names of the politicians are presented. the third screengrab (fig.  ) is a collage of three photographs where the prime-minister is showcased interacting with both citizens and the police-force during his much-publicized tour of the coun- try (primarily in the marginalized suburbs of larger cities and rural areas). identifica- tion with the citizenship and members of the security forces is an important theme that emerges in the sw-dataset. this maps onto what is being perceived as heightened issues of national security threats and lawlessness together with the need for political parties to engage with the concerns of the common person. the last two screengrabs illus- trate such concerns through the imagery of strong and committed political leaders. the downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : repeated presence of the party leader of the moderaterna in the sw-dataset can also be understood by the fact that mr. ulf kristersson replaced ms. anna kinnberg batra who resigned from her post at the end of september . in gujarat, farmers have been betrayed rather than helped by the government, now the hope is on congress: ri�ka ambalia’s story #revivalwithrahul “our streets and city-squares will be safe for everyone”. this was stefan löfven’s message when he visited svenljunga yesterday and go�sunda today. the prime-minister is currently travelling through the country to meet people and visit the police. sweden shall be a safe country. read more here: (webpage address) together we can make a difference – become a member today! directly through swish or by visi�ng: (webpage address) “i want that sweden should become a country for the hopeful. and i want that the new moderates should be a party for the hopeful”. __________________________ ulf kristersson party leader in gujarat, farmers have been betrayed rather than helped by the government, now the hope is on congress: ri�ka ambalia’s story #revivalwithrahul fig. political leaders—personality cult ( / ; / ; / ; / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : languaging features in social media issues of relevance to the final theme that has emerged in the analysis, i.e. language, have been both implicitly and explicitly touched upon in “media features, convergence and participation spaces” and “identity-positionings in political social media” sections. three issues that contribute to this theme are presented here. content‑chaining and local‑chaining as has been illustrated above, the very fabric of web . mediascapes like facebook opens up for both the re-cycling of content from other media-types wherein party- members posts (from their individual facebook pages) or tv-broadcasts or newspa- per texts, etc. are presented (see for instance, figs.  , , , , , ). such re-cycling of content constitutes “content-chaining” of digital media, including texts from across the spectrum of other virtual platforms (twitter, instagram, youtube, etc.; fig.  ) and media (tv, newspapers, blogs, etc.; figs.  , , , , , ). content-chaining is marked by the modality pluralism of languaging in digital spaces (see also gynne and bagga- gupta ; messina dahlberg ). content-chaining often has the goal of presenting a convergence of a specific message (this includes, but is not restricted to, party slogans; figs.  , ); it also highlights some news or event (fig.  ). party symbols and colors are also important dimensions of content-chaining. another form of chaining that has been identified (see “media features, convergence and participation spaces” and “identity-positionings in political social media” sections) as a dimension of the nature of languaging in the political party mediascapes relates to the language-varieties/modalities and other semiotic resources in the datasets. as high- lighted earlier, while the in-dataset display the deployment of at least three language- varieties (english, hindi, gujarati), including at least two scripts (latin, devanagri), the sw-dataset displays the use of only one language-variety (swedish) in the latin script. stefan lÖfven condems sexual excessess “i feel a deep disgust against this. these are serious viola�ons. we all must therefore stand up to the fact that our society is not equal enough. we must in a real sense stand up for women and men’s equality, rights and responsibili�es” said stefan löfven in tv- channel’s party-leader debate. this is how we work for increasing equality: (web page address) (cap�oning text): we have obviously done this in comparison to other countries. but when one sees this, then one realizes how wide ranging the problem is and it is for this reason that i am a feminist. fig. subtitled video screengrab from the sw‑dataset ( / ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : furthermore, in the in-dataset, words and phrases presented in hindi or english are transliterated into the script that is conventionally deployed by the other language-vari- ety (see figs.  , , , , ). such languaging blurs the boundaries between language-vari- eties. figures  , , , , , , , highlight the chained use of oral (video), written (infographics, comments), pictorial, embodied communication, etc. such “local-chain- ing”—irrespective of whether one or more language-varieties/modalities are in use—has been identified in the in- and sw-datasets. local-chaining represents a routine discur- sive-technological order where more than one language-variety/modality, resource and tools are used by the participants. subtitling and access while subtitling is part of local-chaining, it merits special attention given that non- subtitled videos from other media (tv, youtube) are subtitled prior to presentation in the political party posts. the volume of uploaded videos, recycled-videos and live- videos in the datasets varies (table  ). quantitatively there are fewer live-videos in the sw-dataset as compared to the in-dataset. one political party in each of the two nation- states—bjp and moderaterna—have quantitatively more live-videos than their counter- parts (table  ). while all the uploaded and recycled-videos (for instance, from tv-news channels) in the sw-dataset are subtitled in swedish (fig.  ), none of the in ones are subtitled. the sw-dataset is interlingually subtitled. figure  illustrates a screengrab of a video-clip that presents key statements made by the prime-minister during a leading tv-channels party-leader debate where issues of sexual harassment and discrimination were discussed. this theme became a key topic across the media following the #metoo movement in sw. here is it interesting to note that the sw tv-news broadcasts are not automatically interlingually subtitled during their live-broadcasts (all non-swedish oral language is, however, intralingually subtitled). this means that both the political parties get these videos interlingually subtitled before they are uploaded on their pages. in contrast, none of the live-streamed videos in the datasets are subtitled. subtitling in swedish makes oral swedish language available for participants who, for different reasons, cannot access spoken swedish language. this suggests that issues of accessibility are attended to in the sw political parties mediaspaces. however, it can be argued that the monolingual nature of the languaging in the sw-dataset curtails issues of access for citizens who use lan- guage-varieties other than swedish. in contrast, the hindi–english (and gujarati) lan- guaging in the oral and written modalities in the in-dataset, it can be argued, is more inclusive for citizens. digital languaging as the analysis in “media features, convergence and participation spaces” and “identity- positionings in political social media” sections has richly illustrated, digital conventions are an important dimension of the languaging in current political discourse (figs.  , , , , , , ). a unique feature of digital languaging is the use of emojis and emoticons to convey sentiments. these have become popular among netizens across the globe and its usage is more popular in the in-dataset as compared to the sw-dataset. this means that in addition to experiences with different conventional language-varieties and an internet downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : connection, participants need to know how to make sense of digital language conven- tions in order to be able to participate in social practices where symbols like “#” or web- page addresses constitute dimensions of the languaging. hashtags can (potentially) draw attention to a message in a minimalistic manner. tv broadcasts in in are noted for using hashtags to either criticize or praise a person or an issue. some hashtags in our datasets clearly reveal a specific point of view/ideol- ogy that a post attempts to promote. however, an understanding of events across time in the national contexts (for both netizens and us, the analysts) are a pre-requisite for meaning-making of the content of digital languaging. this means that while the political party pages are (potentially) accessible to anyone anywhere, such access is contingent upon familiarity with language-varieties/modalities deployed on the page, contextual knowledge as well as conventions of digital languaging. for instance, the hashtag #vad- fanfårjag (swedish: what the hell do i get) itself refers to the socialdemokraterna mes- sage ( / ) that everyone needs to contribute with taxes in order to get access to free education, health-care and other services. the congress hashtag #javabdegahimachal (hindi: the state of himachal pradesh will respond) in the infographic, accompanying a video ( / ), points to the upcoming state elections ( / ). the congress ruled the state and the hashtag points to a response by the citizens that could bring them back to power in the state. a bjp hashtag that accompanied a video ( / ), #modidhumal vi- kas (hindi/english/digital: modi and dhumal for development) brings to the forefront another dimension of digital languaging in global-south settings like in: while the term “vikas” can be attributed to the language-variety hindi, it is also part of asian englishes. furthermore, being proper nouns, the two politicians’ names—prime-minister mr. nar- endra modi and mr. p.k. dhumal—cannot be said to belong to only hindi, english or for that matter swedish. furthermore, the number “ ”, is part of standard digital languaging and denotes “for” (and also “four”). the idea that one language is bounded and completely distinct from other language- varieties, builds upon political ideology. as highlighted in the  “introduction” section, recent global-north scholarship explicitly problematizes such monolingual and mono- centric biases (gramling ). however, these discussions tend to occur among euro- pean (american and australian) scholarly networks, that do not include the rest of the world. these global-north discussions have proposed neologisms that are in themselves problematic, not least since key points of departure related to their emergence include recent waves of migration, including digitalization in global-north spaces themselves (bagga-gupta a, b, ; bagga-gupta and dahlberg ). a comparative view- ing of digital datasets of political parties from across gsn settings therefore is signifi- cant, and potentially allows for critically understanding how language plays out in public mediascapes. discussion and reflections on ways‑of‑being‑with‑words across the global‑south/north “currently, there are probably as many foetal theories of internet language behavior around as there are linguists; the internet is the largest area of language develop- ment we have seen in our lifetimes” (crystal : ; ) downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : in addition to contributing from analysis of empirically framed scholarship to illumi- nating the area of new mediascapes, what do the findings of this study offer in terms of mundane political languaging or the “ways-with-words” (heath ) and the concomi- tant identity-positions or “ways-of-being” (bagga-gupta ) across gsn settings? furthermore, in addition to making relevant a multi-theoretical and multi-disciplinary stance, what new types of issues have been made visible when empirical datasets across gsn settings are focused upon within the same analytical framings? going beyond decolonial framings where global-north hegemonies are commonly articulated, does an engagement with decoloniality (in particular in an empirical study) contribute in specific ways to current concerns regarding communication and diversity in the global-north? these are the types of issues that this study has attempted to explore and can contribute towards. these are discussed broadly in this final section. emerging in the early s, the internet has succeeded in shrinking the world meta- phorically and literally. it allows scholars from different disciplinary hues to reflect upon the powerful, highly problematic ideas related to bounded, “imagined communities” (andersson ), including demarcated nation-states. a focus upon datasets made up of political parties’ facebook pages requires the creation of empirical materials that emerge from the local contexts of two different nation-states. however, such medias- capes, unlike the constructed boundaries that demarcate one nation-state from another, are not hermeneutically sealed spaces; they are part of the larger medial landscapes, including societal contexts. the internet allows anyone with a technological device and a connection, including a desire to connect with anyone else with similar connectivity, to connect. here language has been and continues to be an issue—particularly in terms of access to the “multilingual internet” (crystal : - ). reports on global usage- patterns (“media-types across spaces. some perspectives on india and sweden” section) highlight that the internet-usage picture is not static, and the new media situation across gsn settings cannot be simplified to an issue of haves-have-nots. savransky’s ( ) call for cultivating a decolonial imagination means that scholar- ship needs to focus upon the here and now in all spaces, including re-viewing datasets that can empirically contrast the here and now across gsn contexts. the findings in this empirically framed study highlight the multilayered communication that makes-up dis- courses that circulate in the facebook pages of political parties across gsn contexts. the specific media features of the social networking site facebook, that is reported to be immensely popular in both nation-states, support complex processes of convergence where materials from other media are curated and presented. in addition to the politi- cal parties who host the facebook pages, active participants in these pages include party representatives and netizens. political leaders’ participation in these “affinity spaces” (gee ) takes place in different ways. for instance, (i) when leaders’ posts from their individual facebook pages are re-cycled on the parties’ pages; (ii) when a special post is created center-staging them in some special role or with a special message; or (iii) when a leader is positioned in lieu of the party symbol and ideology. this “cult of personality” pattern is stronger in the in-dataset, and more-so in the bjp materials, but is present in the datasets from both nation-states. patterns of participation that emerge in the analyses raise issues concerned with un- reached/reachable potentials for democratic dialoguing between parties, politicians and downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : citizens. in addition to a mismatch between comments by netizens and the contents/ themes of uploaded party posts, the “interaction order” (goffman ) at this scale can be understood in terms of the following: • an initiation of a topic when a post is uploaded (i), • a comment by a citizen (c), and • a response by a party representative (r) or • a comment–response by another citizen on the same thread as the first comment (c–r). such icr/c-r sequences are common in the analyzed datasets. they do not constitute dimensions of rich/in-depth dialogues. the latter would involve discussions that enable the emergence of newer understandings or positions. these interactional patterns have some semblance to the classical ire (initiation–response–evaluation) interaction order typical of classroom instruction (mehan ). other interactional features on face- book—the “thumbs-up” likes, emoticons/emojis, shares, links to other websites, etc.— too do not enhance dialoguing between politicians and citizens in any clear-cut manner. it is perhaps the case that new media features do not support such dialoguing. thus, mediascapes offer parties and politicians a new platform to advertise curated positions. this includes displaying allegiances with citizens and their interests and concerns and downplaying the opposition. this orientation is a dimension of identity-politics: politi- cians align their activities and discourse towards different communities, including per- sonality-driven approaches and different ways of identifying with the citizenship; they engage with citizens and accentuate differences between ideologies. such orientations project strong and committed political leaders. “when political parties and candidates directly connect with potential voters through social media, and give them the option of ‘like’ the posts and ‘comment’ on messages and pictures in an interactive manner, it cre- ates an element of personalization” (saleem and stephan : ). since a personaliza- tion element is limited in the datasets, the findings raise issues concerning the promise of democratic potentials of contemporary mediascapes. thus, while web . platforms hold promise of being democratic platforms (narayan and narayanan ; schroeder ), analysis at the micro-scale presents a gloomy picture. other features vis-à-vis identity-positions are related to the issue of secularism. while secularism is understood in global-north spaces in terms of the separation of religion from the state (which would suggest that secularism is officially a new situation in sw), in the context of in, secularism can be more clearly understood in terms of “sarva dharma samabhava” (sanskrit: equality of all faiths). this is recognized as being part of hindu philosophy and its essence has been pushed by scholars and leaders like vive- kananda, ramakrishna and mahatma gandhi; sarva dharma samabhava embodies “the equality of the destination of the path’s followed by all religions (although the path’s themselves may be different)". without claiming that such an ethos can automatically wikipedia sarva dharma sama bhava. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sarva_dharma_sama_bhava. accessed december . downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sarva_dharma_sama_bhava page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : solve issues related to societal tensions, it holds promise for current challenges faced by global-north settings like sw and europe. despite popular understandings of what is understood as secular, the analyses suggest that while there exists a recognized pluralism in in, a hegemonic mono-religious norm exists in sw. given that the swedish state  separated from the church only in also calls attention to why (in comparison to the in-dataset) no religious symbols or slogans have been identified in the sw-dataset. could their very absence in political party dis- courses highlight a disconnect between the multiethnic citizenship in sw and the pri- marily mono-ethnic political elite? for instance, othering in public discourses in sw has, in the twnty-first century, become marked through implicitly linking islam with terror- ism/extremism. in this light, religious plurality that marks public spaces in in, where all religions are openly marked and celebrated becomes interesting (this is not to deny the challenges inherent for individuals and groups who profess allegiance to different religions in “normally diverse” settings like in). the point that is interesting for pre- sent purposes is that differences in identity-positionings between the two nation-states highlights the importance of contributions from the global-south towards invigorating understandings of diversity—a contemporary issue that is proving to be difficult to man- age in global-north settings like sw. another significant theme that this study highlights and where understandings from the global-south can potentially illuminate areas of current concerns in the global-north relate to conceptualizations related to language. this has particular significance since a monolingual ethos has contributed to making the “inclusion” of minorities an uphill task in contexts like sw. american anthropologist ruth finnegan ( ) succulently reminded language scholars (in the global-north) at the end of her academic career, that there is need to pause and ask if “we” really know what, where and for whom lan- guage is. decoloniality here represents a call for a new reflexivity that enables posing such uncomfortable questions that have the potential of illuminating non/mainstreamed ways-of-being-with-words. going beyond both namism and academic branding and dealing with naturalistic datasets where the analysis builds upon theoretical framings is, we argue, key here. monolingual positions in the scholarship obscure the fact that most humans live lives engaging with and deploying resources from more than one language-variety (gal and irvine ; hasnain et al. ; may ). a monolingual bias marks the global-north political discourse as compared to a much more fluid meaning-making interactional order in the in-dataset. in the latter, meaning-making is marked with the ways-of-being- with-words that are common dimensions of irl interactions across the globe. having gained popularity in the global-north scholarship only recently, such fluidity is seen as novel and continues to be accounted for in terms of recent mobilities, urbanization, including digitalization; it is marked in terms of “super/hyper/urban-diversity”, and “pluri/trans/metrolingualism or -languaging” (blommaert ; vertovec ). these glossed concepts build implicitly upon a non-marked mono-ethnic, monolingual norm. in addition to the fact that such scholarship is marked by reductionistic sloganism and academic branding (pavlenko in press), a colonial hegemony underlies the continuing invisibility accorded to the patterned ways-of-being-with-words that mark languaging across time–space in the “rest of the world”. downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : thus, identifying features of languaging across the datasets, and particularly from the global-south are significant. they mark important dimensions of human exist- ence, and are not specific to contemporary times alone. in other words, our concern is related to making visible the dominating colonially framed monoglossic understand- ings of bounded language-varieties/modalities, including the monolingual ethos in the sw-dataset. we call attention to the need for engaging with scholarship from and by global-south scholars with the intent of reconceptualizing languaging behavior and identity-positionings beyond boundaries. thus, while a colonial linguacentrism, only in a limited manner, recognizes that routine ways of sense-making in digital (and irl) set- tings are not only rich sites for research, but that languaging needs to be researched from points of departure where more than one language-variety are made analytically sali- ent. “dehegemonizing standard language” (hasnain and gupta ) points to a mono- lingual norm  that exists primarily in global-north spaces from where  the majority of language and identity scholars are referenced. while this situation is slowly changing, monolingual positions continue to remain non-marked, thus normalizing and legitimiz- ing oppressive webs-of-understandings (bagga-gupta ). different types of chaining identified in the in-datasets constitute “normal commu- nication and languaging”. chaining here builds upon oral, written, pictorial, embodied resources within facebook and other media-types (bagga-gupta b, c; horowitz ; jones and hafner ). furthermore, the medley of modalities, varieties, tools and embodiment illuminated in this study is similar to the complex, intricate ways in which oral-written-virtual-irl-embodied dimensions are chained and have been identi- fied previously in other types of institutional settings (bagga-gupta a, b, c, ; gynne ; messina dahlberg ). like one of the first digital symbols, “@”, that heralded the digital era, the “#” too has become a new letter/character in the contemporary netizens alphabetic tool-kit. the local-chaining in the facebook pages where a symbolic representation i.e. #, leaves one space (twitter) and is presented in another (facebook), not only constitutes content- chaining, but now becomes a marker of social media savviness. from sociocultural action and emic perspectives these dimensions of discourse constitute normal languag- ing. symbolic units like “#” and web-page urls constitute fluid resources deployed by all individuals and communities that interface with digital mediaspaces. this means that being able to participate in contemporary political discourse is not contingent only upon access to digital technologies or peoples’ skills in a specific language-variety or oral or written modality. it is the situated-distributed nature of specific kinds of knowledge— for instance what “#” stands for or a string of alphabets strung together in a web page address—that are key dimensions of participation in mediascapes. going beyond con- ventional language competencies, languaging here thus needs to be accounted for (in the analysis) in terms of the access that participants have to resources across digital media- scapes. the point that is salient is that it is not knowledge about a specific bounded lan- guage, or a specific writing system or membership in a particular nation-state that is significant in an overarching sense. rather it is the ways-with-words that are contingent upon the ways-of-being, including the sociohistorical experiences of participants in a multitude of affinity spaces that are significant. downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : abbreviations bjp: bharatiya janta party; gsn: global‑south and north; in: the nation‑state of india; icr/c‑r: initiation‑comment‑ response/comment‑response; ire: initiation‑response‑evaluation; irl: in real life; sw: the nation‑state of sweden. authors’ contributions the first author, sbg, has in collaboration with the second author, ar, designed the study. both authors have contrib‑ uted equally to the creation of the datasets, its first level of analysis and its final analysis. the authors have collaborated through face‑to‑face meetings and by using social media platforms in weekly data‑sessions and joint analysis. sbg and ar have had responsibility to do the initial elaborations of different sections of the paper. sbg has had overall responsibility for the study and the writing of the “introduction” and “discussion and reflections on ways‑of‑being‑with‑ words across the global‑south/north” sections. ar has been engaged in working on parts of the “introduction” section and has commented on the development of the “introduction” and “discussion and reflections on ways‑of‑being‑with‑ words across the global‑south/north” sections. both authors have worked closely in the writing and development of the “discourse and mediascapes” section. the first author is the corresponding author. both authors have read and approved the final manuscript. authors’ information sangeeta bagga‑gupta is full professor of education at jönköping university, sweden, and adjunct professor – at amu, aligarh muslim university, india. she conducted her doctoral studies at the multidisciplinary department of communication studies at linköping university, sweden and her post‑doctoral studies at gallaudet university in wash‑ ington dc, usa. her multidisciplinary research focuses on communication broadly, identity, culture and learning from ethnographically framed, multi‑scalar, sociocultural and decolonial framings. she is the scientific leader of the research group ccd, communication, culture and diversity (http://www.ju.se/ccd) since the end of the s, and is director of the research milieu lps, learning practices inside and outside schools since (http://ju.se/en/research/research‑groups/ learning‑practices‑inside‑and‑outside‑school‑lps.html). sangeeta bagga‑gupta currently leads the large scale swedish research council project pal, participation for all? (http://www.ju.se/ccd/pal). she publishes extensively in international peer‑reviewed contexts and her latest edited books include: identity revisted and reimagined. empirical and theoretical contributions on embodied communication across time and space ( with springer). marginalization processes across different settings. going beyond the mainstream ( with cambridge scholars publishing). aprameya rao is a multimedia journalist and graduated from kc college, mumbai, india. he has a bachelors degree in economics and a masters degree in media studies. he currently covers indian politics and foreign relationships in his work for firstpost.com. author details school of education and communication, jönköping university, p.o. box , jönköping, sweden. b‑ , radhakrishna chs, mira road, thane , india. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge the support of dr. guy karnung in bringing clarity and precision to the screengrabs and figures that are used in this paper. we acknowledge the support of our institutions during the intensive periods of work‑ ing on the research reported in this study. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. availability of data and materials the datasets used in the study presented in the paper are publicly available materials on the social media platform facebook. the datasets are posts and comments etc. posted between the period october and november by four political parties, their members and participants on the internet. webpages to the four pages are: https://www.facebook.com/bjp india/. https://www.facebook.com/indiannationalcongress/. https://www.facebook.com/moderaterna/. https://www.facebook.com/socialdemokraterna/. ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. funding we, the authors, have not received any specific funding for carrying out the research presented in this study. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. received: february accepted: april downloaded from brill.com / / : : am via free access http://www.ju.se/ccd http://ju.se/en/research/research-groups/learning-practices-inside-and-outside-school-lps.html http://ju.se/en/research/research-groups/learning-practices-inside-and-outside-school-lps.html http://www.ju.se/ccd/pal https://www.facebook.com/bjp india/ https://www.facebook.com/indiannationalcongress/ https://www.facebook.com/moderaterna/ https://www.facebook.com/socialdemokraterna/ page of bagga‑gupta and rao bandung j of global south ( ) : references abu‑lughod, janet. . before european hegemony. oxford: oxford university press. andersson, benedict. . imagined communities. reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. . challenging understandings of bilingualism in the language sciences from the lens of research that focuses social practices. in learning, social interaction and diversity—exploring school practices, ed. eva hjörne, geerdina van der aalsvoort, and guida de abreu, – . rotterdam: sense. bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. . the boundary‑turn. relocating language, identity and culture through the epistemologi‑ cal lenses of time, space and social interactions. in alternative voices: researching language, culture and identity, ed. imtiaz hasnain, sangeeta bagga‑gupta, and shailendra mohan, – . newcastle‑upon‑tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. . languaging: ways‑of‑being‑with‑words across disciplinary boundaries and empirical sites. in language contacts at the crossroads of disciplines, ed. heli paulasto, lea meriläinen, helka riionheimo, and maria kok, – . newcastle‑upon‑tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. a. language and identity beyond the mainstream. democratic and equity issues for and by whom, where, when and why. journal of the european second language association. : – . https://doi. org/ . /jesla. . bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. b. languaging and isms of reinforced across settings: multidisciplinary ethnographical explorations. in isms of oppression in language education, ed. damian rivers, and karin zotzmann, – . berlin: mouton de gruyter. bagga‑gupta, sangeeta. c. going beyond oral‑written‑signed‑virtual divides. theorizing languaging from social practice perspectives. writing & pedagogy. 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bob_ridge@byu.edu burrell college of osteopathic medicine, arrowhead dr, las cruces, nm , usa; alexander.dresden@mybcom.org * correspondence: brooke.dresden@byu.net; tel.: + - - - received: december ; accepted: january ; published: january abstract: sexual harassment has been widely studied in the workforce, but the factors that contribute to hostile educational environments for women have received less attention. the present study focuses on male dominance, gender harassment, gender threats, masculinity, and their influences on creating a hostile environment for women in academia. one hundred and forty-two male participants from a private university in the southwestern united states self-reported their masculinity, completed a group task with a female confederate leader serving as a gender threat in half the conditions, and had their subsequent affect, perceptions of leadership effectiveness, and behavioral aggression measured. men from male-dominated majors and men who had received a gender threat did not differ from men from gender-equivalent majors and men who had not received a gender threat on affect, perceptions of leadership effectiveness, or behavioral aggression (ps > . , ηp s ≤ . ). however, post-hoc analyses revealed that as masculinity increased among men from male-dominated majors under gender threat, they became significantly more behaviorally aggressive (b = . , p = . ) and perceived their female leader as less effective (b = − . , p = . ). implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. keywords: behavioral aggression; course selection; gender; gender threat; hostile environment; male dominance; masculinity; sexual harassment; stem . introduction and literature review the sexual harassment awareness campaign #metoo was named time’s person of the year for , and its impact continues to spread around the globe (zacharek et al. ). with more people than ever discussing harassment and its potential impacts, it is a pivotal time for research on the issue. one factor that has been demonstrated to lead to harassment in the workplace is female underrepresentation or male dominance (de haas and timmerman ; fouad and singh ; gruber and morgan ; kabat-farr and cortina ; stockdale et al. ). in the workforce, women in male-dominated environments are more likely to experience a hostile work environment, a form of sexual harassment recognized by the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc), and report experiences that include, but are not limited to, doubts about their legitimacy and competence, blocked access to promotion, and personal hostility as they demonstrate proficiency in male-typed tasks (heilman et al. ; mclaughlin et al. ; taylor ; rudman and glick ). additionally, women are rated as less effective in leadership positions when their organizations are male-dominated (bartol ). whereas harassment that occurs in the workforce has been heavily focused upon by previous research and the media, recent research regarding the experiences of women in academia demonstrated that reports of gender harassment in male-dominated majors are significantly higher than those in gender-equivalent majors at our universities (dresden et al. ). in , men accounted for only soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of . % of bachelor’s degrees in all fields, but . % in computer science, . % in engineering, % in physical sciences, and % in mathematics (national science board nsb). this male domination may have unwittingly fostered an atmosphere that is not female-friendly and created issues related to the retention of female students. in science, technology, and engineering (stem) majors, which are traditionally male-dominated, proportionally more females than males switch to non-stem majors, and within engineering, approximately % of women who graduate never enter the workforce in that field (chen and soldner ; fouad and singh ). among the percent who leave engineering, a significant proportion report the “engineering culture” as their main reason for leaving (fouad and singh ). in these male-dominated environments, women may be viewed as a gender threat, or a threat to masculinity, by their male counterparts, resulting in increased hostility toward them and the creation of a negative work environment. these women are especially at risk when they occupy positions of leadership (bartol ; eagly and karau ). gilmore ( ) argues that “real manhood . . . is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds” (p. ). thus, masculinity is a social construction, and it must be earned and protected (vandello et al. ). when it is threatened, men will go to great lengths to defend against the threat. for example, bosson et al. ( ) found that men who experienced a gender threat, in the form of a hair braiding activity, subsequently chose to complete a physically aggressive boxing activity at a significantly higher frequency than men who did not receive a gender threat. similar results were obtained by funk and werhun ( ), who found that men squeezed a handgrip much more forcefully if they had been told that they “squeezed like a girl” on their first attempt. not only do men react behaviorally to restore their masculinity in the presence of a gender threat, but they also react cognitively and affectively. vandello et al. ( ) gave men feedback that their performance was atypical on a gender knowledge test and then had them engage in a word completion task. men who received the atypical feedback nearly doubled the number of aggressive words they completed relative to women who received atypical feedback, suggesting that men, but not women, experience heightened aggressive cognition when their gender status was threatened. in addition, men who were told that they had received a score similar to that of a woman on the gender knowledge test completed significantly more word fragments with anxiety-related words, suggesting a negative emotional reaction to the threat. this literature suggests that gender threats, or threats to masculinity, are powerful predictors of increased anxiety and stress, as well as aggressive cognition and behavior, in men (bosson et al. ; funk and werhun ; michniewicz et al. ). the purpose of this study is to introduce a realistic gender threat in the laboratory and analyze whether men in male-dominated majors will be primed to perceive the threat as more severe than men in gender-equivalent majors and subsequently behave more aggressively toward a female leader, have increased negative affect, and perceive their female leader as less effective. this was achieved in a blind study by creating a group task where a female confederate was chosen as the leader, ostensibly based upon her higher scores on masculine leadership traits, and three male participants, from either male-dominated or gender-equivalent majors, performed a task under her supervision. following the task, and the revelation that the group performed poorly, the male participants were asked to rate their female leader’s leadership effectiveness as well as their current affect. finally, each participant engaged in a task which measured behavioral aggression toward the female leader. academia is a crucial place to focus this research because it is a weeder for those who will actually end up in the workforce; thus, providing a window of opportunity to support and educate male and female students and hopefully prevent issues related to sexual harassment in the future. combining the literature on male dominance and gender threats, we hypothesize that men in a gender threat condition will be more aggressive toward their female leader, report more negative affect, and perceive their female leader as less effective than men in a low gender threat condition (hypothesis ). additionally, we hypothesize that men from male-dominated majors will be more aggressive toward their female leader, report more negative affect, and perceive their female leader soc. sci. , , of as less effective, than men from gender-equivalent majors (hypothesis ). we also anticipate that these main effects will be moderated by a significant interaction wherein men in the high gender threat condition who are from male-dominated majors will be the most aggressive (hypothesis ), report the most negative affect (hypothesis ), and perceive their female leader as the least effective (hypothesis ). . method . . participants one hundred and forty-two male participants from a large private university in the southwestern united states participated in the study (see table for participant details). all participants were current undergraduate students from male-dominated and gender-equivalent majors. consistent with the definition created by the department of labor ( ), male-dominated majors were operationally defined as consisting of % or more males, whereas gender-equivalent majors consisted of a maximum of % of a single gender. participants were randomly assigned to a high gender threat or low gender threat condition, resulting in four possible conditions: high gender threat/male-dominated major ( participants), high gender threat/gender-equivalent major ( participants), low gender threat/male-dominated major ( participants), and low gender threat/gender-equivalent major ( participants). table . demographic characteristics of participants. characteristic n (%) (n = ) major classification male dominant ( . %) gender equivalent ( . %) race/ethnicity caucasian ( . %) hispanic/latino ( . %) asian ( . %) african american ( . %) american indian/alaskan native ( . %) other ( . %) year in school senior ( . %) junior ( . %) sophomore ( . %) freshman ( . %) other ( . %) marital status never married ( . %) married ( . %) other ( . %) mean age . years . . procedure participants were recruited using flyers and email announcements within individual undergraduate departments after the study received approval from the institutional review board (approval number: f ). upon arrival to the computer laboratory, participants were asked to read and sign an informed consent form prior to study participation. participants were then placed in a group with two other men from their major classification (male-dominated or gender-equivalent) as well as a female confederate. soc. sci. , , of participants sat at their individual computers as they were informed that the ostensible purpose of the study was to better understand how well students can perform in a group while working on an online system rather than meeting in person. they were also told that following the group task and an evaluation of their group performance level, their individual performance level would be measured on a separate task. . . . masculinity and femininity participants first completed the masculinity and femininity measure, disguised as a simple personality questionnaire, which would be used later in the study to induce a gender threat. developed by williams and best ( ), this measure includes characteristics that have been identified cross-culturally as masculine and feminine (nine masculine characteristics and nine feminine characteristics). an updated version replacing dated terms like “poised” and “disorderly” with “graceful” and “rowdy” was created by bosson and michniewicz ( ) and was used in the present study. the cronbach’s alpha was . for the masculinity scale and . for the femininity scale. after the questionnaires were completed, the participants and confederate gathered around a table at the front of the room and a group leader was assigned. . . . threat manipulation in the high gender threat condition, participants were informed that the female confederate was chosen as the group leader based on her higher scores on leadership traits as assessed by the personality questionnaire completed at the beginning of the study. specifically, it was stated that she scored higher on the traits of assertiveness, capability, independence, and rationality. past research has found that these leadership traits are generally recognized as masculine (bosson and michniewicz ). to further exacerbate the gender threat, the female confederate was moved to a slightly taller chair at the head of the table. in the low gender threat condition, participants were informed that they all had an equal chance of becoming the leader, but the female confederate had been randomly assigned as their leader. in this condition, the female leader sat in a chair at equal level with the other participants. due to the fact that the male participants in the low gender threat condition were not receiving feedback that the female confederate had scored higher than they on traditionally masculine leadership traits (the operationally defined gender threat), far less, and perhaps no, gender threat should exist. after assigning the female leader, the researcher read a brief overview of the task to the group of participants, which read: for the group task, we will provide the group a passage to read and answer questions from. your leader will choose either a historical passage or a romantic tragedy. your leader will then assign different segments of the reading to each person to read via gmail chat. you will read your separate segments, and then come together as a group online, using gmail chat, to discuss your individual section and answer questions. participants were informed in all conditions that the leader would serve in a more supervisory role by choosing the content for the group task, emailing individual reading sections to each group member, keeping track of time, recording group responses for the ten-question quiz, and compiling and reviewing the group’s responses before submitting them to the researcher. although the female leader would have access to the entire reading, it was made clear that she was not to actively participate in group discussion. the participants were further instructed that each of them would be receiving a unique section of the reading, and although they could refer back to their own section in order to answer test questions, they could not share their reading with any of their group members nor copy and paste any section of their reading into the discussion. the answers to the test questions were each located in different soc. sci. , , of sections throughout the reading. this strategy effectively removed any certainty from the individual participants that their group had answered every question correctly. the female leader was then provided the options of either a historical piece of writing on the american revolution or a romantic tragedy for the group task. in all conditions, the female confederate chose the historical writing. she was then asked to parcel out reading assignments to her team. the group members returned to their individual computers, and each male participant was assigned to read the piece of text provided to him by the female confederate leader via email. after participants had completed their assigned reading (three minutes), they were asked to use gmail chat, which was already set up for them, and respond to test questions regarding the reading. as previously mentioned, each participant had a unique section of the reading, and the group had to work together to decide what the correct answer was for each item, forcing them to rely on each other ’s knowledge and also creating an environment where no one individual would have direct access to every correct answer. participants simulated an online group project by wearing noise-canceling headphones and only communicating via instant messaging. as the group members discussed the answers, the female leader maintained a supervisory role by viewing the ongoing discussion, recording the participants’ answers to each question, and updating the group on the remaining time. after approximately seven minutes, the researcher gave the official word to the group that time was up and asked the female group leader to look over the group’s responses and decide if any changes needed to be made before submitting them. the group leader had approximately two minutes to do so. while the group leader was ostensibly looking over their test answers, the other group members were asked to sit quietly for two minutes. after the group leader submitted the test answers, the researcher took a few moments to ostensibly grade the group’s test. in reality, none of the tests were graded, and every group was informed that they had received the same score. after the “grading” was complete, the researcher informed the group that they had “scored below average with a score of / ( %) correct, or a c−”. . . . positive and negative affect schedule (panas) after receiving this negative feedback, participants were asked to answer a few survey questions regarding their feelings following the group task, their overall group experience, and the effectiveness of their group members and group leader. in order to assess their negative affect, participants completed an online version of the panas, a -item self-report measure of mood, which produces two distinct scores for positive and negative affect (watson et al. ). the cronbach’s alphas were . and . , respectively. . . . perceived leadership effectiveness scale (ples) participants were asked to rate their group experience on a variety of dimensions (e.g., enjoyable, effective, willingness to work together again) as well as the effectiveness of their team leader using the ples. questions were added within the perceived leadership effectiveness scale regarding group effectiveness in order to disguise the true purpose of the scale. the ples is a six-item self-report measure regarding perceived leadership effectiveness (giessner and van knippenberg ). the cronbach’s alpha for the ples was . . . . . competitive reaction time task (crtt) participants were then informed that their performance would now be measured at an individual level by completing a competitive task. for this task, participants remained at their computers, and each participant was handed a slip of paper that informed them that they had been randomly assigned to compete against one member of their team. in reality, all participants were assigned to compete against their female group leader in the crtt. the crtt, originally created by epstein and taylor ( ), allows participants to supposedly “compete” against another participant in a reaction time task. in the crtt, a colored box changes from green, to yellow, to red, and the participant is told to click on soc. sci. , , of the screen as soon as the box turns red. the participant is told that the individual with the quickest reaction time will win the task. the participant plays the crtt times and is randomly assigned to lose the task of those times. upon losing, the participant is blasted by an unpleasant white noise ostensibly selected by their partner. upon winning, the participant is able to choose the intensity ( – intensity) and duration ( – s) with which their opponent will be noise blasted. following the scoring method for the crtt used by bushman and baumeister ( ), participants received a score based on the sum of the intensity and duration they chose on the first trial, providing a measure of “unprovoked” aggression. . . . debriefing after the crtt was completed, participants were debriefed online as to the actual purpose of the study and provided the opportunity to have their data removed from analysis. before leaving the study area, all participants were either monetarily compensated with $ or received course credit if enrolled in a course that required participation in a study. . results the primary purpose of this experiment was to determine the influence of gender threat and male dominance within a major on subsequent behavior, affect, and cognition. for the purposes of analysis, participants were separated by enrollment in a male-dominated or gender-equivalent major and receipt of a high or low gender threat, resulting in (major classification: male-dominated, gender-equivalent) × (condition: high gender threat, low gender threat) factorial design. using stata statistical software, three separate analyses of variance (anovas), instead of a single manova, were run for each dependent variable due to the existence of separate a priori hypotheses. . . hypotheses in order to test hypotheses and , that men in the high gender threat condition and men from male-dominated majors will be more aggressive toward their female leader, have more negative affect, and perceive their female leader as less effective, than men in the low gender threat condition and men from gender-equivalent majors (i.e., significant main effects), and hypotheses , , and , that an interaction will exist wherein men in the gender threat condition who are from male-dominated majors will be the most aggressive, the dv’s were submitted as the dependent variables to separate (major classification: male-dominated, gender-equivalent) × (condition: high gender threat, low gender threat) anovas. the results revealed no significant main effects or interactions, all f’s( , ) < . , ps > . , thus failing to support our a priori hypotheses. . . post-hoc analyses although our hypotheses did not return significant results, recent research on the influence of traditional masculinity suggests that conformity to traditional masculine norms may moderate relationships between behavioral aggression and many other factors, including playing violent video games and being exposed to gender threats (hunt and gonsalkorale ; thomas and levant ). following this line of research, we investigated the effects of self-reported masculinity related to behavioral aggression as post-hoc analyses. preliminary t-test analyses on the self-report masculinity and femininity variables indicated no significant difference between male-dominated and gender-equivalent majors on self-reported masculinity t( ) = − . , p = . , d = − . , % ci [− . , . ], with males from male-dominated majors (m = . , sd = . ) self-reporting masculinity essentially equal to that of men from gender-equivalent majors (m = . , sd = . ). however, a significant difference emerged between male-dominated majors and gender-equivalent majors in regards to self-reported femininity t( ) = − . , p < . , d = − . , % ci [− . , − . ], with males from male-dominated majors (m = . , sd = . ) self-reporting significantly less soc. sci. , , of femininity than men from gender-equivalent majors (m = . , sd = . ), indicating that men from gender-equivalent majors were relatively more androgynous than men from male-dominated majors. with the knowledge that men from the two major classifications did not differ significantly on self-reported masculinity, we correlated masculinity with behavioral aggression, negative affect, and the perception of the female leader’s leadership effectiveness within each of the four experimental conditions (male-dominated, high gender threat; gender-equivalent, high gender threat; male-dominated, low gender threat; gender-equivalent, low gender threat). the correlation matrix revealed a large (cohen ), significant correlation between self-reported masculinity and behavioral aggression (r = . , p = . ), as well as a similar trend between self-reported masculinity and perceptions of leadership effectiveness (r = − . , p = . ), among men from male-dominated majors who had received a gender threat (see table ), but no significant correlations in any of the other three groups, suggesting that as a gender threat is introduced to men from male-dominated majors, an increase in self-reported masculinity corresponds to an increase in behavioral aggression toward the female confederate and a decrease in their perception of her leadership effectiveness. negative affect did not correlate with the other variables. table . correlation table. group measures male-dominated major, gender threat n = . masculinity . behavioral aggression . ** . negative affect − . − . . perception of leadership effectiveness − . − . * − . * note: * p < . , ** p < . . following the findings within the correlation matrix, a multivariate multiple regression was conducted to predict the three dependent variables (behavioral aggression, negative affect, and perceptions of leadership effectiveness) from self-reported masculinity within each group. a significant regression equation was found among men in male-dominated majors who had received a gender threat (b = . , t( ) = . , p = . ), but not among any of the other three groups (see table ). table . multiple multivariate regression analysis of factors related to self-reported masculinity. group b se b t % ci male-dominated major, gender threat n = behavioral aggression . ** . . . . negative affect − . . − . − . . perception of leadership effectiveness − . † . − . − . . note: † p < . , ** p < . . masculinity significantly predicted whether participants from male-dominated majors who had received a gender threat were more behaviorally aggressive and explained a significant proportion of the variance (r = . , f( , ) = . , p = . ). additionally, the multivariate multiple regression produced a marginally significant relationship among men in male-dominated majors who had received a gender threat (b = − . , t( ) = − . , p = . ), but not among any of the other three groups. masculinity marginally predicted whether participants from male-dominated majors who had received a gender threat perceived their leader as less effective and explained a marginally significant proportion of the variance (r = . , f( , ) = . , p = . ; see table ). soc. sci. , , of . discussion contrary to our hypotheses, men who experienced a high gender threat and men from male-dominated majors did not exhibit more behavioral aggression, increased negative affect, or decreased perceptions of leadership effectiveness toward a female confederate than men who did not receive a gender threat and men from gender-equivalent majors, and there was no interaction between the variables. it appears that the combination of gender threat with enrollment in a male-dominated major did not affect men’s negative behavior toward a female leader. however, post-hoc analyses incorporating self-reported masculinity as a moderator revealed that as self-reported masculinity increased among men who had experienced a high gender threat and came from a male-dominated major, as did their behavioral aggression, while their perceptions of a female leaders’ effectiveness decreased. this relationship was not present among men in any other combination of threat and major, suggesting that the high gender threat and type of major may affect behavior and cognition but only for a specific group of self-reported “masculine” men. we offer this interpretation tentatively, as these results were the results of post-hoc analyses and were not part of our original hypotheses. consequently, we are cautious about the implications of these findings. for men from male-dominated majors who experienced a high gender threat, higher self-reported masculinity predicted increased behavioral aggression toward their female leader as well as decreased perceptions of leadership effectiveness. these findings are consistent with the original hypotheses and background research for this study, which suggested that the interaction between male dominance and a gender threat would lead to an increase in behavioral aggression; however, the influence of masculinity was not initially addressed. it is interesting and important to note that whereas high masculinity has often been associated with increased aggression (sears ; weisbuch et al. ), self-reported masculinity in this study was equal for the gender-equivalent and male-dominated majors, but only affected behavioral aggression for the male-dominated majors under gender threat. these findings make a case for the negative influence of numerical and normative male dominance when a gender threat is presented to men who self-report as high on masculinity. as shown by their behavioral aggression scores, the gender threat impacted men from male-dominated majors on a scale relative to their self-reported masculinity. as discussed in the literature review, schultz ( ) asserted that “a drive to maintain the most highly rewarded forms of work as domains of masculine competence underlies many, if not most, forms of sex-based harassment on the job” (p. ). although physical aggression cannot be equated to a hostile work environment, the physical aggression demonstrated in this study suggests a desire to “punish” the female leader. based on schultz’s assertion, men higher in masculinity, who view their major as a masculine domain, may feel a greater drive to maintain that domain of masculine competence, creating a potentially hostile environment for female counterparts. when men are already in a numerically and normatively male-dominated environment, the introduction of a female leader may be perceived as a gender threat for men high on masculinity and may result in increased behavioral aggression and a perception of the female leader as less effective, potentially resulting in a hostile work environment for their female counterparts. another significant contribution is the identification of appointed female leaders as a gender threat among men from male-dominated majors who self-rate as high on masculinity. a gender threat has not, to our knowledge, been presented in previous research in such a subtle but potentially powerful manner. in this study, men had a real choice as to whether they would perceive the appointment of a female leader with traditionally masculine leadership qualities as a gender threat, much like they would encounter in academia or the workforce. it is generally understood in the sexual harassment literature that although sexual harassment, specifically gender harassment, is more prevalent in male-dominated workforces, not all men in those fields are guilty of harassment. the fact that a select group of men, namely men from male-dominated majors who self-identified as highly masculine, apparently perceived their female leader as a gender threat and reacted aggressively toward her behaviorally and in their leadership ratings, sheds additional light on the types of toxic situations in academia and the workforce that may result in a hostile working environment. soc. sci. , , of this toxic situation is a difficult one to overcome. male-dominated environments could be made to be more gender-equivalent by introducing more females, but as this study demonstrates, these women may be perceived as gender threats and experience a hostile working environment. one solution may be creating the appropriate type of contact between men and women that does not result in a gender threat. allport ( ) introduced contact theory and four factors that can contribute to positive contact: equal status, intergroup cooperation, supportive norms, and acquaintanceship. in the case of gender harassment in academia and the workforce, focusing on supportive norms and acquaintanceship would likely be of the most use. professors and teaching assistants in academia, as well as bosses and supervisors in the workforce, can demonstrate supportive norms by modeling appropriate intergroup behavior and encouraging positive intergroup behavior from their students and employees (salomon and cairns ). in academia, this may be demonstrated by professors who actively work with and acknowledge female students and encourage their male students to do the same. female professors may have an especially profound impact by creating role models for female students and providing a positive female leader archetype for male students. acquaintanceship is probably the most important of the four factors in this scenario because it can potentially help overcome the gender threat created by female leaders in male-dominated environments. the acquaintanceship factor in contact theory suggests that superficial contact between men and women in male-dominated environments may actually increase stereotypes. this may be the case when a female leader, like in the present study, maintains a strictly supervisory role and has no substantive interactions with her male counterparts. in contrast to superficial contact, creating acquaintanceship by sharing interpersonal information and creating friendships may reduce prejudice and is the most important of the four factors in contact theory because it has the potential for lasting attitude change (salomon and cairns ). although this strategy may be effective, it highlights the trap that women can be placed in within male-dominated fields where masculine leadership qualities are valued but the display of those qualities may result in a gender threat among their male counterparts, resulting in lower perceived leadership effectiveness and an increased risk of gender harassment. this situation is an unfair burden placed on female leaders, as opposed to male leaders, and continued research is needed to even the playing field. . future research future research should focus specifically on men who are from male-dominated majors and high on masculinity as they are the group most at risk of perceiving gender threats, which may result in negative outcomes. future research could also focus on more diverse samples of male students, as well as incorporating diversity as a factor among the female confederates. additionally, future research could include a longitudinal or cross-sectional study design in order to better understand the development of implicit and explicit biases in this group of men and follow their progression through male-dominated college majors and into the workforce. such a study would have the potential to identify when explicit and implicit biases begin to emerge and whether they increase with tenure in a male-dominated field. additionally, these studies could focus on working to diminish felt threat among this specific group of men through bias workshops, which have had success reducing harassment long-term in recent research (carnes et al. ; fine et al. ). acknowledgments: this research was partially supported by funding from the brigham young university department 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /a: http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction and literature review 	method 	participants 	procedure 	masculinity and femininity 	threat manipulation 	positive and negative affect schedule (panas) 	perceived leadership effectiveness scale (ples) 	competitive reaction time task (crtt) 	debriefing 	results 	hypotheses 	post-hoc analyses 	discussion 	future research 	references towards a muslim family law act? debating muslim women's rights and the codification of personal laws in india full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ccsa contemporary south asia issn: - (print) - x (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsa towards a muslim family law act? debating muslim women's rights and the codification of personal laws in india justin jones to cite this article: justin jones ( ): towards a muslim family law act? debating muslim women's rights and the codification of personal laws in india, contemporary south asia, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: oct . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ccsa https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsa https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ccsa &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ccsa &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - towards a muslim family law act? debating muslim women’s rights and the codification of personal laws in india justin jones faculty of theology and religion, university of oxford, oxford, uk abstract muslim personal laws in india have never been systematically codified, in marked contrast both to hindu family laws in india and to islamic family laws in much of the muslim-majority world, both of which have been subject to a far greater degree of codification. this article examines the call being made by one prominent contemporary muslim women’s organisation, the bharatiya muslim mahila andolan (bmma), for the wholesale codification of muslim family laws in india as a pathway to protecting women’s rights. following a discussion of the wider context of india’s uncodified muslim personal law system, this paper offers a commentary on the bmma’s draft family law act, first released in . it demonstrates how this document synthesises discourses of women’s rights drawn from a series of qur’anic, constitutional and transnational reference points. by drawing from such diverse sources, and while legal codification in much of the islamic world has instituted fundamentally patriarchal legal norms, the bmma’s proposed code articulates a distinctive, more gender-equal reading of islamic family law. keywords muslim personal laws; codification; women’s rights; muslim women; talaq-i- bid’ah/triple talaq introduction in , the bharatiya muslim mahila andolan (bmma, or ‘indian muslim women’s movement’) pub- lished the first draft of a document that has come to define its agenda: the muslim family law act. the act opens with the statement that, across the world including muslim-majority states, ‘new legal codes have been introduced … [to] introduce the rule of law in family matters, and to end arbitrari- ness and variances in judicial decisions’ (bmma ). it then laments the ‘absence of codified law’ applicable to muslim family matters in india, which gives legal officials little firm ground on which to adjudicate muslim personal laws, and allows the perpetuation of ‘customary practices … divergent from the values and principles of the qur’an.’ thus begins a self-declared effort ‘to consolidate, clarify and codify the provisions of muslim law’ in a way consummate with that achieved in much of the islamic world (bmma ). ‘almost all muslim countries … such as morocco, tunisia, turkey, egypt, jordan, … bangladesh and pakistan’, the bmma argued, ‘have codified personal laws’ (bmma b), and a comparable effort must now be made in india. since its foundation in , the bmma has established itself as one of india’s most influential muslim women’s organisations. it engages both liberal and islamic discourses in its promotion of women’s justice and equality, and it has become especially associated with the campaign for the reform of muslim personal laws. in an exhaustive national survey of muslim women’s perspectives on family law in , the bmma claimed that % of respondents believed that the codification of muslim personal laws would help to protect women’s rights, with high numbers also supporting © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. contact justin jones justin.jones@theology.ox.ac.uk contemporary south asia https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:justin.jones@theology.ox.ac.uk http://www.tandfonline.com the reform of unequal personal laws relating to divorce, polygamous marriage, mehr (dowry) and inheritance (bmma a, – and passim). addressing what the organisation sees as a public need, this draft act, the result of some six years of consultations among muslim community leaders and women’s associations, was intended to prompt community and political debate about the codification of muslim family laws in india – and perhaps even provide an early blueprint for any such bill to the indian legislature. in contrast to the occasional, piecemeal legislative tweaks made to muslim personal laws since independence, the draft act represents a systematic presentation of a codified islamic family law that could stand as a parallel to personal law legislation that already exists for other communities. if any legislation on the lines urged by the bmma were ever enacted, it would comprise the most significant legislative intervention into muslim personal laws since the s. while the bmma’s proposed act gleaned minimal coverage initially, it has subsequently garnered greater attention on account of the organisation’s simultaneous success in demanding legislation upon specific muslim personal law issues. in , the bmma’s conveners co-filed a pil (public inter- est litigation) application to the supreme court, seeking the abolition of talaq-i-bid`ah, a form of instant islamic divorce by which a husband can unilaterally repudiate a wife. this pil accompanied a court case filed in the court by shayara bano, a victim of the practice, and ultimately led to the supreme court’s declaration of this practice to be unconstitutional and legally invalid. follow- ing the court victory, the bmma supported the government’s attempts to legislate upon the court’s decision. while a bill on the issue introduced by the government was quickly passed by the lok sahba (lower house) in , it only recently in july cleared the rajya sahba (upper house). as a result, the muslim women (protection of rights on marriage) bill has finally been enacted, rendering talaq-i- bid`ah both legally inadmissible and a criminal offence. this development has both established the influence of the bmma within recent public and political debates on personal laws and, moreover, has made the codification of individual or collective islamic family laws a more conceivable prospect than it has been in decades. this article examines the background and motivations behind the bmma’s push to codify islamic family laws. it explores how the organisation has sought to formulate an original, progressive code islamic family law that draws inspiration from an array of sources including the personal status codes of muslim nations, modernist and ‘islamic feminist’ readings of islamic laws, indian consti- tutional rights, and transnational women’s rights discourse. finally, it reflects upon the possible direc- tions of muslim personal law reform in contemporary india. india’s uncodified muslim personal laws since before india’s independence, the state has accepted that different sets of religious laws should be applied to different communities in their personal and family affairs, and the courts have always adjudicated family matters on this basis. however, by comparison with the laws applying to other communities, muslim personal laws in india have never been systematically codified. while muslim personal law (and its forerunner anglo-muhammadan law) is sometimes talked about as a coherent body of law shaped by legal digests and case precedent (kugle ; abbasi ), there is very little in muslim personal law that parallels the statutory acts that already determine the family laws of hindu, christian and other citizens. even the few direct legislative interventions into muslim personal laws, before and since independence, have been more notable for what they omit rather than include. for instance, the muslim personal law (shariat) application act (saa) of , while confi- rming that muslims were subject to shari`ah laws in their personal and family matters, specified almost nothing about the content of these stipulations, nor about the legal bodies authorised to adju- dicate them. for all but a few syncretic communities, the act confirmed far more than it changed in the adjudication of muslim family laws (niaz , ). even the dissolution of muslim marriages act (dmma) of , frequently taken as the most explicit and important government intervention into muslim personal laws, only codified the nine grounds on which a woman can file for divorce (for j. jones example, a husband’s absence, neglect or cruelty). it said nothing about issues arising from divorce, like post-divorce maintenance, mehr (bridal dowry), marital property or child custody; nor did it change anything about forms of male-initiated divorce (niaz, – ). some later interventions have been similarly limited in their remit. while murmurs of more government intervention in muslim personal laws have rumbled for decades, the usual reality has been of exempting these laws from legislative interference. by contrast with india, the formation of full or partial islamic family law codes has been the major legal trajectory elsewhere in the muslim world over the last century. following the ottoman law of family rights ( ) that established an early template for a codified family law (tucker ), the governments of many arab nations endeavoured to codify islamic family laws soon after their inde- pendence in the s. personal status codes were created by the early governments of newly-inde- pendent jordan ( ), syria ( ), tunisia ( ), morocco ( ), iraq ( ) and others (mahmood b; hallaq , – ; welchman ; otto ). these codification initiatives aimed to promote a moderate, restrained vision of muslim family conduct that could foster social stability, enhance national cohesion and promote the state’s modernising agenda (sfeir , – ; sonbol , – ). ultimately, less complete but nevertheless transformative legislative invol- vements spread to south asia, notably the family laws ordinance of pakistan, later also retained and amended in bangladesh. mirroring this treatment of family laws in newly decolonised muslim-majority nations, there was considerable momentum in india for the codification of family laws after independence. many post- colonial politicians and lawmakers demanded progress towards a uniform civil code (ucc), a common body of civil laws which would nominally draw from shared legal values and apply to all citizens. in most cases, however, the constitutional directive for progress towards a ucc (article ) was placed into careful balance with religious personal laws, a provision maintained on the basis of the constitution’s parallel commitments to freedom of religion (articles – ). as a result, and while hindu personal laws were systematically codified via the hindu code bills of the early- s, the personal laws of the muslim minority were left relatively untouched by lawmakers, as a perceived concession to minority rights and wary public opinion (hasan and menon ; williams ). however, this overarching narrative somewhat forgets that, as narendra subramanian ( , ) has reminded us, many prominent muslim public figures and community leaders did support a full or partial codification of personal laws in the decades following indian independence. politicians like abul kalam azad, naziruddin ahmad and hussain imam argued for constructive amendments or the full or partial codification of muslim personal laws according to constitutional values (subramanian , – ). the national indian women’s movement, which included many muslim women, pushed at moments for either a ucc or for the reform of particular personal laws, such as the abolition of polygamy and talaq-i-bid`ah, the raising of the minimum marriage age for girls and the implementation of a model muslim marriage contract (kumar , – ; tschalaer , – ). the renowned legal expert and barrister asaf ali asghar fyzee called in the early- s for a ‘root and branch’ review of muslim personal laws which could ‘deal … with the major needs of the community’, as did many other muslim judges (saxena , – ). some muslim activists also made powerful interventions in favour of amendments to muslim personal laws or a common civil code that incorporated elements of islamic family law. among the latter was hamid dalwai, an often-forgotten social activist who in organised a march of muslim women in mumbai against talaq-i-bid`ah. he subsequently founded the muslim satyashodhak samaj in , a muslim socio-political organisation that pressed for the legal prohibition of conten- tious muslim family laws and the move towards a common civil code (haygunde ; guha , – ). the full or partial codification of muslim personal laws was also advocated by some of postcolonial india’s key specialists in islamic family laws. in the early s, the renowned jurist tahir mahmood compiled two companion volumes advocating the so-called ‘progressive codification’ of muslim contemporary south asia personal laws, to bring them into line with common civil laws and abolish some of its practices (mahmood a). arguing that such reforms had been implemented via existing personal status codes across much of the islamic world, he referenced countries including egypt, iran, singapore, pakistan, malaysia and indonesia to claim the possibility of shari`ah-based laws ‘adapting to contem- porary social requirements’ (mahmood b, ). mahmood’s verdict was unequivocal: it is unwise for the muslims of india to shut their eyes to the tremendous progress in the fields of personal law and succession made in a major part of the world of islam. a unified, codified and modernised law of personal status is now the order of the day in a large number of countries where muslims constitute overwhelming majorities. in india, the muslims have to live in the company of a dominant non-muslim majority and other co-minorities, all of whom are now governed by largely modernised and codified personal laws. how can they afford to insist on an absolutely undisturbed continuance of their classical and uncodified personal law? and if they do so it would be to their own sheer detriment. (mahmood a, – ) there were, therefore, several factors that might have created a sympathetic environment for the codification of muslim family law after independence. the models of codified family law established in the wider islamic world; the prior codification of hindu family law in india; and the weight of sig- nificant muslim community support for reform, might all have incurred legislative intervention. why, then, did the legislature fail – or ‘miss the opportunity’ (subramanian , ) – to substantially codify muslim personal laws after independence? one reason is that the legislative assembly first turned its attentions to hindu religious personal laws, on the pragmatic assumption that regulating the family unit of the majority community was the priority for the postcolonial projects of nation-building and socio-economic regulation (newbigin ). second, the overwhelming political need for community accommodation after partition incurred a strong emphasis upon the language of protections for minorities, including their distinct personal laws, rather than upon more assimilationist forms of civil integration (ghosh ). third, there remained an impression among lawmakers, inherited from the colonial era, that muslims were uniquely attached to their religious personal laws and unwilling to accept any government interference in community regulations (subramanian , – ; newbigin , – ). fourth, the acrimony surrounding the hindu code bill debates in the early- s, in which hindu community, caste and female spokespersons clashed heavily on many issues, instilled fatigue among politicians and diminished their willingness to follow the codification of hindu personal laws with a similar effort for muslim ones. nehru and his administration were thus pushed into retreat from enacting equivalent changes to islamic family laws, despite awareness of the impli- cations that this might have for muslim women. poignantly, when the journalist taya zinkin inter- viewed nehru in the late- s, he stated that his greatest achievement had been ‘securing rights for my hindu sisters’; when asked next about his greatest disappointment, he said that he ‘could not achieve the same for my muslim sisters.’ the state’s distance from personal law reform was assured further from the s by a series of `ulama-led religious organisations that have consistently framed the state’s constitutional obligations to ‘secularism’ in terms of its non-interference in the religious laws of the muslim minority. in particu- lar, the all india muslim personal law board (aimplb), founded in , espoused unequivocally to safeguard muslim personal laws from legislative intervention. founded in response to the introduc- tion of a proposed adoption bill into the legislative assembly in the s that would have applied the same civil provisions on child adoption to all communities, the aimplb argued that the interpret- ation of islamic laws (ijtihad) was open only to trained islamic scholars, and that judges and legislators should have no role in shaping the contents of shari`ah-based stipulations (rahmani ). the aimplb’s pressure successfully prevented the passing of the bill. comparable campaigns have like- wise deterred successive governments from intervening in muslim personal laws on some significant occasions. an especially renowned example arose from the shah bano affair of – , in which religious organisations compelled the government to reject a verdict from the supreme court that would have entitled muslim women to civil provisions for post-divorce maintenance. instead, the government capitulated and passed the muslim women’s (protection of rights on divorce) act j. jones (mwprda), which re-stated the jurisdiction of muslim personal laws over the maintenance question (hasan ; vatuk ; williams , – ). community opposition to government interference, a lack of political will, and the conflation of the principle of personal law reform with the hindu right’s policy of a ucc, have thus together deterred governments from any serious legislative moves towards the codification of muslim per- sonal laws. indeed, the political discord provoked by the issue from the s led former advocates of government interventions into personal laws, including tahir mahmood, to turn away from this approach, fearing the prospect of communal division (kumar , ; subramanian , ). the result is that, unlike the middle east and even the rest of south asia, india has maintained a substantially uncodified muslim family law, one adjudicated according to a mixture of case pre- cedent, sporadic legislation and the influence of community actors (mahmood , ). this context in turn has determined how indian judicial officials and legal activists have attempted to pursue their objective of offering suitable legal safeguards to muslim citizens, especially muslim women, from some of the gender-unequal stipulations of muslim personal law. while they have sometimes continued to call for legislative intervention, for the most part they have found pathways to work in the absence of codified personal laws, building alternative strategies to ensure muslim women’s access to protections within the existing legal framework. for instance, advocates and court judges have in recent times amended judicial practice to decide cases in favour of muslim women’s needs without codified laws. as subramanian ( ) emphasises, judges have found new ways in recent decades to build upon landmark case precedents and existing personal and statutory laws to covertly adjust the implementation of muslim personal laws in ways that ‘align’ with civil laws applicable to other communities. they have managed to formulate verdicts on issues such as instant triple-talaq, payment of post-divorce maintenance and the right to adopt that favour muslim women’s rights, in spite of the absence of specific legislation. likewise, many women’s rights activists, who had in earlier generations pushed for legislative reform of muslim personal laws or moves towards a common civil code, have increasingly found mechanisms to defend women’s rights that do not necessitate extensive legislative involvement. this is embodied, for instance, by flavia agnes, one of india’s most influential women’s activists and the founder of the ngo majlis in mumbai in . the political polarisation surrounding the issue of a ucc in the aftermath of shah bano led agnes, like many other activists, to oppose the wholesale legislative overhaul of muslim personal laws advocated by women’s activists in earlier gen- erations, arguing that such initiatives might foster social division and lack support within the commu- nity. she has consistently argued, instead, that existing indian laws have the capacity to protect women, if used astutely. likewise, her ngo in the last quarter-century has worked closely with lawyers, judges, academics and non-state practitioners like counsellors and community workers, finding ways to protect women’s rights that do not depend upon the need for codification. a blueprint for ‘a progressive islamic family law’ in its context, the bmma’s draft family law act, with its call for the ‘uniformity and certainty’ that would come with codified laws, therefore rejects the implicit thirty-year consensus described above that muslim personal laws should not be fully codified and that india’s existing case-led adju- dicative framework contains sufficient mechanisms for protecting muslim women. the bmma’s draft act received input, over a long consultation process, from a range of legal professionals, advocates, islamic scholars and academics, most notably the late liberal islamic scholar asghar ali engineer, whose influence is evident throughout the work. composed in a judicial style and running to several dozen pages, it is clearly designed to communicate authority and comprehensiveness, and to garner attention. this section now provides a detailed assessment of the content of the bmma’s draft family law act itself, comparing it with the statutory laws applying to other religious communities in india, and the personal status codes determining the content of islamic family laws in much of the muslim contemporary south asia world. testifying to the draft’s origins in a long and multi-pronged consultation process, the act can be read as an inclusive template that amalgamates multiple lines of legal reasoning. the sources that the document invokes include indian constitutional principles, especially those articles affirming reli- gious and gender equality (e.g. articles – ), and also, existing statutory legislation on civil and per- sonal laws. indeed, the bmma states that its draft act conforms with all existing legislation. further, the text contains reference to international rights law and declarations, especially women’s rights charters such as the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw) of . critically, the draft act also picks up elements from the personal status codes of some muslim majority countries, suggesting the engagement of its authors’ with examples of the constructive reformulation of islamic family laws across the muslim world. many of the act’s stipulations differ greatly from established interpretations and practices of muslim personal laws. for instance, the bill overhauls provisions governing muslim marriage. it demands compulsory civil registration of all religious marriages: a departure from existing realities where nikahs (marriages) often remain unregistered and are solemnised by imams (prayer-leaders) and qazis (religious judges/officiates) at community level. it demands that both partners declare ‘unambiguous consent’ to marriage, effectively eroding traditional norms of male guardianship (wilayat) within families (bmma , – ). it prohibits polygyny and nikah-i-halalah , while also specifying that a divorced couple may remarry without hindrance. it sets the minimum marriage age of (m)/ (f) to prevent juvenile marriage: a provision that aligns the act both with existing civil laws in india (including the prohibition of child marriage act ( ) and the special marriage act ( )), but also, with age-of-marriage stipulations in other islamic personal status codes, as in tunisia and algeria. like other such codes in the muslim world, the act also contains proposals for regulating mehr: the bridal dowry gift payable by the husband to the wife upon marriage. in reality in india, women often agree to ‘forgive’ this payment, with the husband either deferring it to a hypothetical future date or reducing the amount given to purely tokenistic status. the act, however, specifies that the mehr be paid to the wife immediately upon marriage, and that the sum must be equivalent to the husband’s annual income (bmma , – ). this provision to secure a generous mehr would afford women some financial autonomy and protection from divorce. many of the draft act’s provisions about marriage are re-stated in the bmma’s proposed standard nikah-namah (marriage contract), which is included as an appendix (bmma , – ). many muslim states, regulating muslim marriages more directly than in india, have appropriated the nikah-namah as a means of enshrining women’s marital rights: both by using it to affirm the personal details (age, marital history etc) of the spouses, and allowing the insertion of stipulations into the con- tract to uphold legal protections for the wife (quraishi and vogel ; el-alami ). however, unlike many muslim-majority countries, india does not have a standardised nikah-namah; instead, anecdotal evidence suggests that the issuing of nikah-namahs can be careless and inconsistent, and can favour the husband over the wife. it is for this reason that several women’s organisations in the last years have published their own ‘model nikah-namahs’ which include a variety of stipu- lations contractually affirming women’s position in marriage (tschalaer , – ; suneetha ). the bmma’s nikah-namah is the latest in this series of attempts to enshrine spousal rights. by demanding full background details from both spouses, such as their current marital status and age, it seeks to eliminate the possibility of polygamous or child marriages. it also demands a declara- tion of the spouses’ earnings, and the husband’s signed commitment to the upfront payment of mehr. finally, it records the details of the officiating qazi and declares him responsible for registering the marriage with the civil authorities. the draft act is equally path breaking in its treatment of divorce. it prohibits instant triple-talaq (a practice which, as noted above, has now been made illegal). it reaffirms a muslim woman’s grounds for divorce as stated in the dmma; however, it adds to these ‘irretrievable breakdown’ ( – ). this provision, which is more akin to the shiqaq provisions in the personal status codes of arab countries such as morocco and jordan (sadiqi ) than to any existing muslim divorce legislation in india, j. jones widens the grounds on which a woman may file for divorce. the act maintains a wife’s right to initiate a khula` (separation) from her husband, and unambiguously gives her the ability to do so without her husband’s consent; it also scraps the condition that a wife divorced by khula` should return her mehr. provisions like these, widening women’s abilities to dissolve a marriage while also curtailing men’s, tacitly equalise male and female rights to divorce, within the framework of a reinterpreted islamic matrimonial law. the draft act also offers full instruction on proper divorce procedure. based on the principle of the so-called ‘rightful’ divorce (talaq-i-ehsan) which is believed to derive from qur’anic commands (q : ), it envisages a staggered, multi-stage process of compulsory arbitration over a minimum of three `iddats (menstrual cycles). these arbitrators can be family members, or otherwise, appointees from a ‘registered organisation’ or ‘welfare agency’: by implication, this could be a registry office, family court or ngo, reflecting the ngo-background of the bmma’s leaders and their history of working with such institutions (bmma , , ). the appointed arbitrators are empowered to facili- tate marital reconciliation, or if divorce is unavoidable, then to negotiate the settlement of residual issues such as dower, division of property, child custody and maintenance payments. once again, as above, these arbitrators are legally responsible for formally registering the separation as a civil divorce. the document also deals with a range of other issues. it amends laws on child custody, demanding that traditional norms of the father assuming custody rights from age seven are replaced by increas- ing consideration for the preferences of the child, and a formal role for arbitrators (bmma , – ). it gives muslims an unequivocal right to adopt children (bmma , ), something that is not currently established in statutory law. it also substantially reworks policies of inheritance, which have traditionally promoted unequal distribution between males and females. affirming the qur’an’s instruction to pass inheritance to wives and daughters (q : – ), the act seeks to equalise women’s rights as heirs. it grants a wife equal share in marital property ‘in lieu of her housework con- tributing to the conjugal home and property creation’ (bmma , ). significantly, the docu- ment also encourages parents to equalise a daughter’s share in their estate by giving hiba – an islamic law of gift that is not gender-specific and can thus been used to circumvent inheritance sti- pulations (bmma , ). this mechanism had been used historically, both in south asia and else- where in the islamic world, in situations such as those of fathers wishing to maximise the estates provided to daughters (e.g. fyzee , – ). once again, the bmma’s instrumentalisation of this legal tool alludes to their selection of useful legal devices from across the islamic world to find creative reparations to the patriarchal character of muslim personal laws. looked at in its entirety, the draft act has several core implications. first, reflecting the wider ethos of the bmma, the document applies arguments from both qur’anic and constitutional lines of reason- ing. arguing that the existing structures of muslim personal have both ‘denied [muslim women] their quranic rights as well as their rights as equal indian citizens’ (bmma b), it argues that the values underpinning both sources mutually affirm each other. this claim reflects their approach of returning to the qur’an alone as the source of islamic law, discounting the later traditions of hadith and fiqh (jurisprudence) which have formed the basis of islamic personal status codes elsewhere. the simul- taneous recourse to two sources of rights is seen as essential to the bmma. to argue only from the constitution, its founders argue, would lead in the direction of a ucc; while engaging both together paves the way for the bmma’s desired end, namely, a codified islamic law that also functions in accordance with constitutional standards of equality and justice. further to this, the act is easily read as a specific manifestation of the global movement of islamic feminism, which has sought to rethink islamic family laws from within the islamic tradition via an autonomous re-reading of the scriptures and the abandonment of later jurisprudence. the intro- duction to the act notes the inspiration of renowned islamic feminists including amina wadud, ziba mir-hosseini, zainah anwar and fatima mernissi (bmma , ): thinkers to whom some of the bmma’s leaders often refer. indeed, like the works of some of these figures, the bmma’s draft act does not seek to apply identical legal stipulations to men and women. it acknowledges, contemporary south asia for instance, that the legal mechanisms available in islam to each gender are different. instead, it establishes interpretations of these stipulations that are largely equalising in their impacts and that remove the androcentric bias of some traditional interpretations. a further feature throughout the act is the intention to bring islamic family laws under the clear jurisdiction of official bodies. it is widely acknowledged in india that muslim marriages and divorces area in practice often handled exclusively within communities, in the form of unregistered nikah mar- riages and non-judicial islamic divorces, which can make eventual judicial reparation difficult (e.g. vatuk ). however, under this proposed act, islamic marriages, divorces and other family trans- actions would all be filed officially, giving aggrieved individuals easier recourse to the courts. simul- taneously, the act would erode the autonomy of local practitioners of religious laws, like community elders, imams and qazis, by obliging them to follow set procedures and register religious transactions with the civil authorities. it would thus bring a deregulated world of local legal practice under increas- ing regulation. there is one further very significant point to make about the overall worldview embodied in this draft act. the bmma puts faith in the codification of muslim family laws as the path towards muslim women’s legal empowerment. codifying laws, the bmma’s leaders argue, would liberate women from the whims of male relatives and community patriarchs, and give their claims substance in the courts. yet, while the draft act quotes a range of islamic family law provisions from other countries, the codifications of islamic family laws outside of india have often been interpreted in aca- demic work as having had the opposite effect, regulating and subordinating women rather than empowering them. the islamic personal status codes extant in many arab nations have often entrenched a covert form of ‘state patriarchy’, since the regimes of these nations have implemented laws that uphold the primacy of men’s authority within the family unit to ensure societal constancy (sonbol ; elliott ; welchman ). family law codes have thus tended to take paternalistic or protective approaches to women, and confirmed male dominance within the family. even many of the twenty-first century changes in family law hailed as victories for women’s rights across the muslim world, such as the widening of women’s judicial access to khula’ divorce in egypt in (sonneveld ) and the suspension of male guardianship stipulations in the moroccan personal status code of (elliott ) – both of which were presented as transformative advances in women’s rights – have in reality been relatively small concessions within wider codes that bestow fundamentally unequal rights upon men and women. the impacts of codified family laws in much of the muslim-majority world therefore differ con- siderably from the outcomes that are anticipated by muslim women’s groups in india, who consider a code to be a means to promoting women’s equality. yet, perhaps this is because the architects of the code in india are operating in a context of unusual interpretative freedom. outside of india, islamic family law codes emerged out of long negotiations among established lawmakers and poli- ticians. they therefore ultimately took on conservative, patriarchal tones that reflected the process of their legislative creation and upheld the residual social patriarchies upon which these states depended. with these codes in place, women’s rights campaigners in these societies have only been able to urge amendment to existing stipulations, rather than proposing their own alternatives from scratch. by contrast, since india has so few statutory muslim family laws, india’s muslim women’s activists have been able to pick-and-mix different woman-friendly stipulations from a range of islamic, transnational and constitutional sources. india’s existing environment of uncodified laws, in other words, has given the bmma considerable interpretative freedom to formulate its own, unbound vision of a code of islamic family law. explaining the push for codification why, then, has this push for the codification of muslim family law gained force in the last few years, after decades of quiet acceptance of uncodified personal laws? speaking broadly, underpinning the draft act is a wider sense of social transition in india. some of the social power of the `ulama and j. jones religious organisations, who have acted in the past as a force blocking state intervention in muslim personal laws, has been eroded. equally, a range of lay thinkers and organisations – in this case, women’s organisations such as the bmma – have felt empowered to interpret religious teachings on their own terms, consulting the qur’an themselves and refusing to accept the jurisdiction of cle- rical figures. in this sense, the debate over personal law reform is one manifestation of the wider democratisation of knowledge across the islamic world, as debate on critical issues of islamic law and conduct is opened up to a marketplace of intellectual, political and professional stakeholders (e.g. kramer and schmidtke ). the most significant factor, though, is the wider growth of women’s rights activism in india. national, cross-community women’s movements have grown hugely in recent years, spurred by social and generational change, the prolific use of social media. these have combined in the last few years with the effects of the #metoo movement and the so-called ‘fourth wave’ of global femin- ism, together with the huge public outcries about rape and violence against women from to . muslim women’s movements represent just one distinct trajectory within this recent upsurge of national women’s activism. a new generation of muslim women’s organisation such as the bmma are marked by a highly educated and articulate leadership, well-organised grassroots branches, and strong strategic knowledge of india’s legal structures and mechanisms for defending rights (vatuk ; kirmani , ; schneider ; tschalaer ). they have displayed a will- ingness to propose radical new solutions to muslim women’s problems. as well as this enhanced influence, a second reason that muslim women’s groups have looked afresh to codifying personal laws is the sense that existing legal and political strategies for handling muslim affairs have done little to improve the predicament of the community generally, or its women especially. consultations like the government’s sachar committee report confirmed that govern- ment measures had not succeeded in facilitating the community’s socio-economic development and integration, with the effects of marginalisation impacting upon women in particular as the ‘torch- bearers of community identity’ (sachar committee , – ). this has prompted muslim women’s groups to think beyond earlier strategies and push for alternative solutions. the codification of laws is just one bold measure among several which embodies a new determination by these groups, and their willingness to break boundaries. another factor that has opened up the debate on personal law reform is the changing political and legal climate in india. the election of successive bjp governments in and have forestalled a more muscular tone of political debate on the issue, and created greater legislative will to intervene in muslim personal laws than had existed under previous administrations (khan ; agnes ; punwani ). moreover, the huge public debate about muslim divorce laws prompted by the shayara bano court case and the parliamentary bills that followed has forestalled a newly receptive environment for the bmma’s codification campaign. however, the contemporary climate of political debate has simultaneously created problems for the bmma. many activists and community leaders have interpreted the government’s recent enthu- siasm to legislate on personal laws as illustrative of a wider agenda of eroding minority rights, and have expressed apprehension about the mwprma’s criminalisation of an exclusively muslim practice. the bmma, therefore, has been placed in a delicate position, simultaneously supporting the govern- ment’s legislation against talaq-i-bid`ah as a necessary measure for protecting women, while refrain- ing from implying any sympathy for the wider agenda of the government. nevertheless, while the bmma has been criticised for being overly supportive of the government’s bill, the organisation’s demand for the codification of a distinct set of muslim personal laws is fundamentally different from the bjp’s long-standing political commitment to a ucc for all citizens. in this sense, notwith- standing a momentary convergence of interest between the bmma and the government on the single question of triple-talaq, the bmma’s call for the codification of a separate code of muslim family laws ultimately represents a very different vision for how personal laws should be handled. the organisation upholds the existence of distinct bodies of minority personal laws as a constitutional necessity, while simultaneously transforming the contents of these laws themselves. contemporary south asia conclusions: prospects for a muslim family law act this paper has argued that the bmma’s draft text for the codification of an islamic family law in india marks a major shift in the strategies employed by some muslim women’s activists in india. drawing upon high levels of intellectual confidence, media exposure and grassroots support, the bmma has been more forthright than some earlier muslim women’s organisations in its willingness to formulate its own body of shari’ah stipulations, creatively rethinking muslim personal laws in ways that combine constitutional and islamic, national and transnational mechanisms for promoting women’s rights. indeed, while the draft act incorporates some women’s rights-oriented legal provisions from other muslim majority countries, the freedom that the bmma has enjoyed in compiling this document has allowed it to create a ‘code’ of islamic family law that is far less patriarchal, both in its tone and possible impacts, than the personal status codes in place in many muslim-majority nations. as a far more explicitly equalising code than its counterparts in the contem- porary muslim world, it takes its place in the global islamic feminist movement to reformulate islamic family laws. what are the prospects, then, for the codification of muslim family laws in india, as desired by groups like the bmma? while, as noted above, lawmakers and legal practitioners in india have become increasingly adept at protecting muslim women’s legal rights in the absence of such a code, several recent developments mark a shift towards partial codification of muslim personal laws. this is not just on account of the increasing willingness of the legislature to intervene in per- sonal laws, as discussed above, but a tangible shift in approach within the judiciary. certainly, the supreme court’s instruction to parliament in to legislate on talaq-i-bid`ah divorce marked a rec- ognition that muslim personal laws should not be placed above the constitution, and should be subject to amendment where they are discriminatory. nevertheless, significantly, and in contrast to its approach in – , the supreme court judges did not in their judgement call for a move to a uniform civil code. instead, they seemed to uphold the recognition of the distinct per- sonal laws of religious minorities as a constitutional necessity. similar support for piecemeal codification of personal laws can be detected in the advice given by the law commission of india, the government body charged with steering legal reform. following a request for the body to initiate a consultation regarding the implementation of a ucc, its report of august declared that a ucc was ‘neither necessary nor desirable’ (law commission , ). instead, it supported the principle of codifying particular personal laws, as a means of producing legal consistency ‘within communities’ rather than between them. for muslim personal laws, for instance, it suggested abolishing talaq-i-bid`ah and polygamy; fixing the age of marriage at ; making adultery a ground for a wife to seek divorce; allowing a divorced wife to make a claim on marital property; and confirming the right of muslims to child adoption. it also insinuated that codifying different bodies of religious personal laws could bring hindu, muslim and other laws to ‘arrive at certain universal prin- ciples that prioritise equity’ (law commission , ). it thus appears that india’s judicial elites are turning towards selective personal law codification as a preferable approach to a ucc on the one hand and the non-statutory, case-led adjudication of personal laws on the other. however, the barriers to the codification of muslim family laws are ultimately political. personal laws have become so deeply enmeshed with questions of minority rights over many generations that any suggestion of legislative involvement has become politically difficult and potentially provo- cative. a lack of political consensus means that any wholesale overhaul of muslim personal laws along the lines proposed by the bmma’s family law act remains a distant prospect. however, the draft has been more successful at prompting discussion and building community awareness, in turn changing the dynamics of public and political debate on the issue. indeed, in the aftermath of the talaq-i-bid`ah judgement, the bmma has invigorated its campaign for full codification while also seeking further incremental reforms to personal laws, such as bans on polygamy and nikah-i-halalah. to do this, it is emulating its earlier strategy, planning to file relevant pils (public interest litigation) to the supreme court and linking them to particular court cases. j. jones if the bmma is to build the necessary public support for its campaign for codification, however, it is essential that the organisation succeeds in presenting the campaign as expressive of a general demand within the community, rather than as the agenda of lawmakers hostile to minority rights. a sense remains that any push for codification generated from outside of the community itself is likely to lead to a climate of suspicion. memory remains fresh of the shah bano debacle in the s, when liberal and women’s voices within the community supporting the legislative reform of personal laws were silenced following the communalisation of the debate (hasan ; vatuk ). since the publication of its draft and its survey of women’s opinion the following year (bmma a), the bmma has largely succeeded in presenting muslim family law codification as an aspiration pursued from within the community, by muslim women themselves. in , the press frequent remarked that the most striking feature of the public debates about talaq-i-bid`ah, especially when compared retrospectively to the events of – , was the visible and vocal role of muslim women’s groups in pushing for legislative change, and the wide support that they eli- cited from the muslim public. as zoya hasan ( ) claimed at the time, ‘the new development in the past decade is the emergence of muslim women’s activism … non-party, autonomous women’s groups … have taken the lead and carried the momentum for change on their shoulders.’ whether the bmma’s early success in controlling the narrative can withstand the often acrimonious debate over personal laws in contemporary india, however, remains to be seen. notes . rather than being a typical women’s rights ngo, the bmma self-characterises as a ‘movement’ that operates via a range of autonomous state- and local-level women’s groups, although it also has up to , directly enrolled members. for further background on the bmma, chiefly in its formative years, see kirmani , ; vatuk , – ; tschalaer , esp. – ; zaman . . for background on talaq-i-bid`ah in india and beyond, see ahmad ; ahmad ; khurshid . . shayara bano vs union of india, no. / . . these include the four hindu code bills of – ; the indian christian marriage act ( ) and indian divorce act ( ) and the parsi marriage and divorce act ( ). . including the muslim women (protection of rights on divorce) act (mwprda) of , which deals exclusively with post-divorce maintenance. . this interview has been quoted on multiple occasions by the celebrated supreme court justice arif mohammad khan. e.g. the economic times (mumbai), october ; hindustan times (delhi), august . . in this landmark court case, the supreme court had upheld a divorced muslim woman’s entitlement to claim post- divorce maintenance from her husband in perpetuity (as under civil laws), rather than for the three-month `iddat period stipulated in muslim personal law. . as illustrated by the following cases: danial latifi vs union of india ( ), which extended a woman’s entitlement to post-divorce maintenance from her ex-husband beyond the three-month period required by muslim personal law; shamim ara vs state of up ( ) which invalidated talaq-i-bid`ah; and shabnam hashmi vs union of india ( ), which confirmed that civil laws on child adoption would prevail over muslim personal laws. . e.g. see the interview with agnes in india today (online edition) february , https://www.indiatoday.in/ magazine/the-big-story/story/ -triple-talaq-flavia-agnes-womens-rights-activist-interview- - - - [last accessed / / ]. . existing laws invoked in the text include the saa, the dmma, the child marriage restraint act ( ), the special marriage act ( ), the mwprda, the protection of women from domestic violence act ( ), and juvenile justice act (bmma ). . this refers to the practice by which, for a divorced couple to re-marry, the woman must contract and consummate an intermediate marriage with another husband, which must then be terminated. see stowasser and haddad . . for instance, this may be a paltry sum like the ‘pious’ figure of rupees, or a ‘traditional’ sum fixed by ancestors and never updated. . these might include clauses demanding the husband’s fair treatment of his spouse; prohibiting other actions from the husband such as unilateral divorce, polygamous marriage or the withholding of mehr; or delegating to the wife the ability to issue divorce proceedings against her husband (talaq-i-tafwiz) in certain conditions. . before independence, nikah-namah certificates were often not even completed, with nikahs merely being wit- nessed in person. even today, the written contracts are often not completedwith much seriousness. copies contemporary south asia https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/ -triple-talaq-flavia-agnes-womens-rights-activist-interview- - - - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/ -triple-talaq-flavia-agnes-womens-rights-activist-interview- - - - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/ -triple-talaq-flavia-agnes-womens-rights-activist-interview- - - - may be only provided to the husband’s family, or only kept by the officiating imam, or neither. sometimes, major details are not recorded; sometimes, provisions that might protect women are scribbled out. in any case, women are often not provided with a copy. . this instruction echoes recent islamic feminist efforts to reformulate the qur’anic legal concepts of male guar- dianship (wilayah) and husbandly ownership (qiwamah) of women away from a sense of dominance or charge, and towards one of mutual spousal responsibility and contributions to the partnership (mir-hosseini, al-sharmani, and rumminger ). this argument is propounded by musawah and other global islamic feminist movements. . for general introductions to islamic feminism, see badran ; aslan, hermansen, and medeni ; mir-hosseini et al. . . one even describes the edited volume men in charge? (mir-hosseini, al-sharmani, and rumminger ), which reevaluates wilayah and qiwamah (see above, note ), as the bmma’s ‘bible’. . for instance, as noted above, the act still affirms the distinctions between talaq and khula` (male- and female- initiated divorce), but respectively restricts talaq and widens khula` in ways that move men’s and women’s rights to divorce closer together. . in its verdict, the supreme court had argued that muslims, ‘instead of wasting their energies … to secure an ‘immunity’ for their traditional personal law from the state’s legislative jurisdiction … will do well to begin explor- ing … how true islamic laws … can enrich the common civil code of india’. mohammad ahmed khan vs shah bano begum ( ). . the judgements of the supreme court noted that personal laws were ‘a constitutional necessity’ and enjoyed ‘constitutional protection’. shayara bano vs union of india, nos. , , . . this interpretation was also common to much newspaper coverage, e.g. hindustan times, august ; the indian express, august . disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. funding this work was supported by arts and humanities research council [grant number ah/n / ]. notes on contributor justin jones is associate professor in the study of religion in the faculty of theology and religion, university of oxford, and is a specialist in islam in modern south asia. he has published extensively on shi’i islam in south asia, and on the social histories of south asian muslim cities. he has current research interests in the adjudication of islamic family laws in south asia, and muslim women’s rights. references abbasi, zubair. . “islamic law and social change: an insight into the making of anglo-muhammadan law.” journal of islamic studies ( ): – . agnes, flavia. . “the politics behind criminalising triple talaq.” economic and political weekly ( ). ahmad, nehaluddin. . “a critical appraisal of ‘triple divorce’ in islamic law.” international journal of law, policy and the family ( ): – . ahmad, aijaz. . triple talaq. delhi: k.k. publications. aslan, ednan, marcia hermansen, and elif medeni, eds. . muslima theoloogy; the voices of muslim women theologians. frankfurt: peter lang. badran, margot. . feminism in islam: secular and religious convergences. oxford: oneworld. bmma (bharatiya muslim mahila andolan). . the muslim family law act, first amendment ( . . ), https:// bmmaindia.com/ / / /the-muslim-family-act- st-amendment-prepared-by-bharatiya-muslim-mahila-andolan/. bmma (bharatiya muslim mahila andolan). a. seeking justice within family: a national study on muslim women’s views on reforms in muslim personal law. belgaum: omega publications. bmma (bharatiya muslim mahila andolan). b. “letter to pm demanding codification of muslim family law.” https:// bmmaindia.com/ / / /letter-to-pm-demanding-codification-of-muslim-family-law/. bmma (bharatiya muslim mahila andolan). . muslim family law, : draft for the bill. belgaum: omega publications. j. jones https://bmmaindia.com/ / / /the-muslim-family-act- st-amendment-prepared-by-bharatiya-muslim-mahila-andolan/ https://bmmaindia.com/ / / /the-muslim-family-act- st-amendment-prepared-by-bharatiya-muslim-mahila-andolan/ https://bmmaindia.com/ / / /letter-to-pm-demanding-codification-of-muslim-family-law/ https://bmmaindia.com/ / / /letter-to-pm-demanding-codification-of-muslim-family-law/ el-alami, dawoud sudqi. . the marriage contract in islamic law: the shari’ah and personal status laws of egypt and morocco. london: graham trotman. elliott, katja zvan. . “reforming the moroccan personal status code: a revolution for whom?” mediterranean studies ( ): – . elliott, katja zvan. . modernizing patriarchy: the politics of women’s rights in morocco. austin: university of texas. fyzee, asaf ali asghar. 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( ). postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? sarah banet-weiser, rosalind gill and catherine rottenberg in conversation. feminist theory, doi: . / this is the accepted version of the paper. this version of the publication may differ from the final published version. permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/ . / copyright and reuse: city research online aims to make research outputs of city, university of london available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. urls from city research online may be freely distributed and linked to. city research online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk city research online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? sarah banet-weiser, rosalind gill and catherine rottenberg in conversation sarah banet-weiser [london school of economics, uk] rosalind gill [city, uk] catherine rottenberg [university of nottingham, uk] as feminist media studies and cultural studies scholars, we have been preoccupied for many years with the various ways in which feminist concepts, expressions, practices, and sensibilities - and backlashes against them - have circulated and manifested in popular and media culture. rosalind gill has written extensively about postfeminism; catherine rottenberg has coined the term neoliberal feminism; and sarah banet-weiser has just finished a book on popular feminism. in our theorisations, we have benefited greatly both from reading each other’s work and from intellectual conversations with other feminist scholars and have found that there are productive and compelling differences among and between our approaches as well as deep similarities. we decided to have a conversation about our varied approaches, as both a feminist project in itself and a way to push our thinking about contemporary gender politics further. this conversation has yielded, among other things, a better understanding of the ways in which theories about gender speak to each other, borrow from each other, and can contribute to a collaborative mode of thinking about contemporary feminism. in our conversations it became clear that there are central themes that thread through all of our perspectives, and thus we use this space to think through these themes. our first theme is positionings. in this section, we discuss how each of us approaches contemporary manifestations of feminism through slightly different optics. ros, for example, theorises postfeminism as a kind of sensibility, the way in which postfeminism is not only created, expressed and circulated, but also received and reproduced. catherine focuses on a key analytic within neoliberalism, namely, neoliberalism’s entanglement with feminism, which emphasises professional and economic success but not at the expense of family. sarah argues that the postfeminist sensibility that ros theorises has authorised a popularity of feminism, one that is tied to media visibility, circulation, and affective embrace. our second theme is media and capitalism. here, we think through the fact that post, neoliberal, and popular feminism all depend on and validate media platforms and organisations as well neoliberal capitalism. these iterations of contemporary feminism do not critique or challenge the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism (or the media platforms that are co-constituitive with capitalism), but rather contribute to its normalisation and conceit of inevitability. finally, our third theme attempts to push back at this kind of normalisation in terms of alternatives/ambivalences. despite the fact that all of us have written critically about contemporary feminisms, our critique also represents our investment in alternatives that might challenge current feminist iterations. in this section, we discuss the ambivalences we feel are potentially generative in post, neoliberal and popular feminisms, and think through what might be effective counter-productions within them. we thus offer some ruminations about how these ambivalences might be mobilized to effect a renewed vision of economic, racial and gender justice. positionings rosalind gill: the term postfeminism came to prominence in the s in the english-speaking world as a way of making sense of paradoxes and contradictions in the representation of women. in the media culture of the time, celebrations of 'girl power' and female success sat alongside the intense hostile scrutiny of women in the public eye; pronouncements about gender equality were juxtaposed with the growing misogyny of 'lad culture'; and assertions about the redundancy of feminism were paired with an intensified interest in sexual difference, and with the repeated assertion that any remaining inequalities were not the result of sexism but of natural differences and/or as women’s own choices. the apparent certainty of earlier periods had fragmented, giving way to a moment in which there seemed to be no singular template of normative femininity, and a strong sense of female autonomy, agency and choice pervaded media discourses. everywhere feminism seemed – in angela mcrobbie’s ( ) famous formulation – to be ‘taken into account’ yet ‘repudiated’. the term ‘postfeminist’ – or sometimes post-feminist (with a much- contested hyphen) – developed as a way of speaking to the distinctiveness of circulating discourses and representations, and became a key part of the feminist lexicon. against this context, i coined the notion of a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ to intervene in debates in three key ways. first, the notion of sensibility was designed to respond to the vastly different ways in which the term postfeminism was being used. as i argued (gill, ), some people used the term to signal a temporal or historical shift – a time after second-wave feminism; others used it to delimit a new kind of feminism – sometimes a feminism influenced by post- structuralist or post-colonial thinking, or, alternatively, something akin to a new (third) ‘wave’ of feminism; while others still used the term to refer solely to a backlash against feminism. none of these was entirely convincing to me or only seemed to speak to part of the picture, and, what’s more, the terms often seemed to be used interchangeably with people slipping between different meanings. the notion of sensibility was developed firstly, then, to contribute to conceptual clarity about the term. secondly, the idea of sensibility was designed to emphasise that ‘postfeminism’ should be considered as a critical object – not, as was sometimes the case, taken to be an analytical perspective. that is, i sought to highlight that i am a feminist analyst of postfeminist culture, and not a postfeminist analyst or theorist. this foregrounded the idea of a critical approach to postfeminism – a sensibility that i argued had as much to do with neoliberalism as with feminism. thirdly, the notion of a sensibility was designed to be used empirically as a way of analysing popular culture. it called attention to postfeminism as a circulating set of ideas, images, and meanings. alternative formulations might have dubbed it an ‘ideology’ or a ‘discourse’ or even a ‘regime’, but the term ‘sensibility’ seemed more open, and also called attention to features that are sometimes explored through notions of affect, public mood, atmosphere or ‘structure of feeling’ (williams, ), and that might be missed with an approach that centred only language. in my original work discussing postfeminism in media culture i considered several repetitive features of the sensibility, including the emphasis upon choice and autonomy, the focus on women’s bodies as their source of value, and the centrality of ideas of ‘makeover’, including the requirement to ‘upgrade’ one’s psychic life to be positive, confident and glowing. since that initial formulation over ten years ago i’ve been thinking a lot more about the notion and developing it in several key ways, often in collaboration with students, friends and colleagues. there’s also been an extraordinary uptake of the term more generally, and i feel that my work is very much part of an ongoing and collective conversation – including with you both. one of the most important sets of debates is about postfeminism’s relationship to race, class, sexuality, disability and age. of course much critical work on postfeminism has always attempted to think intersectionally. key writers on postfeminism such as angela mcrobbie, diane negra and yvonne tasker have all been attentive to difference, in particular writing critically about race and class, with some arguing that the female subject centred by postfeminism is ‘white and middle class by default’ (tasker and negra, : ). in my own earlier work in elements i reflected upon the need to think about postfeminism as ‘racialized and heterosexualized’ (gill, ), later arguing for the need to think sexism with racism, ageism, classism, homophobia, (dis)ablism and also to think transnationally (imre et al, ). as i noted, ‘it is not simply a matter of integrating sexism with other axes of power and difference, but also facing up to the complex dynamics and complicities in play in the current moment.’ (gill, : ). so i don’t think it’s a matter that earlier work ignored differences other than gender, but more that recent interrogations have pushed beyond the terms of inclusion versus exclusion. jess butler’s ( ) paper ‘for white women only?’ was germinal in this, as was simidele dosekun’s ( ) questioning of the assumption that postfeminism was a distinctively western sensibility. more recently i’ve been working with roisin ryan-flood (flood and gill, ) on whether or not the subject interpellated by postfeminist discourse can be ‘presumed heterosexual’ – building on important work by kate mcnicholas smith (mcnicholas smith and tyler, ) and hannah mccann ( ) – and with ngaire donaghue on thinking about age and generation. overall, what all this work seems to be highlighting is the spreading out of postfeminism – the diffusion of its address across different groups and contexts; its attempts to speak to women of different ages, classes, sexual orientations, and so on. the other strand of development has been an increasing focus on the psychic and affective life of postfeminism, which i have been developing with christina scharff, shani orgad and akane kanai. in different ways all of us have been trying to grasp the way in which the sensibility operates on emotions, feelings and subjectivity. christina and i have worked – in homage to judith butler – on the ‘psychic life’ of neoliberalism (scharff, ) and posfeminism (gill, ). shani and i are looking at how there is a turn to the qualities and dispositions – e.g. confidence, resilence, positive mental attitude – needed to survive and thrive in the current moment (gill and orgad, ; ; ). and with akane i have been developing the idea of postfeminist or neoliberal ‘feeling rules’ – building out of akane’s reading (kanai, a; b) of arlie hochschild’s ( ) work. taken together, this work is increasingly interested in what we see as a psychological turn in neoliberalism and postfeminism (gill and kanai, a; b). this perhaps resonates especially strongly for me because of my background in psychology and sociology, and my interest in the psychosocial. catherine rottenberg: my work has been profoundly influenced by ros’s articulation of postfeminism as a critical object. it was precisely against the background of ros’s and angela mcrobbie’s conceptualisation of postfeminism that i developed the notion of neoliberal feminism. i would like to say a few words about the genesis of my project in order to underscore the particular problematic that i was trying to understand and theorise. the project began when i was on sabbatical in the us in - – precisely the year that anne-marie slaughter’s ‘why women still can’t have it all’ was published in the atlantic. that piece created a real stir, generating heated debate, and catapulted slaughter, who was a former princeton dean and advisor to hillary clinton when she was secretary of state, into the national spotlight. slaughter’s article went on to become the most widely read essay in the history of the atlantic. this was also the year in which the coo of facebook sheryl sandberg’s feminist manifesto lean in was published and instantly became a new york times bestseller. all of a sudden, or so it seemed, powerful and high-profile women were publicly identifying as feminist, something that we hadn’t seen in the past. so i began to read these two manifestos very carefully. i am trained as a literary critic, so for me reading slaughter and later sandberg was an exercise in textual analysis. i was struck by a number of rhetorical aspects – but perhaps most of all by all the circulation of a new feminist vocabulary, where happiness, balance, and ‘lean in’ were replacing key terms traditionally inseperable from public feminist discussions and debates, namely, autonomy, rights, liberation, and social justice. i became preoccupied with questions like: given that postfeminist sensibility was doing such a good job in disavowing or repudiating the need for feminism, how might we explain the resuscitation of this eviscerated feminist discourse on the cultural landscape? in other words, what kind of cultural work was this perplexing variant of feminism carrying out? i began to call this form of feminism neoliberal feminism, since, while is very clearly avows gender inequality – thus, i believe, differentiating it from a postfeminist sensibility – it simultaneously disavows the socio-economic and cultural structures shaping our lives. this feminism also helps to spawn a new feminist subject, one who accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care. in the us, this new feminist’s well-being and self-care seemed to be predicated on crafting a felicitous work-family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. the notion of a happy work- family balance is central to this discourse, and i began to notice that ‘balance’ was being bandied about all over the mainstream and popular press as a feminist ideal. i tried to give an account for why we might be witnessing the rise of a new variant of feminism. i suggested that neoliberalism may actually ‘need’ feminism to resolve – at least temporarily – one of its internal tensions in relation to gender (rottenberg, a; b; ; ). following wendy brown ( ; ), i understand neoliberalism not just as a set of economic policies but as a dominant political rationality that moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, recasting individuals as human capital and thus capital enhancing agents. thus, as an economic order, neoliberalism relies on reproduction and care work in order to reproduce and maintain so-called human capital. however, as a political rationality – and in contrast to liberalism – neoliberalism has no lexicon that can recognise let alone value reproduction and care work. everything is reduced to a market metrics, even our political imagination. the disappearance of a political lexicon is not only due to human subjects being increasingly converted into generic human capital, where gender is disavowed, but also because the division of the public-private spheres – informing liberal thought and traditional notions of the sexual division of labor – is being eroded through the conversion of everything into capital and the infiltration of a market rationality into all spheres of life, including the most private ones. as i argue in the rise of neoliberal feminism, what this means is that different registers – political, economic, social, and affective – collapse under the hegemony of neoliberalism, and all forms of valuation transpire through a market metrics. neoliberal feminism thus operates as a kind of pushback to the total conversion of educated and upwardly mobile women into generic human capital. by maintaining reproduction as part of middle-class or so-called aspirational women’s normative trajectory and positing balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal, neoliberal feminism helps to both maintain a discourse of reproduction and care-work while ensuring that all responsibility for these forms of labor – but not necessarily all of the labor itself – falls squarely on the shoulder of so-called aspirational women. in this way it solves its own constitutive tension – the quandary of reproduction and care-work – at least temporarily. indeed, neoliberal feminism produces and maintains a distinctive and affective lexiconic register of reproductive and care-work within neoliberalism, even as neoliberal rationality collapses the boundaries and divides constitutive of liberal thought, such as the private-public divide. this kind of hyper-individualising neoliberal feminism, which construes women not only as entrepreneurial subjects but also as individual enterprises, is clearly more easily mainstreamed and popularised since it has been defanged of most if not all of its oppositional force. and while it might acknowledge that the gendered wage gap and sexual harassment are signs of continued gender inequality, the solutions it posits elide the structural or economic undergirding of these phenomena. this is where i believe my work and sarah’s work really complement one another. and where postfeminism absolutely still resonates but with a difference. sarah’s work on popular feminism has compelled me to think about the relationship between neoliberal feminismand the rise of popular feminism. i would tentatively argue that neoliberal feminism, with its constitutive notion of a happy work-family balance, has helped to render feminism palatable and legitimate, which has, in turn, facilitated feminism’s widespread diffusion, embrace and circulation within the anglo-american mainstream cultural landscape. and in many crucial ways it was the postfeminist sensibility that ros formulates that helped created the conditions for the rise of neoliberal feminism. sarah banet-weiser: like ros and catherine, i have been thinking a lot about the ways in which a postfeminist sensibility has been both validated and challenged in the past years. when i wrote about postfeminism and girl culture a decade ago, i, like ros, was struck by the contradictions within and between a growing market for girls that centred ‘girl power’ as its key selling point and a cultural, social and economic context that clearly saw the ‘power’ in girl power as almost exclusively about consumer power – not a challenge of gendered power relations and rationalities. i was also struck by the normative repudiation of feminism and feminist politics and values in everyday life. year after year, i would teach undergraduates who insisted – vehemently – that they were not feminists – and nor did they need to be, as political and economic obstacles to gender equality had apparently been overcome. the stark contradictions between this feeling of gender equality and the reality seemed easily explained away – through individual desires and aspirations rather than concrete and material contexts. but at around the same time that catherine was thinking through the visibility of slaughter’s ‘why women still can’t have it all’, i was also noticing a shift in visibility of more overt feminist statements – that announced themselves as feminist – in popular culture. because my work often focuses on material conditions and markets, i began to attend to the ways these popular feminist statements connected to an increasingly visible market and economy. so, when i write about popular feminism, i am, in part, defining and describing a set of social conditions that i am calling popular feminism; for me, these conditions form the logic of a popular feminist sensibility. some of my guiding questions in thinking about popular feminism involve those who have shifted from the earlier rejection of feminism as part of their identities: who can we think of as a popular feminist? what are the goals of popular feminism? in the contemporary moment, i see popular feminism as existing along a continuum, where spectacular, media-friendly expressions such as celebrity feminism and corporate feminism achieve more visibility, and expressions that critique patriarchal structure and systems of racism and violence are obscured (see gill, ; ; rottenberg, b; mcrobbie, ). in general, for me popular feminism refers to practices and conditions that are accessible to a broad public, from organising marches to hashtag activism to commodities. popular feminism is also, like both ros and catherine point out, a ‘happy’ feminism, one that is about uplift, that is decidedly not what sara ahmed ( ) has called a ‘feminist killjoy’. as i argue in my book, seeing and hearing a safely affirmative feminism in spectacularly visible ways often eclipses a feminist critique of structure as well as obscures the labor involved in producing oneself according to the parameters of popular feminism; ‘the visibility of popular feminism, where examples appear on television, in film, on social media, and on bodies, is important but it often stops there, as if seeing or purchasing feminism is the same thing as changing patriarchal structures’ (banet-weiser, : ). while postfeminism, neoliberal feminism and popular feminism are all sensibilities that exist simultaneously, they are also engaged in a cultural conversation with each other that builds and expands; a central tenet of postfeminist sensibility, as ros has discussed, is a focus on personal (and consumer/economic) choice. personal choice is, of course, a key logic of neoliberalism; as catherine points out, neoliberal feminism depends not only on gendered entrepreneurialism but also individual enterprise. popular feminism clearly connects to these neoliberal principles of individualism and entrepreneurialism, and in this sense neoliberal feminism helped construct the context for popular feminism to flourish in popular culture and media. i also contend though, that popular feminism does, in fact, owe a debt to liberal feminism’s critique of gendered exclusions in the public and corporate spheres. as i argue in my book, this corporate-friendly popular feminism emanates from an increasing visibility of a gendered disparity in dominant economic spheres – a lack of female ceos and film directors, a lack of women in technology and media fields, an increased awareness of sexual harassment within corporate industries such as media and technology. the popular feminisms i analyse are, like liberal feminism, in many ways a call to bring more women to the table, simply because they are women. popular feminism, that is, has a history in what joan scott has called an ‘add women and stir’ kind of liberal feminism, where the presence of women is sufficient enough to call feminism into being (scott, ). the inclusion of women becomes the solution for all gender problems, not just those of exclusion or absence. it is, of course, important to have bodies at the table, but their mere presence doesn’t necessarily challenge the structure that supports, and builds, the table in the first place; as scott points out, merely including women does not address ‘the framework of (historically contingent) dominant patterns of sexuality and the ideology that supports them’ (scott, : ). in this way, i think that popular feminism and its exhortations to simply have more women in various cultural, political and economic realms can be read as similar to continuing liberal efforts to include people of color within a widened field of whiteness, one that continues to shape representation, work, and politics. this inclusion often comes without interrogating the racism that forms the boundaries and structures of whiteness from the ground up (banet-weiser, ). the focus on inclusion by popular and neoliberal feminism is authorised by a specific political economic context. the market in feminism is not simply about commodification of slogans, political messages, and feminist products; it is also about validating an economic subject and an economic context, one in which the inclusion of women signals feminism – though this inclusion, this version of feminism, isn’t necessarily committed to interrogating sexist and racist structural ground. in other words, as catherine argues in her book, popular feminism rarely critiques neoliberalism and its values; on the contrary, these values – economic success, new market growth, self-entrepreneurship – are all part and parcel of popular feminism. thus, we can’t analyse popular feminism in isolation; rather, we need to understand it as co-constituitive of capitalist practices, values, and divisions of labor. and this leads us to our second theme that connects post, neoliberal, and popular feminism: neoliberal capitalism. media/capitalism sarah: i would say that the focus on inclusion by popular feminism makes it specifically corporate friendly; it has benefited from decades of neoliberal commodity activism, where companies have taken up women’s issues, especially those that have to do with individual consumption habits, as a key selling point for products (mukherjee and banet-weiser, ). and, as we know, the architecture of many of these popular media platforms is capitalist and corporate. as we have seen historically, specific messages of feminism are often incorporated into advertising and marketing, and contemporary popular feminism is no different. as both ros and catherine have pointed out, the contemporary landscape offers us constant emotional advertising campaigns, where major global companies (verizon, covergirl, dove, and so on), urge us to pay closer attention to girls and women and the obstacles they face in the world (and not surprisingly, these companies also imply that overcoming these obstacles depends on individual girls and women’s energies and ambitions, rather than examining the ways capitalism depends on gendered divisions of labor). the new ‘products’ in neoliberal capitalism, as catherine has argued so powerfully, are heralded by successful female entrepreneurs who plead with girls and women to overcome ‘imposter syndrome’ and to ‘lean in’. girl empowerment organisations, both in the us and in global development, insist that focusing on gender equality is ‘smarter economics’, and again, that girls and women need to ‘lean in’ to be economically successful. teaching girls and women to code in computing, as a way to address the marginalisation of women in technology industries, became a hot new industry itself. the brand of feminism has been stamped on clothing, jewelry, and other personal accutrements. etsy and others offer feminist tank tops, buttons, and entire wardrobes. we can buy ‘empowered’ crop tops at h&m, or for those feminists who have financial means, we can wear the $ . t-shirt designed by christian dior that proclaims ‘we should all be feminists’. we can drink our coffee out of mugs that say ‘smash the patriarchy’ or ‘women power’ (and indeed i do drink my coffee out of these mugs!). pop-up shops in new york, los angeles, and london have all kinds of feminist merchandise for us to buy and then proudly display our feminism. but perhaps it is social and digital media that has been the most visible platform for popular feminism. as i write about in empowered, we have seen an explosion of feminist hashtag activism, from #bringbackourgirls to #solidarityisforwhitewomen to #yesallwomen, to #notokay, and of course, to #metoo. the blogosphere has become an important site for feminists to express passionate defenses and celebrations of feminism and exhortations toward feminist and anti-racist activism. but in order to emerge so forcefully, popular feminism needs a neoliberal capitalist context, including digital media and its affordances and its expanded markets and circulation capabilities. digital media has afforded spaces and places for popular feminists to create media, voice their opinions, launch a business. so for me, contemporary feminism is popular in part because of the media forms on which it circulates; feminist messages of gender inequality, body-positivity, equal pay for equal work, the normalisation of sexual harassment, self-confidence – these circulate and achieve visibility on multiple media platforms and industries. i want to be clear here; the popular feminism i discuss in my book focuses on media expressions and their circulation – i am not making an argument about the political intentions that energise a variety of feminist practices; it is about how these political intentions are marshalled by institutions and structures, and what they make available and what they foreclose in terms of politics. for me, it is important to analyse the popular in popular feminism to see how it is distinct from other feminist practices and expressions, as well as to understand its connection with contemporary capitalism. what are its boundaries, its borders? is it defined by its politics, its visibility, where it emanates from? the popular feminism i analyse generally materialises as a kind of media that is widely visible and accessible: ‘it appears on broadcast media, in television and advertising. it appears in popular music. in the contemporary context, it appears perhaps most urgently in social media, with digital sites such as instagram, tumblr, facebook, and twitter providing platforms for its circulation’ (banet-weiser, : ). as i argue in empowered, popular feminism circulates in an economy of visibility. yet, visibility is never simple. media scholars, feminists, critical race scholars, lgbtq scholars, and others have worked over many decades in the name of visibility; in a media context in which if you are visible, you matter, visibility matters indeed (e.g., grewal, ; hegde, ; gross, ; gray, ). part of this visibility means being accessible to a large, popular audience. and, this popularity and accessibility are measured in and through its ability to increase that visibility; popular feminism engages in a feedback loop, where it is more popular when it is more visible, which then authorises it to create ever-increasing visibility. visibility is not a static thing, it has to be in a constant state of growth. but, as we also know, in a media context in which most circuits of visibility are driven by profit, competition, and consumers, simply becoming visible does not guarantee that identity categories will somehow be transformed, or will deeply challenge hegemonic power relations. in large part, this is because becoming visible in this digital and ‘datafied’ context is intricately connected to the contemporary political economy and the structural logics of capitalist accumulation. popular feminism thus relies in some ways on ‘platform capitalism’, implying the emptying or flattening out of the content of meaning, emphasizing instead the endless traffic and circulation of this content (hearn, ). media and entertainment platforms are conditioning the content of feminism (among other things), so that business models end up conditioning the types of feminist expressions that we see. the contemporary obsession with metrics, the numbers, likes and followers also frames popular feminism; given the predominance of digital media platforms that are predicated on the accumulation of numbers, where their business depends on these numbers; then to make oneself visible or to express oneself is also dependent on an accumulation of numbers. this feminist economy of visibility also facilitated postfeminism and neoliberal feminism; in the contemporary moment, however, the visibility of popular feminism becomes an end in itself (gray, ). in other words, most popular feminisms are typically those that become visible precisely because they do not challenge deep structures of inequities (banet-weiser, ). ros: i absolutely recognise the ‘neoliberal feminism’ and the ‘popular feminism’ that you both discuss. and it is perhaps not surprising that so many elements of a postfeminist sensibility – the individualism, the entrepreneurial subjectivity, the emphasis on personal transformation – seem to be so present in these newer formulations. after all this is how cultural change happens: there are rarely clear breaks, newer ideas do not necessarily displace older ones, and we have to be prepared to think about continuities as well as changes if we are interested in exploring a particular cultural formation or conjuncture – as stuart hall would have put it. i think all three of us are interested in the way in which contemporary visibilities of feminism are shaped both by a capitalist and neoliberal context. for me it is the contemporary embrace of a feminist identity by so many that primarily marks out a difference from the postfeminist sensibility. while postfeminism was marked by warm enthusiasm about equality, ‘girl power’ and female success, it was often – as christina scharff ( ) demonstrated so compellingly – associated with a repudiation of feminism. indeed it was precisely that double move that intrigued angela mcrobbie ( ). what is different now is that far from repudiating feminism, it appears that many people from celebrities to politicians to business leaders are lining up to embrace a feminist identity. feminism, in jessica valenti’s ( ) phrase is ‘having a moment’. yet when we look at the substance or content of the forms of feminism that have greatest visibility in mainstream media this often seems very influenced by individualism, postfeminism and neoliberal corporate culture, as you have argued sarah. take women’s magazines for example. laura favaro and i (favaro and gill, ) have analysed interviews with young women who work in and put together women’s magazines – purveyors of what we call ‘glossy feminism’, a mainstream, almost ubiquitous version of this popular mediated feminism. in these interviews, we found both a sense of the obviousness of a feminist identification alongside the absence of much sense of what this might mean in terms of a politics. often it was taken to refer to diffuse statements about ‘supporting women’ or it was underpinned by the argument that anything can be feminist as long as it is chosen. in postfeminist style, personal choice becomes mobilised as a guarantor of the ‘feministness’ of anything. in other words – with a few exceptions – this feminism seemed to be very similar to the postfeminist sensibility in the ideological work it was doing, except that it involved a strong – often times even defiant-sounding – championing of feminism as an identity. i am not suggesting it is inauthentic. rather, i am really interested in what this ‘hollow defiance’ does ideologically and performatively. it is something i have also been working on in relation to the new visibility of black, lgbtq, disabled and muslim individuals in commercial mainstream media. there’s a new genre of advertising that jumps off from ‘love your body’ and confidence discourses to offer a dual celebration of ‘diversity’ and ‘breaking the rules’ – recent examples are from h&m, river island and l’oreal’s ‘we’re all worth it’ campaigns. these respond to calls for visibility and inclusion with texts that proclaim their rule breaking and defiance, and that centre stylish, glamorised wheelchair users, women who wear hijab, and trans* people (among others) in outward celebration of a carefully curated diversity. i’m struggling with some of the same questions as you around this, sarah: the visibility is clearly important in itself – and i witnessed the real pleasure among many of my female muslim students at seeing a hijabi in an advert for the first time – yet very often it seems a kind of empty signifier that might even work as a means not to have to look – long and hard – at power relations. it seems like a kind of ‘glossy diversity’ – post-race (mukherjee, ) and post-queer (mcnicholas, smith, and tyler, ) in its sensibility. the one element that doesn’t quite resonate for me in your analysis catherine is about the new prominence accorded to a felicitous work-family balance. i guess my reaction to this is that it feels as if it has been part of the discourse for a longer time – at least in the uk. ideas of work- life balance have a long history, and even the s image of the superwoman seemed very much premised on ‘having it all’. i guess in a london context it also feels discordant – in the context of multiple and diverse family forms (shaped by class and race and religion and generational poverty), as well as a large lgbtq population. whilst questions of reproduction and care are indeed a perennial crisis, it seems to me that questions of sexual violence and harassment, of equal pay, and perhaps most of all the body are at least as visible in contemporary mediated feminisms. catherine: let me just respond to your last comment, ros, since this is a really important point and critique. yes, i totally agree with you that the issues of work-life balance are nothing new, but what i would argue is new, at least in the us, is the positing of a happy work-family balance as feminist ideal and as the signifier for emancipation for ‘progressive womanhood’. when feminists spoke about work-family issues, it was mostly through the lens of the second shift (hochschild, ). in the us in the late s and early s the media was obsessed with the so-called mommy wars, which were about an either/or discourse and not about balance. also, i would say that the superwoman model was precisely about ‘having it all’ and the professional working mother but not a happy balance. the superwoman model is exactly what slaughter argued against in her piece ‘why women still can’t have it all’. in any case, i do think that we all approach the question of feminist discourse in the cultural field from slightly different perspectives. my training is first and foremost as a feminist literary scholar, and i feel most comfortable analysing texts. another set of differences, perhaps related to the first, has to do with the intellectual/academic context in which we work as well as, perhaps, the questions that we find generative and thus preoccupy us. they are surely similar – as we are all concerned with the evisceration of feminism of its emancipatory potential, but the foci and emphases, as ros has pointed out, are different. as i mentioned, my problematic, initially, revolved around the question of how and why the notion of a happy work-family balance was becoming a new ideal of progressive womanhood, which means that even as families have become more diverse, this heteronormative ideal has become even more prominent. i don’t think this is coincidental. but, again, i do agree completely with ros that context matters. living in london now, i am beginning to get a better sense of the different inflections of this resuscitated feminist discourse and the way its articulation differs in different media. although, as it happens, i just read an empirical study by jill armstrong ( ) where she demonstrates the uptake of this balance discourse among younger women. and shani orgad’s ( ; ) work also points to the perhaps belated infiltration of the work-family balance ideal into the uk context, particularly through mediated venues like the good wife. finally, i guess in my project on neoliberal feminism, i am concerned first and foremost with theorising dominance, which means that i look at a range of cultural texts, mainstream as well as more popular, and my focus has been on dominant discourse and the kinds of normative and affective subjects that this discourse helps to produce. as joan scott has recently argued, idealised norms matter not only in ‘the expectations set for individual subjects, but because they set the terms for law, politics and social policy’ (scott, : ). i have been very influenced by michel feher ( ) and wendy brown’s work on how neoliberal rationality creates its own ‘apparatus of subjectification’ where only certain subjects are deemed worthy because capital- enhancing while the rest are rendered disposable. i really do believe that in order to conceptualise and cultivate resistance, we also need to have to understand the operations of power and dominance. ambivalences/alternatives ros: i agree totally that understanding power and dominace is crucial, catherine! i guess i’ll end by just mentioning two things that i feel ambivalent about. one relates to the new mediated visibility of feminism. obviously there is much to celebrate here in terms of feminism now having a public visibility, after being marginalised in media and public discourse for so long, especially in terms of the way that it is facilitating discussion – and even action on topics such as equal pay and sexual harassment. i have been a feminist for more than years and for all of that time there have been vociferous campaigns by generations of women, yet these campaigns rarely garnered sustained attention, or, if they were reported they were a tiny item tucked away on page , or (in a uk context) only discussed in the guardian. it is clear that there’s a real relationship between the media visibility of feminism and feminist energy and activism. but i’m also troubled by which versions of feminism garner visibility – the largely white, heteronormative, corporate and neoliberal-friendly versions. i am not saying there is ‘one true feminism’ – but i am struck again and again with which versions get to be seen and heard, and which remain marginalised. this is something i talked about in my contribution to a special issue on intergenerational feminism in feminist media studies a couple of years ago (gill, ). here class, race, disability, and sexuality seem key – alongside the relationship to capitalism. it seems to me that the more critical, intersectional analyses with which i align myself – that see feminist struggles as necessarily connected to other liberation struggles and to a broader agenda that questions capitalism – are much less likely to be heard. the other thing i’m struggling with is where i stand on the continued use of the term postfeminism. while, as i’ve said, i think in one sense that – even with the new visibility of feminism – a postfeminist sensibility has actually tightened its hold in contemporary culture, has made itself virtually hegemonic, i also recognise that the key difference is in the way that those elements co-exist with a new alacrity (albeit unevenly spread) to identify as feminist. my ambivalence then isn’t about whether postfeminism still exists as a critical object – it does! (just as a postracial sensibility can co-exist with widespread activism by people of colour.) the ambivalence is in using the term – which for new generations (of students) makes little sense. in my media class this last semester i started with five ‘foundational’ sessions for thinking about contemporary media ranging over neoliberalism, thinking intersectionally, lgbtq struggles over visibility, etc – and i placed the lecture on postfeminism before the one on feminism which made every kind of sense to me in thinking about the current moment but was decidedly weird for the students! i know because they told me! there are so many criticisms now of the idea of a postfeminist media culture, especially in our brand culture in which there is a hunger for the new in academia as much as anywhere else. should i abandon the word – if not the attachment to interrogating a sense-making characterised by relentless individualism, that exculpates the institutions of patriarchal capitalism and blames women for their disadvantaged positions, that renders the intense surveillance of women’s bodies normal or even desirable, that calls forth endless work on the self, that centres notions of empowerment and choice whilst enrolling women in ever more intense regimes of ‘the perfect’ (mcrobbie, )? i would understand this now in terms of a gendered neoliberalism. i would love to know your thoughts. catherine: i think that maintaining postfeminism as a critical concept is key and crucial – not just for understanding the past but also for understanding the current permutations of mediated feminist discourse. but, again, i might also argue that the sensibility has undergone some significant transformations, which have facilitated the rise of what i call neoliberal feminism and what sarah calls popular feminism. the very fact that feminism is being avowed in the mainstream and popular cultural landscape seems, to me, to point to some kind of shift that needs to be taken into account. in other words, going back to my earlier question: is the cultural work that the new and very visible feminism doing exactly the same as the cultural work that the postfeminist sensibility was carrying out? i guess that would be my question. my sense is that we are experiencing a care crisis in the anglo-american world, and that this has to do with the way in which neoliberal rationality is colonisng ever more domains of our lives. i do also think neoliberal rationality needs a distinctive discursive register of reproduction and care work, which neoliberal feminism currently provides. so this was one of the ways i tried to account for the resurgence of feminism in the public domain. but the feminist landscape is shifting so quickly these days. perhaps we could say that we are currently witnessing competing sensibilities and discourses that, nevertheless, overlap, draw on yet push back one against the other? or perhaps even as i might argue that neoliberal feminism has been on the ascendant in the us, colonising new spaces, it is clear that there are other rationalities that circulate and challenge, interact, and overlap with it. indeed, even as i was writing my book on neoliberal feminism, making the claim that this variant was becoming dominant in the us mainstream, the feminist landscape kept changing! we have witnessed incredible changes even in the past two years. so if i were to sum up my thoughts about the current feminist landscape and alternatives and ambivalences, i would say that in the uk and the us, we are witnessing of a number of really fascinating trends, some of which are also extremely disturbing. first, as sara farris ( ) has argued, we have witnessed the way in which feminist themes have increasingly converged with neoliberalism in the us as well as been mobilised by far-right nationalist parties in europe. we also, as ros and sarah have also pointed out, have an unprecedented number of neoliberal and conservative women proudly declaring themselves feminists: from sheryl sandberg through theresa may to ivanka trump. second, feminism has become popular in ways that no one would have predicted just a few years ago. as sarah so brilliantly argues in her work, identifying as ‘feminist’ has become an unexpected source of cultural capital. again, i think that these phenomena are intimately related to the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal feminism, since when feminism encourages individual women to focus on themselves and their own aspirations, it can more easily be popularised, circulated, and capitalised in the market place. neoliberal feminism, as ros so rightly points out, is also an unabashedly exclusionary one, encompassing as it does, only so-called aspirational women in its address. it thus reifies white and class privilege and heteronormativity, lending itself to neo-conservative and xenophobic agendas. finally, at the same time that you have an explosion of popular feminism and the convergence of feminism with neoconservative and neoliberal agendas, we have also seen grassroots feminism and large-scale feminist protest reemerge as a potentially potent political force. i am tempted to argue that, on the one hand, the rise of neoliberal feminism has helped to render feminism popular in ways few scholars could have predicted just a few years ago. and, yet, on the other hand, this process of popularisation generates a double edged sword, since as susan buck morse ( ) has convincingly argued, power always produces its own vulnerability. by facilitating feminism’s widespread embrace, neoliberal feminism has also – and paradoxically – helped to pave the way for more militant and mass feminist movements, such as #metoo, the woman’s march and the global women’s strike. clearly, much of the infrastructure for the recent oppositional feminist groundswell was already in place. we know that the ‘me too’ campaign initially emerged over a decade ago as part of a grassroots movement spearheaded by the african american activist tarana burke, and that it comes on the heels of other mobilisations, such as slutwalk. but i would suggest that in addition to trump’s election and the reappearance of a shameless sexism in the public sphere, which has had its own galvanizing effect, #metoo was able to gain such widespread traction at this particular moment in history, at least in part, because feminism had already been embraced and rendered desirable by high-power corporate women like sheryl sandberg, hollywood stars like emma watson as well as music celebrities like beyoncé – to name just a few. taken all together, these various feminist manifestations certainly all suggest that we are experiencing a feminist renaissance of sorts. the question then becomes how we can sustain and broaden this feminist renaissance as resistance, while rejecting the logic of neoliberal feminism? i would also say that there are movements creating hope. the feminist group that helped organise the global women’s strike, such as feminism for the % is just one example. these feminist movements are qualitatively different from their mainstream and popular counterparts since they challenge and even threaten neoliberalism by demanding dramatic economic, social, and cultural transformation. what is also striking about these movements, the recent wave of mass demonstrations as well as the grassroots activists who helped organise them, is that they very consciously attempt to include and address inequalities that expand, in significant ways, the single analytic frame of gender. these are not one-issue or narrowly defined protests but rather an expression of mass discontent regarding a dizzying array of inequalities facing women, minorities, and precarious populations. my sense is that given just how bleak the future currently looks for an ever-increasing number of people across the globe, this is exactly the kind of threatening feminism that we need. sarah: like catherine and ros just pointed out, i think it is important – indeed, a source of hope – to theorise the popular of popular feminism as a terrain of struggle over meaning, and it is here where i see the most potential for a productive ambivalence. like ros, i am, and have been throughout my career, influenced by stuart hall and his theorising about the terrain of the popular as one that is uneven in its dynamics between consent and resistance. much of highly visible popular feminism, as catherine just pointed out, is firmly within what hall would call the ‘culture of the powerful’. this is a culture of racial and economic privilege, of a kind of consent: it consents to heteronormativity, to the universality of whiteness, to dominant economic formations, to a trajectory of capitalist ‘success’. when this kind of feminism, one that consents, becomes visible in a new way, it is important because we can at least hear the messages feminism has been trying to impart for so long. i know that i have felt deep joy at hearing and seeing feminism embraced by a wide swath of people— not just my friends and colleagues! yet this pleasure at seeing and hearing feminism in spectacular ways eclipses a feminist structural critique. by arguing this, i don’t discount popular feminism, or think of it as politically vacuous, but rather i understand popular feminisms precisely through ambivalence, rather than through a reductive binary that asks us to determine the authenticity of certain feminisms over others. through a lens of ambivalence, we can more clearly see the relationship between popular feminisms and populist feminisms rather than cast them as diametrically opposed. but what does it mean, actually, to use ambivalence as an analytic? in empowered, i find lauren berlant’s work on this especially useful. she points out that in popular culture, ‘ambivalence is seen as the failure of a relation, the opposite of happiness, rather than as an inevitable condition of intimate attachment and a pleasure in its own right’ ( : ). i agree that ambivalence is an inevitable condition of intimate attachment, which is precisely why it is so useful in understanding the media circulation of popular feminisms. and, this intimate attachment is a pleasure in its own right. but, this is not a zero-sum game; pleasure and intimate attachments are political; there is not one authentic feminism that cancels out an inauthentic one. the refusal of the zero-sum game, contra berlant, does signal a kind of failure, but it is a productive failure, a failure that produces a certain kind of public and popular awareness, an opening in the public’s imagination, to imagine a different set of norms for gender and sexual difference. leaning on jack halberstam’s work on the queer art of failure, i want to suggest that those who practice productive failure ‘use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the us’ ( : ). for halberstam, failure repudiates oppressive social relations and gives those who ‘fail’ relief from the pressure to measure up to constraining and patriarchal norms of achievement, which are themselves a form of unfreedom. i think we can find this within popular feminism, where sometimes productive failure provides the opening to map a different logic of being in the world than what is dictated by an idealised masculine soverign subject. and we can see where these opportunities are taken up, those popular feminisms that share some characteristics of media visibility and popularity but challenge and expose the whiteness of much of popular feminism, or use media visibility as a way to expose structural violence, or are non- heteronormative and intersectional. social media has created what whitney phillips and ryan milner call ‘the ambivalent internet’, and this surely works as a context for popular feminism as well (phillips and milner, ). on twitter, alongside corporate ads that exhort girls to just ‘be empowered’ we also have black twitter, as caitlin gunn ( ), dayna chatman ( ), andre brock ( ) and others have shown, which has become a place for feminists of color to create campaigns for social justice. the blogosphere is rife with popular feminist musings, outrage, and community, and some critique the whiteness of much popular feminism and offer important intersectional analyses of gendered power relations in contemporary culture (banet-weiser, ). so, while i think that a highly visible, spectacular feminism often dominates our mediascape, i also think it is possible to imagine a different feminist politics, to shift us from a popular feminism to a populist one (and i mean ‘populist’ in the sense of being about people and activism, not as a stand-in for far-right movements across the globe). we need to think, as feminist activist/scholar liz mason-deece argues so powerfully, in terms of ‘assemblies’, where feminists think of connections and intersections between different realms of life, rather than reducing gender issues to a single realm (mason-deece, ). as mason-deece argues, ‘these connections have been made through the practice of assemblies, where women share stories of facing sexual harassment on the job, of being afraid to advocate for better working conditions because of fear of violence, of staying in abusive relationships because they lack the economic means to leave.’ we can see some of these connections, as catherine has pointed out, in recent feminist movements such as #metoo and the international women’s strike. mason-deece, in her piece ‘from #metoo to #westrike: a politics in feminine’ discusses what the #metoo movement can learn from latin american feminists, and how a more global perspective can help create a politics that challenges some of the fundamental bases of gender inequality, not one that begins and potentially ends with media visibility (mason-deece, ). within the context of the vast women’s strikes in argentina over the past few years, mason- deece argues for a different kind of popular feminism, which in part ‘emerges from the frustration women experienced participating in other movements, be they movements of the unemployed, the workers’ cooperative movements, or other populist and leftist struggles. in each of these, women were central to both everyday organizing and the day-to-day practices that kept these struggles together’. the ‘keeping the struggles together’ is the usually invisible labor of social reproduction that mostly women do, in every context. this keeping the struggles together also, as silvia federici has discussed, allows for the emergence of the ‘collective subject’ – the subject that is not only crucial to populism but antithetical to the ‘popularity’ of popular feminism that immediately centres the individual (federici, ). this kind of care work, unlike the kind that is privileged in what catherine has coined ‘neoliberal feminism’, exposes the contradictions within the neocapitalist context for postfeminism and popular feminism. *** during the time that the three of us were having this conversation, and then writing it out, stories about sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other forms of sexual violence continued to pour in through the mainstream, alternative, and social media. it seems like every week (and sometimes every day) there was a new revelation: multiple stories of sexual harassment in higher education; sexual assault accusations about the us supreme court nominee, brett kavanaugh; continued exposures of powerful men in the media industries, including les moonves, the president of cbs in the us; the ‘come back’ stories of accused sexual harrassers and sexual predators such as comedian louis ck and radio personality rain ghomeshi; star athlete serena williams was the victim of sexist officiating, and then again the target of racism and sexism for her reaction to such officiating. it is overwhelming and exhausting to read these stories constantly. it is hard not to think that change is a long way away. but it is precisely this kind of structural sexism and misogyny that mobilized us to have this conversation, and to engage in this kind of feminist project. thus, as a way of concluding, it seems important to underscore that each of us, in her own way, has expressed her enjoyment at thinking with, through and even against one another. our divergent points of entry and optics all contribute to thinking through the contemporary landscape. and, again, we consider this conversation with each other, about differences and similar threads between and within our perspectives, as a feminist project. what we have tried to offer above – both to each other and to other feminist scholars – is a conjunctural analysis of the various and often conflicting manifestations of feminism currently circulating in mainstream and popular culture, and we have outlined how we have come to understand the ways in which these manifestations borrow from as well as compete with one another in the contemporary landscape. this kind of critical engagement has also helped to clarify as well as to challenge various aspects of our thinking. this is the first time, for instance, that each one of us has specifically addressed how postfeminism, neoliberal feminism, and popular feminism draw on and feed off one another, even as they are not reducible one to another. we don’t necessarily agree on the precise nature of this inter-relationship, but we have tried to outline both the lines of convergence as well as divergence. moreover, this kind of conversation has also highlighted, yet again, how our differences can be productively juxtaposed in order to generate new and urgent conceptual questions – for us and for other feminist scholars. the challenges that we have posed to one another: about the us-centric or uk-centric tendency of our analyses, how the current avowal of feminism may complicate discussions of postfeminist sensibility as a critical object, the continued legacy of liberal feminism even within popular and neoliberal feminsim, and our sometimes diverging understandings of neoliberalism – as an advanced stage of capitalism or as a political rationality (or both!) – have proven incredibly useful for thinking through and perhaps even beyond our current positions. we feel that this kind of on-going collabortive conversation is urgently needed in the contemporary moment. and while we may approach the question of the hows and whys of the emergence of highly visible mediated feminisms somewhat differently, we all clearly share a politics of economic, racial and gendered justice. references ahmed, sara ( ) the promise of happiness. durham, nc: duke university press. armstrong, jill ( ) ‘higher stakes: generational differences in mother and daughters feelings about combining motherhood with a career’. studies in the maternal, ( ): - . banet-weiser, sarah ( ) empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. durham, nc: duke university press. banet-weiser, sarah ( ) authentic tm: the politics 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( ). if everyone is a feminist, is anyone? the guardian, november : available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /nov/ /when- everyone-is-a-feminist. williams, raymond ( ) the long revolution. london: chatto & windus. 	hearn, alison ( ) ‘verified: self-presentation, identity management, and selfhood in the age of big data’. journal of popular culture, ( ), - / 	phillips, whitney and ryan milner ( ) ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online, polity press, . islamophobia, representation and the muslim political subject. a swedish case study societies article islamophobia, representation and the muslim political subject. a swedish case study nina jakku center for theology and religion studies, lund university, lund, sweden; nina.jakku@ctr.lu.se received: september ; accepted: december ; published: december ����������������� abstract: applying media analysis, this article addresses how the exclusion of muslim women from fields of common public interest in sweden, such as partaking as an active citizen, is materialized. focusing on a specific event—the cancellation of a screening of burka songs . —and the media coverage and representation of the cancellation, it discusses the role of discourses of gender equality, secularity and democracy in circumscribing space for muslim political subjects. it casts light on islamophobic stereotyping, questionable democracy and secularity, as well as the over-simplified approaches to gender equality connected to dealings with muslim women in sweden. besides obstacles connected to muslim political subjects, the study provides insights into media representation of muslim women in general, specially connected to veils and the role of lawmaking connected to certain kind of veiling, in sweden and europe. keywords: islamophobia; muslim political subjects; burka songs . ; representation; gender equality . introduction islamophobia is of rising concern in sweden, manifested, for example, in hate crimes [ – ], discrimination in the labor market and housing [ , ] (pp. , ), and racial profiling [ ] (pp. – ). hate crimes in the country increasingly target muslim women [ , ] (pp. , ), especially women who wear some kind of veil, thereby enhancing their visibility as muslims. according to mattias gardell and meheke muftee [ ], islamophobia has also entered mainstream politics, in line with which, this article argues that one of its aspects concerns matters which result in excluding muslims from active citizenship. there are numerous ways to implement such exclusion, three of which are discussed below: by law, through representation and as a result of political decisions. the study adds to a growing body of research analyzing the impact of islamophobia on muslim women [ – ], which remains largely understudied in the context of sweden [ , – ]. it therefore constitutes a significant contribution to analysis of several aspects of the complex phenomenon of contemporary islamophobia in western countries. islamophobia as a concept will be discussed and defined below. i begin by focusing on one specific event, occurring in march , that serves to illustrate how exclusion materializes and operates in sweden and how decisions framed as protecting democratic values, instead risk dominating, and hence producing inequality. hanna högstedt’s film, burka songs . , was scheduled for screening in gothenburg on march as part of a pre-europride program arranged by the municipality of gothenburg. the director, hanna högstedt, describes the aim of the film: the movie and the conversation afterwards are about interpretative prerogative: who can speak for whom, who is considered credible and not; about the difficulty of seeing structures in which oneself is part of the power, such as seeing white racism’s effects as white; about europe’s colonial history and how it affects our society today [ , ]. societies , , ; doi: . /soc www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /soc http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies societies , , of on march, the municipality of gothenburg announced that the screening of burka songs . , with its following panel discussion, had been cancelled due to critique of the focus of the arrangement and composition of the panel. in august it happened again. reclaim pride gothenburg had planned a screening of burka songs . with a discussion to follow between the filmmaker and fatima doubakil, who features in the film; the day before the screening the organizers were called to a meeting with the municipality of gothenburg and told that the event could not go ahead [ ]. before examining the implications of this double cancellation, i discuss increased hostility and islamophobia in sweden in more general terms. legal bans on aspects of islam, such as items of dress, most of which were instituted after / [ ] (p. ), also play a part in normalizing the exclusion of muslims; i therefore include an overview of the legal situation in other european countries, as well as sweden. while studies of specific contexts, sweden in this case, are necessary given europe’s heterogeneity, insights into the broader context are also valuable due to similarities which have an impact on europe more generally; for instance, via eu legal rulings, which are applicable in many european countries, including sweden. i conclude by highlighting some media events and political processes—a ban on the niqab [ ] (veil) and concrete proposals in favor of bans—connected to representation and gender. the examples presented in this article are analyzed with a focus on islamophobia and ideas of gender equality; taken together they demonstrate that forbidding certain items of clothing is also about baring certain people from participation, hence denying them the right of expression and drawing attention to democratic shortcomings. the principal questions addressed below are the following: in which ways do liberal arguments favoring a niqab ban and actions taken against political subjects identifying actively as muslims relate to the discourse of islamophobia? how are the critiques of niqab and muslim political subjects represented? how do ideas of gender equality operate in the representation and exclusion of muslim women? i start with a part clarifying my materials and methods, followed by a short background to the film burka songs . . after that i will give a background to the terms “islamophobia” and “gender equality”, followed by both a background and analyses connected to the cancellation of the film screening and to the media debate in connection to it. this will be followed with a background to the swedish and european legal discourses connected with veiling. this is then followed by two parts that give both background and analyses connected to gender and representation and to the concept of “white men and women saving muslim women”. the final discussion is mainly used as an analytical conclusion. . materials and methods this study comprises media analysis of representations and the political agency of muslims in sweden. studying media discourse has offered a fruitful method for such exploration, supplying tools with which to access structures of knowledge regimes inherent in the data used in the study, and uncovering the rationales whereby some dicta are accepted as the truth, while others are silenced. discourse analysis specifically aims to show how the cognitive, social, historical, cultural or political contexts of language use and communication impinge on the contents, meanings, structures, or strategies of text and dialogue, and vice versa, how discourse itself is an integral part of and contributes to the structures of the context [ ] (p. ). teun a. van dijk describes critical discourse studies as an approach for studying social problems and political issues that can be used for analyzing how discourses (re)produce social domination, in one group’s power abuse over another, as well as how the dominated part responds. the study and analyses aim to contribute to the understanding of social problems, especially those caused by public talk and text, and to point out social inequalities [ ]. the material cited in this article consists of fourteen articles from the principal swedish newspapers (four editorials [ – ]; eight debate articles [ – ]; one culture review [ ]; one news story [ ]; three radio reports [ – ]; three press releases [ , , ]: seven blog posts [ – ] from societies , , of the social democratic municipal commissioner in gothenburg, ann-sofie hermansson; and, finally, two bills passed in the municipality of norrköping [ , ]. i have, however, been following the swedish debates connected to the niqab in the principal swedish newspapers since at least , which means reading every article connected to banning face veils and discussions connected to incidents where niqab has been pointed at as a problem in educational and work-related situations. in addition to the elements discussed here, there have been three coherent and nationwide waves, spurred by three separate incidents: in two students at a high school were asked to remove their niqab while in school; this was repeated in , involving a student in a municipal adult education program; and, in , a preschool teacher was told that she could not wear a niqab at work. these debates have been largely similar to those discussed here in terms of speakers and content, with few exceptions. this article does not provide detailed accounts of the debates; i have instead chosen three articles that discuss common features within the debate [ ]: compulsion connected to face veiling, connections with phenomena such as honor violence, secularity and gender equality. the material connected to the cancelling of burka songs . has been chosen because it is written by the main actors connected to the cancellation, but also because they bear parts of “making of an islamist” [ ] which i refer to in my analyses. available media research in sweden concludes that a stereotyping representation of muslims is common in swedish media. the representation reinforces already existing negative ideas of muslims, which tends to result in factual representation also being affected by negative associations [ – ]. . burka songs: a short presentation of the content and the idea behind whose voice may be heard in public space? what stories can be told in sweden today? what happens to the artistic process when it gets caught up in these issues? burka songs . is a film about a film that went wrong, about white spaces, about solidarity and fear. hanna högstedt received funding to make a film, following the burqa ban in france in , in which she would walk along the champs-Élysées singing the french national anthem and wearing a face veil until she was arrested. that film was never made. burka songs . begins with a protest against the french face veil ban on the champs-Élysées, followed by a talk about representation, racism and the stories that may be told in sweden today. in the course of the documentary, director hanna högstedt speaks to athena farrokhzad (poet), baker karim (film consultant) and fatima doubakil (human rights activist), among others. the debate organized after the screening was supposed to address issues such as power structures and interpretative prerogatives. maimuna abdullahi, who was one of the planned panelists, is a social work student, writer and secretary to the antiracist academy in sweden. fatima doubakil is a human right activist and a commissioner on the muslim human rights committee (mhrc). they are two of the most influential muslim debaters/lecturers in sweden. . background gender equality and islamophobia it is challenging to discuss matters of islamophobia, because as salman sayyid puts it: “islamophobia, both as a term and a concept, is widely used, hotly disputed and frequently disavowed” [ ] (p. ). there have been several attempts to define islamophobia, one by mattias gardell, who suggests that it comprises “socially reproduced prejudices of and aversions against islam and muslims, as well as acts and practices that assail, exclude or discriminate people on the basis that they are or are believed to be muslims and associated with islam” [ , ] (p. ), i will use gardell’s definition when analyzing islamophobia but, fruitfully for this study, sayyid adds to that definition with a discussion of what islamophobia seeks to discipline. he argues that it is present whenever muslims or islam are described as antithetical to western [ , ] values and emerges in contexts where being muslim has political significance [ ] (p. ). in the context of the screening of burka songs . and its attendant panel session, it strongly accentuates the significance of analyzing actions taken in connection with the muslim political subject. societies , , of defining islamophobia is also challenging because it tends to be absorbed into a discourse of “racism without racists” [ ], which differs from racism in which biological difference is in focus, such as nazism, in that it can be explained as religious critique. the question of whether islam may be criticized occurs often and the answer should be that of course it can and, indeed, should be; the problem is, however, that much of the criticism directed towards islam and muslims is not free from islamophobia. conforming to the profile of racism without racists, it bears colonial and orientalist connotations harking back to projects of “civilizing” unruly muslims [ ], and is often justified in terms of democratization and the defense of western values. there are no reliable figures for the size of the muslim population in sweden. a study from , based on country of birth or origins, estimated it to be in the region of , persons [ ], a figure that has increased since then; currently a credible estimate would be around % of the population in total, but that includes people with an assumed muslim cultural background, not only those practicing islam, and it excludes people who are living in sweden but have not yet received (or been denied) a permanent or temporary residence permit. as jonas otterbeck argues: sweden has become obsessed with its muslim population. blogs, newspapers, tv shows, debaters, artists, politicians, interfaith activists, academics in the social science field, school personnel, comedians, right-wing christians and, of course, people with a muslim family history are active participants in an endless discourse about muslims. integration, criminality, honor, sexism, undemocratic thinking, rape, nativity, radicalization, etc.—everything is given a muslim angle [ ] (p. ). the subjects of discussion in otterbeck’s quote also offer a sample of some of the most common biases and stereotypes that flourish in understandings of muslims in sweden. further, islamophobia makes use of gendered practice; in effect the stereotyping and biases differ depending on a person’s sex. muslim women, specially veil-wearing women, are largely constructed as a homogenous group in terms of lack of agency as well as being oppressed [ ] (p. ). the discourse of a unique swedish gender equality contrasted with stereotypical representation of muslim gender relations is something that matters in analyzing the parts where gender equality is discussed [ ]. in this context stereotypes of both “us” and “them” are in use, which may prevent us from seeing things in their whole complexity. . burka songs . : the media discussions and the political processes on february , the liberal writer jenny sonesson wrote an editorial in göteborgs posten with the title, “the critics of the burka must also be invited”; even if the title indicates that the concern is face-veils, she states in the article that the panel should also include credible critics of veils in general [ ]. she claims that the problem consists of the combination of abdullahi and doubakil who, together with högstedt, were to participate in the panel after the screening. sonesson argues that abdullahi and doubakil do not problematize forced veiling; in her view, what they do—labelling as colonialists and racists those europeans who invoke the oppression of muslim women—is the opposite of this. she does not give her source, but it is fair to assume that she is referring to an article by maimuna abdullahi, zaynab ouahabi, aftab soltani and fatima doubakil [ ], written in response to an article by journalist lars Åberg with the title, “the veil as a weapon against secular democracy”, that critiques a conference named “the hijab as political resistance” [ ]. the article by abdullahi and her co-writers posits a problem with policies and representation that are used as tools to promote women to take off their veils; clearly this differs from what sonesson suggests they advocate. in some ways it is quite the contrary. sonesson also refers to lars Åberg’s article when arguing that abdullahi and doubakil relativize honor-related oppression and equate anti-terror measures with racism; specifically, she quotes Åberg’s interpretation of an alternative report to the united nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (cerd) (written by doubakil et al.), rather than referring to the report itself. she thereby presents Åberg’s interpretation as a “truth” on which the reader may depend when determining who societies , , of abdullahi and doubakil are: a common device in discourse-making [ ]. as Åberg’s article is central to the resulting furor, it is worth summarizing and analyzing its content, which is principally devoted to claiming that that there is an islamist network in sweden of which doubakil is a central figure. but what has doubakil done in order to be labeled in such manner? in doubakil was a member of a group entitled muslims in cooperation network (mcin) that wrote the alternative report to cerd. Åberg claims that the report demanded that the state should monitor and control the media on matters connected to islam. in the part of the report that concerns this issue, however, islam is not mentioned; rather, muslims and, more specifically, freedom of speech, are the topics raised: the government through its various branches, such as the chancellor of justice, must ensure that the freedom of speech and freedom of the press is balanced by respect for the rights and reputation of others. in particular the chancellor of justice must use its discretion to prosecute offences against the freedom of the press and freedom of expression targeting muslims. special attention also needs to be paid to the commentary fields of internet media outlets [ ] (p. ). responding to doubakil et al.’s alternative report, the cerd recommendation reads: that the state party effectively investigate, prosecute and punish all hate crimes and take effective measures to combat hate speech in the media and on the internet, including by prosecuting the perpetrators, where appropriate, regardless of their official status. the committee urges the state party to take the necessary measures to promote tolerance, intercultural dialogue and respect for diversity, aiming those measures at journalists, inter alios [ ]. cerd repeats basically the same statements in its concluding observations for [ ], and the same kinds of concerns were highlighted by the united nations association of sweden in their alternative report to cerd in [ ]. Åberg also expresses dissatisfaction with the report’s concerns about the government’s work with issues connected with the honor culture, work which is criticized both for being ineffective and for its imbalance: [t]hese policies are stigmatising muslims since the practices they target are perceived to be linked to muslims in the public imagination. given this stigmatisation downside, it is important that the policies address real societal problems instead of just giving the impression that these practices are common features among certain people [ ] (p. ). one question that arises here concerns who should be allowed to criticize how the work against honor violence is carried out. Åberg himself has written several newspaper articles and co-written a book [ ] criticizing the conduct of measures against honor violence by the authorities, for instance for their ineffectiveness. concerns that resonate with the views of the mcin regarding representations of stigmatization can also be found in a different alternative report to cerd, written by the united nations association of sweden in [ ] (p. ). Åberg argues that some of what he regards as islamist propaganda is fundamentally a critique directed at improved anti-terrorism laws. the mcin’s alternative report of presses for the creation of an independent truth commission to investigate the effects of anti-terror laws and their compliance—or otherwise—with human rights. in response to this, cerd states in its concluding observations in that: the committee is concerned at reports that at present the terrorism act disproportionately targets muslims, while crimes committed by other groups, such as neo-nazi groups, are not investigated as terrorism. . . . the committee recommends that the state party ensure that measures to combat terrorism are undertaken in such a way as to protect fundamental human rights, including the right of equality [ ]. societies , , of notwithstanding this similar framing by a high-ranking body of concerns that replicates those expressed by the mcin five years earlier, Åberg ended his article by stating that individuals in the islamist group he references seem to dislike the society (sweden) in which they live: a society that provides greater equality than most, as well as freedom of speech, freedom of association and funding. what we may observe from this is that, when expressing their views—for instance, when writing an alternative report requesting equality, fair treatment and practices in according human rights—muslim political subjects must be prepared to be criticized and described as islamists in one of the country’s mainstream newspapers. i have failed to find a similar critique when it comes to the united nations association of sweden or to cerd, who have both expressed similar concerns. another important aspect of this exchange is that media actors such as sonesson and Åberg use their platforms in order to take part in, and attempt to shape, agenda planning resulting in limitations being placed on the space in which muslim political subjects may act as active citizens. the cancellation of the burka songs . screening soon became a political matter. the decision was not made by politicians, but by public officials; nevertheless, the (former, after the elections in september ) social democratic municipal commissioner, ann-sofie hermansson, has been one of the most influential opponents of the screening and the panel discussion to follow, stating unequivocally that, “these kinds of arrangements are totally unacceptable” [ ]. furthermore, she writes that the city of gothenburg should never be a platform for extremists. her rhetoric concerning abdullahi and doubakil has followed the same pattern in several interviews, as well as on her private blog [ ]. she has stated that both have expressed religious extremism, although, when asked to provide specific examples, she merely replied that they could easily be found on google [ ]. meanwhile, the furor over burka songs . is becoming heated. on march , swedish television announced that the film would be screened at gothenburg literature house on april th [ ]; on march, swedish radio reported hermansson’s statement that the municipal cultural affairs committee would be inspecting municipal funding arrangements for the venue [ ]. meanwhile the cultural affairs director in gothenburg, anna rosengren, defended both the film screening and the literature house, asserting that neither have overstepped the mark [ ]. the debate continued between hermansson and a politician for the liberal party, helene odenjung, in which odenjung claimed that the mhrc is known for inviting hate preachers, spreading anti-semitic propaganda and expressing hatred toward women and homosexuals [ ]. similar statements were issued from gothenburg municipality when it attempted to stop doubakil from participating in a discussion in august ; they could not be sure that doubakil agrees with principles of democracy and human rights [ ]. odenjung did not present any proof for her allegations. abdullahi and doubakil were not formally accused of anything; rather, sonesson and hermansson used guilt by association to affirm their theses. gothenburg municipality in their press release (and hermansson in her blog) referred to debaters, terror experts and police while stating that doubakil can be associated with the muslim brotherhood, extremists and non-democratic organizations. these evocative terms were not defined, nor their referents explicated; it is enough for the purposes of tarring abdullahi and doubakil with the brush of islamophobic discourse that such notions should be associated with them in readers’ minds. there appears to be no foundation for these statements, however, and the organizers of the projected august screening requested gothenburg municipality to produce the documents on which the statements about doubakil were purported to be based [ ]. finally, they decided to stage the event despite the municipality’s embargo. the actions and responses in connection with screening burka songs . clearly resonate with the underlying aim of the film, highlighting issues such as who is to be considered credible and by whom. these questions did not arise on a theoretical level in the form of debate, but in very concrete form in, for example, the cancellation of events due to who was supposed to be participating. in many of the arguments against the screening and the panel conversation, the criticism also seemed to work on autopilot via the thoughtless application of muslim stereotypes. from an analytical point of view, societies , , of it needs to be highlighted that an accusation of someone being islamist happens in a context where the term islamist, since / , has in much media debate lost many of its necessary nuances, and gets easily connected to a person being a terrorist [ ]. it is therefore a serious accusation, especially when it is used without a definition. i call the process “making of an islamist”. it successfully undermines someone’s credibility and it proceeds without clear evidence or explanations of exactly why the person deemed an islamist deserves the label. it is further a claim that you are islamist in all aspects of your character. common here are also references to democratic core values, as something that needs to be protected, again without specification of the ways in which “the islamist” is threatening them. this takes place in an already hostile environment where muslim stereotyping is a common feature, hence leading to decreasing space for muslim political subjects. all the above creates a polarized political and medial public sphere, where those with interpretative prerogative use their platform to overshadow and potentially also prevent those inadequately defined as islamist to respond and participate. the process of “making of an islamist” has happened on several occasions in the swedish political sphere. connections to the muslim brotherhood, in particular, are often repeated when discrediting muslim political subjects, but so far have appeared without references [ ]. this needs to be seen as a part in the discourse of islamophobia, where both stereotypes and restrictions of political subjects are used as tools, resulting in decreased space for active citizenship. as an aside, it should be noted that the film is not about forced veiling and, as far as i have been able to ascertain, neither abdullahi nor doubakil have indicated they are in favor of it. it needs to be mentioned, however, that this article does not have the intention of passing judgements regarding the overall political work of abdullahi and doubakil, but to analyze how their practice of active citizenship is met. . niqab and hijab within legal discourse and the law—in sweden and in europe there are no general, national or specific, local laws in sweden that forbid the wearing of the niqab or hijab. the only context in which such bans can be put in place is within private companies in accordance with a general policy that forbids philosophical, religious and political symbols for staff members coming into contact with customers, based on an eu court of justice ruling on march , in case c- / , samira achbita vs. g s secure solutions, and case c- / , asma bougnaoui vs. micropole univers. several proposals have been put forward in favor of a legal ban of face veils, however, the first by two mps for the centre party in . other attempts have been made in parliament by liberals, moderates and swedish democrats [ ] (p. ). until (when france and subsequently belgium introduced a national ban on covering the face), there were no national prohibitions against the practice in europe; however, there were local prohibitions of various degrees, which prohibited specific ways of covering the face in specific contexts in belgium, the netherlands, italy, switzerland and catalonia [ ] (pp. – ). bulgaria introduced a general national ban on the niqab in , austria in and denmark in . in finland, germany, latvia, belgium, the netherlands, luxembourg and spain there are pending legislative proposals that seek to ban face veils; in belgium, spain and germany at least one type of legal ban is already in place [ ] (p. ). in estonia and hungary, the governments are working on a bill aimed at banning the niqab in public places, while in the non-eu country of norway, the government plans to introduce a ban on wearing face veils at schools and universities and, in switzerland, the lower house has approved a ban on wearing the niqab in public places. in france, it is forbidden to wear the veil in schools (together with other religious symbols), while national bans on religious clothing can also be found in denmark and spain in specific settings and sectors, and local bans prohibiting religious symbols exist in out of states in germany [ ] (p. ). common to the processes in the eu member states mentioned here has been the role played by nationalist and far-right parties in proposing, promoting and introducing the legal bans, even if, in most cases, it has been mainstream parties enacting the restrictions [ ] (p. ). societies , , of . gender and representation in media in the new cambridge history of islam, manuela marín [ ] raises an essential issue concerning scholarly representations of muslim women that she claims have tended to lack intersectional analysis. historical research—which is scarce—has treated muslim women as a discrete and uniform category, yet marín urges the importance of exploring further dimensions. differences between women’s lives, positions and opportunities are difficult to understand only by means of the single analytical category of gender; social and economic factors are also very important, as well as, historically, whether the individual was free or enslaved. furthermore, marital status has likewise played a crucial role, along with issues of ethnicity, urban or rural residence, a nomadic lifestyle, and so on. these factors are not important only in historical studies, but are also highly relevant to contemporary research; class, age and functionality comprise further considerations. in order to put this into context, i continue this discussion by highlighting material from swedish media contexts which exemplifies facets of how muslim women are represented in sweden. i start with a debate article in svenska dagbladet in which ghazala chaudhry reflects on her own perceptions: something that can be seen in swedish society is that muslim women are usually seen as puppet dolls. a person who is a puppet doll does not stand up for something of her own, lacks character, and lets herself be led and guided by others. the veil is seen as something imposed and women who wear it appear to be ruled by others or indoctrinated to believe that the veil is something that is good [ , ]. the voices of muslim women, often in the form of debate articles, have become more common in swedish media, often testifying to similar experiences as chaudhry, and not rarely to their vulnerability to threats and violence [ , ]. in sharp contrast to these voices there are others (debate articles, editorials, columns, etc.) that discuss muslim women—and especially the clothes that some of them wear—from a very different perspective. i explore this discourse below, highlighting its common themes through a number of profiled debaters. sophia jarl is a right-wing opposition commissioner in the municipality of norrköping in sweden, who published a debate article in aftonbladet on august , entitled “the burka and niqab are symbols of oppression”. not only aimed at the face veils, the article advocates a ban on wearing veils of any kind in schools. after stating that the face veils are not religious symbols, she continues by discussing the struggle against honor-related violence in sweden. this resonates with the introduction to jan guillou’s column in aftonbladet, “sweden should not allow the degradation of women in schools”, which reads, “there is a minority in the world who believes that it is god’s will that young women should be genitally mutilated” [ ]. guillou stated later in the article that genital mutilation and the face veil cannot be considered equally serious tendencies, but jarl does not clarify how the veil and honor-related violence have any relevant connection at all. rhetoric that links veiling or specifically the niqab to genital mutilation and honor-related violence is rather common in similar contexts [ ] (pp. – ). in an article in göteborgs posten, “why not sit naked in the classroom?”, lars Åberg ( ) argues, much like jarl, that the niqab is a quasi-religious phenomenon, adding, “[w]ith reference to religious freedom, any craziness can now be justified if given a religious meaning” [ ]. although jarl observes that the veil is not about religion, but, rather, “originates in cultural, traditional and patriarchal structures” [ ], she continues with the statement that sweden should, as a secular society, “put the law before religious freedom” [ ]. in addition, jarl believes that the veil manages, simultaneously, to encourage shyness and the diminishment of the sexuality of those wearing it, while sexualizing girls. “in sweden, neither men nor women are seen as representatives of their gender. our identity is so much more than sexuality. we meet as equals based on free and individual choices of whom we want to be” [ ]. apart from painting a far too ideal image of “our” gender-blindness in sweden, the liberal tolerance discourse appears in its most clearly contradictory form when free and individual choices become the slogan with which to ban people dressing the way they wish. societies , , of wendy brown ( ) argues that tolerance as discourse requires dichotomies such as civilized, free and tolerant on the one hand and barbarians, fundamentalists and intolerant on the other. discursively, civilization and tolerance have been identified (by western scholars) with the west, both historically and in the present time [ ] (p. ), while non-western societies or people are (discursively) sorted into illiberal categories. in this way tolerance can be used as an argument for phenomena as diverse as bans on the hijab/niqab and military invasions [ ] (p. ). jarl’s argumentation asserts the idea of a form of gender equality that is specific and unique to sweden [ , ] (p. ), meaning that, as gardell argues, “[t]hrough the patriarchy associated with islam and muslims—among those who are not like us—gender discrimination becomes an ethnically and religiously coded problem, an immigrant problem that does not concern us equal swedes” [ ] (p. ). what marín emphasized regarding the lack of intersectional analysis in scholarly texts is also clearly present throughout jarl’s debate article. for instance, although jarl claims that multi-dimensional identities are the norm in sweden, the muslim women in her text are described only in terms of their assumed gender roles and sexuality that then become parts of a sexistic and islamophobic representation, presenting the muslim women through stereotypical understandings of her as passive and controlled by men’s desires. further, the representation touches upon a common discourse, discussed by mayanthi fernando, where a successful integration happens through an undressed female muslim body, together with a successful heterosexuality (fernando ). the discourse also plays a part in differentiating the west from the rest, through what fernando calls “a sexual clash of civilizations” [ ]. something else that is remarkable in these texts is that neither guillou, Åberg, nor jarl include the perspectives of women who have experience of wearing the niqab, yet, although access is rather limited, such views are available in sweden via blogs, newspaper interviews, television shows and debate articles. these writers impose their own interpretations of what religiosity means on these women when stating that the niqab does not qualify as a religious symbol, completely disregarding and silencing the possible objections of niqab-wearers themselves. nor do they take into consideration their own participation in meaning-making connected to the niqab. consequently, heidi safia mirza ( ) argues that it is actually through discussions like these that the complex dress of muslim women has been given a meaning greater than its religious or social status. these texts together also contain many of the ingredients that have been used in the broader context of european countries when arguing in favor of banning face veils: the drive for gender equality, secularity and the inclination for homogeneity [ ] (p. ). besides writing debate articles, jarl has in her capacity as a politician written two bills [ , ] in the municipality of norrköping, together with pär linderoth, one of which aims to forbid face veils for employees within the municipality. here again they connect their arguments to honor culture by claiming that wearing face-veils is the result of its presence in norrköping. the bill does not mention religion at all, rather describing the veil as an item of cultural and traditional clothing. the second bill aims at investigating the possibility of the municipality of norrköping’s imposing regulations banning children under the age of from wearing the hijab when taking part in any of the municipality’s activities. the city council of norrköping has rejected both proposals with references to the discrimination and education acts. the texts of guillou, Åberg and jarl make similar arguments in their statements regarding connections between honor-related violence and the oppression of women, on the one hand, and representations of the swedish self as gender equal on the other. there is very little evidence put forward to support either claim, however, underlining the fact that some dicta are expected to be naturally accepted [ ] (p. ). . white men and women saving muslim women from muslim men? in her essay, “can the subaltern speak?” gayatri chakravorty spivak coined the phrase: “white men saving brown women from brown men” [ ] (p. ). saving muslim women from muslim men is societies , , of a practice and motif present both in historical and contemporary instances, and one in which the veil has also played a central role. the unveiling of algeria [ ] (p. ), the war on afghanistan [ – ] (p. ) and the french veil debate(s) [ ] all bear elements that reference gender equality as seen through the lens of a western viewer. the texts that i have analyzed for this study are similarly distorted, as i have indicated, and all demonstrate shortcomings in understanding the diversity within veiling. lila abu-lughod, however, emphasizes the importance of taking into account the different circumstances and heterogeneity of women wearing veils, observing that it is a reductive oversimplification to analyze a large number of women simply on the basis of a single piece of cloth that they all wear [ , – ] (p. ). abu-lughod goes on to add that veiling tends to be described as evidence of a lack of agency. Åberg assumes, for instance, that the niqab can never be a free choice made by the person wearing it [ , , – ] while guillou states that, “[i]t is time to free the schoolgirls [ ] who are either forced by their parents to wear the niqab or burqa in school, or possibly themselves imagine that [it is part of] being grown up (adult), cool, exclusive or god’s will” [ ]. finally, jarl describes the niqab as a manifestation of women’s inferior position [ ], and then all three writers reach the same conclusion: banning the niqab is the correct way forward in terms of gender equality, secularity and freedom of choice. this claim is made without considering the consequences such bans have had in countries like france and belgium [ , , ]. over the past two decades, scholars have also challenged the conventional narrative connected to secularity as simply a separation between church and state, religion and law, political and church-based authority. it cannot be understood as a pillar upon which the disappearance of religion is leaning on, but as a historical product containing its own epistemological, moral and political parts—which in turn cannot be understood simply by describing a modern state’s retreat from religion [ ]. using this understanding of secularity provides the insight that the term is, in a similar way to the term islamist, used in ways that do not provide any depth to the understanding of what is meant when secularity is used as an argument for banning certain clothes. there is also a clear difference in representations of nameless hijab-wearing women and the muslim political subject. even if both stereotypes carry socially reproduced prejudices and hence lean on islamophobic ideas, the actions taken to exclude them differ. the oppressed hijab-wearing woman must be saved by us, while the muslim political subject is a person from whom we (or the democracy) needs to be saved. relevant to this, mirza discusses the dual roles of the nameless hijabis—who have, in light of the “war against terrorism”, become some sort of obsession in which all the measures taken against them, such as banning veils, appear in endless discussions and debates—being concurrently portrayed as voiceless victims in need of saving, and at the same time dangerous and a potential threat [ ] (p. ). the representations can be connected to the islamophobia seeking to discipline political subjects, understood as if there is a will of her own, there is a threat. the ambivalence also became clear in france during in connection to the banning of the wearing of religious symbols at schools. muslim women were often represented as not having a choice or lacking will-power to decide when it came to wearing the hijab. when it gradually became clear that the hijab was also worn as a result of the women’s free will, representations of them shifted from being a victim to being dangerous—she has chosen it, therefore she is a threat [ ]. different aspects of islamophobia are mobilized to interpret the actions of a woman who exercises her own will and those of a woman presumed to lacking one. as an aside, it is also worth noting that the construct of our remarkable swedish equality should be problematized with vigor, due to the outcome of #metoo, which demonstrated the extent to which women, regardless of their positions in sweden, are exposed to sexual harassment and abuse—not by “the others” but by men in every walk of life. most of the articles discussed here are written prior to #metoo, and hence have not taken the movement into consideration. i might have left some stone unturned, but a regular search indicates that of the journalists mentioned in this article, only sonesson has written something related to #metoo, while guillou has given an interview in which he stated that he is nowadays afraid of hugging female friends [ ]. this leads me back to abu-lughod’s reflections societies , , of that saving “the other women” is a mainstream global issue for white men and women, which elides the women’s will to be “saved” and the consequences of the saving, while demonstrating an inability or unwillingness to see shortcomings in the gender equality they advocate [ ] (p. ). . discussion when liberal discourses such as tolerance are used to ban, or argue for a ban on, a certain kind of clothing, and when freedom and gender equality serve as rhetorical tools to convince audiences of the correctness of the proposed prohibition, it demonstrates who the discourse considers able to practice tolerance. within such discourses tolerance is an undisputed western norm together with freedom and equality, accompanied by a drive to eradicate their presumed opposites, forbid them, take measures to hold them back. in the cases i have discussed here, stereotypes are used to justify these dichotomies; further, communication is most often only in one direction—from majority to minority. this though does not happen without a resistance, which is, for instance, shown in the increasing amount of muslim women voices in media advocating their own understandings of both veiling, muslim political subjecthood and the islamophobic environment in sweden. but in the case of debates, liberal majority voices tend to ignore the actual arguments of muslim intellectuals or wearers of niqabs and rather resort to character assassination as a strategy. the language of stereotypes and the casting of suspicion have been used in all the fields that i have described in this article: in arguments in favor and justifications of face-veil bans and hence lawmaking; in representations in mainstream swedish media; in the cancellations of screenings of burka songs . . all instances have produced similar results: suggestions to restrict or actually forbid certain clothes, bodies, voices, ideas, actions—or put differently, attempts to disqualify certain people from their sought role as active citizens, not for their ideas but for whom they are presumed to be. if we approach the topic of (face) veiling from outside the described discourses, mattias gardell interprets the laws relating to clothing in diametrically oppositional terms to the voices that advocate these bans: this wave of laws and authoritarian decrees that govern the dress a muslim woman may wear if she leaves her home and enters public places, has led many european democracies to embrace a policy that was previously restricted to authoritarian regimes in the muslim world, such as iran, afghanistan, sudan and the countries on arabian peninsula, where the state has long been dictating muslim women’s clothing [ , ] (p. ). this observation once again strikes at the very heart of the contradictions of so-called liberal tolerance. in jarl’s text we may see references to sweden’s secularity, what it is committed to and what it cannot include. secularity understood in this way creates an internal contradiction between secularism’s ideal of freedom of religion and the state’s desire for regulations that break down the public/private barrier, thus directly opposing ideas of the individual’s freedom [ ] (p. ). attitudes connected to “saving” muslim women follow a secular epistemology within which there are clear tendencies towards translating religion-based truths/interpretations as compulsion [ ] (p. ). indeed, secular epistemology is closely linked to the liberal tolerance discourse [ ] (p. ), something which became clear in the french veil debate, where the idea of laïcité as opposing religious symbols in public spaces played a central role [ ], as it seems to play even in the case of sweden. the problematization of veils and the propagation of suspicion that tends to lead to exclusion are performed in the name of secularity and democracy, which are presented as inherently swedish values; discourses colored by historical and cultural specificity are also part of this representation. the forced or false connections made between face veiling and practices such as honor violence, extremism and islamism are often repeated, but seldom come supported by any evidence, constituting a discourse because the rhetorical patterns seem to be taken for granted to the point that no further explanations or evidence are required. societies , , of how and where to delineate what fits within both democracy and secularity seems very unclear. as the space for participation among sweden’s muslim population decreases, so too may their sense of belonging, something already affected by islamophobic victimization in the country [ ]. it is therefore necessary to highlight the question of what democracy obligates, and to address it from a starting point where certain bodies do not automatically possess democratic values and hence get to define it, regardless of how they act. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflicts of interests. references and notes . kolankiewicz, m. anti-muslim violence and the possibility of justice; 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- - - . http://www.gp.se/debatt/s-svingar-vilt-i-senkommen-kamp-mot-extremism- . http://www.gp.se/debatt/s-svingar-vilt-i-senkommen-kamp-mot-extremism- . http://www.gp.se/debatt/med-sl�jan-som-vapen-mot-den-sekul�ra-demokratin- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . http://www.gp.se/debatt/med-sl�jan-som-vapen-mot-den-sekul�ra-demokratin- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . http://www.gp.se/debatt/ni-torgf�r-islamistisk-propaganda- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . http://www.gp.se/debatt/ni-torgf�r-islamistisk-propaganda- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . http://www.gp.se/kultur/kultur/lars-�berg-varf�r-inte-sitta-naken-i-klassrummet- . http://www.gp.se/kultur/kultur/lars-�berg-varf�r-inte-sitta-naken-i-klassrummet- . https://www.svt.se/kultur/film/burka-songs- - https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid= &artikel= http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/goteborgsstad/pressreleases/goeteborgs-stad-staeller-in-visningen-av-burka-songs- -punkt- - http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/goteborgsstad/pressreleases/goeteborgs-stad-staeller-in-visningen-av-burka-songs- -punkt- - http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ http://goteborg.se/wps/portal/press-och-media/aktuelltarkivet/aktuellt/e adfde- - a-a - e b b b /!ut/p/z /pzfna naeiz_sw edwc_ ky askhaaw ymu ldvzpyc yryv-utra ggljbquq _pcdmprhvjovjwvni u ghatzl_iqe igd ed fd bc zosbchzjaq n aun eo rbcxsr ch kbub p_i ca_lw x egxiqaewebku_wuqf n_lukrvwqmc ihva rlpfs hbtlrplis lvtwrwxdkbcaxtcxl paewgwxvmdfyd urtpuwgccaq gcwkuc-frz ofzr rqjjmgyrvoabndzhevhvth ssgacr fsujooz dbc k ppouhzjor n zr x ehcbf-bpyb aq bq!!/dz/d /l dbisevz fbis nqseh/ https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://soffangbg.wordpress.com/ / / https://www.do.se/globalassets/publikationer/rapport-representationer-stereotyper-nyhetsvardering .pdf https://www.do.se/globalassets/publikationer/rapport-representationer-stereotyper-nyhetsvardering .pdf societies , , of . sayyid, s.; vakil, a. thinking through islamophobia; hurst & company: london, uk, ; isbn - - - - . . my translation. original: socialt reproducerade fördomar om och avsersioner mot islam och muslimer, samt handlingar och praktiker som angriper, exkluderar eller diskriminerar människor på basis av att de är eller antas vara muslimer och associeras till islam. . sayyid points out that ’the west’ does not refer to a geographical entity, but rather an ideology [ ] (p. ); this is also how i understand the term. . sayyid, s. islam(ism), eurocentrism and the world order. def. stud. , , – . [crossref] . sayyid, s. racism and islamophobia. in mnm commentary no. . international centre for muslim and non-muslim understanding; university of south australia: adelaide, australia, . available online: http:// . . . /documents/eass/mnm/commentaries/sayyid-racism-islamophobia.pdf (accessed on september ). . larsson, g.; sander, Å. islam and muslims in sweden: integration or fragmentation? a contextual study; lit verlag: berlin, germany, ; isbn - . . abdullahi, m.; ouahabi, z.; soltani, a.; doubakil, f. av-slöjarna har inte förstått någonting. göteborgs posten. march . available online: http://www.gp.se/debatt/av-slöjarna-har-inte-förstått-någonting- . ? noaccess=true&aid= . (accessed on september ). . winther jørgensen, m.; phillips, l. diskursanalys som teori och metod; studentlitteratur: lund, sweden, ; isbn - - - - . . swedish muslims in cooperation network alternative report. in response to the swedish government’s nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first report to cerd; stockholm, sweden, ; available online: https://tbinternet. ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _e.pdf (accessed on september ). . international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. cerd/c/swe/co - . september . available online: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download. aspx?symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en (accessed on september ). . international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. cerd/c/swe/co/ - . may . available online: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx? symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en (accessed on september ). . the united nations association of sweden. alternative report; july . available online: https://tbinternet. ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _ _e.pdf (accessed on september ). . grutzky, e.; Åberg, l. heder och samvete; fri tanke: stockholm, sweden, ; isbn . . in march hermansson wrote about extremism in five out of six of her blog posts. several of them discuss the planned panel connected to burka songs . , but the same rhetoric is used, for instance, in texts that discuss people from gothenburg who have joined is in syria. the work against extremism that she advocates in these posts cuts across an extremely wide range of areas, and as the term appears without any form of definition, the panelists risk being bracketed with agents such as is. . sorgenfrei, s. islam i sverige de första åren; danagårdlitho: helsingborg, sweden, ; isbn - - - - . . brems, e. the experiences of face veil wearers in europe and the law; cambridge university press: cambridge, uk, ; pp. – . isbn - - - - . . marín, m. women, gender and sexuality. in the new cambridge history of islam vol : islamic cultures and societies to the end of the eighteenth century; cambridge university press: cambridge, uk, ; isbn . . quotes from swedish newspapers are my translations from swedish to english. . salihu, d. hatet mot slöjan. expressen. january . available online: https://www.expressen.se/ nyheter/hatet-mot-slojan/del- / (accessed on september ). . brown, w. regulating aversions; princeton university press: princeton, nj, usa, ; isbn - - - - . . hübinette, t.; lundström, c. den svenska vithetens melankoli. glänta , , – . . fernando, m. save the muslim woman, save the republic: ni putes ni soumises and the rise of neoliberal sovereignty. mod. contemp. france , , – . [crossref] http://dx.doi.org/ . / http:// . . . /documents/eass/mnm/commentaries/sayyid-racism-islamophobia.pdf http://www.gp.se/debatt/av-sl�jarna-har-inte-f�rst�tt-n�gonting- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . http://www.gp.se/debatt/av-sl�jarna-har-inte-f�rst�tt-n�gonting- . ?noaccess=true&aid= . https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _e.pdf https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _e.pdf https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=cerd% fc% fswe% f - &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _ _e.pdf https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/cerd/shared% documents/swe/int_cerd_ngo_swe_ _ _e.pdf https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/hatet-mot-slojan/del- / https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/hatet-mot-slojan/del- / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . societies , , of . spivak, g.c. can the subaltern speak? in colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader; williams, p., chrisman, l., eds.; harvester wheatsheaf: hertfordshire, uk, . . fanon, f. algeriet av-slöjat. in globaliseringens kulturer; eriksson, c., eriksson baaz, m., thörn, h., eds.; nya doxa: nora, sweden, ; pp. – , isbn - - - . . abu-lughod, l. do muslim women need saving? harvard university press: cambridge, ma, usa; london, uk, ; isbn - - - - . . mishra, s. “saving” muslim women and fighting muslim men: analysis of representations in the new york times. glob. media j. , , – . . cloud, d.l. “to veil the threat of terror”: afghan women and the (clash of civilizations) in the imagery of the u.s. war on terror. q. j. speech , , – . [crossref] . wallach scott, j. slöjans politik; tankekraft förlag: hägersten, sweden, ; isbn - - - - . . ahmed, l. a quiet revolution; yale university press: new haven, ct, usa, ; isbn - - - - . . heath, j. the veil; university of california press: berkeley, ca, usa, ; isbn - - - - . . tarlo, e. visibly muslim; berg: new york, ny, usa, ; isbn - - - - . . el guindi, f. veil. modesty, privacy and resistance; berg: oxford, uk, ; isbn . . the available research about face-veiling in europe does not indicate coercion as a reason for wearing the niqab. in many cases the niqab is worn against the wishes of the niqabi’s near family [ , – ]. . bouteldja, n. unveiling the truth: why women wear the full-face veil in france; open society foundations: new york, ny, usa, ; available online: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/unveiling- truth-why- -muslim-women-wear-full-face-veil-france (accessed on september ). . bouteldja, n. after the ban: the experiences of women of the full-face veil in france; open society foundations: new york, ny, usa, ; available online: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/after- the-ban-experience-full-face-veil-france- .pdf (accessed on september ). . bouteldja, n. behind the veil: why women choose to wear the full face veil in britain; open society foundations: new york, ny, usa, ; available online: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/ default/files/behind-veil- .pdf (accessed on september ). . by the time the article was written there had been two public cases with three niqabis involved. one of them concerned a -year-old woman. the second concerned two students at a high-school in gothenburg, aged and years. all three have stated that wearing the niqab was their own choice. . out of interviewees in a french study have claimed that their social lives were negatively affected and their activities outside the home were circumscribed. the fear of the police’s id checks and verbal abuse prevents the interviewees from leaving their homes. freedom of movement has also been restricted for those participants who chose to stop wearing the niqab because they do not feel comfortable in public without covering their faces. only one person said that she socializes more since she stopped wearing the niqab. several respondents argue that restrictions on freedom of movement have led to less physical activity, which in turn has resulted in physical and mental problems. interviewees have also reported that they have suffered from depression and felt anxiety in connection with venturing outside their homes [ ] (pp. – ). the belgian ’burka ban’ confronted with inside realities written by eva brems et al. [ ] deals with similar issues as the french report after the ban. the informants in the belgian study experienced indignation, frustration and humiliation and felt worried about the future after the ban came into force. . brems, e.; janssens, y.; lecoyer, k.; chaib, s.o.; vandersteen, v.; vrielink, j. the belgian ‘burqa ban’ confronted with insider realities. in the experiences of face veil wearers in europe and the law; brems, e., ed.; cambridge university press: cambridge, uk, ; pp. – , isbn - - - - . . mahmood, s. religious difference in a secular age; princeton university press: princeton, nj, usa, ; isbn - - - - . . asad, t. french secularism and the “islamic veil affair”. hedgehog rev. , , – . . rydhagen, m. jan guillou vågar inte krama kvinnliga vänner. expressen. november . available online: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/jan-guillou-vagar-inte-krama-kvinnliga-vanner/ (accessed on september ). http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/unveiling-truth-why- -muslim-women-wear-full-face-veil-france https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/unveiling-truth-why- -muslim-women-wear-full-face-veil-france https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/after-the-ban-experience-full-face-veil-france- .pdf https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/after-the-ban-experience-full-face-veil-france- .pdf https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/behind-veil- .pdf https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/behind-veil- .pdf https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/jan-guillou-vagar-inte-krama-kvinnliga-vanner/ societies , , of . my translation. original: denna våg av lagar och myndighetsdekret som reglerar vilken klädsel en muslimsk kvinna får bära om hon beger sig hemifrån, ut i det offentliga rummet, har medfört att många europeiska demokratier kommit att anamma en politik som tidigare varit begränsad till auktoritära regimer i den muslimska världen, som iran, afghanistan, sudan och länderna på arabiska halvön, där staten sedan länge dikterat muslimska kvinnors klädsel. . mahmood, s. politics of piety; princeton university press: princeton, nj, usa, ; isbn - - - - . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	burka songs: a short presentation of the content and the idea behind 	background gender equality and islamophobia 	burka songs . : the media discussions and the political processes 	niqab and hijab within legal discourse and the law—in sweden and in europe 	gender and representation in media 	white men and women saving muslim women from muslim men? 	discussion 	references sumÁrio anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura v. , n. , janeiro-junho © by rdl – doi: . /anamps. . - interview with greta olson feel empowered to tell your own legal-cultural story by dieter axt greta olson is a professor of english and american literary and cultural studies at the university of giessen and was a fellow researcher at the käte hamburger center for advanced study in the humanities “law as culture” in bonn ( , ). she is the editor-in-chief of the european journal of english studies (ejes), alongside jeanne gaakeer (erasmus school of law / hol), she is the co-founder of the european network for law and literature (www.eurnll.org), whose core proposals are to encourage the studies on law and literature and to promote european collaboration around the theme. currently, her research areas of interest focus on law, narrative politics, feminism, queer and gender, the critical study of north american politics and culture, and the media. throughout her academic trajectory, she has received several awards related to her research. master in public law by universidade do vale do rio dos sinos (unisinos). bachelor of law by universidade federal do rio grande do sul (ufrgs). screenwriter of the tv show law & literature (tv justiça - brazil). member of the brazilian law and literature network (rdl). editorial assistant of anamorphosis - international journal of law and literature. writer and editor of le chien publishing house. porto alegre, rs, brazil. cv lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/ . orcid: https://orcid.org/ - - - . e-mail: dieter@rdl.org.br. http://www.eurnll.org/ http://lattes.cnpq.br/ https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:dieter@rdl.org.br anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - dieter axt – in the opening issue of the interview section for anamorphosis we interviewed jeanne gaakeer who, together with you, founded the european network of law and literature (eurnll). more recently, we have also had the opportunity to interview daniela carpi, founder of associazone italiana diritto e letteratura (aidel). how do eurnll and aidel foster the exchange of ideas among their researchers and associates? which initiatives would you highlight? daniela carpi and aidel are wonderful resources in terms of getting the word out about new law and literature publications and events. under daniela’s leadership, the aidel network publishes a journal, holds a yearly conference, and in its newsletter publicizes the work of those working in europe along with what are often the better known publications of us american and british colleagues. from the beginning, jeanne gaakeer and i (eurnll) have had a slightly different emphasis. we highlight research based in europe and spread the word about european conferences, researchers, and resources. this occurs through our dialogic publications, and through our both featuring the work of those who are outside of the north american paradigms in conferences and other scholarly and public events. jeanne has just published her book judging from experience: law, praxis, humanities ( ) and my from law and literature to legality and affect is scheduled to come out in . in both of these monographs as well as in other essay publications, we individually argue for the need for differentiated narratologies of law and point out that narratives of law cannot be based solely on the anglo-american common law based model. individually, we host events in germany and the netherlands that feature continental european and other non-anglo-american narratives and cultures of law. i am about to hold a workshop on rechtsgefühle (feelings about law/justice) that centers on european work on affect and law, and jeanne shall provide a keynote there. this is not in any sense to be critical of our wonderful north american colleagues and friends. rather, it is to push back at a history that suggests that law and literature was a us american invention that began only during the s. many european and other interventions into the intersections of the poetic/literary and the legal took place outside the olson; axt | fell empowered to tell your own... united states well before the s. this is to look at the specifics of particular law and literature histories, for instance, in the netherlands and in france and in austria and germany, or in the igbo nation. the issue here is that these efforts were not called law and literature per se but bore other names. dieter axt – you obtained a bachelor of arts from vassar college (ny) in , where you studied philosophy and studio arts, and you studied art history and philosophy at university college london. later, you focused your studies on english literature until you approached law and literature. tell us a little about your academic and professional trajectory: how was this path from art and literature to law? what is your assessment on the development of the studies of law and literature in the european continent? actually, after studying visual arts and philosophy in the states and in britain, i went on to study comparative linguistics and philosophy as well as english and american studies after coming to germany, as well as of course learning german. while i am a german civil servant and have three german children and have also lived for the greater part of my life in germany, my nationality remains us american. i therefore describe myself as a hyphenated german. like many people who work interdisciplinarily, i am a border crosser. this means that i do not have a deep sense of certitude about the inevitability and rightness of any one set of disciplinary and methodological tools and approaches as compared to others. the same goes for my disciplinary moorings. i take training that i did in philosophy and studio art and linguistics as well as in literary and cultural studies to my analyses of law and legal processes to treat them as cultural phenomena. as i document in my essay from on the “futures of law and literature” and in my forthcoming book from law and literature to legality and affect, there has been an expansion of the type of aesthetic text that is the object of analysis in law and literature. whereas a once somewhat narrow canon of shakespeare’s tragedies and victorian novels constituted the bulk of the objects of research on the literature side of law anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - and literature, with regretfully little work being taken into account from other languages or cultures, the field has now expanded enormously. law and literature now encompasses law and film, law and television, law and art, law and the material, law and the aesthetic, and law and sound. many shall disagree with me in this albeit very broad assessment of what is the literary in law and literature. for instance, does the literary have to be primarily constituted by the written or the spoken word? be this as it may, the leading periodicals in law and literature now include work focusing on science fiction, television, youth literature, romance, and porn. the genres and art forms that can now be spoken about in law and literature include sculpture and painting, as well as literary fiction. in terms of what has gone on in european research, there is a new awareness of the need to articulate specifically european and other local histories of law and literature. i published another comparative essay in that discussed law and literature in brazil. this was an albeit very imperfect piece because i do not speak or read portuguese and was therefore reliant on translations into german and english and some kind ‘native informants.’ there, i wrote something quite similar – that law and literature has to be thought of as more than one history or field of research. individual law and literatures depend on the specific legal, cultural, and political circumstances and histories of the places where they are produced and to which they speak and respond. this includes the various ways in which aesthetic interventions into the legal are expressed. they articulate critique of either legal practice in itself or what is viewed as an inequitable legal environment more generally. this can be not only through literature, in the traditional sense, but also through graffiti and music. i see many, many people working on specific histories in europe. these include to name only a few colleagues gisèle sapiro, frans-willem korsten, ralph grüttemeier, claudia lieb, ted laros, sylvia sasse, amongst many, many others. the nordic nations have entered into a dialogue with one another about their not always untroubled law and literature histories as well, due to colonization. this explicitly european law and literature work accompanies new and pressing issues such as the olson; axt | fell empowered to tell your own... possible dissolution of europe due to ethnonationalism. the question arises of whether there is a need for a common european narrative or narratives that might also be garnered through law and literature work. would such narrative be helpful in creating a more cohesive sense of european identity? dieter axt – how do narrative and metaphor merge with the juridical speech? if i may answer the question somewhat indirectly, i find that there has been a narrative turn in critical legal studies, with many legal researchers now embracing the idea that law is narratively constructed and interpreted and that narratological concepts and models are helpful. yet there is a quite palpable distrust of metaphor in much critical legal work, a suspicion of metaphor’s capacity to distort or to be used ideologically, and of metaphor and other tropes’ affective importance in terms of rhetoric. my argument has been that narrativization and metaphorization are both important to cognitive world and sense making. both are intrinsic to creating and interpreting law, also in terms of how juridical discourse is constructed. thus, i argue for conjoined narratological and metaphorological investigations of the legal. dieter axt – one of your major areas of research and interest concentrates on the topics of feminism, gender and sexual diversity. the western representation of justice – and of law itself – has always invoked feminine icons of the greco-latin world: the greek goddess of justice, dike; themis, dike’s mother, representing the statute; iustitia. in oresteia, it is pallas athena who utters the renowned minerva vow. on the other hand, switching from symbology to reality, the juridical practice in courts and universities seems not to translate in importance this feminine symbolic representation of law. what is your assessment of women’s participation in law and their place in the juridical career? your question is complex. i want to avoid any essentialization that says that the feminine is this and the masculine is that. such differentiations rest on a binaric thinking pattern, which leads to anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - needless stereotyping of so-called typical masculine and feminine behaviors. as deconstructive practice has shown us, this binary becomes unstable as soon as one starts to take the terms apart. there is a historical questioning of masculinist assumptions about the rationality and centrality of legal process in literature, for instance, in antigone and in susan glaspell’s trifles and a jury of her peers. further, feminist legal critique has shown how much law (property, family, criminal, tax) has been based on the conditions of propertied, white, heterosexual cis men, and this has led to the elision of the representation of interests of everyone who is not a propertied, white heterosexual man. i have pointed out a problematic tendency to gender law as masculine and brutish and literature as feminine and ethical in some law and literature work. a huge discrepancy also remains, for instance, between the prevalence of women judges and particularly women judges of color in fictional television and film representations of law and the actual numbers. in other words, the prominent visibility of women legal actors in fictionalized accounts of law can often lead to very non-progressive politics. so, let’s be critical of the masculine-feminine binary in general. dieter axt – one of the main topics of juridical debate nowadays resides on the effectuation of policies to recognize minorities and socially stigmatized groups, seeking to promote a more equal and democratic society. this subject often conflicts defenders of judicial minimalism with those who support the possibility of a more activist position by the courts. what is the extension of the operation of courts in subjects such as the effectuation of the rights of minorities? should gender be visible or invisible to the blind justice, to quote a recent question proposed by camille paglia? has literature been successful in this debate? there is a fundamental dilemma here. when the courts protect minorities they also reify the status of the minority as being in need of protection and in some sense having less agency. yet testimony and witness narratives are increasingly recognized in legal studies as a means of expression for those who have not previously been recognized in and by law. the steady expansion of catalogues of human rights to include olson; axt | fell empowered to tell your own... communal rights, and the universalization of human rights discourse in all areas of law bespeak efforts to render law and politics more democratic. yet, as with gender, it is simplistic to assert that legal representation automatically equals more progressive politics and more rights for minority groups. dieter axt – on the literary field, the writer and social critic camille paglia identifies that women were often “victims of the law, instead of its agents”. this, in fact, has been one of the main insurgences of the suffragist movement, when strongly developed in early th-century england. to what extent has the democratic political process been achieving success in reorganizing these traditional spaces of representation? has such space been contemplated by literature in its pages? one goal of liberal feminism and what i would call liberal queer advocacy is to achieve equal rights under the law for both genders and/or for sexual minorities. in many post-industrial societies, this goal has already been achieved. however, equal rights under the law does not equate with an equality of representation or of articulation. nor does it end discrimination. this concerns not only law but also social attitudes and internalized forms of discrimination. hence, legal studies need to be combined with an awareness of how social identities and attitudes and prejudices are created and maintained. dieter axt – since ancient greece, western literature has vastly represented female characters. by way of illustration, we can make reference to antigone, hester prynne, hedda gabler, emma bovary, anna karenina, capitu, elizabeth bennet. on the other hand, there have not been that many female writers to stand out in our literary universe. can you identify a reason for that? what is your assessment of the representation of the feminine in western literature? there is no simple answer to this question. first, historically women were simply not expected to or socialized to articulate themselves in the same manner or with the same force as men. this has affected notions of anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - literary authority. until quite recently, and now only sporadically, women authors, like people of color, and working-class people were vastly underrepresented in the literary canon. second, valuations of ‘great’ literature have tended to praise a masculinist aesthetic as in modernist poetry, which was gendered and classist and hence simply less available as a means of expression to most women authors. third, there is a vast difference between the quite variable representations of women in literature and how women produce literature on an individual level. dieter axt – democracy requires constant toleration of differences… recently, however, the hungarian government has banned gender studies in universities. in germany, while the implementation of the “third gender” is discussed, conservative sectors claim the end of the “gender delusion” (genderwahn) in language and education. in brazil, a bill named “nonpartisan school” (escola sem partido) is currently in the house of representatives, directed against “political and ideological indoctrination” in schools, largely motivated by themes connected to gender and sexual diversity. on the other hand, scotland was the first country to embed lgbti teaching in the school curriculum. what does this global conjuncture allow us to apprehend? within this scenario, what is the relevance of opening space for the discussion of themes such as feminism, gender and sexual diversity in classrooms for the task of forming citizens? and how could literature resonate on this debate? i am interested in the clashes of values and norms that are going on in sexual cultures now and how these conflicts are also reflected on in law. you are correct that the alternative for germany party campaigns against “gender-hysteria,” “gender-terror” and “gender-insanity” as well as against the supposed “early sexualization” of students in schools. hungary has banned gender studies, brazil may do so as well, and one result of the #metoo discussion and debate has been legislative efforts to regulate sexuality more and to make explicit consent prerequisite to sexual activities. on the other hand, queer marriage has just been legalized in taiwan and recently in germany, the united states, and ireland. this process has occurred far more rapidly than was thought possible only olson; axt | fell empowered to tell your own... twenty years ago. the proliferation of christopher street day festivals throughout european cities speaks for a new openness and celebration and making visible of formally non-normative sexual lifestyles. i see these trends as clashing with one another. one trajectory is to close down the recent proliferation of genders and sexual orientations and also to regulate sex more. the other is to do just the opposite. i believe we need the arts and literary and cultural critique to comprehend these contradictory tendencies. literature and aesthetic vehicles can imagine gendered and sexual worlds before they occur in reality. the arts also deal with current, highly evident anxieties about how people are or are not having sex and living out their gendered identities. dieter axt – you deal with the “pornification” of mainstream culture in post-industrial western societies, clearly identifying this phenomenon in the relationship that young people have been developing with the exposition of their image in social media. this scenario would indicate that we have gotten used to the regularity of porn in our realities. what is the place of obscenity in this society of hyper exposition? does this new mainstream culture rupture or reproduce sexist patterns? there is a huge debate going on right now about whether the so- called pornification of culture is leading to a number of behavioral crises, such as men becoming so addicted to porn that they are no longer able to have sex in actual relationships, such as girls and boys learning about sexual initiation through porn representations of extreme sexual acts, or as young women measuring their bodies and perceived attractiveness against a porn actress ideal. the other side says that the ubiquity of digital porn and the variety of it has helped sexual minorities to find their communities and fulfil their desires. pro-porn individuals also argue that more differentiated porn now also caters to women’s sexual tastes. it is estimated that women represent roughly a third or more of porn users. pornification, according to these arguments, has led to a democratization of sex, which is no longer controlled by the experts. see the work of foucault. law interacts with this to the degree it censors porn, controls what is available, and can be used to limit access. anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - your question seems to me to take “obscenity” as a given. this word contains a normative judgement about what should be permitted to be seen, with which i cannot easily agree. mainstream culture always contains contradictory elements – dominant, emergent, and residual patterns. so, i would say that contemporary cultures include some narratives and images that disrupt traditional sexist patterns and some that reify these patterns. dieter axt – in , deborah de robertis featured in an art intervention in front of gustave courbet’s “origin of the world”, at musée d’orsay, in paris, exposing her genitalia, enacting the french artist’s painting. the performance was praised by the visitors at the museum, but cost her a complaint for sexual exhibitionism. what is the limit of the law in art? and what if deborah de robertis’ enactment had been reproduced by a passer-by on public road? the classic differentiation is that when explicit material is recognized as belonging to the realm of art it becomes free from many forms of legal control. then, it is authors and literary experts, or artists and art historians who have the last word about what is possible and permissible and desirable in art. what has been considered to be “obscenity” is then valued as art. then it may also become mundane. in other words, the arts develop their own means, canons, and rules and forms of self-control. and, this process is historically and culturally highly variable. dieter axt – does law tame and dominate the bodies? law can be used to tame and control bodies. black bodies have historically been treated as property in us american law, rather than as parts of fully recognized legal persons. women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction continue to be subject to gendered forms of legal control. see the new anti-abortion legislation in alabama, which if successful, shall not end abortion, but shall make it difficult for other than materially better off olson; axt | fell empowered to tell your own... women to attain in safe forms. law interacts with other forms of social regulation in controlling bodies. dieter axt – how does technology impact memory and writing? in what ways has literature been affected by the electronic information society? digitality has definitely changed how we express ourselves and in what forms. people who write professionally, whether authors or journalists or jurists – now do so in many forms, also digitally in order to make themselves heard. arguably, the so-called iconic turn has given a new weight to the visual as the primary mode of expression. as everything from case archives to photos of our children is stored digitally and is only partially accessible in haptic modes, there is also an argument that memory has been altered, that it has become disembodied, and that part of our memory function has been outsourced to our hard drives or the cloud. there is a difference when i read a book or about a legal case while holding a book or a print-out text in my hands or look at a printed out photograph of my granddaughter rather than on my mobile phone. literature has responded to the digital turn by incorporating new forms of expression – blogging, instagram, tweets, memes – into newer aesthetic modes, often in mash-up form. the affects and social mores of reading are also changing as we read and interact with literature and other media on screen. dieter axt – finally, what future perspectives could you project for the law and literature movement in the european continent? what particular works of literature would you recommend for jurists? i would continue to encourage european law and literature practitioners to concentrate on contextualizing and historicizing whatever literature is important in their specific local environment. this includes taking popular culture seriously. look at whatever legal television series people are talking about. take the pleasure people take in that series or other aesthetic forms seriously. think about the form of the text and how anamorphosis – revista internacional de direito e literatura, v. , n. , p. - the form conveys messages about law and legal processes. see if local legal preoccupations are addressed. also think about the politics of the literature or series or music or visual art work you are looking at and how this interacts with the legal environment. feel empowered to tell your own legal-cultural story. translated by felipe zobaran science magazine post date • october s c i e n c e sciencemag.org w e have heard from readers with concerns about the publication of the letter “harass- ment charges: injustice done?” (a. moya et al., august, p. ). at science, we take harassment issues very seriously. we are working to develop policies that adhere to our editorial principle of airing a wide range of perspectives and that also prevent causing further harm to the targets of harassment. publication of a letter does not represent an endorsement by the editorial staff at science. past practice has been based on the understanding that reader-submitted letters are intended to reflect conversations taking place in the scientific community. the pub- lished letter in question did that by raising concerns about the transparency of the investiga- tory process. this point touched on the challenges institutions face when de-termining how the processes and outcomes of harassment investigations should be shared, decisions that must weigh the bene-fits of transparency against important priva-cy concerns. however, the letter also dis-cussed the personal conduct and scientific accomplishments of the individual found guilty of harassment. in the future, we will not publish letters in which authors argue that an individual accused or found guilty of harassment is likely innocent because others have inter-acted with that per- son without incident; this argument is logically flawed. in addi-tion, although some informa- tion about a per-son’s scientific achievements is at times nec-essary to establish context, we will not pub-lish letters in which authors argue that pro-fessional achievements have any bearing at all on the likelihood that the individual en-gaged in harassment. such arguments not only lack relevance to harassment behavior but also may result in further harm to the targets of harassment and exacerbate the al-ready daunting process that targets face in coming forward publicly. we are striving to increase our under-standing of all facets of the issue of harass-ment and to review and modify our editorial processes accordingly. jeremy m. berg editor-in-chief editor’s note: harassment policy . /science.aav post date october o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ august • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o : ia n p a r k e r harassment charges: enough himpathy we are well into the #metoo era, yet journal- ists and editors are still fixated on the harasser’s fall from grace rather than the detrimental effect of sexual harassment on the victims and our society as a whole. the news story “prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding” (m. wadman, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) reinforces a familiar toxic narrative: the accomplishments of the harasser hold more value to science than women’s right to a safe workplace. this is now so commonplace that it has been dubbed “himpathy” ( ). in the news story, wadman tells us all about the “eminent” professor, from his scientific accomplishments to his personal hobbies. he did “pioneering” and “ground- breaking” work, he donated money to the university, and he was president of aaas (the publisher of science). however, we do not hear about the pioneering work of the women he harassed at university of califor- nia, irvine (uci). from a graduate student to a tenured professor to an assistant dean, the news story reduced the women who demanded an end to his misconduct to complainers. we are told that ayala was just being “european” and his actions were mis- understood; instead, the narrative should focus on the many women and careers that suffered from ayala’s actions. wadman then chose to end the article by quoting an ayala supporter who diminished the investigation. edited by jennifer sills letters the same himpathy sentiments return in the follow-up news in depth story “report details harassment by famed biologist” (m. wadman, july, p. ). words matter, and science should wield its words and influence carefully. it is time to recognize that harassers have taken a substantial toll on the advancement of science. it is time to acknowledge that sexual harassment in all its nefarious forms puts an unquantifiable burden on the victims (many of whom are our colleagues). it’s time to believe women. jane zelikova, kelly ramirez,* jewel lipps, on behalf of women scientists leadership women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: k.ramirez@nioo.knaw.nl reference . k. manne, down girl (oxford univ. press, ). . /science.aau harassment charges: journalists’ role as a woman in science, i find the report- ing of allegations against francisco ayala (“#metoo complaints fell noted geneticist,” m. wadman, news in brief, july, p. ) deeply troubling. the title implicates the “complaints” or “complainers” as respon- sible for the resignation, as opposed to the actions of the accused or the impartial sexual harassment investigation. the term “complaint” gives the impression that the alleged victims have minor grievances as opposed to serious reports of scientific misconduct. not only is this title biased against whistleblowers, it is also factu- ally incorrect, as the first allegations of harassment were allegedly made years before the resignation. i assert that the investigation, not the allegations, caused the accused to resign. jessica duffy department of biology, midwestern state university, wichita falls, tx , usa. email: jlduffy @my.mwsu.edu . /science.aau harassment charges: injustice done? we are deeply concerned by the way in which our friend and colleague professor francisco ayala has been forced to resign from the university of california, irvine (uci), after being accused of sexual harass- ment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation). the charges that have been raised against him have had appall- ing consequences. those of us who are well acquainted with professor ayala know that he is an honorable person, who throughout his career has treated his friends, co-workers, and students in a respectful, egalitar- ian way. his lifelong commitment to teaching, research, and outreach on bio- logical evolution has won him worldwide recognition. he has been a generous bene- factor to the university of california and throughout his fruitful career has opened new fields of biological research, pro- moted mutual respect and independence uci decided to remove francisco ayala’s name from the science library after he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ between evolutionary studies and religious perspectives, played a key role in several major scientific organizations, and helped many spanish-speaking female scholars and hispanic students, in particular, both in the united states and throughout the world. from the available information, it appears that the inquiry conducted by uci lacked genuine due process, fair- ness, and full transparency. we urge uci to acknowledge the possibility that its sanctions against professor ayala were enacted in haste and to reopen the case and investigate the matter more thor- oughly. we understand the wish of both the institution and professor ayala not to unduly prolong this whole unhappy episode. it is equally important, however, that justice be done and be seen to be done. if carried out properly, uci could help devise a more successful model for how institutions should deal with such situations in the future. devising an improved procedure for these cases would earn everyone’s gratitude. andrés moya and additional authors* institute of integrative systems biology, university of valència, valència, spain, and foundation for the promotion of health and biomedical research of valència region (fisabio), valència, spain. email: andres.moya@uv.es *the full list of authors is available online. s u p p l e m e n ta ry m at e r i a l s full list of authors www.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . /suppl/dc . /science.aau harassment charges: metoo but due process the resignation of eminent biologist francisco j. ayala amid charges of sexual harassment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) has left ayala’s home campus deeply divided. the controversy highlights problems in the way universities currently address charges of sexual harass- ment. because the university of california, irvine (uci), failed to post easily acces- sible guidelines on how the ayala case was handled, especially how and by whom final decisions were made, many uci faculty are concerned that the university overreached, imposing a punishment not commensurate with the specific charges of wrongdoing. a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment should include clearly stated procedures to protect due process and ensure propor- tional responses to wrongdoing. i will not engage in the ugly nastiness of “he said, she said” as we debate the veracity of accusations described in sala- cious detail (“report details harassment by famed biologist,” m. wadman, news in depth, july, p. ). these are human tragedies evolving in front of us. victims strive to regain lost self-esteem, along with justice. the accused wrestle with shock, forced to confront their own cluelessness at shifting mores, and everyone realizes how vulnerable we all are, including adminis- trators struggling to figure out how best to fairly confront sexual harassment and gender equality. we are all at risk when goodwill and communications break down. to fairly and equitably strike a balance between complacency and overreaction, i recommend three procedures to help achieve the notoriously difficult goal of changing attitudes toward gender. first, we must do more to foster a university climate that takes seriously and protects potential targets, be they male or female. part of that is recognizing that even subtle forms of verbal behavior—i.e., jokes or comments about appearance—make some women and minorities uncomfortable. yet resulting deferential treatment can contribute to a climate in which women or minorities are treated differently. even- tually, this subtle, differential treatment can foster continuing inequality. second, we must insist that legally correct poli- cies and procedures are followed when charges of sexual harassment are made. these procedures need to be transpar- ent and the same for all faculty. policies should be written in prose that even nonlawyers can understand and posted in obvious places, with regularly sched- uled discussion forums designed to help educate all members of the university community. third, the punishment must fit the crime. if tasteless, off-color jokes and the kind of ambiguous “unwanted touching” of which ayala was accused warrant his public humiliation, what do we do with more serious charges of sexual harassment? and why is hana ayala pun- ished for her husband’s acts by having her name removed from gifts to uci? the #metoo movement has done a great service in opening up an area too long taboo. but the failure to follow clearly es- tablished, fairly administered, and trans- parent procedures can too easily produce witch hunts that cast doubts on legitimate charges of sexual harassment. this will set back the move toward gender equality, in the academy and in society at large. kristen renwick monroe department of political science, university of california, irvine, irvine, ca , usa. email: krmonroe@uci.edu . /science.aau insights | l e t t e r s sciencemag.org s c i e n c e step up your job search with science careers • access thousands of job postings • sign up for job alerts • explore career development tools and resources search sciencecareers.org published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ 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http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/ / / / . . -c.dc http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ #metoo and female patients with major mental disorders: what should academic psychiatry do? editorial #metoo and female patients with major mental disorders: what should academic psychiatry do? john coverdale & laura weiss roberts & richard balon & eugene v. beresin & anthony p. s. guerrero & alan k. louie & rashi aggarwal & mary k. morreale & adam m. brenner received: october /accepted: october # academic psychiatry if it is hard for privileged women to come forward, we have to acknowledge how much harder it is for women who are marginalized to be believed. —carolyn m. west (new york times, september , ) [ ] #metoo is an international movement that was founded in . the movement aims to reframe and expand the conversation around sexual violence, to pro- vide assistance to providers, to hold perpetrators account- able, and to create solutions to interrupt sexual violence in communities [ ]. sexual violence against women and girls is a global problem [ ], and the #metoo movement brings much needed light to the plight of victims and to the pervasiveness of sexual violence. sexual violence takes many forms by perpetrators both male and female, includ- ing unwanted sexual comments or acts; derogatory sexual language or threats; coercive sexual behavior such as ha- rassment, stalking, and sexual assault or rape; forced or early marriage without consent; female genital mutilation; and sex trafficking. sexual violence is a part of criminal wartime behavior experienced by some, and sexual vio- lence is a part of everyday life experienced by many. in this issue of academic psychiatry, wainberg, mckinnon, and cournos [ ] assert the need for action in training psychiatric faculty and residents to discuss sexual well-being as a health care issue. at the time of writing, a search of pubmed using the term #metoo found other articles, none of which directly addressed the plight of patients with major mental disorders. nor have some in- fluential publications on violence specifically identified these patients as a risk group [ , ]. moreover, personal accounts of sexual violence by women in the new york times did not include women who identified as having psychiatric disorders [ , ], and direct representation of people with mental disorders tends to be limited in the media [ ]. consequently, the experiences of sexual vio- lence and needs of patients with major mental disorders is surely poorly appreciated by the general public and policy makers as well as overlooked in previous medical publi- cations concerning the #metoo movement. the #metoo website provides national resources for a wide spectrum of survivors but not specifically for women or men with major mental disorders [ ]. in this editorial, we aim to rectify this imbalance, seek- ing to elevate the issues encountered by women living with mental illness. we will describe some of the research on sexual violence against adult women with major men- tal disorders and briefly discuss some of the potential responses to this public health issue. we recognize that men, men with major mental disorders, adults with cog- nitive and physical impairments, and children and adoles- cents constitute other very vulnerable groups who are also especially worthy of attention. our focus for this editorial is limited to adult women with major mental disorders. by these methods, we hope to firmly entrench our patients into the #metoo conversation. * john coverdale jhc@bcm.edu baylor college of medicine, houston, tx, usa stanford university, stanford, ca, usa wayne state university, detroit, mi, usa harvard medical school, boston, ma, usa university of hawai’i john a. burns school of medicine, honolulu, hi, usa rutgers new jersey medical school, newark, nj, usa university of texas southwestern medical center, dallas, tx, usa https://doi.org/ . /s - - - academic psychiatry ( ) : – /published online: october http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:jhc@bcm.edu sexual violence perpetrated against women with major mental disorders because trauma can be causative of psychiatric disorders, it is important to be clear about the direction of causality in re- search concerning sexual trauma and major mental disorders. our interest for this editorial concerns the risk of sexual vio- lence against patients with established major mental disorders. studies that survey patients regarding whether or not they had been victims of sexual violence within a broad time frame of adulthood cannot clearly establish whether the patients were already diagnosed with serious mental disorders before be- coming victims of sexual violence [ ]. one recently conducted, and high-quality systematically conducted, review reported on studies on recent violence by any perpetrator against people with serious mental disor- ders [ ]. within this review, eight studies reported on the prevalence of various forms of sexual violence against women within the previous year with a median prevalence rate of % [ – ]. our own search found three additional studies [ – ]. of these studies, four were conducted in the usa [ , , , ], two in sweden [ , ], two in britain [ , ], two in the netherlands [ , ], and one in greece [ ]. the study samples included predominantly patients with schizo- phrenia or other psychotic disorders and bipolar or depressive disorders, although one provided data on patients who were currently depressed [ ]. response rates were greater than % for six of the studies [ – , , ], and six of the studies compared their data on sexual violence with compar- ison groups including the general population of individuals who were not mentally ill [ , , , , , ]. ten of the studies [ – , , ] assessed the rate of sexual violence over a -year period, with sexual violence usually being broadly defined, although two studies also provided data spe- cifically about rape [ , ]. one study assessed patients in an urban emergency department who had presented with a chief complaint of sexual assault [ ]. in this study, a major psychi- atric diagnosis was found in % of the women. these studies together found high rates of sexually violent acts per- petrated against women with major mental disorders [ – ]. overall, people with major mental disorders were at greater risk of sexual violence than comparison groups who did not have major mental disorders [ , , , , , ]. we did not find information on risks of becoming sexually trafficked among women with major mental disorders. although there is little information, risk factors associated with sexual victimization of persons with major mental disor- ders include homelessness, alcohol or substance abuse/mis- use, and illness severity [ , ]. concomitant physical, intel- lectual, social, and interpersonal disabilities also pose signifi- cant risks for sexual assault. women with mental health dis- orders who are at the mercy of caregivers or who are easily overpowered are more vulnerable to sexual abuse. furthermore, in many instances, because of their cognitive or communication deficits, they are less likely to be able to report abuse. it would be expected that violent acts against patients with major mental disorders would exacerbate their mental health problems. depression, anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and alcohol and substance use are potential conse- quences of stressful adversities. in one of the studies [ ], female victims with major mental disorders were more likely to report adverse psychological/social effects than those vic- tims without a major mental disorder. in another study [ ], assaults on women with a major psychiatric diagnosis were more violent and resulted in body trauma more frequently than assaults on women without a psychiatric diagnosis. primary prevention homelessness was identified as one of the risk factors for sexual violence perpetrated against patients with major mental disorders [ , ]. therefore, primary prevention, which is defined as preventing sexual violence from occurring, is sup- ported by providing housing and shelters where women have safety and privacy with locked doors and security. teaching social skills in the domains of finding and renting an apart- ment, using time well, getting closer to people, managing finances, avoiding drugs and alcohol problems, solving inter- personal problems, and managing one’s health are proposed as an important determinant of housing acquisition and support [ ]. the provision of stable housing for homeless adults with mental illness with intensive case management is also likely a cost-effective intervention in comparison with usual treat- ments [ ]. alcohol and substance use disorders have also been iden- tified as risk factors [ , ], and even when motivation for treatment is high, being homeless is associated with barriers to treatment [ ]. community outreach to substance users in community settings may be warranted. one helpful treatment model emphasized patient choice and housing over substance abuse treatment and did not penalize patients who refused treatment or relapsed on alcohol or drugs [ ]. people living with mental illnesses should also receive ed- ucational resources and emotional support related to how best to avoid potentially dangerous circumstances. financial sup- port and a guaranteed income should be provided for individ- uals with disabilities so that they do not have to resort to risky behaviors such as exchanging sex for financial gain. patients should also be taught key skills, such as how to resist unwant- ed advances and how to say no when feeling uncomfortable about offers for sex. psychoeducation, problem-solving, and communications skills training are integral aspects of evidence-based cognitive-behavioral approaches for the acad psychiatry ( ) : – treatment of major mental disorders [ ]. some patients with concomitant disabilities may not be amenable to psychoeducation or other means of individual primary preven- tion. in these cases, it is of the utmost importance to train, supervise, and sometimes monitor caregivers of the disabled to help prevent sexual assault. there is a dearth of evidence-based sexual assault resis- tance programs for women with major mental disorders. one potential model, which was efficacious for university women in reducing sexual assaults, is the enhanced, assess, acknowledge, act, sexual assault resistance program [ ]. this program consisted of four, -hour units of training, in- cluding ( ) a focus on improving women’s assessment of the risk of sexual assault by male acquaintances and developing problem-solving strategies to reduce perpetrator advantages, ( ) assisting women to more quickly acknowledge the danger in situations that turned coercive, ( ) providing instruction about and practice of effective options for resistance, includ- ing self-defense training, and ( ) providing sexual information and strategies to explore sexual attitudes, values, and desires and to develop strategies for sexual communication. this pro- gram was also successful in reducing the occurrence of sexual assaults for women at higher risk because of previous rape victimization [ ]. police may be able to assist in skills- based crime prevention programs [ ]. secondary prevention secondary prevention, which concerns reducing the psycho- logically and physically distressing consequences of sexual violence, is mainly facilitated by routine screening in all clin- ical settings. patients may be ashamed to report their abuse experiences or fear retaliation by perpetrators or even distrust their service providers. thus, inquiry has to be handled with sensitivity to patients’ cultural needs and vulnerabilities. patients should be informed about the rationale for screening and about confidentiality safeguards. most importantly, pa- tients should be treated with dignity and respect as sensitive issues surrounding sexual violence and negative sexual expe- riences are explored. psychiatrists should be mindful that questioning and physical assessments can further traumatize victims. screening questions should also include the possibil- ity that patients may be victims of sex trafficking [ ]. screening should also be supported by services that can adequately address identified problems and that can reduce psychological distress and improve the quality of life. services should be integrated with emergency services, nurs- ing, social work services, obstetrics and gynecology pro- grams, and sexual health. one model of a secondary preven- tion clinic program for female survivors of sexual violence, although not necessarily for those with major mental disor- ders, partnered obstetrics-gynecology with psychiatry in attempting to address the longer term sequela of sexual vio- lence in a trauma-informed setting [ ]. screening for the physical consequences of sexual assault and prophylaxis of sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies should occur according to established guidelines [ , ] with accommodations for the special needs of patients with major mental disorders, including assisting patients who have para- noia during the physical examination. the psychologically distressing consequences of sexual violence should also be formally identified, assessed, and treated. training should be provided in order to assist the clinicians most likely to work with this population in identifying and managing traumatized patients. the training especially should address barriers to screening, because occasions of sexual vi- olence are sometimes not recognized by mental health clini- cians [ ], and address how to manage effectively the physical and psychological consequences of sexually violent acts or to refer to others when indicated. some may view inquiry about violence as not a part of their role [ ]. potential barriers to sexual history-taking include a view that patients with chronic psychiatric illness are much the same as others when it comes to risky sexual behaviors, a lack of knowledge on how to educate patients, and discomfort in discussing sexual topics [ ]. although a trauma policy and training program im- proved staff response to abuse disclosures in new zealand outpatient mental health clinic settings, the proportion referred for relevant treatment remained low across abuse categories [ ]. for adult women with major mental disorders and con- comitant developmental disabilities in which screening may not be feasible or realistic, it is critical for caregivers to be attentive to the many causes of behavioral changes, such as agitation, depression, or diminished cognitive and communi- cation capacities. in addition, primary care physicians, allied health professionals, family members, and caregivers who know patients well should be trained to observe behavioral changes that may herald sexual assault. the police and the legal profession have especially valu- able contributions to make. the police may be the first to learn about sexual assaults, and they organize referrals for support and treatment [ ]. because even articulate and capable wom- en who do not have a mental disorder can experience great difficulties in negotiating the forensic and legal systems to seek redress [ ], it is especially important to see that these systems are optimized to accommodate patients with major mental disorders who become victims of violence. many in- dividuals may find that dealing with the forensic implications of their experiences with sexual violence represent, psycho- logically, a “second rape” [ ], and for this reason, services should be provided longitudinally. psychiatry has an impor- tant role in ensuring that this is so and in supporting patients through these systems. there is an emotional cost to bear when caring for patients who experience trauma. work-related support [ ] and acad psychiatry ( ) : – interventions to reduce burnout [ ] are important protective factors in the development of stress reactions. organizations and their leadership will likely be financially advantaged by investing in well-being programs [ ]. advocacy services should be adequately funded to support female pa- tients with major mental disorders who have been victims of violence. such services include providing training to those most likely to work with this population on effectively iden- tifying and managing patients who have experienced trauma, developing clinically integrated teams, and reaching out to community resources including the law enforcement and legal professions, providing women with social and financial sup- ports and resources when indicated including sanctuaries, ad- dressing safety in the areas where patients reside, and address- ing poverty and homelessness. a broad approach also in- cludes researching the efficacy of training programs and eval- uating the potential benefits and harms of treatment including human trafficking programs. we also need to develop the evidence base on the prevalence of sexual violence, risks, and their mitigation. in order to achieve these goals, adminis- trators and funders should appreciate the special vulnerabil- ities of women with major mental disorders and their risks to becoming victims of violence. and we should confront the pervasive cultural mechanisms that stigmatize and discrimi- nate against patients with mental disorders and that subvert funding and support. conclusion the #metoo movement has galvanized attention to sexual violence and to its solutions. female patients with major men- tal disorders constitute an especially vulnerable population at risk of sexual violence. women living with mental illness thoroughly deserve to be well represented in the #metoo con- versations. the profession of psychiatry and indeed all disci- plines who care for adult women with mental illnesses have critical roles to play in developing comprehensive primary and secondary preventive strategies and programs for which our patients are especially worthy. we should advocate for the services and research that protect and promote their interests and for education, especially of our trainees. the horror of sexual violence in all of its forms should drive our commit- ment to this end. compliance with ethical standards disclosure on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there are no conflicts of interest. references . forten j. #whyididn’treport: survivors of sexual assault share their stories after trump tweet. new york times, september , . available at https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/why- i-didnt-report-assault-stories.html. 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 october abstract the ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered most vital for scientific progress. existing ranking systems focus on measuring the influence of a scientific paper (citations)—these rankings do not reward journals for publishing innovative work that builds on new ideas. we propose an alternative ranking based on the proclivity of journals to publish papers that build on new ideas, and we implement this ranking via a text-based analysis of all published biomedical papers dating back to . our results show that our neophilia ranking is distinct from citation-based rankings. prior theoretical work suggests an active role for our neophilia index in science policy. absent an explicit incentive to pursue novel science, scientists underinvest in innovative work because of a coordination problem: for work on a new idea to flourish, many scientists must decide to adopt it in their work. rankings that are based purely on influence thus do not provide sufficient incentives for publishing innovative work. by contrast, adoption of the neophilia index as part of journal-ranking procedures by funding agencies and university administrators would provide an explicit incentive for journals to publish innovative work and thus help solve the coordination problem by increasing scientists’ incentives to pursue innovative work. * we thank bruce weinberg, vetla torvik, neil smalheiser, partha bhattacharyya, walter schaeffer, katy borner, robert kaestner, donna ginther, joel blit and joseph de juan for comments. we also thank seminar participants at the university of illinois at chicago institute of government and public affairs, at the research in progress seminar at stanford medical school, and at the national bureau of economic research working group on invention in an aging society for helpful feedback. finally, we thank the national institute of aging for funding for this research through grant p -ag . we are solely responsible for the content and errors in the paper. 
 . introduction the ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered important in science. the top ranked journals by their editorial policies set standards and often also the agenda for scientific investigation. editors make decisions about which papers to send out for review, which referees to ask for comments, requirements for additional analysis, and of course which papers to ultimately publish. these decisions work to check on the correctness of submitted papers, but they also let other scientists, administrators, and funding agencies know what is considered novel, important, and worthy of study (e.g. brown ; frey and katja ; katerattanakul et al. ; weingart ). highly ranked journals thus exert considerable influence on the direction that scientific disciplines move, as well as on the activity of scientists in each field. journal rankings are also important because they provide a filter for scientists in the face of a rapidly growing scientific literature (e.g. bird ). given the vast volume of published scientific work, it is impossible for scientists to read and independently evaluate every publication even in their field. since time is limited, as the number of scientific publications grows, the fraction of published papers that it is possible to read and carefully evaluate shrinks. journal rankings provide a way to quickly identify those articles that other scientists in a field are most likely to be familiar with. existing rankings of journals (or individual scientists) almost exclusively rely upon citation counts to determine the pecking order (e.g. abbott et al. ; adam ; chapron and husté ; egghe ; engemann and wall ; frey and katja ; garfield ; hirsch ; moed ; palacios-huerta and volij , ; tort et al. ). citations, of course, are a good measure of the influence of any given paper; a highly cited paper, almost by definition, has influenced many other scientists. while this reliance on citations is sensible if the goal of a ranking system is to identify the most influential journals, there is circularity in the logic. as financial rewards and professional prestige are tied to publishing in highly cited journals, scientists have a strong incentive to pursue work that has the best chance of being published in highly cited journals. often, this entails work that builds upon and emulates other work that has been published in such journals. highly cited journals may thus receive a high number of citations merely because scientists aim to publish in these journals. that a journal is highly cited need not tell us anything about what kind of science the journal promotes. one important reason for why rankings should consider also what kind of science is being pursued is that both individual scientists and journals face a coordination problem in moving to a new area of scientific investigation. as new ideas are often raw 
 when they are first born, they need revision and the attention of many scientists for the ideas to mature (kuhn ; marshall ). debate among an emerging community of scientists who build on a new idea is essential both for the idea to mature and for the idea to gain the attention of other scientists. if only one scientist, or only a few, try out a new idea in their work, no new area will open up to broader scientific attention (kuhn ). the presence of this coordination problem — that is, the dependence of scientists on other scientists to productively engage with their work — implies that even if citations accurately reflect the ex post value of working in a given area, absent specific incentives that reward novel science, a suboptimal amount of work takes place in novel areas. thus, a journal ranking system that rewards only influence will provide too little incentive for a scientist to work in a new area. reputable journals also face a similar coordination problem; publishing a one-off paper in a new area is unlikely to generate many cites unless multiple journals publish papers in that new area. this exacerbates the coordination problem among scientists who are considering working in a new area, as they need their articles published in reputable journals to attract the attention of fellow scientists to their new area. citation-based journal rankings thus provide scientists too little incentive to pursue work that builds on new ideas, and too little incentive for journals to publish work that builds on new ideas. hence, the ranking of scientific journals should instead be based at least partly on things that measure what type of science is being pursued. in this paper, we construct a new journal ranking that measures to what extent the articles published by a given journal build on new ideas. our neophilia-based ranking is tied directly to an objective of science policy; journals are ranked higher if they 
 a formal model of coordination failure among scientists is provided by besancenot and vranceaunu ( ). using a global games model (e.g. carlsson and van damme ; morris and shin ; sakovics and steiner ), they show that when scientists’ beliefs about the usefulness of a new idea differ even a little, too little novel science takes place in equilibrium. in related empirical work, foster et al. ( ) show that while successful novel research yields more citations than successful conventional research, the difference is not enough to compensate for the risk associated with pursuing innovative work. coordination problems among scientists and among journals are not the only reasons for why reliance on influence-based rankings alone does not provide sufficient incentives for high-impact journals to publish novel science. first, because disruptive science implies a decrease in citations to past breakthroughs, journals that have published those past breakthroughs face a disincentive in publishing disruptive science. second, editors of high-impact journals are often people whose ideas disruptive science seeks to challenge. this view has become become surprisingly common; even the editor-in-chief of the most highly cited scientific journal — science — has warned that citation-based metrics block innovation and lead to me- too science (alberts ). moreover, the rise of citation-based metrics over the past three decades may already be changing how scientists work: evidence from biomedicine shows that during this time scientists have become less likely to pursue novel research paths (foster et al. ). publish articles that explore the scientific frontier. our index is thus a useful complement to citation-based rankings — the latter fail to reward journals that promote innovative science. to construct our neophilia ranking of journals, we must first select a set of journals to be ranked. we rank journals in medicine because of the substantive importance of medical science, because this focus builds on our existing work (e.g. packalen and bhattacharya a), and because of the availability of a large database on publications in medicine (medline). for our corpus of medical research papers, we must first determine which published papers are built on new ideas and which are built on older ideas. we determine the ideas that each paper is built upon from its textual content. to find which ideas each paper builds upon, we take advantage of the availability of a large and well-accepted thesaurus, the united medical language system (“umls”). we allow each term in this thesaurus to represent an idea, broadly interpreted. hence, to determine which ideas each paper builds upon, we search each paper for all + million terms that appear in the umls thesaurus. for each paper we then determine the vintage of each term that appears in it based the paper’s publication year and the year in which the term first appeared in published biomedical literature. next, we determine for each paper the age of the newest term that appears in it. based on this age of the newest term that appears in each paper, we then determine for each journal to what degree it publishes innovative work — papers that mention relatively new terms. this yields us the neophilia index that we propose in this paper. one advantage of the umls thesaurus is that it reveals which terms are synonyms, allowing us to treat synonyms as representing the same idea when we construct our neophilia index. however, we also show that neophilia rankings change very little when we employ an alternative approach to constructing the neophilia index, an approach that does not take advantage of the umls thesaurus in any way. in this alternative approach, we construct the neophilia index by indexing all words and word sequences that appear in each paper rather than only words and word sequences that appear in the umls thesaurus. this sensitivity analysis shows that the neophilia ranking can be constructed also for areas of science for which no thesaurus is available. besides calculating the new ranking for each journal, we examine the relationship between the neophilia-based measure and the traditional citation-based impact factor rankings. we find that impact factor ranking and our neophilia index are only weakly linked, which shows that our index captures a distinct aspect of each journal’s role in promoting scientific progress. 
 . methods in this section we first present the two sets of medical journals to which we apply the neophilia ranking procedure that we propose in this paper. we then explain how the neophilia index is constructed for each journal. next, we discuss our approach for comparing the neophilia ranking against an influence-based ranking. the section concludes with methods for four sets of sensitivity analyses. . journals we rank we analyze two sets of medical journals. the first set of journals is the set of journals that are ranked annually by thomson reuters (tr) under the category general and internal medicine. journals in this category are aimed at a general medical audience; this set does not include field journals — even highly ranked field journals — that are aimed at practitioners in a particular medical specialty. the use of this set is advantageous for two reasons. the general nature of these journals implies that the rankings will be relevant to a large audience. moreover, reliance on a journal set used by tr allows us to examine the relationship between our neophilia index and the widely used citation-based impact factor ranking — a ranking that is published by tr. while tr lists journals in the general and internal medicine category, we calculate the neophilia index for only journals. this is for several reasons. four of the journals are not indexed in medline. some of the journals are review journals (e.g. cochrane database of systematic reviews) whereas we only rank original research articles (and thereby exclude not just reviews but also editorials, commentaries, etc.). moreover, for some journals medline has little or no information on article abstracts whereas we only rank articles for which the database includes sufficient textual information. the second set of journals that we analyze is the set of journals that are listed as belonging to the core clinical journals category by medline (this journal set is also referred to as abridged index medicus). core clinical journals includes both general medicine journals as well as well-known field journals from different areas of medicine. this journal set allows us to examine if either journals aimed at the whole profession or specialized journals play a dominant role in promoting the trying out of new ideas in medicine. . constructing the neophilia index for a journal the neophilia index that we propose in this paper measures to what extent articles published in a given journal build on new ideas; the index reflects a journal’s 
 propensity to publish innovative articles that try out new ideas. we construct this index based on the textual content of original research articles that appear in a journal. we determine the textual content of a journal from the medline database. medline is a comprehensive database of + million biomedical scientific publications. comprehensive coverage of this database begins in . for articles published before the textual information generally includes the title but not the abstract of each article. for articles published since the data generally include both the title and the abstract of each article. for this reason, in our baseline specification we calculate the neophilia index for a journal based on articles published in it during - . to determine which ideas each paper in medline builds upon we use this database in conjunction with the united medical language system (umls) metathesaurus. the umls database is a comprehensive and widely used medical thesaurus that consists of over million different terms (e.g. chen et al. ; xu et al. ). the umls database is referred to as a metathesaurus because it links the terms mentioned in over separate medical vocabularies. each term in the umls database is linked to one or more of categories of terms. further below we present the name of each of these categories and for each category a plethora of examples of terms in the category. an additional curated feature of the umls metathesaurus is that terms that are considered synonyms are linked to one another. this feature enables us to treat terms that are synonyms as representing the same idea. we will thus avoid the mistake of assigning a high neophilia ranking to a journal that merely prefers to publish articles that use novel terminology for seasoned ideas. the construction of the neophilia index for a journal proceeds in four steps. in steps - we treat original research articles published in any journal the same; only in step do we focus the analysis on the two journal sets mentioned in section . . step . determine when each term was new. for each term in the umls thesaurus, we first 
 an alternate approach to ours might measure the vintage of ideas on which a paper is built by the vintage of the publications that the paper cites. the main disadvantage of this approach is that a citation is an ambiguous reference. citations are sometimes signposts for a bundle of ideas that have appeared in a literature over a long period of time, rather than a pointer to a particular idea in a paper. thus, it is problematic to infer that a paper builds on a novel idea simply because it cites recent papers. additionally, a citation may instead reflect similarity in the aims of the citing and cited papers, rather than a citation to any particular idea. to the extent that this is the case, a high propensity to cite recent articles in a journal would merely be a reflection of publishing papers in areas with many similar papers rather than a reflection of the authors’ love of trying out new ideas. citation-based indices are thus best viewed as measuring a journal’s influence — useful for some purposes — and complementary to the neophilia-based approach we outline in this paper. in umls, terms that are synonyms are mapped to one “concept id”. there are million concept ids and million terms. thus, each umls term has approximately . synonyms on average. determine the earliest publication year among all those articles in the medline database that mention the term (we search all + million medline articles for each term). for terms that have no synonyms in the umls metathesaurus, we refer to this year of first appearance in medline as the term’s cohort year. for a term that has synonyms, we find the earliest year in which either the term itself or any of its synonyms appeared in medline and then assign that year as the cohort year of the term. thus, all terms that are considered synonyms receive the same cohort year. determining the cohort year of each term allows us to determine in the next steps which papers mention terms that are relatively new. step . determine age of newest term mentioned in each article. for each original research paper in medline we then index which of the + million terms in the umls database appear in the article. having found which umls terms appear in each article, we determine the age of each such umls term by calculating the difference between the publication year of the medline article in question and the cohort year of the umls term. next, we determine the identity and age of the newest terms mentioned in each paper (here we consider all terms in cohorts - ). this concludes step . before proceeding to present step , we now pause to show lists of example terms in each category. for the sake of presenting these lists and for the sake of several sensitivity analyses to be discussed further below (section . ), we have grouped each of umls’s categories for terms to category groups that we constructed (the number in parenthesis is the number of umls categories we assigned to the group): clinical ( ), anatomy ( ), drug ( ), research tools ( ), basic science i ( ), basic science ii ( ), miscellaneous i ( ), and miscellaneous ii ( ). we constructed two basic science groups merely to limit the size of each list; the first basic science category includes processes and functions, the other everything else. the latter of the two “miscellaneous” groups includes many terms that one may argue do not represent idea inputs to scientific work in the traditional sense; in a sensitivity analysis we exclude from the analysis the terms in this category group. by clicking on one of the following links the reader can open an embedded document that shows example terms for each umls category in a given category group. the terms listed for decade in each category group are those terms that are the most often the newest umls term for some paper in the medline database. the purpose of this popularity ranking is merely expositional. in constructing the neophilia index we treat 
 the popularity ranking allows us to limit the size of the embedded files (there are , umls terms in cohorts - that are at least once the newest term in a medline paper published during - ). focus on less popular terms would obviously put readers not working in those few research areas where such terms are used at a considerable disadvantage. all umls terms the same irrespective of how many times they are mentioned in the medline database and how many times they are the newest term for some paper. [the links do not access the internet; they open inside abobe acrobat and may not work insider a browser; the documents are also available on the first author’s homepage.] list . clinical (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . anatomy (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . drug (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . research tool (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . basic science i (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . basic science ii (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . miscellaneous i (click here to open an embedded pdf document) list . miscellaneous ii (click here to open an embedded pdf document) we hope that browsing these lists makes two issues evident to the reader — at least to a reader with some familiarity with changes in biomedical science in the last years. first, the terms captured by our approach represent ideas that have served as inputs to biomedical science in recent decades. second, the cohort year for most terms is a reasonable reflection of the time period when the idea represented by the term was a new idea as an input to biomedical scientific work. step . determining which papers mention relatively new terms. having determine the age of the newest umls term that appear in each article, we next determine which articles mention relatively new terms. to achieve this, we first order all papers published in any given year based on the age of the newest umls term that mention in it (as mentioned above, the analysis is limited to all original research papers — we exclude editorials, reviews, etc. from the analysis). using this ordering we then construct a dummy variable top % by age of newest idea input that is for papers that are in the top % based on the age of the newest term that appears in them and for all other papers. thus, this dummy variable is for papers that mention one or more relatively new terms and for papers that only mention older terms. in our baseline specification the comparison group for each article is very broad when the top % by age of newest idea input dummy variable is constructed: the comparison group is all other articles published in the same year. however, in sensitivity analyses 
 we employ much narrower comparison groups. specifically, in these sensitivity analyses we compare articles to other articles published in the same research area in the same year (section . . ). we selected the % cutoff to allow for such very strict comparison sets in the sensitivity analyses. in our related previous work (packalen and bhattacharya a) we have not found any meaningful differences owing to different cutoff percentiles. step . constructing the neophilia index for a journal. having constructed for each article the dummy variable top % by age of newest idea input, the variable that captures whether the paper mentions a new term, we calculate the average value of this variable for each journal during the time period under consideration. next, we perform a normalization: we divide these journal-specific average values by the average value of the dummy variable top % by age of newest idea input for all journals in the journal set general and internal medicine. the resulting variable is our journal-specific neophilia index. based on this index, we determine the neophilia ranking of each journal in a given journal set. the neophilia index is between and for journals that promote the trying out of new ideas less than the average article in the journal set general and internal medicine. for example, a neophilia index of . for a journal implies that articles in that journal mention a relatively new idea % less often than the average article in this journal set. the neophilia index is greater than for journals that promote the trying out of new ideas more than the average article published in the journal set general and internal medicine. for example, a neophilia index of . for a journal implies that articles in that journal mention a relatively new idea % more often than the average article published in this journal set. . comparison of a neophilia index and citation ranking to compare our neophilia index against citation based journal rankings, we make use of the impact factor rankings published by tr for the year for journals in the journal set general and internal medicine. analysis of the relationship between our neophilia index and the citation ranking reveals whether our neophilia index captures an aspect 
 a % cutoff means the comparison set can be as small as articles. a % cutoff would mean that the comparison set can be as small as articles. when there are fewer than articles in a comparison group, which only occurs in our sensitivity analyses, we assign the top % status to the article at the top of “age of the newest term” ordering. in our baseline specification this time period is - . we weight observations for each decade so that the total weight of observations for any given decade is the same as the total weight of observations is for any other decade. of scientific progress that is distinct from features of scientific progress that are captured by citation based measures. if a journal with a higher citation ranking than another journal always has also a higher neophilia ranking than the other journal, the neophilia index would be of little value. on the other hand, the neophilia index does have value as an input to science policy if the relationship between the neophilia index and impact factor rankings is not one-to-one. . sensitivity analyses we perform four sets of sensitivity analyses. . . sensitivity analysis i: time periods in our baseline specification we calculate the neophilia index of a journal based on the + million original research articles published during - (for our medline data the year is the last year of comprehensive coverage). to examine how stable the neophilia index is over time, we also calculate the index separately for four time periods: s, s, s, and - . . . sensitivity analysis ii: subsets of umls terms in our baseline specification we construct the neophilia index based on all terms in the umls thesaurus. in one set of sensitivity analyses we calculate the neophilia index based on narrower sets of umls terms. first, we calculate the neophilia index after excluding mentions of terms in the category group “miscellaneous ii”. this allows us to examine if the neophilia ranking is robust to excluding terms which may not reflect traditional idea inputs to scientific work. second, we calculate the neophilia index after excluding mentions of terms in the category groups “miscellaneous ii” and “drug”. this allows us to examine to what extent our baseline neophilia ranking is driven by research on novel pharmaceutical agents. third, we calculate the neophilia index by only including in the analysis terms in the category groups “clinical” and “drug”. this allows us to examine how different the neophilia rankings would be for a decision maker that is only interested in advancing applied clinical knowledge. thus, in each of these sensitivity analyses, we exclude from the analysis terms from some umls categories. however, because in some umls terms are appear in multiple 
 categories, some terms that appear in the excluded categories will still be included in the analysis — provided they also appear in one or more of the still included categories. . . sensitivity analysis iii: narrower comparison groups in our baseline specification we construct the neophilia index by comparing each article to all articles published in the same year. in one set of sensitivity analyses we address the fact that some journals may choose to publish articles that are written on topics that are from a field where scientists are more inclined to try out new ideas but may at the same time be less willing to publish articles that use novel terms given the standards of the field. specifically, in these sensitivity analyses, we no longer compare a publication to all publications published in the same year when we determine a publication’s top % status based on the age of the newest term mentioned in it. instead, we compare the publication to other publications published in the same research area in the same year when we determine a publication’s top % status. for these analyses, we follow our earlier work (packalen and bhattacharya a) and determine research areas based on the -digit medical subject heading (mesh) codes by which each medline publication indexed. mesh is a controlled medical vocabulary of over , terms. mesh terms and corresponding codes are affixed to each publication by professional coders with a biomedical degree. we consider papers marked with the same mesh codes to be in the same research area. in one analysis, we construct the research areas based on the mesh disease terms mentioned in each article; for our purposes these terms serve as a proxy for clinical research areas in one analysis, we construct the research areas based on the mesh phenomena and processes terms mentioned in each article; for our purposes these terms serve as a proxy for basic research areas. having determined the comparison group (based on research area and year of publication) for each publication, we determine which papers in that comparison group are in the top % based on the age of the newest term mentioned in them. this dummy variable is then used to construct the neophilia index (analogously to the baseline specification). . . sensitivity analysis iv: n-gram approach in our baseline specification, we determine the ideas that each paper builds upon based on the vintage of any umls terms that appear in it. in one sensitivity analysis, we 
 instead follow our earlier work (packalen and bhattacharya abc) and determine the ideas that each paper builds upon based the vintage of words and - and - word sequences that appear in it. in this alternative approach (“n-gram approach”) we first index for each publication all words and word sequences that appear in it. for all such “concepts” that appear in medline, we then determine the cohort year of each such concept as the earliest publication year among papers that mention the concept in the medline database. for each concept cohort we then determine which concepts in the cohort are the most popular concepts in the cohort. popularity of each concept is determined based on the number of publications in which it has appeared since. for each cohort year during - , we then cull through the list of the top most popular concepts in the cohort and exclude concepts that likely do not represent idea inputs in the traditional sense. the remaining top concepts for each cohort are then used to determine the vintage of idea inputs in any given publication — in the exact the same way that we employ the umls thesaurus in the baseline specification. the neophilia index for a journal is then calculated based on the vintage of the newest idea input in each paper. the only difference to the baseline specification is again that the curated top concept lists — one list for each concept cohort — are used in place of the terms that make up the umls thesaurus. one advantage of constructing the neophilia index using the n-gram approach is that it does not depend on the availability of a thesaurus, which may not not exist for all fields. one potential disadvantage of the n-gram approach — relative to the baseline specification which relies on the umls thesaurus — is that the n-gram approach may assign a different cohort year to two words that are synonyms. to the extent that this occurs, in the present context it would imply that journals that prefer using newer terminology for old ideas receive higher neophilia scores even though the work published in these journals is not particularly innovative in any way that genuinely advances science. . results our results consist of four sets of results: neophilia rankings for highly cited journals in the general and internal medicine journal set (table ), neophilia rankings for all journals in the same journal set (table ), a scatterplot and a regression line for the relationship between the neophilia index and the citation-based impact factor rankings for the same journal set (figure ), and neophilia rankings for the journal set core clinical journals (table ). in each table, columns d and a, respectively, show the 
 neophilia index and the corresponding neophilia ranking for the baseline specification. column b shows the journal name (medline abbreviation) and column c shows the number of original research articles published during - based on which the neophilia index shown in column d was calculated. columns - show the results for the four sets of sensitivity analyses. entries in each table are color coded, with reddish hues indicating a high propensity to publish articles that mention novel terms relative to the average paper and blue indicating the lowest propensity. we next discuss each of these results in turn. table shows the neophilia ranking for highly cited general and internal medicine journals. to construct this table, we calculated the neophilia index for the most cited journals that are both ranked by tr in the general and internal medicine journal category and for which data is available in medline to construct the neophilia index. the highly cited status is determined based on tr impact factors in . these journals are arguably some of the most prestigious english language medical journals. among these highly cited medical journals, the new england journal of medicine (n engl j med) ranks at the top of our neophilia index. the number . in the top row of column d indicates that over the period to , the new england journal of medicine was % more likely to publish articles that mention novel terms compared to the average article published in the general and internal medicine journal set. by contrast, out of these journals, the british medical journal (bmj) was the least likely to publish articles that mention new terms during this period. overall, several features stand out from the results reported in table . first, these highly cited journals vary considerably in their propensity to publish articles that try out new ideas. for the two journals with the highest neophilia indices in column d — the new england journal of medicine and bmc medicine (bmc med)— the neophilia index is more than twice as large as the neophilia index is for either of the two journals with the lowest neophilia index in column d— the british medical journal and the canadian medical association journal (cmaj). prestigious high-influence journals are not equal in terms of their ability to reward innovative science. second, while out of the prestigious journals have a higher than average propensity to publish articles that try out new ideas (that is, for journals in table the neophilia index in column d is above . ), at the same time out of these prestigious journals 
 two top journals in the tr impact factor rankings are excluded from our analysis. cochrane database of systematic reviews is excluded because it does not publish sufficiently many original research articles — the focus of the journal is on reviews. journal of cachexia, sarcopenia, and muscle is excluded because medline does not have sufficient textual information on this journal. accordingly, the highly cited journals in table are among the top most cited journals in the general and internal medicine category. have a lower than average propensity to publish articles that try out new ideas (the british medical journal and the canadian medical association journal). being a prestigious high-influence journal does not automatically imply that the journal encourages innovative science. third, for most of these journals the neophilia index and the corresponding neophilia ranking remain relatively stable over time. this is shown by the time-period specific neophilia indices reported in columns a- d of table . that said, some changes over time are apparent. for instance, the neophilia index for the new england journal of medicine has increased substantially from s to s (from . to . ). on the other hand, for annals of internal medicine (ann intern med) the neophilia index has changed from well-above average to merely average (from . to . ), and the neophilia indices for the british medical journal and the canadian medical association journal have plummeted from average to well-below average (from . to . , and from . to . , respectively). it is also interesting to note that one relatively new journal, bmc medicine, fares so well in the rankings, but another, plos medicine, appears to be struggling in recent years after initially succeeding in publishing innovative work. fourth, for most journals the neophilia index and the corresponding neophilia ranking remain robust to the other sensitivity analyses that are reported in columns a- c, a- b, and of table . the neophilia indices reported in columns a- c rely on different subsets of umls terms, such as the set that excludes novel pharmaceutical terms (column b). the neophilia indices reported in columns a and b in turn control for the propensity to publish in hot clinical research areas or in hot basic science areas, respectively. while these adjustments have small effects on the relative rankings of these top journals in our neophilia index, they do not have a large effect. this consistency with our main results is not surprising given that these general interest journals tend to publish papers from a broad set of areas, not just drug trials or particular hot clinical or basic science fields. finally, the neophilia indices reported in column show that the rankings are relatively robust to using the alternative n-gram based approach in place of the umls thesaurus approach used in the baseline specification. we now turn our attention to table , which lists the neophilia index and the corresponding ranking for all journals in the general and internal medicine category (for out of journals in this category enough data is available in medline to construct the neophilia index). we have indicated in bold text those journals which are also present in table (the table on highly cited journals). the top ranked journals in table are current medical research and opinion, the american journal of chinese medicine, and translational research, none of which rank among the top based on citations. this indicates that our neophilia rankings and citations-based impact factor rankings capture 
 different aspects of science. the fact that journals translational research and journal of investigative medicine are highly ranked in our neophilia rankings ( rd and th, respectively) is reassuring because these journals strive to promote the very thing that our measure seeks to capture — innovative science that builds on new ideas (the journals aim to translate new ideas in ways that benefit patient health). columns a- d of table show that also for this broad set of journals the neophilia index remains relatively stable over time. this persistence in journal neophilia indices over time implies that the neophilia rankings of these journals during any given time period are not random; to a significant degree the rankings are the result of variations in editorial policies across journals. columns a- c of table in turn show that with some exceptions the neophilia rankings are also relatively independent of the set of umls terms that are included in the analysis. one such exception concerns the exclusion of terms in the “drug” category from the analysis (column b): unsurprisingly this dramatically lowers the neophilia index for journals that are mainly focused on research on effects of new pharmaceutical agents — these journals include current medical research and opinion and international journal of clinical practice (rows and , respectively). columns a- d of table show that the neophilia rankings are relatively stable to selecting narrower comparison groups in determining which articles build on new ideas. finally, column shows that the neophilia rankings remain relatively robust to constructing the neophilia index based on appearance of new n-grams rather than based on the appearance of new umls terms. we now turn to the results shown in figure on the link between our neophilia index and the traditional citation-based impact factor rankings. the scatterplot shows for each journal in the general and internal medicine category the journal’s citation based impact factor ranking in (horizontal axis) against the journal’s neophilia index for the - period (vertical axis). the figure also shows the least squares regression line for these observations. the scatterplot and the regression line shown in figure demonstrate that more cited journals generally have also a higher neophilia index (p < . ). there is, however, considerable variation around this regression line, with some less cited journals faring very well on our neophilia index, and some highly cited journals being relatively averse to publishing papers that build on fresh ideas. our earlier results showing the strong persistence in the neophilia index over time (table and table ) implies that to a significant degree this variation around the regression line reflects genuine, persistent, differences in editorial policies across journals. that the relationship between the 
 citation ranking and our neophilia index is not monotonic implies that the neophilia index captures an aspect of scientific progress that is not captured by citations. the neophilia index proposed here thus has value as an additional input to science policy. we next turn our attention to results in table , which reports neophilia rankings for the journal set core clinical journals. this set includes both general medical journals and specialized field journals. we have again indicated in bold text those journals which are also present in table . the most neophilic journals on this list are blood, the journal of immunology, and medical letters on drugs and therapeutics, showing that no field dominates over others in terms of the propensity to try out new ideas. the same observation is supported by scrolling further down the list; no field appears to have an obvious domination over others in terms of having more journals closer to the top. in the rankings of table , there are specialized journals above the most neophilic general medical journal (the new england journal of medicine). and there are even many more specialized journals above another highly cited general medical journal (the british medical journal, ranked th). these observations indicate that, while general medical journals are usually viewed as more prestigious, field journals too play an important role in promoting the trying out of new ideas in medicine. neither field journals nor general medical journals appear to have a monopoly in this regard. the results across the different columns of table follow the pattern that is familiar from tables and . first, there is a lot of variation in the neophilia index across journals. second, the neophilia index is relatively stable over time, though some variation exists. the journal hospital practice (row ) is an extreme outlier in this regard. but the sudden change its neophilia index is not unexpected as it published no articles during - ; when the journal was brought back to life it likely followed very different editorial practices compared to its previous incarnation. third, the neophilia index is generally robust to employing a different set of umls terms in the analysis. one exception to this robustness is that excluding terms in the “drug” category group leads journals such as medical letters on drugs and therapeutics and anesthesia and analgesia (rows and , respectively) to fall quite dramatically in the rankings. because these journals focus on research on new drug compounds, this is not a surprising finding. in fact, it again acts as one validity test for our methods. fourth, the neophilia index is relatively insensitive to choosing narrower comparison sets and 
 in table each neophilia index is again normalized relative to journals in the general and internal medicine journal set. this way, the neophilia index does not change from one table to the next for journals that appear also in table or table . in principle, of course, in constructing a neophilia index the normalization can be performed relative to any set of of journals. to employing the n-gram approach over the umls thesaurus approach. . discussion our primary finding is that, on average, highly cited prestige journals in biomedicine actually do a good job in promoting innovative science. this is surprising in one regard. one might think that lower ranked journals would attempt to distinguish themselves by seeking novelty. one possible explanation for this surprising finding is our focus on medicine, rather than other scientific disciplines. by focusing on medicine, we have selected the area of science that may be most disciplined by the practical usefulness of its findings. this discipline may lead prestige journals to be less likely influenced by citation-oriented rankings, and to seek out innovative work that will affect the treatment of patients. hence, when our neophilia index is exported to other fields, we might expect different results. furthermore, we should be careful about what to expect given the nature of the coordination problem. this problem causes journals to publish less innovative science than they would absent the problem — it does not necessarily make less influential journals more likely to publish innovative work. nevertheless, knowing the impact factor alone does not automatically predict the position in the neophilia-based index; there are high impact journals with a low neophilia score and there are lower impact journals with a high neophilia score. while the link between citation-based rankings and the neophilia index is positive, it is not a one-to-one relationship. for example, we found that some prestigious highly cited medical journals have even a below average neophilia score. one implication of these results is that focusing on impact factor alone does not provide appropriate incentives for journals to publish innovative work in biomedicine. furthermore, lower ranked journals appear to play an important role in science by serving as an outlet for innovative work that — for whatever reason — is not poised to draw many citations from others in a field. a complementary finding of ours was that neither general medical journals nor specialized field journals dominate over one another in terms of publishing innovative work; both types of journals play an important role in advancing science in this regard. . potential limitations one possible critique of taking the neophilia index seriously is that it might lead a journal to publish work that builds on new ideas simply for the sake of improving its neophilia score, even when the editors do not view the innovative work as particularly 
 important in the field. propagating the neophilia index, under this reasoning, may create incentives on the part of journals to game the index by distorting publication decisions in order to improve a journal’s position. in our view, this is a benefit arising from the neophilia index, rather than an unintended harm. we want journals to compete to publish work that elaborates on newer ideas because it makes science healthier: prior theoretical work suggests that absent such an incentive scientists underinvest in innovative science. furthermore, one can tweak the index in many ways depending on the purpose; for instance, one can construct the index only based on ideas that have stood the test of time or based on ideas that exceed some popularity threshold. of course, as with citation-based rankings, the novelty-based ranking too can have unintended consequences. for example, scientists and journals may be tempted to merely mention new ideas rather than actually incorporate them in their work. for most individuals and journals the potential reputational costs should prevent this. moreover, algorithms will be developed to detect such behavior, as will new more robust versions of the ranking. these developments will mirror the proliferation of various citation- based indexes. . conclusion for science to advance, it is important that journals publish articles that are at the frontier of science. at the same time, papers that are at the frontier — papers that explore new ideas or new areas within a field — are sometimes difficult to get published because there is no existing community of scholars to evaluate the idea and further develop it. this coordination problem leads to a suboptimal rate of publishing at the frontier. journals can play an important role in combatting this problem by publishing papers that try out new ideas, but will be less willing to do so if they are not rewarded for it. a citation-based ranking system alone will not provide appropriate incentives because it is tied only to the influence that papers published in a journal has, rather than directly to the innovativeness of the published papers. by contrast, the neophilia-based index proposed in this paper captures the proximity of each journal to the scientific frontier. publishing the neophilia ranking for medicine and other fields can directly lead to more innovative science. because the ranking provides a visible signal to the scientific community that a journal with a high ranking values innovation, and scientists long for the recognition of other scientists, the new ranking should make the decision to try out innovative but risky ideas easier. once scientists start paying attention to the new 
 rankings, journals will do the same. a positive feedback loop encouraging innovative experimentation will result. adoption of the neophilia ranking as part of tenure and promotion and granting decisions by university administrators and grant agencies will reinforce this positive feedback loop. we hope that the journal ranking method proposed in this paper opens an empirical conversation on how novelty should be measured. as argued in the previous section, other versions of the neophilia index can and should be designed for different purposes. what should not be controversial, in our view, is the idea that novelty— like impact — can and should be quantified. in the age of relentless quantification scientists can ill afford to hide behind the excuse that the ingenuity of their own work cannot be measured. the issue seems also urgent: exploration in science may be on the decline (foster et al. ) and the reliance on impact factors may hinder not just exploration (e.g. alberts ) but also the desire to become scientists in the first place (osterloh and frey ). in this paper, we have proposed the neophilia ranking as a constructive way to start addressing these issues. we close with a proposed agenda for future research in this area. in our view, what is needed is a suite of indices that are tied to those aspects of science that we want scientific work to exhibit. trying out new ideas is one important aspect of a healthy science. citation-based indexes too will continue to have their place; scientific impact is still important. one could easily list others, such as the presence of work that exchanges ideas across fields, papers that affect real world decisions and outcomes (such as patient mortality), and so on. theoretical and quantitative work to develop these metrics is an agenda that is important for effective science policy. references abbott, a., cyranoski, d., jones, n., maher, b., schiermeier, q. and r. van noorden, , metrics: do metrics matter? nature , pp. - . adam, d., , citations: the counting house, nature , pp. – . alberts, b., , impact factor distortions, science, , p. . bird, s. b., , journal impact factors, h indices, and citation analyses in toxicology, journal of medical toxicology, ( ), pp. - . brown, j. d., , citation searching for tenure and promotion: an overview of issues and tools, reference services review, ( ), pp. - . frey, b. and r. katja, , do rankings reflect research quality? journal of applied science, ( ), pp. - . carlsson, h. and e. van damme, , global games and equilibrium selection, econometrica, ( ), pp. - . chapron, g and a. husté, , open, fair, and free journal ranking for researchers. bioscience, ( ), pp. - . chen, y., perl, y., geller, j. and j. j. cimino, , analysis of a study of users, uses, and future agenda of the umls, journal of the american medical informatics association, ( ) pp. - . egghe, l., , theory and practice of the g-index, scientometrics, ( ), pp. - . engemann, k. m. and h. j. wall, , a journal ranking for the ambitious economist, federal reserve bank of st. louis review, ( ), pp. - . foster, j. g., rzhetsky, a. and j. a evans, , tradition and innovation in scientists’ research strategies, american sociological review, ( ), pp. - . garfield, e., , citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation, science, , pp. - . hirsch, j. e., , an index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output, proceedings of the national academy of science, , pp. - . katerattanakul, p., razi, m. a., han, b. t., and h.-j kam, , consistency and concern on is journal rankings, journal of information technology theory and application (jitta), ( ), pp. - . kuhn, t. s., , the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago university press. marshall, a., , principles of economics, th ed. london: macmillan and co. moed, h. f., , uk research assessment exercises: informed judgments on research quality or quantity? scientometrics, ( ), pp. - . morris, s. and h. s. shin, , global games: theory and applications, in dewatripont, m., hansen, l. and s. turnovsky (eds.) advances in economics and econometrics. cambridge university press. osterloh, m. and b. s. frey, , ranking games, evaluation review, , pp. - .
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. http://link.springer.com/journal/ science journals — aaas review false equivalencies: online activism from left to right deen freelon , *, alice marwick , , daniel kreiss , digital media are critical for contemporary activism—even low-effort “clicktivism” is politically consequential and contributes to offline participation. we argue that in the united states and throughout the industrialized west, left- and right-wing activists use digital and legacy media differently to achieve political goals. although left-wing actors operate primarily through “hashtag activism” and offline protest, right-wing activists manipulate legacy media, migrate to alternative platforms, and work strategically with partisan media to spread their messages. although scholarship suggests that the right has embraced strategic disinformation and conspiracy theories more than the left, more research is needed to reveal the magnitude and character of left-wing disinformation. such ideological asymmetries between left- and right-wing activism hold critical implications for democratic practice, social media governance, and the interdisciplinary study of digital politics. a ctivism is a fixture of contemporary politics, both democratic and otherwise. at its core is the drive to enact or pre- vent political, cultural, and/or social changes by a range of means. although nonelite citizens have advanced activist claims against the powers that be for millennia ( ), in the st century, digital media offer un- precedented tools for activists around the world to help realize their sociopolitical visions. in this review, which focuses on the united states but also incorporates evidence from other countries, we argue that both the ideological left and right use the ad- ditional channels and low-cost parti- cipation afforded by digital media to reach potentially sympathetic publics. however, despite some similarities, re- cent research indicates that left and right differ sharply in how they use di- gital media. whereas the left generally combines on- and offline protest ac- tions with transmedia branding, an ap- proach known as “hashtag activism” ( ), the right tends to eschew offline protest (notwithstanding a few prominent excep- tions), preferring instead a combination of “trolling” or manipulating mainstream me- dia, protest against and even strategic exit from platforms owned by “big tech,” and cooperation with ideologically friendly me- dia outlets. moreover, available evidence suggests that the right has invested far more than the left in disinformation and conspiracy theories as core components of its activist repertoire, although a lack of sim- ilar research on the left makes comparisons difficult. these asymmetric trends hold im- portant implications both for scholarship and for democratic practice. low cost, high benefit: clicktivism and political participation since the start of social media’s diffusion throughout western societies, concerns have been raised about its efficacy for political par- ticipation. one prominent early objection was that “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” low-cost sym- bolic actions such as sharing, “liking,” changing one’s profile image, and generally posting ac- tivist content on social media, projects an impression of efficacy without actually being effective ( ). the two assumptions underlying this objection are, first, that such digitally mediated symbolic behaviors are generally not consequential in and of themselves and, sec- ond, that they substitute for more impactful actions such as voting or offline protest. later, we will turn to recent research on how digital activism can be highly impactful on its own, contributing to phenomena such as disinfor- mation. meanwhile, empirical research has consistently failed to support the proposition that digital action substitutes for offline action ( – ). that is, people who are strongly inte- rested in politics tend to express that interest through both online and offline behaviors. dig- ital political activities–including low-cost ones– are a complement to, not a substitute for, their offline counterparts. inversely, those who are uninterested in politics tend to avoid it both online and offline. specifically, lane et al. found that sharing information about politics on social media predicted offline political ac- tivities such as attending political meetings, contacting public officials, and donating money to political campaigns ( ). de zúñiga et al. ( ) found that the use of social media to address community problems, which they call “social media social capital,” predicted the propensity to engage in similar activities offline. and a meta- analysis of survey studies of young people's civic and political use of digital media in > countries found thatthe use of digital media for political purposes was positively correlated with offline political and civic engagement ( ). the unanimity of the literature on this point has led some to declare that the clicktivism debate is conclusively settled ( ). however, this conclusion is premature given several im- portant questions that lack solid empirical answers. one of the most pressing begins with the observation that political engage- ment is issue specific: an individual can be engaged with one or more issues and disen- gaged from others. the clicktivism question then evolves from whether low-cost digital ac- tivities exhaust one’s engagement with politics in general to whether such activities may do so for specific issues that lie beyond the person’s usual interests. for example, whereas liking, sharing, and posting memes about environ- mental topics may be just one of many ways an environmentalist engages with her pet issue, it may be the only way she does so for, say, black lives matter when that movement is trending nationally on twitter. the pat- tern of punctuated equilibrium that typ- ifies social movement activity on social media implies that some variant of this will be true at least some of the time. to continue with the black lives matter example, a study that tracked related tweets over a -year period overlapping the movement’s birth showed a few sharp peaks of interest (most prominently in august, november, and december of and in april and may of ) separated by lengthy periods of much lower activity (fig. ) ( ). this is typical of such movements’ social media activity and indeed of social me- dia in general ( ). logically, the bursts of attention that create such peaks must be provided by people (or bots, a non-negligible possibility) who engage for a short time and then depart, leaving a com- mitted core of activists to sustain the baseline conversation. whether such participation is considered clicktivism is more a question of philosophy than empiricism. on the one hand, the degree of individual commitment is un- doubtedly low, but on the other, the aggregate crests of attention generated by thousands or millions of such actions can catapult a protest movement from obscurity to international pro- minence ( ). as freelon et al. document ( ), grassroots attention on social media played a substantial role in spreading the initial pub- lic awareness of black lives matter’s existence and goals, which was an essential precursor to its widespread acceptance by the american democracy in the balance freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of “digital political activities–including low-cost ones–are a complement to, not a substitute for, their offline counterparts.” hussman school of journalism and media, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. center for information, technology, and public life, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. department of communication, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. *corresponding author. email: freelon@email.unc.edu o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ public in mid- ( ). our hypothetical en- vironmentalist may not have engaged with black lives matter at all if low-cost online actions were unavailable; thus, rather than substituting for higher-cost street-level activ- ism, online actions broaden symbolic support for movements ( ). our main arguments on clicktivism can be summarized thusly: there is a continuum of online activist participation ranging from post- ing and liking content to high-level decision- making as a full-time activist. even more, as the remainder of this review clearly reveals through the lens of recent empirical research, low-cost digital activities can sum to sub- stantial effects ranging from publicizing movements for mass audiences to circulating disinformation that undermines democratic deliberation and processes. a number of american activist movements have substan- tially furthered their goals through digital means over the past decade, including oc- cupy wall street, black lives matter, #metoo/ #timesup, far-right anti-immigration advo- cates, and the mens’ rights movement. sim- ilar results have been observed outside of the united states ( , , ). to add a right-wing example to the black lives matter case de- tailed above, benkler et al. explain how far- right media, activists, and social media users successfully introduced the term “globalist,” an anti-semitic dog whistle, into the journal- istic mainstream ( ). this effort began with white nationalist sites such as vdare and continued through breitbart (a far-right site that avoids explicit white nationalism), fox news, and the trump administration after the election, finally ending up as a synonym for “neoconservative” in the new york times. the online-only media outlets at the begin- ning of this chain rely heavily on social media sharing to boost their messages ( ). in the united states, this is the main way they attract the attention of fox news, which is more di- rectly networked with more traditional media outlets and the trump administration. over- all, this example demonstrates how far-right actors can insert their preferred terminology and ideas into more “respectable” outlets that would otherwise try to avoid such associa- tions. other studies have demonstrated that sites such as breitbart (and their european counterparts) serve similar “bridging” func- tions between far-right and legacy media ( , ). in these and other ways, slacktivism has been a consequential component of con- temporary social movements and will likely continue to be so in the future. the empirical record has very little to say on the question of ideological asymmetries in slacktivism, mostly because left-wing protests have been studied far more than right-wing protests ( ). based on what we know about how most areas of life typically work online, we might expect that right-wing actors would use online and offline means to pursue their interests similarly to the way that those on the left do. one survey-based study found that for american respondents with low political interest, “easy political behaviors [such as liking and commenting on social media] can be gateway behaviors to more significant po- litical activities,” but that ideology was not a significant predictor of this tendency ( ). left- and right-wing digital strategies and ecosystems one of digital media’s most important contrib- utions to activism is how they have opened new pathways to reach target audiences. be- fore the digital age, protesters who wished to project their messages nationally or interna- tionally had only one viable option: attracting the news media’s attention, which they usually did through street protests. mailing lists and alternative media extended their reach only moderately. today, digital media afford activ- ists across the political spectrum two general methods of promoting their causes. the first is to circumvent the news media entirely and appeal directly to digital platform users. this method offers the advantage of placing mes- sage control mostly in the hands of activists and sympathetic partiesbut by definitionmostly reaches people who are already platform users. second, activists use digital platforms to attract journalists’ attention (because most use social media extensively as a gauge of public opin- ion and as a source of stories) ( ) in the hopes that they will cover their movement. the ad- vantage here is that news outlets can reach in- dividuals outside of the digital spheres within which activists operate, as well as those who are not digitally active at all, but may also alter activist messages in ways that are not always favorabletomovements( ). these twomethods are not mutually exclusive; many of the best- known activist movements in recent years have used both ( , , ). although activists on both sides use digital media to reach audiences directly and indi- rectly through the news media, the left and the right have each evolved their own dis- tinct style of doing so. the dominant style on the left has been labeled hashtag activism ( , , ) and bears three main distinguish- ing characteristics. the first and foremost of these is the creation of a declarative hashtag to serve as the movement’s unifying slogan; e.g., #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and #fightfor became shorthand for a host of demands and priorities. the limited amount of attention that most people decide to allocate to news in general and activist appeals in particular gua- rantees that only a few protest hashtags will attain national or international prominence. such hashtags often come to the public’s at- tention through news coverage of shocking and disruptive events, such as michael brown’s death at the hands of police officer darren wilson in ferguson, mo (#blacklivesmatter), the disclosure of harvey weinstein’s decades- long history of sexual predation (#metoo), and a series of american fast-food worker strikes in – (#fightfor ). second, such hash- tags are buoyed by the widespread engage- ment of nonelites, ordinary citizens who relate to the hashtag’s core message or simply want to declare their support. this is what causes them to “trend” on social media and thereby trigger the third element: attention and support from elite third parties. most prominent among these are mainstream news outlets, which are often thefirstelitestopublicizeactivisthashtags.others include celebrities, businesses, and politicians, all of whom hold disproportionate power to direct attention to movements. examples in- clude hip-hop artists talib kweli and common (#blacklivesmatter), ice cream company ben & jerry’s (#blacklivesmatter), actress alyssa milano (#metoo), and senator bernie sanders (#fightfor ). although much hashtag activism research is u.s. focused, the phenomenon has alsobeenobservedincountriessuchasargentina ( ), bangladesh ( ), france ( ), and india ( ). the right engages with these dual pathways very differently. several fundamental differ- ences with the left explain this. first, american conservatives’ mistrust of the mainstream news media has been intensifying for decades ( , ), a pattern that seems to be common on the right across europe and india as well ( – ). the sense that traditional news out- lets are irredeemably biased against con- servatives is one of the driving factors in the establishment of right-wing media ecosystems, the roots of which in the united states reach back at least to the s ( ). second, con- servatives have more recently developed an analogous belief that “big tech,” a pejorative term for the companies that produce and main- tain the internet’s most widely used commu- nication platforms and hardware, including facebook, google, twitter, apple, and amazon, is also biased against them ( ). these two beliefs have led the right to interact with the news media and tech platforms in more radi- cally oppositional ways than the left despite the latter’s critiques of those institutions. dis- taste for (and being deplatformed from) big tech has prompted some far-right users to de- camp to platforms more accepting of their politics, including telegram, gab, and voat ( ). third, since , the center-right’s pres- ence on social media has diminished substan- tially ( , , ), leaving the far right as the dominant conservative presence. together, these short- and long-term trends have shifted the right into a world apart from the left and center, and its activist tactics reflect that re- ality. figure quantifies this phenomenon by depicting the percentages of “fragmented” freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ users that retweeted media outlets along the ideological spectrum in . outlets with pre- dominantly far-right audiences attracted nearly four times more fragmented users (those that disproportionately retweeted within one parti- tion) than the second most fragmented partition. conservative mistrust of the mainstream media has inspired two distinctive tactics for interacting with two kinds of media outlets. those that lack an explicitly conservative out- look often find themselves targeted by media manipulation, an umbrella term that refers to a repertoire of bad-faith tactics intended to attract journalistic attention ( ). one of the most prominent of these, known as “trading up the chain,” involves planting a sensation- alistic hoax, conspiracy theory, or extreme viewpoint in a small or local news outlet that may not fact-check it ( , ). this story may then be repeated by larger outlets, either be- cause of its content or because an elite (such as donald trump) has endorsed it. whether the underlying claim is presented as true or debunked, the goal of spreading it further is fulfilled. by contrast, right-wing activists’ in- teractions with ideologically friendly outlets are understandably far less contentious. what benkler et al. have called the american “right- wing media ecosystem” is a densely interlinked region of the media network that stands far apart from other media in terms of digital, professional, and ideological connections ( , ). its reach on social media platforms is extensive, in most cases larger than its left- wing equivalent ( ). the ostensibly more journalistic outlets in this network, such as fox news and the daily caller, regularly le- gitimize content surfaced by the more radical outlets, which include infowars, gateway pundit, and breitbart. the right-wing media ecosystem’s favored topics during the trump administration have prominently included un- compromising opposition to non-western im- migration, the evils of the so-called “deep state,” and attacks on the legitimacy of the mueller investigation ( ). two other tactics used disproportionately by right-wing actors are specific to social plat- forms. the first is the strategic manipulation of platform algorithms to increase attention to desired messages. much as the gatekeep- ing function of legacy journalism shaped the norms, practices, and patterns of news cov- erage of social movements, social platforms’ emphasis on user engagement affects what information is displayed to individual users, for example, by giving greater reach to emo- tionally charged content, videos, and visual graphics over text ( ). thus, successful online activists must understand how social plat- forms algorithmically sort content to ensure that their own is given priority. although both left- and right-wing actors engage in such tactics, preliminary evidence suggests that the right has been more successful. for instance, platforms such as youtube have recommen- ded increasingly extreme far-right content to viewers of more moderate right-wing channels to maximize user engagement with the site ( ). similar techniques include optimizing search engine keywords so that interested parties will more readily find ideologically biased results ( ) and the use of fake accounts and bots to imply widespread consensus on social media ( ). because journalists often rely on engagement metrics such as twitter’s “trending topics” to determine which stories should be covered and how they should be framed, successful algorithmic manipulation may help to set legacy media agendas ( ). second, in response to deplatforming, shadow banning, and content moderation by big tech, some right-wing actors have migrated to “alt- tech” equivalents that offer more permissive moderation. these include social media sites dedicated to right-wing communities, such as chan and chan, the twitter alternatives parler and gab, and the youtube alternative bitchute, as well as more ideologically neutral platforms such as discord and telegram ( ). although alt-tech platforms are much smaller than their mainstream counterparts, they al- low partisan and fringe communities to exist without opposition from alternative viewpoints. studies have demonstrated a high prevalence of hate speech on chan ( ), gab ( ), and bitchute ( ), which is typically moderated on more mainstream social platforms. these spaces allow more extreme viewpoints to thrive, whereas mainstream social media pri- marily host less extreme content designed to reach wider audiences ( ). the most relevant implications of the dif- ferences between how left- and right-wing ac- tivist networks reach their respective audiences derive from their very different relationships with the platforms they use. the left largely engages directly with traditional and social media, using them as primary communication venues to develop and distribute activist mes- sages. these outlets and platforms present themselves as what cass sunstein called “gen- eral interest intermediaries” ( ), information environments that admit a wide range of per- spectives. consequently, left-wing ideas tend to connect with individuals and institutions along a much broader range of the ideological spectrum than the right, including much of the center ( ). by contrast, the right has created and used its own ideologically exclusive media ecosystem and digital platforms even as it continues to engage with the best-known tech platforms and news outlets out of necessity. these developments in turn (along with other nondigital factors) fuel what scholars have called “asymmetric polarization,” the proposition freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of june july august september october november january february march april maydecember tw ee ts p os te d pe r da y . . . . . . . . . . million initial protests after michael brown was shot and killed by police officer darren wilson in ferguson, missouri death of freddie gray in police custody in baltimore, maryland decision to not indict new york city police officer daniel pantaleo, whose chokehold killed eric garner decision to not indict darren wilson fig. . daily tweets about police violence and black lives matter, june to may . reproduced with permission from ( ). see ( ) for the data and code used in creating this figure. democracy in the balance o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ that conservatives have grown more extreme over the past few decadesthanliberals( , , ). asymmetric polarization’s broader consequences include less common ground between opposing political sides, increasingly extreme policies when conservatives are elected, and more opportunities for ideologically branded mis- and disinformation to spread on the right, which we discuss further in the next section. emerging research on asymmetric disinformation since the u.s. and u.k. brexit elections, scholars, the news media, and international publics have become increasingly concerned with the problem of false and misleading political content ( , , , ). this general pheno- menon has multiple variants with a variety of labels, including the ubiq- uitous and ambiguous “fake news,” which we avoid. here, we will focus on disinformation, which we define as “all forms of false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, pre- sented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit” ( ). unlike misinformation, which refers to misleading content spread inadver- tently, disseminators of disinformation knowtheirmessagesaredeceitful.actors behind such deceptive content seek to spread conspiracy theories, false rumors, hoaxes, and inflammatory opinions to promote their ideological viewpoints, decrease trust in mainstream insti- tutions, and recruit others to their causes ( ). the relevant literature offers three types of evidence in support of the proposition that disinformation is more prevalent on the right than on the left, although to our knowledge this has not been directly tested. first, evidence from psychological studies indicates that conserva- tive individuals are more likely than liberals to prefer the kinds of closed media environ- ments (sometimes called “echo chambers”) that facilitate the spread of mis- and disinfor- mation ( ), believe conspiracy theories when cued by official denials of conspiratorial causes ( ), and tolerate the spreading of disinforma- tion by politicians ( ). second, analyses of false news diffusion on social media have generally shown a tendency for conservatives to share such content more than liberals ( , ). third, the most visible mainstream news media out- lets, upon which the left relies much more heavily for political information than the right, have a long history of fact-checking norms that largely prevent disinformation from thriv- ing there ( ), which is why understanding how the news industry operates helps individ- uals avoid disinformation ( ). existing research provides numerous exam- ples of conservative-targeted disinformation, in which right-wing media ecosystems around the world are often centrally implicated ( , , ). in the united states, the alt-right, unapologetic white nationalists, and others on the rightmost fringe attract relatively small audiences and must rely on media outlets at higher levels of the ecosystem to help circulate their disinformation and other extreme ideas broadly ( ). the fringes are not always suc- cessful; in particular, conspiracy theories im- plicating a washington, dc, pizza parlor as the center of a democrat-controlled pedophilia ring and accusing a left-wing activist of mur- dering a counterprotester at the unite the right rally were not endorsed by the ecosys- tem’s upper echelons ( , ). the ranks of disinformation stories that achieved greater notoriety include the seth rich conspiracy, in which a hillary clinton staffer was allegedly murdered because of what he knew about her emails. (rich was killed in washington, dc, on july by unknown assailants, but no credible evidence links his death to clinton.) the story originated among fringe ecosystem users on twitter and reddit in the weeks after rich’s death ( ). sean hannity covered the conspiracy multiple times in on his eponymous fox news program, although the network eventually retracted the story. more recently, our analysis shows thatthe top ranks of the twitter network discussing the debunked documentary plandemic (which makes unsubstantiated and scientifically unsound allegations about covid- ) in april and may of prominently includes right-wing media ecosystem members such as gatewaypundit (@gatewaypundit) and commentators for fox news (@greggutfeld) and infowars (@liberty- tarian) ( ). in this way, the right-wing media ecosystem circulates sensationalistic content to an ideologically friendly audience free of the sorts of editorial practices that would prevent the spread of false information. the goal, as with much disinformation, is to support the in- group and denigrate the outgroup, even at the expense of verifiable truth. perhaps because of the implications of the research reviewed above, very few studies have directly investigated online left- wing disinformation or conspiracy theories at scale. the studies show- ing a conservative-leaning asymmetry in social media false news sharing largely draw their data from before the election ( , ). if liberals have changed in their susceptibility to dis- information in the ensuing years, pos- sibly because of incentives introduced by strong anti-trump animus, we do not yet know. this could be a case of failing to find that which is not sought. the implications of such research are highly relevant to democratic practice: for one, they will help us understand the extent of the problem, who is most acutely affected, and under what con- ditions. understanding the ideological and psychological antecedents of dis- information susceptibility is an impor- tant first step in targeting interventions to counteract it. to the extent that we as citizens value a democracy free of fraudulent attempts at opinion manip- ulation, we should investigate all con- texts in which it might lurk. two existing studies, along with our own analysis of recent twitter data, offer some evidence that left-leaning disinformation may not be as rare as the literature suggests. first, research published by buzzfeed in october found that although conservative facebook pages posted nearly double the proportion of false or partly false content as liberal pages, such content garnered much higher median shares per post on left-wing pages than on right-wing ones ( ). (we should note that this report only analyzed six facebook pages in total, its data were not made public, and it is possible that false content on right-leaning pages accrued more shares in total given that there was more of it.) second, a recent study found that tweets posted by russian disinfor- mation agents masquerading as left-wing african american activists attracted more attention on a per-tweet basis than either those by conservative identities or non-black left-leaning identities ( ). this demonstrates a level of vulnerability to disinformation on freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of far left center left center center right far right p er ce nt ag e of f ra gm en te d us er s , / , / , , / / , , , / , / , , / / , , / , , / , / , , , / , , / , / , , / , fig. . percentages of fragmented users retweeting media outlets across five ideological partitions. the denominator for each percentage is the number of users who retweeted (shared content from) at least one media outlet in that partition, whereas the numerator is the number of users for whom at least % of their retweets were of outlets in that partition (i.e., “fragmented” users). this figure depicts the behavior of the . million unique twitter users in the dataset who retweeted three or more media accounts. the dataset upon which this figure is based comes from ( ) and contains > million tweets about six major news issues throughout . media outlets and corresponding ideological classifications come from ( ). see ( ) for the data and code used in creating this figure. o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ the left that is not often acknowledged. third, we find that tweets mentioning the key words “anonymous” and “trump” posted between may (when the anonymous hacktivist collective released a cache of documents pur- porting to prove, among other accusations, that donald trump was involved in child sex trafficking) and june were retweeted > . million times, more than double the total retweet count for plandemic in our analysis above ( ). in contrast to the plandemic net- work, the most-retweeted users on this topic are overwhelmingly nonelites with few fol- lowers (except for @youranoncentral, which is ostensibly controlled by anonymous), not well- known liberals or mainstream news outlets. we acknowledge that these findings are pre- liminary and raise pressing validity questions— many of the attention metrics boosting these stories could have been generated by bots, for example—but we include them here for lack of more rigorous research on the matter. taken together, we believe that they suffice to justify further investigation into disinfor- mation aimed at the left. conclusion and future research this review offers three main sets of conclu- sions. first, people participate in online activ- ism along a wide spectrum of commitment levels, from liking and sharing content, to the back-and-forth of political discussion, to involvement as core movement leaders. low- cost online actions do not harm activist goals; on the contrary, they help to boost activist topics and concerns to the levels of public visibility necessary to enact or prevent change. both the left and right benefit from this basic dynamic of online activism. however, there is still much to learn about how clicktivism op- erates; for example, we still do not know how frequently hashtag-based conversations or signal-boosting extreme perspectives change people’s minds or behaviors. second, the left and right generally engage in two distinct styles of online outreach: hashtag activism and online advocacy spearheaded by the right- wing media ecosystem, respectively. the iso- lation of the far right from the rest of the ideological spectrum results in asymmetric polarization and complicates the process of governing ideologically diverse polities. key areas for future research here include mea- suring the relative capacities of these two styles in reaching, persuading, mobilizing, and antagonizing elites and nonelites on both sides. third, disinformation distribution ap- pears to be one of the key functions of right- wing media ecosystems. however, the marked lack of research on left-wing disinformation leaves many questions about how it operates, who is most at risk, and how serious a problem it is, making such research an urgent priority. the very limited number of studies on right- wing online protest and activist hashtag use is similarly glaring. moving forward, research- ers should endeavor to discover whether our current empirical understanding of left- and right-wing activism online represents reality faithfully or is a product of systematic gaps in case selection. references and notes . c. tilly, l. j. wood, social movements – (routledge, ). . s. j. jackson, m. bailey, b. f. welles, #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice (mit, ). . e. morozov, the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom (publicaffairs, ). . d. s. lane, d. h. kim, s. s. lee, b. e. weeks, n. kwak, soc. media soc. , ( ). . h. g. de zúñiga, m. barnidge, a. scherman, polit. commun. , – ( ). . s. boulianne, y. theocharis, soc. sci. comput. rev. , – ( ). . d. karpf, in a research agenda for digital politics, elgar research agendas, w. h. dutton, ed. 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( ). acknowledgments we gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of k. adams and m. reddi. funding: the empirical analysis shown in fig. was supported by grant no. from the spencer foundation. the empirical analysis shown in fig. was supported by grant no. gr- - from the john s. and james l. knight foundation. author contributions: d.f. wrote the initial draft of this review and conducted all original empirical analyses. a.m. and d.k. contributed to writing and editing the review. competing interests:the authors declare no competing interests. data and materials availability: all data, code, and documentation used to conduct the original empirical analyses in this review (fig. , fig. , and the “plandemic” and “anonymous trump” analyses) are available on the harvard dataverse ( ). . /science.abb freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of democracy in the balance o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://doi.org/ 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http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / #bibl http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ s jed .. editorial introduction to indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren this special issue of hypatia aims to cultivate and encourage theorizing about indigenous philosophies and decolonizing methodologies. although feminist theoriz- ing has explored the diverse legacies and experiences of marginalized voices, including indigenous concerns, philosophy has failed to acknowledge and systematically examine its own role in perpetuating colonial oppression. this special issue aims to explore how indigenous philosophy might transform feminist theorizing. for the purposes of this issue, the terms indigenous, native, or first nations people refer to peoples who have developed and maintained cultural ties in a specific region prior to colonial contact. hence, the issue frames indigenous identities within the context of resisting colonial domination and advocating political stances of sovereignty and self-determination. moreover, it is important to understand the intersections and distinctions between the terms indigenizing and decolonizing. though not all projects of decolonization may specifically address indigenous issues, it is important to see how decolonizing methodologies play a role in advancing indigenous projects and perhaps developing coalitions among multiple communities affected by colonialism. a hypatia issue dedicated to indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy is both unique and timely. it has been over sixteen years since hypatia dedicated an issue to indigenous feminism in anne waters’s edited issue, indigenous women in the americas. indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy is a timely issue as well, given the leadership roles of women in contemporary indigenous activism, including resistances at standing rock reservation in north dakota and mauna kea in hawaiʻi. moreover, in examining the intersections of indigenizing and decolonizing frameworks, we aim to expand feminist theorizing on questions of sovereignty, allyship, dangers of cultural appropriation at university institutions, and activism. feminism, in general, has historically been a contested movement that has generated skepticism among indigenous women, in which any potential alliance between indigenous women and feminism as a liberating framework of analysis and activism is regarded with caution. sandy grande characterizes a “whitestream” feminism that fails to recognize intersectionality and props up settler-colonial ideology within models of social justice (grande ). theorists such as lisa hall, joyce green, and kim anderson have further articulated problems of white feminism that undermine efforts of solidarity between indigenous women and feminism (green ; hall ; anderson ), thereby inciting indigenous resistance to feminist analyses, such as feminism’s relationship with sovereignty, feminism’s appeal to a universal category of women based on gender identity or shared oppression, and feminism’s relationship to undermining traditional gender norms of indigenous communities. given this, many indigenous scholars reject feminism as a platform for advancing indigenous © by hypatia, inc. hypatia ( ), , – doi: . /hyp. . perspectives. feminist philosophy is also more susceptible to these criticisms as the tra- dition of philosophy has historically emphasized a white, european, western tradition. feminist philosophy has followed suit in its inception as a subfield in philosophy in which dominant scholarship in feminist philosophy has been centered around a partic- ular brand of white feminism, that is, feminist philosophical analysis written by and focused on white women’s experiences. moreover, philosophy, and by extension femi- nist philosophical analysis, has historically been deeply influenced rather unknowingly or knowingly by settler-colonial ideology. both margaret (a european descendant set- tler) and celia (a filipina american settler) recognize the limitations of our own efforts in editing this issue on “indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy” as a potentially self-defeating task, as both co-editors are settlers in indigenous lands in the us mainland and hawaiʻi islands teaching at settler university institutions. the challenges of creating a space within feminist philosophy for indigenous and decoloniz- ing methodologies informs the trajectory of this special issue, keeping in view the “moves to innocence,” as eve tuck and k. wayne yang remind us of well-intentioned settlers seeking initiatives to diversify academia but rather naively perpetuating further instances of settler ideology (tuck and yang ). moreover, we recognize that the majority of contributors to the special issue are settlers. this, of course, is unsettling for us as coeditors, and we recognize the limitation of this issue due to the minimal presence of indigenous scholars represented within it. it should be noted that this col- lection should not be taken as the paradigmatic model of indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy. furthermore, it should be noted that we still have a long way to go in making space for indigenous feminism in feminist philosophy. however, we did find that the authors who have contributed to this special issue center indigenous scholar- ship as their starting point in developing philosophical frameworks that address con- cerns within settler contexts. though both the coeditors come to this special issue with a shared interest in moving feminist philosophy outside the hallowed halls of “whitestream” feminism, we recognize our own limitations and contradictions as set- tlers in relation to this project. key critical terms before we engage in the challenges and future possibilities in making a space for indigenous feminist philosophical analysis, it is important to situate the project with some key terms: settler-colonial ideology, decolonization (methods/praxis), and indigenous/indigenizing. some indigenous scholars identify with the term indigenous feminism and understand this term as working alongside the aims of feminism in gene- ral and examine feminism’s role more specifically within the context of indigenous women’s experiences, which are defined by the specific ways in which patriarchy, cap- italism, racism, and heteropatriarchy are defined by coloniality (goeman and denetdale ; hall ). others, such as maile arvin, eve tuck, and angie morrill, suggest the term native feminist analyses, which focuses on the theoretical frameworks that are deployed to further challenge colonial hierarchies, rather than indigenous feminism, which tends to focus on an identity label (arvin, tuck, and morrill ). in making a space for indigenous feminism in feminist philosophy, it is important to keep both nuanced viewpoints as the backdrop to guiding the larger mission of feminism inspired by barbara smith’s unvarnished statement: “feminism is the political theory and prac- tice that struggles to free all women. . . . anything less than this freedom is not femi- nism, but merely female self-aggrandizement” (smith , ). hypatia settler colonialism has been aptly defined by tuck and yang as “settlers who come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (tuck and yang , ). arvin, tuck, and morrill—referencing patrick wolfe’s definition of settler colonialism as a structure and not an event that happened in the past (wolfe )—argue that “settler colonialism must be understood as a multi-fronted project of making the first peoples of the place extinct; it is a relentless structure, not contained in a period of time” (arvin, tuck, and morrill , ). hall states that “colonialism takes place through gendered and sexualized forms that reconstitute both individual and commu- nal indigenous identities in stigmatized and disempowering ways” (hall , ). hence, settler colonialism intersects with patriarchy and leads to damaging conse- quences for indigenous women. feminist philosophy must take seriously how land and sovereignty play a role in how philosophical analyses might perpetuate systems of colonial domination. ultimately, settler colonialism seeks to perpetuate a deep era- sure, an eradication of indigenous presence and its cultural claims to the land. decolonization is the remedy against the harms caused by settler ideology. though some decolonizing methodologies may in fact treat decolonization as a metaphor, and thereby are not genuinely engaged in practices of decolonization, according to linda tuhiwai smith, eve tuck, and k. wayne yang in their important anthology, indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: mapping the long view, “decoloni- zation studies emphasize the ways that colonization and decolonization are time- specific and land-specific” (smith, tuck, and yang , xi). moreover, “decolonizing studies at the border attend to how coloniality shapes and severs human and non- human relationships across land, nation-state, waters and time” (xii). this allows for comparative critical analysis between indigenous studies and chican@ studies, black studies, pacific island studies, diasporic studies, and muslim/arab studies. finally, “decolonizing studies, when most centered in indigenous philosophy, push back against assumptions about the linearity of history and the future, against teleological narratives of human development, and argue for a rendering of time and place that exceeds col- oniality and conquest” (xiii). decolonizing methods and practices in feminist philoso- phy would necessarily involve ensuring that indigenous culture and presence become prominent features of the feminist philosophical canon through active engagement and genuine inclusion of indigenous perspectives that transform feminist philosophical theorizing. this would entail that a radical self-examination of unreflective settler- colonial bias, the hidden gendered and colonial logics, would be interrogated and trans- formed to a decolonized feminist philosophical analysis that aims to ensure that indigenous communities flourish. finally, according to smith, tuck, and yang, citing elizabeth cook-lynn, native american studies is defined as “the study of indigenous lives and issues by indigenous peoples” (smith, tuck, and yang , xi). this entails that feminist phi- losophy ought to consider the philosophical insights generated by native scholars about their cultural cosmologies and metaphysics, epistemologies and ethical frame- works. rather than seeking sources from the traditional white, european canon as the starting point in thinking about decolonial possibilities and cultivating socially just futures, feminist philosophers ought to seek out sources of indigenous scholars. moreover, this would also entail feminist philosophy becoming more curious about the land, ocean, and sky: the actual places of settlement that nonnative feminist philos- ophers are occupying. one method that indigenous scholars have pointed to in their philosophical traditions is place-based frameworks. vine deloria, jr. has defined celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren indigenous as “to become of place” and hence to indigenize ethics or education would mean to center analysis of how place operates to relate us to the larger community of beings within nature. for example, indigenous epistemologies are understood as ways of knowing that emerge from our relationships with the land, the ocean, and the sky, which in turn guide our ethical actions appropriately in the world. according to deloria, indigenous thought conceives of relationships as informed through a person- centered model of metaphysics, rather than the western machine-model of metaphys- ics. knowing nature as persons—as opposed to inanimate objects—orients our ethical and political relationships to the wider community of nature (deloria , ). manulani meyer has further clarified indigenous as “that which has endured/thrived” (meyer ). hence, cultural continuity through a revitalization of indigenous lan- guage, cultural expression, and epistemologies is essential to ensure that an indigenous community’s well-being continues to thrive. adhering to values of reciproc- ity and interdependency rather than dualistic values that separate and alienate the knower from the world cultivates thriving relationships to the wider communities of nature. knowledge-acquisition in this sense would mean to develop a cultural and envi- ronmental literacy of the land, ocean, and sky. meyer refers to this indigenizing shift as “cultural empiricism” (meyer , ), knowledge generated by our embodied senses mediated by indigenous cultural traditions and ways of knowing. smith, tuck, and yang echo this sentiment and foreground their anthology with the wisdom: “water is life, land is our first teacher.” to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy why indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy? who is making the call to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy? will this call fall on the deaf ears of a feminist philosophical community comprised mostly of scholars writing about and centering settler experiences? it is important to keep in mind tuck and yang’s concerns that if we are to take seriously the call to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy, then challenging settler ideology and making space for indigenous futures where indigenous lives will not be rendered invisible ought to be at the center of our commit- ment within feminist philosophy (tuck and yang ). some of the challenges of indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy involve the concern that there might not be enough interest in feminist philosophy to take up this project. it is too specialized and nuanced and there might not be enough feminist philosophical scholars to appropriately and adequately take up this call to action. this challenge is concerning for indigenous scholarship, which again is relegated to the periphery in feminist philos- ophy. subjects that are more “universal” in experience might be able to capture a wide range of interlocutors, and these types of topics tend to be more popular in conceiving feminist philosophical scholarship. this brings up the second challenge of indigenizing and decolonizing feminist phi- losophy: who is making the call to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy? if feminist philosophy has not made a hospitable place for indigenous feminist scholars (not to mention women of color), then who is the effort to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy appealing to? given the paucity of indigenous feminist philosoph- ical scholarship represented in conferences and journals, who is this call actually serv- ing? going beyond a quantitative framework, both margaret and celia believe that numbers should not determine the direction of feminist philosophy. moreover, under- represented topics ought to inspire feminist philosophers to consider unexamined hypatia dogmatic assumptions within their own analysis. on the one hand, to indigenize and decolonize genuinely might frighten or alarm settler feminist philosophers, as it would mean giving up settler privilege of land, property, and intellectual presence in creating liberatory strategies toward social justice. it wouldn’t mean just to include indigenous perspectives, but also to give up power and control of feminist philosophical theorizing and adopt and welcome alternative methods of analysis. on the other hand, given the interdisciplinary nature of indigenous scholarship, the call might perhaps solicit nonphilosophers to situate their work within the frameworks of feminist philos- ophy. this might mean that feminist philosophy ought to be open to other methods of knowing through ceremony, dance, harvesting herbs for medicine, building a sustain- able community garden, building voyaging canoes, swimming, surfing, sailing and fish- ing in the ocean, and more specifically transforming accepted practices in academia by decentering the need to invite yet another white feminist philosopher as a keynote speaker to a conference in order to legitimate and give credibility to the need for indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy. more specifically, indigenous and decolonizing philosophical analysis is essential to move feminist philosophy out of a space of self-aggrandizement. mishuana goeman and jennifer denetdale argue that though there are strains of feminist analysis that assume racial hierarchies and settler privilege that work against the capacities of indigenous communities to thrive, native feminist analysis is crucial and useful to the project of decolonizing native people (goeman and denetdale ). following these indigenous feminist scholars, feminist philosophy must also “make space for indigenous feminism” as joyce green aptly identifies (green ), which will mean that theories of decolonization or indigenizing projects must contribute to indigenous communities’ ability to thrive. lacking this commitment amounts to a fail- ure to achieve genuine social justice in feminist philosophy. as goeman and denetdale, and hall, argue, there is no monolithic definition of what feminism is (goeman and denetdale ; hall ); indigenous perspectives are able to inform and determine the meaning of feminism within indigenous communities. moreover, academic research, including feminist philosophy, can be transformed in genuinely linking theory and praxis through careful readings and actual engagement with indigenous research methodologies. article summaries this special issue of hypatia aims to transform and decolonize feminist philosophy by creating a space dedicated to indigenous knowledges and perspectives. creating this space involves a more inclusive notion of feminist philosophical analysis not bound by disciplinary structures of argumentation, but open to creative genres such as poetry, literature, film, dance, and textiles. we have organized the articles into four thematic sections: decolonizing university institutions; indigenous ways of knowing; ambiguities and incommensurability; and undermining settler futures, making space for indigenous futures. we conclude with three musings, each of which provides an important perspective on indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy. the two articles in the first section trace the history and logic of colonialism in the academy and in knowledge-production. showing that university institutions remain rooted in colonial logic, the authors of these articles contribute to decolonizing the structures of knowledge and the university by offering alternative structures and meth- odologies rooted in relationality. in “uprooting narratives: legacies of colonialism in celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren the neoliberal university,” melanie bowman and maría rebolleda-gómez ( ) pre- sent a twofold argument about colonialism in universities. first, they argue that knowl- edge itself is shaped by colonialist values, specifically alienation, improvement, and capitalism. second, they argue that colonialist values circumscribe diversity efforts ren- dering them “essentializing, tokenizing, and superficial” (pg ). using the example of wild-rice research and the conflict between the anishinaabe community and the university of minnesota, bowman and rebolleda-gomez ( ) trace the way that wild rice has been commodified through research that defines it in terms of its biolog- ical identity. abstracting wild rice from its relational context, they argue, alienates it from its context and contributes to its commodification. they demonstrate that colo- nialist values permeate the wild-rice research program from its initial move of separat- ing it from the anishinaabe community and their traditional ways of harvesting and understanding wild rice in its local ecological context, to the outcome of the research program, which perpetuates values of productivity, capitalism, and colonial agricultural expansion. they argue that in addition to knowledge being shaped by colonialist values, these values shape the production of knowers as well. when alienation, productivity, and colonialism are the primary values guiding research, researchers/knowers are separated from what they are studying; this alienation, along with the values of individualism and productivity, remove knowers and knowledge from their context, including the power structures and relations of colonialism. abstracting knowers from their contexts, and separating knowers from what they are studying, results in a type of individualism that separates diversity from its social and political context and thus obscures the rela- tions of power that structure the university and its projects. not recognizing these power relations does a disservice to indigenous people as they are simply inserted into a dominant framework that recognizes neither multiple ways of knowing, nor the colonial power structures that shape both knowledge and knowers. thus, decoloniz- ing methods are necessary to undermine the hegemonic structures of colonialism in the university. but decolonizing knowledge is not sufficient. within the university, funda- mental changes to the structures of the institution must be advocated for, and outside the university, decolonization must include activism around restoring sovereignty to native peoples and advocating for land restoration. exploring the ways that white settler subjectivity is constructed as nonrelational through denying our vulnerability and accepting paradigms of the gift as an exchange, in the second article in this section laurie gagnon-bouchard and camille ranger ( ) draw upon sami scholar rauna kuokkanen’s reinterpretation of the gift as rela- tional. beginning with an example of the failure of epistemic dialogue in knowledge- construction, the authors seek to provide an account under which epistemic dialogue could flourish. presented as a failure of epistemic dialogue, traditional ecological knowledge (tek) emerged from the ostensible inclusion of indigenous peoples in the construction of knowledge. however, the inclusion of tek failed to fully include indigenous perspectives because it did not embrace a relational ontology. as the authors note, the logic of mastery, as articulated by ecofeminists val plumwood and juliette singh, precludes real epistemic dialogue based as it is on dualisms and domination. in this case the separation of nature from culture furthers colonial goals, and knowledge is used in the service of dominating nature. moreover, the logic of mastery associates some groups of people with nature, for example, women and indigenous peoples, and this contributes to their subordination. in order to overcome the logic of mastery, the authors draw upon kuokkanen’s notion of the gift. in contrast to the classic idea of hypatia the gift as exchange, kuokkanen develops a notion of the gift as relational; rethinking the gift as relational reflects an acknowledgment of the relational, interdependent nature of the world and the importance of relations of reciprocity and responsibility rather than exchange. if these features were appropriately valued in academia, it would be a more hospitable place for indigenous people. acknowledging our vulnerability and adopting this new model of the gift as relational could serve to transform universities and academic institutions. the next two articles, by rebekah sinclair ( ) and susana matallana-peláez ( ), focus on indigenous ways of knowing. sinclair showcases how indigenous logic differs from settler binary logic, and matallana-peláez provides rich examples of indigenous logic as embodied in indigenous philosophies and manifested in the com- munity through spirals that represent the continuum of life. like bowman and rebolleda-gomez ( ), sinclair questions the scientific concept of biological identity and individualism, revealing that the scientific concept of the individual cannot be clearly defined within binary logic. she contrasts classical (binary) logic with indigenous (paraconsistent) logic; the former is based on accepting the principle of noncontradiction whereas the later allows for true contradictions. moreover, whereas classical logic claims to be neutral with regard to the world, it actually has particular ontological commitments that limit its ability to accurately reflect real states in the world. sinclair offers several examples in support of paraconsistent logic. paraconsistent logics are found in indigenous creation stories, as well as in ways of knowing and understanding the world as two things at once. as sinclair states: “these contradictions are not fictional, but represent ontological facts about the nature of bodies and relationships, the way power and violence work, and the kinship among humans, land, and nonhuman lives that two-valued systems simply cannot name” (pg ). the limitations of classical logic are further revealed when applied to the issue of biological individuality. sinclair points out the contradictions in three of the criteria for individuality. if one uses spatial boundaries where the parts of a thing are attached to one another and to nothing else, fungus and aspen groves count as individuals. using genotype as the criterion for individuals does not solve the problem either, as clones share the same genotype, and portuguese man o’ wars are made up of genetically dis- tinct parts but are attached to a single digestive tract. finally, the scientific criteria for biological individuality cannot be understood in terms of immune-self-definition as this fails to account for an individual’s resistance to cancer or autoimmune diseases. the failure of classical logic to capture the complex realities of the world indicates the lim- itations of binary logic with its assumptions of noncontradiction, duality, and individ- ualism. indigenous logic, by contrast, is better able to capture the complexity of the world, in part because the underlying ontology of indigenous logic is relational, fluid, and pluralist. sinclair concludes that indigenous logic not only represents the world better, but can play a political and ethical role in decolonizing as indigenous logic supports and validates truth claims made by indigenous peoples about land res- toration, ecological harms, treaty rights, and violence against women. resistance to colonization takes many forms; indigenous knowledges can serve as the grounding for political resistance. in colombia, the indigenous nasa communities of corinto launched a project to liberate mother earth (lme). the lme movement sought to de-barbwire (desalambrar) mother earth thus reclaiming land from the barbed-wire enclosures of private property. this process of de-barbwiring, susana matallana-peláez argues, is also a philosophical standpoint rejecting the eurocentric divide between culture and nature. matallana-peláez embraces the rejection of this celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren division in favor of an idea of “continuum”: the nasa people recognize that heart and land are one and the same. she notes that in relational ontologies there is consubstan- tiality and commensurability between humans and nature. using examples from the nasayuwe language as well as from nasa textiles and dance, she shows the continuity between humans and the natural world. this continuity is evidenced by images of botanical drawings that incorporate human elements and textiles that incorporate spi- rals. the spiral has long been associated with continuous growth, expansion, and non- linear development; it occurs naturally in shells, snails, and even the shape of galaxies. the spiral appears in a variety of textile designs of the nasa, especially the sash or chumbe. spirals represent ontological continuity, and the idea that all life has a common origin and kinship connection. spirals, and the continuity of life they represent, appear in ritual dance as well. matallana-peláez describes the snail dance done at the annual festival celebrating mother earth. participants in the snail dance form a spiral line, and continue the spiral movement by dancing around one another in turn. the pervasiveness of the spiral in ritual dance, textiles, language, and botanical representations of the natural world all serve to underscore the nasa philosophy that life is a continuum that cannot be divided up into parts. this philosophy of continuity and wholeness undergirds the movement to liberate mother earth by removing the barbed wire that artificially and arbitrarily separates the land into units. connections between the movement to liberate the earth and to resist other forms of domination such as patriarchy follow from the rejec- tion of dualism and domination in favor of holism and relationality. the nasa move- ment to liberate mother earth is a decolonization project based upon their indigenous philosophy; embracing this philosophy has wide-reaching implications for undermining the gender binary and contributing to women’s liberation. questions of voice, silence, motherhood, and mentoring are central to feminist thinking about the ways we engage in the world in our interpersonal relationships. the next two essays engage with issue of incommensurability between the views and experiences of settlers and indigenous peoples and between white women and women of color dwelling in the ambiguity of unresolved colonial violence. this incom- mensurability arises because of the difference in social locations in relation to decolo- nizing and indigenizing projects. in her article, shelley park ( ) explores the intergenerational and interracial relationships of mothering through analyzing australian artist tracy moffat’s film, night cries. expanding on the ways that colonial violence shapes interpersonal relationships, park also looks at mentoring relationships in academia between older white feminists and younger feminists of color. in night cries, an aboriginal woman takes care of her dying, white, adoptive mother. scenes from the film depict the ambiguity of a relationship enabled by a history of racism and colonialism, which removed aboriginal children from their homes and stripped them of their culture. park explores the complexities of colonial power relationships in the private space of the home as exemplified in the care work performed by the daughter; complicated by a colonial history that is still implicated in their present-day relationship, the aboriginal daughter is by turns resentful and genuinely caring while engaging in the domestic labor of feeding, bathing, and carrying her mother to the out- house. moffat’s night cries portrays the ways that colonial violence infiltrates the domestic sphere and carries into present interpersonal relationships. colonial violence may be unwittingly reenacted in the arena of mentoring, too. when senior, white, feminist colleagues in philosophy mentor junior colleagues of color they may be participating in the process of assimilation as they share strategies hypatia for success in what is currently a white-dominated discipline. noting the toll that aca- demia has taken on many feminists of color, park warns that senior white feminists need to interrogate diversity projects; if they recruit women of color without changing the racist and colonialist structures of the university, diversity projects may be harmful to those they are seeking to support. instead, white, senior colleagues can participate in undermining the structures of racism, sexism, and colonialism that make the university an inhospitable place for all but white men. left unexamined, intergenerational and interracial practices of mothering and mentoring may replicate the colonial violence rather than create supportive relationships of care. park offers several suggestions for avoiding this appropriation by colonialism, including interrupting business as usual, improvising, and experimenting. just as colonialism recuperates and appropriates well-intentioned practices of moth- ering and mentoring, it also sets the conditions for what can be heard and understood. introducing the concept of coloniality of silence, martina ferrari ( ) points out the ways that silence is rendered flat and unintelligible by a colonial framework of meaning. voice has been privileged in feminist discourse, and the recent #metoo movement amplifies this demand to speak up and speak out. ferrari explores the meaning of silence in the face of sexual assault for ernesto martinez, a gay, latinx man. for martinez, silence constituted a form of resistance, a way of being that did not engage in violence. in the face of demands to speak up, silence is viewed as passivity or even complicity. yet that reading misses the complexity and nuance of the ways that silence may function for the oppressed. the imperative to speak up imposes a normative framework where voice is valorized and silence is dismissed or misread. the demand to speak in a way that one can be understood in the dominant colonial framework mir- rors the way that colonialism operates in imposing language on the colonized. invoking spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” ferrari points out the paradox of demanding the subaltern to speak. on the one hand, if the subaltern speaks in her native language, her speech lacks uptake by the colonizers. on the other hand, if the subaltern speaks in the language of the colonizer, she has sacrificed her culture and language. thus, the coloniality of language and speech inhibits communication between the colonized and the colonizers because the colonized remain unintelligible to the colonized unless she speaks to them in their language, in which case she capitulates to the dominant framework, losing her own framework of sense and meaning. through this imposition of the dominant language, coloniality erases the communicative and knowledge- validation practices of the colonized. moreover, this epistemic move has ontological consequences, as it renders invisible not only the knowledge of the colonized, but the colonized themselves through a process of dehumanization. ferrari draws on ophelia schutte’s work to think through possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural communication. schutte’s view that there is a lack of complete translatability leaves open the possibility of communication without the demand for transparency; likewise, allowing for incommensurability between systems of meaning leaves room for deep silence, which is inherent to the process of meaning itself. the last four essays address the responsibilities of settlers to recognize the ongoing and material harms of colonialism to indigenous peoples and to mitigate those harms through political action in solidarity with indigenous communities by undermining set- tler futurities to make space for indigenous futurities. examining the role of apology, shame, testimony in front of the truth and reconciliation commission, and activism around the water protectors at standing rock, the articles in this section call for polit- ical action, including repatriation of land, repoliticizing the concept of genocide, and celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren working in allyship to secure a more just future for indigenous peoples. elizabeth paquette ( ) calls for repoliticizing the meaning of genocide, rights, and actions, which she sees as essential for the process of reconciliation. she argues that the concept of cultural genocide as currently employed by the canadian government separates cul- tural genocide from physical genocide, and by doing so, may trivialize cultural genocide. moreover, the ongoing effects from actions the canadian government considers cultural genocide, such the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families to attend residential school, also resulted in physical genocide because of the mistreatment of indigenous children in the residential schools. paquette notes that as many as % of children in residential schools died from malnutrition, starvation, diseases, and the gen- erally poor conditions in the residential schools. lest one think that the effects of col- onization are in the past, paquette provides statistics about its disproportionate and ongoing effects on indigenous peoples, including greater suicide rates, homicide rates, numbers of indigenous children in foster care, and numbers of women and chil- dren trafficked for prostitution. all of this points to the fact that colonization is not a thing of the past, but continues to have real effects on indigenous people. given this, apologies from the canadian government are not enough to ameliorate the harms per- petrated by colonialism; action must be taken to address the ongoing injustices to indigenous communities. simply apologizing evokes a “settler move to innocence” wherein settlers believe that recognizing and apologizing for harms to indigenous peo- ple exonerates them of guilt and responsibility. similarly, having a truth and reconciliation commission to hear testimonies is not far-reaching enough without structural changes to address the injustices. recognizing that cultural genocide cannot be separated from physical genocide is one step in repoliticizing it. next, paquette elucidates the ways that culture is rendered nonpolitical even in political theories, such as liberal multiculturalism, that aim to embrace and include culture. she demonstrates how charles taylor’s well-known the- ory of liberal multiculturalism fails to politicize culture because it is always subordinate to, and contained by, the political. drawing on stephanie lumsden’s expansive account of reproductive justice, which includes “sexual self-determination, parental rights, cul- tural integrity, and an intimate relationship with the land, [all of which] is essential to [indigenous] sovereignty” (pg ) and culture, paquette shows that connection to the land, environment, and reproduction repoliticizes culture and offers a promising route for indigenous futurity. issues of reconciliation and recognition return in sarah kizuk’s article ( ). kizuk examines the limitations of settler shame, claiming that shame cannot do the work of reconciliation. she draws on the work of sarah ahmed and glen coulthard to demon- strate that a politics of recognition falls short of the type of reparative justice necessary to right the wrongs of colonialism. to move toward a decolonized justice, settlers must go beyond feeling shame and recognizing the harms colonialism has wrought; they should engage in material actions, such as the repatriation of the land to indigenous peoples. janice keil in ontario, canada has begun the process of repatriating her land to the alderville first nation. although keil says she was motivated by shame, kizuk distinguishes this shame that spurs material action from settler shame that is self- referential and deployed to make settlers feel good about themselves. keil’s willingness to repatriate her land disrupts settler futurity, which continues the erasure and displace- ment of indigenous peoples, and instead opens up possibilities for indigenous futurity. the transfer of land is being done without government mediation, but directly between keil and tribal leaders, thus disrupting mainstream notions of political sovereignty. hypatia practical actions such as this foster solidarity and contribute to a process of decoloni- zation that will help make indigenous futurity possible. possibilities for allyship between settlers and indigenous peoples are further explored in andrea sullivan-clarke’s article ( ), where she looks at the activism around stop- ping the pipeline through sioux territory (#nodapl). sullivan-clarke distinguishes being an ally from being an active bystander—active bystanders speak up to keep situ- ations from escalating. the concept of allyship has been criticized by rachel mckinnon, who claims that “ally” has been taken up as an identity and that this identity can then be used to undermine members of oppressed groups’ claims to epistemic authority, resulting in epistemic injustice. sullivan-clarke believes that the concept of active bystander does not go far enough because it does not make epistemic demands on an individual to know about an oppressed group’s culture, history, or experience. moreover, she notes that often allies are also members of an oppressed group. she argues for a decolonized notion of ally. using examples of the support of veteran’s stand for standing rock (vssr) and black lives matter (blm) for the water protectors at standing rock, sullivan-clarke makes a case for reclaiming a decolonized notion of allyship along with the concept of active bystander, as both are necessary to fully capture the actions of solidarity and support shown by vssr and blm for the water protectors. a decolonized notion of allyship would require that allies attend to the experiences, culture, and needs of indigenous people; this requires an epistemic commitment on the part of the ally to learn about the people, the land, and the issue. allies with a real commitment to active support and openness to learning can undermine settler futurity and help to create the conditions for indigenous futurity. the musings in this issue are invited essays from one of the keynote speakers, and two of the invited panelists at the feast conference whose theme was “decolonizing and indigenizing feminist philosophy.” in the first person, these essays draw upon the life experience and knowledge of their authors; they bring in personal narratives, poetry, and literature to paint a fuller picture of their engagement as indigenous women and women of color as they negotiate what it means to be a feminist or to engage in feminist philosophy. kim anderson’s essay traces her trajectory from her time as a young mother and beginning scholar to the present, in which she identifies as a “middle-aged indigenous ‘academic auntie’” (pg ). anderson (cree-metís) is a pioneer in indigenous feminist studies, and she recounts some of the factors that made indigenous women reluctant to take up the banner of feminism: “a presumed focus on equality that implies sameness with men; the perception that feminism excludes men from our overall struggles as peoples; the view that feminism is about rights vs. responsibilities with an emphasis on individual autonomy; and the feeling that it rep- resents an attack on ‘traditional’ responsibilities, including mothering” (pg ). reflecting back on her journey as a mother, an indigenous woman, and a scholar, anderson sees these as interwoven. turning to elders/aunties for parenting advice and pursuing research on child welfare led her to explore the topic of indigenous female empowerment. these interconnections weave their way through anderson’s essay as she reflects on the meaning of “women” and “home.” currently in a department of home economics, anderson traces the history of home and mothering through its colonial past to an indigenous future. she notes that the home was an important site of colonial power as maternal feminists and social reform- ers were dispatched as missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bring celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren white, christian values to indigenous communities. oblivious of what indigenous com- munities could teach them about women’s power as it was exercised in matrilineal soci- eties, or the importance of community as manifested in extended kinship structures and shared housing, middle-class white women imposed the dominant values of heteropa- triarchal family norms on indigenous households. racist standards of mothering and childrearing were entangled with eugenics projects that justified the removal of indigenous children from their homes, and the sterilization of indigenous women. circling back to her own story, anderson points out that individual and institutional histories are messy and complex; telling the stories is an important part of the work to move forward. anderson’s current position involves indigenizing the department of home econom- ics. she reflects on what that means for her as an academic auntie: teaching and men- toring the younger generations, caring for the well-being of the community, leadership and community-organizing, and creating safe space, among other things. for anderson, leadership and community-organizing has included artivist projects such as making a human medicine wheel with colleagues to raise awareness about the missing and mur- dered indigenous women in canada, and performance art in resistance to celebrations of canada’s sesquicentennial. indigenizing the department will involve reforming the curriculum to include both the history of colonialist projects, and indigenous knowl- edges and practices that resist colonialism. her office is a safe space where students from various departments come to drink tea and relate stories of experiencing racism or heterosexism on campus. seeking to expand this safe space and to make room for indigenous ceremonies, rituals, and gardens, anderson is spearheading a project to build a “grannie’s cabin” in a wooded area of campus. near the cabin there will be a garden that will provide indigenous students with food to take home. as part of this initiative, indigenous elders will tell stories and provide teachings linking indigenous knowledge to the issue of working toward indigenous food security. anderson redefines home and women’s place in it as participating in activism and engaged care for the well- being of the indigenous community and its members. the grandmothers situate lorraine mayer’s reflection on her identity and her rela- tion to feminist philosophy ( ). beginning with the stories of her french grand- mother and her cree grandmother, mayer bemoans the patriarchal history that obscures her grandmothers’ names, but not her grandfathers’, attributing this erasure to the male-dominated system of colonialism. this erasure of her cree grandmother’s name and history from genealogical documents led mayer to explore feminism in spite of her skepticism about feminism as an indigenous woman. in she attended the “hypatia and the status of women” conference, finding it inhospitable. she did not feel welcome and was appalled at the lack of knowledge and concern of the conference audi- ence to what was happening to indigenous canadian women. she relates that even though this foray into feminist philosophy was disappointing, while there she also met some wonderful women philosophers who invited her to attend the feminist ethics and social theory conference in where she chaired a session on indigenous philosophy. however, she wondered about her limited role as chair, rather than presenter because as the only indigenous scholar on the panel she had much to contribute to the discussion. discussions at that conference brought up issues of the marginalization of women of color, the continuing domination of white-stream feminism, and the recalcitrance and whiteness of philosophy as a disci- pline. given these experiences, mayer was reluctant to attend future feminist confer- ences. in spite of this she accepted an invitation to organize a panel for feast hypatia , whose theme was decolonizing and indigenizing feminist philosophy. mayer invited her students to be on her panel so that they could share their experiences with the cultures and languages of their indigenous communities. the three students came from different communities, beverly from the opaskywiak, glen from the anishinaabe, and grace from brochet. the panel focused on teaching indigenous phi- losophy and was structured as a talking circle with everyone introducing themselves and identifying the communities they were from; the session began with a prayer. each stu- dent told her or his story while other conference participants listened and learned. because of their deep, firsthand knowledge of their languages, cultures, and communi- ties, the students were able to offer rich insight into indigenous philosophy and ways of life. as mayer recounts: “they spoke from the heart, not the head. they spoke of com- munity and living philosophy. they were able to explain the lack of gendered terminol- ogy in our languages. they were able to articulate an egalitarian world and the value of childbirth. they were able to bestow a native philosophy upon us that only speakers can know” (pg ). mayer reports that she was pleasantly surprised by the acceptance and openness at this conference, and looks forward to more spaces such as this where she can share indigenous philosophy and her stories. in her essay, yomaira figueroa ( ) lays out the contours of afro-latina decolo- nial feminist thought. as part of an invited panel on decolonizing feminism, figueroa intended to discuss the “overlapping arcs of decolonial feminisms,” but the devastation of puerto rico caused by hurricanes irma and maría prompted a reflection closer to home. figueroa employs the concept of destierro to explore the complex relations among different and sometimes overlapping groups of indigenous, latinx, and caribbean peoples. destierro is usually translated into english as “exile,” but its mean- ing is actually closer to the word “banishment” with connotations of being unwillingly, forcibly uprooted from the earth and land. figueroa sees destierro as “a vector of dis- possession constitutive of colonial modernity” (pg ). it can provide a way to think through various forms and movements of resistance based on experiences, histo- ries, and ties to the land. resisting banishment by reclaiming land, and also lived experiences, including cul- tural and literary productions, can highlight the ways that land, home, and body are intimately connected. colonizing thought, methodologies, and practices deny the rela- tional understandings underlying indigenous philosophy. moreover, this relational understanding, figueroa points out, is necessary to work in coalition with other oppressed groups. “relationality is a methodology of complex coalition-building, of learning one another’s histories, and of understanding why difference can fragment communities in search of liberation” (pg ). because destierro tears people away from their land, land-based practices, and epistemologies, collective resistance to it offers a promising strategy for decolonizing practices and reclaiming land, as well as revaluing land-based practices and knowledges; this revaluing may contribute to indigenous futures in which land is repatriated, and indigenous knowledges, languages, cultures, and practices thrive. conclusion: imagining indigenous and decolonizing futurities within feminist philosophy this special issue is about a future for feminist philosophy, imagining our discipline in ways that make space for indigenous feminism. smith, tuck, and yang define their work in indigenous and decolonizing education as one relating to a futurity, “a word celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren that imbibes the future with what we are doing now to bring about different futures” (smith, tuck, and yang , ). noelani goodyear-kaʻōpua echoes this insight and characterizes futurities as “ways that groups imagine and produce knowledge of the future” (goodyear-kaʻōpua , ). however, through settler-colonial bias, indigenous futures have been undermined. hall argues that indigenous scholarship is easily erased or brought within problematic terms such as api (asian pacific islander), which renders pacific islanders absent as a distinct people (hall , ). moreover, settler-colonial metaphysical determinism uncritically argues that indigenous peoples, such as native hawaiʻians, would have eventually been colonized, and if the us hadn’t done so, some other superpower would have. in this sense, it seems that indigenous futures are intentionally suppressed by a settler logic of imperial occupation. in contrast, goodyear-kaʻōpua suggests that indigenous futurities “tend away from controlling and possessive modes of knowing. instead, they frequently include ways of relating that involve putting our bodies in motion in various kinds of non-human rhythms that engage multiple senses” (goodyear-kaʻōpua , ). this would involve developing a literacy of the land and/or ocean. opposed to an understanding of land based on a western proprietary model that emphasizes ownership through capitalistic values, hawaiʻian indigenous scholars have been theorizing that the task of sovereignty is to establish better relationships with the land, ocean, and sky through embodied prac- tice with nature. various indigenous scholars have discussed the development of land lit- eracy (goodyear-kaʻōpua ; styres ) as a decolonial and indigenous approach to sovereignty. j. kehaulani kauanui points us toward a distinctly native hawaiʻian decolo- nial “erotic autonomy” that engages the embodied dimensions of sexuality and land. this offers a decolonial expression of sovereignty that goes beyond a proprietary relationship to the land but nonetheless aims to ensure that indigenous presence and cultural and sex- ual expressions are able to thrive within occupied lands (kauanui , ). karin ingersoll’s work in developing a seascape epistemology articulates an oceanic literacy that views knowledge as arising from embodied activities with the ocean. what follows from these encounters with the ocean generates an ethics and a politics that resists settler configurations defining ocean as mere property or as a resource to consume, and ensures that indigenous presence endures and thrives (ingersoll , ). following land and oceanic literacies, indigenous and decolonizing futurities for feminist philosophy need to be mindful of the highly situated and contextual project that cultivating indigenous futurities might look like in a settler-dominant terrain within feminist philosophy. incommensurability based on the divergent commitments of indigenous and feminist scholars should be a starting point in repositioning one’s stance in relation to the legacies of settler colonialism in feminist philosophy. it will require situating feminist philosoph- ical analysis anchored within the visions and values of indigenous communities, which have been hidden behind settler ideological frameworks and deterministic imperial visions. the articles in this special issue offer brief vignettes that introduce new ideolog- ical frameworks, imagine new directions, and navigate toward better and more vibrant indigenous futurities within feminist philosophy, while acknowledging the limits of our own settler-colonial biases. notes . we capitalize “indigenous” to follow the naja (native american journalists association), which dis- tinguishes indigenous referring to people from reference to indigenous plants, species, animals, and so on. hypatia . tuck and yang point out many sources of indigenous research that should be on the reading lists of feminist philosophers. . manulani meyer also presented a version of the concept of “indigenous” understood as “to thrive” dur- ing a panel presentation on “sustainability, resistance and education” at the pacific association of continental thought held at the university of hawaiʻi at hilo in september . references anderson, kim. . affirmations of an indigenous feminist. in indigenous women and feminism: politics, activism, and culture, ed. cheryl suzack, shari m. hughndorf, jeanne perreault, and jean barman. vancouver: university of british columbia press. arvin, maile, eve tuck, and angie morrill. . decolonizing feminism: challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. feminist formations ( ): – . bowman, melanie, and maria rebolleda-gómez. . uprooting narratives: legacies of colonialism in the neoliberal university. hypatia ( ): – . deloria, jr., vine. . power and place: indian education in america. golden, colo.: fulcrum publishing. ferrari, martina. . questions of silence: on the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence. hypatia ( ): – . figueroa, yomaira. . after the hurricane: afro-latina decolonial feminisms and destierro. hypatia ( ): – . goeman, mishuana r., and jennifer nez denetdale. . introduction: native feminisms: legacies, inter- ventions, and indigenous sovereignties. wicazo sa review ( ): – . goodyear-kaʻōpua, noelani. . the seeds we planted: portraits of a native hawaiian charter school. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ——. . indigenous oceanic futures: challenging settler colonialisms and militarization. in indigenous and decolonizing studies in education, ed. linda tuhiwai smith, eve tuck, and k. wayne yang. new york: routledge. grande, sandra. . red pedagogy: native american social and political thought. lanham, md.: rowman and littlefield publishers. green, joyce, ed. . making space for indigenous feminism. halifax, n.s.: fernwood publishing. hall, lisa kahaleole. . navigating our own “sea of islands”: remapping a theoretical space for hawaiian women and indigenous feminism. wicazo sa review ( ): – . ingersoll, karin amimoto. . waves of knowing: a seascape epistemology. durham, n.c.: duke university press. kauanui, j. kehaulani. . paradoxes of hawaiian sovereignty: land, sex, and the colonial politics of state nationalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. kizuk, sarah. . settler shame: a critique of the role of shame in settler–indigenous relationships in canada. hypatia ( ): – . matallana-peláez, susana. . desalambrando: a nasa standpoint for liberation. hypatia ( ): – . mayer, lorraine. . from the outside looking in: one woman’s acimowin. hypatia ( ): – . meyer, manulani aluli . ho’oulu: our time of becoming: hawaiian epistemology and early writings. honolulu: ‘ai pōhaku press. —— . connecting education and the environment: mobilizing sustainability in education, research, policy and practice. sepn conference presentation, university of saskatchewan, saskatoon. june. paquette, elisabeth. . reconciliation and cultural genocide: a critique of liberal multicultural strategies of innocence. hypatia ( ): – . park, shelley. . unsettling feminist philosophy: an encounter with tracey moffatt’s night cries. hypatia ( ): – . ranger, camille, and laurie gagnon-bouchard. . reclaiming relationality through the logic of the gift and vulnerability. hypatia ( ): – . sinclair, rebekah. . exploding individuals: engaging indigenous logic and decolonizing science. hypatia ( ): – . smith, barbara. . racism and women’s studies. national women’s studies association: selected conference proceedings. frontiers: a journal of women’s studies ( ): – . celia t. bardwell-jones and margaret a. mclaren smith, linda tuhiwai, eve tuck, and k. wayne yang. . indigenous and decolonizing studies in educa- tion: mapping the long view. new york: routledge. styres, sandra. . literacies of the land: decolonizing narratives, storying, and literature. in indigenous and decolonizing studies in education, ed. linda tuhiwai smith, eve tuck, and k. wayne yang. new york: routledge. sullivan-clarke, andrea. . decolonizing “allyship” for indian country: lessons from #nodapl. hypatia ( ): – . tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. . decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education and society ( ): – . wolfe, patrick. . settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. london: cassell. celia t. bardwell-jones is associate professor of philosophy at the university of hawaiʻi at hilo. she is currently the chair of the gender and women’s studies program. her research interests include topics on feminism and pragmatism, transnational identities, ethics, race, immigration, and indigenous epistemol- ogies, with an emphasis in the geographies of the pacific. she teaches courses that incorporate an interdis- ciplinary and a social-ethics approach to metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of nature. she is the co-editor, along with maurice hamington, of the anthology contemporary feminist pragmatism (routledge, ). her publications have appeared in the pluralist, the journal of speculative philosophy, transactions of the charles s. peirce society, and numerous anthologies on subject matters of identity and decolonial methodologies. (celiab@hawaii.edu) margaret a. mclaren teaches philosophy, and in the sexuality, women’s, and gender studies program at rollins college where she holds the george d. and harriet w. cornell chair of philosophy. her most recent book, women’s activism, feminism, and social justice (oxford university press, ) develops a social-justice model for transnational feminism emerging out of women’s grassroots activism in india. she is also the author of feminism, foucault, and embodied subjectivity (suny press, ), and the edi- tor of decolonizing feminism: transnational feminism and globalization (rowman and littlefield international, ). her articles on women and human rights, feminism, cooperatives and economic empowerment, and foucault have appeared in several journals, including hypatia, social theory and practice, journal of developing societies, forum on public policy, and philosophy today, as well as in a number of book anthologies. (mmclaren@rollins.edu) cite this article: bardwell-jones ct, mclaren ma ( ). introduction to indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy. hypatia , – . https://doi.org/ . /hyp. . hypatia https://www.celiab@hawaii.edu https://www.mmclaren@rollins.edu https://doi.org/ . /hyp. . 	introduction to indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy 	key critical terms 	to indigenize and decolonize feminist philosophy 	article summaries 	conclusion: imagining indigenous and decolonizing futurities within feminist philosophy 	notes 	references association of sexual harassment and sexual assault with midlife women’s mental and physical health association of sexual harassment and sexual assault with midlife women’s mental and physical health rebecca c. thurston, phd; yuefang chang, phd; karen a. matthews, phd; roland von känel, md; karestan koenen, phd importance sexual harassment and sexual assault are prevalent experiences among women. however, their association with health indices is less well understood. objective to investigate the association of history of sexual harassment and sexual assault with blood pressure, mood, anxiety, and sleep among midlife women. design, setting, and participants nonsmoking women without cardiovascular disease were recruited from the community to undergo physical measurements (blood pressure, height, weight), medical history, and questionnaire psychosocial assessments (workplace sexual harassment, sexual assault, depression, anxiety, sleep). exposures sexual harassment and sexual assault. main outcomes and measures blood pressure, depressive symptoms, anxiety, and sleep characteristics. results among the nonsmoking women aged to years who participated in the study, all were free of clinical cardiovascular disease, and the mean (sd) age was . ( . ) years. a total of % reported a history of workplace sexual harassment (n = ), and % reported a history of sexual assault (n = ). sexual harassment was related to significantly greater odds of stage or hypertension among women not taking antihypertensives (odds ratio [or], . ; % ci, . - . ; p = . ) as well as clinically poor sleep (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; p = . ), after adjusting for covariates. sexual assault was associated with significantly greater odds of clinically elevated depressive symptoms (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multivariable p = . ), clinically relevant anxiety (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; p = . ), and clinically poor sleep (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multivariable p = . ), after adjusting for covariates. conclusions and relevance sexual harassment and sexual assault are prevalent experiences among midlife women. sexual harassment was associated with higher blood pressure and poorer sleep. sexual assault was associated with poorer mental health and sleep. efforts to improve women’s health should target sexual harassment and assault prevention. jama intern med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jamainternmed. . published online october , . corrected on november , . related article page author affiliations: author affiliations are listed at the end of this article. corresponding author: rebecca c. thurston, phd, department of psychiatry, university of pittsburgh, o’hara st, pittsburgh, pa (thurstonrc@upmc.edu). research jama internal medicine | original investigation (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . mailto:thurstonrc@upmc.edu http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . s exual harassment and sexual assault are common ex-periences among women. in the united states, an esti-mated % to % of women have experienced work- place sexual harassment, and over in women ( %) have experienced sexual assault. with recent popular move- ments (eg, metoo, #timesup), there is rising public aware- ness of sexual harassment and assault and their implications for women’s health. both sexual harassment and sexual assault have been linked to poorer self-reported physical and mental health outcomes. - while these studies suggest that harassment and assault are associated with adverse outcomes broadly, these findings are limited by several issues. survey studies, particu- larly of sexual harassment, largely assess physical health via self-report. these reports can be biased by mood, memory, and reporting of physical symptoms and by awareness of health conditions, which can vary by socioeconomic status, health care access, and health literacy. another limitation is incom- plete consideration of critical confounding factors, such as socioeconomic position, adiposity, and medication use. fur- thermore, self-reported outcomes are often assessed using single-question items rather than full validated measures. re- search on sexual harassment and assault using measured health indices, full multidimensional scales, and comprehensive con- sideration of confounders is warranted. among a well-characterized sample of midlife women, we investigated the association of a history of sexual harass- ment and sexual assault with blood pressure (bp), depressed mood, anxiety, and sleep, important health issues affecting midlife women. elevated bp is a major risk factor for cardio- vascular disease (cvd), the leading cause of death in women, and an important indicator of risk among midlife women who typically develop clinical cvd later in life. depression and anxiety show a doubling in rates in women relative to men, and up to half of midlife women report problems with sleep. , we hypothesized that sexual harassment and assault would be associated with higher bp, more depressed mood and anxi- ety, and poorer sleep after accounting for key confounders. methods study participants a total of nonsmoking women aged to years were recruited from the community (pittsburgh, pennsylva- nia) via advertisements, mailings, and online message boards. the cohort was originally selected for a study designed to ex- amine the association of menopausal hot flashes and subclini- cal atherosclerosis as assessed by carotid ultrasonography. per the original study design, half of the women reported menopausal hot flashes, and half reported no hot flashes. of the women who underwent telephone screening, were eligible and enrolled. exclusions, selected based on their impact on menopausal symptoms and cardiovascular health, included premenopausal status; hysterectomy or oophorec- tomy; reported history of cvd, arrhythmia, kidney failure, gy- necological cancer; current pregnancy; or having used key medications in the past months: oral/transdermal estrogen or progesterone, selective estrogen receptor modulators, se- lective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, serotonin norepineph- rine reuptake inhibitors, gabapentin, insulin, β-blockers, calcium channel blockers, and α- adrenergic agonists. pro- cedures were approved by the university of pittsburgh insti- tutional review board, and all participants provided written informed consent. main outcomes and measures procedures included physical measurements, interviews, and questionnaires. sexual harassment and assault were as- sessed from brief trauma questionnaire items developed for the nurses’ health study ii adapted from the brief trauma interview. , items assessed workplace sexual harassment (“have you ever experienced sexual harassment at work that was either physical or verbal?”) and sexual assault (“have you ever been made or pressured into having some type of un- wanted sexual contact? [by sexual contact we mean any con- tact between someone else and your private parts or between you and someone else’s private parts])?” response options were yes/no. this measure has high interrater reliability relative to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (fourth edition) for presence of criterion a trauma exposure (κ = . ). seated bp was measured via a dinamap device after a -minute rest. height and weight were measured via a sta- diometer and balance beam scale. body mass index (bmi) was calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. depressive symptoms were assessed by the center for epidemiologic studies depression (cesd) scale, trait anxi- ety via the spielberger state-trait anxiety inventory (stai), and sleep quality via the pittsburgh sleep quality index (psqi) considered continuously and via clinical cut points (cesd ≥ ; psqi > ; and stai ≥ and upper quartile of nor- mative samples ). demographics and medical history were as- sessed via structured interview. women reported current medi- c ation use (eg, for bp: angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, diuretics; for sleep: melatonin, gaba-α agents (γ-aminobutyric acid-α); for anxi- ety: benzodiazepines; and for depression: bupropion, tricy- clic agents). physical activity was assessed via the interna- key points question do women with a history of sexual harassment or sexual assault have higher blood pressure, greater depression and anxiety, and poorer sleep than women without this history? findings among nonsmoking midlife women recruited from the community to undergo assessment and complete questionnaires for this prospective cohort study, those with a history of workplace sexual harassment had significantly higher odds of hypertension and clinically poor sleep than women without this history, after adjusting for covariates. women with a history of sexual assault had significantly higher odds of clinically significant depressive symptoms, anxiety, and poor sleep than women without this history, after adjusting for covariates. meaning sexual harassment and sexual assault have implications for women’s health. association of sexual harassment and sexual assault with midlife women’s health original investigation research jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine january volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . tional physical activity questionnaire and snoring via the berlin questionnaire. data analyses all psqi values were natural log–transformed for analysis. dif- ferences between participants by harassment or assault history were tested using linear regression, wilcoxon rank sum, and χ tests. associations between exposures and outcomes were tested in regression models. covariates were factors associated with the outcome at p < . , with select variables selected a priori for in- clusion (medications and for sleep models snoring and nightshift work). residual analysis and diagnostic plots were conducted to verify model assumptions. analyses were performed with sas software, version . (sas institute inc). models were sided, α = . . results participants were on average years old (table ). nineteen percent of women (n = ) reported a history of workplace sexual harassment, and % reported a history of sexual as- sault (n = ). ten percent of women reported both sexual ha- rassment and assault (n = ). women with a history of sexual harassment had higher education yet more financial strain. no characteristics varied by sexual assault. women with a history of sexual harassment had signifi- cantly higher systolic bp (sbp), marginally higher diastolic bp (dbp), and significantly poorer sleep quality than women with- out a history of harassment, after adjusting for covariates (all supporting data provided in table ). when considering clini- cal cut points, harassment was associated with significantly higher likelihood of stage or hypertension among women not taking antihypertensive medications (sbp ≥ or dbp ≥ mm hg; odds ratio [or], . ; % ci, . - . ; multivari- able p = . ) and of poor sleep consistent with clinical insom- nia (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multivariable p = . ) (figure ). women with a history of sexual assault had higher depres- sive symptoms, anxiety, and poorer sleep quality than women without a history of sexual assault (table ). assault was as- sociated with significantly higher odds of clinically elevated depressive symptoms (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multivari- able p = . ), anxiety (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multi- variable p = . ), and poor sleep (or, . ; % ci, . - . ; multivariable p = . ) (figure ). table . study participant characteristics characteristic participants, no. (%) (n = ) workplace sexual harassment sexual assault yes (n = [ %]) no (n = [ %]) yes (n = [ %]) no (n = [ %]) age, mean (sd), y . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) race/ethnicity white ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) nonwhitea ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) educationb <college ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ≥college ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) marital status married/partnered ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) divorced/widowed ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) single ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) financial strain, yesc ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) bmi, mean (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) alcohol use <monthly ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) monthly but <weekly ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) weekly ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) leisure physical activity (ipaq score), median (iqr)d ( - ) ( - ) ( - ) ( - ) snoring ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) nightshift work ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) medication use bp-lowering ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) sleep ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) antidepressants ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) anxiolytics ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) abbreviations: bmi, body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared); bp, blood pressure; ipaq, international physical activity questionnaire ; iqr, interquartile range. a nonwhite race/ethnicity includes african american, asian, hispanic, or biracial. b education level varied significantly by harassment status (p < . ). c financial strain was defined as somewhat hard or very hard to pay for basic necessities of life, and it varied significantly by harassment status (p < . ). d physical activity was square-root transformed for analysis. research original investigation association of sexual harassment and sexual assault with midlife women’s health jama internal medicine january volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . discussion among the study participants, % reported a history of work- place sexual harassment, and % reported a history of sexual as- sault. sexual harassment was associated with higher bp and poorer sleep, and sexual assault with depressed mood, anxiety, and poor sleep. associations persisted after adjusting for demo- graphic and biomedical covariates. approximately in women reported having been sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. although high, these rates are lower than those of national samples. , variations in estimates can arise from sample characteristics, assessment methods, and willingness of participants to report these sensitive experiences. our sample was somewhat lower risk in sociodemographic and physical characteristics than the average population because we excluded women who were smokers, who had undergone hys- terectomy, or who were using common antidepressants and cer- tain cardiovascular medications. few characteristics distinguished between women who had been sexually harassed and those who had been sexually assaulted, with the exception that women who were sexually harassed were more highly educated yet more fi- nancially strained. notably, women who are younger or are in more precarious employment situations are more likely to be ha- rassed, and financially stressed women can lack the financial se- curity to leave abusive work situations. why more highly edu- cated women in the present study were more likely to be harassed is unclear; these women may more often be employed in male- dominated settings, be more knowledgeable about what consti- tutes sexual harassment, or be perceived as threatening; sexual harassment is an assertion of hierarchical power relations. , this study examines sexual harassment and assault in re- lation to measured bp, an advance over previous work relying largely on self-reports. an exception is work by krieger and colleagues, who examined workplace hazards in relation to bp among low-income participants, finding that only sexual harassment was associated with sbp among women. notably, the magnitude of increase in sbp observed in the present study associated with a history of harassment (approximately mm hg in sbp) is clinically significant (eg, a % increased risk for cvd). importantly, harassed women not taking antihyper- tensive agents had more than -fold increased odds of bp con- sistent with hypertension. sexual assault was related to poorer mental health. assaulted women had almost -fold greater odds of symptoms consistent with a major depressive disorder and more than -fold greater odds of elevated anxiety. conversely, sexual assault appeared less figure . association of sexual assault with depressed mood, anxiety, and sleep quality pa rt ic ip an ts , % sexual assaultno sexual assault anxiety poor sleepdepression for depressed mood, the adjusted odds ratio (aor) was . ( % ci, . - . ) (p = . ); for anxiety, aor, . ( % ci, . - . ) (p = . ); for sleep, aor, . ( % ci, . - . ) (p = . ). depression and anxiety models were adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, education, bmi, use of antidepressants, and use of anxiolytics; sleep models were adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, education, bmi, snoring, use of sleep medication, and nightshift work. table . workplace sexual harassment and sexual assault associated with bp, mental health, and sleep indicesa characteristic sexual harassment, b (se) p value sexual assault, b (se) p value sbp . ( . ) . . ( . ) . dbp . ( . ) . . ( . ) . depressive symptoms . ( . ) . . ( . ) <. anxiety . ( . ) . . ( . ) . sleep qualityb . ( . ) . . ( . ) <. abbreviations: bmi, body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared); bp, blood pressure; b (se), unstandardized beta (standard error); dbp, diastolic blood pressure; sbp, systolic blood pressure. a all models adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, education, bmi; bp models adjusted for use of bp-lowering medication; depression/anxiety models adjusted for use of antidepressants or anxiolytics; sleep models adjusted for snoring, use of sleep medication, nightshift work. b sleep quality natural log transformed for analysis. figure . association of sexual harassment with prevalence of hypertension and poor sleep pa rt ic ip an ts , % sexual harassmentno sexual harassment poor sleephypertension for hypertension, the adjusted odds ratio (aor) was . ( % ci, . - . ) (p = . ); for sleep, aor, . ( % ci, . - . ) (p = . ). hypertension models were adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, education, and bmi among women not using antihypertensive medications; hypertension stage or was defined as systolic blood pressure of mm hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of mm hg or higher. sleep models were adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, education, bmi, snoring, use of sleep medication, and nightshift work. association of sexual harassment and sexual assault with midlife women’s health original investigation research jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine january volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . related to bp; a relation that may depend on the severity or chro- nicity of the victimization history. sexual assault and harass- ment were each associated with a -fold increased odds of poor sleep consistent with clinical insomnia. notably, poor sleep, , depressed mood, and anxiety are themselves linked adverse physical health outcomes. strengths and limitations this work has limitations. study exposures were assessed via questions. future work should use a full multidimensional scale that measures the severity and chronicity of exposures. women recalled harassment and assault and reported exclusionary medi- cal conditions that may incorporate reporting biases. the sample had somewhat limited representation of racial/ethnic minority groups and reflected several exclusions; thus, findings may not be generalizable to all women. future work should include more diverse samples. this work incorporates multiple comparisons. finally, this study cannot establish the causality or temporality of exposures associated with outcomes. this study has several strengths. we considered sexual ha- rassment and assault, prevalent yet understudied exposures in women. we considered measured bp and a range of mental health indices assessed with full, validated scales. we ad- justed for a range of key covariates. we studied these associa- tions in a well-characterized sample of women. conclusions among midlife women, workplace sexual harassment was associated with higher bp and poorer sleep, and sexual assault with depressed mood, anxiety, and poorer sleep. future work should consider whether preventing or mitigat- ing sexual harassment and sexual assault can improve wom- en’s mental and c ardiovascular health. given the high prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, addressing these prevalent and potent social exposures may be critical to promoting health and preventing disease in women. article information accepted for publication: july , . published online: october , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . correction: this article was corrected on november , , to correct the y-axis in figure , which had made the percentage of participants display incorrectly in the bar graph. author affiliations: department of psychiatry, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pennsylvania (thurston, matthews); department of epidemiology, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pennsylvania (thurston, matthews); department of psychology, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pennsylvania (thurston, matthews); department of neurosurgery, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pennsylvania (chang); department of consultation–liaison psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, university hospital zurich, zurich, switzerland (von känel); department of epidemiology, harvard t.h. chan school of public health, boston, massachusetts (koenen); department of social and behavioral sciences, harvard t.h. chan school of public health, boston, massachusetts (koenen). author contributions: dr thurston had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. concept and design: thurston, matthews, koenen. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: thurston, chang, von känel, koenen. drafting of the manuscript: thurston. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: all authors. statistical analysis: thurston, chang. obtained funding: thurston. administrative, technical, or material support: thurston. supervision: thurston, von känel. conflict of interest disclosures: dr thurston reports consulting for mas innovations, procter & gamble, and pfizer. no other disclosures are reported. funding/support: this work was supported by the supported by the national institutes of health (nih), national heart lung and blood institute (r hl and k , dr thurston) and the university of pittsburgh clinical and translational science institute (nih grant ul tr ). role of the funder/sponsor: the national institutes of health funded this work and approved the initial study design, but was not involved in the conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data; nor the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript. meeting presentation: this article was presented at the north american menopause society annual meeting; october , ; san diego, california. references . willness cr, steel p, lee k. a meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of workplace sexual harassment. person psychol. ; : - . doi: . /j. - . . .x . breiding mj, smith sg, basile kc, walters ml, chen j, merrick mt. prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence victimization—national intimate partner and sexual violence survey, united states, . mmwr surveill summ. ; ( ): - . . mcdonald p. workplace sexual harassment years on: a review of the literature. int j manag rev. ; : - . doi: . /j. - . . .x . centers for disease control and prevention. adverse health conditions and health risk behaviors associated with intimate partner 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its first international recognition came in the form of the zkb acknowledgement prize at the theater spektakel in zurich in , and it has since performed at such festivals as les urbaines in lausanne ( ), the inter - national theatre festival of kerala ( ), alchemy at the southbank centre in london ( ), the short theatre festival in rome ( ), and most recently at the women of the world festival in brisbane ( ). the production is in its fifth year and continues to receive invitations and critical acclaim from across the globe. in her discussion of the application of cultural materialism to understand the work - ings of theatre industries in urban environ - ments, jen harvie has shown that ‘what we can and cannot do is profoundly conditioned – or constrained – by the material conditions in which we try to do it’. however, she continues, ‘ it might indeed be useful to recognize how theatre and urban cultures are socially oppressive rather than wishfully to think that they are inevitably sites of liber - ation just because we want them to be; recognizing their limitations might usefully help us to address those limitations.’ this requires an urgent reconsideration of social agency and ways of thinking about how theatre practices navigate the hegemonic socio-political ideologies of neoliberal capit - al ism. ntq : (february ) © cambridge university press doi: . /s x x swati arora be a little careful: women, violence, and performance in india in this article swati arora analyzes a contemporary indian feminist performance, thoda dhyaan se (a little carefully, ), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of india. it highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country’s feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. swati arora argues that the concerns raised by thoda dhyaan se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. with conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #metoo and #timesup, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. swati arora is an andrew w. mellon postdoctoral fellow at the centre for humanities research, university of the western cape. her work exists at the intersections of theatre and performance, feminist theory, critical urban studies, post/de-colonial theory, and visual cultures. she completed her phd at the university of exeter and is a co- convenor of the international federation of theatre research. key terms: gender, caste, violence, feminist theatre, delhi, urban space, mallika taneja. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core following harvie, taneja’s performance is discussed here as a product of the cultural and political climate of india as well as that of the material urban environment of the capital city of delhi. the feminist politics of thoda dhyaan se is revealed as in tension with the privileged conditions of its pro - duction and reception. in this article i draw on henri lefebvre’s groundbreaking explor - a tion of space in the production of space ( ), both in its adoption of a spatial tria - lectic and in its critique of capitalism and the role of the state as an institution of power. thus, i have adapted lefebvre’s two sets of spatial trialectics (representations of space, spatial practice and representational space; and conceived space, perceived space, and lived space) to develop my own trialectic that identifies and addresses specific aspects of performance in the urban public spaces of delhi. my trialectic – affective space, geograph - ical space, and discursive space – makes use of lefebvre’s socio-political understanding of space for analyzing the situatedness of theatrical street performances. affective space refers to the space of stories and the space of questions that inspire the artists to make the work they do; geographical space denotes the physical space in which the per form - ances are created, as well as the spatial code of particular sites; while discursive space includes the visible and invisible spaces of power. the simultaneous operation of these three components of space as well the multidim - en sional aspect of each of the components contributes to the critical ‘liveness’ required for my performance analysis. it opens up a possibility to explore how this social aspect of space can become a creative and aesthetic dimension through which the repressive political and social marginalization is nego - tiated and interrogated by the performative aspect of theatre. this article is thus an invitation to identify the ways in which a performance event is caught in the complex spatial network of the city. an analysis of the internal interaction between the three dimensions of my tria - lectic offers the possibility of exploring the contradictory yet productive tensions bet - ween the operating forces. it proposes that even when the art work intends to be sub ver - sive in its political orientation, it can be seen to be entangled in a web of spatial structures by virtue of its geographic, ideo logical, social, and political affiliations. fur ther, the discussion highlights the heterogeneous char - ac ter of the contemporary phase of the femi - n ist movement in the country by using an intersectional perspective, which pays close attention to the role of region, class, caste, sexuality, and ethnicity in determining the ability to be heard, beyond the ability to speak. while not denying its significance for the feminist discourse in the country, i argue that the concerns raised by thoda dhyaan se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper- caste women and exclude the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower- class, and lower-caste backgrounds. the visib ility and popularity that taneja’s perfor - mance has claimed can be said to be a con - sequence of its location – in the national capital region – that is inextricably embroiled in an ideological endorsement of the national symbolic, even when the national state is not necessarily benign. the discussion throws light on how the neoliberal market ideo - logies function by multiplication of images of the majoritarian aesthetic – upper-class, upper-caste, hindu – in the indian context. affective space be a little careful begins with a dark, bare stage, except for a spot in the centre where piles of clothes are placed carelessly on two wooden chairs. a few seconds of silence pass before taneja appears from upstage left and walks towards the stage centre with slow, confident steps. the light reveals her to be dressed only in her underclothes. she stares at the audience, as if looking into a mirror. with her hands on her waist and her profile to the audience, she is composed and self- possessed. taneja’s examination of her neatly toned body slowly changes into admiration. she switches profile, continuing her sharp https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core gaze at the audience. another long pause follows. this entire sequence does not last for more than two minutes, but one can sense that the audience feels otherwise. there is an eerie, uncomfortable silence in the auditor - ium. a few people are heard coughing. another minute passes before taneja has finished admiring herself in the mirror. the sharp centre spot changes to a bright ambient stage light and, suddenly, she begins to envelop herself frantically in all sorts of clothing. a scarf is used to cover her midriff, the ends sealed with a knot. several other layers follow, one scarf over the other. many knickers and shorts of various sizes are then worn to make sure that ‘no one points fingers at her later’ in case ‘anything goes wrong’. the performance is about the patriarchal concern for a woman’s ‘safety’ when she is outside her home. taneja quotes her father, who, like any other father of the indian middle class , insists that his daughter has to ‘be a little careful’ when she steps out of the house. it is the ‘responsibility’ of every wo - man to ‘protect’ herself by following certain unwritten rules, she tells us. the patriarchal mallika taneja in be a little careful as ‘she begins to envelop herself frantically in all sorts of clothing’. photo: david wohlschlag. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core discourse around protection of women’s bodies is repeated as she puts on many layers of clothes, of different colours, sizes, and fabrics to make herself ‘rape-proof’. the sentences gradually lose the meas - ured tone of the opening as the volume, pitch, and rhythm of her speech increases. soon after this, they become phrases repeated like frantic chants. the figure of the confident woman who had entered the stage and admired herself with pride transforms into an anxious, insecure, and infantilized girl who pays heed to the cautions of her father. her slow, careful choice of clothes in the beginning becomes absurd as taneja loses all sense of aesthetics, symmetry, and coordin - ation. each piece of clothing becomes a wall necessary to guard her from the outside world. after taneja has repeated her father’s words, she shares a secret with the audience: there is a party at her office later that even - ing. she picks out a red and white floral dress with great excitement, but stops herself, saying, ‘par iska yeh matpal thode hi hai ki aap kuchh bhi pehen ke chale jaayenge!’ (‘but that does not mean you can wear any - thing!’) a special, celebratory occasion cert - ainly demand special attire, but that does not give you the ‘choice’ to dress ‘inappropri - ately’, she mutters. she wears her favourite floral dress, but only after her body has been covered with several layers of mismatched and ill-fitted garments together with hand gloves. the absurdity of the image is made clear when she concludes by covering her head with a helmet, the final addition to her armour. before she can step out of the house, she has ensured that her body is rape-proof. she asks the audience: ‘main kaisi lag rahi hoon?’ (‘how am i looking?’) the patriarchal discourse of femininity be a little careful is a sharp critique of the social and psychological restrictions imposed on urban middle-class women, who are expected to perform their femin inity in ways that conform to the patriarchal discourse of respectability and safety. it satirizes the strategies of control used by families and well-wishers who seek to ‘protect’ women’s bodies from the dangers of the street in metropolitan spaces in such a way as to utilize the affective space of performance. this aspect of my trialectic refers to the space of stories and the concerns or ques - tions that motivate the artists to create the work that they do. affective space places the body of artists, poets, and revolutionaries at the centre as they engage with non- hegemonic forms of creative practice and social resistance. it is thus the only dimen - sion in the trialectic that offers agency to the body of the artists and to the performative potential of theatre practice itself. further, it is a generative space that explores alternative forms of socio-spatial reorganization, as well as being a space of memories and a hetero - topic space, with a potential for challenging the repressive tendencies of the establish - ment. in be a little careful, taneja’s act of wrap - ping her semi-nude body with layers of clothing to make it ‘rape-proof’ mocks the middle-class belief that equates a fully clothed body with safety – the falsity of this belief being proven by two recent rape incid - ents that inspired taneja. in both cases, the survivors were single women from middle- class backgrounds who were used to navig - ating the city spaces on their own terms and who were both fully dressed and accom - panied by men. using humour and irony, taneja’s presentation of her body challenges the culture of victim-blaming and shaming that places the onus of safety on the woman and which conveniently excludes from its narrative the structural violence that encour - ages patriarchal objectification of the female body. after almost a year and a half of per - forming across india, taneja went on stage absolutely naked for the show’s first inter - national performance in zurich in . on the european stage, a naked female body might not be very uncommon, but a naked indian woman performing on stage as a pro - test against gendered violence garnered a lot https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core of media attention and publicity. taneja’s first naked performance in india took place at the international theatre festival of kerala (itfok) in january , to an intimate audi - ence at the black-box natayagruham. since itfok, tanjea has continued to perform the piece naked, mostly in institutional festivals and at small, intimate venues in delhi, and the length of the performance has in creased from eight to twenty minutes. for the per - formance that forms part of jurrat, thoda dhyaan se was due to be played outside at the munirka bus stop, but the organizers cancelled these plans at the last minute as they feared it would be too provocative and dangerous. nakedness as protest in draupadi the question of representation of naked ness and its use as a mode of protest is vexed, especially in the indian context, albeit not exclusive to it. renowned manipuri director heisnam kanhailal’s adaptation of mahas - weta devi’s short story draupadi, in which sabitri heisnam appears naked on stage as the character of dropdi, is a case in point. devi borrows the title of her story from the character of draupadi, the polyandrous wife of five pandava brothers in the ancient indian hindu epic the mahabharata. towards the end of the tale, the pandavas lose draupadi to the kauravas, the enemy step- brothers, in a game of dice. when she refuses to come to the court, the kaurava prince dushasana is asked to drag draupadi by her hair in full view of the public. his efforts at disrobing draupadi are countered by lord krishna appearing mysteriously in answer to draupadi’s prayer. when dushasana tries to disrobe her by force, the length of draup - adi’s sari becomes never-ending, and the exhausted dushasana eventually gives up. devi’s draupadi, however, is set against the naxalite peasant rebellion that took place in the naxalbari region of west bengal in the s. it takes place with the revolt in the back ground by lower castes against their ex - ploitation by rich, upper-caste land owners, which included sexual harassment of tribal women, under the aegis of armed forces special forces act (afspa). under special privileges provided to the indian army for combating terrorism, this controversial act has provided impunity to its officers, who have been accused of sexual violence in kashmir, manipur, and chhattisgarh. when kanhailal adapted devi’s story for the stage in , the character of the tribal protagonist dropdi was played by his sixty- year-old wife sabitri. towards the end of the play, she appeared naked on the stage, ques - tioning and challenging the idea of feminine virtue as well as drawing attention to the repeated cases of rape and violence on manipuri women through afspa. dropdi refuses to cover herself when asked to do so by the army commander and inverts the narrative of feminine virtue and shame ascribed to women’s bodies. dropdi screaming ‘confront my body’ at the soldier in one scene is said to have inspired the protests in imphal in manipur in against the indian state. thus, deepti misri writes: ‘the efficacy of draupadi’s protest lies precisely in its ability to hijack the her - meneutics of rape by calling the patriarchal state to account on its own discursive terrain’ and claims that ‘the naked protest tauntingly punctures the triumphalist structure of rape- as-power by recoding rape as an unmanly act of cowardice’. when a group of manipuri meitei women staged a nude protest against the cruel rape and murder of thangjam manorama devi by the indian army in front of the kangra fort in imphal in , the entire nation wit - nessed the power and resolve of those women’s bodies as they became a weapon of political resistance. furthermore, if queen draupadi needs a male saviour figure to protect her in the mahabharata, the protagon - ist in devi’s feminist version is a tribal woman who does not aspire or hope for such a thing. in her foreword to the english translation, gayatri chakravorty spivak argues: rather than save her modesty through the im - plicit intervention of a benign and divine (in this case it would have been godlike) com rade, the story insists that this is the place where male leadership stops. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core the protest by meitei mothers similarly punc tures the image of the indian state as a benevolent guardian by exposing its acquies - cence in crimes of gendered violence. their terms of engagement with processes of law and justice are divorced from those of the indian constitution, as laid down by upper- caste men in . displaying the naked female body considering the narrative of shame that is associated with the naked female body in india, a display of an absolutely unclothed female body on stage is an act of defiance that is undertaken in helplessness. in a media interview, taneja is quoted as saying that her inspiration for using a naked body for pro - test came from the meitei mothers. the space afforded by the naked body of taneja, however, is dissimilar to the one occupied by the naked protest that occurred in manipur in , even though women in both cases had to resort to spectacle as a mode of protest in order to be seen and heard. taneja’s well- toned body is the body of a cis, straight, abled woman, and does not belie the time and effort that is spent on it to make it presentable in public. her arms, legs, and armpits have been shaved, and her toned body has undergone intense workouts in order to become ready to be gazed at. taneja explained in an interview : ‘i have body issues like everyone else.’ the meitei women who staged the protest outside the kangra fort, by contrast, were middle-aged mothers with hairy, unshaved arms and legs, and loose skin around their waists. they pro - tested against a state-authorized crime, a gang-rape case that had not received a hear - ing in court or resulted in any prosecutions. after more than a decade, the supreme court of india directed the government to pay one mil lion rupees as compensation to manor - ama’s mother. samik bandhopadhyay argues that if ‘the - atre/ performance is the product/expres sion of the actor’s body, so the body is the product of a culture defined as a way of living. . . . the body of the community, more than an agglomeration of the bodies of its indivi - duals, carries its political and cultural history in itself.’ the meitei women reacted to the use of rape as a torture inflicted on the vul - nerable bodies of marginalized commu nities by using their bodies to challenge the idea of the state as a protector of women’s right to be safe. taneja’s performance, how ever, lies within the space of the capital city, where the refusal to allow her to perform on the streets shields her naked body from perceived or threatened violence. more recently, the rape and murder of asifa bano, a tribal muslim from the occu - pied and highly militarized region of jammu and kashmir, by five hindu men – a retired government official and four police officers – highlighted, yet again, how sexual violence and rape are inextricably linked to the work - ings of caste, class, and religion, and repeat - edly deployed for communal politics in india. bano was abducted when she was feeding her horses in the kathua district in jammu’s mainly hindu area in order to punish her nomadic bakerwal commu - nity and to deter them from using hindu land. this was yet another incident of hindu nationalism’s violation of women’s bodies in order to define itself, demoralize min ority communities, and destabilize resis - tance. taneja’s performance activism continues to engage with the desire of urban women to be able to walk on the streets without fear. she organizes an annual midnight walk through the city, inviting people to join her in this endeavour through an open call pub - lished on her facebook page. through find - ing a group of interested men and women and walking with them, taneja echoes the invitation of shilpa phadke and others to envision a better and safer city for women: imagine an indian city with street corners full of women: chatting, laughing, breast-feeding, ex - chang ing corporate notes or planning protest meetings. imagine footpaths spilling over with old and young women watching the world go by as they sip tea, and discuss love, cricket, and the latest blockbuster. imagine women in saris, jeans, salwars, and skirts sitting at the nukkad reflecting on world politics and dissecting the rising [shares on the] sensex. if you can imagine this, you’re imagin - ing a radically dif ferent city. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core problems of the privileged in writing about the gendered nature of urban spaces in the country and mumbai in particular, phadke and her co-authors dis - cuss the nature of the street as a space. high - lighting the pejorative connotations of the term ‘loitering’ and its masculine associ - ations when translated into hindi – lukka, lafanga, vella, tapori, bekaar – they lament women’s lack of access to the pleasures of the public street space. why loiter? encour - ages women to embrace the rhetoric of ‘fun’ over ‘safety’ and to take ownership of public spaces and public streets through the acts of sipping tea and discussing cricket and poli - tics. yet, as with taneja’s performance activ - ism, by asking women to indulge in carefree abandon on the streets, ‘loitering’ refers to the lifestyle of middle-class, upper-caste women whose experience of the urban is one of leisure, not because their daily survival depends on it. what taneja’s performance misses, then, is the impossibility of dis-embodying walk - ing from its contexts. it excludes the fact that the desire for fearless occupation of spaces does not negate the body who attempts it. the intent to roam the streets of delhi in taneja’s various initiatives overlooks the effects of the markers of class, caste, and reli - gious identity that privilege hindu, middle- class, brahman, urban women’s bodies over others. the bodies of manorama devi and asifa bano were marked by their ethnicity and religion, and their experience of the streets is inextricably tied to them. however, the concerns of taneja’s performances are the concerns of urban women like her – middle- class, educated, liberal, english-speak ing, university-bred, financially independent, and living in the capital city of delhi. by exclud - ing the narratives of sexual violence against minority communities, thoda dhyaan se fails to engage critically with the structural issues that assail these women and, consequently, alienates them as potential audiences. the feminist demands of thoda dhyaan se end up becoming reduced to ‘choice’ politics, whereby sympathy towards freedom and safety is limited to middle-class, upper-caste women in metropolitan spaces. its mode of ‘occupying’ the urban, construed as a radical and liberating act, overlooks the concerns of minority women of different castes, religion, women protesting against gender violence at jantar mantar on december . photo: swati arora. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core and socio-economic background, who inhabit public spaces in very different ways, either out of ‘compulsions of economics’ or due to infrastructural gaps such as lack of toilets. taneja’s act does not represent the con - cerns of adivasi, dalit, economically poor women from ethnic minorities, women with disabilities, or female bodies that inhabit different sexual orientations. her cultural capital, enhanced by the attention of the mainstream media, inscribes middle-class metropolitan concerns as universally valid across the country and neglects the inter - sectionality of class, caste, and religion. it also excludes the lgbt community, where the concerns of queer and transgender people might not be premised on visibility politics at all. thoda dhyaan se has represented india internationally and has invited empathy and anger from middle-class audiences in differ - ing measures, but it is imperative to recog - nize that the issues raised by taneja’s performance, although valid and urgent, rep resent only urban metropolitan concerns. geographical space the second component of the trialectic – geographical space – refers to material space, including architecture, performance venues, and institutional sites, as well as the ‘spatial codes’ and inbuilt privilege, or lack thereof, that shape one’s understanding of a space and what takes place within it. in the case of delhi, the spatial structure of the city continues to be influenced by the decisions made following indian indepen - dence in , when the new government defined very closely the cultural agenda of the postcolonial nation in symbolic and material terms. the location of ‘indian cul - ture’ was planned within the boundaries of new delhi, originally constructed as the capital of the british empire between and and designed by edwin lutyens and herbert baker. this particular space was redesigned meticulously in an effort to take control of the physical and cultural space of the capital. the cultural nodal hub of the city, mandi house, continues to exist adjacent to new delhi and it is constitutive of prominent national cultural organizations and institu - tions that provide artistic and pedagogic training around ‘indian culture’. sangeet natak akademi, or the academy of theatre, dance, and music, was set up in this area in . soon after, both the lalit kala akademi for fine arts and the sahitya kala akademi for literature were established. besides these, the national school of drama was set up in , kathak kendra in , the kamani audi - torium in , and the shri ram centre for performing arts in . these buildings are barely two miles from the rashtrapati bhavan (the president’s house) and the india gate, making explicit the complicity of the cultural buildings in the political ideologies of the time. this part of the city, therefore, affords an authority and visibility that other spaces do not, and embodies india’s modernist ambitions, with implications for performance events held at these locations. the stein auditoriun, where the first per - for m ance of thoda dhyaan se took place in december , is part of the india habitat centre (ihc) in lodhi colony. the habitat centre was intended to be an office space for the housing and urban devel op ment corpor ation limited (hudco) and other non-profit organizations, and was gradu ally trans formed into an urban design pro ject in the hands of the american architect joseph allen stein, the chairman of hudco. conceived in , ihc hosts offices of almost forty organizations, along with a multi-purpose auditorium named after stein, art galleries, an amphitheatre, and fine dining restaurants. even though the ihc does not exist within the boundaries of new delhi, this space is a luxurious hub of cultural activity for the upper- and middle- class inhabitants of the city. the courtyard spaces in between the brick and cement buildings are lined up neatly with trees and flowering plants to complete the illusion of a city within a city. yet, the unusual quiet and cleanliness of the space is an anomaly in delhi, betraying https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core what the streets look and feel like in most parts of the city. since the visitors here are either indians holding blue-collar jobs or foreign tourists, the space has been created to showcase an image of delhi that reflects the orderliness of european cities. taneja’s performance at ihc launched the week-long jurrat campaign that focused on advocating freedom and safety for women of the country. in keeping with the nature of the venue, the audience comprised the city’s university-going intelligentsia, who had be - come aware of the campaign through social media. similar venues to host thoda dhyaan se include the goethe institute in delhi and such educational institutions as the jawah - arlal nehru university and various colleges under the university of delhi. the perform - ance continues to be invited to high-profile festivals in europe and australia. taneja strives to expand the outreach of her piece to spaces outside new delhi and to the private space of homes of her friends and colleagues. she does not charge the audience for her performance at these events. how - ever, entry is limited to invitations circulated through social media, and hence is mostly confined to friends and acquaintances with a similar cultural capital. taneja has also per - formed at small, independent venues that are slowly carving their niche in the cultural life of delhi, including the basement in hauz khaz, bakheda in saket, and studio safdar in shadipur. expanding to public spaces these venues are artistic initiatives that allow for showcasing new, radical acts and aim to reach out to audiences in peripheral spaces. they do not lie within the boundary of new delhi and, thus, are not afforded the institutional privilege and media attention that the centre of the city invites. on the other hand, they are free of ideological im pli - cations and influences that come with such associations and are, therefore, capable of more subversive potential by virtue of their location in the peripheral spaces of delhi. thoda dhyaan se articulates the dangers of being seen in public spaces as a woman and demands, with a fiery spirit, being allowed to do so. however, taneja has confessed that all the venues in which she has performed have been ‘protected’ spaces – that is, en - closed spaces with private audiences – although with media access to disseminate information about it. the only exception has been a perform ance at jantar mantar. the play has been labelled ‘provocative’ and has been restricted to non-street, private spaces that do not allow for a spontaneous audience lest it spark off controversy or violence of any kind. as noted above, the scheduled performance at the munirka bus stop, where jyoti singh had boarded the bus in december , was cancelled for fear that it was too dangerous. this undermines the intention behind thoda dhyaan se, which is to create fearless freedom for women on the streets, since the nature of the performance has made it impossible to present it in the public space of the streets. taneja is also the founder-director of lost and found trust, a non-profit organization that ‘aims to seek out new spaces within the city – unseen, unnoticed, and undercover – for artists and audiences to make contact with each other’, and and ‘hopes to con tri - bute towards nurturing more engaged and empathetic citizens, for a secular and more tolerant society’. supported by the goethe institute, the trust aims to expand the cul - tural spaces of the city beyond the boundary of mandi house to create ‘new neighbour - hoods while building a community of audi - ence, friends, and supporters’. as part of this, taneja has managed to present theatre, music, dance, and storytell - ing events in public parks, spaces which are usually only used for wedding and festival celebrations a couple of times and left dor - mant for the rest of the year. this initiative thus adds vibrancy to the community centres in each locality by bringing children and families together and encouraging them to participate in these free events. taneja has also organized events in pitam pura, sarita vihar, vasant kunj, dwarka, chittaranjan park, and rama krishna puram, and is work ing on reaching out to more peripheral zones. these venues are not street spaces, but https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core en closed within community buildings and parks, and so highlight again the increasing unavailability of the street for cultural ventions. this is in contrast to the s, when the street served as a radical stage for protests, as maya rao, anuradha kapur, rati bartholomew, and other delhi-based artists addressed gender violence with passion. as the site of national law-making institu - tions and authorities, new delhi was also the focal point for the legislative wing of the women’s movement in the s. many demonstrations were organized on parlia - ment street and street theatre took on a renewed significance to bring attention to the structural and social conditions detrimental to women. two female ensembles based in delhi – theatre union and buland natya manch – were the forerunners of making street theatre plays specifically aimed at legis lative changes. radically political feminist theatre in the hands of performers like maya rao, anuradha kapur, and rati bartholomew, and then in the s amal allana and vijay mehta, addressed instances of violence against women, and the fury and persistence of people’s power initiated a change in judicial and democratic laws to make them more gender-sensitive. anita singh and tarun tapas mukherjee’s gender, space, and resistance, and acting up by a. mangai, are the most recent additions to the increasing repertoire of theatre scholar ship by indian women themselves. mangai explains: ‘delhi being the national capital is a valid spatial marker and, further, it does seek to provide a forum for various trends in the country’. she identifies: a recent moment in history during which gen - der concerns came to be foregrounded in public life and social movements, and initiated some truly radical departures in theatrical practice. . . . anuradha kapur, maya rao, and tripurari sharma, in short all those who are committed to women’s theatre, are inheritors of this moment in time. the reference here is to the delhi rape incident in december , which sparked debates on gender and public space not just in the country, but also across the world. it is pertinent to note that the three women mangai mentions as stalwarts of the feminist theatre movement in contemporary india are all based in delhi and have been affiliated with the nsd, a government-funded body set up in . in terms of the spatial location of both delhi and india, the visibility, auth - ority, and financial support continues to be afforded to theatre that takes places in the centre of the capital. threats to the use of public spaces thoda dhyaan se imagines alternative modes of inhabiting and experiencing public spaces, but taneja’s work does not involve walking through the unsafe and dangerous public space of delhi, instead offering ‘heterotopic’ spaces where the act of walking is imagined and critiqued. the shift between spaces – from outdoor streets to protected indoors – is also symptomatic of the larger issue of the democratization of spaces in india. since the election of hindutva leader narendra modi as prime minister in may , regressive campaigns like ‘love jihad’, the ‘anti- romeo’ squad, and the recent beef-ban across north india have been prevalent, and increas ingly so since the appointment of the hard-line hindutva advocate yogi aditya - nath as the chief minister of uttar pradesh in march . with state planning policies and neo liberal capitalism taking over public spaces, and religious fundamentalism striv - ing to limit women’s mobility, taneja’s inability to perform in public spaces, due to either the decision taken by the organizing bodies or individual restraint, is also symp - tomatic of the current nationalist discourse that is threatening to shut down all forms of dissent and occupation of public spaces. just as the spatial implications of different venues in delhi became evident in the media coverage and cultural value accorded to taneja’s performance, the significance and visibility given to different geographical lo - cations within the country enhanced the politics of spaces on the periphery such as manipur. within the masculine nationalist space of the india, delhi is framed as the stage where political events are picked up by the media, amplified in their dimensions, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core and consumed by the larger public. starkly different artistic, social, and political respon - ses to the gang-rape incidents in the two cities also point to the differing ways in which the gender discourse operates within the national boundaries, and how it varies between the capital city and the marginal space of manipur. even though both delhi and manipur became sites of crimes of a similar magni - tude, if not higher in the case of the latter, the fact that attention was given to delhi points to the media bias that restricts visibility and consequently outrage to metropolitan spaces. different treatment accorded to the gendered violence in the two cities highlights the ways in which neoliberalism, capitalism, nation - alism, and militarization construct the idea of india as a nation. the women from mani - pur have no faith in the legal system or the nation state since both have failed them repeatedly. the support and publicity the delhi gang- rape incident received through the media helped to put pressure on the government to take swift action and also brought in the legal changes recommended by the justice verma committee. the court sentenced the rapists to death within a year of the com - plaint being lodged. the othering of the lower-class and uneducated rapists and the punishment of the death penalty also high - lighted the selective outrage of the middle class – concerned to save and protect its own women, while women from peripheral spaces still face routine sexual assaults. as joanna kadi reminds us, ‘speech and sil ence are worthy of the most intense poli - tical analy sis,’ before urging the need to ‘examine the spaces where speech happens, examine the spaces where silence is en - forced’, since, ‘in many cases, silence is left for the oppressed’. and, even if speech is articulated as a shriek let out in sheer desper - ation, as in the protest by meitei women, it falls on deaf ears. there is value in the discussions that have taken place because of thoda dhyaan se, but it is imperative to recognize that the scope and outreach of the per formance is limited to metropolitan spaces. discursive space the events in delhi during that cold dec - ember of and the months that followed had a precedent in the women’s protest move ment that erupted in the late s and early s as a response to the failure of the indian state to effectively address instances of violence against women. the anxieties and hopes created after ‘the emergency’ – when, between june and march , then indian prime minister indira gandhi imposed self-rule on the country, suspended all civil rights, and censored the press – manifested themselves in a ferocious articulation of the demands for civil rights. the crisis of the indira gandhi govern - ment gave rise to new social movements, concretized the women’s movements, the dalit movement, including the founding of the dalit panthers in , the naxal move - ment of the s, and the founding of the bahujan samaj party (majority people’s party) in , along with movements for workers’ rights, as well as tribal and envir - onmental move ments across the country. the thrust of these movements was to - wards challenging the hegemony of the state and the reclaiming of not just social and economic control, but also of the cultural sphere where dissent could be articulated. high-profile events such as the shah bano case in , the immolation of roop kanwar in , and the mathura rape case pro - voked national agitations to force the state to address the issues of gendered violence, includ ing divorce rights, the practice of sati, custodial rape, sexual harassment in the work place, and the dowry system. such events and the discourse surrounding them highlight the inner workings of the discur sive space, the final element of my trialectic, and the various networks of affiliation that con - stitute it, including institutional affiliations, published discourses, associations with poli - tical parties and governmental networks, the academic world, the mainstream media, and legal discourses. previously, it was the social reform move - ment of the early nineteenth century that https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core borrowed from the victorian sensibility to model the indian woman into a good wife and companion for the westernized, privi - leged man. it was within the framework of hindu revivalism and reformist organiz - ations like arya samaj and the brahmo samaj that the subordination of women was confronted, and where oppressive social customs like child marriage and sati were to be elim inated through the education of hindu women. however, the patriarchal notion of women as devoted, self-sacrificing wives and mothers remained unques ti - oned. maitrayee chaudhuri further argues that ‘the reformers belonged mostly to the upper castes, that they were predom inantly male, and that the specific problems add - ressed and the mode of addressing them were very often restricted by region and caste location’. educational impetus during this period created a group of educated women who later contributed to the growth of women’s organizations between and , but this was almost exclusively confined to the urban centres. the setting up of the indian women’s association in and the all- india women’s conference in were crucial in encouraging women’s active poli - tical participation and mobilizing them to claim their legal rights. however, yet again, the modernization project under colonialism was restricted to serving the nation by pro - pa gating the wider patriarchal project and benefiting women from upper castes and classes while poor and unprivileged women were sidelined. rebirth of the feminist move ment while the rebirth of the feminist move ment in the s was pro voked by local struggles against violence – rape, dowry deaths, and custodial killings – they were ‘initiated by urban middle-class professional women (for the most part)’. it is ironic, too, that the demands of a separate political space for the dalit women were, yet again, brought to the forefront by upper-caste women. in terms of performance, male play - wrights and directors dominated the urban theatre in india, while the subject matter was limited to questions of the home and be - longing, desire, existentialism and absurd - ism, denoting the pervading influence of the lives and practices of male european direc - tors. the revival of the women’s move ment in the s gradually gave visibility to the efforts of women playwrights and directors, who had existed on the fringes in the cultural industry of the country. the pre-indepen d ence rhetoric around developmental politics, as inspired by the european feminist move ment, was trans - formed when the focus shifted to grassroots activism in order to educate women and mobilize them to take decisions concerning their body. the family as a site of oppression was discussed and debated for the first time, and the slogan ‘the personal is political’ became the guiding precept. the force and momentum of the struggle, however, was particularly domin ant in urban areas. furthermore, mary john has observed that the women’s movement in the city and the country at large is marked by ‘height - ened institutionalization’: feminism now has a marginal presence in the syllabi of different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, while women’s studies centres are proliferating across the country under the fiat of the university grants commission. insti tu tionalization has congealed around the term ‘gender’, as state, ngos and women’s organ iz ations take on various tasks in its name. the passionate engagement at the grassroots level that characterized the women’s move - ment earlier has been forced to limit its out - reach to the safe space of academia. since the women’s movement, from its inception, has been dominated by middle-class, upper- caste women living in urban spaces, the legacies of its character continue to define the protest, activism, and theatre that takes place in the capital city of delhi today. taneja’s location in delhi, her middle-class background, and her cultural capital afford her invitations from academic institutions and national and international festivals, and the resulting media attention continues to accelerate her celebrity status. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core she told me that she was ‘bombarded’ with phone calls from journalists who wanted to interview her. whereas, even after the meitei women’s protest in and irom sharmila’s sixteen-year hunger strike, afspa continues to be in place. this also points towards an elitism of media coverage and to the workings of manipulative market - ing strategies, where the central capital city and its citizens’ fury is amplified and gets immediate attention while the peri phery is conveniently obscured. the nation and its narratives have always been fraught with gender violence. as dis - cussed above, women’s bodies have repeat - edly become the battleground on which religious and national wars are fought. during periods of communal strife, rape has been consistently used as a weapon, with women becoming the embodiment of the nation state and its ‘difference’ from the other. whenever indian national identity is conflated with hinduism, women of muslim and sikh background have borne the brunt of majoritarian political warfare, including during the partition of , the sikh vio - lence in , and the godhra massacre of . the rape and stripping of dalit and adivasi women and women from manipur and kashmir is not uncommon, and has been carried out routinely to curb dissidence against the national state. the gang rape and murder of singh in , then, ‘demonstrates the typical model of feudal patriarchy club - bed with capitalist hegemony’. shalu nigam continues: ‘it took place in the busiest street of the capital where increasingly pred atory sexual culture permeates the notion of seem - ingly emerging modernity,’ and ‘the neolib - eral forces which tend to reassert patriarchy in its new and virulent form are evident in this case’. a city that is competing with european cities on the global map is increasingly becoming a city where public spaces are reserved for rich, hindu, upper-caste men, with political conditions becoming worse under the current prime minister narendar modi, who is also the hindu nationalist leader. the rhetoric of modernity and devel - opment disguises the deeply entrenched fear and hatred of the ‘other’. on may , the supreme court of india upheld the death sentence for the four men accused of gang- raping and violating singh. while the deci - sion sparked celebrations across india, it was also criticized for being influenced by the ‘tsunami of shock’ caused to the ‘collective conscience’ of the country, where selective middle-class anger was assuaged by picking the ‘bad’ men who were poor and belonged to lower castes. in complete contrast, the media attention and celebrations were completely missing a day earlier, when eleven men were sentenced to life imprisonment by the bombay high court in the case of bilkis bano, who was gang-raped and fourteen members of her family murdered during the godhra riots in gujarat, which were targeted at mus - lim communities living in the state. while it took fifteen years for bano’s case to be heard, singh’s abusers were convicted within five years through a fast-tracked court. one significant outcome of the passionate and sustained demonstrations of was the government setting up the justice verma committee to provide recommendations in the legislative wing and the constitution. a widespread climate of anger and accom - panying demonstrations also led to changes in the indian penal code that had been in place since , bringing changes to rape and dowry laws. this was also reminiscent of the introduction of the criminal law (second amendment) act of , after the public fury over the rape of a young tribal girl named mathura by two policemen in maharashtra. conclusion however, despite the swiftness, commit - ment, and dedication with which the justice verma committee worked five years ago, the ordinances released by the government failed to live up to the expectations of the civilian population. they exclude any provision made for sexual assault against women in conflict zones and perpetuate the legacy of violation in the name of counter-terrorism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core there is value in embracing the intention behind the inception of thoda dhyaan se while not denying the limitations of its pro - duction. the saleability and popularity of thoda dhyaan se disguises the ambivalence of its affective reach. one needs to be wary of the mechanisms by which gender prac tices of dominant communities become the norm - ative model for the entire nation by making the differences of caste, community, and region invisible. framing taneja’s per - formance in the larger discursive and geo - graphical spaces of the capital allows for a recognition of its situatedness within the spatiality of delhi, as well as within the feminist theatre of the city. taneja’s class, caste, and institutional associations invite audiences with similar backgrounds and positions. but in its articu - la tion of the desire of highly individuated, liberalized woman, the feminist articulations in thoda dhyaan se fail to elicit solidarity from women whose lives and realities suffer from patriarchal violence in markedly differ - ent ways. it is, therefore, of value to acknow - ledge that the concerns raised by thoda dhyaan se are not representative of a pan- indian feminism, and that the artist is a product of a gender discourse that is dis - tinctly urban in its ideology and outreach. thoda dhyaan se is well intentioned in its aim to address the systemic and institutional rape culture and the misogynist attitudes towards women in india. however, it ends up sidelining the differing histories of oppression, where the question is not always of a regulated sexuality by the middle-class patriarchal culture. it focuses on the notion of empowerment through choice and expos - ure of body as a liberating feminist strategy, but fails to unpack how that choice does not always exist in a vacuum but is a façade created by neoliberal capitalism in the pro - cess of commodifying and sexualizing women’s bodies. taneja’s performance offers potential urban imaginaries for women, but the terms of engagement are limited to women with similar cultural and economic backgrounds. repeated invitations to international festivals and educational institutions point to the fact that thoda dhyaan se is mostly being consumed by middle-class, english- speaking, university-bred, heteronormative, and also white audiences with cultural capital. a campaign that took the shape of a national movement in india in has been overtaken by the limits of its discursive space; and both the geographical space and the political intensity of affective space are in danger of getting diluted as the class char - acter of the movement intensifies. in this article i have aimed to highlight the need to acknowledge the tensions between the ways in which different sections of indian society identify with the city’s spaces, and also bring to light how the concerns of feminist theatre play themselves out in the cities, and its urban demands are addressed and negotiated. with the power and visib - ility that it affords, new delhi has been instrumental in channelling the anger and resentment at the government’s failure to address the gender concerns appropriately in . if street plays were a powerful mode of participating in the feminist movement and their demands for legal and structural changes in the s, the gender discourse today is increasingly centred around the right to mobility and choice in politics, with theatre performances restricted to mostly enclosed venues. there is thus a danger of the feminist conversations in india being co- opted as celebratory without being inclusive. careful attention to intersectional work - ings of gender is critical for performance practitioners as they strive to keep up with the momentum of the international conver - sation on gendered violence. a recog nition and critical understanding of differential spatial structures could aid and, hopefully, expand and democratize our relation ship with theatre and its spaces. notes and references . jyoti singh was a twenty-three-year-old physio - therapy student who was brutally gang-raped and thrown from a moving bus in south delhi on december . she died from her injuries twelve days later. . jen harvie, theatre and the city (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, ), p. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core . ibid. . chandra talpade mohanty, feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practising solidarity (durham: duke university press, ). . the production was performed in hindi. all trans lations are my own. . mallika taneja, thoda dhyaan se, december . . ibid. . michel foucault, ‘of other spaces’, diacritics, xvi,, no. (spring ) p. – . . see srila roy, remembering revolution: gender, violence and subjectivity in india’s naxalbari movement (new delhi: oxford university press, ). . see, for example, shivali tukdeo, ‘indian army and the legacy of rape’, countercurrents, october , available at <www.countercurrents.org/hr-tuk deo .htm>, accessed february ; deepti priya mehrotra, restoring order in manipur: the drama of contemporary women’s protests (new delhi: zubaan, ); dolly nikon, memories of rape: the banality of violence and impunity in naga society (new delhi: zubaan, ); essar batool et al., do you remember kunan pashpora? (new delhi: zubaan, ). . deepti misri, ‘are you a man? performing naked protest in india’, in beyond partition: gender, violence, and representation in postcolonial india (urbana: university of illinois press, ), p. – . gayatri chakraborty spivak, ‘draupadi by mahasveta devi’, critical inquiry, viii, no. ( ); ‘writing and sexual difference’, p. . . malini nair, ‘“i was tired of hiding”: delhi-based actor mallika taneja turns onstage nudity into act of protest’, scroll, march , available at < https:// scroll.in/magazine/ /i-was-tired-of-hiding- delhi-based-actor-mallika-taneja-turns-onstage-nudity- into-act-of-protest>, accessed march . . unpublished interview between the author and mallika taneja, january . . niharika singh, ‘manorma devi rape-murder case: the rs. ten lakh in compensation is far from justice’, youth ki awaaz, january , available at <www.youthkiawaaz.com/ / /thangjam-mano rama-devi-sc-verdict>, accessed february . . samik bandhopadhyay, ‘the cultural body of the community’, in sudhanva deshpande et al., ed., our stage: the pleasures and perils of theatre practice in india (new delhi: tulika, ), p. . . manaal farooqi, ‘to do justice [to] asifa would be to recognise that in her tragedy lies the story of thousands of women and girls in kashmir who have experienced the same crimes fueled by the same ideologies’, wearyourvoicemag, april , available at <https://wearyourvoicemag.com/news/justice-asifa- bano-freedom-kashmir>, accessed may . . rouf dar, ‘the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in kashmir’, trtworld, april , available at <www.trtworld.com/opinion/the-system atic-use-of-rape-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-kashmir- >, accessed may . . see, for example, her invitation to one such midnight walk in october , available at <https://en- gb.facebook.com/events/ >. . shilpa phadke et al., why loiter? women and risk on mumbai streets (new delhi: penguin, ), p. xii; original em phasis. . debi chatterjee, ‘dalit women and the public sphere in india: in pursuit of social justice’, in dalit rights/human rights (jaipur: rawat publications, ), p. . . henri lefebvre, the production of space (oxford: blackwell, ) p. . . see jyoti hosagrahar, indigenous modernities: negotiating architecture and urbanism (london: rout - ledge, ); stephen legg, spaces of colonialism: delhi’s urban governmentalities (malden, mass.: blackwell, ). . unpublished interview between the author and mallika taneja, january . . jwb, ‘interview with mallika taneja: media told her ”thoda dhyaan se’’ ’, jaipur women blog, decem - ber , available at: <http://jaipurwomenblog.org/ interview-mallika-taneja-media-told-thoda-dhyaan- se/>, accessed december ; harikrishnan, charmy, ‘international theatre festival: “so what if i am naked?’’ ’, the open magazine, january , available at: <www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/ international-theatre-festival-so-what-if-i-am-naked>, accessed january . . spaces for art facebook page, available at <facebook.com/spacesforarts>. . ibid. . raka ray, fields of protest: women’s movement in india (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ). . shayoni mitra, ‘dispatches from the margins: theatre in india since the s’, in ashis sengupta, ed., mapping south asia through contemporary theatre: essays on the theatres of india, pakistan, bangladesh, nepal, and sri lanka (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, ). . nivedita menon, recovering subversion: feminist politics beyond the law (urbana-champaign: university of illinois press, ). . anita singh and tarun tapas mukherjee, ed., gender, space and resistance: women and theatre in india (new delhi: d. k. printworld, ); a. mangai, acting up: gender and theatre in india, onwards (new delhi: leftword books, ). . mangai, acting up, p. . . ibid., p. , . . foucault, ‘of other spaces’. . ‘love jihad’ is a campaign run by right-wing hindu groups against what they say is a muslim con - spiracy to convert hindu girls to islam by feigning love. the ‘anti-romeo’ squad was launched in march by the newly appointed chief minister of uttar pradesh to ‘protect’ women from youths who were sus pected of harassing them. the current ruling govern ment has banned the consumption of beef owing to the sacredness of the cow in hinduism. failure to abide by this law invites imprisonment of up to five years and has led to lynching of muslims by hindu mobs. . a three-member committee comprising retired justice j. s. verma, retired justice leila seth, and solicitor general gopal subramanium was constituted on december to recommend amendments to criminal laws. the committee submitted its report on january , which included in the definition of sexual violence stalking, voyeurism, acid attacks, and traffick - ing. see j. s. verma et al., ‘report of the committee to amendments to criminal law’, prs legislative research, january , available at <www.prsindia.org/ uploads/media/justice% verma% committee/js% verma% committe% report.pdf>, accessed janu - ary . . ashok bagria and bhadra sinha, ‘ delhi gang rape verdict highlights: sc confirms death to all https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core four convicts’, the hindustan times, july , available at <www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/ dec- -delhi-gang-rape-verdict-live-will-supreme- court-uphold-death-penalty/story- yzn eki yfmx scwo.html> , accessed august . . joanna kadi, ‘speaking (about) silence’, in m. j. alexander et al., ed., sing, whisper, shout, pray! feminist versions for a just world (fort bragg: edgework press, ), p. . . gail omvedt, reinventing revolution: new social movements and the socialist tradition in india (armonk: m. e. sharpe, ). . gail omvedt, dalit visions: tracts for the times (hyderabad; delhi: orient longman, ); gail omvedt, ‘in search of the indian nation’, economic and political weekly, xxxii, no. ( ), p. – . . indu agnihotri and vina mazumdar, ‘changing terms of political discourse: women’s movement in india, s– s’, economic and political weekly, xxx, no. ( ), p. – . sati refers to the funeral cus - tom whereby a widow immolates herself shortly after her husband’s death. . vina mazumdar, ‘social reform movement in india from ranade to nehru’, in b. r. nanda, ed., indian women: from purdah to modernity (delhi: vikas pub - lishers, ). . sumit sarkar and tanika sarkar, ed., women and social reform in modern india (ranikhet: permanent black, ). . maitrayee chaudhuri, ‘feminism in india: the tale and its telling’, tiers monde, no. ( ), p. – , available at <www.cairn.info/revue-tiers-monde- - -page- .html>, accessed september . . see, for example, jana m. everett, women and social change in india (new york: st martin’s press, ); vina mazumdar and k. sharma, ‘women’s studies: new perspectives and challenges’, economic and political weekly, xiv, no. ( ), p. – ; nandita gandhi and nandita shah, the issues at stake: theory and practice in the women’s movement in india (new delhi: kali for women, ). . rajeswari sunder rajan, ‘is the hindu goddess a feminist?’, economic and political weekly, xxxiii, no. ( ), p. . see, uma chakravarti, gendering caste: through a feminist lens (kolkata: stree, ); gail omvedt, ‘capit alism and globalization, dalit and adivasis’, economic and political weekly, xl, no. ( ), p. – ; sharmila rege, writing caste, writing gender: dalit women’s testimonies (new delhi: zubaan, ). . aparna dharwardker, theatres of independence: drama, theory, and urban performance in india since (iowa: university of iowa press; oxford university press, ); nandi bhatia, ed., modern indian theatre: a reader (oxford: oxford university press, ). . see tutun mukherjee, ed., staging resistance: plays by women in translation (new delhi: oxford university press, ); bhatia ; mangai, acting up; lata singh, raising the curtain: recasting women per - formers in india (delhi: orient blackswan, ). . anuradha kapur, ‘reassembling the modern: an indian theatre map since independence’, in nandi bhatia, ed., modern indian theatre: a reader (new delhi: oxford university press, ), p. – . . mary john, ‘reframing globalisation: perspec - tives from the women’s movement’, economic and political weekly, xxxiv, no. ( ), p. . . unpublished interview by the author with mallika taneja, december . . irom sharmila, a political activist from manipur, was on a hunger strike from november until august , demanding the repeal of the controversial afspa. during this time, she was arrested multiple times on charges of attempted suicide. . see kumari jayawardena et al., eds., embodied violence: communalizing female sexuality in south asia (delhi: kali for women, ); ritu menon and kamla bhasin, borders and boundaries: women in india’s partition (new delhi: kali for women, ); veena das, life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary (berke - ley: university of california press, ); tejaswini niranjana, ‘feminism and cultural studies in india’, in women and feminisms in asia, special issue of interventions: international journal of postcolonial studies, ix, no. ( ), p. – . . urvashi butalia, the other side of silence: voices from the partition of india (durham, nc: duke university press, ); anna hardgrove, ‘south asian women’s communal identities’, economic and political weekly, xxx, no. ( ), p. – . . shalu nigam, ‘violence, protest, and change: a socio-legal analysis of extraordinary mobilization after the delhi gang rape case’, international journal of gender and women’s studies, ii, no. ( ), p. – . . vrinda grover, ‘delhi gang rape case: move away from “masculinist” responses to rape’, hindustan times, may , available at: <www.hindustantimes. com/opinion/delhi-gang-rape-case-move-away-from- masculinist-responses-to-rape/story- ymacn kcfe uvm lqm.html>. . albeena shakil, ‘protests, the justice verma committee, and the government ordinance’, economic and political weekly, xlviii, no. ( ), february , available at: <www.epw.in/journal/ / /web- exclusives/protests-justice-verma-committee-and- government-ordinance.html>, accessed december ; shakil, ; nivedita menon, ‘gender just, gender sensitive, not gender neutral rape laws’, kafila, march , available at: <http://kafila.org/ / / /gender-just-gender-sensitive-not-gender- neutral-rape-laws>, accessed february . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of exeter, on jan at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core microsoft word - _the knowledge revolution of .docx the knowledge revolution of jeffrey c. stewart university of california, santa barbara political revolution emerged in that is no less important for understanding con- temporary education than the humanist revolution in fifteenth-century italy. for like its italian predecessor, the revolution of occurred because of the rise of democratic values, really a democratic consciousness, around the world that insisted on a new sense of civic and republican duty in the nation states of late capitalism (nauert , - ). in , it suddenly became clear that throughout the world the consent of the governed was crucial to maintaining the legitimacy of government. domination of the global sphere had meant the suppression of dissent, the curtailment of human rights, and the silencing of the very people who would be the source of creative ideas for the next century. from the united states to france to mexico to czechoslovakia to vietnam, those who were previously silent, silently oppressed and marginalized in the cold war consensus, suddenly spoke out and demanded to be heard and their consent to sought, secured and won by those who pur- ported to rule them. the actual nature of that consent remained blurred, confused, and at times easily dismissed. but the necessity to find a new way of treating formerly oppressed people—black americans and women, to take only two examples, emerged as a key con- sideration of leadership. with the sense of a new calculus of democracy worldwide came the sense that a new kind of education was needed to help man and woman face the moral and political ques- tions of how to create a just world in which all could enjoy the fruits of democracy, liberty, and justice. thinkers of several nations tried to answer this question: what kinds of knowledge are needed to prepare the young leaders of tomorrow to exercise moral judg- ment, make good political decisions, and grow a world in which human conservation mat- ters as much as global profit? this led to facing a daunting question: how could we craft an educational system that prepared everyone, not just the white, the male, and the elite, to participate, broadly and knowledgeably in a polity that extended beyond our national bor- ders, and that took seriously the notion that “justice for all” meant just treatment for those less fortunate, less educated, and less corporately powerful than we are. as we move towards the conclusion of , a half century after , we have to acknowledge that many stumbles have occurred since , caused, let us be clear, in part, by a relentless counterrevolution of politicians, corporate interests, and even academics and students, who resisted the democratic vision of radical transformation of ’ because it would reduce if not eliminate their power and privilege. not least is that true in the realm of education, where today we see a resurgence of the kinds of resistance to a new kind of a | the knowledge revolution of education at all levels of the educational establishment, from k- to post-graduate higher education. indeed, during the reagan administration, a concerted and successful effort was waged to de-legitimize university trained intellectuals and impoverished learners who wanted to change the american educational system and its curricular and broader educa- tional programming to bring more opportunities for earning and more intellectual power to the underclasses of the world. it was during the reagan administration, for example, that the gains made through affirmative action for placing of women and minorities in manage- ment positions in corporations and in universities plummeted (wolters ). in our own time, a concerted campaign continues to discredit public intellectuals and activist thinkers, and continues to make it more difficult for those who are first generation college students to succeed in getting into the best of schools. and now we see that schools that pioneered innovative affirmative action plans have had those rolled back by passage of such extra- legislative fiats like proposition in california (nadav and savio ). as if that is not enough, during our current moment in the united states, a relentless supreme court has put even programs to promote diversity on life-support while the secretary of education attacks even the rights of assaulted and raped women on college campuses (saul and taylor ). nonetheless, despite such setbacks since , despite the missteps we ourselves have made, despite the counterrevolution we have heard shouted in our ears daily, a corner was turned in that cannot be turned back. an opening has been made, largely by stu- dents on campuses like ucsb, and by black students like those who took over north hall in october of , that cannot be closed. once the misguided subject comes out of plato’s cave and sees the light and the world with her own eyes, there is no way that, even if put back in that cage, she will see the world in the shadowy way she did before. a new light inside has been turned on in our students and our educators, and what is needed now, more than ever is a clear, critical assessment of what has been gained, what has been lost, and what we can do now, in the current educational environment, to move our peoples— and they are many and diverse and global—forward. i want to suggest that there was a hidden and unacknowledged dimension to the knowledge revolution of that we have largely overlooked, made visible when black students seized the computer center in north hall on the campus of the university of cal- ifornia, santa barbara on the morning of october , and issued a series of demands to chancellor vernon cheadle to create a department of black studies and a center for black studies as part of the university. for by seizing the computer center, those students point our attention to something no other cadre of revolutionary-minded black students on other college campuses identified—that the computer already had transformed the uni- versity. for the computer and the students who took over north hall revealed something that would become clearer as the years went on—that the computer was the source of power in knowledge formation for the th and subsequent centuries. for unlike the many jeffrey c. stewart | jam it! no. december | rethinking and the global sixties other insurgents on college campuses who seized college president’s offices or student cen- ters, etc., the administration at uc santa barbara, mainly chancellor cheadle, reacted im- mediately with a conciliatory attitude to resolve the standoff and get the students to peace- fully exit the building. he knew he could not afford to lose the power in those computers in that building, which consisted of all of the records and billing and pay stubs and student records for the whole university (stewart ). this was a different kind of power than that which was crumbling in detroit, the power of the second industrial revolution, as jeremy rifkin puts it, the oil and car power that was still driving the american economy. no, this was the power of information and the use of that information to affect the thinking of people, countries, and the world, a power that was building, almost silently. these students saw how dependent the university had become already on that power, and by temporarily seizing the computer, they changed the calculus of power on campus, immediately, and for the next fifty years. because out of that seizure of computer power came a seizure and transformation of the knowledge dis- seminated by the social sciences and the humanities on this campus, a transformation that was huge at first, and that has waxed and waned since then, but that resulted in the creation of the department of black studies and chicano studies, and the eventual creation of the department of asian american and feminist studies afterwards. a permanent shift in the knowledge all students at uc santa barbara, and arguably at other uc universities, oc- curred because of seizing the power of the computer on this campus. there was another aspect to this seizure of the computer by these students that is largely unnoticed. few if any at the time realized it, but the computer that was mainly thought of as a storage compartment, a calculating machine that kept records and printed out paystubs, in , would become, after the creation of the world wide web in , the main source of knowledge for students and professors alike (andrews ). for once the computer began to replace the library as the most visited site of knowledge, knowledge at university was no longer something contained in a library in books written by a single or group of authors removed from those who are their reader. no, today, through the web, and the smartphone, knowledge is a dialogical formation, a system of exchange between people who are constantly updating knowledge by input from its consumers. and this is actually in sync with the knowledge revolution that black students insisted on in uc santa barbara—broadening the community of those who created and disseminated knowledge on campus by admitting black authors into that community. for key to black students’ demands for a black studies department and a center for black studies was that the education taught at the university there be relevant. this concept is often critiqued, but in fact is the key to the shift from the “banking system of education,” as paulo freire put it in his classic, the pedagogy of the oppressed, into a dialogic system of education, in which knowledge emerges from a dialogue between the teacher and the student, that engages the student as an active participant if education, real education, is to | the knowledge revolution of take place. knowledge has to be relevant to those who consume it. black students wanted a knowledge taught them that was relevant to the syllabus of knowledge they had gained from living in america’s ghettos; and in demanding a black studies department, they were demanding that the knowledge they received in uc santa barbara had to be in dialogue with the black epistemologies they brought into santa barbara, as well as those already there for them to learn for the first time. now here’s the irony: the computer they took over was the ultimate symbol of the banking system of knowledge—it banked the financial records no less than the intellectual property of western civilization the university force-fed all students who entered the cam- pus. black knowledge, chicanx knowledge, asian american knowledge, feminist knowledge were kept out of most of the books on the shelves in the library and the files in this supercomputer. by seizing the computer, the black students threatened to destroy a literal “bank of knowledge.” but what the computer created in the s through the web replicated what black students were doing on campuses in —challenging, critiquing, and revising the knowledge they received on campus. ultimately, that capacity of constant updating is what the web means to any knowledge we gain from it. knowledge is never stable, never sacrosanct, and never so certain that its counters were permanent. and this permanent nature of knowledge was precisely what the teaching of so-called western civ- ilization was before . students from black communities were supposed to come to uni- versities like ucsb and assimilate the knowledge already held in the libraries and class- rooms of the university. in effect, the process of challenging received knowledge began with rebellion, even the knowledge that black students believed they had when they arrived at university. because all knowledge, taught us, was constructed out of racial, class, and gender bias that was subject to critique, and necessarily so, if it was to grow and reflect reality. black youth also added one other element: that knowledge that helped form edu- cated black thinkers had to dialogue with the community, the black community, outside of historically-white colleges and universities, in order to be relevant to the black experi- ence of america. the enlightened black community was already a world wide diaspora of embedded black epistemologies. that meant that everyone could be criticized by those with knowledge and, depending on how they react to that critique, able to change. a per- sonal story illustrates this functionality of embedded epistemologies in the formation of my knowledge in . in , at ucla, i, along with several other undergraduates, went down to watts for a meeting. it occurred after dr. king was shot. the late winston martin, my dorm’s rd floor president, had arranged the meeting as part a job-training program called, “operation bootstrap.” but there was nothing job training-like about this meeting. rather, it was threatening critique of our positionality as students at a university in a society that directly subjugated black people. suddenly, the ivory tower was standing in the wasteland of the jeffrey c. stewart | jam it! no. december | rethinking and the global sixties watts riot of . we were complicit in the oppression of poor black people, and the ques- tion was, “what were we going to do about it?” while i had been criticized by my family and friends before, this was the first time that black strangers critiqued my decision to go to college and went further to criticize my role as a bourgeois black student with no other real goal than personal success and aggrandizement. i remember the room like it was yes- terday. it was in a cavernous garage (with roll-down steel doors). the confrontational as- pect was enhanced by the fact that the visitors were seated on folding chairs in a circle, and standing behind them and against the walls and doors was a congress of young black males with accusatory voices. this trip to watts was at night, to a place where there were no friendly faces—the feeling of danger was palpable—particularly when the doors rolled down and clanged shut. but mostly i remember the leader, a medium dark brown skinned man who spoke with tremendous energy, as he paced back and forth in front of us, with his words spat out at us like bullets. his anger came from this—that we were about to become agents of oppression for hundreds of people we would never meet and we had a choice. we could reverse course and become the agents, the representatives, the voices of the people in watts, if we would only dare to open our eyes, unplug our ears, and perceive what was happening in what was then called the urban black community of america. we rode back to westwood largely in silence. but a mini-revolution occurred in me. afterwards, conversations about what had happened took place in the dorm weyburn hall. i attended them and participated in the discussions with others at the black student union. through those discussions i met a whole host of other black students i had only seen cas- ually crossing campus, and began to engage, timidly at first, in discussions about “what is to be done?” i began to read books not assigned in my classes, but brought up and refer- enced in these conversations—conversations that spoke to the prospects and problems of black liberation. i also began to participate in demonstrations and meetings where some negroes i had never seen before showed up on campus with guns. and i want to assure you that i am not trying to romanticize this story, because later that year, i was on campus when two black panthers were shot and killed in the basement of campbell hall, an inci- dent, along with other considerations, that led me to transfer to the santa cruz campus the following year to complete my undergraduate education. but something interesting had happened. i was transformed. jumping ahead to the last class i took at ucla, an independent study with a political scientist, leads me to another personal, but relevant story. the professor asked me to come over to his apartment the last day of the spring quarter to participate in an end-of-the-year get together for his graduate students. after snacks in a tiny westwood apartment with a great view, each of the students presented a critique of a book they had chosen. one stu- dent had chosen frantz fanon’s wretched of the earth. he criticized the book as advocating violent black nationalism, which this student believed was counterproductive to moving the civil rights agenda forward. the professor turned to me, expecting me to comment. | the knowledge revolution of without much thought, i took apart the student’s argument, providing a detailed exegesis of the chapter, “on the pitfalls of national consciousness,” proving that instead of advo- cating an unreflective nationalism, fanon critiqued the nationalist dream, warning of the problems ahead if algerians and other former colonial peoples simply reproduced the na- tionalist paradigm that the europeans had extended onto the african continent. after i spoke, there was a brief silence. then, the professor nodded and went on to the next stu- dent. i wondered afterwards exactly why the professor had invited me to the meeting. but even later, i was struck by the ease with which i took apart the graduate student’s argu- ment, and then i remembered that i had read the book and had debates about it in small group sessions in the black student union. i read wretched of the earth quite differently and devastatingly, because i had been part of a conversation outside of the classroom about the text and it's meaning for a revolutionary new world we imagined as possible, if the right kinds of thinking were engaged. by participating in those sessions and having those con- versations, i had developed a certain kind of criticality that had been embedded in the watts’ garage experience, but was amplified and theorized in readings and discussions i had had on campus. this professor, i realized many years afterwards, had brought me to that tiny westwood flat to function as the native theorist, as nelson maldonado-torres would put it ( ). in retrospect, what i realized is that i was exposed to the epistemology of the black working and lower class los angeles community on that trip to watts, and in a way that is uninterrogated in american intellectual or educational history, admitted, if briefly, to a community of practice of criticality that had been going on under the radar, so to speak. michel foucault would call it a subjugated knowledge—a tradition of literate and discursive practices with political intent that was unacknowledged and dismissed soon after the s passed (foucault , - ). those ways of thinking, then, were amplified and aug- mented on campus in the small group discussion sessions i participated in at ucla. now, i want to conclude that something like that went on in students all around the world in . while emerging out of the particularity of southern california, one of the black students, dalton nezey, who seized the computer at uc santa barbara, recalled that the sense of isolation he and other black students experienced on the lily-white santa bar- bara campus generated a tight-knit sense of intellectual collaboration among the alienated students that led up to the decision to take radical action. almost six thousand miles away in nanterre, france, outside of paris, a group of french students, led by jean-pierre duteil, launched the march movement with a similar sense of alienation and anger. jean-pierre recall that at his french university in the working class suburb of nanterre, “there was nothing, we had to create everything. a social life, a cultural life, a sense of belonging, social relations, places, means of expression . . .” what race imposed in southern california, class imposed in nanterre. this alienation bestowed on students an urgency to create a “way out jeffrey c. stewart | jam it! no. december | rethinking and the global sixties of no way” to transform the educational contract in france in ways similar to that in amer- ica. as jean pierre recalled, “just like any other political family, a strong nanterre identity: we felt we were different from everybody else” (duteil : n.d.). a transnational analysis of student activism breaks down the segregation of knowledge that keeps most of us from linking black student activism in america to student activism in france. what linked the black ucsb students and the french nauheim stu- dents was how they were treated and how they responded. they were treated as if there were nothing, as if they had no intelligence, no knowledge, that as working-class youth they brought nothing to the table of learning worth knowing. their jobs as students were to sit and listen and take in, not question, not react, not rebel against the lies and misrep- resentations they were forced-fed by what went for university education in . instead of deference, however, students of ‘ took the demand that the consent of the governed must be obtained in order for a democracy to exist and applied it to their educations—the con- sent of the student would be the criteria on which education, especially higher education, would rest moving forward from . there was a sleeping giant alive in these students that refused to be treated as an inferior, a ward of knowledge. that giant awoke and as- serted their rights as equal partners in the production of knowledge, as educational citizens who can, if they wish, withhold their consent, their obeisance, their agreement to swallow whatever shit a university wants to force down their throats, and demand something rele- vant to their knowledge of the world. students asserted their right to question, not only the knowledge, but also the world, the system, that that knowledge sustained, and to reject that knowledge if it led to fundamentally cruel and dehumanizing outcomes. this was the revolution in the form of knowledge that is sometimes ignored by our legitimate focus on its content—that the relationship between the student and the school was fundamentally changed by . the educated had a right to withhold or give consent to what they learned if they found it illegitimate. there was something more. black students in the ucs went beyond even freire to argue that knowledge was not something that erupted only in the process of formal educa- tion, when literacy gave the peasant power over his or her world. that was important. but that was not all. for the takeover of the computer center at ucsb and the demand to teach a history and culture ignored in american education also meant that those occupying stu- dents demanded that the knowledge they already possessed from sites of epistemology like watts needed be taught at ucsb to make it a more perfect mirror of american society. i experienced that subjugated knowledge in watts myself—an embedded criticality that ed- ucated me. that subjugated knowledge made under the conditions of racism, urbanism, and the built environment of commodity enslaved ghettos, had to be part of the dialogue of higher education in america. by analogy, in the suburbs of paris, the ghettos of buenos aires, detroit, london, and beirut, other epistemologies existed of how the global system of subjugation works. and that knowledge is transformative if learned and disseminated | the knowledge revolution of throughout a system of education, especially one heretofore designed to keep the op- pressed silent, marginal, and unknown. after , higher education would usually ignore that knowledge; but it could never be sure it would not raise its ugly head of criticality once the oppressed gained their voice, again, and demanded to be heard. after , the knowledge of american and global dom- ination would always be worried that this knowledge would once again speaks its truth in embarrassing situations of dialogic confrontation. it meant that no matter how often amer- ican university education repeated to unwitting student triumphant discourses of america as the beacon of freedom, teachers also would have to be prepared for student articulation of the counter assertion that america was also the home of slavery. students today need to reclaim that sense that to become educated means to be self- conscious about the embodied knowledge they bring to college and university. students are embodied dialogues with their communities of origin as they engage their university educations. even if they are turned off from such knowledge from their past, the current moment brings a plethora of knowledge from oppressed communities and the criticality associated with them through the smartphone every day. one’s knowledge is constantly being updated in new and spectacular ways often with so-called illegitimate sources of knowledge as much as that from university presses. verification, of course, is the new chal- lenge. our job as thinkers today is to assess critical opinion using the very tools brought into being—the internet of our communities, who, like those men in the garage in watts, critiqued me. our system of embedded criticality has expanded into an internet knowledge formation today—a collaborative, risky, porous, but perpetual system of update that makes the twenty-first century a new epoch in world intellectual history. through that process, certain important things traceable to are important, and i close with three. first, we are witnessing the expansion and attempted universalization of due pro- cess as one outcome of the expansion and attempted universalization of access to knowledge. what do i mean by that? the injured have the right to be compensated, re- dressed, by transforming unsanctioned knowledge into a system of reparations. this is emerging today in the #metoo movement by which testimony by those injured, deeply, can be disseminated through social media as truth to power. the right to redress, to compen- sation, and to be made whole after devastation by some person or some institution is broader today than ever before. despite the attempts of the dark web to crush those who speak out against abuse, the abused can get a hearing by taking over the computer center of social media and demanding to be heard. second, those who protest abuse can marshal a worldwide community through so- cial media and the internet to support them and buoy their confidence despite the almost inevitable counter-attacks that result. we are seeing this in the #metoo movement and also with the #blacklivesmatter movement, despite the babble of those who say the latter is dead (taylor ). we know, for example, today, almost every time an unarmed black jeffrey c. stewart | jam it! no. december | rethinking and the global sixties person is shot and killed by a police officer or by the private guards of white private prop- erty, a minute later the information is beamed all over the world. people who have never met become a community of protest, just like the students who brought to a halt, if only briefly, universities in the france and united states, in march and october of , that pressures those responsible about what has happened. even as we lament that this mar- shalling has not stopped the practices of sexual assault and state supported racial murder, there is some redress: even though the policeman who killed michael brown got off scot- free, the prosecutor who defended his decision not to bring charges against the officer was voted out of office. third, through mastery of social media and web-based knowledge platforms like wikipedia and others, students have the power to produce knowledge relevant to them, to their communities, and to their emerging political consciousness, disseminate it and have it critiqued and revised in a matter of days, if not hours. for one of the lessons of is that students have the power to self-organize, to create programs, conferences, forums, governments, even, just as students of may ‘ ran major services in paris for almost a month! students can take an organization like the graduate student organization of aisna and transform it into a university on line for those without enough money to go to univer- sity on the ground. students can publish their own papers, create their own peer review boards, bind papers together in virtual volumes, and distribute them all over the world— showing the world knowledge-making talent among graduate students in italy. and if they do so they will be operating out of a ‘ model and show that, rather than dead, ‘ is more alive than ever in . bibliography andrews, evan. . “who invented the internet?” history. oct. , . available at: https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-internet. duteil, jean-pierre. . “the french student awakening: may ‘ and its significance today.” paper presented at the conference, : a global year of student driven, uc santa barbara, november , . foucault, michel. . power-knowledge: selected interviews and writings, - , ed- ited by colin gordon. new york: pantheon books, - . maldonaldo-torres, nelson. march-may . “on the coloniality of being,” cultural stud- ies volume , no. - : - . nauert, charles g. jr. . humanism and the culture of renaissance europe. new york: cambridge university press. saul, stephanie and kate taylor. . “betsy devos reverses obama-era policy on campus sexual assault investigations,” the new york times, september . available at: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/devos-colleges-sex-assault.html. savio, nadav and mario savio. . in defense of affirmative action: the case against proposition . oakland: campus coalitions for human rights & social justice. | the knowledge revolution of stewart, jeffrey c. spring . “introduction. : a revolution of the mind.” kalfou , no. : - . taylor, keeanga-yamahtta. . “five years later, do black lives matter?” jacobin, sep- tember . available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /black-lives-matter-laquan- mcdonald-mike-brown-eric-garner. wolters, raymond. . right turn: william bradford reynolds, the reagan administra- tion, and black civil rights. new brunswick, n.j.: transaction publishers. jeffrey c. stewart is professor of black studies at the university of california, santa bar- bara. he has won the pulitzer prize in biography and the national book award for nonfiction for his book the new negro: the life of alain locke (oup ). he has authored numerous other books, articles, and essays, including “beyond category: before afro-futurism there was norman lewis,” in procession: the art of norman lewis ( ), winner of the alfred h. barr award of the college art association. his current projects are a book on the knowledge revolution of transnationally and a biographical study of th century movements in activism, stem, and afro-futurism. stewart has been a vis- iting senior lecturer at the terra foundation in giverny, france, a residential fellow at the charles warren center in american history, harvard university, and a fellow at the w.e.b. du bois institute at harvard university. in , he curated a conference on entitled, “north hall years after: a black vision of change” at uc santa barbara. free speech and safe spaces: how moderation policies shape online discussion spaces https://doi.org/ . / creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). social media + society january-march : – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sms article introduction habermas ( ) articulated the concept of the public sphere as a space for private citizens to come together as a public to deliberate. in the age of digital connections, the internet has been theorized as a new space for these kinds of discussions of civic importance (papacharissi, ; price, nir, & cappella, ). the accessibility and visibility of networked digital media have been considered democratiz- ing forces that can allow even more citizens to participate in the kind of public discussion needed for a democracy (dylko et al., ; papacharissi, ). online discourse has had some striking positive effects on politics across the world through the last decade, from the arab spring uprisings of (lotan, graeff, ananny, gaffney, & pearce, ; wilson & dunn, ) to #metoo (hawbaker, ; pazzanese & walsh, ). in a comparison of online com- ments to letters to the editor published in newspapers, mccluskey and hmielowski ( ) found that online com- ments on a news story were more diverse in viewpoints and more likely to challenge institutions than conventional let- ters to the editor. however, internet discussion spaces still face the same issue that all other spaces for public discussion in the past have faced: how can—and should—these spaces be designed to meet the needs of a public sphere? ever since the creation of online spaces for discussion, there has been controversy about the extent to which speech should be regulated and controlled (pfaffenberger, ). according to a pew poll, most us teens have experienced cyberbullying, includ- ing ridicule, threats, or false rumors (anderson, ). recent years have also seen horrific mass violence, such as the killing of muslim minorities in sri lanka, as a result of misinformation and hate speech spread on online discussion spaces (taub & fisher, ). in the face of all the potentials and dangers, what kind of speech should be allowed in online spaces, and to what end? smsxxx . / social media <span class="symbol" cstyle="mathematical">+</span> societygibson research-article stanford university, usa corresponding author: anna gibson, department of communication, stanford university, building , room , serra mall, stanford, ca - , usa. email: agibson @stanford.edu free speech and safe spaces: how moderation policies shape online discussion spaces anna gibson abstract how do moderation policies affect online discussion? this article analyzes nearly a quarter of a million anonymous comments over a -month period from two online reddit forums matched in topic and size, but with differing moderation policies of “safe space” and “free speech.” i found that in the safe space, moderators removed significantly more comments, and authors deleted their own comments significantly more often as well, suggesting higher rates of self-censorship. looking only at relatively low frequency posters, i found that language in the safe space is more positive and discussions are more about leisure activities, whereas language in the free speech space is relatively negative and angry, and material personal concerns of work, money, and death are more frequently discussed. importantly, i found that many of these linguistic differences persisted even in comments by users who were concurrently posting in both subreddits. altogether, these results suggest that differences in moderation policies may affect self-censorship and language use in online space, implicating moderation policies as key sites of inquiry for scholars of democratic discussion. keywords reddit, moderation, online moderation, communication accommodation theory, linguistic style matching, civil discussion, self-censorship https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms mailto:agibson @stanford.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - social media + society on its face, this is a normative question for political philoso- phers. however, it can also be approached empirically. this article will investigate one specific comparative case of how the values-driven moderation strategies of “safe spaces” and “free speech” shape discussion in two reddit discussion forums. free speech and safe space a policy of freedom of speech has been justified through its potential to unearth truth and create the social conditions necessary for democracy to flourish, as people can make informed decisions and check those in power (ananny, ; ash, ; habermas, ). speech is also a defining char- acteristic of humans, and it has been argued that only through total freedom of speech can a person fully explore and under- stand their own humanity (ash, , p. ). culturally, freedom of speech from government censor- ship is dearly held american value; according to a pew poll, americans have the strongest support for free expres- sion in the world (wike, ). the same poll also reports that americans are more tolerant of offensive speech than any other country. a libertarian commitment to total freedom, including freedom of speech, has been a central part of internet culture since at least the establishment of usenet as an alternative to arpanet in (pfaffenberger, ; reagle, ). many of the early prominent figures of the internet advocated a “hacker” ethos, which celebrated the liberation of systems and information from any form of centralized control (reagle, ; turner, ). early online spaces, such as usenet, reflected that demand for freedom through cultural norms of users, as well as the technical affordances of the systems themselves (pfaffenberger, ). users abhorred the threat of censorship (pfaffenberger, ) and uplifted the idea of the “rational, autonomous individual” (turner, ). pfaffenberger ( ) summarizes this attitude as “[it’s] up to the individual user, not some committee or administrator, to decide what’s worth reading” (p. ). this libertarian view advocates equal access to discursive spaces for all without threat of intervention (fiss, ). as the president of the american civil liberties union has sug- gested, in a land of free speech, the solution to hate speech is more speech (as paraphrased in marwick, ). fiss ( ) argues, however, that there is an inherent irony to free speech; even in the most open space, some voices will tend to have more access to this “free” discur- sive space than others because of social and economic hier- archies. similarly, fraser ( ), in her critique of the habermasian public sphere, asserts that the bracketing pro- cess that habermas proposes—to leave behind all individ- ual markers such as class to engage in rational political deliberation—is simply impossible and minority groups must form their own subaltern counterpublics. indeed, there is substantial evidence that many “free” online spaces exhibit the sexist and racist tendencies of broader culture. herring ( ) found that even in theoreti- cally free and neutral spaces, women were discouraged from participating in favor of the domination of a small and vocal sect of men. attempts by women to assert their pres- ence were met by silence or attempts to delegitimize their statements (herring, , p. ). gray ( ) documented the persistent racist and sexist abuse experienced by black female gamers in xbox live gaming spaces. reagle ( ) examined why women are disproportionately under- represented on wikipedia as compared with other online spaces, despite the site’s explicit embrace of a free culture. he suggests that free culture in online environments is laden with historical and cultural connotations. thus, online spaces labeled as “free” may in fact signpost a space for argumenta- tive, male-dominated discussion. in a more extreme exam- ple, marwick and lewis ( ) note that “commitments to ‘free speech’ in certain communities can serve as an on-ramp for far-right radicalization” (p. ). as freeman examined in her paper “the tyranny of structurelessness,” even when formal structures of power are eliminated, informal structures persist and these structures tend to benefit some members and punish others. “contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a ‘structureless’ group” (freeman, , p. ). safe spaces the meaning of safe space has been widely contested in aca- demic literature as well as popular culture (barrett, ; harris, ; stengel & weems, ). several scholars have noted that the metaphor of a safe space is both overused and undertheorized (boostrom, ). for the purposes of this empirical study, however, i will follow the roestone collective ( ) in their calls to understand safe spaces through their relational work, as sites for “negotiating differ- ence and challenging oppression.” in her book “mapping gay l.a.,” kenney ( ) traces the development of the safe space discourse around the cre- ation of radical feminist spaces in the s: “the notion of safe space implies a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resis- tance” (p. ). she notes that in this context safe spaces acted as “a means rather than an end” for women to find strength and community. the roestone collective writes that “the categories of safe and unsafe are socially produced and context depen- dent” (p. ) thus, safe spaces arise in social contexts of specific threats to specific groups. in her ethnographic case study of one online safe space, the facebook group girl army, clark-parsons identifies the need for such spaces in the context of rhetoric that seeks to silence women’s partici- pation. within these spaces, “marginalized users [can] speak gibson freely, seek support, and organize action against injustices faced outside the group’s boundaries” (p. ). such spaces are never understood as perfectly safe, but perpetually doing the work of “negotiating and foreground- ing difference” (roestone collective, ). this differs from the caricature of such spaces as infantile playgrounds (mckee, ; @richarddawkins, ). following the work of foucault ( ), speakers are understood not just as neutral voices, but emanating from bodies situated within interconnected webs of power: “[power] is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared . . . power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.” thus, the way in which power structures discourse and the relative positionality of speakers is salient in deciding what kind of language to allow in these spaces. policies of safe spaces are thus concerned with preventing the marginalization of voices already hurt by dominant power relations. this may be implemented through strict no- tolerance policies of “hate speech” or other discussion that would undermine the political project assumed in the space of the community. in practice, this often means that people can be censored or ejected from a space for not properly observing the standards of speech, tone, or style (clark- parsons, ). this includes not only hateful statements but also ignorantly prejudiced or unintentionally traumatizing topics without giving notice to readers in the form of trigger or content warnings (manne, ). spiral of silence in a highly influential paper, noelle-neumann coined the term “spiral of silence” to describe why members of the public with minority perspectives on value-laden topics stayed silent. according to her theory, if individuals perceive their opinions to be in the minority, they will refrain from expression out of fear of social isolation. this tendency is self-reinforcing, as a lack of public support for a minority position will discourage others with that opinion from expression. thus, public expression is understood not through a habermasian lens of rational debate, but performa- tive social interaction (scheufle & moy, ). the theory has been met with limited, but positive, empirical support in the pre-digital age (see scheufle & moy, , and glynn, hayes, & shanahan, for reviews). online support for the spiral of silence has been found across a variety of digital spaces (de koster & houtman, ; gearhart & zhang, ; hampton et al., ; liu, rui, & cui, ; meyer & speakman, ; schulz & roessler, ; stoycheff, ). mcdevitt, kiousis, and wahl-jorgensen ( ) compared discussions about the topic of abortions between individuals who were face to face or connected through computer mes- saging and found that individuals in the computer condition were perceived as more moderate. however, several recent studies suggest that the effects of a theorized spiral of silence are only exhibited by specific people with regard to specific topics. hayes, glynn, and shanahan ( ) developed a scale to measure a construct at the individual level they called the “willingness to self- censor.” in an experiment designed to put participants in a spiral-of-silence situation, hayes, uldall, and glynn ( ) found that the willingness to self-censor was driven almost entirely by those who had scored high on the scale; for indi- viduals who were not dispositional self-censors, opinion cli- mate made no difference in opinion expression. a study by matthes, morrison, and schemer ( ) examined the role of “attitude certainty” with regard to the spiral of silence and concluded that individual differences in the strength of atti- tude affected susceptibility to a spiral of silence. topic, too, appears to make a difference. gearhart and zhang ( ) found that the degree to which a topic has been an enduring, emerging, or transitory subject of public debate affected the willingness of individuals to voice minority opinions. porten-cheé and eilders ( ) failed to find sup- port for the spiral of silence, but conceded that their chosen topic of public discussion, climate change, actually had little to no moral conflict in its german context. neubaum and krämer ( ) propose that the social envi- ronment in which the opinion is expressed may also affect the tendency of individuals to be susceptible to the spiral of silence. different social environments may yield different expected sanctions for transgressions, changing the situa- tional fear of isolation and correspondingly changing the stakes in deciding to share an opinion perceived to be in the minority. moderation policies the history of online discussion is replete with stories of users deliberately deceiving (van gelder, ) and hurting (dibbell, ) fellow forum users. many online discussion spaces have some sort of moderation policies and/or struc- ture in place to address the needs of users (gillespie, ; grimmelmann, ). like other spaces for debate, online forums also use mod- erators—usually a computer program and/or a designated person—to determine and enforce the baseline rules of dis- cussion. moderators play an important role in preventing dis- ruptive users like trolls or spam from taking over forums (brunton, ). moderator powers often include the ability to screen, modify, and delete comments, or ban users (matias, ). consequently, moderators have more power to affect the discussion in online forums than other forum partici- pants. therefore, the forum policies established by modera- tors, and the effects they have on discussion or spirals of silence, are important to investigate and understand. there have been many studies of what kinds of online community structures facilitate community growth and lon- gevity (see, for example, aumayr & hayes, ; hinds & lee, ; lin et al., ; wagner, liu, schneider, prasarnphanich, & chen, ), but this is the first study to social media + society use a matching methodology to compare effects of differ- ences in moderation policy. method language accommodation theories speakers adjust their communication within different groups and contexts with respect to self and group identity (dragojevic, gasiorek, & giles, ). such accommoda- tion, often understood through the framework of communi- cation accommodation theory (cat), happens both at a conscious level and at an unconscious level. language is often used to negotiate in-group social identity and is per- ceived in accordance with local sociocultural norms around language. a person who wants to be seen as a member of the “in-group,” for example, may consciously or unconsciously adopt the group’s linguistic features, such as intonation, accent, or word usage. such changes are examples of accom- modation. on the other hand, a person who is trying to dis- tance themselves from the group may emphasize linguistic features that differ from the norms of the group; this is lin- guistic divergence. in addition, linguistic accommodation may serve an instrumental end, such as increasing communi- cative efficiency (dragojevic et al., ). linguistic style matching (lsm), as defined by niederhoffer and pennebaker ( ), builds on cat. one prominent part of lsm is that within groups, word use cova- ries to reflect how “in-sync” speakers are. the mechanism in this situation is priming: the words one speaker uses prime the other’s response. liwc, or linguistic inquiry and word count, sorts and displays the words present in text into a variety of categories by frequency (tausczik & pennebaker, ). the word types included linguistic categories (e.g. word count, articles, and prepositions), social/affect categories (e.g. first-person singular pronoun usage, positive, and negative emotion), and cognitive categories (e.g. tentative, certainty). this tool has been shown as an effective way to study how groups con- verge under lsm using transcripts of conversations (ireland et al., ; niederhoffer & pennebaker, ; scissors, gill, geraghty, & gergle, ; scissors, gill, & gergle, ) as well as text from computer mediated writing and discussion (gonzales & hancock, ; gonzales, hancock, & pennebaker, ; ireland & pennebaker, ). because liwc analyzes categories of invisible structural “style” words, such as pronouns, that are theoretically rich and clinically tested but may otherwise go unnoticed, liwc pro- vides a method to study group language convergence at mass scale in an unbiased and meaningful way (pennebaker, ). object of study according to alexa.com, as of october , reddit is the eighth most popular website globally, ranking above amazon and twitter. in the united states, it is the fourth most popular, below only google, youtube, and facebook. the site is organized into communities, called subreddits, which users can subscribe to or visit (“about,” n.d.). users with accounts can post text, links, or images into these sub- reddits and also comment in response to the posts. anyone can create an account without an email address and begin posting and commenting immediately. users tend to remain anonymous or use pseudonyms and connect with strangers rather than friends or family (bergstrom, ; lamont, ; shelton, lo, & nardi, ). redditors can vote posts and comments “up” or “down” which will affect the post or comment’s public score and subsequently how easily other redditors and the general public will see that post or com- ment (grimmelmann, ). the structure of reddit into subreddits makes it an inter- esting site for study because there is not a uniform policy of moderation across the site. the company takes a hands-off stance with regard to content in favor of letting individual subreddits make and enforce their own moderation policies, as detailed in a blog post from titled “every man is responsible for his own soul”: we uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you—the user—has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so. when you know something is right, you should choose to do it. but as much as possible, we will not force you to do it. you choose what to post. you choose what to read. you choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. we will try not to interfere—not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong. the established norms of acceptable discourse in any given subreddit can vary wildly; moderators create and post rules and then are expected to enforce those policies accord- ingly. reddit users can join or leave communities in reaction to those policies. therefore, it can be posited that moderation policies act as an independent factor in the study of subreddit discourse. studying the differences in discourse between subreddits with differing moderation policies may therefore provide evidence of the effects of those policies on com- menter discourse. of course, there are many variables that may affect dis- cussion within a subreddit: size, topic, and relative visibility are some of the most prominent factors. all of these may have much more profound effects on the observed measures of discourse than moderation style. therefore, any investiga- tion of subreddit discourse will need to account for these confounding variables. to compare the effects of moderation policy, i will use a matching strategy and analyze two sub- reddits that are alike in almost every way except for modera- tion policy. gibson subreddits in this study the two subreddits chosen for study in this article are r/lgbt (www.reddit.com/r/lgbt) and r/ainbow (www.reddit.com/r /ainbow). according to redditlist.com (n.d.), as accessed october , r/lgbt has approximately , subscribers, and r/ainbow has approximately , subscribers. for context, of the over , subreddits tracked by redditlist. com, the top subreddits have over , subscribers each. the median subreddit (r/grilling, ranked , th) only has approximately , subscribers. even though these sizes are not a perfect match, they are acceptable relative to the spread of community sizes on reddit. both subreddits have similar self-descriptions, identify- ing themselves as spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans- gender (lgbt) and other to have discussions. the r/lgbt subreddit defines itself in the following way: this subreddit is by and for people who are gender and sexual minorities (gsm), including but by no means limited to lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, and respect for our diversity and experiences is paramount. all are welcome to participate who agree to follow the rules outlined below and in: the r/lgbt faq it also boasts a “safe space” badge icon on its sidebar. the r/ainbow subreddit posts this self-description: a free area for the discussion of issues facing those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and all other sexual or nonsexual orientations and/or gender identities. post links to articles, self-posts, photographs, experiences and whatever else is important to your experience of queer life. we encourage you to treat others with respect, start and/or engage in robust discussion and interact with the community. the more we know each other, the better we’ll get along. these the two subreddits explicitly define the ideological bases for their policies and then link to each other as alterna- tive, making them excellent sites for studying the effects of moderation policy. for example, r/lgbt explicitly bills itself as a safe space and links to r/ainbow as an alternative, less moderated space: this is a safe space. anyone can make a mistake and accidentally say something hurtful or triggering. if you find yourself corrected for making this error, please try to learn from it. this is not a place to tell people that they need to reclaim a pejorative so you can use it, that they should laugh at jokes about them, or that they otherwise just ‘shouldn’t be so sensitive.’ for lightly moderated lgbt-related discussion, i recommend /r/ainbow. /r/ ainbow does not moderate discussion, but the community will expect that you treat them with respect. for more information, see /r/ainbow’s faq. similarly, r/ainbow describes itself a free speech area and links to r/lgbt as an alternative, more moderated space: this subreddit is lightly moderated. the community actively self-moderates offensive comments with downvotes, but comments are generally not removed except for violations of site-wide guidelines and as outlined below. if you prefer a more hands-on approach, try /r/lgbt. /r/lgbt requires trigger warnings, and removes comments and users for violations of their rules, which are detailed in their faq. this subreddit is a free speech zone . . . it is also lightly moderated, which means that it’s up to you the community to downvote offensive posts and comments, and upvote constructive content. please use your voting and posting powers to create the community you want to see. in an exploratory study, there were very few other simi- larly paired subreddits. often, it appeared that users who felt they were being censored started free speech subreddits in reaction to new policies in larger subreddits. such new free speech subreddits, in addition to being smaller than the origi- nal subreddit by several orders of magnitude, generally cen- tered reactionary politics and rejected the safe-space subreddits as being compromised by “sjws” (frankenmine, ) or social justice warriors, a pejorative term ascribed to individuals concerned with identity politics or feminism (massanari & chess, ). in contrast, the subreddits stud- ied here, r/lgbt and r/ainbow, have relatively more similar political standpoints, activity, and subscribers. research questions comment deletion heavily moderated spaces entail more moderator interven- tion, including deleting offending comments. along these lines, i wanted to explore whether moderators will delete more comments in a safe space than the free speech subred- dit. this might also manifest as more pressure for users to delete their own comments, either due to intrinsic motiva- tions like personal shame, or extrinsic factors, like other users downvoting that comment overwhelmingly. that is, i suspect more moderation to lead to not only greater amounts of moderator intervention, specifically to remove comments, but also to have that reflected in users’ own self-monitoring and self-censorship of their own comments. research question a. do moderators delete more com- ments in r/lgbt, the safe space, than r/ainbow, the free speech space? research question b. do more users delete their own comments in r/lgbt, the safe space, than r/ainbow, the free speech space? participation when a user creates an account reddit, he or she is automati- cally “subscribed” to a number of popular subreddits, meaning www.reddit.com/r/lgbt www.reddit.com/r/ainbow www.reddit.com/r/ainbow social media + society posts from those subreddits will comprise that user’s reddit homepage. a user can then change what subreddits’ posts they want to see by either subscribing to or unsubscribing from as many subreddits as they want. not all users who sub- scribe to a subreddit will post or ever even comment in that subreddit, remaining “lurkers” who watch without interact- ing through text. i was curious to see if there was a difference between the two subreddits in the proportion of users who commented in that subreddit. as discussed in the literature review, safe spaces are con- cerned with minimizing the structural barriers that prevent individuals in different positions of power from participating in discussions. thus, if safe space moderation policies are successful, a greater proportion of the subscribers for the safe space subreddit will actually participate in the subreddit by writing a comment. conversely, it could be argued that the heightened standards for entry in a safe space dissuade individuals who are already hesitant about participation. research question . how do the safe space, r/lgbt, and the free speech space, r/ainbow, differ in overall participa- tion rates by subscribers? language use free speech and safe spaces have been characterized by the ways in which participants interact; discussion in free speech spaces has been described as overly rational and argumenta- tive (reagle, ), and discussion in safe spaces as overly emotional, deferent, and meek (lukianoff & haidt, ; massanari & chess, ). to explore whether these differ- ences were real, i decided to analyze language use using liwc (pennebaker, boyd, jordan, & blackburn, ). the liwc program can analyze different vari- ables for each text, and thus i had many categories through which i could compare the two subreddits. rather than sim- ply going through all variables and looking for differ- ences, i chose to focus in on a few categories that pertain specifically to interpersonal attitude and boundary negotia- tion, as i believed these would most starkly draw out linguis- tic differences between the communities. i chose to examine five categories of language from liwc: summary variables, linguistic dimensions, affective processes, personal con- cerns, and informal language. word choice can be used to indicate the attentional focus, or the “gaze” of a speaker, and therefore identifying common themes in words can serve to reflect the speaker’s mental state (tausczik & pennebaker, ). for example, as indi- viduals identify more and more with a group, they will shift from using first-person singular pronouns (“i” and “me”) to first-person plural pronouns (“we” and “us”). first-person plural pronouns, however, can also be used to insinuate dis- tance, as in an exclusive we-and-not-you, royal-we, or we- as-those-who-agree-with-me (“we need to make america great again”). thus, the usage frequency of first-person pronouns is not only a reflection of group identity but also status and arrogance, among other traits (pennebaker, ; pennebaker & lay, ). research question . how does language use differ between r/lgbt, the safe space subreddit, and r/ainbow, the free speech subreddit? crossposters to test whether these differences arise because of author traits or contextual cues in the individual subreddits, i decided to isolate a subset of comments created by authors who had concurrently posted in both subreddits. i can then examine whether these comments by “recent crossposters” exhibited the same kinds of differences in linguistic markers. if these differences persist in this subset of comments, it would provide evidence that language differences are influ- enced by contextual language usage rather than innate author characteristics. research question . do users who post in both the free speech and safe space subreddits show differences in the language they use in each subreddit? data analysis a total of , , comments from r/lgbt and r/ainbow made between june and july (inclusive) were downloaded from the bigquery reddit repository. these dates were chosen to include a number of recent american political events relevant to the lgbt community which might spark civic discussion, including the orlando pulse massacre ( june ), the american presidential election ( november ), and the presidential announcement through a tweet to exclude transgender individuals from the military (@realdonaldtrump, ). for each comment, the initial data set contained the comment author, subreddit, month and year posted, and full body text. data cleaning a “bot” is a pre-programmed reddit user that posts a com- ment when triggered by a certain type of comment made by another user. various bots do such diverse things as tran- scribe comic strips (u/imagetranscribingbot), fix common spelling errors (u/commonmisspellingbot), or post pictures of cats for sad people (u/thiscatmightcheeryou). because bots post indiscriminately, they were excluded from the data set for comment analysis. there is no fixed list of bots, so i created my own list to exclude comments from those authors. first, all usernames and comments from the sample containing the word “bot” were examined to find posting patterns that corresponded to bot behavior, including multiple postings in a row of the gibson same or similarly formatted post. suspected bots were fur- ther researched by looking up their username on reddit and/ or archived reddit pages. this yielded a list of bots and covered , comments in my sample. next, i compiled a list of alleged bots from goodbot- badbot’s voting site (good bot, bad bot). this list is automati- cally created through user votes and potentially contained false positive bot identifications. the list contained , bot names and covered , comments in my sample. only usernames appearing in the goodbot-badbot list were both in my data set and not on my previous list of bot names. these suspected bots were further investigated and yielded an additional bots. in total, my list of bots from my sample contained usernames, and these bots created , comments. a total of were in r/lgbt and were in r/ainbow. after removing these comments, my data set contained , , comments. in my remaining data set of comments, many comment entries were incomplete. if a user deletes their comment or if that comment is removed by a moderator, reddit indicates that this action has taken place by replacing the body of the comment as either “[deleted]” or “[removed],” respectively. if that action took place between the creation of the comment and the archiving of the comment into the bigquery reddit repository, the body of the comment is preserved as only “[deleted]” or “[removed].” many users go farther, by not just deleting their com- ments, but by deleting their user accounts as well. in this case, username attached to the comment will be replaced by “[deleted].” it is not uncommon to find vestigial comments in comment threads with a comment that says “[deleted]” posted by a “[deleted]” author. my data set thus also contained many of these “null” com- ments. because they are not useful for a linguistic analysis, i separated these comments into a separate data set. creating the data set of crossposters in the remaining set of , , comments, , had an author who deleted his or her account. therefore, i cannot know whether or not the author of the comment was a cross- poster. i therefore excluded those , authorless comments for the following analysis, leaving a total of , com- ments in the corpus. to identify comments as being made by a crossposter, i filtered the corpus at both the author and comment level. i identified three levels at which a comment could be identi- fied as being authored by a crossposter, here numbered from least strict to strictest: level . filtered at the author level. the comment’s author posted in both r/ainbow and r/lgbt at some point within the -month sample window. level . filtered at the author level. the comment’s author posted in both r/ainbow and r/lgbt in the same cal- endar month at some point within the -month sample window. level . filtered at the comment level. the comment was written in the same calendar month as another comment by the same author in the other subreddit. at level , . % of comments qualified as being written by a crossposter, at level , . %, and at level , my strictest level, only . % of comments qualified. to maximize con- textual posting validity, i chose to classify comments as hav- ing been authored by a crossposter if and only if they qualified under level . this subset thus consists of . % of comments in r/lgbt and . % of comments in r/ainbow. please refer to tables and for a detailed breakdown of the number of authors and comments in each subreddit and level. results research questions a and b: comment removal and deletion there were a total of , comments with the body “[deleted].” of those, only three comments had a username attached to them, and the rest had username “[deleted].” of the , comments deleted by the author, , were posted in r/lgbt, the safe space, and , were posted in r/ ainbow, the free speech space (see table ). a chi-square test table . authorship in subreddits. r/lgbt (safe space) r/ainbow (free speech) total authors , , authors who posted only in one subreddit , ( . %) , ( . %) some point in both , ( . %) , ( . %) both in same month , ( . %) , ( . %) table . relative size of comment groups. subreddit total comments level level level no. of comments total (%) no. of comments total (%) no. of comments total (%) r/lgbt (safe space) , , ( . ) , ( . ) , ( . ) r/ainbow (free speech) , , ( . ) , ( . ) , ( . ) total , , ( . ) , ( . ) , ( . ) social media + society indicated that the difference in proportion of deleted com- ments is significant, χ ( ) = . and p = . . a total of , comments had the body text body “[removed].” of those, only three comments had a user- name attached to them, the rest had username “[deleted],” indicating a ban by moderators. of the , comments removed by moderators, , were posted in r/lgbt, the safe space, and , were posted in r/ainbow, the free speech space (see table ). a chi-square test indicated that the difference in proportion of removed comments is signifi- cant, χ ( ) = , . and p < . . in summary, i found significant differences in self-dele- tion and moderator removal of comments between the two subreddits, as summarized below in table . research question : participation to examine participation, i first counted the number of unique authors per month in each subreddit from my com- ment corpus. as illustrated in figure , the number of unique authors spiked in both subreddits in november , when the american presidential election took place. the number of unique authors also spiked in the free speech space r/lgbt in january , when president trump was sworn into office, and in june , gay pride month in the united states. to track subscribers in the subreddits over time, i used the internet archive’s wayback machine. in my -month date range, i found archived versions of the safe space r/lgbt and archived versions of the free speech space r/ainbow. each archived page displayed the number of subscribers to the subreddit on the day on which the page was archived. from those data of dates and subscribers, i performed simple linear regressions to model the rate at which each subreddit gained subscribers, predicting the number of subscribers over time. both communities grew at almost table . comment deletion rate in subreddits. subreddit comments deleted by author total comments comments deleted (%) r/lgbt (safe space) , , . r/ainbow (free speech) , , . table . comment removal rate in subreddits. subreddit comments removed by moderator total comments comments removed (%) r/lgbt (safe space) , , , . r/ainbow (free speech) , , . table . summary statistics of deletion and removal rate in subreddits. r/lgbt (safe space) r/ainbow (free speech) χ test p comments deleted by author , ( . %) , ( . %) χ ( ) = . . ** comments removed by moderator , ( . %) , ( . %) χ ( ) = , . <. *** figure . number of unique authors in each subreddit per month june –july . gibson perfectly linear rates with significant regression results. in the safe space r/lgbt, f( , ) = , with an r = . , p < . . in the free speech space r/ainbow, f( , ) = , with an r = . , p < . . i then estimated the number of subscribers for each sub- reddit using the first day of each month to represent the esti- mated subscribers for that month. (that is, the estimate for subscribers in june is based on the number of subscribers on june.) i then divided the number of unique authors in that month by the number of subscribers to see what proportion of subscribers contributed a comment. the relative participa- tion in each subreddit is graphed in figure . averaged by month over my -month window, . % of subscribers commented in safe space r/lgbt and . % of subscribers commented in free speech space r/ainbow. overall, i found no significant difference in authorship rates between the two subreddits, t( . ) = – . , p = . . research question : language use across subreddits i used liwc to compare linguistic measures between comments in the two subreddits over my -month sample. liwc classifies the percentage of words in each text file that fit into predetermined and validated categories (pennebaker et al., ). each comment body was pro- cessed as a separate file. as the category percentages would be especially high for short comments, i excluded all com- ments with a word count less than from the data set (fol- lowing ireland & iserman, ). like many online spaces, very few users are responsible for a large percentage of comments (sun, rau, & ma, ; van mierlo, ). in this sample, the top % most prolific comment authors created more than one-third of the total comments collected ( . %), and the top % wrote two- thirds of the total comments ( . %). thus, to create a normal distribution of comments and prevent the possibility that this small percentage of users was overly skewing the results, i removed comments by the top . % most prolific posters from the data set, including com- ments by authors who deleted their accounts, leaving only named users who posted or fewer comments over the -month sample (n = , authors). to analyze the data, i constructed linear mixed models fit by reml for each linguistic dimension to minimize error arising from individual differences (barr et al., ) using the lme package for r (bates, maechler, bolker, & walker, ). in each model the estimate for the liwc measure ( )ysi was calculated using subreddit as a fixed effect ( )β and comment author as a random effect ( )s s , thus allowing intercepts to vary by author. i constructed a model that would allow slopes to vary as well, but the model did not converge for all data. the simpler model, below, was therefore used for all estimates in tables and . the t-test results were calculated using satterthwaite’s method y s x esi s i si= + + +β β ( )equation from barr et al., hypothesis : language use among crossposters the same statistical tests were then run using only the “cross- poster” subset of the data analyzed above. discussion first, i found significant differences in moderator deletion rates between the two subreddits, with the safe space subred- dit, r/lgbt, demonstrating a higher rate of both post removal by moderators and users deleting their own comments. this result affirms that moderators effectively implemented dif- fering moderation policies in my sample. figure . proportion of subscribers who authored comments june –july . social media + society i operationalized spiral of silence effects slightly differ- ently than they have been treated in the literature, a distinc- tion captured by the difference between expressive and withdrawal behaviors as defined in chen ( ). generally, spiral of silence predicts a limit of expressive behaviors, that is, the decision to limit future posting. however, my data only allows me to observe withdrawal behaviors, that is, deleting comments that have already been posted. the results described above suggest a greater spiral of silence in the safe space subreddit, as we see a significantly greater proportion of comment deletion. however, this must be tested experimentally, as the spiral of silence may also be affected by individual differences (gearhart & zhang, ) and social norms (neubaum & krämer, ), and we have no way to know how individuals self-sorted into these sub- reddits. the difference in deletion rate may be an effect of the population of the safe space having a relatively higher willingness to self-censor, or it may be that the social sanc- tions in the safe space for minority opinions are relatively more severe than in the free speech space. in either case, the relationship between ideology and self-censorship should be further investigated. i did not find any significant difference in participation rates between the two subreddits. this result is interesting, table . comments by lower % of all non-deleted authors. liwc measure r/lgbta (safe space) r/ainbowb (free speech) t p summary variables word count . . . ** words/sentence . . . *** linguistic dimensions st person singular . . − . *** st person plural . . . *** nd person . . − . *** rd person singular . . . rd person plural . . . impersonal pronouns . . − . *** articles . . . *** prepositions . . . * auxiliary verbs . . − . *** common adverbs . . − . conjunctions . . − . *** negations . . . ** affective processes overall affect . . – . *** positive emotion . . – . *** negative emotion . . . *** anxiety . . . anger . . . *** sadness . . – . personal concerns work . . . *** leisure . . – . * home . . – . money . . . ** religion . . . death . . . *** informal language swear words . . . *** netspeak . . – . ** assent . . – . nonfluencies . . – . fillers . . – . * liwc: linguistic inquiry and word count. an = , comments. bn = , comments. ***p < . ; **p < . ; *p < . . gibson but ultimately inconclusive in this context, as i theorized that participation might be driven by inherent inclusiveness of safe spaces or salience of group identification. either mechanism, or both, might be at play here. in the future, studies that carefully control for safe space moderation policy as well as salience of group identity may be able to find a more specific mechanism. participation may also be more carefully studied over shorter periods of time for more granularity, which might reveal more meaningful results. the participation rates were not found to have a main effect, but rather spiked at various times. this could be further studied to understand what kind of comments were being made in each community at the times of these spikes. the statistical models revealed many significant differ- ences in language use between r/lgbt and r/ainbow. first, there were many differences along linguistic dimensions. users in the safe space used more first-person singular pro- nouns (i or me), second person pronouns (you), impersonal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and conjunctions. in the free speech space, users used more words in every comment, more words per sentence, more first-person plural pronouns (we or us), more articles, more prepositions, and more nega- tions. there were also differences in affect. in the safe space, table . comments by crossposters in lower % of all non-deleted authors. liwc measure r/lgbta (safe space) r/ainbowb (free speech) t p summary variables word count . . . words/sentence . . . linguistic dimensions st person singular . . − . *** st person plural . . . ** nd person . . − . rd person singular . . . ** rd person plural . . − . impersonal pronouns . . − . * articles . . . prepositions . . . auxiliary verbs . . − . common adverbs . . − . conjunctions . . − . * negations . . . * affective processes overall affect . . . positive emotion . . – . * negative emotion . . . *** anxiety . . . * anger . . . *** sadness . . – . personal concerns work . . . * leisure . . – . home . . – . money . . . religion . . . death . . . informal language swear words . . . * netspeak . . – . assent . . . nonfluencies . . – . fillers . . – . liwc: linguistic inquiry and word count. an = , comments. bn = , comments. ***p < . ; **p < . ; *p < . . social media + society users used more overall affect, driven by a higher use of posi- tive emotion words. in the free speech space, authors used more negative emotion words and more words indicating anger. the range of personal topics discussed differed between the two spaces. in the safe space, users discussed leisure relatively more frequently, whereas in the free speech space, users were more likely to discuss work, money, and death. finally, there were also differences in informal lan- guage. users in the safe space were relatively more likely to use netspeak and fillers, while in the free speech space, users used more swear words. after identifying these differences, i isolated the com- ments of crossposters to identify which linguistic tendencies were driven by space rather than individual differences. among the crossposters, most of the language difference persisted. crossposters in the safe space were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and conjunctions, while in the free speech space they were more likely to use first-person plural pronouns, third person singular pronouns, and negations. crossposters were also more likely to use positive emotion words in the safe space, but in the free speech space use negative emotion words, anxiety-related words, and anger-related words. they were also more likely to discuss work and use swear words in the free speech space. pronoun use has been linked to understanding of one’s position in social hierarchies, with lower-status individuals using “i” much more frequently, and high-status individuals using “we” more frequently (kacewicz, pennebaker, davis, jeon, & graesser, ). difference in pronoun usage between these subreddits may reflect normative positions about the proper relationship of the individual to the group at large. for example, in safe spaces, in accordance with pro- cesses of relational negotiation as discussed above, individu- als are encouraged to not make assumptions about groups of other people; speaker gaze, therefore, should focus more on oneself rather than the group at large, leading to more use of the singular first-person pronoun. correspondingly, there is no such norm in free speech spaces, and individuals are given free rein to express how they believe wide swaths of people and groups behave, leading to more use of the plural first- person pronoun. altogether, these results suggest that implemented mod- eration policies were able to effectively set norms around style, affect, and topic. in our sample of thousands of infre- quent posters, we found prominent trends. generally, lan- guage in the safe space is more positive and discussions are more about leisure activities. language in the free speech space is relatively negative and angry, and material personal concerns of work, money, and death are more frequently discussed. one limitation of this study is that it lacks access to the specific mechanics and practices of the moderators of these subreddits, and instead the moderation practices have been summed up in broad, ideological terms. if online spaces are indeed the future of democratic dis- cussion, then this research suggests that moderation policies, on both ideological and practical grounds, should be a fea- tured issue of inquiry for their role in shaping discussion. this applies not only to volunteer moderation on sites like reddit but also to otherwise opaque or invisible corporate moderation which takes place at a broad scale. if moderation does indeed shape and constrain public discourse, as these results suggest, then the ways in which moderation policies shape and constrain public discourse for the purposes of a democracy at a much larger scale are indeed worth investi- gating further. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article. references about. 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( ). the arab spring: digital media in the egyptian revolution: descriptive analysis from the tahrir data set. international journal of communication, , . author biography anna gibson is a phd candidate in the communication department at stanford university. her research interests include digital media and labor. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html http://lindsyvangelder.com/clips/strange-case-electronic-lover http://lindsyvangelder.com/clips/strange-case-electronic-lover https://www.jmir.org/ / /e / https://www.jmir.org/ / /e / blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation for the persistence of patriarchal patterns copyright © by author/s and licensed by lectito bv, netherlands. this is an open access article distributed under the creative commons attribution license which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. journal of cultural analysis and social change, , ( ), issn: - blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation for the persistence of patriarchal patterns sherri dioguardi *, ashley wellman , frances p. reddington university of central missouri, usa texas christian university, usa *corresponding author: dioguardi@ucmo.edu citation: dioguardi, s., wellman, a. and reddington, f. p. ( ). blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation for the persistence of patriarchal patterns, journal of cultural analysis and social change, ( ), . https://doi.org/ . /jcasc/ published: july , abstract rape was a prominent theme in greek mythology and has recently re-emerged in the media spotlight due to the #metoo and #timesup movements as well as celebrity-involved cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment (i.e., bill cosby and harvey weinstein). the current paper examines three ancient greek myths involving rapes committed by gods. a qualitative content analysis was done to compare these myths to modern day sexual assaults. latent content results were analyzed and framed within the context of jungian theory. prior research has placed rape and other sexual assaults within a patriarchal framework, presuming strategic male hegemony. archetype theory offers an alternative, and more benign, explanation for the prevalence of rape myths, the persistence of gender power differentials, and for the perpetuation of ancient stereotypes. analysis of study findings within a jungian framework suggests a possible solution for these persistent problems within society, one worthy of empirical investigation. keywords: carl g. jung, archetype theory, rape, sexual assault, patriarchy, misogyny, feminism, myths, greek mythology, stereotypes introduction recently, there has been heightened public awareness of sexual assault and harassment as a result of celebrities (i.e., harvey weinstein, bill cosby, and larry nassar) dominating broadcast news and social media. the latest #metoo movement has shed light on the far-reaching impact of sexual assault and the emotional and physical effects that follow. despite the recent focus on the issue of sexual abuse, few people realize that current rape myths and the accompanying negative perceptions of rape victims have long-standing historical roots. for instance, medusa, the greek monster who had venomous snakes for hair, was once a beautiful maiden. after being raped by poseidon, she was denounced and demonized for her victimization. other mythological women endured similar fates. this paper draws parallels between three mythological stories and three modern-day accounts of criminal sexual behaviour, and then offers the jungian concept of archetypes to explain those parallels. greek mythology & archetypes myths have been referred to as society’s sacred stories (lule, ) because they persist generationally as a result of their evocative nature. myths are ideological rather than factual (dowden, ). while ideology has been defined as a belief or conviction (livingstone, ), in reality, ideology is the force that empowers specific beliefs mailto:dioguardi@ucmo.edu https://doi.org/ . /jcasc/ dioguardi et al. / blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation / © by author/s or convictions. sometimes, as with certain greek myths, that force is brutal, but that is primarily because almost everything is amplified or bigger than life in greek myths. also, raw, undiluted emotions and exaggerated traits allow myths (or exemplars) to be more easily visualized and remembered (gibson and zillmann, ; morgan and dennehy, ), and it is those types of archetypal characteristics that enable myths to continue to resonate in the modern world. it was c. g. jung, renowned twentieth century swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, who used the term ‘archetype’ to represent a ‘primordial image’ (jung, , p. ). jung considered archetypes to be akin to the embodiment of primitive emotions imbedded within a ‘collective unconscious’ (stevens, , p. ). for jung ( ), the persistent power of archetypes could not be overstated: “[a]rchetypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of histories” (p. ). by looking back at greek myths and the archetypes contained within them, it may be possible to trace the germination of gender ideology in the modern world to better understand the presence of rape then and now and to also possibly explain societal reactions to sexual assault. women & rape in greek mythology greek myths were early ancestors’ attempts to understand relationships and explain origination. at first, according to myth, only the male human was created by prometheus, a titan god, and it was not until later that the first mortal woman was created as the way to punish man for fire being stolen from the sun. upon instructions from zeus, the king of the gods, pandora was created as a torment to man, and she was described as kalon kakon, or ‘beautiful evil’ (zeitlin, , p. ). while many people today may not know that pandora was the first female creation in greek mythology, they will likely recognize the phrase ‘pandora’s box,’ and know that pandora was blamed for bringing ‘death, woe, and evil into the world’ (zeitlin, , p. ). one of the vilest accounts of rape and murder in greek mythology is the story of princess philomela being raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law, king tereus of thrace. neither were gods, but both were royalty. after the sexual assault, tereus commanded philomela to keep silent about the rape; when she refused, he cut out her tongue. even though she no longer had a voice, philomela created a tapestry upon which she had written within the weavings the story of her sexual assault, and she sent that to her sister, procne, who was the wife of tereus (the rapist). after learning what her husband had done to her sister, procne was enraged and killed her own son (who was fathered by tereus) in revenge. procne then cooked and served those remains as a meal to her husband. after tereus finished eating, procne brought out their son’s severed head so that tereus would know the horror of cannibalizing his own son (encyclopaedia britannica, a). despite this myth being rewritten very concisely in the preceding paragraph, the violence remains vivid. this illustrates how viscerally potent the images contained in myths are, even when retold thousands of years later. that is what jung ( , p. ) meant when he described the quality of ‘numinosity’ being present with archetypes or emotion-packed symbols. women & rape in modern society in modern united states history, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and the husband or father would be recognized as the victim (burgess-jackson, ). rape, therefore, was viewed as lessening the value of the female property, and it required financial recompense paid to her male ‘owner’ (burgess-jackson, ). while women are no longer legally viewed as property in america, the differential power that men hold over women remains problematic. patriarchal and misogynous attitudes continue to be related to the commission, and acceptance, of rape and other sexual assaults (murnen et al., ). feminists have reframed rape as a crime motivated by control, anger and power, designed to strip dignity from its victims. brownmiller ( ) specifically challenged rape as a form of sex and instead defined rape as an expression of masculinity that endeavors to keep women oppressed through fear. this new perspective reframed rape as a political act as much as an individual crime. radical feminism asserts men, not women, have maintained control over the female body for reproductive and sexual purposes (whisnant, ). men may use violence or threats of violence as forms of power to control their female victims. rape-prone civilizations – such as the kenyan tribe of kikuyu, the arunta which is an aboriginal australian population, and the mundurucu from brazil – use rape as threat, punishment, or even as a ceremonial act (sanday, ). there are still countries with ‘marry- your-rapist laws’ which allow a rapist to escape prosecution if he agrees to marry his victim; and the coerced marriage is often viewed by the victim as her only way to regain honor (raphelson, ). feminists also argue that the domination of the sexual experience by men causes women to lack sexual freedom and to unconsciously fill the role of submissive, blurring the lines between consensual sex and rape (whisnant, journal of cultural analysis and social change, ( ), © by author/s / ). while not always legally rape, men may utilize power and coercion to lure women into sexual engagement. patriarchal views which oppress women are furthered by the transmission of misogynistic comments, jokes, and fantasies (ford and ferguson, ). common misconceptions of sexual assault, its victims, and the perpetrators articulate similarly misguided and detrimental ideas. burt ( ) termed many of these false beliefs broadly as ‘rape myths’ (p. ). “rape myths are attitudes and generally false beliefs about rape that are widely and persistently held” (lonsway and fitzgerald, , p. ). these myths are held both by individuals in society and by the institutions entrenched within society (edwards et al., ). while there are many rape myths, this article focuses on the myths that remove blame from the male offender by excusing his behaviour and transferring blame to the victim due to her voluntary alcohol consumption, physical appeal, choice of clothing, or promiscuous past (burt, ; lonsway and fitzgerald, ; suarez and gadalla, ). rape myths harm society by trivializing rape and all forms of sexual assault and by discounting their long-term psychological effects (iconis, ). because rape myths are attributed to a patriarchal society and patriarchy is defined as a political system in which males dominate and perpetually maintain power over laws and policy (lerner, ), the presumption has primarily been that the persistence of the control and oppression of women has been conscious and strategic; that the domination has been deliberately driven. the explanation presented in this article presumes a much less malignant motive, and that is a theory of archetypes (jung, ). this paper proposes that the persistence of patriarchal attitudes and behaviors in society may have less to do with conscious intent and much more to do with unconscious content (archetypes). the reason this distinction is relevant and important is not to excuse sexual assaults or even minimize the harm caused by rape myths. instead, this article offers a new avenue to explore, one which has the potential to provide a way out of the ‘sexist stalemate’ position that patriarchy has appeared to place upon society. current theories tend to make males and females antagonistic to each other, and antagonism is never conducive for creating collaborative solutions. the theory of archetypes jung ( ) was convinced that archetypes represent evolutionary pre-programming or patterns that pre-exist in everyone, akin to an imprint created from an action repeatedly occurring in early history and becoming a pattern of default survival behavior. [archetypes] are, in a sense, the deposits of all our ancestral experiences themselves…all those factors, therefore, that were essential to our near and remote ancestors will also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited organ system (jung, , p. ). jung ( ) considered archetypes to be natural and neutral in value but recognized their potential for stimulating reactive, non-reflective responses that might be perceived as being prejudicial. archetypes, which have been called residue from ancient memories, are an unconscious link to the collective mind of our earliest ancestors (jung, ). modern man is in fact a curious mixture of characteristics acquired over the long ages of his mental development. this mixed-up being is the man and his symbols that we have to deal with, and we must scrutinize his mental products very carefully indeed. skepticism and scientific convictions exist in him side by side with old-fashioned prejudices, outdated habits of thought and feeling, obstinate misinterpretations, and blind ignorance (jung, , p. ). jung ( ) was convinced that the reason people dream so vividly in archetype forms is because the unconscious is attempting to bring those ancestral imprints into conscious awareness for acknowledgement and insight. the symbol-producing function of our dreams is thus an attempt to bring the original mind of man into “advanced” or differentiated consciousness, where it has never been before and where, therefore, it has never been subjected to critical self-reflection. for, in ages long past, that original mind was the whole of man’s personality. as he developed consciousness, so his conscious mind lost contact with some of that primitive psychic energy (jung, , p. ). some scholars have compared jungian philosophy with that of friedrich nietzsche (huskinson, ) because nietzsche “suggested a plan for ‘becoming what one is’ throughout the cultivation of instincts and various cognitive faculties, a plan that requires constant struggle with one’s psychological and intellectual inheritances” (wilkerson, , para. ). nietzsche termed the fundamental driving force within all life forms as the will to power. nietzsche’s will to power may be interpreted as the battle between the rational mind and primordial instinctive drives; dioguardi et al. / blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation / © by author/s such struggle could be overcome through reaching an equilibrium between the two or an integration, which was nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch or whole self (huskinson, ). this aligns with jung’s belief that human beings will only reach their highest potential when they stop denying or repressing primordial instincts and, instead, work diligently to bring them into conscious awareness and under cognitive control. bringing personal archetypes out of the shadows (the unconscious) and into the light (the conscious) is also how analytical therapists believe a person becomes whole (jung, ). in society, the same principle applies. it can only be after archetypes are brought into cultural awareness that people will stop being so susceptible to forces that, for centuries, have resided within the collective unconscious (jung, ). analyzing language may also illuminate archetypes (or imbedded bias) because words can be viewed as both expressions of symbols and as stand-alone symbols. “[a] symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional obvious meaning” (jung, , p. ). for example, when referring to a subject as an invalid, the speaker may not be consciously aware of the etymology of the word because of the different pronunciation, but the subject’s subconscious will instinctively sense the derogation from literally being dismissed as in-valid. in critical language studies, there is a term called naturalization, which is when ideological language becomes so mainstream that it appears to be free of ideology and is generally accepted as unbiased (fairclough, ). for instance, mass media and even judicial reporting may use evocative words to describe sexual assault; i.e., referring to women’s underwear as panties or using the term fondling for a forcible touching (judicial language project, n.d.); and these titillating terms may slip past conscious awareness despite connoting a decreased degree of crime culpability. over time, they may become naturalized, which hides the harm and reinforces archetypal stereotypes and rape myths, both individually and collectively across society. while the concepts of archetypes and a collective unconscious are foundational principles in analytical psychology, there has been little attempt to empirically test these concepts outside of that discipline (sotirova- kohli et al., ). part of the problem is that jung never formulated his theory in a way that would allow easy testing (stevens, ). jung believed the reason his books were not well read or understood was due to the difficulty of explaining with words a phenomenon that pre-existed language; for him, the archetype was a ‘hypothetical and irrepresentable model’ (jung, , p. ). because jung was trained as a medical doctor and was up-to-date in scientific knowledge, he saw a similarity between archetypes and the ‘pattern of behavior’ (grillner, , p. ) phenomenon from biology, which allowed him to state with confidence: “not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations” (jung, , p. ). since jung’s passing in , a variety of different disciplines have independently come up with their own version of the archetype (stevens, ). neurobiologists call a similar concept ‘instinctual psychological processes’ (goodwin, , p. ). ethologists or behavioral biologists have identified innate releasing mechanisms (irms) which are patterns of behavior that are activated by sign stimuli in the environment (stevens, ). in addition, the triune brain (maclean, ), a popular but overly simplified model, was developed that fits in well with jung’s theory of archetypes. the triune brain model shows the brain as being comprised of three evolutionary layers with the earliest layer labeled as the reptilian brain; the next evolutionary brain level as the limbic brain system or emotional brain; and the last layer as the new mammalian brain. only the latest brain level is hypothesized to be involved with higher order reasoning, and that is the area of the brain that is thought to be most plastic or capable of continuous adaptation; in contrast, the reptilian brain would be the least likely to change, would be the seat of survival instincts, and would be the most likely location of the archetypes (goodwin, ). “archetypes emerges as a nonmystical but profound representation of the deep organizing unconscious, which cognitive science has finally helped us to understand as a mechanism” (fonagy, , p. xv). while word association (wa) tests are widely used today (fitzpatrick et al., ), it is rarely acknowledged that jung was an early pioneer of that methodology. jung used wa tests to provide empirical support for the existence of a universal depository of archetypes (stevens, ). results of recent studies utilizing word association and word matching tests support the idea that the unconscious, rather than conscious, retains knowledge of archetypal symbols, even cross-culturally (huston et al., ; brown and hannigan, ). while not a direct test of the theory of archetypes, roesler ( ) reviewed empirical studies that evaluated the effectiveness of jungian psychotherapy for patients and found it was effective in ( ) reducing symptoms, ( ) decreasing healthcare claims, and ( ) successfully concluding most treatment after an average of sessions. critics of jung’s theory of archetypes argue that human migration and cultural diffusion sufficiently explain the universality of symbols across cultures (stevens, ). while it is intriguing that other disciplines have independently come up with concepts similar to archetypes and a collective unconscious, more empirical studies are needed. despite the small body of literature, however, the theory has instinctive appeal and provides an explanation for why – despite changing laws, a progressive society, and the passage of time since the creation of journal of cultural analysis and social change, ( ), © by author/s / the greek myths – parallels still exist between those mythical accounts of rapes and sexual assaults that occur thousands of years later. methodology research design the current study is guided by the following research question: to what extent, if any, do the presentations of rape in greek mythology and the facts of three modern day sexual assault cases parallel each other? a qualitative content analysis compared these mythological rapes to three media accounts. while plots were purposely chosen that contained rape portrayals in the greek myths, when utilizing content analysis, ‘how the story is told and how characters are portrayed are often more telling than specific plot points’ (kort-butler, , p. ). here, a latent analysis was conducted because, instead of looking at specific words (which undoubtedly changed through repetitive retelling of the mythological stories), the objective was to uncover the overall meaning being conveyed, as that likely remained intact over time. the criteria for choosing a modern case to analyze was ( ) it needed to be a sensationalized case that ( ) involved a male athlete or celebrity, i.e., someone who could be the modern equivalent for the mythological greek god, ( ) in which there had been a lawful conviction in the criminal justice system. in addition, ( ) there needed to be sufficient coverage of the case so that facts could be accessed as well as ( ) reliable information on how the public reacted. lastly, ( ) enough time had to have passed so that follow-up information could also be attained. the three modern cases selected were state of indiana v. michael g. tyson, people (of the state of california) v. roman raymond polanski, and people (of the state of california) v. brock turner. qualitative content analysis m ytholog ical account: m edusa & poseiden legend has it that the world was divided into three parts after the war of the titans, and three supreme brothers – zeus, poseidon and hades – drew straws to find out which one-third of the world would become their kingdom: the sky, the sea, or the underworld. poseidon became the sea god. according to ovid, around ad, in metamorphoses, medusa was born human and quite beautiful. “every man who saw her face and her gorgeous, silken hair immediately asked for her hand in marriage - all but one” (saldarriaga, , p. ). and that one was not a man, but a god. while the virginal medusa reposed in athena’s temple, poseidon raped her, an act which also defiled athena’s temple. athena blamed medusa for the defilement of her temple, and ‘also chose to punish medusa for her part in the whole affair - she cursed medusa’s beauty’ (saldarriaga, , p. ). she punished medusa by turning her locks of hair into serpents and causing her face to be so horrible that merely glancing at it would instantly transform the observer to stone. medusa was forced to go into exile, and she was eventually beheaded (freeman, ). m odern account: desiree washing ton & m ike tyson present day parallels were drawn between this greek myth and the case involving desiree washington and convicted rapist, mike tyson. mike tyson, known as ‘iron mike,’ had been the youngest heavyweight boxing champion of the world. when he was years old, after having recently lost the heavyweight boxing title, tyson was persuaded to lend his celebrity name and presence to the miss black america pageant held in indianapolis on july , . while present at the pageant festivities, tyson saw desiree washington, a beautiful, -year-old woman; desiree had recently graduated from high school and was a part-time sunday school teacher (corliss, ) who aspired to go into law and politics; she was outgoing and enjoyed being part of the beauty pageant events (walters, ). after agreeing to go out with tyson on a late-night date, desiree went with him to his hotel room, where a jury later found that she was raped by him. tyson was sentenced to a six-year prison term, but he was subsequently released after serving only three years. one of the prosecutors in the case gave the following statement about desiree washington: “she is imprisoned herself emotionally for the rest of her life…there are so many competing fears and concerns. this child has no sense of happiness or elation. it’ll take months just to get back to normal and that’s what she’s trying to do” (shipp, , p. ). one of desiree’s concerns was related to the vast number of tyson fans who were blaming her and supporting him. at least one study showed that % of television station viewers did not agree with the jury’s verdict of guilt for tyson (corliss, ). such unsympathetic and hard-hearted response to desiree by a slight majority of the public might be seen as the manifestation of the metaphoric ‘turning to stone’ by those who viewed medusa. desiree washington disappeared from public view after giving an interview to barbara walters within days after tyson’s conviction. a newsday article (gelman, ) reported on desiree’s life still being shattered nearly four years after the rape occurred. this portrayal was in sharp contrast to tyson, who was picked up by a chauffeur- dioguardi et al. / blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation / © by author/s driven limousine on the day he was released from prison and announced to the press that he had just signed a contract with mgm grand in las vegas which would potentially mean earnings of up to $ million for his first post-prison professional fight. before the rape, desiree was ‘always at the center of attention’ (gelman, , p. ), but after the rape, she shunned the spotlight. her family broke up soon after the sentencing, and the happy home in which desiree grew up had to be sold so that desiree’s father and younger sister could escape constant harassment by tyson supporters (gelman, ). this destruction of the family home parallels the defilement of athena’s temple. in , years after the rape, the first hits from a google search of ‘desiree washington’ prominently display the name of mike tyson. not only has desiree washington disappeared from the public eye (a virtual exile), but her once independent identity appears to have been obliterated because she no longer exists on-line at all except in relation to her rapist. while tyson’s international fame might explain his prominent online presence, it does not explain the complete absence of any updated online information about desiree washington individually. this obliteration represents desiree’s symbolic beheading by the athena-like public. m ytholog ical account: leda & zeus a well-known myth in the middle ages, the horror of the rape of leda, was not really addressed until in the william butler yeats sonnet and in fact was even romanticized during the italian renaissance (norfolk, ). zeus, ‘father and ruler of all the gods of ancient greece’ (norfolk, , p. ) and controller of lightning, saw the very young mortal maiden, leda, by a lake and desired her. when leda fled, zeus ‘transforms himself into the shape of a swan and proceeds to sneak up on leda and rape her’ (history of rape culture, n.d., p. ). the following is the first stanza from a sonnet written by william butler yeats ( ) describing the violent act: “a sudden blow; the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. he holds her helpless breast upon his breast” (p. ). in this sonnet, the act is ‘an unambiguously brutal rape after which the victim is indifferently discarded’ (norfolk, , p. ). m odern account: sam antha geim er & rom an polanski leda’s assault is directly contrasted with the rape of samantha geimer. in , samantha was a -year-old child who was desired by wealthy, award-winning hollywood director, roman polanski. in order to get samantha to accompany him alone and unchaperoned, polanski tricked both samantha and her mother into believing that he was taking samantha to model for a vogue photo shoot. this was similar to zeus disguising himself as a swan in order to trick leda. instead, of taking her to a photo shoot, polanski took samantha to a fellow celebrity’s house where it is undisputed that she was drugged and sexually assaulted. polanski pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and expected to be sentenced to the days in jail already served months earlier. the night before the sentencing hearing, however, polanski learned that the judge was likely not going to agree to the plea deal negotiated by his defense attorney and the prosecutor, and so he fled america (toobin, ). polanski has maintained dual citizenship in france and poland, and both countries have refused all requests to extradite him (doezema, ; kolanko and cieply, ). in , polanski received the lifetime achievement award at the zurich film festival (serisier, ). it was only last year that polanski (along with bill cosby) was expelled from membership of the academy of motion pictures arts and sciences (melas and france, ). in los angeles county, an arrest warrant issued in remains outstanding for polanski (oehling and cummins, ). despite no dispute over the facts – a -some year-old man drugging and sexually assaulting a -year-old girl – there was support from the public for polanski being allowed to return to the united states, and legal petitions were filed, requesting all charges be dismissed (toobin, ). the view co-host whoopi goldberg minimized the crime by stating on national television that ‘it wasn’t rape-rape’ (keegan, , p. ), which is similar to how leda’s mythological rape is sometimes seen as a seduction. m ytholog ical account: aura & dionysus the rape of aura by dionysus, son of zeus, is recounted in the epic poem dionysiaca (nonnus, ). dionysus is also the god credited with granting king midas the power to turn everything he touched into gold (encyclopaedia britannica, b). aura was a young and beautiful virgin huntress who offended the goddess artemis, daughter of zeus, by questioning her virginity. in retaliation, artemis sought revenge by having aura sexually assaulted by dionysus, the god of wine (spanoudakis, ). dionysus saw aura, desired her, and so deliberately got her drunk. once she passed out, he raped her (lightfoot, ). when aura awakened, ‘she saw with surprise her breasts bare of the modest bodice, the cleft of her thighs uncovered, her dress marked with the drops of wedlock that told of a maidenhood ravished…she was maddened by what she saw’ (nonnus, , book xlviii, p. ). in contrast, dionysus became revered for bestowing the gift of wine to mankind, and for centuries he inspired a cult following (cartwright, ). journal of cultural analysis and social change, ( ), © by author/s / m odern account: em ily doe & brock turner significant parallels are present when examining the case of aura alongside the sexual assault of emily doe. two witnesses came upon brock turner, a stanford university student, sexually assaulting emily doe on campus grounds while she was unconscious. turner claimed he received verbal consent before ‘emily’ had passed out. the media made much of the fact that turner was an aspiring olympic swimmer, and in some accounts the assault was described almost as if it were merely a drunken indiscretion on turner’s part. turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault: ( ) assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, ( ) penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object; and ( ) penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object (james, ). he was sentenced to six months in jail followed by three years of probation with the condition that he register as a sex offender and complete a treatment program. he was released in three months (grinberg and shoichet, ). emily’s real name was never made public, and her image was never broadcast. she did, however, give a victim-impact statement at the criminal court hearing which went viral on social media. in the statement, she addressed turner directly, “you don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today” (bever, , p. ). she described how she came to while on a gurney in a hallway and how, after a few hours of being poked and prodded by medical personnel and having all her scratches and abrasions photographed, she was finally allowed to shower. she stated how she felt as she looked down at her own body: i stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, i don’t want my body any more. i was terrified of it. i didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. i wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else (bever, , p. ). like aura, she was maddened, as she told her attacker: “if you are hoping that one of my organs will implode from anger and i will die, i’m almost there. you are very close” (bever, , p. ). she responded to some of the comments contained in the defendant’s written statement that was proffered to the court, such as his assertions that he was establishing a program where he will go to high schools and colleges to ‘speak out against the college campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that’ because he wants to ‘show people that one night of drinking can ruin a life.’ here was her response: a life, one life, yours. you forgot about mine. let me rephrase for you. i want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. you and me. you are the cause. i am the effect. you have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. you knocked down both our towers. i collapsed at the same time you did. if you think i was spared, came out unscathed, that today i ride off into sunset while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. nobody wins. we have all been devastated. we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering. your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. my damage was internal, unseen. i carry it with me. you took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today. see one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning. i am no stranger to suffering. you made me a victim. in newspapers my name was “unconscious intoxicated woman,” ten syllables, and nothing more than that. for a while, i believed that that was all i was. i had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. to relearn that this is not all that i am. that i am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the all american swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. i am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if i was worth something (bever, , p. ). discussion summary of parallels between myths and modern cases it is interesting to realize that the only modern sexual assault survivor who was not vilified or devalued by the public and who enjoyed support from the media was the one who kept her identity private and never allowed her face and form to be publicized. this ‘invisibility’ might have protected emily doe from being ‘mortalized’ (knocked down from a ‘virgin goddess’ status) and kept her from being an easy target for either the media or the public. brock turner also was not officially a celebrity (or modern ‘god’), even though there was testimony and media reports about his privileged status (i.e., stanford university student and swimming star). rape myths, as well as greek myths, provide simplistic narratives. it is human nature to prefer simplicity over complexity (baker, ), and science itself requires parsimony in theory-making (sober, ; swinburne, ). the greek myths contain viscerally potent images, or archetypes, that may become imbedded in the subconscious dioguardi et al. / blaming beauty for the beast: a jungian explanation / © by author/s and allow patriarchal patterns to persist (jung, ). this may occur through the process of heuristic reasoning (chaiken and trope, ; kahneman, ; stanovich, west, and toplak, ), in which people come to conclusions based on unconsciously retained memory fragments rather than on conscious, reflective, systematic reasoning. the all-powerful male gods have been transformed in modern times to be our sports heroes or celebrities whose privilege protects them. the overly simplistic narratives of rape myths also provide support for the belief that the world is inherently fair (see just-world hypothesis, such as lerner and simmons, ; rubin and peplau, ); that bad things only happen for a victim-based reason; that, as long as a victim can be blamed, no one else needs to fear being violated. “[t]he exercise of power, in modern society, is increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particularly through the ideological workings of language” (fairclough, , p. ). by focusing on language, fairclough ( ) believes it is possible to change embedded ideologies which create domination and oppression in modern society. looking at language, which puts symbolism in words, helps to uncover powerful parallels between antiquity and today. in the greek myth, when medusa cast her gaze on people, they were turned to stone. in desiree washington’s case, when she succeeded in getting tyson convicted, the majority of the public became stone-cold and unsympathetic toward her. medusa’s beheading revealed the power of patriarchy to deny her existence as a whole person and have her exist only as a body. desiree’s personhood (or identity) was publicly erased by the media, which was evidenced by the googling of her name not producing results separate and apart from the name of her rapist, whose world fame allowed him to attain (and retain) god-like status. both medusa and desiree were doubly wronged by being violated and then by being seen as complicit in their own violations (delong, ). in samantha geimer’s rape, the public’s persistent unwillingness to censure roman polanski may be attributed to some remnant of sympathy toward him because of the horrific murder of his wife, sharon tate, and their unborn child (bugliosi and gentry, ). polanski’s own victimhood may have allowed him to be publicly viewed less like the predatory eagle from greek mythology and more like the harmless swan. however, it was his stature as a hollywood elite that enabled him to disguise his dark side to both samantha geimer and her mother and to exploit their innocence and gullibility. some accounts of the leda-zeus encounter describe the rape as a seduction (greekmythology.com); similarly, media accounts of samantha geimer’s sexual assault minimized the violation, some reporting it as a consensual act despite the fact that samantha geimer was years old while polanski was . the legal system allowed polanski to plead guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor (keegan, ), and the press persists even today in portraying polanski’s predation in a swanlike manner. the sole sexual assault survivor in this analysis who retained her voice in a public forum was emily doe, a pseudonym which effectively hid her true identity. while it would be gratifying to believe that it is evolving standards of decency in a progressive society that engendered media and subsequent public support for her, it is just as likely that emily doe’s hidden identity is what kept her from being the recipient of media scorn and victim blaming. her invisibility made it difficult to be disparaging of her appearance, her demeanor, or her body language. instead, she could only be judged by the facts of the case, making it easier for others to place themselves in her position (see defensive attribution hypothesis; i.e., cann et al., ; kanekar and vaz, ; muller et al., ; shaver, ; thornton et al., ) and defer knee-jerk defensiveness for an attacker who was only a potential celebrity or sports star. besides being known as the god of wine, dionysus is also known as the god of ecstasy. in modern society, we persist in using euphemisms and providing god status to a mythological male entity known for raping women after they were deliberately rendered unconscious from alcohol ingestion. one of the ‘she asked for it’ items in a typical rape myth acceptance scale is: if a woman is raped while she is drunk, she is at least somewhat responsible for letting things get out of control (payne et al., ; mcmahon and farmer, ). alcohol remains the drug of choice for would-be rapists to incapacitate their victims (grubb and turner, ). despite this premeditated, predatory strategy on the part of rapists, more blame is often attributed to victims who have consumed alcohol prior to the attack (richardson and campbell, ; scronce and corcoran, ; simms et al., ; wild et al., ). conclusion while this article’s focus is male-on-female rape and examines gender roles, the researchers recognize the seriousness of male victims of sexual assault, same-gender victimization, and the changing ideation of gender in modern society. the primary purpose of this research was to determine if parallels existed between ancient myths and modern media-reported cases and, more importantly, to explore a jungian explanation for those parallels. patriarchy has been defined as a deliberate power control strategy, and such definition divides and polarizes the population. our analysis makes it clear that, even though we may not have progressed past patriarchal patterns present in ancient myths, there may be an alternative reason, one not wholly hegemonically driven, for the persistence of these patterns. powerful primordial forces may be influencing people on an unconscious level. we posit that these patriarchal patterns may persist because of archetypal images imbedded within a jungian collective journal of cultural analysis and social change, ( ), © by author/s / unconscious rather than because of consciously constructed patriarchal power. our examination of archetypes as an alternative explanation for these persistent patriarchal patterns has not been offered to excuse wrong-doing, and it is not meant to minimize the harm caused. instead, in the wake of emergent science across research fields (i.e., analytic psychology, behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuropsychology), jung’s theory of archetypes is now being recognized as relevant; and, as such, it has the potential to provide a practical way to root out ancient attitudes and create a safer society. the archetype explanation is offered as the means by which disparate disciplines, and even opposing ideological groups, might collaboratively come together to finally find solutions to a serious societal problem. it was surprisingly easy to search out and select modern cases that paralleled mythological rapes. the three modern cases chosen were in our first group of four found by a simple google search conducted on december , : ‘celebrities convicted of rape.’ we had to discard one case because we could not find an official disposition, and it appeared that the case may have been settled out of court. for the three cases selected, we found the parallels rather astounding, given the historical gap of thousands of years. we, as a society, need to be more fully cognizant of innate biases; we need to hold our heroes to a higher standard than the greek gods; and we need to be much more mindful of the language being used by the media (and by ourselves) so as to alter behavioral patterns and progress past myths, both greek-based and rape-based. unless we become more reflective and less reactive, the light of reason may not uncover ancient stereotypes hidden deeply within the shadows. references baker, a, ( ). simplicity. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win /entries/simplicity/ bever, l. 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( ). blame and punishment for intoxicated aggression: when is the perpetrator culpable? addiction, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x wilkerson, d. ( ). friedrich nietzsche ( - ). the internet encyclopedia of philosophy. available at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/nietzsch/ yeats, w. b. ( ). the tower. (a facsimile edition). simon & schuster. available at: http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/the-tower/william-butler- yeats/ /browse_inside zeitlin, f. i. ( ). signifying difference: the myth of pandora. in r. hawley and b. levick (eds.), women in antiquity: new assessments. routledge: london, pp. - . https://doi.org/ . /bjps/ . . https://doi.org/ . /bs https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-celebrity-defense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiyzsi v-u https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://www.iep.utm.edu/nietzsch/ http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/the-tower/william-butler-yeats/ /browse_inside http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/the-tower/william-butler-yeats/ /browse_inside 	introduction 	greek mythology & archetypes 	women & rape in greek mythology 	women & rape in modern society 	the theory of archetypes 	methodology 	research design 	qualitative content analysis 	mythological account: medusa & poseiden 	modern account: desiree washington & mike tyson 	mythological account: leda & zeus 	modern account: samantha geimer & roman polanski 	mythological account: aura & dionysus 	modern account: emily doe & brock turner 	discussion 	summary of parallels between myths and modern cases 	conclusion ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising a partir de un estudio de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrío revista de estudios sociales | revisitando la industrialización latinoamericana en el siglo xx: entre el estado y el mercado ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising a partir de un estudio de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrío can advertising be feminist? ambivalence and gender interests in “femvertising” from a case study: campofrio´s “deliciosa calma” a publicidade pode ser feminista? ambivalência e interesses de gênero na femvertising a partir de um estudo de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrio maría isabel menéndez menéndez edición electrónica url: http://journals.openedition.org/revestudsoc/ issn: - editor universidad de los andes edición impresa fecha de publicación: abril paginación: - issn: - x referencia electrónica maría isabel menéndez menéndez, « ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising a partir de un estudio de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrío », revista de estudios sociales [en línea], | , publicado el abril , consultado el julio . url : http://journals.openedition.org/revestudsoc/ los contenidos de la revista de estudios sociales están editados bajo la licencia creative commons attribution . international. ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising a partir de un estudio de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrío* maría isabel menéndez menéndez ** fecha de recepción: de julio de · fecha de aceptación: de octubre de · fecha de modificación: de enero de https://doi.org/ . /res . . cómo citar: menéndez menéndez, maría isabel. . “¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising a partir de un estudio de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrío”. revista de estudios sociales : - . https://doi. org/ . /res . . resumen | una reciente estrategia publicitaria, llamada femvertising, parece llamada a terminar con el sexismo que siempre ha acompañado a gran parte de la publicidad. se trata de una propuesta que no sólo supera los paradigmas sexistas sino que incorpora elementos de empoderamiento de las mujeres. sin embargo, no está exenta de riesgos, por su carácter ambivalente y por los intereses de género que compromete. el presente artículo reflexiona sobre los aspectos teóricos de la femvertising y realiza un estudio de caso para aproximarse a una publicidad sobre la que apenas existe bibliografía. las conclusiones nos anuncian que se trata de un fenómeno complejo que exige seguir siendo profundizado en su análisis para diagnosticar su compromiso con la igualdad. palabras clave | Ética de la publicidad; feminismo; femvertising; género; sexismo can advertising be feminist? ambivalence and gender interests in “femvertising” from a case study: campofrio´s “deliciosa calma” abstract | a recent strategy known as “femvertising” appears to seek to end the sexism that has always accompanied much of advertising. it not only proposes overcoming sexist paradigms, but also incor- porates elements of female empowerment. however, it is not exempt from risks, given its ambivalent nature and the gender interests it invokes. this paper reflects on the theoretical aspects of “femver- tising” and employs a case study as a way to approach this type of advertising, on which there is hardly any literature. the conclusions suggest that this is a complex phenomenon that requires deeper analysis in order to diagnose its commitment to equality. keywords | ethics of advertising; feminism; “femvertising”; gender; sexism a publicidade pode ser feminista? ambivalência e interesses de gênero na femvertising a partir de um estudo de caso: deliciosa calma de campofrio resumo | uma recente estratégia publicitária, denominada femvertising, parece determinada a acabar com o sexismo que sempre acompanhou grande parte da publicidade. trata-se de uma proposta que não apenas supera * el presente texto es resultado del proyecto i+d fem - -c - -pb ( - ), “produsage juvenil en las redes sociales: construcción de la identidad sexual y gestión de las desigualdades de género”, financiado por el ministerio de industria, economía y competitividad del gobierno de españa, en el marco del programa estatal de fomento de la investigación científica y técnica de excelencia. ** doctora en filosofía y licenciada en periodismo. profesora titular de comunicación audiovisual y publicidad de la universidad de burgos, españa. experta en estudios feministas y de género. Últimas publicaciones: “entre el neomachismo y el retrosexismo: antifeminismo contemporáneo en las industrias culturales”. prisma social. revista de ciencias sociales : - , ; “golosinas visuales: biopolítica, postfeminismo y comunicación de masas”. iberic@l. revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines : - , . * mimenendez@ubu.es o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez os paradigmas sexistas, mas também incorpora elementos de empoderamento das mulheres. no entanto, não está isenta de riscos, por seu caráter ambivalente e pelos interesses de gênero que compromete. o presente artigo reflete sobre os aspectos teóricos da femvertising e realiza um estudo de caso para se aproximar de uma publicidade sobre a qual existe apenas bibliografia. as conclusões sugerem que se trata de um fenômeno complexo que exige aprofundamento em sua análise para diagnosticar seu compromisso com a igualdade. palavras-chave | Ética da publicidade; feminismo; femvertising; gênero; sexismo introducción la representación de las mujeres en publicidad ha sido ampliamente estudiada en la literatura acadé- mica desde los años setenta del siglo xx (mcarthur y resko ; rincón ; lynn, hardin y walsdorf ; royo-vela, küster-boluda y vila-lópez ; gill b; navarro y martín ; knoll, eisend y stein- hagen ; hernández-ruiz, martín y beléndez ), poniendo en evidencia problemáticas recurrentes como el uso de estereotipos de género o la cosificación del cuerpo femenino, materia sobre la que apenas ha habido progresos. a mediados de los años noventa apa- rece una publicidad ligada al feminismo, en el marco del commodity feminism, en la que los estereotipos de género se fusionan con ideales feministas con un objetivo comercial. como una evolución, surge ya en la segunda década del nuevo siglo lo que se ha llegado a conocer como femvertising, estrategia que cada año utilizan decenas de marcas. un estudio realizado en con consumidoras en estados unidos concluía que el tratamiento de las muje- res en publicidad era una de las claves para llamar la atención y fidelizar a las posibles consumidoras. las marcas han comprendido, por razones tanto de imagen como comerciales, que deben abandonar el tradicional sexismo publicitario si desean mejorar su relación con las consumidoras. en el estudio citado, algo más de la mitad de las encuestadas aseguraron que habían com- prado productos de ciertas marcas después de ver repre- sentaciones positivas de las mujeres en sus anuncios, y el % dijo que usar a las mujeres como sex symbols en publicidad era dañino para su género. como contrapunto, un % seguía comprando una marca o producto aunque atentara contra la dignidad femenina. también facebook, una de las plataformas que aglutina hoy la más impor- tante inversión publicitaria a nivel planetario, realizó un estudio en que demostró que los anuncios que se interesan por el empoderamiento de las mujeres son el concepto es de difícil traducción al español: feminismo comercial, feminismo mercantilista, feminismo de merca- do, mercantilización feminista o feminismo consumista son algunas de las posibilidades. en este texto se mantiene la fórmula en inglés. sheknows, disponible en la web: w w w.sheknows.com más rentables. tras un análisis de las publicaciones de esta red social se demostró que los estadounidenses respondían entre un y un % más positivamente a las marcas que realizaron acciones en favor de la igualdad de género, en comparación con aquellas que realizaron menos acciones en ese sentido, o ninguna. en general, la estrategia aumentaba la fidelidad con la marca y proveía una imagen positiva de esta. el propio origen de la palabra femvertising no está claro. la mayoría de textos defienden que es la suma de femi- nism y advertising (becker-herby , ), lo que debería traducirse como publicidad feminista, pero otros pocos eligen la suma de female y advertising (carrillo , ; polidura , ), que desembocaría más bien en la idea de publicidad en femenino. según medeiros, bulhões y dantas ( , ), el concepto empezó a tomar protago- nismo en , en la advertising week (adweek) de nueva york, uno de los eventos publicitarios más impor- tantes del mundo, con la exposición de samantha skey, directora de ventas de sheknows media. se trataría del neologismo con el que se define aquella publicidad que, además de evitar mensajes especialmente lesivos sobre las mujeres (estereotipos de género, vejación de la ima- gen femenina, ridiculización de las mujeres), se esfuerza por ofrecer un discurso potencialmente emancipador, por lo que estaría más cerca de la primera propuesta, que de la segunda. más allá de ser una tendencia social, la femvertising (también denominada publicidad go-girl, pro género o ad-her-tising) ha generado mejores resul- tados para las empresas, convirtiendo la publicidad en un agente de cambio social. estos hallazgos resaltan la necesidad de que los mensajes publicitarios represen- ten con mayor precisión a sus públicos para relacionar- se mejor con ellos y optimizar las actitudes de marca (drake , ). feminismo y publicidad parecen dos términos antagó- nicos, dado que la publicidad se construye a partir de la utilización de estereotipos fácilmente comprensibles (jalakas , ). estudios de audiencia han demostrado que la mayoría de las mujeres reportan que la publicidad las hace sentir mal respecto a sus propios cuerpos, un malestar muy superior al que sienten los hombres. la estudio disponible en https://w w w.facebook.com/business/ news/insights/how-gender-positive-ads-pay-off o t r a s v o c e s rev.estud.soc. no. • abril-junio • pp. - • issn - x • e-issn - · https://doi.org/ . /res . . mayoría de mujeres relata su cansancio ante la utiliza- ción extendida de todo lo femenino como algo pasivo, desnudo, débil, sexualizado y objetivado, y ello puede explicar que en , la igualdad de género se convirtie- ra en una de las principales causas sociales elegidas por las marcas. ese mismo año, se entregaron los primeros premios femvertising en estados unidos, los cuales reconocieron a aquellas firmas con impacto social a par- tir de valores feministas (jalakas , ). sin duda, si la publicidad sexista es un freno a la igual- dad, la publicidad feminista podría trabajar a su favor. sin embargo, existe la sospecha de su instrumentaliza- ción únicamente con objetivos comerciales. hay posicio- nes que definen cualquier uso de las políticas feministas desde la cultura popular como un feminismo bastardo y apolítico: angela mcrobbie ( ) considera que estas estrategias contribuyen a desarmar el movimiento feminista; rosalind gill ( ) opina que se trata de opciones que sugieren que las mujeres tomen el control de sus vidas mediante el consumo, y no a través de la lucha colectiva. para estas autoras, la publicidad nunca podrá liderar el cambio social. entre las audiencias, sin embargo (y a pesar de que existen pocos estudios sobre recepción de la femvertising), parece que estos men- sajes despiertan tanto el escepticismo como la alegría, ambivalencia por la que su análisis es complejo. en relación con las posibilidades de interacción que hoy existen en la red aparecen campañas como la popular #like a girl (de la firma always) —visualizada más de millones de veces— y el anuncio más compartido en youtube en de la campaña real beauty sketches de dove. en este sentido, más allá de la definición de falso feminismo, y de acuerdo con jalakas ( , ), puede ser útil explorar cómo encajan estas campañas en el feminismo actual, en especial entre las jóvenes, quienes las utilizan y dotan de sentido en las redes sociales. así, la femvertising podría contribuir a cierto “despertar feminista” entre la juventud, favoreciendo el debate sobre las cuestiones de género. hay consenso en admitir que el público consumidor que percibe una imagen positiva de la firma mejora su rela- ción con ella, aunque en la femvertising —debido a su ambivalencia— esto es menos claro, ya que no siempre es evidente la relación entre el mensaje publicitario y el activismo feminista. algunas empresas han elegido alentar a las mujeres a adoptar rasgos tradicionalmente masculinos, como la ambición o el coraje, y actividades más relacionadas con la socialización de los hombres, como algunos deportes. otras estrategias de femverti- sing, por el contrario, hacen referencia a rasgos feme- ninos, poniendo un importante énfasis en la apariencia. en tercer lugar, se construye una mujer más bien ambi- valente: bella, pero fuerte, voluntariosa, pero amable. si bien la androginia tiene una larga historia en publicidad, con la femvertising sería la primera vez que las marcas adoptan una posición esencialmente feminista (abitbol y sternadori , ). a partir de lo anterior, puede definirse femvertising como la publicidad que se realiza a favor de las muje- res, con mensajes e imágenes que las empoderan (becker-herby , ). el empowerment femenino aparece entonces como un objetivo feminista que, sin embargo, se construye en torno a la promoción comer- cial de productos dirigidos a las féminas, que, la mayoría de las veces, pertenece a un metadiscurso que no rompe el mensaje global sexista, como los productos light o los de belleza, moda y cosmética. así, se hace necesario reflexionar sobre la femvertising para estudiar si se tra- ta de una fórmula únicamente comercial y que no tiene reparo en instrumentalizar la acción feminista, si puede incluso ser una modalidad sofisticada de sexismo que hace más difícil su identificación o si en realidad ofrece un universo emancipador a las consumidoras. el análi- sis es clave por su discurso altamente ambivalente y por los intereses de género que compromete. es bastante común identificar su origen en la campaña propuesta en por la marca de productos de higiene dove (creada en y perteneciente a la multinacio- nal unilever), bautizada como real beauty (medeiros, bulhões y dantas , ; becker-herby , ; jalakas , ), resultado de un análisis de mercado asesora- do por susie orbach y nancy etcoff, que reveló que las mujeres consideraban que el concepto belleza se había vuelto inalcanzable, lo que afectaba a su autoestima. orbach era una autora reputada de los estudios femi- nistas por su denuncia de la opresión estética que sufrían las mujeres (orbach ). en realidad, habían existido propuestas de comunicación similares mucho antes, destacando entre ellas la de la empresa the body shop, que en lanzó love your body, protagonizada por ruby (una muñeca fuera del estándar de delgadez, inspirada más bien en la belleza pictórica de rubens), y donde se divulgaban eslóganes como “there are billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only who do”. la creadora de la empresa, la activista social anita roddick, fue una de las primeras que supo combinar ética y negocio. a esta campaña la siguieron otras antes de que roddick vendiera la firma. son pro- puestas que vienen a discutir un discurso, el publicita- rio, cuestionado históricamente por su posición ética (feenstra , ). el estudio, realizado en y titulado la verdad acerca de la belleza, se basó en datos cuantitativos recabados de encues- tas mundiales, con la participación de . mujeres entre y años, de estados unidos, canadá, méxico, gran bretaña, italia, francia, portugal, países bajos, brasil, argentina y japón. el trabajo se amplió a otro, global, en el . en su libro, orbach denunciaba la esclavitud del estereotipo de belleza actual, la obsesión por la delgadez, la fobia a la obe- sidad y la enorme carga de violencia contra las mujeres que todo ello produce. desde entonces, la autora británica es una referencia ineludible de los estudios sobre cuerpo y género. o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez metodología como ya se dijo, la femvertising prácticamente no se ha explorado en la literatura especializada y, sin embargo, es un campo fértil para estudios multidisciplinares intere- sados por las relaciones entre teoría feminista, estudios culturales y estudios publicitarios y/o de comunicación, ofreciendo un espacio de innovación, con especial rele- vancia en el cambio social y la eliminación del sexismo. el presente texto brinda una interpretación de un fenó- meno social reciente, para lo que elabora un estudio de caso, junto con una reflexión sobre las cuestiones conceptuales implicadas en la responsabilidad social de la publicidad en relación con el sexismo. el análisis de caso permite acercarse de manera exploratoria a dicho fenómeno, al que apenas ha dedicado atención la lite- ratura académica, y que puede definirse por su carácter complejo, dinámico y ambivalente. del trabajo analítico se extraen variables que permiten avanzar en la elabo- ración de un marco teórico básico con el que inter- pretar y comprender términos como femvertising, pero también otros como empowerment o prosumer. la novedad que ofrece este artículo consiste en rela- cionar el fenómeno de esta publicidad contemporánea con presupuestos teóricos relativamente aceptados, vinculados a los estudios feministas específicos del ámbito de la comunicación. el artículo se divide en cuatro apartados: en primer lugar, se introduce el marco teórico relacionado con el objeto de estudio mediante una reflexión bibliográfica; luego, se analiza una campaña publicitaria de femvertising a través de la descripción de un estudio de caso, en el que se aplica una metodología propia, aunque inspirada en otros textos y que puede ser utilizada en investigaciones posteriores. en tercer lugar, se reflexiona sobre los retos éticos que plantea esta publicidad a partir de la discusión de resultados, y, finalmente, se elaboran las conclusiones. marco teórico: ambivalencia e intereses de género la investigación académica sobre femvertising es toda- vía escasa, y en lengua española prácticamente no existe, quizá porque, como fenómeno de masas, también es una realidad reciente. de hecho, es fácil encontrar artículos de opinión en prensa e internet, pero no así en la lite- ratura especializada. aunque el concepto como tal sea contemporáneo, se trataría de una evolución del denomi- nado commodity feminism, y representa la tendencia en publicidad que intenta aunar activismo y feminismo a través del consumo. al calificar sus productos como una término del marketing digital que describe a un tipo de usuario web que, además de ser consumidor de la marca, tam- bién es generador de contenido en el blog de la empresa o en sus redes sociales. prosumer, por tanto, es un anglicismo que define a un consumidor que no se conforma sólo con consumir. “opción feminista” se construye una marca que permite a su público respaldar la causa, de manera que se propone un consumo apoyado en la identidad del producto y no en el producto mismo (reker , ). este fenómeno va de la mano de lo que hoy podemos lla- mar feminismo mediático, un protagonismo inédito hasta ahora, relacionado con el movimiento de mujeres que se rebela de forma clara contra la explotación económica, las servidumbres culturales y la violencia (cobo , ). el feminismo se ha renovado y ha hecho mucho más visibles sus reclamaciones de igualdad. la principal novedad ha sido su capacidad para llegar a la agenda de los medios de comunicación y, junto con la viralidad conseguida en las redes sociales, convertirse en un discurso de masas capaz de movilizar a mujeres en las calles de todo el mundo. el movimiento #metoo es probablemente lo más popular de este resurgimiento del feminismo como respuesta a los retrocesos experimentados en las últimas décadas con la hegemonía de las políticas neoliberales y neocon- servadoras. en españa, la multitudinaria manifestación/ huelga del de marzo de es un hito en este mismo sentido, como previamente lo había sido el tren de la libertad, que en hizo caer a un ministro. el commodity feminism se puede considerar, no obs- tante, como una apropiación del feminismo con fines comerciales, estrategia tanto ensalzada por su supues- to progresismo como criticada por reducir la política feminista a un artículo mercantilizado y destinado al público de masas: commodity feminism refers to the way feminist ideas and icons are appropriated for commercial purposes, emptied of their political significance and offered back to the public in a commodified form —usually in advertising. the term pays homage to marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism” and is often framed within contemporary marxist and feminist terms. (gill a) en lugar de luchar contra la legitimidad del discurso feminista, las marcas intentan canalizar los aspectos clave de ese discurso a través de marcadores semióti- cos que se pueden adjuntar a nombres de productos. las firmas compiten por ser las primeras y mejores en traducir los discursos y reclamaciones de las muje- res a signos comerciales. aunque a primera vista esto puede aparecer como evidencia de una nueva era de el #metoo se refiere a un movimiento en redes sociales que, en octubre de , denunció el acoso sexual a partir de las evidencias contra el productor de cine harvey weinstein. al movimiento se sumarían multitud de celebridades en los meses siguientes e inspiraría otros movimientos similares en múltiples países. a consecuencia del #metoo, el de mar- zo de marcaría un hito a nivel mundial, con la manifes- tación de miles de personas en diversos lugares del mundo, especialmente preocupadas por la lucha contra la violencia hacia las mujeres. o t r a s v o c e s rev.estud.soc. no. • abril-junio • pp. - • issn - x • e-issn - · https://doi.org/ . /res . . pluralismo cultural democrático, se trata de un proceso inherentemente contradictorio: una dialéctica con- tinua entre el discurso dominante y el de resistencia (goldman, heath y smith ). para muchas autoras, este feminismo mercantil se apropia estratégicamente de los valores feministas, poniendo su potencial político al servicio de las marcas (lazar ; gill b; reker ) mediante una estrategia corporativa centrada en el consumo como fuente de identidad. el commodity feminism aparece como una estrategia de publicidad empleada por empresas que desean construir mensa- jes apoyados en el empoderamiento de las mujeres y la oportunidad de la reciente visibilidad del feminismo. el empoderamiento, centrado en el consumo individual, estaría al servicio del cambio social. el término clave es empoderamiento, decisivo en el feminismo. se trata de un concepto sociopolítico capaz de trascender la participación política formal. se origina en estados unidos durante los movimientos civiles de los años sesenta, y una década más tarde comenzó a adoptarse en los movimientos de mujeres, en respuesta a la necesidad de generar cambios en las relaciones de poder entre los sexos (de león ). el empoderamiento está relacionado, de acuerdo con john friedmann ( ), con tres tipos de poder: ) social, o acceso a la riqueza productiva; ) político, o acceso a la toma de decisiones; y ) psicológico, o capacidad individual. en el mismo sentido, jo rowlands ( ) menciona tres dimensio- nes: ) personal, o el desarrollo del yo, la confianza y la capacidad individual; ) relaciones próximas, o capaci- dad de negociar en las interacciones y decisiones; y ) colectiva, o participación en las estructuras políticas y en las acciones basadas en la cooperación colectiva. el empoderamiento, por consiguiente, se desarrolla en dos planos: el individual, que sería el proceso por el cual las personas incrementan sus niveles de autoestima y capacidad a partir de la identificación de sus propias necesidades, y el colectivo, que implica la unión de los individuos para luchar por objetivos comunes. de acuerdo con porroche-escudero, “el desarrollo de la conciencia política es un prerrequisito y una solución para el empoderamiento” (porroche-escudero , ). la autora citada considera que el empoderamiento debe cumplir cuatro principios para ser considerado como tal: ) potenciar la capacidad crítica para tomar decisiones autónomamente; ) reconocer que el empo- deramiento no puede ser un monólogo desde el cual un discurso experto alecciona al público; ) la información transmitida debe ser valiosa, relevante y efectiva; y ) debe favorecer la conciencia política, impulsando no sólo el empoderamiento individual sino también el colectivo, es decir, debe ser capaz de generar cam- bios sociales más allá de la modificación individual (porroche-escudero , - ). en la línea que se viene exponiendo sobre la (re)apropia- ción y despolitización de conceptos subversivos por parte del statu quo, bacqué y biewener destacan que, a partir de los años ochenta, el concepto empoderamiento es adop- tado por la derecha norteamericana para ponerlo al ser- vicio de las políticas neoliberales. así, tener un empleo y formar parte de la economía de mercado se convierten en el paradigma de individuo “gestor de su propia vida”; la capacidad de hacer elecciones se reduce a poco más que encontrar un lugar en el mercado de consumo, sin plantearse jamás la justicia social o la emancipación (bac- qué y biewener , ). en las políticas conservadoras se emplea como recurso contra la pobreza, de tal manera que desplaza a las personas pobres la responsabilidad de su propio acceso a la riqueza. desaparece la idea de comunidad y únicamente queda la de individualismo, en una cadena de equivalencias que articula “libre elección, competencia, propiedad, trabajo, responsabilidad y self- help” (bacqué y biewener , ). los estudios críticos sobre las técnicas que están detrás de la femvertising destacan como un factor decisivo la visibilidad que el feminismo está tomando en la actua- lidad, libre de los prejuicios con los que hasta ahora se representaba, y a partir de movimientos de empodera- miento de las mujeres. todo ello estaría modificando el rol consumidor, pero a costa de la instrumentalización del activismo y la ideología feminista. tal y como pro- pone reker ( ), la idea clave pasa por inculcar en los consumidores (y en especial en las consumidoras) la creencia de estar realizando cambios significativos, rechazando el destructivo clima sexista anterior. la cuestión del prosumidor (público que consume y al mismo tiempo crea) se revela como un elemento más de la estrategia, al participar de una investigación crea- da por la propia marca, pero generado por un público que participa a través de canales interactivos, en lo que podría denominarse activismo comercializado. es difícil, sin embargo, no observar estas opciones de compra feministas como algo más que una forma de terapia ante la discriminación sistemática de género. en efecto, en su sentido cultural, dowsett señala que sería un fenómeno que anima a las mujeres a expresar su empoderamiento mediante el consumo. se trata de una política tanto progresista como conservadora: pro- gresista, en la medida en que ofrece una respuesta a la tensión feminismo/feminidad mediante el apoyo a las políticas de independencia y autodeterminación, pero conservadora, en el sentido en que se entiende que las masas son un problema que necesita control. por lo tan- to, además de resolver la tensión feminismo/feminidad mediante la revalorización de los productos feminiza- dos y las mujeres que los utilizan, transforma las mer- cancías en una forma de control social. dicho de otra manera, las reclamaciones feministas se desactivan y las mujeres se convierten en inofensivas para el sistema, aunque lo hacen a través de un consumo de productos feminizados y mediante la exaltación de la feminidad. el commodity feminism construye subjetividades feminis- tas que son cada vez más globales (dowsett ); otra o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez cosa es que sean realmente emancipadoras. si bien “en ciertos casos los progresos en la eliminación de este- reotipos son notables, en otros se intenta manipular a la audiencia por medio de tácticas contrarias al activismo feminista” (rodríguez y gutiérrez , ). la literatura que analiza la femvertising, en general, no arroja un balance positivo. más que dar voz a las mujeres, parece una estrategia capaz de rentabilizar la frustración que produce el mandato de feminidad, ofre- ciendo el deseo de consumir como solución. “the ques- tion now is whether the people who buy what verizon, always and the others are selling can also get on board with the more complex heart of the movement, the place where true equality is almost never an easy sell” (zeisler ). se trata, entonces, de un falso recurso, un espejismo de igualdad que no es más que una fantasía de poder (douglas ). en parte por su relación con contenidos periodísticos y no sólo publicitarios, se ha convertido en una potente estrategia de branding, cuyo peligro es convertir el dis- curso feminista en algo atractivo pero despolitizado, muy alejado de la incomodidad que siempre han desper- tado las reivindicaciones feministas. el individualismo que define al mundo neoliberal, ahora pensado como herramienta para consumir, sustituye las características esenciales del feminismo: su carácter político y colectivo. femvertising en la publicidad española: el caso de campofrío en este epígrafe se analiza un estudio de caso con el objeto de investigar si la femvertising es capaz o no de subvertir o trascender el tradicional sexismo publicita- rio pues, como ya se ha expuesto, no hay acuerdo sobre el potencial emancipador de esta publicidad. para ello, se analiza la campaña publicitaria de una firma, buscando su compromiso con la igualdad y el empoderamiento femenino. partiendo de la idea de que la femvertising es una publicidad que abandona los criticados estereotipos de género y convierte a las mujeres en protagonistas, para llevar a cabo el estudio se ha utilizado la metodolo- gía elaborada por becker-herby, quien define la femver- tising en función de cinco categorías de análisis. otras cuatro categorías adicionales se han construido a partir de las aportaciones que sobre el empoderamiento reali- za porroche-escudero. estas cuatro variables permiten branding es el concepto que en publicidad se utiliza para hablar de la construcción de marca. como ocurre con la mayoría de términos del ámbito publicitario, se suele utilizar en inglés y así se mantiene en el texto, como otros del campo publicitario que se mencionan más adelante. previendo que el público lector no esté familiarizado con algún concepto, se explica su significado cuando aparecen. rodríguez y gutiérrez ( ) también aplican esta metodolo- gía a dos campañas de publicidad española (kaiku y desigual). afinar el estudio sobre empoderamiento y mejoran la propuesta de becker-herby, que puede ser demasiado descriptiva pues es posible que un spot cumpla con todos los criterios, aun sin incorporar elementos de empoderamiento. finalmente, se construye una cate- goría que profundiza en la idea de prosumidor/a. tras la exposición de estas herramientas metodológicas se aplica el modelo a la campaña elegida. la firma: campofrío campofrío, empresa de productos cárnicos líder en el sector, nació en de la mano de josé luis ballvé, quien instaló la primera fábrica en la ciudad española de burgos. en la actualidad es una empresa multina- cional (salió a bolsa en ), que en españa cuenta con nueve fábricas repartidas por varias provincias y una plantilla que se acerca a las tres mil personas. el grupo campofrío es propietario de marcas líderes como revi- lla, oscar mayer o navidul, a las que hay que sumar las propias, entre ellas finíssimas, cuida-t + y pavofrío. en el año se había convertido en la mayor empresa cárnica de la unión europea y una de las más importan- tes del mundo, revelando una historia tanto corta como exitosa (moreno , ). tal y como explica moreno, “campofrío fue pionera en la incorporación del fordismo en las relaciones laborales, la división multifuncional y la planificación estratégica así como en constitución de un departamento de i+d en las empresas alimentarias españolas” (moreno , ). desde el punto de vista publicitario, desde el , con la campaña elena salgado, campofrío comienza su cola- boración con la agencia mccann worldgroup. de su mano, se ha convertido en un referente del marketing emocional y el uso de storytelling. de esta colabora- ción se pueden destacar dos características principales: la creatividad y la emotividad: “sus últimas campañas publicitarias han estado marcadas por el factor emo- ción como estrategia para empatizar con el consumidor y, en los últimos años, para cargar de positividad los ánimos de una sociedad afectada por la crisis económi- ca” (martínez-rodrigo y raya-gonzález , ). en efecto, con la campaña navideña de , cómicos, cam- pofrío contagió de emoción a un país entero, incluso antes de que se emitiera el spot televisivo, extendién- dose a través de las redes sociales. consiguieron ser la marca más recordada de la publicidad navideña, y con ella empezaba el camino del éxito. campofrío, junto con mccann, forman un tándem que se supera cada año, siempre innovando, arriesgando y adelantándose a las la historia de conservera campofrío se había iniciado en , aunque la actual etapa comienza con su adquisición por parte del empresario bilbaíno ballvé, junto con clemen- te garay (moreno , ). el término se refiere a la narración de historias, y en la publici- dad contemporánea es una de las estrategias de mayor éxito. o t r a s v o c e s rev.estud.soc. no. • abril-junio • pp. - • issn - x • e-issn - · https://doi.org/ . /res . . empresas de la competencia. tanto en europa como en latinoamérica han sabido reconocer este talento, lo que se demuestra por la cantidad de premios con los que se han reconocido sus campañas publicitarias. la campaña publicitaria: deliciosa calma el de mayo de , campofrío lanzó el primer spot de la campaña deliciosa calma (ver imagen ), campa- ña publicitaria para su producto pavofrío (embutido de pavo), bajo la dirección creativa de mónica moro, desde la que se ofrecía la posibilidad de acudir al restaurante del mismo nombre. allí, la prestigiosa chef susi díaz ofrecía platos saludables, desestresantes y llenos de rebeldía. el restaurante fue un proyecto efímero que durante algu- nos días estuvo abierto en madrid, en las instalaciones del restaurante la contraseña. deliciosa calma incluía una acción digital, donde las consumidoras podían ganar una cena con sus amigas, y recibió más de siete mil soli- citudes. esta acción, liderada por la empresa momentum, acogió a comensales, que fueron recibidas por la actriz llum barrera, quien actuó como anfitriona. el anuncio (y la bienvenida en la web) arranca con un dato real de un informe nielsen: “el % de las mujeres disponible en: https://w w w.deliciosacalma.com/ los días , y de mayo, así como el de junio, en dicho restaurante se contó con la presencia de susi díaz, chef con una estrella michelín y dos soles, popular por participar en el programa televisivo top chef, encargada de manejar el restaurante, dirigido únicamente a mujeres. los ingredien- tes de la carta fueron elegidos a partir de un estudio de la universidad de berkeley sobre alimentos que ayudan a ali- viar el estrés, entre los que se incluía el pavo. españolas aseguran sentirse estresadas”. para solucio- narlo, la empresa propone un restaurante para mujeres (el target de pavofrío), donde los platos de la carta son reivindicaciones contra la presión social que soportan las mujeres. el spot es protagonizado por las actri- ces carmen maura, maría barranco y rossy de palma, quienes formaron parte del reparto de la más famosa e internacional de las películas de pedro almodóvar: mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios ( ), título directamente relacionado con el eslogan de la cam- paña. el objetivo de deliciosa calma, según la agencia de publicidad, era llamar a la reflexión sobre el origen de las cargas femeninas y las maneras de liberarse de ellas mediante actividades elegidas y libres. deliciosa calma seguía el camino emprendido un año antes con me gusto, en la que se proponía claramente una actitud de empoderamiento femenino. como explica la revista marketingnews.es, conceptualmente el spot se apoya en la idea de que una sociedad equilibrada también elimina el estrés, al basarse en los datos de nielsen y en el estu- dio de alimentos de la universidad de berkeley. al igual que han hecho otras muchas corporaciones que incorporan acciones de femversiting, y como estrategia para explicar la sintonía entre el mensaje que propo- ne el producto y la identidad de la firma, campofrío el término target hace referencia al público objetivo o diana de un anuncio. algunos platos del menú: hoy no llego a recoger a mis hijos al cole con carpaccio de pavo acompañado de ya está su padre para hacerlo, ¡digo yo! con brunoise de verdura y foie; que se me note la lorza con el top me importa un pimiento con cre- ma de hierbas recién cortadas; macarrón rosa de no pienso tener hijos y qué! con helado de yogur griego, sopa de coco y arándanos o canelones de no me caso porque no me da la gana rellenos de requesón, ceps y virutas de parmesano. disponible en goo.gl/c mnez. imagen . fotograma de apertura del spot de la campaña deliciosa calma fuente: página oficial de la campaña (https://www.deliciosacalma.com/). o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez colaboraba en esta ocasión con la fundación ana bella y su escuela para el empoderamiento de la mujer, que aporta recursos a mujeres socialmente excluidas. de ello se desprende que la empresa genera contenido más allá del puramente publicitario, como parte de una campaña de responsabilidad social corporativa (rsc), a través de la cual “campofrío muestra su interés por el entorno y se compromete con su público con hechos concretos, y en la que es constante la generación de emoción” (mut y breva ). la campaña fue un gran éxito, tanto desde el punto de vista profesional como comercial. desde el punto de vis- ta profesional, resultó premiada con casi una treintena de galardones de prestigio. comercialmente, y según la revista especializada ipmark, deliciosa calma ayudó a incrementar las ventas totales de pavofrío en un , %, frente a los meses anteriores a la campaña. su notoriedad de marca también aumentó en puntos, el mercado de referencia se incrementó del , % al , % (+ , puntos) y la marca superó en puntos la media de impacto del mercado de la alimentación. en poco más de tres meses, el spot había dejado atrás los trece millones de visualizaciones, superando a firmas emblemáticas como coca-cola o adidas. un estudio de mercado, realizado por milward brown, descubrió que el % de las perso- nas que habían visto el spot habían dicho que lo habían disfrutado, y el % lo encontraba valioso. el anuncio se convirtió en el más popular en youtube en el . estudio de caso el spot de dos minutos de duración se divide en tres partes: la primera, de presentación, está ambientada en espacios domésticos; la segunda, central, se desarrolla en el restaurante; la tercera parte es el cierre que cul- mina con el pack shot y el claim. el spot arranca con varias escenas muy rápidas, en las que se ve a mujeres superadas por las tareas de cuidado y/o profesionales, y donde se introduce la estadística del informe niel- sen. tras una imagen en primer plano de un hacha de cocina que cae violentamente sobre la tabla de cortar, sugiriendo simbólicamente un “basta ya”, un cambio de música nos traslada al restaurante, mientras un texto superpuesto, tras leer el nombre del local (deliciosa calma), nos indica que se trata del primer restaurante que cocina platos libres de estrés. vemos a la encargada de sala que va tomando nota por las diferentes mesas, puede consultarse una lista de premios en goo.gl/ s y g. disponible en goo.gl/thdprp. pack shot es, literalmente, la imagen del producto. en los spots televisivos suele aparecer al final, con una toma fija que muestra el producto y generalmente el eslogan o el claim y el logotipo de la marca. claim es un término similar al eslogan, pero con algunas diferencias, en especial la duración, que es más larga en el eslogan. el claim suele usarse para reforzar la idea publicitaria. todas ocupadas por mujeres, hasta que llega a la última, donde están las actrices carmen maura, rossy de palma y maría barranco. las peticiones de estas son un guiño intertextual a la película de almodóvar: “estamos al bor- de de un ataque de risa con reducción de nervios”, pide maura, a la que sigue la alusión al gazpacho por parte de rossy de palma (elemento esencial en su papel en el film) y la frase “se te hace una bola horrorosa, horro- rosa”, que hizo popular el personaje de maría barran- co. finalmente, vemos a la jefa de sala hablando con la cocinera, quien está sorprendida de que el local esté tan lleno: “normal, somos millones de mujeres”, explica la primera. comienza el cierre del spot con una voz en off que argumenta: “una sociedad equilibrada también ayuda a reducir el estrés”, y aparece el pack shot, donde se ve por primera vez el producto (pavofrío) junto a la dirección web y una apelación directa a la consumidora para que se inscriba y pueda conseguir una mesa en el restaurante. análisis para becker-herby, hay cinco variables que permiten identificar la estrategia de la femvertising: ) utilización de la diversidad: al igual que el feminismo contemporá- neo que es interseccional, en esta publicidad las mujeres deben ser diversas (edad, tamaño, origen étnico), y por ello, la femvertising abandona el cuerpo normativizado de las modelos; ) elaboración de mensajes expresa- mente a favor de las mujeres: deben ser inspiradores e inclusivos, que refuercen lo positivo, buscando sen- timientos de confianza y autoafirmación. así, la fem- vertising rechaza mensajes en los que el producto es la solución a los problemas que tiene la consumidora; ) ruptura de los estereotipos y/o mandatos de género: desafío frente a lo que el patriarcado considera que las mujeres o las niñas “deben ser”. la femvertising utiliza escenarios que rompen los estereotipos, por lo que es raro que se usen mujeres en el espacio doméstico o ejer- ciendo tareas típicamente femeninas. por el contrario, suelen aparecer en ambientes competitivos, de ocio, atléticos, profesionales o bien neutros; ) minimización de la sexualidad: se trata de negar la “mirada masculina” habitual del sexismo publicitario. en la femvertising, si se exhibe el cuerpo, se realiza de forma mucho más natural, sin exagerar la apariencia con poses sexuales o sofisticaciones estéticas; y ) representación autén- tica de las mujeres: esta variable se refiere a todos los aspectos publicitarios, desde el talento, el producto, la ambientación o el estilo. en la femvertising, el mensaje de la campaña debe sentirse real y en sintonía con el producto anunciado. este impulso sobrepasa la publi- cidad y las consumidoras esperan que la marca sea consecuente con las mujeres más allá de la campaña publicitaria (becker-herby , - ). la propuesta de becker-herby se acerca con efectivi- dad al objeto de análisis, pero sus resultados pueden o t r a s v o c e s rev.estud.soc. no. • abril-junio • pp. - • issn - x • e-issn - · https://doi.org/ . /res . . ser únicamente descriptivos, por lo que se necesita un esfuerzo adicional para estudiar si la publicidad, además de estar a favor de la igualdad, es capaz de motivar el empoderamiento de las consumidoras. en consecuen- cia, se incorporan otras cuatro variables de análisis a las cinco anteriores, elaboradas a partir de la propuesta de porroche-escudero que se explicó en el marco teórico ( , - ). estas son: ) fomento de la capacidad crí- tica para tomar decisiones; ) propuesta de un discurso propio frente al de una voz experta y exógena; ) infor- mación valiosa, relevante y efectiva; y ) impulso de la conciencia política, no sólo individual sino colectiva. la décima variable, activismo o impulso de la participa- ción del público, se incorpora para estudiar el concepto prosumidor/a en la femvertising, categoría relacionada con toda publicidad contemporánea. a continuación, veamos estas variables de análisis apli- cadas a deliciosa calma: . utilización de la diversidad: el spot de campofrío ofrece un elenco de mujeres, cuyas edades se pueden adscribir a una horquilla de entre treinta y cincuenta años en su mayoría, a excepción de la actriz carmen maura, que es mayor. las mujeres que vemos en las mesas y las que trabajan en el restaurante, así como las del inicio del spot que aparecen en el entorno doméstico, en su mayoría superan las edades de las actrices que suelen protagonizar los anuncios. todas son blancas (como la mayoría de mujeres españolas) y responden al fenotipo más común: cabello more- no, ojos oscuros. si bien en esas variables se rompe el criterio de diversidad, hay que tener en cuenta el target de la firma y la estructura poblacional españo- la, aunque se echa de menos alguna protagonista de origen diferente, por ejemplo, mujeres latinoame- ricanas. ninguna es obesa o formalmente no nor- mativa, aunque al inicio se nos muestra a una mujer incapaz de abrochar la falda. no son, en todo caso, las recurrentes modelos muy delgadas, altas y jóvenes. aparecen bien vestidas y arregladas, como se espe- ra en una cena formal, aunque de manera bastante convencional, revelando que pertenecen a una clase social media-alta. ninguna aparece sexualizada o instrumentalizada desde el punto de vista estético, aunque sí reproducen cierto canon, subvertido en la cuestión de la edad. definitivamente no se expone un modelo de perfección al estilo hegemónico actual (muy joven y delgada), por lo que, aunque incorpora elementos de la idea canónica de feminidad y tam- bién de clase social y origen étnico, no se representa tan opresivo como suele ocurrir en la publicidad mainstream. el claim final refuerza estas ideas mainstream es un anglicismo que significa tendencia o moda dominante. la traducción literaria del término mainstream es “corriente popular”. el término mainstream en inglés está compuesto por dos expresiones: “main”, que significa “prin- cipal”, y “stream”, que expresa “corriente o flujo”. expresamente: “pavofrío, alimentando otro modelo de mujer”. . elaboración de mensajes expresamente a favor de las mujeres: el mensaje es sin duda a favor de la igualdad de género, y el discurso se construye a través de los nombres de los platos, que indican la necesidad de desprenderse de responsabilidades, pero también la importancia de no sentir culpabili- dad al hacerlo. en ningún momento (excepto en el pack shot) se relacionan estos mensajes de manera específica con el producto, y la idea no es adelgazar (habitual en los productos bajos en calorías, como es el embutido de pavo) sino el bienestar: reducir el estrés, sentirse bien, disfrutar de la vida. como debilidad, señalada en algunas críticas en prensa e internet, se puede indicar que campofrío elige la estrategia de femversiting precisamente para pro- ductos considerados por el público como bajos en calorías, pero no tanto saludables. en este sentido, no se rompe la asociación entre cuidado de la línea o de la salud y el género. . ruptura de los estereotipos y/o mandatos de género: el spot apela a romper los mandatos de género cuan- do dice de modo expreso que el padre puede recoger a las criaturas en el colegio, que no importa si se tie- nen arrugas y/o kilos de más o que el matrimonio no es el fin principal en la vida. con estas ideas se ponen en discusión principios claros de la socialización femenina (y por extensión, de la masculina). a través del menú, las protagonistas van discutiendo los este- reotipos de género que tienen que ver con el mundo de los cuidados, la esfera profesional, y también el mandato de belleza que exige un único modelo de feminidad normativa. la elección del restaurante como espacio discursivo (una vez que el anuncio se desplaza desde el ámbito doméstico) sugiere la transgresión liminar, mediante la ruptura de fron- tera que simboliza el hacha de cocina que cae en la tabla de cortar, para ocupar el entorno público, en lo que intuimos que es una cena, en una ubicación libre de hombres y que puede descodificarse como una conquista de áreas masculinas, pero también como un lugar neutro desde el punto de vista de género, pues el restaurante ofrece un espacio de aspecto más bien familiar. todas las trabajadoras que aparecen en el spot son mujeres, sugiriendo también una toma de posición en una profesión, la restauración, que ha encumbrado numerosos nombres masculinos como chefs de prestigio, mientras que apenas existen mujeres en el olimpo de la alta cocina, paradójica- mente un espacio femenino por tradición. . minimización de la sexualidad: en el spot de campofrío las mujeres son atractivas, pero dentro de cierta normalidad, y no se exponen con criterios de sexualización, aunque sí de belleza clásica. apenas se descubre el cuerpo de las mujeres que aparecen, o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez todas van vestidas sin escotes, y no hay elementos fetichistas de la sexualización normalizada (como transparencias o encajes) ni exhibición gratuita de zonas del cuerpo. en ningún caso se puede inferir, del visionado del spot, que exista ningún tipo de instrumentalización de la imagen de las mujeres. no se han diseñado de forma clara imágenes para complacer la “mirada masculina” y se han elegido con cuidado puestas en escena no sexualizadas. la sensación que da ese espacio poblado de mujeres es de comodidad y equilibrio. . representación auténtica de las mujeres: este crite- rio es difícil de conseguir si lo que promueve el spot, como en este caso, es un mundo utópico. no obstan- te, sí hay una relación fuerte y clara entre la idea del inicio (las mujeres están superadas por las tareas que deben afrontar), la posibilidad de romper los manda- tos de género (que es lo que nos sugieren los platos de la carta, pero también la propia actitud de esas muje- res que deciden juntarse para disfrutar de la comida, sin sentir culpa por delegar tareas) y el concepto que utiliza la firma, al poner en relación a las mujeres con los alimentos que se han demostrado científicamente positivos para reducir el estrés (entre ellos, el pavo). en este sentido, el comercial rechaza los mandatos de género e incorpora una idea muy importante para el feminismo: la sororidad. estas mujeres deciden jun- tarse, compartir su ocio y poner en común la necesi- dad de romper las cadenas. la amistad entre mujeres, una de las más potentes ideas del feminismo, aparece aquí sin fisuras hasta el punto de incomodar a algu- nas personas que consideran molesto no sólo que se reúnan sin hombres en un espacio segregado, sino que hablen de ellos y/o critiquen sus acciones, tal y como se reflejó en algunas entradas de blogs y publicaciones de internet. sin importar que la esta- dística demuestre que las mujeres son cuidadoras en un porcentaje mucho más alto que los hombres, pues muchas mujeres manifestaron que, si bien el anuncio les había gustado, encontraban inadecuada la forma de reflejar la maternidad. otras escribían que los hombres salían perjudicados en el spot. una curiosidad es que la plataforma change.org recibió una petición para la retirada del anuncio, iniciativa auspiciada por parte de hombres que consideraban que el anuncio era denigrante para su sexo. consi- guió recoger firmas. . fomento de la capacidad crítica para tomar decisio- nes: el anuncio de campofrío nos ofrece a mujeres que, tras una toma de conciencia (a partir del estrés que generan las múltiples tareas que deben afrontar algunos ejemplos en: http://bit.ly/ iqoleg;http://bit.ly/ w mh n; http://bit.ly/ xs eas; http://bit.ly/ eyxfxv o http:// bit.ly/ vtq k disponible en goo.gl/kcduyc. tanto en la esfera privada como en la profesional), deciden hacer un alto y elegir opciones vitales que las descargan de responsabilidades o culpas. aun- que el spot no puede enseñarnos el proceso, este se infiere a partir del cambio de ritmo, tono y situación que se ofrecen antes y después de la imagen del hacha de cocina cayendo sobre la tabla de cortar. . propuesta de un discurso propio frente al de una voz experta y exógena: esta variable es especialmente interesante en el análisis de publicidad porque la mayoría de comerciales utilizan una voz prescriptora que, en el caso de productos dirigidos a mujeres, en ocasiones construye una voz crítica que culpabiliza a la consumidora, a la que se anima a elegir un tipo de consumo concreto para solucionar sus problemas. en deliciosa calma esto no se produce. en ningún momento algo o alguien les dice a las protagonistas lo que tienen que hacer. más bien se nos presenta la solución como fruto de una toma de conciencia personal, a partir de una reflexión que no se ve en la pantalla pero que es fácil intuir en el fuera de campo. . información valiosa, relevante y efectiva: la publi- cidad actual se apoya en argumentos en esencia emocionales y no tanto racionales, por lo que no se suele encontrar información científica o autén- ticamente relevante en los anuncios. no obstante, en productos de alimentación hay una tendencia a proporcionar evidencias científicas producto de la investigación, sobre todo en lo que se denomina alimentos funcionales, aquellos que proveen ele- mentos nutricionales o dietéticos suplementarios y sobre los que la regulación publicitaria es muy estricta. en el caso de deliciosa calma se usan dos datos reales e importantes: el que informa sobre el nivel de estrés de las mujeres y el que propone que una alimentación saludable puede ayudar a paliar el estrés (aunque en el spot no se menciona el estudio universitario en que se basa la campaña publicitaria). en este caso no encontramos ejemplos de informa- ción hiperbólica o innecesaria, construida a partir de sofisticados neologismos, como es habitual en pro- ductos de cosmética o belleza. . impulso de la conciencia política, no sólo individual sino colectiva: la elección de un restaurante sólo para mujeres y atendido por mujeres, en el que ellas reconocen entre sí los problemas que comparten, es el indicador más visible de la incorporación de este principio por parte del spot. puede ser buscado o no, pero la lectura que se extrae es que las mujeres no están solas ante el estrés y la sobrecarga, muchas otras comparten sus problemas, y quizá el primer paso para superarlos es ponerlos en común y apo- yarse en las otras. esta dimensión es precisamente la más política de todas. no por casualidad fue la que más recelo despertó entre el público, pues la toma de conciencia común es lo que mueve al cambio social, o t r a s v o c e s rev.estud.soc. no. • abril-junio • pp. - • issn - x • e-issn - · https://doi.org/ . /res . . y eso es lo que ahora mismo reclaman los movimien- tos feministas con más fuerza que nunca. . activismo o impulso de la participación del público: las numerosas solicitudes que deliciosa calma reci- bió para asistir al restaurante indican que la firma ha implementado correctamente una acción que impli- ca la respuesta del público más allá del consumo. el activismo, en este caso, se puede observar no sólo en la solicitud de participación, que puede analizarse como el deseo de beneficiarse de un regalo, sino en que la propia estrategia digital animaba a otras fór- mulas de participación, como elaborar nuevos platos libres de estrés. la participación del público, en este caso, ha servido para que la marca recopile abun- dante información sobre su campaña, adquiriendo propuestas que puede emplear en sucesivas actua- ciones. esta es la estrategia que define el papel del prosumidor/a, quien participa en esos canales inte- ractivos y, al mismo tiempo, forma parte de la propia investigación publicitaria, influyendo en el diseño de posteriores acciones. del análisis anterior se puede concluir que deliciosa calma amplía la representación femenina. aunque no lo hace de manera radical, sí lo hace de forma signifi- cativa: es importante la visibilidad de mujeres que han dejado atrás la juventud (aunque en el spot no se llega a las ancianas) porque la prohibición de envejecer es uno de los grandes problemas identificados por la literatura feminista, junto con el modelo opresivo de belleza (orbach y ; wolf ; sontag ). en el mis- mo sentido, el discurso de deliciosa calma discute la idea de la mística femenina (friedan ) o la construcción social y estereotípica de la maternidad, en la línea de tex- tos feministas como los de badinter ( ), rich ( ) o gimeno ( ). asimismo, rechaza cualquier identifi- cación con la “mirada masculina” teorizada por mulvey ( ) y por berger ( ), y que constituye una de las críticas más recurrentes en la literatura feminista. el mensaje potencialmente subversivo es expreso: ani- ma a las mujeres a romper mandatos sociales, que sean ellas las que elijan y que se sientan bien por hacerlo, sugiriendo que eso les ayudará a conseguir calidad de friedan llama mística de la feminidad a aquello que la cultura y la sociedad consideran como esencialmente femenino y que, como horma moral, se pretende para todas las mujeres. la obra de friedan es un clásico del pensamiento feminista de segunda ola. la mirada, en teoría fílmica, describe cómo el público espec- tador interactúa con los medios visuales. el concepto mirada masculina, clave en la teoría fílmica feminista a partir de la obra de mulvey, sugiere una forma de mirar sexualizada que empodera a los hombres al posicionar visualmente a las mujeres como un objeto del deseo masculino heterosexual. berger, por su parte, en su propuesta sobre cómo mirar el arte, explica que “los hombres miran a las mujeres y las mujeres se miran a sí mismas siendo miradas” ( , ). vida: reducción del estrés y, en la propuesta aspiracional de la campaña publicitaria, felicidad. esta idea enlaza con la necesidad de autenticidad y credibilidad que habíamos definido como prerrequisito para la femvertising; ello, a pesar de la debilidad que constituye el hecho de que el alimento anunciado es considerado óptimo para mante- ner la línea. en esta dirección, hay que reflexionar acerca de la posibilidad de que el aparente cuestionamiento de estereotipos se asiente, pues precisamente sobre ellos las protagonistas del anuncio pueden sugerir también otra lectura: las tareas de cuidado y domésticas siguen siendo responsabilidad suya; de ahí la ambivalencia a la que alude el título de este artículo. por último, en ningún momento se instrumentaliza el cuerpo o la imagen de las mujeres, que aparecen no sexualizadas, seguras de sí mismas y portadoras de un mensaje positivo: ninguna de ellas puede leerse como una caricatura, un insulto a la feminidad o un modelo negativo de ser y estar como mujer en el mundo. no es menos importante que la campaña sea capaz de reflejar una toma de conciencia endógena, elaborada por las propias mujeres y no expuesta desde un dis- curso externo a ellas mismas. la puesta en común de los problemas compartidos, mediante esa toma de conciencia, indica que el mensaje es político y llama a la acción colectiva, al cambio social. el spot no sólo infor- ma del cansancio y el hartazgo de las mujeres, sino que advierte a toda la sociedad de lo injusto de la situación y sugiere que las mujeres, independientes y conscien- tes de su situación, no se quedarán de brazos cruzados ante ello. lo anterior indica que la campaña incorpora principios básicos del feminismo de forma respetuosa y sostenible, aunque lo haga sin ofrecer una salida con- creta relacionada con la exigencia de cambios. no hay que dejar de lado el papel activo del público, ese prosumidor/a que hoy es capaz de interactuar con las firmas en un discurso que ya no es unidireccional. la estrategia de conexión con las consumidoras es un recurso muy potente pero exige un cuidadoso diseño si se desea que funcione. la acción digital de deliciosa calma y la respuesta de miles de mujeres que quisieron participar de la iniciativa nos indican que ha recibido más apoyo que rechazo, a pesar de las críticas comen- tadas. el aumento de las ventas pone sobre la mesa la necesidad de incorporar mensajes socialmente respon- sables desde las firmas si desean fidelizar a una audien- cia cada vez más exigente desde el punto de vista ético y sociopolítico. conclusiones la femvertising se presenta como un fenómeno que probablemente ha llegado para quedarse, dado que, cada vez más, las marcas son conscientes de la nece- sidad de crear contextos de responsabilidad social. en este sentido, la crítica a las acciones en favor de la o t r a s v o c e s ¿puede la publicidad ser feminista? ambivalencia e intereses de género en la femvertising | maría isabel menéndez menéndez igualdad parece ser positiva y, además, intervenir en el aumento de las ventas. no obstante, desde una perspec- tiva feminista, presenta tensiones ante la posibilidad de destruir el lesivo sexismo de la publicidad mainstream a costa de la instrumentalización del propio feminismo, que puede ser “domesticado”, o bien utilizado con fines espurios. esta tensión es clave para seguir profundizando en este tipo de publicidad que se revela como un espa- cio de investigación muy fértil que, de momento, carece de estudios en lengua española. incluso, los que existen en inglés no son muy numerosos. es, por tanto, necesa- rio seguir reflexionando sobre conceptos relacionados con la femvertising, como son el de empoderamiento o el de prosumidores/as, pues la ambivalencia de la pro- pia femvertising se revela como algo intrínsecamente unido. quizá los fenómenos complejos sólo pueden recibir respuestas complejas, sin posibilidad alguna de establecer una sola lectura, ya sea, en este caso, la de pervertir el propio feminismo o la de empoderar a las consumidoras. lo indudable es que las mujeres sienten hartazgo de los modelos, tanto corporales como actitu- dinales, que propone la publicidad convencional, y las marcas deben tomar nota si desean mantener su rela- ción con ellas. también es un hecho que hoy asistimos a un movimiento feminista más visible y rearticulado que el de la década anterior, y que no parece que las nuevas generaciones, al menos en occidente, estén dispuestas a acatar algunas o muchas de las normas de género radicalizadas en el nuevo siglo. no puede darse, al menos de momento, una respuesta contundente a la pregunta retórica que encabeza este artículo. la publi- cidad siempre es una herramienta de comunicación destinada a aumentar ventas y/o prestigio de la marca, por lo que no podemos exigirle que opere en otro para- digma. salvo el caso de la publicidad institucional, sus fines siempre serán comerciales. pero está claro que es posible elegir entre la construcción de un discurso positivo sobre las mujeres o mantener el tradicional, denigrante e insultante para casi todas. referencias . abitbol, alan y miglena sternadori. . “you act like a girl: an examination of consumer perceptions of ‘femvertising’”. quarterly review of business disciplines ( ): - . . almodóvar, pedro, dir. . mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. españa. . bacqué, marie-hélène y carole biewener. . el empoderamiento. una acción progresiva que ha revolu- cionado la política y la sociedad. barcelona: gedisa. . badinter, elisabeth. . 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bellaterra. . reker, katherine m. . “‘why can’t run ‘like a girl’ also mean win the race?’: commodity feminism and participatory branding as forms of self-therapy in the neoliberal advertising space”, disertación docto- ral, scripps college. . rich, adrienne. . nacemos de mujer. la materni- dad como institución y experiencia. madrid: cátedra. . rincón, ana. . ¿de qué habla begira cuando habla de sexismo en la publicidad? vitoria-gasteiz: emakunde- instituto vasco de la mujer. . rodríguez, maría pilar y mirén gutiérrez. . “femvertising: female empowering strategies in recent spanish commercials”. investigaciones feministas ( ): - . http://dx.doi.org/ . /infe. . rowlands, jo. . questioning empowerment: working with women in honduras. oxford: oxfam. . royo-vela, marcelo, inés küster-boluda y natalia vila-lópez. . “roles de género y sexismo en la publicidad de las revistas españolas: un análisis de las tres últimas décadas del siglo xx”. comunicación y sociedad xviii ( ): - . . sontag, susan. . “woman’s beauty: put-down or power source”. en women’s voices: visions and pers- pectives, editado por pat c. hoy ii, esther h. schor y robert di yanni, - . nueva york: mcgraw-hill. . wolf, naomi. . the beauty myth: how images of beau- ty are used against women. londres: chatto & windus. . zeisler, andi. . “worst sales pitch ever: the ad industry’s shameless history of using feminism to sell products”. salon, de julio, https://www.salon. com/ / / /worst_sales_pitch_ever_the_ad_ industrys_shameless_history_of_using_feminism_to_ sell_products/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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el feminismo, este artículo describe la situación política, social y económica de chile durante el año . se argumenta que durante el año en estudio se cuestionó, en diversos espacios de la sociedad chilena, la forma en que se distribuye el poder entre hombres y mujeres. se revisa también la tercera ola de protestas feminista, caracterizada por el accionar de mujeres universitarias a lo lar- go de todo el país, cuyas manifestaciones visibilizaron la discriminación y el trato desigual que viven las mujeres y la diversidad sexual, emplazando a los poderes legislativo y ejecutivo a tomar medidas para mejorar las condiciones de grupos históricamente marginados. se concluye que durante el año se desafió el poder político y social, cuestionando las brechas de género persistentes en la sociedad chi- lena. asimismo, se plantea que es fundamental analizar los orígenes y consecuen- cias del “año del feminismo” en chile, pues las demandas feministas enriquecen los debates actuales sobre la calidad de la democracia. palabras clave: feminismo, género, movilizaciones feministas, diversidad sexual, calidad de la democracia abstract focusing on feminism, this article describes the political, social and economic situation in chile throughout . we argue that during this year, the way in which power is struc- tured between men and women was questioned in diverse spaces of chilean society. this third wave of feminist protest, instigated primarily by female university students in , possibly constitutes the largest wave of feminism in chilean history. these events forced po- litical actors in both the legislative and executive branches to improve the participation and representation of group that are historically marginalized according to gender. we conclude that an analysis of the origins and consequences of the “year of feminism” could enrich current debates on the quality of democracy in chile. key words: feminism, gender, feminist mobilizations, sexual diversity, quality of demo- cracy * las autoras agradecen el apoyo del centro de estudios de conflicto y cohesión social y de la universidad diego portales a través de la beca conicyt/fondap/ , y a flacso-chile por promover las investi- gaciones sobre las manifestaciones feministas en chile. las autoras agradecen los comentarios de julieta suárez-cao al borrador preliminar de este trabajo. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque a través de un reporte de los acontecimientos en chile, este artículo argumentará que a lo largo de se desafió el “poder de género” en varios espacios sociales, políticos y económicos. el poder de género se refiere a las estructuras políticas, sociales y económicas que privilegian a hombres y a sexualidades e identidades predominantes (duerst-lahti and kelly ; valdés y fernández ) . estas estructuras históricamente han perjudicado a las mujeres, a la diversidad sexual y, en última instancia, a la calidad de la democracia chilena (kirkwood ). este artículo describe cómo una serie de marchas y tomas feministas en diferentes universidades a lo largo del país consolidaron lo que probablemente constituye la tercera ola de protestas feministas en la historia chilena. los poderes legislativo y ejecutivo respondieron a las demandas feministas de diversas formas y con diferentes grados de éxito, evidenciando un proceso de transversalización de las variantes de feminismo en la política chilena. se concluye que investigaciones futuras sobre las orígenes y consecuencias del “año del feminismo” pueden enriquecer los debates actuales sobre la calidad de la democracia en chile. i. coyuntura social: desafÍos al poder de gÉnero antecedentes históricos e internacionales antes de las movilizaciones acontecidas durante el , en chile se habían experimentado dos olas de movilizaciones lideradas por mujeres para desafiar al patriarcado (baldez ; forstensfer ; towns ). la primera tuvo como principal objetivos la emancipación de las mujeres y la igualdad de derechos políticos—poder elegir y ser elegida—entre hombres y mujeres, cuyo hito fue la obtención del voto para las mujeres (valdés y weinstein ). el período comprendido entre y se caracterizó por el aumento sin precedentes de las movilizaciones femeniles (miranda y roque en prensa). en conjunto con el aumento de las protestas emergieron decenas de organizaciones de mujeres feministas, con diversos propósitos y objetivos, donde se destaca el accionar del movimiento pro-emancipación de la mujer chilena (memch) (kirkwood, ). luego de un período de baja movilización en las calles, las mujeres feministas chilenas volvieron a movilizarse bajo el lema “democracia en el país y en la casa” en el contexto del movimiento opositor al régimen cívico-militar de augusto pinochet, conformando la segunda ola del feminismo en chile (kirkwood ; baldez ; ríos at al. ) . la urgencia por la democratización del país y el fin de la represión estuvo acompañada de un cuestionamiento a los roles de género en la sociedad chilena (kirkwood ). el concepto poder de género es diferente del concepto patriarcado. este último se refiere al poder que ejercen los hombres para ejercer poder y ha sido utilizado por las activistas feministas. en cambio, el concepto poder de género se utiliza a lo largo de este artículo pues no solamente se refiere al dominio ejercido por los hombres y la masculinidad establecida, sino también de las mayorías sexuales y la heteronormatividad. chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda con la democratización del país disminuyó la movilización de mujeres feministas en las calles pues la heterogeneidad política e ideológica que caracteriza a la diversidad de mujeres se materializó en la división del movimiento motivada por dos estrategias distintas: feministas militantes y feministas autónomas (ríos et al. ). mientras el primer grupo apostó por la institucionalización del movimiento (stoffel ), el segundo apostó por la autonomía política (forstenzer ). de esta forma, el movimiento feminista perdió su notoriedad pública y cohesión luego de la transición a la democracia (ríos et al. ). en los años precedentes al , la participación y representación política de las mujeres habían avanzado a grandes pasos. la primera presidenta de chile, michelle bachelet ( - ; - ) nombró gabinetes (cuasi) paritarios y promovió políticas promujer como nunca antes (reyes-housholder , ). durante su último gobierno el servicio nacional de la mujer (sernam) se convirtió en el ministerio de la mujer y la equidad de género, se aprobó la ley de interrupción voluntaria del embarazo en tres causales y se implementaron cuotas de género para candidaturas legislativas (reyes-housholder ; le foulon and suárez-cao ). a pesar de la importancia de las presidencias de bachelet, ni la primera ni la segunda elección de la primera presidenta de chile se debieron a la movilización electoral de un movimiento feminista activo (ríos tobar ; reyes-housholder ). al contrario, ni las mujeres ni la diversidad sexual en chile se organizaron masivamente antes de la salida de bachelet. en mayo de , connotadas académicas chilenas entre las que destacan maría josé cumplido, maría emilia tijoux y teresa valdés, identificaron en los medios de comunicación la ola de movilizaciones feministas, considerada como la más grande de la historia de chile (seguel a. ). este año se caracterizó por la acumulación de tomas feministas de universidades a lo largo del país y una gran cantidad de marchas en contra del sexismo en la educación y la violencia de género (miranda and roque b). en la figura se puede visualizar la cantidad de protestas feministas entre los años y ocurridas en chile, utilizando los datos del observatorio de conflictos del centro de estudios de conflicto y cohesión social es notoria el alza de protestas feministas desde hasta . la codificación construida por coes aborda como “protestas feministas” aquellas que tiene demandas de violencia contra la mujer, igualdad de salarios, cuotas de género, educación o capacitación para mujeres o anti discriminación. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque figura : cantidad protestas feministas registrados entre los años - fuente: elaboración propia en base a los datos del observatorio de conflicto social del centro de estudios de conflicto y cohesión social www.coes.cl entre y la cantidad de protesta feminista en promedio alcanzaba eventos anuales en chile. no obstante, en se puede observar el aumento de las movilizaciones feministas relacionadas con el movimiento transnacional #niunamenos (chenou and cepeda-másmela ). mientras que en el “año del feminismo” se contabilizaron protestas feministas a lo largo de todo el país. la región metropolitana lideró en cuanto a la cantidad de protestas, con en , después siguió la región de antofagasta con protestas, y la región de los ríos con protestas feministas. la heterogeneidad ideológica propia del feminismo (jaggar ) permeó las movilizaciones chilenas. la tabla identifica las principales variantes del feminismo que calaron los discursos, la prensa, las discusiones parlamentarias y hasta el poder ejecutivo. chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda tabla : variantes del feminismo en chile ( ) variante del feminismo preguntas a las que apunta feminismo liberal ¿cómo alcanzar la igualdad de derechos entre hombres y mujeres y la autonomía de la mujer? feminismo maternalista ¿cómo reconocer, valorizar y apoyar las experiencias de criar hijos? feminismo posmoderno ¿cómo identificar y luchar contra la violencia simbólica? feminismo interseccional ¿cómo abordar la multiplicidad de identidades de las mujeres? feminismo socialista ¿cómo conciliar las demandas feministas con las inequi- dades económicas? feminismo católico ¿cómo reconciliar la fe católica con el feminismo? feminismo radical ¿cómo combatir la opresión universal, con orígenes bio- lógicos, de los hombres sobre las mujeres? fuente: elaboración propia si bien la heterogeneidad política e ideológica ha sido una característica constante del movimiento feminista, durante el existieron temáticas que unificaron. este hecho no solo ha tenido lugar en chile, sino también en gran parte de américa latina y estados unidos. en este sentido, los movimientos transnacionales y el mundo del cine estadounidense instalaron en el debate público una de las principales demandas feministas, preparando el camino para las protestas. por una parte, el movimiento #niunamenos, que comenzó en en argentina, se extendió por gran parte de américa latina donde miles de mujeres se movilizaron para decir basta a la violencia contra las mujeres y a los femicidios (chenou and cepeda-másmela ; suárez-cao and arellano ). por otra parte, el movimiento #metoo llegó a chile cuando actrices chilenas desafiaron el poder de género con denuncias contra directores con gran influencia en el mundo cultural chileno. este episodio resaltó las temáticas asociadas a la violencia y acoso sexual del movimiento feminista estudiantil y del movimiento internacional #metoo. asimismo, el impacto social y político que trajo consigo el premio oscar otorgado por hollywood a la película chilena una mujer fantástica, permitió instalar en los medios de comunicación la situación de discriminación que vive la comunidad lgbtiq. la protagonista, interpretada por la actriz daniela vega, ilustra el rechazo social que sufren las personas transexuales. la atención nacional e internacional fortaleció el proyecto de ley de identidad de género por entonces en el congreso. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque mayo feminista: el despertar de las estudiantes chilenas las movilizaciones comenzaron en el sur de chile e inspiraron a las estudiantes del resto del país a participar en el movimiento (miranda and roque a). una gran cantidad de tomas se establecieron entre mayo y junio de . el % de los chilenos, según la encuesta cadem de julio de ese año, aprobaban “las marchas de las mujeres por la vía pública” y un % aprobaba “la movilización feminista”. sin embargo, solo el % aprobaba las tomas de universidades. las denuncias de violencia sexual motivaron a las estudiantes de la universidad austral a iniciar la primera toma feminista el de abril. diez días después, la facultad de derecho de la universidad de chile entró en toma debido a las acusaciones de acoso sexual contra el académico carlos carmona, una figura conocida en la política nacional. carmona se había desempeñado como asesor legal de la secretaría general de la presidencia durante cuatro gobiernos de la concertación e, incluso, en fue nombrado miembro del tribunal constitucional, institución que presidió entre y , teniendo un rol clave en las discusiones constitucionales sobre la ley de interrupción voluntaria del embarazo (pizarro ). carmona fue denunciado en agosto de por una estudiante que se desempeñaba como su ayudante en diversas labores académicas. sin embargo, debido a graves faltas en el proceso de sumario realizado por la universidad, decidió hacer público su testimonio (pizarro ). las acusaciones contra carmona indignaron a profesoras de la facultad, quienes apoyaron la causa de la movilización y comprometieron su participación activa en la resolución del conflicto (osses a), propiciando la unión entre estudiantes y profesoras para abordar esta temática. carmona renunció a su cargo de profesor titular en la universidad de chile (ayala y rivas ). las acciones realizadas en las movilizaciones feministas cuestionaron la cultura machista en la sociedad (alcázar ; preciado ). durante la marcha nacional del día de mayo, un grupo de feministas, estudiantes de la universidad católica, marcharon por la alameda con el rostro cubierto y el torso desnudo, convirtiéndose en un ícono del mayo feminista (grau ). para las manifestantes, los torsos descubiertos desafíaron visualmente el poder de género en cuanto a las normas culturales que objetivizan los cuerpos de las mujeres. “es la liberación del cuerpo contra lo que nos han hecho creer desde niñas: que nuestras pechugas son objeto de deseo, de consumo, de goce para el macho”, explicó la ex vicepresidenta de la feuc y exvocera de la confech (farías ). las estudiantes secundarias también participaron de las movilizaciones. sus demandas solicitaron la apertura de los liceos masculinos a la educación mixta, respuestas de las autoridades en cuanto a acoso sexual y el fin de la intolerancia hacia la diversidad sexual. uno hito de estas movilizaciones fue una marcha hacia el instituto nacional, el primer establecimiento educativo de chile, destacado chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda por su tradición de excelencia académica, debido a frases que cosificaban a las mujeres en los polerones de sus alumnos de cuarto medio (troncoso m. ) . con el pasar de los días las movilizaciones aumentaron y se acrecentaron las denuncias públicas, las asambleas autoconvocadas de mujeres y las instituciones en toma feminista. durante la primera semana de mayo se contabilizaron doce universidades y seis liceos en toma feminista (salas y almazabar ), iniciativas convocadas por agrupaciones feministas que participaron activamente del movimiento, tanto en sus propias actividades como en las convocatorias realizadas por la coordinadora feminista universitaria, red independiente que organizó secretarías de género y vocalías. uno de estos casos fue el de la coordinadora #niunamenos, que convocó a todas las mujeres y a las organizaciones feministas a manifestarse en contra de la cultura de la violación debido a los escabrosos casos de dos bebés abusadas sexualmente y asesinadas por su padre y su tío respectivamente (bbc mundo ; cáceres ; vera ). ambos casos abrieron debates acerca del carácter adultocéntrico del concepto violencia sexual, que contrasta con el hecho de que esta afecta principalmente a niños y niñas (ponce y soto-lafoy ). las cifras de la fiscalía sostienen que el porcentaje mayoritario de víctimas por violencia sexual corresponde a menores de edad ( %), además de estar concentradas en menores de sexo femenino ( %) (mardones a). la convocatoria fue exitosa (fernández ). hacia la segunda semana de mayo, la cantidad de universidades en toma feminista ascendía a quince, entre las que se destacan: universidad andrés bello sede viña del mar, facultad de economía y negocios de la universidad de chile, universidad de playa ancha y universidad arturo prat sede iquique (peña ; riquelme ; soy chile ), entre otras. de la mano de las tomas universitarias, las estudiantes secundarias de los liceos emblemáticos de niñas ocuparon las dependencias del instituto nacional para mostrar su descontento con la educación sexista (troncoso ). el punto más alto de las movilizaciones feministas se alcanzó el de mayo, con la marcha convocada por la confech. los organizadores estimaron que ciento cincuenta mil personas se manifestaron en contra de la violencia machista, el sexismo en la educación y la violencia de género (televisión nacional de chile ). las manifestaciones feministas se distinguieron por su carácter pacífico, disruptividad y desafío al conservadurismo, mediante performances realizadas por las estudiantes (miranda y roque ). se tomaron más universidades en los días posteriores a la multitudinaria marcha, pero fue la toma de la casa central de la pontificia universidad católica de chile la madrugada del de mayo, lo que llamó la atención nacional. este hasta la publicación de este artículo en se mantiene como colegio de hombres a pesar de las demandas feministas. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque campus, el más antiguo de dicha universidad, había sido ocupado solo en dos ocasiones anteriores. se esperaba que esta toma radicalizara el movimiento. las alumnas plantearon tres puntos para bajar la toma: utilización del nombre social en la credencial y el correo institucional de la universidad para personas transgénero (osses b), regularización del pago de montos pendientes a trabajadores y trabajadoras encargadas del aseo en campus oriente y el establecimiento de conversaciones con una funcionaria destituida luego de acusar violencia intrafamiliar por parte de su exmarido y profesor de la facultad de matemáticas (mardones b). desalojaron pacíficamente el edificio el de mayo gracias a que el rector accedió a estas demandas, además de negociar el petitorio mediante mesas de diálogo (varas ). la histórica toma de la universidad católica provocó que más estudiantes participen en las movilizaciones. a días de la cuenta pública, la confech convocó a otra marcha feminista tras el anuncio de la agenda mujer por parte del gobierno (ver sección sobre respuestas del poder ejecutivo) (aguirre ). por entonces se contabilizaban diecinueve universidades en toma feminista (salas a). pero la efervescencia de inicios de mayo disminuía en parte por la falta de una organización centralizada a nivel nacional. las negociaciones de las estudiantes feministas se efectuaron directamente con las autoridades de sus universidades, generando diferencias de timing: mientras algunas universidades ya estaban negociando resoluciones, otras recién comenzaban sus procesos de movilización (salas b). los desafíos al poder de género —la heteronormatividad— desde la calle continuaban, pero con otros grupos, específicamente con la comunidad lgbtiq. el movimiento de integración y liberación homosexual (movilh) y fundación iguales convocaron la marcha por el orgullo para el de junio (el dínamo ). sus demandas principales fueron: inclusión de menores de catorce años en la legislación sobre identidad de género, incorporación de parejas del mismo sexo como posibles padres o madres adoptivos y avances en el matrimonio igualitario (la tercera ). según los organizadores, más de ochenta mil personas respondieron a la convocatoria realizada en santiago (la tercera ). por su parte, en concepción marcharon aproximadamente dos mil personas (avendaño ). en esta ocasión sucedió que algunas empresas privadas mostraron su adhesión pública a la causa lgbtiq. iguales comunicó que, por primera vez en el país, decenas de empresas privadas expusieron públicamente su apoyo a la marcha, especialmente empresas multinacionales (wal-mart y google) y equipos consultores (pozo ). la muestra de adhesión del sector privado mostró que los desafíos al poder de género eran transversales. las feministas chilenas se movilizaron el mes siguiente para apoyar a las feministas argentinas, en cuyo país se debatía la ley de aborto. diversas chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda agrupaciones feministas marcharon bajo la consigna de “aborto libre, legal, seguro y gratuito” en las ciudades de temuco, valdivia, concepción y valparaíso el de julio (segovia b). en la ciudad de santiago, un grupo de encapuchados contrarios a la movilización apuñalaron tres mujeres, generando fuertes repercusiones mediáticas y discusiones acerca de la seguridad en manifestaciones políticas (sepúlveda ). pocos días antes de finalizar el mes de agosto, cuatro alumnas de la universidad de playa ancha, única universidad que continuaba en toma, anunciaron el inicio de una huelga de hambre (olguín ). duró solo dos días pues lograron un acuerdo formal con la rectoría de la universidad. con esto cerró un ciclo de movilizaciones y tomas feministas en chile que no había tenido lugar desde la lucha de las mujeres en contra de la dictadura de pinochet. los resultados de las movilizaciones estudiantiles feministas eran significativos. en las universidades estatales y privadas se crearon protocolos de acoso sexual y planes de prevención de la violencia de género. se formaron instituciones como el observatorio de género, diversidad y no discriminación en la universidad austral, se adoptó el lenguaje inclusivo en la universidad diego portales y se establecieron unidades de género y diversidad sexual en diversas casas de estudios superiores. otro avance de las movilizaciones feministas consistió en la consideración del nombre social para las personas transgénero en la documentación universitaria. pese a su importancia, estos logros no abacaron las demandas históricas de las mujeres chilenas, pues se centraron en las preocupaciones de mujeres y diversidad sexual en las universidades. pese a que las demandas de las movilizaciones feministas solicitaron cambios en las condiciones de las trabajadoras y se movilizaron en contra de la discriminación que sufren las mujeres migrantes en chile (miranda and roque a), los cambios en estas áreas han sido más bien escasos. por su parte, las brechas de género se reflejan a nivel socioeconómicos. por ejemplo, los resultados de la encuesta bianual casen reflejan diferencias de género enormes en cifras sobre los ninis: chilenos entre y años que ni trabajan, ni estudian (el mostrador b). el ministerio de desarrollo social reveló en septiembre que % de los ninis en chile son hombres, mientras que % son mujeres. la gran mayoría ( %) viven en sectores vulnerables. el concepto parece peyorativo pues los ninis son presentados como flojos, sin embargo, según el ministro alfredo moreno muchas de estas mujeres están embarazadas o cuidan niños o familiares descapacitados o mayores. esta ola de movilizaciones feministas tuvo su principal escenario en las instituciones universitarias chilenas, pero las estudiantes cuestionaron el poder de género en todas sus esferas. no obstante, las demandas nacionales que buscaban mutar la estructura del poder de manera global, no han generado cambios sustanciales. en este sentido, es relevante analizar la coyuntura política y las respuestas de los poderes legislativo y ejecutivo que, si bien han pretendido acoger las demandas feministas, aún no se concretan. en las siguientes páginas se analiza lo acontecido en esta materia. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque ii. coyuntura polÍtica: respuestas del poder legislativo y ejecutivo nuevo congreso con histórico número de legisladoras esta sección detalla cómo el congreso respondió a los desafíos al poder de género, es decir, el cuestionamiento del patriarcado y la heteronormatividad, que emanaron principalmente desde la calle. la cámara estaba bien posicionada para canalizar las reclamaciones feministas estudiantiles en parte porque, en enero de , un grupo de diputadas crearon la bancada feminista julieta kirkwood, inspiradas en la intelectual y activista chilena (el mostrador ). la nueva agrupación busca promover proyectos de ley en materia de equidad de género, entre los que se destacan proyectos alusivos a la violencia contra las mujeres, la brecha salarial, los derechos sexuales y reproductivos y el matrimonio igualitario (villalobos díaz ). durante los meses de movilizaciones las integrantes de la bancada ingresaron un proyecto para crear una comisión permanente de mujeres y equidad de género (cámara de diputados de chile ). tras el receso de febrero se inauguró un nuevo congreso con un histórico número de legisladoras ( , %) gracias a la recién implementada ley de cuotas (reyes- housholder ; le foulon and suárez-cao ). en la reforma electoral de se introdujo la ley de cuotas que establece un máximo de % de candidatos hombres o candidatas mujeres del total respectivo. esta medida se ha de aplicar durante las elecciones legislativas celebradas durante , , y , y se caracteriza por contar con sanciones altas pues se impide la inscripción de aquellas listas que no logren los porcentajes establecidos (batlle y roque ). además de la sanción, la ley cuenta con incentivos económicos para los partidos políticos. por una parte, por cada mujer electa el partido de pertenencia recibe uf; por otra parte, los votos obtenidos cuentan con un reembolso adicional de , uf. la figura muestra la evolución histórica de la presencia de mujeres en el congreso chileno. chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda figura : variación porcentaje de diputadas y senadoras por período legislativo fuente: elaboración propia en base a los datos disponibles en www.servel.cl si comparamos las medidas de acción afirmativa implementadas en diversos países de américa latina (freidenberg y lajas ), esta medida fue implementada en chile de manera tardía. de hecho, hubo cuatro intentos previos por introducir medidas de acción afirmativa desde el año : tres mociones parlamentarias y un mensaje presidencial (batlle y roque ). además de la presencia histórica de legisladoras, la irrupción del frente amplio en el congreso, liderado por ex dirigentes estudiantiles, también contribuyó a la consolidación de variantes del feminismo —especialmente el feminismo socialista— en el parlamento. la coalición subió de , a % su representación (toro y valenzuela ). además, en noviembre de lograron obtener un histórico , % de los votos de la primera vuelta presidencial para la periodista beatriz sánchez. las integrantes de la bancada feminista en la cámara de diputados respondieron a las preocupaciones del movimiento en junio. la diputada del partido por la democracia (ppd) cristina girardi impulsó una sesión especial el día de ese mes para abordar sus demandas (cáceres ). maya fernández presidió la sesión a la que asistieron el ministro de educación gerardo varela y la ministra de la mujer isabel plá. algunos manifestantes presentes desplegaron un lienzo con el mensaje “por un chile feminista, educación no sexista” ( ). la diputada vallejos, ex dirigenta estudiantil, intervino a favor del movimiento resaltando las demandas para tratar el acoso sexual, remarcó el poder cultural de los establecimientos educativos en reforzar o combatir desigualdades entre catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque hombres y mujeres. finalmente, destacó la preocupación del movimiento por las intersecciones de dominación que se expresan especialmente por las mujeres transgénero, la diversidad sexual y las mujeres pobres. en la instancia se aprobaron dos iniciativas relacionadas a las demandas de las estudiantes feministas: eliminar las pruebas estandarizadas y terminar con los establecimientos educativos unisexuales, es decir, colegios donde asisten niños o niñas. la cámara también aprobó el proyecto, patrocinado por integrantes de la bancada feminista, para crear la comisión permanente de mujeres y equidad de género el de junio. la transversalización partidaria del feminismo se manifestó con la votación: votos a favor, dos abstenciones y ningún voto en contra. las discusiones entre parlamentarios revelaron, además, una heterogeneidad de ideologías feministas por parte de representantes de todo el espectro partidario. la tabla muestra los proyectos de ley trabajados en la comisión de mujeres y equidad de género entre agosto y diciembre de . todos han sido iniciativas de la cámara de diputados y ningún proyecto ha contado con urgencia presidencial (ver sección sobre el poder ejecutivo). además, es posible notar la diversidad de partidos que han patrocinado proyectos de ley relacionados con temáticas de género. esto evidencia la transversalización de variantes del feminismo en el sistema partidario chileno en . tabla : proyectos de ley en la comisión de mujeres y equidad de género materia partidos autora/es modifica el código del trabajo con el objeto de equipa- rar los derechos de la madre y del padre, en materia de permiso posnatal y de fuero laboral. - renovación nacional; hombres, mujer modifica la ley sobre libertades de opinión e información y ejercicio del periodismo, respecto de los datos que deben proporcionar los medios de comunica- ción en forma conexa cuando den a conocer hechos de violencia contra la mujer o violencia intrafamiliar. - renovación nacional; mujeres modifica el código del trabajo para fortalecer la corres- ponsabilidad parental en las normas laborales sobre protección de la maternidad y la paternidad. - revolución democráti- ca; mujer, hombres - partido socialista; hombre - partido radical; mujer - partido humanista; mujer - democracia cristiana; hombre chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda materia partidos autora/es modifica el código del trabajo para establecer el de- recho de los trabajadores a asistir a controles de niño sano, respecto de sus hijos, en las condiciones que indi- ca. - renovación nacional; mujer ; hombres exige la instalación de mudadores en baños de hombres y mujeres en los recintos de uso público. - renovación nacional; mujer - hombres modifica el código penal para despenalizar el aborto consentido por la mujer dentro de las primeras catorce semanas de gestación. - partido comunista; mujeres - revolución democráti- ca; mujeres - partido socialista; mujeres - partido por la demo- cracia; mujer - poder; mujer - independiente; mu- jeres modifica la ley , orgánica constitucional de mu- nicipalidades, con el objeto de establecer una cuota de género aplicable a las candidaturas a concejal. - partido socialista; mujer - independientes; hom- bres - revolución democráti- ca; mujer - partido humanista; mujer - partido por la demo- cracia; hombre - renovación nacional; hombre - frente regionalista verde social; mujer - democracia cristiana; hombre - evópoli; hombre modifica la ley , orgánica constitucional de parti- dos políticos, para exigir el establecimiento de un pro- tocolo de prevención y sanción del acoso sexual en estas entidades. - evópoli; hombres - renovación nacional; hombre - democracia cristiana; hombre modifica el código civil, en lo que respecta al concepto de buen padre de familia, para eliminar la discrimina- ción legal o normativa contra la mujer en esa materia. - renovación nacional; mujer, hombres - poder; mujer - independiente; mujer - partido comunista; mujer - democracia cristiana; hombre catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque materia partidos autora/es modifica la ley , que dicta normas sobre adop- ción de menores, para consagrar el principio de acom- pañamiento psicológico de la madre durante el proce- dimiento previo a la declaración de susceptibilidad de adopción del hijo. - unión democrática independiente; mujeres, hombres modifica el código civil para incorporar el concepto de femicidio en las causales de indignidad para suceder al difunto. - democracia cristiana; mujer, hombres - partido por la demo- cracia; mujeres - partido radical; mu- jer, hombres fuente: elaboración propia en base a la información disponible en www.camara.cl esta transversalización del feminismo se evidencia también en la composición partidaria de las nuevas instituciones que buscan tratar políticas de género. las integrantes iniciales de la bancada feminista representaron casi todo el espectro ideológico, pese a su conformación principalmente de izquierda. ninguna diputada de la unión democrática independiente (udi) participó en la comisión de la cámara, pero su presidenta, jacqueline van rysselberghe, afirmó en que su partido es “feminista”, destacando el hecho de que ningún otro partido chileno era, en aquel entonces, liderado por una mujer (reyes ). además, el senado creó una comisión especial para tratar políticas de género en septiembre, comisión que incluyó a la udi, evópoli, el ps, la dc y el ppd. hubo parlamentarios que recogieron la preocupación de los protagonistas del “año del feminismo” en chile sobre cómo los símbolos culturales refuerzan o desafían el poder de género, una preocupación de la variante del feminismo posmoderno (ver tabla ). varias polémicas emergieron basadas en que los nombres de los lugares públicos ayudan a fortalecer la hegemonía social masculina. se discutía, por ejemplo, si el aeropuerto debería homenajear a un hombre poeta (pablo neruda) o una mujer poeta (gabriela mistral), ambos ganadores del premio nobel de literatura. un diputado anunció que buscaba nombrar al aeropuerto de santiago “gabriela mistral”. poco después, algunas feministas cuestionaron exitosamente la propuesta de la comisión de cultura de la cámara de diputados de renombrar el aeropuerto de santiago por pablo neruda. poder ejecutivo: la promoción del feminismo liberal el gobierno de piñera respondió a los desafíos al poder de género promoviendo el feminismo liberal a través de su énfasis en la igualdad de derechos entre hombres y mujeres, la protección contra la violencia física y la autonomía económica femenina (ver “feminismo liberal” en la tabla ). la adhesión chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda de piñera a los principios del feminismo liberal produjo algunos avances puntuales inesperados por líderes feministas. para ellas, el retorno del gobierno conservador de piñera ponía en duda el entonces proyecto ley de identidad de género, que permitiera a las personas transgénero cambiar su sexo y nombre en el registro civil . sin embargo, piñera firmó la ley bajo la presión del “mayo feminista”. su discurso durante el evento cuadró esta demanda dentro de una lógica liberal: “todas las personas somos iguales, [...] todas las personas, con su libertad, con su creatividad, son los verdaderos motores de una mejor sociedad y deben ser los arquitectos de sus propias vidas” (“presidente piñera promulga ley de identidad de género” ). evidencia adicional del feminismo liberal de piñera apareció el de mayo cuando firmó una reforma constitucional para consagrar la igualdad de derechos entre mujeres y hombres (el mostrador a). sus menciones de “violencia”, “abuso” y “acoso” respondieron al movimiento, aunque en su discurso destacan una ambigua definición de violencia (no queda claro, por ejemplo, si esta incluye lo simbólico además de lo físico) y un silencio sobre el poder cultural de los establecimientos educativos para reforzar o desafiar estereotipos y normas de género. además de estas acciones, piñera respondió directamente al movimiento feminista con la agenda de igualdad de género, presentada en mayo. sus propuestas se basaron en el feminismo liberal, destacando, por ejemplo, el proyecto de ley sobre la violencia en el “pololeo” y medidas para mejorar la participación laboral de las mujeres (ministerio de la mujer y equidad de género ). las líderes estudiantiles feministas criticaron las propuestas del gobierno por considerar que no se dirigían a las causas de fondo del poder de género (almazabar ). la historia de frases sexistas y violentas emitidas por el propio presidente provocaron desconfianza por parte de las feministas(the clinic ) . piñera cometió otro error discursivo el de junio tras su primera cuenta pública, en la que anunció un listado de propuestas, inclusive su agenda de género. al salir del congreso se dirigió a la presidenta de la cámara maya fernández: “tan linda que se ve y tan dura que es”. sus dichos fueron criticados inmediatamente en la prensa y en las redes sociales (#piñeranoesfeminista). fernández afirmó más tarde que esa frase “pone en tela de juicio la agenda de género que presentó la semana pasada. quedamos con la duda, ¿le creemos o no le creemos?” (silva ). una encuesta nacional preguntó qué les parecía las palabras de piñera y % dijo “bien”, % “ni bien ni mal” y % contestó “mal”. por otra parte, el % calificó al presidente como “machista”; mientras que un % lo consideró esta reforma generó polémica dentro de la coalición gobernante conservadora. había lanzado este chiste en y en : ¿sabe usted cuál es la diferencia entre un político y una dama? cuando el político dice que ‘sí’, quiere decir ‘tal vez’; cuando dice ‘tal vez’, quiere decir que ‘no’ y cuando dice que ‘no’, no es político. cuando una dama dice que ‘no’ quiere decir ‘tal vez’; cuando dice ‘tal vez’, quiere decir que ‘sí’; y cuando dice que ‘sí’, no es dama. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque “ni machista ni feminista”. solamente un % lo calificó de “feminista” (encuesta plaza pública ) . el desempeño global de piñera en su primer año no fue catastrófico con respecto a la opinión pública, en parte debido a los buenos indicadores macroeconómicos. el producto interno bruto (pib) creció a su mayor ritmo desde gracias a mayores niveles de inversiones (ocde ). la tasa de inflación también fue otra señal positiva, siendo , %, levemente mayor que la tasa del año pasado (toro y valenzuela ). la tasa de desempleo en chile se mantuvo estable en , alcanzando el . % según el instituto nacional de estadísticas (ine) . piñera entonces pudo disfrutar de un contexto económico que parece positivo. sin embargo, las críticas y sus errores descritos arriba no parecen haberle ayudado en las encuestas. en diciembre, el presidente y su gabinete recibieron sus peores evaluaciones del año, lo que suele ocurrir después de las lunas de miel presidenciales (encuesta plaza pública cadem ). solamente un % aprobó el desempeño del presidente y % aprobó el desempeño de su gabinete. dentro del gabinete, los desempeños individuales variaban. el ministro de educación y la ministra de la mujer y equidad de género, quienes ocupaban posiciones claves a lo largo del “año de feminismo”, ejemplifican esta disparidad. los errores más notorios vinieron del ministro de educación. en abril, el ministro gerardo varela, aludiendo a la educación sexual, dijo que les compraba preservativos a sus hijos porque “mis hijos son campeones”. el comentario enfureció a feministas porque demostró los dobles estándares de la sociedad que aplaude la actividad sexual de los hombres adolescentes y condena a las mujeres de la misma edad, quienes corren el peligro de acusaciones de promiscuidad (batarce ). varela cometió un segundo error grave el mes siguiente en una comisión del senado sobre temas de acoso sexual, la demanda central de las tomas universitarias. antes de comenzar su exposición, denominó el acoso sexual como “pequeñas humillaciones y discriminaciones que son las que estamos llamados a solucionar” (marin ). otra expositora en la sesión apuntó al ministro, afirmando que “las humillaciones no son pequeñas, yo no puedo dejar pasar las palabras del ministro de educación”. las mismas voceras del movimiento feminista expresaron su furia contra los dichos del ministro (segovia a). la opinión pública parecía concordar, al menos parcialmente. una encuesta nacional reveló en julio que el ministro peor evaluado fue varela, con un % de aprobación (plaza pública cadem ). debido al mal desempeño, piñera piñera cometió otro error discursivo a fines de octubre cuando declaró que una nueva iniciativa adheriera al “viejo y sabio principio de la minifalda: tiene que ser lo suficientemente larga para cubrir lo fundamental y lo suficientemente corta para mantener la atención”. a lo largo de la tasa de desocupación de los hombres varió entre , y - % mientras que la tasa de desocupación de las mujeres varió entre , y , %. brechas en las tasas de participación laboral en chile históricamente han limitado la autonomía económica de las mujeres. en , las mujeres lograron una tasa de participación laboral de , %, mientras que la tasa de los hombres alcanzó , %. ver figura a en el apéndice de este artículo. chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda lo reemplazó en agosto por su entonces ministra de medio ambiente, marcela cubillos. la ministra de la mujer y la equidad de género tuvo mucho mayor éxito a pesar de la dificultad de su tarea. la nominación de isabel plá, anunciada en enero de , suscitó críticas inmediatas de la oposición principalmente porque había mantenido una postura antiaborto, derecho que las chilenas lograron parcialmente durante el segundo gobierno de bachelet (burgos ). las estrategias políticas de plá en fueron complicadas y a ratos contradictorias. se habría anticipado que, como encargada de promover la igualdad entre los hombres y las mujeres, apoyara al movimiento. sin embargo, como es nombrada por el presidente actuó como su delegada, promoviendo sus ideas y ejecutando sus políticas. en ciertas ocasiones adhirió a la primera estrategia y en otras oportunidades a la segunda. declaró en mayo que el movimiento iba a “impulsar cambios que van a modificar la vida de las personas” (nahas bordón ); luego reconoció en una entrevista que: “el feminismo es un movimiento social que es muy inspirador, probablemente es la primera fuente de inspiración de la lucha por los derechos de las mujeres en todo el mundo” (burgos ). en otros momentos, plá defendió el gobierno, dejando de lado oportunidades para combatir el sexismo ejercido por el propio presidente. además, se mostró en contra de algunas preocupaciones del movimiento, por ejemplo, del lenguaje inclusivo (burgos ). en noviembre se posicionaba para acoger la lucha por los derechos de la mujer pero a la vez buscaba no ceder terreno a la izquierda, el lado político que se ha alineado más cerca del feminismo en las últimas décadas . a pesar de la dificultad de su tarea, en tuvo un desempeño destacado, según la opinión pública chilena. a lo largo del año, las mejores evaluaciones del gabinete de piñera solían mantenerse con niveles de aprobación que alcanzaron % durante septiembre y octubre. iii. implicancias de los desafÍos al poder de gÉnero para la democracia chilena no hay democracia sin feminismo. julieta kirkwood la democracia chilena sufre, desde hace algunos años, de una “crisis de representación” (joignant et al. ). durante el , la legitimidad del sistema político chileno se posicionó en su “punto más bajo desde el retorno a la democracia” (arana araya ). las interpretaciones predominantes de este fenómeno sugieren que las movilizaciones feministas de proveen un indicador más del estrés que la democracia experimenta (castiglioni and rovira sin embargo, fue el partido conservador el que promovió el sufragio femenino durante la primera ola femi- nista en chile. los partidos liberal y radical en chile, como anticipaban que las mujeres votantes apoyarían el conservadurismo, tendieron a oponerse al sufragio femenino. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque ). en este artículo se describieron diversos acontecimientos políticos, sociales y económicos desarrollados durante el en chile. el argumento sostenido a lo largo de este trabajo sostiene que los hechos narrados han desafiado de manera históricas el poder de género. sugerimos en esta conclusión que investigaciones futuras sobre los orígenes y consecuencias del “año del feminismo” contribuirán a enriquecer los debates actuales sobre la democracia chilena que suelen omitir un enfoque de género. la crisis chilena se ha caracterizado por el deseo ciudadano de renovar la elite política. los avances recientes en la participación política femenina —las elecciones de bachelet, los gabinetes (cuasi) paritarios y la ley de cuotas— están todos relacionados con el anhelo ciudadano de nuevos liderazgos (ríos tobar ; reyes-housholder , ). un análisis con perspectiva de género enfatiza en que la dominación política de un grupo (los hombres y/o las mayorías sexuales) sobre otro grupo (las mujeres y la comunidad lgbtiq) daña la calidad de la democracia. nuevos liderazgos de mujeres desde la calle hasta la moneda emergieron durante “el año de feminismo”. tomas y marchas adhirieron en ocasiones a una lógica de separatismo: todas quienes participaran en marchas feministas debían identificarse como mujeres (miranda y roque ). además, doce mujeres y cinco hombres ganaron elecciones presidenciales para federaciones universitarias en ; de las cuales, un % serán presididas por mujeres (ramírez ). destaca también la elección de la primera mujer transgénero en la federación de estudiantes de la universidad de chile (fech), cuyo protagonismo en las movilizaciones feministas no solo desafiaba creencias de liderazgo de mujeres sino también la visibilidad de la comunidad lgbtiq. como algunos líderes estudiantiles a veces se convierten en líderes nacionales, la emergencia de mujeres líderes estudiantiles podría aumentar la oferta de mujeres líderes en el congreso y en la política chilena. nuestro artículo describió cómo se desafió la dominación masculina en la política, no solamente en la calle sino también en el poder legislativo, con la histórica presencia y actuación de legisladoras canalizando el movimiento. es el caso de maya fernández, quien ejerció el cargo de presidenta de la cámara de diputados a lo largo de , atrayendo más atención a la actuación de las parlamentarias. en el poder ejecutivo, por su parte, el ministerio de la mujer y la equidad de género, históricamente considerado de bajo prestigio y poder (escobar-lemmon y taylor-robinson ), protagonizó la agenda nacional en algunos momentos claves del año. un análisis con perspectiva de género podría sostener que las instituciones democráticas creadas por hombres han privilegiado intereses masculinos y de las mayorías sexuales. los partidos políticos que deberían canalizar las demandas de todos los ciudadanos, han representado poco los intereses de estos grupos (morgan y hinojosa ). las políticas públicas, en consecuencia, han reforzado el poder de género, perjudicando a las mujeres y a la comunidad lgbtiq. nuevas instancias presentes en el congreso —especialmente la bancada feminista, la comisión permanente en la cámara y la comisión especial en chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda el senado— pueden contribuir a rectificar estas deficiencias. el gobierno conservador de piñera se vio obligado a responder con nuevas iniciativas feministas y resucitar otras iniciativas que dormían. la falta de acción en relación a demandas articuladas en la calle pone en duda las posibilidades de avances en cambios culturales más profundos. en suma, el “año del feminismo” no solucionó las deficiencias de la democracia chilena, pese a ello, la emergencia de nuevos debates abre aristas positivas para plantear soluciones novedosas a problemáticas históricas. este artículo muestra cómo los desafíos al poder de género han permeado la sociedad civil y los movimientos sociales. es momento, entonces, de empezar a institucionalizar estas discusiones 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https://www.soychile.cl/valparaiso/sociedad/ / / / /exdi- rigenta-de-la-unab-califica-la-toma-feminista-de-vina-como-un-momento-historico. aspx sáez leal, javier. , de diciembre. “indignación feminista por el plan para llamar pablo neruda al aeropuerto de santiago de chile”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://elpais.com/cultura/ / / /actualidad/ _ .html salas, antonia. a, de mayo. “a tres días de la cuenta pública de piñera: ¿cuántas y qué universidades están en toma feminista?”. recuperado el de agosto de dehttps://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /a-tres-dias-de- la-cuenta-publica-de-pinera-cuantas-y-que-universidades-estan-en-toma-feminista. html salas, antonia. b, de junio. “universidad austral, el plantel donde se gestó la primera toma feminista en chile y protocolo contra el acoso”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /universi- dad-austral-el-plantel-donde-se-gesto-la-primera-toma-feminista-en-chile-y-proto- colo-contra-el-acoso.html salas, antonia y diego almazabar. . “tomas feministas: los establecimientos educacionales movilizados a raíz de casos de acoso”. recuperado el de agosto de de https:// www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /por-acoso-sexual-discri- catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque minacion-o-infraestructura-los-establecimientos-educacionales-del-pais-que-es- tan-en-paro-o-toma.html segovia, macarena. ª, de mayo. “mineduc saca as bajo la manga y anuncia protoco- lo para neutralizar casos de acoso sexual”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/ / / /mineduc-saca-as-ba- jo-la-manga-y-anuncia-protocolo-para-neutralizar-casos-de-acoso-sexual/ segovia, macarena. b, de julio. “masiva marcha por aborto libre da un segundo aire a la ola feminista”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.elmostrador. cl/noticias/pais/ / / /masiva-marcha-por-aborto-libre-da-un-segundo-aire- a-la-ola-feminista/ seguel a., natalia. , de mayo. “socióloga, maría emilia tijoux: ‘este movimiento femi- nista es el más grande de la historia de chile’”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.radioagricultura.cl/nacional/ / / /sociologa-maria-emilia-ti- joux-este-movimiento-feminista-es-el-mas-grande-de-la-historia-de-chile.html sepúlveda, paulina. , de marzo. “¿quiénes se oponen a las demandas sociales de las mu- jeres?”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.latercera.com/que-pa- sa/noticia/quienes-se-oponen-a-las-demandas-sociales-de-las-mujeres/ / silva, daniela. , de junio. “‘tan linda que se ve y tan dura que es’: la frase de piñera a maya fernández en las afueras del congreso”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.latercera.com/nacional/noticia/tan-linda-se-ve-tan-dura-la-frase- pinera-maya-fernandez-las-afueras-del-congreso/ / soy chile. , de mayo. “alumnas de la ufro de temuco realizaron toma de dependen- cias universitarias exigiendo una educación no sexista”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.soychile.cl/temuco/sociedad/ / / / /alum- nas-de-la-ufro-realizaron-toma-de-dependencias-universitarias-exigiendo-una-edu- cacion-no-sexista.aspx suárez-cao, julieta & alondra arellano. , de marzo. “latin america. universities and the year of the feminist uprising”. recuperado el de agosto de de https:// www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= tele . , de noviembre. “comisión de la cámara aprueba cambiar nombre al aeropuer- to de santiago por pablo neruda”. recuperado el de agosto de de https:// www.t .cl/noticia/nacional/comision-cultura-aprueba-cambiar-nombre-al-aero- puerto-internacional-santiago-pablo-neruda the clinic. , de mayo. “carlos peña destroza el posible feminismo de piñera y la de- recha: ‘hasta ayer hacía chistes groseros y sexistas’”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.theclinic.cl/ / / /carlos-pena-destroza-posible-feminis- mo-pinera-la-derecha-ayer-hacia-chistes-groseros-sexistas/ toro, sergio y macarena valenzuela. . “chile : ambiciones, estrategias y expectativas en el estreno de las nuevas reglas electorales”. revista de ciencia política ( ): - . troncoso m., constanza. , de mayo. “alumnas del liceo carmela carvajal realizan marcha feminista frente al instituto nacional”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /alumnas-del-li- ceo-carmela-carvajal-celebran-marcha-feminista-frente-al-instituto-nacional.html televisión nacional de chile. , de mayo. “con incidentes aislados culmina marcha por una educación no sexista”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www. ho- ras.cl/nacional/con-incidentes-aislados-culmina-marcha-por-una-educacion-no-se- xista- valdés, teresa y maría de los Ángeles fernández. . “género y política: un análisis perti- nente”. política : - . varas, gabriela. , de mayo. “alumnas de la universidad católica deponen toma fe- minista de casa central”. recuperado el de agosto de de https://www.emol. com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /alumnas-de-la-universidad-catoli- ca-deponen-toma-feminista-de-casa-central.html chile : desafÍos al poder de gÉnero desde la calle hasta la moneda vera, angélica. , de enero. “el caso de sophia, la lactante brutalmente asesinada que causa indignación en puerto montt”. recuperado el de agosto de de https:// www.latercera.com/nacional/noticia/caso-sophia-la-lactante-brutalmente-asesina- da-causa-indignacion-puerto-montt/ / villalobos díaz, fernanda. , de enero. “los proyectos de ley que la bancada feminista quiere dar prioridad | emol.com”. recuperado el de agosto de de https:// www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/ / / / /los-proyectos-de-ley-que- duermen-en-el-congreso-y-que-la-bancada-feminista-quiere-dar-prioridad.html recibido: de mayo de aceptado: de julio de catherine reyes-housholder: doctora en ciencia política de la universidad cornell, investigadora postdoctoral de fondecyt, investigadora asociada a icso universidad diego portales, e investigadora adjunta al centro de estudio de conflicto y cohesión social (coes). ha publicado artículos sobre temas del poder ejecutivo y el género en las revistas comparative politics, political research quarterly, latin american politics and society, y politics, groups and identities. ganó el premio de mejor tesis de doctorado en otorgada por la asociación americana de ciencia política, sección mujeres y política. puede ser contactada en catherinehousholder@gmail.com y www.reyes-housholder.com. beatriz roque: investigadora en el área de “comportamiento e institucionalidad política en américa latina” en la facultad latinoamericana de ciencias sociales (flacso-chile). su tesis de pregrado estudió el activismo trans y las legislaciones de identidad de género en bolivia y ecuador finalizó un magíster de ciencia política en la pontificia universidad católica de chile, y ha publicado capítulos de libro sobre mujeres y política en américa latina. sus intereses de investigación incluyen género y participación política, movimientos feministas y lgbt. puede ser contactada en bcroque@uc.cl. catherine reyes-housholder • beatriz roque apÉndice figura a: tasa de desocupación por sexo fuente: elaboración propia en base a la información del instituto nacional de estadísticas the messages are part of mexico’s broader reckoning with sexual harassment and assault, which in recent years has spilt onto social media with hashtags such as #miprimeracoso (‘my first harassment’). the latest tweets also contribute to science’s #metoo moment — a growing awareness of sexual misconduct in research settings, and the harm it causes. the outpouring in mexico has prompted a fierce public discussion about the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in the coun­ try’s universities, and the part that educational institutions should play in confronting and preventing such behaviour. some researchers are pushing universities to take stronger action against sexual misconduct in laboratories and classrooms, and at scientific meetings. but change must also come from scientists themselves, says antígona segura, an astro­ biologist at the nuclear sciences institute of the national autonomous university of mexico (unam) in mexico city. those who harass or assault others “should feel that we’re going to condemn them for doing these things”, says segura, an outspoken voice in the debate over sexual harassment in mexican science. “that we consider the lives of young students so important that we will not allow anyone from our community to ruin them.” research by ana buquet, director of unam’s research center for gender studies, and her colleagues suggests that mexican academia has far to go. the team last year published results from its survey of the steps that universi­ ties and research centres have taken to ensure gender equality — including policies to pre­ vent, monitor and punish sexual harassment and assault. the institutions, spread across mexico, scored an average of just . points out of . “we have serious problems in dealing with gender­based violence in higher­education institutions,” says buquet, who plans to update the survey each year. “the authorities can no longer shun the issue.” even some of the universities that ranked highest in the survey have faced criticism over their policies. in , unam — a giant of mexican higher education, which enrols about , students across roughly campuses — implemented its first protocol to address gender violence. (the term is widely used in mexico to refer to sexual harassment, assault and abuse.) the original version of the policy gave adults who had been the subject of such behaviour up to one year after an incident to file a complaint, a condition that unam eliminated in march in response to an outcry from students. the latest version of the protocol says that unam made the change after it “evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the instrument”. the university declined to comment further on the rationale for the switch. but it says that the protocol has prompted a spike in gender­ violence complaints: in less than three years, compared with just from to . but telling people who have been harassed or assaulted in academic settings to report what happened is not enough by itself, says socorro damián, a feminist lawyer at the metro­ politan autonomous university in mexico city. although mexico’s criminal code and federal laws prohibit anyone in a position of power from sexually harassing or assaulting subordinates, she says, officials at the country’s universities often discourage students from reporting incidents — and in some cases, actively delay ongoing investigations. “it’s always a question of protecting the prestige of the university at the expense of the human rights of students,” says damián. unam’s general counsel, mónica gonzález contró, rejects any suggestion that her univer­ sity does not adequately evaluate claims of sex­ ual harassment and abuse. since unam put in place its protocol for handling complaints in , the university has sought to ensure that victims of sexual harassment and abuse can “file a complaint without re­victimization, and with legal and psychological support dur­ ing the procedure”, she says. others want universities to work harder at preventing sexual misconduct, not just pun­ ishing it. maría Ávila, a population geneticist, underwent mandatory training on reporting and preventing sexual harassment in as a new postdoc at stanford university in cali­ fornia. at first, she was sceptical, but now, as a researcher at unam in querétaro, Ávila sees value in such training. “it’s important for the community to have that agreement,” she says. “to know what’s right, and what isn’t.” but such changes in mexican academia might come too late for some. after her experi­ ences at the conference where she presented her research, dana abandoned hopes of a career in science and dropped out of university. “i didn’t feel worthy of being in a good lab with a good researcher,” she says. “i was dying of shame.” now, years later, dana is planning to start her own business. she also often thinks about filing a harassment complaint against her former adviser with the university where he still works. “i don’t hate him,” dana says. “i just want it known that he’s a pig.” ■ b y a l i s o n a b b o t t most of the scientists who work for one of the world’s richest and most prestigious basic research organizations, the max planck s ociety (mps) in germany, have pride and trust in their institutes. however, cases of sexual discrimination and bullying occur regularly, and nearly half of foreign scientists working for the mps don’t feel that they fit in. these are some of the findings of a huge survey of the society’s staff and its working cul­ ture, which analysed answers from more than ,  people, or % of mps staff, at the soci­ ety’s research institutes. the society commis­ sioned the survey after two high­profile bullying scandals last year involving research directors. the draft conclusions were presented at the mps annual meeting on june in hamburg. “i wanted to get a picture of the general mood in the society so that we can base our responses to any problems on a more thorough under­ standing of how the society works,” says mps president martin stratmann. the survey was conducted independently by sociologists at the berlin­based center for responsible research and innovation, part of the fraunhofer society, germany’s main applied­research organization. bullying and harassment overall, % of staff members who responded said they were proud to work at their organi­ zation and % said they would go above and beyond to support their institute’s success. but about % said they had experienced bullying in the past months, and . % said they had done so over a longer period — figures similar to those found by surveys in countries including the united states. the incidence of gender­based discrimination or sexual harass­ ment — reported by nearly % of respondents in the past months — was below that found in other similar surveys (see ‘working culture’). “we have serious problems in dealing with gender-based violence.” r e s e a r c h c u l t u r e max planck conducts huge bullying survey thousands of employees took part in a social study after high-profile bullying scandals emerged last year. | n a t u r e | v o l | j u l y in focusnews © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. b y s a r a r e a r d o n opioid addiction kills tens of thousands of people in the united states every year, and the trend shows no signs of slowing. now, public­health officials are worried about a surge in bacterial and viral infections linked to opioid misuse that threatens to compound the crisis. the surge includes an unprecedented rise in bacterial infections — including those caused by staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that’s frequently resistant to antibiotics — and a spike in new cases of hiv and hepatitis associated with opioid use that risks undoing decades of progress against these diseases. research groups around the country are working to understand, identify and treat the outbreaks. but the lack of solid data on the number of new cases, and where they’ll crop up next, as well as the stigma associated with drug use that can prevent people with infections from seeking early treatment, is hindering efforts. “this is like hiv all over again,” says judith feinberg, an infectious­disease physician at west virginia university in morgantown, com­ paring the current crisis to the hiv epidemic that dominated us public­health efforts in the and s. “people are stigmatized; they don’t feel they deserve to live. they hear people say it’s a lifestyle choice.” over the past years, the use of opioids, including prescription pain medications, heroin and synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, has skyrocketed in the united states. in , there were roughly opioid­overdose­related deaths per , people in the country, com­ pared with per , in , according to estimates from the us centers for disease control and prevention. one type of opioid­related infection that misuse of opioids such as heroin has led to a surge in diseases including hiv, risking years of progress . p u b l i c h e a l t h us opioid crisis is driving a spike in infectious diseases researchers around the country are scrambling to understand and identify the outbreaks. that doesn’t excuse any case, says stratmann, adding that he is committed to a zero­tolerance approach to both issues. the survey comes as the international academic community grapples with issues of bullying, which have emerged in the past year or so. however, many academic institutions have not had formal bullying poli­ cies or definitions of the behaviour. stratmann says that the mps is creating a code of conduct for bullying in response to the results, and is rolling out mandatory training. the survey also found that more non­ scientific staff members than scientific ones felt that they had been bullied — % com­ pared with %. and % of women said they had experienced sexual harassment in a period longer than the past months. but unexpectedly, says stratmann, women in lead­ ership positions reported experiencing sexist behaviour at a higher rate than others — % of directors and group leaders, compared with % of postdocs and % of phd students. “ t h e ma x p l an ck s u r ve y s h ow s an apparently lower level of bullying than other academic surveys — but what really matters is that they say that the level they obser ve is unacceptable, and plan to do something about it,” says loraleigh keashly, an occupational psychologist at wayne state university in detroit, michigan, who specializes in workplace bullying. different people — for example, those from different cultures — might not consider the same types of behaviour to be bullying. so the survey asked respondents whether they had experienced particular behaviours that are indicated in the social­science literature to be bullying, such as having opinions ignored or being unfairly blamed, publicly humiliated or shouted at. around % reported having experienced one or more such behaviours. the mps’s international make­up was another focus of the survey: % of research directors there are from outside germany, as are % of postdocs. but % of the non­germans working at mps institutes felt excluded. “we have to be really worried about this,” says stratmann, who speculates that one reason for this could be language barriers. ■ s p e n c e r p l a t t /g e t t y s o u r c e : m a x p l a n c k s o c . proportion of respondents (%) non-scienti�c sta� scienti�c sta� all sta� in past months in more than a year working culture the max planck society in germany conducted a huge social study of its sta� and received more than , responses. the results will inform the development of policies on topics including bullying. have you been bullied? j u l y | v o l | n a t u r e | in focus news © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. amep_a_ .. r e v i e w second victims in health care: current perspectives this article was published in the following dove press journal: advances in medical education and practice ozcan ozeke vildan ozeke , ozlem coskun isil irem budakoglu health sciences university, ankara city hospital, department of cardiology, ankara, turkey; gaziosmanpasa university, department of computer education and instructional technology, tokat, turkey; gazi university, department of medical education and informatics, ankara, turkey abstract: medical errors are a serious public health problem and the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. every day, the health care professionals (hcps) practice their skill and knowledge within excessively complex situations and meet unex- pected patient outcomes. these unexpected complications and unintentional errors will always be a part of the medical system due to the universal nature of human fallibility and technology. while not all errors are life-threatening, they can s ignificantly compro- mise a patient’s quality of life. however, the victims of medical error reach far beyond the patient. the second victim (sv), which defined for the first time by albert wu in his description of the impact of errors on hcps by both personally and professionally, is a medical emergency equivalent to post-traumatic stress disorder. when the errors occur, it causes a domino effect including the four groups: the patient and family (first victim), the hcp [sv], the hospital reputation (third victim), and patients who are harmed subsequently (fourth victims). the rights of our patients to safe, reliable, and patient-centered care are critical and most important as a primary and utmost aim of medicine. however, we also have to take care of our own (svs), especially when we have good people who mean to do well and then find themselves in an emotionally complex situation. there is a need to articulate to the public, politicians, and media how system failure leads to medical error even in hand of well-educated and competent hcps are given an increasing clinical workload. furthermore, despite several leading institutions in western countries have developed formal support programs that allow hcps to cope with their emotional distress by obtaining timely support in an emphatic, confidential, non-judgmental environment, we need to raise awareness of this phenomenon and appropriate institutional responses both to harmed patients and their families and hcps. keywords: second victim, defensive medicine, medical malpractice, medical errors, clinical-judicial syndrome, second victim syndrome introduction every day, health care professionals (hcps) practice their art and science within excessively complex health care (hc) situations and meet unexpected patient outcomes. avoiding complications is a major goal of all patient safety efforts; however, medical errors and adverse events will likely always be a part of the medical system due to the universal nature of human fallibility. these adverse events may cause a patient serious harm or death; therefore, the patient becomes the “first victim” of these events. however, the victims of medical error reach far beyond the patient. when the errors occur, there is a knock-on effect with four groups: i) the patient and family (first victims), ii) the hcps [second victim (sv)], iii) the hospital reputation (third victim), , and iv) patients who are harmed subsequently (fourth victim). first and foremost, we have to take care of the correspondence: ozcan ozeke sağlık bilimleri Üniversitesi, ankara Şehir hastanesi, kardiyoloji klinigi, ankara , turkiye tel + email ozcanozeke@gmail.com advances in medical education and practice dovepress open access to scientific and medical research open access full text article submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com advances in medical education and practice : – dovepress © ozeke et al. this work is published and licensed by dove medical press limited. the full terms of this license are available at https://www.dovepress.com/terms. php and incorporate the creative commons attribution – non commercial (unported, v . ) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /). by accessing the work you hereby accept the terms. non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from dove medical press limited, provided the work is properly attributed. for permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs . and of our terms (https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php). http://doi.org/ . /amep.s a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com https://www.facebook.com/dovemedicalpress/ https://twitter.com/dovepress https://www.linkedin.com/company/dove-medical-press https://www.youtube.com/user/dovepress http://www.dovepress.com/permissions.php patients and families (first victims). however, we have to take care of our own (svs), especially when we have good people who mean to do well and then find them- selves in an emotionally complex situation. we should keep intentional negligence and harm because of malice, out of this topic. definition of second victim the sv term was used for the first time by albert wu in his description of the impact of medical errors on hcps – especially when there has been an error or the hcp feels responsibility for the outcome. using the term victim leads two concerns as follows: signifying passivity or stigmatizing involved hcps. , some authors recommended to abandon the term sv. it can be seen as insensitive to the patient as well as dissipat- ing the professional identity of the hcp, and even wu has recently acknowledged concerns about its use. however, it has been used as an internationally recog- nized term by hcps and managers as well as policy makers because it is memorable and connotes urgency. it is not denying responsibility but highlighting that something needs attention. prevalance of svs among medical subspecialties after an adverse event, the prevalence of svs varied from . % up to . %. almost half of hcps experience the impact as an sv at least one time in their career. indeed, there are always svs, when there is a serious patient adverse event, but mostly silent because of the fear of litigation and absence of a well-defined reporting system. the effects were particularly strong among physicians specializing in surgery, anesthesiology, pediatrics, or obstetrics and gynecology. – in hospitals, most of the malpractice asser- tions are related to “surgical” or “infusion errors”, whereas for outpatient care, the most assertions are related to “unno- ticed” or “late diagnosis”. , , nurses, pharmacists, and other members of the hc team are also susceptible to error and vulnerable to unanticipated patient harm. – trainees and interns may be particularly defenseless to continuing damage to their clinical confidence and self-esteem. impact of svs on hcp and recovery process of svs the second victim syndrome (svs) is defined as the hcps who commit an error and are traumatized by the event manifesting psychological (shame, guilt, anxiety, grief, and depression), cognitive (compassion dissatisfaction, burnout, secondary traumatic stress), and/or physical reac- tions that have a personal negative impact. wolf et al described svs’ reactions as unique and traumatic in terms of social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, and physical characteristics. some have suggested that the svs has very similar signs and symptoms with acute stress disorder , , and a medical trauma requiring a psycho- logical emergency care. one clinician with svs describes his experience as “emotional tsunami”, which he had never ever experienced before in his professional career. these emotional effects can last for weeks or up to several years , depending on the nature of the case and severity of injury to the patient, and even cause long-term conse- quences similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). the victim repeatedly reassesses the situation with “what if” questions. however, this idea of svs as an emergency situation is not the common point that all authors agree. these types of cases are unforgettable and can leave permanent emotional scars on hcp. psychological dis- tress, aftermath of adverse events, has a long-lasting impact on hcp’s quality of life and it may affect the job performance and the ability to provide safe patient care (fourth victims). the severity of the sv response is affected by a number of variables. for example, a patient may remind the clinician a loved one from his/her own family (eg, the same name, age, or physical characteris- tics), the close relationship between the patient and hcp, the length of professional relationships, cases that involved pediatric patients, the clinician’s past clinical experiences, support or blame by colleagues/mentors, and spirituality may be some of the sv response variables. the course of events is largely predictable. , scott et al identified the natural history of the svs phenomenon with six stages as sv recovery process: i) chaos and accident response, ii) intrusive reflections, iii) restoring personal integrity, iv) enduring the inquisition, v) obtaining emo- tional first aid, and vi) moving on (table ). during the first stage of “chaos and accident response,” immediately after the adverse event occurs, svs begin to understand the magnitude and may experience inner strife or easily get distracted. at the second stage of “intrusive reflections”, the svs reenact the event and may feel insufficiency. during the critical third stage of “restoring personal integ- rity,” hcps will begin to seek support from a trusted individual such as a mentor, colleague, family member or friend. without a positive supportive environment during ozeke et al dovepress submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress advances in medical education and practice : a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com this stage, hcps may find extreme difficulty moving for- ward from the event. personal reflections of hcps reveal challenges such as “what will others think about me” and “will i ever be trusted again”. sv may pass through one or more of the first three stages at the same time. stage four of the recovery process is known as “enduring the inquisi- tion” when the sv begins to focus on the potential reper- cussions affecting job security, licensure, and future litigation. while awaiting investigation of the error, the sv is often plagued with fears of losing the job and its financial consequences; being labeled as incompetent or careless by colleagues, their family, and the patient’s family; losing coworkers’ respect; involvement in a civil or crim- inal court proceeding; and losing the professional license. during this stage, it is critical that the hcps start to worry about reactions from their organization and potential reper- cussions. stage five involves “obtaining emotional first aid”. victims seek emotional support and are often concerned about who is safe to confide. peer supporters, patient safety, and risk management all play a crucial role in ensuring the hcp has a safe space to recover from the event. in the final stage, “moving on,” has three notable ways. some “dropped out” either by moving another places or quitting medical practice completely (eg, changing jobs) while others “sur- vived” but continued to carry significant emotional luggage. some give up their profession and a few hcps even com- mit suicide because of the experience. the “thrived” hcps were able to acquire something positive from the experience (ie, making something good out of the experi- ence). the culture and rapid response of an organization is essential for the recovery of victims and will ultimately affect how they move on. for the five human rights of svs, there is a suggested proposal as an acronym of trust (treatment, respect, understanding and compassion, supportive care, and transparency and opportunities to contribute their learning). in the literature, there are potential solutions which are proposed as follows: hcp counseling, learning from mistakes without fear of punishment, discussing mis- takes with others, emphasizing hcp wellness, and focus- ing on the system versus the individual. svs deserve the assumption that their intentions were good, they deserve respect and common reverence, and they should not be blamed and embarrassed for their human fallibility. , they need compassion and gratitude for their recovery, and leaders must understand the psychological emergency that occurs when a patient is unintentionally damaged. , in terms of contributing to the prevention of future events, the svs should have the opportunity to share the problems that cause errors, and to participate learning from gathered error, and the opportunity for recovery should be provided to them. , impact of svs on health care system: defensive medicine if resulted in a tragic death, the representation of these adverse events as criminal acts will have adverse effects on hc system. after the adverse events resulted in a tragic loss of life, the representation of these events as criminal acts is likely to have an adverse effect on hc system. in addition to svs, the literature has described another condi- tion; the clinical-judicial syndrome which is affecting care- givers at any moment during a medical litigation. , it is well documented that a lawsuit can be one of the most table second victim recovery trajectory , stages of second victim syndrome stage chaos and accident response “how and why did this happen?” stage intrusive reflections “how did i miss this and could this have been prevented?” stage restoring personal integrity “what will others think?” ”will i ever be trusted again?” stage enduring the inquisition “i might get fired,” “the double fear” stage obtaining emotional first aid peer supporters stage moving on (a) by dropping out “every day is like eternity,” (b) by surviving (c) by thriving “following the event i learned my lessons.” dovepress ozeke et al advances in medical education and practice : submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com emotionally damaging experience for a clinician. it may become common for hcps to practice defensive medicine aimed to protect themselves from liability rather than actu- ally advancing care of patients, that often translates to ordering unnecessary tests and costs. the impact of med- ical malpractice litigation on medical practice is grossly underestimated by politicians and “super lawyers”. as a natural result, defensive medicine emerged as a conse- quence of a deep crisis in the relationship between physi- cians, payers, and society. management: whom/when/how should/must support the sv? it is crucial that the patients and families harmed by medical errors must be paid increased attention. on the other side, it is also crucial that we have to take care of our own svs, especially when we have good people who mean to do well but then find themselves in an emotionally complex situation. , however, very little attention has been dedicated to hcps involved in adverse. most svs have often suffered in silence. only % of the svs agreed that hc organizations adequately supported them in coping with error-related stress. even some hc orga- nizations have an employee assistance program, svs may be reluctant to access this service because of concerns about confidentiality and other barriers. , svs often felt that others saw their efforts to seek help as a sign of professional/personal weakness and vulnerability. in that point, the role of clinical leaders is utmost important by providing empathy and emotional support. whereas col- leagues, rather than friends or family, offer the most useful support; a few hcp may also require psychological ther- apy/counseling. both emotional and informational sup- port by colleagues, a mentor, or a supervisor are the most requested and most useful strategies. scott et al con- cluded that, in the early stages, trained supervisors and colleagues would be ideal for providing support and, in the later stages mental health professionals could be benefi- cial. the best strategy appears to be to create supporting networks at individual, organizational, national, or inter- national level. supportive care must be delivered by a professional in an organized way when needed. the hc organizations and clinical or senior leaders have a moral obligation to take care of hcps, after a system failure or human error which resulted in patient harm, and must encourage their organizations to respect those involved in that event. , , hospitals publish clear guidelines for handling adverse events and should share their institu- tional policy on open disclosure. for example, the hc institution should develop the accountability mechanism, simple checklists, and clear guidelines about who will be responsible for what and when, and how they will act. when starting a prosecution about a significant adverse event, in addition to the root cause investigation, a parallel investigation should be started to determine if there are svs. the influence of the adverse event on svs’ work is particularly important in the first – hrs, because at those moments, they had high potential to be involved in another adverse event. scott et al provide details about performing a sv rapid-response team right after a harmful error. basic education which may reduce some of the anxiety about the possible legal process surrounding adverse events should be organized. , both psychologi- cal help and legal assistance are significant for svs. several leading institutions in western countries have developed formal support programs that allow hcps to cope with their emotional distress by obtaining timely support in an emphatic, confidential, non-judgmental environment. johns hopkins hospital has a multi-disci- plinary svs work group, which is working to assist the hospital in delivering care and support to the hcps. johns hopkins hospital has rise (resilience in stressful events) program which uses an emotional peer-support with volunteer hcps. these volunteers as a part of multi- disciplinary peer responder team are learning how to talk to svs and give them a safe harbor for exploring their emotions aftermath a traumatic event. john hopkins medicine (http://bit.ly/ ivycip) and the center for patient safety (http://bit.ly/ iwps q) have online resources about svs. the second and third victims research group reported the following recommendations in order to prevent the adverse events timely, as struc- tured around eight areas: (a) safety and organizational policies, (b) patient care, (c) proactive approach to pre- venting reoccurrence, (d) supporting the clinician and health care team, (e) activation of resources to provide an appropriate response, (f) informing patients and/or family members, (g)incidents’ analysis, and (h) protecting the reputation of hcps and the organization. root analysis: from “culture of blame” to a “just culture” blaming individuals is emotionally more satisfying than targeting institutions. in ancient times, the bearer of the ozeke et al dovepress submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress advances in medical education and practice : a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://bit.ly/ ivycip http://bit.ly/ iwps q http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com news that a battle had been lost was often killed. similarly, while responding to bad news, some patients blame their clinicians. unfortunately, our medical culture has been lacking in its support of the hcps involved in these cases. whereas the hcp can be severely affected by the adverse event itself, the main decisive factors are the response of the patient, family, peers, and managers. the colleagues offer unsympathetic comments that can be help (or harm further) to hcp. , , the hcps have stated that many organizational reactions to medical errors are malicious, threatening, isolating, and fundamentally unhelpful. the svs reported that it is impossible to move forward when the adverse event was followed by non-supportive, mal- icious gossip. as a moral necessity, our current culture of renunciation, isolation, and punishment of svs should transform into a culture that maintains accessible and effective support for these wounded. in medicine, deter- mining the root cause of errors (by root cause analysis) is also important to help prevent the occurrence of future errors. investigation of the adverse event has become a routine part of the hospital’s reaction. however, the above scheme of support is not meant to disrupt any correct medical investigation or to stand between the sv and his superiors, but rather to allow them to cope with these events. it is critical but often misunderstood. careful investigation is important in order to avoid treating the physician as if he were in court for committing a crime. this type of criminal prosecution of human error will likely have terrible everlasting outcomes. indeed, medical error causes the patient harm because of two factors; individual or systemic. there is a risk of human error behind every endeavor, but each person should be held accountable only for things under his con- trol. in order for the patient safety, hcps should have appropriate tools and environment to perform the neces- sary tasks and coordinate their effort. the swiss cheese model is a useful theoretical model for accident causation while explaining the multidimensional (human, organiza- tional, and technological) aspects of hc data breaches. james reason categorized errors under active or latent factors. the active errors at the “sharp end” are related with the interaction of hcps with patients or equipment. the latent errors at the “blunt end” are related with defects in the design of systems, organizations, management, training, and equipment. latent factors or conditions are inherent in the system (eg, heavy workload, structure of organizations, the work environment), and in time, these factors begin to trigger the problems and start to affect hcps and care processes, then one day an active error occurs. these blunt-end factors, including economic pol- icymakers, insurance administrators, payers, regulators, and technology suppliers influence and shape the demands within the hospitals. the totality of active and latent errors of a system may regard as systems fault. focusing on their root causes reduces the number of hazards and risks. underlying medical condition of the patient is the main source of “harm”. however, a medical error may be another source of unintended harm to the patient, and it is related to the care and/or services provided to the patient. still, one of the most challenging unanswered question is “what constitutes a medical error?” nobody have clear answer to this basic question, which makes “medical errors” difficult to measure scientifically. some can accept bad consequences (“harm”) as “accident” and “misfortune” instead of “mistakes/errors”. there are many ways for error categorizing. one common way is determining if the act is an omission of action or a com- mission of action. lee expands the omission/commission conceptualization of error making as follows: underuse, misuse, and overuse. the error of omission occurs as a result of no action (underuse), the error of the commission occurs as a result of the wrong action taken (misuse or overuse). , medical error defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome. error of execution is defined as the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended, error of planning is defined as the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim, or a deviation from the process of care that may or may not cause harm to the patient. , wu et al define a mistake as commission or omission with potentially negative out- comes for the patient that would have been judged wrong by skilled and knowledgeable peers at the time it occurred, even it doesn’t have any negative outcomes. although there are differences in definitions, four general elements exist for defining the errors in the literature: intentionality, outcome, choice, and culpability. malicious acts are not considered neither a mistake, nor as if it was done for beneficial purpose. morality based on being the more “proper choice” among at least two choices or paths. therefore, the ethical decisions are more suitably characterized as “better choices” or “more fitting”, rather than “right” or “wrong”. howe believed that consensus could detect when an error has occurred. his definitions of nonmistakes, mistakes, and possible mistakes are dovepress ozeke et al advances in medical education and practice : submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com detected by the views of other practitioners’ judgments about that action. if there is a consensus of practitioners, a mistake or nonmistake could be defined, but a possible mistake could be defined when there is no consensus of practitioners. more recently, marx has introduced a just culture term which differentiates between error and unjus- tifiable risk-taking. , , in just culture, individuals are evaluated in their actions, based on whether or not they take unjustifiable risk. because nobody has the right to increase the risk unjustifiably. if a patient has two different problems, the hcp has to take risk to balance them, then the balance may change in this condition. there are algo- rithms and associated educational materials that can be previewed online (https://www.outcome-eng.com/). these tools can help distinguish among (a) human error (what was done instead of what should have been done), (b) reckless behavior (causing harm to a patient), and (c) at- risk behavior (unsafe). with the help of these tools, the experts can be more effective while separating blameless error and justifiable risk from unjustifiable risk-taking, and also decide better in differentiating system accountability and individual accountability. apology and error disclosure: ethical obligation and learning from errors when the error occurs, there are three stages in responding ethically: disclosure, apology, and amends. apology is pain- ful on its own, but it is also cleansing and refreshing. when an error occurs and is noticed, hcp’s explanation of the error to patients, families, and hospital colleagues is a difficult and/or threatening process for most physicians. in particular, the expression of moral feelings such as guilt, regret, and remorse play an important role in explaining the errors to patients and families. hcps fear that acceptance of guilt or expressions of remorse could be used by litigants in malpractice lawsuits, so apologies and full disclosure are rare in the medical world. nevertheless, the ethical thing to do is disclosing adverse events and apologizing to harmed patients, regardless of whether it decreases or increases rates of litigation. recently, in some of us states the courts have attempted to encourage physicians to reveal medical errors by enacting “apology laws”. under these laws, a physician’s apology to a patient or family cannot be used against that physician in future litigation. promoting and protecting open communication was the main goal while enacting these laws. even though it is no guarantee, , , the studies showed that full disclosure to patients is associated with greater trust, higher satisfac- tion, more positive emotional response, less support for sanctions against the physician, and less probability of changing physicians. on the other side, insurance compa- nies may avoid payouts after these laws, but injured patients can be damaged if they accept the apology in lieu of full compensation. it remains unknown whether these laws will reach their aims of encouraging apologies and open communication and decreasing litigation. the most important thing about error is recurrence, the fact that the same situation shapes the same kinds of errors in different people. hospitals and organizations need to support clinicians throughout the disclosure process and facilitate learning for the system and individual in order to prevent recurrences. learning from errors is possible only when the errors are reported. in particular, blaming or punishing individuals for errors due to systemic causes does not address the causes nor prevent a repetition of the error. governmental, legal, and medical institutions must work collaboratively to remove the culture of blame, shame, and punishment while retaining accountability. otherwise, it remains as blame and shame culture and gets difficult to change the non-reporting culture. primordial prevention of medical errors by education at medical schools and institutions medical education in all levels (undergraduate, graduate, and continuous) aims to train successful hcps. medical schools are sometimes insufficient to prepare trainees for the reality of the practice of medicine, to the more prag- matic skills such as time management, conflict resolution, and damage control. junior residents, overwhelmed by the demands of daily floor work, can easily lose sight of the reasons that they went into medicine. when an adverse event occurs, they feel important barriers such as fear of outcomes, attitudes about disclosure, lack of skill and role models, and lack of peer and institutional support. the medical education should also emphasize confronting the emotional dimensions of the errors by the physician trai- nees, with the full acceptance by the senior attending medical staff. the new technology may make one part of our life easier, but many of us rarely trained on new technologies in real-life conditions. the simulation labs might become much more effective when we need to repeat the real experience and ozeke et al dovepress submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress advances in medical education and practice : a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / https://www.outcome-eng.com/ http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com practice more for different scenarios. there are online train- ing programs , , on medical errors, and sv education toolkits such as the svs toolkit, the mindfulness and medita- tion toolkit and the positive psychology toolkit which improves self-evaluation, attitudes, and skills in junior doctors. however, the online materials (video, podcast, simulation, animation…, etc.) about practice of medicine are more than the materials which aim to teach pragmatic skills. medical educators should focus to design and develop more resources for these skills. one of a physician’s most difficult duty is breaking (delivering) bad news, and medical education offers little formal preparation for this difficult task. most hcps avoid such conversations entirely or they speak to patients using medical jargon. medical facul- ties should train the residents for communicating with patients and their family aftermath of an adverse event about following issues; i) how to disclose bad news or errors (abcde model or spikes protocols ), ii) apologize to injured patients and families, iii) reinforce the commitment to continued care, and iv) repair of trust. , combining evi- dence-based clinician training with health system workflow redesign would likely maximize the impact of this training. physicians often discuss their colleagues’ mistakes among themselves, but less with patients. , the prevalent culture of perfectionism and individual blame in medicine may play a prominent role toward these negative acts. on the other side, more acceptance of criticism of professional conduct may prevent patient harm and may also give more support to peers who have involved serious patient injury. doctors who found it easy to criticize peers also reported having received more support from their peers after a ser- ious patient injury. present medical culture was critiqued by coulehan as “characterized by arrogance and entitlement”. according to berger, the arrogance is sys- temic and beyond the individual physician. today, being a physician is not idealized, the doctor–patient relationship in the hc system has depersonalized and the “system arro- gance” has emerged in which the patient is seen not as a person but as a job. additionally, arrogance among med- ical staff, such as doctors and nurses, affects relationships between a doctor and their patient negatively. this failure to communicate as a team may result in costly mistakes by physicians and nurses and could potentially cost them their jobs or patients’ lives. medicine is a stressful career, and physician wellness is often neglected within the culture of medicine. physician burnout is a hot topic these days and increasing at an alarm- ing rate. nearly half of the residents report burnout during their second year of residency, and in reports regretting their career choice. if we can change the conditions under which people work, then it may cause an indirect change in their personal condition. in their zeal to promote hc qual- ity, payers, regulators, politicians, and employers have meddled in the doctor–patient relationship with requirements promoted by the performance assessment tools, quality mea- sures, and workflow issues related to the use of electronic health record (ehr) system. moreover, in the era of #metoo, physicians should confirm that the medical profes- sion has nonimmunity to bullying, harassment, and discrimi- nation, and act to remove these attitudes. , the literature has found that women physicians may be more likely to experience negative emotional and professional outcomes related to adverse events than men and that these outcomes may be more pronounced among women with family responsibilities. it has been recommended that sexual har- assment, mobbing and burnout awareness and training should be implemented in the medical school curriculum. change in medical culture culture change is ultimately more important than any single intervention. patients’ expectations and the role of the doctor in the patient–physician relationship are changing. patients may perceive their doctors as infall- ible experts. physicians similarly tend to expect the same unrealistic levels of perfection from themselves. although it is often said that “doctors are only human” or “err is human”, developments in medical technology and the greater precision of laboratory tests since s have in fact generated an expectation of perfection. furthermore, popular media have a perception that morbidity and mor- tality should be “never events” in minor surgeries, preg- nancy, and delivery, and if an adverse event happens, it is because of an error. , the hcps are also victims of a system motivated by politics and “super lawyers”. , the political and media climates in many countries too often demand that hcps are held responsible regardless of the reason. , the proliferation of news magazines and the success of investigative journalism have made sensa- tionalized investigations of many institutions, including hospitals, a highly successful and profitable enterprise. trust has always been the basis of the doctor–patient relationship; however, in their article entitled “the end of the golden age of doctoring,” authors capture the impact of managed care on the erosion of patients’ trust. fueled by anecdotal reports of excessive salaries and managed care company profits, public opinion is turning dovepress ozeke et al advances in medical education and practice : submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com against physicians and the essential trust has been wea- kened by changes in the structure and financing of the hc system. mistrust in hc is associated with the increment of medical negligence, complaints and lawsuit cases. bawa-garba’s case became a cause celebre among doc- tors, many of whom thought that she had been made a scapegoat for an overstretched and underfunded nhs. in , dr hadiza bawa-garba was found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter after mistakenly misdiagnosing sepsis as gastroenteritis in -year-old jack adcock, who subsequently died in at leicester royal infirmary. this was a case that triggered a public debate about the increasing pressures facing doctors at work, how they are impacting upon their effectiveness, and the extent to which they should be taken into account in medical negligence cases. bawa-garba told the jury that she had worked for hrs without a break. the media and politicians should realize the extremely damaging nature of reporting pre- sumed medical errors and subjecting physicians to public trials through newspapers, radios, television, or websites before they are eventually judged in court. mirza explained the bawa-garba principle states as when an otherwise competent doctor is given an increas- ing clinical workload in situations of inadequate support or systemic failure, or both, at some point medical error becomes inevitable. therefore, we will need a cultural shift in medicine. the traditional culture of shame and blame aimed at hcps who have experienced an sv phenomenon should be rapidly replaced by a movement toward a “just culture”. medicine can never have complete validation for each treatment for each patient subgroup. we will always be alone with our “best guess” for many patients. however, we need also to take steps to reassure patients and rebuild public trust in our efforts. , – the more humble the medical profes- sion is, the more likely we will avoid costly errors. , we should explain more to the public, as described in the book “to err is human”, people working at hc are not bad people, they are good people who are trying to make bad systems safer. despite several leading institutions in western countries have developed formal support pro- grams that allow hcps to cope with their emotional dis- tress by obtaining timely support in an emphatic, confidential, non-judgmental environment, we need to raise awareness of this phenomenon and also appropriate institutional responses to both harmed patients and their families and hcps. disclosure the authors report no conflicts of interest in this work. references . wienke a. errors and pitfalls: briefing and accusation of medical malpractice - the second victim. gms curr top otorhinolaryngol head neck surg. ; :doc . . wu aw. medical error: the second victim. the doctor who makes the mistake needs help too. bmj. ; ( ): – . doi: . /bmj. . . . 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journal advances in medical education and practice is an international, peer- reviewed, open access journal that aims to present and publish research on medical education covering medical, dental, nursing and allied health care professional education. the journal covers undergraduate education, postgraduate training and continuing medical education including emerging trends and innovative models linking education, research, and health care services. the manuscript management system is completely online and includes a very quick and fair peer-review system. visit http://www.dovepress.com/testimonials.php to read real quotes from published authors. submit your manuscript here: http://www.dovepress.com/advances-in-medical-education-and-practice-journal dovepress ozeke et al advances in medical education and practice : submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com dovepress a d va n ce s in m e d ic a l e d u ca tio n a n d p ra ct ic e d o w n lo a d e d f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .d o ve p re ss .c o m / b y . . . o n -a p r- f o r p e rs o n a l u se o n ly . powered by tcpdf (www.tcpdf.org) / http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com/testimonials.php http://www.dovepress.com http://www.dovepress.com tax, order, and good government: a new political history of canada, - by e.a. heaman copyright © the ontario historical society, ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : ontario history tax, order, and good government: a new political history of canada, - by e.a. heaman robert a.j. mcdonald volume , numéro , fall uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) the ontario historical society issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce compte rendu mcdonald, r. a. ( ). compte rendu de [tax, order, and good government: a new political history of canada, - by e.a. heaman]. ontario history, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ -v -n -onhistory / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ book reviews these complexities wonderfully. again and again throughout this book, goodhand’s interviewees assert that their biggest barrier to confronting vio- lence against women was the failure to rec- ognize the “scope and nature of the prob- lem” ( ). reading this book, one can’t help but reflect on the similarities with our present moment and the almost-daily revelations of entrenched violence that have come to light because of the #metoo movement. feminists still battle against an assumption that violence against women is the result of the individual patholog y of a bad man, rather than a manifestation of patriarchy and the oppression rooted in colonialism, racism, disability, and other kinds of inequality. there was widespread reluctance, for example, to identify the ten murders and sixteen injuries that resulted from the so-called toronto van attack of april as patriarchal violence, despite the fact that it was perpetrated by a young man who was reportedly motivated by rage at being spurned by women and consid- ered himself “involuntarily celibate.” to- day, as in the early s, “it’s a lot easier to pretend it isn’t a problem” ( ) if we don’t recognize the “scope and nature” of gender-based violence. goodhand’s his- tory captures both the ongoing need for feminist activism at the level of society and state, and, equally importantly, it reminds us of the need to recognize and support the women who do the fundraising, write the grants, organize the meetings, buy the groceries, and clean the houses, doing the daily work of caring for the victims and survivors of violence. lisa pasolli queen’s university tax, order, and good government a new political history of canada, - by e.a. heaman montreal and kingston: mcgill univer- sity press, . xiv, pages. $ . hard- cover. isbn - - - - . in tax, order, and good government elsbeth heaman makes a compelling case that it is time to write taxes and pov- erty into canadian history. framed as an example of the “new political history,” the book studies canada’s tax history as a social history of politics for the period to . it does so from both the top-down perspective of the state and the bottom-up perspective of the people. of ontario history these, it is the bottom-up perspective, re- flecting the author’s desire to understand how popular agency influenced the way that “taxes mediated between wealth and poverty,” that drives the narrative ( ). in- deed, heaman argues, though canadian historians have ignored the country’s tax history, such was not the case for the peo- ple themselves whose debates about taxa- tion addressed the problems of wealth and poverty head-on. this book is a study of what canadians said about wealth, pover- ty, and taxes before the introduction of the federal income tax. it is written from the perspective of progressives who challenged the rule of property. as heaman observes, the “desperate pleas of the poor from harsh taxation do matter. they give this book its moral centre” ( ). heaman argues that the canadian state at confederation, and for decades after under conservative and liberal par- ty administrations, governed according to classic liberal principles. they did so as clients of the propertied class, protect- ing wealth and ensuring that poverty was “a problem of civil society rather than the state” ( ). to achieve this goal it limited federal taxation to indirect customs and excise taxes, which spread the federal tax load to the general population through the tariff, disproportionately burdening cana- dians as consumers. the creative heart of the book is the author’s extensive coverage of tax history at the provincial and munici- pal levels where direct taxes prevailed, and from which the radical potential of taxing income spread. the emphasis on direct taxation “prompted searching questions about how municipal taxation related to the big social and economic questions of the day,” leading, for instance, to the on- tario legislature’s decision in march to pass a new direct tax on wealthy corpo- rations ( ). yet, even when the federal government, under war conditions, began taxing income in , the resistance of property successfully constrained the tax’s capacity to confiscate capital and redistrib- ute wealth. an important agent of this transfor- mation was henry george’s single tax, which heaman concludes was a far more important instrument of social inquiry about the concentration of canadian wealth than historians have appreciated. while single tax was particularly popular in the west, she argues, it infused virtually all forms of progressive thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving as “a useful instrument of alliance building. it got bread-and-butter concerns more squarely into mainstream liberal politics” ( - ). single taxers helped to engineer new thinking about the relation- ship between wealth and poverty, from heaman’s perspective the central question of canada’s tax history in the half century after confederation. one of the book’s prominent features is its hard-charging flow that sweeps up in its pages a vast trove of historical in- sight about canadian political history and the ideas about taxation and wealth that shaped it. it is written from the perspective of a particular understanding of the mean- ing of liberalism, one that in the lockean tradition puts property at its centre. but among the several variants of liberalism in the victorian and edwardian eras was “new liberalism,” a strand influenced by intel- lectuals such as john stuart mill and t.h. green that was more deliberately collectiv- ist than classic liberalism while remaining faithful to core liberal values. is it possible that heaman’s highly-focused equation of liberalism with property underestimates the challenge to canada’s class-based tax system that flowed from the statist ideas of “new liberal” reformist thought? the au- book reviews thor’s handling of the relationship between taxes and racism is one of the most intrigu- ing but ultimately unsatisfying aspects of the book. for instance, the chapter on the tax history of the recently-created province of british columbia is an important addi- tion to the pacific province’s historiogra- phy, moving beyond the earlier insights on racism in bc by patricia roy. heaman’s argument that bc politicians in the s “tried, as much as possible, to tax by race” is convincing ( ). so too is her assertion that during the war income tax was intro- duced in a manner that aimed to protect the property interests of the anglo wealth community rather than those of french canadians. but i do wonder how germane the question of racism is to the central ar- gument of the book. quibbles aside, tax, order, and good government represents a powerful addi- tion to the developing field of “new po- litical history.” in particular, it helps to define the field in two ways. first, along with shirley tillotson’s recently-published give and take: the citizen-taxpayer and the rise of canadian democracy ( ) it challenges readers to consider how the tax system mediated relations between citizens and the canadian state. heaman’s empha- sis on the creative function of municipal and provincial tax policies, and the need to understand how thinking about taxes encompasses all levels of the state, is an im- portant contribution to the development of canadian political history. in addition, tax, order, and good government reminds us that there is much more to be said about the relationship between wealth, poverty, and political power in canadian history. heaman has written an outstanding book that, while too long, is consequential. it is a book that ontario history readers will find provocative and rewarding. robert a.j. mcdonald department of history university of british columbia (ret.) with never rest on your ores, nor-man b. keevil of teck-hughes gold mines ltd. adds his family’s story to a stack of popular mining histories written in ontario since the s. in the tradition of the genre, never rest on your ores celebrates liberal corporate as- cension while erasing indigenous people. despite some serious problems, readers may find some useful material here: teck- hughes is of a newer generation than the usual subjects of popular business story- telling (i.e. the long-dead behemoths of the early twentieth century industry). never rest on your ores portrays an ag- ile, connected, and responsive company which successfully navigated the cyclical nature of its industry and continues to shape the world in the present. keevil’s portrayal is rooted in his ca- never rest on your ores building a mining company, one stone at a time by norman b. keevil montreal & kingston, mcgill-queen’s university press, . pag- es. $ . cloth. isbn - - - - . (www.mqup.ca) the way we look matters: witnessing. trauma. perspectivism. by logan alexander m.a., brock university, a thesis submitted in partial fullfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (interdisciplinary studies) [rhetoric/philosophy/performance studies] the university of british columbia (vancouver) april © logan alexander ii the following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: the way we look maters: witnessing. trauma. perspectivism_ submitted by logan alexander in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in interdisciplinary studies examining committee: dr. steven taubeneck, german, philosophy and interdisciplinary studies co-supervisor dr. janice stewart, institute of gender, race, sexuality and social justice. co-supervisor additional supervisory committee members: dr. carl leggo, language and literacy education supervisory committee member iii abstract this began as a film project. we took cameras and queer actors on a filmed/photographed walk in downtown vancouver to demonstrate that people who look queer receive harsh micro-expressions when they are in public space. the photos were taken in public space and the actors consented to having their images used for this project. this is using the same public photography method used by hayley morris caffiero (professor of photography) in her project wait watchers, where she photographed herself in public space and captured the micro-expressions of members of the public as a provocative statement about the type of treatment that fat people experience in public. i wanted to use this photographic method with queer people to demonstrate how queer people are looked at in public, and i wanted to interview the actors afterwards using a photo-elicited interview method where we would review the footage together during a debriefing interview. after i experienced an inter-lgbtq-community trauma, i decided to incorporate a deeper layer of auto-ethnography into the project and turn this into a story about how we all look at each other imperfectly, including ourselves, including me. it became a process for me to document and move through a phase of existential resentment towards hope. this work is intended as art. it is also intended to be provocative in order to prompt dialogue regarding the importance of the phenomenon of “looking at others” and “being looked at” vis a vis gender and power and hope. i used an interdisciplinary/mixed methods approach: philosophical inquiry, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, rhetorical analysis, auto-ethnography, photography, performance, conscientization and photo-elicited journalism. my conclusion is that the way we look does matter, but so does the way we talk about the process of looking, and if we lapse into dogmatic controlling behaviors in response to being looked at harshly, then we perpetuate harm. i also conclude that to some degree hope is an elusive, and mysterious, but nonetheless existentially, poetically, and even academically significant framework from which to perform inquiries about power and gender and witnessing. iv lay summary the way we look matters because looking at each other and being looked at by others might be one of the oldest ways that human beings have been connecting and making meaning with each other. it’s a phenomenon that’s intrigued philosophers for centuries, and it’s a tension that prompts questions for almost everyone in the era of multi-media/social media. this is an investigation into looking/being looked at using interviews, photography, storytelling and poetry. thank you for reading, and welcome to my story. i hope you see something in here that makes you wonder. v preface this dissertation is original, unpublished work by logan alexander who acted as researcher/story- teller, producer and director in collaboration with photographer ray mceachern, and actors justin saint, taz samorodin, and melody dawn. figures: , , , , , , are photos taken by ray mceachern, who signed a release form. figures: , , are photos of justin saint, who signed a release form. figures: , , , are photos of taz samorodin, and figure: is a .gif of taz samorodin, who signed a release form. figure: is a photo of melody johnson, who signed a release form. after submitting the project proposal for ethical review, the ubc behavioral research ethics board deemed it unnecessary to seek ethics approval for this project on the grounds that it falls under “creative practice.” vi table of contents abstract………………………………..…………………………………………………………... iii lay summary…………………………..………………………………………………………….. iv preface ………………………………..……………………………………………………………. v table of contents……………………………….…………………………………………....……..vi list of figures…………………………………………………………………………...…………vii list of supplementary materials...………………………………………………………………..viii acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………...…….ix dedication..……………...……………………………………………………………………...…...x introduction………………………………………………………………………………..……...... part : philosophical groundwork for looking at looking ………………………..……………... part : topic of study: the way we look matters ………………………………..……………. part : the way we talk about the way we look matters ……………………..………….…... bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….…………….. vii list of figures figure : you will read this first...…………………………………………………………………. figure : she is water……………….…………………..…………………………………………. figure : the genderbread person….……………………………………………………………. figure : justin and taz: gender failures.……….………………………………………………. figure : #thewaywelookmatters .gif ……………………………………………………………. figure : haley morris caffiero: the watchers.…………………………………………………. figure : they/them/their pin………..…………………………………………………………. figure : lost voice………………….…………………………………………………………… figure : redacted…………………..……………………………………………………………. figure : looking at looking……………………..……………………………………………… figure : more looking……………..…………………………………………………………… figure : queer map of vancouver……………………………………………………………… figure : culture clash………………...………………………………………………………… figure : everybody. every body……..………………………………………………………… figure : vancouver club kids………..………………………………………………………… figure : arson puts vancouver arts and leisure society on ice…..…………………………… figure : goat love……………………………………………………………………………… figure : #metoo………………………...……………………………………………………… figure : i have a vagina………………………………………………………………………… figure : looking at the bus stop…...…………………………………………………………… figure : hope and drag queens………………………………………………………………… figure : asking to be seen/dealing with being seen.…………………………………………… figure : hope stone .gif ……….……..………………………………………………………… figure : sponge dress.………………..………………………………………………………… figure sponge song………………….………………………………………………………… figure : hope in port alice…………….…..…………………………………………………… figure : sheep/dog/cat………………..………………………………………………………… figure : more sheep/dog/cat …….…….……………………………………………………… figure : kid me and kid goat ………….……………………………………………………… figure : tears are strength………………………....…………………………………………… figure : what do we do when our hearts hurt? ..……….………….…………………………… figure : kind(er) gaze…………….……………………………………………………….…… figure : one of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things. ……........……...…………… figure : the greatest illusion… is that life should be perfect ………….…….………………… figure : mycelium, ants, ferns, wavicle …………………...……….………………………… figure : starlings/dandelions…………………….…..………………………………………… figure : it’s the wild…………….…………………….………………………………………… figure : look how far we’ve come…………………….……………………………………….. viii list of supplementary materials . #thewaywelookmatters .gif . hope stone .gif ix acknowledgements many people helped me with this project. thank you: ➢ carl leggo: thank you for helping me to branch into poetry, for holding me to my commitment to write from a place of hope, and for being a dear friend. ➢ steven taubeneck: thank you for having so much patience and understanding while i recovered from ptsd and found a way to write again; and thank you for offering fantastic philosophical insight, which helped me to deepen the element of existential reflection in this story. ➢ janice stewart: thank you for reminding me that while it is legitimate for me to critique academia, i am also immensely grateful for the frameworks that i’ve learned through academia. ➢ barb & todd: thank you for housing/feeding/laughing/ideating with me in general, but especially while i finished this thesis. ➢ lisa baynton-cairns: thank you mom, for offering so much support, patience and understanding for my strange and winding academic path. ➢ ray mceachern: thank you for being a fantastic photographer at our gender failure downtown photoshoot and for teaching me that there is allot of value in getting the shot right. ➢ outlooktv: thank you for training me in journalistic media production. ➢ vancouver art and leisure: thank you for being a strange and interesting organization to work for, where i learned quite a bit about queer event production and associated political fallout(s). ➢ andi grace rose: thank you for being a source of inspiration, and for suggesting fantastic articles related to queerness, magic and resilience. x dedication i’m dedicating this work to the principle of healing through poetry, dialogue, and laughter. introduction “i realize that the english language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. i try to cut the world some slack for this every day. all day. and the day after that, too. but the truth is that every time i am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, a tiny little sliver of me is reminded that i do not fit ... i remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. all those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around.” - ivan coyote “when language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel.” - michel foucault “as a punishment in elementary school, my teacher required me to write lines, and for years, all my writing was linear, a composition of lines that began at the left edge of the page and marched with hypnotic fervor to the right edge of the page, ... but in my linear writing i lived a lie, a fabrication tailored from a fabric of neat geometric lines angles corners planes founded on axioms theorems and precise measures of consistency, convention, comprehension, conciseness, coordination, correctness, and conclusion. leggo, carl. . “writing as living compos(t)ting: poetry and desire.” (language and literacy ( ). https://doi.org/ . /g k w), . foucault, michel, and maurice blanchot. foucault/ blanchot: the thought from outside (new york: zone books, ), . https://doi.org/ . /g k w now i know my writing is no linear composition; it is a living composting. - carl leggo “[l]anguage is a species of action, symbolic action- and its nature is that it can be used as a tool.” - kenneth burke ““all that philosophy can do is destroy idols.” in a sense this is correct. not in the sense that philosophy’s function is essentially that of analytic jousting. but in the sense that we can come to see a philosophical problem as the result of a way of looking at the world-- away of looking that can be changed.” - jan zwicky § greetings, this started as a project about calling out the straight gaze , and it morphed into a story about how queers suffer under that gaze, and sometimes simultaneously fail to recognize each other’s suffering and humanity. then in i did a #metoo style call-out. i named the person who harmed me, i stated my name, and i described what they did. and i asked my community to witness this wound and support the person who harmed me to recover, and support me to get space from them. leggo, carl. . “writing as living compos(t)ting: poetry and desire.” (language and literacy ( ). https://doi.org/ . /g k w), . burke, kenneth. . language as symbolic action, (saratoga springs, ny: empire state college, state university of new york), . zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor, (edmonton: brush education inc.), § . some concessions were made in how i formatted this in order to fit with the university of british columbia archival standards. in the end i like some of the changes and i find others irritating. so there will be form/content disconnect sometimes in places where i made these concessions. i see this as part of the art. these are some of the redactions i needed to make in order for this piece to be considered academic. “call-ins” and “call-outs” are part of the queer lexicon. a call-in is private, and compassionate. it encourages someone to do better whilst still holding that they are a good and valuable person. call-outs are more severe. they hold that someone has mis-stepped critically and that there must be serious reparations before things will be ok again. the experience of being looked at/judged/othered by heterosexual people. https://doi.org/ . /g k w what followed was a textbook rape culture-esque response from my community. this would not have been super surprising, if my community wasn't queer and social justice oriented. it left me with questions about my own queerness, my sense of justice, and my sense of place. so i left the city, and started working on farms with animals. i put myself in stable environments where my morning routine consisted of walking the land, checking the fences, feeding the animals and checking their bodies for wounds. i would often spend my afternoons sitting with goats in the shade or rubbing a pig’s round belly. i also worked on compost systems and learned about permaculture--- the sustainable use of space where pieces in the system feed into other nodes, with the goal of achieving a closed loop- total sustainability. i talked with farmers about interdependence, and the apocalypse, and their plans. i kept mulling on my story from back in the city, and questions about how we look at each other. i started asking questions about how permaculture as a practice can go so much further than feeding chicken poop to the compost and eventually to the garden from which you feed yourself. farmers often have loops of exchange with other farmers, where one might have apples, and the other one has pigs. where both can be happy if one offers apples to the other's pigs, and the other offers pork to the apple farmer. i wondered about how we need to look at each other in order to support each other’s livelihood and basic needs, such an intimate type of support. a type of support i wish i could see in queer/social justice community. i chose the title the way we look matters for a dual effect. because the way we look at people does matter. it affects them. and because of that, in spite of that, and for reasons of personal expression/creativity, the way we present ourselves in the world also matters. and when queer bodies walk down the street, or move together at a dance party, or post on social media, or start a land project, all of this is invoked. ~ part : philosophical groundwork for looking at looking § looking at how i’m looking at this: methodology: interdisciplinarity: an alchemy of mediums i am blending: auto-ethnography + poetry + trauma recovery if you don’t care that much about method(ology) discussions, or talking about talking before talking, and you’d rather get right to the story… go ahead and skip this. § grammar issues: “you must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. i mean: it is not based on grounds. it is not reasonable (or unreasonable).” - jan zwicky § minimal and intentional use of capital letters: because: descriptive, not prescriptive grammar “many writing teachers have the notion that they are guardians of the grammar garden. some teachers see themselves as angels with flaming swords outside the garden, policing and securing traditions of correctness. bochner, arthur p., and carolyn ellis. “methods of collecting and analyzing empirical materials.” (communication theory, no. ), . “usually written in first-person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms- short stories, poetry, fiction novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose. in these texts, concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness are featured, appearing as relational and institutional stories affected by history, social structure, and culture, which themselves are dialectically revealed through action, feeling, thought, and language.” - carolyn ellis zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor (edmonton: brush education inc.) § they have grown up in a system where they are constantly grading students with letters and numbers and are constantly assessing students according to prescribed standards. i was happily surprised when i learned that the word grammar is derived from the word gramarye which is now called an archaic word related to the old french gramaire or learning. gramarye means magic, occult knowledge, alchemy, necromancy, and enchantment. so, grammar is really about spells and spelling.” - carl leggo language is about “spelling.” it’s a material for building worlds. many cutting-edge linguists believe that “good grammar” is about facilitating communication. successful communication being when an idea/feeling makes it from person(s) a to person(s) b. so then, as long as a communication moment is a clear conveyor of an idea/feeling, it is grammatically correct. that’s my understanding of descriptive grammar. and the traditions around how language gets used can chain us. prescriptive grammar says we follow the rules even if it fucks up the flow of communication. prescriptive grammar says it’s cool to cut someone off mid-sentence to demand they say “i saw, not i seen” or “jaye and i, not me and jaye”, only to have the other person feel shut down and maybe even forget what they were talking about. when people ignore the content of an entire post just to contribute a passive aggressive “*they’re*” to thread, that’s prescriptive grammar. this kind of obsession with technical correctness can colonize our voice. academic rigor can lead to rigor mortis. a slow death by a thousand technical corrections until you don’t sound like yourself. at all. not even in texting. you’ll realize one day that your voice is possessed by a textbook. the kind of voice you used to judge or rebel against maybe, the voice of your dad, or grade teacher, or a caricature of an oxford professor. language can be liberation. i used to joke about this concept of rigor mortis as if it were something i was distant from. i don't know if it was after or during my first logic class, or when one of my profs told me to record myself so i could hear myself up-speaking: raising my voice at the end of sentences that aren’t questions. leggo, carl. . “the unpredictability of bliss.” poetic inquiry ii – seeing, caring, understanding ( https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ ), foucault, michel. . discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. (new york: vintage), - . but at some point, part of me agreed that i was talking wrong. i levelled out my voice into more of an albertan monotone. and i started saying “i think” instead of “i feel.” “i’m wondering... how can we spell our way out of “rigor mortis”? - carl leggo so, to push against the currents of prescriptive grammar, i start sentences with “so,” and “and.” and, sometimes, (if it fits with someone’s preference) i use small letters for peoples’ names. but i use capital letters when referring to books/articles and to organizations or when i’m referring to an idea that has established qualities, like philosophy- this isn’t to convey respect, it’s to identify power. i text in small letters. small letters are the way i connect to friends. and that’s the voice i want to inhabit when i write. i feel like it helps me connect to my heart. one of my greatest fears is accidentally channeling a lawyer. and that fear has me so afraid of how i might speak that i don't notice what's happening inside my heart, and so i can't access my throat to describe it. when logic consumes me it’s easier to just blame the circumstances and say they made me use that part of my brain until i couldn't feel anything anymore. care ethics is a branch of ethics that says that if we rely too heavily on logic to decide what’s right, we’ll end up with systems that can justify horrifying things like genocide (if an area is densely populated, and existing systems just kill a bunch of people, right?) systems that prioritize ridiculous notions of efficiency and deny humanity. systems that deny our feelings and our heart and prioritize efficiency without humanity, results in the horrifically absurd. § no “one”: because: fuck the toxic male gaze. in a piece on gender, pronouns matter. leggo, carl. . “the unpredictability of bliss.” poetic inquiry ii – seeing, caring, understanding ( – . https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ ), i love this phrase. thank you to carl leggo for coining it and using it often. according to the structures of logic starting sentences in this way is sound. it just isn’t considered correct according to the norms of traditional grammar. i also occasionally skip periods. periods have a sense of finality and closure that don’t always feel appropriate for me. so sometimes i just end a sentence without one. see my section on poetic- inquiry for more justifications on this. i won’t be using universalizing and objective pronouns because i won't be trying to elevate things to the level of objectivity. i'm trying to call back pieces of my heart. i’m trying to bring this into feelings and story. and it’s feelings that are deeply personal, about community that i’ve been steeped in since i was . so sometimes i’ll say “you,” and sometimes i’ll say “we” when i'm talking about someone else’s experience who is part of a group i am also part of, where it would make sense for me to be able to refer to a kind of collective/community experience. mostly i’ll be saying “i” when i speak from my memories/feelings/ideas. but never “one.” the universal masculine “one” is actually a perspective that causes a lot of harm, and it’s arguably the perspective that inhabits the critical gaze i’m most frustrated with and addressing here. so i’d like to address that perspective, and not inhabit it, as best as i can. figure : you will read this first. § no times new roman either. times new roman is symbolically associated with academic publishing and the new york times. both very exclusive and very authoritative. many legitimate online publishing bodies publish using a more personalized, less universalized font. but an intentional font nonetheless. a font that is a suitable medium to the story at hand. this type of font play is a tool for voice distinction and working the narrative flow. it is a norm now for people to choose a font that fits their unique voice, and it is still considered professional so long as it is readable. usually it is recommended that people choose sans serif fonts for ease of reading and contrast the body font with differentiated title fonts using both size and placement to make the flow distinction. i'm going to be using: part of the “language game” - zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor. (edmonton: brush education inc.), § . cabin for body font raleway bold size for title raleway size for subtitles, raleway bold, size , one indent, for sub-subtitles raleway, size , one indent, for sub-sub-subtitles raleway bold, size , two indents, sub-sub-sub-subtitles raleway, size , two indents, sub-sub-sub-sub-subtitles i punctuate the flow with a summarizing, personal take sometimes. caveat brush, size . one indent. i also interject with crystalizing thoughts from other authors with caveat brush. size or (depending on space allowance). often with one indent but also placed wherever i feel it is impactful. raleway, bold, size for author names paired with quotes, positioned by my discretion each time. § inexact descriptions of things: because: “gesture” and metaphor. no word can fully describe the thing it signifies in a : kind of way. “gesture” solves this problem by doing away with the illusion that that kind of precision is possible, and by motioning more generally towards the thing instead. the motion becomes less of a word and more of a continuum; a relationship between the letters and the thing, dissolving the line between word and described. it's a non-binary way of communicating. when the material is non-binary in nature, the way of feelings, and stories, and gender, it can be more effective to point at these things from memories, and from the body, and from the heart. saussure, ferdinand de. . course in general linguistics, (new york: columbia university press), . the founder of semiotics, a philosopher of language who said that words cannot have a : relationship with words. figure : she is water. mind needs to be here too. i just want to resist, (as best as i can) letting it turn this piece into too many syllables pretending to solve something about gender, enabling me to go on an inappropriate power trip, colonizing this material with my academic privilege. i feel that it’s very important for people to question their academic privilege when they engage in research, especially research that involves working with members of marginalized communities. “by ‘metaphor’ i mean the linguistic expression of the results of focused analogical thinking… strictly speaking, “x is y” is not a metaphorical claim unless “x is not y” - jan zwicky § gaps between ideas: because ) aphoristic reasoning, ) poetic inquiry it is usually more effective to describe parts of a thing; the feelings around it, the body sensations, an encounter, memory flashes, rather than perfectly lay out all of the components of the thing. in zwicky, jan. wisdom & metaphor (edmonton: brush education inc., ), § . nietzsche writes in aphorism, poetically, with line breaks where he chooses, keeping the reader guessing not only by writing with a social critique that is /was outside the norm, but with a style that defied traditional text. “dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need i add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?” nietzsche friedrich, twilight of the idols (new york: oxford university press, ), . fact, if a poet did take this route, the ability, as readers to see ourselves in the wanderings would be lost. with analytic writing, it is endless accounting, often until you aren’t even sure you know what you’re talking about anymore, where the analysis takes you further away from the thing, rather than closer. with analysis there’s always so much more to explain. the work is never finished. rupi kaur talks about water, conjuring to mind its physical properties, it’s capacity to return force, and give way. she didn’t submit an essay mapping the nature of emotional vulnerability to a psychology journal. this is a principle that derrida was getting at with his gift metaphor. a gift, for derrida, is something that isn't fully measured, where if it is deeply analyzed, it becomes an economic exchange- where in searching for all of the gift’s components, it slips away and transforms into an invoice. in zeno’s dichotomy paradox, he explains that, since a thing can get from point a to point b, and since that distance can be divided infinitely, things can make infinite leaps. poetry does this. poetry makes radical leaps across gaps that pure logic would take eternities to cross. logic is usually still there in those jumps but it’s felt, beneath and between the stanzas. poetry gets there faster. so i will pieces. miss there will be gaps. and if you expected a finely tuned machine, where each paragraph follows perfectly from the last, with no meat left on the bone of the idea, then i will fail you. deleuze, gilles, guattari félix, and massumi brian. nomadology: war machine, (a.k. press, ), . for deleuze and guattari, to wander, like nomad, is to chart your own course, rather than adhere to a prescribed path. rupi kaur, milk and honey (kansas city, mo: andrews mcmeel publishing, ), . derrida, jacques, and peggy kamuf. . given time. chicago: university of chicago press. huggett, nick, "zeno’s paradoxes", the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (winter edition), edward n. zalta (ed.), url = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win /entries/paradox-zeno/>. i don't want to consume this content until there is no mystery left and rebuild it into a too-many- syllabled frankenstein made of my own belly button lint, begging “loooooooove me” to my advisors. i can’t fully talk about this stuff anyway, because #trauma. so i'm going to use a poetic approach as a chance to go easy on myself, to heal my voice, to sit next to this information peripherally, and i invite you to build some of the connective tissue with me from your own mind/heart, so this thing can breathe. § some hope: but only when it feels genuine and not when it feels compulsory, because: “cruel optimism” mandatory hope says we must always see exciting possibilities. this kind of mandatory positive thinking requires dissociation from the reality of a situation. to genuinely be hopeful requires open eyes, and a willingness to do an honest, brave inventory of what’s going on -isn’t that more exciting to write/read about anyway? after looking at the available options, which might also mean looking at what is unavailable, and grieving, then you can build hope into the situation. sometimes the most exciting questions are about what isn’t working, so you can figure out how to build something different. § very little time spent differentiating sexuality from gender: because: that’s a false binary. sexuality and gender are certainly related, it’s an illusion to believe they are totally separate things, but sussing out the distinction/similarity is a massive task. rae spoon and ivan coyote focus on gender in their book gender failure, and they don’t spend any time making a categorical distinction between sexuality failure and gender failure. they focus on gender, and in doing so talk about sexuality sometimes. i’m going to take a similar tack here. “cruel optimism” is a term coined by lauren berlant and it refers to the idea that it is unkind to expect people to feel hope for certain things that are simply unviable in under certain systems of structural oppression. that hope is a fundamentally helpful thing, but when the conditions are such that the thing that’s being hoped for is possible. berlant, lauren gail. . cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. sex/gender are a false binary. § a focus on my experiences: because: auto-ethnography a piece on how queers are looked at/how queers look at each other, from the perspective of a queer person, incorporating their lived experiences as context and content, makes the fact that i was sexually assaulted, and then publicly called my rapist out on facebook, while this research project was happening, not only fair game, but those events become relevant content. queers are at a higher risk of sexual assault than straight people. and within that group, gay transmen are especially at risk. to be a queer transmasculine person, doing autoethnography on queer content, means to talk about these hard pieces that are inextricably linked to the content but aren’t always included in master’s theses. and to leave those pieces out would redact my voice so heavily, that i wouldn’t be able to talk much about my own experiences around “queer looking” with very much authenticity. i need to be able to navigate into these strange and dark and not usually-included-in- a-master’s-thesis waters, in order to excavate this material in a meaningful way. in order to do autoethnography, making myself both the author and part of the work in a meaningful way. i need to talk about my sexual assault and usually more specifically, my subsequent public facebook call- out. § my auto-ethnography might be too subjective, or incomplete, but it, hopefully, won’t be a jargon maze. in nyu physics professor alan sokal submitted a brilliant hoax article transgressing the boundaries - toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity, to the cultural studies journal social text, packed full of the latest jargon, claiming that gravity was a social construct. he wanted academics to drool over it. he then published a second article explaining that what they were idolizing was an illusion of their own egos. i love this story. it reminds me of the tale the emperor’s new clothes , where the townspeople are led to believe that if they are smart, they’ll be able to see the emperor’s new magical garment, and if they are stupid, the cloth would appear invisible. this was the con-artist’s platform that allowed him to pretend to weave the emperor a new outfit, when in fact he sent him out to see the townspeople naked. sokal submitted invisible clothes to social text to demonstrate: sokal, alan d. . “transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.” social text, no. / : . https://doi.org/ . / . andersen, h. c., and michael adams. . the emperor’s new clothes. morris plains, nj: unicorn pub. house. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v /transgress_v _singlefile.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v /transgress_v _singlefile.html . that academic writing uses that same platform: “if you buy this, you’re smart, if you question it, you’re stupid.” (does that sound capitalist?) . that an audience can be glamoured into loving and supporting something that’s bullshit. i don’t want to channel the worst of academia through my voice i don’t want to have a disciplined voice i want my voice back. foucault said, in , in one of his lectures, in critique of academia: “for the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. but alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something… beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” - michel foucault the academic dialect is shifting. social media is decentralizing the publishing hegemony. the hoarded knowledge is being redistributed on people’s personal blog posts and on websites like everydayfeminism.com. and even everyday feminism is coming under fire as being too academic in francis lee’s article excommunicate me from the church of social justice “nearly all of their articles follow a standard structure: an instructive title, list of problematic or suggested behaviors, and a final statement of hard opinion. the titles, the educational tone, and the prescriptive checklists contribute to creating the idea that there is only one way to think about and do activism.” - francis lee foucault, michel, colin tr. gordon, and colin gordon. . power / knowledge. new york: harvester wheatsheaf. lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of- social-justice- /. http://everydayfeminism.com/ https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of-social-justice- / we don’t need to use an authoritative voice to be heard and to be relevant. § storytelling: because: institutional autobiography & narrative inquiry. i’m struggling to figure out how to talk about my messy feelings in an academic paper. when i go to write i imagine professors who told me to speak differently, to “use more “ones” and “therefores”, less inflection, fewer metaphors, and no personal details.” - so many professors when i imagine writing to a non-academic audience, i imagine them flinching every time i accidentally use a piece of jargon. then i wonder what my voice would have sounded like if i hadn’t gone to university for almost a decade. richard e. miller, explains that we are all institutionalized, and that autobiography invites our personal aspect, our free self, and our institutionalized aspect, our imprisoned self, to tell a story. i think that’s the best i can do here; because part of what i’ve realized in writing this, is that even if i want to break free from a certain kind of academic form. that form is in me now. so i can resist it. but if i want to talk authentically about my experiences, some of those experiences includes academic experiences, and part of my way of coming at raw experiences is academic. § raw, and unfinished: because: this is a “process.” “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” - daniel gilbert this kind of personal excavation work isn't something that people do in one spurt with one concrete product in the end. it’s ongoing and lifelong. so parts of this will seem unfinished. daniel gilbert, “the psychology of your future self,” march in vancouver bc, ted recording, : , https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_psychology_of_your_future_self?language=en. a philosophical context for understanding this is through “becoming” https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_psychology_of_your_future_self?language=en § an absence of a provable point: because: i want to focus on questions. answers are usually singular, and final, and testable; while questions and stories can be opening and vast. i want to focus on things i’m wondering about and offering. i don’t want to come at those things by way of trying to prove them. there is however a reason for this writing-- to name that the way we see others and the way we're seen by others is deeply significant. and we don't always do it well, even in the communities that pride themselves on inclusion. § a tone shift as i go along: i’m going to have to name logic, as i move away from it, because the burden that i engage the analytical is so high in academia and so trained in me, that i need to story tell my way out of it, and that means, for me, starting with logic. so i’ll try to oil the mechanical tone out of my voice as i justify shifting out of a robotic state and into my feelings. hopefully you will hear my heart beating by the end. § looking at references: i will be engaging majority nonacademic articles in this piece. why? because this is where the most relevant articles on liberation exist now. at this point, in , the articles with the most cutting-edge insights and integrity on anti-oppression are also critical of academic privilege, and published in democratized settings; on personal blogs or on websites like autostraddle.com, thebodyisnotanappology.com, and everydayfeminism.com. and the proof of their relevance becomes clear in how they are taken up by community in dialogue, and how the terms and ideas put forth in those articles are incorporated into the public imaginary. this is distinctly different from typical academic publishings that end up in dusty peer reviewed journals, for academics, by academics. a case study of a person who underestimated the impact of democratized publishing is feminist transmasculine person jack halberstam who published an article you are triggering me! the a philosophical context for understanding this is through “the totalizing fallacy” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/ / / /you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ neo-liberal rhetoric of harm, danger and trauma that stated that students were responsible for managing their own triggers and that education was meant to be emotionally challenging. this idea was generally well received in academia, while a controversy about “victim-blaming” raged outside of academia. halberstam miscalculated how his ideas would be taken up in the public sphere, and because of this he didn't do follow up with dialogue or accountability on social media, and because of this he is no longer considered a broadly respected feminist outside of academia. the ivory tower no longer has the vice grip on relevant ideas the way it once did. if i want to write about survivors and gender violence, i need to engage the most relevant publishers, and some, or even most, of those people are publishing outside of academia now. so these are the people i will be majority sourcing here. § footnotes: i’m going to include description and conversation and tangent in the footnotes. my goal for this is to criteria dialogue between my main points and my follow up points, so that readers can have the option to dig deeper into the onion layers of the story, or they can stay on the main artery of the story line. § no chicago or mla style: another reason i won’t be doing traditional footnotes is because i really struggle to organize information using that hyper detail oriented, excessive details method because of my learning disability. it feels more accessible to me to organize my footnotes also as a gesture, and a subtext conversation that handles tangents and sidebars and long descriptive parenthesis, that also perform the function of referencing, rather than as a perfectly collating the information into a rigid structure that is only readable to an academic audience. i feel that this will make my footnotes more readable to more people, and it involves bending the academic referencing rules. § dear audience, full disclosure. writing this is hard. this material is sore for me. there are pieces in here that i don’t know how to make salient (enough for the ivory tower?). when i imagine an academic halberstam, jack. . “you are triggering me! the neo-liberal rhetoric of harm, danger, and trauma.” beacon broadside: a project of beacon press. july , . https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/ / /you-are-triggering-me.html. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/ / / /you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ audience i can feel defensive. like i'm offering my wound up for assessment. when i imagine turning this into a blog post, i flinch, because there are details in here that feel too vulnerable to share on social media again. putting this down into words has been a kind of exposure therapy for me, but i don’t want to forge you into my therapist. i don’t want to simply rebel against you or make you my feelings garbage can. i want to offer up a narrative of my journey through trauma recovery as a study in non-dualism. a lived, auto-ethnographic, choose your own adventure, study in poetic communication and post- structuralist thought. working my way through a culture of academia and counter-culture, and counter-counter-culture, asking questions about how we see our trauma and belonging and witnessing. i hope this story inspires curiosity and questions. “to develop the symptoms of ptsd, you need to first experience a traumatic event.” - matthew tull “words, words…” “… exposure is, in many ways, is the opposite of avoidance, and it’s one of the best treatments for ptsd.” - matthew tull tull, matthew. cognitive behavioral coping skills workbook (milton keynes: speechmark publishing ltd, ), . “although there wasn’t a lot of research done on ptsd prior to , the disorder has always been around… the symptoms have been described in literary works throughout the ages even as early as the either century bce in homer’s iliad and odyssey.” - matthew tull tull, matthew. cognitive behavioral coping skills workbook (milton keynes: speechmark publishing ltd, ), . “ when the server asked what i was writing, i told her, i’m a poet and professor like that explained something when i should have said, like hamlet, words, words…” - carl leggo - hamlet (and carl leggo) § this is not a typical thesis: why i’ll fail to explain gender failure, existentialism, post-structuralism, interdisciplinarity etc. a thesis has a clear and valid and defensible point. and that is not what i’m doing here . if you expect to be able to fully understand the gender binary after reading this, i will fail you. the burden of proof is too high. to fully explain the gender binary, i would first have to fully explain gender. debates are still thick across science-based disciplines, feminist oriented networks and the blogosphere, as to whether gender is primarily a thing of nature or nurture. most theories point to the idea that gender is a combination of a nature/nurture. that gender is felt, and it is performed . that it’s an idea system that informs our conditioning, and that it is also a series of impulses, and behaviors. people who study gender their entire lives, and who have bodies and lives where gender is a constant focus still struggle to define it. but generally, there is some agreement that gender is complex, and personal. leggo, carl. . “writing as living compos(t)ting: poetry and desire.” language and literacy ( ). https://doi.org/ . /g k w. this is a poem “...the poem must, on whatever scale, dislodge assumption, not by simply opposing it, but by dismantling the systematic proof in which its inevitability is grounded. in other words: not “c is wrong” but “who says a has to lead to b?... poetic intelligence lacks… focused investment in conclusion, being naturally wary of its own assumptions. it derives its energy from a willingness to discard conclusion in the face of evidence, its willingness, in fact, to discard anything.” - jan zwicky - zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor. edmonton: brush education inc., s i want to focus more on questions. beauvoir, simone de, constance borde, and sheila malovany-chevallier. . the second sex. london: vintage books. in the second sex, simone de beauvoir said “no one is born, but rather becomes a woman,” do indicate primacy of social constructionism over determinism with regards to gender and power. figure : the genderbread person. § a glance at the gender binary: in sam killerman published a book called a guide to gender, where he included a picture called the genderbread person. it quickly achieved viral status on the internet, and soon became a staple image in classrooms and workshops about gender. it distinguishes gender from sex, and sexuality, and emphasizes the role of appearance/performance. i would also need to define binary systems, which is also something that theorists struggle to do neatly and in unison. i can give a brief window into a couple staple theories, but i won’t be able to fully define binary systems here. deconstructing binaries is an approach that can be traced back to ancient greek thought. back to zeno’s paradox. where, if infinity is taken as a given, then the space between a location “a” and location “b” can be divided into infinite parts, then the process of shooting an arrow from point a to point b proves that infinity can be traversed. not only is there infinity, but we can traverse infinity. we don’t need to be trapped on one side with an unimaginable distance to cross. we don’t need to choose an either/or approach. deciding to think in terms of both/and comes from the realization that we can dance in the in between. killerman sam, a guide to gender: the social justice advocates handbook (impetus books. ), cover. i know i said i wouldn't focus on such distinctions, but killerman’s photo is useful to have in the background of this conversation. helene cixous talks about how binary oppositions lead to hierarchy, because often one half of the binary is elevated above the other where it then oppresses the other. this is a great reason to unlearn binary thinking. in ivan coyote and rae spoon published gender failure, a book exploring both the ways in which they fail to fit into the gender binary, and the ways the gender binary, in all of its rigidness, fails to recognize all of us. when we adopt a nebulous view of gender, where it is difficult to define, but generally there is an agreement that there seems to be two poles, and layer into that the idea that there is not only infinite space between those poles, but that there is also infinite possibilities for movement- we arrive in the reality that genderqueers, genderfucks, gender anarchists, gender retirees, choose to live in. and it is difficult to describe to people outside this culture, because the bedrock of these identities requires a movement towards non-binary thinking- an existential shift towards viewing the world less in black and white terms, and less in fixed terms. it means living a life of faith in the grey and the changeable. § seeing in black/white: this kind of spectrum-based, fluid way of thinking can very healing for certain disordered thinking patterns mechanisms of thinking/feeling/being, caused by trauma, where a person becomes vigilant to their environment, constantly assessing for danger, and the mind/body switches to categorizing all stimulus as being either safe or dangerous without much room in between. because in a state of fear, in a pattern of learned vigilance, there isn't any time to wonder. and this belief that things are either safe or dangerous, and that danger could arise any time, bleeds into the rest of that person’s lens to view the world, and it fosters a deeper black and white thinking. it fosters binary thinking. and one of the ways of healing this stress response is to use cognitive behavioral therapy to remind ourselves that there is room for grey and for movement between the extremeness . cixous, helene, "sorties: out and out: attacks/ways out/forays," the logic of the gift: toward an ethic of generosity (new york: routledge, ), . hesse herman, siddhartha, bantam. . in zen buddhism people are encouraged to see the middle way between extremes, where things are neither entirely fixed nor completely changeable. nietzsche also talks about looking to nature, which is inherently fluid, as a working metaphor for the broader nature of things. evidence of a fluid universe on both a micro and macro level. and if we buy the premises that the nature of things is fluid, then in the spirit of form/content symmetry, then why not play with fluid mediums to express content that we already know can’t not be fluid. if we take fluidity as a given, then poetry makes more sense than analytical writing, which takes a false hidden premise (enthymeme) that words have a : relationship to the concepts they represent. if we buy the idea of gesture, that interestingly, many queer people develop bpd, as a result of their gender performance being persecuted. this persecution creates a very real and justified fear of strangers because there is a very real possibility that strangers will cause some degree of harm to visibly queer people. this plays out as genderqueer people walk down the street, confronted with people who stare at them and make rude and degrading comments. people who receive stares like this can become extremely literate in body language because their safety depends on it. and they can find themselves in a state of vigilance walking down the street where they are looking for micro-expressions of disgust, fear, curiosity, confusion. because basic dignity and physical safety can depend on being able to read micro-expressions. so, a non-binary perspective, for queer people, is often both the cause of trauma, and the healing salve. because to be ourselves, for genderqueer people, is to be beyond one of the most primal binaries our culture is steeped in- “male” vs “female.” a queer body’s way of being in the world is beyond binary categorization. a queer body’s way of being in the world is a catalyst for cognitive dissonance. and bodies that cause cognitive dissonance instigate hateful behavior from ignorant people who don’t know how to sit with mystery and greyness and the in-between. and the persistent feedback from people on the street/bus/line-at-the-bank etc. can prime the queer mind to see strangers, and sometimes everyone, as either a friend or an enemy. queers often dance in between male and female, and in between enemy and friend... and every weekend, queers dance in clubs, warehouse parties, and drag shows. something to wonder about: conceptual dancing and literal dancing are integral to queer culture. ~ words and ideas are moving changing principles and that spectrum and nuance apply to everything, so the idea that one word can represent one concept for all time, doesn’t add up. part : topic of study: the way we look matters. § looking at being looked at: justin and taz: genderqueer gender performers “phenomenology can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds.” - sara ahmed justin and taz are both genderqueer. they both use “they” pronouns. they both dress and act in ways that fall outside of the gender binary. in that sense, figure : justin and taz: gender failures. ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (durham: duke university press), . they are gender failures (self-described). they wanted to document their failure to live up to the binary expectations of ‘male’ and ‘female’ with me. so we went for a walk in downtown vancouver, and took some pictures… we experienced rubbernecking: entitled watching; unfounded staring; voyeurism. figure : #thewaywelookmatters taz is walking down the street, while a couple stares. this .gif is my favorite artifact from the shoot. this is the kind of image i was most interested in catching. this method of public photography is riffing off of the work of haley morris cafiero, who specializes in bullying photography; where the goal is to catch the facial expressions of passers-by and spread awareness of fat-phobia. figure : haley morris caffiero: the watchers. “the attribution of feeling toward an object (i feel afraid because you are fearsome) moves the subject away from the object, creating distance through the registering of proximity as a threat” - sara ahmed all we did was go for a photographed walk with people who are visibly queer, and the queer bodies morphed from being the subject of the shoot, to the object of staring. this switch from subject to object, and the distancing involved in this demotion is “othering.” we didn't need to schedule or arrange for any staring. this is the nature of how queer bodies are typically read in space. this is what many queer people know they’re going to be faced with when they go out in public. in order to do the kind of shoot that was in alignment with the letter of what i applied to do, i would have had to discard shots, change the framing to exclude members of the public, and ask the photographer to change the focus. a redacting. a compartmentalizing, a repressing of something. a repressing of a certain kind of looking. the staring is overt, unkind, and unnecessary. morris-cafiero, haley. the watchers. ontario, canada: the magenta foundation, . ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham: duke university press. this is all i applied for with ubc ethics review- to do a photographed walk with visibly queer people. the proposition was to treat queer bodies as photographic subjects in public space. but we knew that the queer subjects would become objects, without our consent or control, and this is what we actually wanted to document- a kind of queer subjectivity failure: the othering of queer subjects, the turning of queer subjects into strange objects in public space. it is a tangible event and it does tangible damage. at the end of the .gif you can see one of the gawkers look up at the camera. they are now seeing themselves be seen- turning them and their gawking into the object. does this replicate the harm of the gawking? are we now gawking at them? i think it depends how we have this conversation. it depends how much humanity we leave gawker. after all, haven’t we all gawked? as i was describing the process of describing myself describing gawking in this piece to my partner, who is familiar with how visible queers are gawked at, they told me about how earlier that day they had been gawked at. they identify as an invisibilized femme, where femme is a queering of feminine. and that queering is invisible to those with binary eyes. most normy people see a ‘woman,’ but they don’t identify as a woman. their energy and capacity and resilience go beyond what simone de beauvoir would describe as ‘the second sex’. figure : they/them/their pin. they were in a liquor store: and at the checkout the cashier asked them about the pin on their vest. it said "they/them." they responded by saying, "that's my gender pronoun." the cashier said, "i thought that was a plural pronoun, for multiple people." "no they changed it" “well i should really do some research on that" "ya, the internet is full of resources on the legitimacy of they as a pronoun" term i thought of: an event that is real that we need to un-gas-light ourselves to believe is real. my take on “the second sex” is that de beauvoir wanted us all to view everyone as being beyond the second sex because she was using that term to refer to a socially constructed second- class citizen. "wait, do you mean urban dictionary?" he asked skeptically. “no, i think it was oxford," they said as they walked out of the store. returning to the disciplining quality of prescriptive grammar (where people believe that if "they" is prescribed to refer to multiple people in the dictionary), that trumps the reality of "they" being used for singular genderqueer people in queer culture, and the validating quality of institutional stamps of approval (where the difference between urban dictionary and oxford dictionary determines the validity of word usage. we should also consider the ways that we allow rules of grammar to trump other dialects or communication. we should probably consider that we might be acting like donald trump when we correct each other's grammar---we are expressing that one way of talking is more supreme & legitimate than other perfectly understandable ways of communicating. we don't need to build walls of exclusion around language. rhetoric is about bridge-building. )) so invisibilized queers are gawked at too the dynamic is the same, but the mechanics are different if gawking means to interrupt social flow to do deep skeptical questioning of a person's being to degrade them by interrogating, putting on trial asking whether they should exist as they are in many ways a gawking moment is a saturated moment for the gawker. time slows down. there is more meaning in what they are looking at than they can fit into their current reality. cognitive dissonance occurs. and rejection or integration, or some combination of both follows. “in general, rhetoric- and rhetorical theory!- is motivated by the urge to decrease division and (the illusion of) isolation.” - judith segal segal, judith. “patient compliance, the rhetoric of rhetoric, and the rhetoric of persuasion.” (rhetoric society quarterly , no. - ( ): https://doi.org/ . / ), . when i first conceived of this project, i was interested in dealing with visible queers only, because i was assuming that only visible queers are glared at. where i was limiting glaring to a certain set of mechanics (which wouldn’t account for the reality that many invisibilized queers are literally glared at on the street for reasons of misogyny) but in opening glaring up to a broader kind of gawking, it includes the skeptical gaze that invisible queers live under a gaze that says “i don't fully see you, and when i get glimpses, my confusion makes me angry at you.” jean luc marion’s “saturated phenomena” refers to an event that is so full of data that the entirety of it is imperceptible to the human senses. https://doi.org/ . / § looking at the wound/wounding: “…the truth is that every time i am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears.” - ivan coyote sometimes when you’re trying to find a witness and can’t it’s because people don't have the conceptual framework to see you. “structures of language fundamentally shape, rather than merely reflect, cultural assumptions.” - kimberly emmons figure : lost voice. the process of asking for witnessing from people who can't see you can damage your voice. it becomes a crisis of audience. a rhetorical impossibility. coyote, ivan e. gender failure. (vancouver: arsenal pulp press, ), . emmons, kimberly. black dogs and blue words: depression and gender in the age of self- care (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), . samaran, nora. . “psychological harm is physical harm : why survivors lose their voice.” dating tips for the feminist man. march , . https://norasamaran.com/ / / /why-dont-survivors-speak/. nora samaran writes in her article psychological harm is physical harm : why survivors lose their voice, that it is very common for victims of abuse to lose their voices. like ariel from the little mermaid. this happened to me. i could feel it as my voice went. first i started saying that i was getting burnt-out from defending myself. then i started opting out of certain topics because “i just couldn't go there right now,” and then it wasn't opting out anymore. i couldn't talk about anything that felt like i was holding more than one piece of information at a time, as if my need to always be holding what people couldn't see about my story right there in case i needed to leap to my own defense. i was a burnt-out defense attorney who couldn't stand up for myself anymore. so i left the city to work on farms and be with animals and plants. and as i sat under a tree one day, as a donkey paced back and forth in front of me, trying to get me to play, asking me to see his silly cheerfulness, i realized that a lot of normy people can’t fully see queer people and often queer people can’t see each other. we can get burnt out and dissociated and forget how to play. many queers exist in a steady state of solidarity scarcity. we sometimes trade our dignity to walk on the surface and feel normal. as i was reading gender failure, i came across a section in a story that made my stomach feel cold/hollow. my queer ptsd was getting tripped. it was the feeling i get when i'm in proximity to queers who might have bad blood with each other. it’s not rational because most of the time this dynamic will have no impact on my safety. but i've developed a vigilance towards that vibe now because of the times that it has affected my life, it’s been devastating. i could recognize my friend’s energy in the description in one of rae’s stories, and then when it got to the dialogue, i could feel his syntax. rae was talking about a person who was also a trans guy, but who was on hormones long enough to “pass.” and rae does not take hormones, so rae experiences passing differently. in fact, they explain many times in the book, that since they do not the language they use to describe gender is both the cause and the effect of this. samaran, nora. . “psychological harm is physical harm : why survivors lose their voice.” dating tips for the feminist man. march , . https://norasamaran.com/ / / /why-dont-survivors-speak/. coyote, ivan e. . gender failure. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. “passing” in queer community is a controversial term. it refers to bodies/behaviors that fit the normal standards of the gender binary. people who pass are typically not causing members of the general public to have the cognitive dissonance that leads to the staring/judgement. https://norasamaran.com/ / / /why-dont-survivors-speak/ https://norasamaran.com/ / / /why-dont-survivors-speak/ pass by way of being in alignment with the rules of the gender binary, they fail on a daily basis in the eyes of people they interact with. and this is why they’ve retired from gender. to reject the binary that rejects them. at this point in their story, they hadn’t started using a “they” pronoun yet. they were still using a “he” pronoun and identifying as a man. the conversation they had with my friend was a pivotal changing point for them. because in that conversation, rae realized that my friend didn't see them as fully male, because they weren’t performing their gender in the same way he was. i texted my friend after reading this section, to ask if he was the person rae was referring to, and to see how he felt about rae’s process. maybe my friend was failing to see rae’s gender. maybe rae was failing to see that my friend wasn’t totally failing. (and maybe being a good gender audience is pass/fail? or is that too binary?) i wanted to hear what was going on for my friend in that moment. we texted and processed it. he said he’s a very different person now that he stopped drinking. sometimes queers fail to see each other. (and being invisible to your own kind can be devastating) maybe i'm failing to see my friend in this moment, and maybe he’s either not failing at all, or maybe he did fully fail to witness rae in this conversation (stressful thinking can breed binary thinking). there are probably gaps in my ability to interpret both of their experiences. i’ve started including gaps in my storytelling around my assault, because i can predict where i will lose people. and feeling someone’s attention drop because of boredom, misunderstanding, and/or dissociation is painful when i feel like i'm showing someone a gaping bloody hole in my heart. i notice i keep the rawest details to myself now. something about having the police officer ask me to write it all out in more detail than i ever had. something about how she told me there was nothing she could do with that information because it contained no evidence. (i was hemorrhaging details everywhere, but not enough to drink.) something about how i hoped she would be able to do more than nothing because she was a woman. and maybe she would be able to sympathize because maybe she or someone she knew had been raped too. so i have a vigilance now, where i notice that i assume someone will find my assault details simultaneously too heavy, and yet not solid enough to count. i struggle to imagine an audience i can reach. if i imagine a non-queer audience then i feel like talking about my journey through gender pronouns (something that can feel like both a basic, yet advanced and abstract aspect of myself, depending on who i'm talking to) is too much of a gender type conversation, and that it would be best for me to use the most entry level gender language. this is a safety calculous. i am assessing where i will lose you. if you aren’t queer i guestimate that i will lose you when i start talking about how i go by “he/him/his” now, but that i do not like when people call me “a man” because i perceive it to be the most binary of the masculine pronouns and although identify as masculine enough to fit masculine pronouns like “guy,” “dude,” “him”. i don’t feel that i fit well with “man” when it’s used more formally, but it’s ok when it’s more casual like “thanks man.” but even then, sometimes i catch my ear listening hard to hear if that last syllable was a “n” or an “m.” there’s so much meaning in that letter. figure : redacted. if i imagine a queer audience, i flinch at the idea of sharing the information that i publicly called out a trans guy for rape. even though this isn’t written in stone as a commandment, there is an expectation that we don’t call each other out horizontally. that members of the same tier of power within the lgbtq alphabet soup don’t get each other in trouble. so a white passing trans guy, calling out another white passing trans guy, is challenging for queer community to understand and show support towards. i believe both the perpetrator and the survivor deserve support, and i believe healing and resolution can come about that way. “it often isn’t the initial harm that is the most damaging in conflict---it’s the way the thing is responded to that often does the most harm.” - michael dues i included this photo in my call-out. i was using the medium started by project unbreakable, where victims of sexual assault take a picture of themselves holding a sign with a quote from their rapist. the idea is that in doing this they are reclaiming agency over the moment, and making themselves whole again, and thus unbreakable. i don’t feel able to share a photo like that again. but i do feel able to share the ways in which sharing that photo felt vulnerable, and the ways in which my silence has changed shape. at the time of the original photo, i wanted people to know the intimate details. after sharing those details publicly and feeling like i didn’t receive the response i wanted, i don't want to share about this wound with that much graphic vulnerability anymore. i would rather share the ways in which the sharing process itself hurt. the ways in which i'd rather cloud over the most painful pieces now (represented by the fading/greying), until i'm sure that i trust someone. and sharing about that blur has been having an unbarring effect. it’s un-redacting… this is where i imagine there being expectations that i will edit my personal narrative into a clear causal chain with a minimum degree of hope and clarity and empowerment. when in fact my experience around most of the pieces that lead to being able to write this were bloody, doubt-filled and confusing. this piece will likely be perceived to be too subjective and sloppy. someone might mention losing the forest for the trees § looking at reaction/reacting: “the arousal that goes along with ptsd can make all emotions more intense--and this intensity can be more difficult to regulate.” - matthew tull dues, michael. the art of conflict management: achieving solutions for life, work, and beyond (chantilly, va: the teaching company, ), . “the good news is that there are a number of skills for regulating emotions.” - matthew tull tull, matthew. cognitive behavioral coping skills workbook (milton keynes: speechmark publishing ltd, ), . http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/ § looking for safety: community climate crisis figure : looking at looking. when you know that people in the world are going to scowl at you, you’re faced with the idea that the larger group, your environment, isn’t right. and then this makes the stakes very high that your little pocket of trees be safe. one characteristic of queer culture is the belief that “normy world,” the forest, isn’t safe. so we reclaim safety as a promise for each other as “chosen family.” in the ’s we called gay/lesbian bars “safe space” in response to anti-sodomy laws. the concept of safe space has been hash tagged into oblivion. it’s often taken as a given that queer events will be “safe spaces” today, and when we fail to deliver on that promise of safety, it can feel like we have no home. if we agree with the premise that everything is connected, “as above, so below,” which is the motto associated with the tree of life in celtic paganism, then to some degree maybe our human- social-climate is destabilized in a similar way to our environmental climate - ie. if plastic is in the ocean, it is also in us, if the salmon are depleted and the trees are starving, then so are we “the salmon feed the trees that make the air we breathe.” - alexandra morton. morton, alexandra, and billy proctor. heart of the raincoast: the life of billy proctor (victoria, bc: touchwood editions, ), . harris, malcolm. “what's a 'safe space'? a look at the phrase's -year history.” splinter. accessed april , . https://splinternews.com/what-s-a-safe-space-a-look-at-the-phrases- - year-hi- . as i was working on this piece, one day, my partner called me to them in the bath where they were reading “the remedy”. they’d just finished a story by amber dawn that sounded like a story i had told them. it was about showing up to a queer party, just as a femme and a drag queen were making fun of sex workers. amber dawn explains that it was literally blocks from where sex workers she knew had disappeared. she talked about feeling betrayed by queer community. feeling unsafe in her body. i recognized that story partly because that kind of scenario is typical of lateral aggressions at queer parties. queer partying is -part liberation, -part anxiety, and -part daggers cutting into lifelong wounds to the pulse of house music. queer social anxiety is often a mix of excitement and well-founded fear. the other reason i recognized the story was because i was there that night. i was standing outside. i watched amber dawn arrive. i watched the femme and the drag queen, who were my friends, make the joke. i watched amber dawn tell them to never ever talk about those women like that. i said “ahh not cool.” quietly. and in that moment, it functioned as basically saying nothing. it was too quiet. my femme friend was already weaving an apologist story about why amber dawn was overreacting, and i didn’t call her on that in the moment. and that wasn’t ok. amber dawn writes about the particular devastation queers can feel when they show up to events with the hope that they won’t experience more of the same shit they get from normy people as they walk down the street. “no blood test can detect grief or disgrace. no research survey can quantify the harmful impact of having your queer communities-- your so called safe inclusive spaces -- other you again and again.” - amber dawn queers live in an environment of cultural crisis. a cultural/environmental crisis. it’s becoming more common to promise “safer spaces” in queer community now. where safety is considered a collaborative process, and where absolute, binary safety is considered unattainable. this revision focuses more on promising to increase safety, rather than promising total safety. this feels more honest. less gas-lighty. the promise of total safety sets people up to experience vibe failure, and since people at parties are motivated to see partying as light and fun, i think it also sets dawn, amber. the remedy: queer and trans voices on health and health care. (vancouver: arsenal pulp press, ), where safety is understood to exist if and only if all danger is removed, in a safety or danger, never safety and danger framework. gas-lighting is a psychological abuse technique where someone denies someone else’s accurate perception of reality. it results in someone losing faith in their own perspective. it damages eyes and voices. people up to dissociate from the degrees to which they are not feeling safe. it encourages fake smiles and forced stories of good times. but the modification to safer space can let people laugh and dance and talk about what felt “off” at the same time. it breaks down the party or suffer binary and let’s us party and talk about our pain, hopefully so the next party can be better. i wanted to talk about how my friend who insulted sex workers could be both an uplifting part of the overall vibe of the party, and also, in that moment, an undermining quality. in an environment where total safety has been promised, a breach in that safety means total failure. i wished there was a way in which we were expecting degrees of failure that night. figure : more looking. “there are always ways to intervene against othering. and when i say othering i don’t mean those pop-up reality tv shows about addiction, i’m talking about holistic and preventative care.” - amber dawn and i wish that people like me were more skilled at naming what feels off in the moment, setting boundaries in the moment. if queer party space could be cued in such a way that peoples’ pallets would have been more open to a call-in in the moment, and also a call-in days later. people would have been more open to dawn, amber. . the remedy: queer and trans voices on health and health care. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. , i can speak for myself at least and say that i would have felt more open to doing a call-in in a space that hadn’t promised total safety. but i also would have felt more comfortable calling-in in the moment if i wasn’t already known in the community for making a call-out. i felt like i was under scrutiny to see if i was just trigger happy and oversensitive. and i had already gone unheard, in the sense that i didn’t feel supported enough after my call-out. i wasn’t sure if i would be able to navigate gathering an audience, in the heat of a moment. i was unsure. and in flinching, and letting the moment pass me by, i was a bystander. and that was not ok. resolution, to missteps, since missteps would already have been accounted for and expected. the promise of total safety sets us up to be perfectionists and dissociated and open to excommunicating that which doesn’t align with total safety, and that is very unsafe. § looking for proof: when seeing is believing. “...when we feel fear, we feel fear of something.” - sara ahmed that's why i wanted tangible proof of the stares, because otherwise we are just sharing our feelings about being glared at, trying to convince people that these looks are micro-expressions connected to very real feelings of disgust/fear/hate. and that those feelings lead to very real joblessness/homelessness/friendlessness. that micro- expressions aren’t of micro-importance. they are tangible. that's also why i came out publicly about being sexually assaulted. before coming out i'd talked about the experience privately with friends and acquaintances, but there was always something that felt kind of hypothetical about what i was sharing. i was sharing the feeling about being sexually assaulted, which was being disregarded just as easily as my feelings-based way of being in the world has been countless times. sharing the feelings wasn’t enough to prove to people that something significant had happened and that i was living in significant danger. i did however talk to my boss the next day and i told him that something had happened, and that we needed to make a plan to address it. i suggested meeting with the person who made the sexworker-phobic joke, talking with her, letting her know that we know she is fundamentally a good person, and that what she did wasn’t ok. at the time i suggested this, my boss agreed. but he said he wanted to have the conversation with her privately. i didn’t hear from him for a week. i contacted him. his response was that confronting our friend about what she’d done had caused her massive anxiety and that he wished i had just dealt with it in the moment. i quit after that conversation. and i wonder if that was the right decision every day. maybe i could have worked it out with him. maybe i could have gotten him to understand that it wasn’t worse to point out the harm done, than it was to do the harm. but, i think what is more likely, is that i would have just slowly adapted to an environment when i felt more and more unable to name when things didn’t feel ok for me, because i was living under a constant question mark- did he overreact? couldn’t he have just gotten a mediator to sit with him and his rapist and they could have all held hands and said namaste? that’s me giving words to the ambient, felt skepticism. real or imagined- it would have worn me down. ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham: duke university press. but by creating a story, describing myself in relation to the person who assaulted me, describing the scene of the event, and describing the slow boiling of the frog that were my boundaries in relation to this guy, i had created something tangible. and when i published it, more people believed me. many people did not, and eventually their skepticism created an acid fog that made it impossible for me to continue living in vancouver with any shred of self- respect or dignity. but even as i was existing under their skeptical looks, i could tell they felt they were looking at something. they were engaging with something real. even if they wondered about the realism of the details in my story, they weren’t doubting the reality of my call-out. they had likely read it or heard about it. that piece was real. afterwards he went into hiding and left the city. that piece is real too. i had gotten them to see something. even if i wasn't being held deep enough or warm enough. sometimes people don't understand what they see and reject it, and sometimes people know what they're seeing but the reality of what they're looking at is too much to integrate, and so they scowl or look away. § the way this project came about, in : as i drove past the spy store on broadway in vancouver it occurred to me that i’d love to be able to wear the kind of glasses that james bond would wear in old movies, where he’d have a tiny camera hidden in the glasses. i wanted to be able to show other people what it was like to be looked at the way i was getting looked at. my friend who didn't receive those looks could see. they could see people glaring at me on the bus or rubbernecking as they walked past me on the street. but i wanted to be able to show people what it’s like to hold eye contact with someone who is glaring at you. i wanted to have physical evidence that it’s possible to walk down the street every day and receive hundreds of those glares. i thought if i could show people who don’t have those experiences the footage, that they would have an embodied reaction. that there would be something about it that would make it feel like it was happening to them. i was counting on people being able to have more sympathy for their own pain than empathy for other peoples’. but during the process of my transition, i stopped receiving the dangerous looks of confusion/curiosity/disgust/fear. because i started to look like i fit in a gender box. and so on the day of the shoot i decided i’d out myself by holding up a sign that said “i have a vagina.” in order to cause myself to fail, to instigate my own failure, knowing that the average person walking down the street in downtown vancouver would think it was absurd that someone with a beard could have a vagina. and i did receive glares. a frog boiling slowly is a classic metaphor for abuse. the idea is that if you drop a frog in already boiling water it will jump out. but if you put a frog in tepid water, and then increase the temperature slowly, the water will eventually come to a boil and the frog will stay in the pot and die. as i researched the subject of radical public photography further, i came upon the work of haley morris cafiero. i found her blocking particularly inspiring. the way she positioned herself, doing mundane activities, in public space. i also really appreciate the concept behind her next project: capturing the looks of surprise on people who notice she is taking pictures of people. she also takes her pictures to art galleries which brings in another layer of audience looking at the looking. one person even stopped me to yell at me. the confusion triggered anger in him. he wanted me to explain myself to him as he yelled at me. he thought his need to understand my gender had priority over the dignity i was losing by enduring his pointing and his questions. after i took a break from this project to work on my ptsd, this medium became a genre. after the viral video of the woman walking through new york, there were countless videos of a similar nature; documenting how gay men, disabled people and fat people are looked at as they walk down the street. people were hungry to explain to the world that micro-expressions can amount to micro- aggressions, and microaggressions matter. the way we look matters. § looking at being looked at: i interviewed justin, about a month after the shoot, to talk about how they felt about doing that kind of public performance. we talked while we looked at the footage together. they explained that after doing this shoot, they had become hyper- aware of the way they were being looked at on a daily basis. before the shoot, in our first interview they were excited. they knew they had a gender performance that attracted a lot of staring. they said they were going to “femme it up” and have fun with it, to really draw out those stares. they said they were interested in documenting and seeing that. after the performance, one month later, they were more masculine than i had ever seen them. i felt bad for noticing that. they brought it up, without me asking, so i feel like it’s ok for me to share that piece here. the first time we met they were in an amazing floor length turquoise dress, and they were singing “let it go” for tv cameras in front of nerdy queers in a coffee shop for gamers. that day justin was talking about how queer visibility is hard in the gaming community. they were making themselves abundantly visible to help those who were afraid to be seen feel like there was someone else holding that spotlight. when i saw them one month after our shoot, they were standing adjacent to that spotlight. we talked about that too. they said they were pulling that part of themselves in for a bit, to take a break. so they don't burn out. § looking at/for trauma: how do queers heal when trauma is at the root of our identity? rob bliss creative. “ hours of walking in nyc as a woman.” youtube video, : . october , .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b xgpvbwn a this is photo-elicited journalism. the idea is that photograph are more evocative than words, and that photos transport us somewhere. i wanted us to feel transported back to the scene, to feel those eyes again, and to talk about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b xgpvbwn a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b xgpvbwn a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b xgpvbwn a sometimes we install ourselves in a victim mindset so we can have a framework to understand ourselves as always right, and everything else as owing us something. not all of us are doing this all the time. there are very legitimate moments where queer/anti- oppression minded folks are being wronged and they need to be able to access social justice language to slam down the hammer of thor into a situation for their own protection and dignity. and sometimes queers weaponize their victim statuses against each other. this could be called “power under abuse.” § this is what power under abuse can look like: a checklist: ● using shame and social justice language to justify entitlement to someone else’s time, skills, resources or capacity. ● telling someone that their basic needs or boundaries (which is distinct from their comfort) are not valid because they hold an identity that is more privileged than yours. ● pressuring or forcing someone to have sex with you and then making claims about their politics when they say no or name that you were sexually violent towards them. ● accusing someone of controlling or abusing you because they are requesting accountability or transparent conflict resolution with you, for harm you caused or participated in. ● accusing someone (often publicly) of harming you in ways that did not happen. ● refusing to absorb or validate reality checks offered by friends and loved ones who witness abuse in your dynamic and justifying this deflection by stating that abuse "can only exist when power or privilege is held over someone else." ● refusing to accept support from anyone other than the person you are being abusive towards and leveraging shame or guilt at their power and privilege to pressure them not to set boundaries with you. ● denying, erasing or minimizing the support you receive from the person you are being abusive towards, both in private and in front of other people. ● acting confused or dismissive when the person whose care you have erased or minimized expresses feeling frustrated or hurt by you (often this is done in front of other people and the person experiencing the abuse is framed as over reacting or just having an unrelated hard time). ● accusing someone of abandoning you when they set boundaries or reach limits of capacity to care for you. ● refusing to set your own boundaries (when it was possible for you to do so) and then making statements like “you made me do this.” grace, andi. “power under abuse.” the witch cabinet, september , . https://witchcabinet.com/blogs/andi-grace/power-under-abuse-what-it-is-and-how-to- heal?ck_subscriber_id= . https://witchcabinet.com/blogs/andi-grace/power-under-abuse-what-it-is-and-how-to-heal ● calling for ostracization or punishment that is not proportionate to the harm done (i.e. 'going nuclear' when situation does not call for this or simple conflict resolution would have sufficed). ● constantly accusing other people of being oppressive, while simultaneously being unwilling to unpack your own privilege or examine how you harm or hold power over others. ● not acknowledging the oppression experienced by the person you are abusing and/or convincing the person you are abusing that they have more power (in general and specifically over you) than they actually do. ● refusing to acknowledge care, labor and resources given to you by the person you are in conflict with and instead characterizing them as only ever having had harmed you. ● refusing to address conflict in a way that honors the integrity and humanity of everyone involved. ● stealing from the person you are being abusive towards and either denying you stole, or claiming you have a right to the thing you stole because you are more oppressed than the person you stole from (which may or may not actually be true). ● accusing someone of triangulating or breaking confidentiality when they seek witnesses or support to navigate the abusive dynamic they are in with you. ● claiming to be 'getting support' and 'calling in witnesses' when you are spreading rumors and triangulating. ● weaponizing and applying pop psychology terms like "toxic", "narcissist" and "empath" to create a hyper-simplistic narrative of what happened between you and the person you were abusive towards, where in you lack an understanding of what these terms were intended to describe. ● labelling confusion, miscommunication or difference of opinion as gas-lighting. when i came out about being sexually assaulted, there were people in the community who perceived my call-out to be power under abuse. they thought that i was struggling to handle rejection and that i wanted revenge. the reason someone coming out about sexual assault can be perceived that way in the queer community is because of how rampant this kind of behavior is. some people weren’t wrong to wonder if i was retaliating, when i was steeped in a retaliation- based community that uses social justice language to publicly execute people. and in this climate, naming someone a rapist is a public execution, or it leads to public denial because we don’t have a spectrum of options available to us. we don’t have robust restorative justice circles, or a bro- culture of calling each other in when people get predatory. it has to escalate to the level of a call-out because there are gaps in our collective protocol around how we as a culture respond to sexual assault. in the fall of #metoo is taking over the internet because there’s a bottleneck opening up and a massive pressure release is happening. i’m excited to see what will come from making conversations about sexual assault more normalized. i co-wrote this article with poplar rose for the tarot and social justice themed organization little red tarot. it has since been taken down after the blog closed. § resting bitch face: the scowlee becomes the scowler. sometimes queers are assholes. and lots of them are that way for very understandable reasons. and sometimes this doesn't make the assholery ok. and sometimes it does. resting bitch face falls along these strata. resting bitch face, if you are unfamiliar, is when someone's baseline facial expression is cold. they're always glaring at the world, to some degree. in the queer community it's part of the culture to know that lots of queers have resting bitch face. and it's also part of the lore to believe that the reason for this is because normies do us wrong (won't hire queers, won't rent to queers, won't look at or treat queers nicely, the degree and visibility of this varies based on the degree of gender failure and geography). when you know you’re going to be glared at, why not glare back? there are so many understandable reasons for resting bitch face and so many tragic consequences. scowling can invite scowling scowling can calibrate us to feel dark emotions scowling can make people think we hate them scowling can scare people off scowling can make someone think we want to fight and scowling can scare someone into not fighting us scowling can keep people who shouldn’t be close at a distance scowling can be armor and sometimes that scowling, when turned inward, can make us monstrous. grushkin, rebecca. “i’ll smile when i want to: why resting bitch face is sexist.” accessed april , . https://www.hercampus.com/school/american/ill-smile-when-i-want-why-resting- bitch-face-sexist. this article deals with the problematics*** of thinking women shouldn't have resting bitch face, which is related to men feeling entitled to women's affection and insulted by their rejection. i think a similar logic can be used to understand resting bitch face in queers (many of whom identify as women, or who have feminized experiences). i just watched a documentary called party monster. it's about the rise and fall of club kid culture, which was characterized by gay men taking over public spaces in glam rock outfits for after-hour parties with lots of drugs and sex. the leader of this movement was michael alig who then goes on to end the movement by murdering his social competitor and roommate. the narrative of the documentary suggests that it was childhood bullying that forged alig into a disco murder. maybe it's because queers often experience rejection at fundamental developmental times that we have trouble holding each other gently. sometimes we become party monsters and devour each other. § once i worked in a gay/queer club: figure : queer map of vancouver. i lived in eastvan, and i was attracted to gay men in the west end. party monster. bailey fenton. new york: world of wonder, . glam rock, which was hugely about colorful flamboyant outfits, happened in response to the previous hippie movement, which rejected high fashion. this is the idea supported by the documentary, but many queers in urban centers dress up in fabulous outfits and spend a lot of time in clubs identify as club kids today. figure : culture clash. although both sections of the city are lgbtq, during the years i lived there, eastvan had more people who were assigned female at birth and may now identify as: lesbians, transmen, nonbinary etc. and the west end has more people assigned male at birth who are attracted to other people assigned male at birth or transmen. i found it particularly challenging to move east and west, from queer space to gay space and back. gay men say “hey girl” to their people… if they see you as a gay man they say “hey girl” … but if you say “hey girl” to a masculine of center person in eastvan it can be seen as critically offensive misgendering and a violation of “safe space.” i felt like i had to calibrate and recalibrate my social/language apparatus as i rode the skytrain to hang out in these culturally distinct, yet lgbtq, parts of the city. how can we ever talk about queer culture in a stable way when it is different in every major city/town/village around the world; it’s different for people of different generations (even micro- generations across spans of - years). nonetheless we have tangible experiences in these communities, and it can be helpful to talk about our experiences in these changing micro-cultures like they are nonetheless real even thought they are multifaceted, multiple, and changing cultures. the lgbtq community is not a static or unified community. we do not have one consistent agenda. so i’m speaking about my experiences of queerness here like they are concrete experiences, because they were tangible for me, but i also see this epoch that my experiences happened within as a changing fluid epoch amongst other cultural queer epochs on a fluid tapestry we are all simultaneously interpreting and creating. figure : everybody. every body. vancouver art and leisure society was supposed to be a space where everyone could party: gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, kinky, festival-goers, club kids. lgbtq and more! i started working in this organization by reaching out to the owner who was being inundated by a public call-out. i told him that i might be able to help him out, because it appeared as though he had made a faux pas without knowing. it appeared as though, although he was gay, he did not speak “queer.” he had forgotten to do an accessibility audit of his venue. this was normal on the west end. it was social suicide in eastvan. it is expected that if you are putting on an event for one member of a marginalized group, that you will be making room at the table for everyone. this means knowing how people in wheelchairs are going to experience your event and making those details clear to people as you advertise your event. in the west end people want to know ) who is performing. ) who else is coming out to party that night, and ) is there a cover charge, and maybe ) what are the drink specials? gay and queer are distinct yet overlapping cultures. queer has emerged from queer theory and academic feminism even if someone hasn’t been in academia, if someone identifies as queer chances are they study their identity and identity politics in general with an academic vigor. gays were traditionally cis-men who were persecuted in gay bars. their liberation involves happily partying without getting beat up or killed. but the term queer is being universalized in the lgbtq community. people who used to be gay now identify as queer; the cultures are mixing. ~ so i ran his facebook account for a few days i made the appropriate minimal apologies i avoided invitations to debate i later helped him come up with the tagline everybody every body a more accessible way of talking about accessibility politics, i thought his spaces weren’t fully wheelchair accessible though, so i guess it wasn’t technically correct. but the spirit of the message was that we wanted people from east and west to converge on main street to mix with bisexuals and straight festival go-er figure : vancouver club kids. i was standing to the left of the photographer when this was taken. i remembered thinking it seemed like an iconic moment. the image seems to call to mind a timeless club kid, unbothered by the goings on of the - . nocturnal, and living in the underground. cameron, baron s. night visions: beyond good and evil. vancouver, british columbia: culture thug photography, . “we must face ugly truths about ourselves, the company we keep, and the company we kept. we are not responsible for the actions of others but cannot pretend problems don’t exist because we are not directly involved… some of the people i photograph are way out on the margins… i do not seek to romanticize their situations. nothing could be worse or more dangerous. worse, in the sense that to romanticize their situation is to give it a false nobility and no onus for anyone to push for change. dangerous because you are ill-advised to stop counting sheep when wolves are about… i am here to insist you stop turning a blind eye to far corners of our society. we are all our brother's keepers. if not, then who will come for us when we need help?” - cameron s. baron these guys were gender failures and gender fucks too. having a multi-disciplinary (music/art/performance) and multi-cultural space sounded amazing to me. what could go wrong? figure : arson puts vancouver arts and leisure society on ice. it was speculated that this was retaliation for stealing customers from the west end. it turns out that members of the lgbtq umbrella can’t just be mish-mashed together in a creative/party space without complications. little, simon, and robyn crawford. “suspected arson puts vancouver arts and leisure society on ice.” global news. global news, january , . https://globalnews.ca/news/ /arts- group-arson/. we are not endangered pandas who can just be thrown into an enclosure together in the hopes of cuteness. (that isn’t even realistic when it comes to the pandas. sometimes they cannibalize.) we are not unanimous about the gay agenda. we are not unanimous about whether we’re having a party or a protest we are not unanimous about how we party or how we protest. the gays prefer screaming, body contact, sarcasm. the queers prefer conversations about consent. bisexual people can party with any of them. but they also feel left out a lot. in my time working there i witnessed women coming to me to report consent violations (i guess the limited conversations about consent was a complicated policy). ~ sometimes we're able to heal enough that we can march and dance beside each other. i think we are able to hold each other well when we look at our trauma and rework it. i think that applies to everyone, not just queers. § why are queers so mean to each other? “...the community that i have spent my entire adult life working and living in sometimes feels even more dangerous and volatile than the mainstream, cis and heteronormative world that i spent my teen years trying to escape. after all, i can at least blame the cruelty of straight, cis society on homophobia and transphobia. but why are queers so mean to queers?” - kai cheng thom arguably the most effective protests are fun and the most powerful parties affect social change. (some kind of quote about social movement theory). the right party can be a powerful dialectic between action and theory. the right moments at a parties have profound butterfly-effect-esque impacts on cultural trends. thom, kai cheng. . “why are queer people so mean to each other?” xtra magazine. august , . https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other- . “what happens to a community of people who have been raised with a sensation of constant, looming danger, of being fundamentally wrong in the way we love and express ourselves? what impact might that collective trauma have upon our bodies and spirits?” - kai cheng thom scholars of the brain are fond of saying “what fires together, wires together,” which refers to the brain’s tendency to form neural networks (pathways in the brain that form certain thought, feeling and behavioral responses) that become stronger and stronger every time they are used. trauma theory holds that traumatized individuals — and, i hypothesize, queer and trans community as a whole — have well-worn neural networks shaped around the deeply held physical sensation that we are constantly in danger, that we are bad and unlovable, that others are untrustworthy and violent. every time we are abused, discriminated against or neglected, those neural networks become stronger, while our neural networks associated with safety and loving relationships atrophy. we become physically less capable of imagining a world where being with others is not synonymous with being unsafe.” so queers are super-saturated in call-outs we have replicated a police state within our own saf(er) space “[language] can precipitate action by mapping the cognitive terrain and persuading us that we are (or are not) in need of treatment, and it can shape the forms of treatment to which we are willing to subject ourselves.” - kimberly emmons words got us here identity label words imperative words thou shalt words words casting broad strokes and mobilizing armies thom, kai cheng. . “why are queer people so mean to each other?” xtra magazine. august , . https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other- . emmons, kimberly. black dogs and blue words: depression and gender in the age of self- care (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), . “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?” - ru paul “unfortunately, humans often do not completely discharge the vast energies mobilized to protect themselves.” - peter a. levine § looking at cults: as i was leaving vancouver, i watched going clear: scientology and the prison of belief, a documentary about people leaving scientology. there was something that i found strangely familiar about the behaviors and nature of the cult of scientology, and cults in general. the repeating of the approved phrases. the look of tense fear in the eyes. conditioned behavior. tangible consequences for stepping out of line. “a typical cult has a charismatic, unaccountable leader, persuades by coercion and exploits its members, economically, sexually or in some other way.” - rick ross francis lee identifies some key ways in which the social justice community (which has massive overlap with the queer community) behaves in a similar way to a religion on the basis of ru paul’s drag race. “drag on a dime.” episode . ru paul. outtv, february , . levine, peter a. waking the tiger: healing trauma through the body. berkeley, ca: north atlantic books, . warning: slight conflation between cults and extreme religiosity. there’s enough overlap between the two to justify the blending of the conversation, i believe. “going clear: scientology & the prison of belief.” alex gibney, imdb.com, june , . https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /. - also see the documentaries “mad mad country”, and “tiger king” for depictions of communities who believed they were not cults, when in fact the communities existed under the dominating rule of one charismatic leader. ross, rick. “what makes a cult? | rick ross.” the guardian. guardian news and media, may , . https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /may/ /cults-definition- religion. ) seeking purity- “social death follows when being labelled a “bad activist” or ”problematic”” ) reproducing colonial logics - “the experiences of oppression do not grant supremacy” ) preaching punishments - “telling people what to do and how to live their lives is endemic to dogmatic religion and activism.” ) sacred texts- “nearly all of [the latest mandatory reading] articles follow a standard structure: an instructive title, list of problematic or suggested behaviors, and a final statement of hard opinion.” “god is dead. god remains dead. and we have killed him. how shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? what was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? what water is there for us to clean ourselves? what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - friedrich nietzsche one of nietzsche’s social critiques is that we have dethroned god by stepping away from religion as a primary source of information, but he believed that we still had religious tendencies. he wondered what we would do to move beyond religious ways of seeing and being with each other. i think we’re still figuring this out… § seeing freedom/liberation in the stars: queering my saturn return. it's not controversial to say astrology is part of queer culture. when queers get to know each other they often lead by asking about sun/moon/rising signs. lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of- social-justice- /. nietzsche, friedrich and walter arnold kaufmann. the gay science with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (brantford, ontario: w. ross macdonald school resource services library, ), . foucault, michel. . discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: vintage. foucault on language and liberation: we need a minimal amount of freedom to articulate our liberation. power affects how we see our freedom. queering is when you take something and upend it, make it strange, make it different, reverse it, take a radically different perspective. ma thesis + saturn return discussion = kinda queer. astrology is a framework that means something to me. ever since my grade four teacher called me to the front of the room and asked when my birthday was and told me i was a cancer. and i didn't know what a cancer was, except that i knew people could get cancer and that that was bad. i was sure i wasn't bad, so i wanted to know what a cancer was so i could prove it wasn't bad. it turns out cancers are a sign that get characterized and treated rather simplistically as overly emotional/sensitive. and i've been living with this struggle my whole life-- having feelings about things that i’d like to share except that i know i will likely be sharing to an audience that doesn’t want to talk that much about feelings. when i was in undergrad a feminist philosophy professor took a liking to me and told me that she thought i should practice speaking in a firmer, more monotone voice, and that i should say "i think _____," instead of "i feel ______." then i started studying non-dualism and post-structuralism. i loved how these frameworks could undermine the mind/body division of descartes’ super reductive “i think therefore i am” metaphysics, which also cascades into undermining the mind/heart division. it felt good to know that there were ways of relating to the world that didn’t just need to be mind/analysis based, but that a heart/poetry relationship to the world was valid too, and that actually sometimes the heart/poetic is more effective at conveying things than the mind/analytic. after studying astrology more i learned that my sun sign is actually gemini/cancer cusp. which is a placement that bridges mind and heart, where gemini is mind and cancer is heart. so the worlds that i try to bridge in philosophy and poetry are reflected in my stars. i think i would be missing something to talk about how queers see each other, and how i see myself in queer community, and leave out astrology. according to mythology, saturn is a planet whose energy asks us to look at structures and systems and ask if they have integrity. and when saturn returns to the same place in the sky when we were born, it asks us if what we've built so far is load-bearing. it asks us to wonder if we want to keep building in the same way. it asks if our projects and plans follow from our heart and our hopes. saturn tests our castles. saturn returns when people are - , and again when people are - . this is often when people have quarter and mid-life crisis, as they reflect on the significance of what they’ve built thus far. my saturn return happened immediately after i publicly called out a trans guy for sexually assaulting me (at the time of the call-out it was his saturn return). then when my return started, i was hacked and cyber- stalked by one of his friends. and then i had a falling out with one of my best friends/project-partner/boss around an ethical issue that played out at a fundraiser/party for our project. saturn returned to look at me, and it could see with fullness that there were gaps in the structure of my life. so i deconstructed the rickety structures, and left to the woods to live in a trailer in a goat pen, where i woke up every morning to the sound of them sharpening their horns on the door of the trailer. saturn, represented by the goat, was feeling ignited. figure : goat love. and then a -year-old dorm on a commune on saturna island, where they build fences around their vegetation to keep their free-range pigs/chickens/cows out, rather than building cages to keep their animals in. and then a room in a -year-old farmhouse on cortes island, where a would-be cult leader from toronto taught me what he had googled about raising the biggest pigs on the island. in nietzsche’s thus spoke zarathustra, zarathustra goes up the mountain to contemplate, and he comes down the mountain when he’s ready to re-enter society, after he’s integrated what he needed to integrate back up on the mountain. i feel like i can relate to this story in how i dealt with my trauma. i feel like i needed to go off away from everyone i knew, up the mountain. and i wasn't ready to talk about it until after i had had some time away and i’d come back down and i ’d been bumping shoulders with people for a while. there’s a simplicity to being with animals that i find very healing for my ptsd. a social injury that was caused by socializing with humans. in those rural spaces, i missed queer vibe. i was starting to identify as having queer ptsd. i wasn't sure how i could ever write about queer content or engage with queer audience again. so i went to a queer land project in the interior of bc. i think in my traumatized state, i was hoping that other traumatized queers would be able to see and hold me. i fell in love with a genderqueer femme witch, and i witnessed the collapse of their epic relationship to their femme trans pregnant partner. the aftermath of that left deep gashes and scorched earth. leaving me feeling that queer + rural isn't in itself a place of holding and seeing. i want queer + rural + stable i want a queer permaculture. which requires healing, which requires talking/witnessing. which requires genuinely safer space. which requires being able to look at structural flaws in the flow and fix them. and it requires that we learn how to live in reciprocal relationship with each other. it requires that we integrate saturnine teachings. “only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... i doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but i know it makes us more profound... in the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.” - friedrich nietzsche as opposed to a queer climate crisis. nietzsche, friedrich wilhelm, and walter arnold kaufmann. the gay science with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (brantford, ontario: w. ross macdonald school resource services library, ), . § here’s a saturnine sub-plot… so.. your friend got called out for sexual assault? things you can do* *suggestions from a trans masculine survivor. “i believe that passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice injures us - it widens the disconnect. the part of us that is hurting does not heal in the dark; we must turn on the light to look at it. we must pay attention.” ― amber dawn a post-weinstein listicle: figure : #metoo. amber dawn, how poetry saved my life: a hustlers memoir (vancouver: arsenal pulp press, ), . we are in a post-weinstein era. #metoo stories are becoming normal. in this new world, people are named publicly for committing sexual violence. lots of people. people you love. maybe even your friends/partners/family/co-workers/ role models. the friends of someone who is called out for sexual assault play a significant role in shaping the aftermath of the call-out. friends form the jury in the court of public opinion and can make a life or death difference to both the survivor and the person being called out. a few years ago, i did a #metoo-style call-out. and i lived through painful aftermath. from that journey, i learned what meaningful support for survivors can look like. so, i have some ideas to offer… please take what feels right and leave the rest. if you have a friend who was called out for sexual assault, the way you respond matters. here's things you can do: ) support the survivor/s ● *believe that harm happened* sexual harm often happens without outside witnesses, so it's important to give the survivor's account of the situation credibility. ● contribute to the public discussion and lift up the survivor and their story. it’s ok to be unsure of what to say - but minimizing, retaliating, or being silent is not the answer. ● consult the survivor/s - check in with the survivor or one of their close friends to let them know that you are working with your friend on an accountability process. ask what they need to feel supported and offer to give them space. ) support your friend ● the time immediately after a sexual misconduct call-out is critically important. consider being by your friend’s side to help them emotionally regulate. they may become unstable or at risk of self-harm or retaliation - if the situation looks risky, call your local suicide help line. ● encourage your friend to engage with restorative justice - work with a restorative justice counsellor and/or join a restorative justice support group. many of these counsellors and support groups offer support to communities as they address sexual violence. this is where folks with sexually harmful behavior can do the work of figuring out #howiwillchange (a hashtag parallel to #metoo that emerged october ) ● encourage your friend to apologize *genuinely* - genuine apologies include: identifying harm, acknowledging impact, and outlining a plan to heal and learn healthier behaviors. genuine apologies do not include minimizing the situation or sending the survivor/s under the bus. supporting your friend means helping them step into accountability. it’s in your friend’s best interest to heal their wounds/behaviors and repair their relationship to community. ) support yourself: ● this process requires significant amounts of energy and emotional labor. it will probably be a huge moment in your life. take plenty of time to reflect, integrate, & restore. check in with yourself. are your basic needs taken care of? are you in a fight/flight/freeze/fawn trigger loop? are you feeling regulated/grounded when offering support? ● check in with your counsellor/support team re: debriefing, managing your triggers, and your boundaries/energy. you don’t need to give endlessly to this accountability/healing process, but it is important to show up in a meaningful way that is available to you. *this is an introductory conversation, not a comprehensive sexual misconduct response kit.* i want this article to help folks resist the pressure to be silent and perpetuate shame in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct. my original advisor, carl leggo, didn’t like this article. he felt that i had drifted away from asking questions and that i had wandered into the realm of lecturing. he was very gentle but firm in supporting me to realize that i had started to weaponize myself in response to my trauma, and § this is a website layout for a business idea that i had to start an online peer support group for masculine people wanting to live in a “masculine nurturance culture.” i was focusing on the concept radical masculinity. ** radical masculinity is a way to present, perform, play with, celebrate, and liberate masculinity, in thousands of multi-dimensional expressions. it is still being created, recreated, formed, and reformed, and i want to be a part of its ongoing evolution.” - sinclair sexsmith aka sugarbutch a gathering space for masculine folks who want to work on themselves in community. in the wake of #metoo, it is has become widely accepted that the norm for masculinity is toxic: competitive, judgmental, and threatening… people with masculinity need to do better... my name is onyx rose, and i’m a masculine survivor. when i sought support, i wanted to join a masculinity group that was: - welcoming of people of all genders - encouraging people to heal and take accountability - offering space to learn theory and practice healthy masculinity i wasn’t able to find a community that held all of these different pieces. it’s common to find spaces for cis-masculine or transmasculine folks that place more emphasis on either healing or accountability.. it’s also more common to focus on theory over practice, except in retreat spaces. i believe we can bridge these both/and’s that part of that weapon was to take on an authoritarian tone. i don’t want my ptsd to result in me being too afraid to be vulnerable enough to ask questions, and be in dialogue with people as opposed to living in my own monologue where i have created a false sense of safety through routine and lecture. samaran, nora. . “the opposite of rape culture is nurturance culture.” dating tips for the feminist man. december , . https://norasamaran.com/ / / /the-opposite-of-rape- culture-is-nurturance-culture- /. sexsmith, sinclair. . “a manifesto for radical masculinity.” feminist philosophers. december , . https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ / / /a-manifesto-for- radical-masculinity/. and i believe it is possible to heal #toxicmasculinity by cultivating space for diverse, nurturing and transformative masculinity. so i created radicalmascs.com a radical online peer-support community for people of all genders with any kind of self-defined masculinity. we support each other by: - sharing our stories - listening with open hearts - encouraging each other to grow do you crave belonging to a community that encourages people to have a conscious relationship to masculinity? join us? * mascs are: anyone who is engaging with masculinity in their gender performance and wants to consciously curate their masculinity so that it is nurturing rather than toxic. ** this system is inspired by: - the #metoo movement - a manifesto for radical masculinity, describes a masculinity that is powerful yet not oppressive. - the masks we live in, a film about masculine people reckoning with their masculinity. - the opposite of rape culture is nurturance culture , nora samaran’s viral essay about masculine people disrupting rape culture. - excommunicate me from the church of social justice, an essay that describes the ways in which social justice culture replicates dogmatic behaviors. sexsmith, sinclair. “a manifesto for radical masculinity.” feminist philosophers, december , . https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ / / /a-manifesto-for-radical- masculinity/. “the mask you live in - a film from the representation project.” the representation project. accessed april , . http://therepresentationproject.org/film/the-mask-you-live-in- film/. samaran, nora. “the opposite of rape culture is nurturance culture.” dating tips for the feminist man, december , . https://norasamaran.com/ / / /the-opposite-of-rape- culture-is-nurturance-culture- /. lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . http://therepresentationproject.org/film/the-mask-you-live-in/ https://norasamaran.com/ / / /the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture- / - reflections on enabling in queer culture, validation is not the only valid method of support. if you are a content-creator, artist, and/or healer of some kind who would like to contribute to radicalmascs* in some way, please send a message with a description of your work and some of the ways you would like to participate. “brave space” not safe space radicalmasc peer support: a space for folks with any past/present/future masculinity, to support each other to heal and grow “the opposite of masculine rape culture is masculine nurturance culture: [people with masculinity] increasing their capacity to nurture, and becoming whole.” - nora samaran this is where theorizing about being heart open and accountable meets practice--. this is where we cultivate nurturance culture. we support each other by: - sharing our vulnerable stories - listening with open hearts - encouraging each other to grow pay what you crave: this payment system is based on the idea that if we are entering into exchange with each other based on clear communication and healthy cravings that we have cultivated; we can achieve balance. part of this work is to re-calibrate our cravings so that we are mutually supporting each other. masculine people are trained to receive unreciprocated emotional labor. membership in the group is offered sliding scale with a suggested $ /month. but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. sintrayda. “reflections on enabling in queer culture.” who will walk these wooden streets? december , . https://sintrayda.tumblr.com/post/ /reflections-on-enabling-in- queer-culture. samaran, nora. “the opposite of rape culture is nurturance culture.” dating tips for the feminist man, december , . http://sintrayda.tumblr.com/post/ /reflections-on-enabling-in-queer-culture part of mutual support is to meet each other where we’re at. so if you are unable to afford the suggested $ /month, please choose an amount that works for you. you can return the support by participating in the group and by sharing my work. community agreements: “i don’t want to listen just actively, but also mindfully, compassionately, critically, lovingly. and i want to be listened to in those ways by my friends and family. i have come to believe that support, or at least the kind that comes from long-term relationships between loved ones, is not only validation, but also grounding. containment. authenticity. willingness to enter the space of conflict and the knowledge that we will also emerge from it.” - sintrayda we listen: - mindfully - compassionately - critically - lovingly mindful communication: we notice context, content and methods of communication. who is here, what is being said, how are we showing up? we notice community agreements. we notice what is coming up in our body. compassionate communication: we hold that people are strong. we also tend to ourselves- we take space when we need to critical communication: we examine what’s being said. hold it up against different ethical frameworks, including our guts. we start dialogues. we unpack things that come up. loving communication: we hold that other we speak: - from our own experience we grow: - by unlearning - asking questions - sharing stories/ideas/resources sintrayda. “reflections on enabling in queer culture.” who will walk these wooden streets? december , . https://sintrayda.tumblr.com/post/ /reflections-on-enabling-in- queer-culture. - processing emotions - re-writing patterns - becoming acountabilibuddies in conflict we: - don’t call-in/out. we call-to: - instead of focusing on the person who did something, we focus on the topic not safe space, brave space. - “assume good intentions, and attend to impact.” - fatfeministwitch § looking at deadlines i’ve been reflecting on timing. in some ways i was too late to publish this work and contribute meaningfully to the public dialogue on #streetharassment. and in some ways i was too early when i told my own public #metoo story, two years before it became a movement. in a post-weinstein climate, i wonder if my story would have been heard differently if i waited a couple years. the public imaginary has been primed to hear these stories now. these stories teach a protocol of right and wrong ways to hear a sexual assault story. they’re teaching people how to be a receptive audience. how to see each other’s stories without repressing the information and moving one with the day. this kind of seeing is preventing people from falling through the cracks it never seems like the right time to share bad news. and these stories are felt as bad news. they are traumatic to tell, and traumatic to hear. but when we integrate information that is challenging to our current reality it becomes revolutionary thefatfeministwitch. “interview with andi grace.” the fat feminist witch, november , . https://thefatfeministwitch.com/ / / /interview-with-andi-grace/. it has also been somewhat traumatic for me to write about. however, shifting to the rubric of: ) asking questions, instead of seeking answers, ) finding realistic hope somehow, ) engaging more perspectives than just my own into this discourse, ) using auto-ethnography to discuss my own experience with the topic of: traumatic gaze(s)... i have found the process healing to my own personal story and how i talk about and see myself. it has been narrative therapy. nietzsche’s “free spirit” would inflict a helpful wound on society by offering up information that would force outdated data to be flushed and for healing and new integration to happen around the site of old ideology. the timing around this story has been a challenge for me. i’m doing a social critique from a personal place. i’ve needed to step away and take breaks and come back with a different perspective. this is why i have written about this somewhat chronologically somewhat linearly so that you can see my voice and perspective change. i have felt moved more than once on the position of what tone/framing feels right to use on this material. i felt very confused when i saw the #metoo controversy erupt at my university. a professor in my department was called out by a student. a famous canadian author weighed in. the #metoo conversation played out in some expected ways and some unexpected ways and i don’t feel able to write about it it needs to stay redacted but i will say that it impacted my ability to sit down to this story for a few months. § looking at failure: is this a thesis? rae spoon’s gender retirement is an empowered, intentional failure. “to me gender retirement is the refusal to identify myself within the gender binary.” - rae spoon my original intention with this project was to make a performative argument that the way we look matters, with a focus on how queers are looked at in public, using footage of queers getting glared at as proof. i ended up becoming part of my own performance when i made a call-out that wasn't received in the way i would have liked, which hurt, proving again that the way we look matters. this time with a focus on what it's like to be witnessed by queers. if we gawk if we only look if we look briefly only to return to texting if we look over and over again but say nothing if we look and then say something, but not about the thing we're looking at if we look and say something about what we see but somehow in putting words to it, we miss the mark so terribly and reveal that we don't actually care, not in the way we need to another person who prefers lower case letters. spoon, rae. gender failure, (vancouver: arsenal pulp press. ), in investigating “looking,” i realized a kind of obvious corny thing which is that we all crave witnesses to our truths, to some degree. our painful truths, our exciting truths, our weird and boring truths. i realized in collecting this footage that everyone can be looked at like this. i wasn’t looked at with disgust until i held a whiteboard reading “i have a vagina,” figure : i have a vagina. and then again when i held a cardboard sign quoting my rapist. fundamentally, having unsympathetic eyes on us hurts. glaring hurts. i think it hurts anyone who is aware it is happening, because i believe we are pack animals who thrive with healthy connections and feel pain in strained hostile relationships. in showing people how easily queers are gawked at i hope i made a point that those who aren't looked at like this all the time should have some sympathy for what it must be like to live under a gauntlet of that kind of harshness, squinting eyes, tight lips, shoulders and heart turned away figure : looking at the bus stop. but in processing this i realized that i don’t need to prove that glaring in and of itself hurts, because everyone has been on the receiving end of that kind of coldness at some point. and i realized that although queers are very literate in naming when they have been viewed in a way that's not ok, that doesn’t mean that all queers are automatically experts at witnessing people. some queers develop amazing resilience strategies in response to their trauma/oppression that has them being very emotionally intelligent, powerful yet kind in their ways of relating to others. some don't. and i realized, as i am healing my ptsd, that we all look like this too. i started to recover memories of times i hadn’t looked at people kindly. when i had held them with harshness, with black/white eyes. it helped me remember why people do that. i think it’s fear mostly. so witnessing, i think, is something we're all craving and we’re all learning at. this has been an exposure therapy and my voice is coming back. ~ it might always be an “ing.” it certainly isn’t an “ed.” part : the way we talk about the way we look matters § feedback: my advisors think i need more: ) hope ) questions ) existentialism hope: maybe i've taken on an armored approach that is painful for my audience. i wonder if anyone really needs another instructive listicle. when i ask myself why i included a listicle in here, the answer that comes to me is -because you needed to say it- i needed to be able to delineate harm and wrongful action. and now that i have, i want to talk about something else. and i want to talk differently. i want to let go of some significant resentment and cultivate hope. “[crafting alternative futures where we don’t have to fight each other for resources and care] might mean checking in with myself about how i have let my heart grow hard.” - frances lee questions: in a piece that’s been supposed to be focused on questions rather than answers… i lapsed into dictums…. ironically, my only question was - will you “join us?”- was i accidentally trying to start a cult? when you focus on answers it can lead to culty-ness. is this what happens at the extreme end of the spectrum when we switch from asking questions to fighting for answers? we start getting dogmatic? we want to start a group for our teachings? i was given a book on religious masculinity because i think the person who gave it to me thought i could use some help lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church- of-social-justice- /.frances lee, excommunicate me from the church of social justice it said things like: “...a man wants to be the hero to the beauty...” - john eldredge and “this is every man’s deepest fear” to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an imposter, and not really a man.” - john eldredge i remember laughing because i thought that i was taking a much more evolved approach to gender but, with an answer heavy approach, it could come across like i’m basically saying that: all queers are hurt and all hurt people hurt people and all gays hate the queers and all bisexual people are confused and all normy people oppress the entire lgbtq community and i’m not trying to say that but maybe i’m not as far away from the religious way of relating to gender as i would like. maybe i need to work harder at asking questions about gender. existentialism: existentialists have been reckoning with how we see ourselves since wwii. hitler gave the world an existential crisis and many thinkers had quite a bit to ponder after that. let's look more into some of the core issues surrounding how humanity views itself. eldredge, john. wild at heart: discovering the secret of a man’s soul. nelson incorporated, thomas, . § “the look:” “looking” in existentialism. existentialists have been saying that “looking” matters for a long time. sartre’s “look” we cannot see the other as our self that’s projecting when we stare at another, it is easy to reduce them to an object and yet, if we say the other is unknowable, we cannot connect merleau ponty’s “phenomenology of perception” we sense each other we project meanings onto each other as we project we forget that we are even looking and we believe the projections so we need to reinterpret our perceptions we must look at how we look simone de beauvoir’s “other” when we see women as secondary we make them less than less knowable less relatable less human other we cannot see people as secondary we must learn to see everyone as having agency sartre, jean-paul. . being and nothingness: an essay in phenomenological ontology. routledge. merleau-ponty, maurice. . phenomenology of perception. nevada: franklin classics. and value § what about the magic of liminal bridge-work? : letting go. moving on. shifting the vibe? figure : hope and drag queens. “stop for a minute or two - take a breath with the land beneath you, breathe in the sky above you, and deeply breathe with the rhythm of the seas that surround the shores of your land. imagine a bridge that crosses a stream or a river; this is the epitome of liminal space, neither on ground nor in the air, not on earth nor water. it is betwixt and between. in your vision it is midnight; sense a silence that sings of magic. feel the particles of water that rise from the river below, and glance down at its inky blackness, flickers of starlight glittering on its surface. what does it mean to be liminal? why is this essential for magic? standing at the center of the bridge, look to your right. this is the world of ordinariness, or word and cars, obligations and bills. now glance to the left; soft grass and the whispers of aspen sing the songs of the lands of magic. the expanse between is crossed by the bridge of liminality. beauvoir, simone de, constance borde, and sheila malovany-chevallier. . the second sex. london: vintage books. hughes, kristoffer. . the book of celtic magic: transformative teachings from the cauldron of awen. woodbury, mn: llewellyn publications), . according to hughes, in celtic druid tradition, to do magic, i must “clarify, state, and maintain my intent.” this has been a powerful mantra for my healing. it helps to be de-escalate out of a triggered, activated state, and find a quiet focus. “liminality--from the greek limen, meaning “threshold”--brings a subtle power to the magic by utilizing the subtle forces that linger between the seen and unseen, apartment and unapparent. liminal places, times and spaces are effective tools that ready the mind for magic and serve as a conduit for projection of will and desire. when we move into liminal space or time, the world may feel slightly different--and most importantly, so will the magician.” ( ). i wonder about the power of spending time in liminal space, the “betwixt and between’, to heal the black/white, traumatized ways of seeing the world. feel, sense, and be here now. with a deep breath and loud sigh, arise from your vision and record your thoughts in your journal.” - kristoffer hughes § looking at recovery: see me! a drag queen inspired ritual. “intimacy is the feeling that comes from revealing our inner self to be actively witnessed by another.” - justice schanfarber i'm thinking about wearing eye makeup again. when i go to do it, i get a little dissociated and procrastinate-y butterflies in my belly i just moved to a small town. i know i would get looks at the check\-out if i was wearing stubble, plaid & eyeliner. drag queens are brave. not boys-don’t-cry brave. vulnerability-as-a-strength brave the vulnerability vs bravery binary haunts most people with masculinity, i think. i feel like i’m constantly calibrating my vulnerability. my heart & throat say: i want to express myself! hughes, kristoffer. the book of celtic magic: transformative teachings from the cauldron of awen (woodbury, mn: llewellyn publications, ), . schanfarber justice, “the re-connection handbook for couples - the book by justice schanfarber.” justice schanfarber counselling - relationships, sex, intimacy. accessed april , . https://www.justiceschanfarber.com/the-re-connection-handbook-for-couples/. and my head says: but... how much? when ? with who? § asking to be seen: more reflections on drag queens: figure : asking to be seen/dealing with being seen. drag queens use: dance, makeup, sewing, design, comedy, improv, and character-work in their art. when the queens on rupaul’s drag race aren’t performing to their fullest, rupaul asks them why they’re standing in the way of their own growth. he encourages them to ask themselves if they are being motivated by love, or fear. drag appears, to me, to be shadow-work. interdisciplinary boot camp. a common phrase in pop-culture/pop-psychology inspired by the carl jung’s “shadow”- our subconscious aspect. so shadow-work is based on a non-binary premise that excavating what has i don't agree with all of rupaul's choices. some of them have offended members of various communities, including myself. and at the same time watching this ridiculous, flawed, drag-queen-reality-show has brought me the most laughter & hope of all the things i've used to treat my ptsd & apocalypse anxiety. \ in a recent challenge, the queens were asked to embody their ‘inner saboteur.’ sometimes i struggle with self-sabotage. when things feel great, i can rock the boat just to test if it’ll stay afloat. me and my partner refer to the escalated version of this as drilling holes in the boat. on the gemini new moon i did a ritual for my inner saboteur “in celtic spirituality, bridge rituals are a practice in liminality. between times. past/future. letting go of/calling in.” - kristoffer hughes my inner saboteur says: you don't know how to talk about vulnerability in the right most perfect vulnerable way so we drove to a river with a bridge we found a place for our cauldron in a circle of rocks nearby while our dogs bounded around playing tag i burned a piece of writing that reminded me of feeling misunderstood and unseen and i asked the fire to see me and help me look at the grief that’s been haunting me the “empty chairs and empty tables” of what could have been and asked the fire to help me let go of the fear of being judged then i wrote the word ‘hope’ on a stone. been polarized in the psyche and integrating it onto more of a spectrum of consciousness, rather than a dark repressed shadow area of forgetting. hughes, kristoffer. . the book of celtic magic: transformative teachings from the cauldron of awen. woodbury, mn: llewellyn publications. figure : hope stone .gif. and asked the stone to safely hold my craving to connect with people who want to hear my stories then we walked to the middle of the bridge and i threw the ashes over the side where i could imagine them being carried away and softened along the stones and around the bends. and i threw the hope-stone off the other side of the bridge, where i could see another bridge upstream made from older wood, with more moss, that made me want to walk along it and explore. i asked the river to wash away my paralyzing fear to soothe the parts of me that brace for impact i want to make room for communication that feels connective i want mutual bridge-building. § dealing with being seen: in season of “drag race,” monet x change made an iconic dress out of kitchen sponges. the judges didn’t share monet’s enthusiasm, and that tension became a source of teasing from the other queens and people online. the moment her elimination-episode finished airing, monet launched a music video called “soak it up” where she spends a significant amount of time being lavished by boys in ‘kitchen sponge’ green/yellow singlets while she sings about saying no to the wrong feedback. hope is sassy in the universe of this sponge-song. do i want a sponge-song kind of hope figure : sponge dress. figure : sponge song. monet x change, “soak it up,” youtube video, : , may , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq ijbmabsm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq ijbmabsm § looking at hope: “what, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'you are a god and never have i heard anything more divine.” - friedrich nietzsche figure : hope in port alice. § my middle name is hope: and i'm being faced with the kind of ironic situation of having my academic advisor explain to me (kindly) that my project needs more hope. part of me felt very misunderstood by this prognosis. nietzsche, friedrich wilhelm, and walter arnold kaufmann. the gay science with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (brantford, ontario: w. ross macdonald school resource services library, ), . this is a controversial quote from nietzsche’s gay science, similar in controversy to his quote about the abyss, where people can have an initial impression that this is about something dark and destructive. i like the interpretation that this aphorism is an encouragement to do what brings you joy in life, find a way to light your spark of passion in what you do, as if you had to do whatever it is you end up choosing for the rest of your life; so find a way to be so passionate about how you’re living your life that even repetition and monotony cannot kill your joy. but i can't really argue with it. i’ve spent a bunch of time here talking about my ptsd, my frustration with traditional academic publishing styles, and my disillusionment with rape culture at large but especially within queer community and my sense of let down with the #metoo movement -- part of me thought twitter was going to be able to fix it all. i don't want to spend years crafting an alienating piece of writing that sort of feels like a suicide note. truly i don't. figure : sheep/dog/cat. i know i’ve been gnashing my teeth on hope here. i haven’t been doing hope yet. and i don't want to make my own trauma a specimen of examination and force it into a certain kind of cleanliness so that i can call it auto-ethnography. but i get that there is a certain tone of teenage-diary-feeling-sorry-for-myself that can make writing unreadable. so i'm going to meditate a bit on hope here, and try to think of some things that i do know about hope... hope doesn't need to be contingent on whether or not humans make it to mars. and it doesn’t need to be resting on the idea that humans can band together in groups that can actually function without self-imploding and it doesn't need to be rooted in receiving approval from a god, or an academic institution, or a medical professional. hope doesn't need to be human-centric figure : more sheep/dog/cat. the most reliably healing experiences i’ve had in the last years have been with animals. i feel hope when i see interspecies animal friendships. actually, it goes back further than that for me this was me as a child. figure : kid me and kid goat. pictures from the farm i worked at in alberta. my favorite moments were watching the different kinds of animals play together. something about the trust and communication that it must take for animals of a different species to play. it heals me to look at. i think it produces a cognitive dissonance that disturbs an anxious thought pattern i can get lost in- that the world is full of danger. for these animals to cuddle and play they need to suspend that fight or flight and drop into a more relaxed state, a state they can yes/and, they can riff off of each other. they can bridge build. they can be understood. they can be seen. i feel hope when i connect to these pictures. i almost died during surgery getting my ovaries removed. my mom was downstairs in the hospital, walking around in the lobby, not knowing what to do, but she saw a book about unlikely animal friendships, and she got it for me because she knew i loved animals. i read the book for a whole week in the hospital, hopped up on morphine. my mom would sometimes push my morphine- dispensing button while i was asleep. that’s a love language. so i guess animals have been a sign of healing for me for a while. and at times when i felt like i could trust no one, i was able to reach out to animals. “a lot of what animals see normal people see, too, but normal people don’t know they’re seeing it. instead, a normal person’s brain uses the detailed raw data of the world to for a generalized concept or schema, and that’s what reaches consciousness. fifty shades of brown turn into just one unified color: brown. that’s why normal people see only what they expect to see--because they can’t consciously experience the raw data, only the schema their brains create out of the raw data.” - temple grandin “a gut feeling tells me that at the very least we have severely underestimated the capacity of our fellow creatures to communicate” - peter wohlleben i think the hope that we can feel with animals when we’ve experienced profound trauma might be one of the premises behind animal therapy. i’ve heard a lot of people say good things about equine therapy. forget to forgive? forget to feel hope again? i think that forgetting is at the basis of maintaining “the faith” in fundamental cultures. grandin, temple. animals in translation, (london: bloomsbury, ), . wohlleben, peter. the inner life of animals: love, grief, and compassion- surprising observations of a hidden world, (greystone books, ), . necessary condition: x must be present for y to occur. i can remember being at one of the corrective church camps i was sent to when i was young and i remember the question of faith coming up a lot. and most times when a kid would have an example of a lived experience that didn’t lend itself very well to the dictums (and the world view they were attempting to indoctrinate us into). they were encouraged to think of other things. distractions. look over here at those people who turned into pillars of salt because they didn't believe. i want to move on without forgetting. figure : tears are strength. § dear carl, it has taken me a long time to know what i want to say to you and i’m realizing that i’ve had a lot of emotions to work through before my voice was ready for this conversation. there have been times, in this process, where my voice has been all about myself, and my own recovery process. it’s taken a lot of healing to get to the point where i can reach out in lightness again. mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. i will always be grateful for how you helped me see the poetry in my trauma. and so i got to experience the healing nature of poetry first hand. auto-ethnography/poetry/trauma-work. trauma poetry. the intentional gaps, and intentional filling of gaps. wandering integration. un-spelling trauma. i feel that a letter that i send to you in the afterlife needs to have poetry. first, thank you. i especially thank you for the time you invited me to do an interpretive dance, inspired by nietzsche’s eternal return, with you and april and celeste in front of the archeology building at ubc. we took turns, witnessing each other, we closed our eyes while we danced around while the other watched supportively. while there is no record of what happened next except in memory i am still filled with angst anger hurt horror i twirled lurched hunched squat in the meadow and a wound opened up in my memory like a wide hole that won’t heal my body remembered what i didn’t know it knew (family stories secrets scandals) but when i opened my eyes the meadow was the same logan, celeste, and april were the same, and i was the same, too, except i had died in the meadow behind the museum with its stored memories each day is now new birth where the past is the same but distinctly different, seen through holes of difference. - carl leggo leggo carl, "the eternal return" (unpublished poem, april ), typescript. i felt ridiculous. the only thing i felt able to do on campus with my eyes closed while “dancing” was flail my arms around- somewhat symbolic of how i felt walking around regularly on campus i suppose. when it was your turn you walked, and pondered, and giggled, and i was surprised to see you punching the air, and i was completely touched when you told me about the anger coming through. i thought i was signing up for an interesting afternoon when i said yes to this, but i had no idea that i’d be looking back on that moment as a touchstone of powerful, vulnerable masculinity. to just let yourself be, and feel, and do, not hurting anyone, but expressing, blindly yet within sight of so many others--passers-by, in a rush to get to a lecture, people looking out of office windows, and not dancing on the front lawn. you let yourself be seen. “those who are seen dancing, are thought to be mad by those who cannot hear the music” - unknown but your openness to let yourself feel and see new things let you dance on the manicured lawn, and cry on that lawn as we debriefed, and let yourself see me and see my story -which holds some unique intersectional trauma- when i might have thought no white straight man your age could. when you ask people to write with you, it’s like being invited to dance like that. you create a space where people can let their most absurd and personal stuff become public. and i will always hold that lesson in my heart. that’s why i trusted your voice when you said that i had lost hope and your capacity to dance and laugh has been a continuous inspiration for me to conjure it back. you didn’t have to be someone who can see across your culture. mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. foucault, michel. madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason (london: routledge, ) xxi “the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made.” - michel foucault so, dancing with our words can also be read as madness can poetry, dancing, and madness un-spell “rigor mortis?” this has been one of my favorite quotes for years. and it’s often not sited, or incorrectly sited as a nietzsche quote. the source unknown. and i respect the hell out of your decision to live that way. i hope you’re drinking and laughing and commiserating in a newfoundland-esque poet’s valhalla and hanging out in liminal space, inspiring young writers. appreciating you, poetically, - l “we are capable of creating a culture that is committed to healing on a cellular level, that encourages us to experiment with reaching out, making contact both physically and emotionally.” - kai cheng thom § looking at gratitude: (and how it relates to hope, which relates to healing ptsd, which relates to healing a wounded voice) when i let myself see the things i’m grateful for in this story, i see that the story isn't just filled with shit. i’m grateful to have lived through something unique. it’s been, if nothing else, interesting to tell and sift through. the process of writing about my story has helped me to appreciate an artistic aspect to the tensions around my trauma. it’s helped me consider more perspectives on my trauma too, which helps to move out of the fixed trains of thought that trauma can encourage. thinking about an audience to our trauma is so interesting. a productive audience, because there is often an audience to trauma and this isn’t always productive (bystander effect). and so i’m wiring my brain and beginning to believe that if good things also happened here in all of this, then good things will probably happen again. so it isn't all shit. even though it was hard. so hard. ~ thom, kai cheng. . “why are queer people so mean to each other?” xtra magazine. august , . https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other- . figure : what do we do when our hearts hurt? § a look back at my process: i wrote most of the foreground text in the order that it came in trusting that there is a logic in that. it involves repeating and connecting similar points at different stages of the piece but there is a continuity in the sense that the vibe, the aesthetic, the approach, the methodology of the beginning of the piece is different from the end of the piece. it changes throughout. my capacity to deal with the logical came first. then i sorted through the old footage from the previous version of this project. sometimes i would shake for days after opening my computer and not be able to even think about this story again during that time without shaking worse. sometimes it feels like having a huge dump in the sense that i feel a million pounds lighter after interacting with some aspect of this story. this story has been my longest serious relationship outside of my blood family. we’ve broken up a few times. and i’ve come back broken to it. sometimes when i interact with it feels like massaging dough. i can feel the ingredients integrating. mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. § thank you for reading this: thank you for witnessing me in this process. i truly love the practice of combining ideas and methods in one conversation. so it’s been a treat to get to do that here. i feel so appreciative of interdisciplinarity. it’s given a validity to a way of communicating that was on the brink of being academically shamed out of me. it’s helping me un- colonize my voice. i can’t close all of the loops i began in this piece. i want this to be a launching-off point. a conversation starter. i'd like to see other people write in response to gaps that i've left here, like easter eggs. that is a writing methodology that i want to stand behind, and treat it as though it’s intentional, and not a mistake. it’s a type of conscientization to encourage your audience to participate in your piece. so i haven't made this a color-by-number exercise, or a completely finished painting. i hope it feels like i’ve built part of a bridge into an exciting conversation, and i hope you want to return the gesture. § looking at kindness: “seeking composure and repose without imposing, always afraid of disposing and decomposing, constantly proposing and supposing the fecundity of composting.” - carl leggo “i want to spend less time antagonizing and more time crafting alternative futures where we don’t have to fight each other for resources and care.” - francis lee freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed. (new york: bloomsbury academic, ), . freire’s non-dualist, socialist methodology involves engaging with students in dialogue where everybody’s’ ideas are valued. leggo, carl. . “writing as living compos(t)ting: poetry and desire.” (language and literacy, https://doi.org/ . /g k w. ), . lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church- of-social-justice- /. https://doi.org/ . /g k w i wanted to come back to kindness in the end. it seemed like the unkindness was the worst part of the glances we caught on camera. it was unkindness that hurt the most when i felt neglected by bystander effect after i came out about being assaulted. and it’s been kindness that’s helped me heal my ptsd (not over. not fully healed. it’s still a process) the belief that the bad things won't necessarily happen again. and the hope that kind things will happen again. my friend reached out and asked me to send him a picture of the story where he was written about. i’m going to send it. i don’t want to scratch at scabs that will heal if they’re left well enough alone and i also don’t want to leave something to fester. sometimes shining the light of day on something dusty helps disinfect and get the shame out. “in my first somatics course, the teacher spoke to us about co-regulation: the ability of our bodies’ nervous systems to gradually become attuned to one another. she likened this to a group of fireflies coming together in the night: their flashing bioluminescence starts off random and asynchronous, but the more time they spend together, the more their flashes coalesce around a shared rhythm. - kai cheng thom this is us: we are each so powerful, so brilliant, so capable of individual, fierce resilience. we are also capable of harmony, of coming together to form a single bright light. we have the ability to love one another, deeply and securely. and we are capable of imagining a world, of bringing a world into being, where we do not have to kill each other to survive.” - kai cheng thom thom, kai cheng. . “why are queer people so mean to each other?” xtra magazine. august , . https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other- . figure : kind(er) gaze. § a kind(er) gaze how else can we look at each other? hope + questions = kind(er) gaze here’s an image of straight and gay people looking warmly at each other. i want to balance out the possibility of being scowled at with the possibility of being smiled at. if we let ourselves see only danger and only potential scowls, we succumb to black and white. either/or thinking. this is a term i thought of when i was trying to add (realistic) hope to looking. like an equation. (realistic) hope + looking = kind(er) gaze not kind gaze, an unattainable thing where we behold each other as perfect this is idealization. another kind of black/white thinking “kind(er)” is like “saf(er) space,” it’s a more realistic, more attainable option. “century house association.” century house association. accessed april , . https://www.centuryhouseassociation.com/?page_id= . i was encouraged by many people to include some kind of positive imagery of people interacting with queer people in a loving way. and when i began this project i couldn’t conceive of putting my time into such a picture. i didn’t see the value in it. at this point i think that it’s critically important to balance out discussions of harsh gaze’s with relation to oppression with instances of love and connection across the intersection that is being critiqued/called-out. if we don’t balance out our critiques we might engage in polarized arguing/thinking/being. leaving room for love doesn’t hurt. it softens the us vs. them binary. we are deciding that we are either safe in our cloistered queer community - which we are not- or we are in danger out in the rest of the world with “normy” people - which isn’t always the case. maybe believing in the possibility of connection across different truly difficult bridge-building takes a leap of faith not a forgetting that you can be eaten a willingness to take a chance on the possibility that something wonderful might happen. and the fire inside my chest ignites figure : one of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things. “change begins with the belief that change is possible, when we invite our bodies to entertain the possibility that connection is possible.” - kai cheng thom mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. thom, kai cheng. . “why are queer people so mean to each other?” xtra magazine. august , . https://www.dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other- . “the poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. it is the same with the act of love. to know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as i do--that is enough, the rest follows of itself.” - jan zwicky i remember a time in carl’s office talking about how it was important to the ethics review process to not only make sure that a project wasn’t harmful to the test subjects, but to also make sure that the project wasn’t harmful to the author itself. he gave an example of one of his students who was dealing with sensitive material that delved into their childhood trauma where that person’s ptsd was triggered and it wasn’t clear whether the process was in the spirit of healing or whether the person was just being re-traumatized. it’s occurred to me many times here that i’ve walked a fine line with this project with regards to my own trauma. at this point i can truly say that this has been cathartic. but it has also been extremely painful. my voice is not the same as it was at the beginning of this. i like the definition of queer” as “different or inverting what is normal.” i hope i have inverted integrated and clarified some things here. thank you for coming with me on this journey. in hope & poetry, - logan § post-mortem: reflection on methods: i think we always need to be careful not to lapse into embodying the qualities of the thing we are critiquing. zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor. edmonton: brush education inc. in a piece where i’m trying to achieve a kind of form/content integrity,( without aiming for a perfect : relationship between the way i’m talking and what i’m talking about) it’s been hard to talk about trauma without retraumatizing myself by dredging through the details. but truly i do feel that this has been cathartic. i’ve been trying to use the rubric of reaching for hope authentically, not cruelly. queer social critique + auto-ethnography = getting into some of my trauma-content. figure : the greatest illusion… is that life should be perfect. “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process [they do] not become a monster. and if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - friedrich nietzsche i’ve seen us become the charismatic leaders who rule through fear and divide and conquer methods. i've seen us lapse into “thou shalts”, “should-ing” on each other. i’ve seen us wear the farmer’s clothing many times. and as i’ve been working on my voice here, i think i’ve lapsed into trying that clothing on the farmer’s the emperor’s i’ve spouted dictums... mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. nietzsche friedrich and kaufmann walter. beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future (new york: vintage books. ) § . it’s very hard to talk authentically and powerfully about trauma in a way that is also balanced where you don’t stare too long into the abyss and become a tyrant or other people walking that kind of line dancing in that kind of balanced flowing narrative might be what perfect enlightenment is an enlightened voice and since enlightenment isn’t something that’s all that human and i want an auto-ethnography that’s authentic in its dealings with this content maybe it makes sense for there to be demonstrable imperfections in my voice fluctuations in my framing, and changes in my tense. § looking at the tone shift i’ve documented both my politics and my voice changing in this piece. * i don’t use phrases like “fuck the toxic male gaze” anymore. or even “the toxic male gaze” ** i don’t use the phrase “radical masculinity” anymore either. *** i actively dislike the term “problematic now, because of overuse anita association with persecution. “art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual” - martin heidegger hesse herman, “siddhartha,” (random house publishing group, ). hesse’s version of siddhartha didn’t become magically powerful until he stopped being so attached to his own enlightenment and started going with the flow. nietzsche, friedrich, and reginald john hollingdale. . human, all too human. cambridge: cambridge university press. mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. heidegger, martin. the origin of the work of art. (waterloo, ont.: university of waterloo, ) . § continued inspiration: an author i’ve been very inspired by recently is adrienne maree brown and her book emergent strategy. instead of critiquing (naming what’s wrong) she shares something positive (naming what she would like to aim towards) in community organizing. and she relies on metaphors as anchor points for her flexible, living, community-oriented rubric of values. figure : mycelium, ants, ferns, wavicle. brown, adrienne m. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. chico, ca: ak press, . brown, adrienne m. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. (chico, ca: ak press, ), . mycelium: we can connect and communicate like a non-linear communal mycelial network. ants: the worker is part of a functioning whole and is valued for their contributions. ferns smaller groups operate as nodes within a larger network that reflects the reality of the smaller microcosms (opposite of false trickle down). the wavicle ultimate symbol of non-duality. how can light be both a particle and a wave? figure : starlings/dandelions. starlings a popular metaphor amongst social movement theorists for working and moving as individuals and yet also as a group. look how it’s been taken up in a book that has had fantastic mainstream success. the metaphor works. it crosses both academic and the mainstream the metaphors are multilingual/cross cultural dandelions a symbol of resourcefulness and resilience. brown, adrienne m. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. (chico, ca: ak press, ), . “we have to create futures in which everyone doesn't have to be the same kind of person. that’s the problem with most utopias for me: they are presented as a mono value, a new greener more local monoculture where everyone gardens and plays the lute and no one travels.. and i don’t want to go there!” - adrienne maree brown - i agree. i don’t think it works when we try to come up with one rubric of values, one solution to a political problem, one charismatic leader, or even one group of charismatic leaders. i don’t think it’s even healthy to keep the same opinion throughout your life! “...pleasure evokes change--perhaps more than shame. more precisely, where shame makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow. - adrienne maree brown figure : it’s the wild. brown, adrienne m. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds (chico, ca: ak press, ), . or the same voice. or the same politics. brown, adrienne m. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds (chico, ca: ak press, ), . mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. the concept of “change” is key for adrienne maree brown. she’s artistically philosophizing about how to effect social change, and she believes that we can do that by emulating more of the systems we already see working in nature, and she feels these systems rely on collaboration and change-- i.e. non-duality and flux. § interspecies animal friendship: a guiding metaphor for effective communication: if i could add a community-building/communication metaphor to adrienne maree brown’s list, it would be interspecies animal friendships. interspecies animal friendships are quite popular as a soothing feel-good image right now. but it’s not a superficial wishy-washy metaphor. it’s popular because it moves people. if we can make friendships across species if we can build that bridge then we can be incredible bridgebuilders we can heal our fear we can fire differently and wire differently “the boy is lonely when the mole first surfaces. they spend time together gazing into the wild. i think the wild is a bit like life- frightening sometimes but beautiful. in their wanderings they meet the fox. it’s never going to be easy meeting a fox if you’re a mole. the boy is full of questions, the mole is greedy for cake. the fox is mainly silent and wary because he’s been hurt by life.” - charlie mackesy their friendship is a fantastic metaphor schema to discuss existential disillusionment and return to hope and connection. mackesy, charlie. the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse (london: ebury press. ), . figure : look how far we’ve come. “i can see myself in all four of them [the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse], perhaps you can too.” - charlie mackesy the animal friendship metaphor creates a relatable, not-corny, moving platform to discuss: healing, witnessing, belongingness, heartbreak, hope, gratitude and healing. these are the mediums i want to focus on now: metaphors, hope/ gratitude/ healing, liminality, perspectivism, laughter connection. § to be continued... this is a song i've been listening to for years. hoppipola - sigur ros mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. mackesy, charlie. the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse (london: ebury press. ), . mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnawpeqrdak it’s sung in a mix of icelandic and hopelandic, the band’s made up language. “there is no ending, there’s just the place where you stop the story.” - frank herbert “my poems(in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.… where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.” - jan zwicky in its essence an interesting poem is an epistemological and metaphysical problem for the poet” - jan zwicky “…trace the lines for a different genealogy…as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world” - sara ahmed wikipedia. . “sigur rós.” last modified january , . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sigur_r%c %b s “vonlenska (eng: hopelandic) is a term coined by the band to refer to the vocalizations that jónsi sings on in lieu of lyrics in icelandic or english.[ ] vonlenska differs from both natural and constructed languages used for human communication. it consists of strings of meaningless syllables containing non-lexical vocals and phonemes. there is no grammatical relation between or among syllables, nor are they accompanied by clearly defined word boundaries. vonlenska emphasizes the phonological and emotive qualities of human vocalizations, and it uses the melodic and rhythmic elements of singing without the conceptual content of language. in this way, it is similar to the use of scat singing in vocal jazz and puirt à beul in traditional scottish and irish folk music. the band's website describes it as "a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music".”[ ] frank herbert. azquotes.com, wind and fly ltd, . https://www.azquotes.com/quote/ , accessed april , zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor. edmonton: brush education inc. zwicky, jan. . wisdom & metaphor. edmonton: brush education inc. ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. (durham: duke university press), . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sigur_r%c %b s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/icelandic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/english_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sigur_r%c %b s#cite_note- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/constructed_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non-lexical_vocables_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non-lexical_vocables_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/phoneme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scat_singing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jazz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/puirt_%c %a _beul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scottish_folk_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/irish_folk_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gibberish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sigur_r%c %b s#cite_note- “i wrote a poem because a poem always seems an apt way to respond” - carl leggo leggo carl, "the eternal return" (unpublished poem, april ), typescript. bibliography ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham: duke university press. andersen, h. c., and michael adams. . the emperor’s new clothes. morris plains, nj: unicorn pub. house. beauvoir, simone de, constance borde, and sheila malovany-chevallier. . the second sex. london: vintage books. berlant, lauren gail. . cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. brown, adrienne maree. . emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. chico, ca: ak press. burke, kenneth. . language as symbolic action. saratoga springs, ny: empire state college, state university of new york. coyote, ivan e. . gender failure. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. cixous, helene, "sorties: out and out: attacks/ways out/forays," the logic of the gift: toward an ethic of generosity. new york: routledge, . deleuze, gilles, guattari félix, and brian massumi. . nomadology: war machine. a.k. press. denzin, norman k., and yvonna s. lincoln. . handbook of qualitative research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. derrida, jacques, and peggy kamuf. . given time. chicago: university of chicago press. foucault, michel, colin tr. gordon, and colin gordon. . power / knowledge. new york: harvester wheatsheaf. foucault, michel. . discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: vintage. foucault, michel, and maurice blanchot. foucault/ blanchot: the thought from outside. new york: zone books, . freire, paulo. . pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: bloomsbury academic. “going clear: scientology & the prison of belief.” alex gibney, imdb.com, june , . https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /. grandin, temple. . animals in translation. london: bloomsbury. grushkin, rebecca. “i’ll smile when i want to: why resting bitch face is sexist.” accessed april , . https://www.hercampus.com/school/american/ill-smile-when-i-want-why- resting-bitch-face-sexist. halberstam, jack. . “you are triggering me! the neo-liberal rhetoric of harm, danger, and trauma.” beacon broadside: a project of beacon press. july , . https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/ / /you-are-triggering-me.html. hughes, kristoffer. . the book of celtic magic: transformative teachings from the cauldron of awen. woodbury, mn: llewellyn publications. kaufmann, walter arnold, and friedrich nietzsche. . beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. new york: vintage books. kaur, rupi. . milk and honey. charleston, sc: rupi kaur. lee, frances. . “excommunicate me from the church of social justice.” autostraddle. july , . https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the- church-of-social-justice- /. leggo, carl. . “writing as living compos(t)ting: poetry and desire.” language and literacy ( ). https://doi.org/ . /g k w. leggo, carl. . “the unpredictability of bliss.” poetic inquiry ii – seeing, caring, understanding, – . https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ . mackesy, charlie. . the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. london: ebury press. marion, jean-luc. . being given: toward a phenomenology of givenness. stanford, ca: stanford univ. press. mazur, joseph. . zenos paradox: unraveling the ancient mystery behind the science of space and time. new york: plume. morris-cafiero, haley. the watchers. ontario, canada: the magenta foundation, . morton, alexandra, and billy proctor. heart of the raincoast: the life of billy proctor. victoria, bc: touchwood editions, . merleau-ponty, maurice. . phenomenology of perception. nevada: franklin classics. nietzsche, friedrich wilhelm, and walter wilhelm kaufmann. . 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education inc. how is the covid- pandemic affecting our sexualities? an overview of the current media narratives and research hypotheses vol.:( ) archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z co m m e n ta ry how is the covid‑ pandemic affecting our sexualities? an overview of the current media narratives and research hypotheses nicola döring received: may / revised: june / accepted: june / published online: august © the author(s) coronavirus disease (covid- ) first broke out in december in wuhan, china, and has spread rapidly worldwide since the beginning of . this new infectious disease is associated with a variety of symptoms and, in severe cases, leads to organ failure and death. on march , , the world health organization (who) ( a) declared the covid- outbreak a global pandemic. since then, the primary goal has been to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus (sars-cov- ), which is responsible for the disease and is easily transmitted by direct and contact transmission. to this end, travel restrictions, curfews, and contact bans have been imposed in numerous countries around the world, and all nonessential public institutions have been closed (covid- shutdown or lockdown). most political, cul- tural, religious, and sporting events have been canceled or postponed. people are being asked to wash their hands regu- larly and wear protective masks, to keep a minimum distance of . meters away from other human beings and to stay at home if possible (i.e., social distancing and self-isolation). by spring , more than half of the world population was in lockdown (sandford, ). the covid- pandemic is causing one of the world’s largest economic crises and is affecting the well-being of individuals; some stress factors, such as domestic isolation, lack of movement and social con- tact, loss of jobs and economic problems, supply bottlenecks, limited health and psychosocial care, and fear of and confron- tation with infection and death, characterize life worldwide during the pandemic, but with great differences depending on the respective geographical region, socioeconomic situation, and personal circumstances. sexuality‑related effects of the covid‑ pandemic in addition to many other pandemic consequences, the effects of covid- on human sexualities have been intensively discussed on both mass media (press, radio, and television) and social media (facebook, youtube, instagram, and twit- ter; döring & walter, ). for example, the new york times ran “coronavirus and sex: questions and answers” (gunter, ), vice magazine reported “how sex workers are dealing with coronavirus” (pringels, ), and the new facebook group “lgbti covid- response” was founded. this is gratifying because issues of sexual and reproductive health and rights and sexual well-being should be taken seri- ously, even (and perhaps especially) in times of crisis, as they are closely related to overall health and quality of life. this is where media reports can have an educational and supportive effect. at the same time, it should be noted that the media discourse on “sex and the coronavirus” naturally follows the old rule of “sex sells” (streitmatter, ): the topic attracts attention and increases click rates, especially when it is sen- sationalized. therefore, the accuracy of media narratives on sexuality and the novel coronavirus should always be ques- tioned (döring & walter, ). researchers have also begun to address the sexuality- related effects of the covid- pandemic. comments on different sexuality-related aspects have been published in scientific journals (e.g., ait addi, benksim, & cherkaoui, ; alpalhão & filipe, ; grubbs, ; hall et al., ; hough, ; hussein, ; joseph davey, bekker, coates, & myer, ; mestre-bach, blycker, & potenza, ; sun et al., ), as well as first empirical studies (e.g., chen et al., ; jacob et al., ; li, li, xin, wang, & yang, ; riley, sully, ahmed, & biddlecom, ; sanchez, zlotorzynska, rai, & baral, ; yuksel & ozgor, ) and research reviews (e.g., rasmussen, smulian, led- nicky, wen, & jamieson, ). scientific societies provide * nicola döring nicola.doering@tu-ilmenau.de institute of media and communication science, department of economic sciences and media, ilmenau university of technology, ehrenbergstraße ,  ilmenau, germany http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – statements on their websites (e.g., asha, ; issm, ; isswsh, ). the first large-scale online surveys are already in pro- gress: the kinsey institute (indiana university), for exam- ple, launched a three-wave longitudinal study on “sex and relationships in the time of covid- ” (https ://kinse yinst itute .org/resea rch/covid -relat ionsh ips.php) in march . an international network of trans* organizations and research institutions initiated a global survey on “measuring the impact of the covid- pandemic on trans health & trans health care” (https ://trans carec ovid- .com/). the global network of sex work projects (nswp) launched an inter- national survey on the perceptions of sex workers and sex work organizations of covid- effects in april (https ://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launc h-covid - -impac t-surve y). many more national surveys and clinical studies are in the field or in preparation. in germany, for example, in coopera- tion with the german institute for sexuality pedagogy, sex educators were interviewed about their working conditions during the pandemic (https ://www.tu-ilmen au.de/en/media -psych ology -and-media -desig n/resea rch/coron a-surve y/). this commentary aims to inspire researchers and clini- cians to further explore the sexuality-related implications of the covid- pandemic. to this end, an overview of the effects that have been much discussed in the media and in academic journals is presented. the sexuality-related effects of the covid- pandemic are addressed in four thematic blocks: ( ) partnered sex, ( ) solo sex, ( ) sexual and repro- ductive health issues in vulnerable groups, and ( ) sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexual education. covid‑ effects on partnered sex how is covid- changing partnered sex? four main media narratives or research hypotheses of change could be identi- fied in public and academic discourse. more relationship sex and a coronavirus baby boom in domestic covid- isolation, couples are less distracted, have more time for each other, and can indulge in love making more often during the day, which—planned or unplanned— will inevitably lead to a “coronavirus baby boom” in nine months. this is at least a description found in mass media contributions (döring & walter, ) and academic papers (ait addi et al., ) alike. the press often speak of “love in the time of corona” (e.g., bbc, ) in allusion to the bestselling novel “love in the time of cholera” (garcía márquez, ) that tells the story of two lovers who, after a life-long separation, finally get together and use the cholera quarantine on a ship for undisturbed togetherness. the belief in the “coronavirus baby boom,” which symbolizes a posi- tive future, is so strong that names are already being created on social media for the new generation: they should not be called “millennials” but “coronials” (see hashtag #coronials on twitter or instagram). the narrative of the coronavirus baby boom is reminiscent of the hypothesis of the “blackout baby boom”: here, too, one imagines that couples have fewer distractions in the event of a power failure and can thus have sex undisturbed. however, the so-called blackout baby boom, in which newspapers are always happy to report on the basis of anecdotal examples, has never been confirmed on the basis of systematic empirical data. it is now more likely to be classified as a sexual urban legend (brunvand, ): not only did the birth rate  months after the exceptional situation of a historical power failure in the u.s. not rise, but, in fact, it fell (izenman & zabell, ; menaker, ; udry, ). for most people, a prolonged blackout is a stressful and frightening interruption of their daily routine and thus is not particularly suited for relaxed romanticism and eroticism. perhaps a power outage lasting several hours is not the right comparison scenario either. instead, terrorist attacks and natural disasters that create terror and put people in an exceptional situation for weeks and months might be the bet- ter reference. in fact, the available data here point to positive fertility effects that are explained by different theories. for example, terror management theory predicts that existential threats lead people to recall traditional and family values and thus become more willing to marry and reproduce. attach- ment theory predicts that, in times of threat, people move closer together with their significant others. replacement the- ory assumes that, in existential crises, people—consciously or unconsciously—conceive more children to compensate for the loss of life. the fertility effects of collective threat situa- tions are complex and depend on various influencing factors (evans, hu, & zhao, ; rodgers, st john, & coleman, ). they would therefore also need to be worked out more precisely for the covid- pandemic. an italian online sur- vey with a self-selection sample of women and men of fertile age in stable heterosexual relationships (micelli et al., ) revealed both a pandemic-related increase in the desire of parenthood (e.g., due to need for positivity) and a decrease (e.g., due to economic difficulties). a turk- ish study with a sample of married women of fertile age (yuksel & ozgor, ) showed that during the covid- pandemic, the frequency of sexual intercourse in marriage increased significantly (from an average of . times to . times per week) compared to –  months before; at the same time, however, the proportion of women intending to become pregnant decreased (from . to . %). thus, regarding the predicted coronavirus baby boom, whether these are intended or unintended pregnancies must always be questioned (see https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/covid-relationships.php https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/covid-relationships.php https://transcarecovid- .com/ https://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launch-covid- -impact-survey https://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launch-covid- -impact-survey https://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launch-covid- -impact-survey https://www.tu-ilmenau.de/en/media-psychology-and-media-design/research/corona-survey/ https://www.tu-ilmenau.de/en/media-psychology-and-media-design/research/corona-survey/ archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – section below on pandemic-related barriers to family plan- ning and abortion). it should also be noted that the more relationship sex plus baby boom narrative always assumes that there is no risk of sars-cov- transmission in cohabiting couples because neither partner is infected or because both are already infected or immune. in discordant couples, however, part- nered sex is considered unsafe and should—similar to other types of physical contact—be strictly avoided, as emphasized by media, health authority, and scientific society publications (e.g., issm, ; isswsh, ). less relationship sex and the rise in divorce rates the romantic-optimistic picture of the “quarantine hon- eymoon” including a “coronavirus baby boom” has not remained unchallenged. relatively quickly, a completely unerotic picture of the domestic covid- isolation was drawn: one heard of couples who were mainly bored and annoyed with each other. moreover, in domestic isolation, otherwise hidden injustices, gender asymmetries, and family conflicts can become unexpectedly apparent, as the wash- ington post points out: “the truth is, with babysitters, nan- nies, day cares, schools and, for some folks, their jobs, out of the mix, relationship inequities could be a lot more fraught” (dvorak, ). according to media narratives, a kind of “camp frenzy” and permanent dispute with subsequent soar- ing separation and divorce rates can be expected (döring & walter, ). factors contributing to relationship stress during the pandemic are limited living space, demanding home schooling and home office duties as well as job loss, preexisting conflicts, physical and mental diseases. literature reviews show that mental health deteriorated significantly after the economic crisis in (parmar, stav- ropoulou, & ioannidis, ) and in the course of quarantine measures related to earlier pandemics (brooks et al., ). an increase in anger, anxiety, post-traumatic stress symp- toms, depression or even suicidal tendencies usually has a negative impact on relationships and sexual life and might foster sexual dysfunctions and sexual deviance. some stud- ies also show that divorce rates increase in the aftermath of natural disasters (cohan & cole, ). there is thus a clear need for psychosocial care: coun- seling, therapy, and crisis intervention are needed for indi- viduals, couples, and families whose domestic conflicts and sexual problems have intensified during the pandemic and who are in separation crises. in addition, a special burden sit- uation arises for couples who are being forced to be separated for a long period of time during the covid- pandemic (e.g., due to travel bans or because one person is living in a nursing home due to old age, which has issued a visiting ban). the washington times asked the following question: “will coronavirus intimacy lead to a baby boom? or a divorce tsunami?” (dvorak, ). however, presumably, it is not at all about playing one effect against the other but rather about finding the determinants that ensure that some couples become closer during the coronavirus crisis, while others grow apart. correspondingly ambivalent effects are also known from less dramatic situations such as holidays: some couples fall in love anew on vacation, and others fight all the time and separate afterward. it should also be borne in mind that the effect sizes of the postulated effects may be small and the changes only short- term in the general population. many couples might stick to their established patterns of communication and sexuality or return to them in the wake of the crisis. it is therefore important not only to focus on problematic changes and sup- port needs but also to keep an eye on the persistence and resilience of couples and identify the factors that foster their successful coping. less casual sex as the examples quoted so far show, changes in sexuality as a result of the covid- pandemic are often discussed using heterosexual monogamous couple relationships as an exam- ple. a different narrative emerges when one looks at part- nered sex, which does not take place with domestic spouses and life partners but within the framework of alternative rela- tionship models (e.g., friendships with benefits and polyam- orous relationship networks) and is practiced as so-called casual sex, for example, in the context of one-night stands, hook-ups, sex dates, affairs or commercial sexual services. these forms of sexual interactions, which are more often part of the lifestyles of adolescents, singles, and lgbtq + -iden- tifying people, among others, have been largely prohibited in the covid- pandemic mitigation measures. this means that many adolescents and adults have had to adjust to long weeks and months without intimate physical contact with other people. there has been much media coverage about the fact that “bad times for singles” are dawning or that their “libido must take a break.” newspapers have quoted surveys of hetero- sexual and queer dating services, whose members stated that since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, they have had much less sex or no sex at all and have renounced casual sex (döring & walter, ). a rapid online survey of men who have sex with men from the u.s. showed that half of them had less sex partners (sanchez et al., ). a chinese online survey with a convenience sample of women and men aged –  years revealed a decrease in sexual partners, sexual frequency, and sexual risk taking during the pandemic (li et al., ). the editor of the journal sexuality and disability is asking for data on how people with disabilities are doing during the pandemic when their scheduled sexual surrogate and massage sessions are canceled and they remain archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – without any sensual physical contact for weeks and months (hough, ). in addition to a descriptive narrative describing the liv- ing conditions of singles who adhere to social and sexual contact bans, a prescriptive narrative can also be observed on social media. this narrative addresses how to encourage or even force people to stop having casual sex during the covid- pandemic. in the newly formed facebook group “lgbti covid- response,” for example, one member suggested in a prescriptive less casual sex narrative that dur- ing the covid- pandemic, it would be best to shut down grindr, scruff, growlr, and all other queer dating apps to stop casual sex. a heated discussion with dozens of posts followed. especially in lgbtq + communities, comparisons between coronavirus narratives and hiv narratives are obvi- ous. the establishment of safer sex, treatment as preven- tion (tasp), and, more recently, pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) significantly reduced the fear of infection in msm with regard to hiv. will the novel coronavirus, which is much easier to transmit than hiv, threaten the newfound freedom from fear and foster a new stigmatization of non- monogamous lifestyles? how, from a scientific point of view, is an appropriate risk assessment to be made? how do the risks of a weeks- or months-long lack of physical intimacy compare with the increased risk of sars-cov- infection through casual sex? is there possibly a pragmatic middle ground of risk reduction, which lies between a risky “carry on as before” mentality on the one hand and total abstinence from partnered sex on the other? anecdotally, there are reports of singles who limit their casual sex to a small circle of people to reduce the risk of sars-cov- transmission or who go into self-isolation together as a group and then only have sex among each other. this procedure is recommended on youtube by an austral- ian doctor from the lgbtq + community, among others (forgan-schmith, ), and discussed in the scientific lit- erature (turban, keuroghlian, & mayer, ). finally, the expected reduction in casual sex should reduce the transmission of hiv and sti, and first evidence of a cor- responding reduction in new infections is already available in the literature (e.g., alpalhão & filipe, ; junejo, girom- etti, mcowan, whitlock, & dean street collaborative group, ). more telephone and online sex the fact that partnered sex with people outside the house- hold poses a significant risk of sars-cov- transmission is undisputed in view of its easy transmission through respira- tory droplets and physical intimacy (cipriano, giacalone, & ruberti, ). however, what remains to be consid- ered is interpersonal sexual contact at a distance. these technology-mediated sexual interactions and relationships have been known since the s under labels such as cyber- sex, virtual sex, electronic sex, chat sex, cam sex, or more recently, sexting (courtice & shaughnessy, ). in view of the coronavirus contact bans, such technology-mediated interpersonal sex contacts suddenly enjoy great popularity and are so much in the public eye that, in march , a narrative of more telephone sex and more online sex was identified in german-speaking media as the most popular partnered sex media narrative (döring & walter, ). similar to the narrative of less casual sex, the narrative of more phone sex and online sex exists with descriptive and prescriptive variants. on the one hand, it is observed and described that an increasing number of people prefer to resort to telephone and online sex instead of face-to-face sex dates. on the other hand, this approach has been explicitly recommended. the new york city health department made headlines world- wide when it published tips on safe sex during the covid- pandemic on march , , positioning itself as being surprisingly inclusive and sex-positive for a state agency (nyc health department, ): “if you usually meet your sex partners online or make a living by having sex, consider taking a break from in-person dates. video dates, sexting or chat rooms may be options for you.” it is remarkable that online sex, including sexting, which is often frowned upon and even declared a pathological or deviant risky behavior (see döring, ), has now officially advanced to a disease prevention behavior. health organi- zations worldwide recommend telephone and online sex as alternatives to in-person sex dates. the international society for the study of women’s sexual health (isswsh, ) postulates the following: “the new ‘really safe’ sex in many cases may require ‘e-sex’.” since the beginning of the covid- pandemic, the media have been providing tips, tricks, and advice for good telephone and online sex. such tips are quite useful, as phone and online sex require specific knowledge and skills. there- fore, in times of a pandemic, specific sexual education is in demand. the technical side of mediated sex requires knowl- edge and skills regarding the selection of the necessary equip- ment (microphone, camera, and light) and the appropriate platform or app (e.g., zoom, skype, tinder, grindr, etc.) as well as the correct handling (e.g., appealing camera angle and correct privacy settings). the sexual and social side of mediated sex requires knowledge and skills of how to express sexual desires and fantasies interactively and consensually with other people through text, pictures, audio, and video. this includes sexual interactions not only between two peo- ple but also between several people and in groups, as well as the integration of sexual scripts from kink, fetish, bdsm, and lgbtq + contexts. in the meantime, queer sex parties are being organized online with “instagram djs” and “skype archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – darkrooms.” for example, the online edition of london’s “naked gay party sbn,” which normally has approximately guests offline, welcomed more than visitors in the video chat room on march , (attitude, ). in the course of the covid- pandemic, a destigma- tization and normalization of technology-mediated sexual interactions has been observed, which is desirable in prin- ciple, since these interactions have been part of the sexual repertoire of various populations for about a quarter of a century and are experienced positively by the majority (döring, ; döring & mohseni, ). conversely, it is problematic if the appreciation of the qualities of technology- mediated sex—especially its usefulness during face-to-face contact bans—immediately turns into glorification, as can be observed in some press articles (döring & walter, ). the sexual literacy to be promoted through sexual education in connection with technology-mediated sexual interactions should also include awareness of risks and protective meas- ures (alpalhão & filipe, ; turban et al., ). this concerns, for example, the prevention of and intervention in cases of online sexual harassment, online grooming, online stalking, revenge pornography, online dating scams, etc. sex- ual education should consider these topics, and in counseling and therapy, one should be prepared to deal with conflicts and problems related to telephone and online sex and to support people in their search for satisfying technology-mediated sexual contact. it would be interesting for sex researchers to investigate how technology-mediated sexual interactions are experi- enced and whether and how, for example, sexual scripts in online sex differ from sexual scripts in offline sex (cf. döring, ). in the context of technology-mediated partnered sex research questions relating to remote-controlled sex toys that add haptic stimulation to the experience (liberati, ) should also be considered, including new technologies that allow for kissing over distance (cheok & zhang, ). pan- demic-relevant research questions are also related to immer- sive virtual environments in which people experience sexual interactions mediated by avatars (wardle, ). another relevant research question addresses who will switch from offline sex to online sex during the pandemic and who cannot or will not do so. particular attention should be paid here, for example, to the situation of young people: for them, participation in online sex and sexting is partly illegal, depending on the national legal system and is generally con- sidered very risky. at the same time, young people are often single and have a strong desire for sexual exploration and contact. what does “safer online sex” or “safer phone sex” look like for young people (döring, ) under pandemic conditions? regarding senior citizens, contrary to the cliché of the “nonsexual elderly,” older people today also want to be sex- ually active more often. this raises the following question: do single elderly people at home and in residential and care facilities have the possibility of finding suitable tech- nology-mediated sexual expressions under the conditions of a pandemic? are there sexual education offerings that support older people and people with disabilities in this and take their needs for sexual well-being seriously? covid‑ effects on solo sex in addition to changes in partnered sex, changes in solo sex have also been intensively discussed, with four aspects of change particularly being suspected. more masturbation those who spend more time in domestic isolation due to the covid- pandemic also have more time and opportu- nity to masturbate. this at least is suspected by the public, and a corresponding descriptive narrative of more mastur- bation has been well visible in the media in spring (döring & walter, ). this also applies to a prescriptive narrative of more masturbation, which directly calls on the population to masturbate more often. masturbation is rec- ommended because it reduces stress and anxiety, strength- ens the immune system, fights boredom and frustration, and compensates for the lack of partnered sex, at least accord- ing to the arguments of the media (e.g., die bild, ), loosely referring to the state of research on the positive health outcomes of masturbation (e.g., coleman, ; levin, ; robbins et al., ). the new york city health department (nyc health department, ) was quoted worldwide as stating the following: “you are your safest sex partner. masturbation will not spread covid- , especially if you wash your hands (and any sex toys) with soap and water for at least  s before and after sex.” the new enthusiasm with which the media and health authorities are celebrating masturbation may be a desir- able step toward further destigmatizing and normalizing solo sex. at the same time, it is problematic when mas- turbation is officially recommended as an alternative to partnered sex. for some people masturbation might be a viable substitute, while others feel they cannot do without interpersonal intimacy. empirically, it is an open question whether, and if so, with whom, changes in masturbation frequency occur at all. in addition to pandemic factors that can have an increasing effect (e.g., more time at home), there are also pandemic fac- tors that can have a dampening effect (e.g., fears and worries). it is also plausible that the majority of people will more or less stick to their preexisting masturbation habits. archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – more sex toy use the most popular solo sex media narrative during the early phase of the covid- pandemic has postulated the use of more sex toys (döring & walter, ). toys are used for partnered sex, but even more often—especially with women—for solo sex (döring & poeschl, ), for which during coronavirus isolation, according to common belief, there is a particularly high opportunity. the media narrative of more sex toy use, which might be more prevalent in high-income countries, is optimistically oriented and refers to extra-pleasurable masturbation due to more or less sophisticated technical aids. such mass media information about sex toys has a normalizing and educational character. at the same time, it is clever public relations work on the part of the sex toy industry because specific brands and products (e.g., womanizer.com and we-vibe.com) have often been praised in media reports and, in some cases, press articles directly linked to online shopping sites. this media narrative is often missing a critical examina- tion of the commercialization of solo sex and of the sex prod- ucts themselves, such as their functionality, sustainability, material quality, or pricing. while there are numerous blogs dedicated to the differentiated review of sex toys from users’ perspectives, only the marketing managers of the companies that report on sales successes have a say in media reports (döring & walter, ). empirically, we hardly know anything about pandemic- specific effects: by whom are sex toys increasingly bought, and how intensively are they being used during the covid- pandemic? which sexual scripts are acted out with these toys? what effects on solosexual satisfaction are experienced? finally, it should be noted that the narrative of more sex toy use refers to established toys such as dildos and vibrators and excludes sex dolls or sex robots, which are otherwise dis- cussed as new trends (döring, mohseni, & walter, in press; döring & pöschl, ). whole-body toys such as robots and dolls, as well as conventional cuddly toys, may be particularly well suited for use in self-isolation when the need for tender- ness, hugging, and cuddling is at stake and people want to calm and comfort themselves while falling asleep. more pornography use during masturbation, people resort not only to toys but often also to pornography, currently mostly in the form of online pornography (grubbs, wright, braden, wilt, & kraus, ). during the covid- pandemic, this has increasingly been the case, at least that is what the narrative of more pornogra- phy use circulating in the media claims: “corona makes porn purchases explode” was the headline of germany’s largest daily newspaper (döring & walter, ). pornhub.com led a special public relations coup. this leading provider of online pornography made headlines worldwide at the beginning of march because it gave quarantined italians free premium access to the platform for one month. the offer was so positively received that pornhub immediately expanded it to spain and france and eventually the whole world. pornhub tweeted the following on march , (pornhub, b): “stay home and help flatten the curve! since covid- continues to impact us all, pornhub has decided to extend free pornhub premium worldwide until april rd. so enjoy, stay home, and stay safe https :// pornh ub.com/stayh ome #stayhomehub.” those who signed up for free also confirmed that they would stay away from social contacts and enjoy pornhub pre- mium videos in return. pornhub jokingly changed its name to stayhomehub. for the pornhub platform, which is repeat- edly mentioned in the narrative of more pornography use, the covid- crisis is likely to have resulted in a significant increase in the platform’s popularity. pornhub’s approach was not at all original, as various companies have offered free premium access during the pandemic. in connection with porn, however, this marketing measure had a particularly high news value. pornography and its effects are a very controversial sub- ject in both public and academic discourses. in the german- language media in the spring of , the narrative of more pornography use was accompanied by rather affirmative assessments: people staying at home and masturbating more often using pornography were suddenly seen less as a prob- lematic risk behavior and more as a desirable sars-cov- prevention behavior and thus much more favorably regarded than usual. professional assessments also go in this direction and do not see temporarily increased pornography consump- tion as a major problem but rather as constructive coping behavior to overcome pandemic-induced boredom and fear (grubbs, ; lehmiller, ) and to comply with contact bans (grubbs, ): for most users, pornography is probably just another distraction–one that might actually help “flatten the curve” by keeping people safely occupied and socially distanced. combined with the fact that many people are isolating alone, pornography may provide a low-risk sexual outlet that does not cause people to risk their own safety or the safety of others. in the international press, however, there are also articles that classify increased pornography consumption during the covid- pandemic as a danger, mainly because it is expected to foster sexualized violence (quek & tyler, ; schilling, ). from a clinical point of view, it is predicted that in people who already have problems with their pornography consump- tion and self-regulation, these problems will increase under https://pornhub.com/stayhome https://pornhub.com/stayhome archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – the conditions of the pandemic (mestre-bach et al., ). hence, target-group-specific healthcare is necessary, for example, via online self-help forums (e.g., nofap, reboot nation, or -step forums focusing on sex and love addiction) according to pornography addiction experts (mestre-bach et al., ). again, special attention should be paid to young people who may be consuming more pornography during the pan- demic and at the same time have less direct contact with peers and sexual educators. they may need target-group-specific online sexual education during the pandemic. moreover, pos- itive effects are also possible, for example, in the form that the increased use of pornography may help in the exploration of one’s own sexual fantasies and desires, in self-validation and in open partner communication (kohut, fisher, & campbell, ). instead of playing opportunities and risks against each other in a pro and con pornography discourse, according to the differential susceptibility to media effects model (dsmm; valkenburg & peter, ), we must identify the specific predictors that in individual cases can lead to predominantly positive, predominantly negative, ambivalent, or even no effects of pornography use. the rise of coronavirus porn as a new genre of pornography the media has reported not only about a general increase in pornography use but also about the rise of coronavirus porn as a new genre of pornography. in so-called coronavi- rus porn, the action takes place in a hospital or supposedly in the chinese city of wuhan, where covid- originally broke out. the protagonists wear masks, gloves, and protec- tive suits and interact with doctors and nurses, as described in detail by the magazine vice (cole, ). in fact, at the beginning of april , more than videos were found on the pornography platform pornhub.com under the search term “corona” and more than videos were found on the platform xhamster.com. what has often been declared by the media to be an alleg- edly “extreme” or at least “strange” sex trend is actually quite normal: current events are reflected in people’s sexual fantasies and thus also become the subject of pornography. coronavirus fantasies and porn probably have very different functions: fear defense, eroticization of the threat, curiosity about the bizarre, desire to cross borders, hopes of recovery, etc. (lehmiller, ). moreover, the motifs of coronavirus porn are partly connectable to existing fetishes and kinks (e.g., latex masks and gloves, clinic sex/white sex). while forbes magazine has emphasized the normality of eroticiz- ing the novel coronavirus (cookney, ), the independent has criticized that an irresponsible pornography industry is capitalizing on the topic of coronavirus in a harmful way (austin & boyd, ). pornhub.com provided platform statistics that demonstrate increased interest in coronavirus porn in march (porn- hub, a). these statistics were often quoted in the relevant media reports, which in turn may have helped to raise the popularity of the pornhub brand. to date, there are no sys- tematic content analyses of the new coronavirus pornography genre nor are there any empirical user studies on actual usage patterns and their possible effects. covid‑ effects on sexual and reproductive health issues in vulnerable groups both academic publications and the media point out that under the conditions of the covid- pandemic, serious negative effects on sexual and reproductive health are to be predicted in the form of increased social and health inequali- ties. particularly strong negative effects are expected among disadvantaged and neglected groups, including adoles- cents, those in humanitarian settings, people who identify as lgbtq+, people experiencing gender-based violence, those living with hiv, incarcerated populations, individuals with disabilities, people of lower socioeconomic status, and people in low- and middle-income countries (riley et al., ). as gender, class, and race are relevant factors, an intersectional perspective of sexuality-related covid- effects is important (hall et al., ). some negative effects are classified as direct pandemic consequences (e.g., increas- ing sexualized domestic violence) and others are classified as indirect pandemic consequences (e.g., poorer medical care for pregnant women and newborns due to general overloading of the healthcare system). more sexualized domestic violence the prediction of the narrative of more sexualized domestic violence is that violence will escalate in domestic corona- virus isolation and that those affected find it even more dif- ficult than usual to seek and receive help. the police, child protection associations, women’s shelters, and the media have issued warnings, published telephone hotline num- bers and online contact points, and called for more room in women’s shelters (e.g., bettinger-lopez & bro, ; talmazan, sirna, ratto, & ing, ). the who ( b) has provided answers to central questions on violence against women in the covid- pandemic. to provide care and protection for victims of sexualized domestic violence under pandemic conditions, it is also important to offer alternative violence reporting mechanisms and to avoid disruptions to the criminal justice system (bettinger-lopez & bro, ): archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – “countries have shifted to virtual court hearings, facilitated online methods for obtaining protection orders, and commu- nicated their intentions to continue to provide legal protection to survivors.” the improved sensitization to the long-tabooed issue of sexualized domestic violence expressed in the media narra- tive of more sexualized domestic violence is very gratifying. at the same time, it is striking (and surprising in view of the extensive #metoo debate on sexual assaults in educa- tional and work contexts as well as in public) that the possible effects of the covid- pandemic on sexualized violence in nondomestic contexts have hardly been discussed so far. will more home offices, more home schooling, and more social distancing protect many children, adolescents, and adults—at least temporarily—from unwanted sexualized body contact in various abuse relationships (e.g., at school and at work) and from strangers (e.g., on the street and on public trans- portation)? could coronavirus contact bans possibly make it easier for these individuals to get away from the perpetrator long enough to get help? what prevention and intervention services do we need to address these possible opportunities to end abusive relationships during the pandemic with its enforced contact bans? at the same time, we must expect an increase in sexual- ized violence (mostly against women and children) in digital contexts due to the increased use of online communication and counteract it with appropriate prevention and interven- tion measures (parks et al., ; un news, ). more barriers to family planning and abortion the media narrative of more barriers to family planning and abortion indicates that under the conditions of the covid- pandemic with curfews and limited medical care, there is sometimes insufficient access to contraception and abor- tion. this applies to high-income countries such as germany, where during the covid- pandemic, access to manda- tory offline abortion counseling was difficult. to alleviate this problem, for the first time, online counseling has been allowed in this field. however, the demand of pro-choice activists to enable telemedical-accompanied medical abor- tion at home, which is already being practiced in other countries and has also been positively evaluated scientifi- cally (raymond et al., ), has not been met politically in germany (döring & walter, ). in middle- and low-income countries, the shortcomings in the supply of contraceptives and in access to abortion are even greater. a model calculation for low- and middle-income countries showed that a deterioration in the two areas mentioned by only % within  year will lead to more than million additional unintended pregnancies and more than million additional unsafe abortions, with more than additional maternal deaths (riley et al., ). from the experience with the ebola epidemic in west afr ica (bietsch, williamson, & reeves, ; camara et al., ; sochas, channon, & nam, ), it can be concluded that the reproductive healthcare problems caused by the covid- pandemic in low- and middle- income countries will be serious and long term. the professional community therefore calls for sexual and reproductive healthcare to be defined as essential, for support programs to be set up and for care facilities and care measures to be adapted (e.g., distribution of contra- ceptives without a prescription and telemedically assisted medical abortion; hall et al., ; riley et al., ). more health risks during pregnancy and birth the existential experiences surrounding pregnancy and birth are generally accompanied by fears and uncertain- ties. under the conditions of a pandemic, these are even more intense: the risk of infection, supply bottlenecks in clinics, and the question of whether a personal compan- ion may be taken into the delivery room although contact restrictions are common worries. the mass media reports in high-income countries have displayed such worries and fears, reporting on anxiety and desperation among pregnant women. “strained hospitals and isolation: how coronavirus made giving birth even harder” was the title of an article in the british guardian (graves, ). however, the press has also reported on new help services such as facebook groups by and for pregnant women, online birth preparation courses, and virtual midwifery support (döring & walter, ). in middle- and low-income countries, the provision of essential pregnancy-related and newborn care has become even more problematic during the covid- pandemic. according to model calculations, a decline in care by only % would lead to more than million additional seri- ous complications for mothers and children and to almost , additional deaths of mothers and newborns (riley et al., ). here, too, it is therefore necessary to coun- teract the feared and presumably already occurring sup- ply bottlenecks with rapid and sustainable measures (hall et al., ). there are additional risks of sars-cov- infection for pregnant women and newborns (rasmussen et al., ); however, the first case studies found no evi- dence for vertical transmission in late pregnancy (chen et al., ). for hiv-uninfected pregnant and breastfeed- ing women at risk of hiv acquisition, continued prep pro- vision and hiv risk reduction counseling are explicitly recommended by experts from south africa, even if vis- its to possibly crowded healthcare facilities may increase their risk of contracting sars-cov- (joseph davey et al., ). archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – more health risks and economic hardships in sex work a relatively large number of media reports point to existence- threatening situations for prostitutes and other sex workers resulting from brothel closures and bans on body-related services, which, due to the lack of reserves in most cases, lead to acute poverty and homelessness (döring & walter, ). interestingly, the media reports presenting the narra- tive of more economic hardships in sex work often not only speak “about” sex workers but actually with them: sex work organizations and individual sex workers have their say in detail. in view of the polarized debates on prostitution, which are often conducted without the people concerned and mor- ally condemn the offering and/or demand of sexual services (see benoit, smith, jansson, healey, & magnuson, ), it is remarkable that in relation to the covid- impact, the human and labor rights of sex workers have often been so vis- ibly placed on the media agenda (e.g., in germany) (döring & walter, ). however, the coronavirus pandemic is also used by the anti-prostitution movement to campaign for fur- ther criminalization of prostitution. the novel coronavirus has already been called the “abolitionist virus” because it prevents men from paying for sex (smith, ). unaids ( ) has explicitly demanded the protection of the health and rights of sex workers during the covid- pandemic and the involvement of sex workers in emergency public health planning groups. meanwhile, sex work organizations worldwide have demonstrated resourcefulness in responding to the pandemic by engaging in mutual help, building emer- gency hardship funds, and organizing undisrupted sexual health care (kimani et al., ; smith, ). in addition to sex workers offering in-person services for clients, pornography performers have also been severely affected by covid- as porn production studios have closed. to stay in business, some sex workers and pornog- raphy performers now market phone sex and online sex or sell solo sex recordings (lehmiller, ) and additional products (e.g., worn underwear and other fetish items). the international survey on the perceptions of sex workers and sex work organizations of covid- effects (https ://www. nswp.org/news/nswp-launc h-covid - -impac t-surve y), run by the global nswp, will provide the first empirical data on those issues. according to media reports, the existence of small sex shops without online distribution is also threatened. more disadvantages for lgbtq+‑identifying populations in two open letters, more than lgbtq + organizations in the u.s. have pointed out that lgbtq + communities are being severely affected by the negative consequences of the covid- pandemic (national lgbt cancer network, ; whitman-walker health et al., ). this is attrib- uted to the fact that lgbtq + communities are vulnerable due to increased rates of smoking, cancer, and hiv and thus belong to covid- risk groups. furthermore, the open let- ters stress that lgbtq + people experience discrimination, unwelcoming attitudes, and lack of understanding from pro- viders and staff in many healthcare settings and, as a result, many are reluctant to seek medical care. lgbtq + people are disproportionately low income or live in poverty according to the open letters. consequently, there is a demand to investi- gate the support needs of lgbtq + populations more closely and to provide nondiscriminatory healthcare and economic support during the pandemic. scientific contributions address, among other things, the importance of hiv, pep, and prep care during the covid- pandemic (alpalhão & filipe, ; junejo et al., ; sun et al., ). they point to the discrimination of transgender and gender nonconforming (tgnc) people by national covid- measures (e.g., in peru) (perez-brumer & silva-santisteban, ) and explain the multiple (mental) health challenges of tgnc individuals when their gender- affirming treatment is deferred during covid- (van der miesen, raaijmakers, & van de grift, ). another impor- tant research topic is the new covid- stigma and how to combat it (logie & turan, ). press reports have indicated that coronavirus is also discussed in xenophobic and racist frames (“china virus” or “wuhan virus”) and in homophobic and transphobic frames (“homo virus”; browning, ). coronavirus tracking measures can be problematic if they contribute to stigmatization of lgbtq + persons, such as in south korea (borowiec, ). covid‑ effects on sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexual education looking at the sexuality-related covid- effects from the perspective of sexual healthcare provision, the follow- ing four aspects are particularly relevant, as mentioned in some of experts’ comments (e.g., hall et al., ; joseph davey et al., ; mestre-bach et al., ; national lgbt cancer network, ; rasmussen et al., ; riley et al., ; thorne et al., ; unaids, ; whitman-walker health et al., ). they are not very visible in media report- ing, though. . sexual and reproductive healthcare that requires per- sonal consultation and treatment (e.g., sexual health- related surgeries, safe delivery, contraception and abor- tion services) must be guaranteed in times of pandemics and even expanded as needed (e.g., because of possibly increasing pregnancy rates), while infection protection https://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launch-covid- -impact-survey https://www.nswp.org/news/nswp-launch-covid- -impact-survey archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – measures are taken. here, especially in low- and middle- income countries, support programs and infrastructure measures are necessary. . wherever possible, sexual and reproductive healthcare services and sexual education should be transferred from offline settings to infection-proof online settings accessi- ble during curfews and contact bans in times of pandem- ics. corresponding online platforms, mobile apps, and virtual therapy and counseling services must be devel- oped, implemented, and evaluated. in its recent position statement, the european society for sexual medicine (essm) emphasized the great potential of e-sexual health (kirana et al., ); however, using telemedicine in sexual health comes with diverse challenges (shindel & rowen, ). nonetheless, good practice examples are already available (e.g., for the provision of compre- hensive hiv prep service via telehealth for adolescent msm and tgw in brazil: dourado et al., ; for the prevention of consumption of child sexual abuse mate- rial via online cognitive behavioral therapy: parks et al., ). . in addition to the development of new digital delivery formats, sexual and reproductive healthcare services and sexual education are required to incorporate pandemic- specific topics such as coping with domestic isolation for couples experiencing increased domestic estrangement or conflicts, coping with domestic isolation for singles experiencing increased loneliness, and dealing with technology-mediated sexual interactions and relation- ships among adolescents, adults, and seniors. appropri- ate target-group-specific content, which is rights-based, inclusive, pleasure-friendly, and simultaneously focuses on risk reduction, must be developed, implemented, and evaluated. some authors suggest that pandemic-related health interventions should include positive sexual health and even promote safe and consensual sexual activ- ity in sexually inactive people to mitigate some of the detrimental consequences of self-isolation and social distancing (jacob et al., ). the assumed reduction in the number of sex partners and in sexual risk taking during the pandemic creates a good opportunity for sti and hiv prevention to find undiagnosed people (junejo et al., ). hence, pandemic-specific social media campaigns that encourage testing are recommended and already implemented in the uk (e.g., https ://www.testn owsto phiv.com/), using claims like “been going solo recently? time to test. lockdown has broken the hiv chain.” . to meet these new challenges (e.g., the implementa- tion of infection control in face-to-face service settings, development of new digital delivery formats, and the development of new target-group-focused pandemic- specific content and services), professionals in the field of sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexual edu- cation, for their part, need appropriate (virtual) train- ing courses, concepts, tools, and economic support. for example, sexual education professionals and institutions are currently facing existential problems, even in high- income countries, because they have been unable to hold their usual face-to-face events, seminars, and workshops for months. an important prerequisite for appropriate measures is the recognition of sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexual education as being essential in times of a pandemic. discussion and outlook this overview of current media narratives and scientific observations and predictions on sexuality-related covid- effects shows how many different aspects of sexual behavior and sexual and reproductive health can be affected. looking at the public and professional discourse, it is gratifying that questions of sexual and reproductive health and rights have moved so quickly onto the agenda. it is also gratifying that underserved groups and their demands are so clearly visible in the discussion and that their voices are being heard. it is also remarkable that technology-mediated sexual interactions and masturbation with pornography and toys under condi- tions of a pandemic with contact restrictions have suddenly been normalized to such a degree that they are even officially recommended by the media and health authorities as health prevention behaviors. as with any change, we probably tend to accentuate either positive or negative effects, neglecting the possibility of only small effect sizes and the possibility of ambivalent effects. this can be assumed, for example, for the pandemic effects on partnered sex and solo sex: since relationship sex and mas- turbation are in part strongly habitualized, the pandemic can have only a temporary, limited, and often ambivalent impact. other consequences of the pandemic, however, appear to be clearly negative, serious, and long term, such as the lack of access to family planning and abortion, poorer care during pregnancy and birth, or the rise of a racist and homophobic coronavirus stigma. overall, it is important to empirically test the common media narratives and research hypotheses that have been put forward and to develop intervention measures that will help to better protect and strengthen sexual and reproductive health in future epidemics and pandemics. it is particularly important to keep in mind the feared worsening of inequali- ties in sexual and reproductive healthcare at national and international levels and to initiate rapid and sustainable coun- termeasures. questions of resilience and coping in connec- tion with sexual and reproductive health under the conditions https://www.testnowstophiv.com/ https://www.testnowstophiv.com/ archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – of a pandemic are also worth investigating, both on the side of sexual healthcare providers and on that of their patients and clients. the question of a possible long-term cultural change is also relatively open at this point in time. will technology- mediated forms of sex remain more common and more recognized after they have been used during the pandemic contact bans in broader sections of the population and were recognized as preventive behaviors? will the rules of social distancing be more firmly anchored in everyday life in the long term, or will a return to the former status quo occur relatively soon? this commentary provides a first overview of media narra- tives and research hypotheses on the sexuality-related effects of the covid- pandemic. the main limitations of the pre- sent commentary are that only german and english language media contributions and academic papers were included and that the number of empirical studies in this field is still very small. the planned special issue of archives of sexual behav- ior on the impact of covid- on sexual health and behavior will help to close the diverse research gaps (scott-sheldon, mark, balzarini, & welling, ). acknowledgments open access funding provided by projekt deal. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the author declares that she has no conflicts of in- terest. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attri- bution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. references ait addi, r., benksim, a., & cherkaoui, m. 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( ). effect of the covid- pandemic on female sexual behavior. international journal of gynaecology and obstetrics, , – . https ://doi.org/ . /ijgo. . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/european-countries-develop-new-ways-tackle-domestic-violence-during-coronavirus-n https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/european-countries-develop-new-ways-tackle-domestic-violence-during-coronavirus-n https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /m - https://doi.org/ . /m - https://news.un.org/en/story/ / / https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/ /april/ _sex-work https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/ /april/ _sex-work https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/ /april/ _sex-work https://doi.org/ . /jcom. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /jvwr.v i . https://doi.org/ . /jvwr.v i . https://cancer-network.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /second-open-letter-lgbtq-covid- -final- .pdf https://cancer-network.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /second-open-letter-lgbtq-covid- -final- .pdf https://cancer-network.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /second-open-letter-lgbtq-covid- -final- .pdf https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- /question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/violence-against-women-during-covid- https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- /question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/violence-against-women-during-covid- https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- /question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/violence-against-women-during-covid- https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus- /question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/violence-against-women-during-covid- https://doi.org/ . /ijgo. 	how is the covid- pandemic affecting our sexualities? an overview of the current media narratives and research hypotheses 	sexuality-related effects of the covid- pandemic 	covid- effects on partnered sex 	more relationship sex and a coronavirus baby boom 	less relationship sex and the rise in divorce rates 	less casual sex 	more telephone and online sex 	covid- effects on solo sex 	more masturbation 	more sex toy use 	more pornography use 	the rise of coronavirus porn as a new genre of pornography 	covid- effects on sexual and reproductive health issues in vulnerable groups 	more sexualized domestic violence 	more barriers to family planning and abortion 	more health risks during pregnancy and birth 	more health risks and economic hardships in sex work 	more disadvantages for lgbtq+-identifying populations 	covid- effects on sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexual education 	discussion and outlook 	acknowledgments 	references bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - agnĖ aleksaitĖ lietuvių kalbos institutas emocinĖ-ekspresinĖ leksika lietuviŲ kalbos naujaŽodŽiŲ duomenyne – naujadarŲ radimosi aplinkybĖs ir darybos bŪdai esminiai ŽodŽiai: emocinė-ekspresinė leksika, naujažodžiai, okaziniai dariniai, darybinė analizė, darybos būdas, produktyvumas. Įvadas apie lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyną (toliau – nd, duomenynas) rašyta įvairiais aspektais (plačiau žr. miliūnaitė a: – ; : – ; : – ; murmulaitytė a: – ; b: – ; aleksaitė : – ), todėl šiuokart, nebetęsiant bendrosios duomenyno apžvalgos, gilinamasi į tradicinę naujažodžių sampratą ir rūšis, pateikiamas novatoriškas požiūris į lietuvių kalbos naujažodžius kaip gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklus. duomenyne m. balandžio mėn. d. buvo leksikografiškai aprašytų kalbos vienetų. rasti emocinę-ekspresinę paskirtį atliekantys naujadarai . stilistiškai žymėti naujadarai duomenyne suskirstyti pagal aštuonis ekspresinius atspalvius: vulgarusis, niekinamasis, menkinamasis, mažybinis, maloninis, juokaujamasis, ironiškasis ir familiarusis (žr. pav.). daiktavardžiai sudaro , proc. visos nd fiksuotos emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos, veiksmažodžiai – , proc., būdvardžiai – , proc. atsižvelgus į negausią veiksmažodžių ir būdvardžių empirinę medžiagą, matyti, kad negalima nuodugniai aptarti būdvardžių ir veiksmažodžių darybos būdų, todėl šiame straipsnyje bendrai aprašomi stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų darybos polinkiai. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - pav. naujadarų pasiskirstymas duomenyne pagal ekspresinį atspalvį matyti, kad nd didžiąją emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos dalį (net , proc.) sudaro neigiamos konotacijos naujadarai, t. y. ironiškąjį, menkinamąjį, niekinamąjį, vulgarųjį ir familiarųjį atspalvį turintys dariniai. tokį netolygų pasiskirstymą galima paaiškinti psichologinėmis ir socialinėmis priežastimis: lietuvių kalboje (kaip ir daugelyje kitų kalbų) neigiamas emocinis vertinimas išreiškiamas dažniau negu teigiamas, nes visa, kas gera, priimama kaip norma, o ypatingų emocijų dėl normalių dalykų žmonės nereiškia, todėl visa, kas negera, laikoma nukrypimu nuo normos ir įvertinama neigiamos konotacijos naujažodžiais (jakaitienė : ; gudavičius : – ). atmetus nd darybiškai neskaidomus semantinius naujažodžius, pvz., plūgas „menk. viskuo nepatenkintas tamsuolis“, runkelis „menk. tamsuoliu laikomas pesimistiškai nusiteikęs žmogus, priešinamas elitui“, žodžių junginius, pvz., kelių vištelė „menk. vairuotoja moteris, akiplėšiškai ir piktybiškai nepaisanti eismo taisyklių“ (plg. kelių gaidelis, kelių erelis), naudingas idiotas „menk. kas nesavanaudiškai skleidžia įtartinas žinias ir ideologijas, naudingas priešininkams, nesuvokdamas tokio elgesio kenksmingumo“, ir skolinius, pvz., nafris, -ė „menk. išeivis europoje iš Šiaurės afrikos“, retarderis „ . iron. perkeltine reikšme – atsilikėlis; politinių vulgarusis , % niekinamasis , % menkinamasis , % mažybinis , % maloninis , % juokaujamasis , % ironiškasis , % familiarusis , % agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - procesų stabdis“ (plačiau apie etiškai netinkamus žodžius žr. Župerka : – ), tyrimo o b j e k t u pasirinkti kalbos vienetai . Šio straipsnio t i k s l a s – nustatyti pagrindinius emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos, užfiksuotos nd, žodžių darybos būdus ir produktyviausias darybos priemones. u ž d a v i n i a i : ) išrinkti iš nd emocinę-ekspresinę funkciją atliekančius naujadarus; ) atlikti darybinę nd stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų analizę; ) ištirti ir aprašyti stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų darybos būdus ir priemones; ) nustatyti naujus darybos polinkius ir ) aptarti stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų (gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklų) radimosi aplinkybes. darbe taikyti darybinės analizės ir skaičiavimo m e t o d a i . emocinĖs-ekspresinĖs leksikos samprata stilistiškai žymėtą leksiką sudaro emotyvai ir ekspresyvai. Įprastai emotyvai apibrėžiami kaip žodžiai, kuriais reiškiami jausmai, jų „reikšmės pagrindas – teigiamas ar neigiamas emocinis kalbėtojo santykis su pavadinamu dalyku. tai jo nuomonė apie tam tikro dalyko vertę, ir ta nuomonė pasireiškia ne kaip loginis sprendimas, o kaip kalbančio asmens pojūtis ar jausmas“ (gudavičius : ). dėl stilistinių priežasčių vartojami ir ekspresyvai – tai „žodžiai, kurie pavadinamą dalyką nusako vaizdu“ (jakaitienė : ). pagrindinis emotyvų ir ekspresyvų skirtumas – netapačios poveikio kryptys, mat „emotyvai veikia pašnekovo jausmus, o vaizdingieji žodžiai – vaizduotę, nes jų reikšmė tarsi įsikūnija regimaisiais ar girdimaisiais vaizdais“ (jakaitienė : ). nors mokslinėje literatūroje įprasta emotyvus ir ekspresyvus skirti pagal jų daromą poveikio kryptį, vis dėlto jų griežtai atriboti negalima, nes „kas emocinga kalboje, visuomet ekspresyvu“ (pikčilingis : ; dar žr. volek : ) ir, atvirkščiai, „vaizdu perteikiama informacija susilaukia dar ir vienokio ar kitokio emocinio vertinimo“ (jakaitienė : – ), todėl straipsnyje stilistiškai žymėtai leksikai pavadinti renkamasi vartoti emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos terminą . tai yra pirminis emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos tyrimas, kurį atlikus paaiškėjo, kad kai kurie duomenyno naujadarai dar turėtų būti sistemiškai redaguojami stilistikos aspektu. nd tikslas – fiksuoti leksikos naujoves, todėl į bazę, dedant po vieną žodį, iš karto nebūna aiški visa sistema. tik sukaupus daugiau duomenų, galima matyti, kokios naujadarų grupės išsiskiria, ir šias grupes nuosekliai vertinti stilistiškai. dėl šios keblios atskyrimo priežasties nd emocinė-ekspresinė leksika smulkiau (į minėtąsias dvi grupes) nėra skirstoma. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - tradicinĖ naujaŽodŽiŲ samprata ir rŪŠys lietuvių kalbotyros veikaluose naujažodis (neologizmas) paprastai apibrėžiamas kaip naujai kalboje atsiradęs žodis (urbutis : – ; jakaitienė : ; girčienė : ), nors mokslinėje literatūroje pateikiama naujažodžio samprata įvairuoja (plačiau žr. girčienė b: ): vieni skiriamąja naujažodžio ypatybe laiko keliamą naujumo, neįprastumo įspūdį (palionis : ), kiti naujažodžiais laiko žodžius, iki tol neįtrauktus į atraminius žodynus (miliūnaitė : ) . mokslininkai polemizuoja dėl naujažodžiui priskiriamos „naujumo aureolės“, „[m]at naujumas kartais gali būti suprantamas pernelyg subjektyviai: vieniems kalbos vartotojams koks nors žodis gali atrodyti jau įprastas, o kiti dar gali jo ir nesuprasti“ (popova : – , cituojama iš jakaitienė : ; dar žr. kazlauskaitė, Župerka, macienė : ). patikimesnis esti naujažodžių atrankos kriterijus pagal atraminius leidinius, nors lietuvių kalbos atveju toks kriterijus nėra visiškai patikimas – žodynuose esama leksikografinių plyšių, susiduriama su žodynų nesistemiškumo problema (miliūnaitė : ). duomenyne naujažodžiais laikomi žodžiai, kurie nėra įrašyti kaip atraminiais pasirinktuose žodynuose, t. y. dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodyne ( -asis (elektroninis) leidimas, ), internetiniame lietuvių kalbos žodyne ir tarptautinių žodžių žodyne (alma littera, ) (žr. http://naujazodziai.lki.lt/?apie_duomenyna; apie protologizmo ir neologizmo skirtumus žr. aleksaitė : – ). funkciškai naujažodžiai skiriami į dvi pagrindines grupes – referentinius (dar vadinami nominatyviniais, termininiais, būtinaisiais ir kt.) ir ekspresinius (dar vadinami stilistiniais, fakultatyviaisiais ir kt.) (girčienė a: ; b: ; dar žr. offord : ; vaicekauskienė : – ). referentiniai naujažodžiai įvardija naujas realijas, t. y. atlieka referentinę (informacijos perdavimo) funkciją, o ekspresiniai naujažodžiai į tekstą įtraukiami stilistiniais sumetimais, čia svarbiausia emocinė-ekspresinė funkcija (girčienė b: ). referentiniai tiesa, nd pateikiami ir tokie kalbos vienetai, kurie veikiausiai per apsirikimą nepateko į atraminius žodynus. jie nd turi žymą nenaujas (nefiksuotas), pvz., meiliavaistis „liaudies medicinos priemonė, sukelianti arba didinanti lytinį potraukį“. duomenyne nurodoma, kad šis naujadaras – tai „kadaise lietuvių kalboje vartotas, bet į didįjį „lietuvių kalbos žodyną“ nepatekęs dabartinio skolinio afrodiziakas dalinis atitikmuo“. http://naujazodziai.lki.lt/?apie_duomenyna agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - naujažodžiai, kurių pagrindinis skiriamasis bruožas – stilistinis neutralumas (girčienė b: ), žodžių darybos veikaluose įvardijami kaip potenciniai dariniai (potencionalizmai). potencinis darinys – kalbos vartotojui visiškai įprastas, naujai sudarytas ir darybos tipo reikalavimui paklūstantis darinys, šnekos akto metu realizuojamas kiekvienu momentu, kai tik jo prireikia (plag : ; paulauskienė : ; urbutis : ; vaskelienė : ), pvz., šalia lietuviams įprastų mėsos pavadinimų (paukštiena, kiauliena, jautiena) prireikus pasidaryta buivoliena (: buivolas) „buivolo mėsa“, kengūriena (: kengūra) „kengūros mėsa“, kupranugariena (: kupranugaris) „kupranugario mėsa“ ir kt. esminis potencinių darinių skiriamasis bruožas – net ir jų pirmojo pasirodymo metu naujumas dažnai nėra juntamas (mikelionienė a: ; urbutis : ). jie kuriami iš būtino reikalo įvardyti naują realiją (girčienė b: ), siekiant užpildyti vadinamąsiais „semantines tuštumas“ (mikelionienė b: ), priešingai nei ekspresiniai naujažodžiai, kuriais siekiama „naujesnės, ekspresyvesnės ar madingesnės kalbinės raiškos“ (girčienė : ). Šie stilistiškai žymėti, arba konotuoti, teksto elementai (girčienė b: ; dar žr. lehrer : ) kituose veikaluose dar vadinami okaziniais dariniais (okazionalizmais). okazinis darinys (okazionalizmas) – ekspresyvus, nuo darybos sistemos nutolęs ir individualiame kontekste sustingęs naujadaras (blažinskaitė : ; rozenbergs : ; urbutis : – ; jakaitienė : ; mattiello : ), dar įvardijamas autorinio, individualaus, stilistinio, situacinio, kontekstinio, vienkartinio ir neįprastos darybos naujadaro / neologizmo, taip pat žodynų nefiksuoto darinio terminais (mikelionienė c: ; : ; jakaitienė : ; kazlauskaitė, Župerka, macienė : ; miliūnaitė : ), pvz., menko proto asmenis apibūdina išplautsmegenis, -ė (: išplautas, -a + smegenys) „menk. kas atbukinto mąstymo (išplautomis smegenimis)“, vienavingis, -ė (: vienas, -a + vingis) „menk. kas su vienu smegenų vingiu, t. y. primityvaus mąstymo“, žirniasmegenis, -ė (: žirnis + smegenys) „menk. kas primityvaus mąstymo, neapsišvietęs, netašytas stuobrys“ ir kt. taigi straipsnyje nagrinėjama nd emocinė-ekspresinė leksika, į kurią patenka nemaža dalis okazinių naujadarų. galima tolimesnė tyrimų kryptis – panagrinėti, kiek skiriasi okazinių darinių ir referentinių naujadarų darybos polinkiai. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - naujaŽodŽiai – gyvenamojo meto aktualijŲ Ženklai kalba – vienas iš svarbiausių tautos požymių (gudavičius : ), nes „[k]iekvienos tautos kalba saugo įdomią istoriją apie daugelio amžių žmonių pastangas pažinti, suvokti ir pajungti sau juos supantį pasaulį“ (kopylenko : , cituojama iš gudavičius : ), kitaip tariant, nuo seno vartojamuose kalbos vienetuose yra išlikęs per šimtmečius susiklostęs tautos pasaulėvaizdis ir pasaulėjauta (gudavičius : ). kalbos ir tautos santykis nagrinėjamas ne tik kalbininkų, bet ir kitų sričių specialistų: „kalba daugelio kultūrologų, mitologų seniai suvokiama kaip liaudies kultūros, tautos psichologijos ir filosofijos veidrodis, dažnai ir kaip vienintelis šaltinis tautos istorijai ir jos dvasiai pažinti ir yra tiriama šiuo požiūriu“ (tolstojus : ). gimtosios kalbos pasaulėvaizdžiui yra būdingas daugiasluoksniškumas ir daugiaaspektiškumas, nes kalboje išlieka ne tik visuomenei nebeaktualūs pasaulėvaizdžio elementai (seni įsitikinimai, vaizdiniai), bet randasi ir naujų pasaulio suvokimo aspektų (naujo patyrimo, naujų reiškinių, naujų mokslo tiesų) (mackiewicz a: ; : , cituojama iš gudavičius : ), pvz., šalia lietuviams įprastų senovinių namų pavadinimų (gryčia, pirkia, stuba, troba), pasikeitus gyvenimo aplinkybėms (sunykus agrarinei kultūrai ir stiprėjus urbanizacijai), palaipsniui kalboje radosi betonmonstris (: betonas + monstras) „didžiulis, grėsmingai atrodantis betoninis pastatas“, betonoidas (: betonas) „harmoningą aplinką darkantis naujoviškas betoninis pastatas“, dangoraižynas (: dangoraižis) „vieta modernaus miesto centre, kur daug dangoraižių“, naują reikšmę įgavęs stiklainis „menk. naujoviškas stiklinis pastatas arba antstatas (paprastai menkavertis, ne visada pastatytas teisėtai)“ ir žemėraižis (: žemė + raižyti) „giliai po žeme įleistas pastatas, dangoraižio priešingybė“. panašūs naujadarai teikia vertingos informacijos ne tik apie lietuvių tautos kalboje užfiksuotą pasaulėvaizdį, bet ir apie kalbos pasaulėjautą, kuri perteikia emocinį žmogaus santykį su tikrove (gudavičius : ). būtent laiko aktualijas bei laikinus, situacinius dalykus (miliūnaitė a: ) ar net visuomenės raidos lūžius (girčienė c: ) žymi naujų žodžių srautas. duomenyne fiksuota keliasdešimt naujadarų, kuriuos derėtų laikyti gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklais, pvz., m. politikų teikti transporto ir švietimo, maisto srities teisinio reglamentavimo siūlymai nesulaukė visuomenės palaikymo, todėl kalboje radosi stilistiškai žymėtų, laiko aktualijas žyminčių agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - naujadarų: dyzelheitas (: dyzelis „dyzelinu varomas automobilis“ + -heitas < anglų k. hate „neapkęsti“) „juok. dyzelinių automobilių nemėgimas“ ; maistnešys, -ė (: maistas + nešti) „juok. kas nešiojasi sveikatos apsaugos ministerijos nerekomenduojamą maistą į mokyklą“ (plg. užkandnešys, -ė) . Į sveikatos apsaugos ministerijos pateiktas rekomendacijas akimirksniu sureagavę verslininkai mokiniams ir jų tėvams pasiūlė išeitį – tai kalboje kartu su nauja realija radęsis galimas kontaminantas (maišinys) (plačiau žr. kabašinskaitė: : , – , ; urbutis : – ; miliūnaitė : – ; murmulaitytė : – ) sveikatronas (: sveikas, -a + -tronas) „skatinanti valgyti daržoves užkandžių dėžutė vaikams“ . nd gausu ir daugiau nepasitenkinimą dabartine valdžia rodančių naujadarų, susijusių su lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjunga bei jai prijaučiančiais asmenimis: gandragalviai (: gandras + galva) „menk. ramūno karbauskio vadovaujama politinė jėga – lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjunga, kurios simbolis – skrendantis gandras“ , gandragalviškas, -a (: gandragalvis, -ė) „menk. būdingas gandragalviams“, gandramintis, -ė (: gandras + mintis) „menk. valstiečių ir žaliųjų partijos žmogus ar jai prijaučiantis“ ir gandriniai (: gandras) „iron. ramūno karbauskio vadovaujama politinė jėga – lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjunga, kurios simbolis – skrendantis gandras“. duomenyne fiksuota naujadarų, pasidarytų iš lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos plg. nd teikiamą pavyzdį: Šis reiškinys, kai dalis automobilių bendruomenės išsako vien tik neigiamą nuomonę apie dyzelinius automobilius, jau įgavo bendrinį pavadinimą – dyzelheitas (angl. diesel hate – nekęsti dyzelio), – juokiasi lietuvos autoverslininkų asociacijos generalinis direktorius vitoldas milius ( min.lt ). beje, naujadaro dyzelheitas nederėtų painioti su fonetiškai panašiu dyzelgeitu (plg. anglų k. dieselgate, rusų k. дизельгейт). dyzelheitu apibūdinamas „dyzelinių automobilių nemėgimas“, o skoliniu dyzelgeitas (: dyzelis + -geitas (anglų k. -gate < watergate) dūrinių dėmuo, reiškiantis dažniausiai didelio masto politinį ar su nuslėptais valdžios veiksmais susijusį skandalą) – „volkswagen“ dyzelinių automobilių taršos duomenų klastojimo skandalas“. plg. nd teikiamus vartosenos pavyzdžius: buvo knygnešiai, dabar bus maistnešiai [moksleivio, kuris buvo supažindintas su nerekomenduojamo mokykloje maisto sąrašu, komentaras. – red. past.] (facebook.com ). prasidėjo užkandnešių laikai. pagal viską, tai tęsis metų [reakcija į feisbuko diskusiją apie sveikatos apsaugos ministerijos nurodymus, kokio maisto mokiniams negalima neštis į mokyklą. – red. past.] (facebook.com ). plg. nd pateiktą pavyzdį: „dėl šios priežasties trečius metus iš eilės vykdome socialinės atsakomybės projektą „sodinčius“, kurio tikslas – padėti vaikams pažinti daržoves ir vaisius bei tokiu būdu paskatinti mažuosius jų valgyti daugiau. Šiais metais nusprendėme ateiti į pagalbą tėveliams ir dėmesį skirti tam, kad jų vaikai originaliau ir žaismingiau sužinotų apie sveiką mitybą. sukūrėme specialias užkandžių dėžutes – „sveikatronus“, kuriuose pavaizduotos daržovės – herojės, tokios kaip pomidoras, brokolis, obuolys, morka ir avietė, simbolizuojantys daržovių ir vaisių super galias. norėdami, kad vaikai į šias dėžutes įsidėtų sveikus užkandžius, daržovėms, vaisiams ir uogoms davėme specialius pavadinimus, pvz. „morkatronas“, – pasakoja b. Čaikauskaitė (zmones.lt ). naujadaras pasidarytas pagal analogiją su žodžiu bukagalvis, -ė. naujadaras pasidarytas pagal analogiją su žodžiu bendramintis, -ė. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - lyderio ramūno karbauskio pavardės: karbauskiada (: karbauskis) „istorijos, susijusios su seimo nario ramūno karbauskio veikla“, karbauskininkai (: karbauskis) „ramūno karbauskio vadovaujama politinė jėga – lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjunga“ ir karbauskizmas (: karbauskis) „niek. politiko ramūno karbauskio ir jo vadovaujamos partijos ideologija“. glaudų politikų sauliaus skvernelio ir ramūno karbauskio bendradarbiavimą įvardija galimas kontaminantas karboskvernelis (: karbauskis + skvernelis) „niek. politikų sauliaus skvernelio ir ramūno karbauskio duetas“. duomenyne rasta kiek mažiau naujadarų, pasidarytų, remiantis ministro pirmininko sauliaus skvernelio pavarde, pvz., skvernelininkas, -ė (: skvernelis) „premjero sauliaus skvernelio šalininkas“ ir skvernelkė (: skvernelis) „menk. premjero sauliaus skvernelio vadovaujamos vyriausybės siūlomas sąlyginis piniginis vienetas, skirtas socialiai remtiniems žmonėms apsipirkti smulkiose parduotuvėse“ (pasidaryta pagal analogiją su žargonybe vagnorkė ). naujažodystės – okazinių naujažodžių kūrimo procese, rodant emocinį santykį su lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos vadovu, kuriama ir tokių darinių, kurių darybos pamatu pasirenkamas gyvenvietės lietuvoje pavadinimas – naisiai, siejami su ramūnu karbauskiu: naisiada (: naisiai) „su tv serialu „naisių vasara“ ir valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos politine reklama tame seriale susijusios peripetijos“, naisybė (: naisiai) „iron. ypatybės, reiškiančios neigiamas opozicinių jėgų nuostatas dėl visko, kas susiję su naisiais kaip valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos simboliu, pavadinimas“ (plg. naisu, naisumas, naisus, -i), naisietija (: naisietis, -ė) „valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos, kurios vienas iš simbolių – naisiai, rinkėjai“, naisietis, -ė (: naisiai) „ . naisių gyventojas; . valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos, kurios vienas iš simbolių – naisiai, narys ar sekėjas“, naisizacija (: naisiai) „iron. ramūno karbauskio idėjų, įgyvendintų naisių gyvenvietėje, plėtra“ ir naisuva (: naisiai) „valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjungos, kurios vienas iš simbolių – naisiai, atstovai seime“. akivaizdu, kad patys aktualiausi dalykai ilgainiui aplimpa dariniais (džn. neigiamos konotacijos) (plg. miliūnaitė : ). stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų kūrėjai atkreipia dėmesį ir į sveikatos apsaugos ministro aurelijaus verygos veiklą, ypač neigiamai vertinama jo inicijuota alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimo kampanija, todėl darybos pamatu pasirenkama ministro pavardė ir kuriami ne tik neigiamos vagnorkėmis (: vagnorius) vadinti po nepriklausomybės atkūrimo įvesti pirmieji lietuviški pinigai (laikinieji talonai, iliustruoti įvairiais žvėreliais). agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - konotacijos, bet ir juokaujamieji dariniai, pašiepiantys ar pajuokiantys ne tik patį ministrą, bet ir alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimo kampanijos šalininkus: kontaminantas veryganas, -ė (: veryga + veganas) „juok. naujadaras blaivininkui, aktyviai palaikančiam alkoholio ribojimus, pavadinti“, verygininkas, -ė (: veryga) „iron. alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimo šalininkas“, verygizacija (: veryga) „iron. lr sveikatos ministro aurelijaus verygos inicijuotas alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimas“, verygmetis (: veryga + metas) „iron. lr sveikatos ministro aurelijaus verygos inicijuoto alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimo įstatymo įsigaliojimo laikotarpis“ ir kontaminantas žveryga (: žvėris + veryga) „iron. naujadaras, sukurtas ironizuojant sveikatos ministro aurelijaus verygos inicijuotą alkoholio kontrolės griežtinimo kampaniją“. draudimo pasekmė – kalboje radęsis okazionalizmas puslapiakarpys, -ė (: puslapis + karpyti) „juok. įstatymo vykdytojas – užsienio žurnalų puslapių su draudžiama alkoholio reklama karpytojas“. tokių politikos naujadarų „plėtros polinkius, svarbą kalbos vartotojams rodo ne tik <...> vartosenos dažnis, bet ir darybos šakojimasis“ (girčienė : ) – tai, kad kuriami ne pavieniai, o gausų darybos lizdą sudarantys nauji dariniai, įrodo, kad lietuvių tauta, kūrybingai naudodamasi žodžių darybos išgalėmis, įvairiai ir gausiai reiškia emocinį santykį su opiomis gyvenamojo meto aktualijomis (plačiau žr. pikčilingis : ; gudavičius : ). laikini, situaciniai dalykai (pvz., pavieniai politikų skandalai ir pan.) žymimi tik vienu kitu naujadaru: markauskiada (: markauskas) „iron. skandalas dėl žemės ūkio ministro broniaus markausko žemės ūkio verslo“, nusišalčiūtinti (: *šalčiūtintis : *šalčiūtinti : Šalčiūtė) „iron. nusifotografuoti asmenukei socialinių tinklų ir pramogų pasaulio veikėjos monikos Šalčiūtės stiliumi“, pakildišinti (: *kildišinti : kildišienė) „juok. sukompromituoti dėl politiko ramūno karbauskio proteguotos buvusios seimo narės gretos kildišienės“, pūkintis (: *pūkinti : pūkas) „juok. naujadaras, skirtas apibūdinti parlamentaro kęstučio pūko veiklai, dėl kurios jam pareikšti įtarimai dėl seksualinio priekabiavimo“ ir kt. dar keli ryškūs m. gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklai, fiksuoti nd „kaip graži kalbos kūrybos apraiška ir kalbos bei jos kūrėjų išgalių paliudijimas“ (miliūnaitė b: ): sausuva (: sausas, -a) „sausros apimta lietuva“ (plg. m. kontaminantą vilnecija (: vilnius plg. nd pateiktą pavyzdį: lietuvių kančios: pernai – tikra lietuva, šiemet – jau sausuva [antraštė] vietoj laukto lietaus – tik keli lašai. tuo vakar buvo itin nusivylę daugelis šalies ūkininkų, kurie jau pristigo net šieno galvijams. ne ką geresnė padėtis ir miškuose, todėl dzūkai kol kas lieka be uždarbio. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - + venecija) „juok. vilnius, kuris dėl vasaros liūties patvinus gatvėms, tapo panašus į veneciją“), kontaminantas Šiukšliniškės (: šiukšlinas, -a + viršuliškės) „menk. apšiukšlintas gyvenamasis rajonas (turimos galvoje vilniaus viršuliškės)“ , tais metais suaktualėjęs naujadaras vaikmušys, -ė (: vaikas + mušti) „menk. kas muša savo vaikus“. pasaulyje prasidėjęs #metoo judėjimas lietuvių kalbos naujosios leksikos sluoksnį papildė naujažodžiais mytiūtis, -ė (: mytiu < anglų k. metoo) „seksualinio priekabiavimo auka, paviešinusi šį faktą viešojoje erdvėje su grotažyme #metoo, taip išreikšdama solidarumą su kitomis nukentėjėlėmis“, mytukė (: mytiu) ir mytušnikė (plg. rusų k. митушница, митушник). m. nesutarimai dėl vilniaus lukiškių aikštės paminklo paskatino visuomenę sukurti darinius vytininkas, -ė (: vytis) „vilniaus lukiškių aikštės paminklo – vyčio statulos – šalininkas“ ir bunkerininkas, -ė (: bunkeris) „vilniaus lukiškių aikštės paminklo, primenančio partizanų bunkerį, šalininkas“ . m. ne tik lietuvoje, bet ir daugelyje pasaulio šalių paplito politikos skolinys – trampokalipsė (anglų k. trumpocalypse < trump (naujojo jav prezidento donaldo trumpo pavardė) + apocalypse) „apokalipsei – pasaulio pabaigos artėjimui – prilygintas donaldo trumpo išrinkimas jav prezidentu“. tais pačiais metais į nd (kaip didelį nepasitenkinimą lietuvių visuomenėje sukėlęs reiškinys) pateko kalafiorgeitas (: kalafioras „žiedinis kopūstas“ + -geitas lietaus šalimi vadinamoje lietuvoje pernai buvo paskelbta ekstremali padėtis dėl užklupusių liūčių, o šiemet – viskas atvirkščiai (lrytas.lt ). plg. nd fiksuotą pavyzdį: dėl šiukšlių krūvų vilniaus viršuliškes gyventojai jau vadina Šiukšliniškėmis [antraštė] „atvažiuoja mašinomis ir išmeta, iš visų namų neša ir meta. Žmonių sąmoningumo nepakeisi, bet kai konteinerių nebuvo prie kelio, tokios nesąmonės nebūdavo. dabar ne viršuliškės, o Šiukšliniškės, galima taip pavadinti. jau net – metų vaikai piktinasi, kodėl niekas neveža šiukšlių“, – kalbėjo moteris ( min.lt ). Žvengiu. ji kovoja su seksualiniu priekabiavimu :-) jūs pasižiūrėkite į tos mytiu įkurėjos snukį. arba ir į šią. tai, normalūs vyrai laikosi atstumo. nu negražios. seksualiai nepatrauklios. perversijos. apsidžiaugtų jei prie jų papriekabiautų :-d [kalba netaisyta – red. past.] (tv .lt [el. komunikacija] ). beje, remiantis istoriko gedimino kulikausko veikale lietuvio kodas. Įpročiai ir būdas senovės lietuvio prieš metų pateiktais duomenimis, galima daryti prielaidą, kad lietuvių visuomenei susiskaldyti, nesutarus dėl kokio paminklo ar statinio, – įprasta, nes dar tarpukariu (apie m.) kaune visuomenė skilo į dvi grupes „dėl okupacinės carinės valdžios palikimo pačioje miesto širdyje – petro ir povilo soboro. vieniems atrodė, kad pakanka statinį pervadinti į Šv. arkangelo mykolo bažnyčią ir perduoti kauno karinės įgulos žinion. kiti norėjo sulyginti statinį su žeme“ (kulikauskas : ; plačiau žr. : – ; plg. nesenus vaidus, kilusius dėl Žaliojo tilto skulptūrų). plg. nd pavyzdį: valstybės šimtmetį paminėsime „vytininkų“ ir „bunkerininkų“ riaušėmis? [antraštė] jei kiekvieną ginčą dėl skonio paversime pasaulėžiūriniais karais, visai gali būti, kad lietuvos valstybės šimtmečio jubiliejų paminėsime „vytininkų“ ir „bunkerininkų“ riaušėmis lukiškių aikštėje, tyliu gedimino kalno striptizu ir tokiu visuomenės susipriešinimu, kokio nebuvo nuo -ųjų perversmo laikų (delfi.lt ; romas sadauskas- kvietkevičius). agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - (anglų k. -gate < watergate) „juok. skandalas, kurį lietuvoje žmonės sukėlė dėl itin išaugusių kainų; jo pradžia buvo vieno piliečio pasipiktinimas žiedinių kopūstų kaina (už galvą – , eur)“ ir kalafobija (: kalafioras „žiedinis kopūstas“ + fobija (graikų k. phobos) „baimė“) „juok. baimė pirkti žiedinius kopūstus (kalafiorus) dėl pakilusių jų kainų“. m. nepalankiai įvertintas vyrų nenoras eiti į kariuomenę, todėl radosi ironiškas visuomenės, karybos vartosenos srities kontaminantas verktinis, -ė (: verkti + šauktinis) „iron. kas verkšlena dėl šauktinių kariuomenės ir nori nuo jos išsisukti arba kas tai parodijuoja; kas nepagrįstai dėl ko nors virkauja“. m. lietuvos visuomenės dėmesio akiratyje atsidūrė karo, tiksliau, agresyvios politikos, reiškinys, į lietuvių kalbą patekęs kaip skolinys okupendumas (rusų k. окупендум < okupuoti + referendumas) „okupacijos (nekonvencinio karo) sąlygomis vykęs krymo referendumas dėl atsiskyrimo nuo ukrainos“. m. duomenyne pateiktas vos vienas gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklas – pavienis naujadaras varškianešys, -ė (: varškė + nešti) „juok. kontrabandininkas, per m. spalį rusijos pradėtą lietuvos pieno gaminių blokadą plukdantis varškę per nemuną į kaliningrado (karaliaučiaus) sritį“ (pasidaryta pagal analogiją su knygnešiu). remiantis m. nd duomenimis, matyti, kad tais metais buvo kilę tariamos pedofilijos ir banko „snoras“ skandalai. buvus pedofilijos skandalą rodo į duomenyną įrašyti tokie naujadarai, kaip kontaminantas kedofilas, -ė (: kedys + pedofilas) „menk. drąsiaus kedžio, kovojusio prieš pedofiliją ir žuvusio neaiškiomis aplinkybėmis, šalininkas“, kedofilija (: kedys + pedofilija) „drąsiaus kedžio šalininkų (kedofilų) sambūrio palaikymas“ , kedofilinis, -ė (: kedofilas, -ė) „susijęs su kedofilija ir kedofilais“ ir kedofilizacija (: *kedofilizuoti) „kedofilijos plitimas“. tais metais, panaikinus banką „snoras“, lietuvių kalboje radosi įvairių neigiamos konotacijos darinių, pvz., apsisnorinti (: *apsnorinti : *snorinti : snoras) „iron. apsikvailinti, svarstant „snoro“ banko nacionalizavimo klausimus“, nusnorinti (: *snorinti : snoras) „iron. likviduoti „snoro“ banką“, snoriada (: snoras) „iron. m. suvalstybinto banko „snoras“ istorija ir visa, kas su ja susiję“ ir net mažybinis darinys snoriukas (: snoras) „buvusio ( m. pabaigoje suvalstybinto) banko „snoras“ savitarnos kioskelis gatvėje“. tai, kad naujadarą tiesa, čia galima įžvelgti ir priesaginę darybą. naujadarą kedofilija (: kedofilas, -ė) būtų galima laikyti priesagos -ija vediniu. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - snoriukas bei kitus bazėje fiksuotus darinius iš tiesų galima laikyti gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklais, pagrindžia prie mažybinio darinio duomenyno kūrėjų nurodyta pastaba – snoriukas yra „po kiek laiko, matyt, nueisiantis į praeitį šnekamosios kalbos žodis“ . tokie okaziniai dariniai, „keleto sezonų“ dalykai „nusitveriami kaip aktualijos, bet ilgainiui pasitraukia iš aktyviosios vartosenos“ (miliūnaitė : ). nekyla abejonių, kad ilgainiui aktualūs gyvenamojo meto įvykiai pasimiršta, o juos pavadinę naujadarai be papildomo paaiškinimo – sunkiai suvokiami. Šį teiginį pagrindžia m. internetinėje žiniasklaidoje sukurtas darinys varškėfobija (: varškė + fobija) „juok. taip pavadintas visuomenės judėjimas, atsiradęs kaip ironiškas protestas prieš žiniasklaidą, kuri išpūtė iki sensacijos faktą, kad apsauginis neįsileido zitos Čepaitės, nešinos grūdėtosios varškės indeliu, į „anties“ koncertą mokytojų namų kiemelyje“. Žinoma, suvokti darybos reikšmę („varškės baimė“) nėra sunku, nes naujadarai kuriami iš esamos kalbinės medžiagos, todėl naujas darinys kalboje turi atramą, yra motyvuotas – pavadindami naują daiktą, dalyką ar reiškinį kartu pasakome, kodėl jį taip pavadinome, pabrėždami vieną ar kitą pavadinamojo objekto savybę ar aspektą (gudavičius : ; plačiau žr. urbutis : – ). duomenyne pateiktą medžiagą pravartu patyrinėti ir etnolingvistikos, ir žodžių darybos aspektais. nd sukaupta medžiaga rodo, kad kalbos vartotojai reaguoja į šių dienų aktualijas ir geba prikurti pačių įvairiausių stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų. akivaizdu, kad leksika yra visuomenės atspindys, o „kiekvienas kalbos raidos periodas atspindi atitinkamą periodą tautos gyvenime“ (gudavičius : ; dar žr. wohlgemuth : ). darybinĖ duomenyno emocinĖs-ekspresinĖs leksikos analizĖ darybinė nd emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos analizė parodė, kad pagrindiniai stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų darybos būdai yra priesaginė daryba ( , proc.), sandūra ( , proc.) ir nemorfeminis žodžių darymosi būdas – kontaminacija (sąmaiša) ( , proc.) (dar apie kontaminaciją žr. murmulaitytė : ). pastaruoju žodžių darybos būdu naujadarai sudaromi, suliejant nemorfemines esančių žodžių dalis, tačiau lietuvių kalbotyroje tokia „sąmaiša nelaikoma kai kurie gyvenamojo meto aktualijas žymintys naujadarai, fiksuoti nd, nuo m. yra įtraukiami į metų žodžio ir metų posakio rinkimų sąrašus. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - tradiciškai suprantamos žodžių darybos proceso dalimi“ (miliūnaitė : ; dar žr. murmulaitytė : ) – „[ž]odžių darybai terūpi dariniai, o ne fonetiniai ar kitokie perdirbiniai, vienų teksto žodžių keitimas kitais, kontaminacijos padariniai ir panašūs dalykai“ (urbutis : ). menko produktyvumo yra priešdėlinė daryba ( , proc.), mišrusis darybos būdas ( , proc.) ir galūninė daryba ( , proc.) (žr. pav.). pav. emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos pasiskirstymas duomenyne pagal darybos būdus produktyviausio darybos būdo – priesaginės darybos – dariausia priemonė yra vardažodinės ypatybės turėtojų pavadinimų priesaga -(i)ukas, -ė, kuri sudaro , proc. visų priesaginių darinių , pvz., karštukė (: karštas, -a) „malon. karšta seksuali mergina“, mylimukas, -ė (: mylimas, -a) „malon., mžb. asmuo ar daiktas, prie kurio labai prisirišama, kuris labai mėgstamas ar mylimas (ypač kalbant apie vaikus)“, neįgaliukas (: neįgalus, -i) „malon. neįgalus viena daresnių kitos kalbos dalies priesagų – išskiriamųjų (rūšinių) būdvardžių darybos kategorijos -inis, -ė ( , proc.), pvz., koloradinis, -ė (: koloradas) „menk. susijęs su georgijaus juostelėmis, jų nešiotojais“, čikenfektorinis, -ė (: čikenfektorius) „iron. susijęs su čikenfektoriumi, t. y. įmone išeivijoje, kur apdorojama viščiukų produkcija; perkeltine reikšme ironizuojant – prasčiokiškas“ ir kt. priesaginė daryba , % priešdėlinė daryba , % galūninė daryba , % sandūra , % kontaminacija , % mišrusis darybos būdas , % agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - žmogus“ ir kt. naujadaro beglobiukas, -ė (: beglobis, -ė) „malon. beglobis gyvūnas“ darybą galima interpretuoti dvejopai, priklausomai nuo to, kas būtų laikoma darybos pamatu – daiktavardis beglobis, -ė (priskirtina deminutyvų (mažybinių daiktavardžių) kategorijai) ar būdvardis (priskirtina vardažodinės ypatybės turėtojų pavadinimų kategorijai). perpus mažiau rasta priesagos -(i)ukas, -ė vedinių, priklausančių veikėjų ir veiksmažodinės ypatybės turėtojų pavadinimams ( , proc.), pvz., nemiegiukas, -ė (: nemiegoti) „malon. mažylis, kuriam sunku užmigti (ypač pietų miego)“, nugirstukas (: nugirsti) „juok. nuogirda“ ir kt. deminutyvų, arba mažybinių priesagos -(i)ukas,-ė vedinių, duomenyne fiksuota vos vienas kitas ( , proc.): pabaisiukas (: pabaisa) „mžb. nedidelis pabaisa“ (plačiau apie deminutyvų vartoseną vaikų ir vaikiškojoje kalboje žr. savickienė : ; kamandulytė : ; apie produktyviausias priesagas vaikų kalboje žr. dabašinskienė : ), netipinės darybos nėštukė (: nėščia) „ . malon. besilaukianti moteris, nėščioji“, kurios darybos pamatas – būdvardis, ir kt. veikiausiai prie specialiosios reikšmės deminutyvų reikėtų skirti naujadarą snoriukas (: snoras) „mžb. buvusio ( m. pabaigoje suvalstybinto) banko „snoras“ savitarnos kioskelis gatvėje“. naujadarų linkstama darytis ir su ypatybių pavadinimų (vardažodžių abstraktų) darybos kategorijos priesaga -izmas ( , proc.), pvz., priekvailizmas (: priekvailis, -ė) „iron. priekvailių propaguojama ideologija“, runkelizmas (: runkelis) „menk. tamsumu ir pesimizmu pasižyminčių žmonių, vadinamų runkeliais, būvis“; plg. netipišką okazinį darinį nusispjovizmas (: nusispjovė) „iron. tyčinis ir sistemiškas ko nors nepaisymas“, kurio darybos pamatas – priešdėlinis sangrąžinis veiksmažodis. atskirai reikėtų aptarti dariąją, sąlygiškai prie mėsos pavadinimų priskirtą priesagą -iena ( , proc.). prie šio darybos tipo šliejasi nemažai naujadarų, kuriais pavadinama ne kokio gyvulio ar paukščio mėsa, o kokio nors daikto, dalyko, reiškinio gausa, visuma (žaliava) – darybos pamatu imamas dalies pavadinimas, pvz., dokumentiena (: dokumentas) „menk. abejotinos vertės dokumentų ruošiniai (žaliava)“, internetiena (: internetas) „menk. internete esanti informacija (informacijos žaliava)“, laikraštiena (: laikraštis) „menk. menkavertė, dažnai bulvarinė spausdintinė žiniasklaida“, skaitaliena (: skaitalas) „menk. skaitalas, menkavertė literatūra“, televizijiena (: televizija) „menk. menkavertė televizijos produkcija“, netipiškos darybos verteliena (: vertalas?) „menk. menkavertis vertimas, tikro vertimo teksto žaliava“, žodiena (: žodis) „iron. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - tuščių žodžių gausa“ (plg. žodeliena) (dar žr. mikelionienė : – ). dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstyne (toliau – dlkt) fiksuoti dar du šiam pogrupiui priskirtini naujadarai, t. y. bulvariena (: bulvarinis, -ė) ir žurnalistiena (: žurnalistas) . nors priesagos -iena vediniai gali būti priskiriami ir vardažodinės ypatybės turėtojų pavadinimų kategorijai (plg. naujiena, seniena, žaliena; mėnesiena; plačiau žr. dlkg : ), vis dėlto manytina, kad šių menkinamųjų, ironiškųjų darinių pavadinimai šliejasi būtent prie mėsos pavadinimų – jais įprastai pavadinama kieno nors neapdirbta, nesutvarkyta medžiaga. remiantis dlkt rastu žurnalistienos ir nd fiksuotais laikraštienos pavyzdžiais , matyti, kad iš minėtųjų priesagos -iena vedinių vartosenoje anksčiausiai atsirado naujadaras laikraštiena, veikiausiai pagal jį ir buvo analogiškai prikurta panašių darinių. atsižvelgus į nd sukauptus pavyzdžius, galima daryti prielaidą, kad galbūt formuojasi naujas priesagos -iena darybos tipas. Žinoma, daryti apibendrintų išvadų, remiantis tik duomenyno medžiaga, – negalima, todėl šią prielaidą būtina tikrinti, sukaupus ir nuodugniai išnagrinėjus gausesnę nei nd medžiagą. bent kiek daresnė emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos priesaga yra ypatybių pavadinimų (vardažodžių abstraktų) darybos kategorijos -ystė ( , proc.), pvz., pelnagaudystė (: pelnagaudys, -ė) „menk. pelno vaikymasis“, šūdmalystė (: šūdmala) „niek. niekų darymas, paistymas“, žemgrobystė (: žemgrobys, -ė) „menk. nelegalus nuosavybės teisės į žemę įgijimas“ ir kt. anot nd sudarytojos ritos miliūnaitės, „į duomenyną sudėtas naujosios leksikos pluoštas rodo, kad lietuvių kalba telkia savyje daugiau gyvybinių galių, nei esame linkę manyti“ (žr. http://naujazodziai.lki.lt/?apie_duomenyna). priesaginės darybos naujadarų pavyzdžiai rodo, kad visuomenė „jaučia kalbos išgales ir moka jas valdyti“ (miliūnaitė b: ) – kuriant stilistiškai žymėtus darinius, naudojamos pačios įvairiausios priesagos, pvz., pilstukininkas, -ė plg. „prie šio darybos tipo dar šliejasi keletas mokslo terminais einančių naujadarų, kuriais pavadinama kokio nors kūno medžiaga („mėsa“), pvz.: grybiena, mediena, uoliena“ (dlkg : ). naujadarai verteliena, žodeliena gali būti analogiškai pasidaryti pagal panašios darybos žodžius, pvz.: dvėseliena, ląsteliena ir kt. „<...> ir save solidžia laikančios spaudos. grynoji "bulvariena" gal taip net neįžeistų žmogaus, <...>“ („kauno diena“ ). „<...> nes dar daug žmonių maitinosi "laikraštiena", "žurnalistiena", knygų rinkoje viešpatavo komerciniai leidiniai“ („santara“ ). „po to per kelerius metus mūsų visuomenė buvo maitinama laikraštiena su nuodais“ („lietuvos aidas“ ; jonas juškaitis); pradžioje, gerbiamas profesoriau, gal susitarkime, kad kalbėsime ne apie leidinius ar eterio laidas profesionalams, mokslo, meno ar kultūros elitui, o apie tą laikraštieną, žurnalieną bei šouvieną, kurios kasdien pateikiamos masinio skaitytojo stalui („Žurnalistų žinios“ ; domas Šniukas). http://naujazodziai.lki.lt/?apie_duomenyna agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - (: pilstukas) „menk. kas pardavinėja ar geria pilstuką“ ( , proc.), žvaigždūnas (: žvaigždė) „iron. vyrai – įžymybės, garsenybės (paprastai iš pramogų pasaulio)“ ( , proc.), mėšlainis (: mėšlas) „menk. greitasis nesveikas mėsainių tipo maistas“ ( , proc.), stambutė (: stambus, -i) „malon. apkūni, stambaus sudėjimo mergina ar moteris“ (plg. pilnutė) ( , proc.), kalbišius (: kalba) „menk. nekoks, pro šalį šaudantis kalbininkas“ (plg. kalbišiūtė) ( , proc.), engykla (: engė) „menk. darbuotojus engianti įmonė“ ( , proc.), apsisnukiuotojas (: apsisnukiuoti) „iron. muštynių, per kurias duodama į veidą, dalyvis“ ( , proc.), trolija (: trolis, -ė) „iron. trolių bendruomenė“ ( , proc.), sveikatinė (: sveikata) „juok. vieta, kur prekiaujama sveikatos gerinimo ir grožio priežiūroms priemonėmis“ ( , proc.), runkelynas (: runkelis) „menk. vieta, kur susibūrę daug runkeliais pašaipiai vadinamų žmonių“ ( , proc.), baisuoklis, -ė (: baisus, -i) „iron., juok. kas baisus, baisiai atrodo, elgiasi ar pan.“ ( , proc.), girtuomenė (: girtas, -a) „iron. prasigėrusi visuomenės dalis“ ( , proc.), konservatorienė (: konservatorius, -ė) „juok. įtakingo politiko konservatoriaus žmona“ ( , proc.), davatkinas (: davatka) „menk. vyras davatka“ ( , proc.), švaistytuvės (: švaistyti) „iron. tradicija švaistyti (valdiškus) pinigus“ ( , proc.), spuoguočius (: spuogas) „menk. kas spuoguotas“ ( , proc.), darnuva (: darnus, -i) „iron. visko, kas darnu, visuma“ ( , proc.) ir daugelis kt. remiantis nd duomenimis, matyti, kad antras pagal produktyvumą žodžių darybos būdas – sandūra ( , proc.). dūrinių darumą pagrindžia ne tik duomenyno medžiaga. apie tokį „sudurtinių žodžių (lyginant juos su priesagų ir galūnių vediniais) santykinį pagausėjimą“ (gaivenis : ) rašyta dar anksčiau. nd vyrauja stilistiškai žymėti dūriniai, sudaryti iš dviejų daiktavardžių ( , proc.), pvz., blusturgis (: blusa + turgus) „menk. turgus, kuriame prekiaujama naudotais daiktais arba rankdarbiais“, kiauliagyvis (: kiaulė + gyvis) „menk. nenatūraliu (paspartintu) būdu užauginta kiaulė“, špygsubinė (: špyga + subinė) „vulg. moteris, kurios labai menkas užpakaliukas“, zombadėžė (: zombis + dėžė) „iron. žmones bukinantis televizorius (televizija)“ ir kt. itin darūs yra dviejų daiktavardžių dūriniai (džn. neigiamos konotacijos), kurių antrasis sandas – -žmogis, pvz., europažmogis (: europa + žmogus) „iron. federacijos santykiais grįstos europos sąjungos gyventojas be valstybės ir tautos“, galvažmogis (: galva + žmogus) „iron. žmogus informacijos perkimšta galva“, kėdžmogis (: kėdė + žmogus) „juok. kas nd pastabose nurodyta, kad „žodis dažniausiai vartojamas kalbant apie rusiškąją propagandinę televiziją“. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - dirba sėdimą darbą“, miniažmogis (: minia + žmogus) „menk. žmogus iš minios, kuriam būdingas nerūpestingas požiūris į gyvenimą“, projektažmogis (: projektas + žmogus) „iron. gyvenantis iš projektų žmogus“, rinkažmogis (: rinka + žmogus) „iron. žmogus, gyvenantis pagal laisvosios rinkos dėsnius“, sovietžmogis (: sovietai + žmogus) „niek. sovietinei ideologijai tarnavęs žmogus“, šiukšliažmogis (: šiukšlės + žmogus) „ . menk. šiukšlinantis žmogus“, tolerantžmogis (: tolerancija + žmogus) „iron. liberalizmo ideologijos suformuotas tolerantiškumą virš kitų vertybių iškėlęs žmogus“ ir valdžiažmogis, -ė (: valdžia + žmogus) „menk., iron. valdžioje esantis savanaudis žmogus; biurokratas“ (plg. būdvardžio ir daiktavardžio dūrinius: naujažmogis (: naujas, -a + žmogus) „iron. naujo tipo žmogus“, šlykštažmogis (: šlykštus, -i + žmogus) „niek. šlykščiai, bjauriai atrodantis ir (ar) besielgiantis žmogus“). atskirai reikėtų paminėti ir stilistiškai žymėtų dūrinių darųjį pirmąjį sandą valdžia-, pvz., valdžiadurnis, -ė (: valdžia + durnius) „juok. valdžioje esantis kvailys“, valdžiagalvis (: valdžia + galva) „menk. esantis valdžioje; biurokratas“, valdžiagyvis (: valdžia + gyvis) „niek. niekinamasis valdžios atstovo pavadinimas“, valdžiatvarka (: valdžia + tvarka) „iron. savitvarkos priešingybė, t. y. valdžios institucijų įgalinimas reguliuoti kokią nors visuomenės gyvenimo sritį (pavyzdžiui, žiniasklaidą)“, valdžiasnukis (: valdžia + snukis) „menk. menkinamasis valdžios atstovo įvardijimas“, valdžiavyris (: valdžia + vyras) „iron. valdžioje esantis žmogus“ (plg. daiktavardžio ir veiksmažodžio dūrinius: valdžiagrobis (: valdžia + grobti) „iron. kas užsigrobęs valdžią“ ir valdžiasiekys, -ė (: valdžia + siekti) „juok. kas siekia valdžios (kandidatuoja į seimą ar savivaldą)“). Šiek tiek mažiau duomenyne esama stilistiškai žymėtų dūrinių iš daiktavardžio ir veiksmažodžio ( , proc.) – tai „daugiausia asmenų pavadinimai, kurių antruoju sandu yra nurodoma, kokį tie asmenys darbą dirba ar šiaip veiksmą atlieka, o pirmuoju – į ką tas veiksmas yra nukreiptas, kas eina darbo bei veiksmo objektu“ (dlkg : ), pvz., spiritonešis, -ė (: spiritas + nešti) „juok. spirito kontrabandininkas“, tautadrebys, -ė (: tauta + drebėti) „menk. kas dreba dėl tautos likimo“, variavagis, -ė (: varis + vogti / vagis) „menk. spalvotojo metalo – vario vagis“, žinialaižys, -ė (: žinios + laižyti) „iron. kas be saiko gaudo žinias internete“ ir kt. fiksuotas vienas dūrinys seimasėdis, -ė (: seimas + sėdėti) „juok. kas sėdi seime (t. y. seimo narys)“, kurio pirmuoju dėmeniu pasakytas ne veiksmo objektas, o jo vieta (dlkg : ). pasitaiko vienas kitas priemonės ar automobilio pavadinimas: galvaplovė (: galva + plauti) „ . iron. kirpyklose naudojama galvos plautuvė“, pupytvežis (: pupytė + vežti) „juok. automobilis, tinkamas agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - merginoms (pupytėms) vežioti“ ir kt. iš kitų negausių daiktavardžio ir veiksmažodžio dūrinių galima paminėti naujadarus, kurie savo reikšme primena veiksmažodžių abstraktus (dlkg : ), pvz., žinialaiža (: žinios + laižyti) „iron. besaikis žinių gaudymas internete“ ir kt. duomenyne apstu daiktavardžio ir veiksmažodžio dūrinių (neigiamos konotacijos žiniasklaidos pavadinimų), kurių antrasis sandas – -skleisti (-skleidė) : brukalosklaida (: brukalas + skleisti) „menk. brukalą (šlamštą) skleidžianti žiniasklaida“, galiasklaida (: galia + skleisti) „menk. įtakinga žiniasklaida, kuri savo galią pasitelkia tam, kad manipuliuotų žmonėmis, formuotų tam tikrą visuomenės nuomonę“, klaidasklaida (: klaida + skleisti) „iron. klaidinanti, klaidas skleidžianti žiniasklaida“, klikiasklaida (: klikas „spustelėjimas kompiuterio pelės žymekliu“ + skleisti) „menk. populiarumo, vadinamųjų klikų (paspaudimų) besivaikanti žiniasklaida, manipuliuojanti klaidinančia, sensacinga interneto straipsnio antrašte ar paveikslėliu“, melasklaida (: melas + skleisti) „iron. melą skleidžianti žiniasklaida“, mėšlasklaida (: mėšlas + skleisti) „niek. nešvarius dalykus skleidžianti žiniasklaida“, purvasklaida (: purvas + skleisti) „menk., juok., niek., iron. purvą skleidžianti, t. y. ką nors juodinanti, šmeižianti, niekinanti žiniasklaida“, reklamsklaida (: reklama + skleisti) „iron. šališka žiniasklaida, pateikianti tik komerciškai naudingą informaciją“, snargliasklaida (: snarglys + skleisti) „menk. menkinamasis žiniasklaidos pavadinimas“ ir valdžiasklaida (: valdžia + skleisti) „iron. valdžiai tarnaujanti žiniasklaida“ (plg. būdvardžio ir daiktavardžio dūrinį geltonasklaida (: geltonas, -a + skleisti) „menk. geltonoji (bulvarinė) žiniasklaida“). nd duomenys rodytų, kad dūrinių sandai valdžia- (pirmasis dėmuo), -skleisti (-skleidė) ir -žmogis (antrasis dėmuo) – produktyvūs stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų dėmenys. neatmestina tikimybė, kad šie naujadarai galėjo būti pasidaryti pagal analogiją su žodžiu žiniasklaida. duomenyne fiksuoti pavieniai dūriniai iš ) būdvardžio ir daiktavardžio, pvz., klišakalbė (: klišas, -a + kalba) „juok. kalba, maišyta iš kelių kalbų“, linksmakojis (: linksmas, -a + koja) „iron. ironizuojant – linksmas neblaivių statybininkų „šokis“ – darbas statybų aikštelėje“ (pasidaryta pagal analogiją su klumpakoju) ; ) skaitvardžio ir daiktavardžio, pvz., dvikalėdis (: dvi Šie dūriniai veikiausiai negalėtų remtis dabartinėje lietuvių kalboje paplitusiu daiktavardžiu sklaida, nes pagal žodžių darybos taisykles turėtų keistis sudurtinio daiktavardžio galūnė, pvz., brukalosklaidė (: brukalas + sklaida); plg. šunuogė (: šuo, šuns + uoga) (plačiau žr. lkg : – ; dlkg : ). lkg nurodoma, kad „[d]ariniai, kurių antruoju dėmeniu imamas io kamieno daiktavardis, yra ia ir ė kamienų“ ( : ). naujadarą linksmakojis (: linksmas, -a + klumpakojis) veikiausiai galima laikyti ir kontaminantu. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - + kalėdos) „iron. dvejopai – valdžios ir žmonių – švenčiamos kalėdos“; ) veiksmažodžio formos (būtojo laiko neveikiamosios rūšies dalyvio) ir daiktavardžio, pvz., apverstsmegenis, -ė (: apverstas, -a / apversti + smegenys) „iron. kas apverstomis smegenimis, t. y. atvirkščiai mąstantis“; ) veiksmažodžio ir daiktavardžio, pvz., spoksadėžė (: spoksoti + dėžė) „juok. televizorius“, šikpopieris (: šikti + popierius) „fam. tualetinis popierius“, šnypštavynis (: šnypšti + vynas) „menk. pigus gazuotas putojantis vynas“; ) prieveiksmio ir daiktavardžio, pvz., šiandienžmogis (: šiandien + žmogus) „iron. žmogus, kurio atmintis siekia tik šiandieną ir neturi praeities“; ) įvardžio ir daiktavardžio, pvz., kitovalda (: kitas, -a + valda / valdyti) „iron. priešingybė savivaldai, kai bendruomenę valdo ne jos, o savo interesais besirūpinanti valdžia“; ) būdvardžio / prieveiksmio ir veiksmažodžio, pvz., sengyvena (: senas, -a / seniai + gyventi) „menk. žmogus, siekiantis gyventi taip, kaip buvo gyvenama seniau“; ilgasėdis, -ė (: ilgai + sėdėti) „iron. kas ilgai užsisėdėjęs (eidamas kokias pareigas)“. matyti, kad dūrybos procese remiamasi įvairių kalbos dalių sandais. dar vienas produktyvus emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos darybos būdas (be minėtosios priesaginės darybos ir dūrybos) – kontaminacija (sąmaiša) ( , proc.). tai nėra gramatinis (morfologinio pobūdžio) procesas, o jo padariniai (kontaminantai, arba maišiniai) – darybiškai neskaidomi (nemotyvuoti) žodžiai (urbutis : ). nors kontaminacija (angl. blending – darybos procesas, kontaminacija, blend – darybos rezultatas, kontaminantas) (miliūnaitė : ) yra nemorfeminis žodžių darymosi būdas, tačiau galima daryti prielaidą, kad sąmoninga dviejų žodžių sąmaiša (jų fragmentų jungimas į vieną naujadarą) (urbutis : – ) pamažu plinta lietuvių kalboje . darybinė nd emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos analizė rodo, kad nevengiama imtis netradicinio žodžių darymosi, o tokių darinių (kontaminantų) nd randasi vis naujų, pvz., biurozauras (: biuras + dinozauras) „iron. keletą dešimtmečių įstaigai (paprastai valstybinei) vadovaujantis asmuo“, kiaulega (: kiaulė + kolega) „juok. kiaulinantis kolega“, klerkvabalis (: klerkas + karkvabalis) „menk. menkinamasis valdininko pavadinimas“, melagienos (: melagingas, -a / melagis, -ė + naujiena) „menk. melaginga, klaidinanti naujiena“, seimonautas, -ė (: seimas + kosmonautas) „iron. seimo senbuvis, atitrūkęs nuo tikrovės ir nenutuokiantis, kaip nuo m. nd kontaminantų padaugėjo apie , karto, tačiau procentiškai jų dalis duomenyne paaugo labai nežymiai, t. y. nuo iki proc. (murmulaitytė : ). agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - lietuva iš tikrųjų gyvena pagal seimo kuriamus įstatymus“, vėminutyvas (: vėmė + deminutyvas) „niek. vemti verčiantis deminutyvas (mažybinis maloninis žodis)“ ir daugelis kt. su priešdėliais stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų daromasi rečiau ( proc.), pvz., aptamsa (: tamsa) „iron. apšvietos priešingybė“ (naujadaras pasidarytas pagal analogiją su žodžiu apšvieta) , supermamytė (: mamytė) „iron. mama, perdėtai besirūpinanti savo vaikais ir išskirtinai tuo besididžiuojanti“, nukalbinti (: kalbinti) „juok. daug kalbinant iškamantinėti iki paskutiniųjų“, surunkelėti (: runkelėti) „menk. pavirsti runkeliu“, ir mišrusis darybos būdas ( , proc.), pvz., galvapjūtė (: galva + pjauti + -tė) „juok. masiškas ilgai vadovaujamus postus užimančių valdininkų atleidimas iš darbo, siekiant atsinaujinimo ir skaidrumo“, valdžiapjūtė (: valdžia + pjauti + -tė) „juok. ilgamečių valstybės įmonių vadovų atleidimo iš pareigų banga“ , trešnėdra (: trešnės + ėsti (ėda) + -ra) „juok. trešnių ėdrūnas“ (naujadaras pasidarytas pagal analogiją su žodžiu žmogėdra) ir kt. darumu nepasižymi ir galūninė daryba ( , proc.). didžiąją dalį negausių vedinių sudaro pavadinimai pagal lyties skirtumą (galūnės -ė vediniai): šviesulė (: šviesulys) „iron. žinoma (paprastai pramogų pasaulio) moteris“, tėvė (: tėvas) „iron. pagal genderizmo ideologiją – vienas iš vaiką auginančių šeimos narių (nesvarbu, kurios lyties)“, zombė (: zombis) „niek. perkeltine reikšme – bevalė mirusi gyva moteriškosios lyties būtybė“; mūzas (: mūza) „juok. daiktavardžio mūza (deivė, poetinės kūrybos įkvėpėja) vyriškoji giminė“, sesutis (: sesutė) „juok. vyras, dirbantis medicinos sesele“. pastarieji galūnės -as ir -is vediniai priklauso pavadinimų pagal lyties skirtumą darybos kategorijai, nors gramatikų aprašuose prie šios kategorijos priskirti tik galūnės -ė vediniai. iŠvados . darybinė lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyno emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos analizė (tirti kalbos vienetai) parodė, kad pagrindiniai stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų darybos veikiausiai būtų galima įžvelgti ir priesaginę darybą: aptamsa (: aptemti). rugiapjūtės analoginių darinių darybą galima interpretuoti dvejopai: įžvelgti mišrią darybą arba dūrybą, t. y. galvapjūtė (: galva + pjūtis) ir valdžiapjūtė (: valdžia + pjūtis). tiesa, naujadarą trešnėdra (: trešnės + ėdrus, -i) būtų galima laikyti ir sudurtiniu daiktavardžiu. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - būdai yra priesaginė daryba ( , proc.), sandūra ( , proc.) ir nemorfeminis žodžių darymosi būdas – kontaminacija (sąmaiša) ( , proc.). . produktyviausio darybos būdo – priesaginės darybos – dariausios priemonės yra vardažodinės ypatybės turėtojų pavadinimų priesaga -(i)ukas, -ė ir ypatybių pavadinimų (vardažodžių abstraktų) darybos kategorijos priesaga -izmas: su abiem priesagomis padaryta po , proc. stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų. . nd duomenys rodytų, kad dūrinių sandai valdžia- (pirmasis dėmuo), -skleisti (-skleidė) ir -žmogis (antrasis dėmuo) – produktyvūs stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų dėmenys. . menko produktyvumo yra priešdėlinė daryba ( , proc.), mišrusis darybos būdas ( , proc.) ir galūninė daryba ( , proc.). . tai buvo pirminis nd emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos tyrimas, kurį atlikus paaiškėjo, kad kai kurie nd naujadarai dar turėtų būti sistemiškai redaguojami stilistikos aspektu. be to, siekiant nuodugniai ištirti emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos darybos polinkius, reikėtų remtis įvairesniais ir gausesniais šaltiniais. . duomenyne pateiktą medžiagą pravartu patyrinėti ir etnolingvistikos, ir žodžių darybos aspektais. emocinės-ekspresinės leksikos sankaupa rodo, kad kalbos vartotojai reaguoja į šių dienų aktualijas ir geba prikurti pačių įvairiausių stilistiškai žymėtų naujadarų. okazinių darinių gausa patvirtina tam tikro reiškinio aktualumą. akivaizdu, kad leksika yra visuomenės atspindys, o bazėje sukaupti naujadarai (gyvenamojo meto aktualijų ženklai) teikia vertingos informacijos apie tam tikrą laikotarpį tautos gyvenime. Šaltiniai dlkt – dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstynas. prieiga internete: http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/tekstynas/ [žiūrėta m. gegužės mėn.]. nd – lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenynas. [tęstinis internetinis žinynas nuo m.]. miliūnaitė r., aleksaitė a. sudarytoja r. miliūnaitė. vilnius: lietuvių kalbos institutas. prieiga internete: http://naujazodziai.lki.lt [žiūrėta m. kovo–balandžio mėn.]. isbn - - - - . https://doi.org/ . /neol. http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/tekstynas/ http://naujazodziai.lki.lt/ https://doi.org/ . /neol agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - literatŪra a l e k s a i t ė a. : ypatybių pavadinimai lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne. – bendrinė kalba , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /aleksaite_bk_ _straipsnis_apie_pavadinimus.pdf. b l a ž i n s k a i t ė d. : naujadarai ir perdirbiniai reklamoje. – kalbos kultūra , – . d a b a š i n s k i e n ė i. : the comprehension of derivational morphemes in early childhood: an experimental study for lithuanian. – estonian papers in applied linguistics , – . d l k g – dabartinės lietuvių kalbos gramatika. red. v. ambrazas, vilnius: mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. g a i v e n i s k. : naujadarai ir naujažodžiai. – mokslas ir gyvenimas , . g i r č i e n ė j. : neologizmų integracija į tekstą. – Žmogus ir žodis , – . prieiga internete: http://www.biblioteka.vpu.lt/zmogusirzodis/pdf/didaktinelingvistika/ /girciene.pdf. g i r č i e n ė j. : naujažodžiai su dėmeniu (-)tinkl-. – kalbos kultūra , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /girciene_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf. g i r č i e n ė j. a: metakalbiniai komentarai kaip internetinio naujažodžių diskurso elementas. – lituanistica ( / ), – . g i r č i e n ė j. b: naujoji lietuvių kalbos leksika: teorija ir praktika. metodinė priemonė [elektroninis išteklius], vilnius: edukologija. g i r č i e n ė j. c: pokyčiai, kalba ir mokykla. – gimtasis žodis , – . g i r č i e n ė j. : stilistiniai naujadarai internete. – Šiuolaikinės stilistikos kryptys ir problemos: mokslo straipsnių rinkinys, vilnius: lietuvos edukologijos universiteto leidykla, – . g u d a v i č i u s a. : kalbos tautiškumas. – gimtoji kalba , – . g u d a v i č i u s a. : etnolingvistika, Šiauliai: Šiaulių universitetas. g u d a v i č i u s a. : Žodžio reikšmės definicijos tautinis aspektas. – leksikografijos ir leksikologijos problemos, – . g u d a v i č i u s a. : gretinamoji semantika, Šiauliai: Šiaulių universiteto leidykla. j a k a i t i e n ė e. : leksinė semantika, vilnius: mokslas. j a k a i t i e n ė e. : leksikologija, vilnius: vilniaus universiteto leidykla. http://www.biblioteka.vpu.lt/zmogusirzodis/pdf/didaktinelingvistika/ /girciene.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /girciene_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - k a b a š i n s k a i t ė b. : lietuvių kalbos liaudies etimologija ir artimi reiškiniai, vilnius: mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. k a m a n d u l y t ė l. : vaikiškosios kalbos ypatybės. – bendrinė kalba , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /kamandulyte_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf. k a z l a u s k a i t ė r., Ž u p e r k a k., m a c i e n ė j. : okazionalūs deminutyvai: tipai ir paskirtis kalbiniame akte. – Žmogus ir žodis , – . prieiga internete: http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/objects/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /datastreams/ds. . . .artic/content. k u l i k a u s k a s g. : lietuvio kodas. Įpročiai ir būdas senovės lietuvio prieš metų, vilnius: tyto alba. l e h r e r a. : understanding trendy neologisms. – italian journal of linguistics / rivista di linguistica . , – . prieiga internete: http://linguistica.sns.it/rdl/ . / .lehrer.pdf. lkg – lietuvių kalbos gramatika – fonetika ir morfologija i. red. k. ulvydas. vilnius: mintis. m a t t i e l l o e. : analogical neologisms in english. – italian journal of linguistics . , – . prieiga internete: http://www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/wp- content/uploads/ _analogical-neologisms-in-english.pdf. m i k e l i o n i e n ė j. a: naujoji lietuvių kalbos leksika ( – m. kompiuterinio periodikos tekstyno pagrindu). daktaro disertacijos santrauka, kaunas: vytauto didžiojo universitetas. m i k e l i o n i e n ė j. b: Šiuolaikiniai metodai kalbos naujovėms tirti. – darbai ir dienos , – . m i k e l i o n i e n ė j. c: naujoji lietuvių kalbos leksika ( – m. kompiuterinio periodikos tekstyno pagrindu). daktaro disertacija, kaunas: vytauto didžiojo universitetas. m i k e l i o n i e n ė j. : analogija lietuvių kalbos žodžių daryboje. potenciniai ir okaziniai dariniai. – acta linguistica lithuanica , – . m i l i ū n a i t ė r. : nauji kalbos reiškiniai: natūralioji ir dirbtinė atranka. – acta linguistica lithuanica , – . m i l i ū n a i t ė r. : apie kalbą ir mus, vilnius: lietuvių kalbos instituto leidykla. m i l i ū n a i t ė r. a: lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenynas. – gimtoji kalba , – . http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /kamandulyte_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/objects/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /datastreams/ds. . . .artic/content http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/objects/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /datastreams/ds. . . .artic/content http://linguistica.sns.it/rdl/ . / .lehrer.pdf http://www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/wp-content/uploads/ _analogical-neologisms-in-english.pdf http://www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/wp-content/uploads/ _analogical-neologisms-in-english.pdf agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - m i l i ū n a i t ė r. b: kalbos vartotojai ir naujadarų kūryba. – gimtoji kalba , – . m i l i ū n a i t ė r. : naujieji kontaminaciniai dariniai lietuvių kalboje. – acta linguistica lithuanica , – . m i l i ū n a i t ė r. : naujažodžių atranka ir pateikimas lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne. – leksikografija ir leksikologija , – . m i l i ū n a i t ė r. : naujažodžių pateikimas ir paieškos galimybės lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne. – bendrinė kalba , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /miliunaite_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf. m u r m u l a i t y t ė d. a: lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenynas ir naujadarų tyrimų perspektyvos. – bendrinė kalba , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /murmulaityte_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf. m u r m u l a i t y t ė d. b: naujažodžių duomenyno leksika pakeliui į bendrinės lietuvių kalbos žodyną. – acta linguistica lithuanica , – . m u r m u l a i t y t ė d. : kontaminacija ir lietuvių kalbos naujadara. – kalba ir kontekstai ( ), – . o f f o r d m. : french words: past, present and future, clevedon: multilingual matters. p a l i o n i s j. : kalbos mokslo pradmenys, vilnius: mokslas. p a u l a u s k i e n ė a. : lietuvių kalbos morfologijos pagrindai, kaunas: technologija. p i k č i l i n g i s j. : lietuvių kalbos stilistika , vilnius: mokslas. p i k č i l i n g i s j. : stilistikos darbų rinktinė. moksl. red. r. koženiauskienė. vilnius: mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras. p l a g i. : word-formation in english, cambridge: cambridge university press. r o z e n b e r g s j. : the stylistics of latvian, rīga: latvijas universitāte. s a v i c k i e n ė i. : komunikacinė pragmatika ir kalbėjimo situacijos tikslas: deminutyvų vartojimo atvejis. – bendrinė kalba , – . prieiga internete: http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /savickiene_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf. t o l s t o j u s n. : kalba ir kultūra. – kalba ir žmonės, – . u r b u t i s v. : Žodžių darybos teorija. -asis leidimas, vilnius: mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /miliunaite_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /murmulaityte_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /murmulaityte_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /murmulaityte_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /murmulaityte_bk_ _straipsnis.pdf http://www.bendrinekalba.lt/straipsniai/ /savickiene_kk_ _straipsnis.pdf agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - v a i c e k a u s k i e n ė l. : naujieji lietuvių kalbos svetimžodžiai: kalbos politika ir vartosena, vilnius: lietuvių kalbos instituto leidykla. v a s k e l i e n ė j. : lietuvių kalbos žodyne nefiksuoti dariniai ir jų funkcionavimas antano kalanavičiaus poezijoje. – filologija , – . v a s k e l i e n ė j. : Žodynų nefiksuotų darinių funkcionavimas jono strielkūno lyrikoje. – res humanitariae , – . v o l e k b. : emotive signs in language and semantic functioning of derived nouns in russian, amsterdam / philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. Ž u p e r k a k. : tekstas etinės stilistikos požiūriu. – Žmogus ir žodis i, – . prieiga internete: http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/get/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /ds. . . .artic. w o h l g e m u t h j. : a typology of verbal borrowings, berlin / new york: mouton de gruyter. gauta priimta http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/get/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /ds. . . .artic. http://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/get/lt-ldb- :j. ~ ~ /ds. . . .artic. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - emotive-expressive lexis in the database of lithuanian neologisms: factors influencing its emergence and types of word-building s u m m a r y the aim of the study is to identify the main types of word-building of the emotive- expressive neologisms and to examine the most productive means used in the coining of these new words. the object of the research includes neologisms that perform emotive-expressive function. the word-formation analysis of emotive-expressive lexis included in “the database of lithuanian neologisms” (dn) revealed that: . stylistically connotated neologisms are formed mostly by means of suffixation ( . %), composition ( . %) and blending ( . %), the latter being a non-morphemic type of word-building. . the most formative suffixes of the most productive type of formation, i.e. suffixation, are as follows: the suffix -(i)ukas, -ė ( . %) in the formational category of names of possessors of nominal characteristics and the suffix -izmas ( . %) in the formational category of names of characteristics (nominal abstractions). . the data of dn show that the following elements of compounds valdžia- (first component), -skleisti (-skleidė) and -žmogis (second component) are productive elements of stylistically connotated neologisms. . less productive types of word-building are prefixation ( . %), mixed type of word- formation ( . %) and inflectional derivation ( . %). . this was the primary research on emotive-expressive lexis, which revealed the necessity to stylistically edit some neologisms in dn. moreover, seeking to conduct an in-depth analysis on tendencies in formation of emotive-expressive lexis, more diversified and numerous sources should be included. agnĖ aleksaitĖ. emocinė-ekspresinė leksika lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenyne – naujadarų radimosi aplinkybės ir darybos būdai | doi.org/ . /bkalba. . . bendrinĖ kalba ( ) www.bendrinekalba.lt issn - . the data available in the database should be analysed not only in terms of word- formation but also from the perspective of ethno-linguistics. lexis is a reflection of the society and the neologisms (signs of realities of current time) stored in the database provide valuable information about a certain period in the life of nation. keywords: emotive-expressive lexis, neologism, occasional derivatives, word-formation analysis, types of word-formation, productivity. agnĖ aleksaitĖ lietuvių kalbos institutas petro vileišio g. , lt- vilnius agne.aleksaite@lki.lt the association between life satisfaction, emotional support, and perceived health among women who experienced intimate partner violence (ipv) – behavioral risk factor surveillance system research article open access the association between life satisfaction, emotional support, and perceived health among women who experienced intimate partner violence (ipv) – behavioral risk factor surveillance system vivian hui* and rose eva constantino abstract background: intimate partner violence (ipv) is a pressing phenomenon whose consequences are associated with severe physical and mental health outcomes. every minute, around people in the united states are raped, physically injured, or emotionally abused by their intimate partner. although having experienced ipv is not modifiable, emotional support is a protective factor to prevent victims from committing suicide. the psychological state of ipv victims is critical in post-traumatic events and this is evidenced in numerous qualitative interviews. therefore, the objective of this study is to explore the association between ipv with emotional support, life satisfaction, and perceived health status in the united states. methods: this study analyzed the data from the behavioral risk factor surveillance system. univariate analyses, multivariable logistic regression analyses, and ordinal logistic regression analyses were used to estimate the adjusted odds ratios (aors) and % confidence intervals ( % cis) for factors associated with ipv. analyses were conducted using spss version . results: the analyses show that there is a strong association between ipv experience and emotional support (aor: . ; % ci = . – . ). participants who had either physical violence or unwanted sex with an intimate partner in the past months have . higher odds to receive less emotional support and . higher odds to perceive poor life satisfaction. also, participants who reported experiencing ipv were associated with (aor: . ; % ci = . – . ) times the odds of having ≥ days more mentally unhealthy days in a month. for perceived health outcomes, people who had been threatened with violence by a sex partner have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds of having poor perceived general health status. ipv survivors have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds of having ≥ days more mentally unhealthy days in a month. conclusions: people reported with any ipv experience are more likely to receive less emotional support, perceive dissatisfaction in life, and poor health outcomes. this study shows the need for policies centered on the development of interventions that focus on mental health for those who have experienced ipv. keywords: life satisfaction, emotional, perceived health, intimate partner violence © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: vivianhui.care@gmail.com department of health and community systems, school of nursing, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pa, usa hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:vivianhui.care@gmail.com background intimate partner violence (ipv), includes physical vio- lence, sexual violence, unwanted sex, and psychological aggression by an intimate partner [ ], which is a multi- dimensional phenomenon with consequences of severe social, emotional, and cognitive impairment [ ]. nearly % of the women have experienced ipv and reported a significant impact on their daily functioning [ ]. such experiences include physical, sexual, emotional abuse, and threats. these exposures had a graded relationship with serious consequences on the victim’s physical and mental health [ ]. the prevalence of ipv and its seque- lae have profound health consequences, economic bur- den, and public health significance. ipv is attributed to an array of multidimensional health outcomes. women are three times more likely to be exposed to domestic violence compared to men [ ] and are most likely to suffer poor physical and mental health ranging from hypertension, diabetes [ ], and higher rates of hiv/aids infection [ ]. a growing litera- ture suggests that ipv can impede psychosocial develop- ment and trigger behavioral and mental health problems. traumatic experiences like ipv can also affect emotional and psychological development, increasing vulnerability to mental health problems such as sleep disturbances [ ], major depression, anxiety, posttrau- matic stress disorder (ptsd) [ – ], and suicide at- tempts [ ]. also, borderline, narcissistic, and antisocial personality disorders are common among ipv perpetra- tors [ ]. therefore, the health consequences of ipv are far-reaching and multifaceted. the physiologic and psychosocial consequences of ipv are also notable. greater exposure to ipv is associated with higher household out-of-pocket medical costs and a financial burden to society. according to the centres for disease control (cdc), the estimated annual cost of ipv is over billion arise from increasing health ex- penses, and decreasing productivity [ ]. moreover, the health care cost burden usually sustains for at least years after the exposure to ipv until the victims recover from the trauma and resume their work [ ]. import- antly, however, the economic burden of ipv is underes- timated since the previous research mostly focused only on inpatient or referral data. research on ipv has thoroughly addressed its negative consequences. however, this line of inquiry can hardly display how adversity can also positively transform ipv survivors, and thus a comprehensive picture of recovery is absent [ ]. some studies reveal that some survivors can develop better adaptation, positive thinking, and emotional and social recovery despite experiencing trau- matic situations [ , ]. evidence has shown that the availability of social and emotional support is essential to mental and behavioral health in women who have experienced ipv [ , ]. adequate actual- and perceived support can act as a buffer against the development of ptsd in trauma-exposed victims [ , ]. the psychological state of ipv survivors is critical in post-traumatic events and this is evidenced in numerous qualitative interviews [ ]. yet, there is a paucity of representa- tive studies to compare the perceived life satisfaction, emotional support, and health status among ipv in the current state of the science. in the absence of such knowledge, the development of effective inter- vention strategies and treatment protocol to address such deficiencies in ipv will likely remain problematic. methods behavioral risk factor surveillance system (brfss) survey was analyzed to assess the association between ipv and the outcomes of perceived emotional support, life satisfaction, and health status among women aged years and over in the united states [ ]. brfss is a state-based, cross-sectional survey, collected via telephone. though years have passed since the data was collected, this survey in contains the most recent module on ipv that covered across states in the united states. participants were asked based on the questions from the core component, and some from the optional mod- ules [ ]. brfss selects individuals randomly by dialing household telephone numbers and interviews only one participant per household [ ]. to evaluate the primary independent variable, for the current study, the optional intimate partner violence module was used. this op- tional module has been applied to the states of hawaii, virginia, and west virginia, and therefore the analysis depicted only three states where the ipv module was included. measures our data were obtained from the brfss self- reported survey, which is the latest brfss study that included an ipv module. ipv is measured by the follow- ing questions: intimate partner violence (ipv) “has an intimate partner ever threatened you with physical violence? this includes threatening to hit, slap, push, kick, or hurt you in any way.” “has an intimate partner ever attempted physical violence against you? this includes times when they tried to hit, slap, push, kick, or otherwise hurt you, but they were not able to.” hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : page of “has an intimate partner ever hit, slapped, pushed, kicked, or hurt you in any way?” “in the past months, have you experienced any physical violence or had unwanted sex with an in- timate partner?” the first three questions do not have a specific time- frame for the ipv experience, while the last question about unwanted sex is constrained with any experi- ences that occurred in the past months. the follow- ing variables were used to correlate the association with ipv. emotional support is measured with the following question ‘how often do you get the social and emo- tional support you need?’ and participants responded with an ordinal level of measurement, ranging from “al- ways”, “usually”, “sometimes”, “rarely”, “never”, “don’t know”, “not sure”, and “refused”. we collapsed the re- sponses from five to three levels, using only “always”, “sometimes” and “rarely” for a better fit with our analysis. life satisfaction is measured with the following ques- tion ‘in general, how satisfied are you with your life?’ participants responded from “very satisfied”, “satisfied”, “dissatisfied”, “very dissatisfied”, “don’t know”, “not sure”, and “refused”. we collapsed the responses from four to two levels, as “satisfied” and “dissatisfied” as a dichotom- ous variable. perceived general health status is measured with the following question ‘would you say that in general, your health status is?’ the response options were “excellent”, “very good”, “good”, “fair”, and “poor” perceived physical health, mental health, and poor health are measured by the following questions with the response options “__number of days”, “none”, “don’t know/not sure”, or “refused”. the items measured in days were classified as “none”, “ – days” or “ days or more” in a month. ‘now thinking about your physical health, which includes physical illness and injury, for how many days during the past days was your physical health not good? ‘now thinking about your mental health, which in- cludes stress, depression, and problems with emo- tions, for how many days during the past days was your mental health not good?’ ‘during the past days, for about how many days did poor physical or mental health keep you from doing your usual activities, such as self-care, work, or recre- ation?’ additional covariates considered were race, edu- cation, employment, income, and age. analysis the frequency and demographic variables were described by univariate analyses, while the association between perceived emotional support, life satisfaction, unhealthy days, sociodemographic factors, and ipv were conducted by bivariate analyses with chi-square tests for nominal data. multivariable logistic regression analyses were applied to predict the adjusted odds ratios (ors) and % confidence interval (cis). ordinal logistic regression analysis was initially used to examine the rela- tionship of ipv variables to each of the ordinally scaled variables. since the proportional odds assumption is not satisfied, the continuation ratio approach was used to obtain the ors and cis for each transition of the choices in the variable. data analysis excluded those missing data or recorded as “don’t’ know/not sure” with the large sample size in the dataset, and the ipv module is not compulsory for participants, it is anticipated that the missing data are at random. we used hot deck imput- ation to address the missing variables, which calculated the average score on an identified outcome variable by matching the score of other variables in the sample (i.e., donor variables). we used participants’ gender, educa- tion level, and race as the donor variables. hot deck im- putation provides less bias compared to mean imputation and is deemed as a better overall solution than the listwise deletion [ ]. statistical significance is indicated by a -sided p-value of <. . race, education, and employment were used as covariates for all dependent variables, while income and age were added exclusively for perceived health outcomes including physical, mental, and poor health. analyses were con- ducted using spss version . results demographics showed a sample size of n = , with the mean age of . for those with ipv experience, while . is the mean age for those without any ipv experience. ( . %) participants indicated an ipv experience in their lifetime. women (n = , ; %) comprised the majority of the sample. the sample in- cluded white (n = , ; . %) and non-white persons (n = ; . %). majority of the participants graduated from high school or had some high school education (n = ; . %), followed by college or more (n = ; . %), and college – years (n = ; . %) as shown in table . logistic regression analysis (table ) shows a signifi- cantly higher odds ratio to explain the association between ipv experience, received emotional support, and perceived life satisfaction. table shows that per- sons who had been threatened with violence by their partner have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds of rarely receiving emotional support compared to hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : page of persons who had not been threatened with violence by their partner. simultaneously, people who had either physical violence or unwanted sex from a partner have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds of rarely receiv- ing emotional support compared to persons who have not. in terms of life satisfaction, persons who have been threatened with violence have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds compared to persons who have not been threatened with violence. moreover, persons who had experienced either physical violence or table descriptive statistics on demographics and ipv from states of hawaii, virginia, and west virginia: brfss, united states any yes ipv (count/%) no total x or t-test statistics race white ( . %) , ( . %) , ( . %) non-white ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) p < . age (years) mean +/− sd . ± . . ± . . ± . p < . marital status p < . married ( . %) ( . %) , ( . %) divorced/widowed ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) single ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) highest education attained p < . high school grad or less ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) college – years ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) college or more ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) employment status p < . employed ( . %) ( . %) , ( . %) unemployed ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) retired ( . %) ( %) ( . %) annual income p < . less than $ , ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) $ , - < $ , ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) $ , or more ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) sd standard deviation table logistic regression between ipv and emotional support, life satisfaction and perceived health from states of hawaii, virginia, and west virginia: brfss, united states ^emotional support ^life satisfaction ^general health **physical health **mental health **poor health sometimes or rarely rarely dissatisfied good, fair, poor fair, poor poor ≥ day(s) ≥ days ≥ day(s) ≥ days ≥ day(s) ≥ days ipv (threatened) . a ci: . – . b . a ci: . , . b . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . a ci: . – . b . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . ipv (attempted) . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . ipv (ever violent) . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . ipv (unwanted sex) . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . . ci: . – . *a = odds ratio (adjusted) *b = ci % ^=adjusted covariates (race, education, employment) ** = adjusted covariates (race, education, employment, income, age) hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : page of unwanted sex with their partner have . ( % ci = . – . ) times the odds of more dissatisfaction in life compared to people who do not have unwanted sex with a partner. as for perceived health outcomes, persons who had been threatened with violence by their sex partner have a . ( % ci = . – . ) lower perceived general health status compared with persons who have not been threatened by their sex partner. on the number of unhealthy days in a month reported by participants, those who had been threatened with vio- lence by their sex partner have a . ( % ci = . – . ) more mentally unhealthy days in a month compared with persons who have not been threatened with violence by their sex partner. contemporaneously, persons who had experienced either physical violence or unwanted sex with a partner have a . ( % ci = . – . ) is having at least unhealthy days in a year could negatively impact performance as a parent, employee, or student. discussion having or more “unhealthy days” in a month is a diffi- cult predicament for anyone, whether a parent, worker or student. having at least unhealthy days in a year could ruin one’s hopes of being a competent parent, worker, or student. the purpose of this study was to understand the association between ipv experience and perceived emotional support, life satisfaction, and health status. first, we examined the relationships among the variables, and then we used a regression analysis to understand the influence of the covariates (i.e., race, education, employment, income, age) towards the dependent variables (i.e., emotional support, life satisfac- tion, and perceived health status). finally, we explored the association between ipv and the outcome variables (i.e., dependent variables) with adjusted covariates. results indicate a strong association between partici- pants’ ipv experience and emotional support, suggesting that persons with ipv experience received less emotional table descriptive statistics for ipv and study constructs from states of hawaii, virginia, and west virginia: brfss, united states any ipv (count/%) total x or t- test statistics yes no emotional support p < . always ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) sometimes ( . %) ( . %) ( %) rarely ( %) ( . %) ( . %) life satisfaction p < . satisfied ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) dissatisfied ( . %) ( %) , ( . %) general health p < . excellent ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) good ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) fair ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) poor ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) physical health p < . none ( %) , ( . %) , ( . %) – days ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) > days ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) mental health p < . none ( . %) , ( . %) , ( . %) – days ( . %) ( . %) ( %) > days ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) poor health p < . none ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) – days ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) > days ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) sd standard deviation hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : page of support. the most significant finding is that physical violence or unwanted sex with an intimate partner in the past months has a . higher odds of rarely re- ceiving emotional support and . higher odds of per- ceived life dissatisfaction. this finding is similar to the conclusions made by coker et al. ( ) [ ] in a struc- tural equation model that higher emotional support af- fects the health outcomes of ipv survivors in the long run. however, our analysis from this state-wide national survey can capture more unreported ipv experiences from random selection, which demonstrates higher generalizability with larger sample size and representa- tion in different states. our study also elicited the evi- dence that emotional support and life satisfaction varies between the different degree of ipv experience. the more severe the ipv experience (i.e., unwanted sex over the past year), the lower the emotional support received, and life satisfaction perceived. we also found that participants who reported ipv ex- perience (e.g., threatened, attempted, over violent, or un- wanted sex) reported more unhealthy days in a month, with mental health as the most significant of reasons for having “unhealthy days”. we believe that ipv experi- ences could negatively affect the mood of women, fre- quent exposure to ipv experience contributes to an unhealthy relationship with their intimate partner. with the accumulated threats and violent experience, women may hide their feelings and themselves from the external environment. although initially surprising, these results appear somewhat consistent with the findings from the world health organization (who) multi-country sam- ple in that found women who reported ipv at least once in their lifetime also reported significantly more emotional distress, suicidal thoughts (ors . [cis: . – . ]), and suicidal attempts (ors . [cis: . – . ]), compared to women who did not experience ipv [ ]. with the widespread use of mobile phones and technology, we believed that the perceptions and forms of ipv can shift or evolve over some time (e.g., cyberbullying, sexting threat, online coercion, etc.) given that our data is from the last decade, the measurement from using a survey might not be able to capture all kinds of ipv experience at one time. recently, social media has become an indispensable platform to share feelings and seek help in life events, including ipv. massive public awareness related to ipv has been aroused through twitter via different hashtags (#metoo, #notokay, #maybehedoesnothur- tyou) [ ]. during the covid- pandemic in , the physical ipv is exacerbated . fold higher (p = . ) when compared to the past years – [ ]. as social media is the only platform accessible for survivors in the lockdown, we believe that social media would be a potential avenue for providing emotional support and improving life satisfaction. telehealth is one of the ongoing trends after the pan- demic, however, the abused women might not be able to talk with healthcare professionals virtually if they are still living with their intimate partner. therefore, the nature of self-disclosure text and massive #hash- tags campaign on social media would provide a better way out to express negative emotions and seek sup- port among other ipv survivors. future research should leverage the skills of text mining like senti- ment analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis to examine the emotional or informational support received by ipv victims on social media. implications like public health, social justice, and human rights is- sues, ipv experience is associated with less emotional support, poor life satisfaction, and poor mental health outcomes. ipv experience can linger in people’s minds after physical wounds have healed, casting a long shadow of other physical and psychological problems throughout the lifespan. therefore, the process of growth and pain can be inextricably associated with trauma recovery [ ]. to combat the effects of ipv on emotional support and life satisfaction, enhancing biobe- havioral attributes of resilience could facilitate re- appraisal and create a sense of purpose in the face of ipv, thereby improving mental health and post- traumatic growth. resilience literature demonstrated some individuals can bounce back and develop healthy relationships after suffering from stressful events like ipv [ ]. since resilience can be replenished [ ], we suggest that enhancing an ipv survivor’s sense of con- trol, coping skills, social support, and providing multiple online resources could improve resilience and reduce the threatening and traumatic effects caused by ipv. previous evidence has shown that resiliency programs [ ] including social support [ ], safety planning [ ], and other technology-based interventions can mitigate the far-reaching consequences of ipv [ ]. policymakers should focus on how to turn the victims to become survivors by improving their resiliency. for example, social media would be an interactive and re- sourceful platform to find ipv support groups, financial support, or shelter availability information around their neighborhood. policymakers should provide more fund- ing for non-governmental organizations (ngos) or vio- lence prevention advocacy groups to integrate the online resources and create a hub for ipv survivors to navigate themselves easier. also, as victim-blaming is one of the serious online harassment when ipv victims disclose their stories, policymakers should devise policies to com- bat the victim-blaming culture and encourage empath- etic and supporting messages both on the internet and hui and constantino bmc public health ( ) : page of in a real-life situation. for example, using positive #hashtags to empower victims, highlighting the survivor stories, and creating an emotional support hub for abused women. limitations one of the limitations of this study is the lack of the use of a weighting formula that could have re-balanced the data to reflect the population more accurately. however, the large sample size of the data set represents greater generalizability of the brfss to the u.s. population. we also acknowledged that the national intimate part- ner and sexual violence survey may capture more recent data on ipv, however, the brfss also captured the physical, psychological, and sexual violence and included more mental health indicators (i.e., perceived life satis- faction and perceived mental health). these indicators are important for researchers to plan mental health intervention strategies. another limitation is that each variable measured uses a single question only. for ex- ample, emotional support is measured with the following question ‘how often do you get the social and emotional support you need?’ and participants responded with an ordinal level of measurement, ranging from “always”, “usually”, “sometimes”, “rarely”, “never”, “don’t know”, “not sure”, and “refused”. then, we collapsed the re- sponses from five to three levels, using only “always”, “sometimes” and “rarely” for a better fit with our ana- lysis. further, some of the questions did not include a specific timeframe to recall the ipv experience. we are concerned about missing data which may affect the interpretation of the results. the use of the dataset in this study is in brfss , are discussed in the following way ) the interpretation of results, ) the analysis procedure, and ) hot-deck imputation provides less bias compared to mean imputation and is deemed as a better overall solution than the listwise deletion [ ]. self-reported data and recall bias are other limita- tions of the study. the strength of the study is it pro- vides information on the effects of emotional support, life satisfaction, and perceived health status on ipv in the u.s. which gives guidance to future intervention studies. conclusions in conclusion, the consequences of ipv are enormous. in this study, persons who reported having experienced ipv were more likely to receive less emotional support, more likely to perceive dissatisfaction in life, and have poor health outcomes. mental health encompasses vari- ous aspects that may lead a person who survives ipv to develop poor mental health. these indicators of poor mental health include depression, ptsd, suicidal idea- tion, sleep disturbance, and self-esteem issues [ , ]. the results of this study suggest the need for person- centered policies on the development of interventions that focus on mental health for people who have experi- enced ipv. precision health intervention programs [ ] could be designed to provide individualized information, educa- tion, and prevention strategies on ipv that will match diverse ipv survivors of all races, socioeconomic sta- tuses, gender, and age. constantino and crane ( ), found that social/emotional support intervention in women experiencing ipv is effective in improving per- ceived social/emotional support and decreasing health- care utilization. the perception of the availability of social/emotional support is significant to survivors of ipv [ ]. when their perceived availability of social/ emotional support is low, survivors of ipv lose their ability to attenuate the unhealthy consequences of ipv [ ]. as such, future research should concentrate on increasing emotional support, resilience, and life satisfac- tion from the online or offline intervention (e.g., social media and community support groups). abbreviations brfss: behavioral risk factor surveillance system; hiv/aids: human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome; ipv: intimate partner violence; ptsd: post-traumatic stress disorder acknowledgments we would like to thank the center for disease control and prevention for access to data. authors’ contributions vh analyzed the data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. rc reviewed and edited the manuscript. all authors have read and approved the manuscript. funding no funding to be reported for this study. availability of data and materials the original dataset for the current study is available on the center for disease control and prevention website. the datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. the raw dataset can be obtained from https://www.cdc. gov/brfss/annual_data/annual_ .htm. declarations ethics approval and consent to participate the institutional review board at the university of pittsburgh approved this study. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. received: may accepted: march references . howell kh, thurston ib, schwartz le, jamison le, hasselle aj. protective factors associated with resilience in women exposed to intimate partner hui and constantino 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( ), pp. – doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /respectus. . . . Žanro konferencija subūrė skirtingų sričių mokslininkus gabija bankauskaitė vilniaus universiteto kauno fakultetas kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų institutas vilnius university, lithuania e. paštas gabija.bankauskaite@knf.vu.lt orcid id: https://orcid.org/ - - - moksliniai interesai: modernizmas, xx a. lietuvių literatūra, tarpukario lietuvos spauda ir reklama research interests: modernism, lithuanian literature of th century, press and advertising of interwar lithuanian periodicals spalio dieną vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų institute įvyko tarpdalykinė mokslinė Žanro konferencija. renginio dalyves sveikino konferencijos sumanytoja ir mokslinio komiteto pirmininkė profesorė gabija bankauskaitė. pirmoji Žanro konferencija, kurią organizavo dar kauno humanitarinio fakulteto socio- kultūrinių tyrimų centras, įvyko metų spalio dieną. svarstyti klausimai, ar žanras yra kanonas ar transformacija, kiek aktuali tradicinė jo samprata įvairiuose moksluose ir menuose, ar jis apskritai dar svarbus, ar tinka šiais laikais ankstesni apibrėžimai, kokie nauji žanro porūšiai atsirado. pirmojo renginio diskusijos patvirtino tris dalykus: pirma – humanitariniai mokslai nebeįmanūs be tarpdalykiškumo, antra – visuose menuose ryškios žanro transformacijos, trečia – vis dėlto teigti, kad grynasis žanro kanonas šiandien ne- beįdomus ir nebepopuliarus, negalima. Šios, jau antrosios, Žanro konferencijos diskusijos taip pat patvirtino, kad žanras, viena vertus, yra nuolatinis kūrybinis iššūkis kiekvienam rašytojui nuo pat antikos laikų iki šių dienų, kita vertus, jis būtinas šiuolaikinei visuomenei, nes eliminuoja neapibrėžtumą, konceptualizuoja transformacijas, įvardija naujas formas. Į konferenciją susirinkusios tyrėjos dirbo dviejose sekcijose. sekcijoje Žanro trans- formacijos informacijos amŽiuje pirmoji kalbėjo vilniaus universiteto komu- nikacijos fakulteto Žurnalistikos ir audiovizualinių medijų katedros docentė dr. jolanta mažylė. prelegentė svarstė žurnalistinių žanrų problemą intermedialumo aspektu ir akcen- tavo, kad šiuolaikinėje lietuvių žurnalistikoje ryškėja žanrų simbiozė, kuriai įtakos turi ir surinkta informacija, ir žurnalisto kūrybinis sprendimas, kaip ją pateikti įdomiau, įtaigiau ir https://www.vu.lt/leidyba/ creative commons attribution license cc by-nc-nd . http://www.zurnalai.vu.lt/respectus-philologicus http:// http://dx.doi.org/ . /respectus. . . . mailto:gabija.bankauskaite@knf.vu.lt eissn - respectus philologicus suprantamiau. prisitaikydami prie besikeičiančios aplinkos komunikaciniame lauke, vieni žurnalistinių kūrinių žanrai perima kitų žanrų grupių ar rūšių požymius: niveliuojamas straipsnis ir pranešimas, vertinimas informaciniame komentare mutuoja iš analitinio į pramoginį, klostosi naujas komentarų žanras – „valatkizmas“, algis ramanauskas trina viešosios erdvės mandagumo, kultūringo pokalbio ribas, seklėja interviu žanras. vilniaus universiteto filologijos fakulteto anglistikos, romanistikos ir klasikinių studijų instituto asistentė dr. dovilė keršienė svarstė laiško žanrinės definicijos problematiką. prelegentė siekė atskleisti, dėl ko svarbi tiksli ir detali, istoriškai motyvuota žanrinė apibrėžtis, išsiaiškinti, kokią laiško definiciją turėtume suformuluoti, kad ji geriausiai atlieptų šiuolaikinio mokslo poreikius ir intencijas ar konkretaus epistolikos tyrimo, vertimo projekto, korespondencijos publikacijos ar jos atrankos tikslus. d. keršienė kon- statavo, kad evoliucionuojant laiško žanrui, daugėjant asmeniškumo, randasi paratekstų, požanrių, kurie skatina kelti klausimą, ar įsiklausoma į žanro turiningumą, istoriją, ženklus. netikėta klausytojams buvo mintis, kad ir viduramžiais, ir dabar laiško žanro formalizmas (privalomos formos, raktiniai žodžiai, skirstymai ir pan.) yra panašus. pranešime itin akcentuotas teiginys, kad svarbiausia yra apsibrėžti, kaip žiūrėsime į laišką. vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto dėstytojos doc. dr. skirmantė biržietienė ir dr. eglė gabrėnaitė aptarė rinkimų programą kaip politinės retorikos žanrą. remdamosi paskutiniųjų rinkimų į seimą programomis, skelbiamomis vrk svetainėje, pranešėjos siekė atskleisti pastoviuosius diskurso formos ir turinio elementus, kurie leistų nustatyti žanrinius rinkimų programų ypatumus ir jų sąsają su politinės retorikos universalijomis. konstatuota, kad vienas pastoviausių – politinis rinkiminis pažadas arba politinis diskur- sas, nukreiptas į ateitį. sekcijos darbą pratęsė vytauto didžiojo universiteto mokslininkė, lietuvos nacionalinės martyno mažvydo bibliotekos darbuotoja jolanta budriūnienė, aptarusi anglakalbės xx a. antrosios pusės jav lietuvių kultūrinės spaudos žanro tyrimus, atliktus pasitelkus literatūros sociologijos lauko teoriją. akcentuota, kad šios spaudos turinys, pagrįstas vertybiniu matmeniu, dėl išsamiai ir aiškiai suformuluoto tautinio tapatumo apibrėžties konstrukto bei jo reprezentavimo, sudarė galimybes į lietuvių tautą, jos egzilinę bendruomenę, taip pat į šalies istoriją ir kultūrą pažvelgti „iš šalies“. pranešime aptartos leidyklos „manyland books“ ir „lithuanian library press“ bei žurnalo „litua- nus“ leidėjų pastangos reprezentuoti lietuvą jav ir kitų užsienio šalių skaitytojui per grožinės literatūros tekstus. aiškintasi, kurie žanrų apibrėžti tekstai geriausiai atspindėjo leidėjų siunčiamą žinią apie mūsų šalį, kaip jie atitiko to meto jav grožinės literatūros skaitytojų poreikius. po pietų sekcijos darbą pradėjo vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto tyrėjos dr. eglė gabrėnaitė ir doktorantė monika triaušytė. pranešėjos retoriniu aspektu anali- zavo provokaciją kaip žanrą. nagrinėtas daug atgarsio sulaukęs ir įvairiausių reakcijų išprovokavęs judėjimas #metoo prieš seksualinio priekabiavimo netoleravimą, jo inspi- ruoti lietuvoje publikuoti straipsniai, liudijimai ir komentarai. akcentuota, kad provo- katyvaus naratyvo skverbtys viešajame diskurse vis intensyvėja, provokacija ir reakcija į provokaciją neretai tampa karščiausiomis medijų temomis, o provokatyvus naratyvas ne vii. scientific life chronicle / mokslinio gyvenimo kronika / kronika życia naukowego g. bankauskaitė. Žanro konferencija subūrė skirtingų sričių mokslininkus tik funkcionuoja kaip savarankiškas žanras, bet vis gausiau produkuojamas inspiruoja ir kitų informacinių, vertinamųjų, pramoginių žanrų pokyčius. kauno fakulteto mokslininkės doc. dr. saulutė juzelėnienė, doc. dr. rita baranauskienė ir prof. dr. skirmantė Šarkauskienė aiškinosi verbalinių ir neverbalinių elementų dermę socialinėje reklamoje modalumo aspektu – nagrinėjo socialinių problemų konceptualizaciją ir tropų kūrimo principus. akcentuota, kad tropus galima identifikuoti ne tik žodiniame, bet ir vaizdiniame diskurse, kadangi dėsningumas tropams išlieka toks pat, taip pat ne- galima kalbėti apie vieno tropo raišką socialinėje reklamoje – neretai derinami keli (pvz., kontekstinė metafora ir ironija). fakulteto kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų instituto asistentė dr. eglė alosevičienė analizavo daugiakalbio filmo žanro ir vertimo problematiką: apibrėžtį, žanro ypatybes, pasikartojančius motyvus, dėmesį migracijos ir diasporos problemoms. prelegentė akcentavo, kad audiovizualinio vertimo kontekste daugiakalbis filmas kelia ypač daug problemų. dubliuojant filmas pritaikomas vertimo kalbai ir kultūrai, tad daugiakalbystės nebelieka. subtitruojant filmo autentiškumas išlaikomas paliekant originalų takelį, o daugiakalbiškumą galima perteikti įvairių tipų subtitrais. verčiant užklotiniu vertimu, labai svarbi įvairių tipų sinchronija ir izochronija. srities tematiką pratęsė instituto docentė dr. laura niedzviegienė, kuri svarstė apie žanro įtaką (audio)vizualinio produkto garsiniam vaizdavimui. pranešime siekta atskleisti, kiek ir kaip audiovizualinio arba vizualinio produkto, kuriam taikomas garsinis vaizdavimas, žanras nulemia to produkto garsinio vaizdavimo specifiką, ar egzistuoja aiški koreliacija tarp šiuo būdu žmonėms su regos negalia pritaikomo produkto žanro ir garsinio vaizdavimo teksto ypatumų. palyginti keli (audio)vizualinių produktų pavyzdžiai ir jų garsinio vaizdavimo tekstai, šių produktų garsinio vaizdavimo pateikimo techniniai aspektai. kauno fakulteto mokslininkės doc. dr. rita baranauskienė ir doc. dr. ilona mickienė aiškinosi viešųjų užrašų žanrą – jų leksikos ir grafikos aktualizaciją. svarstytos viešųjų užrašų kaip kraštovaizdžio dalies rūšys (informaciniai, reklaminiai užrašai, juridinių asmenų pavadinimai ir prekių ženklai), jų informacinė ir estetinė funkcijos. diskutuota motyvuotai ir tikslingai pasirenkama aktualizuotoji raiška viešuosiuose užrašuose. sekcijoje Žanro aktualumas literatŪros naratyvuose iki pietų disku- tuota anglų kalba. vytauto didžiojo universiteto profesorė dr. ingrida eglė Žindžiuvienė aptarė populiariosios grožinės literatūros žanrą, sampratas, ypatybes ir atkreipė dėmesį, kad tai itin plati, bet šiek tiek pamiršta grožinės literatūros šaka, dažnai kritikuojama dėl žemos kokybės. akcentuota, kad pastaruoju metu daugėja populiariosios literatūros žanro tyrimų dėl kultūrinių aspektų, visuomenės ir medijų pokyčių. vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų instituto profesorė dr. loreta ulvydienė ir evelina jonaitytė kalbėjo apie žodinį pasakojimo žanrą kaip komunikacinį dialogo šaltinį ir jo koreliaciją su trumpuoju afrikietiškosios fantasti- kos žanru. analizuotos dvi trumpos moterų rašytojų istorijos. konstatuota, kad vaizdai ir simboliai tiek žodinėse, tiek rašytinėse afrikos tradicijose išplėtė literatūrinį trumposios fantastikos žanrą ir sąveikauja su kitais literatūros žanrais. fakulteto kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų instituto docentė dr. Živilė nemickienė eissn - respectus philologicus pranešime svarstė, kaip pakeitė antrinio pasaulio sampratą j. k. rowlingo tekstai, kiek antrinis magijos pasaulis atitinka klasikinės maginės fantastikos kriterijus. atkreiptas dė- mesys į tai, kad j. k. rowlingas įtikinamą magiško pasaulio vaizdą kuria ne tik detaliais aprašymais ir apokrifais, būdingais klasikinei maginei fantastikai, bet ir imituodamas skaitytojams aiškiai suprantamas pirminio pasaulio ypatybes, tačiau sukurtasis pasaulis maginės fantastikos kriterijus atitinka tik iš dalies – jame aktyvios antgamtinės jėgos, tačiau žmogaus atžvilgiu jos neveikia kaip išorinis veiksnys. kauno fakulteto mokslininkės prof. dr. jadvyga krūminienė ir indrė višinskaitė kalbėjo apie r. l. stivensono novelę „neįprastas bagažas“ (angl. the wrong box) ir farso žanrą. akcentuota, kad šioje novelėje gausu šio viduramžius menančio žanro apraiškų – nuo neįtikėtinų įvykių kupino siužeto iki stereotipinių šmaikščių personažų. aptarus farso žanrines ypatybes, atskleista, kad savo kūriniu rašytojas siekė šio to daugiau. po pietų sekcijos darbą pratęsė instituto docentė dr. skirmantė biržietienė, kuri audi- torijai pasiūlė padiskutuoti apie tris antikinių epų kelionės motyvo žanrines variacijas: homero odisėją, apolonijaus rodiečio argonautiką ir vergilijaus eneidą. pasirėmusi j. campbello herojaus kelionės schema, prelegentė detaliai atskleidė būdinguosius šių kelionių elementus ir akcentavo, kad analizuojamos kelionės yra skirtingos ir nevisiškai išpildo modelį. apibendrinta, kad geriausiai pasaulinėje kultūrinėje tradicijoje žinoma seniausioji iš šių trijų nostalgiška odisėjo kelionė, tapusi bendriniu kelionės įvardijimu ir brėžianti grįžimo į gimtinę žanrinį variantą. pranešimas auditorijoje išprovokavo diskusijas apie tekstų dekonstravimą juos interpretuojant. lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos instituto mokslininkė dr. Živilė nedzinskaitė kalbė- jo apie žanrų transformacijas xvii a. ldk lotyniškoje poezijoje ir aiškinosi figūrines kūrybos galimybes. aptarusi smulkiųjų poezijos žanrų kontekstą xvii a. europoje, prelegentė aptarė ldk kūrusių poetų ir nesvyžiaus jėzuitų akademijos studentų darbus. ypatingas dėmesys buvo skirtas studentų figūrinei kūrybai, kuri iš kūrėjo reikalavo ypač aukšto meistriškumo. nagrinėtas herbinis eilėraštis, į ratą išsivyniojantis eilėraštis, kiti artificiozinės kūrybos pavyzdžiai. sekcijos darbą pratęsė vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto kalbų, literatūros ir vertimo studijų instituto profesorė dr. sigutė radzevičienė, klausytojus sutelkusi ties lietuvių ir švedų kultūra bei moterų literatūra. keltas klausimas, kodėl sulaukiame daugiatomio romano, kaip žanro ribas keičia naratyvo laisvėjimas, kas sieja tekstą su žanro konvencija. tirta istorinio ir istoriškojo romano skirtis nagrinėjant kristinos sabaliauskaitės knygas silva rerum, petro imperatorė ir kerstinos thorvall trilogiją pasakojimai apie signę. ieškota paralelių, patvirtinančių hipotezę apie dabarties laikams būdingą universalios literatūrinės savimonės bruožą – daugiaklodžio semantinio naratyvo ir retrospektyvaus žanro dermę. instituto docentė dr. eglė keturakienė savo pranešime, remdamasi f. w. schellingo įvardytomis istorinės elegijos ypatybėmis, analizavo prano vaičaičio eilėraštį-elegiją „yra šalis, kur upės teka“. išskirtas pamatinis šio žanro atpažinimo kriterijus – poetinė nuotaika, sukurianti ištisą žmogiškosios būties pasaulį. konstatuota, kad prano vaičaičio istorinių elegijų raiška, esanti tarp epinės kalbėsenos, krypstančios klasicistinės tradicijos link, ir intymaus romantinio išgyvenimo, atliepia f. w. schellingo suformuluotą istorinės vii. scientific life chronicle / mokslinio gyvenimo kronika / kronika życia naukowego g. bankauskaitė. Žanro konferencija subūrė skirtingų sričių mokslininkus elegijos sampratą. pranešimas pakurstė auditoriją diskusijai apie elegijos žanro aktualumą šiais laikais. fakulteto tyrėja gabrielė gibavičienė aiškinosi lietuvių išeivių kelionių literatūros, parašytos – m., topiką. tiriant topus julės pranaitytės ( – ), alės rūtos ( – ) ir kitų išeivių kelionių aprašymuose, klausta: kas yra sava, nekintanti erdvė šiam keliautojui, koks jo ryšys su lietuva ir lietuviais, kas šiuose aprašymuose yra kitas. ieškota atsakymo, kas keliautojui yra namai, analizuota, kokios ypatybės vienija išeivių kelionių į lietuvą aprašymus ir žymi kelionių literatūros žanrą. Šiaulių universiteto mokslininkė justė povilaitienė aiškinosi šiuolaikinės konvencinės paauglių literatūros atmainos – problemų prozos – suvešėjimą lietuvoje ir jungtinėje karalystėje. aptartos požanrio – socialinių problemų, problemų arba socialinių romanų (kartais dar vadinamų propagandiniais romanais) – ypatybės, jų problemiškumas, re- cepcija, šių tekstų išplitimas ir populiarumas xxi a. pradžioje. rhoados wald ir dainos opolskaitės kūriniai paaugliams lyginti pasitelkus septynis realistinio požiūrio aspektus. paskutinį pranešimą sekcijoje Žanro aktualumas literatŪros nara- tyvuose skaitė vilniaus universiteto kauno fakulteto alumnė, poetė lina buividavičiūtė. prelegentė kalbėjo apie žanro variacijas šiuolaikinėje lietuvių poezijoje, akcentavo vis labilėjančias žanro ribas, pakitusią lyrikos žanro recepciją. apžvelgdama ryškiausius šiuolaikinės lietuvių poezijos pavyzdžius, l. buividavičiūtė kėlė klausimus, ar galima nusakyti, kas sudaro šiuolaikinės poezijos literatūriškumą, kaip pakito lyrikos samprata ir kokie lyrikos požymiai būdingi šiuolaikinei poezijai. pasvarsčiusi, kokie analizės įrankiai ir literatūros teorijos leidžia geriausiai išnarstyti dabarties eilėraščio būtį, pranešėja pamė- gino nusakyti žanro raidos tendencijas. pranešimą lydėjo įvairios klausytojų nuomonės ir reakcijos į besikeičiantį lyrikos žanrą: prisiminti rusų formalistai, taip pat lietuvių keturvė- jininkai, sudaiktinę poeziją, prano morkūno vizualieji tekstai, krypstantys į pornografinę raišką, svarstyta, kas poeziją daro poezija. taigi Žanro konferencija subūrė skirtingų humanitarinių sričių atstoves: literates, kalbininkes, vertimo ir audiovizualikos specialistes, žurnalistikos ir komunikacijos moks- lininkes. konferencija pasižymėjo itin kūrybingomis diskusijomis, idėjų mainais, todėl žanro kanono ir transformacijų tyrėjų po poros metų tikimasi sulaukti ne tik iš lietuvos, bet ir iš užsienio. 	Žanro konferencija subūrė skirtingų sričių mokslininkus. gabija bankauskaitė publisher the swedish archaeological society & nordic academic press editors sophie bergerbrant & alison klevnäs reviews editor daniel sahlén digital editor gustav wollentz editorial board benjamin alberti elisabeth arwill-nordbladh anders carlsson kerstin cassel catherine frieman roberta gilchrist yannis hamilakis carl knappett gavin lucas lynn meskell nick shepherd lena sjögren brit solli fredrik svanberg julian thomas anna wessman subscription current swedish archaeology is published in one annual volume. price per volume excl. post- age: sek for individuals, sek for institutions. subscription orders should be sent to: current swedish archaeology c/o förlagssystem ab box stockholm tel: - email: csa@forlagssystem.se www.arkeologiskasamfundet.se/csa www.nordicacademicpress.com © the swedish archaeological society & the authors nordic academic press box lund email: info@nordicacademicpress.com revision of english language: alison klevnäs graphic design: lönegård & co & anders gutehall image processing & typesetting: anders gutehall boat illustration on cover: inger kåberg printed by holmbergs, malmö issn - (print) issn - (online) the swedish archaeological society vol. current swedish archaeology editors: sophie bergerbrant & alison klevnäs the swedish archaeological society in the first meeting to establish the swedish archaeological society was held at the museum of national antiquities in stockholm. the society is the common body for professional archaeologists in sweden, regardless of specialism. according to the statutes the purpose of the society is to further swedish archaeological research and to support this research by granting scholarships. the society is especially tasked with attending to the vocational interests of archaeologists. this task is to be carried out by taking part in public debate, by influencing public opinion, and by being a body to which proposed measures are submitted for consideration. the society also arranges discussions and seminars on archaeological topics. the society’s board currently has fourteen members from universities, mu- seums and archae ological institutions in various parts of sweden. ingrid berg from uppsala university is the present chair. in the society began issuing its annual journal current swedish archaeology. since then the journal has presented articles mirroring current archaeological research and theoretical trends. sophie bergerbrant & alison klevnäs editorial .............................................................................................................. theme alexandra ion who are we as historical beings? shaping identities in light of the archaeogenetics ‘revolution’ .......................... john c. barrett the archaeology of population dynamics .......................................................... martin furholt de-contaminating the adna–archaeology dialogue on mobility and migration: discussing the culture-historical legacy ............................................................ anna källén, charlotte mulcare, andreas nyblom & daniel strand archaeogenetics in popular media: contemporary implications of ancient dna ...................................................... marko m. marila slow science for fast archaeology .................................................................... artur ribeiro science, data, and case-studies under the third science revolution: some theoretical considerations ..................................................................... daniela hofmann commentary. archaeology, archaeogenetics and theory: challenges and convergences ......................................................................... contents articles anna sörman casting in the longhouse: the organization of metalworking in late bronze age settlements in south-eastern sweden ................................................................................ fredrik fahlander fantastic beings and where to make them: boats as object-beings in bronze age rock art ............................................... matthias s. toplak the warrior and the cat: a re-evaluation of the roles of domestic cats in viking age scandinavia ........ review & notices ingrid berg review: johannes siapkas. antikvetenskapens teoretiska landskap ii: från olympia till leonidas (the theoretical landscape of classical studies ii: from olympia to leonidas) .............................................................................. richard grönwall & rebecka jonsson sandby borg: new perspectives for iron age archaeology in the baltic region. report from an archaeological conference at linnaeus university, kalmar, sweden. – may ..................................................................... magnus djerfsten the eastern link: the largest archaeological excavation program in the history of sweden? ................................................................................ christina rosén recent excavations at nya lödöse ................................................................... current swedish archaeology vol. | https://doi.org/ . /csa. . editorial this year for the first time current swedish archaeology presents a themed section with a collection of peer-reviewed discussion papers on a shared topic, instead of a keynote article and commentaries. in the future we plan to vary the format between keynotes and themed sections – each time fol- lowed by individual research papers covering our usual breadth of subjects and periods. for the theme format enables us to bring you nine fully reviewed papers, along with commentary, reviews and notices. we are also pleased that, with our second volume in six months, csa production is now back on schedule. the use of natural science approaches in archaeology has long been dis- cussed and debated. kristian kristiansen’s keynote in csa volume re- sparked this debate and is one of our most downloaded papers. this year’s theme comes from a workshop called can science accommodate multiple ontologies? the genetics revolution and archaeological theory, held in the mcdonald institute for archaeological research at the university of cam- bridge in june . results from ancient dna research often reach media headlines and hence huge audiences. how do interactions between genetic evidence and archaeological knowledge play out? the articles in this sec- tion reflect critically on relations between archaeogenetics and archaeology. the theme is introduced by alexandra ion, who presents the background to the workshop and goes on to evaluate narratives of archaeogenetics in relation to different audiences. it continues with a paper by john barrett, looking at current interpretations of adna data and how they have been used to question earlier models that argued for the uptake of farming by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations. with the paper by martin furholt we stay within the sphere of the gene- tic interpretation of the spread of human populations, but this time in the https://doi.org/ . . /csa. . current swedish archaeology vol. editorial third millennium bc. the author argues that new genetic results have not had any meaningful impact on the way we view prehistory, despite the debate they create. he contends that adna results have been tacked onto some of the most outdated narratives in european prehistory, arguing in- stead for a practice-based approach to how new transregional objects and practices are integrated into local contexts. next come anna källén, charlotte mulcare, andreas nyblom & daniel strand, the team behind the project code–narrative–history, funded by riksbankens jubileumsfond. they analyse the public debate resulting from two archaeogenetics papers based on human remains from central sweden, including the ‘viking warrior woman’. the authors show that there is sig- nificant interlacing of scientific, political and media discourses in and around archaeogenetic papers, and argue that adna researchers need to give greater consideration to public impact when they communicate results. marko marila argues for slow science in his paper. using the discus- sions around slow science and the related idea that scientific importance is a matter of concern rather than fact, he proposes that archaeologists should start to cultivate methods of deceleration. the last peer-reviewed paper in this section is written by artur ribeiro and makes the case that while the so-called third science revolution has brought significant enhancement in terms of scientific methods and ap- proaches, it risks transforming archaeology into a methodologically mo- nistic discipline. ribeiro contends that especially when it comes to big data analysis, there is a risk that archaeological evidence is reduced to those ele- ments that are quantifiable. daniela hofmann wraps up the theme with a commentary. she con- cludes that the papers clearly show the issues that trouble archaeologists when engaging with big data, in particular adna. the strongest message to emerge from the papers is that this is not about unlearning and relearn- ing things we thought we knew about the prehistoric societies, but the need to defend different kinds of questions and approaches, and the idea that different ways of knowing are important. three general research articles follow. the first, by anna sörman, explores bronze casting in the scandinavian late bronze age. her study shows that traces of bronze casting frequently occur in late bronze age settlements in south-eastern sweden. by using an empirical, bottom-up ap- proach to the examination of spatial and social contexts of bronze casting, sörman provides new insight into the social organization of metalworking. she shows that domestic arenas often hosted varied and complex remains of metalworking staged at various outdoor and indoor hearths, often located in the core areas of settlements. the author concludes that metalworking current swedish archaeology vol. | https://doi.org/ . /csa. . editorial was not organizationally conceptualized as levels, but that it was a multi- faceted, communicative and user-oriented practice. we stay in the bronze age with the next paper by fredrik fahlander, who takes us from metalwork to boat motifs in rock carvings. he argues that rather than seeing the boat motif as representing real or symbolic boats in some form, we should see them as autonomous articulations, made to do something rather than to represent. through this change of perspective we can understand the hybrid character of the boat motif as something which has no original elsewhere. cats – the roles of cats in viking age society – are the topic of the last research paper in this volume. matthias toplak uses literary and archaeo- logical sources to understand cats from a human-animal relations perspec- tive, arguing that the cat was a symbolically, functionally and probably also emotionally important companion for humans beyond the borders of sex or gender in late iron age scandinavia. this year we expanded the csa editorial team with two new members. digital editor gustav wollentz is working on moving the journal into the s with a new digital platform for our open access model. dan- iel sahlén is the editor for reviews and notices. in this volume we have one review of a new book, a report from a recent conference, and two notices introducing fieldwork of international significance. in the future we hope to be able to present further short notices about current archaeological excavations, new exhibitions, and other events of interest to our national and international readerships, and we welcome contact from those respon- sible for relevant work. the review is of johannes siapkas’ antikvetenskapens teoretiska landskap ii: från olympia till leonidas (the theoretical landscape of classical studies ii: from olympia to leonidas), one of a series by the author mapping the theoretical underpinnings of knowledge production within classical studies. then comes a report from the conference sandby borg – new perspec- tives for iron age archaeology in the baltic region, which was held at linnaeus university, kalmar, in may , as part of a research project on the sandby borg ringfort and massacre site. articles discussing sandby borg have previously been published in csa volume . next christina rosén describes the huge rescue excavation of nya lödöse, now part of gothenburg. the excavation took place as part of exten sive city development between and . the resulting archae- ological data cover periods from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries ad and give significant new information about town-dwelling in late medieval and early modern sweden. current swedish archaeology vol. editorial the final notice in this volume is written by magnus djerfsten and in- troduces the ongoing and planned archaeological surveys and excavations in advance of the ‘eastern link’ – the new high speed railway which will require huge numbers of rescue excavations, particularly in the county of Östergötland. up to archaeologists will be employed during the years to , with probably over ancient monuments to be excavated. we look forward to many interesting results from these excavations in a region with a high density of archaeological remains. in the last editorial we mentioned the planned #metoo-related conference organized by the swedish archaeological society (svenska arkeologiska samfundet) that was going to take place in november in växsjö, in cooperation with the department of cultural sciences at linnaeus univer- sity. due to unforeseen circumstances the conference has been moved to - april , at the same venue. for more information, please see the web- page of the swedish archaeological society. for those of you who cannot make it, a review of the conference will appear in the next volume. wishing you a great . we hope it will be full of new funding opp- or tunities for sweden’s academic journals. sophie bergerbrant & alison klevnäs editors of current swedish archaeology wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ october • vol. , no. family medicine brief reports i ntimate partner violence (ipv) is a silent epidemic affecting one in three women during their lifetime. ipv leads to injuries and death from physical and sexual as- sault, sexually transmitted infec- tions, pelvic inflammatory disease, unintended pregnancy, chronic pain, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. the us preven- tive services task force (uspstf) recommends that clinicians routinely screen women of childbearing age for ipv (“b” recommendation), but research shows that actual rates of screening in primary care settings are low. in addition, there is a wide range of screening strategies across different medical practices, with some clinics assigning nonphysi- cian personnel (ie, nurse/midwife, social worker, medical assistant) to do screening, while others rely on physicians. there is no consensus on the optimal screening protocol. a randomized trial of three screening protocols (self-administered survey, nonphysician personnel interview, and physician interview) showed similar rates of ipv disclosure in a controlled environment. however, in real-world settings where lack of office protocols and limited time are common barriers for physicians, - results are inconsistent and contra- dictory on the optimal way of deliv- ering ipv screening. - with violence against women in the national spotlight due to the #metoo movement, we set out on a quality improvement initiative to identify opportunities to enhance ipv screening within our university- based network of primary care clin- ics. our objectives were to determine ( ) how often ipv screening was be- ing documented, and ( ) whether screening initiated by nonphysician staff or physicians resulted in more documented screens. methods setting we examined ipv screening prac- tices in five primary care clinics within a university-based network in northern california. collectively, these clinics provide care for , people and have providers, includ- ing family physicians and general background and objectives: intimate partner violence (ipv) is a si- lent epidemic affecting one in three women. the us preventive services task force recommends routine ipv screening for women of childbearing age, but actual rates of screening in primary care settings are low. our objectives were to determine how often ipv screening was being done in our system and whether screening initiated by medical assistants or physicians resulted in more screens. methods: we conducted a retrospective chart review to investigate ipv screening practices in five primary care clinics within a university-based net- work in northern california. we reviewed charts from each clinic for a total of charts. each chart was reviewed to determine if an ipv screen was documented, and if so, whether it was done by the medical assistant or the physician. results: the overall frequency of ipv screening was % ( / ). we found a wide variation in screening practices among the clinics. screening initiated by medical assistants resulted in significantly more documented screens than screening delivered by physicians ( % vs %, p< . ). conclusions: ipv screening is an important, but underdelivered service. using medical assistants to deliver ipv screening may be more effective than relying on physicians alone. (fam med. ; ( ): - .) doi: . /fammed. . identifying opportunities to improve intimate partner violence screening in a primary care system laurel sharpless, bs; cathina nguyen, rn, mph; baldeep singh, md; steven lin, md from the division of primary care and population health, department of medicine, stanford university school of medicine, stanford, ca. family medicine vol. , no. • october brief reports internists. among the participat- ing clinics, one had an established protocol of medical assistants doing screening, while the other four loca- tions had an established protocol of physicians doing screening. all five clinics subscribed to a policy of ipv screening consistent with the uspstf guidelines. standard proce- dures to support ipv screening and follow-up in the event of ipv dis- closure were identical across clin- ics. the clinics were within miles of one another and served a simi- lar patient population (ie, insured, working, upper middle class, racial- ly diverse). physician characteris- tics were similar across the clinics (ie, gender, average years of clinical experience). design we conducted a retrospective chart review in the electronic health re- cord. our inclusion criteria were: ( ) female patient of childbearing age (defined as to years), ( ) pre- ventive exam as the reason for visit, and ( ) charts completed on or af- ter may , . we reviewed charts from each study clinic for a total of charts. charts were re- viewed in chronological order until the target was achieved. each chart was reviewed to determine if an ipv screen was documented. if a screen was completed, the reviewer deter- mined whether it was done by the physician or the medical assistant, and what questions were asked. data were also collected on the pa- tients’ age and the screeners’ gender. the chart review was conducted by a trained clinical scribe (l.s.) using a checklist/spreadsheet developed for the project under the supervision of a faculty mentor (s.l.). data analysis descriptive statistics were used to examine the frequency distribu- tion of patients screened, patients’ age, and screeners’ gender. pearson χ test and fisher exact test were performed to discover associations between the number of patients screened by clinic site, screener type (physician or medical assistant), pa- tient age, and screener gender. a bi- nary logistic regression model was performed to predict patient screen- ing based on patient age as a con- tinuous variable. all analyses were done using spss (ibm spss sta- tistics for windows, version . , armonk, ny: ibm corp). the insti- tutional review board of stanford university school of medicine grant- ed this study a formal exemption. results patient and screener characteristics are shown in table ; these were similar across the five study clinics. the overall frequency of ipv screen- ing across five primary care clinics within our academic medical cen- ter was % ( / ; table ). we identified a wide variation in the fre- quency of screening documentation between clinics, ranging from %- % (table ). screening performed in the clinic where the screener was a medical assistant resulted in sig- nificantly more documented screens than in clinics where the physician was the screener ( / [ %] vs / [ %], p< . , table ). the most commonly used screening ques- tions were: ( ) “because difficult rela- tionships can cause health problems, we are asking all of our patients the following question: ‘does a part- ner, or anyone at home, hurt, hit, or threaten you?’” and ( ) “is anyone at home hurting you, threatening you, or making you afraid?” male screeners were associated with more documented screens than female screeners ( / [ %] vs / [ %], p= . ), though there was a heavy skew in our female-to- male ratio (table ). patient age was associated with documented screens (age - years: / [ %]; age - years: / [ %]; age - years: / [ %]; p= . , table ). binary logistic regression showed that patient age was a significant predictor of being screened for ipv (χ = . , df= and p= . ). discussion our study identified opportunities to improve ipv screening in our prima- ry care system—lessons we believe might be helpful to other systems. first, we found a wide variation in the frequency of screening docu- mentation ( %- %) among clinics within the same primary care net- work. this is despite the fact that standard policies and guidelines to support screening and follow-up in the event of disclosure were identical across clinics. this suggests that pol- icies alone are insufficient and that a universal workflow, training, and screening protocol might be needed to help eliminate disparities in care quality and adherence to evidence- based screening guidelines within a system. second, we found that ipv screening performed in the clinic where the screener was a medical assistant resulted in significantly more documented screens than in the clinics where the screener was table : ipv screening frequency and characteristics of patients/screeners characteristics n (%) (n= ) patient screened yes ( . %) no ( . %) patient age - ( . %) - ( . %) - ( . %) screener gender female ( . %) male ( . %) october • vol. , no. family medicine brief reports a physician. though previous stud- ies have shown no difference in the rates of ipv screening and disclosure between physician and nonphysician methods in a controlled setting, in our real-world setting, a medical as- sistant protocol was more effective in completing screens. nonphysician screening has been shown in a recent randomized con- trolled trial to be superior to a phy- sician-only approach for another uspstf recommendation, namely alcohol abuse screening. in a study of primary care clinics in an in- tegrated health care system (kaiser permanente northern california), screening rates were highest in the nonphysician provider and medi- cal assistant arm ( %), followed by the primary care physician arm ( %), and the control arm ( . %). their study and ours together add to a growing body of literature suggest- ing that screening by medical assis- tants with intervention and referral by physicians as needed can be a fea- sible model for increasing evidence- based screenings. our study is limited by its retro- spective, nonrandomized design fo- cused on a single institution. our chart review methodology may not have captured the true frequency of screening across the system; our re- ported screening frequency of % is probably driven by the clinic with a medical assistant screening protocol. although we found associations be- tween screener gender and patient age with ipv screening, the study was insufficiently powered to exam- ine the clinical significance of screen- er and patient factors. lastly we only measured the frequency of screening documentation and not the rates of ipv disclosure. conclusions ipv screening is an important, but underdelivered service. using medical assistants to perform ipv screening may be a more effective real-world strategy than relying on physicians alone. acknowledgments: the authors thank dr harise stein for her contributions to this work, as well as her many years of research and advocacy on the topic of intimate partner violence. previous presentations: part of this manuscript was presented as a poster at the stfm annual spring conference in washing- ton, dc, may - , . corresponding author: address cor- respondence to steven lin, md, quar- ry road, ste , mc , palo alto, ca . - - . fax: - - . stevenlin@stanford.edu. references . smith sg, chen j, basile kc, et al. the na- tional intimate partner and sexual violence survey (nisvs): - state report. at- lanta, ga: national center for injury preven- tion and control, centers for disease control and prevention; . https://www.cdc.gov/vio- lenceprevention/pdf/nisvs-statereportbook. pdf. accessed january , . . nelson hd, bougatsos c, blazina i. screening women for intimate partner violence: a sys- tematic review to update the u.s. preventive services task force recommendation. ann in- tern med. ; ( ): - , w- , w- , w- , w- . . moyer va; u.s. preventive services task force. screening for intimate partner violence and abuse of elderly and vulnerable adults: u.s. preventive services task force recommendation statement. ann intern med. ; ( ): - . . rodriguez ma, bauer hm, mcloughlin e, grumbach k. screening and intervention for intimate partner abuse: practices and at- titudes of primary care physicians. jama. ; ( ): - . table : association between ipv screening and clinic patient screened clinic (screener) p value pearson χ clinic (ma) clinic (md) clinic (md) clinic (md) clinic (md) yes (n= ) < . no (n= ) total table : association between ipv screening and screener type patient screened screener p value pearson χ ma md yes (n= ) < . no (n= ) total abbreviation: ma, medical assistant. table : association between ipv screening and screener gender patient screened screener gender p value pearson χ female male yes (n= ) . no (n= ) total table : association between ipv screening and patient age patient screened patient age p value pearson χ - - - yes (n= ) . no (n= ) total family medicine vol. , no. • october brief reports . sprague s, slobogean gp, spurr h, et al. a scoping review of intimate partner violence screening programs for health care profession- als. plos one. ; ( ):e . . chen ph, rovi s, washington j, et al. random- ized comparison of methods to screen for domestic violence in family practice. ann fam med. ; ( ): - . . erickson mj, hill td, siegel rm. barriers to domestic violence screening in the pediatric setting. pediatrics. ; ( ): - . . cummins a, little d, seagrave m, ricken a, esparza v, richardson-nassif k. vermont family practitioners’ perceptions on intimate partner violence. presentation at north ameri- can primary care research group (napcrg) th annual meeting, new orleans, la. . gerber mr, leiter ks, hermann rc, bor dh. how and why community hospital clinicians document a positive screen for intimate part- ner violence: a cross-sectional study. bmc fam pract. ; ( ): . . mcgrath me, bettacchi a, duffy sj, peipert jf, becker bm, st angelo l. violence against women: provider barriers to intervention in emergency departments. acad emerg med. ; ( ): - . . mcfarlane j, christoffel k, bateman l, miller v, bullock l. assessing for abuse: self-report versus nurse interview. public health nurs. ; ( ): - . . canterino jc, vanhorn lg, harrigan jt, an- anth cv, vintzileos am. domestic abuse in pregnancy: a comparison of a self-completed domestic abuse questionnaire with a directed interview. am j obstet gynecol. ; ( pt ): - . . zacharek s, dockterman e, edwards hs. time person of the year : the silence breakers. time. december , . http:// time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence- breakers. accessed january , . . mertens jr, chi fw, weisner cm, et al. physi- cian versus non-physician delivery of alcohol screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment in adult primary care: the advise cluster randomized controlled implementation trial. addict sci clin pract. ; ( ): . aseas ( ) | machinery of male violence: embodied properties and chronic crisis amongst partners in vietnam helle rydstrom ► rydstrom, h. ( ). machinery of male violence: embodied properties and chronic crisis amongst partners in vietnam. austrian journal of south-east asian studies, ( ), - . this article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in vietnam. based on ethnographic research i conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracket- ing of daily life, while others, such as intimate partner violence, might settle as a crisis of chronicity; as a condition of prolonged difficulties and pain that surreptitiously becomes a new ‘normal’. the machinery of violence, the article shows, refers to processes of symbolic and material transformations of a targeted woman, shaped in accordance with a perpetra- tor’s essentialist imaginations about her embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness). such violence is invigorated by a patrilineal organization of society and a systemic permissiveness to male-to-female abuse. a battered woman is con- fined to an interregnum; a space in which the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity. yet, men’s violence against their female partners also is combatted and resisted in vietnamese society. keywords: body; gender; intimate partner violence; masculinity; vietnam  introduction in brutally crossing boundaries, the forces of violence are not unlike machinery. the ubiquitous ways in which violence inflicts damage upon those it is imposed resembles the menacing drive of a persisting engine. yet, this is machinery without any ontological status because violence, as hannah arendt ( ) has reminded us, has no essence. violence emerges as an instrumental means that needs justification through the ends it pursues, because the application of vio- lent techniques “like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength” (arendt, , p. ; see also, schmidt & schroder, ). the repertoires and techniques of abuse applied in direct violent encoun- ters differ in character. the tools of violence are designed as the result of fantasies about a target’s embodied properties including gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, class, and bodyableness. in this article, i focus on men’s violence against their female partners, as a gendered and sexualized machinery of male violence. i am considering how a during various periods of anthropological fieldwork conducted in vietnam, i have collected eth- aktuelle südostasienforschung  current research on southeast asia w w w .s ea s. at d o i . / . a se a s- | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence number of body typologies come into play when a woman or anybody else is violated as vehicles for processes of transformation of the phenomenological human body into an object of abuse; into dehumanized naked corporeality (agamben, , ; mbembe, ; rydstrom, , ). the world health organization (who) ( ) estimates that % of all women across the globe have experienced physical and/or sexual violence and intimate partner or non-partner sexual violence. % of this violence is perpetrated by an intimate male partner, while % of all murders of women are committed by a partner (see also, true, ). in times of war, conflict, and catastrophes, intimate partner violence might be fueled, while violence against the female population in public spheres might increase. in obscuring the line between natality and mortality, violence exacerbates pre- cariousness and insecurity. violence ruins the foundation of lifeworlds (stoler, ) by impairing the possibility for a return to how life used to be; hampering agency (das & kleinman, ; kleinman, ); and imprinting a “poisonous knowledge” (das, , ) about the realities and perils of harm. the rupturing powers of violence provoke a state of crisis for the survivor, her household, and by extension for society at large (see united nations vietnam, ; world health organization, ). crisis is a notion that provides a helpful analytical entry to unfold the modal- ities and temporalities of the machinery of violence, as manifested in men’s violence against their female partners and the ruination it impacts on lifeworlds. while some types of crises are episodic and thus reduced to a bracketing of daily life, other types of crises grow into a more permanent condition (rydstrom, ). men’s violence against their female partners epitomizes how a specific type of crisis can transmute into a “crisis of chronicity” (vigh, ), which, however, can be challenged and even curbed (roitman, ). nographic data on gendered and sexualized violence by unravelling the hierarchies, privileges, and pow- ers with which gender based violence is imbued. thus, from to , i carried out fieldwork in a northern rural commune, which i call thinh tri, to study gender socialization. when conducting a second round of fieldwork in thinh tri from to , i focused on violence and sexuality from an inter- generational perspective. in , , - , and , i carried out fieldwork in the larger region of hanoi and in a northern semi-rural area, which i refer to as quang vinh, to study gender and harm. from to , i was the swedish coordinator of the rural families in transitional vietnam project under the frame of which data were collected in , households in the north, center, and south of viet- nam. in , i conducted fieldwork in coastal vietnam in a community, which i call long lanh, to study climate disasters, gender and violence. in and , i carried out fieldwork to examine the gendering of labor and harm in the industrial zones of northern vietnam. all names of persons and communities are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of those involved in my research. “the term ‘violence against women’”, the united nations (un) ( ) declaration on the elimination of violence against women reads, “means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life”. “violence”, according to the world health organization ( , p. ), “is the intentional use of physi- cal force or power, threatened or actual, against … another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal-development or deprivation.” “intimate partner violence” (ipv) is a term which avoids any a priori gender categorization of per- petrator and victim in defining ipv as “an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviors” (world health organization, ). aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom to explore the ways in which the machinery of male violence is intrinsically gendered and sexualized, i consider various components that together provide the conditions which allow for the perpetuation of men’s violence against their female partners. hence, i will first, outline how violence manipulates the human body; sec- ond, introduce figures and debates on male-to-female violence in the vietnamese context; third, address a masculinized organization of social life as a framework for male powers, privileges, and abuse; and last, highlight how men’s violence against women and girls in the vietnamese context is rejected and combatted. dehumanized bodies men’s violence against their female partners is shaped through a perpetrator’s essentialist and stereotypical fantasies about a woman’s embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness) (rydstrom, , ). the processes through which human beings are reduced to an object of abuse, a naked corporeality, or what giorgio agamben ( ) has conceptualized as “bare life”, are tied to the ways in which a sov- ereign power takes biological life as its target, as corporeality upon which violence and death can be enacted (see also, foucault, ; mbembe, ). how lives are attempted to be laid bare by the means of violence, i argue, refer to symbolic and tangible processes of transformation undergone by the abused body (rydstrom, , , ). violence is a direct attack on the physical and mental integrity of the phenomeno- logical body; the first body typology, which is the foundation for our being-in-the-world and how we sense, feel, perceive, think, experience, and remember (bourdieu, ; grosz, ; merleau-ponty, ; rydstrom, ). this body incorporates our life story and memories, including “poisonous knowledge” about pain and agony (das, , ; scarry, ; valéry, ). the surface of the human body materializes as a second body typology, as corporeality that meets the ‘outside world’. this body is ren- dered intelligible and categorized by others due to its physical appearance, properties, and qualities (merleau-ponty, ; rydstrom, ; valéry, ). it emerges as a site upon which discursive socio-cultural powers operate in accordance with ideas about gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, class, and bodyableness to establish ideas about priv- ileges, hierarchies, and rights (foucault, ; grosz, ; rydstrom, ). the violated body is a third body typology, which concerns the ways in which the infliction of violence involves “thingification” (barad, ) of the phenomenological body through the design of abusive techniques and repertoires of abuse. this body is wrought physically, mentally, and ethically as a result of the destructive ways in which a perpetrator transgresses the boundaries of the body and mind. stereotypical and essentialist imaginations lie behind the dehumanization of the person upon whom the violence is perpetrated (agamben, ; butler, ; rydstrom, ). the body of fantasies refers to a fourth body typology which appears as the vector of a “field of immanence of desire” (deleuze & guattari, , p. ). such desires are modelled in accordance with fantasies about superiority over the bodies of others due to their gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, class, and bodyableness. this body typology con- cerns the ways in which the distribution and projection of imaginations, including those which are profoundly violent, inform differentiated and specialized forms of harm (braidotti, ; deleuze & guattari, ; rydstrom, ). | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence these symbolic and corporeal body typologies are intimately intertwined with one another as volatile and dynamic processes that come into play when human bod- ies are subjected to the intrusive and destructive powers of a machinery of violence (rydstrom, , , , ). these processes result in the configuration of the emblematic figure which agamben ( ) has conceptualized as homo sacer. banned from society by a sovereign power, homo sacer is included by exclusion, captured in a space of impunity where it is “permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life [i.e. homo sacer]—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere” (agamben, , p. ; italics removed). manipulated by techniques of violence, an abused woman is caught in a “zone of exception”; a space in which the rule of law does not apply and impunity prevails (agamben, ; mbembe, ; rydstrom, , , ). here, female life is defined by a machinery of male violence, which truncates the possibili- ties for agency and the potentialities for positive change (vigh, ). crisis of chronicity as decisive moments, which forcefully can differentiate, select, and separate, crises can be seen as “conditions that make outcomes unpredictable” (habermas, / , p. ). the term crisis is a latinized form of the greek krisis, which refers to “a turning point in a disease” (etymonline.com, n.d.; merriam-webster dictionary, n.d.). for this reason, a crisis tends to be associated with a figurative purification, catharsis, under- stood in terms of an avenue to a new beginning (endres & six-hohenbalken, ; vigh, ; walby, ). a crisis could lead to renewal, but it might as well open to a path fraught with difficulties and suffering (see, etymonline.com, n.d.; merriam- webster dictionary, n.d.). in disrupting coherency and augmenting uncertainty for future prospects (habermas, ), a crisis could swiftly change from a state of emergency (benjamin, / ) into a condition of ahistorical permanence (bhabha, ). an episodic interaction of sudden harm might lead to repeated abuse (das, ; true, ). repeated intimate partner violence can over time transmute into a banality of daily life (arendt, ; rydstrom, ), and in doing so morph from a momentary crisis into a crisis of chronicity (vigh, ). such a crisis is characterized by stillness in the sense that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (gramsci, , pp. - ). approaching crisis as a chronic condition might appear as if it neither had a beginning nor an end (roitman, ) as if freed “from its tem- poral confines” (vigh, , p. ). a crisis determined by a machinery of male violence precisely is characterized by not appearing as coming to a closure anytime soon. temporality needs to be approached as a subjective phenomenon to capture the modalities and intensities by which specific types of crises are composed. in some tempo-spatial pockets, a crisis might pass quickly, while in others it might compartmentalize as a permanent situ- ation, as if separated from predominant understandings of the progression of time. repeated violence can create a parallel crisis universe, a zone of alternative tempi and speeds in which time seems to have stopped and the horizon been blurred. that is an aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom interregnum, an ahistorical permanence (gramsci, ), in which there is no return to how life used to be prior to the violence and a violence-free life seems out of reach (rydstrom, , , ). reiterated violence gathering around small plastic tables squeezed into the shade of a cluster of trees for protection against the blistering morning sun, a group of men from long lanh in central coastal vietnam were sharing their experiences of intimate partner violence. several of the men told how they used to be abusive against their female partners and how they eventually had ended their violent behavior. one of the men, van, suddenly stated that “women also beat men” (phự nũ cũng đánh đàn ông chứ). this was not the first time that a man in the vietnamese context had let me (a female researcher) know that not only men but also women are violent. violence is harmful to anyone and abuse against boys and men renders the risk of being overlooked if gendered violence is equalized with women. the comment, however, does not reflect the realities on the ground in vietnam, or anywhere else, but rather appears as a way of dealing with a legally, morally, and emotionally loaded problem (kimmel, ). joan kelly and michael johnson ( ) thus have observed that “when advocates for men claim that domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men and women … they are describing situational couple violence, not coercive con- trolling violence” (p. ). kelly and johnson ( ) have defined “coercive controlling violence”, which is in the fore of my discussion, as various combinations of physical intimidation, asserting male privilege, coercion, and threats, emotional abuse, iso- lation, use of children, economic abuse as well as belittling, denying, and blaming a partner. the symmetry argument, reflected in van’s comment, has been rebutted by figures on gender-based violence provided by various international organizations. according to the who ( ), statistics on male intimate partner violence vary from . % in high-income countries to . % in the western pacific, % in the eastern mediterranean region, and . % in southeast asia. mirroring such num- bers, a study conducted by united nations women vietnam ( ) shows that % of ever-partnered women in the vietnamese context reported “lifetime experience of physical and/or sexual violence, with % experiencing physical and/or sexual violence in the last months” (p. ). these startlingly high numbers indicate that men’s violence against their female partners is a problem of “pandemic” proportions (united nations, ; united nations women, ), and the most prevalent human rights violation experienced by women and girls in the world today (united nations statistics division, ; united nations population fund, ). according to a study carried out by kathryn yount et al. ( ) in northern vietnam on intimate partner violence, . % out of interviewed men ( - years) reported that they had perpetrated some form of abuse, especially physical violence against their wife. a minority of respondents, only . % of the interviewed men, said the comment resonates with the symmetry debate which erupted in the s, when men’s organi- zations, especially in the usa, claimed that despite statistics intimate partner violence is experienced in equal proportions by both women and men (kimmel, ). | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence that they had perpetrated sexual violence against their wife. in the same study, % out of interviewed married women ( - years), however, reported that they had experienced sexual violence committed by their husband. discrepancies in men’s and women’s reporting of sexual violence resemble earlier findings in vietnam, according to which sexual violence “was seen as a problem to be tolerated by female focus groups, while the male groups did not consider it to be a serious issue” (world bank , p. ). hence, the conviction rate of men who have perpetrated violence against their female partners is remarkably low. while about % of violent crimes are referred to the police, only % of reported cases result in criminal charges, and as few as % of reported cases of men’s violence against women lead to conviction (duvvury, carney, & minh/united nations women, ; khuyên, ). such findings epitomize how violence against women has become an inte- grated, and in that sense ordinary dimension of female life, which holds power to turn life into a chronic crisis defined by insecurity and danger (arendt, ; rydstrom, b, , ; vigh, ). in the vietnamese context, men’s violence against their female partners frequently has been associated with vietnam’s opening into the global economy; with the intro- duction of the Đổi mới (renovation) policy in (le, , p. ; ljunggren, ). in the wake of the Đổi mới policy in december , the vietnamese government launched resolution as a means to eliminate any “social evils” (tệ nạn xã hội); a label which refers both to illicit activities as well as morally condemned behaviors such as domestic violence, gambling, and drug addiction (koh, ; marr, ; nguyen-vo, ; rydstrom, ; vijeyarasa, ). jayne werner ( ) has dis- cussed how social issues with the introduction of the Đổi mới policy increasingly have been defined as household problems and individual concerns. well-socialized citizens would promote “equality of men and women” (nam nữ bình đẳng) (hoang, ) and engage in the building of a “happy and harmonious family life” (gia đình hạnh phúc hòa thuận) which would not suffer from any conflicts or crises (drummond & rydstrom, ; leskhowich, ; rydstrom, a, b, , ). silencing men’s violence against women international attention to men’s violence against women, as highlighted by the united nations general assembly’s declaration on the elimination of violence against women (launched in ) and the beijing declaration (adopted in by the fourth world conference on women, see united nations, ), provide the backdrop for debates on men’s violence against women in vietnam. prior to the intro- duction of the Đổi mới policy, men’s violence against women was not recognized as a problem (khuat, ). the tendency to silence men’s violence against women thus prompted le thi quy ( ), an official voice of the national women’s union (hội phụ nữ), to introduce the term “family violence” (bạo lực gia đình) and to explain the for a definition of sexual violence, see world health organization ( ). see also, general statistics office of vietnam, ; schuler, lenzi, hoang, vu, yount, & trang, ; vietnam women’s union, ; yount et al., . as one of the mass organizations, the union is responsible for identifying women-specific problems in the household and in society at large (endres, ; rydstrom, ; waibel & glück, ). aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom visible as well as invisible harm violence inflicts upon women (see also, pistor & le, ). following le thi quy ( ), le thi nham tuyet and ho thi phuong tien ( ) highlighted the invisible features of male-to-female violence, while doan bao chau ( ) drew attention to a public neglect of the silent female suffering caused by men’s physical and sexual abuse (see also le, ). thus, these voices identified how corporeal properties of gender and sexuality in intersection with other parameters such as age inform male violence. the study gender-based violence: the case of vietnam (world bank, ) provided an early empirical overview of the prevalence of men’s abuse of women in vietnam, and even indicated that the onus for male-to-female violence tended to be placed on the abused woman. in , on the international day for the elimination of violence against women (november ), the general statistics office of vietnam (gso) pub- lished the large-scaled national study, keeping silent is dying: results from the national study on domestic violence against women in viet nam, which offered novel quantita- tive as well as qualitative insights into the ways in which men’s violence against their female partners harmed women, ruined their lifeworlds, limited their participation in social and economic life, and sometimes even cost them their lives. the study indi- cates that women who have been subjected to a male partner’s violence feel ashamed and worried about “losing face” (mất mặt) because of what they see as an inability to manage their family and marriage well. they would thus remain silent about the abuse and “endure the suffering” (chịu đau khổ). sexually abused women even stated that there would be no solutions to end such abuse because of a wife’s assumed obli- gation to satisfy her husband sexually. some women, though, told in the report that they had encouraged their husband to consult sex workers and thereby transfer the problem to another realm (general statistics office of vietnam, , p. ; see also horton & rydstrom, ). vietnam’s #metoo movement has evolved as an attempt to interrupt the machinery of male violence and, in doing so, even the crisis of chronicity in which an abused woman is caught. the movement in vietnam corresponds with a current global social media movement, which efficiently has drawn public attention to men’s sexual abuse of women, called for recognition of the harm such violence inflicts upon women, and for legal punishment of sexual violence perpetrators. under the hashtag #ngungimlang/#ngừngimlặng (stop staying silent), the tendency to mute and neglect men’s violence against women has been critically debated on social media. in addition, female survivors of sexual violence have shared their testimonies on being sexually abused in the domain of the home or at the workplace (see also “phong trào #metoo liệu”, ; “#metoo, vietnam”, ; “vietnam’s #metoo movement begins”, ). from laws to practices while an elaborated legislation on the prevention of violence is in place in vietnam (schuler et al., ; yount et al., ), the law does not necessarily prevent violence taking place at home. the gap between the letter of the law to prevent and combat violence against women and the implementation of the law was epitomized at the these comments accord with my own data from vietnam. | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence smiling tears (nước mắt cười) exhibition held in hanoi in (“everyday items used for”, ). focus at the exhibition was on men’s violence against their female partners, and the explicitness of the exhibition was horrifying. tools used by men to maltreat and injure their female partners were on display, including a saucepan and batons. in addition to these instruments of brutality, female survivors of partner vio- lence shared their experiences of being abused and even told about the energy they had been able to muster to leave an abusive partner and terminate a life impaired by a crisis of chronicity encroached by a gendered and sexualized machinery of male violence (see also, kwiatkowski, , ; rydstrom, b, , ). according to the keeping silent is dying report (general statistics office of vietnam, ) it is of paramount importance to strengthen the enforcement and implemen- tation of existing policies and legal frameworks related to violence prevention and response through enhancing the capacities of duty bearers (the national assembly, the government of viet nam and mass organizations) at all levels and developing structured multi-sectoral coordination mechanisms to improve the coherence of policies, laws and programs related to violence (p. ). vietnam ratified the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw) in and both the penal code of (no. / / qh ) as well as the law on marriage and family of stipulate that the use of violence is prohibited. according to the civil code of (no. - -qh ) (national assembly of vietnam, ), the civil rights of a person entitles that per- son to request the court or other relevant agencies to protect them (art. ). in , the national assembly debated the draft law on preventing domestic violence, which was passed in as the law on domestic violence prevention and control (no. / /qh ) (national assembly of vietnam, ). with the new law an impor- tant step was taken in the prevention and combat of violence in the household, and beyond. while the law does not call for criminal sanctions, it does encourage civil solutions, including reconciliation with the aid of third party mediators such as kin, health care clinics, or local reconciliation units; fines; prohibition orders; and the re-education of male perpetrators (see also, duvvury, carney, & minh/united nations women, ; kwiatkowski, , ; nguyen & rydstrom, ; rydstrom, , ). scales of harm when domestic violence breaches the criminal law, article under the penal code of (no. / /qh ) may apply (see also, united nations women, vietnam, ). the seriousness of violence is defined in accordance with a number of stip- ulated infirmity rates required for an action to be a criminal act. regarding the seriousness of abuse, article (penal code) (national assembly of vietnam, ) clarifies that for details on the infirmity rate, see national assembly of vietnam ( ). aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom those who intentionally injure or causes harm to the health of other per- sons with an infirmity rate of between % and % … , shall be sentenced to non-custodial reform for up to three years or between six months and three years of imprisonment. the infirmity rate is determined by a medical examiner who issues a certificate to verify the level of harm. such a document, however, does not always come without a cost. those women who cannot afford a certificate or those who find unauthorized fees unacceptable will not be able to obtain the needed certificate (borgstrom, ; general statistics office of vietnam, ; hakkarainen, ; vian, brinkerhoff, feeley, salomon, & vien, ). the infirmity rate sheds light on how the gravity of men’s violence against women is understood legally at a systemic level and even how a culture of impunity is facil- itated. when female bodies are manipulated from phenomenological fellow human beings into objects of abuse, into naked life, by the aid of repertoires and techniques of abuse, local authorities are in charge of determining the scale of harm. serious cases of male-to-female violence are those which lead to hospitalization and/or have lethal consequences, according to a representative from the women’s union from the northern quang vinh area. local women’s union units, health care clinics, and rec- onciliation units might dismiss a case of violence because the damage is determined to fall under the % infirmity limit. as it is both tedious and costly in terms of time, money, and dignity to approach relevant agencies to pursue a legal procedure, much abuse is never registered, thus not recognized, but rendered silent as an individu- alized problem and a chronic crisis to endure (general statistics office of vietnam, ; nguyen, ; nguyen & rydstrom, ; rydstrom, b, ; united nations office on drugs and crime, ). the power to define violence can in itself be seen as a kind of harm, as a violence which “is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (galtung, , p. ). as a nexus of various societal inequalities (farmer, ), this kind of violence is symbolically shaped and operates through- out the societal system as systemic harm (nguyen & rydstrom, ). systemic harm fosters a machinery of male violence through larger socio-economic, cultural, and political structures as these serve to establish a political discourse of permissiveness and a culture of impunity (derrida, ; nguyen & rydstrom, ). systemic harm is intertwined with men’s violence against women on the ground, as two types of vio- lence in a socio-cultural continuum of harm. these types of violence capitalize upon and might even galvanize one another as “rebounding violence”, which thus refers to a dialectical relation between these two levels of violence and how they perpetually interact with and inform one another (bloch, ; nguyen & rydstrom, ). these dynamics of violence condition the production and reproduction of gender-based abuse as a justified practice, which is reduced to a banal dimension of the ordinary (arendt, ). that is, “or under % but in one of the following circumstances”. these include, amongst others, using weapons, causing harm to more than one person, causing minor permanent damage to the victims, committing the crime more than once or against children, pregnant women, and other people considered to be weak, or against parents. for details, see national assembly of vietnam ( ). | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence patriliny, masculinity, and violence patriliny informs social organization in the household and by extension society at large (king & stone, ; sandgren, ). in addition to a gender perspective, which provides a lens for critical assessments of how socio-cultural logics produce particu- lar images, narratives, and practices with regard to men and women, the machinery of male violence encourages a focus on masculinity (bourdieu, ; butler, ; schrock & schwalbe, ). even though not all men agree with an influential type of masculinity, they are under pressure to conform to influential ideas about men, male- ness, and masculinity as are women to assumptions about women, femaleness, and femininity (connell, ; hearn, ; horton, ; horton & rydstrom, ). the patrilineal and heterosexual family remains common in vietnamese society despite an increase in same-sex partnerships, single-headed households, and co-hab- itation prior to marriage (braemer, ; horton, ; newton, ; nguyen, ; rydstrom ). the “pillar of the house” (trụ cột gia đình; literally the pillar of the family) is a role which the most senior male (in terms of age and status) of a house- hold is supposed to hold. the continuation of the patrilineage is considered critical and male progeny therefore valued. as “inside lineage” (họ nội), sons enjoy privileges and powers which daughters do not. descent traced along the male line means that daughters come to stand in a position of exteriority to the patrilineage as “outside lineage” (họ ngoại) (rydstrom, a, b; bourdieu, ; sandgren, ). a dichotomic and ontological way of rendering men and women meaning- ful prevails in vietnamese society, meaning that men generally are associated with masculinity and women with femininity. considered as the result of the merging of “physiology” (sinh ly ́ ho ̣c), “psychology” (tâm lý), and a person’s “character” (tính cách), male bodies are understood as being related to the forces of dương (yang in chinese) and female bodies with the forces of Âm (yin in chinese). the forces of dương would make a man “hot” (nóng; also meaning bad tempered), while a female body would be “cold” (lạnh) due to the forces of Âm (see also, sandgren, ). “hot” bodies are associated with active and centripetal energies, or masculinity, and “cold” bodies with passive and centrifugal energies, or femininity. these two forces of the phenomenological body would ideally complement one another and ensure harmony in the household and by extension in society (jamieson, ; leshkowich, ; ngo, ). women’s inferior position is expected to be balanced through a sociality of femininity that is called tình cảm (sentiments/emotions/feelings) and the various qualities of which it is composed, including “respect” (kính), “self-denial” (nhường), “endurance” (chịu), and “holding back oneself ” (nhịn). even though, tình cảm also is appreciated in men, tình cảm is associated with female capacities thanks to which they can verify their “good morality” (đạo đức tốt) and navigate the asymmetrical reciprocity inherent to the patriliny. the qualities associated with tình cảm ideally stimulate the fostering of “happy and harmonious family life” (gia đình hạnh phúc hòa thuận) (rydstrom, b, , , ). such a gendered asymmetrical reciprocity, furthermore, is illustrated by confucian dictums such as the four virtues (tứ đức), which dictate female behavior beyond tình cảm (ngo, ). for a discussion of gen- dered asymmetrical reciprocity, see also young ( ). aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom an official representative of the women’s union in quang vinh, for example, emphasized that women need to be aware of the social hierarchies and behave accord- ingly. in daily life, women are expected to navigate a patrilineal hierarchy and manage ideals regarding family happiness by practicing tình cảm. this capacity is recognized as a critical means by which women can attempt to prevent the “rice” from “boiling” (sôi); or more precisely hinder a male partner from being “enraged”/“mad” (nổi khùng) and maybe even from becoming violent (rydstrom, b, , , ). hierarchies, energies, and powers composed of gendered energies, the phenomenological body interlocks with a patriliny, which creates “openings towards violence [and] towards misogyny” (connell, , pp. - ). this was illustrated by a thinh tri health care clinic worker in northern vietnam, who explained that “due to their hot character and hard work it is normal that men get angry”. “hot characters” contain “hot” blood which produc- es “strength” (mạnh mẽ) and “energy” (năng lượng) in men and boys. this does not only mean that they might be aggressive but even could “explode” (hăng lên) (see also, dao, hoang, & kanthoul, ; general statistics office of vietnam, ; horton & rydstrom, ; martin, ; pells, wilson, & nguyen, ; yount et al., ). in a similar vein, a thinh tri nurse explained that “women should hold back themselves and … not explode”. if women were exploding, a conflict could easily escalate, and women are therefore expected to remain calm, or stay cool, if a partner becomes hot tempered. not all women, however, are willing to cool down a “hot” partner by “enduring suffering”. bian, a young woman in her early twenties from northern quang vinh, for example, related how throughout her childhood she had witnessed violent encounters between her parents, thus remembering that, my father had extramarital affairs and my mother knew about it. when she complained, my father beat her. he did so instead of explaining and talking with her. but women talk too much. for instance, my mother brought up his extramarital affairs even if we were having a good time. women often criticize [their husband]”. even though bian emphasized that she finds men’s violence against women unac- ceptable, she also held her mother accountable for the repeated incidents of violence between her parents. placing the responsibility for the violence to which women are subjected on the abused woman is not uncommon, as indicated by a male interviewee in the keeping silent is dying study, who suggested that “women are often mean and often fuss about small things. that is why violence occurs. the main cause of conflict in the family is women” (general statistics office of vietnam, , p. ). what is criticized as a woman’s “grumbling”/“complaning” (càm ràm) attitude frequently is referred to as a reason for men’s violence against their female partners. in this vein, hiep from northern vietnam stated that women do not understand their husband this statement resembles the confucian dictum “showing respect for the superior and self-denial for the inferior” (biết kính trên nhường dưới). | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence because they “have big mouths and talk too much” (see also, dao et al., ; horton & rydstrom, ; rydstrom, b, , ; trinh, ; yount et al., ). women who do not act with tình cảm tend to be looked down upon as incapable of balancing a “hot” partner by “cooling” him down appropriately. such assumed femi- nine ‘flaws’ are frequently taken as justification for a man’s beating of his wife by men, women, and even by official representatives. thus, a woman who “grumbles/com- plains” would often be condemned in the vietnamese context for her lack of ability to stimulate harmony in the household by showing tình cảm appropriately (rydstrom, a, b, ; see also, kwiatkowski, , ; yount & krause, ). oanh, a woman in her late thirties who lives in central coastal long lanh, recalled an incident of abuse which she at the same time minimized by saying, “i was beaten once by my husband because i complained. it was not a big thing. he was drunk and hot-tempered and then he beat me”. oanh’s comment illuminates how a man’s vio- lence against his female partner is downplayed and thereby serves to surreptitiously transform abuse into a common and even expected male practice. giang, who also lives in long lanh and is about twice as old as oanh, related in a similar vein how she had begun to “grumble/complain” due to the extramarital affairs of her husband and how the confrontations had resulted in him abusing her. on these occasions, giang would flee to her parent’s place together with the couple’s children, but she would always return. after a particularly terrifying incident of abuse, giang and her children, however, left and stayed to reside with her parents (rydstrom, ). uyen, who lives in the same community as oanh and giang, belongs to the same age bracket as oanh. independently of oanh and giang, uyen reiterated ideas about how women’s behavior fuels conflict and violence in a marriage. she thus explained that her husband’s violence had been spurred by what she saw as her “grumbling/ complaining” behavior and “provoking” (khiêu khích) attitude (nguyen & rydstrom, ; rydstrom, , ). after getting married, uyen’s husband became violent, and she was, as she remembered, “hit many times”. also, uyen would escape her hus- band’s violence by fleeing to her parents’ home where she would find safety. uyen, however, was determined to divorce her abusive husband and therefore gathered information from the authorities about how to initiate a divorce process. the divorce plans, though, were put to rest due to the advice of close kin and neighbors, who suggested that she should not leave her husband but rather stay for the sake of their children. blaming the survivor of violence for the abuse appears as a strategy, albeit self-destructive, which is employed by women to cope with the forces of a machinery of male violence and the ways in which it determines life as a chronic crisis. crisis of chronicity interrupted while men’s violence against women in the vietnamese context has mainly been restricted to the realm of the household, recent reports indicate a surge in the abuse of women in public spaces. recordings shared on social media have caused alarm in vietnamese society, including a clip which showed how a woman was beaten by her husband in central hanoi, in close proximity to a cafeteria, and another one from the international airport in hanoi, which displayed how two men attacked a young woman on vietnamese women’s day ( october). another video clip showed how aseas ( ) | helle rydstrom a mixed group of young boys and girls were beating up girls on the streets in the province of nghe an and in ho chi minh city (i.e., former saigon). hoang giang son of the institute for studies of society, economy, and environment (isee), a hanoi- based ngo, concluded in connection with these incidents that “violence against humans, particularly against women, is escalating in our society” (khuyên, ). conveying footage of male-to-female violence to a global audience through social media platforms elucidates how secondary virtual types of abuse and humiliation can be added to first grade direct physical violence. social media, however, at the same time has become an important means for international and national agencies as well as ngos devoted to prevent men’s violence against women in the domestic and public spheres. social media offer a platform from which agencies and organizations can provide information to abused women to break their isolation and escape a crisis of chronicity. organizations and agencies such as the vietnam women’s union have set up hotlines and platforms such as the facebook page called “families without violence” (gia đình không bạo lực) to reach out to women to inform them about anti-violence legislation, rights, and programs aimed at combatting men’s violence against women (domestic violence in vietnam, ; see also, rydstrom, , ). as part of the international november campaign “say no – unite to end violence against women” launched by the un women, various activities have been initiated in vietnam to mark opposition to men’s violence against women. in , for example, vietnamese ngos and institutes dedicated to mobilizing resistance against male-to-female violence organized events, lectures, and meetings as part of the national campaign “say no to violence” (nói không với bạo lực). the “say no – unite to end violence against women” annual campaign has gained traction and broad public support in vietnamese society. many women – and men – wear clothes in the campaign’s signature color orange when attending demonstrations and activi- ties to end men’s violence against women during the campaign month. the following year, in , in connection with the un women “say no – unite to end violence against women” campaign, a large event called “zumba festival: love’s steps” was held in the thong nhat park in hanoi. thousands of girls and women participated in the demonstration, which encouraged female survivors to voice their experiences of male violence as a way of ending the silencing of male-to-female abuse. such initiatives have become recurrent annual activities, as illustrated by the #hearmetoo campaign of (doan, ). in response to the days of activism against gender-based violence campaign , the un secretary-general’s unite orange the world campaign, the un women, and the un’s gender thematic group, social media and videos were used to disseminate information across the country about men’s violence against women. a national workshop on gender-based violence prevention and safe city models was organized by the un women and the department of labor, invalids, and social affairs (molisa) in ho chi minh city to develop strategies aimed at tackling the problem of men’s violence against women in the zumba event was launched by the center for studies and applied sciences in gender, family, women, and adolescents (csaga) in collaboration with the united nations population fund (unfpa), department of gender equality under the ministry of labor, invalids and social affairs (molisa), and ho chi minh communist youth union in hanoi amongst others. even international ngos and agencies supported the initiative (dance campaign aims to stop, , december ). | aseas ( ) machinery of male violence the home as well as in urban spaces. the workshop selected “safer cities for women and girls” as the action theme of the vietnam women’s union for the year of , which might imply that the movement is driven by women located in the cities. while the majority of vietnamese women live in the countryside, bridging between experiences from urban and rural spaces plays an important role in promulgating the impact and success of the anti-violence campaigns (united nations women, ). conclusions masculinized social structures and the ways in which these create a framework for the production of systemic harm are reciprocally connected with male-to-female violence perpetrated on the ground. in a patrilineally organized universe, where women are rendered inferior and men superior, the machinery of male violence is enforced to multiply strength in highly gendered and sexualized ways (arendt, ). the design of repertoires, techniques, and tools implemented by men to harm a female partner is inseparable from masculinized hierarchies, privileges, and powers, as configured in the vietnamese context. the violence imposed by a man upon his female partner is shaped in specific encounters, i have argued, when a perpetrator’s essentialist and stereotypical fantasies about a woman’s embodied properties (i.e., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, class, and bodyableness) degrade the female phenomenological body into a corporeal object of abuse through processes of transformation between the first, second, third, and fourth body typologies. the male machinery of violence attempts to reduce the female body into “naked life” as the result of a process of what i have referred to as “thingification”. a battered woman is in this sense dehumanized and constrained to a “zone of excep- tion” (agamben, ) where the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity (mbembe, ; rydstrom, , , ). repeated violence inflicted by a man upon his female partner confines life to a tempo-spatial “interregnum” (gramsci, ); into a “crisis of chronicity” (vigh, ), which impedes agency and the possibilities for positive change. a “poisonous knowledge” about the realities of violence and the perils of harm thus holds power to ruin the very foundation of the lifeworld of an abused woman (stoler, ). yet, women do not passively comply with a violent male partner. as i have discussed, abused women resist and counter the violence to which they are subjected and the pain and damage they have experienced. vietnamese agencies as well as national and international organizations offer support to abused women and raise public aware- ness about a severe and dehumanizing problem that has been, and even continues to be, silenced. in dealing directly with the ways in which a gendered and sexualized machinery of male violence manufactures a crisis of chronicity, organizational initia- tives can provide critical support to abused women. empowered women – anywhere in the world – might be able to eschew the stillness imbued in a crisis of chronicity defined by male violence. “making time moving again” means to turn a crisis of per- manency into a bracket which eventually could provide a path to positive change; 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( ). men’s perpetration of intimate partner violence in vietnam: gendered social learning and the challenges of masculinity. men and masculinities,  ( ), - about the author helle rydstrom is a professor at the department of gender studies, lund university, sweden, specialized in the anthropology of gender in asia. her research examines the ways in which gender informs violence, (in)security, and precariousness in social life and in sites of conflict and war, on the one hand, and how gendered power relations and hierarchies frame sociali- zation, sexuality, and education, on the other. she recently edited a volume (with catarina kinnvall) climate hazards, disasters, and gender ramifications (routledge, ). ► contact: helle.rydstrom@genus.lu.se acknowledgements the projects for this article have been generously funded by the swedish international development cooperation agency (sida), the swedish research council (vetenskapsrådet), and the swedish foundation for humanities and social sciences (riksbankens jubileumsfond). i greatly appreciate the support offered on various occasions in connection with the conduction of these research projects by dinh hoai, ho ha, hoang n. an, luong a. ngoc, ngo huong, nguyen hanh, nguyen mai, nguyen h. minh, nguyen t. t. huong, pham hoan, thanh b. xuan, tran t. c. nhung, and tran t. k. thuan. my gratitude goes to those who have shared their experiences with me, but who cannot be mentioned for anonymity reasons. ongoing communication with don kulick, nguyen-vo thu-huong, nguyen t. t. huong, jeff hearn, and members of the pufendorf institute for advanced studies theme on crisis, which i am coordinating, has been inspiring for my analysis. many thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments and to the editors of this special issue for all their work. < dc d c a c f e > 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 서 론 연구의 필요성 성(性)에 한 개방 가치 과 문화 유입은 우리사회의 성 인식에 많은 변화를 가져왔다. 이는 자아정체성을 확립해나가 는 학생에게도 향을 미쳐서 그들의 성역할 혼돈으로 이어 지면서 많은 사회 문제로 나타나기도 한다(choi & ha, ; lee, kim, & choi, ). 우리나라 학생들은 학입 시 주의 교육에 집 되어 오다가 학입학 이후 갑자기 개 방 인 성 문화에 노출되는 경향이 높다. 이는 간혹 이성교제 에 심이 높아지는 시기의 학생들에게 한 성보호 제도 를 마련해주지 못한 채 성에 한 정보를 무분별하게 수용하 여 다양한 신체 혹은 정신 건강문제를 야기할 수도 있다 (kim, moon, & kang, ; shim, ). 한편 년 월 미국 화계에서 시작된 미투운동(metoo movement)이 한국에서는 년 월 한 여성 법조인이 성폭 력 실상을 고발하면서 소셜네트워크서비스(social network service, sns)를 통해 빠르게 확산되었다. 성폭행이나 성희롱 을 청산하기 한 해시태그운동인 미투 캠페인으로 말미암아 성 자기주장에 한 심도 높아지게 되었다. 성 자기주장이 란 원치 않은 성 인 상황에서 자신의 거부 의사를 표 하여 자신 성 건강을 보호하는 것을 기본으로 한다(choi, ). 이 에 더하여 성 상황에서 균형 인 자신의 감정, 자부심, 사회 으로 당당함을 추구할 수 있는 자율성이 내포된 개념이므로 성 자기주장을 증진시킴에 있어서 자기주장은 필수 요소이 며, 의사소통기술과 성 자기결정권을 아우른다고 할 수 있다 (kim & park, ; kim et al., ; lee & lee, ). 성에 한 가치 을 정립한 사람이라 하더라도 친 한 계에서 한 성 자기주장에 어려움이 있다면 후회나 자아존 감 하 등의 부정 정서를 경험할 가능성 한 높다(kim et al., ). 원치 않은 성 인 상황에서 거부 의사를 표 할 수 있는 성 자기주장은 성 의사소통의 행동 략이기도 하기 때문에 (kim, ), 일반 인 상황에서의 자기주장능력이 성 상황 에서 거부의사를 표 하는 성 자기주장과 무 하지 않을 수 있다(kim et al., ). 그런데 성폭력 피해자가 피해사실을 주변에 알리는 경우는 약 % 수 이다(statistics korea, ). 이를 통해 나머지 더 많은 사람들이 성폭력 피해와 련해서 는 자신의 입장을 충분히 표 하지 못하고 있음을 짐작할 수 있다. 한 통 인 한국사회의 가부장 특성은 여성으로 하 여 상 방의 기분에 민감하게 반응하는 것을 미덕으로 수용 하도록 하 다. 이와 같은 사회 분 기는 자기표 을 억제하 는 사회화된 언어와 메시지 속에서 타인은 물론 자신에게도 명확한 자기주장을 하기 어렵게 만든다(jang, cha, & lee, ). 따라서 이미 알려진 일반 인 상황에서의 자기주장이나 의사소통 능력 이외에도 성 자기주장 진에 보다 효과 인 의사표 략을 탐색할 필요가 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 성 자기주장이 필요한 상황에서는 문제해결을 한 보다 기능 이고 도 인 표 방식이 요할 것으로 상되어 발언행 한국간호교육학회지 제 권 제 호, 년 월 j korean acad soc nurs educ vol. no. , - , november, https://doi.org/ . /jkasne. . . . 간호대학생의 발언행동, 자아존중감과 성지식이 성적자기주장에 미치는 영향* 우 정 희 )․박 주 ) 주요어: 간호대학생, 자아존중감, 성건강 * 이 논문은 년도 정부(미래창조과학부)의 재원으로 한국연구재단의 지원을 받아 수행된 기 연구사업임(nrf- r c b ). ) 건양 학교 간호 학 부교수 ) 건양 학교 간호 학 부교수(교신 자 e-mail: jypark@konyang.ac.kr) received: july , revised: september , accepted: september , 우 정 희 외 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 동을 통해 그 가능성을 악하고자 한다. 발언행동은 자신의 생각, 의견, 정보와 아이디어를 자발 으로 표 하는 극 이 고 건설 인 제안 행 에 속하기 때문이다(lepine & van dyne, ). 발언행동은 기존의 에 도 하고 항하는 속 성도 내포하고 있어 잠정 인 손해나 험을 감수해야하는 상 황 속에서의 도움행동의도와도 련이 있었고(woo & park, ), 간호 학생의 임상수행능력의 측요인이기도 하 다 (park, woo, & kim, ). 그러므로 간호 학의 교육과정 속 에 강조되고 있는 의사소통역량이 발언행동과 같은 극 인 의사표 의 형태로 성 자기주장에 향을 주는 요인일 가능 성을 확인하여 교육방향을 재고하는데 기 자료로 활용하고자 한다. 자아존 감은 자신을 가치 있다고 생각하고 존 해주는 자 신에 해 느끼는 태도로써 자아존 감이 높은 사람은 건 하 고 만족한 인간 계를 유지하며 책임 있는 행동을 함으로써 자신과 타인에게 정 인 향을 주게 된다(satir, ). 자아 존 감은 청소년 학생의 성 자기주장과 련성이 높은 요인(kim & park, ; lee, )이기도 하여 자아존 감이 낮은 청소년은 성 자기주장 한 낮아, 본인이 원치 않는 성 경험에 취약할 수도 있다(lee, ). 성별에 따라서는 남 자 학생의 경우가 여자 학생에 비해 자아존 감과 성 자 기주장에서 좀 더 강한 상 계를 보이기도 하며 성별 간 차 이가 있을 수 있음을 보여주기도 하 다(kim & park, ). 하지만 보편 으로 자아존 감은 자신을 보호하는 자기주장 방어 기술로의 가치가 있어 보이므로(lee, ), 간호 학 생의 자아존 감을 높이는 략이 성 자기주장 능력을 향상 시키는 것과 계가 있는지 악할 필요가 있다. 일부 선행연구에서는 성에 일반 인 지식과 임신·성병 등과 같은 정보를 많이 할수록 성 자기주장이나 성 자율성이 높은 편임을 보여주고 있다(choi & ha, ; kim et al., ). 그러나 선행연구(kang, ; shim, ; whang, )의 결 과는 지속 으로 성교육에 노출되어 왔다 하더라도 학생들 의 역별 지식수 은 다양하여 일 성을 제시할 수 없는 실 정이다. 일 연구에는 성폭력과 성역할 역에 한 이해수 이 높았다(shim, ). 따라서 이러한 들이 최근 반 인 성 교육 양상의 변화나 공에 따라 성 련 지식을 교과목을 통 해서도 습득하게 되면, 성지식이 성 자기주장에 다르게 작용 하게 되는지 확인하고 간호 학생의 성 자기주장에 미치는 향요인을 발언행동과 자아존 감을 통합 으로 악하여, 간 호교육방향을 정교하게 정립하는데 기 자료를 제공하고자 한다. 연구 목 본 연구의 목 은 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성 지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향을 악하기 함이며 구 체 인 목 은 다음과 같다. ∙ 상자의 일반 특성, 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식 성 자기주장의 정도를 악한다. ∙ 상자의 일반 특성에 따른 성 자기주장의 차이를 확인 한다. ∙ 상자의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식과 성 자기주장 간 의 상 계를 확인한다. ∙ 상자의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향을 확인한다. 연구 방법 연구 설계 본 연구는 간호 학생의 성지식, 자아존 감과 발언행동이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향을 확인하는 서술 조사연구이다. 연구 상 본 연구의 연구 상은 d시와 g시 소재 간호학과 재학 인 학생으로 연구의 목 을 이해하고 연구 참여에 동의한 학생을 상으로 편의표집 하 다. 표본 수 산정은 효과크기 . , 유의 수 . , 검정력 % 주요 측변수 개를 기 으로 하 을 때 명이 산출되었고 약 %의 탈락률을 고려하여 명을 상자로 선정하 다. 이 불성실한 응답 부를 제외 하고 최종 부를 분석에 사용하 다. 연구 도구 본 연구의 도구는 구조화된 설문지를 사용하여 일반 특성 개 문항, 발언행동 개 문항, 자아존 감 개 문항, 성지식 개 문항과 성 자기주장 개 문항으로 총 문항으로 구성 되어 있다. ● 발언행동 발언행동은 van dyne과 lepine ( )이 개발한 친사회 발언(pro-social voice) 문항과 farrell ( )의 evln (exit, voice, loyalty and neglect) 모형에서 사용한 발언 문항을 chung ( )이 문항으로 통합한 도구를 학생에 맞게 수정 보완한 도구(park et al., )를 사용하 다. 본 도구는 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 likert식 척도로 ‘ 그 지 않다’ 에서 ‘매우 그 다’ 으로 채 하며 수가 높을수록 발언행동 수 이 높음을 의 미한다. park 등( )의 연구에서 cronbach's α=. 이었으며 본 연구의 cronbach's α=. 이었다. ● 자아존 감 본 연구에서 자아존 감은 rosenberg ( )가 개발한 자아 존 감 척도(self-esteem scale)를 lee와 won ( )이 번역한 척도를 사용하여 측정하 다. 이 척도는 정 자아존 감 문항과 부정 자아존 감 문항 등 총 문항이며 likert 척도로 이루어져 있다. ' 그 지 않다‘ 에서 '매우 그 다’ 이며, 부정 문항은 역으로 환산하 으며 총 수가 높을수록 자아존 감이 높음을 의미한다. lee와 won ( )의 연구에서 신뢰도 cronbach's α=. 으며, 본 연구의 cronbach's α=. 이었다. ● 성지식 성지식은 kye ( )가 개발하고 whang ( )이 수정·보완 한 도구를 사용하 다. 하 역으로는 성 생리( 문항), 성 건강( 문항), 피임( 문항), 성폭력 성역할( 문항)으로 구 성되어 총 문항이다. 정답은 , 오답은 으로 처리되며 에서 으로 수가 높을수록 성에 한 지식정도가 높 음을 의미한다. polit, beck과 owen ( )의 공식에 따라 liket 척도를 활용하여 item-level content validity (i-cvi) 를 구하 다. 간호 학 인의 교수로부터 평가된 i-cvi 평균 값은 . 이었다. ● 성 자기주장 성 자기주장은 ha, jun, yoo, lee와 cho ( )가 개발한 성발달 평가척도의 하 요인인 성 자기주장요인 척도를 사용 한다. 이 척도의 문항은 총 개이며, 청소년들의 이성교제나 이를 통한 성행동의 자기결정권, 성 련 행동의 합의 인 의사 결정능력, 효과 인 의사소통과 자기주장 내용을 묻는 문항들 로 구성되어 있다. 각 문항은 likert 척도로 이루어져있으 며, ' 그 지 않다 에서 '매우 그 다‘ 으로 수가 높을수록 성 자기주장이 높음을 의미한다. ha 등( )의 연 구에서 cronbach's α=. 이다. 본 연구에서 cronbach's α=. 이 었다. 자료 수집 방법 윤리 고려 본 연구는 설문조사 상 간호학과의 사 기 동의서를 첨 부하여 소재 학기 의 생명윤리 원회(institutional review board, irb)의 심의를 거쳐 연구승인(irb no. - - )을 받은 후 진행하 다. 자료수집 기간은 년 월 일부터 월 일까지 이루어졌다. 학과 게시 에 공고 문을 게시하여 상자를 모집하며, 자발 으로 찾아오는 상 자에 한하여 연구자로부터 교육받은 연구보조자가 연구 상 자에게 연구의 목 설문 내용에 하여 설명하고 서면동 의서를 작성한 상자에게 설문지를 직 배부하 다. 연구의 목 과 취지에 한 내용 자료의 익명성과 비 보장, 사생 활 보장, 연구의 참여 과정에서 언제든지 원하지 않을 경우 단할 자유가 있으며, 이로 인한 어떠한 불이익도 없음에 한 내용 등을 설명하고 추가로 같은 내용을 설명문을 제시하여 필요 시 확인할 수 있도록 하 다. 작성한 설문지는 개인정보 식별이 불가능한 수거박스에 본인이 직 제출하도록 하고 연 구보조자가 최종 수거하여 연구자에게 달하 다. 설문에 참 여한 상자에게는 소정의 답례품을 제공하 다. 자료 분석 방법 본 연구에서 수집된 자료는 spss statistics . 로그램을 이용하 으며 구체 인 통계 분석방법은 다음과 같다. ∙ 상자의 일반 특성, 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식과 성 자기주장은 빈도, 백분율, 평균과 표 편차로 산출하 다. ∙ 상자의 일반 특성에 따른 성 자기주장의 차이는 t-test, anova로 분석하 다. ∙ 상자의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식 성 자기주장 간 의 상 계는 pearson’s correlation coefficient로 분석하 다. ∙ 상자의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향을 분석하기 해 stepwise multiple regression으 로 분석하 다. 연구 결과 상자의 일반 특성 일반 특성에 따른 성 자기주장의 차이 연구 상자의 평균연령은 . ± . 세이며 성별은 여자가 명( . %), 학년은 학년과 학년이 각각 명( . %), 명( . %)으로 다소 많았다. 종교는 없다고 응답한 상자가 명( . %), 성격은 자신을 외향 이라고 생각하는 상자가 명( . %)로 다소 많았으며, 가족과 동거 여부에서는 부분 가족과 떨어져 자취나 기숙사에 거주하는 경향을 보 다( 명, . %). 이성교제 경험이 있는 경우가 더 많았지만( 명, . %), 키스 이상의 신체 경험을 묻는 질문에는 없다 고 응답한 상자가 약간 더 많았다( 명, . %). 가정경제수 은 간 정도( 명, . %), 아버지의 개방성에 한 지각정 우 정 희 외 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 도는 높거나 간 정도라 느끼는 상자가 각각 명( . %), 어머니의 개방성에 한 지각정도는 높다고 보는 경우가 명 ( . %)로 가장 높게 나타났다(table ). 본 연구 상자의 일반 특성에 따른 성 자기주장의 차이 는 거주형태에서 가족과의 동거를 하고 있는 상자와 자취나 기숙사생활을 하고 있는 상자에서 성 자기주장에 하여 통계 으로 유의한 차이가 있는 것으로 확인되었다(t= . , p=. ). 그 외 개인 특성인 성별(t= . , p=. ), 학년(t= . , p=. ), 종교(t=- . , p=. ), 성격(t= . , p=. ), 이성교제 경험(t=- . , p=. ), 키스 이상의 신체 경험(t=- . , p=. )을 비롯하여 가족 특성의 지각된 아버지의 개방성 (t= . , p=. ), 지각된 어머니의 개방성(t= . , p=. )은 성 자기주장에 하여 통계 으로 유의한 차이를 보이지 않았 다(table ). 상자의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식과 성 자기주장 정도 본 연구 상자의 발언행동은 만 . ± . 정도 인 것으로 나타났다. 자아존 감은 . ± . , 성지식은 만 . ± . 이었다. 성 자기주장은 만 . ± . 이었다(table ). 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식과 성 자기주장의 계 table . differences in sexual assertiveness according to the general characteristics of participants (n= ) variables categories n (%) or mean±sd sexual assertiveness mean±sd t/f (p) age (year) . ± . gender male ( . ) . ± . . (. ) female ( . ) . ± . grade st ( . ) . ± . . (. ) nd ( . ) . ± . rd ( . ) . ± . th ( . ) . ± . religion yes ( . ) . ± . - . (. ) none ( . ) . ± . personality extroverted ( . ) . ± . . (. ) introverted ( . ) . ± . residence type live with family ( . ) . ± . . (. ) dormitory/living alone ( . ) . ± . dating experience yes ( . ) . ± . - . (. ) none ( . ) . ± . physical contact (more than kiss) yes ( . ) . ± . - . (. ) none ( . ) . ± . economic status of parents high ( . ) . ± . . (. )middle ( . ) . ± . low ( . ) . ± . father’s openness high ( . ) . ± . . (. )average ( . ) . ± . low ( . ) . ± . mother’s openness high ( . ) . ± . . (. )average ( . ) . ± . low ( . ) . ± . table . level of voice behavior, self-esteem, sexual knowledge and sexual assertiveness (n= ) variables mean±sd min max voice behavior . ± . . . self-esteem . ± . . . sexual knowledge . ± . . . sexual assertiveness . ± . . . 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 본 연구 상자의 성 자기주장에 하여 자아존 감(r=. , p<. )과 발언행동(r=. , p=. )은 각각 통계 으로 유의한 양의 상 계를 보 다. 한 자아존 감은 발언행동과도 유 의한 양의 상 계(r=. , p<. )를 보 다. 성지식은 발언행 동, 자아존 감 성 자기주장에 하여 통계 으로 유의한 상 계는 확인되지 않았다(table ). 상자의 성 자기주장에 향을 미치는 요인 연구 상자의 성 자기주장에 미치는 련요인을 규명하기 하여 단계 다 회귀분석을 실시하 다. 오차항의 등분산성 과 정규성을 검토하기 해 표 화 잔차 정규 p-p도표 (probability plot)를 확인한 결과 정규분포를 보 고, 잔차 산 도 상 등분산이 확인되었으며 잔차의 독립성 검토를 해 durbin-watson값을 확인한 결과 . 로 에 가까워 자기상 성은 없는 것으로 나타났다. 한 독립변수 간 다 공선성을 확인한 결과 회귀분석의 공차한계(tolerance)는 . , 분산팽창 지수(variation inflation factor, vif)는 . 으로 독립변수 간 다 공선성은 없음을 확인하 다. 따라서 본 연구모형은 단계 다 회귀분석을 한 가정을 충족하 다. 간호 학생의 성 자기주장에 향을 주는 요인을 확인하기 하여 일반 특성에서 통계 으로 유의한 차이를 보 던 가 족과의 동거 여부를 악하는 거주형태와 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식 요인을 독립변수로 하여 단계 다 회귀분석을 수 행한 결과, 자아존 감(β=. , p<. )이 유의한 것으로 나타났 으며, 자아존 감이 높을수록 성 자기주장 정도가 높았다 (f= . , p<. ). 간호 학생의 성 자기주장에 한 자아존 감의 설명력은 % 다(table ). 논 의 본 연구는 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식 성 자기주장 정도를 악하고 성 자기주장의 향요인을 확 인하기 해 시도되었다. 본 연구결과 간호 학생의 발언행동은 만 에 . 으 로 이는 일 간호 학생의 발언행동 결과(park et al., )인 . 과 약간 높거나 비슷한 수 이었다. 비슷한 수 의 발언 행동 수 을 보인 것은 교육과정 내 의사소통을 포함하고 있 는 간호학을 공하는 면에서 기인한 유사 일 수 있다. 하지 만 일반 학생이 보여 . 보다 낮은 수 (lee & park, )인 면에서는 추가 인 심이 요구된다. 선행연구에서 발 언행동은 간호 학생 임상수행능력 측요인이었으며(park et al., ), 괴롭힘을 당하는 동료에게 도움행동을 할 수 있는 의지에도 향을 미치는 요인이기도 하 다(woo & park, ). 간호사에게는 때로 환자 옹호자로서 부서 간 건설 인 의견 교환 능력이 요구된다. 그러므로 의사소통능력을 기반으 로 보다 극 인 의견개진 능력을 함양하기 한 발언행동 역량을 한 교육방향이 검토될 필요가 있다. 자아존 감의 경우 만 의 . 으로 일반 남녀 학생 의 성 자기주장 향요인 연구(kim & park, )에서 보여 환산 수 . 과 . 과 비슷한 수 이고, 여 생의 성 자기주장 향요인 연구(choi, )에서 나타난 . 과 는 약간 높거나 비슷한 수 이었다. 체로 학생의 성 자기 주장과 련이 높은 것으로 생각되고 있는 자아존 감 수 이 비교 높은 수 을 보여 것은 자신이 원하지 않은 성희롱 이나 성폭력 상황에서 자신을 보호할 능력(lee, )이 어 느 정도는 있다고 해석될 수 있어 바람직한 것으로 여겨진다. 본 연구의 간호 학생 성지식 수 은 만 에서 . 수 이었다. 이는 학생 . , 고등학생 . 학 생 . 이로 나타난 연구(whang, )나 보건계열 학생 의 성지식 . (shim, )보다는 다소 높은 수 이라고 할 수 있다. whang ( )은 여학생은 . , 남학생은 . 으 table . correlation between voice behavior, self-esteem, sexual knowledge and sexual assertiveness (n= ) variables voice behavior self-esteem sexual knowledge r (p) r (p) r (p) self-esteem . (<. ) sexual knowledge . (. ) -. (. ) sexual assertiveness . (. ) . (<. ) . (. ) table . influencing factors on sexual assertiveness (n= ) variables b se β t p r adjusted r f p (constant) . . . <. . . . <. self-esteem . . . . <. 우 정 희 외 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 로 여학생이 남학생보다 성지식 수 이 다소 높았는데, 이는 남학생의 비 이 . % 던 shim ( )의 연구에서도 같은 결과로 나타났다. 일반 으로 남학생보다는 여학생에게 성교육 이 강조되고 있는 사회 실을 반 한 결과일 가능성이 있 다. 따라서 선행연구와 비교하여 상 으로 다소 높았던 본 연구 상자의 성지식 수 은 상자가 간호계열 학생이면서 특성 상 여학생이 많았던 이 향을 주었을 것으로 생각된 다. 성교육목 의 성지식을 의도 으로 강조하지는 않지만 학 문 련성과 성별에서 오는 차이를 배제할 수 없을 것으로 보인다. 본 연구 상자의 일반 특성에 따른 성 자기주장의 차이 는 유일하게 주거유형에서 나타났다. 가족과 함께 살고 있는 집단과 혹은 가족과 분리되어 기숙사나 자취를 하고 있는 집 단을 구분하여 보았을 때 가족과 함께 살고 있는 집단이 그 지 않은 집단에 비하여 성 자기주장 정도가 높았다. 성 자기 주장을 할 수 있는 원천이라고 보는 성 자율성에 거주형태 는 유의한 차이가 없었던 반면, 성별, 공, 종교, 성교경험에 따라 차이를 보인 연구와는 다른 결과이다(kim et al., ). 일부 측정이 동일하지 않은 요인을 제외하고도 성별, 연령, 종 교, 성교경험 거주형태에서 다른 결과를 보인 것이다. 이에 성 자기주장에 향을 미치는 일반 특성을 정교하게 구성 하고 다양한 환경의 간호 학생을 상으로 반복연구를 시도 할 필요가 있다. 본 연구 상자인 간호 학생의 성 자기주장에 하여 자아 존 감과 발언행동 순으로 양의 상 계를 보 다. 자아존 감은 일반 학생의 성 자기주장에 있어 련성이 높은 요인 (choi, )이며 특히 남학생이 더 높은 련성을 보 다는 연구(kim & park, )와 낮은 강도(r=. )의 양의 상 성을 제시한 연구결과(choi, )를 지지하 다. 발언행동과 성 자기주장 간 련성을 확인한 연구는 없어 직 비교가 어려워 다르지만 유사성을 가진 자기주장과 의사소통요인으로 살펴보 았다. 일반 학생들의 성 자기주장에 하여 자기주장은 높 은 양의 상 성을 보 다(kim et al., ). 자기주장은 자신 의 감정과 의견을 표 하고 상 방에게 합리 으로 요청하거 나 비합리 인 요청을 거 하는 것 등을 의미하므로 발언행동 과 비교 유사한 개념이라 할 수 있다. 그 외 역기능 인 의 사소통유형들과는 음의 상 성을, 기능 인 의사소통과는 양의 상 성을 보 거나(choi, ), 부모-자녀 간 개방 의사소통 을 하는 경우는 남녀 학생 모두 양의 상 성을, 역기능 의 사소통은 남녀 학생 모두 음의 상 성을 보 고, 성별 간 남 학생이 더 강한 상 성을 보인 결과(kim & park, )와 유 사한 맥락이다. 한편 성지식은 보건계열 학생의 혼 성허용 도에는 음의 상 성(shim, ), 청소년기 상의 성 자율 성과는 양의 상 성(whang, )을 보 던 선행연구들과는 다른 결과라 할 수 있다. 보건계열 공의 특성이 반 된 결과 이거나(kim et al., ) 상의 세분화 정도에 따른 차이 (whang, )에서 기인한 것인지 교육수 과 연령을 세분화 하여 청소년기의 성지식과 성 자기주장과의 련성을 확인하 는 반복연구는 성교육 련 가이드라인을 마련하는데 의미가 있을 것이다. 본 연구 상인 간호 학생의 성 자기주장에 자아존 감만 이 유일하게 향을 미치는 요인인 것으로 확인되었다. 이는 간호학과 여학생의 성 자기주장에 향을 미치는 요인에 자 아존 감이 가장 요한 요인이라는 에서는 일 연구(choi, )와 같은 결과이다. 학생의 성 자기주장에 자기주장이 유의한 측요인이었던 연구(cho & kim, ; kim et al., )에서와 달리 본 연구에서는 발언행동은 측요인에서 배 제되었다. 한편 학생 남학생의 모-자녀 간 개방 역 기능 의사소통, 부-자녀 간 역기능 의사소통, 종교와 자아 존 감이 성 자기주장을 측하 고, 여학생의 경우 자아존 감과 모-자녀 간 개방 의사소통이 성 자기주장을 측하 던 연구(kim & park, )와는 의사소통 련 요인이 포함된 부분은 불일치하 고, 자아존 감은 일치하는 요인이었다. 자 아존 감은 청소년들의 비행행 와 높은 련성을 가지며(lee, ), 폭력을 이는데 정 인 기능도 가능한 것으로 알려 져 있다(reasoner, ). 하지만 성 자기주장에 한 자아존 감의 향은 성별에 따라 다르게 나타날 수도 있기 때문에 (choi, ), 성별을 통제한 반복연구를 통해 신 한 해석이 요구된다. 간호 학생의 경우 의사소통역량을 핵심역량의 하나로 간주 하고 교육과정에 다양하게 포함되어 교육하고, 성지식의 경우 에도 간호학 학습과 더불어 자연스럽게 배양되는 것이므로 부분의 학생들 간 수 차이가 크지 않은 부분이다. 이와 같은 이유 때문에 발언행동이나 성지식이 간호 학생의 성 자기주 장에 향을 미치는지 통계 으로 확인할 수 없었다면 여 히 발언행동이나 성지식은 간호 학생의 성 자기주장 능력에는 잠재 인 힘일 가능성이 있다. 따라서 의사소통능력이나 성지 식 함양은 이미 교육과정에서 다루고 있는 수 에서 유지시켜 나가는 것은 의미가 있을 것이다. 한 높은 자아존 감은 청 소년 학생들에게 다양한 분야에서 정 인 향을 주는 경향을 확인할 수 있었다. 그러므로 교육과정 반에서 다각 인 자아존 감 향상 로그램들이 마련된다면, 의사소통이나 성지식처럼 성교육에 화하는 형식을 갖추지 않아도 성 자기주장 능력에 정 인 향을 발휘할 수 있을 것이다. 본 연구는 간호 학생의 성 자기주장 수 을 강화하기 하여 무엇보다 자아존 감이 요한 요인임을 확인한 것에 의 의가 있다. 그러나 일 지역의 개 학의 간호 학생만을 편의 추출하 으므로 연구결과를 일반화하는데는 제한 이며, 한 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 % 수 의 설명력이므로 해석에 신 을 기하여야 한다. 결론 및 제언 본 연구는 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감, 성지식 성 자기주장과의 련성을 확인하고 성 자기주장에 향을 미치는 요인을 규명하기 해 시도되었다. 연구결과, 간호 학 생의 자아존 감만이 성 자기주장에 유의한 향요인으로 확 인되었다. 따라서 간호 학생의 성 자기주장을 향상시키기 한 교육 로그램은 자아존 감을 증진시킬 수 있는 요인들이 포함되어야 할 것이다.본 연구결과를 바탕으로 다음과 같이 제 언하고자 한다. 첫째, 간호 학생의 성 자기주장의 향요인 은 보다 다양한 요인과 환경을 탐색하여 고려한 연구가 필요 하다. 둘째, 자아존 감은 다양한 결과변수의 설명변수로써 확 인되고 있고, 간호 학생에게 있어 자아존 감을 향상하기 한 노력은 개인이 성장하고 스스로 문제해결을 해나가는 핵심 략이 될 수 있으므로 자아존 감을 향상시킬 수 있는 로 그램개발 연구를 제언한다. references cho, g. y., & kim, y. h. 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( ). the study on sexual knowledge, contraception knowledge and sexual permissiveness in health department college students. asia-pacific journal of multimedia services convergent with art, humanities, and sociology, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /ajmahs. . . . statistics korea ( ). survey of sexual violence in . retrieved from https://meta.narastat.kr/metasvc/index.do?orgid = &confmno= &kosisyn=y van dyne, l., & lepine, j. a. ( ). helping and voice extra-role behaviors: evidence of construct and predictive validity. the academy of management journal, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / whang, i. ( ). a study of korean students' sexual knowledge, self-regulation, attitude ,and their perception of unwed pregnancy (unpublished master's thesis). eulji university, daejeon. woo, c. h., & park, j. y. ( ). mediating effect of voice behavior on relationships between empathy, fairness and intention in helping behavior of nursing students in assumed bullying situations. journal of korean academy nursing administration, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / jkana. . . . 간호 학생의 발언행동, 자아존 감과 성지식이 성 자기주장에 미치는 향 한국간호교육학회지 ( ), 년 월 the influence of voice behavior, self-esteem and sexual knowledge on sexual assertiveness of nursing college students* woo, chung hee )․park, ju young ) ) associate professor, college of nursing, konyang university ) associate professor, college of nursing, konyang university purpose: the study was done to investigate the influence of voice behavior, self-esteem and sexual knowledge on sexual assertiveness of nursing college students. methods: a structured self-report questionnaire was used to measure voice behavior, self-esteem, sexual knowledge and sexual assertiveness. during march, , data were collected from nursing students in d city and g city. data were analyzed using t-test, one-way anova, pearson’s correlation coefficients, and stepwise multiple linear regression with the spss/win . program. results: voice behavior and self-esteem were positively correlated with the sexual assertiveness of participants, while voice behavior was positively correlated with the self-esteem of participants. also, self-esteem was a significant predictor of sexual assertiveness in nursing college students. the predictor explained % of their sexual assertiveness. conclusion: the finding indicates that self-esteem is an important factor for sexual assertiveness of nursing students. it is also expected that self-esteem can further promote their sexual assertiveness. keywords: nursing students, self-esteem, sexual health * this research was supported by basic science research program through the national research foundation of korea (nrf) funded by the ministry of science, ict & future planning (nrf- r c b ). ∙ address reprint requests to : park, ju young college of nursing, konyang university , gwanjeodong-ro, seo-gu, daejeon, , republic of korea. tel: + - - - fax: + - - - e-mail: jypark@konyang.ac.kr letter from america.indd econstor make your publications visible. a service of zbw leibniz-informationszentrum wirtschaft leibniz information centre for economics fredrickson, caroline article — published version the lingering wage gap from rosie the riveter to #metoo intereconomics suggested citation: fredrickson, caroline ( ) : the lingering wage gap from rosie the riveter to #metoo, intereconomics, issn - x, springer, heidelberg, vol. , iss. , pp. - , http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -y this version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/ / standard-nutzungsbedingungen: die dokumente auf econstor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen zwecken und zum privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. sie dürfen die dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. sofern die verfasser die dokumente unter open-content-lizenzen (insbesondere cc-lizenzen) zur verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten lizenz gewährten nutzungsrechte. terms of use: documents in econstor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. you are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. if the documents have been made available under an open content licence (especially creative commons licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu zbw – leibniz information centre for economics letter from america caroline fredrickson, american constitution society for law and policy, washington dc, usa. doi: . /s - - -y the lingering wage gap from rosie the riveter to #metoo during women’s history month, the world war ii image of rosie the riveter is justifi ably cel- ebrated, not only because it captures a fabulous gesture of proud defi ance, but also because it signals the importance of women’s contributions to the u.s. war economy. but when men came home from the war, women were pushed out of the well-paying manufacturing jobs and sent back to the kitchen – or at least to jobs of low pay and little respect. even for women whose paychecks were essential to their families’ incomes, there was no protection against getting fi red simply for being a woman. in her history of women in the american workforce, historian alice kessler-harris comments that “questions the war had brought to the fore – like equal pay, child care, and community centers for wage-earning women – lost immediacy as women faced the reality of poorly paid jobs or none at all.” but despite the hurdles put in their path, women have continued to participate in the workforce – and in the economy – in growing numbers since . a few things remain stubbornly unchanged: affordable child care is non- existent, discrimination endures, and women are still shunted into lower-paying and contingent work. the impact is not just to stunt women’s wages, but to stifl e our economy more generally. for national fi scal health, as well as for women and their families, eliminating the gap between men’s and women’s wages would have a signifi cant and positive impact. economists estimate that bringing women’s wages up to equal men’s would raise women’s earnings by more than %, and family incomes would climb by almost $ , per family annually, or $ . billion nationwide. despite the positive impact, our efforts to address pay disparities remain halting and ineffective. we have all heard the statistic: women earn only % of men’s wages in the united states. while this fi gure represents progress of sorts compared to past decades, much of the increase has come at the top, where high-earning professional women have narrowed the gap slightly. and sadly, women’s wages have gained relative to men’s earnings in large part only because men’s wages have declined. the median wage per hour for women in was . % that of men’s wages. that fi gure rose to . % in , but a quarter of that growth came from men losing ground. in the past decade, women have not made any progress at all, with the wage gap overall remaining stubbornly at %. women of color fare even worse. while white women make % of what all men make and asian women make %, african american women make only % of what all men make and hispanic women just %. while some euro- pean countries have slightly better numbers, overall it is a grim picture. women are found throughout the workforce but are concentrated in the low-wage sector; in fact, women make up % of the low-wage workforce. (the low-wage workforce, or working poor, is defi ned as persons who spent at least weeks in the labor force but whose incomes were nonetheless below the offi cial poverty level.) they are domestic workers, caring for chil- dren and the elderly, cleaning houses, or otherwise serving in someone’s home; they wait ta- bles or act as hostesses in restaurants; they are “independent contractors,” cutting hair and doing makeup and nails, cleaning offi ces and homes, and taking care of lawns and gardens. they work for small businesses as receptionists and secretaries. many of them work part-time jobs. these facts have a growing relevance, because not only is this group already surprisingly large, but these jobs are also the ones more and more people will hold in coming years. projec- tions for job growth forecast that, in the future, we will see the biggest increases in job catego- this paper is adapted from c. f r e d r i c k s o n : under the bus: how working women are being run over, new york , the new press. a. k e s s l e r - h a r r i s : out to work: a history of wage-earning women in the united states, new york and ox- ford , oxford university press, p. . intereconomics | letter from america ries that are low paid and currently dominated by women. an overview of the statistics for the u.s. helps underscore the vital importance of addressing the inequality in women’s wages: • women are now . % of breadwinners or co-breadwinners (co-breadwinners are those who earn at least a quarter of their families’ income). • women are % of minimum-wage workers. (minimum-wage workers are approximately fi ve percent of all workers, and their numbers are growing.) in , . million women earned less than $ per hour. • women are % of tipped employees, including waiters, manicurists and hairdressers. these workers make only $ . per hour before tips. • women are % of personal care aides, a profession expected to grow % from to . within that category, they are % of child care workers and % of home health aides. • women are % of the country’s . million independent contractors. • women are % of part-time workers. in trying to address the lingering pay gap, our fi rst project must be to understand why it is that women are paid so poorly. direct discrimination is responsible for a large share of the wage discrepancy, with a little more than % of the difference in pay not attributable to work ex- perience, education or type of job – basically, employers are paying women less just because they are women. in this moment of #metoo, a vital part of the conversation needs to be about addressing the loss of income women suffer due to sexual harassment in the workplace. ac- cording to equal rights advocates, an advocacy group working for low-wage women, over the course of two years, federal employees lost more than $ . million in wages and took more than hours of leave per year due to sexual harassment, and other research shows that sexual harassment “has negative consequences for workers, including increased job turnover, higher absenteeism, reduced job satisfaction, lower productivity, and adverse health outcomes.” a second drag on women’s wages, besides direct discrimination, is the indirect discrimination that comes from our society undervaluing so-called women’s work – almost half of the wage gap is due to this entrenched occupational segregation, with traditional women’s jobs paying less than men’s jobs, even with comparable education and skills. many women continue to work in fi elds dominated by women workers, fi elds which are paid less than those dominated by men. many of these “traditional” jobs are minimum-wage and subminimum-wage jobs, and women make up the majority of the workforce earning such small wages. this group of workers has so little political power that the u.s. minimum wage remains at historically low levels, and women who earn the subminimum wage paid to tipped employees have their pay stuck at $ . per hour, where it has been since the early s. the economy depends on the labor of women. rising wages for female workers would expand the pie for everyone. but how do we make that happen? of critical importance, we need to beef up enforcement by equal employment agencies. we also need to make it easier for women to sue when subject to pay discrimination and workplace harassment by barring the use of practices like nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration that take away access to the courts and undercut efforts to penalize bad behavior. a higher minimum wage would also help women and their families disproportionately, as would paying comparable wages for jobs of equal value and skills. #metoo registers today because when women do not have economic power and an ability to change jobs easily, sexual predators control their fate – and that hurts all of us. it is time to learn from iceland, which now requires that employers be certifi ed to show they pay fairly or face signifi cant fi nes. the real #metoo should be the understanding that equal wages for women benefi t us all. that is a hashtag we could really celebrate. h. a n t e c o l , d. c o b b - c l a r k : the changing nature of employment-related sexual harassment: evidence from the u.s. federal government, - , in: industrial and labor relations review, vol. , no. , , pp. - , here p. .   open peer review discuss this article  ( )comments research article effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust  reversals due to environmental disturbance [version ; referees: approved, approved with reservations] samira abdulai-saiku ,     akshaya hegde , ajai vyas, rupshi mitra school of biological sciences, nanyang technological university, singapore,  , singapore  equal contributors abstract  the behavior of animals is intricately linked to the environment; abackground: relationship that is often studied in laboratory conditions by using environmental perturbations to study biological mechanisms underlying the behavioral change.   this study pertains to two such well-studied and well-replicatedmethods: perturbations, i.e., stress-induced anxiogenesis and toxoplasma-induced loss of innate fear. here, we demonstrate that behavioral outcomes of these experimental manipulations are contingent upon the ambient quality of the wider environment where animal facilities are situated.  during late   and early  , a building construction projectresults: started adjacent to our animal facility. during this phase, we observed that maternal separation stress caused anxiolysis, rather than historically observed anxiogenesis, in laboratory rats. we also found that toxoplasma infection caused an increase, rather than historically observed decrease, in innate aversion to predator odors in rats.  these observations suggest that effects of stress andconclusion: toxoplasma are dependent on variables in the environment that often go unreported in the published literature. * * *    referee status:   invited referees      version published  jan  version published  dec    report report , charles university injaroslav flegr prague, czech republic , university of melbourne,terence y. pang australia    dec  ,  :  (doi:  )first published: . /f research. .    jan  ,  :  (doi:  )latest published: . /f research. . v page of f research , : last updated: jan https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /f research. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - -    rupshi mitra ( )corresponding author: rmitra@ntu.edu.sg   : conceptualization, investigation, writing – original draft preparation;  : conceptualization, investigation,author roles: abdulai-saiku s hegde a writing – original draft preparation;  : conceptualization, supervision, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review & editing; vyas a mitra : conceptualization, supervision, writing – review & editingr  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests:  abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a and mitra r. how to cite this article: effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust reversals     ,  :  (doi: due to environmental disturbance [version ; referees: approved, approved with reservations] f research ) . /f research. .  ©   abdulai-saiku s  . this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the  ,copyright: et al creative commons attribution licence which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. data associated with the article are available under the terms of the   (cc   .  public domain dedication).creative commons zero "no rights reserved" data waiver  this work was financially supported by ministry of education, singapore (grant rg /  and rg  / ).grant information: the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.    dec  ,  :  (doi:  ) first published: . /f research. . page of f research , : last updated: jan http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . introduction multiple laboratories have reported that stress causes anxiogenesis in rats – . similarly, well-replicated studies indicate that infection of rats with protozoan toxoplasma gondii reduces innate aversion to predator odor – . this report describes our serendipitous observations that the direction for both behavioral changes is intricately dependent on the broader environment where animal facilities are situated. the primary aim of our experiments was to study proximate mechanisms of anxiogenesis and innate aversion in rats. we used routine paradigms of maternal separation and toxoplasma gondii infection that cause anxiogenesis and loss of innate aversion, respectively. however, construction of a building was initiated during the experiment adjacent to the animal holding facility. results from this quasi-experimental change provided us with an unplanned opportunity to study the effects of change in environment on rat anxiety and defensive behaviors. methods animals adult male and female wistar han rats ( to weeks at the start of the experiments) were procured from invivos, singapore. rats were housed in groups of two per cage (males and females were housed separately) with ad libitum access to food and water ( – °c; – % relative humidity; h light-dark cycle with lights on at h). for all tests, animals were allocated to groups in a random manner. experiments were conducted by sa-s and ahn who were blind to group allocations. analysis was done by av who was also blind to group allocations. all procedures were approved by the institutional animal care and use committee of the nanyang technology university. all efforts were made to ameliorate any suffering of animals. none of our procedure involved induction of sustained pain requiring pharmacological interventions. animals were observed daily to confirm lack of sick- ness related behaviors and weighed weekly. the behavior tests do not involve any use of shock or other painful stimuli. the dose of parasites used in this study does not result in weight loss or sickness behavior in this strain of rats. at the end of all experiments, animals used in the toxoplasma infection paradigm were sacrificed by decapitation and their brains were removed and flash frozen. in the case of the stress paradigm, animals were sacrificed by cardiac perfusion using cold phosphate buffered saline (pbs) followed by cold % paraformaldehyde. toxoplasma gondii infection and quantification of aversion to cat odor female rats were either injected with tachyzoites of type prugniaud strain of toxoplasma gondii ( × tachyzoites in µl phosphate buffered saline, i.p.;) or mock injected with the buffer alone between pm and pm. parasites needed for the infection were maintained in vitro in human foreskin fibroblast cultures and were harvested using syringe lysis. behavioral experiments were conducted seven weeks post-infection; a time- window consistent with chronic phase of the infection. aversion to cat odor was quantified in two different manners. for each run of the experiment, there was one control group and one toxoplasma-infected group. fifteen ( ) animals were used in total for experiment ( control, infected) and animals were used in total for experiment ( control, infected). aversion was first quantified in a rectangular arena with two opposite and identical arms ( × cm each), separated by a central part ( × cm in size; white perspex). animals were habituated to the arena for three consecutive days for minutes each day. on the subsequent day, cat odors were presented in one bisect of the maze ( ml each; bobcat urine from maine outdoor solutions, usa). animals were placed in the center of the maze and exploration time in both bisects of the arena was measured for minutes. trials were video recorded with offline analysis conducted using anymaze (stoelting, usa). in this batch of animals, each received µl of buffered saline intraperitoneally thirty minutes before the behavioral test. aversion to cat odor was also quantified in a circular arena that was arbitrally divided into four quadrants. animals were habituated to the arena for three consecutive days for minutes each day. on the subsequent day, cat odor, vanilla essence, water and the bedding from the animal’s home cage were presented in each quadrant of the maze. animals were placed in the center of the maze and exploration time in all quadrants of the arena was measured for minutes. trials were video recorded with offline analysis conducted using anymaze (stoelting, usa). stress paradigm and quantification of anxiety eight week old breeders obtained from invivos were allowed to acclimatize for at least days before setting up breeding pairs (one male and one female per cage). breeding cages were changed once a week as per normal, but with gentle handling of female, in case of pregnancy. once pregnancy was certain (approx. weeks), male was removed. days after breeding pairs were set up (or if visually heavily pregnant), cages were checked daily for litters. day of birth is assigned p . maternal separation was used as the stress model (p -p , daily). animals were used in total; stressed, unstressed. on each of these days, the dam was removed from the cage and placed in a new cage with unsoiled bedding. pups were then retrieved into another cage with unsoiled bedding, transported to a separate room and put on a heating pad for three hours every morning. at the end of the separation period, pups and then dam were sequentially returned to the original soiled cage. also, soiled bedding was changed on postnatal day , and ; by returning pups to a clean cage that had been supplemented with a scoop of soiled bedding and nesting material from the original cage. this practice was repeated on postnatal day if the bedding was considered significantly soiled in case of large litter sizes. pups were weaned on postnatal day . anxiety was quantified when the male pups reached adulthood ( – weeks of age). anxiety was measured using home cage emergence assay (adapted from ) and elevated plus-maze . page of f research , : last updated: jan in the home cage emergence assay, a rat placed in its home cage was transported to a well-lit room and habituated for five minutes. the cage was then left open by removal of the lid. the rat was offered a possibility of emerging from the home cage through a wire grid placed within the cage. the latency of emergence was recorded. emergence was defined when all four limbs of the rat were placed on the grid. trials were terminated at the emergence or at five minutes, whichever occurred earlier. trials were video recorded and scored manually. the elevated plus-maze consisted of a plus-shaped arena with two open ( × cm, cm wall, – lux illumination) and two enclosed arms ( × cm, cm wall). the arena was elevated to a height of cm above the ground. the animal was placed at the center at the start of the trial. exploration in open and enclosed arms was quantified for five minutes each. all experiments for the stress paradigm were done using two groups of mice: stressed and unstressed. statistical analysis the probability of type error was calculated using unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test. the standardized effect size was calculated using cohen’s d ; with values above the magnitude of . interpreted as being of robust scale. negative d values correspond to the comparisons where mean of experimental treat- ment was greater than that of respective controls. mean inter- group difference was also calculated with % confidence intervals. data is graphically presented as mean and standard error of the mean (sem), along with individual values for each animal for each endpoint. number of animals in each experimental group is noted in the figures. all statistical analysis was conducted using graphpad prism. results toxoplasma gondii infection increased aversion to cat odor in the first set of animals, aversion to cat odor was quantified as percentage time in bisect containing cat odor relative to total trial duration. rabbit odor was placed in the opposing bisect as a novel non-predator odor. inter-group differences did not reach pre-determined threshold for statistical significance (figure a; t = . , p = . ). despite the lack of sufficiently low type error, the effect on mean was of robust magnitude (cohen’s d = . ; Δ = - . % with % confidence intervals - . to . %). the maximum of animals from the infected group was below the median of the control animals. the robust effect size and the observation that infected mean was lower than controls in contrast to the multitude of published studies, led us to plan a further experiment to increase the statistical power. in this second set of animals, aversion to cat odor was quantified in a circular arena congruent to the initial design of reported infection effects. one quadrant contained soiled bedding from home cage of the animal, serving as the home base for exploratory sorties. cat odor and a novel vanilla odor were placed in two adjoining quad- rants. the ratio of time spent in cat quadrant relative to sum time spent in both cat and novel odor quadrants was calculated (chance = %). toxoplasma infection, in contrast to earlier observations in the similar design, reduced percentage time spent near cat urine (figure b; t = . , p = . ). the effect of infection on innate aversion was of robust magnitude (cohen’s d = . ; Δ = - . % with % confidence intervals - . to - . %). the maximum of animals from the infected group was again observed to be below the median of the control animals. serological examination confirmed that all animals in the infected groups sustained chronic infection with toxoplasma gondii. figure . toxoplasma gondii-infected female rats showed increased aversion to bobcat odor in two sequential experiments (a and b). ordinate depicts time spent by female rats chronically infected with toxoplasma gondii near bobcat odor. line graphs depict mean and standard error of the mean for control (black) and infected (gray) female rats. *, p < . ; unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test. page of f research , : last updated: jan early life maternal separation stress resulted in anxiolytic behavior in male rats animals subjected to early life maternal separation stress were tested in the elevated plus maze and home cage emergence test to determine the effect of maternal separation on anxiety behavior during adulthood. stressed animals, in contrast to earlier observations in a similar design, exhibited significantly less anxiety compared to unstressed controls. this was evident as increased percentage entries into anxiogenic open arms of elevated plus-maze (figure a; t = . , p = . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was of robust magnitude (cohen’s d = - . ; Δ = . % with % confidence intervals . to . %). the minimum of animals from the stressed group was higher than all but one animal from the unstressed group. experimental treatment did not cause significant differences in number of entries made into non- anxiogenic enclosed arms of the maze (t = . , p = . ). to preclude effects of entries in enclosed arms on open arm exploration, we further conducted a univariate analysis of variance for percentage open arm entries while employing number of enclosed entries as a covariate. this analysis revealed a significant increase in open arm exploration due to the stress independent of inter-group differences in enclosed arm entries (f , = . , p = . ). this is congruent with significant increase in number of head dips made during the trial by stressed animals (t = . , p = . ; Δ = . with % confidence intervals . to . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was also confirmed by home cage emergence test. in this assay, anxiolysis manifests as reduced latency to emerge into a novel environment from home cage. stress significantly decreased the latency of home cage emergence (figure b; t = . , p = . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was also of robust magnitude in this assay (cohen’s d = - . ; Δ = - . s with % confidence intervals - . to - . s). the maximum latency of animals from the stressed group was lower than median latency from the unstressed group. dataset . cat odour avoidance assay http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d percentage time spent exploring the cat odour stimulus by control and toxoplasma-infected rats in both experiment and . figure . early life maternal separation stress resulted in increased anxiolytic behavior in male rats. ordinate depicts number of entries into the open arm relative to total entries in open and enclosed arms of the elevated plus maze (a) and latency to emerge from the home cage into a novel environment (b). line graphs depict mean and standard error of the mean for unstressed (black) and stressed (gray) male rats. *, p < . ; **, p < . ; unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test. page of f research , : last updated: jan http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d dataset . elevated plus maze anxiety test http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d escape latency and percentage open arm entries for stressed and unstressed animals. discussion experimental treatment in the present report caused robust effects, as evidenced by substantial effect size and clear departure of mean differences from the chance. the direction of these effects is in stark contrast to those observed in previous reports , – , – . for example, multiple experiments in several laboratories indicate that chronic toxoplasma gondii infection causes loss of innate fear to predator odor in male and female rats – , . data in the present report, however, argue for a significant increase in innate fear post-infection. similarly, stress-induced anxiogenesis has been reported across several laboratories and several paradigms. the current dataset, in contrast, exhibits significant anxiolysis post- stress. the cause of this discrepancy cannot be ascertained with confidence. in fact, we have observed stress-induced anxiogenesis and the infection-induced loss of fear in the same animal facility and same animal strain before these experiments , – , . the only difference between the experimental circumstances has been a construction project that was ongoing during the present experi- ments. the construction started across the road from the animal facility after our preceding baselines were conducted and during the present period of the behavioral testing. in fact, we observed reversal to toxoplasma-induced loss of fear in female rats in experiments conducted in the animal facility after the cessation of building construction. it remains unclear if the effects of construc- tion related to the change in ambient vibrational environment or some hitherto unknown variable. although the acoustic noise in frequency range audible to humans remained unchanged during the period, we are not confident that the construction did not change the acoustic environment in sub-audible frequencies. it is interest- ing that the effects observed here do not correspond to a simplis- tic notion of greater baseline stress during the period. effects of stress on anxiety are often presented to have an inverse u kind of reaction norm, whereby increasing stress enhances its effects on the behavioral and health parameters – . we observed an anxi- olysis by experimental stress rather than greater anxiogenesis due to the accumulative stress of the treatment and environmen- tal change. thus, the present observations reiterate the often complex interactions between environment and behavior that could impose significant bounds on the interpretation of laboratory experiments. related to this, same transgenic mice are known to exhibit divergent behavioral phenotypes across three experi- mental locations despite careful alignment of experimental protocols . conclusions often, unforeseen changes in the environment near animal facilities can significantly alter the direction of experimental effects in rodent research. this highlights the crucial role of often unreported and unquantified environmental context in the interpretation and replicability of the behavioral data. data availability dataset : cat odour avoidance assay. percentage time spent exploring the cat odour stimulus by control and toxoplasma-infected rats in both experiment and . . /f research. . d dataset : elevated plus maze anxiety test. escape latency and percentage open arm entries for stressed and unstressed animals. . /f research. .d competing interests no competing interests were disclosed. grant information this work was financially supported by ministry of education, singapore (grant rg / and rg / ). the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. references . ashokan a, hegde a, mitra r: short-term environmental enrichment is sufficient to counter stress-induced anxiety and associated structural and molecular plasticity in basolateral amygdala. psychoneuroendocrinology. ; : – . pubmed abstract | publisher full text . hillerer km, neumann id, 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publisher full text . abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a, et al.: dataset in: effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust reversals due to environmental disturbance. f research. . data source . abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a, et al.: dataset in: effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust reversals due to environmental disturbance. f research. . data source page of f research , : last updated: jan http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /schbul/sbl http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /rspb. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /nprot. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.physbeh. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /tp. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /nn. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /nn. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) -x http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /science. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d   open peer review current referee status: version december referee report doi: . /f research. .r  terence y. pang florey institute of neuroscience and mental health, university of melbourne, parkville, vic, australia this is a well-written, clearly presented manuscript describing unexpected behavioural phenotypes of two well-established rodent models which routinely lead to rats having anxiolytic or anxiogenic behaviours. in the field of behavioural neuroscience where robustness of results and reproducibility is vital, the reporting of negative or contrary outcomes remains important. this report raises substantial concern for the rodent research occurring across that time period. it is crucial that universities and research institutes be educated on the impact that infrastructure development has on researchers, and the time and financial costs it imposes on research teams/projects.   in the introduction, which is rather short, it would be useful to include one or two paragraphs referencing evidence that both toxoplasma infection and maternal separation models are prone to environmental modification. one of the included references (koe et al., transl psychiatry  ) is an example of environmental modification of a robust maternal separation-induced adult phenotype. see also sahafi e et al., physiol behav   as another example of an external modifier of anxiety behaviour.   this manuscript is limited in that there is no molecular data to be paired with the interesting behavioural phenotype. a comparison of monoamine-relevant genes ala récamier-carballo s et al., behav pharmacol   would have been ideal. but this can be speculated upon in the discussion. could also mention the involvement of environment-induced epigenetic changes, see mccoy cr et al., eur j neurosci   : dna methylation changes in the hippocampus.   the major shortcoming of this manuscript is that i am unsure about how one would go about quantifying structural disturbances. is it based solely on the unexpected behavioural phenotype observed? or has the phenotypes consistently shifted during the stated period before returning to “normal”? have there been anecdotal accounts of construction noise in the rodent facility? is there any data about building vibrations? (civil engineers would have the equipment to measure structural vibrations).   assuming the significant external source of variability (as compared to a new experimenter who is a inexperienced at handling rodents and conducting the behavioural tests), it would be useful to include litter sizes and m/f sex ratios. is there body weight data in the event that feeding behaviour was also altered?   it is unusual to only present epm data as % entries in open arm. what about total time in open arms as a % of the test duration?   page of f research , : last updated: jan http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .r   % of the test duration?   is it possible to include schematics of the different test arenas for figure  ? do the authors have habituation data (total time spent moving, distance travelled) for odor aversion tests? if the infected rats are anxious, they could be observed to display non- or lesser habituation even at baseline in the absence of a predator odor. if this was the case, it would only serve to strengthen the interpretation. is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? partly is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? partly if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? yes are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? partly are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: referee expertise: rodent behaviour testing, anxiety, stress i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however i have significant reservations, as outlined above. author response   dec  , nanyang technological university, singaporerupshi mitra we thank reviewer for suggestions and comments. this has helped us to improve this manuscript during the revision. we have now submitted version   of this manuscript to the f research. introduction has been modified in version   to include prior work showing that effects of toxoplasma infection and maternal separation are subject to environmental modification (references   through   in the bibliography). we have also revised the discussion to include plausible proximate mechanisms including epigenetic changes and monoamines. please see paragraphs immediately preceding the conclusions. we now return to the reviewer’s comment about ambivalent nature of quantifying structural disturbances. we have indeed observed return to stress-induced anxiogenesis and toxoplasma-induced loss of fear once construction project abated. toxoplasma effects were eventually published (reference   in the revised bibliography; doi:  ). . /j.bbi. . . page of f research , : last updated: jan https://doi.org/ . /j.bbi. . .   toxoplasma-induced loss of fear once construction project abated. toxoplasma effects were eventually published (reference   in the revised bibliography; doi:  ). . /j.bbi. . . same set of experimenters conducted experiments before, during and after the construction project. thus, congruent stress- and infection- effects before and after construction project suggest that the environmental modification brought about by the construction explains atypical effects in the interim. experimental groups were coded during the experiment. for example, in case of toxoplasma infection, experimenter did not know infection status of the individual animals; and groups were merely identified with codes during the statistical analysis. hence we did not notice the reversal until long after the experiment was over, data was analyzed and infection status was confirmed using serology. this precluded systematic investigation of the environmental variables during the period of experiment itself. although the acoustic noise in frequency range audible to humans remained unchanged during the period, we are not confident that the construction did not change the acoustic environment in sub-audible frequencies. similarly we did not have opportunity to measure structural vibrations as the project was finished while we were analyzing the data and confirming group assignments using serology. toxoplasma gondii infection did not cause significant change in body weight of animals ( .  ± . , n =   for control;  .  ±  . , n =   for infected; p =  . ). this information is now included in methods section of the revised manuscript. we have revised the manuscript to include date for percentage open arm time (  <  . ) for epm in figure  . we have also included schematics ofp test arena in revised figure  . please note that this has changed panel number for figures in the results and legends. unfortunately, we did not record videos for habituation sessions. we have earlier shown that toxoplasma infection does not affect locomotion or exploration in open field arena.   no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: december referee report doi: . /f research. .r    jaroslav flegr department of biology, charles university in prague, prague, czech republic the authors present interesting data showing that, most likely, an unknown environmental factor or factors can qualitatively modify the behavioral responses of experimental animals on various standard stimuli (here the maternal separation stress and the   infection), which could result intoxoplasma unexpected results of standard experiments. the methods are clear and with sufficient details described, and the collected data are analyzed, presented and interpreted in a proper way. the authors suggested that the most probable factor that influenced the outputs of their experiments was (acoustical or mechanical) disturbance from a building construction project that had started adjacent to their animal facility during their experiments. this explanation seems to be reasonable, however, it would be a little bit difficult (and expensive) to test its validity. i consider the results (and conclusions) of this study to be not only very interesting, but also very important. it is highly probable that the same or similar phenomena are frequently seen by many researchers, however, they are mostly considered to be just the results of some technical error – “this page of f research , : last updated: jan https://doi.org/ . /j.bbi. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .r http://orcid.org/ - - -   researchers, however, they are mostly considered to be just the results of some technical error – “this new student/technician is really terrible, he certainly confused the labels on the cages/test tubes!”. we can just hope that the publication of the present paper will have the “#metoo effect” – that it will encourage other researchers to publish their own puzzling results. i agree that the inverted-u shape (or u-shape) relations between many physiological variables is mostly responsible for frequently observed opposite reaction of a biological system on the same stimuli. under one situation (e.g., when no building construction project is going on) the background level of stress is low and adding some stress factor, e.g., infecting animals with  , will shift the behavioral responsetoxoplasma toward the maximum of the inverted-u function. under another situation, when the background level of stress is higher (when the building construction project is going on) additional stress (e.g., the infection with  ) will shift the behavioral response behind the maximum of the inverted-u function, whichtoxoplasma will result in an opposite behavioral reaction on the infection. in the review article on the methodological problems of studying the effects of toxoplasmosis using  -human model (flegr,  ), itoxoplasma showed that on genetically polymorphic outbred animals, including humans, the same factor often influences some individuals in one way and another individuals in an opposite way, depending on their (unknown) genotype. very often, we can see that population means of the output variable in the affected individual and in the controls remains the same; however, variance of the output variable in the population of affected individuals grows significantly. for example, comparison of cattell’s  pf personality profiles of women showed that infected women had higher intelligence and lower guilt proneness than  -free women. at the same time, they differed in the variance of four other personality factors,toxoplasma namely protension, surgency, shrewdness and self-sentiment integration (flegr and havlíček,  ). it is therefore very important to study the effects of particular factors not only on population mean of the output variable but also on the variance of this variable. we should never forget that the f-test (or a permutation test performed on squared z- scores) is not just a pesky technique for testing presumptions of parametric statistical tests, but often it can also be an important and powerful tool for detecting biologically relevant effects of the factor under study. exactly the same mechanism can explain why males and females so often react to the same factor in an opposite way. in most animal species, males and females are not same. therefore, many physiological parameters of males and females differ in their (mean) position in relation to the maximum of the inverted-u function. consequently, they will respond to the same factor by the opposite-direction shifts. for example,   of   cattell’s personality factors are shifted in an opposite direction in men and women in reaction to the   infection (flegr  ,  ; flegr  ,  ). similarly, toxoplasma et al. et al. toxoplasma -infected men rate the smell of highly diluted cat urine as more attractive while infected women rate this smell as less attractive than their non-infected peers (flegr  ,  ). it is worthwhile in the context ofet al. the present abdyla-saiku   article to mention that our recent study showed the very opposite pattern,et al. namely higher attractiveness of the smell in the infected women and lower in the infected men, when undiluted cat urine was used as the stimulus (flegr    ). et al. back to the present article. it can be published in its present form. i would just suggest that the authors cite the old study (vyas  ,  ) showing the inverted-u shaped response of infected rats on the smellet al. of cat urine. when describing their experimental setup, the authors should better emphasize the fact that stressed mothers, not stressed pubs were used in all ethological tests. authors should also double-check whether all latin names of species and genera are printed in italic, both in the main text and in the references.  references . flegr j: influence of latent toxoplasma infection on human personality, physiology and morphology: pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. .  ;j exp biol page of f research , : last updated: jan   pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. .  ;j exp biol  (pt  ):  -    |    pubmed abstract publisher full text . flegr j, havlícek j: changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis.folia .  ;   ( ):  -  parasitol (praha) pubmed abstract . flegr j, kodym p, tolarová v: correlation of duration of latent toxoplasma gondii infection with personality changes in women. .  ;   ( ):  -  biol psychol pubmed abstract . flegr j, lenochová p, hodný z, vondrová m: fatal attraction phenomenon in humans: cat odour attractiveness increased for toxoplasma-infected men while decreased for infected women.plos negl .  ;   ( ): e    |   trop dis pubmed abstract publisher full text . flegr j, zitková s, kodym p, frynta d: induction of changes in human behaviour by the parasitic protozoan toxoplasma gondii. .  ;  :  -  parasitology ( pt ) pubmed abstract . flegr j, milinski m, kaňková Š, hůla m, hlavačová j, sýkorová k: effects of latent toxoplasmosis on olfactory functions of men and women.  .  .   biorxiv reference source . vyas a, kim sk, sapolsky rm: the effects of toxoplasma infection on rodent behavior are dependent on dose of the stimulus. .  ;   ( ):  -    |   neuroscience pubmed abstract publisher full text is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? yes is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? yes if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? yes are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? yes are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: referee expertise: evolutionary biology, evolutionary parasitology i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. author response   dec  , nanyang technological university, singaporerupshi mitra we thank reviewer for suggestions and comments. this has helped us to improve this manuscript during the revision. we have now submitted version   of this manuscript to the f research. in the version  , we have included a discussion of non-monotonic response of toxoplasma in the introduction. we would also like to clarify that we tested stressed pups not their mothers. pups were maternally deprived before weaning, allowed to reach adulthood and then tested. page of f research , : last updated: jan http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jeb. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://https://doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.neuroscience. . .   introduction. we would also like to clarify that we tested stressed pups not their mothers. pups were maternally deprived before weaning, allowed to reach adulthood and then tested. this has now been made clear during the revision. we have carefully checked and corrected all latin names.   no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: the benefits of publishing with f research: your article is published within days, with no editorial bias you can publish traditional articles, null/negative results, case reports, data notes and more the peer review process is transparent and collaborative your article is indexed in pubmed after passing peer review dedicated customer support at every stage for pre-submission enquiries, contact   research@f .com page of f research , : last updated: jan ea .indd eri a l auudised eesti arst ; ( ): – kardioloogia k a s . a a s ta m u u d a b h Ü p e r t e n s i o o n i r av i e e s m Ä r k vÄ Ä r t u s i? tabel . soovituslikud vererõhu eesmärkväärtused antihüpertensiivse ravi korral ( ) vererõhu eesmärkväärtus (mm hg) haiged vanus < eluaasta vanus – eluaastat vanus ≥ eluaasta tavapatsiendid < / < b < c suure riskiga patsiendida < < , kui svh, svh suur risk või krooniline neeruhaigusb < kui diabeetc < c a südame-veresoonkonnahaigus (svh), svh suur risk, krooniline neeruhaigus või diabeet. b algul langeta svr < mm hg, kui ravi on hästi talutav, siis < mm hg. c algul langeta svr < mm hg, kui ravi on hästi talutav, siis < mm hg. hüpertensioonimaailmas algas . aasta põneva debatiga antihüper- ten si ivse r av i eesmä rk v ää r t u ste asjus. Ä sja a meer i k a med itsi i n i- assotsiatsiooni ajakirjas jama aval- dat ud a r t i k kel ( ) v i itab v ajadu- sele langetada süstoolset vererõhku noortel patsientidel < mm hg ja keskealistel < mm hg (vt tabel ). nende soov it u s te a lu sek s on uuringu sprint (systolic blood pres- sure intervention trial) tulemused ( ). lisaks ilmus äsja metaanalüüs, mis viitab agressiivsema ravi vajadusele vanemaealistel hüpertoonikutel, et saavutada süstoolse rõhu eesmärk- väärtuseks vähemalt mm hg ( ). seega on tulipunktis küsimus, kas euroopa ja ameerika hüperten- sioonijuhendites peaks lähemal ajal vererõhu eesmärkväärtusi oluliselt vähendama. hÜper tensioonir avi eesm Ärk vÄ Är tus te muutumine viim a se a a s tag a tuleb tunnistada, et vererõhu eesmärk- väärtuste leidmine on küll teadus, aga mitte päris täppisteadus. soovitus- likud väärtused on saadud suurte klii- niliste uuringute põhjal. nendes uurin- gutes on aga osalenud heterogeense vanuse, riskiteguritega, kaasuvate haigustega ja ravirežiimiga patsiendid. on ainult üksikud uuringud, mille esmane eesmärk on võrrelda patsien- tide elulemust erinevate vererõhu eesmärkväärtuste saavutamisel. euroopa hüpertensiooniühingu ( esh ) ja eu roopa ka rd ioloog ide seltsi ( esc) . aasta hüperten- sioonijuhendis ja usa . aasta juhendis olid toodud järgmised vere- rõhu eesmärkväärtused: vererõhku tuleb langetada < / mm hg kõigil hüpertoonikutel ja < / mm hg suure riskiga haigetel (diabeetikutel, kroonilise neeruhaigusega patsien- tidel ja südameinfarkti ning ajuin- farkti põdenutel). need väärtused olid kogu maailmas konsensuslikud kuni . aastani. euroopa hüpertensiooniühingu ja euroopa kardioloogide seltsi . aasta hüpertensioonijuhendis ( ) on süstoolse vererõhu eesmärkväärtused peaaegu kõigil patsientidel < mm hg. juhendites on rõhutatud j-kujulise kõvera esinemist, mis tingib kardio- vaskulaarse suremuse suurenemise liiga madalate vererõhuväär tuste saav utamisel ja seda eriti kaasuva südame isheemiatõvega patsientidel. miks siis kadus ära soovitus lange- tada . tüüpi diabeediga patsientidel süstoolset vererõhku alla mm hg? s e e o n j u h a i ge t e r ü h m , k e l l e l hüpertensioon suurendab oluliselt kardiovaskulaarset riski. peamiseks põhjuseks said accord-bp (action to control cardiovascular risk in diabetes-bp) uuringu tulemused. see oli ulatuslik uuring usas, milles otsiti vastust küsimusele, kas madalama süstoolse vererõhu (< mm hg) saav utamine vähendab kardiovas- kulaarseid sündmusi suure riskiga . tüüpi diabeedi haigetel võrreldes tavalise süstoolse vererõhu eesmärk- väärtusega mm hg. vaatamata ootustele ei näidanud uuring vere- rõhu ulatuslikuma langetamise eelist ( ). peale selle uuringu tulemuste avaldamist . aastal mindi kõigis maailma hüpertensioonijuhendites tagasi < mm hg soovituse juurde. esh ja esc . aasta juhendis on toodud ka diastoolse rõhu eesmärk- väärtus . tüüpi diabeedi patsientidel, milleks on < mm hg. see erines euroopa kardioloogide seltsi südame- veresoonkonnahaiguste (svh) . aasta preventsioonijuhendis toodud eesmärkväärtusest (< / mm hg) ja diastoolse ravieesmärgi debatt esh ja esc . aasta juhendi autorite seas oli pikk ja kirglik (metaanalüüsid näitasid, et optimaalse diastoolse vererõhu tase ravitud diabeetikutel on mm hg). on heameel tõdeda, et uues, . aasta euroopa kardioloo- gide seltsi svh preventsioonijuhendis on . tüüpi diabeedi korral vererõhu eesmärkväärtus ka < / mm hg, seega valitseb euroopas konsensus. Üheks oluliseks kliiniliseks prob- leemiks . tüüpi diabeedi patsientidel (aga ka eakatel ja seega just eriti vanemaealistel diabeetik utel ) on ortostaatiline hüpotensioon. paljudel haigetel, kes saavutavad küll vererõhu eesmärkväärtuse, kui seda mõõde- takse istudes, tekib püsti tõustes ( .– . minutil) liiga väljendunud vererõhu- langus (> / mm hg). accord-bp alauuringus leiti, et ortostaatiline hüpotensioon on . tüüpi diabeedi patsientidel seotud südamepuudulikkuse suurenenud riski ja kardiovaskulaarse suremusega ( ). seega peaksime . tüüpi diabeedi patsientidel alati määrama vererõhku ka seistes. eri a l auudised eesti arst ; ( ): – k a s siiski on Õige vÄide, mida m adal a m, seda parem? aastal lancetis ilmunud enam k u i m i ljon it patsient i hõl ma nud ulatuslik metaanalüüs ( ) näitas, et nii kardiovaskulaarne kui ka üldsuremus v ä heneb kõig is v a nuser ü h mades vähemalt kuni vererõhu väärtuseni / mm hg. see tulemus pani klinitsiste aastateks uskuma, et vere- rõhku tuleb langetada madalaima talu- tava tasemeni, ja oli aluseks „mida mada- lam, seda parem“ kontseptsioonile. uuringus sprint juhuslikustati üle suure kardiovaskulaarse r i sk ig a p at s ie n d i , e t s a a v u t a d a intensiivse rav i rühmas vererõhu eesmärkväärtus < mm hg võrrel- duna standardravi saanud rühmaga (< mm hg). tuleb rõhutada, et . tüüpi diabeediga ja ajuinfarkti põdenud patsiente uuring usse ei kaasat ud. leiti, et intensiivsema raviga kaasnes kardiovaskulaarsete sündmuste ja suremuse riski vähe- nemine. see tulemus avaldati . aasta novembris ja vapustas kogu hüpertensioonimaailma ( ). algas intensiivne arutelu selle üle, kas nende tulemuste alusel peaks muutma vere- rõhu eesmärkväärtusi. eriti nõudsid ameerika Ühend- riikides vererõhu eesmärkväärtuste vähendamist paljud veendunud eriala- liidrid. leiti, et ligikaudu % usa hüpertoonikutest ( , miljonit pat- sienti!) vastavad sprint-uuring u kriteeriumidele ja neid ei ole eetiline ra- vida vanade eesmärkväärtustega ( ). siiski on mitu olulist argumenti, mis räägivad sprint-uuringu tule- muste alusel vererõhu eesmärkväär- tuste < / mm hg vähendamise vastu. peamiseks argumendiks on vererõhu m ää r a m i se me tood i k a sprint-uuringus. kasutati uut metoo- dikat, mida nimetatakse patsiendi määratud kabinetivererõhu kind- la k stegem isek s ( i ngl unattended offi ce blood pressure measurement). see t ä hend ab, e t med it si i n ip er- sonal lahkus ruumist ja minuti pärast mõõtis patsient ise korda järjest oma vererõhku. on leitud, et patsiend i mää rat ud süstoolse vererõhu väärtused on – mm hg madalamad kui praegu standardiks olevatel kabinetimõõtmistel. sellisest mõõtmismeetodist võib saada uus standard tulevikus, kuna see neut- raliseerib valge kitli fenomeni. siiski ei võimalda see metoodika sprint- uuring u vererõhuväär tusi teistes uuringutes saav utatutega otseselt võrrelda. sprint-uuringus mõõdetud vererõhuväärtuste korrigeerimise järel jääb praegune eesmärkväärtus < mm hg püsima ( ). te i s e k s a r g u m e n d i k s o n , e t müokardiinfarkti ja ajuinfarkti riski vähenemist < mm hg haigete rühmas ei leitud. kogu suremuse kahanemise taga oli peamiselt süda- mepuudulikkuse vähenemine. see oli tõenäoselt tingitud intensiivsema rav iga kaasnenud diureetikumide oluliselt suuremast kasutamisest ( ). kolmas oluline argument on, et raskeid kõrvaltoimeid (sünkoop, elektrolüütide sisalduse vähenemine, äge neerukahjustus) esines intensiivse ravi rühmas rohkem. ka hiljuti avaldatud uuring hope- (heart outcomes prevention evaluation) ei toeta “mida madalam, seda parem“ kont sept sioon i ( ). uu r i ng u sse kaasati > aasta vanused mehed ja > aasta vanused naised. kande- sa r taa n mg ja hüd rok loor t ia- siidi , mg raviga langes vererõhk , mm hg-ni võrrelduna , mm hg platseeboga ravitute rühmas. kardio- vaskulaarne suremus rühmades ei erinenud. sümptomaatilist hüpoten- siooni ja pearinglusi esines ravirühmas oluliselt rohkem. seega toetavad hope- tulemused seisukohta, et me ei peaks langetama süstoolse vererõhu väärtusi üle aastastel patsientidel alla mm hg. Üks oluline haigete kategooria, kellel intensiivsem vererõhu lange- tamine võiks anda hea tulemuse, on ajuinfarkti põdenud patsiendid. sprint-uuringusse neid ei kaasatud. euroopas ja hiinas on praegu käimas insuldi sekundaarse preventsiooni uuring esh-chl-shot. uuringu esma- seks tulemusnäitajaks on korduv aju i n f a rk t . uu r it a k s e e r i ne v a id süstoolse vererõhu eesmärkväärtusi kuni < mm hg. tulemusi on oodata . aasta lõpuks. noortel (alla aastastel) patsien- tidel on vererõhu eesmärkväärtused ilmselt väiksemad (< / mm hg), kuid kuna spetsiaalseid sellele vanu- serühmale suunatud uuringuid pole tehtud, on tõenduspõhiseid andmeid piiratult. r avi eesm Ärk vÄ Är tused e ak atel ja vÄg a e ak atel eakatel on tõenduspõhiste eesmärk- väärtuste määramine veelgi keeru- lisem. ameerika riikliku Ühiskomitee . juhendis ( jnc ), mis avaldati . aastal ( ), on soovitatud üle aastas- tele patsientidele süstoolse vererõhu eesmärkväärtust < / mm hg, mis on suurem kui eelmises jnc- -s (< / mm hg). esh ja esc . aasta juhendis on kuni aastaste haigete vererõhu eesmärk väärtus < m m hg ja ü le aa st a stel – mm hg ( ). rõhutatakse, et nende eesmärkväärtuste järgimisel peavad arstid arvesse võtma ka eaka patsiendi vaimset ja füüsilist seisundit. uuringu hy v et (hypertension in the very elderly trial ) alusel leiti esimest korda tõenduspõhisus üle aastaste patsientide antihüperten- siivse ravi eesmärkväärtusele ja see oli < / mm hg ( ). uuringus raviti väga eakaid patsiente, kelle süstoolne algvererõhk oli > mm hg ja eesmärkväärtus / mm hg. ravitud haigete rühmas leiti oluline kardiovaskulaarse suremuse ja süda- mepuudulikkuse riski vähenemine, seejuures esines rav itud haigetel vähem raskeid kõr valtoimeid kui platseebot saanutel. Äsja ilmus ajakirjas jama metaana- lüüs, kus uuriti üle aastaste patsien- tide intensiivse vererõhu langetamise tõhusust ja ohut ust ( ). leiti, et süstoolse rõhu langus < mm hg vähendab kardiovaskulaarset sure- must. kõr v a ltoi metest t u v astat i neerukahjustuse mõõdukas sagene- mine. järeldus on, et arst peab iga patsiendi puhul kaaluma kasulike toimete ja kõrvaltoimete vahekorda. tulemuste kokkuvõte on esitatud joonisel . agressiivsemat ravi väga eakatel hüpertoonikutel toetab äsjane uuring eri a l auudised eesti arst ; ( ): – sprint-senior ( ) üle aastastel patsientidel (v.a . tüüpi diabeediga ja põetud ajuinfarktiga patsiendid). see on väga oluline vanuserühm, kuna üle % neist on hüpertoonikud. uuringus võrreldi süstoolse rõhu eesmärkväär- tusi < mm hg ja < mm hg. leiti, et intensiivselt ravitud patsien- tidel oli kardiovaskulaarsete sünd- muste ja surma risk oluliselt väiksem. samas esines hüpotensiooni intensiiv- selt ravitutel ligi korda sagedamini ( , % vs. , %). selle uuringu väärtust uute ravieesmärkide seadmisel väga eakatele hüpertoonikutele vähendab mittestandardse valveta kabinetive- rerõhu määramise metoodika kasu- tamine, millest oli eelnevalt juttu sprint-uuringu juures. veelgi ebaselgem on olukord väga- väga eakate (> aastaste) hüpertoo- nikute vererõhu eesmärk väärtus- tega. arenenud riikides kasvab selle vanuserühma isikute ar v kiiresti. Äsja ilmus ajakirjas alzheimer’s & dementia ( ) artikkel, kus on leitud, et pärast . eluaastat alanud vererõhu tõus kaitseb üle aasta vanuseid patsiente dementsuse eest. see on esimene suurem uuring selles vallas ja näitab, et väga-väga eakatele ei saa üks ühele rakendada keskealiste ega isegi nooremate eakate uuringutulemusi. kokkuvÕte m i l l i sed on si i s i k k ag i vererõhu eesmärkväärtused . aastal? • vereõhu eesmärkväärtuseks kuni aastasel haigetel on endiselt < / mm hg. • . tüüpi diabeediga patsientide ravieesmärk on < / mm hg. • ajuinfarkti põdenud patsientidel võib ravieesmärk olla < mm hg (selgub uuringust esh-chl-shot (� e stroke in hypertension optimal treatment trial) . aasta lõpuks). • Üle aastastel on süstoolse vere- rõhu eesmärk – mm hg. • väga-väga eakatel (üle aastastel) peame olema konservatiivsemad, sest pärast . eluaastat alanud vererõhu tõus kaitseb dementsuse kujunemise eest. • noortel (alla aastastel) patsien- t i d e l o n v e r e r õ h u e e s m ä r k- v ä ä r t u sed i l m selt v ä i k sem ad (< / mm hg), kuid tõendus- põhiseid andmeid on piiratult. kõige olulisem hüpertensiooni rav is on aga, et „m ida madalam, seda parem“ kontseptsioon on asen- dunud seisukohaga “mida varem, seda parem”. peame alustama anti- hüpertensiivset ravi koos elustiili muutustega ja vajaduse korral düslipi- deemia ja/või . tüüpi diabeedi raviga võimalikult vara, et hoida ära varajase ateroskleroosi arengut ja veresoonte jäigastumist. k ir ja n d u s . chobanian av. hypertension in -what is the right target? jama ; : – . . wright jt jr, williamson jd, whelton pk, et al. ran- domized trial of intensive versus standard blood- pressure control. n engl j med ; : – . . bavishi c, bangalore s, messerli fh. outcomes of in- tensive blood pressure lowering in older hypertensive patients. j am coll cardiol ; : – . . mancia g, fagard r, narkiewicz k, et al. esh/ e sc guideline s for the management of ar ter ial hypertension: the task force for the management of arterial hypertension of the european society of hypertension (esh) and of the european society of cardiology (esc). eur heart j ; : – . . cushman wc, evans gw, byington rp, et al. eff ects of intensive blood-pressure control in type diabetes mellitus. n engl j med ; : – . . fleg jl, evans gw, margolis kl, et al. or thostatic h y potension in the accord (ac tion to control cardiovascular risk in diabetes) blood pressure trial: prevalence, incidence, and prognostic signifi cance. hypertension ; : – . . lewington s, clarke r, qizilbash n, peto r, collins r. prospective studies collaboration age-specifi c rele- vance of usual blood pressure to vascular mortality: a meta-analysis of individual data for one million adults in prospective studies. lancet ; : – . . bress ap, tanner rm, hess r, colantonio ld, shimbo d, muntner p. gener aliz abilit y of sprint result s to the u. s . adul t p opul ation . j a m coll c ardiol . ; : – . . kjeldsen se, mancia g. the un-observed automated offi ce blood pressure measurement technique used in the sprint study points to a standard target offi ce systolic blood pressure < mm hg. curr hypertens rep ; : . . kjeldsen se, narkiewicz k, hedner t, mancia g. the sprint study: outcome may be driven by diff erence in diuretic treatment demasking heart failure and study design may support systolic blood pressure target below mmhg rather than below mm hg. blood press ; : – . . lonn em, bosch j, lópez-jaramillo p, et al. blood-pressu- re lowering in intermediate-risk persons without car- diovascular disease. n engl j med ; : – . . james pa, oparil s, carter bl, et al. evidence- based guideline for the management of high blood pressure in adults: report from the panel members appointed to the eighth joint national committee ( jnc ). jama ; : – . . beckett ns, peters r, fletcher ae, et al. treatment of hypertension in patients years of age or older. n engl j med ; : – . . williamson jd, supiano m a , applegate wb, et al. intensive vs standard blood pressure control and car- diovascular disease outcomes in adults aged ≥ years: a randomized clinical trial. jama ; : – . . corrada mm, hayden km, paganini-hill a, et al. age of onset of hyper tension and risk of dementia in the oldest-old: the + study. alzheimers dement ; : – . joonis . intensiivse vererõhu langetamise toimed vanemaealistel hüpertoonikutel ( ). margus viigimaa – põhja-eesti regionaalhaigla südametervise keskus, tallinna tehnikaülikooli tervise- tehnoloogiate instituut hüpotensiooni, sünkoopide ja teiste kõrval- toimete võimalik sagenemine intensiivse vererõhu langetamise toimed vanemaealistel (≥ aasta vanustel) hüpertoonikutel kasulikud toimed puudused suurte kardio- vaskulaarsete sündmuste vähenemine % kardio- vaskulaarse suremuse vähenemine % südame- puudulikkuse vähenemine % antihüper- tensiivsete ravimite suurem kasutamine neeru- puudulikkuse võimalik sagenemine raskete kõrvaltoimete võimalik sagenemine #wegmit a : governmental restrictions and the importance of online hashtags in feminist movements anne laura penning “the personal is political”—this slogan, that became popular by u.s. american feminist movements in the s to highlight the connection be- tween individual experiences and politi- cal structures (mccann and seung- kyung ), appears to be gaining mo- mentum again, this time in the context of online movements. with social media widely accessible, the personal becomes not only political but also something to post about, as seen with recent hashtag movements like #metoo. a similar femi- nist protest movement started in ger- many in , introducing the hashtag #wegmit a to voice discontent regard- ing germany’s abortion act. almost years after germany’s reunification, the debate regarding the abortion legislation in the german penal code thus resur- faces. similar to former debates between east and west germany around fo- cusing particularly on § a that prohib- its the “promotion” of abortions, there- fore e.g. banning any information on websites indicating even the possibility of an abortion, current protests and so- cial media movements also centre on said paragraph and aim at abolishing it with the help of internet campaigns (“weg mit § a”). this paper will pri- marily focus on #wegmit a movement and discuss whether its online discourse presents a useful tool to provoke change within the german legal system. draw- ing on the origin and the development of the § a, i argue that the abortion act exemplifies germany’s antiquated stance on womanhood in opposition to germany’s image as a self-proclaimed progressive and liberal state. historical background since , § of the german pe- nal code has been regulating the termi- nation of pregnancy, deeming it a crimi- nal act (schmid). until , women get- ting abortions could be imprisoned for at least six months—afterwards, abortions for medical reasons were legally permit- ted (bundeszentrale für politische bild- ung). during the nazi regime, the legis- lation in germany was tightened drasti- cally; in addition to wanting more le- bensraum, one of the fundamental aims of nazi germany was the preservation of the “aryan” race. german women need- ed to provide children for the sake of the german family and nation, whereas satura vol. “non-aryans” were forcibly sterilized or had to abort (tuomala - ). under nazi rule, the original § was re-intro- duced to the german penal code, stating that german women getting abortions could be imprisoned for up to two years. in , this law was exacerbated even further: abortion was punished with the death penalty so as not to demolish the “life force” of the german nation (notz). in , § a was introduced, which prohibited doctors and institutions to actively “promote” abortions. after the nazi regime and during the division of germany, the amendment of the penal code was repealed through efforts from the occupying nations (notz). the abortion legislation changed in the two respective states: in west ger- many, abortion remained a criminal of- fence but was allowed in special cases, such as for medical reasons (fisher ). east germany introduced its so-called “muttipolitik” (“mother politics”) in , which was “aimed at improving the compatibility of employment and moth- erhood” ( ). it introduced more per- missive abortion and contraception laws according to which access to abortions within the first weeks of pregnancy and free contraception was granted ( ). it is noteworthy that the socialist gov- ernment in east germany opted for a more permissive approach, undoubtedly linking labour force and reproductive freedom with each other, “defining wo- men as both producers and reproducers” ( ). in its neighbouring capitalist state, west germany, the abortion law re- mained more restrictive and closer to the former nazi legislations. abortion here was defined as “a statement against the west german family model, and thus, in a way, precluded one from taking up membership in the national commu- nity” (frankfurth ). bearing children was once again synonymous with providing for the nation. the reunification process eventu- ally also addressed the demand for a united abortion legislation, quickly lead- ing to a heated debate between west and east german legislators and activists. the two different laws were initially left in place until the parliament passed a new abortion law or, rather, an amended version of west germany’s legislation, permitting abortions after an obligatory pro-life counselling in the first twelve weeks (wuerth - ; frankfurth ). this decision of simply overwriting east german legislations with west german laws illustrates the reunification process in its entirety: west germany as the “winner of the global contestation of lib- eral capitalism against soviet social- ism... shape[d] the discourse of reunifi- cation and transition in germany... [and] gave expression to the hierarchical rela- tionship between east and west” (frankfurth ). the inclusion of the mandatory pro-life counselling in par- ticular appears like a very stealthy way of incorporating west germany’s original satura vol. stance on abortion, in which “the em- bryo became... a future member of the national community” ( ). hence, the dominant discourse centred around the protection of the embryo, ergo putting the preservation of the german nuclear family and the continuity of the nation before women’s welfare ( ). west ger- many was understood as the epitome of a modern european state, “defin[ing] ger- manness in terms of a purely west ger- man understanding... [leaving] the citi- zens of east germany... to abandon their political and social past and conform en- tirely to western norms” (fisher ). “§ a still defines abortions as (non-punishable) criminal acts nowa- days and thus forbids health insurances to pay for the service” (ferree ). even though the state supposedly supports pregnant women this way ( ), the wording of the paragraph suggests oth- erwise (“§ a werbung für den ab- bruch der schwangerschaft”). the abor- tion act makes abortions more accessible for women from former west germany, but still poses several obstacles for women to overcome in general: financial demands, a mandatory pro-life oriented counselling session and the need to find a doctor or clinic where abortions are be- ing carried out. the mandatory counsel- ling session illustrates the state’s reluc- tance to grant women autonomy. fur- thermore, the necessity to attend a counselling session seems to suggest that women from former east germany acted immorally when getting abortions without having to seek counselling (frankfurth ). according to yvonne frankfurth, it is evident that “progressiveness was being defined in terms of the west ger- man ideal of the breadwinner-housewife structure, in which women featured pri- marily as social and biological reproduc- ers” ( ). this highly gendered model that dominated the abortion discourse and gender politics in the s will pro- vide the framework for a comparison with the current debate surrounding § a. since the abortion act has not been modified yet again, it seems that the notion of women’s main role as bio- logical reproducers, even in a time where gender equality is being promoted in pol- itics to a certain extent (e.g. with the women’s quota), remains the predomi- nant discourse today. the pro-choice movement debates surrounding the abortion act have been numerous since its intro- duction; as early as in , the “alliance for protection of mothers and sexual re- forms” demanded free access to contra- ceptives, more information and educa- tion services as well the abolishment of § (notz). new feminist movements were found in west germany after wwii and in a united germany after the reuni- fication process, demanding similar if not equal reforms with the slogan “my satura vol. belly belongs to me” (schmid). similar to prior protest movements, the current social media outcry and protest move- ment also demands the total abolish- ment of § , but focuses primarily on the repeal of § a. the protest started after media re- ports revealed the indictment of a doctor from giessen, hänel. she was sentenced to a , euro fine for publicly promot- ing abortions on her website (hild), meaning that hänel openly used the term “schwangerschaftsabbruch” (“abortion”) on her website and allowed patients to request more information. it is debatable whether this can already be perceived as a promotion of abortions and not simply as providing information about the services being offered at her office. hänel’s very public case caused the german bündnis für sexuelle selbst- bestimmung (“alliance for sexual self- determination”) to start an online cam- paign in support of hänel and other doc- tors in similar positions. the alliance ar- gues that sexual self-determination is a human right and thus demands “the im- mediate repeal of § a of the german [penal] code and free access to infor- mation about abortion” (“weg mit § a”). before hänel’s sentence, the al- liance published hänel’s petition on chance.org and triggered a social media storm by introducing the internet cam- paign weg mit § a (repeal § a) at the beginning of . at the heart of the campaign was a call for photos, mainly portraits with a tape labelled “§ a” covering the (photographed) person’s mouth, shared on all social media plat- forms using the hashtag #wegmit a. after the initial photo campaign, the hashtag stuck and was then used for problematizing the debate surrounding the paragraph and abortion rights online. as of june , the hashtag has been used , times on instagram alone (“#wegmit a”). however, the movement did not remain an online phenomenon, but nu- merous magazines and newspapers (e.g. spiegel and zeit) kept track of the story and the campaign. in addition to this print coverage, the bündnis für sexuelle selbstbestimmung organized two offline campaign days in berlin in and —the second one sparking nation- wide protests in cities all over ger- many, challenging the government’s so- called compromise and demanding an immediate repeal of the paragraph. this transition from a movement confined to the capital of germany to a nation-wide movement illustrates the growing sig- nificance of the movement’s cause within the public sphere. moreover, it demonstrates how the movement cannot simply be described as an online-hash- tag movement. it seems to be relevant in both online and offline spaces, indeed, its online presence helps spreading the word, documents new developments and achievements, and brings people to- gether for protests that take place out- side of the online world. hence, it ap- pears as if the introduction of the hash- satura vol. tag and internet campaign as a starting point of the movement helped further the cause significantly, both by using an important case that was already covered by news media as a stepping stone to promote its interests, and in bringing people to the streets. governmental restriction and censor- ship the government’s persistence to keep § a in the german penal code can be viewed critically in several ways. ban- ning the promotion of abortions sug- gests that abortions might be promoted by doctors in the first place — even though doctors are generally not allowed to promote any sort of service for their own financial gain (bundesärztekam- mer)—and thus creates an almost apoc- alyptic image of a drastically increasing abortion rate after the possible lift of the ban. the term promotion itself describes an “activity that supports or encourages a cause, venture, or aim [and/or] the publicizing of a product, organization, or venture so as to increase sales or public awareness” (“promotion”). from an economic perspective, this suggests that doctors would actively promote their abortion services to make more profit. it further insinuates that a heightened public awareness and unrestricted, eas- ier access to information would auto- matically bias women towards a pro- abortion decision and therefore cause an increase in abortions. this scenario il- lustrates a rather antiquated view of wo- men, removes their agency and under- mines their autonomy. it implies that choices need to be made for women in- stead of by them. similarly, the term promotion evokes associations with advertisements promoting e.g. fashion trends or holiday vacations. equating these aspects turns a medical procedure like an abortion into a mere luxury rather than a right for all women, regardless of their economic status, and furthermore disregards the fact that abortions can constitute a ne- cessity for women. frankfurth high- lights this problematic view in the fol- lowing excerpt: placing abortion in this. . . framework seems to suggest that the penal code serves as a national anchor of moral ideas and that, consequently, it is a woman’s moral responsibility to cherish the advent of a pregnancy, regardless of whether it is (un)wanted. moreover, [this idea] acutely fails to acknowledge that abortion is not per se a statement against motherhood. rather, such a view disregards the multi- tude of reasons that may count towards a woman’s decision for choosing to have an abortion. it further ignores that some women wanting an abortion may already be mothers, who decide against having another child. (frankfurth ) the fact that the paragraph remains a relic from nazi germany seems even more problematic. other legislations from this time have been nullified due to satura vol. their segregating, racist notions and op- pressive nature (beck - ). it can be argued that the abortion act does op- press women since it restricts their free choice in regard to this particular deci- sion by imposing obstacles on the possi- bility of an abortion. nonetheless, the german government has only recently, in february, decided to merely re- form § a in reply to the protest move- ment. the reform consists of what both the federal government and german me- dia outlets have titled “a compromise” (see e.g. “paragraf a”). the paragraph itself remains intact and within the ger- man penal code. however, doctors are now allowed to publicly inform their pa- tients about their abortion services, e.g. by stating it on their websites. they are permitted to refer them to other author- ities for further information on the topic, e.g. by linking specific websites author- ized by the state (“paragraf a”). the government also decided to provide young women up to the age of years with the birth control pill for free (the expenses must be paid by their respec- tive health insurance). additionally, the german medical association is in- structed to maintain a register with doc- tors, clinics etc. carrying out abortions (“paragraf a”). the register is sup- posed to contain information regarding the applied methods and is scheduled to be updated monthly and published online by the federal agency for civic education. yet, this compromise still does not grant women unlimited and quick access to information. furthermore, doctors, supposed authorities in their fields, are still not allowed to freely provide more detailed information about their ser- vices—the state apparatus decides which information to provide, and where to make it accessible. this approach of withholding information or regulating the distribution of information can be interpreted as censorship. even though censorship is traditionally thought of as “a device for protecting official beliefs and ideologies and for suppressing those that are opposed to them,” it could also “be used to withhold facts or to prevent their dissemination” (matthews ). it is possible to argue that the government does provide the necessary information. however, if access to information was the main reason for the reform to be in- troduced, it seems inconsistent that doc- tors are still not allowed to provide the relevant information on their own web- sites—a step that would make the rele- vant information much more easily ac- cessible to women. instead, it seems that the state wants to maintain its control and power over the information on abor- tions. this can be interpreted not only as the state exerting power over women but also as spreading and legitimizing the state’s dominant ideology on the matter. the personal remains political since re- production politics are still very much used to place women within societal power structures. in fact, the so-called satura vol. compromise that was reached politically highlights how non-violent protests and hashtag movements are only able to ac- complish small reforms. this reform seems like a silencing of the protestors— but can or should this tiny improvement in the legislation stop them from de- manding more? the personal remains political the analysis of both historical and recent abortion debates in germany highlights how an “ultra-saturated me- dia and communication environment provides ample opportunities for activ- ists to resist, to exert their agency, to self-represent themselves and to defy the structural constraints” (cammaerts ). the protest movement led by the bündnis für sexuelle selbstbestimmung became publicly known in a short time due to the introduction of an online hashtag. as the internet campaign shows, the statement “the personal is political” is still valid today. indeed, nowadays it seems to be a successful strategy to become visible and share one’s own stories online in order to form a larger movement. in this light, i argue that the cur- rent debate in germany can be described as a resurfacing discourse from the s. to be precise, the recent demand for a reform of the abortion act appears to be similar to the debates between the two former states of germany: the hashtag movement’s demands and east germany’s more liberal abortion law on one side and its opponents and west germany’s more restrictive approach on the other side. it can be said that feminist movements’ ongoing quest, either for the complete abolishment of the abor- tion act or the repeal of the “promotion ban,” has not been met. instead, the preservation of christian values seems to dominate the state’s decision in keeping the paragraph. this becomes highly transparent when analysing arguments from political parties and organizations (e.g. the catholic church and the march for life) supporting (the exacerbation of) § a. thus, the paragraph is used as a tool to undermine women’s bodily self- determination and autonomy, which ul- timately leads to the solidification of pa- triarchal structures in society. it is not possible to unpack and discuss all intricacies of the abortion rights discourse in germany in the scope of one paper. further political repercus- sions and consequences need to be ana- lysed in the frame of the online and of- fline protest movement “weg mit § a” to determine the success of a pro- test movement that acts on these two scales. it is also necessary for this analy- sis to include other legislations concern- ing womanhood, such as childcare and the health care system, in order to create a holistic understanding of women’s rights in society satura vol. bibliography “§ a werbung für den abbruch der schwangerschaft.” dejure.org, dejure.org/ge- setze/stgb/ a.html. accessed may . “#wegmit a.” query on instagram.com. www.instagram.com/explore/tags/wegmit a. accessed june . bundesärztekammer. “arzt—werbung—Öffentlichkeit: hinweise und erläuterungen.” bundesärztekammer.de, www.bundesaerztekammer.de/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/pdf- ordner/recht/arzt-werbung-oeffentlichkeit.pdf. accessed june . bundeszentrale für politische bildung. “ : streit um straffreie abtreibung vor dem verfassungsgericht.” bpb.de, feb. , www.bpb.de/politik/hintergrund/aktuell/ / - streit-um-straffreie-abtreibung. accessed apr. . cammaerts, bart. “protest logics and the mediation opportunity structure.” european journal of communication, vol. , , pp. - . worldcat.org, doi: . / . accessed march . ferree, myra marx. “resonance and radicalism: feminist framing in the abortion debates of the united states and germany.” american journal of sociology, vol. , no. , , pp. - . fisher, pamela. “abortion in post-communist germany: the end of muttipolitik and a still birth for feminism.” womens studies international forum, 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a-recht-auf-information-zu-schwangerschaftsabbruechen/. accessed may . wuerth, andrea. “national politics/local identities: abortion rights activism in post-wall berlin.” feminist studies, vol. , no. , , pp. - . . satura vol. “you do it without their knowledge.” assessing knowledge and perception of stealthing among college students international journal of environmental research and public health article “you do it without their knowledge.” assessing knowledge and perception of stealthing among college students marwa ahmad , benjamin becerra , dyanna hernandez , paulchris okpala , , amber olney and monideepa becerra , ,* department of health science & human ecology, california state university, san bernardino, ca , usa; moham @coyote.csusb.edu (m.a.); @coyote.csusb.edu (d.h.); pokpala@csusb.edu (p.o.); aolney@csusb.edu (a.o.) department of information & decision sciences, california state university, san bernardino, ca , usa; bbecerra@csusb.edu center for health equity, california state university, san bernardino, ca , usa * correspondence: mbecerra@csusb.edu; tel.: + - - - received: february ; accepted: may ; published: may ���������� ������� abstract: in recent years, the act of nonconsensual condom removal, termed stealthing, has become commonly discussed on social and print media; yet, little to no evidence exists on the current knowledge and perception of stealthing among young adults. as such, we assessed what college students know and feel regarding stealthing. we employed an exploratory mixed-method analysis where focus groups were followed by a quantitative survey. a qualitative assessment was conducted using grounded theory analyses and questions for a quantitative survey were developed based on emergent themes from focus groups. quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive and bivariate analyses with alpha less than . to denote significance. though limited knowledge exists, participants felt that stealthing was a violation of their privacy, trust, sexual consent, and their ability to make a health decision, and should be considered an assault. participants noted stealthing may have become acceptable due to its popularity in social media and young adult culture, especially porn. we also found sex differences in the perception of stealthing being considered a sexual assault with lower rates among males as compared to females. our results demonstrate that there is a need for health educators to assess the prevalence of such a behavior among college students and policy makers to assess the legal implications of nonconsensual condom removal. keywords: sexual consent; college students; condom; privacy; sexually transmitted diseases; infections . introduction sexual consent is commonly defined as freely agreeing to participate in sexual activity; though the legal definition varies by state in the u.s. [ ] for example, in california, consent is defined as free and voluntary agreement with knowledge of the act, while north carolina has no specific definition of consent, although threat to bodily harm is considered lack of consent. likewise, while california requires the definition of consent to include words such as “freely given” or “affirmative,” similar requirements are not present in texas or arizona, making legal and consistent understanding of consent difficult across the nation [ ]. in recent years, the importance of sexual consent has gained further interest—often attributable to the #metoo movement—that has brought to light the importance of discussing consent and violence related to sexual health [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of despite national attention on sexual consent, a novel term that has arisen, especially through social media, has been that of stealthing, currently defined as the act of nonconsensual condom removal [ , ]. stealthing has often been referred to as gift giving or generationing, and is associated with men who have sex with men (msm) where one partner who is hiv-positive infects the other without the latter’s knowledge [ ]. while the practice of stealthing is not new, the terminology has been promoted through the internet beyond that of msm or hiv, especially through social media and has recently been reported as a rising trend, as further noted in empirical literature [ ]. specifically, corners of the internet have discussed the practice and stealthing has progressively become a trending new topic. in fact, various posts on social media promote men bragging about their act of nonconsensual condom removal. according to social media platforms such as reddit, men brag about having the right to “spread their seeds” [ ]. further, brodsky’s legal analysis [ ] found that men discuss the subject of stealthing and support one another with tips and tricks of doing such acts or encourage other men to stealth their partners. while the term stealthing was not used, the act of sexual intercourse without a condom, which contradicted the agreement of a sexual act between two adults, came to international light in under the legal case assange v swedish prosecution authority ( ) ewhc . in this case, assange was accused of rape due to having sexual intercourse without a condom, and while previously the court ruled against that conditional consent, in order to ensure extradition, the court ruled against assange, thus making conditional consent legal under english law [ ]. while peer-reviewed studies in the u.s. are lacking, a study on stealthing prevalence in australia noted that % of women and % of msm who attended health service clinics reported experiencing stealthing [ ]. in the u.s., a study addressed the term stealthing, though it was utilized in the context of non-consensual hiv transmission among msm. though not directly related to the more novel and rising social media use of the word stealthing, the results of the study do note that . % of the sample experienced similar behavior [ ]. likewise, among women aged – years, davis et al. found that % of the participants experienced coercive condom use resistance (cur). though this does not directly relate to the stealthing behavior promoted on social media, it does shed light on the common practice of sexual acts without condoms when consent is lacking [ ]. to date, however, not only is there no state or federal law in the u.s. explicitly addressing stealthing, there is also limited empirical research on stealthing, knowledge and attitudes towards it, its prevalence, or its impact, especially among young adults. moreover, a recent article by ebrahim [ ] noted that the practice of nonconsensual condom removal is intertwined with “sexual autonomy, sexual consent, and sexual violence,” and warrants further academic research, though there remains a significant paucity of literature. in this study, we thus provide empirical evidence of young adults’ knowledge and perception of stealthing and in turn produce a foundation for evidence-based policy implications and further research on the driving factors of the behavior. our study was driven by the theoretical foundations of the growing field of sexual health literacy [ , ], which goes well beyond general health literacy and how patients navigate the healthcare system. while often utilized among sexual minorities, sexual health literacy addresses questions of having accurate knowledge related to sexual health, how one manages their own sexual health and wellbeing, as well as structural and contextual influences that may impact sexual knowledge and health. . methods we undertook an exploratory sequential mixed-methods [ ] approach where qualitative data was first analyzed followed by quantitative data to further elucidate key themes that emerged from the former. particularly, survey questions were developed on content that were deemed to be of interest for further evaluation based on focus group results of emergent themes. for example, the concept of sexual consent was consistent and predominant in the focus groups as an emergent theme, thus survey questions were added to assess how participants felt about giving and asking for consent and their related self-efficacy (i.e., confidence in asking and giving consent). reporting of all qualitative results int. j. environ. res. public health , , of followed the standard thematic analysis supported by quotes, but quantitative data is presented in applicable numeric numbers and p value when appropriate. . . sample and data collection college students from a medium-sized four-year public university were selected as the study population. general education courses through multiple departments gave out extra credit as an incentive to participate. per institutional review board approval guidelines, any registered student aged years or older was allowed to participate in the study. no student was prevented from participating in the study and all students received extra credit deemed non-coercive by the institutional review board. data was collected in two phases: focus groups and survey questionnaire. all participants agreeing to attend focus groups were first given consent forms to sign and for those giving consent, data collection continued. participants were asked semi-structured interview questions for a total of one hour. interviews were led by two researchers with training in qualitative assessment. focus group questions were centralized on understanding the knowledge of stealthing and sexual consent, as well as influences of stealthing behavior. focus group interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. each focus group was limited to no more than five participants. central questions for the focus groups were based on the following questions, though it should be noted that the formatting of some questions was slightly modified or probe questions were added based on participant feedback: . what is stealthing? . do you think stealthing increases one’s risk of sti (sexually transmitted infection) transmission and how? . do you think stealthing is considered a form of sexual assault and why? . do you think stealthing should be against the law and why? . what are your thoughts on stealthing being socially acceptable? for the second phase using a survey questionnaire, the participants were distinct from those in the qualitative analyses to ensure a lack of diffusion of questions and thus protect against bias results. participants were given consent forms and had the right to refuse to participate in the study without consequences to their grade in the course or any other academic outcomes. the survey was anonymous and a separate sign-in sheet ensured extra credit was given, as approved by the institutional review board. surveys were given out in general education courses and included both closed and open-ended questions assessing knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy related to sexual consent, as these were emergent themes from the qualitative analyses. . . data analysis we analyzed transcripts from focus groups and results of open-ended questions from surveys using a modified grounded theory. grounded theory has been modified over the years from traditional, to evolved, to constructivist [ ]. while traditional grounded theory’s goal was to generate a conceptual theory that accounts for patterns of behavior, the purpose of our study was to assess knowledge and perception. thus, a modified version was more appropriate where constructivist grounded theory addressed how participants construct meaning towards a particular topic (in our case, stealthing). each member of the research team independently read the transcripts and created a list of commonly occurring phrases and words as preliminary codes. this method was repeated until no new codes were generated. such codes were then reviewed for patterns and themes, followed by labeling and the naming of domains. as per grounded theory protocol, we continued this analysis until no new themes emerged, thus reaching saturation, and focus group recruitment was concluded. quantitative data from survey questionnaires were input into spss software v (ibm corp.; armonk, ny, usa) for analysis. descriptive statistics were conducted to assess the prevalence of variables of interest, including sexual consent-related knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of sex differences were further assessed using bivariate analyses (chi-square test for independence), with alpha less than . to denote significance. missing values were excluded from analyses. . results a total of participants were included in focus groups before theoretical saturation was reached. a total of students participated in the quantitative survey. qualitative assessment of the focus group and open-ended survey questions highlighted several emergent domains (table ). these included: knowledge themes of awareness and how a lack of it can impact health-decision making; consent with multiple themes of communication and violation/assault; and finally, social norms and acceptance of stealthing. table . identified themes and associated domains from focus group results. domain themes additional example quotes knowledge awareness “ . . . i don’t really know how to describe it. it just sounds negative”. “ . . . it’s like they are tricking you into something.” health-decision making “..i mean condoms are essentially used for prevention, you’re removing that barrier, you’re exposing yourself to a bunch of diseases now”. “ . . . when you wear a condom it generally means you guys are protecting each other from any diseases, once you take off the condom you are no longer protected.” “yeah, i feel having a condom present in the first place, sets a mutual understanding that we are trying to avoid getting any disease, so if you are willing to take it off, then essentially, you are prompting it.” consent communication “ . . . it goes back to communication, communication is key and not talking about it and telling them what you are doing or why you did it make me not want to do that again with that person because of trust.” “ . . . because if i choose to have sex with someone, i am obviously going to want to use a condom for my safety and health because not everyone is up front and honest with their past or if they’ve been tested before, and not everyone is willing to share that information with the other person.” violation/assault “things such as rape is against the law, i feel this goes hand in hand with stealthing because you removed the condom without their consent, without their knowledge”. “if you end up with hiv you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life and if you contracted the disease through an act like stealthing i would consider it a crime because you are hurting the other person’s health either way.” social norm porn “i feel that the viewer will see stealthing in porn and think, oh it’s seems okay because the actor is doing it, then when i practice sex, it’ll be okay to do the same.” “a lot of people will follow what others do or say, whoever watches porn and see that a condom was being used then removed without the consent of their partner then they will think it is okay to do the same.” . . knowledge a majority of the participants were unable to define the word stealthing, but once the term was explained many of them associated it with a negative connotation, specifically the impact of health-decision making. participants in our study consistently noted that condoms are essentially used to protect an individual from stis and hiv; when individuals agree to have consensual sex with a condom, they are essentially protecting themselves from unwanted diseases. the moment that a condom is removed, both parties are no longer protected, which may impact their sexual health. although the act of stealthing is not new, the terminology of the act is. participants were aware of the act but did not know that was the term used to describe a condom removal without the consent of the partner. among the participants that were surveyed, a small percentage knew the act of stealthing, but a majority associated a negative connotation; however, there were no significant sex differences among individuals who participated. “ . . . i have no idea, never heard of it. it sounds kind of negative in a way”. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of once participants had the meaning of stealthing explained to them, a lack of knowledge continued to be a theme, especially around its impact on health-decision making. “not everybody knows what they have and not everybody gets tested so they won’t know what they are passing on to other people, you could get gonorrhea, syphilis, or hiv.” in addition, some participants were aware of the act, but not necessarily the terminology itself. “ . . . you do it without their knowledge.” “oh that’s what it’s called?” among the participants in the survey, . % reported that stealthing was the removal of a condom without consent, while . % associated the word with a negative connotation, with no significant sex differences (the rest identified it incorrectly) to the open ended question: what does the word stealthing mean? . . consent the lack of consent was another emerging domain, with further themes of trust, communication, privacy, and violation. while the interview questions in focus groups did not ask about consent, participants consistently brought up consent; which is aligned with current literature highlighting the relation of stealthing to the concept of lack of consent [ ]. many participants expressed that removing a condom without the knowledge or consent of the partner was going against the sexual act that the person agreed on. the terms of agreement of the sexual act changed once the condom is removed without the knowledge or consent of the partner, which led to a violation of trust and a demonstrates poor communication between both individuals. communication between two individuals is very important; an individual should be told or asked if they want the condom to be removed during a sexual activity, that way they have the choice whether they want to continue or not. not giving them the opportunity to choose violates what they intentionally consented to do and puts the individual at a risk of contracting an sti or hiv. “ . . . basically again they took off the condom without your consent and then continued to do something that you did not agree to do, the terms changed.” “i don’t think it’s right because you both agreed that you were going to do it with a condom, but it’s not right for either one of them to take off the condom and continue with the sexual activity without the person knowing there is no longer a condom.” furthermore, participants highlighted that such break of consent and trust further put the health of those impacted at risk. “it’s a violation of their consent, they should have been told if they wanted to take off the condom that way they have the choice whether they want to continue or not. it is a violation of their trust, privacy, and it’s a health concern as well.” a third emergent theme under the domain of consent was the consideration of stealthing as sexual assault. participants expressed that stealthing should be considered a violation or sexual assault, as once the condom is removed without a partner’s consent, the act of stealthing is similar to rape. “the second the page is split and you both are on different pages there is an issue, as soon as you step over that boundary and remove the condom without your partner’s knowledge that is considered sexual assault.” “i feel once either partners says no or stop or i don’t want this anymore the moment the condom is removed without their knowledge that’s when it becomes sexual assault.” int. j. environ. res. public health , , of “i feel like it is assault because if something were to happen like a pregnancy or sexual transmitted disease there is repercussions and consequences and someone has to answer to that.” “yes, because maybe that one person has hiv and they give it to you, then you are stuck with it. i mean people don’t think of it as serious, but if that person is having sex with a lot of people and they do that [stealthing], then they are putting you at a higher risk of getting hiv and if you end up getting it then someone is to blame.” in the quantitative assessment (table ), participants were asked if unwanted touching, kissing, or hugs should be considered sexual assault. while a majority reported strongly agree/agree, a lower percent was found among males as compared to females ( . % vs. . %, p < . ). similar differences were further noted in response to the question regarding whether condom removal without the approval of a sexual partner should be considered sexual assault. while a majority reported strongly agree/agree, a lower percent was noted for males compared to females ( . % vs. . %, p < . ). table . results from quantitative survey on understanding consent. unwanted touching, kissing, or hugging should be considered sexual assault total male female strongly disagree/disagree . % . % . % strongly agree/agree . % . % . % removal of condom without approval of sexual partner should be considered sexual assault strongly disagree/disagree . % . % . % strongly agree/agree . % . % . % . . social norm another emergent theme was the perception that if stealthing is perceived to be a social norm, then the practice is more likely to be prevalent. for example, some participants expressed confusion because in porn, which can be socially normal for young adults, there is no way to affirm if consent was asked or not prior to the removal of a condom. participants consistently stated that since a lack of a condom is prevalent in porn, it can encourage curiosity, especially if it is normalized in porn. “i’ve watched porn and i think it’s weird that some don’t use condoms since that’s their career and they do that a lot, but one time i saw that in a video that a guy was wearing a condom, but then he took it off, but i don’t know if he asked the girl for consent or if she was forced.” “the first time someone sees stealthing in a porn video they might think it’s a normal thing to do and if they see it so often it can encourage them to probably try it too.” “ . . . monkey see monkey do.” participants expressed that stealthing in the porn industry has the same correlation as that of video games encouraging violence in children. “ . . . not to stray off with video games, but it can apply to stealthing in porn as well. people see video games and say “oh my kid is violent now”, you can imply the same exact thing with porn, “oh you watch porn this way, and so you’re going to have sex this way.” participants noted that individuals who watch porn do not realize that the act of stealthing is wrong because of a lack of awareness or a lack of education regarding risk factors that is associated with the behavior. “if they don’t know it’s wrong then they are not going to see it as wrong. they are going to see it as, this is something fetishized and something that i might like so i am going to try it. but if there is educational explanation that stealthing shouldn’t be fetishized and the risk factors and consequences that are associated to stealthing, they would less likely try it.” int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . self-efficacy a majority of participants reported strongly agree/agree when asked about their ability to ask and give consent during sexual activity, as well as their ability to say no during sexual activity (table ). no statistical difference was noted by sex. table . results from quantitative survey on self-efficacy of consent. questions total male female i am confident in my ability to ask for consent during sexual activity strongly disagree/disagree % . % . % strongly agree/agree % . % . % i am confident in my ability to give consent during sexual activity strongly disagree/disagree . % . % . % strongly agree/agree . % . % . % i am confident in my ability to say no during sexual activity strongly disagree/disagree . % . % . % strongly agree/agree . % . % . % . discussion the results of our study highlight several key emergent domains. one major emergent domain was the lack of knowledge about the term stealthing, even while students were familiar with the behavior itself. such results on low knowledge of various sexual health-related factors is similar to that in the literature discussing other sexual health issues, including hiv, sexual consent, etc. for example, moore and smith noted that while college students tend to be very knowledgeable on hiv, they are less knowledgeable regarding stis and general sexual health, as well as on preventive measures [ ]. in particular, king et al. noted that while overall sti knowledge was low among college students belonging to a minority group, length of stay in the united states was related to higher knowledge, thus indicating that minority immigrant college students may have better sti knowledge upon exposure to such education [ ]. thus, given that our student population was primarily an immigrant group, targeted health education initiatives to address sexual health literacy—especially condom use—may be imperative to ensure that the most at-risk populations have appropriate resources. the second emergent domain was on consent. when asked about their confidence (self-efficacy) in asking or giving consent during sexual activity, more than half of participants felt confident. however, the lack of actual understanding what is included in consent is evident from the aforementioned assessment of unwanted touching, kissing, etc. for example, while a majority felt confident giving and receiving consent, they did not identify unwanted kissing and touching as a part of consent; which contradicts the united nations’ inclusion of such acts as sexual harassment—[ ], a term that is broader than assault [ ]—which was commonly cited by our participants. we also noted that a higher percentage reported confidence in asking or giving consent than being able to say no to sexual activity. as noted across various platforms [ – ], saying no at any time during sexual activity is a part of sexual consent. thus, while participants feel confident asking and giving consent, when asked about a key component of consent, such as saying no, we see differences. this demonstrates a disconnect between understanding a general term versus specific components of it. a similar trend is noted when dealing with addressing whether unwanted behavior should be considered assault. as mentioned earlier, despite high rates of participants reporting confidence in giving and asking consent, a lower percentage felt that unwanted behavior should be classed as sexual assault, further demonstrating a disconnect from understanding a general concept versus specific components of it. given that sexual harassment is an umbrella term that includes sexual abuse, assault, etc., and given that the united nations includes such unwanted behavior as part of sexual harassment, the results noted in our study highlight the need for further sexual health education. cumulatively, these results show that college students may feel int. j. environ. res. public health , , of that they understand the general concept of consent, but may lack the knowledge of what is actually included in consent such that sexual harassment can be avoided. as such, health education efforts for college students would benefit from discussing state-specific consent definitions as well as what entails sexual harassment. while we did note some sex differences in the quantitative study which was not apparent in the qualitative study, it is feasible that the open discussion in mixed-sex focus groups was a factor, and thus future studies could benefit from sex-specific focus groups. the third domain was that of social norms where the participants reported that watching porn, which is common among college students, often normalized the lack of a condom and stealthing was common in such porn videos. the literature notes that normalization of a negative behavior can further increase such a behavior among young adults. for example, neighbors and groups found that college students who overestimate the drinking of their peers and perceive their friends as more approving of alcohol tended to practice a similar behavior [ ]. likewise, normalization of alcohol use through social media has been further shown to be related to adolescents’ positive attitudes towards alcohol [ ]. this is consistent with what we see among our participants, as many expressed that if stealthing is perceived as a social norm, then the practice is more likely to be prevalent, especially among individuals who may lack knowledge or education of risk factors associated with the act of stealthing. as such, the literature and the results of our study further note the importance of addressing stealthing in the social context. moreover, anecdotal evidence notes that a google search of the key words of “porn” and “stealthing” will lead to a plethora of videos and sites including it, though formalized research is needed. regardless, the importance of the connection between porn and stealthing was highlighted in australia’s bill [ ] where stealthing was included as part of banning and criminalizing revenge porn. while the authors of this manuscript acknowledge that participants’ perceptions of porn as an influence on stealthing remains to be supported by literature, it does warrant further research to potentially interview stealthers (i.e., those that engage in the act of stealthing) and their driving factors. this further brings to attention significant legal cases occurring globally that are related to addressing the legal implications of stealthing, which has been further highlighted in the literature as an area of debate [ , ]. while the purpose of our study was to assess the knowledge and perception of stealthing and not legal implications, results of focus group interviews have given rise to participants’ discussion of legal consequences. as such, this warrants some discussion, though further legal research is needed. for example, in switzerland, a male who met a female through a dating platform was convicted for deliberating removing a condom without his partner’s knowledge. while they both agreed to have sex, the female refused unprotected sex and later discovered that the condom was removed without her consent during sexual activity [ ]. likewise, in germany, a german police officer was found guilty of sexual assault for removing a condom without the consent of his partner and was sentenced to eight months in jail, fined $ , and had to pay for a sexual health test for the female victim [ ]. such cases highlight two major themes: there is little understanding what stealthing is in the legal context and there remains little precedence for the legal consequences. as noted in our study population, sexual assault was a consistent emergent theme in relation to the legal consequences of stealthing, though participants may also have considered rape as an option for legal charges. however, participants defined sexual assault differently, with some including rape, threats, and unwanted sexual contact, while others (mostly females) considered unwanted touching, kissing, or hugging as sexual assault as well. this further affirms that not only is there a need for a comprehensive and concrete definition of consent, but also that of sexual assault, that in turn can pave the way for more legal precedence in such cases. whether stealthing should be criminalized has been met with debate and further comprehensive legal research is needed before such measures are made. for example, blanco [ ] notes that while the removal of a condom without consent may negate the bodily autonomy of women, considering it as rape may instead be over-criminalization. as such, a major recommendation has been to avoid new laws against stealthing and instead implement conditional consent, as noted in the case of assange [ ]. regardless, as noted by ebrahim, stealthing int. j. environ. res. public health , , of raises questions around what sex is and how it changes with or without a condom, and thus highlighting the need for further research. the results of this study should be interpreted in the context of its limitations. the college campus is primarily a first-generation minority-serving location, thus the results are not generalizable to other populations. likewise, to prevent accidental identification of participants, we did not analyze data separately by major. it is highly likely that the results would vary among health science or related majors as compared to non-science-based majors, as the former may be exposed to more sexual health classes. furthermore, self-reported data is susceptible to social desirability, especially due to the sensitive nature of the topic. . conclusions the results of our study are the first to provide empirical evidence on the current knowledge and perception of stealthing among college students. we note that stealthing, despite being popular among the young adult population, is viewed negatively and raises questions among the population, including concerns over trust, personal health, as well as consent. these results provide evidence that stealthing—the act of nonconsensual condom removal—must become an imperative component of public health efforts to ensure appropriate sexual health literacy. criminalizing stealthing and making it an equivalent of rape, as noted by many participants in our study, is not a feasible first step and opponents may argue that the consent for sexual intercourse supersedes that of condom removal. however, our results do demonstrate that young adults perceive the act of stealthing as at least a sexual violation—a notion that has been brought up in the field of law and thus provides public health a foundation upon which to initiate health education programs to address stealthing prevention behaviors as well as further research. specifically, formalized social media qualitative analyses would be beneficial to highlight emergent themes related to how stealthing is discussed, as well as research among stealthers into the driving factors behind such behavior that may shed further light on means of preventive measures. given the substantial media coverage on stealthing and the importance of ensuring that young adults receive appropriate evidence-based information, public health efforts are needed to incorporate stealthing as a part of sexual health education. author contributions: conceptualization, m.a. and m.b.; methodology, m.b. software, m.b.; validation, m.a., m.b., b.b., p.o. and a.o.; formal analysis, m.a. and m.b.; investigation, m.a., d.h.; resources, m.b.; data curation, m.a., d.h. and m.b.; writing—original draft preparation, m.a.; writing—review and editing, m.a., m.b., b.b., p.o. and a.o.; visualization, m.a.; supervision, m.b.; project administration, m.b. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . rainn. state law report generator. . available online: https://apps.rainn.org/policy/ (accessed on april ). . about. me too movement. available online: https://metoomvmt.org/about/ 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http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.whi. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/whatissh.pdf https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/whatissh.pdf http://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-sexual-abuse-sexual-assault-sexual-harassment-and-rape- http://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-sexual-abuse-sexual-assault-sexual-harassment-and-rape- http://www.sscok.edu/comsafetypgs/consent.html https://www.rainn.org/articles/what-is-consent http://dx.doi.org/ . /jsad. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /a http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/ /act-greens-rival-revenge-porn-legislation-to-tackle-stealthing/ https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/ /act-greens-rival-revenge-porn-legislation-to-tackle-stealthing/ https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/pslr/vol /iss / int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . abc. swiss court upholds sentence in “stealthing” condom case. abc news. . available online: https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /swiss-court-upholds-sentence-in-stealthing- condom-case/ (accessed on february ). . cnn mr. police officer found guilty of condom “stealthing” in landmark trial. cnn, . available online: https://www.cnn.com/ / / /health/stealthing-germany-sexual-assault-scli-intl/index. html (accessed on february ). © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /swiss-court-upholds-sentence-in-stealthing-condom-case/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /swiss-court-upholds-sentence-in-stealthing-condom-case/ https://www.cnn.com/ / / /health/stealthing-germany-sexual-assault-scli-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/ / / /health/stealthing-germany-sexual-assault-scli-intl/index.html http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	methods 	sample and data collection 	data analysis 	results 	knowledge 	consent 	social norm 	self-efficacy 	discussion 	conclusions 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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and society / social sciences / culture / arts [uri / / / / ] standfirst revelations of sexual harassment, sexism and unequal pay in film and broadcasting have called ‘time’s up’ on the myths of egalitarianism that circulate about the creative sector, argues rosalind gill. pull out comment arguably…inequality in our cultural industries is even more troubling than in other fields our cultural fields are not as equal as they think for people interested in equality, diversity and social justice in the workplace, the cultural and creative industries present a curious paradox. on one hand, much evidence indicates that fields such as advertising, architecture and design, broadcasting, film and new media are sites of stark and persistent inequalities, in which women, people from black and minority ethnic (bame) groups and from poorer backgrounds are often under-represented, paid less and concentrated in less highly valued areas compared with men, white people and those from more privileged socioeconomic groups. yet on the other hand, these same fields are deeply invested in egalitarian values, are hostile to hierarchies, and present themselves as open, tolerant and based on democratic and meritocratic principles. as i was told on numerous occasions doing fieldwork among media workers: ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, black or white, gay or straight, as long as you’re creative’. what recent scandals have shown, however—from ‘metoo’ to the bbc’s record of unequally rewarding male and female talent—is that it clearly does matter and, moreover, that our ‘creative’ fields are no better (and possibly a lot worse) than other fields such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem), where gender inequality is better recognised and where programmes are in place to challenge it. focussing on gender, and taking the film industry as an example, it is evident that almost whatever indicator is examined—from pay, to seniority, to security of tenure—women fare significantly less well than men. there are, of course, exceptions but the data is compelling. there is horizontal segregation, with women concentrated in some roles (make-up and wardrobe, for example) and men in others (sound and lighting). but there is also vertical segregation, which becomes stark at the top in key creative roles. for nearly twenty years, a california-based research team lead by martha lauzen has tracked the employment of women behind the scenes in the top-grossing films produced in hollywood. the celluloid ceiling report for (https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/ / / _celluloid_ceiling_report.pdf) revealed that women made up only % of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers, a drop of % from the previous year. in terms of directors, women were only %, again representing a reduction from the previous year, and thus contesting optimistic accounts that things are slowly getting better. expressed differently, % of the top hollywood films were directed only by men. the picture in the uk is similar, and further highlights the inverse relationship between a film’s budget and the likelihood of a woman being employed in any of the key creative positions. these figures are sobering in their own right, representing a great loss of talent and potential, particularly considering that women and men graduate from film school in equal numbers and express similar desires for their working lives afterward graduation. however, it is also disturbing for another reason: namely that film is a storytelling medium that shapes which narratives and whose narratives and voices we see and hear. arguably, for this reason, inequality in our cultural industries is even more troubling than in other fields. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/ / / _celluloid_ceiling_report.pdf https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/ / / _celluloid_ceiling_report.pdf researchers have become more adept at measuring the impact that employment inequality can have on the nature or content of films, from the famous ‘bechdel test’—in which films were evaluated on whether they had more than one female character who spoke to another woman about something other than a man—to sophisticated measures of the screen time or speaking time of female and male characters. there is clear evidence that female actors and characters are less disadvantaged in films with female creatives behind the camera. similarly, research from directors uk in (https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/generic_file_content_rows/file_ s/ / / /o riginal/cut_out_of_the_picture_-_report.pdf? ) shows there are ‘symbiotic’ benefits in that female creatives tend to be more likely to hire women than male creatives. why, though, is inequality so entrenched in our creative professions—from art and architecture to publishing, film and television? the conventional explanation is that motherhood is the issue. as industry bodies such as skillset note, our societies are not set up for people who may need to work round the clock at times, then have no work at all for several months; nurseries are not open for someone who needs to leave for a shoot at am. yet these factors also affect men who become fathers, but who rarely pay a penalty in this way. moreover, such an argument does not account for the large number of women in arts and media professions who do not have children but are still under-represented in positions of authority. another potential explanation focuses on the informality of many of the ‘employers’ in these fields—film, for example, is organised around project teams that are often pulled together at short notice. in this context, ‘homophilly’—appointing in one’s own image— comes to the fore, as well as falling back on one’s ‘contacts’, who are also likely to be ‘people like you’. unconscious bias clearly plays into this, especially in the context of hiring practices that do not depend on a formal record of achievement (e.g. qualifications, resumé) and are more likely based on by word of mouth judgments (e.g. ‘he’s good to work with’ versus ‘she can be difficult’). deborah jones and judith pringle have coined the term ‘unmanageable inequalities’ to talk about forms of inequality that exist and are reproduced outside the formal apparatuses (e.g. equal opportunities legislation) that have been put in place to deal with fairness in the workplace. https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/generic_file_content_rows/file_ s/ / / /original/cut_out_of_the_picture_-_report.pdf? https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/generic_file_content_rows/file_ s/ / / /original/cut_out_of_the_picture_-_report.pdf? it may be also that the myth of egalitarianism, to which people in cultural and creative fields are so attached, is itself part of the problem, because it obscures inequalities or presents them as the outcome of differential individual merit. during the s it seemed as if inequalities had become not just unmanageable but also unspeakable, producing strange affective dissonances for me as a researcher as i was told again and again how open, equal and diverse workplaces were, even when this contradicted the evidence of both my own eyes and reliable data. one of the most surreal experiences was being told how ‘multi-culti’ the staff of a large new media company was, while surveying a large open-plan space filled almost exclusively with white people. as my interviews attest, a profound investment in meritocracy can, and does, sit alongside acknowledgements that other factors are in fact crucial to success (eg, ‘it’s all down to who you know’). for women i interviewed, chosing not to talk about inequality was sometimes a strategic decision; i was told ‘you don’t talk about gender if you want to get on’. in this sense, ‘metoo’, ‘timesup’ and the eloquent activism of carrie gracie and others in exposing the ‘secretive’ pay culture of the bbc, offers hope in breaking the silence and challenging the myth of egalitarianism in our creative professions. for it is only when we begin to acknowledge how unequal our cultural industries are that we can truly start to work on challenging this. rosalind gill is professor of social and cultural analysis, department of sociology, city university of london, london ec v hb. email rosalind.gill. @city.ac.uk competing interests the author declares no competing interests. mailto:rosalind.gill. @city.ac.uk u n i v e r s i t y o f c o p e n h a g e n infrastructural performance reclaiming social relationality in times of structural precarity schmidt, cecilie ullerup published in: nordic theatre studies doi: . /nts.v i . publication date: document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record citation for published version (apa): schmidt, c. u. ( ). infrastructural performance: reclaiming social relationality in times of structural precarity. nordic theatre studies, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /nts.v i . download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /nts.v i . https://doi.org/ . /nts.v i . abstract as freelance workers are living in inconstancy and increasing social isolation, a crucial question arises: how can solidarity be reclaimed through a critique of structural precar- ity? precarity as a consequence of neoliberal working conditions is analysed and prob- lematized across academic disciplines. departing from lauren berlant’s description of structural precarity and judith butler’s elaborations on performativity, i propose the term infrastructural performance in order to portray artistic strategies which criticize inequality and organize collectively. i analyse the infrastructural performance of the performance art collective cobratheater.cobra to show how precarity has provoked organisational and artistic reconfigurations in the independent performance art scene. i demonstrate how features within the neoliberal work ethos such as the repetition of the artistic signature, individualisation, and the imperative of mobility are dismantled by the group’s infrastruc- tural performance. i conclude that infrastructural performance criticises structural pre- carity through collective actions of infection, exposure, and disobedience. it is a new form of collective artistic organisation, which proposes the possibility of change in social and economic conditions. at the end of the article, i speculate how infrastructural perfor- mance might change the conception of the art work itself. keywords infrastructural performance, structural precarity, neoliberalism, performance art, collectivism, self-organisation infrastructural performance reclaiming social relationality in times of structural precarity cecilie ullerup schmidt nordic theatre studies vol. , no. . , – . issn – © cecilie ullerup schmidt and nordic theatre studies peer reviewed article open access: https://tidsskrift.dk/nts/index published with support from nordic board for periodicals in the humanities and social sciences (nop-hs) what constitutes continuity amid the pressure of structural incon- stancy? lauren berlant ( b, ) how can we struggle around or organise diffuse forms of cultural and artistic labor? stevphen shukastis ( , ) i’m a part of a network which has so many protagonists and so little structure that all financial supporters and institutions constantly say: set up an organisation. set up a business entity. set up a contact person. carolin gerlach about the network cobratheater.cobra ( , ) introduction the possibilities of creating artistic work depend on an infrastructure of ven- ues and funding. in europe, the contemporary cultural policy behind venues and funding builds on the notion of national belonging, international mobility as well as an ideology of the (soloist) artist genius. i define infrastructure within artistic production as the organisational model, which determines how artists can work, move, and live their lives. american literature professor lau- ren berlant describes infrastructure as an organisational model consisting of “patterns, habits, and norms of use.” infrastructure is performative or, as berlant writes, “infrastructure is defined by use and movement.” i employ the term infrastructure as an organisational model which is not just given through policy and institutions, but can be performed, moulded, and changed. infra- structural performance is, then, the specific negotiation of the given condi- berlant a, . berlant b, . infrastructural performance reclaiming social relationality in times of structural precarity nordic theatre studies tions of economy and sociality. it is a reconfiguration of structural conditions, which determine how we work and live. as theoreticians such as luc boltanski, eve chiapello, bojana kunst, isa- bell lorey and angela mcrobbie have demonstrated for more than a decade, artists and freelance cultural workers have long been living the “role model” of work in precarity. i am curious to see how artists reflect and respond to this state of precarity in their way of organising: might there be more socially and financially sustainable ways of working? when looking at the performance art scene with its imperative of the con- stant production of ephemeral works, of transformation, of building portfolios with recognizable and outstanding signatures, i am hopeful about the tactics of certain young, international groups such as cobratheater.cobra, breakfast club, and danseatelier, which have all emerged out of educational pro- grammes for performance art within the last five years. what i find compel- ling – following blake stimson and gregory sholette ( ) – in analysing these artistic practices of collectivism, is how collectivism inevitably exposes and attacks “broader social and economic conditions of production.” in the context of neoliberalism, every sphere of life is economised and each indi- vidual is working on herself as a company, measuring and accounting her individual production. the performance groups mentioned above propose other ways of performing and re-forming the economic and social conditions, which we are offered in neoliberalism. in various ways, the groupings men- tioned above actively resist the conventions of recognisability, belonging, and governable behaviour through their infrastructural performance. yet, before looking into the specific infrastructural performance of cobratheater.cobra, i want to propose structural precarity as the contextual horizon on which this phenomenon figures. in this article, i read precarity in the context of the work and economy the following two collectives will not be explored further here but can be summa- rized briefly as this: danseatelier is a group of alumni from dance & choreography at the danish national school of performing arts, who, through a shared space, continuous daily, collective practice, and performance nights with a broad spectrum of associated artists exercise an infrastructural performance where the shared space and continuous practice oppose neoliberal individualisation and mobility. breakfast club consists of members from different countries, all graduates from the inter-university of dance in berlin, and attacks directly the privilege of the nation state. breakfast club redistributes national funding between its trans-national members and opposes the idea of privileged belonging. see also schmidt . stimson and sholette , . brown , , . i consequently employ the term ”work” instead of “labour”, since – following post-marxist feminist kathi weeks – “work” is associated with waged activity opposed to the broader understanding of “living labour” as something alternative happening “out- side” waged work time (weeks , – ). in times of the neoliberal economisation of every human activity (as for example unfolded by wendy brown in undoing the demos ( )), i don’t find a division between waged work and living labour productive, since every kind of activity potentially counts and adds to or disrupts the individual value pro- infrastructural performance of the independent performance artist: a precarity based on short-term con- tracts, being one’s own boss, and own employee, performing social and geo- graphical flexibility, having freedom to follow one’s desires and to decide the rhythm of work, and only a few social rights, if any. i want to address struc- tural conditions of precarity in my historical present in order to address the challenges of the subject in new forms of work, specifically the work of the freelance performance artist. through a reading of the performance group labelled cobratheater.cobra, i show how they, through infrastructural perfor- mances, criticize the demand for artistic signature, individualisation, austerity politics, and inequality. i want to discuss how performance collectives display structural precarity not only as distribution of political powerlessness, but also as a reason for forming models for “rethinking social relationality” through a reorganisation of infrastructure (butler, berlant). consequently, i want to ex- amine the sustainability of these reorganised infrastructures: what happens to economic stability, the possibility of family, continuous work-relations, or close friendships? is it possible to imagine temporary models of situated cri- tique ten years ahead? in a final perspective, i will consider whether the in- frastructural performance might change the conception of the art work itself. precarity made by structures precarity is a term employed on life formed by structurally determined ine- quality and insecurity: the everyday is filled by worries such as if social se- curity can be guaranteed, whether there will be jobs in the future, if one can afford having a family, falling ill, aging. here, the citizen puts a lot of affective labour into thinking about how to sustain an acceptable life. berlant explores affective responses to structurally conditioned precarity in the us where poverty, inequality, and structural inconstancy are caused by racial hierarchies, reproduction of class, and austerity politics. she de- fines precarity as a structural condition coming out of “[...] the privatization of wealth and the slow and uneven bankrupting of so many localities (nations, states, regions) beginning in the s: leading to such uneven desiccation of the public sector materially, ideologically, and in fantasy that ‘austerity’ has developed into the name for the new realism.” precarity is defined by berlant as a structural condition growing out of capitalism over the past nearly years, where the public sector has been shrinking in the global north, labor has been globalised, debts have been growing, and where the rationale is to cut welfare when crisis threatens growth. furthermore, berlant defines precarity as an affective resonance of this structural diet: [...] an ongoing (structurally) economic problem – first, indicating that capital- duction. through this, i also focus on a critique of work in all its complexity, instead of opening a utopian idea about labour “outside economy” or “without interest”. berlant et al. , . berlant et.al. , . nordic theatre studies ism thrives on instability; and second, pointing to the ways that capitalist forms of labor make bodies and minds precarious, holding out the promise of flour- ishing while wearing out the corpus we drag around in different ways and at different rates, partly by overstimulation, partly by under stimulation, and partly by the incoherence with which alienation is lived as exhaustion plus saturating intensity. berlant stresses how capitalism has structurally inserted instability as an existential feeling. she makes a notable link between the ways of working in capitalism and the production of precarious subjectivation: the constant changes of rhythm resulting in a bodily and mental exhaustion. through vari- ous analyses of literature and film works, berlant points out how an individual self-precarisation – a sort of self-interpellation of a disappointing narrative of one’s own life – takes place through, what she calls, a general cruel opti- mism. here a collective fantasy of “the good life” is practiced: a hetero-famil- ial, upwardly mobile good-life fantasy” including “job security, political and social equality and lively, durable intimacy.” yet, this fantasy is lost in the clash with an individual reality of structural inconstancy. broken, unrealistic promises make the individuals of cruel optimism face their life as a continuum of defeats with the soundtrack of guilt – “i didn’t manage to…”. this individual effect of loss, as berlant stresses, belongs to the general structure of feel- ings in capitalism. berlant refers to the dichotomy of individual structures of feeling and structural conditions set by contemporary politics. she detects a general cruel optimism in capitalism echoed in many individual “situation tragedies,” where one personal disaster seems to lead to the next. precarity is structurally destabilising, yet felt on a very concrete, subjective level “at home” with such common symptoms as “a lack of time, energy, money, mul- tiple work commitments leaving little time for meetings or even travelling to meetings, burn-out, health issues, including mental health, forced migration, visa issues, care duties.” the political “capacity to act” within one’s own life and in public is limited. or, as slovenian art theoretician bojana kunst berlant et al. . berlant b, . berlant b, . berlant emphasises her methodological ambition to track individual feelings into generalisation: “this is part of my method, to track the becoming general of singular things, and to give those things materiality by tracking their resonances across many scenes.” (berlant b, ) berlant b: . see “precarious workers brigade: transversal articulations of art workers’ or- ganising precarious workers brigade interviewed by tereza stejskalová and barbora kleinhamplová” p. – in henriksson et al. , . butler , . infrastructural performance states, a certain powerlessness towards political change is experienced. the genre of the individualized situation tragedy leads me to look at the inter- nalization of the structures of the freelance worker, hereunder specifically the performance artist, who embodies the rhythm and life of structural precarity. the precarious worker as a figure covers not only artists and cultural workers, but also migrant workers, phd students, interns, students, service workers, manual workers, and freelancers (without any noticeable, contin- uous success). the precarity of the freelancer is substantially described by german political theoretician isabell lorey. she traces in the close relation between freedom and insecurity, between the entrepreneurial, passionate, self-governed work-life and the lack of security. the etymology of the free- lancer is the medieval knight being hired to fight for whatever lord offering the best conditions. the freelancer risks his life in the name of others, yet he travels alone from one temporary employment to the next. he lives out an unreserved mobility and he serves neither a nation, nor a religion, nor a political direction. berlant describes the freelancer as one of the key figures in neoliberalism: a mobile and “post-geographic” character preferring “entre- preneurial precarity [...] giving “herself to the dream.’” the artist in particular is seen as a happy worker, loving what she is doing, thankfully accepting chances in place of fees and operating in self-constituted sovereignty. what makes the independent performance artist a figure exposing the conditions of artistic freelance work to its extremes is the immateriality, em- bodiment, and ephemerality of the genre of performance art. here, the per- sonality and the body are the main materials in the artistic practice: think of solo pioneers of body art carolee schneemann or marina abramovic, or contemporary performance artists with bodies in political conflict such as the south african feminist mamela nyamza or serbian border-crosser tanja ostojic. or think of british and german performance art collectives such as forced entertainment, she she pop or gob squad drawing on their relations and conflicts as the main motive of their performances. obviously, affective and bodily work are at the center of these artists’ political production. since the personal-political is at the center of performance art, it cannot be delegat- ed to others, nor repeated, but requires authentic passion in personae. with derrida, i would say that performance art, as a genre, lives from producing kunst , – . lorey ; . gibson quoted in berlant b, . the figure of the “happy artist” is a strange prejudice, “dream” or promise: the art- ist is assumed to be in constant happiness and self-fulfilment through work as opposition to all other workers being unhappy. such assumption of the happy artist paralyses the possibility of structural critique from the artists. the price of the “free” preference of pas- sion and pleasure is the loss of rights and protection, but also of the right to complain... even when mediated, as in performances of gob squad or the wooster group, the play with the expected “ontological” authenticity of the genre is at the centre, as point- ed out by, amongst others, philip auslander in liveness ( ). nordic theatre studies differance. therefore, similarly to other consumptions in capitalism, perfor- mance art steadily produces “the new” and through this constant transforma- tion and production, new ways of seeing and consuming, a.k.a. growth. so, if performance art serves the demands of capitalism perfectly in its produc- tivity, and at the same time exhausts the artists through structural precarity, how can artists then propose more socially and economically sustainable ways of working? american philosopher and feminist judith butler insists on analyzing struc- tural distribution in social and economic institutions when addressing new forms of work within academia and the arts: “i want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way
 of rethinking so- cial relationality [...] our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the or- ganization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. in this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.” where ber- lant detects individual situation tragedies and kunst mourns a powerlessness towards political change, butler insists on actively rethinking sociality. with the backdrop of structural precarity, butler formulates optimism towards the collective re-structuring, towards new ways of assembling. infect and explode the signature i find in the multi-levelled work of cobratheater.cobra. an example of how in- frastructural performance collectively negotiates and opposes the structural precarity of performance artists. their way of organising collectively criticizes (at least) three conditions within structural precarity: the idea of an artistic signature, the isolation and exhaustion of freelance workers, and the imper- ative of individual mobility. cobratheater.cobra is a group of more than members from visual arts, performance art, and cultural studies. based in germany, members of cobrat- heater.cobra have mainly studied at the department of cultural studies and aesthetic communication at the university of hildesheim, which is, amongst others, directed by the professor for experimental forms of contemporary the- atre and founding group member of the performance collective she she pop, annemarie matzke. after a few decades of hyping the brand of the collective in german performance art, influenced by the many successful graduates from the institute of applied theatre studies in giessen, cobratheater.cobra bojana kunst points out, with reference to brian massumi’s mourning of the loss of normality, how “weirdness” of performance art is a promise of growth and radical con- sumption (kunst , ). berlant et al. , , my highlighting. see also a concrete analysis of social movements in butler’s book notes toward a performative theory of assembly ( ). infrastructural performance calls itself neither a collective nor a self-organised workers’ association, but a network and a label. cobratheater.cobra is influenced by digital technol- ogies and it works – partly due to its dispersed workers all over germany – widely through the medium of the internet. to describe the relationality of themselves, cobratheater.cobra deploys the metaphor of infection (german: ansteckung): when you have been infected – that is involved – in a cobrat- heater.cobra production, you’re automatically licenced to use the label for your own work. despite the easily obtained admittance to the label, another inauguration ritual is demanded: you have to let at least two – until then to you unknown – members of cobratheater.cobra attend and criticize a version of your art work before going public. this peer critique must go public along with the art work. the infective principle means that cobratheater.cobra is constantly expanding as a network: the cobra snake, the hyper-flexible line of vertebras, has, as it says on its official website, no end. the very “casting” of members is uncontrollable and results in a diverse identity with divergent aesthetics. the inauguration ritual – getting a peer critique from unknown members – exercises a continued criticality among the members. opposed to the idea of the “artist genius” or the autonomous theatre di- rector, cobratheater.cobra has no addressable spokesperson, front figure, or identifiable “creative mind”. neither has it an aesthetic mission, as opposed to numerous german collectives educated since the late s in giessen. there is an obvious critique of authorship and of artistic signature in insisting on the diversity of a label. furthermore, the aesthetic contingency makes the group a sincere provocation to art councils: when cobratheater.cobra sends eight applications to the berlin senate, who is then being supported? in the reading of the application, the network forces the appointed jury to close-read each of the applications in order to estimate the specific artistic proposals. since cobratheater.cobra is a network and its website-calendar presents a hyper-activity of work as well as a many-voiced authorship, there is no portfolio or artistic recognisability to rely on. as marx said, the collective action of workers exposes the fragile construction of individuality: “when the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” in collective action, cobratheater.cobra devalues the artist genius as a prisoning narrative building on a speculative accumulation of aesthetic praxis as property. i read the explosive production of identities and dissonant aesthetics within the la- bel cobratheater.cobra as an infrastructural performance criticising artistic identification: a strategic labelling to cause destabilisation of the judgemental premises for traditional infrastructural support within (performance) art. the infective network disturbs identification as we know it from the art world: here, i neither identify the artist genius, nor the (german) performance col- lective nor the workers’ association. the artistic signature has exploded. see http://www.cobratheatercobra.com/die-cobra/ may karl marx ( ) , .. nordic theatre studies expose exhaustion and isolation cobratheater.cobra attack the structural level of precarity, when they, through strategic labelling, infect the purity of the “artist genius” and explode the ar- tistic signature. they display an affective level of precarity when they expose their own daily interpellation as cultural workers within the field of perfor- mance art. in the concrete performance work, caro von cobra auf kampn- agel ( ), cobratheater.cobra makes visible the common precarity, which gathers and characterises the work and lives of the cobra-members. in an artistic statement at kampnagel on nov. , , presented in the frame of the discursive evening, a so-called “apparatus”, really useful theater cu- rated by stefanie wenner and thorsten eibeler, the performance artist car- olin gerlach stands alone in the manège representing nine digitally present colleagues of cobratheater.cobra. through short snap-chat messages with video confessions, the colleagues send their “updates” to gerlach in a medi- um designed for ephemeral, personal statements: mothers, artists, thinkers, and other workers across germany complain about their exhaustion due to a forthcoming premiere of a political theatre piece and the organisation of a child’s birthday, a late-night deadline and a next-morning rehearsal with colleagues, staged between a kitchen sink and computer screens. here, masked with the cartoonish and stereotyped filters offered by the software, the women confess and mock the precarity of the cultural worker. this expo- sure of the exhaustion could be read as a feminist performance in the sense of sharing. through the gathering of documented personal precarity caused by a neoliberal work demand, solidarity is exercised among workers across immaterial, creative, domestic, and reproductive labor. cobratheater.cobra’s collectivism displays the affective level of individu- al precarity through several examples on snap-chat. at the same time, the repetition of individualised troubles proves a general structural condition of contemporary performance art production. however, although the “cobras” are sending their warmest thoughts and greetings to their colleague gerlach, they physically leave her on her own: online sociality in the mobile network. the network is apart, since the neoliberal work market demands flexibility and mobility: a one-month production here, another three weeks there, a res- idency abroad again. the geographical work mobility functions as a promise of economic upward mobility for the artists – or at least maintenance of a minimum income and the right to work. physically present sociality is thereby threatened by economically forced migration. here, i think of the practice of sharing as seen in in the #metoo movement, which points back to the tradition within feminist affect theory represented by, amongst others, audre lorde and sara ahmed. both writers accumulate episodes of racist or sex- ist behaviour experienced by themselves in, for example, lorde’s sister outsider ( ) and ahmed’s recent living a feminist life ( ). infrastructural performance disobey economically forced (im)mobility while the colleagues - due to temporary project work or residencies away from home – are all placed in different corners of germany, gerlach is able to be present and represent cobratheater.cobra. since she is officially unemployed on “hartz iv”, the unpopular german unemployment benefit and social welfare package of euros a month. “hartz iv” was introduced in and is an example of the german austerity policy with not only finan- cial, but also social consequences. it includes directives on how to live and how (not) to move. gerlach presents her personal ambivalence towards the imperative of mobility haunting the life of the performance artist: officially gerlach is allowed to travel only days a year when receiving “hartz iv”, in order to mainly be available for possible job offers in dresden, where she is based. gerlach decides to reject the geographical imprisonment and conduct what i would call an infrastructural performance of civil disobedience through her on-going practice hartz iv und die welt gehÖrt dir (”hartz iv and the world belongs to you”, my translation). gerlach has taken the “free- dom” to travel as much as possible across mid-europe in . invited by wenner and eibeler to perform in hamburg, gerlach finds another possibility to break the hartz iv-conduct of immobility: gerlach travels km from dresden to hamburg to perform. she travels by train as unemployed, per- forming her self-declared freedom, a civil disobedience. she travels through several of the cities where her cobra-colleagues are simultaneously working and being paid as performance artists. she travels and performs for the label cobratheater.cobra. her individual civil disobedience against geographical imprisonment in dresden is placed in the context of the other working co- bras. as a collective, they expose how the “freedom” to move is structurally dictated by their working opportunities within an unpredictable work market of independent performance art where, at the lowest income-level, gerlach is governed by the state and cannot move. their collection of migratory ine- quality i categorise as – with the term of berlant – a collection of neoliberal situation tragedies. in the discourse on the artist as worker, it is often criti- cized that the narrative becomes too generic and fetishizes certain simplistic motives such as poverty or loneliness. however, with cobratheater.cobra, a rather explicit inequality within the independent performance art scene is on display. here, i detect a conflict in neoliberalism: the structural inequality within the group of colleagues shows a conflict between the lived mobility of the freelancers and gerlach’s immobility dictated by austerity policies. be- maurizio lazzarato warns against a generic “artist’s critique”, which he finds developed by luc boltanski and eve chiapello in the new spirit of capitalism ( ). lazzarato is very specific on the inequalities of creative workers: ”in ein und demselben beruf arbeitend, kann man reich und abgesichert sein oder arm und einer situation ex- tremer prekarität ausgesetzt. zwischen den beiden extremen gibt es eine beinahe unendliche abstufung und abwandlung bezüglich situation und status” (see “die miss- geschicke der „künstlerkritik“ und der kulturellen beschäftigung “ maurizio lazzarato, – in raunig and wuggenig , ). nordic theatre studies sides exposing the unequal economic and social conditions of performance art workers, cobratheater.cobra also proposes civil disobedience towards the state-led government of precarious subjects. a promising infection obviously a network does not make its members more equal than the market, the curators, the grant juries, and the state allow: despite the label as a sol- idary infrastructural performance producing a plurality of aesthetics, shared visibility, individual legitimisation, and access to the performance art scene, cobratheater.cobra is neither a guarantee of continued work, nor a stabi- lisation of income through collective sharing of income across projects. in the performance, gerlach tells how a member of the austrian performance collective god’s entertainment addresses her as a cobratheater.cobra mem- ber, asking her what she presented in the last performance of cobratheater. cobra in the frame of the really useful theater in berlin. but gerlach did not attend that cobratheater.cobra performance in berlin. other colleagues performed under the same label. she explains the model of cobratheater. cobra to the god’s entertainment member: “i’m a part of a network which has so many protagonists and so little structure that all financial supporters and institutions constantly say: set up an organisation. set up a business entity. set up a contact person.” her utterance states the institutional advisory and interpellation of the artists to become recognisable as an organisation, iden- tifiable as a financial model, and addressable in terms of a reduction of the label into one subject. gerlach states how they are too many and too much, exploding the reasonable number of the performance art collective, at the same time having too little structure to be an entity to collaborate with. in oth- er words, corbatheater.cobra does not respond to the institutional interpella- tion in the althusserian sense: similarly to the police officer, the art institution shouts “hey you”, and a network-choir of internet-dispersed subjects answer with more than ephemeral snap-chat videos. cobratheater.cobra does not fulfill institutional expectations, but the label does allow the individual to iden- tify with the collective: gerlach states her legitimisation in cobratheater.cobra saying, “i am part of [...],” which i would interpret as an affective belonging. gerlach is not a soloist. she is infected: a part of the network cobratheater. cobra. artistic self-organisation and collectivism are phenomena which could eas- ily be subscribed to a transitional, “immature” phase after finishing studies: a communal step into “the market” made by alumnae, who haven’t yet found their own artistic signature, nor stabilised their individual life, nor working conditions. to me, as an academic gesture, there is a point in highlighting the artists’ infrastructural performance as an aesthetic and political form of economic and social critique. i read, however, the current disproportionality from the script caro von cobra auf kampnagel (gerlach , ), my transla- tion. infrastructural performance in collectivism – groups too big exploding the artistic signature, exposing the inequality among the members – as a direct response to the increasing structural precarity and individualisation in our historical present; an individu- alisation, which is a characteristic of the project work and the possibilities for funding and career, and which already starts during art school, where – fol- lowing the bologna process – each art student is trained to collect individual points and forms an individual, recognizable portfolio as artist genius. a politics of belonging is negotiated in the structures and movement patterns of cobratheater.cobra: the right to belong in a social group and the right to appear without aligning with the neoliberal work ethos are exercised. i conclude that infrastructural performance is a way of recomposing within the “given” political and economic conditions, insisting on the possibility of political change. when cobratheater.cobra criticises the idea of an artistic signature, the isolation and exhaustion of freelance workers, and the impera- tive of individual (im)mobility, they thereby also promote a collective political imagination: infection, disturbance, and disobedience are the means to start this change. the infrastructural performance is a critique and re-negotiation of what is promoted in neoliberalism as a given and unchangeable situational tragedy of each individual. concerns around the fragility of working subjects have increased against the backdrop of the so-called financial crises, cuts in education and culture, growing nationalism, and border politics. i would claim that infrastructural per- formance is a new phenomenon growing up with and out of these concerns, uttered by young performance artists who make artistic proposals within the practice of “social organisation”. in the visual arts, a tradition of self-organ- ised art workers’ movements uttering institutional critique, fighting for a min- imum wage, and visibility of women can be traced back to the first half of the th century, but growing in the s and onwards. yet, as airi triisberg and isabell lorey have described, since the s a collective outspokenness on structural precarity has emerged. the organisation of and solidarity in social movements in and beyond art and education have been established such as w.a.g.e ( –), precarious workers brigade ( –), the occupy movement ( –). i define the category of infrastructural performance as neither a “social movement” nor an “art work”. it is both. i would advocate for an understanding of the ongoing, collective infra- structural performance of cobratheater.cobra – on stages, on the internet, in funding applications and in ways of organising – as avant-garde in the sense of peter bürger: durational artistic activity which makes visible the very con- ditions and general categories of art, rather than serving “whole”, finished see an elaborated reading of the conditions of art students following the bologna process in ”the-one-woman-orchestra”, schmidt a. see art workers between precarity and resistance: a genealogy by corina l. apostol in henriksson et al. , . triisberg ; lorey . nordic theatre studies art works of hermeneutic, aesthetic unity. far more than making hermeneu- tic art works, cobratheater.cobra’s artistic organisation must be read as an expanded, ongoing performance: an ongoing performance of constant criti- cality, which challenges the given structures within artistic production – and even, with this criticality, threatens its own very existence. when reading the infrastructural performance of the network, it displays the technologies of subjectivation within artistic practice: how an artist sub- ject becomes individualised, hypermobile or immobile and exhausted due to working conditions. it also proposes a range of performative technologies of assembly and promotes the possibility of change by reclaiming social rela- tionality in times of structural precarity. continuing from berlant’s idea of the affective level of precarity uttered in situation tragedies, i propose that infrastructural performance is a reaction to the loss. it is not just an experience of an individual situation tragedy, but the reaction and answer to the situation tragedy: a disturbing and disobedient, collective reaction to structural precarity. this answer to structural precarity is a new affective state of collective optimism against the back-drop of indi- vidual situation tragedies: the activities of cobratheater.cobra propose the hope of political change through assembly. the infection is good: after fever comes strength. peter bürger ( ) , – . a few months after the performance of cobratheater.cobra, the documentation video on the website of really useful theatre was taken away, censored by the mem- bers of cobratheater.cobra themselves. in the continous critical practice of the network, they agreed to take the documentation away from public accessibility,”due to statements made during the performance that could be misconstrued as racist” (still-statement in- serted in videodocumentation of the evening at kampnagel, http://usefultheater.de/re- ally-useful-theater-auf-kampnagel/, accessed . . ). cobratheater.cobra’s identity is defined by constant criticality in terms of peers reviewing before going public. yet, the performance was censored after the show. through correspondences by email with the curator stefanie wenner as well as caroline gerlach herself, i learned that the racist uttering was found in the way gerlach describes a mask worn in one of the snap chat videos. whether she or the software provides the racializing language is arguable. but the consequences of this utterance, which was anything but central in the dramaturgy or focus of the performance, caused the cobra-collaborators to decide – after months of email and skype conferences – to invest the fee for the performance of euro in a -day professionally moderated racism-sensitive conflict conversation for of the cobras (one did not participate in this so-called “white space”). moving away from criticis- ing precarity, the cobras ended up in a new precarity: spending unpaid hours evaluating an unpaid job. what came out of their engagement with critical whiteness (self)studies, will hopefully be discussed and published elsewhere. however, the critical practice of self-evaluation can be described as a central modus operandi in structural precarity: staying with the trouble in a double sense, criticising and optimising at one’s own ex- pense. in reality, the actual artwork is no longer accessible. the possible surplus value which it could attain through attention online, as well as the critique of structural precarity and knowledge sharing, which it actually exercised, are deleted. this article records the memorable work. infrastructural performance references berlant, lauren. a. “austerity, precarity, awkwardness.” supervalentthought.files.world- press.com. https://supervalentthought.files.wordpress.com/ / /berlant-aaa- final.pdf berlant, lauren. b. cruel optimism. durham: duke university press. berlant, butler, cvejic, lorey, puar and vujanovic. . "precarity talk: a virtual roundtable with…." tdr: the drama review ( , winter (t )): – . brown, wendy. . undoing the demos. new york: zone books. butler, judith. . acting in concert: a conversation with judith butler. ed. jean-philippe cazier: verso books. bürger, peter. . theorie der avantgarde. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. gerlach, carolin. . caro von cobra auf kampnagel. private script. henriksson, minna, erik krikortz and airi triisberg. . art workers – material conditions and labour struggles in contemporary art practice. berlin/ helsinki/stockholm/ tallinn. http://www.art-workers.org/index.php kunst, bojana. . artist at work. proximity of art and capitalism. new york: zero books. lorey, isabell. . die regierung der prekären. wien/berlin: turia + kant. lorey, isabell. . “governmentality and self-precarization. on the normalization of cultural producers”. http://eipcp.net/transversal/ /lorey/en/print ( . april ) marx, karl. ( ). capital. a critique of political economy, volume . moscow: progress publishers. raunig, gerald and ulf wuggenig. . kritik der kreativität. linz, berlin, london, zürich: transversal texts. schmidt, cecilie ullerup. . "fællesskab i mursten." teater : – . shukaistis, stevphen. . the composition of movements to come. london: rowmann and littlefield. stimson, blake and sholette gregory . collectivism after modernism. minneapolis: univer- sity of minnesota press. weeks, kathi. . the problem with work. durham: duke university press. nordic theatre studies author cecilie ullerup schmidt is a phd fellow enrolled at the department for theatre and per- formance studies, institute of arts and cultural studies at the university of copenhagen since feb. . in her phd, she examines the notions and practices of work within artistic education in the frame of the bologna process seen in the perspective of a con- temporary work ethos. she holds a ba in comparative literature and an ma in modern cultural studies from the university of copenhagen and has been a guest student at applied theatre studies in giessen – . from to she was artistic re- search associate teaching to the ba-programme “dance, context, choreography” at inter-university of dance /university of the arts in berlin. she has published the book who’s there? subject on stage in reality and a number of peer reviewed articles in journals such as danish kultur & klasse and peripeti. furthermore, she has worked and toured internationally as a performance artist for the last decade, and from – she was the curator and artistic director of the international performance festival works at work in dansehallerne, copenhagen. further details on teaching and publications: https://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=da/persons/ jbr_ _ _post book reviews .. ultra-montane faction, composed of people who wanted the pope to rule over kings and governments even in temporal matters. instead, he was drawn to unconventional religious thinkers and to social reformers generally. unavoidably, the book conveys something of boole’s attitude to mathematics. for example, in letters to his friend joseph hill, he argued that mathematics can be used to obtain truths what we might otherwise have been able to obtain only through “some unknown intuition of revelation” ( ). math, he says, trains the mind, but at a cost: its exclusive study will “deaden the imagination and destroy the relish for elegant literature and indispose the mind for everything but the bare pursuit of abstract truths” ( ). whether this was because of the nature of mathematical study or the intensity and abstract nature of thought required he could not say, although he held out the prospect that all might eventually be made easy and free of such risks. new light on boole offers a textually well-sourced, highly readable picture of provincial british life. precisely because boole lived in a remote part of ireland, his letters and still more people’s replies to them tell us a lot about the great causes of his time, as well as the daily business of life. the remarkable amount of information conveyed by this study amplifies our picture of a man who became, after his death, one of the more influential figures of vic- torian mathematics. jeremy gray the open university (emeritus) jeremy.gray@open.ac.uk emily j. manktelow. gender, power and sexual abuse in the pacific: rev. simpson’s “improper liberties.” london: bloomsbury, . pp. . $ . (cloth). doi: . /jbr. . few readers today will be surprised to learn that in the s, the reverend alexander simpson of the london missionary society in the tahitian field sexually abused many of the girls in his care at a school for the children of missionaries. the current focus on child sexual abuse has shown that religious boarding institutions create a virtual algorithm of age, status, power, opportunity, and vulnerability, too often resulting in both abuse and the subse- quent cover up. yet the charges were a deep shock to the london-based mission society for whom tahiti was meant to be the jewel in the crown. drawn to the high islands of eastern polynesia by the thrill- ing literature on the pacific published from the wallis and cook expeditions, missionaries were at first dismayed by their failure to convey to islanders how they had been moved and saved by their book. conversion, when it came under the tahitian leader pomare ii, was little consola- tion, for the new faith was deeply entangled in tahitian and then wider polynesian politics. missionary fantasies of compliant converted “natives” were quickly disabused; the daily grind of mission life wore away missionaries’ faith, tested their pious expectations, and revealed their weaknesses. by the s, the mission remained an outpost effectively ruled from london, but the islands were now the site of considerable pacific trade and a battle for political and military supremacy between french agents and tahitians. british missionaries tried to block france through their influence with tahitian nobles. it was against this backdrop that simpson’s sexual attacks on the female students of the missionary school were finally revealed. com- plaints were laid; reports and correspondence began flooding into the london missionary ▪ book reviews at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jbr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:jeremy.gray@open.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jbr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core society headquarters, where the charges were considered and the outcome decided. over two chapters in emily j. manktelow’s new study, we follow the minutiae of this process, learning that alliances and arguments formed first in favor of simpson, as many fathers and brothers believed their colleague over their daughters and sisters. manktelow’s analysis of this event is both innovative and wide-ranging, as much a medita- tion on history writing as on the events of tahiti in the mid-nineteenth century. her primary method is micro-history, the episodic approach. this is especially valuable for the analysis of trials, where the structures of power are most clearly exposed. she knows that the archives are potent places where privilege is embedded not merely in the white hands, largely male, who put pen to paper to construct narratives in their own defense, but also in the maintenance of records and the very buildings in which these documents are housed. manktelow’s explicit reflection on contemporary events for the writing of this history is powerful and engaging. her historiography of sexual violence begins with susan brownmil- ler’s landmark study on rape, against our will: men, women and rape ( ), and the sub- sequent debate on the prevalence of this abuse through history. as manktelow was struggling with this book, the #metoo movement revealed the extent of gendered sexual bullying and abuse, so this, too, fed into the analysis, along with statistics on rape in england and wales from . she deployed the same method to uncover the history of sexual violence specifi- cally against children, finding the past echoed in the recent celebrity cases of jimmy saville and rolf harris. manktelow’s deep subjectivity ensures the book is not only a polemic. she examines her own doubts as well as the considerable archive covering the events in tahiti. she mulls over the letters from simpson’s wife protesting his innocence and those from simpson’s supporters, who exploited possible weaknesses in the girls’ stories, particularly the long delay in the report- ing of the abuse. manktelow explores the suspicion of missionary children seemingly tainted by their close association with tahitians and the power of gossip in small societies where punish- ment was meted out by a distant administration. in the final chapter, manktelow focuses on the legacies of british colonialism and efforts to shore up the myth of the benevolent civilizing empire by hiding damming documents, partic- ularly those relating to the mau in kenya. again, the prose is thoughtful and the ideas are pow- erful. this chapter might have been strengthened, however, by some analysis of the current tahitian struggle with french colonialism. the conclusion reminds the reader that the book is thin on the broader politics of tahiti of the mid-nineteenth century and of the present. the central events of this book took place in the lead-up to french annexation of tahiti. yet british imperialism and colonialism provide the key thrust of manktelow’s approach and the source of most of her literature. manktelow’s exemplary analysis of sexual violence in the second chapter, which demonstrates so vividly the power of exploring the past from an explicit analysis of the present, was not brought to bear on the present political realities of french poly- nesia. there is no discussion, therefore, of how the macron administration continues to defy both united nation resolutions and tahitian demands for real autonomy and perhaps indepen- dence in the future. despite these concerns, this is an admirable book, notable for manktelow’s method, poised and balanced prose, and finely crafted and thoughtful analysis. manktelow’s focus on commu- nities of mission, thousands of miles from home, and the grinding disputes that ate away at the tight circle of congregation, is a welcome move in the study of empire. she harnesses the slow burn of her anger and her subjectivity to provide a masterclass, for the most part, in how to write the past from the present. helen gardner deakin university helen.gardner@deakin.edu.au book reviews ▪ at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jbr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:helen.gardner@deakin.edu.au https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jbr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce university of southern denmark onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce rugulies, reiner; sørensen, kathrine; aldrich, per t.; folker, anna p.; friborg, maria k.; kjær, susie; nielsen, maj britt d.; sørensen, jeppe k.; madsen, ida e.h. published in: journal of affective disorders doi: . /j.jad. . . publication date: document version final published version document license cc by-nc-nd citation for pulished version (apa): rugulies, r., sørensen, k., aldrich, p. t., folker, a. p., friborg, m. k., kjær, s., nielsen, m. b. d., sørensen, j. k., & madsen, i. e. h. ( ). onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce. journal of affective disorders, , - . https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . terms of use this work is brought to you by the university of southern denmark through the sdu research portal. unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. if no other license is stated, these terms apply: • you may download this work for personal use only. • you may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • you may freely distribute the url identifying this open access version if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. please direct all enquiries to puresupport@bib.sdu.dk download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . contents lists available at sciencedirect journal of affective disorders journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jad research paper onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce reiner ruguliesa,b,c,⁎, kathrine sørensena, per t. aldrichd, anna p. folkere, maria k. friborga, susie kjærf, maj britt d. nielsene, jeppe k. sørensena, ida e.h. madsena a national research centre for the working environment, copenhagen, denmark b department of public health, university of copenhagen, denmark c department of psychology, university of copenhagen, denmark d joblife, allerød, denmark e national institute of public health, university of southern denmark, denmark f anerkendende psykologpraksis, herlev, denmark a r t i c l e i n f o keywords: depression occupational health psychosocial work environment stress violence offending behaviours a b s t r a c t background: we studied onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent risk of depressive symptoms and depressive disorder. methods: we examined , individuals who participated in the work environment and health in denmark survey in and and , individuals who also participated in , all unexposed to sexual har- assment in . depressive symptoms and disorder were assessed with the major depression inventory. using linear regression, we estimated the associations between onset of sexual harassment in the months preceding the survey and depressive symptoms in and , respectively. using logistic regression, we esti- mated risk of incident depressive disorder in . results: onset of sexual harassment was associated with elevated depressive symptoms in , both for har- assment by non-workplace personnel (e.g., patients, estimate (b): . , % ci: . – . , p = . ) and workplace personnel (e.g., supervisors, b: . , % ci: . – . , p < . ), after adjustment for depressive symptoms in . harassment by workplace personnel was further associated with elevated depressive symptoms in after adjustment for symptoms in , but not after adjustment for symptoms in . harassment by workplace personnel was associated with incident depressive disorder in (odds ratio: . , % ci: . – . , p < . ). limitations: depressive symptoms and disorder were assessed with a validated self-administered rating scale but not a clinical diagnostic interview. participants reporting harassment in had elevated depressive symptoms already in requiring future investigation. conclusions: exposure to sexual harassments at the workplace may be a contributing factor in the aetiology of depressive symptoms and disorder. . introduction sexual harassment at work has become a topic of rapidly increasing interest, not least because of the #metoo debate, where well-known individuals from the entertainment and professional sports industry and from politics were accused of sexual harassment (choo et al., ; freischlag and faria, ; mendes et al., ). while the debate showed a broad societal consensus that workplace sexual harassment is unacceptable and is thought to be psychological harmful for those ex- posed to sexual harassment (o'neil et al., ), epidemiological studies of high quality quantifying the impact of workplace sexual harassment on mental health outcomes are scarce (mcdonald, ; o'neil et al., ; quick and mcfadyen, ; sojo et al., ; spector et al., ; willness et al., ). reviews of the literature have shown that the vast majority of stu- dies examining the association of workplace sexual harassment and risk of mental ill-health have been cross-sectional in design, severely lim- iting any conclusion about the causal direction of the association (mcdonald, ; sojo et al., ; spector et al., ; willness et al., ). one of the few exceptions is a longitudinal study with https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . received january ; received in revised form may ; accepted june ⁎ corresponding author at: national research centre for the working environment, lerso parkalle , dk- copenhagen, denmark. e-mail address: rer@nfa.dk (r. rugulies). journal of affective disorders ( ) – available online july - / © the authors. published by elsevier b.v. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). t http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ https://www.elsevier.com/locate/jad https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . mailto:rer@nfa.dk https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.jad. . . &domain=pdf norwegian employees, reporting a two-fold higher risk of psychological distress symptoms among women, but not among men, following ex- posure to sexual harassment in a two-year follow-up study (nielsen and einarsen, ). to the best of our knowledge, no longitudinal study has examined yet, whether workplace sexual harassment predicts ele- vated depressive symptoms or the incidence of a depressive disorder. although longitudinal studies have the obvious advantage over cross-sectional studies that they allow examining the temporal order in the association between the exposure to sexual harassment and sub- sequent mental health, they also face important challenges. in a long- itudinal study, researchers usually would examine if sexual harassment at baseline predicts depressive symptom level at follow-up, after ad- justment for baseline depressive symptom level. on the one hand, ad- justing for baseline depressive symptom level is an appropriate ap- proach, because baseline depressive symptom level may influence both the reporting of baseline sexual harassment and depressive symptom level at follow-up, causing spurious associations between baseline sexual harassment and depressive symptom level at follow-up. on the other hand, adjusting for baseline depressive symptom level would be inappropriate if the effect of sexual harassment on depressive symptoms is instantaneous, i.e. without any considerable latency period. in this case, baseline sexual harassment would influence baseline depressive symptom level and adjusting for baseline depressive symptom levels would be an adjustment for an earlier manifestation of the effect, leading to an underestimation of the association between baseline sexual harassment and depressive symptom level at follow-up. to address the challenge that baseline depressive symptoms might be influenced by baseline sexual harassment, we constructed a cohort of workers where no one was exposed to sexual harassment at baseline. we then followed this cohort for two years and during this time some of the participants reported being exposed to sexual harassment. we then analysed both the association between the onset of exposure to sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depres- sive disorder, while adjusting for participants’ depressive symptoms at baseline, when they were unexposed. we had previously reported cross-sectional results on sexual har- assment and depressive symptoms in a subsample of our study popu- lation (friborg et al., ). these results indicated that the strengths of the association between sexual harassment and mental health might depend on the type of the perpetrator (friborg et al., ). conse- quently, we distinguished in the present study between harassment by non-workplace personnel (customers, clients, patients, students) and by workplace personnel (colleagues, supervisors, subordinates). . methods . . study design and population we used data from the work environment and health in denmark (wehd) study, a bi-annual survey on working conditions and health established in . we examined the association between onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent level of depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce with measurements in (t ), (t ) and (t ). all partici- pants were free of sexual harassment at t and the months preceding t . at t , some participants reported the onset of at least one episode of sexual harassment during the last months. based on this information we constructed two cohorts. in cohort i (participants with measure- ments in and ) we analysed the association between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms and disorder at t (short-term association). in cohort ii (participants with measurements in , , and ) we analysed the asso- ciation between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms at t (long-term association). in both cohorts we adjusted the analyses for depressive symptom level at t when all participants were unexposed to sexual harassment. fig. illustrates the two study designs. fig. shows the flow-chart for inclusion into the study and con- structing the two cohorts. a detailed description of the wehd study design and recruitment process is published elsewhere (johnsen et al., ). briefly, in , statistics denmark drew a nationwide sample of , employees, aged to years, of which , ( . %) responded to the wehd questionnaire (t ). we excluded re- spondents who were not in the workforce when they filled in the questionnaire (n = ), had missing values on key variables (n = ) or were exposed to sexual harassment at t (n = ), yielding a sample of , individuals. of those, responded to the follow- up questionnaire in (t ), were at work at t and had no missing values on key variables. these individuals constituted cohort i for analysing the short-term association between onset of sexual harass- ment in the months before t and level of depressive symptoms at t . for analysing risk of incident depressive disorder at t , we built a subsample of cohort i by excluding individuals who at t had signs of a depressive disorder (n = ), reported treatment for a depressive disorder during the last year (n = ), or both (n = ), yielding a subsample of individuals who were free of a depressive disorder at baseline. of the participants of cohort i, filled in the wehd survey (t ) with no missing values on key variables. these individuals constituted cohort ii for analysing the long-term association between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and level of depressive symptoms at t . . . assessment of workplace sexual harassment workplace sexual harassment was assessed with one question: “have you been exposed to sexual harassment at your workplace during the last months?”, with the response options “yes, daily”, “yes, weekly”, “yes, monthly”, “yes, rarely”, “no, never”. for the purpose of analysis, we collapsed all “yes” options together, generating a binary variable indicating presence or absence of sexual harassment. participants who selected one of the “yes” options were then asked “who exposed you to sexual harassment?”, with the response options “customer/client/patient/student/others” (non-workplace person- nel),“colleague”, “supervisor”, or “subordinate” (workplace personnel). we constructed three exposure groups according to exposure in (t ): group was not exposed to sexual harassment, group was exposed to sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel and group was exposed to sexual harassment by workplace personnel. if an in- dividual was exposed to sexual harassment by both non-workplace personnel and workplace personnel then this individual was assigned to group . . . measurement of depressive symptoms and disorder we measured depressive symptoms and disorder by the major depression inventory (mdi), a clinically validated self-administered rating scale (bech et al., , ; olsen et al., ). the mdi consists of items assessing the presence of depressive symptoms during the last two weeks in accordance with the icd- symptom list of depression (bech et al., ). each item is responded on a scale ranging from (the symptom has not been present at all) to (the symptom has been present all of the time). two pairs of items are combined (i.e. only the item with the higher score is included), yielding an mdi-score with a possible range of to points. we used this score for assessing the level of depressive symptoms in our study. as an in- dicator for the presence of a depressive disorder we used a mdi-score of ≥ points as recommended in a recent validation study of the mdi (bech et al., ). in addition to the mdi, the survey included also a question whether the respondent was currently or in the last year in treatment for a de- pressive disorder, with the response options “yes” or “no”. we used this r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – response as further information for identifying a prevalent depressive disorder at baseline. . . measurement of covariates as covariates we included age (continuous, in years), sex, cohabi- tation (yes/no), education (“low” (≤ years of education), “medium- low” ( – years), “medium high” ( – years) and “high” (≥ years)), and occupational status (“senior manager”, “working in a job requiring high skill level”, “working in a job requiring intermediate skill level”, “working in occupation requiring basic skill level”, “other jobs/ not classified”). all these covariates were derived from national regis- ters maintained by statistics denmark, using the participants’ unique civil registration number (pedersen, ). we further included a variable indicating the occupational sector, by using the codes of the danish version of the eu's nomenclature (nace, statistical classifica- tion of economic activities in the european community) from statistics denmark (torma et al., ). we used “the standard industrial grouping for publishing purposes” that aggregates the possible industries into groups (torma et al., ). . . statistical analysis using linear regression and logistic regression, respectively, we compared the level of depressive symptoms and the proportion of in- dividuals with incident depressive disorder at follow-up in the two exposed groups (onset of sexual harassment by non-workplace per- sonnel; onset of sexual harassment by workplace personnel) to the level and proportion in the reference group (no onset of sexual harassment). in cohort i, we compared levels of depressive symptom scores at t in the three groups, yielding estimates for the mean differences with % confidence intervals (ci) for the short-term association between onset of exposure to sexual harassment during the last months before t and level of depressive symptoms at t . in the subsample of cohort i that was free of a depressive disorder at t , we compared the proportion of individuals with incident depressive disorder at t in the three groups, yielding odds ratios (or) with % ci for the short-term association between onset of sexual harassment during the last months before t and risk of incident depressive disorder at t . all estimates from cohort i were adjusted for age, sex, cohabitation, education, occupational status, occupational sector and depressive symptom level at t . in cohort ii, we compared levels of depressive symptom scores at t in the three groups, yielding estimates for the mean differences with % ci for the long-term association between onset of sexual harass- ment during the last months before t and level of depressive symptoms at t . in model , estimates were adjusted for age, sex, co- habitation, education, occupational status, occupational sector, de- pressive symptom level at t and treatment for a depressive disorder at t . in model , estimates were further adjusted for depressive symptom level at t and treatment for a depressive disorder at t . because some individuals who were free of sexual harassment at t became exposed to harassment in the months before t , we conducted an additional analyses of cohort ii, in which we excluded those newly exposed par- ticipants. . results table shows the characteristics of the participants of the two co- horts. mean age was years in cohort i and years in cohort ii. women and men were almost equally represented in the study ( % women in both cohorts). most participants worked in public adminis- tration, education and health ( and % in cohort i and ii, respec- tively), followed by trade and transport ( % in both cohorts). onset of sexual harassment in the months before t was reported by participants in cohort i ( . %) and individuals in cohort ii ( . %). the majority of the participants reported that the exposure was “rarely” ( out of ( . %) and out of ( . %) in cohorts i and ii, respectively). the perpetrator came more often from non-workplace personnel than from workplace personnel ( out of ( . %) and out of cases ( . %) in cohorts i and ii respectively). women reported more sexual harassment than men. in cohort i, harassment from non-workplace personnel was reported by . % of women ( out of ) and . % of men ( out of ). harassment from workplace personnel was reported by . % of women ( out of ) and . % of men ( out of ). in cohort ii, harassment from non-workplace personnel was reported by . % of women ( out of ) and . % of men ( out of ). harassment from workplace personnel was reported by . % of women ( out of ) and . % of men ( out of ). . . onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms at t (short-term association) fig. shows changes in depressive symptom levels from t to t in the three groups from cohort i. groups and consisting of partici- pants who later became exposed to sexual harassment had already at t higher depressive symptom levels than the reference group that not fig. . illustration of the design and measurement points of the two cohort studies. r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – became exposed. from t to t , depressive symptom levels remained stable among those who remained unexposed to sexual harassment (group , change of − . points) and increased among those who became exposed to sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel (group , + . points) and workplace personnel (group , + . points). consequently, at t , depressive symptom levels were statistically sig- nificantly higher among participants exposed to sexual harassment by both non-workplace personnel (group , mean: . , sd: . , esti- mate (b): . , % ci: . to . , p = . ) and workplace per- sonnel (group , mean: . , sd: . , b: . , % ci: . to . , p < . ) compared to participants that were not exposed (group , mean: . , sd: . ) after adjustment for all covariates, including depressive symptom level at t . when we stratified the analyses by sex, there was no clear indication that the short-term association between sexual harassment and de- pressive symptoms may be different for women and men (see e-table , online appendix). fig. . flow-chart of the construction of cohort i and cohort ii. r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – . . onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and incident depressive disorder at t (short-term association) of the participants who were free of a depressive disorder in , ( . %) were classified with a depressive disorder in . the incidence rate of depressive disorder was . %, . % and . % in groups , and , respectively. table shows the odds ratios and % ci for the association between onset of sexual harassment and incident depressive disorder. compared to the reference group with no exposure to sexual harassment (group ), the odds ratio for incident depressive disorder was . ( % ci: . to . , p = . ) among participants exposed to sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel (group ), and . ( % ci: . to . , p < . ) among participants ex- posed to sexual harassment by workplace personnel (group ) after adjustment for all covariates, including depressive symptom level at t . . . onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms at t (long-term association) fig. shows changes in depressive symptom levels from t to t to t for the three groups from cohort ii. as in cohort i, also cohort ii participants who later became exposed to sexual harassment (group and ) had already at t higher depressive symptom levels than parti- cipants who not later became exposed (group ). from t to t , depressive symptom levels remained stable in the non-exposed group (group , + . points) and increased for partici- pants who became exposed to sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel (group , + . points) and workplace personnel (group , + . points). at t , depressive symptom levels were statistically significantly higher among participants exposed to sexual harassment by workplace personnel (group , mean: . , sd: . , b: . , % ci: . to . , p = . ) compared to participants that were not exposed (group , mean: . , sd: . ) after adjustment for covari- ates, including depressive symptom level at t and treatment for de- pressive disorder at t (model ). after further adjustment for depres- sive symptom level at t and treatment for a depressive disorder at t , the estimate attenuated and statistical significance was lost (model , p = . ). group did not differ statistical significantly in depressive symptom levels at t from group , neither in the analyses in model (p = . ) nor in model (p = . ). when we stratified the analyses by sex, there was no clear indication that the long-term association between sexual harassment and depres- sive symptoms may be different for women and men (see e-table , online appendix). when we excluded participants, who were not exposed to sexual harassment in the months preceding t (group ) but became ex- posed in the months preceding t , results were similar to the main analyses (data available upon request). . discussion . . interpretation of the results the results of this study of the danish workforce show that onset of workplace sexual harassment, particularly from workplace personnel, was associated with elevated depressive symptoms and risk of incident depressive disorder. particularly striking was the five-fold higher risk of incident depressive disorder among participants exposed to onset of table characteristics of the two cohorts in . cohort i ( – ) n = cohort ii ( – – ) n = age, mean (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) sex women, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) men, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) cohabitation yes, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) education high, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) medium high, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) medium low, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) low, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) not known, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) occupational status senior manager, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) job requiring high skill level, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) job requiring intermediate skill level, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) job requiring basic skill level, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) other/not classified, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) occupational sector agriculture, forestry and fishing, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) manufacturing, mining, quarrying, utility services, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) construction, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) trade and transport, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) information and communication, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) financial and insurance, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) real estate, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) other business services, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) public administration, education and health, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) arts, entertainment, other services, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) sexual harassment never, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) rarely, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) monthly or more often, n (%) ( . ) ( . ) perpetrator for sexual harassment group : no harassment ( . ) ( . ) group : harassment by non-workplace personnel, n (%) (client, customer, patient, student) ( . ) ( . ) group : harassment by workplace personnel, n (%) (colleague, supervisor, subordinate) ( . ) ( . ) r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – sexual harassment by workplace personnel compared to those who re- mained unexposed, after adjustment for baseline depressive symptom level (short-term association analysis). that the association between sexual harassment and depressive symptoms and disorder was stronger when the harassment came from workplace personnel, such as a colleague or supervisor, and weaker when harassment came from non-workplace personnel, such as a cus- tomer, client or patient, is in agreement with results from an earlier cross-sectional analysis conducted in a subsample of our study popu- lation (friborg et al., ). sexual harassment by colleagues or su- pervisors may be experienced as particularly adverse as it is often ne- cessary to collaborate with the perpetrator on a daily basis, which may be emotionally taxing. further, revealing the sexual harassment at the workplace may sometimes negatively change the social relations to other colleagues and supervisors, which could be a further source of emotional strain. sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel often includes har- assment by individuals who may not be responsible for their behavior, such as eldercare home residents with dementia or institutionalized individuals with severe mental health conditions (nielsen et al., ). a recent qualitative interview study showed that care workers often consider handling sexual harassment by patients and clients as a mark of professionalism (nielsen et al., ). further, at workplaces with a relatively high prevalence of sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel, employees might get habituated to the exposure to a certain extent, and those employees who find it difficult to get habituated fig. . short-term association between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptom level at t among women and men who were not exposed to sexual harassment at t . table short-term association between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and risk of incident depressive disorder at t among women and men who were at t both free of a depressive disorder and not exposed to sexual harassment. crude adjusted n cases (%) or ( %ci) or ( %ci) group ; no sexual harassment ( . %) reference reference group ; sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel ( . %) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) group ; sexual harassment by workplace personnel ( . %) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) logistic regression analysis. estimates are adjusted for age, sex cohabitation, education, occupational status, occupational sector and, depressive symptom score at t . individuals with indications of depressive disorder at t (either mdi-score ≥ or self-reported treatment of depressive disorder at t or the year before t ) were excluded. r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – might not last long at the workplace and in the profession (nielsen et al., ). that all said, it is important to note that although the association of sexual harassment with depressive symptoms was weaker for harassment by non-workplace personnel than by workplace personnel, also harassment by non-workplace personnel predicted an elevated level of depressive symptoms that was statistically significant. thus, sexual harassment by non-workplace personnel is by no mean harmless, but it is likely qualitatively different and maybe harmful to a lesser extent compared to sexual harassment by workplace personnel. we adjusted all estimates for depressive symptoms in (t ) when all participants were unexposed to sexual harassment. exposure to sexual harassment between and was assessed in (t ) by asking participants if they had been exposed to sexual harassment during the last months. thus, our analyses showed the association between a relatively recent onset of exposure to sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and disorder, while adjusting for de- pressive symptom level before onset of exposure. we believe that this approach, adjusting for baseline depressive symptom level before the onset of exposure had occurred, is superior to a traditional longitudinal design that would have adjusted for baseline depressive symptoms measured concurrently with the measurement of exposure, as it is plausible that in the traditional design the baseline depressive symp- toms already had been impacted by the prevalent exposure. a disadvantage of our approach, though, is that we asked the par- ticipants to recall the occurrence of sexual harassment during the last months at the same time in when we also assessed depressive symptoms and disorder. we cannot rule out that an unknown number of study participants developed elevated depressive symptoms from to for other reasons than onset of workplace sexual harassment and that these elevated depressive symptoms in had led them to overestimate exposure to sexual harassment during the last months. we followed participants further until (t ), analyzing the as- sociation between onset of sexual harassment in the months before (t ) with depressive symptoms in (t ). for participants re- porting harassment by workplace personnel, we still found an associa- tion between harassment and depressive symptoms in (t ) after adjustment for depressive symptoms in (t ). however, the asso- ciation, was attenuated and lost statistical significance after adjustment for depressive symptoms in (t ). this was unsurprising, as we had expected that the impact of exposure to sexual harassment in the months preceding the (t ) survey on depressive symptoms would be mainly seen in higher depressive symptoms in (t ) and that a further increase in depressive symptoms from (t ) to (t ) was unlikely. an unexpected result of our study was that individuals who reported onset of sexual harassment in the survey, already in , when they were unexposed, had higher depressive symptom levels compared to participants who were unexposed in both and . different explanations for this result are conceivable. first, individuals with elevated depressive symptoms may, for reasons unknown, be at higher risk for becoming exposed to sexual harassment, suggesting that the association between sexual harassment and depressive may be bi- fig. . long-term association between onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptom level at t among women and men who were not exposed to sexual harassment at t . r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – directional. second, elevated depressive symptoms may make in- dividuals more likely to perceive certain behaviors as sexual harass- ment. third, some individuals may have been exposed to sexual har- assment in the more distant past, i.e. longer than the months before t that we assessed with our questionnaire and this history of previous sexual harassment may have influenced both the level of depressive symptoms at t and the risk of onset of sexual harassment at t . fourth, specific adverse working conditions, e.g., conflicts at work or poor so- cial relations among employees and between employees and manage- ment, may contribute to a higher risk of both onset of sexual harass- ment and elevated depressive symptoms. these potential explanations are important topics to be examined in future studies. for the present study, it was key that we had the data on depressive symptoms in (t ) available, and that we therefore were able to adjust all analyses for depressive symptoms prior onset of exposure. . . comparison with earlier studies to the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one that ex- amined the longitudinal association between onset of workplace sexual harassment and risk of elevated depressive symptoms and disorder. further, we believe that our study is also the first to examine sexual harassment and depressive symptoms and disorder in a large cross-oc- cupational sample of a national workforce, with repeated measure- ments of both exposures and outcomes. cross-sectional associations between sexual harassment and symp- toms of mental-ill health and reduced psychological well-being have been documented in several previous studies (mcdonald, ; sojo et al., ). recently, a cross-sectional study showed a dose-re- sponse association between frequency of sexual harassment and pre- valent depressive disorder among us and canada based flight atten- dants (gale et al., ). longitudinally, nielsen and einarsen ( ) reported in a norwe- gian study, that women exposed to sexual harassment had a two-fold higher risk of psychological distress, measured with the hopkins symptoms checklist- (hscl- ) a screening instrument for common psychiatric problems, including but not limited to depressive symptoms (nettelbladt et al., ). thus, the outcome was broader and less specific than the outcome in our study. nielsen and einarsen used a more comprehensive assessment of sexual harassment than the present study, applying the item bergen sexual harassment scale (nielsen et al., ), whereas our measurement of sexual harassment was limited to a single item. . . strengths and limitations strengths of the study include the longitudinal design, the large study population comprising a wide range of occupations in the danish workforce, and the measurement of depressive symptoms and disorder with a clinically validated rating scale. to our knowledge, this is the first cohort study demonstrating an association between onset of ex- posure to workplace sexual harassment and subsequent risk of elevated depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder. several important limitations should be noted. first, we measured sexual harassment with a single global item, which might have caused an underestimation of the prevalence of sexual harassment. using a scale providing specific examples of sexual harassment e.g., about un- wanted touching or verbal sexual suggestions, might have resulted in the reporting of higher number of events of harassment, particularly of events that may have been regarded by the study participants as less severe (nielsen et al., ). second, we measured depressive disorder with the mdi, an instru- ment that has previously been validated in clinical studies (bech et al., , ; olsen et al., ). the strong association between onset of sexual harassment and a five-fold higher risk of incident depressive disorder is an important result of this study, as it indicates that sexual harassment not only affects individuals’ well-being but may also con- tribute to the development of a clinical disorder. however, caution is needed in the interpretation of the result, as the gold standard measure for assessing a depressive disorder in research studies is a clinical di- agnostic interview, which was not available in this large population- based study. the mdi is focused on the frequency and duration of symptoms of clinical depression, but, unlike a clinical diagnostic in- terview, does not assess impairment in different areas of living. therefore, the results on incident depressive disorder need to be re- plicated in further clinical studies. third, individuals who later experienced onset of sexual harassment had already at baseline higher levels of depressive symptoms than in- dividuals who later did not experience sexual harassment. as we ad- justed all estimates for baseline depressive symptoms, our results were not biased by this unexpected finding. however, as described in detail above, further research on explanations for this finding is needed. fourth, as delineated in the section “interpretation of the results”, we measured onset of exposure to sexual harassment during the last months retrospectively in the (t ) survey and we cannot rule out that elevated depressive symptoms in that had other reasons than exposure to sexual harassment, may have led participants to over- estimate the occurrence of harassment. we attempted to mitigate this potential bias by adjusting for depressive symptoms in (t ). fifth, although we analyzed data of almost , individuals with two measures (cohort i) and more than individuals with three measures (cohort ii), the study sample was still not large enough for performing a number of desirable subgroup analyses, as both onset of exposure to sexual harassment and incident depressive disorder was rare. for example, we could not analyze whether the frequency of the harassment or the status of the perpetrator within the group of work- place personnel (colleague, supervisor or subordinate) were related to the subsequent level of depressive symptoms and risk of depressive disorder. when further waves of wehd with more study participants become available in the future, we may be able to perform some of these subgroup analyses. sixth, because of the low number of individuals with onset of sexual harassment, the results from the sex-stratified analyses need to be viewed with caution. in these subgroup analyses, the exposure groups were small, particularly among men, and although we did not find evidence for that pattern of associations were different for women and for men, we cannot rule out that such different patterns may have emerged in a larger study sample. . conclusion onset of workplace sexual harassment is associated with elevated depressive symptoms and higher risk of incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce. a particularly strong association was found for the association of onset of sexual harassment from workplace personal and incident depressive disorder, with an odds ratio of more than five. workplace sexual harassment may be a potential contributing factor in the aetiology of depressive symptoms and disorder. declaration of competing interest all authors declare no conflict of interest. funding the study was supported by the danish working environment research fund (grant no. - - ). the funding source had no in- volvement in the study design, the data collection, the analysis, the interpretation of data, the writing of the paper, or the decision to submit the paper for publication. r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – author contributions rr and iehm conceived the study. rr, iehm and ks designed the analyses. ks conducted the data analysis and jks assisted in conducting the data analysis. all authors interpreted the data and discussed the results. rr wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors re- vised the draft critically for important intellectual content. all authors read and approved the final version for submission. acknowledgment none. supplementary materials supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: . /j.jad. . . . references bech, p., rasmussen, n.a., olsen, l.r., noerholm, v., abildgaard, w., . the sensi- tivity and specificity of the major depression inventory, using the present state examination as the index of diagnostic validity. j. affect. disord. , – . bech, p., timmerby, n., martiny, k., lunde, m., soendergaard, s., . psychometric evaluation of the major depression inventory (mdi) as depression severity scale using the lead (longitudinal expert assessment of all data) as index of validity. bmc psychiatry , . choo, e.k., byington, c.l., johnson, n.l., jagsi, r., . from #metoo to #timesup in health care: can a culture of accountability end inequity and harassment? lancet , – . freischlag, j.a., faria, p., . it is time for women (and men) to be brave: a con- sequence of the #metoo movement. jama , – . friborg, m.k., hansen, j.v., aldrich, p.t., folker, a.p., kjaer, s., nielsen, m.b.d., rugulies, r., madsen, i.e.h., . workplace sexual harassment and depressive symptoms: a cross-sectional multilevel analysis comparing harassment from clients or customers to harassment from other employees amongst danish employees from organizations. bmc public health , . gale, s., mordukhovich, i., newlan, s., mcneely, e., . the impact of workplace harassment on health in a working cohort. front psychol. , . johnsen, n.f., thomsen, b.l., hansen, j.v., christensen, b.s., rugulies, r., schlünssen, v., . job type and other socio-demographic factors associated with participation in a national, cross-sectional study of danish employees. bmj open , e . mcdonald, p., . workplace sexual harassment years on: a review of the literature. int. j. manag. rev. , – . mendes, k., ringrose, j., keller, j., . #metoo and the promise and pitfalls of chal- lenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. eur. j. women's stud. , – . nettelbladt, p., hansson, l., stefansson, c.g., borgquist, l., nordstrom, g., . test characteristics of the hopkins symptom check list- (hscl- ) in sweden, using the present state examination (pse- ) as a caseness criterion. soc. psychiatry psychiatr. epidemiol. , – . nielsen, m.b., bjørkelo, b., notelaers, g., einarsen, s., . sexual harassment: pre- valence, outcomes, and dender differences assessed by three different estimation methods. j. aggress. maltreat. trauma , – . nielsen, m.b., einarsen, s., . prospective relationships between workplace sexual harassment and psychological distress. occup. med. , – . nielsen, m.b.d., kjaer, s., aldrich, p.t., madsen, i.e.h., friborg, m.k., rugulies, r., folker, a.p., . sexual harassment in care work - dilemmas and consequences: a qualitative investigation. int. j. nurs. stud. , – . o'neil, a., sojo, v., fileborn, b., scovelle, a.j., milner, a., . the #metoo movement: an opportunity in public health? lancet , – . olsen, l.r., jensen, d.v., noerholm, v., martiny, k., bech, p., . the internal and external validity of the major depression inventory in measuring severity of de- pressive states. psychol. med. , – . pedersen, c.b., . the danish civil registration system. scand. j. public health , – . quick, j.c., mcfadyen, m.a., . sexual harassment: have we made any progress? j. occup. health psychol. , – . sojo, v.e., wood, r.e., genat, a.e., . harmful workplace experiences and women's occupational well-being: a meta-analysis. psychol. women q. , – . spector, p.e., zhou, z.e., che, x.x., . nurse exposure to physical and nonphysical violence, bullying, and sexual harassment: a quantitative review. int. j. nurs. stud. , – . torma, k., simbold, c.t., sørensen, a.g., madsen, k.k., skjelbo, k., . dansk branchekode , db . danish industrial classification of all economic activities . revideret december . statistics denmark, copenhagen. available from: http://www.dst.dk/site/dst/udgivelser/getpubfile.aspx?id= &sid=helepubl (retrieved january ). willness, c.r., steel, p., lee, k., . a meta-analysis of the antecedents and con- sequences of workplace sexual harassment. pers. psychol. , – . r. rugulies, et al. journal of affective disorders ( ) – https://doi.org/ . /j.jad. . . http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://www.dst.dk/site/dst/udgivelser/getpubfile.aspx?id= &sid=helepubl http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref 	onset of workplace sexual harassment and subsequent depressive symptoms and incident depressive disorder in the danish workforce 	introduction 	methods 	study design and population 	assessment of workplace sexual harassment 	measurement of depressive symptoms and disorder 	measurement of covariates 	statistical analysis 	results 	onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms at t (short-term association) 	onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and incident depressive disorder at t (short-term association) 	onset of sexual harassment in the months before t and depressive symptoms at t (long-term association) 	discussion 	interpretation of the results 	comparison with earlier studies 	strengths and limitations 	conclusion 	declaration of competing interest 	funding 	mk:h _ 	author contributions 	mk:h _ 	acknowledgment 	mk:h _ 	supplementary materials 	references om a sil m ag a eesti arst ; ( ): – mesenteriaalveeni tromboos liina uudam – tÜ kliinikumi radioloogiakliinik h a i g u sju h t aastane naine pöördus erakorraliseks konsultatsiooniks perearsti poole. prob- leemiks oli päeva kestnud kõhuvalu, mis oli kahel v iimasel päeval ägenenud. valu oli olnud pidev, öine uni oli häiritud. iivel- dust, oksendamist ega palavikku ei olnud esi nenud. ur i neer i m isega probleeme ei olnud. kõht oli käinud läbi viimati eelmisel päeval, väljaheite vär v us ega konsistents ei olnud muutunud. perearsti vastuvõtul kaebas patsient valu naba ümbruses kesk- kõhus, aeg-ajalt tundis valu ka vasakul ja paremal pool kõhus. patsient ol i sisenenud arsti v ast uvõ- t u r uu m i kõht u k i n n i hoides ja k üü r us. palpatoorselt esines tal terav valu mcburney punkti kohal, lisaks kerge lihaste kaitse- pi nge nabapi i rkon na s. perea rst suu na s patsiendi erakorralise meditsiini osakonda (emo) lisauuringuteks ja apenditsiidi välis- tamiseks. patsient oli umbes ühe aasta jooksul kasutanud rasestumisvastase vahendina nuvaringi, muid ravimeid igapäevaselt ta ei tar v itanud. a nam neesis oli tal alates lapsepõlvest rauavaegusaneemia ja sellega seoses soov itatud võtta rauapreparaate, kuid patsient neid ei tar vitanud. ravimi- allergiat patsient eitas ja operatsioone tal ei olnud tehtud. suitsetanud oli ta umbes pak kaastat ( kuni sigaretti päevas), alkoholi tarvitanud maksimaalselt pokaal veini päevas. emos objektiivse leiu kirjeldus: patsient teadv usel, kontaktne, rahuldavas üldsei- sundis. hemodünaamiliselt stabiilne, süda- metöö normofrekventne. saturatsioon %. palav ik uvaba. kõht pehme, palpatoorne valulikkus üla- ja alakõhus paremal. peri- toneaalärritusnähte ei ole. verea n a lüü sides ol i m i k rot süt aa r ne hüpokroomne aneemia hemoglobiinisisal- dusega g/ l, c-reaktiivse valgu sisaldus suurenenud väärtuseni mg/ l. muus osas kõrvalekaldeid laboratoorsetes analüüsides pöördumise päeval ei leitud. apenditsiidi kahtluse tõttu tehti ultra- heli- ( uh ) uuring kõhukoopast, kus paren- hümatoossed elundid olid iseärasusteta. pilt . nabast allpool paremal oli alumise õõnesveeni ees (pildil tähistatud ristikestega) paksuseinaline tubulaarne struktuur, mille läbimõõt on , cm ning mis on kas ebatüüpilise asukohaga paksenenud seinaga ussripik või veen, milles on tromb. + + om a sil m ag a eesti arst ; ( ): – kõhu koopa s ol id nor m a a l se suu r u seg a ja tavapärase rasv väratiga lümf isõlmed. p a r e m a l a l a kõhu s ol i ve id i v ab a ve d e - likku. nabast allpool paremal oli alumise õõnesveeni ees paksuseinaline tubulaarne struktuur läbimõõduga , cm (v t pilt ), mis uh-anduriga ei olnud kokku surutav ja millel motoorika puudus. piirkond oli anduriga vajutades valulik. sellel tubulaarsel struktuuril polnud algusosa ega lõpposa visualiseeritav, sest jäi osaliselt soolegaasi varju. ultraheliuuringu alusel jäi kahtlus kas ebat üüpil ise asu kohaga apend itsiid i või veenitromboosi suhtes. leiu täpsusta m isek s tehti k t-uuring kontrastainega parenhümatoosses faasis, kus v isualiseerus v. mesenterica superior ( v ms), mis omakorda jagunes kaheks ja mille parempoolses harus oli tromb, mis ulatus vms-ni (v t pilt ja ). tromboseerunud veeni ümber oli rasv- k ude i n f i ltreer it ud. v msi v asa k poolsed harud kontrasteerusid tavapäraselt. väikses vaagnas oli vähest vaba vedelikku, muus osas oli leid iseärasusteta. patsient hospitaliseeriti erakorraliselt sisehaiguste osakonda esmase ägeda mesen- teriaalveeni-tromboosi ( mv t ) tõttu ja tal alustati antikoagulantravi. kirurgilist ravi patsient ei vajanud. täiendavalt võeti analüüsid kaasasün- dinud ja pärilikele trombofiiliate võima- lu s e h i nd a m i s e k s . e si ne s v ä he ne v ab a s-valgu sisalduse vähenemine, mis võis olla mõjutat ud kombi neer it ud hor monaa lse rasestumisvastase vahendi kasutamisest ja kasvajaantigeeni ca - sisalduse suure- nemine seoses suitsetamisega. perekonnas polnud tromboose olnud. geenianalüüsis leiti heterosügootsena protrombiini geenis c.* g>a (vana n imet usega c. g>a) mutatsioon ja metüleentetrahüdrofolaadi reduktaasi ( mthfr) geenis heterosügoot- sena c. c>t (vana nimetusega c>t ) mu u t u s . p r o t r o m b i i n i ge e n i mu u t u s e suhtes heterosügootidel on veenitromboosi risk suurenenud kuni korda võrreldes tavarahvastikuga. leitud mthfr genotüüp on s eot ud m t h fr en s üü m i a k t i i v s u s e vähenemisega, mis võib põhjustada kerget hüperhomotsüstei neem iat. ja k geen is muutust p.v f ei detekteeritud. ku n a -k uu möödu m i sel a nt i koag u- lantravi alustamisest patsiendil kaebused puudusid ja kordus-uh-uuringul mesente- riaalveresoonte oletatavas lokalisatsioonis valendikku täitvaid trombimasse nähtavale ei tulnud, lõpetati antikoagulantravi. kirjeldatud juhtumi puhul olid veeni- tromboosi riskiteguriteks kombineeritud hormonaalse rasestumisvastase vahendi k a s u t a m i n e , s u i t s e t a m i n e (u m b e s pak kaastat) ja geneetiline eelsoodumus. patsiendil soovitati loobuda suitsetamisest ja pöörduda günekoloogi vastuvõtule, et valida sobilik rasestumisvastane vahend. endoskoopi l i s tes t uu r i ng utes t keeldu s p at sie nt kor du v a lt . so ov it at u d jä lg id a b -vitamiini, foolhappe ja homotsüsteiini sisaldust seerumis. edaspidi on näidustatud tromboosi profülaktika pikema immobilisat- pilt . tärniga (*) on märgistatud v. me- senterica superior’i (vms) tromboseerunud osa ja vmsi mittekontrasteeruvad harud. noolega on märgistatud vmsi kontrastee- ruv osa. pilt . tärniga (*) on märgistatud v. mesenterica superior (vms), mille valendikus on hüpodensne tromb. * * * ** om a sil m ag a eesti arst ; ( ): – siooni (nt haiglaravi, rohkem kui tunnised lennureisid) ajal. a r u t e l u me s e nte r i a a l ve e n i t r omb o o s on h a r v a e s i n e v, k u i d p o t e n t s i a a l s e l t e l u o h t l i k haigus. Ägeda mesenteriaalveeni-tromboosi tõt t u verevool aeglust ub ja suurenenud venoosne rõhk võib põhjustada sooleseina turset ja submukoosset hemorraagiat. kui sooleseina venoosne äravool on täielikult takistatud, tekib sooleinfarkt. sagedasimad mvt teket soodustavad tegurid on hiljutine kõhupiirkonna operatsioon, infektsioon, trombofiilia ja pahaloomulised haigused (v t tabel ). kt-uuring kontrastainega on mesente- riaalveeni tromboosi diagnostiline valik- meetod, sest sellega on võimalik visualisee- rida veenisisest täitumisdefekti ja hinnata, k a s on tek k i nud soolesei n a i sheem ia le v i itav leid, nä itek s soolesei na pa k sene- mine, pneumatoos ja õhk portaalveenides. a nt i ko a g u l a nt r a v i kohe ne a lu s t a m i ne parandab elulemust ( ). antikoagulantraviga rekanaliseeruvad tromboseerunud mesen- teriaalveenid enamikul juhtudel ( kuni üle %) ( ). kirurgiline rav i on vajalik, kui on tekkinud sooleinfarkt, perforatsioon ja peritoniit. kirjeldatud patsiendil ei tekkinud sooleinfarkti, kuna venoosne äravool toimus osaliselt kollateraalide kaudu vmsi, mille valendik oli hargnemise kohal vaid osaliselt tromboseerunud. tÄ n u ava l d u s tänan nõuannete eest ingrid l auri, pilvi ilvest ja tiina kahret. k i r ja n d u s . singal ak, kamath ps, tefferi a. mesenteric venous thrombosis. mayo clin proc mayo clin ; : – . . condat b, pessione f, denninger hm, hillaire s, valla d. recent por tal or mesenteric venous thrombosis: increased recogni- tion and frequent recanalization on anticoagulant therapy. hepatology ; : – . tabel . mesenteriaalveeni tromboosi põhjused ( ) trombofiilia pärilik - c- või s-valgu puudulikkus - leideni v faktori mutatsioon - antitrombiini puudulikkus - protrombiini geeni mutatsioon (c. g>a) - metüleentetrahüdrofolaadi reduktaasi (mthfr) geeni mutatsioon omandatud - hematoloogilised põhjused polütsüteemia müelofibroos trombotsüteemia jak geeni mutatsioon antifosfolipiidantikehade sündroom paroksüsmaalne öine hemoglobinuuria - mittehematoloogilised põhjused pahaloomulised haigused kombineeritud hormonaalsed rasestumisvastased vahendid rasedus nefrootiline sündroom hüperhomotsüsteineemia lokaalsed tegurid, mis põhjustavad veresooneseina kahjustust - põletikulised haigused pankreatiit põletikuline soolehaigus divertikuliit peritoniit apenditsiit - intra-abdominaalsed operatsioonid - kõhupiirkonna trauma staas - kongestiivne splenomegaalia - tsirroos - kongestiivne südamepuudulikkus idiopaatiline to push for stardom or not: a rookie&#x ;s dilemma in the tamil movie industry iimb management review ( ) , e indian institute of management bangalore iimb available at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/iimb to push for stardom or not: a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry trichy v. krishnan a,*, a. m. sakkthivel b a faculty of marketing, nus business school, mochtar riady building, biz , - , , kent ridge drive, singapore , singapore b department of business administration, sur university college, sur, sultanate of oman, oman available online june keywords tamil movie; stars; rookies; positioning; game theory; producers * corresponding author. tel.: þ e-mail addresses: krishnan@nus. com (t.v. krishnan), drsakkthi@gma om (a.m. sakkthivel). - ª indian institute of rights reserved. peer-review under res of management bangalore. doi: . /j.iimb. . . abstract there is a trend today among successful rookies (srs) in the indian tamil film industry to try to get on a fast track to stardom, running the risk of failure or being replaced with a new entrant. the study examines the rationale for this, and the options available to the actor and the producer. using a decision theory oriented approach we develop and solve a model, and using the data collected in the field we assign values to the parameters in the model and derive the current equilibrium in the market. we also conduct a numerical analysis to see which factors most affect the decision. we find that the strategy may pay off for the sr when the probability of success is neither too high nor too low and when the producer invests in a film that pays attention to all its facets, and not just the lead role. ª indian institute of management bangalore. all rights reserved. introduction the motion picture or movie industry is a key and perhaps the most vibrant component of the indian economy. the number of movies produced annually in india is higher than that produced in hollywood, usa. while hollywood ; fax: þ . edu.sg, bh.kumar@elsevier. il.com, sakkthivel@suc.edu. management bangalore. all ponsibility of indian institute produces around movies a year, the indian movie industry produces more than movies ever year . around four million indians ‘go to movies’ on any given day, and this number swells during festivals and holidays. of the film producing cities in india, mumbai (bollywood) and chennai (kollywood) stand out in terms of their history, the availability of a large number of movie production houses, studios, actors, directors and other technical people. while mumbai produces largely hindi movies, chennai produces tamil and, to a smaller extent, telugu movies. our research focuses on the tamil movie industry which on an average data and information given here and elsewhere in this manu- script are taken from the various trade journals and the interviews conducted by the authors with various industry experts, actors, directors and producers in the tamil film industry. we interviewed some of the well known and highly knowledgeable personalities such as mr. m. saravanan, proprietor of the avm productions, chennai, mr. s.v. sekar, a playwright and actor, mr. venkatprabu, a young and upcoming director, and mr. sangili murugan, a producer and script-writer. we take this opportunity to thank all of them. mailto:krishnan@nus.edu.sg mailto:bh.kumar@elsevier.com mailto:bh.kumar@elsevier.com mailto:drsakkthi@gmail.com mailto:sakkthivel@suc.edu.om mailto:sakkthivel@suc.edu.om http://www.elsevier.com/locate/iimb to some degree, these fans are like die-hard consumers of apple products who would not hesitate to buy any new product from apple although some of these products might eventually fail in the market place. said differently, these fan bases guarantee some minimum of ticket sales for the movies that cast their favourite actors even though the movie may fail eventually. if on the other hand the movie turns out to be good, these fans would indulge in repeat-buying and spread such a good word of mouth around that the movie would become a major hit, drawing huge sums of money for the producers. some of kollywood’s successful rookies in the past years include jeeva, simbu, dhanush, bharath, arya, vishal and karthi. we are citing a website which mentions a particular actor rejecting a movie role because the director refused to employ the lead heroine. http://cinema.dinamalar.com/tamil-news/ / cinema/kollywood/jeeva-in-go-movie.htm. while this particular a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry releases one tamil movie every four days i.e. movies in a year. a movie is a multi-dimensional product and the success of a movie depends on several factors such as the story line, the script, the performance of the actors, the direction and music, and other technical aspects concerning light, sound and other hi-tech features including computer graphics. however, it seems an undisputable fact that in the kolly- wood industry, the lead actor plays a major role in scripting the success of a movie. some of the lead actors, by starring in many successful movies over time, establish a larger-than-life image with the public, and get to become movie ‘stars’. a few such stars were even able to use their movie image to become popular politicians and secure coveted positions in the government by winning elections. this goes to show the loyalty exhibited by fans towards their favorite actors, which in turn underscores the importance of an actor in a movie’s success. the high importance attached to the actors has one significant external impact. many new faces come knocking on the doors of the industry in their aspiration to become actors, and although the success rate of a movie with a new face is relatively very low, producers are willing to give them a chance because they are inexpensive and readily avail- able . in fact, out of the total movies produced in a year, movies cast new faces. given the high rate of movie production in kollywood, one can always see a few ‘rookies’ or new faces scoring a successful hit on their debut. while this may often be attributed to luck, each successful rookie creates excitement in the industry because each is a poten- tial future star. however, it is widely acknowledged that some of these successful rookies actually start believing that they are destined to be stars, and their resulting behaviour creates a new set of dynamics in the industry. movie producers tend to view this disfavourably because stars are expensive. let us explain this further. it is important to note that successful rookies are different from actual stars. stars are established actors who have acted in many successful movies in the past, and are characterised by two attributes: image and fan base. image is the position the star has carefully crafted over the years (i.e. the type of role he plays in the movies, the type of dialogues he delivers, the type of songs he allows in his movie, the type of fights he engages in, etc.) and he rarely plays a role that could mar this positioning. the star’s fan- base tends to support any movie starring this actor, ensuring some minimum of tickets sales for an average it takes roughly six months to a year to make a movie. given the long time involved, the directors are usually very worried about the time commitment from the actors. an established actor may find it difficult to commit to long stretches of time for a movie shooting but a new face will have no such problems. this eases the movie making process for the director, and reduces the cost of the movie production significantly. movie and huge returns for a successful movie . compared to an established star, a successful rookie lacks history, having come into acting recently, with the two or three hits, but without a concrete image or a sizeable fan base yet. the movie industry looks at the rookie cautiously but with interest. although he could potentially become a star in future, he could also fail and become a non-entity in the movie world . why is studying the role of successful rookies inter- esting? the current state of the movie industry is different from the past. in the s, s and even in the early s, rookies had to work hard for many years before gradually turning into stars. today’s successful rookies, however, want to run on a faster track and achieve star status quickly. for example, some of the successful rookies focus on proactively building fan bases and promoting themselves intensely through various media channels to project their image ahead of themselves. some want the producers and directors to cast them in risky big-budget movies, use lead heroines, and use other tactics that would project them as stars . they also start demanding large salaries, which poses a dilemma for the producers: are these really potential stars trying to grab the future quickly, or lucky early-winners who might not last for long? the successful rookie is in a dilemma too. he would like to move up to the next stage and become a star which would guarantee him a stable place in the industry. however, if his bid for stardom is premature and he fails in the attempt he might have to exit the movie industry altogether because of the ill-will created with the producers . staying the course may be an easier option but incident may not have anything to do with the behaviour we research in this paper, such incidents show that the recent successful rookies do take their careers seriously and try to shape them proactively. as mentioned elsewhere, when we met with some of the producers and directors including mr. m. saravanan of avm productions, mr. sangili murugan (producer and script-writer), mr. s.v. sekar (actor and playwright), mr. venkat prabhu (director) and mr. dhinesh (production manager and director), many of them, if not all, told us that the star-level treatment demanded by some of the successful rookies was a big problem for them to handle and so they look out for new faces all the time. note however that not all of the successful rookies indulge in creating such ill-will. for reasons of confidentiality we cannot provide more particulars on this. http://cinema.dinamalar.com/tamil-news/ /cinema/kollywood/jeeva-in-go-movie.htm http://cinema.dinamalar.com/tamil-news/ /cinema/kollywood/jeeva-in-go-movie.htm t.v. krishnan, a.m. sakkthivel the revenues are low and the possibility of failure still exists. further, there is the constant threat of new faces coming into the market place. producers on the other hand can choose between successful rookies and new faces. while opting for a successful rookie would increase the costs, settling for a new face, while keeping the costs low would increase the probability of failure. our research question is as follows. why do successful rookies try to get on a fast track to stardom? why don’t they stay the course for a few more years, prove themselves and let their history make them stars? what should a producer do in terms of hiring an actor for his movie given that there are successful rookies and new faces in the market? we use a decision model oriented approach to answer these ques- tions. we use the data collected in the field to assign values to the various parameters in the model, and thereby derive the current equilibrium in the market. we also conduct a numerical analysis to see which factors most affect the decision. the rest of the paper is organised as follows. in the next section we look at the extant literature to see if there are any research findings that have a bearing on our research. in section we develop the model, solve it and derive the key results using numerical analysis and find out what factors really drive successful rookies to behave like potential stars. in section we conclude the paper, giving directions for future research. literature survey serious research on the film industry can be said to have commenced in the marketing area in the s. over the past few years, the growing professionalism exhibited in the film industry has attracted many researchers to start looking at the strategies employed in this industry with an academic eye. some of the topics that interest researchers are: finding the determinants of a successful film, evalua- tion of a ‘right’ production budget, and understanding the impact of award nominations, reviewers’ ratings and word of mouth on the box-office collections (brewer, kelley, & jozefowicz, ). smith and smith ( ) conducted an early study on the film industry to identify the determinants of a successful film. numerous studies followed to further explore the determinants of a successful film, impact of different variables on the success of films, consumer adoption pattern of a new film, and impact of initial booking on the financial success of films (de vany & walls, ; prag & casavant, ; sawhney & eliashberg, ). ravid ( ) analysed film revenues with respect to the various production costs involved but could not draw any normally it costs around a few tens of crores of rupees for a big budget movie. the movies made with established actors are big budget not only because of the high salaries paid to the lead actors but also due to the extravagant ways they are designed in to accommodate the image of the stars. with a new face, the movie would be relatively inexpensive to make (rs . e crore i.e. million to million.) this information was gleaned from our discussion with some of the producers, and various reports pub- lished in the tamil cine journals. major conclusion. however, de vany and walls ( ) conclude that a movie is so highly complex a product that it would be difficult to determine whether it would be a hit or a miss. in other words, one can say that in spite of the considerable research in the extant literature a lot of uncertainty rides on a movie’s success. however, one factor that does appear to have an impact on the success of a movie is the lead actor. a study con- ducted by bagella and becchetti ( ) concluded that the popularity of established actors significantly increased the chance of success of a film. this has a direct bearing on our research because this is true of the tamil movie industry too, as we will show later. eliashberg, elberse, and leenders ( ) studied the effect of employing estab- lished actors and stars on the financing of movies and found that stars enable easier financing of movies. in another study, it was found that the lack of appeal of the lead actors and critics’ reviews would lead to performance risk which in turn would lead to financial risk (desai, leob, & veblen, ). while analysing the economics of movie making, vogel ( ) finds that producers tend to control cost of production and reduce their risk exposure because of the high failure probability in the movies. taken in our research context, one could say that employing a new face is one way producers would attempt to reduce the cost of production. in sum, the extant literature indicates that the success of a movie is still highly unpredictable but employing an established actor will enhance the probability of success, while at the same time producers are always on the look out to reduce their cost of production. although much of this research pertains to western movie productions, the results very well apply to the tamil movie industry which is the focus of our research. in our study, we use these find- ings and ask a question that is very relevant to the tamil movie industry. we ask why a successful rookie would try to push himself to become a star (thus incurring a huge investment risk for the producer) and how a producer would act strategically given that he has the choice of hiring an inexpensive new face in place of the recently successful but ambitious rookie. we study the resulting interaction between the two players in a stylised decision model framework. model for studying interaction between producer and rookie there are two players acting strategically in our model. these are the producer of a movie (pr) who is ready to invest in a new movie, and the successful rookie (sr). we will first describe the strategies of the sr and then take up the pr for analysis. strategies of the successful rookie the evolution process and the decision nodes of the strat- egies of a successful rookie are depicted in figure . the sr has to decide if he wants to move himself up to star status immediately or wait for a period and prove himself once again and then try to move up in the second period. thus, there are potentially two stages or periods. it is important sr h l hit fail sr is a star sr is doomed! hit h l hit fail sr is a star sr is doomed! producer (pr) hire the sr? hit sr is me-too star fail fail sr is me-too star stage stage sr sr h l hit fail sr is a star sr is doomed! hit sr is a me-too star outcome producer (pr) hire the sr? pr hire sr? pr hire sr? pr hire sr? pr hire sr? legend: h: high l: low sr: successful rookie pr: producer figure strategies of the successful rookie: evolution process and decision nodes. this is akin to any new product introduced in a consumer market. a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry to note that each stage represents not just a year but a time span where the sr activates his specific strategy. at each stage, the sr has two options. in the first option, he can treat himself as a star and demand a high salary and ask the pr to make the movie to suit his aspiration. this typi- cally means that the pr makes a high budget movie that projects the sr as a star. but the pr may not sign the sr for his movie because of the high cost involved and may go for a new face. in the second option, the sr can ask the pr to treat him as just a successful rookie, settle for a lower salary and let the producer decide on the movie project. let us call these high and low options. there are three possible destinations for the sr at the end of this evolution process in his career. they are: becoming a star, becoming a me-too star and resulting in a total failure. the two stages we have assumed will determine his final destiny. our discussions with movie producers and actors pointed to certain characteristics that define this evolution process. we use them to build our model. the three characteristics that we learnt about are: ( ) if the sr takes the high strategy at any of the two stages and scores a box-office hit he would become a star. ( ) if the sr takes the high strategy at any stage but fails to score a box-office hit, or if he takes the low strategy in both the stages and fails in both the stages, he is deemed to be a total failure. ( ) in other cases, he would become a me-too star. there are several points to note here. first, these char- acteristics are born out of the invaluable experience of the producers and actors, and hence are expected to hold in general although there could be exceptions. second, looking at figure we see that out of the total nine possible outcomes of this two-stage process, three point to ‘star’, three point to ‘me-too star’ and three to ‘total failure’. although it looks like all three destinations are equally likely, this is not really so because the probabilities associated with each outcome are vastly different. for example, the prob- abilities associated with the ‘star’ outcome are very low. a third implication of the assumed evolution process is that an sr can never become a star unless he projects himself as one at some stage. the rationale is quite simple. star status is obtained only if an actor achieves a clear, consistent and unique image in the public space, which cannot be achieved unless the actor takes a stand and announces it openly and with confidence to the market . for example, vijay, an actor who recently acquired star status, projected himself as ‘a star who would act only in action-oriented movies’, seeking only masala movies in the tamil movie industry, i.e. those with a certain standard of music and dance sequences, ‘thrills’, engrossing fight scenes, a certain level of romance and a story to stitch all these together. it was only with this declaration of intent, we were told, that the producers were ready to invest in mega-budget movies starring him in the lead role. that image made vijay a star. in contrast, dha- nush, a recent sr, has not been able to clearly define a position or find a unique and consistent image so far in spite of achieving three box-office hits with his first three movies. two stages of the successful rookie’s evolution process we will now explain the two stages and the evolution process of a successful rookie’s journey in detail. t.v. krishnan, a.m. sakkthivel stage : if the sr chooses the high strategy, there will be a lower probability of the pr using him instead of a new face. if the pr does enrol the sr and if the movie is a box- office hit then the sr will be a star. the evolution process ends here. but if the movie fails in the box-office, the pr is less likely to consider him in the near future because he would have lost money and faith in the sr. so, the sr is doomed. the process ends here. thus, if the sr chooses the high strategy, regardless of the outcome of the movie performance the process will end in stage itself. there will be no stage . if on the other hand the sr chooses the low strategy, there will be a higher probability of his getting enrolled by the pr. if the sr is signed up, and if the movie is a box- office hit then the sr will have a higher probability of getting signed up in stage also by the pr. he will not however become a star because the movie was not pro- jecting him as a star to begin with, but the chances of becoming a star in the next stage increases. if on the other hand the movie fails in the box-office in stage , the pr may still be willing to give the sr another chance in the second stage because his monetary losses through the sr in stage were not considerable, and more importantly, he knows that the failure of the movie cannot be attributed to the sr alone. thus, with a low strategy option in stage , the sr is destined to move on to stage . stage : (note that stage sets in if only if the sr had taken the low strategy in stage .) if the movie had been a box-office hit in stage , then the sr once again faces two options: go for high strategy or stick to the low strategy. with the high strategy, the probability of the pr signing the sr is higher than in stage because the sr’s movie has been a success in stage . a box-office hit in a stage movie would propel the sr to become a star. if the movie is not a box-office hit, it would doom the sr to total failure. if the movie had been a box-office hit in stage , and if in stage also the sr chooses the low strategy, then the probability of being hired by the pr gets to be much higher. in this case, given his success in the first stage, regardless of the result of the movie in stage the sr would become a me-too star, whose status is lower than that of a star but not a total failure. if the movie had been a failure in stage , the sr once again faces two options: go for high strategy or stick to the low strategy. with the high strategy, the probability is much lower than in stage for the pr to sign him because of the failure of the movie in stage . however, a box-office hit in stage would propel the sr towards stardom. if the movie is not a box-office hit, it would doom the sr to total failure. if the movie in stage had been a failure, and in stage also the sr chooses the low strategy, then the probability of being hired by the pr is still positive but somewhat lower than in stage . if the ensuing movie becomes a box-office hit then the sr is a me-too star. if, however, the movie fails to become a box-office hit, it would doom the sr to total failure. although other actors including reigning stars and other srs are available we assume that the pr looks into only the focal sr and a new face. later we will see how relaxing this assumption would affect the results. strategies of the producer at each stage, the pr will simultaneously make a decision on whether or not to hire the sr given the sr’s strategy. the pr has two options at any stage. he can hire the sr or go for a new face. his choice will depend on the probability of success with either, the returns expected and how he updates these probabilities in stage based on what happened in stage . we develop the pr’s and the sr’s strategies and the associated profits in the following section. strategies and associated profits (payoff) let us first take the pr and see with what probability he would hire the sr at either stage. note that the pr has to choose between the sr and a new face . in deciding between the sr and a new face, it is assumed that the pr follows the principle that is captured in the hotelling’s location model (hotelling, ). in this location model, there are two competing firms located on two ends of a market street trying to attract the customers who are uniformly situated along that street. for our case, we have a similar situation. we have the producer as the customer, and the sr and the new face as the two competitors trying to appeal to the pr’s movie. we assume a unit length [ , ] as the market street, with the sr positioned at and the new face at . we can say that the unit distance between the sr and the new face represents all other market factors that go into the pr’s movie. these include the genre of the story (investigative, romance, action, etc.), music (will it be a musical?), lead heroine, fight sequence, etc. suppose the pr has decided to make a movie that is a certain combination of all the other factors and that the only missing factor is the actor. we further assume that this particular movie can best be done if the pr can get an actor whose profile suits neither the sr nor the new face but someone in between the two. let that ‘ideal’ actor for this movie be at a distance x from the sr on this unit dimension. said otherwise, this point represents the actor that the pr will be thinking about for the movie he has in his mind. however, he has to choose either the sr who is at a distance of x units away from his ideal actor or the new face who is at a distance of -x from this ideal actor. either way he incurs some misalignment cost, which we will explain later in more detail. if the sr wants to choose the high strategy, we assume the following for the pr: cost to hire the sr at high strategy z h cost to make the movie that hires at h z ch probability that the movie would be a box-office hit z pr revenue from the movie z r if it is a box-office hit, z otherwise. without loss of generality we assume that with a new face the pr will incur the following: cost to hire a new face z cost to make the movie that hires a new face z cb a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry probability that the movie would be a box-office hit z pb revenue from the movie z rb if it is a box-office hit, z otherwise. consider the point x from the end. at this point: profits to pr by hiring the sr (who is a high) z pr r � [h þ ch] � xt, profits to pr by hiring the new face z pb rb � cb � ( � x)t, where t is the cost of misalignment of a movie with respect to the actors at the end of the line. as mentioned earlier, the ideal actor needed is at distance x from the sr. by choosing the given sr instead, the pr is introducing a misalignment. he has to incur some cost to remove this misalignment and this cost is represented by ‘ tx’ in our model. this is also called travelling cost in the economics literature. we typically make the cost to be ‘ tx’ instead of ‘tx’ to indicate that the pr ‘travels’ from the ideal point to the sr and comes back to the ideal point to make the movie. however, it does not really matter whether the cost is modeled as ‘tx’ or ‘ tx’. if the pr chooses the new face instead, this alignment cost would be ‘ t ( � x)’. it is important to appreciate the fact that a higher value for t implies that the pr is very particular about addressing this misalignment i.e. he is relatively less worried about what the sr costs. this in turn implies when t is high the high/ low strategies of the sr would have less impact on the pr’s evaluation of the probability of hiring him than if t is of a smaller value. for the time being we will keep this as simply t. based on these two equations we can show that there exists a point x where the pr’s profits are the same either way. let x j high be the probability that the pr would hire the sr who chooses the high strategy, and this is given by: x jhighz þ t ½ðprr � pbrbÞ � ðh þ ch � cbÞ� ð Þ note that pb is less than pr because these are actually the ‘expected’ probabilities as seen by the pr, which we assume to be common knowledge (see also our discussion in section ). similarly, it is commonly believed that rb is less than r because the sr will have a wider market reach than a new face, but ch is greater than cb. it is easy to derive the corresponding probability if the sr chooses to be l. x jlowz þ t ½ðprr � pbrbÞ � ðl þ cl � cbÞ� ð Þ where, cost to hire the sr at low strategy z l cost to make the movie that hires l z cl probability that the movie would be a box-office hit z pr revenue from the movie z r if it is a box-office hit, z otherwise. note that l < h and cl < ch by construction. it is interesting to note that pr and r are the same in expressions and , i.e. regardless of how the movie is made and whether the sr is being projected as a star or an sr, the probability of success and returns from the movie are assumed to be the same. this is in line with industry wisdom: since the sr has no established image or fan base yet, the success of the movie would depend on how the audience like the film, and this would be independent of the type of sr. however, if the movie becomes a box-office hit, the image projected in the movie for the sr would propel him to stardom. so, the movie success is the cause here and is assumed to be exogenous to how the sr is treated or the movie is made to accommodate the expec- ted image of the sr. this assumption leads to the following expression: x jhighzx jlow � t ½ðh þ chÞ � ðl þ clÞ� ð Þ thus, the sr will always find himself to be more easily acceptable to the pr if he adopts a low strategy as against adopting the high strategy. note that as t increases the probability of hiring the sr who chooses the high strategy also increases. this is because, as mentioned earlier, when t is of larger value the importance paid to the actor’s costs goes down. for stage , expressions and give the probability that the sr will be hired by the pr. as explained earlier, if in stage the sr adopts the high strategy there is no stage . we therefore focus on the sr adopting the low strategy in stage . if the movie thus produced in stage is a box-office hit, then the pr would like to place a higher probability on the sr in stage because he has learnt something more concrete about the sr’s capability as a potential future star. we capture this by the following expressions: x s jhighz þ t ½ðfpr þ eð � prÞgr � pbrbÞ � ðh þ ch � cbÞ� ð Þ x s jlowz þ t ½ðfpr þ eð � prÞgr � pbrbÞ � ðl þ cl � cbÞ� ð Þ where x s jhigh and x s jlow are the probabilities that the pr would hire the sr in stage when the sr had given a box-office hit in stage . here, e is the learning parameter which takes the value between and . suppose, in stage , the movie was a failure. then, the pr would modify the probabilities as follows to evaluate the probabilities of hiring the sr in stage : x f jhighz þ t ½ðprð � eÞr � pbrbÞ � ðh þ ch � cbÞ� ð Þ x f jlowz þ t ½ðprð � eÞr � pbrbÞ � ðl þ cl � cbÞ� ð Þ where x f jhigh and x f jlow are the probabilities that the pr would hire the sr in stage when the sr’s movie failed in stage . having developed the strategies of the pr, we turn our attention to the sr. let p(high ) and p(low ) represent respectively the total profits accruing to the sr from adopting high strategy in stage and low strategy in stage . t.v. krishnan, a.m. sakkthivel pðhigh Þzðx jhighÞ½h þ prps�; ð Þ where x jhigh is the probability that the sr will be hired by the pr in stage (given by expression ), h is the fees charged by the sr, pr is the probability that the movie is going to be a box-office hit and ps is the total discounted profits the sr will be acquiring as a star in future. suppose the sr chooses low strategy in stage . then, total profits to him are: pðlow Þzðx jlowÞ½l þ preðsr jsuc Þ þ ð � prÞeðsr jfail Þ�; ð Þ where x jlow is the probability that the sr will be hired by the pr in stage (given by expression ), l is the fees charged by the sr for the movie in stage , pr is the prob- ability that the movie will be a box-office hit, e(sr jsuc ) is the expected profits to the sr in stage following the successful movie release in stage , ( � pr) is the proba- bility that the movie in stage will be a failure at the box- office, e(sr jfail ) is the expected profits to the sr in stage following the poor outcome of his movie in stage . here we use the expected operator to indicate the options to choose from in stage . let us focus on stage now. suppose the sr has a box- office hit in stage . then, he has two options in stage : high and low, and the probability of getting hired (i.e. over a new face) by the pr is higher in either strategy because of the success in the previous stage. the sr will choose the strategy that will get him the better returns. let p (high jsuc ) and p(low jsuc ) denote the profits to sr in stage in choosing the high and low strategy respectively, given that he had a box-office hit in stage . these are given by: pðhigh jsuc Þzðx s jhighÞ½h þ prps� ð Þ where x s jhigh is the probability that sr will be hired by pr in stage if sr had given a box-office hit in stage and wants to be projected as a star in this stage (given by expression ), h is the fees charged by the sr in stage , pr is the probability the movie in stage will be a box-office hit, and ps is the total discounted profits the sr will be acquiring as a star in future. similar to expression , we produce the profits to the sr if he chooses low strategy. pðlow jsuc Þzðx s jlowÞ½l þ aps� ð Þ where x s jlow is the probability that the pr will hire the sr if the movie in stage was a box-office hit and does not want to be projected as a star in stage also (given by expression ), l is the fees charged for the movie in stage , aps is the total discounted profits the sr will be acquiring as a me-too star in future. note that whatever happens to the movie in this situation, the sr will turn out to be a me- too star. this status enables the sr to earn in the long future a fraction of the earnings earned by a star, and this fraction is given by a, where < a < . going by the industry, a is roughly e %. we can now state the expected returns to the sr in stage following his box- office hit in stage . eðsr jsuc Þzmaxfpðhigh jsuc Þ; pðlow jsuc Þg ð Þ suppose the sr has a failed movie in stage . then, he has two options in stage : high and low, and the probability of getting hired (i.e. over a new face) by the pr is lower in either strategy because of the failure in the previous stage. the sr will choose the one that will get him the better returns. let p(high jfail ) and p(low jfail ) denote the profits to the sr in stage in choosing the high and low strategy respectively, given that he had a failed movie in stage . these are given by: pðhigh jfail Þzðx f jhighÞ½h þ prps� ð Þ where x f jhigh is the probability that the sr will be hired by the pr in stage if the sr’s movie had failed in stage (given by expression ), h is the fees charged by the sr in stage , pr is the probability the movie will be a box-office hit in stage , and ps is the total discounted profits the sr will be acquiring as a star in future. similarly, we produce the profits to the sr if he chooses low strategy. pðlow jfail Þzðx f jlowÞ½l þ praps� ð Þ where x f jlow is the probability that the pr will hire the sr if his movie in the previous stage had failed (given by expression ), l is the fees charged for the movie in stage , pr is the probability that the movie will be a box-office hit, and aps is the total discounted profits the sr will be acquiring as a me-too star in future. note that only if the movie is a box-office hit, will the sr turn out to be a me-too star; otherwise, he will be doomed to be a total failure. as mentioned earlier, the me-too star status enables the sr earn in the long future a fraction of the earnings earned by a star, and this fraction is given by a, where < a < . going by the industry, a is roughly e %. we can now state the expected returns to the sr in stage following his failed movie in stage . eðsr jfail Þzmaxfpðhigh jfail Þ; pðlow jfail Þg ð Þ outcome of the process: a numerical analysis the focus of this research paper is to find out what the sr would do: project himself as a star or stay the course of the sr status and try to move up to star status in the next stage after proving himself again. this involves comparing expressions and and then concluding whether the sr would act as a star (i.e. choose high strategy) or stay the course (i.e. choose the low strategy). however, the profit functions and the other functions they in turn depend on are really complicated expressions with many industry parameters built in, and hence an analytical solution is very difficult, if not impossible, to get. hence, we resort to numerical analysis and focus on those parameters that are of high interest to the industry. we have the following parameters in the model: cost to hire the sr z h (high strategy), l (low strategy) cost to make the movie z ch (if the sr asks for high strategy), cl (if the sr chooses low strategy) probability that the sr’s movie would be a box-office hit z pr table values assigned to the parameters of the numerical analysis. t . e . e . , . pr . e . pb . returns to pr hiring sr: r returns with a new face: rb high strategy sr cost: h . e low strategy sr cost: l . cost of movie with sr z h: ch . cost of movie with sr z l: cl . cost of movie with a new face: cb . a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry revenue from the movie z r if it is a box-office hit, otherwise. cost to hire a new face z , cost to make the movie that hires new face z cb probability that the movie with a new face would be a box-office hit z pb revenue from the movie with a new face z rb if it is a box-office hit, otherwise. e z learning parameter which updates the pr’s proba- bility of box-office hit of a movie with the sr. t equals; cost of misalignment (explained earlier). psz discounted total future profits to the sr if he becomes a star. a ps z discounted total future profits to the sr if he becomes a me-too star, where < a < . of the numerous parameters, pr, e, h, a and t play a primary role, while the rest of the parameters can be thought of playing a secondary or reference role. for example, h and ch can be clubbed together, and so there is no need to consider ch separately. since it is the difference between h and l that matters in evaluating the difference between the various probabilities in expression through , we can keep l fixed and do what-if analysis on h alone. following this, since l and cl can be clubbed together, we do not need to analyse cl separately. similarly, it is the difference between ps and aps that matters, and hence we need to focus only on a for the analysis. the returns to the pr, i.e. r and rb, are actually scale parameters and do not affect the qualitative nature of the outcomes. also, given the focus on pr the role of pb is reduced to a reference point. hence, we focus on five parameters, namely, t, e, pr, h, a for our numerical analysis. based on the numerous discussions we had with producers, actors, and other important people in the industry, we assigned values to the parameters (table ). for example, in the industry, stars actually charge anywhere between five and times the salary of an sr. we have l at . and test for various h, ranging from . to , which converts to a multiple of e . similarly, the probability of success of a movie with an sr and that with a new face were derived from the actual data we collected . the parameters whose values are given as a range (i.e. t, e, pr, h, a) are the parameters to be used as what-if vari- ables in the analysis. we now discuss the results of our numerical analysis. our objective is to find out if the sr would adopt a star-like position in stage or not. in other words, we want to find out under what conditions he would choose to adopt high strategy in stage . tables e present the results. in these tables, we use the terms ‘high’ to mean that the sr is adopting the high strategy in stage , and ‘low’ to mean that the sr is adopting the low strategy in stage . result : impact of pr and h we kept t z , e z . , a z . (rather a high fraction) and evaluated what the sr would do in stage under different this is explained in detail in a later section. combinations of pr and h. since pr is bounded and h has a natural limit (because l was kept at . ) we believe we cover a very wide range of the combinations. note that each cell represents an industry scenario. since we do not know the exact situation in the tamil movie industry, we test over a wide range of possible scenarios. also, although we covered more combinations in the actual analysis, in the interests of space we are providing only a few here. however, the results we could infer from these combina- tions are applicable to all the combinations. consider the row pertaining to pr z . and the column pertaining to h z . . if the industry practice is such that a star charges a fee of . (i.e. roughly times that of a regular sr) and the probability of the sr- cast movie making a box-office hit is . , then armed with this knowledge and the pr’s probability evaluation of hiring him under different strategies, the sr would find it profitable to act like a star in stage i.e. adopt a high strategy. consider the same row but the column h z . . under this industry scenario, the sr would find it profit- able to play the low strategy i.e. by accepting a salary of l and asking the pr to project him as a regular rookie. his reason for doing this is that if h is high, the probability that the pr would move away from hiring him and go instead for a new face increases dramatically. when h is relatively smaller (i.e. up to . ) the prospects of star status are more attractive and the sr goes for the high strategy in stage . exactly at what point of h the sr would decide to resist the temptation to be treated like a star and ask to be treated like a normal rookie depends on the probability of his movie becoming a box-office hit. recall that if it turns out to be a failure the sr would be doomed. for example, looking at the two rows pertaining to pr z . and pr z . and the column pertaining to h z . we see that if the pr is low the sr would ask to be treated like a normal rookie. if the probability is low the sr is aware that the audience is less likely to make his movie a box-office hit and hence he would not risk asking for star treatment. however, looking at the two rows pertaining to pr z . and pr z . and the column pertaining to h z . we see that the higher probability of success is actually making the sr adopt the cost of a new face ps (total future returns for a star) a . , . table sr choosing high or low: impact of combinations of pr (probability that the sr’s movie would be a hit) and h (cost of hiring sr with high strategy) under {t z ; e z . ; a z . } setting. pr h z . e . h z . h z . h z . h z . . high high low low low . high high high low low . high high high low low . high high high high low . high high high high low . high high high high low . high high high high low . high high high high low . high high high low low . high high low low low . high low low low low t.v. krishnan, a.m. sakkthivel low strategy of asking to be treated like a normal rookie. the rationale behind this would be as follows: if he chooses the low strategy in stage , he is very likely to get a box- office hit which would push up the chances of the pr hiring him in stage . this would make the overall probability of the second stage box-office hit much higher; moreover, even if the second stage results in an unsuccessful movie, the sr has some chance of making it to the me-too star status. given that a z . the me-too star status is not unsatisfactory. however, a needs to be sufficiently high. we will discuss the case of low a later. thus we find that if a is not low, the parameter pr is a double-edged sword. if pr is too low, it discourages the sr from taking the high strategy in stage because of the poor chances of making it; if too high, it encourages the sr to move on to stage by adopting the low strategy in stage and thus enhances his overall expected returns in stage much higher than opting for high in stage . extending this result one can argue that only when the probability of his movie being a box-office hit is in the mid-range will we find table sr choosing high or low: impact of combinations of pr ( hiring sr with high strategy) under {t z . ; e z . ; a z . } se pr h z . e . h z . e . h z . e . . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high high . high high low . high low low . low low low the sr adopting the high strategy in stage . in other words, neither a poorly performing sr nor a very strongly per- forming sr would rush in to move up to star status. it is those srs in the ‘grey area’ who would try to act like stars too early in their careers. result : impact of t and pr recall that a high value of t implies that the pr would spend a lot of money in aligning the actor to suit his ideal movie, and hence the importance of the sr’s salary (h or l) and the probability of success (pr) get reduced in his evaluation of whether to hire the sr or not. we will see the impact of this t on the sr’s strategic decision in stage . the results are seen in table (t z ) and table (t z . ). consider the columns pertaining to h z . in table and h z . e . in table . both columns pertain to h z . . consider all the rows pertaining to . through . . table shows that the sr would choose low strategy in stage while table shows that the sr would choose high strategy in stage . the only difference between the two tables in the value assigned to parameter t. in table t z while in table t z . . what does this imply? with a higher value for t, the pr pays less importance to the sr’s salary in hiring him and hence the sr would automatically push up his cost i.e. would project himself to be a star. this is an important result because it implies that the sr would be more likely to project himself as a star if the pr is investing in a movie that pays a lot of attention to all the attributes of the movie and not just to the cost of the actor. note that the probability of success of the movie still remains the same but the producers put more focus on all the dimensions of the movie and are going for the ‘right’ actor for the movie. result : impact of a and pr in tables and , used to describe the first two results, we had assumed rather a high value for a ( . ).if we assume probability that the sr’s movie would be a hit) and h (cost of tting. h z . h z . h z . h z . high low low low high low low low high high low low high high high low high high high low high high high low high high high low high high high low high high high low high high low low high high low low high low low low low low low low low low low low low low low low low low low low table sr choosing high or low: impact of combinations of pr (probability that the sr’s movie would be a hit) and h (cost of hiring sr with high strategy) under {t z ; e z . ; a z . } setting. pr h z . e . h z . h z . , . h z . h z . h z . h z . h z . h z . h z . . high low . high high low . high high high low low . high high high high low low low . high high high high high high low low . high high high high high high high low low . high high high high high high high high low low . high high high high high high high high high low . high high high high high high high high high low . high high high high high high high high high low . high high low low low low low low low low these statistics do not include the cost of making a movie starring superstars. these superstar movies are called mega-budget movies and costs tens of crores of rupees. a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry a low value for a, say . , the results can be seen in table . comparing table (a z . ) and (a z . ) and considering therein columns pertaining to h z . we see that across all the values of pr, the sr in the scenario of a z . chooses to act as a rookie in stage , while in the scenario of a z . he chooses to act as a star in stage . a low a means that if the sr becomes a me-too star instead of a star he would get only % of what a star would totally get in the future. in this industry scenario where the me-too star status is not bright, the strategy of moving to stage is not as lucrative as it is in the industry scenario that has a z . . this will encourage the sr to choose high strategy if everything else remains the same across the two scenarios. this result complements results and . for example, result implies that result will hold only if a is sufficiently high. how high that should be depends on the values the other parameters take in a specific situation. result : impact of e the parameter e tells how the market updates the prob- ability of success of the sr’s movie in stage using the result in stage . this is important only if the sr chooses the low strategy in stage . the updating is done in both cases: if the movie at stage is a box-office hit the probability of another box-office hit in stage is pr( þ e) while if it is a failure in stage the probability of it being a box-office hit in stage is pr( � e). so, the net effect of the updating parameter, as seen strategically by the sr, is not going to be significant. our numerical analysis also showed that there is no significant change in the sr’s decision in stage when we changed the updating parameter from . to . . having discussed four key results, we now consider the situation in the tamil movie industry. does it point to a condition that encourages the sr to project himself as a star before he actually becomes one? actual market conditions let us focus on the probability of a movie becoming a box- office hit with a new face (i.e. pb) and that with the sr (i.e. pr). we collected data on the tamil movies released in the period e and analysed the success rate with new faces and established faces respectively. out of the approximately movies released we could gather information on around movies. there were new faces introduced in the industry in the period e , which makes it roughly new faces per year. of the movies, movies had failed new faces. these two facts imply that the success rate of a movie with a new face is / z which is . % (anandan, ). our discussions with the producers and directors revealed that the prob- ability figure would be much lower if we were to get information on all the movies released in the e period. based on this, we estimated pb around . ; this is what we used in all of our numerical analyses, including table . the probability of a movie becoming a box-office hit with an sr (i.e. pr) is more difficult to evaluate because one cannot exactly mark when an sr actually became a star or a me-too star. we looked into the rate of hit movies that came out of a new face in (a) the third and fourth years of his career, (b) the fifth and sixth years of his career and (c) the seventh and eighth years of his career. assuming that an unsuccessful new face would have most likely exited the industry within the first two years and most certainly within the first five years, and that the sr might be evolving into a star around the sixth to eighth year of his career, we took the mean of these three averages. this came out to be in the range of . e . . thus we put the value of pr around . . based on our discussion with the producers and various reports published in the cine journals, we found that it takes roughly around rs . crore ( million) to crore ( million) to make a movie with a new face while it could take around rs crores ( million) to crores ( million) to make a movie with a star or an sr projecting himself to be a star . thus, the cost of making a movie for the sr projecting himself to be star is three to times the cost of making a movie with a new face. in our numerical simula- tions, we had assumed a value of . for the movie with a new face, and hence the parameter h can be said to have t.v. krishnan, a.m. sakkthivel a value between . and (the method of evaluating h has been discussed in a previous section). if we take pb z . , pr to be around . and h to be in the interval . e , then from tables , and see that the sr would find it optimal to project himself to be a star. this is true of both the high and low values of a. thus, we can conclude that the market conditions in the tamil movie industry are such that the sr would want to project himself to be a star. model refinement (markov chain) the model proposed above is a simplified picture of the seemingly odd behaviour of successful rookies in the tamil movie industry. clearly, there are other ways to model the rationalisation of this behaviour, and we discuss one of them below . an actor may pass through several stages before becoming a star eventually, but many taking that long route end up as me-too stars. being an sr, one can take this long, traditional route or take a short cut and ask to be treated like a star immediately. consider the long route first. suppose the sr has a goodwill of n units acquired from his early movie successes. further, if he could increase these n units to n units over time, he will be considered a star. for every movie he acts in during this period, there is however a probability p that it would be a hit movie and � p that it would be a flop. with every success during this run, he will gain unit of goodwill and with every failure he will lose unit. this is very similar to the gambler’s ruin problem (stigler, ). the probability that the sr would eventually reach star status is given by ( � kn)/( � kn) where k z ( � p )/p , provided p is not half but between and . note here that n z and n are absorption states. see ross ( ) for the derivation and details. if p is lower than . this probability becomes zero, implying that the sr would only become a me-too star earning a return of a ps (where < a < and ps is the total returns to a star; see the previous sections for more details), while if p is greater than . the probability of reaching star status (and thus earning the ps returns) increases with p . for example, let us say that the amount of goodwill units available with the sr is four and that to reach star status there should be units accruing to the sr. in that case, if p is . then the probability that he would become a star in the long run is also . , but then if p is . the probability of the sr becoming a star in the long run increases to . . in the latter case, by providing the sr with such a high probability of becoming a star, the long route would become the natural choice. on the other hand consider a low p (below . ). with the short route the expected returns are very small but with the long route there is always ‘some’ returns offered by the me-too star status, and so the long route again would be more advan- tageous. thus, with either p high or low, it is better for the sr to take the long route while for other intermediate we thank a reviewer for encouraging us to look at using the markov chain method. values, the short route is better. this conclusion is very similar to what we arrived at in the previous section . another way to evaluate the strategies in this markov model is to ask how long it would take the sr to reach the star stage and see if the sr can wait that long. the expected number of periods the actor would take to reach n goodwill points starting from n units is given by: ð �kÞ [{ k nþ � (n þ )k þ n � } � { knþ � (n þ ) k þ n � }], where n is the star stage, n is the sr stage, kz ( � p )/p (see sheldon ross, ). what is the impact of a large n? if p is less than . then the expected number of periods he needs to become a star is an exponential func- tion in n and so it almost becomes impossible for the sr to achieve the star status in his lifetime. he would very likely end up as a me-too star. on the other hand, if p is higher than . the expression almost becomes linear in n and so a good performing sr would be able to reach star status sooner. now, we can include the discount rate and then compare the returns with what the sr could achieve by taking the shorter route. we however leave the develop- ment of a full model for future research. conclusions, managerial implications and caveats in this research we took the tamil movie industry into focus and analysed the strategic decision making process of a successful rookie. there are many factors one could analyse in this industry and we decided to focus on the one that we found out to be critical, based on our discussions with producers, directors and actors. when his first few movies become successful, a rookie generally pushes himself to become a star and demands ‘star’ treatment from the producers but that is perceived as an arrogant posture by many producers in the industry because stars are typically formed after a long and gruelling movie experi- ence. this very often leads to producers opting for new faces. although the successful rookies are aware of this, they still try to push for stardom. in our research, we built a decision making model based on our in-depth discussion with some prominent producers and actors and analysed the conditions under which the successful rookies could strategically chase stardom, and when they could not. our analysis showed that when the probability of success of an sr’s movie is assessed to be neither too high nor too low, the rookie would push himself to become a star immediately. a very low probability would discourage him because his failure in such an attempt would doom him forever, and a high probability would encourage him to prove himself further to the producers and to ensure higher returns in the long run. so, only those facing a moderate probability of scoring a hit would demand star treatment. a second finding is that the sr is more likely to project himself as a star if the producer invests in a movie that pays note that we use these numbers for demonstration purposes only. also, note that the p we use here is different from pr we used in the previous sections since the frameworks are different. a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry attention to all the attributes of the movie (i.e. good story, stage setting, music, director, etc.) and looks at the perfect fit between the movie and the actor. thirdly, if the industry is such that the me-too stars in the long run cannot make more than a small percentage of what a star makes, the successful rookie would try to become a star sooner because by waiting his chances of good returns from a me- too star status are not very high. this counter-intuitive result is born out of the possibility that the successful rookie finds the other alternatives to be such failing prop- ositions that he prefers to project as a star even though he is aware the risk is high. applying the proposed model to the tamil movie industry and evaluating the various parameters, we find that it is perfectly plausible for a new actor with two or three quick hits to put himself up to achieve star status. although such a strategy may look optimal for an sr it may nevertheless appear to a producer that the sr has over- reached himselfdone of the producers we interviewed stated his preference for a new face or a proven star and not an ‘arrogant’ sr, who would demand an inordinate amount of money and attention. what are the managerial implications of our findings? first, the industry should understand that the seemingly odd behaviour of successful rookies can be explained rationally and handled through a rational approach. instead of looking for a new face for a movie, producers can look for ways to work with srs; for example, srs can be asked to share the risk in the production of the expensive movies that the prs undertake to suit the aspirations of the srs. or, they can be asked to share their future revenues if the current movie pushes the rookie to stardom. anyway, by understanding the factors driving the srs to demand star status, producers can find ways to address their concerns and thereby reduce their own reliance on the new faces. secondly, srs should be aware that they take the short cut from fear of an uncertain future coupled with the continuous stream of new faces in the industry. once they become aware of their situation and their motives, they could look for solutions and explain their point of view to producers, reducing ill-will all around. thirdly, since the probability of achieving a hit deter- mines an sr’s demand for star treatment to a great extent, successful rookies facing a moderate probability of success can start asking how they can improve the odds and thereby reduce the need to demand star treatment. fourthly, a good movie is based not just on the contribu- tion of the actor but on a full package that includes the script, story, dialogues, setting, etc. our finding says that if a producer is thinking about hiring an sr for such a well thought-out movie then the demand for high salary or star treatment from the sr would become less relevant in the bigger scheme of things, and there would be more likelihood of the sr getting hired than in a movie where the actor is the only important part. this in turn suggests that the sr should seek out only those movies that pay attention to the whole package and not just to him! while this may appear counter- intuitive when an sr wants to be projected as a star, the strategy may work on the ground (as the recent success of an sr like karthi has shown) and is in line with reasoning. the indian movie industry is coming of age, with production houses replacing independent producers. these production houses are companies that are professionally managed, and our findings will give them additional insights into this industry and thus help in their decision making process when they deal with various actors. however, there are some caveats. first, there could be other ‘irrational’ reasons for the sr’s demand for star treatment. for example, as borne out in our interviews, before becoming srs, actors who enter the industry as new faces often encounter numerous problems, getting slim gains in return. hence, even a minor success encourages them to initiate action to overcome this sense of insecurity. also, the young age and inexperience of these successful rookies (most of them are in their early twenties) make them vulnerable to the fallout of sudden wealth and fame. secondly, our model has only one sr, and does not take into account factors such as the competitive spirit between the srs, which might make them demand star treatment with more vigour. another element that our model does not take into consideration is the role played by the currently reigning stars who might seem a better bet to the producers than an sr, at the same cost. however, reigning stars carefully pick movies that suit their image and hence avoid acting in too many movies in a given year. thus, the producers are left with the option of an sr or a new face for many of their movies. we believe that our results provide interesting insights that are useful for both producers and actors. it is to be hoped that this first step towards understanding the nuances in the film industry will spur academia’s interest in its complexities. references anandan. 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( ). entertainment industry economics: a guide for financial analysis. e. new york: cambridge university press. 	to push for stardom or not: a rookie’s dilemma in the tamil movie industry 	introduction 	literature survey 	model for studying interaction between producer and rookie 	strategies of the successful rookie 	two stages of the successful rookie’s evolution process 	strategies of the producer 	strategies and associated profits (payoff) 	outcome of the process: a numerical analysis 	result : impact of pr and h 	result : impact of t and pr 	result : impact of &alpha; and pr 	result : impact of &epsi; 	actual market conditions 	model refinement (markov chain) 	conclusions, managerial implications and caveats 	references translational research in bipolar disorder: emerging insights from genetically based models feature review translational research in bipolar disorder: emerging insights from genetically based models g chen , id henter and hk manji , mood and anxiety disorders program, national institute of mental health, national institutes of health, bethesda, md, usa and johnson and johnson pharmaceutical research and development, titusville, nj, usa bipolar disorder (bpd) is characterized by vulnerability to episodic depression and mania and spontaneous cycling. because of marked advances in candidate-gene and genome-wide association studies, the list of risk genes for bpd is growing rapidly, creating an unprecedented opportunity to understand the pathophysiology of bpd and to develop novel therapeutics for its treatment. however, genetic findings are associated with major unresolved issues, including whether and how risk variance leads to behavioral abnormalities. although animal studies are key to resolving these issues, consensus is needed regarding how to define and monitor phenotypes related to mania, depression and mood swing vulnerability in genetically manipulated rodents. in this study we discuss multiple facets of this challenging area, including theoretical considerations, available tests, limitations associated with rodent behavioral modeling and promising molecular–behavioral findings. these include clock, glycogen synthase kinase b (gsk- b), glutamate receptor (glur ), extracellular signal- regulated kinase- (erk ), p (or s a ), vesicular monoamine transporter (vmat or slc a ), glucocorticoid receptors (grs), bcl- -associated athanogene- (bag ) and mitochondrial dna polymerase-c (polg). some mutant rodent strains show behavioral clusters or activity patterns that cross-species phenocopy objective/observable facets of mood syndromes, and changes in these clustered behaviors can be used as outcome measures in genetic–behavioral research in bpd. molecular psychiatry ( ) , – ; doi: . /mp. . ; published online february keywords: mania; depression; bipolar disorder; animal model; lithium introduction bipolar disorder (bpd) is a severe, disabling and often life-threatening psychiatric disorder that affects ap- proximately – % of the general population. , phenotypically, bpd is a very complex disease in which patients alternate between episodes of mania and depression , (figure ). accumulating data support the theory that bpd arises from the complex inheritance of multiple genetic variants – (figure ). in susceptible subjects, physical and psychosocial stressors can facilitate the progress of bpd into a stage of vulnerability and trigger mood episodes. such episodes can also be induced by psychostimulants, monoamine depletion and corticosteroids; an intrin- sic biological trigger is also suspected for ‘sponta- neous’ mood episodes. , recently, large-scale candidate and genome-wide association studies have generated a rapidly growing list of risk genes for bpd, including ank and cacna a. , more key findings are expected from copy-number variance and in-depth sequencing stu- dies of thousands of individuals. advances in genetic studies create an unprecedented opportunity to finally understand the pathophysiology of this devas- tating illness at the molecular level, and to develop novel therapeutics capable of relieving mood symp- toms as well as preventing recurrences. however, both existing and future association studies have at least three key issues that remain unresolved: ( ) whether, and to what extent, risk variance causes gene dysfunction; ( ) whether risk genes are causally linked to behavioral abnormalities in bpd and ( ) if so, what are the precise mechanisms that lead to behavioral abnormalities. animal studies have long had a pivotal role in attempting to resolve these issues. currently, two types of behavioral approaches are used to analyze the pathogenesis of bpd; broadly, these can be thought of as the animal model and model animal approaches. the animal model approach begins by identifying a behavioral stress or chemical treatment that induces specific behavior(s) thought to cross- species phenocopy one or a few mood symptoms (for example, immobility in the forced swim or tail suspension tests, escaping deficit in the learned helplessness paradigm or social avoidance or re- duced sweet solution preference in the social defeat received november ; revised december ; accepted december ; published online february correspondence: dr g chen, map, nimh-irp, nih, building , room c- (main office) and bc- , convent drive, msc , bethesda, md , usa. e-mail: guangchen@mail.nih.gov molecular psychiatry ( ) , – & macmillan publishers limited all rights reserved - / www.nature.com/mp http://dx.doi.org/ . /mp. . mailto:guangchen@mail.nih.gov http://www.nature.com/mp paradigm ). the biological basis of induced beha- viors can then be studied. in contrast, the initial step of the model animal approach is to introduce specific gene or pathway alterations implicated in bpd into animals. these animals are then evaluated using batteries of behavioral tests to examine whether the abnormality is causally linked to behaviors or to behavior clusters that cross-species phenocopy mood symptoms, mood syndromes or mood swing vulner- ability observed in euthymic bpd patients. once these causal relationships are established, the im- plicated biological alterations to behavior can be further analyzed. although both animal models and model animals can be used to evaluate novel therapeutics, the increased use of model animals is expected, given the unique ability of such animals to evaluate pathophysiology driven target treatments. the term ‘cross-species phenocopy’, which we use throughout this review, is used to emphasize apparent phenomenological similarities that can result from the same or different underlying mechanism(s) in humans and rodents. to be cautious with regard to animal research, investigators have used the term ‘cross-species phenocopy of depression or mania’ rather than ‘model of depression or mania’ to reflect the fact that true behavioral models for a given illness stem from established pathology, and that the pathol- ogy of bpd is still largely unknown. below, we discuss the strengths and limitations of each animal approach and describe recent promising findings from several mutant strains. specifically, we discuss ( ) the advantages and drawbacks associated with current batteries of tests that characterize behavioral clusters or activity patterns related to the bipolar i bipolar ii genetic factors environmental factors early life maltreatment psychostimulant monoamine depletion circadian shift/sleep deprivation social-psychological stress s a (p ) slc a (vmat ) clock glur erk gsk- betagr bag predisposed abnormalities (intrinsic & inducible switch) pathophysiology pathophysiology mania depression susceptible stage mood stabilizers antidepressants figure (a) bpd has unique episodic and dual-directional features in which mood states can be either elevated (red, mania), suppressed (blue, depression) or rapidly alternate between the two extremes (mixed episodes). euthymic/remitted phases occur between the episodes in which patients, especially those with residual mood symptoms, remain vulnerable to the recurrence of full-blown mood episodes. mood stabilizers, such as lithium, valproate, carbamazepine, lamotrigine, as well as atypical antipsychotics, are effective therapeutic agents that gradually relieve the symptoms of mania and/or depression. they also prevent the recurrence of mood episodes. recent data from the systematic treatment enhancement program for bipolar disorder (step-bd) study found that approximately % of patients recover after appropriate treatments, and approximately % of recovered patients experience a recurrence within years; recurrence is highly associated with residual mood symptoms at initial recovery. bpd-i: patient has one or more manic episodes or mixed episodes. often individuals have also had one or more major depressive episodes. bpd-ii: patient has at least one hypomanic episode and at least one major depressive episode. (b) conceptually, the course of bpd can be divided into two major parts: vulnerability and episode stages; the illness is further characterized by a transition period from vulnerability to episode stage. genetic variants and environmental stressors, and the interaction between the two (g � e), contribute to the predisposed abnormalities underlying the vulnerability stage. these two factors and their interaction may also contribute to the intrinsic (or spontaneous) switch mechanism. psychosocial and biological stressors can trigger mood episodes in susceptible individuals. the use of psychostimulants and experimental monoamine depletion can cause mania or depressive relapses in subjects with a personal or family history of mood disorders, or with certain genetic variants. unique pathophysiological mechanisms are believed to underlie depression, mania and mixed episodes. the color reproduction of this figure is available on the html full text version of the manuscript. translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry three major components of bpd: mania, depression and vulnerability to mood swings; ( ) the relevance of behavioral clusters or patterns to depression and mania, and how these can be further validated through treatment with antidepressants or mood stabilizers; and ( ) how these behavioral clusters or patterns can be used as major behavioral outcome measures in studies that use the model animal approach to address issues related to genetic–beha- vioral relationships in bpd. it is worth noting that although rodents are nocturnal animals, the behavioral tests or measures discussed in this review are currently conducted during the light phase (with the exception of home cage wheel running and home cage activity scans). furthermore, animals are bred in the laboratory for experimental purposes, and these conditions are far from natural. this adds a further dimension to our ability to extrapolate the results of one or a few tests to the overall state of rodent activity, and from rodents to humans. future studies should address alternative behavioral tests and measures, as well as the logistical problems of animal holding and behavioral facilities for experiments that are more in line with the nocturnal nature of rodents. the animal model approach a comprehensive list of current animal models for depression or mania can be found in several recent, well-written reviews. – these animal models are valid for evaluating mood stabilizers as well as ‘me- too’ and novel types of antidepressants. , for instance, the forced swim test is sensitive to most direct monoamine manipulating antidepressants , as well as other clinically effective antidepressant agents such as ketamine, lamotrigine , and lithium. because the outcome measures of these models are sensitive to treatment with mood stabi- lizers or antidepressants, – they are often collec- tively referred to as antidepressant- or mood stabilizer-sensitive behavioral paradigms. two terms describe experimental outcomes from these para- digms: ( ) mood-stabilizer-like or antidepressant-like behavioral actions and ( ) the behavioral effects of mood stabilizers or antidepressants. it should be noted that these terms are not directly equivocal to mood stabilizing or antidepressant actions. presently, it remains unknown whether or not the administra- tion of mood stabilizers or antidepressants elicits different behavioral actions through the same me- chanisms. these animal models are associated with other advantages and weaknesses, and these have been well addressed in previous reviews. – the model animal approach the ‘reverse translation’ model animal approach is being used in the study of bpd with increasing frequency. loosely defined, reverse translation shifts the focus from creating animal behaviors that pheno- typically resemble aspects of mental disorders (that is, animal models) to instead using what we have learned about the potential pathological changes found in bpd from human genetic, post-mortem and other studies (that is, creating model animals). potential pathological changes include genetic, epi- genetic and other biological alterations. this subtle distinction shifts the focus from creating animal models to understanding the role of those specific changes already implicated in bpd. thus, instead of approaching this issue from the perspective of creating an ‘animal model of bpd’, researchers can focus on understanding whether and how specific changes contribute to a ‘mania-like phenotype’, ‘depression-like phenotype’ or ‘vulnerability-like phenotype’. studies using this approach can ulti- mately provide fundamental information for design- ing novel therapeutics that are able to target causally linked changes, or the biological consequences of the changes. the animals created from this type of research can, in turn, serve as tools for the compre- hensive evaluation of the effectiveness of novel therapeutic methods for bpd at both the neurochem- ical and behavioral levels. in the model animal approach, biologically predis- posed animals are generated using genetic (for example, gene transgenic, knockout or mutation– knock-in manipulation) or other biological means (such as viral vector-based gene overexpression or knockdown). these predisposed animals are then studied using batteries of behavioral tests for pheno- copies related to different components of bpd. some of these tests are highlighted in tables – . it should be emphasized that the translational study of bpd using the model animal approach rests upon making the same assumptions that are made in studies using animal models. first, the basic structure and biochemical function of the gene being studied is thought to be, to a certain degree, similar in both humans and rodents. it is important to recognize, however, that although the proteins encoded by the genes of human and rodents are highly homologous, the regulation of gene transcription by transcription factors or epigenetics, or the regulation of gene translation by micrornas, can vary extensively between humans and rodents. second, the gene– behavior relationships of some behaviors may be conserved only to a certain extent between the human and animal genomes. clearly, human brains are far more complex than those of rodents, and rodents should not be viewed as miniature humans. we now turn our focus to research approaches that use model animals, as well as findings from these studies. mania mania can affect mood, thinking (processing and content) and behavior. although many genes impli- cated in bpd are certainly being studied (see craddock and sklar and kato for a review), some translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry table clinical features of mania and rodent phenocopies of components of excessive behavioral excitement domains clinical diagnostic features suitable animal tests expected outcomes mclock glur �/� erk �/� mood elevated, expansive or irritable mood unknown na na na na thought inflated self-esteem or grandiosity unknown na na na na flight of ideas or racing thoughts unknown na na na na behavior more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking unknown na na na na increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school or sexually) or psychomotor agitation open field test novel object exploration increased investigation yes yes yes social interaction test resident–intruder test increased social interaction, constructive or destructive no data yes no data mating activity increased sexual activity no data no data no data sweetened solution preference test wheel running activity fust cpp icss increased hedonic/ pleasurable activity yes yes yes forced swim or tail suspension tests learned helplessness paradigm increased escaping activity yes yes yes excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions or foolish business investments) center activity in open field elevated plus maze or zero maze light/dark reward/aversion test novelty-induced hypophagia more risk-taking (or less anxiety- like) activity yes yes yes decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only h of sleep) home cage activity monitoring home cage wheel running more activity and less rest in home cage no data yes yes attention distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli) there are potential tests, but these need to be further validated. more distractible no data no data no data exclusions manic symptoms are not due to neurological, endocrine or metabolic diseases brain morphology, biochemical tests and battery of motor-sensory tests no obvious changes circadian dysfunction yes yes psycho- stimulant increased use psychostimulant- induced locomotion no change or increased yes yes yes abbreviations: cpp, conditioned place preference test; erk , extracellular signal-regulated kinase- ; fust, female urine sniffing test; glur , glutamate receptor ; icss, intracranial self-stimulation; na, not applicable. translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry t a b le c li n ic a l fe a tu re s o f d e p re s s io n a n d ro d e n t p h e n o c o p ie s o f d e p re s s iv e s y m p to m s d o m a in s c li n ic a l d ia g n o st ic fe a tu re s s u it a b le a n im a l te st s e x p e c te d o u tc o m e s p � /� v m a t � / þ d e p re s s e d m o o d d e p re s s e d m o o d m o s t o f th e d a y , n e a rl y e v e ry d a y , a s in d ic a te d b y e it h e r s u b je c ti v e re p o rt (e .g ., fe e ls s a d o r e m p ty ) o r o b s e rv a ti o n s m a d e b y o th e rs (e .g ., a p p e a rs te a rf u l) u n k n o w n n a n a n a in c h il d re n a n d a d o le s c e n ts , c a n b e ir ri ta b le m o o d u n k n o w n n a n a n a a n h e d o n ia m a rk e d ly d im in is h e d in te re s t o r p le a s u re in a ll , o r a lm o s t a ll , a c ti v it ie s m o s t o f th e d a y , n e a rl y e v e ry d a y (a s in d ic a te d b y e it h e r s u b je c ti v e a c c o u n t o r o b s e rv a ti o n s m a d e b y o th e rs ) h o m e c a g e a c ti v it y s c a n s w e e te n e d s o lu ti o n p re fe re n c e f u s t w h e e l ru n n in g l e s s l e s s d e c re a s e d d e c re a s e d n o d a ta y e s n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta y e s n o d a ta n o d a ta w e ig h t o r a p p e ti te c h a n g e s ig n if ic a n t w e ig h t lo s s w h e n n o t d ie ti n g o r w e ig h t g a in (e .g ., a c h a n g e o f > % o f b o d y w e ig h t in a m o n th ), o r d e c re a s e o r in c re a s e in a p p e ti te n e a rl y e v e ry d a y . n o te : in c h il d re n , c o n s id e r fa il u re to m a k e e x p e c te d w e ig h t g a in s w e ig h t m o n it o ri n g e a ti n g a n d d ri n k in g m o n it o ri n g v a ri e d v a ri e d n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta s le e p d is tu rb a n c e s in s o m n ia o r h y p e rs o m n ia n e a rl y e v e ry d a y h o m e c a g e a c ti v it y s c a n p a tt e rn c h a n g e n o d a ta n o d a ta p s y c h o m o to r a c ti v it y c h a n g e p s y c h o m o to r a g it a ti o n o r re ta rd a ti o n n e a rl y e v e ry d a y (o b s e rv a b le b y o th e rs , n o t m e re ly s u b je c ti v e fe e li n g s o f re s tl e s s n e s s o r b e in g s lo w e d d o w n ) h o m e c a g e a c ti v it y s c a n o p e n fi e ld te s t s lo w /p a tt e rn c h a n g e s lo w /p a tt e rn c h a n g e n o d a ta y e s n o d a ta y e s l o s t p h y s ic a l s tr e n g th f a ti g u e o r lo s s o f e n e rg y n e a rl y e v e ry d a y h o m e c a g e a c ti v it y s c a n t re a d m il l o p e n fi e ld te s t f o rc e d s w im o r ta il s u s p e n s io n te s ts l e s s l e s s l e s s m o re im m o b il it y n o d a ta n o d a ta y e s y e s n o d a ta n o d a ta y e s y e s l o w s e lf e s te e m f e e li n g s o f w o rt h le s s n e s s o r e x c e s s iv e o r in a p p ro p ri a te g u il t (w h ic h m a y b e d e lu s io n a l) n e a rl y e v e ry d a y (n o t m e re ly s e lf -r e p ro a c h o r g u il t a b o u t b e in g s ic k ) u n k n o w n n a n a n a c o g n it iv e d is tu rb a n c e s d im in is h e d a b il it y to th in k o r c o n c e n tr a te , o r in d e c is iv e n e s s , n e a rl y e v e ry d a y (e it h e r b y s u b je c ti v e a c c o u n t o r a s o b s e rv e d b y o th e rs ) u n k n o w n n a n a n a h o p e le s s n e s s r e c u rr e n t th o u g h ts o f d e a th (n o t ju s t fe a r o f d y in g ), re c u rr e n t s u ic id a l id e a ti o n w it h o u t a s p e c if ic p la n , o r a s u ic id e a tt e m p t o r a s p e c if ic p la n fo r c o m m it ti n g s u ic id e u n k n o w n n a n a n a e x c lu s io n s t h e s y m p to m s a re n o t d u e to th e d ir e c t p h y s io lo g ic a l e ff e c ts o f a s u b s ta n c e (e .g ., a d ru g o f a b u s e , a m e d ic a ti o n ) o r a g e n e ra l m e d ic a l c o n d it io n (e .g ., h y p o th y ro id is m ) b io lo g ic a l te s ts g e n e ra l h e a lt h c h e c k li s t n o m a rk e d c h a n g e y e s y e s t re a tm e n t l it h iu m , la m o tr ig in e t re a tm e n t e ff e c ti v e n o d a ta n o d a ta a n ti d e p re s s a n ts t re a tm e n t e ff e c ti v e y e s y e s k e ta m in e t re a tm e n t e ff e c ti v e n o d a ta n o d a ta a b b re v ia ti o n s : f u s t , fe m a le u ri n e s n if fi n g te s t; n a , n o t a p p li c a b le ; v m a t , v e s ic u la r m o n o a m in e tr a n s p o rt e r . translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry t a b le a ff e c ti v e v u ln e ra b il it y in h u m a n s a n d c ro s s -s p e c ie s p h e n o c o p ie s o f a ff e c ti v e v u ln e ra b il it y in ro d e n ts t y p e a ff e c ti v e v u ln e ra b il it y in h u m a n s s u it a b le te st /o b se rv a ti o n o u tc o m e s g r tr a n sg e n ic b a g tr a n sg e n ic b a g þ /� g e n e ra l a b s e n c e o f n e u ro lo g ic a l d is e a s e s g ro w th a n d a p p e a ra n c e g e n e ra l b e h a v io r n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e e u th y m ic m o o d b a tt e ri e s fo r d e p re s s io n a n d m a n ia p h e n o c o p ie s n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e v u ln e ra b il it y to d e p re s s io n s tr e s s c o p in g d e fi c it s im m o b il it y in fo rc e d s w im a n d ta il s u s p e n s io n te s ts r e s p o n s e to h e lp le s s n e s s in d u c ti o n r e c o v e ry fr o m h e lp le s s n e s s r e s p o n s e to c h ro n ic s tr e s s r e c o v e ry fr o m c h ro n ic s tr e s s n o c h a n g e /m o re in c re a s e d l e s s /l o s t in c re a s e d l e s s /l o s t in c re a s e d n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e e n h a n c e d n o d a ta n o d a ta n o c h a n g e n o c h a n g e r e d u c e d n o d a ta n o d a ta m o n o a m in e d e p le ti o n c a u s e s d e p re s s io n re la p s e r e s p o n s e to m o n o a m in e d e p le ti o n in te s ts fo r a n h e d o n ia -l ik e b e h a v io rs in c re a s e d n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta v u ln e ra b il it y to m a n ia p s y c h o s ti m u la n ts c a u s e m a n ia re la p s e p s y c h o s ti m u la n t c h a ll e n g e te s t in c re a s e d n a e n h a n c e d re c o v e ry n o c h a n g e b e h a v io ra l s e n s it iz a ti o n in c re a s e d in c re a s e d r e d u c e d in c re a s e d c ir c a d ia n s h if t/ je tl a g tr ig g e rs m a n ia re la p s e c ir c a d ia n s h if t/ s le e p d e p ri v a ti o n -i n d u c e d b e h a v io ra l c h a n g e s in c re a s e d n o d a ta n o d a ta n o d a ta t re a tm e n ts fo r d e p re s s io n a n d m a n ia a n ti d e p re s s a n ts b e h a v io ra l re s p o n s e to a n ti d e p re s s a n ts e it h e r ( ) n o t e ff e c ti v e ; ( ) p re v e n t th e in d u c ti o n o f d e p re s s io n -l ik e b e h a v io rs ; o r ( ) w o rs e n m a n ia - li k e b e h a v io rs in c re a s e d n a n o d a ta m o o d s ta b il iz e rs b e h a v io ra l re s p o n s e to m o o d s ta b il iz e rs n o t e ff e c ti v e o r p re v e n ti v e n o d a ta n a n o d a ta a b b re v ia ti o n s : b a g , b c l- -a s s o c ia te d a th a n o g e n e - ; g r , g lu c o c o rt ic o id re c e p to r; n a , n o t a p p li c a b le ; v m a t , v e s ic u la r m o n o a m in e tr a n s p o rt e r . translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry genes have been more comprehensively evaluated in behavioral experiments and seem to be most convin- cing in terms of their ability to encompass the multiple behavioral aspects of mania; for research purposes, these behavioral aspects are collectively referred to as excessive behavioral excitement. any working definition for phenocopies of excessive behavioral excitement should include the following: the animal shows hyperactivity in multiple tests, increased goal-directed behavior, increased risk-tak- ing activity, distractibility and reduced sleep or rest; furthermore, these deficits as a cluster can be experimentally distinguished from locomotor unrest, which is another behavioral abnormality, and cannot be alleviated by treatment with psychostimu- lants. table lists some of the tests proposed for monitoring these behaviors. the most promising genes believed to be associated with excessive behavioral excitement include: glycogen synthase kinase (gsk- ), clock, glutamate receptor (glur or grik , one of the kainate receptors) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase- (erk , also known as map kinase- ). ample evidence implicates all of these genes in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. for instance, polymorphisms of gsk- b have been associated with age of onset in bpd, as well as with therapeutic response to lithium treatment or sleep depriva- tion. , some studies suggest that polymorphisms of clock and other components (arntl (bmal ), bhlhb , csnk e and per ) of the molecular clock are associated with bpd risk, , recurrence and age of onset. glur (or grik ) resides on chromosome q , which has been linked to bpd in several studies; – however, whether grik polymorphisms per se contribute to the genetic risk of bpd in general or in some bpd pedigrees requires further investiga- tion. it is interesting to note that mrna levels of glur were found to be significantly lower in the brain tissue of individuals with bpd. , finally, erk and the erk pathway are activated by treatment with mood stabilizers, – and single gene and genome-wide association studies show significant and strong associations between bpd risk and poly- morphisms of erk pathway-modulating genes, such as bdnf (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), disc (disrupted-in-schizophrenia ), , rasgrp (ras guanyl releasing protein ), egfr (epidermal growth factor receptor) and glur . – it is worth noting that genetic findings are not consistent across all studies, or consistent with findings from genome- wide association studies. although reasons for such inconsistencies remain a matter of considerable debate, the interplay between risk genes and environ- mental factors are key issues of consideration. as table highlights, behavioral studies used to assess cross-species phenocopies of different facets of excessive behavioral excitement have revealed that in mice, gsk- b overexpression, mutant clock (mclock), glur knockout (ko) and erk ko all resulted in hyperactivity in the open field or in the locomotor activity test, and reduced immobility in the forced swim or tail suspension tests. mclock, glur ko and erk ko mice also showed increased hedonic and risk-taking activity. , , in addition, glur ko mice showed increased aggression during home cage observation, the social interaction test and the resident–intruder test, as well as changes in rest/ activity pattern in their home cages. however, the interpretation of such behavioral data is complicated. for instance, although it is a featured abnormality of manic behavioral disturbances, hyper- activity per se is not specific to mania, and can also be observed in models of several other disorders, most notably attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder; it should also be noted that psychostimulants induce manic episodes in euthymic bpd patients and relieve symptoms in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder patients. consistent with the effects of psychostimulants in patients with bpd, psychosti- mulants aggravate, but do not relieve, hyperactivity in glur ko, erk ko and mclock mice. table genes and behavioral patterns genes mutant stains open field test immobility tests anxiety-like/ risk-taking tests clock mclock hyperactive less immobile more risk-taking-like grik (also known as glur ) glur �/� hyperactive less immobile more risk-taking-like map (also known as erk ) erk �/� hyperactive less immobile more risk-taking-like grin d (also known as nmdar d or glure ) glure �/� hypoactive less immobile more risk-taking-like oprm mu-opioid receptor ko no change less immobile more risk-taking-like oprd oprd�/� hyperactive more immobile more anxious-like gabbr gabab( )�/� bell-shaped activity display less immobile more anxious-like gabbr gabab( )�/� no data less immobile more anxious-like abbreviations: gabbr , g-aminobutyric acid (gaba) b receptor, ; gabbr , gaba b receptor, ; grik , glutamate receptor, ionotropic, kainate ; grin d glutamate receptor, ionotropic, n-methyl d-aspartate d; map , mitogen-activated protein kinase ; oprd , opioid receptor, d- ; oprm , opioid receptor, m- . translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry in addition, discussion and interpretation of these results have been aided by studies that clarify the ability of mood stabilizers to relieve these symptoms. for instance, in humans, lithium can reverse many of these manic symptoms, but there are no sufficient or convincing clinical data to support the notion that lithium therapy is effective in treating attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. furthermore, most be- havioral abnormalities observed in mclock and glur ko mice respond to chronic treatment with lithium. , , the amphetamine supersensitivity noted in erk ko mice also responded to chronic treatment with either lithium or valproate, as well as acute treatment with olanzapine; in addition, treat- ment with either chronic valproate or acute olanza- pine reduced the baseline activity of erk ko mice. notably, lithium treatment did not significantly reduce the baseline activity of erk ko mice, suggesting that ablation of erk —which is a target of mood stabilizers—compromised the behavioral effects of lithium. these treatment data also support the link between the phenocopies showed by these mice and a manic behavioral syndrome. the beha- vioral effects of mood stabilizers on behavioral disturbances in gsk- b overexpressing mice have not yet been reported. it is important to note that even if behavioral phenocopies of model animals do not respond to treatment with existing mood stabilizers, the data can still support (though less conclusively) the role of implicated or suspected changes in affective regulation in bpd; this is related to the fact that existing mood stabilizers are not effective for all bpd patients. indeed, such an outcome may yield clues as to the particular mechanisms of action of these physiological changes. another related issue is the extent to which hyperactivity showed in the open field test confounds results from tests for other behaviors, including risk- taking behaviors, aggression and escaping activity (in the forced swim or tail suspension tests). it is notable that behavioral clusters or activity patterns assessed through multiple tests seem relatively gene specific (table ). for instance, mclock, glur ko and erk ko mice show similar patterns of behaviors— for example, hyperactivity in the open field test, less immobility in the forced swim test and more risk- taking or less anxious-like behaviors in anxiety- related tests. in contrast, deletion of the nmdar d (n-methyl-d-aspartate (nmda) receptor type d) in rodents reduced total activity in the open field test, reduced immobility in the forced swim test and increased risk-taking behavior in the elevated plus maze. deletion of d-opioid receptors did not affect open field activity, but did increase activity in the open arms during the elevated plus test and reduced immobility in the forced swim test. , deletion of d- opioid receptors increased open field activity in the open field test and increased anxious-like beha- viors. deletion of the g-aminobutyric acid (gaba) b( ) and b( ) receptors did not change overall activity in the open field test, but did induce anxiety-like behaviors and reduced immobility. , as table illustrates, the behavioral patterns showed in the open field, anxiety-related and immobility tests differ between strains of mice harboring different genetic alterations. therefore, a cluster of behaviors high- lighting a pattern of increased activity in the open field arena, increased activity in the open arms of the elevated plus maze and reduced immobility is likely to be specific for manipulating certain genes or pathways. bipolar depression depression affects mood, thinking and physiological and social–psychological functioning. the diagnosis of depression requires one of two core symptoms, that is, either depressed mood or anhedonia. because mood cannot be directly assessed in rodents, anhe- donia-like behaviors have become critical in evaluat- ing behavioral clusters of cross-species phenocopies of depressive symptoms (see table ) to link the behavioral clusters being studied with clinical de- pression. behavioral clusters without such a link to the core symptoms of depression provide evidence that is much more circumstantial. in humans, anhedonia is loosely defined as an impaired capacity to experience or anticipate plea- sure, and in rodents tests that assess anhedonia-like behaviors traditionally focus on a particular reward- seeking activity assessed in a given context; for example, sweet solution consumption or preference, wheel running, female urine sniffing or lever pressing or wheel running in the intracranial self-stimulation paradigm. home cage and other activities (for exam- ple, novel object exploration or social interaction) can also provide useful information. theoretically and empirically speaking, the outcomes of these tests or observations (table ) can be confounded by factors that by themselves do not constitute depression, such as locomotive dysfunction, lack of explorative curi- osity or neophobia, specific sensory alterations, low sexual drive and loss of appetite. for all of these, one operational definition of anhedonia-like behaviors in rodents is that experimental animals show concurrent reductions in multiple activities known to be pre- ferred by suitable control animals, and these reduc- tions cannot be explained by any single cause alone. this definition means that anhedonia-like behaviors should be evaluated as a behavioral cluster or pattern assessed through multiple tests or tasks, but not as one type of activity in any given context. anhedonia and other symptoms of depression can be observed in other neurological and psychiatric disorders, includ- ing schizophrenia, parkinsonism and dementia. therefore, additional tests should be considered to examine whether genes associated with anhedonia- like behaviors/depression-like alterations are depres- sion specific. furthermore, the effects on such anhedonia-like behaviors of therapeutic agents used to treat various illnesses are also useful in evaluating this issue. translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry the diagnostic criteria for a depressive episode are the same for both bpd and major depressive disorder. therefore, diagnosing bipolar depression requires both the occurrence of a current depressive episode as well as knowledge of an individual’s previous course of illness, for example, whether mania or hypomania had previously occurred. bipolar depres- sion can be treated with mood stabilizers such as lithium and valproate and, as suggested by a recent independent meta-analysis and meta-regression of individual patient data from five randomized trials, lamotrigine, although the overall effect of lamotrigine is modest. treating bipolar depression with anti- depressants alone can cause dysphoric symptoms, and even induce switch to a manic episode, and there is no convincing evidence suggesting that a combination of mood stabilizers and antidepressants is beneficial in treating bipolar depression. very recent data suggest that the n-methyl-d-aspartate antagonist ketamine, which is added on to mood stabilizers, may rapidly relieve depressive symptoms in patients with bipolar depression. although suitable tests exist for monitoring animal behaviors that cross-species phenocopy behavioral facets of depressive symptoms (table ), further refinement and validation of these tests are needed. in addition to the behavioral tests listed in table , physiological and biological methods, such as electroencephalo- gram, can be used to monitor sleep disturbances. it is important to note that some rodent behavioral displays, such as motivational deficits, ‘behavioral despair’, ‘helplessness’, submissiveness and anxiety- like abnormalities, are thought to be linked to clinical alterations frequently observed in depression, despite the fact that not all are diagnostic symptoms. several animal models target these behaviors and are sensi- tive to chronic or repeated treatment with anti- depressants, including the learned helplessness paradigm, the forced swim and tail suspension tests, the social defeat paradigm and the novelty-induced hypophagia test. in addition, some investigators have suggested that the behavioral effects of chronic treatment with antidepressants in the novelty-in- duced hypophagia test reflect the anxiolytic effects of chronic treatment with these agents observed in humans. notably, much of the data used to assess these paradigms were generated from models de- signed to shed light on major depressive disorder or depressive disorders in general rather than bipolar depression in particular. however, conclusive data are lacking regarding whether or not the learned helplessness paradigm, the social defeat paradigm and the novelty-induced hypophagia test are sensitive to mood stabilizers and to lamotrigine administered in clinically relevant regimens. many candidate genes are being studied in anti- depressant-sensitive behavioral paradigms or animal models. the influence of some genes (such as brain- derived neurotrophic factor and camp response element binding (creb)) on behavior is brain region specific. , for instance, blocking brain-derived neurotrophic factor and creb in the hippocampus attenuated the effects of antidepressants, whereas in the ventral tegmental area, amygdala or nucleus accumbens, the blockage itself produced antidepres- sant-like effects or potentiated the effects of anti- depressants. it remains unknown whether or not functional changes of these genes cause anhedonia- like behaviors. the model animal approach is also used in transla- tional studies analyzing the relationship between suspected genes and phenocopies of depressive symp- toms. functional manipulation of p was recently found to result in a phenotype conferring anhedonic- like behaviors and behavioral despair. also known as s a , p is a member of the s protein family that mediates cell surface localization of the -ht b receptor and several ion channels. p levels were lower in the brain tissues of depressed patients and of helpless animals, and higher in the brain tissues of animals treated with antidepressants or electroconvul- sive therapy. p ko mice showed increased anxiety- like measures (thigmotaxis) in the open field test, and immobility in the tail suspension test. the mice also consumed less palatable % sucrose solution than their wild-type littermates. thus, the mice showed a behavioral phenotype of depressive symptoms with two critical features: anhedonia-like behaviors and behavioral despair. it is presently unknown whether these features of p ko mice respond to treatment with various mood stabilizers, and it remains to be elucidated whether p alterations are involved in bipolar depression or, indeed, whether bipolar and unipolar depressive episodes share a common patho- physiological pathway. another promising finding was obtained from the study of vesicular monoamine transporter (vmat ) heterozygous (het) ko mice. in brief, treatment with reserpine, which is an irreversible inhibitor of vmat that transports cytoplasmic monoamine into secretory vesicles, depletes vesicular monoamine stores and precipitates depression in susceptible individuals. a specific haplotype of vmat (also known as slc a ) was significantly associated with depressive symptoms in elderly men. vmat het ko mice were hypoactive in the open field test, showed less preference to sweetened but not quinine solutions and showed increased immobility in the forced swim and tail suspension tests. treatment with antidepressants reduced the immobility of vmat het ko mice. however, the effects of antidepressants on motor retardation/lack of explorative behavior, anhedonia and increased immobility remain unknown, as do the behavioral effects of mood stabilizers and lamotrigine in vmat het ko mice. direct evidence for the involvement of vmat in the pathophysiology of bipolar depression is still lacking. vulnerability to bpd patients with bpd remitted from a manic or depres- sive episode are sometimes considered to be in a translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry euthymic state in which they are vulnerable to relapse (figure ). relapses can be triggered by physical stressors (such as lack of sleep or jetlag), social–psychological stressors, experimental use of psychostimulants and experimentally induced monoamine depletion (figure ). interestingly, experimentally induced monoamine depletion causes some mood changes in healthy controls, but a full- blown depression in only individuals with a personal or family history of mood disorders. these unique clinical responses can be collectively considered as an affective vulnerability. several animal paradigms can be used to study the roles of candidate genes in affective vulnerability in animals – (table ). these paradigms contain components of behavior induction and outcome observation. it should be noted that these paradigms encompass previously proposed animal models of depression or mania; however, their focus under the model animal approach is to analyze the interaction between implicated or suspected biological changes in bpd in tandem with behavioral inducers (such as foot shocks or psychostimulants) on outcome mea- sures. under such a design, the effects of these factors alone on outcome measures are not the focus of the investigation. some of the most promising candidates include glucocorticoid receptors (grs), and b-cell lymphoma (bcl- )-associated athanogene (bag ). considerable clinical data have shown that gluco- corticoids are one of the few agents that are capable of triggering both depressive and manic episodes in individuals with bpd. furthermore, alternative gr expression variants have been implicated in major depressive disorder by two independent groups of studies. , upbinding to glucocorticoids, grs trans- locate from cytoplasm to nuclei and then regulate gene expression. this trafficking process is regu- lated by chaperones and co-chaperones including fkbp (fk binding protein , also known as fkbp ). some, but not all, genetic studies show that variants of fkbp are associated with increased recurrence of depression, response to antidepres- sants, – increased risk for bpd and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in adults with a history of childhood abuse. these clinical data support the role of grs in mood regulation. grov mice, a strain in which overexpression of grs in neurons was achieved through use of a neuron- specific promoter, showed anxious-like behaviors in the elevated plus maze and light–dark box tests, and increased immobility in the forced swim test, suggest- ing that the mice were sensitive to stressful environ- mental conditions. interestingly, the mice also showed enhanced cocaine-induced behavioral sensi- tization. taken together, these results suggest that grov mice seem to show an altered affective-like lability. bag is another co-chaperone involved in gr signaling. through interaction with hsp /hsc , this protein regulates both glucocorticoid binding and gene transactivation of grs. bag is one of the common brain targets of chronic treatment with lithium and valproate, both of which upregulate bag mrna and protein levels and alter bag function, including gr trafficking to nuclei. mice with selective brain overexpression of bag show less anxious-like behaviors in the elevated plus maze test, accelerated recovery from amphetamine-induced hyperlocomotion, blunted response to cocaine in the psychostimulant-induced behavioral sensitization paradigm and rapid spontaneous recovery from help- lessness in the learned helplessness paradigm. bag het ko mice showed enhanced response to cocaine in the psychostimulant-induced behavioral sensitization paradigm and increased tendency to become helpless in the learned helplessness para- digm. these data suggest that bag regulates affective lability and resilience. additional considerations cognitive deficits clinically, to diagnose bpd, symptoms that can be explained by other medical conditions, such as organic brain diseases, must be excluded. , mild cognitive impairments in working memory and attention are known to be present in at least some patients with bpd, and these phenomena are often observed in schizophrenia. to address whether gene manipulation affects mood regulation as well as broadly influences multiple domains of brain func- tion, predisposed animals can be examined using batteries of tests to assess general health, motor, sensory, learning and memory functioning and other neurological functions. these have been well- described elsewhere. mood swings because the process of switching from depression to a state of mania or hypomania is a unique and core feature of bpd, another key issue is that of sponta- neous mood swings. although often triggered by particular stressors or medications, spontaneous mood relapses can occur in bpd without a clear external triggering event. if these mechanisms do exist, they must closely interact with, or even be integrated into, the mechanisms that underlie vulner- ability. to study candidate genes for internal sponta- neous swing mechanisms, long-term home cage activity monitoring of mice predisposed to known bpd risk factors can be helpful. accumulating data from both human genetic and post-mortem studies imply that mitochondrial dys- function contributes to the etiology of bpd (for a review, see kato ). interestingly, a mutation (d a) of mitochondrial dna polymerase-g(polg) does not affect this enzyme’s polymerase activity; instead, it abolishes its – exonuclease activity and causes mitochondrial dna deletion. transgenic mice with brain-specific expression of mutant polg accumulate brain mitochondrial dna abnormalities similar to those found in the post-mortem brain of individuals translational research in bipolar disorder g chen et al molecular psychiatry with bpd. although the mutant polg mice seem normal on a variety of short-term tests, long-term home cage monitoring revealed that these mice have a unique activity pattern. namely, they show altered activity immediately before and after the dark phase (which is the active phase for rodents) of the circadian cycle. this alteration can be further deteriorated by treatment with a tricyclic antidepressant known to induce mood switches in individuals with bpd. female mutant polg mice also show robust activity swings concurrent with the estrous cycle that can be stabilized by treatment with lithium. taken together, the findings support the notion that mitochondrial dysfunction influences diurnal activity rhythms and the magnitude of rhythmic activity. whether and how mitochondrial dysfunction drives these abnormal mood swings requires further investigation. closing remarks this is an unprecedented time in bpd research. owing to significant advances in human genetics, the identity of true susceptibility genes is starting to emerge. the influence of genetic risk variants on gene and gene network function continues to be exten- sively analyzed at the molecular, neural circuitry and behavioral levels. although all animal approaches have well-known limitations in their ability to mirror human conditions, there is no doubt that animal behavioral research in general—and the model animal approach in particular—will have an irreplaceable role in analyzing the causal relationship between biological abnormalities resulting from genetic bpd risk variants, early-life environmental factors and behavioral manifestations of bpd. at the same time, a significant need exists to form a consensus regard- ing how to phenotype animals in mood disorders research, and how to improve the ability of behavioral research to monitor these alterations and the manner in which they relate to mood disorders. the reverse translation model animal approach outlined in this review can and should be viewed as one of many research avenues in overall bpd research. future research advances in both biological information and behavioral methodology will be essential for the rapid 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 ����� �� 	 �� 	how to evaluate and predict the ecologic impact of antibiotics: the pharmaceutical industry view from research and development 	introduction 	references pdf hosted at the radboud repository of the radboud university nijmegen the following full text is a publisher's version. for additional information about this publication click this link. https://hdl.handle.net/ / please be advised that this information was generated on - - and may be subject to change. https://hdl.handle.net/ / research article left powerless: a qualitative social media content analysis of the dutch #breakthesilence campaign on negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth marit s. g. van der pijlid *, martine h. hollander , tineke van der linden , , , rachel verweij , , lianne holten , elselijn kingma , , ank de jonge , corine j. m. verhoeven , , department of midwifery science, avag, amsterdam public health research institute, amsterdam umc, vu medical centre, amsterdam, the netherlands, department of obstetrics, amalia children’s hospital, radboud university medical center, nijmegen, the netherlands, stichting geboortebeweging (birth movement nl), ede, the netherlands, ggze, eindhoven, the netherlands, faculty of behavioural and movement sciences, vrije universiteit amsterdam, amsterdam, the netherlands, hechte band, boxtel, the netherlands, department of philosophy, university of southampton, southampton, united kingdom, department of industrial engineering & innovation sciences, philosophy & ethics, technical university eindhoven, eindhoven, the netherlands, department of obstetrics and gynaecology, maxima medical centre, veldhoven, the netherlands, division of midwifery, school of health sciences, university of nottingham, nottingham, united kingdom * m.vanderpijl@amsterdamumc.nl abstract introduction disrespect and abuse during labour and birth are increasingly reported all over the world. in , a dutch client organization initiated an online campaign, #genoeggezwegen (#break- thesilence) which encouraged women to share negative and traumatic maternity care expe- riences. this study aimed ( ) to determine what types of disrespect and abuse were described in #genoeggezwegen and ( ) to gain a more detailed understanding of these experiences. methods a qualitative social media content analysis was carried out in two phases. ( ) a deductive coding procedure was carried out to identify types of disrespect and abuse, using bohren et al.’s existing typology of mistreatment during childbirth. ( ) a separate, inductive coding procedure was performed to gain further understanding of the data. results #genoeggezwegen stories were included. based on the typology of mistreatment during childbirth, it was found that situations of ineffective communication, loss of autonomy and lack of informed consent and confidentiality were most often described. the inductive analy- sis revealed five major themes: ‘‘lack of informed consent”; ‘‘not being taken seriously and plos one plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / a a a a a open access citation: van der pijl msg, hollander mh, van der linden t, verweij r, holten l, kingma e, et al. ( ) left powerless: a qualitative social media content analysis of the dutch #breakthesilence campaign on negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth. plos one ( ): e . https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. editor: florian fischer, ravensburg-weingarten university of applied sciences, germany received: november , accepted: april , published: may , peer review history: plos recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. the editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. copyright: © van der pijl et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. data availability statement: the data used in this study has been deposited to zenodo and can be http://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /journal.pone. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / not being listened to”; ‘‘lack of compassion”; ‘‘use of force”; and ‘‘short and long term conse- quences”. “left powerless” was identified as an overarching theme that occurred throughout all five main themes. conclusion this study gives insight into the negative and traumatic maternity care experiences of dutch women participating in the #genoeggezwegen campaign. this may indicate that disrespect and abuse during labour and birth do happen in the netherlands, although the current study gives no insight into prevalence. the findings of this study may increase awareness amongst maternity care providers and the community of the existence of disrespect and abuse in dutch maternity care, and encourage joint effort on improving care both individually and systemically/institutionally. introduction worldwide, women increasingly report experiences of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth, including physical abuse, non-consented care, non-confidential care, non-dignified care, discrimination, abandonment and detention [ ]. disrespectful and abusive care leads to the neglect of psychological and emotional needs in labour and birth, which are essential for labouring women [ ]. previous studies have tried to gain insight in the extent of the problem. in a worldwide study among health care workers in from the united states agency for international development (usaid), the most prevalent types of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth were lack of privacy, performing harmful practices, lack of information about the care, lack of informed consent and denying choice of birthing position [ ]. an italian survey among women revealed that over % of women considered themselves victims of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth [ ]. in the usa, . % of the women experienced one or more types of mistreatment during pregnancy and childbirth, for example being scolded, threatened or ignored [ ]. an australian study investigating caregivers’ interactions with women during labour found that women felt caregivers disregarded embodied knowledge, used lies and threats to gain compliance and prioritized their own agendas [ ]. in the netherlands, hollander et al. asked dutch women through social media about their traumatic labour and birth experiences; many women felt their trauma could have been reduced or prevented by more adequate communication and support by the caregiver [ ]. in addition, women’s choice to give birth outside professional guidelines (for example giving birth at home when a hospital birth was indicated) was often made following negative experi- ences with previous care [ ]. these findings suggest (types of) disrespect and abuse during labour and birth are present in the netherlands. however, scientific literature from the neth- erlands on this topic is lacking. dutch maternity care is divided in primary midwife-led care and secondary obstetrician- led care [ , ]. in primary care, women deemed at low risk for obstetric complications are cared for by autonomous midwives antenatally and intrapartum. autonomous midwives work independently in community practice and are assisted by trained maternity care assistants dur- ing the birth, which takes place either at home or at a birth centre. when complications occur during pregnancy, birth or postpartum, or when pharmacological pain relief is requested dur- ing birth, women are referred to obstetrician-led care in the hospital. in obstetrician-led care, plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / accessed via the following link: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. . funding: the author(s) received no specific funding for this work. competing interests: we declare that the organizations hechte band and geboortebeweging did not provide funding to carry out this study. two authors (tl and rv) affiliated with these organizations were part of the research team representing the client. tl is a member of geboortebeweging, a clinical psychologist and a phd student (ggze & vrije universiteit). rv is also a member of geboortebeweging and is a certified babywearing consultant and bonding coach (hechte band). both authors were involved in managing the #gg campaign in , in which they also participated themselves. tl and rv were involved in the research process from the start. they provided feedback on the research proposal and design of the study and contributed to discussing the findings within the research team and writing the paper, all from a client point of view. they were not involved in data collection or analysing the data. this does not alter our adherence to plos one policies on sharing data and materials. there are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. hospital-based midwives and residents provide care under obstetric supervision, assisted by obstetric nurses. obstetricians provide care when risks or problems occur [ , ]. the dutch “birth movement”(dutch: stichting geboortebeweging) is an advocate for the rights of women in dutch maternity care and is part of a global network: human rights in child- birth [ ]. this charity aims for ‘‘a society in which every woman is at the centre of care during her pregnancy, labour, birth and postpartum period and in which the health care system informs, facilitates and supports women in making their own informed choices” [ ]. in , the birth movement set up a campaign inviting women who had a negative experience with their care dur- ing labour and birth to publicly share their story. the campaign was initiated by a message posted on november th on the social media platform facebook, in which the birth movement requested women to ( ) write down their story on a a -sized paper, adding the hashtag #genoeg- gezwegen (known in english as: #breakthesilence or #rosesrevolution), ( ) take a picture of this paper and ( ) email the picture to the birth movement. the birth movement posted all pictures received between november th and december th , on their public facebook page, hereby leaving out any information on the origin of the picture, such as names or email addresses. this kind of campaign originated in spain where, known as ‘‘la revolución de las rosas” (english: roses revolution), it was initiated in response to offensive cartoons published in the official journal of the spanish society of gynaecology and obstetrics (sego). these cartoons mocked women in birthing situations [ ]. the campaign received global attention, inspiring similar campaigns in countries like the usa, italy, croatia and germany. in the dutch campaign, numerous stories about disrespect and abuse in maternity care were shared, which documented, amongst others, medical interventions without informed consent, intimidation, threats, violations of privacy, ver- bal violence and even physical violence. many women mentioned that they had kept quiet for years and felt that this was the first time they could share their experiences. the stories evoked public and media attention, and also reached policymakers; a selection of the stories were gathered and presented, as a ‘black book’, to the dutch ministry of health [ ]. the #genoeggezwegen campaign is a form of hashtag activism: the fighting for, or support- ing of, a cause by using hashtags as the primary method, with the aim of raising awareness and evoking debate through social media [ ]. hashtag activism motivates citizens to share their experiences and opinions on social media, including unfiltered details and feelings [ ]. social media content enables access to information that is not easily found through scientific data collection, especially information from people who are reluctant to share such information via official ways, e.g. surveys or interviews [ ]. analysis and aggregation of social media content could therefore give valuable insight in opinions and experiences of individuals[ ]. although in general social media is increasingly being used for research purposes, studies that focus on the content of hashtag activism is relatively new [ ]. little is known about the occurrence of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth in the netherlands. the #genoeggezwegen stories shared by women through the pictures can provide insight in negative and traumatic experiences of women with dutch maternity care as reported by themselves. this study investigated these stories using a qualitative social media content analysis. the aim was ( ) to determine what types of disrespect and abuse women reported in the #genoeggezwegen stories and ( ) to gain a more detailed understanding of the experiences reported by these women in the #genoeggezwegen stories. methods study design this study investigated the stories shared by women in the #genoeggezwegen (#gg) campaign using a qualitative social media content analysis. plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. data collection in march , all pictures posted by the birth movement on their public facebook page were downloaded and saved on a computer by the researcher (mp). subsequently, the textual con- tent (#gg story) of each picture was transcribed in a word document. some women shared their stories using multiple pictures. in this case, the textual content of all related pictures were gathered together and transcribed as one story. as this study only focused on the women’s point of view, all #gg stories that were shared by caregivers, partners or other witnesses of negative or traumatic experiences were excluded. also excluded were #gg stories that only comprised a response to the hashtag movement, without including textual content about a negative or traumatic experience. duplicate #gg stories were identified and excluded. ethical considerations ethics approval was sought from the medical ethics committee of amsterdam umc; the study was deemed not to require ethics approval ( . ). the pictures downloaded from the facebook page of the birth movement did not contain any information, such as names or email addresses of the women who shared their experiences. although faces of individuals were visible in some of the pictures, only the textual content of the pictures was used for data analysis in this study to guarantee the privacy of the women participating in the #gg cam- paign. furthermore, any identifiable information in the textual content (such as names of per- sons, caregivers or hospitals) were removed if present, making all data anonymous prior to analysis. all data were stored in a password-protected file. data analysis the textual transcripts of the #gg stories were copied into maxqda analytics pro, a qualita- tive data analysis software program [ ], in order to manually assign codes and categories to (parts of) the textual content. first, the characteristics of the stories were investigated and described (e.g. number of stories, length of stories, type of content, type of interventions men- tioned, type of caregivers mentioned). then, the qualitative content analysis was conducted in two ways: ( ) the textual content was deductively coded using the existing typology of mis- treatment of bohren et al. [ ]. a deductive coding process is based on previous knowledge and/or theories and can be used to test the applicability of an earlier theory in different situa- tions [ , ]. the typology of bohren et al., based on analysis of studies from countries, consists of seven types of mistreatment of women during childbirth (table ) [ ]. the types and subtypes of mistreatment as described by bohren et al. were used as codes to categorize the textual content of the #gg stories, thereby determining what type of mistreatment was reported therein, taking the women’s own words at face value. when more than one type of mistreatment would fit one (section of a) story, multiple codes were used. ( ) next, an inductive coding procedure was used. the primary purpose of an inductive coding procedure is to allow research findings to emerge from the raw data without restric- tions [ ].this procedure was used to disentangle, examine, compare and categorize the stories into codes independently from the typology of mistreatment of bohren et al, allowing new themes to emerge from the data. the first stories were coded and categorized by two researchers together (mp and mh). any discrepancies in coding were discussed and consen- sus was found. the remaining stories were analysed by one researcher (mp). after the coding of the first stories, (sub)categories were created by comparing codes and merging codes together. after analysing every stories thereafter, the formulated (sub)categories were adjusted if needed (mp). in the last phase of coding, the codes were structured; five main themes were established; and a coding tree was created (mp). the themes that emerged from plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. the data were discussed within the research team, including two client representatives, and adjusted thereafter. data saturation was reached after analysing stories, which was con- firmed by the analysis of the remaining stories. the results describe how women reported their experience in the stories. hereby we take the women’s words at face value. that means, for example, that if the woman described in the story that she was left alone or that there was not enough staff, that we report this in those terms—and equally if she describes her feelings, for example that she felt lonely or alone, we describe those feelings as such. the quotes presented in the findings were translated from dutch to english by two of the authors (mp and ek). during the data analysis process, it was not possible to validate the interpretations of the data by performing a member check, due to the anonymity of the women who shared the #gg stories. however, the analysis was checked by the two client representatives in the research team, both of whom participated in the #gg campaign and are members of birth movement. research team and reflexivity it is important to reflect on the social positioning of the researchers involved and the way in which their beliefs may have informed the research. two female researchers took the lead in the data analysis process (mp and mh). mp is a phd researcher in the field of respectful maternity care with a background in health sciences and global health. she has no medical background and no experience of pregnancy and birth herself. mh has a medical background table . typology of mistreatment of women during childbirth of bohren et al. types of mistreatment physical abuse use of force using rough touch or extreme force; aggression, punching, hitting, slapping. physical restraint women restrained to the bed or gagged during delivery sexual abuse sexual abuse sexual abuse or rape. verbal abuse harsh language harsh and rude language; judgmental and accusatory comments. threats and blaming threats of poor outcome of child; threats of withholding treatment; blaming women for child’s poor health outcomes. stigma and discrimination discrimination based on sociodemographic characteristics discrimination based on ethnicity, race, age, education level, social class and/or income level. discrimination based on medical conditions discrimination based on women’s existing medical conditions, for example hiv. failure to meet professional standards of care lack of informed consent and confidentiality no consent asked prior to a procedure; not adequately informing of the risk and benefits of a procedure; breaches of confidentiality. physical examinations and procedures painful vaginal exams (possibly in non-private settings, without consent or communication); refusal to provide pain relief. neglect and abandonment leaving women alone, ignored and abandoned; long delays in care; no skilled attendant present at time of delivery. poor rapport between women and providers ineffective communication poor communication; poor staff attitudes; being ‘left in the dark’; dismissal of concerns; language and interpretation issues. lack of supportive care not adequately cared for; lack of comfort and empathy; denial of birth companions. loss of autonomy women treated as passive participants during childbirth; forcing women to deliver in undesirable or humiliating positions; denial of safe traditional practices; denial of food, fluids or mobility; detainment in facilities. health system conditions and constraints lack of resources dirty, noisy, overcrowded facilities; staff shortages; unskilled staff; inadequate medical supplies; lack of privacy. lack of policies no (safe) opportunity for expressing opinions about the treatment and services; lack of accountability and sanctioning within the health system. facility culture bribery and extortion of women; unclear fee structures; unreasonable requests of women by care givers https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .t plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .t https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. in both midwifery and obstetrics; a phd in traumatic birth experiences/birthing outside the guidelines; and has positively experienced labour, birth and motherhood herself. both researchers (mp and mh) had previous knowledge of research in the field of public health and negative and traumatic birth experiences, and had experience in analysing qualitative data prior to this study. furthermore, both researchers have specific interests in women’s autonomy and rights, both in general and in maternity care. both researchers were aware that their roles impacted the way they interpreted the data. therefore, the process of the data analysis was dis- cussed within the research team, leading to greater trustworthiness of the interpretation of the data. the other members of the team included three midwife researchers (cv, aj and lh), two client representatives (rv &tl) and a philosopher/ethicist with a degree in medicine and psychology (ek). all members were female and all but one experienced labour, birth and motherhood themselves, with experiences ranging from very positive to very negative. results in total stories were collected, of which were excluded, leaving stories for the analy- sis. the excluded stories consisted of duplicate stories ( ), stories only expressing gratitude to the movement ( ) and stories that were written from partners’ ( ) or caregivers’ perspectives ( ) (fig ). the included stories varied in form (e.g. poetry; quotations; or bullet-point description); use of language; and length. the shortest story comprised three words and the longest . in almost all stories, women described a situation during childbirth or the post- partum period, with five exceptions. one described contact with health care professionals dur- ing pregnancy, one an encounter at the pharmacy during pregnancy, one ivf treatment, and two filing a complaint concerning previously received care. most stories described multiple events including different types of situations; some only shared one or two sentences about one particular situation. a type of caregiver was mentioned times in the stories, with some women mentioning multiple types of caregivers within one story. obstetricians ( times) and midwives (either hospital-based or community, times) were mentioned most often, fol- lowed by nurses ( times). in stories, at least one type of intervention was mentioned by women. episiotomy ( times), caesarean section ( times), suturing ( times) and vaginal exams ( times) were mentioned most often. fig . flowchart of the #genoeggezwegen stories included for analysis (n = ). https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .g plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .g https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. deductive coding procedure by the typology of bohren et al table shows what types of mistreatment according to bohren et al.’s typology were coded in the stories. since in most stories women described multiple situations and/or types of mistreat- ment, most stories were given multiple codes. ineffective communication (coded times) was found most often, followed by loss of autonomy (coded times) and lack of informed consent and confidentiality (coded times). we only coded sexual abuse when the stories explicitly mentioned it as such. other situations that may also have warranted coding as sexual abuse, such as internal exams against/without women’s permission (e.g. when the exam was unannounced and roughly performed and/or women’s refusal or request to stop was ignored); internal exams that were perceived as unnecessary; or painful exams without compassion, were coded as physical abuse in keeping with taking the women’s words at face value, even though in some of these cases the coders got the strong impression that women implicitly con- veyed an experience of sexual abuse. discrimination based on gender was not included in ‘stigma and discrimination’ because childbirth only happens to women and therefore it was difficult to disentangle whether the experience occurred because of gender inequality. inductive coding procedure five major themes emerged from the stories: ‘‘lack of informed consent”; ‘‘not being taken seriously and not being listened to”; ‘‘lack of compassion”; ‘‘the use of force”; and ‘‘short and long term consequences”. the code tree is shown in fig . we identified one overarching theme that connected all major themes: ‘‘left powerless”. table . the #gg stories coded according the typology of mistreatment of women during childbirth of bohren et al. typology of mistreatment times of coding physical abuse use of force physical restraint sexual abuse verbal abuse harsh language threats and blaming stigma and discrimination discrimination based on sociodemographic characteristics discrimination based on medical conditions failure to meet professional standards of care lack of informed consent and confidentiality physical examinations and procedures neglect and abandonment poor rapport between women and providers ineffective communication lack of supportive care loss of autonomy health system conditions and constraints lack of resources lack of policies facility culture https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .t plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .t https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. fig . coding tree sorted by the five main themes emerging from the inductive analysis of the #genoeggezwegen stories. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .g plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. .g https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. lack of informed consent in more than a quarter of stories, women reported at least one act performed by caregivers without informed consent. some described a general lack of choice in care, for example due to caregivers’ following hospital protocol. [. . .] i was hooked onto the iv. i was opposed to this, but it was hospital protocol. the nurse said casually that if i were to refuse, perhaps i could try for a different hospital? [. . .] (story ) sometimes situations were reported in which caregivers only announced their intention to perform an intervention, but neither consulted nor asked consent of the woman. during my super-smooth second birth, the resident suddenly appeared, and said: ‘‘i will do an epi during the next contraction”. “consultation? nought. zero consultation took place. [. . .] (story ) in other situations, women described caregivers carrying out procedures such as internal exams, episiotomies, or amniotomy absent any prior communication with the woman. without consultation, consent, or even letting me know, they cut me open. [. . .] (story ) i am lying on my back with my legs up in stirrups. without saying a word, the midwife shoves her hand inside me. i recoil in pain. dumbfounded, i cannot utter a word. when the midwife notices my angry face, she says: ‘‘oh, yeah, i had to stretch you out for the expulsion”. (story ) in approximately one third of all situations in which actions without consent were described, women reported having said ‘no’ explicitly either prior to the intervention, or ask- ing the caregiver to stop during the intervention. despite this, the intervention was still carried out or continued. even though i had emphatically prohibited the doctor from breaking my waters without per- mission, she did it anyway. [. . .] (story ) my birth plan said: stop the vaginal examination when i say ‘stop’. a vaginal examination is being performed. i say: ‘‘stop”. she does not stop. my husband says: ‘‘hey!—she says stop!” she just carries on. (story ) women reported that acts performed without informed consent resulted in feelings of loss of control including: being overwhelmed, feeling distraught or feeling defeated. a loss of autonomy and confidence in the process was also described. [. . .] i felt helpless and defeated. i lost all control and, with that, my self-esteem. (story ) not being taken seriously and not being listened to the second theme appeared in almost half the stories and includes stories in which women report being ignored and not being taken seriously, and stories about women who experienced unsupportive care and/or being left alone. women described caregivers’ leaving them alone during labour and birth or postpartum, most commonly in the immediate postpartum period, in which a delay in care was reported. for example: being left alone in the labour room after plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. birth, or in the recovery room after a caesarean section, without knowing where their partner or baby was and/or how their baby was doing. other women reported being left alone all night after birth, without any help for them or the baby. [. . .] after giving birth i was left alone with my feet up in stirrups. after two hours somebody said: ‘‘oh, you are still here”. [. . .] (story ) many women described that being left alone by caregivers made them feel abandoned and scared. postpartum, women felt no longer important now that the baby was born. q[. . .] not knowing if my baby (who had a brain defect) was okay or going to make it. mins i lay there [in the recovery room]–alone and forsaken–in fear. (story ) [..] i felt discarded, like a disposable wrapper. (story ) women also reported caregivers’ not talking to but about them, caregivers’ not taking notice of their presence while being in the room, caregivers’ talking ‘in between their legs’ to each other, and caregivers’ not paying attention to the woman as the person giving birth. the placenta didn’t want to come out. rushed to the operating theatre; lost liters of blood. [. . .] suddenly somebody whips the blankets of my naked body, pushes my legs aside. next i hear panicked deliberation: ‘‘if the bleeding continues like this, she might die”. hello! i can hear you!! (story ) literally in between my legs, they are deliberating about an episiotomy. nobody asks me any- thing. (story ) women also reported caregivers talking about non-relevant topics during their labour and birth, even during situations they perceived as an emergency. on the way to the operating theatre for an christmas eve caesarean section. my baby was in danger. the staff were talking in detail about their presents and plans. (story ) some women described trying to talk to their caregivers about their sensations in labour, but caregivers did not listen or take them seriously. contexts described by women frequently involved feeling a lot of pain at the start of induced labour or feeling the urge to push. caregiv- ers’ ignoring of women’s worries about the progress of labour was also reported. my waters broke and straight away i had massive contractions. ‘‘this is nothing yet–it could easily take another week” said the ob. the pain made me vomit. the hospital midwife refused to check my dilation. i asked more than times, and when she finally relented: cen- timeters. minutes later, my daughter is born. (story ) another form of caregivers’ ignoring of women was the dismissal of requests. requests were often related to caregivers’ postponement of, or not doing, certain interventions, or were related to caregivers’ care in the immediate postpartum period. a specific request often reported as being ignored was the request for pain relief, both during labour and postpartum. [. . .] unbearable pain; i was panicking. every request for an epidural was ignored. ‘‘your body will never give you more pain than you can handle”. [. . .] (story ) plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. [after a long and exhausting labour]: stitches. ‘‘we can manage that on the numbing agent given for the episiotomy“. i have never experienced that much pain in my life! she said that was impossible–and continued suturing. (story ) in the case of an emergency caesarean section, some women described feeling that the epi- dural did not work properly. they reported that they expressed this to the caregiver, but were ignored. i was transported to the operating theatre for a caesarean. i keep telling them that the epidural is not working, and i keep puffing away my contractions. nobody responds. when they pinch me to check [the epidural], i report a shooting pain, and again that the epidural is not work- ing. after a few more attempts the doctor’s patience has run out, and says: ‘‘you feel some- thing, but no pain”. then, despite my vehement protesting, he starts the operation. when i howl in excruciating pain, and, in tears, tell them they have to stop, the doctor says: ‘‘you are not in pain, you are just afraid”. (story ) another request often reported as disregarded by caregivers was the request to see, hold, or feed the baby after birth. the context often involved a caesarean section or admission of mother and baby to separate wards. i had an emergency caesarean. my healthy son was born. i was briefly allowed to see him, then he was taken to neonatology. he had a slight fever. after hours, and insisting, i was allowed to hold him. they could have given me any baby. (story ) women described that caregivers’ ignored them, did not take them seriously, and caregivers’ dismissals of their requests made them feel dehumanized and objectified: e.g. ‘feeling like a num- ber’ among many others giving birth, and ‘feeling like an animal or an object’ during childbirth. [..] there were about nine people standing around me but i never felt so alone in my life. (story ) [..] i felt neither seen nor heard. i, as laboring woman, did not matter. [. . .] (story ) lack of compassion in more than half of the stories, women reported caregivers’ lack of compassion. most often: caregivers telling women to ‘stop acting like a baby’ or to ‘grit your teeth and bear it’, for exam- ple when they indicated pain or exhaustion during labour and birth. lying on my back there was nothing i could to cope with the suddenly intense contractions—i wanted an epidural. ‘‘madam, please stop whining”. (story ) sometimes women reported that caregivers neither introduced themselves, nor communi- cated with the woman directly, upon entering the labour room. other women experienced caregivers’ contact with them as lacking in compassion, or that caregivers talked to them in a rude manner. during birth, women described being told to be quiet when they made noises; to push in a certain way; to work harder during the pushing phase, and being screamed at. i am coping with the contractions in my own way when a ‘white coat’ walks in [. . .] who says: ‘‘you really don’t need to make so much noise”. suddenly i am very conscious of my plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. surroundings, and focused more on what others think of me, than on myself. my contractions fade away and in the end it is a caesarean. (story ) women also reported caregivers’ using threats. for example: caregivers threatened forced interventions if women wouldn’t listen or cooperate, or poor health outcomes for the baby if women expressed their own preferences or refused an intervention. ‘‘i don’t understand that you don’t want this. you don’t want the baby to die in your belly, do you?” after i refused a scalp electrode. (story ) other women described caregivers having certain expectations during or after birth counter to the women’s preferences. during birth this is often related to the way of pushing or the birthing position. women reported about caregivers telling them to shower on their own after giving birth, despite these women felt they were not up to the task. the midwife made me to lie flat on my back with my legs in stirrups. i hate this position. (story ). i had to shower right away. eating first wasn’t possible. i fainted in the shower. nurse sighed: ‘‘now you’ll have to stay the night too.” [. . .] (story ) descriptions of insufficient compassion by caregivers included caregivers’ downplaying of a woman’s traumatic experience or bad outcome after the birth. [a horrifying labour due to medical error] ‘‘oh well, at least you’ve got two [children]”–so said the obstetrician. i was never allowed to be pregnant again. [. . .] (story ) women reported that caregivers’ negative attitude and poor use of language left them feel- ing unsupported, humiliated and belittled. i needed a brief moment of compassion, support and encouragement when i was almost push- ing [..] i got a threat from the obstetrician instead: ‘‘ms, i am preparing the vacuum pump. you have to hurry.” (story ) at . i was being sutured. every prick in my battered vagina, i felt. when i asked for pain relief, she said: ‘‘i could also leave it as it is, if you prefer.” i felt so small! (story ). other women felt angry due to caregivers’ attitude, most often during the active phase of labour. [..] the only strength i could find was rage, and in rage i gave birth to my baby. [. . .] (story ) use of force in / th of stories, women described the use of force, mostly during the active stage of labour. descriptions included caregivers’ use of force prior to or during interventions. for example: an intervention being carried out anyway, despite the woman’s refusal and/or attempts to pre- vent it from happening by e.g. closing her legs, kicking and/or screaming. i was involuntarily catheterized during birth. i yelled no. according to the nurse, this is ‘how it is done’. two people were holding down my legs. (story ) plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. some women experienced these types of situations as sexual assault, for example when caregiv- ers overruled women’s refusals and/or carried out forced internal exams without compassion. [. . .] while i was laying there, in all my naked vulnerability, she barked at me, twice: i should not interfere. with her hand in between my legs, looking me straight in the eyes, she said that. it felt like violation. [. . .] (story ) women also described caregivers using force to get the baby or placenta out, for example by pushing on the abdomen or pulling on the baby or the umbilical cord. after minutes the placenta is still not here. the resident is leaning on his elbow, pushing his full bodyweight into my abdomen. i am crying. then he pulls on the umbilical cord. he thinks he needs so much force that he has to put one foot on the bed for leverage. (story ) women reported that the use of force made them feel horrified, variously described as going through ‘horrible circumstances’, ‘gruesome situations’ and it feeling like ‘torture’. some reported feeling like they were dying. she used full force on my abdomen. . . she was pushing so heavily. . . i experienced so much pain. . . i closed my eyes and thought: i am not going to survive. (story ) short and long term consequences in almost a quarter of all stories, women described short- and long-term consequences of the experience. emotional trauma was the most frequently reported consequence of these experi- ences, sometimes characterized as unnecessary and deeply rooted. some women described they still suffer the emotional consequences of the event years later. [. . .] more than three years later, panic still overwhelms me when i think about this. every single time, with full force. (story ) [. . .] i don’t know what my baby felt, smelled or sounded like; the sound of the episiotomy scis- sors i remember in detail, . years later. (story ) a few women are still dealing with the consequences of interventions that took place, of which internal exams were most frequently mentioned. women reported difficulty sleeping; experiencing nightmares; or feeling sad when they think about their experience. [. . .] it felt like rape, i can still feel the hand (inside me). (story ) [. . .] the suturing was very traumatic and painful; it couldn’t sleep for months, thinking about it. (story ) some women specifically described post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), postpartum depression or the need for psychological treatment in their stories. [. . .]this was the beginning of my postnatal depression. (story ) while some women tried to make sense of what happened to them in the stories (e.g. by giving reasons such as unavailability of caregivers, or hospital protocol), others express wonder about why the situation occurred. plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. after the induction—which i did not want–had started, we rolled from one intervention into the next, everything just got worse and worse. why did nobody listen to me? at no point was i or my son in danger. then why all these forced interventions? (story ) some women reported that their experience left them scared to get pregnant or give birth again. [. . .] i still dream about it. i am too scared to try for a second (child). (story ) overarching theme: left powerless despite the variety of women’s descriptions of their negative and traumatic experiences, a feel- ing of powerlessness occurred in all five main themes and was therefore identified as the over- arching theme. [. . .] never in my life have i felt so powerless. [. . .] (story , story , story ) when informed consent was lacking, women reported a feeling like their power was taken away from them by caregivers as interventions took place without their knowledge and/or per- mission. in cases of being ignored or left alone by caregivers, women described their own counteractive efforts at keeping or regaining control, which were not heard or dismissed–leav- ing them powerless. lack of compassion was reported by women, leaving them feeling belittled and humiliated and where caregivers used force, women described being horrified by the acts that were performed, and feeling completely powerless. women not only described being left powerless during the situations themselves, but also afterwards: the emotional trauma ascribed to their labour and birth experience continued to haunt them; women stated they will never forget their experience. [..] i lost all control, all emotional feeling. the baby is just a child, not mine. the black pit that i fell into lasted several years. now, eight years later, occasionally it still gets me. (story ) discussion the present study examined women’s negative and traumatic experiences of dutch maternity care, as described in the #genoeggezwegen stories. first, we carried out a deductive coding pro- cedure using the typology of bohren et al. to determine what types of mistreatment were men- tioned in the #gg stories. we found that ineffective communication, loss of autonomy and lack of informed consent and confidentiality were mentioned most often by women. an addi- tional separate inductive coding process allowed us to further investigate the content of the stories, and revealed five main themes: lack of informed consent; not being taken seriously and not being listened to; lack of compassion; the use of force; and short and long term conse- quences. feelings of losing control, fear, being objectified and being humiliated were fre- quently reported as experienced by women. ‘left powerless’ was identified as overarching theme as it occurred in all five main themes. most current literature on disrespect and abuse during labour and birth focuses on facilities or hospitals where obstetricians are the responsible caregivers [ – ]. in the #gg stories, midwives and obstetricians were mentioned by women in roughly equal numbers. this may indicate women experience disrespect and abuse throughout the dutch maternity care system, plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. regardless of type of caregiver. thus, awareness-raising efforts must be targeted at all caregivers in the system. furthermore, in the majority of stories, women described one or multiple types of interventions. most often it was not the intervention itself that was identified by women as the direct cause of her negative and/or traumatic experience, but rather the context in which the intervention took place. this is in line with previous studies stating that caregivers’ interac- tions are more important for a woman’s birth experience than the interventions she undergoes [ , , ]. even so, the types of interventions most frequently mentioned in these stories may indicate what can be especially vulnerable moments during labour and birth according to women, in need of extra attention when striving to provide respectful care. for the deductive coding process, the typology of mistreatment by bohren et al. was found to be helpful in identifying what types of mistreatment were reported. often, one story fitted multiple types of the typology of mistreatment, underlining the complexity of the occurrence of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth [ , ]. according to bohren et al., acts of mis- treatment in maternity care can be active or passive, related to the behaviour of individual caregivers or related to health system conditions [ ]. the variety of situations described in the #gg stories confirms this. the inductive coding analysis of the #gg stories allowed certain themes to emerge from the data, enabling a broader understanding of the experiences described, including women’s feelings and their consequences. lack of informed consent was an important theme, consistent with other studies [ – ], and came in multiple forms: women described not being informed or consulted prior to procedures; not being asked for, or given time to, consent; or having their explicit refusal overridden. an australian study similarly found that women reported a lack of informed consent prior to multiple types of procedures in maternity care [ ]. since , informed consent for medical procedures is a legal requirement in the netherlands. the act states that the patient needs to be informed about the content, the goal, the consequences and alternatives of the procedure and consent always needs to be obtained; explicitly for inva- sive and surgical procedures. this makes the experienced lack of informed consent, as described by women in the stories, particularly striking. not only is this an aspect of respectful maternity care; it also a legal requirement under dutch law, suggesting some interactions in dutch maternity care may violate the law [ ]. previous literature from australia found that maternity caregivers have a poor understanding of their legal accountability and women’s rights, causing them to inconsistently support women’s rights during pregnancy and birth [ ]. women described in the stories that a lack of informed consent often caused feelings of loss of control and loss of autonomy. in a survey on dutch women’s traumatic labour and birth experiences, women most often attributed their traumatic experience to the lack and/or loss of control during labour and birth [ ]. in the last decade, there has been an increase in awareness of the autonomy and wishes of patients in health care provision. where previously caregivers played a dominant role in decision-making about patients’ health care, today patients are tak- ing a larger role [ ]. this shift is visible in a systematic review on decision making in general health care, in which % of the patients preferred shared decision making roles in studies after , compared to % of the studies before [ ]. active patient engagement has been shown to be beneficial for patients’ health outcomes, satisfaction of care and the feeling of autonomy [ ]. the importance of autonomy and control is emphasized by a qualitative analysis of dutch birth stories on the social media platform instagram [ ]. the main theme identified here was ‘doing it yourself’. this captures the notion that women’s aims in sharing their birth story online was not just to represent their birth, but also to explain to what degree they were in charge of their birth; strong emotions were associated with doing and deciding plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. things for themselves [ ]. a sense of choice and control during birth therefore appears a cru- cial element in achieving a positive experience. a second main theme in the #gg stories was women describing not being listened to and not being taken seriously by caregivers, which resulted in women feeling sidelined and objecti- fied in their own care. a lack of compassion of care providers experienced by women was another important theme, leading to feelings of fear, humiliation and anger. this confirms previous studies that emphasise the considerable effect of patient-caregiver interaction on women’s experiences [ , , , ]. caregivers’ responding to women’s needs and offering emotional support to women have been found to promote positive birth experiences [ ]. in the theme use of force, violent care was reported by some women, triggering major emotional consequences. this is in line with previous research, showing that women’s accounts of birth trauma often included violence and physical abuse [ ]. caregivers may not be aware of the major influence they have on women’s experience; they sometimes consider their actions routine and fail to realise that women can experience them as traumatic [ ]. reed, sharman and inglis reported that dehumanizing practices in maternity care can be so pervasive, that care providers cease to be able to perceive them as such [ ]. some caregivers explain their unawareness in terms of a disproportionate focus on the biomedical care in educational institutions and health care facilities, at the expense of the humanistic aspects of labour and birth [ ]. however, even caregivers that realise the potential impact of their actions experience barriers to providing respectful maternity care due to their work con- ditions (e.g. long hours, no breaks), their responsibilities and duties (e.g. heavy workloads, giv- ing care to multiple patients at a time), and/or local work culture (e.g. experienced hierarchy, strict protocols). all of these can lead to stress and sometimes even traumatic experiences for themselves [ , ]. women occasionally report the presence of such circumstances in the cur- rent study: women mentioned busy caregivers that have to care for multiple women at once; caregivers that appeared rushed; and strict adherence to protocols. healy humphreys and kennedy found that strict protocols and guidelines often serve to undermine women’s auton- omy, which can evoke feelings of conflict among caregivers. caregivers state that they are afraid of being criticised by other health care professionals; good outcomes are never cele- brated, while bad outcomes are put under a spotlight. this prevents caregivers from providing care that promotes a positive birth experience [ ]. there are therefore many factors that stand in the way of providing respectful care. it is important that, in addition to considering the level of individual interactions between women and caregivers, we consider the structural challenges present in facilities and health care sys- tems [ , ]. in addition, the underlying problem may not be specific to health care, but rooted within wider culture. disrespect and abuse during labour and birth can be seen as a form of sex and gender discrimination and/or violence, as it specifically affects the health and rights of women [ , ]. this emphasizes that we also need to look at the broader aspects of disrespect and abuse during labour and birth, emphasizing the responsibility as a society to tackle gender inequality and promote respectful maternity care [ , , ]. ‘left powerless’ was identified as the overarching theme representing women’s experiences in the current study, concurrent with previous studies. elmir, schmied and wilke described that feelings of powerlessness are caused by many different situations during labour and birth, e.g. women having no say in what happens during birth; not being provided with information; or not being able to make informed decisions [ ]. other research shows that feelings of pow- erlessness are associated with the development of psychological trauma and (postpartum) ptsd [ , ]. stramrood et al. conducted a survey study among dutch women and found that . % of respondents suffered from ptsd following labour and birth, with . % experienc- ing one or more ptsd symptoms [ ]. in the #gg stories, some women also mentioned post- plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. traumatic stress symptoms and other severe short and long term consequences of negative and/or traumatic experiences with maternity care, which was identified as the fifth theme of the study. the major and long-term consequences of women’s negative and/or traumatic expe- riences reported in the #gg stories indicate the need for increased attention to women’s psy- chological wellbeing during labour and birth. the most recent who intrapartum guidelines make a similar recommendation, and recognize a positive childbirth experience as a main end point for all women undergoing labour [ ]. #gg is not the only hashtag campaign on social media that has covered women’s issues; others include #metoo, #notokay (sexual harassment), #whyistayed (domestic violence) and #shoutyourabortion (abortion) [ – ]. bogen et al. investigated the use of the #metoo hashtag on twitter and concluded that this platform facilitates a space where individuals can share per- sonal trauma and connect with others with similar experiences. they pointed out that sharing on twitter can raise awareness of sexual violence [ ]. the present analysis confirms that social media content can be usefully investigated in order to gain a better understanding of women’s experiences. strengths and limitations to our knowledge, this is the first study that analysed the content of one of the worldwide #breakthesilence or #rosesrevolution campaigns. it shows that content shared as a form of hashtag activism can provide important information on experiences, including unfiltered details and feelings. both a deductive and an inductive open coding procedure was used to analyse the stories. the deductive approach showed the applicability of using existing categories to code the #gg stories, whereas the inductive approach led to a more detailed understanding of the negative and traumatic experiences shared in the #gg stories. using both approaches allowed us to not only identify the types of disrespect and abuse that were experienced by women, but also to describe feelings and consequences related to women’s experiences. for the present study, all #gg stories that were posted on the public facebook page of the birth movement were analysed. however, the huge amount of social media engagement around the #gg campaign also motivated some women to share their experience directly on social media, for example in the comment section of facebook messages, through personal facebook pages or on other social media platforms such as twitter or instagram. the amount of stories analysed in this study could therefore underrepresent the number of actual #gg sto- ries, by missing stories that women shared in other ways. in the #gg campaign, women had limited space available to write their story as they were asked to share it on one a -sized paper. due to this, the stories were short and often decontex- tualized. it is also important to note that the present analysis took the women’s stories at face value, which means it can only represent the woman’s perspective of her negative/traumatic experience with maternity care and its context and causes. it is quite possible that the caregiv- ers involved or bystanders would have had a different perspective on some of these situations and their causes. it is also likely that actions and interactions were often not intended as they were received, nor do we know the amount of time elapsed between the woman´s experience and her writing of the story, which may have led to recall bias. if some stories are quite old, then they may stem from an earlier era that no longer represents present-day maternity care. whilst these considerations should make us wary of jumping to conclusions about causes or caregivers’ knowledge, intention, or insight, the #gg stories provide us with useful insight into the negative and traumatic experiences from the women’s point of view. furthermore, social media users are not representative of the entire population, and the sample included plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. here was heavily self-selected. the #gg campaign was started by the dutch birth movement, whose goal is defending women’s rights in maternity care. it is likely that a large group of par- ticipants of the #gg campaign had a specific interest in subjects such as women’s rights, and were therefore motivated to participate in the campaign. there are no demographic data about the participants of the #gg campaign, therefore the findings of the study cannot be generalised to the general dutch maternity population. even so, the present study provides detailed and valuable insight in the experiences of dutch women who did participate in the #gg campaign. this gives reason to think that disrespect and abuse do occur during labour and birth in the netherlands, and can form the basis for further investigation. recommendations women’s control during labour and birth; being seen and heard; and being provided with sup- port are central elements of good maternity care. these aspects, as well as a better understand- ing of the importance of informed consent, should be explicitly included in the curriculum by all educational institutions relevant to maternity care provision. a positive labour and birth experience should be recognized in both the health care system and by the community as a main endpoint for maternity care, in line with who recommendations. only then can we cre- ate an environment in which achieving such an experience is a priority amongst others, which is one aspect of reducing disrespect and abuse in maternity care. we also recommend ( ) conducting a quantitative study among a group of women repre- sentative for the general dutch population, to obtain information on the incidence of disre- spectful and abusive care in the netherlands and ( ) a qualitative study on causes of the occurrence of disrespect and abuse in dutch maternity care. lack of informed consent appears to be an important element of disrespect and abuse in maternity care in higher income set- tings, including in this study, and therefore requires special attention when conducting research in such settings. caregivers’ and birth companions’ perspectives should also be inves- tigated, to gain a more accurate understanding of the causes of this problem. conclusion this study gives insight into the content shared by women through the #genoeggezwegen cam- paign, that was started to break the silence on negative and traumatic experiences in dutch maternity care. women reported experiencing a lack of informed consent, not being taken seriously and not being listened to, lack of compassion and use of force; this left them feeling powerless. this may indicate that disrespect and abuse during labour and birth do happen in the netherlands, although the current study gives no insight into prevalence. the findings of this study may contribute to better awareness of maternity care providers and the community on the possible existence of disrespect and abuse in dutch maternity care, and encourage joint effort on improving care both individually and systemically/institutionally. acknowledgments we are grateful to the women who participated in the #genoeggezwegen campaign for sharing their stories. author contributions conceptualization: marit s. g. van der pijl, martine h. hollander, tineke van der linden, rachel verweij, lianne holten, elselijn kingma, ank de jonge, corine j. m. verhoeven. data curation: marit s. g. van der pijl, tineke van der linden, rachel verweij. plos one a qualitative social media content analysis of negative and traumatic experiences of labour and birth plos one | https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. may , / https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. formal analysis: marit s. g. van der pijl, martine h. hollander. investigation: marit s. g. van der pijl, tineke van der linden, rachel verweij, lianne holten, corine j. m. verhoeven. methodology: marit s. g. van der pijl, martine h. hollander, tineke van der linden, rachel verweij, lianne holten, elselijn kingma, ank de jonge, corine j. m. verhoeven. project administration: marit s. g. van der pijl, corine j. m. verhoeven. supervision: martine h. hollander, lianne holten, ank de jonge, corine j. m. verhoeven. validation: elselijn kingma. writing – original draft: marit s. g. van der pijl, martine h. hollander, tineke van der lin- den, rachel verweij, lianne holten, elselijn kingma, ank de jonge, corine j. m. verhoeven. references . bowser d, hill k. exploring evidence for disrespect and abuse in facility-based childbirth report of a landscape analysis. harvard sch public heal univ res co, llc. ; 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junxiang chen , phd; chen chen , phd; ran hu , ma, msw; tingshao zhu , phd factor-inwentash faculty of social work, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada faculty of information, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada school of medicine, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pa, united states middleware system research group, university of toronto, toronto, on, canada institute of psychology, chinese academy of sciences, beijing, china corresponding author: jia xue, phd factor-inwentash faculty of social work university of toronto bloor st w toronto, on, m s v canada phone: email: jia.xue@utoronto.ca abstract background: family violence (including intimate partner violence/domestic violence, child abuse, and elder abuse) is a hidden pandemic happening alongside covid- . the rates of family violence are rising fast, and women and children are disproportionately affected and vulnerable during this time. objective: this study aims to provide a large-scale analysis of public discourse on family violence and the covid- pandemic on twitter. methods: we analyzed over million tweets related to family violence and covid- from april to july , . we used the machine learning approach latent dirichlet allocation and identified salient themes, topics, and representative tweets. results: we extracted themes from , , tweets on family violence and the covid- pandemic: ( ) increased vulnerability: covid- and family violence (eg, rising rates, increases in hotline calls, homicide); ( ) types of family violence (eg, child abuse, domestic violence, sexual abuse); ( ) forms of family violence (eg, physical aggression, coercive control); ( ) risk factors linked to family violence (eg, alcohol abuse, financial constraints, guns, quarantine); ( ) victims of family violence (eg, the lgbtq [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning] community, women, women of color, children); ( ) social services for family violence (eg, hotlines, social workers, confidential services, shelters, funding); ( ) law enforcement response (eg, calls, police arrest, protective orders, abuse reports); ( ) social movements and awareness (eg, support victims, raise awareness); and ( ) domestic violence–related news (eg, tara reade, melissa derosa). conclusions: this study overcomes limitations in the existing scholarship where data on the consequences of covid- on family violence are lacking. we contribute to understanding family violence during the pandemic by providing surveillance via tweets. this is essential for identifying potentially useful policy programs that can offer targeted support for victims and survivors as we prepare for future outbreaks. (j med internet res ; ( ):e ) doi: . / keywords twitter; family violence; covid- ; machine learning; big data; infodemiology; infoveillance introduction as seen in the case of ebola, epidemics increase the rates of domestic violence [ ]. the world health organization declared covid- a pandemic on march , . to effectively control the spread of the disease, many countries have adopted rigorous measures to limit mobility, such as social distancing, stay-at-home orders (sheltering in place), closure of nonessential j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx mailto:jia.xue@utoronto.ca http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ business, travel restrictions, and quarantine. even though these measures are useful for infection control [ ], they bring a series of negative social consequences, such as psychological stress [ - ], unemployment [ ], ageism [ ], and increased rates of violence against women and children [ - ]. since these rigorous measures overlap with many of the intervention strategies for family violence [ ], they are likely to increase the vulnerability of victims of family violence (including intimate partner violence [ipv]/domestic violence, elder abuse, and child abuse), by increasing exposure to an exploitative relationship, reducing options for support [ ], economic stress [ ], and alcohol abuse [ , ]. for example, isolation limits social contact with families and social services, and thus may facilitate family violence and prevent victims from seeking help [ - ]. during the covid- quarantine, the home becomes a dangerous place for victims while individuals are living in forced close quarters [ ]. in addition, mental health exacerbated by social isolation increases the likelihood of locking victims of domestic violence in an unsafe home environment and increases their vulnerability [ ]. unicef [ ] reports that school closures increased child (sexual) abuse and neglect during the ebola epidemic. it is also important to note that child abuse and domestic violence are likely to co-occur when isolated at home [ , ]. during the covid- pandemic, scholars have suggested that new forms of family violence may occur; for example, abusers may threaten to infect their family members with the virus [ ]. in many countries, the reported cases of and service needs related to family violence dramatically increased since quarantine measures came into effect [ ]. for example, calls to domestic violence hotlines have risen by %, and the number of google searches for family violence–related help during the outbreak has been substantial [ ]. according to national domestic violence hotline representatives in the united states, abusers are attempting to isolate victims from resources and unleashing more violence by enforcing covid- social distancing measures [ ]. in the united kingdom, calls to the domestic violence helpline increase by % in the first week after the lockdown measures were implemented [ ]. in china, domestic violence increased three times in hubei province during the lockdown [ ]. there was a . % increase in domestic violence calls in the united states during the covid- pandemic [ ]. these reports illustrate that existing covid- intervention measures (eg, living in a closed space with abusers for a long period) may profoundly impact victims and survivors of family violence. according to bradbury-jones and isham [ ], “domestic violence rates are rising, and they are rising fast” (p ). data on family violence during the pandemic are still scarce [ ], and there is a need for further research. we cannot capture the impact of covid- on family violence without adequate surveillance [ ]. enhanced surveillance provides an understanding of the impact and risk factors associated with covid- , which is essential for developing policy programs to respond and mitigate adverse effects and offer targeted support for victims and survivors [ ]. eysenbach [ ] defined infodemiology and infoveillance as “the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. infodemiology data can be collected and analyzed in near real time” (p ). according to eysenbach’s framework, the automated analysis of unstructured data related to family violence and covid- is an application of an infoveillance study. understanding public discussions can assist governments and public health authorities in navigating the outbreak [ ]. during the implementation of social isolation measures, social media should be leveraged to raise public awareness and share best practices (eg, bystander approaches, supportive statements, obtaining help on behalf of a survivor) [ ], and provide support [ ]. twitter is a real-time network that allows users from across the globe to communicate via public and private messages, organized chronologically on a given user's account. existing studies have confirmed twitter's role in connecting practitioners and clients [ - ]. researchers have used twitter data to examine the nature of domestic violence [ - ]. a significant number of studies describe twitter hashtag #metoo as a phenomenal tool for disclosing experiences of sexual harassment, and more importantly, to ignite a widespread social campaign or political protest on social media. modrek and chakalov [ ] examined tweets containing #metoo in the united states and supported the role of machine learning methods in understanding the widespread sexual assault self-revelations on twitter. recently, twitter has become a valuable source for understanding user-generated covid- content and activities in real time [ , ]. aim of the study there is a lack of data on the covid- pandemic as it relates to family violence [ ]. this study aims to provide a large-scale analysis of public discourse on family violence and covid- on twitter using machine learning techniques to fill this gap. the research questions are as follows: ( ) what contents are discussed relating to family violence and covid- ? and ( ) what themes are identified relating to family violence and covid- ? the study offers a new perspective on the impact, risks factors, and continuing social support services during the pandemic for family violence. methods this study employed an observational design and followed the pipeline developed by the authors [ ], including sampling, data collection, preprocessing of raw data, and data analysis. sampling and data collection our covid- data set used a list of covid- –relevant hashtags as search terms to randomly collect tweets from twitter between april to july , [ ] (multimedia appendix ). twitter developer’s python code was used to access the twitter api to collect tweets. as shown in figure , our data set included a total of , , tweets during the study period, of which , , were in english. we sampled tweets using keywords such as “domestic violence,” “intimate partner violence,” “family violence,” “violence against women,” “gender-based violence,” “child abuse,” “child maltreatment,” j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ “elder abuse,” and “ipv.” the final data set comprised , , tweets. figure . tweets preprocessing chart. preprocessing the raw data we used python to clean the data and remove the following items because they did not contribute to the semantic meaning of the tweets: the hashtag symbol, urls, @users, special characters, punctuations, and stop-words [ , , , ]. unsupervised machine learning we used a machine learning approach, latent dirichlet allocation (lda) [ ], to analyze a corpus of unstructured text. lda was a generative statistical model that regards a corpus of text (tweets) as a mixture of a small number of latent topics. each latent topic was assigned with a set of linguistic units (eg, single words or a pair of words) counted by the algorithm. these linguistic units with high frequency were likely to co-occur and form into different latent topics. with the lda model, the distribution of topics in documents can be inferred. lda assumes a generative process describing how the documents are created, such that we can infer or reverse engineer the topic distributions. the generative process of lda for m documents, each of which has a length of ni, is given as: . choose θi ∼ dir (α), with i ∈ { ,…,m}. . choose ϕk ∼ dir (β), with k ∈ { ,…,k}. . for the j-th linguistic unit in the i-th document with i ∈ { ,…,m, andj ∈ { ,…,nni} a. choose zi,j ∼ multinomial (θi) b. choose wi,j ∼ multinomial (ϕzi,j) multimedia appendix presents the definitions of these notations. with the generative process described above, the distributions of the topics can be inferred using the python package genism. results we analyzed , , tweets mentioning family violence and covid- in twitter posts. we identified latent topics and frequently mentioned pairs of words (bigrams) for each topic. we further categorized these identified common topics into themes and topics (table ). table presents commonly co-occurring bigrams and examples of representative tweets under each identified theme and topic. j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ table . themes, topics, commonly co-occurring terms, and examples of tweets about domestic violence and covid- . tweet exampletermsthemes and topics increased vulnerability: covid- and family violence “…seeking shelter at home, rates of domestic violence and abuse have skyrocketed. further, women and girls at a high risk for trafficking…” violence increase, violence spike, violence risen, abuse up rising rates “several countries saw spikes in domestic violence reports.”violence reports, reports surgedva reports “…works with domestic violence survivors is seeing a spike in emergency shelter capacity and crisis line calls during the coronavirus pandemic.” crisis line, violence hotline, abuse hotline, calls increased, calls help hotline calls increased “lots of social behaviours and issues are sadly coming to the fore during this pandemic...domestic violence where in the uk women are killed...” murder domestic, violence homi- cide, murder wife homicide “ny gov. cuomo: suicides and increased domestic violence worth prices of coronavirus lockdown.” suicide increased, suicide domes- tic, abuse suicide suicide “longer shutdowns = even more domestic violence, more substance abuse, more lonliness. more mental health symptoms.” mental health, mental abuse, men- tal illness, abuse depression (mental) health types of family violence during covid- “if we're going to talk about quarantine, please don't forget that children are also in danger.” assault child, children suffering, rape child, fgmb child child abuse/maltreatment “with #stayhome orders, many women are left in isolation with abusive partners, unable to access life-saving resources and support systems.” abusive partners, risk family, fam- ily impacted domestic violence “thousands across the country are infected … shelters for rough sleepers, sexual abused have no place to go!” sexual assault, abuse rape, marital rape, rape incest, sexual abuse sexual violence forms of family violence during covid- “…violence against women and girls has risen dramatically. my fear is more women and girls will die from physical violence than #covid .” stop hitting, physical domestic, physical abuse, physical violence physical aggression “domestic violence is about power and control. abusers use more coer- cive control tactics surrounding the #covid pandemic to continue to maintain power and control over their partner.” power control, forced stay, coer- cive control, run away coercive control risk factors linked to family violence during covid- “@caesarpodcast as i've noted for years, the history of domestic violence and drug abuse was enough to make him a prime suspect.” overdose domestic, drug abuse, violence drug, addiction domestic drug abuse “march saw a surge in 'reported' cases of domestic violence. alco- holism increases chances of abuse manifold on women’s and children.” liquor shops, violence alcoholism, suicide alcohol, violence alcohol alcohol abuse “take measures to stop domestic violence, which is on the rise due to lock down pressures. no work and no income. women are facing double violence unemployment, financial ruin, job lost, violence financial financial constrain burden of providing food for the family and also facing the violence created by the frustrations.” “during this covid- pandemic we are seeing a rise in gun sales, and a drastic increase in domestic violence cases nationwide.” gun control, violence guns, gun laws, gun violence, violence gun guns “this is part of our anti-trafficking #covid response and our new dv response and led by cm @abbiekamin, @hawctalk.” human trafficking, sex trafficking, trafficking domestic trafficking “during the lockdown domestic violence happens, because the stress and also by the fact that coworkers/friends won’t see the bruises.” people stuck, violence covid , unsafe home, abuse quarantine covid- related victims of family violence during covid- “covid- has serious consequences for cis and trans women every- where including higher risks a result of …the rise in domestic violence.” trans people, trans women, men men, lesbian couples lgbtqc “covid- induced isolation and quarantine disproportionately affect women and girls. around the world, there has been an increase in sexual and gender-based violence during covid- .” women disproportionately affect- ed, beat wife, black women, fe- male victims, women die women and women of color “refugee women are at greater risk for gender-based violence during the covid- lockdown #worldrefugeeday https://t.co/iupeae vo ” refuge domestic, charity refuge, violence refuges refugee women “evidence shows that violence against children is increasing due to #covid lockdown. the pandemic shouldn't create another pandemic of torture and rights abuse against children.” violence child, child abusers, abuse child children j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ tweet exampletermsthemes and topics social services for victims of family violence during covid- “domestic violence help is available during #covid . call the @ndvh hotline at - - - , text loveis to , or log on to chat at https://t.co/khihlk fq . you are not alone. https://t.co/qkrp i wbr.” , , , , , , safe, hotline , , hotline numbers called “risk of abuse through coercive control’s, addictions’; mental health. no social work input is disappointing https://t.co/sbrhrprlie.” social workers, social service, safety plan, crisis center, limited access, service open resources “shelters have formed a gbv safety plan as victims of domestic violence are likely to be forced to stay at home with an abuser for longer periods due to the lockdown. https://t.co/wuqpskec l.” women shelter, violence shelters, seeking shelters, shelters open shelters “…the beauty industry supports victims of dv during the covid- by donating products to women's shelters and dv service organizations.” funding support, consider donat- ing, raise funds funding “…national domestic violence helpline is there for victims, but it's not for men. that is apparent from their website. https://t.co/bhyubfozmv” visit website, violence website, retweet help social media “social workers would just get shot along with the wife or family, so who should society send to domestic violence calls? cops say domestic violence calls are the most dangerous” social workers, responding domes- tic, violence call first responders: social workers law enforcement responses “calls to local police departments are up in the last month. help is available. visit: https://t.co/nasnuadep for a list of local resources. https://t.co/c kecoxkgh.” contact police, protection orders, calls, police arrest, legal aid, protective orders, local police law enforcement “due to the #covid lockdown, there are increasing reports that girls and young women are facing gender-based violence…https: //bit.ly/ cgkfdt.” cases reported, abuse reports, re- port abuse, increase reports reports of dv cases social movements and awareness “covid- lockdown witnesses a global rise in domestic violence. trapped at home with abusers at all hours, lacking privacy to reach out for help, and the sudden disappearance of regular support systems, has isolated individuals, specifically women and children, in violence. https://t.co/ az rmvy.” help victims, support victims, campaign combat, zero tolerance, care victims, ask help, reach out, situation help, protect vulnerable support victims “women share horrific photos of injuries to raise awareness of domestic violence as are killed since start of lockdown. pics of their horrendous injuries to raise awareness of dv, as killings in the home doubled during the first three weeks of lockdown in the uk. https://t.co/ noczkowiu.” awareness domestic, raise aware- ness, help raise, awareness month, raising awareness, spread aware- ness, assault awareness awareness domestic violence–related news “today, secretary to the governor melissa derosa issued a report to governor cuomo outlining the covid- domestic violence task force's initial recommendations to reimagine new york's approach to services for domestic violence survivors. https://t.co/vpmjed njc.” johnny depp, tracy mccarter, rikers island, melissa derosa, keith ellison, chris brown, anto- nio guterres, alexandra mccabe, robert goforth, tara reade, bre- ann leath, california’s bail rules personnel and events adv: domestic violence. bfgm: female genital mutilation. clgbtq: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning. increased vulnerability: covid- and family violence tweets mentioning rising rates of domestic violence as a consequence of covid- were frequent, with popular bigrams like “violence increased,” “violence higher,” “rising violence,” and “violence skyrocketing.” increases in hotline calls and reports of family violence were also influenced by the ongoing covid- pandemic (eg, calls increased, calls help, reports surge). a representative tweet indicated, “a miami valley nonprofit agent is seeing a spike in crisis line calls during the pandemic.” other consequences of the pandemic include homicides related to domestic violence and mental health issues (eg, depression, mental abuse). types of family violence during covid- findings showed that several types of family violence were mentioned together in a single tweet alongside terms related to covid- , such as “child abuse/maltreatment” (eg, assault child, rape child), “domestic violence” (eg, abusive partners, j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ violence partners), and “sexual violence” (eg, sexually assault, marital rape). forms of family violence during covid- two primary forms of family violence were discussed on twitter during the covid- : “physical aggression” (eg, physically hurt, stop hitting) and “coercive control” (eg, power control, forced stay). the latter is demonstrated by this example: “…abusers may use more coercive control tactics surrounding the #covid pandemic to continue to maintain power and control over their partner.” risk factors linked to family violence during covid- we found that the rising rate of domestic violence was associated with risk factors: “drug abuse,” “alcohol abuse,” “financial constraints” (eg, job loss, loss income), “guns,” “trafficking,” and “covid- related” (eg, lockdown, stuck home, quarantine). sample tweets include “march saw a surge in reported cases of domestic violence. alcoholism increases chances of abuse manifold on women and children…” and “during the lockdown, domestic violence happens because the coworkers/friends can’t see the bruises.” victims of family violence during covid- tweets designated the lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning) community, women, women of color, refugee women, and children as victims of family violence during the covid- . popular words in describing the victims and survivors of family violence included “trans people,” “lesbian couples,” “women disproportionately affected,” “beat wife,” “black women,” “female victims,” “refuge domestic,” “charity refuge,” “violence child,” “child abusers,” and “abuse child.” social services for victims of family violence during covid- social services for victims of family violence was a prominent theme discussed by twitter users during the pandemic, as indicated by the high frequency mentions of hotline numbers. resources, shelters, funding support, and visiting websites on family violence were also frequently mentioned in tweets. in addition, confidential services, safety plans, and limited access were representative topics identified in the sampled tweets. social workers’ safety was tweeted as a salient topic in our data set: “…domestic violence cases are just asking for a lot of social workers to get shot and killed” and “has anyone actually asked social workers how willing they are to go on domestic violence calls…?” law enforcement responses with the rising rates of family violence during the pandemic, reports of domestic violence cases (eg, cases reported, abuse reports, violence reports, increase reports, and reported increase) were a salient topic in the tweets. police departments (eg, police officers, local police, police chief, calls, contact police, police arrest) were the first responders on the front lines during increased domestic violence reports during covid- . social movements and awareness findings also identified social justice movements and awareness to support victims and survivors of family violence. tweet content highlighted the advocacy of zero tolerance for domestic violence, indicated by popular bigrams such as “help victims,” “campaign combat,” “violence advocacy,” “care victims,” “raise awareness,” and “awareness campaign” and sample tweets like “women share horrific photos of injuries to raise awareness of domestic violence.” domestic violence–related news news events related to domestic violence cases during the pandemic were also identified, such as ( ) american actor johnny depp’s denial of domestic abuse allegations by ex-wife amber heard; ( ) tracy mccarter’s murder charge for the fatal stabbing of her husband in manhattan; ( ) singer chris brown’s arrest in paris on allegations of rape; ( ) tara reade’s sexual assault allegations against joe biden; ( ) kentucky legislator robert goforth’s arrest for th-degree domestic violence; and ( ) death of police officer breann leath, who was shot on duty while responding to a domestic disturbance call. news of solutions to help survivors of domestic violence were also frequently discussed in the sampled tweets. for example, the governor of the new york state council on women and girls, melissa derosa, created a task force to find innovative solutions to the domestic violence spike during the covid- pandemic. united nations chief antonio guterres called for measures to address the surge in domestic violence linked to lockdowns that were imposed by governments in responding to the covid- pandemic. the news article child abusers eligible for immediate release under california’s new $ cash bail emergency mandate [ ] has become a prominent topic due to the high volume of retweets. given the new state rules, individuals arrested for child abuse will be released on $ bail in california. the original tweet was posted by bill melugin (@billfoxla) and had been retweeted almost times (“rt @billfoxla: under california's new $ cash bail rules, child abusers are now eligible for immediate release. san bernardino county sheriff @sheriffmcmahon tells me he had to release a felony child abuse suspect /w priors for domestic violence & child abuse immediately after arrest. @foxla”). discussion principal results our study employed a large-scale analysis of tweets on public discourse related to family violence on twitter during the covid- pandemic. the study's twitter data consisted of a random selection of more than million tweets mentioning family violence and covid- from april to july , . the machine learning technique lda was used to extract a high volume of co-occurring word pairs and topics related to family violence from unstructured tweets. the study contributes to the understanding of public discourse and concerns of family violence during the covid- pandemic. we identified themes from the analysis: ( ) increased vulnerability: covid- and family violence (eg, increasing rates, victims affected); ( ) j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ types of family violence; ( ) forms of family violence; ( ) victims of family violence; ( ) risk factors linked to family violence; ( ) social services for victims of family violence; ( ) law enforcement responses; ( ) social movements and awareness; and ( ) domestic violence–related news. the study adds to existing scholarship, where there is a lack of data on the covid- –domestic violence connection, or only anecdotal reports. our findings contribute to understanding family violence during the pandemic by providing surveillance via tweets, which is essential to identify potentially effective policy programs in offering targeted support for victims and survivors and preparing for future outbreaks. twitter users have discussed who is at higher risk of family violence during the lockdown. findings reveal a broader range of affected victims, such as the lgbtq community. salient tweets suggest that women and children are disproportionately affected by family violence that is consistent with the majority of the research in the field [ , - ]. violence against children has been associated with previous epidemics [ ]. in addition, the sampled tweets suggest that domestic violence–related discussions focus on the support and protection of victims instead of interventions against abusers, consistent with one recent study using twitter data for domestic violence research [ ]. we find tweets mentioning family violence and covid- have a limitation in primarily posting stories about male-to-female violence [ ] even though other patterns of violence exist, including female-to-male, male-to-male, and bidirectional ipv [ ]. tweets about family violence and covid- during the lockdown mentioned a range of risk factors associated with family violence during pandemics, such as drug abuse, alcohol abuse, financial constraints, guns, and trafficking. our study reveals similar results with one recent report by peterman and colleagues [ ], who summarized that main pathways that connect the covid- pandemic and violence against women and children (ie, economic insecurity and poverty-related stress; quarantines and social isolation; disaster- and conflict-related unrest and instability; and inability to temporarily take shelter from abusive partners). for example, public discussions indicate that alcohol abuse continues to be a risk factor for family violence during stressful events [ ]. financial constraints (eg, financial ruin, lost jobs, economic collapse) due to covid- create barriers for victims of family violence for help seeking [ ]. beland and colleagues [ ] analyzed the canadian perspective survey series and found that financial worries due to covid- contributed to increased family violence and stress. an increasing rate of domestic homicides identified in tweets suggests that guns are still a concern at home where family violence occurs. specific covid- –related risk factors (eg, quarantines, social isolation) limit contact between victims of family violence and the outside world, trapping them at home with their abusers; these factors were indicated by the frequent use of words like “people stuck,” “unsafe home,” “people locked,” and “abuse quarantine” on twitter. multiagency integration of law enforcement responses (eg, protection orders, arrest), social services (eg, hotlines, shelters), and social movements and awareness are recommended to address domestic violence and support victims [ ]. social services (including deployment of social work practitioners, therapists, etc) for cases of domestic violence must be resourced during the pandemic. due to the mobility restriction, a lack of informal support, such as that from family, friends, coworkers, further contributes to increased rates of family violence during the pandemic. thus, it is more crucial than ever for victims to access voluntary sector practitioners' support during the covid- pandemic [ ]. our results provide evidence that some agencies continued to deliver services during the pandemic. for example, several hotline numbers in the united states have been frequently mentioned during the pandemic, such as “illinois domestic violence hotline, - - ( -to end dv),” “national suicide prevention lifeline, - - (us),” “national domestic violence hotline, - -safe ( ) (us),” “national sexual assault telephone hotline, - -hope ( ) (us),” and “loveisrespect, text loveis to (us).” we also identified popular hotline numbers from the united kingdom, such as mind the mental health charity (mind infoline: - - ), the national stalking helpline ( - - ), and the national domestic abuse helpline ( - - ). however, a commentary in the canadian medical association journal raises concerns about family violence support using videoconference or telemedicine settings where the abusers can be present [ ]. abusers can coercively control victims-survivors’ use of mobile phones to access hotline support. therefore, further evidence is needed to indicate whether the services fulfill their roles. twitter conversations about highly publicized domestic violence cases were significant. news about hollywood star johnny depp’s denial of abuse allegations when he was accused of domestic violence against his ex-wife amber heard was a prominent topic in the sampled tweets. our results show public discussions of high-profile cases of domestic violence (eg, athletes arrested for domestic violence), consistent with previous studies. cravens et al [ ] used qualitative content analysis to examine the factors that influence ipv victims to leave an abusive relationship using tweets related to #whyistayed and #whyileft. xue et al [ ] analyzed , tweets about domestic violence and found that high-profile cases such as greg hardy's domestic violence case are prominent. these studies consistently show that twitter continues to be a source of news coverage on current events for domestic violence, even during the covid- pandemic. limitations there are a number of limitations to this study that must be acknowledged. first, twitter data reveal insights from twitter users and thus does not represent the entire population's opinions. despite this shortcoming, our study provides one of the first large-scale analysis of tweets using real-time data to identify the impact of covid- on family violence. second, we did not include non-english tweets in the analysis. future studies should carry out analyses on non-english tweets regarding the impact of covid- on family violence. third, even though our collected data cover days of the outbreak since april , , discussion patterns may evolve as the covid- situation continues to change over time. fourth, the search terms used in the study mostly reflect terminology used j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ by professionals rather than victims when discussing family violence. for example, one study examined how child abuse victims post their stories on social media and found that the victims rarely use explicit words to describe their experiences [ ]. thus, this study may be limited in capturing victims’ opinions. to protect twitter users' privacy and anonymity, we did not examine the sample's sociodemographic characteristics. it remains unknown whether the collected tweets were from victims, abusers, organizations, etc. it is also possible that abusers may prevent victims from reaching out for help on social media [ ]. future studies could consider sampling tweets from victims of family violence to further examine the impact of covid- . conclusion as seen in our large-scale tweets data set, people have been actively discussing family violence in the context of covid- . we identified themes and topics relating to family violence and covid- . the findings demonstrate that twitter can serve as a platform for real-time and large-scale surveillance of family violence by offering an understanding of the people who are discussing the impact and risk factors associated with covid- , which is essential for developing policy programs for supporting victims and survivors. this study provides insights for professionals who work with victims and survivors of family violence to develop a social network–based support system for informal and formal help when conventional in-person support services become unavailable during future outbreaks. conflicts of interest none declared. multimedia appendix hashtags used as data collection search terms. 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&dopt=abstract http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ edited by g eysenbach; submitted . . ; peer-reviewed by l schwab-reese, t freeman; comments to author . . ; revised version received . . ; accepted . . ; published . . please cite as: xue j, chen j, chen c, hu r, zhu t the hidden pandemic of family violence during covid- : unsupervised learning of tweets j med internet res ; ( ):e url: http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / doi: . / pmid: ©jia xue, junxiang chen, chen chen, ran hu, tingshao zhu. originally published in the journal of medical internet research (http://www.jmir.org), . . . this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the journal of medical internet research, is properly cited. the complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. j med internet res | vol. | iss. | e | p. http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / (page number not for citation purposes) xue et aljournal of medical internet research xsl•fo renderx http://www.jmir.org/ / /e / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract http://www.w .org/style/xsl http://www.renderx.com/ colloquy with emily bell at columbia university on digital platforms, journalism, and society full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rchu church, communication and culture issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rchu colloquy with emily bell at columbia university on digital platforms, journalism, and society alexandre gonçalves & daniel arasa to cite this article: alexandre gonçalves & daniel arasa ( 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&domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - interview colloquy with emily bell at columbia university on digital platforms, journalism, and society alexandre gonçalvesa and daniel arasab aschool of journalism, columbia university, new york, ny, usa; bschool of institutional communications, pontifical university of the holy cross, rome, italy abstract this interview with professor emily bell encompasses a variety of topics centered on the relationship between digital platforms and journalism, religion, and society. issues range from the alarming phenomenon of a growing share of the population who avoid news altogether to the resistance of internet companies to regu- late speech. professor bell is not sparing with her criticism of digital behemoths, defending comprehensive regulation and greater transparency in their algorithms and data. she talks at length about the seismic consequences of the technological revo- lution for journalism and the challenges in finding a sustainable business model for the news media. when it comes to religion, she points out that churches have an ally in digital platforms, which can be used to disseminate their messages far and wide. nevertheless, she warns against the risk of jeopardizing ethical principles when such an alliance lacks critical judgement. professor emily bell is the director of the tow center for digital journalism at columbia university and an expert on the interplay of communication and technology. article history received january accepted january keywords digital platforms; journalism; trust; social media; church and technology; news introduction getting hold of professor emily bell is not an easy task. she is often traveling, teaching, coordinating research meetings, and participating in conference calls. nonetheless, she promptly accepted the invitation to be interviewed by church, communication and culture. most of professor bell’s career was spent at the british newspaper the guardian. as director of digital content, bell was a key figure in one of the most successful efforts by a mainstream media outlet to build an online presence. not for nothing was she called to head the tow center for digital journalism at the prestigious columbia journalism school. she moved to new york city around ten years ago with her family. contact daniel arasa arasa@pusc.it school of institutional communications, pontifical university of the holy cross, rome , italy � the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. church, communication and culture , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com bell’s research focuses on the intersection of technology and journalism. she pays particular attention to economic trends in digital journalism, the changing techno- logical environment, and the corresponding cultural shifts. all those themes are at the center of this interview: news, society and trust; the role and influence of digital plat- forms; the church and digital technologies; the social turmoil brought about by the internet, among others. bell has a cheerful and kind personality, but she does not shy away from making a strong case against the worst instincts in silicon valley. news, society and trust in one of your recent articles, you have written about the growing phenomenon of the ‘never-newsers’, or news avoiders (bell a). why are people avoiding the news? there is so much more content now that is not news. you can encounter all types of media and never cross paths with news if you do not want to. there are also people who actively do not seek out news because they find it overwhelming. that inspired the slow news movement. executives like james harding decided to leave the bbc to set up a slow news outlet called tortoise (https://www.tortoisemedia.com/.), in part because he himself felt overwhelmed by the news cycle and saw something unhealthy about it. i have a slightly different view. i think it is a privileged position to feel overwhelmed by the news. outside europe and north america, there are plenty of places where we observe a shortage of news. we also see local news fading in our own communities. in addition to that, part of the population is oblivious to the news cycle not by choice but by design: by the design of algorithms that target users who are more likely to stay con- nected if they are viewing entertainment rather than news. the phenomenon of ‘never-newsers’ is also connected to the fragmentation of audi- ences. again, either by choice or by design, we see slightly different things at slightly different times. more and more people will not share a collective experience of news. that has enormous consequences for journalism and the pursuit of viable business models. we are getting into a post-broadcast world that we have not even begun to understand. the present moment is particularly puzzling when it comes to politics: it is enmeshed in the news cycle and also designed to drive the news cycle. in that context, we talk a lot about distrust of the media as another reason for ‘never-newsers’. i am wary of the terminology used around trust. it is a difficult metric to attribute value to. when levels of trust are low, people certainly become more scep- tical of news, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. very high trust can be as problem- atic as very low trust. my experience as a news executive at the guardian was that our readers had high trust in us but low trust in other news brands. at the daily mail, their readers had high trust in them and low trust in the guardian. in the aggregate, one can say that there was no shortfall of trust in the media as a whole. of course, there is a range of acceptable levels of trust in the media: not too high, but not too low. for some people, trust levels have dropped below the minimum threshold. when that happens, people avoid news because they feel they know enough about the inner workings of the media to say: ‘i don’t think they are telling me the church, communication and culture https://www.tortoisemedia.com/ truth.’ at the same time, they have a hard time understanding their own place in the world. they are facing enormous disruption: finance, climate, migrations, and all sorts of things. it does not help that we have all this information at our fingertips and, on the other hand, there seems to loom existential threats and the unknown. people get discouraged and disoriented. they do not feel that it is worth reading the news. that is a problem for all of us because we do need shared facts. especially in liberal democracies where one of the premises is that you have a public conversation that encompasses everyone … debate around shared facts enables us to manage self-governance. that is why the news media is so important. but the media is not alone. we focus on the problems of the press because journalists are egocentric: we think of ourselves as victims of this process and also the ones who can fix it. nevertheless, the media is just part of a larger ecosystem that is changing. we have an important role in it. if journalism disappears and people forget the difference between news and political or commercial messages, society will suffer. there will probably be a rise of corruption and oppression. but jour- nalism is not the only institution that stops those scourges. it is a necessary condition, although not sufficient, for the life of democracies. other important institutions are suffering from the same lack of trust and engage- ment. we are undergoing a crisis in the values of western liberal democracy. we got used to thinking of democracy as the model on the rise. it is not clear anymore. political philosophers were surprised by how quickly recent democracies, particularly former members of the soviet bloc, have slid away from democratic norms. we under- estimated the fragility of democracy. what’s the role of digital platforms? are they the cause or just the context for these changes? they are part of the cause. the speed of processing, the cost of storage, the dynamics of moore’s law in computation are at the root of this. it is all about moving informa- tion, intangible assets and currencies faster and faster. the movements of capital and labour have traditionally defined the growth of democracy. now they are powered, in one way or another, by engineering and technology. we can identify similarities between the forces that led to the financial collapse [in ] and the rise of platforms. it is the same kind of engineering: real time trading, used for credit default options in the former and for ad-tech in the latter. there is something about speed and connectivity, and how it is being used to create new markets, that does actually spill from online into the real world. ten years ago, there was a debate whether online activity could influence offline events. now there is no doubt about it. take, for instance, occupy wall street . one decade ago, journalists were looking at it and saying: ‘it is not really a movement about anything. we cannot understand those activists in zuccotti park and around the world. they do not have a cause.’ the move- ment, with its personalized messages and memes, was entirely appropriate for the new platforms. when i was a student activist, we had to focus on one message because we had a. gonÇalves and d. arasa seconds on the evening news. occupy wall street’s personalization was made possible by the dynamics of digital platforms. a similar thing could be said about the arab spring. people from a previous generation would probably remind us that in the wake of those revolutionary movements there was a backlash of the worst kind of commercial- ism and authoritarianism. that is also true. no one would look at american society today and say that we have healed the economic division. what we actually got is a set of economic and communication devices which sort people out into the highly desir- able/very monetizable and the uncreditworthy. some historians argue that nothing is new, that these disruptions resemble previous explosions in new communication technologies. optimists would add: ‘the internet is just like tv and radio. they triggered the same moral panic but it turned out to be just fine. lots of people now have access to things they would not have otherwise.’ in these moments, the argument goes, there is always intense debate to figure out how to react to the new technology. the british government, for instance, felt sufficiently threatened by the development of radio to create the bbc as a central authority to discourage pamphlet- eers such as those who had disrupted the political process during the first world war. someone could also take a different perspective and argue that there is something genuinely new about the internet. among other things, it is less well-defined, barely regulated, global, and capable of changing its shape in unprecedented ways. according to that view, we are still finding out the degree to which the internet differs from other media, but the differences are apparent. i agree with that view. one important difference between old and new media is the illegibility of the new. in the past, you could scrutinize even state media: you knew who controlled it and why it was giving you certain messages. those were simple and understandable struc- tures. new media is illegible even to experts and the people who built it. and it is done deliberately so. again, we can draw a parallel with the financial crisis: even people who had built those trading systems that led to the collapse did not foresee how they would play out in real life. likewise, nobody in cupertino, mountain view, or menlo park seemed to realize that, if you encourage people to engage on a digital platform with no commit- ments to democratic norms or social cohesion, the results can be absolutely disastrous. internet companies talk about communities, democracy and connectivity all the time. they have no idea what those terms mean, the difficulties of creating the realities meant by them, and what to do when things go awry. we have now a series of catastro- phes that demonstrate how deaf they were to the warning signs and how poorly they understood their own role in it. as a further example: anyone familiar with the economics of the news industry knows that journalism is expensive because a lot of it is about what you do not publish. proper curation and moderation have a cost and are hard to scale up. it is easier and cheaper to publish absolutely everything. that is the stance of the platforms despite the utterly predictable social cost that this choice brings about. how would you describe the impact of online platforms? first, they undermined the economic basis of modern media by dramatically changing the dominant advertising model in a very short time span. in terms of other media church, communication and culture effects, they have certainly had a profound effect on shaping society, but it is difficult to truly understand those changes if platforms do not release their data. internet companies take a cavalier attitude to privacy when it comes to tracking user behavior. at the same time, they are incredibly disingenuous about the arguments around protecting their own data. facebook has a new incident every week: ‘oops, we actually let this app access all of your data. we should not have done it. we are really sorry!’ meanwhile, they reject the most reasonable requests: ‘we cannot possibly let journalists and researchers see this data.’ many questions on important societal issues – such as unemployment, automation, finance, and news consumption – converge around technology and are theoretically knowable. it is a scandal that they go unanswered because researchers and journalists have no access to data. in twenty years’ time, people will be astonished by how much data around behaviour platforms managed to hang on to, use for their own benefit, and shield from public scrutiny. downsizing and taxing digital platforms this brings up the issue of internet regulation. in your opinion, what is the ideal scenario? i am european. in europe, when we see things, we want to regulate them. that is not a bad instinct. look at post-war europe and the united states during the new deal. both europe and the united states were leaving tragic events behind: the second world war and the great depression, respectively. both underwent reconstruction projects that were incredibly successful. the institutional building during those years was phenomenal. in great britain, for instance, the national health service and public broadcasting were created. regulation was instrumental in that success. that brings to mind [princeton professor and sociologist] paul starr ( )’s con- cept of constitutive choices: those consequential and often tumultuous moments in his- tory in which countries are forced to make a series of choices and those decisions shape society for years to come. inspired by milton friedman, free market economics, reaganomics, and thatcher, we decided in the s that regulation in general and media regulation in particular were bad things. the american government acted accordingly and deregulated radio and tv . in those years, there was a tight regulatory framework to be undone. now there is none. consider the case of political ads on facebook. there is no regulation, not even boundaries that anyone would agree with. we are at the mercy of the ‘terms and condi- tions’ of a private company with no oversight. it is mind-blowing. many people will say: ‘i’m very happy to give up my data to get faster access to these incredible services.’ should we allow people to make that kind of decision? neither they, nor we, nor google, nor anyone really understands what the surrender of that data will mean in ten years’ time. platforms have changed so much since day one. they are not just larger and faster. they play a completely different role from their original one. there is no reason to think they will stand still from now on. when we regulate, we are invited to think about the consequences down the road. a. gonÇalves and d. arasa right now, we see traditional media institutions being swept aside and replaced by a completely untamed market. in that context, we can benefit from some analogies. for instance, gresham’s law in economics — in the absence of regulation, bad money drives out good money — can also be applied to speech: in the absence of regulation, bad speech drives out good speech. when it comes to platforms, you cannot combat bad speech with good speech alone because bad actors will employ automated tools to endlessly populate social media feeds with their individualized messages. we need regulation which clearly states: any automated strategy that drowns out or frightens people is wrong. critics of internet regulation often invoke the first amendment and its protection of freedom of speech. another analogy might illuminate this argument too. the second amendment enshrines the right to bear arms. however, that right looked very different when the constitution was promulgated. now we have bump stocks and semi-automatic weapons. they have already increased the lethality of mass shootings. most americans will agree that restrictions on that kind of modern weaponry do not contradict the second amendment. similarly, the authors of the first amendment did not know anything about the proliferation of bots, deep fakes, or automated speech. if they did, they would certainly see them as threats to free speech. accordingly, regula- tions against bots and digital manipulation do not go against the first amendment. they protect it. i do think the need for regulation is indisputable. nonetheless, some experts, par- ticularly in the united states, still think that self-regulation is better than government regulation. that is a problem because regulation has to start in the united states or is not going to work. how to start? what are the concrete first steps? first, we should break the map. the platforms are just too big. it is absurd that a pri- vately held entity like google knows more about a certain population than its demo- cratically-elected government. again, not everyone agrees with me. [cuny professor and media critic] jeff jarvis ( , ), for instance, would argue that it is much bet- ter that google owns all that data because, if they do bad things with it, people will just stop using their services. in my opinion, that is simply not true. we have passed the point where there can be competition. it is virtually impossible to challenge google in the short term. the development of artificial intelligence is entirely dependent on proc- essing power and data. you cannot do that in your garage. the reasoning should be: if data is going to be important for centuries, we cannot allow only one or two companies to control it. we should start by breaking the map. then we should focus on oversight. utility-style regulation offers a good framework for that. think of water or the electrical grid. private companies provide water but the government constantly monitors water quality. private companies run the electrical grid but they are obliged to supply everybody according to predetermined parameters. in that case, what kind of parameters would you establish for digital platforms? we need a multipronged approach for regulation. a basic requirement could be guar- anteeing universal access. church, communication and culture i also like [yale professor and legal scholar] jack balkin’s ( ) idea of treating internet companies as information fiduciaries. they would be prevented from using the information they collect against their users’ interests. platforms would have a legal obligation to be trustworthy in a way that resembles the fiduciary duties of doctors, lawyers and accountants. in addition to that, we could require platforms to publish their accounts as public companies do. here, we touch the issue of transparency. transparency is not about overwhelming people with decontextualized data. it has to provide real knowledge and insight: why are they doing this? who is in charge of what? who else is involved? how much are they spending? just as an example, i have been looking at the google transparency project (which i know it is funded by a rival of google ). they have col- lected data on how much google spends with journalism projects. our own research at the tow center confirms their figures. google funds lots of initiatives at a relatively low cost: it spends around one hundred million dollars a year. the number of projects is well over , . looking at the names of individuals, institutions and academics who received funding from google, we observe networks of influence coalescing. i am always curious to see who is organizing meetings to discuss misinformation. sometimes i notice that % or even % of the participants are funded by google. it is unlikely that they will have an open conversation about the responsibility of plat- forms. that is why we need oversight to understand how those companies exert their influence and where they spend their money. in one of your articles in the columbia journalism review (bell ), you proposed to tax big digital platforms and use that money to invest in journalism, particularly in civic media. when you talk about journalism and how to preserve it, there are two schools of thought. the first one says: ‘let the market decide how much journalism is going to survive.’ in practical terms, that means that lots of people will go without proper reporting on schools, health care, water quality, etc. that is the current approach. the second school of thought says that you have to support journalism and recreate it in places where it is not economically viable, particularly at the local level. that requires money. john thornton, an american entrepreneur who founded the texas tribune with other journalists, a successful data-driven local news operation in austin, points out that, if we subsidized journalism with the same amount of funding that is commonly raised by ballets and operas in the united states, we could replace a signifi- cant amount of newsrooms that have been lost. you do not need a huge amount of money to get some basic reporting back into many places, but the money has to come from somewhere. for me, it seems completely logical that companies that benefit the most from media content — the platforms — should be the ones that foot the bill. google wants to organize the world of informa- tion, right? then, it should fund those who create the information that will be organ- ized. it is not a stretch. some people say: ‘it is not the platforms’ fault.’ it does not matter. we are beyond the point of finding culprits. we have to ask ourselves: how can we introduce a a. gonÇalves and d. arasa progressive type of taxation on platforms that will give resources to news media which will benefit people who do not have the money to pay for it? i am not worried about the readers of the wall street journal, the new york times, or the financial times. not even the readers of the guardian, where we tried to keep it free for readers. i am worried about readers who do not have access to news at the local level, who do not see journalists in their own communities, or do not trust what those journalists report. google is very keen on automating the news. for instance, they have a partnership with the uk press association called project radar. it is about automating reports coming out of courts (bbc news ). on the one hand, that sounds revolutionary and a good way of creating stories where you do not have human reporters. but let’s think for a moment: the criminal justice system does not deserve human reporters but the white house does. why? maybe because we do not see a problem in offering auto- mated content to the poor while providing good old human judgment to the elites who are able to pay for it. imagine if the admissions office at columbia university announced that student applications would be analyzed by an algorithm that would make admission decisions with no human intervention. there would be an uproar. well, that actually happens if you are a poor kid applying for elementary school in some parts of the united states. meanwhile, overprivileged kids can rest assured that they will get as much human intervention as they deserve. i do not buy this desire to automate everything. of course, it creates efficiencies in news, but the corollary of that is fewer journalists. the youngstown vindicator – not necessarily a paper that everybody liked – shut down in august (benton ). it was the last newspaper in an ohio town of around , inhabitants, with a metropol- itan area of more than half a million people. the newsroom had journalists. it was replaced by an experiment that google is co-funding which provides local news with a newsroom of only four people. a typical example of ‘technoptimism’ that has to be challenged: if it is only four people, it is not going to work. we need people from the community to think about which stories have to be told and to keep an institutional memory. maybe journalists will look like community man- agers in the future. at the moment, any debate on this is a moot point because there is no funding anyway. moving forward, i think the money should come from tax on platforms. let me play the devil’s advocate. what would you answer to someone who says: ‘state and local news are boring … why read them when i have netflix?’ i watch more netflix than i read core reports from queens … that’s for sure! first, attention is not everything. there is a misconception that journalism needs to be read every day by everyone in order to have an impact. not true. let me give you a couple of examples from my experience at the guardian. a reporter called ian cobain published a series of investigations into the use of torture by the mi (cobain ). it was sufficiently scandalous to get laws changed but did not attract many readers. understandably, people did not want to know about someone having his fingernails pulled out. another horrible case of child neglect was powerful in the headlines, but church, communication and culture had low page traffic. again, people did not want to read the actual details of a child dying due to neglect. nevertheless, in both cases readers wanted us to report on it. on top of that, we cannot forget that journalism constitutes a permanent record. in stalinist russia, they literally cut pieces out of photos to erase the memory of purged figures. now it is even easier. digital files can be erased in the blink of an eye. at the beginning of the trump administration, data activists scrambled to download every- thing they could find on government websites. they were afraid of public records going missing and rightly so. if you control the switch, you can delete everything. journalism serves as an independent public record that cannot be wiped out so easily. we often overlook the fact that entertainment and news used to constitute a bundle and the entertainment side paid for the news side. now publishers can reassemble the bundle to be maximally profitable. that means more entertainment and less (or none) news. we return to the business model problem. in free market america, journalism is meant to be for profit, but it should be seen as a public good. in the near future, we need to shift perceptions of journalism from a market-driven good to a public good. with the downturn in ad revenue, i do not see an alternative. not long ago, i heard a horrifying prediction from someone who works in advertise- ment: ‘in the future, all messages available for free will have some kind of commercial, political or religious interest underwriting them. people will have to pay for unbiased content.’ that is not far from our current reality. the most expensive information is also the most high-quality and up-to-date one: real-time market data. in any case, it is hard to justify certain sectors of society having access to better information and, in turn, leveraging their privilege. it drives inequality and journalism is not vocal enough about it. we need to figure out how people can have free access to high quality information. platforms and religion traditional social networks, like the ones from organized religions, are being some- how replaced or overshadowed by digital platforms. how do you see the future of these traditional social networks facing this new wave? the catholic church is probably the oldest messaging platform that exists and it has been predicated on a one-to-many design. broadcast has been like that ever since. with the rise of digital platforms, that paradigm is being replaced by a many-to-many design based on personalization. both religious and news organizations — which are not religions even though we like to think they are — face a similar question: how much do you integrate with the disrupting influences? how much do you withdraw to isolate yourself from them? but there is an important difference between religious and news organizations. platforms are enormously good at delivering real-time messages and they are in direct competition with news organizations in that regard. churches and other religious organizations are not in direct competition with the platform’s business model. if any- thing, they can use it for their own benefit. platforms amplify their message. at the same time, religious, political and news organizations share a common ethical question: ‘how can we use platforms to serve our mission without betraying our a. gonÇalves and d. arasa values?’ in a concrete level, for instance, someone could ask: ‘should we allow our jour- nalists — or priests, in the case of a religious organization — to have private whatsapp groups ( participants max) where they can give slightly different messag- ing?’ politicians went all in: ‘this is great! we can personalize our messages with little or no scrutiny.’ religious and news organizations tend to be more cautious. i can also see a shared problem for pre-existing religious and political movements. now it is easier to challenge two-party systems by rallying online supporters and creat- ing a new third party. religious movements tend to be more socially cohesive than pol- itical movements but, for a tech-savvy religious leader, it is likewise easier to start a new church now than in any time in the past. there is another challenge for religious organizations, especially the [catholic] church. platforms are designed to elevate individuals while suppressing brands. companies have to pay a lot of money to elevate their brands. since the church prizes a central identity — a ‘brand’ — that might be a source of tension. journalism is strug- gling with a similar question: how to tie back to a central body or channel a collection of very charismatic individuals who perform well on messaging platforms? on the other hand, churches have one thing that is much sought after nowadays: physical contact and meeting places. in that sense, they can be complementary to the disembodied experience on digital platforms. people crave meeting in real life. if you told me years ago that there would be queues around art galleries in london, i would not have believed you. people visited those galleries because they were heavily subsidized. otherwise, they would be empty. something has changed since then. the director of the british museum told me that he participated in a series with the bbc that presented the history of the world through objects. in one episode, he spoke about a tiny artefact: a carolingian carved bookmark. after that, he decided to take it to a book festival. he was mobbed by people in the festival: ‘can i see it? can i touch it?’ the church has direct experience of this, of how people converge in spaces that have significance and sometimes tangible icons. more than a challenge to religions’ ethics, do you not think that the new digital environment poses a challenge to religions’ authority? that is an interesting question: to what extent pre-existing institutions become unfash- ionable in this new environment? i think traditional media and religions are vulnerable to the same kind of charismatic — and sometimes authoritarian and untrue — messag- ing that thrives in digital platforms: ‘do not believe the priests! do not believe the jour- nalists! believe me.’ that is why it is in the public interest to demand transparency of social media algorithms. they have allowed that kind of discourse to become so influential. at the same time, if there is one thing that we learned from the disruption of news media is that durability seems to reside with long-lasting institutions rather than with newcomers. twenty years ago, everyone predicted: ‘forget the washington post, the new york times, the bbc … digital natives are the future.’ then we saw the weakness of new media outlets. they can do well for a short period of time, but they lack the stamina and resilience of incumbents to survive in the new environment. to the extent church, communication and culture that we can apply this logic to religious organizations, we can expect that durable insti- tutions like the catholic church are well positioned to weather the storm. of course, the most successful media organizations have been the ones with a lot of resources to invest in reforming their processes, improving their journalism, and mak- ing themselves more accountable and reflective of people’s interests and concerns. in a certain way, digital platforms had a positive effect on them. they were challenged to be better. long-lasting religious organizations will probably undergo the same kind of institutional shake-up if they want to keep their relevance in the digital age. in any case, there is a lot of potential for incumbents to do well if they take the necessary steps to adapt. meanwhile, it has become harder for non-incumbents to find a place in the sun. as an aside, it has been interesting to observe that digital platforms themselves are going from being disruptive to suffering disruption. the attack is coming from talk- boards like chan and chan: micro-social networks swarming with users where every- thing is permitted and that often become a breeding ground for anarchy and violence. as a result, the main platforms are starting to behave like incumbents. they are encouraging and reaching out to the same traditional media organizations they thought we could get rid of. after all, when you turn into an incumbent, you become more sympathetic towards other incumbents. mainstream media has been the watchdog for institutions such as the catholic church. the scandal of child sexual abuse by priests is a case in point. today, with the crowded media environment, who are the watchdogs? do the platforms have a role? platforms do not report and they have absolutely resisted the idea of becoming accountability platforms. they always say: ‘we are not the news media. we are not governance systems.’ when they play that role, they do so by accident rather than by design. despite all that, i do think the platforms might change their strategy in the near future. up to this point, everyone assumed that they would be broken up into smaller commercial units. now, i am not so sure. they might propose a bargain: ‘we will take a lot more governance and civic responsibility if you leave our scale alone, if we are allowed to continue being these digital juggernauts.’ they have a very special relationship with washington. we have seen this before with united fruit in south america in the s, for instance (kenny ). the american government values these outgrowths of soft power that are very active in other economies. the platforms are also spending a lot of money on lobbying. they really want to integrate themselves into the fabric of society and governance in order to make it impossible to break them down into smaller units. even so, it has to be said that platforms are not all bad. their amplification effect allows skilled and well-intentioned journalists to have a greater impact in a much shorter period of time. the child abuse scandals that you mentioned took several years to come to light. now everything is faster thanks to the platforms. take the #metoo movement. its foundation was not people gossiping on social media, but quite hard reporting that was then amplified by the platforms. or the current scandal at the mit a. gonÇalves and d. arasa media lab [for receiving money from sex offender jeffrey epstein]: a big institution under a lot of pressure after a few months of reporting and social media uproar (farrow ). surprisingly, journalism’s impact has not diminished. if anything, it has grown. the caveat is that it is now residing in a smaller number of organizations. we are probably seeing an age where only a handful of influential media outlets will be able to amplify their stories and play the watchdog role. an educational failure the tech industry tends toward indifference bordering on contempt for the past. in a recent new yorker’s piece, pioneering autonomous vehicle engineer anthony levandowski was quoted as saying, ‘the only thing that matters is the future. ( … ) i don’t even know why we study history. it’s entertaining i guess — the dinosaurs and the neanderthals and the industrial revolution and stuff like that. but what already happened doesn’t really matter. you don’t need to know the history to build on what they made. in technology, all that matters is tomorrow’ (duhigg ). in your opinion, what is wrong with silicon valley? it has to be a failing in some aspects of the education system. i can talk for hours about both the brilliance and the shortcomings of the american education system. that clus- ter around stanford with its venture capitalists is especially prone to this kind of distor- tion. the education for excellence and achievement is shaped by the economy. america is the purest expression of capitalism that you can experience anywhere in the world. all the incentives are commercial and commerce is not a great lover of history. capitalism only cares about profitability. it does not care about the lessons of the past. first of all, ‘the past does not matter’ is the kind of thing that sounds great on a cer- eal box or on a pair of sneakers … but it is simply not true. only silly people who have been indoctrinated can say things like that. it is a performative bravado about how you are going to conquer the world in new ways, very much like investment bankers in the ’s. when i left college, the smartest kids who were not members of left-wing organizations went to work for merchant banks. investment banking was how you went from a poor background to an enormous wealth if you were smart enough. now it is software engineering. you see the same characteristics, the same focus on making money. and you are surrounded by people who validate that view of the world. i have given a couple of talks to computer science students at columbia university. we are usually tempted to speak to them on their own terms: what technologies are working and how they may be applied to the newsroom. more often than not, i resist that temptation and talk to them about journalism. i role-play with them: ‘a story breaks. person a says x on twitter or facebook. her identity is obscured but person b reveals who she is … ’ and so on. i use real case studies where people ended up killing each other like in the genocide in myanmar (stecklow ). then i open for discus- sion. the students’ first reaction is: ‘you cannot say that this is technology’s fault. it is people’s fault.’ my answer to them: ‘you (as a software engineer) have designed the platform. you designed a platform that has no retrieval, deletion latency. it is working the way you built it for. this is your fault.’ church, communication and culture i was talking to julia hirschberg. she is a fantastic woman and was the chair of the computer science department. i asked her: ‘how is that they do not know their role in all these changes?’ she answered: ‘that is why we bring people like you to talk to them … they never hear these kinds of things.’ if you look at papers written by com- puter science students, you see that they are incentivized to get the code right. they are not incentivized to think critically afterwards: ‘i got the code right but … should i deploy it?’ there is no incentive for a student to say: ‘i have read about the history of the relationship between silicon valley and the defense industry. now i understand better the consequences of what we are doing here.’ meanwhile, american universities are shutting history and language departments. i have got three kids. the first one studied political science. by current standards, an absolutely useless degree. the second one, even worse, is studying classics. both careers introduce you to an amazing world. everything is there. if you listen to archaeologists talking about mater- ial cultures and how it relates to space exploration, it is mind-blowing. but those courses are dwindling. everybody is going into computer science, statistics and mathematics and those courses have not caught up with the need to provide tools for critical thinking. in the past, engineers created systems that were then played into a political culture that was controlled by liberal arts graduates. defense mechanisms built in silicon valley would be arbitrated by politicians who studied literature at williams college. now, tech- nocracy is running everything. the system is running faster than liberal arts can under- stand or keep up with. that is a problem because engineers tend to optimize one thing and forget the rest. workers at uber would probably have a different view on how to develop their software if they understood urbanization, the history of the car industry, the dynamics of migrant labour, and the social outcomes of the gig economy. but they are not incentivized to learn all that because it does not maximize profit. they are not stupid. they are really smart people who have been told that to think in this narrow and superficial way is not only ok but desirable. and nobody contradicts it. to see what i mean read [cuny professor and media theorist] douglas rushkoff ( )’s throwing rocks at the google bus or just visit san francisco. san francisco is a shocking demonstration of what is happening at both ends of society. go to market street near twitter’s headquarters. the most highly paid young people in the world come in and out of those shiny buildings, alongside squalor, homelessness, opioid addiction, people literally shitting out in the streets and sleeping on cardboard. the insularity of it is astonishing: how you can avoid a world that is right there, how you can just step into an uber that takes you to your unmixed neighborhood, how you never have to engage with the misery around you. the city of london and wall street are smaller and somehow contained in big cities that have other things. the valley is different. it is just one thing. and it attracts the most talented people in the world. that reinforces this unsettling culture. privacy, transparency and speech moderation going back to privacy issues, how do you see the need to moderate conversations? i have been looking at what platforms have done to fight misinformation, like the new oversight board at facebook (horwitz and seetharaman ). around , a. gonÇalves and d. arasa moderators have been added by youtube and facebook. they are also investing in moderating algorithms through fact checking (bell b). however, it is a small investment compared to the overall size of those companies and the urgency of the problem. mark zuckerberg explicitly said that his companies are going to tackle it in two dif- ferent ways. first, they are going to promote ephemeral stories: content that you post and then disappear. second, they are going to break conversations up into smaller groups. in a certain sense, we are seeing the end of open systems where you can look at what everybody is saying on facebook or twitter. in the new era, it is much harder to penetrate or understand what is going on in small private groups. to some extent, it amounts to an admission: ‘since we have not figured out how to moderate the spread of misinformation, we are going to sweep it under the carpet.’ they are building a system that is even less transparent. you can already see the nar- rative to justify the change: ‘you do not want the government eavesdropping outside your living room. you do not want the cia showing up in your church. the same holds for these small internet groups.’ nevertheless, there are conversations that ought to be open. we should be able to see what advertisers and politicians are showing to people. otherwise, they can even disguise themselves and their intentions in order to manipulate people. nobody would be able to report them because, from the outside, you cannot see what is going on in those private groups. just to give you an example, we have been looking into the indian election on whatsapp, a particularly opaque social network owned by facebook (bengani ). there are hundreds of millions of messages. some of them were sent by well-meaning entities. others, by bad actors that are spreading misinformation. those misleading messages are not produced at human scale: they are clearly seeded by bots. the platforms dream of finding a way to sort people out into groups where everyone agrees with everyone and gets along well. that would make the issue of moderation go away. by reinforcing the echo chamber … as we have already discussed, they do not read history books. they are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their decisions. journalism cannot scale because it is so culturally specific to an area or particular demographics. moderation is also culturally specific but the platforms think they can scale it up everywhere. why? because they do not understand culture. we often forget that google and facebook are advertising businesses. they will do whatever it takes to extract the right data from people to carry on the most effective ad platform. they do not care about the quality of the conversation. they do not care about journalism. they care about their business. i do not want to sound cynical and i do not blame them. i just think they made all sorts of empty statements about their role in the world. facebook says: ‘we want to connect people to make the world a bet- ter place.’ what does that even mean? the bright side of this is that we are having conversations about the nature of humanity, communication, and connectivity that we have not had for a generation. the s and the s were not a golden age of theorizing about communication. church, communication and culture you had a few good thinkers such as jurgen habermas and james carey. some people say that communications theory is going to be a booming research field because we have experienced the digital revolution without any true theoretical framework to understand it. we are looking for guideposts to think about its effects on society and what to do with it. it is similar to the industrial revolution, an analogous technical disruption that rad- ically changed how people lived. peasants left the countryside and went to towns. everything was decided around the demands of the ongoing revolution, exactly like now. commercial creativity was at its height for years or maybe a bit longer. then, for the following years, people were dealing with wars and social policies. the period of social policy went roughly from to . it was all about clearing up in the wake of the industrial revolution. with the technological and digital revolution, we have not had this second phase of social policies yet. it will not be just about government. all civil society stakehold- ers — media, universities, churches, etc — will have to figure out what this revolu- tion means and how to react to it. during the industrial revolution, there was an act of parliament that stated that ‘children should no longer go up chimneys’ (strange ). we have not had that moment, as a society, that goes: ‘why are we putting children up to chimneys? that seems like a very bad idea.’ in our case, it will be more like: ‘facial recognition? why did we allow it?’ you can feel the first signs of it, but we have not got neither a policy response nor a response from civil soci- ety yet. it is such a profound change that one can underestimate it. the disruption it meant for political movements is a sign that it is fundamentally changing how people live their lives. after the cold war, capitalism became the total dominant ideology. to some extent, it still is but with unexpected turns. china is a free market that is not free, for instance. it is state capitalism. suddenly we have unanticipated shifts in power that are caused by technology. when vladimir putin says that ‘whoever owns artificial intelligence will run the world’, he is overdramatic but not wrong. there is something in there which is fundamentally true. we have not got to that phase yet and we talk about it as a theory. when it hits us, our present moment will feel like a prelude. as you can see, i am not, generally speaking, a very optimistic person. i tend to be quite pessimistic. but i think pessimists are quite cheerful at the moment because we feel we have been proved right: ‘i told you! i told you that it was going to be awful!’ notes . moore’s law is a term that originated around stating that overall processing power for computers doubles every two years. . occupy wall street is a protest movement that began in september , in zuccotti park, next to new york city’s wall street financial district. it opposes social and economic inequality and the undue influence of corporations on government, particularly from the financial services sector. . cupertino, mountain view and menlo park are, respectively, the localities of the headquarters of apple, google, and facebook. a. gonÇalves and d. arasa . in , the federal communications commission (fcc) deregulated radio by eliminating programming guidelines, commercial limits, ascertainment, and the program logging requirement. in , the commission deregulated tv in much the same manner it had radio. in , the fcc repealed the fairness doctrine (waldman ). . on august , fortune published that oracle is one of the funders of the google transparency project (roberts ). disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors alexandre gonçalves is a doctoral student at columbia university. his research is focused on the use of social media by populist movements and the impact of algorithms in political com- munication. he also teaches courses on data journalism and computational methods for com- munication research at columbia journalism school and the school of international and public affairs. he holds an msc in comparative media studies from mit and was a researcher at the mit center for civic media. he has also worked as a science reporter for the brazilian daily o estado de s. paulo. daniel arasa was born in barcelona, spain, in . he has a bachelor’s degree in journalism ( ) from the universitat aut�onoma de barcelona (uab), spain, a bachelor’s degree in theology ( ) from the pontifical university of the holy cross, rome, an m.a. in television and radio ( ) from the southern methodist university (smu), dallas, tx, and a phd in social institutional communications ( ) from the pontifical university of the holy cross, rome. from to , daniel worked as a journalist in the political, social and local sections of europa press news agency, spain. in , he started teaching at the pontifical university of the holy cross, where he is currently extraordinary professor of digital communications and strategic communications, dean of the school of church communications and editor of the academic journal church, communication and culture. his main research interests are dynamics of mass media groups, institutional communications, and online religious communication, particularly of catholic institutions. references balkin, jack m. . “information fiduciaries and the first amendment.” ucdl rev. : . http://bit.ly/ no v . bbc news. . “google funds automated news project,” july , , sec. technology. https://bbc.in/ qas ct. bell, emily. . “platforms, publishers, and the uneasy alliance at the heart of journalism.” columbia journalism review. accessed june . http://bit.ly/ szqspb. bell, emily. a. “how can we lure back all the people who avoid news? j emily bell.” the guardian, sec. opinion. accessed june . http://bit.ly/guardianbell. bell, emily. b. “the fact-check industry.” columbia journalism review. fall . accessed january . http://bit.ly/ q xuzi. bengani, priyanjana. . “india had its first ‘whatsapp election.’ we have a million messages from it.” columbia journalism review. accessed october . http://bit.ly/ mhxclw. benton, joshua. . “so youngstown will have a daily named the vindicator after all. but it’s a brand surviving, not a newspaper.” nieman lab (blog). accessed august . http://bit.ly/ qzldmd. church, communication and culture http://bit.ly/ no v https://bbc.in/ qas ct http://bit.ly/ szqspb http://bit.ly/guardianbell http://bit.ly/ q xuzi http://bit.ly/ mhxclw http://bit.ly/ mhxclw http://bit.ly/ qzldmd cobain, ian. . “ian cobain on the truth about torture j politics j the guardian.” the guardian. accessed july . http://bit.ly/ twgiof. duhigg, charles. . “did uber steal google’s intellectual property?” the new yorker, accessed october . http://bit.ly/ zdru p. farrow, ronan. . “how an �elite university research center concealed its relationship with jeffrey epstein.” the new yorker, accessed september . http://bit.ly/ qashew. horwitz, jeff, and deepa seetharaman. . “facebook board to tighten oversight, as zuckerberg keeps control.” wall street journal, sec. tech, accessed july . https://on. wsj.com/ q stqk. jarvis, jeff. . “the technologists’ hippocratic oath.” buzzmachine. accessed december . http://bit.ly/ qt it. jarvis, jeff. . “we have met the problem. guess who?” buzzmachine. accessed january . http://bit.ly/ tbzaiw. kenny, brian. . “the controversial history of united fruit.” hbr cold call. accessed jan . http://bit.ly/ u apvo. roberts, jeffjohn. . “oracle is behind a new anti-google group.” fortune. accessed august . http://bit.ly/ mfa pb. rushkoff, d. . throwing rocks at the google bus: how growth became the enemy of prosperity. new york, ny: penguin publishing group. starr, paul. . the creation of the media: political origins of modern communications. collingdale, pa: diane publishing company. stecklow, steve. . “why facebook is losing the war on hate speech in myanmar.” reuters. accessed august . https://reut.rs/ rebenm. strange, kathleen. . climbing boys: a study of sweeps’ apprentices. vol. . london: allison and busby. waldman, steven. . “information needs of communities: the changing media landscape in a broadband age.” diane publishing. accessed january . http://bit.ly/ zdrdwi. a. gonÇalves and d. arasa http://bit.ly/ twgiof http://bit.ly/ zdru p http://bit.ly/ qashew https://on.wsj.com/ q stqk https://on.wsj.com/ q stqk http://bit.ly/ qt it http://bit.ly/ tbzaiw http://bit.ly/ u apvo http://bit.ly/ mfa pb https://reut.rs/ rebenm http://bit.ly/ zdrdwi 	abstract 	introduction 	news, society and trust 	downsizing and taxing digital platforms 	platforms and religion 	an educational failure 	privacy, transparency and speech moderation 	disclosure statement 	references dynel & poppi: arcana imperii* arcana imperii* the power of humorous retorts to insults on twitter marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi , university of Łódź, poland | sechenov university, russia this paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in twitter interactions. the analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur stormy daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. these acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with president donald trump and his former attorney. based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. first, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of stormy daniels’s retorts. second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication. keywords: creative humour, insult, misogyny, self-deprecating humour, slut-shaming, superiority, twitter, witty retort . introduction focusing on witty retorts to insults on twitter, this paper contributes to the stud- ies of creative humour in online interactions (demjén , ; vásquez and creel ; vásquez ; dynel and poppi , ) and, in a more general https://doi.org/ . /jlac. .dyn | published online: october journal of language aggression and conflict : ( ), pp. – . issn - | e‑issn - this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . license. * secrets of power/the empire (latin) https://doi.org/ . /jlac. .dyn http://localhost: /exist/apps/journals.benjamins.com/jlac/list/issue/jlac. . sense, to the vast area of research on the use of humour as a powerful rhetori- cal tool and a robust image management factor. humour, in its different forms and guises, serves numerous socio-psychological and interactional purposes (for an overview, see e.g. martin ; martin and ford ; dynel and sinkeviciute forth). strategic use of humour is vital on social media especially for public fig- ures, notably politicians and celebrities, who use twitter to self-promote and communicate with vast audiences in a personal manner (e.g. marwick and boyd ), thereby building their positive image and fostering a sense of familiarity with the followers. the success of public figures’ accounts is premised on the assumption of authenticity and sincerity; it is the public figures, not their assis- tants, that are believed to be responsible for tweeting (marwick and boyd ). this is the point of departure for the present study of stormy daniels’s quick retorts to the misogynist insults hurled at her on twitter. while twitter is often seen as a public microblogging site and does not necessitate direct replies to previous tweets (see zappavigna ), it does facil- itate conversational exchanges. twitter is based on sequential organisation and turn-taking, which are amenable to conversational-analytic investigations (e.g. paulus et al. ; housley et al. a). despite evident differences (e.g. written rather than spoken discourse, or spatial and temporal divisions), twitter interac- tions do show some characteristics of regular multi-party conversations between participants, conventionally called “speakers” and “hearers”; the latter can be divided into different categories, notably the addressee and the collective third party encompassing innumerable, frequently unidentified users, who are (by default) ratified participants in publicly available interactions (see e.g. dynel a). what is most significant is that an insult and a reply thereto are regarded here as an adjacency pair (schegloff ), albeit not in spoken conversation (as originally conceptualised) but in written interaction, which may involve multi- modality (e.g. pictures, gifs and emoticons). this is the topic of section , where we introduce the notion of the insult- retort sequence (sacks [ ]), shedding light on both components and indi- cating the need to study them jointly. in section entitled “setting the scene”, we proceed with a description of the political drama, which serves as a backdrop for the present research. section depicts our research methodology, most notably the data collection and annotation procedures, indicating problems key to the analysis of insults and retorts on social media. in section , we duly present a micro-analysis of the data, focusing primarily on the formal and conceptual cre- ativity of daniels’s humorous retorts to the insults she receives. we extrapolate from this investigation general findings concerning the workings of humorous replies to misogynist insults in the “discussion” that ensues in section . the paper closes with concluding comments in section . marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi . insult-reply adjacency pairs a standard insult is typically thought of as an utterance that is intended to offend the target. an insult (or a putdown) is a spoken or written utterance that ascribes a negative characteristic to the target by debasing his/her “physical appearance, mental ability, character, behaviour, beliefs and/or familial and social relations” (allan and burridge , ). insults may centre on, but should not be reduced to, the use of, typically taboo, pejorative/derogatory terms that aim to abuse the person whom they concern (see e.g. jay ; dynel a and references therein). these can be dubbed slurs, even though, according to a narrow definition, this term pertains to pejorative terms indicative of a social category, such as ethnicity, race or sexual orientation (for a solid overview, see hess, forth). it needs to be emphasised that, contrary to what the semantics of the success verb “to insult” might suggest, insults need not always achieve the perlocutionary effect desired by the speaker. a distinction needs to be drawn between the speaker’s intention to insult the target and the target’s resulting emotional state, which may, but does not need to, show in his/her reaction. essentially, the rel- evant verbal act is performed with a view to causing offence, while the effect exerted on the target does not have to involve taking offence. on the other hand, a person might feel insulted even when there has been no relevant intention on the speaker’s part, and even if the offended person should be cognisant of this fact (cf. jucker and taavitsainen , see also mateo and yus on (mis)understand- ing insults). a successful insult proper rests on the speaker’s intention to demean the tar- get, and the target’s considering the remark demeaning. jucker and taavitsainen ( ) add to this definition a third condition, namely the target’s belief that the speaker did have the intention to hurt or demean him/her. this condition is, how- ever, questionable – not merely optional, as jucker and taavitsainen ( ) sug- gest, pointing to the hearer’s recognition of the unintentionality of an insult – inasmuch as intention recognition is not necessarily part of interlocutors’ cog- nitive reality (see dynel ). most importantly here, an insult need not cause offence, or at least its target does not have to explicitly show taking offence or may even “explicitly refuse to be insulted” (kampf , ). overall, distinctions must be drawn between the addressee’s perception of the speaker’s intent, his/her actual taking offence, and his/her perceivable reaction. there is no way of know- ing what the target of an insult actually feels or thinks, even though some conjec- tures can be made given his/her perceptible reaction. in any case, insults must be examined in tandem with the responses they elicit from the target of offence. it is these responses that can be the central topic of investigation. humorous retorts to insults on twitter sacks ( [ ]) is, presumably, the first to have talked about the insult- retort sequence, pointing out that insults “come in pairs” and can be “returned” (sacks [ ], ). however, a counter-insult is not the only possible reac- tion. jucker and taavitsainen ( , ) suggest that apart from a “reaction in kind”, i.e. a counter-insult, the original insult is apt to invite denial, violence or silence. however, this list of reactions is not exhaustive. insults may elicit retorts, here defined as quick and witty responses, which can be rhetorically powerful even if not they are not tantamount to counter-insults. in interactional terms, a retort to an insult is a second pair member (sacks [ ]), which together form an adjacency pair (schegloff ). reactions to insults vary depending on the nature of the insults, which – according to a traditional distinction – may be ritual or personal (labov ; arnovick ). this distinction seems to correspond to the difference between what labov ( ) calls a “factual statement” which communicates some intended offensive meaning and a humorous ritual utterance making some absurd or, at least “obviously implausible” (stokoe and edwards , ) or not “accurate statement of reality” (smitherman , – ), which typically elicits another insult in response. technically, what these authors must mean to suggest is that speakers doing ritual insulting do not believe what they are uttering to be true, and hence that the insults exhibit what can be labelled “autotelic untruthfulness” (dynel ). however, the juxtaposition of personal insults with ritual insults, as conceptualised above, is not appealing. jocular insults performed as a humor- ous ritual (e.g. on social media) can be immensely creative and may communi- cate truthful meanings about targets even though they are not intended to cause offence (dynel and poppi , forth), while insults proper made with the intent to offend the target may present conventionalised formats, and need not always be “factual” or represent the speaker’s true beliefs, let alone correspond to the objective truth. also, both types of insults are capable of eliciting relevant insults in reply. it is, nonetheless, crucial to differentiate between (genuine) insults and joc- ular insults. unlike the former, the latter are not intended to offend the target, being a form of solidarity-building humour instead (see e.g. maíz-arévalo ; dynel and poppi and references therein). therefore, both insults and pejo- rative terms therein should be viewed in context, that is, through the lens of what the speakers – in both face-to-face conversations and social media interactions – seem to mean regardless of what the literal meanings may suggest. marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi . setting the scene stephanie clifford (née stephanie gregory), better known as stormy daniels, is an acclaimed american pornographic actress, scriptwriter and director. her name became widely known outside film industry in when she entered a legal dis- pute with us president donald trump and his attorney michael cohen. in a nutshell, in , it transpired that in october , just before the presidential election, stormy daniels had signed a non-disclosure agreement and had been paid $ , worth of hush money so that she would not disclose her (alleged) affair (and sexual intercourse) with trump back in . whilst admitting to the payment made from his personal account (rather than campaign funds), cohen, together with trump’s other spokespeople, accused daniels of lying and denied the affair. in , daniels filed two lawsuits against trump, one concerning the invalidity of the non-disclosure agreement (which trump himself never signed) and cohen’s intimidating threats; and the other on libel charges (i.e. trump call- ing her statements “fraud”). on th april , on air force one, trump denied having any knowledge of the $ , payment made by cohen to daniels or the underlying rationale of this act. in september , trump’s lawyers stated that he would neither enforce the non-disclosure agreement nor oppose daniels’s claim about its invalidity. whatever the truth may be, the stormy daniels-donald trump scandal is likely to have critical political repercussions given the potential suspicion of impeachable offences “committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.” additionally, in the #metoo age, the political drama has feminist over- tones. this is interesting given that trump has eluded the consequences of his . https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-arranged- - -payment-for-adult-film- stars-silence- https://www.npr.org/ / / / /stormy-daniels-shares-graphic-details-about-al leged-affair-with-trump https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-says-he-didnt-know-about-payment- to-stormy-daniels/ https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /politics/stormy-daniels-new-lawsuit/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/cohen-trump-organization-campaign-hush- money.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=% fpolitics% ftrump-cohen-do- not-plan-to-enforce-stormy-danielss-nondisclosure-agreement-court-filings-state% f % f % f % fb cc -b e- e -a c - f e _story.html% f&utm_term=. f ef e ab . https://nypost.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-on-becoming-unlikely-heroine-of-the- resistance/ https://nypost.com/ / / /nadler-says-trump-could-be-impeached-for-stormy-daniels- payment/ humorous retorts to insults on twitter https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-arranged- - -payment-for-adult-film-stars-silence- https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-arranged- - -payment-for-adult-film-stars-silence- https://www.npr.org/ / / / /stormy-daniels-shares-graphic-details-about-alleged-affair-with-trump https://www.npr.org/ / / / /stormy-daniels-shares-graphic-details-about-alleged-affair-with-trump https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-says-he-didnt-know-about-payment-to-stormy-daniels/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /donald-trump-says-he-didnt-know-about-payment-to-stormy-daniels/ https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /politics/stormy-daniels-new-lawsuit/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/cohen-trump-organization-campaign-hush-money.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/cohen-trump-organization-campaign-hush-money.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=% fpolitics% ftrump-cohen-do-not-plan-to-enforce-stormy-danielss-nondisclosure-agreement-court-filings-state% f % f % f % fb cc -b e- e -a c - f e _story.html% f&utm_term=. f ef e ab https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=% fpolitics% ftrump-cohen-do-not-plan-to-enforce-stormy-danielss-nondisclosure-agreement-court-filings-state% f % f % f % fb cc -b e- e -a c - f e _story.html% f&utm_term=. f ef e ab https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=% fpolitics% ftrump-cohen-do-not-plan-to-enforce-stormy-danielss-nondisclosure-agreement-court-filings-state% f % f % f % fb cc -b e- e -a c - f e _story.html% f&utm_term=. f ef e ab https://nypost.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-on-becoming-unlikely-heroine-of-the-resistance/ https://nypost.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-on-becoming-unlikely-heroine-of-the-resistance/ https://nypost.com/ / / /nadler-says-trump-could-be-impeached-for-stormy-daniels-payment/ https://nypost.com/ / / /nadler-says-trump-could-be-impeached-for-stormy-daniels-payment/ misogyny (e.g. jenkins and mazer ), and daniels is a sex entrepreneur. notwithstanding her policies, stormy daniels is considered a feminist heroine who bravely speaks up, inciting other harassed or assaulted women to step for- ward against president trump. most importantly here, stormy daniels is held in high regard for her humour. numerous journalists have commented on her acerbic wit on twitter often in response to aggressive sexist and/or misogynist comments posted by users known as “(trumpkin) trolls.” whether these “trolls” (see dynel on the ambigu- ous emic/etic label) are to be seen as trump’s vehement but sincere supporters (of both sexes) or as his spin doctors who deceptively pretend to be the former, they chastise and insult daniels often only to delete their tweets or entire accounts after they receive her immediate (as the twitter data demonstrate) replies. these exchanges are the topic of the present paper. . methodology: data collection and annotation set up in february , stormy daniels’s publicly available twitter page (https:// twitter.com/stormydaniels) had almost , tweets, , followers and over , likes in june , that is, at the time this paper was being written. the dataset examined in this study is a corpus of tweets collected between th and th june from the account’s “timeline”, which encompasses the most pop- ular/successful tweets, namely those showing the highest visibility gauged on the basis of the number of likes (symbolised by hearts) and retweets. each of the authors independently did a manual search through the account’s timeline, going back to the beginning of the political drama in , in pursuit . https://www.salon.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-is-a-feminist-hero/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/stormy-daniels-michael-cohen- feminist-hero.html . https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-stormy-daniels- -minutes-trump- -story.html . https://hollywoodlife.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-sex-joke-no-sleeping/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stormy-daniels-twitter_n_ aa b a e b bec ?gu ccounter= https://www.rawstory.com/ / /stormy-daniels-brilliantly-shuts-trump-defenders-sit- hurt/ https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /stormy-daniels-trump- horseface-tweet-tiny . https://www.thecut.com/ / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-twitter-trolls.html https://www.thedailybeast.com/stormy-daniels-slays-trump-trolls-on-twitter https://www.thecut.com/ / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-twitter-trolls.html marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi https://twitter.com/stormydaniels https://twitter.com/stormydaniels https://www.salon.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-is-a-feminist-hero/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/stormy-daniels-michael-cohen-feminist-hero.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/stormy-daniels-michael-cohen-feminist-hero.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-stormy-daniels- -minutes-trump- -story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-stormy-daniels- -minutes-trump- -story.html https://hollywoodlife.com/ / / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-sex-joke-no-sleeping/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stormy-daniels-twitter_n_ aa b a e b bec ?guccounter= https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stormy-daniels-twitter_n_ aa b a e b bec ?guccounter= https://www.rawstory.com/ / /stormy-daniels-brilliantly-shuts-trump-defenders-sit-hurt/ https://www.rawstory.com/ / /stormy-daniels-brilliantly-shuts-trump-defenders-sit-hurt/ https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /stormy-daniels-trump-horseface-tweet-tiny https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /stormy-daniels-trump-horseface-tweet-tiny https://www.thecut.com/ / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-twitter-trolls.html https://www.thedailybeast.com/stormy-daniels-slays-trump-trolls-on-twitter https://www.thecut.com/ / /stormy-daniels-donald-trump-twitter-trolls.html of users’ insults targeted at stormy daniels (with the posts not necessarily being addressed to her) and her humorous reactions thereto, taking either component as a cue. the initial results were duly compared and collated, with repetitions eradicated. this yielded a tentative corpus of tweets to be duly annotated. how- ever, in many cases, the tweets triggering what looked evidently like replies to insults were missing, insofar as either the specific messages had been deleted or user accounts suspended. we thus commenced an online search for the relevant nicknames or the verbatim replies in order to recover the original insulting mes- sages. this search proved successful thanks to reposting on twitter (i.e. retweet- ing), as well as the tweets’ snowballing across social media, notably on humour hubs and online magazines’ websites, where the original insults were retained thanks to screenshots taken in time. thus, the visual and typographic presenta- tion of the consecutive tweets, captured as screenshots, differs depending on the channel via which the tweets are syndicated and displayed (see also zappavigna ). in some cases, the ever-growing numbers of replies, retweets and likes are captured in the images as well, corroborating the popularity of stormy daniels’s posts. regardless of their visual format, notably the visual order, the insult-reply adjacency pairs are composed of first pair members (insults) and the chronologi- cally ensuing @replies (retorts) directed to “@username”. although “@username” is used to tag the author of the original tweet, this tag is deployed as a personal deictic marker (zappavigna ) and conventionally indicates also the addressee of the tweet (honeycutt and herring ; housley et al. a). the addressee, who may be a single individual or multiple ones for one tweet, is the person or people who have authored the previous comment(s) now replied to. nonethe- less, each message is also intended to have countless many ratified receivers (not only the followers of, or unregistered “lurkers” on, the original account, but also those who search for specific hashtag metadata). a tweet – whether or not in accordance with the original speaker’s intent – ultimately reaches vast unpre- dictable audiences, who cannot be fully predicted or determined (see chovanec and dynel ; dynel a), also thanks to retweeting and further reposting online (marwick and boyd ). cognisant of this potential broad reach of their publicly available tweets, both insulters and stormy daniels tailor their posts in order to interact not only with the “@”-indicated addressees but also with the col- lective third party with different goals in mind, as the present analysis will show. in this context, an ethics statement is in order. as is often the case on social media, both the celebrity’s tweets and other users’ insulting tweets presented in this paper are publicly available, and so are the usernames, all being widely searchable and accessible, whether on twitter or reposting sites. be that as it may, we anonymise all tweets except for stormy daniels’s, deleting from the screen- humorous retorts to insults on twitter shots other names and monikers in the sender and receiver positions, which is a common ethical practice adopted in social-media research: we deploy publicly available data accessed without signing in and delete the usernames and pho- tographs/icons representing “everyday users” while keeping the names and user- names, as well as photographs, of public figures (see townsend and wallace ). with an initial corpus of adjacency pairs (n = ) gathered, a grounded theory approach was followed, allowing the relevant qualitative insights to emerge from the data. as predicted (and consonant with various media reports), the majority of stormy daniels’s retorts to insults in the corpus of the timeline tweets do show humorous potential. this is evidenced by the formal properties of the tweets coinciding with the hallmarks of various humour categories (to be described in section ), in tandem with users’ reactions to stormy daniels’s tweets involving laughter emoticons, emoji and/or relevant verbal metapragmatic evaluations (e.g. “so funny”), all being indicative of users’ humour experience on social media (see dynel on methodology in humour research). however, not evidently humorous replies to insults were also found in the original corpus. suffice it to say that these non-humorous retorts were apt and meritorious, presenting facts and/or logical arguments. this is the case with stormy daniels’s reply to the tweet that calls her a failure (example ) or another one involving an accusation and insult questioning the deservedness of an adult video news award on which she had just reported (example ). examples – . in both cases, stormy evaluates the observations made by insulters as “funny” (which does not mean “amusing”, but rather “strange” in these contexts) given the objective evidence at hand that disproves the messages relayed in the insulting tweets. even though sharp replies like these, based on arguments which pre-empt further counter-attacks, can still occasion humorous reactions in some receivers, they are discarded from the corpus insofar as they lack the structural properties of any previously identified form of verbal humour, which relies on formal and/or conceptual creativity. we also disposed of adjacency pairs encompassing humor- ous replies to non-insulting posts (example ) or insults targeted at other users but supportive of stormy herself (example ). . there is an ongoing academic debate on the ethics of twitter studies, namely whether or not personal data in widely available content should be removed in academic discussions (webb et al. ). marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi example . example presents stormy’s jocular insult targeted at a fan who has paid her a compliment on her sense of humour. through this kind of humorous teasing involving overtly pretended aggression (see e.g. sinkeviciute and dynel, forth and references therein), she deflects the compliment and builds a bond of solidarity with the user, assuming that he will recognise the humorous nature of her retort and will take the abuse as being overtly pretended (see dynel c on overt pre- tence). example . in example , a user hurls an insult at another one, endorsing stormy’s political activities. in her teasing reply, stormy voices a humorous objection based on the pun anchored in the two meanings of the verb “suck”. this answer may commu- nicate truthful meanings, but the protest is overtly pretended and does not mean that daniels sincerely objects to the supportive tweet. in the original corpus, we also found several examples of insults that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be jocular insults (see dynel and poppi , forth and references therein). example . the male user metapragmatically labels his comment – seemingly rife with accu- sations and tantamount to a complex insult – as “sarcasm”, a commonplace emic label in american english for the figure of irony (dynel b). he thus indicates humorous retorts to insults on twitter that he dissociates himself from such opinions, of which he is critical. what the user does is express his negative evaluation of this kind of criticism levelled at stormy by others, thereby showing his support for her, implying that she is not the one to blame. thus, the insult (“damn girl”) qualifies as a jocular one. stormy responds in kind through a humorous ironic reply based on absurdity and a cul- tural allusion (to the lord of the dark side of the force from star wars), overtly pretending to agree with the purported criticism. while the jocular nature of the insult in example is rather easy to determine in the local context thanks to the metapragmatic label, example presents a more problematic case. example . at first blush, the user’s tweet in example is based on the figure of irony aimed to deprecate stormy daniels (i.e. there is no real challenge for her to face since she is a porn actress). understanding the nature of this potentially offensive tweet, which stormy daniels receives with humour, necessitates knowing a broader con- text, specifically the preceding tweets to which the user is replying. example ′. marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi the broader interactional context (see example ′) reveals that the post by a user (whose account indicates that he is not trump’s supporter) is a reply to a com- ment that praises stormy daniels for her political actions and a good sense of humour, in view of melania trump’s post about a ceremony in recognition of influential female leaders. therefore, the seemingly offensive comment is not, in fact, meant to deny stormy her political courage but rather to jocularly comment on her profession, which the user seems to have nothing against. this causes stormy to tease the user. she accepts the positive evaluation and does not deny her sexual activities, but she playfully takes issue with the user’s imagery, pointing to her moderation in accessories, indicative of her good taste. the detection of this example, which indicates the necessity to study insults in a broader interactional context, prompted us to double-check the whole dataset to ensure that the ultimate corpus would encompass only adjacency pairs comprised of insults proper (rather than jocular ones) and humorous retorts, all annotated with regard to the various types of humorous creativity (formal and/or concep- tual) that they represent. we thus arrived at the corpus of examples (n = ) briefly depicted in section below. . data analysis this section presents the result of the qualitative analysis of stormy daniels’s humorous retorts to insults. we depict the corpus of humorous replies, focusing on their creative construction and novelty of expression (see dynel and poppi , forth; vásquez and references therein), finding similarities and recur- rent patterns therein. the analysis aims to seamlessly present all the diversified examples before the essence is distilled, namely their common denominators and the key functions are teased out in section . as one of her recurrent strategies, stormy rhetorically turns tables on the insulters by making humorous but, at the same time, logical extrapolations from the insulting comments, and thus questioning their premises. examples – . in reply to the condemning post pointing out her promiscuity in example , stormy takes up on the religious scenario and rationalises the determiner (“so humorous retorts to insults on twitter many”) only to defiantly reject the premise endorsed by the prudish insulter and to jocularly suggest that she does care for going to hell actually. on the other hand, when responding to the “villain” epithet in example , she refers to the two incompatible elements of the aggressive post. she thus invokes a cultural allusion to a fairy-tale film adaptation while building a sexual scenario. (this is followed by a rational observation, which ridicules the dubious logic of the insulter.) a fic- tional scenario can also be co-constructed in an insult-retort adjacency pair, a special case of humorous joint fantasising (e.g. chovanec ; tsakona ; cf. poppi forth), as is the case in example . example . the insult in example appears in an interaction concerning stormy’s advanced (sic) age and her alleged seeking attention at the dusk of her career through cre- ating the political scandal. the insulter presumably means to suggest, based on folk knowledge of female biology, that, as a result of her long career in porno- graphic industry, her pelvic muscles and ligaments have weakened, causing her uterus to slip down and protrude out of her vagina. what stormy does is develop this absurd, hyperbole-based insult into a fictional scenario, in which she takes the image to the extreme (not just falling out, but falling down) and pictures herself as casually asking the insulter for help. stormy daniels creatively plays also with other stylistic figures, not just hyper- bole, notably metaphor (on the humorous potential of metaphor in interaction, see dynel b). specifically, she uses an interactant’s literal expression as a point of departure for a metaphor (example ), develops on a metaphor (example ), or feigns obliviousness to it (example ). example . marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi in example , stormy outwits the insulter by using the same imagery as he did (“farm animals”) for the sake of creating a metaphor (“pig”) that serves as an insult, albeit not targeted at the addressed user. also, she skillfully handles the accusation concerning her alleged insignificance by making a rational observa- tion about the lengths to which twitter users go before they can deprecate her (see also example ). example . as example shows, in her retort to the metaphorical chiasmus-based insult tar- geting her provenance and presumed vulgarity, stormy seems to reconcile herself with her humble origins, as evidenced by the hashtag she adds, but she elabo- rates on the metaphor in order to communicate her success. a reverse strategy involves overtly pretended obliviousness to, and misunderstanding of, a metaphor (example ), as well as irony (example ), thanks to which she purports to be blind to the insults. examples – . the insulter in example metaphorically implicates that stormy daniels is phys- ically used up, having served men sexually in pornographic films (similar to the proverbial western film horses), possibly alluding also to trump’s notorious “horseface” epithet. in her riposte, stormy takes “horse” as if it was meant literally and jocularly teases the addressee about his/her experience and fetishes. simi- larly, in example , stormy overtly pretends to be blind to the irony (see dynel ), and hence the implicated criticism the ironic utterance carries (namely that she is the source of her father’s shame/humiliation). she also humorously per- forms an act of subversive disobedience, as though she wants to be subject to the criticism. . https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ . she also rightly observes that the tweet is confusing. first, the canine imagery is used in the conventionalised metaphor, resulting in catachresis (i.e. mixed metaphor). second, a typo must be involved: either a question mark missing or “and” is mistaken for “are”. humorous retorts to insults on twitter https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ these two retorts in examples and (see also examples and ) qualify as trumping (veale et al. ), which is a witty adversarial language game based on the speaker’s overtly pretended misunderstanding of the preceding turn and skewing the intended meaning to activate an alternative one, typically facilitated by the ambiguity of the original turn, here an insult. this ambiguity may be lex- ical, and so trumping may involve what is known as interactional puns (norrick ) or reformulation puns (partington ), as in example (see also example ). example . in her response to the insult, stormy daniels humorously makes use of the poly- semy of the word “sleep” and focuses on the irrelevant sense (clearly not intended by the insulter) for the sake of humour. only then does she confirm and clarify the user’s observation (i.e. she had intercourse with trump, an actor at the time), tacitly accepting the insulting slur (cf. examples – ). she then pursues a seri- ous agenda regarding the president’s activities, only to defiantly assert her posi- tion on the political arena and close her post with the patronising (in this context) superiority-building “hugs and kisses” symbol. interactional puns that serve trumping are not the only ones that stormy deploys. examples – . responding to an implicit insult suggesting that she is despised rather than liked (which involves a tacit reference to her profession) in example , stormy makes use of the polysemy of the word “grow” used in the insult, boldly addressing the taboo topic. she then rationally dispels the doubt that she is disliked. on the other hand, in example , stormy produces a pun that allows her to change the sub- ject smoothly. thus, rather than addressing the offence based on a sexual taboo, she wittily disparages some cowardly twitter users. in yet another punning reply marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi (example ) based on zeugma and the polysemy of the word “stimulate”, she deflects the criticism of her profession and exploitation, whilst taking the slur for granted (see examples – ). punning is not the only type of wordplay that stormy uses to her advantage in the retorts she makes. examples – . using the word “joke” in the insult as the wordplay’s basis in example , stormy deploys an idiom with the word “laugh” and thereby shows her superiority, both financial and rhetorical. in the tweet in example , she boldly admits to her profession, which she does not find shameful. the humorous nature of stormy’s reply resides in her use of the onomatopoeia, whereby she alludes to the idiomatic expression in which the insulting tweet is couched and accepts the implicit epi- thet. however, wordplay (including puns) is not the only way in which stormy plays with the form of derogatory comments, which examples – illustrate. example . as example shows, stormy begins her retort by mimicking the rather uncanny opening format of the insulting tweet only to superciliously criticise it and repeat the rather obvious observation the user has designed to insult her, clearly to no avail. examples – . in example , referring to stormy’s previous tweet involving a swearword, the user submits a prudish comment in which he/she makes a spelling mistake. stormy corrects it and, moreover, uses the swearword again as an act of marked disobedience. it is, however, more often ordinary twitter users that post abusive humorous retorts to insults on twitter expletives, albeit sometimes editing them out. in her ironic meta-pragmatic com- ment in example , stormy criticises the insulter for not being able to spell out the “naughty” words while she does not protest against their abusive content. examples – . example shows how stormy plays with the visual form of the tweet through feigning naivety and taking the insult as an inadvertently submitted riddle, which she solves by spelling out the, in fact, purposefully deleted slurs. similarly, in example , she playfully engages with the implicit insult, solving the puzzle as if she is oblivious to the use of socratic irony (i.e. overtly pretended ignorance) in the insulting tweet. generally, as examples – demonstrate (cf. also example ), whether more implicit or evidently containing misogynist slurs, these insults hurled at stormy are tantamount to online slut-shaming performed by representatives of both sexes (see webb ; jane ). even though the stigmatising taboo labels, not only “slut” but also “whore”, may be regarded as reflecting the celebrity’s pro- fession, they show disdain for her sexual activities and serve as an expression of strong negative emotions with a clear intent to offend her (cf. jay ). stormy’s standard strategy is to accept the invectives, whether tacitly (see also examples , and ) or explicitly. in the latter case, she unabashedly admits to her stig- matised profession, joyfully taking slurs on the chin, which many examples in the corpus bear out. here is a collection of insults and retorts (examples – ) focused specifically on slurs, not only slut-shaming ones, with a longer conversa- tional strand on the left, in which various users fling insults at stormy, who replies to each. . slut-shaming may also be performed without the use of slurs, see examples and . . in the dataset, the users’ names and photographs (deleted here), indicate both men and women. whether any of this user information is truthful cannot be confirmed. . technically speaking, however, a porn actress need not have many sexual partners, so the central concept underlying the semantics of both the slurs does not need to obtain. marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi examples – . as these examples indicate, stormy gladly accepts and confirms the various pejo- rative epithets. in some of the cases, she replies as if they hold formally (a “busi- ness card”) and playfully uses them as part of a distancing form of address (“miss”). faced with the blatantly offensive (impolite) insults, she performs politeness upshifts as she addresses the insulters with a polite formula (“nice to meet ya”) or praise (“at least you’ve been paying attention” and “i love your enthu- siasm”). another noteworthy strategy involves modifying the pejorative epithets. whilst retaining the slurs, stormy substitutes positive modifiers for negative ones either in her post content (“happy” vs “sad” “whore”) or in the hashtag metadata that she corrects (“successful” vs “poor” “old slut”). she thus pictures the con- structs communicated through the pejorative epithets as being positive. here are some further, more elaborate examples ( – ), where she makes apt and/or witty observations, accepting the pejorative labels applied to her. example . in example , doing wordplay based on two derogatory terms, stormy explicitly conceptualises what she is accused of as something pleasurable. she also does trumping, based on the meaning of “ ” with the use of vivid sexual imagery. humorous retorts to insults on twitter examples – . whilst accepting the stigmatising label as being relevant to her, in example , stormy makes a rational observation about her marital status at the time, which proves the insulter wrong. also, similar to other cases above, in example , she changes the epithet preceding the slur as if paying herself a tongue-in-cheek com- pliment (“dumb” vs. “smart”) and thereby she wittily escapes the doom pictured by the insulter. yet another strategy that stormy uses involves recognising posi- tive aspects in the pejorative label not envisaged by the insulter. this is the case of the pig epithet, illustrated with a gif (showing an angry birds pig dancing) in example . example . stormy turns the offensive epithet (together with its visual representation) into a compliment (see also kampf ) based on a positive feature attributed to the animal, feigning obliviousness to the intended meaning. this instance may then be seen as rhetorical re-focusing (similar to trumping), that is changing the topic by focusing on a non-salient or basically irrelevant issue present in, or inspired by, the original comment. insulters sometimes facilitate this, for instance through making typos, as in example , or questionable assumptions, as in example . marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi example . capitalising on a typo in the insult (“are” vs “ate”), stormy offers what she pre- sents as a compromising revelation (its veracity aside) about her recent meal, as well as making a sexual allusion with impunity to taunt the insulter, who seems to have intended to frown upon her sexual activity. example . stormy opens another tweet (example ) by mocking the form of address the user has deployed (cf. example ) only to address a secondary issue, possibly irrelevant from the latter’s perspective. thereby, stormy rationalises the premise underlying the insult, which has somewhat convoluted imagery (“manure” and a metonymic passenger to “cart” simultaneously). rationalisation that reveals some flaws in the insulter’s logic or premises can be a humorous response strategy in its own right, as many of stormy’s comebacks bear out, such as the one in example (see also examples , and ). example . replying to a female user (which can be gathered based on the name and picture edited out here) who has cast a slur at her in the previous tweet, stormy makes a humorous retorts to insults on twitter rational comment referring to the time of the exchange only to tease the prudish interlocutor with a sexual scenario involving herself. additionally, in examples – , the few rationalising replies bring to light the situational irony (see dynel b and references therein) co-created by the users’ mildly insulting tweets suggesting that stormy’s contributions are irrelevant, offensive or uninter- esting. stormy wittily points out the contradiction co-constructed by the tweets, which exerts humorous effects. examples – . apart from providing rational replies that bring out the contextual silliness of the original tweets in examples and , in example , stormy attempts to insult the attacker through a relevant slur, in tandem with other target group members, wittily playing with im/politeness effects. after making a metapragmatic remark about avoiding “rudeness”, she actually goes on to be seemingly impolite, ulti- mately indicating her jocularity with the hugs and kisses symbol. it needs to be pointed out that she rarely insults her twitter interlocutors. besides this example, the corpus contains only a few other cases where stormy seems to trade insults. examples – . in the tit-for-tat retorts in examples and , stormy makes rational observa- tions that puncture the users’ insulting rhetoric only to give potentially offensive statements herself. these, nonetheless, may be considered more of jocular insults, rather than genuinely abusive assertions, given their hyperbolic nature and no validation for the claims she makes. this is even more pronounced in the next two cases in examples and , where absurdity is evident. marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi examples – . what example shows is that stormy seems to reconcile herself to the slut- shaming slur while not accepting the retirement suggestion. she thus creates a fic- tional scenario that hyperbolises her allegedly old age and jocularly threatens the insulter’s grandmother, calling her “nana”, which is in line with “muffin”, another old-fashioned term of endearment typifying an elderly person’s idiolect. simi- larly, in the retort in example based on the garden-path mechanism (see dynel ) – “can you?” promotes an interpretation that the speaker can perform the incredible sexual feat and is boasting about this, which turns out not to be the case – stormy seems to allude to the “yo mama” humorous routine in order to joc- ularly insult the addressee with the rather absurd suggestion. however, as many examples have corroborated, rather than aggressively but still playfully teasing her insulters via jocular insults, stormy often performs self- deprecation (see section ). this is manifest in her honest admissions delivered in a humorous tone or just self-compromising statements whose truthfulness is irrel- evant. in either case, she brazenly admits to her profession and other “flaws”, as in examples and . examples – . having made a rational observation about the post (cf. examples – ), stormy makes an honest admission about her breasts, coupled with an absurd compari- son for hyperbolic and humorous effects. on the other hand, rather than deny- ing the insulting slut-shaming premise that underlies the rhetorical question, she overtly pretends – as is quite clear – to be engaged in the activity in order to turn tables on the insulter. in some cases, the truthfulness of the jocular self-revelations cannot be established for lack of any available evidence. humorous retorts to insults on twitter examples – . as examples and show, while implicitly accepting the pejorative labels and the well-known facts about her profession, stormy makes humorous admissions (about her pet hates and musical preferences), whose truthfulness cannot be cat- egorically known and is basically insignificant in the context at hand. . discussion the analysis of the representative corpus of stormy daniels’s humorous replies to insults indicates a significant function of humour that has not been widely recognised so far, namely humour as a successful rhetorical strategy in response to insults. as the data examined here illustrate, the most salient leitmotifs in her humorous reactions to insulting tweets are wit and creativity, often coupled with self-deprecation. stormy daniels uses a range of form-related linguistic tools and conceptual operations, which may not only overlap but also co-occur, such as: wordplay (including puns) and play with the form, creative applications of rhetorical figures (metaphor and irony), teasing, trumping, jocular insults, joint fantasising, witty acceptance of slurs, rhetorical re-focusing, rational observations puncturing insulters’ rhetoric and logic (including recognition of situational irony), and com- promising self-revelations. all of these help her to save face and, not necessarily fully consciously, display her wit and eloquence, as well as a good sense of humour. what stormy daniels must be mindful of, however, is that the insults she endures and the retorts she hurls are publicly available. this is why she will intend not only to address the insulters but also to communicate her replies to other twitter users so that they should find them apt and possibly also amusing. her tweets are indeed appreciated as being humorous and rhetorically successful by users on twitter and, thanks to reposting, on other new media, as indicated by the vast numbers of hearts, reposts and positive metapragmatic comments by ordinary people and public commentators (e.g. journalists). . nevertheless, it is not the case that all members of the general public must find the humour amusing. humour appreciation is idiosyncratic and depends on many variables. in the present marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi the humour receivers, presumably, do not include the retorts’ addressees, inasmuch as their rhetoric is deflated. as long as they do read the replies and see other users’ reactions, they may find themselves conversationally defeated, hence feeling embarrassed or even dejected. even though most of stormy’s reactions are not insulting to the addressees, many might sound a tad aggressive as she outwits the interlocutors and thereby demonstrates her intellectual superiority over them. her public retorts to insults online epitomise utterances which (aim to) attain dif- ferent communicative goals with respect to different hearers in multi-party inter- actions, with not all being intended, or able, to appreciate the creative humour (see dynel , ). rather than evidently taking offence or counter-attacking her insulters, which stormy does rather rarely, she typically prefers to deploy what most receivers can see as creative humour, which is a testament to her composure and sharp wit. thereby, she skillfully deflects the criticism (cf. stewart ), not concep- tualising the features and epithets (concerning the sexual domain) ascribed to her as shameful. in most of these witty retorts, stormy daniels boldly admits to, or tacitly concedes to, what is traditionally considered vices, taking the insults on the chin. such retorts then qualify as self-denigrating or self-deprecating (or self-deprecatory) humour (zajdman ; boxer and cortés-conde ; holmes ; hay ; greengross and miller ; schnurr and chan ; stewart ), also known as self-directed joking (ziv ; norrick ; lampert and ervin-tripp ; ervin-tripp and lampert ). this form of humour testifies to her ability to laugh at herself, building a positive self-image (norrick ; boxer and cortés-conde ; lampert and ervin-tripp ; schnurr and chan ). therefore, stormy daniels very often tacitly communicates a message along the lines of: “i am weak, i admit it. to admit means to be strong. so, i am strong” (zajdman , ), thus being in control of the situation (schnurr and chan ) and even superior, especially when her retort is not only self- deprecatory but also creatively constructed and undermines the interlocutor’s rhetoric and/or logic at the same time. greengross and miller ( , ) rightly observe that “expert use of self-deprecating humor can be an especially risky, reli- able indicator not only of general intelligence and verbal creativity, but also of moral virtues such as humility.” as various psychological studies indicate, self- deprecation is a very well-received type of humour, which puts the speakers in a positive light (e.g. greengross and miller ; stewart ), which is believed to facilitate affiliation and solidarity-based relationships (chapel ; ziv ; meyer ). context, relevant factors include people’s individual attitudes to sexual matters, as well as dispo- sitions towards the actress and the us president. humorous retorts to insults on twitter self-deprecating humour is reported to be a risk-laden strategy for it involves self-handicapping and explicitly indicating one’s latent faults and flaws, and thus it is mainly high-status individuals that can afford to deploy it (greengross and miller ). stormy daniels’s use of self-deprecation does testify to the claim that “the individual making the self-deprecatory comment may be seen as having so much social prestige they can afford to” (stewart , ). it is because she is aware of her high status earned thanks to her profession, which, paradoxocally, the general public can consider – or, at least, present as being – morally question- able (see poppi and sandberg forth), that she boldly admits to the widely known facts, rhetorically turning tables on the accusers. in her case, self-deprecation is not the standard coping strategy that allows the speaker to make light of his/ her shortcomings (see ziv ). when dealing with the insults, stormy daniels reconceptualises the alleged shortcomings as advantages. on a related note, self- deprecating humour is often associated with covert weaknesses and vices that the speaker identifies himself/herself before they are discovered (ziv ). the speaker thus performs “confessional self-abasement” for instance through per- sonal anecdotes (lampert and ervin-tripp ). by contrast, stormy daniels boldly admits to her widely known activities or characteristics and gladly echoes the slurs with which she is pelted. this is in line with the suggestion that “self- deprecating humor often highlights – in a socially pre-emptive way – perceived deficits” (greengross and miller , ). stormy daniels turns what the attack- ers conceive as a source of embarrassment into a source of pride, encoding her messages humorously (cf. holmes ) and/or making humorous admissions or self-revelations, whether truthful or not (dynel ). . conclusions and final comments this paper has addressed the topic of insult-retort adjacency pairs on twitter, focusing on the rhetorical effects of humour. our study indicates the need to examine insults and replies thereto in a broader context, which poses a challenge especially in the case of social media data, so that jocular/ritual insults can be distinguished from insults proper. additionally, rather than examining the insults alone, it is crucial to focus on the reactions they elicit in line with the conversation-analytic tradition. instead of openly taking offence, the target of an insult may respond, among other things, in a humorous tone, without necessar- ily reciprocating the insult. this, in turn, reveals a hitherto ignored communica- tive function of humour as a means of saving face and achieving rhetorical victory over the insulter. marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi the empirical findings reported here are based on a corpus of select top tweets posted by stormy daniels, who has developed a reputation as an emanci- pated woman endowed with a great sense of humour and capable of producing witty replies. she thus gains the upper hand in online exchanges when publicly replying to insults that seem to be deployed as a political weapon, namely to publicly intimidate and disparage trump’s opponent, rather than being merely a prevalent means of garnering interest and high status online (see housley et al. b). the twitter data analysed in this paper indicate that through her humor- ous retorts, stormy daniels never shows taking offence at the misogynist insults, nor does she come across as being inferior; instead, she uses the alleged vices as a source of pride, and she does so in a very witty and creative manner. she must post the superiority-building, but hardly insulting, tweets with the multiple receivers in mind (cf. vásquez ), aiming to build a positive public image and amuse the general public, albeit – presumably – not the insulter (and like-minded people endorsing his/her tweet). indeed, her retorts are positively evaluated by both twitter users and journalists, as the plethora of upvotes and metapragmatic comments online demonstrate. stormy daniels’s humorous reactions to misogy- nist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming, come across as being much more effective than any aggressive replies might be (cf. jane ). given her pro- fession, she is able to “one up” her insulters by acknowledging and unapologeti- cally owning her sexual activities. all this offers interesting practical implications for women subjected to sexist/ misogynist remarks in everyday conversations, as well as in online interactions, where women are the frequent targets of verbal aggression and pejorative ide- ologies (see e.g. bou-franch and garcés-conejos blitvich ; jaki et al. ). whilst slut-shamed women in lines of work other than sex business might not be able to respond in quite the same way as stormy daniels does, they could still attempt to claim their sexuality, rather than succumb to the dominant sexist ide- ologies (cf. poppi and sandberg forth). most importantly, regardless of the nature of the misogynist insult, trying to keep a stiff upper lip and retorting in a witty and humorous manner may be the best way of silencing the verbal abuser and secur- ing a rhetorical victory over him or, importantly, her. additionally, while previous studies have shown that self-denigration is a means of sharing amusement and affirming solidarity, as well as a tool for over- coming evident embarrassment (walkinshaw et al. ), our study adduces evi- dence that self-deprecating humour can be used in markedly different contexts, namely where no embarrassment can be detected on the target’s part. self- deprecating humour may be employed to communicate one’s superiority over the interlocutor with a view to amusing other participants in publicly available humorous retorts to insults on twitter multi-party interactions online and asserting one’s strong social and interper- sonal position. on a higher plane, humorous replies to insults can be considered “dispre- ferred” (cf. e.g. sacks ; levinson ) reactions to the intimidating com- ments. the insults are thus undermined, if not wholly disarmed, rather than occasioning the planned/preferred reactions indicative of offence being taken, for instance, when no answer or an angry reply follows from the target. even though each consecutive insulter should be braced for stormy daniels’s comebacks (cog- nisant of how she has responded to the previous ones), they cannot really envisage the nature of her reply to their own insult, which is the essence of the retort’s rhetorical success. following sacks ( [ ], ), we can conclude that “there’s a big crucial thing on having the last word” after an insult has been produced. irrespective of who the winner of the political and legal trump-daniels battle turns out to be in future, stormy daniels is a powerful opponent, if not an unquestionable winner, in the battle of wits on twitter. funding this work was supported by the national science centre, poland (project number / /e/ hs / ). references allan, keith and kate burridge. . forbidden words: taboo and the censoring of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/ . /cbo arnovick, leslie. . “sounding and flyting the english agonistic insult: writing pragmatic history in a cross-cultural context.” in the twenty-first l acus forum . chapel hill, n.c.: the linguistic association of canada and the united states, edited by m. powell, – . bou-franch, patricia, and pilar 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% % -g https://doi.org/ . % f https://doi.org/ . % f - address for correspondence marta dynel university of Łódź department of pragmatics institute of english studies ul. pomorska / - Łódź poland marta.dynel@yahoo.com co-author information fabio i. m. poppi university of Łódź sechenov university fabioimpoppi@me.com https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - humorous retorts to insults on twitter mailto:marta.dynel@yahoo.com https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - x mailto:fabioimpoppi@me.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - 	arcana imperiisecrets of power/the empire (latin): the power of humorous retorts to insults on twitter 	marta dynel and fabio i. m. poppi university of Łódź, poland | sechenov university, russia 	 .introduction 	 .insult-reply adjacency pairs 	 .setting the scene 	 .methodology: data collection and annotation 	 .data analysis 	 .discussion 	 .conclusions and final comments 	funding 	references 	address for correspondence 	co-author information promoting digital humanitarian action in protecting human rights: hope or hype commentary open access promoting digital humanitarian action in protecting human rights: hope or hype dzhennet-mari akhmatova * and malika-sofi akhmatova abstract the digital transformation has affected every aspect of human being by bringing fundamental changes in technology, culture, operations, and principles of creating new products and services in the framework of economic globalization and innovations. humanitarian action has not been left out either as the implementation of digital solutions provides large-scale opportunities to enhance the performance of humanitarian practices and, as a result, the capability to save more lives of people affected by armed conflicts or disasters, migrants, and refugees. in this commentary, we are focused on such a vulnerable subject as human rights, freedoms, and dignity protection in the digital domain of humanitarian assistance since it is inextricably linked to risks and threats of being a member of the digital world. we consider and synthesize the experience of parties involved into the valuable work on humanitarian action and highlight the lessons from the past as well as decisions taken in the present to fundamentally update and adapt humanitarian assistance to confidently meet challenges while protecting its fundamental principles and add value to humanitarian missions. keywords: digital, humanitarian action, human rights, digital geneva convention, data protection introduction technology plays a much larger role in the digital era than it did for previous generations (hashim ) and is letting businesses maintain ongoing and experience- driven relationships with individual consumers in ways that were impossible before (biltz et al. ). in this context, the digital era contributes to the significant changes in understanding the relevant perspectives in international humanitarian law and related humanitarian practice. sandvik et al. ( ) emphasized that technol- ogy is substantially perceived as a transformative tool to alter the humanitarian action foundations (capgemini consulting ). for instance, microsoft will invest $ million to apply artificial intelligence (ai) to humanitar- ian issues as to a program on disaster-response, needs of children across the world, issues affecting refugees, and human rights problems (lerman ). the rationale for consideration of current transform- ation in practices of humanitarian action is also in the fact that the growing trend of digitalization in emerging economies, as well as in affected countries, is fundamen- tally changing the context and ways in which humanitar- ian assistance is executed (stoll ; dave ; casswell and hamilton ). usage of messaging apps, social networks, media platforms, and mobile money by people that are affected by humanitarian crises, critical situations, disasters, and accidents is being actively intro- duced (lunt ; kaspersen and lindsey-curtet ; bouffet ). however, while the digital technologies provide new opportunities for communication in com- plex situations, the humanitarian and volunteer organi- zations do not have appropriate standards or internationally agreed and approved ethical norms for their deployment that in combination with people’s liv- ing conditions, specific culture of developing countries, social and material inequalities, and women’s rights problems can cause serious obstacles in facilitating hu- manitarian support. © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. * correspondence: dzhennet-mari.akhmatova@mail.ru faculty of law, lomonosov moscow state university, leninskie gory, - , humanities building, moscow , russia full list of author information is available at the end of the article journal of international humanitarian action akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:dzhennet-mari.akhmatova@mail.ru furthermore, since the complementarity and mutual influence inform the interaction between international humanitarian law and international human rights law (droege ), then the digital trends entrenched in hu- manitarian practice affect the entire spectrum of hu- manitarian assistance, as well as human place and rights in this framework. considering the relevant scope of digital humanitarian action, this commentary is aimed to ask questions on the crucial area of human rights, freedoms, and dignity protection in the context of digital humanitarian assist- ance through analysis of global experience and revealing the issues and limitations on the latest technology imple- mentation to support the human rights-orientated hu- manitarian practice. digital humanitarian action perspectives mobile technology and messaging apps it is an undeniable fact that mobile phones as well as in- stalled messaging apps, such as whatsapp, facebook messenger, wechat, kakaotalk, and telegram, have be- come an integral part of our lives since they allow users to send and receive a wider range of data than it is pos- sible using mobile phone networks. as these apps grow in popularity, their usage in emer- gencies is also on the rise (lunt ). some studies pre- dict that smartphone subscriptions will almost double from . billion to . billion by , meaning that most adults on earth will have access to some form of connected mobile device (thomas ). new research, led by the international committee of the red cross (icrc), also suggests messaging apps could play a cru- cial role in humanitarian work in the future (stoll ). from this, communities affected by harsh living condi- tions, war, and natural disasters can rely on these plat- forms to keep in touch with each other, have access to up-to-date information and connect with humanitarian facilities and volunteers to report on a difficult or life- threatening condition that requires emergency humani- tarian assistance. importance of discussed digital solutions in the area of humanitarian assistance can be emphasized by a case in west africa where the british broadcasting corporation (bbc) world service turned to messaging apps in to broadcast public health information regarding ebola, reaching , subscribers in various local languages. furthermore, in yemen, people affected by war are now able to contact the icrc using whatsapp to report se- curity incidents and request urgent assistance (lunt ). in drought-stricken somaliland, a whatsapp group called daryeel, “caring”, is directly connecting “donors” with affected relatives and their communities (bouffet ). the results are significant: “ water trucks sent out, monthly food packages for families across villages, and a total of usd , donated by somali diasporas from around the world” (bouffet ). according to the icrc report, titled humanitar- ian futures for messaging apps, israeli-based humani- tarian non-governmental organization israaid uses a whatsapp group for staff communications in each of the countries in which it actively works to share in- formation quickly (icrc and the engine room and block party ). there are no doubts that positive practices on messaging apps usage can be adapted and expanded by humanitarian, volunteer and non- governmental facilities, aid workers, and leaders of mes- saging apps market. humanitarian apps in the framework of digitalization, implementation of advanced information systems, such as humanitarian apps, contributes to tackling a wide range of problems (lunt ; hill ). in many cases, usage of humani- tarian apps is to ensure timely coordination, agile, and precise response to urgent situations. for instance, w (who, what, where, and when) maps were developed to provide information for the planning of humanitarian assistance, covering the critical questions, such as who is doing what, where, and when. tracking of humanitarian responders, automated updat- ing of their location and responsibilities were piloted for nepal, vanuatu, and the philippines (comes and de walle ). further, kobotoolbox, developed by the harvard humanitarian initiative, is a free suite of tools for humanitarian data collection to be used in challen- ging environments (kobotoolbox ). tracerx plat- form is positioned as a well-known humanitarian supply chain solution. in large-scale emergencies, such as the earthquake in nepal in april and the hurricane in haiti in october , humanitarian id was used to perform the humanitarian contact lists management (united nations office for the coordination of humani- tarian affairs ; stewart ). as the digital state-of-the-art solutions, the mentioned platforms together with messaging apps contribute to re- sponse coordination and communication between af- fected communities, volunteers, and aid workers to provide the integrated digital environment for transpar- ent and timely humanitarian assistance. however, to ad- dress the full complexity of processes on humanitarian action, the dedicated logistics information systems are required to complement the generic humanitarian infor- mation systems (comes and de walle ). drones in humanitarian assistance the advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (uav), also known as a drone, is an item whose flight is controlled either autonomously by artificial intelligence, computers, akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of or a pilot on the ground. the uavs received worldwide media attention since they had a significant range of ap- plications, such as usage for military purposes in pakistan (us army), aid work development in africa (matternet), and parcel delivery in germany (dhl paket), as well as throughout the world (dhl customer solutions and innovation ). the promising direc- tions of drone application in humanitarian crises are the following: mapping, delivering essential items to hard- to-access locations, monitoring environmental changes, supporting damage assessments, etc. (fondation suisse de déminage ). humanitarian organizations have started to use uavs, including in haiti and the philippines to provide real-time information and situ- ation monitoring, public information, search and rescue, etc. (united nations office for the coordination of hu- manitarian affairs ). in this way, different types of drones ensure accurate and up-to-date data on demand, helping representatives of humanitarian missions to make more informed decisions. however, some issues, such as data protection, should be addressed during ap- plication of drones. damoclis gladius: human rights scope despite the active development of new technologies, the emergence of innovations, the digitalization of processes in all areas of our lives, including humanitarian action, the human rights issues are adapting to current condi- tions, entailing challenges behind. it is required to con- sider the scope of problems related to the human rights protection in the context of digital humanitarian action. the price of access to digital solutions: gender gap . billion women now own a mobile phone in low- and middle-income countries (lmics), and over a billion use the mobile internet. however, a significant gender gap in mobile phone ownership and usage exposes women to the risk of being left behind in an increasingly digitized world. in this context, females in lmics are % less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. the variations within specific regions and countries are significant (downer ). furthermore, women in south asia are % less likely to own a mobile than men and % less likely to use mobile internet (rowntree ). in india, % of men own personal mobile phones, but only % percent of women do (vota ). the reasons for this situation are as old as time and associated with such ob- vious barriers such as the availability of new technolo- gies, cultural, religious and social background, and attitude to women’s rights. the exclusion of women refugees and internally dis- placed women from the digital world and societies would negatively affect the possibilities to be rescued from dangerous situations and to express the rights to life, liberty, and security of a person, as it is stated in the universal declaration of human rights ( ). the existence of such trends requires the immediate identification of cause-and-effect relationships and con- certed action to remove obstacles to women’s equal ac- cess to mobile services in the context of countries, where the gender gap is greatest. mobile operators, soft- ware developers, humanitarian facilities, and non- governmental organizations (ngos) can work together to promote policies and initiatives aimed to reduce the cost of phones or enhance work on mitigation of the im- pact of cultural traditions and social norms on their use, such as awareness sessions, informative talks, and seminars. hashtag: women humanitarians the role of women humanitarians should be emphasized as they are also vulnerable to the dangers and perform the precious work in the conditions of armed conflicts, nature disasters, hunger, and humanitarian catastrophe, risking their health and lives. subject of women humani- tarians’ vulnerability has been brought to light in discus- sions of #aidtoo movement, inspired by #metoo and opposed to the sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse. widespread reports of sexual misconduct in hu- manitarian contexts threaten women humanitarians’ own safety and security (o’donnell ) and confirm the violations of inviolable human rights. in the current context, there is a need to actively ad- dress the issues of gender equality in humanitarian ac- tion and protection of women from sexual harassment and abuse in order to ensure respect for women rights and dignity, since, according to article of universal declaration of human rights ( ), “everyone is enti- tled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this dec- laration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. furthermore, the specific limitations should not affect the access of women humanitarians to the digital solu- tions developed to enhance the effectiveness of their work under the changing environment. double-headed barrel: digital media and communications one of the most important links that connects those who need humanitarian assistance with those who are interested in responding is digital media and communi- cations, integrating mobile mass communication with the internet. according to lobb and mock ( ), dur- ing humanitarian response efforts, the mass media serves as the primary informational intermediary, informing donors, and policy-makers as well as the non-affected public. akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of the role of digital mass media can be revealed by a case of one of the worst human disaster in sri lanka in , such as a tsunami. the media of sri lanka reacted in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and trans- ferred all programming to coverage of the disaster. how- ever, after a while, instead of reporting the real scope of problems faced by the affected population, journalists concentrated on “political intrigue and scandal” (mor- tensen ). this case shows the extent to which digital media may influence the international community’s un- derstanding of the problem. according to lobb and mock ( ), “…disaster and crisis response often is hampered by poor communication.” in the context of humanitarian action, it is necessary to improve relations with the media in such a way that the disseminated infor- mation concerns real problems and contributes to the fastest response of international organizations, ngos, pol- icies, etc. to provide appropriate assistance to the commu- nities affected by the crises. the involvement of the media in addressing issues of humanitarian support, the expan- sion of published studies, commentaries, and articles cov- ering current problems and obstacles and joint efforts of leading decision-makers, can facilitate the development of a reliable basis for strengthening the synergy effect in the provision of humanitarian assistance. changed nature of conflict: humanitarian action digitalization threats while digital solutions provide the capabilities to re- spond to crises in a better way, if mismanaged, these same technologies risk exposing users to violations of their rights (hill ). usage of cyberspace and the lat- est technology as a serious weapon is emphasized through the growing scope of cyberattacks, influencing the safety and security of civilian populations, for in- stance, the negative consequences that affected the healthcare and other civil infrastructures across the world by the wannacry attack (guay and rudnick ). further, the messaging apps actualize problems related to data protection, privacy, and security since the infor- mation environment is often contested, and misinforma- tion, propaganda, and rumors travel swiftly (roby ), particularly, in the case of armed conflicts and disasters. for humanitarians, the risks of mobile app usage are as- sociated with submitting or providing the permission to access the personal information, such as name, location, contacts, email address, and photos. the negative side is that this allows the provider of messaging app to collect a significant information on the user, including his daily routine, personal preferences, and list of trustees. social media is a related topic since the generated so- cial media data (i.e., content) or metadata (i.e., descrip- tion), even it is for humanitarian purposes, can be an object for commercial exploitation and provide informa- tion on the user’s sort of activity, political, social and re- ligious affiliations, sexual orientation, etc. (icrc and privacy international ). despite the fact that humanitarian aid is to serve people in crises, during use of advanced drones, cash transfer programs, mobile networks, or telecommunica- tions, all parties involved, including humanitarian orga- nizations, are exposed to the risks of data interception, tracking, or access by unauthorized persons with bad in- tentions. the ambiguity of the situation is also in the fact that legislation around the protection of metadata and data is not uniform worldwide, and the places where humanitarian facilities operate tend to be under- enforced, or under-legislated (bouffet and marelli ). thus, the gap created in the field of information protec- tion and legal norms in the era of digitalization can be used to violate human rights, his freedoms, and create threats to his life, whether he is a humanitarian worker, volunteer, or a refugee. reducing entropy since protecting personal data is a pillar of protecting life, rights, and dignity, there is a required need to iden- tify the ways to mitigate or balance risks in the context of humanitarian action digitalization. time-tested solutions for new challenges: digital geneva convention as far as we know, the last (i.e. fourth) geneva conven- tion ( ) formed an important contribution to the international law in the humanitarian domain, as well as to the protection of civilians affected by war. consid- ering the transformation of society, world digitalization and globalization, the subject of geneva convention adaptation for the current conditions is highly relevant and has been proposed by microsoft to promote inter- national cooperation and to prevent warfare in cyber- space (tworek ). the digital geneva convention would be aimed to play the central role in safeguarding civilians around the world from state-led or state- sanctioned cyberattacks during peacetime (microsoft ). thus, this initiative is a call to action in the con- text of a new digital community to update and adapt rights and obligations to the current realities. an important part of the changes is also the policies of companies, operating in the framework of digitalization, and their initiatives on the corporate social responsibility (csr) that include cause promotion, cause-related marketing, corporate social marketing and philanthropy, community volunteering, and socially re- sponsible business practices (kotler et al. ). akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of learning from the mistakes: digital data protection the principle of “do no harm” is considered the minimum requirement underlying all policies and ap- proaches in humanitarian assistance (capgemini con- sulting ). in this context, some attempts to protect personal data and information transmitted through messaging apps are performed by their devel- opers. for instance, the founder of the telegram app, pavel durov, launched the messenger in with the promise of end-to-end encryption (icrc and the engine room and block party ) of data without any possibility to be read by the company itself. the international committee of the red cross (icrc and privacy international ) also deals with the issue of metadata protection in the framework of humani- tarian action. at the same time, the updated privacy policy of whatsapp in suggested that whatsapp would share users’ personal data with “the facebook family of companies” for three purposes: business analysis, system security, and targeted advertising (icrc and privacy international ). it was alleged that what- sapp was sharing users’ personal data with facebook without a fair notice or a legitimate legal basis. how- ever, in , whatsapp committed to not sharing eu (european union) users’ personal data with face- book prior to the implementation of the general data protection regulation (icrc and privacy international ). wechat and kakaotalk have been also pub- licly criticized after revelations of potential collabor- ation with governments in response to requests for user data (icrc and the engine room and block party ). all parties involved in humanitarian action provision should understand the importance of the need to prevent the leakage of personal data and vio- lations of privacy, as the potential negative conse- quences for people’s lives and rights are significant. thus, much depends on the decision-makers within the companies, their internal and external policies as well as appropriate support from the government. accord- ing to kaspersen and lindsey-curtet ( ), it is essential to provide “proactive discussion on global standards for collecting, sharing and storing data in times of crisis – and a zero-tolerance for attempts to penetrate these organiza- tions to gain insights into people at their most vulnerable”. the problems associated with the humane use of the latest technologies in humanitarian assistance should be raised for discussion by the international commu- nity in order to identify ways for covering the hu- manitarian principles such as humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence (united nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs ) in the era of digitalization. conclusions the key objective of this commentary has been to con- sider the scope of humanitarian action in digital domain and to reveal the bottlenecks that affect effectiveness of humanitarian assistance through the human rights viola- tion and threats posed by the era of digitalization. from this, the following conclusions can be formulated. the fundamental changes in the provision of humani- tarian assistance, concerning the development of digital technologies and state-of-the art solutions, may have a direct impact on the sustainability of the fundamental principles of humanitarian practice and human rights. ignoring these issues by the international community costs the lives of hundreds and millions of people af- fected by the crisis, humanitarian catastrophe, or war. a timely incorporation of cyber threats into legal, social, and political frameworks should be accompanied by ac- tive actions by the politicians, world government leaders, ngos, humanitarian organizations, volunteers, services providers, leaders of csr initiatives, etc. to consider the whole scope of challenges faced by both crisis-affected populations and aid workers who are genuinely involved in saving lives and also vulnerable. hence, a digital gen- eva convention would become one of the effective plat- forms to formalize the norms and standards in prevention the illegal actions with the aim to secure cyberspace. ensuring the protection of digital data and information is a key concern for all parties involved in humanitarian action. furthermore, the responsible approach is needed to improve the knowledge of people affected by armed con- flicts, refugees, or migrants on the use of new technolo- gies, as well as aid workers and volunteers, to ensure the most secure and ethical use of digital devices for oper- ational two-way communication, reliable coordination, and management. the continuous coverage of the real problems faced by humanitarian missions in mass media, social media platforms, scientific articles, blogs, etc. as well as a joint search for solutions should be provided. the specific risks are an integral part of our lives, however, we cannot ignore the new opportunities that would help to enhance the performance of humanitarian action and create an environment that is friendly to hu- man rights, freedoms, and dignity. abbreviations bbc: british broadcasting corporation; csr: corporate social responsibility; eu: european union; icrc: international committee of the red cross; lmics: low- and middle-income countries; ngo: non-governmental organization; uav: unmanned aerial vehicle; usd: united states dollar acknowledgements the authors would like to thank associate professor zaira akhmedova for the motivation for paper preparation. akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of authors’ contributions dma investigated the scope of considered issues, analyzed key trends, provided recommendations, and edited the paper. msa summarized the results and formulated the conclusions. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding no funding was received for this article. availability of data and materials not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. author details faculty of law, lomonosov moscow state university, leninskie gory, - , humanities building, moscow , russia. school of aeronautics and astronautics, shanghai jiao tong university, dongchuan rd. minhang district, shanghai , china. received: october accepted: june references biltz m, carrel-billiard m, daugherty pr, hadar e, liongosari er ( ) the post-digital era – technology trends and needed research. https://www. researchgate.net/publication/ _the_post-digital_era_- technology_trends_and_needed_research. accessed june . bouffet t ( ) how messaging apps are changing the way people respond to humanitarian crises. 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https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/documents/udhr_translations/eng.pdf. accessed sept . vota w ( ) why does south asia have the world largest mobile phone gender gap? https://www.ictworks.org/south-asia-mobile-phone-gender-gap/ #.xbayr-gzbiu. accessed sept . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. akhmatova and akhmatova journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/documents/udhr_translations/eng.pdf.% % accessed% % sept% https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/documents/udhr_translations/eng.pdf.% % accessed% % sept% https://www.ictworks.org/south-asia-mobile-phone-gender-gap/#.xbayr-gzbiu https://www.ictworks.org/south-asia-mobile-phone-gender-gap/#.xbayr-gzbiu 	abstract 	introduction 	digital humanitarian action perspectives 	mobile technology and messaging apps 	humanitarian apps 	drones in humanitarian assistance 	damoclis gladius: human rights scope 	the price of access to digital solutions: gender gap 	hashtag: women humanitarians 	double-headed barrel: digital media and communications 	changed nature of conflict: humanitarian action digitalization threats 	reducing entropy 	time-tested solutions for new challenges: digital geneva convention 	learning from the mistakes: digital data protection 	conclusions 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note with the ignition of the #metoo movement, increasing uncertainty of north korea’s nuclear armament and string of terror attacks around the world, the latter half of was an undeniably contentious time. throughout all the uncertainty, the constant push remains for innovative research. healthcare and life expectancy have improved drastically around the world, thanks to innovative biomedical research. however, this trend of has not impacted all countries equally, and that cannot be ignored. it is the mission the journal of global health to bring to the forefront innovations and areas of improvement in parts of the world that do not always have an international presence. this issue highlights the promise of emerging innovations. while the history of global health is studded with many scientific breakthroughs, in recent years, the forms of innovation have multiplied. there have been advances in traditional medical devices such as tele-stethoscopy with the potential to transform global healthcare delivery in low- income countries. there have also been new solutions to end stigma associated with disease such as creating opportunities to construct sustainable gardens to benefit communities. we invite you to read about these exciting innovations in the following pages. this issue marks the journal of global health’s seventh year of leading insightful global health discussions around the world. we are proud to present the product of months of hard work by our authors and editors. no single issue can possibly present every valuable research finding from the world of global health research. there is an ever-present need for progress in healthcare, and countless stories and voices remain to be heard. we continue our mission to promote global health dialogue and impactful research in the form of our physical journal, global health podcasts and regularly updated content on our website, wwww. ghjournal.org. smriti kanangat & rahi punjabi editors-in-chief, © the journal of global health. all rights reserved. issn: - (print) issn: - (online) the journal of global health lerner hall broadway new york, ny, , usa info@ghjournal.org jgh | vol vii issue ii | fall all articles published represent the opinions of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy of jgh or institution(s) with which the author is affiliated, unless clearly indicated. manuscripts should be submitted at www.ghjournal.org. all inquiries regarding submissions, advertisements, subscriptions and permissions to republish or adapt material should be sent to info@ ghjournal.org. photo from nasa the journal of global health s ta f f letter from the editors dear reader, *head editors-in-chief smiriti kanangat rahi punjabi executive editor emily sun managing editor chandana golla website hyunsoo chung* sarah shi senior editors anthony chesebro nathan lam ankita saxena associate editors waleed ali lynn bi michelle bosche samuel castro celine chen joshua choe hyunsoo chung abhishek chakraborty aimee cicchiello ailis dooner victor gordillo lilian ha linnie jiang claire kim kelly lew katie long rachel mintz asim rana sairaj sajjath neeraj sakhrani john sheehy shreya sirivolu anna sung jerica tan anisha tyagi naazanene vatan varun venkatesh joyce zhou online editors waleed ali* alvina han* alondra aguilar kat chen patrick kelly jason mohabir guadelupe nufino jeremy perna renee ren jerica tan anisha tyagi max rose zimberg graduate board sarah bress anjali doshi abilgail elmer mozhgon jeddi sarah kramer ena oru kathleen rees business & communication nathan lam design katie long smriti kanangat rahi punjabi towards inclusive scholarly publishing: developments in the university press community this article provides an overview of the ways in which the members of the association of university presses are working towards more inclusive practices in scholarly publishing. the authors consider the mellon university press diversity fellowship program (now in its fourth year), the work of the association’s diversity and inclusion task force, the gender, equity and cultures of respect task force and the new equity, justice and inclusion committee. they also look at press-based working groups and several ‘toolkits for equity’ that are currently in development. the volunteers engaged in these and other efforts are working to document how bias has shaped universities and university presses, to propose actions to disrupt this powerful force and to share what they have learned with their colleagues as well as with the larger scholarly publishing and academic communities. towards inclusive scholarly publishing: developments in the university press community keywords diversity; inclusion; equity; bias; university press; scholarly publishing the association of university presses (aupresses, or ‘the association’), founded in , today represents a global community of more than mission-driven scholarly publishers dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. each university press brings a distinctive vision to its work. yet we all are guided by, and united in, core values – integrity, diversity, stewardship and intellectual freedom – that define who we are, the work we do and the goals to which we aspire. aupresses have taken recent steps to explore and advance our core value of diversity, with a goal of empowering inclusion, equity and, ultimately, justice. bias is at the heart of many of the persistent inequalities we see across organizations, even progressive, well-intentioned insights – , towards inclusivity: developments in the up community | niccole leilanionapae’aina coggins, et al. niccole leilanionapae’aina coggins editorial, design and production co-ordinator and assistant project editor university of virginia press gisela concepciÓn fosado editorial director duke university press christie henry director princeton university press gita manaktala editorial director mit press places like universities and university presses, so introspection and honest assessment of our practices, the interests they serve and the people and perspectives they exclude are essential components of this project. armed with baseline information and critique as well as with continuing vigilance, we as leaders and colleagues can understand the scope of the problem and move to creatively disrupt the individual, structural and organizational barriers to equitable decision-making, power-sharing and community-building. we believe that this necessary work will contribute not only to our individual lives, workplaces and publications, but also to the network of stakeholders – the global knowledge ecosystem – that we as university presses serve. beginnings the association’s first diversity-conscious initiatives focused, not surprisingly, on recruitment, development and retention of early-career professionals in the scholarly publishing field, seeking to help our member presses diversify their staff. its annual reports from the early s mention the ways that the association encouraged ‘equal opportunity’ and ’worked actively to promote the hiring of minorities and women for positions of responsibility in scholarly publishing’; this included securing and administering multi-year grants from the metropolitan life foundation to fund summer publishing institute fellowships and from the william and flora hewlett foundation to support interns. attendance by individuals who identify as a member of an under- represented group at our own annual meeting has also been supported by a longstanding ’diversity grant’ program. every year since a mentorship program supported by our professional development committee has linked those new to the profession with mid- and senior-level colleagues as all attend the annual meeting. nearly individuals have been matched with mentors in various departments at presses of different sizes and scopes since this program began. while not explicitly a diversity program, the mentorship matching recognizes the need to build professional relationships; when applying to the program, participants can request a match with mentors from a specific group, demographic or community. mentors and mentees are introduced via e-mail prior to the meeting and pairs determine the amount of interaction prior to, during and after the meeting. mentors advise mentees on getting the most value from the conference, introduce them to colleagues and discuss their career goals. mentees are encouraged to talk with mentors about workplace challenges and opportunities. last summer this program expanded to match virtual mentoring pairs of interested participants not able to attend the annual meeting. mellon university press diversity fellowship program our community’s most recent effort to increase the recruitment and retention of those currently under-represented in publishing is the mellon university press diversity fellowship program, led by the university of washington press. in washington, along with the mit press, duke university press and the university of georgia press, received us$ , from the andrew w mellon foundation to create a three-year program offering year-long acquisitions editorial apprenticeships to individuals with sustained personal engagement with low-income communities and/or communities within the us that are under-represented in publishing. staff at partner presses have learned from and applied the fellows’ perspectives and input and they have provided fellows not only with introductory experiences in scholarly publishing, but also with focused career and job-seeking advice and professional development opportunities, including attendance at the association’s annual meetings at the beginning and end of the fellowship. program organizers and association leadership have worked to introduce members of each cohort ‘worked actively to promote the hiring of minorities and women for positions of responsibility in scholarly publishing’ ‘introspection and honest assessment of our practices … are essential components of this project’ to the wider university press community through listservs and conferences, increasing their visibility to potential employers. the outcome so far of the program has been positive but also highlights where challenges of equity and inclusion remain. ten of the fellows of the first three grant cohorts received full-time job offers from around the community and nine accepted. however, two have since left their positions at university presses. the program won renewed support from the mellon foundation in with us$ , , to expand to six university presses for another three annual cycles. editorial fellowships are currently offered at the university of washington press, the mit press, cornell university press, the ohio state university press, the university of chicago press and northwestern university press. the duration of fellowships has expanded from to months to allow fellows’ terms to overlap. the second cycle of the fellowship is also attempting to apply early lessons to questions of longer-term retention. together the two grant cycles will provide for a total of fellows. participating in the fellowship program has also encouraged host presses to confront diversity and equity challenges in their overall practices. individual presses have noted a number of changes made since joining the program, including: •	 overhauling internship programs and creating new, more equitable entry-level opportunities, including paying interns and looking to less traditional recruitment channels when posting jobs •	 being more aware of the limitations of institutional employment screening processes, which sometimes filter out highly qualified entry- level applicants with valuable non-publishing experience in favor of those with publishing experience (which our members of staff already have) •	 incorporating considerations of diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the hiring process by improving interview practices, including regularly asking all candidates about their experiences with diverse communities or how they work towards equity and inclusion in their interactions with peers and colleagues •	 establishing working groups focused on equity and inclusion to create space for staff discussions and activities. the existence of these internal networks, particularly when supported by leadership, can be an important signal of a press’s commitment, willingness to examine all procedures with regard to equity and inclusion, and support for those who experience aggression or exclusion at work •	 increasing scrutiny of author and peer reviewer networks and faculty board rosters to ensure that a diversity of perspectives, resulting from lived experience as well as professional expertise, informs a press’s publishing decisions. other opportunities to encourage inclusion and equity aupresses has also collaborated with other scholarly publishing groups to encourage inclusive practices. the association was one of the ten co- founders – along with the association of learned and professional society publishers, the society for scholarly publishing (ssp) and uksg – of the coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications (c disc) in and adopted the c disc joint statement of principles in . aupresses continues to be centrally engaged with the c disc research and governance objectives. aupresses’ recent annual meetings and webinars have been designed with greater inclusivity in mind as well. recent conference keynoters have included publisher ‘the fellowship program has also encouraged host presses to confront diversity and equity challenges’ ‘recent annual meetings and webinars have been designed with greater inclusivity in mind’ chris jackson in ; scholar safiya noble, author of algorithms of oppression, in ; and desiree cooper, community activist and author of know the mother, in . aupresses webinars have considered relevant topics, such as diversity and inclusion initiatives in spring . sessions at last summer’s annual meeting also included such topics as ’transforming scholarly publishing through an equity and anti-racism framework’, ‘making the invisible visible: creating new career paths for experienced people of color’, ‘creating and using accessible scholarly ebooks: tips from those in the trenches’ and ‘peer review, diversity and inclusion’ in addition to two interactive collaboration labs, one on building and sustaining cultures of gender equity and inclusion and the other on the future of diversity, equity and inclusion in internships. with help from ssp, association leadership also recently updated the code of conduct for the association’s annual meeting along with better defined procedures for handling infractions. diversity and inclusion task force although many conversations around equity in scholarly publishing have conveyed a clear sense of the problem through personal experience and anecdote, the need for baseline data on which to build assessment was acute. the association’s diversity and inclusion task force, formed in , first moved to document and understand diversity and inclusion issues within our community by surveying aupresses member directors about relevant perceptions, needs and efforts. members of the task force, along with association leadership, also worked with lee and low books on the second iteration of their important diversity baseline survey of the wider publishing industry in order to broaden the participation of university presses. the diversity and inclusion task force also gathered resources to share with aupresses members. among the ideas and samples inventoried by the task force in its report are: equity mission statements (e.g. university of north carolina press ), recruitment and job placement tools, information about mentorship programs and remote peer networks to assist with retention and support, and equity training resources. the task force also documented how several university presses have established cross- departmental working groups to support equity and inclusion initiatives, which may serve as models within the community. staff members who participate in these groups have frequently worked with press and university human resources departments to reassess and improve hiring procedures, to refine internship programs and to identify and promote local or conference-based equity training resources to their press colleagues. working group members have also encouraged colleagues’ awareness of relevant issues by hosting speakers and book-club-style discussions, organizing community volunteer projects and articulating ways to create and sustain a welcoming workplace. while similarities among these groups are apparent, each group also addresses challenges and opportunities unique to their presses, universities and home communities. for example, the johns hopkins university press group reports that their efforts are ’intimately informed by the historic redlining and systemic racism that shapes baltimore city’; the duke university press group has taken steps to increase intern- and employee- recruitment outreach to nearby historically black colleges and universities; and the cambridge university press group operates a global mentor program. by gathering and presenting these groups’ ideas, the aupresses diversity and inclusion task force seeks to facilitate employee-led inclusivity work at other presses. the task force’s resource list is available publicly. ‘the need for baseline data on which to build assessment was acute’ equity, justice and inclusion committee diversity and inclusion work continue to be an organizational priority for the association. our diversity and inclusion task force transformed in into a standing equity, justice and inclusion committee, which continues to develop the resource list as well as an anti- racism statement drafted by the task force. the committee is charged with: •	 developing networking and mentorship opportunities for member-press staff from under-represented backgrounds, in co-ordination with the professional development and annual meeting program committees •	 recommending professional development opportunities and tools throughout the year via association discussion lists, in co-ordination with the professional development committee •	 developing best practices for creating inclusive environments at association-sponsored events. at the time of writing the committee is organizing a community read for our annual meeting to foster thoughtful and collective reading and discussion of equity and inclusion. they have invited nominations of relevant university press books from the membership, aiming to select two titles. they also intend to host in-person discussions in june in seattle and are working to determine how best to support press-based or virtual conversations – perhaps even local collaborations with university, library or bookstore partners – for those who cannot attend that meeting. gender, equity and cultures of respect task force while the diversity and inclusion task force has investigated the challenges of racism and homogeneity in the aupresses community, we have also sought to engage in similar self-assessment of the ways our community members experience gender bias, galvanized by the #metoo movement. in the association created the gender, equity and cultures of respect task force with the charge of assessing the full range of gender-related issues facing the community and its individual members and recommending policies, programs and resources that increase gender-equity, confront hostility and foster respect. situating their work intersectionally and within the larger aupresses project on equity, this group began by aiming to document the nature of the on-the-job gender-based harassment and discrimination qualitatively and quantitatively, devising a community survey to collect data. a critical first step was the group’s decision to include all member press staff in this survey, making it possible to identify experiences of inequity and harassment that might not have been known by leadership. the task force also reviewed the association’s two most recent biennial compensation surveys, which illuminated gender imbalances in pay equity as well as in certain leadership positions and also suggested further research is needed on gender parity in career advancements and compensation. the surveys led to recommendations for individual presses to conduct compensation analyses for gender parity, ideally by external audit or in partnership with their universities. the task force’s full report was distributed to the aupresses membership in early . having identified challenges that are unique to university press publishing – including author ethics and how to confront bad behavior; conference attendance and staff in the field; gender balance among staff, authors, peer reviewers, faculty committees and in marketing materials – this task force has recommended that the association draft a model code of conduct or position paper to articulate the association’s values in this area. it also recommends the creation of a toolkit of resources to help members nurture cultures of ‘policies, programs and resources that increase gender- equity, confront hostility and foster respect’ ‘recommendations for individual presses to conduct compensation analyses for gender parity’ ‘diversity and inclusion work continue to be an organizational priority for the association’ respect and to address gender-equity and sexual harassment issues which may fall outside the broad guidance issued by a member’s parent institution. anecdotal evidence indicates that raised awareness is beginning to shape new organizational priorities. for example, the task force’s report has begun to inform individual directors’ efforts to create codes of conduct and salary reviews in support of equity at their presses and to implement more inclusive gender categories – among other important demographics – on author questionnaires and title management systems to better understand and document the composition of their lists. the association has also responded to the report’s request for more managerial training, particularly at the director level, by organizing a training session on equity and inclusion for directors at its upcoming annual meeting. much of the groundwork laid by this task force will be carried forward by the equity, justice and inclusion committee. toolkits for equity: transforming scholarly publishing communities  in the latter half of several university press staff members spear-headed the development of anti-racism tools for scholarly publishing professionals. this team, led by niccole coggins (university of virginia press), jocelyn dawson (duke university press), melanie dolecheck (ssp) and gisela fosado (duke university press), is modeling its work on three toolkits developed by the american alliance of museums’ lgbtq + alliance to address transgender inclusion. the team’s new toolkits for equity speak to three distinct audiences. the first toolkit aims to provide guidance to white co-workers on how to become allies, the second seeks to inspire leadership teams within organizations to foster inclusivity and the third undertakes to assist people of color who already work in scholarly publishing in successfully navigating ‘white- supermajority’ spaces. once finalized, the toolkits for equity will be made freely available to the scholarly publishing community via the c disc website. members of the team will speak about the project at several industry conferences throughout and will work with aupresses, ssp, c disc and other professional organizations to encourage widespread personal and organizational use. conclusion all of these committees, task forces and working groups depend on the time and commitment of members who have many other obligations. this is both a remarkable testament to the individuals and a signpost of an ongoing challenge. similarly, within our institutions, equity and inclusion work is often seen as extra-curricular – something that must be done on one’s own time, over lunch hours or after hours. in addition, finding modes of collaboration that allow all voices to be heard, while conserving precious time and achieving measurable results, can be difficult. collaboration tools – conferencing software, document-editing platforms and scheduling tools – have been helpful to our long-distance team work, but technology tools do not by themselves produce engagement or consensus. our community needs to envision equity and inclusion as first-level organizational priorities, central to the work of developing and publishing high quality scholarship. time spent to make our policies, practices and publications more inclusive should be valued appropriately through compensation or credit. our association’s leadership, member presses and their staff are only beginning to understand how bias – intentional and implicit – and historically derived power structures ‘toolkits for equity will be made freely available to the scholarly publishing community’ ‘our community needs to envision equity and inclusion as first- level organizational priorities’ have shaped our institutional environments and our own work. led by the volunteers serving in groups and informed by the courageous witness of publishing professionals who have encountered bias, exclusion, harassment and discrimination, efforts to collect baseline data, to brainstorm solutions and to identify resources for action will help all to develop practices over the long term to support the work of inclusion in scholarly publishing, higher education and the entire knowledge industry. american activist pauli murray ( – ) remarked that ’true community is based on equality, mutuality and reciprocity. it affirms the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together’. that community is what we in the association strive to build together. acknowledgements the authors gratefully acknowledge insights provided by larin mclaughlin, editor-in-chief of the university of washington press, co-chair of the aupresses diversity and inclusion task force and principal investigator for both mellon university press diversity fellowship program grants. abbreviations and acronyms a list of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this and other insights articles can be accessed here – click on the url below and then select the ‘full list of industry a&as’ link: http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa competing interests the authors have declared no competing interests. references . “joint statement of principles,” coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications, https://c disc.org/principles/ (accessed march ). . chris jackson, “’diversity in publishing’ doesn’t exist—but here’s how it can,” lithub (october , ). essay adapted from talk given to the annual meeting of the association of american university presses, june , https://lithub.com/diversity-in-publishing-doesnt-exist-but-heres-how-it-can/ (accessed march ). . “diversity and inclusion initiatives,” aupresses webinar (spring ), https://aupresses.adobeconnect.com/pljzror jsr / (log-in page accessed march ). . “transforming scholarly publishing through an equity and anti-racism framework,” aupresses, annual meeting session (summer ), https://vimeo.com/ (accessed march ). . “creating and using accessible scholarly ebooks: tips from those in the trenches,” aupresses, annual meeting session (summer ), https://vimeo.com/ (accessed march ). . annual meeting code of conduct, aupresses (summer ), http://www.aupresses.org/events-a-conferences/annual-meeting/aupresses- /code-of-conduct (accessed march ). . “the diversity baseline survey,” lee & low books, ( and ), https://www.leeandlow.com/about-us/the-diversity-baseline-survey (accessed march ). . “diversity, equity and inclusion: unc press commitment,” university of north carolina press, https://uncpress.org/diversity-equity-inclusion/ (accessed march ). . “aupresses diversity and inclusion task force survey summary and resource list,” aupresses, http://www.aupresses.org/images/stories/documents/aupresses_diversity_and_inclusion_task_force_ - _survey_and_resource_list.pdf (accessed march ). . “gender transition and transgender inclusion in the museum workplace: a toolkit for trans individuals, institutions and coworkers,” american alliance of museums, lgbtq + alliance, https://www.aam-us.org/professional-networks/lgbtq-alliance/resources/ (accessed march ). http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa https://c disc.org/principles/ https://lithub.com/diversity-in-publishing-doesnt-exist-but-heres-how-it-can/ https://aupresses.adobeconnect.com/pljzror jsr / https://vimeo.com/ https://vimeo.com/ http://www.aupresses.org/events-a-conferences/annual-meeting/aupresses- /code-of-conduct https://www.leeandlow.com/about-us/the-diversity-baseline-survey https://uncpress.org/diversity-equity-inclusion/ http://www.aupresses.org/images/stories/documents/aupresses_diversity_and_inclusion_task_force_ - _survey_and_resource_list.pdf https://www.aam-us.org/professional-networks/lgbtq-alliance/resources/ article copyright: © niccole leilanionapae‘aina coggins, gisela concepción fosado, christie henry and gita manaktala. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence, which permits unrestricted use and distribution provided the original author and source are credited. corresponding author: christie henry director princeton university press and chair association of university presses gender, equity and cultures of respect task force, us e-mail: christie_henry@press.princeton.edu co-authors who have orcids: niccole leilanionapae‘aina coggins orcid id: https://orcid.org/ - - - gisela concepción fosado orcid id: https://orcid.org/ - - - to cite this article: coggins n l, fosado g c, henry c and manaktala g, “towards inclusive scholarly publishing: developments in the university press community”, insights, , : , – ; doi: https://doi.org/ . /uksg. submitted on january             accepted on march             published on may published by uksg in association with ubiquity press. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:christie_henry@press.princeton.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /uksg. http://www.uksg.org/ http://www.ubiquitypress.com/ 	beginnings 	mellon university press diversity fellowship program 	other opportunities to encourage inclusion and equity 	diversity and inclusion task force 	equity, justice and inclusion committee 	gender, equity and cultures of respect task force 	toolkits for equity: transforming scholarly publishing communities  	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	abbreviations and acronyms 	competing interests 	references preparing millennials as digital citizens and socially and environmentally responsible business professionals in a socially irresponsible climate proceedings of the rd annual conference of the association for business communication october - , – miami, florida, usa preparing millennials as digital citizens and socially and environmentally responsible business professionals in a socially irresponsible climate barbara burgess-wilkerson, clovia hamilton, chlotia garrison, keith robbins winthrop university abstract as of , millennials (born in the ’s) became the largest population in the workplace – and are still growing. studies indicate millennials are tech savvy but are lagging in the exercise of digital responsibility. in addition, they are passive towards environmental sustainability and fail to grasp the importance of social responsibility. this paper provides a review of such findings relating to business communications educators in their classrooms. the literature should enable the development of millennials as excellent global citizens through business communications curricula that emphasize: digital citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility. the impetus for this work is to provide guidance in the development of courses and teaching strategies customized to the development of millennials as digital, environmental and socially responsible global citizens. introduction since , millennials are the most represented generational population in the workplace. by , million millennials will make up % of the workforce (fry, ). it is likely that the next two decades will bear witness to this new generation confronting issues of global urgency amid demands for public action. one of the greatest challenges facing today’s educators is properly equipping the next generation of business leaders with a blueprint for these future challenges. the good news is that millennials possess many admirable attributes. inarguably millennials are technologically more sophisticated than any previous generation. millennials are viewed as confident, team-oriented and high achievers (klass & lindenberger, ). despite these qualities, a recent national survey determined that barely one adult in three believe millennials as adults will make the world a better place (strauss, ). although millennials are the most tech savvy generation of all time, many lack competence in digital responsibility; have a passive attitude towards environmental sustainability and fail to grasp the importance of social responsibility (davis, ; ribble, ). digital citizenship, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility are key components of” socially responsible ethics.” their definitions follow. mike ribble, author of “raising a digital child” is considered the godfather of digital citizenship and is at the forefront of conceptualizing digital citizenship in schooling. he argues that digital citizenship should be viewed as a way of thinking and whenever possible educators should find ways to incorporate digital citizenship lessons and examples in every classroom. a “responsible digital citizen” is a person skilled in using the internet to buy and sell products/services safely; engages in making practical, safe, responsible, ethical, and legal use of technology; understands the rights and responsibilities that come with being online and is someone who uses technology in a positive manner (cambridge english dictionary, ; davis, ; ribble, ). digital citizenship and environmental responsibility both fall into the over-arching category of social responsibility. social responsibility or “social responsibility ethics” is an ethical framework that includes individual and organizational obligations to act for the benefit of society and is the duty of every person. social responsibility refers to a balance between economic development, the welfare of society and the environment. social responsibility must be embraced by each generation as the actions of one generation will impact the next. some argue that the ethics of the past have been corrupted and are no longer adequate for the self-governance of businesses and individuals because of changes in the environment, as well as cultural and political norms (ferrell, ). “environmental sustainability” is typically defined as the ability to operate today in a way that does not threaten the environment in the future (foster, , p. ). herman daly, a pioneer in ecological sustainability looked at the problem of environmental maintenance. in he proposed that an environmentally responsible citizen adheres to ecological sustainability that includes: a) concern for renewable resources - the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of regeneration (sustainable yield); b) concern for pollution – the rate of waste regeneration should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment (sustainable waste disposal); c) concern for renewable resources – the depletion of the nonrenewable resources should require comparable development of renewable substitutes for those resources (herman e. daly, ; herman e. daly, ). besides environmental sustainability, there are social sustainability and economic sustainability practices. social sustainability includes product safety, workforce health and safety, ethics and governance, and the improvement of the quality of life in communities. economic sustainability includes: building high performance organizations; building businesses with sound financial plans; acquiring and managing resources in an effective and efficient manner; and emergency preparedness (collier, ). relevance of business communications exploring these topics within the context of business communication is nothing new. some business communications curricula go beyond the fundamentals of writing and speaking in business to encouragement of critical discourse of events, trends and perspectives impacting how communication takes place in a business setting. critical thinking and problem-solving are promoted in some business communications classrooms. barton ( ) argues for the enhancement of business communications courses to extend the course beyond punctuation and style into more of a problem-solving realm. critical thinking is considered an essential component of managerial literacy; bloch and spataro ( ), argue for a two-pronged approach in a business curriculum: a) clearly defining critical thinking and selecting an accessible model for applying it and ; b) integrating critical thinking consistently throughout the business curriculum. pennell and miles ( ) argue for problem-based learning in the business communications classroom. infusing discourse surrounding digital responsibility, socially responsible ethics and environmental sustainability as part of a critical thinking and problem-solving strategy are part of some business communications curriculum as well. for example, chaudhri ( ), highlights the importance of corporate social responsibility (csr) and argues that communication is central to the enactment of socially responsible behavior. he uses csr scholarship as a basis for understanding how managers construct or articulate the case for communication in csr, suggesting communication plays an important and multidimensional role. he also highlights the role of the media as an (dis)enabler for “getting the word out.” likewise, vernuccio ( ) studied the extent to which companies embracing a corporate social responsibility agenda adapt and align their value systems to reflect such commitment by juxtaposing corporate values, corporate social responsibility values and how the configurations of the two impact the corporate communications. kim and lee ( ) highlight the impact of cybersecurity breaches that are creating high-impact crisis for many corporations and how corporations protect their reputations through effective crisis communication. they examined official statements issued in both the u.s. and south korea when cybersecurity breaches threatened their corporate reputations. the findings indicated the statements varied based upon cultural dimensions that included the communication style (low-context vs. high- context). lewis and speck ( ) conducted a literature review of ethical opinions to help frame the discussion of business ethics to address: ) why be ethical and, ). how to be ethical. barton ( ) argues for the use of case studies for consideration to integrate crisis management into the business communication curriculum. cases studies also provide opportunities for discourse from several perspectives such as crisis communication, social responsibility, ethics and human rights. “say it isn’t so, lady o: a sex scandal at the oprah leadership academy for girls,” highlights the allegations of sexual molestation in the oprah leadership academy in myerton, south africa providing an opportunity to critically reflect on how leaders communicate and address tough issues in a manner consist with corporate and individual values (burgess-wilkerson, fuller and frederick ). the purpose of this paper is to provide recommendations based on an analysis of the literature regarding pedagogies that will empower millennials to become excellent global citizens. this research describes how current events are to be used to prepare millennials for professional business communication in the desired capacity as excellent global business citizens. the impetus for this work is to provide guidance in the development of courses and teaching strategies customized to the development of millennials as responsible digital global citizens from an individual, employee and societal perspective. background since millennials make up half of the public and private workforce (raytheon, , , ), this study focuses on the potential adverse impact of the present socially irresponsible climate on millennials. several recent high-profile incidents over the past five ( ) years motivated this study. these incidents are listed in table . table high profile incidents that motivated the study year industry issue current events retail department store sales cybersecurity the target store had to pay $ . million to states in the united states of america as a settlement for a security breach. in , hackers obtained credit card numbers, names and other personal information about year industry issue current events million target customers. the hackers stole credentials from a third-party vendor that the hackers used to access the customer database. the hackers then installed malware to capture the data (abrams, ). in , target’s ceo gregg steinhafel resigned following this massive data breach because the company’s board of directors decided it was time for new leadership (team, ). us federal government cybersecurity further, with regard to computer hacking, it has been declared undeniable that russia affected the election (mckew, ). an indictment was issued by the united states’ head of the special counsel investigation of russian interference in the united states elections and related matters. robert mueller against russia’s internet research agency for information warfare that targeted the american public during the elections related to issues of use of propaganda and disinformation; and alleged hacking of the election systems and hacking to obtain information illegally. the propaganda is the result of an expenditure of millions of dollars over several years to build a system to influence american opinion with the use of individuals and groups with hidden identities. their identities were hidden with servers and vpns used to mask their location; and to launder payments. paid and promoted ads were not used. instead data driven targeted social media marketing videos, photos, memes, and text messages were crafted, refined and posted based on data analytics (mckew, ). entertainment sexual harassment the movie producer harvey weinstein has been accused by several women of using his power to lure them into hotel rooms where he allegedly committed acts of sexual assault (mckinley jr, ). actor and comedian bill cosby has been convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting women (bowley, ; thornton, ).the hip hop mogul russell simmons is facing several accusations of sexual misconduct including harassment, assault and rape. in november , simmons stepped down from all of his businesses (snapes, ). in addition, in january , allegations of las vegas hotel mogul steve wynn were published. there were reports that wynn sexually harassed, coerced and assaulted wynn resorts’ employees over decades (richard, ). higher education sexual harassment a case in point began with the september investigation of michigan state university (msu) by the u.s. department of education’s office for civil rights. the investigative report stated that msu failed to address year industry issue current events complaints in a prompt and equitable manner. in august , the indianapolis star published an investigative report into the usa gymnastics and how it handled complaints of sexual abuse. thereafter, although msu asked their medical doctor larry nassar to step down from his clinical and patient duties, he continued to see patients for months. in december nassar was finally convicted and sentenced to years in federal prison for child pornography charges he admitted to (lacy, ). emergency preparedness and relief environmental justice; human rights hurricane maria and hurricane harvey devastated puerto rico and the state of texas in with historic flooding and wind damage. as of may , half of the puerto rico population still does not have power. they are suffering from a dilapidated, corroded and poorly maintained power grid. their power supplier prepa and puerto rico are both bankrupt (glanz, ). the state of texas fared better. for example, toyota partnered with emergency relief nonprofits to plan, assess, train, guide and assist with emergency relief (evans, ). us federal government human rights facebook, google, apple, and the business roundtable representing walmart, general motors, boeing, jpmorgan chase, mastercard and others spoke out against the us child separations at the mexican border (durbin, ) these companies wield a great deal of influence and used their influence to speak out against this american policy calling it inhumane. it is important to note that several high technology companies such a hewlett packard, thomson reuters, microsoft and motorola have contracts to develop and implement advanced data analysis and tracking for the u.s. immigration customs and enforcement (ice) agency. after threatened sanctions by the united nations, in june , a presidential executive order was signed to end the inhumane family separations (hohmann, ). information technology and automotive workplace bullying notable ceo bullies who have displayed machiavellian type cut-throat behavior include, but are not limited to, larry ellison at oracle, mark pincus of the gaming company zynga, and martin winterkorn of volkswagen (hamilton, ). there is a lack of diplomacy in communications between employer and employees. thus, it is imperative that business students be educated to be aware of potential cybersecurity risks and the relevance from a business communications perspective. they can be taught to critically examine strategies to be socially responsible when delivering negative news and how during a crisis, corporate messaging can simultaneously protect the company’s reputation and be ethical (kim and lee, ). business communications students can critically explore how socially responsible corporations can communicate in a manner that reflects corporate values consistent with corporate social responsibility values (schmeltz, ). in addition, business students must be aware of acceptable behavior and the dangers that exist related to sexual harassment and sexual violence. the plethora of sexual harassment allegations and court cases have put two worldwide movements and organizations in the spotlight. the metoo movement, an organization founded by tarana burke committed to putting a stop to sexual violence. the time’s up movement, an organization founded by christy hubegger that is focused on leading changes that result in improved workplace equity through the removal of inequitable power imbalances and safety issues (langone, ). now more than ever, business communication classes should help students critically explore the impact of their words and actions in a business setting and how workplace inequities are perpetuated through formal and informal channels of communications. sexual harassment and rape are problems on many college campuses. this year marks the th birthday of the landmark civil rights law title ix passed by the us congress. although the law has resulted in women now comprising % of america’s college students, % of all tenure-track positions, and the number of female athletes has increased tenfold, / of the women on college campuses experience sexual assault and nearly half of the students in middle and high school report sexual harassments (churches, ). in fact, annie clark, the co-founder of the nonprofit end rape on campus has reported that there are repeat offenders that seek out victims time and again without punishment (saul, ). some forms of the sexual harassment occur on the internet where rules are not clear and protecting oneself can be tricky. business communications can provide a platform to discuss the proper use of social media and how to be protected in cyberspace in personal and professional settings. economic sustainability includes emergency preparedness and the protection of human safety and quality of living (collier, ). details of hurricane relief issues in puerto rico are noted in table . besides the hurricane relief debacle in puerto rico, several america ceos recently spoke out against the united states of america’s child separations at the mexican border. students in business communication can learn lessons in crisis communication and corporate social responsibility (csr) (chaudri, ). in addition to computer hacking, sexual harassment and other human rights issues, there is also bullying in workplaces and educational institutions. workplace bullying can include offensive, intimidating, malicious and/or overbearing supervision, criticism, exclusion, work and threats (landau ). cyber bullying accounts for significant increase in suicides among young people (twenge, ). business communication classes can provide an opportunity to discuss safe use of the internet even when seeking employment and how surfing the “dark web” or “friending” can lead to contact with unsavory characters who might appear to be “business professionals.” method the method used in this study is a literature review on current pedagogical practices involving the use of current events in education relevant to preparing millennials for professional business communications. the identification of gaps between the literature and current practice should stimulate development of a new curriculum that infuses these critical elements to provide consistency in messaging regarding the serious nature and responsibility of every student as a global citizen. the goal is to embrace these approaches as a way of thinking about teaching and to advocate for incorporating them wherever appropriate. literature review the attempt here is to provide a review of contemporary issues that can be explored critically in a business communications classroom. exercises can then be developed to provide opportunities for problem-solving to promote responsible digital citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility within a business communications curriculum. about millennials with the growth of millennials in the employee base, millennials are at the forefront of many business conversations (stewart, ): • with regard to duty, millennials do not believe that productivity should be measured by the number of hours worked, but rather by performance output (pricewaterhousecoopers, ). • with regard to drive, millennials prefer synergistic decision making team environments; (stewart, ). • young adults want to feel personally connected to their employers’ goals (raytheon, ). • millennials do not conceptually link workplace culture with organizational commitment. their views of duty, work drive, and rewards differ from other generations recommended differences (stewart, ). this is relevant because as educators prepare millennials for the workforce, it might be helpful for educators to know how the millennials’ performance might be evaluated. stewart ( ) has suggested that to alleviate frustrations between members of varying generations, training is necessary to develop adequate communication strategies that alleviate misconceptions related to the value of duty, responsibility and work obligations. this should include social responsibilities in business contexts. digital citizenship digital citizenship is associated with how individuals use their power to process their social decision making (simsek, ). the phrase “cyberspace literacy” is used in information technology to refer to the goal of every cyberspace user behaving and participating in a manner that is independent, cultured and critical (area, ). with the use of online social media platforms such as facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram and linkedin, there is a need for the development of new cyberspace literacy that embraces web . . web . refers to the second generation of the world wide web which is characterized by more dynamic and interactive collaborative and shared web experiences (wolcott, ). today’s emphasis is on the internet of things (iot) which is defined as the giant network of any device (e.g. cell phones and appliances) connected to the internet (morgan, ). the key issues in the interaction of new literacies and digital citizenship include professional online participation, the exercise of citizen rights, adequate development of technical know-how, formulation and enforcement of values and norms, proper ways to assess the information overload, and the development of critical attitudes (simsek, ). this is particularly important because the terms of use in the fine print that social media and other digital application providers tout, in order to nudge user behavior, is noncommunicative since most users ignore them. although millennials believe that cybersecurity is important, their behavior puts themselves and their employers at risk. the types of actions in which millennials engage put themselves and their employers file:///c:/users/barbara/downloads/bbw% draft% robbins_garrison% ( ).docx% _enref_ file:///c:/users/barbara/downloads/bbw% draft% robbins_garrison% ( ).docx% _enref_ file:///c:/users/barbara/downloads/bbw% draft% robbins_garrison% ( ).docx% _enref_ file:///c:/users/barbara/downloads/bbw% draft% robbins_garrison% ( ).docx% _enref_ file:///c:/users/barbara/downloads/bbw% draft% robbins_garrison% ( ).docx% _enref_ at risk include: failure to update their applications, failure to use two-step authentications, clinking on links regardless of the certainty of their legitimacy, carelessness in sharing their personal information online, and failure to change passwords for each of their key accounts (raytheon, , , ). further, % connect online without password protection and % share their passwords with non- family members. “cybersecurity” is rapidly becoming connected with global politics as we witnessed a voter concern in the us presidential election. in partnership with the national cyber security alliance, raytheon conducted a study entitled securing our future: closing the cybersecurity talent gap which included a global survey of millennials by zogby analytics. millennial respondents were from australia, germany, japan, jordan, poland, qatar, saudi arabia, the united arab emirates, united kingdom and the united states. the population consisted of adult respondents ages to in and nearly in and again in (raytheon, , , ). for us respondents, % said that political candidates position on cybersecurity determined whether the millennial respondent would support the candidate. millennials are aware of ensuing cyberthreats and are making a strong connection between the political atmosphere and cybersecurity issues that face the nation (raytheon, ). it was concluded that: “the ongoing effort to raise awareness among millennials about the issue, combined with near-daily news regarding cyberattacks, has both made today’s young adults increasingly aware of and interested in cybersecurity jobs. this increase in informed young adults will also likely have effects beyond the obvious jobs to be filled — it very well could sway the nation’s future at the voting booths, as most young americans said cybersecurity issues would likely affect how they vote in elections” (raytheon, ). further, with respect to the us presidential election, there is a movement toward american leadership having fewer interventions in foreign policy which concerns some foreign policy scholars as america has been looked to for global assistance (restad, ). millennials blame cyberattacks on their loss of trust in the electoral system. thus, with the digital ease of information sharing, millennials need to be made aware of the impact of foreign policy on businesses guided by scholars in an evidence based, objective manner. the lack of trust seems to beg a desire for more transparency. in a virtual ethnography study of chinese students on the chinese social network called renren, researchers found that students speak out online to assert their rights and show a sense of wanting to be responsible to wider societal issues. the researchers called this cyber civic participation in cultural citizenship and in lifestyle politics rather than traditional formal political mechanisms such as discussions about political parties, debates, service organizations or elections (ke, ). this is political activism. besides educators, it has also been advocated that social media marketing intermediaries such as facebook, – be held accountable to assist users in developing an understanding of digital citizenship and pay more attention to the dignity and safety of their users. although, they handle a number of cyber bullying, harassment and other abuse complaints, the decisions they make are vague and indecisive (citron, ). in , facebook was in the news ; and facebook’s founder mark zuckerberg was asked to answer to the united states congress regarding their user privacy practices and transparency issues (carlson, ; romm, ). according to mike ribble, a forerunner in the area of digital citizenship education, digital citizenship should be embraced by educators as a way of thinking and should be incorporated in any curriculum. he advocates the infusion of the “nine elements of digital citizenship” in the curriculum as follows: ) digital access- these lessons address issues related to access to the internet; ) digital commerce – these lessons address the buying and selling of goods online safely; ) digital communication – these lessons address sharing information online properly and safely; ) digital literacy – these lessons address ongoing education on how to use current digital technologies; ) digital etiquette – these lessons address the use of technology by following a respectable code of conduct; ) digital law- these lessons address the lawful use of technology content found online; ) digital rights and responsibilities – these lessons address the freedom and responsibility of using the internet; ) digital wellness – these lessons address how to achieve a balance that promotes physical and psychological well-being; ) digital security – these lessons address strategies to protect your s afety online (ribble, ). this framework serves to assist educators in instilling a “consciousness” among students and sense of right and wrong in order to use digital technology in a socially responsible and acceptable manner . part of the curriculum can include a survey developed to allow students to self-report by assessing their digital etiquette, security and responsible attitudes and behaviors (nordin, ). other digital citizenship assessment scales have been developed to advance this area of scholarship. one includes five ( ) characteristics: ( ) ethics, ( ) fluency, ( ) rational, reasonable activities, ( ) establishing self-identity, and ( ) engagement. this five-factor digital citizenship scale is called the s.a.f.e model, meaning leading character of self-identity in digital environment, activity in online (reasonable activity and social/cultural engagement), fluency for the digital tools, and ethics for digital environment. the goal of using this instrument is to encourage students to behave as ethical digital citizens (m. c. kim, dongyeon ). another scale is the digital citizenship scale which was validated as a valid measure of digital citizenship (isman, ). another research team developed a self-report digital citizenship scale used in a survey of american university students which yielded a five-factor structure of digital citizenship. this included: internet “political activism,” technical skills, local/global awareness, critical perspective, and network agency (choi, ). the advancements in this area of scholarship is relevant to educators and to the development of a pedagogical framework because it is important for educators, especially in higher education, to remain current in disciplines that they promote and teach . educators can also make use of these instruments in studying their students’ behavior and in their research. lessons in digital citizenship in business communications can also include analyzing the impact of technology in a professional setting; considering the ethical use of employer resources; and acknowledging the personal responsibility and dangers inherent in using the technology. today’s professionals must evaluate the appropriateness of online resources and should be educated on the damage that can impact an employer’s reputation by a single digital user. environmental and social citizenship there are several environmental crises looming in america. one of the most egregious is the flint, michigan water crisis. businesses and private citizens are all adversely impacted. in and , the residents of genesee county, mi, endured the third largest recorded disease outbreak in american history. the disease cases coincided with changes in the source and treatment of drinking water in flint’s municipal water system (zahran, ). lead was found in the water (dengler, ). america is also suffering from joblessness, numerous foreclosed homes, unorganized protests, school shootings, environmental justice issues and what has been called an emotional plague. there is global discourse of the political climate and economy, and a need for debate and dialogue about the cultural and political unconsciousness? (aronowitz, ). given all this strife in a seemingly irresponsible society, how should millennials be prepared in institutions of higher education to become more socially responsible? environmental sustainability can be assisted by empowering students toward a renewed commitment to: ) perceive dominant ideologies and unmask new ones through systems thinking; ) challenge power relations; ) pursue leadership practices for social transformation. “[t]houghtful leaders increasingly recognize that we are not only failing to solve the persistent [environmental] problems we face but are in fact causing them. today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems” (sterman, ). dominant ideologies hidden behind a cloak of goodwill obscure the reality until it is too late. a perspective that includes system thinking allows individuals to look beyond individual blame to a systems approach that examines the system in which these ideologies are allowed to flourish. transformational leadership provides a framework embracing power from a socially, environmentally and technically responsible manner. since implementing social responsibility programs costs companies, there are understandable budgetary concerns. this is particularly true for environmental sustainability initiatives. for example, in sustainable logistics, there are landed cost, cost to service and cost to cost trade-offs to consider in making such financial investment decisions (foster, , pp. - ). business communications curriculum can provide special knowledge, skills and abilities to empower millennials to be able to communicate as environmental sustainability stewards and advocates in a diplomatic manner with an understanding and sensitivity toward budgetary concerns. modern day early career professionals are particularly at risk because they are challenged by their increasing reliance on social media and texting for communications (hershatter, ; lenhart, ) rather than face to face interactions (j.-h. kim, ). the centrality of communication pedagogy and a discipline’s content is vital (morreale, ). relevance in the today’s classroom american youth demonstrate a lack of current events knowledge (knowledge unlimited, ). academic instructors often fail to relate their syllabi to current events. for example, this is true in the tourism and hospitality discipline (bernasco, ). higher education faculty are encouraged to integrate current events into their curriculum and augment these events with other scholarly works. for example, it would make sense for a faculty member to not only identify interesting current events, even if difficult to discuss, because most issues will at some point impact student professionally and personally and therefore should be in the repertoire of the faculty’s scholarship (vanderbilt center for teaching). syllabi should not be revised to include units on current events if the teaching strategy is merely to chat with students about news stories without contextualization with relevant scholarly work (rooks, ). in social work and biology, research on the integration of current events into the learning experience have reported positive findings on the impact on student performance (grise-owens, ; tinsley, ). just as transaction lawyers must be well versed in current events since political views and public sentiment affect recently enacted and proposed future legislation that apply to his or her legal transactions, so should business managers (dean, ). further, modern day business transactions are often global and multicultural. discussing current events in the classroom is an effective strategy for getting students to begin to deconstruct and understand the complexities of multiculturalism (deardorff, ; galczynski, ; gordon, ). current events can be selected which have multicultural themes. challenges to integrating current events - authentic learning current events can be highly engaging by providing opportunities to examine real business problems requiring problem solving, ethical decision making and critical thinking skills. current events can be used to achieve constructivism and authenticity (authentic instruction and online delivery: proven principles in higher education, ). reportedly, the use of current events in economics was first proposed in (kelley, ; pomykalski, ). with regard to business concepts such as economics, it was discovered that students find it difficult to relate to examples and cases if they are not current, “they have either forgotten about it or they have never heard of it” (ghosh, ). yet, students are excited and are able to relate better to current events (ghosh, ). in a study of an undergraduate leadership class, students’ curriculum included being quizzed on news items in newspapers and on television. students mostly enjoyed and related to those group discussions (odom, ). the use of currents events is related to the “real world relevance” component of authentic learning which advocates that students use socialization processes and to learn to use their judgment, patience, ability to synthesize unfamiliar contexts and the flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries (lombardi, a, b; windham, ). a fundamental component of authentic learning experiences is student-centered information inquiry. current events are examples of content and context of learning readily accepted by students as relevant to his or her needs and deemed by faculty to simulate life beyond the classroom. a specific challenge of library media specialists is to partner with teachers to design learning activities and develop assessments that resemble constructive experiences beyond the school (callison, ; lamb, ). identification of specific pedagogical strategies there are several published strategies for integrating current events into the classroom. a model technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) case refers to searching weblogs for current events in world affairs by an instructor and requiring students to keep their own blogs to improve their writing and reflection (cox, ). a law professor reported use of simulations and role-playing exercises in areas of bank failures and system risk based on real controversies involving recent news stories focused on present day economic problems (dean, ). although designed for a law school course, it is certainly relevant to business law courses. simulations, role playing, experimentation and the use of current events offer authentic learning experiences and are commonly used across business curriculum including: management, marketing, business law, accounting, and increasingly in business communications (lombardi, b). in some instances, students are asked to compare their lessons to real world news stories that they find. the students are asked to defend their choice in selecting the news story and whether the news report is relevant for the class assignment. oftentimes current events are very relevant from a business communications perspective providing opportunities for critical thinking and problem-solving that can spark thinking about social responsibility, environmental sustainability and digital citizenship. they can be discussed in class orally or structured for multiple assignments that address various aspects of business communication that can be critically examined including: crisis management, csr management, leadership communication, ethical communication, persuasive messaging, ethical leadership and communication, power and communication, influence and communication, communication and social media/cybersecurity, etc. (garretson, ; hollander, ). students can also be instructed to find multiple news articles regarding a current event and explore deeply the differences between the sources and the ways the stories were reported to explore lessons in ethical communication and corporate values (scheibe, ). this would improve the students’ media literacy, information processing and offer a way to enhance business communications skills. students are more engaged when they take ownership of discussion topics and recognize relevant news stories. for example, students can interview individuals about news stories and make evidence-based arguments in reports on the news subject (sage publishing, ). having the students write in journals about current events and other experiences are also effective in providing feedback on concepts that the student perhaps does not understand (bahmani, ; stanton, ). journaling helps students find their own voice and self-identities. much has been written about ways to teach with current events. for example, the new york times published “ ways to teach with current events” (gonchar, ). evidenced based reporting of truth is important since students should not merely rely on their opinions (gonchar, ; leo, ). in an article of active learning business class activities, the author shared the strategy of leaving off the outcome of current events and having students fill in the blank by evaluating and deciding on what the resolutions could be (livingston, ). further, towson university’s student life office administers a collegiate readership program and advocates ways to use newspapers in the classroom. they conduct new york times talks luncheons form meaningful conversations including students and faculty from all disciplines; and they promote a civil engagement program which makes use of new york times teaching toolkit (" ideas for using newspapers in the college classroom," towson university). western kentucky university uses current events as a means of ethical awareness in its senior assessment finance course. students are to discuss current events found in the wall street journal weekly in online discussion boards and then submit an ethics-based essay at the end of the semester (western kentucky university, ). reportedly, america’s approach to news literacy was led by dr. howard schneider, dean of the stony brook university school of journalism. he advocated that non-journalism majors be taught the principles and practices of the press; i.e. the information processing skills of a newspaper reporter. related to current events, since it is difficult to separate high quality, fact-based journalism from everything else, dr. schneider advocated that students become news literate on how to identify news and how to critically analyze it (fleming, ). news media literacy is multi-disciplined and includes civics instruction, cultural studies, values education and the impact of media. the core challenges are to get students familiar with recognizing quality sources of news, learn with stories to read and read the news daily (siena, ). social/political engagement literacy is the quality and state of being literate. to be literate is to have knowledge and competence. rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing effectively. this is what business communications is all about. it is important that students be led “through the reflection that makes rhetoric intentional” (lynch, ). when dealing with global media, faculty need to be proactive in equipping students with critical literacy skills (carneiro, ). further with regard to news media literacy, it is advocated that students need to be taught how to make a difference through creativity, conversation and political knowledge (gauntlett, ). they also need to learn how media (news, social) feel and fit emotionally and intellectually (gauntlett, ). the politically oriented current events may lead students to think critically about policy issues (yob, ). when it comes to contentious political issues which can be fervently debated, it is important to set ground rules in order to facilitate a safe class environment (mcdaniel, ; yale center for teaching and learning). lastly, unfortunately there is a steady stream of ethical scandals such as those noted in table (weybrecht, ). students need time to practice, reflect, formulate their thoughts, and formulate their questions. in preparing millennials, they need time to practice the ethics skills building so that they become ethical business professionals and excellent, socially responsible global citizens (weybrecht, ). findings the gaps in the literature related to the use of current events in education relevant to preparing millennials for professional business communications include focusing on the students' individual voice and critical exploration of issues within the context of business communication. none of the literature reviewed specific to business education emphasized the importance of preparing millennials to exercise diplomacy as they forge their business careers. further, while some research studies advocated that students find their own news stories, there is little scholarship about the ‘then what?’ what should instructors do to pull out of students their ability to exercise their individual voice about ethics, policies, legislation, and business practices. typically, students merely summarize what the current event news article, blog or social media microblog post states. there needs to be much more research and practice focused on providing outlets for students to: ( ) express themselves in online discussions; ( ) craft evidence-based judgments; and ( ) debate on the difficult dialogues related to unethical business practices (weybrecht, ). the literature review enabled us to identify constructs of importance to include in the proposed pedagogical framework for preparing millennials to be socially responsible citizens. one focus was placed on strategic business management and business policy concepts relevant to social responsibility and digital citizenship in this age of social irresponsibility. these concepts are noted in table . the over- arching emphasis was to search for published research that addressed issues in business communications. table literature review of socially responsible digital citizenship - business communications pedagogy literature review of social responsibility business communications pedagogy business management curriculum social responsibility topics marketing alternative facts – aka false claims, disinformation truth in advertising transparency business law and ethics corporate social responsibility environmental sustainability hate speech, harassment, violence, domestic terrorism, racism, sexism, xenophobes, homophobes human rights including immigration politics lying computer science and technology digital citizenship responsible use of online social networks cybersecurity, cyberattacks cyberbullying while we found some discussion of social responsibility, our sources were greatly limited. based on our literature review, we find a need for additional socially responsible citizenship education in business communication specifically. we advocate that there is a need for a novel pedagogical framework to assist with the implementation of socially responsible citizenship across the business school curriculum particularly business communications – as well as other business programs. based on our literature review, we recommend a pedagogical framework for developing business management curricula which has the following ten ( ) themes that need to be promoted and implemented by higher education administrative leaders and faculty: . socially responsive ethics – digital citizenship and environmental sustainability; social justice awareness using current events in teaching . self- identity: in this age of selfies, faculty should encourage students to establish their own authentic self-identities. . diplomat business communication – encourage the development of experiential learning activities focused on civic participation for interventionist engagement . transparency - the business schools need to begin at home with discussing digital citizen related decisions made by the university and their college related to cyber bullying, harassment, unethical behavior; and with related current events. . evidenced –based assignments: evidence-based assignments will thwart any inclination for students to indulge in fake news and alt facts. require oral and written communication based on sound researched evidence. . assert their rights and opinions – in concert with discovering their self-identities, encourage students to learn what their rights and opinions are and exercise their voice . protect human rights - identify how they can actively participate in human rights protection locally and globally . political activism – encourage students to be politically active cyber civic participants . cyber secure technical skills – ensure that all business students understand and apply cyber security safeguards . critical thinking – it is important that the students develop critical attitudes, critical perspectives and critical thinking skills conclusion the world is in a moment of experiencing numerous political, ideological, social, economic, cultural, religious, and other crises. this paper in pedagogy provides educators with guidance in the development of curricula that prepares students as the next generation of leaders responsible in the areas of technology, environmental sustainability and social responsibility as global citizens. the primary recommendation is that in preparing millennial business students, they should receive adequate ethical business communications training in each of their required courses - - i.e. across the business curriculum. as history unfolds, as a matter of interventionist pedagogy, business college students need to be trained to think critically about what it means and what is required of them in serving as an excellent socially responsible digital citizen. students need to be steered in a positive direction of becoming more actively engaged in the social issues of their time and business communications courses can assist in this effort. a novel pedagogical framework is offered herein as a solution to address the key issues in the interaction of new literacies and digital citizenship include professional online participation, the exercise of citizen rights, adequate development of technical know-how, formulation and enforcement of values and norms, proper ways to assess the information overload, and the development of critical thinking throughout business curricula. the implication of this study in pedagogy is that it will provide educators with much needed guidance in the development of curriculums that address the problem area of social responsibility and better prepare students to perform professionally in their careers as excellent digital citizens and communicate both their environmental sustainability concerns with diplomacy and in a manner that is sensitive to their employers’ concerns. references ideas for using newspapers in the college classroom. 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( ). political engagement in higher education curricula. journal of social change ( ). zahran, s., mcelmurry, s. p., kilgore, p. e., mushinski, d., press, j., love, n., sadler, r. c., & swanson, m. s. , no. ( ): . ( ). assessment of the legionnaires’ disease outbreak in flint, michigan (vol. proceedings of the national academy of sciences (pnas), pp. e -e ). washington, dc: national academy of sciences. barbara burgess-wilkerson is professor of management and spd director at winthrop university. she received a ph.d. in higher education administration from the university of pittsburgh and was an od consultant and ceo of bba consulting services for years. her research interests include: leadership and business communication, emotional intelligence and student professional development. clovia hamilton has a ph.d. in industrial & systems engineering with a concentration in management at the university of tennessee. she is experienced and educated in sustainable operations management. her research interests include: business law & ethics, technology management, academic entrepreneurship, and university/ federal lab technology transfer operations as novel supply chains. cholita posey garrison received her ph.d. in computer science from florida state university, tallahassee fl. she is a professor of computer science at winthrop university, rock hill sc. she worked for years in software development. dr. garrison’s research areas include: computer security of the user, promoting computer science, software engineering and ethical implications of technology. keith robbins is chair of the department of management and marketing and professor of management in the cba at winthrop university. he has authored numerous articles and cases primarily focused on business turnaround strategies. keith received his ph.d. in strategic management from the university of south carolina. on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation vol.:( ) law and critique ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation peter kalulé published online: april © the author(s) abstract generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a forma- tive and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. it is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empt- ing threats and crime or harm. from this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. these fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behav- iours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. in this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. it functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. these determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and reg- ulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. in placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. keywords automated filtering technologies · deconstruction · law · regulation · speech · undecidability * peter kalulé m.kalule@qmul.ac.uk; peterokalule@yahoo.com centre for commercial law studies, queen mary, university of london, - lincoln inn’s fields, london wc a  jb, uk http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf p. kalulé layli, the irreducible sociality of speech can’t be spoken in one voice. (moten , p. ) one has only to constantly, appropriately, pivot the centre. (brown ) introduction the structure of this article is as follows. part explores the limits of law as a deter- minable form of general regulation. it then probes the regulation of speech that incites terrorism. part examines technological regulation and its impulse towards calculability or determinability within the context of online communication technol- ogies. it emphasises the use of software that uses natural language processing (nlp) techniques as a means of detecting, apprehending and sanctioning harmful speech and shows how they are fallible. it does this by exploring contemporary regulatory failings like fake news in addition to particular illustrations of instances of speech regulation where seemingly harmless words like ‘milk’ (freeman ) have taken on new unanticipated significations in neo-nazi and white supremacist circles. parts and provide some tentative closing thoughts on decidability within regulation. this article does not seek to provide answers. it only seeks to identify and criti- cally unpack the extensive aporias inhabited within contemporary regulatory struc- tures, processes and practices in order to suggest that regulation in the areas of law and online communications technologies is not as graspable, coherent and determi- nable as it is widely imagined. although a reasonable body of scholarship concerning the counter productiv- ity of regulation (grabosky ; sunstein , ; hornstein ) exists, not much work has been written on regulation and its interaction with deconstruction especially in the context of online communication technologies. consequently, this article attempts to draw these links and to develop and affirm their relations. part : deconstructing law and regulation law is often presented as a closed, self-identical and self-enforcing entity that fol- lows strict traditional interpretive canons and established conventions. this is evi- denced in descriptions of law as ‘a rule-governed system of coercion’ (hart and green ) or descriptions of law as prescriptive commands (austin ; kro- nman ; raz ). elements of law (and regulation as rules backed by sanc- tions) are thus widely represented in terms of obligations of an enduring determi- nacy, in providing some assured stability of expectation, some definitive normative hold on futurity. hence, law is thought of as a singular sovereign-oriented juridico- legal system or essence that easily regulates (i.e., through identifying, designating, apprehending and sanctioning) whatever harms/crimes it seeks to contain. such a model of law as an overarching ideal that isolates itself from everything else other on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation than its own terms of reference, and is not productive of anything other than con- stancy, is arguably misleading. in fact, in its quest to design strict normative commands or rules that can be eas- ily understood by those to whom they are addressed, law becomes language. and in becoming language, law becomes an open undecidable generality, a system of ‘decentred’ and disseminated social inter-communication with no clear boundaries (derrida a). inasmuch as law undergoes performative moments in the form of the judicial decision that attempt to clarify and stabilise its meanings, these iterable moments of decision-making could be read as differentiated moments of textual interpretation or translation. in this regard they are at once always already haunted by a heterological terror of undecidability. regulation, which can be defined as a ‘mechanism of social control or influence affecting all aspects of behaviour from whatever source whether they are intentional or not’ (black , p. ) also appears to function similarly. regulation exhibits rubrics of calculability and intentionality of control (gunningham and grabosky ) that seek to preserve, influence or manage behaviour within a constative sys- tem of rules, norms and procedures often backed by sanctions. such management is akin to decision-making in the sense that it attempts to know, decide, determine and calculate outcomes of meaning. however, as with legal decisions, day-to-day regu- latory decisions made across a highly differentiated and cross-cultural society are always already drifting, decentred, fragmented, polycentric and undecidable (bell ; weber ). this article is concerned with probing such moments of undecidability that spec- trally hover into both law and regulation. it is interested in interrogating what these moments mirror and denote. thus, my intention here is not to reify law and regula- tion as if they are perfectly self-identical; rather, i want to problematise our under- standings of law and regulation by teasing out some of their textual and conceptual commonalities. the example of undecidable terrorism laws in attempting to illustrate what i have delineated above, it is worth looking at the structure of some legal provisions to see how they expose some aporias (i.e., of stability decidability and determinability vs. fragmentation, decentralisation and undecidability) within themselves. the legal provisions i consider in the subsequent sections can also be read as forms of regulation because they display an inexorable iterability does not simply signify repetition as in ‘reiteration’; rather, iteration is an alteration, a modi- fication of what it repeats i.e., an ‘other’. iteration thereby introduces new contexts and diversities into communication. no doubt, as vismann ( ) observes, law understands how to make use of this undecidability and its ‘undermining, constituting aporias for its own ends, [and] law does not collapse under the burden of par- adoxes’. nevertheless, at the same time, this undecidability also holds an unforeseeable potentiality for an on-going ‘otherwise’ negotiation and improvisation towards justice (ramshaw ). i briefly invoke this ‘otherwise’ mode of undecidability in part of this article. p. kalulé interdependence and an ongoing cross-dialogue between law and regulation in the area of counter terrorism. for purposes of scope, i focus my attention on the definitional decidability versus undecidability of terrorism, a concept found under s. of the terrorism act , which provides: ( ) in this act ‘terrorism’ means the use or threat of action where — (a) the action falls within subsection ( ), (b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government [or an interna- tional governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, [racial] or ideological cause. a close reading of the definition of terrorism under the act (like a close reading of any other legal statutory provision) will show that it is susceptible to being interpreted broadly or extensively due to the fact that the act itself is essentially a communicative text. this is an inescapable reality that is sometimes exacerbated by the regulatory (or communicatory) intentions and ambitions of the statute itself. indeed, in trying to widen its reach by proscribing the unpredictable generality of international terrorism offences, the terrorism act inescapably exposes itself exteriorly to illimitable interpretational conundrums. to illustrate this point, let us briefly focus on s. (c) of the act. s. (c) lumps together different criminal offences and concepts (such as ‘political, religious, racial or ideological’) and conflates them. but by obfuscating the boundaries between racial, ideological and political motivations, it engenders the interplay of an even longer indistinguishable and undecidable list of offences. opaque terms like ‘reli- gious’ and ‘ideological’ are then inscribed within the very undecidable opacity of ‘terrorism’, enkindling opacities within opacities. hence, from the outset, an inevita- ble and undecidable entanglement of differences that play upon each other is inhab- ited and initiated from within s. ’s text. this play of differences is perhaps most evident in the inclusion of the notion of racial ideology, an amendment to the act that was made in . the explicit introduction of ‘racial’ ideology into s. ’s text inscribes or marks the speech of the racialised other (in particular the muslim other), as a potentially transferential cause section  of the terrorism act (c. ). generally, in the context of post- / anti-terrorism laws, the state does not have to make racism or islamophobia explicit. such racism is originary; already there. it is evident in the legitimised extensive- ness of the anti-terrorism laws and their prosecutorial apparatus, which allow for the arbitrary and dis- criminatory interpretation and enforcement of law from the outset. see also n. . consider for example, how the procedures laid out in the terrorism act such as the enforcement of stop and search spring directly from schedule to the terrorism act . in this instance the act has a clear direct influence on the uk’s contest strategy (which aims to reduce the risk to the uk and its citizens and interests overseas from terrorism, so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence) and the terrorism act . on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation and referent of terror. in doing so, the provision psychically asserts and reinforces a presence of ontological perception, a homo-hegemonic orientalised percep- tion (said ) that widens the already extensive scope of terrorism reifying and enforcing an exceptionalist and racialised interpretation of terrorism that inherently defers and pathologises the alterity of the other (fanon ; puar ; browne ; puar and rai ). crucially, inasmuch as this widening of the act increases the sovereign’s power to police terrorism, it also paradoxically opens out the definition of terrorism further, into ‘monstrous excesses’ (puar ) or other psychic dimensions and extremities (cohen ) that elevate ‘the wrong things into sensational focus [by] hiding and mystifying the[ir] deeper causes’ (hall et  al. ). this fundamentally and inexo- rably blurs and compromises the intended stability, coherence and enforceability of s. . precisely, because of this ‘monstrous legal excess’, a double interminable haunt- ing, or spectral feeling of inadequacy and helplessness (that psychically affects both the self and the pathologised other) is interminably initiated. the supreme court’s decision in r v. gul ( ) emphasises some of the inter- pretational difficulties brought about by s. ’s broad definition of terrorism in its inscribed (inside/outside) interplay of differences. in gul, the defendant uploaded and disseminated videos depicting attacks by insurgents on coalition forces in iraq and afghanistan and excerpts of martyrdom videos accompanied by commentar- ies praising the attackers’ bravery and encouraging others to emulate them. he was tried, charged and convicted under s. of the terrorism act . one of the key issues of concern in gul was the likelihood of the definition of terrorism under s. of the act to be used arbitrarily due to its imprecise or undecidable wording. in fact, this was the basis of gul’s appeal. gul believed that his actions did not amount to terrorism because the definition of terrorism in international law (unlike the uk’s definition of terrorism) excluded those engaged in an armed struggle against a gov- ernment who attacked its armed forces in the context of a non-international conflict. although gul’s appeal was dismissed, the court acknowledged the potential over- reaches resulting from the way in which terrorism was defined. the court’s obiter dictum stated thus: the wide definition of ‘terrorism’ does not only give rise to concerns in rela- tion to the very broad prosecutorial discretion bestowed by the and acts, as discussed […] above. the two acts also grant substantial intrusive powers to the police and to immigration officers, including stop and search, which depend upon what appears to be a very broad discretion on their part. while the need to bestow wide, even intrusive, powers on the police and other officers in connection with terrorism is understandable, the fact that the pow- ers are so unrestricted and the definition of ‘terrorism’ is so wide means that the notion of racial ideology serves to emphasise that law spectrally inscribes a ‘racial-epidermal schema’ that excludes infra-human/racialised subjects from humanity (weheliye ; wynter ; browne ). [ ] all er . p. kalulé such powers are probably of even more concern than the prosecutorial powers to which the acts give rise ( , para. ). clearly, the wideness in the definitional scope of terrorism in gul suggests that any codified, seemingly stable and determinable notion such as terrorism is inevi- tably susceptible (owing to its very nature as a communicative text) to becoming stretched and being interpreted differently in unforeseen/upcoming contexts. terror- ism thus becomes openly expansive and undecidable with no decidable boundaries. rather than remaining closed and singular, it becomes a movable, transferable com- ponent of an iterable system of ‘decentred’ communication, performance and mean- ing through its interpretation, transmission and enforcement (ramshaw ). moreover, it is worth pointing out that the definition of terrorism also interacts— intertextually—with other forms of terrorist-related crime and thus gestures further towards the undecidable. take for example the notion of glorification of terrorism under s.( ) of the act, which provides: ( ) for the purposes of this section, the statements that are likely to be under- stood by members of the public as indirectly encouraging the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism or convention offences include every statement which: (a) glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) of such acts or offences; and (b) is a statement from which those members of the public could reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being glorified as conduct that should be emulated by them in existing circumstances. the offence of ‘glorification’ of terrorism is thereby intertextual. kristeva ( , p. ) on discussing intertextuality suggests that it occurs when the ‘literary word’, becomes ‘an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings’. with intertextuality, the intelligible rules of sequence and legal/regulatory causality from identification to apprehending to sanc- tioning harms or crimes no longer hold, for different unforeseen, transformative tem- poralities always emerge in a dynamic locus/loci of changeable spiralling meanings. accordingly, in interpreting ‘glorification’, it is conceivable that an enormous scope of disagreement could arise between reasonable people as to whether a par- ticular comment is merely an explanation or an expression of a previous terror inci- dent or whether it amounts to praise or ‘glorification’. this evidently throws open tensions in negotiation and decidability hence complicating the notions of stability and calculability commonly attributed to legal/regulatory texts. although not a glorification case but an offence dealing with proscribed organi- sations, the decision in r v. choudary (anjem) and another offers some insight [ ]  w.l.r. : here, the appellants had been charged and convicted with the offences of inviting support for a proscribed organisation. they were said to have given talks and made an oath of allegiance to the organisation and its leader and posted them on the internet. on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation into how the interpretational undecidability of glorification could be handled by the courts. i refer to this case because it was concerned with clarifying the notion of ‘inviting support’, a notion similar to glorification. what is striking about this decision is not the original conviction, or the dismissal of the appeal, but the significance (both textually and conceptually) of the court’s reading of ‘inviting support’. giving the word ‘support’ its ordinary meaning, the court held that ‘the actus reus of the offence could encompass support going beyond that which could be characterised as practical or tangible; however, that did not mean that the section was ambiguous or impermissibly vague’. this statement ‘beyond that which could be characterised as practical or tangible’ and the court’s emphasis on the offence’s ordinary meaning infers that the courts could also interpret ‘glorification’ ambiguously below conventional legal boundaries and criminal law standards like the burden of proof. thence the court’s reading in choudary potentially leaves room for pre-conceptions and presuppositions, as there may, for instance, be no need to prove ‘glorification’ beyond reasonable doubt. in this sense, the decision in choudary echoes vismann’s ( ) observation that the glorification offence ‘may not be rendered hopelessly illegitimate’ in spite of the exposure of its contradictions. notwithstanding, although the ambiguous legality of ‘glorification’ is concep- tually indispensible in the sense that it allows the state’s prosecutorial apparatus a broad discretion with regard to whomever it goes after, it also somewhat inscribes and sustains a rather counterproductive textual incoherence within the law. the implication of this textual incoherence is that the identification, determination and apprehension of speech that glorifies terrorism on a day-to-day basis becomes intractable. it is perhaps because of this textual problematic that there is a dearth of case law pertaining to glorification. the rarity of cases under ‘glorification’, however, does not take away ‘glorifica- tion’s’ symbolic function. that is to say, despite its textual incoherence, the offence of glorification still remains on the statute books. hence, it  still plays a role in the day-to-day enforcement and regulation of speech both offline and online. thus, if we try and imagine the differentiated ways and contexts in which ‘glorification’ could be enforced and is enforced on a day-to-day basis, it becomes evident that the offence throws up many inescapable practical/operable difficulties. glorification begins to self deconstruct i.e., it begins to take on a multitude of possible mean- ings engendering new contexts in an illimitable way. consequently, in the moment of a legal-ethico-regulatory decision, a term such as ‘glorification’ collapses upon itself compromising its stabilising purpose and calculable logics. this blurs the boundaries i.e., the inside/outside of the proscription. in this regard, the proscription opens itself to a futural and on-going ambiguity that involves a redrawing of various ibid para . in the uk the counter terrorism internet referral unit (ctiru), an enforcement body that derives its legitimacy from s. of the terrorism act, is responsible for making requests to online gatekeep- ers to block/filter content. the ctiru makes reference to the act when it ‘flags’ such content. an evaluation of the ctiru’s activities is almost impossible; ‘they do not routinely produce statistics, analy- sis or evaluations due to the nature of their work’ (open rights group ). p. kalulé contestable translations and navigations of its very terms in an unending manner (butler ). at any rate, the enforcement and interpretation of these offences, despite its apparent undecidability, aligns itself with a particular stabilising mono-logic that already assumes a clarity and determinability of meaning and interpretation as to what terrorist offences mean. understandably, the aim of this is to make offences easily identifiable and apprehendable in a somewhat calculable manner. however, because these offences (e.g., ‘terrorism’ and one could also include the concepts of ‘obscenity’ and ‘hatred’) are repeated in different contexts and cited in different contexts (e.g., consider the notion of ‘state terrorism’—acts of violence conducted by a state against foreigners or against its citizens) they obfuscate and contaminate their very singularity, spatiality and constative stability. they thereby begin to ques- tion the widely held assumption that legal writing or communication can be grasped in constatives of meaning and interpretation. but in reality, legal/regulatory consta- tives such as ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalisation’, ‘pornography’, ‘fake news’, ‘hate speech’, ‘propaganda’, ‘obscenity’, ‘graphic imagery’ etc., are fraught with impermanence and contestable performativity, interpretation, understanding and so forth. because of this, these offences become mootable, impartial and inter-subjective. their mean- ings evolve and mutate, contesting from both within and without. the various mean- ings, readings and interpretations of law compromise their closed structure by ‘incit- ing’ the opening of a shifting irresistible reproduction of reverse or counterpoint dialogues within the very prescription of limits, of what cannot be said or done. in this regard, they problematise the calculable ideals or intentionalities of law and reg- ulation for notwithstanding, they are ‘not even amenable to precise empirical obser- vation’ (heinze ). ultimately, legal/regulatory constatives of offences like terrorism (or the glori- fication of terrorism) are inscribed within a larger ecological system of legal com- munication and recitation, and within a system of diverse players who interpret, enforce, translate, transmit, transgress, reformulate and abide by them. they also function and are played out within a relational diversity of subjectivities, cultures and memories. accordingly, they become written signatures carrying the structure of a trace (ramshaw , p. ) that is issued by an authority, or the sovereign in order to create preconditions for communication to a differentiated community (black  ). thus, law and regulation open themselves in/out to a necessarily vague system of semiotics and language (endicott ), i.e., into a spatio-tempo- ral-networked system of movable differences and incomprehension (ramshaw ) hence engendering a ‘destinerrance’, a wandering away from their predefined and specified destination and goal (miller  ), or an undecidability, a ‘blindness’ (kirby et al. ). in the film derrida ( ). in an analysis of the greek myth of echo and narcissus, derrida connects echo’s repeating of narcissus’ last words (in whatever he spoke) to the ‘blindness’ (i.e., opacity) that for him marks all speech and writing as communication. bennington ( , p. ) also notes that writing is blind for it can never fully express a thought or realise an intention. on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation because they become a system of communication, a process of iterable discourse, utterances and dialogue between individuals (murray ), they correspondingly lose their initial qualities of singular control, anticipation, exclusivity and purity (ramshaw , p. ; landgraf ). as such, they begin to gain a distinct plas- ticity. they start to reveal a multiple exteriority of potential iterable sequences and meanings from within their very text, including those deferred and concealed, from the moment of its inception (derrida ). further, in becoming language, law and regulation are detached from a strict pro- cedural (i.e., ethico-juridico-legal) singularity. they remain perpetually closed; yet, open too, in an uncountable relation that requires a necessary ‘simultaneous respon- siveness’ (ramshaw ), i.e., an improvisational-interpretational flexibility and ‘attentiveness’ in order to communicate what is beyond (murphy ), and also in order to function. because of its inscription within iterability, a performative speech act (such as law/regulation) can never be a pure event, in other words absolutely singular, a pre- sent singular intervention, or ‘something’ that happens for the first and last time—it is always split, dissociated from itself. iterability necessarily limits what it makes possible rendering its rigour and purity impossible (de ville , p. ). to this extent, because law/regulation are not pure, they are contaminated by marking that which they seek to exclude, i.e., the peripheries (e.g. racial ideology discussed above) into their very signature. this ‘impressed’ other from within (der- rida ) repeatedly returns to reveal the contestable exteriority of law’s norms and codified values, morals, rights and responsibilities. precisely, by codifying this exte- riority within their very legal/regulatory text, a tension in negotiation i.e., ‘a certain inevitable complicity’ (ramshaw , p. ) is initiated. this ultimately makes the interpretation of law/regulation not fully singular and not fully determinable. law/ regulation therefore becomes contaminated and open to being used, applied and interpreted in divergent, present and futural contexts. part : deconstructing the regulation of online communication technologies having considered the undecidability of law/regulatory texts and their making, interpretation and enforcement, it is now important to interrogate the ungraspable undecidability that haunts technological regulation. for purposes of scope, in talk- ing about technology, i focus on what i call online communication technologies, such as the internet and its different social networking platforms. with a few exceptions, technologies are conceptualised as property/tools that are exclusive to us as humans, property/tools for particular ends, almost like a ‘child’s toys’ (johnson , p. ), obeying us, and having anthropomorphic qualities (derrida b) that are graspable and in our control. however, the complexity of artificial intelligence and computer science today complicates this understanding. certainly, today, computers not only outperform human operators in mathemati- cal operations and in proving complex mathematical theorems but they also drive cars, translate between human languages, outthink grand-masters at chess, and play p. kalulé improvisational music differently—‘smart’—in a rhythm notated instantaneously, faster than ours (virilio and bertrand ), one finitely surpassing our program- mability (gunkel ). owing to the fact that online communication technologies are (aided by) com- puters, they are susceptible to evading our impositions of spatiality and calculable programmability, determinability and stability. nevertheless, computers, due to this very programmability, are constantly having their code being redesigned and rewrit- ten (joque , p. ). as such, they are inherently deconstructive machines or texts susceptible to resisting and disrupting regulation. to understand this claim, it is important to think of online communication technologies as modern prosthetic extensions of writing—‘the page remains a screen’ (derrida , p. ). online communication technologies thus belong to a ‘digital history’ of finger-operating devices and handheld devices, like ‘pen tools’ that process words or print words with voices and with words (derrida ). thus, as with the signatures of law and regulation discussed above, online communication technologies are always embed- ded within an iterable and disseminatory ecological process of writing and commu- nication. they are ever in (and of) a process of languaging i.e., of reproducing and being produced as copies and duplicates of texts interminably looped in a network of coded computers and their human and computer addressees (joque , p. ; hayles , p. ). further, due to the interfacing (human/machine) synchronic engagement intrin- sic to online communications technologies, these technologies can be thought of as disseminatory organisms that produce a new kind of dual-authored writing, i.e., a ‘duplicitous’ double speech that ‘seems to originate not just with the persons who are individually identifiable in a genealogical sense, but also with a computer dis- course that carries with itself its own textual protocol’ (aycock ). because this writing occurs between human/machine or human/computer it re-enacts a spectral play of différance. accordingly, for us ‘the humans’, it occurs within an invisible techno-hallucinatory trickery or automatic spontaneity, ‘an inter- nal demon’ i.e.—an ‘other’ that can (or not) be withdrawn, in front of us; one that is faceless, from a different place, remote, secretly—behind the computer screen (der- rida , p. ). this spectral and phantasmic element of spontaneity and trick- ery is manifested in the manifold ways in which online communication technologies come up with new or unarticulated conjunctional combinations of solutions to diver- gent situations (as well as slippages e.g. ‘glitches’, ‘crashes’ or ‘leaks’) that befud- dle, surprise, ‘freeze!’ and outwit not only us, their users, but also their designers and programmers. moreover, it is worth noting that the kind of writing produced by online com- munication technologies is faster and has more mobility and fluidity than the kind of writing produced by humans in the real world. because of this, writing done via online communication technologies accelerates all the traces of speech and writing that occur in the real world hence blurring communicative contexts duplicitously in a more immediate out of time register. to belabour this point, it is worth exploring the notion of context within communication. derrida has suggested that ‘context’, which is always determined by the pres- ence of a receiver, is a notion based on a hermeneutic consensus. however, this on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation consensus can never be absolutely ascertained because the predeterminability of meaning within which communication (i.e. texts or images or speech) is received is always at once absent (derrida ). hence, one is never sure of the destinations or arrival of speech. in other words, the meaning of what a speaker or reader says or intends to say always loses its original form and rhythm and is susceptible to becoming lost or unreadable. this means for example, that words, which are intended to offend or cause harm, can miss their intended target and produce an unintended and unfore- seen effect on the readers or listeners (butler , p. ), their context is always shifting, dislodged, drifting in a flux of rupture. the possibilities of this occurring are incalculable, particularly online, given the condensed cross-cultural landscape of the internet. certainly, the re-citation, re-iteration, and re-contextualisation of writing is per- haps nowhere more evident than on the internet where a number of internet media signatures like memes, tweets (including retweets, subtweets) and videos allow for the citing, re-linking, recoding and reworking of content non-deterministically, mul- tipliably and cross-jurisdictionally. this is done using a number of online communication technological tools in pro- cesses of remixing (lessig ) that involve the endless deferral, translation, inven- tion and repetition of texts in and at differing times. to illustrate this, if we con- sider a re-mark like ‘blood is red’, a statement which at first may appear simple and graspable, it is highly likely that when disseminated and recited by various speakers online, it can infer a different meaning (a spectrum of meanings) than was originally intended by its (absent) online speaker (derrida ; butler ). other speak- ers and audiences could then (re)cite it and through this recitation, create a non- deterministic, derivative, re-punctuated vocabulary—with each single word, a pic- tograph, + [‘emoji’] or even a ‘deepfake’ image (quach ; cole )—that contests and challenges our normative understandings of fiction/reality; i.e., ‘isness’, ‘blood’ and even the very colour ‘red’ instituting a free play of meaning upon sub- stitutable meaning—‘iterability alters, contaminating parasitically’ (derrida , p. ). of course, the argument can be made here that online communications can be trapped and are contained within certain limits (e.g. through filtering and block- ing technologies), and that these very filtering and blocking technologies are used to limit the iterability of online communication technologies through censorship. nonetheless, because of their irrevocable bind to an exterior (in other words, to that which they exclude) these very blocking and filtering technologies also paradoxically yield symbiotic possibilities of invention and improvisation—for improvisation is a subversion that always occurs within limits and frameworks an emoji (japanese, from e ‘picture’ + moji ‘image, letter, character’) is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion. deepfake software is ai image software that is used to mimic facial topiary using selfies. cole ( ) notes that ‘sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable’. p. kalulé (murphy ). this claim is supported in the scholarship of a commentator like levine ( , p. ) who has argued that writers or speakers can be ‘spurred on’ by the impediments of censorship to innovate new styles of communication, which anticipate and bypass the calculable limits imposed by censorship. an example of such a phenomenon would be the re-appropriation and re- contextualisation of ordinary and seemingly innocuous words such as ‘milk’ by online right-wing and neo-nazi extremists to iconise and connote white suprem- acy (freeman ). for the regulator(s), such a change in terminology, a repeti- tive scattering of a sign (within a different context) would create an unanticipated graft of polysemic (ad infinitum) possibilities. it would thus subvert norma- tive assumptions of what constitutes ‘hateful speech’ and would alter prevalent notions of certainty and clarity (i.e., through widening the lexicon of hate speech with derivative, imitated, faked and differentiated words) hence making the very regulation of such speech intractable. even in the most repressive regulatory regimes, with the most technologically advanced filtering system in the world, ‘closed-off words’ can still give rise to a regeneration and invention of infinite textual possibilities based on those very closed-off words. hiruncharoenvate ( ), for instance, has shown how digital activists employ non-deterministic homophones of censored keywords to avoid detection by keyword matching algorithms on chinese social media/online com- munication websites (hiruncharoenvate et  al. ). zeng ( ) highlights a relevant practical example of such non-deterministic circumvention wherein chi- nese women and feminist activists on social networking websites like weibo use the hashtag #ricebunny as a substitute to the #metoo campaign. with #rice- bunny, users manipulate emojis (+ pictographs and homophones) of rice bowls (pronounced as ‘mi’) in addition to emojis of bunny heads (pronounced as ‘tu’) hence creating (mi +tu = #mitu/#metoo) in order to avoid censorship and detec- tion by the software and the authorities (zeng ). because these homophones and emojis are or were not pre-determined by the software (and its designers) they create new unprogrammable situations for cen- sors. these new unforeseen homophones can stay up on the internet undetected three times longer than their censored counterparts. consequently, in a play upon play of meaning, the cancelled excluded other returns to the fore. it subverts the ‘logical systematicity’ (spivak , p. ) of that which seeks to censor it by ‘determining its conditions of existence, fixing at least its limits, establishing its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and showing what other forms of statement it excludes’ (foucault , p. ). thus, online censorship (as a form of negative-writing or cancelled-out writing) from the very beginning creates the possibilities for a reverse-play of power or counter-power situations (by ascribing or inscribing différance). such reversed speech acts and utterances are performed in irreducible guises that divert from pre-established and pre-determined linguistic speech norms (butler ). these irreducible heterogeneous guises are always already present, haunt- ing the originarity of locutionary violence. in other words, the outside of such speech or writing is also from the outset in the inside of it. consequently, speech on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation ‘invaginates’ itself (derrida , p. ) in a ‘hermeneutic circle’ structured by a double contrary motion (moten , p. ). it is worth observing that these invaginated irreducible guises or ‘others’ within a text can be spectral i.e., psychically absent yet also present. derrida ( ) demon- strates the presence of this other through the notion of différance, a neologism that means both to defer and to differ. derrida has proposed that the deferred-differ- ence (i.e., différance) of writing reveals otherness i.e., it reveals the representative subjectivities of the excluded outside and binds them into a continuous relation and interaction with closed foundational and hierarchal structures. thus, the excluded outside of regulation i.e., its prohibited outside (by virtue of différance) is compelled to interact continuously with the very homo-hegemonic structures that seek to erase, exclude or overcome it in the first place. indeed, in every erasure or exclusion, the unconscious is revealed (but also repressed)  because différance itself engages in a free-play of the forces of the unconscious. derrida and mehlman ( ) and derrida ( ), drawing from freud’s use of writing as a psychic writing pad, demonstrates that in the unconscious process of inscription, of meaning, of essence or truth, writ- ing can also contain an erasure, a repression of difference. crucially, this repres- sion (or regulation or censorship) never completely deletes (kristeva ; foucault ). it operates within an economy of return, an economy of différance that never radically cancels out the other. thus, it acknowledges the other immemorially and psychically etches the absence of the other and the danger/desire for/of the other into a general collective consciousness. the implication of this within the context of reading law is that what regulation/ law proscribes (i.e., risks, crimes or harms) remains, interminably and profoundly attached and bound to regulation/law. it remains already, before, after, and in the moment, emphasising its exclusion. ‘what one tries to keep outside always inhabits the inside’ (bennington , p. ). therefore, regulation/law creates an interminable irresolvable aporetic rela- tionship with what it proscribes (whether it be crime or harm) and simultane- ously deconstructs itself in a ‘chronic autoimmunitary logic’ (l’auto-immunitaire), through a quasi-suicidal process wherein it works to destroy its own protection, in order to immunise itself against attack from within (borradori , p. ; miller ). the result of this is that the singularity, essence and stability of regulation/ law and its commands and rules are always put into question. they are always inade- quate, always lacking, always terrified—chronically. in light of this, the very process of regulation and containability becomes contaminated, inescapably unpredictable, self-defeating and more complex than is dominantly imagined. what this means in the context of speech and conversation generally is that closed-off or cancelled-out return interminably as they are always already (in a différance is also about the interplay of tensions and oppositions. différance is evident in notions such as absence/presence, outside/inside etc. invagination is the inward refolding of form, ‘an inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket… an internal pocket larger than the whole; for derrida ( ) when/where invagination happens, the limits of the border are limitless. p. kalulé contrapuntal and polyphonic/polyrhythmic motion) appropriated by subjects to pivot and conjure up historical, present and futural meanings for which they were never intended (butler ; said , pp. – ; aptheker , p. ; brown ). for the subordinated speaker, or the excluded speaker, the ability to re-appropriate and juxtapose meanings within language/speech becomes an instance of disruption and a re-centring, or renegotiation of dominant homo-hegemonic linguistic imperial projects. hence, speech and writing, as forms of language/speech and communica- tion, become counter/reversible tools for agency and for validating subjectivity. it is this inherent illimitable power, this inescapable reverse power play within speech writing and communication that perhaps makes it such a spectral concept and makes its regulation irrevocably difficult, especially online. having looked at how online communication technologies can compromise them- selves and complicate regulation, it is important to explicate the ways in which this happens in more detail. my focus here is on textual filtering processing technologies or nlp technologies. seeing as textual filtering and software are inseparable, i also consider filtering software and software more generally in my discussion. my inten- tion here is not to explain what these technologies do in detail but to interrogate the role of technological regulation vis-à-vis offensive online content (in the context of communication and writing) and the peripheries of this relation. in doing this, i hope to underscore some of the underlying undecidabilities of regulation that these technologies demonstrate. . nlp technologies in rather reductive terms, nlp techniques work by scrutinising the meanings of language generated within online communications technologies. using algorithmic systems (khurana et al. ), they scrutinise euphemisms, references, code words and colloquialisms online to predict their proximity to crime and its commission. nlp techniques associate and identify extracted words and sentiments to specific topics by using statistical extraction and retrieval algorithms. by looking at docu- ments as a ‘bag of words’, each word in each document is assigned a score reflecting a related word (jain et  al. ). the document is then allocated a vector whose coordinates correspond to the words it contains. a likeness of vectors indicates a likeness or similarity of documents. in order to identify this likeliness in documents, a method of elimination known as hashing (a dna-like sequence that allows com- puters to sequentially search for, identify, segment and cluster duplicates) is applied. the archive of hashes—undiscerning of the fact that the archive is haunted by what it excludes (derrida )—is then used to exclude certain categories of communi- cation that are usually regarded as offensive, hateful or simply inconvenient as is the case with spam filters (cohen ). nlp technologies have been used in software such as impero education pro, an internet monitoring software used in over % of secondary schools in the uk. in this particular context, nlp technologies like impero have been developed in on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation response to the prevent strategy and its duty of care placed on schools in the counterterrorism and security act, which provides that: specified authorities will be expected to ensure children are safe from ter- rorist and extremist material when accessing the internet in school, includ- ing by establishing appropriate levels of filtering (hm government , p. ). . of iterable keywords and software impero comes with a radicalisation library (i.e. a list of over phrases, words and word combinations) that filters the internet to indicate whether a student is proactively seeking extremist content (impero ). the functional logic of an nlp programme like impero is that it helps to forestall ‘harmful’ expressions by detecting and identifying ‘harmful’ cited keywords, as used in the context of other words. nevertheless, its aims are somewhat undecidable, as i will attempt to unravel henceforth. first, from a psychoanalytic lens, the inclusion of banned words into a glossary creates an incalculable absence/presence, an (unheimlich) uncanniness or impression that frustrates the regulatory and repressive structure of the singular archive, or the familiar/familial/filial whole that seeks to impose form, castrate, inscribe, cancel and put it in the out of memory. therefore, in a kind of ineluctable catachresis, excluded or closed-off words inevitably inhabit an encrypted dystopic space of power, a space of incomplete powerlessness (encoded secretly already in the inside) that haunts the very process of their predetermined meaning, closure, spatiality and regulation. further, because nlp technologies and such software technologies work within a system of rule and word learning, they carry with them the trace of com- munication and writing. on this account, in the library of words with(in) which nlp’s work, there is always a return to citational writing i.e., there is always a referring to and a cross-referring to of signs and their significations. this is done through a process of word navigation, combination and translation that embod- ies an intertextuality of differing irresolvable representations and tensions. the significance of this is due to nlps functioning within a process of translation. they are always susceptible to an ‘infinity of loss’ (derrida and venuti ) with regard to the interpretational originality, legibility and stability of meaning. put differently, with nlps there is always an iterable process of experimenta- tion that confuses and frays meaning. nlps inevitably traverse a complex system of roots (deleuze and guattari ) and are enveloped in coils of ‘borrowed pieces’ (derrida , pp. – ) folded within limits/defects/inadequacies that cross a multitude of singular scenes of utterance, and further possible non- linear scenes of utterance. thus, an acronym like say ‘yodo—you only die once’ when detected by nlp software, for example, can complicate interpreta- tion and translation cryptically because it undoes singularities of meaning and context. on the one hand, yodo can be used in communications involving health activism by organisations such as the dying matters coalition during dying p. kalulé matters awareness week and, on the other hand, it can be appropriated by mili- tants from daesh to disseminate their propaganda (religious leader ). the acronym hence drifts indeterminably, destabilising its own limits. it overlaps, and begins to acquire new meanings and functions even those for which (we think) it was never intended (butler ). moreover, because nlp software and most filtering and algorithmic software are programmed to function in a predetermined (albeit ever-changing) predictive upcoming sequence of grammars and linguistic structures, they still ‘learn on the job’. thus, they have to deal with word situations that do not ever occur in their initial programming or training (jurafsky and martin , p. ). as such, there is always an informational void, a slippage, a probability of ‘blindness’ (i.e., a delay or deferred belatedness) in their intention to grasp, estimate and encode meanings proximate, sparse, and exterior to them i.e., heterogeneous meanings within evolving polyphonic/polyrhythmic communicatory conventions and con- texts. for this very reason, these software technologies are susceptible to filtering out content randomly (e.g. in the case of innocuous content), hence compromis- ing and complicating their very computational/regulatory usefulness. to illustrate this, let us consider the following examples of facebook’s filter- ing moderation policy, which is based on a ‘combination of the processing power of computers’ (algorithmic software) with the ‘nuanced understanding provided by humans’ (cruickshank ). in september , shaun king—a writer for the new york daily news, who frequently writes stories about police brutality and runs a community page with over , members—posted on his facebook page a screenshot of an email that twice called him the n-word, saying: ‘fuck you n*****!’ within a mat- ter of a few hours, the facebook software filters banned him temporarily, claim- ing that he had violated its ‘community standards’ (breitenbach ). crucially, the stability and legitimacy of the phrase ‘community standards’ is something elusive, divergent and in a constant questioning of itself, especially in the hetero- geneous context of online communication. yet again, it presents us with all the ever-recurring problems, tetherings and tensions of writing i.e., iterability, diffé- rance, destinerrance, i/other, presence/absence, inside/outside, etc. another example of a censorship incident ‘gone wrong’ is facebook’s censor- ing of an image of the prehistoric venus of willendorf figurine, a fertility symbol and masterpiece of the palaeolithic era (breitenbach ). this incident, and the controversy surrounding it, began in december when italian activist laura ghianda posted a ‘viral’ picture of the figurine on facebook. subsequently, face- book censored the image based on the grounds that the depiction of the figurine implied nudity and violated its community standards. by doing so however, face- book upset members of its very community. an outraged christian köberl, direc- tor of the natural history museum in vienna where the figurine is displayed, for example, commented saying: let the venus be naked! since ,   years she shows herself as prehis- toric fertility symbol without any clothes. facebook censors it and upsets the community. (breitenbach ) on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation facebook apologised subsequently in reaction to the ensuing public outrage. the company’s spokesperson explained that facebook’s policies did not allow depictions of nudity: however, we (i.e., facebook) make an exception for statues, which is why the post should have been approved. (breitenbach ) for another example of facebook’s censorship regime and how it reproduces false positives that conflict with the views of its community, one should consider the case of celeste liddle (graham ), an aboriginal feminist activist in australia, who had her account suspended (not for the first time) on the grounds of nudity after posting pictures of two older aboriginal women performing an ancient ceremony whilst topless. later in this case liddle launched a petition, which gathered more than , signatures in less than  days, demanding that facebook review its community standards. at any rate, these incidents were mistakes or ‘false positives’ on the part of the detection software, or facebook’s moderation policy, or both. from our point of view, it is impossible to tell how these false positives occurred with clarity because the whole process of moderation and algorithmic use remains invisible and not well accounted for (diakopoulos ; bucher ). in fact, seeing that there is always a temporal deferral and a human/machine or human/ai disjunc- tion in any process of internet content regulation and reactive/proactive filtering, i doubt that such processes can or could ever possibly be ‘well accounted for’ or ‘accurately’ investigated—but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this article. what is clear however, is that examples of self-defeating ‘mistakes’ or ‘false positives’ i.e., situations where seemingly innocuous content is wrongly cen- sored, where technological tools and software virally mutate and ‘auto-destruct’ our impulse to censor and regulate in today’s age of technological and absolute warlike militaristic dominance—a ‘finitve [finitrice] technē’? (nancy , p. ; joque )—are recurringly endemic. this then begs the question: are automatic false-positives really avoidable? perhaps, we should not blame these ‘tools’, technologies or software because as heidegger ( ) suggests, they are only ‘revealing’ the inevitable realities (i.e., the limitations, iterations, absences, destinerrance, as well as the inherent openness to the viral and pathogenic contamination) of communication in nature, in the real world. perhaps these technologies and software are simply deconstruct- ing code, communication and linguistics in an ‘other’ incalculable uncanny reg- ister, in a language unfamiliar to us, in a spectral play upon play of différance, in a ‘speech coming from the other, a speech [or call] of the unconscious as well’? (derrida , p. ). derrida once again elaborates: i don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. what rules it obeys. this secret with no mystery frequently marks our dependence in rela- tion to many instruments of modern technology. we know how to use them p. kalulé and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them on their side and this may give us plenty to think about with regard to our rela- tionship with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (derrida , p. ) part : interlude the different aspects of online communications technology and law with which i have and have not engaged here are still marked with an on-going writing and counter-writing that communicates even beyond this screen. they are endlessly being disseminated, transmitted, enforced and interpreted iterably. thus, they are always already accumulating a multiplicity of infinite differences and unprogram- mable anarchic tensions and meanings. at any rate, aspects of online communications technology and law as on-going forms of heterogeneous communication ‘rooted in the infinity of memories and cultures i.e., the religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth’ (derrida ), cannot simply be expressed with accuracy, stability and perfectibility. moreover, because they are relational, they reveal the heterogeneous unseen,  as well as the incomplete plenitude of the unanticipated other. thus, there is always an imper- ceptible ‘contact, juxtaposition, porosity, osmosis, friction, attraction and repul- sion’ (nancy , p. ), i.e., an inevitable intractability to them that requires an impossible kind of faith or justice, a responsiveness of radical responsibility (responsabilité), an attentiveness to the wholly other (derrida , pp. – ), that can only be measured in our offbeat ‘inability to read’ and attune to their call (moten , p. ) in order to ‘negotiate the dangers and pleasures of the worlds they encapsulate and explode’ (chun ). part : coda this article has suggested that the regulation of law and online communications technologies is inescapably charged with an infinite heterogeneous iterability and dissemination. it has shown that law/regulation and online communication tech- nologies as both processes and acts of language and communication are inher- ently destinerrant, contaminable and undecidable despite our efforts to master them. indeed, the re-circulable meanings of law and online communications tech- nologies cannot completely arrive; they cannot be mastered or contained let alone be firmly located. unsettling psychically like errant ghosts (derrida ; glis- sant , p. ), their meanings and unprogrammable protocol elude the laws of stability, mastery, fixity and coherent ordering hence compromising the mono- logic regulatory impulse of determinability. and even after processes of transla- tion and legal-juridical clarification, law/regulation and online communications technologies (like all writing and communication) forever gesture towards an on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation infinite (dis)order —a de-regulated presence of ‘heterological openings’ (chow , pp. – ). acknowledgements special thanks to shaimaa abdelkarim, justin joque, joão carlos magalhães, angela daly, gavin sutter, jaspal kaur, sadhu singh, stewart motha, yanina spizzirri, jake reeder, and my ph.d. supervisors julia hornle and saskia hufnagel for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. open access this 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https://theconversation.com/from-metoo-to-ricebunny-how-social-media-users-are-campaigning-in-china- https://theconversation.com/from-metoo-to-ricebunny-how-social-media-users-are-campaigning-in-china- 	on the undecidability of legal and technological regulation 	abstract 	introduction 	part : deconstructing law and regulation 	the example of undecidable terrorism laws 	part : deconstructing the regulation of online communication technologies 	part : interlude 	part : coda 	acknowledgements 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ introduction dr ruth lewis, associate professor, university of northumbria, uk (corresponding author) email: ruth.lewis@northumbria.ac.uk professor susan marine, associate professor of higher education, merrimack college, ma, usa mailto:ruth.lewis@northumbria.ac.uk despite decades of attention to the problem of gender based violence (gbv) on campus, in , it is still so prevalent as to warrant this special issue of violence against women. as part of a wider resurgence of feminist activism, the decades of attention given to the issue in the u.s. and canada, and more recently in the uk, other european countries, it is timely to consider whether current efforts to address gbv on campus are adequate. should we turn attention to attempts to transform rather than simply adapt, university environments? if so, how might that work best be accomplished? this special issue seeks to explore those questions and reveal the challenges posed by efforts at transformation, as well as the successes. recent attention to gbv has been been amplified due to recent exposure of violent and abusive behaviour by men across numerous institutional settings, including the catholic church, the entertainment industry, and both amateur and professional sport. these abuses have been particularly pernicious within post-secondary education. high profile examples such as the prosecution of michigan state/u.s. gymnastics team doctor larry nassar and the recent indictment of michigan state president lou anna simon, the conviction of stanford student, brock turner and of lecturer lee salter in the uk, and the recent multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by survivors against dartmouth college remind us that even as awareness of gbv has grown enormously, it continues to happen, seemingly unabated. fortunately, visible and committed resistance to this state of affairs is evident, particularly in the realm of social media. high profile reporting of these incidents has given rise to and reflects a resurgence of energy and anger about gbv represented by global social media initiatives to expose it (e.g. #metoo, #himtoo, #timesup, #balancetonporc, #niunamenos, #yotambien, #metooindia, #everydaysexism, #ibelieveher and #hollaback). the offences exposed in these campaigns, and many others like them, have opened up conversations about sexual relations, consent and male entitlement to women’s bodies which are taking place globally, in social media, and in mainstream media. although many scholars, activists and practitioners in the u.s. and canada have argued for more radical approaches, efforts to address gbv on campus have too often focused on changing institutional policy by ramping up legalistic responses, and applying programmatic interventions (such as bystander frameworks) that appear to have fallen victim to neoliberal commodification. prioritizing systems of auditing, monitoring, and data-collecting in anti-sexual violence work signals the emergence of what marine and nicolazzo ( ) refer to as “compliance culture.” many of these interventions also ignore the experiential distinctions among various campus populations, and fail to account for or address the higher rates of violence committed against women of color and lgbtq survivors (cantor, et al., ; harris & linder, ). there has also been a tendency to focus on sexual violence to the exclusion of other forms of gbv, such as intimate partner abuse. while many of these interventions appear to be promising, very few currently adopted by universities are backed up by evidence of measurable change (naspa, ). arguably, these developments restrict the scope for radical transformational change to gender relations and do little to counteract the normalization of gbv. while efforts to eradicate gbv from universities or societies might seem ambitious, or even naive, a failure to set ambitious targets can lead to a focus on ‘managing’ violence rather than boldly imagining and working towards gbv-free worlds. the work of transformation, while elusive in current practice, is nonetheless crucial to center. this special issue attempts to begin filling the gap in scholarship about attempts to achieve cultural transformation in universities. anti-rape campus activism in the u.s. began in the s, and was punctuated by student protests, sit-ins, and the establishment of the first campus based rape crisis centers (heldman, ackerman, & breckenridge-jackson, ). in the uk, although students and academic staff have been active against sexual violence for decades, it is only since the recent upsurge in global feminist activism that efforts to challenge university- based sexual violence have gained ground. arguably, the strategies employed by activists across these varying national settings are typified by a demand for culture change. furthermore, these approaches are consciously attentive to centering the agency and dignity of survivors, a practice that ensures that such movements are and will remain survivor-led (rentschler, ). as we prepared the call for proposals for this volume, we felt it was important to ask: what ‘counts’ as transformation? the manuscripts in this special issue indicate that transformation includes activism by students, staff, and faculty aimed at long-term progressive changes in cultures, norms and behaviours and/or the systemic inequalities underlying problematic cultures. transformational change thus has both cultural and structural ramifications. to achieve and maintain transformation, problematic binaries of ‘before’ and ‘after’ must be transcended; instead, transformative activism demands effort that is ongoing and iterative, rather than reduced to a single intervention. transformation appears to be rarely a result of sudden change (although sudden events can provide the catalyst for transformation), and is more likely to result from persistent application of effort which is refined, developed, and extended through generations of the student cohort. the work is vigilantly attended to, and constantly appraised for effectiveness and adapted to respond to the cultural context, the emerging cultural zeitgeist and current events. transformation, as evidenced in the articles in this volume, often comes out of struggle and conflict, and through a reckoning with how poorly universities have responded to struggles around gbv. it is catalyzed by anger and a sense of injustice, as activists strive to rectify these failings. to be effective, such activism must critically engage with wider issues of inequality in institutions; transformational work is embedded in the realities of institutional power structures typified by masculinist, neoliberal institutions (aleman, ). however, it does not stop at critique but rather builds on critique to “work the space of neoliberalism” (laurie & bondi, ) and identify scope for transformative potential in local contexts. while the manuscripts in this issue are each specifically place-bound, our intention is to provide readers with material to imagine possibilities of transformation that could be applied to their own communities, as we move away from generic, ‘one size fits all’ programmes. the work of the authors in this special issue instead opens a conversation about transformation as translational practice, whereby blueprints are offered to be adapted to different varying contexts. this special issue examines a selection of contemporary transformative efforts to end gbv and gbv-condoning cultures on campus. it includes a variety of transformative responses to gbv practiced by students, faculty and staff, and in some cases, collaborations of all three. the articles engage critically with institutional policies and practices in terms of how they contribute to, or inhibit, cultural transformation. cultures that promote gbv, often described as rape culture (buchwald, fletcher & roth, ; henry & powell, ), lad culture (phipps, ), and laddism (lewis, marine, & kenney, ), are actively resisted in these selections, as the authors describe. a unifying thread-- naming and exposing the institutional, cultural, and societal norms that contribute to gbv-- is embodied in each manuscript, though the ways of thinking and acting on that opposition are diverse. ricci and bergeron lead off the special issue, with a detailed and stirring account of how a variety of actors, tactics and events have generated progressive change on a canadian university campus. drawing on the process of designing, conducting and disseminating findings of their research about sexual harassment and violence at quebec universities, they reflect on the opportunities for change offered by a feminist activist research approach. they provide evidence to suggest this change has the potential to be transformative; only time will tell whether the institutional policy changes and other responsive actions they hastened will yield a shift in incidents of violence at universite du quebec au montreal. page, bull, and chapman write from the perspective of activist academics, some of whom have experienced staff misconduct while they have been students, and describe the process of making a complaint. they urgently call for increased attention to a relatively neglected area; abusive behaviour by university staff towards students. highlighting the ways in which abuse by staff has been hidden, they thoughtfully explore ‘slow activism’ - tactics that operate at varying levels of speed and at different levels of the sector to enact change that can achieve the important goal of making visible this form of gbv. atkinson and standing problematize the notion of ‘cultural change,’ a term used by uuk (the advocacy organisation for uk universities, whose membership is vice-chancellors) in their report, changing the culture, which marked a step change in uk institutional approaches to gbv. they persuasively argue that attempts at ‘cultural change’ must go beyond policy reform, zero tolerance and condemnation to address the ways in which sexism, intersecting with other structures of oppression, plays out in the neoliberal university. advocating for the role of feminist academic activists in resisting the neoliberal project of modern universities, they note that the focus on students as both the problem and the solution to gbv on campus enables delegation of responsibility for cultural change to student bodies. their critique reminds us this approach sidesteps accountability for senior leaders to address underlying patriarchal, misogynistic institutional cultures. the special issue also includes two contributions from scholar activists exploring broader thematic issues-- the precarity of contingency, and the potential of enhanced faculty advocacy. sharoni and klocke explore the role of faculty in challenging gbv, particularly in the us context where the trump/de vos regime signals regressive steps that will likely damage the hard-won rights for victim/survivors. documenting the inspiring, tireless work of the activist group faculty against rape, the authors make a persuasive case for the urgency of faculty to re- engage in the work of culture change on their campuses. sharoni and klocke rightly advise against faculty passivity, providing examples of far’s change work that, while based in u.s. frameworks, has great potential to be adapted to transform multiple university and national contexts. finally, deborah cohan contributes an activist/advocate note that makes linkages between serving as a contingent faculty member and teaching about gender based violence. cohan’s experiences of navigating the deeply complex issues raised in her courses on interpersonal violence, while also navigating the precarity of contingency, offers important insights about the investment of time, and both intellectual and emotional energy, required to teach about violence in ways that seek to transform. the consciously cultivated depth of cohan’s connection to students who are also survivors points to the crucial yet time intensive work of empowerment. this work is typically “inefficient” in the neoliberal university context and thus is “incompatible” with the demands of part-time faculty status. cohan reminds us that the rewards of this investment are great, yet the costs are high, requiring faculty to make intensely personal calculations of feasibility. while these pieces open the conversation in rich and fruitful ways, and bring both new insight and time-tested strategies to the fore, we would be remiss not to name the persistent unanswered questions they also raise. each piece highlights the enduring barriers to transformational work; the structural, ideological and cultural obstacles that attempts at transformational change seek to overcome. in focusing on attempts at transformation, we cannot overlook the perniciousness of the power structures in which gbv thrives, and the ongoing puzzlement how such power structures can be effectively challenged. moreover, while each piece in this special issue provides an example of change that appears to ‘work,’ we must consider how transformation should be assessed, evaluated, and appraised. as argued earlier, neoliberal frames dependent on quantification are generally not useful here. these strategies call for new ways of thinking about how we know whether the work is shifting culture and in fact, reducing (and eventually eliminating) violence. each submission we received was, by necessity, embedded in a particular context, and thus contextually limited in the ways it engaged with a full interrogation of interlocking systems of oppression, particularly pertaining to race/ethnicity, (dis)ability, sex, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and nationality. future scholarship on transformative strategies must continue, and deepen, effective interrogation into these multiple vectors of identity, inclusion, and intersectionality (crenshaw, ). given the recent evidence that trans and gender nonbinary individuals on university campuses are more likely to experience sexual and intimate partner violence (cantor, et al., ), transformative strategies must attend in more complex ways to interrogating what is ‘gendered’ about gbv. in addition, while the attention to transforming rape culture provides rich insights into the harms it generates, the question remains why these forms of gbv are considered to the neglect of others, such as intimate partner violence. the concept of the “continuum” of gbv (kelly, , p. ) helpfully draws our attention away from single acts or types of violence to reflect the ways they are experienced - as different forms of violence which share ‘a basic common character’ (ibid). future scholarship would also do well to attend to the overlapping and intersecting types of gbv and approaches which seek to end them. finally, this special issue frames transformation as, by definition, beneficial, but the harrowing stories retold by the scholar activists in this issue remind us that attending to the work of transformation comes at a considerable effort of time, energy and work by activists who are working against the prevailing norms of the neoliberal academy. how might we discern whether the costs are 'worth it'? in other words, how might we best reconcile the costs of oppositionality? as it addresses these and other pressing questions, we envision that the next frontier of resistance to gbv in universities will include identification of transformative strategies that can be shared across different contexts, national and otherwise. all social movements can benefit from cross-teaching and cross-learning, and from the iterative evolution of resistance which yields the raw material for framing a theory of transformation. to this utopian end, the central question remains: how can we assure that all institutions of higher education are safe for all? and what ways of thinking and being in the world must we embody to ensure liberation from harm? these questions prod us onward, serving as a vital reminder that until and unless we are all safe, we will never be free. references alemán, a. m. m. 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( ). working the spaces of neoliberalism: activism, professionalisation and incorporation (vol. ). indianapolis, in: wiley-blackwell. lewis, r., marine, s., & kenney, k. ( ). i get together with my friends and try to change it’. young feminist students resist ‘laddism,’ ‘rape culture,’ and ‘everyday sexism.’ journal of gender studies, ( ), - . marine, s.b. & nicolazzo, z. ( , june ). the rise of compliance culture: a dead end for addressing sexual violence. praxis: the blog of the journal of critical scholarship on higher education and student affairs. retrieved from https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/% % files/climate% survey/aau_campus_climate_survey_ _ _ .pdf https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/% % files/climate% survey/aau_campus_climate_survey_ _ _ .pdf https://jcshesa.wordpress.com/ / / /the-rise-of-compliance-culture-a-dead-end- for-ending-campus-sexual-violence/ phipps, a. ( ). ‘lad culture’ and sexual violence against students. in s. anitha and r. lewis, (eds.), gender based violence in university communities: policy, prevention and educational initiatives. bristol, england: policy press rentschler, c. a. ( ). # metoo and student activism against sexual violence. communication culture & critique, ( ), - . https://jcshesa.wordpress.com/ / / /the-rise-of-compliance-culture-a-dead-end-for-ending-campus-sexual-violence/ https://jcshesa.wordpress.com/ / / /the-rise-of-compliance-culture-a-dead-end-for-ending-campus-sexual-violence/ author bios dr. ruth lewis is associate professor in the department of social science, university of northumbria. she has published widely on feminist activism and gender-based violence - including intimate partner violence, online abuse and gbv in universities - and has been involved in feminist activism of various kinds, locally and nationally. dr. susan marine is associate professor and program director in the higher education master’s program at merrimack college, massachusetts, usa. with extensive experience of leading initiatives in higher education for the advancement of women and trans* students, her research focuses on building gender expansive campuses, including ending violence against lgbtq students and fostering full participation of trans* students. on equivariant isometric embeddings math. z. , -i ( ) mathematische zeitschrift � by springer-verlag on equivariant isometric embeddings j o h n d o u g l a s m o o r e , . a n d r o g e r schlafly z department of mathematics, university of california, santa barbara, california , usa department of mathematics, university of california, berkeley, california , usa . introduction t h e n a s h e m b e d d i n g t h e o r e m [ ] asserts t h a t a n y r i e m a n n i a n m a n i f o l d possesses a n i s o m e t r i c e m b e d d i n g into a euclidean space o f sufficiently large dimension. this article is d e v o t e d to a p r o o f o f a n e q u i v a r i a n t version o f n a s h ' s t h e o r e m , m a i n theorem. i f m is a compact riemannian manifold and g is a compact lie group which acts on m by isometries, there is an orthogonal representation p o f g on some euclidean space n and an isometric embedding f r o m m into ie n which is equivariant with respect to p. t h e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n p can be r e g a r d e d as a lie g r o u p h o m o m o r p h i s m f r o m g into the o r t h o g o n a l g r o u p o(n) which acts o n ie n b y r o t a t i o n s a n d reflections; a s m o o t h m a p x : m ~ i e n is e q u i v a r i a n t with respect to p if a n d only if x ( ~ p ) =p(cr) x(p), for all ~r~g, p e m . t h e m a i n t h e o r e m is true in b o t h the c ~ a n d real analytic categories. w e will w o r k in the c ~ c a t e g o r y for the t i m e being, a n d r e t u r n to the real analytic case in w . m o r e o v e r , the t h e o r e m h o l d s for m a n i f o l d s with b o u n d a r y . t h e m a i n a n a l y t i c t o o l used b y n a s h to p r o v e his i s o m e t r i c e m b e d d i n g t h e o r e m is an implicit function t h e o r e m b a s e d u p o n the n e w t o n i t e r a t i o n m e t h o d . t h e implicit function t h e o r e m applies to the e q u i v a r i a n t case with virtually n o change. i n o r d e r to a p p l y the implicit function t h e o r e m we need to a p p r o x i m a t e a given g - i n v a r i a n t r i e m a n n i a n m e t r i c o n m b y a m e t r i c induced b y an e q u i v a r i a n t e m b e d d i n g ; we will d o this b y using the t h e o r y o f the l a p l a c e o p e r a t o r o n c o m p a c t r i e m a n n i a n manifolds. a c c o r d i n g to g r o m o v a n d r o k h l i n [ ], a n y n - d i m e n s i o n a l c o m p a c t rie- m a n n i a n m a n i f o l d can be isometrically e m b e d d e d in if, n, where n = ( / ) n(n + ) + n + . n o such universal b o u n d is possible in the e q u i v a r i a n t case, a n d in fact, given a n y positive integer n , it is possible to c o n s t r u c t a left i n v a r i a n t * partially supported by national science foundation grant mcs - - / / / /$ , j.d. moore and r. schlafly metric on the group s of unit quaternion s which is n o t induced b y any equivariant embedding in ie" for n __< n, as described in w of this article. moreover, the equivariant isometric embedding t h e o r e m does n o t h o l d without the assumption that m be compact. indeed, bieberbach [ ] shows t h at the poincar disc with the hyperbolic metric o f constant cu rv at u re - t o g et h er with the circle group of r o t a t i o n s a b o u t the origin possesses no equivariant isometric embedding in any finite-dimensional euclidean space. it suffices to p r o v e the equivariant isometric em b ed d i n g t h e o r e m in the special case where m is an n-dimensional sphere s" with a r i e m a n n i a n metric invariant under a lie subgroup g of o(n+ ). indeed, b y a t h e o r e m o f m o s t o w and palais [- , p. ], any c o m p a c t g-manifold possesses an equivariant embed- ding in a sphere s" of sufficiently large dimension, even if the manifold has b o u n d a r y , and by a p a r t i t i o n of unity argumen t o n e easily extends a g-invariant metric on m to a g-invariant metric on s" which makes this equivariant embedding isometric. it will be convenient to formulate the equivariant isometric em b ed d i n g p r o b l e m in terms of certain frhchet spaces. if g is a given c o m p a c t lie g ro u p acting on a c o m p a c t manifold m and p: g ~ o ( n ) is a given representation, let c~ ien)= {c maps x: m ~ i e n } , c~, p(m, ie u) = {xe coo (m, ien)i x is equivariant with respect to p}, metoo(m)= {coo symmetric r a n k two covarian t tensors o n m}, m e t ~ (m) = {g e met oo (m) i g is g-invariant}. these vector spaces b e c o m e fr chet spaces with the usual family of c k norms, (notation: ilx[ik and [ighk will denote the c k n o r m s of elements xscoo(m, ien), g ~ met oo (m).) finally let c~ (m, ie n) = ~ { c~, p(m, ien) i p: g ~ o(n) a representation}. we define a m a p f: c~(m, i e n ) ~ m e t g ( m ) by letting f(x) be the metric induced on m by x. in terms of local coordinates (u . . . . , u") defined o n an o p en subset u of m, f(x) i u = y (x). (x) du i duj. j ~ " t o p r o v e the theorem, we need to show t h at given a positive-definite g ~ m e t ~ ( m ) , there is some representation p: g-+o(n) and some em b ed d i n g x e ca~ p(m, ie n) such that f(x) = g. we say that an element g ~ m e t ~ ( m ) is realizable if there is a m a p p i n g (not necessarily an embedding) x ~ c ~ ( m , if. n) for some n such t h at f ( x ) = g . t h e set of realizable metrics is closed under addition an d multiplication b y positive scalars. t h e r e are two steps to the p r o o f of the equivariant isometric em b ed d i n g theorem. t h e first step consists of constructing a specific " p e r t u r b a b l e " embed- ding x o e c ~ ( m , ie n~) such that if g o = f ( x o ) , t h e n any g l ~ m e t ~ ( m ) which is on equivariant isometric embeddings sufficiently close to go can be realized as f(x for some em b ed d i n g xi~ c~(m, ieni). this step relies on the nash implicit function t h e o r e m an d o u r t r e a t m e n t o f it will be based u p o n the w o r k o f schwartz [ ] and sergeraert el ], [ ]. t h e second step consists of showing t h at an y given positive-definite g e m e t ~ ( m ) can be a p p r o x i m a t e d arbitrarily closely by realizable metrics. t h e two steps of the p r o o f are p u t togeth er in the following way: if g is a positive-definite element of m e t e ( m ) , choose a co n st an t c > so t h at g - c g o is positive-definite, where go is the metric induced by the p e r t u r b a b l e em b ed d i n g x o constructed in step . (the metric c g o will be induced by the p e r t u r b a b l e embedding ~ c x o . ) use step to a p p r o x i m a t e g - c g o by a realizable metric g ; g =f(x ) for some x z e c ~ ( m , ]en ). t h e n g - g will be close to cg o a n d hence ~ m by step , there will be an element xlecg( , ie n ) such t h at f ( x ) = g - g z. h e n c e x=(x~, x ) will be an embedding in c~(m, ie n) (where n = n +n ) such that f(x)= g. t h e above t h e o r e m extends the main result o f an earlier article [ ]. t h e two steps of the p r o o f of the main t h e o r e m will be given in w and . in w we will discuss the modifications necessary for p ro v i n g the real analytic version of the main theorem. in w we will show t h at even if m is n o t c o m p a c t it possesses an equivariant isometric embeddi n g into h i l b ert space, o r into a finite-dimensional pseudo-euclidean space if it has finitely m a n y orbit types. finally, in w we will discuss nonexistence theorems, including an extension o f bieberbach's example m e n t i o n e d above. . step . nash's implicit function theorem except for a few details, this is just like the c o r r e s p o n d i n g step in the non- equivariant case. f o r each choice of representation p, the m a p f : c~,p(m, e n ) ~ m e t ~ ( m ) defined previously is fr chet differentiable. indeed, if x, ax are elements o f c~g, o( m, ien), f(x + ax)iu= ~ o@(x) o@(x)dui duj i , j = l i,j= \ ouz ouj { aj gu~ / + - - (ax) (ax) du i du j, i, j= ~ui from which we see that the fr chet derivatives o f f are given by the formulae i, j= \ou oia ~ f " ( x ) ( a i x , a x ) i u = ~ ~ ( a i x ) ( d x ) , i , j = l f (n) (x) = for n > . j.d. m o o r e a n d r. schlafly let g be a given positive-definite element of m e t e ( m ) an d suppose t h at we can find an embedding x~c~,p(m, ie n) such t h at f(x) is close to g. w e might then try to construct an embedding x + a x such that f(x+ax) is closer to g by solving the linearized equation if f'(x)(ax)=ag, where ag=g-f(x). agiu= f (ag)ijdu idu j, i , j = i the linearized equation is cqui (x). � ~--~ (ax) = (a g)ij. ( ) following nash, we impose the additional con d i t i o n t h at ax be p erp en d i cu l ar to x ( m ) : c~u, (x). ax = . ( ) integrating by parts shows that eqs. ( ) an d ( ) are equivalent to the linear system au' (x). (ax)= (~ a ~u'~uj (x). (ax)= - ~ ( g),j ( ) recall that we are given ag and we wish to solve for ax. it is n at u ral to restrict a t t e n t i o n to embeddings for which this linear system is nondegenerate. definition. an embedding x : m ~ i e u is said to be perturbable if for every pem there are local coordinates (u ,...,u") defined o n some n e i g h b o r h o o d u of p such that the matrix of c o l u m n vectors has r a n k n+� ( n o t e that this condition does n o t d ep en d u p o n the choice of local coordinates.) any g-manifold m possesses a p e r t u r b a b l e equivariant embedding into a euclidean space of sufficiently large dimension. indeed, by the equivariant embedding t h e o r e m of m o s t o w a n d palais m e n t i o n e d in the i n t ro d u ct i o n , there is an equivariant embedding x=(x , ...,xm): m - - , i e "~ on equivariant isometric embeddings into a euclidean space of some dimension m, fro m which we can c ~ a p e r t u r b a b l e equivariant e m b e d d i n g (x,) , x xo, into a euclidean space of dimension m + � m(m + ). we can rewrite the linear system ( ) in the form if x is perturbable, taa will be a nonsingular square m at ri x an d a x = a ( a a ) - : ( _ ~ a g ) ( ) will be a solution to ( ), a n d in fact the a r g u m e n t given in schwartz [- , p. ] or g r e e n e [ , pp. , ] shows that it is the unique solution o f smallest length. thus even t h o u g h a is defined in terms o f local coordinates (ul, ..., u") on m, the solution ax given by ( ) does not depend on the choice o f local coordinates. ax is a globally defined s m o o t h m a p p i n g from m into ie n, which as we will next check, is also equivariant. if p~m a n d ~r~g we can choose c o o r d i n a t e systems (u' . . . . ,u ~) defined o n a n e i g h b o r h o o d u o f p and (if , . . . , f t , ) d e f i n e d on au so that ~(crq)=ui(q) for q~u. since x is equivariant the matrices ~ are related by the e q u a t i o n a ( ~ p ) = ( ) ~ (p), and since p(~) is orthogonal, ax(ap)=a-(crp)(ta(ap) " (':rp))-i ( - � a g ( a p ) ) / \ = p ( a ) a(p)(ta(p) a(p)) - [-� ag(p)) = p(a) ax (p). thus ax is indeed an element of c~ ~, p(m, if, u). h e n c e we can define ( ) l(x): m e t ~ ( m ) ~ c a ~ p ( m , ie n) by l(x)(ag)= a('aa)- : -� ag ' j.d. moore and r. schlafly so t h a t f'(x) o l ( x ) = identity. suppose t h a t x o is a fixed p e r t u r b a b l e e m b e d d i n g with f ( x o ) = g o. i f g is a m e t r i c which is close to go, we m i g h t try to solve the n o n l i n e a r e q u a t i o n f ( x ) = g b y the n e w t o n iteration x n = x n _ l q - l ( x n _ l ) ( g - f ( x n _ l ) ) , n>=l. i f the x , ' s were to c o n v e r g e in the c ~ t o p o l o g y to a n element xooec~,,p(m, lelv), it would follow i m m e d i a t e l y t h a t f ( x ~ ) = g , b u t unfor- t u n a t e l y this s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d iteration does n o t c o n v e r g e since the e s t i m a t e we o b t a i n for l(x), iil(x)(g-- f(x))[ik_ ~ mk iixii~ iig-- f(x)llk, ( ) m k a constant, involves a loss of two derivatives. t o c i r c u m v e n t this difficulty, we m a k e use o f s m o o t h i n g o p e r a t o r s s(t): cs, o(m, if, n) --, c~, p(m, ie n) which satisfy the estimates ii s(t) x i l k + , < a k , , t ~ ilxll,, ( ) ][(i-- s(t)) xnk <=bk, lt -i []xnk +l, where ak, t, bk, ~ are suitable constants. i n the n o n e q u i v a r i a n t case, s m o o t h i n g o p e r a t o r s s(t): c ~ (m, ie n) ~ c ~ ( m , ie n) satisfying ( ) are c o n s t r u c t e d b y l a n g [ ] or schwartz [ , pp. , ]. i n the e q u i v a r i a n t case, we set s ( t ) = p o s ( t ) , where p: c~ ien) --, c~,p(m, ie n) is the p r o j e c t i o n o p e r a t o r defined b y p ( x ) (p) = ~ . ( a - ) x ( a p ) d . , g the integral being t a k e n with respect to the h a a r m e a s u r e o n g. (it is easily checked t h a t p is b o u n d e d in each c k norm.) o n c e we h a v e defined these s m o o t h i n g o p e r a t o r s we can consider the modified n e w t o n iteration: x n = x , _ l + s ( t n ) o l ( x , _ i ) ( g - f ( x , _ i ) ) , n > l , where { t > t , . . . , t , _ , t , , . . . } is a suitably chosen increasing sequence of real n u m b e r s . t h e r e m a r k a b l e fact is t h a t the t~'s can be chosen so t h a t the m o d i f i e d n e w t o n iteration converges. this is essentially the c o n t e n t o f n a s h ' s implicit function t h e o r e m . i t is easiest to p r o v e convergence when it is a s s u m e d (without loss o f generality) t h a t m is the n-sphere a n d g is a s u b g r o u p o f o(n + ). w e can use the fact t h a t f a n d l are i n v a r i a n t u n d e r r o t a t i o n s o f the sphere (just as schwartz [- , pp. , ] uses the t r a n s l a t i o n - i n v a r i a n t n a t u r e of f a n d l on the t o r u s in his t r e a t m e n t o f the n o n e q u i v a r i a n t case) to establish estimates which are s o m e w h a t s t r o n g e r t h a n ( ): i f ] [ a x i ] < , [il(x o + a x ) agllk_ --<__ adk( q- [ axi[k)h aghk, ][l(xo + a x ) f ( x o + ax)hk_ z < mk( + [iaxhk), o n e q u i v a r i a n t i s o m e t r i c e m b e d d i n g s where x is the perturbable embedding fixed earlier. these inequalities yield the hypotheses for the elegant version of the implicit function theorem proven in the short note of sergeraert [ ], which can be applied without any change to our situation to establish convergence. it follows from sergeraert's theorem that there exist k and ~ such that if ][g--g k< , then g can be realized by an equivariant isometric embedding, and step is finished. . step . approximation by realizable metrics thus the p r o o f of the theorem reduces to showing that any positive-definite g- invariant metric can be approximated by realizable metrics. it will suffice to show that if g is any positive-definite element of m e t e ( m ) , k a positive integer, and e a small positive number, there is a realizable metric f(x) such that pig - - f ( x ) l l k < a it follows from the nonequivariant version of the nash embedding theorem that any positive-definite metric g on m can be expressed as a finite sum g = ~ dyi@dy i, i = l where each yi: m ~ r is a smooth function. (instead of relying on the entire p r o o f of the nash embedding theorem the following a r g u m e n t could rest on the weaker assertion that g can be ck-approximated by a sum ~dy~| ~, an assertion which is proven in nash [ , p. ] or greene [ , p. ] by a direct construction.) according to the theory of elliptic operators on compact manifolds (as presented in [ , chap. ] for example), each yg can be approximated in the c k topology by a finite linear combination of eigenfunctions for the laplace operator on m. it follows that there exists a finite sum ni f,= y, fij, j = l where each f~j is an element of some eigenspace v~j for the laplace operator, such that i i tidy | -df~| <~/n, and hence ng- dfi| llk< . i = since g acts on m via isometries it acts on each eigenspace v~ via a linear representation (as described in [ , p. ]). let vii be the minimal g-invariant ni subspace of ~ v/j which contains f/, and define a s m o o t h equivariant m a p j = l xi: m ~ v i * by (xi(p))(f)=f(p) for f ~ v i. j.d. m o o r e and r. schlafly here we are using the fact that vii is a linear space of real-valued functions defined on m. we now construct a suitable g-invariant euclidean metric on vii*. by differentiation under the integral sign it can be shown that defined by p" met ~ (m) ~ mets (m) p(g) (p) = s (a* g) (p) da, g where d a is h a a r measure, is n o r m decreasing in each c k norm. we have p(dji| ) = ~ a* (dfi| da, g where fi is regarded as a real-valued function on m. but f~ also determines a linear functional j~: vi*~ ir which satisfies the equation f~o x i = f i . we give v~* the euclidean metric if-- s a* (dj~| da. g (this metric is positive definite because as a ranges t h r o u g h o u t g, a(fl) gen- erates v/.) with this choice of euclidean metric on v/* it is easily verified that f(x,)=-p(df~| the xi's fit together to give an equivariant mapping x = ( x , . . . , x n ) into a euclidean space of large dimension such that jig- f(x) lik = iig- ~ f(x lk = []g--zp(df~| i[g-zdf~| this shows that g can be ck-approximated by a realizable g-invariant metric and finishes the p r o o f of the main theorem. . real analytic embeddings if the r i e m a n n i a n manifold m is real-analytic, then the embedding in the equivariant isometric embedding theorem may be chosen to be real-analytic. the p r o o f of this follows, as before, from the following two steps. step . given an analytic perturbable x i ~ c ~ , p ( m , ie n) and an analytic g c m e t ~ ( m ) sufficiently close to f(x ) in the c ~~ topology, then there exists an analytic x ~ co~ p(m, ie n) such that f ( x ) = g . step . the analytic realizable metrics are dense in m e t e ( m ) . f o r the p r o o f of step , we follow the proof of the analytic isometric embedding theorem in greene-jacobowitz [- ]. we remark that their p r o o f also o n e q u i v a l e n t i s o m e t r i c e m b e d d i n g s holds for c o m p a c t manifolds with b o u n d a r y . see also the m o r e general treat- m e n t by g r o m o v [ ]. as before we use the n e w t o n iteration x , = x , _ i + l ( x , _ o ( g - f ( x , _ o ) only this time we don't have to use s m o o t h i n g operators. each x , is evidently ff oo equivariant (i.e., x , cg, p(m, ien)) and analytic. by extending everything to a complex analytic extension o f m and using c a u c h y estimates, g r e e n e and j a c o b o w i t z are able to show that x = lira x . n ~ o o exists, is real-analytic, and satisfies f ( x ) = g . step follows from this. if m has no b o u n d a r y , the p r o o f o f step is exactly as before, because the eigenfunctions of a on m are real-analytic. if m has b o u n d a r y we can analyti- cally continue m to some slightly larger open r i e m a n n i a n manifold n. l e t m~ = {x e n [ dist(x, m) < e} for small enough e > for this to be a c o m p a c t manifold with b o u n d a r y . we can suppose that the g-action has been analytically c o n t i n u e d to m~. n o t e t h at m e is real-analytic, and g acts on it by isometries. t h e eigenfunctions o f a o n m~ with dirichlet b o u n d a r y conditions are real-analytic. f u r t h e r m o r e linear com- binations o f eigenfunctions (when restricted to m) are dense in ck(m) for all k. t h e p r o o f of step n o w proceeds exactly as before. . embeddings into other spaces t h e examples in w show that we c a n n o t d r o p the condition that m be c o m p a c t in o u r main theorem. however, we do have the following theorem. let g be a compact lie group acting by isometries on some riemannian manifold m, where m may have boundary and need not be compact. hen there exists a continuous orthogonal representation p on some real separable hilbert space ~ and an isometric embedding from m into h which is equivariant with respect to p. proof l e t f : m - m e n be an isometric embedding. l e t ~ be the direct sum o f n copies of lz(g), i.e., = {~ = (~ , --., ~,)] each ~,el (g)}, where the integration is with respect to n o r m a l i z e d h a a r measure. define a c o n t i n u o u s o r t h o g o n a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n p o f g o n ~ by (p(rr)~)( ) = ~( rr) a, e g , ' e ~ . j.d. m o o r e and r. schlafly f o r x ~ m and a~g define h: m ~ by h(x)(a) = f ( a x ) . h is obviously s m o o t h and injective. we claim that h is an equivariant isometric embedding, h is equivariant because for x e m and o, eg, h(crx)( ) = f ( crx) =h(x)( a) = {p(a) [h(x)] } ( -) so h(ax) = p(a) h(x). if v ~ tm, then h,(v)(a) = (fo a), (v) = f , ( a , ( v ) ) so i h , ( v ) ( ~ r ) l = i f , ( o ' , ( v ) ) l = % ( t = ivl and <h,(v), h,(v)>,e = [h,(v)(a) da g = ff ivl d - g = l v l . h e n c e h is isometric. this completes the proof. we n o w discuss embeddings into pseudo-euclidean space, i.e., ir n with an indefinite metric. it is shown in the next section t h at the poiucar n-disc does n o t have an equivariant isometric embedding into euclidean space. h o w e v e r it does have an equivariant isometric embedding into the pseudo-euclidean space (m "+ , d x ~ + . . + d x . ~ = - . � - d x . + l ) as the h y p e r b o l o i d x ~ + ... + x - x.+ l e t g be a compact lie group acting s m o o t h l y o n some (not necessarily compact) manifold m. recall that two orbits are said to be equivalent if the c o r r e s p o n d i n g isotropy groups are conjugate� an orbit type is an equivalence class of orbits� t h e t h e o r e m of m o s t o w and palais cited earlier possesses a n o n c o m p a c t version due to m o s t o w [ ]: m has an equivariant embedding into some euclidean space if and only if the number of orbit types is finite. n o w suppose that m has a symmetric bilinear form g (such as a r i e m a n n i a n or p s e u d o - r i e m a n n i a n metric) and that the action o f g preserves g. t h e n using mostow's t h e o r e m and a trick due to g r o m o v [ - we n o w prove: theorem. m has an equivariant isometric embedding into some pseudo-euclidean space if and only if the number of orbit types is finite. in particular, if m is compact then m has an equivariant isometric embedding into some pseudo- euclidean space, proof. in view of mostow's theorem, it is sufficient to construct an equivariant isometric embedding from a given equivariant embedding x e c ~ , p ( m , ien). o n equivariant isometric e m b e d d i n g s according to w we can suppose that x has been modified to m a k e it perturbable. in the n o t a t i o n of w , let g , = ~ (~x ~ x i f ( x ) = l ~u~ui'~uju ~ du du j be the metric on m induced by x, where (u . . . . ,u n) are local coordinates o n m. let t h e n and hence y = l (x) (g - g') ~ c~, p(m, ien). g -- g' = f ' ( x ) . l ( x ) ( g - g') = f ' ( x ) ( y ) / ~ x ~ y ox y \ =e . ) du'a f ( x -]- y) = ( x @ y). ~u j ( x -~- y) dbl i dig j = f ( x ) + g - g ' + f ( y ) = g + f ( y ) . i f ] ' [ is the usual n o r m on r n then the m a p ( x + y, y): (m, g ) ~ r n, i" ) o ( ~ n, - i " ) is an equivariant isometric embedding. . n o n e x i s t e n c e theorems l e t g be a c o m p a c t lie g r o u p acting on a r i e m a n n i a n manifold m by isometries. in this section we will show that, u n d er certain circumstances, m m a y not have any equivariant isometric embed d i n g into ie n. this means t h at m has no isometric embedding into ie n which is equivariant with respect to some h o m o m o r p h i s m from g to the isometry g r o u p o f ie n. however, an y h o m o m o r - phism g--,isom(ie n) is conjugate to a h o m o m o r p h i s m g-~o(n)~isom(ien), so it is sufficient to consider isometric embeddings which are equivariant with respect to some o r t h o g o n a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of g. l e m m a . l e t { x > x , x } be a basis for ~u( ) satisfying [xl,x ]=x [x ,x o=xl [x~,xl]=x . then f o r any lie algebra homomorphism p: ~ a ( ) ~ u ( n ) and any v~l n we have n - ip(x )vl <~(ip(xovlz +lp(xe)vl ). j.d. moore and r, schlafly proof it is sufficient to prove this for irreducible representations. so suppose that p is an irreducible representation of dimension i+i<__n. then p(x ) has eigenvalues - l l / ~ , ( - l + ) /-z- , . . . , l ] f ~- , p(x~) has the value - l(l + ). i = l it follows that and hence and the casimir operator lp(xa)vl < ivl lp(x~)vl = l(l + )lvl z. i = ip(xl)vl -/-[p(x )vl ~ llvl ~ l f l ( x ) v l . theorem. let g be a non-abelian compact lie group (with lie algebra g) acting smoothly on m. suppose that for some point y e m , the derived map g ~ t y m is injective. hen for any integer n there exists a g-invariant metric on m such that m has no equivariant isometric embedding into ie s. proof by hypothesis, there exist nonzero x , x , x eg satisfying [ x , x ] = x [ x , x ] = x i [ x , x ] = x . f u r t h e r m o r e the vectors ~ d t x i x i = ~ e " ylt=oe tym are linearly independent. given n, put a metric on { , , x } that satisfies > n--- -~l ( + ). extend this to a g-invariant metric on m. n o w suppose we h a d an isometric embedding f : m-me n which is equi- variant with respect to p: g ~ o ( n ) . denote also by p the induced map g ~ o(n). then f , (xi) = p(xi) f (y) and hence ip(x ) f ( y ) t z = i f,( ; ) z =l){ ] a n - n - which contradicts the lemma. > ~ ( + ) - - - ( i / , ( + i f , ( ) ? ) - - - (lp(x ) f(y)l + ip(x ) f (y)l z) on equivariant isometric embeddings thus left-invariant metrics on su( ) (or any o t h e r c o m p a c t non-abelian lie group) require arbitrarily m a n y dimensions for an equivariant isometric embed- ding into euclidean space. in general, if the manifold m is not c o m p a c t there m a y n o t be any equivariant isometric e m b e d d i n g of m into euclidean space. t h e r e are examples of manifolds with c o m p a c t lie g r o u p actions having infinitely m a n y o rb i t types. these manifolds do not even have equivariant embeddings into euclidean space. a somewhat different example was p r o v i d e d by bieberbach [ ] w h o showed that the poincar disc with its obvious circle action has n o equivariant isometric e m b e d d i n g into euclidean space. t h e following is a mild generalization" theorem. let m be a complete simply-connected manifold with sectional curva- tures <--e<o, and let g be a compact connected lie group acting nontrivially on m by isometries. then m has no equivariant embedding into any euclidean space. proof by a t h e o r e m of c a r t a n (see [ j, p. ) there exists a p o i n t p e m which is fixed by g. t h e c a r t a n - h a d a m a r d t h e o r e m tells us that exp: t p m ~ m is a diffeomorphism. w i t h o u t loss o f generality, we m a y take the g ro u p g to be s . let : [ , oe)-~ m be a geodesic ray (parametrized by arc-length) with ( ) = p which is not fixed by the s action. define a v ect o r field v along b y v(t)=~--~ei~ (t)l~=o, t e l , oo),ei~es . v is a jacobi field along , and satisfies v ( ) = , v'(o) • v(o), i v'( )l + . we now consider the analogous set-up in mo, the space form o f constant curvature - e . in geodesic coordinates a b o u t a p o i n t po~mo, the metric o n m o is ds = d r ~ + s i n h ( ] / ~ r ) do . h e r e r is the distance to po and is the angle a b o u t po. let : [ , ~ ) ~ m o be a geodesic p a r a m e t r i z e d by arc-length with o( )=po. let v o be the vector field [v'( )i c~/ restricted to . vo is a jacobi field satisfying vo(o)=o, yo(o) • ;(o), [ v ; ( ) / = i v'( )l. t h e a b o v e jacobi fields satisfy the hypotheses o f the r a u c h c o m p a r i s o n t h e o r e m (see [ ]), so we m a y conclude that [v(t)l>lvo(t)[ for all t e [ , ~ ) . w e easily c o m p u t e j.d. moore and r. schlafly s i n h ( ] / iyo(t)l=lv'(o)l /~ f o r r e [ , oo), let ct: [ , n ] ~ m be the c l o s e d c u r v e given by c t ( ~ ) = e i~. y(t) _ < ~ < ~ . t h e l e n g t h o f c t is ~lv'(t)l, so l e n g t h (ct) > h i v'( )] s i n h ( l / t t ) f o r t h e sake o f o b t a i n i n g a c o n t r a d i c t i o n , s u p p o s e t h a t f : m ~ i e n is a n i s o m e t r i c e m b e d d i n g w h i c h is e q u i v a r i a n t with r e s p e c t t o ei~-~e ~b e i ~ s a , b e o ( n ) . t h e n the c u r v e f o c~ satisfies ( f o ct)(a) = e ~b. f (y(t)) a n d h a s l e n g t h l e n g t h ( f o c~) = n ] b f ( (t))l < n l]bll (i f (p)i + t). b u t f is isometric, so c o m b i n i n g this with t h e a b o v e i n e q u a l i t y gives n lv'( )], sinh~l/~t) < n lib ]l ( f (p) i + t) w h i c h is a c o n t r a d i c t i o n for large t. r e f e r e n c e s . bieberbach, l.: eine singularit~itenfreie fl~iche konstanter negativer krijmmung im hilbertschen raum. comment. math. helv. , - ( ) . bredon, g.e.: introduction to compact transformation groups. london-new york: academic press . cheeger, j., ebin, d.: comparison theorems in riemannian geometry. amsterdam: north- holland . greene, r.e.: isometric embeddings of riemannian and pseudo-riemannian manifolds. mem. amer. math. soc. ( ) . greene, r.e., jacobowitz, h.: analytic isometric embeddings. ann. of math. , - ( ) . gromov, m.l.: smoothing and inversion of differential operators. math. ussr sb. , - ( ) . gromov, m.l., rokhlin, v.a.: embeddings and immersions in riemannian geometry. russian math. surveys , - ( ) on equivariant isometric embeddings . kobayashi, s., nomizu, k.: foundations of differential geometry, vol. i . new york: interscience . lang, s.: fonctions implicites et plongements riemanniens. s minaire bourbaki exp. . paris: secr tariat mathematique . moore, j.d.: equivariant embeddings of riemannian homogeneous spaces. indiana univ. math. j. , - ( ) . mostow, g.d.: equivariant embeddings in euclidean space. ann. of math. , - ( ) . narasimhan, r.: analysis on real and complex manifolds. paris: masson . nash, j.: the imbedding problem for riemannian manifolds. ann. of math. , - ( ) . schwartz, j.t.: nonlinear functional analysis. new york: g o r d o n and breach . sergeraert, f.: une g n ralisation du th or~me des fonctions implicites de nash. c. r. acad. sci. paris ser. a, - ( ) . sergeraert, f.: u n th or~me de fonctions implicites sur certains espaces de fr chet et quelques applications. ann. sci. ecole norm. sup. s~r. , - ( ) . warner, f.w.: foundations of differentiable manifolds and lie groups. glenview, illinois: scott, foresman received october , it will not be long before very large sections of the world population be- come difficult to attract. in their roles as consumers, citizens, workers, deci- sion makers, policy makers, investors etc people will look carefully at what brands have to offer them. they will often have little time or mind space for decisions and they will choose those brands that clearly offer them the most value; and their demands for value are increasing rapidly. how will global brands cope with this demand? how will they be able to con- tinuously increase their value to fickle stakeholders? how will they do that in a world where people are becoming more and more conscious of their national, regional and local identities? as a reaction to these above- mentioned global developments, many organisations have mainly been con- cerned with improving their opera- tional efficiencies. this may seem obvious, considering the pricing pres- sures they are under; however, it is introduction over the past decades, people around the globe have become increasingly discerning and have been offered much more choice. this is due to three factors that have worked both simul- taneously and in tandem. the first is that trade liberalisation and subsequent global competition have increased the supply of goods and services to con- sumers and have driven down their prices. the second is that people around the world have, overall, be- come richer, especially in places such as china and india. the third is that, due to increased competition, many product life cycles have shortened dramatically, which means that people are offered new, innovative, novel and better products and services all the time. just take the example of the relentless advance of computer and telecommunications technology, which has transformed the way many people live and work, and not just in rich countries. � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june sicco van gelder brand meta, valschermkade , amsterdam cd, the netherlands tel: � e-mail: sicco.van.gelder @brand-meta.com the new imperatives for global branding: strategy, creativity and leadership received (in revised form): st january, sicco van gelder runs a netherlands-based global branding consultancy, brand meta (www.brand-meta.com). he is also the co-founder of placebrands ltd, a firm dedicated to helping cities, regions and countries define their purpose and achieve their full potential. he is the author of ‘global brand strategy — unlocking brand potential across countries, cultures and markets’ (kogan page, ). abstract this paper argues that the combination of strategy, creativity and leadership is going to be the key to the success of global brands in the coming decade. it also states that one needs to understand how these three disciplines interact, and specifically how this interaction may differ across the markets where the brand is active. will determine the competitiveness of global brands in the coming decade. it does not matter whether these brands are products, services, ngos, cor- porates or places. all of them need to build their global competitive ad- vantages, and no advantage is more powerful than a compelling brand. a compelling global brand is one that offers exceptional value to its various stakeholders who have to live in very different countries, under different cir- cumstances, in different cultures and often with different needs. strategy, creativity and leadership are to a brand what fuel, heat and oxygen are to a fire: reduce one and it flickers, remove one entirely and it is extin- guished. it is in the combination of these three disciplines that the energy of a brand rests. interbrand’s list of top brands for gives an indication of the power of this trinity. comparing and , the biggest winners in brand value increase are: — apple (+ %) — amazon.com (+ %) — yahoo (+ %) — samsung (+ %) — hsbc (+ %). these five are generally well regarded for their vision, their ability to innovate and the quality of their management. as a result, they provide value to their customers worldwide well over and above what their rivals are capable of. now look at the biggest losers on this list: — kodak (– %) — nintendo (– %) — aol (– %) — nokia (– %) — ford (– %). a supply-side solution that can jeop- ardise their ability to compete in the future. unless they can find ways that will persuade their customers to pay more or buy more of their products or services, they will only be in a race to the bottom towards the lowest price. some companies have decided to slap their brands on products and services developed, manufactured and delivered by efficient third parties at the expense of their own knowledge base and at the expense of their own brands that are slowly becoming mere labels devoid of value. other brands have reacted by improving their offers to their customers. for instance, apple has shown relentless innovation with its ipod player, its itunes music service and recently with its affordable mac mini. toyota has been shown to be one of the most innovative car manufacturers with its highly suc- cessful prius hybrid car. rituals, a unilever offshoot that is fast expand- ing from its home base of the nether- lands into belgium, germany and the uk, offers a combination of highly stylised home and body care products such as lotus stone laundry cleaning tablets, samurai secret shaving gel (with basil and ginger) and carpe diem shampoo (with rice milk and sakura cherry blossom). such ex- amples show that global competitive- ness is less about efficiency than about creating new and inspiring value for customers. creating value: the combination of strategy, creativity and leadership this paper argues that the combination of strategy, creativity and leadership � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june van gelder stakeholders must be offered an ex- perience that is on brand. leadership is obviously key to these three types of strategy, as the leadership creates them, leads on their implementation and aligns the entire workforce with them. in addition, the leadership must them- selves be seen to be acting on brand. this is a fine process, yet one that becomes useless unless at every step sufficient doses of creativity are intro- duced. how can a strategy be truly compelling if it starts off with a boring purpose for the brand? how can it create value if the brand that is devised lacks original thinking? how can the brand truly delight consumers if no creative thought has been applied to its tangible and intangible manifestations? creativity creativity is about ideas. this can be thinking in a different way about famil- iar issues or even coming up with absolutely new ideas. creativity can and must be applied throughout the entire strategy process from the for- mulation of a vision for the brand right down to the design and delivery of its products and services. this is what jeff mauzy and richard a. harriman call systemic creativity. nicholas ind and cameron watt argue that truly creative organisations break down the barriers within the organisation and with the outside world and engage all stakeholders in a continuous crea- tive process. creativity is therefore not something that is limited to brainstorm sessions, but rather a habit that is imbedded in the organisation. this is a task for the leadership: to encourage ideas to be created throughout the organisation. its processes and innova- tions will be built from those ideas. these five have either lost their way and are stuck in a product category that is fading, or they have come up against competition that can provide more value to their customers. although the exact calculation of brand value is al- ways open to discussion (there is always the matter of the purpose for which a brand is valued), this list does illustrate the importance of getting the mixture and balance of strategy, creativity and leadership right. strategy, creativity and leadership are examined separately below, before looking at their combination and before looking at them in a global setting. strategy there are three forms of strategy that are pertinent to brands, namely business strategy, brand strategy and marketing strategy. the significance of business strategy to branding is that it determines the vision, purpose, objec- tives, business model, resources, com- petencies and motivations for the brand. what the business strategy sets out to achieve is turned into a value proposition by the brand. thus the brand strategy deals with what makes the brand unique, inspiring, believable, trustworthy and likeable or even ad- mirable. none of this is worth a thing unless this translates well into the brands’ products and services, and their pricing, promotion, servicing and delivery. which is where the marketing strategy comes in: to translate the brand into a valuable stakeholder experience. the brand functions as the organising principle for the entire strategy process, because it is the definition of the value to be created for the organisation’s stakeholders. in other words, the � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june the new imperatives for global branding can take various forms, such as public-private brand partnerships for places, brand development partner- ships, marketing partnerships and product or service development partnerships. leading such partnerships involves joint strategising, joint development and joint implementa- tion. this puts an added strain on the leadership, because it involves negotiating with partners (ie equals). the brand that the partnership develops and manages helps to keep it on track, because it provides the partnership with a clear guiding purpose to fulfil. the combination of strategy, creativity and leadership it is clear that strategy, creativity and leadership all have an important part to play in branding and vice versa. the new leadership agenda has introduced creativity into the mix where the focus has so far been on strategy — devised by the leadership and handed down to the organisation. as indicated in the previous paragraphs, strategy without creativity and creativity without leader- ship are not meaningful. however, it is in their full combination that these three become imperatives to the branding process. if the links between the three are strong, they reinforce, inspire and interact with each other. traditionally, strategy, creativity and leadership have been separated in organisations, because it was felt that these were processes suited to particular departments, organisational levels or even certain individuals. this has led many corporations to develop uninspir- ing brands or for their brands to lose their lustre over time, such as gm, philips, xerox and coca–cola. some creativity is not the same as innova- tion, which may be termed ‘applied creativity’. creativity is also not the same as improvement, which may be termed ‘routine creativity’. however, both innovation and improvement re- quire pure creativity to function. the brand functions as the inspiration for the creativity, it gives direction and provides the parameters within which the creativity must take place. in other words, the creativity has to be on brand. but what is creativity worth if there is no one to direct and encourage it? if there are no structures within which it can flourish? if there are no rewards (or at least no penalties) for being crea- tive? leadership leadership is about the ability to lead. it is about creating the vision, struc- tures, systems, trust and clarity that inspire people in the organisation to achieve its strategy and apply their creativity to the things they do in their work. leading a brand entails set- ting a context and a culture within which employees live the brand and stakeholders perceive the brand. in other words, the employees’ behaviour and demeanour must be recognisably on brand. leadership is also about involving employees in the planning and im- plementation of the actions required to fulfil the organisation’s vision. this means inspiring the workforce to con- tribute creatively to a common goal and aligning their personal values to those of the brand. increasingly, leadership involves creating (temporary) partnerships with other stakeholders of the brand. these � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june van gelder innovating the business model and the customer service rather than its products. dell saw early on that a direct channel to its customers was the way to go for mass-market computers, which he coupled with the leanest just-in-time production methods for the entire industry. dell, a very demanding leader, inspires his people to constantly improve the company’s operations. for example, at its newest us factory in austin, texas managers view videotapes of its production process to shave time off assembly. major computer components, such as hard drives and cd players, have been redesigned so as to snap into place rather than screw. yet the success of the dell model is not only due to its management of inventory, its online channels, its state of the art technology and its affordable products. other computer brands are also good at this. dell’s success is largely because it recognises that customers have increas- ingly differing requirements for com- puters. the dell organisation is totally geared to meeting these needs through its ordering and customisation process, delivery process and after-sales service. but even old-fashioned giant con- glomerates can learn to be nimble and apply the disciplines across their or- ganisations. take the example of sam- sung. samsung, an organisation that is traditionally hierarchic and non- transparent, has shown during the last few years that it can be flexible and innovative. characteristically, the deci- sion to switch from developing ‘me- too’ consumer electronics products to innovative ones was made by sam- sung group chair lee kun hee in . this decision has meant untying samsung managers from corporate red tape and allowing them to use even came a cropper, such as polaroid. polaroid filed for bankruptcy in after missing the digital imaging boat, because management banked on its mainstay technology, instant photography. polaroid overestimated the power of its brand as an icon of cutting-edge imaging technology. con- sumers had no qualms about abandon- ing polaroid’s instant cameras for digital cameras from nikon, canon and sony. it has generally been the young and imaginative companies that tended not to separate the disciplines, such as apple, amazon, dell, dyson, ebay, virgin, quiksilver, red bull and google. it probably came naturally to their founders to appreciate the linkages between strategy, creativity and leader- ship, and to apply branding as the guiding principle of all they do. yet, the kinds of brands and the way they combine strategy, creativity and leader- ship differ significantly. a comparison of apple and dell illustrates this. apple is well known for its industry-changing innovations and designs, which are largely credited to steve jobs, the company co-founder and ceo. jobs is a man with a vision for his industry and, although reputedly not always easy to get along with, he has inspired his people to develop some of the most iconic hardware and novel software. apple’s strength has been that it has a clear idea of what people’s experience of computers should be, creatively applies its technological and design expertise to just that, and expands that practice to computer- related consumer products. apple’s success relies on its ability to develop cutting-edge products with almost minimalist stylish designs. michael dell also has a clear vision of the same industry, but his is about � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june the new imperatives for global branding management’s vision of the future of the market may differ significantly between countries. this has an im- mediate impact on the organisation’s future purpose. for example, toyota’s vision of a market for hybrid powered cars is directly relevant to developed markets where people are willing and able to spend money on a ‘green’ car and where environmental legislation makes such cars almost inevitable. such a vision probably has little relevance to fast developing markets such as china and india. there toyota’s vision is probably more about the vast potential of the market for regular cars with rising consumer purchasing power, and about the trade liberalisation and cor- porate legislation that affect its abilities to operate in those markets. business models may also differ between markets, due to local cir- cumstances. some business models will just not work in certain countries due to matters such as low internet and credit card penetrations, legislation against direct selling (as is the case in china), differing business hours (eg very short shop opening hours in germany), differing technological stan- dards (as is the case with mobile telephones, and low levels of disposable income. for example, in japan, - eleven expanded its e-commerce offer- ings with the launch of a website called dream.com. according to the com- pany, dream.com shoppers can browse through more than , items, including music, flowers and photo- graphic supplies, place their orders online, then go to their local -eleven stores to pay for and collect their purchases. it is unlikely that this would be a viable business model in europe or the usa. the brand strategy may also differ all the resources under their own roof. mr lee launched an effort to focus the company on a new com- petitive advantage: design innovation. he committed $ m to develop a global-design programme and he estab- lished the company’s first-ever in- house design school. before long, the company’s top designers, and in later years, marketers and engineers, were taking full-time classes six days a week in fundamentals such as mechanical engineering and marketing. since lee embarked on what he calls a ‘design revolution’, the company has more than doubled the number of designers in top-level management positions. without doubt, samsung is one of the big branding success stories of the past decade and shows how strategy, creativity and leadership interact to achieve this. the implications for global branding global branding is a complicated matter that requires management to understand the various internal and external factors that affect their brand as it stretches across the globe. global and international brands are affected by differing structural, motivational and cultural influences across the countries (and sometimes even within the countries) that they operate in. for the purpose of this paper, the discus- sion is limited to the influence that these factors have on strategy, creativity and leadership. global strategy an organisation’s strategy can differ significantly between markets because of various local circumstances. initially, � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june van gelder of factors to take into account it is an enormous achievement to be able to create the greatest value for the brand’s stakeholders in each and every market. this paper will now examine creativity in a global context. global creativity although creativity is lauded by academics, consultants, business leaders and politicians the world over, it is actually not considered to be the same thing in every society nor is it regarded equally highly in every society. culture and education have a significant impact on creativity in various parts of the world. in europe, creativity is often con- sidered to be limited to specific in- dividuals, departments or organisations. in addition, creativity is generally con- fined to specific creative industries or research and development func- tions. thus european brands are often well known for their product design and their marketing creativity, such as alessi, ikea, heineken, l’oréal, audi and prada. technological and busi- ness innovations are generally not the strong points of european brands. of course there are notable exceptions such as airbus, hennes & maurits and virgin. the value of design to european audiences has often been underestimated by japanese and us brands. japanese car makers have had a tough time during the past decade matching the reinvigorated european brands (eg renault and alfa romeo). perhaps their product quality was bet- ter (only just), but their designs left europeans cold. us fashion brands have also found it tough to com- pete in the european marketplace. an erstwhile venerable jeans brand such between countries due to organisa- tional issues, such as the business strategy as discussed above, but also due to local market influences. in each market there are conventions, the unwritten rules of the product and service categories that can affect the brand. there are structural conventions — the way almost all players in the market act — there are cultural conventions — the things most people believe and the way they behave to one another — and there are motiva- tional conventions — the way that people commonly fulfil their needs. for example, brands often unwittingly carry the values of their country of origin in them as part of their brand identity, which can be entirely inap- propriate to a host country. a typical american social value such as equality will be totally inappropriate in a hierarchical society such as indonesia. that is why mcdonald’s offers a clear-up service in such countries rather than letting its patrons dispose of the remains of their meals themselves. finally, the marketing strategy may differ between markets. this can be due to a differing brand strategy, as discussed above, but may also be due to legal, religious, competitive, infrastruc- ture, purchasing power and personnel limitations imposed by a country. examples of this are lamb burgers in india, the difficulties of efficiently distributing wares into the chinese hinterland and the subsequent lack of control of product shelf displays, and the mini packs in which personal care products are often sold in many developing nations. it is clear that all such factors should force management to be highly crea- tive when devising global or interna- tional strategies. with such a multitude � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june the new imperatives for global branding lean production total quality manage- ment and continuous improvement. although these innovations led to an almost worldwide quality revolution in the s, it did make japanese brands take their eyes off foreign consumers who value other things apart from quality and perfection. arguably, the most creative area of japanese business has been in what is commonly called gadgets, such as docomo’s i-mode telephones, sony’s aibo robot dog and the tamagochi electronic pet. most japanese gadgets are not much ap- preciated beyond japan’s shores. the significance for global branding of these differences in creativity not only has to do with different con- sumer preferences, but also with the fact that global organisations employ people with these differing mindsets. in other words, the creativity of a korean employee is going to be quite different from the kind of creativity one may expect from an italian employee and different again from one in the usa. this is a benefit when it comes to localising the brand and fulfiling its potential across markets, but it makes the brand difficult to manage globally. however, the example of samsung discussed in a previous paragraph shows that culture is not a straitjacket and that creativity can be encouraged by creat- ing the right structures, atmosphere and rewards for people in the en- terprise. there follows an examination of leadership in a global context. global leadership leading a global brand is about providing direction, structure, inspira- tion and opportunity to the people who manage the brand in various places around the world. not only do as levi has not been able to respond adequately to the marketing creativity of italy’s diesel. in the usa, technology, entertain- ment and entrepreneurship are highly regarded and it is no wonder that the country has produced most creativity in these very powerful areas. think of microsoft, mcdonald’s, cisco, pixar, charles schwab, mtv and accen- ture. a lack of sensitivity to local circumstances has sometimes played havoc with us brands, especially when they tried to forcefully challenge local beliefs, values and customs. what was considered creative or innovative at home was not much appreciated else- where. for example, wal-mart is famous in the usa for its customer service and its employee evangelism. when wal-mart tried to duplicate this in germany, customers were unimpressed by its meeters/greeters at the doors. worse still for the company was that the german staff hid in the toilets to avoid the morning wal-mart cheer. east asian countries, that have an education system geared to rote learn- ing and societal values of obedience and respect for elders, do not en- courage young people to stick their necks out. a lot of stock is often placed on to perfection. this is an aesthetic need that in particular encompasses many aspects of japanese society, rang- ing from manufacturing to sports and from religion to food. examples of brands that cater to this need for per- fection are lexus automobiles (tag-line: ‘we pursue perfection, so you can pursue living’) and shiseido cosmetics (the shiseido ‘meme’: beauty and tech- nology). in japan, creativity in business is often focused on process improve- ments, such as just-in-time production, � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june van gelder public–private partnerships. strategy is often stated in language about the vision, purpose and ambition of the organisation. this helps everyone (employees, partners, communities etc) understand what the organisation is trying to achieve. for example, express and logistics company tnt has a vision called ‘delivering more’ and a subsequent mission that states ‘we lead the industry by instilling pride in our people, creating value for our stakeholders and sharing responsibility for our world’. creativity is often undertaken in r&d centres, which are more and more connected with partner r&d centres. for example, philips and douwe egberts jointly developed the hugely successful senseo coffee machine by putting their knowledge of electronics and coffee brewing to- gether. the emphasis among european brands is frequently on sharing and the evolution of technologies and knowledge. in the usa, leadership may be about driving an organisation to achieve specific firm goals: eg increased shareholder value, roi and market share. strategy is often stated in terms of growth, leadership (as in being market leader) and financial results. for example, hp talks about its corporate objectives in the following or- der: customer loyalty, profit, market leadership, growth, employee com- mitment, leadership capability and global citizenship. the leadership of creativity (and innovation) is often a highly personalised matter among us business leaders. it is about the personal drive of people such as bill gates, phil knight, howard schultz and jeff bezos. creativity for us brands is generally about reinventing the way people work, innovation they themselves have different cultural backgrounds, they also manage the brand in environments that are often unknown, if not alien, to global management. it is essential that global management realises this and under- stands how these differences affect the brand as it stretches across the globe. on the one hand this means im- plementing a common brand strategy and management framework that takes these matters into account and is comparable across markets. on the other hand it also means getting to grips with how leadership differs in various parts of the world. in collectivist societies, such as most asian ones, leadership is about managing groups rather than managing individuals. this means that as a manager it is more important to ensure group performance rather than in- dividual performance. this has an effect on strategy and creativity, be- cause in a collectivist society these become group processes aimed at achieving consensus. voicing personal opinions is considered bad behaviour. strategy is, therefore, often stated in ‘group language’. hamel and prahalad quote a nissan senior executive as saying: ‘gm is a powerful company, but they aren’t clearly directing that power. if some [employees] turn left, and some turn right, a company cannot move forward.’ similarly, individual creativity is not encouraged yet group creativity is often found in the shape of continuous improvement. in europe, leadership is often about a multi-stakeholder environment whereby management spends time and energy trying to keep everyone on board. management is about various kinds of partnership performance, such as co-development, co-branding and � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june the new imperatives for global branding ganisations to determine where they are going, how to do so in novel and valuable ways, and how to keep everyone inspired and on track. the best tool available to ensure this happens is the brand, functioning as the organisation’s guiding, inspiring and organising principle. references ( ) ‘the top brands’, businessweek, nd august, . ( ) mauzy, j. and harriman, r. a. ( ) ‘creativity inc., building an inventive organization’, harvard business school press, boston, ma. ( ) ind, n. and watt, c. ( ) ‘inspiration, capturing the creative potential of your organization’, palgrave, basingstoke, uk. ( ) fast company ( ) ‘living in dell time’, available at: www.fastcompany.com/ magazine/ /dell.html, november. ( ) ‘samsung tries to snatch sony’s crown’, far eastern economic review, th october, . ( ) fast company ( ) ‘masters of design: kun-hee lee’, june. ( ) van gelder, s. ( ) ‘global brand strategy; unlocking brand potential across countries, cultures and markets’, kogan page, london, uk. ( ) ‘wal around the world’, the economist, th december, . ( ) van gelder, ref. above. ( ) hofstede, g. ( ) ‘cultures and organizations: software of the mind’, mcgraw-hill, london, uk. ( ) hamel, g. and prahalad, c. k. ( ) ‘competing for the future’, harvard business school press, boston, ma. ( ) tnt.com, accessed on st april, . ( ) hp.com, accessed on th january, . breakthroughs and revolutionary tech- nology. the leaders of globally operating companies need to be far more culturally aware than ever before. they need to understand what travels well and what does not, and when and why local adaptations to strategy, creativity and leadership are required. this requires not only an appreciation of structural, cultural and motivational differences between markets, but also a clear understanding of how the or- ganisation can best operate across markets. conclusion getting the mix and balance between strategy, creativity and leadership right, across multiple markets, will be the most crucial job of global and local management in the years to come if their brand’s flame is to burn brightly and not to flicker or be altogether extinguished. but, as this paper ex- plains, it requires a thorough un- derstanding of how these disciplines actually work and, more importantly, how they interact with one another in structurally, culturally and motivation- ally different settings. this is not some intellectual game to be played by people sitting at their desks in com- pany, institutional and government offices, but a contest for entire or- � henry stewart publications - brand management vol. , no. , – june van gelder intimate partner violence screening programs in the veterans health administration: informing scale-up of successful practices intimate partner violence screening programs in the veterans health administration: informing scale-up of successful practices katherine m. iverson, phd , , , omonyêlé adjognon, scm , , alessandra r. grillo, bs , melissa e. dichter, phd, msw , , cassidy a. gutner, phd , , alison b. hamilton, phd, mph , , shannon wiltsey stirman, phd , , and megan r. gerber, md, mph , women’s health sciences division, national center for ptsd, va boston healthcare system, boston, ma, usa; department of psychiatry, boston university school of medicine, boston, ma, usa; center for healthcare organization and implementation research (choir), va boston healthcare system, boston, ma, usa; va center for health equity research and promotion (cherp), crescenz va medical center, philadelphia, pa, usa; school of social work, temple university, philadelphia, pa, usa; va center for the study of healthcare innovation, implementation and policy (cshiip), va greater los angeles healthcare system, los angeles, ca, usa; department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, university of california los angeles david geffen school of medicine, los angeles, ca, usa; dissemination and training division, national center for ptsd, va palo alto healthcare system, palo alto, ca, usa; department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, stanford university school of medicine, stanford, ca, usa; women’s health center, va boston healthcare system, boston, ma, usa; section of general internal medicine, boston university school of medicine, boston, ma, usa. objectives: screening women for intimate partner vio- lence (ipv) is increasingly expected in primary care, consis- tent with clinical prevention guidelines (e.g., united states preventive services task force). yet, little is known about real-world implementation of clinical practices or contex- tual factors impacting ipv screening program success. this study identified successful clinical practices, and barriers to and facilitators of ipv screening program implementa- tion in the veterans health administration (vha). design: descriptive, qualitative study of a purposeful sample of veterans affairs medical centers (vamcs) categorized as early and late adopters of ipv screening programs within women’s health primary care clinics. vamcs were categorized based on performance measures collected by vha operations partners. participants: thirty-two administrators and clinician key informants (e.g., women’s health medical directors, ipv coordinators, and physicians) involved in ipv screen- ing program implementation decisions from six early- and five late-adopting sites nationwide. main measures: participants reported on ipv screen- ing and response practices, and contextual factors impacting implementation, in individual -h semi-struc- tured phone interviews. transcripts were analyzed using rapid content analysis with key practices and issues syn- thesized in profile summaries. themes were identified and iteratively revised, utilizing matrices to compare content across early- and late-adopting sites. key results: five successful clinical practices were identified (use of two specific screening tools for primary ipv screening and secondary risk assessment, multilevel resource provision and community partnerships, co- location of mental health/social work, and patient- centered documentation). multilevel barriers (time/resource constraints, competing priorities and mounting responsibilities in primary care, lack of policy, inadequate training, and discomfort addressing ipv) and facilitators (engaged ipv champions, internal and exter- nal supports, positive feedback regarding ipv screening practices, and current, national attention to violence against women) were identified. conclusions: findings advance national efforts by highlighting successful clinical practices for ipv screening programs and informing strategies useful for enhancing their implementation within and beyond the vha, ulti- mately improving services and women’s health. key words: evidence-based medicine; healthcare response; intervention; implementation science; qualitative research; women veterans. doi: . /s - - -y © society of general internal medicine (this is a u.s. government work and not under copyright protection in the u.s.; foreign copyright protection may apply) i ntimate partner violence (ipv) against women is a popula-tion health problem with wide-reaching impact. – in the united states (us), one in three women experiences physical aggression, sexual violence, or stalking by an intimate part- ner. the numerous and often debilitating health outcomes from ipv include direct injury and poorer physical and psy- chological health and overall well-being. – women who experience ipvare frequently seen in primary care (pc), creating opportunity for identification and interven- tion. , the us preventative services task force (uspstf) and recent reviews found evidence that screening paired with received september , revised february , accepted may , j gen intern med ( ): – published online august , http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -y&domain=pdf response interventions can reduce ipv and attendant physical and mental health harms. – routine screening promotes readiness to disclose and increases access to ipv-related ser- vices. additionally, women who discussed ipv with a pro- vider were four times more likely to use an intervention and . times more likely to exit the relationship. given the high prevalence of ipv, many women could benefit from effective implementation of healthcare-based ipv screening programs, but there is limited evidence on how to effectively implement screening recommendations in real-world care. ipv is a critical issue for the veterans health administra- tion (vha), as women veterans are at higher risk for ipv than women who never served in the military. findings from a national survey of vha pc patients revealed that nearly one in five women experienced past-year ipv. addi- tionally, non-veteran women who use vha pc (i.e., spouses, dependents of service-connected veterans) are at high risk for ipv. in response to these findings, and consistent with uspstf recommendations, the vha disseminated recom- mendations for ipv screening within pc in . even though the vha recommends use of a validated ipv screen- ing tool, and an on-site ipv coordinator (ipvc) to assist with implementation and ipv-related care, the uptake of ipv screening program recommendations and best clinical prac- tices throughout this large integrated healthcare system re- mains unknown. as widespread ipv screening is in its infancy, there are lessons to learn from va medical centers’ (vamc) screening adoption that can inform the scale-up of successful practices within the vha, and beyond. in this study, we (a) character- ized successful clinical practices of ipv screening programs in the vha and (b) identified multilevel barriers to and facilita- tors of ipv screening programs. methods design and participants all study procedures were approved by the va boston institu- tional review board. in , vamcs responded to a national program evaluation conducted by vha’s leadership regarding ipv-related programming implementation. women’s health pc staff completed follow-up program evaluation surveys regarding current adoption status that provided the sampling pool for this study. early-adopting sites were defined as those that reported currently engaging in ipv screening as part of routine care (i.e., screening all female patients of child-bearing age or all female patients at least annually). late-adopting sites were de- fined as those that reported not currently engaging in ipv screen- ing as routine care (i.e., no screening or screening at provider’s discretion). this categorization resulted in a sampling pool of vamcs provided by vha leadership. from this roster, vamcs were purposively targeted for potential recruitment based on ipv screening adoption status and geographic loca- tion. we attempted to recruit of these vamcs, of which declined to participate. we recruited sites until saturation was reached, totaling vamcs ( early- and late-adopting sites). we recruited key informants for individual phone inter- views at each site based on known vha structures and roles involved in ipv screening programs. a total of key infor- mants were interviewed ( % participation rate), including ipv coordinators (ipvc; n = ), women veteran program managers (wvpm; n = ), women’s health medical direc- tors (whmd; n = ), psychologists (n = ); social workers (sw; n = ), and women’s health pcps (wh pcp) or nurse care managers (n = ). table displays positions/roles of key informants. approach a semi-structured interview guide and codebook were devel- oped based on the integrated-promoting action on research implementation in health services (i-parihs) framework, which emphasizes innovation characteristics, individuals (i.e., recipients in line to adopt the innovation and patients who receive the innovation), and inner and outter contextual factors that inhibit or enable implementation. sample ques- tions included “what is the process of ipv screening and response in your clinic?” and “what have been challenges to integrating ipv screening?” the first author conducted audio recorded interviews, which were transcribed verbatim. four team members then independently coded the same transcripts using the deductive codebook, convened to discuss and refine codebook definitions, and reached consensus across codes and transcripts through hybrid inductive-deductive rapid content analysis. thereafter, transcripts were independently coded by two team members and coding was discussed until consen- sus was achieved. using nvivo software, team members pulled coded content from all transcripts and created individ- table key informants and respective roles (n = ) position acronym role in va women’s health medical director whmd internist, family practice physician, or gynecologist women’s health primary care physician wh pcp general internist, family practice physician, or nurse practitioner/ physician assistant with credentialing in women's health women’s health nurse care manager n/a registered nurse who assists in managing/coordinating complex care needs of women veterans psychologist n/a psychologists working in a women’s health clinic or directly with a women’s health team social worker sw attached to or working with a women’s health primary care team women veterans program manager wvpm oversee provision of care to women veterans across the vamc to ensures access and quality (typically an rn, sw, or psychologist) ipv coordinator ipvc recommended position at all vamcs. typically, a licensed sw responsible for coordinating ipv education and response efforts across a vamc vamc, va medical center iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementation jgim ual site profiles to synthesize findings into themes with exem- plar quotes. from site profiles, we used matrix analysis to display themes across all early- and late-adopting sites. results we identified five successful clinical practices from early adopters, as late adopters were in varying pre- implementation stages. early-adopting sites reported screen- ing for . to . years. we also identified five barriers to and four facilitating factors of implementation from all sites, in- cluding factors that were unique to early- and late-adopting sites. table displays summarized findings. successful clinical practices successful clinical practices were defined as feasible, effective procedures and processes that are considered acceptable to providers and patients. the extended-hit, insult, threaten, scream (e-hits) tool (a -item ipv screening tool validated for use with female vha patients) , was routinely administered in all early-adopting sites as a primary means of ipv detection, usually as a clinical reminder. the -item risk assessment tool (adapted from the lengthier danger assessment), , administered succeeding positive detection of ipv (ipv+) for further assessment of severe violence was viewed as helpful for assessing risk, triaging, and safety planning. multilevel resource provision and community partnerships were critical following ipv screening, entailing internal (e.g., referrals to support groups/programs and mental health) and external (e.g., national domestic violence hotline, commu- nity organizations) assistance for women at risk for ipv. sites relied on community partnerships and programs as supple- mental supports (e.g., in-depth safety planning, legal advice, shelters). an ipvc explained: we have several resources in our office on where they can get help. i’ve never had anybody want to go to a shelter from here, although i am prepared for that. we discuss safety planning and resources. we have a card on where to get help, including shelters and the do- mestic violence hotline. co-location of social work and/or mental health services enhanced ipv-related care. participants underscored that primary care mental health integration (pchmi) staff are ideally co-located; their visibility, open access schedules, and expertise ensure timely warm handoffs and instill provider comfort and continuity of care. as expressed by an ipvc, “because i’m co-located in primary care, it’s such a faster track to therapy if somebody needs that. we don’t necessarily have to refer out or have the veteran repeat her story.” patient-centered documentation of ipv-related care (e.g., positive screens, disclosures, and referrals), consisting of conversations with patients about what they are comfortable documenting in their electronic medical records, was a key theme. such documentation was sensitive to patient safety and preferences. as explained by a sw, “‘is it safe to document in the record?’ is asked during screening. if it’s not, we do not explicitly document ipv in the patient’s electronic medical record.” nonetheless, sites acknowledged the need for continued education to sustain patient-centered documentation. barriers barriers were defined as short- and long-term challenges to implementation and/or maintenance of ipv screening programs. time and resource constraints. time-related constraints cited among early- and late-adopting sites included limited time within an appointment to address both medical issues and an ipv+ screen. resource constraints included insufficient availability of community (e.g., domestic violence agencies) and hospital (e.g., staffing shortages, limited availability of essential staff (e.g., ipvc) supports. a psychologist explained: we’ve had chronic staffing shortages the last couple of years, coinciding with the ipv screening initiative coming from the national program … one of the main concerns is still ‘who will be responsible for following up on positive screens and where?’ and then table summary of primary findings successful clinical practices • the extended-hit, insult, threaten, scream (e-hits) tool • a -item risk assessment following disclo- sures • multilevel resource provision and community partnerships • co-location of social work and/or mental health services • patient-centered documentation barriers • time and resource constraints • competing priorities and mounting responsibilities within primary care • lack of formal policy or mandate on ipv screening and response procedures • lack of or inadequate training on successful clinical practices for ipv screening and response • discomfort around (and avoidance of) discussing ipv facilitating factors • engaged and supportive ipv champions • internal and external supports • positive feedback regarding ipv screening practices • recognition of violence against women as a current, national topic iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementationjgim identifying what services to connect people to. there’s infrastructure building and provider education that needs to happen, and there hasn’t been a champion on site with time devoted to putting all those pieces together yet.unique to late-adopting sites was the in- sufficient time dedicated to the ipvc role, which was a collateral duty to their existing job, with limited or no dedicated time. this severely limited availability for ipv screening program tasks. competing priorities and mounting responsibilities within primary care. pc was viewed as the “gatekeeper” for new initiatives, and their providers a “catch-all” for any residual needs of patients, especially within women’s health. the numerous clinical reminders and high workload assigned to pc can result in “reminder fatigue” and burnout among providers, which can negatively impact ipv screening uptake and practices. an associate chief of sw stated: [providers] have all these clinical reminders they have to get done and they can’t even get down to the reason for the appointment until these reminders are knocked out of the way, and the more clinical reminders you add to them, … they become desensitized to the purpose behind it.similarly, integrating ipv screening is some- times viewed as an additional stressor for those who treat complex patient populations within busy pc set- tings. a whmd highlighted the burden on providers: you have all these screens that have been triggered positive where the provider needs to follow up, but the patient is there about their ankle … then your : has arrived, and your : is in the : time slot. you live under that tremendous pressure and then you have instant messaging and medical advice line calls and then someone’s walked in pregnant. so i’ve been re- luctant to tell my providers that [ipv screening] is coming.unlike early adopters, a few late-adopting sites perceived additional burden placed on wh pcps due to the physical and mental health complexities of the patient population. being a wh pcp was regarded as more challenging (and with higher turnover rates), compared with non-wh pcps. lack of formal policy or mandate on ipv screening and response procedures. frustration over lags in “forthcoming” directives and national clinical reminders left some sites, especially late-adopting sites, stalled in negotiations with local leadership for resources to implement ipv screening pro- grams. some late-adopting sites explained that lack of leadership support surrounding the ipv initiative as an imped- iment for pushing ipv screening forward. sites anticipate that having an official directive or mandate would provide clear expectations for developing protocols and delineating respon- sibilities. pc leadership at late-adopting sites was less recep- tive to the ipv screening initiative coming from sw in the absence of such formal policy. a wvpm stated: va needs to be more definitive about exactly what they want done and have a clear expectation for doing it. often they’ll put on initiatives, but there’s no push for it, so two years later we’re still trying to do it and it’s okay because nobody ever gave us a hard date to get it done by.at the same time, a few sites posited that recommendations from agency leadership may under- estimate day-to-day challenges at individual sites. a whmd expressed concerns that site-specific time and resource realities may not support forthcoming direc- tives: “i think that when these things come down from way up high i’m not certain that the reality of what happens in the clinic day-to-day is taken into consideration.” lack of or inadequate training on successful clinical practices for ipv screening and response. sites discussed inadequate ipv training in providers’ respective professional training programs, as well as ongoing education needed in their current roles to better screen and respond to ipv. a sw reflected: i offered some on the side training with our gynecolo- gists. one of the things that just floored me whenever i was doing this training is that there is no mention of assessment for ipv within the medical school for phy- sicians who are going to be the people examining the general well-being of our patients. they’ve received no training.sites also relayed instances of staff lacking knowledge of trauma-sensitive care, creating a poten- tially unsafe environment for implementing ipv screening programs. a wvpm discussed the implica- tions of limited training on trauma-informed documen- tation: trainings cover how to protect the patient’s privacy with documentation, because we’re concerned about partners having access to online patient records. before implementing this program, we had a doctor insistent on documenting what shelter this woman was at, and of course, the women’s health sw hit the roof and edu- cated them. iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementation jgim discomfort around (and avoidance of) discussing ipv. provider discomfort with ipv was a barrier across disciplines and leadership levels. effective trainings and awareness-raising activities were helpful in overcoming this barrier at early-adopting sites. discomfort and avoidance were perceived as more salient or harder to overcome at late- adopting sites, especially among some male decision-makers in pc. an ipvc noted: people around the table were male leaders … they were turned off by ipv screening because it made them evaluate their own behavior and they didn’t like it … they basically brushed [implementation] off. facilitating factors facilitators were defined as attributes that helped get ipv screening programs implemented and/or maintained. engaged and supportive ipv champions. sites recognized ipv champions’ roles in driving ipv screening program implementation, and in sustaining broader ipv-related activities (e.g., obtaining additional funding for posi- tions, creating ipv work groups, initiating support/ skills groups for ipv+ women). champions were often ipvcs, whmds, wvpms, or sws within whpc. ipvc champions played a more prominent role in im- plementation at early-adopting sites, corresponding with more protected time for the role at these sites. cham- pions frequently facilitate and accept warm handoffs, provide on-site consultation, and reinforce provider will- ingness to engage in ipv screening practices. they represent well-connected resources and liaisons with na- tional leadership. a psychologist asserted the value of an ipv champion in implementation efforts: our ipvc is very knowledgeable, approachable, and friendly. she is able to put time and energy into this topic and when she’s present, you see people asking questions and getting involved. she can make relation- ships with people. … she is critical to the success of the program. internal and external supports. early-adopting sites noted several internal and external supports underlying ipv screening implementation success. along with the presence of an ipv champion, early-adopting sites noted internal support from local leadership as a catalyst for ipv screening program implementation. additionally, early-adopting sites regarded effective trainings (e.g., trauma-informed screening procedures, general educa- tion, and role-playing) as an ongoing facilitator of ipv screening implementation. external supports included engagement with national ipv and women’s health lead- ership. specifically, ipvcs and wvpms consistently liaise with internal and external leadership and staff to communicate program updates, relay bidirectional feed- back, and troubleshoot challenges. an ipvc shared: i think the biggest thing is the collaboration between the people at different sites and national-level people as well. the best thing about the va is our interconnected- ness and ability to share lessons learned and contribute back to one another … that’s such a motivator. positive feedback regarding ipv screening practices. positive experiences with and feedback about ipv screening and response practices from patients and staff helped to bolster support for the program, especially at early-adopting sites. for example, patients and staff endorse routine ipv screening (often the e- hits) for its ability to facilitate discussion on ipv subtypes and promote conversations about past or cur- rent relationship abuse/patterns. a wh pcp described the value of screening: “people see they’re getting some relief, they appreciate it, because sometimes they have shame attached to it, and i feel like this means a burden has been taken off them.” a psychologist underscored the value of screening while demonstrating vha sup- port of this health issue: “what i like is the e-hits raises those questions and opens up a conversation with the veteran...and sends the message that we take it seriously and that we’re here to provide support to the extent veterans want or need.” recognition of violence against women as a current, national topic. both early- and late-adopting sites reported local impact from the recent increase of national media cov- erage on sexual abuse and ipv against women. sites reported that this surge in ipv representation on national platforms legitimizes and, in some cases, prioritizes ipv as a relevant health issue to target in female patients. as described by a psychologist: violence against women is a public health issue. the numbers are staggering and we’re just not doing a lot to really address and take it seriously, and you see that in sexual harassment in our media right now … most women have known this is going on forever and it’s just getting a moment in the spotlight … there is an uphill battle to keep ipvrelevant and real and at the top of people’s lists. and i think maybe now is a moment, i mean riding the wave of the public discussion.building on this momentum and keeping ipv initiatives in line with public discussions of violence against women iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementationjgim were described as strategies to facilitate adoption of ipv screening programs. discussion clinicians in pc are increasingly called on to screen for ipv, yet little is known about what clinical practices are success- fully implemented in real-world care and what contextual factors impede or facilitate their uptake. this qualitative re- search identified five successful clinical practices and five barriers to and four facilitators of implementing ipv screening programs into wh pc within the vha, the us’ largest integrated healthcare system. this research is innovative be- cause it is guided by an established implementation frame- work (i-parihs), enabling identification of clinical prac- tices and contextual factors that inform evidence-based strat- egies for scale-up of ipv screening programs in and beyond the vha. our findings regarding successful clinical practices and factors impacting ipv screening program implementation share similarities to previously reported elements of effective ipv screening programs, and reinforce vha recommenda- tions. successful practices include adoption of two evidence-based screening tools (e.g., e-hits and a -item risk assessment). – these findings extend prior quantitative studies that have supported the effectiveness of the e-hits for identifying ipv+ women and the utility of a subsequent -item risk assessment to facilitate triage and intervention. – con- sistent with i-parihs’s focus on the role of innovation char- acteristics and evidence in uptake of new practices, these tools may be candidates for use given their demonstrated effective- ness, feasibility, and acceptability among our participants. such tools reportedly attenuated provider discomfort and avoidance of discussing ipv, had perceived positive effects on clinical care, and were regarded as facilitators of imple- mentation. thus, the testimonials provided in this study may help promote uptake of ipv screening in other settings. key informants also illustrated the importance of multilevel resource provision and community partnerships, and co- located sw or mental health services as fundamental practices/processes for ipv screening and response protocols. these findings reinforce the importance of a systems approach to integrating ipv screening programs into healthcare set- tings. – however, ipvcs reportedly had less (or no) protected time at late-adopting sites, limiting their capacity to cultivate resources, partnerships, and collaboration across set- tings. dedicated time for ipvcs could enhance implementa- tion of successful clinical practices and reduce barriers related to time constraints and mounting responsibilities within pc. co-located sw and mental health enabled accessible consul- tation, effective trainings, and easy access for patients to intervention/referral sources. in fact, support from mental health, especially pcmhi, was a key factor that differentiated early- and late-adopting sites. moving forward, pcmhi should be an integral part of ipv screening program imple- mentation, as this care model can assist with multilevel re- sources and community referrals, while providing a pathway for patient-centered interventions for women who experience ipv. notably, our findings uncovered the feasibility of patient- centered documentation from provider and administrator per- spectives, extending prior research on patient preferences. patient-centered documentation includes engaging in transpar- ent conversations with patients about their documentation preferences related to ipv such as obtaining patient consent to have ipv-specific details in their electronic medical record or limiting documentation altogether. such practices lend themselves to enhancing care coordination while empowering patients who have reservations about disclosing and/or seek- ing help due to privacy and safety concerns to access care. given the complexities of documentation and barriers related to time constraints, lack of training, and discomfort with ipv, there is a need for further research regarding patient-centered and trauma-informed documentation practices. the vha is currently developing templates and guidance on ipv-related documentation, which may serve as models for other health settings. “reminder fatigue” may inhibit ipv screening, especially in the absence of formal policy from vha leadership. as observed in this study, strategies to address fatigue may in- clude relaying patients’ and early-adopting sites’ positive re- gard for ipv screening to clinicians and leadership. as dem- onstrated by findings on barriers, some sites may need to overcome male leadership discomfort with, or dismissal of, addressing ipv in a healthcare system that predominantly treats men. increased awareness of, and education about, ipv, in tandem with public attention to violence against wom- en, may reduce this issue. finally, the lack of formal policy requiring ipv screening programs was a particularly salient barrier in late-adopting sites. in january , after the com- pletion of this study, the vha issued a policy directive to this effect. the current findings are therefore extremely timely and can help more pc clinics adopt ipv screening programs throughout the vha and other integrated healthcare systems. a supportive and highly visible ipv champion can break down barriers and foster enabling factors. ipvcs with dedi- cated time for their role could serve as clinical champions as ipv screening programs are scaled up in the vha. ipvcs serve as internal facilitators who assist with “boots on the ground” efforts while working with national programs for bidirectional feedback and up-to-date policy guidance. they liaise with local and national leadership to communicate site- specific challenges to enhance feasibility or acceptability of national guidelines, overcoming a barrier identified in this study. given the modifiable nature of several identified bar- riers and facilitators, implementation facilitation is a promising strategy to enhance uptake of successful clinical practices found in this study in vha pc nationwide. consistent with i-parihs, implementation facilitation is a multi-faceted iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementation jgim process of enabling and supporting clinics and facilities, and has been successfully used in pc to overcome barriers and leverage facilitators to foster implementation of evidence- based practices. , thus, implementation facilitation could serve as a strategy to achieve successful implementation of ipv screening programs nationally within the vha. such efforts are needed to “ride the wave” of national attention to ipvand keep ipv initiatives in line with public discussions of violence against women. study limitations highlight areas for future research. this study did not systematically collect information on structural factors (e.g., staffing mix) that may impact uptake. this is an important next step for quantitative and mixed method studies. patient perspectives were not examined, but vha patient preferences and outcomes with ipv screening and responses practices have been studied previously. , , nonetheless, patient feedback and quality improvement are important as- pects of implementation success and require future examina- tion. this study was limited to ipv screening programs for women who experience ipv. there is also a need to extend this line of research within the vha to men who experience ipv and individuals who engage in ipv. , conclusion while ipv screening is recommended, many healthcare set- tings continue to struggle with implementation as society begins to more openly discuss abuse and violence against women. this study of ipv screening program implementation in the largest integrated healthcare system in the us provides important insights and clinical practices that can be applied broadly within and outside vha settings, mitigating identified barriers. future directions include evaluations of implementation impact (e.g., reach, costs, sustainability) and clinical effective- ness (e.g., disclosure rates, post-screening ipv-related services use, satisfaction) of ipv screening programs in a wider array of pc clinics treating women and men. combined with other ipvand implementation science literature, these findings pro- vide actionable strategies that can facilitate effective ipv screening and intervention programs within pc settings. as us society grapples with the revelations of the #metoo movement, and greater disclosures of interpersonal violence and its attendant health effects, it is even more critical to effectively address ipvand to disseminate successful practices across health systems. acknowledgments: our special thanks to rachel m. maskin for her assistance with data analysis and to the clinicians and ad- ministrators who shared their perspectives for this research. we also thank vha’s office of women’s health services and the vha ipv assistance program of care management and social work services for providing program evaluation metrics for sampling and recruitment (drs. patricia hayes, sally haskell, galina portnoy, and leann bruce). funding support: this research was supported by the department of veterans affairs, veterans health administration, health services research and development (hsr&d) services (ppo - ; pi iverson). this work was also supported, in part, by dr. iverson’s pres- idential early career award for scientists and engineers (usa - ) and drs. iverson’s and gutner’s implementation research institute fellowships from nimh ( r mh ) through hsr&d services, quality enhancement research initiative. corresponding author: katherine m. iverson, phd; women’s health sciences division, national center for ptsdva boston healthcare system, south huntington avenue, boston, ma, usa (e-mail: katherine.iverson@va.gov). compliance with ethical standards: conflict of interest: the authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest. disclaimer: the views expressed in this article are those of the au- thors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the depart- ment of veterans affairs or the united states government. references . bonomi ae, thompson rs, anderson m, et al. intimate partner violence and women’s physical, mental, and social functioning. american journal of preventive medicine. ; ( ): – . . devries km, mak jyt, garcía-moreno c, petzold m, child jc, falder g, lim s, bacchus lj, engell re, rosenfeld l, pallitto c, vos t, abrahams n, watts ch. the global prevalence of intimate partner violence against women. science. ; : – . . liebschutz jm, rothman, ef. intimate-partner violence- what physi- cians can do. 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facilitation strategy to implement primary care-mental health. journal of general internal medicine. ; (suppl ): – . . dichter me, sorrentino ae, haywood tn, et al. women’s healthcare utilization following routine screening for past-year intimate partner violence in the veterans health administration. journal of general internal medicine. ; ( ): – . . proctor e, silmere h, raghavan r, et al. outcomes for implementation research: conceptual distinctions, measurement challenges, and re- search agenda. administration and policy in mental health and mental health services research. ; ( ): – . . iverson km, vogt d, maskin r., & smith br. intimate partner violence victimization and associated implications for health and functioning among male and female post- / veterans. medical care. ; ( ):s -s . . portnoy ga, haskell sg, king mw, masking r, gerber mr, & iverson km. accuracy and acceptability of a screening tool for identifying intimate partner violence perpetration among women veterans: a pre- implementation evaluation. women’s health issues. ; ( ): – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. iverson et al: scaling up ipv screening program implementation jgim http://dx.doi.org/https://www.queri.research.va.gov/tools/implementation/facilitation-manual.pdf http://dx.doi.org/https://www.queri.research.va.gov/tools/implementation/facilitation-manual.pdf 	intimate partner violence screening programs in the veterans health administration: informing scale-up of successful practices 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	methods 	design and participants 	approach 	results 	successful clinical practices 	barriers 	facilitating factors 	discussion 	conclusion 	references arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction of phallic space vol.:( ) int j semiot law ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction of phallic space dany nobus published online: may © the author(s) abstract this paper examines how the signifier of ‘toxic masculinity’ operates in the con- temporary psycho-social landscape of embodied power relations. it is argued that toxic masculinity is a symbolic response to the deep sense of anger people experi- ence owing to the persistent disturbance of reason that characterizes the radically incongruous thirdspace in which we live. to those who feel disoriented and lost, toxic masculinity is both an imagined cause and a projected solution to the endemic sense of dislocation. as an index of repressive power, self-serving discipline and ruthless ambition, toxic masculinity is held fully responsible by angry ‘outsiders’ for the ongoing disturbance of reason, whilst the very attribution of the cause of this disturbance to a gendered position of traditional embodied authority simultane- ously serves the purpose of changing the hybridity of thirdspace into more conven- tional figurations of social imbalance. this explanatory model, which draws both on edward w. soja’s reflections on the changing spatialities of the human lifeworld and henri lefebvre’s theory of the (re-)production of (phallic) space, is further employed to address the questions as to why patriarchy persists and whether alterna- tive constellations of governance are feasible. keywords anger · masculinity · thirdspace · hybridity · patriarchy introduction once upon a time, a long time ago, so long ago that i cannot even pinpoint exactly when, it would have been unequivocally complimentary for a man to be called a man. nowadays, being called a man is an insult at best and a derogation at worst. a man is someone who talks in manspeak (usually characterised by an extended series of guttural sounds), who also performs manspeaking, i.e. who unashamedly * dany nobus dany.nobus@brunel.ac.uk division of psychology, college of health and life sciences, brunel university london, london, uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf d. nobus contributes to a conversation amongst women without waiting until he is being spo- ken to, and who consistently engages in the discursive evil of mansplaining. at the risk of over-simplifying the picture, a st century man (not the schizoid type king crimson were singing about back in , but the ‘normal’ variety) is unmannerly, self-absorbed, authoritarian, reactionary, disrespectful, bigoted, secretly hoping for the return of page in the sun newspaper, misogynistic, sex-starved, loud-mouthed, sleazy, ignorant, lazy, arrogant, proud about his beer-belly, physically and emotion- ally abusive, power-hungry, potentially violent towards everyone apart from himself and his man-mates down the pub, and utterly risible without he himself knowing it. maybe i am exaggerating, maybe i am painting a caricature, maybe i am just disgruntled about the fact that i was once called out on twitter in a faux apologetic meme as a ‘man with a manly view’. fact of the matter is that in times of #metoo campaigns, when white male billionaire besuited businessmen are ruling the world, white male etonians and harrovians are enjoying themselves tearing apart economic treaties, and other not-so-white right-wing male populists have no shame in justify- ing extra-judicial killings, it is not very nice to be called a man with a manly view. two decades into the st century, (white) masculinity has become a bottomless repository for all that is repulsive in the late capitalist western world, and the signi- fier has acquired such a high degree of ‘toxicity’ that ‘toxic masculinity’ is almost tautological. in addition, this toxicity is not merely associated with the hegemonic social status of masculinity [ , pp. – ], but is meant to capture its very exist- ence as a residual product of patriarchy. however, within the space of this paper i shall not offer a detailed psychoanalytic interpretation of how ‘men with manly views’ have come to represent the foul faces of all types of social inequality, nor of how this ‘crisis of masculinity’ is deeply affecting scores of young men in search of an identity. man though allegedly i am, i remain unsure i would be able to ‘pull it off’ without having recourse to an extensive discussion of how sexual identity poli- tics interact with symbolic and other capital in the wake of a global economic crisis, which would require more than a few pages in an academic journal. likewise, i shall resist the temptation to critically deconstruct the prevailing meanings of (white) masculinity in contemporary discursive practices, because my own (self-identified or attributed) manhood, not to mention the fact that i can easily be perceived as writ- ing from a white, male privileged position of social and intellectual authority, would make the exercise inherently suspect and thus largely futile. if there is any percent- age to be found in a careful dissection of the semantic field in which contemporary masculinity is embedded, the task would have to befall someone whose wardrobe does not contain male sartorial paraphernalia, and who is therefore high above sus- picion, lest the outcome be regarded as but an insidious attempt at rehabilitating the tarnished image of man, or resolving the sorry state of ‘masculinity in crisis’. lofty as these aims would have been—some abandoned owing to a lack of space, others discarded owing to an accidental chromosomal excess—i shall restrict myself, here, to some brief (psychoanalytic) reflections on how the signifier of ‘toxic masculinity’ operates in the contemporary psycho-social landscape of embodied power relations, and on how this prevalent paradigm of modern masculinity connects with contem- porary debates on (the future of) patriarchy. indeed, i believe that contemporary allegations of toxic masculinity are characteristic of a broader social force-field, in arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… which toxicity is the new name for a reprehensible amalgamation of moral corrup- tion, systemic exploitation and limitless egomania. it is not only worth investigating, then, how this name circulates and what purpose it serves, but also how it impacts upon those who employ it and those who receive it—as an allegation of perfidy and prodigality, or as a concept of gendered selfhood. a brief anatomy of anger by contrast with the last decade of the th century, which has been dubbed ‘the age of anxiety’ [ ], the still relatively young st century could be characterised as the ‘age of anger’. all around the world, people young and old are angry, and whereas the majority vents it via social media, peaceful protests, school strikes, public inquir- ies and critical social movements such as extinction rebellion, global action for trans equality (gate) and the swarm collective, on an almost daily basis it is also manifested in formal complaints, road- and other types of rage, seditious torchlight parades, hate crime and often barbaric, physical interpersonal violence. for all his emphasis on the death drive [ ] and the irreducible discontents in civilization [ ], freud had almost nothing to say about anger. for sure, aggressivity intermittently appeared on his radar, yet this manifestation of the drive must not be confused with the passion or the emotion of anger, as an explosive interior affec- tive state [ , p. ]. aggressivity may be motivated by factors other than anger— amongst the cardinal sins, lust, envy and greed would probably be the most likely candidates—and anger does not de facto result in aggressivity, especially if the latter term is restricted to instances of hostile or violent behaviour towards others. perhaps it is testament to freud’s general disregard of anger, or maybe even his visceral fear of it, that his most evocative riff on the subject appeared in an essay on a th cen- tury statue of a prophet whose historical existence remains disputed. first published anonymously, and allegedly only by virtue of the fact that its methodology bore some resemblance to psychoanalysis, freud’s reading of the moses of michelangelo stands out for its persistent refusal to acknowledge the grandiose marble sculpture in san pietro in vincoli as a representation of a man filled with wrath (zorn), who is on the verge of smashing the tables. angry as he may have been at the sight of his apostate people cavorting around the golden calf, freud’s moses is a figure whose respect for the divine laws allows him to freeze his fury and keep his passions in in london, stabbings have become so common that the traumatic impact of yet another young life wasted is almost instantly erased by the shock of a new lethal incident. it is important to note, in this respect, that the seemingly unstoppable surge of knife-crime on the streets of london is not just another epiphenomenon of inner city racism, or a symptom of unemployed metropolitan youth culture. it is indissociably linked to desperate expressions of masculinity amongst the city’s socially deprived young men, paired with a search for identity, a desire for community and an urge to be appreciated for personal accomplishments. on the historical circumstances surrounding the publication of the paper, whose authorship was only known to the members of the ‘secret committee’ [ , ] until it was reprinted in freud’s gesammelte schriften in , see [ , pp. – ] and [ , pp. – ]. for critical and occasionally angry anal- yses of freud’s reading, see for example [ , , , , ]. d. nobus check, to the benefit of all mankind [ , pp. – ]. contrary to what the old testament suggests, freud does not make moses literally break the law in anger when he observes how the people at the foot of mount sinai have already broken the law in their shameless worship of a secular idol. as if to suggest that moses would never be driven to enact what his people have already performed metaphorically in his absence, freud argues that moses is capable of saving the law despite his anger, and that the preservation of the law saves him and his people from further wrongdo- ings. anger, it is opined here, proceeds from the disintegration of law and order, the fading of a given set of established principles, or the disruption of an accepted mode of thinking, the more so as this ‘sense of reason’ is attached to someone’s psycho- social sense of identity. where anger erupts, only the maintenance, or the reinstate- ment of a stabilizing structuring force may reduce its own destructive potential. it is moses’ unwavering loyalty to the word of god that stops him from giving free rein to the fury provoked by the idolatrous israelites. freud’s subversive interpretation of michelangelo’s moses, as a seethingly angry man who remains nonetheless committed to self-restraint, echoes the enduringly captivating observations on anger by the roman philosopher seneca. purportedly written in response to a request from his older brother novatus, seneca’s de ira [ ] takes its point of departure from the central stoic premise that human beings need to submit voluntarily to the law of nature, the supreme sovereign authority which is governed by virtue. as an unruly passion, anger emanates from a mis-inter- pretation or mis-judgement of reality—in modern therapeutic parlance, we might call it a ‘cognitive distortion’—and to mitigate its harmful effects it is better to pre- vent it from occurring altogether, yet when it does erupt it should be restrained by the power of reason. although freud is unlikely to have agreed with the stoics that human nature is intrinsically virtuous, seneca’s idea that anger is not a key compo- nent of the basic human emotional repertoire but a secondary ‘re-action’, and his proposed antagonism between anger and reason, definitely resonate with freud’s comments on ‘frozen wrath’ in the moses of michelangelo [ , p. ]. seneca goes on to assert that ‘babies and the aged and the sick [infantes senesque et aegri]’ are ‘most inclined to anger [iracundissimi]’, and that ‘everything weak is by nature given to complaint [invalidum omne natura querulum est]’ [ , p. ]. he does not explain why this would be the case, but the stoic celebration of reason and lucid tranquillity makes it easy to infer that it may have something to do with their being more at the mercy of ‘unreason’, or less recognised as reasonable human beings. anger thus originates in a disturbance of reason, and only by virtue of reason shall it be contained. when i was outed on twitter as a ‘man with a manly view’, some- one was probably angry at me, because something i had said or done had driven them out of their comfort zone. i am reluctant to claim that they mis-perceived their immediate social reality, but somehow their reason was being suspended in favour of an unruly passion. if so many people are angry these days, i would venture the hypothesis that it is because they experience the world in which they live as what baudrillard would have designated, back in the early s, as a pure simulacrum [ , p. ]. social insti- tutions have no relation to reality anymore, at least if reality is defined as the norma- tive primary task they are expected to fulfil. neoliberal rationalities have infiltrated arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… each and every aspect of the social sphere, to the point where everything we see and hear seems to have lost its intrinsic value—reduced to the status of an exchangeable commodity in the endless proliferation of late capitalism. health care provision is no longer tailored to patient needs, let alone to the development of a personalised treatment programme, but to key performance indicators, measures of success and case management protocols. in the uk, public universities are now also accounta- ble to the competition and markets authority, because they are effectively selling an educational service to potential ‘partners in learning’, formerly known as students, who are being readied for the job-market. british vice-chancellors brazenly state that their universities are addressing the skills-gap and preparing the workforce of the future, yet over the past decade the proportion of students disclosing a mental health problem to their institutions has quintupled [ ]. to address the issue, the office for students (the new ‘independent’ regulator of english universities) called for an investigation by inviting universities to submit competitive project bids to a so- called ‘catalyst fund’. the consortium of ‘educational service providers’ winning the competition were given funds for a project on ‘addressing barriers to student success’ [ , ]. the uk acknowledges that there is a student mental health cri- sis, and so to tackle the problem they are considering ‘grading’ universities on their capability to deliver enhanced well-being outcomes. i honestly could not make this up, and if it were not so deeply tragic, i would definitely regard it as a tasteless joke. in the all-encompassing whirlwind of consumerism, people feel crushed, helpless and out of control, and so politicians deviously take advantage of this widespread feeling of dislocation by speaking to their despair, selling them greatness, health, freedom and independence. virtual space, hyper-reality and post-truth are the new norm. and since the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, fantasy and reality, sincerity and deception, right and wrong have simultaneously become blurred or abolished, new forms of exploitation and abuse are legion, or the old forms have found themselves new playgrounds. drawing on edward w. soja’s meticulous dissection of post-modern geographies, i would say that people in the western world now live in a radically incongruous thirdspace. according to soja, thirdspace is where everything comes together: ‘subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history’ [ , pp. – ]. almost twenty-five years after these words were first written, some additional confluences of conventional dichotomies could probably be added to the list: left and right, east and west, selfhood and otherness, meaning and nonsense, analogue and digital, for an excellent explication of how the steady neoliberal infiltration of the public sphere has effectively led to the imperilment of democracy, see [ ]. for the unintended repercussions of performance metrics in medicine and public health care, which are commonly justified with reference to accountability and transparency, see [ , pp. – ]. in case it is not entirely clear from my description, i shall state it categorically and unequivocally: i am angry too. d. nobus high art and popular culture, masculinity and femininity. insofar as reason relies (or used to rely) on discernment, differentiation and discretion, reason is disturbed. yet i would consider st century thirdspace to be radically incongruous, because the complete hybridity of our lifeworld—internal as well as external—also coincides, as homi bhabha argued in his seminal work on the location of culture and in other texts [ , , p. ], with new structures of authority, much less visible than those of yore, which would have been embodied by priests, teachers, medical doctors and law enforcers, but all the more controlling for that. insofar as contemporary rea- son is disturbed on account of the intrinsic hybridity of the thirdspace, the distur- bance is counter-balanced and confounded by a socio-political sphere of continuous surveillance, which is materialised in omnipresent cctv cameras (no one knows whether they really work, because functionality has long since been abandoned as a key deterrent, and defective cameras are much more cost-effective than fully oper- ational ones) and so-called ‘low emission zones’ (a clever ecological euphemism for the presence of punitive speed control cameras in densely populated areas), but which is much more insidiously enforced through virtual user engagement metrics and countless anonymous policies ranging from ‘quality and standards’ to ‘health and safety’, and from ‘equality and diversity’ to ‘prevent’ and ‘dignity at work’. i therefore disagree with psychoanalytic theorists who have claimed that we live under the spell of a collapse of the (symbolic) paternal function, resulting in relent- less injunctions to enjoy (more) [ , p. , , , ]. cultural goods have no doubt become more diverse over the past twenty-five years or so, and corporate institutions have done their best to create increasingly wider ranges of products— from the coca-cola life to the tall-double-decaf-hazelnut-latte-with-soy-milk-and- marshmallows-to-take-away—allegedly because they care about customers’ ‘special needs’, but in reality because they only really care about themselves. some would say that the enjoyment that can be derived from the diversity and availability of these cultural goods is endless—the quantity of enjoyment is directly proportional, then, to the size of the commodity spectrum—yet i cannot help but think that every source of enjoyment also includes its own source of dissatisfaction, and that the more complicated the source of enjoyment is the more extensive the sources of dis- satisfaction associated with it must be. there are only so many things one can be dissatisfied about when drinking an ordinary black filter coffee—it is presumably either too weak or too strong—but i really do not want to think about all the things the consumer of the aforementioned coffee-monstrosity could possibly be disgrun- tled about. if a command to enjoy is pervading the st century, it may perhaps be ascertained in this super-abundance of cultural goods and corporate slogans to to give but one example of how anonymous policies may be used to police civil liberties, the uni- versity of reading recently warned its third-year politics undergraduates not to access an essay by the renowned political theorist norman geras, which had been listed as ‘essential reading’ on their module outline, on any personal devices, and to read it only in a ‘secure setting’, lest they put themselves at risk of being in breach of the uk government’s prevent strategy, which is designed to identify and report instances of political extremism giving reason for concern as potentially leading to radicalisation [ ]. on the ubiquitous monitoring of individual behaviour in cyberspace, see the landmark tome by zuboff [ ]. arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… ‘enjoy more’, but i do not believe it is at all present on a social level. the aforemen- tioned examples of increased surveillance and policing may serve to illustrate this. because reason is disturbed rather than collapsing, anger rather than anxiety ensues. for if anxiety, in one of freud’s many and often mutually incompatible statements on the matter, is tantamount to a transformation of free-floating libido [ , pp. – ], i.e. psychic sexual energy which is no longer attached or attach- able to a concrete object, then the radically incongruous thirdspace does not put its inhabitants’ libido in an object-less state. much like reason itself, the object(s) to which libido is attached are volatile, inchoate, transient—always in flux, but never completely absent. if anything, people in the industrialised world must live with an excess of readily available objects, none of which particularly stable or solid, each and every one of which no more than a momentary occurrence in time and space. yet the more we believe that the objects to which we attach our libido and, by exten- sion, our identities will offer lasting pleasure, the more we mis-judge the ‘reality’ of thirdspace and the angrier we become. in this case too, seneca was right. masculinity and phallic space up until now, i have argued that anger is rooted in a disturbance of reason. in a radically incongruous thirdspace, this disturbance is exacerbated by the fact that the state of hybridity in which reason finds itself is complemented by a pervasive, yet largely invisible structure of authority. if we accept that form not only follows libido, as sylvia lavin once cogently argued [ ], but that libido also follows form, i.e. that the distribution of psychic sexual energy is a reflection of the shape of the environment in which it operates, the all but universal state of anger in which the contemporary world is thrown correlates with the inherent volatility of the object in thirdspace, the more so as citizens mis-represent the reality of this object to them- selves and others as a safe and secure investment. in this febrile and forever chang- ing state of affairs, toxic masculinity is both an imagined cause and a projected solu- tion to the endemic sense of dislocation—at least to those who feel disoriented and lost, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, the disinherited and the disenchanted. as an index of repressive power, self-serving discipline and ruthless ambition, toxic masculinity is held fully responsible by the angry disillusioned ‘weaklings’ for the ongoing disturbance of reason, whilst the very attribution of the cause of this dis- turbance to a gendered position of traditional embodied authority also serves the purpose of changing the hybridity of thirdspace into more conventional figurations of social imbalance. undeservedly ignored and sometimes only discarded for its christian overtones by secular psychoanalysts, the work of rené girard, and especially his mimetic scapegoat theory [ ], may provide valuable additional insights here. expressed in a girardian key, the radically incongruous thirdspace, which is characterised by uncontrolled hybridity and an inescapable inceptive disturbance of reason, repre- sents a fundamental ‘mimetic crisis’, generally as well as individually, in the private as well as in the public sphere, socially as well as psychically. the contemporary state of reason is in crisis, because some of the most important distinctions upon d. nobus which its exercise rests—those between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, mean- ing and nonsense, value and worthlessness—are constantly amalgamated in a para- consistent discursive logic. the crisis is mimetic, because at its most profound level it affects and disrupts human desire, which is according to girard always taken up in a dual process of imitative mediation: externally, the imitator and the model iden- tify with regard to an object of desire; internally, they enter into a state of rivalry which may become so violent that the very object of desire is eclipsed by it [ ]. in order to resolve this mimetic crisis, people living through it have recourse to the identification and exposure of a scapegoat: a person or group in an outsider position, and therefore easily blamed for breaking societal rules, is accused of causing the crisis, which allows the rivalrous parties to bury the hatchet and reunite in a col- lective battle against the culprit [ , pp. – ]. girard himself acknowledged that there is a distinct echo in all of this of freud’s infamous myth of the murder of the primal father [ , pp. – ], yet the principle accords more directly with freud’s observations on social cohesion and interpersonal violence in civilization and its discontents, in which he wrote: ‘it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness’ [ , p. ]. girard’s theory is appealing not only because it documents psycho-social forces that resonate with our contemporary living conditions, as a world-in-anger, but also because its proposed mechanism of the scapegoat, as the common solution to the mimetic crisis, chimes with the way in which this st century world-in-anger responds to its own internal and external dissociations. on at least three points, how- ever, do we need to consider a modification to girard’s mimetic scapegoat theory if we are to employ it as an explanation for the emergence of toxic masculinity as an essential component of the endemic mimetic crisis of the radically incongruous thirdspace in which we live. first, the relationship between insider and outsider, inasmuch as this dichotomy is still valid and detectable in the hybrid thirdspace, needs to be reversed. in girard’s model, the generalised mimetic crisis emboldens those in a social majority position to reassemble, close the ranks and collaborate against a culpable outsider. in our current socio-political climate, it is the self-identi- fied or exposed outsiders, or at least those who feel they have somehow lost out and are in a position of secondariness, who reconvene, forge new bonds of solidarity, and join forces against a blameworthy insider. second, although the scapegoat is still routinely identified as a concrete person or group, it is much more common for the answerable agency to be an abstract concept or principle, which is subsequently saturated with a broad range of physical and other attributes. if sovereign toxic mas- culinity is to blame for the mimetic crisis of thirdspace, this attribution applies less to a person or group of people than to a certain quiddity that is indicative of a series of cultural representations and a reprehensible ideology. third, in girard’s mimetic scapegoat theory, which was originally developed in relation to the fictional space of western literature but which subsequently gained momentum as a comprehensive account of human social relations, the question concerning the validity of the attri- bution is rarely posed, but always resolved, if only because the newly found consen- sus amongst the insiders suffices for the verdict to be passed. in our contemporary thirdspace, where fake news rules and post-truth is a dominant value, the issue as arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… to whether the attribution is valid is always posed, yet rarely resolved, neither by the outsiders who claim to have witnessed it and have been on its receiving end, nor by the allegedly guilty insiders who have been operating under its aegis—although the latter may of course always protest that one cannot prove a negative. it is undoubt- edly the case that toxic masculinity exists, in all its abusive realities, and that it has persisted since the halcyon days of the paterfamilias, yet the consensus of the vic- timised outsiders no longer suffices to validate its occurrence, the less so as the dis- tinction between scientific proof and hazy speculation has become putty in the hands of the ruling elite. as such, in the era of the radically incongruous thirdspace, and the anger result- ing from the disturbance of reason and the mimetic crisis, toxic masculinity is one way for the outsiders to close the infernal cycle of commodification in which they have been bound up. apart from generating structure where there was only chaos and disruption, order where there was only dissipation and fluidity, the attribution of toxic masculinity, which may or may not coincide with a material reality of exploita- tion and abuse, acts as an organising signifier of power, against which the powerless, or the temporarily disempowered outsiders, may vent their anger, and through which they can experience a new sense of community, identity and belonging. in its most elementary form, this attribution reintroduces the most conventional psycho-social spatial arrangement, in which power is transacted between a dominant and a submis- sive force, to render intelligible and (at least temporarily) suspend the disturbance of reason. in their hegelian designations, the forces operate as ‘master’ (herrschaft) and ‘servant’ (knechtschaft) [ , p. ], which has the distinct disadvantage that they may easily be confused with, or constrained to largely outdated social identities. pace the lingering associations with a certain eroto-sexual practice, there is noth- ing wrong in employing the terms domination and submission; after all, given the fact that the attribution originates in the outsiders cum oppressed, unjustifiable and non-consensual domination is very much what is being indicted. however, maybe there is yet another way of articulating the terms of this super-imposed force-field, which would have the added benefit of literally staging the spatial re-distributions of power i am trying to articulate here. it is to say that the dominant is constituted by arrectness (verticality, raised, upright and straight) and the submissive by decu- bitus (horizontality, lying down, recumbent, supine). between these two, often vis- ibly recognisable positions in a concrete spatial arrangement, power is transacted from (masculine) emission to (feminine) receptivity, with the caveat that the conven- tional association of emission with arrectness and receptivity with decubitus may be confounded by other than purely physical variables, such as the explicitly agreed or implicitly adopted flow of speech. in a thought-provoking essay on the typical spatial arrangements of the psychoanalytic setting, diana fuss and joel sanders have taken issue with luce irigaray’s famous critique of the ‘scene of analysis’ as an orthogonal pairing of an erect psychoanalyst and a prone patient [ ], by arguing that freud always opens ‘himself to the risk of feminization’ in that he assumes ‘the role of an orifice, a listening ear, while the patient becomes a mouth, an oral transmitter’ [ , p. ]. d. nobus in any case, as an attributed signifier of (abusive) power, toxic masculinity pri- marily functions as a linguistic tool for resolving the mimetic crisis in the radically incongruous thirdspace, whereby the outsiders’ anger stemming from the distur- bance of reason is not so much tempered, but re-centred on an object that is pur- portedly more stable and less transient, owing to the prolonged if deplorable his- tory of abusive power-relations from which it emanates. taking account of the three modifications to girard’s theory of mimetic scapegoating i mentioned above, toxic masculinity is thus an attempt on behalf of the disenfranchised to restore order, which implies that it is simultaneously an indictment and a reproduction of tradi- tional patriarchy, and all the ills and evils it carries along. using the terminology of henri lefebvre’s seminal volume the production of space, the attribution of toxic masculinity to the identified disturber of reason exposes as well as reproduces phallic space, which in its most rudimentary appearance involves the distribution of power between powerful arrectness (masculine emission) and powerless decubitus (feminine receptivity). for lefebvre, phallic space “symbolizes force, male fertility, masculine violence… [but] phallic brutality does not remain abstract, for it is the brutality of political power, of the means of constraint: police, army, bureaucracy” [ , p. ]. assuming that my analysis is persuasive, or at least sufficiently plausi- ble for it to be considered worthy of further consideration, at least two key questions remain. why does our contemporary anger attach itself to a symbolic, yet generic figuration of reprehensible masculinity? and even more importantly, how could we conceive of an alternative to phallic space, and under which conditions would this alternative constitute, if not a reasonable prophylactic strategy for the eruption of a new mimetic crisis, perhaps a feasible therapeutic solution to the sense of angry dislocation it elicits? writing in the aftermath of the election of donald j. trump to the white house, carol gilligan and naomi snider dared to ask the impossible question: why does patriarchy persist, in spite of decade-long widespread campaigns for social equal- ity and women’s rights? although they occasionally conflate patriarchy with hier- archy, and power with authority, their answer is that—over and above the fact that a notable sub-section of the population, namely those men-in-power, evidently benefit from the advantages it bestows upon them—patriarchy fulfils an important psycho- logical function: patriarchy’s persistence is tied not only to a struggle for power and a contest between different frameworks for living or systems of belief, but also to the tension between our desire for love and our desire to avoid the pain of loss. with its gender binary and hierarchy creating impediments to relational pres- ence and integrity, patriarchy becomes a bastion against the pain of loss. the catch is: it requires a sacrifice of love [ , p. ]. deeply influenced by john bowlby’s theory of attachment and loss [ – ], gilligan and snider argue that the socio-political restoration and preservation of patriarchy provides relief from the psychological anguish that is associated with the intrinsic vulnerabilities of love. in freudian terms, allowing oneself to (be in) love requires a certain relinquishment of self-love, and thus the acceptance that a quantum of nar- cissism will need to be given up in favour of the reorientation of the libido towards arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… the external object of love [ , pp. – ]. being in love makes us more vul- nerable, vulnerability is tantamount to a reduction of self-love, the resulting experi- ence of loss is painful, and the foundation of patriarchy, which entails a gendering of social imbalances of power, attenuates the affective impact of loss, presumably because it exchanges the human experience of love, and all the emotional quandaries it generates, for a loveless system of domination and submission. there is a lot to be said in favour of this perspective, yet i am not convinced that patriarchy, which is but another word for toxic masculinity here, effectively dampens down the psychological pain of loss. for one, the ‘therapeutic’ function of patriarchy may easily be undone by the new plethora of losses it generates in the oppressed, amongst which the loss of a voice may very well be the most impor- tant one. in addition, patriarchy is also crucially conditioned by its own structures of love—the unconditional love of the leader, ruler or sovereign—which undoubt- edly induces other experiences of vulnerability and pain. i do think that gilligan and snider hit the proverbial nail when they aver that patriarchy fulfils an impor- tant psychological function, and that precisely because of this it is likely to persist. yet instead of designating this psychological function as ‘therapeutic’, insofar as it would alleviate pain, i am more inclined to say it is ‘prophylactic’, inasmuch as it prevents human desire, which is also driven by loss, from becoming extinguished and therefore lost in and of itself in the overwhelming plenitude of commodified objects, which may also include identity—as the final frontier of mass-market com- modification. echoing todd mcgowan’s compelling argument that capitalism con- tinues to dominate—despite the numerous inequalities it creates and despite its vocal opponents—because it mimics the structure of human desire [ ], which is mired in a ruthless dynamic of incomplete satisfaction and an equally tenacious anticipation of self-fulfilment, i would propose that toxic masculinity continues to rule, because its fundamental mechanism of domination (arrectness) and submission (decubitus) captures another feature of human desire—the fact that it cannot operate without alienation, i.e. without its having been forced into a state of compulsory disposses- sion. in other words, the relentless return of toxic masculinity, in its simultaneous attribution as a possible cause of the disorder of reason and as the reproduction of phallic space, reinstates and confirms the structure of human desire as a force flow- ing from loss. by contrast with gilligan and snider, i would argue, then, that patri- archy persists not because it mitigates (the pain of) loss, but because it renders (the pain of) loss possible, which is in itself a necessary precondition for human desire to operate. as to the second question, which raises the complex issue of a feasible alterna- tive, i remain far less optimistic than gilligan and snider, who continue to believe in the revolutionary power of social protest: we see movements fuelled by the anger of hope: the hope that things will in fact change, that the ruptures in democracy can be repaired, that relation- ship—however tenuous its hold, however beset by appeals to masculine honor and feminine goodness—does not give way to dominance and submission, violence and silence. these are movements inspired by the conviction that as humans we are capable of reconciliation, that the moral arc of the universe d. nobus bends toward justice, and that in the end the anger of hope will win out over the anger of despair [ , p. ]. in not sharing these words, heartfelt and inspiring as they may be, i fully accept that someone out there might go on to expose me again as a man with a manly view, the more so as the authors of the cited volume are women and i, at least for the time being, remain just an average man, although probably one who will be perceived as writing from a high-status position of academic prestige. however, gilligan and snider’s message of love and hope occurs to me as a flagrant contradiction of their own observational premises: patriarchy persists despite social protest, and the intrin- sic vulnerabilities of love prompt the preservation of patriarchy. why would the new waves of protest, which are purportedly animated by the anger of hope, be more effective in the abolition of patriarchy than all the ones that have gone before? why would the new restorative relationships of justice and reconciliation no longer entail painful experiences of loss, and why would the latter be less intractable than those that gave rise to a renewed call for ‘therapeutic’ patriarchy? when it comes to thinking about effective ways for disposing of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, i am much more on lacan’s side when, in a chaotic exchange with students and agitators at the newly established experimental university of vin- cennes in december , he proclaimed: ‘what you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. you will get one’ [ , p. ]. the discourse of the master, which is consist- ent with the discourse of domination and submission, and the distribution of libido in a phallic space, is inescapable, for the pure and simple reason that it is the dis- course of the human unconscious, and as such the fundamental discourse of human desire. this does not imply that other discourses are de facto excluded, and lacan himself identified at least three alternative discursive structures [ , pp. – ], yet these other discourses only ever operate with reference and in opposition to the dis- course of the master, which reigns supreme. when, in , lefebvre unfolded his theory of the (re-)production of phallic space, he at one stage played with the idea of an alternative arrangement of spatial coordinates: ‘is a final metamorphosis called for that will reverse all earlier ones, destroying phallic space and replacing it with a ‘uterine’ space? we can be sure, at any rate, that this in itself will not ensure the invention of a truly appropriated space, or that of an architecture of joy and enjoy- ment’ [ , p. ]. for lefebvre, the mode of production of goods and services within space, of which the capitalist modality is but one example, is in fact easier to transform than the production of space itself, because the latter would require a modification of the controlling agencies and parameters of space, and thus a shift from the relentless (re-)production of things towards the intractable (re-)production of the environment in which these things are produced, which is much more difficult to contemplate, at least in terms of socio-economic and political action. because lacan’s discourse theory is generally restricted to the four interrelated discourses (of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric) he formalised during his seminar of –’ [ ]. however, during a lecture in milan on may , he coined a fifth discourse, termed the discourse of the capi- talist, which potentially allows for an additional three ‘social bonds’, if the same principle of the ‘quarter turn’, as outlined in his –’ seminar, is implemented [ , p. ]. arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… his intellectual agenda is firmly set on ideological matters, lefebvre does not con- sider the extent to which the transformation of phallic space may only be achievable through psychological means, as a mental transformation of the structure of human desire, yet even then it remains to be seen what could be achieved at this level and whether a permanent transformation of the discourse of the master, phallic space and toxic masculinity is at all realistic. for all its ostensible duplication of arrect- ness and decubitus, the discourse of psychoanalysis, which lacan conceived as the exact opposite of the master’s discourse [ , pp. – ], initiates an alternative, generative space for speech and a potential re-restructuring of desire, yet this does not necessarily imply that the discourse of the master will completely disintegrate. maybe the best we can hope for is that, with or without psychoanalysis, authority and hierarchy no longer by definition lead to (an abuse of) power, that domination and submission are incorporated in a more flexible distribution of libido, and that masculinity’s obstinate odium of toxicity is in itself recuperated within the conflu- ence of discursive categories. unlike gilligan and snider, and much like lacan and lefebvre, i therefore do not believe that the question as to why patriarchy persists will one day become obsolete, because (as i have endeavoured to argue) it constitutes the most basic, necessary and sufficient condition for human desire to emerge and sustain itself. at the same time, however, i can envisage a psycho-social constellation in which the conventional forms of patriarchy are balanced against other, alternative configurations of power and less rigid spatial arrangements. i am not advocating, here, a serious reconsid- eration of the radically incongruous thirdspace and all its hybridities, because the thirdspace cannot be disjointed from patriarchy, much less so as it proliferates in its appropriation of the object-world as a series of transient, inchoate commodities. what i have in mind is the invention of new, more open and more accessible spaces for human speech, where (much like in psychoanalysis) the lack and the losses that preside over desire can be re-configured into what jill gentile has called a ‘feminine law’ [ ], i.e. a generative, emancipatory structure that activates the crucial ‘space between’ positions of power, divisions of labour, mechanisms of (in)equality, gender dichotomies etc. in its most radical sense, it would involve the creation of spaces in which priority is given to the voice of desire. conclusion at this stage, the reader undoubtedly expects me to provide a neat synthesis of the argument i have tried to develop. if i shall refrain from doing so, it is not because i deliberately want to disturb the reader’s own sense of reason and potentially attract a new wave of anger, but because i believe that this type of standard, conceptual sum- mary at the end of an academic paper is too facile a conclusion, which is in this case also neither necessary nor warranted given the subtleties and complexities of the symbolic circulation of toxic masculinity i have endeavoured to articulate. instead, and at the risk of overstating my case, i would like to add two further points to my argument. the first is that over the past couple of years, and especially since the arrival of a certain blatantly misogynistic and excessively self-absorbed d. nobus man in the most powerful house on the planet, masculinity has acquired strong con- notations of perversion, and that the very notion of toxicity, which to many is an undeniable and intrinsic feature of masculinity, resonates with the terminology of perversion, as it is used in common parlance and in ‘urban dictionaries’: behaviour which deviates from socio-cultural norms of acceptability, especially in terms of sexual conduct. indeed, it is interesting to observe in this respect how concepts and ideas of perversion have recently shifted from all (sexual) behaviours falling outside the conventional framework of (genital) hetero-normativity to (sexual) behaviours falling firmly within the traditional standards of (sexual) identity. although the term ‘perversion’ has long since been replaced with ‘paraphilia’ in the official psychiatric nomenclature, it has almost invariably been linked to ‘disorders’ of human sexual behaviour, either because the object of sexual attraction was considered ‘abnormal’ and/or ‘illegal’ (say, a child or a non-human animal), or because the sexual activity contravened ethico-legal principles of public decency and consent. in recent times, however, we have witnessed a progressive contraction of these paraphilias of sexual orientation and behaviour, including in the psychiatric textbooks, and this has ush- ered in—although in this case outside the medical discourse and primarily within the common discursive practices of western socio-cultural understanding—newly recognized perversions (or paraphilias) of sexual identity. this first shift, from per- verse orientation and behaviour towards perverse identity, has thereby generated a second transposition, from perversion being defined as what exceeds or transgresses an established (sexual) norm to its being situated within a certain (sexual) norm, notably that of the stereotypical distribution of gender roles, the standard or ‘nor- mal’ adoption of sexual identity, and the ‘garden variety’ of identity politics, with all the instances of abusive normativity and sexualised power imbalances this norm entails. whereas the masculine man was once the epitome of sexual normality, he and his accoutrements have more and more become the emblems of sexual abnor- mality—perversion or toxicity, depending on the discursive context. without wanting to assay or judge the validity of this dual change in st century sexual identity politics, i think it has left an indelible mark on the lived experience of young men growing up in the radically incongruous thirdspace of ubiquitous hybridisation and pervasive covert surveillance. for sure, the troubles facing con- temporary male youth are not entirely new. before the turn of the last century, the american journalist susan faludi already drew attention to the state of (american) male youth in crisis [ ]. more than twenty years ago, faludi already concluded that the prevailing paradigm of modern masculinity obstructs rather than enables young men in finding an adequate solution to the social contradictions they experi- ence on a daily basis. on the one hand, young boys are still expected to take control and be strong, yet at the same time they realise that the world in which they live no longer values honesty, mutual respect, loyalty and integrity. if anything, faludi’s assessment, which came quite a few years before the rise of islamic terror, mass migration and male toxicity, was deeply premonitory of a social crisis of male sex- ual identity that has continued to aggravate and expand. the disenfranchised of our current mimetic crisis may be angry, and anger may result in a steady (re-)produc- tion of phallic space, yet the unequivocal meanings of predatory power associated with modern masculine sexual identity have no doubt also led to new sources of arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction… disturbance amongst young men, which perhaps more often than not have found their expression in academic underachievement, hate crime and social delinquency [ ]. if masculinity is toxic, there is no reason to believe that its toxicity is not felt by men themselves, or that men are not affected in their own way by how the signi- fiers of male entitlement and privilege are circulating and structuring our contem- porary lifeworld. let this not be an afterthought, but perhaps a starting-point for a detailed consideration of how toxic masculinity also shapes, and not necessarily in a good way, those of us citizens who tend to identify or be identified as male, without therefore attaching much weight to the signifier of masculinity, and who occasion- ally feel they must express a bit of a view. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative com- mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. references . albrecht, t. . subject and object in psychoanalytic criticism: on the interpretative method of freud’s ‘the moses of michelangelo’. textual practice ( ): – . . 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es. accessed may , . . verhaeghe, p. . the collapse of the function of the father and its effects on gender roles. in sexuation, ed. r. salecl. durham, nc-london: duke university press. . wittenberger, g. . das ‘geheime komitee’ sigmund freuds. institutionalisierungs-prozesse in der psychoanalytischen bewegung zwischen und . tübingen: diskord. . woodward, k. . anger and anger: from freud to feminism. in freud and the passions, ed. j. o’neill. university park, pa: penn state university press. . Žižek, s. . the ticklish subject: the absent centre of political ontology. london-new york: verso. . zuboff, s. . the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/ / / /brex-n .html https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/not-by-degrees https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/not-by-degrees 	arresting masculinity: anger, hybridity and the reproduction of phallic space 	abstract 	 introduction 	 a brief anatomy of anger 	 masculinity and phallic space 	 conclusion 	references digitized narratives of sexual violence: making sexual violence felt and known through digital disclosures https://doi.org/ . / new media & society – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/nms digitized narratives of sexual violence: making sexual violence felt and known through digital disclosures kaitlynn mendes university of leicester, uk jessalynn keller university of calgary, canada jessica ringrose university college london, uk abstract in this article, we argue that social media platforms like tumblr and twitter have facilitated an emergence of “digitized narratives” of sexual violence. these narratives are rooted in historical ways in which feminists have discursively articulated sexual violence, yet are shaped by distinctive “platform vernacular” or the conventions, affordances, and restrictions of the platforms in which they appear. drawing on a qualitative content and critical discourse analysis of texts from the tumblr site who needs feminism? and the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, we argue that digital platforms such as tumblr and twitter produce new vernacular practices which shape how “digitized narratives” of sexual violence are not only disclosed and known, but felt and experienced across digital networks. keywords digitized narratives, feminism, memes, platform vernacular, rape, rape culture, sexual violence, tumblr, twitter corresponding author: kaitlynn mendes, university of leicester, – princess road east, leicester, le dr, uk. email: km @le.ac.uk nms . / new media & societymendes et al. research-article article https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/nms mailto:km @le.ac.uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - new media & society ( ) introduction in , students enrolled in the “women in the public sphere” course at duke university designed a class assignment titled who needs feminism? which sought to problematize the negative associations with the word “feminism.” using the popular social networking site tumblr, they encouraged fellow students to post photos of them- selves with signs explaining why feminism continues to be relevant in contemporary society, challenging dominant postfeminist sensibilities found within media cultures suggesting feminism is outdated and no longer needed (gill, ; mcrobbie, ). since the campaign began, there have been over submissions to the tumblr site, and over other educational institutions have launched their own who needs feminism? campaigns and separate websites (seidman, ), demonstrating a widespread desire to problematize narratives that feminism is redundant or passé. two years later in , the #beenrapedneverreported hashtag began to trend on twitter after allegations broke within the canadian news media of sexual violence by prominent radio host jian ghomeshi (see also keller et al., ; mendes et al., ). the hashtag, started by two female canadian journalists, was a public response to those who suggested ghomeshi’s accusers were lying because they had not previously reported their assaults to the police and served to document the myriad of reasons why victims do not report sexual violence. many women (and some men) used the hashtag to share their own reasons for not reporting their assaults, creating an archive of million tweets that document the prevalence of sexual violence. who needs feminism? and #beenrapedneverreported are just two examples of the ways the public increasingly use technology in creative ways to make visible, chal- lenge, and call out sexual violence. drawing from a qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis (cda) of texts, we argue that social media platforms like tumblr and twitter have facilitated an emergence of “digitized narratives” of sexual violence. these narratives draw on the ways in which feminists have discursively artic- ulated sexual violence, extending them into digital spaces that are governed by distinc- tive “platform vernaculars” (gibbs et al., ), or the conventions, affordances, and restrictions of the platforms in which they appear. this article then addresses two pri- mary research questions: how are digitized narratives of sexual violence articulated on tumblr and twitter? and what types of affects are produced through these digital disclosures? platform vernaculars and sexual scripts for several decades, feminist scholars have been interested in the narrative accounts of sexual violence in court cases, media, autobiographical accounts, and interviews (see doherty and anderson, ; gunnarsson, ; karlsson, ; loney-howes, ; o’neil, ; spry, ; wood and rennie, ). according to young and mcguire ( ), the way people discuss sexually violent experiences is important because it shapes how they make sense of their assault. as a result, scholars have attended to the use of language and narrative accounts of violence, paying attention to the ways many vic- tims have been unable to speak about their experiences, or had them invalidated during mendes et al. disclosures (kelly and radford, ). while this work provides important insights into how victims construct experiences of sexual violence and therefore shape what we know about it, the emergence of digital technologies opens new ways of communicating, dis- closing, and narrating previously invisible experiences, emotions, and affects. as part of the increased visibility of feminist activism in recent years, there has come a renewed focus on combatting sexual violence. in particular, digital campaigns have emerged to not only challenge sexual violence, but give victims a voice and provide them alternative forms of justice (see drueke and zobl, ; fileborn, ; loney-howes, ; olson, ; powell, ; salter, ; wånggren, ; wood et al., ). many of these initiatives rely on sharing personal testimonials of violence, and scholars have begun to study the ways disclosures of violence are shared in digital spaces using digital devices and apps (see bivens and hasinoff, ; dodge, ; fileborn, ; loney-howes, , ; mendes et al., ; o’neil, ). bianca fileborn ( ) argues that disclosure of sexual violence must be understood as a “curated” process in which careful decisions are made about whom to disclose, which experiences to share, and how narratives should be shaped. others have identified how digitally curated dis- closures hold the capacity to challenge victim-blaming narratives and female responsibi- lization of violence, making way for new narratives to emerge (loney-howes, ; salter, ). although scholars are increasingly attending to narratives of sexual violence in digital spaces, few have theorized the particular narrative forms that circulate online, nor the technological, cultural, and material factors shaping them. this article aims to address this gap in research by considering how the “platform vernacular” (gibbs et al., ) of tumblr and twitter shape the ways in which sexual violence is discursively produced. platform vernacular refers to the ways each social media platform develops its own “unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics” (gibbs et al., : ), and for the purposes of our study, how narratives of sexual violence are told. stylistic and visual elements also contribute to a platform’s vernacular and are especially important given the visual orientation of platforms like tumblr and instagram. thus, platform vernacular emerges from within social networks, where meaning and affective value are constituted and established through both use and context (warfield, : ). this concept or the variant of “digital vernacular” has been used by a range of scholars studying digital social practices (see cho, ; kanai, ; mendes et al., ; warfield, ). we find it a useful way to consider how “group communication and grammar emerges on social media platforms” to highlight the ways in which digital platforms are simultane- ously governed by social norms, conventions, and practices in addition to technological constraints (warfield, : ). we are particularly interested in how platform vernaculars shape the affective experi- ences of engaging with sexual violence disclosures on tumblr and twitter. in other words, how do vernacular practices not only shape what we know about sexual violence but also how we come to know and feel these experiences? our theoretical framework is informed by theories of “networked affect” (hillis et al., ) which explore how the digital remediates and extends bodily capacities via connectivity, virality, and spread (boyd, ; jenkins et al., ), and particularly how social media platforms enable new forms of affective relationality (clough, ; kuntsman, ; mendes et al., new media & society ( ) ; papacharissi, ; sampson et al., wood et al., ). we consider how discourses (of sexual violence) emerge and are experienced affectively, considering their “affective intensities” (ringrose and renold, ) and variable ‘stickiness’—in other words how they grab, attract, gain traction or not (ahmed, ). we explore these affec- tive aspects of digital connectivity as integral to understanding sexual violence in this contemporary moment. in this article, we specifically consider how new sexual scripts or discourses (simon and gagnon, ) are emerging and developing in online spaces, creating new affective platform vernaculars (mendes et al., ). our article catalogs both digitized “scripts of coercion” (bletzer and koss, ) or the “ways that a woman recognizes (either at the time that it happens or thereafter) that she has experienced an assault that may con- stitute rape” (bletzer and koss, : ), as well as “scripts of consent” in which women “negotiate and set boundaries within sexual relations” (bletzer and koss, : ). as scholars have identified when it comes to narratives of sexual violence, scripts of coercion are shaped by many factors, such as cultural differences between women, time, and place (bletzer and koss, ; ramos lira et al., ). adding to these argu- ments, we contend that scripts of coercion are “curated” (fileborn, ) differently across digital platforms, shaped not only by the cultural, social, and personal (simon and gagnon, ) but also by affordances inherent in the platform architecture and the ver- nacular practices which develop in these online spaces. the concepts of platform vernacular and scripts of coercion are useful because they attend to how architectural and social affordances produce different articulations of the experience of sexual violence. in this sense, we come to know sexual violence differently depending on the platform through which a narrative is mediated. the idea of platform vernacular also negates a technological deterministic argument by highlighting how social practices determine particular uses for platforms, within the limits of platform affordances. for this article, we focus on two platforms: twitter and tumblr. twitter is a popular social networking and microblogging site, which at the time of our study, allowed users to post -character updates or “tweets” to a network. with twitter, there are also vari- ous ways to post messages, depending on the desired outcome. users can attempt to draw attention to certain topics/events but prefacing them with a thematic hashtag (e.g. #beenrapedneverreported). these hashtags are searchable via the twitter website and are said to “trend” when widely used, drawing more attention to the topic. one common vernacular on twitter is to share hyperlinked content to other sites (boyd et al., ). in their analysis of over , tweets, boyd et al. ( ) found that % contained a url. this indicates that twitter is not only used to provide brief “news” updates, but direct people to external sites which they can click through to get further information. this is often necessary given the character limit of the platform, which was only recently increased from to characters. finally, it is worth highlighting how twitter has become a central part of contemporary news media culture, often used by journalists to “break news” provide updates on rapidly evolving stories and interact with audiences, which can be done quickly on the platform. this is important in understanding twitter as a digital tool that often hosts key conversations about current events, a point we will return to later in the article. mendes et al. who needs feminism? is hosted on the tumblr platform and provides information for users such as how the campaign started, a link to submit a story and information for the public to start their own campaign. tumblr is a microblogging site which “curates” diverse content produced by others ranging from pornography, fashion, blog entries, art, selfies poems, and protest. tumblr prioritizes visual images which are aggregated among each tumblr blog and circulate throughout the network via a process of re-blogging (cho, ; fink and miller, ). as alexander cho ( ) has argued, tumblr oper- ates through affect, which “reverb” throughout the network, accruing intensity and movement through re-blogs and likes – an integral part of the tumblr experience. submissions to this site are presented in reverse chronological order, and each submis- sion displays the number of “notes” which record the submission’s circulation on the site, including the number of times it was commented upon, re-blogged, or “liked” (fink and miller, ; renninger, ). a typical who needs feminism? submission has several hundred to several thousand notes, indicating the extent to which submissions forge “sticky” and emotional entangle- ments between contributors and readers (ahmed, ), who share, like and re-blog content. unlike other social media platforms such as facebook, tumblr blogs contain no personal profiles and are often anonymously authored. this is a key platform affordance in that the possibility of anonymity invites engagements, particularly when disclosing sensitive, private, or traumatic experiences. consequently, tumblr has become a particu- larly popular platform with marginalized groups, including people of color, queer com- munities, and those looking for digital spaces where they are “safe” to explore identities and ideas that may be unwelcome elsewhere (cho, ; fink and miller, ; renninger, ; thelandersson, ; warfield, ). this article draws upon a systematic random sample of posts from the who needs feminism? tumblr between march and january . due to the sensitive nature of the topic and the importance of anonymity of contributors, we sought university ethics approval before beginning this project. drawing from other studies of online disclosure of sexual violence, we have removed identifying information to preserve contributors’ ano- nymity (see andalibi et al., ; o’neil, ). to study the #beenrapedneverreported hashtag using a python script, we scraped all tweets published between november and march , the time in which the hashtag was most active. an algorithm was then developed to randomly select tweets for further analysis. altogether, our sample for this article is a total of pieces of digital data that were analyzed using qualitative content and cda. qualitative content analysis is useful for its ability to analyze large amounts of data, presenting it as simple frequencies (bhattacherjee, ; schreier, ). in addition to tabulating manifest content such as author, gender, or use of hashtags, qualitative content analysis records symbolic and latent content such as themes, frames, discourses, and tone (see bhattacherjee, ). despite its benefits, qualitative content analysis is incapable of analyzing systems of representations in text or speech (deacon et al., ), which is why we use it in combination with cda. following the tradition of cda as developed by norman fairclough ( ), teun van dijk ( ), and michelle lazar ( ), which examine the relationship between language, social practice, ideology, gender, and power, we are interested in what experi- ences are (not) being recounted in each text, which details are (not) provided, and what new media & society ( ) impact the presence or absence of these disclosures have on the overall narrative accounts of assault. unlike some work on networked affect (see papacharissi, ), we are not taking a big data approach, but instead have drawn a relatively small sample size to enable a deeper qualitative analysis of texts. as a result, while we are hesitant to make generalized claims from our sample, it nonetheless provides us with some under- standing of emerging trends and practices in relation to the ways narratives of sexual violence materialize and gain affective traction across digital spaces. who needs feminism? visuality, anonymity, and stylized affect in this section, we address the ways in which disclosure of sexual violence is mediated through the vernacular practices common on the tumblr campaign who needs feminism? given that the campaign is ostensibly about a much wider set of themes than sexual violence, we were surprised to see that in the random sample of submissions from march to january , a dominant subject was sexual violence, abuse, and harassment ( %). thus, the campaign serves as a useful case study for our inquiry. in our analysis, we focus on the use of the handmade sign as a strategy that mobilizes the platform vernacular and affordances of tumblr to orient particular affective reactions and ultimately, a sense of collective protest against sexual violence. what is distinctive about the who needs feminism? campaign is the creation of the handmade sign that is photographed and then uploaded to tumblr. the signs function as the medium through which the personal testimonial is shared—often in handwritten or printed form. the use of signs is a pertinent example of the ways digitized narratives of sexual violence differ from conventional offline narratives found in interviews, court cases, or autobiographical accounts. the repetitive use of the handmade sign allows us to read the campaign as a meme, whereby a set of common expectations are established (shifman, ). as part of tumblr’s visual meme culture, one of the main conventions defining this campaign is the use of what amy shield dobson ( ) calls “pain memes” through which contributors’ experiences of sexual violence are narrated through the vis- ceral means of the hand-crafted sign, which makes use of different colors, size of print, bold, italics, and the underlining of key words. following a long tradition of feminist craftivism (see bain, ; clarke, ; kelly, ), who needs feminism? pain memes demonstrate the artful potential of these modalities. the signs are material objects which have been digitally captured and transmitted to convey specific messages in par- ticular ways (rentschler and thrift, ). we explore how the material and stylistic aspects of the signs, the texture, color, and embellishments create new forms of vernacu- lar signage practices, initiating new forms of communicating experiences of sexual vio- lence. we are therefore looking at the discursive, the material, and the affective in these practices of digital posting (mendes et al., ). stylized affect through recounting the second-assault a dominant narrative practice which emerged on who needs feminism? is not just the recounting of the incident itself, but the significant critique of victim blaming, or not mendes et al. figure . who needs feminism? submission. author screenshot. being taken seriously when confiding in, or reporting the assault to others. this “second- assault” is a well-known phenomenon which has been a central part of feminist theoriz- ing on sexual violence (wolburt burgess et al., ), whereby the post-assault experience can be just as traumatic as the assault itself. this is because victims are routinely sub- jected to questioning about their appearance, behavior, lifestyle, or sexual past, as a way of transferring blame to them (benedict, ; bonnes, ; herman, ; meyer, ; worthington, ). for example, as one contributor in figure stated, “i need feminism because my sister was raped and no one took her seriously.” stylistically, this image is typical within the sample and is striking in its use of a com- mon ring-bound note pad, which we may associate with school-aged youth who would likely use this type of stationary in class. this is further accentuated by the careful re- tracing of words using red-colored felt tip pens to emphasize and accentuate key words. in terms of the narrative, although it is not clear to whom the sister reported her rape, the key lesson here was the way she was disbelieved, and thus discouraged from taking her claim forward. although the sign in figure does not indicate the extent to which the sister was slut-shamed or victim-blamed, this was a common narrative in many other submissions, such as with figure , where a young man shares his girlfriend’s experience or reporting an attempted rape to the police. this entry is unique because it is one of the few in which we can see the contributor’s full face. although this was a vernacular practice in early submissions to the project, over time, contributors began to either “hide” behind their sign ( % of total) or photograph only the sign itself ( % of total). a full view of the contributor’s face was visible in only new media & society ( ) submissions within our sample ( % of total), perhaps in response to the backlash and online abuse experienced by many contributors to this project (mendes et al., ), but also as a means of providing a sense of anonymity as contributors shared highly personal and traumatic experiences. although we have blurred his face to protect his anonymity, the young man in figure sports a look of concern and seriousness in the photo. the fact the sign appears to have been ripped out of the notebook, and hastily written, with a mixture of capitalized letters adds to the material implications that his message is both urgent and alarming. the dif- ficulty in reading the handwriting makes the accompanying typed out text below addi- tionally important, as it ensures readers do not miss the message due to messy handwriting or poor photographic quality. the narrative presented here is important for directly chal- lenging the police’s victim-blaming and slut-shaming of his girlfriend who disbelieved her story because of how “she presents herself.” because of hegemonic ideologies enforced by neoliberal frameworks, which condi- tion women to take responsibility for guarding themselves against assault and accepting responsibility if assaulted (see campbell, ; loney-howes, ; moore, ; stringer, ; vera-gray, ), it was not just the police who disbelieved victims, but family members as well. this is evident in figure which describes how a young woman’s family dismissed her experiences of sexual violence at the hands of her brother. another notepad is featured here with densely written, hard-to-read prose in pencil. pencil gives a different impression than pen, as it is erasable, softer, and more tenuous than some of the earlier examples. age is used repeatedly here to show the time figure . who needs feminism? submission. author screenshot. mendes et al. of assault ( ), the time of discovery ( ), and the ongoing implications of her family’s condoning of sexual violence from her brother. the age, innocence, and thus vulnerabil- ity of the participant is highlighted in the text (see also littleton and dodd, ), along with her anger toward her brother and family over his perceived entitlement to her body. what figure has in common with many other submissions is the range of latent and manifest emotions conveyed such as outrage, indignation, guilt, blame, and grief made evident through lexical choices and the stylized nature of the signs. in fact, when looking at the results from the content analysis, the most common latent tone in submissions was one of “anger” ( %), followed next by “resentment” ( %). these emotions were con- veyed via the use of capitalized letters (an affective register to shout through print) as seen in figure but also through the underlining or bolding of words, exclamation marks, and use of vibrant colors to highlight key words. these carefully crafted hand- written signs we argue are not only used to make experiences of sexual assault known, but operate to direct the reader’s attention to particular parts of the narrative as a means of throwing an “affective punch” (ahmed, ) through the screen. figure . who needs feminism? submission. author screenshot. new media & society ( ) we see this again in figure where the contributor shares the ways her rape was de- legitimized by her own mother as a “one-night stand,” supporting the rape myth that any assault in which the attack is not committed by a stranger, and where the victim does not put up a valiant fight, is easily categorized as “just sex” or “sex gone a bit wrong” (see benedict, ; gavey, ; meyer, ; moore, ). written on a flash card typical of many pain memes (see dobson, ), the message takes up the entire space on the article, giving the impression there is perhaps too much to say. like the use of the felt pens in earlier examples, here we see that key messages such as “do the math” are both bolded and written in blue, with other critical information written in red and pink. “do the math” is both an appeal to a rational discourse of statistics around rape from known assailants, and an affective rhetorical strategy used to guide readers toward an “appropriate response” (fileborn, )—in this case belief that her story is true, and anger at the invalidation of her experience by her own mother. in this sense, affect takes on a stylized material form that works to not only attract the reader’s attention but bring about particular affective resonance that would not be generated through a typed note, for example. when considering the vernaculars which develop around the sharing of scripts of coercion on who needs feminism? and those on offline spaces, there are some clear similarities. in both, it is rare to see detailed “incident accounts” (bletzer and koss, ), of specific sexual acts, labeling the experience as “rape,” or even providing figure . who needs feminism? submission. author screenshot. mendes et al. information such as their age at the time of the assault, the location of the assault, or how they attempted to stop it. in fact, a dominant vernacular which developed on this site was not simply the descriptive details of personal experiences of sexual violence, but a com- mon theme to narrate both the residual effects and their attendant affects, specifically a sense of generalized fear of sexual violence in their everyday lives (see also vera-gray, ). this sense of dread and fear is not only part of the developing vernacular and shared literacy of the site, but is in fact a “performative condition of normative feminin- ity” (campbell, : ), where women learn to view themselves as vulnerable, weak, and indefensible. as a result, they are conditioned to engage in safety work—or a range of tools, strategies, actions, and behaviors intended to avoid, mitigate or escape sexual violence (kelly, ; loney-howes, ; vera-gray, ). researchers further argue that fear of sexual violence is in fact almost universal among women, regardless of their background, ethnicity, or other markers of identity (see brownmiller, ; cliff, ; stanko, ; valenti, ; vera-gray, ). by drawing narratively upon this common experience/emotion between women, we argue that contributors were able to forge new mediated connections around why feminism is necessary. this was evident, for example, when participants shared their fear of going out alone at night, even for seemingly harmless activities such as taking out the trash, or as seen below, exercising in public alone: i need feminism and equality between genders because my fiancé is free to do his jogging in public without fearing being assaulted. when i want to go running he comes with me so that no one attacks or violates me. i wish he wasn’t afraid for me. i wish i wasn’t afraid of every man that i cross in public. while of course not all women live in constant fear of sexual violence, the potential of being sexually assaulted indeed causes many women to consider, if not alter routine behaviors and decisions (see also campbell, ; stanko, ; vera-gray, ). as evidenced above, in addition to fear, the participant demonstrates her longing to live in a different, better, and safer world, evident with the repetition of “i wish.” there is also evidence of resentment at the ways she has come to fear “every man that i cross in public.” outrage was also visceral in what was presumably well-meaning advice from others on how to avoid male violence: “i need feminism because i start college in two weeks and have been told to ‘try not to get raped,’ as if being raped would somehow be my fault” (italics original). such submissions are designed to evoke responses like anger, not just about the prevalence of sexual violence, but about the way that women are con- stantly being taught to avoid rape, while men’s behavior remains unchallenged (see also vera-gray, ). the affective tenor created in the submission is one of an “intimate public” (khoja-moolji, ), where contributors appeal to common aspects like fear, contempt or outrage. as lawrence and ringrose ( ) argue, it is the potential harness- ing of these affects, to create solidarity through a collective sense of outrage that is being generated and forms specific vernaculars, or ways of documenting and therefore under- standing sexual violence on this platform (see also ringrose and lawrence, ). it seems then that vernacular practices found in digitized narrative accounts of sexual violence on who needs feminism? create new affective practices, including the creative new media & society ( ) use of hand-written signs, bolded, italicized, and underlined letters, to communicate the force of feeling; vernacular practices such as “hiding” behind their signs have become common practice which convey fear and shame about reporting sexual violence. as we have shown, these include feelings of being victim-blamed, resentful, angry, sad, and mistrustful of the wider rape culture in which they live. these practices we argue, while holding great potential for opening new ways of generating a shared sense of feminist belonging which may foster wider social and ideological change are simultaneously “problematic and limited” (fileborn, : ; salter, ). this is because the “abil- ity to harness the power of social media … is highly contingent upon the skills and social media skill of the victim/survivor.” in other words, these sites do not tell the stories of those survivors who lack the practical skills and/or knowledge of digital media culture to participate in social media campaigns such as who needs feminism? as such, platform vernaculars ultimately render some stories invisible (e.g. older survivors, those with dis- abilities, or the poor) while amplifying others through circulatory practices like re-blogging. while this article has begun the work of documenting many of the dominant “digi- tized narratives” of sexual violence, more can certainly be done to explore issues of access, power, and privilege in relation to the new practices and conventions that develop within specific platform contexts. this is an issue we keep in mind as we explore the very different vernaculars found on the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, which are shaped we argue by the platform’s unique affordances and architecture. #beenrapedneverreported: hashtagging digitalized rape narratives as a narrative device for sharing experiences of sexual violence, hashtags we argue, work in three key ways. first, on a practical organizational level, hashtags allow the user to remain within the character limit while thematically link their tweets to others addressing the same topic. nathan rambukkana ( ) argues that this linking function threads together related conversations across media platforms, making broad connec- tions possible. in this way, like signs and memes discussed above, hashtags work to create a collective account of the systemic and widespread nature of sexual violence. as we have argued elsewhere (mendes et al., ), participating in hashtags such as #beenrapedneverreported can “generate affective relations that are both personally healing, and which can also move participants to engage in initiatives” such as forming sexual assault survivor support groups, or reporting their assault to the police—a form of activism which we recognize is not equally available to all victims, particularly those from communities who have long been stigmatized and persecuted within criminal jus- tice systems (davis, ; palacios, ; powell, ). second, the hashtag itself provides a way for victims to speak about their experience without having to directly say they were raped or assaulted. in other words, hashtags work as a stand in or placeholder for those who may find articulating their script of coer- cion painful or even impossible and constitutes a discursive practice only made possible through the architecture and affordances of platforms that link hashtags. this function cannot be dismissed, as it may be what in fact allows for narratives of assault to be mendes et al. digitally rendered in such high numbers, as we saw with #beenrapedneverreported, or more contemporary hashtags such as #metoo. third, the linking is not only discursive and semiotic but generates public forms of “mediated” affect, jolts that travel through the connected hashtag creating a stream of stories that join together experiences victims felt unable to report but are being documented en mass through the repeated (re)use of the hashtag. this repetition creates new forms of dialogue, connectivity, and awareness, which although may be temporary and ephemeral are nonetheless real and powerful (see loney-howes, ; mendes et al., ). hashtags as a placeholder when studying the scripts of coercion on #beenrapedneverreported, it is noticeable that words such as “rape,” “assault,” “violated,” and “abused” are conspicuous in their absence. instead, readers are often left to “read into” the meaning of these experiences based on the use of the hashtag itself. in this sense, the hashtag is an essential part of the digitized narrative, serving as a placeholder for sexual violence and functioning as an important narrative and connective device. for example, as one woman tweeted, “i was five years old the first time. set me up for years of silence/shame, drug addiction, mental illness. #beenrapedneverreported.” here, the twitter user’s experience is mediated via her use of the #beenrapedneverreported hashtag, which allows the public to interpret what “the first time” means. likewise, another user tweeted, “i asked him to stop. he did not. #beenrapedneverreported.” the hashtag does the painful work in explaining to the audience that what she asked him to stop doing was raping her. although these tweets are on the surface unconnected, when read together, they build a powerful picture of the structural and systemic nature of sexual violence via repetition and accumulation of sim- ilarities in experience afforded through the hashtag and its sheer volume of usage. other tweets contain multiple hashtags, linking #beenrapedneverreported to other conversations happening on the social media platform. in our sample, tweets ( %) included at least one other hashtag, of which around % were not always directly linked to sexual assault. results from the content analysis reveal that popular accompanying hashtags include #rape ( % of total), and #vaw (violence against women) ( % of total). for example, one user included the additional hashtag #sexualassault in her tweet: “his wife told me i ruined his life for telling what happened, instead he ruined mine #been- rapedneverreported #sexualassault.” indeed, the mobilization of the hashtag as a narra- tive device is a strategy that uses the dominant twitter vernacular of the hashtag yet subverts it to speak about often “unspeakable” experiences (penny, , see also fileborn, ; keller et al., ; loney-howes, ). the script of coercion here relies on the hashtag to make sense of the narrative, a unique example of how digitized narratives of sexual assault have been shaped by technological affordances of platform architecture. hyperlinking as narrative extension because of twitter’s platform architecture which has a limited character restriction, it is simply not possible for contributors to provide detailed “incident accounts” (bletzer and new media & society ( ) koss, ) within a single tweet or without “threading” multiple tweets together. instead, it was common for hashtag users to re-direct readers to external links providing a full account of violence experienced, reasons why they didn’t report it, and reflections upon their healing processes (see also karlsson, ; o’neil, ). for example, one woman tweeted a link to a local newspaper feature which detailed her experiences of sexual assault and why she did not report it. rather than using the tweet to try to sum- marize her experiences, she instead writes, “my story. out of the darkness” before including the hyperlink. while tweets need to be short and to the point, this creates new lexicons with qualitatively rich, carefully chosen phrases filled with metaphors, euphe- misms, and implicit meanings. for example, by discussing the ways her story is now “out of the darkness,” this woman indicates the extent to which stories of sexual violence have long been hidden, but through the hashtag have been “outed” and “brought into the light.” using the closeted metaphor so common in challenging injustice for sexual minorities (halberstam, ), this form of “coming out” makes experiences of sexual violence legible. in this way digital platform’s offer the affordance of visibility (boyd, ) disrupting normative rape scripts (see also loney-howes, ). this example also points to the ways in which hyperlinks were used to extend narra- tives beyond a singular tweet and even beyond the twitter platform. as a common ver- nacular practice on twitter, hyperlinking to other digital content is pertinent to consider when thinking about how digitized narratives of sexual violence take form. for the case described above, the hyperlink to the mainstream news offered more words to tell her story, while simultaneously connecting it to experiences not featured on major main- stream platforms. most victims will never have news features written about their assaults so they use connective affordances to link detailed testimonies of similar assaults, statis- tics on sexual violence, or reports documenting institutional prejudices against women in the police and judicial systems. for example, one twitter user in figure repeatedly asks, “why didn’t she go to the police?” with an accompanying link to a new york times story about how the new orleans police force “routinely ignored sex crimes.” receiving over re-tweets and “likes,” extending one’s narrative in this way then can also be understood as a form of affect labor (jarrett, ) which women must do to make their story “credible” and to be believed (loney-howes, ; powell, ; salter, ). as such, this labor highlights how digitized rape narratives remain constrained by historical rape myths that put the onus on the victim to prove they were assaulted (ullman, ) while highlighting the ways victims of sexual violence are chronically disbelieved, particularly those from minority cultures (alcoff, ). conclusion while scholars have long been interested in narrative accounts of rape and sexual vio- lence, we argue that social media platforms such as twitter and tumblr offer new terrains for scholarship. by studying digitized narratives of sexual violence across the tumblr campaign who needs feminism? and the twitter hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, we begin important work documenting unique affective vernacular practices. while some narrative conventions from offline disclosures have traversed to online spaces, this article points to the ways digitized narratives are shaped by the architectures, affordances, mendes et al. and conventions which emerge within and between the digital media platforms tumblr and twitter and highlights the ways some of these conventions are simply not possible within non-digitized spaces. these new digitized narratives not only shape what is dis- closed and known about sexual violence, but what is felt and experienced, as they gener- ate affective charges, for example, through the visceral creation of hand-crafted signs, or “intimate publics” between those who use hashtags to connect their stories of sexual violence. although we argue that tumblr memes and twitter hashtags are creating new means through which sexual violence is known and felt, what possibilities does it hold for pre- venting sexual violence, challenging conventional rape myths or narratives? while it is perhaps too soon to tell what impact the widespread circulation of digitized narratives of sexual violence may have for reducing incidences of violence, when it comes to chal- lenging rape myths and opening new ways of narrating one’s experience, we are cau- tiously optimistic. following on from scholars such as rachel loney-howes ( ), we argue that digital platforms and storytelling conventions such as pain memes have “expanded the scope of for challenging the deeply entrenched myths and assumptions about rape through various modes of representation” ( ). although digital platforms can be spaces where victim-survivors feel supported and believed there is no doubt that many continue to receive, if not abusive messages and comments, then those of provocation or disbelief that perpetuate victim-blaming tropes (see also loney-howes, ). a recent case, where a closed facebook group for survivors of sexual violence was hacked and the members harassed, remind us that digital spaces remain fraught with gendered vio- lence (see matsakis, ). figure . tweet explaining why people do not report their assault. author screenshot. new media & society ( ) finally, although it is beyond the scope of this article to investigate audience responses to digitized narratives of sexual violence in depth, our discussion of re- blogging, sharing, favoriting, retweeting, and liking showed the context-specific affec- tive charges that were generated through various modes of response. for example, within our #beenrapedneverreported sample, the vast majority of tweets ( %) were re-tweeted between one and five times, while only % were favorited times or more. within who needs feminism? only % of our sample received between and notes while the vast majority ( %) received between and . while this is encouraging, we recognize that some of these interactions constitute what loney- howes calls “negative witnessing” (p. ), where their experiences are called into ques- tioned, or they are abused, discredited, and disbelieved (see also alcoff, ). as scholars we have only began to consider and map the affective intensities gener- ated through twitter hashtags and pain memes via the interactions, being mindful of the ways these only tell part of the story. although it is beyond the scope of this article, we know from our qualitative research that participants described deep emotional invest- ments in these digital feminist campaigns as they made careful decisions about if and how to share their own experiences of violence (mendes et al., ). in return, partici- pants spoke of the ways they took comfort and solace in having their experiences shared, listened to, and “liked” (mendes et al., ). loney-howes ( ) calls this “peer-to- peer witnessing” (p. ) which provides an important system of recognition for victims. as she goes on to argue: “the affective work done in these online spaces constitutes important political work through the ways in which witnessing fosters a sense of solidar- ity as well as recognition” (p. ). regardless of whether these digitized narratives of sexual violence lead to tangible policy or legal changes, recent scholarship demonstrates how on a personal level, partici- pating in digital feminist campaigns such as #beenrapedneverreported or who needs feminism? forges powerful affective solidarities (hemmings, ) which were often hugely significant for participants, and were experienced as life changing in the micro- moments of connecting, dialoguing, and finding solidarity with others (loney-howes, ; mendes et al., ; o’neil, ; wood et al., ). for many, disclosing pain- ful personal experiences works as a form of personal healing. indeed, the uptake of digi- tal technologies have provided victims of sexual violence a way “to tell their stories in their own way, in a setting of their choice” (herman, : ), making them feel heard, supported, and giving them some sense of comfort and justice, albeit outside structural legal frameworks (see also fileborn, ; gunnarsson, ; o’neil, ; powell, ; salter, ; wood et al., ). while it is unlikely that everyone who shares their experience of sexual violence considers this to be an activist, or even a feminist act, mak- ing oppression visible has always been a key tenant of feminism (serisier, ). thus, drawing on sara ahmed ( ), we may conceptualize this visibility of sexual violence via pain memes and twitter streams as part of the work of feminist cataloging necessary for showing “that this incident is not isolated but part of a series of events: a series of structures” (p. ). this new visibility made possible through the affective force of digi- tal narratives of sexual violence is critical, we argue in dismantling and reconfiguring these structures of gendered and sexualized power. mendes et al. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: this work was supported by the arts and humanities research council grant ah/l / . notes . the data analyzed in this article are taken from a much larger dataset or over social media texts. when collecting data, we selected tumblr posts and tweets because these were a manageable size given the qualitative nature of the research. . as a research team studying sexual violence, we take issues of safety and anonymity very seriously. we conducted reverse image searches of all images included in this article to ensure they could not be traced back to the contributor. however, to ensure anonymity is preserved, we used blurring technologies where a face was visible and removed the date, username, or other information which could be used to identify the contributor. . we recognize that some women are more likely to experience sexual violence than others as a result of intersectional identities, and that these identities have a profound impact on the ways any claims about this violence is taken forward. here, we simply wish to showcase the way that fear of sexual violence is something which binds all women. see also serisier ( ). . we recognize that not all users come to hashtags such as #beenrapedneverreported through the search function. many likely encountered the hashtag as they scrolled through their twitter feed, the content of which is influenced by the accounts one follows. in such instances, tweets linked to the thematic hashtag may not be interpreted as a collective or political project, but as a one-off experience. however, drawing on the work of feminist scholars, it is important to note the ways the personal testimonies have always “been the basis for feminist politics” (serisier, : ) and that, as the new york radical manifesto states “when or more people suffer the same oppression it is no longer personal but political” (cited in serisier, : ). . these hashtags included places such as #montreal, sayings such as #foodforthought, other social movements such as #blacklivesmatter, or affective/inspirational words such as #courage. orcid id kaitlynn mendes https://orcid.org/ - - - references ahmed s ( ) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. ahmed s ( ) living a feminist life. durham, nc; london: duke university press. alcoff lm ( ) rape and resistance. cambridge: polity press. andalibi n, haimson ol, de choudhury m, et al. 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( ) victim services and sane/sart programs. in: hazlewood r and wolbert burgess a (eds) practical aspects of rape investigations. th ed. boca raton, fl: taylor & francis, pp. – . wood la and rennie h ( ) formulating rape: the discursive construction of victims and vil- lains. discourse & society : – . wood m, rose e and thompson c ( ) viral justice? online justice-seeking, intimate partner violence and affective contagion. theoretical criminology. epub ahead of print january . doi: . / . worthington n ( ) progress and persistent problems: local tv news framing of acquaintance rape on campus. feminist media studies ( ): – . young sl and mcguire kc ( ) talking about sexual violence. women & language ( ): – . author biographies kaitlynn mendes is an associate professor of media and communication at the university of leicester, uk. she is an expert on digital feminist activism and rape culture, and is author or editor of five books including feminism in the news ( ), slutwalk: feminism, activism and media ( ) and digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture (with jessica ringrose and jessalynn keller, ). jessica ringrose is a professor of sociology of gender and education at the ucl institute of education. her research is about transforming sexualized media cultures, and activating gender and sexual equity in secondary schools. her latest books are feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education (edited with katie warfield, shiva zarabadi, ), and digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture (with kaitlynn mendes and jessalynn keller, ). jessalynn keller is an assistant professor in the department of communication, media and film at the university of calgary. her reserach interrogates gender politics and mediated identities within popu- lar digital cultures, particularly in relation to contemporary feminist activism. she is author of girls’ feminist blogging in a postfeminist age ( ), emergent feminisms: challenging a postfeminist media culture (edited with maureen ryan, ), and digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture (with kaitlynn mendes and jessalynn keller, ). . .j.ellc. . english language, literature & culture ; ( ): - http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/j/ellc doi: . /j.ellc. . issn: - (print); issn: - (online) female gender identity in the adaptation of disney live-action film mulan xu qingli * , shi ying foreign languages department, zhanjiang preschool education college, zhanjiang, china email address: * corresponding author to cite this article: xu qingli, shi ying. female gender identity in the adaptation of disney live-action film mulan. english language, literature & culture. vol. , no. , , pp. - . doi: . /j.ellc. . received: august , ; accepted: september , ; published: september , abstract: the disney’s live-action mulan is remade from its animated one whose box office globally grossed million. both movies are based on chinese “the ballad of mulan” that a young woman disguised as a man to join the army about years ago. the mulan movie is adapted to strengthen mulan’s motto “loyal”, “brave” and “true” as a warrior, spill li xiang into chen honghui and master tung, replace mushu with phoenix, and create two female role：mulan’s sister xiu and a witch xianniang for views of new era from the animated film. these changes are analysed from a perspective of female gender identity to conclude that “loyal”, “brave” and “true” motto will push women to be engaged in social fairs and take more social responsibilities, omission of li xiang is helpful for women to break their hidden cinderella complex, phoenix, a female symbol, rather than a dragon, a male, is better to be mulan’s guardian, and xianniang, the villain in the movie, is pessimistic for women to take their place in the world, showing her power as a woman in a negative way. these adaptations reflect more independent gender identity of females. keywords: gender identity, mulan, female . introduction television, radio, newspapers and films have long been recognized as key players in society: helping to define people’s sense of taken-for-granted normality [ ]. mass media such as tv and films are also often identified as an important source of ‘role models’[ ]. disney's status as a producer and distributor of the genre of animated fantasy and children's film often results in audience members placing its products in a safe niche above reproach or interrogation and disney princess series have influences in gender perception of females [ ], which usually refers to society’s concept of how men and women are expected to act and how they should behave [ - ]. in oriental and western tradition, masculine roles are usually associated with strength, aggression, and dominance, while feminine roles are usually associated with passivity, nurturing, and subordination [ ], which is reflected in the early disney movies. according to amy m. davis [ ], since the mid- s, female characters had begun to take on a more central role at disney productions; the usual perception of the disney films from s to s were made up almost solely of not just fairy tale princesses, but specifically blonde-haired, blue-eyed, “all-american”types and female roles and had gone on much fewer sustained adventures and been more framed within domestic settings throughout their films; yet, the heroines from s to s did not sit passively pining for her lover to find and rescue her, and the hero was not an all-conquering warrior or romantic dream-prince. films of this era focused upon adventure and team work. indeed, in the united states of the era, the notion that men and women – and certainly boys and girls – could work together on equal terms was finally entering into mainstream thinking, certainly the portrayal of a girl working equally with a boy would have been seen as both positive to children. however, ideas such as child-care facilities, equal pay for equal work, women working in leadership positions, and the importance of female contributions both to the workplace and american life as a whole did not enter into the social and cultural lexicon, english language, literature & culture ; ( ): - and did not become a secure part of the majority’s accepted value system until the mid- to late- s - when stronger, tougher women had begun to appear, both within disney films and in the larger arena of hollywood cinema and at that time, the animated mulan was made and got global box office of $ million in . the disney mulan movie is based on chinese “the ballard of mulan” [ ] written in the northern and southern dynasties about years ago. a dutiful daughter named hua mulan from a family without a son of age, takes the place of her crippled father, a veteran warrior, when a draft order from the emperor obligates each family to provide one able male to raise an army to defend the kingdom from northern invaders. mulan, a brave and able horsewoman, leaves her village posing as a man and joins the army, having a long journey to be a skillful and valorous soldier, eventually becoming a battle-hardened warrior. after years of service she gains favor with the emperor, and a grant of a wish. so she requests only a horse to return to her family, donning her old clothes and revealing the secret she is a woman to the surprise of her comrades. the version is live-action movie remade from the animated one. the animated mulan is musical and directed by barry cook and tony bancroft, two males, while the live-action mulan is not musical and directed by niki caro, a female, as more women begin to move into such key movie-making roles as producer and director. both movies have the same story, but the new one is adapted in putting weight on warriors’ motto “loyal”, “brave” and “true”, spilling li xiang in the movie into chen honghui and master tung in the mulan, replacing dragon mushu with a phoenix and creating new female roles xiu and xianniang. these changes reflect the development of female gender identity with the time. . analysis of adaptations the disney princess franchise is a powerful force in the lives of young girls. yet not all of disney’s female protagonists are technically princesses or enjoy a princess-like existence. instead, mulan eithor of or made by disney is portrayed as a strong country girl different from the early disney princess and is moved away from previously common elements, like female passivity [ - ]. in spite of winning acclaim for new protagonists that purportedly model feminism, disney does not achieve gender parity in its portrayal of the animated heroine mulan of . disney live-action mulan reportedly carries a more than $ million dollar price tag, which makes it one of the most expensive movies ever made. the mulan has made some changes when remaking from the animated film. some changes are welcomed from female viewers and thought to push the construction of social gender identity of females. . . from xiu to mulan both movies attach importance to mulan’s growth from a country girl to a real warrior who takes responsibility of saving the emperor, the army and the country. but the live-action adds weight to mulan’s ego development. there are three phases of mulan’s growth in the film. at first mulan makes efforts to be a woman like her sister xiu, a newly created role in the live action, who is “quiet”, “demure” and “graceful” and can bring honor to the family, so she puts on make-up and meets matchmaker with her mother. unfortunately, a spider ruins all efforts. then, mulan takes her father’s horse and sword to join the army where she met chen honghui, her future lover. mulan tells honghui that an ideal woman is courageous, smart and has sense of humor. a soldier named yao says “mulan is not describing a woman, she’s describing a man”. so at the second phase, mulan tries to be a “courageous”, “funny” and “smart” woman which is not biologically or socially female, but usually marked as male characteristics. “sense of humor” or “funny” is a westernized rather than chinese virtue. and at the third phase, mulan makes efforts to be a “loyal”, “brave” and “true” woman warrior who can bring honor to her family. she is loyal to her country and brave in the training and battlefield. meanwhile she is struggling that she tells a lie that she is a man. but she drapes her hair as a woman when saving the emperor, the army and the country and finally mulan's father hua zhou speaks of mulan to their ancestors, stating that she is "the great warrior mulan: the loyal, the brave, the true." warriors’ motto “loyal”, “brave” to which mulan manages to fit action originate from confucianism and “true” is not directly mentioned, but it is closely related to virtues such as being honest that confucianism calls people to adhere to. the chinese characters “忠” “勇” “真” for "loyal, brave, and true" appear on mulan's sword on the movie post. loyalty usually refers to be loyal to the country, being brave means to be brave in battlefield or in life and being true is true to oneself and others. they are virtues that confucianism advocates men to obey. as a warrior, often a male warrior, being loyal to their country and fighting bravely for their country will bring honor to their family while being “quiet, demure and graceful” like xiu brings honor to a woman’s family, as mulan’s mother said, “a daughter brings honor through marriage.” “quiet, demure and graceful” are women virtues first mentioned in “woman’s commandments” written by ban zhao ( - d.c.), a female historian and writer. in the new film, hua zhou, mulan’s father, undoubtedly adored mulan very much and was always tolerant of mulan to be who she was. when the magistrate asked the father, “have you no son old enough to fight?” the father answered, “i am blessed with two daughters.” but the father still thought a man in a family brought honor to the family on the battlefield and warned mulan to “learn her place”. mulan’s place or a woman’s place, as hua zhou said, was clearly taking care of her husband and children in the home like xiu, mulan’s sister, hard working in weaving and housework to be a good wife. some may think that the woman’s place, i.e. in the home, is outdated, but actually it is still popular that female’s duty is to xu qingli and shi ying: female gender identity in the adaptation of disney live-action film mulan marry a man, give birth to babies and take care of the whole family. it is still hard for women to cover the journey from xiu to mulan. days ago, yang liping, a successful talented chinese dancer with no children, shared a video of her daily life online and was commented by a young woman, “a woman's biggest failure is that she has no children. the so-called living your own life is deceptive. now you (in your fifties) look like a -year-old woman, but when you are years old, can you still keep your appearance of ? even if you are beautiful and excellent, you can't escape from time. when you are years old, will you get your happiness without children and grandchildren?” even though the female netizen was criticized by many netizens of different genders and ages, the comment still got more than , thumbs-up. therefore, women still need encouraging to be out of their home and take more social responsibilities to the country or the world. in the version, mulan teaches girls what constitutes a happy ending: going home to fulfill domestic duties. the movie does not conclude with her military victory. instead, she returns home to emotionally embrace her father and then presumably secures a spouse. we happily see that mulan accept the position as an female officer in the imperial guard at the ending episode of version. mulan in the live-action movie has better “role model effect” to positively improve women to empower themselves politically and socially, and then correspond with increased numbers of women in senior roles in the labour market and other fields. . . phoenix vs dragon in the mulan, the dragon mushu protects mulan as her guardian and has stayed with her since she left home; in the film, a phoenix replacing the dragon helps mulan whenever she is in trouble, and flies away satisfied when mulan is powerful enough to protect herself even to protect others. the phoenix (or feng huang in chinese) and dragon are chinese mythical animals and in china are often paired together, which symbolizes a wish for a harmonious marriage for new couple. phoenix in china also represents female virtues such as beauty and charm, while dragon represents male feature like power. and because of this, the dresses worn by the ancient emperors in china are often decorated with a picture of dragons and the phoenix was also accorded a similar significance to empresses. phoenix nirvana originated from eastern buddhism, and is also related with western culture “a phoenix from the ashes”, reflecting phoenix’s persistence and strength. at the beginning of the movie, the father also told the daughter, “failure is not fatal, mulan. this is the lesson of the phoenix. what matters is that each day you rise up and continue. the phoenix will watch over you.” actually, phoenix or ‘feng huang’ incorporates the notions of feng, a male bird and huang, a female bird, therefore according to that logic, the phoenix is actually a symbol of the combination between masculinity and femininity, or yin-yang. in the new movie, hua zhou, mulan’s father told her, “...she (the phoenix) is half male and half female...she is both beautiful and strong.” a phoenix is a better choice than a dragon as mulan’s guardian and supporter and contributes to constructing female identity that women may look graceful, but has persistence and power. . . chen honghui vs li xiang in the disney live-action mulan remake, the character of li xiang, who is a captain in the chinese army and mulan’s commanding officer, and ultimately falls in love with her in the disney animated film mulan, is omitted and split into two characters. one is commander tung who serves as her surrogate father and mentor and the other is chen honghui who is mulan’s equal in the squad. the change arouses arguments. the producer of the remake movie gives to collider an explanation that “in the time of the #metoo# movement, having a commanding officer that is also the sexual love interest was very uncomfortable and we didn’t think it was appropriate.” but this explanation does not appease some fans who feel li xiang was removed to avoid depicting his perceived bisexuality. this paper will not discuss the reasons for the omission of li xiang, but the positive instructions to some women who have cinderella complex, which was coined by c. downing in her book of the same name for what she describes as woman’s unconscious desire to be taken care of by others, based primarily on a fear of independence, often coupled with a need to be rescued by an outside force—e.g., a prince [ ]. this is an excellent move because today’s mulan doesn’t need that “prince element” to help mulan see her worth. it is an old story trick to have a prince to rescue a princess out of mess and still popular in a hidden way. i had a survey of female college students. one question is “should husbands earn more than wives?” more than percent young women choose “yes”. it is not a low percentage of women who has hidden cinderella complex. certainly, they do not really have love affairs with or marry a prince, but hope to have a “white horse prince” who earns more, has higher social position or more successful course than themselves, which i call hidden cinderella complex. although education attainment as well as health and survival enjoy much closer to parity ( . % and . % respectively) reported in global gender gap report in , one important area of concern is that of economic participation and opportunity. this is the only dimension where progress has regressed. here, the figures are sobering, with a deteriorating situation forcing gender parity to a lowly . %. the report highlights the primary reasons for this: women have greater representation in roles that are being automated; not enough women are entering professions where wage growth is the most pronounced (most obviously, but not exclusively, technology). however, it is more important to break the hidden cinderella complex that husbands should earn more than wives. if women think men should earn more than women, how can they actively make efforts to narrow the gender parity in earning? therefore, being an independent woman with no cinderella complex, it is better for mulan to work and grow with her comrade-in-arms chen honghui rather than her superior li xiang. english language, literature & culture ; ( ): - . . xianniang vs mulan xianniang is a witch, a newly created role, who possesses special powers in the live-action movie. as the story unfolds, xianniang learns that she has more in common with her young adversary mulan than she realizes. in a male world, they find “the more power i showed, the more i was crushed.” woman’s power can’t be admitted in a male world. xianniang’s own people have shunned her. as white snow princess has an evil stepmother in other disney’s princess movies, xianniang is also a villain in the mulan movie. unlike stepmothers in disney’s princess movies, xianniang makes use of her special powers not to be the most beautiful or powerful woman in the world, but to take her place so that she can be accepted as a powerful woman. compared to mulan, xianniang is pessimistic, she says, “they (men) will not listen to you! it will always be a man’s army”. mulan is more optimistic and determined and finally succeeds to achieve her place as a woman in the army. . conclusion when the woman director niki caro was interviewed why she chose liu yifei to act as mulan, she said, “she kicks ass with the sword and she’s incredibly beautiful, but she’s also really handsome. as a guy, she fits in.” mulan has the features of a woman and a man, which is strengthened in the live-action mulan movie. the movie focuses on the growth of mulan from a country girl in a male world to a loyal, brave and true warrior which often characterizes a man. a phoenix rather than a dragon is her guardian and flies away when mulan grows powful enough to protect herself. chen honghui, her comrade-in- arms, is her lover and they work and develop together rather than a superior in professional field helps her. xianniang, a powerful witch, is tragic when she wants to take her place in the world in a negative way. all these changes in the live-action mulan movie contributes to building a more independent female identity in the modern world and new mulan makes the right way. acknowledgements this research was supported by the guangdong youth innovative talents project “a study on the english translation of chinese children’s literature in the new century from the perspective of systematic-functional linguistics” ( gwqncx ); zhanjiang preschool education college project “a comparative study on english and chinese children’s picture books from the perspective of cognitive linguistics ”(zjyzzd ) references [ ] eldridge, j., kitzinger, j. and williams, k. ( ) the mass media and power in modern britain. oxford: oxford university press. [ ] b. tammy and j. kitzinger. ( ) promoting women in the media: the role of set organisations and their science media communicators, research report series for ukrc no. . bradford: uk resource centre for women in science, engineering and technology. [ ] brocklebank, l. disney's "mulan"—the "true" deconstructed heroine? marvels & tales, vol. , no. ( ), pp. - . wayne state university press. [ ] fao, rome (italy). women, population div. eng ( ). agricultural censuses and gender considerations - concept and methodology. rome, italy: food and agricultural organization of the united nations. available online. [ ] little, w., mcgivern, r., kerins, n. ( ). introduction to sociology - nd canadian edition. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology ndedition/chapt er/chapter- -gender-sex-and-sexuality/ [ ] prentice, d. a. and e. carranza ( ). what women and men should be, shouldn’t be, are allowed to be, and don’t have to be, the contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. psychology of women quarterly, volume , number , december , pp. - ( ). wiley-blackwell (publisher). [ ] davis, a. m. ( ) good girls and wicked witches: women in disney’s feature animation. john libbey publishing. [ ] the flowering plum and the palace lady: interpretations of chinese poetry (the ballard of mulan by han h. frankel, yale university press, . https://kevinjamesng.com/ / / /finding-mulan-the-balla rd-of-mulan/ [ ] cheu, j. (ed) ( ) diversity in disney films: critical essays on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability. [ ] dunders, l., & streiff, m. ( ). reel royal diversity? the glass ceiling in disney’s mulan and princess and the frog. societies , , ; doi: . /soc www.mdpi.com/journal/societi [ ] cook, j., & hasmath, r. ( ). the discursive construction and performance of gendered identity on social media. current sociology , vol. ( ) – sagepub.co.uk/journals permissions.nav. [ ] dowling, c. ( ). the cinderella complex: women's hidden fear of independence/. microsoft word - . dawson_introduction.docx introduction ashley dawson the graduate center, city university of new york hen donald trump unveiled his america first energy plan while on the campaign trail back in , he summoned coal miners to stand at his side. flanked by these brawny emissaries from a bygone age of american industrial might, trump announced his plan to “end the war on coal” and promised to use the resulting revenues to rebuild the nation's roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure (lakely ). the miners may have helped legitimate trump's rollback of obama-era efforts to fight climate change, but they functioned above all as symbols of an american working class betrayed and abandoned during more than four decades of bipartisan support for neoliberal globalization (davenport and rubin ). when trump stood surrounded by these men and proclaimed that “we will unleash the full power of american energy, ending the job killing restrictions on shale, oil, natural gas and clean, beautiful coal,” he seemed to promise to elevate not simply coal country but all of the country’s willfully forgotten workers. but trump’s promises to the failing coal industry have proven to be hollow. opening federal lands to coal mining has not brought jobs back to economically depressed communities in coal country, where mechanization of the industry began to destroy jobs as long ago as the s (climate nexus ). the real reason for the coal industry’s decline, however, is that power plants have been abandoning coal for natural gas as the price of gas has plummeted following the fracking revolution, a bonanza that began under the obama administration (fears ). over the last seven years, over half of the coal-fired power plants in the us have either shut down or announced plans to retire, and natural gas is now the biggest source of the nation’s electricity. it should be no surprise that trump’s promises to revive coal have failed, since they are incoherent: his american first energy w | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post plan promises support for natural gas as well as coal, despite the fact that the former is the main reason for the death of the latter. trump's unbridled support for fossil fuels has, however, helped the us achieve and indeed surpass the goal of “energy independence” that presidents since richard nixon have promised but failed to achieve. the explosive expansion of fossil fuel production under trump has turned the us into “saudi america,” generating what trump and energy- industry minions in his administration celebrate as “energy dominance.” trump has successfully fomented a new oil bloc – consisting of the us, russia and saudi arabia – which has effectively replaced opec as the dominant global energy superpower. notwithstanding his populist rhetoric about saving the american working class, trump's hyper-nationalism actually serves the interests of a corrupt ruling oligarchy. as is the case in the other countries with which the us now finds itself in a baleful triumvirate, trump's hyper-nationalism is a very thin fig-leaf covering the monstrous appetites of a self- interested, globe-trotting elite. hyper-nationalism might thus be said to be the current mode of post-nationalism; the former should be seen not so much as an antithesis of the latter as the means of securing hegemony for a parasitic elite under contemporary conditions of crisis-ridden capitalism. that is, if trump – and counterparts of his in nations such as hungary, the philippines, and brazil – have come to power by sensing and articulating popular rage at the manifest failures of a neoliberal capitalist order that has been globally hegemonic for nearly three decades, they do not offer any significant solutions to the resulting crisis but rather seek to exploit it for their own narrow interests. in the process, they pile up the contradictions of the system ever higher. we have been here before. at the outset of the current era of conservative counterrevolution in the late s, stuart hall and his colleagues at the centre for contemporary cultural studies in britain analyzed the onset of what they called popular authoritarianism in response to the crisis of the postwar keynesian capitalist order (hall et al. ). on the eve of margaret thatcher's electoral victory, hall and his colleagues anatomized the rise of what they termed a “moral panic” over mugging in britain. according to the police, the courts, and the media, the culprits for this crime wave were ashley dawson | britain's black and asian british population, who at the time constituted less than percent of the national population. hall and his comrades showed that the mugging scare was in fact generated not so much by a real rise in crime but rather, by growing anxiety about eroding social consensus as the postwar keynesian economic order frayed. the crisis of this model of accumulation and the social quietus it helped secure manifested itself most clearly, hall and his colleagues argued, in fears among the british police and judiciary about the transatlantic spread of “american mugging” and other social crises such as unrest in urban ghettos, which in turn led to targeting of black and asian communities by these organs of state power, which then led to heightened statistics about crime, in a ramifying feedback loop. media coverage of the purported “crime wave” of the era helped generate a sense of an implied dominant, consensual, and homogenous national body under threat, one said to be characterized above all by respect for law and order. the result was the consolidation of an authoritarian popular consensus in which the majority of the british public consented to the erosion of their collective rights in the name of cracking down on social scapegoats – the country's racialized populations – who were blamed for the economic downturn and social disorganization that generated public anxiety in the first place (hall et al. , ). this racist moral panic culminated in the thatcher regime's nationality act, which intended to terminate the rights of subjects born in the british colonies to citizenship. donald trump's public persona was crafted during this era of capitalist crisis, racist moral panic, and conservative counterrevolution. his public pronouncements continue to reflect this genealogy of racist authoritarian populism. indeed, his campaign for president was characterized by a paroxysm of authoritarian populist rhetoric that sought to suture the sort of scapegoating tactics that hall anatomized so effectively to mendacious promises to make the white working-class whole. as was true of thatcherism, trump's policies have only inflamed the gaping social wounds that they promised to heal. although it should be noted that many trump voters were actually quite well-heeled, and it is therefore a fallacy for a more extended discussion of how this politics of racial scapegoating played out in britain, see my book mongrel nation ( ). | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post to blame the working class for his victory, trump's rhetoric nonetheless resonated with significant numbers of people in the us precisely because the material conditions of the working and middle classes have deteriorated significantly since the crisis of the s. since then, elites have overseen the creation of a new international division of labor that has shipped much – if not all – industrial production abroad. in the us, a bipartisan consensus among the established political parties in favor of “globalization” has meant little opposition to these trends, no matter who is in office. in tandem, as economists such as thomas piketty have documented, economic and social inequality have ballooned grotesquely ( ). elites have dealt with the gargantuan fortunes they have accumulated thanks to this counterrevolution by investing in the stock market and in real estate, leading to forms of financialization and galloping gentrification that have added to the deterioration of the life conditions of the majority. elites have dealt particularly harshly with traditionally excluded portions of the american population through the establishment of carceral gulags and militarized policing. the primary salve to this parlous situation has not been any creative new economic and ideological dispensation, but rather fresh rounds of authoritarian populism yoked to the inclusion of ever-greater segments of the american population in credit-fueled asset bubbles. the extension of housing mortgages to african americans, who had previously been denied access to this – the most significant form of government subvention to the us middle class – is the most telling example. but in this creditocracy came crashing down (ross ). we have lived since then in a state of perpetual unacknowledged crisis, one of secular economic stagnation and the increasingly patent ideological bankruptcy of neoliberalism. hyper-nationalism is the result of these worsening contradictions: liberal elites who have embraced neoliberal governance that benefits the % are everywhere being displaced by a strident authoritarian populism, whether in the form of the election of donald trump, the brexit vote in the uk, or in the slide towards explicit fascism evident in the rise of figures like jair bolsonaro in brazil and matteo salvini in italy, and parties like the front nationale in france and alternativ für deutschland in germany. ashley dawson | given the bankruptcy of most “mainstream” thinking about this crisis, it is not clear what the exit from the present cul-de-sac will be, but there is one overarching factor that suggests that another round of savage dispossession will not solve the increasingly intractable contradictions of the global capitalist system: the climate emergency. the ultimate bankruptcy of an economic system predicated on ceaseless expansion on a finite planetary natural resource base is becoming increasingly clear to masses of people, not least because the climate emergency is generating “natural” disasters and slow-onset tragedies that affect increasing numbers of people, including those in the wealthy nations. in this regard, the destructive impact of trumpian oligarchy is epic. under trump regulatory agencies charged with protecting the environment and public health have been turned into subsidiaries of big oil, the epa has dismantled the obama clean power plan and eliminated rules regulating methane emissions and coal ash waste, congress has opened up drilling in the arctic national wildlife preserve, and the interior department has rescinded rules designed to make offshore drilling safer after the deepwater horizon tragedy – to name but a few of the elements of the trump administration's full-throttle attack on the environment. in the process, the trump regime has overseen a significant expansion of carbon emissions, thereby helping to condemn the planet to catastrophic climate change (juhasz ). we are confronted with nothing short of planetary ecocide, although, as the movement of climate justice constantly reminds us, the impact of the climate emergency will be borne first and foremost by the people of the global south and by dispossessed peoples in the wealthy nations. in other words, those who are least responsible for carbon emissions will bear the heaviest brunt of the climate emergency. fortunately, there are countervailing tendencies, heroic activists and movements around the world who are fighting against the right-wing surge and planetary ecocide. while it might be easy to conclude that the upsurge of hope that accompanied the arab spring, the occupy movement, and the rise of radical parties like syriza in greece after was misplaced given the rise of the far right, progressive struggles against the contradictions of the neoliberal order have in fact intensified over the last decade. movements in the us such as black lives matter, the struggle of the standing rock sioux | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post and their allies against the dakota access pipeline, the women's march and #metoo movement, and movements against islamophobia and for immigrant rights have proliferated despite the heavy repression meted out to them under both the obama and trump administrations. although there have been tensions within and between these movements, they are nonetheless striking for their solidarity. indeed, it is in these movements that truly radical forms of transnational affiliation are gestating. the rise of global indigenous solidarity that was evident in the mobilization at standing rock is an obvious example. another clear example of this transnational ethic is the enduring solidarity between black lives matter activists and palestinians. these movements are definitively not post-national, at least not in the sense of the term that enjoyed prominence in discussions of globalization in the s and early s – including among radicals such as antonio negri and michael hardt in empire ( ). in the case of indigenous peoples, the insistence on national sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism and the repeated abrogation of treaties by countries like the us and canada is a constant. but the determination to engage with and remake existing structures of national governance is equally clear among other contemporary radical movements. take the movement for a green new deal. this notion has been in circulation in the us and europe at least since the onset of the great recession in , but it has recently reignited as a result of the efforts of newly elected us congressperson alexandria ocasio-cortez. working with the sunrise movement, ocasio-cortez has insisted that the democratic leadership in the house of representatives constitute a committee to develop a plan for rapid and sweeping climate action. as its name suggests, this plan would entail a massive program of investments in clean energy jobs and infrastructure that would transform not just the energy sector but the entire us economy, making it far more egalitarian and just. the proposal for a green new deal has caught fire in the us because of its sweeping ambitions to remake a country whose people have been devastated by decades of neoliberal austerity, who are angry with the political status quo, and who are hungry for climate action plans that constitute genuine responses to the unfolding climate emergency. this desire for transformation is, in other words, the same one that donald trump tapped, although it ashley dawson | is of course intent on countering the odious bigotry embedded in trump's “make america great again” rhetoric. like the depression-era programs for which it is named, the green new deal would remake the american economy, but would also allow the us to export cutting edge renewable energy technologies in order to ensure a global just transition. the green new deal, in other words, aims to be a genuine program of national uplift that would also be part of a progressive internationalism aimed at averting planetary ecocide. jam it! debuts and must inevitably be shaped by this context of political extremes and radical movements of various stripes in the us and in italy and other european nations. while american studies in italy has, according to a commentator such as maurizio vaudagna, largely retreated behind the walls of the academy, this is decisively not the case across the atlantic (vaudagna , ). the last decade or so in the us has seen not just the politically inspired transnational turn in american studies but also the public support of the american studies association for the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement. the asa's courageous public stance in a country where public statements challenging israel's policies towards palestinians have long been anathema is mirrored and augmented by recent scholarly work in american studies scholarship on settler colonialism, decolonization, critical prison studies, queer studies, and similar topics. these trends have only intensified during the trump years. the politicization of american studies in the us has also been propelled by the job market, which, as in italy, is terrible. in the us, it is clear that the lack of openings for younger scholars is in significant part a result of political decisions: on the part of state legislatures to cut back support for public education, and on the part of university presidents to hire cadres of handsomely paid administrators and ill- paid adjuncts rather than tenure-track professors. such transformations of the american university are animated by decades of right-wing attacks on “identity politics” and the interdisciplinary programs (american studies, women's studies, ethnic studies) that recent issues of american quarterly offer ample testimony to the radical bent of contemporary american studies in the us. | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post social movements have managed to establish within the us academy. critical university studies has therefore also become an important branch of us studies. jam it! will no doubt bring a lively awareness of this terrain of struggle to american studies in italy. it promises to offer younger italian scholars of american studies an important venue for publication and intervention, a key intervention given the relative sclerosis of the field that the dismal job market in italy has precipitated. it is not too much to hope that the journal will also play a role in catalyzing and solidifying new circuits of progressive transnational solidarity, both within academia and in broader public life. after all, we know that despite their bellicose nationalist rhetoric, leaders of the extreme right like steve bannon are organizing transnationally. the malignant presence of fascist organs like breitbart in the us and multiple european countries demonstrates this clearly. the task of all those opposed to the fascist creep must be to develop new stories of radical political and social possibility, and to learn from and support one another through new bonds of solidarity. i very much hope that jam it! will play an important role in this great struggle against the contemporary onslaught of barbarism. bibliography climate nexus. . “what’s driving the decline of coal in the united states.” https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving-the-decline-of-coal-in-the- united-states/ davenport, coral and alissa j. rubin. . “trump signs executive order unwinding obama climate policies” in new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /climate/trump-executive-order-climate- change.html dawson, ashley. . mongrel nation: diasporic culture and the making of postcolonial britain. ann arbor: university of michigan press. on the history of these attacks, see lisa duggan, the twilight of equality? neoliberalism,cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (beacon press, ). see, for example, roderick a. ferguson's the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference (university of minnesota press, ). ashley dawson | duggan, lisa. . the twilight of equality? neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. boston: beacon press. fears, darryl. . “trump promised to bring back coal jobs. that promise ‘will not be kept,’ experts say” in the washington post. ferguson, roderick a. . the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hall, stuart et al. . policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order. london: macmillan. juhasz, antonia. . “trump's pursuit of “american energy dominance” threatens the entire planet” in washington post. lakely, jim. . “an america first energy plan” in the heartland institute. https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/an-america-first-energy- plan negri, antonio and michael hardt. . empire. cambridge: harvard university press. piketty, thomas. . capital in the twenty-first century. cambridge: belknap press. ross, andrew. . creditocracy, and the case for debt refusal. new york: o/r press. vaudagna, maurizio. . “american studies in italy: historic legacies, public contexts, and scholarly trends”. storia della storiografia : - . ashley dawson is professor of english at the graduate center/cuny and the college of staten island. he is the author of two recent books on topics relating to the environmental humanities, extreme cities: the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change (verso, ), and extinction: a radical history (o/r, ), as well as six previous books and essay collections on topics related to anti-racism, global social justice, and anti- imperialism. he is a long-time member of the social text collective and the founder of the cuny climate action lab. science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ social media for social change in science samantha z. yammine, christine liu, paige b. jarreau and imogen r. coe doi: . /science.aat ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related 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( ). unruly women and carnivalesque countercontrol: offensive humor in mediated social protest. journal of communication inquiry, http://dx.doi.org/ . / _____________________________________________________________ this item is brought to you by swansea university. any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence. copies of full text items may be used or reproduced in any format or medium, without prior permission for personal research or study, educational or non-commercial purposes only. the copyright for any work remains with the original author unless otherwise specified. the full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder. permission for multiple reproductions should be obtained from the original author. authors are personally responsible for adhering to copyright and publisher restrictions when uploading content to the repository. http://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/ris-support/ http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/record/cronfa http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/ris-support/ unruly women and carnivalesque countercontrol: offensive humor in mediated social protest anne graefer, allaina kilby & inger-lise kalviknes bore abstract at the women’s march in january , many protest posters featured offensive jokes at the expense of trump’s body and behavior. such posters were shared widely online, much to the amusement of the movement’s supporters. through a close analysis of posts on instagram and twitter, we explore the role of “vulgar” and “offensive” humor in mediated social protest. by highlighting its radical and conservative tendencies, we demonstrate how we can understand these practices of offensive humor as a contemporary expression of “the carnivalesque” that is complexly intertwined with social change. keywords offensive humor, social protest, women’s march, digital culture, carnivalesque introduction the women’s march in january was a worldwide protest to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, including women’s rights, immigration reform, health-care reform, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights. most of the rallies were aimed at donald trump, largely due to statements he had made and positions that he had taken which were regarded as racist, anti-women, or otherwise offensive. to vent this anger, many protest posters featured offensive jokes at the expense of trump’s body, mocking his “comb over” hairstyle, his small hands, his orange taint, and so on. such posters were often spotted at protests and shared widely online, much to the amusement of the movement’s supporters. while some people suggest that such charged political online humor can mobilize people and serve as “a pre-political gateway to future civic engagement” (i. reilly & boler, , p. ), there is also concern that it remains inefficient or even antithetical to meaningful sociopolitical change (thorogood, ). thus, in the context of social media, offensive political humor advances the so-called echo chambers where people only speak to like-minded individuals (bore, graefer, & kilby, ). others argue that routine online searches for pleasure and entertainment “entrap[s] us within the circuits of neoliberal communicative capitalism—a process that continuously replaces political action with political feeling, forever turning activity into passivity” (pedwell , p. ). by drawing on the literature that explores and adapts bakhtin’s ( ) concept of the carnivalesque (e.g., rowe, ; stallybrass & white, ), this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of offensive political humor as a flexible affective resource that is complexly intertwined with social change (pedwell, ). based on our analysis of social media posts from instagram and twitter, we argue that the online circulation of humorous (yet offensive) protest posters creates forms of “polysemic undertow” (waisanen & becker, , p. ) that both contest and confirm normative assumptions about white masculinity and the political public sphere. for this reason, the meanings of these protest posters are not so coherent as to reflect either transgression or backlash politics exclusively. rather, the contradictory nature of offensive humor holds these circulating online images in tension, thereby enabling what reilly and boler ( ) call “prepolitization”—a novel form of civic participation that can mobilize citizens who would not otherwise explicitly participate in civic life, thereby creating new political sensibilities and desires. we argue that the women’s march provides unique insight into how offensive humor can function as a mobilizing force, without glossing over its limitations in the realm of civic engagement. offending those in power does not replace rational political debate. nonetheless, it can be an effective tool for drawing attention to situations of injustice, for binding people together against formal power structures of authority, and for carving out a space for empowering feelings of countercontrol, which are necessary ingredients for social and political change (day, ; mouffe, ). in this sense, this article contributes to the work of contemporary scholars of social movements and media who rethink traditional understandings of politics and participatory democracy. literature review: offense, online humor, and mediated protest the cheerful vulgarity of the powerless is used as a weapon against the pretence and hypocrisy of the powerful. (stamm, , p, ) giving and taking offense on social networking sites is a contested topic. while some celebrate the interactive architecture of social media as a democratizing and diversifying force, others warn that these seemingly antihierarchical affordances invite offensive behavior, such as cyberbullying or the production and circulation of offensive material that more traditional media outlets would have censored or regulated. thus, social media and other user content hosting companies are increasingly under the ethical and legal responsibility to make their network a “positive” and “safe” space where offense is avoided. offense, however, is an affectively charged, slippery subject that escapes clear definitions. although offensive material is, in principle, distinguished from that which is illegal (obscenity, child abuse images, incitement to racial hatred, etc.), it remains difficult to define the boundaries in a robust and consensual fashion. generally, media content is judged to be offensive when it is too graphic or explicit in style and content (attwood, campbell, & hunter, ). intrusive images of suffering, or racist, classist, or sexist depictions that contribute to stereotyping, or bias and inaccuracy in the media are often reported as offending audiences (livingstone & hargrave, ). in public discussions, “offensive” media content is often equated with “harmful” content. this equation is based on simplistic theories of media effects that conceive offense as a monolithic “bad” thing that can be pinned to certain media representations and eliminated through censorship. such understandings fail to see the contextual, relational nature of offense (offensive to whom? in what situation?) as well as the emotional messiness of offense. offense is far from a monolithic, clear-cut emotion but contains a wide range of contradictory feelings and emotions, such as pain, anger and frustration, alongside joy and titillation (das & graefer, ). furthermore, these approaches overlook the potential for the so-called negative emotions to push us into new critical directions, as it has long been theorized by feminist scholars such as audre lorde ( ), sara ahmed ( ), and sianne ngai ( ). taking offense and “getting angry” is here often conceived as an affective mobilizing force for social and political transformation. offensive joking, in particular, has been theorized as offering temporary relief from oppressive social norms and conventions (freud, ). pickering and littlewood ( ) argue that what remains crucial in this context is whether the humor kicks socially upwards or downwards; whether comic aggression is directed “at those who are in positions of power and authority, or at those who are relatively powerless and subordinated” (p. ). such an understanding implies that offense is not in and of itself wrong and that, depending on its direction, it can have a positive or negative impact. the affirmative and liberating possibilities of grotesque, offensive humorous transgressions are often associated with “the carnivalesque”: a general mood of liberation, mocking of hierarchies, and temporary suspension of rules (bakhtin, ). for mikhail bakhtin ( ), the popular tradition of carnival has the potential to suspend social hierarchies through mostly bodily and bawdy humor, which finds expression in the celebration of bodily grotesqueness and excessiveness, fooling around, and profanities. these markers of indecorum are strictly policed during “normal” times, but during carnival, they can be animated and enable comic reversals. for instance, a jester might be crowned in place of a king, and, as a result, the authoritative voice of the dominant discourse momentarily loses its privilege. bakhtinian carnival theory has been criticized for its neglect of carnival violence against women and jews, its failure to consider social relations of gender, and its failure to deal with the consistence of dominant culture (e.g., russo, ). we nevertheless see bakhtin’s concept as a valuable starting point and draw on the productive ways in which it has been extended through the work of stallybrass and white ( ) and rowe ( ). first, stallybrass and white ( ) argue that the carnivalesque should be situated within a wider pattern of transgression, in order to “move beyond bakhtin’s problematic folkloric approach to a political anthropology of binary extremism in class society” (p. ). they maintain that this broader focus on “transgressive symbolic domains” enables us not only to examine cultural hierarchies and binary social structures that underlie the carnival but also to “operate far beyond the strict confines of popular festivities.” second, kathleen rowe ( , ) builds on mary russo’s ( ) work on the female grotesque to adapt bakhtin’s concept for thinking about female unruliness. as rowe ( ) argues, the transgressive figure of the “unruly woman” can help “sanction political disobedience” but is also associated with dirt and pollution (p. ). she threatens “the conceptual categories which organize our lives,” and this liminality evokes intense, contradictory feelings: “her ambivalence, which is the source of her oppositional power, is usually contained within the licence accorded to the comic and the carnivalesque. but not always.” our study, then, draws on these two key extensions of bakhtin’s work to examine how transgression spills over the confines of the temporary, local contexts of the women’s march through the online circulation of offensive protest humor. here, the carnivalesque functions as a malleable resource that can provide spaces for disruption and rebellion, without glossing over cultural differences. however, while some scholars in critical humor studies have argued that offensive humor can operate as a powerful social corrective as well as a strategic and effective commentator on political issues (bivens & cole, ; thorogood, ), others highlight that its uniting-and-dividing function draws a sharp boundary between those who laugh and those who are not “in on the joke” (kuipers, ; lockyer & pickering, ). from such a perspective, bawdy political humor that predominantly works by deriding and offending those in power is merely: further convincing those who agree with it while alienating those who don’t agree. thus, the satirical mission to “make laugh, not war” only serves to polemicise the gap between those who agree and disagree with its political message, suggesting its transformative worth is limited. (thorogood, , p. ) this so-called echo chamber phenomenon is often discussed in the context of social media. critics argue that, rather than enabling debate and deliberative compromise essential for creating political change, our social media practices of “posting,” “liking” and “sharing,” along with algorithms, generate filter bubbles and echo chambers with restrictive partisan sentiments, where only like- minded people speak to each other (bore et al., ; jamieson & capella, ; pariser, ). nevertheless, bivens and cole ( , p. ) maintain that “the prevalence of social media use, like instagram, facebook, and twitter, provides a method through which individuals can push back against the legislative structures in the united states.” they illustrate in their work on “grotesque protest” that social media provides individuals with opportunities to resist attempts to control bodies and to reinsert individuals’ voices in political discourse that is aimed to exclude those bodies (enli and skogerbø, ). in a similar vein, tufekci and wilson ( ) found that social media use greatly increased the odds of being involved in a protest, and that it “represent[s] crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology” (segerberg & bennett, , p. ). thus, although commonly understood as like minds speaking to like minds, social media can also be seen to diversify protest networks and encourage debate. methodology this article builds on our previous study (bore et al., ), which examined the social media circulation of images from the women’s march. one of the key themes we identified was the prevalence of images featuring placards that mocked trump’s body. we want to explore this tendency further within the context of the women’s march, to consider how offensive humor might function as an affective protest strategy. we collected our sample by using the #womensmarch and #womensmarchnyc hashtags to search for public posts of images that were shared on instagram and twitter between january and , . we chose these two platforms because they are associated with different affordances and cultures. twitter is reportedly used by % of the u.s. adults (smith & anderson, ), and, although it facilitates the sharing of imagery, it is primarily associated with text content (sulleyman, ) and has often been used for political communication and activism (enli & skogerbø, ). instagram is reportedly used by % of the u.s. adults (smith & anderson, ). this platform foregrounds imagery and is often considered a feminized online space that is preoccupied with celebrity, beauty, and style (seligson, ). we are interested in images of protest signs as a form of visual and affective political communication, and about how protesters and social media users can grab our attention and encourage circulation through the use of offensive humor and spectacle. our data collection followed a three-step process. on the day of the march, we followed the #womensmarch and #womensmarchnyc hashtags on twitter and instagram and observed recurring images of individuals and groups of protesters holding protest signs, many of which were designed to offend donald trump through bawdy and bodily humor. this trend confirmed that offensive humor was once again a prevalent protest strategy. on january , we then used the platform tools to collect the “top” posts from each of the two platforms for thematic analysis. we identified three recurring themes: the ridicule of trump’s body, the association of trump with excrement, and name-calling and violence targeting trump. finally, we selected one illustrative post from each of these three themes for close analysis. we include screengrabs of the images here but have removed social media usernames and profile pictures. the three-case study images were all widely shared on social media. this approach facilitates reflection on how the reiteration and circulation of images “invite polysemic undertow” (waisanen & becker, , p. ) that can unsettle trump’s intended personae as serious public official and thereby animate political engagement and social change. having outlined our theoretical framework and our methodological approach, we will now move on to our three-part analysis. we begin by exploring the tendency to mock trump’s skin color. orange skin, white masculinity, and carnivalesque countercontrol trump’s body is often the target of ridicule. his “orange” skin tone has inspired large numbers of internet memes where the president is mocked as “agent orange” or “cheeto trump.” equally popular targets are his supposedly “tiny” hands. merchandise includes t-shirts that read “keep your tiny hands off my rights” and coffee cups with extra small handles, just two of the many physical and digital artifacts through which trump’s opponents publicly ridicule his masculinity. here, we focus on the recurring degradation of trump as failed white masculinity and use bakhtin’s ( ) concept of the carnivalesque to consider the ambiguous workings of this offensive humor in political protest. the above poster draws attention to the deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca) act that the trump administration has tried to rescind since september . daca, an obama-era protection scheme, allows those who entered the united states illegally as children to receive a renewable, - year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit. the scheme is now closed to new entrants and puts , registered recipients in danger of deportation. trump’s attack on daca offended not only many dreamers (recipients of daca) but also protesters at the women’s march. thus, numerous protest posters in the march focused on daca and the above placard is one such example. under the pink headline “daca daca tiny cock-a,” we see a cartoonlike drawing of trump. he is naked, showing off his “orange” skin, and wearing only a blue jacket and a red tie. his signature comb over hair-do is exaggerated and his arms are wide open. the lines around his small hands make it look as if he is “flashing” the onlooker, showing off his small penis, or his “tiny cock-a,” as the poster reads. the poster criticizes the imminent changes in daca policy and aims to provoke laughter by offending and shaming trump’s body through the use of “carnivalesque” humor. drawing on bakhtin’s ( ) work, we employ the concept of the carnivalesque to think about vulgar, grotesque, bodily humor that is commonly intended or experienced as offensive, and that is used to challenge privileged positions and reframe public and political discourse. the rhyme “daca daca tiny cock-a” mimics the ways in which small children try to offend each other in the playground. it relies on the shared understanding that there is a comic incongruity between our expectations for “presidential” behavior and the “childish” and unconsidered ways in which trump presents himself publicly and politically. trump’s child-like behaviour violates dominant assumptions about the rational, male agent in the political public sphere, and it can be argued that it is exactly these kinds of transgressions that trump’s opponents experience as offensive, and which in turn mobilize them to protest and give offense back. the poster also makes reference to the running joke of trump’s “tiny hands,” and the popular myth that a man’s hand size is indicative of his penis size. small hands here suggest a lack of masculinity and a lack of gendered attributes, such as strength and leadership. the link between hands and gender performance is underlined by janice winship’s ( ) influential work about the relationship between the positioning of hands and sexuality in advertising. according to her analysis, male and female hands are part of an entire message system of representation signifying appropriate gender behavior. in other words, hands allow us to tap into familiar ideologies of masculinity and femininity because the big and strong hand of the “leader” is “naturally” the hand of a man, whereas the small and delicate hand of the homemaker and caretaker is “naturally” the hand of a woman. by repeatedly mocking trump for his “small” hands, opponents do not only offend his masculinity on a personal level, but they undermine his presidency by insinuating that he is not a “real” man, he is not a “leader” and therefore not someone we should fear, trust, or follow. furthermore, the poster constructs the naked, overly tanned trump as the butt of the joke because orange skin is commonly perceived as a funny tanning “accident” rather than a desired skin hue. as graefer ( ) argues, “orange” skin invites ridicule and offense giving as it symbolizes excessiveness, lack of taste, and the pollution of “proper” whiteness. regarded as “ugly” and “tasteless,” this skin tone stands in stark contrast to the white hue that the proper white, middleclass subject should embody. the white, middle-class subject is controlled and rational in its desire to darken its skin, making tanning in this case an acceptable and positive habit. orange skin, on the other hand, is taken as visible evidence of a subject’s inner out-of-controlness and illustrates that trump does not have the supposedly innate cultural tastes and decorum that wealthy white people should have. his highly visible over- and misuse of tanning products also marks him as vain and overly concerned with his appearance, characteristics that are commonly associated with femininity rather than masculinity. the daca daca protest poster then uses offensive, bodily humor to produce trump as a figure of ridicule, but this kind of humor is riddled with both transgressive and conservative tendencies: one could, for instance, argue that offensive humor works here to undermine the powerful white man via emasculation. yet it ironically also works to restore dominant assumptions of an idealized white masculinity that is free from feminine traces, such as tiny hands or vanity, and immaculately white, rather than orange. furthermore, the vulgar ridiculing of trump’s body can also be interpreted as conservative because women have historically been silenced and policed through these same mechanisms of body shaming. however, we should not reject offensive humor as a tool in mediated social protest altogether. rather, we suggest that this online sharing of offensive humor aimed at the powerful can be seen as a contemporary expression of bakhtin’s ( ) carnivalesque. despite the fact that online practices in the context of instagram and twitter defy the circumscribed spatial and temporal specificity of “carnival,” it still provides a useful tool for understanding the transformative potential of offensive, vulgar humor because it illustrates how the transgression of social boundaries (i.e., being offensive) can be a productive act of resistance. this potential is grounded in the collective experience of transgression: carnival is not a spectacle seen by people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people . . . it has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. (bakhtin, , p. ) notwithstanding the inherent problems of bakhtin’s celebratory universalism, it can be argued that posting offensive placards against trump generates new forms of collectivity because it serves as a public act of stance taking (du bois, ), where people align (and disalign) with others through the stances they take towards a particular idea, object, or person. offending trump through humor works, then, not only to vent the protesters’ anger and frustration but to create a sense of superiority and belonging, through the affective experience of shared laughter: laughing at faulty behaviour [and bodies] can also reinforce unity among group members, as a feeling of superiority over those being ridiculed can coexist with a feeling of belonging. (duncan, cited in j. c. meyer, , p. ) these acts of online offense giving, then, are performances designed to appeal to like-minded others, thereby aligning bodies with antiracist counterpolitics and drawing boundaries between “us” and “them.” some of the comments below the online image highlight this uniting power of offensive humor: expressions such as “love it” or the powerful arm emoji illustrate that sharing “great signs” beyond the marches enables new forms of collectivity, temporary zones in which feminists are able to take a stance and make their anger visible while enjoying themselves in the process. the glee and pleasure that users experienced when engaging with these offensive online images can be seen as producing carnivalesque moments of countercontrol where activists no longer feel helpless in the face of patriarchy and racism, but where they feel powerful and impactful. our premise, then, is that offensive humor, as communicated through these images, is affective and, as such, drives online exchanges and attaches people to particular platforms, threads, or groups. a direct, tangible and measurable “effect” of activism might not be easy to locate, yet it would be wrong to ignore results like the production of feeling, which, we argue, is necessary for social change. filth, cultural transgression, and immigrant bodies we now turn to the second recurring theme in the circulated images from the women’s march, which was the degradation of trump through the semiotic resource of filth. combining the concept of the carnivalesque with stallybrass and white’s ( ) notion of cultural transgression, we examine a sign shared on twitter and consider how it responded to trump’s offensive behavior by shifting the shame and otherness he inscribes on immigrant bodies onto the president himself. this sign illustrates the recurring association between trump and feces. the image was posted by a private twitter user, who photographed and shared his “favorite” signs from the women’s march in new york city. at the time of our data collection, the tweet had been shared times, favorited . k times and had received comments. the sign depicts trump’s face as a bottom that emits a brown puddle. across his yellow hair, the text reads “f*ing moron,” while text within the brown puddle reads “liar.” the discursive association between trump and feces work in two key ways here. first, the sign is a critique of trump’s use of the term “shithole countries” to refer to the nations of origin of immigrants he considered undesirable (dawsey, ). second, the sign uses comic inversion and grotesque imagery to construct trump as abject. we explore how these strategies work together and reflect on how they invite onlookers to feel both offense and pleasure. trump’s “shithole” remarks were made in a meeting with the u.s. senators on the january , , and received extensive international media coverage. the president of senegal said he was “shocked,” the government of botswana said the remarks were “irresponsible, reprehensible and racist,” while an african group of ambassadors at the united nations described them as “outrageous, racist and xenophobic” (taylor, ). the remarks, then, were widely constructed as offensive. the protest sign shifts the “shithole” label from these nations onto trump himself, repositioning the offender as the target of offense. here, trump becomes the “shithole,” reduced to an abject body part and dismissed as a “moron.” as in the grotesque imagery described by bakhtin ( ), we see a decentered body that is ruptured by bulges and orifices. the close-up image fills the entire sign. the buttocks are comically round and disproportionately large. the anus protrudes and leaks filth. the vulgarity of the picture is echoed by the crudeness of the written language: trump’s debased body contaminates the world with its “shit.” such rhetorical strategies work “to mock, destabilize, and publicize private parts and activities we are socialized to hide” (bivens & cole, , p. ). situated within protest culture, the sign employed this carnivalesque language and imagery to contribute an affective critique of trump to public sphere debates around his presidency. by shifting the “shithole” label from developing nations onto trump himself, it reverted the cultural hierarchy of trump’s racist immigration policy, simultaneously articulating offense at his racism, and giving back offense by degrading and insulting the president. the reach of the sign was extended beyond the moment and geographical context of the march through the circulation of the image on social media. the twitter user who shared it used the platform’s comment function to share a number of other photographs of protest signs, while other users responded by expressing excitement, laughter, calling for trump to be impeached, and sharing photographs of other signs that resonated with them: we can locate these photographed protest signs within a wider symbolic practice that degrades trump by associating him with the lower stratum of the body (bakhtin, ). trump’s buttocks and feces were recurring themes in circulating images from the women’s march, while other social media users have also adopted the hashtags #peeotus and #scrotus to avoid mentioning trump’s name and title, thereby denying the legitimacy of his presidency (bivens & cole, ). this refusal indicates that he is seen as a transgressive figure. he is both president and other, both insider and outsider. drawing on stallybrass and white ( ), we argue that the widespread use of grotesque representations signals a dual sense of disgust and fascination with trump. his offensive behavior represents base impulses that should have been repressed from the rational public sphere, a notion that is also evident in hillary clinton’s labeling of some trump supporters as “deplorables” with “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamaphobic” views (k. reilly, ). trump-as-president is a hybrid of high and low discourse, a transgression of established cultural boundaries that creates a ‘powerful symbolic dissonance’ (stallybrass & white, , p. ). the recurring use of filth as a semiotic resource in protest signs can be seen as an attempt to reaffirm the classification of him as other, suggesting the coexistence of a desire “to degrade the high and mighty” and “a paradoxical reverence for tradition and hierarchy” (gilmore, , p. ). through this mingling of transgressive and conservative tendencies, the target of laughter and offense is not the presidency as institution, but trump as an illegitimate president. challenging the universalism that undermines bakhtin’s work on the carnival, stallybrass and white ( ) were interested in examining the cultural transgressions of class binaries. our study, in turn, underscores that class structures inter- sect with those of race, nationality, and gender. in each case, “discourses about the body have a privileged role, for transcoding between different levels and sectors of social and psychic reality are effected through the intensifying grid of the body” (stallybrass & white, , p. ). trump attempts to classify, legislate, and control the bodies of immigrants by associating them with excrement, while protesters use the same semiotic resource to degrade his body and delegitimize his presidency. as stallybrass and white ( ) note, “somatic symbols...are ultimate elements of social classification itself” (p. ). thorogood ( ) suggests that crude, ambiguous humor can help fight disengagement from formal politics. by “reducing politics to the excretions of the human body,” protesters negotiate and challenge geopolitical discourse by connecting contemporary debates to our shared bodily vulnerability. as grant- smith ( ) writes, “we all shit,” and so defecation can be mobilized to dem- onstrate our “common humanity and animality” (para. ). however, we would argue that this sign does not work to position trump within a human collective but instead positions him as a repulsive other. its strategy resembles that of the “daca daca” sign, as it employs the playground rhetoric of “no, you’re the shithole.” however, drawing on bivens and cole, we nonetheless argue that “grotesque protest” can still work as “an effective tool for opening space, transgressing boundaries, and demanding attention.” the excess of protest signs like this one invites us to take gleeful pleasure in offending trump, reminding him that he is out of place and illegitimate, and demonstrating resistance to his attempts “to control bodies.” in this way, the grotesque is mobilized “to strategically reframe public and political discourse about the body” through street protests and on social media (bivens & cole, , p. ). across the protest signs focusing on “orange” trump and trump-as-filth, his white, male, heterosexual, and wealthy body is subjected to degrading strategies that have long been used to oppress women and minorities. it here becomes violently appropriated as a site of resistance, used to articulate feelings of offense but also to cause offense. this strategy valorizes anger as a political emotion and invites us to take pleasure in voicing that anger without concern for the decorum imposed on women by patriarchal discourse. the last part of our analysis will focus in on this relationship between gender, anger, and offensive humor. the retaliation of the unruly in this final theme of circulated protest signs from the women’s march, we examine how female protestors used the characteristics of unruliness, such as offense (rowe, ), to appropriate trump as the target of carnivalesque humor. to illustrate this trend, we conduct a close analysis of the sign saying “little bitch, you can’t fuck with me,” which demonstrates the ambiguity that was evident in some of the offensive trump placards: this sign mixes humor, politics, and popular culture to promote the embrace of unruly feminism and to protest an epidemic culture of sexual harassment and the policing of women’s bodies. the sign features a quote from music artist cardi b’s song “bodak yellow”; a “diss” track that skewers those who have mocked b’s rise to fame from bronx stripper to music history maker. in this track, b uses the pejorative term “little bitch” to lambast those who criticize her achievements, but in the context of the women’s march, the term is used to insult trump’s behavior and body. according to the urban dictionary ( ), “little bitch” is a whiny, petty person, willing to stab people in the back. thus, the sign’s reappropriation of the popular term connects these associations with trump’s actions and behavior, such as his claim that “no politician in history has been treated worse” (gambino, ) than him, his childish exchanges with north korean leader king jong un, and the republican party’s cutting of medicaid, which trump’s working-class supporters are reliant on (harwood, ). the gendered nature of the term “bitch” further attacks trump’s “inadequate” masculinity, emphasized by the word “little” and its connection to the long running joke about his small hands and penis. the sign combines this insult with a threat through the phrase “you can’t fuck with me” and the image of trump’s head pinned down by a pair of black, high-heeled feet. together, they act as a warning that the women’s march activists are not to be “messed with.” this threat is supported by cardi b’s own clarification of her lyrics: “i can be humble but...if you push me, i can really stamp on your head” (giulione, ). while the song incites violent behavior, its meaning within a humorous placard is much more ambiguous. as lockyer and pickering ( , p. ) argue, the line between make-believe and reality is not clear in a joking context. this is because humor can be a form of exaggeration, but it can also be used to express real beliefs (lockyer and pickering, ). thus, while some may view the sign’s message as threatening and offensive, others may defend it as “just a joke” or benign violation humor (mcgraw & warren, ) that appears immoral but is essentially harmless because the words are “just” borrowed from a song and are not the actual words of the protestors. this image garnered many affective responses because it was posted by cardi b and circulated to her million instagram followers. b’s cultural and symbolic capital afforded maximum exposure to the protest sign and this particular women’s march message. according to d. s. meyer ( , p. ), one of the key benefits of celebrity-endorsed protest is “the increased mobilization of sup- port and publicity”. similarly, scholars have argued that music has the capacity to mobilize political action and collective identity (denora, ; githens- mazer, ). such ideas are applicable to cardi b’s instagram post, as it acquired over million likes and nearly , comments. the comments were varied; some expressed support for trump, arguing that he was “creating a fuck ton of jobs,” while some expressed amusement through the crying laughing emoji. however, the dominant response expressed support for the sign’s message and b’s accompanying comment about the disrespectful treatment of women: “yaaas” supported by the hands up in agreement emoji; “this is every- thing”; and “yas girl, pussy power.” the sign’s divisive humor perhaps resonated with instagram users because it reflects a shift in feminist tone since the women’s march. the first event launched as a reaction to trump’s misogynistic behavior and the gop’s attempts to cut female health care. but, since then, we have been confronted with the weinstein scandal and a myriad of sexual harassment cases highlighted by the #metoo movement and #timesup initiative. the shocking extent of abuse, identified across different industries, has accelerated and widened the objectives of the current women’s movement, accompanied by widespread expressions of anger and the adoption of a combative tone. that tone is evident in this sign, where it takes the form of "rebellious humor that simultaneously mocks the powerful" (billing, , pp. , ) and creates connective laughter among the unruly women of the march. unruly women do not conform to traditional norms of femininity that emphasize women’s passivity, compliance, and agreeability (fox, ; tolman, impett, tracy, & michael, ). instead, their unruliness is characterized by aggression, humor, and their will to offend and challenge the patriarchal status quo (peterson, ; rowe, ). once again, these characteristics draw our attention to bakhtin’s ( ) work on the “carnivalesque” as a form of grotesque resistance. for bakhtin, the female body signifies the grotesque body because “woman is related to the material bodily lower stratum” (p. ) through menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. this is a problematic label that high- lights the limitations associated with bakhtin’s ( ) claims that the carnival was a liberating event that embraced all people. “the female association with the lower bodily stratum connotes shame and filth, which works in contrast to the cerebral upper body that is associated with higher functions of thought and emotion” (mizejewski, , p. ). it suggests that the female body was a victim of the carnival’s subversive comedy, rather than an instigator of it. this argument resonates with the work of other scholars (russo, ; stallybrass & white, ), who argue that women were regularly subjected to physical and verbal abuse at the carnival. the characteristics of unruliness and the grotesque appear to be grounded in misogyny, as they have been used to attack women who do not conform to traditional standards of femininity. however, rowe ( , p. ) argues that “transgressing this line of acceptability can be a source of power for women, especially when the characteristics or unruliness are recoded and reframed to expose what they conceal”: the oppression of women through the expectation that we stay silent, compliant, and do not make a spectacle of ourselves. the women of the march use the semiotic resources of unruliness as part of affective strategies to claim visibility, voice, and agency and to reposition trump as the grotesque body. consequently, the male body that stands accused of mocking, attacking, and attempting to police the female body becomes the protestors’ symbolic target of collective, angry, and offensive humor. while trump may be the sign’s chief target, its humorous political message can also be read as an attack on all those who reinforce the patriarchal status quo. its circulation on instagram might be particularly valuable, then, because of the site’s preoccupation with conventional beauty and body standards (seligson, ). however, while instagram may bolster traditional notions of femininity, its audience of million active users and its visual-led content make it an attractive platform to challenge these conventions via online activism. deluca and peeples stress the power of visual communication in their theorization of the public screen. their work attempts to expand our understanding of political debate beyond the emphasis on face-to-face rational dialogue of the public sphere (habermas, ) by arguing that the use of spectacle across image-led media platforms can expand dialogue and make political issues more accessible (deluca & peeples, ). consequently, cardi b’s post indicates that the circulation of feminist content within the feminized sphere of instagram might have the potential to attract new supporters to the women’s march movement and create a space for users to deliberate its messages, beyond the temporal and spatial confinements of the marches themselves. conclusion this article has unpacked some of the ways in which protest signs in the women’s march used offensive humor to challenge trump and reflected on how they were recontextualized and circulated on twitter and instagram. through the close analysis of three social media posts, we have explored how trump was dismissed as an improper white, masculine subject, how he was degraded through an association with feces and the lower bodily stratum, and, finally, how he was repositioned as the infantile, feminized victim of unruly women. emphasizing the ambiguity of offensive humor, we identified a recurring tension not only between its uniting and dividing functions but also between conservative and radical tendencies: protesters and social media users attacked trump’s patriarchal and racist policies and practices through the use of gendered and raced insults that simultaneously reinforced established notions of ideal white masculinity. this duality worked in two key ways: first, protesters identified and punished trump as a transgressive other while redrawing the boundaries of appropriate white masculinity. this discourse articulated offense at his transgressions of established norms for public sphere debate and “presidential” behavior while simultaneously giving offense back through the spectacle of unruly, carnivalesque protest. second, participants repeatedly appropriated aggressive, humorous strategies of offense giving that have been associated with masculine cultures (pujolar, ) and used to oppress female and non- white bodies (thomas, ). here, they reversed that hierarchy by repositioning trump as the abject body; malformed, leaking, and prostrate. we argue that the use of offensive humor in feminist protest in online and offline spaces can open up new opportunities for unruly dialogue and civic participation. online networks are central to this practice, as humorous content grabs our attention and is shared through followers and hashtags (day, ). this is “spreadable” (jenkins, ford, & green, ) media content, which is privileged by popular platforms because it is entertaining and drives online traffic. as such, it “floats to the top” among representations of the women’s march and becomes part of the “popular memory” (newman, , p. ) of the event. this pattern is evident in the frequent publication of news articles listing the “funniest” protest signs from the march, which promotes the value of humor and spectacle in protest communication. the signs, at the protests and in their new online contexts, offer the pleasures of creative, transgressive humor and offense giving (pujolar, ). this invites us to see the world differently through the carnivalesque lens of affective intensities, reversed hierarchies, and a grotesque aesthetic. thus, in addition to laughter, offensive humor provides an effective intervention in the dominant regime by allowing unheard voices to be heard and to respond to the issues they face. but offensive humor as spectacle is not a tactic solely used by liberal protestors, it has also been used by right-wing tea party activists to draw attention to america’s economic issues. interestingly, bar one study (see mayer et al., ) on the political content of tea party protest signs there is a deficit of research on conservative movements and humorous collective action strategies. therefore, we believe that this would make a worthy topic of further research or comparative analysis of oppositional political movements. returning to the subject of the women’s march, we argue that offensive humor is a worthy political tool that readdresses traditional understandings of protest strategy in an attempt to publicize neglected political issues. this is because its attention grabbing power might introduce citizens who do not see themselves as “political” to relevant issues, thereby “preparing them for civic participation and political engagement” (dahlgren cited in reilly and boler, , p. ). furthermore, offensive humor appeals to like-minded others, thereby aligning bodies with feminist and antiracist counter politics in communities of resistance that include and transcend the geographically and temporally bound march events. this process can facilitate new insight and energize participants to continue their feminist 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( ). handling sex. media, culture & society, ( ), – . an empirical study of declining lead times: potential ramifications on the performance of early market entrants michael j. poletti, brian t. engelland, and howard g. ling this study examines innovation lead time, the construct believed to be the key determinant of launch order strategic value. anecdotal evidence has suggested that innovation lead times are continuing to decrease as the result of new product development acceleration strategies. however, broad scale empirical evidence regarding product launches since has not been forthcoming. this study fills the void by comparing lead times for first movers and second movers across a -year time span, ending in . results confirm that first-mover lead times have continued to decrease significantly, whereas second-mover lead times have decreased marginally. innovation is a vital ingredient in the survival and success of firms. innovation in new products and services enables the development of durable first-mover advantage by supporting the creation of isolating mechanisms such as proprietary technology, switching cost hurdles, and resource preemption that slow down competitive reaction and increase innovation lead time (suarez and lanzolla , ). as a result, earlier entrants can enjoy extended periods of prosperity and profitability before later entrants come into the market (short and payne ; suarez and lanzolla , , ). however, first-mover advantage becomes less potent when the first mover fails to have enough time to establish effective barriers to competitive entry. innovative followers can reduce the lead time enjoyed by first movers by using technological advances to speed up the pace of change and facilitate transference of knowledge (agarwal and gort ; langerak and hultink ). in this way, fast followers can respond more quickly to pioneering action, giving the earlier mover less time to establish consumer preference, dominate distribution channels, and create other structural barriers to competition. innovation designed to speed up response to pioneering innovation has been a powerful force from the industrial revolution forward. indeed, in a study of new product innovations introduced from to , the average first-mover lead time decreased from almost years at the turn of the century to . years by the s (agarwal and gort ). a follow-up study involving new products also introduced prior to confirmed that first-mover lead times had declined, especially in the later periods (vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram ). however, these studies were based on pre- data, and little empirical work has been completed since then to extend these results into the twenty-first century. marketing strategists are left with two unanswered questions: are innovation lead times still decreasing? have improvements in product development systems reached the point of diminishing returns? the answers to these two questions are important to marketing strategists concerned with the performance-related potential of new product launch as a business development strategy. the benefits that first movers create are realized only to the extent that temporal strategic barriers can be activated and maintained (patterson ). if lead times are still decreasing significantly, then temporal barriers must not be as robust as previously established and calls into question the relevancy and impact of the pioneering strategy to grow the business. under these changing environmental conditions, a rapid follower strategy may be just as effective. but what happens to the second mover when a third mover enters the market? does the second mover enjoy stability in lead time so as to establish its second-mover position and reap the benefits of a stable market? is second mover lead time declining as quickly as first-mover lead time? to date, there have been no empirical studies of second-mover lead time, and consequently, it is difficult to determine whether the “fast- second” strategic approach is gaining in viability. accordingly, this paper has two objectives. first, we build on the work of agarwal and gort ( ) and vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram ( ) in understanding what is happening to innovation lead times by evaluating post- data. second, we examine innovation lead times not only for first movers but for second movers as well. to our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of innovation lead times that incorporates both. by studying both categories, a more comprehensive understanding of the lead time phenomenon is achieved. we believe that this is especially important for followers’ timing of response, an issue that has only recently gained the attention of marketing researchers (kuester, homburg, and robertson ; vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram ). this paper briefly discusses the advantages conferred to early movers and the importance of lead time in determining the viability of launch order strategy. then, hypotheses addressing lead time are advanced and tested. finally, conclusions are drawn and suggestions are made on how marketing strategists might utilize changes in lead time to their advantage. background a firm that is first to enter the market with a specific product or service is the pioneer or first mover (lieberman and montgomery ). the next competitor to enter with a substantially similar offering is referred to as the second mover, and subsequent market entrants are called third movers or fourth movers, and so on, depending on their order of launch. for decades, it has been assumed that first movers initially enjoy short-term benefits as they operate as a monopoly before later entrants arrive. second movers also enjoy a period of reduced competition until a third mover enters the market. these periods of reduced competition are called innovation lead time and are defined as the elapsed time between the date of prior product entry and the date of competitive imitation (lee et al. ). innovation lead time is sometimes confused with time to market, which is defined as the elapsed time from a product being conceived until it is made available for sale (kahn ). the management process involved in conceiving a product to respond to a competitive entry can involve days, weeks, or years. consequently, innovation lead time can be considerably longer than time to market. first-mover advantage given the weight of evidence provided in economic, management, and marketing literature, being first to market (pioneering) would seem to be an excellent strategy for a firm to employ (alpert ; buzzell, gale, and sultan ; carpenter and nakamoto ; conrad ; robinson and min ). the literature suggests that a negative relationship exists between order of market entry and market share (kalyanaram, robinson, and urban ; vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram ), and further research indicates that increased lead times can enhance first-mover market share advantages (huff and robinson ; vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram ). consequently, first movers should achieve higher market share than followers. but a tighter look at the literature reveals that early movers (first and second movers) create for themselves the potential for garnering large benefits only to the extent that temporal strategic barriers can be activated and maintained. entry barriers such as proprietary knowledge and patent protection, which initially allow the pioneer to operate as a pseudo-monopoly, afford greater value than barriers that may take time to activate, even if they have the potential to provide longer-term benefits. the effectiveness of entry barriers in deterring competitor entry and the length of time first movers are able to earn monopoly-like profits depend largely on the first mover’s ability to impede competitive reaction (d’aveni ; nelson and winter ). consequently, early movers will attempt to engage in product and market innovation strategies that increase structural barriers between themselves and subsequent followers. the higher the barriers, the longer the early mover lead time becomes; the lower the barriers, the shorter the lead time. innovation lead time provides a window of opportunity for the early mover to solidify potentially sustainable advantages that can be broadly characterized as either consumer-based (huff and robinson ) or producer-based advantages. consumer- based advantages are discussed first. carpenter and nakamoto ( ) explained first-mover advantage in terms of the role of learning in consumer preference formation and suggested that the process by which consumers learn about brands plays an important part in creating first-mover advantage. the first mover may be able to influence how product attributes are valued, define the ideal attribute combination, and ultimately influence consumers’ preferences to the first-mover’s benefit (carpenter and nakamoto ). further, it is possible that the first mover can define a product category and thus become the “prototype” against which all later entrants are judged (alpert ; engelland and alford ). first movers can also profitably use this lead time to establish an even stronger brand name (schmalensee ) and preempt later entrants with important line extensions (robinson ). in addition to these consumer-based advantages, there are believed to be many producer-based advantages. the producer-based advantages include economies of scale, asymmetric information about product quality and riskaverse buyers, experience effects, and reputational effects (lieberman and montgomery ; robinson ; suarez and lanzolla ). early movers can lengthen innovation lead time through the establishment of technological leadership, preemption of scarce resources such as raw materials and distribution channels, and by building in buyer switching costs (lieberman and montgomery ). all of these producer-based advantages serve to build strong entry barriers that increase the innovation lead time between early movers and the response of followers (suarez and lanzolla ). both consumer-based and producer-based advantages allow the early mover to benefit by initially operating as a monopolist or semimonopolist while establishing market position and learning curve economies (von hippel ). these may allow it to retain a dominant market share and higher profits than subsequent entrants would earn. for instance, when software arts introduced visicalc in may , the product was received as the first truly user-friendly spreadsheet program. when computer makers realized that visicalc’s practical utility in business applications was a prime reason for individuals to purchase computers, they were eager to bundle the software for sale with their machines. software arts used its early positive cash flow to develop good customer relationships, enhance customer service, and build strong relationships with computer manufacturers. thus, visicalc was able to preempt the original equipment manufacturer (oem) distribution channel by becoming a preferred, manufacturer- endorsed software brand. this provided a structural barrier to competitive entry for second mover supercalc (introduced nine months later by sorcim) and third mover multiplan (introduced months later by microsoft). despite having superior products, these follower entries were not successful in breaking visicalc’s hold on the distribution channel. visicalc is an example of a first mover that succeeded in successfully achieving market dominance in a fast-changing product category. first-mover lead time there has been a growing trend for firms to enter markets faster due to shorter product life cycles, faster product obsolescence, and intensified competition (griffin ). competitors seek to implement organizational and technological strategies that reduce the barriers erected by others, thus decreasing the longer lead times once enjoyed by early movers. advances in media and communication (agarwal and gort ), particularly the explosion of growth in technology fueled by computerization and the internet, has led to quicker dissemination of information, further eroding away the barriers to competitive entry. both first movers and fast followers have accelerated new product development through a broad variety of strategies, including lead user involvement, training and rewarding employees, increased supplier involvement, speeding activities and tasks, and a simplification of organization structure (langerak and hultink ). consequently, a number of forces are in play that tend to compress innovation lead times. since the late s, there has been a growing recognition that first-moving may no longer be the advantage that it once was, especially if lead times are continuing to decline. conceptual articles have questioned many of the theoretical advantages assumed to provide long-term advantages to first movers (lieberman and montgomery ; mellahi and johnson ). further, cross-sectional empirical research has indicated that first-mover market share leadership is supported in only percent of major product categories (golder and tellis ), that being first to market does not necessarily ensure dominant market share or long-term rewards (chen et al. ), and that the initial economic advantage garnered by first movers is significantly reduced following the market entry of second and third movers (poletti, engelland, and ling ). second-mover lead time game theory has contributed a number of economic models and corresponding research that provides insights into the desirability of various launch order positions (he et al. ). under conditions of imperfect information, the stackelberg model predicts that the second mover will be more profitable than the first mover because the second mover will have the chance to observe and learn from the first mover’s efforts (gal‑or ). the stackelberg model presumes that the first mover becomes constrained by initial product configuration and launch decisions made under conditions of imperfect information and is not as nimble in adapting to new market information or optimizing its market offering as the second mover. consequently, in the real world, a particularly nimble second mover can outmaneuver the first mover and become more successful long term. however, this result is based on a fairly restrictive condition: that the market is a two-brand oligopoly. when a third entrant is added to the stackelberg model to create a three-brand oligopoly, the model result is extremely disadvantageous for the second mover. at model equilibrium, the third mover becomes a strategic substitute to the first mover and a strategic complement to the second mover. under this condition, the second mover earns the lowest expected profit, while the third mover earns the greatest profit (shinkai ). consequently, this type of economic modeling predicts that the presence of a third mover is a disastrous result for the fast-second launch strategy. however, stackelberg economic models do not have the ability to take preference formation effects into consideration. when given enough lead time, earlier market entrants have the advantage of being able to shape consumer preferences (carpenter and nakamoto ) and establish other structural barriers that make it difficult for later entrants. given enough lead time, earlier entrants can build brand loyalties that are difficult for later entrants to break away. therefore, an understanding of both market structure and lead time is critical for marketing strategists to make good decisions with respect to launch order. marketers need to know if it is likely there will be one, two, or three players in any new product category. if a two-brand market is anticipated, what is the likely lead time between first mover launch and second mover response? if a three-brand market is anticipated, what is the likely lead time between first mover and second mover, and what is the likely lead time between second mover and third mover? are the anticipated lead times sufficient enough to establish preference formation and structural barriers? a continuation of the previous example may be helpful. in january , months after visicalc’s launch, lotus development corporation introduced a new innovation called lotus ‑ ‑ , the first software that combined three different functions (spreadsheet, graphics, and database management) into one program. this was not a “me‑too” introduction, but a significant new-to-the-world product concept. lotus employed an end-run strategy to break visicalc’s hold on computer makers: mass- market television advertising directed to consumers. the resulting consumer demand encouraged computer manufacturers to back away from exclusive arrangements with visicalc. this strategy caught software arts by surprise, and lotus ‑ ‑ quickly surpassed visicalc as the preferred consumer choice. in subsequent years, lotus sealed its strategic victory by acquiring software arts and withdrawing visicalc from the market, then fending off launches by mosaic software (twin) and paperback software (vp planner) through successful copyright infringement legal action. but there is more to the story. nearly five years later, microsoft’s multiplan was extended into a spread-sheet-graphics-database product and renamed excel. this “me‑ too” product became the fourth mover in this category when it was launched in october as one of the first applications to take full advantage of the capabilities of microsoft’s new windows operating system. despite the fact that lotus ‑ ‑ had established a leading and apparently unassailable market position, and the fact that excel did essentially the same things as that lotus ‑ ‑ , microsoft used its windows operating system and a compelling case for multi-application compatibility as wedges to encourage users to acquire a family of microsoft products. this product family included such programs as word, powerpoint, and excel that eventually became part of microsoft’s office suite package. thus, excel is a great example of a late mover that successfully overcame the first-mover’s structural advantages. as a result, excel soon nudged out lotus ‑ ‑ as the leading spreadsheet program and has held the number one position since the late s. the need for lead time research as previously discussed, declining innovation lead time is suspected as the principal cause of the diminution of first-mover advantage, and this supposition provokes additional scrutiny. if lead times are continuing to decline, what is the rate of that decline? is there evidence of a lessening in the rate of decline? a rapid rate of decline would argue that the advantages of being an early mover will become more difficult to establish. with a reduced opportunity to develop the scale economies, technological leadership, brand loyalty, preemptive patenting, and switching cost barriers that preempt competition, the fast follower strategy begins to look much more attractive. unfortunately, prior empirical research has concentrated on first-mover lead time and has ignored second-mover lead time. we suggest that this is an important deficiency given that much research has recommended a fast-second strategy with little consideration of the likelihood of a third entrant or the lead time necessary to prevent significant incursion by that entrant. we were unable to find any published research into second-mover lead times. the literature is silent as to whether second-mover lead times are similar in length to first-mover lead times or whether they are declining at a similar rate. accordingly, a second objective of the present study is to rectify this deficiency by examining second-mover lead times over a -year period. hypotheses the most compelling evidence to date of a constricting innovation lead time is provided by agarwal and gort’s ( ) study of new product innovations. this research found a decline in lead times from an average of almost years at the end of the nineteenth century to . years for innovations introduced in the – period. the study’s empirical evidence suggested that this change resulted largely from a lowering of absolute cost advantages of first movers through easier transfer of knowledge and skills across firms. further, this change was also facilitated by the growth in markets, rapid information dissemination, reverse engineering, an increase in the population of potential entrants, and greater globalization of markets. the authors concluded that the rate of initial competitive entry has been rapidly and steadily rising over the past century, pointing to an overall weakening of entry barriers and a reduction of first-mover lead times. a time-series regression analysis revealed a rate of decline of – . per year. the mean first-mover lead time for the last period of analysis was computed at . years. however, this decline rate and ending value may both be understated or overstated due to the arbitrary nature of the sample, the relatively small sample size (only data points spread over years), and the retrospective nature of the selection process (inclusion in the sample required that the new product be deemed “significant” according to post hoc analysis rather than perception at time of launch). another shortcoming is that the source of lead time data was the thomas register, a periodical that was published annually during the period of the study. consequently, dates of new product introduction could only be recorded to the nearest year, and this lack of precision could have some effect on the accuracy of the estimates, particularly in the later periods of the analysis. clearly, greater examination of innovation lead times is needed. in order to fulfill the first objective of this research—understanding what is happening to first-mover lead times since agarwal and gort’s ( ) study ended in —we begin with the null hypothesis expectation that lead times since are consistent with the rate of decrease and an extrapolation of the ending level found by the previous research. accordingly, we propose that: hypothesis : the general level of first-mover lead times since will be consistent with an extension of the trend line found by agarwal and gort ( ) in their -year study ending in . hypothesis : the rate of change in first-mover lead times since will be consistent with the rate of change found by agarwal and gort ( ) in their -year study ending in . another important contribution regarding declining first-mover lead time is borne out in vakratsas, rao, and kalyanaram’s ( ) study, which suggested that declines in average lead time were due in large part to the second mover’s desire to reduce the increased market-share penalties, which were strongly correlated with longer lead times. in addition, they found that later movers suffer increased market-share penalties, which are different and distinct from those resulting from increased lead time. these findings, coupled with the previously discussed predictions of stackelberg game theory models, underscore the need to study the lead times of second movers. consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that third movers, which are already faced with larger market-share penalties than are second movers, would place a strong emphasis on decreasing the lead time between themselves and second movers. further, third movers benefit from observing the launch of the prior first and second movers and can apply this learning to their own situation to save time in product planning and development activities. all this suggests that second-mover lead times would be shorter than first-mover lead times and that there would be continuing pressure to reduce second-mover lead time further. accordingly, we propose that: hypothesis : mean second-mover lead times since will be less than mean first-mover lead times during the same period. hypothesis : mean second-mover lead times will decline from forward. as prior studies have not addressed the rate of change for second-mover lead times, making predictions regarding their rate of change is difficult. however, research referenced earlier (agarwal and gort ; langerak and hultink ) suggest that improvements in product development systems are continuing, and presumably are available to all competitors, no matter what launch order. thus, we would expect to find a consistent rate of lead time reduction, whether first mover or second mover, and we propose: hypothesis : second-mover lead times will decline at the same rate as first-mover lead times. methodology a study methodology was designed to overcome the previously summarized weaknesses of the agarwal and gort ( ) study. rather than a limited selection of innovations based on post hoc performance, a structured content analysis was performed on every new product announcement article appearing in the wall street journal for the ‑year period from january , , to december , . the wall street journal was employed because it is considered the newspaper of record for financially relevant events (mcwilliams and siegal ) and because it satisfied the criteria of consistent dates across announcements, long-term availability, and lack of industry bias. alternative sources of new product announcements such as the thomas register, scientific journals, chronologies, encyclopedias of new product innovations, and trade journals were examined. however, most alternative sources of new product announcements, particularly trade publications, are weekly, bimonthly, or monthly, leading to obvious problems in the accurate determination of the actual announcement dates. the content of each new product announcement was analyzed by a team of three researchers for key words to determine if the product was classifiable as truly “new to the world” or rather simply a “new and improved” modification of previously available products. the “not representative” rule (bearden, netemeyer, and teel ; netemeyer, boles, and mcmurrian ; netemeyer, burton, and lichtenstein ) was observed wherein products not classified as new to the world by the entire team were eliminated from consideration. for each new product identified, a rigorous effort was conducted to find second- and third-mover entries using a wide variety of sources. nevertheless, due to the fact that new product announcements of second- and third- market entrants were not considered newsworthy enough in all cases to warrant inclusion in the wall street journal, alternative sources of new product announcements, including the new york times, lexisnexis databases, and trade journals, were also consulted to find and verify the new product announcement activities of both second- and third-market entrants. previously anticipated new products were omitted from the analysis because it was difficult to determine the precise date when the details of the new product became available to consumers and the industry. consequently, the pharmaceutical industry was eliminated because of prior clinical trial publicity, and the automobile industry was eliminated because of the prevalence of preannouncement publicity. the product with the first announcement of a product that was the same or imitative of one of the new-to-the world products was considered the second mover, and the date of this announcement was recorded. similarly, the next competitor to announce a competing product was considered the third mover. no efforts were made to identify fourth or later movers. the number of days between each new product announcement and subsequent rival entry was then entered into an excel spreadsheet and averaged across all firms and industries. this search and classification procedure yielded a total sample comprising first movers, second movers, and third movers across different industries during the -year span of analysis (see table for an industry analysis). table number of first-mover/second-mover pairs by three-digit sic code sic product description number code food and kindred products dairy products canned, frozen, and preserved fruits, vegetables, and food specialties grain mill products beverages tobacco products apparel and other finished products of fabrics and similar material chemicals and allied products plastic material, synthetic resin/rubber, cellulose soap, detergents, cleaning preparations, perfumes, cosmetics agricultural chemicals farm machinery and equipment metalworking machinery and equipment computer and office equipment electronic and other electrical equipment household appliances electrical lighting and wiring equipment electronic components and accessories miscellaneous electrical machinery, equipment, and supplies aircraft and parts guided missiles and space vehicles and parts jewelry, silverware, and plated ware pens, pencils, and artists’ materials costume jewelry and novelties total note: sic = standard industrial classification_____________________________________________ _______ findings of the new-to-the-world innovations retained for analysis, ( percent) attracted at least one imitator and ( percent) attracted at least two. first-mover lead times were computed by determining the number of days between the first-mover announcement and the second-mover announcement. second-mover lead times were determined by computing the number of days between the second- and third-mover announcements. first-mover lead times in our sample ranged from a low of days ( . years) to a high of days ( . years), with a mean of days ( . years) over the -year time frame (figure ). annual ranges in lead time values averaged days ( . years) from low to high each year. however, there was a clear downward trend in mean first-mover lead times. annual means from forward were all less than days. by , mean first-mover lead time was days ( . years). the first hypothesis dealt with a comparison of the general level of first-mover lead times. to test this hypothesis, we chose to compare the mean first-mover lead time at the end point of the agarwal and gort ( ) study with the beginning point for our study. by implementing our methodology, we found new product innovations in and . lead times ranged from days ( . years) to days ( . years), with a mean of days ( . years). this mean is significantly less than the . years estimated by agarwal and gort ( ), based on the last five new product innovations they included in their study. accordingly, hypothesis is rejected. the second hypothesis dealt with the rate of change in first-mover lead time from through . based on a time-series regression of nonweighted mean lead times, we found that the percent confidence interval for the first-mover rate of change was – . ± . (table ) versus the – . found by agarwal and gort ( ). there is no significant difference between these two values, and accordingly, hypothesis is supported. the number of first-mover/second-mover pairs is presented in table by study year, along with the highest, lowest, and mean first-mover lead time values. second-mover lead times in our sample ranged from a low of days ( . years) to a high of days ( . years), with a mean of days ( . years) over the -year time frame (figure ). the third hypothesis dealt with the relationship between first-mover and second-mover lead times, and our results indicate a statistically significant difference. at days ( . years), mean second-mover lead times were clearly less than the -day mean ( . years) found for first movers, and, accordingly, hypothesis was supported. the fourth hypothesis dealt with whether second-mover lead time is declining, and our results indicate a slight but statistically significant rate of decline. accordingly, hypothesis is supported. the fifth hypothesis dealt with whether first-mover and second-mover lead times are declining at the same rate during the study period. our results found a statistically significant difference. accordingly, hypothesis is not supported. first-mover lead time is declining at six times the rate of second-mover lead time decline. in order to determine whether the changes we observed in lead times over the -year study period might have anything to do with unintended changes in the mix of product- industries represented in the sample, a chi-square goodness-of-fit test for frequencies was conducted (churchill, brown, and suter ). the sample data were divided into thirds so that the first third represented products introduced early in the -year study period, the second third represented products introduced in the middle years, and the last third represented products introduced in the last years of the study. a frequency distribution was compiled for each third and that distribution was compared to the overall -year distribution. computed chi-square values were . for the first-third data, . for the second-third data, and . for the last-third data, all less than the . test statistic for degrees of freedom and a . level of significance. consequently, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, and we conclude that the product- industry distributions are statistically the same throughout the study. figure highest, lowest, and mean first-mover lead times by year table innovation lead time rates of decline first-mover lead time _________________________________ second-mover lead time _______________________________ variable estimate t (p-value) estimate t (p-value) intercept year of product announcement . years – . . ( . ) – . ( . ) . years – . . ( . ) – . ( . ) figure highest, lowest, and mean second-mover lead times by year discussion and conclusions it has been well documented that securing adequate lead time is a major factor in determining the rewards garnered by new product innovation. from a strategic standpoint, first movers are motivated to not only be first to market but also to build high enough barriers to competitive entry so as to delay second movers or deter them from market entry. second movers are motivated to develop product offerings that capture the opportunity left to them while making it difficult or undesirable for third movers to enter and upset the established market dynamics. in our study, percent of first movers never experienced the disrupting presence of a second mover throughout the study period, and percent of second movers never experienced the disrupting presence of a third mover. this underscores the fact that not all new product innovations attract competitive entry. when marketing executives plan launch order strategy, they must anticipate the likelihood of competitive entries in addition to realistic lead time expectation. this study has been successful in extending prior research by confirming that first- mover lead time has continued to decline at a significant rate through . the rate of change that we observed is – . per year, which is within the statistical range of the findings of agarwal and gort ( ). however, our study found a much shorter first- mover lead time than did agarwal and gort relative to the final years of their analysis, days ( . years) in our study versus , days ( . years) in theirs. reasons for the difference may be an artifact of the differences in the sample selection process. agarwal and gort limited their sample to selected innovations that they deemed historically significant and, as a result, may have biased their results by failing to include a broad enough range of innovations. for instance, agarwal and gort included pharmaceutical products protected by patents while ignoring the food product category, the beverage category, and household cleaning products category, all products with potentially shorter product-development cycles. our findings indicate that average first-mover lead time declined by percent from days ( . years) in to days ( . years) in . there appeared to be no evidence of a slowing in the rate of decline. this study was also successful in measuring second-mover lead times for a broad sample of products. our results demonstrate that second-mover lead times are significantly shorter than first-mover lead times, but at the same time, the likelihood of further competitive entry is much lower than for first movers. this would suggest that fast followers experience much less risk of changes in market composition and dynamics than first movers do and provides a key advantage for second movers that is not identified in the current literature. indeed, the fast-follower approach could be increasingly viable as lead times continue to decrease. finally, this study found a materially small but statistically significant decline in second- mover lead time. mean lead time decreased from days ( . years) in the first two years studied, to days ( . years) in the last two years studied, a . percent decline. this average rate of decline over the ‑year period was much lower than the decline rate for first movers, and a visual analysis of the data suggests a flattening of the curve since . this suggests that reductions in second-mover lead times may have reached a point of diminishing returns. second-mover lead times have decreased at a slower rate than first-mover lead times for two possible reasons. first, profit-making firms may perceive a large difference in the potential payoff from being second versus third in the race to market new products and order their launch efforts accordingly. once the race is lost for second place, firms may place their resources not on getting to the market faster but, rather, on getting to the market better by making certain that their product and strategy are correct given the changing competitive situation. this might require extra time and study in understanding how consumer segments are reacting to the first and second mover’s offerings so that niche opportunities may be uncovered. second, there may be essential differences in firms with a first-mover culture versus firms with a third-mover culture. those firms that aim for first entry, even though they occasionally come in second, have a different strategic intent from that of firms that aim for third. they expend resources on speeding up their decision processes so that they can increase their first-to-market winning percentage. but not every competitor is playing this game. some firms may be perfectly content with a low-risk strategy of producing low-differentiated products at low cost, and these may be the firms that we observed as third movers. limitations and future research this work has two limitations that need to be acknowledged, both of which could potentially affect the results. the first relates to our use of the wall street journal as the key source of first-mover identification. as mentioned earlier, the wall street journal enabled us to capture lead times to the nearest day, but no source is without problems. the choice of wall street journal naturally tends to eliminate product innovations introduced by small, privately funded companies that are not motivated to announce their new-to-the-world innovation to national financial markets in order to attract investment capital or raise the price of their stock. undoubtedly, this source also tended to underrepresent innovations launched by local or regional companies. the second limitation is that. although innovation lead times are likely to be different for different types of products or different industries, our study did not attempt to select an equal number of first movers for every type or industry. new products that require significant developmental research, high levels of new capital equipment for production, or extended periods of prelaunch certification testing can be expected to have longer lead times. in fact, pharmaceutical and automotive products were specifically eliminated because of our concern that true innovation lead time was masked by extended prelaunch trials and preannouncement publicity in these industries. because innovation lead times may tend to be longer for such products, our omission of them might have understated the overall average lead estimates reported in our analysis. but differences between industry segments are not clear, and we were unable to locate prior empirical research that assessed lead times for different product categories or different industry groups. consequently, additional research should be conducted to examine lead time differences for different product, firm, or industry classifications. recent work integrating first-mover advantage with the resource-based view (rbv) of the firm (finney, lueg, and campbell ; morgan ; morgan and hunt ) may be very beneficial in this regard. the rbv suggests that there is a difference between the management skills of first movers and the management skills of late movers. first- mover skills are posited to include ( ) efficient acquisition, ( ) bundling/combining, ( ) positioning, and ( ) maintenance/protection skills. late movers, however, may need a different set of skills that enable them to benchmark the initiatives of the first movers, creatively copy and improve these initiatives, and then introduce competitive entries that some market segments find attractive. this idea that early movers have different skill sets than followers needs to be empirically validated. technological developments (data storage and retrieval, communications technology, etc.) support improvements in the resource management skills required by early movers, but these technological developments appear to have had a much less dramatic effect on the speed of reaction for the late-mover skills of benchmarking and copying. these differences should be evaluated. our study suggests that if first movers are to be successful under conditions of rapidly declining lead times, they have a smaller and smaller window of opportunity to establish their market competitive advantage. research needs to be conducted that uncovers the salient keys to success for the first mover, and to what extent those keys include greater marketing competence, sophistication, speed, and dexterity on the part of the first mover. conversely, further empirical research is appropriate to evaluate followers’ use of benchmarking, market segmentation, and increasing promotional expenditures to achieve higher consumer relative preferences in targeted segments. ideally, followers should make efforts to decrease lead times while simultaneously increasing consumer preference formation, if firm resources allow such strategies to be pursued and executed effectively. research should also be directed toward understanding the role of intangible, organizational, and relational resources in determining launch order success. intangible skills may be contributing differently to first-mover success (barnes, collier, and lueg ). these intangible skills include embedding operant resources through programs that train employees in areas such as understanding the consumer’s perspective, empower employees to react to the dynamic relationship with the customer, and monopolize the control over scarce resources within the environment, including both physical and nonphysical types (barnes, collier, and lueg ). finally, additional research is needed to more fully understand ( ) the reasons for the rate of decline differences between first-mover and second-mover lead times we have documented, ( ) the potential for further reductions in innovation lead time, and ( ) the influence of strategic posture related to efforts to speed market entry. 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"this is an accepted manuscript of an article published by taylor & francis in the journal of marketing theory & practice (winter , vol. issue ), available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/ [article doi: . /mtp - ." wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ work (still) in progress_ establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences contents lists available at sciencedirect women's studies international forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif work (still) in progress: establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences fiona jenkinsa, helen keaneb, claire donovanc,⁎ a school of philosophy, research school of social sciences, australian national university, canberra, act , australia b school of sociology, research school of social sciences, australian national university, canberra, act , australia c division of health sciences, department of clinical sciences, brunel university london, uxbridge, ub ph, middlesex, united kingdom the extensive significance of feminist and gender research clearly does not need demonstrating to the audience of this specific journal; yet such recognition of its importance is far from being universal. feminist economics belongs to a class of approaches stigmatized by the main- stream neoclassical discipline as ‘heterodox’. feminist philosophy, like feminist economics, is largely published outside the discipline's most prestigious journals, and is produced almost exclusively by women. political science and international relations, likewise, are disciplines that in their mainstream incarnation, seem barely to have begun to engage with gender as a fundamental aspect of all political relations. although in these disciplines, as across the social sciences, we see vi- brant sub-fields, where feminist approaches and gendered analysis are the norm, the degree of gender segregation that often marks such scholarship in terms of practice, impact and citation, is cause for con- cern. in present institutional contexts, where perceptions of the ‘ex- cellence’ of research shape funding decisions and career paths, and where many disciplinary fields continue to construct images of the social, economic and political world that are at best indifferent to questions of gender and at worst perpetuate ways of thinking intimately bound up with the preservation of gender inequality and subordination, it may be timely to reflect upon and construct accounts precisely of why gender matters in these fields. at a conference held at the australian national university in , we sought to elaborate instances of gendered innovations in the social sciences that would both serve as elucidations of the importance of feminist and gender research to those as yet unfamiliar with or un- convinced of this; and to reflect upon the extent to which recognition of the value of this work had been conceded by mainstreams that all too often remain heavily male dominated. the work forms part of ongoing investigations conducted under the auspices of an australian research council grant into ‘gendered excellence in the social sciences’ (gess). the aim of our conference was at once to consider how feminist and gender research sharpens and reforms disciplinary approaches, showing how our understanding of fundamental social science questions is im- proved by using a gendered analysis; and to compile evidence of the extent to which that promise of progress in knowledge is being realized - or not - through the uptake represented by disciplinary engagement and transformation. the findings on this latter question vary widely across disciplines, as the paper by rebecca pearse, james n. hitchcock and helen keane in this special issue discusses. if we ask how far the ground-breaking work of feminist and gender research has been mainstreamed or acknowl- edged in its importance by the academic disciplines that are tasked with understanding society, the story is a very mixed one. there appear to be large variations in the extent to which disciplines have become con- scious of the importance of gender, with sociology a clear leader in this respect. in this special issue we thus place an overview of empirical research findings about the status and influence of feminist and gender research, based on analysis of citation patterns and other indicators, alongside three ‘case studies’ of gendered innovations in some of the most problematic disciplines: economics, philosophy and political sci- ence. gendered innovations in social sciences have arisen from forms of inquiry that pay attention to multiple differences, modes of inequality, and potentials of human existence that were systemically overlooked or discounted by the androcentric paradigms that have dominated social inquiry. this has meant scholarship that is more adequate to under- standing the lives and destinies of half the world's population, as well as the creation of public spaces where women have been able to articulate their individual and collective voices as producers of knowledge since second-wave feminism swept women into the academy. yet in many respects the task of transforming disciplines by insisting on gender's broad significance is no less necessary today than it was when critical perspectives on androcentric social sciences were first being forged from the s onwards by academic feminism. to be sure, data-driven social science research will now most typically include at least some https://doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . received april ; accepted april ⁎ corresponding author. e-mail addresses: fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au (f. jenkins), helen.keane@anu.edu.au (h. keane), claire.donovan@brunel.ac.uk (c. donovan). gendered innovations in the social sciences, australian national university november – , . http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gendered-innovations-social-sciences. for further information see http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gess-home. further case studies appear on our gess project website. note that the project embraces a broad definition of social sciences that includes the disciplines of philosophy and history. women's studies international forum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx - / © the authors. published by elsevier ltd. this is an open access article under the cc by license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). please cite this article as: jenkins, f., women's studies international forum ( ), https://doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ https://www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif https://doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . mailto:fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au mailto:helen.keane@anu.edu.au mailto:claire.donovan@brunel.ac.uk http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gendered-innovations-social-sciences http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gess-home https://doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . attention to sex and gender differences, while much more extensive formulations of the importance and impact of gender in social worlds shape interpretative and explanatory approaches in many contexts. yet the idea of what constitutes innovative or excellent research in the academy remains in multiple respects gendered, and often excludes or diminishes feminist research (jenkins and keane, ). the innova- tions that feminist scholars have brought to key academic disciplines have in many cases gone unrecognised and ignored in their implica- tions. it is therefore of value to consider and highlight the extent and nature of the impact of this work, both within and beyond specific disciplines. in undertaking this project, we have been influenced by the as- pirations of the gendered innovations project hosted by stanford university. this seeks to raise awareness in the broad science com- munity of the importance of sex and gender analysis for all basic re- search. the website associated with this project, which is focused on science, health and medicine, engineering and environmental dis- ciplines, presents a series of case studies illustrating the ways in which androcentric bias and gender blindness has limited, distorted and hin- dered knowledge in medicine, engineering and biological research. for instance, research into heart disease, as well as many other medical conditions, has often taken male bodies and conditions as the norm, thus missing what are in fact large variations by sex in symptomology and underlying causes; medical research involving animal experi- mentation has typically failed to take account of the difference the presence of sex hormones can make to reactions to drugs, leading to distorted results and effectively untested drugs being given to women; car seat belts were long-designed with a normal male body imagined to be their wearers, with disastrous consequences for pregnant women; and transport systems designed without considerations of gender dif- ferences in daily schedules prove sub-optimal in utility. while strongly endorsing the value of this project in making the case for the im- portance of recognizing and including sex and gender differences, we became aware of limitations in the model of knowledge and persuasion embedded in the project, at least for our purposes. in turning to con- sider how ‘gendered innovations’ in the social sciences might be ela- borated, important differences from these stem discipline examples and the general approach of the stanford project emerged. to briefly enumerate some of these, whereas in the stanford gendered innovations examples a positivist account of knowledge supports an additive and corrective model of improvement in research, much feminist scholarship has advocated for post-positivist commit- ments (jenkins, ). critical and transformative work is necessary to challenge entrenched androcentric models and basic conceptions of such fundamental elements in disciplinary knowledge as ‘the economy’, the ‘public sphere’ or ‘freedom and autonomy’, all topics explored in the papers that follow. gendered innovations in social sciences, when pursued at this level, often involve engagement with contested social ontologies, conflicting economic interests and the disturbance of en- trenched political arrangements that have long preserved the interests of a small minority. the persuasive power such innovations exert is therefore much less easy to establish than the incontrovertible examples presented as evidence by the stanford project. at stake in gendered innovations in the social sciences, in many important instances, is the actual transformation of gender relations, not simply the tracking of sex and gender differences. knowledge and power not only prove in- separably intertwined in this perspective, but the model of ‘progress’ in understanding gendered questions requires reflection on the institu- tional forms that acknowledgement and recognition, as aspects of promoting or blocking change, may take. our approach to considering gendered innovations therefore includes acknowledging as historically and critically important the gendered distribution of power in different disciplinary fields, recognizing the ongoing ways in which this shapes the production and impact of knowledge-claims. where and how have feminist questions and methodologies received their uptake in the disciplines whose core work comprises accounts of society, the economy and politics? where and how does gender as a category of analysis appear to matter in social science research? who does this research? the locations and occasions of the acknowledgment of gender's importance, whether as a significant empirical variable, or as a mod- ality of power shaping fields of meaning and social relations, might serve to indicate the ways in which disciplinary knowledge has re- formed itself - or not - around the questions posed by social movements committed to realizing gender equality and recognizing its absence. a further dimension is important, however, and returns us to reflection on how concerns for gender equality in academic contexts intersect with a concern for the quality of research. where women have low status and representation in a particular field of knowledge, it seems reasonable to speculate that this leads to undervaluing certain types of knowledge and to underestimating the social effects of gendered inequity. a question to consider in this context, then, is how variation in the uptake of gendered innovations correlates with the rates at which women participate in certain fields or become leaders within them. far fewer women than men appear at professorial level across most disciplines, but there is considerable variability between them, which leads us to ask how disciplinary norms and practices may function to enhance or diminish gender inequality. how do knowledge formation and certain characteristic forms of masculine privilege interact, for instance in de- termining ‘mainstream’ research agendas? if, in some of the social sci- ences, women make up less than % of the professoriate, it would seem a reasonable hypothesis that this gender imbalance will reflect and reproduce the effect of assumptions about what kind of research is most valuable and whose research that is. yet the consequences of that go beyond gender inequalities internal to the academy, for these are the disciplines that should most aid our understanding of how gender works in society. what impact, then, does women's limited influence and status in these key fields of research have upon understanding so- cial realities, or our capacity to grapple with the social, economic and political changes necessary for progress towards gender equality? the papers in this special issue comprise a sociological approach to mapping the relative status of feminist and gender research across the broad range of social science disciplines, and three ‘case studies’ of gendered innovations within those disciplines less receptive to feminist and gender research: political science, economics, and philosophy. pearse et al. (this volume) make an excursion into the sociology of knowledge, and undertake a citation analysis of feminist papers in in- fluential journals in economics, history, international relations, philo- sophy, political science and sociology, as well as influential feminist journals. while studies of individual disciplines have previously been conducted, this approach is novel in providing a wide-ranging overview and comparison, reflecting on the reasons for the respective place of feminist research in the core or periphery of these disciplines. editorial positions on a range of influential journals are examined, and gender inequalities are evident for woman as editors and authors for all dis- ciplines. citation data are presented as evidence of feminist sub-fields being marginalized within disciplines, and that the less permeable a discipline is (e.g. the less interdisciplinary it is in its citation practices), then the more marginal feminist work is. however, this effect seems to be mediated to some extent by the level of congruence between the citation practices of disciplines and the relevant feminist sub-discipline. overall, feminist research is found to have more general influence in sociology and history, and less in economics, international relations, political science and philosophy. pearse et al. therefore conclude that gender is a foundational topic in sociology, as it is home to larger https://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/. for further details see the gess project website, http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/ gess-home. f. jenkins et al. women's studies international forum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx https://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/ http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gess-home http://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/gess-home proportions of gender-related research than the other disciplines, and evidence points to sociology's interdisciplinary nature allowing feminist knowledge to be more readily absorbed. on a sliding scale, sociology and history are revealed as disciplines where the reception of feminist ideas and research is ‘strong’, international relations and political sci- ence ‘modest’, and economics and philosophy ‘minimal’. the more re- sistant disciplines are to absorbing feminist knowledge, then the less is the likelihood of gendered innovations and disciplinary transformation. s. laurel weldon (in press) presents an account of what feminist innovations in political science have taught us about power and gender, how this has influenced political science as a discipline, and what gender studies can learn from feminist political science. she asks how, given the male domination of the political sphere (and other spheres), women can contest power, and explores this question by weaving to- gether a discussion of contemporary concerns about sexual harassment and the #metoo campaign, the divergent directions of abortion policy and foreign policy in canada and the usa, and a history of landmark feminist contributions to political science. she finds that key gendered innovations within the discipline have been transforming under- standing of what constitutes the political. feminist political scientists challenged the limitations of top-down approaches to politics and power that centred on people or positions at the top of the hierarchy by introducing the consideration of ‘bottom up’ informal politics. in this respect, ‘a feminist understanding of power points to the importance of civil society and broader social norms as a potential area for resistance and empowerment’ (add page number when known). feminist research highlighted that informal norms and practices deserve as much atten- tion as formal rules in understanding how power operates within po- litical institutions. crucially, feminist political science maintained that power and patriarchy can not only be exercised and challenged by women's movements within the political sphere, but also within public and private institutions such as the church and the family. while weldon observes that ‘the reciprocal influence of feminist scholarship and political science has been one of mutual enrich- ment’ (add page number when known), she laments that recognition of feminist contributions to political science has largely been obscured or discounted due to male bias. yet weldon finds that feminist political science provides innovations for other fields of gender studies, and she uses the examples of current abortion policy and foreign policy in canada and the unites states to demonstrate how formal and informal institutions can, in different conditions, reinforce or weaken male dominance, and help or hinder the effectiveness of women's social movements. dalziel and saunders (this volume) celebrate the career of marilyn waring, whom we might regard as personifying gendered innovations in economics. the genesis and publication of her book, if women counted: a new feminist economics, is presented as a case study of gendered innovations occurring because the starting point was not what dalziel and saunders call the ‘popper-kuhn-lakatos model of scientific progress’ that continues to dominate the economics profession, but rather, ‘a researcher embedded within a community of activists grap- pling with [a] burning issue of the day’ (add page number when known). waring's key innovation was offering another possible model for scientific research and a feminist economic framework by challen- ging ‘what is permitted to be considered “economic problems”’. a national party member of the new zealand government from to , waring championed women's issues, such as affordable childcare. when appointed chair of the public expenditure select committee in , she first encountered the united nations system of national accounts (unsna), which was being adopted as the standard for new zealand's national income and expenditure accounts. she found that, in unsna terms, woman engaged in household labour were labelled as ‘non-producers’ and domestic work was invisible within economic policy, which then rendered affordable childcare economic- ally unnecessary. after leaving parliament, waring made a study of the unsna, and found that, for example, women's agricultural work in developing countries was excluded if it supplied their household and was not for sale on the market, although this labour provided food for millions of people. in her book she argued that the patriarchal as- sumptions underpinning the unsna ‘enshrines the invisibility and en- slavement of women in the economic process as “of little or no im- portance”’ (add page number when known). rejecting patriarchal applications of economic theory to practice, she proposed an alternative theoretical framework starting with practice, and incorporating wo- men's household work within measures of economic activity. this mission-led research, argue dalziel and saunders, stands in stark relief to the popper-kuhn-lakatos model of scientific discovery, a double- inversion at the heart of waring's radical and transformative approach to economics. catriona mackenzie (this volume) reflects on her own role in de- veloping relational autonomy theory, ‘a perspective informed by fem- inist ethics and by feminist commitments to combatting both gendered and other forms social oppression and inequality’ (add page number when known). she observes the devaluation of knowledge claims made by feminist philosophers, perhaps because the feminist challenge goes ‘to the heart of philosophical methodology and disciplinary self-un- derstandings’ (add page number when known). gendered innovations therefore arise in challenging orthodox positions and providing alter- native thinking. relational autonomy theory is an example of such innovations, where feminist thinking has ‘conceptually refigured the concept’ by rejecting methodological individualism, the default position in philo- sophy, which reduces all social phenomena to individual behaviour and thus excludes the possibility of social explanations. turning away from methodological individualism, a feminist lens focuses on social groups and social oppression, and so makes visible considerations of social justice as the context for autonomy. this is political in essence as it challenges methodological individualism for existing hand in glove with libertarian conceptions of justice, as well as non-interventionism, which bolsters neoliberalism and minimal state assistance to support vulnerable individuals and social groups. feminist relational ethics eschews social atomism and centres on a socio-relational account of individuals who are constituted by ‘interpersonal, familial and social relationships and intersecting social group memberships, and through processes of enculturation into specific linguistic, political and histor- ical communities’ (add page number when known). people are moulded and constrained by overlapping social determinants, such as gender, class, race and sexuality. the theory also emphasises the importance of personal autonomy for women and other social groups who have been subject to oppression. the papers in this special issue cover diverse disciplinary terrain, yet they share three key themes in common. first, across the social science disciplines feminist and gender research has been overlooked or made peripheral, albeit to a greater or lesser extent. second, there exists the idea of a ‘hard core’ of knowledge which ‘normal science’ or ‘an- drocentric science’ works to protect, and which excludes feminist per- spectives. third, that gendered innovations in social science are typi- cally underpinned by a commitment to broader social impact, activism, and gender equality. the focus on and commitment to gender equality also raises ques- tions about the status and nature of gender itself. the gess project is concerned with the gender composition of academic disciplines and the relationship between the representation of women and the valuing of feminist knowledge. in order to demonstrate the significance of gender in knowledge production it works with the category ‘women’, which is defined against the category ‘men’. this follows convention in main- stream social science literature concerned with gender differences, and it does not imply an adherence to any form of essentialism in relation to identity. it does, however, produce consequences that require some reflection and elaboration. firstly, it constructs gender as a binary, excluding non-binary and gender fluid identities (see pearse et al., this volume). in the case of the citation analysis carried out by pearse et al., f. jenkins et al. women's studies international forum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx authors are allocated to one of two gender categories according to first names. this enables insightful and important findings related to gen- dered disciplinary practices, but should not be understood as mimetic of the complexity of social reality in which gender is experienced and expressed. secondly, as weldon (in press) notes (add page number when known), the focus on gender obscures hierarchies of race, class, nationality and sexuality, which also profoundly shape patterns of knowledge production. indeed, it can be argued that the dominance of the global north in research publication, across all disciplines, is the context for all discussions of the politics of scholarship (connell et al., ). while a detailed account of the concept of gender is not possible here, it is worthwhile to highlight some points relevant to the concerns of this volume. from de beauvoir onwards, feminist scholars and acti- vists have debated the question of gender and the issue of what unifies women as a group (if anything) (hekman, ). the work of feminists of colour has powerfully challenged the false universalism of second wave feminist claims about women and the way such claims furthered the hegemony of the white subject (collins, ; hooks, , ). in addition, recognition of the limitations of the sex/gender distinction, most influentially elaborated by judith butler, further destabilise the identity category ‘women’ (butler, ). as linda alcoff ( ) has observed, questions about the viability of the category ‘women’ place feminism in a paradoxical position. the political project of feminism is to challenge the oppression of women and to make claims in the name of women. at the same time it rejects the idea that there is a unified category of women. feminist philosophers and theorists have developed a range of re- sponses to this dilemma which engage with the ways groups and col- lectives can be conceptualised without assuming or imposing sameness. for example, iris marion young has argued that women make up a series, a particular kind of social collective ( ). a series differs from a group in that members are not unified by a shared feature or ex- perience, nor by a common self-conception. rather, ‘members are unified by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other’ (young, : ). this idea of women as a gendered social series, unified by external rather than internal features, resonates with the opening section of weldon's article on feminist accounts of power (add page number when known). sexual harassment and assault are prac- tices and realities which constitute gendered subject positions, from which a social movement can emerge. from a more sociological perspective, the understanding of gender as a social structure and system of relations has enabled a different kind of move away from a focus on individual identity. as connell and pearse state, gender ‘is not an expression of biology, nor a fixed di- chotomy in human life or character. it is a pattern in our social ar- rangements, and the everyday activities shaped by those arrangements’ ( , chapter , section , para. ). the work collected in this special issue can be considered as an exploration of the operation of the social structure of gender in social science disciplines. as the articles reveal, this is not just a matter of the representation of women as scholars, authors and editors, but of gendered arrangements in the way knowl- edge is produced, circulated and valued. here gender is revealed to be fundamentally about power and its operation through disciplinary norms. moreover, disciplinary norms shape the often uneasy, embodied experience of being a feminist academic, by constituting certain kinds of voices as authoritative and others as marginal (lipton and mackinlay, ). one of the central concerns of our project is the ef- fects of disciplinary knowledge norms and practices on the experiences of women and other marginalized people in higher education institu- tions. margaret thornton has eloquently described ‘benchmark man’, the ideal academic who emerges in a new masculine form within the contemporary knowledge economy ( ). thornton's concern is with the relationship between notions of merit and the ideal academic in the context of neoliberal systems of performance measurement. our project expands this concern to reveal how norms and ideals of authoritative knowledge act to shape the careers of academics who fall outside the mainstream due to either embodied identity, or research interests, or both. feminist and women academics navigate promotion and leader- ship in gendered organisations through varied forms of agency and resistance (blackmore and sachs, ; lipton, ). the collective building of alternative networks and new disciplinary centres (identi- fied in pearse et al. in this volume as one of the key practices of feminist philosophy and feminist economics) has been a particularly productive response to marginalisation. in its concern with reform and transformation in the disciplines, the gess project intersects with debates about the relationship of feminist politics with managerial discourses of equity and diversity (ahmed, ). university equity initiatives tend to leave untouched norms of success and excellence that support the status quo and indeed protect them from investigation (jenkins, ). they also focus on the in- dividual as the locus of change. while feminist understandings of power shift attention to structural dimensions, it can be argued that feminism has also been preoccupied with identity and subjectivity (zerilli, ). according to political theorist linda zerilli, this has limited its transformative and creative potential ( ). instead she highlights the potential of a post-identity feminist politics focused on freedom and creative acts of imagination. for her, the thinking of radically new figures which do not already exist in embodied experience is crucial to feminism. it is radical acts of the imagination which are able to project ‘a word like women into a new context, where it is taken up by others in ways we can neither predict or control, which has the potential power to change every political, worldly constellation’ ( , ). thus, feminist claims about ‘women’ are anticipatory political claims rather than statements about the truth of an existing collective. this insistence on the importance of openness to the new is valuable for projects such as ours which are concerned with innovations and seek to transform disciplines as well as diagnosing their limits. the articles in this collection demonstrate the disciplinary innova- tions which have been produced by feminist scholarship, as well as the barriers to such innovations. as the articles by weldon, dalziel and saunders, and mackenzie reveal, disciplinary knowledge is transformed in powerful and meaningful ways by working with existing dominant concepts: power, work and autonomy in these cases. feminist re- formulations of these concepts are impactful and successful because they are legible within current modes of thinking while at the same time being subversive of deeply held gendered assumptions. however, zerilli's account of politics provokes a reflection on how such innova- tions align with broader feminist projects both in and outside of the academy. how can moves towards a radically transformative un- disciplining of knowledge be enabled and supported without the loss of the structures of meaning and hard-won influence and impact re- presented in feminist scholarship? acknowledgements the ‘gendered excellence in the social sciences’ (gess) project is funded by an australian research council discovery project grant dp . references ahmed, s. ( ). doing diversity work in higher education in australia. educational philosophy and theory, ( ), – . alcoff, l. ( ). visible identities: race, gender, and the self. new york: oxford university press. blackmore, j., & sachs, j. ( ). performing and reforming leaders: gender, educational restructuring, and organizational change. new york: suny press. butler, j. (ed.). ( ). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity( nd edn). new york: routledge. f. jenkins et al. women's studies international forum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf collins, p. h. ( ). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. connell, r., & pearse, r. ( ). gender: in world perspective ( rd edn). cambridge: polity (kindle version). connell, r., et al. ( ). re-making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of north–south relations? the british journal of sociology.. http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . *dalziel, paul and caroline saunders ‘gendered innovation in economics: marilyn waring's approach to social science research’, women's studies international forum, (this special issue vol.?, pp. ??, doi: . /j.wsif. . . ). hekman, s. ( ). the feminine subject. cambridge: polity. hooks, b. ( ). talking back: thinking feminist. thinking black. boston: south end press. hooks, b. ( ). feminist theory: from margin to center ( nd edn). london: pluto press. jenkins, f. ( ). singing the post-discrimination blues. in k. hutchison, & f. jenkins (eds.). women in philosophy: what needs to change?. oxford: oxford university press. jenkins, f. ( ). gendered innovation in the social sciences. in m. sawer, & k. baker (eds.). gender innovation in political science. london: palgrave macmillan. jenkins, f., & keane, h. ( ). gender and feminism in the social sciences: equity, excellence and knowledge in the disciplines. australian feminist studies, ( ), – . lipton, b. ( ). writing through the labyrinth: using l'ecriture feminine in leadership studies. leadership, ( ), – . lipton, b., & mackinlay, e. ( ). we only talk feminist here: feminist academics, voice and agency in the neoliberal university. cham: springer. *mackenzie, catriona ‘feminist innovation in philosophy: relational autonomy and social justice’, women's studies international forum, (this special issue vol.?, pp. ??, doi: . /j.wsif. . . ). *pearse, rebecca, james n. hitchcock and helen keane ‘gender, inter/disciplinarity and marginality in the social sciences and humanities: a comparison of six disciplines’, women's studies international forum, (this special issue vol. ?, pp. ??, doi: . /j. wsif. . . ). thornton, m. ( ). the mirage of merit: reconstituting the ‘ideal academic’. australian feminist studies, ( ), – . *weldon, s. laurel ‘power and exclusion: feminist innovation in political science’, women's studies international forum, (vol. ?, pp. ??, in press). young, i. m. ( ). gender as seriality: thinking about women as a social collective. signs: journal of women in culture and society, ( ), – . zerilli, l. ( ). feminism and the abyss of freedom. chicago: university of chicago press. f. jenkins et al. women's studies international forum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . http:// . /j.wsif. . . http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http:// . /j.wsif. . . http:// . /j.wsif. . . http:// . /j.wsif. . . http:// . /j.wsif. . . http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /rf 	work (still) in progress: establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences 	acknowledgements 	references by giuliana viglione l ast year, the us national academy of sciences (nas) voted overwhelmingly to amend its by-laws so that it could expel members for harassment or other types of misconduct. nearly months later, no one has been ousted and no one has used the new system to report known harass- ers within the nas’s membership, nature has learnt. marcia mcnutt, president of the nas, confirmed that although the academy has reviewed two or three reports of other types of misconduct since amending its by-laws, it has not received any reports concerning harassers. that’s not because the nas’s membership is free of harassers. still among its members are astronomer geoffrey marcy and evolutionary geneticist francisco ayala, who resigned from their universities in and , respec- tively, following findings of sexual harassment, and electrical engineer sergio verdú, who was dismissed from princeton university in new jersey in for violating its policy prohibit- ing consensual relations with students. “we know that there are several nas mem- bers for which there is good documentation of violation of our code of conduct,” says mcnutt. after the by-laws were changed last year, mcnutt feared that the nas would be inun- dated with requests to investigate members. “and in fact the opposite has happened,” she says. “it’s been practically radio silence.” several other prominent scientific bodies have instituted similar policies in recent years. in , the governing council of the ameri- can association for the advancement of sci- ence voted unanimously to adopt a policy for removing known harassers from its fellows. and other professional societies have estab- lished processes for revoking fellowships and awards in cases of misconduct. filing a complaint under the nas’s new policy, anyone — whether they are a member of the academy or not — can bring a complaint, mcnutt says. when this marcia mcnutt, president of the us national academy of sciences, says that the academy hasn’t received any requests to expel members. d r e w a n g e r e r /n y t /r e d u x /e y e v in e the academy told nature that no one has used the complaint system put in place last year, even though several academy members are known sexual harassers. the us national academy of sciences can now kick out harassers. so why hasn’t it? nature | vol | october | the world this week news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. occurs, the appropriate secretary — the home secretary when an nas member is accused, and the foreign secretary when a member without us citizenship is accused — would examine the evidence presented as part of the complaint. if incidents being reported seem to violate the nas code of conduct, the secretary appoints a committee, which then gathers statements from the complainant and the accused, allows each to respond, and makes a recommenda- tion on what disciplinary measures the nas should take. the nas does not have the resources to con- duct its own formal investigations, unless the complaint that’s been filed is about internal nas matters, according to mcnutt. so the pol- icy stipulates that complaints must be based on public documentation of resolved cases investigated elsewhere, such as a university report detailing harassing behaviour or a state- ment that a professor has been dismissed for violating an ethics policy. the change to the nas’s by-laws, announced in early june , came amid renewed scrutiny of sexual harassment at professional institu- tions as part of the #metoo movement. before the change, the academy had no mechanism for removing members. even a prison sen- tence for child molestation did not prompt the nas to oust physician daniel gajdusek from its ranks. he was still a member when he died in . a prestigious award eighty-four per cent of the nas’s membership ultimately voted to adopt the new policy, which required only a simple majority to pass. “i was very happy to see the vote come out as it did,” says meg urry, an astrophysicist at yale univer- sity in new haven, connecticut, who became an nas member in . urry has long spoken out against sexual harassment in academia. election to the nas — a lifetime appoint- ment — is often considered one of the high- est honours a us scientist can receive. but membership of the academy isn’t just a line in a scientist’s awards list: the academy takes an active role in advising the federal government on scientific issues, so members are often recruited to serve on panels. the national academies press publishes more than reports each year that weigh in on issues such as the implications of climate change and equi- table vaccine distribution. it is problematic for someone who has committed sexual harassment to have such an influential, national role, says kathleen treseder, an ecologist at the university of cali- fornia, irvine. treseder was one of four women at the university who filed sexual-harassment complaints against ayala in november . membership of the academy is a signal that, by some measure, a person is a great scientist. but mentoring young people and fostering their growth as scholars is also part of being a great scientist, urry says, and that’s why harassers should not be allowed to stay. “it’s not just that you’ve done something bad, it’s that you’ve poisoned the well.” radio silence why no one has used the new nas system to file a harassment complaint is an open question. one possibility is that the nas has not properly communicated its new policy and process for reporting harassers to its members and to the wider community. “as far as i understand it, the process hasn’t been finalized,” urry told nature when contacted about this issue. bill kearney, a spokesperson for the nas, says that the change to the policy was widely covered in the media last year and was dissem- inated to the nas’s members. some might also question why the nas leadership can’t proactively move known harassers into the queue for consideration by a committee, even if no individual has filed a complaint. mcnutt cannot, because under the policy, she would be the arbiter if there were an appeal, presenting a conflict of interest. as for other members of the nas’s governing council or leadership, kearney confirmed that they could bring forward complaints so long as they excused themselves from the rest of the proceedings. and those who have already reported harassers to other organizations might be feeling fatigue. “do i have to do everything? i’ve already sacrificed enough,” treseder says about why she hasn’t filed a complaint with the nas. “everybody else has this information. somebody else could do it.” she adds: “i could not be more disappointed in the national acad- emy of sciences as an institution and every sin- gle national academy of sciences member who has allowed the sexual harassers to stay.” mcnutt says that the nas members who are known harassers have been keeping a low pro- file since the by-laws changed. “they are not being appointed to committees or panels or anything like that,” she says. “their influence in the academy is non-existent.” jane willenbring, a geologist at stanford uni- versity in california, who successfully pushed the geological society of america to institute a similar policy after someone who harassed her was named a fellow of the organization in , says that these scientists’ lack of partic- ipation in academy activities is not enough. their continued presence as members — even inactive ones — sends a signal that “we don’t have to take an active role in telling harassers that they have no place in science”, she says. “i don’t think that’s a healthy way to create the important change that we need to see.” jabs now in trials could stumble on safety, be subject to political interference or fail to meet expectations. concerns intensify over upcoming covid-vaccine results by smriti mallapaty & heidi ledford s everal ongoing coronavirus-vaccine trials could announce game-changing results next month. but as anticipa- tion grows, concerns are building about whether the vaccines will clear safety trials, what they will achieve if they do and the risk that the approval process will be influenced by politics, or at least seem to be. three weeks ago, the uk trial of a leading vaccine candidate developed by the univer- sity of oxford and pharmaceutical company astrazeneca restarted after a six-day pause to investigate safety concerns. halted trials of the same vaccine in south africa and brazil have also since resumed, but the us food and drug administration (fda) has not yet given the green light for us studies to start again. the trials’ sponsors have so far released few details about what caused the pause. some scientists say this lack of transparency could erode public trust in the vaccine. in the background, fears have intensified that political meddling could see a vaccine approved for emergency use without suf- ficient evidence that it works. us president donald trump has said he wants a vaccine ahead of his country’s presidential election in november. to assuage concerns, the drug companies behind the three leading coronavirus vaccines in phase iii trials — astrazeneca, pfizer and moderna — have released documents describ- ing how their tests are being conducted. these trial protocols include benchmarks for safety and success, and details that had not been made public before, including how soon the vaccines’ preliminary results could be reported and how the companies might stop | nature | vol | october news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. kapiszewski, diana, lauren m. maclean, and benjamin l. read. . field research in political science: practices and principles. cambridge: cambridge university press. kasza, gregory j. . the conscription society: administered mass organizations. new haven: yale university press. lapalombara, joseph. . “monoliths or plural systems: through conceptual lenses darkly.” studies in comparative communism ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / - ( ) - . read, benjamin l. . roots of the state: neighborhood organization and social networks in beijing and taipei. stanford: stanford university press. ———. . “serial interviews: when and why to talk to someone more than once.” international journal of qualitative methods ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . read, benjamin l., and robert pekkanen, eds. . local organizations and urban governance in east and southeast asia: straddling state and society. milton park, abingdon, oxon: routledge. sartori, giovanni. . “concept misformation in comparative politics.” american political science review ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . snow, david a., and robert d. benford. . “master frames and cycles of protest.” in frontiers in social movement theory, edited by aldon d. morris and carol mcclurg mueller, – . new haven: yale university press. tsai, kellee s. . “cosmopolitan capitalism: local state-society relations in china and india.” the journal of asian studies ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /s . zhang, yue. . the fragmented politics of urban preservation: beijing, chicago, and paris. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. | problems and possibilities of comparison across regime types the dignity of complexity: being human in political science sarah e. parkinson johns hopkins university monet, aja. . “wit.” my mother was a freedom fighter. chicago, il: haymarket books. the last conversations i had with lee ann fujii had nothing to do with violence, research methods, or political science. called unexpectedly to her mother’s deathbed in seattle after a week of meetings in washington, dc, lee ann was out of clean clothes and preparing to catch a hurriedly-bought flight. and so, on a chilly, drizzly grey morning in baltimore, i left her in my apartment with a laundry card and ran off to a meeting. returning home a few hours later, i opened the door to find dr. lee ann fujii—academic heavyweight, author of burn-it-down speeches, and potential future tenure- letter-writer—decked out in snake-print yoga pants and cheerfully folding my laundry as well as her own. laughing at my abject horror, lee ann explained that she found folding freshly laundered clothes calming. and indeed, as our conversations turned to family dynamics surrounding acute illness, the #metoo movement, and the intricacies of real estate acquisition, the smell of clean laundry soothingly lingered around us as rain pattered against the windows. though lee ann was never one for formality, the sheer humanness of the moment encapsulates much about her approach to her scholarship, as well as her life, in general. so much about lee ann’s professional existence was deadly serious—her in-depth explorations of violent performances; her commitment to ethics and ethical practices in research; her insistence that political scientists recognize and ameliorate racist and sexist structures in the discipline—that her bubbly, frank, accessible personality surprised some. lee ann’s intellectual genius rested within her embrace of this apparent tension, indeed, it rested upon the complex intertwining of these seemingly incompatible traits. informants, subjects, participants, people lee ann was a superb scholar of violence precisely because she embraced her own humanity and the humanity of those around her: research participants, students, mentees, colleagues. her ability to recognize and appreciate the significance of banal human interactions gave her unparalleled insight into people’s relationships with each other and with power. specifically, lee ann had an ability to notice (bond, this issue) how simple moments—such as folding a mentee’s largely worn-out clothes—fed into larger, more complex relationships. in the case of the laundry, lee ann’s laughter resulted from both my facial expression and from the innate pleasure she took in inverting our profession’s most revered hierarchies. the effect was not simply to remind me that she was human, but that i was, too. this acuity regarding the mundane nuances of relationships made lee ann uniquely equipped to engage with the complexities of mass killing and structural racism. she insisted on treating even the most elite individuals—whether a chaired professor or the former leader of a genocidal militia—as inherently ordinary people, and worked from that extraordinarily simple foundation to unravel why they behaved the way they did. doing so allowed her to analytically underscore links between social relations and violence, especially by exploring the performative aspects of killing (fujii c). it also underpins the work she did to unmask the many faces of privilege in the discipline, perhaps qualitative and multi-method research | “an ode to her revolt:” remembering lee ann fujii qualitative & multi-method research qualitative and multi-method research , vol. , no. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. most superbly via a discussion of the disparate treatment of white and black mediocrity in the sanctified halls of academia (fujii a). in a profession that tends to study extremes and to view its members as necessarily exceptional, i continue to see lee ann’s spotlighting of mediocrity as a turn of brilliance. lee ann’s scholarship impels many critical reflections on humanity, often in ways that political scientists hesitate to accommodate (let alone celebrate). i address two more here. the first involves the extent to which researchers allow their participants the dignity of complexity. in her recent volume on relational interviewing, lee ann recounts the story of interviewing an elderly man on maryland’s eastern shore who “had a reputation for being one of the biggest racists in town” (fujii b, ). according to her contacts, “old timer” (as she calls him) was an important interviewee precisely because he was an elite, old, racist, white man; lee ann believed he might shed light on the events surrounding a lynching that occurred in . yet, during her interviews with him, old timer both condemned the lynching (for which he had not been present) and refused to discuss it because “[t]o this man, there was dishonor in the telling itself, especially if it meant passing on anything that was salacious or damning about those who gave him the information” (fujii b, ). lee ann operated within old timer’s parameters, challenging and stripping away her own assumptions about him as their conversations progressed over the course of four meetings. during their final interview, he confirmed the location of the lynching, a piece of information lee ann had long sought. for lee ann, this relationship illustrated how demonstrating respect and boundaries allowed her to build a productive relationship with old timer. yet the interlude also reveals the way that allowing participants’ own humanity—in many ways, their ordinary-ness rather than their elite-ness or their key-actor-ness—into research interactions can provide enormous richness in data. by interacting with people as people lee ann opened new avenues to crucial data. in this way, lee ann’s work elucidated violent processes in ways that rang true because she centered the fact that it was real people—not data points, not subjects, and not cases— who participated in lynchings, massacres, and genocide. by contrast, many other researchers might ontologically or methodologically foreclose the analytical possibilities posed by the contradictions, hesitations, or even outright dishonesty that naturally emerge over the course of researcher-participant relationships (fujii ). lee ann protected the dignity of being human—that is, of being fundamentally complicated—for her research participants by embracing her relationships with them as forms of data in their own right. the model her work provides is one that should inspire future violence scholars to better situate violence in the complexities of human life, rather than attempting to isolate it from other social processes. complexity and complicity the second relationship involves the extent to which researchers allow themselves to be complicit in harmful societal and disciplinary power relations. on this note, lee ann’s contribution to the spring issue of the comparative politics newsletter (fujii ) is a masterclass in how scholars of color perform immeasurable intellectual and emotional labor for their white colleagues around issues of race and inequality. in it, lee ann walks scholars through a hypothetical scenario involving an academic who wishes to publish archival research on lynching. in the scenario, the researcher is asked to provide the journal with the violent images of lynchings that she accessed, in the interest of “transparency.” lee ann deftly uses this example to highlight three things that should be painfully obvious. the first is that encouraging context-less viewing of material, such as photos of white-on-black lynchings, in the interest of validating scholarly analysis, renders viewers complicit in the reproduction of spectacular violence. this is particularly straightforward when we consider that the original intent of lynchings was largely to encourage spectatorship in the dehumanization of black bodies. second, to expect non-white scholars to engage with images of this sort on the same terms as white scholars may, for some, offer a false choice between participating in one’s own dehumanization by engaging or accepting one’s continued marginalization by refusing. third, and most importantly, both the spectatorship and the false choices are forms of victimization that our discipline frequently replicates in other ways. indeed, lee ann notes: “for those who can imagine ourselves at the end of the rope or chained to the tree, the images live inside as much as on the page” ( , ). this single line demands that many scholars recognize not only that they have never had to imagine themselves at the end of that rope, but also that some of our colleagues have. scholars’ experience and understanding of those images would necessarily differ as a result, and this ought to be reflected in our scholarship without reminder. lee ann spent far too much of her career trying to teach people the significance of this simple reality. | the dignity of complexity lee ann was calling attention to the harm that scholars often unwittingly commit against each other and to the people and communities they study (including after death). that powerful “j’accuse” moment continues to inspire both my own ongoing scholarship on the methodological and ethical challenges of research in refugee and displaced person communities and other fragile contexts (lake and parkinson ; parkinson ). along with many others, my research projects have provided solid evidence that it is ethically and scientifically problematic for the scholarly community to ignore pervasive issues, such as over-research (sukarieh and tannock ); the damage done by unskilled, irresponsible, or entitled interviewers (foster and minwalla ); and the underrecognized and sometimes exploitative labor performed by local translators and research assistants (cronin-furman and lake ). these and other, related problems all reduce the quality and validity of scholarly data, along with the broader societal value of the research. lee ann’s example continues to remind me that in order to be better social scientists, we must also interrogate our own practices and structures, both because doing so improves our ability to contribute to knowledge, and because those practices and structures affect actual people. being human i don’t remember what lee ann said to me when she got on the elevator in my building back in february. instead, the complex interplay of grief and memory allows that i only vividly recall the brand-new, pointy- toed, leopard-print, calf-haired chelsea boots that she held out excitedly as she packed in the middle of my living room. lee ann’s repeated insistence that i do nice things for myself—a fancy dinner, a massage, a shopping trip—as i revised my book stands as yet another helpful reminder that respecting one’s own humanity in the process of scholarly work often makes it better. lee ann taught us that the surprising tensions and unexpected juxtapositions in human existence—the mentor who does your laundry, the racist who condemns the lynching, the well-meaning scholar who is unwittingly complicit in structural violence—are essential to our understanding of political life. that comprehending the complex dynamics of political violence, racism, or any number of social processes that we study, requires us to admit that we fundamentally study complicated humans as complicated humans ourselves. that upholding the dignity of complexity for all of us is the first step in becoming better scholars and people. references cronin-furman, kate, and milli lake. . “ethics abroad: fieldwork in fragile and violent contexts.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /s . foster, johanna e., and sherizaan minwalla. . “voices of yazidi women: perceptions of journalistic practices in the reporting on isis sexual violence.” women’s studies international forum (march–april): – . https://doi.org/ . /j. wsif. . . . fujii, lee ann. . “shades of truth and lies: interpreting testimonies of war and violence.” journal of peace research ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . ———. . “the dark side of da-rt.” comparative politics newsletter ( ): – . ———. a. “the real problem with diversity in political science.” duck of minerva, april , . http://duckofminerva. com/ / /the-real-problem-with-diversity-in-political-science.html. ———. b. interviewing in social science research: a relational approach. new york: routledge. ———. c. “‘talk of the town’: explaining pathways to participation in violent display.” journal of peace research ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . lake, milli, and sarah e. parkinson. . “the ethics of fieldwork preparedness.” political violence @ a glance, june , . http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/ / / /the-ethics-of-fieldwork-preparedness/. parkinson, sarah e. . “(dis)courtesy bias: ethics and evidentiary validity in violence-adjacent research.” presented at the annual meeting of the international studies association. san francisco, ca, august - september , . sukarieh, mayssoun, and stuart tannock. . “on the problem of over-researched communities: the case of the shatila palestinian refugee camp in lebanon.” sociology ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . qualitative and multi-method research | durham research online deposited in dro: january version of attached �le: accepted version peer-review status of attached �le: peer-reviewed citation for published item: burrell, s.r. ( ) 'the contradictory possibilities of engaging men and boys in the prevention of men's violence against women in the uk.', journal of gender-based violence., ( ). pp. - . further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/ . / x publisher's copyright statement: this is a post-peer-review pre-copy edited version of an article published in journal of gender-based violence. the de�nitive publisher-authenticated version burrell, s.r. 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https://www.dur.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . / x http://dro.dur.ac.uk/ / https://dro.dur.ac.uk/policies/usepolicy.pdf https://dro.dur.ac.uk the contradictory possibilities of engaging men and boys in the prevention of men’s violence against women in the uk stephen r burrell, s.r.burrell@durham.ac.uk, durham university, uk abstract contemporary initiatives to engage men and boys in preventing men’s violence against women in the uk are modest but growing in prominence, and attracting increasing interest from policymakers. this article discusses findings from qualitative research in which expert-informant interviews were carried out with activists playing an influential role in the development of such efforts. it explores how, despite its potential, there are a number of policy obstacles facing work with men in the uk, including ongoing neoliberal austerity, the influence of ‘gender-neutral’ conceptions of abuse, and political inertia towards prevention. in addition, the interviews highlighted some of the political contradictions that lie within work which encourages men to question their own power and privilege, and critically evaluate their own practices and those of their peers. these include the need to support rather than supersede the women’s movement, simultaneously appealing to and challenging men, bringing about both individual and structural social change, and building pro-feminist engagements without diluting them. the article argues that, if these contradictions are addressed and pro-feminist equilibriums found within them, then work with men has the potential to make an important contribution as part of efforts to prevent men’s violence against women in the uk. keywords engaging men and boys; men’s violence against women; prevention; men and masculinities; pro-feminism key messages work with men and boys to prevent men’s violence against women currently faces a number of policy obstacles in the uk, as well as internal political contradictions. if pro-feminist equilibriums can be found to address these tensions then engaging men has the potential to make an important contribution to preventing violence against women in the uk. introduction in the united kingdom (uk) and across the globe there is increasing attention towards engaging men and boys as part of efforts to prevent gender-based violence (ricardo, ; flood, ). the influence of the ‘#metoo’ movement has helped to brighten the spotlight on men’s harassment and abuse of women - and in turn, the role men can play in tackling such practices amongst one another. this article examines some of the key issues facing policy and practice for this field of work in the uk context, by discussing insights garnered from the perspectives of advocates who have played an influential role in developing these efforts. flood ( ) has argued that there is a significant feminist rationale for involving men in the prevention of violence against women: men are responsible for enacting the vast majority of this abuse; it is significantly shaped by norms of masculinity and the structures of male dominance; and men have the potential to play a positive role in helping to eliminate it. this work is closely linked to building gender justice more broadly, based upon the feminist theorisation of men’s violence as both a cause and consequence of patriarchal inequalities (westmarland, ). many feminists have therefore long been calling on men to speak out against gender-based violence, and there is a long history of small numbers of men doing so in the uk. however, to date, most men remain silent on the issue. recent policy documents in the uk on tackling violence against women and girls, from successive labour, coalition and conservative governments, have placed an emphasis on prevention, and the conservative government’s - strategy highlights “how men can be involved as an integral part of approaches to prevention” ( : ). the home office has also initiated its own prevention campaigns, including ‘this is abuse’, which was launched by the labour government in ; and ‘disrespect nobody’, which the conservative government instigated in . however, these have been largely media- based campaigns. despite the strong words, there has been little accompanying investment in prevention work on the ground (gadd, ), and this was a key point raised within many of the interviews. methodology this article discusses the views expressed within fourteen semi-structured, expert- informant interviews (bogner et al., ) carried out with activists, practitioners and researchers playing a key role in efforts to engage men and prevent violence against women in the uk. work with and by men in this field are two distinct things (pease, ), and the interviews illustrated that many of those involved in building and delivering this work are women. however, this research has particularly focused upon scrutinising work by men to prevent violence against women. as a result, thirteen of the participants were men, and one was a woman. interviewees were selected based on the researcher’s existing knowledge of the field, together with recommendations from interviewees themselves. eight were based in england; two in scotland; and one in northern ireland and the republic of ireland. three were located in other countries, but had nevertheless been identified as playing a significant role in the british context. the only uk country not represented was wales, though some of the interviewees were involved in work there. eight interviews were conducted in person, and six through a skype video or voice call, between may and march . the interviews lasted from - minutes, and the transcriptions were analysed using inductive thematic analysis (braun and clarke, ). a key ethical issue for the study was that of protecting participants’ anonymity, with the small size of the field and unique roles of those within it meaning that participants could potentially be identified even from anonymised comments about their work. interviewees were therefore asked to take into account that only a limited level of anonymity could be guaranteed. whilst some felt comfortable for their remarks to be public, i did seek to keep the interviews anonymous so that participants felt able to speak as honestly as possible about their experiences. as a man seeking to support efforts to prevent men’s violence against women, i was positioned to some degree as an ‘insider’ in the field. this may have helped to facilitate participant involvement, and enable them to be more candid with me. however, it may have also inhibited my ability to critically probe the participants at times. this connects to the possibilities for collusion in interviewing other men about their work (mccarry, ), which they were likely to want to portray positively. it is also possible that at times, i reproduced what messner, greenberg and peretz ( ) call the ‘pedestal effect’, of treating pro-feminist men with particular awe, which may have weakened my scrutiny of their practice. i therefore strove to achieve a balance between my support for the work of participants, and the need to examine it through a critical lens. the key points raised within these interviews will now be explored, beginning with the participants’ views on the contemporary uk context. ‘just fighting fires’ - the uk policy landscape for all of the interviewees, one of the defining issues facing the prevention of men’s violence against women in the uk was a paucity of resources, in relation to broader attacks on the women’s movement. connections were made here to the ongoing neoliberal austerity project since , which has included severe cuts to local government funding (sanders-mcdonagh, neville and nolas, ). this has had a devastating effect on violence against women services, as articulated by ben: “women’s services...have been hit particularly hard, in recent years so, i mean it has to be a much higher priority also in terms of, well, government or other funding.” for example, towers and walby ( ) found that % of local authority funding for the sector was cut between / to / alone, and the number of specialist domestic violence refuge services in england declined from to between and (women’s aid, ). several participants pointed out that this situation has been compounded by the increasing influence of ‘gender neutral’ constructions of violence and abuse in policy and practice. in this respect, whilst men’s practices continue to simultaneously be treated as the default and made invisible within policy discourses, the existence of male victim- survivors is being used to claim that gender should be disregarded in responses to abuse (hearn and mckie, ; reed et al., ). this is despite the fact that research consistently shows gender to be at the heart of interpersonal violence, with men’s violence against women by far the most common form of domestic and sexual abuse for instance (walby and allen, ). in some cases, this ‘gender-neutral’ framing has also contributed to specialist women’s organisations closing and being replaced by generic, cheaper, larger, depoliticised organisations (ishkanian, ). interviewees such as kate felt that this approach also has ominous implications for engaging men: “i mean you can’t call it men’s violence against women if you’re not allowed to gender it...if you don’t see violence against women as emanating from men having more power in society...i don’t know how you start, like from a gender-neutral, starting point.” meanwhile, carl noted that there is a risk that discourses around engaging men could actually be co-opted into justifications for a ‘gender-neutral’ approach, as is currently being applied in relation to male victim-survivors: “there’s now a sense, in the sector and among policymakers, that you always have to engage men and boys, you always have to have men and boys in the room, and that i think is troubling.” in this way, there is a danger that engaging men could have implications for women to have separate spaces to discuss experiences of or approaches to tackling violence and abuse. a number of participants emphasised that existing efforts to prevent gender-based violence have been led by the women’s movement, so the weakening of women’s services in turn constrains the potential for prevention work to grow. edward described the situation as one of continuously ‘fighting fires’, with frontline services’ struggle for survival leaving few resources for prevention. several of the interviewees felt that this landscape belies the continued under-prioritisation of men’s violence against women among policymakers. the approach of the british state could thus be seen as one of managing the problem, rather than seriously trying to stop it. in spite of this, the participants pointed out that there have still been some steps forward in prevention in the uk in recent years. for example, the government announced in april that it would become mandatory for relationships and sex education - long campaigned for by feminist activists - to be delivered in all english primary and secondary schools. participants highlighted that this could provide a vital space for engaging with boys and young men - and all young people - around issues of gender norms, inequalities and violences. for instance, harry commented that: “i think this stuff really should run through, the curriculum, from start to finish, from primary years upwards. i think it does need to be there, and i think it, teachers need upskilling and supporting to be able do that.” however, the introduction of compulsory rse has subsequently been delayed until , and the subject has traditionally been based upon a ‘gender-neutral’ lens in the uk, so the extent to which this shift will enable the gender dynamics of violence to be substantively discussed with young people remains unclear. another important development which several participants highlighted was the council of europe’s istanbul convention, a legal framework for tackling violence against women. having signed the convention in , ongoing pressure from the women’s movement has brought the uk government close to ratifying it. this was seen as being an important step by interviewees such as daniel: “it’s a sort of rallying cry i suppose, and so that’s useful...and i think one of the things that was important for me in terms of this, is the way in which...and i don’t think this had happened much before, the importance of, engaging with men and boys...was clearly not an afterthought within this document.” though this would still leave few guarantees about how seriously the uk government would take putting the framework of the convention into practice. meanwhile, some of the participants pointed out that prevention efforts have been spreading into new spheres in the uk, such as university campuses. this often takes the form of ‘consent workshops’, first instigated by student activists themselves, or bystander intervention programmes such as the intervention initiative (fenton and jones, ). however, thus far ‘gender-neutral’ discourses again appear to be shaping the responses of universities, despite considerable public attention towards harmful constructions of masculinity on campus in recent years through notions of ‘lad culture’ (phipps, ). in addition, their focus has typically been limited only to sexual violence (rather than all forms of violence against women) and the student body (rather than the institution as a whole). one interviewee pointed out that the ebbs of flows of policymaking itself provide a significant challenge to the sustainability of violence prevention, as it is so dependent on the priorities of particular ministers at any particular time, and the shifting of different issues into and out of the public eye. for example, in the labour government committed to a far-reaching strategy to prevent violence against women, including through work with men and boys (hm government, ; gadd, ). however, they were unable to implement these plans after losing power in the general election. similarly, several interviewees discussed the initiation of the coalition on men and boys (comab) in as a particularly significant development for the engaging men field. this was supported by the labour government, and included several different pro- feminist oriented men’s organisations and academics. it published a wide-ranging report in about the relationships between public policy and men and masculinities (ruxton, ; wright and cowburn, ; hearn, ). however, comab also experienced internal divisions, and dissipated in the wake of the financial crisis. this provides an example of what interviewees such as harry saw as the obstacles provided by the transience of policymaking: “the civil servants move on, or the political agenda moves on, and that’s that, you know. and you think, oh god, why have i been engaged in this for so long, and there’s now nothing, really, to show, for all of that.” it is also important to recognise that the policy context does vary significantly in the different constituent countries of the uk, and caution must be taken in considering them as a whole. several of the participants talked about how the devolved governments in scotland, wales and northern ireland have some freedom to devise their own policies around violence against women, and often take different approaches to that of the uk government, shaped by the unique political histories of each of these countries (charles and mackay, ). many interviewees felt that the scottish government in particular was ahead of the rest of the uk in supporting violence prevention and adopting a gendered approach. it was suggested that this was linked to the strength of the women’s movement in scotland (hearn and mckie, ) which, through the zero tolerance campaign for example, has developed highly influential prevention work. the uk practice landscape of engaging men the interviewees discussed how there has been a long history of men supporting struggles for women’s rights in the uk, such as through the anti-sexist magazine achilles heel from - (owen, ), and there are now a range of organisations involved in work of this kind in the uk. the most well-known of these are the uk adaptations of the global movement of white ribbon campaigns for men to speak out against violence towards women (seymour, ). the uk’s first ‘white ribbon day’ took place in , organised by the charity womankind, and white ribbon uk (which operates principally in england and wales) was set up in . subsequently, white ribbon scotland was launched in , and in , an all-ireland white ribbon campaign was founded, which is now run by the men’s development network. a white ribbon all party parliamentary group was also established in , with the support of several uk members of parliament. the work of these white ribbons include ambassadorship programmes with volunteers who commit to spreading the campaign’s message; accreditation and partnership schemes to encourage organisations to take steps towards engaging men in violence prevention; education and training; and public-facing actions such as community mobilising. a key focus of activity is the annual ‘white ribbon day’ on the th november. whilst the different uk-based white ribbon campaigns have all received some degree of government funding, participants pointed out that the resources of all organisations involved in this work in the uk remain meagre. such efforts were therefore described as being in a piecemeal, fragmented state; typically being small scale, localised, and delivered by voluntary organisations. the interviewees also discussed several other organisations carrying out work with men to prevent violence against women in different parts of the uk. for instance, two organisations in this area, great men and the good lad initiative, have recently amalgamated. great men delivers workshops by trained volunteers with young men at secondary schools around challenging gender stereotypes. the good lad initiative was founded by university students, originally running workshops primarily for young men in higher education around promoting ‘positive masculinity’ and tackling gender-based violence on campus, and has now branched out to schools and workplaces too. they have also recently been involved in imagine (inspiring male action on gender equality in europe), a cross-european project on preventing sexual violence and harassment with young people. meanwhile, a call to men uk, which was inspired by the us organisation of the same name, trains those who already work with young men (such as teachers or youth workers) to become coaches for their ‘freeup: living respectfully’ programme. some interviewees discussed how there has also been “a lot more cross-fertilisation going on” (edward) in work with men in recent years, including interactions and collaborations through international networks (hearn, ). the menengage alliance, which was founded in , was seen as being particularly influential in this respect: “menengage is now a kind of, significant player internationally, representing, what seven or eight hundred ngo’s i’m not sure, and are having a presence at international events like the un commission on the status of women and other significant international events.” (carl) several interviewees referred to the significance of online communications in this regard, by enabling greater connectivity between activists across the world. one participant emphasised how valuable it can be for sometimes isolated pro-feminist men to know they are part of a bigger national and international movement. however, it was noted that the internet has also opened up new spaces for misogyny, harassment and abuse towards women, and edward pointed out that it has similarly helped to develop anti-feminist ‘men’s rights’ activism: “there has been, i think, quite a significant development of, what i would regard as men’s rights activity, in the uk as well. which is, you know, a counterweight, a countervailing force if you like...” in this respect, one interviewee argued that it could be valuable for the engaging men field to do more to take up and apply a pro-feminist analysis to some of the issues that ‘men’s rights’ activists focus on, in order to reduce their influence. contradictions in engaging men and boys the interviews demonstrated that there are also a number of tensions involved within work with men itself. these may be difficult to entirely resolve, because they are based upon a fundamental political contradiction described by carl: “the overarching problem, is around the challenge of engaging members of a privileged group, in undermining that same privilege”. this article will now explore some of the issues raised by the interviewees in this respect, where the implication appeared to be that for engaging men to create change, it should seek to find pro-feminist equilibriums by taking into account the different factors at play within its contradictions, as described by kate: “you’ve got to tread such a line, you’ve got to be able to engage with people who are probably, possibly hostile to your message, and not going to understand it...you’ve got to also have, that depth of gender analysis yourself, like, understanding...but equally be able to, put it across in such a way which isn’t going to alienate people, but also isn’t going to condone, like sexist behaviours...” supporting and collaborating with the women’s movement perhaps the most fundamental principle echoed throughout the interviews was that efforts to engage men should be carried out in collaboration with the women’s movement. this means that it should consult with and be accountable to feminist women, with critical commentary taken on board and addressed (pease, ). interviewees pointed out that failing to do this can lead to ineffective, counterproductive, or even harmful practice. there were a range of approaches to pro-feminism being adopted by the participants, and some were more explicit about their feminist commitments than others. there was also sometimes vagueness about how this accountability was being put into practice. however, they commonly described their work as being shaped by feminist women’s voices and experiences: “listening to the range of thought within feminism. specifically, about their views of male intervention in this sphere…if you don’t spend time on that then i think you’re on sticky wicket, and can come a cropper because you’re just marching on in perhaps an unguided, and unreflective instinct to do something.” (ian) several participants suggested that it is important for men in the field to model egalitarian relations with women and women’s organisations - and to play a supportive rather than superseding role to them. indeed, some questioned how necessary it is for work with men, to be delivered by men. whilst they appeared to see the answer as resting partly on the context and aims of the activities being carried out, a number of participants felt it is important to recognise that a lot of this work is already being done by women, both formally and informally. they pointed out, for example, that it is often women in men’s lives that push them to think most profoundly about gender norms and inequalities. similarly, whilst many organisations in the field seek to recruit men as public representatives for campaigns, a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that keeps organisations running but receives less public recognition is being done by women, which in turn could help to reinforce dynamics of male authority. these imbalances were summed up by kate: “the second men do anything, like a little bit, it’s like, oh amazing, oh brilliant, oh look what you’re doing, oh great, and then you realise all these like, women that have been working away at the same thing, saying the same thing for like, years.” a key task may therefore be encouraging men to play a more active, supportive role in the behind-the-scenes work, and not only the symbolic, public-facing activities. edward also pointed out that some oft-repeated ideas about men only listening to other men, and male role models being crucial to preventing violence, may be overly simplistic: “i think we’re in danger of, missing the influence that women and girls have, which i think is absolutely huge to be honest.” a number of interviewees also underlined how involving men in the struggle to end men’s violence against women carries with it a number of risks, such as constraining or diminishing women’s voices and leadership (pease, ; flood, ). for example, it was noted that ‘white ribbon day’ has been perceived as taking over what was originally a day of feminist activism; the international day for the elimination of violence against women, which is marked on the same date. some participants alluded to the potential for men’s presence, no matter how well intentioned, to have a deradicalising, depoliticising or colonising impact upon feminist activism. indeed, there is the potential for men to replicate patriarchal inequalities within violence prevention. this underscores the importance of pro-feminist men practicing critical self-reflection in their work, and i discuss further some of the personal and political issues which can arise with men’s involvement in preventing violence against women elsewhere (burrell, forthcoming). edward summed up these tensions as follows: “there are all kinds of elephant traps, to fall into, and i think there’s quite a lot of guys who just, topple right into them, and they don’t even know they’ve, done it, you know. and so they, they can act insensitively, they can take over women’s spaces, you know, not be sufficiently informed about some of the issues, some of the impacts...” many of the participants recognised that they were just as likely to fall into these traps, and that this possibility always remains for pro-feminist men, no matter how much experience they may have. however, this was not always the case, and on other occasions, some of the interviewees did appear to be less reflexive about the potential for mistakes in their own work. it is crucial then that in seeking to change the practices of other men, pro-feminists also apply a critical lens towards their own practices and complicities. this reflects one of the foremost contradictions of engaging men; that it is simultaneously both necessary, and potentially perilous, for men to play an active role in preventing violence against women, as surmised by kate: “i think working with men and boys is vital, i think it’s absolutely important, i think it should be well resourced. however...you want it to be the right work with men and boys, and i think that’s always the, hesitation, that women, the women’s sector, tend to have.” some participants spoke of the significance of this tension in relation to resources, with a common principle for pro-feminist men’s organisations being to avoid taking funding away from women (pease, ). this becomes even more important given the aforementioned cuts to women’s services. however, some interviewees felt that there had not always been enough care taken in this regard in the uk. this also creates a dilemma for prevention work more broadly: “you have to provide services to survivors of violence against women. those services can’t be allowed to diminish, in order to provide funding for a prevention campaign. but if you don’t have a well-funded prevention campaign, you won’t diminish the need for the services.” (lee) edward described the situation as one of attempting to ‘square the circle’, but did propose some solutions: “apply for different funds, so that we’re not in direct competition. but that can be difficult…in an ideal world, what would happen i think is that we would raise the profile of gender equality across the board, and therefore in a sense you’d end up with a bigger cake. if you can end up with a bigger cake then we’re all at least going to win, more.” these tensions demonstrate the limitations of working to end men’s violence against women within the confines of a patriarchal, neoliberal state. it was thus suggested by some of the participants that pro-feminism must not become detached from its roots in social movement-building and activism, and the creation of radical social change. both appealing to and challenging men to create change within their experiences of the practice of engaging men, one of the biggest challenges that participants described was that of getting men and boys ‘in the room’ in the first place (casey et al., a). josé stated that: “i mean men don’t flock to this campaign, they’re not knocking our door down.” some pointed out that participation in prevention programmes should therefore sometimes be mandatory, such as in schools. however, it was also recognised that this can impact on participants’ willingness to engage. for this reason, interviewees such as marcus described the importance of a dialogic, participatory approach: “you don’t want them to be walking into your workshop thinking, i’m here because of a punishment. you want people to be open minded, and most of the time, we can, like change that round, but it involves, getting them to talk about it, rather than talking at them.” this touches upon another core contradiction in engaging men, between the need to communicate a message which participants will take on board and not feel alienated by, whilst at the same time honestly confronting the realities of men’s practices within patriarchy: “they need to know, and think about, some of the, the very negative stuff that goes on, but at the same time, we need to give them some, possibilities, some opportunities for, being involved actively themselves, and being part of the solution.” (edward) if men are not listening, then they are unlikely to change. however, the same is also true if they at no point feel challenged or uncomfortable by work which seeks to deconstruct their power and privilege. several interviewees talked about how they seek to articulate a positive vision to men and boys, which offers optimism and opportunities for action, whilst at the same time encouraging them to question how they might be implicated in patriarchal inequalities. it was deduced from the interviews that an impactful way of balancing these issues might be found through a triadic approach to engaging men (see figure ). this should include focusing on the construction of masculine norms (which may often serve as a useful starting point), and illuminating the connections between that and men’s varied practices and experiences, and the structures of patriarchy and their reproduction. this means helping men to make sense of the micro, meso and macro dynamics through which violence against women is perpetuated, and how they relate to their own lives, personally and politically. figure here some participants felt that this should include articulating empathy for the conditions in which men and boys live - especially when they too are experiencing forms of structural oppression - and for the difficulties of overcoming the constraints of rigidly-policed masculinity. it was suggested that whilst seeking to challenge men, it is necessary not to lose sight of the humanity in them - not least as a catalyst for change. edward discussed a comment he had heard within the field which had a lasting impact on him in this respect: “if you don’t like young men, you’re going to find it difficult to convince them to change.” work with men must therefore find a balance between the need to embrace and encourage men’s humanity, and illuminate and confront the inhumane ways in which they often behave towards others: “it’s one of the steps towards getting men and boys back to our true selves, back to where we’re humane, and connected, and loving, and caring, and so that’s why i think it’s really, really important.” (josé) several of the interviewees also raised concerns about appealing to men’s investments in masculinity in attempting to reach out to them, by deploying notions such as heroism, strength or ‘real men’ to convince men to change (salter, ). some participants felt that this risks reinforcing the norms of gender that are so entwined in the roots of men’s violence itself: “it’s tempting, to go down a route that, is comfortable for a certain sort of guy, that doesn’t actually challenge his basic concept of his own masculinity, and sees him almost as a sort of protector, of women. and you can sort of, you know...who’s not going to be against, which sort of mainstream guy like that is not going to be against violence against women?” (daniel) it was suggested that the more challenging, yet more sustainable goal for prevention work, may be to persuade men to disinvest from hierarchical codes of masculinity altogether, rather than simply proposing alternative formulations of them (flood, ). within some interviews there was also consideration of the value of attempting to recruit men on the basis of how they can ‘benefit’ from the dismantlement of patriarchy. some participants did argue that there are ways in which promoting gender justice can be seen as in men’s interests, such as by enabling healthier, more fulfilling relationships with others. however, it was also argued that self-interest is unlikely to present a sustainable path towards individual or social change (pease, ; flood, ): “i think it’s really important to take that to young people, but not by saying, as a man or as a boy, you benefit from this as well, or...you need to learn this because it helps you. i think, a lot of the time that does, it resonates with young people, but i would, i don’t think an approach of sort of gender equality, of the idea that, of something in it for men, you know, is helpful in the longer term.” (fred) men report a range of motivations for becoming involved in the prevention of violence against women (casey et al., b; peretz, ). however, the advocates interviewed here fundamentally appeared to share a drive founded in an ethical commitment to gender justice. cultivating such an ethos among men based upon a sense of solidarity with women may offer the most sustainable path towards individual and collective change (edwards, ). this question can also obscure the complicities of men in maintaining patriarchy because it structurally benefits them to do so - and risks centring a discussion about male domination on men’s needs. meanwhile, illuminating the complicities of both practitioners and participants in prevention work alike, may help to encourage men to understand their role in both perpetuating and potentially preventing violence against women (pease, ). the need for both individual and structural transformations another common view within the interviews was that efforts to engage men and boys are needed everywhere; not only in certain settings, or carried out only by certain individuals: “there’s so many opportunities to try and do something about it...it’s about trying to get people to realise that actually, you can raise these issues, you can talk about these issues, in almost any kind of context.”(andrew) some participants pointed out that this means that prevention work cannot only focus on young people - not least because of the contradictory messages they will continue to receive from the world around them: “they...tell their parents what they’ve been doing today, and quite enthusiastically say that, and it’s so easy for that to be dismissed out of hand with a single comment. and if that’s what happens, then you’ve killed that enthusiasm.” (lee) it was a shared view that formal and informal efforts to prevent violence against women need to be undertaken within every sphere, at every level of society, as part of a holistic approach to social change. this scale provides a major challenge for organisations working in this area - gareth described them as being relatively ‘diffuse’ as a result, and edward summed up this tension by asking: “you’ve got this huge canvas of things you could do, how do you decide, what’s the best thing to do, you know?” perhaps as a result of this, several of the participants felt that the focus of work with men is too often on changing individual attitudes, leaving the patriarchal structures that provide the foundations for men’s violence largely untouched (pease and flood, ; salter, ). carl argued that: “the ways we address men and boys, and the things that we try to shift, are kind of limited, and we don’t necessarily address the material or the structural dimensions of domestic...violence...in particular the kind of structural inequalities that are at the heart of those forms of violence.” this raises another key contradiction within this field - that on its own, engaging men is not actually enough. work with individual men and boys therefore needs to be accompanied by efforts to bring about broader structural change. these tasks are not mutually exclusive, given that social structures are themselves created, maintained and changed through the patterns of practice of multitudes of social actors. however, it was suggested by some interviewees that this work is sometimes currently taking relatively superficial forms, which have limited potential to create deep-rooted individual or structural change: “i guess i’m saying i’ve been really disappointed by, you know, sometimes when you get, things which seem very tokenistic…does it make any difference to people? um, i’m not sure that it does.” (gareth) participants therefore emphasised the need for preventative interventions to be coordinated both vertically and horizontally throughout an organisation or institution, in order to address the patriarchal inequalities embedded within it, as described by kate in relation to schools: “if we want to prevent violence against women in a school, it’s the same as society, you can’t just do one thing, you’ve got to be looking at the teachers, the policies, the curriculum, the, you know, everything.” similarly, harry argued that whilst media-based campaigns are important in initiating conversations, they need to be joined up with other, more in-depth forms of prevention work: “it’s not enough on its own, you know, there’s no escaping the need to talk to people”. several interviewees also discussed the importance of helping men to understand not only how different forms of violence are interconnected with one another and with the structures of patriarchy, but how these inequalities also intersect with and mutually reinforce other systems of oppression based around class, ‘race’, sexuality, and disability for example (peretz, ). carl remarked that: “there’s growing recognition now, in the engaging men and boys field, of the fact of...men and boys’ diverse lives, and a kind of taking up, at least in some simple sense, of the, kind of fundamental feminist recognition of intersectionality.” it was noted that this can complicate discussions within this work, because whilst all men receive some degree of power and privilege from patriarchy, there are also significant differences between men in relation to their positions within other systems of power (casey et al., ) men can therefore simultaneously dominate and be marginalised through these different systems, and it is important for this to be addressed when engaging with them, to recognise for example that structural privileges may make it easier for some men to speak out about violence against women than others. for instance, one participant pointed out that, as a white middle class man, going into a diverse room of young men and encouraging them to take action against gender-based violence without taking into account the different ways in which this message might be received and acted upon might receive a dismissive response. interviewees therefore underlined the importance of prevention work being relevant and relatable to its audience - and for practitioners to be reflexive about their social positioning in relation to different systems of power. making engaging men ‘mainstream’? an urgent question facing the participants was how prevention efforts can be broadened to engage many more men and boys in the uk. the following were commonly seen as being crucial first steps in this respect: entrenching learning about gender norms, inequalities and violences at all stages of education and beyond, such as workplace training; developing large-scale, impactful campaigns to start conversations across communities; and policy shifts which recognise the pervasive and gendered nature of men’s violences against women. however, this question also illustrates another core contradiction in engaging men, between the need to make it more ‘mainstream’, and the risk of it becoming politically diluted in the process. some of the interviewees spoke about tensions associated with the increased professionalisation of work with men, as it seeks governmental and institutional funding and support (messner, greenberg and peretz, ): “there’s a danger of it being depoliticised, of it being psychologised, of it increasingly having a...kind of soft focus on individual men’s attitudes, rather than i think a more radical social justice orientated focus.” (carl) similarly, many participants acknowledged the importance of ongoing evaluation, to understand and demonstrate how preventative change is being achieved. however, they also discussed how challenging it can be to show the extent to which prevention ‘works’ according to narrow neoliberal definitions. in the words of ian, “preventative work is hard to quantify, in terms of its impact”. this was also described by kate: “primary prevention is always really under-prioritised…it’s one of those things that’s like, really important, but incredibly difficult to measure, like incredibly difficult, almost impossible to measure and evaluate, and that’s not the funding context that we live in. we don’t live in a world where people are happy to give you money, for something you can’t prove at the end.” some interviewees suggested that the lack of resources or political support for prevention also constrains opportunities for instigating innovative and creative approaches, which were seen as vital for its development. it was stressed that effective prevention is long term, multifaceted, in-depth work which needs to be carefully strategised and sustained, yet this rarely fits with the prioritisations of the institutions and organisations in which it needs to be implemented. an additional bearing mentioned here was the impact of shifts in the political landscape, such as britain leaving the european union, an institution which edward felt “has always been a significant player in terms of gender equality.” turbulences in the political climate accentuated another point made by several interviewees, about the importance of engaging men becoming more sustainable. it was discussed that violence prevention organisations and projects often come and go within a short space of time; in the words of harry, “the good work doesn’t always last very long”. with many organisations being significantly reliant on volunteers or precarious staff, it was described as difficult to plan ahead or retain commitment over time: “to keep people on board as volunteers in any charity, is difficult, and people’s ability to be part of that change is…just through circumstance, not necessarily through lack of interest or whatever. but then there is also the element of keeping the interest, so that’s a massive thing, as to how, how do we manage our volunteers effectively, and keep them all on board.”(lee) a crucial next step for building work with men for some participants therefore meant consolidating a more resilient base from which to grow. conclusion this research has found that there is mounting momentum for engaging men and boys as part of efforts to prevent men’s violence against women in the uk. however, whilst political interest and initiatives in this area are both growing, such work remains localised and fragmented. the ongoing neoliberal austerity agenda, ‘gender-neutral’ framings of abuse, and a lack of ambition for prevention among policymakers, all appear to be seriously inhibiting efforts to prevent gender-based violence in the uk. engaging men also contains a number of political contradictions, and if these go unaddressed, then there are dangers that it could be counterproductive. for example, in terms of its potential to deradicalise, delegitimise or colonise feminist activism - or for some of the same patriarchal inequities it seeks to end to be reproduced within it. it is therefore imperative not to lose sight of the fundamental goal of engaging men: to support the cultivation of feminist transformations across society. the interviews suggested that rather than seeking to ‘solve’ its contradictions, an effective approach may be one based around dialectically developing pro-feminist equilibriums within them. if such balances can be found, then work with men has the potential to make an important contribution towards preventing men’s violence against women in the uk and beyond. references bogner, a., littig, b., and menz, w. 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( ) violence against women: criminological perspectives on men's violences. abingdon: routledge. women’s aid ( ) why we need to save our services: women’s aid data report on specialist domestic violence services in england. bristol: women’s aid federation of england. wright, c., and cowburn, m. ( ) what's happening in men's work in the uk? reflections on policies and processes, in: ruspini e., hearn, j., pease, b. et al. (eds.) men and masculinities around the world: transforming men's practices. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. - . funding details this work was supported by the economic and social research council under grant number . the author declares that there is no conflict of interest. acknowledgements the author would like to thank all of the interviewees who took part in the study; professor nicole westmarland for her supervision throughout the research project; and the reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. traditional medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward? r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n drug discovery today �volume , number �june reviews traditional medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward? bhushan patwardhan , and raghunath anant mashelkar interdisciplinary school of health sciences, university of pune, pune , india national chemical laboratory, pune , india drug discovery strategies based on natural products and traditional medicines are re-emerging as attractive options. we suggest that drug discovery and development need not always be confined to new molecular entities. rationally designed, carefully standardized, synergistic traditional herbal formulations and botanical drug products with robust scientific evidence can also be alternatives. a reverse pharmacology approach, inspired by traditional medicine and ayurveda, can offer a smart strategy for new drug candidates to facilitate discovery process and also for the development of rational synergistic botanical formulations. drug discovery scenario drug discovery is no longer a game of chance or just limited to the availability of new technology. better understanding of various approaches and key learning from the past with the appropriate strategy for the future is essential to make a significant difference [ ]. during the past few years a large number of approved new drug applications have originated from the biotechnology industry and analysts expect a continuation of pharmaceutical-biotechnology alliances to help expand pipelines [ ]. similarly, natural products have contributed nearly half of all small molecules approved in this decade. it has been suggested that the current drug discovery approach of finding ‘new entity drugs’, if shifted to ‘combining existing agents’ may be helpful. therefore natural product drug discovery based on ethnopharmacology and traditional medicines may also be considered as attractive strategic options [ ]. seeking innovative paradigms the age of the blockbuster drugs seem to have become a distant dream [ ]. for instance, in only new molecular entities were approved by us fda and so few are anticipated to become blockbus- ters. the usual distinctions drawn between breakthrough and me- too drugs may not be very relevant today [ ]. despite very stringent and demanding regulatory processes, postapproval or postmarket- please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . corresponding author: patwardhan, b. (bhushan@unipune.ernet.in), (bhushan.patwardhan@manipalu.com), mashelkar, r.a. (ram@ncl.res.in) current address: manipal education, bangalore , india. - / /$ - see front matter � elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. doi: . /j.drudis. . . ing withdrawal of new drugs continues. it is argued that the safety of new agents cannot be known with certainty until a drug has been in the market for many years [ ]. this has led to a re-examination of the process of drug regulation and increased concern that the current process is inadequate for the protection of public health [ ]. the united states food and drug administration (us fda)’s drug watch and drug advisory committee briefings on the new antic- oagulant ximelagatran from astrazeneca, the cox ii inhibitor, vioxx from merck and the case of the cancer vaccine provenge approval of dendreon are typically indicative [ , ]. societal expectations about drug safety and efficacy are rising while r&d productivity in the pharmaceutical industry is falling. the critical path initiative of fda was intended to modernize drug development by incorporating recent scientific advances, shows a proactive policy approach to enhance innovation opportunities in a public/private partnership model [ ]. we suggest that tradi- tional medicine may offer better routes to the discovery, devel- opment and delivery of new drugs with enhanced performance in terms of cost, safety and efficacy. to this end, we believe that the basic principles, experiential wisdom, holistic approach and sys- tematic database of ayurveda (box and fig. ) may offer useful bioprospecting tools and an efficient discovery engine [ ]. rediscovering history the history of medicine reveals that most of the early discoveries resulted from either serendipity or folklore approaches, often involving poisonous sources and not really from traditional to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), www.drugdiscoverytoday.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . mailto:bhushan@unipune.ernet.in mailto:bhushan.patwardhan@manipalu.com mailto:ram@ncl.res.in http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . reviews drug discovery today �volume , number �june drudis- ; no of pages box ayurveda – the knowledge of life � ayurveda is one of the oldest still extant, health traditions in the world. originating in india ayurveda is based on sankhya philosophy, which means ‘rational enquiry into the nature of the truth’. sanskrit meaning of ayu is life and veda is knowledge or science. � charak samhita ( bc) and sushrut samhita ( ad) are the main classics. ayurveda materia medica give detailed descriptions of over herbs and , formulations. madhav nidan ( ad) a diagnostic classic provides over signs and symptoms. � life in ayurveda is conceived as the union of body, senses, mind and soul. the concept of prakriti or human constitution plays a central role in understanding health and disease in ayurveda, which is similar to modern pharmacogenomics. � with over , registered ayurveda practitioners, government of india department of ayush (ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy) has responsibility to regulate quality, education and practice. r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n medicines. the mass screening of plants in the search for new leads or drugs is vastly expensive and inefficient. yet, traditional knowledge based bioprospecting offered better leads for the treat- ment of aids and cancer. it is estimated that over new natural product-based leads are in clinical development [ ]. about % please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . figure ayurveda: overview of basic principles and therapeutics. www.drugdiscoverytoday.com of anticancer and % of anti-infective drugs approved from to could be traced to natural origins [ ]. a multidisciplinary approach combining natural product diversity with total, com- binatorial synthetic and biosynthesis may provide an apt solution to the current innovation quandary [ ]. combinatorial chemistry approaches based on natural products from traditional medicine are being used to create screening libraries that closely resemble drug-like compounds [ ]. since most of these compounds are part of routinely used traditional medicines, their tolerance and safety are relatively better known than other synthetic chemical entities entering first-in-human studies [ ]. for instance, piramal life sciences ltd., mumbai has a unique and diverse library of over natural product extracts from indian medicinal plants inherited from the hoechst research center. their first lead, npb- - , has demonstrated efficacy in various cellular and animal models, and is currently undergoing human clinical trials for chronic myeloid leukemia. the second lead, nps , is being developed for the treatment of chronic inflammatory disorders including rheumatoid arthritis. the third lead, nph , has been developed as a topical for- mulation with good antidermatophyte activity against a panel of microorganisms [ ]. thus, similar to microbiological sources, traditional medicine-based bioprospecting may offer promising new leads with compounds generally recognized as safe [ ]. a large number of promising lead molecules that have come out of ayurveda include rauwolfia alkaloids for hypertension, psoralens to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . drug discovery today �volume , number �june reviews drudis- ; no of pages r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n for vitiligo, holarrhena alkaloids for amoebiasis, guggulsterons as hypolipidemic agents, mucuna pruriens for parkinson’s disease, piperidines as bioavailability enhancers, baccosides for mental retention, picrosides for hepatic protection, phyllanthins as anti- virals, curcumines for inflammation, withanolides and many other steroidal lactones and glycosides as immunomodulators [ ]. there is growing evidence to show that old molecules are finding new applications through a better understanding of tradi- tional knowledge and clinical observations. for instance, forskolin has been revisited as adenylate cyclase activator, to treat condi- tions including obesity and atherosclerosis [ ]. similarly, anti- microbial berberine alkaloids are being investigated in dyslipidemia with a mechanism different from statins [ ]. reverse pharmacology the traditional knowledge-inspired reverse pharmacology described here relates to reversing the routine ‘laboratory-to-clinic’ progress to ‘clinics-to-laboratories’ [ ]. earlier, the term reverse pharmacology has been used in relation to ligand-independent orphan functions that can modulate well-defined drug targets, but this review does not cover such aspects [ ]. reverse pharmacology is defined here as a rigorous scientific approach of integrating documented clinical experiences and experiential observations into leads by transdisciplinary exploratory studies and further developing these into drug candidates or formulations through robust preclinical and clinical research [ ]. in this process ‘safety’ remains the most important starting point and the efficacy becomes a matter of validation. the novelty of this approach is the combination of living traditional knowledge such as ayurveda and the application of modern technology and processes to pro- vide better and safer leads. sir ram nath chopra and gananath sen laid the foundation of reverse pharmacology of medicinal plants by pursuing the clini- cally documented effects of ayurvedic drugs [ ]. rauwolfia serpentina benth, was a major discovery via this approach. sen and bose were able to convincingly demonstrate the antihyper- tensive and tranquillizing effects of the plant and also observed unique side effects such as depression, extra pyramidal syn- dromes, gynecomastia among others [ ]. this effort led to a watershed for new antidepressants, anti-parkinson’s drugs and prolactin-reducing drugs [ ]. reserpine is an example of an antihypertensive alkaloid from rauwolfia that became available from such an approach. some promising work was undertaken almost two to three decades ago through a joint drug research program between the indian council of medical research (icmr) and the council for scientific and industrial research (csir) of the government of india. the cholesterol-lowering drug, guggulipid, was developed from commiphora mukul, taking the lead from ayurveda [ ]. the drug controller general of india (dcgi) approved this drug for marketing in . guggulipid is being manufactured and mar- keted by cipla pharmaceuticals limited, but the limited availabil- ity of authentic raw material has remained a limiting factor for its widespread use. a memory enhancer developed from bacopa mon- nieri by the central drug research institute, lucknow is also licensed and marketed. regrettably, the great potential of such approaches has not been fully explored to create globally compe- titive products. please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . in an attempt to pull industry and academia together to explore the potential of herbal drug development, csir, under the national network project known as new millennium indian tech- nology leadership initiative (nmitli), has instigated drug devel- opment projects on psoriasis, osteoarthritis, hepatitis and diabetes [ ]. to this end, the icmr has recently established an advanced center of reverse pharmacology with initial focus on malaria, sarcopenia and cognitive decline. we present here a few case studies where a reverse pharmacology approach has been used to expedite the drug development process. psoriasis psoriasis is one of the most common dermatological diseases, affecting approximately % of the world population with no preventive or curative therapy. under the nmitli project, lupin limited in india undertook the development of a single plant- based oral formulation adopting a reverse pharmacology approach [ ]. the botanical drug product (desoris) is an extract of a single plant that effectively modulates cellular function, leading to an improvement in psoriatic lesions [ ]. extensive studies led to the filing of an investigational new drug (ind) application in india. this product has been developed to conform to fda guidelines for botanical drug products and dcgi norms on new drug develop- ment. currently, this product is undergoing phase clinical trials across different centers in india. vaccine adjuvant despite centuries of vaccine use, still alum salts remain universal vaccine adjuvants licensed for human use. they have limitations, however, in engaging cellular immunity. various immunostimu- lants from natural and synthetic origin are being studied either to replace or complement alum salts in vaccine formulations [ ]. a project to develop herbal vaccine adjuvants using a reverse phar- macology approach based on ayurveda and other studies [ , ] has been supported by the department of science and technology (dst) of india and was undertaken by the interdisciplinary school of health sciences, university of pune with the serum institute of india as an industrial partner. the project used flow cytometry to monitor the effects of fractions on antigen-specific protective immunity and test materials were screened using in vivo potency assays for pertussis or diphtheria. these models are routinely used in potency testing of vaccines [ , ]. within three years, this project identified several semi-pure leads with considerable effi- cacy with respect to polysaccharide, toxoid and recombinant groups of vaccines. further, these leads were found to modulate t-helper cell immunity, which is crucial for efficient cellular and humoral immunity. a detailed safety profile of one of the leads has been established, which is found to be over times more potent than its effective preclinical immunomodulatory dose. traditional herbal formulations we suggest that drug discovery need not be always confined to the discovery of a single molecule. many analysts believe that the current ‘one drug fits all’ approach may be unsustainable in the future. the growing interest in polypill concept is indicative of the need to collectively address multiple targets, risk factors or symptoms [ ]. in the management of polygenic syndromes and conditions there is renewed interest in multi-ingredient to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), www.drugdiscoverytoday.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . reviews drug discovery today �volume , number �june drudis- ; no of pages r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n synergistic formulations [ ]. we suggest that rationally designed polyherbal formulations also could be explored as an option for multitarget therapeutic and prophylactic applications. both tcm and ayurveda, over thousands of years have developed various practical theories to create polyherbal formulations in which multiple agents contained in one formula act synergisti- cally [ ]. development of standardized, synergistic, safe and effective traditional herbal formulations with robust scientific evidence can also offer faster and more economical alternatives. for instance, ayurvedic texts include thousands of single or polyher- bal formulations [ ]. these have been rationally designed and have been in therapeutic use for many years. sufficient pharma- coepidemiological evidence, based on actual clinical use, can be generated to support their safety and efficacy [ ]. systematic data mining of the existing formulations’ huge database can certainly help the drug discovery processes to identify safe candidates and synergistic formulations. the fda and a few other agencies have come up with practical guidelines for botanical ‘drug’ development [ ]. a botanical drug product often has unique features and may include complex mixtures with as yet unknown active ingredients some botanical drugs, including cascara, psyllium and senna, are included in the over-the-counter drug review. no botanical products are, how- ever, currently approved or marketed as prescription drugs. the fda recognizes that prior human experience with botanical products may be documented in many different forms and sources, some of which may not meet the quality standards of modern scientific testing. the fda, maintains, however, the same standards for safety and efficacy for marketing approval whether it is a botanical-sourced product or a purified chemical. the botanical guidance simply recommends the use of different types of data for preliminary safety consideration. it also con- siders large quantities of mostly anecdotal human data in place of well-controlled animal studies and human trials in an ind [ ]. in such a situation, traditional medicine data remains very important. traditional herbal formulations could follow such regulatory guidance to create scientific evidence base with robust chemistry, manufacturing and controls. department of ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha, homeopathy (ayush) in india has recently estab- lished a research center at the university of mississippi, oxford, ms, usa to facilitate scientific investigations on indian herbal drugs. such efforts should help improve quality assurance, enhan- cing the chance of regulatory approvals and improving the accep- tance of botanical drug products and formulations. thus, if safe and effective herbal formulations are developed in accordance with stringent regulatory guidelines on a par with any modern drug, we hope that the conventional skepticism against herbals may slowly wane. issues related to the appropriateness of conventional biomedical and clinical models for evaluating effi- cacy of traditional medicine remain, however, very crucial. a holistic approach based on systems biology seems much more suited to study therapeutic efficacy and pharmacodynamics of traditional medicine-based drug development [ ]. it can also be argued that instead of randomized controlled trials, strategies of pragmatic clinical trials may be better suited for traditional medicine-inspired reverse pharmacology approaches [ ]. we pre- please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . www.drugdiscoverytoday.com sent here two case studies where herbal formulations were success- fully developed using such strategies. nmitli scheme the osteoarthritis herbal drug development project under the nmitli scheme involved a network of national research insti- tutions, modern medicine hospitals and pharmaceutical indus- tries from india (fig. ). following literature search [ ] and several rounds of national level consultations with ayurvedic physicians and scholars, judiciously short-listed botanical drugs entered a parallel track of animal pharmacology and open label observa- tional studies by clinicians. the project used a traditional knowl- edge-guided platform where the base formulation was optimized with additional ingredients to obtain desired therapeutic activ- ities. all the formulations were manufactured under good man- ufacturing practices in accordance using fda guidance to industry for botanical drugs. the preclinical evaluation was designed on the basis of a systems approach, wherein the assay battery involved targets relevant to inflammation, pain, immunomodulation and chondroprotection in human explant models of oa cartilage damage [ ]. this led to the design a few variants of synergistic polyherbal formulations that were found to be safe and devoid of any genotoxicity or mutagenic activity. the short-listed formula- tions entered a series of randomized clinical trials together with known drugs, glucosamine and celecoxib, for comparison. finally the best formulation was selected that led to one indian and one patent cooperation treaty (pct) applications. a dossier of neces- sary data required for possible regulatory submissions was also prepared [ , ]. thus, this project was completed in five years with an expenditure of about million us dollars. currently, csir is in the process of identifying a suitable industrial partner for further development, optimization, manufacturing, registration and marketing. tanga project in tanzania, the tanga aids working group (tawg) has used indigenous knowledge (ik) in an attempt to alleviate suffering from hiv/aids. the group has treated over aids patients with herbs prescribed by local healers. the impact has been most significant in reducing opportunistic diseases accompany- ing hiv infection. the tanga regional hospital, a modern medicine facility, has been involved in testing patients for hiv, treating them and providing counseling. with support from the world bank’s indigenous knowledge for development program, tawg has organized community-to-community exchanges, involving their healers, people living with aids and staff working with patients to provide medical care and alternative income generating opportunities, in exchange of ik with other communities in tanzania [ ]. such experiences are also important in scientific or rational drug discovery process. a crucial challenge is to lever local and global knowledge systems effectively to resolve development challenges. to facilitate this process, the global research alliance (gra) and the world bank have initiated a partnership between the tawg and the us national institutes of health to cooperate on the scientific validation of the efficacy of these herbal treatments. during the recent launch of the global indigenous knowledge and innovation partnership (gikip) in new york, the tanga project to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . drug discovery today �volume , number �june reviews drudis- ; no of pages figure nmitli osteoarthritis project: national institutional network, steps and responsibilities. r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n was showcased prominently (http://www.research-alliance.net/ gikip_launched.html). future perspectives drug discovery and development is an extremely complex, tech- nology and capital-intensive process that is facing major chal- please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . lenges with the current target rich–lead poor situation. a major cause of attrition in drug discovery is due to toxicity in human trials and it is known that drugs with novel mechanisms have higher attrition rates. better validated preclinical targets with proof-of-concept of better efficacy and safety of drugs can, how- ever, mitigate such attrition risks. we propose that the reverse to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), www.drugdiscoverytoday.com http://www.research-alliance.net/gikip_launched.html http://www.research-alliance.net/gikip_launched.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . reviews drug discovery today �volume , number �june drudis- ; no of pages r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n pharmacology approach can be useful in this process and help in reducing failure rates [ ]. seeking new synergistic combinations and improvements in bioavailability are innovative strategies, that can play a significant role in drug development. for instance, in animal studies, a combination of artemisinin derivative and curcumin has been reported to show a synergistic interaction in killing plasmodium falciparum leading effectively to total survival [ ]. there have been several studies on piperine showing its combination improved bioavailability of synthetic drugs such as propranolol, theophylline and rifampicin. the clue for piperine as a bioenhan- cer came from ayurveda [ ]. such bioavailability enhancing activity may have numerous advantages in drug development including reduction in dose, toxicity and treatment costs. herbalome is an ambitious project from china that is expected to undertake high-throughput screening, toxicity testing and clinical trials to identify active compounds and toxic contami- nants in popular recipes to identify scores of drug candidates [ ]. it is believed that drugs based on traditional medicine may provide a cost-effective alternative to protein-based or other biotech-based expensive therapeutics [ ]. multisite mechanisms of action of herbal preparations from the crude extracts may offer greater chances for success where conventional single-site agents have been disappointing. single drugs, however, may not be an optimal way to treat a patient, with so many characteristics that are so individual, associated, of course with the challenges of genetic diversity. genome-wide functional screening against disease targets may be the practical approach. combining ayurveda and functional genomics in a systems biology scenario may reveal the pathway analysis of crude and active components [ ]. pharmacogenomics is now significantly influencing drug discovery and genotyping is recommended for drugs that are metabolized by enzymes whose genes have inactivating polymorphisms [ ]. efforts to correlate genotype and phenotype-based traditional methodology of clas- sifying humans into three major prakriti types or constitutions described in ayurveda have opened an exciting scientific chapter and will help the progress of individualized medicine approaches [ , ]. the issue of protecting intellectual property rights poses special challenges in such approaches based on natural resources. the traditional knowledge digital library (tkdl) developed by csir and ayush offer unique technologies (http://www.tkdl.res.in/). the tkdl has been able to provide a scientific classification structure to traditional knowledge, resulting in an altogether new resource classification system. the issues relating to patenting of new products that rely on old knowledge are also important. the european patent office has been recently given access to the tkdl database so that patent applications relying on indian traditional remedies can be blocked at an early stage. similar arrangements with the us patent office and others are also under- way. another ambitious project named ayusoft involves systems standardization for an integrated, intelligent and communicative decision support system (http://ayusoft.cdac.in/). ayusoft has converted classical ayurvedic textual knowledge into comprehen- sive, authentic, intelligent and interactive repositories with com- plex analytical tools that can be used as a powerful discovery please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . www.drugdiscoverytoday.com resource [ ]. a systematic medicinal plants database also remains very crucial and important tool for bioprospecting. napralert – a relational database of natural products developed by the uni- versity of illinois at chicago (http://www.napralert.org/) and the online encyclopedia of indian medicinal plants developed by the foundation for revitalisation of local health traditions (frlht) now known as indian institute of ayurveda and integrative med- icine (iiaim), bangalore, india (http://www.frlht.org.in/) are two most available valuable resources. the world health organization’s commission on intellectual property and innovation in public health has also recognized the promise and role of traditional medicine in drug develop- ment for affordable health solutions [ ]. many countries for example india, china, korea, malaysia, brazil, south africa, australia and the like are becoming increasingly aware of the value of their traditional knowledge. on the other hand, the global pharmaceutical industry is looking for innovative solu- tions to expedite the discovery process. therefore, innovative approaches inspired by traditional knowledge like ayurveda may aptly occupy this niche strategy to expedite drug discovery and development process especially in the existing global economic environment. admittedly, despite the vast potential and possibilities, as of now, very few success stories have emerged from ayurveda. this may be because most of the work in this field has remained within the clinics of traditional practitioners or confined to academic research laboratories and not taken seriously by industries that are strong in research and development. therefore, path-breaking initiatives like nmitli in india are crucially important. the gov- ernment of india’s golden triangle project integrating biomedi- cine, modern sciences and traditional medicine is indicative of a trend where traditional sciences like ayurveda are increasingly embracing the scientific evidence-base and the spirit of robust research [ ]. finally, after this discussion of traditional medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery, we return to the question posed in the title: can ayurveda show the way forward? we can offer an assertive answer, albeit with caveats. great traditions like ayur- veda and tcm certainly offer sound rationale, valuable experien- tial wisdom and a large database of botanical resources. for several reasons, researchers involved in the modern drug discovery have started revisiting ancient traditional knowledge and ethnophar- macology, especially to develop new, effective synergistic drug combinations for management of difficult to treat conditions like cancer and dementia. many promising leads like curcumins, with- anoloides and the like offer a great hope, and need to be taken to their logical conclusions. a paradigm shift in innovation strategy is needed, involving, among other things, revisiting the vast possibilities that the ayurveda and other global traditional knowl- edge bases offer. a strong conduit between ayurveda, academia and industry coupled with robust evidence-based research and mutually respected public private partnership is possibly the right way forward. conflict of interests statement ram was the former director general of csir, which, during his tenure, made major investments in drug discovery programs, that used the reverse pharmacology-based approach, involving several to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), http://www.tkdl.res.in/ http://ayusoft.cdac.in/ http://www.napralert.org/ http://www.frlht.org.in/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . drug discovery today �volume , number �june reviews drudis- ; no of pages r e v ie w s � p o s t s c r e e n public–private partnerships. further, csir, during ram’s tenure, financially supported and managed the national program nmi- tli, that in turn supported osteoarthritis and psoriasis research referred to in this article. ram is the president of gra and one of the founding members of gikip that has championed the tanga project. ram is also a member of the board of directors as well as a member of the scientific advisory board of piramal life science, which has been referred to in this manuscript. ram is also a member of the board of directors of reliance geneme- dix, a pharmaceutical company with business in multiceutics. bp has been the principal investigator of nmitli supported osteoar- thritis and vaccine adjuvant and ayusoft projects referred to in this manuscript. bp is also honorary scientific advisor to frlht/ iiaim that has been referred here. both the authors state that they do not have any competing financial interests related to this article. please cite this article in press as: patwardhan, b. traditional medicine-inspired approaches doi: . /j.drudis. . . acknowledgements we thank the government of india’s department of ayush, csir, icmr, dst, dbt and our colleagues from the nmitli herbal drug project. we also thank all those who provided valuable informa- tion and advice during preparation of this review. we specially mention dr ashok vaidya for giving better insights into reverse pharmacology and drs g. padmanaban, darshan shankar, mukund chorghade, kalpana joshi, manish gautam, vijay chau- han, narendra bhatt, alex hankey, gerry bodeker, arvind chopra and pralhad patki for valuable inputs. we thank vaidya girish tillu, vaidya g.g. gangadharan and prashant khairnar for help in creating the ayurveda overview thematic diagram. we also grate- fully thank drs sreedhar swamy of lupin research center and dba narayana of hindustan unilever research center for crucial com- ments and suggestions. special thanks to dr alan harvey for crucial comments and help in improving the review. references schmid, e.f. and smith, d.a. 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( ) ayurveda and ecam: a closer connection. evid. complement. altern. med. , – to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward?, drug discov today ( ), http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/studies/traditional_medicine/en/index.html http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/studies/traditional_medicine/en/index.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drudis. . . 	traditional medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery: can ayurveda show the way forward? 	drug discovery scenario 	seeking innovative paradigms 	rediscovering history 	reverse pharmacology 	psoriasis 	vaccine adjuvant 	traditional herbal formulations 	nmitli scheme 	tanga project 	future perspectives 	conflict of interests statement 	acknowledgements 	references hostility, harassment, and violence: on the limits of ‘free speech’ for minority feminist scholars all rights reserved ©, robyn bourgeois ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice hostility, harassment, and violence: on the limits of ‘free speech’ for minority feminist scholars robyn bourgeois volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article bourgeois, r. ( ). hostility, harassment, and violence: on the limits of ‘free speech’ for minority feminist scholars. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article en suivant la riche tradition des féministes et des auteures autochtones et noires, cet article fait usage du récit pour explorer les limites de la liberté d’expression dans le milieu universitaire pour les érudites féministes appartenant à des groupes socialement marginalisés et, en particulier, les féministes autochtones. par le biais de l’auto-ethnographie, j’expose les façons dont la liberté d’expression a été utilisée comme une arme à mon encontre par des personnes ayant le pouvoir de me réduire au silence et de supprimer ma liberté d’expression. de plus, j’attire l’attention sur les façons dont cela a été fait à mon égard afin de garantir la liberté d’expression de personnes dominantes et puissantes. cet article se conclut par des recommandations pour briser cette violence et mieux soutenir les universitaires féministes issues de groupes minoritaires. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal
 issue . / special section: speaking freely and freedom of speech research hostility, harassment, and violence: on the limits of  ‘free speech’ for minority feminist scholars robyn  bourgeois  is  a  mixed­race  nêhiyaw  iskwew  (cree woman) currently residing in haudenosaunee/ anishinaabe territory. she is an associate professor in  the centre for women’s and gender studies at brock  university where her work focuses on violence against  indigenous  women  and  girls  and  other  forms  of  gender­based violence. abstract: following the rich tradition of indigenous  and black feminists and authors, this article makes use  of  storytelling  to  explore  the  limits  of  freedom  of  speech in the academy for feminist scholars belonging  to socially marginalized groups and, particularly, indi­ genous feminist scholars. rough autoethnography, i  expose  the  ways  that  freedom  of  speech  was  been  weaponized against me by people with power  to  si­ lence and suppress my freedom of speech. moreover, i  draw attention to the ways this has been done to me  in  order  to  secure  the  freedom  of  speech  of  other  dominant and powerful people. is paper concludes  with some recommendations about disrupting this vi­ olence  and  better  supporting  feminist  scholars  from  minority groups.     keywords: indigenous feminism, power, privilege, si­ lencing,  suppresssion,  violence  in  the  academy,  weaponizing freedom of speech in the aftermath of one of canada’s deadliest mass shootings by a civilian  this past  spring,  i dared  to  publicly name this violence as the inevitable outcome  of white heteropatriarchy—and paid the price. on april  th and  th,  , a lone white man trav­ elled between rural communities in western nova sco­ tia  in  a  replica  police  car  and  murdered    people  before being shot and killed by police during a brief  confrontation. as someone who lived for several years  in  nova  scotia—or  more  appropriately,  mi’kmaw’ki,  as  the  local  indigenous peoples  refer  to  this  territory —and also as an indigenous feminist scholar whose ca­ reer has focused on gender­based violence, i followed  the  developments  of  this  case  intently.  while  the  gendered  and  racialized  aspects  of  this  violence  were  painfully  evident  for me,  they were  largely being  ig­ nored  in mainstream canada media; and after many  frustrating days of not seeing such analyses included in  this  coverage,  i  successfully  pitched  an  article  to  the  scholarly  online  media  site  e  conversation,  which  was published on   april,  . titled “let’s call the  nova scotia mass shooting what it is: white male ter­ rorism,”  this  article  drew  attention  to  the  regularity  with which white males have committed mass murders  in canada and explained this violent propensity as be­ ing  rooted  in whiteness and heteropatriarchy.  in  line  with e  conversation's commitment to the free flow  of information, the article was republished on multiple  sites and, by the end of april, had been read in excess  of  ,  times. by comparison, the most frequently  read e conversation article from my institution up to  that point had been read  ,  times. e response from white men was immediate and vi­ cious:  within  hours  of  the  article  being  published,  i  was  inundated  with  emails  from  angry  white  men —and i know this because most of them claimed their  white masculinity  in  their  responses. even after  i  re­ moved the direct contact option through e conversa­ atlantis journal
 issue . / tion  website,  they  hunted  me  down,  like  the  mass  murderers  i had written about, on email and social  media  to  attack  me.  ey  accused  me  of  misandry  and  racism  against  white  people  and  dismissed  my  knowledge, my training, and my ability to conduct re­ search. ey claimed i didn’t know what i was talking  about and mansplained to me why i was wrong in my  thinking, never with any meaningful evidence to sup­ port these claims. ey referred to me as a disgusting  human being, both in terms of my ideas and my looks —because, of course, my looks have everything to do  with reinforcing heteropatriarchy and nothing to do  with my ability  to  theorize  and conduct  research.  i  mentioned my son in the article and was told multiple  times  that  i  was  an  inadequate  mother  who  would  scar  my  son  for  life.  ese  responses  also  included  threats of violence which scared me so much that i  walked  my  neighborhood  with  a  pocket  knife  for  weeks  after  publication.  while  some  of  these  men  owned  their  hate  by  emailing  from  their  personal  email accounts and signing off with their full names,  others  created  anonymous    accounts  to  hide  their  identity behind their hate.  as  if  these  personal  attacks  weren’t  enough,  these  angry white men reached out  to my colleagues and  supervisors  at brock university. a white male com­ munity researcher documenting acts of terrorism in­ volving  muslim  men  repeatedly  emailed  me  and  many of my colleagues demanding i respond to his is­ lamaphobic research, which he claimed disputed my  arguments about white male terrorism. some of the  men who harassed me indicated that they had emailed  my dean and the president of our university to de­ mand my immediate dismissal. fortunately, my dean  was entirely supportive and a large contingent of my  colleagues signed a letter of support sent to our pres­ ident. while i am so grateful for this support, it does­ n’t negate the violence of these attempts to have me  fired  for  voicing  my  well­founded  and  well­docu­ mented opinion, nor the trauma of being targeted for  hostility,  harassment,  and  threats  of  violence  for  voicing my perspective on systematic privilege and vi­ olence. neither does it negate the regularity which i experi­ ence attacks  for voicing my opinions:  as  an  indige­ nous feminist scholar of mixed­race ancestry (nêhiyaw  (cree) and white settler) living and working in colo­ nial canada, i have rarely experienced the freedom of  speech nor the protection of my freedom of speech en­ joyed by other academics, especially those belonging to  dominant social groups. roughout my scholarly ca­ reer, which has focused on naming, confronting, and  disrupting dominant social systems of oppression and  their violence, my perspectives are regularly met with  hostility, harassment, and violence. i am regularly por­ trayed as a troublemaker whose knowledge is deemed  too  emotional,  inherently  biased,  and  inferior  and,  consequently, dismissed. while this suppression has in­ cluded violence and threats to my employment, it also  regularly includes microaggressions directed at under­ mining  my  knowledge,  my  capacity  for  creating  knowledge, and my right to share this knowledge with  others. as a result, i rarely experience the level of insti­ tutional support directed at protecting my freedom of  speech—and specifically my freedom to name, expose,  and dismantle power, privilege, and violence—as i did  from brock university in the aftermath of my article in  e conversation. using autobiographical storytelling, this current article  is organized around ten stories demonstrating lack of  freedom of speech i’ve experienced as an indigenous  feminist scholar in western colonial academia and bey­ ond. my purpose in telling these stories  is to expose  the  range of  tactics used by people with power  and  privilege to silence and suppress the knowledge of mar­ ginalized  people,  especially  when  those  perspectives  challenge this power and privilege. in other words, i  demonstrate  how  freedom  of  speech  is  weaponized  against  scholars  from socially marginalized groups  in  support of systems of social and individual power and  privilege. i employ this approach because storytelling is  a fundamental component of nêhiyawiwan (cree cul­ ture) and, thus, reflects our ways of knowing and do­ ing. while dismissed as biased within western colonial  knowledge  systems  that  falsely  claim  objectivity,  my  nation treats these stories as authentic and important  knowledge worthy of consideration. indeed, this is the  same  for  many  other  indigenous  nations  and  storytelling  is  considered  an  essential  component  of  indigenous methodologies and pedagogies (archibald  ; kovatch  ; smith  ).  atlantis journal
 issue . / moreover, autobiographical storytelling has frequently  been  employed  by  indigenous  (campbell  [ ]  ; elliot  ; maracle [ ]  ) and black  (gay  ,  ; hooks  ; lorde  ) women  writers  in  unpacking  and  articulating  their  experi­ ences with power, privilege, and violence. while  re­ lated to our ways of knowing and doing within the  indigenous context, indigenous women’s use of auto­ biographical  storytelling  in print, argues cree/métis  feminist literary scholar emma larocque ( ), has  also  been  shaped  by  racism,  colonialism,  and  white  supremacy. in response  to white audiences who “re­ sorted to racist techniques of psychologically labelling  and  blaming”  indigenous  writers  for  being  bitter,  emotionally  incapacitated,  militant,  and  biased,  ca­ nadian  publishers  have  refused  to  publish  anything  they considered indigenous “protest literature”—writ­ ing that was perceived as “blustering and bludgeoning  [canadian]  society”  (larocque  , xvii). accord­ ing to larocque, “we were directed to tell our ‘stories’  … in a manner  reminiscent of archival descriptions  reflecting earlier colonial attitudes [and not] to be so  ‘arrogant’ or so daring as to analyze or to call on ca­ nadian  society  for  its  injustices”  ( ,  xvii).  us,  from  the  mid­ s  onward,  publishers  favoured  what  they considered “soft­sell native  literature”  in­ cluding  personal  narratives  and  autobiographies  (larocque  ,  xvii),  making  them  an  important  site where indigenous and non­indigenous audiences  could  access  indigenous  women’s  theorizing  around  race, gender, and colonialism, albeit within limits es­ tablished by publishers that curtailed their freedom of  speech. for example, in  , it was announced that  métis author maria campbell’s influential   auto­ biography half­breed would be reissued and include  an account of the author being sexually assaulted by  an rcmp officer at age  , a story that publishers re­ moved from the text for the publication of the book.  consequently, in addition to exposing dominant so­ cial systems of oppression, my purpose in this article  is to present a decolonial challenge to western ways of  knowing and doing.  e  next  section  of  this  paper  includes    stories,  which in addition to describing my experiences with  the weaponization of freedom of speech and silencing,  contain reflections about the impacts of these experi­ ences on me and others, and unpack how these experi­ ences reinforce dominant social systems of oppression  within the academy and beyond. is is followed by a  discussion and recommendations section where in ad­ dition  to  theorizing what contributed  to  the  institu­ tional  support  i  received  after  the  attacks  in  april  ,  i  suggest  some  wise  practices  for  supporting  minority  scholars  and  disrupting  the  violence  of  weaponized freedom of speech. finally, this paper con­ cludes  by  considering  the  importance  and  power  of  storytelling.   . "you should be grateful for residential schools.” is comment came from a young white man imme­ diately after i had vulnerably shared my family’s viol­ ent  experiences  with  residential  schools  and  the  subsequent effects of intergenerational trauma on our  lives in a second­year sociology course focused on race  and ethnicity. he then white mansplained to me, des­ pite evidence to the contrary, that residential schools  provided indigenous children with a necessary educa­ tion that would prepare them for success (and thus, as­ similation) in colonial canadian society and that these  schools protected us from tuberculosis and violence.  a  white  woman  student  trying  to  be  sympathetic  joined the conversation: “i’m sorry about your family’s  experiences, but it’s important to remember that white  people never intended for this to be violent. ey ac­ ted in a way they saw as being in the best interest for  canada and for native people.” “but also,” added another white man, “why should i  be held responsible for something i didn’t do? i didn’t  send indians to residential school.” neither the instructor nor other students  intervened;  instead, more white students joined the discussion to  dismiss the colonial violence myself, my family, and all  other indigenous peoples have experienced as a result  of  residential  schools  and exonerate  themselves  from  any culpability  in this violence. after sitting through  an  academic  debate  predominantly  conducted  by  white students on why i, an indigenous person, was  wrong  and  should  be  grateful  for  indian  residential  atlantis journal
 issue . / schools, i never attended this class again and ended up  failing it. failing this course and jeopardizing my aca­ demic future was better than sitting in a classroom of  white  supremacists exercising  their  scholarly  right  to  debate my lived reality and reinforce colonial domina­ tion.     . i was in the yukon when i found out. a student i was  visiting  in whitehorse  told  me  that  a  man  charged  with sexually abusing intoxicated women through his  taxi  service  was  transporting  the  students  from  my  program  for  indigenous  women  leaders.  while  the  university  had  banned  him  from  being  on  campus,  the on­campus organization i worked  for continued  to use his company for transportation. in addition to  personally transporting our students between the air­ port and our university before handing off to another  driver  to  bring  the  students  on  campus,  he  was  providing  in­town  transportation,  including  a  dis­ counted limo with champagne service. upon hearing  this news,  i  immediately emailed my  supervisors, including the white, woman director, my  immediate  white,  woman  supervisor  within  my  de­ partment, and the white man overseeing finances and  travel arrangements  for our organization. leveraging  my expertise on violence against  indigenous women  and girls, i begged them to prioritize the safety of our  students and stop using this accused rapist’s services.  e  white  man  responded  first:  “we  can’t  because  there’s no other option.” enraged  by  this  outright  dismal  of  indigenous  wo­ men’s safety, i wrote an impassioned email back and  called this white man out: i challenged him as a father  of a daughter. i challenged him to think about hold­ ing her hand if something like this happened to her.  and then i challenged him to think about holding the  hand of one of our students who had been sexually as­ saulted by a predator known to us, making this attack  something we could have prevented. while  my  immediate  supervisor  arranged  for  other  transportation for my students, she also scolded me as  though i were an impertinent child when i returned: i  had been too hard on this white man and he was  deeply hurt by my comments. she warned me against  being confrontational and suggested i soften my tone.  because  clearly,  how  i  confront  white  people  about  their complicity in colonial violence and their feelings  outweigh the right of indigenous women to live lives  free from violence. . “ank  you,  robyn.  at’s  enough.  i  think  we  get  your point.” is is how the white woman director of a community  development institute i worked for shut down my at­ tempt  to  intervene  in  the  university’s  disturbing  de­ cision to co­host marie henein,  the defense attorney  for accused woman abuser jian ghomeshi, as a guest  speaker,  but  also  the  director’s  equally  disturbing  at­ tempt to raise this issue in an open staff meeting.  after discovering  that henein,  a woman  lawyer who  not only defends men who are perpetrators of violence  but is also infamous for engaging in “whacking”—re­ peatedly  asking  purposefully  embarrassing  questions  that  draw  on  highly  problematic  stereotypes  about  sexual violence (rizvic  )—was being co­hosted by  our university as a featured guest speaker, local feminist  scholars,  educators,  and community members organ­ ized to intervene. our position: providing henein with  a public platform normalized her inappropriate beha­ viour and traumatized survivors of sexual violence. prior  to  an  upcoming  staff  meeting,  our  director  emailed the women team members of the institute’s in­ ternational centre  for women’s leadership  for guid­ ance, asking if it was appropriate to address the issue of  henein’s guest speaking at this meeting. we unanim­ ously agreed that a staff meeting wasn’t the appropriate  place to discuss this issue and several of us sent indi­ vidual emails  to  the director discussing why this was  the  case.  despite  our  recommendation,  the  director  decided  to  raise  the  issue at  this meeting. while  ac­ knowledging concerns about hosting henein, she dis­ missed them on the basis of freedom of speech and the  right of henein to be heard. upon observing distress  among members of our team, the director put one wo­ man on the spot by asking if she had something to say.  forced to respond, this individual challenged the dir­ atlantis journal
 issue . / ector’s  “freedom  of  speech”  position  and  ended  up  outing herself  as  a  survivor of  sexual  violence. ob­ serving this violence against my friend, i intervened:  referencing  my  own  experiences  of  sexual  violence  but also my scholarly knowledge of  the  topic,  i at­ tempted  to  expose  the  hypocrisy  of  privileging  henein’s  freedom of  speech over  the perspectives of  sexual assault  survivors, and how this position priv­ ileged  freedom  of  speech  over  preventing  further  trauma among sexual assault  survivors.  i challenged  her claims that it was possible to have objective and  dispassionate debates about sexual violence, especially  for survivors, and i challenged her right to force sur­ vivors  of  sexual  violence  to  debate  their  trauma  against henein’s freedom of speech. in a power  move designed to protect the freedom of  speech of two privileged women—her’s and henein’s —this  director  interrupted  to  silence  me  and  fore­ close my freedom of speech. she dismissed my experi­ ential  and  expert  knowledge  of  sexual  violence  but  also the perspectives of other sexual assault survivors  in favour of her opinion and freedom of speech with  a single sentence: “ank you, robyn. at’s enough.  i think we get your point.” white students, especially white men, regularly chal­ lenge my assessment of their assignments for the indi­ genous  studies  courses  i  teach.  ey  email  and/or  come to my office and claim that another white per­ son, usually someone close to them with a university  degree, has reviewed their assignment and declared it  sound. ey claim this person knows better than i do  and, as a result, i need to review my grading of this  assignment. apparently, as an indigenous person with  lived experience and advanced training and research  experience  in  indigenous  studies,  my  perspective  is  inadequate and inferior  to this white person. while  deeply  enraged  by  this  sexist  and  racist  violence,  i  have  to hold my tongue or  risk escalating  the  situ­ ation and opening myself to more verbal and poten­ tially physical abuse from these white male students.  as someone with expertise in racialized gender­based  violence,  i  know  that  challenging  white  supremacy  and hegemonic masculinity frequently results in viol­ ence and i’m honestly afraid of these white men in  these moments. so instead of calling them out for the  racism and sexism, i’m polite and try to reiterate my  assessments gently. when they don’t get the response  or grade they believe they should receive, they write ra­ cist and/or negative reviews on my course evaluations  and  ratemyprofessor.com  which,  in  turn,  negatively  impact my employability and, thus, ability to have my  voice included in the academy.   after completing a  two­year  study and authoring an  almost  ­page report on the findings, i was told by  the funder that they were unhappy with the report and  wouldn’t be releasing it. despite recruiting me on the  basis of my training, scholarship, and experience work­ ing with socially marginalized communities and direct­ ing me to critically explore the ways that oppression  operates within the funding organization, they claimed  my analyses were unfair and deemed my language “in­ flammatory.” moreover, despite being a highly quali­ fied researcher with extensive training and experience  and having co­developed the research strategy with the  funder,  they  questioned  the  methodology  and  chal­ lenged  the  veracity  of  the  findings.  finally,  they  claimed, because i was an outsider to the organization,  i wasn’t qualified to make the recommendations i had  in advancing their commitment to equity. at report  never saw the light of day, and while we jointly own  the data and our contract provides me with the ability  to publish on the findings, the organization is trying to  prevent this  from happening through threats of  legal  challenges.   when challenging the right of white settler scholars to  use indigenous ways of knowing and doing respons­ ibly  in  their  curriculum  and  pedagogical  practice,  i  regularly encounter dismissals of my concerns on the  grounds that some other indigenous person this white  person  knows  agrees  with  them.  for  example,  after  learning  that  a  white  colleague  teaching  indigenous  knowledge systems was using sweat lodges in his ped­ agogical practice, another indigenous colleague and i  raised concerns about this practice with our institute.  not only did we question the right of this white col­ league to use this sacred indigenous practice as a ped­ agogical  practice  with  mostly  non­indigenous  atlantis journal
 issue . / students, we also alerted this colleague and our insti­ tute that we were aware that indigenous elders across  canada were questioning the appropriateness of using  our  ceremonies  in  western  post­secondary  institu­ tions. in fact, i had just come from a conference hos­ ted  by  the  canadian  association  of  university  teachers  where  this  very  topic  had  been  debated  among indigenous attendees.   our concerns were met with claims from this white  instructor that a local indigenous elder approved of  this practice and, in fact, our opposition was hamper­ ing this mutual settler­indigenous collaboration. as a  result, this white person’s right to use sweat lodges as  pedagogical practice was secured against our concerns  about  appropriation,  colonial  racism,  and  potential  harm to participants.  as i prepared to confront management about an un­ just and discriminatory workplace, a  racialized man  who was a colleague pulled me into his office to offer  advice. “you’re too emotional,” he said. “you need to  get your emotions under control because they think  you’re  crazy.”  he  advised  me  that  my  perspectives  would only be valued if i divested them of any feel­ ing. in this moment, he reinforced the western colo­ nial notion that only objective knowledge devoid of  emotion  is  worthy  of  consideration  and,  con­ sequently, dismissed indigenous ways of knowing and  doing that value the gift of emotion. moreover, he re­ inforced that patriarchal notion that women are too  emotional and, thus, their knowledge is suspect.  i would have been more hurt except this wasn’t the  first  time  i’ve  heard  this:  colleagues—particularly  white men and women—regularly dismiss my know­ ledge because it comes infused with emotion. while  this emotion is viewed in indigenous ways of know­ ing and doing as a gift from creator, they view it as a  sign  of  weakness  and  dysfunction,  and  a  reason  to  delegitimate  and  ignore  my  knowledge.  it’s  awfully  hard not to be emotional in the face of colonial ra­ cism and heterosexism—to sit  in rooms where your  very existence and access  to basic human rights  are  debated  among  mostly  white  privileged  colleagues.  it’s  a  position  of  privilege  to  not  be  impacted —whether physically, mentally,  emotionally, or  spir­ itually—by  discriminatory  hierarchies  of  power  and  privilege and get to debate  issues dispassionately. it’s  also a position of privilege and social policing to de­ mand that i respond to these threats sans emotions,  denying my pain for the benefit of others. hiding my  pain  allows  these  people  to  avoid  feeling  negative  emotions related to confronting their own complicity  with oppression and violence.    journal article status: approved with revisions. revisions: “this article needs to conform to standard  [western, white, colonial, academic] scholarly report­ ing practices.” is response not only privileges western, white, colo­ nial,  academic  approaches  to  knowledge  production  and dissemination over indigenous ways of knowing  and doing, but also forces me to alter and, thus, sub­ vert  my  authentic  scholarly  voice.  it  diminishes  my  ability to be an indigenous scholar and employ indi­ genous ways of knowing and doing in my research. in  other words, it colonizes my scholarship by forcing me  to  conform  to  dominant,  western  academic  stand­ ards.      to mark december  , canada’s national day of re­ membrance and action of violence against women,  in  , our centre for women’s and gender studies  (wgst) decided to host an event examining violence  against racialized people. while not wanting to erase  the murders of  the   white women at ecole poly­ technique  in  ,  whose  deaths  are  the  reason  we  have this day, we sought to expand discussions of this  violence  to  include  racialized  women  and  slgb­ tqqia  (two­spirit,  lesbian,  gay,  bisexual, trans,  queer,  questioning,  intersex,  and  asexual)  people.  consequently,  we  hosted  a  panel  featuring  a  black  feminist scholar, a south asian queer activist, and an  indigenous scholar (me).  after completing our panel, we opened the floor  to  questions and the first eager hand came from a white  woman who is an assistant professor at our university.  atlantis journal
 issue . / she decried our efforts to bring race to the forefront of  this event as undermining the deaths of the   white  women  at  ecole  polytechnique,  grounding  her  per­ spectives in a relationship with one of these women.  she also claimed that after hearing our presentations  that she knew less about the experiences of black and  south asian people and “even  less about the experi­ ences  of  indigenous  peoples.”  apparently,  we  had  presented so poorly that we had decreased her under­ standing of the lived experiences of black, south asi­ an,  and  indigenous  peoples.  after  one  of  my  co­presenters attempted to challenge her,  i  took this  person to task,  indicating that her preference  for re­ membering violence against white women only is part  of the problem and amounts to reinforcing white su­ premacy. while we had patiently listened to her per­ spective, she refused to listen to ours: i had to remind  her  multiple  times  to  not  disrupt  me  and  listen  re­ spectfully  to  what  i  had  to  say.  instead  of  acknow­ ledging  our  comments  and  owning  her  own  complicity  in colonial  racism,  this person  loaded up  her stuff and walked away. in doing so, she used her  white  privilege  to  dismiss  our  knowledge,  foreclose  discussion, and avoid taking accountability for the ra­ cism we named.  is scene repeated itself a year later. for  , we in  wgst  again  wanted  to  create  space  for  bipoc  (black, indigenous, and other people of colour) per­ spectives, so myself and a black female author shared  the stage. i presented a new paper i was preparing for  publication  about  how  the  #metoo  movement  had  been co­opted by white women in ways that under­ mine  the  movement’s  roots  in  black  intersectional  feminism  and,  i  argued,  decolonization  and  ending  sexual violence against  indigenous women and girls.  during the question and answer period, a white wo­ man,  who  had  come  into  my  presentation  near  the  end,  interrupted and disrupted  the discussion about  the lack of awareness and response to sexual violence  perpetrated against bipoc people to let us know that  as a white woman she had also experienced this dis­ missal of violence after being raped. additionally, she   referenced a white woman as a founder of the #met­ oo movement. shocked into silence by having to con­ front  the  exact  issues  i  was  writing  and  speaking  about, a racialized woman in the audience intervened  and challenged this woman for inserting her whiteness  into  this  conversation  and,  thus,  undermining  everything i said in my presentation. again, instead of  staying, acknowledging  these comments,  and owning  her complicity in colonial racism, this woman packed  up her belongings and exited the room. however, in­ stead of this situation ending there, she took to social  media, tagged our event, and publicly declared that she  had been discriminated against at this event. “do you remember gorillas  in  the  mist?” my brother  asked me.  of course, i did: as kids we have watched this    academy  award  nominated  film  starring  sigourney  weaver  as  dian  fossey,  the  american  primatologist  who was murdered in her fight to save the mountain  gorillas  of  rwanda  against  poachers.  i  nodded,  to  which  my  brother,  now  choking  back  tears  replied,  “i’m so scared that’s what’s going to happen to you be­ cause of the work you do.”   and i couldn’t reassure him and tell him he was wrong —because  the  truth  is  threats  of  violence  and  death  have always been a normal part of my experience as an  indigenous  feminist  activist,  academic,  and  author  committed to exposing and eliminating dominant so­ cial  systems of oppression.  in a  colonial nation  state  whose  existence  is  predicated  on  the  elimination —whether through assimilation or violence—of indi­ genous  peoples,  my  existence  and  also  my  efforts  to  name and dismantle colonial domination and violence  pose a significant threat to the colonial order of things  in canada and, as such, are regularly met with innate  hostility  and  threats  of  violence,  especially  among  white people and, more specifically, white men. in fact,  threats of violence have come exclusively  from white  men. sometimes these threats occur in person, such as  shouted  threats  of  physical  and  sexual  violence  by  white male bystanders at rallies, but also the more sin­ ister  threats whispered  in my ear as a white man in­ vades  (colonizes)  my  personal  space:  “be  careful:  speaking out will  lead you  to  the  same  fate  as your  missing and murdered sisters.”  ese  threats  have  also  come  via  social  media  and  atlantis journal
 issue . / email.  sometimes  these  are  anonymous  but  more  commonly, as in the case of the attacks following my  article in e conversation, owned by the author who  exposes his name and whiteness. ey weaponize their  white  masculinity  against  me  without  fear  of  con­ sequences  because  of  the  privilege  and  entitlement  they experience in our colonial white settler heteropat­ riarchal society, including their right to abuse indigen­ ous women with impunity. ey demand my silence  by threatening acts of violence, mostly directed at me  but also my family when i have mentioned them. we  have been threatened with rape, physical assault, tor­ ture,  and  death.  several  times,  i’ve  been  threatened  with being “disappeared.”    discussion and recommendations  e   stories i share expose the ways that people, es­ pecially  those  with  power  and  privilege,  weaponize  freedom  of  speech  against  minority  scholars.  ese  tactics range from microaggressions to public “calling  outs” to physical and sexual violence. while frequently  used by people in positions of power, these techniques  of power  and privilege  are  accessible  to  anyone and  have been employed against me, albeit infrequently, by  other  socially  marginalized  people.  is  being  said,  these attacks come most frequently from white people  and occur when i’m naming and challenging oppres­ sion  and  violence. while  fighting  tooth  and  nail  to  protect their freedom of speech, their actions work to  actively suppress my right to speak and be heard.    e difference in institutional responses between what  happened to me this past april and some of the incid­ ents  covered  in  these  stories  raises  some  important  questions:  what  made  brock  university  different?  why was brock’s response one of support  instead of  suppression of my  freedom of  speech? while by no  means perfect, brock university has made significant  commitments  to  social  justice. our current  strategic  plan ( ­ ) prioritizes “fostering a culture of in­ clusivity,  accessibility,  reconciliation  and  decoloniza­ tion” as one of its four pillars (brock university  ,  ­ ). is commitment has been met with concrete  action including, for example, the creation of the pres­ ident’s  advisory  committee  on  human  rights,  equity, and decolonization (pachred), the estab­ lishment of a funded and well­staffed human rights  and equity office, and completion of a climate survey  meant  to explore  the diverse experiences of  students,  staff,  and  faculty.  brock  also  has  academic  commit­ ments to social justice, including its master of arts pro­ gram  in  social  justice  and  equity  studies,  and  the  social justice research institute which is home to the  scholarly peer­reviewed journal studies in social justice.  e university is also home to academic/activist faculty,  staff,  and  students  committed  to  addressing  social  justice issues, many of whom come from socially mar­ ginalized  groups.  i  believe  this  institutional  commit­ ment to equity and social justice—a commitment that  is not only stated, but actively pursued—and our com­ munity of social justice­oriented people lay at the core  of my supportive experience this past april. notably,  while i’ve experienced support as an indigenous scholar  targeted by racist and sexist attacks, brock has also ac­ tualized its commitment to equity by publicly denoun­ cing  white  professors  who’ve  made  racist  comments  online  and  in  their  scholarship.  for  example,  in  the  summer of  , brock stripped a retired political sci­ ence professor of his emeritus title after he made racist  comments  about  indigenous  peoples  and  issued  a  death  threat on  social media  (canadian press  );  and in june  , brock’s provost  issued a statement  against one of its chemistry professors for a journal art­ icle (published and then retracted by the journal) con­ taining  misogynist  and  racist  statements  (benner  ).  at the same time, i can’t ignore how power and priv­ ilege may have been involved in this response. while  my colleagues may have acted genuinely as allies and  accomplices,  it’s  always  important  to  consider  how  power and privilege may operate in any system, as well  as critically examining my own privileges and compli­ city  with  oppression.  while  indigenous,  i’m  white­ passing and, therefore, benefit from white privilege and  don’t share the same experiences with racism as many  indigenous and racialized scholars. for example, i have  observed  how  my  whiteness  along  with  my  overtly  happy  and  friendly  personality  prevent  me,  for  the  most part,  from being  labelled angry and confronta­ tional—terms commonly used in racist ways to silence  racialized,  and  especially  black,  scholars  (williams  ; daniel  ). brock’s strategic commitment to  atlantis journal
 issue . / decolonization has created a sort of reverence around  indigeneity that offers me privileges and protections as  an indigenous scholar. for example, all of the indigen­ ous­centred initiatives i’ve put forward have been well­ supported, both in terms of funding and widespread  institutional  support. at  the  same  time,  as  the only  tenured female first nations professor at brock uni­ versity, my departure could undermine the university’s  stated commitment to decolonization. us, the uni­ versity’s efforts to make me feel supported and safe can  reduce this risk. again, i want to believe that my col­ leagues acted as genuine allies and accomplices, but we  cannot ignore the ways in which power and privilege  may have influenced their supportive response. action is critical aspect of  nêhiyaw ways of knowing  and doing and to assist with this, i want to offer some  recommendations on how individuals and institutions  can address  the weaponization of  freedom of  speech  and the violent silencing of scholars from socially mar­ ginalized groups. in addition to drawing on my own  experiences,  these  recommendations  arise  from years  of  working  with  people—educators,  scholars,  and  community members—to address oppression in vari­ ous contexts, and the many things i’ve  learned from  these people and through these processes inform these  recommendations.  .  support  indigenous  and  other  minority  scholars  who are being attacked and having their  freedom of  speech denied. is  is an  important way  that brock  university’s response differed from my previous exper­ iences: all  levels of the university stepped up to sup­ port me. in addition to the support of my dean,   of  my colleagues  signed a  letter of  support  sent  to our  president defending my freedom of speech and decry­ ing the threats made against me. many of these indi­ viduals also reached out to me individually to check  in, offer advice, and reiterate their support. my union  president connected me with campus security who not  only documented the harassment and threats but also  worked with me to create a safety plan me. is sup­ port  was  essential  to  me  surviving  and  moving  for­ ward  after  these  vicious  attacks.  it  bolstered  my  confidence as an indigenous scholar and my right to  expose and challenge oppression and violence. it also  made me feel less alone.     .  don’t  be  a  bystander—intervene  when  you  see  someone  shutting  down  an  indigenous  scholar  or  scholars from other minority groups. so many times,  people  have  come  to  me  after  to  let  me  know  they  agreed with me and/or thought how i was treated was  wrong. while i appreciate this support and understand  the risks involved with intervening, the times that col­ leagues have stepped forward to publicly support me,  including naming and challenging racist and sexist be­ haviour, have been fundamental to my survival as an  indigenous feminist scholar. in addition to bolstering  my spirits in the face of such violence and making me  feel less alone, this support has alleviated some of the  burden and work required of me to address this viol­ ence. while you shouldn’t try to speak for or over the  individual being targeted, feel free to name the racist,  sexist, and other forms of oppression at work and de­ mand an end to violent censures and other acts of si­ lencing.  also  make  efforts  to  assist  colleagues  with  understanding  how  access  to  freedom  of  speech  is  shaped  by  oppression  and  how  its  weaponized  as  a  mechanism for silencing scholars from socially margin­ alized groups.        .  address  institutional  inequity  because  it’s  founda­ tional to the silencing of minority scholars. as noted  above,  brock  university’s  stated  and  actualized  com­ mitment to addressing equity, human rights, and de­ colonization played an important role in the support i  received when i experienced backlash in april  . in  pursuing this process, it’s essential that people from so­ cially marginalized groups be included at all  levels of  decision­making, be involved in all processes, and have  their voices/perspectives centered.           .  remember,  if  scholars  from  socially  marginalized  groups are having these experiences so too are students  and staff; and its essential that institutions address this  kind of violence for everyone.   . given the regularity and viciousness of this violence,  it’s  important  that  institutions  have  appropriate  sup­ ports available. in the case of indigenous scholars, this  means having elder and other culturally safe supports,  such as an indigenous support worker. it’s also critical  that these supports don’t replicate racism, sexism, het­ erosexism and other forms of oppression.  atlantis journal
 issue . / is is by no means an exhaustive list;  instead, it’s a  starting  point  for  future  discussions  of  how  best  to  support  minority  scholars  against  weaponizations  of  freedom of speech. is being said, it’s important that  these  discussions  centre  the  perspectives  of  minority  scholars.  borrowing  the  famous  feminist  mantra:  nothing about us without us.  conclusion “stories,” as cherokee writer omas king proclaimed  in  his    massey  lecture  series,  “are  a  wonderous  thing” but “they are dangerous” ( ). for once they are  told, he explains, stories cannot be called back and re­ main  “loose  in  the  world”  (king  ,  ).  while  likely  to  be  dismissed  as  emotional  and  subjective  within western  academia,  the  stories  i’ve  shared  are  dangerous because they not only speak truth about the  limits of freedom of speech for scholars from margin­ alized social groups, but also expose how, far from be­ ing a universal human right accorded to all, freedom  of  speech as  it  currently  exists  in academia but also  western  societies  operates  to  secure  social  and  indi­ vidual  power  and  privilege.  powerful,  privileged  people fight for freedom of speech insofar as it secures  their right to spew hate and, at the same time, actively  works  to  suppress  the  perspectives  of  marginalized  people,  especially  when  these  perspectives  challenge  this power and privilege. ese two strategies, as such,  work in tandem to ideologically and materially secure  a global elite through the weaponization of freedom of  speech aimed at eliminating resistance and, thus, sus­ taining  the  dominant  interlocking  social  systems  of  oppression—heterosexism,  racism,  colonialism,  ableism, and economic exploitation and marginaliza­ tion—that  underpin  their  power  and  privilege.  by  sharing these stories, i expose this truth about freedom  of speech.  e stories i’ve shared are dangerous because they ex­ pose some of the tactics by which freedom of speech  can be weaponized against scholars from socially mar­ ginalized  groups.  in  addition  to  acts  and  threats  of  physical  and/or  sexual  violence  which  can  easily  be  dismissed as the demented acts of extremists or a few  “bad apples,” these stories expose the everyday micro­ aggressions—the  shushings,  scoldings,  and  claims  to  superior authority—perpetrated by people who, while  not  necessarily  feeling  powerful  nor  privileged,  have  nonetheless, used their freedom of speech and/or sup­ pression of speech to silence and suppress me and other  marginalized people in the service of power and priv­ ilege. in fact, it’s my hope that some of you might see  your own complicity in such weaponizing of freedom  of speech through these stories and strive to do better.  ese  stories  are  dangerous  because  they  expose  the  severity of these attacks for scholars from marginalized  social groups. consider this: as an indigenous person  with white privilege, my whiteness has afforded me cer­ tain protections against  regular and severe acts of  ra­ cism inflicted on racialized academics—and yet, it’s still  this bad. and if it’s this bad for me as a white­passing  indigenous feminist scholar, you can only imagine how  much worse it is for visibly racialized feminist scholars.  at the same time, these stories expose the limits of priv­ ilege: our hierarchically ordered global society is intol­ erant to perceived threats from anyone and, as such, no  amount  of  privilege  can  protect  you  from  being  tar­ geted  if  you  choose  to  expose  and  dismantle  it.  however, if devoted to this work, those of us with priv­ ilege have a responsibly to examine and end our com­ plicity in weaponizing freedom of speech against other  socially marginalized people—otherwise we are no bet­ ter  than the privileged people who have silenced and  suppressed  us.  in  addition  to  making  use  of  your  unique skill sets to better support scholars, faculty, staff,  and students belonging to socially marginalized groups,  this work must  include efforts  to dismantle  forms of  privilege operating within our educational institutions  that unfairly target and exclude indigenous and other  minority  scholars.  is  is  not  a  call  for  privileged  people to “rescue” these scholars but, instead, a demand  for active dismantling of the educational systems that  we have unfairly benefited from at the expense of oth­ ers.        finally,  these stories are dangerous because they resist  these attempts at silencing and, in turn, create the po­ tential for community and collective action against this  weaponization  of  freedom  of  speech  against  scholars  from socially marginalized groups. for a  long time, i  kept  these  stories  to myself out of  fear  that exposing  this violence would negatively impact my academic ca­ atlantis journal
 issue . / reer;  and  as  someone  who  has  only  every  dreamed  about  being  an  academic,  has  gone  into  significant  debt to fund my education, and as the sole “breadwin­ ner” for my family of five, i’ve never felt safe telling  these stories as long as my employment was at risk. in  doing so, i carried the burden of this violence on my  own  shoulders:  instead  of  holding  privileged  people  accountable, i swallowed this pain out of survival and  made myself sick. moreover, this silence hindered my  ability  to  connect  with  other  marginalized  feminist  scholars and, thus, mobilize against this violence. be­ coming tenured has reduced the threat to my employ­ ment and i choose to use this privilege to name and  expose  this  violence  and  find  ways  to  create  com­ munity and promote collective resistance among mar­ ginalized scholars. for  those of you who share  these  experiences but aren’t  in a position to tell your own  dangerous stories, please know you’re not alone. please  know there are lots of us out here who share these ex­ periences and we are here to support you.  references archibald, jo­ann.  . indigenous storywork:  educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit.  vancouver: ubc press. benner, allan.  . “brock university professor  slammed for ‘hurtful and alienating’ article.” e st.  catharines standard. last modified   june  .  https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/niagara­ region/ / / /brock­university­professor­ slammed­for­hurtful­and­alienating­article.html.     bourgeois, robyn.  . “let’s call the nova scotia  mass shooting what it is: white male terrorism.” e  conversation. last modified   april  . https:// theconversation.com/lets­call­the­nova­scotia­mass­ shooting­what­it­is­white­male­terrorism­ . brock university.  . niagara roots—global  reach: strategic plan  ­ . st. catherines, on:  brock university.   campbell, maria. ( )  . halfbreed. toronto:  penguin random house. canadian press.  . “brock university strips former  prof’s emeritus status after abhorrent posts.” cbc  news. last modified   august  . https:// www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/brock­university­ strips­former­prof­s­emeritus­status­after­abhorrent­ posts­ . . daniel, beverly­jean.  . “teaching while black:  racial dynamics, evaluations and the role of white  females in the canadian academy in carrying the  racism torch.” race, ethnicity and education  , no.  :  ­ .      elliot, alicia.  . a mind spread out on the  ground. toronto: doubleday. gay, roxane.  . bad feminist: essays. new york:  harper perennial. gay, roxanne.  . hunger: a memoir of (my) body.  new york: harper perennial.   atlantis journal
 issue . / hooks, bell.  . bone black: memories of girlhood.  new york: henry holt & co.   king, omas.  . e truth about stories: a native  narrative. toronto: house of anansi.  kovatch, margaret.  . indigenous methodologies:  characteristics, conversations and contexts. toronto:  university of toronto press.  larocque, emma.  . “preface or hear are our  voices – who will here?” in writing the circle – native  women of western canada. edited by jeanne perrault  and sylvia vance. edmonton: nuwest publishers ltd,  xv­xxx.  lorde, audre.  . zami: a new spelling of my name —a biomythography. new york: crossing press.  maracle, lee. ( )  . bobbie lee indian rebel.  toronto: women’s press.  rizvic, seila.  . “why many women can’t get  justice from sexual assault trials.” e walrus. last  modified   march  . https://thewalrus.ca/why­ many­women­cant­get­justice­from­sexual­assault­ trials/. smith, linda tuhiwai.  . decolonizing  methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. new  york: zed books.   williams, charmaine c.  . “e angry black  woman scholar.” feminist formations—nwsa journal  , no.  :  ­ . living a feminist life review living a feminist life sarah ahmed duke university press, january , ix+ pp., isbn: contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ; published online february sarah ahmed’s living a feminist life is much more than a farewell to her institutional academic life in the wake of her highly publicized resignation from goldsmiths, the university of london, in protest of the university’s handling of sexual harassment. her latest work retains a fierce grip on the spirit of feminist critical theory, while avowing that it is possible and even powerful to ‘leave a life’ that is not feminist. it is customary to begin studying feminism by defining it as a ‘life question’. for educators, such discussions flow into rewarding ‘clicks’ of transformative political consciousness when students re-examine their own experiences in the light of feminist theory. ahmed, writing explicitly for students, begins by considering what it means ‘to make everything into something that is questionable’ (p. ), recounting her own ‘clicking’ moments: ‘i began to realize what i already knew: that patriarchal reasoning goes all the way down, to the letter, to the bone’ (p. ). in laying out a foundational self-reflexivity, constantly connecting her background in philosophy (the letter) with her life (bone) as a brown lesbian feminist of mixed heritage, ahmed shows us how to re-politicize the personal: ‘i began to appreciate that theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin’ (p. ). in urging feminists, ‘do not become the master’s tool!’ (p. ), ahmed invokes audre lorde’s well-known concept of the master’s house: ‘i had to find ways not to reproduce its grammar in what i said, in what i wrote, in what i did, in who i was’ (p. ). her own refusal to be a master’s tool crops up in, for example, ahmed’s policy of citing feminists of colour rather than white men, because citations ‘are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings’ (p. ). feminism’s fault lines (such as excluding trans women) show us the cracks in dogmatic certainty: ahmed argues that a ‘feminist tendency … does not give us a stable ground’ (p. ). stability mires feminisms in injustice. instead we must learn to reject what alexis shotwell ( ) describes as a politics of ‘purity’, and instead embrace the idea that feminism’s houses may be reconstructed and deconstructed on shifting terrain. � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals ahmed freely acknowledges the difficulty of such work. for her, ‘intersection- ality is messy and embodied’ (p. ), and feminism creates difficult, ‘sweaty concepts’ (p. ). these concepts are expressed with ahmed’s characteristic style of ‘turning them this way and that, like an object that catches a different light every time it is turned’ (p. ), producing prismatic rainbows of meaning. in so doing, ahmed also refuses to separate poetry from politics, affirming, ‘i think of feminism as poetry’ (p. ). language, in order not to become the master’s tool, must be recuperated through close scrutiny, through loving litany, through rippling repetitions. thus, ahmed repeatedly circles back to her theoretical and literary foremothers – to bell hooks, audre lorde, virginia woolf, rita mae brown, george eliot, toni morrison, chandra talpade mohanty and gloria anzaldúa, to name only a few. in her words, we hear their voices; in her voice, we hear their words – the direct, accessible rigour of hooks, the flowing stream of consciousness of woolf. in summoning this circle, ahmed displays the collective power informing her singular voice. in her classic essay, the laugh of the medusa, hélène cixous called for an écriture feminine in: ‘write your self. the body must be heard’ (cixous, , p. ). now, with growing numbers of women coming forward (#metoo) to say that their bodies are not being heard, ahmed’s écriture feministe (my twist) takes on even greater relevance. her writing insists upon embodiment as epistemology: ‘feminism begins with sensation’, is ‘sensible’ (p. ), ‘a body that is not at ease in the world; a body that fidgets and moves around’ (p. ). she recalls painful experiences of violence and sexual assault that result in trauma lodged deep in the body. for ahmed, this violence accompanies every process of gendered assignment, constricting a body that’s expected to appear, speak, move and behave in specific ways. feminist ‘noticing becomes a form of political labour’ (p. ). it is for that reason that the ‘feminist killjoy’, the one who notices and who names, interrupting the smooth flow of normative traffic, becomes such a central figure. the feminist killjoy must resist the ‘promise of happiness’ because ‘inequality is preserved through the appeal of happiness, the appeal to happiness. it is as if the response to power and violence is or should be to simply adjust or modify how we feel’ (p. ). ahmed’s sister concept of the ‘willful subject’ is similarly persistent, embodied in the stubbornly raised arm of the ‘willful child’, a grim folktale. the violence that greets any exercise of will necessitates ‘a call of arms’ (p. ), the refusal of silence and complicity within the master’s house. ahmed then invites us to explore diversity work within the master’s house of the academy, where the diversity workers themselves often embody lip service paid to policies of inclusion that do not lead to action: ‘diversity work is the work we do when we are attempting to transform an institution; and second, diversity work is the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution’ (p. ). diversity workers are ‘institutional killjoys’ facing a ‘brick wall’: ‘indeed the wall review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s might become all the more apparent, all the more a sign of immobility, the more the institution presents itself as being opened up’ (p. ). to gain any real transformation, ahmed argues, feminists everywhere must be willful, must push. again, she acknowledges how exhausting such work can be; how ‘institutional passing’ (p. ) may be a survival strategy: ‘for those who are not white, whiteness can be experienced as wall: something solid, a body with mass that stops you from getting through … heavy, slow, down, brown’ (p. ). to combat such exhaustion, ahmed calls for solidarity ‘to give support to those who are willing to expose the will of the institution as violence; we need to become our own support system … so that when she speaks up, when she is, as she is, quickly represented as the willful child who deserves her fate, who is beaten because her will is immature and impoverished, she will not be an arm coming up alone; she will not be an arm all on her own’ (p. ). the anguish that pervades living a feminist life is excruciating; the sorrow and frustration of a woman patiently and gently articulating what it is like to be left all on her own. perhaps that is why the book is such an intense read – the writer carin beilin described her reading as ‘like gasping in nettles’ (beilin, ). and yet, out of the consequences of being a feminist killjoy, from the pain of leaving a life, comes a moment of ‘feminist snap’ that ahmed describes as ‘how we collectively acquire tendencies that can allow us to break ties that are damaging as well as to invest in new possibilities’ (p. ). again, one thinks of the #metoo movement, the snap of speaking out in multitudes. movements that only venerate ‘strong women’ leave little room for the bodies that shatter, the idea that one has been or can be broken. yet, for ahmed, there is much to be gained from fragility, ‘learn[ing] making from breaking’ (p. ). this is one of her most powerful concepts: that great strength can be derived from shattering experiences: ‘from a shattering, a story can be told, one that finds in fragility the source of a connection … a break can offer another claim to being, being in question as a break in being, recognizing breaking as making a difference in the present, shaping the present’ (p. ). for ahmed, ‘life unfolds from such points’ (p. ). a snap can be an enormous ‘relief from [the] pressure’ of normative expectations (p. ). following her ‘snap’ from goldsmiths, ahmed writes, she has recreated ‘feminist hope’ and a ‘feminist communication system’ (p. ) – living a feminist life appears alongside her blog feministkilljoys.com. the feminist hope of living a feminist life rests on the power of assembling collectivities, affinities, shelters and survival kits as a ‘shared feminist project’ (p. ). ahmed’s ‘killjoy manifesto’ (an instant classic for feminist survival kits everywhere) concludes that ‘we must stay unhappy with this world’ (p. ) if we want to change it, must honour our killjoys, our broken spirits and fragile communities if we want to stay strong. review � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s references beilin, c. ( ) full stop. http://www.full-stop.net/ / / /reviews/caren-beilin/living-a-feminist- life-sara-ahmed/. cixous, h. ( ) the laugh of the medusa. trans. keith cohen and paula cohen. university of chicago press, signs, vol. , no. (summer ), pp. – . shotwell, a. ( ). against purity: living ethically in compromised times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. aalya ahmad carleton university, ottawa, on k s b , canada aalya.ahmad@carleton.ca review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s http://www.full-stop.net/ / / /reviews/caren-beilin/living-a-feminist-life-sara-ahmed/ http://www.full-stop.net/ / / /reviews/caren-beilin/living-a-feminist-life-sara-ahmed/ 	living a feminist life 	sarah ahmed duke university press, january , ix+ pp., isbn: 	references runaway wives and rogue feminists: the origins of the women’s shelter movement in canada by margo goodhand copyright © the ontario historical society, ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : ontario history runaway wives and rogue feminists: the origins of the women’s shelter movement in canada by margo goodhand lisa pasolli volume , numéro , fall uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) the ontario historical society issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce compte rendu pasolli, l. ( ). compte rendu de [runaway wives and rogue feminists: the origins of the women’s shelter movement in canada by margo goodhand]. ontario history, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ -v -n -onhistory / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ book reviews put, a reordering of religion in society). fi- nally, chapter confronts the assumption that canada has long been in a state of re- ligious decline and argues instead that this phenomenon is recent. the formativeness of this process of de-christianization has contributed and continues to contribute to a reordering of people’s participation in civic life. while the authors do not ar- gue for religious revival, they do point to the vacuum of social power created by the decline in religious life, and wonder at the consequences of such a vacuum. it would not be hard to make an argument for the growth of political populism as by-product of this vacuum. but that’s a thought for an- other study. leaving christianity demonstrates secularization to be a process of religious re-ordering. clarke and macdonald ac- knowledge that the growth of world reli- gions within canada’s cultural plurality has had an effect on the changes to reli- gious culture. however, they also conclude that christianity itself has “undergone an unprecedented development” ( ). ca- nadians have left the church. they have left because they oppose “organized ex- pressions of christianity;” they have left because they have found meaning outside of the structure and institution of chris- tian churches; and they have left as a result of generational shifts in religious iden- tity. this book is an important contribu- tion to our understanding of the extent of religious change in the latter twentieth century. clarke and macdonald call atten- tion to the importance of the s as a decade of change, and situate their work within broader scholarship on religious and social history that point to the way the monumental cultural changes (or fallout) reverberated across social institutions and especially organized religion. julia rady-shaw margo goodhand’s runaway wives and rogue feminists, a history of the women’s shelter movement in canada, is engaging, powerful, and touching. relying heavily on oral testimonies, she puts the spotlight on the creation of five shelters in : interval house in toronto; ishtar transition house in aldergrove, b.c.; the edmonton women’s shelter (with a de- tour to the calgary women’s emergency shelter); saskatoon interval house; and vancouver transition house. much like the women she profiles, goodhand’s his- tory recognizes the importance of the po- litical and the personal. her book situates the shelters and transition houses in the politics of the women’s movement of the s, but she also gives careful attention to those often invisible and grassroots la- bours that propelled their creation, includ- ing, in the most compelling sections of the book, the emotional support women pro- vided each other during some of the hard- est times of their lives. runaway wives and rogue feminists the origins of the women’s shelter movement in canada by margo goodhand halifax & winnipeg : fernwood publishing, . pages. $ . paperback. isbn: . $ . kindle. isbn: . (www.fernwoodpublishing.ca) ontario history this is a trim book—only pages— yet it is packed with details and anecdotes that will be of interest to historians of canadian feminism. goodhand’s inter- viewees grapple with many of the issues and themes that appear, for example, in academic studies like nancy janovicek’s no place to go: local histories of the battered women’s shelter movement (vancouver: ubc press, ). take the issue of public funding. virtually all of goodhand’s inter- viewees identified the importance of local initiatives program (lip) and opportuni- ties for youth (ofy) grants, federal job- creation programs that ran for a short time during the early s and allowed wom- en to pay themselves during the shelters’ founding years. they also, however, point to the trade-offs involved in accepting gov- ernment money. in more recent years, for example, women in the shelter movement worry that the “feminist, collaborative ad- vocacy role” of the s has been lost in favour of the “client and employee” struc- ture demanded of government-supported programs, and that a “cone of silence” has descended on shelters and transition houses who must agree to curtail their advocacy work as a condition of public funding ( - ). the local variations of this story will be important to scholars who grapple with the relationship between feminism and the state. a related tension between ideolog y and action also runs throughout the book. many of the women goodhand interviews, especially those in toronto and vancouver, were concerned with the silence on domes- tic violence in much of the mainstream feminism of the s and s (violence against women was not addressed, for ex- ample, in the royal commission on the status of women). they urged recognition of wife battering as a societal rather than a private family issue, and considered their interventions as part of the political work of feminism. they also, though, had to bal- ance their politics with meeting the daily, urgent, on-the-ground needs of abused women and their children. occasionally, this meant collaborating with those who were indifferent or even hostile to femi- nism. in the chapter about alberta’s shel- ters, goodhand tells us about women who came to shelter work not through the wom- en’s movement but through church-based community services. members of the cath- olic women’s league, for example, did not identify as feminist and instead considered their shelter work (and, importantly, their financial donations to shelters) as charita- ble and missionary service. these kinds of adaptations, compromises, and forging cre- ative paths forward is an important part of feminist history, and goodhand captures book reviews these complexities wonderfully. again and again throughout this book, goodhand’s interviewees assert that their biggest barrier to confronting vio- lence against women was the failure to rec- ognize the “scope and nature of the prob- lem” ( ). reading this book, one can’t help but reflect on the similarities with our present moment and the almost-daily revelations of entrenched violence that have come to light because of the #metoo movement. feminists still battle against an assumption that violence against women is the result of the individual patholog y of a bad man, rather than a manifestation of patriarchy and the oppression rooted in colonialism, racism, disability, and other kinds of inequality. there was widespread reluctance, for example, to identify the ten murders and sixteen injuries that resulted from the so-called toronto van attack of april as patriarchal violence, despite the fact that it was perpetrated by a young man who was reportedly motivated by rage at being spurned by women and consid- ered himself “involuntarily celibate.” to- day, as in the early s, “it’s a lot easier to pretend it isn’t a problem” ( ) if we don’t recognize the “scope and nature” of gender-based violence. goodhand’s his- tory captures both the ongoing need for feminist activism at the level of society and state, and, equally importantly, it reminds us of the need to recognize and support the women who do the fundraising, write the grants, organize the meetings, buy the groceries, and clean the houses, doing the daily work of caring for the victims and survivors of violence. lisa pasolli queen’s university tax, order, and good government a new political history of canada, - by e.a. heaman montreal and kingston: mcgill univer- sity press, . xiv, pages. $ . hard- cover. isbn - - - - . in tax, order, and good government elsbeth heaman makes a compelling case that it is time to write taxes and pov- erty into canadian history. framed as an example of the “new political history,” the book studies canada’s tax history as a social history of politics for the period to . it does so from both the top-down perspective of the state and the bottom-up perspective of the people. of a call to action to address gender equity within our specialty: time's up on waiting for change. | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /aog. corpus id: a call to action to address gender equity within our specialty: time's up on waiting for change. @article{baecherlind act, title={a call to action to address gender equity within our specialty: time's up on waiting for change.}, author={l. baecher-lind and j. abbott and k. atkins and j. b. nijjar and celeste s. royce and l. schiff and h. ricciotti}, journal={obstetrics and gynecology}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	l. baecher-lind, j. abbott, + authors h. ricciotti 	published 	medicine 	obstetrics and gynecology although national attention has been focused on sexual harassment and gender inequity in the united states, leaders within the obstetrics and gynecology community have remained relatively silent. sexual harassment and gender inequity remain pervasive in our specialty. this article serves as a call to action for leadership as well as physicians within obstetrics and gynecology to implement ethical and evidence-based approaches to reduce gender inequity and improve workplace culture within our… expand view on pubmed scholar.harvard.edu save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	obstetrics and gynecology (clinical specialty) 	physiological sexual disorders citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency sexism in obstetrics and gynecology: not just a "women's issue". 	f. hughes, p. bernstein 	medicine 	american journal of obstetrics and gynecology 	 	 save alert research feed workplace harassment and discrimination in gynecology: results of the aagl member survey. 	j. brown, l. drury, + authors r. w. naumann 	medicine 	journal of minimally invasive gynecology 	 	 save alert research feed pesticides’ impact on pollinators 	m. aoun 	biology 	 save alert research feed references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency striving for gender equity in academic medicine careers: a call to action 	c. bates, lynn k. gordon, + authors ashleigh moses 	sociology, medicine 	academic medicine : journal of the association of american medical colleges 	 	 	 save alert research feed it is time for zero tolerance for sexual harassment in academic medicine. 	c. bates, r. jagsi, + authors t. flotte 	medicine 	academic medicine : journal of the association of american medical colleges 	 	 	 save alert research feed a review of organizational strategies for reducing sexual harassment: insights from the u. s. military 	nicole t buchanan, isis h. settles, a. t. hall, rachel c. o'connor 	psychology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed comparison of women in department leadership in obstetrics and gynecology with those in other specialties 	l. hofler, m. hacker, l. dodge, rose schutzberg, h. ricciotti 	medicine 	obstetrics and gynecology 	 	 	 save alert research feed women in leadership positions within obstetrics and gynecology: does the past explain the present? 	l. baecher-lind 	medicine 	obstetrics and gynecology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed does students' exposure to gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medical school affect specialty choice and residency program selection? 	t. stratton, m. mclaughlin, f. m. witte, s. fosson, l. nora 	medicine 	academic medicine : journal of the association of american medical colleges 	 	 	 save alert research feed nonreassuring status: improving obstetrician-gynecologist wellness. 	a. winkel, f. hughes, s. blank 	medicine 	obstetrics and gynecology 	 	 save alert research feed compensation and advancement of women in academic medicine: is there 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help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue microsoft word - body politic article.docx university of birmingham the body politic downing, lisa doi: . / license: creative commons: attribution-noncommercial-noderivs (cc by-nc-nd) document version peer reviewed version citation for published version (harvard): downing, l , 'the body politic: gender, the right wing and 'identity category violations'', french cultural studies, vol. , no. , pp. - . https://doi.org/ . / link to publication on research at birmingham portal general rights unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. the express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •	users may freely distribute the url that is used to identify this publication. •	users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the university of birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •	user may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the copyright, designs and patents act (?) •	users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. when citing, please reference the published version. take down policy while the university of birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. if you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact ubira@lists.bham.ac.uk providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-body-politic( fe e-be - fd-bea - dc beaa ).html the body politic: gender, the right wing, and “identity category violations” lisa downing, university of birmingham, uk. abstract the post-brexit, post-trump climate in the eu has seen a series of challenges from the right wing of politics to the liberal consensus of recent years (e.g. the rise of gert wilders in the netherlands and the increased support for alternativ für deutschland in the german election). this article examines the gendering and embodiment of the new far right in france and the uk. it offers a comparative focus on two recent political challengers from the right who are female: marine le pen (born ), the leader of the front national in france since , and anne marie waters (born ), the islam-critical candidate who was runner-up for the ukip (uk independence party) leadership in the uk in , and who has since started her own political party, “for britain”. it focuses on media coverage of, and self-representation by, these two figures. it argues that the discourse of the “right” and “left” wings has, historically, been gendered on the basis of assumptions that women are naturally more inclined towards consensus-building, collectivity, and compassion (and therefore left- wing politics), by dint of their biological function as child-bearers and traditional gender role as care-givers. right-leaning women have been treated as anomalies, both by feminist political analysts and the mainstream media. feminist concerns over the very existence of right-wing women is suggested by books such as second-wave feminist andrea dworkin’s right-wing women ( ), the more recent edited collection by paola bacchetta and margaret power, also called right wing women ( ), and, in the french context, claudie lesselier and fiametta venner’s l’extrême droite et les femmes ( ). le pen and waters appear as doubly aberrant, doubly exceptional figures – firstly as (far) right-wing women and secondly as (far) right-wing female leaders. the article considers the stakes of our categorical understandings of (gendered and political) identity more broadly. specifically, by introducing the original critical concept of “identity category violation”, it analyses the ways in which the recent trend for identity politics on the left in the west, often under the banner of “intersectionality”, leads to over-simplified understandings of how categories of gendered, sexual, class, and race-based identities are assumed to determine political affiliation. keywords: the right wing, feminism, identity politics, marine le pen, front national introduction right-wing women in modern western culture have been treated as anomalies or as categorical problems, both by mainstream commentators and by feminism. mainstream coverage of right-wing women often seeks to understand their politics by measuring the distance between their femininity and corporeality on the one hand, and their politics on the other. the obsessive media focus on margaret thatcher’s ultra- feminine hair and dress and the contrast they presented with her bellicose policies throughout the s offers ample illustrations of this (see: rose, ; downing, ). simultaneously, feminist concerns over the very existence of right-wing women is suggested by books such as second-wave feminist andrea dworkin’s right- wing women ( ), the more recent edited collection by paola bacchetta and margaret power, also called right-wing women ( ), and, in the french context, claudie lesselier and fiametta venner’s l’extrême droite et les femmes ( ). right-wing women may appear as a problem or puzzle to be solved precisely because “the right” and “the left”, broadly understood, tend to be thought of as gendered on the basis of assumptions that women are “naturally” more inclined towards consensus-building, collectivity, and compassion (and therefore left-wing politics) by dint of their biological function as child-bearers and traditional gender role as care-givers. women tend to be viewed as a class; men as individuals. this explains why exceptional women more generally – where exceptionality could signify political inappropriateness, forceful leadership, outstanding excellence, or physical violence – are constituted as a problem; too “self-ful” to conform to cultural rules about what women are supposed to be. it is worth noting that even feminist discourse uses the term “exceptional” (as in “exceptional woman syndrome”) to connote something negative – those successful women who fail to pull other women up with them (downing, ). attempting to explain why, in the uk, the conservative party has had two female prime ministers while labour has never had a female leader, mp jess phillips has argued that while c/conservative women are happy to leave the status quo intact if they get a chance to lead, left-wing women would be more likely to want to change society for the good of all women – which male left-wing men may not permit (rodger, ). yet, obviously, not all right-identifying women see themselves as arch individualists or as leaders. andrea dworkin set out to discover why so many women in the usa of the s voted for right-wing candidates when this seemed to go directly against their interests, given the often anti-woman leanings of us right-wing politics with its religious prohibitions, attempts to control reproductive freedoms, and disapproval of women in leadership roles. surely such features should have proved unattractive to most women? dworkin argues, however, that in a patriarchy the game of politics tout court is rigged against women. the left wing brings an illusion of sexual freedom, but only in male-dominated patriarchal terms, while the right – including the far right – may appeal to women precisely because it promises to limit the damage (sexual harm) to which women are exposed: as long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men who must provide; the most reliable protection against battery; the most respect. (dworkin, : .) dworkin argues that women are attracted towards right-wing politics on the basis of promises of protection from male harm – and specifically from the “other”: the immigrant male, the outsider. this is a smokescreen, of course, since most harm that comes to women happens within the domestic sphere (dworkin, : ). here, as in many of dworkin’s books, the world evoked as “patriarchy” is a totalitarian condition of male ownership of women in which the stakes of feminist liberation are high – in fact, the stakes are survival. while many would find dworkin’s second-wave politics unpalatable or irrelevant today, it is instructive to consider the degree to which her analysis still resonates. this rhetoric of “protection from the other”, for example, can be seen still to feature heavily in the language and logic deployed to appeal to the voter by the right, and particularly the far right. the recent emergence of a wave of us alt-right women bloggers calling themselves “tradwives” suggests this. their blogs blend a romanticization of traditional female gender roles and behaviours – obedience in marriage, homemaking, modest s-style dress, family values – with a discourse of white supremacy and the imperative to produce white babies (in terms that are disturbingly reminiscent of margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale, ). one “tradwife” has claimed that “traditionalism does ‘what feminism is supposed to do’ in preventing women from being made into ‘sexual objects’ and treated ‘like a whore’” (kelley, ). this suggests that the ideas noted by dworkin (and presaged by atwood’s creation of the authoritarian gilead) in the s persist in our present moment. our present moment is, of course, the post-brexit, post-trump climate, which has seen a recent growth of the far right across europe, as in america, marked, for example, by the rise of gert wilders in the netherlands, a serious challenge from the front national in france in the election, and the increased support for alternativ für deutschland in the german election of the same year. taking these observations as background, this article will examine specifically the gendering and embodiment of the new right wing in france and the uk. it will offer a comparative focus on two recent political challengers from the right who are female: marine le pen (born ), the leader of the front national in france since , and anne marie waters (born ), the islam-critical candidate who was runner-up for the ukip (uk independence party) leadership in , and who has since started her own political party, “for britain”. i shall examine how these two female leaders fit – or fail to fit – in a political tradition in which women have long been seen as helpmeets rather than leaders, and therefore who are doubly aberrant, doubly exceptional figures – firstly as (far) right-wing women and secondly as (far) right-wing female leaders. i will then consider the stakes of our categorical understandings of (gendered and political) identity more broadly. specifically, by introducing the original critical concept of “identity category violation”, i will analyse the ways in which the recent trend for identity politics on the left in the west, leads to over-simplified understandings of how categories of gendered, sexual, class, and race- based identities are assumed to determine political affiliation. the violation of legible identity categories demonstrates the need to re-examine both recently entrenched ideas of personal identity politics and the long-standing associations of the “left”- “right” model in the st century. the body politic and right-wing french female activists politics has always been gendered and embodied in a number of ways. the medieval metaphor of the “body politic”, or in french le corps-état, comprises the population of a particular country considered as a single entity, or as the organs of a single body. this idea is found in the work of french poet and court writer christine de pizan, particularly in le livre du corps de policie ( ). representations of the continent or the nation state as a specifically sexed and gendered body also have a long history. the continent of europe has as its embodiment europa, a raped female body. france, of course, has marianne, personification of justice and freedom and is also often symbolised, especially for nationalists (about which more later), by jeanne d’arc. and great britain has britannia, a female warrior holding aloft a trident and a shield. the personified figures of france and britain, then, are women, but they are exceptional women: warrior figures. yet, often the personifications of nations are also metaphorically evoked as mothers, both drawing on the notion of one’s homeland as a “motherland”/ terre maternelle and appealing to the collective male instinct to protect the same. (the rhetoric of “keeping those others off our land” goes hand-in-hand with “keeping those others from violating ‘our women’”, as a feature of the xenophobic ideology of many far-right parties.) the extended metaphor of the-land-as-a-woman and woman-as-the-land is picked up in dworkin’s analysis in right-wing women. she writes of the so-called “farming model” by which men control women, whereby “women as a class [are] planted with male seed and harvested; women [are] used for the fruit they bear, like trees.” (dworkin, : ). hence we have the notion of “husbandry” – the verb “to husband” meaning “to plow for the purpose of growing crops” (dworkin, : ). actual, real-life, fleshy women in politics – not being mythical heroines or symbols, but being understood in the context of these – face a series of contradictory expectations in a patriarchal society and in politics. it is instructive to assess these in the context of the history of women in the french front national prior to marine le pen’s election as leader, which came in . the party that would become the front national was founded in by jean-marie le pen. from the outset, the language used by j-m le pen about women and female bodies was at once idealized and derogatory. le pen metaphorized france as a “fiancée savoureuse”, a promised land that might be attainable if the perceived risks of migration and moral degeneration could be averted (lallemand, [ ]: ). yet, while the woman-land of france was seen as virginal, pure, and desirable, the actions of actual frenchwomen were often criticized as tainted and prone to disappointment. this is seen in j-m le pen’s emotive description of abortion as “une genocide antifrançaise” and the french women who terminated pregnancies as propagating “une culture de mort”. (alduy & wahnich, : ). yet, simultaneously, the presence of women has featured heavily in front national propaganda in a number of ways and to a number of ends, many of which evoke the iconography and symbolism of woman-as-nation-state (so woman-as-body) or woman-as-mythical-warrior. in an essay included in bacchetta and power’s collection, claudie lesselier identifies a number of functions of an activist woman in the front national, and in far-right french propaganda more generally, which support this inherently contradictory expectation. in , jean-marie le pen insisted in an interview on “femme et politique”, published in national hebdo that the fact that some women, including his daughters, worked on behalf of the party proved that the fn was not a party that excluded women. he also insisted upon their devotion to the national heroine saint joan of arc, equalled only by the important role the party recognised in the mother. (lesselier, : .) since , the fn has held a demonstration every year on may, the day commemorating joan of arc, “a figure who seamlessly combines religious, national, military, and feminine thematics, and thus introduces the idea of woman as a fighter” (lesselier, : ). lesselier argues that a primary function fn women have been called upon to fill is that of embodying “the party-as-family”. this describes the notion that members are encouraged to feel as if they belong to a “countersociety”, organised as a family (lesselier, : p. ). in the annual may demonstration in , a number of fn women marched with their children, or pushed baby carriages that were empty, to symbolise the decreasing birth rate and the idea that french women were failing to do their duty. jean-marie le pen greeted them with the words: “femmes d’ europe! vous êtes charme et fécondité” (lesselier, : p. ). so, notwithstanding the political agency these women expressed by marching in a demonstration, they were effectively reduced by the leader of the party they supported to their sexual and maternal functions. (fig. . front national poster - ) women have also been charged throughout the fn’s history with providing a ‘good image’ for it, as the party has worked hard to undo its reputation for machismo. between and , a poster with the caption ‘le front nationale, c’est vous!’ (fig. ) was used to recruit to the party. it shows a wholesome family, comprising a blonde-haired, caucasian mother and her identikit daughters, designed to soften the party’s image by suggesting that this mother is the type of fn voter you might meet at the school gate or in the boulangerie, and suggesting also, along the lines of andrea dworkin’s analysis, that these precious females of france are precisely whom the fn will protect from the incursion of non-white immigrants, societal degeneration and threats to traditional catholic family values. although relatively little specific attention was paid to policing the behaviour of immigrant and non-white french women until the affaire du foulard of november (see kofman, : ), it is notable that the islamisation of france was a widespread concern that the front national was able to play on, both explicitly and by suggestion, throughout the s. the front cover of le figaro of october asks “serons-nous encore français dans years?” and shows a bust of marianne traduced by veiling. the ostentatious european blondeness of the women depicted in the front national poster (fig. ), in tandem with its notably s-style advertising aesthetic, offers a nostalgic image of the acceptable french female citizen and works to preclude and erase a parallel image of the – unacceptable – head-scarf-wearing muslim french woman. in all of these uses, women appear as symbols, and self-contradictory ones. they are warriors or homemakers and nothing in between. often, they are little more than impregnable chattle to be protected by the good men of france. yet, much is also expected of them. the burden placed on a female activist to fulfil a number of – incompatible and rigid – roles is summarised by lesselier as follows. women activists are supposed to demonstrate … that they can reconcile the traditional image of femininity and, when possible, motherhood, with a salaried job and political duties, as well as legitimise their political involvement as a family responsibility even when it clearly does not correspond to the reality of their motivations. (lesselier, : ) marine le pen and french femininity the election of marine le pen to president of the front national in was marketed as heralding a change of tone and style for the party. brigitte beauzamy writes that it was dressed up as: “a sign of the party’s modernization and renunciation of its roots – be they fundamentalist catholic and counter-revolutionary or fascist” (beauzamy, : ). and as alduy and wahnich point out in their linguistic study of marine le pen’s use of political language: “elle ne manque pas de rappeler régulièrement qu’elle est elle-même mère de trois enfants, divorcée, et qu’elle travaille” (alduy and wahnich, : ). marine le pen has insisted on marketing herself as ideologically more culturally liberal than the party’s previous official position with regard to issues including abortion, gay rights, and the condemnation of anti-semitism (albeit often by omission of comment on these issues, rather than by direct statements of support for them). yet, some traditional front national themes remain strong in her language, including her critique of european integration, a strong nationalist stance, and finally a deep suspicion of islam (but, notably, by adopting for the first time in fn rhetoric the language of “la laïcité” which has historically been a theme of the left). (see: beauzamy, : ; scrinzi, .) yet, le pen’s self-presentation and the cultural and media understanding of her extend, in a number of significant ways, the discourses around women on the far right articulated by lesselier. a typical article in le lab politique of july focuses on marine’s trajectory from “la fille de jean-marie” to the “mère de famille”, where the family is the party and (aspirationally) the nation (de violet, ). the article charts her desire to stake her claim to the future of the party and to re-make it in her image, consigning her father to the past, opening with the words: “marine le pen en a un peu marre qu’on la ramène sans cesse à son statut de ‘fille de’”. and a section of the recent biography of marine le pen is entitled “‘fifille’ coupe le cordon”, emphasising at once the desire and the difficulty of being “l’héritière [qui] s’émancipe” (rosso, : ). her persona, then, seems constrained to that of a moveable player within a family romance. where the age-old epic story of the singular male hero would involve killing the father in order to take his place as chief patriarch, marine can move only from the role of daughter to the role of mother. she is thus not fully allowed to be a self-defined individual, but limited by the language of biological female roles and playing on the stereotypical notion discussed by lesselier that feminine political ambition is modelled on domestic/ family dynamics. in a recent article on the front national’s attitudes to women under marine le pen, francesca scrinzi has argued persuasively that, while the association between woman and mother remains strong for the party, its female leader has attempted to nudge its members from seeing women as “mothers of the nation” to seeing them as “working mothers” (scrinzi, ). marine le pen thus embodies a gendered hybrid of roles or archetypes representing both tradition and reform. she is “maternal figure”, “joan of arc-style warrior”, and “modern working woman” in one. her blog, a slick piece of marketing, has the tag line on its home page: “je suis une femme libre, une mère, une française et j’ai choisi de m’engager pour mon pays” (http://carnetsdesperances.fr/marine-le- pen/ accessed june ). marine le pen, then, treads a difficult line that no male political leader would ever have to tread between being the exceptional individual leader she seems to want to be and carefully playing to the persistent fn stereotypes of the good female activist rooted in ideas of family, biology and maternity. yet it is evident that while she feels discomfort with this limitation, she does not explicitly address the all-pervading sexism at the heart of politics. indeed, when discussing “la parité des sexes” in the context of all-female quotas in political parties in a discussion sponsored by sciences po and elle magazine in , she argues for individual merit – for women competing on a par with men – in the political sphere, such that the best candidate regardless of sex should always be appointed to a given position. marine le pen states: je pense que notre république et nos valeurs sont très claires. on accède à tel ou tel poste en fonction de son mérite. ni en fonction de son sexe, ni en fonction de la couleur de son peau, ni en fonction de ses origines. ni dans un sens ni dans l’autre, d’ailleurs. on ne peut pas vous le refuser en raison de cela, mais vous n’êtes pas censé avoir un avantage en raison de ses spécificités. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_ kz yazog, my transcription, accessed june .) le pen argues here that, in terms of political representation, there should be no difference between people with regard to their sex, ethnic origins, religion etc., they should be judged as individuals only on their ability to do the job. the claims for individualism and meritocracy may, however, ring a little hollow from one who has essentially inherited her position from her father. she further argues that quotas of the kind discussed are in violation of the notion of the universal subject of the republic. the dearly beloved concept of the universal republican subject on which the french state is founded is indeed at odds with notions such as positive discrimination or quotas ensuring female representation. yet, just as marine le pen’s claims of meritocracy sit uncomfortably with the realities of nepotism, so, as many feminists have pointed out over the years, france is a hyper-gendered culture, such that women are culturally conditioned to perform roles that are deemed proper to their sex and that do not always fit well with the subject of universal republicanism, who is modelled on a white french man (see: lépinard and mazur, ). it is precisely in the context of the persistence of belief in the universal subject of republicanism and the contradictory demand for women’s extreme compliance with femininity, i would contend, that the open letter published in le monde on january , written by a number of high profile women including catherine deneuve, can be understood. this letter – a response to the campaign of #metoo or, in french, #balancetonporc, defends the right of men to pursue seduction clumsily. the letter is headed “nous défendons une liberté d'importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle”. particularly striking is the following passage: une femme peut, dans la même journée, diriger une équipe professionnelle et jouir d’être l’objet sexuel d’un homme, sans être une « salope » ni une vile complice du patriarcat. elle peut veiller à ce que son salaire soit égal à celui d’un homme, mais ne pas se sentir traumatisée à jamais par un frotteur dans le métro, même si cela est considéré comme un délit. elle peut même l’envisager comme l’expression d’une grande misère sexuelle voire comme un non-événement. (par collectif, le monde, ) this statement shows how st-century french women are expected to fulfil a series of very rigidly drawn – and incompatible to the point of cognitive dissonance- inducing – roles. crucially, none of these roles are merely that of individual human being with her own tastes and life projects, and only half of them are also expected of men, who are permitted to be citizens and public actors without also having to worry about their physical desirability as an object. what is especially noteworthy is the degree to which this demanding, coerced cultural femininity is naturalized as inherent to women both in this letter by concerned french women and in the far-right french discourses explored in the previous section. as eleanor kofman has pointed out, the far-right women’s movement ufram (the union féminine pour le respect et l’aide à la maternité) interpreted “real feminism” as “the defence of a feminine nature.” (kofman, : ). the rhetoric of the far right is the rhetoric of patriarchy itself writ large, and without its benign and faux-egalitarian mask. along these lines, it is worth reminding ourselves that the french language has no separate words for the biological term “female”, and the gender “feminine” for human beings. (the word “femelle” is only applied to nonhuman animals and “feminité” indicates embodied experience as much as gender role). femininity is femaleness in french, suggesting much about the french understanding of women’s experience, since what can be expressed in a language so obviously conditions what can be thought and lived. anne marie waters and “identity category violation” to illustrate further the complexity of, and apparent contradictions inherent in, the category of the right-wing woman leader, i turn now to consideration of a limit example: anne marie waters, who ran for the leadership of ukip in and now leads her own fledgling political party “for britain”. waters, who had previously set up the group “sharia watch” to attempt to monitor and raise awareness of the existence and activities of sharia courts in the uk, ran for ukip leader on an explicitly anti-islam ticket. this divided the party membership and saw her denounced by the former leader nigel farage as racist, islamophobic, and likely to lead to the destruction of the party if she won (roberts, ). waters came in second, being narrowly defeated by henry bolton, a virtual unknown. (bolton was then himself – ironically – forced out of his position following the coming-to-light of racist comments made by his girlfriend jo marney about meghan markle. (see: quin, .)) waters is a fascinating political phenomenon. an irish-born lesbian feminist, former labour activist, and ardent anti-islamist, it is striking that she as an individual, and her set of political values, fail to fit any of the roles and stereotypes expected of, and taken up by, the far-right-wing female activists identified by lesselier in the french context, and also fail to add up as an easily understandable or consistent political package in the uk context. to analyse how waters signifies – or fails to signify – in the field of political meaning-making and gender meaning-making, i want to borrow, analogously, a concept from linguistics, that of category violation. a famous example of category violation in the linguistics sense is noam chomsky’s sentence: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” (chomsky, [ ]: ) this sentence obeys grammatical and syntactical rules pertaining to adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs, but it is nonsense in terms of meaning, because the adjectives chosen contradict each other and the adverb is not appropriate to the verb it describes, confounding our expectations. if we transpose this concept from syntax and grammar to the codification of identity politics and identificatory labels, we arrive at a critical concept that i will call identity category violation. this concept may be used to describe exceptional women who occupy leadership roles in political organisations in general, since as lesselier writes: “all women politicians are confronted with questions about how they reconcile their feminine and political responsibilities” (lesselier, : ). in the case of waters, the chomskyesque formulation to convey the category violation she embodies would read something like: irish-born, british-nationalist lesbian leads anti-islam party feministically. here, then, we see an example of identity category violation on steroids, à la puissance treize. to illustrate the extent to which waters herself seems uncomfortably aware of the identity category violation she embodies, we can turn to one of the regular facebook live videos that waters posts. the style of waters’s media persona in these vlog messages to her followers is very casual and direct, lacking the polish and sheen of marine le pen’s blog and carefully managed online presence, and attempting to create a sense of directness and intimacy. the transcript below comes from a . - minute-long vlog published online on december . in this section of video, waters discusses the fact that the american right-wing provocatrice and social commentator ann coulter has once again trolled the public by stating she would prefer that women – especially liberal women – did not have the right to vote. many of anne marie’s “for britain” followers supported coulter’s point and wanted their leader to share their views, prompting the visibly tortured, earnest rejoinder she makes in this vlog: a lot of people have criticised me for this, and that’s perfectly fine, i’m perfectly willing to take people’s criticisms. but i’m also perfectly free to stand my own ground and stand by my principles. look, when i criticise people like laurie penny, for example, or other so-called feminists, for being complete and utter hypocrites about the treatment of women in muslim countries, what if she – or any of them, not just laurie penny - were to come back to me and say “but look, ann coulter says that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, so if you don’t condemn that, who is the hypocrite here?” and she’d have a point. you know people can say that it is a joke, or what have you, but it’s not. ann coulter has repeatedly stated that, in her ideal society, women would not be allowed to vote. now, if i hold jihadists to account, and i criticise jihadists for their ideal society being a dark place of tyranny where women have no say, then i am going to criticise others when they say the same thing. it’s called consistency and it’s called principle. (https://www.facebook.com/amwaters /videos/ / my transcription, accessed june .) waters grapples womanfully in the video with the tension between her own sense of consistency and the contradictions they represent. as someone who claims to critique islamic fundamentalism largely on feminist and pro-lesbian and gay grounds (specifically the protection of girls and women’s rights), but obviously attracts to her message the more traditional and hard-right male ex-ukip voter, who is likely to have as little time for gay and lesbian concerns and for feminism as he would have for islamism, she constantly and precariously has to tread a fine line between her distinct ideological interests. the case of anne marie waters – an extreme case in which the various identity categories and affiliations we would expect to see together in the same person are radically disrupted – demonstrates in a particularly acute way that our notion that we can both understand and predict reliably the categorization of political identity as it is imbricated with the other identity categories of sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc., is deeply flawed. even in the case of le pen, who adheres much more closely in her rhetoric to lesselier’s category of far-right-wing female activist than waters (perhaps in part owing to the specificity of the french context), there is evidence of the violation of identity categories, in so far as she who should be helpmeet or daughter now leads the party, and her own lifestyle choices (divorced, a single mother) do not align exactly with the traditional values and role imagined for a right- wing woman. some concluding remarks: coming full circle what is especially noteworthy is that, unlike in their strictly linguistics sense, sociologically and philosophically speaking, identity category violations may show up the instability, or flimsiness, or fictional quality, of the rules that govern them. in this case, those rules pertain to the reification of “identity”. thinking in these terms may suggest that the movement towards a greater focus on identity politics in recent years, including the notion of “intersectionality” within feminism and its extreme occasional outcome of producing a so-called “hierarchy of oppression”, may not be an unambiguously edifying or progressive political undertaking, despite being a dominant discourse of the left in multiple countries. with its exhortations to check one’s privilege, centre others in one’s politics, and ex-communicate those who reject these prescriptions, there is a disturbingly authoritarian underpinning to this ideology. while this is a larger subject, deserving of more space than i have to give to it here, i would nevertheless emphasize that i have deliberately drawn on a second-wave, radical, and therefore class-analysis-based feminist – andrea dworkin – to frame this article, rather than a postmodernist or third-wave feminist. this is not only because dworkin wrote a book which analyses right-wing women, but because the branch of feminism she represents understood (much as a foucauldian analysis understands, albeit using a radically different frame of analysis), that the classes to which individuals are allocated – and the supposed nature of those in said classes – have much to do with the interests of the ones doing the allocating, categorising, and defining. these cannot be uniquely understood as some, very recent, identity politics claims would have it, on the basis of identification and self-identification of oppression alone. further, what too much recent, third-wave intersectional feminism demands, i would argue, is the same kind of being-for-the-other that much mainstream patriarchal discourse already demands of those in “class woman”. what is needed is an awareness of individuality, separated from adherence to narrow group interests and the ontologization of oppression, and an ongoing and sophisticated class-based awareness of the way in which power continues to function. and so i have come full circle and will close with another quotation from dworkin’s right wing women: women desperately try to embody a male-defined feminine ideal because survival depends upon it. the ideal, by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created […] like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her. (dworkin, : ) by reading accounts and self-representations of le pen and waters in terms of their presentation of their gender and their politics, and their claims for an individuality that is not identical with the labels ascribed to them, we have seen how the imaginary construct of the representative of the “body politic” in the twenty-first century remains both strikingly and normatively gendered, in ways that do not map on to the lived reality of the female political agents in question. we have also seen how living as a multifaceted human being while female risks perpetrating identity category violations, resulting in a lack of legibility, that doing the same while male would not – or at least not to the same extent, since men have always been allowed to be complex individuals. references: alduy, cécile and stéphane wahnich ( ) marine le pen prise aux mots, paris: seuil. beauzamy, brigitte ( ) “explaining the rise of the front national to electoral prominence: multi-faceted or contradictory models”, in ruth wodak, majid khosravinik and brigitte mral (eds.), right-wing populism in europe: politics and discourse, london and new york: bloomsbury, - . bilge, sirma ( ) “théorisations féministes de l’intersectionnalité”, diogène, : , - . chomsky, noam ( [ ]) syntactic structures, second edition with an introduction by david w. lightfoot, berlin and new york: mouton de gruyter. crenshaw, kimberlé ( ) “demarginalizing the intersections of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine’, university of chicago legal forum, , - . de violet, ghislain ( ) “comment la ‘mère de famille’ marine le pen tente de renvoyer jean marie le pen au passé”, le lab politique, juillet: http://lelab.europe .fr/comment-la-mere-de-famille-marine-le-pen-tente-de-renvoyer- jean-marie-le-pen-au-passe- accessed june . downing, lisa ( ) “selfish women and other inconvenient deviants”, inaugural lecture, university of birmingham, november: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avxlkhrqv accessed june . dworkin, andrea ( ) right-wing women, new york: perigree. kelly, annie ( ) “the housewives of white supremacy”, the new york times, june: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt- right.html accessed june . kofman, eleonore ( ) “when society was simple: gender and ethnic divisions and the far and new right in france”, in nickie charles and helen hintjens (eds.), gender, ethnicity and political ideologies, london and new york: routledge, - . lallemand, myriam ( [ ]) “la métaphore sexuelle dans le discours de jean marie le pen” in claudie lesselier and fiametta venner (eds.), l’extrême droite et les femmes, villeurbanne: golias, - [reprinted from celcius, , july-august , - ]. lépinard, eléonore and mazur, amy ( ) “republican universalism faces the feminist challenge: the continuing struggle for gender equality” in sylvain brouard, amy mazur, and andrew m. appleton (eds.), the french fifth republic at fifty: beyond stereotypes, basingstoke, palgrave macmillan, - . lesselier, claudie ( ) “far-right women in france: the case of the national front” [translated by paola bacchetta], in paola bacchetta and margaret power (eds.), right-wing women: from conservatives to extremists around the world, new york and london: routledge, - . mushaben, joyce marie ( ) becoming madame chancellor: angela merkel and the berlin republic, cambridge: cambridge university press. par collectif ( ) “nous défendons une liberté d'importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle”, le monde, janvier: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/ / / /nous-defendons-une-liberte-d- importuner-indispensable-a-la-liberte-sexuelle_ _ .html accessed june . quin, ben ( ) “ukip members oust henry bolton as leader after only five months” the guardian, february: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /feb/ /ukip- members-oust-henry-bolton-as-leader-after-five-months accessed june . roberts, rachel ( ) “nigel farage ‘to form new party’ if anti-islam campaigner anne marie waters wins ukip leadership”, the independent, september: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-new-party-anne-marie- waters-aaron-banks-ukip-leadership-contest-a .html accessed june . rodger, james ( ) “jess phillips says labour has problem with women in leadership”, the birmingham mail, december: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/jess-phillips-says-labour- problem- accessed june . rose, jacqueline ( ) “margaret thatcher and ruth ellis”, new formations, , winter, - . rosso, romain ( ) la face cachée de marine le pen, paris: flammarion, . scrinzi, francesca ( ) “gender and women in the front national discourse and policy: from ‘mothers of the nation’ to ‘working mothers’?”, new formations, , spring/summer, - . notes: the undue media focus on female politicians’ appearance, especially clothes and make-up, is not, of course, limited to right-wing leaders. joyce marie mushaben calls this phenomenon “lipstick watch” and notes its prominence in coverage of hillary clinton, condoleeza rice, and the subject of her study, angela merkel (mushaben, : ). i use this term, first coined in my inaugural lecture (downing, ), to signify the opposite of “selfless”, i.e. what women are traditionally supposed to be. the linguistically jarring nature of the neologism is intended to reflect the ontologically jarring nature of the very concept it is designed to describe. the idea of “intersectionality” probably originates with the writings of us legal scholar kimberlé crenshaw. her influential article of set out to show that employers in the usa, including general motors, were discriminating against black women not only on the grounds of sex, as they employed white women in customer- facing roles, and not only on the grounds of race, as they employed black men on the factory floor, but because of the particular – intersecting – axis of sexism and racism that black women alone face (crenshaw, .) for an overview of how intersectionality has since developed, been deformed, and now manifests in a range of national and linguistic contexts, see bilge ( ). . contested issues surrounding populism in public and academic debates full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rspe the international spectator italian journal of international affairs issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rspe contested issues surrounding populism in public and academic debates bertjan verbeek & andrej zaslove to cite this article: bertjan verbeek & andrej zaslove ( ) contested issues surrounding populism in public and academic debates, the international spectator, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: jun . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rspe https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rspe https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rspe &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rspe &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule contested issues surrounding populism in public and academic debates bertjan verbeek and andrej zaslove radboud university, nijmegen abstract populism seems to be a well-established notion in public and academic debate alike. nevertheless, several issues surrounding populism are still contested and thus merit closer attention. these contested issues encompass the extent to which populism is novel and ubiquitous; the scope of the phenomenon; the merits of the various definitions of populism; its political colour(s); the potential danger it poses to democracy; its appropriateness to govern; as well as populism’s impact beyond national borders. keywords populism; public debate; populist radical right; populist left; populism and democracy; populism and government; populism and foreign policy much has been said and written about populism, especially since cas mudde published what proved to be a foundational article entitled the “the populist zeitgeist” (mudde ). undoubtedly, populism is currently one of the most popular topics in academia and public debate, in coffee houses and on online posts, possibly only rivalled by global warming, #metoo and sports. a quick search in google scholar for english language publications using ‘populism’ or ‘populist’ in their titles, suggests that academic interest in populism has proliferated since (see figure ). on the one hand, there is reason to rejoice in such a lively discussion: to the extent that populism is linked to the public’s interest in politics, it testifies to the vibrancy of open societies. on the other hand, it runs the risk of resembling the tower of babel: the various ideas of what is meant by the very term populism has produced a situation in which everyone is using the term, with different people employing different interpreta- tions. the academic and public debate is thus ridden with contestation over various issues regarding populism. this may run the risk of producing misunderstandings. in this article, we seek to map out part of the confusion and identify such issues of contestation in order to contribute to a coherent research agenda and a more fruitful public debate. we address nine such issues. contested issue : is populism new? populism is sometimes presented as a new phenomenon, particularly in the public debate in which opinion leaders have become involved since the success of populists in western europe and, particularly, the rise of donald trump in the united states. indeed, while recognising that academics have addressed populism for some time, contact andrej zaslove a.zaslove@fm.ru.nl the international spectator , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - the guardian questions why populism has become “sexy” particularly over the past years (rooduijn ). to be sure, populism has now reached new heights. in the european context, populist parties are now found across the left/right political spec- trum. moreover, quite a few governments are founded on populist parties: austria, hungary, italy, poland, and norway boast such governments. in addition, it is sug- gested that the wave has produced a new type of leadership: depending on how one views populism, one could argue that populist leaders rule bolivia, ecuador, hungary, the philippines, and the united states. the most radical suggestion of the newness, found in both academia and the public debate, is the suggestion that populism heralds the end of liberal democracy as we have known it for most of the post-second world war period, and ushers in a new type of political system, sometimes called illiberal democracy, which rejects liberal elements such as checks and balances and minority rights. this is the case in public as well as academic debate: witness the manifesto of intellectuals against populism (libération ) and yascha mounk’s the people vs. democracy (mounk ). often, the economic and financial crisis that started in is portrayed as a catalyst: from this perspective, populism reflects the resistance of those who stood on the losing side of globalisation and became aware of this when the financial crunch came. the crisis thus fed into feelings of insecurity that had been developing since / when the world, as the west saw it, collapsed and islam-inspired terrorism made many people afraid of plural societies. however, if we look over time, we find that there has been a gradual, but significant increase in support for populist parties for some time now, well preceding the financial crisis and even / . if we look at aggregate numbers, populist radical right parties were populism populist figure . scholarly publications with populism or populist in title ( - ). numbers are cumulative. source: google scholar (authors' own calculations) b. verbeek and a. zaslove already gaining percent of the vote in the s (see figure ). on average, by then, they were already doing better than green political parties. to be sure, there were fewer populist left parties at that time. however, to imply that populist parties are a new phenomenon is empirically not correct. it is important to note that if we tally up left and right populism, we see more populists than ever. in some extreme cases, such as in italy, populist parties can compose up to percent of the vote (in both the and elections). nevertheless, one should be careful not to speak of an explosion of populism. indeed, populism far precedes the post-cold war era. to the extent that it is philosophi- cally related to the ideals of the enlightenment centring around radical forms of direct democracy (going back to rousseau and possibly calvin), populism has long been present in movements and parties that have embraced such forms of direct democracy. it was present in some of the ideas of the french revolution; it was present in the radical council ideas at the turn of the th century and again in the movement; it was present in the push for decentralisation and referenda in many countries after world war ii. in as much as it is in some ways philosophically related to an almost pre-modern longing for an arcadian society in which the people are a self-sufficient community, the american populist party ( th century), the french poujadists ( s), argentine peronism ( - and - ), the dutch farmers’ party ( s/ s) and possibly nordic anti-tax parties ( s) belong to that tradition. contested issue : is populism ubiquitous? populism seems to be dramatically on the rise, indeed ubiquitous. however, this is not the case and often emanates from contested definitions of populism (see below). this leads to a paradoxical finding: whereas populism is less present than is often claimed, it is also more . . . . . . . populist radical right (west) populist left (west) green parties (west) figure . average vote (%) for the populist radical right, populist radical left, and green parties in western europe in national elections between and . source: wolinetz and zaslove b, (reprinted with permission). the international spectator present than is often claimed (hawkinset al. ). let’s ponder the first claim:many actors or events are considered to be populist while in essence they are not populist at all. three examples serve to illustrate: firstly, some claim that, in , us presidential candidate donald trump, jr. was campaigning as a populist. for example, kirk hawkins and levente littvay (forthcoming) argue that trump is “half populist”, scoring higher on anti-elitism than on people-centrism; secondly, dramatic events such as brexit are often considered to be evidence of populism; and thirdly, mainstream politicians are often described as populists (iakhnis et al. ). for instance, the media often portray dutch prime minister mark rutte as populist since he uses ‘folksy’ expressions such as “sod off” when speaking about badly behaving youth (korteweg ). however, in these examples use of the term populism obfuscates the issues and hinders the development of a precise meaning of the term. in essence, trump’s populism is a borderline case (hawkins and rovira kaltwasser ): analysis shows that trump was less populist at the beginning of his campaign. he became more populist later when he made explicit claims to represent the people versus the corrupt elite. the latter is the litmus test if we are to claim that trump is a populist (see below). regarding brexit, although many actors such as the uk independence party (ukip) and arguments used to support brexit may be considered populist, it would be a stretch of the imagination to call the entire brexit movement populist. indeed, brexit itself is part of a broader debate over issues that are not populist in and of themselves, ranging from immigration and economic sovereignty to a surge in english nationalism after the scottish independence referendum (colantone and stanig ; dennison and geddes ). last, if mainstream politicians such as rutte tap into popular sentiments, this is not enough to qualify them as populist. this brings us to an important difference between being a populist and being close to the people. in this respect, luke march has made a very useful distinction between populism and demoticism. the latter refers to being close to the people; it denotes using a common language and suggests the connotation of being part of the people. as march writes, what passes for ‘mainstream’ or ‘thin’ populism is not really populism at all but demoti- cism (closeness to ordinary people), which is necessary, but by no means sufficient for populism. therefore, analysts should not call parties ‘rather populist’ just because their rhetoric is demotic (march , ). demoticism is different from populism insofar as it does not employ the antagonism between the people and the elite: being part of the people is not one and the same thing as being anti-elitist. although many actors who are often seen as populist thus are, in fact, not populist, we have to be equally careful not to deny the presence of populism when it is actually present. because of our focus on political parties and individual politicians, we overlook the possibility that populism is present elsewhere in society, particularly in civil society organisations and more broadly amongst the population in their political attitudes. examples from civil society are the occupy movement across the globe (gould-wartofsky ), which was preceded by the indignados movement in spain (castañeda ). underlying the rise of populists as distinct political actors is often a cultural undercurrent that offers fecund soil for political populism to prosper. the intellectuals’ nuova destra b. verbeek and a. zaslove (new right) movement in italy is a case in point (capra casadio ). similarly, the us tea party, a grass roots organisation that operates within the republican party, is based on an intellectual movement that combines traditional ideas about sovereign individuals uniting against a strong (federal) state with conservative religious ideas (skocpol and williamson ). on the left, populism has intellectual roots in the works of chantal mouffe (mouffe ), for example, and the group of intellectuals around pablo iglesias (kioupkiolis ), laying the foundation for podemos (we can) in spain. indeed, populism is present more broadly among the population than is often appreciated. this is borne out by new developments in measuring populism in europe as well as in latin america (see akkerman et al. ; ; hawkins et al. ). political scientists have been measuring populist attitudes in a variety of contexts for some time with remarkable results: first, populist attitudes are found not only in countries where there are populist parties, but also in countries without populist parties (hawkins et al. ). second, citizens who are more populist in attitude are more likely to vote for a populist party but may also vote for non-populist parties (akkerman et al. ). populism may thus be more dormant and bigger than is often claimed, reinfor- cing the claim in the previous section that populism may not be new, but rather a more permanent feature of parts of the electorate. the question that should be addressed is: how and under what conditions is it mobilised? contested issue : can we agree on what populism means? different conceptualisations of populism abound in the scientific and popular literature. often these differences are presented as a debate between irreconcilable camps. we maintain, however, that this need not be the case. rather, different conceptualisations may lead to different, yet relevant and sometimes related, research questions (cf. miller- idriss ). ) populism is sometimes equated with politicians who promise (and give) the people what they want. this would identify populism with political opportunism. actually, this is the cambridge dictionary definition. however, this categorisation makes it very hard to distinguish populism as a separate phenomenon: most politicians take an opportunity when they see one and are prepared to cater to voters’ preferences. few, however, would be so opportunistic as to risk the political damage of being seen as inconsistent and unreliable. every politician is interested in power, but will seek it on the basis of a fairly consistent and stable political platform, which puts limits on the ease with which they can alter their position. ) populism is sometimes defined as a political strategy (weyland ).this remains close to the opportunist notion of populism, but clearly differs from it in that the strategic objective (gaining power) is achieved via a consistent hammering on specific issues such as security, protectionism, and/or strong leadership. nevertheless, the tendency of politicians to emphasize such themes is hardly new. it thus cannot explain the current (and past) popularity of populist movements and parties. however, it does help us understand the behaviour displayed by various mainstream parties that compete with populist parties: they often emulate both the rhetoric (although playing it down somewhat) and the issues of populists, and thus are often ‘accused’ of being populists themselves, particularly by anti-populists (see for example, van klingeren et al. ). the international spectator in the dutch parliamentary election campaign of , liberal party leader (and prime minister) mark rutte took it so far as to declare that his party, the people‘s party for freedom and democracy (volkspartij voor vrijheid en democratie, vvd) represents “good populism” (nos ). the concept of populist strategy may thus be a relevant concept in studying populism. ) third, it is sometimes claimed that populism represents the antagonism towards the elite felt by the broader public. most would maintain that populists are anti- incumbent, anti-establishment, and/or anti-mainstream. indeed, reduced electoral turn out, lack of trust in government or even feelings of resentment are often invoked to describe the playing field of populists (cf. sikk ; barr ). yet, only seldom is populism identified with anti-system movements or parties, such as the communist or gaullist parties of the past, even though italy’s five star movement (movimento stelle, m s) and spain’s podemos have been described as anti-system (cf. bickerton and invernizzi accetti ). nevertheless, if we embrace this conceptualisation we run the risk of identifying populism exclusively with sentiments felt by the people towards their rulers. in doing so, we would not be able to understand what such citizens seek from a political system that they are dissatisfied with, but do not wish to overthrow altogether. this requires a notion of populism that encompasses leaders as well as followers and is capable of proposing a political programme beyond the total rejection of the political system. ) the notion of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” (cf. mudde ) is capable of meeting the shortcomings of the previous conceptualisations. this notion is ideological because it claims that all populists present politics as a conflict between those they conceive to be the pure people and the corrupt, or evil elite. in this sense, it sometimes harks back to rousseau-like notions of the general will (mudde , - ) or invokes a different, pre- modernist notion of an arcadian society. however, the ideology is thin-centred because the juxtaposition of people and elite does not in itself produce a comprehensive outlook on society. hence, populists borrow elements from existing ideologies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism, christian democracy, environmentalism) and marry them consistently with their baseline: the people-elite juxtaposition. this focus on ideology has two analytical advantages: first, ideology is a property that applies both to leaders, their movements and parties, as well as to their followers. it thus encompasses much of the other populist conceptualisations; second, it allows for a comparative study without having to give in to the idea that every populist movement is idiosyncratic because of unique temporal and geographic circumstances (cf. halikiopoulou , who combines populism’s thin ideology with nationalism). all in all, we can roughly agree on what populism means: populism is something very specific, primarily a set of ideas (mudde ). we need not be troubled by most other conceptualisations: starting with the notion of thin-centred ideology, we can ignore opportunism, we can allow for strategy (mainly as a response of populist opponents), we can study voters, politicians, movements as well as parties. importantly, embracing the thin-centred ideology notion, we have a proper tool for comparative analysis across time and space (cf. mudde , ). b. verbeek and a. zaslove contested issue : is populism right-wing? in the past, research into populism, especially its european variety, focused on radical right- wingpopulism.it remainsunclear why thisis the case: itcould be thelongstandingfearof neo- fascism; perhaps the presumed parallel between democracy’s weakness in the interbellum and illiberal democracy today; perhaps the appearance of and suggested need for strong leaders. this emphasis seems odd, given that populism in the united states started rather as an agricultural movement, and that early latin american populism (e.g., peronism) seemed to be in a class of its own. indeed, early comparative academic work on populism (ionescu and gellner ; canovan ) presented a broad notion of the concept. an emphasis on radical right populism had two disadvantages: first, it ignored the possibility of other manifestations of populism such as left-wing populism; second, it created an analytical straitjacket into which ‘deviant cases’ had to fit, for instance, dutch pim fortuyn’s list (lijst pim fortuyn, lpf) was classified as right-wing because of its migration policies, but effectively displayed a mixture of liberal and social-democratic ideologies. the concept of a thin-centred ideology serves to tackle this problem and it does so in two ways. first, all populist parties share a notion of the pure people versus the corrupt elite. however, these notions may, and do, vary across parties: right-wing populists often have a nativist perspective on the pure people and decry the ruling class as the enemy; left-wing populists often define the pure people in terms of class or the underprivileged, juxtaposing them to financial and business elites (see mudde and rovira kaltwasser ). note that this may transcend the classical class divide, as specific entrepreneurs, and specific ethnic groups (e.g., in bolivia or ecuador) may be victims of global capital as well. second, all populist parties have to borrow from other ideologies in order to be able to present a comprehensive perspective on society and politics. indeed, some borrow from liberalism [e.g., the dutch lpf or berlusconi’s forza italia (fi, go italy); alberto fujimori in peru; john howard in australia]; other may borrow from socialism [e.g., podemos in spain or syriza (synaspismós rizospastikís aristerás, coalition of the radical left) in greece; hugo chavez in venezuela; rafael correa in ecuador]. yet, others may take their ideological cues from regionalism [like the lega nord (northern league) in italy in the s or vlaams blok (vb, flemish block) in belgium in the s] or nationalism [fidesz (magyar polgári szövetség, hungarian civic alliance) in hungary]. populism can be found on the left and the right of the political spectrum. contested issue : is populism a danger? most qualifications of populism in the media have a negative ring to them. this can be cast in disapproving or more pejorative wordings. in a disapproving formula this is done by portraying populists as ‘irresponsible’ or ‘unfit to govern’. they are not expected to be prepared to practice the art of the possible and accept compromises, and are thus declared unfit to govern. at best, populists are seen as giving voice to unspoken criticism, but in the end they threaten the daily art of deal-making, partly also because they polarise public debate with their divisive debating style. in more pejorative language, populists are depicted as xenophobic, racist or anti-democratic (e.g., tisdall ). sometimes populists are likened to actors of the fascist and nazi regimes of the s to s. in this context, dutch prime minister mark rutte’s suggestion that the international spectator ‘good populism’ does exist (meaning mainstream parties that listen to the people) is a rare exception in the public debate. in academia, populism is generally treated with proper academic distance, but here also it is sometimes seen as a threat to stable democracy, especially because of the polarising effect of populist views (galston ; mounk ). populism’s success is seen as contributing to the fragmentation of political systems. and even in academia, the alleged current rise of illiberal democracy, the continued lack of trust in politicians, as well as the rise of strong leaders have prompted comparisons to the interbellum when the competition from totalitarian ideologies and polarisation, combined with fragmentation, spelled the collapse of a number of democracies in europe and latin america (cf. berman ). undoubtedly, from the point of view of political theory, one can and should question the position taken by any political movement or party, hence also of populists. and, certainly, objections can be raised with regard to specific populist positions. however, the preoccupation with populism should not exempt us from considering the possible positive effects it may have (had) on democracy (mudde and rovira kaltwasser ). there are at least three: ( ) populist parties can shake up party systems where government has long been dominated by the same (combination of) parties. in democratic theory, alterna- tion is an important feature of democratic systems. robert dahl ( ) even defined alternation (public contestation) as one of the defining characteristics of “real life democracies” or polyarchies. in several democracies, this quality had been weakened by the late s: for example, until , social democrats dominated swedish governments; until , italian governments were domi- nated by the christian democratic party (dc), which regularly changed one junior coalition partner after another; christian democrats also dominated coalitions in the netherlands until . in other countries, such as austria and germany, some major parties alternated in government but kept outsiders out. populist parties ended this real or perceived dominance of established parties and added options for alternation. one could even go so far as to argue that in italy the populist parties made possible the formation of a legitimate centre-right government that would not automatically be discarded as marginal or neo-fascist. ( ) populism can give voice to those who are not represented (mudde and rovira kaltwasser ): the presumably reduced salience of the classical, clear-cut left/ right and religious and social cleavages has left quite a portion of the electorate without a natural harbour. also, regional integration and economic and financial globalisation have bereft voters – especially those on the losing side – of the idea that national governments are in control and will act as a ‘safety net of last resort’. this has contributed to a feeling among such voters of not being represented by the system and its major parties, reinforced by the mainstream parties that still pretend to be in control of society and its economy. populists offer a harbour to such wandering citizens because they provide a clear explana- tion (the national elite! the global financial elite! the eurocrats!) and promise a return to control by hammering on national sovereignty and instruments of b. verbeek and a. zaslove direct democracy. the example par excellence here is the italian five star movement. by presenting a critical italian voice in brussels and elements of a deliberative democracy at home, m s has offered rescue to those who feel abandoned by the traditional italian left and who feared berlusconi’s liberal populism. ( ) populism can improve political responsiveness (mudde and rovira kaltwasser ). the rising popularity of populist parties in the polls may cause other parties and governments to move closer to populist positions. populists’ contin- uous pounding on the perceived threat of migration has caused most govern- ments to develop stricter migration policies, at both the national and european level (swedish migration policies surrounding the elections are a case in point). the rise of anti-eu sentiments, often voiced by populists, has coincided with a tougher position of many eu member states on eu integration; this has been the case particularly in the netherlands since the referendum on the european constitutional treaty (cf. odmalm and hepburn ). mainstream parties thus have become more responsive to distinct parts of the electorate. interestingly, in most countries this increased responsiveness has seldom led to a weakening of populist parties. importantly, these effects of populism are achieved in different ways in different systems: populist parties are more likely to profit from electoral systems that approach pure propor- tional representation. in majoritarian systems, alternation seems to be institutionalised in the system itself. populists thus have more difficulty in giving voice to the unrepresented. sometimes they have to wait for opportunities such as the european parliament elections, which provide proportional representation (which explains the relative successes of ukip in the uk and fn in france), or moments of direct democracy such as referenda (e.g., the brexit referendum in ). sometimes they have to operate from within the system: the tea party exploiting the republican party as a vehicle for its ideas; or, to the extent that they can be considered populists, donald trump and bernie sanders deciding to seek power through established parties rather than as independent candidates – the latter a guarantee for failure in the american majoritarian system. contested issue : are populists unfit to govern? in the media, populists are often presented as unfit to participate in government. in the s, the economist has run several covers suggesting italian populists are incapable of governing: on the occasion of the italian elections, the cover depicted berlusconi and grillo as two clowns (the economist ). although they may have positive qualities in shaking up the system and giving voice to previously neglected citizens, many commentators would not recommend populists in government because they thrive on polarisation and fear losing electoral support if they compromise on issues. indeed, some commentators would stretch that argument and claim that one should incorporate populists in government because it would expose their lack of responsibility and their proclivity to conflict, or turn them into mainstream parties – all arguments that presumably would lead to a weakening of support for populist parties. populist governments are thus expected to be short-lived. yet, looking at the the international spectator empirical record, we find many examples of governments in which populist parties of all sorts have participated (either formally or in an explicitly supportive role) (see table ). several observations are in order: first, populist parties are regular participants in government. the swiss case is peculiar because of the consociational arrangement of its federal council. second, very few governments with populists are really short-lived. while this was clearly the case for the first berlusconi government in italy ( ) and the first balkenende government in the netherlands ( ) and possibly also for the first rutte government in the netherlands ( - ), these constitute a minority of all governments supported by populists. third, populists do not seem to be punished by participating in government, neither by their coalition partners nor by the electorate. the only exception being the netherlands: both the lpf’s and pvv’s participation in two short-lived governments was partly motivated by the intention of mainstream parties (christian democrats and liberals) to try to fight populists by either turning them into mainstream parties or showing their irresponsibility. having been blamed for the governments’ collapse, both lpf and pvv fell back in the elections held immedi- ately afterward. table . populists in government in europe country type of populist party radical right liberal left wing maverick* austria fpÖ, freiheitliche partei Österreichs, freedom party ( - ; - ; -present) bzÖ, bündnis zukunft Österreich, alliance for the future of austria ( - ) denmark df, danske folkeparti ( - )** greece syriza ( - present) finland true finns, perussuomalaiset, ps ( - ) hungary fidesz ( - ; - present) italy lega nord ( - ; - ; -present) fi/pdl, popolo della libertà, people of freedom ( ; - ; - ) lega nord ( ) m s ( - present) netherlands pvv, partij voor de vrijheid, freedom party ( - )** lpf ( ) norway progress party fremskrittspartiet, frp ( -present) slovakia smer, sociálna demokracia, social democracy ( - ) switzerland svp, schweizerische volkspartei, swiss people’s party ( - ; -present) *maverick parties combine elements of the other types. in , the lega nord, as of simply lega (league), was more regionalist than radical right; m s presents such a diverse combination of ideological elements that it is hard to classify. ** danish governments and dutch rutte i are minority coalitions supported by populist parties in formal agreements. b. verbeek and a. zaslove contested issue : do populists oppose eu integration? much has been said about populists and their critical relation to eu integration. indeed, many populists are sceptical of eu integration. thus, radical right populists, such as the french national front (front national, fn, now rassemblement national, rn) and the dutch freedom party campaign against eu integration, linking it with immigration and a loss of national sovereignty. in a similar vein, ukip was, of course, a prime motor and backer of brexit. however, caution is needed. early in the s, many populist parties were less critical of eu integration. thus the northern league in italy was pro-europe, viewing the eu as an alternative to the corrupt national politicians and an instrument in promoting regional autonomy (zaslove ). even parties such as the french fn were not overtly opposed to eu integration. with the rise of left-wing parties such as podemos, the german left party (die linke) and the dutch socialist party (sp), it has become increasingly clear that opposition to the eu is not an essential feature of populism. for one, a party such as podemos is critical of the eu but does not advocate withdrawing from the eu. also dutch and german left-wing populist parties are often critical of eu integration on economic grounds, but may even be supportive of increasing eu powers when it comes to questions of immigration. other parties, such as the five star movement in italy can often be ambiguous. indeed, the founder of the sm, beppe grillo, is more critical of the eu than the current party leader luigi di maio. at the same time, the current italian coalition consisting of the lega and the five star movement has gone to great lengths to emphasize that the coalition will not seek to hold a referendum on the euro nor will it support withdrawing from the eu. contested issue : is populism a temporary phenomenon? in the public debate, the implicit expectation is that the rise of populism is circumstantial, that mainstream parties are capable of picking up the lost electorate, that the electorate will understand the dangers populism poses to society and that populists, once invited to govern, will either fail or transform into a mainstream party. however, academic studies suggest that populism is not a temporary phenomenon as it is embedded in larger structural, thus more permanent, transformations: socio-economic changes, changing party systems, and changing notions of authority (zaslove ; kriesi et al., ; mudde ). the variety of populisms that exist must be seen in the context of the structural changes emanating from the changing nature of our economies, the changing nature of employment, and also the advent of developments such as international migration (cf. kriesi et al. ). as noted above, populism is a thin-centred ideology. thus, there is not a single populist response to these events. rather populist movements that combine populism with an attached ideology have become important actors representing those who feel the brunt of unemployment, economic restructuring, and/or the changing fabric of their neighbourhoods. as cas mudde ( ) points out, the rise of cognitive mobilisation (that is, the notion that citizens are more critical of their political leaders and are less likely to follow them blindly) implies that the voters’ relationships with elites have changed. populists are also part and parcel of the changing nature of party systems. former mainstream the international spectator parties (esp. social democratic and christian democratic parties) no longer dominate party systems, which have become more fragmented with the rise of a plethora of new actors, some of which are populist. these developments have created new opportunities for populist actors (for an extensive argument, see wolinetz and zaslove a). thus, even in the very unlikely situation that pressing issues such as immigration and economic restructuring were to be solved, it is unlikely that populism would completely disappear (mudde ). when politicians and media pundits speak about defeating populism, their comments are misplaced. for instance, in , relief was expressed when dutch populist geert wilders’ pvv failed to become the largest party in parliament (bbc ). similar reactions occurred with respect to the fn after the french elections that year (erlanger and smale ). nevertheless, witnessed the rise of the lega and m s in italy. populism is mostly likely to remain a political force for the foreseeable future. how strong and successful it will prove to be will depend in large part on the actions of the populist parties and their non-populist opponents. contested issue : is populism a domestic phenomenon? one of the weaknesses of the comparative politics discipline is its dismissal of international relations as an important explanatory factor for domestic politics (the reverse, but to a lesser degree, could be said of the ir discipline). yet, in order to understand the rise and electoral fortune of populist parties, it is vital to take the consequences of international politics into account. moreover, ir considerations can occasionally affect the substantive ideology that the thin-centred ideology populists choose to embrace. consequently, this also helps understand what kind of foreign policies such populists are likely to pursue. international politics create an ideological vacuum that offers populists opportunities. the surge of contemporary populism is intimately linked to the end of the cold war around - . the disappearances of democracies’ mortal geopolitical and ideological enemy meant that the tacit or explicit premise of postwar democratic politics had disappeared: the unspoken agreement between centre-right and centre-left parties that competition for power should take place among parties that accepted western democ- racy and that would prevent the rise to power of communist or other anti-systemic parties. in the past, dominant coalitions or single-party rule were taken for granted: this might run against the democratic idea of alternation, but at least they kept the anti- democrats at bay. after , this was no longer necessary. indeed, we witnessed an end to the dominance of christian democrats in belgium, italy and the netherlands. although social democrats first rejoiced at the end of the ideological dominance of the centre-right, it soon became clear that they would be punished too; sweden saw the first non-social democratic government since the s. in austria, germany, the netherlands and france, the centre left was unable to continue to occupy the centre ground, despite the optimistic lure of the third way. in latin america also, the geopolitical changes ensured that russia and the united states were less intimately involved in the domestic politics of the region, thus altering the political opportunity structures for domestic political forces. of course, the rise of populist parties was not the case across all western european democracies: the lega nord in italy, the svp in switzerland, and the people’s party (dansk folkeparti, df) in denmark had been successful long before the berlin wall came down. also b. verbeek and a. zaslove the rise of green parties since the s had slowly created a fissure in western democracies. yet, the end of the cold war created a vast momentum in which citizens did not embrace fukuyama’s proclamation that history had ended in favour of democracy as we know it, but started to pose questions regarding the future of their societies. this momentum gained prominence particularly in europe because the end of the cold war coincided with the intensification of the european integration process and the advent of an intensified phase in economic and financial globalisation. combined, these international political developments made citizens uncertain of having control over european and global processes, as well of the capacities of their governments to control such developments, thus ushering in a latent legitimacy crisis of democratic government. such doubts regarding effective policymaking capacity have re-entered the debate with the migratory flows that ensued from international and civil conflicts in north africa and the middle east. in central and eastern europe, the end of the cold war opened up the can of worms that the first world war and the interbellum had sealed off for decades. the geopolitical conflicts in the balkans that had been left open at versailles, the frustrated democratic experiments in czechoslovakia, georgia, estonia, latvia and lithuania in the interbellum, coupled with the delegitimisation of the communist discourse produced fertile grounds for populists riding the nationalist wave. they reintroduced old cleavages regarding national identity, complicated by the need to position themselves vis-à-vis the old communist order. international politics offers new ideologies to combine with populism’s thin-centred ideology. this process operates in two ways: international developments offer new modes to juxtapose the pure people versus the bad elite. globalisation offers populists global moguls, especially in finance, to blame for the plight of the trampled-upon people. this position is often espoused by left-wing populists, such as the dutch sp, the greek syriza, france’s la france insoumie (unsubmissive france), and germany’s die linke. european integration offers an opportunity to point a finger at technical eurocrats, especially in the european commission. this has been the centre argument of ukip and has, in different phases, been the position of the dutch pvv, the italian lega and m s, and the french fn (now rn). the breakup of communism has provided an opportunity to blame the elite for having agreed to the post wwii territorial status quo. this is particularly true in hungary where fidesz, pressured by the even more nationalist jobbik (jobbik magyarországért mozgalom, movement for a better hungary) pursues a nationalist agenda, but also in fpÖ-governed austria which, after the end of the cold war, raised the issues of the sudeten germans and, recently, politicized the south tyrol issue when it started to grant south tyrolians austrian citizenship in addition to their italian citizenship. international politics have also offered opportunities to mobilise like- minded populists: in latin america in the s, venezuelan hugo chavez’ anti- americanism not only helped him mobilise domestic supporters, but also strengthened the hand of left-wing populists in ecuador and bolivia. at the same time, international developments offer opportunities to embrace a specific ideology to complement populism’s thin-centred ideology. the end of the cold war (and the advent of globalisation) have helped invoke old fashioned nationalism. globalisation has made it possible not only to embrace transnational socialism but also to welcome the free market (as in the cases of the dutch lpf and the italian fi). populists affect a country’s foreign policy. the international/domestic nexus also operates in the other direction. the more popular populists become and the more their success is linked the international spectator to policy issues that are related to global affairs, the more likely it is that governments will take populist positions into account in their foreign policies. this need not be the case only with a populist party in government, such as the austrian fpÖ, or m s and lega in italy. it can also affect mainstream parties which, fearing the polls, feel they can only ride the populist wave if they move closer to them. the effect of populist parties on foreign policy depends on three factors: a) the relative vulnerability of government to populist politics; b) the specific definition of the pure people and the corrupt elite; and c) the specific ideology a populist party chooses to borrow from. notably, countries may adjust their policies in different directions: more protectionist in trade, less committed to multilateralism, less open to refugees and migrants, less open to deepening integration schemes, unless this is part of challenging a regional hegemon (as in latin america where populists have attempted to become less dependent on the us) (verbeek and zaslove ). conclusions above we have identified nine contested issues surrounding populism. they make it possible to approach populism in a more analytical manner without necessarily abandoning the firm defence of contemporary democracy. importantly, we need to develop different, yet related research programs based on the different dimensions of the populist phenomenon. the notion of a thin-centred ideology looks particularly promising because it offers a conceptualisation that allows for comparison across time and space. in addition, it makes it possible to link up populist leaders (parties) and followers in a systematic fashion. the dual quality of the notion of a thin-centred ideology, allowing for variation in both the people/elite divide and the ‘added ideology’, will prevent systematic biases towards any one type of populism. the additional concept of populism as a strategy permits the incorporation of mainstream parties as part of the playing field. having thus mapped out the players, we need to be aware of context: international developments as well as electoral and party systems affect the way the game is being played. only in this way will academia ride the populist storm. notes on contributors bertjan verbeek is professor of international relations at the department of political science, institute formanagement research, radboud university,nijmegen,the netherlands. email:b.verbeek@fm.ru.nl andrej zaslove is assistant professor of comparative politics at the department of political science, institute for management research, radboud university, nijmegen, the netherlands. references akkerman, a., mudde, c., and zaslove, a. . how populist are the people? measuring populist attitudes in voters. comparative political studies ( ): – . akkerman, a., zaslove, a., and spruyt, b. . ‘we the people’ or ‘we the peoples’? a comparison of support for the populist radical right and populist radical left in the netherlands. swiss political science review ( ): – . barr, r. r. . populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics. party politics ( ): – . bbc. . dutch election: relief as mainstream triumphs. march. https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe- . b. verbeek and a. zaslove https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe- berman, s. . populism is not fascism: but it could be a harbinger. foreign affairs ( ): – . bickerton, c. j., and invernizzi accetti, c. . ‘techno-populism’ as a new party family: the case of the five star movement and podemos. contemporary italian politics ( ): – . canovan, m. . populism. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. capra casadio, m. . the new right and metapolitics in france and italy. journal for the study of radicalism ( ): – . castañeda, e. . the indignados of spain: a precedent to occupy wall street. social movement studies ( – ): – . colantone, i., and stanig, p. . global competition and brexit. american political science review ( ): – . dahl, r. a. . polyarchy. participation and opposition. new haven: yale university press. dennison, j., and geddes, a. . brexit and the perils of ‘europeanised’ migration. journal of european 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populist discourse in the united states and beyond. nature human behaviour ( ): – . hawkins, k. a., rovira kaltwasser, c. and andreadis, i. . the activation of populist attitudes. government and opposition online first. https://doi.org/ . /gov. . iakhnis, e., rathbun, b., reifler, j., and scotto, t. j. . populist referendum: was ‘brexit’ an expression of nativist and anti-elitist sentiment? research & politics ( ): – . ionescu, g., and gellner, e. eds. . populism: its meaning and national characteristics. london: macmillan. kioupkiolis, a. . podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary spain. journal of political ideologies ( ): – . korteweg, a. . daar klinkt de onderbuik van de vvd. de volkskrant. july. https://www. volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/daar-klinkt-de-onderbuik-van-de-vvd~b d / kriesi, h., grande, e., dolezal, m., helbling, m., höglinger, d., hutter, s., and wüest, b. eds. . political conflict in western europe. cambridge: cambridge university press. libération. . l’europe est en péril, january. https://www.liberation.fr/planete/ / / / il-y-a-le-feu-a-la-maison-europe-le-manifeste-des-patriotes-europeens_ march, l. . left and right populism compared: the british case. the british journal of politics and international relations ( ): – . miller-idriss, c. . the global dimensions of populist nationalism. the international spectator ( ). doi: . / . . mouffe, c. . for a left populism. london: verso books. mounk, y. . the people vs. democracy. why our freedom is in danger and how to safe it. cambridge ma: harvard university press. mudde, c. . the populist zeitgeist. government and opposition ( ): – . the international spectator https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/europe/france-election-europe.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/europe/france-election-europe.html https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /gov. . https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/daar-klinkt-de-onderbuik-van-de-vvd~b d / https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/daar-klinkt-de-onderbuik-van-de-vvd~b d / https://www.liberation.fr/planete/ / / /il-y-a-le-feu-a-la-maison-europe-le-manifeste-des-patriotes-europeens_ https://www.liberation.fr/planete/ / / /il-y-a-le-feu-a-la-maison-europe-le-manifeste-des-patriotes-europeens_ https://doi.org/ . / . . mudde, c. . populism: an ideational approach. in c. rovira kaltwasser, p. taggart, p. ochoa espejo, and p. ostiguy, eds. the oxford handbook of populism: – . oxford: oxford university press. mudde, c. . how populism became the concept that defines our age. the guardian, november. mudde, c., and rovira kaltwasser, c. . populism: a very short introduction. oxford: oxford university press. mudde, c., and rovira kaltwasser, c. r. . exclusionary vs. inclusionary populism: comparing contemporary europe and latin america. government and opposition ( ): – . nos. . rutte: nederland zegt ‘ho’ tegen verkeerde soort populisme. march. https://nos.nl/ artikel/ -rutte-nederland-zegt-ho-tegen-verkeerde-soort-populisme.html odmalm, p., and hepburn, e. eds. . the european mainstream and the populist radical right. london: routledge. rooduijn, m. . why is populism suddenly all the rage? the guardian, november. https://www.theguardian.com/world/political-science/ /nov/ /why-is-populism-suddenly -so-sexy-the-reasons-are-many. sikk, a. . parties and populism, working paper - . london: ucl centre for european politics, security, and integration. skocpol, t., and williamson, v. . the tea party and the remaking of republican conservatism. oxford: oxford university press. the economist. . send in the clowns. march. https://www.economist.com/leaders/ / / /send-in-the-clowns tisdall, s. . rise of xenophobia is fanning immigration flames in eu and us. the guardian. june. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /as-immigration-crisis-explodes- xenophobes-gain-ground-in-eu. van klingeren, m., zaslove, a., and verbeek, b. . accommodating the dutch populist radical right in a multi-party system: success or failure? in p. odmalm and e. hepburn, eds the european mainstream and the populist radical right: – . london: routledge. verbeek, b., and zaslove, a. . populism and foreign policy. in. c. rovira kaltwasser, p. taggart, p. ochoa espejo, and p. ostiguy, eds. the oxford handbook of populism: – . oxford: oxford university press. weyland, k. . populism: a political-strategic approach. in c. rovira kaltwasser, p. taggart, p. ochoa espejo, and p. ostiguy, eds. the oxford handbook of populism: – . oxford: oxford university press. wolinetz, s., and zaslove, a. eds. a. absorbing the blow: the impact of populist parties on european party systems. rowman and littlefield: ecpr press. wolinetz, s., and zaslove, a. b. the impact of populist parties on party systems. in s. wolinetz and a. zaslove, eds. absorbing the blow: the impact of populist parties on european party systems: – . rowman and littlefield: ecpr press. zaslove, a. . the re-invention of the european radical right: populism, regionalism, and the italian lega nord. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press. zaslove, a. . here to stay? populism as a new party type? european review ( ): – . b. verbeek and a. zaslove https://nos.nl/artikel/ -rutte-nederland-zegt-ho-tegen-verkeerde-soort-populisme.html https://nos.nl/artikel/ -rutte-nederland-zegt-ho-tegen-verkeerde-soort-populisme.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/political-science/ /nov/ /why-is-populism-suddenly-so-sexy-the-reasons-are-many https://www.theguardian.com/world/political-science/ /nov/ /why-is-populism-suddenly-so-sexy-the-reasons-are-many https://www.economist.com/leaders/ / / /send-in-the-clowns https://www.economist.com/leaders/ / / /send-in-the-clowns https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /as-immigration-crisis-explodes-xenophobes-gain-ground-in-eu https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /as-immigration-crisis-explodes-xenophobes-gain-ground-in-eu 	abstract 	contested issue : is populism new? 	contested issue : is populism ubiquitous? 	contested issue : can we agree on what populism means? 	contested issue : is populism right-wing? 	contested issue : is populism adanger? 	contested issue : are populists unfit to govern? 	contested issue : do populists oppose eu integration? 	contested issue : is populism atemporary phenomenon? 	contested issue : is populism adomestic phenomenon? 	conclusions 	notes on contributors 	references loyaltytraduct_relu - research group: food, farms, and firms december, are consumers more loyal to national brands than to private labels? fabian bergÈs, daniel hassan and sylvette monier-dilhan page are consumers more loyal to national brands than to private labels? fabian bergès, toulouse school of economics (gremaq-inra and idei) daniel hassan, toulouse school of economics (gremaq-inra) sylvette monier-dilhan, toulouse school of economics (gremaq-inra) umr gremaq-inra - bâtiment f allée de brienne f- toulouse france abstract: the evolution of private labels has been linked to the strategy adopted by the retail industry to increase competition with national brands in terms of quality. since the early s, retailers have upgraded their store brands by introducing high-quality products along with “me too” retail products. the aim of this study is to analyze consumer perception of both types of private labels ("me-too" and high quality products) compared to national brands. we deal with three staple goods offered by three mass retail companies. we show that consumer demand for “me- too” private labels is as elastic as for national brands. this result indicates that such private labels are now considered as leading brands in terms of characteristics. however, on the high quality market, consumers are more sensitive to the price of private labels, indicating a lesser attachment to these brand names. keywords: national brands, private labels, demand elasticity, competition. jel: d , l , q correspondence: fabian bergÈs umr gremaq (ma ) allées de brienne f- toulouse france mail: fabian.berges@toulouse.inra.fr tel: + . . . . . fax: + . . . . . page . introduction the development of retailers' brands in france, commonly named private labels (pls), remains years after their creation a topical phenomenon. a recent study emphasizes that their development is continuing (moati, ). these pls currently represent % in value of the sales of consumer products by the mass retail industry, and % in volume. although these figures do not reveal the high degree of heterogeneity that exists from department to department and from retail company to retail company, what they do indicate is that pls have become an inescapable part of what is on offer in supermarkets. [table here ] the evolution of brands has been linked to the strategy adopted by the mass retailers to compete more and more directly with national brands (nb) in terms of quality. the strategy initially adopted, which rested exclusively on price-based competition (carrefour’s “free products”, ), has been abandoned in favor of competition based on two dimensions: prices and quality. one of the driving forces behind this evolution is tariff negotiation with the manufacturers of nbs. the introduction of high quality private label products constitutes a strategic threat to industrialists, causing them to lower their prices (bontems, monier and réquillart, ; caprice, ). the improvement in the quality of private brands has also been facilitated by a better control of the production costs of private label products (mills, ; bontems, monier and réquillart, ). this difference can be explained by the fact that pls are sold at an average price that is lower than the average prices of the products displayed in the department. the “generic” brand was then attributed to low-quality products, which are less linked to the reputation of the retail store. these “generic” brands are used by the mass retail stores to slow down the growth of hard discount. page the “quality” option led, in the s, to the appearance on the market of “me too” retail brands. “me too” wares represent the largest part of mass retailers’ offering and through them retail companies offer products that are competitive both in terms of quality – the quality of these products is significantly higher than that of the first generation of private labels - and in terms of price: indeed, private label prices are on average % lower than those of nbs. since the early s, retail companies have developed a second quality based strategy through “upmarket” private label ranges for certain niche markets (emphasis on the qualities of the land where the goods are produced, on their flavours, etc). we shall call the standard private label spl and the high quality private labels hpl. the objective of this study is to assess consumer perception of this two-faceted strategy adopted by the mass retail industry to compete with national brands. the second section presents an overview of some previous studies related to perception of pls versus nbs. the third section is dedicated to the method and the fourth section to the data. in the fifth section, we present the results. the last section concludes. . background the questions related to consumer perception of pls and to what motivates them to buy these labels have been the topic of much research work (for a review of the literature, bergès- sennou, bontems and réquillart, ). studies using early s data reveal that socio- demographic characteristics have an effect on the purchase of pls. it was found that high incomes decrease the consumers’ probability of buying a pl product (richardson et al, , dhar and hoch, ), while on the contrary the size of the household (richardson et al, ) and the level of education (binkley et al., ) have a positive influence on their probability of buying pls. however, using more recent data, cataluña, garcia and phau for example, the leclerc group introduced a range called “nos régions ont du talent”; carrefour introduced a “reflets de france” range and casino has a “destinations saveurs” brand, etc. they correspond to the uk equivalents "tesco's finest" or sainsbury's "taste the difference". page ( ) or bergès et al. ( ) conclude that socio-demographic variables have no strong influence on the purchase of pls. experimental economics shows that nbs often enjoy an advantage over pls in terms of perceived quality (richardson, dick and jain, ; kumar and steenkamp, ). this advantage rests less on the intrinsic quality of the products – which, in blind tests, are often difficult to differentiate – than on reputation. thus, these brands are for the most part differentiated vertically: given equal prices, the majority of consumers choose nbs over pls. pls are therefore chosen by consumers partly because of their price advantage. however, a number of studies put this price effect into perspective, showing that it varies from product to product: in some cases (orange juice), consumers remain loyal to the pl even when the price differential decreases (livesey and lennon, ). in the same vein, baltas ( ) and chardon and dumartin ( ) indicate that buyers of pls consider that the intrinsic quality of these pl products is satisfactory. a consumer’s preference for a nb over a pl is often related to the perceived purchasing risk (batra and sinha, ; erdem, zhao and valenzuela, ). this parameter plays a significant role both at individual and at sector level. in the latter case, it partly explains why the penetration rate of pls varies according to the nature of products: high in the case of some staple goods (uht milk, pasta products, etc…) but low in the case of products for which consumer trust is absolutely essential (baby food, cosmetics). this characteristic certainly contributes to lowering consumers’ price sensitivity for the benefit of nbs. nevertheless, it varies from individual to individual and from product to product and should logically decrease with the improvement of the intrinsic quality of pl products and their increasing availability. indeed, results vary according to the period studied and to the establishment of the pls. in a study of the american orange juice market in the early s, binkley et al ( ) find that nbs have lower price elasticity than pls, especially in the case of the upmarket segment of page refrigerated orange juice. conversely, in a more recent study about pasta products in france sold by a famous retailer – where pls are more strongly established than on the american market – bergès, hassan and monier-dilhan ( ) observe that consumers’ willingness to pay for a pl product is higher than their willingness to pay for the leading nbs. . method and data part a focuses on the methodological choices intended to measure consumers’ attachment to brands. part b lists the products and the retailers involved in the analysis and presents the data used. part c explains the demand model (aids). .a demand price elasticity: a measure of consumers’ attachment to brands this paper aims to compare consumers’ global attachment to nbs and pls. we capture the attachment to brands throughout the own-price elasticities of demand. the own-price elasticity of demand for a given good measures consumers’ reactions to the price variations of that good in terms of purchased quantity : the stronger the consumers’ attachment to the product, the lower the variation in the demand to price variations and the weaker the demand price elasticity (in absolute value). marketing researchers (merunka, changeur and bourgeat, ) question the ability of demand price elasticities to measure consumer loyalty to products. they point out that demand variations may occur not only in reaction to prices: for example, they can translate a reduction of the shelf space devoted to the product by the retailer. nevertheless, such risk is reduced when the number of retailers taken into account increases or the period of time is extended. another concern is whether the brand elasticities hierarchy provides a good picture of that of consumers’ attachment to brands. this question comes down to the relationship page existing between perceived quality and demand price elasticity. theoretical studies have examined the question from the supply viewpoint (for a review of the literature, see coibion, einav and hallav, ). these studies endeavour to determine the conditions under which a firm offering two qualities can gain higher profit margins with its “upmarket” products – not only in absolute but also in relative value – than with its generic quality products . in their pioneering study, mussa and rosen ( ) analyse the behaviour of a monopoly firm offering two qualities differentiated according to a price sensibility parameter. they show that although the profit margins associated with the high quality goods are, in absolute value, higher that those of the generic quality products, their relative value is lower. reopening mussa and rosen’s analysis ( ), verboven ( ) finds in a context of duopoly the demand price elasticity of the high quality shorter, in absolute value, than that of the generic quality. according to verboven, two elements can lead to lower elasticities for the upmarket product: the attachment of the consumers to brands selling high quality products (advertising) and the ability of enterprises to make the information about high quality products’ prices costly for the consumer. in the context of the competition between nbs and pls, let’s notice that if the former favours nbs, the latter must benefit pls. indeed, comparing prices between retail companies is easier in the case of nb products, the characteristics of which do not vary from one retailer to the next, than it is in the case of pl products which are designed by the retailer. most empirical studies on the demand for differentiated goods find that direct price elasticities are lower for “high quality” products. investigating the beer market, hausman, leonard and zona ( ) explained this finding by the fact that consumers of high quality products are less sensitive to prices than other consumers with lower incomes. on the american automobile market, berry, levinsohn and pakes ( ) found also that upmarket cars had the lowest direct price elasticity of demand. nevertheless, in this example, the page highest elasticities are not necessarily associated with the cheapest cars. they are observed for goods on the intermediary segment, i.e. goods the supply of which is the densest. before presenting the model used to compute price elasticities, we describe the data used. .b the data contrary to some previous papers (binkley et al., or bergès, hassan and monier-dilhan, ), the present investigation does not rely on a single example (one product sold by one retailer). to bring out more basic features, several products are considered (tree products, see below). moreover, as pls are retailer-dependent in terms of many parameters (quality, packaging, price, date at which the product was introduced on the shelves, etc…), it is useful to consider several retailers. this study incorporates three of the five largest french mass distributors. the economic data we have used here are drawn from the tns worldpanel database. this database comes from a panel of approximately , households where consumers home scan their purchases and thus provide information on value and quantity of food products bought as well as where the products were purchased, their brand, their price and other information about the offer variables (the characteristics of the product, possible promotional campaign, etc). the high-quality private labels were recently introduced. in the tns world panel database, the year is one of the first years in which upmarket private labels appear for a significant number of products and retail companies. the analysis shall therefore focus on the - period and on three staple products: pasta, biscuits and jam. these three products comply with the double constraint related to their existence and numerous purchases. indeed, for each retail group and each product, it is necessary to observe both a standard private label and a high-quality private label. moreover, the number of purchases must be high enough to page estimate a demand system while ensuring that the important problem related to the non- purchase of some commodities be prevented. pls being by definition specific to each retailer, we have distinguished three retail companies. this choice was determined by their weight in the mass food retail industry : these three retail groups represented in % of the cumulated sales of food products. this choice also takes into account diversities in terms of pls positioning, of communication on this market section and of possible historical advantage. for each retail group, we have distinguished various categories of offer: - the leading national brands (nbs): this category comprises the three national brands with the largest market shares. - the standard private labels (spl): these are the “me-too” products competing directly with nb products. - the high-quality private labels (hpl): these are the retailers’ own products sold under niche private labels at prices that are mostly higher than those of the equivalent nb products. - the other national brands (onb): this category is composed of branded products which are neither nbs nor the lowest price products. they are generally upmarket niche products. - the low price products (lp): this category includes the cheapest generic products offered by each retailer. they are sold at lower prices than those of spl and are supposed to compete with products offered by hard discount retailers. table indicates, for each product and each retail group, the market share in volume as well as the average price (and standard deviation) for each category of goods. these are lustucru, barilla and panzani for pasta; lu, bn and delacre for biscuits, and confipote, bonne maman and andros for jam. croix de savoie for pasta, balhsen for biscuits, or chivers for jam. page [table here ] we note a high level of price competition between retailers within the nb segment, whatever the product. this is also the case for the various retailers’ spl products, but not for hpl. on average, the price difference between the nbs and the spl is % for pasta products, % for biscuits and % for jam products. inversely, the prices of nbs are lower than those of hpl by % to %, with some exceptions, however, depending on the product. on the other hand, the prices of hpl products are close to those of onb products, with which they compete in the high quality segment. the different products therefore reflect the segmentation according to prices implemented by large retailer groups. we observe first the low-price products, then the standard private labels, followed by the leading nbs and finally the “up-market” private label products and the other nbs. in - , the nbs dominated the market, either in absolute (they accounted for over % of the pasta market shares) or in relative value, with market shares ranging from % to % for biscuits and jam products respectively. spl only take the dominant position in case out of (jam sold by retailer ). the assortment of spl slightly varies from one retailer to the next, but it does vary more significantly from product to product, with a very high degree of presence in the case of jam. the market shares of spl range between % (pasta in retailer ) and . % (biscuits, retailer ). in - , hpl were still niche products, with a market share of . % on average. retailer is at the forefront of the distribution of this kind of product, and jam products constitute, as for spl, the most favorable segment to hpl products. the market shares held by the “low-price” products and the heterogeneous group of other national brands are non negligible (on average . % and % respectively) but vary significantly from product to product and from one retailer to the next. page distinguishing the different retailers and products, we calculate the price elasticities for the five kinds of product categories we have identified. .c the demand model (aids) elasticities are computed using the estimated parameters of an almost ideal demand system (aids; deaton and muelbauer, ). in the last two decades, this model has been widely used in research studies on the demand for food products (see among others eales and unnevehr, ; moschini and mielke, ; moschini, moro and green, ; eales and henderson, ). like other demand systems (translog, rotterdam…), aids is both flexible and computationally easy to estimate. moreover, since it does not start from some arbitrary preference system but from a specific class of preferences (piglog) which permits exact aggregation over consumers, aids makes it possible the representation of market demands as if they were the outcome of decisions by a rational representative consumer. a limitation of demand models is they cannot include a high number of alternatives, the number of cross price elasticities growing exponentially with the number of products. this limitation can however be overcome thanks to the weak separability hypothesis. this makes it possible to model budget allocation decision like a sequential choice process. only the choices between products belonging to the same category are made simultaneously. for staple food products, this model seems acceptable: the consumer buys these products regularly without really making a choice between these and other expenses. once s/he has made the decision to purchase a product, s/he then chooses the brand: in the present study, we are interested in the second stage of the choice process. moreover, demand systems allow for the purchase of variable quantities of each product. in the case of low-price everyday products, this feature is more suitable than the assumption of a unitary demand specific to choice models (more adapted to durable expensive goods such as automobiles, see pinkse and slade, page ). the households panel is representative of the french population in income and profession, and the data are rich and wide in terms of information. therefore, we can aggregate individual data for and on a weekly time path to observe the purchasing behavior of a (composite) national representative consumer. for each product and each retailer, we thus have a series of observations, including in particular the total expense on the product considered, its distribution between the different brands, and retail prices. we also introduce a variable reflecting promotional intensity. indeed, promotions can influence the budget decisions of the representative consumer. since we observe the final decision of consumers, part of the effect is therefore already integrated into the data, whether they are price or quantity promotions. however, the promotional impact is not limited to this direct effect; it also relies on the announcement effect. the promo variable is constructed from the item of information indicating, for each purchase, whether the household bought the product while it was on promotion. we then calculate for each week, for a given retailer and a given product, the distribution of the promotions between the groups of brands. we denote promoi the promotion rate of product i in relation to its competitors (thus, for each week, ∑promoi= ). promotions are present in all categories of products, though the promotion rate of hpl is low. table indicates the distribution of promotion rates per brand, retailer and product during the - period. [table here ] it is not surprising to observe that the promotion rates for nb and onb products are identical among the various retailers because there are usually coordinated national campaigns. however, this rate is heterogeneous for spl and to a lesser extent for hpl, depending on each retailer specific policy. page the demand model takes the form of a system of equations written in the following way for each product and each retailer company: ititittiit j ijiit pypw ρθβγα ++++= ∑ = promo )/log(log ( ) where the dependent variables are the weekly market share of each brand in the weekly budget of the representative household (wit with i= ,..., and t= ,..., ). nine independent demand systems are estimated, one for each product sold in each retailer company. the independent variables are the weekly prices of the brands ( itp ), the total expense for the product considered in the retail store studied ( ty ), corrected by an index of average prices ( tp ) and itρ is the error term. the translog price index tp (where log jtit n j ij n i it i it pppp logloglog ∑∑∑ ++= γαα ) is, as suggested by deaton and muellbauer ( ), replaced by a linear approximation defined by the stone index ( ip i iwtp loglog ∑= ). to overcome the simultaneity problem related to the presence of itw in both terms of equation ( ), itw is substituted by the iw mean in the stone index. we impose the theoretical restrictions of additivity of budget shares ( =∑ i iα ), of homogeneity and of symmetry ( === ∑∑∑ i i j ji i ij βγγ ). resulting from the additivity hypothesis, only four budget share equations are estimated. furthermore, the prices and expenses are normalized by their means (asche and wessells, ). the price elasticities (direct and cross) are then calculated from the coefficients estimated in the share regressions, using green and alston’s tests ( ). the formulas for this calculation are the following: using an iterative procedure ensures the independence of the results in relation to the omitted product (prais- winsten regression in the stata software). page direct price elasticity: )( iii i i w βγε −+−= cross price elasticity: )( jiij i ij w w βγε −+−= where iε and ijε denote the direct price elasticity of product i, and the cross price elasticity of i in relation to the price of j, respectively. these elasticities are calculated at the mean value. . results for four categories of brands (nb, spl, hpl and onb), whatever the product and the retailer, the direct price elasticities are negative; they are nil for lp (see table ). the cross price elasticities are seldom significantly different from zero. in the short term, consumers therefore react to a price variation by adjusting their demand for the brand they normally purchase, but without turning to another brand. binkley et al ( ) obtain the same result in the case of orange juice: direct price elasticities of nbs and pls are significantly different from zero and the cross price elasticities are nil. the overall quality of the regressions is acceptable. we observe that the value of r² is more linked to the product (they are higher for pasta and biscuits) than to the retailer. furthermore, as the data is presented in the form of time series, we have ensured that the residuals are not strongly correlated. the results of the tests (durbin watson and box and pierce) lead us to accept the null hypothesis of no residual correlation. the short time lag (week) and the absence of seasonality related to the products studied explain why the residuals exhibit the characteristics of a random white noise. [ table here ] the elasticities of nbs and spls are often close to one whereas the elasticities with the lowest absolute value are related to the lp and onb. on the other hand, hpl have a high price elasticity. page the objective of this study being to capture the brand impact on own-price elasticities, we aim to check for other sources of variability, namely the heterogeneity of products and retailers. we therefore estimate the following hedonic equation where we regress the elasticity variable ( observations) on three characteristics: brand, retailer and product: i j p ijp i i j j p p ijp i j p m e p uε α β γ µ − − − = = = = + + + +∑ ∑ ∑ where ijpε is the direct price elasticity of product p sold under brand i at retailer j. dummy variables are created to isolate the brand effect (m), the retailer effect (e) and the product effect (p). the reference good used is the product “lp pasta sold by retailer ”. the regression results are presented in table . note that to calculate the expected values for each elasticity, one must add to the elasticity of the reference good measured by the constant (- . ), the values associated with the characteristics concerned. for example, the expected elasticity for spl biscuits sold in retail shop is equal to - . . [table here ] all direct price elasticities are negative. this result also applies in the case of biscuits despite the positive coefficient associated with this product. a mean test shows that the direct price elasticities do not differ according to the retailers (the coefficients associated with retailers and are not different from zero). similarly, the product effect is limited to biscuits whose elasticity is half a point lower than that of other products. contrary to the most common hypothesis, the demand for spl is not more elastic to prices than the demand for nbs. a mean-test of equality shows that the gap between the two coefficients is indeed not significant. the reactions of buyers to variations in the prices of both types of brands exhibit comparable levels of intensity (in both cases, the elasticity is page close to one): when there is a price increase, the demand for pls does not decrease more than the demand for nbs. in other words, consumers' attachment to pl and nb is therefore the same. this conclusion is contrary to that of binkley et al ( ) who show that spl had a more fragile position on the american market in . this evolution can be explained by the rise in the perceived quality of spl (intrinsic quality, packaging, shelf space) and by a learning effect among consumers. the latter has increased consumers’ loyalty to pls, which has reinforced their attachment to the brand by avoiding the extrinsic cue premium. according to tourtoulou, dietsch and krémer ( ), advertising for a brand results in a fall in direct price elasticity. this phenomenon clearly indicates an attachment by the consumer to this brand. for spl products, a similar phenomenon occurs with consumer loyalty to a retailer. bergès and orozco ( ) show that when households have a choice between different retail stores, all located within a km radius, they shop in retail stores on average; furthermore, a large percentage of households are characterized by a high index of store loyalty. these elements also contribute to consumers’ attachment to pls. however, note that the highest elasticities in absolute value are those related to hpl. the introduction of these upmarket retailers’ brands on store shelves is recent: their reputation must therefore develop and product maturity has not been reached yet. the elasticity values of hpl must be compared with the direct price elasticities of other national brands, positioned on the same segment in terms of quality and specificity (organic products, products with a registered designation of origin…). the demand for these products is not elastic to prices. this segment comprises the high quality national brands (the distribution of which is not as widespread as that of the better known leading national brands), commercializing niche products which are close in characteristics to those sold in the delicatessen sections of the retail stores. the demand for this type of product is probably associated with a low price page sensitivity and a high perceived quality. consumers do not yet perceive hpl products as close substitutes for onb products. . conclusion the introduction by retailers of their own private labels has been an important stage in the attempts by the mass distribution industry to gain a dominant position as an economic actor. indeed, they have enabled this sector to go beyond its retail function and to gain the status of manufacturer. these private labels have shifted the balance of power from the manufacturers of national brands to the retail groups . what is more, private labels represent for mass retailers a direct source of profit increase as the margins on spl products are known to be % higher on average than those gained on other products, and they reinforce consumers’ store loyalty (bonfrer and chintagunta, ).. our results indeed show that in the last few years, these products have gained the loyalty of consumers by reducing the buyers’ sensitivity to prices and by increasing their market shares. with respect to hpl, which represent a strategy implemented more recently by the mass distribution industry, the market shares are already significant, if we bear in mind that the first objective of this strategy is to assert the presence of the mass distribution sector on the segment of high quality products. the high quality products supporting this strategy do not necessarily yield high profits, nor do they achieve high market shares (randall, ulrich and reibstein, ). the balance of power between hpl and onb products within retail stores in is comparable to that observed in the s between spl and nb products. the notoriety of what we have called onb (other national brands) products is greater than that of the upmarket private labels: consumers do not hesitate to pay a little more to keep buying the same product. however, it is reasonable to believe that the situation is not set in stone and that the selling power of retailers is sufficient to positively influence consumers’ perception of and attachment to hpl products. page in addition to the standard segment and upmarket one, the distribution network develops low prices. direct competitors of such products are hard discount retailers. the purpose of this research is to study the competition between nb/pl within the mass food retail sector. the hard discount stores are not included in the analysis, which does not allow a relevant study of the role of first price products. until recent years, competition between national brands and private labels took place moderately on the standard quality segment. large retailers are now expanding their own brand strategy in the high quality segment, whose market share is significant because it represents approximately % (hpl +onb). in the future, competition among brands of large retailers will therefore cover the full spectrum of quality from the lowest price (in order not to lose market share relatively from hard discount) to high quality products. acknowledgments: many thanks to valérie orozco (tse, gremaq-inra) for her engineering help with the data. page references asche f. and wessells c.r., , on price indices in the almost ideal demand system, american journal of agricultural economics, , - ; 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( . ) retailer . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) retailer . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) biscuits retailer . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) retailer . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) retailer . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) jam retailer . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) retailer . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) . ( . ) retailer . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . . ( . ) . ( . ) . . ( . ) page table : promotion rate per brand, product and retailer in - . presence of a promotion - nb spl hpl onb lp average rate per retailer rate standard deviation rate standard deviation rate standard deviation rate standard deviation rate standard deviation pasta retailer . . . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . . . biscuits retailer . . . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . jam retailer . . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . retailer . . . . . . . . . . page table : price elasticities and quality of the regression aids nb spl hpl onb lp price elasticity (standard deviation) r² (adjusted) price elasticity (standard deviation) r² (adjusted) price elasticity (standard deviation) r² (adjusted) price elasticity (standard deviation) r² (adjusted) price elasticity (standard deviation) r² (adjusted) pasta retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . . ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) -- biscuits retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) -- jam retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) -- retailer - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . - . ** ( . ) . . ( . ) -- ** = estimator significant at %; * = estimator significant at % page table : linear regression of own price elasticity variables coefficient t-student nb - . - . spl - . - . hpl - . - . onb - . - . retailer - . - . retailer - . - . biscuit . . jam . . constant - . - . adjusted r² . science magazine a hidden history the salk institute for biological studies in san diego, california, where inder verma has spent his career. as cancer scientist inder verma’s career soared, female colleagues allege that a parallel tale of sexual harassment unfolded over decades features published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ news may • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o s : e d u a r d o c o n t r e r a s / t r ib u n e c o n t e n t a g e n c y l l c / a l a m y s t o c k p h o t o ; (o p p o s it e p a g e ) j u s t in b r o w n / c c b y -n c -s a . i nder verma, the prominent geneticist and cancer scientist who has made his mark on u.s. research for decades, has sexually harassed women for just as long, according to allegations from eight women. verma, , led key studies of genes and cancer, pioneered gene therapy techniques, and was editor-in-chief of a major journal and a leader at scientific societies (including aaas, science’s pub- lisher). he has spent his career at the sto- ried salk institute for biological studies in san diego, california. in reports stretching from to , women allege, variously, that he grabbed their breasts, pinched their buttocks, forc- ibly kissed them, propositioned them, and repeatedly commented on their physical attributes in professional settings. the alle- gations come from a salk lab technician, a postdoctoral researcher, other salk staffers and faculty, and women outside of the in- stitute, including a potential faculty recruit. five women in their s and s in secure scientific positions agreed to be named in this story. three younger women requested anonymity, fearing repercus- sions to their careers. they cited verma’s power at salk and the reach of his influ- ence, including his connections to nobel laureates, national institutes of health (nih) peer-review committees, and jour- nal editorial boards. on april, salk’s board of trustees put verma on administrative leave, days after receiving a list of questions from science concerning the allegations and the institute’s responses to previous complaints about verma’s behavior. science’s questions about harassment caused salk to expand an existing investiga- tion of verma, board chairman dan lewis told salk employees in an email on april. the institute had launched an internal inves- tigation in february and hired a law firm on march to conduct an external probe, salk told science in a separate statement. for decades, women at salk have warned female colleagues not to be alone with verma. “it was on everybody’s mouth that he was a harasser,” says monica zoppè, now a molecu- lar and cell biologist at the institute of clini- cal physiology in pisa, italy. as a brand-new postdoc in verma’s lab in , she had not yet heard the warnings when verma forcibly grabbed and kissed her, a few weeks after she had arrived from italy, she alleges. salk administrators have received at least two formal complaints and three additional by meredith wadman inder verma, pictured in a salk laboratory in , conducted research that helped power the institute’s reputation for outstanding science. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ news | f e at u r e s may • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e reports about verma’s behavior since the late s, and they had hired an outside inves- tigator to probe a complaint about him at least once before last month. they also have repeatedly protected him, say women who formally complained and other people with knowledge of the institute’s actions. zoppè, for example, alleges that after she formally complained about verma’s behavior, salk ad- ministrators told her not to speak to anyone about the incident. the allegations reported to science are not as egregious as some examples of harassment in the scientific world (science, october , p. ). and many women who worked with verma at salk say he treated them with respect. “i found him to be an honorable and very supportive supervisor,” says jane visvader, a leading breast cancer researcher at the walter and eliza hall institute of medical research in parkville, australia, who was a postdoc in verma’s lab in the late s. visvader was one of women science con- tacted who said they experienced no ha- rassment when working with or for verma; another women ignored or declined repeated interview re- quests. among verma’s backers, several praised his mentoring and described his kindness. yet some women who allege harass- ment say that after the incidents, they made career choices that would allow them to dodge verma’s influence, or at least his presence. “i have been avoid- ing him for years,” says pamela mellon, a neuroscientist at the university of califor- nia, san diego (ucsd). she was an assistant professor at salk in the mid- s when, she says, verma grabbed her breasts during a party at his home. outside experts say that if the decades- long pattern of alleged advances is true, “he’s a textbook sexual harasser,” as ann olivarius, a senior partner at mcallister olivarius in saratoga springs, new york, puts it. olivarius, who specializes in sexual harass- ment cases, reviewed the eight women’s alle- gations at science’s request. “when you touch in the way that has been described in these examples,” she says, “under the law, these are called assault.” cathy young, a media fellow at the cato institute, a libertarian think tank in wash- ington, d.c., also reviewed the allegations. “i have raised questions about some #metoo accounts in the media that i think are over- reactions,” she says. “but once you start mak- ing surprise, aggressive advances, especially toward people of lower status, especially if they’re at the same institution—that clearly crosses the line.” verma declined to answer a list of ques- tions from science, but he issued a general denial in a statement released after salk sus- pended him last month: “i have never used my position at the salk institute to take ad- vantage of others. i have also never engaged in any sort of intimate relationship with any- one affiliated with the salk institute. i have never inappropriately touched, nor have i made any sexually charged comments, to anyone affiliated with the salk institute. i have never allowed any offensive or sexually charged conversations, jokes, material, etc., to occur at the salk institute.” citing legal and privacy constraints, salk declined to answer science’s questions about certain specific allegations. it would not say how many complaints about sexual harass- ment by verma it has received, nor what discipline, if any, it has imposed on him. however, its statement to science said, “salk has not condoned—and will not condone— any findings of inappropriate conduct in the workplace, regardless of one’s stature or influence.” it continued: “salk has had, and has enforced, policies prohibiting sexual ha- rassment for decades. … these policies are reviewed regularly and have been updated numerous times over the years.” the institute also noted that it “requires that employees periodically attend anti-harassment and dis- crimination training.” the allegations come as the research insti- tute, founded in by polio vaccine inven- tor jonas salk, defends itself against gender discrimination lawsuits filed last summer by three of its senior female scientists. the scientists allege that they were denied lab space and personnel, career advancement, and funding opportunities because they are women. two lawsuits accuse verma by name. in december , he was suspended as editor-in-chief of the proceedings of the na- tional academy of sciences (pnas) until is- sues raised by the lawsuits are resolved. verma—the highest-paid scientist at salk in its fiscal year, earning $ , — remained a power there until last month. he chaired and served on faculty promotion and search committees. he exerted influence on internal funding decisions. on april, he was slated to be on a panel at salk with former vice president joe biden, promoting a salk cancer research initiative—but he was dropped at the last moment. “they used to call salk ‘inder’s institute,’” recalls a young woman who alleges that she experienced unwanted touching and sexual comments from verma when she worked at salk during the past years. the lab tech verma, a native of sangrur, india, was hired by salk in , at age , after completing a ph.d. at the weizmann institute of science in rehovot, israel, and a postdoctoral fellow- ship in the lab of david baltimore, who was then at the massachusetts institute of tech- nology in cambridge. during verma’s first years at salk, he published papers, many reporting dis- coveries about reverse transcriptase, the en- zyme that enables retroviruses to insert their genetic material into cells’ dna. eight were co-authored with baltimore, who shared the nobel prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of the enzyme. verma was promoted to associate professor in , one step short of earning tenure in the salk system. in may , leslie jerominski, now a senior laboratory specialist at the university of utah hospitals and clinics in salt lake city, got a job as a technician in verma’s lab. she was . within a couple months of hiring her, jerominski says, verma asked her to play tennis at nearby ucsd. after their match, jerominski says, she stood preparing to change in a common break room with a private bathroom at salk. she alleges that verma grabbed her, hugged her, tried to kiss her—she turned her head aside—and asked her out to dinner. “i told him to quit,” she recalls. “i felt scared, angry, and disappointed.” jerominski did not report the incident, which was not repeated. “i was very young and i felt really privileged to be working at the salk institute. so i kind of let it go.” but she remained on the alert until she left salk in october . “i never put myself in a position when i was alone in a room with him ever again. … i hated the fact that i al- ways had to be on guard.” another technician in verma’s lab in that era remembers being warned by other women not to be alone with him. “it was a culture of ‘be careful,’” she says. “it was understood.” a female trainee in a different salk lab at the time recalls, “he had a habit of following women into the darkroom. i made sure when i was going in, he didn’t know.” the junior cancer biologist by the mid- s, verma’s lab was a world “i have never inappropriately touched, nor have i made any sexually charged comments, to anyone affiliated with the salk institute.” inder verma, salk institute for biological studies published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ may • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org leader in its field. verma had assembled a small, talented group of scientists who uncovered the structure of certain retro- viruses and revealed how they co-opted oncogenes to cause cancer. the team also led the development of retroviruses as vec- tors to deliver dna for gene therapy. in alone, verma published nine papers in cell, science, and nature, and was senior author on five of them. in , salk promoted him to full professor. in , the year verma turned , the na- tional cancer institute asked him and jean wang, then a -year-old assistant profes- sor studying cancer biology at ucsd, to help review a program at the dana-farber can- cer institute in boston. verma chaired the site review team. thrilled to be selected as a re- viewer, wang wore her favorite professional dress from talbots. it was calf length and blue, with irregular white dots and a white peter pan collar. the group stayed at an em- bassy suites hotel on the charles river, she recalls. after an intense, daylong assessment at dana- farber, wang had just returned to her room when the phone rang. it was verma, she says, ask- ing her to come to his room to discuss an important matter re- garding the site visit. when verma opened the door, wang says, she saw champagne chilling on ice beyond him. she alleges that verma closed the door behind her, sat on a couch in the front room of the suite and asked her to sit on his lap. stunned and fearful of angering him, she complied. “he started to ask me about my ex-boyfriend, my sex life, who i was going out with,” she says. she parried with pointed questions about his wife and daughter, whom she had met at a party at his home not long before. she told him repeatedly that she would like to leave and after about minutes, she did so. back in her room, she took a long shower. “i wanted to wash away the humiliation,” wang says. she threw the dress in the trash in disgust, knowing she would not wear it again. when she returned to san diego, “i didn’t say a word,” wang says. she blamed herself for going to verma’s hotel room, and she feared both others’ judgment of her and retaliation by verma. she was an ob- scure, nontenured assistant professor. she remembers thinking that if she told others, “he’s going to hurt me. i need grants.” wang did, however, begin counseling fe- male ucsd students who proposed to do re- search at salk, kilometers away, not to work with verma. in the mid- s, she told her husband, richard kolodner, about the inci- dent. (he confirmed that report to science.) and whenever she ran into verma at semi- nars and meetings, “i actively avoided him each time and made sure that i showed my disgust with my body language,” wang says. wang is now a distinguished professor emeritus in the department of medicine at ucsd. three decades later, she still feels shame and anger about that -minute epi- sode. she is speaking up now, she says, be- cause “i just can’t keep it in anymore. the #metoo movement opened my wound. i had to take this opportunity to tell my story so that i could hopefully close that wound and forgive myself.” the salk assistant professor verma and his wife (he has been married since ) have long been known as conge- nial, generous hosts. in the s, they of- ten invited salk colleagues to their spacious home in suburban solana beach, california. at one hot, crowded party there in the late s, pamela mellon, an assistant profes- sor at salk who was studying how gene tran- scription is regulated, stepped into the dark, quiet backyard to cool off. mellon, then in her mid- s, was standing with her back to the house admiring the hilly vista when, she says, verma’s arms suddenly encircled her from behind, pinning her arms to her side as he grabbed her breasts. “i was shocked and struggled to get rid of his arms,” mellon says. that failed, she says. next, “i just kicked him in the shin backwards. and he let go.” upset, she left the party immediately. she told no one about the incident and dealt with it by avoiding verma, who was not in her department and had no direct authority over her. but a year or two later, verma was appointed chair of the committee deciding whether mellon should be promoted from as- sistant to associate professor. distraught that the man whose advances she had rebuffed would be chairing that committee, she took her situa- tion to the director of human resources. she recalls him telling her that she needed counseling, and refusing to take up the inci- dent with verma. (that now-re- tired salk staffer did not respond to two letters and a phone mes- sage requesting an interview.) salk wrote in an email last week: “the institute does not have a record of any report given to human resources of this nature during [mellon’s] employment at salk.” it added: “when salk officials have been made aware of allegations of inappropriate conduct by an employee, the institute has investigated and responded, as appropriate.” next, mellon turned to salk professor tony hunter, whom she knew from shared inter- ests in whitewater rafting and retrovirology. she implored him to remove verma from the promo- tion committee. without asking her why she was so uncomfort- able with verma in that role, mellon recalls, hunter arranged to take verma’s place as chair of the committee. “tony took me seriously and he fixed it,” mellon says. (hunter declined repeated inter- view requests.) mellon was promoted. in , she left salk for a tenured position at ucsd, where today she studies how the brain controls reproduction. one woman who worked at salk at the time, who declined to be named for fear of career repercussions, says she recalls the day verma told her that mellon had left salk. “he was, like, ‘mellons has left.’ and i said, ‘mellons?’ and he said, ‘pam mellon, you know, her big breasts look like watermelons?’” inder verma at a meeting at cold spring harbor laboratory in new york in , the year after he was promoted to full professor at the salk institute. two women allege he made unwanted physical advances around this time. p h o t o : c o l d s p r in g h a r b o r l a b o r a t o r y da_ newsfeatures.indd / / : pm published by aaas corrected may . see full text. o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://science.sciencemag.org/ news | f e at u r e s may • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e “i was just in shock,” says the woman, who adds that she felt too intimidated to respond with anything but silence. the postdoctoral student monica zoppè was years old when she became a postdoc in verma’s lab late in . a newcomer to the united states, she was excited to work in the lab of a pioneer in gene transfer. a few weeks after her arrival, verma of- fered her a ride home. she didn’t have a car and gratefully accepted. “during the trip, he said, ‘i don’t know what i’m going home to do, nobody is there,’” zoppè recalls. pleased with the chance to discuss her research with him, she invited him in for a cup of tea. zoppè shared the house with two roommates. neither was home. “as soon as he stepped in the house he tried to kiss me very, very abruptly,” zoppè says. shocked and outraged, she shoved him away. struggling for words in her uncertain english, she said at first, “let’s go!” verma’s face lit up, zoppè recalls. she corrected herself: “you go!” he went. the next day, zoppè confronted verma, she says. in a statement she set down years later when she briefly considered taking legal action against salk or verma, she wrote, “he assured me that he had never done anything like this before and he would never do it again. … [he] asked me not to talk to anybody about this ‘incident.’” because she had taken salk’s sexual harassment training, which urged re- porting of such incidents, zoppè says, she complained to human resources at salk a few days later. (a former salk employee who declined to be named confirmed the complaint and the subsequent investigation to science.) zoppè says salk offered to move her to a lab at ucsd; she refused, feeling that if anyone should move it should be verma. several days later, she recalls, the hu- man resources director—the same man whom mellon had approached a few years earlier—called her at home to tell her she should stay home that day, and continue to stay home until she heard back from human resources, because verma was going to be told of her complaint and would be angry. within another few days, zoppè says, verma “apologized very coldly for what he did. he assured me he was not mad at me, which was clearly a lie.” in her statement from the mid- s, zoppè adds that human resources “told me that [verma] would be requested to undergo psychological counseling … and that, if anybody asked, i should say i know nothing about it.” (as with all specific al- legations about its handling of complaints, salk had no comment on the details of zoppè’s account.) according to zoppè, verma routinely dis- paraged her science after she complained. “if an experiment didn’t work, i was incom- petent. any time i would say something in a lab meeting, according to inder i was wrong.” another postdoc in verma’s lab at the time, who declined to be named for fear of professional retaliation, confirmed to science that after the complaint, verma “was overly and openly aggressive in criti- cizing” zoppè at a lab meeting. paolo remondelli, now a cell biologist at the university of salerno in fisciano, italy, was working in a ucsd lab in the early s and shared a house with zoppè for months beginning soon after the alleged incident. in an interview with science, he recalled what he described as zoppè’s “dis- tress” about her relationship with verma af- ter she complained about him to salk. “it was clearly something that com- promised her relationship with him,” remondelli said. “she didn’t work with calm. she was not quiet. it was damaging. it was compromising her career.” zoppè completed her postdoc, she says, because she had strong support from others in verma’s lab. she left in for a posi- tion in milan, italy. the senior salk colleague verma’s career continued to soar. in , he won an “outstanding investigator” award from nih, which steered $ . mil- lion to verma and salk for cancer research over the next years. in , verma was awarded a coveted american cancer society professorship, which funded his work with hundreds of thousands of dollars until . his laboratory pressed ahead with pioneer- ing work developing gene therapy vectors and made key discoveries about cancer- causing genes such as the breast cancer gene brca . he was visible in public and policy circles, chairing a com- mittee that examined nih oversight of gene therapy clinical trials and co- chairing the government’s recombi- nant dna advisory committee. in , the year he turned , verma was elected to the national academy of sciences (nas) and years later, to the institute of medi- cine, part of nas that advises the gov- ernment on key issues in medicine and health. in , he joined the edi- torial board of pnas. one evening in september , beverly emerson, then , a molecu- lar biologist salk had hired in and promoted to full professor in , was working at the photocopier, deep in the salk library stacks. no one else was around. she didn’t hear verma approach. suddenly, she says, he was beside her; he grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth. “yes?” he asked. “no!” she remembers responding, in shock. he backed away and left. the incident, emerson says, “left me feeling physically vulnerable be- cause dr. verma snuck up on me— and at risk of losing lab resources and professional opportunities at salk” because of verma’s power and influence at the institute. (emerson, , is one of the plaintiffs in the current gender discrimina- tion lawsuits. in december , months after the lawsuits were filed, salk declined to renew her contract, saying that she failed to bring in % of her salary from external sources, as required. science, december , p. .) emerson did not report the incident be- cause, she says, “he didn’t do it again.” if he had, she says she would have reported it not to human resources, but to the institute’s president. “i had the sense that human re- sources had no real power to discipline or take corrective action over dr. verma.” inder verma receives a $ , prize from the vilcek foundation in new york city in . the award honors outstanding contributions to biomedical research by immigrants to the united states. p h o t o : m a t t c a r a s e l l a / p a t r ic k m c m u l l a n v ia g e t t y i m a g e s published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ may • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org the recruit in the first years of this century, salk’s sci- entific ranks were sorely lacking in women. in , seven of faculty members were women, and the trend wasn’t improving: only one of the assistant professors was a woman. the institute did seek to hire women. between and , it offered faculty positions to outsiders, five of them women; none of the five accepted a position. one potential faculty recruit, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, visited salk during that period. she noted that sev- eral female professors pointedly sought pri- vacy during conversations with her by closing their office doors; one insisted on talking with her in the women’s bathroom. one woman, who had published in nature and cell, con- fided that she was not going to get promoted. “i looked at her résumé and thought, ‘how is that possible?’” the recruit recalls. she also met with verma in his office and discussed her research and the institute’s. as he escorted her to her next interview, she says, verma volunteered that, if she had a husband, salk would not be able to hire him as well. she replied that she wasn’t married. at that point, she al- leges, verma reached behind her and pinched her buttocks. “it wasn’t a pat on the butt, it was a pinch,” she says. she declined salk’s job offer. “i was very disturbed by my experience there,” she says. two people—her faculty mentor and a post- doc at her institution at the time—confirmed in interviews with science that she told them of that incident soon after it happened. the junior salk colleagues one night during the past decade, a young female salk research assistant, her boss (a salk professor), and verma attended a din- ner at a san diego restaurant with pharma- ceutical company executives. the research assistant was the only woman present. as the dinner adjourned, she says, verma “put his arm around my waist and said, ‘you are always so beautiful. you are like a beautiful starlet.’” the woman exchanged a glance with her boss, who “had this, like, ‘uh-oh’ look on his face,” she recalls. she quickly disentangled herself and walked away. verma continued to make sexual com- ments about her to others at salk, that woman says; those comments found their way back to her and made her feel that “at- tractiveness was apparently what i was there for. not doing science.” she went out of her way to avoid verma. “you knew not to complain to human re- sources about it. you don’t want to be on verma’s bad side. i wanted to keep my job.” another young woman working at salk in reports that after a meeting, she ex- tended her hand to verma to shake. he took it and pulled her into a half-hug, she says. she alleges that he then put his hand on her cheek and said, “i should probably not say this, but you are so pretty.” he went on to compare her to his daughter, she says. the young woman says she told elizabeth blackburn, then salk’s president, about the incident, and that blackburn reported it to human resources. (blackburn, who re- signed in december , did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the incident.) human resources brought in ken rose, principal of the rose group, a san diego law firm—the same firm it hired in march to investigate verma—to investigate. rose determined that no sexual harass- ment had occurred, the woman says. she adds that he concluded by telling her, “‘you need to go tell him you thought it was inap- propriate.’ … but i never confronted him, mostly because i didn’t want to be alone with him and i was afraid of retaliation.” rose de- clined to comment. from then on, she warned new female em- ployees not to be alone with verma. during science ’s -month investigation, some women who worked with verma over the years offered a counternarrative to his por- trayal as a sexual harasser, and they praised his actions as a mentor. in verma’s lab, “women were treated equal to men,” says virginie bottero, a verma post- doc from to who is now a lecturer at lake forest college in illinois. “i was never subjected to harassment of any sort. i did not witness any harassment and i did not hear about anyone who could have been a target.” she called the lab “a fantastic place to work and grow scientifically.” dinorah friedmann-morvinski, an assis- tant professor at tel aviv university in israel who was a verma postdoc from to , wrote in an email, “when my husband lost his job and inder heard about it, he not only raised my salary but also helped [connect] my husband with relevant people he knew in his field.” she added, “during my mater- nity leave, he assigned a technician to help me with my ongoing experiments and she kept helping me when i returned full time to the lab.” when verma was elevated to become editor-in-chief of pnas years ago, ralph cicerone, then nas president, lauded verma as “the ideal person” for the job. “dr. inder verma is known worldwide for his scientific creativity and for his consci- entiousness and fair-mindedness,” cicerone said. other leading science organizations also have sought him out, including aaas, where verma served on the board of direc- tors from to . last october, at a gala at the beverly hills hotel in los angeles, california, the ameri- can cancer society honored verma as a “gi- ant of science.” in november , he opined on the virtues of preprint servers in pnas. in march—with nas president marcia mcnutt, the new england journal of medi- cine editor jeffrey drazen, science’s execu- tive editor monica bradford, and others—he co-authored a pnas article urging changes to standardize journals’ authorship policies. research under verma also contin- ued, until last week. he was a co- author on three new scientific papers in the first quarter of this year. in february, he and his team at salk won a $ . million award from the w. m. keck founda- tion to develop living mammalian tissues that are transparent to light microscopy. salk said in a statement on april that hunter will oversee all ongoing research programs in the verma lab “during dr. ver- ma’s leave” and that “the institute expects all research to continue as normal during this period.” it added that salk has con- tacted the foundations and funding agen- cies that support verma’s work “to assure them the research they are sponsoring will continue without disruption.” can outstanding science redeem harass- ment? “it’s the old ‘great man’ theory of the universe: ‘look what he has done in sci- ence,’” says olivarius, the sexual harassment lawyer. “instead, look at how many careers he has hurt.” jennifer freyd, a research psychologist at the university of oregon in eugene, notes that verma’s alleged harassment occurred at an institution where women also con- tend that they have been shut out of power. “sexual harassment really reinforces the male power structure and keeps women in their place and terrified. but also, any kind of gender inequity gives more permission to sexually harass. so they are mutually reinforcing. they do go together.” j this story was supported by the science fund for investigative reporting. “when you touch in the way that has been described in these examples, under the law, these are called assault.” ann olivarius, mcallister olivarius law firm published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ a hidden history meredith wadman doi: . /science. . . ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ beyond the fears of the pandemic: reinventing the nation-state? but one cannot explain everything with facts, ideas, and words. there is, in addition, all one does not know and never will. —louis-ferdinand céline once more, in politics, fearing has replaced planning. but this time the danger is not imaginary. the health crisis, coupled with an economic crisis, is probably the most severe one since . as for the enlighten- ment project of freeing people from fear and making them sovereign, it has been relegated to the museum of dead ideas. fears proliferate, fuel- ing fantasies and dictating behavior. the triggering event, the coronavirus * warm thanks to annick duraffour and isabelle de mecquenem for their com- ments. a short version of this essay previously appeared as “pandémie, et si l’État-nation se réinventait?,” l’express, april , , https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/idees-et-debats/ pierre-andre-taguieff-pandemie-et-si-l-etat-nation-se-reinventait_ .html. translated by pierre schwarzer. . louis-ferdinand céline, la vie et l’œuvre de philippe ignace semmelweis ( – ), in cahiers céline , ed. jean-pierre dauphin and henri godard (paris: gallimard, ), p. . [translator’s note: no translation available, thus the quotation has been trans- lated along with the article.] . cf. max horkheimer and theodor w. adorno, “begriff der aufklärung,” in dialek- tik der aufklärung: philosophische fragmente (frankfurt am main: fischer taschenbuch verlag, ), p. ; english translation: dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical frag- ments, trans. edmund jephcott (stanford, ca: stanford univ. press, ), p. . pierre-andré taguieff beyond the fears of the pandemic: reinventing the nation-state? this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noderivatives . international (cc by-nd . ) license. to view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/ . . english translation © the telos- paul piccone institute, http://www.telosinstitute.net. telos (summer ): – doi: . / www.telospress.com pierre-andré taguieff pandemic, brings us face to face with a highly anxiety-provoking conjunc- tion: that of the inexplicable and the incurable—until further notice. this clashes head-on with the prometheism of the moderns, which assumes that humanity only encounters problems it can solve. however, to succeed in explaining and mastering phenomena, one requires time, and fear only feeds impatience. the time of and for politics is utterly different from that of scientific research. as the unforeseen occurs, so does uncertainty that, in conjunction with the perception of a lethal threat, fosters fear and sets up a dictator- ship of urgency. and fear, paralyzing our capacity to imagine the future, tends to dictate its law to political leaders and ordinary citizens alike, with politicians believing they must reassure people and show them they know enough about the pandemic and are taking responsible actions against it. but the claim of explanatory omnipotence distorts the game: above all, it serves to comfort the public. an immodest power seeks to maintain the il- lusion that they have the situation under control. the parades and prances of approved experts, however competent they may be, hardly conceal our ignorance and powerlessness. they also stir up a paradoxical malaise: what good is such expertise if it does not advance knowledge or seriously control the pandemic? medical statistics should not be a substitute for biomedical research or serve as a cover-up in the absence of effective treatments. it is as much about guarding oneself from a crippling catastrophism as it is about avoiding blind optimism. a truthful, lucid, and responsible intervention by a political leader would admit: “we do not know.” but who among our politicians would dare to take the risk of the simple truth? managing scarcity to better camouflage it or indefinitely postponing po- litical decisions in anticipation of a “scientific consensus” is much easier. this is how, on april of this year, the french government’s press secre- tary (for the presidency), sibeth ndiaye, stated on the radio station france info: “we will decide on a possible extension of the mandatory wearing of masks to the entire population as soon as we can build it on scientific consensus.” she justified her statement by playing the french academy of medicine’s recommendation of compulsory mask-wearing against the guideline of the world health organization (who), which “does not rec- ommend the wearing of masks for the general population.” this is a wait- and-see attitude, ignoring the fact that, in the biomedical field, there can be no absolute consensus within the scientific community, which lives with beyond the fears of the pandemic the controversies through which research advances knowledge. above all, however, it means that one takes for granted that political decisions must be scientifically based, that politics must cease to be an art and become an applied science. this is the illusion of scientism par excellence. in situations of great danger (wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, epidemics), when questions of security and protection take precedence over all others, national sentiment returns to the surface and the “retreat” into the nation’s borders becomes a major imperative for protection. the awakening of the tragic, the experience of suffering necessity without justice, impels, along with the feeling of an intractable conflict of values, a great return to reality, which must be confronted in all its terrible aspects. the sudden pervasiveness of death is a brutal reminder of our finitude, but also of the fact that as humans, we are social animals now living within the framework of nations rather than that of tribes or empires. national solidarity thus regains its meaning “from below,” so to speak, silencing merchants of illusions and utopias, as well as the followers of a negative form of individualism, which is based on sanctified hedonistic and com- petitive values that undermine social ties under the cloak of openness. it should be noted, however, that while the feeling of a common threat unites or brings together, it can just as easily divide and oppose, depending on the associated passions and interests. a critical glance at the tragic this brutal awakening of the tragic signals the defeat of the bright fu- ture promised by the secular religions. but it is a joyless tragedy. this is not a time for the rebirth of tragedy: we are less and less greek, to over- throw a formula of nietzsche. the merry tragic heroes are nowhere to be found. we only encounter the sad and tired ones. fear and pity remain, but without accompanying moral sublimation. the tragic also lies in the rise of unsolvable dilemmas and problems: how can one respond effec- tively to the imperative of collective health without restricting individual freedoms? how can the economic machine be restarted without the sus- pension of prudential lockdown measures, that is, without endangering the lives of the most vulnerable? how can containment measures be jus- tified when they reveal socioeconomic inequalities and risk exacerbating . cf. friedrich nietzsche, the will to power, ed. walter kaufmann and r. j. hol- lingdale (new york: vintage books, ), sec. , p. : “we are growing more greek by the day.” pierre-andré taguieff social envy? the tragic lies in the impossibility to justify once and for all the decisive choices: between health and the economy, between health and individual liberties. this revival of the tragic, however, is accompanied by the awakening of critical thought, which, stripped of its ideological bias, at last focuses on sociohistorical realities. at the same time as the reality of borders, french citizens can come to acknowledge the importance of the sovereign state, gnawed away for several decades by the europeanization of bureaucracy and a neoliberal globalization that goes hand in hand with deindustrial- ization, offshoring, and technological dependency. hence the hysterical posturing of a french state now overtaken by events it had certainly nei- ther foreseen nor even imagined; the elites in power having converted to an adaptationist gnosis, grounded in the belief that mankind’s salvation lies in its ever-increasing adaptation to the boundless world market order, celebrated as a triumphant march toward prosperity and happiness for all. a transfigured headlong rush, illustrating the “legitimation through the fu- ture” analyzed recently by marcel gauchet. the forced march toward adaptation at all costs, under the pretense of “reform,” was to be accomplished by the government of experts formed around president macron, orchestrator of this new attempt to realize rea- son in history. but the resulting outcome is rather that of an involuntary display of incompetence and impotence. the actions of this government have been marked by a series of resignations or defections, as well as by successive turns, above all rhetorical, fueling the mistrust of its citizens— a growing one, apparent for many years now, between the rulers and the ruled. this wariness affecting many democratic societies is burdened by an anger that, in times of lockdown, is manifested by gestures of humor, in france as elsewhere. this is the case, for instance, in spain, devastated by the pandemic, where people loudly beat their saucepans on their balconies in protest against the government. like many western governments, french political leaders have been fumbling around, multiplying their contradictory injunctions, one glaring example being when they chose not to postpone the municipal elections . cf. marcel gauchet, the disenchantment of the world, trans. oscar burge (princ- eton, nj: princeton univ. press, ), pp. – . . cf. luc rouban, la démocratie représentative est-elle en crise? (paris: la docu- mentation française, ); pascal perrineau, le grand écart: chronique d’une démocratie fragmentée (paris: plon, ). beyond the fears of the pandemic just when the official discourse turned to alarmism. today, the conquer- ing discourse of the first years of macron, turned toward the bright future of the start-up nation, is giving way to a dramatization of the situation re- flected in a martial discourse, adapted to a foreseeable dark future—after the health crisis, the economic catastrophe, or the recession on the horizon. tragedy gives way to catastrophism, to a “twilight vision of the world.” the image of a march toward chaos gives rise to deep pessimism, nurtured by a despair so severe it could translate into violent revolts and an intensi- fication of social conflicts. as for fear, it favors the lifting of moral barriers and, for example, drives some distraught citizens to denounce their neigh- bors for violating the rules of the lockdown, a now commonplace practice. on march , , in a solemn address to the nation, president ma- cron repeated several times: “we are at war.” a new, unforeseen, invisible and elusive, unfamiliar, resistant, and mutant “enemy” was thus added to the list of our foes, our secular demonology renewed through biology and medical care. as a result, our political imagination expands in equal mea- sure with our weakened grip on reality. if, in the modern age, “health has replaced salvation,” then illness has replaced eternal damnation. demons are now called “viruses.” but this is a strange “war,” since the enemy is unknown and only one side, the human side, has victims. the war meta- phor here is misleading. but it serves to rally the troops. widespread lockdown seems to be the only overall response to the health challenge, in the absence of systematic screening and vaccination. nothing really new, since the coercive measures taken to address the major epidemics of the past, from quarantine to a sanitary control of ships, as the black plague ( – ) and the plague of marseilles ( – ), illustrate among others. although it is not a cure and only serves to pre- vent hospitals from overloading, general lockdown has been turned into a compulsory miracle cure, prescribed as part of the government’s medical catechism. this means that besides the collateral economic damage and the negative psychological effects that lockdown induces (stress, depression, emotional fatigue, etc.), one of the perverse effects of general lockdown is being ignored: the majority of the population is prevented from develop- ing neutralizing antibodies, thus blocking their immunization. it must be . the formula (from ) stems from the physician and historian of science josé miguel guardia ( – ) and is quoted by michel foucault in the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception, trans. a. m. sheridan smith (new york: rout- ledge, ), p. . pierre-andré taguieff acknowledged, however, that it is not scientifically established that herd immunity can be acquired. according to studies in china and the united states, covid- could attack the human immune system, destroying the t cells that are supposed to protect the body from harmful invaders. this is another example of the limitations of our knowledge of covid- . there is a real problem here, stemming from a conflict of norms. as the historian patrice bourdelais reminds us, while it is true that “for centu- ries, the history of progressive scientific findings has contributed to imag- ining the possibility of eradicating infectious diseases,” medical optimism in this area now comes up against the emergence of new diseases, on the rise since the s. as a result, “the progress of science in the under- standing of living organisms leads us to believe the eradication of infec- tious diseases is simply impossible and that we must try to control the spread of new epidemics as best we can.” control, not eradicate: by this rule of practical wisdom, we recognize the limits of the prometheism of the moderns. as in most european countries, since march , all that macron’s government has accomplished is preaching petty lessons in morality and hygiene for infantilized citizens and the mere performance of power to intimidate or console people—the old progressive refrain of a better to- morrow rings hollow. its representatives merely repeat the necessary rules of “social distancing” by stigmatizing the bad subjects worrying too loudly about their madly amateurish tinkerings, unprepared for a health crisis compounded by an economic crisis. the drop in gdp in the first quarter of (– %) has lead some political leaders to advocate for a gradual lifting of the lockdown without waiting for reliable tests to be pro- duced. those competing fears are dangerous, particularly because in their frenzy they supersede the much-needed focus on devising strategies to follow. some doctors, such as professor jean-françois toussaint, propose . stephen chen, “coronavirus could attack immune system like hiv by target- ing protective cells, warn scientists,” south china morning post, april , , https:// www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /coronavirus-could-target-immune- system-targeting-protective. . patrice bourdelais, “la compréhension du vivant conduit à penser que l’éradi- cation des maladies infectieuses est impossible,” interview by simon blin, libération, april , , https://www.liberation.fr/debats/ / / /patrice-bourdelais-la-compre- hension-du-vivant-conduit-a-penser-que-l-eradication-des-maladies-infect_ . . cf. pierre-andré taguieff, l’effacement de l’avenir (paris: galilée, ), pp. – ; taguieff, le sens du progrès: une approche historique et philosophique (paris: flam- marion, ), pp. – . beyond the fears of the pandemic to move away from “blind” quarantine toward “personalized” quaran- tine, which implies the use of reliable tests. such a selective quarantine cannot be carried out without systematic screening. the condition for re- sponsible deconfinement is also mass screening, implying the availability of the required equipment. however, the expertocracy cannot stand any kind of opposition. neither in the form of scientific controversy, nor in the form of a political debate based on respecting and listening to the adver- sary. but the facts are stubborn: thousands of french people are dying, and there is a shortage of effective protective masks, beds, respirators, and re- liable tests—even sanitizer, gloves, and safety gowns are running low. no amount of rhetoric can transform or transfigure the harshness of reality. for example, it turns out that france has been dependent on china for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and the production of face masks (in march , french manufacturers produced million face masks per week, while healthcare workers used million in the same period of time). it must be acknowledged that, in this respect, the current french government is not the only one in this predicament and that france, with its public hospitals struck by austerity policies, was very poorly equipped to deal with such an epidemic (few intensive care beds, few molecular bi- ology laboratories, etc.). the negligence of western governments in the face of the pandemic is blindingly obvious. they began by underestimat- ing the danger, implemented preventive measures with a delay, and did not hesitate to make reassuring statements based on approximate or un- verifiable figures, sometimes purely and simply fake—as in china, iran, or turkey—and fallacious arguments—such as justifying the shortage of masks by claiming that they are of no use to ordinary citizens or that their use may even be dangerous. for example, president trump never ceased to minimize the danger of the pandemic by comparing it to the seasonal flu and by repeating that ev- erything was “under control,” that the country was “very well prepared,” before panicking and totally changing his tune in the face of the increasing . jean-françois toussaint, “le confinement généralisé serait-il une erreur?,” up’ magazine, april , , https://up-magazine.info/index.php/decryptages/analyses/ - le-confinement-generalise-serait-il-une-erreur/. . cf., among others, steven lee myers, “china created a fail-safe system to track contagions. it failed,” new york times, march , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/coronavirus-china.html; françois danjou, “affaibli à l’intérieur, le parti redore son blason dans le monde,” questionchine, march , , https://www. questionchine.net/affaibli-a-l-interieur-le-parti-redore-son-blason-dans-le-monde. pierre-andré taguieff number of covid- deaths in the united states, and then declaring, as a worried businessman, that it was necessary to “reopen the country” as soon as possible. let us also recall the unfortunate statements of agnès buzyn, then minister of health, first on january , : “the risk of in- troducing this virus into france is low but cannot be excluded,” then three days later: “the risk of importation is practically nil.” on february , she declared that “it is necessary to prepare our health system for a pos- sible pandemic spread of the virus,” before announcing the next day her candidacy for mayor of paris and resigning from her post as minister. on february , , on the radio station rtl, the new minister of health, olivier véran, asserted that “there are no longer any sick people in circu- lation in france today.” on the february , the football game between the olympique of lyon and juventus of turin, involving thousands of fans, was authorized in lyon. as for president macron, on march , he at- tended a performance at the antoine theater with his wife and encouraged the french, leading them by example, to continue going out in spite of the epidemic—so much so that at the end of the performance he declared: “life goes on. there is no reason, except for the vulnerable populations, to change our habits of going out.” in an even more worrisome fashion, on march , as he made an alarmist speech on the spread of covid- , af- firming in particular that “the absolute priority for our nation will be our health,” he nonetheless called on the french, piously grounded in “scien- tific advice,” to go to the polls on march in the first round of municipal elections: a major inconsistency, for which he is no doubt not the sole cul- prit. these messages were even more contradictory since, the day after the election, the same president announced quarantine measures for the entire country —not without urging companies to continue their activity “whenever possible” on march . it was not until march that presi- dent macron declared a “sanitary war” on covid- , which earned him a temporary increase in popularity, as measured by ifop in a study carried out on march – , . we recognize here the phenomenon known as “rallying around the flag,” that is, a patriotic rallying in the face of an international crisis, which is the case for the pandemic. but this effect is . cf. jean-paul moatti, “the french response to covid- : intrinsic difficulties at the interface of science, public health, and policy,” lancet, april , , https://www. thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/piis - ( ) - . . bruno cautrès, “la ‘start-up nation’ semble terriblement démodée et vieux monde aujourd’hui . . . ,” interview by arnaud benedetti, revue politique et parlementaire, beyond the fears of the pandemic generally short-lived and can be reversed if the crisis is prolonged with- out a clear way out. in an ifop poll carried out on april – , , only % of french people trusted the government to effectively fight the pan- demic—a six-point drop compared to the previous survey carried out on march – . the legitimism of the french is often fleeting. however, as jérôme fourquet rightly notes, “what currently preserves the executive branch is that the other western leaders, including populists, do not seem to be doing any better.” as for the unfortunate british prime minister, boris johnson, after downplaying the danger—and riding on the comforting idea that mass immunization should be allowed to develop—he had to acknowledge in early march that this was a “national challenge,” without taking clear measures to deal with the pandemic. less than a month later, the person who ostensibly shook hands in a hospital (“not even scared!”) tested posi- tive for covid- , before being hospitalized on april . all these senior political leaders have constantly sent contradictory messages, often re- flecting the discords among the experts themselves. this can only increase the mistrust of political leaders, who sail on sight and enter the future backward. the demagoguery of those in power, masking their short-sight- edness, uncertainty, and powerlessness with expert speeches under the sky of a scientism not unlike that of homais, is obvious. the sacralization of “science” allows the rulers to cheaply relieve themselves of their respon- sibilities. the only science we get are mainly daily floods of statistics, which, depending on how we interpret them, worry or comfort us, inviting fantasies and rumors along. the public’s expectations toward the medical field increase with the feeling of a growing threat. the raoult affair shows that, in situations marked by uncertainty and disarray, doctors who respond to the pub- lic’s demand for therapeutic hope are seen as gurus, masters of truth, and march , , https://www.revuepolitique.fr/la-start-up-nation-semble-terriblement-de- modee-et-vieux-monde-aujourdhui/. . jérôme fourquet, “covid- : ‘cette épreuve collective révèle les fractures pré- existantes de l’archipel français,’” interview by eugénie bastié, figarovox, april , , https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/l-annulation-des-epreuves-du-bac- -repousse-l- horizon-d-une-sortie-de-crise- . . monsieur homais, pharmacist by trade, is a character in flaubert’s novel ma- dame bovary ( ). this grotesque figure, blending definitive decisions with apothecary recipes, is known for his social vanity and scientific pretensions. he embodies a kind of “scientific” idiocy that has become widespread since the middle of the nineteenth century. pierre-andré taguieff saviors. they are endowed with a charismatic power comparable to that of famous healers or shamans. when they are not recognized and supported by the political and medical establishment, they appear both as robin hoods defying the ruling power and as benefactors to humanity. replac- ing the reference to puerperal infection by the mention of the covid- pandemic, one could attribute to didier raoult, with a zest of irony, these words of philippe ignace semmelweis, quoted by céline in his medical thesis: “fate has chosen me to be the missionary of truth for the mea- sures that must be taken to avoid and fight the puerperal scourge.” the raoult affair has the advantage of revealing the antagonism of two logics of action: that of the defenders of the scientific method, involving clini- cal trials that take time, and that of the supporters of therapeutic urgency, illustrating a pragmatic medicine of which didier raoult has become the champion. here again we are treading on thin ice: the difficulty lies in avoiding both the scientific dogmatism of the medical bureaucracy and the demagogy of miracle workers, who do not hesitate to tap into the public’s mistrust of “official science” cut off from the field, thus running the risk of feeding the imaginary conspiracy accompanying the health crisis (“they hide everything from us,” “they take us for a ride,” etc.). professor philippe gabriel steg heavily criticized didier raoult’s media stance, in particular his criticism of randomized trials, dismissed as unethical in an emergency situation, amounting to letting the argument of authority (“eminence-based medicine”) prevail in medicine by disqual- ifying “evidence-based medicine”: what is presented as the fight of the “maverick” against the “ivory tow- er” is in fact exactly the opposite: to refuse the experimental method, verification, and replication is to return to the bygone era of ivory tow- er certainties, in which the authority and intuition of the boss were equal to proof. conversely, medicine by evidence, derived from randomized . céline, la vie et l’œuvre de philippe ignace semmelweis, p. . . cf. amélie petit, “hydroxychloroquine ou l’essai clinique à l’épreuve du covid- ,” aoc, april , , https://aoc.media/opinion/ / / /hydroxychloroquine-ou- lessai-clinique-a-lepreuve-du-covid- /. . in medicine, a randomized controlled trial is an experimental protocol that serves to evaluate the efficacy of a treatment, of a prevention measure, or of a drug. it consists in comparing an experimental group (also called intervention group) that is administered the treatment with a control group (or witness group) that has been administered either a standard treatment or a placebo. it prevents treatments from becoming subject merely to the whim of physicians. beyond the fears of the pandemic clinical trials, amounts to giving each and every researcher, every doctor, regardless of rank, country, or specialty, the possibility of experimental- ly testing a hypothesis, of verifying or invalidating it, of replicating the results—and, via peer review, of criticizing or moderating the conclu- sions drawn from them; a process of confronting doubts, opinions, and verification. the raoult affair, which divides the french, exemplifying the populist pat- tern “the people against the elites,” can be understood in its psychosocial dimension, characterized as follows by jérôme fourquet: it is a classic feature of times of crisis that the bearers of good news arouse interest and sympathy. but the infatuation toward prof. raoult, encour- aged by his skilled communication and positioning, is also based . . . on a movement already present during the “yellow vests” crisis: a severe mistrust of the given authorities, the opposition of the presumed prag- matism of the field to the supposedly disconnected elites, the province (marseille) against paris. in his public actions, president macron likes to surprise. such was the case when he secretly planned his visit to didier raoult at the university hospital institute in marseille on april , . it is true that this deci- sion was made after the success of several petitions in defense of pro- fessor raoult, attacked by many of his peers. a great communicator, this doctor-researcher was already an “international star”—as he likes to point out himself—before the controversies over the treatment of covid- patients with hydroxychloroquine. with hundreds of thousands of sig- natures on petitions in favor of his proposed treatment, the pro-raoult movement had become a mainstream political force to be reckoned with. . philippe gabriel steg, “coronavirus: trois premières leçons sur l’épidémie,” april , , les echos, https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/editos-analyses/exclusif- coronavirus-trois-premieres-lecons-sur-lepidemie- . . fourquet, “covid- .” . cf., among others, “chloroquine: l’appel urgent d’un groupe de médecins,” https:// www.petition-chloroquine.fr/. on the morning of april , , this petition had , signatures. another petition, “il faut écouter le professeur raoult,” https:// www. mesopinions.com/petition/sante/faut-ecouter-professeur-raoult/ , was signed by , people. with regard to the pleas of medical professors, see “traitement covid- : ne perdons plus de temps! #neperdonsplusdetemps,” april , , https://www.change. org/p/ephilippepm-traitement-covid -ne-perdons-plus-de-temps-neperdonsplusdetemps, which had collected , signatures one week later. pierre-andré taguieff and his growing fame made him a formidable opponent and critic of gov- ernment decisions. hence the strategy of inclusion followed by the french president: to make this famous figure an ally rather than an enemy, dem- onstrating that he has no enemies, apart from those he calls “nationalists” or “populists,” with whom he does not argue. this communication strat- egy had been tested at the time of the mobilization of the yellow vests, through the organization of the “great national debate,” launched on jan- uary , . in a similar fashion, the april visit to prof. raoult was in- tended to reactivate the image of a president who listens to the french, is intellectually curious and open to discussion. this unexpected visit can be considered a successful media coup. however, we can observe a notable increase of public discontent, in late march and early april , with macron’s management of the pan- demic. as pascal perrineau and guillaume tabard noted, “the government is being blamed for concealing information, for its opaque communica- tion, for responding too late, and for inadequately protecting those on the front line fighting the virus-related issues.” of the respondents to an ifop survey in early april, % believe that “the government has concealed certain information,” % that it “has not communicated clearly,” % that it “has not allocated the proper resources to the infrastructures and health professionals to fight against the virus,” and % that it “has not re- acted quickly.” mistrust of elites is the backdrop for the rising tide of conspiracy theo- ries unleashed by the health crisis. and this mistrust is the shared premise of both the populist stance and the conspiracy mindset. upon measuring the french population’s support of conspiracy theories, one discovers that the openness to conspiracy theories is not evenly distributed. according to the survey carried out from march – , , by ifop with conspiracy watch and the jean-jaurès foundation, more than a quarter of the french . guillaume tabard, “faire du professeur raoult un allié plutôt qu’un ennemi,” le figaro, april , , https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/guillaume-tabard-faire-du-pr- raoult-un-allie-plutot-qu-un-ennemi- . . guillaume tabard and pascal perrineau, “face à la crise du covid- , les fran- çais entre colère, inquiétude et légitimisme,” le figaro, april , , https://www. lefigaro.fr/politique/face-a-la-crise-du-covid- -les-francais-entre-colere-inquietude-et- legitimisme- . . rudy reichstadt and jérôme fourquet, “l’épidémie dans l’épidémie: thèses com- plotistes et covid- ,” fondation jean-jaurès website, march , , https://jean-jaures. org/nos-productions/l-epidemie-dans-l-epidemie-theses-complotistes-et-covid- . beyond the fears of the pandemic ( %) adhere to the claim that covid- is human-made and either in- tentionally ( %) or accidentally ( %) conceived in a lab. those most prone to conspiracy theories are composed of, on the one hand, the young- est generations, often appropriating news indiscriminately and without verification, and, on the other hand, the most disadvantaged social cat- egories, on average less qualified than the others and more tempted by alternative frames of interpretation, opposing “official truths” and postu- lating that “the truth is elsewhere.” for example, % of people under agree with the view that the virus was intentionally developed in a labo- ratory, compared with only % of those over . among the less wealthy, % agree with this thesis, while the more affluent ones only adhere by %. furthermore, when it comes to partisan sympathies, % of the sup- porters of the rassemblement national [the main far-right party in france] believe covid- was intentionally created in a laboratory, which is per- fectly consistent with their systematic suspicion toward elites, supposedly irresponsible, corrupt, or criminal, as well as with the presumption that the true reasons for our ills are always hidden. finally, the study establishes that being concerned about covid- does not correlate with adhering to conspiracy theories. in this matter, the braggarts claiming or suggesting they had seen the virus coming and would have drawn the right consequences had they been in power ought to be dismissed. such boasting is simply childish. but it does not excuse the procrastination, the palaver, and the contradictory directives of our political leaders. in any case, it is hard to see how the ir- responsible political and administrative leaders with regard to the health crisis could be held unaccountable. european disunion, disastrous globalization, and national sentiment one of the possible lessons one can draw from this pandemic is that the health of the citizens in each european nation, involving a general mobi- lization and a state of emergency—destined to remain temporary—must be placed above the “european values”—yet to be defined clearly—now sung by headless ducks gripped by the great fear of seeing their utopia fade away. the priority of life has destroyed the cozy illusions and wishful ide- alism. who still believes the european union can save anyone at all? that is the crux of the matter. no one would agree to die for “european values.” in difficult times, the french sing the national anthem and not the euro- pean anthem. they can cooperate with this or that neighboring country, pierre-andré taguieff regardless of the heavy machine called the european union. europe is not a homeland; europeans are not a people. they are not a community of destiny and responsibility, despite the flood of europeanist rhetoric poured into discourse over the last three decades. people lulled by the european union’s rocking tunes are just good for wide-eyed daydreaming. in this respect, the responsibility of the elites is huge. they have indeed done ev- erything they could to denationalize minds. but they have not succeeded in wiping out national sentiment. moreover, since the harm caused by offshoring and deindustrializa- tion among the nations caught in the dream has now been acknowledged, deglobalization returns to the agenda as a condition for the survival of the human species. this does not of course entail suppressing all trade among nations: deglobalization can only be partial, which implies that choices must be made. but it is important to rethink economic exchange by topping it with protective rules. insofar as it is never symmetrical, interdependence is a subtle form of dependence for the least powerful na- tions. thus, savvy and selective protectionism may be necessary after the crisis ends. how could one not now want “french-made” products, espe- cially when it comes to those that are vital for the country? how could we not firmly commit ourselves to a policy of reindustrializing france? presi- dent macron himself, visiting a small business on march , , stated: “today’s priority is to produce more in france.” these words have a symp- tomatic value for a political leader attentive to shifts in public opinion. if governing means forecasting, then many governments do not gov- ern. we can assume the french want to be governed, and well governed, that is to say, in reference to the common good. if, moreover, to govern is to choose, then the macron governance based on the acrobatic principle of sitting on both sides of the fence at the same time [“en même temps”] is doomed to keep ducking and weaving. one can only choose properly and make the right decision when priorities are clearly defined, which presup- poses a hierarchy of values that today’s coy political leaders would never dare to assert, stripped as they are of any sense of history. for to do so requires that the feeling for the state is married with that of nationhood. where are georges clemenceau and charles de gaulle? the utopia of a “happy globalization” has shattered against the rock of reality. for the pandemic can be seen in some respects as a pathology of globalization, a factor in accelerating the virus’s spread. however, we must be careful not to completely attribute its rise to entirely unnatural causes beyond the fears of the pandemic so as to blame the culprits, always to be found among the “rulers” and the “powerful,” according to the old “revolutionary” principle fashioned by the leftists of the s and s: “everything is political.” but one can also note that all partisans of “politically correct” verbiage are silent, a possible relief for the free-spirited. our usual debates suddenly seem in- significant and can be dismissed as futile. in times of global lockdown, the paternalistic and compulsory preaching urging us to “live together” [“vivre-ensemble” is a politician’s euphemism for “multiculturalism”] seems incongruous, especially since lockdown hasn’t prevented civil so- ciety from rediscovering actual forms of mutual aid devoid of commercial intentions. the same holds true for the ritual celebration of multicultural societies, the objects of an ideological cult in the land of the intellectuals who “think well” and imagine the self-destruction of nations as the way to humanity’s salvation. postcolonial and decolonial “theorists” have noth- ing to say on the matter, except that, according to their chorus, the origin of our ills can only be the legacy of european colonialism and “white capital- ism.” the eco-disaster activists, while rejoicing in the improvement of air quality, see in the pandemic a “sort of ultimatum from nature,” in the words of former tv presenter turned activist and politician nicolas hulot, who adds, reinforcing the most succinct anthropomorphism: “nature sends us a message, it tests us on our determination.” humans would thus atone, by the propagation of the virus-monster, for their faults, the main one being their lack of ecological awareness. the neofeminist agitations and misan- dries on the model of the #metoo or #balancetonporc [a hashtag used to denounce sexual predators, translatable as #snitchonyourpig] movement become derisory, even grotesque. one can only choke with laughter when one sees neofeminists improvising with gravitas on their unique theme: it is the patriarchy’s fault. as for the anti-speciesist or animalist sermons on “animal welfare” and the commando operations of vegan fanatics, they seem insignificant or burlesque, even abominable. sophisticated prattle comparing the welfare of the lion and the gazelle becomes obnoxious. for, if one takes the reasoning to the absurd, the “welfare” of the corona- virus involves the unhappiness and death of millions of humans. what can . “nicolas hulot: on assiste ‘à un passage de cap de l’humanité,’” interview, bfmtv, march , , https://www.bfmtv.com/actualite/hulot-sur-bfmtv-on-assiste-a- un-passage-de-cap-de-l-humanite- .html. . sandra laugier, pascale molinier, and patricia paperman, “nous défendre—face au discours politique sur le covid- ,” aoc, april , , https://aoc.media/opinion/ / / /nous-defendre-face-au-discours-politique-sur-le-covid- /. pierre-andré taguieff we conclude from this, except that the circle of foolishness intersects here with that of criminality? the chimeras vanish, clearing the horizon. in his address to the french on march , , president macron himself, seemingly returning to serious matters, made a strong reference to the idea of nationhood: “i am counting on you because the government alone cannot do everything, and because we are a nation.” borderless peo- ple of all political stripes come to recognize the need for border controls, even border closures, and strict adherence to those micro internal bor- ders prescribed by the rules of quarantine. the pandemic could well have a positive effect, reshuffling the cards in many respects, provided we do not throw the baby (the democratic ideal) out with the bathwater (undem- ocratic neoliberalism). this predictable upheaval of the political sphere is of course not without danger, as it could awaken the desire for a clean slate. but this is a risk we must take, using a strong democratic foundation based on the french republican tradition as well as drawing inspiration from the experience of participatory or direct democracy in various coun- tries —sometimes described as “populist.” what we know as specialty bias is illustrated by the “crisis exit” proposals made by intellectuals and activists who follow this or that re- demptive utopia. the world’s tireless “transformers” and “improvers” see in the pandemic a “major opportunity” to finally achieve the total change of their dreams. they all want, first and foremost, to destroy what they call “the system.” the illusion of a clean slate is in line with the communist mythology dreaming of a “great night” that changed everything: for the absolute enemies of the “system,” everything must be destroyed in order to rebuild it all on new foundations. the bias of specialization finds itself ironically exemplified by the posture of a survivor of marxism-leninism-maoism, alain badiou, a vet- eran of revolutionary simplification. in late march , in a short essay entitled “on the epidemic situation,” this preacher of communism quietly . benjamin r. barber, strong democracy: participatory politics for a new age (berkeley: univ. of california press, ); pierre-andré taguieff, résister au “bou- gisme”: démocratie forte contre mondialisation techno-marchande (paris: fayard/mille et une nuits, ); philip pettit, republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (oxford: oxford univ. press, ). . yannis papadopoulos, démocratie directe (paris: economica, ). . cristóbal rovira kaltwasser, paul taggart, paulina ochoa espejo, and pierre os- tiguy, eds., the oxford handbook of populism (oxford and new york: oxford univ. press, ). beyond the fears of the pandemic calls to work “for the transnational progress of a third stage of commu- nism, after the brilliant stage of its invention and the strong and complex, but ultimately defeated stage of its state experimentation.” this call to build a new bright future says nothing about the tens of millions of deaths due to the vast communist “experimentation” that was unfortunately “defeated” by ruthless external forces, the forces of evil (capitalism, im- perialism, nationalism, etc.). the same refrain, on the opposite sidewalk, has long been hummed by the neo-nazis, who imagine the third reich as a “state experiment” in germanic racism and imperialism—with its “bril- liant” beginnings in pan-germanism—an experiment that is also “strong and complex, but ultimately defeated” by demonic powers—“international jewish finance” and “jewish bolshevism.” both are paving the way for their “third stage,” which is supposed to realize their respective dreams of reworking human nature. ideologized nostalgia, whether for communism or national socialism, not only erases the criminal past, it embellishes and transfigures it. and this decriminalization of totalitarian regimes, modern political translations of prometheism, gives rise to plans to restart the to- talitarian enterprise, sometimes under different names. lucidity, courage, and solidarity however, there are signs, albeit weak and ambiguous, of a turning point that can be considered positive. with their backs to the wall, even the ruling elites who have had a global approach for a long time are wonder- ing about national destiny, at least tentatively so. they call for national unity and solidarity, which in no way excludes, in principle, cooperation between sovereign nations—one that in no way implies the final fusion hoped for by the new cosmopolitans of the left or right. but sovereignty must first be regained and restored. and this must be done unambiguously. when president macron, on march , , called for “rebuilding our national and european sovereignty,” his phrasing was confusing. where then is the “european people” supposed to exercise so-called “european sovereignty”? european sovereignty is nothing but a sanctified chimera. by mechanically pretending that everything and its contrary can be done . alain badiou, “on the epidemic situation,” trans. alberto toscano, verso blog, march , , https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/ -on-the-epidemic-situation. . pierre-andré taguieff, “emmanuel macron, le président en marche vers ‘l’eu- rope souveraine’ ou la dernière utopie messianique en butte au réel,” in qu’est-ce qu’une nation en europe?, ed. Éric anceau and henri temple (paris: sorbonne univ. presses, ), pp. – . pierre-andré taguieff “simultaneously,” as macron often says, only lame and nebulous synthe- ses can emerge. what needs to be reconstructed is national sovereignty. let us recall the great illusion shared by communists, anarchists, and neoliberals: that the state would disappear, and that it had to disappear for the greater good of the human race. as it posits the disappearance of con- flicts in the world and thus the disappearance of any tangible enemy, the call for the “end of territories” and sovereignties was the meeting point of all the utopias of liberation, fueled by the promises of globalization: more exchanges and mixtures, and “openness” as a new moral impera- tive. the pandemic brutally reminds us, first of all, that the world is still not at peace, that it abounds in the most diverse threats, and second, that the sovereign state is the only effective instrument to “respond to the om- nipresent existential threats” because it is the only body that can make crucial decisions. however, when the leaders of a nation-state are unable or unwilling to control national borders, or tolerate lawless zones within the national territory, they forsake state power. defending the sovereign state means defending the freedom of citizens. a strong nation-state is in no way incompatible with a strong democracy: it gives it a framework in which it can flourish. in recent years, in europe, in the face of migratory pressure, we have seen not only a return of borders but also a demand for protective borders, a desire for better-controlled borders. the pandemic has given additional legitimacy to this demand while radicalizing it at once. in france, the im- perative of reindustrialization has been imposed through the awareness of the country’s extreme dependence on other countries for pharmaceuti- cal products. this policy of reindustrialization implies the restoration of a sovereign and strategic state, capable of anticipation and concerned about the common good, which is defined on the basis of national interest and not in reference to the mystique of free trade without borders. there is no sovereignty without borders, no national community or national territory, if it is true that the border is “the perimeter of the exercise of sovereignty,” as michel foucher puts it so well. some people are worried about the emergence of a “neo-national world” that would feed on “neo-nationalist fevers,” summarily labeled “far right”—a way of disqualifying them by . russell a. berman, “the reemergence of the state in the time of covid- ,” telosscope, april , , http://www.telospress.com/the-reemergence-of-the-state-in- the-time-of-covid- /. . cf. michel foucher, le retour des frontières (paris: cnrs Éditions, ). beyond the fears of the pandemic demonizing them through their reduction to a resurgence of “fascism.” foucher interprets the contemporary return of borders, sovereignty, and national sentiment as a return of the repressed, after the long intellectual and political domination of the ideology of “governance,” linked to the cult of the post-national: we are thus clearly emerging from a period of the disqualification of bor- ders. i have always considered that . . . their negation carries the risk of a return of the repressed. that is what is happening to us today. and that is unfortunately what makes the far right so strong: in france in particular, we did not want to take the idea of nationhood seriously, we have di- luted sovereignty in international cooperation and in the construction of europe. nation, sovereignty, borders, they are part of the same political category, which is supposed to disappear in the face of “governance.” let us note in passing that the controlled deglobalization we are entitled to hope for does not in any way imply playing the card of a degrowth policy, which, to satisfy a few radical ecologists, would be just as ruinous as un- bridled globalization. the supporters of border-abolition policies on both the left and the right are discovering the resistance of geopolitical reality, along with the hard truth of aristotle’s formula that “necessity cannot be convinced.” the activists of the transnational leftist no border network and the globalist or cosmopolitan voices of the “borderless world” remain speechless. the “borderless world” of their dreams becomes an increasingly unlikely pos- sibility. the total abolition of the limits between “us” and “the others,” between one inside and one outside, would transform the planet into a bat- tlefield of all against all. borders should not be seen as barriers, walls, or barbed wire, but as places of passage subject to rules. the total opening of borders would create not only a state of unbearable interdependence but also a permanent state of war between individuals and groups. a few lessons it is therefore necessary to further undo the demonization of the national fact and the deification of the post-national, to strip it of the allure of an . michel foucher, “#coronavirus. avec la pandémie, nos stéréotypes sur les fron- tières sont remis en question,” interview, agrobiosciences, april , , http://www. agrobiosciences.org/territoires/article/coronavirus-avec-la-pandemie-nos-stereotypes-sur- les-frontieres-sont-remis-en-question#.xpb dxqrl . pierre-andré taguieff emancipatory promise, even one of happiness for everyone. the stakes are clear: it is not a matter of abandoning the nation to xenophobic nation- alists, those whom today’s op-eds in a hurry call “populists,” in a mixture of fear, ignorance, and contempt, a way of lazily amalgamating heteroge- neous movements with contradictory orientations. one may hope that this will be the practical lesson drawn by the french from the terrible ordeal of the coronavirus pandemic. it may be that the question of the hour is that of sovereignism, but of a sovereignism no longer bound up with xenophobic nationalism and reinscribed in the republican tradition, itself rediscovered after three decades of attempts to disqualify it in the name of the multicul- turalist model, the chimeras of cosmopolitanism, arrogant europeanism, or any kind of identity-based communitarianism. but this pandemic also reminds us that medical and hygienic advances, however real they may be, have not put an end to human vulnerability. the polymorphic artificialization of our existence does not protect us from epi- demics. the pandemic brutally opens our eyes to one of the battles lost in advance by promethean humanity, the one it is waging against aging, to the sound of trans- or posthumanist drums. if populations are aging due to advances in hygiene and medicine, they are also becoming more frag- ile. such is the perverse effect of the lengthening of human life, as gabriel martinez-gros points out: “covid- , which is taking tens of thousands of our elders, is twisting the knife in our wound: humanity is aging, and we are fighting a battle against death that we cannot win in the long run, as the age of our populations rises—and it will inevitably rise.” this should encourage states to be strategic, to look beyond the short term and to use forward-looking analysis to prepare for challenging situations. foresight should not be confused with prediction or prophecy. prometheus is less farsighted than he is presumptuous. above all, he was powerless. his followers, the moderns, proud to live in the age of globalization, discover with awe the limits of the omniscience and om- nipotence they grant each other. the narcissistic wound is deep. but the truth emerges: the conquering progressivism that expects everything from . cf. pierre-andré taguieff, l’émancipation promise: exigence forte ou illusion durable? (paris: Éditions du cerf, ). . laurent alexandre, la mort de la mort: comment la technomédecine va boule- verser l’humanité (paris: jc lattès, ). . gabriel martinez-gros, “covid- : la mélancolie de donald trump,” april , , herodote.net, https://www.herodote.net/covid_ _la_melancolie_de_donald_trump- article- .php. beyond the fears of the pandemic techno-science and free trade offers little more than deceptive promises, arrogant admonitions, and consoling words. science is too important to be left in the hands of those who sacralize and instrumentalize it with dubious intentions. it is time to desecrate it and to no longer expect salvation from the marvels of technology or the miracles of growth. as to the “pragmatism” hastily deemed redemptive, this key concept of macron supposed to open all doors and solve all problems, we now know it is but a nickname for opportunism and chameleonism. when one is first and foremost a showman, one can perfectly well play the role of a statesman as a professional. but this is just one of many roles played by macron as well as by trump, bolsonaro, johnson, and many other ac- tors who have proven themselves on the political scene. and we know that in ukraine a comedian, volodymyr zelensky, is a talented performer in the role of the head of state. none of them fits the famous definition of the president of the republic proposed on january , , by general de gaulle: “the man of the nation, set up by itself to answer for its fate.” the quest of power for its own sake and the taste for prestige for prestige’s sake cannot bear the responsibility for a national destiny, or even imagine a great national design. in his solemn address on april , , president macron empha- sized his empathy and compassion for the french rather than the martial call to mobilize, without relinquishing his role as supreme leader in a dangerous situation. in a very measured fashion, he sketched out a self- criticism: “were we prepared for this crisis? clearly, not enough.” so it is not a mea culpa: the catastrophic mask management was “explained” by the global mask shortage or attributed to “weaknesses . . . in our logistics.” his declarations of humility were offset by the pride of having achieved an initial success due to the lockdown measures: “the epidemic is starting to slow down.” he especially made promises, regarding, among other things, masks and tests, for the period after may , the date set for the end of the general lockdown measures: “we will be able to test anyone who shows symptoms.” and he ensured france was actively engaged in vaccine re- search: “our country is the country that has undertaken the most clinical trials in europe.” this speech is far from putting to rest the uncertainties concerning the actual means to fight the pandemic. but it is of great interest in an entirely . cf. pierre-andré taguieff, macron: miracle ou mirage? (paris: Éditions de l’ob- servatoire, ), pp. – . pierre-andré taguieff different matter: the call for “founding anew” and “reinvention” after the great “upheaval,” the insistence on the independence of france, with pa- triotic and sovereignist accents. european “sovereignty” seems to have vanished from the horizon, at least for the time of a presidential speech in which the head of state dares to declare: “let us reinvent ourselves, my- self included.” it remains to be seen whether the metamorphosis will take place or whether it will be a mere conjuring trick. too much is known about president macron’s skills as an illusionist. what we sorely lack are real statesmen apt to face the great histori- cal challenges of the twenty-first century. we are in vain searching for possible heirs to the general de gaulle or winston churchill. all we see when they lose their function of cognitive enlightenment to become in- struments of manipulation are reincarnations of louis xv “the beloved,” louis xviii “the desired,” or napoleon the small, in the apolitical age of communicators, social networks, and professional pollsters selling the new opium of the people. the cult of the majority’s opinion—always as- sumed—by establishing the reign of media democracy, imperceptibly turned political actors into professional demagogues, surrounded by foot- men and apparatchiks. there are few exceptions. incarnations of the weak autocrat type are multiplying. in the face of trump and his unchecked verbal impulses, in the face of macron and his long, drawn-out speeches, bergson’s advice about political leaders is worthy of note: “don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do.” critical theory of the contemporary since , the quarterly journal telos has served as the definitive international forum for discussions of political, social, and cultural change. readers from around the globe turn to telos to engage with the sharpest minds in politics and philosophy, and to discover emerging theoretical analyses of the pivotal issues of the day. timely. provocative. independent. telos is a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in politics, philosophy, culture, and the arts. subscribe now at www.telospress.com. telos press publishing po box candor, ny tel: · · www.telospress.com ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... svo: in your view, what are the disadvantages women face for being part of a field that is predominantly male? lm: the professor and lawyer joan williams and her daughter rachel dempsey wrote an amazing book about this: what works for women at work (williams and dempsey ). they inter- viewed successful working women and signaled four main patterns that affect women at work. the first pattern is called “prove it again.” this refers to the way women often have to prove themselves, time and again. “the tight rope” refers to the delicate, often impossible, bal- ance women need to find between being feminine (and not being taken seriously) and masculine (and not being likable). the third pattern is called “the maternal wall,” which refers to the negative competence and commitment assumptions on becom- ing a mother. even women without children are influenced by the maternal wall: they are expected to be available more than they should because of not having children. the fourth pat- tern is a combination of all of the above: “tug of war” refers to the way gender bias against women creates conflicts among women. for instance, an older woman applies harsher standards to a younger woman because that is what it takes to succeed as a woman. i think these four patterns are very important because we see them everywhere, definitely also in academia. svo: what can we do about it? lm: we need male allies. research shows that quality of work increases in more diverse organizations, so this is in everyone’s interest. we need to invest in structures and institutions to try to change the culture. we need men on board to make that change (mügge, evans and engeli ). additionally, academia should become more diverse in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity. in the united states, apsa has a strong community of african american scholars; they are very visible. this is a challenge that european political science should take on (mügge et al. ). n r e f e r e n c e s ahrens, petra, karen celis, sarah childs, isabelle engeli, elizabeth evans, and liza mügge. . “editorial: politics and gender: rocking political science and creating new horizons.” european journal of politics and gender ( ): – . available at http://doi.org/ . / x . european consortium for political research (ecpr). . “gender equality plan, targets and actions, – publications.” available at https://ecpr.eu/ filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf. mügge, liza. . “de persoonlijke politiek van meindert fennema.” over de kracht van anekdotes en netwerken. in democratie en wetenschap, essays voor meindert fen- nema, ed. marcel maussen and floris vermeulen, – . amsterdam: university of amsterdam, amsterdam institute for social science research. available at https:// pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf. mügge, liza. a. “in the mud puddle: the research diary as a method.” in migration and integration research: filling in penninx’s heuristic model, ed. anja van heelsum and blanca garcés-mascareñas, – . amsterdam: amsterdam university press. available at http://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/ / . . mügge, liza. b. “sexually harassed by gatekeepers: reflections on fieldwork in surinam and turkey.” international journal of social research methodology ( ): – . available at http://doi.org/ . / . . . mügge, liza, elizabeth evans, and isabelle engeli. . “introduction: gender in european political science education–taking stock and future directions.” european political science ( ): – . available at doi: . /eps. . . mügge, liza, celeste montoya, akwugo emejulu, and s. laurel weldon. . “intersectionality and the politics of knowledge production.” european journal of politics and gender ( / ): – . available at doi: . / x . williams, joan, and rachel dempsey. . what works for women at work: four patterns working women need to know. first edition. new york: new york university press. one woman’s career path—with advice for young women scholars patricia a. hurley, texas a&m university doi: . /s some context for this article is necessary. i started my career being extremely naïve about gender discrimination in the world at large. my family never gave me any indication that i should have limited expectations for what i might accomplish because i am a woman. parental expectations for me were high—and higher than they were for my brothers, at least from my perspec- tive. after graduation from high school in (a date necessary for further context), i attended newcomb college of tulane uni- versity and graduated in . newcomb was a women’s college at that time and all of my classes (with only a few exceptions) in my first two years were populated only by female students. gender bias in the classroom did not exist. my cohort in graduate school at rice university included only five people, of whom i was the only woman. there were no women on the faculty in the political science department at that time, but it was a small department and i did not give it much thought. although i was a quiet student, it was not because i felt intim- idated by men in my seminars. (i confess to being intimidated by students in the class ahead of me, who all seemed to know so much more than the members of the entering class.) once i was far enough along in the program to have a dissertation committee (all male), i received support and encouragement for my work. does this mean that the department was free of sexism? no. cer- tainly there were people (students and some faculty) who would tell an off-color joke, make the occasional comment that would be interpreted today as creating a hostile environment, or even occasionally say something outrageous directly to me. none of it was any worse than i had heard growing up with three brothers— this was simply the way the world was in those days, so i never took particular offense. if my fellow students were willing to tell that off-color joke in my presence, it simply was a sign that i was “one of the guys.” if a meeting with my committee reduced me to tears (it did once), it was not because they were harder on me than they were on the male students—it was because i was the one who cried. there were times i thought i would fail in those days, but it never occurred to me that i would fail because i was a woman. after taking my first job in the summer of (a non- tenure-track position at the university of houston), i began to recognize the professional difficulties that women faced because of their gender. there were tenure-track women on the faculty who seemed to be judged harshly because they were women. there were women on the faculty who found the environment intimidating because of the behavior of men. there were the conversations all about sports that seemed to leave women out. i received little, if any, mentoring from senior faculty, even while male colleagues also in non-tenure-track positions did receive such support. (i continued to receive mentoring from several dissertation committee members, who were in close geographic proximity.) add to that the male students who approached their female professors inappropriately. yes, there was gender bias in the academic world and i was just realizing it. the atmosphere was far more supportive when i moved to a tenure-track position at texas a&m in , where i was encouraged, given resources, and chosen for administrative leadership posi- tions, including two terms as department head and appointment http://doi.org/ . / x https://ecpr.eu/filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf https://ecpr.eu/filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf http://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/ / . http://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /eps. . https://doi.org/ . / x https://doi.org/ . / x 	 ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... p r o f e s s i o n s p o t l i g h t : i n t e r v i e w s , r e f l e c t i o n s , a n d a d v i c e f r o m w o m e n i n l e g i s l a t i v e s t u d i e s as associate dean of liberal arts. this is not to say there is no gen- der bias at that institution but, in my experience, it was limited (and, oddly, more pronounced when i had more senior rank). the worst was from students exhibiting inappropriate behaviors. yet, i rarely felt disadvantaged in my subfield of legislative studies because of my sex. there were not many women in the subfield, but when i was just starting out, there were scholars senior to me (e.g., barbara sinclair) to consider as role models. it also is the case that the entire field was smaller at that time, and there were fewer graduate students vying for the limited space to present papers on panels. conferences have expanded to meet the demand for participation, but this means that not all panels are composed of equally prominent scholars. in the s and s, the odds of being placed on a panel with top scholars were much higher than today. being on panels with top scholars meant that i was able to meet them, and the folks who came to a panel to hear them also had to hear me. it was easier for any young scholar in the field—and, therefore, for a young female scholar—to get bene- ficial exposure in the s than it is today. and exposure leads to opportunities that lead to more exposure. i served a term on the editorial board of legislative studies quarterly, twice organized panels for the legislative politics section of the midwest polit- ical science association, did the same for the southern political science association once, and served as a member of the advi- sory panel for political science at the national science founda- tion. whereas some might see this as thankless service work, it also is an opportunity for professional networking and getting one’s name in front of people. i also participated in several spe- cialized conferences on various aspects of the legislative process, sometimes through an application process and sometimes by invitation. these conferences provide good opportunities for net- working and making people aware of one’s work. yet, at one such conference, i had the only seriously negative experience that i can remember that i attribute to gender bias. the paper i presented (with a male coauthor) critiqued on methodological grounds an earlier work on the same topic that was coauthored by a very sen- ior scholar who also was at the conference. during a break, he cornered me to question that critique and take me to task for it. it was notable to me that he did not question my coauthor alone or the two of us together. my subsequent relations with that individual (who i encountered at panels and events) were rather chilly. however, if this is the only unpleasant experience i had related to gender, it is not so bad. it is entirely possible that i was successful at being integrated into the field precisely because i am a woman. this is simply the serendipity of timing. in the s and s, universities and professional associations were making an effort to afford women more opportunities. if there was a demand to include women (e.g., on the program committee of a professional association) and there were not many women available, then the odds of being included were greatly increased. at its worst, this was tokenism. however, even tokenism gives one a seat at the table. the challenge is to take advantage of that seat. the most significant change to the field since i was an assistant professor is that it is larger. there are more women, but there are more men too. therefore, the competition is stiffer than it used to be. it is more difficult to have work accepted in top journals, and the proliferation of panels and the sheer size of conferences dilute the opportunities for networking. ironically, women also may be currently disadvantaged by an increase in their numbers in the field, which makes them a visible minority but does not give them parity with men. despite this situation, many aspects of the route to success today are no different than the ones i took: show up, speak up, be competent, and be responsible. attend the important confer- ences, go to panels other than your own, join the relevant subfield sections, and attend their business meetings and social events. present papers that are essentially finished products rather than works in progress. be willing to serve as a panel chair or discus- sant and then do a good job. i have observed a remarkable decline in professionalism during the course of my career: people pres- ent papers that are too rough for prime time, panel chairs who do nothing more than keep time, and discussants who offer no useful comments to an author. they are joined by those who refuse to review for journals, write sloppy reviews, or send them in late. one simple step toward success is to counter this trend by cultivating a strong sense of professionalism. no matter the role, do your best work and always—and only—put your best work for- ward. set high expectations for your career and recognize that, at least to a degree, you can control your achievements through your own efforts and abilities. some readers will conclude that i remain naïve about gen- der bias in the profession or lament that i have not addressed the repercussions of the #metoo movement in the discipline. i acknowledge that both sexism and sexual harassment are prob- lems in some departments and in parts of the discipline. but they are barriers that can be overcome by persistence and profession- alism. withdrawal in the face of bias is not an option. success is the best revenge. n advice for women and for their colleagues and mentors: an interview with frances e. lee sorelle wyckoff gaynor, university of maryland frances e. lee, princeton university doi: . /s sorelle gaynor (sg): when you first started graduate school or as a new professor, were you aware of a gender disparity in the field of legislative studies? frances lee (fl): i wasn’t. and, in fact, when i first started out, there were particular women scholars who were very visible in the legislative politics field. obviously, there was barbara sinclair. there was linda fowler and diana evans as well. when i started my first job—a one-year research fellowship at brookings right after grad school—sarah binder was on staff there and wendy schiller was a visiting scholar. i was well aware of work by all of these scholars as i studied for comps and worked on my dissertation. so, there seemed to be quite a few women in the field. it was only later, over time, that i began to see that women are a distinct minority in legislative studies. it’s not unusual today to go to panels where most—if not all—of the panelists are men and most everyone in the audience is a man, too. but i wasn’t cognizant of this at the start. that impression evolved over time. sg: do you see any reason for this gender imbalance? and what approach could legislative scholars take in addressing this gap? fl: it seems to be true of the study of american institutions over- all. the presidency subfield also is very male dominated, just like s jed .. editorial gender discrimination, victimisation and women’s mental health georgina m. hosang and kamaldeep bhui summary gender inequality and discrimination, as well as violence and victimisation towards women, have recently hit the headlines creating a media furore. we provide a timely discussion sur- rounding the impact of these issues on women’s mental health and a discussion of the role of psychiatry in this context. declaration of interest k.b. is the editor for the british journal of psychiatry but has not played a role in the decision to accept this editorial for publication in this journal. g.h. has no conflict of interest to declare. keywords women’s mental health; gender discrimination; victimisation; childhood maltreatment. copyright and usage © the royal college of psychiatrists . georgina hosang (pictured) is a senior lecturer researching the impact of psychosocial stress and its interplay with genetic factors on mood disorders and physical illnesses; kamaldeep bhui is a psychiatrist and professor interested in the sociocultural risk and protective factors related to inequalities in population mental health. mental health problems affect men and women equally but a female preponderance is observed in some illnesses, such as major depression and anxiety disorders. moreover, the burden of mental disorders is greater in females compared to males according to disability-adjusted life years. explanations for these gender patterns have asserted biological causation due to hormonal differences, vulnerability to female-specific medical illnesses (e.g. ovarian cancer), reproductive risks of physical illness and puerperal psychiatric disorders (e.g. postnatal depression). disruption or abnormalities in some of these biological factors (i.e. reproductive health) can directly impact on women’s mental health, best illu- strated with premenstrual dysphoric disorder. women are also at greater risk of experiencing various psychosocial stressors (e.g. sexual violence) that are key determinants of poor physical and mental health outcomes, but are preventable. gender discrimin- ation, also referred to as gender disadvantage, inequalities or dispar- ities encompass a range of experiences and structural inequalities. these include the increased likelihood that women may hold posi- tions of lower power in work settings and lower status in societies in which women are not protected against violence or are discouraged from pursuing an education and independent living. the negative impact of gender discrimination on physical and mental health can be compounded by its ‘correlates’ (e.g. poverty). these factors can cause much stress and strain on women as well as impact their opportunity to access health care. here we will focus on gender discrimination and victimisation since they have received less attention in the women’s mental health literature compared to biological factors. the prevalence of gender discrimination in the workplace, such as sexual harass- ment and gender pay inequalities, have recently been publicly illu- minated with the #metoo and #timesup movements and campaigns championed by both hollywood stars and activists such as tarana burke. the public and media interest in gender discrimination and victimisation towards women forces us to stop and review the pertinence of these issues on women’s mental health. does gender discrimination affect women’s mental health? sex is a biological fact based on physiological characteristics, whereas gender is a socio-cultural construct that encompasses norms and attitudes related to social roles, statuses and abilities. discrimination exists when these social norms and attitudes stipu- late that women should hold a subordinate position. as a result, women may hold a ‘minority’ status based on their gender within a society or subculture where a gender power imbalance exists, despite females representing approximately half of the population. gender discrimination impacts all aspects of a woman’s life, such as limited access to employment opportunities and quality health care, which can result in poor health outcomes. this power imbalance becomes especially troubling in resource-poor areas where multiple disadvantages cluster. in addition to discrimination, women who do not conform to the socio-cultural norms of their gender can face stigma, social exclusion and violence (e.g. ‘honour killings’). women can hold multiple forms of minority statuses (e.g. due to their ethnicity), meaning that they can be subject to dis- crimination from a myriad of angles, which together leads to greater stress and worse mental health outcomes. there is growing recogni- tion that gender-influenced isolation, social exclusion, bullying and threats all add to the burden and injustice of discrimination. yet there is a dearth of research that explores gender disadvantage and women’s mental health. this discourse should not undermine resilience, fortitude and that action is taking place, but should be taken as an opportunity to raise the profile of these issues. discrimination can be subtle or explicit, conscious or uncon- scious and permeates into all life domains and areas of society. gender discrimination in the workplace includes harassment, unequal pay and implementation of rules that puts one gender at a disadvantage. although gender discrimination is illegal in many countries it is still evident. for instance, statistics from europe show that women earn on average % less than men. in the uk, over % of women surveyed reported experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace (e.g. unwanted sexual touching). experimental evidence shows gender-biased hiring preferences where men are favoured over women (even though qualifications and experience are identical); interestingly, both men and women exhibited these biases. although instances of gender discrimination are still common, the cultures in which these incidents happen are usually structured the british journal of psychiatry ( ) , – . doi: . /bjp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core to not notice or prevent such discrimination. for example, gender power imbalances exist in policies and processes (e.g., primogeni- ture, law or custom pertaining to inheritance of firstborn son which overlooks daughters), reinforcing a certain mindset that sup- ports or encourages gender discrimination. the power of group conformity and dependency makes it particularly challenging to speak out against instances of discrimination and requires courage and strength to stand up to the institution and individuals. responses to such action include avoiding acknowledgement and responsibility, making reporting and addressing discrimination difficult. perceived gender discrimination has been associated with various psychiatric disorders, including major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder [ptsd]. research shows that the experience of gender discrimination accounts for more of the variance for depressive, anxiety and somatic symptoms in women compared with psychosocial stressors (known predictors of depres- sion). similar patterns are observed when more objective mea- sures of discrimination are considered (e.g. gender pay inequalities). women who earn less than men have significantly higher odds of major depression than their male counterparts. however, no significant gender differences in depression are observed among matched pairs in which women had a higher income than men. interestingly, the female preponderance in depression has been found to be less pronounced in recent years and has been attributed to changes in the traditionality of female gender roles (e.g. better female education). these findings provide preliminary but convincing evidence that gender discrimin- ation plays a prominent role in women’s mental health. greater efforts are needed to reduce gender discrimination throughout society by raising awareness, development of new and better implementation of existing policies, more equal representa- tion of females in positions of power, as well as structures and envir- onments that promote gender equality. does victimisation have a negative impact on women’s mental health? physical violence, sexual assaults, and psychological, economic and emotional abuses can all be categorized under the construct of vic- timisation. depending on the age of the victim and the perpetrator these types of victimisation can be classified as childhood maltreat- ment, where the victim is a child or adolescent, and includes phys- ical, sexual, psychological and/or emotional abuse as well as neglect (lack of provision for the individual’s physical and emotional needs by their caregiver) perpetrated by an adult (or an older child for sexual abuse). domestic or intimate partner violence and abuse is defined as one partner using physical, sexual, financial and/or emo- tional abuse to gain or maintain control or power over their partner. females are at greater risk of being exposed to childhood maltreat- ment and domestic violence and abuse. gender victimisation also includes forced marriage, ‘honour’ crimes and human trafficking, however, a review of their impact on women’s mental health is outside the scope of this discussion. childhood maltreatment is significantly associated with phys- ical and mental illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and mood disorders in adulthood; these associations have been shown to be strongest in women. , the experience of domestic violence and abuse can lead to the development of mental health problems. for instance, a recent meta-analysis reported a seven-times increase in the likelihood of ptsd among women exposed to domestic vio- lence and abuse. childhood maltreatment is also a risk factor for domestic violence and abuse. in fact, victimisation in childhood and adulthood has been shown to have an accumulative impact on mental health outcomes in a dose-response fashion. specifically, women with a history of childhood maltreatment, and who are exposed to domestic violence and abuse, have the highest risk of depression followed by those who have experienced only one of these victimisation types; women with no such victim- isation histories show the lowest risk of depression. in sum, the research evidence converges to show the significant independent and combined impact of childhood maltreatment and domestic vio- lence and abuse on women’s mental health. recommendations for mental health services based on such findings include the imple- mentation of gender and trauma sensitive protocols regarding clin- ical assessment and access to trauma-informed interventions as well as staff training in these areas. gender inequality and women’s mental health, what is psychiatry doing about it? as a clinical and academic community, psychiatry has a responsibil- ity toaddress gender disadvantage toimprove themental health ofits female staff and patients. female psychiatrists are underrepresented in senior roles in academia, for instance approximately % of uk clinical professors are female. this is disappointing and highlights the need for action. however, thisfigure is also encouraging since it is similar to the proportion of female non-clinical lecturers ( %) and is higher than the figures where only % of clinical professors were women. , in terms of leadership, both the president and the dean of the uk’s royal college of psychiatrists (rcpsych) are women. other societies for professionals that work in mental health research and care also have female presidents (e.g. the british psychological society and the royal college of nurses). increasing academic dialogue concerned with gender disadvan- tage and women’s mental health has been sparked by initiatives, including taskforces and special interest groups within the rcpsych and the world psychiatric association (wpa). the lancet has also published a series of articles focused on ‘advancing women in science, medicine and global health’. it is hoped that these efforts will translate into real change in intellectual thinking, research and institutional structures, ultimately resulting in gender equality. women are overrepresented in the delivery and management of mental health care, making up to % of those that provide and % that manage psychological services in the nhs. however, men represent a higher proportion of those that shape and influence such services (e.g. commissioners). greater efforts to achieve gender balance across all levels of nhs mental health services are needed to better reflect the population it serves. steps have been taken to account for the impact of gender disad- vantage and violence clinically. for example, the wpa has produced a training curriculum for mental health care providers on intimate partner violence andsexual violenceagainst women.someofthe prin- ciples of this training are in line with the trauma-informed mental health care (timhc) framework (i.e. recognition) that has seen calls for implementation in the uk. the rationale behind the need for timhc is based on two points: first, that a considerable portion of people with mental health problems have experienced trauma; and second, mental health care can involve coercion and control (e.g. restraint and forced medication) which can trigger similar emo- tional, cognitive and physiological responses associated with previous traumatic experiences and thus may re-traumatise survivors. timhc focuses on building trust between service users and providers and cre- atingsafetherapeuticenvironments,basedonprinciplessuchastrans- parencyandsurvivorpartnerships. thebeneficial impactoftimhc includes the reduction in the number of seclusions/restraints and time to discharge, and has been included in the nhs england’s strategic plan for sexual assault and abuse services. gender discrimination, victimisation and women’s mental health downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core summary and conclusions women are exposed to a plethora of adverse experiences and envir- onments that negatively impact on their health and wellbeing. many of these factors are either gender-specific (e.g. gender discrimin- ation) or more common in women (e.g. childhood maltreat- ment). , these factors intersect, with many women experiencing multiple factors at the same time or across their lifetime, creating a lethal cocktail of risk that results in poor health, social and eco- nomic outcomes. there is an overwhelming need for co-ordinated prevention and intervention efforts that tackle these issues from societal, community and individual levels. gender-specific and trauma-sensitive strategies are recom- mended by the who and the uk’s national institute of health and care excellence. these can manifest as staff training, adminis- tration of clinical assessments without women’s partners or family members, and/or the use of independent interpreters (if needed) rather than reliance on family or friends. as a clinical and academic community we have a responsibility to raise awareness of these issues, ensuring that our structures and policies create a working environment and service that promotes gender equality and women’s mental health. georgina m. hosang , senior lecturer, centre for psychiatry, wolfson institute of preventive medicine, barts & the london school of medicine & dentistry, queen mary, university of london, uk; kamaldeep bhui , centre for psychiatry, wolfson institute of preventive medicine, barts & the london school of medicine & dentistry, queen mary, university of london, uk correspondence: dr georgina hosang, centre for psychiatry, wolfson institute of preventive medicine, barts & the london school of medicine & dentistry, queen mary, university of london, old anatomy building, charterhouse square, london ec m bq, uk. email: g.hosang@qmul.ac.uk first received apr , final revision sep , accepted oct references kessler rc, berglund p, demler o, jin r, merikangas kr, walters ee. lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of dsm-iv disorders in the national comorbidity survey replication. arch gen psychiatry ; : – . seedat s, scott km, angermeyer mc, berglund p, bromet ej, brugha ts, et al. cross-national associations between gender and mental disorders in the who world mental health surveys. arch gen psychiatry ; : – . whiteford ha, degenhardt l, rehm j, baxter aj, ferrari aj, erskine he, et al. global burden of disease attributable to mental and substance use disorders: findings from the global burden of disease study . lancet ; : – . oram s, khalifeh h, howard lm. violence against women and mental health. the lancet psychiatry ; : – . seedat s, scott km, angermeyer mc, berglund p, bromet ej, brugha ts, et al. cross-national associations between gender and mental disorders in the who world mental health surveys. arch gen psychiatry ; : – . eige. gender equality index . measuring gender equality in the european union - . . doi: . / . tuc and everyday sexism project. still just a bit of banter? . moss-racusin ca, dovidio jf, brescoll vl, graham mj, handelsman j. science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. proc natl acad sci ; : – . mclaughlin ka, hatzenbuehler ml, keyes km. responses to discrimination and psychiatric disorders among black, hispanic, female, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. am j public health ; : – . klonoff ea, landrine h, campbell r. sexist discrimination may account for well-known gender differences in psychiatric symptoms. psychol women q ; : – . platt jm, prins sj, bates lm, keyes km. erratum: corrigendum to ‘unequal depression for equal work? how the wage gap explains gendered disparities in mood disorders’ (soc. sci. med. ( ) ( – ). soc sci med ; : . christoffersen mn. the prevalence of four types of childhood maltreatment in denmark. clin pract epidemiol ment heal ; : – . hosang gm, fisher hl, uher r, cohen-woods s, maughan b, mcguffin p, et al. childhood maltreatment and the medical morbidity in bipolar disorder: a case– control study. int j bipolar disord ; : . hosang gm, johnson sl, kiecolt-glaser j, di gregorio mp, lambert dr, bechtel ma, et al. gender specific association of child abuse and adult car- diovascular disease in a sample of patients with basal cell carcinoma. child abus negl ; , doi: . /j.chiabu. . . . gallo eag, munhoz tn, loret de mola c, murray j. gender differences in the effects of childhood maltreatment on adult depression and anxiety: a systematic review and meta-analysis. child abus negl ; : – . trevillion k, oram s, feder g, howard lm. experiences of domestic violence and mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one ; : e . ouellet-morin i, fisher hl, york-smith m, fincham-campbell s, moffitt te, arseneault l. intimate partner violence and new-onset depression: a longitu- dinal study of women’s childhood and adult histories of abuse. depress anxiety ; : – . watson n, tang p, knight e. survey of medical clinical academic staffing levels. . medical schools council. women in clinical academia. . hesa. staff in higher education / . . morison l, trigeorgis c, john m. are mental health services inherently femin- ised? psychologist ; : – . sweeney a, clement s, filson b, kennedy a. trauma-informed mental health- care in the uk: what is it and how can we further its development? ment heal rev j ; : – . hosang & bhui downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. http:&sol;&sol;orcid.org&sol; - - - http:&sol;&sol;orcid.org&sol; - - - mailto:g.hosang@qmul.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core 	gender discrimination, victimisation and women's mental health 	does gender discrimination affect women's mental health? 	does victimisation have a negative impact on women's mental health? 	gender inequality and women's mental health, what is psychiatry doing about it? 	summary and conclusions 	references s jrv .. forum: new perspectives ‘research sharing’ using social media: online conferencing and the experience of #bshsglobalhist jemma houghton, alexander longworth-dunbar and nicola sugden* in february , the british society for the history of science hosted its first entirely digital conference via twitter, with the dual goals of improving outreach and engage- ment with international historians of science, and exploring methods of reducing the carbon footprint of academic activities. in this article we discuss how we planned and organized this conference, and provide a summary of our experience of the conference itself. we also describe in greater detail the motivations behind its organization, and explore the good and bad dimensions of this relatively new kind of conferencing. as the climate crisis becomes more acute and, in turn, the pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of academic activities increases, we argue that digital conferences of this style will necessarily become more central to how academia operates. by sharing our own experiences of running such a conference, we seek to contribute to a rapidly growing body of knowledge on the subject that might be drawn on to improve our practices going forward. we also share some of our own ideas about how best to approach digital conference organization which helped us to make the most of this par- ticular event. over the past year, the british society for the history of science (bshs) has made mul- tiple forays into the facilitation of academic research sharing through digital media. the most recent of these was the highly successful global digital history of science festival that took place in july . this online festival replaced the society’s annual confer- ence, which could not be held in person due to the covid- outbreak. however, the society’s efforts to move at least some of its conference activities online considerably pre-date the pandemic. as a society, we have been eager both to engage more with the international hstm community, and to respond effectively to the climate emergency: * centre for the history of science, technology and medicine at the university of manchester, uk. email: jemma.houghton@manchester.ac.uk, alexander.longworth-dunbar@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk, nicola. sugden@manchester.ac.uk. bjhs ( ): – , december . © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of british society for the history of science. doi: . /s first published online december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:jemma.houghton@manchester.ac.uk mailto:alexander.longworth-dunbar@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk mailto:nicola.sugden@manchester.ac.uk mailto:nicola.sugden@manchester.ac.uk https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core making more use of digital spaces seemed to be one way to address these. as a result, our first attempt at an online conference took place on twitter, on february . this bshs twitter conference was our first attempt at re-creating – or, in reality, experiment- ing with – an academic conference on a digital platform. while twitter has often been used as a communications ‘backchannel’ at standard in- person conferences, the bshs decided instead to use the social media platform as the primary conference medium. connected through the hashtag #bshsglobalhist, the speakers presented their papers in the novel format of six to twelve -character ‘tweets’, the unique format for this social media platform. all of the papers have since been archived on the bshs website and a ‘how-to’ guide to hosting a twitter conference has already been published as a result of this conference in the bshs magazine viewpoint. however, this piece aims to be a more reflective analysis of why the bshs carried out the digital conference, why twitter was selected as the platform, how the day went and lessons learnt through the process. it will also begin to consider the question posed by pat lockley and natalie lafferty of ‘how does twitter function when it is not a backchannel but the only channel?’ in doing so we will demonstrate that, although alternative formats such as these will not entirely replace in-person con- ferencing, they do provide a valuable and creative alternative to engaging with the aca- demic community on an international scale – particularly in the wake of growing concerns surrounding air travel. why digital conferencing? this particular conference was devised in response to three questions the bshs council posed to itself. . in response to the climate emergency, could more of our work – especially confer- ences, which carry a particularly heavy carbon footprint – be done digitally? . in line with the society’s mission to promote understanding of the history of science, technology and medicine in a wide range of contexts, could public, digital platforms be a viable way to share research and build relationships? . in response to the uncertainties precipitated by the uk’s decision to leave the european union, how can we strengthen our ties to the international history-of- science community? #bshsglobalhist was a pilot project operating at the intersection of these three problems. the goals of the twitter conference were therefore threefold: to explore a low-carbon conferencing alternative, to make history-of-science research accessible in a public forum, and to promote a strong international spirit. jemma houghton, ‘hosting a twitter conference’, viewpoint ( ) , pp. – . the papers can be found at www.bshs.org.uk/bshsglobalhist-the-papers. pat lockley and natalie lafferty, ‘pressed: where the conference is the hashtag’, in chris rowell (ed.), social media in higher education: case studies, reflections and analysis, cambridge: open book publishers, , pp. – , . jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.bshs.org.uk/bshsglobalhist-the-papers https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core tackling the climate emergency in , the uk and hundreds of other governments around the world symbolically acknowledged the severity and urgency of the ongoing climate crisis by declaring ‘climate emergencies’. the year was the second-hottest year on record, and also concluded the five hottest years on record, which were themselves the latter half of the ten hottest years on record. the climate crisis is happening now, and it can no longer be ignored by any organization, sector or industry. we must therefore do our utmost to publicly acknowledge this crisis in all our actions, and to do whatever we can to miti- gate our carbon footprints as much as possible. academia can and must be a part of this change. the bshs has adopted a climate policy that recognizes the seriousness of this challenge and sets ambitious goals for ourselves as an organization. we do not believe it is necessary to recount the arguments and evidence for a massive and urgent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions here; to do so would imply that there could still be any doubt about this fact. the climate emergency has compelled us all to consider how we can, through our own actions, work to reduce carbon emissions. as a result, academic conferences, in particular international conferences, have come under increasing scrutiny with regard to their carbon footprints. for these events air travel is, by some margin, the most significant associated source of carbon emissions. calculations by uc santa barbara estimate that fully one-third of the entire university’s carbon emis- sions were accounted for by flights taken by faculty and staff to attend conferences, talks and meetings. the total co released by this activity was equivalent to that of a city of , people in the philippines. one climate scientist, peter kalmus, calculated that flying, primarily to conferences and meetings, accounted for more than two-thirds of his total annual carbon emissions. ‘hour for hour’, he observed, ‘there’s no better way to warm the planet than to fly a plane’. in response to his findings he was able to drastically reduce his carbon footprint by stopping flying wherever possible. a growing awareness of the significant environmental impact of air travel and in turn the need to minimize it wherever possible has posed a new question for those seeking to organize academic conferences: is the physical co-presence of attendees worth the potentially significant collective carbon footprint such attendance will generate? this calculation is not a simple one. sam desiere, in analysing the carbon footprint of the fourteenth european association of agricultural economists (eaae) conference in ljubljana in , found that just per cent of the conference’s justine calma, ‘ was the year of “climate emergency” declarations’, the verge, december , at www.theverge.com/ / / / /climate-change- -emergency-declaration (accessed august ). camilla hodgson, ‘hottest decade ever recorded “driven by man-made climate change”’, financial times, january , www.ft.com/content/ f b ee- e - ea-a d - a f c cba (accessed august ). bshs climate policy at www.bshs.org.uk/about-society/climate-policy (accessed / / ). ken hiltner, ‘a nearly carbon-neutral conference model’, kenhiltner.com, https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/ index.php/ncnc-guide (accessed august ). peter kalmus, ‘a climate scientist who decided not to fly’, grist, february , https://grist.org/ climate-energy/a-climate-scientist-who-decided-not-to-fly (accessed august ). forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.theverge.com/ / / / /climate-change- -emergency-declaration https://www.ft.com/content/ f b ee- e - ea-a d - a f c cba https://www.bshs.org.uk/about-society/climate-policy https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide https://grist.org/climate-energy/a-climate-scientist-who-decided-not-to-fly https://grist.org/climate-energy/a-climate-scientist-who-decided-not-to-fly https://grist.org/climate-energy/a-climate-scientist-who-decided-not-to-fly https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core participants accounted for nearly per cent of total travel-related emissions. these were participants travelling from substantially further away – in the most extreme case from australia, a flight of some , kilometres. to minimize the carbon footprint of academic conferences desiere proposes a number of potential steps, including encouraging the use of public transport and restricting the number of long-distance attendees. clearly, then, the most important step we can take to reduce the carbon emissions associated with academic conferences is to reduce their associated air miles. the need for change is thus most acute for international confer- ences, which, by virtue of their greater associated air miles, typically have far greater carbon footprints than national conferences. air miles do not, of course, represent the whole picture when considering carbon emissions. every aspect of any kind of academic conference has an associated carbon footprint, and these should not be ignored. we might consider, for example, the relative power consumption of overhead projectors typically used during physical conference presentations and that of the electronic devices used to engage with virtual conferences. catering is another area where associated carbon emissions might be easily reduced, primarily by reducing the associated meat consumption – something the bshs has already taken action on by introducing vegetarian catering as standard. however, these other potential sources of carbon emissions appear negligible when compared to the emissions produced by even the shortest of flights. reducing air travel wherever possible is, therefore, by far the most significant way academic organ- izations can work to reduce their associated carbon footprint. to this end, academic conference organizers must engage in a very serious assessment of the value of the physical co-presence of attendees where that co-presence would be at the cost of any amount of air travel. physical co-presence is evidently not something to which a value can be straightfor- wardly attached. for conferences held in locations easily accessible by public transport, and where attendees are drawn from within reasonable non-flying travel distance, the value of physical co-presence may be weighed more favourably against the carbon foot- print of a conference. where associated air miles are higher, however, this equation becomes harder to balance: to say that physical co-presence is worth the carbon emis- sions associated with a domestic train journey is one thing, but to suggest it is worth the emissions produced by a multi-thousand-kilometre round trip by aeroplane is another entirely. to this problem of the increasingly unjustifiable carbon footprints of physical aca- demic conferences, virtual conferences of various forms present themselves as the obvious solution. using digital technologies to host and organize conferences, while by no means totally carbon-neutral, is substantially better than even the smallest and most localized of physical conferences at which a large number of digital devices sam desiere, ‘the carbon footprint of academic conferences: evidence from the th eaae congress in slovenia’, eurochoices ( ) , pp. – . there are, of course, significant exceptions to this rule, such as the united states, where internal air travel is commonplace and, in the absence of alternative modes of relatively low-carbon transport such as high-speed rail, often necessary. jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core would likely be used anyway. certainly nothing can replace face-to-face interaction, a fact our collective experience of social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic has made us perhaps more acutely aware of than ever before, but we believe that digital con- ferencing has great potential that deserves further exploration. thinking about digital conferencing while we consider the primary benefit of digital conferencing to be negatively defined (i.e. by the carbon emissions they do not incur compared to physical conferences), we believe that digital conferencing should not be viewed in purely negative terms (i.e. by what they are not, which is to say physical conferences). while we may feel regret at the loss of those elements of physical conferences which digital conferencing cannot replicate, we must come to terms with the fact that the carbon emissions associated with physical conferences are, in a time of acute climate crisis, no longer ethically justi- fiable. to head off this negative framing which would threaten to sap the morale of any attempts at organization, we instead argue that digital conferencing should be framed positively, in terms of the exciting opportunities and new kinds of interaction it opens up, and embraced as a chance to explore and experiment. this optimism should, however, also be accompanied by a reasoned assessment of the risks and potential prob- lems associated with this new way of doing things. an exploration of the opportunities and risks of digital conferencing must first begin with an assessment of the particularities of digital conferencing itself, its history, and the particular tools available for it. here we can make comparisons to physical conferences to understand the similarities and differences between the two formats. this, in turn, will allow us to assess the opportunities and risks that digital conferencing represents. online forums are complex and often contradictory spaces. they can offer safe spaces where like-minded people can form communities and share their experiences in a secure environment. at the same time, they can open people up to unprecedented levels of vit- riolic abuse and aggression. here the particularities of a platform must be considered. whilst we did not encounter any issues with twitter ‘trolls’ (a colloquial term for indi- viduals who intentionally start quarrels on social media) during the bshs twitter con- ference, we were nonetheless aware that this could have been a problem. as an open platform, any organized activity on twitter entails the possibility of unwanted attention from unpleasant individuals or groups of individuals seeking to disrupt and offend. twitter has proven itself to be slow and often unwilling to deal with abusive users on its platform, and offers a limited number of ways (besides blocking, muting and report- ing) for users to deal with harassment. the systematic harassment of women on twitter and the company’s failure to properly address it even drew condemnation from amnesty international in , with the organization accusing the platform of ‘failing to respect women’s rights online’. the openness of twitter is at once its greatest strength and biggest downside when considering hosting an academic conference on it: any interested amnesty international, ‘toxic twitter: a toxic place for women’, amnesty.org ( march ), at www. amnesty.org/en/latest/research/ / /online-violence-against-women-chapter- (accessed august ). forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/ / /online-violence-against-women-chapter- https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/ / /online-violence-against-women-chapter- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core user on the platform could join in and engage productively with the conference; just as easily as a random troll could stumble upon it and attempt to disrupt it with offensive and abusive posts. needless to say, the larger and higher-profile the conference itself the more these both good and bad dimensions of twitter’s openness are likely to come into play. we would acknowledge here that physical conferences are not themselves without problems, either. the extent of sexual harassment at academic conferences has only recently begun to be acknowledged and discussed openly, for example, as have both explicit and implicit forms of racism and other prejudice. digital conferencing does promise to provide the means to mitigate, prevent and circumvent some of these issues, but should not be treated as a panacea either. these problems can and will re- create themselves in a new format, and can only properly be addressed by cultural shifts within academic organizations and academia as a whole. to take one example, digital conferences overcome the problem that travelling to physical conferences can be prohibitively expensive for many prospective attendees. while digital conferences solve this problem by being available to anyone with a digital device and internet con- nectivity, they also create new issues – accessibility becomes instead dependent on the quality and reliability of the digital devices and internet connections available to atten- dees. similarly, in terms of accessibility, while digital conferences may be far easier to attend for those with, for instance, mobility difficulties, the format can create new problems for others. a text-based conference, for example, will be harder to interact with for those with impaired vision. one area where digital conferencing does provide undeniable benefits is in inter- national reach. the global reach of most digital platforms means that conferences hosted on them can involve a far more diverse and international group of attendees. this in turn means that the content of presentations and subjects of discussion becomes more diverse and international, a key goal for contemporary conference pro- grammes. as discussed above, however, new problems also arise when involving a diver- sity of international attendees. while digital conferencing removes many barriers to attendance, it can create new temporal barriers and general complications for organizers. as attendees can be spread across multiple time zones, the window in which these overlap at reasonable times of the day becomes smaller and smaller the further away attendees are from the conference organizers. likewise, including a more geographically diverse array of attendees means language must be taken into greater consideration. the countries in which attendees are situated can also have significant implications for the digital platform being used: many platforms are subject to censorship and state restric- tions in various countries, and this situation can change quite rapidly. this is something which should be closely considered when choosing how to host a digital conference. see nina m. flores, ‘harassment at conferences: will #metoo momentum translate to real change?’, gender and education ( ) , pp. – , on sexual harassment; and emma pettit, ‘after racist incidents mire a conference, classicists point to bigger problems’, chronicle of higher education, january , https://www.chronicle.com/article/after-racist-incidents-mire-a-conference-classicists-point-to-bigger- problems (accessed august ), for a description of how racism manifested during one particular academic conference. jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.chronicle.com/article/after-racist-incidents-mire-a-conference-classicists-point-to-bigger-problems https://www.chronicle.com/article/after-racist-incidents-mire-a-conference-classicists-point-to-bigger-problems https://www.chronicle.com/article/after-racist-incidents-mire-a-conference-classicists-point-to-bigger-problems https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the twittersphere the use of twitter for hosting the #bshsglobalhist conference was hardly a novel application of the platform. much scholarly commentary has already noted the use of this social media outlet as a so-called ‘conference backchannel’. twitter has predom- inantly been described as a microblogging service – that is, a variant on blogging that enables brief updates of up to characters per post (referred to as a ‘tweet’). this microblogging format, as aqdas malik, cassandra heyman-schrum and aditya johri state in their reflection on the educational uses of twitter, facilitates a combination of information sharing and self-expression. through hashtags (a mechanism that enables tweets to be classified together through a keyword preceded by the # symbol), mentions/tagging (referencing another user and linking them to the message through their username, which always starts with the @ symbol), and replies (a function that enables another user to respond to a tweet), twitter can further be employed to form a dialog and network. in the context of standard academic conferencing, these functions provide a secondary means to connect, network and start a dialog with other conference delegates also using the platform. the additional benefit of the online medium is that it enables outside par- ticipation in discussions and engagement beyond conference attendees. whilst not all delegates may be engaging with the platform, it has become the norm for conferences to have a twitter hashtag to facilitate discussions, knowledge sharing and networking external to – but also in relation to – the conference. though the hashtag may be engaged with by the conference organizers, the impetus for this form of engagement is largely left to the attendees’ discretion and the discussions are generally unmoderated. hence the twittersphere forms a backchannel in which networking and discussions can take place amongst individuals both internal and external to the conference. the use of twitter as the primary mode of conferencing, rather than simply a back- channel, provides a complicated – an in many ways an unique – set of benefits and chal- lenges. there is much literature that explores the negative dimensions to academic twitter use. malik, heyman-schrum and johri, for example, summarized some of these as inappropriate usage, reputational risk, issues associated with content, and per- sonal privacy. being an open and public platform, unless an account is private (where an individual’s tweets can only be viewed by their followers and cannot be shared by for instance, royce kimmons and george veletsianos, ‘education scholars’ evolving use of twitter as a conference backchannel and social commentary platform’, british journal of educational technology ( ) , pp. – , ; rosie jones and emily shields, ‘using games to disrupt the conference twittersphere’, research in learning technology ( ) , pp. – , . shirley williams, melissa terras and claire warwick, ‘what do people study when they study twitter? classifying twitter related academic papers’, journal of documentation ( ) , pp. – ; jeffrey carpenter and daniel krutka, ‘engagement through microblogging: educator professional development via twitter’, professional development in education ( ) , pp. – . aqdas malik, cassandra heyman-schrum and aditya johri, ‘use of twitter across educational settings: a review of the literature’, international journal of educational technology in higher education ( ) , pp. – , . malik, heyman-schrum and johri, op. cit. ( ), pp. – ; kimmons and veletsianos, op. cit. ( ), p. . malik, heyman-schrum and johri, op. cit. ( ), p. . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core another user), anybody can view and engage with tweets. thus there is an element of risk both to an academic’s reputation and to personal privacy depending on what is shared on the social media platform. furthermore, not everyone who views the tweets necessar- ily engages with the messages. it is possible on twitter for individuals to ‘lurk’; that is, to view tweets without replying, liking or retweeting (which reposts the tweet in its entirety on the individual’s own timeline). consequently, it is impossible for the tweet’s author to be fully aware of who is viewing their posts since users only provide an identifiable presence upon active engagement. the content of the tweets themselves can also provide issues if, for example, images used are under copyright, or the short character limit results in the message being misconstrued or possibly misrepresented if retweeted or in comments – and, as noted, the problem of potential trolling is ever-present. the complications of academic twitter use are further compounded by what rosie jones and emily shields refer to as ‘overlapping social contexts’. scholarly use of twitter varies between formal and informal applications, with use of the medium being employed in both professional and personal capacities. in fact, in their review of the literature surrounding conference backchannels, royce kimmons and george veletsianos state that large-scale surveys indicate that the most prevalent mode of twitter use was a combination of both. whilst this in and of itself is not detrimental to the use of twitter for conferencing, it is an important facet of the medium’s use that must be taken into account. clearly, the potenial presence of family and friends might affect how those participating would engage on a purely digital platform. so, while a twitter conference may be beneficial in relation to strengthening inter- national ties and reducing air travel, it presents its own set of issues that must be consid- ered and – where possible – mitigated. that said, we still believe that twitter does provide the opportunity to network and share research in an alternative format to the standard conference. how did it work? embracing the novelty of using twitter to host a conference, we decided to extend the tweet format to the abstract-submission process as well as the day itself. instead of the standard abstract, submissions were in the form of a tweet with a maximum length of characters and an optional accompanying image. whilst the short abstract length made it more difficult to assess the submissions, it provided two useful benchmarks. first, it provided those applying with an opportunity to try and condense their research for this new format ahead of the conference itself. second, it gave a means to determine how successful they were in this endeavour. the format of the papers themselves then consisted of six to twelve tweets, each num- bered and containing the conference hashtag #bshsglobalhist, that were connected as suzan koseoglu, ‘open and networked scholarship’, in chris rowell (ed.), social media in higher education: case studies, reflections and analysis, cambridge: open book publishers, , pp. – , . jones and shields, op. cit. ( ), p. . kimmons and veletsianos, op. cit. ( ), p. . jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ‘threads’ (replying to oneself on twitter creates a ‘thread’ or series of linked tweets that can be read together by the viewer). speakers were allowed to use any twitter-compat- ible visual elements alongside their body tweets – such as gifs, photographs and videos – providing they were accessible to those who are colour-blind or visually impaired. any tweet using visual elements, therefore, utilized image descriptions (for which twitter allows a maximum of characters), audio transcripts and well-contrasted colours for images conveying information through colour. on a practical level the conference programme was determined not by thematic content, but rather the time zone of each speaker. this was a conference that in essence could be attended from home, and its digital nature meant that speakers fit the conference around their daily work, family and social commitments rather than taking time out specifically for the event. unlike a normal conference, in which speakers would travel and for the most part be committing to attend the entire confer- ence period, participants could ‘opt in and out’ around their own commitments. consideration for timings took into account not only geographic location but teaching commitments, childcare and other factors. formulating a programme that took this into account, therefore, required substantial dialogue between the organizational committee and the speakers in order to find a suitable programme that worked for all those involved. due to the scale of the conference, we deemed it easier to tweet the papers from the official bshs account (@bshsnews) rather than requesting that speakers tweet their own papers at set times and the bshs retweeting. consequently, the papers were collated prior to the conference to enable them to be tweeted live on the day. there are sites avail- able that enable the scheduling of individual tweets beforehand, including tweetdeck and hootsuite. however, there is no free service that allows the scheduling of ‘threads’ of tweets. therefore we tweeted the papers for the bshs twitter conference live on the day. the day itself began with ‘housekeeping’ tweets from the official bshs twitter account, which linked to relevant policies and information – in particular the social media guidelines and the equality and diversity statement of the bshs (figures and ). from then on, each paper was tweeted at fifteen-minute intervals, with the intervening time being for questions. however, the benefit of using twitter meant that questions were not limited to the window allocated for them. speakers were linked to their papers through mentions, and as a result were able to see the questions and comments relating to their tweets on their personal accounts. this meant that, as harriet palfreyman commented in one tweet, there was ‘more time to digest fascinating work like this than traditional (rushed) conference q & as’. consequently, once a paper had been tweeted, questions could continue to be asked throughout the rest of the day and possibly even after the conference had ended. harriet palfreyman (@hjpalfreyman), february , fabulous and thoughtful stuff from @michaelaclarkba at the #bshsglobalhist twitter conference. i love a format which allows for more time to digest fascinating work like this than traditional (rushed) conference q&as! embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/bshsnews/status/ [tweet], retrieved from https://twitter.com/ hjpalfreyman/status/ . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://twitter.com/bshsnews/status/ https://twitter.com/bshsnews/status/ https://twitter.com/hjpalfreyman/status/ https://twitter.com/hjpalfreyman/status/ https://twitter.com/hjpalfreyman/status/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the conference ran for fourteen hours continuously and the organizing committee worked in shifts during the conference itself. we were split into two teams, the first being responsible for the live tweeting of speakers’ papers and the second acting as mod- erators. since any twitter user could engage with conference content, it was important to keep an eye on the discussions and report any ‘trolling’ (aggressive behaviour) in order to keep the conference an open and friendly space. participants could follow the conference either from the bshs twitter account directly or via the conference hashtag, asking questions through the ‘reply’ function of twitter. since the speakers were tagged into their corresponding threads, notifications of these replies would be received by both the committee and the speakers. the benefit of the notifications meant that any questions figure . opening tweet from the bshs account launching the bshs twitter conference. jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core not asked in the fifteen-minute window provided following the tweeting of the papers could still be answered at a later time. how did it go? the #bshsglobalhist conference was far from the first attempt to provide a purely digital conference. utilizing the thread function of twitter had previously been exploited for a novel and engaging research-sharing format. in january , for instance, the underpinnings museum held a successful conference through twitter. the bshs confer- ence, however, aimed to build on these smaller conferences with a larger, international-scale version that engaged with multiple time zones and scholars from around the world. figure . ‘housekeeping’ tweet from the bshs account sharing links to appropriate guidelines for those participating in the conference. more information on this conference can be found on their website at https://underpinningsmuseum.com/ archive-twitter-conference- - - . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://underpinningsmuseum.com/archive-twitter-conference- - - https://underpinningsmuseum.com/archive-twitter-conference- - - https://underpinningsmuseum.com/archive-twitter-conference- - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in this goal, the society’s first ever digital conference did have contributions from around the world. from the call for abstracts, submissions were received from twelve different countries. unsurprisingly given the uk base of the bshs, the uk accounted for just under half of all those who presented at the conference. however, submissions were aso received from a range of countries, including – but not limited to – the usa, australia, qatar, turkey, estonia, the netherlands and portugal. the conference was advertised using the same vehicles used to promote standard bshs conferences in the past: mailing lists to members of the society; the bshs website; specialist mailing lists in the history of science, medicine and technology; and social media platforms, such as twitter and facebook. in an attempt to reach a more international demographic, the society’s ambassadors (pgr representatives in univer- sities around the world) and international advisers were also asked to promote the event to their respective institutions. in the feedback from speakers – of which nineteen responded out of the thirty-three who participated – . per cent discovered the call for figure . feedback from bshs twitter conference speakers regarding how they heard about the conference initially. figure . response from the feedback questionnaire to speakers about whether they were a member of the bshs. some . per cent of respondents were members of the bshs, . per cent were former members and . per cent had heard of the society but had never been a member. jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core abstracts on the very platform on which the conference itself would take place (figure ). additionally, by promoting the event through the same channels as a standard confer- ence, the speakers were still all at least aware of the society, if not a member or former member (figure ). some . per cent of respondents had previously presented at a bshs conference, and a further . per cent had attended a conference organized by the society before. when asked why they decided to take part in the conference, the majority of respondents echoed sentiments similar to the initial motivation behind this new approach: the novelty, the apparently low carbon footprint and the international nature of twitter. although the call for abstracts asked what languages the speakers wished to tweet their papers in, the call itself was only in english and the reach in an international sphere was likely hindered by not sharing more through international channels. despite this, the bshs twitter conference was still the first that the authors are aware of to attempt such a conference on an international scale and still had contribu- tions from eight time zones (ranging from gmt– to gmt+ ). in order to factor figure . example of one of the conference-adjacent discussions that took place. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in these timings, the conference itself ran continuously for fourteen hours from : gmt. the day itself garnered much engagement on twitter. according to the platform’s own metrics, the reach (or ‘impressions’ as referred to by twitter) on the day of the con- ference from the bshs accounts tweeting the event was over , . there were also a total of retweets, , likes and replies. these figures only relate to engage- ment with tweets from the bshs and exclude those from other accounts using the figure . example of one of the science, technology, engineering and medicine stamps (or #stemstamps) shared in the discussions of the conference. jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core conference hashtag to participate in the conference but not replying to the bshs tweets directly. when twitter becomes the official channel rather than a backchannel, this does not prevent a second backchannel developing on the same platform. unlike standard confer- encing where the conference has a hashtag for unofficial backchannelling, the twitter conference only had the primary hashtag. however, discussions through the reply func- tion and unofficial hashtags developed organically alongside the main questions-and- answers functionality. one of the unexpected conference-adjacent discussions that arose was on the topic of science-, technology-, engineering- and medicine-themed postage stamps (under the hashtag #stemstamps) (figures and ). lessons learnt the utilization of twitter as the main mode of conferencing, rather than simply a back- channel, presented a number of unexpected challenges and considerations. four main lessons can be learnt from this experience. most importantly, the bshs twitter account was suddenly ‘shadow banned’ by twitter itself around : gmt on the day of the conference. this probably happened because an unexpectedly large number of tweets suddenly coming at regular intervals from the same account triggered twitter’s spam filters. but since twitter does not inform the user when it does this, this meant that while everything appeared to be working from the perspective of those of us using the @bshsnews account, no other user could see the threads that had been tweeted. once we realized what had hap- pened, we were able to tweet the remainder of the conference from the bshs outreach and engagement committee account (@bshsoutreach), and the threads did become accessible once the ban was reversed – again automatically – the following day. however, this was a serious inconvenience that impacted the engagement with the papers on the day (particularly those tweeted around the instigation of the ban). unfortunately, avoiding this problem for any future similar conferences will be challen- ging unless twitter itself provides clearer guidance on what triggers a ‘shadow ban’ – though having multiple accounts available for similarly large-scale events will mitigate it to some extent. a second option to avoid a shadow ban would be to have speakers tweet from their personal accounts and retweet on the official conference twitter account. this brings us to the second major lesson we learnt. deciding whether it is more ideal for a particular conference to tweet from a single account or retweet personal accounts is a decision that must be taken early in the process. speakers tweeting the papers from their personal accounts does reduce the amount of work for organizers and gives researchers greater control. from the perspective of the organizers, however, it makes it harder to troubleshoot any technical issues with uploading tweets. on the other hand, tweeting from a single organizational account enables greater control and a basic summary of shadow banning and a search function to determine whether an account has been banned in this manner can be found at https://shadowban.eu. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://shadowban.eu https://shadowban.eu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core oversight for organizers. it may also provide more of a level playing field for early-career researchers: all tweets initially appear from the same official account with the same primary audience and little explicit indication of career stage, specialism or experience. tweeting from an official account would therefore democratize the papers to some extent and enable greater reach for those tweeting from personal accounts with small numbers of followers. but using a single account imposes a major burden on the organ- izers, who must do all the live tweeting (as well as raising the issue of shadow banning). one way to alleviate this burden would be to create a standard form on which participants could submit their tweets ahead of the conference. we made the mistake of asking simply that tweets should be numbered and contain the conference hashtag. we did not consider that there are multiple different ways of numbering tweets, and as a result spent considerable time editing submissions to ensure consistent numbering and format. our third lesson also relates to the administrative burden borne by the organizers. we decided that the papers for our conference should be tweeted continuously throughout the single-day conference, thereby maximizing the number of ‘speakers’ we could include in a time frame already extended to accommodate multiple time zones. however, in hindsight, it would have been better to include breaks, as is standard in physical-presence conferences. we had assumed that our audiences would ‘dip’ in and out around their own commitments and that they would fit breaks in to suit themselves. a shift rota was used for the organizers, so that individuals could take breaks while maintaining live tweets and technical support from the committee as a whole. however, the reality of participant engagement exceeded our expectations as many people stayed active for the duration. consequently, it is advisable for future conferences of this style to include breaks for those wishing to remain online for the full conference. finally, our intent was to adopt a global perspective – hence our efforts to encompass multiple time zones and to offer the option of tweeting in languages other than english. however, no one took up this latter option. more work is therefore needed to provide a firm foundation for international online conferencing. to increase accessibility and reach wider audiences in future, a starting point would be to share the call for abstracts in mul- tiple languages as well as promotion through more international channels. reflections on #bshsglobalhist in comparison to a traditional conference, the bshs twitter conference was of a much smaller scope. given the way in which tweets are posted, parallel sessions are not prac- tical as it would make it confusing to follow. consequently, the amount of content that can be included is less for the same span of time. additionally, a big part of standard con- ferences is the networking opportunities it provides. whilst tweeting and discussing in replies could be construed as a form of networking, it is far more limited than what can be attained through face-to-face socializing. that said, the use of an online platform meant that our papers were much more open to the incorporation of digital elements (oral-history interviews, for example) than a standard conference could support. it also opened up new ways to communicate, jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core allowing participants to provide direct links to resources as part of discussions rather than simply referring to them. one speaker even had their paper tweeted whilst they were teaching a seminar so their students could engage with the conference, which would otherwise not be possible with in-person formats. the period for asking questions or having discussions was also not as time-limited, as people could go back and reread things or dedicate more time to digesting the information before asking questions as the period of engagement extended beyond the paper’s allocated conference slot. additionally, the use of twitter meant that a different kind of etiquette was needed, in comparison to in-person events. while communicating using social media platforms like twitter has its drawbacks, it also enabled and encouraged a more informal style of inter- action, even between individuals who had not met before. the lack of face-to-face inter- action created a sphere in which it is the acceptable norm to communicate directly through replies and including twitter handles with relative strangers in a casual manner. for instance, gifs, memes and emojis were used frequently throughout the con- ference between participants. employing digital media further allowed the bshs to interact with individuals who would not normally attend the annual conference. some . per cent of speakers who replied to our follow-up questionnaire had never taken part in any of the society’s activities prior to the event (including applying for funding or publishing in the bjhs or viewpoint). thus by employing an online platform for events, the society expanded their remit of engagement with audiences who would not have otherwise participated in a bshs conference. nevertheless, when deciding to organize a conference on an online platform rather than in person, we were forced to reflect on some fundamental questions: what is a trad- itional conference? why do we do them? what do we get out of them? what opportun- ities do they afford? what inequalities and harms might they reinforce? in embracing online platforms as a medium for conferencing and other forms of academic interaction, it has become increasingly important to consider questions of these sorts. only by doing so can we determine whether and how digital platforms like twitter can be utilized to serve the academic community. in terms of reducing carbon footprint, the conference was undeniably tremendously successful. compared to a physical conference, the carbon emissions associated with the #bshsglobalhist conference were negligible. the small scale of associated carbon emissions is all the more impressive when the diversity of attendees is considered. the open, online nature of the conference meant that we could accept attendees from all over the world, from australia to qatar to canada. the fact that the conference was free to attend reduced barriers to involvement tremendously, though national restric- tions on access to twitter did limit the pool of possible attendees (perhaps most signifi- cantly possible attendees from china). at the same time, our acceptance of global attendees still had an imperceptible impact on the carbon emissions associated with the conference – contrast this with the tremendous carbon footprint made by an in- person conference that included attendees from all over the world. in terms of the kinds and quality of interaction the conference itself involved, we believe that they could be considered neither superior nor inferior to a physical forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core conference. they were simply different. we would consider video conferencing to be more directly comparable with physical conferences, while twitter conferencing is so dif- ferent in its structure and the interactions it involves that comparison is a pointless endeavour. in our experience, we found many aspects of how twitter shaped interac- tions to be very positive: the asynchronicity of communications allowed conversations to break out, flow and sprawl across vastly different time spans. we also felt that the textual nature of communications had a significant levelling effect, erasing or at least backgrounding many markers of difference that could otherwise inhibit open and con- ducive discussion. we found everyone to be very open and amicable, with numerous pro- ductive discussions breaking out from each presentation that were able to continue uninterrupted by any time constraints. the number of time zones across which partici- pants were spread meant that some were unable to practically engage in real time with some presentations, but, again, the asynchronous nature of communications on twitter meant they could pick up a conversation with a presenter just as easily the following day. conclusion: not a conference, but something else … there exists a vast and still largely unexplored potential for digital conferencing. in our own experiences hosting #bshsglobalhist we explored only some of the ways that a conference can be organized on just one platform. we learnt a great deal, both about what works and about what does not, and encountered much that was unexpected, both good and bad. in this article, we have provided readers with some insight into our own experiences, from which they might extract useful lessons, and find inspiration. we believe that in sharing our knowledge and experiences in this way, we can work col- lectively to make our digital conferences better. at the same time, we do not want these lessons to become dogma: to restrict or inhibit experimentation. just as digital conferen- cing should not be beholden to the traditions of physical conferences, so too should future approaches to digital conferencing not be inhibited by the experiences of the past. to this end, we would question whether it might be useful to reject the term ‘con- ference’ itself as overly restrictive, and instead embrace a heterogeneity of approaches with more descriptive names that signal this variance and innovation. an abandonment of any pretensions of mimicking physical conferences would, we believe, also signal to those involved that the objective is to develop new approaches, to play and innovate, and so encourage them to engage with this process. one description proposed for our event was a ‘research share’, and we feel this provides a more accurate description than ‘conference’ ever could. while we argue for viewing digital conferences as different, rather than judging them as inferior or superior to physical conferences, we want to emphasize that there are two closely related areas where digital conferences do have very substantial advantages. the first is in their associated carbon emissions. while there is no perfect zero-carbon method of organizing conferences, the elimination of all kinds of associated travel, especially air travel, means that digital conferences have drastically reduced carbon footprints. the second is their capacity for international involvement. by removing the requirement of physical travel for attendance, the pool of potential attendees for a digital conference jemma houghton, alexander longworth‐dunbar and nicola sugden https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core is effectively global. this allows digital conferences to be far more international in their make-up than physical conferences, therefore inviting a greater diversity of contributors. by reducing the cost of attendance for those with the necessary equipment and service/ infrastructure to effectively nothing, digital conferences also open themselves up to people who would otherwise have been unable to personally afford or secure funding to attend. the climate crisis has prompted us all to consider the carbon footprints associated with the various activities that are taken for granted as essential elements of how aca- demia functions. in compelling us to reappraise these practices in light of their climate impact, it has in turn led us to ask more fundamental questions about these practices as well. the need to minimize carbon-intensive air travel in academic activity has led us to reconsider the value of physical conferences. consequently, we have been com- pelled to ask questions about the practice of conferencing itself: what is its purpose? what is the real value of physical co-presence? afterword: covid- we conceived and executed this conference before coronavirus, and thus in a very differ- ent world where we made no considerations for how a viral pandemic might impact aca- demia and conferencing more broadly. since then digitally mediated communications have become more important than ever before in our lives, and digital conferencing has become a daily experience for many teachers and researchers. we decided not to address covid- in the body of this article as we wanted to present our thinking as it had been at the time, when none of us were even considering what turned out to be right round the corner. nonetheless, we believe that all of our original arguments in favour of digital conferencing still stand – the need to minimize the risk of contagion is just another added reason. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	outline placeholder 	why digital conferencing? 	tackling the climate emergency 	thinking about digital conferencing 	the twittersphere 	how did it work? 	how did it go? 	lessons learnt 	reflections on #bshsglobalhist 	conclusion: not a conference, but something else … 	afterword: covid- s xjra .. why beauty matters george levine for those of us for whom “literary darwinism,” which bases its “scien-tific” approach to literary criticism on evolutionary psychology, has seemed an intellectual disaster, but who continue to believe that it is important to incorporate science cooperatively into our study of litera- ture; for those who are concerned about how art and literature matter in a world so troubled and dangerous; for those convinced darwinians who find themselves skeptical about and uneasy with the mechanico- materialist version of darwinism that richard dawkins and daniel dennett have made popular; for those who find that the science they credit is yet inadequately attentive to women’s perspectives, richard prum’s the evolution of beauty offers a potentially marvelous option. a dis- tinguished ornithologist, prum has undertaken an enormously ambitious project, whose implications run from evolutionary biology to aesthetics. from the perspective of a very unscientific literary guy and a wannabe birder, i slightly distrust my enthusiasm for the book. but prum’s argu- ments are creatively provocative and brilliantly argued, even when they get rather iffily hypothetical; his ornithological studies are intrinsically fascinating, even to nonbirders, and at the same time they have poten- tially transformative implications. what he has to say, even if his infer- ences can and should be challenged, deserves the most serious engagement. from the perspective of science, prum’s arguments make a strong entry in growing resistance to the dominant paradigm of evolutionary biology (and its virtually exclusive assumption taken over by evolutionary psychology), that all evolutionary change is adaptive, and that it happens algorithmically, without agency, intention, or mind. from the perspective of the humanities, prum lays the groundwork for a potentially creative and liberating aesthetic theory. from the perspective of interdisciplinary scholarship, he suggests fresh ways for science, the arts, and the human- ities to talk creatively to each other. in addition, he reinforces a strong george levine is professor emeritus of english at rutgers university. he is the author of many books on victorian literature, culture, and science, among them: darwin and the novelists ( ), darwin loves you ( ), darwin the writer ( ), dying to know: narrative and scientific epistemology in victorian england ( ), and his edited volume, aesthetics and ideology ( ). victorian literature and culture, vol. , no. , pp. – . © cambridge university press . doi: . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core feminist program from within the framework of scientific study. prum’s insistence on the importance of history, with all its contingencies, in understanding the way things are now may be old news to humanists, but it has a particularly important resonance within the virtually atempo- ral mechanico-materialist system that much scientific study prioritizes. the evolutionary history on which prum sets out is an unusual one. it is not a history of adaptations leading to speciation, but a history of “beauty,” an “aesthetic” history. his unusual focus is on individual prefer- ences, on desires and pleasures and even intentions. “we need,” he says, “to embrace darwin’s aesthetic view of life and fully incorporate the pos- sibility of nonadaptive arbitrary aesthetic evolution by sexual selection.” victorianists will recognize that although this is not a book about victorian culture, the story it tells has victorian resonances. they should be pleased to note that a fundamental move in prum’s argument is the attempt to replace modern “darwinism,” taken as the fundamental assumption of evolutionary science, with a darwinism more in keeping with darwin’s complete theory. the book’s subtitle, “how darwin’s theory of mate choice shapes the animal world,” aggressively affirms the centrality of darwin’s idea of sexual selection against the dominant, but only selectively darwinian, view that natural selection does it all. prum impressively builds a case, out of darwin’s original formulations of sexual selection, that female aesthetic choice provides a better expla- nation than the traditional adaptationist one for many evolutionary changes, not least the evolution of humans away from their primate origins. into the mechanisms on which all serious biologists agree, plum inserts the scientifically dubious elements of individual desire and inten- tion; in addition, he makes the case that evolutionary biology now is largely conducted from a male perspective. without challenging the importance of natural selection, he argues for a shift of perspective that would allow for other evolutionary forces—most particularly, female choice. reading the book for its wondrous study of birds and its chal- lenge to evolutionary psychology, i was startled to realize that i was read- ing also a fresh and singularly strong argument for feminism. prum’s work, from the perspective of a scientist, arrives at similar conclusions, working with similar darwinian ideas, that elizabeth grosz develops in a series of important books that courageously and importantly reconnect the biological and material with important cultural projects like femi- nism, despite the long history of misuse of such material for racist and sexist cultural projects. vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core the idea of “the evolution of beauty” might be said to have its begin- nings in the late eighteenth century, particularly in the work of erasmus darwin, charles’s famous grandfather, but later most fully among the victorians: first, in darwin’s focus in the descent of man on “mate choice,” and then in the disagreements that followed between darwin and a. r. wallace about sexual selection. for darwin, sexual selection was a hard-earned idea that grew from his deeply felt realization that the extravagances of some natural phenomena required an explanation for which his central theory of natural selection wouldn’t work. the intensity of the problem as he experienced it is implied in what he famously wrote to asa gray in : “the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever i gaze at it, makes me sick.” while darwin found a nonadaptationist explanation for that feather, wallace, after years of debate in correspon- dence with darwin, did not; and wallace became a key figure in the sci- entific rejection of sexual selection that endured well into the twentieth century. wallace also famously veered off from darwin by arguing, almost in anticipation of current theories of intelligent design, that the enor- mous complexity of the human mind and brain (he uses mathematics as an example) is evidence that natural selection could not explain the development of mind. his rejection of sexual selection had longer-term consequences for science. today’s evolutionary biology—though obviously not accepting wallace’s move to spiritualism and despite its usual designation as “neo-darwinian”—is on prum’s reading wallacean rather than darwinian. in his book, darwinism, wallace represents darwin as insisting that “all the fixed characters of organic beings have been devel- oped under the action of the law of utility.” wallace thinks of himself as darwinian because his book is, as he puts it in the preface, based on the argument that “all [emphasis mine] specific characters are (or once have been) either useful in themselves or correlated with useful characters” ( ). but sexual selection doesn’t work that way. tracing the evolution of beauty, prum shows how it evolves precisely as it was not useful, and yet important enough to influence speciation itself. prum and darwin insist on inutility as a force in the development of varieties and species. darwin needed the theory of sexual selection not only to account for the peacock’s extravagant plumage, but also to account for racial divergence in a world he thought of as monogenetic: we all descend from the same beings, but each race, he believed, devel- oped distinct aesthetic preferences, preferences not necessarily linked to natural selection and utility. on the one hand, then, almost an aesthetic why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core relativist—every race’s perception of beauty is distinctive—darwin was, on the other hand, a victorian gentleman who was also, from our current perspective, both racist and sexist. victorian science shared these tendencies with darwin and because of them found it impossible to accept darwin’s theory of mate choice because it could not credit the female with as much power as the theory required. but it is hard to claim now that the theory is “forgotten,” as the subtitle of prum’s book suggests. r. a. fisher, with brilliant mathematical ingenuity, made the case for it against scientific consensus, first in and then in (it may be beside the point of the science, but fisher was also outspokenly racist and a supporter of eugenics). prum notes, however, that fisher’s ideas, which tended to confirm that sexual selec- tion works by showing just how it works, “would be mostly ignored for the next fifty years” ( ). now, as prum certainly does acknowledge, “all biologists embrace the fundamental concept of mate choice” ( ). what is controversial and fresh, then, in prum’s argument (aside from the wonderful ornithological studies he describes in the first half of the book) is his “embrace” of what he calls darwin’s aesthetic approach, making “beauty” (and the largely female choice that evokes it) central to evolutionary study, and deploying it as part of what seems a larger argument with important aesthetic and social implications, far from the racist traditions in which the idea was born. while prum rightly connects his own perspectives on sexual selec- tion with darwin’s, his embrace of the female role in speciation and evo- lutionary change takes him a long way, even from the darwin he is trying to reinstate. evelleen richards has convincingly demonstrated that darwin’s willingness, against the grain of his culture, to allow that females had the power of choice and thus to lead to important biological changes was not built on an affirmation of women’s strength, but on its reverse. the choice for extravagant inutility is what women do as they follow fash- ion trends. silly women simply haven’t got the kind of functional intelli- gence that would encourage them to choose the mate with the best chance of reproduction and survival. rather, they like fancy ornaments, subject to the whims of fashion. they are too coy and silly to choose the useful. prum regularly ignores darwin’s ingrained sexism, and makes the inutility of female choice one of the great strengths of the theory: inutility challenges the dominant darwinian theory of our time, just as darwin argued against wallace. in the face of the inutility of female mate choice, contemporary insistence that all evolutionary change is adaptive seems to leave too much out. vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core prum insists that darwin’s theory was forgotten in large part because — even against darwin’s own sense of the superiority of males to females—he so strongly focuses on female agency, female desire, female purpose. “we cannot doubt,” he writes in the descent of man, that, though led by instinct,” female birds ” know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers.” when he describes the female’s reaction to courting males, he says, “we cannot doubt” but that “the females, supposing that their mental capacity sufficed for the exertion of a choice, could select one out of several males.” darwin lets himself “suppose,” and in effect urges that we do as well. his language cedes to the realities he is discovering: “the exertion of some choice on the part of the female seems almost as general a law as the eagerness of the male.” certainly for the purposes of his argument, prum’s avoidance makes sense. although darwin was, in our current terms, victorianly sexist, his science, as jim enderby reminds us, took him where few of his contem- poraries were willing to go. the theory of sexual selection gives the female a strong role in evolution, while “several of his contemporaries —such as alfred russel wallace and st george mivart—rejected darwin’s proposal that female choice could have played any role in evo- lution because females were so notoriously fickle.” prum finds the same attitude more quietly embedded in modern evolutionary biology, and he contends that “darwin’s idea that the aesthetic evaluations invoked in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature is as radical today as it was when he proffered it nearly one hundred fifty years ago” ( ). part of what encourages trust in prum’s arguments is that he is not scientifically unorthodox when discussing the sheer mechanisms of sex- ual selection. in the blind watchmaker, for instance, dawkins describes those mechanisms, as they produce the extravagances of everything from feathers to vaginal tracts, which become so important to prum’s argument. dawkins also implicitly rejects the kind of doubts victorians had about the important role “weak” and “coy” females play in evolution- ary development. so, while it is not quite fair to say that darwin’s theory is now “forgotten,” it is fair to argue that it has been twisted in un-darwinian ways as it has been assimilated to natural selection. wallace had done that one hundred and fifty years ago. “female prefer- ence, says dawkins, is a genetically influenced variable just like any other” ( ). for prum, however, the most important point is that today’s dominant paradigm resists the idea that elaborate ornamentations “are why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core merely meaningless, arbitrary (albeit fabulous) results of co-evolutionary fashion” ( ). it was unease with the implication that his fickle females were subject to fashion that made darwin’s development of his theory so difficult; prum, relieved of the cultural pressures of victorian sexism, finds meaning in female mate choice. moving from prum’s language to my own, the strict adaptationist approach, which darwin also rejected, does not allow for art for art’s sake: a point i will develop later. it does not contemplate the free play of desire or the power of female self- interest. it does not emphasize sufficiently the possibility that sexual selection can at times win out over natural selection—well, at least up to a point. darwin first invokes sexual selection by distinguishing it from natural selection. “it acts,” says darwin, “in a less rigorous manner than natural selection. the latter produces its effects by the life or death at all ages of the more or less successful individuals,” while the former “rarely leads to death of the vanquished male.” in addition, while for natural selection there is “a limit to the amount of advantageous modification” possible, in sexual selection “there is no definite limit.” “sexual selec- tion,” darwin goes on, “depends on the success of certain individuals over others of the same sex in relation to the propagation of the species; whilst natural selection depends on the success of both sexes, at all ages, in relation to the general conditions of life.” which is simply to say that darwin imagined sexual selection not as a major footnote to natural selection, but as a process that works independently of it and is yet required for a fully coherent explanation of evolutionary change. female desire, however arbitrary, can at times win out. “the process of adaptation by natural selection,” prum insists from the start, “is not synon- ymous with evolution itself” ( ). prum focuses primarily on only one of the two major aspects of sex- ual selection to build his case. the male role is usually the one most attended to, with emphasis on the violent struggle of male against male for possession of the female, and thus the development of weapons like horns and talons. this struggle, darwin believed, makes of the male a more powerful, an even more intellectually powerful figure than the female, who “coyly” waits to be mastered. but he insists on the difference between the two forms of sexual selection: “in a multitude of cases the males which conquer other males, do not obtain possession of the females, independently of choice on the part of the latter.” prum’s book builds on the second aspect, “mate choice,” in which the female chooses among males and thus plays the dominant role. here, the vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core male’s superior physical powers are not the essential element and often play no role at all in mating. the nausea darwin felt at the sight of the peacock’s feather was, of course, caused by how impossible he thought it would be to account for it by way of natural selection. sexual selection became his way of account- ing for it. to clarify the problem, let us look briefly at prum’s ground- breaking work on the color of dinosaurs. after studying closely a raptor-like feathered dinosaur (discovered in china in the last century), prum came to realize that “the evolution of aesthetic plumage ornaments originated not within birds but way back in terrestrial theropod dino- saurs. the dinosaurs co-evolved to be beautiful—beautiful to them- selves—long before one exceptional lineage of dinosaurs evolved to become flying birds” ( – ). that little parenthetical “beautiful to themselves” is loaded. simple as it seems, it makes a major move to undercut the idea that speciation is entirely or even dominantly always the result of the adaptation seized upon by natural selection, or survival of the fittest. rather, “the evolution of beauty contributed to the evolu- tion of feathers themselves” ( ). not natural selection. originating as simple tubes on dinosaurs, feathers evolved with “downy tufts” and eventually into the “planar” forms that make such glo- rious canvases for color and are familiar to us in birds. female dinosaurs, demanding beauty in the male, selected for developments in the feather that allowed it to display color. only later, after beauty had begun doing its job, did feathers save dinosaurs from absolute extinction by turning them into birds. color first, not flight. aesthetic pleasure, not utility. the planar feathering that, eventually and luckily for us, developed into feathers that enabled flight was not an adaptation for flight. the won- derful irony here is that a desire for the beautiful divorced entirely from any useful purpose—what our practical-minded culture is trying to defund—saved dinosaurs from absolute extinction by allowing them to transform into birds. for evolutionary biologists following in wallace’s tradition, the idea that something other than adaptive fitness drives evolutionary change has been particularly difficult. there is still, apparently, disagreement in the field about whether beauty “means” something other than what it is, and thus can be assimilated to the adaptationist model. many biol- ogists believe that the beauty of the male, often extravagant and danger- ous to the male, “signals”—and “honestly signals”—reproductive fitness. the minority, to which prum belongs, believes that while “adaptive mate choice can occur” it “is probably rather rare.” these astonishing why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core ornaments “are merely meaningless, arbitrary (albeit fabulous) results of co-evolutionary fashion” ( ). a poem, a peacock’s feather, should not mean, but be. just as dollar bills have been detached from the “gold stan- dard” for which they were originally promissory notes, prum explains, beauty was detached from what it honestly signaled. the miser wants the dollar bills and does not worry about fort knox. the female wants the color and manages without any motive but her own pleasure to choose. the same thing can hold for humans. while neo-darwinist explana- tions imply that “there must be something of greater value in sexual attraction beyond mere sexual attraction” ( )—the theory of “honest signaling”—the evidence is that there is no relationship between body shape and fertility. prum cites a mathematical study by two biologists that has “documented that cultural mating preferences can create feed- back loops that result in the evolutionary elaboration of certain traits that are deemed desirable but have no survival or fecundity value—only aesthetic value” ( ). sexual attraction is sexual attraction—art for art sake, beauty for beauty’s sake, pleasure for pleasure’s sake. as prum neatly puts it, establishing a key phrase for his whole argu- ment, “beauty happens.” released from the gold standard, the dollar’s value is entirely a matter of agreement, a social construct, and everyone wants it. released from the utility it theoretically signaled, beauty becomes also a social construct: an agreement of both parties that the prettier the better—according to their lights. the resonance of this idea for aesthetic theory and criticism is strong and clear and remarkably in harmony with much extremely unscientific aesthetic theorizing of recent years. prum offers many examples of bird behavior and development that illustrate this sort of nonadaptive exchange. to make its mating “call,” for one remarkable instance, the club-winged manakin rubs its wing feath- ers together at a very high frequency, but to produce the sound the wing bones can not be hollow. yet hollowness seems a condition for bird flight and is characteristic of all other manakins. the club-winged fly less well than their cousins because, prum tells us, their ulnas “are four times wider and three times larger in volume . . .there is nothing else like it in any other bird in the world” ( ). but, then, of course, no other birds produce such sexy wing sounds. the beauty of the club-winged manakin’s “song” has a history. it is a physiological evolution different from that of all the other manakins, who are otherwise closely related, and it evolved very clearly from mate vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core choice, the female’s desire for the beautiful. to win mates, this manakin degenerated in fitness; it evolved “a decrease in overall survival capacity” ( ) under the pressure of female desire. the club wings are inherited by both male and female, but so too is the desire for them. this inheri- tance across both sexes assures a cascade of beauty-oriented changes: from generation to generation females get pickier and pickier; offspring inherit larger and stronger bones to make the music that will satisfy. in the pursuit of pleasure, it all becomes extravagantly useless and a sepa- rate species is born. de gustibus non est disputandum. beauty is not truth; it signifies “nothing but itself” ( ). in this whirling, self-reinforcing, aesthetically inspired dance, the female seeks the sound; the male body shapes itself to the female’s pleasure. the evolution of beauty entails a remarkable amount of free play. the idea of the aesthetic as a social contract is not the only impor- tant inference prum draws from the evolutionary engagement (and con- test) of female and male. along with attraction, mating includes a power struggle, the stronger male trying to impose himself on the less powerful female. in a chapter on duck sex, prum describes the extraordinary behaviors and physiological changes among males in mating season, all in response to choosy female ducks who are choosy “because they can be” ( ). this study is one of the few the book discusses that wasn’t con- ducted by prum and his team, but it dazzlingly confirms his larger argu- ments. most interesting for prum’s point, and more distressing for anyone who sentimentalizes ducks, is the behavior of “puddle ducks,” the drakes of which regularly rape the females. prum complains about ornithologists’ decision to call bird rape “forced copulation.” he wants, rather, to emphasize the “violent, ugly, dangerous, and even deadly” nature of sex among these ducks to make clear that it happens against the wills of the females. recognition of the female perspective here becomes essential. the cost of duck rape is not only direct damage to the female’s well-being, but indirect genetic loss: the females and the spe- cies suffer because successful rape not only lowers the number of avail- able females, but also diminishes the chances the offspring will inherit the traits—the “beauty”—that the females prefer. among “puddle ducks,” as prum calls them, the two modes of sexual selection are in contest: the male’s combat for power and dominance, the female’s desire for the beautiful. to overcome the resistance of the female, the males have developed long penises, sometimes longer than their own bodies. to counter, the female has developed a long sinuous vaginal tract with “thickened, convoluted walls . . . wrapped in a mass why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core of fibrous tissue”; “the longer and twistier the penis, the more complex the vaginal tract, full of nooks and crannies” ( ). prum and his team have discovered that though percent of the puddle ducks’ sexual rela- tions are coerced, “only – percent of the young in the nest are sired by a male who is not the chosen partner of the female.” the length and the nooks and crannies “are actually incredibly effective at preventing fertil- ization by force” ( ). in the end, the female carries almost exclusively the young of the male of her dreams, the most aesthetically satisfying of her courtiers: by being overwhelmingly successful at bottling up the penis during forced intromission, and preventing the vast majority of attempts at forced fertiliza- tions, female ducks have managed to maintain the advantage of this sexual arms race. even in the face of persistent sexual violence, female ducks have been able to assert and advance their sexual autonomy—their individual freedom to control paternity through their own mate choices. . .female mate choice continues to predominate. . . .beauty continues to thrive even in the face of persistent violent attempts to subvert the freedom of mate choice that creates it. ( ) although females cannot “evolve to assert power over others in respect to sexual violence,” they can “evolve to assert their own freedom of choice. . . . males evolve weapons of control . . . females are merely coevolving defenses that create opportunity for choice. it’s not a fair fight,” prum concludes; “however, as ducks show, female sexual auton- omy can still win” ( ). if nothing else, these remarkable stories of bird mating and evolution build a strong case: the grim story of the mind- less demands of natural selection for fitness, on matters of life and death, as darwin notes, must take one step to the side. natural selection cannot explain it all; room must be made for beauty, and thus for desire and intention and purpose. * there is yet another way in which current dominant scientific assumptions are simply not adequate to the realities of the natural world. darwin’s theory has been taken to imply that nature provides no “agency” for the enormous evolutionary changes through which it moves across geological time. what happens in evolution happens algo- rithmically: no mind directs it, no desire impels it. daniel dennett argues influentially that “life on earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree—the tree of life—by one algorithmic process or another.” and he defines algorithm as working on three fundamen- tal conditions—first, “substrate neutrality,” which in effect means that vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core what matters is not the particular contingent content of the process, nor the causal powers that may drive them, but a simple logical structure which applies everywhere always. second, “underlying mindlessness”: however designed the outcome might seem to be, it is constructed of a series of steps that, if taken (and even an idiot might be able to take any one of those steps, as in a computer program), will—third—always produce the results, apparently designed or not ( ). algorithms func- tion independently of mind, of conscious direction, or of telos. although, as dennett shows, all of this has been subject to much dis- agreement and uncertainty, prum writes into an intellectual culture in which the “algorithmic” reading has largely triumphed. he mentions dennett only once, but in doing so he makes clear what his own program is: “i propose that darwin’s really dangerous idea is the concept of aes- thetic evolution by mate choice.” implicitly conceding that natural selec- tion works algorithmically, he yet claims that “natural selection can not be the only dynamic at work in evolution” ( ). in fact, his view of aes- thetic evolution is that it runs precisely counter to the algorithmic. unhinging sexual selection from reproductive fitness leads prum to his main point: “the inherently serendipitous and unpredictable nature of aesthetic evolutionary process” ( ). the ornithological studies that i have described are strong evidence that, as prum claims, birds “act as agents in their own evolution” ( ). the conclusion to his startling histories is even more startling, for his lan- guage seems almost lamarckian. he claims, for instance, that the history of the beauty of the manakin’s song is one strong example of how “ani- mals are aesthetic agents who play a role in their own evolution” ( ). prum never mentions lamarck, and he certainly rejects the lamarckian notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but his language occasionally resembles lamarck’s, in suggesting that sexual selection reinserts into the evolutionary process the “intention” that dennett regards as a “skyhook”—it ain’t scientific. darwin’s own meta- phorical language, as particularly with the very active “natural selection,” often looks as though it is affirming agency even though he goes to great pains to deny it literally. lamarck was eliminated from the evolutionary canon in part because he believed in inheritance of acquired characteristics, but largely because this meant that he believed that organisms might “act as agents in their own evolution.” this idea of “agency” is subtly (and sotto voce) alive in prum’s argument—as it was in darwin’s—even though prum would certainly argue that while individu- als have intention, the broad transformations toward speciation are not at why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core all “intended” by an agent; they result from the normal unintentional developments within population genetics. samuel butler, in a long series of anti-darwinian books, culminating in evolution, old and new, argued that a theory that eliminates agency is radically flawed. prum’s birds, cer- tainly not acting with teleology in mind, yet act with a purposiveness it is hard to dismiss. but “for the current generation of biologists,” writes jessica riskin, “naturalism precludes treating agency as an elemental feature of the nat- ural world, or indeed as anything beyond an irresistibly compelling appearance.” whether prum’s experiments produce “an irresistibly compelling appearance” that is belied by the reality or not is for science ultimately to decide. in any case, riskin shows, in her magisterial book the restless clock, that it has been possible to be a pure mechanist and materialist and at the same time a scientist who believes in agency. thinkers as different as lamarck, darwin, dennett, and prum are all entirely naturalistic in their studies and arguments; all exclude from their nature studies any action from the “outside”—certainly any divine hand. the great irony that provides the structure of riskin’s careful and learned study of agency is that removal of agency from nature has its modern foundation not in science but in religion itself—most particu- larly, natural theology. that famous paleyan parable of the difference between the watch and the stone effectively turns nature into a machine without agency, and since there is no agency in nature, a god is required to explain its appearance. dennett’s algorithmic reading of nature is his substitute for paley’s god, since agency of some sort is essential to any adequate explanation of nature’s functioning. the running watch (inter- estingly, paley chooses a machine to make his point) cannot do it simply by virtue of its intrinsic material nature. ironically, then, dennett’s posi- tion is fundamentally a religious one. except he leaves god out. riskin points out that neo-darwinism developed, particularly in germany in the late nineteenth century, by making all scientific explana- tion dependent on a mechanical model, excluding not only any form of spirit, but any sort of internal agency. so lamarck’s explanation of evo- lutionary development, “according to which living forms developed grad- ually and contingently driven by their own inner agencies,” was rejected. neo-darwinians “reject the idea that intrinsic agencies operate in nature” ( ), and thus also reject darwin’s endorsement of lamarck’s view “that the ‘habits,’ ‘ways of life,’ and circumstances of animals very gradually shaped their organs” ( ). vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core the problem of agency looms over all naturalistic explanation. so prum’s argument is doing something extraordinary in telling us that mate choice is an “intrinsic agency operating in nature.” yet he is simply building on darwin’s own ideas: “it is impossible to doubt,” says darwin of birds, in a sequence that constantly evokes human language for beauty, “that the females admire the beauty of their male counter- parts.” “the taste for the beautiful,” says darwin, comfortably using lan- guage of intention, and desire, “is not of a special nature in the human mind.” riskin’s book is one major intervention in a developing concern about agency. being paleyan without god suggests that something is miss- ing in current scientific explanation, and j. scott turner’s purpose and desire: what makes something “alive” and why modern darwinism has failed to explain it, directly addresses the problem. he claims that such a position represents a serious “crisis” in biological thought. on the dennett/paley model, biology, turner claims, fails to make its own sub- ject, “life,” distinguishable from the inorganic. if “life” is a machine that can be understood in strictly chemical/physical terms, then how does it differ from paley’s stone? where is the distinction among the sciences? agreeing that “it seems hard to attribute striving and desire to anything living without getting into unscientific ways of thinking,” turner asks, “how do you experiment with desire?” in effect, although i have no idea whether he would accept turner’s analysis, prum’s ornithological studies might be read as just that, “experiments with desire.” mate choice is a choice—usually a female choice. it implies, at least anthropomorphi- cally speaking, a desire for the pleasurable—“taste,” as darwin puts it. prum’s female ducks work hard to protect their “taste.” prum does not avoid the implications of the verb “to choose,” as darwin had to do when he was challenged about the metaphorical implications of “selec- tion.” for, of course, selecting entails choosing, and choosing entails something that certainly has the appearance of consciousness. facing just this question of the appearance of agency (calling his language anthropomorphic suggests that the agency his language implies is mere appearance), darwin responds to criticism of his anthropomor- phism by offering in the fifth edition of the origin of species ( ) a description of natural selection that would satisfy dennett: it has been said that i speak of natural selection as an active power or deity; but who objects to any author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? . . . so again it is difficult to avoid personifying why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core the word nature; but i mean by nature, only the aggregate action and prod- uct of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. this is the language of algorithm, certainly central to dennett’s own version of darwin, and, if irregularly, it is a language darwin endorses. here, darwin urgently, almost angrily, withdraws agency from nature. it is telling that to make this point darwin uses for clarification “the movement of the planets,” in effect equating inorganic and organic nature. this is the darwin that prum ignores and dennett uses. from turner’s point of view, darwin fails here to distinguish life from nonlife. but darwin’s position in these problems is, as ever, ambiguous. he could not give up on his anthropomorphic metaphor, “natural selection,” and the language with which he otherwise describes “her” actions bursts with intention. as riskin discusses him, darwin remains somewhere in a limbo between the brute mechanism that relied on a distant god to get things moving, and another naturalist tradition, which saw the energy coming from an engine within. prum’s history of beauty very persuasively puts at least some agency back into evolutionary development just where darwin did when he dis- cussed sexual selection. “we now agree,” prum points out that ornament evolves because individuals have the capacity, and the freedom, to choose their mates, and they choose the mates whose ornaments they prefer. in the process of choosing what they like, choosers evolutionarily transform both the objects of their desires and the form of their own desires. it is a true evolutionary dance between beauty and desire” ( ). that “dance” is the basis of the aesthetic theory that prum is suggesting—beauty is, as it were, a negotiation between the desirer and the object desired; in a feed- back loop, desire transforms the object, which in turn reacts on the one who desires. as darwin says, there is no limit to how beautiful and strange and extravagant these developments might be. * the extent of prum’s daring becomes yet more overt when he notes that “in surprising ways . . .the evolutionary hypotheses i’ve outlined are strongly consistent with, and supportive of, contemporary gender theory” ( ), and then asks, “who could have imagined that evolutionary biol- ogy and queer theory could be on the same page about anything?” ( ). prum’s argument that “aesthetic evolution has great explanatory power” ( ) stretches across his science into large cultural issues, where his work might be taken as a strong, scientifically argued counterforce to vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core evolutionary psychology, as it is now practiced, and as evidence on funda- mental issues with which the humanities and social sciences are regularly engaged. the best way to see what’s wrong with literary darwinism is to see what’s wrong with the science that sustains it (although jonathan kramnick, working from the opposite direction, does a very strong job on it, and one that all literary scholars can profit from reading.) although he claims that much of his own work might be thought of as “evolutionary psychology,” since it concerns itself with the will and desires of animals in mate choice, prum laments that today’s evolutionary psy- chology “has a profound, constitutive, often fanatical commitment to the universal efficacy of adaptation by natural selection” ( ). as read- ers of literary darwinist criticism well know, “there is never any doubt what the conclusion of any evolutionary psychology [or therefore, i would add, literary darwinist] study will be” ( ). total adaptationism implies that all art, all culture, must be understood in terms of utility. the negative force of prum’s arguments, against the bad science of evolutionary psychology, as he sees it, and against its founding thesis, the universality of adaptation for fitness, seems to me very powerful. but as it extends from birds to the human, prum’s book becomes more problem- atic. no doubt his arguments are vulnerable, and one important review has already suggested that his claims—or at least the inferences he makes from his studies—are excessive: “the experience of seeing evi- dence of your favorite theory everywhere is prevalent among scientists,” the reviewer half mockingly complains. but by the time we arrive at the chapter called “human beauty happens too,” prum has, from my point of view, earned the right to what he confesses are only “specula- tions” that need to be “tested and analyzed” before they can be dismissed. once again, the argument begins with a rejection of neo-darwinist orientations: the “dominant view of hominin evolution as an interplay between male-male competition and adaptive, ecological natural selec- tion is insufficient to explain the key innovations that have occurred in the evolution of human cognitive, social, and cultural complexity” ( ). that view, prum claims, has diverted attention from the real prob- lems, which can best be recognized through an evolutionary history that attempts to account for our separation from our primate cousins. his alternative view is that “women’s pursuit of pleasure is at the very heart of the evolution of human beauty and sexuality” (just as, he has forcefully shown, female choice is at the very heart of much bird beauty and sexual- ity). the aesthetic history for which he is asking takes “pleasure as the why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core central, organizing force in mate choice, and mate choice as a major dynamic in evolutionary change” ( ), and as the primary force separat- ing us from our primate cousins. that case, which prum made about birds, he tests out again about women. we cultural studies types have long been used to thinking about the “male gaze,” which turns women into objects. prum argues that evolutionary psychology, even in its psychological experiments, reifies “the male gaze as an adaptation,” and has thus enshrined sexist bias in human evolutionary biology and notably failed to explain the mate preferences of the other half of the species” ( ). attending to that other half, prum rereads our break with other primates and every- thing from the unusual anatomy and large size of the penis (in compar- ison with other primates) to cultural variations in physiognomy and perceptions of beauty, and to the abundance of sexual practices, includ- ing homosexuality. so that, as with birds, the inutility of the aesthetic and the aesthetic drive accounts for a great deal in species development. “what is it that you women want?” is a famous grumpy male response to feminism. prum builds much of his argument in answering that ques- tion and offers a hypothetical but strongly explanatory account of our split with primates. simian social organization tends to inhibit change, since, for the most part, primates establish groups with a macho leader who prohibits other males from having sex with any females, and who will often kill the young who have been sired by a former leader. “viewed through the lens of human biology,” prum tells us, “the average male baboon, gorilla, or chimpanzee is an infanticidal maniac” ( ). males in these primate organizations leave the young to their mothers, who expend enormous energy on them, and then often find that energy wasted by male violence. as primates, we lowered the degree of violence that sustained a community: “the evolutionary mechanism for lowered male aggression, cooperative social temperament, and social intelligence . . .proceeded not by natural selection but by aesthetic sexual selection through female mate choice. ( )” the efforts in evolutionary biology to regard “beauty” as an honest signal of fitness once again makes beauty “mean” something. but human beauty “means” fitness no more than bird beauty does. both males and females—unlike most primates and other animals—make “mate choices.” sexual behavior across cultures varies as wildly as lan- guages and customs, and the “big challenge is to understand how our biological history and our cultural history interact to create the various expressions of human sexuality” ( ). prum notes that human males, vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core unlike most primates who “pursue every sexual liaison available to them,” are quite picky, in part because men make much larger “parental invest- ments” in their offspring than other primate males do. the neo-darwinist explanation of feminine beauty is that ample breasts and hips are not only beautiful but also biologically right for reproduction; yet, as prum points out, primate breasts only become prominent in breeding season. the permanent breasts of human females can be explained in the same ways as the peacock’s feathers, and long, crooked vaginal tracts, and club wings: so, too, the larger penises of human males (primates have very small ones, and so much for horny king kong). all, in prum’s theory, are effects of aesthetic agency in mate choice. everywhere, prum argues for (and produces evidence for) the irra- tionality of aesthetic evolution, the free wild arbitrariness of mate choice, and of the beautiful. he insists—consistent with riskin’s representation of the history of naturalist thought—that neo-darwinist thinking repre- sents the world as entirely “rational,” functioning always in the direction of adaptation, meaning. prum reinserts irrationality into evolutionary his- tory by not taking beauty as a signal, certainly not a signal of fitness, by reinserting agency and taking seriously will and desire. he claims that recognizing the irrationality allows for a better understanding of evolution historically and of current cultural practices as well. on this account, mate choice, both male and female, has produced the human species out of the world of primates, largely by satisfying female desires and female needs. prum reexamines neo-darwinist expla- nations of human qualities in a wide range of areas, everywhere from penis size, to female orgasm, to “decrease in the difference in body mass between the sexes,” to reduction of the size of male canine teeth, to male investment in the young. each of these changes satisfies what seem like female needs and desires (the question of whether penis size and scrotum are particularly attractive to women, as prum suggests, i leave open). humans “make more substantial reproductive investments. . . .resources, time, and energy to the protection, care, feeding and social- ization of their offspring” ( ). all of these suggest a widespread dimin- ishment of male aggression in the human split from primates. they also seem to be nonadaptive even as they satisfy female needs and desires. again, orgasmic female pleasure seems a particularly human trait. prum’s attempt to show how the most apparently nonadaptive phe- nomena can be understood better through the “beauty happens” the- ory, leads him to the chapter, “the queering of homo sapiens,” on homosexuality. the phenomenon has the same status within the theory why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core of natural selection as the peacock feather that upset darwin: how could it possibly be related to reproductive success and fitness? sexual behavior, prum points out, need not be understood in terms of sexual identity. that idea is not even two hundred years old, and sexuality is sexuality in whatever form it might take. “diversity of sexual practices is a pro- foundly human characteristic that must be accounted for,” says prum, but homosexuality is not a “conundrum” ( ). the wild freedom of sex- ual practices among humans (again, distinguishing us from other pri- mates) has always included sexual activity with no effect on reproduction. this is yet another instance in which aesthetic evolution is not connected to adaptiveness. it becomes a conundrum only if one is committed to the total adaptationist theory. consistent with its approach to all evolutionary phenomena, neo-darwinism attempts to transform the phenomenon into an adaptive one and has thus come up with the “helpful uncle” theory. the nonpro- ducing male contributes in the long run to overall fitness by helping busy moms and dads raise their children. prum’s speculation—very much a speculation—is, however, this: homosexuality “might have evolved through female mate choice as a mechanism to advance female sexual autonomy and to reduce sexual conflict over fertilization and parental care. according to the aesthetic hypothesis, the existence of same-sex behavior in humans is another evolutionary response to the persistent primate problem of sexual coercion” ( ). once again, female choice, female interest, becomes the explanatory hypothesis. granted, the evi- dence is thin, maybe no better than the “helpful uncle” theory, but it is at least not (yet) contradicted by the evidence and it entirely normal- izes a phenomenon that has historically been taken as an anomaly and would otherwise be taken as a “conundrum”—at best. but then one last big question, one that prum himself recognizes. if it is the case that “female sexual autonomy played a critical role in the evolution of human sexuality and reproduction,” if it was “a critical factor in the evolution of humanity itself,” why are women in human culture so consistently made secondary? why is violence against women almost a norm of human cultures? why in is a “#metoo” campaign even nec- essary? the fact seems strong evidence against the triumphal female-oriented aesthetic history prum has outlined. but prum has an explanation, one that further opens the way to cultural and gender stud- ies. first, males too have evolved in that other mode of sexual selection, and have “evolved mechanisms to advance their capacity for sexual coer- cion and violence” ( ). given male physical strength, in the struggle vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core between male and female “it is not a fair fight.” second, and here is another point at which prum’s speculative science emerges on the same page as gender studies and feminism: “subsequent evolution of human culture has resulted in the emergence of new cultural mechanisms of sexual conflict. . . .cultural ideologies of male power, sexual domina- tion, and social hierarchy—that is, patriarchy—developed to reassert male control over fertilization, reproduction and parental investment as countermeasures to the evolutionary expansion of female sexual autonomy. the biological war is now being conducted through the mechanisms of culture” ( ). what matters most here is the expulsion from the discussion of the idea that the current state of male domination is somehow a biologically implanted, evolutionary necessity, against which no cultural resistance, like the current “#metoo” movement, can ultimately have any power. prum believes that there remains the possibil- ity of women “fully consolidating the previous evolutionary gains in sex- ual autonomy” ( ). prum’s book is so heartening not because he has conclusively made his case. the speculative nature of so much of his large conclusion leaves much in doubt. there is, in addition, always the danger that he, like the eugenicists he attacks, is biologizing cultural phenomena, a practice with an unpleasant victorian and post-victorian history. but one cannot not take biology into account in this very material world. and prum has made a fascinating and forceful case for the idea that it is possible to find other and more fully satisfying explanations of current biological and cultural phenomena, and that serious scientific investigation, freed from the full adaptationist dogma, is not doomed to the same predictable conclusions that evolutionary psychology had been imposing on us. perhaps pie in the sky. but the aesthetic evolutionary history that prum lays out through his startling and wonderful chapters on bird life, fol- lowed by his strong speculations on the causes of the human split from primates, makes sense. it is certainly a workable hypothesis. to this lay critic, it is refreshingly plausible. i hope it is right. whether or not the larger case holds up, however, the “beauty happens” theory provokes fresh thinking, not only about scientific method and perspective, not only about cultural phenomena in general, but specifically about art. it suggests a world that has evolved virtually on the principle of “art for art’s sake.” free arbitrary pursuit of the beautiful to its wildest possible extravagances may be recognized as no mere self- indulgence after all, but as a condition of change and growth, a prod to creativity and the new. if prum is right, we humanists might infer why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core that the “beauty” we study—often with a sense of guilt for devoting such energy to art rather than to the harsh realities of the world that science and social science and the daily newspaper constantly reveal to us—is not a diversion from harsh reality but is integral to it and evolving as the world evolves. making huge inferences from prum’s already large ones, beginning with recognition that beauty is not marginal but central to evo- lutionary history and life itself, we can feel reassured of the significance of the humanities and in our own professional engagement with the beautiful, though it gets us no degrees in business and economics, and may seem a long way from the immanent moral and humanitarian crises that confront everyone, everywhere, every day. prum’s theory of art as the coevolutionary development of funda- mentally arbitrary likings and attractions—perceiver affecting perceived, perceived affecting perceiver—is a useful tool for understanding (and valuing) cultural difference. it foregrounds individual free-ranging “taste,” explains not by reduction to algorithm but by affirming individ- ual, contingently provoked desire. despite science’s long, honorable, necessary commitment to an objectivity and factuality that excludes pur- pose, will, and intention, evolutionary history, on prum’s account, can only be fully understood if it allows for the power of pleasure and includes the history of beauty. theorists, critics, scholars, feeling the pressures of the need to mean and to matter, to be useful in some way in relation to the most pressing concerns of culture and society, often wonder (usually privately) whether it makes sense spending one’s life criticizing novels and poetry while the world is burning. (among us victorianists, one senses this feeling in the recent manifesto and activities of the v group.) some richer sense of the importance of what is not “useful” might help. it is, on prum’s account, just in individual desire, in the disregard of the merely useful, that sexual selection directs change to new forms of beauty and of life. prum is working now on a whole theory of aesthetics, one that makes any defined universal elements in art chimerical. in an essay strictly about aesthetics, prum argues that “beauty is not dependent on meaning to exist.” art is always in process, always a matter of desire (unhinged from “meaning” and “utility”—though any work of art may itself be meaningful and useful in some way). its variations are limited only by the range of possible human desires. here, heuristically, is prum’s sum- mary point: “once we understand that all art is the result of a coevolutionary historical process between audience and artist—a coevolutionary dance between display and desire, expression and taste— vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core we must expand our conception of what art is and can be. . . . being an artwork means being the product of a historical process of aesthetic coevolution. in other words, art is a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation.” like club-winged manakins mating. so prum takes his ornithology to quite daring hypotheses that it will well repay literary scholars to consider. but i want to conclude by daring a bit too, with an analogy: darwin’s origin is also pervasively hypothetical. the strategy was not so much to prove that evolution by natural selection happened as to demonstrate that the hypothesis that it did happen, and largely by means of natural selection, fits better what we certainly know about nature than any other hypothesis out there. darwin knew he couldn’t prove it in , but he wanted minimally to show that his expla- nation of evolution fit the existing facts better than the dominant one he was trying to displace. the origin too laid out its hypotheses as a plan, a framework for future investigation: “i look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.” “in the distant future,” darwin wishfully affirms, “i see open fields for far more important researches.” i make no claim that prum’s work has darwin’s power or significance. as i write, i think of endless objections and questions and doubts. but the evolution of beauty has something of the ambition of the origin, some- thing of its beauty and factual density, and much of its hypothetical argu- mentative structure. like the origin, it is based on dazzling and important field work, making large claims that run against the grain of the day’s dominant scientific paradigm. like the origin, those inferences have implications that resonate through a wide variety of fields of study. like the origin, it still must be taken as a heuristic, a provocation to fur- ther work. prum chose this popular mode of expounding his large argu- ment just because he wanted to cultivate the field for those “young and rising naturalists” who might enter their advanced work more disposed to look at evolution from the perspective of “beauty happens.” i am myself ready to be unconvinced, but not before prum’s arguments are shown to be inconsistent with what’s out there in nature and with what my own experience has taught me that literature does. notes . prum, the evolution of beauty, . all subsequent references to this edition are noted parenthetically within the text. why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core . pearl brilmeyer has called my attention to the important work of elizabeth grosz, which anticipates much of prum’s argument, emphasizing in particular the distinction between natural selection and sexual selection: becoming undone. see particularly the chapter “art and the animal.” and see also the nick of time. . the correspondence of charles darwin, : . . wallace, darwinism, . . richards, darwin and the making, chapter . . darwin, descent, : . . darwin, : . . darwin, : . . endersby, “darwin on generation,” . . dawkins, watchmaker, . . darwin, descent, : . . darwin, : . . darwin, : . . dennett, darwin’s dangerous idea, . . riskin, the restless clock, . . darwin, : . . darwin, : . . turner, purpose and desire. . darwin, origin, . . see my discussion of this issue in darwin the writer. for a fuller discus- sion, see richards, “darwin’s theory of natural selection and its moral purpose,” . . riskin, the restless clock, . . kramnick, “against literary darwinism.” . flannery, “objectifying male birds.” . prum, “coevolutionary aesthetics,” . . prum, evolution of beauty, . . darwin, origin, . . darwin, origin, . works cited darwin, charles. the correspondence of charles darwin, . vol. . edited by frederick burkhardt et al. cambridge: cambridge university press, . ———. on the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life ( ). cambridge, ma.: harvard university press, . vlc • vol. , no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core ———. the descent of man, and selection in relation to sex ( ). princeton: princeton university press, . dawkins, richard. the blind watchmaker: why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. new york: w. w norton, . dennett, daniel. darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meaning of life. new york: simon & schuster, . endersby, jim. “darwin on generation, pangenesis, and sexual selection,” in the cambridge companion to darwin. nd edition. cambridge: cambridge university press, . flannery, tim. “objectifying male birds.” new york review of books, december , , – . grosz, elizabeth richard. becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art. durham: duke university press, . ———. the nick of time: politics, evolution, and the untimely. durham: duke university press, . kramnick, jonathan. “against literary darwinism.” critical inquiry , no. (winter ): – . levine, george. darwin the writer. oxford: oxford university press, . prum, richard. “coevolutionary aesthetics in human and biotic artworlds.” biology and philosophy, ( ) : – . ———. the evolution of beauty: how darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world and us. new york: doubleday, . richards, evelleen. darwin and the making of sexual selection. chicago: university of chicago press, . richards, robert. “darwin’s theory of natural selection and its moral purpose.” the cambridge companion to “the origin of species.” cambridge: cambridge university press, . riskin, jessica. the restless clock: a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick. chicago: university of chicago press, . turner, j. scott. purpose and desire: what makes something “alive” and why modern darwinism has failed to explain it. new york: harperone, . wallace, a. r. darwinism: an exposition of the theory of natural selection, with some of its applications ( ). london: macmillan, . why beauty matters https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core 	why beauty matters 	notes 	works cited overview and analysis of research studies on gender-based violence among uk university students and staff working paper from the gw project “investigating gbv intersectional (dis)advantages and legal duties - a scoping study of uk universities” the scule centre working paper no. - cassandra jones olivia smith tina skinner geetanjali gangoli rachel fenton university of winchester loughborough university university of bath durham university university of exeter correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to cassandra a. jones, university of winchester, sparkford road, winchester, hampshire, so nr, uk. email: cassandra.jones@winchester.ac.uk mailto:cassandra.jones@mmu.ac.uk the authors would like to thank academics and university support services who provided research studies that were included in this overview and sign posted to additional studies. contents . introduction ................................................................................................ . methodology .............................................................................................. . search strategies and inclusion criteria ................................................. . data extraction ...................................................................................... . analysis ................................................................................................ . findings ..................................................................................................................... . study selection ...................................................................................... . design and methods ........................................................................... . sample ................................................................................................ . quantitative tools ................................................................................ . results ............................................................................................... . limitations of studies .............................................................................. . summary and conclusions ...................................................................... . introduction new movements (e.g. #metoo) brought to the forefront of public consciousness the widespread prevalence of gender-based violence (gbv) and the scale of the impact in women’s everyday lives. gbv is understood to be any act of violence and abuse that disproportionately affects women and is rooted in systematic power differences and inequalities between men and women (hester and lilley, ). there is an international body of evidence indicating that universities are significant sites for gbv (degue, ). understanding the prevalence, characteristics, and impacts of gbv among university students and staff is essential for universities to effectively prevent and combat it. in the uk, a limited number of studies have started to address this gap (e.g. nus, ) but they have not been guided by a contextualised theoretical framework nor have they been reviewed and synthesised to create an overall picture of what is known and not known about gbv. there has been increasing pressure on universities to take action to prevent and combat gbv, including limited legal guidance for investigations (e.g. uuk, ; women and equalities committee, ). however, no overarching work has been published examining uk universities’ legal obligations on prevention and response in the round and comparative legislative duties in other jurisdictions, nor on the role of legal duties as a facilitator to disrupting gbv and holding universities to account. the role of law within prevention strategies is unknown in the area of gbv. implementation of prevention and response strategies has been ad hoc and piecemeal (or non-existent) by universities in the light of lack of accountability or enforceable duties an ecological theoretical framework specific to uk universities has not been constructed. theories have been developed for universities in the u.s. but the history, composition, geography, and culture of uk universities is different (phipps and smith, ; stenning et al., ). due to these differences, a theoretical framework relevant to uk universities is needed to guide studies and contextualise findings. as a starting point, the proposers will use and develop hagemann-white’s et al.’s ( ) framework developed for the european union. this framework is the most researched, demonstrated and holistic model existing to date. the framework used an ecological model to identify and categorise factors facilitating and scaffolding gbv, including policies, sanctions, redress and implementation of laws, to provide nation states with a framework which have subsequently been adopted to develop and implement policies that would more effectively prevent and combat gbv. the proposed research will develop this model tailored to uk universities, using a more sophisticated understanding of intersectional (dis)advantage (such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, class, age), men and masculinities, peer-group support for violence, environmental time-space and power relations, and legal duties in prevention and response. in order to fill these gaps, this project aimed to: • provide an overarching picture of research on gbv in uk universities (workstream ) • provide an overview of uk universities’ legal obligation on prevention and response and the role of legal duties as a facilitator to disrupt gbv (workstream ) • develop a theoretical, ecological model specific to gbv in uk universities that will guide and contextualise future research (workstream ) this working paper describes the methodology and results from work undertaken for workstream . the primary aim was to undertake a critical analysis of research on gbv among uk university students and staff to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of knowledge and emerging findings, as well as to make recommendations for future research. this work will feed into the development of an ecological model specific to uk universities (workstream ). the focus was not on students’ views on university responses to gbv but on the research processes used by studies to investigate students’ and staff experiences and associated impacts. as such, the key objectives of the research were to gain detailed knowledge on the approaches used in research studies across the uk, with particular emphasis on the methods, research tools, and findings. the following questions guided this work: . what types of studies are being conducted across the uk? . in particular what methods, designs, and research tools are being used? . are the tools and analyses sensitive to gender and the intersection of gender with other social positions, such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability? . what are the studies showing in terms of the prevalence, incidence, characteristics, and impacts of gbv? this working paper presents first the methodology used in the review and then the results of the analysis of studies followed by a discussion and conclusion. more detailed analysis of the studies identified and included in the review will be provided in peer-reviewed, academic articles. . methodology the aim of the overview was to assess the scope of existing uk studies, the range of research designs and tools used, and the results emerging from these studies. it was intended that the results would identify emerging and significant aspects of gbv in uk universities, which would feed into developing an ecological model. we focused on two forms of gbv, sexual violence (sv) and domestic violence and abuse (dva). to guide the overview, we used the world health organisation’s definition of sv and the home office’s definition of dva: any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work (who, , page ). any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged or older who are or have been intimate partners regardless of gender or sexuality (home office, ) we have taken a wide approach and included in the overview all studies (published and unpublished) conducted in the uk on sv and dva among university students and staff. studies were stored on a secure server and were given a random id to facilitate data management and extraction. searches and data extraction were conducted by the first author and reviewed by the fourth author. . search strategies and inclusion criteria we utilised a variety of search methods and approaches because we wanted to access both published and unpublished research. studies were identified through: • systematically searching electronic databases for studies on sv and dva among uk university students and staff • survey distributed to uk networks of experts and stakeholders (e.g. security services) • direct contact with university support providers (e.g. students wellbeing), experts, and study authors • additional searches of university websites we utilised wider inclusion criteria to capture as many studies as possible. our criteria included • studies that focused on sv and/or dva among university students and/or staff • studies conducted in the uk between january and january that were published as formal academic studies; published as grey literature (e.g. government reports, university reports available to the public); or held internally by universities • studies that reported the methods used. o for studies reporting they used quantitative surveys, quantitative survey queries were provided. • studies that provided biographical information of research participants electronic search for the electronic searches, the following search strings were used: ) (domestic violence or domestic abuse or intimate partner violence or dating violence) and (university students or university staff) and (location england or wales or ireland or scotland or united kingdom) and (language english) ) (sexual violence or sexual assault or sexual harassment) and (university students or university staff) and (location england or wales or ireland or scotland or united kingdom) and (language english) databases searched were: international bibliography of the social sciences (ibss), psychinfo, embase and isi web of knowledge. figure . flowchart of electronic searches and screening , records identified though database searching , titles and abstracts screened duplicates removed records excluded full-text studies assessed for eligibility full-text studies excluded, with reason eligible studies included in review survey + direct contact with study authors and experts a survey was distributed to networks of university researchers and stakeholders, which asked respondents to share reports and publications. additionally, study authors and experts were directly contacted. this process resulted in studies for inclusion. references of these studies were searched, yielding additional study for inclusion. figure . flowchart of identifying studies for the overview search of electronic databases (n = ) survey + direct contact with networks, study authors, and experts + reference searches (n = ) records excluded with reasons (n = ) full text articles assessed for eligibility (n = ) full text excluded with reason (n = ) eligible articles included in review (n = ) articles identified for review (n = ) excluded (duplicates: n = ; with reason: n = ) unique studies included in final review (n = ) . data extraction an excel template was used to gather the following information on studies identified for the overview: study reference, focus, methods, and findings. when there were multiple references describing the same study, all references were recorded but the data and findings were counted only once for the analysis. two categories of information were extracted: ) overarching study information • study id • reference • focus of study: sv, dva, both • category of study authors: academic, within universities student organisation; outside of universities student organisation ) details of study • design • methods: quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method • sample • quantitative tools: validated measure, written for study • results • limitations . analysis studies were divided into those that focused on sv and those that focused on dva and then analysed. only quantitative methods and findings were analysed for this working paper. a narrative synthesis will be conducted on these and will be published separately. an additional narrative synthesis will be conducted on qualitative methods and findings, and published elsewhere. . findings . study selection from the electronic search, a total of , records were generated. following screening of titles and abstracts, records were assessed for eligibility. seven records were identified as eligible for the review. these records were compiled with records identified through a survey, direct contact, and searching references of identified records (n= ), for a total of studies. six articles were excluded, yielding a total of studies in the final review, all of which looked at university students. none of the studies looked at university staff. as shown in table , fourteen studies focused on sv. of these, seven were conducted by academic researchers, five by student organisations affiliated with a university, and two by student organisations not affiliated with a university. most of the studies conducted by academic researchers laid out the conceptual framework that guided their studies whereas most of the studies conducted by student organisations did not. all of the sv studies looked at victimisation, yet only nine also asked about the impacts of sv victimisation. six studies included stalking victimisation. one study focused exclusively on dva, which was conducted by academic researchers. two studies that focused on sv included queries about dva, one conducted by students’ organisations not affiliated with a university and one by a student organisation affiliated with a university. none of the dva studies presented a conceptual framework. two looked at students’ victimisation experiences and one looked at student perpetration. two of the dva studies included sections on the impact of dva. . design and methods the research design for all studies was cross-sectional. (see table .). for the sv studies, the most common method was a survey with of studies utilising them. one sv study used only interviews. looking at the studies that used surveys in more detail, studies used surveys with only quantitative queries, studies employed surveys with quantitative and qualitative queries, two studies used surveys with quantitative and qualitative queries and focus groups. the remaining study used a survey and focus groups. for the study which focused on only dva, the design was cross-sectional and the method was a quantitative survey. for the two sv studies that included dva queries, the method used was a survey with quantitative and qualitative queries. table overview of studies selected for final review article topics research conceptual framework recruitment techniques design data collection methods random id author category sv stalking dva impact yes or no ( ) social media; ( ) direct face- to-face; ( ) survey link sent to email address; ( ) poster/flyers survey quantitative survey qualitative interview focus groups outside of universities student organisation x x x x no ; cross- sectional x x outside of universities student organisation x x yes cross- sectional x x within universities student organisation x x no ; ; cross- sectional x within universities student organisation x x no cross- sectional x x within universities student organisation x x no cross- sectional x x within universities student organisation x no cross- sectional x within universities student organisation x x x x no ; cross- sectional x x academic x yes ; cross- sectional x x x academic x yes ; cross- sectional x x academic x no cross- sectional x academic x yes ; cross- sectional x academic x yes cross- sectional x academic x x x yes cross- sectional x academic x x x yes ; ; cross- sectional x x x academic x x no cross- sectional x . sample as shown in table , there were four recruitment techniques reported in the studies: ) social media (e.g. facebook), ) direct face-to-face, ) survey link sent to email address, and ) physical poster/flyers. out of the studies, sent survey links to email addresses, used social media, used poster/flyers, and recruited directly face-to-face. seven of the studies used a combination of recruitment techniques, in which the most common was social media and a survey link. most of the studies included in the review utilised non-probability techniques, specifically purposive or convenience sampling. three of the sv studies utilised purposive sampling (e.g. sampled all students in a degree programme; sampled all students attending certain universities) while the rest used convenience. all of the studies looking at dva employed convenience sampling. see table . three studies provided information about survey response bias. sample size varied greatly from more than to over , . while there was variation in the amount of information provided about the samples, all described the gender composition ( out of ) and most presented further details ( out of ). with the exception of study and which looked at the experiences of further education and higher education students, sv studies assessed the experiences of only higher education students. see table . the sample for two of the three dva studies (study and study ) included male and female higher education students. the third dva study (study ) included female further education and higher education students. table sample characteristics source sampling technique size sample gender uk status student status ethnicity sexual orientation disability random id country fe university women men uk x x convenience sampling of target group n = to x x x x x uk x x convenience sampling n = to x x x x x x x north ireland x convenience sampling n = to x x x x x scotland x convenience sampling n = to x x x x x x x england x convenience sampling n = to x x x x x x x england x convenience sampling n = to x x x england x convenience sampling n = to x x x x x england x purposive sampling n = to x x x x x x uk x convenience sampling n = to x x x x uk x convenience sampling n = to x x england x convenience sampling n = to x x x wales x purposive sampling n = to x x x c england x convenience sampling of target group n = to n = to x scotland x purposive sampling n = to x x note. study was not analysed as it used only qualitative methods and this working paper focuses on quantitative. c two studies were conducted and described in this record. . quantitative tools out of the sv studies that used quantitative survey tools, eight measured sexual harassment and sexual assault, three measured sexual harassment only, and two measured sexual assault only. see table . the quantitative tools used to measure sexual harassment and sexual assault varied: eight studies measured sv with tools unique to their study and written by the study authors; three used non-validated tools written by another study; one used validated tools; and one used queries from a validated tool and the study authors wrote their own queries. two of the three dva studies measured only physical and sexual abuse - one used a non-validated tool written by another study and one used a tool written by the study authors. the third dva study measured physical and verbal abuse perpetration, with a measure developed by another study. examining the impact of sv and dva is essential to understand the different effects of victimisation across social groups, such as gender (e.g. hester et al, ). in this working paper, only seven of fourteen studies examined impact, with queries ranging from mental health to finances to academic, e.g. marks, attendance. table quantitative tools used to measure sv, dva, and impact quantitative tools sv forms assessed dva forms assessed impact random id validated (written by study authors; validated measure) sexual harassment sexual assault* physical verbal sexual sv dva written x x x x x x written x x x written x x x written by authors of another study x x written x x x written x written by authors of another study x x x x x x written x written by authors of another study & validated measure x x measure on aggression developed by another study x x validated measure x written x x written x x written by authors of another study x x * rape was included in the sexual assault category. . results prevalence table below summarises the prevalence of sv and dva experienced by students while attending university, as well as the impacts. when considering the overall picture of sv victimisation, % to % of students experienced sexual harassment and % to % of students experienced sexual assault. the findings showed % to % of female students and % to % of male students experienced sexual harassment, and % to % of female students and % to % of male students experienced sexual assault. these findings point toward the conclusion that the prevalence of female victimisation is higher than male victimisation. currently, this conclusion is tentative because of the variations in reporting, with some studies presented the prevalence for individual sv behaviours while others presented the prevalence for all sv behaviours. of note, one study asked students about revictimization, finding that % of those who experienced attempted sexual assault were victimised again and % of those who experienced sexual assault were victimised again. dva studies looked at victimisation and perpetration. studies on dva victimisation queried students about different types of victimisation experiences and then asked about the relationship with the perpetrator. nearly one in five ( %) of all students who experienced physical violence reported the perpetrator was an intimate or romantic partner and % to % of all students who experienced sexual violence reported the perpetrator was an intimate or romantic partner. some studies compared the extent of victimisation across social positions, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, and student status (undergraduate vs postgraduate). for sexual orientation, % to % of gay, queer, and bisexual men experienced sv as compared to % to % heterosexual men and % to % gay, queer and bisexual women experienced sv compared to % to % heterosexual women. bme students were compared to white students, with findings showing % to % of bme students experienced sv whereas % to % of white students did. a higher prevalence of postgraduate students ( %) experienced sv than undergraduate students ( %). these findings suggest the prevalence of victimisation is higher for marginalised individuals impact in terms of impact, mental health impacts were the most common followed by academic and then financial. only one study provided information about impact experienced by men so it is difficult to make gender comparisons. characteristics of victimisation experiences eight studies asked students about the context in which they experienced sv. specifically, they queried the gender of the perpetrator, location of victimisation experience, and alcohol and drug use. table presents a summary of these findings. of immediate note is how findings were reported, i.e. the overall trend was contextual information was reported for both male and female victims’ or for female victims only, leaving a gap in knowledge about the context of male victims’ experiences. the one piece of information reported for male victims was the gender of the perpetrator – approximately half were men. the proportion of male perpetrators increased when male and female victims were amalgamated ( % to %) or when female victims were reported on their own ( % to %). studies’ reports on the location of sv experiences tended to ask if the location was on or off university premises and then proceed to ask more detailed questions. these findings suggested more than half of sv experiences occurred off university premises and a significant proportion occurred where students were living. some studies asked students about their alcohol/drug use and the perpetrators’ use. the different approaches to generating this information limits the extent of what can be said about the influence of alcohol/drugs on sexual violence victimisation and perpetration. for example, one study looked at hazardous levels of drinking alcohol as a risk factor for victimisation while other studies asked female victims if they were under the influence. the former approach used a standardised measure to understand the relationship between alcohol use and sv victimisation whereas the latter approach created the space for students to determine if they were under the influence. interestingly, the former approach found a higher risk than the latter. studies asking victims if they thought the perpetrator was under the influence showed consistent findings, with % to % of male and female victims reporting they thought the perpetrator was and % to % of female victims reporting the same. table summary of context of sv victimisation all victims male victims female victims perpetrator to % men to % men to % men to % knew the perpetrator to % knew the perpetrator location to % university premises; to % university premises; to % student residence to % non-university accommodation % own home or in home of someone known alcohol/drug consumption % of non-hazardous alcohol consumption experienced alcohol related non-consensual sex * to % of victims under the influence % of hazardous alcohol consumption experienced alcohol related non-consensual sex* to % coerced into taking alcohol or drugs to % given alcohol or drugs without their consent to % perpetrator provided victim with alcohol or dugs to % of perps under the influence of alcohol or dugs to % perp under influence of alcohol or drugs * the alcohol use disorder identification test (audit), a tool developed by the world health organisation for students, was used to measure drinking levels. if students’ levels of drinking met the threshold set out by the audit authors, they were considered to be hazardous drinkers. table summary of results sv dva impact of sv and dva sexual harassment sexual assault physical verbal sexual academic mental health financial women to % to % to %* %** . %** %* to % to % to % men to % to % %** %** % % total sample to % to % %* to %* to % to % * these number describe the percent of perpetrators who were identified as intimate/dating/romantic partners. ** percentages represent the proportion of students who used physical or verbal aggression towards an intimate/dating/romantic partner. . limitations of studies no study could be located that investigated sv and dva among university staff. none of the studies were conducted with the explicit intention of investigating dva. there were identified and categorised as dva studies because they included domestic/dating/romantic partners in their queries about relationship to the perpetrator. none of the studies asked about students’ perpetration of sv or used a holistic understanding of dva to ask about dva perpetration, i.e. did not utilise a conceptual understanding of dva that recognised dva can occur in more forms than physical, sexual, or verbal. some studies did not present findings in a way that allowed group comparisons. studies described impact for entire samples, so it was not possible to see if and how impact differed across student groups. none of the studies reported incidence of sv or dva. if studies reported incidence of sv and dva, we would be able to tell how many ‘new’ experiences of victimisation occurred for each time span of education, e.g. during the first year of undergraduate, which could in turn be used to identify risk factors unique to first experiences of victimisation. this information could also be used to identify which forms of sv and dva co-occur in singular incidents. a dearth of information on response bias made it unclear which recruitment strategies might be the most effective. while all the studies included in this review shed light on the extent of victimisation at one point in time, none looked longitudinally to examine if, when, where, and how revictimization occurs. . summary and conclusions in total we reviewed fifteen studies, half of which were led by academic researchers and the other half by student led organisations. the predominant focus of these studies was students’ experiences of sexual violence victimisation ( of ), with a minority looking at students’ perpetration and experiences of dva ( of ). studies that looked at university staff’s victimisation or perpetration of sv or dva could not be located. all of the studies in the review used a cross-sectional design, with studies using online surveys to generate quantitative data. seven of studies used online surveys to generate qualitative data to complement the quantitative data. considering the breadth of validated tools available, it is surprising only studies used validated tools to elicit information about sexual violence and none of the dva studies used validated tools. most of the studies used tools written by another study or written by the study authors themselves, making it difficult to compare findings across studies and to understand the extent, characteristics, and impacts of sv and dva among students attending uk universities. nonetheless, there are important emerging findings which evidence that sv and dva are pressing social issues among uk university students. consistent with previous research in the u.s. (e.g. krebs et al., ), approximately % to % of students experienced sexual harassment and % to % experienced sexual assault. the majority of these students reported their mental health and academic studies were affected by these experiences, suggesting that university sv prevention work could reduce the need for university resources aiding recovery. studies included in this review tentatively suggested that the prevalence of female students experiencing sv is higher than for the prevalence of male students experiencing sv. the emerging findings for dva were less clear, with findings pointing towards the conclusion more female than male students perpetrate dva. however, the dva studies did not consider the overall context of the relationship dynamics nor the impact. when these factors were accounted for in previous studies (e.g. allen, swan and ragahavan, ), the prevalence rate of perpetration was higher for men than women. most studies ( of ) collected biographical information needed to understand how the intersections of gender with other social positions influenced victimisation. however, only studies used this information to compare groups, e.g. bme vs white, lgb vs heterosexual, and only one study broke down the comparisons further with gender, e.g. male lgb vs male heterosexual. findings from these four studies were consistent with previous research on gbv (e.g. coulter et al, ) in that they indicated that occupying positions of less social power (e.g. women, bme) had an increased chance of experiencing sv and or dva. eight studies elicited information about the context in which sv occurred, focusing on the perpetrators’ gender, location of experience, and alcohol/drug use. in brief, the majority of perpetrators were men, less than half of sv experiences were on university premises, and substantial proportion of victims and perpetrators were under the influence of alcohol/drugs. recommendations for future research to understand the extent, incidence, characteristics, and impact of gbv in uk universities, as well as how gbv varies across universities, we recommend the following for quantitative studies: - universities should agree on an understanding of gender-based violence and definitions of sv and dva, and the forms of each, that can be used as the basis of operational definitions in future research. these definitions should not consider sv and dva to be mutually exclusive, e.g. sv may occur within dva. - a quantitative tool specific to uk universities needs to be developed and validated. the tool must include perpetration and impact questions and facilitate extracting information about incidents and prevalence. - recruitment techniques (e.g. survey link to email address) and data collection strategies (e.g. online survey) need to be tested to find the most effective and consistent. - sampling strategies need to be more rigorous (e.g. stratified random sampling) and described in more detail in future studies. additionally, studies must look at all university staff. - research designs should include longitudinal studies to understand how gbv and its impacts changes over students’ and staffs’ careers at university and beyond. - more sophisticated analyses are needed to understand how experiences and perpetration of sv and dva differ across social positions, e.g. male, bme, heterosexual students compared to female, bme, lgb students. - studies should report findings for all students together and then for male students only and female students only. this format should be followed for university staff as well, i.e. all staff, male staff only, female staff only. - more information is need about the context in which sv and dva occurs, such as year of study or year of employment and type of campus, e.g. city based. references allen, c.t., swan, s.c. and raghavan, c., . gender symmetry, sexism, and intimate partner violence. journal of interpersonal violence, ( ), pp. - . coulter, r.w., mair, c., miller, e., blosnich, j.r., matthews, d.d. and mccauley, h.l. . prevalence of past-year sexual assault victimization among undergraduate students: exploring differences by and intersections of gender identity, sexual identity, and race/ethnicity. prevention science, ( ), pp. - . degue, s. . preventing sexual violence on college campuses: lessons from research and practice. part one: evidence-based strategies for the primary prevention of sexual violence perpetration [online]. washington dc: white house task force to protect students from sexual assault. available from: www.notalone.gov/assets/evidence- basedstrategies-for-the-prevention-of-sv-perpetration.pdf [accessed january ]. hagemann-white, c., kelly, e. and römkens, r., . feasibility study to assess the possibilities, opportunities and needs to standardise national legislation on violence against women, violence against children and sexual orientation violence. available from: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/cc fb -c - ac - b - b dad f /language-en [accessed april ]. hester, m. and lilley, s.j. . preventing violence against women: article of the istanbul convention [online]. strasbourg: council of europe. available from: www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/convention-violence/thematic_factsheets/article english.pdf [accessed june ]. hester, m., jones, c., williamson, e., fahmy, e. and feder, g., . is it coercive controlling violence? a cross-sectional domestic violence and abuse survey of men attending general practice in england. psychology of violence, ( ), p. . krebs, c., lindquist, c., berzofsky, m., shook-sa, b and peterson, k. . campus climate survey validation study. final technical report. washington, dc: bureau of justice statistics. nus (national union of students). . hidden marks: a study of women students’ experiences of harassment, stalking, violence and sexual assault. nd ed. [online]. london: nus. available from: www.nus.org.uk/global/nus_hidden_marks_report_ nd_edition_web.pdf [accessed april ]. phipps, a. and smith, g., . violence against women students in the uk: time to take action. gender and education, ( ), pp. - . stenning, p., mitra-kahn, t. and gunby, c. . gender-based violence, stalking and fear of crime: country report united kingdom [online]. eu-project - jls/ /isec/ . bochum, germany: ruhr-university bochum; keele: keele university. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/cc fb -c - ac - b -b dad f /language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/cc fb -c - ac - b -b dad f /language-en project website: www.gendercrime.eu. available from: http://vmrz .vm.ruhr- unibochum.de/gendercrime/project_country_report_united_kingdom.html [accessed april ]. universities uk taskforce. ( ) changing the culture. report of the universities uk taskforce examining violence against women, harassment and hate crime affecting university students [online]. london: universities uk. women and equalities committee. . sexual harassment in the workplace. london: house of commons. available from: parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a- z/commons-select/women-and-equalities-committee/inquiries/parliament- /sexual- harassment-workplace- - / [accessed september ]. design for data ethics: using service design approaches to operationalize ethical principles on four projects rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org opinion piece cite this article: drew c. design for data ethics: using service design approaches to operationalize ethical principles on four projects. phil. trans.r.soc.a : . http://dx.doi.org/ . /rsta. . accepted: july one contribution of to a discussion meeting issue ‘the growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations’. subject areas: artificial intelligence keywords: design, service design, user-centred design author for correspondence: cat drew e-mail: cat.drew@uscreates.com design for data ethics: using service design approaches to operationalize ethical principles on four projects cat drew uscreates, studio - , vox studios, – durham street, london se jh, uk cd, - - - ethical frameworks provide helpful guidance about what you should—and should not—do in relation to data projects. but they do not provide definitive yes/no answers about what an ethical data project is or is not. indeed, research (ipsos-mori public dialogue into the ethics of data science in government) conducted for the initial development of the government’s data ethics framework shows that the public does not hold any clear red lines; rather, they make nuanced assessments based on a number of variables, including public good and privacy. ethical frameworks provide a list of these variables to consider in shaping the form of the work. some are now starting to provide more practical tools and guidance to reshape data projects and push it along those variables into a more ethical space. alongside technical tools, service design approaches can help enhance the degree to which a data project is ethical, and provides a toolkit for data scientists, analysts and policymakers to take projects from ‘what should we do’ to ‘how can we do it’. this paper sets out the emergence of data science ethical frameworks within the context of the use of data for social good, and— with the recent release of the updated uk government data ethics framework—shows the recognition more practical guidance needs to be provided. the author then argues that service design approaches provide a helpful ‘wrap around’ for data projects, and draws on experience in using service design tools on four projects, as well as wider examples. the author(s) published by the royal society. all rights reserved. d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /rsta. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /rsta/ / mailto:cat.drew@uscreates.com http://orcid.org/ - - - rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ this article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘the growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations’. . the emergence of data ethics frameworks data science is a field which, while initially concerned with innovation and profits for companies, is increasingly concerned with social good (as referenced in paragraphs below). governments, whose role it is to improve social outcomes for its citizens, are increasingly applying data science techniques to the development and implementation of public policy and services. with the ability to process larger and more complex datasets than ever before, data science can provide better insights for policymakers, make services more tailored and efficient, and democratize information by making it available to the public. in the uk, the government’s transformation strategy [ ] sets out how it will make better use of data by opening up, sharing and storing data, as well as improving its analytical skills and capabilities and the government’s industrial strategy [ ] provided £ m of investment in innovation, including through a specific artificial intelligence (ai) sector deal £ m in stem training. this built on the progress of its open data agenda, which opened up large numbers of datasets for people to use, applying data science, other analytical methods or simply visualizing data to democratize information [ ]. at the same time, there has been an increase in the number of private sector organizations working on data for social good by bringing together data scientists to do pro bono work for charities during weekend hackathons (e.g. datakind, which has chapters in the uk and usa ). organizations have also created fellowships where recent data science graduates are paired with public sector or charitable organizations to work on a social challenge, organized by non- profit arms of private sector technology firms on their own (e.g. ibm ) or with universities (e.g. microsoft and the universities of british columbia and washington; the data science for social good programme at the university of chicago, and this year in europe ). conferences have also been organized to move forward thinking, debate and practice around data for social good (e.g. bloomberg’s data for good exchange ). ensuring that data science is ethical is an implicit part of using data science for social good. there is a large field of academic literature on data ethics [ – ] and about ethics within the field of innovation [ ]. within the field of data ethics, there is a particular focus on privacy, trust and consent, either directly relating to trust in technology [ ] or within society more generally [ ], algorithmic bias and discrimination [ , ], derived data [ ], anonymity [ ] and around the topic of health data which are seen as particularly sensitive [ ]. governments, think tanks and institutions have also published widely on emerging issues of data ethics in the uk within the context of its potential for delivering better social outcomes [ – ] and abroad [ , ]. over the last years, governments, not-for-profits and commercial organizations have been developing ethics frameworks (alongside other methods of ethical oversight, such as advisory bodies and organizations) to regulate how data science is used, provide confidence to those working with data, and reassure the public. as with all new technologies, a lack of confidence might mean that the opportunities presented by data science for social good are not seized (the ‘opportunity cost’), and a lack of awareness about ethical issues means that someone does experiment but in a way that makes the public feel uneasy and jeopardizes the technology’s wider use. in , the uk government data science partnership started the process to create the uk government’s/world’s first ethical framework for data science in government [ ]. this article http://www.datakind.org/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/initiatives/ibmsocialgoodfellowship.html https://dsi.ubc.ca/ -dssg-program https://dssg.uchicago.edu/ https://www.techatbloomberg.com/blog/mining-data-public-good/ d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il http://www.datakind.org/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/initiatives/ibmsocialgoodfellowship.html https://dsi.ubc.ca/ -dssg-program https://dssg.uchicago.edu/ https://www.techatbloomberg.com/blog/mining-data-public-good/ rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ sets out how it was developed through an open, evidence-based and service design/user-centred approach process, including doing user research internally to understand the ‘journey’ of a data science project and what data scientists and policymakers needed to make decisions about the work at different stages; running large-scale public dialogue, including deliberative workshops with + people, an experiment conjoint survey to understand people’s latent opinions, and an online engagement tool (www.datadilemmas.com); and convening a series of expert roundtables and workshops, which included the minister for the cabinet office’s data board. the framework was published in beta form in may . it has since been tested, iterated and improved and was re-published in june [ ]. it includes a set of principles, more detailed guidance and a workbook to support policymakers, operational staff and data scientists to work together to ensure they are using data appropriately. the principles are: (i) start with clear user need and public benefit (ii) be aware of relevant legislation and codes of practice (iii) use data that are proportionate to the user need (iv) understand the limitations of the data (v) use robust practices and work within your skill set (vi) make your work transparent and be accountable (vii) embed data use responsibly. it is not just central government that has been using the framework. feedback from organizations such as the future cities catapult and local councils indicates that the framework is helping to shape ethical data science projects that are delivering benefits for the public. for example, essex county council has been using the framework to guide its work to link personal pseudonymized data to identify people at risk and target early intervention support [ ]. there are other ethical codes or principles that cover data projects (e.g. the open data institute’s data ethics canvas or defra’s data principles , ethical technology (e.g. ind.ie’s ethical design ) and ethical ai (e.g. google deepmind’s ethics & society principles and advisory board; the association of computer machinery’s code of ethics and the ieee’s code of ethics ). this list is not exhaustive, and even from a small sample it is clear that they differ in terms of the level of high-level principle versus practical advice; the focus on the outcome versus the process; and concern about data and privacy versus technology and harm. they all however start with a focus on using data and technology for good and are adding to the collective ethical practice around working with innovative uses of data and ai. . iterating and improving ethical frameworks the initial data ethics framework was published in beta form as it needs iteration: as technology advances and new ethical issues emerge, and as people use it and give feedback on what was useful and what could be improved. this section sets out two areas for improvement: how the updated framework has addressed them, and where there are still gaps in which a more coherent service design approach/wraparound could resolve (§ ). https://theodi.org/the-data-ethics-canvas https://defradigital.blog.gov.uk/ / / /defras-data-principles/ https://ind.ie/ethical-design/ https://deepmind.com/blog/why-we-launched-deepmind-ethics-society/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/ https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p - .html d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il www.datadilemmas.com https://theodi.org/the-data-ethics-canvas https://defradigital.blog.gov.uk/ / / /defras-data-principles/ https://ind.ie/ethical-design/ https://deepmind.com/blog/why-we-launched-deepmind-ethics-society/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/ https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p - .html rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ (a) need for wider communications and focus on public value research with the public as part of the participatory approach to develop the initial ethics framework revealed how people make decisions about the acceptability of data projects [ ]. it is a two-step process. first, participants engaged in a broad values assessment of the overall public benefit and the opportunity of using data science as opposed to other methods. they needed to support the overall policy objective and intended outcome (the user need and/or public benefit). in addition, they needed to understand the opportunities that data can provide, to understand what is possible and how data science could work better than traditional methods (which can be influenced by ideological views and values around technology, trust and reduced human interactions). if these conditions were not satisfied, or contentious, projects were often dismissed outright, before any consideration of how a data approach could work. this is a challenge when there is very little awareness of data science (only % of those surveyed had heard ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ about it), despite people experiencing (consciously or not) its application every day. once the public benefit and value of data science had been established, acceptance of opportunities for data science was based on a nuanced risk assessment of the entire project. this assessment balanced three further considerations: is there a privacy concern? is the approach effective in achieving the intended policy goal? what are the consequences of potential error, either intended or unintended? therefore, there is a need to raise awareness about what data science is and can be, to make sure that there is a clear user need and/or public benefit, and to ensure the data used it proportionate to that user need. the updated framework reiterates the latter two points (relating to user needs) in its first and third principle, and provides detailed guidance on user needs, how to research them, and how to write them. it refers to guidance provided by the government digital service, which since its introduction has impressively increased focus across all departments on user needs. however, the government’s use of data does not and cannot limit itself to focusing solely on individual needs or rights. there are many uses of data—enshrined in the data protection act and now the gdpr —where public good or a collective need trump individual user need, and individuals do not have rights over their data to create data ‘holes’. for example, to deliver justice effectively, the government needs to hold data on those committing crimes; to fund public services, the government needs to hold data on everyone’s tax records, and to conduct effective research into health conditions, identify groups of people most at health risk and direct interventions to support them, the government needs to use—at the very least—a representative (and properly pseudonymized) sample of people’s health data. broadening out from data, others have argued that we need to think about collective systems’ needs, rather than just individual ones [ ]. the role of the policymaker should be to absolutely understand individual needs and balance them with the collective, but as is—with guidance around user needs coming largely from understanding individuals’ accessing digital services, rather than living in complex places among others—this could be too simplified a method of understanding. in terms of raising public awareness of data science, the framework itself provides little guidance as it is intended to ensure appropriate use of data on individual projects. there are wider efforts to raise public understanding of data science and ai. the royal society’s literature review on public engagement [ ] data builds on the initial research for the data ethics framework and shows there is a spectrum of views and understanding, and the society has a number of resources to explain ai (for example easily understable infographics and quizzes ). an online survey of people aged – in great britain was conducted between february and march using the ipsos mori access panel. https://www.gov.uk/data-protection https://www.eugdpr.org https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/machine-learning/what-is-machine-learning-infographic/ d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il https://www.gov.uk/data-protection https://www.eugdpr.org https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/machine-learning/what-is-machine-learning-infographic/ rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ the partnership on artificial intelligence to benefit people and society is a global network of private and non-for-profit organizations promoting awareness and understanding about ai, and the royal statistical society’s big data manifesto prefers to call for more awareness through data literacy. while these are important efforts in shifting the overall public awareness on data science and ai, the author argues that it is also important to do so project by project, as part of general stakeholder or public involvement or engagement on the policy area that data science project is contributing to. (b) need for a toolkit/methods to enact the principles and link to impact delivery feedback from data scientists and policymakers using the framework indicated that it is a useful tool to raise awareness of the issues and variables which make a project ethical or not (for example, being as open as possible, having the minimum intrusion necessary), but further tools might be needed to implement this and to change the shape of the project. for example, the principle might be to be as open and accountable as possible, but a data scientist might not know how to share the data and codes they have used, or to create models to ensure algorithmic accountability. the updated framework provides detailed guidance for each of the principles so that policymakers, data scientists and operational staff can work together and operationalize the framework. however, the author argues that it is still fairly bounded around a data science project: it assumes that the data already exists and has been collected, and while it considers the project outcome, does not provide guidance on what form an activity that would use the data science insight, prediction or automation to achieve the outcome would take. public acceptance of data projects may be as much based around the form of the action/decision taken as a result of the data science, as the rationale or problem which instigated it. for example, within the research, in response to hypothetical scenarios, some respondents could not understand why the government would need to understand a population’s sexual preferences (for example, to assess any discrimination in access to services or outcomes), and therefore did not think data science was acceptable here. responding to another scenario—using data science to understand people’s eating habits to target healthy behaviour advice—some liberally minded respondents disagreed with the use of data science, because they did not feel that it was the government’s place to intervene in people’s lives in this way [ ]. therefore, data scientists and policymakers need to work together and think through public acceptance of both generating the insight and taking the specific form of action. public engagement is better conducted through the context of the policy challenge, with both data science and delivery mechanisms up for discussion as two of many possible ways of addressing the challenge (rather than starting with the data work). . the value of a service design approach to ‘wrap around’ a data project a service design approach (to be defined in this section) could be considered useful here. there is much discussion in the literature about the value of design, rigorously summarized by kimbell [ ]. these range from design as finding form of new ideas [ ], design as leading to a changed state [ ], design as an approach to dealing with complex or ‘wicked’ problems [ , ] and ‘design thinking’ as a more inclusive mindset for designers and non-designers alike to look at problems and solutions from a human perspective [ ]. ‘service design’ is a practice that has emerged over the last years from different fields (for example, management, engineering, product or technology design, graphic design). kimbell’s [ ] article goes on to conceptualize these in four different ways. one of those, ‘designing for services’ is defined as an enquiry-based practice which does not predetermine the form of the solution (e.g. goods or services). ‘talking of designing for services rather than designing services recognizes that what is being designed https://www.partnershiponai.org/ other writers or frameworks more explicitly consider data generation and collection, e.g. ng [ ]. d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il https://www.partnershiponai.org/ rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ is not an end result, but rather a platform for action with which diverse actors will engage over time’. it is this type of ‘service design’ that has been pioneered by organizations such as participle, thinkpublic and uscreates, and has recently been adopted by governments to make government services and policies more user-centred (for example, through mindlab in denmark and policy lab in the uk). there is no one fixed method for this type of service design, but practices (uscreates principles , kimbell [ ], design council double diamond, gds design standards ), commonly include the following design approaches or principles: — it understands the experience of the ‘service user’, or the person experiencing a policy, and reframes problems according to their need, rather than purely the ‘organizational’ need of the body delivering it. — it co-designs and prototypes solutions, creating buy-in from (and providing early training for) those who will need to deliver it, and tests out solutions in small-scale scenarios, spotting errors early on and making improvements, thus avoiding costly waste and increasing the chances of effectiveness. it is this definition that the author will use for ‘service design approaches’ throughout the paper. the discussion between user need and organizational need is an important one. as service design has been applied to policymaking and increasingly complex social challenges, it has had to find a way to marry these up. the overall focus for governments (national and local) needs to be on the overall social outcome. a sole focus on individual needs may not achieve such an outcome. for example, the ‘user need’ of someone who has offended might not be to be locked away from his/her family, but it might achieve the social outcome of making victims of crime feel safe. in order to achieve an outcome, the government needs to consider its politics, its delivery resources, organizations and people. figure shows how a design approach (here, advocated by ideo) emphasizes human understanding. whereas previously designing services might have started with politics (viability) or organizational capacity to deliver (feasibility), a service design approach asks it to start with people (desirability). service design uses a number of tools and techniques to help design better services, which can be usefully applied to a data context. for example, user-journey mapping plots the experience of someone using a service from them becoming aware of a service, through to joining it, using it, and leaving it. it could be considered a helpful way of thinking about the activities that constitute a design process to provide a representation of what a data project is. therefore, if this service design conceptualization method is applied to a data project, the stages might be ‘awareness of data opportunity’; ‘data generation and collection’; ‘data analysis’; ‘use of insight and action’ and ‘monitoring and accountability’. figure shows a map of the stages of the data journey, with the updated government data ethics principles plotted underneath. as discussed in § , in the alpha form, the principles did not stretch into insight and action, and monitoring and accountability, whereas they now do. however, as the author has also argued, more could be done to consider the form of the action taken as a result of the data insight and ensuring this has social impact, as well as increasing data awareness in the first place. the author will demonstrate how service design can support with this in the next section. https://www.uscreates.com/our-thinking/ design council. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il https://www.uscreates.com/our-thinking/ https://www.gov.uk/service-manual rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ viable politics desirable human feasible organizational capability not here start here figure . adaptation from ideo [ ] human-centred design toolkit, ideo. (online version in colour.) . reflections on the personal use of service design approaches in four data projects at uscreates, a service design agency focusing on health, wellbeing and the public sector, we have been applying service design approaches to data projects to ensure that they deliver impact. we have been working with — the open data institute, to explore with two local authorities how open data can drive public services [ ]. — in kent, open energy data have been used to help identify elderly households that might be in need of insulation services to prevent health problems. — in doncaster, open data about the number and type of education and training institutions, the career advice they offer and the variance between learners’ destinations (into education, employment, training or neet) between the school year end and eight months later has been used to democratize careers advice for learners. — nuron—a tech sme which has created a fibre-optic technology to provide real-time waste water monitoring to understand how different functions in water companies would use these data, and how the interface is best presented to allow them to take the decisions and actions needed. — the eu joint research centre’s blockchain eu project, to design and prototype speculative uses of blockchain in order to engage the public and policymakers in how it could be used beyond the financial industry. we have been using service design approaches to make these projects more ethical by https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/eupolicylab/portfolios/blockchain eu/ d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/eupolicylab/portfolios/blockchain eu/ rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ data generation and collection data awareness . start with clear user needs and public benefit . be aware of relevant legislation and codes of practice . embed data use responsibly . use data that is proportionate to the user need . make your work transparent and be accountable . understand the limitations of the data . use robust practices and work within your skill set data ethics framework principles data science insight and action monitoring and accountability figure . plotting data ethics framework against a ‘data project journey’. — raising awareness about and communicating what data can do, for both those involved in delivering the projects (data scientists, policymakers) and those affected by it (citizens). — ensuring that user need and/or public benefit sits at the heart of the work. — designing good experiences throughout the data project (from data collection to insight use and round again), and prototyping, testing and iterating in order to increase its impact (and deliver the public benefit on which the public base their ethical acceptance). figure shows how design (in orange) can ‘wrap around’ and complement more technical work to ensure data projects are ethical. . reflectionsonpersonaluseofservicedesignapproachesinfourdataprojects (a) service design as a method of communicating and building understanding of data opportunities as discussed above, one of the key insights from the initial research that informed the creation of the beta data ethics framework is that before the public can even make an ethical consideration about a project, they first need to understand what data science/open data are and what can be done with it. service design takes a collaborative co-design approach to work, involving users, frontline staff and policymakers throughout. this achieves buy-in, levers in the need, knowledge and feedback of those who will experience the data’s application, and builds capability in them to do so. however, this will also involve non-data experts, so it is important to explain it to them. service design approaches could be considered helpful in four ways through this co-design process and are visualized in figure : — graphic design can visualize and simplify complex messages and information. well-ordered information with reinforcing images can help non-data experts understand what data science is. for example, the datadilemmas.com opening pages visualized web-scraping d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ data generation and collection data awareness . start with clear user needs and public benefit raise awareness and communicate data possibilities and opportunities consider and prototype the experience: generating data >build trust >nudge >empower consider and prototype the experience: using insight and taking action as a result >data value chain >co-design with frontline staff >prototype and iterate . be aware of relevant legislation and codes of practice . embed data use responsibly . use data that is proportionate to the user need . make your work transparent and be accountable . understand the limitations of the data . use robust practices and work within your skill set data ethics framework principles design led approach data science insight and action monitoring and accountability figure . showing where service design approaches (orange) can enhance more technical guidance given within the data ethics framework in enhancing the degree to which a data project is considered ethical. as a human-like computer (with a face) reading information from another computer, or big data being made up of icons representing numbers, photos, postcodes and words. — lateral inspiration to show how it works in other sectors. a common innovation technique is to look out ‘horizontally’ at what other sectors are doing and apply it to your own industry. in place-based workshops in doncaster where we were trying to increase understanding of open data within careers advice, we provided visual examples of how open data were being used to identify and create new bus routes or change behaviour so that residents put their bins out on time. — provocations to push people into a transformative space. in co-design sessions, the challenge can often be around helping people to step out of the constraints of the present and imagine a different future. futures-thinking techniques can be effective here. by asking people to imagine something in the distant future, a space in which to imagine alternatives can be opened up (without the worry of how such alternatives would work tomorrow). in the nuron co-design workshops, we gave participants provocative speculations such as ‘what if google owned a wastewater business?’ and ‘what if a hurricane meant it was too dangerous for teams to go out and respond?’ to help them get into a different creative space. — prototypes make things tangible. prototypes—which can be a two-dimensional sketches, digital wireframe or physical three-dimensional model—have been used to get people to think through how they would interact with data use. a citizen might not need to see the data analysis itself, but would instead interact with an interface, service or object that is driven by the data. prototypes can show people how data will be applied and, as discussed earlier, may be as important to how people perceive the ethics of the data project as the data collection and analysis itself. in the blockchain project, we created a three-dimensional model of a blood transfusion drone enabled by blockchain together with provocation posters/scenarios to engage eu civil servants in how they might be able to use it in their policy areas. in the doncaster project, we created wireframes of a digital platform showing the full breadth of institution options (sixth forms in schools d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ figure . four ways in which service design approaches can raise awareness and communicate of the opportunities of data to non-experts. fromtop left: online data ethicsgame www.datadilemmas.com; case study ofcitymapper nightrider opendata example; prototype of a blood transfusion drone; provocation workshop card for sewage water monitoring technology. (online version in colour.) and colleges, as well as apprenticeships) together with travel to learn time, which we tested with learners, using their feedback to improve the concept. our experiences—as outlined above—demonstrate how necessary it is to continue to do this throughout the project. data, open data and data science are all difficult concepts and co-design can help explain, re-explain and check heightened understanding of what is possible, helping people to move to a more nuanced discussion of how to make the work ethical. (b) design as a way to focus on user need and/or public good service design usually starts with a ‘discovery’ period of qualitative research into people’s lived experience of the social outcome the project is trying to achieve, as well as identifying user needs in achieving those outcomes. but data projects can often start with the data (and well- meaningfully, with the aim for social good). at worst, the process could involve simply playing with a dataset to see what can be found, without any purpose other than to work with the data. at best, the process would be motivated by a clear public benefit, and would involve a safe, controlled sandpit to experiment with the data to ensure that the level of intrusion is always justified by the user need. in line with kimbell’s definition, the majority of service design projects that we work on are solution agnostic: establishing user need first and then creating whatever solutions are necessary to meet that. service design projects from an engineering or technology field often start with a technology (or data) solution in mind and try to establish the user need and how the technology can support it [ ]. there are advantages and disadvantages to both. solution-agnostic projects create a real focus on user need, but the solution is either not always immediately feasible or even d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il www.datadilemmas.com rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ data data scan data feasibility assessment and value/openness segmentation co-design workshop data experiments and technical next steps concept prototypeslearner/advisor interviews analysis and opportunity briefs system needs user needs business case for systems board so lu ti o n deliverdevelop vision definition definediscover p ro bu lm co-design workshop co-design workshop system partner workshop and value exchange system partner interviews figure . a ‘triple-track’ double diamond approach: simultaneously discovering, defining, developing and delivering around data opportunity, user need and public good/systems need. (online version in colour.) known (which is why we often use lateral inspiration). solution-determined projects will be able to move into delivery more quickly, but risk shoehorning a solution to fit a user need. the nuron and blockchain projects both started with a technology (fibre-optic real-time waste water monitoring, or the blockchain for delivery chains) and our work focused on establishing user need through interviews with various roles within water companies, or through more hypothetical personas at a two-day workshop of policy, legal and technology experts in brussels. our open data work with kent and doncaster pursued a triple-track approach (outlined in figure ) to discovery, scanning possible data sources to identify data opportunities at the same time as conducting interviews with learners, advisors and teachers (in the case of doncaster) or health service commissioners (in kent) to establish user need. (c) thinking through and prototyping the experience of those involved if we return to thinking about the data project as a journey, we can think through how people (the public or people experiencing the problem, or policymakers or frontline staff trying to solve it) interact with the project, for example, generating data or using the insight. in service design, these moments are called ‘touchpoints’ and improving the experience of them can improve the likelihood that the service will achieve the intended impact. service design approaches could be considered useful here, and are described below and visualized in figure . (i) providing/generating data the law sets out clearly how organizations can legally process personal data, including the circumstances in which people can expect to be asked to provide their consent [ ]. article of the gdpr clarifies this, including the need for consent to require an explicit, affirmative action. (other conditions for processing personal data include meeting legal obligations, an individual’s vital interests (i.e. saving their life) and necessary obligations (e.g. fulfilling a contract); to deliver justice, government and other public functions; and to meet an organization’s legitimate interests, reflecting the points made earlier about data being a public good rather than a solely individual one.) this is reflected in the ethical framework under the principle ‘be be aware of relevant legislation and codes of practice. however, consent—as one of the conditions on which personal data processing can be based— is important, and as the gdpr came into force, many organizations have been considering how they can not only be compliant but go beyond a standard question with a tick-box answer. the act of generating data and providing consent could be seen as a ‘touchpoint’ between an organization d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................figure . top row: three ways design has improved the experience of generating data: projects by if’s data permissions catalogue; mappiness research and behaviour change tool; alyssa milano’s reignition of the #metoo hashtag on october . bottom row: three ways design has improved and prototyped the experience of using data: the data value chain used inthenuronproject;personacardstothinkthroughhowpeoplewillusedata;wireframestotestdata interface. (onlineversion in colour.) and citizen that could achieve wider social outcomes than ensuring legal compliance. for example, it could be a useful way of — building trust. there are many ways of recording explicit consent. projects by if has drawn together a highly visual catalogue of these methods. setting out clearly at the point of data collection how consent will be given and how the data are going to be used for social good should be considered an important way to raise public acceptance. another odi open data-driven and service design project—this time led by waltham forest— investigated how to provide free wifi as a means to collect gps data to understand residents’ use of cultural institutions across the borough, with the aim of ensuring that culture was being taken up equally by all ethnic and socio-economic groups [ ]. they created consent pages as people were logging in, and produced posters which clearly said how the data would be captured and used — nudging behaviour. service design often uses behaviour change theories to underpin how a service can lead to changes in user behaviour to meet a social outcome. self-awareness is seen as an important behaviour change principle. providing people with data they have generated—either consciously (e.g. responding to a question) or unconsciously (e.g. data generated through using fitbits or accessing apps)—has the potential to make them aware of their behaviour and nudge them to change it. for example, mappiness is a research tool that collects data on wellbeing at work, and through doing so is aiming to generate the largest dataset on work-based health at the same time as activating behaviour change in participants. — engendering a sense of collective empowerment. consider the experiences of reporting sexual assault to the police and writing a #metoo social media post. clearly these are different https://catalogue.projectsbyif.com/ d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il https://catalogue.projectsbyif.com/ rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ reporting mechanisms which lead to different paths of action and legal remedies, but the former can often be a disempowering experience, leading to low prosecution rates by the criminal justice system, while the latter has been reported as a more empowering and collective experience, leading societal conversations about the need for change. (ii) using data/insight as argued previously, the achievement of the user need and/or public benefit of the data project and the course of action taken as a result of the insight is an important consideration for deciding whether or not it could be considered ethical. service design can help data scientists and policymakers think through how the data or insight will be used to achieve the intended impact. — determine what type of data/information you provide. the value of a data project should be seen in the action—a decision, a change in behaviour, etc.—that will be taken as a result. this action could be taken by a policymaker, a frontline member of staff, a service user, or a citizen. different people will need the data to be presented in different ways. in our nuron work, we called this the ‘data value chain’ [ ]. some might want to see it presented as raw data, others as information grouped into charts and graphs, others as purely insight, others as knowledge about the overall issue. our work with nuron identified a number of ‘personas’ (pen portraits of people in different roles across a water network) and designed interfaces that provided them with data/information/insight in different ways. for example, a planning analyst might want to access the data to perform secondary analysis (raw data); a planning manager might want to know when water levels were rising to a critical level (information); a customer service manager might want to simply know when and where to send a repair team (insight); a customer might want knowledge that their water company’s track record of service was excellent (knowledge). — co-design with frontline staff and users. as well as with users, we have found it extremely valuable to co-design how the insight will be used with those who might be delivering the service. in discussions around data (e.g. [ ]), there is some concern being expressed regarding predictive modelling, computer-led decision-making and their impact on jobs—that these will automate jobs, or that open data will replace the need for intermediary advice. one of the aims of our odi doncaster project was to democratize careers advice, placing information directly into the hands of learners and parents. this does not equate to a reduced need for in-person careers advice. through a co- design event, advisors helped us understand how they could also benefit from this insight to target their services, and make sure they spent more in-person time with those who were at ‘high’ and ‘mid’ level risk of falling out of employment, education or training. — prototype and test. service design uses prototyping as a way of mocking up or making tangible solutions in a low-cost, low-fidelity fashion firstly, in order to test ‘desirability’ (whether people accept the idea and are comfortable with it), as well as ‘feasibility’ and ‘deliverability’, spotting errors early, getting feedback from users and providers, and improving its chances of achieving the intended outcome. during our doncaster project in conjunction with some data science work to test how it was technically possible to bring together and visualize datasets, we mocked up wireframes of what learners and advisors would see to get early feedback on the level of insight versus information they wanted (which then re-informed the data science). more speculative uses of prototyping can be used to help people imagine transformation solutions in a safe space. one of the risks around data science discussed by the government is ‘opportunity cost’ of not proceeding with work that could potentially deliver social good due to lack of confidence on the part of those working with data, or public concern. our blockchain project created d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ a prototype for a blood transfusion drone in order to give a tangible example of how distributed ledgers could provide a secure, automated blood transfusion service, and to create a proactive conversation about it. . conclusion ethical frameworks set out overarching principles for how to work with data in a way that the public would deem acceptable. the uk government has recently updated its data ethics framework to include more practical guidance for policymakers and data scientists on how to operationalize its seven principles, which is welcome. the author has argued that service design approaches could provide additional value in ‘wrapping itself’ around data projects, and using design approaches to — raise awareness of and communicating of what data can do, for both those involved in delivering the projects (data scientists, policymakers) and those affected by it (citizens). — ensure that user need and/or public benefit sits at the heart of the work. — design good experiences throughout the data project (from data collection to insight use and round again). — prototyping, testing and iterating in order to increase the impact of the project (and deliver the public benefit on which the public base their ethical acceptance). it will be important to test the stages of the data journey put forward in this article, as well as the ways in which a service design approach can add value and additional experiences and contributions to this hypothesis through practical applications of service design to data projects are welcome. more broadly, it requires continued connections to be made across the design, data and technology space. data scientists and technologists need to understand users in order to humanize technology and ensure that it is ethical. designers and those working in social innovation need to understand the potential of data, but also the ethical implications of working with it. data and research organizations such as the turing institute, the royal academy and the wellcome trust have resources in place to explain ai, machine learning and data ethics to non-data experts which could be more widely used by those working in public sector services. organizations such as uscreates, snook, futuregov, ideo and the government digital service has resources on user-centred design, service design and prototyping. it is important for these elements of the data system to come together. the ada lovelace institute has been created by a wide partnership of organizations in order convene diverse voices to build a shared understanding of the ethical questions raised by the application of data, algorithms and artificial intelligence (ai) and other collaborations between technology, ethics, data and design sectors are developing formally (e.g. through doteveryone’s society in the loop conference) or informally (a network of women, trans and non-binary people working in the field of digital ethics and society meet for informal conversations). data science and ai provide huge opportunities for human good. ethics provides a framework for ensuring human acceptance. service design approaches provide methods to ensure they are created with humans at their heart. data accessibility. this article has no additional data. competing interests. i declare i have no competing interests. funding. i received no funding for this study. http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/ada-lovelace-institute https://medium.com/doteveryone/society-in-the-loop-a-one-day-event- d ea c d ow nl oa de d fr om h tt ps :/ /r oy al so ci et yp ub li sh in g. or g/ o n a pr il http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/ada-lovelace-institute https://medium.com/doteveryone/society-in-the-loop-a-one-day-event- d ea c rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org phil.trans.r.soc.a : ........................................................ references . hm government. government transformation strategy: better use of data https:// www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-transformation-strategy- -to- /government-transformation-strategy-better-use-of-data . hm 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/consent-is-not-the-silver-bullet-for-gdpr-compliance/ https://theodi.org/article/new-service-delivery-models-case-studies-four-councils-using-open-data-for-service-redesign/ https://theodi.org/article/new-service-delivery-models-case-studies-four-councils-using-open-data-for-service-redesign/ https://medium.com/@hello_ /data-and-design-blog- -a-design-wrap-around-for-data-projects-to-achieve-impact- e https://medium.com/@hello_ /data-and-design-blog- -a-design-wrap-around-for-data-projects-to-achieve-impact- e https://medium.com/@hello_ /data-and-design-blog- -a-design-wrap-around-for-data-projects-to-achieve-impact- e 	the emergence of data ethics frameworks 	iterating and improving ethical frameworks 	need for wider communications and focus on public value 	need for a toolkit/methods to enact the principles and link to impact delivery 	the value of a service design approach to `wrap around' a data project 	reflections on the personal use of service design approaches in four data projects 	reflections on personal use of service design approaches in four data projects 	service design as a method of communicating and building understanding of data opportunities 	design as a way to focus on user need and/or public good 	thinking through and prototyping the experience of those involved 	conclusion 	references doi: . /s 	 ©	american	political	science	association,	 	 ps	•	january ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m making academic life “workable” for fathers jon b. gould, american university brian c. lovato, augustana college ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ the pregnancy strip came back blue, and the assistant professor was excited at the prospect of becoming a father. he had invested a lot of time in his career, publishing three articles in his first two years and positioning himself on the path to tenure. but he also wanted to be involved in his child’s life. he hoped to cut his teaching duties in half for a semester after the baby’s birth and began to talk to colleagues about the possi- bility of tolling the tenure clock for a term so he could spend more time at home with the baby. however, the reactions he got were dismissive, to the point of scornful. “you’re doing so well right now,” a colleague told him. “why would you risk it?” another senior professor was even more direct—and chauvinistic: “you have a wife at home, right? can’t she take primary duty for the kid so you can make tenure?” this story comes from , not , and it took place in a political science department at a mid-sized institution. perhaps it should not be that surprising, since mothers have faced such gendered assumptions and discrimination for years. but there is something new afoot when fathers seek to prioritize parenthood alongside work and when their institutions effectively shut them down. for that matter, fathers face a different set of social pressures than mothers do when they seek—and are seen as being—involved, if not equal, parents. in this article, we address the experience of fathers in academe, focusing predominantly on fathers who assume equal parenting responsibilities. we discuss the specific chal- lenges they face, including familial responsibilities, cultural expectations, and professional intransigence, and we suggest accommodations and approaches that would better meet their needs. along the way, we distinguish the experience of academic fathers from that of mothers. our intention is not to say that “we fathers” have it more difficult than or even as difficult as academic working mothers; it would take will- ful ignorance to disregard the privileged position that men, fathers included, have over women, mothers in particular, in the work world. rather, our goal is to contribute to the conversation about academic working fathers and advance the position that the experience of fathers in the academy is unique—both against their female colleagues and in compar- ison to working mothers and fathers in society at large. this experience needs to be taken on its own terms and in light of ongoing conversations around toxic masculinity in particular and hegemonic masculinity and gender expectations in gen- eral. although we refer to statistics and larger-scale studies, most of our contribution is the result of personal stories and conversations that took place both at and as the result of the national science foundation–funded “professional advance- ment through narrative” workshop in october . in our conclusion, we suggest several measures that insti- tutions can pursue to assist fathers in balancing academic life with family life. like their female colleagues, involved fathers would benefit from family and medical leave, flexibility in work duties, job sharing, and subsidized daycare. however, more than individual accommodations, fathers require a societal rethinking of male caregiving that renders it both “normal” and consistent with masculinity. a contrast with motherhood there have been several articles and books written on moth- erhood in academe in recent years (castañeda and isgro ; childers ; sternadori ; ward and wolf-wendel ; young ; among others). some pieces have addressed the differences between academic motherhood and fatherhood (budig ; mason, wolfinger, and goulden ; tolentino ); others have touched on the experiences of fathers in particular (fotis ; perry ). certainly, it is well known that full-time working women earn only % of their male counterparts—a phenomenon hardly foreign to the academy (american association of university women )—and that the pay gap is exacerbated by parenthood or what budig ( ) called the “fatherhood bonus and the motherhood penalty.” this bonus and penalty relationship is not solely evident in salary gaps but also has an impact on the likelihood of achieving tenure. waxman and ispa-landa ( ) showed that fathers as well as women without children are three times more likely than mothers to receive tenure. fathers’ commitment to their work is rarely called into question in the way that mothers or even women consider- ing motherhood may face. conversely, and contributing to the “fatherhood bonus,” men who become fathers often are praised and their involvement with their children is seen as “cute” rather than a distraction or a nuisance. when we que- ryied doctoral students for this piece, one phd candidate told us that as soon as senior scholars in his field discover that he is a father, “they seem to take me more seriously—i’m immediately assumed to be working diligently, trying to finish quickly, not goofing off or running down rabbit holes.” this external validation also has a counterpart in an internal- ized sense of purpose. as fotis ( ), an assistant professor at albright college, noted, “having a reason bigger than graduate 	 ps	•	january p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m : r e f l e c t i n g o n t h e p r o f e s s i o n ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ school to finish grad school helped me immeasurably….having three kids helped put everything in perspective.” so, if men have it easier than women inside academe and out, if parenthood is less a professional hindrance for fathers than mothers, what is the point of exploring the experience and challenges of academic fathers? there are at least three reasons. the nature of fatherhood is changing, yet little work has been done to chronicle the growing distinction between “involved” and “equal” fathers. although fathers in general fare better professionally than mothers, fully involved fathers face many of the same challenges, even in academe. moreover, any father who seeks to balance childcare with work—let alone prioritize parenting over work duties—confronts and challenges “hegemonic masculinity,” which in the process threatens the way that others—and perhaps he—sees his own masculinity (connell and messerschmidt ). this distinc- tion alone makes the experience of fathers worth considering in their own terms, especially those in academe who are pre- sumed to be able to balance work with family life. the equal father the past years have seen a remarkable change in the role of american fathers. through the s, “patriarchal father- hood” was the predominant model, in which fathers served as authority figures and saw their primary mission as pro- viding for their families (larossa ). by the mid- s, a new model of fatherhood began to develop: the vision of the involved father. suddenly, dads were encouraged—even expected—to take on more roles. in addition to providing for their families and enforcing disciplines, fathers were to be their children’s friend and playmate, to serve as caregiv- ers, protectors, nurturers, and advocates for their offspring. however, a much smaller percentage of men are truly equal parents (bright horizons ). the kind of dad who not only gives the children a bath and reads them a story but who also takes the morning off from work to take a child to the doctor. the dad who knows the names of his children’s schoolroom friends and who has driven carpool to an after-school activity or weekend game or party. the father who also keeps the pro- verbial “list” in his mind of which clothes the kids have out- grown, which supplies they need for their school projects, and which groceries are needed for dinner the next night. in many ways, academe “works” for the involved father. to the extent that these men take on some but certainly not an equal share of child-rearing duties, they are still able to prioritize work significantly ahead of family responsibilities and devote sufficient time to research, teaching, and service. in fact, work may not even require compromises for them. however, academe has not yet figured out how to acknowl- edge, yet alone meet, the needs of equal fathers—much as it still fails to meet the needs of working mothers in balancing academic work and family life. how do you prepare lectures, grade papers, and conduct research when your baby won’t sleep, there is soccer practice or a band concert to attend, or your kid is sick? for that matter, how can you find and afford good-quality childcare on an academic’s salary and locate a pleasant neighborhood with decent public schools within a reasonable commute of campus? but, those issues in many ways are “background noise” to the constant drumbeat of academic responsibilities—teach your courses; meet with stu- dents; attend faculty meetings; and publish, publish, publish. despite the relief of open-ended summers and the flexibility of time-shifting during the work week, we all know that academic life is demanding, particularly for those younger parents on the tenure track who must try to shoehorn multiple responsibilities into a single day. seeking accommodations (or not) mothers have long written about the challenge of obtaining reasonable accommodations from their academic employers (national partnership for women & families ). indeed, one of our former colleagues has chronicled her own experi- ence of being denied tenure when she took maternity leave, paused her tenure clock, and then was chided for not being sufficiently productive (gagnon ). yet, men do not always share in the same benefits because many institutions do not slow or stop the tenure clock for new fathers. “for men who invoke [the family and medical leave act] and use that semester to be with their child, the clock keeps running” (leak , ). of course, this is if men actually seek accommodations from their institutions, and many are reluctant to do so. by that, we do not mean the involved fathers mentioned previ- ously, who share in some of the childcare but essentially are a junior partner to their children’s mother who occupies the primary caregiving role. these men might benefit from certain adjustments, such as the rescheduling of evening faculty meetings, but they do not truly “need” accommodations the way that the primary or equal parent craves. so, what stops the equal father from seeking accommoda- tions? several men “fear that they’ll be stigmatized as ‘less committed’ by their departments” for seeking institutional support (marotte, reynolds, and savarese , xi). there also is a particular view of agency and independence at work that in this article, we address the experience of fathers in academe, focusing predominantly on fathers who assume equal parenting responsibilities. we discuss the specific challenges they face, including familial responsibilities, cultural expectations, and professional intransigence, and we suggest accommodations and approaches that would better meet their needs. ps	•	january ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ compels some men to resist accommodations because of their families. fotis ( ) illustrated this sentiment when he said, “i don’t want to feel like i need to be accommodated because i have a family. i don’t want to be less than my colleagues who can focus their full attention on academic life. or get a free pass because [i have kids]. i want to feel like having a family and being [an academic] is ok.” however, fathers—especially those who prioritize child care—face a distinct challenge unknown to mothers: others’ judgments of their masculinity. by assuming much of what historically has been “women’s work,” equal fathers fear the skepticism of their peers, their friends, and perhaps even their family members about their prioritizing home life with—if not over—work duties. in this respect, the very act of asking for an accommodation is a potential threat to their masculin- ity in a culture that codes work as prioritized and masculine whereas family life is secondary and feminine (connell and messerschmidt ). working mothers have seen the flipside of this coin in the past, facing the withering judgments of those who would question their commitment to their children (steiner ). however, for equal fathers, the challenge is not to their com- mitment as fathers or to their seriousness as professionals but rather to their very virility as men. if family “is a ‘distraction’ for a man, it’s assumed he must have some sort of testosterone deficiency,” fotis ( ) explained. “for a man, success at work is culturally more important than success at home.” therefore, if men “embrace a more active place in the lives of their chil- dren, american society” is not yet clear how to evaluate them during the current “shift in social evolution” (leak , ). men may not be as accustomed as women to “going public” and sharing with others their parenting stories and their chal- lenges (and failures) in balancing family and work life. for men to be personal in this way seems, in the words of poet stephen kuusisto, “like an ‘invitation to be nude in public’” (marotte, reynolds, and savarese , xi). still, some equal fathers are becoming increasingly comfortable in sharing their experiences, if only because they crave the support of others and need the kind of work accommodations that mothers previously sought. for one author of this article, that meant convening a lunch group of other young fathers in our assistant-professor days, looking for suggestions on how to find writing time during children’s nap schedules. eventually, we collectively reached out to a department chair to ask for service responsibilities to be pared to levels in other units. we might very well have sought support from our female colleagues—and we did in broaching the issue of service responsibilities—but the lunch conversations did more than simply offer practical suggestions. in retrospect, it is clear that we also were bucking up each other as men, that—in the face of societal pressure telling us to prioritize work, with fathers who had been primary breadwinners, and with partners who had sacrificed so that we could earn a phd—we were still, fundamentally, masculine in wanting to prioritize work and family. to be sure, this story has a happy ending, both in finding collective support and achieving a reasonable accommoda- tion, but the situation is not as positive for many other fathers. we spoke with several academic dads who reported feeling isolated and unsupported by their institutions. one tenured professor described a department chair who responded when he announced that his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, “you know, there is a solution for that.” early in both his graduate-school career and the life of his child, a graduate- student father was told by his adviser that he had to choose between his research and his family. although other faculty members from different departments agreed that such senti- ments were both unrealistic and inappropriate to share with a graduate student, he eventually had to change advisers and “burn a bridge”—which presented a horrible cost in a field that depends on those bridges. another phd candidate said that, despite support from his dissertation supervisor, his department considered him to have made “unsatisfactory progress” for more than two years while he was in the midst of family challenges. although his adviser acknowledged the difficulties and was willing to stand by him, the larger depart- ment seemed to dismiss the arrival of the student’s second child and a series of intense medical issues faced by his older child. these responses from faculty members, advisers, and departmental staff can have tremendous demoralizing and psychologically isolating effects on fathers. there may be a tendency to see these stories as idiosyncratic—that if individual administrators, departments, and schools simply behaved better, then academic fathers would be better served. however, there are larger societal matters at play because working fathers are not used to having their challenges and pitfalls taken seriously. not only does popular culture often depict them as bumbling—unable to decide on a peanut butter brand for their families when “choosy mothers” know well enough to “choose jiff ”—but there also are few publications, whether academic or popu- lar, that address their needs. we can confirm that fact in the paucity of existing literature we found in researching this article. even if fathers are not doing the same “heavy lifting” as mothers in childbirth and some childcare, their stories are still valid to consider. or, as one father said, “why isn’t my fotis ( ) illustrated this sentiment when he said, “i don’t want to feel like i need to be accommodated because i have a family. i don’t want to be less than my colleagues who can focus their full attention on academic life. or get a free pass because [i have kids]. i want to feel like having a family and being [an academic] is ok.” 	 ps	•	january p r o f e s s i o n s y m p o s i u m : r e f l e c t i n g o n t h e p r o f e s s i o n ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ parent juggling act worth watching? why if i say, ‘i can’t go to the meeting because i have to pick up [my kid] from pre- school,’ it isn’t as culturally accepted as a woman picking up her child from school?” (fotis ). not only does popular culture often depict them as bumbling—unable to decide on a peanut butter brand for their families when “choosy mothers” know well enough to “choose jiff ”—but there also are few publications, whether academic or popular, that address their needs. clocks—all of these measures set a tone and shape a culture in which equal fathers are encouraged and supported. it may seem counterintuitive to focus on the needs of fathers at a time when “toxic masculinity” is being closely changes needed so, what can be done to help fathers balance academic life with their desired family responsibilities? some of the solu- tions match those that mothers have sought, and sometimes won, over the last several years. family and medical leave should be made readily available for fathers after the birth or adoption of a new child. schools should permit flexibility in work duties, allowing parents occasionally to trade off a course for additional time (and, in all likelihood, accept a reduced salary) when children require heightened attention. job sharing and subsidized daycare are all benefits that can promote greater productivity among parents. none of these measures is particularly new or novel, and it is understandable if working mothers roll their eyes (or worse) at fathers advocating for and obtaining accommodations that they previously sought. on the one hand, social-movement studies show that change is more successful when broadly sought (mcadam ), but on the other hand, there is a taint of sexism when institutions respond to calls from men that went unanswered when pled by women. we have seen this dilemma firsthand, when one of our departments finally stopped calling faculty meetings for the late afternoon when three fathers of young children complained that the timing made it difficult for them to reach their children’s daycare centers in time for pickup. whether this is a sign of success or proof of continuing double standards in academe, we agree with perry ( ) that “[f ]athers, too, need to advocate for paid parental leave, child-care assistance, [and] flexible tenure clocks…and they need to advocate loudly, using their privileged position as a lever to move the structures of our profession….” yet, whatever concrete accommodations academic fathers secure, the greater priority must be to move the definition of caregiving “beyond the discussion of motherhood” and to foster “a culture that accepts the notion of male caregiving as nor- mal” and consistent with masculinity (perry ). if fathers fear others’ judgments of their masculinity in balancing child- care with work, if they are reluctant to seek accommodations for concern about professional stigma, then change will prove more difficult. academe, of course, is but one institution, and we cannot expect it to singlehandedly create that change—but it certainly can lead the way. normalizing paternal childcare, creating a work atmosphere in which fathers are encouraged to seek accommodations, allowing fathers to toll their tenure scrutinized (black ), when the #metoo movement has drawn attention to the problems of unchecked male power. yet, the very factors that support toxic masculinity are also those that stymie equal fathers, that delegitimize their choices, and that prevent them from obtaining appropriate accommo- dations to make those choices a reality. we are now two gen- erations into involved modern fatherhood with at least one generation of equal fathers. it is time that our institutions catch up to and support the change. more particularly, it is time that our academic institutions foster a culture on campus that allows academic fathers to excel at work and family life. acknowledgments the authors thank jennifer diascro, judith grant, and susan sterett for organizing the national science foundation– sponsored workshop, “advancement through narrative: understanding and navigating success and failure in the academy” (nsf grant # ). we are grateful as well to the participants in that gathering and other academic fathers who generously shared their experiences with us. finally, none of these insights would have been possible without our children and the support of our partners and colleagues. n r e f e r e n c e s american association of university women. . the simple truth about the gender pay gap. available at www.aauw.org/resource/the-simple-truth- about-the-gender-pay-gap (accessed may , ). black, michael ian. . “the boys are not alright.” new york times. available at www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/boys-violence-shootings- guns.html (accessed april , ). bright horizons. . modern family index . available at https:// solutionsatwork.brighthorizons.com/~/media/bh/saw/pdfs/ generalandwellbeing/mfi_ _report_v .ashx (accessed june , ). budig, michelle j. . “the fatherhood bonus and the motherhood penalty: parenthood and the gender gap in pay.” third way. available at www. thirdway.org/report/the-fatherhood-bonus-and-the-motherhood-penalty- parenthood-and-the-gender-gap-in-pay (accessed april , ). castañeda, marie, and kirsten isgro (eds.). . mothers in academia. new york: columbia university press. childers, trenita b. . “black 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........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ gagnon, julia. . “six female american university professors denied tenure, accuse provost of discrimination.” the eagle. available at www. theeagleonline.com/article/ / /six-female-american-university- professors-denied-tenure-accuse-provost-of-discrimination (accessed april , ). larossa, ralph. . “the culture of fatherhood in the fifties: a closer look.” journal of family history : – . leak, jeffrey b. 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from unilocal to comparative research downloaded from: https://research.chalmers.se, - - : utc citation for the original published paper (version of record): simon, d., palmer, h., riise, j. et al ( ) the challenges of transdisciplinary knowledge production: from unilocal to comparative research environment and urbanization, ( ): - http://dx.doi.org/ . / n.b. when citing this work, cite the original published paper. research.chalmers.se offers the possibility of retrieving research publications produced at chalmers university of technology. it covers all kind of research output: articles, dissertations, conference papers, reports etc. since . research.chalmers.se is administrated and maintained by chalmers library (article starts on next page) https://doi.org/ . / environment & urbanization copyright © international institute for environment and development (iied). vol ( ): – . . / www.sagepublications.com the challenges of transdisciplinary knowledge production: from unilocal to comparative research david simon , henrietta palmer , jan riise, warren smit and sandra valencia abstract this reflective paper surveys the lessons learnt and challenges faced by the mistra urban futures (muf) research centre and its research platforms in sweden, the uk, south africa and kenya in developing and deploying different forms of transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge. considerable experience with a distinctive portfolio of such methods has been gained and reflective evaluation is now under way. while it is important to understand the local context within which each method has evolved, we seek to explain the potential for adaptation in diverse contexts so that such knowledge co-production methods can be more widely utilized. furthermore, the current phase of muf’s work is undertaking innovative comparative transdisciplinary co-production research across its research platforms. since the specific local projects differ, systematic thematic comparison requires great care and methodological rigour. transdisciplinary co-production is inherently complex, time consuming and often unpredictable in terms of outcomes, and these challenges are intensified when it is undertaken comparatively. keywords comparative urban research / co-production / mistra urban futures / transdisciplinarity / transdisciplinary urban co-production i. introduction: from unilocal to comparative transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge co-production (also known as co-creation or co-design( )) as an approach has evolved since the s. the objective has been to bring different stakeholder groups together in an attempt to overcome often-longstanding antagonisms and wide asymmetries of power by working or researching together to improve outcomes, whether of services or research, and their legitimacy.( ) essentially, the many modes of co-production constitute more sustained and coherent forms of the diverse participatory research and consultation methods developed to engage with local communities, research subjects, or the intended beneficiaries of development or service investments. there is no clear boundary between co-production and participation – when the intention is to increase diverse stakeholders’ power. indeed, for instance, participatory budgeting, of the kind initiated in porto alegre (brazil) and subsequently applied in diverse cities,( ) has many attributes of co-production. david simon is director of mistra urban futures and professor of development geography, royal holloway, university of london. address: chalmers university of technology, se- , sweden; e-mail: david.simon@chalmers.se henrietta palmer is deputy scientific director of mistra urban futures and artistic professor, chalmers university of technology. address: e-mail: henrietta. palmer@chalmers.se jan riise is manager for engagement, mistra urban futures. address: e-mail: jan.riise@ chalmers.se warren smit is research director, african centre for cities, university of cape town, and director of the mistra urban futures cape town local interaction platform. address: e-mail: warren. smit@uct.ac.za sandra valencia is lead researcher on the mistra urban futures comparative project on implementation of the new urban agenda and urban sustainable development goal. address: e-mail: sandra. valencia@chalmers.se eau environment & urbanization http://www.sagepublications.com mailto:henrietta.palmer@chalmers.se mailto:henrietta.palmer@chalmers.se mailto:jan.riise@chalmers.se mailto:jan.riise@chalmers.se mailto:warren.smit@uct.ac.za mailto:warren.smit@uct.ac.za mailto:sandra.valencia@chalmer.se mailto:sandra.valencia@chalmer.se http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r . these terms tend to be used interchangeably in much of the literature, although the shift towards co-creation or co-design is intended to emphasize the more holistic process of undertaking all stages of a project jointly, even implementation, and to distinguish this latter from forms of co-production in which one stakeholder defines and sometimes designs a project, with joint work commencing with the actual research activity. muf follows this holistic approach [mistra urban futures ( ), strategic plan – , gothenburg, available at http:// www.mistraurbanfutures.org], although still often using the term co-production for reasons of familiarity. . for example, jasanoff, s ( ), “the idiom of co- production”, in s jasanoff (editor), states of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order, pages – , routledge, london; also joshi, a and m moore ( ), “institutionalised co- production: unorthodox public service delivery in challenging environments”, journal of development studies vol , no , pages – ; mitlin, d ( ), “with and beyond the state – co-production as a route to political influence, power and transformation for grassroots organizations”, environment and urbanization vol , no , pages – ; and polk, m (editor) ( a), co-producing knowledge for sustainable cities: joining forces for change, routledge, abingdon and new york. . cabannes, y ( ), “participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy”, environment and urbanization vol , no , pages – ; also cabannes, y ( ), “the impact of participatory budgeting on basic services: municipal practices and evidence from the field”, environment and urbanization vol , no , pages – . . for example, see reference , polk ( a); also polk, m ( b), “transdisciplinary co-production: designing and globally, co-production has most commonly involved local authorities and other public-sector institutions engaging with residents and organized community groups, often in relation to service provision.( ) nevertheless, the term applies also to diverse forms, partnerships and applications nowadays, including, for instance, in relation to global change research and peri-urban disaster risk reduction.( ) the literature demonstrates how challenging, time consuming and sometimes unpredictable genuine co-production of knowledge and understanding can be in terms of outcomes. perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the now- considerable literature on this form of co-production around the world is overwhelmingly conceptual or based on research in one location. it also tends to assume – usually implicitly since these issues are rarely addressed – that power differentials among co-production participants and their respective institutions can be overcome and that consensus can be achieved through sustained negotiation. co-produced research, like the co-production of services, can sometimes also be transdisciplinary. although this latter term is sometimes used synonymously with interdisciplinary to refer to the crossing of academic disciplines, here we adopt the more conventional current usage denoting the collaboration of academics and practitioner/practice- oriented researchers from different disciplines and/or backgrounds. transdisciplinary co-produced research emphasizes inclusiveness and iterative, deliberative negotiation as the mechanism for building shared understandings as a precondition for making progress jointly. as such, it involves a team made up of practitioners and academics, creating a fundamentally different epistemology of social science knowledge production from the conventional linear, positivist and expert-led model that still underpins most urban research worldwide. this paper provides initial reflections on the innovative agenda of mistra urban futures (muf) as it undertakes a coherent programme of international comparative and transdisciplinary co-productive research.( ) the overarching objective of our approach to transdisciplinary comparative research is to analyse how key themes relating to urban sustainability and justice are understood and operationalized in different contexts, thus helping to open up more possibilities for change. the ultimate objective is to ensure the realization of just and sustainable cities in these different contexts (e.g. by learning from the positive and negative experiences of other cities, and developing trans-local links). the paper is divided into four sections. following this introduction, section ii provides an overview of lessons derived from the first phase of muf’s research, in which transdisciplinary co-produced studies were undertaken within individual cities. section iii then examines the challenges involved in moving from this foundation to comparative transdisciplinary co-produced research, while section iv assesses the early lessons emerging from the current suite of comparative projects. section v addresses the important agenda of engagement and societal impact, which are fundamental to muf’s approach to responsible research and innovation. the final section provides a concluding discussion and assessment of the paper’s contribution. established in gothenburg, sweden, in , muf is an international urban research centre (“the centre” in this paper) promoting urban sustainability by means of the transdisciplinary co- production of knowledge, undertaken in a series of local interaction http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e testing a transdisciplinary research framework for societal problem solving”, futures vol , pages – , available at http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. futures. . . ; durose, c and l richardson ( ), designing public policy for co-production: theory, practice and change, policy press, bristol; tabory, s h ( ), “co-production and enterprise culture: negotiating local urban development culture in santo domingo’s ‘barrios populares’”, unpublished ma thesis, university of texas at austin; and wolf, g and n mahaffey ( ), “designing difference: co-production of spaces of potentiality”, urban planning vol , no , pages – . . mauser, w, g klepper, m rice, b s schmalzbauer, h hackmann, r leemans and h moore ( ), “transdisciplinary global change research: the co-creation of knowledge for sustainability”, current opinion in environmental sustainability vol , nos – , pages – ; also schaer, c and e komlavi hanonou ( ), “the real governance of disaster risk management in peri-urban senegal: delivering flood response services through co-production”, progress in development studies vol , no , pages – . . an earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference of the african centre for cities, university of cape town, – february . . see reference , mistra urban futures ( ); also palmer, h and h walasek (editors) ( ), co-production in action, mistra urban futures, gothenburg, available at http:// www.mistraurbanfutures. org/en/annual-conference/ conference-book; and perry, b, z patel, y norén bretzer and m polk ( ), “organising for co-production: local interaction platforms for urban sustainability”, politics and governance vol , no , pages - . . trencher, g, x bai, j evans, k mccormick and m yarime ( ), “university partnerships for co-designing and co- producing urban sustainability”, platforms (lips). these have been formed through bottom-up local initiatives that lead to formal partnerships among groups of academic and practice-oriented institutions in gothenburg (sweden), sheffield/ greater manchester (uk), cape town (south africa), and kisumu (kenya). these partnerships came together to form what became mistra urban futures. in / , a lip was also established in the swedish cities of malmö and lund in southern sweden (skåne lip) in order to join the centre; and a smaller partnership in stockholm is currently in a similar process. the formal nature of all these partnerships is important in terms of their capacity to attract political and financial support, as well as the backing provided to the individual researchers comprising the respective project teams.( ) these partnerships are diverse in terms of the number of institutional partners, their contractual and governance arrangements, their operating mechanisms, and the types of co-production undertaken. however, all have one or more universities and local authorities as members, thus constituting a particular kind of university–local government partnership.( ) all lip partners share the underlying desire to collaborate on mutually defined applied research priorities in the belief that this offers greater prospects for appropriate and practicable interventions and outcomes than traditional, expert-led research. the swedish lips operate as consortia under a multi-year agreement and are hosted by local universities. the kisumu lip (klip) is constituted as a registered trust under kenyan law with its own premises, while the cape town and sheffield–manchester lips (called ctlip and smlip respectively) are university-based partnerships operating by means of bilateral collaboration agreements with local/regional authority partners.( ) muf is distinctive as a centre, comprising a secretariat in gothenburg and this series of lip hubs, along with the smaller partnership just established in stockholm and project-based collaborations in dehradun and shimla (india) and buenos aires (argentina). it thus straddles four continents, deliberately embracing the challenges of urban sustainability across the increasingly artificial global north/south divide that still bedevils the united nations and many other bi- and multi-lateral initiatives. core funding is provided by the swedish foundation for strategic environmental research (mistra), the swedish international development cooperation agency (sida) and the gothenburg consortium of seven partners, which include universities, local and regional authorities and research institutes, with additional local funding in other lips and competitive project-based funds from diverse sources. until the end of phase of the centre’s funding in december , each lip experimented with its own forms of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production, suited to the particular context and blend of academic and practitioner partners and their respective priorities. these experiences and key lessons are drawn together in the next section.( ) among the most important of these experiences are the breaking down of often-longstanding barriers and forging of trust; identification of suitable champions within each institution (ideally at both political and professional levels); development of common approaches to the research; and the role of the lips as “safe spaces” for experimentation away from the constraints and habitual practices of each institution. considerable effort has been devoted to learning about the experiences using http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.futures. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.futures. . . http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r global environmental change vol , pages – . . see reference , mistra urban futures ( ); also see reference , palmer and walasek ( ); and reference , perry et al. ( ). . for a fuller exposition, see reference , palmer and walasek ( ), pages – . . see reference , polk ( a); also see reference , polk ( b); reference , palmer and walasek ( ); westberg, l and m polk, m ( ), “the role of learning in transdisciplinary research: moving from a normative concept to an analytical tool through a practice-based approach”, sustainability science vol , no , pages – ; and polk, m ( ), “achieving the promise of transdisciplinarity: a critical exploration of the relationship between transdisciplinary research and societal problem solving”, sustainability science vol , no , pages – , available at http://dx.doi. org/ . /s - - - . for diverse approaches to urban experimentation, compare these to evans, j, a karvonen and r raven (editors) ( ), the experimental city, routledge, abingdon and new york. more generally, see simon, d and f schiemer ( ), “crossing boundaries: complex systems, transdisciplinarity and applied impact agendas”, current opinion in environmental sustainability vol , pages – , available at http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. cosust. . . . . local environment: international journal of justice and sustainability ( ), vol , no s , “the future of sustainable cities: governance, policy and knowledge”, open access issue, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/ toc/cloe / /sup . . see reference , palmer and walasek ( ). . see reference , perry et al. ( ). . may, t and b perry ( ), “a way forward: active intermediaries”, in t may and b perry (editors), social research and reflexivity: content, transdisciplinary co-produced research.( ) the governance and policy for sustainability (gaps) project attempted to examine the experiences across the lips comparatively during phase . however, governance and funding setbacks made the process difficult, which resulted in platform- specific analyses rather than comparative ones.( ) the second phase of mistra and sida funding ( – ) has enabled the introduction of systematic comparative research projects as a novel and world-leading dimension to muf’s work. a typology of forms or models of comparison was developed, representing a spectrum in terms of the degree of central versus local (bottom-up) design, implementation and control (see section iv). altogether transdisciplinary comparative projects (including one centred on phd studentships) have been initiated to date; they are diverse and represent most of the models in the typology (table ). despite this variety, all these applied social scientific comparative projects are very different from natural or life science comparative projects, which would require identical and reproducible local projects. as such, they also face distinctive challenges. because the comparative dimensions of these projects are still at an early stage, our reflections later in the paper are a preliminary assessment of what we believe to be the first time that such an exercise has been undertaken. as such, we draw on our leadership roles within the centre, as coordinators of subsets of comparative projects, as director of one lip, and as lead researcher on the urban sdg/new urban agenda comparative project. these roles involve regular dialogue, coordination and evaluative discussions and interactions, both formal and informal, with the respective project teams and other stakeholders. ii. lessons learnt from unilocal transdisciplinary co- produced research this section synthesizes some of the key achievements, constraints and generalizable principles based on the experience in the respective lips during the first phase of mistra urban futures. it draws in part on palmer and walasek( ) and perry et al.( ) as emphasized in the previous section, one of the key features of the lips is their diverse history, structure, number, and range of partner institutions and activities. the first important lesson reflects this: namely that a prerequisite for success is being locally appropriate and embedded, so as to be, and be seen to be, responsive to local conditions and flexible in adapting to evolving agendas. attempting to establish a suite of “identikit” lips to undertake transdisciplinary research co-production in different contexts would simply not work. second, in their operations, the lips act as “active intermediaries”( ) between global agendas and local contexts and concerns. this bidirectional role and relationship adds considerable value both ways. on the one hand, the individual cities have been able to understand and learn from experiences elsewhere and from global initiatives on urban sustainability in tackling similar problems. conversely, mistra urban futures uses the transdisciplinary co-production experiences in the individual cities to inform wider global policy debates and agendas for practice. a third lesson is that the partners need to operate through thorough reflexivity, with openness to change and renewal.( ) a perennial challenge http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. cosust. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. cosust. . . https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cloe / /sup https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cloe / /sup t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e t a b l e in te rn a ti o n a l co m p a ra ti v e p ro je ct s o f m is tr a u rb a n f u tu re s p ro je ct (p ro je ct p e ri o d ) a ct o rs in vo lv e d (a ) (t yp o lo g y) (b ) a ct io n s ta ke n a im o f in te rv e n ti o n s (s d g t a rg e t) (c ) w h e re r e a lis in g j u st c it ie s ( – ) a ll p la tf o rm s ( + ) w o rk sh o p o rg a n iz e d in m a rc h . fo u r le ve ls id e n ti fi e d : e va lu a ti o n s o f li p -s p e ci fi c p ro je ct s, c o m p a ra ti ve p ro je ct s, p la tf o rm s a n d in te rn a ti o n a l p a rt n e rs h ip s. c o n tr ib u ti n g t o r e a liz in g ju st c it ie s b y o rg a n iz in g k n o w le d g e t h ro u g h lo ca l p la tf o rm s, g e n e ra ti n g n e w u rb a n k n o w le d g e th ro u g h c o -p ro d u ct io n a n d c o n d u ct in g p la ce - sp e ci fi c co m p a ra ti ve r e se a rc h . ( . , . , . , . , .a ) c a p e t o w n f o r p ro je ct le a d ; a ll o th e r p la tf o rm s a n d p a rt n e rs f o r co m p a ra ti ve w o rk . g e n e ra liz e d to g lo b a lly r e le va n t kn o w le d g e. im p le m e n ti n g t h e n e w u rb a n a g e n d a a n d t h e s d g s: c o m p a ra ti ve u rb a n p e rs p e ct iv e s ( – ) a ll p la tf o rm s + s h im la a n d b u e n o s a ir e s ( ) fo rm a ti o n o f ci ty -w id e w o rk in g g ro u p s in e a ch c it y. s m a ll sa m p le o f s d g in d ic a to rs ( in d ic a to rs . . a n d . . ) te st e d a n d r e p o rt e d f o r e a ch c it y. a n a ly si n g im p le m e n ta ti o n o f th e g lo b a l a g e n d a s w it h t h e c it ie s, f a ci lit a ti n g c ro ss - ci ty le a rn in g a n d in te ra ct io n . c o n tr ib u ti n g t o u n r e vi si o n s o f ta rg e ts , i n d ic a to rs a n d n u a re p o rt s (a ll) . b u e n o s a ir e s, c a p e t o w n , g o th e n b u rg , k is u m u , m a lm ö , s h e ffi e ld a n d s h im la . r e le va n ce : g lo b a l. p a rt ic ip a to ry c it ie s ( – ) c t, g , k , s -m , s k ( ) s u b -t h e m e s o n c o -p ro d u ct io n a n d p a rt ic ip a ti o n ; p a rt ic ip a to ry p la n n in g ; ro le o f in te rm e d ia ri e s; p o lic y b ri e fi n g s. d is cu ss io n p a p e r, a n th o lo g y o f ca se s, m a p p in g o f d if fe re n ce s, r e fl e ct io n s, s yn th e si s o f re su lt s a n d a ca d e m ic a rt ic le s. r e p o rt s a t th e m u f c o n fe re n ce . ( . . ) e m p ir ic a l: a cr o ss a ll p la tf o rm s. r e le va n ce : g lo b a l. c u lt u ra l h e ri ta g e a n d ju st c it ie s ( – ) c t, g , k , s -m ( ) d e ve lo p m e n t o f p la n n in g , a ss e ss m e n t a n d m a p p in g t o o ls , p o si ti o n p a p e r. r o le a n d v a lu e o f cu lt u ra l h e ri ta g e in t h e r e a lis in g j u st c it ie s co n te xt . ( . ) e m p ir ic a l: u k , k e n ya , s w e d e n , s o u th a fr ic a . r e le va n ce : g lo b a l. k n o w le d g e t ra n sf e r p ro g ra m m e ( – ) c t, k , s -m , s k ( ) k n o w le d g e e xc h a n g e m e e ti n g s in o n e m b e d d e d r e se a rc h a n d o th e r tr a n sf e r- o ri e n te d in it ia ti ve s. c re a te a p ro g ra m m e f o r kn o w le d g e e xc h a n g e in m a lm ö . c o -a u th o re d a rt ic le s a n d c o m p a ra ti ve r e fl e ct io n o n e m b e d d e d re se a rc h . ( .b ) c a p e t o w n a n d m a lm ö . a ls o in s h e ffi e ld – m a n ch e st e r, k is u m u . r e le va n ce : g lo b a l. m ig ra ti o n a n d u rb a n d e ve lo p m e n t ( – ) g , k , s -m , s k ( ) o u tp u t d e fi n e d a t th e p ro je ct m e e ti n g in m a y . a d d re ss in g m ig ra ti o n a n d u rb a n iz a ti o n f ro m a n in te g ra te d t h e o re ti ca l p e rs p e ct iv e. ( .a ) p a rt ic ip a ti n g c it ie s/ co u n tr ie s, g e n e ra liz e d re su lt s o n a g lo b a l s ca le . u rb a n f o o d s e cu ri ty a n d v a lu e c h a in ( – ) g , k , s -m , s k ( + ) b u ild s o n e xi st in g p ro je ct s o n u rb a n fo o d s e cu ri ty a n d f o o d v a lu e c h a in s, a d d s va ri o u s co m p a ra ti ve e le m e n ts , e. g. a ro u n d e xa m in in g d if fe re n t co n ce p ts a n d m e th o d o lo g ie s u se d in d if fe re n t p ro je ct s/ ci ti e s. c o n tr ib u ti o n s to t h e o ry t h ro u g h p u b lic a ti o n s, a n d t o p o lic y m a ki n g t h ro u g h p o lic y b ri e fs a n d p o lic y w o rk sh o p s. a p p lie d f o o d p la n f o r g o th e n b u rg . n e w b u si n e ss m o d e ls f o r lo ca l p ro d u ct io n . ( . a n d .a ) p a rt ic ip a ti n g p la tf o rm s. g lo b a l r e le va n ce f o r th e o re ti ca l c o n tr ib u ti o n s. (c o n ti n u e d ) e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r p ro je ct (p ro je ct p e ri o d ) a ct o rs in vo lv e d (a ) (t yp o lo g y) (b ) a ct io n s ta ke n a im o f in te rv e n ti o n s (s d g t a rg e t) (c ) w h e re n e ig h b o u rh o o d tr a n sf o rm a ti o n a n d h o u si n g j u st ic e ( – ) g , s -m , s k ( ) p la n n in g f o r le a rn in g e xc h a n g e in b a se d o n a n in it ia ti ve in s h e ffi e ld . d e ve lo p e m p o w e ri n g a n d a ff o rd a b le m o d e ls fo r h o u si n g lo w -i n co m e u rb a n r e si d e n ts . p a rt ic ip a ti n g c it ie s – g o th e n b u rg , s h e ffi e ld , m a lm ö tr a n sp o rt a ti o n a n d u rb a n d e ve lo p m e n t ( – ) c t, g , k ( + ) w o rk sh o p s p la n n e d f o r , fi rs t in m a y. id e n ti fi ca ti o n o f th e m e s fo r th e c o m p a ra ti ve re se a rc h . ( . , . , .b ) p a rt ic ip a ti n g c it ie s, m e th o d s a n d e xp e ri e n ce s o f g e n e ra l i n te re st . s o lid w a st e m a n a g e m e n t ( – ) k , s k ( ) k n o w le d g e t ra n sf e r, re vi e w o f re le va n ce . c h a n g in g b e h a vi o u r, a tt it u d e s a n d co lla b o ra ti o n in t h e v a lu e c h a in . ( . ) te st b e d : k is u m u , k e n ya . r e le va n ce : p ri m a ri ly g lo b a l s o u th . u rb a n p u b lic f in a n ce ( – ) c t, k , c e n tr e ( ) r e se a rc h a ct iv it ie s, c ro w d fu n d in g co n fe re n ce in l o n d o n , a p ri l . p h d t h e se s a n d p u b lic a ti o n s. c a p a ci ty d e ve lo p m e n t a ct iv it ie s fo r o ffi ci a ls , e n a b lin g ci ti e s to r e th in k re ve n u e r a is in g a n d e xp e n d it u re p o rt fo lio s. e m p ir ic a l s tu d ie s in k is u m u a n d c a p e t o w n . r e le va n ce : g lo b a l a n d d iv e rs e. p h d c o lla b o ra ti ve p ro je ct ( – ) g , k ( ) d o ct o ra l r e se a rc h a n d w o rk sh o p s. p h d t h e se s a n d p u b lic a ti o n s, e va lu a ti o n s o f a ct io n r e se a rc h . c a p e t o w n , g o th e n b u rg , k is u m u . n o te s : (a ) c t= c a p e t o w n , g = g o th e n b u rg , k = k is u m u , s -m = s h e ff ie ld –m a n ch e st e r, s k= s kå n e. (b ) s e e s e ct io n i v. (c ) t h e s d g t a rg e ts a re l is te d a t h tt p s: // m e d iu m .c o m /s d g s- re so u rc e s/ sd g - -i n d ic a to rs - a b d c. ta b le ( c o n t in u e d ) https://medium.com/sdgs-resources/sdg- -indicators- a b dc t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e consequence and context, sage, london. . see reference ; also may, t and b perry ( ), reflexivity: the essential guide, sage, london; and voss, j p and p bornemann ( ), “the politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management”, ecology and society vol , no , pages – . . onyango, g m and b o obera ( ), “tracing kisumu’s path in the co- production of knowledge for urban development”, in m polk (editor), co-producing knowledge for sustainable cities: joining forces for change, abingdon, routledge, pages – . . anderson, p m l, m. brown- luthango, a cartwright, i farouk and w smit ( ), “brokering communities of knowledge and practice: reflections on the african centre for cities’ citylab programme”, cities vol , pages – . . see reference ; also anderson, p and t elmqvist ( ), “urban ecological and social-ecological research in the city of cape town: insights emerging from an urban ecology citylab”, ecology and society vol , no , article ; brown-luthango, m ( ), “community-university engagement: the philippi citylab in cape town and the challenge of collaboration in any large institution, but one that is magnified in transdisciplinary partnerships, is the difficulty of maintaining continuity, consistency and momentum in the face of ongoing changes in key personnel in one or more partners. a change in mayor, chief executive, or even line manager of a particular institutional representative can change priorities, power relations within and across partner institutions, political and/or financial support, or even enthusiasm to participate. new team members often raise new questions and may challenge previous decisions or have different priorities, and the renegotiations involved can be draining, even when there is agreement in principle to abide by previous decisions. another important lesson is that much depends on who the individual researchers are. it is essential to identify and recruit researchers who can straddle disciplines and bridge the divide between academia and policy/practice, since these are extremely difficult challenges and not everybody has the right skills, experience and personality. a related lesson is that different stakeholders often have diverse perspectives and conflicting agendas. people involved in transdisciplinary research need good facilitation skills (or need to be able to draw on people with good facilitation skills) as they attempt to reconcile these perspectives. experience from each lip shows that it is possible to have a significant impact on policy and practice through the transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge. for example, co-production processes that brought together different stakeholders in kisumu resulted in the planning of a range of physical upgrading projects for the city and the implementation of a number of significant initiatives, such as an ecotourism project.( ) several processes have also brought together officials and researchers to co-produce new policies, such as a new policy framework to guide state investment in human settlements in the western cape (where cape town is located) and a new climate change strategy for gothenburg. through exposing practitioners to a range of new perspectives, new “communities of knowledge and practice” have been created, with changes in the mindsets and actions of many practitioners.( ) a final key lesson is that there is no one right way of approaching the transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge. the method that works best can vary considerably from topic to topic and from place to place, depending on who the stakeholders are, how contested that particular issue is, and what the existing body of knowledge on that particular topic in that particular place is. the only commonality in our various transdisciplinary co-production processes was that they all involved extensive engagement over a sustained period of time with a range of stakeholders (especially city officials, academic researchers and civil society) to attempt to better understand and address the real challenges facing the city.( ) iii. the challenges of comparative transdisciplinary co-production a. reasons for comparing at the beginning of phase , muf sharpened its focus on how to transition towards sustainable cities, by suggesting comparative transdisciplinary research as a possible approach to tackle wicked problems( ) of urban e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r across boundaries”, higher education vol , no , – ; greyling, s, z patel and a davison ( ), “urban sustainability disjunctures in cape town: learning the city inside and out”, local environment: international journal of justice and sustainability vol , no s , pages – , available at https://doi.org/ . / . . ; patel, z, s greyling, s parnell and g pirie ( ), “co-producing urban knowledge: experimenting with alternatives to ‘best practice’ for cape town, south africa”, international development planning review vol , no , pages – ; patel, z, s greyling, d simon, h arfvidsson, n moodley, n primo and c wright ( ), “local responses to global sustainability agendas: learning from experimenting with the urban sustainable development goal in cape town”, sustainability science vol , no , pages – ; miszczak, s and z patel ( ), “the role of engaged scholarship and co-production to address urban challenges: a case study of the cape town knowledge transfer programme”, south african geographical journal vol , no , pages – ; smit, w, a de lannoy, r v h dover, e v lambert, n levitt and v watson ( ), “‘good houses make good people’: making knowledge about health & environment in cape town”, in b cooper and r morrell (editors), africa-centred knowledges: crossing fields and worlds, james currey, woodbridge, pages – ; and smit, w, m lawhon and z patel ( ), “co-producing knowledge for whom, and to what end? reflections from the african centre for cities in cape town”, in m polk (editor), co-producing knowledge for sustainable cities: joining forces for change, routledge, abingdon, pages – . . “wicked problems” are those complex, hard to define problems that do not lend themselves to simple, permanent technical solutions. . campbell, s ( ), “green cities, growing cities, just injustices. with the previous and diverse experiences from the set of secondary cities where the lip-involved stakeholders were already experienced in co-production, there was good potential also to contribute to knowledge about what constitutes a just city and how to achieve it in varying urban contexts. sustainable development is a contested term, and conflicts can appear in determining what might be a socially, economically and ecologically desirable urban condition.( ) the question of development for whom? emerges sooner or later. for all the research conducted within the centre (i.e. mistra urban futures), urban justice was an embedded objective. within the three broad themes of socio-spatial, socio- ecological and socio-cultural transformations, three core attributes were considered to characterize just and sustainable cities – namely that they should be fair, green and accessible.( ) since comparative transdisciplinary co-produced research has the potential to catalyse both new knowledge and new behaviours, this comparative component was introduced to extend the centre’s research as much as possible. existing comparative urban concepts such as twinning have already created comparative exchanges between city officials for mutual learning about, for example, planning mechanisms. city branding listings, where urban qualities such as liveability are measured to compete for the same group of investors, represent another form of comparison.( ) there is also a new wave of theoretically inspired comparative urban studies linked to debates about global urbanism.( ) but this trend largely omits decades of comparative research and does not engage with the methodological issues addressed here. indeed, comparing transnational research on how to realize just cities implies an agenda that cannot “belong” to the interest of any particular stakeholder group or practice only, nor to one single geographical context. all perspectives, conflicting as well as aligned, ultimately contribute to the production of a richer body of knowledge on what urban justice could look like, and how it might be imagined, operationalized and achieved. since each of the comparative projects has formulated its own rationale for comparison, deploying the typology of models of comparison as a structure (see section iv), mistra urban futures has set up an overall comparative project, entitled realising just cities. this project aims to produce meta-knowledge, considering how all the different comparative projects together create societal impact in terms of organizational changes and policy effects, along with changed social behaviours and societal visions, all contributing to the realization of just cities.( ) b. learning from comparative co-produced research as has been pointed out elsewhere within the work of muf,( ) different organizational setups contribute to different kinds of knowledge production. consequently, as part of a comparative learning process, the differing organizational project arrangements could also be compared, along with the different co-production methods applied at similar stages of the respective processes in the varying contexts. both these objectives would feed into the cross-context learning on how to achieve just cities. hierarchies that might exist in one context, and that could effectively prohibit deliberative co-production, might https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e cities: urban planning and the contradiction of sustainable development”, journal of the american planning association vol , article ; also simon, d (editor) ( ), rethinking sustainable cities: accessible, green and fair, policy press, bristol, available at https:// oapen.org/search?identifier= ;keyword=rethinking% sustainable% cities. . see reference , mistra urban futures ( ); also see reference , simon ( ). . for example, giap, t k, w w thye and g aw ( ), “a new approach to measuring the liveability of cities: the global liveable cities index”, world review of science, technology and sustainable development vol , no , pages – , available at https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/ d c/ a f eddb f d e e cba.pdf. . for example, robinson, j ( ) “cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture”, international journal of urban and regional research vol , no , pages – ; also robinson, j ( ), “comparative urbanism: new geographies and cultures of theorising the urban”, international journal of urban and regional research vol , no , pages – ; and schmid, c and brenner, n ( ) “towards a new epistemology of the urban?”, city: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action vol , nos – , pages – . . the project realising just cities includes comparative inquiries at each lip, examining lips’ role as active intermediaries and the importance of reflexivity in seeking to detect the so-called second- and third-order effects mentioned above. it includes further components than the comparative projects only, hence its full structural framework is not entirely relevant to describe in this context of comparative project methodology. . see reference , palmer and walasek ( ). be understood in light of shared experiences from other situations, where structures of power would take different forms. in this manner, the methods and organizational structures applied could develop and become more robust. this, in turn, would contribute further insights into transdisciplinary knowledge production and more sustainable processes of co-production. another objective underlying the comparative co-produced research is to mirror the way different problems are manifested in their respective local contexts in order to deepen our understanding of the problem at hand. highlighting differences or similarities, or embracing a diversity of knowledge cultures, allows for an expanded understanding of the problem – which a single context could not produce. in other situations, a crucial problem might be suppressed and hence become “nonexistent” within an agenda promoting urban justice. transnational comparative and co- produced research, with its multitude of stakeholders, could shed light on and highlight such an issue. a striking example is the way the #metoo movement, addressing the matter of silenced sexual abuse, has, through experimential knowledge and an international co-acknowledgement, been brought forward as a parallel to discourse in diverse contexts around the world. in muf’s comparative agenda, the current projects resulting from the previous three broad themes of socio-spatial, socio-ecological and socio-cultural transformations cover an urban ground of great variety – from food production to migration (table ). while using these different topic-lenses to understand how urban justice might be achieved, a further outcome would be to detect the direction and intensity of ongoing change in each local context. how change is taking place, and how it could be directed towards more just urban conditions through different vehicles of transformation, would be explored at a comparative meta level traceable across the full set of projects. here each context would provide valuable insights on mechanisms for transformation towards urban justice, and how they play out in relation to different citizen groups. co-produced research, unlike “traditional” research, has the advantage of already including some of the actors with planning roles or mandates (like city officials and councillors). this means that the research, in addition to pointing to evidence and results, actually becomes a catalyst itself, impacting behavioural changes as part of the research process (see section iva with respect to the centre’s project on the new urban agenda and sustainable development goals). with different stakeholders engaged in the comparative issue, conversations are generated from stakeholder to stakeholder across geographical contexts. in the process, the comparative issue becomes nested in a number of cross-national conversations that, however difficult to foresee, would undoubtedly impact each local environment. c. early assumed outcomes clearly, outcomes and impacts are difficult to specify at this early a stage in this ambitious programme, and can as yet merely be envisioned. however, this in itself is worth commenting on, since outcomes point towards an expansion of a research culture as such, which in itself is a transformative tool for societal change. the researchers and practitioners involved foresee https://oapen.org/search?identifier= ;keyword=rethinking% sustainable% cities https://oapen.org/search?identifier= ;keyword=rethinking% sustainable% cities https://oapen.org/search?identifier= ;keyword=rethinking% sustainable% cities https://oapen.org/search?identifier= ;keyword=rethinking% sustainable% cities https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ d c/ a f eddb f d e e cba.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ d c/ a f eddb f d e e cba.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ d c/ a f eddb f d e e cba.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ d c/ a f eddb f d e e cba.pdf e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r an extended research activity that will enable a joint space for discussion. the comparative issue is also envisioned as an “arena” into which different stakeholders are invited to test new thinking and where new knowledge could be produced. the lips have proved before to provide “safe spaces” for non-traditional research practices (see section ii). ultimately this exploration and production of knowledge will broaden the bases for decisions and for policies and new research to follow. iv. early experiences in comparative transdisciplinary knowledge co-production at the start of phase of muf, we developed a typology of six possible models of how comparative transdisciplinary knowledge co-production could take place across multiple cities: ) local projects retrofitted: where existing research projects on a particular theme in different cities need some retrofitting, or perhaps just a specific comparative “add-on”, to facilitate drawing conclusions about that particular theme from multiple contexts. ) local projects replicated: where particular successful projects initiated in individual cities have been, or are intended to be, replicated in other cities, thus opening up possibilities for cross-city comparison. ) trans-locally clustered comparative research projects: developing new clusters of projects by topic across multiple cities to produce new knowledge and insights. ) internationally initiated projects with local co-production: internationally conceived through co-design, with co-production undertaken by local teams in each city (but with central coordination). ) international projects with trans-local co-production: where completely trans-local teams work across cities. ) phd studentships linked to co-production processes: this can take the form of either students from one city doing research on another city in collaboration with local students, or students doing comparative research on a number of cities. this model is distinct from types – in that, as the projects are led by phd students, the project also includes an educational element. these models provide a spectrum of central versus diverse local design and implementation, and were intended to help us in planning for the comparative projects in phase of muf. it was resolved at the outset not to be prescriptive or proscriptive. so examples of several models were expected to emerge according to the nature of the initial impetus in each case, the subject matter and degree of diversity or uniformity in relevant local projects, and the number of lips participating in each theme. the foci for the comparative research have emerged from an iterative process of negotiation among the lips and secretariat. this negotiation sought to ensure overall coverage of the three broad themes into which the phase research agenda on realising just cities has been divided (socio-spatial, socio-ecological and socio-cultural transformations), along with the cross-cutting “core processes” of urban change, urban knowledge and urban governance (figure ). t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e the lips discussed potential comparative projects of mutual interest and engaged on an opt-in basis. as explained in section iii above, comparative studies operate mainly by comparing locally prioritized projects in each participating city in terms of thematic foci, the respective research processes, outputs, outcomes and broader impacts, using systematic frameworks. however, one of the projects constitutes a single two-city comparative study. hence, the initial expectation of a diversity of comparative models has been borne out in that examples of five of the categories ( – and ) are currently being carried out. it is only the fifth category (international projects with trans-local co-production) that turned out to be unfeasible given budgetary and capacity limitations, as everybody in the project team for these projects would need to spend a significant amount of time in every city involved. not only would this be prohibitively expensive, but most researchers, especially from non- academic partners, would have difficulty in getting a leave of absence for the extended periods required. two of the comparative projects (table ) have been adopted by consensus as universal, in which all lips are participating, and these represent different comparative models. the more advanced project at this stage is a centrally designed but locally adapted and implemented project on how the respective cities engage with and implement (or not) un-habitat’s new urban agenda (nua) and the sustainable development goals (sdgs), and especially the urban sdg (goal ). this project also involves muf’s new project-focused partnerships in shimla (india) and buenos aires (argentina). this project is outlined briefly in section iva. f i g u r e diagram of mistra urban futures’ research themes and core processes related to co-production of knowledge e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r . https://www. mistraurbanfutures.org/en/ project/food-value-chain. . jernsand, e-m and h kraff ( ), “collaborative phds: new approaches, challenges and opportunities”, chapter in h palmer and h walasek (editors) ( ), co-production in action, mistra urban futures, gothenburg, pages – , available at http:// www.mistraurbanfutures. org/en/annual-conference/ conference-book. . for example, clarke, s e ( ), “emerging research the second universal project, entitled realising just cities (deliberately echoing the name of the phase research framework), involves reflexive research by each lip team regarding how its diverse activities and projects are advancing muf’s core objectives of urban sustainability and justice. as such, it represents a kind of meta-learning process rather than a specific comparative project type. the other comparative project themes are food value chain and consuming urban poverty; solid waste management; cultural heritage and the just city; participatory cities; migration and urban development; transportation and urban development; socially sustainable neighbourhoods; urban public finances; knowledge transfer programme; and phd collaborations. each comparative project has different origins and numbers of participating lips. for instance, the comparative food research cluster has grown out of several comparative food projects involving the african centre for cities/cape town lip and kisumu lip, including the consuming urban poverty and the hungry cities partnership, so considerable comparative quantitative and qualitative research work had already been undertaken in those projects.( ) the focus has been broadened somewhat to accommodate other lips, particularly the gothenburg lip and sheffield–manchester lip, where interests focus on allotment cultivation and augmentation of urban food supply; urban commoning; active engagement of refugees with agricultural skills and the need to earn livelihoods; and reduction of food miles. these therefore represent a trans-locally clustered comparative project, which, along with solid waste management, constitutes the social-ecological theme of the centre’s research. public finance is currently the smallest comparative project, having grown out of a comparative phd project comparing the municipal financial systems in the cities of cape town and kisumu. malmö may still join this project to add a european dimension. the model based on transnational phd collaboration has its very successful forerunner in a model set up with special funding from sida, as a mutual learning process between phd students at the gothenburg and kisumu research platforms. the four swedish and three kenyan phd students, together with their supervisors, co-developed an innovative but complex learning and research process. this had both cross-national co- production, as a basis for some of the phd projects, and cross-national comparison and learning among the phd students themselves, in the form of common seminars, courses, exchanges, etc. besides the development of the seven theses, the participants and tutors have also been developing reflexive work on the process itself.( ) taken together, these projects and their themes represent a good amalgam of the respective lips’ particular local priority projects and broad coverage of the realising just cities agenda. reassuringly, they also correspond well to emerging comparative research themes identified in the literature.( ) a. profile of the nua/urban sdg project the sustainable development goals (sdgs), with the dedicated urban goal (sdg ), and the new urban agenda represent an acknowledgement https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/project/food-value-chain https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/project/food-value-chain https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/project/food-value-chain http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book http://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/annual-conference/conference-book t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e agendas in comparative urban research”, paper presented to the political studies association annual conference, edinburgh, available at https://www.researchgate. net/profile/susan_clarke / publication/ _ emerging_research_agendas_ in_comparative_urban_ research/links/ e ae c b f c/ emerging-research-agendas- in-comparative-urban- research.pdf. of the critical role of cities in achieving sustainability. both the sdgs and nua will require the engagement of local governments and citizens to be successful. muf started a comparative project in mid- to follow and support the understanding, engagement and implementation of these two global agendas at the city level. the project includes seven cities from small to medium size, including all of muf’s lips (cape town, gothenburg, kisumu, malmö and sheffield), plus shimla in india and buenos aires in argentina through new partnerships with the social enterprise nagrika and the new school’s observatory on latin america, respectively. the project, which falls under model of the typology described in section iv, was conceptualized and designed centrally, which included a guiding framework, timeline and deliverables. a local researcher (or group of researchers) has been appointed in each city to co-produce the research by involving city officials and other city actors in adapting and implementing the project locally. analyses and outputs are being prepared for each city and also comparatively with the involvement of team members from all cities. at least two workshops with representatives from all cities are also planned to facilitate cross-city learning. transdisciplinary co-production is taking shape uniquely in each city. in gothenburg, for example, the researcher has been integrated into a group of public officials at the city executive board (stadsledningkontoret), tasked with assessing how the sdgs relate to the city’s ongoing activities and how to integrate them into the city’s operations. the group and other city departments adapted the project’s guiding framework to map how relevant the sdgs are to the city’s budget and main strategies, and how the city’s current budget goals and strategies can contribute to the sdgs. the executive board mapping exercise resulted in a report that was presented and approved by the elected executive board and was, at the time of writing, being presented to the city council for approval. in cape town, an agreement has been signed between the city and the university of cape town to embed a researcher into the city’s organisational policy and planning department to engage and work directly with city officials on adapting these agendas. in shimla, the municipal corporation agreed to be part of the project as long as it can be connected to and complement its current smart city and disaster risk reduction and resilience programmes. in buenos aires, the team of researchers has set a working plan with the general directorate of strategic planning of buenos aires city government, the office in charge of the sdgs, where tasks are divided between the researchers and city officials, and later reviewed in monthly meetings. in kisumu, a working team has been formed, which involves researchers and city and county officials. officials from the national level (kenya national bureau of statistics and the ministry of planning and devolution) are participating in meetings with the local working team three times a year. a crucial ingredient in all cities is to find a champion, or preferably a group of key actors, who see the potential benefit in engaging with these agendas. a challenge, however, is determining how to anchor the project so that it survives political cycles and associated potential shifts in priorities and power relations. in kisumu and shimla, for example, the start of the project was delayed due to elections and changing key staff. with or without formal agreements, key personnel changes create the need for familiarization anew and accommodation to possible changing https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r . for example, house of lords ( ), “engaging the public”, chapter in third report of the house of lords select committee on science and technology, available at https://publications.parliament. uk/pa/ld /ldselect/ ldsctech/ / .htm. . responsible research and innovation (rri) is an approach developed by the european union for collaboration during the entire research and innovation process. when researchers, citizens, policymakers, industry and societal organizations work together on the research, the process and outcomes are better aligned with the values, needs and expectations of society. as such, rri can be seen as a wide umbrella, covering different aspects of the relationship between research and innovation and society: public engagement, open access, gender equality, science education, ethics, and governance. https://ec.europa. circumstances within one or more institutions. in malmö, contractual issues delayed the start of the local research and thus co-production arrangements were set up later. in sheffield, where the municipality has not yet started to engage actively with these agendas, setting up a co- production team is more challenging. thus the first step consisted of raising awareness about what these agendas can contribute to city planning, in an effort to galvanize a willingness to participate in the project. a key ingredient of the comparative element of the project is monthly virtual meetings so that the local researchers can share experiences not only on what their cities are doing regarding the sdgs and the nua, but also on methodological challenges and opportunities in carrying out co- production with actors with different levels of awareness and engagement in these global agendas. v. the role of “engagement” in comparative research the nature of muf’s formal city-based institutional partnerships reflects the ambition to undertake rigorous research that addresses locally defined problems of urban sustainability, as identified by some or all of the partners. following directly from this is a commitment to engaging all participating partners throughout the research, reflecting on the research practice as a learning process, and maximizing the overall value and both institutional and wider societal impacts of the research. the term “engagement” has been used for about two decades in the field of science communication.( ) it covers a wide range of activities undertaken to expand and improve the relationship between research and the public – hence the term “public engagement” – as well as diverse other relationships between researchers and policymakers, politicians, industry leaders, activists and ngos, and professionals in public administration, not least urban planning and development. it is about creating trust and mutual learning and benefits for those involved, but also to reach wider audiences and achieve larger impact. as such, “engagement” is also closely related, for instance, to the european union’s efforts to open up science through responsible research and innovation (rri).( ) engagement is crucial to comparative co-produced projects that span two or more local research platforms. bringing together a range of stakeholders, understanding the common issue(s), designing and supporting the co-production of knowledge, and implementing the results for mutually beneficial outcomes and impacts requires support in terms of ongoing communication, events, activities and encouragement. thus, “engagement”, as part of the process of mutual learning and ownership, has to be built into the design and implementation process of each comparative project. this should be done as needed if the co-production work encounters difficulties, e.g. in understanding each stakeholder’s professional reference frameworks or in representing the actual knowledge produced in a way that is beneficial for all parties. this includes the necessity of representing the same body of knowledge in different ways: through academic articles as well as blog posts, policy briefs, reports, events and social media entries. furthermore, a transnational dimension needs to be included as an additional perspective, almost certainly also https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld /ldselect/ldsctech/ / .htm https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld /ldselect/ldsctech/ / .htm https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld /ldselect/ldsctech/ / .htm https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon /en/h -section/responsible-research-innovation t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e eu/programmes/horizon / en/h -section/responsible- research-innovation; https:// www.rri-tools.eu/about-rri. . see reference , simon and schiemer ( ); also darby, s ( ), “making space for co-produced research ‘impact’: learning from a participatory action research case study”, area vol , no , pages – . implying different engagement and communication approaches that are centrally coordinated. engagement as a key component of the comparative projects is expressed in different ways, depending on context and project objectives and design. the following examples illustrate the diversity: •• the culture and urban development project, investigating how culture and cultural activities can contribute to realizing just cities, aims at adding to the existing theoretical work and academic discourses, as well as shaping the debate and narratives on culture and development. for the latter part, tools and instruments like policy briefs, film and video clips, podcasts and collation of exemplars will be used to engage with stakeholders and other groups. •• the urban food chain project is investigating how urban–rural linkages and food distribution can be used as levers for social inclusion and sustainable development. it encourages the development of digital tools for engagement and participation, such as wikis for community contributions, apps and maps for easier access to food chains, and distribution services and digital platforms that are self- sustaining in the longer term and accessible for everyone with a smartphone. •• the urban public finance comparative project is exploring a growing field of interest – the local funding of infrastructure and other investments in sustainable urban development. novel elements include extensive local-level scanning of innovative initiatives and programmes, including public funding and public finance architecture as well as crowdfunding and “neighbourhood” finances. engagement models and tools will be developed to include the concerns and needs of the cities taking part, but also of the communities, neighbourhoods, citizens and other stakeholders. because of the novelty of comparative research using transdisciplinary co-production, the mistra urban futures projects may also contribute significant experiences and knowledge within the field of engagement in transdisciplinary and collaborative processes. this, in turn, contributes to the ability to determine downstream societal impact, a particularly challenging task with all the complexities and uncertainties inherent in transdisciplinary co-production and sustainability research.( ) vi. discussion and conclusions all international comparative research is challenging, but attempting to undertake it in countries in both the global north and south adds a challenge since relative priorities may differ considerably. for example, in relation to food, reducing obstacles for informal retailers and dealing with the implications of supermarketization are priority issues in the global south, whereas the priority food issues in the global north are about enhancing local production of healthy food and reducing the consumption of unhealthy foods, as well as cutting transportation distances. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon /en/h -section/responsible-research-innovation https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon /en/h -section/responsible-research-innovation https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon /en/h -section/responsible-research-innovation https://www.rri-tools.eu/about-rri https://www.rri-tools.eu/about-rri e n v i r o n m e n t & u r b a n i z a t i o n v o l n o o c t o b e r . see reference ; also simon, d, d mcgregor, k nsiah- gyabaah and d thompson ( ), “poverty elimination, such challenges are amplified when the global comparative research is undertaken using transdisciplinary co-production rather than conventional academic research teams that to a greater or lesser extent share epistemological and methodological understandings, despite often-profound differences in institutional, resourcing and local contextual circumstances, practices and power relations. groups of transdisciplinary co-production teams seeking to compare locally defined and appropriate projects and research processes within the same research theme in each participating lip face several additional internal and external challenges. some of these challenges reflect the locally specific nature of transdisciplinarity in each lip, while others pertain to possible differences in the numbers of partners undertaking the co- production, the particular methods used, differences in the nature of the respective empirical projects, and power differentials both within and across the respective research teams. this does not mean there is no role for comparative research or that the challenges outweigh the benefits of such endeavours. it just calls for a different approach, focusing on understanding the different perspectives and methodologies in different contexts, and making those understandings a core of the research process and outputs. here we suggest five distinct but overlapping categories of challenge and opportunity, comprising combinations of internal and external elements: ) project narratives: while the different projects in the participating lips match each other thematically, their empirical foci often differ and they might have different origins. while in some cases, cross- lip comparison formed part of the logic from the start, in others, comparative work was not part of the initial project narrative. it may be difficult in rewriting the project rationale to motivate participants to undertake this expanded mission. comparative work inevitably adds to overall complexity and effort, for benefits that may be uncertain, especially in terms of feedback and tangible local gains. at the same time, the empirical foci and methodologies in one lip can serve as inspiration in another and form the basis of the comparison. ) time: time constraints increase in complexity and extent when many partners are involved in one location, and even more for international comparative research. academic, public-sector, civil society (ngo) and private-sector partners operate with different calendars, budget cycles, time pressures and degrees of flexibility over their timetables. in a north–south comparative context, differences in annual calendars, workloads, the adequacy of salary levels, facilities and infrastructure, performance and assessment criteria can prove challenging both for the same kinds of stakeholders and across stakeholder groups. for instance, collective teamwork between swedish and kenyan phd students was hampered by such differences, with the kenyans having to juggle research and thesis writing on top of fulltime academic posts, while swedish students were able to devote far more of their working time to their studies.( ) setting up clear and realistic goals that can adapt to local constraints, as well as planning in advance the expected times for engagement between the international t r a n s d i s c i p l i n a r y c o - p r o d u c t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e north-south research collaboration and the politics of participatory development”, development in practice vol , no , pages – . . see reference , darby ( ); also see reference , simon et al. ( ). . see reference ; also see reference , simon et al. ( ). partners, may not eliminate these challenges but may reduce misunderstandings and facilitate collaboration. ) funding: different funding sources have different durations, stipulations about the extent of paid employment required or permitted, and demands on results. while common co-funding from a large multi-year programme, such as muf, is invaluable in enabling work on a common agenda, it cannot fully overcome the kinds of often-sharp differences outlined in these paragraphs. the contemporary requirements by funders and some host institutions to demonstrate direct downstream or societal impact within specific timeframes are particularly challenging in inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research.( ) ) culture and power: cultures of decision making (hierarchies, traditions, gender relations, levels of formal educational attainment, attitudes to age differences and the like) and communication (formal and interpersonal communication, different forms of knowledge, methods of interpretation and ways of knowing, the ability and willingness to have a voice in research team discussions) differ considerably across and within countries and regions. indeed, these dimensions are intertwined, complex, and often implicit and subtle, making actual change difficult to engender in practice, even when all agree it is appropriate.( ) yet failure to bridge such differences could reduce the value and quality of both the outputs and processes of mutual learning. these differences require careful and respectful exploration, discussion and resolution, with mindfulness of asymmetrical power relations. beyond these principles of good practice, and making use of any institutional codes of ethics, anti-discrimination and harassment policies and the like, there is no simple toolkit for addressing such entrenched and often-emotive issues. if all else fails, existing complaints procedures have to be used as frequently and strongly as possible as a way to address issues. ) governance: the outputs and outcomes of transdisciplinary comparative work are subject to expectations of different kinds, based not only on the actual setups of the respective projects themselves but also on the relevant governance structures of the participating organizations and institutions in each lip. the same work may be assessed very differently when the focus is usability in the local context, and when it is analytical depth and diversity. to address this concern, research teams may need to produce outputs and interventions in different formats for the respective institutions and audiences, both in any one location and across the research locations. finally, all this underscores the importance of effective ongoing engagement throughout each project’s life in order to address the needs and priorities of often-diverse participating organizations, and to maximize the effective external communication and dissemination of outputs and outcomes to different stakeholder groups and 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https://orcid.org/ - - - warren smit https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae c b f c/emerging-research-agendas-in-comparative-urban-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/susan_clarke /publication/ _emerging_research_agendas_in_comparative_urban_research/links/ e ae 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organizations face risky legal and financial consequences stemming from a single sexual harassment event. the purpose of this study was to verify that the sexual harassment, as perceived by female employees, significantly affects their levels of psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior to investigate the moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment in the causal relationship. first, this study found that perceived sexual harassment has a negative impact on the female employees’ psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. this study’s results also demonstrated that psychological distress has a positive impact on workplace deviant behavior. additionally, the influence of perceived sexual harassment on psychological distress increased when the employees’ psychological detachment was weak. finally, limitations and future research directions are also discussed. keywords: sexual harassment; psychological distress; deviant behavior; organizational silence; psychological detachment; female employee; deluxe hotel . introduction sexual harassment, which is one symptom of social discrimination that occurs when a person becomes subject of unwanted sexual debate, gesture, or action, is presently a critical problem and at the center of attention throughout many organizational environments [ ]. the current #metoo movement raised the public’s awareness of the problem of sexual harassment that women experience within organizations. the movement not only captured the possibility of sexual harassment’s omnipresence within daily workplace functions but also made it clear that people should not be silenced [ ]. today, organizations face risky legal and financial consequences stemming from a single sexual harassment event [ ]. although research on workplace sexual harassment is closely related to psychological health disorders, current longitudinal research on this relationship is scarce. in particular, people working in an environment that involves strong social interaction and stress, such as deluxe hotels, are exposed to excessive psychological distress [ , ]. due to this type of stressful working environment [ ], circumstances of workplace harassment inside such organizations are often specifically silenced [ , ]. for this reason, creating an environment in deluxe hotels where sexual harassment does not occur is a very important factor that can determine the success or failure of the organization. despite this importance, there is scarce prior study related to this issue. therefore, this study examines whether the perception of sexual harassment among female employees causes psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior, as well as investigates the moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment in the causal relationship (figure ). int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . a proposed model of sexual harassment, psychological distress, workplace deviant behavior, organizational silence, and psychological detachment. . literature review and conceptual model . . sexual harassment in the hospitality sector although there is an insufficient amount of academic research regarding sexual harassment in the hospitality industry, the topic has long been a subject of interest within the industry and by researchers. according to eller [ ], the extent of sexual harassment in the hotel industry is not completely clear, as hotel employees experience relatively more cases of sexual harassment than other general workers, with most of the harassment coming from coworkers. gilbert et al. [ ] stated that, among diverse types of harassment, sexual harassment can have a fatal impact on the victim, decrease the individual’s morale, and seriously affect their efficiency. they argued that the problem of sexual harassment is particularly important in the hospitality industry and that the issue should be clearly discussed throughout hiring procedures. in a study that investigated restaurant employees, weber et al. [ ] argue that it is reasonable to say that sexual harassment is more widespread in the restaurant industry because circumstances that can be regarded as sexual harassment in other industries are often not treated as sexual harassment in the restaurant industry. theocharous and philaretou [ ] believe that many cases of sexual harassment remain unreported in the hospitality industry. according to their study, sexual harassment not only causes direct financial threat and loss to the victims, female employees, but also seriously damages their future career, such as delaying promotion and loss of income. yusuf and anuar [ ] suggest that inhumane relationships with coworkers or supervisors, as well as aggressive words from them, are the most frequently observed conflict in the hotel industry. vettori and nicolaides [ ] introduced the peril of sexual harassment in the hospitality industry and suggested policies that managers should provide to maintain a safe and ethical working environment. li et al. [ ] cited that employees’ perceived sexual harassment negatively influences their customer-oriented service behavior and its influence increases when the interpersonal relationship is sensitive. figure . a proposed model of sexual harassment, psychological distress, workplace deviant behavior, organizational silence, and psychological detachment. . literature review and conceptual model . . sexual harassment in the hospitality sector although there is an insufficient amount of academic research regarding sexual harassment in the hospitality industry, the topic has long been a subject of interest within the industry and by researchers. according to eller [ ], the extent of sexual harassment in the hotel industry is not completely clear, as hotel employees experience relatively more cases of sexual harassment than other general workers, with most of the harassment coming from coworkers. gilbert et al. [ ] stated that, among diverse types of harassment, sexual harassment can have a fatal impact on the victim, decrease the individual’s morale, and seriously affect their efficiency. they argued that the problem of sexual harassment is particularly important in the hospitality industry and that the issue should be clearly discussed throughout hiring procedures. in a study that investigated restaurant employees, weber et al. [ ] argue that it is reasonable to say that sexual harassment is more widespread in the restaurant industry because circumstances that can be regarded as sexual harassment in other industries are often not treated as sexual harassment in the restaurant industry. theocharous and philaretou [ ] believe that many cases of sexual harassment remain unreported in the hospitality industry. according to their study, sexual harassment not only causes direct financial threat and loss to the victims, female employees, but also seriously damages their future career, such as delaying promotion and loss of income. yusuf and anuar [ ] suggest that inhumane relationships with coworkers or supervisors, as well as aggressive words from them, are the most frequently observed conflict in the hotel industry. vettori and nicolaides [ ] introduced the peril of sexual harassment in the hospitality industry and suggested policies that managers should provide to maintain a safe and ethical working environment. li et al. [ ] cited that employees’ perceived sexual harassment negatively influences their customer-oriented service behavior and its influence increases when the interpersonal relationship is sensitive. . . model development and hypotheses . . . relationship between sexual harassment and psychological distress sexual harassment is unwanted sex-related behavior inside an organization, which makes the victim feel offended, exceeds the individual’s coping resource, and/or threatens the individual’s int. j. environ. res. public health , , of well-being [ ]. here, not only is unwanted physical behavior included but also unwelcomed verbal and nonverbal sexual behavior [ ]. psychological distress refers to a psychological condition that is characterized by negative thoughts and feelings related to anxiety, fear, or depression [ ]. many studies exist that investigate perceived sexual harassment in organizations and psychological distress. richman et al. [ ] displayed that sexual harassment can exceed the coping resource of the subject of harassment and cause negative psychological behavior. willness et al. [ ] reported that sexual harassment occurring within an organization can damage physical and psychological health as well as cause posttraumatic stress disorder. among the studies related to sexual harassment and psychological distress, nielsen and einarsen ( ) stated that sexual harassment perceived in an organization contributes to the psychological distress of female employees and further argue that organizational measures on this issue can relieve the mental distress. nielsen et al. [ ] showed that all types of harassment occurring in the workplace, including sexual harassment, increase the members’ psychological distress. in a study that used college students as the sample population, mcginnley et al. [ ] demonstrated that psychological distress increases as a result of sexual harassment and that the experience is highly likely to keep affecting the victim into the future. kim et al. [ ] reported that sexual harassment experienced by female soldiers in the army negatively impacts their mental health and its influence persisted for a considerable amount of time after their discharge from duty. wolff et al. [ ] explained that sexual harassment can pose a negative influence on health and showed that sexual harassment also positively affects the symptoms of psychological distress, such as depression and anger. o’neil et al. [ ] argued that sexual harassment and other types of sexual violence that occur inside the workplace provide psychological stress to the victims even after removal of the threat. martinko et al. [ ] also suggested abusive supervising as a cause of psychological distress among subordinate employees. based on these prior studies and further empirical evidence, this study proposes that sexual harassment increases employees’ psychological distress as follows: hypothesis (h ). perception of sexual harassment positively influences employees’ psychological distress. . . . relationship between psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior deviant behavior is voluntary action that violates serious organizational norms by which well-being and performance of both the organization and its members are threatened [ ]. spector and fox [ ] stated that because work-related pain or stress causes negative emotion, it induces the members to commit actions that harm the organization itself. omar et al. [ ] said that stress experienced inside an organization, including negative emotions, such as frustration and irritation, positively affects the members’ deviant behavior. many studies demonstrated that psychological pain, or stress experienced in a work environment, is the major cause of diverse types of deviant behavior [ , ]. nasurdin et al. [ ] reported that strong psychological distress increases the possibility that employees become tense, take impulsive action, and show less tolerance towards other people, which is a demonstrated form of deviation. similarly, vigoda [ ] argued that work-related pain induces employees’ aggressive behavior. saleem et al. [ ] explained how psychological distress coming from abusive supervisors makes the employees leave the organization. roxana [ ] described how stress factors in workplace are controlled by the environment inside the organization and that the pain or stress linked to the members’ behavior acts against the organization. aube et al. [ ] suggested that psychological well-being, which is an opposite concept of psychological distress, decreases the employees’ counterproductive behavior and that existence of the counterproductive behavior can damage the employees’ psychological health. therefore, this study assumes the following: hypothesis (h ). employees’ psychological distress positively influences their workplace deviant behavior. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . . relationship between sexual harassment and workplace deviant behavior appelbaum et al. [ ] stated several reasons why a member of an organization deviates and that sexual harassment is one of the important causes of such behavior. popovich and warren [ ] argued that sexual harassment and organizational counterproductive behavior is an inseparable relationship, and that sexual harassment is the most fundamental motivation for inducing counterproductive behavior in an organization. ahmad and omar [ ] reported that rude physical contact from a boss, which is not sexual harassment, increases the possibility that the employee acts in a manner that does harm to the organization. tangem [ ] cited sexual harassment as one of the most important reasons for unproductive workplace behavior and that it causes the strongest counterproductive behavior among female employees. solakoglu et al. [ ] explained that the experience of sexual abuse is strongly related to the possibility of being involved in most types of the deviant behaviors. zhu et al. [ ] demonstrated that sexual harassment in workplace has a strong and positive relationship with deviation in the workplace and further argued that the relationship strengthens when depression occurs. similarly, merkin and shah [ ] found that respondents who experienced sexual harassment had a higher turnover intention and rate of absenteeism compared to the respondents without such an experience. salman et al. [ ] suggested that sexual harassment and turnover intention are closely related. therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: hypothesis (h ). perceptions of sexual harassment positively influence workplace deviant behavior. . . . moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment organizational silence makes some employees extremely indifferent and unconcerned. therefore, indifferent employees mean those who are uninterested in their work, employer, or quality of the work [ , ]. psychological detachment refers to the work-related experience of when the individual is psychologically “switched off” [ ]. no prior study investigates organizational silence and psychological detachment as a variable that moderates negative influence from perceived sexual harassment on employees. among the studies related to the moderating role of organizational silence, fernando and prasad [ ] described the harmful effect of a silencing atmosphere with evidence that the silencing organizational atmosphere, which makes victims unable to reveal their dissatisfaction, prevents the sexual harassment from being expressed outside of the organization. elçi et al. [ ] showed that organizational silence, or the atmosphere that allows harassment, increases employee turnover intention. jain [ ] investigated factors that cause silence from an aspect of interpersonal relationship and reported that the silence increases when a vertical hierarchical relationship with a supervisor continues. zahed [ ] argued that social harassment that employees experience from coworkers or a supervisor in an organization causes employee silence within the organization. huang et al. [ ] also explained how a negative relationship with an impersonal and rude supervisor is one of the important causes of employee silence. mao et al. [ ] demonstrated that organizational silence caused low performance and low organizational citizenship behavior, which eventually made highly unproductive behavior predictable. based on these results, this study assumed that the negative effect of the employees’ perceived sexual harassment on their psychological distress and counterproductive behavior increases when it is accompanied by organizational silence. hypothesis (h ). organizational silence moderates the effect of sexual harassment on psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. among the studies related to the moderating role of psychological detachment, vogel and mitchell [ ] argued that the positive influence of a supervisor’s abusive behavior on turnover intention, not the perceived sexual harassment, decreases as a result of employee psychological detachment. burris et al. [ ] reported that psychological detachment from the organization diminishes the possibility of leaving the organization. sonnentag et al. [ ] explained that psychological detachment int. j. environ. res. public health , , of experienced in an organization is important because it induces low levels of psychological fatigue and creates time for recovery. safstrom and hartig [ ] found that psychological detachment plays an intervening role between work requirement and life satisfaction. chen et al. [ ] cited psychological detachment as a negative influence on counterproductive behavior and mediates the influence of work demand on counterproductive behavior. tong et al. [ ] demonstrated that psychological detachment experienced inside an organization becomes one of the stress factors that negatively influences employees’ counterproductive behavior and reduces the harmful effect of psychological stress factors on employees’ performance and well-being. empirical evidence proves that increased experience of psychological detachment diminishes stress response, such as job burnout [ ]. based on these results, this study assumed that the effect of employees’ perceived sexual harassment on psychological distress and deviant behavior decreases when there is appropriate psychological detachment. hypothesis (h ). psychological detachment moderates the effect of sexual harassment on psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. . research methodology . . sample and data collection the sample for this study consisted of female employees working in deluxe hotels (five-star hotels) located in seoul, south korea. among deluxe hotels located in seoul, the researcher chose of the hotels that agreed to participate in the survey. the sample was restricted to female employees working in the food and beverage department because many previous studies reported that women are relatively more exposed to sexual harassment situations than men. after the researcher provided sufficient explanation of the purpose and methodology of the study, the subjects, who voluntarily decided to participate in the survey, wrote answers to the questionnaire on a separately prepared space. the researcher reminded responders that the collected data will be used for research purposes only and that it will remain confidential. for even distribution of the extracted samples among the hotels, copies of the questionnaire were distributed to each of the hotels, utilizing the convenience sampling method. at each meeting, the participants received a five-dollar coffee coupon for completing the survey. a total of questionnaires were distributed, among which copies were received. we conducted final analysis on responses ( . %). prior to the main analysis, the researcher implemented data screening and analyzed descriptive statistics to verify whether the normality assumption was satisfied. the mean age of the employees was . (± . ) years, and . % were between and years old. additionally, their education levels were found as primarily college ( . %) and university degree ( . %), and . % worked in a deluxe hotel for less than years. in addition, job position was indicated as part-time employee ( . %) and full-time employee ( . %). . . instrument development the questionnaire consisted of six parts. the first part contained questions about the participants’ demographic information (e.g., age, education, and tenure. the second part requested employees to rate their overall perception of sexual harassment. to measure employees’ perceptions of sexual harassment, this study utilized an adapted multi-item scales by fitzgerald et al. [ ] and a modified set from li et al. [ ]. to measure each item, the researcher utilized items and a -point scale: “how much do you agree or disagree with these statements?” ( : strongly disagree to : strongly agree). the third and fourth parts of the survey focused on employees’ psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. the researcher used items based on those developed by kessler et al. [ ] and birkeland et al. [ ] to measure employees’ psychological distress, while measuring workplace deviant behavior with items developed by bennett and robinson [ ]. in addition, the researcher measured organizational silence, which was used as a moderating variable in this study, with four questions based on dasci and cemaloglu [ ]. the researcher measured the employees’ psychological int. j. environ. res. public health , , of detachment with four items based on those developed by sonnentag and bayer [ ] and sonnentag and kruel [ ]. for all measurement items, the questionnaire, originally written in english by brislin [ ], was translated into korean, and two bilingual experts reverse-translated the questionnaire into english. afterward, they examined whether the meaning of the measurement questions differed between the two language versions three times. then, the researcher implemented the main survey after checking for any ambiguity in the survey questions through a preliminary test. . . data analysis we utilized the spss program (version , spss inc., chicago, il, usa) for demographic analysis, reliability analysis, and correlation analysis of the measurement items. in order to examine the validity of the measurement items, the researcher employed the amos program. the spss program analyzed the demographic characteristics of the respondent, descriptive statistics, reliability, and correlation. the researcher then applied the two-step approach using amos, first assessing the fitness of the measurement model, then the entire model was considered [ ]. next, the researcher conducted confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to test the validity of the measurement item, with the structural equation modeling (sem) used to check the hypothesis. a multi-group analysis (mga) tested the moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment. . results . . measurement model in the analysis results, the skewness ranged between − . and + . , and the kutosis ranged between − . and − . , which implies that the normality is satisfied. all measurement items had a z-score between − and + , indicating the absence of a univariate outlier problem. kline [ ] and hair et al. [ ] reported that skewness and kutosis ranging between − and + allows normal distribution. therefore, it is proof that the probability of a univariate outlier in this study data is minimal [ ]. this study identified convergent validity, discriminant validity, and nominal validity to verify the validity of the measurement items. we examined convergent validity, discriminant validity, and nomological validity to verify construct validity (tables and ). additionally, we conducted cfa, which is a method of analyzing the structural effectiveness of the collected measurement variables before investigating the causal relationship of a developed theoretical model. as shown in table , cronbach’s alpha ranged between . and . , and ccr exceeded . in all cases, indicating satisfaction of the approval criteria [ , ]. furthermore, the standardized coefficient of all measurement items was over . , and the result was significant at . level [ ]. the overall fitness of the model was excellent (χ = . ; df = ; χ /df = . ; gfi = . ; cfi = . ). the square root of the coefficient of all measurement items ( . ~ . ) was smaller than ave ( . ~ . ). ave showed a higher value than asv and msv, thus confirming discriminant validity. table . confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. construct standardized estimate t-value corrected item-total correlation ccr a cronbach’s alpha sexual harassment . sh . fixed *** . . sh . . . sh . . . sh . . . sh . . . sh . . . int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . cont. construct standardized estimate t-value corrected item-total correlation ccr a cronbach’s alpha psychological distress . ps . fixed . . ps . . . ps . . . ps . . . workplace deviant behavior . wdb . fixed . . wdb . . . wdb . . . wdb . . . wdb . . . organizational silence . os . fixed . . os . . . os . . . os . . . psychological detachment . pd . fixed . . pd . . . pd . . . pd . . . note: a ccr = composite construct reliability; standardized estimate = β-value; χ = . (df = ) p < . ; χ /df = . ; goodness of fit index (gfi) = . ; normed fit index (nfi) = . ; tucker lewis index (tli) = . ; comparative fit index (cfi) = . ; incremental fit index (ifi) = . ; root square error of approximation (rmsea) = . ; root mean square residual (rmr) = . ; *** p <. . table . correlation analysis and discriminant validity tests. construct ave asv msv mean ± sd . sexual harassment . . . . . . . . ± . . psychological distress . . . . . . . . ± . . workplace deviantbehavior . . . . . . . . ± . . organizational silence . . . . . . . . ± . . psychological detachment − . − . − . − . . . . . ± . note: ave = average variance extracted; asv = average shared variance; msv = maximum shared variance; boldface type are significant at p < . ; italic type are presented in squared correlation; sd = standard deviation; all items were measured on a -point likert scale from -strongly disagree to -strongly agree. . . structural equation modeling we analyzed the relationship among the variables assumed in this study using sem. table presents the standardized path coefficient of the relationship of the structural equation model and t-value [ , ]. the structural model fit was good (χ = . ; df = ; χ /df = . ; gfi = . ; nfi = . ; cfi = . ; rmr = . ; rmsea = . ). hypothesis , which assumed positive relationship between the perceived sexual harassment and psychological distress, was supported (β = . ; t = . ; p < . ). hypothesis was also supported, as the perceived sexual harassment showed positive impact on workplace deviant behavior (β = . ; t = . ; p < . ). hypothesis , which assumed that psychological distress gives positive influence on workplace deviant behavior, was supported as well (β = . ; t = . ; p < . ). this result demonstrates that people who perceived sexual harassment inside an organization show psychological distress, which consequently increases the possibility of employee action that does harm to the organization. in consideration of hypotheses and , the researcher additionally tested the indirect effects of perceived sexual harassment on workplace int. j. environ. res. public health , , of deviant behavior by the bootstrap and sobel test. in the test results, the perceived sexual harassment showed a partial mediating effect on workplace deviant behavior through psychological distress (point estimate = . , p < . , z–score = . ). the result proves the importance of the role that psychological distress plays in the impact of perceived sexual harassment on workplace deviant behavior. furthermore, we conducted multi-group analysis to examine whether the atmosphere of organizational silence and psychological detachment reduces the negative influence of the perceived sexual harassment. when using organizational silence as a moderating variable, no moderating role of organizational silence was observed in the causal relationship between sexual harassment and psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. therefore, hypothesis was rejected (table ). however, the influence of perceived sexual harassment on psychological distress showed different results in the case of psychological detachment. the weaker the psychological detachment was, the stronger the influence of the perceived sexual harassment on psychological distress. therefore, hypothesis was partially supported (table ). table . structural estimates model. hypothesized path (stated as alternative hypothesis) standardized coefficients t-value results h (+) sexual harassment → psychological distress + . + . *** supported h (+) psychological distress → workplace deviant behavior + . + . *** supported h (+) sexual harassment → workplace deviant behavior + . + . *** supported goodness-of-fit statistics χ (df = ) = . (p < . ) χ /df = . gfi = . nfi = . cfi = . rmr = . rmsea = . note: ( ) gfi = goodness of fit index; nfi = normed fit index; cfi = comparative fit index; rmr = root mean square residual; rmsea = root mean square error of approximation; *** p < . . ( ) mediating role of psychological distress. indirect effect: sexual harassment→psychological distress → workplace deviant behavior point estimate: + . *; bias-corrected bootstrap % ci: . (ll); . (ul) aroian version of the sobel test: z = . *. table . moderating effects of organizational silence. high− organizational silence (n = ) low− organizational silence (n = ) unconstrained model chi-square (df = ) constrained model chi-square (df = ) ∆χ (df = ) standardized coefficients t-value standardized coefficients t-value sexual harassment → psychological distress . . ns − . − . ns . . . ns sexual harassment → workplace deviant behavior . . *** . . *** . . . ns note: χ /df = . ; gfi = . ; nfi = . ; tli = . ; cfi = . ; ifi = . ; rmsea = . ; *** p < . ; ns not significant. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . moderating effects of employees’ psychological detachment. high− psychological detachment (n = ) low− psychological detachment (n = ) unconstrained model chi-square (df = ) constrained model chi-square (df = ) ∆χ (df = ) standardized coefficients t-value standardized coefficients t-value sexual harassment → psychological distress . . * . . *** . . . * sexual harassment → workplace deviant behavior . . *** . . *** . . . ns note: χ /df = . ; gfi = . ; nfi = . ; tli = . ; cfi = . ; ifi = . ; rmsea = . ; * p < . , *** p < . , ns not significant. . discussion and implications . . discussion and theoretical implications this study examined the effect of sexual harassment perceived by female employees in deluxe hotels on their psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior, as well as investigated the moderating effect of organizational silence and psychological detachment that diminishes its negative influence. first, this study found that perceived sexual harassment has a negative impact on the female employees’ psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior. this result is consistent with the existing literature [ , , , ]. it implies that employees undergo psychological distress when they experience sexual harassment inside an organization, which further increases the possibility of conducting deviant behavior within the workplace. this study’s results also demonstrated that psychological distress has a positive impact on workplace deviant behavior, confirming the outcome of earlier studies [ , ]. the employees who underwent psychological distress were more likely to voluntarily exhibit behaviors contrary to those benefiting the organization. furthermore, the influence of perceived sexual harassment on psychological distress increased when the employees’ psychological detachment was weak [ , ]. this result implies that psychological detachment, where work-related experience is switched off, relieves the negative influence of sexual harassment. this study systematically examined sexual harassment that female employees in deluxe hotels perceive and investigated the organic causal relationship between psychological distress and deviant behavior. the purpose was to provide a theoretical base for research on sexual harassment in deluxe hotels. although relevant studies used general companies as a sample, there is a limited number of sexual harassment-related studies that investigate psychological distress or deviant behavior among female employees in deluxe hotels. in this context, this study has significant meaning as an early-stage study that examines the variable of sexual harassment, which exerts absolute influence on the psychological distress and negative deviant behavior from diverse aspects. in particular, employees working in deluxe hotels have intense psychological distress due to interaction with diverse members of the organization. the emotional pain and deviant behavior experienced by employees is of central importance because they are factors that determine a hotel’s competitiveness and job effectiveness. thus far, however, organizations continue to consider sexual harassment as the deviant behavior of certain individuals with personal problems. with consideration of the current situation, this study has a significant meaning for the observation of the negative influence of sexual harassment. this study also has significant meaning as early research on new variables that can relieve the negative influence of sexual harassment by examining the moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment, which have not been examined thus far. unethical behavior that occurs in a workplace, such as sexual harassment, is an important problem that not only decreases the quality of life of an individual employee but also is directly connected to organizational performance. in regard to this point, this study provides the following practical int. j. environ. res. public health , , of implications. an organization should recognize the harmful impact of sexual harassment and make arduous efforts to prevent and solve the problem. the study showed that psychological distress increased, and deviant behavior is largely affected when employees perceived sexual harassment in an organization. for effective management of sexual harassment at an organization level, employers should provide victim-oriented policies so that victims can report an event and testify without fear of retaliation from assailants, including supervisors and coworkers. all institutionalized factors that can cause sexual harassment in an organization’s work environment should be sought out and removed. through an internal report system, these behaviors should be criminalized, and strict guidelines put in place. specific guidelines include the following: establishing clear standards that show an example of sexual harassment, flagging the danger of sexual harassment with a prevention videos or promotion program, and creating a department in charge of managing a sexual harassment problem. considering that psychological detachment can relieve the negative influence of sexual harassment to a certain point, organizations need to provide employees with an opportunity for psychological detachment that focuses on a recharging and recovering experience. with a chance to recharge personal resources, the victim will be able to escape from the psychological distress that results from sexual harassment. instead of simply being away from the work environment, or not performing work, subjective factors are needed that can make the individual feel that they are able to detach from the environment itself [ ]. organizations should encourage not only psychological detachment in the employee’s personal life outside of the workplace, such as taking leave or a vacation, but also psychological detachment and recovery in work-related spaces inside the organization, such as break times and lunch [ ]. based on these results, the researcher, with a long-term perspective, expects this study to contribute to discovering ways to establish practical policies in deluxe hotels regarding sexual harassment. . . limitations and future research this study has several limitations. first, this study’s results come from a sample that consisted of korean employees, which poses a restriction on the generalization of the study’s results. second, the self-report method was used to measure the perception of sexual harassment, psychological distress, workplace deviant behavior, and organizational silence, and psychological detachment, which could have made the subjects respond in a manner they believed to be desirable. therefore, more objective measurement tools should be chosen in future studies. third, workplace deviant behavior was used as a final dependent variable in this study. in the future, variables that reflect the organizational performance should be employed. fourth, although organizational silence and psychological detachment were moderating variables in this study, exploration of new variables that can moderate the negative influence of sexual harassment is also necessary. additional research that investigates the relationship between diverse independent variables that can affect the organizational environment where sexual harassment can occur, and the dependent variables are necessary in the future. author contributions: h.s.j. and h.h.y. contributed equally to this work. all the authors contributed to the conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, writing of the original draft, and review and editing. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: for hyo sun jung, this work was supported by a grant from kyunghee university in (khu- ). conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . burn, s.m. the psychology of sexual harassment. teach. psychol. , , – . 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jvb. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /bs http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /fpsyg. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /apps. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s basp _ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /bf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	literature review and conceptual model 	sexual harassment in the hospitality sector 	model development and hypotheses 	relationship between sexual harassment and psychological distress 	relationship between psychological distress and workplace deviant behavior 	relationship between sexual harassment and workplace deviant behavior 	moderating role of organizational silence and psychological detachment 	research methodology 	sample and data collection 	instrument development 	data analysis 	results 	measurement model 	structural equation modeling 	discussion and implications 	discussion and theoretical implications 	limitations and future research 	references science magazine post date • october s c i e n c e sciencemag.org w e have heard from readers with concerns about the publication of the letter “harass- ment charges: injustice done?” (a. moya et al., august, p. ). at science, we take harassment issues very seriously. we are working to develop policies that adhere to our editorial principle of airing a wide range of perspectives and that also prevent causing further harm to the targets of harassment. publication of a letter does not represent an endorsement by the editorial staff at science. past practice has been based on the understanding that reader-submitted letters are intended to reflect conversations taking place in the scientific community. the pub- lished letter in question did that by raising concerns about the transparency of the investiga- tory process. this point touched on the challenges institutions face when de-termining how the processes and outcomes of harassment investigations should be shared, decisions that must weigh the bene-fits of transparency against important priva-cy concerns. however, the letter also dis-cussed the personal conduct and scientific accomplishments of the individual found guilty of harassment. in the future, we will not publish letters in which authors argue that an individual accused or found guilty of harassment is likely innocent because others have inter-acted with that per- son without incident; this argument is logically flawed. in addi-tion, although some informa- tion about a per-son’s scientific achievements is at times nec-essary to establish context, we will not pub-lish letters in which authors argue that pro-fessional achievements have any bearing at all on the likelihood that the individual en-gaged in harassment. such arguments not only lack relevance to harassment behavior but also may result in further harm to the targets of harassment and exacerbate the al-ready daunting process that targets face in coming forward publicly. we are striving to increase our under-standing of all facets of the issue of harass-ment and to review and modify our editorial processes accordingly. jeremy m. berg editor-in-chief editor’s note: harassment policy . /science.aav post date october o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ august • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o : ia n p a r k e r harassment charges: enough himpathy we are well into the #metoo era, yet journal- ists and editors are still fixated on the harasser’s fall from grace rather than the detrimental effect of sexual harassment on the victims and our society as a whole. the news story “prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding” (m. wadman, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) reinforces a familiar toxic narrative: the accomplishments of the harasser hold more value to science than women’s right to a safe workplace. this is now so commonplace that it has been dubbed “himpathy” ( ). in the news story, wadman tells us all about the “eminent” professor, from his scientific accomplishments to his personal hobbies. he did “pioneering” and “ground- breaking” work, he donated money to the university, and he was president of aaas (the publisher of science). however, we do not hear about the pioneering work of the women he harassed at university of califor- nia, irvine (uci). from a graduate student to a tenured professor to an assistant dean, the news story reduced the women who demanded an end to his misconduct to complainers. we are told that ayala was just being “european” and his actions were mis- understood; instead, the narrative should focus on the many women and careers that suffered from ayala’s actions. wadman then chose to end the article by quoting an ayala supporter who diminished the investigation. edited by jennifer sills letters the same himpathy sentiments return in the follow-up news in depth story “report details harassment by famed biologist” (m. wadman, july, p. ). words matter, and science should wield its words and influence carefully. it is time to recognize that harassers have taken a substantial toll on the advancement of science. it is time to acknowledge that sexual harassment in all its nefarious forms puts an unquantifiable burden on the victims (many of whom are our colleagues). it’s time to believe women. jane zelikova, kelly ramirez,* jewel lipps, on behalf of women scientists leadership women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: k.ramirez@nioo.knaw.nl reference . k. manne, down girl (oxford univ. press, ). . /science.aau harassment charges: journalists’ role as a woman in science, i find the report- ing of allegations against francisco ayala (“#metoo complaints fell noted geneticist,” m. wadman, news in brief, july, p. ) deeply troubling. the title implicates the “complaints” or “complainers” as respon- sible for the resignation, as opposed to the actions of the accused or the impartial sexual harassment investigation. the term “complaint” gives the impression that the alleged victims have minor grievances as opposed to serious reports of scientific misconduct. not only is this title biased against whistleblowers, it is also factu- ally incorrect, as the first allegations of harassment were allegedly made years before the resignation. i assert that the investigation, not the allegations, caused the accused to resign. jessica duffy department of biology, midwestern state university, wichita falls, tx , usa. email: jlduffy @my.mwsu.edu . /science.aau harassment charges: injustice done? we are deeply concerned by the way in which our friend and colleague professor francisco ayala has been forced to resign from the university of california, irvine (uci), after being accused of sexual harass- ment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation). the charges that have been raised against him have had appall- ing consequences. those of us who are well acquainted with professor ayala know that he is an honorable person, who throughout his career has treated his friends, co-workers, and students in a respectful, egalitar- ian way. his lifelong commitment to teaching, research, and outreach on bio- logical evolution has won him worldwide recognition. he has been a generous bene- factor to the university of california and throughout his fruitful career has opened new fields of biological research, pro- moted mutual respect and independence uci decided to remove francisco ayala’s name from the science library after he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ between evolutionary studies and religious perspectives, played a key role in several major scientific organizations, and helped many spanish-speaking female scholars and hispanic students, in particular, both in the united states and throughout the world. from the available information, it appears that the inquiry conducted by uci lacked genuine due process, fair- ness, and full transparency. we urge uci to acknowledge the possibility that its sanctions against professor ayala were enacted in haste and to reopen the case and investigate the matter more thor- oughly. we understand the wish of both the institution and professor ayala not to unduly prolong this whole unhappy episode. it is equally important, however, that justice be done and be seen to be done. if carried out properly, uci could help devise a more successful model for how institutions should deal with such situations in the future. devising an improved procedure for these cases would earn everyone’s gratitude. andrés moya and additional authors* institute of integrative systems biology, university of valència, valència, spain, and foundation for the promotion of health and biomedical research of valència region (fisabio), valència, spain. email: andres.moya@uv.es *the full list of authors is available online. s u p p l e m e n ta ry m at e r i a l s full list of authors www.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . /suppl/dc . /science.aau harassment charges: metoo but due process the resignation of eminent biologist francisco j. ayala amid charges of sexual harassment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) has left ayala’s home campus deeply divided. the controversy highlights problems in the way universities currently address charges of sexual harass- ment. because the university of california, irvine (uci), failed to post easily acces- sible guidelines on how the ayala case was handled, especially how and by whom final decisions were made, many uci faculty are concerned that the university overreached, imposing a punishment not commensurate with the specific charges of wrongdoing. a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment should include clearly stated procedures to protect due process and ensure propor- tional responses to wrongdoing. i will not engage in the ugly nastiness of “he said, she said” as we debate the veracity of accusations described in sala- cious detail (“report details harassment by famed biologist,” m. wadman, news in depth, july, p. ). these are human tragedies evolving in front of us. victims strive to regain lost self-esteem, along with justice. the accused wrestle with shock, forced to confront their own cluelessness at shifting mores, and everyone realizes how vulnerable we all are, including adminis- trators struggling to figure out how best to fairly confront sexual harassment and gender equality. we are all at risk when goodwill and communications break down. to fairly and equitably strike a balance between complacency and overreaction, i recommend three procedures to help achieve the notoriously difficult goal of changing attitudes toward gender. first, we must do more to foster a university climate that takes seriously and protects potential targets, be they male or female. part of that is recognizing that even subtle forms of verbal behavior—i.e., jokes or comments about appearance—make some women and minorities uncomfortable. yet resulting deferential treatment can contribute to a climate in which women or minorities are treated differently. even- tually, this subtle, differential treatment can foster continuing inequality. second, we must insist that legally correct poli- cies and procedures are followed when charges of sexual harassment are made. these procedures need to be transpar- ent and the same for all faculty. policies should be written in prose that even nonlawyers can understand and posted in obvious places, with regularly sched- uled discussion forums designed to help educate all members of the university community. third, the punishment must fit the crime. if tasteless, off-color jokes and the kind of ambiguous “unwanted touching” of which ayala was accused warrant his public humiliation, what do we do with more serious charges of sexual harassment? and why is hana ayala pun- ished for her husband’s acts by having her name removed from gifts to uci? the #metoo movement has done a great service in opening up an area too long taboo. but the failure to follow clearly es- tablished, fairly administered, and trans- parent procedures can too easily produce witch hunts that cast doubts on legitimate charges of sexual harassment. this will set back the move toward gender equality, in the academy and in society at large. kristen renwick monroe department of political science, university of california, irvine, irvine, ca , usa. email: krmonroe@uci.edu . /science.aau insights | l e t t e r s sciencemag.org s c i e n c e step up your job search with science careers • access thousands of job postings • sign up for job alerts • explore career development tools and resources search sciencecareers.org published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ harassment charges: journalists' role jessica duffy doi: . /science.aau ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ <cce eae f e e > issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № УДК . . + ’ . doi: . / - x- - - - ÃËÀÂÍÛÅ ÑËÎÂÀ ÃÎÄÀ: ÑÒÐÓÊÒÓÐÍÎ-ÔÓÍÊÖÈÎÍÀËÜÍÀß È ÑÎÖÈÎËÈÍÃÂÈÑÒÈ×ÅÑÊÀß ÕÀÐÀÊÒÅÐÈÑÒÈÊÀ Едличко А. И. Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова , г. Москва, Ленинские горы, д. , Российская Федерация Аннотация. Целью работы является социолингвистический анализ ключевых слов, кото- рые отбираются в рамках ежегодной акции «Слово года» („wort des jahres“) в немецкоя- зычных странах. Приводится краткая информация об истории проекта и о существующих лингвистических подходах в исследовании данной лексической категории. В результате дискурсивного анализа номинантов на слова года даются их тематическая, структурно- функциональная и социолингвистическая характеристики с учётом плюрицентричности немецкого языка. В процессе исследования лексических единиц обнаруживаются общие и специфические черты с позиций диатопической вариативности немецкого языка, а так- же раскрываются области функционирования слов в диастратической и диафазической языковых подсистемах. Анализ структуры лексем позволяет выявить не только совре- менные словообразовательные тенденции, но и социокультурные факторы, которые вли- яют на доминирование конкретного словообразовательного типа. Ключевые слова: слово года, немецкоязычные страны, социолингвистика, плюрицен- тричность key words of the year: structural, functional, and sociolinguistic characteristics a. edlichko lomonosov moscow state university leninskie gory, moscow , russian federation abstract. the article focuses on the sociolinguistic analysis of the words of the year in german- speaking countries. the history of the project “word of the year” („wort des jahres“) and lin- guistic approaches to the study of this lexical category are described. the thematic, structural, functional and sociolinguistic characteristics of various categories of the words of the year are given in the light of the pluricentricity of the german language. the study of lexemes has shown that they have common and specific features in the viewpoint of the diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic variation of the german language. the structural analysis of these words demon- strates modern word-formation trends, and helps understand the socio-cultural factors of the dominance of a particular word-formation type. keywords: word of the year, german-speaking countries, sociolinguistics, pluricentricity © cc by Едличко А. И., . issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № Введение Известно, что итоги года подводят как невербально, так и вербально. Со- циолингвистическая акция «Слово года» (нем. wort des jahres), один из способов подведения знаковых со- бытий года, – это явление, которое постепенно становится международ- ной традицией и вызывает интерес не только специалистов в области языка, но и представителей других гумани- тарных направлений. Актуальность и интернациональ- ность проекта способствуют тому, что названные категории исследуются на материале русского [ ; ], немецко- го [ ; – ; ], английского [ ; ], а также в сопоставлении двух и более языков [ ; ; ]. Разноплановость лингвистических категорий и большое количество номинаций позволяют применять различные лингвистиче- ские подходы к изучению слов года: структурный, этимологический, линг- вокультурный, дискурсивный, когни- тивный, социолингвистический, линг- водидактический и др. [ ; ; ; ; ]. Примечательно, что такая лексика ста- новится объектом диссертационных исследований, где подчёркиваются её неологический характер и лексикогра- фический потенциал [ ]. В связи с этим актуальность на- стоящего исследования обусловле- на потребностью всестороннего из- учения различных лингвистических единиц акции «Слово года». Целью работы является структурно-функци- ональный и социолингвистический анализ номинантов на слова года: лек- сем, словосочетаний, предложений. Задачи охватывают круг вопросов, связанных с освещением истории про- екта «Слово года» в немецкоязычных странах (Германии, Австрии, Швей- царии, Лихтенштейне, Люксембурге) и регионах (Южном Тироле, Саксо- нии и др.), выявлением используемых лингвистических подходов для анали- за исследуемых единиц, тематической, частеречной и функциональной ха- рактеристикой лексем, определением социолингвистического статуса раз- личных лингвистических категорий с учётом плюрицентричности немецко- го языка. Научная новизна заключает- ся в выявлении универсального и на- ционально-специфического в лексике, включённой в акцию «Слова года» в странах и регионах немецкой речи, с позиций диатопического, диастрати- ческого и диафазического варьирова- ния немецкого языка. Методика ис- следования включает такие методы, как дискурсивный и структурный ана- лиз, а также элементы социолингви- стического и статистического анализа. Исследование структурных, семанти- ческих и прагматических особенно- стей различных лингвистических ка- тегорий, включаемых в акцию «Слово года», не только позволяет выявить их социолингвистическую специфику, но и определяет теоретическую и прак- тическую значимость работы. Слова-ключи и акция «Слово года» Лингвистические символы года не- редко называют ключевыми словами. Ещё в -х гг. Р. А. Будагов, анализи- руя художественные произведения, го- ворил о самостоятельности проблемы «слов-ключей, или ключевых слов» [ , с. ] не только в отношении семасио- логии, но и в отношении конкретного языка. При этом он рассматривал та- кие ключевые слова, как стилистиче- скую категорию в пределах (кон)тек- issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № ста художественного произведения, и соотносил их «с эпохой, с одним из стилей языка данной эпохи, с одним из авторов, с одним из сочинений упомя- нутого автора и т. д.» [цит по: , с. ]. В работе поднимались вопросы не только о жанровом выделении слова (в терминологии Р. А. Будагова – «вы- делимости слова»), но и о принципах, мотивах и последствиях общеязы- ковой «выделимости слова в лексике определенной эпохи» [ , с. ]. Учёный писал, что ключевые слова «становятся характерными признаками самой дан- ной эпохи и переступают, таким обра- зом, за пределы чисто лингвистических ассоциаций» [ , с. ]. Значимость клю- чевых слов для определённой культуры иллюстрируется в дальнейшем в тру- дах других авторов [ ; ]. Организаторы конкурса подчёр- кивают социальное значение проек- та, указывая на выбор «слов и фраз, которые особым образом определя- ли политическую, экономическую и общественную жизнь года» . Лингви- сты отмечают, что с помощью анали- за «языков[ой] жизн[и] социума» [ , с. ] возможно определить приори- тетные направления общественного развития в конкретном календарном периоде времени. Считается необязательным, что- бы слово возникло именно в год про- ведения конкурса, во внимание при- нимаются известность и частотность использования слова, оно должно ука- зывать на положительную динамику в развитии страны или на основные проблемы. Также акцентируется вни- См.: wort des jahres // gesellschaft der deut- schen sprache (gfds): [сайт]. url: https://gfds. de/aktionen/wort-des-jahres (дата обращения: . . ). мание на том, что довольно часто слова года помогают гражданам критически осмыслить социополитические собы- тия. Этим можно объяснить наличие собственных конкурсов в странах с разными национальными варианта- ми определённого плюрицентричного языка [ , с. ]. Выбранные лексемы не только отражают особенности по- литического дискурса, но и влияют на восприятие политиков обществом [ ]. Рассматривая слова и антислова года как элемент формирования «язы- ковой хроники» общества [ , s. ], исследователи не отрицают, что вы- бор ключевых (анти)слов может по- ниматься как один из видов рефлексии на текущие социальные события и на развитие языка или национального ва- рианта в рамках критики языка. Учё- ными также делается акцент на боль- шем вкладе акции «Анти-слово года» в развитие языковой культуры обще- ства (по сравнению с конкурсом «Сло- во года») [ , s. ] и влиянии проекта на коммуникацию в рамках различных дискурсов [ , с. ]. Краткая история проекта «Слово года» в немецкоязычных странах и регионах Выбор главного слова года прохо- дит практически на всех континентах: во многих европейских государствах, в России, США, Австралии, Японии и др., – можно определённо сказать, что эта социолингвистическая тенденция носит международный характер. Воз- никновение и развитие проекта свя- зывают с Германией, где в г. впер- вые было выбрано слово года, однако регулярный характер акция приобрела лишь с г. С г. рейтинг слов публикуется в журнале „der sprach- issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № dienst“ Общества немецкого языка . Общество выбирает слова, которые лингвистически отражают политиче- скую, экономическую и социальную жизнь в Германии по версии жюри и на основе народного голосования, следовательно, при выборе таких слов всегда присутствует субъективный фактор. При этом подчёркивается не- обходимость вовлечения в данный проект нелингвистов-носителей язы- ка, т. е. во внимание принимается важ- ность «непрофессионального взгляда на язык» (laienhaft e sprachbetrachtung) [ , s. ]. Вследствие этого упомяну- тые проекты неоднократно обвиняли в том, что их результаты дают иска- жённую информацию о языке. Одна- ко, по мнению австрийского лингвиста Х. Пфандля, слово года по своей при- роде не может быть объективным: его появление – всегда творческий про- цесс, а выбор производится людьми с учётом собственных пристрастий [ , с. ]. В г. к проекту присоединяет- ся Австрия (факультет германистики университета Карла-Франца в г. Грац). Известный австрийский социолинг- вист, глава конкурса Р. Мур объясняет появление этой акции в Австрии тем фактом, что выбранные в Германии слова нередко касались её внутрен- ней политики, и многие австрийцы не отождествляли себя с такими событи- ями, а иногда даже не понимали слов, называющих их [ , s. ]. Подобные проекты были запущены и в других немецкоязычных странах и регионах: Лихтенштейне (с по гг.), не- См.: wort des jahres // gesellschaft der deut- schen sprache (gfds): [сайт]. url: https://gfds. de/aktionen/wort-des-jahres (дата обращения: . . ). мецкоязычной Швейцарии (с г.), в Италии – в Южном Тироле (с по гг.), Люксембурге (в г). С г. отбор слов, неологизмов и фраз года проводится и на нижнене- мецком языке (plattdeutsch), а с г. в Саксонии с целью поддержки саксон- ского диалекта выбираются исчезаю- щие, популярные и самые красивые слова. С г. по инициативе Швей- царской федерации глухих (schweize- rischer gehörlosenbund) начался выбор жестового слова года в немецкоязыч- ных кантонах Швейцарии. Для нагляд- ности приведём систематизированные данные о проведении акции в странах немецкой речи и немецкоязычных ре- гионах (см. табл. ). Как показывают данные в таблице , инициаторами акции являются не только лингвистические объединения (языковые факультеты университе- тов, лингвистические сообщества), но и непрофессиональные организации (газеты, фонды, музеи и т. д.). В боль- шинстве стран акция носит системати- ческий характер уже не один десяток лет, но есть и разовые проекты, как, например, в Люксембурге. Конкурсы в разных государствах включают как одинаковые номинации (слово – анти- слово – фраза года), так и присущие только конкретной стране (например, англицизм года – в Германии, топоним года – в Австрии, диалектное слово, пресс-релиз года – в Лихтенштейне и Швейцарии, слово года на жестовом языке – в Швейцарии и т. д.). Значимая роль экономики подчёркивается тем, что в Германии и Австрии фондовы- ми биржами выбираются антислова в сфере биржевой торговли. Современный немецкий язык пред- ставляет собой негомогенную систему, issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № Таблица Выбор слова года в немецкоязычных странах и регионах № Год нача-ла акции Страна / Регион Кто выбирает Номинации . г. Германия Общество немецкого языка Дюссельдорфская фон- довая биржа − Слово года ( г., с г. – регулярно); − Антислово года (с г.); − Молодёжное слово (с г.); − Фраза года (с г., кроме – гг.); − Англицизм года (с г.); − Лучшее заимствованное слово ( г.). − Антибиржевый термин года (с г.). . г. Германия, ниж- ненемецкий язы- ковой ареал (plattdeutsch) Земельный союз Ме- кленбург-Передняя Померания и Литера- турный музей Фрица Рейтера − Слово года (с г. по н. вр. – ежегодно, с по гг. – один раз в два года); − Неологизм года /актуальное слово (с г., кроме – , гг.); − Выражение/пословица (с г., кроме – , гг.). . г. Австрия Университет Карла- Франца Венская фондовая биржа − Слово года (с г.); − Антислово года (с г.); − Фраза года (с г.); − Антифраза года (с г.); − Молодёжное слово (с г.); − Топоним года ( , гг.); − Слово полувека ( г.). − Антибиржевый термин года (с г.). . г. Лихтенштейн Бюро «Слово года» и международный клуб прессы Лихтенштейна − Слово года ( – гг.); − Антислово года ( – гг., кроме г.); − Фраза года ( – гг.); − Диалектизм года ( , , гг.); − Цифра года ( , гг.); − Сокращение года ( , гг.); − Пресс-релиз года ( , , гг.). Данные приведены по материалам сайтов организаций, которые занимаются проведением названной акции в разных немецкоязычных странах и регионах и освещают результаты проекта: gesellschaft für deutsche sprache (url: https://gfds.de); oewort. das Österreichische wort des jah- res (url: http://www.oedeutsch.at/oewort); liechtensteiner vaterland online (url: https://www.va- terland.li); luxemburger wort (url: https://www.wort.lu); wort des jahres schweiz (url: https://www. zhaw.ch/de/linguistik/wort-des-jahres-schweiz); schweizerischer gehörlosenbund (sgb-fss) (url: https://www.sgb-fss.ch); ilse bähnert stift ung (url: https://tom-pauls-theater-pirna.de/ilse-baehnert- stift ung/kurz-vorgestellt-ilse-baehnert-stift ung); wort des jahres // wikipedia (url: https://de.wikipedia. org/wiki/wort_des_jahres) и др. issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № объединяющую национальные стан- дарты в Германии, Австрии, Швей- царии, а также различные формы су- ществования – литературный язык, диалект, разговорный язык. Важным представляется тот факт, что акция «Слово года» с г. проводится на одном из миноритарных языков Гер- мании – нижненемецком, и вот уже в течение лет выбираются слова на саксонском диалекте. Тематически отобранная лексика на данных иди- омах не имеет политической направ- ленности, а относится скорее к быто- вой сфере. Так, главным словом года в г. на нижненемецком (plattdeut- sches wort des jahres) стало hartpuckern (herzklopfen ‘сердцебиение’), актуаль- ным словом – лексема ankiekbook (fa- cebook ‘Фейсбук’), фразой года – stroh fast, kiek weit und röög di! (steh fest, schau weit und mach was! досл. ‘Стой прочно, смотри вдаль и делай что-нибудь!’). На саксонском диалекте (sächsisches wort des jahres) акция включала в г. четыре номинации: ) красивое слово года (schönstes wort des jahres) – be- schmuh (täuschung, schwindel, betrug ‘обман, афера’); ) слово, находящееся под угрозой (bedrohtestes [sächsisches] wort des jahres) – dorwiern (qungeln, nerven ‘нервировать’); ) самое люби- мое слово года (beliebtestes wort des jahres) – friemeln (fummeln, etwas mit- einander verbinden, zusammenhänge ver- knüpfen ‘связывать’); ) ругательство года (schimpfwort des jahres) – diggni- schl (dickkopf ‘упрямец’). № Год нача-ла акции Страна / Регион Кто выбирает Номинации . г. Швейцария (не- мецкоязычн.) Цюрихский университет прикладных наук Швейцарская федерация глухих − Слово года (с г.); − Анти-слово года ( – гг.); − Фраза года ( – гг.); − Пресс-релиз года ( г.); − Диалектизм года ( г.); − Неологизм года ( г.); − Молодёжное слово года ( – гг.); − Финансовое слово года ( , гг.). − Жестовое слово года (с г.). . г. Южный Тироль (Италия) Институт профессио- нальной коммуникации и многоязычия eurac и Свободный университет г. Боцен − Слово года ( – гг.); − Антислово года ( – гг.); − Фраза года ( г.). . г. Саксония Фонд Ильзе Бэнерт и факультет германисти- ки Технического ун-та Дрездена − Самое красивое слово (с г.); − (Саксонское) слово, находящее- ся под угрозой (с г.); − Самое популярное/любимое слово (с г.); − Ругательство года ( г.). . г. Люксембург Газета „luxemburger wort“ − Слово года ( г.); − Антислово года ( г.); − Фраза года ( г.). Окончание таблицы issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № Языковые тенденции, характерные для слов года в немецкоязычных странах С социолингвистической точ- ки зрения интерес представляют не только слова-победители, но и все слова-номинанты, которые входят в рейтинговую десятку «Слов года». В структурном отношении наблюдается тенденция к использованию разного типа аббревиатур: aids, sms, pisa- schock (programme-for-international- studies-assesment-schock), yolo (you only live once) и др. Список слов года продолжают не только антислова, со- кращения и фразы года, но и значимые цифры года. Так, в г. в Лихтен- штейне в результате подсчётов таким важным статистическим символом стало число , указывающее на общее количество человек, получив- ших гражданство княжества с по гг. (включая проживающих в стране иностранца и граждан княжества, живущих за границей). Это составляет более трети современного населения страны . Интересной представляется цифро- вая номинация , занявшая третье место в списке слов года Швейцарии в г. « » – название написанной на швейцарском немецком песни, ко- торая стала хитом летом г. В пес- не рассказывается о любви молодого «regenwassergebühr» ist das wort des jahres // liechtensteiner vaterland online. . . . url: https://www.vaterland.li/liechtenstein/ver- mischtes/regenwassergebuehr-ist-das-wort-des- jahres;art , (дата обращения: . . ). См. текст песни на швейцарском не- мецком: songtext // songtexte: [сайт]. url: https://w w w.songtexte.com/songtext/lo-and- leduc/ -g bed b .html (дата обращения: . . ). человека к телефонистке справочной службы, который попросил номер её телефона, но получил в ответ только код . Влюблённый перебрал млн телефонных комбинаций, но когда он, наконец, услышал голос девушки, по- пал по невнимательности под трам- вай. Песня вызвала общественный резонанс в стране, полемику о недо- пустимости навязчивого внимания к женщинам со стороны мужчин, пре- следования женщин, а также о неже- лании мужчин слышать в ответ отказ, что «нет значит нет» (что соотносится с фразой nein heißt nein, ставшей ак- туальной после агрессивных нападок мигрантов-мужчин на женщин в Гер- мании). Характерной особенностью слов года и номинантов является исполь- зование цифровых гибридных соче- таний: der . september (дата теракта в США в г.), agenda (соци- альная программа реформирования рынка труда, начатая правительством Г. Шрёдера в г.), stuttgart (про- ект нового железнодорожного вокзала в Штутгарте), hartz iv (непопулярная программа об отмене социального по- собия по безработице), generation @ (о новом интернет поколении). В каче- стве гибридного примера можно также назвать выбранную в г. в Австрии молодёжную фразу года, в которой от- ражено выражение недовольства и не- понимания: was ist das für life ‘Что это за жизнь?’, – где числительное заменяет неопределённый артикль ein. Исследователи указывают на увели- чение количества небуквенных знаков (эмотиконов, хэштегов и т. д.) в списке слов года в разных языках [ , с. ], что подтверждает популярность хэш- тега в списке ключевых слов года: в issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № г. в Швейцарии это был просто популярный знак #, а в г. – выра- жение с хэштегом #metoo (в Германии в г. #metoo), изначально связан- ное с именем голливудского продю- сера Х. Вайнштейна, стало символом не только сексуального насилия, но и масштабных злоупотреблений власт- ными полномочиями. Возрастающая тенденция к использованию небуквен- ных графических знаков объясняется многообразием их функций, в числе которых можно назвать прежде всего иллюстративную, служащую для ат- трактивного представления инфор- мации, и когнитивную, связанную со структурированием, анализом и син- тезом сообщения [ , с. ]. Словами и антисловами года ста- новятся многочисленные контами- нантные наименования, семантика которых отражает социальную и по- литическую ситуацию в конкретной стране. Например, выход Велико- британии из ЕС вербализирован в лексеме brexit ← britain+exit, послу- жившей моделью для образования других слов года с ироничными кон- нотациями: grexit ← greek+exit, Öxit ← Österreich+exit. По такому же принци- пу образовано прилагательное bahnsin- nig ← bahn+wahnsinnig, указывающее на забастовки немецких машинистов в г. Очевидно, что слово имеет не- гативные коннотации, поскольку его звучание и строение отсылают к слову wahnsinnig ‘безумный’. Контаминанты выполняют не только людическую, са- тирико-ироническую, аттрактивную и другие функции, в них отражается за- кон языковой экономии – один из уни- версальных законов динамики языка. Большое количество подобных кон- таминантов имеется в современном молодёжном языке, что не могло не сказаться на выборе молодёжных слов года: tinderjährig ← tinder+minderjährig ‘достаточно взрослый, чтобы пользо- ваться сайтами знакомств’; napfl ixen ← nap+netfl ix+en ‘дремать во время кинопросмотра на платформе netf- lix’; snackosaurus ← snack+ dinosaurus ‘снекозавр’, ‘прожорливый человек’ и др. Молодёжным словом года в г. стал контаминант smombie ‘зомбиро- ванный телефоном человек, который ничего не замечает вокруг’, составлен- ный из инициального элемента слова smartphone и финального компонента лексемы zombie. Социальная функция современных гаджетов (зомбирующая, изолирующая) отражается и в содер- жании известного сочетания, имену- ющего поколение людей с опущенной головой – generation kopf unten (= ge- neration head down, generation kopf runter, kopf-nach-unten-generation), ко- торое попало в список номинантов ак- ции в г. в Германии. С одной стороны, в списках пре- тендентов в слова года имеется много сокращений, с другой – наблюдается наличие большого количества рас- пространённых в немецком языке суб- стантивных композитов. Такие лекси- ческие единицы, изначально имеющие положительную или нейтральную коннотацию, приобретают со време- нем отрицательный оттенок и очень ёмко отражают социальные проблемы: willkommenskultur ‘культура гостепри- имства’ (направленная на мигрантов), silvesternacht ‘новогодняя ночь’ (как напоминание о новогодних массовых нападениях на женщин в ночь на ян- варя г.), brexit-chaos ‘хаос в про- цессе выхода Британии из ЕС’ ( г.), klimakatastrophe ‘климатическая ка- issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № тастрофа’, regenwassergebühr ‘налог на дождевую воду’ (введённый в общине Тризен в г. в княжестве Лихтен- штейн). В г. вторую позицию в немецком рейтинге слов года занял появившийся в период избирательной компании г. неологизм-композит funklochrepublik, дефиниция которо- го указывает на плохую мобильную связь в сельских регионах Германии. Затянувшиеся выборы президента Австрии в г. инициировали по- явление ставшего словом года оккази- онализма bundespräsidentenstichwahl- wiederholungsverschiebung. Семантиче- ская составляющая слова, указываю- щая на повторный перенос выборов федерального президента, и его длина (композит состоит из буквы) отра- жают иронию и сарказм, вызванные растянувшимися более чем на полгода выборами. Многокомпонентные юри- дические термины попадали в рейтин- ги слов года и в Германии, ср.: arznei- mittelausgabenbegrenzungsgesetz ‘закон об ограничении расходов на лекарствен- ные средства’ и rindfl eischetikettierungs- überwachungsaufgabenübertragungsge- setz, устар. ‘закон о передаче функций контроля маркировки говядины’. В состав номинантов попадают не только автохтонные наименования, но и заимствования (в основном англоаме- риканизмы): big data, event, selfi e, fake news, infl uencer, blockchain, hate speech, yolo и др. В г. в Швейцарии на месте оказалась реалия цифровой эпохи infl uencer ‘популярный блогер’. Англи- цизмом года в г. в Германии стал гибридный композит gendersternchen ‘астериск’, ‘гендерная звёздочка’, состо- ящий из двух частей – инициальной английской и финальной немецкой. gendersternchen – графический знак, который был официально предложен в г. немецкой партией «Союз / Зеленые» для устранения гендерного неравенства на письме. Данный символ является одним из небуквенных сим- волов политической корректности и употребляется перед суффиксом ж. р. во мн. ч., ср.: bürger*innen, student*innen и др. В разные годы в списки слов года входили заимствования из других язы- ков: русского (perestroika, glasnost), японского (tamagotchi, fukushima, ko- alitionsharakiri), арабского (yalla! ‘По- торопись!’; ‘Дай пройти!’; ‘Исчезни!’), французского (je suis charlie – как напо- минание о расстреле в редакции фран- цузской газеты в г.). Помимо отдельных слов в номина- циях представлены и словосочетания, семантика которых также отражает социальную проблематику: unter den eurorettungsschirm schlüpfen, multipola- re welt, eingebettete journalisten, gefühlte armut и др. В г. на втором месте в немецком рейтинге оказалось сло- восочетание ehe für alle ‘брак для всех’, которое стало лозунгом вступившей в силу легализации однополых браков. В г. в список слов вошло словосоче- тание die mutter aller problem ‘мать всех проблем’ – так министр МВД Германии Хорст Зеехофер (horst seehofer) назвал действующего канцлера А. Меркель, обвиняя её в проблемах, вызванных миграционными потоками. Ещё одна тенденция – это исполь- зование цитат при выборе фразы и антифразы года. Как правило, в данной номинации представлены выдержки из речи политиков: ich trete nicht zurück, ich mache den weg frei ‘Я не отступаю / не ухожу в отставку, я освобождаю путь’ (высказывание Габриэле Мозер по окончании карьеры председателя анти- issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № коррупционного комитета Австрии в г.); wir schaff en das! ‘Мы справим- ся’ (фраза Меркель летом г. в пери- од наплыва беженцев из стран Ближне- го Востока и Северной Африки) и др. Однако тематика не ограничивается только политической проблематикой, в качестве примера можно привести вселяющую надежду фразу австрий- ского спортсмена-экстремала Феликса Баумгартнера, который прыгал с вы- соты около км: i am going home now. Антифразы года, попадающие в топо- вые позиции акции, как правило, так- же принадлежат политикам и нередко носят оскорбляющий характер. В каче- стве примера можно назвать антифра- зу- , принадлежавшую министру здравоохранения и социальной поли- тики Австрии Беате Хартингер-Кляйн во время телеинтервью: man kann sicher von euro im monat leben ‘На евро в месяц точно можно прожить’. Как показывают данные, наиболее представленной в конкурсе «Слово года» частью речи является суще- ствительное, что можно объяснить спецификой проекта, цель которого – назвать, задокументировать главные события и процессы определённого года. В Германии в г. победителем стало слово heißzeit, досл. ‘горячее вре- мя’, ‘жаркий период’, что было связано с экстремально жарким летом г. Звуковая аналогия окказионализма heißzeit и нормативного слова eiszeit ‘ледниковый период’ подтверждает, по мнению немецких лингвистов, и их семантическую связь, поскольку слово года указывает не только на времен- ной отрезок, но и на глобальные изме- нения климата в целом . В Австрии в gfds wählt „heißzeit“ zum wort des jahres // gesellschaft für deutsche sprache (gfds): г. словом года выбрали существи- тельное schweigekanzler ‘безмолвный канцлер’, которым называют председа- теля правительства Себастиана Курца (с . . по . . гг.), избега- ющего комментировать неприятные для политика темы. Эта лексема уже становилась австрийским словом года в г. и была связана с именем Воль- фганга Шюсселя, федерального кан- цлера Австрии с по гг.: тогда Шюсселя как представителя Австрий- ской народной партии обвиняли в дис- танцировании от правопопулистских и радикальных высказываний партнё- ра по коалиции Австрийской партии свободы . Композит doppeladler ‘дву- главый орёл’, ставший словом года в немецкоязычной Швейцарии в г., символизировал жест, показанный швейцарскими футболистами албан- ского происхождения после забитого гола в ворота команды Сербии на ЧМ- . Таким образом спортсмены на- помнили о своей национальной иден- тичности: двуглавый орёл изображён на гербе Албании. Этот знак вызвал неоднозначную реакцию швейцарцев, разделившихся на осуждающих «нена- стоящих» подданных конфедерации и заступающихся за албанцев с двойным гражданством, которые забили мячи для швейцарской сборной. Прилагательные редко попадают на первую позицию в списке номинан- тов. В Германии в г. победителем было признано прилагательное auf- müpfi g ‘непокорный’, которое ассоции- [сайт]. url: https://gfds.de/wort-des-jahres- / (дата обращения: . . ). „schweige-kanzler“ ist „wort des jahres“: schüssel glänzt durch verbale sparsamkeit // news: [сайт]. url: https://www.news.at/a/schweige-kan- zler-wort-jahres-schuessel-sparsamkeit- (дата обращения: . . ). issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № ровалось с протестными студенчески- ми движениями конца -х гг. в ФРГ. В г. словом года стало пейоратив- ное прилагательное postfaktisch (от англ. post-truth ‘постправда’), дефиниция которого указывает на то, что правда теряет свою ценность, ср.: postfaktisch – zu einer entwicklungsstufe gehörend, in der die bedeutung von tatsachen stark abnimmt; unabhängig von wahrheitsge- halt oder realität . В номинанты попа- дают, как правило, прилагательные с негативным значением (нормативным либо узуальным). К таким лексемам от- носятся, например, выбранное в г. в Австрии слово года situationselastisch ‘приспосабливающийся под ситуацию’, характеризующее современных поли- тиков, или антислово г. в Герма- нии alternativlos ‘безальтернативный’, которое было употреблено канцлером А. Меркель в оправдание на выделение Греции финансовой помощи. Нередко прилагательные с положи- тельными ингерентными коннотация- ми приобретают в контексте пейора- тивное значение. Так, использованный во время выборов в г. Австрий- ской партией свободы окказионализм inländerfreundlich ‘дружелюбный по отношению к местным жителям’ стал контекстным синонимом кодифици- рованного прилагательного ausländer- feindlich ‘враждебный по отношению к иностранцам’. Партия выдвигала в своей предвыборной программе тре- бования, направленные против ми- грантов и беженцев, что впоследствии очень критиковалось оппозицион- ными политиками и СМИ, при этом ироничность и негативность подчёр- кивались в прессе, как правило, за- См.: duden-online wörterbuch. url: https:// www.duden.de (дата обращения: . . ). кавыченным оформлением данного слова (das «inländerfreundliche» wahl- programm, «inländerfreundliche» politik, die «inländerfreundliche» linie, fpÖ- programm ist «inländerfreundlich» и др.), ср.: in zehn th emenblöcken werden forde- rungen aufgestellt, die sich vor allem durch «inländerfreundliche» politik – also strik- terem vorgehen bei zuwanderung und asyl – auszeichnen . Изменение семан- тики наблюдается и у прилагательного multikulturell ‘мультикультурный’, за- нимавшего восьмую позицию в списке «Слов года– » и приобретающего в настоящее время негативные коннота- ции, обусловленные экстралингвисти- ческими факторами. Глаголы представлены в списках слов года в небольшом количестве. К примеру, в Германии с по гг. из почти односложных слов и композитов встречается толь- ко глаголов. Довольно частотны англицизмы, относящиеся, как прави- ло, к компьютерной сфере, например: googeln ← to google, twittern ← to twitter, simsen ← sms, whatsappen ← whatsapp и пр. Выбор данных слов в качестве слов года подчёркивает влияние совре- менных технологий на жизнь каждого человека и общества в целом. Образо- вание таких лексем отражает принцип языковой экономии: в данном случае вместо глагольных словосочетаний с синонимичным значением использу- ется его лаконичный эквивалент, на- пример, eine sms senden → simsen. Существует особая группа глаго- лов-дериватов от имён собственных „inländerfreundlich“: fpÖ präsentiert pro- gramm // salzburger nachrichten: [сайт]. url: https://www.sn.at/politik/innenpolitik/inlaender- freundlich-fpoe-praesentiert-programm- (дата обращения: . . ). issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № публичных людей. Такие лексемы в разное время входили в список но- минантов слов года и указывали, как правило, на недостойные действия по- литиков, государственных деятелей, спортсменов: gaucken ‘следить’, ‘шпио- нить’; hoyzern ‘манипулировать’; trum- pen ‘оскорблять людей, лгать’; wulff en ‘жить за чужой счёт’, ‘уклончиво рас- сказывать о ч-л.’; merkeln ‘уклоняться от ответов’, ‘откладывать решения на потом’. К примеру, глагол guttenbergen ‘списать ч-л., выдав за своё’ образо- ван от фамилии бывшего министра обороны Германии Карла-Теодора цу Гуттенберга, который лишился учёной степени и отказался от поста министра из-за большого объёма плагиата в сво- ей диссертации. Один из глаголов дан- ной группы verhunzingern ‘подкупить’; ‘лоббировать чьи-либо интересы’ так- же образован от имени собственного скандально известного экс-министра обороны ФРГ Морица Хунцингера, имя которого связывают со способно- стью завязывать знакомства с полити- ками и делать им щедрые подарки для преодоления проблем. В названном деониме пейоративные коннотации также проявляются с помощью при- ставки ver-, одно из значений которой указывает на действие с неправильны- ми результатами. По такому же принципу образова- но выбранное в Австрии в г. слово frankschämen ← frank+fremdschämen, которое можно перевести как ‘сты- диться за Фрэнка’. Первая часть сло- ва-гибрида представляет собой имя политика Фрэнка Стронака , вторая Фрэнк Стронак (frank stronach) – ав- стрийский и канадский бизнесмен и политик, который известен своими нелицеприятными высказываниями. – австрийское слово г. fremdschä- men ‘стыдиться за кого-л.’. Наличие ономастического компонента в словах года обусловлено, по мнению иссле- дователей, спецификой конкурса, по- скольку привлечение прецедентного имени облегчает задачу передачи сути события [ , с. ]. Деривационный по- тенциал и особенности перевода на- званных выше деонимов на русский язык вызывают интерес исследовате- лей [см. подр: ]. Швейцарское общество глухих уже три года выбирает жест года. Так, в г. в немецкоязычной части стра- ны словом года на жестовом языке стал антропоним donald trump. Выбор был обусловлен жестом, имитирую- щим причёску Президента США, или т. н. копну волос Трампа (trumpsche haarpracht) . В г. в победители вышло жестовое имя швейцарского теннисиста Роджера Федерера (roger federer), что связано с триумфальным возвращением спортсмена в рейтинги лучших теннисистов мира . Не только антропонимы, но и дру- гие имена собственные попадают в рейтинги. Так, топоним tschernobyl ( г., Германия) связан с катастро- фой, произошедшей на Чернобыль- ской АЭС апреля г. Композит с инициальным компонентом-топони- мом russlandversteher ‘понимающий „donald trump“ ist gebärde des jahres! // schweizerischer gehörlosenbund (sgb-fss): [сайт]. url: http://www.sgb-fss.ch/gebaerden- des-jahres- (дата обращения: . . ). „roger federer“ ist gebärde des jahres // schweizerischer gehörlosenbund (sgb-fss): [сайт]. url: https://www.sgb-fss.ch/roger-fe- derer-ist-gebaerde-des-jahres (дата обращения: . . ). Слово образовано по аналогии с неоло- гизмом putinversteher / putin-versteher ‘понима- ющий Путина’. issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № Россию’ стал кандидатом в списке не- мецких анти-слов года после присо- единения Крыма к России в г. В г. в Люксембурге единствен- ный раз при поддержке газеты «lu- xemburger wort» прошла акция «Слово года». Жители страны выбрали по- бедителем топоним gambia ‘Гамбия’, именующий коалицию трёх люксем- бургских партий, чьи партийные цвета – красный (Социал-демократическая партия), синий (Демократическая пар- тия), и зелёный (Партия «зелёных») – можно найти в национальном флаге Гамбии . Заметим, что в г. словом года в Германии стало сложное су- ществительное jamaika-aus с компо- нентом-топонимом jamaika ‘Ямайка’, указывающее на неудавшееся сотруд- ничество партий (ХДС/ХСС, СДПГ и «Зелёных») в коалиции jamaika-koali- tion . г. австрийским антисловом- победителем стал двухкомпонентный композит negerkonglomerat, досл. ‘кон- гломерат негров’, включающий дис- криминирующий этноним neger. Так австрийский публицист и экс-депутат Европарламента Андреас Мёльцер вы- разил своё отношение к растущему ха- осу в Европе, связанному с притоком мигрантов: „entweder sind wir ein ne- „gambia“ ist das wort, „bommeleeër“ das unwort des jahres // luxemburger wort: [сайт]. url: https://www.wort.lu/de/lokales/gam- bia-ist-das-wort-bommeleeer-das-unwort-des- jahres- - b d e b edcdac d (дата обращения: . . ). Лексема jamaika-koalition, ‘Ямайская ко- алиция’ или ‘коалиция «Ямайка»’, активно используется в политическом вокабуляре в Германии. Топоним в составе композита ас- социируется с чёрно-зелёно-жёлтым флагом Ямайки, цвета которого соответствуют цветам партий: ХДС/ХСС (чёрный), СДПГ (жёлтый) и Союз /Зелёные (зелёный). gerkonglomerat, wo alles – und das sage ich bewusst brutal politisch nicht korrekt – wo das chaos sich vermehrt“ . Исполь- зование лексемы в предвыборных де- батах, несмотря на последующие изви- нения и оправдания, способствовало дисквалификации Мёльцера как члена законодательного органа ЕС и как по- литика. Редким является наличие в списке слов других частей речи. Так, одним из номинантов в г. в Германии стало причастие strafb elobigt ‘наказанный по- ощрением’, описывающее карьерные назначения экс-главы Федеральной службы по охране конституции Хан- са-Георга Маасена. После ряда скан- дальных поступков и неоднозначных заявлений по поводу инцидентов в Хемнице, деятельности Сноудена, элек- тронного шпионажа и др. Маасена ос- вободили от занимаемой должности и назначили госсекретарем в МВД, что по сути было формальным повышением. В приведённой ниже таблице (табл. ) указывается числовое и про- центное соотношение различных ча- стей речи и синтаксических структур (словосочетаний), ставших победите- лями в проекте «Слово года» в немец- коязычных странах и регионах. В таблицу внесены данные по тем немецкоязычным странам и регио- нам, в которых систематически выби- рается слово года. Мы не стали вклю- чать в таблицу Люксембург, поскольку mölzer gibt sager über „negerkonglomerat“ zu und entschuldigt sich // der standard: [сайт]. url: https://derstandard.at/ / deutsch-moelzer-soll-kandidatur-zurueckzie- hen (дата обращения: . . ); goldfi n- ger . mölzer und das „negerkonglomerat“ // youtube: [сайт]. url: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=fkceetaqqkk (дата обращения: . . ). issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № Таблица Распределение слов-победителей по частям речи (кол-во, %) Страна Часть речи, синтакс. стр-ра А вс тр ия ( – ) Ге рм ан ия ( , - ) Л их те нш те йн ( – ) Ш ве йц ар ия ( – ) Ю ж ны й Ти ро ль ( – ) С ак со ни я ( – ) Н иж не не м ец . ( – к ро м е , , ) Существительные ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) Прилагательные ( %) ( %) - - - ( %) ( %) Глаголы ( %) - - - - ( %) ( %) Словосочетания - ( %) - ( %) - - ( %) Другое (невер- бальные символы) - - - ( %) - - - Всего ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) ( %) подобная акция состоялась в стране в г. и носила, по нашим сведени- ям, разовый характер. Как показыва- ет анализ, подавляющее большинство слов на стандартных и региональных вариантах немецкого языка относится к существительным (от % до %), прилагательные и глаголы представ- лены в количестве %, синтаксические структуры, получившие лексическое значение, составляют % в Германии и % в Швейцарии, невербальные символы как слова года выбирались в немецкоязычной Швейцарии ( %). Противоположная картина наблю- дается в списке слов, выбранных на нижненемецком языке и на саксон- ском диалекте: менее половины суще- ствительных ( % и % соответствен- но), практически равное количество прилагательных ( % и %) и глаго- лов ( % и %), отражающих быто- вую тематику и называющих базовые качества и действия. Словосочетания отбирались в качестве слов года толь- ко на нижненемецком языке ( %). Такой выбор в пользу прилагательных и глаголов на миноритарном языке (öllerhaft ig ‘старомодный’, langtöögsch ‘медленный’, begäuschen ‘успокаивать’, kommodig ‘приятный’ и др.) и на диа- лекте (bomborzionös ‘отличный’, for- blembern ‘тратить время, деньги и дру- гие ресурсы’, forhohnebibln ‘издеваться, насмехаться’, färdsch ‘готовый’ и др.) обусловлен, на наш взгляд, попыткой носителей дистанцироваться от не- гативных социополитических собы- тий, происходящих в стране и в мире, и желанием подчеркнуть значимость повседневных действий и качеств раз- личных предметов / явлений для жиз- ни человека. В связи с этим нельзя не согласиться с мнением, что слова года являются отражением актуальных ре- алий, которые характерны для опреде- лённого социума [ , с. ]. Выводы Проведённый анализ позволяет сделать следующие выводы о специ- фике «Слов года» в немецкоязычных странах. В качестве неязыковых осо- бенностей можно назвать: − расширение количества стран- участников проекта; issn - Вестник Московского государственного областного университета. Серия: Лингвистика / № − системный характер акции в большинстве немецкоязычных стран; − участие в проекте не только учё- ных-лингвистов и преподавателей немецкого языка, но и журналистов, культурологов, представителей других специальностей, не связанных с про- фессиональным изучением языка; − широкий разброс тематики отби- раемых лексических и синтаксических единиц: внутренняя / внешняя поли- тика, экономика, история, миграция, компьютерная сфера, быт и др.; − увеличение количества лексиче- ских и синтаксических номинаций. В целом исследование указанной языковой категории помогает опре- делить ключевые социополитические моменты, охарактеризовать тенден- ции развития общества в течение ка- лендарного года. При выборе слова-победителя в не- мецкоязычных странах не существу- ет конкретных предписаний. С точки зрения временно �й дифференциации лексики к словам года можно отнести как неологизмы, так и слова, уже ак- тивно использующиеся в языке и име- ющие нормативный статус. Лексемы, попавшие в список претендентов, мо- гут носить окказиональный характер и не всегда иметь дальнейшую лекси- кографическую кодификацию (как, к примеру, это происходит в некоторых англоговорящих странах). Коннотативно-семантический диа- пазон слов довольно широкий: от нейтрально-оценочных до положи- тельно маркированных (реже) и пейо- ративных (вплоть до инвективов, руга- тельств – в молодёжном языке). Анализ показывает, что в целом наблюдается тенденция к выбору пейоративных на- званий. Символичный характер таких лексем заключается в адгерентном по- тенциале их значений. В структурном плане отметим, с одной стороны, тен- денцию к сокращениям, аббревиации, использованию небуквенных знаков, с другой стороны – частотное использо- вание композитов. Исследование структурных, семан- тических и функциональных особен- ностей слов года позволяет выявить и их социолингвистическую специфику. Слова года выбираются практически во всех странах немецкой речи и не- редко представляют различные наци- ональные и региональные варианты немецкого языка (т. е. речь идёт о диа- топическом, или пространственном варьировании). Наблюдаются разли- чия в частеречном выборе слов года, отражающиеся на диатопическом уровне: если для национальных стан- дартов немецкого языка характерно превалирование существительных, то в региональных вариантах и диалек- тах – и других знаменательных частей речи, также имеющих номинативное значение. Можно отметить вариант- ность выбора лексем и синтаксических структур в диастратических вариантах (например, выбор молодёжного слова года или экономических терминов) и в диафазной подсистеме языка (в номи- нации попадает литературная, разго- ворная, сниженная лексика). 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ИНФОРМАЦИЯ ОБ АВТОРЕ Едличко Анжела Игоревна – кандидат филологических наук, доцент, доцент кафедры не- мецкого языка и культуры факультета иностранных языков и регионоведения Москов- ского государственного университета имени М. В. Ломоносова; e-mail: ang @yandex.ru information about the author anzhela i. edlichko – phd in philological sciences, associate professor at the department of german language and culture, faculty of foreign languages and area studies, lomonosov moscow state university; e-mail: ang @yandex.ru ПРАВИЛЬНАЯ ССЫЛКА НА СТАТЬЮ Едличко А. И. Главные слова года: структурно-функциональная и социолингвистиче- ская характеристика // Вестник Московского государственного областного университе- та. Серия: Лингвистика. . № . С. – . doi: . / - x- - - - for citation edlichko a. i. key words of the year: structural, functional, and sociolinguistic characteristics. in: bulletin of moscow region state university. series: linguistics, , no. , рр. – . . / - x- - - - untitled teaching point (section editor: w. herrington) pure red cell aplasia after treatment of renal anaemia with epoetin theta clemens wieser and alexander r. rosenkranz clinical division of nephrology, klinikum klagenfurt, klagenfurt, austria and clinical division of nephrology, medical university of graz, graz, austria correspondence and offprint requests to: clemens wieser; e-mail: clemens.wieser@kabeg.at keywords: anti-erythropoietin antibodies; biopharmaceuticals; pure red cell aplasia introduction the treatment of renal anaemia in patients with chronic kidney disease (ckd) has always been a challenge. the in- troduction of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (esas) ap- peared to be a milestone, enabling physicians to avoid red blood cell transfusions in this patient group. in the last decade, however, these assumed advances were tarn- ished by the occurrence of a new condition: esa-induced, antibody-mediated, pure red cell aplasia (prca). prca is characterized by the combination of anaemia, low reticulo- cyte count, absence of erythroblasts in the bone marrow, resistance to therapy with esas and detection of neutraliz- ing antibodies against erythropoietin. the exposure-adjusted incidence of . – . per patient years is considered rare. in the years and , it peaked, however, at an incidence of . cases per patient years, mainly caused by a preparation of epoetin alfa [ ]. hypothetic explanations concerning the prca-inducing potential of this specific preparation of epoetin alfa have been published [ ]. nevertheless, we have to accept the possibility that all esas can induce an immunological response in the form of neutralizing antibodies [ , ]. because of the complexities of manufacturing biopharmaceuticals, there are safety concerns regarding me-too biologicals and biosimilars and the automatic substitution of originator drugs for economic reasons [ , ]. in the interest of patient safety, the kidney disease: improving global outcomes (kdigo) guidelines only recommend the use of biosimilars approved by an independent regulatory agency that are subject to pharmacovigilance plans [ ]. we report on a patient treated with the originator drugs such as epoetin theta, epoetin beta and darbepoetin alfa, who developed esa-induced prca. the repetitive switch- ing of agents hampered our ability to attribute prca to the appropriate agent. case description a male patient, born in , first presented in our ne- phrology unit in with glomerulonephritis [nephritic urine, hypertension, creatinine . mg/dl ( µmol/l), haemoglobin (hb) . g/dl ( g/l), figure ], refusing a morphological diagnosis (kidney biopsy). the patient re- turned in , again presenting with nephritic urine, creatinine at . mg/dl ( µmol/l) and hb . g/dl ( g/l). in , there was a slow progression of renal insufficiency, with creatinine at . mg/dl ( µmol/l) and hb stable at > . g/dl ( g/l). in , creatinine increased to . mg/dl ( µmol/l), with decreasing hb levels. in may , hb was at . g/dl ( g/l). a nor- mochromic, normocytic blood count was unsuspicious of iron deficiency. we started subcutaneous (s.c.) erythro- poietin substitution using epoetin theta. hb rapidly in- creased to . g/dl ( g/l), where we stopped epoetin theta administration upon reaching the upper limit of the hb target. in october , hb had again decreased se- verely to hb . g/dl ( g/l), triggering a new sequence of epoetin theta. because of the beginning of uraemic symptoms, we started renal replacement therapy, choos- ing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (capd). after initiation of capd, we observed a continuous de- crease of hb to . g/dl ( g/l), despite an increase of epoetin theta dose. a detailed workup was initiated to identify reasons for the hb non-response, showing an iron status of total iron µg/dl ( . µmol/l), transferrin level µg/dl ( . µmol/l), transferrin saturation . % and ferritin µg/ml ( . pmol/l). reticulo- cyte counts remained constantly low with levels of ≤ . % (proportion of red blood cells of ≤ . ). a bone marrow sample showed a hyporegenerative state. we tested for anti-erythropoietin antibodies using radioimmunoprecipi- tation (rip), with negative results (laborinstitut prof. seelig, karlsruhe, germany). subsequently, the patient changed to a different dialy- sis centre, where he was switched to epoetin beta. since the patient self-administered the product, he was further switched to the longer-acting, subcutaneously adminis- trable darbepoetin alfa. both epoetin beta and darbepoe- tin alfa were unable to improve the patient’s hb. in may , we repeated the test for anti-erythropoietin anti- bodies in two different laboratories: (i) laborinstitut prof. seelig, karlsruhe, germany (rip), and (ii) ipm biotech, © the author . published by oxford university press on behalf of era-edta. all rights reserved. for permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. clin kidney j ( ) : – doi: . /ckj/sft advance access publication august hamburg, germany (bioassay using the human erythro- leukaemia cell line tf- ; see supplementary material for a description of the testing procedure). both antibody tests were positive, with the bioassay revealing a highly positive antibody titre of : . we immediately stopped the administration of any esa and switched the patient to red blood cell transfusions. we started immunosuppression with prednisolone mg and cyclosporine a mg (target cyclosporine a level: – ng/ml; . – . nmol/l), which resulted in a life-threatening peritonitis caused by prevotella melaninogenica and bacteroides sp. we stopped immunosuppressive treatment and evaluated the patient for renal transplantation after earlier refusal. discussion prca is triggered by the development of neutralizing antibodies against endogenous erythropoietin that may cross-react with different esas [ ]. it is assumed that all bio- pharmaceuticals, including protein-based esas, are immu- nogenic [ ]. however, the mechanism of how the natural b-cell tolerance is broken remains to be elucidated. two major causes have been identified: (i) changes to the three- dimensional ( d) structure of the protein (protein aggrega- tion) and (ii) route of administration. (i) protein aggregates can activate autoreactive b-cells by resembling the repeated self-epitope structure of viral capsids. protein aggregation is not fully under- stood, but there are three potential mechanisms. first, aggregation may be triggered by the presence of small amounts of a contaminant, such as a damaged form of the protein itself, host cell proteins or even non- protein materials (organic leachate of uncoated rubber stoppers of prefilled syringes, polysorbate , tungsten). a second mechanism is partial unfolding of the native protein during storage. some partially or fully unfolded protein molecules are always present in protein sol- utions, but mostly refold to their native structure. alter- natively, these unfolded proteins may co-aggregate with other such molecules or may be incorporated into an existing aggregate to form larger aggregates. elev- ated temperature, shaking (shear and airliquid interface stress), surface adsorption and other physical or chemi- cal stress factors facilitate the aggregation of unfolded proteins. since the patient self-administered the esas, it is thinkable that an interrupted cold chain had triggered this process. the interruption of the cold chain may be less problematic with long-acting esas, as they have a longer stability at room temperature compared with short-acting esas [ – ]. a third aggregation mechan- ism is self-association of the native protein to form oligomers. oligomers vary with solvent conditions such as ph and ionic strength, are very difficult to detect and can become irreversible [ ]. these product-related factors are of high interest, especially in consideration of the increasing number of esas and manufacturers entering the markets and the high economic pressure to produce and prescribe cheaper medical products. the specific demands on storage and handling of a sen- sitive product, such as erythropoietin, may also be too complex for—mostly elderly—patients. (ii) the route of administration of esas was also related to prca. the s.c. route seems to evoke a stronger immune response than the intravenous (i.v.) route, fig. . hb trajectory and treatment history. esa, erythropoiesis-stimulating agent. c. wieser and a.r. rosenkranz http://ndtplus.oxfordjournals.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /ckj/sft /-/dc possibly due to the high concentration of antigen- presenting cells in the skin and the longer local pres- ence of the antigen. epidemiological data support this theory. the incidence of prca is estimated at . per patient years for i.v. and . per patient years for s.c. administration [ ]. however, the s.c. route of administration has organizational benefits, especially for both capd and ckd patients not on dialysis. the detection of the neutralizing antibodies was a chal- lenge in our case. in retrospect, the hb trajectory, the reti- culocyte count and the bone marrow sample clearly identify epoetin theta as the trigger of prca. nevertheless, the first examination of the patient’s serum using a rip assay was negative. only the control tests months later (rip and tf- bioassay) were positive. by this time, however, two more esas (epoetin beta and darbepoetin alfa) had been administered. therefore, the sensitivity and degree of reliance of the antibody tests are essential [ ]. there are several types of binding antibody assays, includ- ing enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (elisa), rip, the biacore biosensor assay and various other bioassays, as reviewed in detail by thorpe and swanson [ ]. elisa assays generally have a poor ability to detect lower- affinity anti-erythropoietin antibodies with limited utility as a screening assay. rip assays are more apt for screen- ing purposes. they measure binding antibodies and their production in amplitude or time to appearance and have been shown to correlate with the severity of symptoms of prca. in our case, however, the rip assay did not detect antibodies, despite the apparent hb drop and non-response to epoetin theta. bioassays are used for measuring the neu- tralizing capability of anti-erythropoietin antibodies. they are also used for studying the binding stoichiometries of antibodies with their target proteins [ ]. in our case, a bioassay using cultures of the human erythroleukaemia cell line tf- was used to confirm the results of the second rip test. an immunological response usually develops gradually over several months and can be present before the occur- rence of clinical symptoms. additionally, the life-cycle of erythrocytes is ∼ months, making an abrupt drop in hb a rare event, thus dampening the chances to perform clari- fying tests in time. for these reasons, it is assumed that full-blown antibody-mediated prca may be identified as late as year after the first occurrence of an immunologi- cal response. as we have observed a continuous decline in hb early in the course of esa treatment and started a de- tailed workup to detect the underlying causes at the first signs of hyporesponsiveness to epoetin theta, it is unclear, why the rip test did not detect the presence of antibodies in our patient. it has been observed that the rip assay is used in various laboratory conditions and formats, leading to large differences in sensitivities and specificities of different assays [ ]. in our case, however, the results of the second rip test were confirmed by the bioassay, ex- cluding quality issues as an explanation. due to the wide range of marketed esas, including me- too biologicals and biosimilars, there is a high economic pressure on esa manufacturers and health care providers. the reimbursement authorities expect physicians to pre- scribe the cheapest products and to accept repetitive switching of agents. as the presented case impressively demonstrates, it seems—from a safety point of view— preferrable to avoid repetitive switching. after a series of dif- ferent products has been administered, the prca-triggering product can only be identified if the accompanying severe anaemia and/or antibodies have been detected before the switch. therefore, traceability of all esas given to a patient is essential. ideally, a serum sample should be stored before any switch is made, but this seems to be very difficult in clinical practice [ , , ]. conclusion the pathogenesis of esa-induced prca remains unclear. several, partly hypothetical, causes are discussed in the litera- ture, such as patient- or product-related factors. additionally, treatment duration, route of administration, inappropriate transport and storage, or the frequent change of esas may play a role. until the true causes of prca have been identified, it is necessary to be alert to the dangers of frequent, cost-driven changes in esas, to reconsider the route of administration and to increase our efforts in pharmacovigilance. teaching points (i) the main challenges with biopharmaceuticals— originators, me-toos and biosimilars—are variable potency and immunogenicity. these are hypothesized to be due to glycosylation, contamination and changes to d structure, which may occur between products and even between batches. (ii) prca is a potentially life-threatening immune response caused by neutralizing antibodies against endogenous erythropoietin that may cross-react with different esas. it can theoretically be induced by any protein-based esa. (iii) any product substitution should only be made with the specific approval of the prescribing physician. pro- curement practices in the hospital sector should always provide for a sufficiently broad choice of products. (iv) in the case of prca, product changes may prohibit the identification of the antibody-causing product, a prac- tice, which has to be reconsidered in the interest of pharmacovigilance. supplementary data supplementary data are available online at http://ckj. oxfordjournals.org. acknowledgements. margit hemetsberger of hemetsberger medical services, vienna, austria, provided editorial support. conflict of interest statement. c.w. declares to have received speaker’s fees from amgen, roche, ratiopharm, and fresenius. a.r.r. has no conflicts of interest to declare. references . mckoy jm, stonecash re, cournoyer d et al. epoetin-associated pure red cell aplasia: past, present, and future considerations. transfusion ; : – . macdougall ic, roger sd, de francisco a et al. antibody- mediated pure red cell aplasia in chronic kidney disease patients receiving erythropoiesis-stimulating agents: new in- sights. kidney int ; : – . casadevall n, nataf j, viron b et al. pure red-cell aplasia and 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+iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/eprex+ % c+ +and+ +iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/eprex+ % c+ +and+ +iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/eprex+ % c+ +and+ +iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/eprex+ % c+ +and+ +iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/eprex+ % c+ +and+ +iu+ml+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/ /spc/neorecormon+solution+for+injection+in+pre-filled+syringe http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_gb/document_library/presentation/ / /wc .pdf 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/monoimageminresolution /monoimageminresolutionpolicy /ok /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /bicubic /monoimageresolution /monoimagedepth /monoimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k - >> /allowpsxobjects true /checkcompliance [ /none ] /pdfx acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier () /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname () /pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice march   cancer discovery |  news in depth investment requests that come across her desk are cancer related. amgen likes the cancer market, says amgen ventures’ managing director janis naeve, phd, because it’s at the front end of personalized medicine. tetralogic is of oncology companies in amgen ventures’ portfolio. however, ed torres, managing director of lilly ventures, says he thinks vc demand for new cancer drug candidates has slipped in the past few years, for reasons: “first, pharma companies, and increasingly large biotech compa- nies, have more in their own cancer pipelines than they can afford to fund.” second, he says acquirers are frequently willing to wait until private companies generate sufficiently advanced clinical data before wanting to buy the asset. torres says that interest is still strong for drugs with particular promise. he cites a deal by genentech of south san francisco, ca, to buy exclusive rights from forma therapeutics in boston to a small-molecule program against a single, undisclosed cancer target. “for very hot targets, very interesting deals can be done with pharma,” he says. the big companies also sometimes get behind the same startups as their rivals. pfizer venture investments joined amgen ventures years ago to invest in tetralogic, im- pressed, jones says, by the small company’s science and leadership. both pfizer and amgen have observer seats on tetralogic’s board. these investments aren’t always successful. drugs don’t live up to their initial promise, and early investors don’t al- ways win acquisition deals. pfizer venture investments has exited of the investments it has made since its for- mation, jones says. but naeve, torres, and jones all say they believe the investments are worth the risk. the big corporate backing is obviously a benefit for start- ups, too. the support tetralogic receives from amgen and pfizer, gill says, “creates the financial base that keeps you from being vulnerable and exploited by new investors or some com- pany that says, ‘okay, let’s see if we can buy it on the cheap.’” —karen weintraub ≠ venture capital arms flex their muscle why big pharmaceutical firms back small biotechs a few years ago, companies developing solid tumor and hematologic cancer drugs called smac (second mitochon- drial-derived activator of caspases) mimetics hit a roadblock. these companies realized that their molecules, which act like endogenous antagonists for inhibitor of apoptosis pro- teins, might not benefit as many patients as hoped—and they didn’t have suitable biomarkers to distinguish between pa- tients who might be helped and those who wouldn’t. tetralogic pharmaceuticals of malvern, pa, decided to delay clinical studies of its smac mimetic compounds and return to the lab. john m. gill, founder, president, and ceo, worried that a less-than-perfect drug would jeopardize his firm. but delaying entry to the clinic was risky, too: a “me- too drug” wouldn’t sell nearly as well as the first to market, and his investors were anxious to get there first. that’s when gill got crucial support from long-time inves- tor amgen ventures of san francisco. the venture capital (vc) arm of pharmaceutical giant amgen convinced the other investors that it was smarter to wait. a year or so later, tetralogic identified a biomarker that allows it to target patients most likely to be helped. now, the tiny -person company has tested its molecule in patients and is in phase ii trials with a combination therapy including chemotherapeutics. nearly all the world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms have vc funds like amgen’s, designed to help the companies get involved early in promising research, supplement their own innovation pipelines, and keep an eye on competitors. rebuilding the vc pipeline twenty years ago, most of the major pharmaceutical companies began closing their vc arms because they had an abundance of new products and didn’t feel the need to seed more, says tracy t. lefteroff, global managing partner of the vc practice at pricewaterhousecoopers. slowly, the number of corporate vc funds has risen again, he said, as blockbuster drugs have come off patent, leaving pharmaceutical compa- nies “scrambling to fill holes in their product pipeline.” there are no industry-wide figures, but a review of com- pany websites suggests that of the largest pharmaceuti- cal companies have their own vc arms, each with tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars invested. lefteroff says large companies have learned that they are not always good incubators of innovation. small biotechnol- ogy companies can be much better, but they’re starved for cash, so both large and small firms benefit, he adds. connecting for cancer cancer is a target-rich environment for biotech innova- tion, lefteroff says, because there is so much unmet need for effective drugs. elaine v. jones, phd, executive director of vc for pfizer venture investments of new york, estimates that half the major pharmaceutical companies are a significant source of capital for biotechnology startups. here are some of their venture subsidiaries with publicly disclosed funding levels. •  amgen: amgen ventures has $ million in its invest- ment portfolio. •  astrazeneca: medimmune ventures has a $ million portfolio. •  eli lilly: lilly ventures has $ million under management. •  glaxosmithkline: sr one has invested more than $ million since its founding. •  merck: merck global health innovation fund has $ million in investments. •  novartis: novartis bioventures ltd. has invested $ million in more than companies. •  pfizer: pfizer venture investments invests $ million a year in both new and ongoing relationships. •  roche: roche venture fund has allocated more than $ million for investments in life science companies. seeking startups research. on april , . © american association for cancercancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org downloaded from published onlinefirst january , ; doi: . / - .cd-nd - http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/ ; : . published onlinefirst january , .cancer discovery venture capital arms flex their muscle updated version . / - .cd-nd - doi: access the most recent version of this article at: e-mail alerts related to this 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society of strong women and helpful men by mary frances dondelinger in this post-truth era comes a discovery so big, so unbelievable, it’s got to be true. ancient society discovered in southern california discovered metres ( feet) below the surface in the santa rosa island region, this rare and unprecedented archaeological cache of pottery and sculpture has flummoxed the archaeological community. some scientists debate the authenticity of this newly-discovered society because of the apparent gender equality. but former native-californian artist m f dondelinger says sometimes it’s hard to get our minds around new concepts and images to understand their meanings. ‘what we need now is to be open to interpreting this unusual society. i think it requires a whole paradigm shift on how some early communities are interpreted.’ this agrarian, village-based society is being called m.flandia (em-flan-dia) and questions arise not of its origin or time of existence but its societal structure. many are familiar with the classic greek vases featuring athletic male bodies prancing across the surface. in m.flandia, similar decorative artistic styles are employed; however, the imagery suggests strong female participation in society. women are shown in active postures running, jumping, throwing and boxing. one sculpture, found nearly intact, is called the ‘goddess of strength’. she stands almost cm tall ( inches). instead of the traditional multiple breasts to symbolise a fertility goddess, she has boxing gloves ballooning off her chest. below, animals of the earth line her dress. it is possible she symbolises the hunter or protector of the earth; or perhaps the animals represent wealth, and this sculpture symbolises her strength and power. archaeologists are not certain at this early point in their research. while these later finds at the site are dated to the archaic m.flandian period, the first sculptures found have been placed in the s, due to the rich blue glaze and surprising delft designs. this suggests that travellers from asia and the netherlands traded with and influenced the m.flandians. the ‘aquatic god of fertility’, another artifact found at the site, is a good example of this influence. the complete sculpture could not be salvaged, but a very fine specimen of the head was recovered. youth and beauty radiate on his gentle face. his striking blue coral-like hair is swept up in a phallic-like shape, ready for action. sculptures of swimming fish also were found near this important artifact and will be on display alongside the aquatic god. ‘it’s not clear that it was specifically a matriarchal or patriarchal society, but certainly both men and women’s roles in village life were considered important and, perhaps, equal’, states an anonymous source close to the discovery site, who is not authorised to speak about the site or specific discoveries. fragments as well as whole, intact pieces are being unearthed daily at m.flandia and are being organised and figure . | goddess of strength, period: archaic m.flandia, cm × cm × cm, attributed to mf dondelinger https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core m.flandia: a newly-discovered society of strong women and helpful men processed for continued research, public viewing and debate. this is the press release announcing the exhibition of m.flandia in pasadena, california. if it seems not quite right or you question the legitimacy of the ‘cache of pottery and sculpture’, you should. i’m messing with you. it’s my job. about seven years ago i was invited to do an artist residency in which the public would visit the studio daily. i thought it would be interesting to develop my own country without borders. everyone who entered the studio would have the option of signing a contract to become a citizen of this country. the contract would outline the important role of citizenship (i.e., looking out for others, equality, kindness, and respectfulness, to name a few). then the person would be photographed and given a passport. i named the country, vainly, after myself. using my first initials, m f, then adding ‘land’ and finishing with a flourish of ‘ia,’ it came out as m.flandia. unfortunately, my schedule did not allow me to attend the residency, but i stored away the idea. in the united states we are fully saturated in an age of fake news and mean-spiritedness that surpasses anything i have experienced in my time. it is disheartening to see this powerful force of disrespect of others. seven years earlier i had wanted to create my own country as a way to band like-minded people together, but now i wanted to escape through creating a whole new evolved society. when i was invited to exhibit new works for a show in california, it was a perfect opportunity in this post-truth era to create a society more advanced than the current one in which i live. my concern with the original idea of m.flandia was that it didn’t seem tangible enough. it was a concept held together with a passport. to make tangible and give credibility, m.flandians needed to have a history and a residence. so i said it was unearthed on an island close to where the exhibit would be held and where other archaeological sites had been in operation. the next exhibit of m. flandia will be shown in coeur d’alene, idaho, and will reveal that a segment of m. flandians travelled, surprisingly, over , miles north and were discovered to have lived in the path of the missoula floods. the missoula floods (a.k.a. spokane floods) refer to the cataclysmic floods that swept periodically across the eastern part of washington state. visual artists create false truths all the time. in , uk artist damien hirst was involved in creating statues supposedly retrieved from an ancient sunken ship , years old. in a mockumentary called treasures from the wreck of the unbelievable , he questions reality and fantasy. on a smaller scale, a graduate student told me she created a story about an early american culture and buried artifacts she had made as a pottery student. later she ‘discovered’ the archeological site and recorded the digging up of the ‘treasures’ of her own making. some art teachers tell me they have students create pottery and then bury it, thus creating their own archaeological site for the future. each artist has his or her own motivation for creating treasures and burying them and for stretching the truth. those working with children want to teach them about the past. my project is to create a new future. my main hope for m.flandia was to create images of a healthy society doing healthy activities. by setting this society in the past, perhaps viewers could see a new way for our future. if an evolved society had lived before, perhaps we could see our way to it again. i wanted to start by presenting figures doing activities not generally associated with their gender. turn the tables, as it were. i hoped the exhibit would empower people by seeing their gender represented flexibly. i had fears too. i feared the project might seem disrespectful to archaeologists and their work. i sent the press release out on social media to archaeologists and, being the smart people they are, they seemed to understand and support the direction of the project. so i proceeded. i was also concerned that presenting m.flandia as too believable would add to the mounting feeling in the u.s. that nothing can be believed, everything is suspect. i needed to make the exhibit interesting enough to the average viewer on an initial glance but have enough clues and markers for them to know early on that m.flandia was a mischievous way to dream of a new way of being. for years, i have been painting images of a boxer who is a woman. she was the first image to come forward for m.flandia. i thought she would be the figure . | run like a girl, terracotta bowl-black figure, period: archaic m.flandia, diam: cm, attributed to mf dondelinger https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core m.flandia: a newly-discovered society of strong women and helpful men most unbelieved figure in the body of work; a clue to cause some scepticism. the titles for the ‘artifacts’ also are intended to be a clue. i remember as a child being told i didn’t run like a girl. running like a girl was a bad thing. m. flandia would embrace running like a girl. this theme became the basis for titles of numerous pieces—run like a girl, throw like a girl, jump like a girl, read like a girl, wrestle like a girl. while i thought these images and titles would give sufficient hints to the falsehood of the society, i paired them with art descriptors i thought certainly should make one think, such as run like a girl, terra-cotta bowl-black figure, period: archaic m.flandia, diam: cm, attributed to m f dondelinger. i never disclosed the actual time period of the oldest works from m.flandia in any written materials. seriously, where is archiac m.flandia on the human timeline chart? additionally, how could the works be attributed to a living artist? m.flandia is not comparing and contrasting with the classical works of the past. instead, by using seemingly familiar patterns, shapes, colours and imagery, the viewer is comfortable taking in the subject matter. then, there is a realisation that the subject matter is actually not familiar. m.flandia requires the viewer to use critical thinking when approaching the exhibit. too many details are kept vague, but people are used to that in the u.s. because that’s what we get through our news media: unnamed sources, only a portion of the story, showy images. most people read the didactic panels at the exhibit with interest and realise m.flandia is reflecting back on who we are not yet in modern society. but, astonishingly, some miss all the clues and sincerely believe the art to be sculptures from antiquity. the human mind is a mysterious thing. it tries to make pieces of a puzzle fit where they do not. an artist colleague visited my studio one afternoon during the early stages of development of m. flandia. she read the press release and was told the project was an invention of my mind. this is the conversation that followed: visitor: but how did you get invited to the dig? me: there is no dig. visitor: i realise these are not the original pieces, so did you photograph the ones at the site and then make these replicas? or did you do sketches? me: there is no dig. visitor: oh, well, then how did you get these ideas? me: i made them up. visitor: wow, really great that you were invited to the dig! figure . | wrestle like a girl, terracotta bowl-red figure, period: archaic m.flandia, diam: cm, attributed to mf dondelinger figure . | discovery of “sparring” shard at m.flandia archeological site https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core m.flandia: a newly-discovered society of strong women and helpful men critical thinking requires us to look beyond our existing beliefs. but research shows people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe (according to research published in psychological bulletin [july ], the journal of the american psychological association). this may seem inconsequential in relation to this exhibit but devastating when it comes to making informed decisions in one’s life. i was most concerned about misleading children who might see the exhibit. their critical thinking skills are not yet developed (as opposed to adults who supposedly do have these skills developed!). however, i do believe children are not told the truth about their capabilities, as it is. what would be wrong with girls and boys seeing women and men portrayed as equally capable and strong, supportive and active and valued for their abilities, rather than for the traditional roles their genders played? throughout much of art history, women are often presented as passive. men are active. in m.flandia, women are capable, strong and supportive. they wrestle lions, throw spears, run, and jump. these are images of women in art the viewer rarely gets to see. in m.flandia, the men are supportive, capable, and strong. they are the caregivers. they support the advancement of the community. and these are images of men in art the viewer rarely gets to see. one afternoon at the library, a man was thumbing through a book on archaeological sites in the americas. over his shoulder i saw this fantastic image of a voluptuous, nude fertility goddess flip by. she was lying on her side, cradling a child. i loved it and thought, ‘what a great inspiration for a male sculpture in m. flandia’. but the more i considered it, i was concerned how a naked man with a small child would be perceived by the standards of today. paedophile? inappropriate? i created the sculpture anyway and in the process found it to be the most tender piece of the series. titled nurturing man, he lies on his side, cradling a small child. as i worked on the piece, i was moved by memories of how comforting it felt as a young child to be embraced by my father. several months later, i saw the picture of the fertility goddess again. this time with my glasses on. she did not cradle a child at all. it was her large elbow that i had misinterpreted as a child. i guess i saw what i wanted to see. when m.flandia was first shown in public, i had just recently started developing the series and hadn’t gotten to the role of men. there were only three images of men and two were naked. the third was symbolically exposed. most viewers did not linger on nurturing man or the aquatic fertility god. nor did heterosexual men respond as women did (women laughed out loud) to the one entitled where the men are always naked and the women are not. this title was intended to play on the past, where the male body was considered superior and often naked, and the present, where it is women who are the naked ones in art and figure . | mf dondelinger at m.flandia archeological site figure . | nurturing man with baby, period: archaic m.flandia, cm × cm × cm, attributed to mf dondelinger https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core m.flandia: a newly-discovered society of strong women and helpful men movies, and men are clothed. there is much yet to explore regarding the role of men in m.flandia. while i personally am not called to wrestle lions or throw spears, seeing healthy women in active roles is inspiring to me. as a young girl, i loved to run and jump, climb trees and study and build things but rarely saw images of girls doing those things. i would like young girls and boys to grow up seeing females in action and males being supportive. we know the reverse already. it seems to me, people want more options on how we see ourselves and others. it is not a surprise, then, when the movie black panther touched so many people across the globe. black panther showed the imaginary world of wakanda, where it seemed every individual, young and old, male or female, was valued and integral to its success. that’s the ideal. much of the time when i create, i don’t know how i will feel about the images until i see them. for a while last winter, i was consumed by the news. there was talk of war with north korea and lots of press on the #metoo movement. this content made its way into new sculptures i was creating for m. flandia. the images are decidedly more forceful. warriors racing off to war, hand-to-hand combat. while i like much about these pieces, my original idyllic world of m.flandia was interrupted. i will need to explore this more, but it is frustrating to see how easily i am seduced back into the world i know instead of the land of what could be. i am curious to know what happens when archaeologists of the future unearth pieces of m.flandia. how will they piece together the meaning of such work? mary frances dondelinger is an artist living in the deserts of the american southwest and the hills of the american northwest. she lives with her husband and two dogs and has never been to an archaeological site … yet. maryfrances@themaryfrances.com see https://www.palazzograssi.it/en/ exhibitions/past/damien-hirst-at-palazzo- grassi-and-punta-della-dogana-in- - / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.palazzograssi.it/en/exhibitions/past/damien-hirst-at-palazzo-grassi-and-punta-della-dogana-in- - / https://www.palazzograssi.it/en/exhibitions/past/damien-hirst-at-palazzo-grassi-and-punta-della-dogana-in- - / https://www.palazzograssi.it/en/exhibitions/past/damien-hirst-at-palazzo-grassi-and-punta-della-dogana-in- - / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" 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available. downloaded - - t : : z some rights reserved. for more information, please see the item record link above. title gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle author(s) dempsey, karen publication date - - publication information dempsey, k. ( ). gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle. antiquity, ( ), - . doi: . /aqy. . publisher cambridge university press link to publisher's version https://dx.doi.org/ . /aqy. . item record http://hdl.handle.net/ / doi http://dx.doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /ie/ gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle karen dempsey* despite more than three decades of feminist critique, archaeological scholarship remains predom- inantly focused on the exploration of patriarchal narratives and is, therefore, complicit in reinfor- cing structural inequalities. questions must be asked of how the construction of archaeological knowledge affects representation and impacts upon our ‘archaeologies’. this article explores the relative absence of gendered approaches within archaeology through the lens of later medieval archaeology, with a micro-focus on castle studies in britain and ireland. are there reasons for the silence in relation to gender in the archaeology of the later middle ages, and what lessons are there for bringing about a more inclusive archaeology? keywords: later medieval archaeology, castle studies, gender, feminism introduction in archaeology, the story of the past is largely told through the experiences of men. there have been noticeably fewer explorations of the wider spectrum of gendered identities and ideolo- gies that undoubtedly existed during the human past. this is perhaps not surprising given that many inequalities based on sex, sexual preference or sexual identity persist to the present day. our versions of the past reflect the context in which archaeological knowledge is pro- duced: a patriarchal society in which (white) men are privileged above others tends to write a past based on the supremacy of males in highly stratified cultures, mirroring their pre- sent. more surprising is that this situation persists more than years after the first feminist critiques of archaeology (conkey & spector ; gilchrist ). does this general silence about gender within the discipline of archaeology represent a backlash against feminism? is it that feminist perspectives to the past are merely unpopular today, or are they viewed as too much of a challenge to the status quo? in a time of global feminist activism, encapsulated by movements such as ‘#metoo’ and ‘timesup’, ‘everyday sexism project’, ‘repealthe th’ and ‘musawah’, this absence cannot reflect a disinterested audience. rather, it demonstrates that archaeology is behind the times and needs to respond to contemporary global and inter- sectional feminist voices. this article represents a renewed call for explicit challenges to con- tinuing androcentrism within archaeology. it reviews the evidence for gender disparity in the authorship of archaeological publications. the impact of this inequality is explored through the lens of later medieval archaeology in britain and ireland (the period ad – is discussed here), before providing a feminist critique of castle studies. * department of archaeology, university of reading, whiteknights box , reading rg ab, uk (email: k. dempsey@reading.ac.uk) © antiquity publications ltd, . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. antiquity ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . mailto:k.dempsey@reading.ac.uk mailto:k.dempsey@reading.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . gender inequality and the construction of archaeological knowledge the gender imbalance in academia has been discussed thoroughly (see harley : – ; european commission ; van den brink & benschop : – ). in archaeology, this imbalance manifests in senior roles within academia and professional practice (hamilton : – ). how does such gender imbalance within the discipline affect the construction of knowledge and, in particular, the representation of women and the interrogation of gender in the past (conkey & gero ; gilchrist )? this question is addressed here by analysing ‘the oxford handbooks of archaeology’ series as an index for gender imbalance in author- ship. these volumes are commissioned as ‘go-to’ guides for students and professionals that make, shape and capture the state-of-the-art in the discipline. ten handbooks from a wide chronological, thematic and geographic range are considered: archaeology (gosden et al. ), anglo-saxon archaeology (hinton et al. ), ritual and religion (insoll ), north american archaeology (pauketat ), african archaeology (mitchell & lane ), european bronze age (fokkens & harding ), death and burial (stutz & tarlow ), neolithic europe (fowler et al. ), later medieval archaeology (gerrard & gutiérrez ) and childhood (crawford et al. ) (figure ). for balance, potential gender dispar- ity in authorship is also assessed within three journals of medieval archaeology published in france, britain and italy (figure ). for multi-authored papers, all authors were included in the analysis. figure . gender balance in a selection of oxford handbooks of archaeology (figure by the author). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, men dominate the authorship in eight of the ten handbooks (figure ). based on their pub- lic profiles, the authors presented as overwhelmingly white (over per cent) in all publica- tions. the gender disparity of the handbooks only somewhat contrasts with the three medieval archaeology journals (figure ). in the oxford handbook of later medieval archaeology (gerrard & gutiérrez ), for example, there are twice as many male authors as female authors. in the section on ‘power and display’, all five chapters are by men. in contrast, six of the nine papers in the ‘growing up and growing old’ section are by women ( per cent). the message for medieval archaeologists is that women = nurture/care, and men = power. in ritual and religion there were only female authors in contrast with male. women outnumber male authors in only two of the handbooks: childhood and death and bur- ial. these comparisons are revealing in relation to contemporary gender roles: today, women are largely responsible for the primary care of children and elderly people. world religions— organised or otherwise—still exclude women from roles as ritual specialists. while power and display are explicit themes in many of the oxford handbooks, gender is not. the discus- sions therefore only account for an assumed and projected heteronormative past, and anything beyond the ‘normative’ is unexplored, including queer or lgbtq+ perspectives. it could be argued optimistically that the discipline has ‘mainstreamed’ gender or, in other words, that gender has been embedded in wider interpretation and no longer requires explicit figure . breakdown of gender balance in three medieval archaeological journals: reti medievali, archéologie médiévale and medieval archaeology – (figure by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, discussion. this, of course, is precisely the problem: a particular gendered ideology is implicit throughout many archaeological texts—that of the lives and practices of white, able-bodied heterosexual men. this means that many archaeologists, not just men, write about what is effectively the modern status quo. not all men, of course, write exclusively about other men, or use masculinist perspectives; nor are all people with different gendered identities, including women, interested in writing about females, disenfranchised or underrepresented people. yet it remains the case that women and all those who fall outside the ‘mainstream’ category of the white, heteronormative male are noticeably absent from the narrative— both as topics for discussion and as authors. the question is: does this matter? do we need more diversity in authorship in order to see more diversity in the past? i argue that this is imperative. embracing different and diverse voices would enhance our understanding of both the past and the present. it is unlikely that people would openly oppose this sentiment, but the evidence suggests that we still fall short of achieving these aims. we must ask then: who is responsible for ensuring that we have diverse representation? the answer is, of course, all of us. together, we must strive to include others. we must all be reflective and conscious of what choices we make in relation to our archaeological practice; who is represented, as well as underrepresented, and who is affected. there is, however, a special onus on those ‘gatekeepers’ who control or influence archaeological discourse to be as inclusive as possible (ahmed ). this means actively addressing these disparities. it may also mean asking difficult questions or refusing to partici- pate in an event or publication that lacks fair representation, while recognising that, despite best efforts, such editorial balance can be difficult to achieve (gerrard & gutiérrez pers. comm.). while this article focuses on gender inequality and feminism, the wider “matrix of dom- ination”, which reinforces structural inequalities especially with regard to racism, must be acknowledged (collins : ). it is noted that the majority of authors were white males, and where women are included, they are also predominately white. it is hypocritical to argue for the greater inclusion of (white) women while ignoring the structural inequalities that result in the exclusion of people of colour—especially women of colour, indigenous peo- ple and trans and gender-non-conforming people. we must be careful not to forget (or deny) the inherently patriarchal structure of academia and the colonial origins of archaeology as a discipline (gosden ; kim ). a broad-brush analysis of race, class, sexual orientation and ethnicity, however, is not attempted here, as these require detailed attention in their own right (franklin ). racism, for example, exists and must be challenged in our discourses. a positive shift to address this—particularly within the disciplines of medieval history and literature—is the emerging field of ‘global middle ages’, which foregrounds studies of ‘race and racism’ and decolonises the middle ages as a eurocentric idea (heng ; kim ; montón-subías & hernando ). gendered archaeologies the twenty-first century has witnessed an increasing acceptance that gender is fluid, non- binary and non-normative (gosling ). gender differences are socially constructed, his- torically contingent and changing. for millennia, people have (re)negotiated context-specific gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, gendered roles and other aspects of their identities involving ethnicity, sexuality and age. awareness of this is evidenced by examples of gendered archaeologies (e.g. tringham ; gilchrist ; sørenson ; brück ), as well as archaeologies of sexuality figure . ‘filling in the gaps’: an outdated approach (image by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, (voss ). yet there remains a resistance (or an apathy) towards more broadly incorporating the ways that scholars have created, assembled and reinforced gender roles into archaeological accounts of the past. it is telling that there is no ‘oxford handbook of gender archaeology’, and studies that offer insights into what women and other gendered identities did in the past are still rare (dowson ; voss , ; ghisleni et al. ). problematically, gender-inclusive archaeologies often consist of ‘filling in the gaps’ of past narratives (figure ); this approach, however, fails to critique the gendered assumptions on which pre-existing inter- pretations were based (see tringham : ). also, the projection into the past of gendered ideologies based upon heteronormative family units is rarely challenged, although there are some exceptions; these include that of reeder ( ), who advanced the (contested) idea of a homosexual relationship to explain depictions of two egyptian elite males within their shared tomb (c. bc). this raises important questions: are scholars afraid that studies of gender, women or those who existed outside mainstream ‘normative’ society are not ‘acceptable’ within the establishment? can we attribute the paucity of gender research to anxieties about what is valued by the academy? are we reifying power dynamics in our scholarship that are more reveal- ing of the sexual politics of our world than those of the past (conboy et al. : )? gender and medieval archaeology in britain and ireland the paucity of research into gendered identities in the medieval past is difficult to comprehend. it seems that the closer we come to the white-washed, heteronormative and patriarchal ‘modern world’ (of europe), the harder it is to imagine an alternative past. in the context of medieval european archaeology, this may be because the medieval past can seem so familiar that it is easy to assume that we already know it intimately. we know people’s names, the places they lived, the words they wrote down, the plays they watched, the songs they sang, the fields they worked, and we have some of the things that they used, loved and cared about. further- more, modern religions still retain and perform certain aspects of their cosmology. the material culture of late medieval britain and ireland is incredibly rich. funerary monuments and effigies offer insights into mortuary practices and representations of the dead, while architecture provides a material context embodied with gender relations and domestic tensions (figure ). literary texts and images are a rich source for representations of rituals surrounding belief and devotion, but also of daily life and the gendered aspects of book ownership (figure ). the design, production, use and decommissioning of objects, such as ceramics and metalwork, further inform our understandings (figure – ). interweav- ing these ‘data’ with our investigations of social relations demonstrates how the archaeological record—in the widest interpretation of that term—can be used to tell less fragmentary stories about the gendered lives of medieval people. given the richness of our sources, it is curious that inclusive studies are not more common in medieval archaeology. why are other disciplines—particularly medieval history and literature— capable of exploring individual agency, social relations and the lived experiences of medieval men and women? (e.g. woolgar ; gee ; nolan ; martin ; moss ; jasperse ; delman ). key themes addressed in these cognate disciplines are sponsorship (patronage) and religious devotion among elite women, while non-elites, such as washerwomen, maidservants, midwives and prostitutes, feature somewhat less (rawcliffe ; müller ). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, these disciplines, however, still show an explicit awareness of the complex ways in which medi- eval people constructed their identities. this has resulted in innovative explorations of sexuality, the body, gendered identities, queerness and, of course, women and feminist activism (e.g. green ; l’estrange ; french ; maude ; moss ). the absence of these approaches is keenly felt in the study of later medieval archaeology, which remains shaped by the predominance of androcentric (male-biased) perspectives. gilchrist ( ) first examined inequality in the practice and discourse of archaeology in britain, later demonstrating how a gendered archaeological approach could reveal a more complex story of the past (gilchrist , , ). beyond gilchrist’s scholarship and work by johnson ( ), giles ( , ) and graves ( ), there has been an apparent resistance to the types of social approaches, such as embodiment, materiality or phe- nomenology, that have been employed in prehistoric studies (e.g. cooney ; brück ; carlin ). except in rare instances (e.g. gilchrist ; robb & harris ), archaeologies of the life course and the body have largely been neglected. studies that include queer theory (dowson ; voss ; ghisleni et al. ) are absent. gendered interpretations that explore lgbtq+ perspectives are non-existent and very rare across archaeology more generally. while some publications do foreground ‘gender’—a malapropos for the study of women—these largely tell stories of women in the male world (standley , ; hicks ; richardson ; wiekart ; collins ). with few exceptions, this perceived disinterest in gender contrasts with early medieval, anglo-saxon and viking studies, in which these subjects are explored to some extent (e.g. lucy ; poole ; o’sullivan ). is this indifference a reflection of unconscious bias in scholarly research or a conscious effort to reinforce a particular status quo? gendered differences are manifest in both past and present, and the absence of atten- tion to the performance of gender is therefore startling. figure . chepstow castle in wales (photograph by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, figure . detail of st genevieve in ms book of hours (courtesy of university of reading special collections). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, figure . seal of margaret mareschall, countess of northfolch and lady segrave (photograph by the author, courtesy of charlotte berry, magdalen college, oxford). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, gender and castle studies: the missing link understanding the issues in relation to gender within castle studies requires some reflection; while this article does not provide a full historiography of castle studies, brief commentary is necessary (barry ; o’conor ; creighton ; hansson ). as with archae- ology more generally, castle studies requires an interdisciplinary approach to explore the past in full; the application of necessary methods, however, has been limited. nonetheless, the field has undergone a profound transformation over the past three decades, moving away from military frameworks (allen brown et al. ) and embracing dee- per explorations of space and place. new approaches have emerged that focus on the symbolic meaning of castles and explore what these buildings might have meant to the medieval person. the emphasis has shifted from simply recounting detailed architectural descriptions towards integrated, interpretative approaches that view the spatial arrangement of buildings as a reflection and enactment of cultural ideolo- gies (e.g. coulson ; heslop ; fairclough ; gilchrist ; marshall ; richardson ; mol ; o’keeffe ). subsequently, a new wave of castle studies operating at a landscape-scale have looked beyond the masonry buildings to propose that the castle was only one part of a seigneurial package. this complex comprised many features, including dovecotes, villages, earthworks, water features and farms, through which to display, enhance and manage lordly economic, political and cultural authority (hansson ; creighton & liddiard ). this shift in approach represents a reaction against long- standing essentialist arguments based on binary oppositional understandings: military vs domestic, and defence vs display. the debates that ensued resulted in a more critical discourse and an acknowledgement that castles served multiple roles (johnson ; speight ; liddiard ; creighton & liddiard ). while these methodologies were at one time beneficial, they are now problematic. land- scape studies are based on macro-scale approaches that concentrate on displays of power, eco- nomic production, ecological exploitation and diet (liddiard ; creighton ; o’conor et al. ; swallow ; beglane ). they rarely, however, address the micro- scale of daily life, or other issues such as gender, sexuality, emotion and the life course. castle studies has not yet fully embraced social archaeology. while spatial approaches have been a figure . exeter puzzle jug (courtesy of royal albert memorial museum and exeter city council). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, key focus for archaeologists and architectural historians for two decades, they have not brought us any closer to understanding how people occupied these spaces. interpretations of the spatial arrangement of buildings remain heavily influenced by perspectives of mascu- line rationality (boys ). buildings are thought to have a ‘grammar’ to be ‘read’ (johnson ). medieval use of space is still characterised and debated through dualistic binaries: pub- lic vs private, sacred vs profane, military vs domestic and male vs female, thus reinforcing oppositional understandings of man vs women, self vs other, subject vs object. this culture of dualisms stems from androcentric thinking, in which man is the beneficiary. in other words, the male ‘subject’ is viewed as active, rational and powerful, the female ‘object’ is emo- tional, passive and can be exploited. while we can demonstrate that medieval society was highly stratified and that social space and interaction were regulated (gilchrist ; hannson ), there remains an onus on the gender scholar to prove that matters are anything other than male. buildings may be thought of as active agents, but often only in terms of masculine power, wealth and status. women, in this model, are determined as passive, secluded ‘objects’, excluded from the ‘loca- tion of power’, which is a male or masculine space (johnson ). if this view is accepted, then one could safely assume that this exclusion had a physical manifestation in the form of a particular set of rooms from which women were excluded or secluded within. yet, confus- ingly, the idea of ‘female space’ in the castle is persistently resisted, despite their obvious and tangible presence. goodall ( : ) contends that women and children were entirely absent from castles, and that medieval elite households were celibate and male. even if this were true, why are homosocial behaviours (moss ), performances of masculinities or potential male homosexual relations not explored in this scenario? our current view of the later medieval period typically comprises buildings, objects and landscapes often detached from each other. discussions of castles have not yet combined peo- ple, places and things together within their historical context. architecture has a much richer role to play in archaeological interpretation than as a passive reflection of human behaviour, or as a binary didactic instrument, containing or transmitting social cues. architecture must be examined in terms of lived experience and as material culture. while some scholars do concentrate on the latter, it is often analysed in a typological or scientific manner—especially pottery—and not contextualised spatially within the castle (e.g. creighton & wright ). people are mostly discussed in terms of power, as patrons or ruling lords; in other words, elite males or females who operated as such. taken together, these traits reveal the discipline’s lack of enthusiasm to engage in meaningful discourses about biographies, life cycles, social prac- tices, beliefs and identities. one key issue is that castle studies remains a male-dominated field. despite the ‘new wave’ of such studies moving beyond militarism, it still typically reproduces male-centred interpre- tations epitomised by a focus on political power or status. studies that focus on women often endeavour to insert the female into ‘traditionally’ male activities, rather than creating a nar- rative of the female experience of living in the medieval world (e.g. richardson ). this is problematic, as it results in ‘male qualities’ being prioritised in analyses of social activities. there is no doubt that castles and associated activities have been long viewed as male, where metonyms for masculinity comprised weapons, armour and horses (gilchrist : ). generally, castle scholars no longer explicitly depict the castle as an aggressively karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, male-only world of sweat and testosterone; the current, insidious ‘gender-blindness’ within castle studies, however, ensures the preservation of this now implicit ideology. women, and those who were (or are?) not accepted as part of mainstream society, are absent(ed)—fig- uratively and literally. it seems that the discipline is focused on maintaining a particular status quo in the present by projecting ‘known’ gender constructs and roles onto the past, thereby ignoring other possibilities (conkey & spector ). ideally, castle studies would foreground human-centred stories that emphasise the real complexities of everyday life, where—as today—the world is experienced through the spec- trum of human emotions. my current marie skłodowska-curie fellowship, ‘herstory’, aims to achieve this by focusing on castles as case studies across ireland, britain and france. crucially, it integrates people, places and things, and asks new questions of the arch- aeological evidence, such as: how was gender constructed and mediated in relation to the medieval castle? what was it like to be a person, other than an elite male, living in the medi- eval castle? what material and social practices shaped the world of the castle? the inclusion of gendered interpretations is a fundamental issue not just for castle studies, but also for medi- eval archaeology and archaeology more generally, where many scholars still take a singular view of the past: that of able-bodied, heterosexual men of power—in other words, the mod- ern ‘masculine’ status quo. conclusion archaeology reinforces or projects a real and mythologised patriarchal hierarchy within its scholarship. consistently endorsing male authors, male perspectives and male stories, it per- petuates the idea of ‘male activities’ as superior. this affects not only our understanding of the past, but also maintains the patriarchal status quo in the present. if a male-oriented narrative is dominant and represented in scholarship, and it is embedded within a patriarchal academy that reinforces androcentrism, then archaeological (or other) evidence that speaks to the con- trary will continue to be overlooked or disregarded. our discourses must create multi-vocal narratives that reveal the social complexities and diversity of the world. in an era of global feminist activism, it is no longer acceptable to portray the past through one master narrative that consistently ignores the lives and experiences of othered people, especially women and those who do not conform to the heteronormative or white eurocentric ‘ideal’. this means moving away from accepting or assuming binary and heteronormative notions of the past. our scholarship needs to stop identifying gender—especially in attempting to make women visible—and to acknowledge that gender is already there. rather than “add women and stir” (tringham : ), we need to weave a new story, reimagining all the threads of various ele- ments of past identities and social relations, and the wide spectrum of gendered identities, to form a rich tapestry of the past and the present that constructs it (figure ). if we remain com- placent to the current gender (and racial) disparity, we are complicit in reinforcing the unequal status quo, and we fail to reach a large part of the potential audience for archaeology—those who feel disenfranchised by patriarchal, heteronormative or colonial narratives. while we now accept that our ways of being in the present inform how we view and interpret the past, many scholars are unable (or unwilling?) to discuss their personal motivations for gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, choosing a particular interpretative approach. the lack of reflection given to the author’s per- sonal perspective in many archaeological studies is a core issue in how structural inequalities endure, including the perpetuation of patriarchal approaches. discrimination today based on sex, gender or sexual orientation is intrinsically linked to the paucity of research on gender in the past. to combat this, we must all demonstrate who we are and why we ‘do’ our studies in our own particular way. to paraphrase virginia woolf, this means changing and adapting, re-arranging our rooms (physical, literal and digital) to encourage other people to take up and redefine that space in order to enable a diverse, multi-vocal archaeology. acknowledgements this project has received funding from the european union’s 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edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture & the arts issue number issue date spring publication date / / editors maria elena torres-quevedo and valentina p. aparicio forum claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in any such media current or later developed. the author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. any latter publication shall recognise forum as the original publisher. university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture and the arts issue | spring forum | issue between hashtagging and hashtrending: counterculture, dissent and aesthetic politics dr. chantelle gray van heerden university of south africa the year was marked by a number of major events, some fleeting, others still ongoing, but almost all underscoring the need for thinking about a very different way of being in the world; in other words, producing radically different kinds of subjectivity. these events – which included brexit and the election of real estate mogul and reality tv celebrity, donald trump, as the president of the u.s. – can be seen as part of the ongoing rise of right-wing populism that has marked world politics for at least the past decade. the continuing european migrant and refugee crises, too, have been harnessed by politicians to create voter fear around personal security in terms of jobs and safety, and national security in terms of terrorism. accordingly, these kinds of political strategies create a victim-perpetrator binary. but can we hashtag ourselves out of the system? the year was marked by a number of major events, some fleeting, others still ongoing, but almost all underscoring the need for thinking about a very different way of being in the world; in other words, producing radically different kinds of subjectivity. these events – which included brexit and the election of real estate mogul and reality tv celebrity, donald trump, as the president of the u.s. – can be seen as part of the ongoing rise of right-wing populism that has marked world politics for at least the past decade. the continuing european migrant and refugee crises, too, have been harnessed by politicians to create voter fear around personal security in terms of jobs and safety, and national security in terms of terrorism. accordingly, these kinds of political strategies create a victim-perpetrator binary. victimhood, it would seem then, is a first line defense tactic of far-right sentiment. complementary to this tactic is an increase in violence, both in a bottom-up fashion and from the state and police in a top-down direction. an article in the washington post holds that the increase in violence on the right may be seen as a “signature quality” for achieving political goals, noting that in contrast it remains largely used as a defense tactic on the left (fromer). commenting on the bottom-up violence of the alt-right in the u.s., the anarchist collective, crimethinc., describes this as the next stage in u.s. fascism because it in effect means that the trump regime now has a “street cadre” doing its dirty work. as for top-down examples, we may recall the series of measures taken in france after the terrorist attacks in paris on november , when the police were granted extended power to arrest people without warrants and demonstrations became increasingly prohibited and unjustly clamped down (perolini). british prime minister, theresa may, expressed the need for similar measures after the terrorist attack in manchester on may , publicly pronouncing, ‘”and if our human rights laws stop us from doing it, we’ll change the laws so we can do it”. forum | issue one of the political strategies that has arisen in the last decade and has been used extensively to protest the increased clampdowns and violence is hashtag politics and activism. andrew walker, co- founder of tweetminster, stated in already that even though hashtags “started out as labels . . . to make it easier to search for messages that you were interested in, in this huge soup of messages that is out there on twitter”, the hashtag was no longer needed as twitter enhanced their technology (mason). this means that twitter, like google, can find what you are looking for without the hashtag, yet people have continued to use them, increasingly so in political protests. in south africa, the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall movements are cases in point. the former was initiated when chumani maxwele covered a bronze statue of colonialist cecil john rhodes with human faeces obtained from a portable flush toilet in khayelitsha, a large “township” outside of cape town. this statue was located on the main campus of the most prestigious university in south africa, namely the university of cape town (uct). chumani’s actions were sparked by the ongoing institutional racism on campus – even after the disbandment of apartheid – and a group of students and staff subsequently called for the removal of the statue because it was seen as a representation of the enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid. although #rhodesmustfall was initially directed at the removal of the statue and institutional racism, it soon developed into more comprehensive discussions about decolonisation and white supremacy. this led to the eruption of a number of other but related protests on campuses throughout south africa, notably #feesmustfall, a response to an increase in fees at south african universities. public opinion has been divided on these student movements but, despite this, they led to a number of significant outcomes, such as the removal of the rhodes statue and ongoing debates about racism, white supremacy, decolonisation and language policy. importantly, there was also a suspension in university fee increases in . hashtag politics and activism has been seen in other parts of the world too. we may think here of #blacklivesmatter, a movement “against police violence [that] was sparked by specific deaths of young black people”, but which also extends to “state violence” (smith) or what we might call structural violence. then there is the #metoo campaign that shed light on sexual harassments. this movement “has already gained substantial momentum” and is now thinking about how to “translate demands into policies, legal frameworks, and action” (kemp and trunk). another major hashtag social movement was #sayhername – an extension of the #blacklivesmatter movement. as activist rachel gilmer says: “when you bring women to the narrative, it very much complicates our understanding of what police violence is and actually builds a much more structural-based argument around the problem” (workneh). these examples raise two questions i am interested in: ) is it possible for such seemingly spontaneous movements to effectively challenge existing socio-economic structures?; and ) can we think of hashtag politics in terms of aesthetics and counterculture? to break open a new field of potentiality the spontaneous eruption of events in france commonly referred to as may ’ greatly influenced the philosophy of gilles deleuze and félix guattari. we see this especially in the detailed attention they pay to the political dimension of socio-cultural stratification. this is not to say that they were not already forum | issue politicised before the civil unrest of this period, but these events held a special interest for them. deleuze writes: in historical phenomena such as the revolution of , the commune, the revolution of , there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. […] an event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but still something survives that cannot be outdated. […] may is of the order of pure event, free from all normal, or normative causalities. […] when a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality. society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own mutation (two regimes ). a number of aspects arise here that are important in the consideration of hashtag politics as an effective challenge to existing structural arrangements and in terms of countercultural political aesthetics. in addressing this, i want to avoid restoring causality, to simply think of hashtag politics and activism as a “natural” outflow condition of social media. it is certain that we cannot account for all the reasons that gave rise to this form of politics. i therefore want to concentrate instead on the ways in which political events become adept in developing what deleuze and guattari refer to as collective assemblages of enunciation (in other words, discursive practices and symbolic orders) that match the new subjectivity they seek to or have already begun to create. this is especially important as these assemblages of enunciation intersect with machinic assemblages of desire – or bodies and processes and the affects they produce. in hatred of democracy ( ), jacques rancière contrasts what he refers to as “the political” with “politics”. he argues that politics, in contrast with the political – which includes reified political, geographical, gender, economic, class and other hegemonic structural arrangements and relations – has the potential for actual or extensive (concretised) social transformation. to put it differently, the political is deeply mired in the state apparatus and capitalism. all of these structural forces, which have extensive political and ideological effects/affects, reinforce established relations of power through various mechanisms, such as binary overcoding and the capture of assemblages, as well as axiomatisation. already we have seen how hashtag politics have been recuperated by politicians. ramsha jahangir reports, for example, that “political figures as well as military officials have been using twitter to make official statements” for some time now. similarly, alyssa lafaro reports how “facebook, google, and twitter focus on content creation, encouraging candidates to use their platforms for brand identity and digital advertising”. british political commentator and alt-right supporter, milo yiannopoulos, emphasises the importance of these hashtag communications in creating binaries “to atomise the terms of the debate” (mason). this relates to what i stated earlier about victimhood. but all of these uses have wider implications than mere politicking and taking part in the political or, conversely, doing politics, according to rancière’s distinction. forum | issue deleuze, in his essay “postscript on the societies of control” ( ), argues that we have moved from michel foucault’s disciplinary societies aimed at enclosing spaces, as well as time-space within these spaces, to societies of control. around the same time as we see the emergence of disciplinary societies, we also see the development of biopower and biopolitics – what foucault calls anatamo- politics. achille mbembe takes this line of argumentation further, by intersecting foucault’s thought with that of racial politics. what mbembe calls necropolitics is thus a consideration of the ways in which the sovereign power of the state apparatus dictates who lives and who dies, as well as how this became embedded in social institutions such as schools, prisons, hospitals and so on. judith butler rephrases the biopolitics of disposability by asking when is life grievable? she writes, “without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. [. . .] the apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life” ( ). what she argues that, although there is an implicit understanding that life is grievable when a life has been led – that is, at the end of a life – we also have to, according to the future anterior, suppose grievability at the beginning of a life. this is, in fact, what the #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername campaigns address. leigh gilmore argues that #blacklivesmatter “provide an important counterweight to the political and market forces that render some lives “grievable” and others “salvage”” ( ). in other words, hashtag politics have the potential to produce new collective assemblages of enunciation according to the new subjectivity they imagine and enact. in moving from disciplinary societies to societies of control – although these are not discreet and should not be thought of in terms of a sharp distinction –, deleuze argues that the previously enclosed systems have been opened up so that we no longer have moulds but modulations (“postscript” ). in this sense, disciplinary societies actually provided some sense of stability, knowability and predictability. societies of control, on the other hand, are the dawning of the era of the precariat. anything can change – be modulated – at any time, and the individual has to adapt to these modulations by becoming modulateable. this makes doing politics very difficult, because attention is arrested by these constantly shifting landscapes and their demands on people’s daily lives. this has been intensified by algorithmic control, and it is where a wider implication of hashtag communications comes to the fore. thus, while platforms such as twitter provide space for real political engagement – let us assume for a moment that we are talking about hashtag politics and activism not in terms of the political but in terms of politics – these communications are being ‘monitored’ by neural networks trained to recognise specific patterns. government agencies have access to our communications and can, as such, use these against protesters far more easily than in the past. despite this, do these platforms provide the means for doing politics? i have already shown how #blacklivesmatter produced new collective assemblages of enunciation. but is this politics, or participation in the political? rancière claims that the political is an inherently dual arrangement of power, or, as he writes, “a vicious circle located in the link between the political relationship and the political subject” (“ten theses”). the political therefore relies on a hierarchical distribution of power relations. so, what is politics? according to rancière’s explanation, to understand politics we first need to investigate the political, which he describes as follows: an interrogation into what is “proper” to politics must be carefully distinguished from current and widespread propositions regarding “the return of the political”. in the past several years, forum | issue and in the context of a state-consensus, we have seen the blossoming of affirmations proclaiming the end of the illusion of the social and a return to a ‘pure’ form of politics. […] on this basis, the frontier between the domestic and the political becomes the frontier between the social and the political; and to the idea of a city-state defined by its common good is opposed the sad reality of modern democracy as the rule of the masses and of necessity. in practice, this celebration of pure politics entrusts the virtue of the ‘political good’ to governmental oligarchies enlightened by “experts”; which is to say that the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social necessity, comes down to nothing more (or less) than the reduction of the political to the state [l'étatique] (“ten theses”). as i stated before, we can deduce from this that the political is always based on a ranked diffusion of power relations, enforced by what rancière refers to as “the police” – which includes algorithms in contemporary society. to put it differently, the political is always a structural organisation with a ruling party to whom power over the individual or the political subject is entrusted, decreed as “being for the good of all”. even what we think of as a “democracy” – which relies on rhetoric of “freedom” and “personal choice” – is situated in the political and is therefore not a form of doing politics. politics, in contrast with the political, does not rely on hierarchical relations with political subjects and cannot be defined in terms of an a priori philosophy that assumes the existence of a “pre-existing subject”. instead, it must be considered from the point of view of the different political arrangements or relations that allow for the existence of this political subject (rancière “the theses”). the focus here shifts to the power relationships that are established when tiered political allocations or social strata are accepted as “normal” and participated in as if these are “natural” manifestations, rendering the political subject immobilised to varying degrees and subject to “the way things are” – which, furthermore, often depends on the political subject’s social standing. politics is thus: … a specific rupture in the logic of the arche. it does not simply presuppose the rupture of “normal” distributions of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. it also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions “proper” to such classifications (rancière “the theses”). this idea is closely linked to deleuze and guattari’s notion of lines of flight from accepted existing nomological and normative territorialisations, and to foucault’s notions of the visible and the sayable. the implication is that, in order for anyone to move away from the political to politics – or to regain political agency – we need to start by acknowledging our complicity in creating and sustaining state and capitalist territorialisations, or what mark fisher refers to as the “pervasive atmosphere” of capitalist realism ( ). if our complicity in these structural arrangements and relations is not acknowledged or remains unconscious, this “unreal real” state becomes normalised – sometimes so much so that an alternative becomes difficult to envision. as fisher puts it, structural arrangements remain intact (even when content is significantly changed through policy, for example) because people are no longer “capable of producing surprises”; they become uninterested in creating because capitalist realism creates a very specific form or sense of reality, one which presents itself as “the one true reality”. while there are endless choices (consumer choices) in this reality, the political subject is rendered scarcely forum | issue more than a “consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and relics” ( ). furthermore, argues fisher, contemporary society is pervaded by a kind of “depressive hedonia”, by which he means a listless seeking of constant “hits” of positive affect, such as facebook “likes”, because of the feeling that “something is missing” ( - ). to make matters worse, illnesses such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and so forth are increasingly pathologised and (overly) medicated, rather than viewed as symptoms of something deeper which “already forecloses any possibility of politicization” ( ). the combination of all of these “symptoms” of capitalism pacify and debilitate people and, as a result, often veto the possibility of questioning the structural violence of capitalism and capitalist realism, or any other systemic interconnections. these ideas have been investigated by foucault in much of his philosophy, as well as by deleuze and guattari. in their collective works, all of these philosophers investigate the effects of external surveillance that lead to internal surveillance and modifications in behaviour, resulting in different forms of “madness”. in a thousand plateaus deleuze and guattari, in fact, argue that if schizophrenia indicates the surface boundaries of capitalism, then bipolar disorder designates the interior chaos thereof. this is why rancière makes the distinction between the political and politics, since for him politics is opposed to the police, by which he means all forms of surveillance. he specifically explains the police “not as a social function but [as] a symbolic constitution of the social” (rancière “the theses”). at its core, the police is always in a structural relationship with the state, whereas politics is always a disengagement from the police, aimed at disrupting these toxic structural arrangements; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. the importance of this has to do, again, with deleuze and guattari’s social ontology, consisting of assemblages of enunciation and machinic assemblages of desire. thus, while the political – the state and police – create specific collective assemblages enforced through machinic desire, it is the work of politics to rupture this desire, creating new desires, new discursive practices and symbolic orders, and new subjectivities. in this sense, #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername can be seen as doing politics rather than participating in the political. while co-optation by the state apparatus and recuperation by capitalism have already taken place to some degree, this does not detract from the capacity these movements of dissent have to produce affirmative power (pouissance) – the power to act. this has clearly been shown by #blacklivesmatter, #sayhername and #metoo. whether or not these movements are capable of desiring their own mutation to become autopoietic systems remains to be seen. this is really the greatest challenge any counterculture faces. desire as resistance, resistance as aesthetics if, as deleuze and guattari argue, desire is not linked to a transcendent set of morals, will it not inevitably be reduced to subjectivism and relativism? this indeed has been the question raised in regards to baruch spinoza and friedrich nietzsche’s philosophies on ethics. deleuze and guattari, in continuation of spinoza and nietzsche’s work, developed a philosophy of desire that contests the idea of desire in terms of repression (as in sigmund freud) or lack (as in jacques lacan). this immanent desire is no longer located within the individual as a closed-off entity, but is conceived of as a social force, inherently connective, flowing through and between assemblages, also known as desiring- machines. it implies an openness to experimentation or becoming; a continuous relation or assemblage of material flows on a plane of immanence. here we reach an interesting point. if we agree with the forum | issue philosophy of desire as developed by deleuze and guattari, and agree that it allows for a redistribution of power in that it does not pit self against other but instead locates power as a social arrangement of intensive affect, we may deduce that desire is a form of resistance to state territorialisations. in other words, desire is at once linked to an immanent politics and ethics, and has the capacity to dislocate dominant power formations and the void (depressive hedonia) left by them. rosi braidotti writes: the vacuous nature of dominant power formations has been analysed by foucault as the panopticon; the void that lies at the heart of the system and which defines that contour of both social and symbolic visibility. deleuze and guattari also comment on the fact that any dominant notion such as masculinity or race has no positive definition. the prerogative of being dominant means that a concept gets defined oppositionally, by casting outwards upon others the mark of oppression or marginalization. the centre is dead and void; there is no becoming there. the action is at the city gates, where nomadic tribes of world-travelled polyglots are taking a short break ( ). a philosophy of desire – that is, an ethics of immanence – supports a conception of life as assemblages of material flows intent on finding new modes of becoming. many of the hashtag movements exemplify this. however, #blacklivesmatter has now “evolved well beyond a hashtag attached to sometimes-smart and often-snarky posts about policing, jailing and racial disparities” into a “social movement with political aims, policy demands and a disparate set of individuals motivated to push those issues” (ross). this marks a recuperation by the political and is where hashtag politics may need to rethink its strategies and tactics. we saw a similar reversion from politics to the political in the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall movements in south africa. furthermore, these movements often become marked by “internal fights” that are sometimes productive and other times not, while protest actions simultaneously become “the subject of government monitoring” (ross). the question then becomes how this tension between the political and politics can be addressed – especially because policies often have real and immediate material consequences and may therefore be desired – and how eruptions such as hashtag politics and activism can remain truly countercultural. in his final work, chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm ( ), guattari refers to an “artistry” or “power of emergence” that traverses all spheres ( ). however, he cautions that this powerful artistry or aesthetics does not in itself have any transformative power; it simply highlights the need to make “a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation” ( ). aesthetics, in its coupling with ethics, could thus be said to constitute the mapping of the new “in contact with the real” (deleuze and guattari ). whereas aesthetics is typically about a value judgment of beauty, guattari sees aesthetic judgement as that which holds potentiality. thus, in aesthetic judgement, “i am not asserting anything about what is, nor am i legislating what it ought to be” (shaviro ). rather, it is “part of the process by which i become what i am” (shaviro ). in the same way, a political movement, such as hashtag politics, has the potential to disrupt normative arrangements, although it is never a foregone conclusion and never comes ready-made. ethico-aesthetics is a form of prefigurative politics, creating a disruption that allows for a potentiality that “has never existed in the universe in quite that way before” ( ). for this to take place, deleuze argues that the “conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience; in this case the work of art would really appear as experimentation” (logic forum | issue of sense ). similarly, to move from the political to politics and thus effectively challenge existing socio-economic structures, movements need to adopt and ethico-aesthetic paradigm which follows a praxis of experimentation, rather than forms of political resistance sanctioned by the state. as rancière puts is, the “question of an aesthetic modernity, that of art after the death of art” can be “formulated in terms of an affirmation of the power of artistic presentation against representative doxa” (“is there” ; emphasis added). the question of politics as art or aesthetics from an ethico-aesthetic perspective is thus about immanent creativity and machinic potentiality that is not marked by representation, but by intensive becomings. in other words, there is no static representation but, rather, a dynamic space through which something passes on its way to another becoming-space, and during which it may be altered or intensified. as a result, there exists a continual production of singularities or, as deleuze and guattari explain, it is on this plane that one is “fully part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside of it” ( ). it is here with virginia woolf’s mrs dalloway that we will never again say “i am this, i am that” (woolf ). while the “citational politics of #sayhername exemplify feminist collective autobiographical practice through which the power of naming offers a means to represent lives that lack security” (gilmore ), it is not merely a representational politics. yes, it “memorializes victims of police violence: mya hall, alexia christian, meagan hockaday, sandra bland, natasha mckenna, tanisha anderson, michelle cusseaux, and aura rosser” (gilmore ), but it also moves beyond representation that often relies on drawing analogies between stable subjects. whereas representationalism – or the cartesian mind/body dualism – hypothesises that we cannot have first-hand knowledge of our ideas or interpretations about humans and objects in the world because there is a “veil of perception” between the mind and everything exterior to it, deleuze and guattari question the primacy of representation. specifically, they show that linguistic representation or the symbolic order does not itself define personhood and argue instead that the mind/body is co- imbricated with material-discursive practices and machinic assemblages of desire. the #sayhername campaign is a good example of how collective enunciations are produced, but also how desire is fundamentally changed. no longer are black women looking to the transcendent moralistic framework (as according to kant’s understanding) of the state apparatus; instead, their immanent desire has become a social force, open to experimentation and becoming. as gilmore states, the body’s circulation becomes potent as the online testimonial network hosts a citational economy of retweeting and sharing that creates value through repetition. testimony in this context acknowledges that “what’s next” is likely to be more violence, more names, more black deaths ( ). however, this “what’s next” has to do more than just show the violence of the state apparatus; it has to point towards the conditions for creating the new, the future. this requires a creative power of practical and social struggle “capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm difference in the state of permanent revolution” (deleuze difference and repetition ). this permanent revolution indicates a movement’s desire for its own mutation so that it becomes autopoietic. there is no mass production of subjectivities here. guattari relates autopoiesis not only to the production of subjectivity, but articulates it in terms of “a more collective machinism without delimited unity, whose autonomy accommodates diverse mediums of alterity” ( ). this is, perhaps, the best description of forum | issue counterculture and aesthetic politics. whether hashtag or in another form, we have seen a new desire for politics beyond the political in recent years. nevertheless, the choices we make to fuel these revolutions will determine whether or not we are able to move against and beyond representative doxa. as guattari says, there is an ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible, an ethics and politics of the virtual that decorporealizes and deterritorializes contingency, linear causality and the pressure of circumstances and significations which besiege us. it is a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation ( ). to watch theresa may delivering this speech go to https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /theresa-may-rip-up-human-rights-laws- impede-new-terror-legislation. typically, symbolic codes and values are produced by the state or other governing bodies to generate and reproduce centralised systems of meaning and ensuing norms and subjectivities. capitalism, as a mode of social production, bases its organisation on axiomatization, which does not require beliefs or norms, but simply sets up an equivalent relation between money and an amount of labour time or a product. nomological denotes certain assumed ontological principles such as the “rules of reasoning” that may in fact not be theoretically sound but are accepted as such. kant proposed that humans are shaped by universally applicable laws that are generalisable and unconditional. these are transcendent laws and exist outside of the autonomous, discreet human. one of deleuze and guattari’s most important contributions to philosophy is the notion of immanence (rather than transcendence) so that there is a focus on processuality and the emergent properties of relations in and between assemblages (instead of the human). hence, life is seen as a process sufficient unto itself, rather than beholden to an external or transcendent principle or cause. what is immanent is thus immediate, particular and always already within. wini breines defines prefigurative politics as an “antiorganisational politics” aimed at embodying “personal and antihierarchical values” and developing “seeds of liberation and the new society (prior to and in the process of revolution) through notions of participatory democracy grounded in counter-institutions” ( ). prefigurative politics thus bifurcates from present political conditions, constructing new political possibilities within and in conjunction with current configurations, but it also contains something additional so that it has the capacity to create something entirely novel which does not reproduce existing structures. it is aimed at form and content. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /theresa-may-rip-up-human-rights-laws-impede-new-terror-legislation https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /theresa-may-rip-up-human-rights-laws-impede-new-terror-legislation forum | issue works cited braidotti, rosi. transpositions: on nomadic ethics. cambridge: polity press, . print. breines, wini. “community and organization: the new left and michels' 'iron law'.” social problems, vol. , no. , , pp. – . web. butler, judith. frames of war: when is life grievable? london: verso, . print. crimethinc. “why the alt-right are so weak and why they are becoming so dangerous.” crimethinc, april , https://crimethinc.com/ / / /altright. web. january . deleuze, gilles. difference and repetition, trans. paul patton. london and new york: continuum, . print. ---. 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https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ / /france-unchecked-clampdown-on-protests-under-guise-of-fighting-terrorism/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ / /france-unchecked-clampdown-on-protests-under-guise-of-fighting-terrorism/ https://doi.org/ . /tae. . forum | issue ross, janell. “how black lives matter moved from a hashtag to a real political force.” the washington post, august , <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/ / / /how-black-lives-matter-moved-from-a-hashtag-to-a-real-political- force/?utm_term=. c ba ac>. web. march . shaviro, steven. without criteria: kant, whitehead, deleuze, and aesthetics. boston: mit press, . print. smith, mychal denzel. “a q&a with alicia garza, co-founder of #blacklivesmatter.” the nation, march , <https://www.thenation.com/article/qa-alicia-garza-co-founder-blacklivesmatter/>. web. april . woolf, virginia. mrs. dalloway. london: hogarth press, . print. workneh, lilly. “#sayhername: why we should declare that black women and girls matter, too.” huffington post, december , <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/entry/black-women- matter_n_ >. web. march . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ / / /how-black-lives-matter-moved-from-a-hashtag-to-a-real-political-force/?utm_term=. c ba ac https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ / / /how-black-lives-matter-moved-from-a-hashtag-to-a-real-political-force/?utm_term=. c ba ac https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ / / /how-black-lives-matter-moved-from-a-hashtag-to-a-real-political-force/?utm_term=. c ba ac https://www.thenation.com/article/qa-alicia-garza-co-founder-blacklivesmatter/ https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/entry/black-women-matter_n_ https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/entry/black-women-matter_n_ forum | issue author biography chantelle gray van heerden (phd) is a senior researcher at the institute for gender studies at the university of south africa (unisa). her research centres on the philosophical collaboration between gilles deleuze and félix guattari and she is one of the organisers of the biennial south african deleuze and guattari studies conference. chantelle is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume, deleuze and anarchism (edinburgh university press), and is a member of the editorial collective of gender questions. in her spare time, she makes experimental music and is one of the organisers of the annual edge of wrong festival. she is particularly interested in the gendered complexities of the music industry and is currently working on a series of music philosophy articles suited to the contemporary experimental scene.. gender in i/o - beyond representation of women in i/o to producing gender-inclusive knowledge margaret s. stockdale indiana university-purdue university indianapolis alice h. eagly northwestern university author note: margaret s. stockdale, department of psychology, iupui; alice h. eagly, department of psychology, northwestern university. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to margaret st. stockdale, department of psychology, iupui, n. blackford st., ld , indianapolis, in . e- mail: pstockda@iupui.edu. ___________________________________________________________________ this is the author's manuscript of the article published in final edited form as: stockdale, m. s., & eagly, a. h. ( ). beyond representation of women in i-o to producing gender-inclusive knowledge. industrial and organizational psychology, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://doi.org/ . /iop. . gender in i/o - beyond representation of women in i/o to producing gender-inclusive knowledge gardner, ryan, and snoeyink provided an excellent and much-needed analysis of the status of women in i/o psychology. although others have produced overall assessments of the status of women in psychology (eagly & riger, ; kite et al., ), these are not sufficient to identify conditions within the subfields of psychology. as shown by statistics on the divisions of the american psychological association (http://www.apa.org/about/division/officers/ services/profiles.aspx), the subfields differ greatly in their gender balance, with some being male-dominated (e.g., experimental and cognitive science), others female-dominated (e.g., developmental psychology), and still others representing women and men more equally (e.g., social and personality psychology). i/o psychology is among the more gender-balanced fields, with an increasing proportion of women over time. it would seem that i/o’s gradual inclusion of more women should have changed aspects of research and discourse in this field. in this comment, we argue that these women have produced impressive changes. before launching into this matter of women’s contributions, we acknowledge gardner and colleagues’ findings indicating men in i/o, compared to the women, have enjoyed greater income, faculty rank in universities, numbers of publications, leadership roles, and recognition for accomplishments. yet, as in psychology as a whole, women have gradually gained status in terms of such indicators (eagly & miller, ). we maintain that women’s contributions go beyond their status and recognition: women have made a difference by introducing new topics into i/o psychology and expanding the scope of some established topics. expansion of the scope of knowledge is not normally assessed, but is not only important, but essential, to the success of any academic field. indeed, specialists in gender in i/o - science, engineering, and technology have recognized the importance of not only increasing the representation and career success of women and underrepresented minorities but also increasing knowledge about sex and gender and their impact on scientific knowledge (schiebinger, , ). for example, recent neuroscience research has discovered sex differences in the neuronal pathways between stress and alcohol consumption that are relevant to treatment programs (logrip, milivojevic, bertholomey. & torregrossa, ). in addition, prior exclusions of women from major studies of cardiovascular disease led to male-centric understanding of symptoms that resulted in suboptimal diagnosis and treatment for women (rosser, ; schiebinger, ). by extension, we ask how well i/o psychologists have represented gender in their research and how the inclusion of gender has enhanced the knowledge base in this field. with this commentary, we assert the following: ( ) the number of gender-related articles published in mainstream i/o journals has increased over the past several decades; ( ) women predominantly authored those publications; ( ) gender research in i/o has had an important impact in broadening knowledge of core areas of our science, which we illustrate with examples from leadership and sexual harassment; and ( ) gender research in i/o is not a career killer, and no one should suggest that it is. to illustrate these themes, we provide some insights into how gender has been represented in mainstream i/o research over the past several decades. to analyze the representation of sex and gender topics in i/o science, we first document the prevalence of sex- or gender-related research published in mainstream i/o journals since the s. second, we show that women are more likely than men to have produced this research. third, we list the most frequent topics appearing in these mainstream journals that were indexed as sex- or gender- gender in i/o - related. finally, we briefly discuss two areas of i/o research, leadership and sexual harassment, in which a focus on gender has been particularly influential. methods and analysis using apa’s psycinfo database, we searched from to the present for all articles published in leading journals in which i/o psychologists and professionals in closely-related business and management disciplines most frequently publish. in psycinfo, psychology journals are typically indexed cover-to-cover, and articles in journals from neighboring fields such as management and sociology are indexed if deemed to have psychological relevance or importance. we recognize that i/o sex and gender researchers also publish in gender-specialty journals such as sex roles, as well as in social psychology and general psychology journals. however, we focused our inquiry on i/o and related management journals to document representation in i/o’s mainstream. within these journals, we identified articles using psycinfo thesaurus index terms, which are applied by professional indexers, because of their greater consistency in identifying articles’ major themes, compared with authors’ own keywords and titles. the following index journals selected for this analysis were those ranked in the top of applied psychology, management and business journal lists as of : academy of management annals, academy of management journal, academy of management perspectives, academy of management review, administrative science quarterly, journal of applied psychology, journal of business and psychology, journal of management, journal of management studies, journal of occupational and organizational psychology, journal of occupational health psychology, journal of organizational behavior, journal of vocational behavior, leadership quarterly, organizational behavior & human performance, organizational behavior and human decision processes, personnel psychology, annual review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior, organizational research methods, work and stress, international journal of management reviews,. gender in i/o - terms identified research related to sex or gender: human sex differences, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, sex role attitudes, sex roles, sexism, gender identity, femininity, masculinity, androgyny, working women, female attitudes, feminism, feminist psychology, mothers, expectant mothers, pregnancy, or fathers. in addition, we coded the articles for the sex of the first author. we then used appropriate index terms to determine which topics were most frequently studied in i/o psychology within this body of sex and gender research. also counting the total number of articles published regardless of topic allowed is to report the percentage of articles pertaining to sex and gender topics. prevalence of sex- or gender-related publications and sex of first author we located , peer-reviewed journal articles fitting our sex and gender criteria out of a population of , articles, indicating that . % of research published in these mainstream i/o journal articles pertained to this research topic. women were the first author of . %, of these articles, and men of . %, with authors of unknown sex. figure depicts the frequency and percentage of sex and gender research by decade and author sex. because data for the s are understandably incomplete, we estimated the values for and . this procedure was an interpolation based in the prior trend of the number of publications having women or men in the first author position as well as the total number of articles. overall, these data show that the frequency of sex- or gender-related articles increased dramatically from the s to the s, with another substantial increase in the s, with subsequent stability. however, the percentage rate of sex- and gender-related articles in mainstream i/o journals has been falling since the s. this shift may reflect the rise of other topics within i/o as well as the growth of specialized journals related to sex and gender (e.g., sex gender in i/o - roles, psychology of women quarterly, gender, work, and organizations; gender in management). whereas men were more likely than women to be first authors of gender research in i/o journals in the s through the s, women substantially surpassed men as first authors of such research from the s forward (see figure ). the percentage of publications by male and female first authors is likely a function of the number of men and women in i/o psychology and related disciplines. although we do not have ready access to data on the proportion of i/o psychologists in academic positions, data from siop's salary surveys dating back to (http://my.siop.org/membership/surveys), which approximately mirror the gender representation of siop members, indicate that women were more likely to be first authors of sex- and gender- related articles than their representation in siop would predict. in the s, women were approximately - % of siop members, yet published about % of gender research, and in the s these statistics changed to - % women in i/o publishing about % of gender research. similarly in the s, women were approximately - % of siop members, yet they published % of gender research, and in s, these statistics change to - % (to ) women in i/o publishing about % of gender research. hence, women are more likely than men to be the lead authors of gender-based research in mainstream i/o-related journals, both in terms of sheer numbers as well as proportionately in relation to their membership in siop. topics using apa psycnet staff members’ indexing of publications by specific topics, within our sample of i/o articles pertaining to sex and gender, we counted the number of articles indexed by specific i/o topics. the most frequent topics were (a) employee attitudes (including attitudes toward work, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, and gender in i/o - occupational attitudes), articles; (b) sexual harassment (including harassment), articles; (c) leadership (including leadership style and leadership qualities), articles, (d) working conditions, articles; and job performance, articles. somewhat less frequent topics were (a) family-work relationships, articles; (b) mothers or pregnancy, articles; (c) sex discrimination, articles, (d) stereotyped attitudes, articles, and (e) diversity, articles. the cases of leadership and sexual harassment women-led innovations include new insights pertaining to the venerable topic of leadership style. after applied psychologists initiated the systematic study of leadership in the s (see lord, day, vaccaro, avolio, & eagly, ), they quickly turned to studying leader behavior and the dimensions—or leadership styles—that underlie these behaviors. although this endeavor was especially popular in the s, attention had waned in the core of i/o psychology by the s. part of the revival of interest in leadership style in the s and s consisted of debates concerning whether women lead differently, or better, than men. the effects of gender on leadership first received attention from prescient writers of managerial trade books. written from a feminist perspective, these female authors maintained that women often have an effective relational leadership style that differs from the command- and-control styles more often favored by men (loden, ; sargent, ). even though additional female writers offered similar conclusions in the s (helgesen, ; rosener, ), these claims failed to impress mainstream i/o psychologists and academic specialists in management. these experts quite emphatically stated that there was no evidence of sex differences in leadership style (e.g., bass, ; kanter, ). eagly and johnson’s ( ) meta-analysis of leadership styles vindicated the main emphasis of trade books authors by finding that there was indeed was a tendency for women to gender in i/o - adopt more democratic and participative styles than their male counterparts. this generalization was further confirmed by research that accumulated later on transformational and transactional leadership. as summarized in eagly, johannesen-schmidt, and van engen’s ( ) meta- analysis, women leaders proved to be somewhat more transformational than male leaders, especially in building supportive relationships with followers. in comparison with men, women were also more transactional in their greater use of rewards as incentives. although leadership researchers focused on gender have moved on to study many others issues (see eagly & heilman, ), leadership style was a breakthrough project that convinced many i/o psychologists that gender should be taken seriously in analyses of organizational behavior. i/o psychologists have also been key contributors to research on sexual harassment. although scholars from many disciplines have also contributed, sexual harassment has been a popular topic in mainstream i/o journals. women have led many of these research projects, often in collaboration with male colleagues. siop fellow barbara gutek ( ) was an early contributor to the analysis of gender issues in the workplace. her work stimulated theories of how organizational structures and conditions, such as male-dominated and sexualized work environments, can foster sexually harassing conduct and influence the interpretations of this conduct (e.g., konrad & gutek, ; offermann & malamut, ). siop fellow louise fitzgerald collaborated with i/o faculty and students at the university of illinois to produce a highly productive and influential body of research demonstrating that, for example, that organizational climates tolerating sexual harassment harm people who work in those environments (fitzgerald, drasgow, hulin, gelfand, & magley, ; glomb, richman, hulin, drasgow, schneider & fitzgerald, ). i/o research on sexual harassment has also substantially influenced broader inquiries on workplace gender in i/o - misconduct, incivility, and other forms of discrimination (e.g., buchanan & fitzgerald, ; miner-rubino & cortina, ). conclusions our review demonstrates that the increase of women in i/o psychology is associated with the growth of research on sex and gender issues. of course, women in i/o have contributed to many topics, not just those related to sex and gender. nonetheless, without these women whose presence is reflected by their growing numbers in siop’s membership rolls, understanding of sex and gender issues in workplaces would have been greatly diminished. our comment should dispel the belief that gender research is a career killer for women. the placement of research on sex and gender in top journals in i/o psychology and management testifies to its legitimacy and centrality to theory and research. however, it was not long ago that many graduate students and early professionals pursuing a research career in i/o psychology were told directly or indirectly to not pursue gender research because it would not be published in top-tier journals. fortunately, such advice was misguided. to exclude this research area would have put i/o psychology on the wrong side of history in psychology and the social sciences. the growth of gender research is impressive within psychology in general (eagly, eaton, rose, riger, & mchugh, ) and is remarkable in most academic fields. the base of knowledge that has accumulated allows i/o psychologists to have an important voice on many public issues. for example, the possibility of a woman president of the united states sparked interest in whether she would likely lead differently from a man. the large body of work on gender and leadership allowed some answers to such questions (eagly, ). similarly, the quick rise in attention to sexual harassment with the #metoo movement creates an this observation is based on both personal experience and the authors' conversations with many women i/o professionals over the years. gender in i/o - opening to bring to the fore the large body of existing research on sexual harassment that is relevant to this social movement (see for example interviews on sexual harassment with siop fellows such as l. cortina and m. stockdale, e.g., paquette, ; reuters, ). in contrast to the mid- th century, i/o research allows evidence-based discussions and of these and many other social issues related to sex and gender. gender in i/o - references bass, b. m. 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( ). feminine leadership or how to succeed in business without being one of the boys. new york: times books. logrip. m. l., milivojevic. v., bertholomey. m. l. & torregrossa, m. m. ( , in press). sexual dimorphism in the neural impact of stress and alcohol. alcohol. doi: . / j.alcohol. . . . gender in i/o - lord, r. g., day, d., zaccaro; s., avolio, b., & eagly, a. h. ( ). leadership in applied psychology: three waves of theory and research. journal of applied psychology, ( ), - . doi: . /apl miner-rubino, k., & cortina, l. m. ( ). working in a context of hostility toward women: implications for employees' well-being. journal of occupational health psychology, , - . doi: . / - . . . . offermann, l. r., malamut, a. b. ( ). when leaders harass: the impact of target perceptions of organizational leadership and climate on harassment reporting and outcomes. journal of applied psychology, , - . doi: . / - . . . . paquette, d. ( , october ). analysis: the depressing truth about sexual harassment in america. the salt lake tribune. retrieved from https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation- world/ / / /analysis-the-depressing-truth-about-sexual-harassment-in-america/ rosener, j. b. ( ). ways women lead. harvard business review, ( ), - . rosser, s. v. ( ). women's health - missing from u.s. medicine. bloomington, in: indiana university press. rueters ( , november ). despite @metoo, u.s. workers fear speaking out about sexual harassment. retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-women- sexcrimes/despite-metoo-u-s-workers-fear-speaking-out-about-sexual-harassment- iduskbn da ny sargent, a. g. ( ). the androgynous manager. new york: amacom. schiebinger, l. ( ). has feminism changed science? signs, , - . retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/ gender in i/o - schiebinger, l. ( ). scientific research must take gender into account. nature, ( ), . doi: . / a. gender in i/o - figure number and percent of sex- or gender-based articles published in mainstream i/o journals, through by gender of first author note. numbers for - are estimated. frequencies appear within each bar for authors of each sex. . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % * % o f a ll pu bl is he d ar ti cl es fr eq ue nc y st author male st author female % of total archaeology international news director’s report, – sue hamilton ,* how to cite: hamilton, s. ‘director’s report, – ’. archaeology international, , ( ), pp. – • doi: https://doi.org/ . / . .ai. . published: december copyright: © , sue hamilton. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (cc-by) . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • doi: https://doi.org/ . / . .ai. . open access: archaeology international is a peer-reviewed open-access journal. *correspondence: ioa-director@ucl.ac.uk ucl institute of archaeology, uk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . / . .ai. . d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – © , sue hamilton. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (cc-by) . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • doi: https://doi.org/ . / . .ai. . director’s report, – sue hamilton welcome to the director’s report for the ucl institute of archaeology (ioa) and to archaeology international for the academic year – . what a year it has been, from hosting the hugely successful forty- first annual theoretical archaeology group (tag) conference in december (see below), with around delegates, to the closure of the ucl campus in march due to the covid- pandemic. i have been extremely proud of (but not surprised by) the immense dedica- tion of institute staff and students working collectively to develop and undertake innovative forms of virtual teaching, learning and research. alongside this we have been continuing to deliver other activities, albeit in different ways to originally planned, and i would like to highlight the efforts of the institute’s professional services staff who have worked tirelessly from home to keep ‘the show on the road’. shutting down our gordon square building, laboratories and collections was a major undertaking led by facilities manager sandra bond, working with our laboratory teams. now, as i write, we are opening up our building again with social distancing measures in place. we are getting ready for the – academic year with a ‘digital-first’ approach, combined with some face-to-face as well as lab- and practice-based teaching and research. archaeology south-east (ase) (our commercial field unit led by dominic perring) has had an equally challenging time, with many https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . / . .ai. . a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l of its staff being temporally ‘furloughed’ until the building industry emerged from its initial lockdown. in an unprecedented global turn of events, we may all have been working remotely but we are definitely not distant. last year we changed the organisational structure of archaeology international to oversee its production, content and format better. this was achieved with the creation of an editorial board that included the co-heads of each of our three sections (archaeological sciences, heritage studies and world archaeology) as members. alice stevenson (editor) produced this volume, which this year is published by ucl press, supported by barney harris (currently a leverhulme trust- funded researcher) as features and copy-editor. while the institute has had a very challenging year, it continues to be impressively productive. below, i present the highlights that affirm our breadth in teaching, research and dissemination of our work in the wider world. this year all our undergraduate degrees have been accredited by the chartered institute for archaeologists (cifa) and universities archaeology uk (uauk). led by bill sillar, the institute was one of seven universities to be included in the first cohort of archaeology departments to be awarded cifa accreditation. at its founding in , the institute was envisaged as ‘a laboratory of archaeological science’ to train students and develop standards for archaeological fieldwork and conservation. we remain committed to training future generations of field archaeologists and undertaking collaborative research that includes students within a wide range of field, laboratory and heritage projects. we seek to support all students in developing their career aspi- rations whether within or outside archaeology. related to this, congratulations to the institute staff (including ase staff) who received a faculty education award in the team category as recognition of their outstanding contribution to the learning experience and success of our students. the winning team – bill sillar, mark roberts, charlotte frearson, andrew gardner, judy medrington, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/cifa-and-uauk-accreditation-ucl-institute-archaeology-undergraduate-degree-programmes https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/cifa-and-uauk-accreditation-ucl-institute-archaeology-undergraduate-degree-programmes https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/cifa-and-uauk-accreditation-ucl-institute-archaeology-undergraduate-degree-programmes https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /mar/faculty-education-award- -ucl-institute-archaeology-team https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /mar/faculty-education-award- -ucl-institute-archaeology-team d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – andrew reid, dorian fuller, sandra bond, louise rayner, mark lake, matthew pope, alex allen, hannah gibbs and jon cogdale – have worked consistently over the last three years to ensure that students gain the skills and transferable skills necessary for careers in archae- ology or beyond. the institute’s laboratories were awarded a gold award from leaf – the laboratory efficiency assessment framework – as part of ucl’s sustainability behaviour change programmes. the archaeology leaf team, led by sandra bond, used the framework as inspiration to change laboratory protocols, thus reducing the impact of lab activities. alongside this our laboratories continue to be significantly upgraded, providing state-of-the-art in-house facilities for the examination and analysis of almost all types of archaeological materials, artefacts and finds, both organic and inorganic. in addition to the new analyt- ical equipment highlighted last year, our biomolecular archaeology research laboratories include facilities for the extraction of carbon and nitrogen for isotopic analysis. we recently acquired a maldi tof mass spectrometer to enable us to undertake species analysis from bone collagen, while our staff access radiogenic isotope analysis through collaborations with universities in london and abroad. promotions, new academic staff and leavers the institute is pleased to announce the success of corisande fenwick and rhiannon stevens in ucl’s senior staff promotions. corisande and rhiannon were both promoted to associate professor (effective from october ). we welcomed ceri shipton (figure ) over the summer to take up the lectureship in palaeolithic archaeology following ignacio de la torre’s departure for a research post at csic, madrid. ceri comes to us from the australian national university and will play a major role in the teaching and development of our msc in palaeoanthropology and palaeolithic archaeology. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/gold-leaf-award-ucl-institute-archaeology-laboratories https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/ucl-senior-promotions-success-institute-archaeology-staff https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/ucl-senior-promotions-success-institute-archaeology-staff https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/ceri-shipton-lecturer-palaeolithic-archaeology a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l figure ceri shipton, the ioa’s new lecturer in palaeolithic archaeology. (image credit: ceri shipton) in addition to those research staff whose projects and fellowships had come to an end (heba abd el gawad, amelia bargallo, eleanor blakelock, jennifer french, maja mise, faye minter, judith plouviez, tomos proffitt, philip riris, isabel sánchez ramos and colin sterling), we were also sad to say goodbye to teaching staff (sirio canos donnay, jonathan gardner and michelé wollstonecroft) who have worked tirelessly over their time at the ioa. jennifer french has a new three-year post as lecturer in palaeolithic archaeology at the university of liverpool and colin sterling will be taking up a permanent lectureship at the university of amsterdam. we thank all of them for their service to the institute and ucl. awards and recognition institute staff, honorary associates and students continue to be recog- nised, both individually and for specific projects, through an impressive array of awards and related indicators, including media interest. the results of the archaeoglobe project, for which dorian fuller was one of the project designers and lead co-authors and which involved https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/archaeoglobe-results-show-effect-past-human-landuse-planet d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – contributions by mark altaweel, were published in science. the archaeoglobe project involved crowd-sourcing expert knowledge from archaeologists globally about the extent of different forms of land use over the past ten thousand years. dean sully was appointed scientist in residence at the ucl slade school of art for – and gave his inaugural lecture in the slade gallery. institute student marie middleton (currently undertaking the msc in environmental archaeology) won a prize from the council for british research in the levant for best undergraduate dissertation in levantine studies for . marie’s dissertation concerned the medieval occupa- tion at the site of khirbet sheikh ‘isa, and the impact on the city of the introduction of the lucrative sugar industry. the beaker people: isotopes, mobility and diet in prehistoric britain, the -page volume edited by mike parker pearson, alison sheridan, mandy jay, andrew chamberlain, michael richards and jane evans, was nominated for book of the year in the annual current archaeology awards. early stone age populations living up to . million years ago made complex decisions in selecting different types of stone to optimise a variety of cutting tools, according to a new study involving british academy postdoctoral fellow tomos proffitt. another collaborative study involving tomos proffitt and researchers from the university of oxford; oxford brookes university; max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology; chulalongkorn university, bangkok; and the national primate research centre of thailand, and published in elife journal, indicated that stone tool use developed differently within species of old world monkeys in spite of shared envi- ronmental and ecological settings. institute alumni mark evans and major charles foinette received a points of light award for their exceptional service founding the https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/dean-sully-appointed-scientist-residence-ucl-slade-school-art https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/dean-sully-appointed-scientist-residence-ucl-slade-school-art https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /dec/institute-student-wins-cbrls-undergraduate-dissertation-prize- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /dec/institute-student-wins-cbrls-undergraduate-dissertation-prize- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /dec/beaker-people-book-nominated-current-archaeology-award https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/early-humans-optimised-use-stone-tools-olduvai-gorge https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /nov/macaques-stone-tool-use-developed-differently-despite-shared-environment a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l charity ‘waterloo uncovered’, which unites rehabilitating veterans with ground-breaking archaeological excavations of the waterloo battle- field. students from ucl continue to work with the charity on their public engagement activities while tim schadla-hall is a waterloo uncovered trustee. experiments conducted for her phd research by alumna carlotta gardner, working with colleagues at ncsr demokritos and the british school at athens, have provided exciting insights into the working prac- tices of roman metalworkers. institute phd student mariana nabais contributed to a research project in portugal, published in science, which discovered that neanderthals systematically exploited shellfish resources. the use of marine resources on such a scale had previously been thought to be a trait of anatomically modern humans. medieval carvings dated to the fourteenth century were discovered by a team from ase in a cave, following a landslip near guildford in surrey. institute phd researcher hayley simon was awarded the prestigious ronald belcher award from the royal society of chemistry for her innova- tive phd research on the conservation of the mary rose iron cannonballs. a team of archaeologists from ase, led by stephen white, discov- ered the elusive remains of what is thought to have been the earliest elizabethan playhouse, the red lion. it was built around at a site in whitechapel (figure ). matthew pope has been part of the ‘the viral archive’, a collaborative project between archaeologists at the university of warwick and the university college cork (ireland), as well as the institute, to record visual signs in the landscape relating to the covid- pandemic. a new collaborative analytical study, involving ian freestone, solved the mystery of the origin of the large quantities of roman colourless/clear glass used for drinking vessels. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /mar/award-waterloo-uncovered-charity-founded-institute-alumni https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/holding-it-all-together-how-roman-metalworkers-preserved-their-metal https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/holding-it-all-together-how-roman-metalworkers-preserved-their-metal https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/institute-phd-researcher-collaborates-new-neanderthal-study https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /apr/medieval-carvings-dated- th-century-discovered-following-landslip https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jun/hayley-simon-wins-prestigious-award-royal-society-chemistry https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /jun/four-ucl-academics-win-prestigious-royal-society-chemistry-awards https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /jun/archaeologists-ucls-archaeology-south-east-may-have-discovered-londons-earliest https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jun/matthew-pope-involved-collaborative-research-record-landscape-pandemic https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/hafnium-isotopes-confirm-origin-high-quality-roman-glass d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – institute phd researcher pauline harding was selected for the talent scheme tv phd by the edinburgh international television festival, the charity arm of the uk’s most prestigious tv industry event. student news several of our undergraduate and masters students were awarded faculty and departmental prizes for the – academic session and feature on the dean’s list of excellence. the institute was delighted to offer a new scholarship for international masters students for – thanks to a generous individual donation. the scholarship will enable will enable one international fee-paying student to undertake a year of study on one of the advertised ma or msc degrees in archaeology or archaeological sciences. the scholar- ship is awarded on the basis of academic excellence and promise and a demonstrated commitment to either world archaeology (in any region or period) or the application of scientific analysis to archaeological materials. figure archaeologists from ase excavating the timber of the elizabethan playhouse at whitechapel. (image credit: archaeology south-east) https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/ucl-institute-archaeology-researcher-chosen-tv-industry-course https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/prizes-awarded-institute-students- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /may/ucl-institute-archaeology-international-masters-student-award https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /may/ucl-institute-archaeology-international-masters-student-award a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l figure ioa student neehaarika jayanth veena on placement with archaeology south-east. (image credit: archaeology south-east) figure ioa student iva popova on placement with archaeology south-east. (image credit: archaeology south-east) d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – the institute also funded a heritage and museums opportunity scholarship for candidates from black and minority ethnic back- grounds, as these groups are currently under-represented within the heritage sector. for the first time the institute’s instagram account (@uclarchaeology) was taken over by one of our students, third-year undergraduate ba archaeology and anthropology student coco shi on friday may. coco shared information about her degree, her time at the institute, what she was up to over lockdown in london and her current research. the institute instagram account was then taken over by a group of our undergraduate students for #fieldworkfriday on friday june. the first #fieldworkfriday instagram takeover was led by five current undergraduate students. it explored the exciting range of digital field- work opportunities which are available to students this summer due to the covid- pandemic. institute students undertaking the recently established ba in archaeology with a placement year have been documenting their time at archaeology south-east: • ioa ase placement – : neehaarika jayanth veena (figure ) • ioa ase placement – : iva popova (figure ) funding awards for new research several of our staff have had their outstanding international research activities recognised by external funding and institutional awards, of which a small selection is mentioned here. the arts and humanities research council (ahrc) heritage priority area team, based at the institute and led by heritage leadership fellow rodney harrison, secured ahrc follow-on-funding from january to september for opening new pathways to impact across heritage research, policy and practice. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /dec/ucl-institute-archaeology-heritage-and-museums-diversity-scholarship https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /dec/ucl-institute-archaeology-heritage-and-museums-diversity-scholarship https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /may/ucl-institute-archaeology-instagram-student-takeover https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jun/ucl-institute-archaeology-instagram-fieldwork-friday-takeover https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /sep/ioa-placement- - -welcome-neehaarika https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /aug/year-commercial-archaeology-student-placement-complete https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/successful-funding-bid-heritage-research-policy-and-practice-ahrc-heritage-priority https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/successful-funding-bid-heritage-research-policy-and-practice-ahrc-heritage-priority a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l andrew bevan and patrick quinn are contributing to a successful marie skłodowska-curie innovative training networks (h -msca-itn) application, the consortium being led by thilo rehren, cyprus institute and part time at the ioa, for place: training the next generation of archaeological scientists: interdisciplinary studies of pre-modern plasters and ceramics from the eastern mediterranean. this is due to run from to . andrew bevan will also be the supervisor for a successful marie skłodowska-curie fellowship candidate, miguel carrero, who will be joining us to undertake his research on megascapes: comparative models of megalithic landscapes in neolithic atlantic europe. corisande fenwick has been awarded ahrc-funding for two collabo- rative research projects: islamafr: conquest, ecology and economy in islamic north africa: the example of the central medjerda valley (with the deutsches archäologisches institut) and oasciv: the making of oasis civilisation in the moroccan sahara (led by the university of leicester). alongside the above, corisande fenwick has also been awarded a five-year erc starting grant for her research on everydayislam: becoming muslim: cultural change, everyday life and state formation in early islamic north africa ( – ). landscape futures and the challenge of change: towards integrated cultural/natural heritage decision making is a newly funded research project based at the institute. it is a result of gaining follow-on funding from the ahrc-funded heritage futures project ( – ) and is also led by rodney harrison. kevin macdonald is involved in the successful application (led by cambridge university) to the arcadia foundation for the project mapping africa’s endangered archaeological sites and monuments. kevin will be working with ibrahima thiaw (dakar, senegal) and malian colleagues on the west african portion of the project. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /feb/ahrc-follow-funding-success-heritage-futures-research-programme d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – matthew pope received british academy/leverhulme small research grant funding to lead an ambitious survey of a former ice age land- scape, which sits in the english channel seabed off the coast of jersey (figure ). the project is also supported by jersey heritage and the société jersiaise. figure seymour tower, an eighteenth-century fortification near the violet bank, channel islands. (image credit: jersey heritage) andrew reynolds has been awarded a leverhulme trust research project grant for collaborative research (with durham university) on monumentality and landscape: linear earthworks in britain. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/exploring-hidden-ice-age-landscape-english-channel https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/exploring-hidden-ice-age-landscape-english-channel a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l the national lottery grant for the community archaeology project rendlesham revealed: anglo-saxon life in south-east suffolk has christopher scull (honorary visiting professor) as the project’s academic lead. we regularly obtain small external grants and grants-in-kind to support collaborative research, fieldwork and post-excavation analyses. in – these included: • corisande fenwick for ongoing research at volubilis, morocco • sue hamilton for the rapa nui landscapes of construction project taheta survey • borja legarra herrero for a new research project: human mobility and long-term social change in the west mediterranean: the case of the vera region (almeria, spain) • mike parker pearson for his ongoing origins of stonehenge project • dean sully for a project with soas entitled entanglements: west african heritage and community curation in the uk we have also had several ucl institutional small grant-funding successes this year including: • stuart brookes for the roads and routes of the gough map gis database capture (ucl shs dean’s strategic fund) • gabriel moshenska for his collaborative project with the museum of british colonialism and african digital heritage on displaying the digital heritage of the mau mau uprising (ucl centre for critical heritage) • miljana radivojević for research on developing fuel (r)evolution in the eurasian landscape: metal technology and carbon emis- sions during the inner eurasian bronze age c. – bce (ucl strategic initiative: sustainability, climate change and the anthropocene) and also for finishing the monograph for the rise of metallurgy in eurasia project (ucl shs dean’s strategic fund) • ulrike sommer and bruno vindrola won funding to organise an event on reframing the waste crisis: environmental, archaeo- logical and anthropological perspectives (ucl ias & urban lab call for waste event proposals) https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /feb/rendlesham-revealed-project-receives-national-lottery-heritage-funding d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – monograph and digital resource publications we are pleased to announce a new ucl institute of archaeology phd series, published by bar. the series allows for rapid publication of largely unaltered institute phd theses and covers all subject areas, including world archaeology, archaeological science, cultural heritage, conservation and museum studies. critical perspectives on cultural memory and heritage construction, transformation and destruction, edited by veysel apaydin, was published by ucl press earlier this year. the open-access volume contains contributions by a number of institute staff including jonathan gardner, rachel king and colin sterling. a new digital resource for scholars of early medieval britain was launched this year by the archaeology data service (ads) with the institute. the early medieval atlas aims to publish a range of spatial evidence, generated by projects since . a new volume on etruscan literacy, edited by ruth d. whitehouse (emeritus professor), was published this year by the accordia research institute, university of london. corisande fenwick’s new book on early islamic north africa: a new perspective is part of the bloomsbury academic debates in archaeology series and proposes a new approach to the arab conquests and the spread of islam in north africa. the volume heritage futures: comparative approaches to natural and cultural heritage practices, by rodney harrison, caitlin desilvey, cornelius holtorf, sharon macdonald, nadia bartolini, esther breithoff, harald fredheim, antony lyons, sarah may, jennie morgan and sefryn penrose, is an outcome of the c.£ million uk ahrc-funded heritage futures research programme and is published by ucl press. the fully open-access monograph is available for download on the ucl press website. https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/open-access/products/ https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/open-access/products/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /mar/launch-early-medieval-atlas-digital-resource https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/etruscan-literacy-its-social-context https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /apr/etruscan-literacy-its-social-context https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/early-islamic-north-africa-new-perspective https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jul/early-islamic-north-africa-new-perspective https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/heritage-futures-comparative-approaches-natural-and-cultural-heritage-practices https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/heritage-futures-comparative-approaches-natural-and-cultural-heritage-practices a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l a new open-access volume, deterritorializing the future: heritage in, of and after the anthropocene, edited by rodney harrison and colin sterling, was published in july . the book is available for free download in open access from open humanities press and is published as part of their critical climate change book series. other recent volumes published by institute staff over the past year are noted below in the special events section (book launches). special events as part of our commitment to provide an outstanding research environ- ment for staff, students and visitors, the institute hosts and organises numerous events on many different aspects of archaeology and is linked to other heritage institutions, archaeological societies and organisa- tions. a selection of events which took place over the past academic year are highlighted below. details of all seminar series and other events are available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/ events october a book launch event was held to mark the publication of four single- author monographs by members of the heritage studies section. • rachel king’s outlaws, anxiety, and disorder in southern africa: material histories of the maloti-drakensberg (palgrave macmillan) • gabriel moshenska’s material cultures of childhood in second world war britain (routledge) • colin sterling’s heritage, photography, and the affective past (routledge) • alice stevenson’s scattered finds: archaeology, egyptology and museums (ucl press) the third annual ucl centre for critical heritage studies public lecture was given by nick merriman (chief executive, the horniman https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/deterritorializing-future-heritage-and-after-anthropocene https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/deterritorializing-future-heritage-and-after-anthropocene https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/events https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/events https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/heritage-studies-section-book-launch https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/heritage-studies-section-book-launch https://www.ucl.ac.uk/critical-heritage-studies/events/ /oct/centre-critical-heritage-studies-annual-public-lecture-nick-merriman https://www.ucl.ac.uk/critical-heritage-studies/events/ /oct/centre-critical-heritage-studies-annual-public-lecture-nick-merriman d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – museum). he discussed how critical museology has been dominated by a human-centred mode of enquiry since it emerged years ago. until recently little attention has been focused on what is now being termed the climate and ecological emergency. nick highlighted ways in which critical approaches to this phenomenon can both illuminate museology as a subject and influence practice in museums. university archaeology day : ucl archaeologists worked with other universities to create the uk’s first university archaeology day in , aimed at inspiring a much-needed next generation of archaeol- ogists. the event now takes place annually with this year’s university archaeology day held at the british museum on october (led for the institute by andrew gardner, charlotte frearson and jennifer french). this free annual event is designed for prospective students, teachers and parents to learn about the many degree programmes on offer across the uk and to discover the huge range of career opportunities that an archaeology degree can lead to. a welcome event was held to mark the revival of the forum for island research and experience (fire) research network by institute phd researchers sarah forgesson and josé garay-vázquez. gareth williams (british museum) presented the sir david wilson lecture in medieval studies entitled ‘from ashdown to the burghal hidage: alfred’s rise to “greatness” reconsidered’. this marked the first event in the – ucl institute of archaeology/british museum medieval seminar series. a reception was held after the lecture to launch volumes recently published by members of the seminar group. the institute’s women’s forum and equality & diversity forum jointly hosted a guest lecture by anne teather (independent researcher) and rachel pope (university of liverpool) on ‘#metoo and you: a change of culture in archaeology’. the international centre for chinese heritage and archaeology (iccha; a joint association between the school for archaeology and museology https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/university-archaeology-day- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/fire-forum-island-research-and-experience-inaugural- -welcome-event https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/fire-forum-island-research-and-experience-inaugural- -welcome-event https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/sir-david-wilson-lecture-medieval-studies-ashdown-burghal-hidage https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/sir-david-wilson-lecture-medieval-studies-ashdown-burghal-hidage https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/metoo-and-you-change-culture-archaeology https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/metoo-and-you-change-culture-archaeology a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l of peking university and the institute) organised a joint research work- shop between the national museum of china and the institute on ‘understanding late-neolithic societies of china: subsistence, craft production and social complexity’. corinna riva and andrew gardner organised a series of dialogues exploring how european museums of archaeology interact with diverse communities (hosted by the italian cultural institute in london): archaeology talks . : who are archaeology museums for? november tom gregory (senior technician in scanning electron microscopy and x-ray microanalysis) was co-organiser of the first ucl heritage imaging workshop, with colleagues from the ucl institute for sustainable heritage and centre for digital humanities. this brought together all aspects of imaging involving heritage, conservation and/or artefacts to assess existing infrastructure and equipment, computational struc- ture, personnel expertise, research interests and future imaging needs at ucl. trowelblazers joined forces with the institute and wikimedia uk to ‘write women back into science’ in the first trowelblazers wikipedia edit-a-thon. the african archaeology research day (aard) was hosted by the institute in november. aard is an informal annual meeting of africanist archaeologists to encourage undergraduate and postgraduate students, post-doctoral researchers and more established scholars to present recent/ongoing research and fieldwork. shadreck chirikure (university of cape town/university of oxford) gave the iams beno rothenberg memorial lecture entitled ‘africa and early globalisation: a decolonial and archaeomaterials intervention’. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/understanding-late-neolithic-societies-china-subsistence-craft-production-and-social https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /oct/understanding-late-neolithic-societies-china-subsistence-craft-production-and-social https://iiclondra.esteri.it/iic_londra/en https://iiclondra.esteri.it/iic_londra/en https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/archaeology-talks- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/archaeology-talks- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/digital-humanities/events/ /nov/ucl-heritage-imaging-workshop https://www.ucl.ac.uk/digital-humanities/events/ /nov/ucl-heritage-imaging-workshop https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/trowelblazers-wikimedia-edit-thon https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/trowelblazers-wikimedia-edit-thon https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/conferences/aard- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/iams-beno-rothenberg-memorial-lecture- -africa-and-early-globalisation d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – the autumn term south american archaeology seminar was a joint meeting with the latin american music seminar. it took place over two days at senate house, focusing on music archaeology of latin america. elizabeth baquedano organised the fifth london nahuatl study day & workshops in ancient mexico at the institute with a keynote lecture by patrick johansson, unam institute of historical research, entitled ‘ november : moctezuma’s last battle’. december the institute was delighted to host the forty-first annual theoretical archaeology group (tag) conference on – december . the theme of this year’s conference was ‘power, knowledge and the past’, which emphasised both current debates about ontologies and ideologies in past societies and the role of knowledge about the past in contemporary political narratives, particularly those to do with different aspects of identity, and including such issues as decolonisation. the antiquity-sponsored plenary session was entitled ‘what is the past good for in the world of ?’ and took place on december . this year’s ucl institute of archaeology gordon childe lecture was held in association with tag and took place immediately prior to the conference. matthew johnson (northwestern university) gave the lecture entitled ‘on writing the past backwards’. january katerina harvati (senckenberg center for human evolution and palaeoenvironment and the dfg center for advanced studies ‘words, bones, genes, tools: tracking linguistic, cultural and biological trajec- tories of the human past’, eberhard karls universität tübingen) gave the sixth annual ucl lecture on climate and human history, jointly organised by ucl geography and the institute. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/south-american-archaeology-seminar-music-archaeology-latin-america https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/south-american-archaeology-seminar-music-archaeology-latin-america https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/fifth-london-nahuatl-study-day-workshops https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /nov/fifth-london-nahuatl-study-day-workshops https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/conferences/tag- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news-events/conferences/tag- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /dec/ucl-institute-archaeology-gordon-childe-lecture- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jan/ th-annual-ucl-lecture-climate-and-human-history a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l february the institute hosted the sixth annual islamic archaeology day, co-organised by corisande fenwick, rahil alipour and tim williams, with colleagues from soas. topics explored included the origins of the earliest mosques to urbanism, food taboos and pigment production across a huge geographic expanse stretching out from the levant, iraq and the arabian gulf to the furthest corners of the islamic world, such as al-andalus and turkmenistan. to mark lgbtq+ history month the institute organised a series of events throughout february, the culmination of which was a keynote lecture given by institute alumnus john j. johnston entitled ‘beyond isis and osiris: alternative sexualities in ancient egypt’. the central asian archaeological landscapes (caal) project, based at the institute, is concerned with the digitisation of archaeological heritage across a vast region from the caspian sea to western china. the team presented a ucl digital humanities seminar on digital geo-spatial inventories along the silk roads of central asia. the seventh annual workshop on maya myths and glyphs: maya on the thames was held at the institute. this year’s theme was ‘rivers of blood: wars along the usumacinta’. a special lecture organised by rachel sparks entitled ‘from the past to the future: the many legacies of jericho’ was held to celebrate the publication of the book: digging up jericho: past, present and future (archaeopress). digging up jericho represents the results of a two-day conference held at ucl in , with contributions by internation- ally renowned scholars, including the institute’s beverley butler and stuart laidlaw (d. ). edited by rachael sparks, bill finlayson, bart wagemakers and josef briffa, it is the first volume to offer a holistic perspective on the research and public value of the site of jericho, with its long and impressive history stretching from the epipalaeolithic to the present day. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/islamic-archaeology-day- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /feb/lgbtq-history-month- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/digital-humanities/events/ /feb/ucldh-seminar-digital-geo-spatial-inventories-along-silk-roads-central-asia https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/maya-thames- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/maya-thames- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/jericho-lecture-and-book-launch https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/jericho-lecture-and-book-launch d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – march the fourth annual central asia seminar group took place at the institute in early march. the day of presentations covered archaeolog- ical and heritage topics related to working in, and researching subjects relevant to, central asia. with lockdown in march , the temporary closure of ucl and cancellation of in-person events, institute staff and students (both current and former) took part in a series of informal interviews, organ- ised by charlotte frearson and turned into a podcast playlist #remote not distant: ‘parkaeology: physically distanced’ sharing short chats about education, life and what they could not be without in their homes. the ahrc heritage priority area team (led by ahrc heritage priority area leadership fellow rodney harrison) organised multiple events this year including: • january : a conference on ‘engaging with independent research organisations: exploring research, policy and practice interfaces’. • february : a one-day workshop on ‘heritage and policy engagement: how to influence decision-making’. • july : a half-day virtual event on ‘global challenges, sustainability and the politics of heritage’. • july : a half-day virtual event on ‘pathways and barriers to climate action through heritage research’. finally, from one large conference at the beginning of the academic session to one at the end! the fifth biennial conference of the association of critical heritage studies (achs) was organised by the institute (again by rodney harrison and the ahrc heritage priority area team) and held as a fully virtual event on – august. the conference’s theme – futures – seeks to engage seriously and critically with the often stated aims of heritage to address the concerns of future generations, while also asking participants to think expansively and creatively about the future of critical heritage studies as an emergent field of focus across a range of academic disciplines. the conference https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /mar/central-asia-seminar-group- https://soundcloud.com/user- https://soundcloud.com/user- https://soundcloud.com/user- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/engaging-independent-research-organisations-exploring-research-policy-and-practice https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/engaging-independent-research-organisations-exploring-research-policy-and-practice https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/engaging-independent-research-organisations-exploring-research-policy-and-practice https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/heritage-and-policy-engagement-workshop-how-influence-decision-making https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /feb/heritage-and-policy-engagement-workshop-how-influence-decision-making https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jul/global-challenges-sustainability-and-politics-heritage https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jul/global-challenges-sustainability-and-politics-heritage https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jul/pathways-and-barriers-climate-action-through-heritage-research https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jul/pathways-and-barriers-climate-action-through-heritage-research https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /aug/achs- -futures-conference https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /aug/achs- -futures-conference a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l had over , international delegates registered for the conference and almost parallel sessions, along with a number of plenary events, talks, discussions and various fringe events curated by the local organising committee members. this is a major achievement and an important milestone for the institute and achs; it was the largest conference since the association started in and its first virtual conference (figure ). figure screenshot of the online opening plenary panel of the fifth biennial conference of the association of critical heritage studies (achs). (image credit: hana morel) recognition of teaching and support institute staff continue to be recognised for their outstanding contri- butions to the learning experience and success of ucl students. the education awards , including the student choice awards, were a virtual celebration of excellence at ucl with this year’s awards, https://studentsunionucl.org/report/education-awards- -winners d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – highlighting all the great work that our students and staff do to make education at ucl even better, taking place online in june. i have already mentioned the faculty education team award above. in addition, institute staff nominations were received across the various student choice awards categories. among these, i am especially pleased to congratulate beverley butler for being shortlisted and runner-up in the diverse & inclusive education category and ioa alumna stacy hackner and clare lewis (current phd student) for winning provost education awards. outreach and public engagement theano moussouri (executive director of the ucl centre for critical heritage studies) was invited to participate in a podcast discussing food, heritage and sustainability in january. the talk was part of the praxis heritage podcast episodes. a photo exhibition, produced by enora gandon (marie skłodowska- curie research fellow) and exploring traditional potters’ wheel-throwing skills, was on display in the ucl south cloisters from march. enora’s ec-funded marie curie fellowship project aims to better understand the cultural transmission of craft skills. the photographs were taken on field- work in nepal, thailand and the palestinian territories (hebron). tim williams was invited to participate in an afternoon of fascinating talks and conversation on the history, culture, material culture and poli- tics of the areas along the silk road in a special online event in april. mike parker pearson was invited to comment in the media on the need for the stonehenge road tunnel plans to be scrapped in the light of the significant discovery nearby of the largest prehistoric structure ever found in britain. mike was also invited to be a celebrity judge on the ‘build your own monument’ challenge organised by the archaeological institute of america during the period of lockdown. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/critical-heritage-studies/news/ /mar/dr-theano-moussouri-podcast-food-heritage-and-sustainability https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /mar/eye-traditional-potters-wheel-throwing-skills https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /apr/afternoon-digital-museum-silk-road-talks https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jun/mike-parker-pearson-scrapping-stonehenge-road-tunnel-plans https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /may/mike-parker-pearson-invited-judge-aia-build-monument-competition a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l the institute’s new student exhibition – a virtual exhibition entitled let’s play: games as connection – was launched in may . the exhibition showcases a variety of games from across the globe, illustrating the universal nature of games no matter the cultural background. institute alumna sarah dhanjal has written a series of blogs this year for the ucl public engagement unit about museum work that happens outside the public eye. • handling history • handling history • handling history • handling history archaeology south-east’s new podcast digging deeper was launched in july, taking listeners to the heart of development-led archaeology in the uk. in each episode, host dr emily johnson (ase) welcomes members of the ase archaeological team to discuss a new archaeological discovery, talk about their day-to-day roles, demystify the archaeological process or tackle issues affecting the sector. institute news regularly featured on the ucl news site, including the article headlines quoted below: october ‘macaques’ stone tool use varies despite same environment: stone tool use develops differently within species of old world monkeys in spite of shared environmental and ecological settings, according to a new study involving ucl.’ november ‘ , -year-old egyptian wheat genome sequenced for first time: the genome of an ancient egyptian variety of wheat has been sequenced for the first time by a ucl-led team, revealing historical patterns of crop movement and domestication.’ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/ /jul/lets-play-games-connection https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/ / / /handling-history- / https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/ / / /handling-history- / https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/ / / /handling-history- / https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/ / / /handling-history-part- / https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /jul/new-podcast-archaeology-south-east-ase-digs-deeper https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /oct/macaques-stone-tool-use-varies-despite-same-environment https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /nov/ -year-old-egyptian-wheat-genome-sequenced-first-time https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /nov/ -year-old-egyptian-wheat-genome-sequenced-first-time d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – january ‘exploring hidden ice age landscape in the english channel: an ambi- tious survey of a former ice age landscape, which sits off the coast of jersey in the english channel seabed, is to be carried out on foot by a team of archaeologists led by ucl’s institute of archaeology.’ ‘iron age “warrior” burial uncovered in west sussex: a richly furnished grave belonging to an iron age “warrior” buried , years ago has been uncovered in west sussex by ucl archaeologists.’ june ‘archaeologists may have discovered london’s earliest playhouse: the earliest playhouse in london may have been discovered at a site in whitechapel by a team of archaeologists from ucl.’ july ‘new research reveals origin of stonehenge’s great sarsen stones: the giant sarsen stones that form the primary architecture of stonehenge originate from west woods on the edge of wiltshire’s marlborough downs, according to new research involving ucl.’ august ‘eating out was a very social matter for early humans, according to new archaeology from boxgrove. the findings of a meticulous study led by ucl institute of archaeology are detailed in a ground-breaking new book, the horse butchery site (matt pope, simon parfitt and mark roberts), published by ucl archaeology south-east’s “spoilheap publications”. the study pieces together the activities and movements of a group of early humans as they made tools, including the oldest bone tools documented in europe, and extensively butchered a large horse , years ago.’ ‘ucl institute of archaeology researchers are involved in collaborative research which has discovered what is believed to be the earliest art in https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /jan/exploring-hidden-ice-age-landscape-english-channel https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /jan/iron-age-warrior-burial-uncovered-west-sussex https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /jun/archaeologists-may-have-discovered-londons-earliest-playhouse https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ /jul/new-research-reveals-origin-stonehenges-great-sarsen-stones https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /aug/eating-out-was-very-social-matter-early-humans-new-archaeology-boxgrove https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/news/ /aug/eating-out-was-very-social-matter-early-humans-new-archaeology-boxgrove https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/earliest-art-british-isles-discovered https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/earliest-art-british-isles-discovered a r c h a e o l o g y i n t e r n at i o n a l the british isles; artistic designs on rock from as long ago as the late ice age.’ ‘ucl institute of archaeology staff are contributing to the newly estab- lished ucl anthropocene initiative, leading research and teaching on topics that critically address our changing environment.’ alumni and former staff another year also brings with it great sadness. institute staff, students, friends and colleagues were saddened to hear of the deaths of several institute alumni and friends. short pieces to commemorate these indi- viduals are included in the obituaries section of this issue. in particular, we were immensely saddened by the death of our esteemed colleague stuart laidlaw who at the time of his death (november ) had been the ‘institute’s photographer’ for years. as lecturer in archaeological photography, he was an exemplary teacher and taught many cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students in archaeolog- ical photography, latterly including digital imaging techniques. stuart was actively working on the redesign and upgrade of our photography and digital imaging facilities at the time of his death. in february we reopened the refurbished laboratory and held a memorial occasion in his honour. theresa o’mahony, a recent ma and ba graduate, passed away in september . theresa was a passionate advocate and tireless activist for disability rights in archaeology. her dissertations and subsequent research focused on discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of archaeology. she also pioneered radical and practical approaches to making archaeological excavations inclusive and accessible. inequality, diversity and difference in recent times, anger about racism and its associated inequalities and injuries has been finding a new voice. while it is the time for all institutions https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/earliest-art-british-isles-discovered https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /aug/institute-expertise-contributing-new-ucl-anthropocene-intiative https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /jan/stuart-ja-laidlaw- - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/news/ /oct/theresa-omahony d i r e c to r ’s r e p o r t, – to listen, statements of well-meaning intentions are not enough. at the institute we are reviewing our existing equality, diversity and inclusivity plans. we are actively decolonising our teaching curricula as befits an institution that undertakes global archaeology in a global university and city. we are consulting across the board on possible actions to isolate and address structural inequalities and increase our disciplinary, social, economic and racial inclusivity for students and staff. our students have initiated a questionnaire and are preparing a document based on responses, and the sections are holding working group discussions. we will be joining these initiatives together to establish priorities for institute research and education, in order best to achieve our wish to become a radically more diverse and inclusive community. concluding remarks: into the future there are demanding times to come. in spite of our size, i see the institute as a highly humane community that puts the student experience and people first. at the same time we are an intellectually stretching and exciting place to be a part of, with our research and teaching being at the forefront of so many new ways of thinking. as director, i am committed to finding a steady way through the current pandemic challenges: one that is as workable as possible for the lives of all of my colleagues and that provides the best possible student expe- rience next year. the ongoing resilience and good humour of all at the institute is amazing. everyday feminism in the digital era: gender, the fourth wave, and social media affordances a dissertation submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree doctor of philosophy by urszula m. pruchniewska may examining committee members: carolyn kitch, advisory chair, media and communication fabienne darling-wolf, media and communication adrienne shaw, media and communication rebecca alpert, religion ii abstract the last decade has seen a pronounced increase in feminist activism and sentiment in the public sphere, which scholars, activists, and journalists have dubbed the “fourth wave” of feminism. a key feature of the fourth wave is the use of digital technologies and the internet for feminist activism and discussion. this dissertation aims to broadly understand what is “new” about fourth wave feminism and specifically to understand how social media intersect with everyday feminist practices in the digital era. this project is made up of three case studies –bumble the “feminist” dating app, private facebook groups for women professionals, and the #metoo movement on twitter— and uses an affordance theory lens, examining the possibilities for (and constraints of) use embedded in the materiality of each digital platform. through in-depth interviews and focus groups with users, alongside a structural discourse analysis of each platform, the findings show how social media are used strategically as tools for feminist purposes during mundane online activities such as dating and connecting with colleagues. overall, this research highlights the feminist potential of everyday social media use, while considering the limits of digital technologies for everyday feminism. this work also reasserts the continued need for feminist activism in the fourth wave, by showing that the material realities of gender inequality persist, often obscured by an illusion of empowerment. iii for riley, my favorite girl iv acknowledgments this dissertation would not have been possible without the time commitment and thoughtful contributions of my interview participants. i am forever indebted to the amazing women who co-produced this knowledge with me. i am profoundly grateful to my advisor, carolyn kitch, the members of my committee, fabienne darling-wolf and adrienne shaw, and my external reader, rebecca alpert. carolyn, you have been guiding me and advocating for me for seven years now – through tears, laughter, difficulties, and triumphs. you have my eternal gratitude for your unwavering supportive presence by my side throughout this journey, for the endless encouragement, the constructive feedback, and thought-provoking discussions. fab, thank you for your warm support, kindness, and intellectual mentoring, particularly on feminist theory, over the years. adrienne, your advice on digital methods informed so much of this dissertation, and our chats on grad school life (and beyond) kept me sane throughout the process – thank you. rebecca, thank you for the helpful conversations about academia and the valuable insights on my work. thank you for always rooting for me and checking in: brian creech, andy mendelson, david mindich, and edward trayes. appreciation also to tony liao for sparking my lifelong (no doubt) interest in affordances. thank you to my family: my mom, hanna pruchniewska, and brother, andrew pruchniewski, for supporting and loving me through the best of times and the worst of v times; my dziadek jurek kozlowski for instilling in me a thirst for knowledge and a love of books; and my father, damian pruchniewski, for the insatiable drive to succeed. to my dear friends, there are no words. can you believe it’s over? thank you for everything. shannon mclaughlin rooney, my cohort #traj best bud, you know i couldn’t have done this without you (and crooney). nevertheless, we persisted! so much love, my brilliant friend. thank you also to (in alphabetical order): michael buozis, for sharing the ups and downs of academic life with me, always with a healthy dose of cynical humor; colby chase, for being my favorite fellow malcontent; lynn detwiler, for appreciating the beauty of photography with me; brooke erin duffy, for loving animals as much as i do and for being there, weird, hilarious, and wildly smart, particularly in the wee hours of winter mornings; dana fiero, for calm, yoga, tea, and cat stories; elizaveta friesem, for the endlessly sympathetic ear and sound advice; rosemary guiser, for keeping me young and fun, and for adopting me on all major holidays; laura kilday, for cakes, wine, broadway, and travels down south; sam seifman, for the years of giggles, bedlam, and pig emoji; emil steiner, for always keeping things interesting (na zdrowie!); meghnaa tallapragada, for helping me learn to self-love and sharing the tribulations of being “international”; nicole westrick and angelo trivelli, for the relentless love and support, for always sharing the most sumptuous treats (cocktails! bread!), and for being the best godparents riley could have ever asked for; and, michele zipkin and vanessa williams, for the happiest happy hours and all the cheese. vi to my oldest (kiwi) friends: debbie-lee bell, i love seeing your beautiful face! thank you for being such a wonderful friend. niall duncan, thanks for always listening to me and for sharing all the gossip. janet burt, your steadfast support from the other side of the world, for all these years, means so much to me. i love you so much, crispy chip. maree martinussen, my best beastie and longest feminist ally, this is our year! i am so grateful for having you in my life ( years now!) and look forward to one day living on the same continent, in the sunshine, with zonkeys, goats, kittens, puppies, bears, sloths, and everything in between! i love you, bb. michael keys, you arrived at the tail end of the tumult, but your bottomless well of kindness, wicked sense of humor, handsome beard, refined taste in tv shows, and amazing cooking skills helped me over the finish line. i’m so looking forward to our cat- tastic future. vii table of contents page abstract ........................................................................................................................ ii dedication ................................................................................................................... iii acknowledgments ................................................................................................. iv list of figures .............................................................................................................x chapter . introduction ......................................................................................................... the rise of the fourth wave ................................................................................... vernacular affordances of digital media technologies ......................................... using a feminist and cultural studies approach .................................................... the three case studies ......................................................................................... . literature review ............................................................................................ defining feminism ................................................................................................ the waves of feminism ........................................................................................ everyday feminism on social media .................................................................... the essential newness of fourth wave feminism ............................................... an affordance approach to everyday politics ..................................................... . methods .................................................................................................................. research design...................................................................................................... a feminist methodology ........................................................................................ . examining empowerment on bumble ...................................................... viii introduction ............................................................................................................ technical walkthrough ........................................................................................ bumble as a series of harm-prevention tools ...................................................... harassment on bumble .......................................................................................... troubling bumble as a feminist app .................................................................. gendered labor on bumble ................................................................................. conclusion ........................................................................................................... . feminist affordances of private facebook groups for professionals .................................................................................................... introduction .......................................................................................................... facebook groups as professional resource spaces ............................................ facebook groups as safe spaces ......................................................................... facebook groups as mediated consciousness-raising platforms ...................... crossing boundaries: the importance of offline spaces.................................... conclusion ........................................................................................................... . #metoo, twitter affordances, and feminist outcomes ............. introduction .......................................................................................................... empowerment and expression on twitter ........................................................... solidarity and support: building connections through twitter ......................... awareness, education, and debate using #metoo ............................................ information and resources: moving beyond discourse ..................................... conclusion ........................................................................................................... . conclusion .......................................................................................................... ix summary .............................................................................................................. what is the role of social media in contemporary feminism? ......................... so, what is new about the fourth wave? .......................................................... limitations and future directions ....................................................................... bibliography ............................................................................................................ appendices a. bumble interview questions .................................................................... b. facebook group interview questions ................................................. x list of figures figure page . a #metoo tweet using a gif ……………………………………….……………. . a #metoo tweet that names names.………………………. ….…………………. . a #metoo tweet aiming to prove credibility of character.…….……..................... . a tweet noting the lack of suitable affordances for showing support in #metoo.……………………………........................................................................ . a tweet suggesting suitable user responses to #metoo.………………………….. . a “virtual hug” gif used frequently in the #metoo discourse.………………….. . a frequently used illustration tweeted during the #metoo movement to show that all sexual assault stories deserve to be heard…………………………………….... . a tweet from naral pro-choice america expressing support for one of their employees as a survivor of sexual assault………………………………………… . a tweeted selfie showing support for survivors of #metoo……………………… . activists tweeted pictures of tarana burke, the black founder of me too, to bring her into the #metoo conversations……………………………………………………. . a tweet using various affordances of twitter to connect #metoo to broader social movements………………………………………………………………………… . a tweet of a photo of a newspaper reporting on bill clinton’s impeachment following the lewinsky scandal, contextualizing #metoo within a historical context………………………………………………………………………..……. . tweeting screenshots of wikipedia and highlighting were used to contextualize the #metoo movement historically…………………………………………………… . some organizations used graphics and statistics to spread the #metoo message………………………………………………………………………….… . a tweeted graphic showing how rape culture is normalized……………………… . a tweet of a physical copy of a #metoo zine…………………………………….. xi . using different affordances of twitter, including hashtags, retweets, and screenshots to pledge support for #metoo…………………………………………………….. . co-opting the #metoo movement to sell surveillance cameras………………….. . trolling #metoo survivors with victim-blaming rhetoric. ………………………. chapter introduction continuing the wave metaphor of the women’s movement, scholars, activists, and journalists have commented on the recent rise of feminist sentiment, dubbing the current era the “fourth wave” of feminism (baumgardner, ; chamberlain, ; cochrane, ; david, ; munro, ; rampton, ; rivers, ). central to the fourth wave is the use of digital technologies and the internet for feminist activism. nicola rivers ( , p. ), in her book postfeminism(s) and the arrival of the fourth wave, writes: the announcement of the arrival of a new wave of feminism raises multiple questions. not least, what is it about the fourth wave that’s new? how does it differ from the waves that came before? and what are the conditions of its arrival? these are questions that this dissertation grapples with, specifically examining social media’s role in this wave. social media (websites as well as mobile apps) afford user agency, interactivity, and possibilities for new connections that help strengthen collective feminist activism, such as protest organization (eckert & steiner, ). however, at the same time as the internet is being used for overtly feminist politics, everyday digital practices link the personal to the political in less explicit, but still significant, ways (highfield, ). studying the everyday uses of social media is thus fertile ground for feminist research, and the focus of this study. this dissertation aims to broadly understand what is “new” about fourth wave feminism and specifically to understand how social media technologies affect feminist practices in the digital era. throughout this project, i simultaneously interrogate the demarcation of the fourth wave as a new era, engaging with cultural debates about the wave metaphor more broadly and situating this analysis within historical discussions of feminist politics. i critically examine the links between the personal and the political in the fourth wave through case studies of everyday uses of digital technologies – bumble, facebook, and twitter – specifically paying attention to the affordances, or possibilities for use, of each platform. the three case studies sit on a continuum from private to public and center on everyday digital uses of these platforms in relation to feminist goals, outcomes, and practices. this dissertation takes a multi-pronged approach to the study of fourth wave feminism on social media, looking at the physical structure of the technologies themselves, the content that users share, observing and talking with users about their experiences with these technologies, as well as examining the broader cultural context. in the first case study, i examined bumble, the “feminist” dating app. here, i combined the walkthrough method for apps (light, burgess & duguay, ) with user interviews, observations, and focus groups of women to understand how bumble, as a self-designated “feminist” technology, is used in developing personal relationships within a patriarchal social system. during the walkthrough method, i focused on how the features and perceptions of the platform enable, guide, and constrain uses of bumble. in the second case study, i looked at private facebook groups for women used for professional purposes, such as networking and career development. here, i conducted a structural discourse analysis (cirucci, ; papacharissi, ), interviews, and digital focus groups with members of these groups. in the final, third case study, i conducted a textual analysis of the first week of the trending hashtag #metoo on twitter, as well as conducting a structural discourse analysis to understand the affordances of twitter as a mediating platform for feminist discourse. the broad research questions guiding this project are: what is the role of social media – and particularly their affordances – in contemporary feminism? what is new about the fourth wave and how does technology affect this “newness”? the rise of the fourth wave: everyday politics and digital media the core defining feature of the fourth wave is the use of the internet and digital technologies for feminism. the fourth wave is visible in discussions of feminism and women’s issues online, including on blogs and through “hashtag feminism” such as the recent #metoo movement, which drew attention to the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment. social media platforms such as facebook and twitter provide numerous features for the fast and efficient dissemination of feminist information across time and space (chamberlain, ; eckert & steiner, ). thus, social media, defined as “computer-mediated communication software that enable users to create, share and view content in a publicly networked one-to-one, one-to-many, and/or many-to-many communications” (hopkins, ), are fundamental to this most recent wave of feminist activity. this project aims to contribute to the scholarship on the fourth wave specifically from a new media materiality perspective, including engaging with critiques of technological determinism in the definition of the fourth wave, as well as considering debates about conceptualizations of the wave metaphor more broadly. the fourth wave in this research project broadly refers to a current upsurge in feminist activity and sentiment through digital means. because intersectionality – taking seriously differences in experience based on race, class, sexuality and so on (crenshaw, ) – is central to the fourth wave, this project uses a digital intersectional theory lens (tynes et al., ) in the examination of the role of social media in contemporary feminism. the link between social media and collective, public, political activities, such as elections and protests, is a prolific area of study (see hill, ). however, highfield ( ) suggests that scholars should also pay attention to the intersection between digital media and “everyday politics, how political themes are framed around our own experiences and interests” (p. ). further, everyday activities that are not overtly political are, too, valuable objects of study because “the political can be present within the personal, without needing to be framed as explicitly political” (highfield, , p. ). feminist scholars have indeed suggested that certain online practices, such as blogging, even if not explicitly labelled as such by those partaking in them can be viewed as feminist practices. for instance, taylor ( ) argues that single women who blog are partaking in a feminist practice by challenging privileged narratives around heterosexual coupling in broader culture. digital platforms, then, allow individuals to challenge gender norms, share experiences, support each other, and ostensibly continue offline feminist practices through their everyday online activities. this study explores how the personal, everyday uses of certain technologies can be linked to broader feminist politics. however, this study also considers that, at the same time as digital media technologies allow increased explicitly feminist activism and women’s less overt “everyday politics,” they also make easier the expressions of sexism and misogyny that women experience offline (mantilla, ). in fact, banet-weiser ( ) claims that a rise in digital “popular feminism” is mirrored by the parallel rise of “popular misogyny” online. women who express feminist opinions online are routinely harassed and intimidated, including instances of rape and death threats (chasmer, ; mantilla, ). but this digital version of sexism and misogyny is not reserved for women who identify as feminists. a pew research center survey found that women as a group, and specifically young women, experience particularly sinister digital harassment, with % being stalked and % experiencing sexual harassment online (duggan, ). this backlash against renewed feminist – and even just female – activity in the public sphere is, of course, not a new phenomenon (faludi, ); feminism as a movement has been met with vitriol throughout the succession of waves, beginning in the mid- th century. however, this contemporary moment is a particularly interesting clash of feminist and anti-feminist sentiment, precisely because of the interactive digital technologies that enable both: “as a result of…the dialogue facilitated by the internet, possibly for the first time women are able to engage directly with the ‘backlash’” (chamberlain, , p. ). accordingly, central to my study is the role of social media in empowering (and constraining) women in relation to the rise of both popular feminism and popular misogyny. analyzing the affordances of digital media technologies is a useful lens to gain nuanced understandings of how technologies and their users interact in the context of the wider social (patriarchal) environment. vernacular affordances of digital media technologies social media is a space designed for connection; they are “those technologies that enable the building and maintenance of relationships” (massie & cirucci, , p. ). the technological architectures and features of social media provide “diverse functionalities to enable networking and communication with other members, to establish groups, and to have discussions” (carstensen, , p. ). such connectivity and other functionalities are what scholars call affordances. affordances represent the opportunity for an interaction between the physical properties of an object and the actions of a social agent (gibson, ). affordances, in the context of media and communication technologies, refer both to technological affordances – the design features and material structures that allow certain actions – and to social or communicative affordances – what the technology allows its users to do socially (for instance, allowing users to communicate virtually with like-minded people) (hutchby, ). technologies, of course, do not exist in a vacuum; how they are designed and what people do with them is embedded in the wider context of hegemonic social power structures. consequently, affordances present possibilities for both aligning with social norms and subverting them (highfield, ; shaw, ). nagy and neff ( ) argue that the concept of affordances is not merely objective, by putting forward the notion of “imagined affordances”; “imagined affordances,” they contend, sit at the intersection of “users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (p. ). what people do with a technology, then, depends both on the objective features of a technology and also on what an individual imagines a technology is for. thus, in order to understand interactions between technologies and their users, it is important to ask users themselves about their experiences and imaginations of digital technologies – getting at what mcveigh-schultz and baym ( ) call “vernacular affordances.” understanding vernacular affordances also leads to an understanding of the “platform vernacular” (gibbs et al, ), the “shared conventions and grammars of communication” specific to each social media platform – thus contributing to the literature on platform studies. accordingly, i conducted either a walkthrough or structural discourse analysis of each platform to map out affordances, but i also spoke with women themselves about their conceptions and uses of these platforms. in the context of digital feminism, affordances are a particularly useful analytical lens, because they allow the consideration of questions such as: what possible feminist actions do technologies allow that are different from face-to-face or other mediated communication? how has offline feminism moved online? has digital media created new obstacles for feminism? how much has changed because of new technologies? how much has stayed the same? i attempt to answer these questions throughout this dissertation. using a feminist and cultural studies approach speaking with women directly about their uses of technologies in large parts of this dissertation (two analytical chapters) was a conscious choice aligned with the feminist epistemology guiding this project. feminist research is “research on, by, and especially for women” (stacey, , p. ); using a feminist methodology means that “women’s perceptions, meanings and experiences are taken seriously and valued” (foss & foss, , p. ). accordingly, interviewing women brings their own words and understandings to the forefront of this dissertation research. further, feminist research is grounded “contextually in the concrete realm of women’s everyday lives” (stacey, , p. ) and is particularly concerned with interpreting the everyday life experiences of women that are usually not scientifically studied. by interviewing women about their everyday uses of bumble and facebook, this research aims to contribute to the body of feminist scholarship that legitimizes lived experiences of women as a form of knowledge production. complementing the interview method of the first two cases is the third case, which used a textual analysis to study the first week of the #metoo movement of twitter. exploring the content of the #metoo discourse in conjunction with an analysis of twitter’s affordances demonstrates how twitter as a platform mediates feminist discussions and outcomes during everyday practices. the decision to focus on the everyday in this dissertation is based on a cultural studies approach to media and communication research. cultural studies scholars contend that media is embedded in every aspect of human existence and not an entity that can be extracted and studied apart from a wider cultural context (baym, ; miguel, ). there are two core assumptions of cultural studies that locate this dissertation in a cultural studies paradigm: firstly, there is an emphasis on how people consume cultural texts (such as media texts) and increasingly, in the digital age, how they interact with media and technologies (shaw, ); secondly, cultural studies emphasize the importance of studying culture of ordinary people and their mundane experience of everyday life, because “culture is ordinary” (williams, [ ]). audience studies as a body of research focuses on the experiences of audiences, with researchers speaking directly with audiences to find out how they engage with media texts and technologies, using interviews, focus groups, surveys or ethnography (e.g., bird, ; darling-wolf, ; hight & harindranath, ; radway, ). audience studies add another dimension to researchers’ analysis of texts and production practices, creating a rich holistic understanding of how media and communication are shaped by and shape society. the importance of audience studies specifically in the digital age is highlighted by hight and harindranath ( , p. ), editors of studying digital media audiences, who write: insights gained from audience research are an essential contribution to debates over the nature and significance of digital media… [particularly as there is] scarcely an area within contemporary modern societies which is untouched by digital media in one form or another. the emphasis on the ordinary is a valuable area of study (kitch, ) and produces research that explores ordinary people’s mundane interactions with media and technologies as they go about their daily lives (e.g., ang, ; bird, ; radway, ). in a classic reception study, radway ( ) asked women what they thought about the romance novels they read in their leisure time. similarly, ang ( ) analyzed viewer responses to the soap opera dallas, specifically looking at the ways that watching dallas could be valued as a pleasurable activity in women’s lives. intersectional and global approaches to reception studies include bobo’s ( ) study on african-american women’s consumption of films and novels created by black women, such as the color purple, and acosta-alzuru’s ( ) explorations of venezuelan audiences’ understandings of feminism in telenovelas. moving into the digital realm, gray ( ) shows how offline and online spaces connect, in her research on queer rural youth’s usage of digital media as places for queer identity construction. baym ( ), in her study of personal relationships online, argues that technologies have become incorporated into the daily routines of people and that in order to understand digital technologies as researchers, it is important to study the everyday lives of people. this dissertation takes a feminist cultural studies approach and answers the call for more research on the “everyday” uses of digital technology (e.g. baym, ; boyd, ; brabham, ), specifically located at the intersection of vernacular affordances of social media platforms and everyday feminist politics. overall, i intend to contribute to a newly-emerging area of scholarship that merges technology and everyday life, linking this to social movement studies focusing on feminist politics. the three case studies this dissertation examines the affordances of social media – bumble, facebook, and twitter. the three case studies sit on a spectrum from private to public everyday uses of social media. examining bumble, the mobile dating app, provides insights into the personal, one-on-one uses of technology in the daily lives of women. studying the participation of women in secret facebook groups sheds light on the dynamic of communities of ordinary women coming together around shared interests. analyzing the #metoo twitter hashtag campaign offers a nuanced understanding of the daily experiences of women made public. bumble, the “feminist” dating app bumble is a “self-proclaimed feminist” mobile dating app with over million users as of september (boorstin, ). it was created by whitney wolfe herd, co- founder of the popular dating app, tinder (darwin, ; yashari, ). wolfe herd calls bumble “ percent feminist,” because, after matching, women have to start the conversation, flipping gendered dating norms (either person can make the first move in same-sex connections on bumble). in contrast, on tinder and other dating apps, either party can make the first move, but the strongly-held cultural assumption is that the man should do it (bennett, ). bumble has been touted as a new technology that provides a digital “safe space” for women, where they have more control of their interactions with men than they would in other online spaces (bastow, ). because a woman reaches out first, the man “doesn’t feel rejection or aggression – he feels flattered” (yashari, ). harassment and abuse by men who have been ignored or rejected on dating apps is a well-documented phenomenon (holmes, ), with the instagram account byefelipe highlighting some of the more extreme cases (byefelipe.com); wolfe argues that women starting the conversation “guides the conversation in a very different way.” indeed, bumble has a very low abuse report rate for a dating app and takes abuse reports seriously, recently even writing an open letter calling out a documented abuser and blocking him from the app (paiella, ). private facebook groups for professional women a current cultural phenomenon is the proliferation of private facebook groups, closed or secret groups on the social networking site, groups in which conversations are not visible to non-members (e.g. cuen, ; dreyfuss, ; krueger, ; roberts, ). although closed facebook groups are of course not limited by gender – anyone can create one – anecdotal evidence points to a significant number of groups being created specifically as spaces exclusively for women (cuen, ; roberts, ). private facebook groups can be used by women for professional purposes (e.g., networking), for friendship and support (e.g., a neighborhood moms’ group), as well as more broadly for the connection to others with shared interests (e.g., a knitting circle group sharing knitting this male-centric approach problematizes the conceptualization of bumble as feminist. issues like these are discussed in my analysis. patterns online). involvement in a secret women-only facebook group may be read as a digital feminist practice, through its very formulation as an exclusively female collective space. the focus of this research are private facebook groups for women for professional purposes, such as career development and networking, particularly in creative, media, and tech fields. because these industries largely rely on freelance/project work, secret facebook groups provide an informal platform for career development and networking, which are particularly important in the absence of job security in these fields. twitter and #metoo hashtags on twitter use a specific phrase to link conversations around the same topic and make it searchable. hashtag activism thus creates public conversations around social issues (blay, ). the #metoo movement on twitter started in october , when actress alyssa milano tweeted for women who had experienced sexual harassment or assault to tweet #metoo, to publicly show the magnitude of the problem. the hashtag quickly went viral and conversations using #metoo continue on twitter over a year later. #metoo was not the first hashtag to highlight the ubiquity of gendered violence; #yesallwomen and #whyistayed, amongst others, were earlier feminist hashtag campaigns that increased public awareness of sexual assault, and particularly its misogynistic components (jackson, bailey & foucault welles, ). #metoo, however, has proved a watershed moment in hashtag activism, with a wider reach and more sustained public discussions than previous campaigns, in part due to the celebrity factor (milano has over million twitter followers) and the cultural climate surrounding the harvey weinstein scandal. weinstein, a powerful hollywood producer, was toppled earlier that october by accusations of decades of sexual abuse by over women (farrow, ; kantor & twohey, ). baer ( ) argues that digital campaigns, such as #metoo, “have begun to re-establish the grounds for a collective feminist politics,” and are thus in a sense “redoing feminism” (p. ), following an era of postfeminism (a contemporary ideology asserting that there is no more need for feminism because gender equality has already been achieved – see gill, ; mcrobbie, ). and so, bumble, facebook, and twitter provide a variety of possibilities and constraints for activities related to the personal and the political online. the findings show how the various affordances of each platform can be used strategically for feminist purposes. for instance, women on bumble feel empowered to challenge normative rules of dating and also “negotiate” the app’s ideal environment of use to maintain control and safety during their interactions with men on the app. private facebook groups for women professionals are used as a women’s version of the “old boys’ club,” as safe spaces for marginalized communities, and as mediated consciousness-raising platforms that support offline feminist actions. twitter, using the #metoo movement, affords feminist outcomes such as empowerment for survivors of sexual assault, support, raising awareness, and resource sharing. the limitations of each platform in feminist politics are discussed in each analytical chapter. overall, this research highlights the feminist potential of everyday social media use. these findings also point to some distinguishing features of the fourth wave of the women’s movement, tied directly to social media. social media shapes contemporary feminism by providing opportunities for alerting people about gender inequality and the continuing need for feminism, actively countering the postfeminist myth that gender equality has been reached. this research empirically exemplifies how women and men in this “wave” –whether self-identifying as feminists or not –are becoming increasingly aware of what sara ahmed ( ) terms “gender as a restriction of possibility,” how gender has material effects on our lives. thus, an important aspect of fourth wave feminism on social media is making more widely visible these continual gendered material inequalities. this research also shows how social media affordances not only spread awareness, but also provide women with possibilities for new strategies to navigate existing material inequalities based on gender. for instance, social media affordances can be used advantageously to help women avoid harassment and overcome discrimination through their interaction with digital technologies. such everyday online strategies can be viewed as feminist practices because they work towards fighting sexist oppression through women’s lived experience. finally, this work reveals that the fourth wave encompasses both the individual empowerment discourse of the third wave and a renewed interest in collective feminist action of earlier waves. there is value, then, in conceptualizing the waves of feminism as radio waves (hewitt, ), with different frequencies and wavelengths all existing simultaneously, rather than as oceanic waves. this research shows that the fourth wave is complex and often contradictory, illustrating how feminism as an ideology is always “living, breathing, and evolving” (fudge, ). chapter literature review defining feminism feminism has been variously theorized as an ideology, a lifestyle, an identity, and a practice. whelehan ( , p. ) reminds us that feminism is interdisciplinary, complex, and “[resistant] to easy categorization.” in fact, the use of “feminisms” in the plural is becoming increasingly common, to account for the multitude of ways of conceptualizing feminism (e.g., hackett & haslanger, ). at the core, feminism is “rooted in the belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex” (whelehan, , p. ). feminist scholarship, like this dissertation, analyzes “gender as a mechanism that structures material and symbolic worlds and our experiences of them” (van zoonen, , p. ). this current research uses bell hooks’ ( ) definition of feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and oppression.” this definition focuses on sexism, an ideology or system, as the problem which affects all genders; “feminism’s aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. it does not privilege women over men” (hooks, , p. ). hooks points out that both men and women can be sexist and anti-feminist, and both men and women can be feminists. hence, not all women are feminists simply by virtue of being women; “one does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female” (hooks, , p. ). this is an important distinction for this research, which focuses in large part on women’s uses of social media and locates these everyday practices in a broader context of feminist politics. even though in the first two case studies (chapter and chapter ) i interview women specifically, i am not asserting that these female users are necessarily feminists or that only women can be feminists. the decisions to explore bumble and private facebook groups as part of the fourth wave of feminism were purposely made on the notion of them being ostensibly feminist spaces. bumble explicitly calls itself (and is written about in popular media) as a “feminist” app and so i was interested in interrogating this assertion. i interviewed women users only, as the app calls itself feminist because it is women-friendly; that is, women are the imagined audience for the feminist uses of this app by the designers. facebook groups for professionals, the second case study, were interesting to me as bordered spaces reminiscent of feminist consciousness-raising groups. the exclusion of cisgender men is a defining feature of these groups, and so only women could be interviewed as members of these groups. the decision to look at the #metoo movement on twitter was made because this is broadly considered a hashtag feminism movement (to end sexual violence), rather than specifically because women were taking part in the conversations . overall, throughout this dissertation, i am exploring how female users, feminist digital spaces, and feminist movements are interconnected in the discourse of fourth wave feminism, and how feminist practices/outcomes/goals play out on specific social media platforms. non-binary/gender non-conforming individuals were recruited in the call for participation – as these groups often allow anybody who is not a cisgender male to be part of the group - but only self-identified cis women came forth to take part in the study. the problematizing of the #metoo discourse in terms of the gender of victims of sexual assault is discussed in detail in chapter . feminism as intersectional and non-essentializing another important aspect of the definition of feminism that this dissertation rests on is that feminism must be intersectional, always actively considering the differences between women’s experiences based on race, class, sexuality, and so on (crenshaw, ). for example, a black, lesbian woman has a completely different experience of oppression to a white, straight woman. social identity factors such as race and class are not additive (one is not black and a lesbian), but intersect, creating a unique experience of being “a black lesbian.” patricia hill collins ( ) has similarly argued that gender, sexuality, race, class, age and other identity markers work together in oppression and domination (in what she calls “the matrix of domination”), and that the study of any oppression and injustice has to consider the “intersectionality” of these … ‘systems of power’” (p. ). as adrienne rich ( , p. ) explains: patriarchy exists nowhere in a pure state; we are the latest to set foot in a tangle of oppressions grown up and around each other for centuries. this isn’t the old children’s game where you choose one strand of color in the web and follow it back to find your prize, ignoring the others as mere distractions. the prize is life itself, and most women in the world must fight for our lives on many fronts at once. rich is arguing that the politics of location –acknowledging the unique circumstances, characteristics, histories, bodies, cultures, etc. of different women—is important to authentic feminist inquiry. accordingly, this research uses a digital intersectional theory lens (tynes et al., ) throughout the analysis, paying attention to different experiences of different groups of women as mediated through digital media. intersectional approaches disrupt the monolithic entity of “women” as a collective group in feminist theorizing, through the acknowledgement of differences between women. tangled up in this, however, is the broader question, what really constitutes a “woman”? the identity of “woman” feminists in the th century, when considering differences between men and women, distinguished between sex (biological/physiological attributes such as hormones, genitalia, secondary sex characteristics) that occur naturally, and gender or sex roles (culturally normative expressions of femininity and masculinity, such as clothing, gestures, personality traits) that are socially constructed. simone de beauvoir ( ) famously proclaimed in her book, the second sex, that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. no biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature...” (p. ). thus, many feminists reject the notion that gender is an essential, natural quality and instead point to cultural/social influence on constructions of womanhood and femininity. in line with this, ahmed ( , p. ), who writes that “feminism requires supporting women in a struggle to exist in this world,” proposes that “women” should be conceptualized as “all those who travel under the sign women,” including trans women and any self-identified women in the category. this dissertation uses ahmed’s inclusive definition when discussing “women.” later, feminist theorists troubled the distinction between sex and gender, some claiming that the lines were too blurry while others arguing that the distinction itself is not necessary. for instance, since the s, feminist and queer theorist judith butler ( , ) has provocatively questioned the existence of the natural category of “woman.” instead, butler argued that the split between gender (as socially constructed) and sex (as biological) is arbitrary. she insisted instead on viewing both gender and sex as constructed, and importantly, viewing both as placed on a spectrum rather than being discrete categories. she also argued that gender is not a stable concept; rather, she explained, gender is constantly constructed through performance – through a “stylized repetition of acts” (p. ). butler posits that because gender and sex are constructed on a daily basis, there is no ontological reality in a “body,” instead it is made up of “the various acts which constitute its reality” (p. ). the body is thus a boundary in which acts of sex and gender are performed. butler argues for the rethinking of norms around gender and sexuality by highlighting the constructed nature of the “natural,” specifically destabilizing the myth of identity categories, such as “man” and “woman.” butler further argued that feminism as a political strategy in fact creates the subject “woman” instead of simply representing it. although as a scholar i subscribe to the notion that gender falls on a spectrum, and that sex and gender are performative, this research takes place in a world that still largely subscribes to the gender binary system, and, where self-identifying and/or being identified as a woman (whether cisgender or trans) by others has material effects. this occurs partially because people embody their gender (construct it through repeated stylized acts) and difference becomes visible on bodies (for instance, in presenting as a woman or as a man). this difference impacts social difference – how people are treated by others (alcoff, ; butler, ). as black feminist kimberle crenshaw ( , p. - ) writes: [to] say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world. on the contrary, a large and continuing project for subordinated people is thinking about the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others. this project attempts to unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them. it is, then, a project that presumes that categories have meaning and consequences. and this project’s most pressing problem, in many if not most cases, is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies. gender may be socially constructed, but the effects of categorization into the dominant gender binary system have “social and material consequences” (crenshaw, , p. ). thus, the category “woman,” although engaged with in a critical way throughout, is a central organizing category of this project which interrogates feminist practices. this project foregrounds women’s experiences precisely because it is a study of everyday practices wherein the “social and material consequences” of the gender binary system play out. feminists have theorized that the category “woman” is placed culturally in opposition to “man” – not only in opposition, however, but also as inferior (de beauvoir, ). man is the universal subject, the norm, and woman is defined by what she lacks in relation to the norm and thus becomes the “other” (de beauvoir, ; bordo & jaggar, ). the gender binary thus places different social expectations on, and provides different opportunities, for men and for women – with the balance of power tipping towards men, creating a patriarchal society. even though feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression seeks to benefit all genders, historically and now women are disproportionately negatively affected by the patriarchy – “institutionalized sexism” (hooks, ). while the goal of feminism is ultimately for gender to not matter, the need to fight for women’s rights specifically remains in a largely gender-binary legal, political, and social world, as does the need for the challenging of binary gender classifications and paying attention to the differences between women. a way to recognize intersectionality and the constructed nature of gender and the material, lived inequalities connected to the “woman” category of gender is the use of “strategic essentialism” (spivak, ). strategic essentialism is a strategy in which marginalized groups temporarily present a united front publicly for political gain, while engaging in debate about difference amongst themselves and in less politically-charged contexts. thus, in order to change the material inequalities rooted in the gender binary system, feminists can temporarily come together as “women” for political gain, while theoretically destabilizing the gender binary. feminism as an everyday practice finally, this research views feminism as a practice. indeed, feminists have debated whether self-identification as a feminist is necessary to the feminist project, with some suggesting viewing feminism as a practice rather than an identity (e.g. hooks, ; heilmann, ). hooks ( , p. ), for instance, suggests avoiding “the phrase ‘i am a feminist’ and [stating] ‘i advocate feminism’” instead, shifting the focus from feminist identity to feminist activities. this definitional shift changes the question around feminist activism from “who is a feminist” to “what are feminist activities” more broadly. for the purposes of this research, feminist activities are those that lead to the primary goal of ending sexist oppression, by “reducing gender inequality” and “promoting the interests of women” (walby, , p. ), for individuals or for women collectively – regardless of whether the actors describe themselves or their actions as feminist or not. based on the notion that feminism can be seen as practice, this research shifts the spotlight from formal feminist organizing onto the everyday. studies of feminist activism tend to focus on explicitly political, overt activism by individuals and organizations that self-identify as feminist. while acknowledging the crucial need for explicitly political feminist organizing, this research emphasizes how everyday activities can also have political impact and resistance does not have to be visible or intentional to be effective (hollander & einwohner, ; vivienne, ). scholars have also highlighted the importance of studying activism as it is “increasingly individualized, personalized, and embedded in everyday lives” (simi & futrell, : ), as “everyday politics” (highfield, ) or “minimal politics” (macgilchrist & bohmig, ), rather than formalized “normal activism” (simi & futrell, , p. ) centered in social movement organizations. everyday activities are valuable objects of social movement studies, precisely because “the political can be present within the personal, without needing to be framed as explicitly political” (highfield, : ). specifically discussing feminism, melucci ( , p. ), evoking the second wave slogan of “the personal is political,” argues that “women’s collective action is nourished by…everyday experiences and does not express itself only through public mobilizations; it develops through the shared apprenticeship of difference and resistance in everyday times, spaces, and relationships” (emphasis added). similarly, walby ( , p. ) argues that activities that “include the pursuit of feminist goals but are not explicitly labelled as such” can be considered feminist. this research shows how certain everyday practices on social media can be considered “everyday feminism,” because they work towards the goals of “reducing gender inequality,” “promoting the interests of women” (walby, ), and challenging the gendered status quo, ultimately working towards ending sexist oppression (hooks, ). the waves of feminism popular understandings of feminism – including journalistic, activist, and academic discourses – in the u.s. classify the women’s movement as a succession of waves, periods in history of heightened activism around women’s issues (hewitt, ; rampton, ). the first wave of the women’s movement refers to the period from the mid- th to the early th century where activists focused predominantly on political representation, particularly on gaining the right for women to vote (whelehan, ). women were granted the right to vote on august th, , with the th amendment to the u.s. constitution, marking the most well-known victory of the first wave and the start of the mass movement for “collective action in the fight for women’s equality” (whelehan, , p. ). the second wave refers to activism from the s to the s, focusing on collective action to change structural inequalities and oppressions around, amongst other issues, reproduction, employment, sex roles, and sexual violence (mendes, ; rampton, ). the second wave was marked by the slogan “the personal is political” which signified the link between women’s individual lives and a wider collective movement for women’s rights, showing that “the private was of very public concern” (whelehan, , p. ). consciousness raising – women getting together in groups, sharing stories of their personal lives, and discovering similarities in their experiences of oppression based on gender – was a key practice in making the personal political (hooks, ). the start of this wave is often attributed to the publication of betty friedan’s the feminine mystique in , where she wrote about “the problem with no name” – why women who were married with children and living comfortable lives in the suburbs were still unhappy. friedan argued that women may need to find fulfillment outside of motherhood and domesticity, sparking debates about gender roles in society. feminists in this wave, then, started to question what it means to be a woman, including critiquing idealized notions of femininity and beauty, gender role expectations, and the division of public and private spheres into masculine and feminine (bordo & jaggar, ; de beauvoir, ). second wave feminism has been loosely theorized as “strands,” such as liberal, marxist, radical, lesbian, and black feminism/womanism (for a comprehensive guide on different strands of feminism throughout history, see fudge, ). despite the key focus areas of the different strands varying, there was an underlying similarity in all feminist activism – a recognition of the power imbalance of social structures and a drive to remedy this imbalance. nonetheless, “one of the major sites of difference [between different factions of feminism] …is in defining the ‘oppressor’ and locating the source of oppression” (whelehan, , p. ). the oppressor is variously categorized as the patriarchy (liberal and radical feminism), capitalism (marxist and socialist feminism), compulsory heterosexuality (lesbian feminism), ethnocentricity/imperialism (black feminism) and even women themselves (all the strands refer to women as sometimes complicit and sometimes unconsciously participating in their own oppression). the two main factions in popular understandings of feminism that originated in the second wave are liberal feminism and radical feminism (dow, ; hooks; ; whelehan, ). liberal feminism aims to gain women equal rights to men in society as it already exists, whereas radical feminists aim to change the societal structure as a whole. liberal feminism focuses on discrimination against women in the public sphere, such as wage inequalities, while radical feminists focus more on critiquing sex roles and the patriarchy. one of the core features of liberal feminism is its mainstreaming of feminist rhetoric to appeal to the broadest audience of “normal” women. because liberal feminists aspire to make women equal to men in society as is, they do not need to challenge the existing structures of society, and hence try to use the prevailing guidelines for access to these structures. as such, liberal feminists use moderate, “logical” arguments to allow women into the liberal meritocracy that is naturally available to men (whelehan, ). liberal feminism is often the first strand of feminism that women (particularly white, middle-class women) come across in the media and through social interactions and has been the most publicly visible faction in the u.s. over the years. it is often seen in popular feminist rhetoric of the st century, for example, in facebook ceo sheryl sandberg’s ( ) concept of “leaning in,” where she encourages women to promote themselves in a “man’s world” in order to succeed professionally. liberal feminist rhetoric is closely tied up with the contradictions – of both validating and denouncing feminism as a collective social movement – present in postfeminism (discussed in more detail below). in the late s, a third wave of feminism emerged, a feminism that embraced individual differences and took seriously the intersections of race, sexuality, class, and other axes of identity in the experience of varied oppressions (bronstein, ; of course, intersections of race, sexuality, class, and so on, were already core features of more marginalized feminist strands of the second wave, such as lesbian feminism, black feminism/womanism, and marxist feminism. mcrobbie, ; mendes, ). bronstein ( ) states that “[t]hird wavers position themselves as different from second wavers, particularly in the areas of sexuality and bodily aesthetics, and in terms of activities that constitute feminist resistance” (p. ). third wavers embraced embodied politics, working to change gender issues in their everyday lives (for instance, through having discussions with their friends about challenging gender norms) rather than taking part in collective social activism and protest (fixmer & wood, ; sowards & renegar ). the body became an important location of feminist thought, for example, theorized as a site of modern social control through ingrained normative, habitual rules and practices focused on the body, such as eating and dressing in specific ways (bordo, ). with third wave feminism focusing on more “personal acts of resistance” (fixmer & wood, , p. ), less attention was paid in the public sphere (including in the media) around this time to societal systems and structures that continued to affect women negatively. the third wave has been critiqued for this focus on individual empowerment as depoliticizing the feminist project (munro, ). the s, then, alongside the evolution of the third wave, saw the rise of postfeminism, rooted in neoliberal sentiment, particularly in the media and popular culture (gill, ; mcrobbie, ). gill ( , p - ) defines postfeminism in popular culture as “a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes [including]… a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment.” postfeminism, a complex contradictory concept, consists of an “entanglement of both feminist and anti- feminist themes” (gill, , p. ). vavrus ( , p. ) proposes that adding the prefix “post” to a social movement emerges out of “a belief that our society has reached a moment in which we are living out our lives on a level playing field.” in this postfeminist era, then, feminism is seemingly “taken into account” (mcrobbie, , p. ), as a number of feminist values and ideas have been incorporated into society. for instance, in postfeminist culture, previous waves of feminism are acknowledged for bringing choice into women’s private lives (e.g. a woman can choose to be a mother or to work outside the home or to do both), and the rhetoric of choice infuses public discussions around gender issues (gill, ; mccarver, ). in fact, choice is often used as a synonym for feminism itself in postfeminist discourse (mccarver, ). however, many scholars argue that the rhetoric of choice and the focus on individualism and empowerment obscures structural issues that affect gender inequality and weaken the collective feminist movement (mcrobbie, ; rivers, ). furthermore, the focus on individual choice and empowerment in feminism serves predominantly white, straight, middle-class women who have the option to “lean in” (sandberg, ), with better access to resources and fewer structural hurdles to success than poor women, women of color, and lgbtq individuals. the digital fourth wave the st century has seen a “new, or renewed, commitment to feminist activity [and] the celebration of feminist identities that have culminated in the swell of activity increasingly being defined as the fourth wave” (rivers, , p. ) the fourth wave of feminism, starting circa , is made up of “instances of public commentaries in popular media reasserting a need for feminism in some form or another” (phillips & cree, , p. ). digital media are central to discussions of the fourth wave, which is “defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online’ (cochrane ), through key affordances such as “immediacy, rapidity, dialogue” (chamberlain, , p. ). martin and valenti ( , p. ) note that “the internet has allowed for a more open space of accountability and learning, helping to push mainstream feminism to be less monolithic.” the centrality of digital technologies in the fourth wave means that intersectionality moves to the fore in contemporary feminist theorizing. intersectionality is the idea that different social features, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersect to produce unique oppressions within broader social structures (crenshaw, ). fourth wavers increasingly define themselves as “intersectional feminists” who “attempt to elevate and make space for the voices and issues of those who are marginalized” (cochrane, , para. ). however, rivers ( ) shows how, frequently, in online culture “intersectional feminism becomes an aspirational ‘brand’ rather than a theoretical tool or mode of activist practice” (p. ), essentially paying lip service to the consideration of differences between women. furthermore, some scholars argue that certain digital feminist campaigns – most notably the recent #metoo movement – fail even at the surface level to consider the differences between women (nyu law, ), showing how the tendency to view all women as a homogeneous group (a long-standing critique of mainstream second-wave feminism) persists in digital spaces. subsequently, it is important to study online feminist practices through a digital intersectional theory lens (tynes et al., ). in addition to a focus on intersectionality, the fourth wave is marked by renewed emphasis on collective political activities, due in large part to the affordance of “publicness” of new technologies. for instance, fourth wavers use digital technologies for action, such as using twitter to organize offline protests such as the women’s march or lobbying facebook to change its moderation policies with consequences for misogynistic content creators (cochrane, ). some argue that the rise in collective feminist activism suggests that postfeminism is over (retallack, ringrose, & lawrence, ). others (e.g., gill, ) contend that the fourth wave is in fact “perfectly in keeping with postfeminism” (p. ): the new collective activism, seen in hashtag campaigns for instance, sits firmly alongside a popular “feminism lite,” which “frequently [reinforces] the advancement of the individual and [centers] the seductive notions of ‘choice,’ ‘empowerment,’ and ‘agency’” (rivers, , p. ) – think #nomakeup selfies shared on social media. this debate highlights a classic distinction in feminist thought between the focus on individual empowerment/agency/choice and systemic/structural change through collective action. is the ideal outcome for feminism individual empowerment (e.g., mentoring individual women to move forward in their careers) or collective change (e.g., changing gendered hiring practices broadly)? is feminist action that which happens at the level of the individual or is it best understood as collective effort? should the targets of feminist actions be individuals or society? for instance, susan faludi ( ) argues, using the #metoo movement as an example, that “fighting the patriarch and fighting the patriarchy are…distinct”; calling out individual perpetrators of sexual assault is not the same as working to change rape culture that normalizes sexual assault. she further argues that the former is far easier than the latter, which requires a lot of effort and collective organizing. this dissertation works on “unraveling the slippage between understandings… of postfeminism” (rivers, , p. ) and feminism, and the distinction between the individual and the collective, in the shaping of the fourth wave, which is “fractured and complex” (rivers, , p. ). new foes in the fourth wave: popular misogyny paralleling this rise in feminism is an increase in anti-feminist sentiment online and what sarah banet-weiser ( ) calls “popular misogyny.” she explains that “while for many a broader acceptance of feminism as an identity, concept, and practice is exhilarating, this acceptance also stimulates fear, trepidation, and aggression for those who find feminism to be a threat” (para. ), and this is expressed increasingly online. digital platforms that give feminists an opportunity to connect with each other and a wider audience also give the opportunity for sexist, misogynist, and anti-feminist sentiment to be disseminated publicly (benn, ; david, ; rivers, ; vickery & everbach, ). aside from the vicious online trolling and harassment of individual feminists (mantilla, ), the digital environment also provides affordances for the dissemination of anti-feminist opinion. for example, the tumblr blog “women against feminism” features women holding up signs explaining why they do not need feminism (e.g., “i don’t need feminism because my son is not an excuse for your daughter’s bad choices”; “i don’t need modern feminism because i don’t need to be superior to men in order to feel confident.”) (http://womenagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/). clearly, both feminist and anti-feminist sentiment is increasing in the fourth wave, and it is precisely digital http://womenagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/ technologies that enable both. so, “the internet allows for simultaneity of activism and backlash” (chamberlain, , p. ), creating urgent, new research opportunities for digital media scholars interested in gender and social movements. muddying the waters: complicating the wave metaphor of feminism many scholars assert that the wave metaphor is not useful, because it creates false boundaries between generations of feminists, reduces the complexity of the feminism, and gives the illusion that the movement does not seamlessly continue, minimizing the efforts of long-term (quieter) feminist fights (dean & aune, ; faludi, ; fudge, ; hewitt ; rivers, ). indeed, discussing each wave separately in the history of feminism is “both a reductive and distinctly narrow depiction of the feminist movement, which in fact includes as much difference of opinion and debate within waves as between them” (rivers, , p. ). arguably, the wave metaphor is a somewhat artificial demarcation. however, its usefulness as an analytical tool for this project stands: “the wave’s presence within popular culture and mainstream journalism, even while it is being problematized within the academy, ensures that the symbol is still relevant to the movement” (chamberlain, , p. - ). hewitt ( ), conceding that, despite its problems, the wave metaphor is firmly entrenched in the popular imaginary, suggests the need to “recast the concept of waves itself in order the recognize the multiple and conflicting elements that comprise particular periods of activism” (p. ). she suggests thinking of feminism as radio waves (instead of oceanic waves) with various frequencies (different feminisms existing all at once) and wavelengths (how far and long over time their reach is), to bring back complexity and agency into the wave metaphor. this dissertation adopts this more nuanced analogy as the foundation for exploring the intricacies of fourth wave feminism. for instance, it is important to note that the idea of a generational break is arbitrary and that each wave in reality encompasses multiple generations of feminists. those who were young and active in the second wave are still presumably engaged with feminist politics in this “fourth wave” (one doesn’t just stop being a feminist at a certain age!). further suggesting a “recasting” of the waves, chamberlain proposes that the waves be “untethered from feminist identity” and instead “associated with the socio-political and technological contexts in which they arise” (p. ). this project also takes up this suggestion, by making the technological context of the fourth wave central to inquiry. overall, this dissertation actively engages throughout with debates about the wave metaphor, including discussions about feminism being defined variously as a lifestyle, as an identity, as a practice, and as a product of a specific cultural context. everyday feminism on social media debates about digital feminism question its effectiveness; some see online political participation as “slacktivism” (see christensen, ), others argue that there is “no uniting focus” in social media activism (blevins, , p. ), leading to questions about whether internet activism in the fourth wave in fact enacts much real change – or “transformative political action” (munro, , p. ). however, studies of feminist activism – including those that find digital feminism lacking (munro, ) – tend to focus on explicitly political, overt activism by individuals and organizations that self- identify as feminist. for instance, eckert & steiner ( ) examined how both individual feminists and feminist organizations used social media platforms to “discuss structural gender issues, aspects of identity, daily practices, provide motivational material, and both justify and defend intersectional feminisms” (p. ). in contrast, the current study presents the argument that it is important to study the less explicit ways that feminism – as a movement to end sexist oppression (hooks, ) – takes shape online through everyday practices, by ordinary people who may not call themselves feminists or see their actions as feminist activities. i take a broad view in this research of what counts as feminist practices: any activities that “reduce gender inequality” and “promote the interests of women” (walby, , p. ), for individuals or for women collectively. i also include activities that challenge “how things are normally done” as men and women in the social structure, activities that subvert normative gender roles and identities. everyday digital practices that focus on personal experience have political potential. for instance, highfield ( ) shows how feminist bloggers are often overlooked as being political, because they “[discuss] domestic and everyday issues, long-running social debates that might especially have personal relevance and decidedly non-political topics” (p. ). of course, the notion that the personal is the political is central to feminism, because women’s daily lives play out in the context of societal structures and institutions that affect the everyday. sharing personal experiences with sexism and misogyny publicly makes the personal political; for example, thrift ( ) argues that "by virtue of participating in the feminist meme event, #yesallwomen contributors make everyday acts of misogyny and sexism eventful" (p. ). a key feminist intervention, then, is challenging dominant social norms around sexism, racism, class, privilege and so on, such as calling out sexism and misogyny. however, even content that does not explicitly challenge the status quo can be regarded as feminist. the mundane becomes political when placed in opposition to the normative; thus, simply discussing social norms (and making them visible and less “normal”) can in itself be seen as a feminist act. indeed, feminist scholars have shown how everyday online activities can be viewed as a continuation of collective politics using new digital tools, particularly activities on blogs for women, such as mommy blogs (anderson & grace, ) and sex blogs (wood, ). for example, taylor ( ) argues that single women who blog are doing both cultural and political work, through everyday discussions of singleness as normative. she contends that even though these bloggers do not necessarily explicitly identify as feminist, challenging notions around heteronormative coupling, through the telling of their personal stories and engaging with readers, is “implicitly feminist” and reminiscent of consciousness-raising groups in the second wave. similarly, lopez ( , p. ) argues that “mommy bloggers” are “creating a different picture of motherhood to what we see in the mainstream media,” contesting the normative discourses around motherhood and thus challenging the gendered status quo. they combine “radical acts” with everyday online activities that are not explicitly political. online everyday activities can also be areas of everyday intersectional politics. for instance, black gossip sites are used by black women to “talk back” (hooks, ) to the systems of patriarchy and white supremacy present in mainstream entertainment media (steel, ). thus, the personal can become political on social media sites through everyday uses and practices that are not designated as political by those participating in them. central to this dissertation is the notion that women’s everyday practices on social media shape the discourses around the fourth wave of feminism. accordingly, activities that are labelled explicitly as feminist, implicit feminist actions (challenging norms through personal stories), but also nonpolitical everyday practices, such as dating and networking –that is, simply living (and struggling) as a woman in the st century – are all considered valuable to feminist knowledge production in this project. ultimately, feminist research is concerned with “making the invisible visible, bringing the margin to the center, rendering the trivial important, putting the spotlight on women as competent actors, understanding women as subjects in their own right rather than objects for men” (reinharz, , p. ). this project aims to explore the connections (and disconnections) between women’s daily lives on social media and the broader context of feminist politics without preemptively imposing boundaries between what “counts” and what “doesn’t count” as relevant to the wider feminist project and to the fourth wave specifically. the essential newness of fourth wave feminism: breaks from and continuations of the past the capabilities of digital technologies are central to discussions of the fourth wave, delineating this wave as “new” because of the technology at its center. banet- weiser ( ) argues that it is specifically technological developments that are central to both popular feminism and popular misogyny: “[i]t is precisely technological access and a flourishing of a “public” culture of comments and feedback that makes this moment feel different” (para ). martin and valenti ( ) too contend that “harnessing the power of online media for feminism…. has transformed the way advocacy and action function within the feminist movement” (p. , p. ). accordingly, this dissertation centralizes an analysis of the social media platforms themselves. the question about whether digital technologies really create a “new” wave of feminism echoes wider debates around the newness of digital media in the context of media history. as hight & harindranath ( , p. ) summarize: on the one hand, much of digital media is informed by continuities with earlier media structures and content patterns…. a contrasting perspective emphasizes the emerging configurations of online, mobile and platform- based media encompass distinctive new forms of media experiences. perhaps thinking about the separation of form and content is a helpful way of simplifying this debate for analytical purposes. for instance, the idea that the creation of communities is a key feature of social media “is not new or surprising” (highfield, , p. ) – communities around shared interests and needs have always been a part of human social existence – the difference is the form this practice takes and the enhanced abilities this form provides, for example, creating groups with a further geographic reach. as schrock ( , p. ) points out “communicative affordances likely do not create the goal an individual is trying to achieve. rather, they enable a new way to accomplish it.” (emphasis added). baym ( ) argues, in the context of building relationships, that “mediated communication is not a space, it is an additional tool people use to connect into daily life” (p. ). that is, new media technologies, “deeply embedded in and influenced by the daily realities of embodied life,” (p. ) mostly augment the actions of humans that were already a part of “real life” instead of providing completely new possibilities. similarly, vivienne ( ) stresses that everyday activism – such as storytelling – is simply amplified by digital media. thus, new media changes the form, but not the practice itself. continuations and similarities in practices: from offline to digital contexts indeed, scholars emphasize the many similarities between online feminism and offline feminism, both those practices of earlier waves and the offline feminist practices of the contemporary moment. for instance, all three platforms in this study (bumble, facebook, and twitter) provide the affordance of a kind of “safe space” for women online, a space that “implies a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resistance” (kenney, , p. ). however, online safe spaces were preceded by offline spaces – both physical places and spaces as a metaphor for communities of women – which originated within the second wave women’s movement (kenney, ). emphasizing the continuation of “old” (offline) politics online, taylor ( ) maintains that single women who blog use similar tactics and rhetoric (such as consciousness-raising and identity politics) to the second wave. wood ( ) too highlights this persistence of old politics in contemporary feminism, showing how sex blogs are a continuation of second-wave politics in the form of women claiming control over the dissemination of sexual knowledge (similar to women in the s spreading information about abortion and contraception through pamphlets). likewise, bennett ( ) explicitly links the slogan “the personal is political” to hashtags such as #yesallwomen, calling them the “the modern-day equivalent” of consciousness- raising. in addition to sustaining “old” feminist practices, online environments reify challenges from the past. hamilton ( ) researched feminist anti-prostitution and anti- pornography blogging and found that the blogosphere provides new opportunities for networking and community, continuing more traditional feminist practices. however, she also found that blogging “simultaneously re-creates old forms of exclusion and division within feminism” (p. ), by positioning sex workers as victims rather than agentic and taking a side against the sex-positive movement. fotopoulou ( ) similarly argues that digital practices in long-established (offline) feminist organizations can serve to reproduce exclusionary elements online, re-drawing and boldening the boundaries between generations of women. goldberg ( ) too shows how heated disagreements between feminists have transferred from offline worlds to online spaces. for instance, different groups of feminists (e.g., radical, liberal, lesbian, black, etc.) clashed in the second wave and continue to do so in online spaces, for example, in “online trashing,” the call to “check your privilege” of feminists whose activism is deemed not inclusive/intersectional enough by others (rivers, ). discussions about whether the fourth wave of digital feminism is truly new can be extended to more broad interrogations of women’s practices online. do women’s experiences using social media differ that much from women’s experiences both throughout history and offline in the present moment? for example, women coming together in groups separate from men (as is the case in secret facebook groups) – for leisure, business and politics – is not a new phenomenon. the women’s clubs movement in the united states gained momentum during the progressive era ( s- s), when women came together for literary and arts discussions, as well as to campaign around social issues such as education and family planning, creating what bowden ( , p. ) called “altruistic services and self-help groups.” although the movement was popular in the late th and early th century, bowden traces the first women’s club opening to in new york city. more recently, in , the wing, an exclusive social/networking club for women, opened its doors, also in new york (evans, ). along a similar vein, book clubs for women have, particularly since the s, provided groups for discussions, support, and friendship (burger, ). even online, the idea for women’s-only organizations and spaces did not start with facebook or twitter. places where women could build community and share resources have been abundant on the web since the s, including discussion forums and mailing lists, such as systers, a private mailing list for women working in computing, which started in (camp, ), and blogher, an exclusive online community for female bloggers, which started in (lopez, ). looking to history thus complicates the “newness” of new media and online practices. the role of social media as tools for feminist practices in the feminist context, then, new media provides a tool for different ways of doing the same things that feminists have been doing throughout history. despite arguing overall that blogging practices of single women signal a continuation of “old” politics, taylor ( ) distinguishes between earlier and current politics by pointing out that the affordances of blogging are allowing women “to say [what] may not be sayable in other spaces” (p. ) – hence, emphasizing the changed form of the practices, not necessarily the content. maclaran ( , p. ) makes the historical continuation of the women’s movement explicit, arguing that fourth wave feminism is about activists who “try to blend the micropolitics that characterized much of the third wave with an agenda that seeks change in political, social and economic structures much like the second wave” – but importantly, she also points out that this blending is done using a new form: online media. martin and valenti ( , p. ) too contend that, regardless of debates around online feminism, at the very least, “technological tools have made it infinitely easier for people invested in social justice to play their part.” keller ( ), who argues that girls’ blogs can be understood as feminist activism, shows how blogging is a continuation of the offline practice of diary writing; however, the tool changes from paper to digital, impacting how the core practice is done (rivers ( ) suggests that the primary difference between diary writing and blogging is a matter of audience.) accordingly, the affordances of new technologies (for instance, the degree of privacy/publicness they offer) can be seen as enhancements of, or even simply different channels for, the core activities of earlier waves of feminism. the differences in the activities, then, position technologies as “mediators” of “old” feminist practices. digital technologies, in addition to providing opportunities for new ways to do “old” politics, also deliver new obstacles to the feminist project, challenges which arise out of the materiality of the technologies themselves. for instance, fotopoulou ( ) found that those in traditional (offline) feminist organizations are driven to pursue digital practices out of a felt urgency to stay relevant, rather than gravitating towards new technologies for the opportunities they afford; feminists “felt they ought to be producing digital texts, or else the world will pass them by” (p. ). the reliance on digital technologies as central to feminist work brings with it additional digital labor, in the form of maintaining social media profiles and interacting with audiences online, activities that were not part of feminist work before the internet. in addition, new technologies in fact widen the generational gap, as older feminists are worried about the digital literacy gap between them and younger activists (fotopoulou, ). that digital spaces can provide either uncertainty or empowerment for women, based in part on their digital literacy skills, points to the importance of understanding affordances of technologies that are being used for feminist purposes. and so, this dissertation examines social media specifically as tools or forms that mediate feminist practices and the experiences of women. contemporary feminist practices offline and online moving beyond discussions of old and new practices impacted by digital technologies, research shows that the boundary between offline and online feminist practices in the contemporary digital era is also not clear-cut. long-standing women’s organizations (such as those that are part of the women’s liberation movement in the u.k.) are indeed aware of the possibilities of digital, networked technologies in continuing feminist activism, including new benefits for more effective campaigning and communication (fotopoulou, ). such organizations are allocating more of their resources to creating and maintaining their digital platforms, considering them essential to their feminist work. importantly, however, these women stress that such uses complement rather than replace feminist work being done offline (such as face-to-face meetings). baer ( ), discussing hashtag campaigns, also complicates the online/offline debate, locating the new feminist politics of the fourth wave at the intersection of digital practices and local (on the ground) activism. rivers ( , p. ) too highlights this link in her analysis of the steubenville rape case and the activism surrounding it, stating: “despite the association of fourth-wave feminism with online activism, the distinction between online activism and feminism operating ‘in the real world’ is blurred, with online campaigns frequently influencing offline activity and events.” in the current era then, “feminist politics, although in dialogue with the digital, are not subsumed in the digital” (fotopoulou, , p. ). in sum, digital media and technologies afford both new opportunities and challenges for “old” feminist politics, but also complement offline practices. the issues and practices of feminism remain largely the same online, that is, broadly, challenging the status quo and aiming to end sexist oppression. they may not be fully new, but they do “take new dimensions and directions in a socially mediated form, shaped by the wealth of platforms and voices (supportive and antagonistic) able to participate” (highfield, , p. ). accordingly, in order to understand how exactly digital media augments women’s everyday practices, we have to turn to looking closely at the technologies themselves and at women’s experiences of them. the connections between offline and online practices, the personal and political, and the private and public are highly connected; “the offline and online are closely interlinked and impact upon one another” (highfield, , p. ), in the same way that “the personal and the political are not mutually exclusive, and separating the two is both impossible and impractical; they are closely interlinked, encouraged by the conventions and norms of social media” (highfield, , p. ). this project aims to explore these connections as holistically as possible, without reducing their complexity, using the lens of affordances. through interviews with users and textual analysis complemented by structural discourse analysis of the platforms themselves, i aim to present a nuanced, rich understanding of the ways that everyday uses of social media connect to feminist politics in the fourth wave. an affordance approach to everyday politics proposing an affordance approach as a useful tool for studying everyday politics, highfield ( ) explains that “to understand everyday politics on social media, we also need to understand the practices, logics and vernacular of social media” (p. ). banet- weiser ( ), discussing popular feminism and popular misogyny, locates technology as the center of these movements, and argues that, because of its significance in these zeitgeists, “we need to interrogate technology for its architecture” (para ). wajcman ( , p. ) too suggests, from a feminist science and technology studies perspective, that looking at technology itself is important because “the materiality of technology affords or inhibits the doing of particular gender power relations.” thus, the social media platforms themselves – in their functions, features, designs, that is, their affordances – are an important part of research on the intersection between women’s everyday practices and digital media technologies. affordances provide a theoretical middle-ground between technological determinism (the idea that technology drives social change) and social constructivism (the notion that social structures and interactions shape technological developments) (hutchby, ; neff et al., ). psychologist james gibson coined the term affordances to describe the latent opportunities present for action in a physical environment, describing affordances as “a combination of physical properties of the environment that is uniquely suited to a given animal” (gibson, , p. ). for instance, a large rock physically offers the opportunity for sitting (an affordance) to social actors. actors perceive an environment in terms of its utility; thus, a person will not perceive a rock as just a rock, but as a place to sit. gibson theorized affordances as “always present” in the environment, waiting to be observed and acted on by social actors. importantly, however, gibson did not view affordances as simply physical properties – he stressed that they are relational. that is, affordances exist between the physical environment and the social actor – both have to be present for the affordance to be materialized; “an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (gibson, , p. ). thus, the affordance of sitting is only actualized when a person or animal sits on the rock. later scholars, in fields ranging from design to technology to communication studies, variously reworked the conceptualization of affordances, extending affordances to include the design aspects of human-made objects, instead of seeing affordances as the features of a natural environment. norman ( ), in contrast to gibson, theorized affordances not as relational, but as “the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used” (norman, , p. ). thus, for norman, affordances are the materiality and design features of objects, such as the buttons on a remote control, that allow social actors to use them in specific ways. adapting the concept for design studies, norman suggested the term “perceived affordances” to capture how designers must think about what actions will seem possible to the end user of a technology. norman contributed to the field of affordances by highlighting the notion of perception as important in the interactions of physical objects and humans. accordingly, in order for the opportunity for action to be realized, the social actor (animal or human) has to be aware of the affordance. expanding on norman’s conceptualization, gaver ( ) distinguished between three types of affordances— perceptible affordances, hidden affordances, and false affordances—based on whether or not they exist and what information about them is visible. perceptible affordances are the easily seen and understood features of an object; hidden affordances are those capabilities of an object that are not outright apparent but nevertheless exist; and false affordances are those that are perceived as attributes, but that the object does not in fact have. gaver ( , p. ), moving beyond perception, stressed action and interaction when thinking about affordances, defining affordances as “properties of the world defined with respect to people’s interaction with it.” he emphasized that, after a social actor perceives an affordance, he or she has to have both the capabilities to actualize it (ability) and the desire to realize the action (that is, to feel that it is a relevant action) (gaver, ). gaver also highlighted that affordances do not exist only between the object and the actor, but they also provide “possibilities…for social interaction” (p. ). consequently, object properties and human actions shape and are shaped by the wider culture. hutchby ( ), developed the term “communicative affordances” to describe the “possibilities for action… [in] technological forms” (p. ). hutchby argues that affordances are both functional (they allow or constrain action) and relational (different social actors can perceive the same affordance differently). the emphasis on the relational is important here, because hutchby points out that the same object provides different affordances to different social actors. this idea is particularly pertinent to this study and research on the affordances of social media, which bucher and helmond ( , p. ) define as “the perceived range of possible actions linked to [the] features of the platform.” social media platforms provide different affordances to different individual based on cultural identity factors, such as gender, race, sexuality, and so on (cirucci, ; highfield, ). further, users flock to particular platforms for the specific affordances they perceive the platforms to provide, depending on if they fit their desired outcomes. for instance, highfield ( ) illustrates how black activists use twitter specifically because of the affordance of hashtags and wordplay, to gather solidarity and raise public awareness around black issues. the asexual community uses tumblr because of certain affordances, such as the de-emphasizing of commenting which lowers trolling for this marginalized population (renninger, ). however, as much as affordances are possibilities for use, they are also constraints on action, limiting different individuals in unique ways. the internet is not a neutral space; it is “a system that reflects, and a site that structures, power and values” (noble & tynes, , p. ). the internet broadly, including specific social media platforms, is designed with a white, male, heteronormative, cisgender worldview (brock, ). through their very design and architecture, then, digital technologies can limit the experiences of underrepresented groups (daniels, , ). furthermore, as nagy and neff ( ) highlight, imagination is a key component of affordances; users interact with technologies based on their imaginations around what that technology is for and how it should be used. the way people perceive a technology impacts how they use it. so, women, people of color, lgbtq individuals, and other underrepresented groups may perceive a certain technology or digital space as not being “for” them, regardless of the objective functionalities and features. for example, blackmon ( ) found that black students were “technologically tentative” because of what she calls “historical access,” which includes “the access that students allow themselves based on past personal and cultural experiences with both computer technology and the hegemonic power structure that it is seen as representing” (p. ). black students have a fear of technology as not being “for” them because of a history of oppression and mistrust. hence, there is variation in social media use among various identity groups: “users’ social context, abilities, and purposes define their interactions with technologies” (nagy & neff, , p. ). studying how specific groups of people use digital technologies is valuable to understanding the intersection between technology and the wider societal context. important to this research is the fact that the same affordances may be used by different groups for completely oppositional purposes. as highfield ( , p. ) points out: “social media and online platforms are employed for articulating identities, for challenging and subverting societal norms and for providing a voice (and safe spaces) for individuals and groups who might variously be marginalized, ignored or under- represented elsewhere.” however, the same opportunities on social media are present for privileged individuals, who may use these platforms to harass, discriminate, intimidate, and de-legitimize marginalized groups. the interaction between affordances and users is mutually shaping. for instance, boyd ( ) argues that “affordances do not dictate participants’ behavior, but they do configure the environment in a way that shapes participants’ engagement” (p. ). thus, users can use social media in a variety of ways (including ways not anticipated by designers) but are ultimately constrained by the materiality of digital platforms (shaw, ). moreover, the policing of platforms with regard to what content or use is deemed acceptable or unacceptable further constrains users (cirucci, ; highfield, ). for instance, macaulay and marcos ( ) argue that facebook’s “real name” policy discriminates against non-normative people (lgbtq, sex workers, indigenous people, etc.) and that the accountability and safety the site promotes in the argument for using one’s real names is actually a way of “rendering users transparent to markets and the state.” thus, the designers and owners of platforms create affordances that may seem as if they have many possibilities (for instance, the affordance to use a fake name exists on facebook), but in fact those who do not adhere to the normative ways of actualizing these affordances are punished. on the other hand, it is important to remember that users choose their specific social media practices and that these practices do in turn shape digital platforms over time (for instance, algorithms are configured based on user feedback). the importance of imagination and vernacular understandings affordance studies tend to focus on analyzing the design features of a particular technology or on exploring the social aspects, what users are afforded by the technology. this theorizing does not fully consider “the complex socio-technical systems” (nagy & neff, , p. ), for instance, algorithms, that act without direct human action. most importantly, nagy and neff ( ) assert that such a conceptualization does not adequately consider how users’ imaginations (in the form of perceptions and expectations of a technology) shape how affordances are actualized. nagy and neff ( , p. ), proposing the concept of “imagined affordances,” contend that affordances are “both environmental and perceptual, both conceptual and imagined” and suggest that scholars working in affordance studies should also address “how people form expectations toward technology” (p. ). it is important to study perceptions because they in fact guide the use of technologies (bucher, ). nagy and neff ( ) also highlight the importance of affect in affordances – that is, emotions affect how people use technologies. specifically, “users project certain emotions on technologies” (p. ), highlighting the importance of interpretation – affordances are not rational and static. an important aspect of affordances is that they arise through practices; “architecture shapes and is shaped by practice in mediated environments just as in physical spaces” (boyd, , p. ) and so “affordances are made sense of in and through practice” (mcveigh-schultz & baym, , p. ). a study of affordances then has to consider practices, that is, how do people in actuality use the technology. to get at that question, as well as to understand “imagined affordances,” it makes sense to talk to people about their uses of technology, analyzing “vernacular affordances” (mcveigh- schultz & baym, ). because possibilities for action require perception and intent, vernacular affordances illustrate how users actually interact with technologies. frameworks for studying affordances: low-level and high-level affordances bucher and helmond ( ) provide a simplified, useful framework for thinking about affordances as empirically studied phenomena: high-level and low-level affordances. in this conceptualization, affordances can be either abstract, high-level –the “dynamics and conditions enabled by technical devices, platforms and media” (p. )— which focus on communicative practices enabled through particular technologies, or concrete, low-level affordances, the material aspects and technical features (buttons, character-limits, profile pictures, etc.) of a particular technology. nagy and neff’s ( ) “imagined affordances” can be either low-level or high-level. thus, this framework encompasses materiality (design and features), social uses, as well as the “imagined” expectations of and perceptions towards technologies. social media affordances, then, include the capabilities and material features of a particular platform, users’ perceptions of a platform, as well as practices that emerge out of interactions with the platform infrastructure. researchers have studied both high-level and low-level affordances of communication technologies, including social media (e.g., boyd, ; majchrzak et al, ; schrock, ; treem & leonardi, ). high-level affordances explain what the technology affords beyond the material low-level affordances of technologies. for example, boyd ( ) delineated four high-level affordances of social network sites: persistence (stuff put online stays online forever), replicability (copies can be made), scalability (the potential to be seen is huge) and searchability (other can search for your stuff). similarly focused on high-level affordances, schrock ( ) developed a typology of affordances of mobile phones: portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. schrock highlights how affordances of mobile phones signal distinctly new possibilities for human interaction; for instance, portability allows the communicative practice of talking to others during a commute (something which was not previously available). other scholars have focused on low-level affordances. for instance, postigo ( ) examined the technological features of youtube to understand how the youtube economy works in the context of videogame commentators. similarly, papacharissi ( ) analyzed the “structure, design and organization” of facebook, linkedin, and asmallworld, mapping what she calls their “architectures.” cirucci ( ) too analyzed the technological or design features of facebook, such as its “real-name” policy and profile picture field, and connected these to identity construction. this dissertation aims to explore both low-level and high-level affordances, including “imagined” affordances, of bumble, private facebook groups, and twitter, through structural discourse analysis of these platforms, combined with interviews, focus groups, and textual analysis of content. such an approach is loosely based on cirucci’s ( ) method of analyzing affordances, in which she combines structural discourse analysis with focus groups. such a combination of methods is useful because “pairing an analysis of presented, non-neutral tools with users’ experiences with these tools provides a dynamic look into the negotiation and interaction that is affordances” (cirucci, , p. ). this methodological approach aligns with the epistemological assumptions of the theoretical underpinnings of this proposed research: cultural studies and feminist theory. blending cultural studies and affordances this project takes a cultural studies approach to the study of digital technologies and the fourth wave of feminism. moving away from effects research (research that aims to understand particular effects of a specific message on an audience), cultural studies as an approach to media and communication research highlights the enmeshment of culture, media, and everyday life. thus, cultural studies views media and communication technologies and their audiences and producers holistically, considering changes over time and the complexity of society as a system. a critical cultural studies approach also highlights the importance of ideology and power in culture, often emphasizing how power dynamics (based on differences in gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) play out in cultural (media) products, their production, their messaging, and their consumption (e.g. hall, [ ]; williams, [ ]). working from a cultural studies perspective, bird ( ), in her book showcasing various case studies of television audiences, emphasized the importance of studying the daily lives of audience to understand the influence of media, not only focusing on specific, isolated interactions with media products and technologies. this importance on the everyday study of culture enmeshed in daily life is echoed by scholars working in digital media. baym ( ), researching how people form relationships online, shows how technologies become incorporated into the daily routines of people and argues that in order to understand digital technologies, it is important to study the everyday lives of people. baym further argues that it is precisely through exploring affordances – the possibilities and constraints present in technologies for social interaction - that we can trace how technologies are integrated into daily life. along the same vein, brabham ( ) argues that scholars pay too much attention to “the highlight reel” of social media, focusing on viral or high-profile phenomena and people. he argues that “the vast majority of what happens on social media is unremarkable” (p. ) and calls for research on “normal, everyday topics” (p. ). brabham, similarly to bird and baym, gives priority to the method of interviewing, urging researchers “talk to people” (p. ), instead of focusing on big data sets and making generalizations about trends. interviews as a method of studying culture as embedded in everyday life allow researchers to get at “the nuance of human experiences” (p. ). an important tenet of cultural studies is that audiences are not passive dupes who simply absorb media messages delivered to them. hall ( ) [ ]) developed the encoding/decoding model, indicating that audiences are able to negotiate or outright reject the meaning of messages in the media, in a “struggle over meaning.” hall proposed that audiences take on different “reading positions” when interacting with a media text: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. dominant readings are when the audience decodes the (hegemonic) message in the same way as it was intended by the producer of the message; negotiated readings are when the message is partially accepted (preferred readings), but partially interpreted in different ways (resistant readings) to the sender’s intention; and oppositional readings are those that reject the meaning of the original message. through this model, hall illustrates how power circulates through culture. the producers of messages are typically more powerful, and produce hegemonic messages aimed at maintaining the status quo and preserving their dominant positions in society. audiences, which include marginalized groups (such as women), have agency in either accepting, rejecting or subverting dominant meanings of messages. despite the relative agency of audiences, interpretations can only be made within a wider hegemonic system that constrains complete agency; as bird ( , p. ) points out: “we may be able to make creative, individual meanings from this torrent of messages and images, but we can still only work with what we’re given.” shaw ( ) argues for the theoretical and methodological value of merging hall’s encoding/decoding model (and more broadly cultural/audience studies) and the concept of affordances in new media studies. specifically, she suggests that gaver’s ( ) conceptualization of perceptible, hidden, and false affordances can be mapped onto hall’s ( [ ]) dominant/hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional reading positions. shaw emphasizes that reading positions are particularly relevant when thinking about the interactivity afforded by new media technologies, which means that audiences, rather than simply reacting to texts, are actively involved in their use. she contends that thinking about affordances in light of the various reading positions can allow scholars to get at “how certain types of interactivity are promoted or discouraged by new technologies and platforms” ( , p. ). similarly to how the meaning of texts arises through interaction between a text and its audience, so does an affordance actualize through the interaction between a user and a technology. shaw suggests the term “using positions” when thinking about affordances: dominant/hegemonic use (technology used as intended), negotiated use (used correctly but not exactly as intended), and oppositional use (unexpected use of technology). shaw argues that affordances map onto audience studies as a middle ground approach – technologies shape and are shaped by social interaction, and users can do various things with and to technology, within boundaries (not all interpretative positions are possible and interpretative positions are constrained by technological features), just like audiences who oppose dominant messages can only do so within the limits of their hegemonic lived reality and the culture surrounding them. as shaw (p. ) points out, “what counts as a dominant, negotiated, or oppositional use is intrinsically linked to who has the power to define how technologies should be used.” here, a further separation of form and content may be useful for analytical purposes in this dissertation. affordances of new media platforms, it seems, can be said to either uphold or challenge “understood practices” (norms) of everyday life in two ways. firstly, users can either explicitly uphold or challenge social norms in the content they post on social media (e.g., point out sexism). secondly, they can also uphold or challenge (subvert) the intended affordances of the platform through oppositional use (for instance, using bumble to promote one’s business profile instead of looking for a dating partner). winner ( ) argued that technologies are not neutral and that power is embedded into a technology’s (or object’s) design. cirucci ( ) too argues that social media platforms are non-neutral mediators and that they promote a narrow “correct” identity through their affordances. further, cirucci ( ) shows that users with different social power status (in terms of identity characteristics such as race and gender) do indeed use digital technologies variously in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways, with those with the most power adhering to the intended uses of the platform and those with less power subverting the affordances of the platform. shaw’s model, then, is particularly useful for feminist research, like this dissertation, because it emphasizes ideology, power, and resistance embedded in technologies. accordingly, i incorporated this model (dominant/negotiated/oppositional uses of technologies) throughout my analysis. chapter methods research design to answer my research questions from a feminist standpoint, i talked to women about their experiences, “putting the spotlight on women as competent actors” (reinharz, , p. ), in conjunction with examining the affordances of the social media platforms, as well as doing a textual analysis of content (in various combinations across the three case studies). i wanted to see, broadly, how the everyday use of various social media technologies relates to feminism, in terms of goals, outcomes, and practices. for my three case studies, i conducted in-depth, repeat interviews and focus groups with female bumble users, repeat in-depth interviews and focus groups with women who were members of secret facebook groups for professionals, and a textual analysis of a sample of #metoo tweets from the first week of the movement. alongside this, i examined the material architecture of each medium by conducting a structural discourse analysis (cirucci, ) of facebook (particularly the “groups” feature) and twitter, paying attention specifically to low-level affordances (their technological features and design characteristics) and high-level affordances (the dynamics, conditions, and cultures) of the platforms themselves. i also conducted a walkthrough of bumble, after completing the data collection and analysis, i came across a methods article by andre brock ( ) proposing the method of “critical technocultural discourse analysis.” this method “combines analyses of information technology material and virtual design with an inquiry into the production of meaning through information technology practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ… [providing] a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology, cultural ideology, and technology practice” (p. ). essentially, this current research used a “critical technocultural discourse analysis” (without being aware of this method when analysis started). loosely following the guidelines set out by light, burgess, & duguay ( ) for app walkthroughs. berger ( ) argues that “it’s best to think of academics as spending their careers trying to prove that their way of looking at whatever portion of the world they look at is correct” (p. ); thus, scholars use their research materials as evidence and use several strategies of analyzing these materials to develop “valid” interpretations that support their arguments. in order to develop a valid interpretation, qualitative researchers often use more than one method – for example, interviews and textual analysis – to “get at” different angles of the phenomenon and see if both methods yield similar findings. this “use of multiple methods, or triangulation, reflects an attempt to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in question” (denzin & lincoln, , p. ). triangulation does not have to be done using two different methods: researchers can, for instance, combine two theoretical perspectives or have multiple investigators in the study to validate their findings. importantly, triangulation can also work in qualitative research in a contradictory (to developing validity), but still valuable, way: triangulation, instead of supporting a specific finding, can be used to reveal the truths of multiple realities, in line with constructivist ontology (brennen, ). along this vein, richardson and st. pierre ( ) argue that the imagery for “validity” in qualitative research should not be a triangle, but rather a “crystal, which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach” (p. ). richardson (richardson & st. pierre, ) proposes the concept of “crystallization practices” to build authenticity and credibility in qualitative accounts. this research uses various combinations of interviews, focus groups, textual analysis, and structural discourse analysis as such “crystallization practices” for this project. for the interviews and focus groups, i limited the number of participants according to guidelines set out by feminist qualitative scholars, who suggest - participants per study as a sample size in a big project (braun & clarke, ). this research is not meant to be generalizable. rather, the goal of this project was discovery, with the aim of providing a depth of understanding about specific practices; accordingly, “thick descriptions” (geertz, ) and quality (depth) was emphasized over quantity. i stopped recruiting new participants when i reached the point of saturation, i.e., when i kept hearing the same things in the last few interviews and focus groups, and so no new knowledge was being produced (brennen, ). structural discourse analysis and app walkthrough to fully answer my first research question, regarding the materiality and affordances of social media platforms, i conducted a structural discourse analysis (cirucci, ) of facebook’s secret group feature and twitter, and followed the “app walkthrough method” for bumble. for facebook and twitter, i amended the method of “discourse analysis” (fairclough, ), which critically examines how power structures work in language. instead of analyzing content, however, i analyzed the architecture – what papacharissi ( , p. ) defines as the “structure, design and organization” – of each platform. i loosely followed the methodological process outlined in papacharissi’s ( ) analysis of the “virtual geographies” of social networking sites, and cirucci’s ( , ) analysis of the structural affordances of facebook. here, i mapped both low-level and high-level affordances of each platforms (bucher & helmond, ). firstly, i systematically navigated each platform as a user, noting what it allowed me (or discouraged/constrained me etc.) to do based on its objective design features and the way it is organized. this first navigation, or affordance mapping, noted the general functionality of each platform, taking into consideration both the technological and social affordances presented by each platform to its users. i then analyzed each architectural part in more detail, including the suggestions for use embedded in the technological structures. here, i loosely followed shaw’s ( ) model merging encoding and decoding with affordances when evaluating the connections between the structural discourse analysis and the interview data, to understand the using positions of my participants in relation to each platform. in addition, i kept in mind throughout my project some criteria put forth by scholars of affordances. for instance, davis and chouinard ( ) outline “how artifacts afford, for whom and under what circumstances” (p. ). they contend that there are gradations in the mechanisms of affordances, arguing that technologies can request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse in relation to the user. for example, the difference between request and demand can be seen in the request for profile pictures on facebook (which are recommended, but not necessary to have an account) and the demand for choosing a gender identification (which must be done in order to start an account). further, they argue, affordances are actualized under the following conditions: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. that is, a person must be aware of what the technology can do, must also be able to use the feature, and the use must be legitimized by social norms (e.g. having a driver’s license to drive a car). i considered these theorizations during my analysis of each platform. for bumble, because it is a mobile app, i specifically followed the “technical walkthrough” part of light, burgess, and duguay’s ( ) “app walkthrough method.” here a researcher engages with the interface of an app, working through screens, tapping buttons, exploring menus, and so on. there are three stages of the app walkthrough: registration and entry (here is where the “dominant use” (shaw, ) is communicated), everyday use, and leaving the app. during the walkthrough, the researcher pays attention to the “mediator characteristics,” which include the arrangement of the user interface, functions and features, and the textual content and tone. to contextualize these findings, the researcher also pays attention to the vision of the app (what is this app designed for), its operational strategies (how does it make money), and governance (how is it regulated), in the context of user practices. bumble case study: interviews/focus groups in addition to the walkthrough, i interviewed users of bumble, to add a user experience dimension to the architectural understandings of the app. i recruited the interview participants predominantly using social media promotion, by posting a status “looking for women and gender non-conforming/non-binary individuals who use bumble to interview for my dissertation research. please dm me or share with your networks!” on my facebook and twitter accounts in october . i wanted my sample to be inclusive and participation to be open to anybody who did not identify as cis-gender male. i also attended a bumble bizz (a new service from bumble connecting business partners instead of dates) launch party in philadelphia in october , where i recruited two participants who used bumble for dating purposes. there were participants in total, all self-identifying as cisgender women, predominantly white (n= ), majority straight (n= , one identified as bisexual), between the ages of and , and almost all based in philadelphia (n= , two lived in new zealand). i conducted one-on-one, in-person initial interviews with all the participants based in philadelphia in october and november . these interviews took place in coffee shops around the city and lasted between minutes and minutes each. two interviews with participants from new zealand took place over skype in november and lasted to minutes each. i recorded each interview with the participants’ consent and have used pseudonyms and left out identifying features in the analysis. i then conducted follow-up one-on-one interviews with three participants and one follow-up focus group of nine participants in february . the interviews were between and minutes each and the focus group took three hours. during the second round of interviews and the focus group, i asked follow-up questions that expanded on and clarified the initial conversations (see appendix a for list of questions from both rounds of the study). i decided to use a mixture of interviews and focus groups both for the convenience of my participants (in terms of their schedules and privacy preferences) and as a “crystallization practice” (richardson & st. pierre, ). further, focus groups are a particularly valuable feminist methodology, because these small groups made up of women give them a with safe space to talk about their daily lives and raise awareness of the similarities of their experiences. in this way, focus groups can become makeshift consciousness-raising groups and empower women. it was important to me as a researcher that my interviewees gained some tangible benefits from partaking in the research; indeed, many of my participants told me during and after the focus groups how these groups had changed their perspective or validated an experience, and how valuable they found the experience of taking part in my research. the interviews and focus group were unstructured (brennen, ), using a short list of “open-ended process reflection questions” (charmaz, , p. ) to start each interview. in this way, the interactions were more like conversations to get at the participants’ experiences and reflections in their own words. i asked the set questions in appendix a but in varying orders for each participant, depending on the natural flow of conversation. i added more questions specifically tailored to each participant based on their answers to the initial set of questions, letting our discussions develop organically. i transcribed the interviews and used a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, ) to interpret my data inductively, using the constant comparative method – moving between the interview data and literature – to analyze my findings (charmaz, ). facebook case study: interviews/focus groups i recruited participants for the facebook groups case study interviews and focus groups primarily through facebook, including through posting in a few secret facebook groups for women professionals i was a part of (for privacy purposes, the names of the groups studied are not reported). i used purposive sampling, selecting people who already belonged to these groups. because these groups had rules for membership based on sex, all participants were self-identified women. though these groups were also open to gender non-conforming or non-binary people (see chapter for further discussion), none of my participants identified as such. i used three criteria for including groups in this study: they had to be ( ) secret or closed facebook groups for ( ) specified for women, ( ) used for professional purposes. the contacts from these groups then referred me to women in other groups (again groups that fulfilled the above criteria), creating a snowball sample. i also attended two offline monthly meetings of female entrepreneurs in philadelphia who knew each other through a secret facebook group, in november and december . during these meetings, i recruited five participants. there were participants in total, predominantly freelancers or independent workers in creative, media, and tech industries (journalism, media production, pr, tech), and entrepreneurs and business owners. the size of the eight groups studied varied widely: the smallest group had eight members, the largest , +. the sample was majority white (n = ), straight (n = ) women living in urban centers in the united states, united kingdom, canada, and new zealand, and aged between and years, with most in their late twenties and early thirties. taylor ( ) suggests caution “when making broader claims about how new technologies act to empower women, as it is only ever some women who are thus empowered” (p. ). indeed, taking intersectionality – the different experiences based on an intersection of identity characteristics, such as gender, race and sexuality – into account is crucial in any feminist research, to avoid universalizing assumptions about women’s experiences (crenshaw, ). throughout the recruitment process, i attempted to diversify the sample multiple times, by specifically asking for people of color, gender non-conforming, and lgbtq individuals to take part in my study, on social media; nonetheless, the majority of this sample ended up being white, middle-class, cis-gender, and straight. the makeup of the sample guided my analysis, in that i was careful to explain how the findings were pertinent only for some women. i also tried to critically analyze and contextualize facebook groups as normative, white, heterosexual, cisgender spaces, using a digital intersectionality theory lens (tynes et al., ). i interviewed seven women individually over skype, phone, or in person; each interview lasted between and minutes. i held a zoom video call interview with three women. these interviews were recorded with the participants’ consent. despite the notion that phone or skype interviews are thought to lack intimacy and provide less useful information, bird ( , p. ) was “surprised and delighted to experience rich, personal conversations” over the phone. indeed, in the current age of ubiquitous technology, most people are used to engaging in intimate conversation through technological means. bird also argues that phone or skype interviews lower the power imbalance between researcher and participant that would be more obvious in a face-to- face setting. the rest of the participants ( ) were interviewed in groups (between three and five women per group) using facebook messenger and closed facebook groups created for this purpose. these asynchronous discussions continued over at least a month each, with me posting questions and the women responding to my questions and commenting on each other’s responses at their convenience. i made the decision to use the combination of individual interviews and focus group interviews using a variety of mediums for the convenience of my participants: because this research foregrounds women’s voices, it was crucial to hear as many of these voices as possible, in whatever way they found easiest. the different interview styles provided varying benefits for my analysis. the interviews over skype and in person allowed for more in-depth discussion of certain topics, while the messenger and facebook groups allowed for insightful interactions between group members (for instance, group members talked to each other when i wasn’t online and guided the conversation in unexpected ways, allowing me to see the natural progression of topics without a researcher present). all names are pseudonyms and identifying features have been removed to protect the participants’ and the groups’ privacy. in the same manner as the bumble case study, i once again used an unstructured interview format (see appendix b for a list of open-ended interview questions), exploring “respondents’ feelings, emotions, experiences, and values” (brennen, , p. ). i then transcribed the interviews and used a grounded theory approach – drawing on feminist theory and affordance literature – for the analysis. twitter case study: textual analysis i focused on the first week of the #metoo movement, starting with october , and ending with october , . i randomly sampled tweets that used #metoo from the homepage of twitter for each day that week, using the search function on twitter itself. however, when a tweet included replies and comments (i.e., became a “thread”), i analyzed all of these related tweets on the entire thread as well. i screenshotted every tweet thread individually and pasted these into a word document, as it was important for me to capture images, emoji, etc. and not just text. accordingly, the corpus for analysis consisted of , pages of tweets – including pictures, links, replies, comments, etc. i carefully paid attention to the various parts of each tweet, such as profile pictures, hashtags, urls, emoji, pictures (low-level affordances that twitter provides), as well as the broader communicative affordances of twitter (high-level affordances, such as searchability, connectivity, visibility, etc.). alongside this structural discourse analysis, i conducted a textual analysis (brennen, ) of the tweets, looking for patterns and themes in the discussions around #metoo, using a feminist lens. looking at both the affordances of twitter and the patterns in the discourse shed light on how twitter serves as a unique mediator of digital feminism. ultimately, the goal of this study was to place the materiality of technologies and people’s experiences of them front and center of analyses, to look at platforms as mediators of everyday experiences (nagy & neff, ). it is, however, important to note that social media are constantly evolving and it is impossible to map precisely all affordances of these platforms. this study instead is meant to produce a snapshot in time, an analysis of bumble, facebook, and twitter in - . a feminist methodology this project is a feminist endeavor and accordingly uses feminist methodology. the specific interpretive commitments of feminist methodology center broadly on the importance of researcher subjectivity, multiple reciprocal relationships and voices, and theory and praxis grounded in everyday experiences and action. feminists adhere to the notion that one should state one’s positionality outright when presenting interpretations of their research findings. feminists should “not disavow the subjectivity (emotions, politics, and standpoint) that we each bring to bear on our research, but rather own it, disclose it, and critically engage with it” (hesse-biber & leavy, , p. ). thus, my position as a white, middle-class, educated, heterosexual woman in her mid-thirties (as well as someone who is or has been a user of all three platforms under study) was reflected on throughout this project. feminist scholars acknowledge their positions of power as privileged in studying their “subjects.” feminist research, then, aims to disrupt the hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the researched: a feminist methodology is participatory, that is, knowledge is seen as the co-construction between the researcher and the subject (reinharz, ). because feminist methodology is collaborative and reciprocal, building empathetic, trusting, personal relationships between the researcher and the researched is key to authentic research. england ( ) argues that, especially in line with feminist goals of social justice and caring, “those who are researched should be treated like people and not as mere mines of information to be exploited by the researcher” (p. ). throughout this study, i have considered my participants as co-creators of knowledge and have sought to build personal, caring relationships with them over repeat interactions with them, to the best of my ability based on circumstances (for instance, i interviewed many women digitally, through facebook pages and messenger, where the building of rapport was more difficult than in face-to-face conversations.) a feminist paradigm rejects positivist ideas and instead sees reality as made up of multiple, constructed, partial truths. accordingly, many feminist researchers work with feminist standpoint theory (harding, ), the idea that people have different views on the world depending on their social position in the world, for instance, how men and women occupy different positions and have different experiences, different access to resources, and so on. because different people claim different standpoints, a multiplicity of voices is important for the co-creation of collaborative, authentic interpretations. reinharz ( ) suggests that feminist researchers, in line with ideas about manifold realities, should try to access different standpoints, that is, start research from their own experiences and include multiple voices in their research. through the inclusion of interviews, i gathered a variety of viewpoints in this research. in line with this notion, foss and foss ( ) argue for the validity of the use of “personal experience as evidence” in feminist studies. personal experience, defined as “the consciousness that emerges from personal participation in events” (p. ), as data is useful for gathering what haraway ( ) calls situated knowledges, a collection of partial perspectives from particular embodied positions, reflecting multiple truths and realities. haraway argues that situated knowledges collectively produce a valid form of knowledge(s). another benefit of personal experience as data is that researchers gather not only knowledge but also “a capacity for insight, empathy, and attentive caring” (foss & foss, , p. ) and can more fully “know” the participants. finally, talking about personal experience also allows participants to “discover their own truths” (p. ), developing a “critical consciousness” (p. ) – therefore empowering participants, collaboratively, through research. throughout this project, the data gathered is largely the personal experience of my participants. this study foregrounds their voices, their motivations, their imaginations, and their emotions as related to social media and technology use. further, because i am or have been an active user of all three platforms and because of my lived experience as a woman in the zeitgeist of the fourth wave of feminism, my personal experience has too shaped this research. i spoke with my interviewees candidly about my own experiences and we discussed how our experiences were alike or differed. i see this not as a flaw in this research design, but instead as another way of producing valuable insights through personal experience. however, the commitment to co-creation of knowledge from different standpoints, using personal experience and multiple voices brings with it problems of control and authenticity in interpretation. for instance, researchers can “[privilege] their own experiences or at least their interpretations of experience over those of their participants” (foss & foss, , p. ; stacey, ). foss and foss argue that feminist researchers have the authority to present data, they have “presentational expertise,” but should try to maintain the authenticity of the respondents’ voices. ultimately, however, the research is the researcher’s product, so she should be particularly careful in her interpretations to balance the participants’ voices with her own (stacey, ). reinharz ( ) suggests using ample quotes, as well as paraphrasing, so that participants’ voices remain central to the text and, also, so readers can make up their own minds about what was said. foss and foss too advocate “constant dialogue, negotiation, and critical reflection” (p. ) in discussing interpretations with participants. researchers using feminist methodology must keep these commitments in mind if they want to develop valid feminist interpretations, which was the intention of this research. indeed, i have used plentiful quotes throughout to foreground my participants’ voices and discussed my findings with my participants throughout the process. chapter examining empowerment on bumble: “i like the fact that it’s… my choice and it’s my choice a couple different times” introduction the mobile dating app bumble was launched in december by whitney wolfe herd, co-founder of the popular dating app, tinder. bumble has million users as of september (boorstin, ). fifty five percent of users are women (burke, ) and seventy two percent of users are under (sola, ). wolfe herd left tinder amid a sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit and decided to start bumble partially as a response to her unpleasant gendered experiences at tinder (o’connor, ). on bumble, only women are allowed to start the conversation – and they must do it within hours of matching with someone or the match disappears forever. the reasoning behind this feature is to empower women to take control of the dating situation and also to quickly get rid of matches who are uncommunicative or not serious about dating. bumble has been publicly lauded as a “feminist tinder” (anwar, ; mei, ) because it “allows for women to take control of the dating game” (anwar, , para ) by making the first move. wolfe herd shared her impetus for starting bumble, and her branding of the app as feminist, in a vanity fair (yashari, ) interview: we are percent feminist… if you look at where we are in the current heteronormative rules surrounding dating, the unwritten rule puts the woman a peg under the man – the man feels the pressure to go first in a conversation, and the woman feels pressure to sit on her hands... if we can take some of the pressure off the man and put some of that encouragement in the woman’s lap, i think we are taking a step in the right direction, especially in terms of really being true to feminism. throughout this chapter, i interrogate the assertation that bumble is a feminist dating app, analyzing the affordances of the platform as well as talking with women who use it. the data here is gathered from women, using repeat in-depth interviews and focus groups. i show that online dating is a series of choices for women, choices that simultaneously ) try to lead towards a love match and ) steer away from harassment and abuse, so that bumble fulfills a double function, of being both “matchmaker” and “protector.” female users balance trying to find a partner on bumble with trying to prevent uncomfortable or threatening situations, through every step of use, in ways that extend far beyond the “women-friendly” features that bumble explicitly markets as such. the felt imperative to constantly consider safety while navigating the app to look for love creates additional, largely invisible, labor for women who use bumble (and online dating in general). dating has always been a lot of work, offline and online, for those seeking partners (weigel, ). this study highlights the particularly gendered nature of this invisible dating labor in the digital context. online dating thus extends the gendered labor – including emotional labor and household labor – that women perform in offline contexts (cirucci, ; hooks, ; hochschild, ). i end with a discussion of how the ways in which women use bumble, and the ways in which bumble guides these uses, relate to contemporary feminism. technical walkthrough: how bumble works a technical walkthrough of an app maps its various features and functionalities, navigating through three parts of use: registration and entry, everyday use, and stopping https://www.google.com/search?rlz= c chfx_enus us &q=arlie+russell+hochschild&stick=h siaaaaaaaaaopge-lsz u mlmssmg v-iesy ylviktwsyk k_lzs_xlizjlsllz svzi ktektlmvklal xml aaaa&sa=x&ved= ahukewicmosb sahvy wmkhaacdjiqmxmiiweoatap use (light, burgess & duguay, ). i loosely follow this structure in the following description of the app. here, i also use davis and chouinard’s ( ) typology of gradations of affordances, that is, showing how bumble requests, demands, allows, encourages, discourages, or refuses certain actions of the user through its interface design. registration and entry immediately on downloading, bumble users are presented with a screen with a picture of a blonde woman in sunglasses, with a bee-shaped key icon, and the words “on bumble, ladies hold the key.” below are the steps showing how bumble works (cited here verbatim): ) two people like each other & it’s a connection ) the girl has to make the first move by starting a chat within hours ) if she doesn’t chat, the connection disappears forever below this, greyed out, is a link that says “wait…but i’m not looking for men” – when clicked on, this link explains that in same-sex matches, either party can make the first move. at the time of data collection, the only way to access bumble was through facebook – thus bumble “demands” (to use davis and chouinard’s ( ) typology) the action of signing up through facebook. once users exit out of the welcome screen, a new screen prompts them to “continue with facebook.” there is a question mark only one woman in my sample was bisexual, the rest all identified as heterosexual and so the use of bumble for same-sex relationships was not brought up in the interviews. the data collection occurred in october and november . bumble has since amended its sign-up options, allowing users to create an account using just a phone number, citing privacy concerns arising from facebook’s cambridge analytica scandal (see plaugic, for more on the decision). underneath the prompt with the words “don’t worry! we never post to facebook,” and then at the bottom of the page, there is a link to terms of service. when the question mark is pressed, a speech bubble comes up saying “we use facebook for accuracy and security. you don’t want bots or spam and neither do we. facebook authentication helps us make sure you get the best experience possible.” once a user logs in to the app through facebook, her bumble profile is automatically populated with her facebook data: college attended, job details, age, as well as her last six profile pictures – the app in this way “encourages” the use of facebook data, though it does “allow” users to manually change some of this information if they so wish. users can show up to six pictures in their dating profile as well as a short text blurb in an “about me” section below the photos. the profile publicly shows the user’s name as well as the fields: occupation, education (college name), age, and location. if a user does not have an occupation listed on facebook, bumble directs them to a screen of “general occupations,” with pre-populated options (e.g., accountant, club promoter, professor) that users can select. the app “refuses” the ability to type in a custom occupation. the user also selects a gender when creating a profile, but this is not listed on the public profile – instead, it is used algorithmically to present users with potential matches based on the selected gender/s that they are interested in. users are clicking on the terms of service (tos) redirects the user to “bumble terms and conditions of use” online. the tos starts with “hey guys! welcome to bumble’s terms and conditions of use (these “terms”). our lawyers insist that we impose rules on users to protect all of our hard work. this is a contract between you and bumble trading inc and we want you to know yours and our rights before you use the bumble application (“app”).” this informal, friendly tone is present throughout bumble’s design, setting up an informal “platform vernacular” (gibbs et al., ). currently, the gender options on bumble are binary: male or female. the app does not cater to non- binary, gender-fluid, trans, etc. users. also “allowed” to link their instagram (photo sharing social media platform) and spotify (music curating platform) accounts to their bumble account. finally, the user has the option (the platform “encourages” this with on-screen prompts) to verify their account. in this verification tool, users are prompted to “show us yourself(ie)” by taking a selfie where they are copying a gesture that is auto-generated by bumble, and then submitting it to bumble staff to verify that this “real” self matches the photos in their profile. (bumble was the first dating app to add a verification feature like this in the u.s.) this verification tool is mean to combat catfishing, “the practice of creating a false online identity” (chang, , para. ). after a profile is created, a screen pops up, “encouraging” users to sign up to the paid features of bumble for $ . per month (bumble is free to use otherwise): “introducing bumble boost – upgrade for extras! but don’t worry, bumble is still free. . see who’s already liked you . rematch with expired matches. . get unlimited extends.” there is also a section in one’s profile called “bumble coins” where users can purchase coins, instead of the bumble boost subscription, on a one-off basis to unlock special features. next, the user decides on settings: to keep their public profile on or off (“turning your public profile off hides you from everyone except the people you’ve already connected with”); an “i’m interested in” section, where a user can choose “men”, “women”, or “everyone”; an age selection for matches (between ages - ); and distance for matches (between < mile and miles). bumble is a location-based matching app – a type of “people-nearby application” (toch & levi, ) which are “mobile systems that allow users to discover new people using geographical proximity search and online communication” (p. ). thus, bumble “demands” that users have their gps turned on to use the service. in the settings section, users can also decide whether to have push notifications on or off (being notified of new matches and messages); here, they can also send feedback to bumble, and look at the terms of service and privacy policy. everyday use after setting up an account and adjusting their settings, users swipe through the profiles of other users (these are limited by location, gender, and age according to both users’ preferences), looking at their photos and text blurb. if a user “likes” another user, she swipes right; if she doesn’t, she swipes left. if a user that one has “liked” “likes” one back, the two users are matched, and the woman then has hours to start the conversation (using text or a picture). if she doesn’t start the conversation within hours, the match disappears. initially, the man had unlimited time to write back, but in april bumble added a clock for the response, so now the man also has only hours to write back before the match disappears (mcgoogan, ). this new feature is supposed to stop the unpleasant practice of “ghosting” by men – “when you stop talking to someone you met on an app without offering an excuse” (mcgoogan, , para. ). there is a section listing the various matches and conversations, with thumbnails of a picture of each match and their names. before a person writes back, their thumbnail is encircled in a ticking clock that counts down the hours. conversations can be filtered by “unread,” “recent,” or “nearby.” when you click into a specific conversation (which then shows the text and pictures that have been exchanged), there is an option to “view profile, block & report, unmatch.” “view profile” takes one to the matched user’s profile. if you click “unmatch” (and follow the prompts asking whether you’re sure), the chat disappears from your match queue and you cannot be matched again with that user. clicking on “block and report” provides users with several options, with the default option being “don’t report abuse,” and others being “stolen photo,” “inappropriate content,” “rude or abusive,” “sending spam,” or “scammer.” once you choose your reason for blocking and reporting, there is a space to write a more detailed report to send to bumble. users who are blocked and reported are banned from the app overall, at the discretion of the bumble team, who monitor these reports and feedback. a bumble exec explained in an interview the reasoning behind banning: basically, the key to determining whether or not somebody is banned is, would we want to run the risk of them treating another user this way? and the odds are, if they're going to treat one person that way, they're going to treat others that way, and they're not allowed on the app. (jalili, ) leaving the app users have three options to exit the app: logging out (this is a temporary halt, as it keeps the app on the phone, but stops notifications), uninstalling the app (this removes the app from the phone, but the account and user data remains “virtually” and can be logged into when the app is re-downloaded), and deleting the account (which removes the account and all the user’s data permanently). other features and guidelines for use in march , bumble launched bumble bff, a platform like the dating interface, but instead of matching with potential romantic partners, users match with potential same-sex friends (burlacu, ). in october , bumble launched bumble bizz, a women-first networking platform to remove “the soliciting nature and the sexism that exists in networking” (wolfe herd, quoted in o’connor, ). all three interfaces are accessed through the bumble app and users can choose to change their profiles for each one or to keep one profile for all three. these two features have further extended bumble’s “feminist” offering, in the connecting and empowering of women in both the social and work contexts. in october , bumble released new photo moderation rules that included a ban on mirror selfies, photos of people in underwear or swimwear (unless on a beach or by a pool), and obscured faces. these rules are meant to make sure that bumble is “a safe, friendly place to meet new people. bumble is not a place to act differently than you would irl [in real life]” (bumble hq, , para. ). through the various features (such as women talking first, verification, and blocking and reporting function), rules and guidelines, as well as monitoring users, bumble markets itself as an app that makes dating better/safer/more empowering to women. in a move that entrepreneur called “totally on brand” (belanger, ), bumble blocked and wrote an open letter to a male user who harassed a female user after she asked him what he did for work as part of small talk. the man suggested that the woman was trying to figure out his salary and said that he didn’t have time “for entitled, gold-digging whores” (belanger, ). in its letter condemning this man, bumble said that “we are going to continue to build a world that makes small-minded, misogynist boys like you feel outdated.” in august , the app announced on its blog that it will work with the anti- defamation league to add technology to bumble that will “identify and categorize hate symbols.” any users who are found to have hate symbols in their profiles will be banned from the app. bumble explained how this move added another tool to its “female- friendly” toolbox and stemmed from a neo-nazi media article urging harassment of bumble’s offices “given bumble’s stance towards promoting women’s empowerment” (bumble hq, n.d.). thus, bumble presents specific features and takes specific actions that are both meant to empower women and to keep them safe, leading to the “feminist dating app” public discourses surrounding bumble. this chapter interrogates this “feminist dating” discourse through interviews and focus groups with users of bumble. bumble as a series of harm-prevention tools online dating provides unique affordances to users that were not present in dating before the internet – the primary one being the ability to be connected with large volumes of curated potential partners in the comfort of one’s own home. however, online dating also brings with it the potential of increased risks, for the same reason – bringing people into virtual (and later, face-to-face) contact with different, previously-unknown others. research shows that people on online dating balance presenting personal information to appeal to potential matches while at the same time applying rules to judge the credibility of others in an online context (heino, ellison & gibbs, ). as gibbs, ellison and lai ( , p. ) write: online dating participants face pressures to reveal personal information, both to conform with social norms and because of their own desire to form romantic relationships. yet they also must consider the risks of sharing such information with strangers absent confirmation that others are being honest in their disclosures, which could result in emotional or physical distress. gibbs, ellison and lai ) found that increased “protective information-seeking behavior” (p. ) – such as verifying information that others disclose online, using various social media platforms –occurs when online dating participants are worried about their personal safety, worries which often stem from online harassment. harassment on online dating is much more common for women, with % of women versus % of men reporting experiencing feelings of harassment on online dating apps (burgess, ). online harassment specifically in the form of sexual advances from strangers is a gendered phenomenon: women, particularly young women, experience online sexualized abuse much more frequently than men (duggan, ). one in five women aged to say they have been sexually harassed online, whereas only one in ten men encounter digital sexual harassment. in addition, % of young women have received unsolicited explicit images online (duggan, ). importantly, women are more affected emotionally by online harassment than men: % of women said they found their most recent harassment experience “extremely upsetting” or “very upsetting,” whereas only % of men described harassment encounters in such strong affective terms. online sexual harassment of women is not a new phenomenon. brail ( , p. ) writes about how in aol’s chat rooms in the early s “should you enter a chat room using a woman’s login name, you’re likely to find yourself the target of a wanna fuck ‘instant message’ from some man you’ve never even heard of.” of course, dating apps differ to the wider online context, in that there is some form of future sexual interaction expected; that is, most people on dating apps are looking for a romantic/sexual partner. online sexual harassment occurs when the line is crossed from consensual flirting to unsolicited sexual advances. toch and levi ( ) found that all interactions on location-based apps are tinged with uncertainty about the ability to trust users. accordingly, both genders use “uncertainty reduction mechanisms,” such as blocking, to stop online harassment (toch & levi, ). however, women on “people-nearby apps,” like dating apps, report lower levels of trust and higher levels of negativity when interacting with others on these apps; in addition, women are much more likely to experience violent harassment on these apps than men (toch and levi, ). eckert ( ) found that many female bloggers experience online harassment and they deal with this digital abuse in various ways, including moderating or blocking comments. she also found that experiencing online abuse has a chilling effect, in that bloggers start keeping a low profile or avoid certain topics. given these and other findings on online harassment that point to it being a gendered phenomenon (mantilla, ), particularly in sexual contexts, women must balance opportunity with risk on online dating. women in particular must balance the pull towards finding a match with the need to shield themselves from unwanted advances and uncomfortable situations that also come with “putting oneself out there.” to avoid negative interactions and feelings, women make carefully considered decisions at various steps of the online dating process. when making choices on online dating, women must balance being authentic, sharing personal information, and women i interviewed about their use of private facebook groups (see chapter ) often spoke about how they got random messages from strangers requesting sex on facebook messenger, highlighting how the practice of asking “wanna fuck” is prevalent on other social networking platforms and not just dating sites. connecting with multiple people, to attract the right matches, but they are also navigating a system where at any point the communication situation can take a darker turn. the various affordances that bumble provides to facilitate love matches are also used by women subversively to prevent or mitigate uncomfortable situations arising from their initial online (and later offline) interactions with men. thus, although the intended use of bumble is for men and women to connect (albeit giving women more control in certain parts of the process), women use the technology holistically in subversive ways, to constantly stay one step ahead of possible negative interactions – illustrating what shaw ( ) terms “negotiated use” when thinking about the affordances of a communication technology. choosing bumble: culture and audience on “feminist tinder” the first way that women used bumble as a system to prevent negative interactions was through the actual choice to use the app. all the women interviewed considered bumble as part of an ecology of dating apps, comparing various apps, their features, and their reputations. the choice to use a particular dating app or apps was made in relation to other dating platforms. bumble, then, is considered in the totality of the dating app ecology, similarly to how users of other social media decide what content to post on different platforms by considering all the platforms available and their unique affordances (zhao, lampe & ellison, ). most of the women said that they started using the app in part at least because of its reputation – including advertising and media discourses – as being women-friendly. for instance, margie explained that “it was definitely advertised that way, of like, the feminist app, you get to make the first move, no more creepy guys thing.” similarly, edie confirmed that “the fact that it was referred to as, like, feminist dating, i think probably did push me to try it.” zee said that she saw ads for bumble “popping up” on facebook and instagram, and after researching it a bit decided to try it because “it was a lot different than other things, where the girl obviously has to speak first.” women were often “pushed” towards bumble and its promises of being a more women-friendly dating app through their negative experiences with other dating platforms. most women spoke about how the “women talk first” affordance was what drew them, particularly because of the agency and control that bumble gave them in comparison to other apps. zee further explained: i think in other dating apps, whether it’s, like, tinder or eharmony or whatever else, i think the initial thought for women is that they’ll create their profiles and curate it to the point where they think that this what guys want to see and they’ll wait. for bumble, there’s no waiting… it’s like, we start to realize we don’t have time for waiting. or we don’t need to wait for a man to come find us. like, we’ll figure it out. however, several women noted that it was not the “women talk first” feature that was the most important to them, but the swiping function, as blake noted: “i think the “talk first” is important, but… i don’t think that’s the main point. i think the main point is that i’m not allowing conversation to happen until you’re both saying it’s okay.” comparisons were made with older sites, such as okcupid and match.com, that were in the format of web pages with very detailed profiles, where anyone with an account could talk to someone else, whether the other person was interested or not. aidan explained how bumble was “better than when i did match because i had more control over [the connection] … i initially liked the person.” women were particularly annoyed that on the legacy sites, men much older than them would routinely reach out. diana said of her match account: i hated it. it’s a lot of older men, people reach out to you. you know that nothing’s going to come of it, i was like, why are you wasting all of our times right now. we’re not even years into the same age. the age selection feature on bumble was deemed useful not only to find a suitable partner in one’s age range, but also to filter out “creepy older men” looking for sex. women moved to bumble, then, to avoid unwanted contact, alongside their desire to find a match. importantly, the swiping function is not exclusive to bumble, as tinder (and some other apps) follows the same model (except on these apps, either party can make the first move after both people have swiped right on each other). however, bumble was often chosen over tinder (or alongside tinder when a person used multiple apps) regardless, for attributes beyond the swiping function, detailed below. comparisons of bumble to tinder were particularly frequent in the interviews, perhaps because of their similar design and the media discourse of bumble being a “feminist tinder” (anwar, ; mei, ). the comparison to tinder, as an app that was used for harassment and aggression, was particularly common. vanessa moved to bumble from tinder because “a lot of guys on tinder were not polite. like, they would initiate sex, the second that they matched with me.” rachel similarly explained: i like this one, because the hour that i had tinder, i was, like, very turned off by it. i don’t know, i just felt like it was very aggressive, like the guys on there are very aggressive and almost had no shame, so i was like, oh my gosh, this is, it just didn’t feel like a good fit kind of thing. and i liked bumble, because the woman had to initiate, so i could kind of control the amount of aggression that was directed towards me. (emphasis added) sadie, too, stated that “i heard that women make the first move and i liked that because i used to get daily messages and comments on the other sites, like tinder, and sometimes they were kind of threatening and uncomfortable… bumble sounded safer.” edie recalled how she had started online dating on tinder but “it was just not a good experience overall.” she went on to say how she thought there would be “more people i would be interested in on bumble than on tinder and it didn’t have that stigma [about being a hook-up site].” indeed, the idea that bumble was different to tinder in its platform culture was repeated throughout the interviews. users felt that bumble provided a different “feel” or “flavor” – a high-level affordance in bucher and helmond’s ( ) typology or a specific “platform vernacular” (gibbs et al, ) – to other apps; bumble was known as a relationship rather than a hook-up app. tinder was “for trashier dating” – ellie said that she used bumble because it was “a little bit less sleazy” than tinder – while bumble was “really classy” and had a “reputation of being more about relationships.” these differences drove user behavior: diana stated that eventually she went back on tinder “because i wasn’t looking for a relationship.” women also imagined that bumble had different users compared to other apps, highlighting how each social media platform has a different “imagined audience” (litt, ). the imagined audience is “the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating” (litt, , p. ) and contributes to the feel or culture of the platform. for instance, in line with bumble’s reputation as a relationship app, many of the women referred to the men being “nicer,” “more polite,” or “better quality” on bumble – compared to the men on tinder who “oozed non-commitment.” men were also seen as having better careers on bumble, again contributing to the idea that bumble was better for those seeking stability and long-term relationships. research shows that men are typically on dating apps for more casual encounters than women, particularly when age is considered (that is, older women seek more long-term relationships) (tyson et al, ). so, finding an app that seemed more relationship-friendly was a big draw to women. even though women spoke of how bumble was different to other apps and was their “preferred” app, most of them conceded that they in fact used multiple apps, “to cover all my bases” (margie). this corroborates previous findings that most online dating users are on multiple apps to maximize their chances of finding a partner (burgess, ). my interviewees also pointed out that, despite the apps being considered different, they saw the same men across different apps – there was “overlap.” edie summed up, after conceding that she had seen the same profiles on several apps: “clearly, realistically, when you get down to it, they're probably the same, but [bumble] has this aura of respectability that tinder still doesn't.” in addition, women were emphatic about different “core” qualities of men on bumble – but they disagreed on what these core qualities were. for instance, aidan felt that bumble was for “younger crowds” but vanessa insisted that the men on bumble were “a little bit older too… and they look like they’ve got it together.” these contradictions highlight how high-level affordances relating to the feel and culture of a platform, as well as the audience on different platforms, are largely imagined, rather than being based on objective differences – illustrating the role of imaginations in social media affordances (nagy & neff, ). importantly, the “encouraging relationships” culture of bumble was not only used to draw in those seeking relationships. many chose bumble strategically to prevent negative experiences in online dating in general, because women thought that men looking for relationships would be less likely to harass, be sexually explicit without consent, or create uncomfortable situations. signing-up: authentication and information management through facebook when setting up a profile on bumble, women deliberately considered what information they were providing, trying to carefully balance self-disclosure to present as attractive and genuine, while limiting personal information. for instance, bumble automatically uses information from facebook to auto-populate a new user’s profile, including information such as college, job title, age, and photographs . bumble states that it uses facebook data to verify that its users are real people and not bots; so, the expectation on bumble is that users will a) have a real facebook profile and b) will not change the information provided from facebook, to maintain this verification system. indeed, users of online dating find the connection to facebook lends others on the app a sense of authenticity and promotes a culture of trust (duguay, ). bumble encourages users to use facebook information by auto-populating their profiles, which is “helpful” because users do not have to “start from scratch” (aidan). however, there was much “negotiated use” (shaw, ) of this feature, through women manually changing this information in their profile according to privacy concerns. for instance, aidan’s profile automatically populated with her specific job title and the name as mentioned earlier, in late , bumble added the ability for users to sign up using just a phone number, citing privacy concerns around facebook’s data collection policies. of her company; she said, “it got me a little worried, because ‘oh crap, they know where i work! i was, like, ‘nope, i’m going to change that.’” edie, who re-downloaded bumble during our interview, walked me through the process as she decided to change her information that had been pulled from facebook: “it's put up random photos up from facebook, that's fine. i’m just going to take down my specific job, because why do you need to tell people where i work…” so, there was distinction made between what information was fine to leave up (photos, for the most part) and what was a privacy or safety violation. sharing where one worked was seen as particularly unsafe by multiple interviewees, because this information was linked to the physical location of the user. users only divulged details about where they worked after developing a trusting relationship over time, which included meeting face to face. as lily explained: i’m still quite reserved about things that i tell people when i’m chatting to them, like i’ll tell them what my role is and a brief summary of what that actually means, but i won’t tell them where i work. when prompted why, she answered: “because i don’t want them to come and find me if i decide that i don’t like them.” this fear, that men could try find them in real life when they did not want to be found, and linking this to personal safety concerns, was prevalent throughout the interviews. some of the women who were concerned with online privacy more broadly said that they kept “pretty clean” profiles so that they didn’t have much personal information on facebook anyway – because they were aware that facebook collects data. however, there was a distinction made between privacy in terms of the platform itself and privacy in terms of the users who have access to your data, echoing cirucci’s ( ) distinction between “little p privacy” (related to other individuals) and “big p privacy” (related to platforms themselves and broader culture). lily, when pressed on why she limits sharing on bumble, explained: [you can be] stalked, harassed, catfished – you’re quite vulnerable. without realizing… all our information is collected online, but that’s by some anonymous corporation or government that you can’t do anything about, but when it’s an individual you’ve to be quite careful about that. i don’t know what their capabilities area and i don’t know what they would actually use that information for. there was a perceived difference of control regarding privacy. most women were resigned to the fact that facebook and other social media platforms collect data. vanessa explained further: “i was hesitating at first, because i don’t want all the people to see my information. i’m quite a private person. but honestly, this is the digital era. everyone can know about everyone in a matter of minutes. just… google. so, i don’t mind anymore.” as reluctantly accepting these women were of facebook collecting data, they felt that they could (and should) control information given out to potential dates much more closely. bumble explains that using facebook for signing up is supposed to ensure that the person in the profile is “real.” indeed, facebook was used to verify the “realness” of matches; trudy stated, “there is still some feeling of risk with, like, meeting strangers and facebook does just give you the feeling of ‘this is a real person,’ i could theoretically find them and they probably have like friends or whatever.” however, a few the women mentioned that linking through facebook was not actually foolproof, because fake facebook profiles can be used. sadie explained: “i don’t think it makes me feel safer necessarily, because i feel like people can put whatever they want online.” margie said that people “end up on dates all the time with someone… who doesn’t look like their picture or isn’t who they said they were. it’s catfishing, like, .” also, many women have two separate facebook profiles, one which is more curated and has limited data (a “faker” version) and the other which is a more authentic version of themselves. indeed, rachel had two facebook accounts, one for her work (she worked in social media) and another personal account. she linked bumble to her work account and she said she felt as if she was “cheating the system” because the “likes on that page are so fake” and it’s presenting an “idealized version of my professional self” which was not authentic. but, this “faker” profile had the significant benefit of limiting information about her and consequently limiting the risks presented by strangers accessing that information bumble allows users to link other social media to their dating profile, such as instagram and spotify. users can also put social media handles, such as twitter or snapchat handles, in their blurbs. the women i spoke with restricted their linking of other apps, to limit the amount of personal information about themselves that they shared. aidan for instance said that she found it “weird” when men had snapchat on their profiles because “it’s a little too personal.” she went on to say that she ignored a lot of requests by dates to be connected on snapchat, because “i don’t want them to be involved in my snaps and see what i’m doing.” for aidan, snapchat was only for her “closer friends” to “make them feel more connected” to her. this ranking of various communication technologies, from public to private, was illustrated by how a couple’s communication moved through various technologies as the relationship developed. for instance, women felt more comfortable giving men their numbers only after they had exchanged a few messages on bumble itself. some even reserved number exchanges for after the first date. adding potential partners to other social media platforms, such as formally adding someone as a “friend” on facebook, was seen as appropriate only much later on in the relationship. these findings corroborate toch and levi’s ( ) findings that people switch to other communication platforms when there is a “step forward in an uncertainty reduction process” that signals trust, a process that develops over time. therefore, by strategically curating and limiting the amount of information that they put in their profiles, my participants were trying to present enough to ensure some good matches, but at the same time, trying to maintain their privacy, in case things went wrong. conversely, women wanted men to put as much information into their profiles as possible, so that they could effectively use that information to further vet their matches, as is discussed below. swipe left, swipe right, verify: weeding out harassers on bumble men are three times more likely to swipe right (“like”) than women are on online apps (bilton, ; tyson et al ) – so women are far more selective in who they choose to connect with. indeed, the women i spoke with mentioned how all their male friends are “very liberal with their swipes” and “basically swipe right on every profile.” this leads to many matches for women, even if they selectively swipe (almost all swipe rights for women are “a match”). tyson et al ( , p. ), exploring how men and women use tinder differently, argue that because women are highly selective and men far less discerning, a “feedback loop” is created “whereby men are driven to be less selective in the hope of attaining a match, whilst women are increasingly driven to be more selective, safe in the knowledge that any profiles they like will probably result in a match.” my findings show, however, that women are not only selective because they are sure of their prospects, but also because they have to incessantly monitor dating interactions to maintain their comfort and safety – and being selective in swiping is a way of avoiding men who could potentially be harmful. women using bumble had a plethora rules for how to avoid men that would harass or be “fuckboys” (men who are disrespectful and sexually aggressive), rules that they would apply when screening pictures and text on profiles. blake stated that she could weed out “ % of harassers” through careful screening: i feel as though it’s very limited where there are harassing messages from people if you’re good about reading their profiles and looking at their pictures and understanding who they are from their profile [and not matching with them]. certain types of pictures or words were thought to be an indication of a man’s personality and his proclivity towards harassment or unwanted sexual advances. vanessa explained how she “learned how to avoid the guys who would harass you” on online dating through looking out for the following: if the pictures show his body a lot, they’re more likely to be ‘fuckboys.’ they’re more good-looking, they appear to be more successful, but [if there is a lot of body] they’re also fuckboys. and in the profile, if there is very little information about them. little to none. women were particularly careful to not swipe on men who had nothing written in their profile, because it showed that these types of men “don’t really care,” are “lazy” or “boring,” and “might be there just to hook up.” pictures were also used as a vetting tool – most women swiped left on men who only had pictures with sunglasses on, mirror selfies, guns in their pictures, gym pictures, or obscured or blurry pictures. one woman even came across a man who had a swastika tattoo on his face (she swiped left)! women felt that these pictures were indicators of possible future problems – for instance, sunglasses were deemed to be not trustworthy because you “could not see the person’s eyes.” thus, both pictures and text were used to decide whether a man had potential to be a good match (a pull function), but also whether the interaction could turn sour (actively aggressive or sexually uncomfortable – not simply “not compatible”). beyond having swiping “rules” for pictures and text in the profiles to weed out the wrong types of men, women also paid attention to bumble’s verification feature to make sure they were not being catfished. the verification feature is a blue check mark on the profile of a person; to be verified, a user takes a selfie in a particular pose randomly ordered by bumble and is then authenticated by bumble staff to be the person they said they were in their profile. the catfishing/verification feature was seen as “an added bonus,” an “honesty and transparency thing” in terms of the person looking like their pictures. however, women often mentioned that the verification tool did not in reality mean that much for safety, because as carrie said, “i don’t think someone looking like and being who they say they are makes them any safer… it’s like, ‘this is who i am, but i’m still gonna kill you.’” so, the verification feature was used more as a compatibility/attractiveness confirmation rather than a safety feature. as mentioned earlier, even though women put out limited information about themselves in their profiles, they preferred men to have more information that they could then verify outside of bumble. women used the information that men disclosed to “stalk” them on other social media, in line with previous findings about online dating and protective information-seeking behavior (gibbs, ellison, & lai, ). so, women scrolled through their matches’ linked instagram accounts and googled their names, alongside colleges and professions, to find out more information. as edie summed up “i do always try to find out about them, just because, i don’t know, it does feel safer.” when this additional information-seeking occurred in the online dating process varied. some women did additional checking after matching with someone, but before actually writing to them; others checked only after agreeing to meet on a date. one woman, diana, in fact did a whole round of vetting research before even swiping: so, like [i go on] facebook if they have an open profile, or linkedin, to find out what they do for a job if it’s not on there. just google and just try and find out. and i’ve found out like really interesting stuff before, really good reasons not to swipe, that you would want to know before. she said she did this also to find out “stuff that’s going to be a real deal breaker.” she took this “risk averse approach” because she wanted to “avoid having to deal with that further down the line and it causing me chaos in my life of any kind, then i’d rather do that up front.” thus, women were not only driven by an attraction approach to dating, trying to sift through profiles for love and the “perfect” matches, they were actively at the same time trying to avoid bad situations, whether it be sexually aggressive situations or simply matching with someone who might cause “chaos” in the future. “changing the dynamic”: women talking first on bumble the “women-first” design is the main feature that differentiates bumble from other dating apps and is the feature that makes bumble ostensibly “feminist.” bumble states in their faqs that the “women talking first” feature is supposed to stop initial harassing/spamming messages that women get on other apps. when there is no swiping function – i.e., on sites like match.com, where anyone can message anyone without first matching –women get a large volume of messages, sometimes between to messages per hour (holmes, ). however, even on tinder, where both parties must agree to match before conversation starts, women are inundated with messages due to their high volume of matches. this feature is also meant to “to counter the age-old and often outdated ‘guys always have to make the first move’ idea!” (bumble faqs, ). thus, bumble is supposed to be feminist both because it stops harassment and flips gendered norms – and these two ideals are seen as related. as wolfe herd has said in interviews, women talking first subverts gender expectations and supposedly “guides the conversation in a different way,” which then in turn limits harassment. indeed, one of my interviewees, trudy, agreed that the women talking first feature “definitely does change the dynamic” in terms of dating interactions going forward. women had to get used to making the first move, but ultimately this feature was seen as empowering. trudy, who never messaged men first on tinder, realized that “once you accept that you just have to message first” it can be “liberating… it’s easy to just shoot out five messages, and be like, ‘i’m kinda witty, i’m clever here,’ and let’s just see if anyone bites.” a number of women stated that it helped them gain confidence in approaching men. vanessa described her experiences after being on bumble for a few months: “at least for me, it gave me the confidence of talking to a guy first. it doesn’t make me think ‘oh i have to play hard to get’ anymore, if i’m interested in somebody i can just go talk to him.” in this sense, the app flipped cultural gender norms of women having to be wooed and men being the pursuers. further, the app was not only seen as beneficial for increasing confidence in dating relationships, but also for increasing confidence in life in general. zee confirmed that “i feel like i have a change in my confidence because of it.” thus, bumble was seen as empowering to women, fulfilling its feminist goal, at least in terms of individual gains. a frequent theme in the interviews was how the “talking first” feature gave welcome additional control to women in the dating process. the fact that the man could not write first was seen as beneficial; this gave the woman the chance to examine the man’s profile in more detail or think about the potential match for a bit and choose to not contact him at all. kathryn explained: i liked the fact that it’s my kind of choice if i want to reach out to someone, even after the initial swipe right. so, the first swipe [is] if i find someone attractive, and then you wait to see if it’s a match, but then even if it is a match, i get, like, a second chance, to decide if i want to reach out. women chose to use bumble specifically because of this additional perceived control in the relationship. as kathryn summed up, “i like the fact that it’s…my choice and it’s my choice a couple different times...it gives me an extra step of control over the men that i would be interacting with.” edie, too, said that she liked the “extra layer of control.” this extra layer of control, or “extra filter” (sadie), was often discussed in the sense of producing a “safer” experience for women. the “talking first” feature was especially useful in providing an additional barrier to the harassment that women routinely experience on online dating. the women interviewed had all experienced various degrees of harassment on other dating apps, ranging from repeated requests for meeting up to sexual innuendo to verbal abuse to rude emoji to “dick pics” (pictures of male genitalia). the fact that this was a very common occurrence, basically an accepted “side-effect” of dating for women, was widely acknowledged by my participants. for instance, margie got a slew of messages that she perceived as harassing and detailed them as such: “just things like, ‘girl, what does that mouth do?’ things like that. dick pics, comments, the typical things that women deal with on tinder and social media” (emphasis added). my interviewees thought that bumble lowered the percentage of initial harassing messages that they received. edie said that she appreciated bumble’s “attempt to level the field by having women contact first, i think it cuts down on receiving abusive messages... aggressive messages.” rachel explained how the “women talk first” function limits initial harassing messages. she had gotten “dick pics” a number of times on online dating. when prompted to think about which dating app she received these through, she said, “i think it was tinder, just because it was unsolicited. so, it was just… there was no stopping anybody that wanted to do that. and then with bumble, i guess, i’m kind of a line of defense for myself.” this idea, that women talking first provided an additional, almost physical, “line of defense” or “barrier” to harassment, was echoed throughout the interviews. my interviewees also felt that by starting the conversation off “right” led to less harassment on the app. kathryn explained that when women have to start a conversation, the conversations are “more mellow.” she went on to say: it’s much rarer to get something like “you wanna come spend the weekend in my bed.” that’s much rarer in my conversations on bumble than it ever was on tinder. getting something that’s out of the box like that or a little startling, happens much, much, much less frequently. so, the nature of the conversations are a little more holistic, if you will. first messages, even if not sexual or inappropriate in nature to begin with, were seen as gateways to harassment; when women did not answer this first message, a man could perceive this as unfair rejection. brail ( , p. ) notes that “most forms of online harassment are mere annoyances… [but] the problem is when the date requests (or “wanna fucks”) continue after you’ve said no twice, or when you’re sent repeated email messages calling you a ‘bitch’...” thus, particularly stressful harassing situations are those when men refuse to take no (or silence) for an answer. aidan recalled an instance when she didn’t respond to a man’s first message “and he kept sending messages, like, ‘you're being so shallow, i'm a really great guy, i can't believe girls’... blah blah blah...” carrie, too, had a similar experience, when a man messaged her “the middle finger emoji several times because i hadn’t answered.” wolfe herd (yashari, ) spoke about this dynamic as part of her decision to make women talk first: “on bumble, by having the lady make the first move, [the man] doesn’t feel rejection or aggression – he feels flattered. that one little shift, that one little change, makes all the difference.” kathryn explained how the talking first worked to minimize harassment from men related to rejection as a “two-step verification” of interest: “so the first step is you both swipe and the second step would be me messaging, which means that i’m interested in potentially meeting you.” by showing men interest twice, “they are maybe a little less intense, because they know that obviously you swiped and now you’re saying something.” zee similarly noted that “usually” men are expected to make the first move, so they feel “the pressure of what to say;” but if the woman has to talk first “he’s like, okay, the first round is fine. all i have to do is respond. because obviously she’s slightly interested.” zee said that “the tone” of the ensuing conversation changed compared to conversations started by men. thus, bumble’s talking first feature was seen to work in part because it placated men and made them feel more secure in the interaction. the notion that women have to talk first indeed saved men from feeling rejected (and possibly getting aggressive). however, aside from problematically placing men’s feelings front and center of this “feminist” app, this feature transferred the burden of rejection onto women, who were also affected when men they reached out to didn’t respond. rachel explained how the idea behind the “women talk first” feature was good in theory, but not in practice: “i liked the idea of being empowered, but it turns out the guy still totally has all the power, because they can still choose to ignore you, so…” women, however, were much less likely to keep trying to talk to a man if he didn’t respond. in fact, the only woman who said she would send a second message after not getting a reply to the first one was aidan: she would check in a few days later with the man to make sure he was not interested and then, if he didn’t respond, would simply unmatch. harassment on bumble though initial harassing messages on bumble are eliminated by the app, harassment not surprisingly still exists in the form of replies to the women; as kathryn noted “a guy who is going to be that aggressive is going to do it anyways [whether on the first message or not].” my interviewees explained that their first messages they sent were designed to attract interest, but also to judge values and serve as another way to expose potentially harmful or creepy men. for instance, kathryn used a topical line that she sent out to all her matches on any given day. on columbus day, she sent the first message: “columbus – hero or villain?” one man responded that columbus was a hero because he founded america and kathryn responded (politely) with a possible alternative way of viewing the actions of columbus. the man responded with a wall of text ranting at her stupidity and calling her a “libtard” pushing her agenda on him. she went on to block and report him. this nasty “turn” in the conversation made kathryn feel “very uncomfortable.” on a note of reflexivity, when i was using the app for dating, i sent a man, who had spoken about frequent travel in his profile, the first message “what’s the last country you visited?”, to which he responded, “if you weren’t into cats [listed as a like on my profile] i’d totally sleep with you haha.” even though not technically harassing or abusive, the unprompted “turn” to a sexual conversation on the first encounter left me with a sour taste in my mouth and i promptly unmatched him. this “turn,” the sinking heart feeling, where you feel vaguely uncomfortable and “icky” about something that’s been said, sometimes without being able to pinpoint why exactly, seems a common experience for women. messages like this, although not directly threatening, can make women feel uncomfortable and make the dating experience as a whole unpleasant – we are constantly on guard for that “turn.” harassing messages were almost always sexual and/or sexist in nature, and not surprisingly, women of color received both racist and sexist messages. for instance, vanessa, who is vietnamese, had an incident on bumble where a man responded to her initial message asking about his travels with “you’re hot for an asian girl.” she unmatched him because “what does that mean, that asian people are ugly?” she also repeatedly received responding messages “saying hi to me in some weird languages. i’m not chinese! why do you assume i’m from this country?” vanessa’s experiences highlight how race and gender intersect to produce unique, intersecting experiences of oppression (crenshaw, ) for women of color on online dating. blocking and reporting to sever a connection between two matches, bumble provides the option of unmatching or of blocking/reporting. all three of these options are presented in the same drop-down menu on the platform; however, blocking and reporting is listed first, encouraging women to consider blocking and reporting before unmatching. unmatching simply gets rid of the match, whereas blocking and reporting can potentially get the user banned from accessing bumble as a whole (the decision to ban someone is up to the bumble team based on the report they get). bumble takes harassment seriously and has a “team of hundreds of live representatives” monitoring reports of abuse (holmes, ). my interviewees used the unmatching function predominantly to “clear” their matches of the connections where conversations had fizzled out or that were boring. interestingly, however, going against what the platform “encouraged,” most of the women i interviewed chose to also unmatch, rather than block or report, those who sent harassing or sexually explicit messages. for instance, despite getting multiple unsolicited dick pics from various men, rachel explained: “i’ve never been harassed to the point where i’ve been like ‘i need to block.’ usually i unmatch you and you get the message.” similarly, zee viewed repeated requests for “coming over to cuddle” as “pretty harmless” so she chose to unmatch. thus, many women see harassment as “par-for-the-course” on online dating and many women who get harassed do not see their harassment as serious enough to warrant blocking or reporting. choosing to not block or report could also be interestingly, this feeling of harassment not being serious enough was echoed in the #metoo discourse i analyzed, when women deliberated writing #metoo because they thought their experiences didn’t “count,” compared to horrific rapes detailed by others. also, women often used private facebook groups for professionals to deliberate with others whether an uncomfortable experience was “valid” or whether they due to the longer process involved in those two options compared with unmatching. both blocking and reporting require typing in an explanation why you were doing this action rather than simply making the problem “disappear” with no further elaboration, as unmatching does. this illustrates what previous research has found (e.g., cirucci, ) – that certain design features (for instance, requiring additional typing) discourage certain user behaviors. so, the placing of the “block and report” menu option first encouraged this action in some ways, but the additional labor of having to write out an explanation discouraged it. however, some of my interviewees discussed how the recent #metoo movement combined with the political climate in the u.s. under the trump administration empowered them to actually block and report, rather than simply unmatch, men who made them uncomfortable. margie explained: in this political climate, i’m so angry and bitter all the time and i feel everything is so much to the forefront. i think everything about it is pretty terrible, but the one thing i feel like it’s made me more comfortable in is voicing my anger and discomfort. so, i would say that a couple of years ago, stuff like that [dick pics] i would find disgusting, but also just be like, ‘whatever, i don’t want to deal with it.’ whereas now, i’m so riled up all the time, it’s much easier for me to be like, ‘nope, let’s make a thing about this.’ because you’re just going to do it to someone else… so, i feel like now i would be much more likely to [block and report]. thus, the cultural climate filters down into women’s private lives, prompting them to make changes in their personal interaction and impacting the normative use of various features of dating platforms. importantly, here women were often thinking of the collective benefit, how reporting someone would prevent other women from experiencing were overreacting. these findings point to how the patriarchal system of rape culture works at various levels in invalidating women’s experiences. their bad behavior, highlighting how individual actions link to broader collective feminist goals. blake recounted a particularly disturbing story of when she blocked and reported someone on bumble who was very aggressive about meeting up. at first, she found it flattering and told him that unfortunately she had plans to go to the theater with her friends; he responded by saying he was going to come to the theater and meet her there: i’m like, ‘no i’m with my girlfriends’ and he was like ‘they’ll understand when they see me roll up in this car’ and i was like ‘oh my god, no. please.’ it was very aggressively, like, ‘i’m going to stalk you down.’ blake said that she blocked and reported the man because “he was stalking me down at my known location.” the fact that he knew where she would be was particularly frightening for blake, mirroring a general pattern in bumble dating: women are more worried about the “real life” interactions that occur as a part of the online dating process than they are about online conversations. indeed, edie said that she wished she could have reported dates “in real life” because “that was when most of the odd behavior came out, after meeting them.” women who worry about dangerous interactions through online dating, such as being “raped and murdered,” are not in fact being hysterical. the rise in online dating has been linked to a six-fold increase in reports of rape (national crime agency, ). the majority of these assaults happened on the first “real life” date following meeting online. the national crime agency ( , p. ) states that online dating is creating these threatening situations, because the offenders are “less likely to have criminal convictions, but instead exploit the ease of access and arm-chair approach to dating websites.” another factor that is presumed to lead to increased sexual assault in online dating is that victims do not see the stranger as a stranger, because they have met through an online dating context which encourages a faster route to personal sharing and the concordant increase in trust and intimacy. indeed, once a man has been thoroughly vetted and a pleasant conversation has flowed for a few days, women might consider moving on to a more personal technology, such as giving the man her number or adding him to her instagram account, signaling an increase in trust (toch & levi, ). eckert ( , p. ) argues that offline and online worlds are “enmeshed” and that “understanding online abuse requires including incidents that occur offline due to someone’s… presence online.” although my participants varied with when they felt comfortable moving to a new technology (some would not share their phone number before they met someone – because “that’s, in particular, when you get aggressive”), the biggest concern was not the leap from technology to technology, but from online to in person. the women i interviewed went to great lengths to try to protect themselves when meeting with online dates in real life, illustrating the porous borders between offline and online in the context of sexism and misogyny (mantilla, ; manne, ; vickery & everbach, ). a number of the women insisted on only meeting for coffee and not having alcohol, because “that could potentially put me in a worse situation” (aidan). zee explained her specific strategies for feeling safe when an online date moved to a face-to- face scenario: i think that’s more so obviously when you meet somebody, you have to pick a public place. i actually always bring my pepper spray. you just never know how they’ll be. i tell people, i tell my friends, my sister, i’ll drop a pin on my location for where i am, and be like “hey, this is where i’m gonna be, i’m meeting this guy, this is what he looks like,” and i let them know i have my pepper spray. but you just hope for the best. i actually get there… usually on dates i’d get there a little earlier, more so just for my benefit of getting there on time and not having to look for the person, but i also just check out the vibe of the place, if it’s easily escapable. women used various technological affordances of their mobile phones to manage their fears about meeting up in real life. like zee, a number of interviewees dropped “pins” (used geo-mapping features on their phones) at the location of their date and shared this with their friends, so that their friends could remotely track their whereabouts during a date. interviewees also often mentioned that they would screenshot (take a picture of their phone’s screen) a man’s profile and send it, with personal information about him (such as his last name), to a few friends before going on a date, so that friends would know “what he looks like in case i’m raped and killed.” even though these are serious concerns and not unfounded – given the high rate of sexual assaults in dating situations – the women couched their worries about safety in humor, minimizing them by laughing or referring to themselves as “crazy” or “over the top.” however, the frequency of safety worries coming up in our conversations illustrates how these fears are something that many women go through, but which are normalized as being overblown or extreme to the degree where women say they feel silly for even bringing them up. ultimately, bumble – or any online dating platform – only gives women control for a very limited period in the relationship; it provides affordances that are “barriers” to harassment online, but, unfortunately, it cannot help with the most violent harassment that happens offline. even though women spoke about the affordances of bumble in general in a positive light, particularly the affordance of making available lots of potential matches in a convenient way – as carrie said “you can sit in your room and meet people in a way that you never could have before” – women were also aware that these same affordances could be materialized in “oppositional” ways. in fact, some women pointed out that bumble and other dating apps, through their very existence, “provided a whole new medium [for] harassment” that had not existed before, by connecting together large volumes of strangers. this highlights how digital media technologies are simultaneously tools for “popular feminism” and “popular misogyny” (banet-weiser, ). troubling bumble as a “feminist app”: “it’s not necessarily not feminist, it’s just not particularly feminist either” when asked to define feminism, kathryn stated that it “is really empowering women, all women all of the time, to actually take control over things.” in this sense then, bumble can be seen as providing a feminist platform for women in their dating lives. however, a number of my interviewees noted that bumble, upon closer examination, is not as feminist as it purports to be. some spoke about the app as being protective of women; lily said that she liked that “bumble seemed to be looking out for women more.” however, a couple others (the minority of my sample) pointed to bumble putting women first as in fact stripping women of their agency. diana said that she thought bumble automatically put women in a position of being “weak and needing to be protected” by adding special features to stop harassment and not acknowledging that women already have control of their lives. she argued that “you’re somehow giving up your own agency, letting the app take care of it for you.” trudy similarly said, “i don't need to be saved from assholes…i can curate my own sex life, bumble, thank you very at the end of the interviews, i asked the women directly: “so, in your opinion, is bumble a feminist app?” this section deals with these answers. much.” diana also bristled at bumble’s denial of her agency, saying she “never felt unsafe on tinder” because if someone is “trying to solicit sex or whatever, i have agency to just say no.” she said that women should personally take a stronger stance against harassment and she pointed out that other apps already provide women with the tools to limit harassment: i feel like it’s good for a woman to feel like it’s okay… it’s not okay, but, like, you don’t have to be afraid of a man saying those explicit things to you because you can just tell them no. and then you can block them or whatever. this shows how the postfeminist logic of individual choice and agency can guide user behavior online. aside from aiming to stop harassment, bumble aims to flip gender norms; wolfe herd states that by creating bumble she was trying to rewrite the “unwritten set of rules around how a woman could interact with a man” (yashari, ). in a sense, bumble is inverting gendered norms of women having to wait to be pursued and men being the pursuers. however, some of my interviewees pointed out how bumble really “reinforces gender stereotypes” despite purporting to flip norms, particularly because of its reputation as “the relationship app.” trudy explained: it's just a very heteronormative idea of dating that, like, all the men on [tinder] are going to be predators and women are not interested in hook- ups and they just want to get to the marriage part of it. a number of the women pointed out that bumble cannot be a feminist app because gender roles on it are not “completely reversed.” others pointed out that even though “women have the power to message first,” there are still plenty non-feminist users on the app. rachel explained that “to be truly a feminist app is an impossible thing to achieve” particularly because of pandering to the user base. she highlighted how apps are beholden to their users, in that they want as many users as possible, so an app is not going to ban non-feminist users. (here, women equated non-feminists with trump supporters frequently – and talked about the “trump filter” that men used on their profile pictures on bumble, paradoxically signaling women to avoid them.) sadie similarly pointed out that there might be people on bumble who are “are just as sleazy as people on tinder.” equality was mentioned as a core tenet of feminism by almost all of the women interviewed, and they tested this definition against what they knew about bumble. margie thought that bumble was “parading as a feminist app” and could not be really feminist, because women and men were not on an equal playing field using the interface (because women had to talk first). many noted how the onus on the woman to talk first makes the dating process actually harder for women and “guys have learned that it’s just easier for them,” because they do not have to do any work. in some ways, several the women noted, tinder could be considered more feminist, because it put men and women on an equal footing, rather than forcing women to make the first move. a few of the women saw bumble’s feminist stance as a marketing gimmick; ellie said that “it’s a bit of a bullshit thing… it wants to hang its hat on that, as a ‘big wow.’” but she didn’t see a “meaningful difference” between tinder and bumble in terms of stopping harassment. margie called it “manufactured feminism… corporatized feminism” because “using the thought and concept of feminism to, like, get your dating app to be popular” and to make money, so it is not “organic, true feminism.” some women took even more umbrage with bumble labelling itself as feminist. edie explained that the feminist label in the context of a dating app could be considered as detrimental to women because there was a societal assumption that “feminists… are just really into casual sex” – so men use bumble to “get a certain type of woman” and “never contact her again.” finally, blake pointed out that bumble is not feminist because she wouldn’t “consider anything to do with dating a feminist expression” because that supports heteronormative ideals of monogamy and partnership. she explained: “it’s leading into a society where you need a partner in order to be accepted, to be considered an adult, to be considered successful” and those ideals, she suggested, are at the core, “anti-feminist.” though few of my participants actively used either bumble bizz or bumble bff, many agreed that the new platforms are where bumble’s feminist potential lies. as margie noted: it’s, like, to meet girls that you have stuff in common with and you think look cool. that excites me more than this dating thing. and like moving my career along, that’s awesome. i haven’t had time to even consider using either of those, but that definitely feels more feminist to me. zee similarly said that she would recommend bumble to other women because of the additional features: “a lot of my friends recommended to me, because they met their boyfriends through it. but they also met their best friends through it, through bff.” thus, overall these women had ambivalent feelings toward bumble and women’s empowerment, saying it is “not necessarily not feminist, it’s just not particularly feminist either” (rachel). gendered labor on bumble: “you have to put in the work” online dating overall is a labor-intensive process; as rachel explained “i guess it’s like anything, you have to put in the work and the effort if you want to get anything out of it.” tailoring one’s profile to be enticing took up a lot of time and effort, as diana told me, “you have to have your peacock feathers out on the dating apps, like, i need to show off, i need to attract a mate… i need to do all this work to attract a mate” (emphasis added). bumble users spend an average of minutes on the app daily (yashari, ), but these statistics broken down by gender are not released by the company. however, given the additional vetting that women feel compelled to do as they move through the app, it is highly likely that women do more labor on online dating – and because the “harm prevention” mindset is so rationalized and normalized, this additional labor is largely invisible. on signing up, women set up their profile in a way that limits information, changing the auto-populated profile from facebook, such as taking down their jobs; this consideration – of how much to disclose to balance being attractive and being safe – takes energy. vetting all men by carefully looking through all their pictures and reading their profile before swiping also takes additional time and effort. the act of swiping then created decision fatigue; diana pointed out: you’re swiping through like a hundred people on like a given day and you match with however many of those and then you have to make decisions about every one of those people and like how many times in your life can you say you’re making decisions about thirty people in one day? “stalking” matches on google and other social media to find out more information about them was also hugely labor-intensive. women matched with a large volume of men, despite being selective, in line with previous findings (holmes, ); having a lot of matches was seen as a chore. vanessa said how she had “so many” matches that she had to stop online dating because “i don’t have the time to do this.” zee similarly said of her decision to stop bumble, “it’s a little too much, to continue to swipe and balance all of that.” a number of women particularly noted how the feature to talk first, touted as the most feminist feature of bumble, was “added pressure” because they “don’t know what to say.” instead of feeling empowered and in control, some women were annoyed that now they had to take time to come up with pithy conversation starters while men could just sit back and let women do all the work: “guys like bumble because they don’t have to put in, they don’t feel like they have to put in more work. all the guys i know like bumble because it’s easy. they just have to match, and the girls have to make the first move” (margie). thus, bumble took the pressure off men, but put it on to women, along with the labor that goes into deciding what to write to start the conversation. gender norms played out here, with participants feeling that women need to say more than just “hey” (which was the perception of how male users coped with having to initiate messages on other apps). so, women felt compelled to take a lot of time to “craft my first line so that it’s really grabbing and enticing.” to be “less boring than hey,” women would often mention something in the man’s profile or picture and ask a question to get the conversation started. despite not explicitly referring to this as “work,” women shared various strategies to help them minimize the labor of initiating these conversations. aidan, for instance, explained: i just copied. i'll write it out, i'll copy it. i'll make sure i have the right name in there and just kind of... so i think that day i matched with four or three different guys, so it's basically just the same line, only because it's just easier that way. lily did a similar “bulk approach” of copying and pasting to all matches. kathryn did “the opening line of the week” which she brainstormed with friends weekly, a line relevant to current events to start the conversation. for example, the week of the solar eclipse, they used “damn boy, are you a solar eclipse, because i’m trying to get your number before you disappear” (referring to the -hour period before a match disappeared on bumble). sadie used wave or smile emojis, “just to kinda bookmark them” before time ran out, as a “kind of, like, saying, ‘hi, i’m interested’” and hoping that the man would then write back something to start the conversation. a few women also used gifs, as an interesting “shortcut” first message. in terms of blocking and reporting, the app “isn't reading through every one of your conversations, so it's really up to you to step it up and tap on that ‘report’ button when you see something uncool” (jalili, ). therefore, bumble provides the tools, but women still have to do the actual work of managing their harassers. this is a similar to how women are told to be careful to not get raped in wider culture instead of men being told not to rape – the onus to end the uncomfortable situation is still on the victim. however, toch and levi ( , p. ) argue that “users assume that other users are aware of these features [blocking and reporting] and take the cooling effect of these features on the whole community.” it is difficult to ascertain how much harassment is prevented on bumble by simply having the mechanism of blocking and reporting – and the company taking these reports seriously – as part of the app. feeling overwhelmed by matches often led to decision fatigue, which led to women stopping using the app and even stopping online dating altogether, to have “just a little bit of a break.” women reported feeling burnt out from the work of dating. diana said that she would “overload” herself and “get exhausted.” aidan conceded that bumble “wasn’t as bad as other dating apps, but it did get to be a psychological drain a little bit.” edie stopped bumble completely because “the stress that online dating was kinda making for me wasn't worth the process.” however, despite all this additional work, women were resigned to using online dating – edie wondered, “then again, where am i going to meet someone?” – but they wished they did not have to use it to find someone to love. as margie put it “i miss the days, i wasn’t even alive when this was, but like you met someone at a bar and that’s how connections were built.” conclusion the interviews and focus groups that i conducted with women about bumble show that in some ways, through the affordances that it makes available to its female users, bumble can ostensibly be considered a “feminist” dating app. women are drawn to bumble because of its female-friendly reputation and of the feelings of control and empowerment that bumble provides, particularly in using the “women talk first” feature. however, online harassment prevalent on dating apps “creates a layer of negativity that people must sift through as they navigate their daily routines online” (duggan, ) – and this intensifies for women, who are much more often harassed. thus, women engage with bumble with a “harm prevention” mindset throughout their use of the app, using all the features of bumble (not just the ones designated as such) to maintain control and steer away from possibly difficult or harmful situations. to effectively use bumble, then, women must constantly balance opportunity with risk. this naturalized need to use various strategies to stay safe, online as well as offline, adds tremendous amounts of additional, invisible labor to women’s navigation of bumble – and, by extension, to women’s uses of online dating in general. this digital labor is an extension of gendered labor offline, such as emotional labor (maintaining solid emotional relationships with loved ones) and household labor (cleaning and looking after children), that disproportionately fall on women in society. bumble calls itself feminist, and in some ways, it is: women indeed have more control over their interactions with men on the app and, through initiating conversations, they subvert normative ideas about gender roles in dating, challenging the cultural status quo of how relationships should work. they also have a set of features, a toolset (whether explicitly stated as such or not), to minimize the gendered risks inherent in online dating. however, bumble is embedded in a neoliberal system, where it is still up to the individuals themselves to use these tools. overall, bumble provides minimal impetus to change the underlying system steeped in sexism, misogyny, and gendered norms, a system in which women endure harassment and even simply discomfort as a side-effect of interactions with others. instead, the onus is still on individual women to protect themselves and minimize risk in an online dating context. bumble could be said to more plausibly ascribe to the postfeminist values of empowerment and choice (although i argue that empowerment and choice have real potential to contribute to the feminist movement to end sexist oppression, particularly when combined with collective action – this is discussed in more detail in the conclusion). as banet-weiser ( ) aptly points out, there are limits to negotiating uses of a technology: we tinker at surface changes, such as blocking mechanisms on twitter, but those don’t change the technological infrastructure that enables popular misogyny to circulate in the way it does. superficial technological adjustments also don’t change the social infrastructure of online spaces, where women simply do not feel safe on the internet (much like many public spaces before the internet). (para ). furthermore, bumble adheres to a limited conceptualization of gender (male/female) and excludes non-binary, gender-fluid, queer, trans, etc. folks. thus, through its very design in limiting gender identification for users, bumble is not intersectional or inclusive, limiting its contribution to a fourth wave feminist project. this analysis shows how the notion of bumble as a “feminist” dating app, particularly in the fourth wave, can be troubled. it also highlights how the affordances of the online environment really sit alongside real-life experiences for women (eckert, ); digital tools only minimally change the fundamental experience of women’s everyday life, for instance, in the experiences of sexual harassment – and sometimes even exacerbate them. chapter feminist affordances of private facebook groups for professionals: “a group that’s just women for women to help other women:” introduction in june , mark zuckerberg, the founder of facebook, changed the mission statement of the social networking platform to read: “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” in an interview with cnn, zuckerberg explained that simply making “the world more open and connected” (part of facebook’s old mission statement) is no longer enough; instead, “building common ground” is vital for humanity in the digital age (kelly, ). the tool that facebook provides for bringing the world closer together, zuckerberg declared, is the “groups” feature. groups, launched in , was being used by a billion people in (kelly, ). facebook groups, specifically closed/secret groups, serve as particularly useful spaces for women (lepore, ). groups are virtual, closed-off spaces on facebook that users join to be connected with other users, in line with their interests and needs. there are groups for different industries, for specific events (such as conferences and concerts), for hobbies, for social movements, and so on. users must first join and then they can take part in conversations with other members on the group’s page, by posting (words, pictures, links, gifs), commenting, “liking” (clicking the “thumbs up” button), or using a “reaction” (emoji showing emotions such as “laughing,” “sad,” or “angry”) – similarly to how users would interact on their personal facebook pages. groups have administrators, moderators who run the group, approving members who ask to join and having the power to remove members. moderators also determine the mission of the group and the rules for participation, and then curate posts and comments according to this mission and rules. groups have three privacy settings: public, closed, and secret. anyone can join a public group, and the conversations, as well as the members of a public group, are visible to all users of facebook. in closed groups, the name and description of the group, as well as the members, are visible to the public, but the conversations in the group are not visible to non-members. secret groups have similar features to closed groups, except that they are not searchable – so, in order to join, a user has to be invited by a member already in the group. the majority of groups discussed in this chapter are secret groups, though some are closed groups; for ease of discussion, as many of the women interviewed were part of more than one type of group, i use the term “private groups” and “closed groups” interchangeably to mean either closed or secret groups. lepore ( , para. ) argues that was an especially important time where private facebook groups “helped women come together, find their voice and make profound changes in the world.” facebook groups are useful for virtual friendship and support, but they are also particularly valuable for women’s careers, as gender inequality in the workplace persists. although the pay gap is the most well-known inequality – white women earn only % of what men earn, with black women earning %, and hispanic women % (calfas, ) – nearly half of all working women report experiencing some additional form of gender discrimination on the job (parker & funk, ). almost a quarter say they have been “treated as if they were not competent,” % say they “received less support from senior leaders than a man doing the same job,” and roughly in say they have “been passed over for the most important assignments,” “felt isolated in the workplace,” or “been denied a promotion” (parker & funk, ). in addition, as the recent #metoo movement made clear, women frequently experience sexual harassment at work (bennett, ). in the face of these experiences of discrimination, women are creating women- only private facebook groups for professional support, networking opportunities, and career development (lepore, ; segal block, ). some notable closed groups include tech ladies (“if you identify as a woman who works in tech (non-binary and trans folks welcome with open arms!) please consider joining us”) with , + members; women in post production (“according to the latest statistics, only about % of people working in post production are women. i hope this can be a group to ask questions, post jobs, and have a safe environment to have female centric discussion about all aspects of television, web, and film finishing”) with , + members; and women writers, editors, agents, and publishers (“the goal for this networking group is to become the largest women only group in the writing arena where we can help each other succeed”) with , + members. in this chapter, i examine how and why women use such groups, paying particular attention to the technological and social affordances of facebook’s “groups” feature. the data for this chapter come from interviews and focus groups with women who use private facebook groups for professional/career purposes. the women interviewed were predominantly freelancers or independent workers in creative, media, and tech industries (writing, journalism, tv production, communication, pr, tech, advertising) or entrepreneurs and business owners. the size of the groups varied widely: the smallest group had eight members, the largest , +. most of the groups had between and members. my analysis shows that private facebook groups for women professionals function as three overlapping online spaces: ) a women’s version of the “old boys’ clubs” used for networking, career resources, and as a virtual professional community; ) safe spaces for women and gender non-conforming people to have their voices heard online; and ) mediated consciousness-raising platforms for action beyond the groups’ borders. women mobilize the affordances of professional closed facebook groups to benefit them professionally, but these groups are also valuable to women in their personal lives. private facebook groups provide women with some tools to achieve tangible positive outcomes in their own lives and collectively for women, making them fundamentally, if not explicitly, nascent feminist spaces. however, these groups are limited in their usefulness for the wider feminist project through their myopic focus on “gender” as a difference category and lack of engagement with the intersectional ethos of the fourth wave. the white, heteronormative, middleclass, and cisgender cultures that underlie private facebook groups for women professionals exclude women across lines of difference such as race, class, and sexuality. this study illustrates empirically how social media is used for everyday politics (highfield, ), contributing to understandings – including the possibilities and limitations – of the digital fourth wave of the women’s movement. facebook groups as professional resource spaces: “our version of ‘the old boys’ club’” private facebook groups provide multiple affordances for professional activities. at the most basic level, these groups link geographically distant people based on similar career interests and experiences. as kelly pointed out, facebook groups allow “people to gain access to a network that they might not otherwise have access to,” a network where “you have at least one thing in common with every person who’s a member of these groups.” because private facebook groups provide affordances for linking people in the same industry, they are valuable for activities such as networking and sharing resources that have traditionally been done offline. so, these groups become a virtual version of “the old boys’ club,” an “informal system[s] of friendship and connections through which men use their positions of influence by providing favors and information to help other men” (nelson, , para. ). such networks provide informal career assistance to members (usually white, high-status men), placing women and underrepresented groups at a disadvantage for career opportunities (mcdonald, ). this affordance, of virtual “people linking,” is particularly valuable to women; as joan explained, by creating “opportunities… and communities…that were not previously open to women.” indeed, my participants frequently mentioned how private facebook groups countered historical imbalances seen in exclusive clubs for men. anya mused: [t]hink about it, men have been doing this for centuries: golf clubs, before women were allowed membership in certain fraternities or professional groups… they have been doing it for much more longer than we have and why not have a group that’s just women for women to help other women? my interviewees explicitly viewed private facebook groups as a women’s “online equivalent of the old boys’ club.” for instance, leslie, a journalist, recounted how at her previous workplaces there were always offline “boys’ clubs”: “there was no support for members outside of those groups. i imagine [private facebook groups] are what that looked like from the inside.” importantly, women identified private facebook groups as uniquely qualified to serve as a virtual old boys’ club – a more informal space for professional purposes – compared to other social media platforms for networking. for instance, caitlyn, a poet, compared linkedin with facebook, saying linkedin is “an online resume” whereas private facebook groups are: “more of a community, cheering each other on, giving advice, celebrating achievements. it's been said before that it's our version of the ‘old boys club’[sic] , and i'd agree with that sentiment.” the comparison to linkedin was used often, with women shunning linkedin because it was a “corporate tool,” “bland,” “sterile,” and “sale-sy.” kim, a tv editor, didn’t like that people use linkedin just to “self-promote” and went on to say that “it’s not really a place for conversation; it’s a place for stuffy business-card networking.” instead, women chose facebook groups for professional purposes, because, as kelly, a pr professional, said, “it just allows for a more human connection.” facebook is, as michelle stated, for “frank conversations;” hillary noted it is “dynamic and personal;” anya said it is “more conversational.” karen, a finance professional, explained she had “deeper networks and connections on facebook” because you get a “personal referral aspect” on facebook, whereas linkedin is like “cold searching.” others compared a number of these interviews and focus groups were conducted online, textually; in these cases, i use the quotes verbatim. private facebook groups to twitter in the context of their careers. kim, for example, said that her “twitter persona” was more “my personal brand” because it was “more public” and “less conversational,” as opposed to facebook, which was “more mate-y.” thus, women gravitated towards facebook for professional purposes over other social media platforms in part because of its unique “relational” culture – what bucher and helmond ( ) term high-level affordances of a social media platform and what gibbs et al ( ) deem its platform vernacular. the words that women used to describe private facebook groups (“personal,” “deep relationships,” “conversational”) are terms that are frequently stereotypically associated with the “feminine” in western society. thus, the feminine culture of private facebook groups – its relational, community-based culture – was deemed to be particularly conducive to a “women’s version of the old boys’ club.” this illustrates how members of different groups are driven towards platforms that they perceive as fulfilling their specific social identity needs (highfield, ), based on their perceptions or imaginations of the platform (how it “feels”), rather than simply objective features (nagy & neff, ). using facebook to find work: networking in private groups one of the primary functions of closed facebook groups for professional purposes is bringing together employers and employees. depending on where they were in their careers, the women i interviewed often used private facebook groups to either look for work or to post about job openings. for instance, nicole, a senior tv editor, said that she wanted to increase the ratio of women working in technical roles in the industry. she posted job openings at her company in women’s private groups specifically: because it can be really hard to find women to apply for jobs when (white) men are out there in droves applying for gigs they’re only a tiny bit qualified for. but we can’t go in public and specify that we want to hire women without someone threatening us. so, we have this space… a number of the women pointed out how private facebook groups provided certain technical (low-level) affordances that made them valuable personalized referral spaces. on seeing a job posting, a woman could “tag” (virtually create a link to someone’s profile which notified that person of the posting) an acquaintance, friend, or previous employee in the group whom she thought would be a particularly good fit for the job. often, people wrote a few words of recommendation to the poster along with the tag. michelle, a young reality tv editor, found this tagging particularly useful because: it seems that when people post jobs in facebook groups for tv, they are more willing to take a resume that they have gotten a direct referral [tag] for, they’re more willing to look at resumes of people who maybe don’t have a ton of credits yet but who have the skills…i found a lot of work that way, either through people i didn’t know or people i kind of knew of, but had never met personally and then, from those jobs, i’ve met people in person whom i’ve gotten referred to for other jobs. sometimes members of very large groups would mine the wealth of connections in the group by explicitly asking for introductions; marisa, a digital marketing strategist, described how people would post “‘does anyone have a connection to bill gates?’ or like some hot-shot in the startup world, and someone is always like, ‘oh yeah that’s my friend.’ everyone is so well connected.” these referral processes demonstrate how the informal networking function of an “old boys’ club” works virtually, through specific low-level affordances, such as adding multiple members and tagging, in private facebook groups for women. despite these groups being specifically for professional purposes, some (especially those for entrepreneurs) had strict rules about explicit self-promotion; as karen noted, “you can’t be, like, spammy or sales-y” because “you don’t want to be just getting sold to all the time.” mae described how: one of the unspoken rules there is that you don't go in with the intent to sell or get coverage or get a job or whatever. you go there to hang and be with colleagues in a semi-professional, casual space. once you do that, you get jobs and coverage… in line with this “unspoken rule” prevalent in some groups, when women did use these groups for self-promotion and finding new jobs, they did so in more subtle ways. for instance, coco, a web designer who ran her own small design business, belonged to a facebook group for female entrepreneurs. when someone posted a technical question about web design in the group, coco would answer the question and then suggest that they connect over email or direct message, if they needed more help. if the person contacted her, she would then offer her professional services for a reduced fee. the informal nature of work connections formed in these groups echoes the casual way that old boys’ clubs function to promote career success. sharing resources and advice in closed groups not only were groups useful for finding jobs and getting referrals, they were also beneficial for sharing resources, such as documents, related to professional activities. for instance, one small group of women, who all knew each other offline, regularly uploaded their resumes to the group for other members to comment on. in another group, hillary, a young writer who had just started freelancing, was given a word template for an invoice by another member, to help her create her first professional invoice. women also often used these groups to “share knowledge” (coco). often women asked for job-specific advice, including technical questions, such as “what type of technical equipment are you using, or what tools did you use? what was your experience with it? did you like it? did you not?” (michelle). groups were also used as a place to “keep…in the loop about what is going on in the industry” (karen) where people could share news articles relevant to that career field and start discussions. for instance, nicole recounted how “when the wga (writers’ guild of america) threatened to strike, there was discussion about how to prepare for a dry spell of work.” other industry-specific advice that might not be common knowledge was also shared in certain groups; for instance, michelle noted how, after the california wildfires in , someone posted in a post-production women’s group how “people can reach out to the motion picture television fund for assistance…when they’re dealing with a natural disaster or a family emergency…” private facebook groups were viewed as spaces where women could also get less “tangible” advice and more just “a woman’s perspective” on important professional activities, such as learning how to negotiate or dealing with “tricky situations” with clients, co-workers, or bosses. for instance, joan recounted a time when a member of her group “had problems with people reporting to her not necessarily respecting her authority” and her supervisors not taking these issues seriously. in the group, they talked about: different techniques that she should use in talking to her management… and the different ways that she could try to assert herself with her direct reports in a way that would make them respect her without thinking that she was being mean. the woman ended up getting a promotion and feeling respected as a “young manager” – and she explicitly credited the group discussions for this outcome. there was an oft-voiced assumption that talking to other women was important, because women “do business differently,” such as being “less aggressive and more creative” in their business dealings (marisa). this falls in line with previous findings that show that gendered assumptions inform much entrepreneurship discourse (ahl & marlow, ). angela pointed out how connecting personally with women at various levels in a specific field to get advice was invaluable: it’s not stuff that you can google. it’s not stuff that you can ask the person in the next cubicle. it’s almost always stuff, where, i think that, as a - year-old who has been in this profession for more than two decades, i have perspective that the people asking generally don’t. such sharing of experiences and perspectives by different women provides a variety of “situated knowledges” (haraway, ) that are produced from an individual’s viewpoint on the world. sharing situated knowledges is important as women can learn from each other to successfully navigate gender discrimination in the workplace. because content shared on social networking sites (sns) has the affordances of persistence and searchability (boyd, ), shared information – such as document templates, media articles about the industry, or career advice – is stored digitally and available as a future resource for members in these groups. facebook, as a specific sns, this is an interesting gendered logic, illustrating the double bind that women face in professional spaces, of having to balance being feminine (kind, nice, empathetic) while at the same time showcasing masculine qualities (assertion, confidence) in order to be taken seriously (see work on the “social dominance penalty” by rudman et al, ). provides a number of unique affordances for organizing material. the ability to upload files (such as resumes or manuscripts) was seen as very beneficial by my interviewees. in addition, a number of the women spoke about the benefits of the “threading” function, where you can see an entire conversation, with the original posting and all the comments and likes, easily in one place. angela found hashtags particularly useful, because “you can indicate whether you’re asking a question [#ask], whether you’re offering something [#offer], whether you’re letting people know about a resource [#resource].” other members can then search using a specific hashtag to yield results relevant to them. however, not everyone found this feature useful – women in smaller groups thought that tagging was a waste of time, because “we want to see all of the content, because these are people that we care deeply about, no matter what they’re posting about” (anya). tagging people, as was common in referrals, was also utilized for simply connecting members. for instance, joan used tagging when “there is something that’s like ‘hey, i hear what you’re saying…i don’t know if i have something to offer, but i’m going to tag anya, who had a similar experience.” certain prominent, senior members in some groups were also tagged “for my opinion on things” (kim). however, sometimes tagging was viewed as an annoyance. marisa, a well-known digital marketing strategist, would remove herself from tags, because she was overwhelmed with requests for help. thus, women could negotiate how they used particular features of facebook groups. the “search” function was frequently used to search for previously-posted resources, such as an article discussing a particular invoicing system. however, some found the search function lacking because, as chloe mentioned, “it doesn’t do very associative or boolean searching [a type of search that allows the use of keywords such as and or not to produce more specific results].” joan similarly mentioned other limitations with search: i know i posted a link about… “being better organized in the way that your workflow is,” but because i didn’t in my post say, like, “being better organized” it’s, like, almost impossible to find, because it doesn’t search for the name of the link, it only searches in the text that you posted. thus, facebook provides certain affordances for organization of work materials, but is limited in some ways, highlighting how users are constrained in their potential uses of a technology by the materiality of digital platforms (boyd, , shaw, ). “let folks know they're not alone”: community on facebook groups aside from providing networking opportunities and an easy way to share and organize career resources and advice, private facebook groups provide another very important social affordance for professionals: that of creating a virtual community, a sense of “being-together” (wilson, ). wilson ( , p. ) defines a community as a “grouping of people with various attributes while also inferring that it is or contains something that is emotionally enriching and valuable” (emphasis added). indeed, private facebook groups provided women professionals with emotional support, combatting loneliness and self-doubt, giving a sounding board for ideas, and helping celebrate successes in their career endeavors. social networking sites in general “carry expectations of sociability, meaningful connection to others, conviviality, perhaps even empathy and support” (parks, , p. ). these expectations are amplified when using the groups function on facebook, which provides a private space for strangers with similar interests to interact. indeed, closed groups are used as replacement work communities, bringing together “colleagues” who work independently, on disjointed projects, on their own businesses, or from home, and who, through the nature of their work, are isolated from their peers. at the most basic level, as kelly noted, these groups give “people someone to talk to if they’re working alone most days.” kim noted how she often used her private facebook groups to simply have conversations, because she felt so isolated in her job as a tv editor. thus, private groups create communities that combat loneliness. these groups are also useful for bringing together peers who share similar work experiences that women might have a difficult time finding in real life. for instance, angela, a computer scientist, joined a private facebook group for women in tech, because “senior women in tech are scarce. so online or irl [in real life], i take every opportunity to find the women i can relate to and learn from as peers and mentors.” a significant affordance of these groups as “community builders” is the provision of tools for asynchronous communication, allowing busy professionals working odd hours to take part in the groups as their schedules allow; as joan said: “facebook is a platform that we can come to on our own time.” certain affordances, such as notifications of new comments on a particular thread, allowed people to be reconnected to relevant conversations after not being on facebook for a while. at the same time, however, facebook provides affordances for synchronous communication, such as showing “someone is typing a comment…” in real time, as a placeholder until the commenter hits “post,” visually signaling immediacy. as angela noted, “facebook is definitely making it by nature of their industries (creative and cultural industries, entrepreneurs), the majority of the women interviewed were independent workers, as these industries are increasingly gig-based. possible to have a much closer to real time group conversation” – if people happen to be on the platform at the same time. being able to move between these two communication modes – asynchronous and synchronous – was brought up frequently as being extremely useful for creating a sense of community. the sense of community built up in these groups allowed women to get emotional support through difficult aspects of their careers. chloe, a writer and editor, used private facebook groups as “a place to vent” about career problems and she particularly appreciated the “buoying each other through rejections.” self-doubt was a common theme in the interviews. coco remarked how, particularly when starting one’s own business, there is always some insecurity or “that question of ‘am i capable of doing that?’” however, she noted that this is “more exaggerated for women” because “men’s voices and men’s places always held more value, societally speaking.” she thought that private facebook groups for women were particularly valuable for empowering women and “really helping each other see the value that we each have.” women also used private facebook groups for feedback, brainstorming, and as professional sounding boards. caitlyn said that her group of writers was useful to “get feedback from all kinds of perspectives” because of the “variety of people – different types of writers, different age groups, different backgrounds and goals” in the group. groups in general were, as coco noted, useful for getting an outsider’s perspective, “brainstorming ideas of things that would be helpful to think about or to prompt people to explore, resources or directions that they could go in, that maybe they wouldn’t think of on their own.” indeed, kim would often just “have a conversation” to “hash” things out, “to see what other people think.” angela noted how having a community was especially important when an idea was “controversial”: [s]omething that you’d be uncomfortable saying out in the bigger internet, to be able to say it in the safe environment and have people ‘say yes, i agree with you,’ is a really reassuring thing, a strengthening thing, that can then lead to being more comfortable saying it more openly. it’s a safe place to try out your ideas before you push them out of the nest. in a sense then, these groups were incubators for business project ideas, “introducing it and practicing it and seeing that it’s really working” (coco) in the community before doing it “for real” offline. group were also useful for making tough decisions about one’s career. jackie recounted a specific instance when her group was particularly helpful: a couple of years ago i had two different job offers and i was working through like, ‘what do i do here?’ and it was this albatross…and i had this platform where, hours a day, if i had a thought in the middle of the night, i could post on it and be, like, ‘but what about this thing that we haven’t talked about yet?’ in addition, more senior women actively mentored others in their groups who were just starting out in their careers. kim, a senior tv editor, pointed out how “actual irl mentorship is actually impossible these days” (because workers are dispersed as contractors/freelancers in the gig economy) so she offered mentorship using the specific affordances of facebook: “i have made it publicly known [in private facebook groups for women] that anyone can dm [direct message] me and ask me questions and a lot of people do that. probably three or four times a week, i have people reaching out.” nicole, who belonged to some of the same groups as kim, explained how senior women in the tv industry would also “use the group to build momentum behind public facing career- oriented things, such as nominating each other for awards and recruiting others to do the same.” women in the groups who were not in a position to formally mentor expressed a desire to “give back” to their groups in the form of showing support and validation by commenting on or “liking” others’ posts. hillary noted that “people sometimes just comment to wish each other luck.” caitlyn said, “i try to always like and comment as an acknowledgement and a thank you.” alice stated that she would respond to [comment on] posts where women shared intimate or personal stories “to let folks know they're not alone.” an important affordance of facebook groups is the quantifiable tangibility of support. angela explained how she really liked “being able to see the ‘like’ count” on her posts. she said that this was akin to “getting the confirmation that you’re not a lone lunatic, but, in fact, other people, other people that you know something about, and maybe you’ve seen their posts so you respect their opinion…agree. seeing the counter go up is reassuring.” this shows how metrics such as “likes” and “friends” have become a new form of social capital in the digital age (gandini, ). importantly, these groups were often used by women to discuss issues either at work or in their private lives that were more personal, emotional, and intimate. kim described these as places: where people have something in common, they basically do the same work, and they can talk about their woes. it’s like therapy, kind of a way, in a safe space… to be able to just chat about what’s going on. many women used these groups to talk about “other stuff going on in our life… like relationship stuff… mental health stuff, life changes… kids” (anya). indeed, some women shared extremely personal stories. for instance, abigail decided to share about her experience of sexual abuse as a child in her private group. after she shared this, other women in the group came forward to talk about their experiences and they ended up creating a new subgroup specifically for that topic. a core aspect of this feeling of community, and feeling comfortable being so vulnerable, was the fact that these groups were exclusive, bordered “safe spaces,” spaces with other supportive women and without cisgender men. facebook groups as safe spaces: “a place with ‘like-minded ladies’” the women i interviewed repeatedly brought up the importance of having a space with other like-minded women but also, importantly, a space away from men – both online and in real life. private facebook groups for professionals were seen as “a way to meet some like-minded ladies” (stephanie) – but the fact that men were not allowed in these groups was crucial and presented a significantly different dynamic to coed groups. although many of my participants were also part of coed professional facebook groups for career advice, they particularly valued being in an exclusive community of women, because, as kelly explained “women just have a very different shared experience than men do.” having a designated space is important for any marginalized group (blackwell, ), but the (problematic) understanding of all women sharing the same experiences was frequently echoed throughout the interviews. notably, most of my participants were white, middle-class women, using these spaces to tackle perceived inequalities rooted predominantly in sexism, but not engaging with intersectional concerns (intersectionality in these groups is discussed in more detail later). to join a private group, members must either be invited or send a request to join the group. groups have “administrators” who run the group, approving or denying members who ask to join, and who guide group conversations by providing rules for conduct and monitoring comments. users who want to join women-only groups are vetted by their profile pictures and names for gender adherence by administrators – “they only let women in, as long as they can obviously see some identification as a woman” (kim). despite this assertion, most of the groups in this study stated that they were for “women” in their group name, but in the detailed description of the group highlighted than “self-identified women,” “trans,” “non-binary,” and “gender-non-conforming” people were also welcome. in online spaces then, these groups – at least in their formal rules for membership – create borders based on non-cis male identification to illustrate inclusion of marginalized social identities. this exclusion of cis men was, not surprisingly, the core low-level affordance of women-only groups. importantly, not allowing cis men provided the imagined affordance of a safer culture compared with private facebook groups that had both male and female members. dr. anita borg, computer scientist and founder of systers, a mailing list for women in computer science that started in the s, argued years ago for the need for women-only groups in professional spaces online (camp, ). she (cited in camp, , p. ) listed four reasons for why there is a need for women-only groups online. firstly, “women need a place to find each other” in a global community, particularly in male-dominated industries. second, “women need female role models and mentors” to succeed professionally. (these two needs were discussed in the previous section on private facebook groups as a women’s version of the old boys’ club.) thirdly, “women need a place to discuss our issues,” issues that are unique to women. finally, “women need to discover our own voice” in a world where men’s voices disproportionately dominate discussions. indeed, these final two needs were brought up continually throughout my interviews as motivations for using private facebook groups. the ability to discuss women’s issues and to hear women’s voices made these groups “safe spaces” within the broader realm of the internet and within society in general (irl). a significant reason these were deemed safe spaces was these groups’ active exclusion of cis men. closed facebook groups for professional purposes with both male and female members were often formed by workers to “talk about our jobs without being observed by the bosses that we were working for” (abigail). however, splinter groups for women- only would frequently form from these groups either because “sexism…reared its head in that group” (a push motive out of coed groups), or as beth stated, “there are sometimes online discussions which are more intimate and vulnerable than can be shared in a “regular” [coed]…closed group” (a pull motive to women’s-only groups). facebook groups as safe spaces without men women often spoke about the need for online safe spaces exclusively for women because of wider societal power imbalances, whether in specific fields or in society as a whole. women saw the exclusion of cis men from these groups not as a privilege for women or as harmfully “exclusionary” to men (an argument that many of them had heard from their male colleagues), but as a necessity, “given the sexism inherent in our society” (alice). beth suggested that these groups levelled the playing field more broadly: “until we have equal rights by law in the usa, and equal political representation, i think we’re going to need our “safe spaces” that are women-only.” mae too conceded that these groups were exclusionary to men but “rightly so” because of “historic injustice and all that… men have been excluding women for-freaking-ever.” others pointed to the need for exclusionary groups because their fields were dominated by men. nicole, who worked in film and television, “a very misogynistic industry with a lack of representation of women,” said she joined closed facebook groups for women because “we all needed an outlet of like-minded women to compare and contrast and build each other up.” some justified exclusion in more personal terms. abigail explained that she felt “kinda bad even excluding cis men, because there are some cis men who don’t identify with masculinity and where do you draw the line?” however, she conceded that she “benefitted from spaces that exclude cis males” and that she found it “necessary to my well-being.” she summed up: “we need that, our little world… the whole reason these groups exist is because we can’t have these conversations when men are present.” differences between co-ed and women-only groups coed professional facebook groups, especially in certain male-dominated industries such as tech and entertainment, were “dominated by men” who considered themselves experts in their field and kept trying to prove their expertise. in these groups, women were often made to feel as “lesser” professionals and their voices were drowned out in technical discussions. women flock to women’s-only professional spaces in response to these dynamics, because “they don’t want to deal with the rack of male elephant-seal-like trumpeting and jostling for status” (borsook, , p. ) accordingly, chloe noted, the choice to use women’s only groups was often “less about safety and more about confidence that your audience is empathetic.” a very important consideration for many women was the ability to ask professional questions “without being judged;” chloe noted she used women’s groups “so that i don’t feel dumb for asking a stupid question” such as “hey what’s the name of x device?” mae similarly said how her desire to use women’s only groups stemmed from the fact that she could “ask ‘dumb’ questions about my industry without getting crapped on.” nicole too conceded that “it’s nice to ask other women so you don’t get mansplained some simple aspect of the issue which doesn’t solve your problem, which happens so much in other [coed] groups women hardly post.” in general, women felt they could discuss technical issues in women-only spaces without getting “burned” like they would in coed groups. private facebook groups were seen as spaces where women’s issues could be focused on, rather than first having a discussion on “what the issues are,” a common occurrence in coed groups. this made communication in female groups “a lot more efficient” because the foundations of “experience and understanding” where already there and the focus on certain issues did not have to be explained. angela noted how such spaces are rare in the open environment of the internet: “not having to defend your right to focus on your particular group’s issues is important. it’s a weight you don’t realize you’re carrying until you get to set it down.” the exclusion of men also allowed for discussion of issues that uniquely affect women in the workplace, without having men’s (often irrelevant) input; as camp ( , p. ) writes: “on the internet, as in life, men dominate discussions about women.” for instance, michelle shared how men derail conversations that are not about them – such as discussions about the pay gap – in other online spaces: in the women’s only groups, it feels like we can let it all hang out as much as we choose to, in terms of talking about pay and in terms of griping about it and saying like ‘this is not equal’ and ‘this is what you should watch out for.’ because then it’s just people who are sort of commiserating and asking for advice and not having to worry about being smashed down by somebody who’s like, ‘oh well, women who work where i do never run into that and i’m a guy.’ hillary, too, recounted how “because it’s just women” she felt that she could comfortably “share articles about the #metoo campaign, about other issues affecting women in the workforce, without getting into arguments with the annoying internet man that always seems to happen in the comments of those articles.” many women spoke of the difference in comfort levels in coed and women’s groups, which they related to shared life experiences; as vivi explained, “a big part of it is just the emotional support of, like, other females who know what it's like” (emphasis added). mae similarly said that these groups meant that she could “have camaraderie with people who get the frustrations of my daily life.” additionally, because these groups often had hundreds if not thousands of members, “there’s just a much higher likelihood of finding someone who understands what you’re talking about” (abigail) – even if one’s experiences were not that common. women’s groups were deemed to have “that empathy feeling” (mae). anya explained that “as women we experience different issues that men can’t always relate to” and so having the presence of men would “make folks more hesitant to share,” thus stifling their voices. for instance, abigail found women-only groups useful for discussing issues such as gender discrimination at work: that was really useful because when you try to talk about it in the coed group you’d start to feel like ‘oh maybe i am just making this up’ or ‘i can’t hack it and i’m not tough enough’ and you’d start to doubt yourself and feel all this anger and confusion and frustration. and then in the women’s groups it was like, ‘oh i’m not crazy, like, other people are experiencing this, and the men are trying to silence us.’ as leslie pointed out: “i like being in a group for women because it feels safer. no weirdos are sending me messages because i shared something i wrote about breastfeeding.” women simply felt more comfortable without men. in fact, my interviewees frequently noted that coed private groups for professionals could “actually be quite aggressively anti-women.” women-only groups, then, were spaces where not only did women feel heard, but spaces where they were shielded from negative reactions from their male peers and where they could discuss their issues without “the concerns of how it will be interpreted by men.” (coco). angela summed up how the two main benefits of women’s only groups were “acceptance” and “safety”: contentious [women’s] topics can be discussed without needing to start from feminism ; they will be taken seriously, not immediately derailed by trolls; and i can speak out with reasonable expectation that my body/family/life won’t be threatened as a result. private groups as safe spaces from harassment online private groups provided a bordered safe space away not only from toxic environments in coed groups, but from online harassment in the “wild west” of the internet in general. online harassment and trolling of women, particularly when they are discussing women’s issues, is not new, nor is the need for women-only havens to get away from it; in the early s, systers, the women-only mailing group for women in computer science was described as “a sanctuary on a hostile net” (camp , p. ). women’s experiences of harassment in other online spaces, beyond facebook groups, limit productive discussions with other women. as brail ( , p. ) writes, “men don’t usually have to jump through a hoop of sexual innuendo and anti-feminist backlash simply to participate. they use their energy for posting, while we often use ours wondering if we’ll be punished for opening our mouths.” a number of the women spoke about how they experienced far less harassment in women-only groups than they did online more broadly. kim shared that in closed groups she didn’t get trolled, whereas “the kind of abuse that i get online [in general] is kind of insane.” facebook groups were thus a safe space from harassment and abuse for women. however, women also pointed out that the same affordances, of semi-privacy and semi-anonymity that created “safe spaces,” allowed people to form private “hateful” communities, “antithetical” to the ethos of women’s groups. after hearing about a group for sharing offensive content – “violent, hateful memes, ones that depict rape, violent crime, gore” – during the course of our virtual repeat focus groups, caitlyn mused: for the first time i find myself thinking that as much as it allows progressive communities to organize, it [facebook] does the same for rape culture, for racists...i mean, i knew it was out there, i just assumed it was mostly on anonymous platforms, not under people's more public identities. she went on to explain that the closed nature of these groups allows people to share violent content, because they cannot be reported as they are not sharing publicly – thus, a group like this becomes an “unmonitored” space. hillary, discussing similar offensive groups, got the sense that they were gendered – “men retaliating against feminism” – but also “about race” and political views: she called these groups a “safe haven for those who feel that the ‘liberal snowflakes’ are taking over.” these examples highlight how digital spaces are tools that can be effectively used both for feminist practices and misogyny (banet-weiser, ; benn ). thus, the same affordances can be materialized for opposing purposes according to needs of different actors (hutchby, ). affordances for feeling safe in private facebook groups women not only spoke of facebook groups as safe spaces because of the absence of men; they also mentioned how these specific communities of women, combined with the affordances of facebook’s group feature, made them feel safe. the internet started out as a space for anonymity, but with the emergence of social networking sites, people started interacting online with people they knew offline (boyd & ellison, ). facebook groups are uniquely positioned as safe spaces, because they combine the affordance of anonymity of the broader internet with the solidarity and shared experience of more personal connections. kim stated that “it’s semi-anonymous because it’s online and most of the people don’t really know each other professionally.” this allowed for maintaining some level of anonymity and not feeling too vulnerable in sharing personal stuff. but, because these groups were women-only and members were vetted before joining, they also provided support from like-minded others. member verification in facebook groups. the feeling of safety was in part created by the strict borders of the groups, guaranteeing both sex exclusivity and the person’s professional authenticity. to join a private group, members have to either be invited or ask to join. before allowing a member to join, administrators would confirm the new member’s gender and confirm that her credentials and experience indeed made her a “writer” or an “editor.” sometimes, in order to join, potential members have to answer a couple of questions, such as “what are your reasons for joining the group?” which were considered in membership decisions by administrators. some groups were very strict with making sure members were professionally verified. for instance, michelle explained: since one of the conditions is that you need to be working in the specific part of the industry that their group is for, a lot of times they will check. and since i don’t list my employer information in my facebook profile, i think people probably checked my linkedin. indeed, using linkedin as a verification tool was common. in addition, the admins of the groups i spoke to talked with each other to verify if someone knew of that person and could vouch for them being in that industry. administrators on facebook groups also curated the content that members posted to make sure they abided by group rules. they also had the power to discipline members for posting incorrectly – for example, by tagging them and asking them to edit their posts if they didn’t use the right hashtag. finally, administrators could delete posts that they deemed inappropriate for the group altogether. some women found this “policing” an additional layer of safety against unpleasant interactions; sandy said that “how admins handle group conversations makes me feel more comfortable rather than the familiarity or anonymity in the group.” anonymity as safety. despite knowing a few friends or acquaintances in these groups, most women did not know the majority of the members in each group. this anonymity actually increased the feeling of the groups being a “safe space.” as abigail said, “it was a safe space to just say stuff that i wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to people that i knew personally.” thus, the distance from people in this space was beneficial for feeling like one could share intimate parts of oneself and one’s life, and not worry about the emotional consequences of such sharing. abigail explained, for instance, that if someone had a negative reaction to something she posted: that negative reaction is not coming from best friend, whose opinion i really value. i can just ignore it if i don’t like. i mean it still affects me but not in the same way. or if someone says something that’s really upsetting to me, i can shut my computer down and walk away, i’m not in a room with them, so it’s far less confronting in that way. these groups were contrasted with other aspects of social media where “you’re so connected” to everyone. private facebook groups, then, because they were “totally closed and private,” were a way to circumvent what marwick and boyd ( ) call “context collapse,” the idea that audiences from various parts of your life (home, work, friendships, dating etc.) are all on the same digital platforms and so it is difficult to keep different areas of your life separate. women further maintained this personal/professional boundary on private facebook groups for professional purposes by not requesting, or rejecting requests, to be “friends” (connecting their personal profiles outside of the group on facebook) with other members. another feature of these groups that provided an extra layer of anonymity if needed was the ability to directly message administrator with a question, which they would then post to the group anonymously (under a tag such as #anon or #helpasisterout). this prevented a question being linked to the asking member’s profile. women used this feature when they had questions they were nervous about asking publicly (even in a private group) because of possible negative consequences, for instance, when talking about a harassment situation in a current job. however, some women conceded that while these groups preserve some anonymity, people were more “known” than in public spaces because they were connected by industry (including connections shared irl) and because they had to use their real facebook profiles to join. this semi-anonymity stopped people from “being dicks” (kim) too much, because, if someone wanted to, it was easy to get to know more about the individual members in a group. the ability to search through member lists and visit individual member’s public profiles was a valuable affordance for reducing anonymity if so desired. others searched the member lists before posting something that might get back to them irl, especially in very large groups. for instance, michelle would check member lists to see if her “immediate supervisors” were in the group, before she posted anything related to her current work. nevertheless, this method was not foolproof, because, as michelle noted, “you never know who else is in that group – maybe they don’t even work for your company but they know your supervisor.” thus, facebook provided affordances for a “variable scale” of anonymity, where women could to some degree choose their level of anonymity (though, of course, there were still large levels of anonymity in most groups, especially the ones with more members). privacy and confidentially concerns in facebook groups. there were rules for sharing the content of the groups beyond its borders; in most groups, members were explicitly (written in the official rules) not allowed to share content posted in the group publicly, to ensure a degree of privacy and confidentiality. there are, of course, however, limitations to the privacy of closed facebook groups – and members were aware that the boundaries of a group, as with any participation space, are “mutable, permeable and subjective” (taylor-smith & smith, , p. ). because it is impossible to know all the members in large private groups, women were posting to an “imagined audience” (litt, ; marwick & boyd, ). mae pointed out that one can never “guarantee confidentially in a group that size… especially not when relative anonymity is possible.” members may talk to those outside of the group regarding what was shared privately; as dreyfuss ( ) wryly notes, “the first rule of secret facebook groups is you do not talk about secret facebook groups. the second rule of secret facebook groups is that someone, inevitably, always talks about secret facebook groups.” indeed, caitlyn and hillary both mentioned separate instances of “people taking screenshots [of conversations inside the groups] and sharing them with non-members” – despite strict rules prohibiting this. perhaps not surprisingly, then, many women held back, to some degree, what they would share in private groups. hillary explained: “i never let my guard down completely on the internet. this is just a space where i mostly let it down, you know, except for that tiny little nudge in my brain telling me to be careful.” mae pointed out that “private groups are safer still, but i am always aware this is the flippin’ internet.” chloe voiced similar concerns: “it’s still the internet and just because it’s a smaller room doesn’t mean its impenetrable.” michelle felt uncomfortable letting it all out on private groups and she would “sanitize” her content and “keep it positive,” so if it was shared beyond the confines of the group, it wouldn’t be a problem for her. not only were women worried about other members sharing content, they were worried about the platform of facebook itself. most women were aware, for instance, that facebook collected their data and so nothing said in private groups was actually completely private and confidential – this fact made them “uncomfortable.” some women were reluctant, as jackie intimated, to put “a lot of personal or private information on a platform like facebook who owns all your content.” they were also worried about the privacy settings on facebook itself. marisa explained how she would never post something controversial in these groups; she didn’t want “a paper trail” because she “know[s] someone somewhere can find anything [about her].” angela stated that she didn’t “trust facebook to maintain privacy perpetually” – and because of this, “there are some stories that i can only ever tell offline.” kelly too said that she wouldn’t post anything that was “damaging or surprising.” she went on to say, “i definitely curate what i post on social media because i realize that it is a public forum and that that data, or that content, even if it’s quote unquote private, it’s still in the public domain.” a number of the women would circumvent these concerns by “taking it offline” – that is, moving more intimate conversations to other means of communication without a written record – phone calls or meeting in person. so, members had privacy concerns both because of the platform itself and because of the other members in the group. however, they conceded that they couldn’t stop using platforms like facebook, because, as joan decreed, that is “the way that the world is and how our lives are and where we live and all that, you know, it’s sort of the best way around that.” ultimately, the benefits of closed facebook groups for professional purposes were deemed to outweigh the privacy risks. safe spaces for which women? despite being described frequently as “empathy places,” facebook groups were not always harmonious; the tensions between different groups of women present offline were often replicated within the groups. although the formal descriptions of the groups embraced people of many different identities (aside from cis men), oftentimes the conversational practices and focus within the groups set different boundaries. for instance, mae mused that “transwomen and poc [people of color] probably think long and hard before they join a group like this (or any group predominantly cis and white)” simply because of the space not being “for” them. even the very naming of the groups as “women-only” limited diversity. users are “interpellated” (althusser, ) by and respond to online spaces that are deigned “for” them. thus, through the decision to promote only one feature of cultural identity, the creators of these groups “interpellated” users based only on gender. this symbolically excluded other subjectivities, those who identify with race, sexuality, ability, and so forth as equally as important and intersecting with their gender identity. through not mentioning race or other features of cultural identity in the naming of the group, these groups designated “whiteness” and “heterosexuality” as unmarked human categories (nakamura, ) and so retained the “normative whiteness” of the broader internet (daniels, ). through discussions in the groups, differences between women – and the concomitant exclusionary practices – became magnified. as hillary pointed out, “groups that are solely women often amplify the woman vs woman problem that the patriarchy has handed us. it’s a double edged [sic] sword.” my participants, mostly white women, perceived significant divisions in their groups around race. claire conceded that such spaces “can often exclude women of color” and ascribe to “white feminism,” focusing on issues that affect white, middle-class women, such as discussing the wage gap using statistics for white women, without acknowledging the much bigger gap that women of color encounter. abigail too noted that hers “was not always a harmonious group, there were a lot of discussion and fighting” and that “a lot of it was around race issues.” however, a couple of my participants noted how discord around race in their groups was “a huge social justice awakening.” sophie said that having conversations with women of other races “transformed … the way i think about things and have conversations with people and learning to manage my defensiveness and actually listen to people with different experiences. it was really impactful.” nonetheless, it is important to recognize that, as a white person, sophie had the choice to engage in a conversation around race, whereas for people of color that engagement is not optional, whether welcome or not: “white people often interpret our mere presence in a room as an opportunity to talk about race, and these are not conversations we always want to have” (blackwell, ). some of my participants perceived problems with age diversity in their groups. a few of the professional groups had a significant number of older women who were “more experienced in their fields” – and michelle even said that “professional groups have a bigger mix age-wise than some social groups.” nevertheless, this was not the overall perception of my participants; most thought their groups were lacking older members – though of course, this could at least in part be due to the higher rate of facebook use by younger women in general (“social media fact sheet,” ), rather than deliberate exclusion. however, in one instance, a very small group of eight members who all knew each other offline decided to not allow a potential new member in, because she was “about a decade older than most of us” and people felt “uncomfortable” because “her career was much more advanced” and she wasn’t the right “fit” for a group. nicole pointed out that deliberate exclusions like this in some online groups helped to redress offline inequalities between women. she described the demographics in the television industry: in our industry, there are a lot of older, privileged white women who think that we just need to “lean in” per sheryl sandberg and we’ll make it. they organize luncheons that are too expensive and are at times of the day when working class women are, like, at work. and if you go to the luncheons, they tell you, “you lack confidence.” they don’t acknowledge privilege. they don’t try to help women of color or younger women. thus, she explained, younger women, working class women, and women of color flocked to their own networks of private facebook groups to help each other succeed. because many women often found the primary online private groups in their industries lacking, they would form smaller professional subgroups, or “splinter groups,” specifically based on intersectional identities, such as “black women and the same for trans women and sex workers and you name it.” abigail explained that sometimes people would stay in the original group, to keep up with the larger conversation, but also become part of these “more identity-specific subgroups” to discuss intersectional topics related to their professional life. systers, the mailing group for women in computing in the s, similarly had “sublists for specific affinity groups” (camp, ), illustrating how underrepresented groups have always had a need for their own spaces, where they can be their “authentic selves” away from the dominant hegemonic culture (blackwell, ). the white women i spoke with agreed with the need for subgroups that better fit the needs of different women, but they largely saw these as “special interest” groups, rather than reflexively thinking about normative whiteness as a construct in the primary groups. (interestingly, none of the few people of color i interviewed mentioned race relations as a problem in these groups. this could simply reflect the small sample of people of color in this study.) subgroups also formed for other reasons. for instance, sophie said that her post- production group was too “u.s.-centric” – the job postings were not useful to her and “the advice not always relevant.” so, she joined a local group in the u.k. where she was based. also, if a topic was deemed “not relevant to the core group” – such as discussions by young moms or about hobbies – subgroups were formed for “people who want to talk about a certain topic” (michelle). in other instances, discord in the group did not fall along identity lines but was based on disagreement on how the groups should run, for example, whether the group allowed the naming of names of discriminatory employers or sexual harassers in the industry. accordingly, some administrators were deemed to have deleted “valuable conversations.” nicole recounted an instance in her group where there was a lot of tension: a member was telling about a sexual assault/harassment situation she was in and warning the rest of us about the guy involved so we wouldn’t work with him. [the admin] told us we weren’t allowed to name names. the rest of us were like well, what is the point of a secret group if we can’t protect each other by naming names? in another instance, a writer i interviewed was hounded out of a women-only group for admitting that she preferred writing male characters. even though she wasn’t formally kicked out, she was made to feel very uncomfortable, as the other members accused her of being swayed by her “internalized misogyny” and so she left. thus, as much as facebook groups allow women to come together in bounded spaces, they also reset old and develop new boundaries between women. facebook groups as mediated consciousness-raising platforms: “would it have happened this way if i weren’t a woman?” an essential yet unstated function of private facebook groups for women is consciousness-raising, a feminist practice popular in the second wave of the women’s movement in the s and s. consciousness-raising occurred when women got together in small groups, specifically separate from men, to talk about their personal experiences and, through this, realized that they shared a lot of similar experiences, that their problems were structural (campbell, , ). consciousness-raising works when you talk about your problems to “similar others”, i.e., women in this case (campbell, , p. ). hanisch ( , para ) states that consciousness-raising during the second wave “was a way to use our own lives – our combined experiences – to understand concretely how we are oppressed and who was actually doing the oppressing.” women shared personal experiences that addressed larger issues, those of “legal, economic, and social inequality” (campbell, ) and thus moved the personal into the political, public realm. a key aspect of consciousness raising was that “actions – large and small – also resulted from these discussions” (hanisch, , para. ). these discussions then equipped women with the tools to change their own lives, for instance, getting a divorce, or to collectively seek change for equality, such as organizing protests about discriminatory labor laws. scholars have identified a shift in consciousness-raising (and the resultant actions) from the second wave to the third wave (late s and s): “from seeking social activism to seeking self-empowerment” (anderson & grace, , p. ; sowards & renegar, ). feminist media scholars have written about how digital platforms can serve as “mediated consciousness-raising platforms” (wood, ). for instance, sex blogs allow women to share sexual knowledge and experiences with other women, serving as a “sex commons” with useful resources (wood, ). mommy blogs and facebook groups serve as spaces where women can develop a voice and learn – both in terms of practical issues and emotional experiences – from other women about parenting. (anderson & grace, ; lopez, ). anderson and grace ( , p. ) found that the consciousness-raising efforts of mommy bloggers in the digital realm included aspects of both the second and third wave, “shar[ing] personal experiences, within a more public space, to provide focus on personal and social injustices” (emphasis added). private facebook groups for women are such “mediated consciousness-raising platforms” focused on both social activism and personal empowerment – making these groups fundamentally, if not overtly, feminist. private facebook groups for women professionals are used for consciousness- raising in that they allow women to band together and discuss their individual experiences of gender discrimination in the workplace, without the presence of men. these groups are particularly effective for sharing of knowledge about pay rates and the discussions of sexual harassment in the workplace. crucially, from a feminist standpoint, these discussions lead to tangible outcomes beyond the borders of the group – there are “actions from the new consciousness” (hanisch, , para. ). tackling the pay gap in january , hollywood reporter ran a story, “tv writers launch anonymous pay survey amid push for salary parity,” detailing a “sharable google doc” that was circulated in the industry for writers to share their pay anonymously, alongside social identity characteristics, such as gender and race (goldberg, ). the story attributed the impetus for this survey to the recent time’s up initiative and the discussions around pay parity that dominated the golden globes. however, my interviews show that such anonymous wage surveys have been circulating in private facebook groups since their inception in . kim, a senior tv editor with years of industry experience, was part of many industry-focused facebook groups, both groups for women only and coed groups. every year for the past five years, she used these groups to run a survey of wages within the industry, by circulating a spreadsheet where people could add their gender, experience, location, job, and rates, which she then made publicly available, including sharing it back to the groups. her impetus for this was simple: “so people can see what other people get paid.” kim went on to say that this spreadsheet “tends to be the most valuable to women in the industry” because it highlights, using recent crowdsourced data, the very real gender pay gap in television. as she explained, this spreadsheet made the pay gap tangible and personally relevant to the women in the groups: the gender gap is always this idea, this concept that we believe and we kind of know it’s there, but it’s a concept. and then when you see it like that, when i go through every single line and i see it every single time, coming up at different levels and just being like, ‘fuck, man, it’s real, it’s there, it’s right in front of me.’ indeed, multiple women i spoke with said that such pay comparisons shared in their private facebook groups were extremely useful for thinking critically about their economic conditions. these spreadsheets were particularly valuable in industries where salary and wage data were not transparent or when individuals set their own freelance rates, because this information spread a “general awareness” of what going rates were. this knowledge gave women the power to negotiate, because as michelle said, “now you know you’re getting a lower rate than somebody who’s a guy, but you’re working in the same position.” abigail pointed out that sharing this information was not only useful for individuals, but also had “consequences that impacted the industry” because “it wasn’t like here and there, it was, like, across the board – once that group emerged, people raised their rates.” importantly for action, this pay rate sharing was buttressed by other advice shared in the groups. many women spoke of how they discussed salary and contract negotiation tactics within the groups, even sharing line-by-line scripts for negotiation. ultimately, then, sharing personal pay information alongside negotiation strategies worked to enact change both for individual women and for women more broadly in particular industries. discussing harassment at work discussions of workplace harassment and other inappropriate behavior in the industry – “putting creeps on blast” – were very frequent in private facebook groups for women. women would share personal experiences of sexually inappropriate or discriminatory treatment with bosses, co-workers, and clients – just a “heads up, this person is a misogynist” – raising awareness that experiences like this were a common phenomenon. for instance, vivi shared a story of a writing collaborator, who, after some disagreements on the direction of their material, sent her a passive-aggressive note about her work ethic with a link to a “nasty, nasty porn video,” leaving vivi “dumbfounded.” when she confronted him about it, he passed it off as a “joke.” she went on to her facebook group to “vent” and she got a lot of support: i needed to share this, i needed to get it off my chest. it's gross, i feel awful and it sucks. and it's just an outpouring of support, like ‘what a creep, i can't believe it, i'm so sorry, it happens.’ it's just, like, a support group. an important part of sharing stories was the validation that the discomfort in certain situations was warranted, particularly where experiences were not explicitly harassing and could be perceived ambiguously. kim stated that facebook groups were a place where women could ask “questions about workplace stuff in terms of relationships and the way they’re being treated and [ask] ‘is this normal or should i kick up a fuss?’” joan described a “situation” where she was terminated and: there was always this, like, kind of hint that there was something gender-y going on, but nothing had ever been explicit. it’s helpful though to even have the group to parse and to say ‘this thing just happened, and it was weird. would it have happened this way if i weren’t a woman? or am i overreacting? different facebook groups had different formal and informal rules for “naming names” of harassers or discriminatory bosses. in vivi’s “porn video” case, her group had a “kind of, like, code” that women did not share names of the men on the group’s page, “but if you really want to know then message that person directly and they’ll give you their name.” chloe, however, shared a harassment experience with an editor, where she named him, publicly within her poetry facebook group. this sharing “ended up in an outpouring of similar stories, which gave me the confidence to post more publicly.” because a number of women in the group “echoed” her experience with this man and “bolstered” her, chloe broke the story publicly and the editor ended up shutting down his business because of the negative publicity. however, abigail had a negative experience in her group naming names. she wrote a letter to a boss she worked with on a particular project, who kept making inappropriate sexual comments at work, and she shared this letter in the group before sending it to him, “to get that feeling of support around me so i wouldn’t feel alone with it.” after she shared it, she faced unexpected backlash: it turned out that of course there were women in the group who had worked with him…some women who felt the exact same way and were like ‘thank you for writing this letter’ and some women who loved working with him and were like super angry and showed it to him. after this experience, abigail was hesitant to share personal things in the group. alice also recounted a time when a white woman in her group shared stories about three harassers and got backlash calling her racist. even though she didn’t name names, “she called out two men of color and made it quite clear who they were [because of their unusual names], while the white man she called out was granted some anonymity, because his name was like john. d. or something.” indeed, a few other women mentioned that they would not post about harassment in these groups because of fear of backlash and lack of trust. kelly said, “it’s not something that i would feel comfortable about in a forum where i don’t personally know the overwhelming majority of the people.” marisa similarly said that “the last place” she would post about harassment would be a facebook group. she said instead she would “reach out to specific people that might work for that person.” nevertheless, the majority of women i interviewed had either personally shared harassment stories or had witnessed stories being shared in their groups and viewed this sharing as useful for women generally. my participants frequently referenced the #metoo and #timesup movements in relation to workplace harassment. kelly noted that there is a “huge movement” along the lines of #metoo happening in advertising groups for women: “there’s a group of women who are kind of leading the charge and exposing some of the perpetrators that have been repeat offenders and have been creating toxic environments for years.” michelle discussed how many women posted links and stories in private facebook groups after the weinstein scandal. she used these groups “to keep up with it, because i wanted to see what people were saying about work conditions.” however, a number of women pointed out how women had “always” shared information about harassers – “a misogynistic or inappropriate colleague or supervisor” – in networks of women, including facebook groups; as hillary stated, “what was once only happening within the groups is now happening outside of them as well.” caitlyn explained further: what i find me too [sic] did was make public conversations that my peer group were having privately in person about the harassers in our academic and literary circles. we had been passing this knowledge as gossip, now it's news (emphasis added). caitlyn went on to say how private facebook groups played a significant role in keeping the #metoo movement rolling forward once it went viral: [the #metoo conversations] carried into private groups where people organized and discussed what they wanted to do in public… it gave people the freedom to react, but also to plan the public response they wanted to give with input from others. a key point is that these stories of harassment and discrimination, both before and after #metoo, raised awareness of the systemic nature of the problem and, crucially, empowered women to act. abigail explained: discovering that has been both, like, super depressing and disempowering on the one hand to find out, like, ‘omg we’re almost all experiencing this,’ this is so depressing and hopeless. but the flipside of it is, ‘ohmygosh, we are not alone and together we can start to build a new reality.’ not only did women share their experiences of gender discrimination at work, they also gave each other advice for dealing with specific issues, for instance, what steps to take with hr when a boss makes repeated uncomfortable comments. thus, facebook groups served as “incubators” for public outing of harassers, as well as leading to more personal consequences for harassers, that impacted not just individuals, but whole industries of women. beyond sharing pay information and harassment stories, women used these groups as incubators for other actions beyond the groups’ borders. for instance, a number of groups organized activist campaigns for specific issues that members were having. others organized panel discussions at industry conferences with members of the groups. for example, sophie organized a panel for editors on “really harmful and regressive stereotypes” found in reality tv after conversations with women in the group. a few groups were used to “correspond and coordinate responses to things that happen to us online” (nicole), such as harassment. michelle explained how, if someone saw something “blatantly endorsing of sexual harassment” in a coed group, for example, women in the women-only group would “flock over there” and start posting arguments on the post. also, if a woman was “getting a hard time” in a coed group, women would “rally the troops” and get members from women-only group to go support her virtually with supportive comments and argue with her harassers, in what kim called a “pile on” of defending somebody. equally important was the incubation of confidence that was raised through consciousness-raising in private facebook groups; as abigail explained “it built up this great confidence in me that i could voice my opinion in mixed spaces.” she went on to say how she also started speaking up at work about things that bothered her or she found offensive, for instance, when there was a particularly stereotypical storyline in a show she was working on. abigail stressed the importance of women-only groups in building up her confidence through the creation of community and sharing experiences: i couldn’t have started out talking about this stuff in public, because when i tried to do that, i was just shut down and made to feel insecure, so it’s like i needed that incubator for me to grow my confidence, learn who my allies were, build my tribe, my circle of support, in order to have the confidence to speak publicly and not get the wind knocked out of me. thus, private facebook groups for women professionals served as consciousness- raising spaces for sharing experiences that then led to tangible action beyond the groups’ borders. i asked the women about what constituted feminist practices online. the women were largely dismissive of “feminist” online efforts, making distinctions between “slacktivism” – that is, “liking” and “posting” about women’s rights – and actually doing activism. a number of the women spoke of their own actions as not feminist enough, or at least not feminist in the context of women-only facebook groups; marisa asserted “i know i’m not as active as i could be. like attending these marches or raising money for planned parenthood...” kim saw her feminist activism online as arguing with men in mixed spaces, (“being a social justice warrior”), but she viewed what she did in private facebook groups as just having “conversations.” despite these dismissals of their own actions, the activities of women in private facebook groups had “very practical and personal implications beyond the group” (coco) for women as a collective. as caitlyn explained: i see some real action in these groups with payrate sheets, offers to vet resumes/pitches/etc., encouraging women to step forward for particular roles in workplaces...it has made a big difference in the number of job opportunities i see, for instance, and i do wonder what effect that has on the total number of women even just applying for these roles. (emphasis added) as mackinnon ( , p. ) stated, “consciousness-raising…shows women their situation in a way that affirms they can act to change it.” activities in private facebook groups made women’s individual lives better, but the groups also spurned collective action that created “erosive social change” (vivienne, , p. ) for the benefit of other women professionally. crossing boundaries: the importance of offline spaces closed facebook groups do not exist in a vacuum; as digital technology is increasingly embedded in our day to day lives, the borders between online and offline worlds become permeable (baym, ). indeed, a number of the groups in my study had offline components, showing how “virtual communities are often simply the online extension of geographically situated offline communities” (parks, , p. ). some online groups started from an offline gathering of women; the smallest group was started by eight women who all knew each other offline. they began having monthly meetings to talk about their careers, but then found that “people’s schedules were really hard to coordinate” so they moved to facebook, which enabled them to “talk to each other all the time any time.” conversely, a number of the groups that had started as online spaces later started holding regular meetings in real life; these were particularly valuable for meeting local “like-minded ladies,” because when “everyone knows each other” in real life it’s easier to share gigs or “refer someone.” these meet-ups deepened the connections that women felt within their digital communities; as coco mused, “the group was created online as a point of connection, but the part that makes it feel authentic is the in-person meetings.” most of the time, people from local groups met up for professional networking- type events, to “talk shop”; however, occasionally, some groups were used for more personal reasons, such as meeting up with other “trusted” women while travelling. marisa even stayed with women that she had never met in person, but knew through these groups, when she went on vacation to mexico and france. thus, the groups provided tools for different types of virtual connections, but did not fully replace in-person connections, which were still deemed very valuable by women professionals. conclusion closed facebook groups for professional women serve multiple purposes. they are a virtual “old boys’ club” for women, used for networking and career resources; they are “safe spaces” where women can talk with each other comfortably and find their own voices; and they are “mediated consciousness-raising platforms” where women “incubate” actions to take beyond the groups’ borders (for individual empowerment and collective change). so, many activities in private facebook groups spur actions that reduce gender inequality and promote the interests of women in the work context, working ultimately to end sexist oppression. the fourth wave is often discussed in the sense of a distinct generational break; fourth wave feminists are seen as young, media-savvy activists, who are interested in different core issues to the previous waves. benn ( ) argues that what is most unusual about the fourth wave is how “predominantly cultural” the issues raised by young feminists are. that is, fourth wavers tend to focus on representation, sexualization, and violence against women, rather than material feminist concerns, such as the pay gap and other economic issues. however, this research shows that private facebook groups for professional women are actually very much about economic concerns (what benn typifies as “second wave”), particularly in the efforts around closing the pay gap. thus, this case study troubles the demarcation of certain issues as second wave or third wave, showing instead how feminist “waves [are] overlapping and operating simultaneously” (rivers, , p. ). these findings highlight how social media can and do provide affordances for everyday feminist practices, even though these groups are not overtly designated as “political” or “feminist.” as one of my participants, hillary, noted, “to me, these groups are feminist – creating spaces for women to be women and support each other and counteract the patriarchy. but it’s not explicit in the message.” it is important to think critically about the goals of these groups in terms of individual success and collective effort. on the surface, these groups are highly individualistic – after all, women join them predominantly for individual career support. there are places where “empowerment” and “choice” – postfeminist buzzwords – abound. and they are all about self-branding and self-promotion to succeed at one’s career goals. at the same time, however, these groups are collectivist spaces, that are being used to disrupt patriarchal social structures, for instance, through challenging norms around workplace harassment, demanding better pay, and ensuring more women are hired in particular industries. private facebook groups are, in practice, then used for both individual empowerment and collective dismantling of the system of sexist oppression. however, it is also important to note the limitations of private facebook groups as feminist spaces. these groups reaffirm whiteness, heteronormativity, cisgender identity, and middle-class values as normative, because they “create social worlds that retain ideologies born of physical, temporal, and social beliefs” (noble & tynes, , p. ). in addition, the digital divide creates access issues to the internet for poor, less educated women in rural areas (smith & anderson, ). thus, it is important to recognize that the benefits of private facebook groups are not equally available to all. further troubling the emancipatory potential of these groups is the fact that interactions on social networking sites are “always labor” (cirucci, ). women contribute emotional labor by engaging in discussions in private facebook groups – labor that is not required of men who have naturalized access to supportive career networks and opportunities in their offline lives. what is more, as much as these groups are touted as “private,” it is important to recognize that conversations within these groups are never truly confidential because of the “surveillance network” nature of facebook as a platform, “which [is] regulated and searchable, and can be forced to provide information to government agencies” (shaw, , p. ). in addition, hooks ( ) argues that feminism should include men. women separating from men to discuss their issues does not change hegemonic power structures, where men are unaware and/or unwilling to take part in systemic changes to reduce gender inequality. for instance, as men still hold most of the positions of power (in leadership, management, etc.), it is important that they become aware of discrimination issues that women face at work and that they start considering diversity in hiring and promotional practices. the onus cannot be on women to drive all the changes for a just and equal society. chapter #metoo, twitter affordances, and feminist outcomes: “why is it so hard to just believe women?!” introduction on october , , actor alyssa milano tweeted: “me too. suggested by a friend: ‘if all the women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.’ if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” milano’s tweet came in the wake of the storm of sexual harassment allegations against hollywood producer harvey weinstein. earlier that month, the new york times and the new yorker ran explosive investigative reports, detailing decades of harassment and abuse of female entertainment industry workers by weinstein (farrow, ; kantor & twohey, ). these reports fueled public conversations, including commentary both in mainstream media and on social media, around women’s experiences of harassment and assault – not only in the glamorous film industry, but in “ordinary” workplaces, too. perhaps not surprisingly, given the social climate, milano’s timely tweet quickly went viral. in the first hours after she tweeted, the hashtag #metoo had been tweeted almost half a million times (gilbert, ); within nine days, it had reached . million tweets and was being used in countries (park, ). this enormous volume of tweets in such a short period of time highlighted the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and abuse in women’s lives all around the globe. in the following months, women called out a string of powerful men in media and entertainment industries – including comedian louis ck, actor danny masterson, and nbc anchor matt lauer – for sexual misconduct in the workplace (de & ceron, ). many of the accused have faced career repercussions – being fired from their shows or having distribution platforms such as netflix and hbo refuse to air their products. conversations using #metoo on social media discussed these high-profile scandals alongside women’s expressions of their own harassment experiences. although much of the public scandal around the hashtag was focused on the workplace, many of the stories shared using #metoo on social media discussed sexual harassment and abuse in spaces outside the workplace, including in dating situations, at home, and in public spaces, such as cat calling on streets. throughout , major entertainment industry events, such as the golden globes and the oscars were dominated by discussions of #metoo – on the red carpet, on stage, and in the associated media buzz. indeed, research shows that #metoo stands out as “uniquely viral” compared to other hashtags documenting sexual harassment and abuse, such as #yesallwomen and #everydaysexism (ohlheiser, ); the data also show that #metoo has been a sustained, stable conversation on twitter – a platform where conversations frequently fizzle out – for over a year. #metoo is an example of “hashtag activism” (gunn, ), a form of online protest using hashtags to draw attention to social justice issues; more specifically, #metoo is an example of “hashtag feminism.” digital feminist scholars argue that hashtag feminism (such as #yesallwomen and #whyistayed) has significant discursive power, shedding light on and challenging normative discourse about issues such as violence against women and rape culture (barker-plummer & barker-plummer, ; clark, ; jackson, bailey & foucault welles, ). feminists scholars have shown how these hashtags form networks in which: women tell their own stories, women are believed, male and celebrity allies helped to elevate ordinary women’s voices, and women — experts in their own lives — offer nuance to all too often oversimplified and inaccurately reported issues of violence and victimhood (jackson, bailey, and foucault welles, ). however, hashtag feminism is not without its problems, perhaps most notably the harassment and threats from trolls that feminists face as a result of speaking up about women’s issues online (cole, ; eckert, ). also, survivors (of rape, abuse, etc.) can be negatively affected (e.g., triggered) by exposure to hashtag feminism (woods, ). literature on hashtag feminism focuses primarily on meanings and themes within tweets themselves, using methods such as “feminist discourse analysis” (clark, ) or “hashtag ethnography” (bonilla & rosa, ) – without much focus on the materiality of the twitter platform itself. eckert and steiner ( ) list the following as “dimensions and functions” of hashtags: searchability, collectability and archiveability; information sharing; visibility, especially of women of color and diversity; consciousness- raising and awareness of women’s issues; mutual support and collaboration; critique of dominant narratives; dissemination of counter- narratives; direct address to journalists, companies, politicians and the public; calls for action; international outreach and pressure; creation of attention; and speed and convenience of use” (p. ) however, in reality, it is a range of technical features and functionalities (beyond the hashtag itself) of twitter that work together in creating these “dimensions and functions” or affordances, and in shaping hashtag feminism. so, it is important to pay attention to the full materiality of the medium when analyzing “hashtag feminism.” to address this gap in the literature, this chapter provides a textual analysis of #metoo tweets alongside an analysis of the affordances of twitter (both the low-level features and the high-level communicative possibilities) to understand how twitter as a whole mediates the formation of a social movement. this material approach combined with textual analysis maps the “sociotechnical shaping of issue publics” (burgess & matamorosa-fernandez, , p. ) around the issue of sexual assault and harassment. the data for this chapter come from a random sample of tweets from the first week of the movement, starting with october , and ending with october , . i randomly sampled tweets from the homepage of twitter for each day that week; the corpus for analysis consisted of , pages of tweets – including pictures, links, replies, comments, etc. alongside this affordance analysis, i conducted a textual analysis of the tweets, looking for patterns and themes in the discussions around #metoo. the findings show that the affordances of twitter manifest in four feminist outcomes around sexual harassment and assault: ) empowerment and expression for individual survivors; ) support and solidarity by allies; ) societal awareness of the issue, including providing context and debate; and; ) information/resource sharing for actions beyond social media. these feminist outcomes occur both at the level of the individual (for instance, in empowering women to break their silence) and at the collective level (for example, publicly challenging societal myths that support rape culture). it is important to note that these categories overlap substantially in the discourse – for instance, the act of a survivor sharing a story using #metoo can have multiple simultaneous outcomes, including promoting solidarity, raising awareness, and dismantling the status quo. these categories of outcomes are only presented separately in this chapter for analytical purposes. this study shows that, as twitter has moved from being a text-based medium to a multi-media format (allowing images, urls, emoji, etc.), it increasingly provides various affordances – such as posting screengrabs – that help effectively and publicly present evidence and build credibility in sexual assault and harassment discourse. this is particularly important given the context of sexual assault survivors frequently not being believed (manne, ). twitter is a “personal public” space, meaning that interaction on it can be “at once intensely personal and highly public” (weller et al., , p. xxxii). overall, this chapter shows how the blurring of private and public on twitter means that the personal becomes increasingly political, through everyday uses of social media. empowerment and expression on twitter the hashtag #metoo is, at the most basic level, “an easily personalized storytelling prompt” (clark, , p. ), which helps elicit and focus survivors’ stories. through the use of the hashtag, individual women were encouraged to share their experiences, essentially “‘announcing’ oneself” (eckert & steiner, , p. ) to the public as a survivor. one primary outcome of #metoo was the cathartic, individual benefit of ending the silence around sexual assault and abuse for survivors. many users chose to simply tweet the words #metoo as their status without further elaboration on the circumstances of their experience. others shared more details, such as what happened, who the perpetrator was (in general terms – a neighbor, a boyfriend – or in more specific terms, naming names or identifying the person through their relationship, e.g., my father), at what age the harassment happened, how people reacted, how they feel now, and so on. the experiences ranged from discomfort, such as unwelcome sexual comments from colleagues at work, to instances of violent rape. for example, one user wrote: “i was or . he was an adult neighbor. he stopped just shy of fully penetrating rape. there, now that’s a thing that you know. #metoo.” some users listed the lasting repercussions on their lives to highlight the severity of sexual assault: “#metoo. i can’t stand being touched. i only walk behind people. i don’t like sleeping in front of windows. it’s hard to sleep in the dark.” some users wrote more abstract poems or musings exploring their feelings and reactions rather than concrete facts of their experiences. yet other chose to share images, emoji, or gifs, such as the below (figure ), while others chose to film themselves discussing their experiences or to share songs that particularly resonated with them regarding their assault. figure . a #metoo tweet using a gif. thus, twitter provided a variety of low-level affordances for sharing stories in multiple formats – including words, images, videos, and emoji– encouraging creative, individual expression of thoughts and feelings around sexual assault and abuse. negotiating the constraints of twitter’s character limit during the first week of the #metoo movement, the character limit of twitter posts was characters, including words, hashtags, emoji, and urls (in november , twitter increased the limit of posts to characters). so, sharing an assault or harassment story on twitter was, theoretically, limited to a sentence or two, along with the hashtag #metoo. however, the character limit of twitter did not stop those who wanted to share their stories in more words. the variety of ways that users negotiated this constraint – an example of shaw’s ( ) “negotiated use” of a technology – are detailed below. one popular way of saying more despite the constraints of twitter’s character limit was for users to post numbered consecutive status updates or / , / , etc., so that others could read their full story as a series of tweets on their profile page. another way of showing continuation of tweets was using ellipses at the end of one tweet and at the start of the next one. tweets are time-stamped to the minute, but when a user tweets quickly in succession it is often within the same minute, so these tactics were necessary to show chronological progression of thoughts in a thread. also, though tweets do appear on the user’s page in chronological order, the home page of twitter randomly selects tweets – so a tweet from the middle of a longer thread was often shown out of context on the home page. the ellipses or numbering thus signaled to audiences scrolling twitter’s home page that they would need to go into the original poster’s profile page thread to see the story in full. a number of users even wrote *thread* or thread alongside the numbers ( / , / ) to more overtly signal the start of a longer message over multiple tweets. others creatively used the affordance of being able to post images to share much longer, more complicated statements. here, users took screenshots of longer stories (using many more than the characters allowed) that they had previously written in the “notes” section of their smart phone, in a word document or in an email, and then posted this screenshot as a single tweet. even though technically images were being posted, these were pictures of words, allowing for detailed stories to be shared. for instance, on october , olympic gymnast mckayla maroney shared her story about being molested by dr. larry nassar, the olympic team doctor. she shared an image of a statement that she had typed out on a page. users tweeted not only pictures of screenshots of typed out words but also pictures of words created through other mediums, such as handwritten pages. the feminist outcome of this “hacking” of the twitter character limit was that marginalized voices that had long been silenced had the space to speak, and, most importantly, to speak their stories in detail, to express themselves more fully and with more nuance than a simple -character tweet would allow. screenshots as evidence in the #metoo discourse the ability to post screenshots as a twitter status not only provided individuals with more physical space to share their detailed stories, but also allowed survivors to provide evidence of sexual harassment. survivors frequently shared screenshots of private conversations they had had over text, instant messaging, or email. for instance, one transgender woman posted two pictures of a text conversation she had had with a straight male acquaintance. this conversation started innocently discussing a recent get- together with friends, but soon the man started being sexually inappropriate and commenting on how beautiful she was. the woman posted this conversation to twitter with the caption “here’s a taste of sexual harassment i’ve received as a transgender woman #metoo #transwomenarewomen.” at the bottom of the screenshot she wrote “if anyone ever tells you that transgender women aren’t real women or that we don’t experience life like cis women do, feel free to show them this. in addition to transphobia, we are subject to the same misogyny, sexism, and harassment that cis women are.” these screenshots provided a firsthand account of sexual harassment, bolstering the credibility of the survivor’s claims and allowing her audience to be a direct witness to her experience. in addition, this tweet showed the importance of intersectionality (crenshaw, ), highlighting awareness of another social issue – the exclusion of trans women in discourses of sexual harassment and assault in general. ultimately, this screenshot served a double purpose, of building credibility for the individual story of sexual harassment and of building credibility specifically for trans women’s stories of sexual harassment, collectively. the above poster shared her private conversation with the name of her harasser blacked out, maintaining his anonymity and using the post to focus on her experience, rather than on calling him out. many users, however, used the ability to post screenshots not only to reinforce their accounts of harassment, but also to name perpetrators. below, the user shared a private email including the name of the harasser (figure ): figure . a #metoo tweet that names names. the naming of names further bolstered the claims of survivors, by showing how real, verifiable people, not just faceless, nameless harassers, were responsible for sexual harassment and abuse. a few users even went so far as to post photographs of their abusers alongside their names. this had a similar effect to how sources “going on record” in journalistic reporting increases the veracity of a story, compared to using anonymous sources (berkowitz, ). the practice of naming names, within screenshots and otherwise in tweets, also served as a practical warning system for other women to avoid harassers and abusers. of course, naming names is risky, inviting possible retaliation from both the accused and from spectators. acknowledging this risk, many in the twitter community commented on statuses like the one above praising the poster on their bravery in sharing names. not surprisingly, many users actively chose not to share the names or identities of their abusers publicly. on one exchange, after someone revealed that they had been molested by a family member, another user asked them what the relation of the family member was. the original user responded, “no, sorry, but i don’t want to bring that info onto social media.” so, survivors showed varying degrees of comfort in how much they shared on a public medium like twitter. they often withheld certain information from their stories in order to maintain privacy. however, many additionally chose to share very detailed stories while not disclosing information about themselves, in order to maintain anonymity. discussed below are some creative uses of twitter’s features and functionalities to share #metoo stories while remaining largely anonymous. anonymity as an affordance for safely sharing stories a way of sharing publicly but not specifically to one’s own followers – thus maintaining some degree of anonymity – was to comment on others’ tweets to share one’s own experiences. for instance, one user wrote on someone else’s thread: “i could never write this on my page. but the only male attention i ever received was from my father from ages - ” (emphasis added). another (male) user commented repeatedly on a thread highlighting how men and boys suffer from abuse too, saying “sorry for all these replies interrupting your thread. just feels like a safe space to put some of this awfulness i’ve been pushing down.” because “twitter can be used strategically to achieve different levels of publicness and publicity” (bruns & moe, ), users had the benefit of cathartically sharing their own stories and showing solidarity without the repercussions of being identifiable in their own social media space. creating profiles on twitter is another feature of the platform that allows for users to maintain anonymity. users do not have to use their real photos or names in creating a twitter account (in contrast to facebook’s “real name” policy) and so can maintain anonymity, while still being able to share their #metoo stories. some survivors asked other twitter users to share on their behalf. one male user shared: “someone close to me wanted to write a thread for #metoo but couldn’t bring herself to do it; she can use my voice instead.” he then went on to recount two instances of his friend’s sexual assault, in the first person. this allowed the survivor to share her story – to get it out there – without being identified. being able to share publicly but anonymously is particularly important for women. women endure both higher levels of online harassment, particularly when they talk about women’s issues (lewis, rowe, & wiper, ) and higher levels of sexual assault (“victims of sexual violence: statistics,” n.d) – a crime that is vastly under- reported because victims are rarely believed and frequently blamed for their abuse. the affordance of anonymous sharing available through twitter, then, allows women to both avoid online harassment and to not suffer the blame and credibility issues of sharing a sexual assault story as a known entity. the importance of images in sexual assault discourse on the other hand, many users regardless shared images of themselves as part of their #metoo status; this ability to post photos was another affordance that lent credibility to survivors and provided evidence of sexual assault and abuse. for instance, childhood sexual abuse survivors shared photos of themselves as children. one user shared a photo of herself with her dog, writing that she was at the time the photo was taken and “already a survivor of months of abuse.” she went on to say: “this is why moralizing crap about ‘the importance of modesty’ gets me especially hard. i was a little girl when it first happened to me.” by pairing photos of children with memories of abuse, users pushed the sexual assault narrative away from victim blaming (how could an innocent child be complicit in her abuse) and also highlighted how the problem lasted throughout a lifetime. the affordance of being able to post photos on twitter can thus be seen as a “tool for contesting victim-blaming” (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). another user, a journalist, shared a graphic selfie of her face after she was beaten during a sexual assault. the photograph – showing a close-up of her face bleeding profusely, a gaping wound on her eyebrow – was powerful visual evidence of the violence of sexual assault. this photo illustrated “how the seemingly vacuous practice of taking “selfies” (i.e., photos of oneself) can become politically meaningful” (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). sometimes survivors shared images not of themselves, but of symbols that reflected their identities, using ethos (convincing the audience of the credibility of the author) as a persuasion strategy to represent their experiences as valid. one female veteran shared an image that boosted her credentials as an honorable, respectable, believable human (figure ). the act of speaking out on twitter (which included words, images, gifs, videos, and emoji) about experiences that had been unspeakable for so long was empowering to survivors, who frequently expressed how using the #metoo hashtag “actually felt kind of freeing.” twitter being an “immediate” platform, with real- time, public posting, lent urgency to the sharing of these stories. many users explicitly evoked time as part of their statuses: “now is the time to speak,” “today it ends,” “we’ve kept silent for too long, no more.” one user even used the hashtag #notmyshameanymore as part of their #metoo status. using #metoo seemed personally beneficial to individuals, a cathartic, confessional act that enabled victims to work through shame and denial that had not been previously expressed. what’s more, using the hashtag allowed them to do this publicly, with the support of others. figure . a #metoo tweet aiming to prove credibility of character. most importantly, instances of sexual assault and harassment reporting have increased significantly since #metoo (chiwaya, ) and have been attributed to the movement. as bell hooks ( ) pointed out years ago, “daring women to speak out, to tell our stories, has been one of the central life-transforming aspects of feminist movement” (p. ); #metoo indeed transformed lives, empowering women individually not only to “speak” on social media, but to act offline. solidarity and support: building connections through twitter strength found in numbers, such as in the #metoo campaign, is “crowdsourcing power” (manne, , p. ) which brings about “social support itself, as well as the prospect of enhanced pattern recognition” (p. , emphasis added). through the connective potential of twitter, users could support survivors sharing #metoo stories. this support came from allies and from other survivors. using trending hashtags such as #metoo to share common experiences also resulted in “feminist cataloguing” (ahmed, ) where, as women, “we begin to identify how what happens to me, happens to others. we begin to identify patterns and regularities” (ahmed, ). that is, hashtags can connect people having similar experiences; #metoo materialized this affordance to “promote gendered solidarity” (berridge & portwood-stacer, , p. ). this section discusses the affordances of twitter that allow for support from allies and solidarity among survivors. supporting survivors: affordances for digital care twitter as a platform provided multiple affordances for others to show support to those sharing stories of sexual abuse and harassment. the most obvious way for allies to show support was to click on the “heart” reaction button to statuses that posted #metoo; #metoo posts usually received a lot of “hearts” indicating virtual support. interestingly, even people with very few followers on twitter got an outpouring of support from strangers. for instance, the user @niasis has only followers, but her tweet in the #metoo conversation, sharing that she suffered ptsd (post-traumatic stress disorder) after being raped, garnered “hearts.” this highlights how the hashtag #metoo, because it is searchable and indexes stories around the same topic, affords the expression of support from strangers, widening the circle of caring around survivors. however, many users noted how the ability to “heart” (“like”) posts was a constraint of twitter’s design for showing support for difficult topics, as one user details below (figure ): figure . a tweet noting the lack of suitable affordances for showing support in #metoo. given the problems of “liking” people’s abuse stories, users adopted other means to support a #metoo tweet. one more appropriate way of showing support was commenting on a #metoo post with supportive words. some simply tweeted #metoo or “i’m so sorry;” others tweeted messages of solidarity, such as “i have been there” and “you are not alone.” yet others thanked and praised the posters for their bravery in sharing, encouraging others to do the same: “speaking publicly takes real courage. good for you.” others used internet or text speak, such as xoxo (kiss hug kiss hug), ygg (you go girl), or “i’m glad u r here and hope the very best u,” more easily adhering to the -character limit of twitter while expressing support. much of the support came from internet-specific low-level affordances that are incorporated into twitter as a platform. aside from using words in the comments, many chose to use emoji to symbolically show their care, such as the praying hands emoji, the hugging face emoji, the sad face emoji, and the heart emoji. some used emoji such as the power fist bump, a flexing bicep, or clapping hands. these emoji correspond with non- verbal gestures signaling support and strength, enriching the communicative nuance potential of computer-mediated communication (derks, fischer, & bos, ; lo, ). others used additional hashtags such #womenwhoroar, #hugs, #bestwishes, #ibelieveyou, in conjunction with #metoo, to show their support for the victims. some of these (such as #womenwhoroar) were trending tags that collated stories around a particular topic related to #metoo; others, such as #hugs or #keepfighting, were responses not connected to any specific movement or event, but simply a general gesture of care. the twitter community often schooled users on the various affordances that the platform provided to allies, as detailed in the interaction in figure . users could also show support by retweeting somebody’s #metoo statement, signaling tacit support of the original poster. retweeting simultaneously served another function: making the original tweet visible to one’s own followers, thus amplifying the sole voice of the survivor and bringing increased awareness to the issue. importantly, retweeting means that references to other users are “visible” but also “navigable.” that is, “people can follow the retweet link to see the context of a conversation or the background of a particular user” (schmidt, , p. ). through retweeting, then, allies not only increased awareness but allowed new supporters access to the original poster, widening the possible circle of support. figure . a tweet suggesting suitable user responses to #metoo. care was also expressed in the images tweeted using #metoo. many included pictures of people holding hands in solidarity or multiple hands raised in fists, visually linking the movement to political solidarity and standing together. other common reactions were “virtual hugs” gifs or still images in the comments section (figure ). because many users use photographs of themselves as their profile pictures, this “real person” support could also be automatically created simply through commenting on or liking a post. every time a user posted #metoo, their post would show up in the twitter feed with a numerical and symbol summary of the retweets and likes that post had garnered. but clicking on someone’s post and maximizing that thread showed the above symbols, next to worded documentation ( retweets, likes) and icons of ten profile pictures of the users who had liked that post. thus, the poster not only got validation in the form of metrics (number of likes and retweets), but also was provided visible support from actual people (as verified by their profile pictures). figure . a “virtual hug” gif used frequently in the #metoo discourse. aside from lending human faces to the virtual support for victims, gender embodiment, visible in profile pictures, was an important tool for lending credibility to the movement. for example, men who used their real photos and names on twitter tweeted support for the movement from a male perspective. their real names and pictures, verifying their masculinity, showed how male allies were important to the movement. they wrote messages such as “guys, it’s up to us to educate ourselves and other men and boys so no girl or woman ever has to say #metoo,” showing how gendered sexual assault and harassment are not just a women’s issue. the feature of direct messaging (dm), which allows two users who follow each other to message each other privately on twitter, was also used to offer support. people often commented on #metoo statuses stating that the poster should dm them if they wanted to talk to somebody. so, survivors had both public support and the opportunity for further private support using the twitter platform. the twitter community supported both survivors who had tweeted #metoo and those who hadn’t. some users were adamant about the need to encourage other survivors to speak, for instance, one user wrote, “speak your truth even if your voice shakes.” supporters were vocal in helping those who thought their stories were not big or important or severe enough to tweet #metoo. the below image (figure ) encouraging women with “small” stories to speak out was widely circulated, often with written words of encouragement such as “all stories are significant.” yet others acknowledged that survivors did not owe anyone their stories, and tweeted support for the “silent survivors” too. one user wrote “for those carrying their #metoo with them silently, you are loved, cherished, and believed. you do not owe your story to anyone.” these tweets recognized that not everybody would be comfortable sharing on twitter, but that they could get support there anyway, through reading the messages of support collated using the #metoo hashtag. figure . a frequently used illustration tweeted during the #metoo movement to show that all sexual assault stories deserve to be heard. it must be noted that the public sharing of #metoo stories did not always create an outpouring of support. some users shared that they had lost followers (a literal withdrawing of support/interest) since they posted their stories. one wrote “wow. since i posted my #metoo, i’ve lost almost followers. not sure if that says more about them or me. either way, i won’t be silent.” thus, although the twitter community was largely supportive of the #metoo movement, there was some backlash from and for individual users. a lot of support for the #metoo movement came not only from individuals, but also from a diverse range of organizations, such as the u.s. navy, the u.s. olympic team, women’s health magazine, and girl scouts. some organizations stated their support outright, for instance, the department of women in south africa tweeted, “department of women supports #metoo campaign. we encourage women to speak out on the heinous crimes committed against them. @governmentza.” some organizations, instead of tweeting generic messages of support chose to show support for specific cases. for instance, naral pro-choice america (a pro-choice non-profit) tweeted their support for one of their employees (figure ). figure . a tweet from naral pro-choice america expressing support for one of their employees as a survivor of sexual assault. many of the organizations were non-profits or government entities concerned with social justice and women’s issues (e.g., the national sexual violence resource center, un women, planned parenthood) and so their support for #metoo was not surprising – they posted pictures of phrases (“you are believed #metoo), links to their organization websites, quotes from their leaders, and so on, to show care and provide resources to survivors. however, there were many posts from “neutral” organizations or even organizations that had a negative valence in the #metoo discourse. for instance, cambridgeshire police tweeted the following: “if you have been a victim of sexual assault you can report it to us. you will be believed #metoo.” this statement directly addressed one common complaint of survivors of sexual assault: that going to the police to report sexual assault is often not taken seriously. thus, cambridgeshire police’s tweet did double work, of supporting victims and also directly challenging hegemonic discourse around police not accepting sexual assault as a serious crime. these organizations used official logos as their profile pictures – such as the green girl scouts logo – and their accounts were verified (the little blue check next to their name confirms that twitter has independently found the account to be authentic) showing that official, established organizations supported survivors. in this way, the voices of millions of ordinary women were supported and amplified by well-known organizations and entities around the world, lending increased legitimacy and credibility to the #metoo movement in the public sphere. https://www.cambs.police.uk/ https://www.cambs.police.uk/ https://www.cambs.police.uk/ https://www.cambs.police.uk/ https://www.cambs.police.uk/ https://www.cambs.police.uk/ solidarity: connecting survivors and consciousness-raising many users expressed how hard it was to talk about their experiences of harassment and abuse and how reluctant they were to post. in the end, however, survivors often decided to post to show solidarity with others, even if it made them personally uncomfortable, because “this wave of awareness is helping us all.” sharing individual stories bought comfort and encouragement to other survivors, who now saw, as one user wrote, that there were “so many women. i’m not alone.” through this pattern recognition, twitter became a mediated consciousness-raising platform (wood, ), allowing women to become more aware of similarities in their experiences. although different women have different experiences based on social identity factors such as race and sexuality, women as a group (which, though socially- constructed, has material, lived implications) experience sexual harassment and assault at a far greater rate than do men (“victims of sexual violence: statistics,” n.d.). the global, immediate reach of twitter allows women “to feel like they are united across both space and time” (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). so, women using #metoo connected across the world, highlighting the universality and pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault. a key low-level affordance of twitter that facilitates global connections among women is the “translate tweet” function that appears under any tweet that is written in a different language to the user’s set language preference on their account. this function allows users to translate tweets, removing linguistic barriers to solidarity between different groups of women. however, research shows that automated web-based translation features, such as google translate, are more accurate for languages that use the roman alphabet (patil & davies, ), which may have implications of exclusion of speakers of non-western languages in the #metoo discourse. in this way, linguistic barriers between western and non-western women might be amplified rather than reduced. another way that users connected across linguistic barriers was through using hashtags in other languages, such as #yotambien in spanish and #balancetonporc in french, while also using the hashtag #metoo to link the conversations happening under both hashtags together. in addition, news organizations, such as pbs.org, shared stories from around the world, such as “women in india are also saying #metoo,” amplifying awareness of the global nature of the movement. the affordance of being able to share urls and images to international audiences connected geographically distant survivors. each story shared, even though tying into the wider #metoo narrative, had a local flavor, with details relevant to that particular culture. for instance, women in india shared stories about frequent assault on public transport. in this way, local tweets produced “situated knowledges” (haraway, ) – a particular viewpoint of sexual harassment and assault from a local perspective, that nevertheless illuminated universal experiences of oppression and domination (mohanty, ). already in the s, haraway herself emphasized the need for “an earth-wide network of connections” ( , p. ) to mobilize situated knowledges – and twitter provides the infrastructure for such a network. sharing such “situated knowledges” across the globe is important for the feminist project, because it helps women to “devise ways to use each other’s difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles” (lorde, , p. ). of course, it is important to recognize that these “situated knowledges” were limited, sharing the middle- and upper-class experiences of those who have social media access and also, despite the global reach, still predominantly english-speaking survivors. twitter also has the affordance of allowing people to “mention” (by typing @username in a tweet) other twitter users in a post. this affordance notifies other users of a conversation that might be useful to them or that they might have something useful to contribute to. frequently, users carried on previous digital and offline conversations to twitter by mentioning specific people in their #metoo posts, thus connecting survivors and supporters through literally bringing them into pertinent conversations. a common way of fostering solidarity and support simultaneously was to post a selfie expressing one’s own experiences alongside a message of “standing with survivors,” as shown in figure . posting selfies had the effect of providing the support of real people – amplifying and verifying the support as coming from “real” others, rather than just the faceless “imagined audience” (litt, ) of social media. awareness, education, and debate using #metoo an important feminist outcome of the #metoo movement is awareness of sexual harassment and assault. hashtags have an “indexing function” (bonilla & rosa, ), that is, they collate all tweets that use the hashtag. because hashtags are searchable, anybody can go on twitter, search for #metoo, and be shown all the tweets that have used that hashtag. thus, hashtags provide a way of viewing all the conversations about a particular topic in one place, publicly, creating a “searchable archive of experiences” (clark, , p. ). people using the trending #metoo hashtag in their status assured that “the message has the potential to reach well beyond the user’s existing number of followers” (bruns & moe, , p. ). #metoo provided visibility to survivors in the figure . a tweeted selfie showing support for survivors of #metoo. public sphere and made tangible the pervasiveness and scope of the problem of sexual harassment and abuse through the collation, visibility, and searchability of tweets. tweets that brought awareness to sexual harassment and assault included those from survivors sharing their stories, but also those that discussed #metoo more broadly. these users did not share personal stories, but instead used the platform to comment on sexual assault and harassment. these included tweets from individuals but also tweets from organizations, particularly news organizations that reported on the movement once it became viral. awareness is important so that survivors are taken seriously and perpetrators are punished, but also so that the broad culture that supports such problematic behavior can change (clark, ). twitter affordances for scope awareness and amplification users actively reminded other users of the best ways to make sure #metoo reached the widest audience possible, showing a desire to actively and most effectively spread the message using the various features of twitter. one user copied the original #metoo post “if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote…” but then she added “p.s. it’s meaningful to see “me too” in your comments to this post, of course, but please copy this to your status as well” (emphasis added). with more people tweeting #metoo from their own accounts, the volume of tweets increased, gaining visibility for the movement. #metoo tweets frequently used numbers to provide awareness of the scope of the problem, for instance: “ in women and in men in the u.s. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. some stay silent, for that i’ll say #metoo them.” another said “every seconds, someone is sexually assaulted. it’s time to let victims know they are not alone.” graphs and other images were used as visual aids to present the scope of the problem in an easily-digestible manner. for instance, one user posted a rainn (rape, abuse & incest national network) graphic of six figures of women with one colored in green (the rest all grayed out) with the words “ out of every american women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.” the sources of the research that came up with the numbers were also presented, further boosting the credibility of the statistics, e.g., “research by cornell professor on street harassment: % of women in the us experience street harassment.” awareness of sexual assault and harassment using #metoo was amplified because social media users interact in a social media ecology (zhao et al., ); in other words, there is significant reciprocity across various social media platforms. for instance, % of twitter users also use facebook (smith & anderson, ). accordingly, many users engaged in cross-platform posting using the #metoo hashtag. interestingly, many did not use the feature provided by twitter and facebook that encourages users to share by clicking a button that automatically posts the same content on both platforms. users instead posted a #metoo status on facebook and, only after it had gathered some likes or comments there, they would repost a screenshot of this status onto twitter. perhaps the outpouring of support on a more private platform like facebook, where most people in a network are known to each other (boyd, ), encouraged users to share their status more publicly on twitter. one user wrote “posted this to private fb, but decided it was important to speak up here as well. thank you all who have done already. #metoo,” and then posted their facebook status, for which they had taken a screenshot of a typed-up page detailing their experience. indeed, users often alluded to the public nature of twitter and the huge visibility afforded by the platform as being part of their consideration for cross-posting. when using a hashtag, twitter users create an “imagined audience” (litt, ), because (unless an account is private) anyone who searches for that hashtag on twitter is able to view the tweet. many of the #metoo users imagined that the audience for their tweets was very large. one user posted “after my #metoo tweet, a friend asked if i ever told anyone. my response, “yes, i just told thousands.” in reality, this tweet only garnered likes and retweets ( months later when this data was collected), highlighting how affordances of platforms are often “imagined” by users (nagy & neff, ), but still guide behaviors on social media platforms. the celebrity factor of #metoo helped spread awareness of the scope of the problem for a couple reasons. firstly, alyssa milano, who sparked the viral campaign, and other famous women who tweeted #metoo have huge numbers of followers – for instance, actresses america ferrera ( k followers) and anna paquin ( k followers), journalist katie couric ( . m followers), and pop star lady gaga ( . m followers). so, celebrities tweeting #metoo automatically ensures the message is visible to millions of people. secondly, because celebrities are more newsworthy than ordinary people, legacy news organizations such as the new york times, the washington post, and the guardian paid more attention to the #metoo movement than they did to previous hashtag campaigns highlighting sexual violence, such as #yesallwomen, which did not have as many celebrities involved (ohlheiser, ). not only did legacy media cover the social media movement, they also shared their coverage, in the form of urls linking to the stories on their websites, back on twitter, using both organizational and individual journalists’ accounts. this cross-sharing amplified the conversation around sexual assault in the public sphere. news organizations also retweeted stories from other news media, expanding the discussion to a broader audience. for instance, kqed news tweeted a public letter signed by women involved in california politics (uploaded as a picture, with a link “read more at kqed.org”) and was retweeted by npr (national public radio). a number of news organizations, such as cnn, also asked audiences to text their #metoo stories directly to them, which they then collated and shared back on twitter using the official cnn account. this ensured that the individual voices of #metoo survivors were given a broader platform and a wider audience than they would have had simply sharing #metoo on their personal accounts. through these symbiotic practices between individuals and organizations, and between social and mainstream media, the scope and importance of the conversation was magnified. on october , the day after milano tweeted, a #metoo twitter moment (a feature run by twitter which posts “curated stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on twitter…. showing current topics that are popular or relevant, so you can discover what is unfolding on twitter in an instant”) was posted. the moment read: “how ‘me too’ is showing the magnitude of sexual assault,” with a picture of three fists. it was shared from the official twitter moments account, using the hashtag #metoo moments. as an officially trending feature, this moment cemented the movement as a viral phenomenon and was frequently shared by users commenting on the scope of the movement on social media itself. awareness: recognizing the history of #metoo on october , – a day after her initial viral #metoo tweet – milano posted about having been made aware of the original founder of me too: tarana burke. in , burke, a black female civil-rights activist, founded the me too movement. she started using the phrase “me too” to raise awareness of the frequent occurrence of sexual assault and to connect sexual violence survivors. public knowledge of burke’s contribution sparked discussion on twitter about why white celebrity feminists were getting credit for a movement that was in fact started by a black woman years ago. historically, women of color and their contributions have frequently been downplayed in the broad feminist movement (hooks, ), and this pattern has continued in hashtag feminism (jackson, bailey & foucault welles, ). for instance, not many people know that #yesallwomen was started by a biracial muslim woman (barker-plummer & barker-plummer, ) or how the black queer women who started #blacklivesmatter were erased from the discourse about the movement as it grew (tynes et al., ). feminist activists frequently tweeted about the importance of intersectionality (crenshaw, ) in #metoo. sophia bush wrote “as women who are for other women, we must make sure our activism is intersectional. acknowledge #taranaburke in the #metoo #wocaffirmation.” twitter users – including individual users and organizations – used two specific affordances of twitter to acknowledge burke: ) the sharing of photographs and ) mentions. users attempting to rectify the “whitewashing” of #metoo used photographs of burke as part of their tweets, specifically photographs of her in a “me too” shirt (figure ). these photos literally brought burke’s black body into the conversation, by linking her name and photograph with the hashtag, and additionally through visually linking her to the phrase on her shirt, physically asserting her place in the #metoo discourse. figure . activists tweeted pictures of tarana burke, the black founder of me too, to bring her into the #metoo conversations. another way that burke was physically “brought into” the conversation was through mentions, that is, writing a status using #metoo and tagging @taranaburke. tweets like this not only linked burke’s name to the #metoo hashtag, publicly giving her credit, but also, because she was notified of each mention, these tweets signaled support and acknowledgement to her personally. on the other hand, it is also important to consider that through such strategies, burke was brought into these conversations without her consent, reducing her agency in choosing to be part of the discourse. there is a fine line between giving credit to and including people of color and placing unwanted focus on them or forcing them to be part of the conversation (blackwell, ). awareness: the history and context of sexual assault not only did twitter users share awareness of the history of the #metoo movement, they also tweeted about the historical context of sexual assault and harassment more broadly. many shared stories of previous generations of women, showing how sexual assault and harassment are not modern phenomena: “even my grandmother was harassed as a teenager. it has to stop. and my grandmother was born in .” users posted both about the past and about the future. a number of women shared pictures of their daughters, or of themselves and their daughters, with captions such as: “let’s vow to use our voices & strength for our daughters & sisters. this stops now. let’s trend: #nother.” the ability to use a combination of hashtags in one tweet, and so cross- index topics, was an important affordance that helped contextualize #metoo in broader societal discussions, what bonilla and rosa ( , p. ) call “the interdiscursive capacity to lasso accompanying texts and their indexical meanings as part of a frame.” one user shared a tweet of herself and her daughter, standing together, with the mom’s shirt stating #metoo and the daughter’s stating #feminist (figure ). this tweet used multiple hashtags and mentions to contextualize #metoo within the women’s movement, linking #metoo with feminism, the more generic “resist,” as well as mentioning the specific account for the women’s march. it also visually linked #metoo to the wider feminist movement in the two hashtags on the mom’s and daughter’s attire, as well as visually showing the generational continuance of sexual assault and harassment in the photographic representation of two generations of women. figure . a tweet using various affordances of twitter to connect #metoo to broader social movements. beyond personal histories, many linked #metoo to historical events highlighting sexual harassment, such as the bill clinton and monica lewinsky scandal. an interesting way of bringing this past event into the present was through users posting photos of old newspaper pages with headlines of the scandal from (figure ). this combination of old media and new media literally placed the past in the current context. further, because the newspaper front pages were from reputable legacy media, the posters automatically built credibility into their claims. figure . a tweet of a photo of a newspaper reporting on bill clinton’s impeachment following the lewinsky scandal, contextualizing #metoo within a historical context. historical context was also created through users tweeting urls to news stories about the distant past and contextualizing them in the present #metoo movement. for instance, the washington post published a story about a slave who murdered her abusive owner and users shared it widely, commenting how it was an early version of #metoo reckoning. a number of articles were shared with black and white photos, for instance, of women campaigning against sexual harassment in the early s. another photo that was shared frequently in media think pieces was that of anita hill testifying against clarence thomas. miss representation, an account for a non-profit organization advocating for fair representation of women in the media, tweeted a san francisco chronicle article, with a black and white photo of hill (visually placing her in the past) with the headline “#metoo – believing survivors of sexual abuse should always be trending.” tweets actively linking images and words from the past to #metoo on twitter showed the importance of contextualizing issues like sexual assault and bringing awareness to the historical roots of the current movement. these showed how #metoo and other hashtag feminist campaigns such as #yesallwomen can be conceptualized “not simply as isolated contemporary phenomena but as long-standing systematic forms of violence …” (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). the ability to screenshot was another way that users brought history into the #metoo conversation, as is seen in figure . here, the user used a screenshot of a wikipedia page and used the cursor function to highlight a particular part of the page that talked about writer and activist emma goldman’s rape. the user then started a thread, commenting on her initial status, explicitly stating how the current movement should highlight the experiences of women from the past who could not write #metoo for themselves, by using the hashtag #hertoo. through uses of the hashtag #hertoo and #nother alongside #metoo, users not only spread awareness of the problem to wider society, but also provided support both to future and past generations who were not taking part in this current moment. figure . tweeting screenshots of wikipedia and highlighting were used to contextualize the #metoo movement historically. dismantling the status quo: challenging rape myths not only was #metoo used to spread awareness of the scope and historical context of sexual assault and harassment, the movement was also used to challenge pervasive myths of rape culture, such as justifying men’s bad behavior with “boys will be boys” and victim-blaming women, for instance, by focusing on what they were wearing during their assault. many users criticized how the discourse focused on survivors and instead called for the creation of new hashtags to flip the focus onto perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault and make them accountable: “so there’s #metoo, but i’d also like to have a hashtag where men admit to harassing and abusing women. cause for every me there’s a he.” one user suggested “instead of calling it #violenceagainstwomen we start calling it #maleviolence;” yet others suggested #himthough and #ididthat. thus, the low-level affordance of using multiple hashtags in one post brought attention to the multiple actors involved in cases of assault and harassment. the difficulty that sexual assault and harassment victims experienced in being believed was a frequent topic of #metoo conversation. one user tweeted how she was “tired of having to prove that it happens…why is it so hard to just believe women?!” the response to this tweet was: “because sometimes they lie.” libertarian journalist john ziegler expanded on this, “gee, i wonder if this #metoo hashtag might facilitate some false accusations & culture which creates more wrongful convictions” #scarystuff.” to counter this common criticism of the movement—that automatically believing victims opens up the opportunity for increased false accusations—people shared statistics and links to studies. one user posted: “false accusations of rape are between - %. the same as every other felony. only % of rapists spend a day in jail #metoo.” another question often asked of #metoo posters was “why didn’t your report it?” one user answered this question by sharing a link to a study that found % of women who report sexual harassment in the workplace are punished. organizations took part in the discourse, providing easy-to-follow arguments using graphics, tables, and statistics, that supported the need to believe victims, as shown in figure . figure . some organizations used graphics and statistics to spread the #metoo message. many users also shared urls to news stories and opinion pieces about rape culture and broader power structures that propagate sexual harassment and assault, challenging the myth that rape is in its own category of crime, separate from more “minor” harassment and gender relations in society. one piece shared widely with the hashtag #metoo was from the washington post: “perspective “what school dress codes have to do with harvey weinstein, sexual harassment and abuse.” often these pieces were shared with personal commentary, such as “don’t be afraid to call out “little” things.” graphics and images were also useful as visual education aids in blurring the boundaries between rape and more “minor” violations. for instance, the pyramid graphic in figure visually shows how certain normalized behaviors and attitudes prop up sexual violence. some tweets focused on exposing mainstream media’s role in the propagation of an ideology that supports rape culture, for instance, in criticizing how media report on sexual assault. users engaged multiple affordances of twitter for this purpose. one user uploaded a picture of a physical newspaper’s “letters to the editor” page, where a letter writer pointed out the use of euphemisms and biased language that led to victim blaming in an earlier article in that paper about a child sex offender. the poster wrote “in the wake of #metoo, the media have responsibility for the way they report sexual assault & violence against women.” the posting of the original letter allowed for a more nuanced argument than would be possible in characters, as well as highlighting that this has been a problem in media historically, not just in the digital age. another user juxtaposed two time magazine covers, one of hugh hefner and one of harvey weinstein, writing “does it seem strange that our society wants to celebrate ‘the life & contributions’ of one figure . a tweeted graphic showing how rape culture is normalized. and act shocked at the actions of the other? #hypocricy [sic] #objectifyingwomen #metoo.” this tweet provided visual evidence of the different treatment of two men, both problematically powerful over women’s bodies, in the same magazine; this tweet explicitly linked the normalization of sexualization of women with sexual harassment, using celebrities and a well-known magazine to make the point.intersectional contestations: who is #metoo for? one frequent point of debate in the #metoo discourse was “who is this hashtag for,” particularly around gender. in her original tweet, milano appealed to women specifically, writing “if all the women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status…,” thus interpellating (althusser, ) female users explicitly. indeed, #metoo on social media and in the news focused largely on women’s experiences of sexual assault and harassment. the gendered aspect combined with the normality of assault was captured by this tweet: “it’s part of being female on this planet ☹” however, as the movement unfolded, many users started highlighting that sexual assault and abuse is not just a women’s issue: “it can happen to male or female. any age, any outfit, any circumstance. abusers could be your family i know, because it happened to #metoo.” another user tweeted “sexual assault can happen to men and women by men and women. #metoo includes #mentoo.” users also highlighted that not only can men be victims, but that women can be abusers. some tweets moved the conversation beyond the gender binary, to be more inclusive of all genders: “#metoo. i hesitated. ‘women & men’ dominating this discourse but non-binary people face sexual assault & we’re often invisible. we’re here.” these types of contestations dispelled the myth that sexual harassment and assault only happen to women. however, the evidence shows that the majority of sexual harassment and assault does indeed happen to women (“victims of sexual violence: statistics,” n.d), i.e., that self-identifying or being identified as a woman exponentially increases the risk of being sexually assaulted. a number of users defended the movement’s focus on the “specific misogynistic component to rape culture, from harassment to assault” while not dismissing the experiences of male and non-binary victims of assault. activists frequently shared statistics to reassert the necessity of focusing on women as victims of sexual harassment and assault such as: “ % of assault and rape victims are female.” beyond gender, intersectionality was a recurrent focus in the #metoo discourse. many criticized the use of the hashtag as being exclusionary in focusing on the experiences of straight, white, middle-class or wealthy women. users shared their own stories, as well as stories from the mainstream media, that showed how different groups of people experience sexual assault and harassment differently. for instance, a number of people pointed out that members of the lgbtq community (male, female, and non- binary) experience higher rates of violent assault than straight people. others highlighted how women of color, particularly in poorer communities, are even less likely to have their stories of sexual assault believed. through such contestations, the twitter community inserted the experiences of a wide range of underrepresented individuals into the discourse, amplifying the intersectional ethos of the fourth wave. however, some scholars have argued that “the brevity” of twitter as a format is not “the best platform for nuanced analysis” of intersectional concerns (rivers, , p. ), and instead here intersectionality can be used to “signal a hierarchy of oppressions, which are presented as static and fixed, suggesting that factors such as race, class, sexuality, and gender are not intersecting, but are in fact competing” (rivers, , p. ). information and resources: moving beyond discourse the #metoo hashtag, combined with various low-level affordances of twitter, was also regularly used to provide practical information and resources (moving beyond discourse) both to victims and to society more broadly. many individuals and organizations shared contact numbers for helplines for the national sexual assault hotline and for organizations such as rainn. when survivors shared #metoo and voiced their desire for practical resources to help them, others commented on their statuses, offering self-help solutions, such as reading a particular book or self-care tips. frequently, organizations shared links to resources related to that organization that would be useful for specific populations of victims. for instance, surrey police shared a page from their site titled “stalking and harassment: advice for victims who are being or at risk of stalking or harassment [sic].” the us olympic team released a statement: “the usoc is supportive of the people identifying with #metoo, and wishes to remind olympic and paralympic movement athletes that they can report sexual misconduct to the u.s. center for safesport, safesport.org.” the new mexico secretary of state tweeted how “victims who feel unsafe” should enroll in “a program that allows victims to use a fictitious address to avoid attackers,” along with a link to the details of the program. one user, kaivan shroff, founder of millennial democrats, started a popular “resource thread.” this thread included resources such as the number for the national sexual assault hotline (written in bold between two bright red telephone emoji); a url to a page by equal rights advocates detailing “sexual harassment at work” – which included a pdf document of a “know your rights” guide; another url to tips from rainn (the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization) on how to talk to survivors of sexual assault; and another url linking to best practices for journalists writing about sexual assault. this thread used multiple affordances – such as the ability to share urls, to post images, and to use emoji –to provide collated practical help (rather than emotional support) to both survivors and to society at large. through the feature of direct messaging (dm) that allows twitter users to talk directly to each other in private, survivors shared names of perpetrators if they were not comfortable sharing them publicly as their status. this was particularly useful for specific industries and specific projects, where an original #metoo poster would give away just enough details that people in that particular industry would be aware that there was a possible sexual harasser in their midst. they could then dm the poster to find out the name of the person, so they could avoid them. this use of twitter was similar to how women in private facebook groups for professionals (see chapter ) used these groups to share names of harassers with each other in private spaces. thus, social media can serve as a practical early warning system for women, allowing them to theoretically avoid harassers. organizations and individuals both shared information about events that might be of interest to the #metoo community, such as the women’s convention and national vigil for survivors of campus sexual assault. one user posted an open invitation to a “zine jam” at a theater to “talk, listen, create & together #speakout” about the #metoo movement and abuses of power in the theater industry. a couple of weeks later she posted the finished product, as seen in figure : figure . a tweet of a physical copy of a #metoo zine. showing a photo of the physical product of the zine highlighted how #metoo was not just “slacktivism” but in fact had tangible results. the call to “dm if you’re interested” presented a resource for others to have access to the zine. tweets like this digitally located dispersed people and brought them together offline, showing how “face-to-face and digital forms of activism work in interrelated and aggregative ways” (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). users also shared practical information on what individuals could do to change society at large. some shared petitions, for example, the green party in the uk tweeted that because of #metoo they had started a petition to make misogyny a hate crime and asked users to sign the petition. amy siskind, an activist and writer, shared a list of actions that men could “pledge” to do to help combat rape culture (figure ). this tweet used multiple affordances that lead to feminist outcomes –the hashtag #withyou to show support, a suggestion to retweet (rt) to amplify the message and pledge support, the ability to post images and, in that way, share suggestions for men to follow in many more words than the -character limit. however, a number of accounts shared resources that were ostensibly for survivors but were in fact co-opting the #metoo movement to sell products and/or troll users. one link that appeared on multiple #metoo threads was a url to “cheap abortion drugs for victims of #metoo.” another frequent post was the one shown in figure , selling surveillance cameras. tweets like this illustrate how political movements in general and feminism is particular, are becoming increasingly commodified, diluting the power of collective action for social change (zeisler, ). it is hard to discern whether this is a real link or a scam without clicking on the link –and exposing oneself to the possible virus of the link, so i chose not to do this. figure . using different affordances of twitter, including hashtags, retweets, and screenshots to pledge support for #metoo. figure . co-opting the #metoo movement to sell surveillance cameras. conclusion this chapter outlines how the various low-level affordances (such as the ability to post images, “like,” comment, and retweet) as well as the high-level affordances (visibility, connectivity, anonymity) of twitter shaped the #metoo discourse, resulting in four feminist outcomes: ) empowerment and expression, ) support and solidarity ) societal awareness and; ) information/resource sharing. these feminist outcomes occur both at the individual and collective level, showing how the personal and political intertwine through everyday use of social media. however, there are a number of limitations to the use of twitter for feminist outcomes in the #metoo movement. firstly, not surprisingly, the same affordances that allowed for feminist outcomes also provided opportunities for trolling survivors and derailing the movement. frequently, users would comment on posts detailing horrific rape stories with such dismissive comments as “lol. you got raped.” others wrote their own dismissively “joking” #metoo statuses, such as “#metoo and it was hot” and “just molested myself, as i was feeling left out #metoo” one user posted the following image (figure in an attempt to victim blame (insinuating that only young, conventionally attractive women are harassed). examples like this illustrate how “popular feminism” is met with an increase in “popular misogyny” in digital spaces (banet-weiser, ). figure . trolling #metoo survivors with victim-blaming rhetoric. secondly, access and reach are barriers to twitter’s possibilities for everyday feminist activism. not everyone has the same access to the internet in the first place (for example, those living in rural areas, those who do not have the finances to purchase computers, etc.). moreover, those that have easy access to the internet may not use certain social media platforms. for instance, only percent of us adults use twitter (compared to percent that use facebook) (smith & anderson, ). thus, the usefulness of twitter as a platform for feminist practices is limited because of its limited user base. as a case in point, in the first hours after milano’s tweet, half a million people tweeted #metoo – but facebook revealed that million posts and comments went up on its site in that same time period (“more than m “me too” facebook posts, comments, reactions in hours,” ). future studies might compare the affordances of multiple social media platforms using hashtags for social change. this research illustrates twitter’s evolution as a medium, from a primarily text- based platform to a fully multi-media format, which has implications for hashtag feminism. in particular, the increased range of features and functionalities of twitter allows for the building of credibility and providing evidence in sexual assault and harassment narratives. whether through victims sharing screenshots of uncomfortable text conversations, through verified, established organizations tweeting support for survivors, or through activists posting graphics of sexual assault statistics, twitter mediates sexual harassment and assault discourse, rendering it ultimately more believable than it has been historically. the specific materiality of platforms is important to consider in research on digital social movements, because, although “social media is not the movement itself… it certainly amplifies and clarifies the work of organizers and offers a mean for disrupting the silences and erasures” (tynes et al., , p. ). this case study of #metoo discourse also empirically sketches two particular features of fourth wave of feminism. first, the fourth wave on digital media pays robust attention to intersectional concerns. the #metoo discourse on twitter was flooded with explicit references to the varied experiences of different individuals, showing how feminist activism in the digital age is increasingly addressing exclusionary critiques from the history of the women’s movement. secondly, this study shows how digital media is being effectively used in everyday settings to disrupt dominant structures of power. faludi ( ) critiqued the #metoo movement in her article “the patriarchs are falling. the patriarchy is stronger than ever,” questioning the value of hashtag activism in challenging structures and system. however, this sample of tweets shows how the millions of expressions of #metoo on twitter raised awareness of sexual assault and harassment and challenged rape culture myths, creating “erosive social change” (vivienne, , p. ) and challenging patriarchal values. this study shows how social media is used for “everyday politics,” highlighting how feminism does not need to be organized, overt, or explicitly political to create positive social change. chapter conclusion “the little changes and the little empowerments make a bigger picture” summary my interest in this dissertation has been developing for years, as i was noticing more and more discussions of feminism, social justice, gender inequality, and women’s empowerment in my own daily conversations and in news stories, popular media, and online. it struck me that this swelling tide of feminist sentiment was often part of everyday, mundane conversations and practices rather than explicit feminist organizing or activism. i decided that i wanted to study this everyday feminism by ordinary people (not activists, politicians, celebrities, etc.), and i selected social media as a site to study because of its ubiquity and embeddedness in our daily lives (baym, ). i focused on the materiality of these technologies and user interactions on these platforms, to answer these questions: what is the role of social media –and particularly their affordances – in contemporary feminism? what is new about the fourth wave and how does technology affect this “newness”? this research presented three case studies of everyday use of social media, placed on a continuum from private to public, examining interpersonal (bumble), group (facebook), and mass communication (twitter). bumble, the “feminist” dating app provides women with more control during their dating interactions and allows for the challenging of gendered dating norms through women initiating conversations. bumble also provides women with a toolkit of affordances that they can strategically use to maintain personal safety while searching for partners. however, this “negotiated use” (shaw, ) means that women who use online dating partake in vast amounts of additional, invisible labor. further, the onus is on individual women to seek safety, rather than the app challenging the broader system of patriarchy that enables sexual harassment of women, troubling the notion of bumble as a “feminist” app. private facebook groups for women professionals are used as ) a women’s version of the “old boys’ clubs,” for networking, career resources, and virtual professional community; ) safe spaces for women and gender non-conforming people to share their voices online; and ) mediated consciousness-raising platforms for offline action. however, these groups serve only some women, excluding others based on race, age, class, sexuality, geography, and sex. twitter, as evidenced in the case study of the #metoo movement, serves as a unique mediator of digital everyday feminism. twitter affords four feminist outcomes, tied directly to its materiality, in the discourse of sexual harassment and assault: ) empowerment and expression for individual survivors; ) support and solidarity by allies; ) societal awareness of the issue, including providing context and facilitating debate; and; ) information/resource sharing for actions beyond social media. however, the same affordances that twitter provides for feminist outcomes are used as part of the #metoo movement in distinctly anti-feminist ways, for instance, through the trolling of survivors using the hashtag. this study contributes to the understandings of the complex role of social media in contemporary feminism. these three case studies outline empirically how everyday uses of social media, such as dating, connecting with colleagues, and blogging about everyday experiences, intersect with feminist politics. while not discounting the valid critiques of social media—including privacy issues and data collection (e.g. shaw, ), online harassment (e.g. duggan, ), and digital labor by users (e.g. duffy, )— this research shows how social media can and do provide affordances for feminist practices as a “contemporary social movement… [that is] intimately interweaved with everyday life and individual experience” (melucci, , p. , emphasis added). further, this research challenges critiques of social media activism as “slacktivism” (christensen, ), showing how social media use can lead to tangible feminist outcomes. everyday feminism on social media leads to changes for both individuals and collectively, illustrating how the fourth wave is complex and contradictory, encompassing values and issues of previous waves as well as postfeminism. what is the role of social media in contemporary feminism? the key finding of this research is the detailing of how social media platforms are tools which provide a variety of low-level and high-level affordances for everyday feminist practices and outcomes that strive towards the feminist goal of ending sexist oppression. crucially, new media does not create a new feminism, per se; rather, it is a tool for “old” feminist practices. perhaps most importantly, social media, such as facebook and twitter, provide opportunities for solidarity and connection between women, so they can learn from each other and help each other, allowing for a network of situated knowledges (haraway, ). for instance, private facebook groups allow women at various levels of seniority in specific industries to connect with each other for mentorship and career development opportunities, while the #metoo hashtag connects survivors of sexual assault with a caring audience for support and encouragement. intersectional feminism on social media social media platforms also provide the potential for the engagement of intersectional concerns and for creating a more inclusionary contemporary feminism; “the public nature of the web and technological infrastructures that enable virality have introduced new possibilities for… the centering of women most at the margins (jackson, bailey & foucault welles, ). for example, the #metoo hashtag brings public awareness to intersectional differences between survivors of sexual assault. marginalized women create their own secret facebook groups, a necessary safe space of their own (blackwell, ). however, just because this potential exists in the form of technological affordances, it is important to recognize that marginalized people may perceive certain online spaces as not “for” them. so, some people may choose to not use some digital spaces due to the hegemonic power structures that these spaces are seen to represent–whiteness, heteronormativity, cisgender identity, and middle-class values (blackmon, ). in addition, social media access is not available to all equally, for instance poor, less educated women in rural areas are much less likely to use social media, limiting its potential for an inclusive feminist project (smith & anderson, ). further, the social media apps studied here were all created in the u.s., and this u.s.-centered focus is reflected in both design and content (for example, how the biggest secret facebook groups for professional women are based in the u.s. and so provide job opportunities only to those living in the u.s.). this leads to cultural exclusions based on geography, regardless of the affordances available to physically connect with people across the globe (eckert, ). there also exists the potential of using social media, and particularly its affordance of “publicness” (presenting a broad audience to users), in simply paying lip service to intersectionality in feminist practices; as rivers ( , p. ) cautions: “the fourth-wave solution to practicing ‘proper’ feminism has been to label one’s feminism as ‘intersectional’ and move swiftly forward, frequently without engaging prior or existent feminist debate or indeed attending to the particularities of intersecting identities and experiences.” so even though social media affordances can be used to bring the “margins to the center,” (hooks, ) it does not mean that they always will, or that they will effectively. digital misogyny and anti-feminism one of my participants, carrie, noted that “social media has the ability to do good, but i also think it has the ability to take us backwards” in terms of feminism. indeed, this research highlights how social media can be used for both feminist and anti- feminist practices, showing how “online spaces remain a double-edged sword for women” (eckert, , p. ). social media platforms such as bumble, facebook, and twitter act as mediators, providing key affordances that can be used strategically for everyday feminist actions and outcomes. at the same time, however, these same platforms enable new strategies for digital harassment and popular misogyny, exposing marginalized users to harm (banet-weiser, ; shaw, .) bumble exposes women to myriad strangers who can harass them using the platform’s affordances, such as sending unsolicited “dick pics,” despite the “women talking first” feature built into the technology for women’s protection. facebook, through its closed and secret group options, also allows for misogynists, racists, and homophobes to create private spaces where they can share hateful rhetoric and strengthen their stereotypical beliefs towards underrepresented groups. trolls on twitter use the same hashtags that are used to spread awareness and support for sexual assault survivors to mock and harass them. as rivers ( , p. ) writes “if social media is being hailed as a possible format for new forms of feminist activism, then abusing women until they no longer engage via this medium becomes an effective tool for silencing feminists.” the fourth wave, then, is characterized by both feminist resistance and anti-feminist backlash using the same affordances of social media platforms. individual and collective politics on social media social media affordances can be materialized for women’s individual empowerment as women negotiate their uses of digital technologies in specifically gendered ways. for example, women use the low-level affordances of bumble dating strategically to minimize their experiences of harassment on the app. others use twitter to cathartically express their #metoo stories. further, through social media use, women frequently become empowered to take offline action. reporting of sexual assault has drastically increased and has been attributed to #metoo (chiwaya, ). indeed, many of my interviewees explained how private facebook groups for professional purposes were used to talk about sexual harassers in certain industries and to make decisions about whether and how to go public with these accusations, including how to formally lodge complaints. women who used bumble for dating also said the #metoo movement emboldened them to report harassment, on the app and in real life, from romantic partners. empowerment, choice, and agency are typically associated with postfeminism, which has been vigorously critiqued as limiting the potential of the feminist project (gill, ; mcrobbie, ; rivers, ). arguably, even though women felt encouraged to formally report sexual harassment and assault through their use of social media, these actions did not directly dismantle the patriarchal culture that supports sexual harassment in the first place nor tangibly change the experiences of women as a group right there and then. however, it seems to me, particularly after talking to many women about contemporary feminism during the course of this research, that as long as empowerment narratives do not overshadow the need for collective politics, as long as structural inequalities are acknowledged and women still work together to chip away at the patriarchal system, and as long as empowerment initiatives consider the needs and experiences of different women, there is value in the embracing of individual empowerment as part of the feminist movement to end sexist oppression. after all, the personal is political and individual actions and benefits work in tandem with collective action to reduce gender inequality. such everyday, individualized activism contributes to “‘erosive social change’: changes in attitude that take place slowly over extended time frames, profoundly reshaping social norms as they diffuse among networked publics” (vivienne, , p. ). challenging gendered, ingrained structures of power - “the tearing of small rips in what is considered possible in the current constellation” (macgilchrist & bomig, , p. ) – even if slowly, rip by rip, person by person, is still beneficial to the wider feminist project in the long run. further, social media is certainly not only about individual empowerment; social media affordances are frequently deployed for everyday feminist practices that benefit women collectively. for instance, sharing pay information across industries in secret facebook groups effectively allowed dispersed workers to “unionize” in demanding higher wages. also, the #metoo movement brought a general awareness to the public of the ubiquity of sexual harassment and challenged hegemonic understandings of rape culture. some organizations even shared petitions using the hashtag to enact changes in law triggered by the outpouring of #metoo stories. and so everyday social media use supports collective feminist politics. nonetheless, there are limitations to the everyday use of social media for the feminist project. firstly, as cirucci ( ) points out, interactions on social media platforms are “always labor.” for instance, women partake in emotional labor by liking, commenting, and posting in private facebook groups—labor that is not required of men who have naturalized access to supportive career networks and opportunities in their offline lives. similarly, women who use bumble strategically to avoid “creeps” also engage in substantial invisible labor –the labor of figuring out and manipulating the app settings to “protect” themselves during all aspects of use. thus, everyday feminist practices require vast amounts of invisible labor by women. relatedly, the user-generated content on social media platforms that requires this labor provides valuable data—and related financial gain—for the companies that own these platforms. and so, the feminist project, through everyday practices on social media, is in some ways commodified and antithetically upholds capitalist structures. so, what is new about the fourth wave? these findings point to two core features of the fourth wave that ostensibly distinguish it from previous waves of the women’s movement, beyond its focus on the digital and intersectionality. firstly, contemporary feminism is embedded in women’s daily lives, precisely because of the ubiquitous daily use of digital technologies. and so, feminist practices in the fourth wave are also those that are subtle, everyday, diffused, and not necessarily labeled as feminist by those partaking in them, but that still do important social justice work. secondly, the fourth wave is a complex amalgamation of previous waves, encompassing both the individual empowerment rhetoric of the third wave and postfeminism, and a renewed interest in collective feminist action of earlier waves. of course, as noted earlier, the division of the waves into “collective second wave” and “individual third wave” is reductive and artificial, as, in reality, the women’s movement has always encompassed fighting simultaneously for changes in individual lives and in social structures. for instance, the slogan “the personal is political” – stressing the need to consider individual experiences in political action—emerged during the second wave. furthermore, it is in practice difficult to disentangle the two – individual change by many often leads to structural change at a broader level and of course structural changes impact individuals. one of my participants, courtney, explained her view on contemporary feminist politics, with its interconnectivity between individual and collective as well as personal and political, as such: i think living is political. we always act within a system, and our actions influence that system: whether that is consumer capitalism, the patriarchy, etc., there are always hierarchies of power at work. as a feminist, i see my role as disturbing these structures through my actions and interactions with the world, whether that is choosing to buy a more eco-friendly brand, engaging in self-care, writing letters to government, choosing to interact in spaces that promote and enhance voices that are traditionally undercut by power... (emphasis added) perhaps because “there are many feminisms that are shaped through organized activism, collective action, and individual empowerment” (rivers, , p. ), then, rather than declaring what is specifically new about this fourth wave, this research illustrates the value of rethinking the wave metaphor. for instance, hewitt’s ( ) recasting of the wave metaphor as radio waves is a conceptual model that allows for different feminisms –including different issues, focus, and practices –to exist simultaneously. along a similar vein, rivers ( , p. ) envisions the women’s movement as a wave over time (rather than separate waves); “rolling back as often as it rolls forward, gaining strength from what it brings with it rather than losing momentum due to what it leaves behind.” the issues of the movement to end sexist oppression, to promote the interests of women, and to reduce gender inequality remain largely the same at the core. social media provides new tools for doing feminism, particularly in everyday activities. one of the primary ways in which social media is shaping contemporary feminism is not through specific feminist practices, but simply through spreading awareness of the need for feminism, challenging the postfeminist myth that equality has been reached. as rivers ( , p. ) writes “the two most cited influences of the fourth wave are a growing disillusionment with the rhetoric of postfeminism and a dawning realization of the social, political, and cultural inequalities still faced by many women.” this research empirically exemplifies how women –whether self-identifying as feminists or not –are becoming increasingly aware of “gender as a restriction of possibility” (ahmed, , p. ), how gender has material negative effects in their lives. ahmed ( , p. ) contends that feminist living includes “how we work with, as well as on, our hunches, those senses that something is amiss, not quite right, which are part of ordinary living and a starting point for so much critical work.” importantly, much of this awareness of “something amiss” spreads online; as one of my participants, courtney, noted when asked about contemporary gender inequality: “i think now there is a clear need for more [feminist work], i think things are becoming more transparent in general because of the internet.” of course, this renewed awareness of gender inequality must be placed in context. i started collecting data for this research in october , around the time the #metoo movement started and one year into the presidency of donald trump in the u.s. since trump was elected, discussions of sexual harassment (including accusations against the president), sexism, misogyny, and women’s rights and issues have spiked in the public sphere. this era has also brought a marked increase activism and resistance, particularly by underrepresented groups, in the form of marches, petitions, and other organizing for social justice. the overall increased awareness of gender inequality and a sense of urgency in fighting for social justice was prevalent throughout my collection of data. my participants noted frequently how they felt that “societally-speaking it’s a very unique time in history.” this awareness by participants of gender as a shaping force in their lives, often in negative ways, was present throughout my research. female users of bumble have resigned themselves to using the platform’s features strategically to minimize possible harassment and assault and are aware that men on online dating have a different experience. women who choose to become part of private facebook groups for career purposes do so deliberately, because they are aware of gender discrimination at work and a lack of career development opportunities offline in their fields. the #metoo discourse on twitter was littered with evidence supporting the argument for focusing on the specific misogynistic component of sexual assault and rape culture, and recognizing that women are disproportionately affected by sexual violence. so, even though i personally subscribe to the belief that gender is a social construct, is performative, and is best understood as a spectrum (butler, ), this dissertation demonstrates how the gender binary persists as a normative system of gender classification in society and further how women (whether self-identified or assigned this identity by others) are materially disadvantaged in this system. thus, the need for feminism as a movement against sexist oppression, with gender as its core issue, remains –and this message can be spread effectively using social media. this study also sheds light on how social media is just one tool in the contemporary feminist toolkit, despite the foregrounding of the digital in discussions of the fourth wave (cochrane, ; rivers, ). social media practices, such as the sharing of #metoo stories on twitter, sit alongside offline practices, such as reporting sexual harassment formally. not only do online and offline everyday feminist practices work in tandem, but women’s issues, such as sexual harassment in dating, are, too, “enmeshed online and offline” (eckert, , p. ). for instance, women who use bumble in strategic ways to minimize their risk of harm from strangers similarly amend their offline actions to try stay safe (for example, scoping out the exits at a dating venue). further, social media platforms are not used in isolation from each other or from mainstream media. the fact that #metoo was brought up repeatedly, unprompted, throughout my interviews about bumble and facebook illustrates how social media and legacy media constantly work together in a vast media ecology. limitations and future directions a significant limitation of this research is the white, cisgender, straight, and middle-class identity of the majority of the interview participants (despite efforts to recruit a more diverse sample). future research should focus specifically on digital intersectional spaces, such as professional facebook groups for black/queer/ trans women, examining how underrepresented groups use these spaces in different ways to the hegemonic culture of social media spaces studied in this dissertation. in addition, this research focuses largely on the english-speaking global north (u.s.a., england, canada, and new zealand) because of my location in the u.s. and the use of snowball sampling. it would be valuable to extend this research to other cultural contexts, to understand how transnational everyday feminist practices intersect with social media use. it would also be interesting to speak with men about their understandings of and experiences of contemporary feminism; as hooks ( ) points out, men should be involved in feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression, because it affects them too. it would be particularly fruitful to speak with male users of bumble, to understand if and how this “feminist” app impacts their everyday experiences of online dating. the methods used in this dissertation could be combined with other ways of gathering data, to present more holistic understandings of the role of social media in contemporary feminism. for example, cirucci ( ) highlights the importance of speaking with designers when studying affordances, to understand what she calls “three- pronged negotiation” (p. ) between users, material artefacts, and designers. thus, speaking to the designers and developers of bumble regarding their ideal (“dominant”) perceived uses for the app would be a useful context to apply to the user experience interviews of women who use bumble. it would also be helpful to be able to analyze the actual content in secret facebook groups for professional women–though of course there are ethical issues in using “secret” spaces for research that will be accessed publicly. finally, alongside analyzing tweets, speaking with those who tweeted #metoo could yield productive insights into the motivations for taking part in the movement, as well as the “vernacular affordances” (mcveigh-schultz & baym, ) of twitter as a medium in the fourth wave. while remaining cautious and even critical of social media’s potential for everyday feminism, this research shows empirically how social media can be used for everyday feminist politics. much research on feminism in the digital age focuses on formal activism by people and organizations calling themselves feminists. this research illustrates how “not all feminist movement is so easily detected” (ahmed, , p. ; see also schuster, ); instead, feminist action in the digital age can be more diffuse, smaller, “like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from the weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching” (ahmed, , p. ). the affordances of social media provide both possibilities and constraints for individual women and for the feminist movement more broadly. on the one hand, social media platforms, while not without their problems for the feminist project (and beyond), ultimately “offer the potential or opportunity to build feminist communities across social, cultural, and global boundaries, and create feminisms that are nuanced, representative, and effective in establishing political and cultural change” (rivers, , p. ). on the other hand, users have some agency in interacting with social media and can negotiate how they engage with this potential. ultimately, this project aims to show that there is no “right” way to do feminism. of course, this research does not mean to minimize or discount the vital work of overt feminist organizing and activism, through official feminist organizations and by feminist activists, both offline and online. however, it is also useful to pay attention to the everyday, to “the little changes and the little empowerments [that] make a bigger picture” (hillary, one of my participants). this project reasserts the renewed value of identity politics in contemporary feminism and conceptualizing “women” as agents of feminist politics, with a strategic (political) focus on commonalities based on gender (spivak, ), in a post-structural era where gender is increasingly theorized as constructed. centralizing women’s lives and everyday experiences is crucial to understanding both the contemporary material issues that women face based on their gender and their responses to these issues, which can inform both feminist theory and practice. the three case studies in this dissertation clearly illustrate how substantial material inequalities around (binary) gender difference persist, over a century after the first wave of the feminist movement and despite increasing contemporary challenges to the gender binary classification system. specifically, this project shows how those “who travel under the sign women” (ahmed, , p. ) continue to face discomfort, harassment, and potentially serious harm just by going about their everyday lives, be it during dating, networking, or walking on the street. fourth wave feminist theorizing must, then, consider the everyday strategies that ordinary women are required to use to navigate existing inequalities, to resist subordination in a patriarchal society, and to, practically, stay safe in their day-to-day lives. everyday social media practices such as coming together in groups separate from men, discussing sexual assault publicly, and adding protective barriers to interactions between men and women are everyday feminist practices, because feminism is about supporting “women in a struggle to exist in this world” ahmed ( , p. ). bibliography acosta‐alzuru, c. 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( ). the social media ecology: user perceptions, strategies and challenges. in proceedings of the chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. – ). https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/ / /bumble-app-whitney-wolfe appendix a bumble interview questions initial interview questions • when did you start using bumble? • why did you decide to use bumble over other dating websites? • do you still use it? if not, why not? • have you or do you use other dating websites? • how does bumble compare to other dating apps? • what features does bumble have that other apps don’t? • what features and functions of bumble do you enjoy? • what features and functions of bumble don’t you like? • take me through how you would move through bumble, open it up… • if you could change or add certain features to bumble, would you? follow-up interview questions • take me through a typical dating scenario in / , thinking specifically about the various technologies you would be using, through the finding a person stage to the first date to the relationship stage (e.g., match on a dating app, exchange some messages on there, move to phone, etc.). • do you think dating apps have changed how we date offline or how dating used to be before these technologies? • what are the advantages and disadvantages of online apps for dating compared to meeting people offline? • how do you think a male approach and a female approach to dating differ, both offline and online? • do you approach men first in real life? do you talk to men first on other dating apps? • do you have “rules” for swiping left or swiping right? pictures? text? • what do you usually write first? e.g. gifs, hey, something about their profile? • do you ever take photos directly through the app? do you send photos? of what? • bumble connecting to other social media – instagram, spotify, snapchat, facebook – yay or nay? why? • what are your safety considerations in using online dating? are men safer than women in dating? • have you heard that bumble calls itself a “feminist” app? would you agree with this statement? appendix b facebook group interview questions • tell me a little about this facebook group. • when did you join? • why did you join? • are you an active member or do you mostly lurk? • what sort of things do people typically post about? (broadcast outside events, ask for jobs, advertise jobs) • what sort of things do people typically post – links, pictures, written thoughts? • why is it important for you to be part of a group for women specifically? • how has this group been helpful for you professionally? • why do you choose to use this group instead of other social media for networking? • does what you say in the group feel safer or more private than using the internet more broadly? do you think what is posted in the group is kept confidential? • thinking of the technical features of a facebook group – such as the fact that it is closed and limits members, the fact that there is a wall you can scroll down, being able to comment and like, what features do you like or don’t like, or find useful or not, when using the group? • can you message other members directly? do you use this feature? • can anyone add members? • do the administrators manage what sort of content is posted or taken down? • negatives of the group? • are private groups more beneficial for women who freelance, do project work, or own their own businesses than for women working in traditional jobs? why or why not? what different benefits do private groups give to these different groups of working women? 	final front matter 	abstract 	acknowledgments 	pruchniewska_dissertation_final 	the rise of the fourth wave: everyday politics and digital media 	vernacular affordances of digital media technologies 	using a feminist and cultural studies approach 	bumble, the “feminist” dating app 	private facebook groups for professional women 	twitter and #metoo 	chapter 	literature review 	defining feminism 	the waves of feminism 	muddying the waters: complicating the wave metaphor of feminism 	everyday feminism on social media 	the essential newness of fourth wave feminism: 	breaks from and continuations of the past 	the role of social media as tools for feminist practices 	contemporary feminist practices offline and online 	an affordance approach to everyday politics 	the importance of imagination and vernacular understandings 	frameworks for studying affordances: low-level and high-level affordances 	blending cultural studies and affordances 	chapter 	methods 	research design 	chapter 	examining empowerment on bumble: 	“i like the fact that it’s… my choice and 	it’s my choice a couple different times” 	chapter 	feminist affordances of private facebook groups for professionals: “a group that’s just women 	for women to help other women:” 	chapter 	#metoo, twitter affordances, and feminist outcomes: 	“why is it so hard to just believe women?!” 	chapter 	conclusion 	“the little changes and the little empowerments 	make a bigger picture” microsoft word - white feminist fragility- full.docx white feminist fragility: from part of the problem to radical allyship by tessa mae macintyre bfa., the university of regina, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirments for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (gender, race, & social justice) the university of british columbia (vancouver) april ©tessa mae macintyre, ii the following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: white feminist fragility: from part of the problem to radical allyship submitted by tessa mae macintyre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in gender, race, & social justice examining committee: dr. janice stewart, professor & acting director of the institute for gender, race, & social justice, ubc supervisor dr. jennifer jenson, professor, faculty of education, department of language & literacy, ubc supervisory committee member iii abstract feminism has a whiteness problem. feminists of colour such as audre lorde, angela davis, and kimberlé crenshaw have been talking about this problem since the ’s, and the term ‘white feminism’ emerged to describe the predominantly white, upper- middle class, academic, heterosexual women who had taken control of mainstream feminist discourses. the problem being, after the early grassroots feminist consciousness raising of the th century, the feminist movement turned academic, an arena where radical feminists, lesbians, women of colour, and poor women were largely underrepresented. the result of this is decades of feminist theorizing, philosophy, and activism became focused on the problems of the privileged few. while feminists of colour started speaking out about this problem over years ago, in the viral #metoo movement brought to light the continued indifference towards women of colour and those who experience intersection systems of oppression. #metoo was overwhelming focused on elite hollywood actresses, and when it was later revealed that the phrase ‘me too’ had been in use by african american activist and community organizer tarana burke since to show solidarity to young, socioeconomically oppressed women and girls of colour, there were renewed calls to examine why the women in our society who hold the most privileged were also gaining the most attention for their causes. the purpose of this work is to define white feminism, understand the structures and strategies that support it, and explain how white supremacy functions to prevent advancement and maintain divisions between feminists. i will use concepts from writers like audre lorde, layla saad, and marilyn frye to analyse feminist discourses, past and iv present, in order to establish a pattern within feminism to centre whiteness. as a feminist who is white, i will call upon other white feminists to challenge institutional racism, decentre whiteness in feminist practice, and commit to radical anti-racism work as a main tenant of feminist activism. v lay summary white feminism is a term used to describe feminists who are predominantly white, heterosexual, upper-middle class, and who lack an understanding of the intersectional problems faced by women of colour, queer, and poor. while women of colour have been writing, theorizing, and speaking out about this issue for decades, when the #metoo movement became viral in , a movement which focused on the privileged and predominantly white hollywood elite, there were renewed calls by women of colour for white feminist to question why institutional sexism are only taken seriously when voiced by some of the most privileged women in our society. this work will examine the history and strategies of white feminism, and challenge white feminists to consider how their own feminist practice can evolve towards intersectionality and anti-racism. vi preface this thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, t. macintyre. vii table of contents abstract……………………………………………………………………………….………….iii lay summary…………………………………………………………………………………….v preface……………………………………………………………………………………...…...vi table of contents……………………………………………………………………………....vii list of figures…………………………………………………………………………..…….....ix acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………...............x chapter one: introduction……………………………………………………………………... a (white) feminist awakening………………………………………………………… white feminism & black erasure…………………………………………………….. white feminism & white fragility…………………………………………………….. background and relevance…………………………………………………………… methodology…………………………………………………………………………… a call to action: white feminist (ignore)ance……………………………………... chapter two: white feminism: a her-story……………………………………………….. votes for (white) women…………………………………………………………….. the sins of my foremothers: eugenic feminism…………………………………. the ‘me’ in #metoo…………………………………………………………………… chapter three: beyond intersectionality: white feminist fragility………………………. the feminist bio-politic………………………………………………………………. white fragility…………………………………………………………………………. angry white women: white feminist resentment………………………………... chapter four: the functions and failures of white feminism………………………….. white supremacy and me: radical de-colonization……………………………… spiritual bypassing: “we are all alike in soul and diverse in outer experience”... tone policing: “thank you for not coming out swinging”…………………………. centring: “it was a personal experience for me that felt like an attack”…………. is it the task of women of colour to educate white women?................................. chapter five: conclusion…………………………………………………………………….. viii radicalizing feminist consciousness raising…………………………………… radical disloyalty to whiteness……………………………………………………. power to embrace our difference………………………………………………….. pathways to a wholistic feminist consciousness……………………………….. radical white feminism…………………………………………………………….. works cited…………………………………………………………………………………… ix list of figures figure screenshot of @alyssa_milano tweet, october ……..………….. figure a screenshot of laylafsaad instragram post july …………….…….… figure b screenshot of laylafsaad july comments section………………... figure c screenshot of laylafsaad july comments section cont…….…….. figure a screenshot of laylafsaad instragram post august …………………. figure b screenshot of laylafsaad july comments section………………… figure c screenshot of laylafsaad july comments section cont……….….. x acknowledgments i would like to give my eternal gratitude to my supervisor dr. janice stewart, who provided me the encouragement, and endless patience to help me (finally) complete this thesis. thank you janice, for your support and easy going attitude – even in the moments i felt like i would never pull this off, a check in with you always reinvigorated my efforts and gave me the confidence i needed to follow through with my goals. i would also like to thank dr. jennifer jenson for the feedback, comments, and thought put into helping me revise and polish this paper. i also would like to thank dabney meachum and marika yeo for their camaraderie, good humor, support, and friendship as we completed our course work. i am so grateful for the opportunity to have met so many intelligent, talented people during my time in the social justice institute. introduction: a (white) feminist awakening “feminists are made, not born.” – bell hooks i had a comfortable childhood; born in in nova scotia, canada, i grew up in a middle class household with my white nuclear family. my parents had and continue to have a solid marriage, my sister and i tolerated each other’s existence, and all-in-all, the most hardship i faced was school yard bullying. it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to my mother when i firmly rejected the notion of feminism in my teenage years. afterall, i had grown up in the ‘girl power’ generation: spice girls, xena warrior princess, buffy the vampire slayer, the x files. pop culture was teaching me that women could do anything men could do – all while wearing tightly fitted, glittery outfits (with the exception of dr. dana scully from the xfiles). you see, i didn’t reject feminism because i didn’t believe in equality (more on this later), i rejected feminism because i did not see myself or other women as oppressed. i could point my number at any number of influences as an explanation for my disinterest in feminism; the media, pop culture, the general suspicion that feminism was somehow equated with lesbianism (since i now identify as queer, this internalized homophobia can take some of the blame). acclaimed feminist theorist bell hooks, author of influential works such as ain’t i a woman? black women and feminism ( ), feminist theory: from margin to centre ( ) and feminism is for everybody: passional politics ( ) has spent her career understanding and deconstructing pathways to feminism and the importance of intersectionality. in her book feminism is for everybody, hooks offers an explanation for my disinterest which may be less tied to my generation, and more so related to the timeless patriarchal nature of our society. as hooks explains; “when women first organized in groups to talk together about the issue of sexism and male domination, they were clear that females were as socialized to believe sexist thinking and values as males, the difference being simply that males benefited from sexism more than females and were as consequence less likely to want to surrender patriarchal privilege. before women could change the patriarchy we had to change ourselves; we had to raise our consciousness.”( ) what i had been missing was this opportunity to raise my consciousness – to remove the blindfold of societal constructs and start questioning the ways women around me were treated. soon after staring my undergraduate degree in the ’s, my feminist consciousness began to take form. i could no longer ignore the seemingly endless series of news headlines covering stories about sexual violence and harassment, stories like the tragic suicide of british columbia teen amanda todd in , who took her own life after a sexual predator posted nude photos of todd online, and she became the target of brutal bullying at the hands of her peers. the term “slut shaming” took form to describe this behavior: bullying young women for perceived promiscuity, regardless of circumstances. (murphy, “amanda todd: bullied to death”) i was learning the hard truths about our society: it wasn’t just that there weren’t enough women becoming doctors, politicians, and ceos. the world is a dangerous and unforgiving place if you had the bad luck of being born female. i became an avid reader of feminist websites like jezebel and feministing. i devoured the book full frontal feminism by influential writer jessica valenti (founder of feministing) and started gifting/ lending/ strongly recommending the book to all of my friends who had yet to have their own feminist awakening. i became involved with #hollarback to combat street harassment, i vocally supported the slut walk movement, and i became so enthralled with it all i even penned my own blog titled release the feminist kraken. i was filled with fire and purpose: i was going to join my foremothers in the fight to dismantle the patriarchy. while i had in many ways raised my feminist consciousness, my pathway towards enlightenment was not exactly what hooks was describing when she talks about the original living room gatherings of women across all social-economic and racial divides. as feminist thinking progressed, feminists forming political and sociological theories sought validity through academia. universities, to this day, are exclusive institutions accessible only to those with class and race privilege. what this means is that as feminism came to be officially recognized by academia, it was the privileged white, middle class women leading the discussions in university lecture halls. hooks makes a strong connection between the transition to academic feminism and the silencing and erasure of women of colour: when academia is the accepted standard of validation and credential, the radical queer, black, indigenous, and or poor women are easily ignored and dismissed. privileged white women were choosing which oppressions were worth studying and analyzing. they created a hierarchy of need based on the concept that gender based discrimination was the ultimate discrimination, and once equality was achieved, all over forms of oppressions would fall away as well (hooks, ). the result of this is that the gatekeepers of the feminism i embraced and learned from are the white feminists born of academia, the feminists who focused solely on the universality of sexism as the rallying point for all women. in terms of what this meant for me, individually, is that for a while at least, i lived and practiced a feminism which focused solely on the inequality between (white) men and (white) women, because i had failed to seek knowledge outside of the mainstream feminist discourses. when i reflect on my feminist awakening, i can see clearly who is missing from the articles, blogs, and websites i was exposed to, which victims of horrible crimes were worth mentioning. overwhelmingly, the stories being told were those of white women, as shown by researcher sarah stillman in her study titled the ‘missing white girl syndrome’: disappeared women and media activism. stillman found that between and , % of missing children featured on news outlets cnn were white children, while only accounting for % of abductions ( ). while all violence is tragic and unacceptable, ignoring the disproportionately high rate of violence against women of colour, in particular the institutional neglect in regard of the safety of indigenous women in canada as proven by the inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (national assembly of first nations), has only served to further isolate and oppress those women who are already vulnerable. while i made an effort to educate myself on racial oppression and include intersectionality in my feminist practice, i felt that issues of racism were best left to those who experience it; i was not racist, and as a privileged white woman myself, i understood it was not my place to take on these challenges. i continued my silence on issues of race until the #metoo movement went viral in . the viral hashtag, and the focus on the entertainment industry hit close to home. my career was in the film and television industry, and i had experienced the rampant sexual harassment and assault being described by famous hollywood elites, yet still felt as if i was not in a position of enough power in my role as a production assistant to speak out. i started thinking about power, who has it? who does not? who was #metoo for, and who was it actually liberating? only once #metoo went mainstream did anyone realize that ‘me too’ was already being used as a symbol of solidarity for victims; the major difference is the original creator, african american activist and community organizer tarana burke’s version of me too was to help young women of colour in her community, many of whom are poor and facing any number of intersecting challenges. it’s quite ironic that a movement intended for disadvantaged women and girls of colour was co-opted so completely by the white hollywood elite. it is uncomfortable to admit that it took something of this scale to cause me to question my own complicity with centering whiteness in my feminism, and to recognize the real world implications of racial erasure within a movement dominated by upper-middle class white women. white feminism & black erasure in black-lesbian-feminist icon audre lorde attended a feminist conference by the new york institute for the humanities. the type of feminism that lorde encountered there was overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, upper-middle class, and academic – just as hooks describes ( ). lorde was one of only two women of colour invited to speak at the conference. in response, lorde penned the famous essay the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. to lorde, “it is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, black and third world women, and lesbians”( ), yet there lorde was, at a conference dedicated to difference, in a sea of whiteness. fast forward to : white actress alissa milano takes to twitter and makes a simple request to her (millions) of followers: “if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” the response was instantaneous. by the next day, the hashtag #metoo had been used , times (@alyssa_milano). the movement only gained momentum, and days later, the hashtag had been used across all social media platforms millions times (sayej). the virility of the hashtag, along with the downfall of a number of powerful men in hollywood, meant that the discussion about the rampant sexual abuse in hollywood was covered by most major news outlets. though these two events took place almost years apart, the similarities are difficult to ignore. #metoo centres white, heterosexual, rich women, at the expense of further subjugating poor women and girls of colour. white feminism & white fragility the problem revealing itself in the paragraphs above has come to be known as white feminism. white feminism is a term which has been in use since feminist theorists of colour such as hooks, audre lorde, and kimberlé crenshaw began writing about racism in feminism in the ’s. the qualities of white feminism are more defined than simply a feminist who is white. for the purposes of this paper, i define the term white feminism as the practice of feminism that centers the problems of predominantly white, middle to upper class, heterosexual women, and tends to focus exclusively on gender inequality as the primary source of all other societal oppressions. white feminism is also, intentionally or otherwise, committed to white supremacy. here i will take a moment to re-contextualize the term ‘white supremacy’ from the image the term conjures in contemporary times. today, the term white supremacy brings to mind the klu klux klan, burning crosses, and the era of slavery long past. however, white supremacy continues to be the foundation of modern western societies , and can be found within anyone holding white privilege. sociologist and lecturer robin diangelo defines white supremacy in her book white fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. as diangelo puts it, “most white people do not identify with these images [white supremacy as described above] of white supremacists and so take great umbrage to the term being used more broadly. for sociologists and those involved in current racial justice movements, however, white supremacy is a descriptive and useful term to capture the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white and the practices based on this assumption” ( ). white supremacy, while jarring to many well-meaning white people, is important language to use in a discussion of white feminism because the desire to protect latent racial superiority and denial of personal responsibility is one of the main ways white feminists can cause harm to women of colour. diangelo provides useful language in her book which helps me to better understand that implicit and insidious nature of internalized white supremacy. the most important term in diangelo’s book is in the title: white fragility. as she explains: “we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offence. the smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable – the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. these include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress inducing situation. these responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy” ( ). white fragility is a powerful tool of white feminism, and as i explore the functions and strategies of white feminism further, i will show how white fragility is one of the major challenges that must be overcome. though white feminists have had the language, theory, and opportunity to embrace intersectionality and difference within the movement for the past years, thanks to the work of black feminist philosophers and theorists, white feminists continue to practice a form of feminism which centers whiteness, denies difference, and subjugates women of colour. what this shows us is that intentional or not, influential white feminists who are the gate keepers of feminist knowledge and theory remains firmly planted in the false universality of the white westernized experience of sexism and fails to provide more than a passing reference to intersectionality. the aim of this work is to understand the systems which built and maintain white feminism, identify its structures and strategies, and to provide a vocabulary for these strategies. in the conclusion of this work, i will propose a call to action to disrupt conventional white feminist discourses and provide pathways towards feminist consciousness raising which centre the voices of women of colour and anti-racism theory. this can only be accomplished if white women who practice feminism commit themselves to radical consciousness raising, taking responsibility for the deconstruction of racism, and to acknowledge and reject the internalized allegiance to whiteness. background and relevance white feminism has deep roots, but with so much research, theory, and philosophy by women of colour available, why do white feminists still struggle to talk about race? philosopher and radical feminist marilyn frye is one of first white feminists to reflect on and deconstruct what she refers to as ‘whiteliness’ in feminism, penning the politics of reality in . in an essay titled on being white: thinking towards a feminist understanding of race and race supremacy, frye reflects on her own journey towards understanding her own complicity, and the complicity of other white feminists, in the intentional ignorance towards issues of racism and white supremacy which ran rampant within feminist institutions. frye embarks on what must have been an uncomfortable personal journey as she describes the problematic ways she herself initially tried to engage with anti-racism work in her feminism, an early misguided strategy was to create a racism consciousness raising group, for white women only ( ). as a result, frye admits she was on the receiving end of anger and frustrations from feminists of colour: while frye meant well and was attempting to take responsibility for raising white feminist consciousness towards issues of race, what this whites only group actually achieved was to reproduce silencing and erasure that feminists of colour were trying to fight against ( ) frye refers to her own behaviour, and that of other white feminists as the ‘whiteliness’ problem. frye realizes that this problem is caused by what she calls false universalization. when people generally say ‘men’ they mean white men; when we say ‘women,’ we mean white women. in short, says frye, “we don’t think of ourselves as white” ( ). this is where the conflict lies: the majority of well-meaning white feminists are ignorant to their own racialized existence. in addition, when white feminists centre themselves in this frame of mind, the movement becomes overly simplified. white feminists speak with a sort of grand generalization, a false universality of their own specific problems. as bell hooks writes in her book talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, contemporary feminist thinkers often cite sexual politics as the origin of this crisis…such an assumption has fostered the notion that elimination of sexist oppression would necessarily lead to the eradication of all forms of domination... ideologically, thinking in this direction enables western women, especially privileged white women, to suggest that racism and class exploitation are merely the offspring of the parent system: patriarchy” ( ). what hooks is identifying is at the root of the white feminist problem; a hierarchy of need, one which prioritizes the patriarchal oppression of middle class white women over intersecting forces of oppression and dominance faced by women of colour, lesbians, and the poor. when white feminists insist racism will be solved once women achieve equality, they deny the reality of racial oppression and white supremacy, and in turn, are supporting and reinforcing that white dominance over women of colour. this is why it is of critical importance that those who consider themselves feminists understand intersectionality and have done the work to understand the structures and functions of racism – even if this involves the discomfort of acknowledging personal behaviours which reproduce the racist patriarchy. methodology the methodology of this work will be a qualitative discourse analysis, which will consist of data relating to white supremacy, white fragility, and white feminism. this data will be collected in the form of academic books, news articles, editorials, and social media posts. i will use the theoretical work of audre lorde, bell hooks, and marilyn frye to frame my analysis. i will also consult contemporary feminist writers such as layla saad, and rachel cargile, among others, to support my findings and underscore the urgency in which contemporary white feminists must address the systematic ignorance within the modern feminist movement. in order to capture the true complexity of white feminism, this work requires historical context. therefore, i will provide a brief histography of the women’s suffrage movement/ feminist movement in order to contextualize the contemporary problem of white feminism and white feminist fragility. i will also make limited use of the michel foucault’s ideas regarding bio power to help provide context and depth to our understanding of how white supremacy functions in our society. foucault was fascinated with the complex ways governments, states, and judicial systems exercised power over a population, and how this developed starting in the th century. biopower is concerned with how the state holds the power to subjugate bodies ( ). according to foucault, there are two poles to biopower, one being disciplinary, referring to the power of the state to incarcerate, limit the movements, and disenfranchise the population. the second pole “focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.”( ) bio-politics is the practice of bio-power: the intersection of power/knowledge and discourse to influence the physical minds and bodies of a population. as foucault discusses at length in society must be defended, control of the physical body is a tool of capitalism. under capitalism, bodies must be used as a means for production, or else that body will not have access to the basic necessities of life. this has led to the prison industrial complex, a broken western system of poverty and welfare, and sweatshops worldwide. this exploitation of bodies, according to foucault, leads us directly back to the topic at hand: white supremacy. we can draw direct comparisons with the problem of white feminism, and again back to what audre lorde writes about in the master’s tools. if white women maintain their allegiance to the white bio-politic, meaning, valuing and protecting their whiteness before dismantling systems of oppression, then by its very nature white feminism functions to further oppress women of colour while seeking equality with white male oppressors. a call to action: white feminist (ignore)ance if mainstream feminist practice is white feminism, is the movement capable of creating any meaningful progress? until white feminists recognize that their allegiance to their race is redirecting feminist discourse, resources, and energy towards protecting and reproducing white supremacy, there can be no meaningful progress. in this work i call on white feminists to end the cycle. kimberlé crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality is not enough – white feminists need to do the introspective anti-racism work required to fully understand the extent to which white supremacy and the patriarchy dictate our global society. by asking women of colour to use their time, knowledge, and emotional energy to convince us that racism is real, we are wasting time. instead of using our difference as power, our difference has divided us, and distracted us. to summarize, in this work, i will form a clear connection between historical patterns of colonization with the current form of westernized bio-power – a form of white supremacy that seeks to protect itself at all costs. once this connection has been established, i will explore how white supremacy - through exercising the various facets of bio-power - has worked to create a society where the white majority is encouraged, either explicitly or implicitly, to protect whiteness and how the feminist movement came to embody and replicate this values in white feminist practice. i will argue that until white feminists do the radical self-reflective work to de-centre whiteness from feminist practice and consciousness-raising, the fight to dismantle the patriarchy in any meaningful way cannot begin in earnest. the ambition of this work is to propose a strategy to help facilitate the deconstruction of white feminism; this will include utilizing the work of women of colour such as bell hooks, lyla saad, and rachel cargle. i will identify terms, behaviours, and vocabulary which assist with identifying and disrupting white feminism in practice. my main argument is that anti-racism must be centred in feminist practice, because, as is made clear by kimberle crenshaw, bell hooks, and many more, racism and sexism occur concurrently. racism is exasperated by gender; sexism is exasperated by race. overcoming white feminism will not only require a reconfiguration of how white feminists understand difference; it will require radical self-acceptance. accepting that white fragility exists in everyone who holds white privilege, and that intentional or not, we are all complicit in structural racism. ignorance can no longer be an excuse; as fyre writes “ignorance of these sorts is a complex result of many acts and many negligences. to begin to appreciate this one need only to hear the active verb to ‘ignore’ in the word ‘ignorance’. our ignorance is perpetuated for us in many way and we have may ways of perpetuating it for ourselves” ( ). only once white feminists are able to fully accept their participation is white supremacy and reject their willful ignorance can they take steps towards true intersectionality. chapter : white feminism: a herstory in audre lorde was invited to participate in a conference by the new york institute for the humanities. lorde, a black lesbian feminist, wrote the essay the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house to reflect on her experience at the conference, where she was one of only two women of colour invited to speak. the essay speaks strongly to the lack of diversity in this academic setting, and how this causes damage to the movement as a whole: it is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, black and third world women, and lesbians. and yet, i stand here as a black lesbian feminist, been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. what this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. to read this program is to assume that lesbian and black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. and what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? what does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? it means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable. (lord, ) lorde begins her essay by questioning the very purpose of feminist discourse when it so sadly lacks diversity of thought. who is this feminism for, and what exactly is it trying to accomplish? this essay is a call to action to white women, an invitation to accept difference as power and to liberate themselves of the patriarchal notion that there are acceptable women, and unacceptable women. to lorde, the patriarchy isn’t just men. the patriarchy, which feminism purports to dismantle, is protecting the status quo; meaning white, elite, heterosexuals. a feminism that only challenges the patriarchy based on gender inequality for white women isn’t really challenging the patriarchy at all – in fact, it only serves to protect it: “for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. and this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support” ( ). this last statement, which identifies white women who ultimately view the patriarchy as something to live with and live under, resonates throughout time. the women’s suffrage movement of the mid th century is what many consider to be the beginning of modern feminism. white women around the world, primarily in europe and colonized countries, started fighting for legal personhood, the right to vote, and to own property (franceschet et al. ). this movement was ultimately successful, in australia, women nationally won the right to vote in ; in america , in the united kingdom in ; canada . other european and nations colonized by europeans followed suit along a similar timeline. while without question the suffrage movement made big strides towards gender equality, it is important to remember that in most cases the suffrage movement was only by, for, and about, white women. in canada, indigenous people were not granted the right to vote until ; aboriginal peoples of australia ; in the united states women of colour, while technically eligible to vote following the civil war, were effectively banned from voting due to laws tying voter rights to property ownership, and property ownership was denied to women of colour. they were fully granted voting rights in (franceschet et al. ). to anyone who might suggest that white women in the suffrage movement may have simply excluded women of colour because of social segregation, i will use the canadian suffrage movement to illustrate that women of colour were not only excluded; they were often targeted for further oppression. votes for (white) women a major milestone for the canadian suffrage movement was what is famously known as the persons case. before the canadian constitution was known as such, the dominion of canada was governed under the british north america act, (the bna). section of this act stated that only ‘qualified persons’ could be appointed to the senate. while most white women in canada had gained the right to vote and run for local government and magistrate positions by the mid ’s (with the exception of quebec, who did not follow suit until ), women were not considered ‘qualified persons’ and therefore ineligible for seats in the senate (devereux, ). in , a group of suffragettes now known as the famous five (emily murphy, nellie mcclung, irene parlby, louise mckinney and henrietta muir edwards), signed a letter petitioning the supreme court of canada to consider the definition of ‘qualified persons’ and if that could be interpreted to include women. the supreme court unanimously voted that while women were ‘persons’, they are not ‘qualified persons’; meaning, they would not be eligible for a seat in senate. it is reported that the judges of the supreme court at the time based their decision on interpreting the law as it was intended at the time it was written – . the supreme court decided that women were not intended to be included (devereux, ). the famous five then decided to take the petition to the privy council – at the time the privy council, as an entity of the british empire, was the last level of court above the supreme court. the privy council ruled in favour of the famous five, and on october th, white canadian women where finally declared qualified persons. the famous five are widely celebrated in canadian history. a canadian heritage minute which ran on public television in the ’s depicts the series of events. the persons case is taught to students in social studies classes across the country. a monument of the famous five signing the petition is immortalized in alberta and on parliament hill in ottawa. before continuing this discussion, i would like to return for a moment to the logic used by the supreme court when deciding that women were not qualified to run for senate. the decision was based on the idea that law is ironclad, irreversible, and assumes those who came before held an almost god-like power to know what truth is. this argument, which has been repeated throughout history, is a function of patriarchy. it serves only to protect the status quo, and has vast implications for our legal institutions, notions of truth, and historical revisions. this commitment and defence of the past is extremely relevant to a discussion of feminism, as feminism shares a colonial history with the patriarchy. how much or how little we hold historical figures accountable for not only their actions, but the future consequences of those actions, is fundamental to anti-racist practice. the sins of my foremothers: eugenic feminism in dr. cecily devereux of the university of alberta published the book growing a race: nellie l. mcclung and the fiction of eugenic feminism. in this book devereux examines mcclung’s legacy to see to what extent her activism was influenced by eugenics. eugenics was a popular philosophy in colonized nations; eugenics, based on ideas gleaned from darwinism, is the notion that humanity and civilization can be improved with selective breeding. if those with undesirable traits are not permitted to reproduce, then those undesirable traits will simply cease to exist. undesirable traits essentially included anyone not able-bodied, mentally stable, white, and heterosexual (devereux, ). the information that mcclung was an advocate of eugenics is not new, but often downplayed. in the same year that mcclung and the famous five were petitioning the supreme court, mcclung and emily murphy were also vocal eugenicists and in full support of the sexual sterilization act (mccavitt, ). this act granted the province of alberta the authority to sterilize anyone deemed mentally deficient in order to protect the gene pool. the term ‘mentally deficient’ could be applied liberally (unlike the use of the word ‘person’ apparently), and applied to: alcoholics, the homeless, poorly behaved children, social deviance, those with epilepsy, and most often, simply being an indigenous woman (devereux, ). while estimates differ widely, by the time forced sterilization was repealed in the , the closest official estimate of the number of individuals who underwent legal forced sterilization is roughly . despite making up approximately . % of the population of alberta, metis or indigenous people accounted for . % of sterilizations (mccavitt, ). forced sterilization of women was just one arm of the ‘take the indian out of the child’ policy established by first canadian prime minister john a macdonald, and mcclung was a enthusiastic advocate for ‘uplifting’ the native people of canada. with the advantage of hindsight, in we have a clearer understanding of the damage caused to the indigenous population by these actions, laws, and policies. how do we reconcile the irony of a figure who dedicated much of her life to fighting for (white) women’s equality, while simultaneously supporting what is now officially recognized as cultural genocide? devereux addresses how many contemporary critics attempt to engage with mcclung’s duality” like so many feminists of the first wave, she is understood to have paradoxically done ‘good’ work for many women that is ‘bad’ because it took place within a framework of cultural imperialism. contemporary critical evaluations have tended to negotiate this paradox by swinging between a sense that is it ‘inappropriate to judge a woman like mcclung by contemporary standards and a sense that a woman like mcclung must be judged by contemporary standards because she figures at this time as a national hero. neither approach is entirely satisfactory, the first because it seems to suggest that the ideas of earlier generations cannot be properly assessed or that they should not be assessed, the second because it leads to a kind of historical denial and to a serious overwriting and reconfiguration of a problematic past. (devereux, ) both of these approaches to assessing mcclung and her legacy, in my opinion, are reductive. the discussion should not be whether or not mcclung was a good or bad person, or what her intention was at the time. these are simply moral judgments. systematic inequality was not created because of the lack of morals of one or even many individuals. those who argue that mcclung was a product of her society are not wrong; mcclung lived in an imperial society focused on the enduring domination of the british empire. however, declaring her a product of her society does not absolve mcclung and other eugenicists of their legacy. to argue that ‘they thought they were doing the right thing’ only serves to further victimize those who continued to suffer under colonial patriarchy. while ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ may have been a philosophical exercise for colonists, the indigenous people of canada were always aware that what was happening to them was wrong. to use historical (white) social norms to defend actions of the past only serves to further disenfranchise oppressed people and ignores the autonomy of past and present-day individuals who wish to hold institutions and governments accountable. i am choosing to engage with nellie mcclung not to demand she be erased from the feminist herstory books; mcclung will continue to be an important historical figure and should be remembered and studied. i am choosing mcclung as an example of how the roots of white feminism were established long ago and continue to be reproduced. as i will discuss further in the next chapter, the desire to place people in a moral good/bad binary is a problematic trait of current and contemporary feminism. the ‘me’ in #metoo we cannot change the past; we can only learn from it. when i look to the actions of mcclung, and then to the white women holding the feminist conference lorde attended in , and again to contemporary feminist movements such as #metoo, there is a discernable pattern. a cycle of repetition is characterized by white women dominating feminist discourse and receiving the most credit and praise. we are nearing a century since mcclung and the famous five signed their petition, yet an analysis of how the #metoo movement unfolded, arguably the most visible feminist moment in recent years, it seems that very little has changed. much of the public conversation surrounding topics of social justice often take place on social media, with hashtags becoming the rallying point to create a collective voice of resistance. however, as many black, indigenous, and queer activists have drawn attention to, this resistance often only seems to apply to wealthy, heterosexual, white women. the series of events leading up to and following the #metoo movement is a convenient example to illustrate how little has changed. the social media hashtag #metoo went viral in after popular white actress alissa milano tweeted: fig. according to a report published by the guardian in december , in the days following this tweet, #metoo was used on twitter and facebook million times (sayej). while the popularity of this hashtag was obviously successful in drawing attention to the often-ignored reality of workplace sexual violence, the majority of the discussion in the weeks following milano’s tweet was led by white, privileged, hollywood actresses. in addition to the narrow scope of #metoo, black feminists were quick to point out that metoo was already in use as a call of solidarity against sexual violence. as dr. penny griffin summarizes in the australian journal of political science, #metoo is not a movement by and for white women, although it has arguably been coopted by and for white women. the origins of the #metoo movement lie in the work of tarana burke, a black, us-based women’s activists. burke established ‘me too’ in as an activist group to help and locate resources for young survivors of sexual violence in underprivileged communities, especially (but not only) young women of colour. ( ) it is ironic that a movement intended for underprivileged young women of colour being was overrun by the white, wealthy, social elite. even if unintentional, this series of events is reproducing a tradition of white women only looking out for the interests of other white women. violence against women of colour in the workplace and in general is experienced at significantly higher rate than white women. indigenous women in canada are particularly vulnerable, with the canadian human rights commission reporting that “young indigenous women are five times more likely than other canadian women to die as a result of violence” (assembly of first nations). returning to lorde’s words i quotes earlier: “it is of particular arrogance to engage in a discussion of feminism without the without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, black and third world women, and lesbians” (lord, ). yet, here we are, once again, centering wealthy heterosexual white women in the conversation. on november th, , the washington post published a piece by tarana burke, reflecting on the sudden virality of her programs namesake. the article, titled ‘#metoo was started for black and brown women and girls. they’re still being ignored.’ burke reflects on her own work, and the work of other black activists over the last decade. what history has shown us time and again is that if marginalized voices- those of people of colour, queer people, disabled people, poor people – aren’t centred in our movements then they tend to become no more than a footnote. i often say that sexual violence knows no race, class or gender, but the response to it does. “me too.” is a response to the spectrum of gender-based sexual violence that comes directly from survivors – all survivors. we can’t afford a racialized, gendered, or classist response. ending sexual violence will require every voice from every corner of the world and it will require those whose voices are most often heard to find ways to amplify those voices that often go unheard (burke). the series of events which took place which resulted in an elite and white-washed version of #metoo was predictably ironic. this pattern pre-dates the suffrage movement and illustrates how black-erasure is a critical feature of main-stream or, what i’ll be referring to as ‘white feminism’. burke’s writing in this piece helps me define what is meant by the term; ‘white feminism’ is a form of feminism generally practiced by white, middle class, heterosexual women, which disregards race, sexuality, poverty, or gender identity as causes worth including in their activism. in the following chapters, i will examine and analysis the functions of white feminism, and propose an approach to disrupt it. chapter : beyond intersectionality: white feminist fragility lorraine bethel is an african american lesbian, feminist, poet, and author. the following excerpt is from a poem, titled what chou mean ‘we’, white girl, bethel penned when she and barbara smith, who is also an african american lesbian feminist, were the guest editors of the “black women’s issue” of conditions: five, a literary magazine predominantly for black lesbian women. the full poem, which fills up pages of conditions is a raw, visceral take down of the academic, white feminism which has alienated and further oppressed feminists of colour in the ’s. the following passage touches on the tokenism and subjugation black feminists often experienced when approached by white academic feminists. i knew it was coming when she said “you don’t know me, but i got your name from…” they never know us, selecting their victims from a rolodex labeled feminists, black or lesbians, black or better still, lesbian feminists, black a list i’m convinced some white girl is selling and has made enough money from to retire with a swiss bank account an index of black women, feminists, lesbians literate ones who don’t eat white women or bite their heads off or say “that’s irrelevant to my struggle as a black woman,” or “the women’s movement is a white girl trip,” or “are you a bull dyke?” or “get out of my face, bitch!” when feminism is mentioned to them. (bethel, ) in this passage, bethel acknowledges she is one of a limited number of black women who identify as feminist, something that at the time was considered rare thanks to underrepresentation in academia, along with the commitment white feminists had to only discuss topics which were relevant to their lives; topics that did not resonate with women of colour. the powerful title of this piece, what chou mean we, white girl, summarizes the feelings of exclusion, willful ignorance, and disdain feminists of colour felt when attempting to engage with white feminists; there is a certain amount of irony with the use of the collective ‘we’ when a privileged white woman speaks from a podium at an academic conference where there are only one or two women of colour in attendance. it is thanks to women like bethel using their anger that acclaimed writer and feminist kimberlé crenshaw introduced the widely influential concept of intersectionality in the , in an effort to articulate and communicate to white feminists the intersecting challenges faced by women of colour. as feminists seemed unwilling to discuss racism, and anti-racism activists seemed unwilling to discuss sexism, crenshaw took it on herself to provide language and make space for the often-ignored problems faced by women of colour. as crenshaw explains: “the failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women” ( ). these words echo the experience of audre lorde at the conference which inspired her essay the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house and will be echoed once again in when tarana burke addresses the #metoo movement. in the previous chapter a brief analysis of historical feminisms reveals the early precedent to centre whiteness in mainstream feminist practice. what this analysis makes clear is that colonial patterns of disenfranchisement of people of colour have been replicated in suffrage movements around the globe, in the nd wave feminism of the ’s, through the so called ‘ rd wave’ of the ’s and ’s, and again in the #metoo movement. african american feminists such as angela davis, audre lorde, and kimberlé crenshaw have been writing about the exclusion of women of colour, poor women, and queer women for decades. if women of colour have been talking about the problem of white feminism for so long, why does feminism to this day continue to struggle with centring whiteness? white exclusivity in feminism has been a topic black feminists have theorized about for decades, yet almost all eventually come to the same foundational conclusion: an internalized and often invisible commitment to white supremacy. the feminist bio-politic understanding the why of racism is crucial to understanding the problem of white feminism. while i have made the intentional choice to exclude white male academics in this work, i do believe any examination of power, especially how power operates in society and on individual bodies, can benefit from the theoretical work of michel foucault. foucault, the highly influential french philosopher and theorist, was fascinated with the complex ways governments, states, and judicial systems exercised power over a population, and how this developed starting in the th century, as global european colonization was in full swing. the history of sexuality: volume i theorised that there are two forms of power – “two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations” ( ). the first pole of power is disciplinary power, and the second pole - which will be of focus in the work - is “focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population ( ). bio-politics is the practice of bio-power: the intersection of power/knowledge and discourse to influence the physical minds and bodies of a population. as foucault discusses at length in society must be defended, control of the physical body is a tool of capitalism. under capitalism, bodies must be used as a means for production, or else that body will not have access to the basic necessities of life. this has led to the prison industrial complex, a broken western system of poverty and welfare, and sweatshops worldwide. this exploitation of bodies, according to foucault, leads us directly back to the topic at hand: the racism. in society must be defended, foucault writes: “…a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage” ( ). what this means is that our governments are not racist by accident. as foucault writes, bio-political racism is “a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products […] the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization” ( ). as foucault predicted, racism has become a pillar in contemporary society. racism has become so normalised, it is invisible to most white folks. the government does not have to be explicitly racist, because racism is the default. bio- power and bio-politics are the invisible systems at work in our society which creates a perpetual cycle of race and gender based discrimination. angela davis, an icon of radical black feminism and civil rights, has dedicated her life to dismantling racism. davis has lived through different political periods and different waves of feminism and has a unique perspective to analyse the bio-political implications of structural racism and how it functions on colonial societies. in a talk at murdoch university titled recognizing racism in the era of neoliberalism, davis identifies how the solidified definition of racism which formed following the civil rights movement of the s has contributed to patterns of structural racism: “definitions of racism informed by particular historical conditions became trans- or ahistorical ways of conceptualizing racial discrimination and subjugation. the persistence of these meanings beyond the particular historical conditions that produced them has hampered the evolution of a new vocabulary and new discourse that might allow us to identify new modes of racism in what is known as the post-civil rights era” (davis). the definition davis provides for neo-liberalism is “the flawed assumption that history does not matter” (davis). what davis argues is that racism was moved from present, to past. it became understood that slavery is racist; segregation is racist; the klu klux klan is racist. keeping generational wealth generated by slave owners is not racist. the war on drugs is not racist. police brutality against people of colour is not racist. all of these instances, under neo-liberalism, are justified because every instance is treated as an individual data point – not a trend which builds on hundreds of years of subjugation (davis). sociologist robin diangelo, author of white fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism expands on the explanations davis provides us in her talk on how ideas of a post racial world continue to disadvantage people of colour. diangelo emphasises the institutional structures of our society, institutions built by the state, designed by and to measure the success and validate the accomplishments of the white population. “to say that whiteness includes a set of cultural practices that are not recognized by white people is to understand racism as a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of colour” (diangelo, ). diangelo is describing the functions of bio-politics. invisible, structured systems which are designed to benefit those with white skin, and harm those without. white fragility through biopower, foucault provides me with the ability to see the invisible structures within our institutions designed to advantage white people, and further subjugate people of colour. i also believe that the actions of white fragility as proposed in diangelo’s book have the qualities biopolitical power in practice, ingrained behaviours which act to correct discourses which challenge white supremacy. diangelo describes white fragility as the adverse emotional reaction experienced by white people due to what she calls the “good/bad binary (diangelo, ). the good/bad binary is a simplistic worldview that certain people are ‘good’, law-abiding, kind, and moral, while people who are sexist, homophobic, or racist, are ‘bad.’ in this dichotomy, all discrimination must be explicit, intentional, and with the goal of causing harm. due to our commitment to viewing ourselves as moral and good, according to diangelo, “we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense” ( ). diangelo also focuses on what she refers to as white progressives as the main group vulnerable to white fragility; white progressives are white people who believe they are not racist, less racist, and are already allies to the cause ( ). this group are even more likely to react negatively to accusations of racism because in their mind, they are ‘one of the good ones,’ and are very concerned with being perceived as such. diangelo says “i believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of colour” ( ), because, based on the good/bad binary, as good people, nothing they do could be considered racist. casual racism and microaggressions are invisible to those who refuse to accept the reality of internalized racism. white feminists i believe would fall under the umbrella of progressive whites, as they view themselves as already committed to the anti-oppression cause. in terms of biopower functioning to protect white supremacy, white fragility is an insidious and effective way to keep even the most progressive white people in line to inadvertently protect racial superiority. while diangelo offers useful terms to help describe some of the bio-political functions of white feminism, the problem is more complex than simple miseducation and hurt feelings; the solution more complex than appealing to white people to become radically self-aware. the suggestion that racism is a result of misunderstanding and poor self-reflective skills and regarding casual racism as inadvertent feels like a gentle attempt to lead white people towards anti-racist work, while simultaneously exonerating us from responsibility. white fragility is a term i would apply to behaviour, however we’re still lacking an understanding of why we see this behaviour, and why are white feminists prone to it? in the book leadership by resentment, dr. ruth capriles takes on the philosophical challenge of understanding the pathology of resentment. according to capriles, resentment (or ressentiment, a linguistic choice in the text) “is understood as a phenomenon and an emotional process that proceeds by phases of repression and transformation of emotions which sink deeply into the centre of the personality until they are removed from consciousness and rational control. when the emotion surfaces it is experienced as a renewal of both the original grievance and the feeling of impotence” ( ). capriles metaphorically describes resentment as an illness; something that can grow in an individual, a community, or even a society. resentment, more than an unconscious bias, is what i would argue is a more accurate explanation of the phenomenon of white fragility as is proposed by robin diangelo. since resentment is common among those who consider themselves to be disenfranchised ( ), i can start to understand why white women and white feminists have always struggled with intersectionality and exclusion. in a world of ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ racism is not only a symptom of oppressive governments; racism is a symptom of a larger pattern of oppression and a capitalist system which by necessity of function creates social stratification. nobody wants to be on the bottom. for white feminists, who have taken up the mantle of activists against sexism, we start to understand why other groups are ignored: discussions of race, sexuality, and gender might eclipse the issues which seem most urgent to heterosexual white women. rather than place anger and resentment towards those who cause the oppression, resentment is most often directed towards other oppressed people who are perceived to be getting ‘more’ – social programs, equal opportunity initiatives, legal protections, etc ( ). feminista jones, an african american social worker, author, and community activist echoed this sentiment on an episode of the podcast just between us in july . when asked why she thought white women vote against their own best interest (in reference to the statistic that % of white women votes for donald trump in the american election), jones provided an answer that captured the complexity of female oppression. most oppressed people vote against their own interests, and white women are oppressed… and i think a lot of times when people are oppressed, they can act out towards others, nobody wants to be at the bottom. i also think that white supremacy and white privilege is like currency, right? so, i always say this, and i challenge you all to think [about] this. if i am with my year old son, and you are with your year old son, as a white mother, and somebody’s standing in front of us, and pointing a gun at us, who’s child would you want to be shot? not yours. and that’s the position that people end up being in. i am going to do whatever i can to live and to survive; and if it means relying on some of the most evil things in our society, when it comes down to it, i want to live and i want to survive. and i think that’s where ‘isms’ come from: it comes from survival, it comes from greed, it comes from the need to survive and as altruistic as you may be, you’re going to go for your own self-interests first… so when white women are voting, they know the strongest currency they have is whiteness.” (jones) jones touches on something that diangelo overlooks in her book; fragility doesn’t only steam from imagined threats to power; those who are oppressed in other ways are sometimes even more prone to protecting whiteness as a means of survival. when put next to writers such as cargile and jones, diangelo’s explanation for white fragility falls flat. as i will explore further in the next chapter, unconscious social bias is one possible explanation; however, it also serves to downplay the intention of racist behaviour. angry white women: white feminist resentment white feminist resentment is especially acute in those who consider themselves as virtuous, or as diangelo would describe, one of the good white people. by denying complicity with white supremacy, white feminists continue to perpetuate institutional racism against women of colour. while there is no shortage of examples of wfr, a higher profile example is the response to a series of social media posts by black activist and writer rachel cargile following the racially motivated murder of nia wilson. wilson was murdered by a white supremacist while taking public transit in oakland, california. (cargle) in the days following wilson’s tragic death, cargile took to her social media to challenge white feminists by asking “where are the voices of all my white feminist friends when a black woman had been tragically murdered”(cargle)? some of cargile’s white followers took this as an opportunity to show solidarity with the black community, however, according to cargile, just as many responded with resentment. instead of sharing in the outrage of nia’s brutal murder, they came with fury for being tagged in a post that they felt challenged their own perceived feminist accomplishments. there were grand displays of defensiveness, demands that they be acknowledged for all the things they had done for black people in the past, and a terrifying lashing out that included racial slurs and doxing. (cargle) to cargle, this reaction is indicative of the deep seeded problems within white feminism – the need to protect whiteness overpowers their self-proclaimed desire to protect women. these attempts at discourse correction is an exercise in bio-politics; the goal of this behaviour is to protect their perception of identity and morality at the expense of people of colour, and at the expense of denying nia wilson the most basic respect of acknowledging the forces which lead to her death. cargile refers to this expression of resentment as ‘white toxic feminism’, because the aim is not to engage in a meaningful discourse, to advance women in society, or advocate for any kind of equality; this expression of ‘feminism’ is aimed at actively harming women of colour for challenging the status quo. ‘white toxic feminism,’ ‘white feminism’ and ‘white feminist resentment’ are part of the same phenomenon. chapter : the functions and failures of white feminism in my previous chapters, i discussed the what and the why of white feminism. here, i will explore the how of white feminism – the strategies, tools, and actions which continue to perpetuate the practice far longer than the black feminists writing in the ’s and ’s could have imagined. returning once again to audre lorde, in the following passage lorde explains one of the most basic – and ongoing – strategies white feminism deploys which prevents adequate intersectionality in feminist practice. women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. this is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. this is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. (lorde, ) the ‘tremendous resistance’ lorde speaks of is the fragility robin diangelo defines of in her book; the resentment capriles speaks of; lorde is identifying the struggle to engage white feminists with topics of race; topics which challenging white supremacy. what lorde is proposing, and what disenfranchised people have reiterated and repeated over the last century, is that it is not the responsibility of women to educate men, for black women to educate white women, for queer people to educate heterosexual people. white feminism exists to protect power by denying the existence of difference, to deny other ways of knowing, and other ways of living as a global community. moreover, by playing into a system which continues to ‘other’ members of the population, the power of feminism becomes diluted. rather than accepting and embracing our points of difference, white feminism is reinforcing the patriarchal system it seeks to dismantle. how can feminism overcome this history of exclusion and fragility? diangelo’s solution of radical self-reflection is only one small part of the potential cure. unpacking the discourse which has been formed by a century of bio-politics aimed to subjugate certain members of society in order for other groups to flourish is no simple task. as marilyn frye writes “race is a tie that binds us to men: “us” being white women, and “men” being white men. if we wish not to be bound in subordination to men, we have to give up trading on our white skin for white men’s race privilege” ( ). here, fyre is explicitly tying sexism and oppression to whiteness. when considering feminism in this way, it becomes very clear that white women must extricate themselves from white supremacy before they engage with even the basic principles of feminism, or else their ability to fight oppression will be extremely limited. in order to take on this work, we must first understand the toolkit and strategies of white feminism, to learn to recognize red flags and disrupt the discourse. white supremacy and me: radical de-colonization layla saad is an author, activist, and teacher. saad, who is an east-african, arab, british, black, muslim woman, uses her uniquely intersectional identity to study and analyse the functions of white supremacy. over the summer of , saad challenged her social media followers with the following post: white folks: time for some radical truth-telling about you and your complicity in white supremacy. not those white people ‘out there’. not white people as a collective. but you. just you. we start tomorrow. days of simple yet direct questions for you to share where you are at in your journey so far of understanding and owning your racism. this is not me educating you. this is you being honest about the work you have been doing so far, and how you have been internalising that work. don’t comment unless you are willing to be all the way honest. i don’t care about perfectionism. i care about truth, because truth sets us free and makes us better. use the hashtag #meandwhitesupremacy if you want to share. see you tomorrow. (laylafsaad) what started out as a social media challenge evolved into what is now titled the “me and white supremacy workbook,” available as an online pdf, and to be published in print in . saad takes the proposal diangelo makes about personal responsibility for racism to another level, turning anti-racist work from a passive and reactive activity into an active and productive exercise. the next days, saad provided followers with simple yet complex prompts, which include: you & white fragility, you & tone policing, you & white centering, and you & optical allyship (saad). the language saad uses here is important, and these concepts are a common thread among academics and writers focusing on anti-racism and whiteness. when rachel cargile wrote her piece for harper bazar addressing white feminism following the death of nia wilson, she included a list of behaviours white feminists engage with as defence mechanisms. before elaborating on these concepts, i have included a sampling of comments on saad’s instagram channel which highlight four major strategies identified by cargile and saad, which are commonly utilized by white feminism: tone policing, spiritual by-passing, white savior complex, and centering. fig. a fig. b fig. c fig. a fig. b fig. c in the first set of images (figure a- c), saad posts a quote which speaks about ‘spiritual white women’ who are lacking an intersectional approach to their feminism. instagram user thecosmiccrysalis, a self-identified spiritual white woman”, chimes in claiming that racism ‘goes both ways’ and that she too experiences ‘positive discrimination’ (price gouging due to the perception that she is a wealthy white person). the comment ends with a call to action; ‘no blame cards, no race cards, no excuses.’ saad’s gentle suggestion that thecosmiccrysalis should educate herself on institutional racism is essentially ignored, as thecosmiccrysalis rejects this suggestion and continues down the path of spiritual bypassing. spiritual bypassing: “we are all alike in soul and diverse in outer experience”. what is ‘spiritual bypassing’? influential psychologist john welwood, who has advanced studies of including spirituality in psychological practice, first coined the term ‘spiritual bypassing’ in to define the use of spiritual practices and beliefs as a way of avoiding dealing with unresolved psychological issues ( ). the term is common with psychologists who incorporate religion and spirituality into their practice. as welwood explains, “spiritual bypassing often adopts a rational based on using absolute truth to deny or disparage relative truth. absolute truth is what is eternally true, now and forever, beyond any particular viewpoint” ( ). in an interview originally published in tricycle magazine, welwood elaborates on the concept and how it can function in interpersonal relationships: “when we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what i call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it” (welwood). when applied to the functions of white feminism, the “raw and messy side of humanness” welwood describes is the latent white supremacy cargile and saad are calling on white women to disrupt. in cargle’s article, she applies the term specifically to white feminists, making the observation that “the easiest way for white women to skirt around the realities of racism is to just “love and light it away.” when confronted with ways they have offended a marginalized group with their words or actions, they immediately start to demand unity and peace; painting those they harmed as aggressive, mean, or divisive (cargle) cargle summarizes the phenomenon of spiritual bypassing in the context of white feminism quite concisely: when we look to the exchange in figure c, thecosmiccrysalis demonstrates all of the above: “my point being, regardless of race we are all divine souls. to even speak about race is to create a boarder, create an illusion.” thecosmiccrysalis dismisses the concept of race entirely due to the fact that we are all divine souls. though thecosmiccrysalis is clearly trying to relate to saad on a level above our physical plain, what this instagram user accomplishes is perpetuating one of the main functions of white feminism; denying the race-based discrimination experienced by many women of colour. rather than listening and benefiting from the resources, discussions, and opportunities saad provides thecosmiccrysalis to evolve her thinking, thecosmiccrysalis chooses to remain committed to her ignorance. spiritual bypassing is an elevated version of ‘i don’t see colour’ – it’s a strategy designed to relieve white of their complicity with systematic racism – you cannot see something you refuse to acknowledge. tone policing: “thank you for not coming out swinging”. the exchange saad engages with in the second set of screenshots (fig. a- c) with instagram user celestialearthmother at first seems rather innocuous – the comment is praising saad for her approach, tone, and gentle nature. saad, however, is quick to draw attention to the practice tone policing. when celestialearthmother says “thanks for not coming out swinging” this is a reference to ‘angry black women’ – a stereotype. in , academics trina jones and kimberly jade norwood published the paper aggressive encounters & white fragility: deconstructing the trope of the angry black woman specifically to deconstruct this stereotype. they describe “the angry black woman” as the “the physical embodiment of some of the worst negative stereotypes of black women—she is out of control, disagreeable, overly aggressive, physically threatening, loud (even when she speaks softly), and to be feared. she will not stay in her “place.” she is not human” ( ). as jones and norwood explain, the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype has contributed to high levels of incarceration, increased instances of police brutality, and an overall dismissal of black women’s voices ( ). tone policing is the practice of discourse correction; it limits how women of colour speak, what they can say, and controls much emotion is deemed acceptable. cargle introduces this idea by emphasizing the many reasons black women have to be angry, “when women of color begin to cry out about their pain, frustration, and utter outrage with the system that is continuing to allow our men to murdered, our babies to be disregarded, and our livelihood to be dismissed, we are often met with white women who tell us perhaps we should “say things a little nicer” if we want to be respected and heard.” with the added context of the damaging history of stereotypes, the comment from celestialearthmother in fig b takes on a new weight. not only is applauding saad for her restraint condescending, but she is enforcing the subjugation of black voices. this exchange is significant; saad invites celestialearthmother to educate herself on the concept of tone policing and goes as far as to provide her with a resource to assist. the irony of the response in fig c is obvious: celestialearthmother claims that she wants women of colour to educate her – yet when saad does try to educate her, celestialearthmother doubles down and insists that since she is coming to the conversation ‘curious’ with the goal to attain a better understanding of racism, she would prefer a gentle approach, because “when i feel attacked when trying to do better, it creates a discord.” so not only does celestialearthmother feel entitled to be educated by black women, she is diverting the conversation from racism to her own feelings. this is a white feminist strategy known as centering. centring: “it was a personal experience for me that felt like an attack”. as cargile explains, centring refers to the phenomenon of making issues of racism or intersectionality about themselves and their feelings. “white women get so caught up in how they feel in a moment of black women expressing themselves that they completely vacuum the energy, direction, and point of the conversation to themselves and their feelings” (cargle). what we see in the comments by celestialearthmother is a fairly direct example of centring. she seems unwilling to take feedback on what she felt like was a justifiable comment. instead of doing the work to educate herself – which she claims she is there to do – celestialearthmother defends herself by explaining that she has felt ‘attacked’ in the past (presumably by black women), and other black women should speak more like saad in order to make white women like her feel comfortable and receptive to their ideas. instead of engaging saad on the topic of the post (white supremacy in yoga), celestialearthmother chooses to talk about the ways black women can be more palatable to well-meaning white women. upon first glance, there may not be anything in celestialearthmother’s initial comment that would seem problematic. that is why this type of racism is so insidious; white people often do not see it. this is why it is of crucial importance to recognize and understand systematic and institutionalized racism. the nuance added with a working knowledge of history, systems, and stereotypes make visible what many are blind to; racism does not exist in a vacuum. racism and racist behaviour are sometimes not easy to define, but once armed with different ways of knowing, you know it when you see it. these are just a handful of terms that allow us to better code and understand white feminism. by codifying repetitive behaviours, the strategies of white feminism become easier to identify and articulate. having vocabulary for these behaviours allows us to disrupt typical discourses and challenge conventional narratives. is it the task of women of colour to educate white women? celestialearthmother argues that “having women of color be willing to hear my piece to hold up a mirror for me in a way that i can grasp is important”. it might be important, but this is placing an incredible amount of responsibility onto women of colour; why should women of colour hold space for her ‘piece’, and why is it their responsibility to ‘hold up a mirror’ and provide her with feedback that is a) easy for her to grasp and b) in a manner which is gentle, non-aggressive, and considerate of her feelings. rather than take responsibility for her own education, and taking advantage of the many free resources saad and cargle make available for white women, celestialearthmother seems to be suggesting that by showing up and engaging people like saad, that she’s done her part. it is now the job of women of colour to tell her how to be a good white person. lyla saad and rachel cargle both make it clear that the work they do is not for white women. despite producing thoughtful and insightful resources, saad and cargle tackle white feminism as a strategy of anti-racist work. the resources are available – but it remains the responsibility of white feminists to do the work for themselves. saad makes this very clear in her communications on social media, and in the me and white supremacy workbook. rather than taking apart these comments point by point (which i have just done), saad offers the vocabulary and a link to her workbook – she offers a pathway to anti-racism consciousness raising. a recurring theme in saad’s work is to make clear she is not there to hold anyone’s hand or comfort white women as they engage with anti-racist work. cargle mirrors this attitude in her own work: she makes it explicitly clear that her work is about survival, and not about teaching white feminists how to be ‘good white people’. a world with less racists is a safer world for people of colour. the expectation on oppressed people to educate oppressors has existed for decades. we now understand that this expectation is another exercise of bio-political power: if subjugated people would like to no longer be subjugated, it is their responsibility to advocate for themselves and lead through education. but as lorde notes, when it comes to white feminism, even when education and knowledge is offered, it is met with ‘intense resistance.’ the intersecting systems of white supremacy, resentment, and fragility that have been discussed in this paper are all designed so that privileged people and oppressors reject any knowledge offered, because it is not the responsibility of whites to be educated. to lorde, “this is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” ( ). what lorde means by this is that rather than accepting and celebrating our points of difference, the current expectation on women of colour to educate white women only serves to intensify white resentment, as well as reinforcing their allegiance to whiteness. the work that saad and cargle are doing is to disrupt this old paradigm by inviting white feminists to claim their own agency and take responsibility for anti-racist work themselves; the only way to disrupt the system is to reject it. the work these women are doing is subversive, nuanced, and critically important to advancing and creating a productive, intersectional, and cohesive feminist practice. chapter conclusion: radicalizing feminist consciousness raising i am a white woman feminist. i differentiate myself from the topic of this work, white feminism, only by virtue of having begun the work to dismantle the internalized white supremacy which all white people raised in western colonial societies are bestowed with. afterall, up until a few years ago, i would have been a near perfect match for the criteria i set in chapter to identify white feminists: white, middle class, academic, and upholding sexism as the main tenant of my feminism. my only saving grace to keep myself from being the definition of a white feminist i have spent this paper criticising is that i am not a heterosexual. this work is uncomfortable, and i must admit i am guilty of utilizing many of the strategies of white feminism outlined in chapter when i became uncomfortable or unsure of how to participate in conversations of race, let alone considering actions which may have caused harm to friends and colleagues. marylin fyre said it best in her essay white woman feminist, when reflecting on her own journey towards deconstructing her own journey towards understand what it means to be a woman, a feminist, to be white. “these were very frustrating experiences: they played out and revealed the way in which the fact that i am white gave unbidden and unwanted meanings to my thought and my actions and poisoned them all with privilege”(fyre, ). this frustration is the experience of grappling with white fragility; the emotional reaction to racial confrontations as described by robin diangelo in her book white fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. as a feminist, i considered myself a progressive white person: someone who understood the systematic problem of racism, but was somehow untouched and unaffected by it. as a white feminist, it was my job to dismantle patriarchy, and decidedly not my place to take on racism. the discomfort i felt was complicated: my understanding of racism up until this point was that racism was intentional, racist people were bad people, who truly believed in white superiority and intended to harm people of colour. by accepting my complicity with further subjugating and oppression women of colour by simply choosing to ignore the issues of racism, particularly within feminism, i experienced the list of emotions diangelo lists in her book as symptoms of white fragility: defensiveness, judged, misunderstood, angry, and guilty ( ). however, if i have learned anything from my journey though anti-racism work, it’s that this work is not actually about me or my feelings. the discomfort of knowing i likely caused pain to people of colour in my life is nowhere near the discomfort of experiencing that racism, inadvertent or not. in context of what drew me to feminism in the first place, the wish to fight injustice and dismantle systems of oppression, my mission had not changed, but it had to be deconstructed in order to acknowledge my own internalized racism and re- centre my feminist practice towards the work of anti-racism. understanding intersectionality is not enough: it is not enough for white feminists to look at a woman of colour and understand she experiences racism and sexism. to be a meaningful ally, white women must engage with internal anti-racist work in order to disrupt the pattern of feminist discourse being dominated by the problems of the white, heterosexual, privileged women who are so often at the centre of the conversation. throughout history, feminism has functioned in a way that always grants rights in an order of subjugation: white women won the right to vote before women of colour; granted access to university education first; went to space first; ran for political offices first (franceschet et al. - ). allowing women of colour to participate in all of these institutions has always been an afterthought. kimberlé crenshaw called out how this approach is problematic in her influential paper demarginalizing the intersection between race and sex, where she initially identified the problem of white feminism and introduced the concept of intersectional practice. “it is somewhat ironic that those concerned with alleviating the ills of racism and sexism should adopt such a top-down approach to discrimination. if their efforts instead began with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged and with restructuring and remaking the world where necessary, then others who are singularly disadvantaged would also benefit” ( ). this statement identifies not only the singular focus of white feminism, but also the inefficiencies of the practice itself. this conversation has been happening for long enough to realize that there is no such thing as trickle down liberation. why, in a group of oppressed people (women), are the most well off prioritized? the ‘top down approach’ crenshaw recognizes is still the practice of white feminism to this day. writers and teachers rachel cargle and layla saad are currently challenging this practice, and challenging white feminists to do more than incorporate an overly simplified version of intersectionality into their activism. when crenshaw first provided us with the concept of intersectionality in , she wrote “it is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework” ( ). this was years ago. it is no longer enough to only look beneath prevailing conceptions – we’re been looking long enough. intersectionality is not a theoretical concept – it must be lived. white feminists must go further and engage with the work or radical self-acceptance. simone de bouvoir, celebrated french writer, philosopher, feminist, and author of renowned book the second sex ( ), wrote in her book the ethics of ambiguity, "it is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting” ( ). if white feminists can authentically and honestly do the work to understand the ‘genuine conditions of our lives’, which is to say, are able to say “i am racist” and accept that as a reality of being white, we soon will learn there is no need to guilt. guilt is an unproductive emotion, and actions stemming from a desire to elevate that feeling of guilt are equally as inauthentic and unproductive. radical disloyalty to whiteness frye, through self-reflection, self-education, consultation and conversations with feminist of colour came to the conclusion that in order for white feminists to be truly fighting oppression, we must break the covenant with whiteness we are raised with. she says “for many of us, resistance to white male domination was first, and quite naturally, action simply for our own release from degradation and tyranny we hated in and of itself. but in this racial context, our pursuit of our liberation (i do not say “of equality”) is, whether or not we so intend it, disloyal to whiteness”( ). what frye is telling us, telling white women, is that it is a misguided hope to think white women can simply gain equality with white men. equality implies ‘sameness,’ and a white woman achieving equality with white men would just mean that white women have now become a more powerful oppressor of everyone else. white feminists must extricate themselves from the loyalty expected of white people to protect white supremacy. this is not to suggest that white women somehow become un-white – the level of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual bypassing this would require is almost laughable. it is simply not possible to no longer be white – in our deeply racialized society, it is impossible to get through a day without benefiting in some small way from white privilege. what fyre is suggesting, and what activists layla saad and rachel cargle are asking, is that white women take on the responsibility of dismantling racism. this means speaking up when other white people show racism, be it over the family dinner table, or in your place of work. even if it is awkward, even if it’s uncomfortable. sitting in silence is a privilege only granted to white people. white feminists must position anti-racism work at the forefront of their practice and discourses. power to embrace our difference to return once again to audre lorde’s powerful words in the master’s tools, i want to emphasise that the focus on difference, and the fractures racism has caused between feminists – this is the tool of the oppressor. women and feminists should not be causing harm, silencing, and further oppressing one another. the white feminist commitment to dismantling sexism before all else is an exercise in repetition; over and over, decade after decade, a new generation of women attempt to dismantle the patriarchal system. however, white feminism, which continues to dominate mainstream feminist discourses and conversations, can no longer afford to view systems of oppression as a two-pronged approach. there can be no hierarchy of need when it comes to liberating the oppressed. racism and sexism go hand in hand, and by denying the power and influence of white supremacy, we doomed to repeat ourselves. this cycle of white women centring the problems of white women, followed by women of colour demanding to be heard has to end. unless anti-racism work becomes central to the feminist fight, then the progress being made to dismantle the patriarchy is severely limited. crenshaw tried to tell us that the power of difference is a force of good, one to be embraced and celebrated. “implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements… is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction” ( ). what crenshaw is telling us is that if feminists embrace difference, and stop letting it be the cause of division, the work to dismantle all poles of oppression can begin in a meaningful way and one day the work may lead to the reconstruction of a society based on social justice. pathways to a wholistic feminist consciousness the most challenging hurdle to a mainstream feminist practice that centres anti- racism is that for many white women who wish to be feminists, the pathway to our education is dominated by the mainstream version of white feminism. while arguably the acknowledgement of tarana burke and her work during the #metoo movement is a step towards inclusivity of subjugated voices, this correction was still reactionary; after the fact. indeed, why did it take the most elite white women in north america speaking out against systematic sexual abuse for any kind of large-scale conversation to take place? why do white women need to be told to listen to the voices of activists of colour, why must they always be an afterthought? it is here that i must call upon the gatekeepers of feminism to do the radical work of de-centering their own perspectives from their work in favour of centring the work and voices of women of colour. to the vloggers like jessica valentie, editors of influential magazines like teen vouge and even cosmopolitan, university lecture halls and feminist bookstores – the places women seek out the words and advice of other women. these are the places these conversations must begin to take place. it is unacceptable that in , activists like saad and cargle are still working so hard to get through to white feminists how much damage the erasure and ignorance to racism can cause women of colour. the emotional and intellectual labour required of these women to engage in this work, to offer white women the opportunity to learn, is incredible. and once again, i return to the most important lesson here: the work they are doing is not for white women. the work they do is part of the larger battle to protect and empower people of colour. less racism in the world makes for a safer world for women of colour. the sooner this intervention can take place – the less time women of colour must spend trying to convince white feminists to pay attention to the structural role racism plays in the patriarchy, the stronger the movement will get as a whole. radical white feminists this work has spent a great deal of time talking about the damage caused by white feminism, but i would like to propose a radical challenge to all feminists who are white: become radical. be a radical ally. use the privilege the colour of our skin affords us to lift up and amplify the voices white supremacy tries to silence. be radically honest: do the work to deprogram yourself, accept that racism is in each of us, and live up to the challenge of accepting this truth as part of the bigger journey to the deconstruction of racism. you cannot dismantle something you cannot see – therefore you must acknowledge it in order to intervein. remember that the fight against oppression is not only one kind– your oppression as a white woman is valid, but it is not the only oppression in this world. accept anger. those who are oppressed are allowed to feel angry at their oppressor. women as a group can be angry towards men, as a group. indigenous people are allowed to be angry towards colonists and settlers. women of colour are allowed to be angry with white women. finally, transform your consciousness, and make it your responsibility to raise the consciousness of those around you. as frye writes in the conclusion of her essay, “seasoned feminists (white feminists along with feminists of other races) know how to transform consciousness. the first break-through is the moment of knowing another way of being is possible. in the matter of a white woman’s racedness, the possibility in question is the possibility of disengaging (on some levels, at least) one’s own energies and wits from the continuing project of social creation and maintenance of the white race, the possibility of being disloyal to that project by constantly making oneself whitely” ( ). though i wish to mirror frye’s sentiment, i will argue that years later, the up taking of this task is even more urgent. white feminists need other women in this battle. whiteness is the master’s ultimate tool, and we should know by now, after so many years, that it has not even come close to dismantling it. radical transformational consciousness raising is the only way forward. it is the responsibility for white woman feminists to take up this task in earnest, so that we can stop spending time trying to convince each other of our intersection oppressions and finally work together towards the common goal of racial and sexual liberation. at the beginning of this paper, i described my own journey to becoming a white feminist – and now i hope i can evolve my own definition of white feminists, to become a radical white feminists. the first step in my own journey – the journey which lead me to researching and writing this paper – was to seek out knowledge beyond that offered by the white women who i looked up to. the same feminists who helped guide my feminist consciousness did not have all the answers, and by looking to them and the women around them – more white feminists – i was only reaffirming a singular perspective and way of knowing. this comes back to the notion that it is not the responsibility of women of colour to educate white women. if i continued to stay in my lane, meaning only taking up causes relevant to me and my life, how could i really be dismantling oppression? once i made the simple effort of seeking out the work of feminists of colour, i realized the incredible wealth of knowledge i had been missing all along – knowledge that is nuanced and important, that offered me a window to perspectives and voices which completely changed how i approach complicated issues of oppression. something else this exercise made me realize – a realization that was reaffirmed as i researched this paper – is that feminists of colour have been imploring white feminists to listen over, and over, and over again. despite not having any obligation or responsibility to education white women, many feminists of colour have still taken the time to create resources, hold discussions, and engage with white feminists – even in the face of extreme resistance. layla saad explains in the introductory chapter of the me and white supremacy workbook that she does not do this work for white women; she does this work because a less racism makes the world a safer place for people of colour( ). i will also say that saad’s workbook is an invaluable resource – to anyone seeking to dismantle internalized racism on a deeper level, i highly encourage them to take up the day challenge. before one can begin to challenge external racism, one must have a nuanced and meaningful understanding of internalized racism. in addition to the rather rudimentary choice to seek out the writing and knowledge of feminists of colour, i will be answering frye’s call to be disloyal to whiteness – this is an ongoing project, and an exercise that will require a great deal of humility and accepting that from time to time i will be wrong; my reactions, instincts, and emotions will still be subject to the filter of white privileged and the good/bad binary. however with practice and self-reflection it becomes easier to recognize you own internalized racism. disloyalty to whiteness also involves speaking to other white people, be they feminists, family, friends, or coworkers about racism, and speaking up when racism occurs. finally, what i feel will be the most meaningful and impactful strategy to becoming a radical white feminists is to learn how to be an active and committed ally to women of colour. this involves learning the difference between speaking for, and speaking about. it involves amplifying the voices of feminists of colour – who have been there all along – rather than using white privileged to take up space on a platform already full of similar voices. this means sharing, linking, and referencing the work of women like cargle and saad, rather than retweeting those like jessica valenti and alyssa milano. feminism is not static, and what feminism looks like and how it is practiced can and should evolve. white feminism doesn’t have to be the frustrating example of what happens when people with privilege stay committed to that privilege; if enough feminists who are white take on this task, and disrupt the pathways to feminist consciousness raising which continue to centre whiteness, then perhaps we can finally answer the calls of lorde, davis, and crenshaw (to name a few). together, feminists can unite in our difference, and in that difference move together to dismantle the systems of power which seek to oppress the many in order to preserve the power of the few. works cited assembly of first nations. coordinated and urgent action to end violence against indigenous women & girls – towards a national action plan. assembly of first nations, . burke, tarana. “#metoo was started for black and brown women and girls. they’re still being ignored.” the washington post, november , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/ / / /the-waitress-who- works-in-the-diner-needs-to-know-that-the-issue-of-sexual-harassment-is-about-her- too/. accessed october capriles, ruth. leadership by resentment: from ‘ressentiment’ to redemption. cheltenham, edward elgar publishing limited. . cargle, rachel. “when feminism is white supremacy in heels.” harper’s bazaar, august , https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a /what-is-toxic-white- feminism/. accessed november . crenshaw, kimberlé. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” university of chicago legal forum, vol. , issue , , pp - . davis, angela y. recognizing racism in the era of neoliberalism. talk at murdoch university, perth, march , https://www.omi.wa.gov.au/resources/publications/documents/orations/recognizing_r racis_in_the_era_of_neoliberalism_davis.pdf. accessed september, . devereux, cecily margaret. growing a race: nellie l mcclung and the fiction of eugenic feminism. quebec city, mcgill-queen’s university press, . diangelo, robin j. white fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. london, allen lane, . fossella, tina. interview with john welwood, “human nature, buddha nature.” tricycle magazine, spring , https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/. accessed september . franceschet, susan, krook mona lena, & tan, netina, editors. the palgrave handbook of women’s political rights. london, palgrave macmillan, . foucault, michel. the history of sexuality: volume i: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york, pantheon books, . foucault, michel. society must be defended: lectures at the college de france. translated by david macey. new york, picador, . frye, marilyn. “on being white,” politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. new york, the crossing press, . pp - . frye, marilyn. “white woman feminist.” willful virgin: essays in feminism, new york, the crossing press, . - . griffin, penny. “#metoo, white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy.” australian journal of political science, vol issue , . pp - . hooks, bell. feminism is for everybody. new york, routledge, . hooks, bell. “racism and feminism.” ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism (second edition), new york, routledge, . hooks, bell. talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. new york, routledge, . jones, feminista, interview by allison raskin and gabby dunn. “when to murder your husband, all american’s are stupid, and tape worms.” just between us podcast, philadelphia, august . jones, t & norwood, k. j. “aggressive encounters & white fragility: deconstructing the trope of the angry black woman.” iowa law review vol , . pp - , http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/ ?accountid= . accessed september . lorde, audre. “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. great britain, penguin random house uk, . pp - . mccavitt, candice m, “eugenics and human rights in canada: the sexual sterilization act of ,” peace and conflict: journal of peace psychology. vol. , no . . pp - milano, alyssa (@alyssa_milano) “if you’ve been sexually harassed,” october . https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/ . murphy, devon, “amanda todd: bullied to death.” the huffington post, october , , https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/devon-murphy/amanda- todd_b_ .html?utm_hp_ref=ca-amanda-todd. accessed april . saad, layla f, me & white supremacy workbook, (s.l.: quercus publishing, ) sayej, nadja, “alyssa milano on the #metoo movement: ‘we’re not going to stand for it anymore,” the guardian. december , https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ /dec/ /alyssa-milano-mee-too-sexual- harassment-abuse. accessed january . science journals — aaas gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of n e t w o r k s c i e n c e a clarified typology of core-periphery structure in networks ryan j. gallagher *, jean-gabriel young , , brooke foucault welles , core-periphery structure, the arrangement of a network into a dense core and sparse periphery, is a versatile de- scriptor of various social, biological, and technological networks. in practice, different core-periphery algorithms are often applied interchangeably despite the fact that they can yield inconsistent descriptions of core-periphery structure. for example, two of the most widely used algorithms, the k-cores decomposition and the classic two-block model of borgatti and everett, extract fundamentally different structures: the latter partitions a network into a binary hub-and-spoke layout, while the former divides it into a layered hierarchy. we introduce a core-periphery typology to clarify these differences, along with bayesian stochastic block modeling techniques to classify networks in accordance with this typology. empirically, we find a rich diversity of core-periphery structure among networks. through a detailed case study, we demonstrate the importance of acknowledging this diversity and situating networks within the core-periphery typology when conducting domain-specific analyses. introduction core-periphery structure is a fundamental network pattern, referring to the presence of two qualitatively distinct components: a dense “core” of tightly connected nodes and a sparse “periphery” of nodes loosely connected to the core and among each other. this pattern has helped explain a broad range of networked phenomena, including online amplification ( ), cognitive learning processes ( ), technological infrastructure organization ( ,  ), and critical disease-spreading conduits ( ). it applies so seamlessly across domains because it pro- vides a succinct mesoscale description of a network’s organization around its core. by decomposing a network into core and peripheral nodes, core-periphery structure separates central processes from those on the margin, allowing us to more precisely classify the func- tional and dynamical roles of nodes with respect to their structural position. the analytic generality of this approach, together with the relative ubiquity of core-periphery structure among networks, makes core-periphery structure an indispensable methodological concept in the network science inventory. several methods and algorithms exist for extracting core-periphery structure from networks ( ). they take on a variety of mathematical and algorithmic forms, ranging from statistical inference ( – ), spectral decomposition ( ,  ), and diffusion mapping ( ) to motif counting ( ), geodesic tracing ( ), and model averaging ( ). these algorithms exhibit a creative diversity of approaches for extracting core-periphery structure, and each is motivated by imagery of how core and peripheral nodes connect to one another. however, under- neath the different high-level descriptions of each model, there are varying and often inconsistent assumptions about how the core and periphery are mutually connected and how core-periphery structure is reflected in a network. as a result, despite the importance of core-periphery decomposition in answering substantive domain questions outside of network science, practitioners looking to apply these methods to their own fields are left without a warning that each algorithm has a different vision of what “core-periphery struc- ture” actually means. this threatens the ability of researchers to draw valid conclusions about the structure and dynamics of numerous networks. by introducing a core-periphery typology that distinguishes between two qualitatively and quantitatively distinct structures and by providing statistical techniques for determining where networks fall within that typology, we intend to make the distinction between various core-periphery structures clear and enable reliable network inferences by scholars and practitioners. the two types of core-periphery characterizations in our typology are well exemplified by two of the most popular approaches for identifying core-periphery structure in networks. the first, which we refer to as the “two-block model,” is rooted in a definition originally proposed by borgatti and everett ( ). their mathematical formu- lation of core-periphery structure proposes that nodes are arranged into two groups, the core and the periphery, such that “core nodes are adjacent to other core nodes, core nodes are adjacent to some periphery nodes, and periphery nodes do not connect with other periphery nodes” ( ). this paints a hub-and-spoke picture of core- periphery struc- ture: there is a central hub of interwoven nodes and a periphery that radiates out from that hub. the hub-and-spoke core-periphery formulation is at the backbone of network science methodology because it underlies many of the more sophisticated models that have been developed since borgatti and everett’s foundational work ( ,  ,  ). furthermore, because the two-block formulation was originally proposed in the language of block models ( ), it is often the de facto statistical definition of core-periphery structure for many network scientists. the second core-periphery characterization is reflected in the widely used k-cores decomposition. the k-core of a network is the largest subset of nodes in the network such that every node has at least k connections to other nodes in that subset ( ). the k-cores define a hierarchy of k-shells, each of which consists of all the nodes in the k-core but not the (k + )–core. a decomposition in terms of the k-cores highlights a network’s core-periphery structure and is typically obtained by iteratively removing the k-shells ( ), starting with peripheral low-degree nodes in the outer shells and working toward embedded high-degree nodes in the inner cores. this algo- rithmic pruning process is accompanied by a suite of evocative network science institute, northeastern university, boston, ma , usa. center for the study of complex systems, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi , usa. department of computer science, university of vermont, burlington, vt , usa. department of communication studies, northeastern university, boston, ma , usa. *corresponding author. email: gallagher.r@northeastern.edu copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of science. no claim to original u.s. government works. distributed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial license . (cc by-nc). o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of language: the periphery is described as a series of “shells” ( ), “onion layers” ( ), or “leaves” ( ), while the core is referred to as the “epicenter” ( ), “corona” ( ), or “nucleus” ( ). the language of the k-cores decomposition conjures up an image of a layered core- periphery structure composed of a nested sequence of layers that funnel toward a core. the scalable algorithm of the k-cores decom- position ( ) has made it a practical tool for studying networks of all sizes, meaning that a number of applied network analyses implicitly assume a layered network arrangement. by these accounts, it is clear that the layered and hub-and-spoke characterizations provide distinct descriptions of core-periphery structure. the differences between the hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery characterizations are more than a linguistic sleight of hand though; they can have repercussive consequences for sub- stantive network analyses. in what follows, we first show that the structures extracted by the two most widely used algorithms, the two-block model and the k-cores decomposition, diverge quantita- tively across many empirical networks. to establish a statistically principled way of comparing these two classes of models, we then formulate both the hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery struc- tures as stochastic block models ( ), which allow us to encode the qualitative differences between the two characterizations and for- mulate an information-theoretic criterion of model fit ( ,  ). with these tools, we analyze a suite of empirical networks and find a rich diversity of core-periphery structure that spans across the core- periphery typology. we finish with a case study of hashtag activism amplification and emphasize how the choice of core-periphery model critically affects the interpretation of substantive results. our typology clarifies the distinct core-periphery structures that can emerge in networks and provides a methodologically sound approach for dis- entangling those structures in practice. results inconsistent core-periphery partitions we start by showing that the hub-and-spoke structure explicitly extracted by the two-block model ( ) and the layered structure implicitly suggested by the k-cores decomposition ( ) provide funda- mentally different descriptions of core-periphery structure for the same networks. to this end, we draw upon the koblenz network collection (konect) ( ), a diverse network repository that spans a number of social, biological, and technological domains. for each konect network, we extract the binary partition of nodes accord- ing to the two-block model ( ) and the nested partition of nodes according to the k-cores decomposition ( ). we then measure the distance between these partitions via the variation of information (vi) ( ,  ) and present the pairwise comparisons in fig.  . the vi is an information-theoretic measure and is therefore expressed in bits per nodes. intuitively, it can be thought of as the sum of information not shared by the two partitions. hence, the more distant or dissimilar two partitions are, the larger the vi. across network domains, we find that the core-periphery parti- tions identified by the two-block model and k-cores decomposition are quite dissimilar, with an overall median vi of . bits per nodes. a normalized version of the vi, which can only be consistently inter- preted for individual networks and not across datasets ( ), yields a median of % the maximal value across domains. in other words, for each individual network, the partitions are about a third as distant as possible. furthermore, the differences in outcomes are not exhibited uniformly across domains. some classes of networks (e.g., social, animal, and infrastructure networks) see relatively more agreement between the two-block and k-cores partitions. for other network types (e.g., authorship, hyperlink, and software networks), however, the two core-periphery algorithms almost always extract distant struc- tures. even within domains, there can be a wide heterogeneity in the similarities: for example, the range of distances is . bits for com- munication networks, . bits for infrastructure networks, and . bits for hyperlink networks. we find even less agreement between algo- rithms when we use other measures to compare partitions, such as the adjusted ( ) or reduced ( ) mutual information. we are able to somewhat improve the agreement by matching the partitions on sizes, to correct for the discrepancy between the number of k-cores and the number of groups in the two-block structure, but nonetheless, the partitions disagree in general (see the supplementary materials). fig. . distributions of distances between partitions extracted by the two-block model ( ) and the k-cores decomposition ( ) across network domains. the two-block and k-cores partitions are dissimilar across a variety of networks and network types, indicating that they generally extract different core-periphery structures. distance is measured by the vi ( ), where higher values indicate more dissimilar partitions. thick lines in each domain’s box plot indicate the median difference and are also represented as the color of each box. the distributions furthest to the left indicate the kernel density estimate and box plot of the distance distribution across all networks. detailed results are reported in the supplementary materials. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of the results of fig.  do not imply that one algorithm or the other is intrinsically flawed but, rather, that the algorithms do not agree in general. if one’s goal is only to describe a network, then this dis- agreement is not an issue because each algorithm simply provides its own description of the network, whatever that may be ( ). however, there is a strict statistical sense in which the algorithms cannot both equally well-characterize a given network: each core-periphery par- tition corresponds to a statistical description of the network, one of which will necessarily be more concise and precise than the other ( ,  ). so, if we want to make network inferences based on core- periphery structure, then we need to call on methods that can iden- tify models that give better statistical descriptions of a network’s structure than others. selecting models, however, requires that we have statistical models in the first place, and the notions of core- periphery structure that we have applied so far have only been defined through algorithms. we therefore turn to bayesian stochastic block models ( ) to establish the missing connection between the two. core-periphery stochastic block models the stochastic block model is a general statistical model of a network’s mesoscale structure ( ). at its core, it assumes that nodes belong to different groups, or “blocks,” such as the core and the periphery. these blocks then specify the probability that any two nodes are connected. more formally, suppose that we have the adjacency matrix a of an unweighted, undirected, simple network with n nodes. we assume that there are a fixed number of b blocks, and let the block assignments of all the nodes be recorded in , a vector of length n where i = r indicates that node i belongs to block r. the probability that any two nodes in the network are connected is given by p, a b × b matrix where prs is the probability that a node in block r connects to a node in block s. this is the defining characteristic of the sto- chastic block model: the block assignments completely determine the probability of connection between any two nodes. in practice, we do not know the block assignments of the nodes  or the probability of connection between blocks p. we are inter- ested, then, in the distribution p(, p ∣ a), the probability that we have a particular arrangement of nodes into blocks and connections between them, given our observed network data a. applying bayes’ rule, we have p(, p ∣ a ) ∝ p(a ∣ , p ) p( ) p(p) ( ) the posterior distribution p(, p ∣ a) is proportional to three components: the likelihood p(a ∣ , p) of the network a, the prior on the block assignments p(), and the prior on the block connectivity matrix p(p). we outline the standard setup of the likeli- hood and block assignment prior in materials and methods. for con- structing core-periphery stochastic block models, our main concern is with the prior on the block connectivity matrix. when we know that we want to model core-periphery structure specifically, we only want to consider particular arrangements of connection probabilities p and that prior knowledge should be reflected in p(p). this is a different view than is usually taken for block models: rather than assuming nothing about a network’s structure and applying a gen- eral, unconstrained block model, we intentionally seek and encode core-periphery structure in our models. we propose a core-periphery typology that contains two struc- tures: the hub-and-spoke structure and the layered structure. both characterizations can be phrased in the language of block models by arranging the block connectivities of p in different ways, as depicted in fig.  . through the bayesian approach to the stochastic block modeling, we can alter the prior p(p) to encode these different arrangements and constrain the model to adhere to those structures ( ). the constrained models allow us to only consider networks with respect to the core-periphery typology and classify them appropriately according to the structure that they exhibit. from here onward, we use “hub-and-spoke” to refer to either the theoretical typology characterization or the stochastic block model implementation, de- pending on context. however, we only use “two-block model” or “two-block algorithm” when specifically referencing borgatti and everett’s implementation ( ). similarly, we use “layered” to refer to the typology characterization or the block model but only “k-cores” to refer to the heuristic algorithm. the hub-and-spoke characterization specifies two blocks, one for the core and one for the periphery. if we let the core be denoted by the first block and the periphery by the second, then the original two-block model presented by borgatti and everett ( ) can be re- covered by setting p = , p = , and p = . we consider a relaxation of this structure ( ), which allows for flexibility in the connections by only requiring p > p > p . this configuration (shown in fig.  a) conveys the intuition of the hub-and-spoke structure: there is a densely connected core moderately connected with a periphery that is only loosely connected among itself. statistically, we enforce this constraint through a uniform prior over all block matrices that satisfy < p < p < p < . in notation, we write p(p ) ∝ { < p < p < p < } ( ) where is the indicator function that takes on the value if the constraint is satisfied and otherwise. fig. . the core-periphery typology formalized through block model representations of the hub-and-spoke and layered structures. each figure depicts the block connectivity matrix p, where darker colors indicate higher densities of links. (a) the hub-and-spoke model is defined according to two blocks, where p > p > p . (b) the layered core-periphery model is defined according to 𝓁 layers, which are ordered as p > p > … > p𝓁. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of we can similarly formulate the layered block model. for conve- nience, we let prr = pr and assume that there are 𝓁 layers, equal to the number of blocks b. to configure the layered structure shown in fig.  b, we first specify p rs = p max (r,s) ( ) which binds the matrix p into layers. similar to the hub-and-spoke model, we then order the layers through a uniform prior over all p that satisfy < p𝓁 < p𝓁 − < … < p < p(p ) ∝ { < p ℓ < p ℓ− <…< p < } ( ) the layered model can be seen as a special case of the hub-and- spoke model when 𝓁 = and p ≈ p . in this block structure, peripheral nodes in the second layer connect to any other node, whether in the core or periphery, with the same probability. for 𝓁 ≥ , any node is agnostic to the specific role of nodes that are in cores more central than itself, connecting to them all with the same prob- ability. in this sense, the layered model can be viewed as a sequence of nested and increasingly dense subgraphs. recall that we are introducing these priors to determine the type of core-periphery structure that best describes a particular network. in practice, we find these structures by computing the most likely core-periphery position of each node in each model (see materials and methods for details). doing so for all nodes yields both hub- and-spoke and layered partitions. while the hub-and-spoke and layered formulations may seem innocuous modifications of existing stochastic block models, they complicate the computational tracta- bility substantially ( ,  ). to infer the distributions of  and p for the two models, we therefore have to resort to a gibbs sampling procedure, detailed in the supplementary materials. we compare the inferred core-periphery structures to select the most statistically appropriate among the two. formally, for a partition ℋ inferred through the hub-and-spoke model ℋ and a partition ℒ inferred through the layered model ℒ, we want to identify which model and its assignment of block labels to nodes is a better fit of the network data a. the answer is given by the the posterior odds ratio ( )  = p(  ℋ , ℋ ∣ a) ─ p(  ℒ , ℒ ∣ a) ( ) if the posterior odds ratio  > , then the hub-and-spoke model better characterizes the core-periphery structure of the network, while  < implies that the layered model is a better descriptor. assuming that we are agnostic about the models a priori, and so p(ℋ) = p(ℒ) = / , we can equivalently consider − log  = Σ ℋ − Σ ℒ = − log p(a,  ℋ ∣ ℋ ) + log p(a,  ℒ​​ ∣ ℒ) ( ) the difference between description lengths of the hub-and-spoke and layered models. the description length, Σℳ = − log p(a, ℳ ∣ ℳ), of a model ℳ describes how well that model can compress the in- formation expressed by a network’s structure ( ,  ). a model that is able to efficiently describe a network with a smaller number of parameters is a better descriptor of the network and will have a minimal description length. so, if the hub-and-spoke model ℋ is a better descriptor of a network’s core-periphery structure than the layered model ℒ, then we will have a posterior odds ratio where  > and, equivalently, a negative difference in description lengths, Σℋ − Σℒ < . we use the description length to quantify model fit, by considering either the pairwise difference in description lengths be- tween two models or the minimum description length (mdl) across many models (see the supplementary materials for numerical details). this measure allows us to distinguish which block model most aptly describes a particular network and properly situate it within the core-periphery typology. we briefly note connections of our core-periphery block models to prior work. with respect to the hub-and-spoke model, zhang et al. ( ) identified the ordering p > p > p as a relaxed version of the hub-and-spoke block structure introduced by borgatti and everett. however, they did not formally encode this constraint in their model and, instead, relied on the susceptibility of stochastic block models to heterogeneous degree distributions ( ) to retrieve core-periphery structure. we examine the suitability of this assumption in the supplementary materials. with respect to the layered model, borgatti and everett ( ) presented a special case of our model where 𝓁 = , p = , and p = . however, given that those binary layer densities imply a network that consists of a connected core component sur- rounded by a cloud of isolate periphery nodes, they only briefly re- marked on the model’s limited conceptual utility. regardless, it is important to emphasize that while the more general layered block model introduced here shares the intuition of nested, increasingly dense layers with the k-cores decomposition, it is distinct from that algorithm. the layered block model is a fuzzier interpretation of how core-periphery structure can be reflected through layers; it allows for low degree nodes to be placed in core layers if they are embedded among other core nodes, while, by definition, nodes can only be in higher k-shells if they have a higher degree. in general, then, the block assignments from the layered model will not exactly align with the partition produced by the k-cores decomposition. synthetic network experiments as an essential validation step, we experimentally verify that our two models of core-periphery properly recover hub-and-spoke and layered structures when we know that they exist within a network. our first experiment measures the capacity for the block models to discern between hub-and-spoke and layered structures. we gener- ate synthetic networks according to the stochastic block model and design p to have a known, ground truth core-periphery block arrangement. we configure p according to a two-parameter model (see materials and methods for details). the first parameter  inter- polates between hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery structure: when  = , the network has a known hub-and-spoke core-periphery structure, and when  = , the network has a known layered struc- ture consisting of three layers. the second parameter  defines the structural clarity: when  = , the network is random and neither model should be able to infer structure, and for large , the networks have a well-defined core-periphery structure. the results, shown in fig.  a, demonstrate that the block models effectively discern the two types of planted core-periphery structures. within each regime of the interpolation parameter , the mdl ap- propriately identifies the correct model as a better description of the network structure, and it is more confident as the parameter reaches the boundaries of its range, at which point only that structure defin- itively exists in the network. for low values of structural clarity , for which the networks are purely random, the models have approximately o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of equal mdls, and neither is strongly designated better in terms of model fit. our second experiment tests the layered model’s ability to iden- tify the appropriate number of layers in a synthetic network with a known layered structure. we start with a synthetic network of six equally sized layers and progressively reduce the effective number of layers by merging layers until there are only two layers (see materials and methods for details). for each fixed number of layers in the synthetic network, we run multiple layered core-periphery models for different choices of the parameter 𝓁, which designates the number of layers to infer. the results, given in fig.  b, indicate that the average mdl accurately identifies the number of layers that exist in each synthetic network. this demonstrates that we can not only use the mdl for model selection between the hub-and-spoke and layered models, per the results of the first experiment, but also use it for choosing the number of layers. core-periphery diversity of empirical networks having validated the core-periphery block models and the use of the mdl as a measure of model fit, we establish the diversity of core- periphery structure expressed by empirical networks. for all net- works with up to , nodes in the konect dataset ( ), we infer partitions according to each of the hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery models (see materials and methods for details). re- call that we use the terminology hub-and-spoke to refer to the stochastic block model (sbm) implementation and two-block to refer specifically to borgatti and everett’s original implementation ( ). similarly, layered refers to the sbm implementation, and k-cores refers to the heuristic algorithm. in fig.  a, we show the breadth of network structure exhibited across the core-periphery typology. as we clearly see, both the hub- and-spoke and layered core-periphery structures are expressed to a wide degree of intensity across all types of networks; neither model is a universal, best descriptor of core-periphery structure. some classes of networks seem to be generally well described by either just the hub-and-spoke characterization or just the layered characteri- zation, but many more show a range of structure across the core- periphery spectrum. communication networks in konect, for example, exhibit the full range of core-periphery prevalence across both characterizations. the diversity of core-periphery structure in these empirical networks demonstrates the danger in assuming a core-periphery type a priori and the need to situate a network within the core-periphery typology to mitigate later downstream network mischaracterizations. we also observe that a smaller portion of networks do not strongly exhibit either a hub-and-spoke or layered structure. in fig.  b, we show that these networks are often the ones for which both core- periphery block models extract partitions that are similar or identical. as discussed earlier when deriving the block models, the layered model with 𝓁 = layers is a special case of the hub-and-spoke model. a number of smaller networks in particular, including all of the animal networks, are best modeled with two layers, and so, both models extract similar partitions and have similar mdls. on the other hand and as expected, we also find that the partitions become less similar as one core-periphery model or the other is preferred according to the mdl. last, we connect the core-periphery stochastic block models back to the motivating algorithms, the two-block model and the k-cores decomposition. in fig.  c, we show that networks that are equally well modeled by either the layered or hub-and-spoke block model are also those for which the two-block model and k-cores decompo- sition extract similar partitions. furthermore, the networks that have the most distant two-block and k-cores core-periphery partitions are also those that mostly strongly exhibit a hub-and-spoke or layered fig. . synthetic network experiments validating the core-periphery block models and the use of mdl as a measure of model fit. (a) the difference in mdl per edge between the layered model and hub-and-spoke model on networks constructed to have varying degrees of each structure. negative values (blue) indicate that the hub-and-spoke model is a better model fit, while positive values (red) indicate that the layered model is a better fit. the mdl accurately discerns which model is the best descriptor of the ground truth network structure, as indicated by the gradual transition from blue to red as the true structure varies from hub-and-spoke to layered. (b) the average mdl per edge of layered models on networks with planted layered structure. for each fixed number of actual layers in the synthetic networks (vertical axis), we run the inference with a varying number of modeled layers 𝓁 (horizontal axis). stars (⋆) indicate the number of modeled layers 𝓁 that yields the lowest mdl for a fixed number of planted layers. the alignment of the stars on the diagonal shows that the layered model properly discerns the number of layers used in the generative model. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of structure according to the description length. figure  d complements these findings by comparing the distances between the inferred par- titions according to the stochastic block models and the partitions of the two-block model and k-cores decomposition. the hub-and- spoke partitions found with the sbm are consistently closer to the two-block partitions than the k-core decomposition. the relation- ship between the layered partitions and the k-cores partitions is less sharp, with layered and hub-and-spoke partitions being about equally distant from the k-cores partitions on average. these results provide evidence that the two-block model is representative of the hub-and- spoke characterization. the layered characterization, however, finds partitions that are not quite the same as the k-cores algorithm. this is due, in part, to the fact that it aggregates nodes in fewer layers. however, as mentioned earlier, the layered block model, along with the hub-and-spoke model, is more flexible than the k-cores decom- position, which requires core nodes to be high-degree nodes. instead and critically, both block models allow for low-degree nodes to be core nodes if they are embedded among other core nodes. so, the similar distances of the hub-and-spoke and layered partitions from the k-cores partitions are also partly explained by how both block models allow for a more fluid interpretation of what it means for a node to be in the core or the periphery. case study: hashtag activism amplification to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between hub-and- spoke and layered core-periphery structures, we briefly conclude with a case study of hashtag activism amplification. social media are notable for creating spaces where historically disenfranchised indi- viduals can come together and share their stories at an unprecedented scale ( – ). hashtag activism, in particular, has been a critical vehi- cle for driving those marginalized voices into the mainstream public sphere ( ,  ), as exemplified by hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter fig. . structural diversity across the core-periphery typology. (a) distributions of differences in mdl between the best-fit hub-and-spoke and layered models, by network domain. different networks within and across domains are better modeled by hub-and-spoke or layered structure, indicating that there is no one universal best descriptor of core-periphery structure. (b) difference in mdl plotted against the distance between the hub-and-spoke and layered partitions for each konect network. networks that have similar mdls are generally those where both core-periphery models extracted similar partitions. (c) difference in mdl plotted against the distance between the two-block and k-cores partitions for each konect network. the stronger the disagreement between heuristics, the clearer the fit for either of the sbm-based core-periphery. (d) distance between the best-fit block model (either hub-and-spoke, indicated by blue, or layered, indicated by red) and the two-block and k-cores partitions. histograms show the marginal distributions of distances, where dashed lines indicate the mean distance. partition distance in all subplots is measured in bits according to the vi. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of and #metoo ( ,  ). the amplification of those voices is a funda- mentally networked process; the core consists of those who are most visible exactly because many peripheral amplifiers share the core’s posts through emergent crowdsourcing ( ). core-periphery struc- ture is a natural network model for such amplification processes. although those at the periphery of hashtag activism events are sometimes derided as “slacktivists,” barberá et al. ( ) demonstrated that the periphery contributes significantly to the amplification of core protest voices. we perform a similar analysis on the retweet network of the hashtag #metoo, a hashtag that highlighted the per- vasiveness of sexual violence against women by creating a space for them to publicly disclose their experiences ( ,  ). we fit hub-and- spoke and layered core-periphery models to the #metoo network and calculate the coreness of each individual according to each model. the coreness, which varies from to , indicates whether an individual is more likely to be situated in the periphery or core, respectively (see materials and methods for details). in line with prior work ( ), we operationalize amplification by measuring the total reach as the sum of the number of followers that each individual in the network has. to quantify the relationship between amplification and the core- periphery structure, we iteratively remove individuals from the retweet network according to their coreness, decomposing the net- work from the periphery to the core, and measure how the hashtag reach varies (see fig.  ). we observe that the cumulative reach, the total number of possible followers exposed to the hashtag, declines sharply for both the hub-and-spoke and layered models as the abundance of peripheral amplifiers is removed. this is consistent with the findings of barberá et al. ( ). however, the reach drops more rapidly for the hub-and-spoke model (mdl =  . bits per edge, the best-fit model overall) than any of the layered models and, in partic- ular, the best-fit layered model with 𝓁 = layers (mdl =  . bits per edge). comparatively, the layered models markedly underestimate the contribution of the periphery to the early reach of #metoo; taking the reach of the hub-and-spoke model as the expected value, the estimates of reach by the best-fit layered model have a percent error of % at a coreness threshold of . and a percent error of % at a threshold of . . hence, we see that using a network model that does not properly describe the core-periphery structure of a hashtag activism network notably misestimates how amplification varies across core and peripheral participants. this example illustrates why it is critical to account for the core- periphery typology to make sound network inferences. qualitatively, the bayesian block models give us a succinct description of the #metoo retweet network, informing us that it is best described as a hub-and-spoke structure that serves to broadcast a small set of core voices, rather than a layered structure with many connections among those disclosing at the periphery. quantitatively, using the mdl to select the hub-and-spoke model as the best fit to our network data allows us to confidently estimate the periphery’s contribution to the hashtag’s reach. this measure can be used to compare across in- stances of hashtag activism and assess the effectiveness of peripheral amplification or to develop interventions to counteract amplification manipulation tactics, such as those deployed by social bots and coordinated information operations. discussion we have presented a typology of core-periphery structure that raises the important distinction between two characterizations: hub-and-spoke and layered. these structures, which are reflected in two of the most widely used core-periphery algorithms ( ,  ), often yield starkly different descriptions of a network’s core-periphery layout. to elucidate the typology, we have formulated two bayesian stochastic block models that statistically encode the hub-and-spoke and layered structures. by applying description length as an information- theoretic measure of model fit across a large network database, we have shown empirically that networks express a rich variety of core- periphery structure. through a case study of online amplification of hashtag activism, we have demonstrated that the choice of core- periphery model used to describe a network affects the substantive interpretation of the network’s structure and function, indicat- ing the need to distinguish between hub-and-spoke and layered structures. while a number of algorithms exist for extracting core-periphery structure, they generally take a vaguely intuitive view of core-periphery structure: we have core-periphery structure when we have a core of densely connected nodes and a sparse periphery around that core. our work challenges the ambiguity of this definition and demon- strates that there are at least two distinct ways that we can concep- tualize core-periphery structure, neither of which is a universal descriptor across all networks. although there is no universal way of describing core-periphery structure, our typology classifies net- works into distinct categories based on their specific connectivity patterns between the core and periphery. within these categories, fig. . core-periphery amplification of the hashtag #metoo during its first hours of use in october . reach is measured as the cumulative number of followers among those in the network. curves show how the fraction of total reach decomposes as the coreness threshold for inclusion into the retweet network is increased. the solid blue curve indicates the best-fit hub-and-spoke curve (and best fit overall); the solid red line indicates the best-fit layered curve (𝓁 = layers), and lighter red lines indicate other layered models with to layers. markers on the vertical axis indicate the reach after removing nodes with coreness of exactly . the histogram above the plot shows the distribution of coreness among nodes in the network for each best-fit model. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of there is the potential to unveil larger structural patterns that cut across networks and domains; networks may systematically exhibit layered or hub-and-spoke structures as a result of a number of phenomena, including domain-specific generative processes, network- specific data collection traditions, and context-specific network constraints. likely, all of these play a role in explaining why hub- and-spoke and layered structures emerge in networks. however, there is significant work to be done across a variety of social, biological, and technological domains to disentangle exactly how and under what conditions those factors affect core-periphery structure. our work shows that there are core-periphery commonalities across net- works and domains that are still unexplained and that a universal notion of core-periphery structure cannot be taken as a given. in light of this lack of universal organization, we must adjust our practical approach to measuring core-periphery structure going for- ward. researchers and network practitioners need to be more explicit about their theories of core-periphery structure and more deliberate in what method they choose to infer that structure. in cases where it is not theoretically clear what kind of core-periphery structure should be reflected in a network—hub-and-spoke, layered, or otherwise—researchers should use the tools that we have introduced here to make informed decisions about what best describes a given network at hand. the core-periphery stochastic block models that we have developed require that we explicitly restrict the search space of the statistical inference to a smaller subset of network structures. these restrictions reduce the expressivity of the model but, at the same time, allow substantive domain experts to guide models as they apply core-periphery models to network datasets, which we argue is critical ( ). in the context of our hashtag activism case study, using constrained block models allowed us to focus our inquiry on core- periphery structure, the theoretical network model that describes the structure of online amplification ( ). if we were to use a general stochastic block model, which could return community structure, disassortativity, or any other mesoscale pattern, then we would not be able to properly align our domain knowledge with the network analysis. constrained core-periphery block models force researchers to be more intentional about how they describe core-periphery structure and, in turn, help researchers theorize about core-periphery network effects in a more precise and statistically sound manner. both the conceptual typology and the statistical methods that we have presented are only the first step in a broader line of work that interrogates how core-periphery structure is reflected in networks. there are natural methodological extensions for network scientists to develop, which would expand the range of the core-periphery typology. our models focus on identifying a single core-periphery structure in a network, but there could be multiple or even interacting sets of cores and peripheries ( ). expanding the scope of the core- periphery typology to include this multiplicity would allow for detailed network descriptions that encode the interactions between cores, peripheries, and communities. the same modeling approach could be used to incorporate edge weights, to extend the typology in terms of core-periphery cohesiveness, and directionality, to extend the typology in terms of in-cores and out-cores ( ). when we ex- press these extensions and formulations of core-periphery struc- ture ( ) in the language of bayesian block models, we have a statistically consistent framework for adjudicating between them and determining which best describes any given network. by pre- senting a core-periphery typology with accompanying statistical models that are readily extensible and generalizable, we have provided the foundation for unifying the notion of core-periphery structure both methodologically and theoretically. network scientists increasingly recognize that there is no “ground truth” structure of networks ( ); there are only models that do and do not help us address particular questions. our constrained block models, typology, and measure of model fit make it possible to more acutely answer questions about core and peripheral dynamics that were not previously possible ( ). as researchers and practi- tioners use our methods to be more deliberate about the kind of core-periphery structure that they want to describe, they will un- doubtedly raise questions that cannot be answered with the current network models at hand. this presents an opportunity for network scientists to fill those methodological gaps and present models that, themselves, may open doors to new theories and questions. our core-periphery typology and models clarify the ways in which core-periphery algorithms can be applied to networks and provide an example of how we, as both domain experts and network scien- tists, can begin to better align our structural methodology with our substantive questions. materials and methods konect network data as of the time of data collection, the konect ( ) consists of networks and represents a variety of network domains. networks in the collection may be undirected, directed, or bipartite, and they can contain multiedges and self-loops. the edges themselves can be unweighted, weighted, signed, or temporal. we take the following preprocessing steps: (i) weighted edges are treated as unweighted, and all multiedges are collapsed to a single edge. (ii) self-loops are disregarded. (iii) directed edges are treated as undirected. (iv) only the largest weakly connected component is considered. we exclude all temporal and dynamic networks in konect to avoid the ambiguity in choosing a time scale to define static networks. we also exclude all networks that were marked as “incomplete” in konect ( ). last, we exclude bipartite networks because they should be modeled with stochastic block models that can account for their special structure and high local density when projected ( ,  ). after these preprocessing and inclusion criteria, we are left with networks, listed in the supplementary materials. we note that the simplifications made during preprocessing likely affect the core-periphery modeling of the konect networks. a node’s strength, the sum of its edge weights, often correlates with its degree ( ), such that the weight-agnostic models may underestimate the cohesiveness of core and how tightly peripheral nodes connect to it. converting directed edges into undirected ones also forces symmetry upon the adjacency matrix, which can obscure other prom- inent patterns particular to directed networks ( ) that may more comprehensively describe the core-periphery organization. we infer block models for all konect networks with up to , nodes, a total of of the networks. the networks with more than , nodes are concentrated on a small set of network domains: % are social networks, % are hyperlink networks, and % are communication networks. fitting larger networks is possi- ble but requires considerable computation. stochastic block model formulation recall that we let a be the adjacency matrix of an unweighted, un- directed, simple network with n nodes. nodes are assigned to a o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of fixed number of b blocks, represented by , a vector of length n where i = r indicates that node i belongs to block r. connections between blocks are specified by the b × b matrix p, where prs is the probability that a node in block r is connected to a node in block s. the posterior distribution of the parameters  and p given our net- work data a is written as p(, p ∣ a ) ∝ p(a ∣ , p ) p( ) p(p) ( ) earlier, we constructed the prior p(p) on the block connectivity matrix, which is the primary alteration needed for the core-periphery block models p ℋ (p ) = ! · { < p < p < p < } ( ) and p ℒ (p ) = ℓ ! · { < p ℓ < p ℓ− <…< p < } ( ) where the leading numerical factors ensure normalization. here, we think of blocks as layers, so we let b = 𝓁, where 𝓁 is the number of layers. we otherwise use a standard formulation of the likelihood p(a ∣ , p) and the block assignments prior p() ( ,  ). the network likelihood rests upon the cornerstone assumption of the stochastic block model: connections are independently generated on the basis of only the block assignments of nodes. let mrs be the number of edges that exist between blocks r and s, and let mrs be the maxi- mum number of edges that could potentially exist between the two blocks. this number equals nrns for two different blocks of size nr and ns and nr(nr − )/ when considering the internal edges of block r. the likelihood can be then calculated as the product of independent bernoulli processes across edges and then aggregated at the block level to yield p(a ∣ , p ) = ∏ r≤s p rs m rs ( − p rs ) m rs − m rs ( ) the constraints on p yield a more compact form for this likeli- hood (see the supplementary materials). the last missing piece of the model is the layer assignment prior p(). the prior on  can then be expressed in three parts ( ). first, we consider the probability p(𝓁) of choosing a particular number of layers 𝓁, which is always 𝓁 = for the hub-and-spoke model and a free parameter for the layered model. next, given the number of layers, we consider the probabil- ity p(n ∣ 𝓁) of drawing a particular sequence of layer sizes n = {n , n , …n𝓁}. last, given the layer sizes, we determine the probability p( ∣ n) of seeing a particular allotment of nodes to layers. all together in notation, the prior on the block assignments  is ex- pressed as p( ) = p( ∣ n ) p(n ∣ ℓ ) p(ℓ ) = ∏ r n r ! ─ n ! ( n − ℓ − ) − n − ( ) with these three parts of the model specified, we can calculate the posterior probability of the model. for more details on the sto- chastic block model formulation, see ( ,  ,  ). we fit the model with a metropolis-within-gibbs algorithm, de- tailed in the supplementary materials. we estimate the true layer of a node by selecting the layer that maximizes its marginal posterior distribution over layers. in doing so, we average the random fluctu- ations found in real systems and avoid overfitting to a particular partition when there are many similar optima ( ,  ). synthetic networks discernment experiment the first synthetic network experiment tests the ability of the core- periphery models to discern between hub-and-spoke and layered structures (see fig.  a). we generate networks through the stochastic block model according to block matrices given by [ ​ p p p( −  ) + p ─    p p + p ─   ( − ) p ─   p( −  ) + p ─    p ─   p ─   ]​ ( ) where p > is the baseline density of the network,  ∈ [ , /p] is the structural clarity parameter, and  ∈ [ , ] is the interpolation pa- rameter. the structural clarity parameter  determines the preva- lence of core-periphery structure in the network. when  = , the network as a whole is simply an erdős-rényi random network with density p. when  ≫ , the core-periphery structure is well defined. the interpolation parameter  specifies whether a layered or hub- and-spoke core-periphery structure is reflected in the network. when  = , the block densities arrange in such a way that the net- work is effictively generated from two blocks and a hub-and-spoke structure is present. when  = , the network exhibits a three-layer structure. we note that  = / holds no special meaning in this interpolation: the structure smoothly transitions from one type to the other as  is varied. for the experiment, each synthetic network consists of n = , nodes, divided equally among the three blocks. we set p = . and generate networks over the parameter ranges  ∈ [ , ] and  ∈ [ , ]. see the “block model inference and parameters” section for details on inference of the experimental network structure. number of layers experiment the second synthetic network experiment tests the ability of the layered model to identify the number of layers in synthetic layered networks (see fig.  b). we first generate a network g via the layered stochastic block model, where g has n = , nodes evenly split among 𝓁 = layers, where layers are connected according to an ini- tial connectivity matrix p(g). we then consider a new network gk of the same number of nodes and layers but where p r ( g k ) = p r (g) for r < k and p r ( g k ) = q k for r ≥ k. this is a network where the inner layers have the same density as in g but where the outermost layers are effectively merged because they have the same density qk. we set qk such that the overall average degree  of g is preserved, i.e., the average degree of gk is  for all k. the merged layers density qk pre- serving  is given by q k = ( n ) ∑ r=k ℓ p r (g) + n ∑ r=k ℓ (r − ) p r (g) ──────────────────── ( n ) (ℓ − k + ) + n ∑ r=k ℓ (r − ) ( ) o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ gallagher et al., sci. adv. ; : eabc march s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of for each choice of k ∈ [ , ], we make networks generated from the same block matrix. we define the block matrix p(g) of the original network such that p = . , p = . , and pr for < r < is geomet- rically distributed between p and p . see the block model inference and parameters section for details on inference of the experimental network structure. hashtag activism case study for the hashtag activism case study, we consider all of the tweets containing the hashtag #metoo that were posted hours after ac- tress alyssa milano’s “me too” tweet, which catalyzed the hashtag campaign on october [see ( ) for further data details]. the use of human-generated data gathered from twitter was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board at northeastern university. in the first hours, there were , tweets. we con- struct a retweet network from these tweets by representing individ- uals as nodes and retweets as edges. for the purpose of core-periphery modeling, we treat edges as undirected and unweighted and remove self-loops from the network. we model the largest weakly connected component of the network ( ), which consists of , nodes and , edges. we measure the coreness of each individual by taking into ac- count all the potential core-periphery descriptions identified by a model. we can consider the average block or layer i of a node as a measure of its distance to the core of the network and use that to define coreness as c i = − ─ ℓ ∑ r= ℓ r p(  i = r ∣ a) ( ) in this expression, 𝓁 is the number of blocks and p(i = r ∣ a) is the probability that node i takes on block assignment r. the latter probability is the marginal distribution of i, formally defined as p( θ i = r ∣ a ) = ∑ θ p(θ ∣ a ) { θ i = r} ( ) coreness varies between and , where an individual positioned consistently in the core will have a higher coreness score. block model inference and parameters for the discernment experiment, we run the hub-and-spoke and layered models three times each for each (, ) parameter tuple. for each model, we use the best model according to the mdl. for each run of each model, we sweep over gibbs samples and let each markov chain monte carlo (mcmc) simulation run for times the number of nodes in the network (see the supplementary mate- rials for numerical details). we use samples from the second half of the gibbs sampling chain to infer the parameters ̂  , the most prob- able block labels. we use samples to approximate the mdl (see the supplementary materials for numerical details). for the layered experiment, we consider l, the actual number of layers in each synthetic network, and 𝓁, the fixed parameter in the layered model. for each l, there are nl = networks. for each of those networks, we run the layered models three times and choose the best model from those three runs according to the mdl. we then average the mdl over the nl networks to get the average mdl per (l, 𝓁) pair. we perform inference similar to the discernment experiment but instead use steps per node for the mcmc chains. to account for more layers than the previous experiment, we use samples to approximate the mdl. for each konect network and the #metoo case study network, we run both the hub-and-spoke and layered models three times each. for each model, we choose the best run, as determined by the mdl. for the konect networks, we run layered models for 𝓁 ∈ [ , ] and use the model with the best mdl across all choices of 𝓁. for the #metoo network, we vary 𝓁 in the range 𝓁 ∈ [ , ] and choose the best model overall (thick red line in fig.  ) and for each individual choice of 𝓁 (light red lines in fig.  ) according to the mdl. we use gibbs samples for the konect and #metoo models and infer partitions according to the second half of each chain. for the mcmc chains, we use steps per node. we use samples to estimate the mdl. supplementary materials supplementary material for this article is available at http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/ content/full/ / /eabc /dc references and notes . p. barberá, n. wang, r. bonneau, j. t. jost, j. nagler, j. tucker, s. gonzález-bailón, the critical periphery in the growth of social protests. plos one , e ( ). . d. s. bassett, n. f. wymbs, m. p. rombach, m. a. porter, p. j. mucha, s. t. grafton, task-based core-periphery organization of human brain dynamics. plos comput. biol. , e ( ). . j. i. alvarez-hamelin, l. dall’asta, a. barrat, a. vespignani, k-core decomposition of internet graphs: hierarchies, self-similarity and measurement biases. netw. heterog. media , – ( ). . s. carmi, s. havlin, s. kirkpatrick, y. 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presented in this work. we also thank n. beauchamp, a. clauset, l. torres, and j. davis for conversations early in the project and b. klein for assistance and advice on the data visualization. funding: this work was supported, in part, by equipment and computing resources from nvidia corporation and northeastern university’s discovery computing cluster. j.-g.y. was supported by a james s. mcdonnell foundation postdoctoral fellowship award. author contributions: r.j.g. and b.f.w. conceptualized the project. r.j.g. and j.-g.y. developed the methods, designed all experiments, and validated all results. b.f.w. and j.-g.y. supervised the project. r.j.g. implemented and validated all computer code, curated all data, and wrote the initial draft. all authors reviewed and edited the final manuscript. competing interests: the authors declare that they have no competing interests. data and materials availability: all data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the supplementary materials. the python code for inferring the hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery models and evaluating their model fit is freely available online at https://github.com/ryanjgallagher/core_periphery_sbm. the konect dataset used in this work is freely available at http://konect.cc/. the twitter data underlying the #metoo case study is available at the university of michigan’s inter-university consortium for political and social research upon submission and acceptance of a restricted data use agreement. additional information related to this paper may be requested from the authors. submitted may accepted january published march . /sciadv.abc citation: r. j. gallagher, j.-g. young, b. f. welles, a clarified typology of core-periphery structure in networks. sci. adv. , eabc ( ). o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://github.com/ryanjgallagher/core_periphery_sbm https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/icpsr/studies/ https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/icpsr/studies/ http://advances.sciencemag.org/ a clarified typology of core-periphery structure in networks ryan j. gallagher, jean-gabriel young and brooke foucault welles doi: . /sciadv.abc ( ), eabc . sci adv article tools http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabc materials supplementary http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/ / / / . .eabc .dc references http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabc #bibl this article cites articles, of which you can access for free permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.science advancesyork avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement of science, newscience advances license . (cc by-nc). science. no claim to original u.s. government works. distributed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabc http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/ / / / . .eabc .dc http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabc #bibl http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://advances.sciencemag.org/ for peer review unleashing talent in mental health sciences: gender equality at the top journal: bjpsych manuscript id bjpsych- - manuscript type: editorial date submitted by the author: -jul- complete list of authors: breedvelt, josefien; mental health foundation, research rowe, sarah ; university college london, division of psychiatry bowden-jones, henrietta; cnwl foundation trust, national problem gambling clinic shridhar, sunita; nhs havering ccg, maylands practice lovett, kate; royal college of psychiatrists, college officers bockting, claudi; amc, department of psychiatry lingford-hughes, anne; imperial college london, centre for psychiatry strathdee, geraldine; nhs england, nhs improvement tracy, derek; oxleas nhs foundation trust, amh; institute of psychiatry psychology and neuroscience, keywords: gender, equality, psychiatry, workforce cambridge university press bjpsych for peer review unleashing talent in mental health sciences: gender equality at the top josefien j f breedvelt*, sarah rowe, henrietta bowden-jones, sunita shridhar, kate lovett, claudi bockting, anne-lingford hughes, geraldine strathdee, derek k tracy author affiliations ms josefien j f breedvelt msc, the mental health foundation, london dr sarah rowe phd, university college london dr henrietta bowden-jones frcpsych, cnwl foundation trust, london dr sunita shridhar mbbs, maylands practice, essex dr kate lovett frcpsych, royal college of psychiatrists, london professor claudi l h bockting phd, amsterdam university medical centers, department of psychiatry, university of amsterdam, the netherlands. professor anne-lingford hughes phd, imperial college london. professor geraldine strathdee frcpsych, nhs improvement. dr derek k tracy frcpsych, oxleas nhs foundation trust london and king’s college london *author for correspondence: ms josefien breedvelt, the mental health foundation, london. jbreedvelt@mentalhealth.org.uk summary society is undergoing a shift in gender politics. science and medicine are part of this conversation, not least as women’s representation – and pay - continues to drop as one progresses through more senior academic and clinical levels. naming and redressing these inequalities needs to be a priority for us all. main article is the centenary of women’s suffrage in the uk. this sits in the contemporary landscape of the #metoo movement, debate on the persisting gender pay gap and representation of women at board level. where are we in science, medicine, and psychiatry? a recent podcast recorded at the royal college of psychiatrists ( ) hosted academics, clinicians, and policy advisors discussing work by carter et al. ( ) on women in academic environments. that paper noted how women were less likely than men to ask questions at seminars and conferences. it opened podcast conversations on participants’ reflections and perceptions of this, and the related ethos and culture of their employers. this matters enormously. women were described as “literally less visible” by carter and colleagues, and it appears to map onto career progression. women are continuing to outnumber men at tertiary education, but only in more junior positions. in europe, across all page of cambridge university press bjpsych for peer review academic subjects they account for: % of undergraduates, % of phd graduates, % of fixed-term contract postdoctoral researchers, % of junior and % of senior faculty positions ( ). in the uk, women account for one fifth of overall professorship and head of institution positions ( ). the issue is particularly problematic in stem subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), where women have historically been under- represented; hewlitt et al. ( ) finding that leave rates for women in these subjects peak about years into their careers. within academic medicine, the picture has been improving over the past decade, though there is variation by specialty. primary care has the highest rate of women clinical academics (about %); at about %, psychiatry is not the worst (surgery is), but sits just about in the top half, above radiology and below paediatrics ( ). the academic output of women has been shown to be less often cited, and they suffer from underrepresentation in authorship ( - ). a recent paper in nature found an inverse relationship between journal impact factor and women who were either first or last author ( ). it is not clear which factors are at play; there are the aforementioned issues of fewer women in senior academic positions, but also concern about reviewer bias. there is mixed evidence about the effects of double blind reviewing, and concern that even with such measures authors can often be identified ( ). in clinical life in the uk we see a similar picture. over half of foundation doctors are women, dropping to % at consultant level ( ); at % this is somewhat better specifically in psychiatry, and this represents an increase of % over the last years. however, this figure hides considerable variation between clinical subspecialties: women make up about % of consultants in forensic psychiatry, whereas within child and adolescent mental health this climbs to approximately %. it is important to note that non- training, non-consultant grades make up % of medical workforce within psychiatry, where women continue to be over-represented at % ( ). this report does not include linked data on ethnicity. given the known impact of intersectionality on women’s opportunities this missing data is clearly crucial for further research in identifying areas for targeting policy. we know that psychiatry relies heavily on international medical graduates, % of whom are bme. gmc data show % of the overall psychiatry medical workforce are from bme backgrounds ( ). full equality by numbers (forgetting whole time equivalents) is estimated to take another two decades ( ). in primary care women account for more than % of the workforce, but only % of ccg chairs ( , ). the ‘leaky pipeline’ persists, with reducing women representation with seniority. a loss of talent and diversity, a loss to the individuals concerned, and a loss to academic and clinical institutions. in management and leadership roles, implicit and explicit bias may be an issue, with different attributes and skills frequently ascribed to men and women ( ). in evaluations and reference letters, the language used is often less favourable to women ( ), who are frequently lauded for their ‘hard work’ rather than their ‘brilliance’ ( , ). it has been argued that women more commonly take on ‘less rewarded’ roles such as sitting on committees, having organizational responsibilities, mentoring others, and teaching. these page of cambridge university press bjpsych for peer review duties receive less acknowledgement and take time away from other important areas, hindering promotion ( ). the truth remains that even in , women are far more likely to take on a ‘double shift’, having the bulk of domestic responsibilities as well as a professional life ( ). differences are also reflected in pay. across the whole nhs there is an overall pay gap of . % in favour of men ( ); amongst doctors this is even wider, women earning an average % less, which has expanded over the last decade. this year the bbc reported on how of the highest earning doctors in the uk were men, with full-time consultants earning on average £ , more than women in equivalent positions ( ). some of the contributing factors to these figures are well recognized, including higher rates of flexible training, part time working, and subsequently additional time required to attain higher positions. however, fewer women are applying for, and receiving, clinical excellence awards (ceas). data for this vary locally, but it has been proposed as one of the drivers to change the existing award scheme ( ). interestingly, this does not appear to be as pronounced for local ceas in academia, with approximately equal percentages of men and women holding them. however far fewer women in academia held national ceas - just under a quarter, compared with over % of men – though, importantly, they were equally likely to be successful at attaining one when they applied ( ). women appear not to be putting themselves forward for these awards: at the very top of the scale, six and a half times more men than women have a platinum award. what should we be doing about this as a profession? awareness of the issues, measuring, benchmarking and challenging them, and looking for mechanisms for local redress are a start. the athena swan charter is noteworthy in higher education for supporting institutes to improve measures of equality such as progression of students into academia, career journeys of staff, and the work environment. within the rcpsych, respect is a defined key organizational value which includes challenging inequality. to ensure that a commitment to narrowing the gaps in gender equality run through all college policy the college has recently appointed its first associate dean for equality, diversity and inclusion. there are recognized criteria for good leadership, including targeting leadership biases ( ), which can allow departmental or organizational evaluation to ensure an environment that encourages women’s leadership to flourish. an example is the aurora leadership scheme that promotes exposure, mentoring, and meaningful management opportunities. those in senior positions – men as well as women - have particular responsibilities and means to support the next generation of diverse talent to reach the top. we have seldom had so many medical royal colleges, including our own, led by women, and our current national mental health director and previous national clinical director for mental health have high visibility. the president of the royal college of physicians, professor jane dacre, is leading an independent review into the gender pay gap for doctors that will keep this conversation alive. page of cambridge university press bjpsych for peer review however, there are limits to what any organisation can achieve, unless more fundamental societal causes of inequality are not addressed. men are a crucial part of this conversation; for too long many men saw inequity as a “women’s issue” – it is a societal issue, including welfare policy and cultural attitudes and practice in terms of child care and part-time working ( ). other intersectional issues can scarcely be done justice in a single editorial, but we are reminded that only % of professors in the uk are female and from black and minority ethnic backgrounds ( ). goldin ( ) argued that the largest advance to career attainment gap in the labour market is to improve temporal flexibility. changes in how jobs are structured, with more flexibility in work hours, and less reward for working long hours might help. indeed, this is one of the key pillars of nordic policies for gender equality, which alongside investment in gender equal workplaces and free childcare have contributed to creating some of the most gender equal labour markets. equality is not just about having a level playing field, it is about unleashing talent. as well as being the ‘right thing to do’, the aforementioned nordic model has been shown to have contributed considerably to economic growth, re-emphasizing the societal loss from inequity. work by the center for creative leadership (ccl), the primary community of leading and emerging women entrepreneurs and executives in silicon valley ( ), has shown that greater senior female leadership improves perceived line management support, employee engagement, and organisational dedication, whilst reducing staff burnout. we finish by throwing a couple of challenges to the bjpsych and the academic publishing sector: we would welcome a review of the processes and commitments toward female representation on publication and in leadership positions. secondly, a quick look at the stats show that most journals still have unequal representation of women at editorial board level. looking at the new england journal of medicine, nature, annual review of psychology, jama psychiatry and the bmj, between and percent of editorial boards are female. to adopt another of ’s hashtags, as #immodestwomen we say that’s better than it was a decade ago, but not good enough. we hope that the bjpsych, with about a third of women on the board, will lead the way in creating equality. declaration of interest the authors confirm they have no relevant interests to declare. references the royal college of psychiatrists. women, science, medicine and psychiatry [internet]. 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[place unknown]: nhs employers; mar [cited jul ]. available from: http://www.nhsemployers.org/your-workforce/pay-and-reward/medical-staff/consultants- and-dental-consultants/local-clinical-excellence-awards-arrangements-from- -april- /local-clinical-excellence-award-employer-faqs ovseiko pv, chapple a, edmunds ld, ziebland s. advancing gender equality through the athena swan charter for women in science: an exploratory study of women’s and men’s perceptions. bmc. ; ( ): - . universities uk. patterns and trends in uk higher education [internet]. london: universities uk; . [cited jul ]. available from: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-and-analysis/documents/patterns- and-trends- .pdf goldin c. a grand gender convergence: it’s last chapter. aer. ; ( ): - . clerkin c. what women want – and why you want women – in the workplace [internet]. north carolina: center for creative leadership; . [cited jul ]. available from: https://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /whatwomenwant.final_.pdf page of cambridge university press bjpsych complexities in ethical decision-making complexities in ethical decision-making libby v. morris published online: january # springer nature b.v. the wave of scandals across education, corporate, and governmental sectors over the past few years drives home the need for greater attention to ethical decision-making and ethical behavior. ann e. tenbrunsel, the rex and alice a. martin professor of business ethics at the university of notre dame, clearly made this point as the signature guest lecturer during the university of georgia’s ethics week. okay, you are probably laughing now….a week for ethics! please note that this week is our intentional focus on ethics, not the sole week we have set aside to bbe ethical.^ professor tenbrunsel began by stating that we, like other people, are generally not as ethical as we think we are. some shifting in the seats occurred as this point because most academics and students like to think of themselves as principled and dedicated to high standards of conduct. yet, through multiple examples, we were led to see that a gap exists between who we think we are, who we would like to be, and who we actually are. her research into behavioral ethics investigates the effects of ethical boundaries and ethical awareness on decision-making. our blind spots do not allow us to see our behaviors or decisions as having ethical components. for example, according to professor tenbrunsel, if we are asked to predict a behavior, we think abstractly and big picture; and we tend to project acting in highly ethical, desirable ways. yet, at the time of a decision, we tend to think concretely with specificity; and we bring other frameworks into play. thus, the ethical dimensions of a decision may fade as other issues (e.g., profitability, winning, pleasing a superior) ascend. bbounded awareness^ allows us to exclude relevant information when we define a problem and thus limits the full examination of ethical dimensions. it was informative to learn that we easily make prediction errors about how we will behave in the prediction-action-recollection phases of decision-making and that subsequently we may participate in revisionary retrospectives on our actions. context, other criteria, and decision frames allow us to compartmentalize our decisions. and, we may even recast our less than optimal decisions with softening euphemisms, such as bwe are just greasing the wheels^ as opposed to btipping the scales.^ my take-away was that bgood^ people often make poor decisions and may engage unintentionally in unethical behaviors as a result of bounded awareness, ethical fading, and innovative higher education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * libby v. morris lvmorris@uga.edu university of georgia, athens, ga, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:lvmorris@uga.edu poorly designed organizational systems that compromise ethical behavior. in blind spots: why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it (bazerman & tenbrunsel, ), tenbrunsel and co-author max h. bazerman shared their research on bounded ethicality and the emerging field of behavioral ethics, that is, what do people actually do when facing ethical dilemmas. ethical lapses and unethical behaviors are not only concerns for individuals, but also for organizations because groupthink and pressures of conformity may pervade decision-making and actions across levels and individuals. in the corporate world the failures at enron, big tobacco, and the madoff financial empire are textbook cases of ethical behaviors ignored and corruption writ large. in post-secondary education we have our own examples of unethical and illegal behavior, as was recently revealed by the widely publicized nassar case at michigan state university. dr. nassar was found guilty of sexual abuse of young women gymnasts over many years. other higher education reports tell the stories of senior administrators who have bstepped down^ due to failures in financial oversight, inappropriate relationships, and other inappropriate conduct. however, ethical decision-making is required not only at the presiden- tial and senior leadership levels; every day faculty members must make multiple decisions about people, processes, and professional and personal goals in the complex arenas of instruction and research. in instruction faculty members must evaluate and assign grades for activities, tests, and courses overall. by compartmentalizing instructional decisions to the bobjective^ selection of content, instructional processes, and grading, faculty members can easily ignore, consciously or subconsciously, how instructional decisions might influence other personally important issues: instructor ratings on end-of-course evaluations, tenure and promotion decisions, future academic employment, merit raises, and teaching awards. how are instruction and providing feedback to students affected by an instructor’s professional goals? how do we make explicit the ethical dilemmas surrounding what appear to be the normal day-to-day activities of teaching and learning? in graduate education faculty-student mentoring relationships are key to career progression and outcomes; and in many areas a small number of experts in a department or discipline may be the gatekeepers for research collaborations, opportunities for instructional experience, joint publications, and future employment. this powerful control of rewards and opportunities exacerbates power differentials and sets the stage for ethical lapses by faculty members and potential moral disengagement. the #metoo movement has brought to public attention the lasting damage from inappropriate sexual relationships between superiors and subordinates, both within and outside of the academy. in graduate education, additional issues that influence lives and careers include access to assistantships, scholarships, research, and future jobs. taking time to individually and collectively consider the ethical dimensions of our instruc- tional and research decisions should benefit both students and faculty. collectively, we do not have to begin a search for unethical people or unethical behaviors on our campuses; we need only to look at our own interactions with people and processes and our own professional aspirations and activities to see decision-points and ethical considerations that are close at hand. by reflecting on past behaviors and broutine^ almost reflexive decisions made personally and within our departments, we may establish the examination of ethical implications as a priority in decisions, thereby breaking down compartmentalization, and potentially achieving the standard of bwho we want to be.^ i highly recommend the blind innovative higher education ( ) : – spots book, and i look forward to the results and findings arising from your research into ethical issues in post-secondary higher education. reference bazerman, m. h., & tenbrunsel, a. e. ( ). blind spots: why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it. princeton, nj: princeton university press. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. innovative higher education ( ) : – 	complexities in ethical decision-making 	reference aji_ _ _bookreviews .. recent books on international law edited by richard b. bilder book reviews research handbook on feminist engagement in international law. edited by susan harris rimmer and kate ogg. northampton, ma: edward elgar, . pp. xxvii, . index. doi: . /ajil. . susan harris rimmer, associate professor at griffith university law school, and kate ogg, senior lecturer at australian national university college of law, have compiled an important vol- ume on feminist engagement with international law. the editors build on recent research and scholarship produced on the subject, but also extend their inquiries to areas not previously cov- ered by feminist scholars of international law in great detail, but which are of significance to the corpus of international law scholarship. the publication of this volume is an ambitious project—for its scope and reach (including pub- lic and private international law); its contributors (a global collection of knowledgeable and engaged scholars); its approach (incorporating theory and practice); and its methodological ori- entation (involving both quantitative and quali- tative approaches). the volume incorporates a range of diverse perspectives. more than thirty contributors were drawn from invited submis- sions as well as an open call for participants, resulting in a globally representative group of submissions, with contributing authors at differ- ent stages of their careers. to bridge theory and practice, each section of the volume includes a contribution from a practitioner of international law. the organization of the book is particularly helpful. the conceptual orientation is about building and strengthening prior international legal scholarship, attempting to fill the gaps and omissions in such scholarship, incorporating and engaging with other critical theories, and pursu- ing an approach that is impactful and meaningful to women’s lives. although the majority of the contributors appear to have been trained in law, almost all have academic orientation or ground- ing in other disciplines as well, making the approach richly interdisciplinary. a valuable inclusion in the introductory dis- cussion is an empirical review of feminist interna- tional legal scholarship’s contribution to international law, especially the field’s reach and influence, as well as its diversity and inclu- sion of varying (and sometimes conflicting) view- points. harris rimmer and ogg provide a useful catalogue of feminist contributions to the field of international law between and . at the same time, they succeed in dispelling some of the conflicting perspectives regarding feminist schol- arship in international law’s disproportionate focus on violence against women, as well as con- cerns raised about the ghettoization of feminist legal scholarship. the empirical data they provide is impressive, but the data also suggests the hard work that still needs to be done to achieve the goals of gender equality and women’s empower- ment—at the global and national level. the introduction notes the contribution of feminist approaches to international law, weigh- ing the success of the contributions (their impact on international law) as well as the limitations or obstacles to the achievement of gender equality in international law, including its institutions and structures. the editors point out how feminist legal scholars have created the discursive space in the legal and political realm to influence inter- national law. they also demonstrate how those scholars have brought women’s issues from the margins of discourse to a more centralized space copyright © by the american society of international law of recognition, at least formally. but they lament the disappointments and the lack of progress in crucial areas of international law. regarding the successes of feminist interna- tional law scholars since the start of the new mil- lennium, harris rimmer and ogg point to the rome statute of the international criminal court, especially the inclusion of sexual violence in the definition of crimes against humanity. between and , the united nations passed eight resolutions on women, peace, and security, as well as creating un women in , which is seen as the un’s global engine for gender equality and women’s empowerment. they also point to regional gains, such as the maputo protocol on the rights of women in africa and the council of europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. at the time of the book’s publication, seven women had been awarded the nobel peace for their endeavors related to human rights, democracy, and peace-building. harris rimmer and ogg particularly highlight the growing influence of feminist legal scholar- ship in the academy, including the proliferation of international law courses and related academic activities generated by such scholarship. to this list of successes i would add the impressive wom- en’s advocacy at the global and local level, includ- ing the large number of nongovernmental organizations dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment. of particular signifi- cance is the emergence in of the #metoo movement, whose influence and impact are yet to be examined. the editors also point to many disappoint- ments, despite the successes noted above. for example, the un has to date failed to appoint a woman as secretary-general, despite the availabil- ity of several prominent women to serve in this role. in addition, the number of women at the senior level throughout the un system remains paltry. in addition, at the national level, men with deeply sexist and misogynistic attitudes have been elected as political leaders in several countries. harris rimmer and ogg also point to a con- tradiction: a growing despondency about the lim- ited influence of feminists at the international law level, despite the proliferation of feminist legal scholarship. and they also note the ongoing debates about feminism as being dominated by western feminists and therefore still largely dem- ographically homogenous. further, they refer to janet halley’s exhortation that international law- yers should take a break from feminism. this tabulation of gains and disappointments raise several issues for the editors, notably the inclusion of diverse perspectives (such as critical race theory, third world feminism, and queer the- ory) into feminist critiques of international law; whether having women in senior positions will make a fundamental difference to the structure and edifice of international law, as opposed to mere tinkering at the edges; and whether the focus of feminist legal scholars should move beyond the widely covered areas of human rights law, which are often erroneously interpreted as “soft” law. the four goals that the authors set out for the volume, highlighted below, are pursued through- out the volume and arranged into four parts. the first goal is diversifying the feminist perspectives on international law, especially in areas that have none or have limited engagement with feminist perspectives. second, the volume seeks to engage with a wider audience and therefore render fem- inist perspectives on international law more influential. the third goal is to find strategies for feminist scholarship that may be translated into productive ways to change women’s lives. fourth, the contributors are invited to engage with racial and other critiques that have vexed the feminist legal theory project. the introductory keynote address of sima samar, afghan women’s and human rights advo- cate, (ch. ) bestows on the volume a kind of gravitas that signals both admirable achievements as well as continuing disappointments. part , “diversifying feminist engagement with international law,” lays the groundwork janet halley, split decisions: how and why to take a break from feminism ( ). the american journal of international law vol. : for the rest of the volume, with contributors pur- suing new horizons of international law. several contributions engage with areas of international law not generally well traversed or influenced by feminist legal theory. from harris rimmer’s interrogation of the “social activity” of diplomacy by states and the theorizing of gender and diplo- macy (ch. ) to a range of analyses on environ- mental concerns, climate change, and natural disasters, the contributors engage with areas of law largely untouched by feminist legal theory. in different ways and from a range of perspec- tives, each of the contributors point to the possi- bilities of feminist methodologies and a feminist ontology to reimagine these areas of law. in the discussion of some of the chapters, there is resourceful reference to national law analogues. for example, in her chapter examining the com- plete absence of feminist analysis of private inter- national law, mary keyes, professor at griffith university law school, ponders whether “there is nothing to be said about women in private international law,” or that “[women] are not involved in, or at least not especially affected by, private international law” (ch. , p. ). she appropriately locates these absences in the gendered analytical gaps in the common law within countries, especially when it comes to family law and the law of contract. it is therefore hard to raise substantive criti- cisms of this volume. very often in texts of this kind, namely feminist legal approaches, the spec- ter of essentialism looms large. although an essentialist critique may be apposite in some of the chapters, in fact quite a few contributors grap- ple with the idea of a range of perspectives that include those of women. some are mindful of the challenge of attributing one viewpoint to all women as a homogenous group. for example, rowena maguire, senior lecturer at queensland university of technology school of law, explores a range and diversity of feminist approaches in her chapter on climate law and pol- icy, recognizing that “a range of feminist theories and perspectives are useful in exploring the gen- der and climate nexus” (ch. , p. ). so too jaya ramji-nogales, associate dean for academic affairs and professor at temple university beasley school of law, revisits the category “women” in part to “demonstrate the promise and peril of using the category “women” as the foundation of a political movement” since she notes that “‘women’ constitutes a diverse group with different and at times diametrically opposed political perspectives” (ch. , p. ). another general critique of feminist legal theory’s contributions has been the lack of a thor- ough appreciation of the totality of women’s expe- rience of subordination and oppression, and consequently the limitations of feminist legal the- orytoaddresssuchtotality.inthisrespect,thecon- tributors to part of the volume, entitled “feminist engagement with international law: improving women’s lives,” confront these con- cerns in creative and thoughtful ways, recognizing the interconnectedness of social and economic rights with civil and political rights. one of the longstanding critiques of feminist legal theory approaches to international law has been its over- sized attention to questions of violence against women, without an appreciation of the structural violence of poverty and economic inequalities and indignities. all the contributors to part appreciate the larger critique and incorporate those perspectives in their analysis. beth goldblatt, professor at the university of technology sydney, is particularly effective in highlighting the connections between poverty and violence (ch. ). similarly, emma larking, visiting research fellow at australian national university, adopts a macroeconomic comprehensive approach to highlight global and systemic economic problems that are designed to reify gendered inequalities (ch. ). part of the volume, entitled “building bridges with other critical theories,” makes a strong contribution to the idea of inclusivity, which animates much of the analysis in this sandra fredman, women and poverty: a human rights approach (working paper no. , ), available at https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/ / /oxhrh-working-paper-number- -fredman .pdf; berta e. hernández-truyol, women’s rights as human rights: rules, realities and the role of culture: a formula for reform, brook. j. int’l l. ( ), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol / papers.cfm?abstract_id¼ . recent books on international law https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ / /oxhrh-working-paper-number- -fredman .pdf https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ / /oxhrh-working-paper-number- -fredman .pdf https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ / /oxhrh-working-paper-number- -fredman .pdf https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ / /oxhrh-working-paper-number- -fredman .pdf https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= volume, and also directly dispels the concerns of feminist essentialism mentioned earlier. even though a few contributors in the other sections also engage with critical theories beyond femi- nism, the contributors to this section of the vol- ume engage in a robust dialogue with some of the major critiques of feminism. those critiques have centered on the eurocentric origins and tenden- cies of feminism and its claims of universality in the face of local contestations, especially around religion or cultural norms. the contribution of kathryn mcneilly, senior lecturer at queen’s university belfast school of law, explores the queering of international law, and makes the appeal that “human rights themselves must be approached as fluid, non-binarised and multitu- dinous” (ch. , p. ). from howard university associate professor jarpa dawuni’s perch as an african woman inviting a reframe of feminist questions, “a new conceptual frame- work aimed at charting a different direction for the study of women in international law” (ch. , p. ) to university of cape coast faculty of law lecturer veronica p. fynn bruey’s atten- tion to the concerns of indigenous women in international law (ch. ), this section is a clarion call to reshape the lens of international law by a critical feminist perspective that embraces the intersectionality and interconnectedness of wom- en’s multiple identities. the different parts of the book fit together well, although several chapters within the differ- ent sections could just as well have been placed elsewhere. this is an observation, not a criticism, since the four themes are interconnected on so many levels. the choices of the editors, ogg and harris rimmer, in parsing out the various sections to give the broader thematic impetus is quite effective. as a research handbook the vol- ume covers almost all the bases, from diversifica- tion of the field, to pushing for influence on a broader scale, including embracing a range of critical theories, and ultimately providing inno- vative perspectives to make a real difference in women’s lives. the various chapters in this vol- ume also invite further explorations, which reflect the tradition and hallmark of feminist legal theory, namely, an ongoing and recurring inquiry of women’s realities. the book faces two challenges which are only addressed tangentially. the first is an apparently global retreat from the utopian and cosmopolitan vision underlying the possibilities of constitu- tionalism and law to be transformative, especially regarding gender equality. it seems like the ascen- sion of global constitutionalism, so widely hailed in the wake of the fall of the berlin wall, has now largely abated. arguably, in the last few years there has been an emergence of an “authoritarian constitutionalism” and what has been termed “autocratic legalism.” although these develop- ments are most pronounced at the national level, their global resonances are profound and could have a deep impact on international law and some of the (limited) gains of feminism. in this regard, the thoughtful chapter by aoifee o’donoghue, professor at durham university, and ruth houghton, lecturer at newcastle university law school, which raises the question whether global constitutionalism could be feminist, might have been a good place to think through the implications of the current context (ch. ). their seven-point mani- festo is compelling, but one wonders whether the global constitutional frame has shifted some- what, and how feminist perspectives might impact or influence this shift. the second challenge is a perennial one, namely about transforming legal rights and legal power into political power. the feminist legal theoretical gains, as mentioned elsewhere, have been quite impressive. but ultimately the legal gains must be translated into fundamental political power. despite extraordinary gains, all indicators still point to women globally as gábor halmai, populism, authoritarianism and constitutionalism, ger. l.j. ( ), available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-jour- nal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutional- ism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core- reader. kim lane scheppele, autocratic legalism, eur. u. inst.: constitutionalism and pol. blog ( ), at https://blogs.eui.eu/constitutionalism-poli- tics-working-group/populist-constitutionalism- -kim- lane-scheppele-autocratic-legalism. the american journal of international law vol. : https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutionalism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core-reader https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutionalism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core-reader https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutionalism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core-reader https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutionalism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core-reader https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/populism-authoritarianism-and-constitutionalism/ bb c b d de fb ece b b /core-reader https://blogs.eui.eu/constitutionalism-politics-working-group/populist-constitutionalism- -kim-lane-scheppele-autocratic-legalism https://blogs.eui.eu/constitutionalism-politics-working-group/populist-constitutionalism- -kim-lane-scheppele-autocratic-legalism https://blogs.eui.eu/constitutionalism-politics-working-group/populist-constitutionalism- -kim-lane-scheppele-autocratic-legalism https://blogs.eui.eu/constitutionalism-politics-working-group/populist-constitutionalism- -kim-lane-scheppele-autocratic-legalism second-class citizens. in fact, the world economic forum’s global gender gap report states that it will take years for women to achieve economic equality with men. this considerable collection of feminist per- spectives is akin to a theoretical smorgasbord, an intellectual buffet offering a wide variety of ideas tinged with complexities, challenges, and possibilities. like a smorgasbord, the variety of offerings cater to different preferences and tastes, and allows for dipping in and out, choosing to start at the beginning, middle, or end. for those who teach, research, practice, or otherwise engage with international law, this volume is a useful source and a notable contribution to the literature. penelope andrews new york law school internationalized armed conflicts in international law. by kubo mačák. oxford, uk: oxford university press, . pp. xl, . index. doi: . /ajil. . internationalized armed conflicts in international law addresses the transformation of a noninternational armed conflict into an international one—which the author refers to as its “internationalization” (p. ). the matter is one of increasing importance in recent decades, given the growing tendency of states to become involved in one way or another in internal con- flicts in another state, or the possibility that a civil conflict may result in the transformation of warring factions into separate warring states. although international law has been evolving to apply more of the international law of armed con- flict to internal conflicts, significant differences nonetheless remain, and it is therefore important to assess when the process of “internationaliza- tion” crosses the line, and what the consequences of that transformation are. kubo mačák is an associate professor at the university of exeter law school and has, among other things, worked at the international criminal tribunals for the former yugoslavia and rwanda, and has done research at the international committee of the red cross and the max planck institute. his scholarly background is evident in the thoroughness and rigor of his analysis in this book. the process of internationalization. the first half of the book deals with the process by which noninternational conflicts may become international. macak’s analysis stays within the current structure of the law that provides for two regimes—one for international conflicts and another for noninternational conflicts— and does not attempt to move toward a possible third category to which some but not all of the international rules might apply. macak argues that there are several mecha- nisms through which internationalization may occur. the first is where a noninternational con- flict becomes an international one by the military intervention of an outside state on the side of a rebel movement. he takes the view that a situa- tion of outside intervention without the consent of the territorial state may be more ambiguous if the intervening state does not engage its armed forces directly, but supports a rebel group in var- ious other ways. he argues that the provision of material or logistical support to a rebel faction is not sufficient to internationalize the conflict, but that such internationalization would occur if the outside state exercises overall control of the rebel movement, in particular by organizing and coordinating its actions against the government in power. on the other hand, he argues that if foreign intervention occurs with the consent of the territorial state, the situation remains a noninter- national conflict. this in effect rejects the propo- sition that such an intervention might transform the conflict into one governed by the rules of international conflict if the conflict is on such a scale as to justify the application of those rules. macak’s position on this point seems to reflect the current understanding of states, as reflected in modern conventions on armed conflict. world economic forum, the global gender gap report ( ), available at http://www .weforum.org/ docs/wef_gggr_ .pdf. recent books on international law http://www .weforum.org/docs/wef_gggr_ .pdf http://www .weforum.org/docs/wef_gggr_ .pdf http://www .weforum.org/docs/wef_gggr_ .pdf s jra .. indigenizing and decolonizing feminist philosophy questions of silence: on the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence martina ferrari department of philosophy, university of oregon, susan campbell hall, e th ave, eugene, oregon corresponding author. email: mferrar @uoregon.edu (received september ; revised may ; accepted may ) abstract this article begins at a (historical) crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the recent public outcry against sexual violence (a protest that, as championed by the #metoo movement, seeks to break the “culture of silence” surrounding sexual violence) and con- cerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within fem- inist theory (ruiz ; lugones ; lugones ; veronelli ). wary of concepts such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break the silence” by “speaking up” central to western liberatory movements—in this article, i return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality. the decolonial turn is about making visible the invisible and analyzing the mech- anisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the “invisible” people themselves. —nelson maldonado-torres, “on the coloniality of being” we must, however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. there is no other way for you and me to penetrate there. —gayatri c. spivak, in conversation with jenny sharp in a new york times article, american author and long-distance swimmer diana nyad recounts her experiences of sexual assault, perpetrated in by her swimming coach, who, it turned out, was a serial sexual predator (nyad ). like many testimonies before and after hers, nyad’s places great emphasis on finding one’s voice, on speaking up vis-à-vis sexual violence as a means to regain power in the wake of shame and humiliation. “we need to prepare coming generations to speak up in the moment, rather than being coerced into years of mute helplessness,” she states. as the #metoo campaign forefronts, speaking up “takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it into a movement” aimed at revealing the pervasiveness and systemic nature of sexual © by hypatia, inc. hypatia ( ), , – doi: . /hyp. . https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:mferrar @uoregon.edu violence while building solidarity through empathy (gilbert ). in this vein, nyad concludes the article with a plea: “tell your story. let us never again be silenced.” testimonials like nyad’s bring attention to the two interrelated assumptions operative in much western feminist theorizing about oppression and emancipation. first, they affirm that coming to voice or speaking up about one’s own experience of, for example, sexual violence is an empowering practice that breaks the silence to which harmful prac- tices like sexual violence and the shame associated with it have relegated its victims. second, they attest that being silenced is “a punishment equal to the molestation” (nyad ); the silence induced by fear and shame associated with sexual violence within a patriarchal culture further oppresses survivors. in this sense, nyad’s testimonial brings to focus the logic structuring emancipatory narratives according to which “voice” is asso- ciated with empowerment and is juxtaposed to silence, which comes to be equated with the silencing of oppression. as aimee carrillo rowe and sheena malhotra point out in the introduction to silence, feminism, power, the binary logic of speech versus silence and the almost commonsensical equation of silence with powerlessness and oppression in the western tradition from aristotle to audre lorde presumes a political imperative: for an individual or group to gain power and “to resist and transform the conditions of their oppression,” they “must activate their voice” (carillo rowe and malhotra , , order of quotes rearranged). “speaking up” and “breaking the silence” are thus unequivocally appealed to as the imperatives necessary to counter displacement, oppres- sion, and marginalization. after all, as adrienne rich puts it, “in a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence” (rich , ). given the harm entailed in these exclusions (the harm of being silenced) and the fact that speaking up is lived as liberatory by many—as the aforementioned account indicates —“speaking up” seems hard to argue against. and yet, i suggest, “voice” is too broad a term; it is not nuanced enough to prevent its own deployment as an instrument of oppression rather than liberation. in fact, when voice becomes the ubiquitous appeal of liberatory movements, it abstracts from the concrete situations and lived experiences of those who inhabit silences, transcending the concrete violences entailed by the normative power of voice. consider a memory from ernesto martínez’s childhood: his older cousin felipe, after having initiated sexual contact, grabs his throat, pushes him on the bed, and repeatedly asks “¿te gusta? ¿te gusta?” (martínez , ), all the while martínez remembers remaining still, silent. within the dominant binary framework of voice versus silence, silences like martínez’s are eviscerated of their complexity and ambiguity, read as instances of complacency or submission to oppression. in his silence, martínez did not comply with the “no te dejes” imperative (roughly translated as “don’t let them do that to you” or “fight back”)—a demand that, similar to “speak up!,” has purchase on the sub- jected, not the aggressors—and his silence or lack of struggle was read over and against the positive, overtly explicit imperatives of voicing one’s dissent or physically rejecting the aggression. within this framework, his silence and passivity are read as indexing oppression and, specifically, as failures or absences of sorts, as complacency. after all, why would martínez remain silent in the face of aggression? yet, martínez remembers, there was more in his passivity and silence than silencing, than either complacency or forced submission. he recalls living that silence as an expression of what he calls “joto passivity,” that is, “the seeming nonresponsiveness of queer chicanos in the face of violence” ( ), which, contra (colonial) common sense, was also felt as resistant behavior; his silence was also a practice of “radical mean- ing making” from which he could envision and bring about radically different gendered practices of resistance like nonmisogynist and nonhomophobic ways of performing martina ferrari masculinity ( , ). to be precise, martínez states that his “joto passivity” was not a liberatory solution that removed violence from his life. nonetheless, it was an “embod- ied negotiation” that enabled him to “account for the contradictions” of his situation, and that reminded martínez that, as a queer man of color, he was “not consumed by violence” ( , ). dwelling, for a moment longer, in martínez’s experience, more precisely, in the mis- hearing or misreading of his silence, raises the following questions: if it is the case that silence, as martínez indicates, can be lived differently than as the mark of exclusion from the subject position, inferiority, or oppression, why is martínez’s embodied response immediately read as submission? what are the structures and operations of the dominant logic such that inhabiting martínez’s silence otherwise is foreclosed? and what would make reading and/or inhabiting martínez’s silences otherwise possible? informed by martínez’s experience, in this article i seek to make visible the mechanisms that make invisible the depth and complexity of the phenomenon of silence—what i refer to as deep silence—within a colonial context. the case for deep silence is, at least in part, a case for the limits of voice as a liberatory concept. in the first section of this article, i draw from recent decolonial literature to problematize the uncritical appeal to voice as emancipatory, an appeal that continues to guide much of feminist theorizing reaching well beyond academia. (it suffices to think of the recent public outcry about racial and sexual violence, in which the #metoo and #timesup campaigns are loud examples of movements that express the necessity to “speak up” about and “break the culture of silence” surrounding one’s own experience of racialized, sexualized, and gendered violence). by bringing into dia- logue jacques derrida with decolonial insights from the modern/colonial research project (mc henceforth), i seek to make explicit the ways in which the onto-epistemology repro- duced by coloniality is, in fact, a racialized metaphysics of presence within which logos and the field of presence are exclusive domains of the colonizer. specifically, i suggest that uncritical appeals to “speak up” or “come to voice” foreclose questions about the normativity of voice, ultimately upholding modern categories of thought and being (logo- centrism, to be precise) that reify the oppressive colonial apparatus they seek to resist. in section ii, i develop and problematize what i call the coloniality of silence, that is, operations of power that eviscerate deep silences of their depth and complexity, flatten- ing them to a transparent, mono-dimensional phenomenon indexing ontological absence—what frantz fanon calls the “zone of non-being” (fanon , xii)—and epi- stemic non-sense. this analytical tool, i argue, reveals that the evisceration of silence is not accidental to coloniality. rather, the specific historical formation of coloniality relies upon and actively promotes the flattening of deep silence for its perpetration and legit- imization—an operation of flattening that is actively concealed through the naturaliza- tion of epistemic and ontological inferiority. the apprehension of the complexity and multiplicity of deep silence and its being an inherent component of sense, thinking, and being would undermine the epistemic, ontological, and temporal presuppositions of coloniality. i. the coloniality of voice initially informed by derrida’s powerful critique of “voice” as the appeal of a metaphys- ics of presence (derrida ; ) and subsequently by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of modernity, over the past two decades scholars have challenged the logocen- trism of the west, bringing attention to the dangers of advancing liberatory discourses hypatia not rooted in and attentive to the cultural specificity of the phenomenon one strives to account for. building on the subaltern studies group, scholars like trinh minh-ha, gayatri spivak, cheryl glenn, and krista ratcliffe have suggested that the role of aca- demic left scholars (but also of those who hold power and public access to voice) is to “learn to listen and to decode subaltern inscriptions” (carrillo rowe and malhotra , ; see trinh ; spivak ; glenn ; and ratcliffe ). while acknowl- edging that silence “has been a tool of marginalization and exclusion,” the contributors to silence, feminism, power, for instance, strive to “free silence from domination’s grip” (keating , , ), reclaiming it as a powerful site of resistance that allows “the free- dom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said” (carrillo rowe and malhotra , ). steeped in this tradition, this section strives to make visible and problematize the assumption operative within liberal discourse that voice (logos broadly construed) is key to emancipation, alerting us to the emancipatory limits of voice and shifting the conversation toward deep silence. specifically, i show how appeals to dialogical commu- nication reify, by uncritically deploying logocentric tools such as “voice” as means of liberation, oppressive colonial power structures that have predicated the exclusion and oppression of those same people who seek emancipation through voice. i contend that “voice” remains a vehicle of eurocentric colonization because, within a colonial context, voice—and, in turn, presence/being—is limited to the voice of the eurocentered subject of modernity. on coloniality and the normativity of voice the first step toward understanding the ways in which uncritical appeals to voice reify colonial structures is to take a step back—or, better yet, outward—to contextualize the current critique of voice within the bounds of the specific historical formation of col- oniality. thinking through voice in light of coloniality raises important questions about the normativity of voice that would otherwise be foreclosed. in fact, coloniality is such that the rejoinder to spivak’s infamous question, “can the subaltern speak?” (spivak ), is no: within a colonial context, “speech” requires conformity to eurocentric standards that exclude subaltern communicative practices and being. as such, the demand to speak places the subaltern in an untenable position. were the sub- altern to speak in their native languages, their speech (and their demands for normative treatment) would lack uptake. but were they to speak in a way that was intelligible to the colonizer, they would, on the one hand, subscribe to and be rewritten by a conceptual and linguistic framework that inscribes their culture, language, and being as inferior, while also, on the other hand, sacrificing their cultural specificity. as trinh puts it in woman, native, other, this constitutes a “double mischief”: unspoken and unable to speak, woman in exile with herself. stolen language will always remain that other’s language. say it obliquely, use trickery, cheat, or fake, for if i tell you now what i would like to hear myself tell you, i will miss it. words thoroughly invested with realities that turn out to be not-quite-not-yet-mines are radically deceptive. whenever i try my best to say, i never fail to utter the wrong words; i weasel, telling you “hen” when i mean something close to “duck.” (trinh , ) as this passage makes concrete, by deploying the language of the colonizer, subalterns would cease being subalterns because the dominant group would not be hearing the martina ferrari subaltern in its idiosyncrasies, but, rather, a mere reflection of its own message and image. “stolen language will always remain that other’s language.” note that this no should not be taken to suggest (as critics too often have taken it to indicate) a communicative or political paralysis. rather, the no points to a fundamental paradox at the heart of intelligibility. (as we will see in what follows, the paradox arises when the desideratum of intelligibility is epistemic transparency). given the seeming impossibility of making sense of subaltern experiences without assimilating or distort- ing their differences into familiar meanings, how are we to approach these differences? can this difference be addressed by engaging in dialogical exchanges that seek to min- imize the incommensurability by providing as much meaning as possible into the plus or translatable side of the exchange? or are these communicative barriers the outcome of historically and geographically specific patterns of power that displace the racialized and colonized “other” from the subject position and locus of enunciation? decolonial thinker gabriela veronelli seems to think the latter, arguing that voice and, more broadly, dialogical exchanges play into what she calls “the coloniality of lan- guage and speech” (cls henceforth) (veronelli , ). veronelli defines cls as the process of racialization of the colonized as communicative agents that began in the sixteenth century, whereby the colonized are reduced to nonhuman status and their language and ways of knowing are dismissed as expressions of their natural inferiority. that is, by presenting the colonized as incapable of expressing themselves rationally, their putative inferiority is naturalized discursively ( ). thus, cls forecloses the pos- sibility of any dialogical relationship between colonized and colonizers (but also between colonized subjects) by erecting what are perceived as “natural barriers” to intel- ligibility and communication; that is, coloniality vacates the colonized’s speech of the possibility of being heard by making the colonized’s modalities of communication and existence invisible to the colonizers. pivotal to cls is the joint operation of the two axes of power, “coloniality of power” and “modernity,” structuring and sustaining what aníbal quijano calls the “eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power” (quijano , ). attending to these patterns of power reveals as naïve any abstract appeal to voice as liberatory and points to the imbrication of coloniality and voice, more precisely, to how coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of emancipatory dialogues. according to quijano, the axis of the “coloniality of power” refers to that “specific basic element of the new pattern of world power that was based on the idea of ‘race’ and in the ‘racial’ social classification of world population” ( ). the invention and deploy- ment of the category of “race” from the sixteenth century onward are pivotal in refram- ing the discourse surrounding the inferiority of the non-european “other” from one tied to conquest, war, and domination to one that casts inferiority as natural and ahis- torical. thus presented, “race” and racial discourse come to legitimize the domination of the “indians,” “blacks,” and “mestizos” by the “spanish” and “portuguese” (all of which are newly produced social historical identities) on natural grounds ( ). take the distribution of gender identity, for instance. as maría lugones points out, racial dis- crimination regulated the ascription of gendered identities, distinguishing between “women” and “females” and extending the status of women so described in the west only to white women, while understanding colonized females “to be animals … in the deep sense of ‘without gender,’ sexually marked as female, but without the charac- teristics of femininity” (lugones , – ). even when colonized females were turned from animals into similes of bourgeois white women, “there was no extension of the status of white women to colonized women” ( ). hypatia the second axis of power, “modernity,” refers to the systematic elaboration, carried out by modern, western europe, of a new intersubjective universe based on a new knowledge perspective compatible with the cognitive needs of capitalism (quijano , ). this knowledge perspective is labeled as “rational” and conforms to strict epistemic criteria such as neutrality, objective validity, and transparency (collins , ). the cognitive needs of capitalism include the carving up, quantifying, and measuring of what is knowable so as to exert control over resources, others, and reality for the sake of commerce and exchange. although eurocentered, this way of knowing was/is imposed upon the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as emblematic of the progress of modernity. importantly, the axes of power instituted through and instituting of “coloniality” not only outlive formal colonialism, remaining integrated in the succeeding social orders, but also are constitutive of modern identity, of the modern ethos. in “purity, impurity, and separation,” lugones describes this modern subject as the outcome of a fiction, of an abstraction from the ambiguity and multiplicity constitutive of concrete subjects and realities aimed at exerting control and imparting order upon that mestizaje. that is, this modern subject deploys a logic of purity that prunes, eliminates, forbids, and purges; it frames complex realities in the fictional terms of a unified reality and a unified subject that can be split-separated, that is “internally separable, divisible into what makes it one and the remainder” (lugones , ). this modern subject is one-dimensional and occupies an ahistorical and acultural “vantage point from which unified wholes, totalities, can be captured” ( ). not surprisingly, internally split- separated into “sense/emotion/reason,” “reason, including its normative aspect, is the unified subject” ( ). attending to the joint operations of these axes of power reveals, as the guiding logic of coloniality and cls in particular, an epistemic production that, by demanding con- formity to purportedly universal (but in fact modern and eurocentered) epistemic stan- dards, relies upon and produces at least a double erasure. first, it erases the colonized’s communicative practices and knowledge-validation processes, which come to be regarded as primitive and lacking the sophistication, clarity, and accuracy necessary to produce knowledge. not only, as women of color feminists have argued, is uptake differentially distributed across gender, ethnic, and racial lines (think, for example, of the differential treatment received by anita hill’s testimony compared to that of christine blasey-ford); as spivak’s paradox highlights, coloniality is such that to be heard entails expressing oneself in a manner that conforms to the epistemic model of the eurocentered, capitalist modern/colonial world power, that is, in a rational and dispassionate manner; it requires being a split-separated subject who does not per- ceive richly. because indigenous peoples do not conform to purportedly universal epi- stemic criteria, “the colonizers perceived indigenous peoples in speaking their tongues as doing less than being able to express knowledge” (veronelli , ). for instance, as trinh observes, non-western languages like those of taoism and zen that are “per- fectly clear but rife with paradox” do not qualify as clear, persuasive, or correct, for “paradox is ‘illogical’ and ‘nonsensical’ to many westerns” (trinh , ). expressive modes that, analogously to these, do not “prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify” ( ) are regarded as “simple communication,” a form of communication that conveys more than denotative meaning, but less than dialogical rational communica- tion, and that is an inherently less valorized form of expressivity than are eurocentric languages (veronelli , – ). martina ferrari as collins details in black feminist thought, the distortion or exclusion from what counts as proper communication or knowledge of nonnormatively eurocentered expe- riences has characterized the lives of us black women, who have relied on alternative expressive forms like music, literature, and daily conversations as sites to develop self- definitions as well as produce and validate knowledge (collins , ). take, for instance, the erasure of the founder of “me too” tarana burke from the #metoo movement when it first took off over a decade later in . as burke observes in a vibe interview with j’na jefferson, women of color—who, statistically, experi- ence higher rates of rape and sexual assault than white women—are not only less likely to report, but their stories have not been granted nearly as much public attention as the tes- timonies of white women. reflecting on her own experience with “me too,” burke asks, “why isn’t it valid when we talk about it?,” thereby raising questions about ) how race affects the epistemic authority of the survivor (but also of who qualifies as a survivor in the first place), and ) of the extent to which credibility and correctness of an utterance is afforded by demanding conformity to grammatical and syntactic rules, key words, or technical terms. in this vein, burke asks, “is [“me too”] only valid if cnn talks about it?” (jefferson and burke ). the two axes perform a second (perhaps more insidious) erasure: this epistemic pro- duction conceals its own structural complicity in the reification of a system that casts the “other” as inferior. the move whereby the in-fact-european epistemic standards/ knowledge-validation processes that norm what counts as knowledge and language is presented as universal naturalizes racialized differences, making the processes that pro- duce these differences, that is, coloniality, invisible. because the colonized deploy com- municative practices that do not conform to the putatively universal model of rational expression, they are perceived as naturally inferior. in turn, such a naturalization makes invisible the mechanisms that produce the colonized as inferior. it is in this sense that, as veronelli argues, cls is more than the colonization of a language as a system of meaning, but a “process of dehumanization through racialization at the level of commu- nication” (veronelli , ). in light of these considerations, we begin to see how the two axes of “coloniality” and “modernity” work in unison within cls to discursively dehumanize the colonized and racialized “other,” ultimately undermining the conditions of possibility for emancipa- tory exchanges. on the one hand, “modernity” naturalizes the colonial difference by upholding putatively universal and rational epistemic standards, a move that casts all those who do not conform to those criteria as naturally inferior or incapable of rational and clear linguistic communication. on the other hand, “coloniality” distributes this natural epistemic inferiority along racial lines; those who are epistemically inferior (putatively) by nature are those who are racialized as other. the outcome is that the epistemic criteria upheld by “modernity” are such that the natural inferiority of the non-european, racialized “other” is constantly reified through its own conceptual and linguistic schemas, which include reason, dialogical communication, and voice—in sum, logos. thinking through questions of voice in the context of coloniality reveals that, while coloniality displaces the colonized from the subject position by producing them as inca- pable of intelligible expression, a simple appeal to voice as emancipatory does not suf- fice; within a colonial context, the voice that can be/is heard by the majority community is normed by coloniality and, thus, is exclusively the voice of the colonizers. this is to say that the abstract imperative to speak up—the imperative according to which speak- ing up is the way to address oppression and violence irrespective of the nuances of a hypatia given, concrete situation—skates over the important question of whose voice norms that imperative. in sum, uncritical appeals to voice do not allow the critical distance (which not so paradoxically can actually be obtained by remaining grounded in concrete lived experiences of those who speak up) necessary to question the (colonial) world in which language and naming are power, and “voice” a colonial tool. quite the contrary—they play into existing power structures by deploying tools, like language, naming, and voice, that are normed by and effect the norming of coloniality, giving voice exclusively to the modern, split-separated, and rational lover of purity. at this juncture, it is telling to briefly turn to linda martín alcoff’s rape and resistance, in which she puts forward a new epistemology of rape grounded in a more nuanced understanding of experiences of sexual violation as a way to reform and transform the condition of survivors’ reception. although she deems survivors’ voices the critical force behind social revolution (on her account, speaking up is neces- sary, for example, insofar as it often is the catalyst for changing definitions, which affect the possibility of understanding and resisting sexual violation), alcoff warns about the ways in which their testimonies echo in the public domain: testimonies are not only inscribed in frames that regulate the “criteria by which claims are interpreted and judged, what may be spoken of, what can come up for judgment itself” (alcoff , ); they are also taken up in a domain in which the dominant understanding of sexual violation lacks complexity and nuance. to avoid the dismissal of “voices expressing complexity … as simply in denial, or as liars, or as deluded about their experience,” and “to make survivor speech as politically effective as possible,” it is paramount to complicate the understanding of the nature and dynamics of experiences of sexual vio- lation to reshape the discourses norming the utterability and reception of such experi- ences ( , ). in spite of her nuanced analysis of the challenges associated with public speaking, and her shift from individual responsibility to “speak up” toward transform- ing the discursive structures regulating uptake, alcoff’s advocacy for voice as the priv- ileged emancipatory tool prevents her from making visible the imbrication of coloniality and voice, or the ways in which the discursive formation of coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of emancipatory dialogues, ultimately reiterat- ing those discursive schemas that frame and dismiss subaltern resistances. uncritical appeals to voice thus contribute to making invisible non-western “voices”: because the voices that can be/are heard are those that conform to the episte- mic norms of coloniality, those that do not conform are not recognized as communi- cative, rational subjects and are dismissed as nonexistent and nonsensical. the claim that coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of dialogical emancipation should not be taken to suggest that the colonized do not have a “voice” or cannot speak. such an understanding would play into the same binary and totalizing logic this article seeks to destabilize. the colonized do have a “voice” and appeal to knowledge-validation processes, but to hear these “voices” and epistemic processes one needs to attune oneself to the echoes reverberating through and fissuring the putative silences to which they are relegated by colonial logic. take the institution- alized sexual violation of black women under conditions of segregation, for instance. as alcoff points out, “even if there is an official silence in the majority community con- cerning a given issue … this does not mean the silence is total”; black communities knew what happened even before the naacp chapters began taking cases to the courts (alcoff , ). “even if these were not echoable in dominant discursive practices,” the necessity for safety and knowledge-sharing led to the development of methods of communication not repressed by eurocentered norms ( ). martina ferrari at this juncture, the mc affirmation, echoed by veronelli, that “there is no way out of coloniality from within modern categories of thought” (veronelli , ) accrues weight and clarity. the dire implications of these two erasures are not just epistemolog- ical, but ontological; they entail a world, a metaphysics, in which the only resisting sub- jects and modes of resistance that are recognized as existing, as sensical, are those normed by coloniality. in other words, the implications of the concealed normativity of voice are that those who are not heard/seen protesting—those who do not resist in a manner consonant with the standards prescribed by coloniality—risk being dismissed as either invalid or as facilitating their own oppression, as martínez’s narrative reminds us. in this sense, coloniality constructs an ontology that strives to eliminate any “resi- due” of resistance: along with non-western “voices,” non-western modes of insubor- dination, sense-making, and, as the following discussion will show, being, are also erased; the modes of insubordination, sense-making, and being made available are those sanctioned by colonial logic, modes that, even in their insubordination, play into coloniality by appealing to its concepts, structures, and logic. in what follows, i unpack this last claim, suggesting that the abstract and uncritical appeal to voice is complicit in the reproduction and reification of colonial epistemic and ontological norms—what i call a racialized metaphysics of presence—that make visible only modes of existence that are normed by coloniality, ultimately preemptively fore- closing ways of reading and writing reality that uphold its complexity and ambiguity. a racialized metaphysics of presence the second step toward understanding the ways uncritical appeals to voice reify colonial structures is by grappling with the ontological implications of coloniality. although the theories discussed thus far focus predominantly on the epistemic ramifications of col- oniality, this historical formation affects the “general understanding of being” (maldonado-torres , ). first, the casting of colonized people as lacking ratio- nality has the effect of depriving them, in fanon’s words, of “ontological resistance,” that is, of being. we saw this implication operative in the preceding discussion of cls, especially in the discursive dehumanization of the colonial other through raciali- zation. but this first ontological erasure relies on a second, conceptual one. the colo- nial/modern world power produces a racialized, dualistic conceptual framework or, more precisely, a metaphysics that limits “the sense of being within the field of pres- ence” (derrida , )—what derrida calls a metaphysics of presence—whereby this field of presence appears as the exclusive domain of the colonizer. in this sense, i speak of a racialized metaphysics of presence. as we will see, this racialized metaphys- ics of presence of being versus nonbeing, sense versus non-sense, light versus darkness, strives to reduce the multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity of (the) being (of nonmo- dern subjects) to nothingness, to nonbeing. not only, then, are the colonized made invisible, reduced to nothingness through an exclusion from presence, but their being is conceived through a framework inadequate to express their complexity and ambiguity. take the first ontological implication of the colonial/modern world power that “the absent of rationality is articulated in modernity with the idea of the absence of being in others” (maldonado-torres , – ). in “the coloniality of being,” nelson maldonado-torres argues that the cartesian ego cogito and its instrumental rationality operate according to an attitude of permanent suspicion—what he calls the “racist/ imperial manichean misanthropic skepticism” ( )—regarding the humanity of hypatia colonized and racialized “others,” which can be summarized thus: “‘i think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore i am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable)’” ( ). the tacit assumption guiding this logic marks the colonial and racial subjects as dispensable; it puts them under the murderous and rapist sight of the modern/colonial ego cogito. fanon’s reflections in black skin, white masks and gloria anzaldúa’s testimony in borderlands/la frontera are a powerful testament to this insight. because the colonial world is structured by colonial conceptual and linguistic frameworks grounded in mis- anthropic skepticism—here it suffices to think of fanon’s powerful description of his (linguistic) encounter with the young white boy’s shout, “look a negro!”—“in the eyes of the white man … the black man [sic] has no ontological resistance” (fanon , , order rearranged). coloniality is such that the colonized appears, in the eyes of the dominant group, not as a subject, that is, someone who has a culture, history, and language, but as nothingness. as anzaldúa’s narrative conveys, when interpreted through colonial schemas, the complex, ambiguous, and paradoxical dimensions of her being are taken to be an indication of her inferiority, of her non-sense. “i have so internalized the borderlands conflict that sometimes i feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. a veces no soy nada ni nada” (anzaldúa , ), as she recounts. in a colonial context, ontology collapses into manicheism whereby the colonized are reduced to the dark side of the light-dark equation; they are reduced to “a zone of non-being, a sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge” (fanon , xii). this manichean ontology, however, does more than relegate the damné to the dark side of the dichotomy; it deprives the colonized of a (nondualistic and nonlogocentric) “metaphysics” of their own capable of accommodating the complexity of (their) being (fanon , ). given the colonial episteme at his disposal, fanon painfully realizes that the answer to the question, “where do i fit in?” ( ), is that he does not fit in. he has arrived “too late!,” so to speak, in a world that chains him, through coloniality and the working of the two axes of power, to pre-existing images, concepts, and significa- tions that have been fabricated without him and that relegate him to nothingness. as the anguish permeating the chapter titled “the lived experience of the black man” indicates, fanon’s existential struggle to make sense of his being through the colonial episteme leads him to one untenable position after another, ultimately culminating in a cry (an affective response that should not be overlooked and to which i will return). similarly, we witness anzaldúa struggle with conceptual and linguistic frameworks too narrow and transparent to make sense of the opaque, complex, ambiguous dimensions of her being, which are thus taken to be an indication of her inferiority, of her non- sense. in this sense, to use maldonado-torres’s words, coloniality is a “metaphysical catastrophe” (maldonado-torres , – ). but how is this metaphysical catastro- phe possible? as previously noted, the epistemic criteria upheld by sixteenth-century europe served the cognitive needs of capitalism in which knowledge had to be conducive to the carving up, quantifying, and measuring of (external) reality for the sake of com- merce and exchange. that is, the sixteenth century witnessed the proliferation of explicit discourses on method for the attainment of knowledge that resulted in not only the production of “objective,” “universal,” “dispassionate” knowledge, but also the sedimentation of ontological assumptions about what being should be like such that it could be known through the above-mentioned method. as it turned out, the martina ferrari being that could be known through these epistemic criteria is limited to the field of presence. as derrida suggests (following heidegger) in ousia and grammē, western metaphysics treats “the meaning of being as parousia or ousia, which signifies, in ontologico-temporal terms, ‘presence’ (anwesenheit)” (derrida , ). this means that it grounds determinations of the meaning of being in that which is—a move that produces, at once, being as “what is present,” as immediate self-presence or “pure auto-affection” (derrida , ) over and against nonbeing, which comes to be understood as “what is not present,” “not-there,” in sum, what cannot be known through immediate presence to consciousness. not to be overlooked is the crucial role that voice plays in delineating the field of presence: logos, derrida tells us, is immediately present to consciousness only through voice because voice—or, as he specifies in voice and phenomenon, internal monologue (derrida , – )—is (presumably) heard without external mediation. the west’s logocentrism is the mark of a metaphysics of presence that understands speech and voice as the immediate conduit of (the) meaning (of being). the ontological implication of the axis of “modernity,” then, is the reification of a parmenidean ontology of being and nonbeing, presence and absence, light and darkness, whereby speech and voice are the mark of purity, presence, transparency, and the fullness of being, whereas its other, silence, is the mark of impurity, absence, and lack of being. the work done in this article, however, should alert us against taking concepts like “voice” abstractly and toward the necessity of attending to the power differentials at play when dealing with questions of coloniality and ontology, bringing to bear consider- ations about the differential and racialized distribution of being onto ones about the metaphysics of presence. in fact, maldonado-torres’s and fanon’s remarks indicate that the field of presence is demarcated by the consciousness or, more precisely, the voice of the colonizer. within a colonial context, the “voice” that stands for presence is not just any voice; the only voice that has uptake and is recognized as language is that of the colonizer—a speech act that conforms to the cognitive needs of capitalism. the exclusion of the colonized’s communicative functions as language, then, does not merely entail the erasure of non-eurocentric modes of communication, but also the rel- egation of racialized bodies/being to absence. in this sense, the metaphysics of presence is a racialized metaphysics of presence whereby the field of presence is the exclusive domain of the colonizer. in light of these considerations, i hear, in the “cries of those whose humanity is being denied” (maldonado-torres , ), the reminder to call into question not only the colonizing power of voice permeating uncritical appeals to “speak up!,” but also a world in which naming and language are power. that is, envisioning decolonial avenues of feminist insubordination cannot stop at questioning the conditions of possibility of reception of subaltern voices (as alcoff among others does in rape and resistance); it must venture beyond voice, recuperating the generative power of deep silence. importantly, i contend, the latter requires displacing the mechanisms that reduce the multiplicity and opacity of deep silence to oppressive silencing, to epistemic and onto- logical absence, and uphold deep silence as a fecund source of radical meaning-making, of a sense and a metaphysics that accommodate the mestizaje and complexity of (the) being (of the colonized). in this vein, it is time to repropose the questions raised at the outset of this article: why is martínez’s silent response read as an absence of sorts? what are the structures and motives such that silence is immediately perceived and conceived as silencing? there are instances of silence that are, in fact, oppressive, but hypatia why can’t we find, within a colonial matrix, a way to think or live silence otherwise than as oppression? and what does this evisceration tell us about coloniality? ii. the coloniality of silence i concluded the preceding section by suggesting that a racialized metaphysics of pres- ence is such that the colonizers’ is the only voice that is heard and stands for presence, which means that being (here limited to the field of presence) is the exclusive domain of the colonizer. because the “voice,” “speech,” or “languages” of the colonized do not conform to eurocentered, capitalist, colonial/modern criteria, they are not heard or rec- ognized as such. this entails the reduction of the colonized’s voice to nonsense (or, as veronelli calls it, “simple communication”) and their being to a “zone of non-being.” however, a racialized metaphysics of presence that excludes communicative forms and beings that are not normed by coloniality has implications for the phenomenon of silence itself. within a colonial context, embodied responses that are not normed by colonial voice, like martínez’s “joto passivity,” fall through the cracks of a racialized metaphysics of presence; rather than being taken in their strangeness and allowed to displace usual expectations, what cannot be heard by and from the colonizer’s stand- point is marked as unintelligible and nonsensical, as nothingness—as mere or total silence. experiences of silences that can be negotiations of reality and fecund sources of radical meaning-making are vacated of their depth and thickness, of sense and being. that is, deep silences are eviscerated of their multiplicity and the phenomenon of silence comes to stand for the opposite of voice and sense, as that which ought to be broken or overcome to convey meaning or to gain recognition. as such, silence is sig- nified negatively, as the mark of ontological nonbeing and epistemic non-sense or the index of oppression and displacement from the (purportedly universal but in fact colo- nial) subject position. i call the mechanisms that make invisible the depth of the phe- nomenon of silence the coloniality of silence. the outcome is that silence is perceived, at best, as a phenomenon irrelevant to meaning-making, to communication, and to the disclosure of being, and, at worst, as an obstacle to be overcome if meaning, commu- nication, and the disclosure of being ought to be attained. but what does it mean for silence to be excluded from the domain of presence, being, and sense? this is also to ask, what does it mean, for sense, to be limited to (the) presence (of the colonizer’s voice)? in “cultural alterity,” ofelia schutte takes up these questions by thinking through the paradox inherent to cross-cultural communication already discussed in relation to spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” differently from spivak, who deals with the untenable predicament of the subaltern from the standpoint of speech/voice, the lynch- pin of schutte’s argument is that there is a “lack of complete translatability” (schutte , , n. ), a silence of sorts, between linguistic-cultural symbolic systems but, more broadly, within sense itself. as she puts it, “[t]here is always a residue of meaning that will not be reached in cross-cultural endeavors, a residue sufficiently important to point to what i shall refer to more abstractly as a principle of (cross-cultural) incom- mensurability” ( ). although colonial/modern epistemic theories of meaning may acknowledge this incommensurability and the fact that it may impede a perfect map- ping of culturally different discourses, they regard incommensurability as “irrelevant to philosophical meaning and knowledge, and thus irrelevant to the operations of rea- son” ( ). this is because they understand incommensurability quantitatively rather than qualitatively; incommensurability is approached as the residue of an equation martina ferrari whose balancing entails communicative transparency. recall lugones’s lover of purity: the colonial/modern subject operates under the assumption that the sense of a pur- portedly unified reality and subject can be grasped in its totality through reason alone, that is, by occupying an acultural and ahistorical vantage point. lovers of purity split-separate reality, sanitizing it from anything “impure” like affective residues and (seeming) incompossibles. that is, they operate under the assumption that a culture’s, language’s, or subject’s meaning is perfectly available and accessible to another, that these meanings can be made available through dialogical exchanges, and that the col- onized can deploy colonial meanings and frameworks to express their experiences of oppression and resistance—assumptions that, as we have seen, make invisible the col- onized’s communicative practices and being. in a word, the lover of purity casts sense and reality as transparent, thus skating over the “silence,” “opacity,” or “excess of mean- ing” inherent in sense and reality. this assumption regarding the nature of incommensurability/silence and sense informs strategies devised to reduce barriers to cross-cultural communication. because sense is assumed to be transparent, cross-cultural incomprehensions or mis- communications are taken to be direct results of a lack of information. the solution to this “lack,” then, is taken to be a “more”: comprehension and communication, this logic goes, are achieved by providing more complete, detailed, accurate information. although these strategies, in some instances, may help reduce the incomprehensions or miscommunications, they mischaracterize the nature of incommensurability/silence and sense, which, in turn, leads them to mischaracterize the nature of the problem. because they overlook the fact that “silence” or “excess of meaning” is inherent to sense and “the process of reasoning itself” (schutte , ), they understand the prob- lem of miscommunication to be a quantitative issue—addressed by providing more of the same kind of input—rather than a qualitative issue—the nature of sense and silence. in other words, they overlook the deep silence of sense and the sense of deep silence. this discussion of eurocentered theories of meaning points to the fact that the colonial, logocentric apparatus is not equipped to approach, dwell in, harken to occurrences of deep silence, or let deep silence open onto other dimensions of being and sense that are prior to and cannot be accounted for by a discourse that operates at the level of con- ceptual thinking. instead, epistemically, silence is framed as the lack or insufficiency of more complete, accurate, detailed sense/information that could be provided by the col- onized via speaking up and coming to voice. in sum, what is made invisible, by virtue of its not being recognized or acknowledged, is the sense of deep silence. although the coloniality of silence strives to eviscerate deep silences, occurrences of silence can be rich phenomena that operate according to decolonial logics. martínez’s testimony points to the ways in which deep silence holds the promise of making sense of his situation otherwise than via colonial epistemic and ontological frameworks. martínez shows us that his “joto passivity” opens onto practices of “radical meaning making” from which one can envision and bring about radically different gendered practices like nonmisogynist and nonhomophobic ways of practicing masculinity (martínez , ). or take the description of marita bonner, a celebrated writer of the harlem renaissance, of black consciousness in “on being young, woman, and colored.” departing from narratives that equate black consciousness with resistance and the public, in her writing—conveyed both through her stylistic choices and con- tent—bonner emphasizes the voluptuousness of interiority and the strength of surrender: hypatia so—being a woman—you can wait. you must sit quietly without a chip. not sodden—and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty. but quiet; quiet. like buddha—who brown like i am—sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before that white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands. motionless on the outside. but inside? silent. still … “perhaps buddha is a woman.” (bonner, – , cited in quashie , ) quiet, stillness, and silence function in bonner’s text as the catalyst for novel under- standings of black identity that do not stand over and against the world, its expectations, and its limited imagination. silence here figures as a location of insight and meaning; in this context, silence is not oppression, “not performative, not a withholding,” but instead, kevin quashie claims in the sovereignty of quiet, “is an expressiveness that is not entirely legible in a discourse of publicness” (quashie , ). so, again, why are these “silent” responses read as negative phenomena, as absence, passivity, or nonresponsiveness? by emphasizing the why, i bring attention to the nonaccidental nature of this reading of reality, to the fact that the casting of deep silence as mere silence, that is, the coloniality of silence, is necessary to coloniality. in fact, because what is deemed as mere silence would open not only onto decolonial epistemic practices, but also onto a metaphysics or zone of being that is neither full presence nor nothing, taking seriously those experi- ences as deep silence would challenge usual assumptions central to coloniality itself. in this sense, the evisceration of deep silence to absence (and to oppressive silencing) is not accidental to coloniality, but, rather, a key process in the successful reification and legitimization of coloniality. by reducing deep silences to the expression of natural infe- riority or the exclusion from the subject position, the coloniality of silence makes invisible modes of knowing, communicating, and being that are otherwise than modernity and that, by virtue of their existence, threaten to fissure the naturalization of coloniality so essential for its own justification. after all, the existence of decolonial modes of being and knowing challenges the operative assumption of coloniality, calling into question the “objective” and “transparent” qualities of eurocentered, capitalist, modern/colonial epistemic and ontological schemas—features that are presented as natural and universal. to use language resonant with the previous section’s discussion, the racialized metaphys- ics of presence eliminates any “impurity” or in-between, reducing them to nonbeing. significantly, because this in-between, this “herida abierta” (anzaldúa , ), is a place where the colonized live in a way that “exceeds” the modern epistemic and onto- logical categories of coloniality, and, as such, offers “new critical horizons … within hegemonic cosmologies” (mignolo , xxvi), in addition to the concealment of the production of the difference between colonized and colonizer, the naturalization of the colonial difference makes invisible this concrete locus fecund with new horizons. in this way, it preemptively dismisses on natural grounds as nonbeing or non-sense the locus from which one could contest the assumptions of coloniality. this erasure is cru- cial to coloniality in that it conceals the colonial difference as a generative source of subversion. martina ferrari iii. toward the rereading and rewriting of deep silence as lugones insightfully reminds us, decoloniality requires resisting the epistemological habit of erasing (lugones , ). what would it mean, then, not to dismiss the res- idue or excess of meaning—the deep silence—of experiences like martínez’s, fanon’s, or anzaldúa’s? and if sense is not transparent, and if silence is not a lack, how are we to make sense of the operations of silence in sense? how can experiences like theirs help us make sense of the silence of sense and the sense of silence? consider fanon’s and anzaldúa’s aforementioned experiences of not fitting within colonial norms and expec- tations. although painful and disorienting, their experiences are not a defeat. upholding the dismemberment brought about by a life in the “herida abierta,” and dwelling in these experiences of displacement from the language and the world of the colonizer not only reveals the fictitious nature of the logic regulating this exclusion; it can also be a fertile “ground” for the rereading and rewriting of reality, for the dis- placement of usual meanings and expectations. although this colonial logic strives to reduce the damné and their multiplicity, opacity, and ambiguity to the dark side of the dichotomy (to nothingness), their material existence contextualizes such reduc- tion. as noted, fanon’s existential struggle to make sense of his being culminates in a cry: “i tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between nothingness and infinity, i began to weep” (fanon , ). we witness fanon rejecting the split- separation imposed upon him by the logic of purity, a separation that would dismiss the emotional residue that makes up his difference, his being, reducing him to nothing- ness and the depth of silence to an “eviscerated” silence. importantly, however, his rejection comes in the form of weeping, which suggests another way of being in and making sense of the world—an embodied, affectively charged ethos. we find a more robust exploration of this affective sense-making in anzaldúa’s writ- ings. we discover, in the remarks from borderlands/la frontera previously cited, that, although at times, when she gives in to colonial logic, anzaldúa feels like she is a “zero, nothing, no one. a veces no soy nada ni nada,” her existence contests the logic of purity: “pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy” (anzaldúa , ). the being that she “is” does not conform to the usual expectation or familiar meanings; she “is” neither the pleni- tude of full being nor the absence of nonbeing: “but even when i am not, i am” ( , my translation). similarly to fanon, when upholding her being and speaking from her expe- rience, from that purportedly eviscerated silence or nothingness to which colonial logic strives to reduce her, anzaldúa is able to challenge the fiction of the racialized meta- physics of presence; “when not copping out,” she lets her deep silence speak for itself, shaping a metaphysics of her own whereby she “is” a multiplicity: mexican, mestiza, chicana, tejana, and so much more. testimonies like these point us to an alternative to understanding incommensurabil- ity as well as sense and silence in terms of transparency; they ask that we resist the ten- dency to subsume the other’s opacity into familiar schemas or meanings, dwelling instead in that unsettling experience akin to when “another’s speech, or some aspect of it, resonates in me as a kind of strangeness, a kind of displacement of the usual expec- tation” (schutte , ). withstanding this strange experience, this deep silence, is key to hearing the other in her difference, for new sense to emerge. although this article has followed decolonial thinkers in challenging the authorial and colonial power of voice, it moves beyond them, inviting the reframing of spivak’s question not in terms of voice—can the subaltern speak?—but in terms of hypatia deep silence—can the deep silence of the colonized be generative of decolonial sense- making? in other words—by attending to colonial patterns of power, this article has revealed the imbrication of coloniality and voice, thus problematizing as naïve any abstract appeal to voice as emancipatory. although survivors’ voices and testimonies are a critical force behind social change, as the #metoo movement continues to pro- mote voice as the ubiquitous means of emancipation, it is paramount to contend with the fact that social change is not achieved by making the platform more inclusive to include the voices of those who have traditionally been marginalized because of their social positionality. as i have argued in this article, the matter at hand is rather to ques- tion the structural conditions and assumptions undergirding the movement, that is, its appeal to voice. in fact, assuming that voice is a ubiquitous means of emancipation, that speaking up is beyond race, gender, or class tacitly undermines the conditions of pos- sibility of dialogical emancipation of those who do not conform to eurocentered episte- mic and ontological norms, ultimately reifying colonial formations whereby the other and their communicative practices are cast as inferior. in this sense, so long as liberatory movements championing the imperative to “speak up” do not critically call into ques- tion the guiding assumption norming what counts as reliable and correct speech, the testimonies of survivors whose expressive means do not conform to logical, clear, or persuasive speech will be reduced to nothingness, to “total silence” (alcoff , ). as spivak suggests in an interview with jenny sharp, perhaps “we must … take a mor- atorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. there is no other way for you and me to penetrate there” (sharp and spivak , ). perhaps, the openings to decolonial sense and the key to “rereading and rewriting of reality” (anzaldúa , ) are not found exclusively in or through conceptual thinking or dialogical exchanges but via affective, sensuous harkenings to experiences of deep silence. notes aimee carrillo rowe’s and sheena malhotra’s silence, feminism, power is a collection dedicated to cri- tiquing, from a feminist standpoint, the dominant conception of silence that casts it as exclusively oppres- sive and recovering it as also a space of possibilities (carrillo rowe and malhotra ). over the decades, there have been attempts to reclaim silence outside of philosophy. communication studies scholar robin clair, for instance, follows the path paved by max picard, arguing that silence and voice should not be thought as “bifurcated concepts,” but as “self-contained opposites” (clair , xiii; see also picard ). in organizing silence and “imposed silence and the story of the warramunga woman,” clair inves- tigates strategies to organize silence such that it becomes possible to hear the voices of those who have been silenced (clair ; ). following a deconstructive approach, clair investigates the “silencing aspects of communication and the expressive aspects of silence” (clair , ) as a way of moving beyond the bifur- cation of voice and silence. notably, clair argues that aesthetics “provides a means for silence to escape and become expression, and an aesthetic perspective allows us to see it … an aesthetic perspective provides a way of exploring how silence is expressed” ( ). it should be noted that the history of silence and feminism is a complex one. by the mid- s, third- wave feminist analyses of oppression complicated the concept of silence. silence was not exclusively a mark of patriarchal oppression, theorists such as audre lorde or maría lugones insisted (lorde / ; lugones and spelman ), but also a phenomenon endemic to feminist discourse. attending to what came to be known—thanks to kimberlé crenshaw’s groundbreaking essay “mapping the margins” (crenshaw )—as the intersectionality of oppression entailed calling into question the racialization of silence, that is, the white assumption that silence is co-extensive with the feminine. on the one hand, inter- sectional analyses of oppression revealed that “silence” (as well as “passivity” or “fragility”) characterizes and normalizes the experience of (most) wasp women, not of all women (collins , ). in the col- lective imaginary and their communal spaces like the family and the church, black women do speak and often are framed as rowdy and loud (lorde / ; hooks / ). in this sense, the reduction of martina ferrari oppressive, silencing practices to the silencing of patriarchal oppression performed a double erasure, that is, the erasure of women of color whose experiences are characterized by the intersection of multiple axes of oppression, but also the making invisible of white feminism’s complicity in the oppression of women of color. in fact, so long as silence is understood to be coextensive with the feminine, the normative force of this assumption is that women of color, whose existence and experiences do not conform with this silent, (white) feminine norm, are made invisible within (white) feminist discourse. to be clear—by taking the experience of white women as indicative of the feminine, second-wave feminism foreclosed the recognition of its participation in the marginalization and exclusion of women of color. on the other hand, intersec- tional analyses of oppression revealed the limitations of the emancipatory strategy of effecting the transition from silence to voice; at stake in women of color’s emancipation was the production of speech that would compel listeners, speech that would be heard—as lorde and hooks argued. yet, although the phenomenon of silence accrued complexity, coming to index not just literal silence, but also the “speech” of women of color (speech that would not conform to white, patriarchal standards of “proper” speech and, as such, lacked uptake), third-wave feminism left unchallenged the guiding political imperative of “breaking the silence” by “coming to voice,” continuing to espouse a conception of silence coextensive with oppression, equating it to “starvation” (moraga , ) or a locus of peril and vulnerability (“your silence will not protect you” [lorde / , ]). given the spatial constraints of this article, i cannot thoroughly engage with critiques of ableist and nor- mative modes of communication such as (narrow forms of) voice put forth by disability studies. a fruitful starting point for those engagements is christine ashby’s “whose ‘voice’ is it anyway?,” in which she takes up the difficult challenge of “giving voice” to those individuals who experience disability—in her case, those who do not use speech as the primary mode of expression—while also calling into question nar- row conceptualizations of voice. “ensur[ing] a space within a critical, qualitative framework for the inclu- sion of ‘voices’ that do not speak” entailed problematizing the use of the term “voice,” which, as she observes, too often goes unchallenged, as well as the assumptions behind the desire to give voice. ashby recognizes the importance of silence as a means for the individual to “give voice to his experience and pro- vide an opportunity to talk back to the technologies of power that oppress. … perhaps not speaking, or not typing, is also a way to subvert systems of power that limit and marginalize” (ashby ). it was brought to my attention by one of the anonymous reviewers that my choice of the terminology deep silence may inadvertently reify problematic dichotomies such as surface/depth that have been central to the colonial/modern project. as marlon b. ross points out in his critique of eve kosofsky sedgwick’s epistemological theory of the closet in “beyond the closet as a raceless paradigm,” the surface/depth dichotomy is at play in the delineation of sexual modernity whereby homosexuality is marked by claustro- philia, that is, the value promoted by the white, intellectual establishment of deep, hidden or “closeted meaning” (ross , ). “primitives, savages, the poor, and those uneducated in the long history of epis- temology are not normally represented as epistemological subjects, partly because they do not have the lux- ury of composing the kind of voluminous texts that bear the weight of such deep buried—and thus closed/ closeted up—intellectual dilemmas begging for painstakingly close readings” ( ). i thank the reviewer for bringing attention to the possible limitations of “depth” as a concept. aware of the imbrication of the binary surface/depth with the reification of eurocentered norms, in the context of this article “deep” is deployed to effect an epistemological suspension of the familiar, and problematize the widespread and monovalent conceptions of silence as oppression. given the decolonial lineage within which this work is situated, the deployment of “depth” as a qualifier for the generative and fecund silence at stake in this article is also meant to evoke the work of “making visible the invisible,” to borrow maldonado-torres’s words, “and analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility” (maldonado-torres , ). “depth” indexes the recuperation of such invisibility. american writer, historian, and activist rebecca solnit’s latest book, the mother of all questions, is a prime example of how the phenomenon of silence is conceived and treated in mainstream white feminist circles. the author discusses how feminists have long used silence as a metaphor for oppression and makes the case for how liberation is “always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, mak- ing new stories. a free person tells her own story. a valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place” (solnit , ). silence, she claims, is what condemns “people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. if our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity” ( ). as i acknowledge in the body of the article, although there are oppressive forms of silencing, the equation of hypatia silence as oppression and voice or storytelling as emancipation forecloses critical analyses of the violence entailed by the normativity of voice. what to do with the co-opting of principles like “having your voice heard” or “breaking the silence” for the fight against justice and equality through fake news, for instance? or appeals to “free speech” as means to advance alt-right messages? or the logically analogous instance whereby french actress catherine deneuve wrote an open letter, published in le monde, in which she undermines the #metoo campaign, contending that men should be “free to hit on” women? and what about instances in which silence is needed for self-care and self-preservation? so again, though public tes- timony may be a practice that, in certain contexts and circumstances, is called for, the ubiquitous imper- ative to speak up and its association with agency and humanity upheld by most liberatory narratives entails harms of its own that ought to be brought to light to avoid complicity with structural oppression. it should be noted that, as carrillo rowe and malhotra point out, although the works of glenn and ratcliffe “productively bring silence more fully into focus by challenging the epistemological conditions of its annihilation, they remain bound to western and modernist assumptions about completeness of understanding” (carrillo rowe and malhotra , ). to this end, in “resistant silences,” christine keating works to recuperate silence from its equation with absence, distinguishing between enforced silences, which are oppressive and should be resisted, from three kinds of silences that serve as technologies of resistance: “silent refusal, silent witness, and deliberative silence” (keating , ). in “legacies of silences,” malhotra speaks of her struggle with the “western compulsion for voice and speaking … speak your position; take a stand; speak, speak, speak!” (carrillo rowe and malhotra , )—a commitment that problematically equates agency with voice. reflecting on her experience as a survivor of ovarian cancer, malhotra reframes silence as a “space of unset- tling possibilities” ( ) whereby words, ideals, thoughts, and explorations do not have to follow structured and linear regimens, but can hold “more than one thing at once” ( ). she argues that agency is a pre- requisite for silence to be empowering, a space for possibilities—“silence without any agency is oppressive, particularly given the material conditions of the lives in question” ( ). as veronelli argues, although these conditions can be granted at the abstract level (she criticizes mc exponents enrique dussel and walter mignolo for taking for granted the existence of these dialogical con- ditions of possibility by operating at the level of “ideas, of epistemic and political projects” (veronelli , )), these conditions of possibility do not necessarily exist at the level of the concrete lives and experi- ences of colonial subjects. as collins points out, knowledge claims must satisfy criteria upheld by the context in which they are presented. ultimately, “because this enterprise is controlled by elite white men, knowledge validation pro- cesses reflect this group’s interests” (collins , ). this is also true for vernacular expressions, which are not acquired through formal institutions and thereby are not “repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words” (trinh , ). burke created “me too” in as a myspace page to promote conversations and build community among women of color who were survivors. as sadie graham points out in an october broadly article, the ubiquity of reporting promoted by and characteristic of #metoo fostered the belief that this journalistic form of reporting would “dismantle the oligo-patriarchy and save us all.” yet many of the same problems persist. not only “other kind of reporting—to human resources, to police—are so aggressively unsustainable for survivors” (graham ); closer scrutiny shows how this platform amplifies the voices of white, middle-class women to the exclusion of others. in in-between, mariana ortega argues that multiplicity and mestizaje are characteristic of all beings, not only of those who, because of their material, geopolitical existence, are forced to “travel” between cultural and linguistic norms and worlds of meaning (ortega ). furthermore, as the discussion on the coloniality of voice indicated, the coloniality of silence inscribes silence as the natural expression of racialized and colonized subjects. the joint operations of the axes of “modernity” and “coloniality” are such that the racialized “other” is cast as naturally epistemically and ontologically inferior—as silent. rather than being recognized as a colonial production, “silence as absence and nonsense” comes to be understood as the natural domain of the colonized—as the expression of the natural inability to fight back, the nonresponsiveness of queer chicanos in the face of violence. see evelynn hammonds’s treatment of a politics of articulation and a politics of silence in “black (w) holes” for a discussion of how the concept of silence figures in black women’s cultural work (hammonds ) martina ferrari as walter mignolo affirms in the “preface” to the edition of his earlier book, the root of the con- cept of the “colonial difference” can be traced to anzaldúa’s use of the nahuatl term nepantla, which she also refers to as “herida abierta”—the open wound that is the lived space of the borderland/la frontera. this lineage stresses the “physical as well as imaginary” (mignolo , xxv) place that is the colonial difference and the traumatic as well as generative/transformative quality that it bears. in other words, as a place whose materiality refuses disappearance and erasure, the colonial difference threatens to undermine, in its resilience and concreteness, the colonial logic whereby “knowledge and aes- thetic norms are … universally established by a transcendental subject” realizing instead that they are “uni- versally established by historical subjects in diverse cultural centers” (mignolo , ). although i speak of a ground here, this ground is a “lugar no lugar,” what anzaldúa calls nepantla, “a nahuatl word for an in-between space, el lugar entre medio. napantla, palabra indígena: un concepto que se refiere a un lugar no-lugar” (anzaldúa , ). references alcoff, linda martín. . rape and resistance: understanding the complexities of sexual violation. cambridge, uk: polity press. anzaldúa, gloria. . borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. san francisco: aunt lute. ——. . light in the dark/luz en lo oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality, ed. analouise keating. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ashby, christine. . whose “voice” is it anyway?: giving voice and qualitative research involving individuals that type to communicate. disability studies quarterly ( ). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ / . carrillo rowe, aimee, and sheena malhotra. . silence, feminism, power: reflections at the edge of sound, ed. aimee carrillo rowe and sheena malhotra. new york: palgrave macmillan. clair, robin. . organizing silence: a world of possibility. albany: suny press. ——. . imposed silence and the story of the warramunga woman. in silence, feminism, power: reflections at the edge of sound, ed. aimee carrillo rowe and sheena malhotra. new york: palgrave macmillan. collins, patricia hill. . black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empower- ment. new york: routledge classics. crenshaw, kimberlé. . mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. in critical race theory: the key writings that formed the movement, ed. kimberlé crenshaw, neil gotanda, gary peller, and kendal thomas. new york: the new press. derrida, jacques. . ousia and grammē: note on a note from being and time. in margins of philosophy. trans. alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press. ——. . voice and phenomenon: introduction to the problem of the sign in husserl’s phenomenology. trans. leonard lawlor. evanston, ill.: northwestern university press. ——. . of grammatology. baltimore: john hopkins university press. fanon, frantz. . black skin, white masks. new york: grove press. gilbert, sophie. . the movement of #metoo: how a hashtag got its power. the atlantic, october . https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /the-movement-of-metoo/ / glenn, cheryl. . unspoken: a rhetoric of silence. carbondale, ill.: southern illinois university press. graham, sadie. . #metoo, a movement reliant on reporting, reveals the limits of journalism. broadly, october . hammonds, evelynn. . black (w)holes and the geometry of black female sexuality. differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies ( – ): – . hooks, bell. / . talking back: thinking feminism, thinking black. new york: south end. jefferson, j’na, and tarana burke. . a long road ahead: #metoo founder tarana burke on sexual assault, stigmas and society. vibe, april . keating, christine (cricket). . resistant silences. in silence, feminism, power: reflections at the edge of sound, ed. aimee carrillo rowe and sheena malhotra. new york: palgrave macmillan. lorde, audre. / . transformation of silence into language and action. in sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, calif.: the crossing press. lugones, maría. . pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. lanham, md.: rowman and littlefield. hypatia http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ / http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /the-movement-of-metoo/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /the-movement-of-metoo/ / ——. . heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. hypatia ( ): – . ——. . toward a decolonial feminism. hypatia ( ): – . lugones, maría, and elizabeth spelman. . have we got a theory for you! feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for “the woman’s voice.” women’s studies international forum ( ): – . maldonado-torres, nelson. . on the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a con- cept. cultural studies ( – ): – . ——. . outline of ten theses. frantz fanon foundation. http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon. com/article .html martínez, ernesto. . con quién, dónde, y por qué te dejas? reflections on joto passivity. aztlán ( ): – . mignolo, walter. . local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border think- ing. durham, n.c.: duke university press. moraga, cherríe. . this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, ed. gloria anzaldúa and cherríe moraga. new york: kitchen table, women of color press. nyad, diana. . my life after sexual assault. new york times, november . ortega, mariana. . in-between: latina feminist phenomenology, multiplicity, and the self. albany: suny press. picard, max. . the world of silence. trans. stanley godwin. chicago: gateway books. quashie, kevin. . the sovereignty of quiet: beyond resistance in black culture. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. quijano, aníbal. . coloniality of power: eurocentrism and latin america. nepantla ( ): – . ratcliffe, krista. . rhetorical listening: identification, gender, whiteness. carbondale, ill.: southern illinois university press. rich, adrienne. . on lies, secrets, and silence. new york: w. w. norton. ross, marlon b. . beyond the closet as raceless paradigm. in black queer studies: a critical anthology, ed. e. patrick johnson and mae g. henderson. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ruiz, elena. . how to hear the unspoken: engaging cross-cultural communication through the latin american testimonial narrative. master’s thesis, university of south florida. schutte, ofelia. . cultural alterity: cross-cultural communication and feminist theory in north-south contexts. hypatia ( ): – . sharp, jenny, and gayatri c. spivak. . a conversation with gayatri chakravorty spivak: politics and the imagination. signs ( ): – . solnit, rebecca. . the mother of all questions. chicago: haymarket books. spivak, gayatri c. . critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. cambridge, mass., and london: harvard university press. trinh, t. minh-ha. . woman, native, other: writing postcoloniality and feminism. bloomington: indiana university press. veronelli, gabriela. . the coloniality of language: race, expressivity, power, and the darker side of modernity. wagadu (summer): – . ——. . a coalitional approach to theorizing decolonial communication. hypatia ( ): – . martina ferrari is a phd candidate in philosophy at the university of oregon specializing in twentieth- century continental philosophy (especially phenomenology), feminist philosophy, and decolonial thought. in her dissertation, titled “decolonizing silence,” she reexamines the question of silence and contends that, approached from the phenomenological standpoint of concrete, lived experiences, silence can be more than a simple absence of speech, sense, and being; it is revealed as a fecund locus for the renewal of sense. ferrari’s work has been published in chiasmi international, symposium, and the international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics. ferrari also co-edited with bonnie mann a volume on simone de beauvoir, titled on ne naît pas femme: on le devient: the life of a sentence (oxford university press, ) and co-founded puncta: journal of critical phenomenology. (mferrar @uoregon.edu) cite this article: ferrari m ( ). questions of silence: on the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence. hypatia , – . https://doi.org/ . /hyp. . martina ferrari http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article .html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article .html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article .html mailto:mferrar &commat;uoregon.edu https://doi.org/ . /hyp. . 	questions of silence: on the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence 	the coloniality of voice 	on coloniality and the normativity of voice 	a racialized metaphysics of presence 	ii. the coloniality of silence 	iii. toward the rereading and rewriting of deep silence 	notes 	references davis | from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism | westminster papers in communication and culture 	 	login | register 	home 	news 	articles 	articles 	issues 	special collections 	about 	about 	research integrity 	become a reviewer 	author guidelines 	editorial team 	editorial team 	submission 	contact 	 start submission 	 account 	login 	 register 	 research articles from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism authors: stuart davis (city university of new york, baruch college) , melisssa santillana (university of texas, austin) options 	share: 	 	 	 	  	a- 	a+ 	 	dyslexia 	 	view harvard citation style 	view vancouver citation style 	view apa citation style abstract drawing on a case study of mexico city-based feminist media producers las morras, this article addresses both the potentialities of digital media activism for raising awareness about gender-based harassment and its limits for facilitating social/political transformations. las morras drew international attention in when they released a series of youtube videos of group members with hidden gopro cameras repeatedly confronting male cat-callers and casual harassers. incorporating a qualitative content analysis of the responses to youtube videos and comments taken from las morras’ twitter and facebook accounts (before deletion) with in-depth interviews with founding members, we argue that las morras offers a powerful illustration of the paradoxical role of networked digital media as activist tool. on the one hand, it rapidly circulated a powerful critique of misogyny. on the other hand, the negative attention it received (including doxing, trolling of the site, and personal threats directed at members) led to the eventual demise of the group. keywords: internet culture, trolling and online incivility, feminist activism, social media activism, tactical media how to cite: davis s. & santillana m., ( ) “from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism”, westminster papers in communication and culture ( ). p. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /wpcc. views downloads published on aug peer reviewed license creative commons attribution . introduction beginning with the innovative utilisation of the internet in the zapatista insurgency (cleaver, ), the affordances of digital communications technologies for social movement activism has been a central concern for theorists and practitioners. intensifying in the period between the so-called ‘twitter revolution’ in iran and the explosive rise of digitally organised protest movements like occupy wall street and the arab spring protests in – , the ability of digitally networked technologies to build networks of solidarity and support became increasingly documented and discussed as a new and potentially revolutionary tactic (e.g. castells, ). in the period succeeding these digitized movements (roughly the early s), a sort of romanticism around the affordances of networked technologies developed. this romanticism is perhaps most clearly expressed in the national endowment for democracy’s coinage of the term ‘liberation technology’ to describe any networked technology that could ‘liberate’ citizens from political, economic, gender-based, and other forms of oppression (diamond and plattner, ). this lofty estimation of digital technologies (particularly snss like twitter and facebook) precipitously fell between and as snss began to be perceived as platforms for increasingly uncivil engagement between users, including ‘trolling’ and ‘flaming’ (rentschler, ); as elusive forums for conspiracy theorists, rightwing activists, or other fringe political actors (nagle, ); or as spaces for disseminating ‘fake news’ intended to either draw readers to advertising/sponsored content or proliferate false information (chen, ). with the notable exceptions of the hashtag-based movements around #blacklivesmatter and #metoo, the emancipatory proclamations of early commentators gave way to an increasingly dystopic view of networked communication technologies. the digital activists of our current moment are no longer indigenous social movements or anti-authoritarian protestors but right-wing extremists, conspiracy theorists, or agents of foreign powers. this piece will analyse both the utopian and dystopic potentialities of networked digital activism – a term employed instead of the more common ‘social media activism’ due to the capacious way it incorporates multiple forms of engagement (gerbaudo and treré, ). more specifically, it will draw on a case study of the mexico city-based feminist media collective las morras in order to address both the role of networked digital activism for raising awareness about gender-based harassment and its limits for facilitating longer-term social/political transformations. naming itself after a pejorative word for young women considered un-cosmopolitan or ‘backwards’, las morras drew international attention in when they released a youtube video of group members with hidden gopro cameras repeatedly confronting male cat-callers and casual harassers on the paseo de la reforma, one of the busiest thoroughfares within the central area of the city. their objective, as explained to cnnenespañol, was to digitally circulate confrontations with male harassers as strategies for other women to follow when facing similar situations (patiño, ). the video, titled ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’ [‘las morras confront their accosters’] went viral after its release on may . within two weeks, the video garnered . million youtube views and led to interviews with media outlets. the popularity of the groups’ videos led the un special rapporteur on human rights for mexico to collaborate with them on vive segura [‘live safe’], a phone application for recording and reporting cases of harassment to law enforcement. (pérez-coutarde, ) despite initial interest and support, in the months following the first video las morras experienced extensive online harassment on social media accounts to a point in where the group deleted them all. as a project native to social media, the shuttering of group accounts ostensibly ended las morras. incorporating a qualitative content analysis of the responses to youtube videos and comments taken from las morras’ twitter and facebook accounts (before deletion) with in-depth interviews with three of the group’s four founding members, we argue that las morras offers a powerful illustration of the paradoxical role of networked digital media as activist tool. on the one hand, the technology’s networking abilities produced a powerful impact within mexico that echoes carrie rentschler’s declaration that feminist social media activism offers an ‘instantaneous assault on the cultural support beams of everyday misogyny’ (rentschler, , ). conversely, our analysis also argues that both the group’s ‘death’ due to online pressure points to what mark carrigan ( ) and zeynep tufecki ( ) call the inherent ‘fragility’ of digitally networked activism. from this perspective, the strength of technology to enact social change is enabled or limited by a process of capacity building that fosters support networks in both online and offline spaces. our analysis draws on the case of las morras to first present a conceptual interrogation of the difficulties of sustaining activist projects borne or incubated digitally as well as an opening in the move described by dubravka and davis ( ), mason-deese ( ), rodino-colocino ( ) and others to utilise digital media as part of a larger repertoire of solidarity-building tactics within social movement campaigns fighting rape culture, everyday misogyny, gender-based violence, and other systemic issues related to structural power differentials. the history of las morras las morras was formed in early by marisol armenta, mireya gonzález, sunny galeana, and melissa amezcua. all four were journalists working as a multimedia team for a major newspaper in mexico city. after being replaced by an all-male team, the group had the idea to create a media production project tackling the issues women deal with on a daily basis in mexico: ‘we came up with the idea to create a medium in which we could publish a lot of stories and in which people will identify with us. as middle-class mexican women, we are living situations that are very real and it’s not just what’s on tv, like makeup, fashion, and that sort of things; these are stories that are very real’ (m. armenta, personal communication, october ). when interviewed by the media studies blog etcetera, the group claims that it picked the name ‘las morras’ precisely because of the cultural and political connotations of the term: ‘the word morra in mexico is slang for young girl, but in some regions the word has pejorative implications: when we decided to produce the video, we were trying to define “who we are.” we asked ourselves if we were a collective, a video channel, etc. we decided we are just some morras [girls] from mexico city, nothing more, who decided to get together to make videos about the things we care about, things that afflict us, outrage us, or excite us. also, we googled [sic.] the meaning of the word morras and we found only negative results, which got us more excited about the name’ (‘cuatro morras mexicanas’, ). the group’s first and by far most popular video, ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’, was released on may, . the video was explicitly inspired by the earlier american viral video ‘ hours of walking through new york city as a woman’, posted in october to over million views (mulato, ). the video begins with a title card that reads: ‘we are four morras living in mexico city. like many we are harassed every day on the street, they yell at us, and insult us. we wanted to go out and ask our harassers what is it that they have to say to us.’ the video shows the four of them dressed in black skirts and t-shirts. one of the group members had a hidden go-pro camera that recorded the interactions of half of the group with strangers on the street. las morras walk through the streets of downtown and paseo de la reforma. the video was recorded in two weeks and was edited in one. it shows that as group members walk men both shout and mumble compliments. audible comments include ‘i’ll marry you’, ‘can we walk with you?’, ‘that’s a pretty thong’, ‘are you going to a funeral?’, among others. las morras replied directly to the man catcalling: ‘excuse me, do you have something to say to me,’ and ‘if you don’t know me, don’t talk to me.’ many of the men when confronted apologised for their comments or attempted to change what they had said in the first place. a second title card states a man was following them when they stopped at a store. when they exited the store, the man was masturbating in front of them. the video shows him in the act outside the store, where more people are walking by. las morras did not confront everyone who harassed them. in some instances, it is clear the presence of male passers-by and street vendors is overwhelming, so they ignore them and keep walking. a final title card indicates they had been walking through the city for days recording their harassers. the text indicates they discover that as they suspected, harassers have nothing to say, and ask men to save their comments about their appearance and avoid talking to them. in a similar fashion to reactions to the unexpected popularity of many videos, hashtags, or other spreadable media that become massively diffused (jenkins, ford and green ), the video’s enormous viewership took its creators by surprise. when las morras created their youtube channel and uploaded the first video, they were not expecting to have a lot of attention. in an interview with the bbc, group members claim that they figured only family and friends would watch and potentially comment on the video (paullier, ). instead, it surged in popularity as it was shared and distributed via a variety of social media. within the first few days the video soared to over , views, reaching one million views by the end of may. as the video grew in popularity, it solicited thousands of comments on youtube, multiple interviews with mainstream media outlets within mexico and beyond (ranging from domestic outlets like excélsior and el debate to the bbc, and even (arguably) inspired a new smartphone application developed by the un special raconteur on human rights. it also inspired a groundswell of backlash from angry viewers and trolls. this backlash would eventually lead to a sustained trolling attack on the group’s facebook and twitter as well as doxing (defined as ‘when a person’s anonymous online persona is linked with their real-world identity and address’ [bancroft and reid, , ]). eventually, the pressure against las morras both as a media production collective and as individuals led to the folding of the project. this piece analyses both the ways the video provided a tactical weapon for combating everyday misogyny and building solidarity and how its online-only nature created a sense of fragility or precarity that left las morras vulnerable to trolling and abuse. tactical media interventions and the production of networked solidarity the following sections develop the theoretical apparatus for understanding both the success of las morras in confronting harassers and building solidarity against everyday misogyny in as well as the difficulties with harassment and lack of support networks that ended the project/disbanded the group in . our central assertion is that as a digital media intervention las morras served to both challenge to the habitual normalization of ‘everyday misogyny’ within mexico city and to create a space for young women to reflect upon their own experiences with street harassment. to better understand how the project functioned as a form of mediated intervention our discussion draws upon two powerful approaches to activist media production and dissemination: the creation of ‘tactical media’, a form of communicative act built around the disruption of experiences in everyday life and the leveraging of the networking functionalities of snss like twitter for the rapid dissemination and scaling up of support for political statements (often colloquially labelled ‘hashtag activism’). by combining tactical media’s ability to disrupt the typical time-space configuration of downtown mexico city with social media’s ability to quickly circulate the video and accommodate reactions by individuals, the video rocketed issues related to everyday gendered violence to centre stage within the mexican media-scape in the summer of . unlike #metoo and other forms of social media activism constructed around short messages linked together through hash-tagging, the nature of las morras as a youtube-situated video based on documenting confrontations with male harassers qualifies the project as a form of what raley ( ), richardson ( ) and others label ‘tactical media’. derived from the work of french cultural theorist michel de certeau, the situationist movement, and the cinema verité filmmaking approach, tactical media interventions are created to instigate the process of defamiliarization within audiences (richardson, , p. ) defamiliarization occurs when the tactical media producer creates a provocative situation that rattles or jars spectators by providing them with an experience that breaks with perceived commonsense behaviours or customs. as rita raley succinctly puts it, the intertwined goals of tactical media are ‘provoke and reveal, defamiliarize and critique’ (raley, , p. ). writing explicitly about street protests (in this case during the movement against the invasion of iraq in ), performance scholar stephen hartnett uses the term ‘startling communication’ to refer to the ‘use of art forms to rock viewers or listeners into a new frame of understanding’ (hartnett, , p. ). as a formal strategy, tactical media production is built on first breaking down expectations of normalcy and then building new expectations that are less governed by societal bias. as tools for disrupting daily life, tactical media interventions can provide important interventions in the way individuals conceptualise public space. writing on the spatial aspects of wide-scale protest movements, gerbaudo ( ) has argued that public confrontations between protestors (everyday citizens with little power) and the police (repressive forces of the state with high levels of power in the situation) effectively reconfigure the way everyday citizens and marginalised populations traverse the space of the city. by showing others that it is possible to stand up to harassers, las morras harness the ability of digital media to make marginalised communities feel secure as they traverse the streets. the impact of las morras as a tactical media intervention would never have reached the audiences it did without amplification via social media. as such it is important to note the similarities in distribution between the video project and other types of networked digital activism. a growing number of scholars and activists working in feminist and racial justice movements have recognised the new possibilities opened up by networked social media for building solidarity among marginalised groups and for raising mass attention through amplifying individual voices via networks like twitter. perhaps the most concise explication of this theory comes from jackson’s discussion of the role of social media in the black lives matter movement, particularly around african-american women whose voices have been historically marginalised: ‘hashtags arising from a black feminist politics take advantage of this architecture to perform the two basic functions of counter-public discourse: reflect the experiences and needs of a marginalised community and call on mainstream politics to listen and respond’ (jackson, , ). many recent studies on the role of ‘hashtag activism’ come to similar conclusions. a central element of the ‘call on mainstream politics to listen and respond’ comes through the aggregative nature of hashtagging via platforms like twitter. as the #metoo moment has shown, every hashtag represents another opportunity to experience solidarity while pushing for accountability (mendes, ringrose, and keller, ). though it does not fit the commonly used definition of ‘hashtag activism’ in the sense that it does not rely exclusively on the mechanism of the hashtag for diffusion (instead being shared and re-shared through youtube’s algorithmic process, facebook and twitter users re-posting, and mainstream media coverage/re-airing), las morras’ videos (particularly the first one) were distributed through social media. read through the theoretical frameworks of hashtag activism and tactical media, las morras can be seen as a widely diffused confrontation with misogyny. it draws on a relatively similar networking process as the first and from the latter an intense and disquieting embodiment that pushed the project from a call for solidarity into a potential tactical template for fighting back against harassment. by creating a visual spectacle around confrontation and utilising digital networks for circulation, las morras created a media event that was both a negation (in the sense of confronting everyday misogyny) and affirmation (in the sense of creating communities of solidarity through youtube, twitter, facebook, and other snss). the two tactics reinforce and strengthen each other. the effectiveness of this synergy between tactical media and hashtag activism as a tool for fighting oppression mirrors the ways in which marwan kraidy describes the hybrid strategy of ‘creative insurgency’ of activists during the egyptian protests of . during these protests activists created videos where they engaged in spectacular and often taboo practices (including nudity, profanity, and the burning in effigy of mubarak and other officials) to attract attention to their cause. kraidy argues that while snss played a powerful role in distribution, the videos would not have spread to the degree they did without the ‘profane’ performances (kraidy, , – passim.). in a similar fashion, las morras’ widely circulated video would not have had the same impact without its confrontational elements. a combination of tactical performance and social media networks fuelled the social impact of the video as it circulated from youtube to other social media to mainstream media coverage. the fragility of digital networks: difficulties of capacity-building when shifting from online to offline activism the strength of las morras as a case study for understanding the complexities of digital activism arises from the group’s trajectory for the project. from to , the group experienced a meteoric rise, an aggressive challenge, and eventual dispersion. when launched, the site had a virtually immediate impact evidenced by high numbers of views and comments on youtube, followers on snss like twitter and facebook, and media appearances/interviews of group members. however, events occurring in the aftermath of the youtube video posting and subsequent explosion of interest first in by social media users then legacy media illustrate a problematic (or even dystopic) potential of networked technologies. the swell of public interest was accompanied by a sizeable number of trolls fighting aggressively and ruthlessly against what angela nagle has called ‘the online economy of virtue’ (nagle, , p. ). being confined to the digital made it easier for flaming and coordinated attacks to hamstring the group’s las morras’ activism. when met with online antagonism (that eventually blurred into the real world with the doxing of all of the women), the project imploded. drawing on recent debates about the online vs. offline elements of digitally enabled protest movements, we argue that implosion of las morras is facilitated by a characteristic ‘fragility’ of digital activist movements that lack real world support networks. this debate over the strength of digital activism to fuel large-scale political transformations first came to the anglophone context in a caustic new yorker piece by journalist/celebrity intellectual malcolm gladwell. specifically, gladwell attacks technologist clay shirky’s notion that having the technological capacity to collaborate through new technologies like twitter would revolutionise the way people work together. drawing on the greensboro woolworth’s sit-in during the civil rights movement, gladwell argues that networked digital activism is fundamentally incapable of sustaining a social movement enough to enact wide-scale transformations (gladwell, ). his condemnation of ‘weak-tie digital networks’ created through social media echoes an earlier argument by political theorist jodi dean: ‘the splintering and collapse of the left constitutes a political trauma. technology fetishism responds to this trauma … for many, new media left them feel as if they were making a contribution, let them deny the larger lack of left solidarity even as their very individualised linking and clicking attests to the new political conditions’ (dean, , – ). this position situates the rise of digital networked activism within the failure of the organised left to generate political counter-power in the wake of the collapse of both the soviet political project and solidarity networks between activists in the global north and global south. while dean’s damning prognosis has been echoed by morozov ( ) and denigrators who label it clicktivism or slacktivism, karpf ( ) and others argue that digital engagement provides more of a supplemental function to existent advocacy tactics. theoretically informed by the social shaping of technology (ssot) approach, mark carrigan captures this diachronic shift in a way that emphasises key socio-political differences within the technological affordances of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ media. his central contention is that social movements that are ‘born’ online do not contain the same level of ‘collective reflexivity’ historically present in large-scale social movements: ‘the logistical challenges posed by assembly using earlier communications’ technologies led inevitably to the development of organisational [sic.] capacities which supported the development of collective reflexivity: the emergence of a shared project in relation to which individual commitment motivated sustained action’(carrigan, , ). in their absence, the ‘we’ experienced by participations will, if it exists at all, be entirely or predominately symbolic and thus ill equipped to respond to changing circumstances or sustain the movement in the face of challenges’ (ibid.). communications in the pre-networked world focused on ‘logistical challenges’ related to information-sharing and organisation. due to the limited affordances of communications technologies at this time in-person individual interactions were significantly more common. as such these pre-digital networked protest movements produced high levels of symbolic shared identity and sense of purpose. while some examples of activist distribution networks certainly predate digital technology (e.g. mislan, ), in most cases communications technologies facilitated activism instead of serving as the terrain of activism. affordances embedded in new communications technologies allow these digital spaces to serve as sites of engagement. however, as carrigan acknowledges and other researchers like hopke ( ) expand on in detail, the break between pre-digital and digital is not clean. as such, activist use of platforms like twitter does not obviate but instead complements other types of communicative practice in the process of creating advocacy campaigns (hopke, , ). zeynep tufecki’s twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest ( ) offers a sustained attempt to apply a capacity-building approach to digital activism in a variety of contexts. in her narrative, protest movements are often conceptualised in terms of success or failure. occupy wall street failed to the degree it didn’t leave any lasting changes. the arab spring failed because it didn’t produce a democratic transition in any nation with wide scale protests. tufecki argues that it instead of engaging in this manichean discussion of winning and losing it is more productive to analyse the specific characteristics of the protest or insurrection. adapting amartya sen’s concept of ‘capacity’, tufecki addresses three specific forms: narrative capacity, disruptive capacity, and institutional capacity. narrative capacity refers to the ‘movement’s ability to “frame a story on its own terms”’ ( , p. ); disruptive capacity refers to ‘whether it can interrupt the regular operations of a system of authority’ (ibid.); institutional capacity is directly linked to ‘the ability to force changes in institutions by mobilizing outsider and insider strategies’ ( , ). though it would not be conceptually accurate to call las morras a social movement, tufecki’s capacities provide a powerful tool for analysis. the project’s ‘narrative’ and (even more so) ‘disruptive’ capacities are high. however, the lack of offline engagement (whether it be institutional collaboration with human rights organizations or engagement with feminist activist groups or solidarity networks in mexico city or beyond) left the project in a position where any sizable online threat could effectively destroy the project and create personal safety issues for group members – which is exactly what happened in . research questions our two central research questions reflect the janus-faced predicament of las morras as precariously situated between disruptive/empowering and fragile/ephemeral. the first question speaks to the project’s achievements in capturing and spreading a confrontational approach to dealing with harassment through ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’. the second research question analyses the resistance to the video after its posting and circulation. research question : as practitioners of networked tactical media, how did las morras attempt to both subvert the discourse of gendered violence in order to create a space for fostering solidarity? research question : as practitioners of networked tactical media, how did las morras struggle due to a lack of offline institutional capacity? research approach our analysis integrates a qualitative textual analysis of both the comments on ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’ and las morras facebook page with a series of interviews conducted with three group members in and interviews published with group members in other media outlets. the component sections of our analysis are organised according to the research questions. in each section, we will discuss when appropriate data from youtube, facebook, or interviews. as fitting for a youtube-generated project, our central object of analysis is the feedback produced in reaction to the video. in order to investigate the different ideas and sentiments expressed in the reactions to their most controversial video, we performed a qualitative content analysis of the comments left on the original youtube video posted by las morras. the video was posted on the group’s youtube channel, morras, which as of march had , subscribers; ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’ had , , views, , likes, and , dislikes. drawing upon a grounded theory approach, we collected the first comments left on the video page when sorting from ‘most relevant’ by youtube. this method allows for concepts and ideas to arise naturally without any preconceived theories (abramson, keefe & chou, ). the process involved copying the users’ comments onto an excel spreadsheet and looking for repeated and common themes and concepts and classifying them accordingly. after looking at the first comments for themes, we reached theoretical saturation, as we were not able to find any new data to build on the identified categories or for new categories and themes to emerge (given, ; birks and mills ). across the youtube comments under analysis, we identify two categories of comments: solidarity and trolling/critique. under the solidarity category we tracked six sub-categories: ) support for the group and the cause, and ) sharing experience of harassment. under trolling and harassment, we identified a few central tropes: ) ‘they’re not even pretty, harassers have bad taste’; ) ‘your dress is the problem’; ) ‘it’s not misogyny; it’s education and class’; and ) ‘denial of any wrongdoing on the part of men’. while youtube comments make up a substantial portion of our research sample, our analysis also includes facebook posts published at the time that las morras removed their facebook and twitter accounts. specifically, we will analyse the strategies adopted by trolls to drown out topical discussion of issues raised by the group on its facebook page. between november and february , we conducted a series of interviews with three of the four members of las morras via skype and telephone. while cognisant of potential perspectives lost by only interviewing members, we designed our questions to address the group’s work as a whole; as such members agreed to speak only about areas that applied to the group and for each interview citation we only used ‘las morras’ to honour the spirit of individuals speaking on behalf of the group’s position. these interviews were chunked, coded, and analysed in light of the framework laid out in our two research questions. we supplement these with interviews conducted in mexican and international press. discussion : las morras’ critique of everyday misogyny and the fostering of solidarity following research question ’s focus on how the video acts as a tactical intervention to critique misogyny and begin to build solidarity, this section draws extensively on youtube comments to trace support for or solidarity with las morras’ activism as encapsulated in the film. youtube theme : support for the group and the cause when addressing the youtube comments, we found that around % of the comments appeared to come from female users and stated support for the group and the video. many of them explicitly thanked las morras for putting themselves at risk by talking back to their harassers. these types of comments expressed sympathy for harassed women, and the inability to peacefully walk the streets of the city. for example, ‘victoria’ wrote: ‘how brave you girls, thank you for putting yourself at risk like that. i’ve been harassed a lot too, and it’s horrible, one cannot walk the streets in peace. i think we all have been through it. it’s not fair that this behaviour is still seen as ‘normal’. regardless of the way we dress, we still deserve respect and that’s it’. this comment reflects a sentiment that young women were impressed and emboldened by las morras’ intervention. in a similar vein, many commenters came to the defence of las morras’ tactics, fighting back against comments that blamed the group for the way they are dressed and from those calling them ‘feminazis’. comments within this category also touch on the culture of catcalling and how it should not be justified to catcall a woman based on her choice of clothing. ‘jennifer’ writes: ‘i was not expecting to read so many people trashing them, implying that they are in ‘impoverished sectors, dressed like prostitutes.’ (…) i always wear big sweatshirts because if i use tight clothes i will get all types of comments and even receive unwarranted touching in public. what they did was to expose what happens every day. that doesn’t make them feminazis… us [sic.] women know what it’s like to deal with that on a daily basis. it is disgusting to have to live in fear of using [sic.] a skirt or even showing your elbows.’ this rich statement serves to reinforce our claim that the video represents a powerful form of tactical media. it first recognises the reason for the intervention: to document the incessant harassment of women on the streets of mexico city. it then places the spectator in the position of las morras and las morras in the position of the spectator: they are all facing a shared problem, everyday misogyny. finally (and most importantly), it valorizes the intervention as irreducible to a fringe belief in the inferiority of men (i.e. the view of ‘feminazis’) but instead as a justified response to assault. read closely, both of these comments show the roots of a shared collective consciousness being generated. youtube theme : sharing experiences of confronting abuse self-identified female commenters presenting their experiences of harassment provided another example of the sense of shared experience among women produced in reaction to the video. these comments were particularly interesting because they were often story-like replies and told the users’ own experience of talking back to harassers and their tactics for confrontation. ‘lucia’ shares: ‘one time a man wolf-whistle [sic.] at me, he was with friends and i was with my mom. she ignored him. i yelled at him ‘coward, what are you looking at?’ and all of his friends started laughing at him looking at how a little girl put him in his place’. ‘dana’ offers yet another example of young women discussing how they fought back against everyday harassment: ‘i took my jacket off and one ‘jerk’ whispered something obscene. i quickly yelled ‘what?’ the dude kept walking. ‘oh no, now you face me “asshole”.’ ‘who me?’ ‘yes, repeat what you just said to me.’ ‘no, i didn’t say anything.’ ‘oh, so now you’re a pussy’ … once you confront them, they lose all their courage … i find it ridiculous when people say to us ‘what if he is good-looking and you like him?’ well no!!! what they want is to feel that they can walk all over me.’ sharing an experience of confronting harassers similar to the one captured in the video, ‘dana’ reinforces the notion that women have the ability to cut through gender stereotypes directed towards both women and men (i.e. harassment by an attractive man constitutes an acceptable form of flirting). in light of these and similar reflections by female viewers, the video could be seen as providing a space not just for empowerment in the sense of providing tactics for women in similar situations. it also provides a platform for reflecting on the previously undocumented ways that women in mexico and beyond have already been empowering themselves to confront male harassers. by producing and posting the video, las morras gave a platform for other women to share their experiences with combating everyday misogyny. if only for a brief instance, this shared experience of fighting back presents the seeds of building a longer sense of solidarity against street harassment and everyday misogyny. however, as our discussion of research question will illustrate, this expression of solidarity was dwarfed by negative responses. discussion : the fragility of las morras though a number of the responses to the youtube video illustrate the solidarity-building potential of its documentation of the confrontation of harassers, the majority of the responses consisted of derogatory remarks or attacks. the following sections will address these statements in more detail. the first section will continue our analysis of the video’s youtube feedback (this time focusing on assaultive commentary), the second section will document and analyse harassment experienced on the group’s facebook page, and the final section will build on in-depth interviews to better understand how these critiques, threats, and attacks facilitated the end of las morras. negative youtube feedback: ‘the women of las morras are too ugly to harass’ by ‘negative’ feedback, we are referring to messages that either attacked the physical appearance of las morras or blamed their treatment by men on the video on suggestive clothing and behaviour. while they acknowledge the bad behaviour on the part of male onlookers, the second set of ‘negative’ comments attempts to rationalise this behaviour based on the men’s background. claiming that misogyny is not the root of the problem, these comments present lack of cultural capital as the root cause of these ‘ignorant’ actions. beyond direct attacks on physical appearance (e.g. calling them fat), messages attacking the physical appearance of las morras also feigned confusion about why men would bother to harass group members, perceived as too unattractive to harass. comments in this category did not make mention of race or class. ‘aldo’ writes: ‘very politely i would like to inform you that you are ugly. you are only demonstrating that there are men with bad taste, you don’t deserve any compliments.’ beyond excoriating the physical appearance of las morras, some respondents claimed that they must have paid men in the video to harangue them. ‘fabian’: ‘they don’t fool me. they paid the dudes to make the video, because to be honest they are not that good-looking for them to be catcalling and wolf-whistling the way they show it in the video’. these comments engaged in degrading tropes including fat shaming and attacks on facial appearance and teeth. in short, these comments focused on physical appearance. another theme that is commonly referenced in general discussions of harassment is the role of provocative attire in encouraging male attention and catcalling. comments in this category blamed las morras (and young women generally) for their treatment by claiming that their clothing was too provocative and they should have expected that response based on their attire. they believed that they should not dress that provocatively if they do not want people to stare. ‘cynthia’ offers a clear example of rationalization based on clothing choice: ‘the way i see it, it’s not just men who are to blame. we women are guilty too because of the way we dress. if we don’t want people to disrespect us, we shouldn’t dress provocatively’. ‘oscar’ echoes this idea: ‘what’s the problem with the compliments? look at what you were wearing, you went out looking for that’. the third and largest sub-set of comments posited socio-economic status or lack of cultural capital on the part of the harassers or las morras as the root problem. a number of posters stated that the group purposely walked through a neighbourhood where men from a low socio-economic background would inevitably harass them. ‘julian’ writes: ‘surely they went to coyoacán or la roma [upscale neighborhoods] and nobody noticed them, that’s why everything was filmed downtown, which is filled with construction workers and lowlifes that would go for any monster.’ ‘marco’ agrees: ‘great video, you have demonstrated that in the most ignorant zones of the country people with very little education exist’. a longer post by ‘jonathan’ combines a classist critique of harassers with an even harsher classist critique of las morras: ‘if they knew how to make an experiment, they should’ve visited different places in mexico city from different socio-economic strata. obviously in the upper-class areas they would have been confused with maids, and no one would harass them.’ viewed from the perspective of tactical media, the youtube responses seem to indicate that when faced with an assault on their deeply held sexist and patriarchal positions, a great deal of the (presumably) male viewers choose to either amplify sexist practices or substitute socio-economic status for misogyny as the video’s ‘real’ target. las morras on facebook: sustained trolling attacks this section briefly discusses the aggressively antagonistic response the video prompted on the facebook page of las morras. in the months following the posting of ‘las morras enfrentan a sus acosadores’ the group’s number of followers jumped in october , and the group’s facebook page had over , likes. while the site grew in popularity, it also received vicious criticism in comments like this: why can’t you accept your role in society? you are a damn furniture [sic.], a display figure temporarily decorating the house … then you will become the disposable ‘bitch’ that you really are … a sexual satisfaction machine, a children factory, a damn maid whose only job is to keep the house clean. you have to finally understand you cannot be at the same level of men. stupid woman, your menstruation is causing you mental retardation, and that is why you will always be stupid … go make me a fucking sandwich already. eat my dick! (facebook comment, october ). direct confrontations were accompanied by intense trolling. in october las morras posted that a group of trolls was trying to take down their page after they posted an invitation for women to participate in a feminist march against femicide (the widespread practice in mexico of engaging in hate crimes – even to the point of murder – against young women with almost complete immunity). in anticipation to the march, las morras had been sharing photos of abusive husbands and boyfriends on facebook to help with criminal cases. this activism prompted extensive trolling on their site to the point where they had to publish a public post addressing it: ‘a group of over trolls is trying to take down our page, after we called for a march against femicides and denounced other cases of domestic violence’ ( october las morras facebook page). in one interview, group members were not able to explain the reason behind the attack other than users reacting to their activism: and we did, and two hours later they started attacking us. also, because we published something about a man who was accused of domestic violence, and so facebook took down our post. and the trolls started trying to take down our page. fortunately, they couldn’t do it, but now we think that everything we publish is going to be trolled (morras, personal communication, october ). according to the group, the troll attack lasted approximately three hours. they had about messages in their facebook inbox and thousands of comments on their facebook posts. the troll attack consisted of copying and pasting the same messages over and over to flood their page with comments. the comments were often long and nonsensical including lyrics of popular songs, lines from the law and order svu television series, passages from harry potter novels, and the transcript of infomercials. some of the comments were indeed incredibly misogynistic in nature and were aimed at provoking a response to reply with more nonsensical comments. according to our interviews, the online incivility began to intensify in late – leading to the folding of the group’s social media accounts by . the end of las morras the facebook confrontation portended the shuttering of las morras’ digital presence. for privacy reasons, the group had decided to keep their identities anonymous. although their faces are clearly visible in the video, they had kept their real names private. however, after the video went viral, online users found their personal twitter and facebook profiles. the group said that social media users sent hateful messages to their personal accounts: ‘they found our personal accounts on twitter and our personal facebook profiles. they would send us messages calling us fat, ugly, prostitutes, and that sort of stuff’ (las morras, personal communication, october ). in a bbc interview, the group reported receiving photos of men carrying firearms and dismembered women (paullier, ). the threats escalated to the point where they were going to report the harassment to the police: ‘our phones are ringing all day long with notifications of harassment, threats, and they send us pictures of dismembered women. (…) at first we were harassed with comments about our physical appearance, then the death threats followed’ (‘cuatro morras mexicanas’, ). the collective believed that the violent reaction to their video and the personal attacks were a symptom of the social structure in mexico: ‘we exposed the worst of mexico. the homophobia, the classism … they call us black, fat, maids, and they are homophobes, misogynists, and sexists. we exposed all of that’ (‘amenazan de muerte’, ). after their identities were exposed, they came to a consensus that they should no longer keep their social media profiles private and instead take a stronger activist stance: ‘before we didn’t say our names, but we are no longer afraid of any of this. we tag our names in our instagram accounts to the morras account … i mean we are no longer hiding or trying to go unnoticed.’ (morras, personal communication, october , ). when analysing the group’s activity on social media in subsequent months this claim did not seem substantiated. despite mentioning that the comments and threats were not a concern for them, somewhere between september and december the group closed their facebook and twitter accounts. the youtube account also went inactive as of march : the last video uploaded to the morras youtube account was ‘las morras nos cuentan sus historias de acoso’ (las morras talk about their harassment stories), which only garnered , views. from february-may their twitter page consisted of only two posts and retweets. seemingly their activity and influence on social media slowly dissipated, as they were not able to produce any more viral videos. the reasons for deleting their traces from social media except for their youtube page are unclear. it is apparent, however, that their presence diminished. only one of the members maintains an active public twitter account. for all intents and purposes, ‘las morras’ no longer exists except in the images and comments from the youtube videos. conclusion: a call to action with nowhere to go our analysis of comments along and interview data registers significantly more support for research question . the feedback was much more antagonistic, aggressive, and caustic than it was supportive or in solidarity. furthermore, as a practice native to online environs, trolling as a communicative strategy was much more effective in dismantling las morras’ work than las morras were in capacity building in the fight against harassment, misogyny, and gender-based violence. the fate of las morras at the hands of trolls illustrates two things. as the group recognised, the ferocity of trolling can be seen as proof of success as the extreme reactions point to the powerful disruptive capacity of the video. at the same time, trolling also destabilises movement-building through targeted online aggression (as mendes and co-authors argue): ‘trolling can disrupt the affective solidarity of a hashtag, discouraging participation, and ultimately even forcing people to abandon it’ (mendes, ringrose, and keller, , ). as a project fully based in the digital realm of youtube, twitter, and facebook, las morras experienced a serious (and in fact ultimately fatal) weakness to trolling. las morras clearly lacked a focus in the sense of providing avenues for continuing to build frameworks to nurture feelings of solidarity into more sustained activist projects. looking beyond the individual case, the boom then bust trajectory of las morras could be seen as a kind of augury or warning sign for other digitally-sparked instances of anti-misogynistic activism including the highly visible #metoo ‘movement’ in . numerous commentaries written in the wake of the initial wave of exposures have struggled with how to translate from identifying perpetrators and activities online to substantially engaging root causes of problems. michelle rodino-colocino argues that the momentum of online exposures of misogyny and violence will fade without an accompanying ‘transformative empathy’ that pushes individuals to ‘self-reflexivity and the potential transformation of one’s own assumptions’ ( , ). this process, she argues, cannot be encapsulated in the act of calling out individuals via digital media (as important as the act is). liz mason-deese ( ) is even more cautious, arguing that #metoo will remain a movement generated against powerful individual men unless activists interface with other movements that have been working for years to organise women experiencing harassment, sexual violence, and other forms of gender-based marginalisation. like tufecki’s work, these arguments highlight the fragility of online activism without connections to off-line/non-digital capacity-building and organizing. learning from the disappearance of las morras, we argue that not heeding these areas will relegate digital interventions with enormous immediate effect to incessantly spark and then fade to obscurity while the insidious power asymmetries they oppose continue more or 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( ). me too, #metoo: countering cruelty with empathy. communication and critical/cultural studies, ( ), – . doi: [doi: . / . . ] tufecki, z. ( ). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. new haven, ct: yale university press. download 	 download xml 	 download pdf issue 	 volume • issue • jump to file checksums (md ) 	 xml: b e aff ea a bd cdfa 	 pdf: e a f f d eef a harvard-style citation santillana, m & davis, s. ( ) 'from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism', westminster papers in communication and culture. ( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: vancouver citation style | apa citation style × vancouver-style citation santillana, m & davis, s. from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism. westminster papers in communication and culture. ; ( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: harvard citation style | apa citation style × apa-style citation santillana, m & davis, s. ( , ). from the streets to the screen to nowhere: las morras and the fragility of networked digital activism. westminster papers in communication and culture ( ) : – . doi: . /wpcc. show: harvard citation style | vancouver citation style × non specialist summary this article has no summary × | - | published by university of westminster press | 	privacy policy 	sitemap 	contact 	login diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all uc davis uc davis previously published works title diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ d c v journal landscape journal, ( ) issn - authors rios, m napawan, nc publication date doi . /lj. . . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ d c v https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ la nd sc ap e jo ur na l  :   is sn - © b y th e bo ar d of r eg en ts o f t he u ni ve rs ity o f w is co ns in s ys te m diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all “engaged scholarship: bringing together research, teaching, and service” is the theme of the coun- cil of educators in landscape architecture (cela) conference. the aim is to start a dialogue about the ways in which our community of practice focuses on issues of public concern and is useful to, and devel- oped in concert with, diverse audiences beyond the academy. while public engagement is not new to our field, there is increasing attention to the ways in which engaged forms of scholarship advance diversity and inclusion in higher education. diversity and inclusion effects are mainstream and are now an integral part of many universities and colleges. based on our review of websites, almost all u.s. institutions with an accredited landscape architecture program have offices dedicated to promoting the value of a diverse academic commu- nity while ensuring representation of underrepresented individuals on campus. supplementing these efforts are a growing number of training courses, workshops, and other mechanisms that value diversity, while also increasing awareness and understanding of the effects of implicit/hidden bias, macro and microaggressions, and other forms of discrimination. whether individual faculty welcome these changes or not, attention to diversity issues and inclusion are not going away as our students are beginning to mirror the changing demographic landscape outside of the ivory tower, and as more women, international, and people of color enter the field. for example, landscape architectural accreditation board data indicate that more than % of all students (graduate and undergraduate) were women, and that individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups grew from % to % of the total student body between and . in , only % of graduating land- scape architecture students were non-whites (asla, a). embracing these trends, prominent landscape architecture organizations, including cela, signed a commitment to “achieve a professional profile that correlates with the population-share estimates, while working toward the longer-term goal of parity with projections for the nation as a whole” by (asla, b, p.  ). diversifying academia will likely have a direct impact on efforts to diversify the profession. the american society of landscape architecture’s (asla) inaugural diversity summit in revealed the lack of mentors, “and specifically mentors that looked like them,” as the greatest hurdle for recruiting underrep- resented students interested in the profession. in their most recent diversity summit ( ), the asla estab- lished a five-year prioritized action list to meet diver- sity goals, including diversifying imagery and resources integrated across their website, and increasing acces- sibility of these resources to underrepresented minori- ties. in response, as landscape architecture academics, we must ask: what is being done to diversify the faculty ranks and the organizations that we lead? how is diversity and inclusion reflected when it comes to faculty recruitment and advancement, and selection of department/program chairs, as well as the composition of organizational and journal editorial boards and of- fices? more importantly, what additional actions need to be taken to achieve a diverse and inclusive academy? there is evidence to suggest that institutional pol- icy change and other top-down approaches will have minimal impact on faculty diversity. a recent study by bradley et al. ( ) found no “significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for under- represented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all michael rios and n. claire napawan university of california, davis landscape journal : tenure, or for university administrator hires” (p.  ). this is not to suggest a causal linkage exists between hiring a diversity officer and the lack of progress being made. other factors need to be considered such as the provision and effective use of resources and the par- ticular institutional culture in which diversity is being advanced. regardless, it becomes important to reflect on how and in what ways do our collective and indi- vidual behaviors either contribute to, or ameliorate, existing representation gaps. it is one thing to believe in and support diversity. it is far more difficult to break down barriers of exclusion and practice inclusion in our everyday lives. silence is complicity when it comes to individual and collective actions that reinforce power imbalances—in the studio, classroom, faculty meetings, and other professional settings. to believe any of us are immune to such discriminatory slippages is simply false, regardless of how one identifies by race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other means. as educators, researchers, and scholars, we often pride ourselves in the insights, discoveries, and new knowledge that shape the profession and larger society. just as the “declaration of concern” (miller et al., ) placed landscape architecture at the forefront of the sustainable environmental design and planning movement, this current moment provides an opportunity to establish the profession as a leader in addressing persistent social and racial inequities. in order to do so, we must seriously note the changes that are taking place outside our privileged locations and rethink our societal relationships. or, to take the example of the “declaration of concern,” consider gina marie ford’s (fasla) critical response at the landscape architecture foundation’s retrospec- tive: “fifty years ago, the voice of our profession was eerily prescient, undeniably smart, and powerfully inspired. it was also, let’s admit it, almost entirely white and male” ( , p.  ). events within the past decade such as the occupy movement, the ferguson protests and black lives matter, the fight for lgbtq rights and, more recently, the #metoo movement, can no longer be ignored as was the case with the civil rights movement a generation earlier. it is clear we have not done enough yet to change our institutional environments and personal behaviors towards a more equitable and engaged culture. we must continue to diversify our faculty ranks and student body, as well as program and organizational leadership. in order to achieve this obvious opportunity, it will require us to move beyond an examination of numbers alone. instead, it is crucial to work towards creating an inclusive culture in our scholarly and creative practice. if the value of diver- sity in academia includes the mentorship of minority students, innovative/creative research methodologies, and the ability to address the needs of underserved communities—these contributions must be recognized as such by academia and move beyond the unseen labor in which they currently operate. an inclusive culture of scholarly and creative practice can take many forms and includes collaborative relationships with local communities as well as providing access to univer- sity resources, to intellectual pursuits and organized research that inform and shape public policies and debates, to scientific and technological innovations that improve people’s lives and the environments in which they inhabit. collectively, these activities have impact at different geographic scales, across sectors, and be- tween disciplines that aim to improve the wellbeing of individuals, communities, and the planet. yet, despite their potential for transformative societal change, some higher learning institutions insist on ignoring the labor-intensive nature of this work or devalue their scholarly contributions. these types of activities can be described as the “scholarship of engagement,” borrowing a term from ernest boyer ( ), who challenged institutions of higher education to go beyond traditional definitions of research, teaching, and service toward articulating the scholarly contributions in each of these catego- ries. today, this reflects a shift away from using the terms “service” or “outreach” and instead an embrace of “engagement” to describe reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships between faculty, students, and non-university groups. equally important is a con- ception of knowledge that has relevance beyond the academy, and is often produced with, not for, non-uni- versity groups, towards actionable outcomes. these scholarly practices are familiar to our field given the focus on the “design, planning, and manage- ment of the land.” scholarly practice examples include evaluative studies that assess built works from a user perspective, inquiry that tests resilient responses to cli- mate change, or ecologically-based research to improve urban habitat, among others. each example speaks to the important role that landscape architects can play diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all as the leaders, choreographers, and communicators for addressing the most complex socio-ecological problems of our era and which require transformative learning and adaptive governance models. the truth is, addressing the majority of the pressing contempo- rary environmental concerns requires recognition of societal conditions that exacerbate their impacts. in addition, a substantial amount of professional train- ing focuses on project-based and experiential learning that addresses societal concern issues. many curricula facilitate interaction between students and non-univer- sity groups through studio projects, practicum courses, education abroad, and internships, among other forms of learning. often landscape architecture programs organize these activities through the many community engaged centers and non-profit organizations. these centers are part of a larger ecosystem of publicly-facing and multi-disciplinary design organizations that, since , have nearly tripled in north america from under to over (acsa, ). despite the positive impact that these activities have had for non-university groups and shaping the professional trajectory of many students, little progress has been made in defining how engaged scholarship intersects with diversity and inclusion more explicitly, and how this is valued and assessed when it comes to faculty recognition and the supportive infrastructure necessary to incentivize fac- ulty participation. or, to refer again to ford’s decla- ration retrospective: “we will need to wholeheartedly embrace the rich diversity of who we are and strive more ambitiously to understand and meet the needs of the people we serve” ( , p.  ). these concerns are not unique to the land- scape architecture field. recent interviews with over  uc davis faculty from the university’s ten colleges and schools identified significant barriers to practicing engaged scholarship. community engaged research requires an enormous amount of work due to the relationships and interactions with non-university groups, and is essentially invisible institutional labor. this research approach often necessitates a substan- tial amount of time, coordination, and non-university resources that other forms of research do not require. related, many colleagues do not value the placement of public scholarship outputs unless they are published in traditional journals and fora. an examination of merit and promotion criteria of thirty-three institutions designated as carnegie community-engaged campuses, revealed that the majority still placed engaged schol- arship within the realm of service and required ad- ditional forms of scholarship to support merit and promotion (saltmarsh et al., ). this leaves faculty few options other than to do this type of work on their own time because they feel it is important, not because they believe they will be rewarded. compounding these challenges is the difficulty in devoting the time to develop collaborations with non-university groups out- side existing commitments. the decentralized nature of many campuses has produced enclaves that exist within the confines of colleges and schools, which does little to promote the value of engaged scholarship or sustain collaborations or communications across disci- plines and academic units. university-wide support for scholarship that involves partnerships with non-corpo- rate/non-industry partners, community stakeholders, and other public entities is also lacking as compared to other sponsored research that involves industry or generates significant revenue. fortunately, many landscape architecture pro- grams already support engaged scholarship, especially given a general orientation toward applied research as well as professionally credentialed curricula. however, we must do a better job in communicating and ampli- fying the importance of this work in serving the public good, measuring its impact outside of the academy, and elevating excellence in research and teaching. the inter- viewed uc davis faculty echoed these sentiments and also shared the main motivations and benefits for why engaged scholarship is essential to their work. some of the reasons include deepening research and learning, serving the underserved, and relevant to this discussion, as a means of practicing more effective diversity and inclusion at higher education institutions. for example, many are personally motivated by a sense of obligation given their position of privilege and/or seeing an im- perative to support those that do not have the privilege. as evidenced by these personal experiences, engaged scholarship allows for a more democratic and inclusive scholarly practice than traditional avenues of research and teaching. however, there is much to be done to create an institutional culture that values, recognizes, and rewards public scholarship as essential to the civic mission of higher education institutions, especially public universities that espouse serving the public good. so what can be done to move closer to these ideals in supporting diversity and inclusion? landscape journal : valuing and supporting publicly engaged research and teaching requires that we respond to the changing demographic landscape in urban, suburban, and rural communities (rios & vazquez, ) and improve experiential learning opportunities in ways that con- nect with a diverse student body. creating an inclusive community of faculty from different backgrounds is one place to start. with the increased diversity among recent graduates, it is no longer excusable to suggest that diversity is lacking among the qualified pool of individuals seeking to enter into the academy as faculty. while it is unreasonable to expect transform- ing the face of the academy necessarily transforms its values, we need to make explicit the types of research and teaching our programs support. for example, a recent study by uc berkeley indicates that faculty job descriptions that included a subject area with public or engaged scholarship saw higher proportions of women and underrepresented minority (urm) applicants as compared with searches that did not use this approach (stacy et al., ). moving beyond recruitment, there is also a need to create spaces where individuals feel welcomed, respected, and can express divergent viewpoints. recent studies indicate implicit bias still impacts retention of urm faculty in landscape ar- chitecture and other disciplines (laden & hagedorn, ; smith & calasanti, ; whittaker et al., ; zambrana et al., ). whittaker et al. ( ) write: [t]he persistent “calls to action” designed to catalyze diversification of the professoriate have resulted in incremental changes at best. as such, successes of a few urm individuals appear to have led to a sense of complacency along with generalized notions that urms no longer face discrimination. the successes of a few can lead to many institutions contracting recruitment and retention efforts. the few (or single) individuals that have been recruited are then left as potential “token” representatives with high service demands, which are not among rewarded performance criteria and/or of limited impact. while discrimination or imposed isolation may not always be blatantly overt, a critical factor and consideration in addressing this issue revolves around environmental and inherent unconscious biases directed towards urms in the academic workplace. institutions should recognize this as a sense of urgency and commit to the transformational and sustained work required to mitigate the problem, which will require long- term, strategic initiatives and commitment of resources (p.  ). in an academic setting, particular norms—not only determined by gender, race, ethnicity, and other attri- butes, but also by disciplinary culture, methods and approaches to research and teaching, and professorial rank—are reinforced through practices and behaviors carried out by individuals, colleagues, peer mentors, and departments that police the boundaries of what constitutes time well spent. moreover, the use of head- counts alone to support faculty diversity exemplifies how affirmative action and other metric-based means of recruitment can hinder retention and advancement. it is not uncommon for a female faculty and/or faculty of color to feel disempowered or have their scholarly and creative work devalued under the assumption that their recruitment was based on their gender and/or ethnicity, and not by the merits of their scholarship/ capabilities (turner et al., ). additional examples of hurdles to retention and advancement of underrep- resented faculty include evidence that student teaching evaluations are often skewed to the disadvantage of women and/or minority faculty (lilienfeld, ), re- search that suggests female faculty carry greater service commitments than their male counterparts (guarino & borden, ), and a study exploring gendered racism perpetrated by white male students towards female faculty of color (pittman, ). online train- ing, retreats and other supports to create and sustain a thriving program culture address these issues head on and ensure underrepresented faculty will want to re- main. services that address implicit bias and cross-cul- tural understanding, among others, are now available at many universities and colleges. beyond creating a culture of inclusion, we must also take a hard look at merit and promotion to ensure success, especially among faculty whose work center on some form of public or community engagement. as patricia matthew, author of written/unwritten: diversity and the hidden truths of tenure, notes: “chances are a faculty member of color is not going to get a sabbatical or a grant from her institution because she contributes to the diversity mission her university diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all probably has posted somewhere on its website. she certainly isn’t going to get tenure for it” ( , p.  ). instead, this effort begins with correlating diversity missions with explicit statements about what a pro- gram/campus values and how these values translate into specific criteria. when revising the appointment, merit, and promotion evaluation criteria in our land- scape architecture + environmental design program at uc davis, this included referencing the campus mission statement, university standards for research and creative excellence, and comparison to commensu- rate institutions and programs. the uc davis mission statement is as follows: . . . generation, advancement, dissemination and application of knowledge. . . . teaching students as a partnership between faculty mentors and young scholars; advancing knowledge and pioneering studies through creative research and scholarship; and applying that knowledge to address the needs of the region, state, nation and globe . . . committed to the land grant tradition on which it was founded, which holds that the broad purpose of a university is service to people and society” (uc davis apm, , section – ). interestingly, this statement reflects many goals of an engaged model of scholarship and supports the cri- teria identified for evaluating such a scholarly pur- suit. in addition, the document required defining the unique scholarly practices of landscape architecture academics: landscape architecture and related placemaking professions are broad and inclusive disciplines in which faculty members pursue different career paths as they become successful and productive scholars and teachers in the academic community. the faculty recognizes that the strength of the program depends on an intellectually engaged faculty who successfully pursue diverse career paths and academic and professional activities (matthew, , p.  ). thus, our appointment, merit, and promotion doc- ument identifies the value of diversity and the role engaged scholarship might play in supporting that effort without resorting to specific metrics or overt statements about race, ethnicity, gender, or other legally protected characteristics of an existing or pro- spective faculty member. these efforts are more than symbolic gestures, but serve as the basis for writing candidate statements, evaluating dossiers, and writing merit and promo- tion review letters. purposeful criteria help to ensure success at the department or program level, but more often, when faculty dossiers are reviewed by college and university committees unfamiliar with engaged scholarship. for example, explicit criteria were a deciding factor for a faculty member in our program who received a split vote by a university-wide review committee that was successfully overturned. in the deciding letter, departmental criteria for promotion were explicitly referenced and included diverse schol- arly outputs as well as a focus on “publicly engaged research or creative work” and “publications more broadly presented than is customary.” however, not all institutions have checks and balances to ensure an ad- equate review of engaged scholarship and its scholarly value. in response, some institutions such as the uni- versity of minnesota are taking it a step further and are launching a university-wide committee that reviews promotion portfolios of publicly engaged scholars, and provides supplemental review letters that assess the quality of promotion candidates’ engaged scholarship. this is in addition to a number of other supports such as departmental grants to “plan, establish, implement, and evaluate strategic initiatives that advance the integration of public engagement into the departments’ research and teaching activities” (university of minne- sota, ). as educators we also must do our part to ensure that educational environments are inclusive spaces for student success. implicit bias, microaggressions and other hurdles to a diverse faculty are also challenges to a diverse student body—an obvious necessity if we are going to see greater diversity in the profession and the academy. again, workshops that address these challenges are increasingly available to instructors as a means of identifying implicit bias and other impedi- ments to an inclusive learning environment. in , a mandatory microaggression training was provided for all faculty at suffolk university in response to a blog post that went viral written by a latina student who was wrongly accused of plagiarism for using the word “hence” in a literature review. her written response landscape journal : articulated what many underrepresented individuals feel within the academy: my last name and appearance immediately instill a set of biases before i have the chance to open my mouth. these stereotypes and generalizations forced on marginalized communities are at times debilitating and painful. as a minority in my classrooms, i continuously hear my peers and professors use language that both covertly and overtly oppresses the communities i belong to (martinez, ). unfortunately, these kinds of biases can feel routine in academia to minority students; moreover, these trans- gressions often occur without full awareness by those who might have committed the offense. just as more diverse metrics of academic success need to be considered to achieve a more diverse faculty, instructors need to embrace broader conceptualiza- tions of what constitutes an ideal student. oftentimes, extroverted characteristics (active verbal participation, for example) are rewarded in scholastic settings, and the students that make themselves more “visible” in a classroom or those with charisma are awarded more accolades. this can be particularly true in design stu- dio instruction, where oral presentations can serve as a major means of evaluating student work. valuing such characteristics, however, reflects a particular cultural bias that student knowledge is reflected only through verbal articulation. equally problematic is an over-reli- ance on individual student assessments. different types of feedback instruments are needed, including ones that also instigate reflective learning for both individu- als and groups. recently within our own program, our faculty recognized the important need to reassess our metrics for student success following an evaluation of our olmsted scholar nominees over the past years— this very process led us to the conclusion that we had been utilizing culturally based definitions of academic strength (such as active class participation and lead- ership roles in group projects) and brought about new perspectives in recognizing student achievements. in- terestingly, laf criteria for olmsted scholars include “leadership” and “communication skills” (landscape architecture foundation, ). finally, there are substantial data supporting that zero-tolerance policies disproportionately impact students of color (hines-datiri & andrews, ). de- spite this, educational institutions often employ such a policy to address academic or social misconduct in the classroom. uc davis, for example, allows an instructor to fail a student if proven to have committed academic misconduct such as cheating or plagiarism (uc davis, ). adopting new strategies such as restorative justice provide greater opportunities to address mis- conduct in a culturally inclusive manner. restorative justice is “. . . a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm” (braithwaite, , p.  ), and evidence suggests that such an approach leads to less recidivism, greater offender accountability, and higher rates of victim satisfaction in the resolution (sherman & strang, ). whether in our student body, faculty, adminis- tration, editorial boards, or institutional committees, it is clear that a more inclusive culture is needed to address current diversity concerns in the landscape architecture academy. by extension, greater inclusivity is needed in our definitions of scholarship. there is a growing body of research that speaks to the value of engaged scholarship and the intersections with diver- sity and inclusion. much of this evidence can be found in a number of academic journals including gate- ways: international journal of community research and engagement, international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement, journal of community engagement and higher education, journal of public scholarship in higher education, journal of community engagement and scholarship, and public: a journal of imagining america, among others. there are also resources pro- vided through national organizations, institutes, and centers. imagining america, for example, is a national organization that promotes publicly engaged scholar- ship in the arts, humanities, and design. it has been a leader in advancing a national dialogue about engaged scholarship in merit and promotion as well as its intersection with diversity and inclusion. for example, sturm et al. ( ) provides a framework to integrate equity, diversity, and inclusion with community, pub- lic, and civic engagement. this document informed much of the criteria for evaluating an engaged scholar- ship model for the uc davis landscape architecture program. diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all if you are interested in these issues, we encour- age you to join us and other engaged scholars at the upcoming cela conference hosted by uc davis in sacramento. the conference’s theme on “engaged scholarship” provides an opportunity to participate in conversations throughout the conference to ad- dress many of these questions and topics. timothy k. eatman, a nationally-recognized educator and past co-director of imagining america, will in his keynote address challenge all of us to reflect on the ethical and practical dimensions of knowledge production and the role that design can play in democratizing our diverse communities of place, identity, and practice. other sessions will focus on inclusion and equity in design decision-making such as a panel discussion on the use of social media and other technologies to make visible, the often hidden, inequities across the land- scape. participative and other techniques for collective creativity will be employed throughout the cela con- ference to elevate engagement toward more democratic and inclusive outcomes in landscape architecture. let us begin. endnote . currently, asla surveys do not provide an option for non-binary gender. references american society of landscape architecture (asla). 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( ). don’t leave us behind: the importance of mentoring for underrepresented minority faculty. american educational research journal, , – . doi: . / https://surface.syr.edu/ia/ doi: . /a http://academicaffairs.ucdavis.edu/apm/apm-toc.htm https://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/bylaws_and_regulations/regulations.cfm https://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/bylaws_and_regulations/regulations.cfm https://engagement.umn.edu/our-impact/engaged copyright © the author(s). open access. this in an open access article published by firenze university press (www.fupress.net/index.php/ccselap) and distributed under the terms of the creative commons attri- bution . international license. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. comparative cultural studies: european and latin american perspectives : - , doi: . /ccselap- | issn - (online) book reviews engaging men and boys in violence prevention di michael flood, palgrave macmillan, new york, antonio raimondo di grigoli università degli studi di firenze il problema dell’uguaglianza di genere costituisce attualmente uno degli obiettivi pri- mari della nostra società, come sostiene tra gli altri l’unesco che ha inserito la questione nell’agenda tra le priorità da raggiungere. ancora oggi esiste una profonda resistenza nei confronti dello sradicamento della violenza di genere, da quanto è emerso dalla cam- pagna #metoo, che ci ha spinto a una riflessione sulle possibili strategie da adottare per decretarne la fine. docente di sociologia presso la queensland university of technology (australia) e leader del mentors in violence prevention programm (mvp), in engaging men and boys in violence prevention, rieditato per la seconda volta dalla prestigiosa casa editrice palgrave macmillian, michael flood ha posto l’accento sul ruolo degli uomini e sulla necessità di un loro coinvolgimento nella risoluzione del problema della violenza di genere. l’educa- zione alla prevenzione di tale fenomeno riguardante le donne rappresenta una delle chiavi di volta affinché si realizzi l’uguaglianza tra i generi (r. w. connell, ; m. flood; ; m. kauffman, ; m. kehler, ). il volume si pone come un utile strumento teorico-pratico sulla natura e la dimen- sione della violenza di genere perpetrata dagli uomini nei confronti delle donne. flood legge tale questione seguendo tre filoni principali: il primo riguarda l’individuazione della violenza contro le donne come questione sociale; il secondo si focalizza sull’importanza svolta dalla prevenzione primaria della veemenza verso le donne e il ruolo svolto dai gio- vani e dalla comunità, in riferimento alla risposta offerta alle vittime e ai perpetratori della violenza contro le donne; e il terzo si concentra sul coinvolgimento maschile (siano essi giovani o adulti). nel complesso, questo studio si articola in tre parti, di cui la prima introduce alcuni principi guida che fungono da fari orientatori per il coinvolgimento di uomini e ragazzi al problema; la seconda si concentra, invece, sulle strategie e sugli scenari attuali che riguar- dano il coinvolgimento dei maschi alla questione in oggetto; la terza parte ha come nucleo le sfide attuali inerenti al lavoro da svolgere per una corretta sensibilizzazione contro la violenza di genere. sul piano terminologico, esistono diverse espressioni che si riferiscono a forme di vee- menza interpersonale, tra cui la “violenza domestica” che è attuata in contesti domesti- ci, nelle relazioni familiari e intime e che nella maggior parte dei casi viene associata a quella concretizzata da un uomo nei confronti della propria moglie, della propria partner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / comparative cultural studies: european and latin american perspectives : - , book reviews o di una ex compagna. tuttavia, va sottolineato che l’espressione “violenza domestica” è adoperata anche per denotare la violenza tra partner dello stesso sesso, tra i membri della famiglia, compresi gli atti veementi tra fratelli e quelli tra genitore e figlio o viceversa, così come quelli commessi da donne verso i loro partner. vi sono, inoltre, diversi termini che fanno parte del campo semantico della violenza domestica, come ad esempio il maltrattamento della moglie e la violenza tra partner. ciò indica che esiste un ampio ventaglio terminologico con cui viene definito tale fenomeno che, sia in ambito politico che accademico, riscuote un grande successo tra gli esperti. un’analisi della violenza di genere comporta anche lo studio degli abusi sessuali, psicolo- gici e verbali da una prospettiva multifocale. difatti, un esame delle conseguenze degli atti veementi in sé non è sufficiente per una corretta e approfondita analisi del problema, dato che vanno esaminati anche (e soprattutto) altri fattori, tra cui le motivazioni che spingono a compiere questo tipo di azioni, la storia personale e il conseguente comportamento del ‘carnefice’. l’appartenenza a un determinato rango sociale ed economico di quest’ultimo, così come l’abuso di sostanze alcoliche e stupefacenti concorre a aumentare le possibilità di adottare atteggiamenti violenti. la costruzione della maschilità è un processo che inizia sin dall’infanzia che impone al bambino un modello di condotta “stoica” di essa (e. anderson, ), basata sulla rigi- dità di espressione che spesso sfocia nell’uso della violenza sessuale e nell’intimidazione come strumento di costruzione e affermazione della maschilità (m. flood, ; j. messer- schmidt, ; c. rinaldi, ). questa prima parte del volume si chiude con alcune riflessioni di flood su come affron- tare la violenza di genere; in particolare, lo studioso adotta una prospettiva pro-femminista e anti-patriarcale e spiega che i programmi politici, educativi e pubblicitari possono promuo- vere un’educazione alla prevenzione e il coinvolgimento dei giovani nella lotta alla violenza di genere. ne sono da esempio alcune istituzioni statunitensi che si occupano della promo- zione di un dialogo fondato nel rispetto reciproco tra uomini e donne e tra uomini e uomi- ni, l’organizzazione menswork e la national organization of men’s against violence (noma). nella seconda parte del libro, lo studioso si concentra sulle strategie idonee al coinvol- gimento degli uomini per il contrasto della violenza verso le donne, quindi su come “con- durre gli uomini alla porta” (get men in the door) (p. ). flood traccia quattro dimen- sioni che hanno come nucleo il rapporto tra l’uomo e la violenza, costituiti dall’«uso della violenza, gli atteggiamenti verso la violenza, le risposte in caso di violenza e gli sforzi per prevenire la violenza» (ibidem). alla domanda su quanti uomini hanno commesso violen- za contro le donne, non ci sono molti dati, visto che le indagini tendono più a soffermarsi sulla vittima e non sui perpetratori della violenza. le scarse informazioni esistenti pro- vengono dalle ricerche condotte dagli studiosi headey, scott e de vaus su un campione di coppie di fidanzati nel lontano biennio - . i risultati, pubblicati nel , riporta- no che il . % degli uomini ha commesso violenza nei confronti della propria partner nel corso dell’ultimo anno dal loro fidanzamento (ibidem). le proposte offerte agli uomini e ai ragazzi per incoraggiarli a impegnarsi nella lotta contro la violenza verso le donne è comunque l’educazione che può provenire dalla scuola, dall’ideazione di campagne pubblicitarie e di programmi creati per il superamento degli stereotipi di genere. flood ricorda alcuni esempi di programmi “face to face” utilizzati in messico, in congo e negli stati uniti. questa metodologia vis-à-vis riscuote maggiore suc- doi: . /ccselap- | issn - (online) book reviews cesso ed è la più utilizzata per favorire l’inclusione degli uomini e dei ragazzi nella sensibi- lizzazione contro la violenza sulle donne. esistono, inoltre, altri programmi di educazione al contrasto della violenza di gene- re, come ad esempio i progetti della white ribbon australia che prevedono la realizzazio- ne di materiali audio e video; due campagne di sensibilizzazione chiamate men can stop the rape che invitano gli uomini a identificarsi con figure maschili non violente; e un’altra campagna denominata don’t be that guy, sviluppata in canada nel , che si focaliz- za sulla sfida lanciata agli uomini nel cambiamento dell’immaginario maschile e propone modelli positivi incentrati sul rispetto della partner. il lavoro si conclude con le “sfide” a cui bisogna far fronte nella realizzazione di que- sto progetto globale di un’educazione all’impegno maschile nella lotta alla violenza sessua- le rivolta alle donne. ad ogni modo, continuano a sussistere molte resistenze nei confronti dell’indirizzo pro-femminista sia da parti di uomini che di donne. inoltre, molti soggetti che hanno commesso in passato atti veementi o che sono stati vittime di abusi sessuali o di violenza assistita, hanno maggiore probabilità di ripetere il fenomeno. ritornando a quanto già affermato nei primi capitoli, flood insiste che il problema della violenza dome- stica e di quella commessa esclusivamente verso le donne risiede nell’asimmetria delle relazioni di genere culturalmente costruite. essa non può prescindere da altri fattori, come il background socio-economico del ‘carnefice’, dalle esperienze passate di violenza subita o agita o dalle alterazioni della personalità dovute all’abuso di alcol o di droghe. non sono fattori predittivi, bensì hanno una certa influenza se si considera l’essere umano nella sua globalità. nel complesso, il volume si presta a essere un utile manuale soprattutto per la parte riguardante la presentazione dei progetti di lavoro sulla maschilità con adulti e ragazzi, dato che il coinvolgimento degli uomini, mediante la rottura con il passato per quanto concerne un modello di mascolinità ancora obsoleto, aiuterebbe nella riduzione e nell’ab- battimento delle discriminazioni e nella violenza di genere, non solo verso le donne, bensì anche verso altre soggettività non conformi al modello binaristico sessuale e di genere. on waxworks considered as one of the hyperreal arts: exhibiting jack the ripper and his victims humanities article on waxworks considered as one of the hyperreal arts: exhibiting jack the ripper and his victims lucyna krawczyk-żywko institute of english studies, university of warsaw, - warsaw, poland; lucyna.krawczyk@uw.edu.pl received: april ; accepted: may ; published: may ���������� ������� abstract: the article discusses one of the tropes present in the representations of the whitechapel killer: the waxworks of either the killer or his victims. these images were shaped by contemporary attitudes: from sensationalism in , through the developing myth and business of ‘jack the ripper,’ to the beginnings of attention being paid to his victims. examined are tableaus created from to current times, both physical and fictional twenty- and twenty-first-century texts encompassing various media, all of which may be located within the baudrillardian realm of simulation. what they demonstrate is that the mythical killer keeps overshadowing his victims, who in this part of the ripper mythos remain to a certain extent as dehumanised and voiceless as when they were actually killed. keywords: jack the ripper; representation; simulacrum; victims; waxworks waxworks was one of the manifestations of the nineteenth-century fascination with the nascent cult and culture of celebrities, a culture that in the twentieth century incorporated serial killers as well (schmid ). in the nineteenth century, visiting exhibitions of wax figures which included infamous criminals was a means of substituting for the ‘lost pleasure’ of public hangings (pamela pilbeam qtd. in worsley [ ] , p. ). the association of representations of villains with this medium became so close that its dictionary definition includes the following usage as an example: “no waxworks is complete without its chamber of horrors” (waxwork n.dat.). it would be equally difficult to argue with a parallel statement that no chamber of horrors is complete without jack the ripper. this article examines various wax representations of him and his victims, with the term ‘waxworks’ used to denote not only dummies put on show in the victorian times but also the ones on display now, as well as their various transmediations, group or individual, on page and screen. since there is no known model to base his wax likeness on, any representation of the infamous jack poses a number of questions about the status of the whitechapel killer and his victims. together with vlad the impaler, elizabeth batory, atilla the hun, rasputin, and billy the kid, a victimless seven-inch jack the ripper figurine represents a historic ‘face of madness’ (mcfarlane’s monsters series : six faces of madness ). this is one of numerous attempts to give the anonymous, faceless killer some form and shape: evil that can be named and seen seems less malevolent, more manageable. this sense of control is, however, false, since any representation of the whitechapel killer has no genuine model and can only be described using the baudrillardian concepts of simulacrum and hyperreality. jean baudrillard described hyperrealism as ‘the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium’; with each transmediality, the real is ‘volatilized’, but, at the same time, ‘reinforced’, eventually becoming ‘reality for its own sake . . . the hyperreal’ (baudrillard [ ] , p. , emphasis original). however, in the case of the whitechapel killer there is no ‘real’—there is only ‘simulation’: ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (baudrillard [ ] , p. ). what is known about him (or her) stems from sensational press reports which were informed by gothic imagery and the fear of the other. the creation of the humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of image of jack the ripper, including his wax likeness, complete with his (stereo)typical signifiers—long knife, top hat, black bag, black overcoat—stems from descriptions by people claiming to have seen him, and its development is parallel to the steps baudrillard assigned to the creation of a simulacrum: ‘ it is the reflection of a basic reality’ (the witnesses’ words), ‘ it masks and perverts a basic reality’ (sensational press reports), ‘ it masks the absence of a basic reality’ (reproductions of images), ‘ it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (production of waxworks) (baudrillard [ ] , p. , emphasis original). accordingly, dan laughey states that the ripper ‘has become a baudrillardian simulation’ and ‘is hyperreal’ (laughey , p. ), and the following paragraphs will discuss twenty- and twenty-first-century texts encompassing various media—novels, short stories, films and tv series, computer and virtual reality games, and museum exhibitions—which serve as further evidence that figures of jack not only do not bring us any closer to revealing the identity of the killer or discovering the reality of this figure, but speed it along its path towards the mythical, while at the same time making the very real victims of the notorious murderer less real and less fleshed-out. publications addressing depictions of the ripper in wax (aliffe ; woods and baddeley ) seem to develop the list of titles provided under the label the ‘waxwork motif’ offered in jack the ripper. his life and crimes in popular entertainment (coville and lucanio [ ] , pp. – ). a notable exception is the ripperologist article, ‘whitechapel’s wax chamber of horrors, ’ ( ), in which mike hawley presents the then exhibition of the images of the ripper victims and the outrage it caused. mark jones describes the waxwork theme as ‘a minor strand in ripper representations’ (jones , p. ), yet the very fact of its continuous presence over the last thirteen decades deserves consideration. the present article aims to examine the instances of depicting both the killer and the victims in wax in the context of the sensationalism and curiosity about various anomalies permeating the era, as well as their later screen, print, and museum adaptations and appropriations in the context of the ripper’s cultural afterlife. unlike other neo-victorian re-imaginings, which ‘seek to return the murderer to reality by narrating motivation’ (maier , p. ), the waxwork theme ignores historicity in favour of symbolism. it is my contention that its particular stages aptly reflect the changes in the cultural significance of the killer, but generally fail to address the imbalance between his and his victims’ representations. calling the nineteenth century a golden age of waxworks would not be an exaggeration. what became the best-known museum of wax figures in the world started with marie tussaud’s thirty figures exhibited in london in . nine decades later, one of its infamous exhibits—mrs pearcey—attracted over thirty thousand visitors on a single day—boxing day; this seems to confirm lucy worsley’s conclusion that the best form of spending free time for lower classes was being ‘face-to-face with murderers’ (worsley [ ] , p. ). the victorians were well aware of the marketing potential notorious figures offered to any entertainment and news business. the star newspaper, launched in january , would not have achieved its status or popularity had it not been for its sensational reporting of the whitechapel murders of that year. it was not possible for madame tussaud’s to capitalise on the case by including jack the ripper among its waxen figures due to its strict policy on adhering to the original: there was no original to model on. for many years, its only references to the figure of the mysterious murderer had been other killers: george chapman, thomas neill cream, frederick bailey deeming—suspects at various stages of the development of the ripper myth—and florence maybrick, whose husband is also often listed as a suspect (woods and baddeley , p. ). other victorian entrepreneurs, however, were free from such qualms and exhibited not only the seemingly faceless whitechapel killer but also the images of the bodies of his victims. the shockingly detailed and graphic descriptions of the injuries of the ripper victims disseminated by the press, which probably served as the basis for their models in wax, cannot be treated merely as a medical report of post-mortem examinations. to contemporary commentators their bodies were ‘reminiscent of “those horrible wax anatomical specimens” on display in medical museums and in the windows of anatomical shops’ (walkowitz , p. ). both hawley ( ) and worsley [ ] humanities , , of ( ) place their discussions of victorian waxworks in the context of ‘venuses’—models of female bodies displayed in anatomical museums, which exposed internal organs, including reproductive ones. however, if some of these models ‘were venerated as beautiful and even erotic objects’ (worsley [ ] , p. ), the whitechapel victims were compared to ‘slaughtered animals’ and ‘dissected cadavers’ that seems to better reflect the prevailing mood. individually, the victims and their bodies ceased to matter; collectively, they became ‘the mounting array of the “grotesque,” mutilated corpses’ (walkowitz , p. ). when photographed and ‘[d]epersonalised in sepia and white, the women became static dissections of the ripper ’s deviant psyche to be studied for clues to his identity, not their individual personae’ (maier , p. ). similarly, waxworks representing those women mattered so far as they mirrored the wounds inflicted by the mysterious killer. already in august people interested in following the bloody trail of the whitechapel killer could admire his latest ‘work’ in the form of wax figures of his victims at whitechapel road, with exhibits being added following each murder (hawley ). they formed a part of a relatively typical display which included various ‘celebrities’ and a chamber of horrors, whose proprietor, thomas barry, did not refrain from using a fair amount of red paint to exploit the most recent victim. as noted by helen davies, the ‘victimisation’ of the women killed during the autumn of terror ‘continue[d] with posthumous objectification and exhibition’ (davies , p. ). they were no longer working as prostitutes, but new procurers were profiting from displaying their wax likenesses, an equivalent to the continuation of the selling of their exposed bodies to anyone willing to pay the admission price. an interesting commentary on the consumers of wax exhibits of the victims of jack the ripper comes from a seemingly unlikely source—a man who himself was a freakshow attraction, joseph merrick, the so-called ‘elephant man’. he noted that the people interested in seeing such ghastly displays wore black silk hats, white scarves, and parasols (davies , p. )—apparent signifiers of a class that rarely visited whitechapel, accessories usually spotted among the ‘slummers’. waxworks were used to satisfy the curiosity and morbid needs of the audience of the whitechapel murder series, but also became a kind of canvas on which the viewers could trace the macabre progress of the ‘artist’. thomas barry and his daughter, mrs roberts, would probably have continued their business undisturbed had it not been for the form of advertising they chose. the front window of their museum displayed pictures of the exhibits, ‘the poor victims who have been so brutally murdered of late’ (hawley , p. ). as reported by contemporary newspapers, ‘one picture showed six women lying down injured and covered in blood, and with their clothes disturbed,’ and within five days of the murder of annie chapman, a wax likeness of her body was added to the collection and advertised with another distressing picture (hawley , p. ). even if in reality, the waxworks within were ‘sadly mutilated figures that have done duty on many previous occasions’ which were now treated with ‘a few streaks of red paint,’ as reported in east london observer two days later (hawley , p. ); at that particular moment they were representing women who lived in the area and whose fate was not merely a sensational piece of gossip to those who knew them. the reaction of the locals, who were threatening to destroy the picture and were dispersed by the police, testifies to that. thomas barry had to remove the picture and, in the end, was convicted for ‘being a nuisance in whitechapel road’ (hawley , p. ). he was using the images of the victims to attract customers to his collection which included many notorious characters, organised in tableaus recreating the very act of committing murder, or execution of the murderer. although he relied on representing in wax what everyone could read in the press, the reaction of the east enders made him turn to exhibiting an apparently less disturbing element of the whitechapel horror—an effigy of jack the ripper. london was not the only city where a representation of the whitechapel killer could have been seen. on november , , the star reported that a wax figure of the ripper on display in liverpool was damaged by a canadian tourist, who was later arrested and fined (curtis , p. ), but the waxworks business specialising in horrors was too lucrative to allow itself to be in any way hampered by such events. in her account of the victorian fascination with crime, judith flanders notes that already by the spring of , mere months after the last murder attributed to the whitechapel killer, humanities , , of ‘jack the ripper exhibitions were a commercial proposition’ and quotes two advertisements relating to that. one is from a provider for ‘the wax head of “jack the ripper”, carefully modelled from sketches published in the “daily telegraph”, furnished by witnesses who had actually seen him, also a wax head of mary jeanette [sic] kelly, hi[s] last victim’, and the other from a waxworks in cardiff declaring an intention ‘to buy a set of jack the ripper victims’ (flanders , p. ). what emerges from the and reports is that whereas the wax images of the victims ‘stopped’ at the second stage of simulacra, reflecting and perverting reality, the wax images of the killer went a step further and masked the absence of the original model (baudrillard [ ] , p. ). what is interesting, when the wax version of the killer started to be represented in popular culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was only the killer’s simulacrum that continued its development; his victims were put to rest, at least for a few decades. as suggested by denis meikle, the text that might have influenced two earliest cinematic depictions of the waxwork motif, farmer spudd and his missus take a trip to town ( ) and waxworks ( ), was the lodger by marie belloc lowndes (meikle , p. ), first published as a short story ( ) and then as a novel ( ). towards the end of the plot, its jack the ripper character, mr sleuth/the ‘avenger’, suggests to mrs bunting, his landlady, and daisy, her stepdaughter, a visit to madame tussaud’s to celebrate daisy’s eighteenth birthday. the venue has positive connotations to mrs bunting, as it was the place where she used to spend a lot of her free time with her husband-to-be. the lodger has never been there, and his first impression is negative: ‘the presence of those curious, still, waxen figures which suggest so strangely death in life, seemed to surprise and affright him’ (lowndes [ ] , p. ). still, the girl’s excitement about going into the chamber of horrors seems infectious, and they are about to enter ‘the curious, vault-like chamber where waxen effigies of dead criminals stand grouped in wooden docks’ (lowndes [ ] , p. ). what prevents them from going in is the presence of important visitors inside, among them the commissioner of the london police and the chief of the paris police. the former is overheard saying he is on the verge of catching the perpetrator of the latest series of murders and he knows what the man looks like. suspecting his landlady of betrayal, mr sleuth excuses himself by saying he is feeling ill and exits the building, never to come back. fictional representations of jack the ripper as a wax figure reflect the change in the perception of him as a more and more mythical being: from a real threat in to an oneiric presence on the silent screen. the aforementioned farmer spudd and his missus take a trip to town ( ) was a short movie about a couple visiting the chamber of horrors, falling asleep there, and dreaming about the exhibits coming to life, one of them being jack (aliffe ). his next screen appearance is in the german expressionist film waxworks ( ), originally das wachsfigurenkabinett, directed by paul leni. screen captions inform us that the jack the ripper figure, here labelled spring heeled jack, is ‘the most amazing character of all times’, but also ‘the notorious character [who] pounced suddenly and silently upon his victims’. he is one of the figures that need appealing advertisements, ‘startling tales’ that would attract visitors to the fun fair where the exhibition is set; the other two are caliph haroun-al-raschid and tsar ivan the terrible. the tales about the historic, or real, characters written there was no possibility for mr sleuth to face his wax likeness in madame tussaud’s in the lodger, but scotland yard’s museum, another ‘regular chamber of ‘orrors,’ is mentioned in the text (lowndes [ ] , p. ). man in the attic ( ), one of the screen adaptations of lowndes’s novel, addresses the question of how the killer might react when confronted with exhibits of his deeds. unlike in the novel, where scotland yard’s black museum is visited by daisy and mr bunting, courtesy of pc joe chandler, in the film adaptation we follow jack the ripper himself admiring his ‘work’. an interesting instance of a rewritten victorian villain visiting madame tussaud’s and commenting on his representation is cole haddon and m.s. corley’s comic book the strange case of mr. hyde (haddon and corley ). hyde, looking nothing like the monster he is supposed to be, notices a hideous wax figure—a tableau depicting the incident with the girl, the first instance when the readers meet hyde in stevenson’s novel—and says: ‘oh dear, this isn’t right. there was no pram’ (p. ). a similar impression is expressed in the autobiography of jack the ripper, when the eponymous killer comments on paul leni’s waxworks, a film he believes to be ‘technically perfect’: ‘but as regards the episode of jack the ripper, i am able to state, from definite knowledge, that it bore not the slightest resemblance either in person, scene or action to the reality; of course, i should have marvelled had it been otherwise’ (carnac , p. ). humanities , , of by the poet (william dieterle) reflect his interest in the daughter of the waxworks proprietor, and are presented to the viewer in the form of cinematic stories. it is only the more legendary, or hyperreal, jack the ripper (werner krauss) that is depicted in a dream sequence about an animated wax figure. described as the most expressionistic episode of waxworks (eisner [ ] , p. ), the final and the shortest sequence (approximately six minutes out of almost two hours of the running time) presents the waxwork as not only moving, but following the poet and the daughter. the close-ups on his eyes create an impression that the infamous killer is looking straight at the viewer. the surreal zeotropic background increases the feeling of unease, culminating when the approaching figure itself is multiplied—it seems there is no escaping him. the poet is stabbed with the knife, an indispensable ripper accessory, and probably the only (stereo)typical ripper signifier modern audience would recognise, since the figure is dressed in a double-breasted long coat accessorised with a long white scarf and a homburg hat. if it were not for those eyes and stealthy steps combined with the initial uncertainty whether the figure is actually alive, this representation would not seem that sinister or scary. the nightmarish sequence ends, the knife turns out to be the only weapon the poet has: his own pen; everyone, including the viewer, is safe. the hyperreality, after all, comprises of images and signs, not of actual objects. before discussing other screen representations of jack in wax, let us turn to the text that introduces the theme of a special relationship between the person owning and/or running the waxworks and the figures. robert arthur’s ‘ . . . said jack the ripper’ is a short story which was included by alfred hitchcock in his collection of sixteen tales of terror published a few years later. like waxworks depicted by leni, pop dillon’s chamber of horrors, known as waxworks museum supreme, is located in an amusement park. dillon has a habit of talking to his figures, who, apparently, talk back: pop was always willing to chat when one of his wax figures seemed in the mood, and he had had a number of interesting conversations with some of them, such as the ones he had with jack the ripper, who was naturally boastful. others, though, never spoke a word—they were the silent types. pop never tried to force them to talk—even a wax dummy had a right to privacy, he figured. (arthur [ ] , p. ). the other boastful type and a good talker is billy the kid, while jesse james is the only silent one (arthur [ ] , p. ). the story revolves around the latest tableau depicting the execution of one burke morgan, who unexpectedly escapes and hides among dillon’s wax figures. the ripper values morgan’s ‘work’ and describes him as ‘a very artful dodger ’ (arthur [ ] , p. ), yet his loyalty to dillon and admiration for his skills are stronger. moreover, jack is a proper team worker—when morgan dies and a new voice is added to pop’s figures, one boasting about being the greatest attraction, the ripper immediately reacts: let him talk all he wants, jack said. just don’t answer him and he’ll get tired of being left out. there’s no point in being concerned over who draws the crowds, because what’s good for one of us is good for all of us. why, think what would happen if pop ever had to go out of business. we’d be sold, melted down—killed. (arthur [ ] , p. , emphasis original). such a manifestation of solidarity coming from the most notorious murderer may seem surprising, however, it may also be read as an expression of the status of the ripper at the time—an uncaught murderer, true, but when shaped as a wax figure, merely one of many infamous figures. what further reduces his significance as a key attraction of the museum is the medium—a short story which does not describe his appearance. paradoxically, it highlights the importance of his words and makes this text probably the only positive representation of jack the ripper not only as a wax figure, but as a character. what enforces this positive reading is the lack of his victims: omitted, they cannot testify to his horrible deeds, and their absence masks the reality. this ripper is no longer the whitechapel killer but a fun fair attraction bearing little relation to ‘himself’, his own simulacrum. whether the events described in the story are manifestations of some supernatural agency, a product of the main character’s imagination, or possibly even deranged mind, is for the reader to decide. humanities , , of the motif of a jack the ripper waxwork in danger of being ‘killed’, whilst also being used to satisfy and conceal one’s murderous instincts by presenting the figure as seemingly coming to life, is used in two screen representations: ‘the new exhibit’ ( ), an episode of the twilight zone tv series, and terror in the wax museum ( ), a horror/mystery movie. although both depict the ripper as one of many exhibits, his status seems extraordinary. ‘the new exhibit’ jack is described by martin senescu (martin balsam), the curator of ferguson’s wax museum, as ‘another soul in torment . . . immortalised in wax, remembered as you and i will never be’. what distinguishes him from other figures is a hidden mechanism—when the tour of the murderers row comes to an end and jack’s story has been presented, the figure’s hand holding the knife, described as the one that was used to kill his victims, swings unexpectedly, scaring and exciting visitors. unlike some exhibits there, which are organised into tableaus representing the acts of murders, the ripper (david bond) stands alone. his clothes seem inconspicuous, yet the scarf around his neck is reminiscent of leni’s depiction and the black bag denotes evil intentions, an impression strengthened by the dark eyes and sinister grin. his victims are merely mentioned, described by the curator as ‘pathetic drabs’. when senescu decides to save the five infamous figures from uncertain fate after fergusson is forced to sell the museum by placing them in his basement, jack is the one that attracts his closest attention. and jack is the one that commits the first murder, at least so it seems. similar seniority is attributed to the wax figure of the ripper in terror in the wax museum. its very opening is suggestive of a standard ripper-esque scene: a horse-driven cab moves along an almost empty, gas-lit street, and when a police officer appears the viewers seem already prepared to hear the scream of another victim. the plot is set ten years after the last ripper murder, and his wax likeness is the main attraction of duppree’s wax museum and chamber of horrors, advertised as ‘london’s very own jack the ripper’. it is introduced as an uncanny presence—when mrduppree is thinking about selling his establishment, jack looks ‘as if he knew what [duppree is] contemplating’. jack is the first figure to attack the proprietor, first verbally and then physically, in what turns out to be duppree’s bad dream. what is more, it is jack’s knife that is used to eventually kill him. as suggested by one of the characters, the real ripper, who was never caught, might have ‘came out of the retirement because he didn’t like the way he looked here in wax’. despite, or because of, such suggestions, jack continues to attract visitors to the museum: ‘show us the bloody ripper. we want the ripper’, they demand. and thus, the notoriety of the cleanshaven figure in a white shirt, black jacket, coat, and hat, holding the deadly knife and apparently seen at new crime scenes continues. ‘the new exhibit’ posits five infamous killers in the category of would-be victims, exhibits in danger and in need of rescue, substituting the five original/real victims. similar to terror in the wax museum, it clears the figure of jack of the possibility of being possessed by or being an incarnation of the ripper, and capitalises on its status of a serial killer celebrity. while these two screen depictions present curators of waxworks whose interest in the infamous killers is bordering on obsession—one is suspected of impersonating the killer, the other is projecting his own murders on them—the open question remains as to what extent they may be reflecting the viewers’ fascination with the whitechapel murderer. the titles discussed so far, especially the screen ones, rely on the concept of the uncanny (cf. smith , p. ; jones , p. ) to unsettle the audience, but also, like any corporeal depiction of jack the ripper, force them to suspend their disbelief while looking at the likeness of someone whose face will most probably remain unknown. and since the easiest way to tame fear of the unknown is to ridicule it, a lighter form of representing the wax motif can also be found. ‘house of max’ ( ) is the title of two episodes of an american spoof tv series get smart created by mel brooks, in which maxwell smart, an american, and his partner, agent , cooperate with chief inspector sparrow of scotland yard to solve a dozen jack-the-ripper-style murders committed in contemporary foggy london. when a suspicious man (george sawaya) lurking around agent in hyde park is shot by smart, there are no doubts as to his identity: black coat and top hat combined with a knife unequivocally signify jack the ripper, or, as a medical report confirms, his wax dummy. an inspection of three museums reveals humanities , , of that one, duval’s cave of wax, is missing the figure. this is confirmed not by a name tag next to an empty space, but by an incomplete tableau: a depiction of a solitary screaming woman. it could have gone unnoticed if duval did not decide to stand in for the missing ripper and, equipped with a knife, commence a mock attack on the agents. the proprietor turns out to be a genius when it comes to creating wax likenesses and a (mad) scientist in one—his primary occupation seems injecting figures with a life-giving serum, which also gives him complete control over the figure, and sending them to kill people. ‘house of max’ is the first twentieth century title discussed here to include the wax likeness of a victim of jack the ripper. she seems presentable—dressed in a long purple skirt, black blouse, black hat with a white feather—with only a boa shawl that may be an indication of her profession; that, and the very presence of a solitary screaming woman in a wax museum specialising in fictional and historic villains. a cursory glance may suggest that this is a rather decent representation of the prospective victim, especially when compared with the real wax depictions from ; on the other hand, her appearance masks the everyday reality of the east end women who were forced to turn to prostitution as a way of earning not even a living, but a few pennies. moreover, her part is comparable to other cinematic ripper victims from the turn of the sixties and seventies, who were supposed to look pretty, seductive even, and scream—though this one cannot be heard. she is anonymous, and her main task is to reveal the absence of jack the ripper. waxwork ( ) and waxwork ii: lost in time ( ), both directed by anthony hickox, are preoccupied neither with jack the ripper, nor his victims, who yet again are used merely as clues to the identity of the figure. his animated tableau in the former and scene in the latter take very little screen time. in the first movie, he is overshadowed by a werewolf, a vampire, the phantom of the opera, zombies, and marquise de sade. depicted as a moustachioed villain in a colourful attire comprising of a houndstooth jacket, checked coat, cravat and top hat—straight out of a victorian melodrama, with the knife and the prostitute as the only proper indications of his identity—he becomes alive together with his victim, sporting a colourful dress and bright red lips. together with numerous other waxworks, they attack the protagonists in the final scene, and the ripper meets his end at the hand of a woman—sarah, the main female character—who kills him with a blade much longer than jack’s knife. the sequel also positions the infamous killer and his victim among other villains and monsters, including aliens, zombies, mr hyde, nosferatu, and godzilla, who form a sequence of time-travelling episodes of kaleidoscopic dimensions. this time, however, since all the scenes take place not in waxworks but their ‘original’ time and place, it is the stereotypical cinematographic setting comprising of a cobbled street in london docks and a foggy evening that introduces the viewers to the ripper. his identity is confirmed by further stereotypical elements of his attire, such as the black cloak, top hat, and bag, and an altogether untypical razor. since the depicted scene is an attack on a prostitute, the screaming victim prompts some vaguely chivalric response in the main character, who is otherwise engaged in fighting for his life throughout all the time-travelling scenes: he knocks the razor out, kicks the ripper, and disappears into another time and space. what is supposed to be a re-enactment of a whitechapel murder scene is not only a recreation of a few already well-established ripperan motifs (the killer’s appearance, his ‘toff’ or mad doctor identity), but also another hyperreal scene grounded in the cultural afterlife, or the mythical ‘reality’ of the mysterious murderer. the waxwork sequel’s setting and time-changing mood is the premise of a computer game of the same year. waxworks ( ), a product of accolade inc. and horror soft ltd., suggests that the gaming industry has learnt its lesson from a few years earlier, when the shocking graphics of the victims in the jack the ripper computer game ( ) caused very strong reactions (begg and bennett , p. ). here the wax tableau of the killer and his victim is reminiscent of the cinematic depictions in ‘the house of max’ and waxwork: a prospective victim—this time almost fainting, not screaming—on the left, the gentlemen-like killer equipped with the knife on the right. again, the ripper segment is one of a series, the three others being an egyptian princess entombed, a mutant plant in a mine, and zombies in a graveyard. the waxworks serve as time portals, worlds to be entered with the help of powerful humanities , , of magic in order to find and kill ‘the most evil of all the twins that have been born to past generations in our family’ and thus remove a witch’s ancient curse (waxworks ). the change from reception to interaction, which characterises such immersive media, includes the player character being accused of being the ripper, fleeing from vigilantes, angry mobs or police, being arrested, and even watching one’s avatar being hanged. the objective of the game is to collect useful objects and information and eventually kill the ripper, which, being a time-travelling experience, would explain his disappearance and why the murders came to such an abrupt end. the final confrontation is a swordstick versus knife duel with a masked man in dark clothes, top hat, and carrying a medical bag. even if the player character’s throat is slashed, the game may continue until the ripper, the evil twin, is killed—the medium-specific simulation of the encounter(s) guarantees that. despite being objectified and marginalised on screen, the victims were brought into focus in reality around the centenary of the whitechapel murders. to a large extent, it was connected with the protests against various forms of centennial celebrations planned, for example, by the jack the ripper pub (till and since known as ten bells), with women against violence against women and action against the ripper centenary leading the way. what made people really notice the women who were murdered in was the re-emergence of the photographs of four of them: mary ann nichols, annie chapman, elizabeth stride, and mary kelly (begg and bennett , pp. – ). even madame tussaud’s decided to include a ripper tableau in an ‘eat the cake and have the cake’ manner—adhering to its principle of exhibiting true to life figures, they displayed a reconstruction of a dark, narrow cobbled victorian street, a sinister alley where the effigy of prostitute mary kelly, last victim of jack the ripper, leans waiting for custom at the door of her sordid room. in a dim passage the body of catherine eddowes lies bloody and mutilated by the invisible ripper, while patrons drinking in the ten bells are disturbed by the sound of screams and running feet. (pauline chapman qtd in woods and baddeley , p. ). while this caused some concern among the women against violence against women (woods and baddeley , p. ), it was the london dungeon’s graphic waxworks forming part of the ‘jack the ripper experience’ that drew the attention of the campaign against pornography (begg and bennett , p. ). when the jack the ripper museum opened in , it followed the tussaud’s and not the dungeon’s lead. pictures on its website suggest a possibility of ‘meeting’ the killer there, yet the display does not include his wax representation. the three figures depicted there are inspector abberline in the third-floor recreation of a police station, and pc watkins finding the body of catherine eddowes in the first-floor tableau set in mitre square. even though the scene is not an accurate representation of the state eddowes was found in, it may be said to correct the mistakes of the past when the sensationalism and cheap thrill of seeing a colourful wax simulacrum, instead of a black and white illustration or reading a description of it in a paper, stood in the way of decency and respect due for the deceased. three months before the jack the ripper museum opened, the second season of the mashup tv series penny dreadful ( – ) premiered. in its first episode, ‘fresh hell’ ( ), the creature subplot takes the viewers to putney’s family waxworks. it is open every day, and offers historical, comical, and tragical tableaus. its chamber of horror is labelled the chambers of grotesque and gore, and is being updated with the proprietor’s ‘new gimmick—my chambers of crime . . . homicide scenes plucked from the headlines and recreated here in the most minute detail’, his pride and joy. the first of its exhibits to be seen is depicted with his back to the viewer, but there is no mistaking that the series not only is a mashup of various victorian villainous characters, but also a reworking referencing other works of popular culture. as far as the theme of this article is concerned, the creature’s entering waxworks may be read as a far echo of the poet from leni’s waxwork, who also visited it not out of curiosity, but after noticing a job advertisement. his very presence there and confinement to the basement may be an echo of karkov, a handicapped man (who is even called by some ‘a creature’) from fenady’s terror in the wax museum. humanities , , of top hat, cape, and long bloody knife in his hand; there is also a victim, rather strangely posed for the onlookers’ convenience. mr putney places his hand on the figure’s shoulder and introduces him saying ‘here’s old jack himself’, re-establishing the ripper as the waxworks superstar and reintroducing the special relationship between the proprietor and the exhibit known from roberts’s short story, the twilight zone episode, and terror in the wax museum. the strangely posed victim is said to be annie chapman: ‘what we couldn’t discover, we invented, of course. no one will know the difference. you tell the public a thing is real, it is.’ thus, again the status of reality is being questioned, and it is its hyperreal version that holds more appeal to the consumers of the serial killer narrative. ‘old jack’ was referenced in the first two episodes of the series, ‘night work’ and ‘séance’ ( ), set in september , with the press wondering whether he was behind the latest atrocious murders. in the waxworks context, his figure is one of the incentives to visit the exhibition, as suggested by the advertisement at the entrance: ‘coming soon/london’s monstrous crimes/brought to life/jack the ripper/the brixton poisoner/the mariner’s inn massacre’. but as the series neo-victorian voice comes to the fore, the real monsters turn out to be the putneys themselves. mr putney’s careless approach to facts—or rather the medium-specific focus on simulation—is, to some extent, repeated in the latest addition to the waxwork motif: the wax house: jack the ripper ( ), a virtual reality game. the difference between the setting of the waxworks computer game is that this wax museum is not a collection of random scary rooms, but a place dedicated to the five canonical victims of jack the ripper. a voiceover in the game’s trailer informs that ‘nobody is saying things happened exactly this way, but i never let facts get in the way of a good story.’ the similarity to almost any game of the kind is the objective to solve certain puzzles and find clues leading to the answer to the thirteen-decade-old question: who was jack the ripper? his wax representation is placed in the tableaus with the victims, with particular scenes designed to recreate the five murder scenes; interestingly, a sixth one is added with only the killer’s figure there. mary kelly’s room does not look like the interior of miller’s court, other tableaus may also misrepresent crime scenes, but the dark corridors and dead ends of the museum introduce the proper mood. what also makes this game stand out from other waxworks depicted on screen is that the victims, or their ghosts, appear: they talk, sing, and move. they are given voice, denied to them by curators and creators of wax museums thus far. the current discussion was started with waxworks and continued with twenty- and twenty-first-century texts encompassing various media: a novel and short story, films and tv series, computer and virtual reality games, museum exhibitions. this april brought an additional entry to this list—a radio dramatization of mark lawson’s the deletion committee (lawson ), a text reflecting on recent changes in social discourse on women, with social media taking over the debate led by the #metoo and #timesup movements. the eponymous committee of oliver’s waxwork world meets to select waxworks exhibits of (mostly) men who have recently been criticised for their (mostly) sexual transgressions. gallery by gallery—corridor of power, hollywood hall of fame, sporting heroes, creative geniuses—two women and two men vote whether to delete or display a given figure. no names are given, only numbers, but the transgressions described clearly point to well-known politicians, captains of industry, celebrities. it is when a well-known second-wave feminist’s fate is about to be sealed that the selection process starts being questioned. the chamber of horrors waxworks, however, are safe; even jack the ripper. visual depictions of the whitechapel killer aptly illustrate jean baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, with his wax likenesses being especially telling, highlighting the absence of the original and bearing no relation to reality. equipped with stereotypical ripper-esque signifiers, they ‘substitut[e] signs of the real for the real itself’ (baudrillard [ ] , p. ). whether exhibited on his own or together with one of the victims, the ripper’s wax tableaus represent scenes taken out of the context and original setting, accommodated to cater to the tastes of contemporary audiences. in , when londoners were eagerly following the instalments in the ripper series of murders, their only evident clue was the bodies of the victims. mutilated by the killer, dissected by the doctors, and further anatomised by the press, humanities , , of they were offered to a public hungry for sensation in the form of wax exhibits. such representation brought about anonymity, as they no longer were mary ann nichols, annie chapman, elizabeth stride, catherine eddowes, or mary kelly, but the victims of the ripper; their disrepute as prostitutes contributed to their marginalisation. anonymity is also the defining characteristic of their killer which, paradoxically, turned him into a celebrity—notorious, infamous, but instantly recognisable. waxen representations of jack and his victims capitalised on the discrepancies between them: the growing fame of the perpetrator and the lessening importance of the victims were informed by class and gender issues. the latter’s initial absence in the wax tableaus represented in popular culture—waxworks ( ), ‘ . . . said jack the ripper’ ( ), ‘the new exhibit’ ( ), terror in the wax museum ( )—reflects the significance of the killer as a character in his own right. their later appearance as clues as to the identity of the figure of the killer—‘house of max’ ( ), waxwork ( ), waxwork ii: lost in time ( ), waxworks ( ), penny dreadful ( , season )—indicates the continuous marginalisation, stereotyping, and even trivialisation of the victims. unlike their underprivileged real-life counterparts, the screen victims are depicted as more deserving of the interest of the ripper as the ‘gent’/’toff’: better dressed and made-up, these wax (and usually animated) figures create seemingly more visually pleasant tableaus—seemingly, since they remain his passive prey. it is the wax house: jack the ripper ( ) that, apart from fairly similar depictions, finally gives them some voice as well. it may be only for the sake of solving the ripper puzzle, but nevertheless, it may suggest that the waxwork theme has started to catch up with other neo-victorian representations. in wax tableaus displayed in museums it is the killer who is absent, but the shift in attitude towards the perpetrator and the victim can also be traced. whereas madame tussaud’s ‘ripper street’ exhibits the mutilated body of catherine eddowes and the transgressive body of mary kelly awaiting her client, containing an element of the ‘male gaze’ (walkowitz , pp. – ), the jack the ripper museum displays a police officer discovering the dead (but apparently not mutilated) body of catherine eddowes, signalling readiness to catch and punish the murderer. the whitechapel killer became jack the ripper, an almost mythical creation, and as such has been experiencing an extremely rich afterlife in popular culture. when reimagined in a wax from, however, he seems to share the fate of his victims and becomes one of the means of attracting contemporary audience’s attention. in a very postmodern fashion, it is only his image that came to matter, an image that, being a simulacrum, does not, and cannot, reflect reality. though in each case the wax figure of jack the ripper has a face and may be said to be based on a person, the overwhelming majority of the narratives discussed here do not revolve around the identity of the whitechapel killer. he appears as one of the well-known (possibly best-known, but still one of many) killers or evildoers, a representative of the late nineteenth century, and testimony to our morbid fascination with the victorian art of murder. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references aliffe, andy. . jack ‘n wax. available online: http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/aliffe-wax.html (accessed on april ). arthur, robert. . . . . said jack the ripper. in alfred hitchcock presents: skeletons from my closet. new york: dell publishing co., inc., pp. – . first published . baudrillard, jean. . symbolic exchange and death. in selected writings. edited and introduced by mark poster. stanford: stanford university press, pp. – . first published . baudrillard, jean. . simulacra and simulations. in selected writings. edited and introduced by mark poster. stanford: stanford university press, pp. – . first published . begg, paul, and john bennett. . the complete and essential jack the ripper. london: penguin books. carnac, james. . the autobiography of jack the ripper. london: corgi books. coville, gary, and patrick lucanio. . jack the ripper. his life and crimes in popular entertainment. jefferson and london: mcfarland & company, inc., publishers. first published . http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/aliffe-wax.html humanities , , of curtis, l. perry, jr. . jack the ripper and the london press. new haven and london: yale university press. davies, helen. . neo-victorian freakery. the cultural afterlife of the victorian freak show. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. eisner, lotte h. . ekran demoniczny [l’ecran démoniaque]. translated by konrad eberhardt. gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria. first published . flanders, judith. . the invention of murder. how the victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime. london: harper press. haddon, cole, and m. s. corley. . the strange case of mr. hyde. milwaukie: dark horse books. hawley, mike. . whitechapel’s wax chamber of horrors, . ripperologist : – . house of max. . get smart. created by mel brooks. new york: cbs, part and part . jones, mark. . jack the representation. in neo-victorian villains. adaptations and transformations in popular culture. edited by benjamin poore. leiden and boston: brill rodopi, pp. – . laughey, dan. . ripper. in barthes’ ‘mythologies’ today. readings of contemporary culture. edited by pete bennett and julian mcdougall. new york and london: routledge. taylor & francis group, pp. – . lawson, mark. . the deletion committee. directed by eoin o’callaghan. london: big fish, bbc radio , aired on april . lowndes, marie belloc. . the lodger. harpenden: gaslight crime. first published in . maier, sarah e. . chasing the dragon: bangtails, toffs, jack and johnny in neo-victorian fiction. in neo- victorian gothic. horror, violence and degeneration in the re-imagined nineteenth century. edited by marie-louise kohlke and christian gutleben. amsterdam and new york: rodopi, pp. – . man in the attic. . directed by hugo fregonese. washington: panoramic productions, leonard goldstein. mcfarlane’s monsters series : six faces of madness. . available online: http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/ starstore_catalogue_mcfarlane_s_monsters_series_ _six_faces_of_madness_ .html (accessed on april ). meikle, denis. . jack the ripper. the murders and the movies. london: reynolds & hearn ltd. penny dreadful. – . created by john logan. new york: showtime, seasons and . schmid, david. . natural born celebrities: serial killers in american culture. chicago: university of chicago press. smith, clare. . jack the ripper in film and culture. top hat, gladstone bag and fog. london: palgrave macmillan. terror in the wax museum. . directed by georg fenady. usa: bing crosby productions. the new exhibit. . twilight zone. created by charles beaumont and rod serling. new york: cbs, season , episode . the wax house: jack the ripper. . simi valley: hollow studios, inc. walkowitz, judith r. . city of dreadful delight. narratives of sexual danger in late-victorian london. chicago: the university of chicago press. waxwork. . directed by anthony hickox. west germany and stamford: palla, vestron pictures, hb filmrullen. waxwork ii: lost in time. . directed by anthony hickox. east fremantle: electric pictures. waxwork. n.dat. in oxford dictionaries. available online: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/waxwork (accessed on april ). waxworks [das wachsfigurenkabinett]. . directed by paul leni. germany: neptune-film a.g.. waxworks. . designed by michael woodroffe, alan bridgman and simon woodroffe. san jose: accolade inc., n/a: horror soft ltd. woods, paul, and gavin baddeley. . saucy jack. the elusive ripper. chatham: ian allan publishing. worsley, lucy. . a very british murder. the curious story of how crime was turned into art. london: bbc books. first published . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/starstore_catalogue_mcfarlane_s_monsters_series_ _six_faces_of_madness_ .html http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/starstore_catalogue_mcfarlane_s_monsters_series_ _six_faces_of_madness_ .html https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/waxwork http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	references _juuni_ea_ _reklaamitu.indd reformid eesti tervishoius – edulugu ja õppetunnid väino sinisalu – ea peatoimetaja käesoleva aasta aprillis-mais toimus kaks esin- duslikku tervishoiureforme käsitlevat konverentsi: . aprillil korraldas haigekassa konverentsi teemal “ aastat ravikindlustussüsteemi eestis” ja . mail tÜ kliinikum kevadkonverentsi teemal „arengu - kavad eesti meditsiinis – ”. eesti arst teeb kokkuvõtte konverentsidel kõneldust. mär tsist rakendus vabariigi valitsuse otsus, mis kinnitas haigekassa põhimääruse ja ravikindlustusmakse tasumise korra. sellega käivitus eestis kindlustusmeditsiin. nagu meenutas haigekassa konverentsil georg männik, kes eesti üleminekuaastatel töötas mitmel juhitaval kohal ter vishoiuministeeriumis, arenes idee kindlustusmeditsiini rakendamiseks samal ajal nõukogude aja lõpul küpsenud isemajandava eesti (ime) kontseptsiooniga. kindlustusmeditsiini põhi- mõtete kujundamisel oli eeskujuks skandinaavia maades töötav sotsiaalse ravikindlustuse süsteem. eesmärgiks oli kujundada eestis majanduslikult isereguleeruv tervishoiusüsteem ja rakendada turumajandussuhteid tervishoius. peamiseks finants- allikaks kavandati kohustuslik tervisekindlustusmaks, mida maksavad tööandjad. nähti ka ette, et selle maksu arvel makstakse töövõimetushüvitisi. pikkade arutelude tulemusena fikseeriti, et kohustuslik tervise- kindlustusmaks moodustab % tööandja poolt väljamakstavast töötasust. samal konverentsil andis haigekassa juhatuse esimees hannes danilov ülevaate haigekassa arengust aasta jooksul. algul asutati iseseisvat haigekassat, mis kogusid oma piirkonnast ravikindlustusmaksu ning tasusid teenusepõhiselt raviasutustele. . a loodi keskhaigekassa, mis hakkas maksu koguma ja jagas seda maakondlikele kassadele pearaha alusel. . a alates hakkas ravikindlustusmaks laekuma sotsiaalmaksu osana maksuametisse. avalik-õiguslik eesti haigekassa loodi . a, algul oli sel seitse, . aastast neli piirkond- likku osakonda. haigekassa organisatsioonilised muudatused võimaldasid järjest vähendada selle tegevuskulusid ja . a moodustasid kogu süs- teemi tegevuskulud % haigekassa kogueelarvest. samal ajal kogu riigi tugevnemise ja majanduse edenemisega paranes järjest sotsiaalmaksu lae- kumine ning kasvas oluliselt haigekassa eelarve: . a oli see , miljardit, . a - , miljardit krooni. siiski on eesti riigi kulutused tervishoiule tervikuna teiste euroliidu maadega võrreldes oluli- selt väiksemad, moodustades eri aastati keskmiselt , – , % sktst. haigekassasse laekuvast rahast kaeti tervishoiukulud . a % ulatuses, ini- meste omaosalus oli %, keskvalitus kattis % ja kohalik omavalitsus % tervishoiu kogukuludest. aastate jooksul on paranenud inimeste tervise- kindlustatus ( . a , %; . a , % elanikest), kuid siiski on kindlustamata üle % eesti rahvastikust. haigekassa on regulaarselt korraldanud rahvastiku rahulolu-uuringuid. arstiabi kättesaadavusega on viimaste aastate küsitluste põhjal rahul üle % elanikest ( . a %; . a %). enam ollakse rahul osutatava abi kvaliteediga ( . a %; . a %). h. danilov tõi ka välja meie sotsiaalse ravi- kindlustuse süsteemi tugevad küljed: ) rahavoog tervisehoiusektoris on nähtav, rahaallikad läbi- paistvad ning laekumused stabiilsed; ) tagatud on teenuseosutajate sõltumatus ja haigekassa suhtleb nendega lepingusüsteemi kaudu. need põhimõtted sätestas . aastast kehtiv tervishoiu- teenuste korraldamise seadus. samuti on tagatud eesti arst ; ( ): – tervishoiukulude jälgimise võimalus nii töövõtjate kui ka tööandjate poolt. selle süsteemi rakenda- misega kaasnevad paratamatult ka probleemid: süsteemi suured halduskulud, kulude keerukas ohja- mine. süsteem tervikuna peab suutma hinnata raha laekumist ja nõudlust teenuste järele vähemalt – aastat ette. omaette küsimus on, kuidas tasustada teenuseid, kui need ületavad lepingumahu. praegu tasustatakse neid koefitsiendiga , . haigekassa konverentsil esines põhjaliku ette- kandega „euroopa tervishoiu finantseerimise süsteemid – võimalused ja väljakutsed eesti regionaalses kontekstis” joseph kutzin, who euroopa regiooni nõunik. tema hinnangul on eesti ravikindlustuse ülesehitus ja toimimine positiivseks kogemuseks kogu regioonis. seda iseloomustab vajadusele vastav ja pidev areng, tervishoiu ümber- korralduste vastavus finantseerimise võimalustele ning see, et inimeste omaosalus tervishoiukulude katmisel jääb väiksemaks, kui võiks eeldada ühiskondlikust kogutoodangust tervishoiule eral- datud osa põhjal. eesti haigekassa tulemusele orienteeritud mudel on eeskujuks teistele maadele ravikindlustussüsteemide arendamisel. who on seisukohal, et tervishoiu rahastamise süsteemid peaksid tagama ) võrdsed võimalused ja kohustused nii panustajatele kui ka teenuse saajatele; ) elanike kaitse tervisega seotud finantsriskide eest; ) olema läbipaistvad ja tagama tervishoiusüsteemi efektiivse toimimise ning ) rahastamissüsteemi haldamise kulutõhususe. who euroopa regioonis on riikide kaupa tervis- hoiu ja kogu avaliku sektori rahastamises küllaltki suured erinevused. fiskaalpoliitilisest seisukohast on riikidel erinevad prioriteedid, eestis on riigi osa avaliku sektori, sealhulgas tervishoiukulutuste kat- misel teiste euroopa riikidega võrreldes suhteliselt väike: j. kutzini järgi on eesti selles osas „väike riik” ja võrreldav venemaa ja ukrainaga. eesti eraldab rahvuslikust kogutoodangust tervis- hoiule (skt) ligi %, samal ajal arenenud euroopa riikides on see riigiti – , %. selle tulemusel on eesti inimeste omaosalus tervishoiukulude katmisel suhteliselt suur ning see on aastate jooksul kasva- nud. nii oli . a inimeste omaosalus , % kogu tervishoiu kuludest; . a juba , %. siiski toob j. kutzin huvitava tähelepaneku: kui üldine seaduspärasus on, mida väiksema osa sktst eraldavad riigid tervishoiule, seda suurem on inimeste omaosalus, siis arvestades eesti suhtelist eraldust sktst, on omaosaluse protsent eeldatust väiksem (poolas on eraldis sktst sama mis eestil, kuid omaosalus on %, eestis %). j. kutzini arvates peaks eesti tulevikus oma ravikindlustussüsteemi arendamisel silmas pidama järgmist: arvestades demograafilisi protsesse tulevikus – rahvastiku vananemist ja seega ka maksumaksjate arvu vähenemist –, tuleb edaspidi ravikindlustust planeerides leida sellele ka teisi rahastamisallikaid, et tagada mittepanustajatele kindlustatus tervisehäirete korral. samuti peab riik leidma võimaluse kindlustada ka see osa rahvas- tikust ( %), kes on seni kindlustamata. otsekohe tuleb rakendada meetmeid hiv-nakkuse leviku tõkestamiseks, et vältida tulevikus veelgi suuremaid kulutusi. samuti tuleb leida võimalusi krooniliselt haigete inimeste finantsiliseks toetamiseks, et vältida nende langemist vaesusse, ja vähendada vaesema elanikkonna suhtelist omaosalust terviseteenuste eest tasumisel. ravikindlustussüsteemi arendamise kõrval oli eesti tervishoiusüsteemi ümberkorraldamisel teiseks tähtsaks sammuks perearstisüsteemi loomine ja arendamine. sellest rääkis haigekassa konverentsil prof heidi-ingrid maaroos. eestis on peremeditsiini loomisel lähtutud euroo- pas rakendatud põhimõtetest: üldine (kõiki elanikke haarav) järjepidev, koordineeritud ja kogukonnale suunatud süsteem. meil alustati . a jaoskonna- arstidele perearstiks ümberõppe kursustega ja ka õpetajate koolitusega. tartu Ülikoolis asus . a tööle peremeditsiini õppetool, samal aastal asutati ka eesti perearstide selts. perearsti eriala põhimäärus anti välja . a ja arstlike erialade nimekirja lisandus eriala perearst. alates . a on avatud peremeditsiini residen- tuur. esmatasandi arstiabi reguleerib . a vastu võetud tervishoiuteenuste korraldamise seadus. peremeditsiini eesmärk on tagada kättesaadav arstiabi kõigis vanuses inimestele, lahendada nende kõige sagedasemad terviseprobleemid, rakendades selleks mitmesuguseid laboratoorseid ja instrumentaalseid uurimismeetodeid. pere- arstide nimistud haaravad praegu kõigis vanuses inimesi, ka vastusündinute osakaal perearstide nimistutes on suurenenud ( . a oli perearstide hoole all % vastsündinutest, . a %). h-i. maaroos refereeris . a tehtud uuringut, mille järgi enamiku sagedasemaid terviseprobleeme lahendab perearst: esmatasandil lahendatakse % hingamiselundite haigustega, % südame- vereringehäiretega, % luu-lihaskonna ja sidekoe haigustega seotud juhtudest. regulaarselt on tehtud haigete esmatasandi arsti- abiga rahulolu uuringuid. nende alusel võib väita, et inimesed on perearstisüsteemi omaks võtnud ja enamasti sellega rahul. võrreldes endise jaoskonna- arstide süsteemiga arvab % vastanutest, et perearstide ravimeetodid on muutunud ajakoha- semaks. % hindab uurimisvõimalusi paremaks ja % on veendunud, et perearstid tegelevad varasemast enam paljude terviseprobleemidega. perearstiabi kättesaadavus on paranenud: . a pääses % abivajajatest samal päeval arsti juurde, % pidi – päeva ootama. kasva- nud on rahulolu perearstidega: . a oli sellega rahul või üldiselt rahul %, . a % vasta- nuist. siiski on abiga rahulolu piirkonniti erinev: kui . a oli % lõuna-eesti elanikest rahul esmatasandi arstiabiga, siis tallinnas oli sellega rahul vaid % vastanutest. teistes piirkondades kõikus rahulolijate hulk – % piires. võrreldes . aastaga oli kõigis piirkondades elanike rahulolu kasvanud ligi % võrra. praeguseks on esmatasandi nimistute piirarv , meil on sertifitseeritud perearsti, neist on nimistu omanikud. välismaal töötas . a nimistu-omanikku, keda asendasid asendusarstid. residentuuri, mis kestab aastat, on lõpetanud praeguseks perearsti, doktorikraad on pere- arstil. meie esmatasandi arstiabi on arendatud kompleksselt: tagatud on spetsialistide koolitamine, kehtib kindel ja arusaadav perearstide rahastamis- süsteem. kõrvuti perearstide õpetamisega tehakse ülikoolis ka sellealast teadustööd. tulevikus on h-i. maaroosi hinnangul vaja residentuuri lõpeta- nud perearste enam motiveerida töötama eestis, suurendada residentuurikohtade arvu ni ja kaasata praktiseerivaid arste teadusprojektidesse senisest enam. kõrge hinnangu eesti perearstisüsteemile andis oma ettekandes prof rifat atun londonist. ta nimetas perearstisüsteemi arengut eesti edulooks ning näitas südame-veresoonkonnahaiguste ja astmahaigete käsitluse näidete toel, et selle raken- damisel on paranenud abi kvaliteet, vähenenud on vajadus haigete hospitaliseerimiseks ja kasutusel on tänapäevased tõenduspõhised ravimeetodid. uue finantseerimissüsteemi juurutamine, mille järgi raviasutustele tasuti tehtud töö eest, ja esma- tasandi arstiabi areng tingisid ümberkorraldusi ka haiglate töös. selle tulemusena vähenes hospita- liseeritute arv ja haiglad pidid oma töös lähtuma haigekassa lepingute mahtudest. Üle lepingu mahu ravitud haigusjuhud jäid enamasti tasustamata. oluliseks meditsiinikorralduse instrumendiks sai hinnakiri. viimane soosis eelkõige uuringuid ja operatsioone, tasu voodipäeva eest oli suhteliselt väike. finantsraskustesse jäid väiksemad haiglad, kus tehti vähem uuringuid ja protseduure. arusaadavalt pälvisid need ümberkorraldused suurt kriitikat ja ka teenuste hinnad polnud sageli vastavuses tehtava töö kulukuse ja mahuga. kujunes ka omamoodi nähtus, mida nimetati võidurelvastumiseks – raviasustused püüdsid hankida võimalikult rohkem aparatuuri, et saada mahukamaid haigekassa lepinguid. alati ei toonud see endaga kaasa paremat kvaliteeti. oluliselt vähenes haiglate voodifond ja vähenes ravil viibimise kestus. kõikidele raskustele ja mitte alati adekvaatsetele otsustele vaatamata arenes eesti tervishoid jõud- salt edasi: kasutusele võeti moodne tehnoloogia ja ravidiagnostilised meetodid, moderniseeriti raviasutuste olmetingimusi. kahjuks sai see teoks osaliselt ka personali madalate töötasude ja suure psühhoemotsionaalse stressi arvel. aastaks oli areng jõudnud sellesse etappi, et oli vaja hakata ümber korraldama eriarstiabi ja planeerima investeeringuid haiglahoonetesse. kogemusi ja saavutusi selles vallas kajastas kliini- kumi konverents. Ülevaatega eriarstiabi reformimiseks ja haiglavõrgu ümberkorraldusest esines tarmo bakler. esimeseks sammuks sellel teel oli skandinaavia maade spetsialistide koostatud “hospital master plan” (hmp), mis esitas vastavad soovitused kuni aastani . nad lähtusid rootsi ja norra koge- mustest ning demograafilistest suundumustest eestis. hmp soovitas luua eestis tervishoiupiirkonda, kus tegutsevad keskhaiglad: ida- ja lääne-tallinnas, pärnus ning kohtla-järvel/jõhvis. Üldhaiglad paik- neksid järvamaal, läänemaal, rakveres, narvas, kuressaares, viljandis, võrus. lisaks soovitati välja arendada regionaalhaiglat tallinnas ja tartus, kus osutatakse spetsialiseeritud abi kõigil eriala- del. haiglate paiknemisel lähtuti nende kaugusest abivajajatest, kes peaks vajadusel haiglasse jõudma vähemalt tunni jooksul. hmp sai ka kohati terava kriitika osaliseks, kuna seal ei arvestatud juba välja- kujunenud regionaalsete tõmbekeskuste olemasolu ega paljusid regionaalarengu asjaolusid. siiski kiitis valitsus . a mais hmp heaks ning tervisehoiu- teenuste korraldamise seaduses . aastast olid määratletud ka haiglaliigid. hmp soovituste kohaselt loodi tallinnas keskhaiglat, ida-virumaa seni tegutsenud haiglad liideti, alustati tÜ kliinikumi ja regionaalhaigla arengukavade koostamist ning viidi lõpule pärnu haigla ehitus. edasise arutelu tulemusena otsustati säilitada valga ja hiiumaa haigla üldhaiglatena ning omaette haiglaliigina peaksid eksisteerima kohalikud haiglad, kus on tunnine arstivalve. valitsuse määrusega kinnitati aprillis haiglavõrgu arengukava ja seda täiendati . a. selle kohaselt on eestis regionaalhaiglat: põhja-eesti regionaalhaigla, tÜ kliinikum, tal- linna lastehaigla; keskhaiglat: ida-tallinna keskhaigla, lääne-tallinna keskhaigla, ida-viru keskhaigla ja pärnu haigla. Üldhaiglad on jär- vamaa, läänemaa, rakvere, narva, kuressaare, viljandi, võru, valga ja hiiumaa haigla. kohali- kud haiglad on jõgeval (alates . a) ning tulevikus ka põlvas ja raplas. kokku peaks eestis olema haiglavoodit. sotsiaalministeeriumi . a hinnangul on akuut- ravi haiglate investeerimisvajadus lähiaastatel , miljardit krooni, mis katab nii uute ehituste kui ka vanade renoveerimisvajaduse. akuutravi haiglate ümberkorraldus eeldab samal ajal hooldus- ja järelravivõrgu arendamist. seda on võimalik teha seniste haiglate baasil. t. bakler rõhutas, et praegu on olemas metoo- dika haiglate tegevuse ja investeerimisvajaduste hindamiseks. arengukavade koostamine annab täpsemad raamid ümberkorralduste elluviimiseks ja erinevate osapoolte arvamusavalduste konso- lideerimiseks, samuti aitab kaitsta riiklikul tasandil tervishoiusüsteemi huve ning investeerimistaotlusi. konverentsil esitatud ettekannetest koorus ka mõte, et arengukavad ei saa olla dogmad ja olude muutu- misel (arstide nappus, elanikkonna vananemine ja migratsioon) tuleb ka seal teha korrektiive. urmas lepner analüüsis kirurgilise ravi mahtusid eesti eri haiglates. eesti üldhaigla teeninduspiirkond on vähem kui elanikku. sellest piirkonda teenindava haigla erakorraline töö on vägagi napi mahuga: tunni jooksul on emos keskmiselt haiget, neist hospitaliseeritakse. nädalas tehakse keskmiselt erakorralist operatsiooni: ägeda apenditsiidi tõttu kord nädalas, ägeda koletsüstiidi tõttu kord päeva jooksul, seedetrakti verejooksuga haiget ravitakse korral nädala jooksul. kindlasti on selline töömaht väike, et tagada arstide professionaalsete oskuste säilimist ja ravikvaliteeti, tööjõu ja aparatuuri rakendamise kulutõhusus on väike. need andmed on kindlasti heaks aluseks edasise tegevuse planeerimisel. Üldhaiglate probleeme vaagis konverentsil võru haigla peaarst rein kermes. arengukava on aluseks, millele tuginedes haigla koostab oma arengukava ja edasise tegevusprogrammi, millega on seotud varustatus tööjõu ja aparatuuriga, inves- teeringud hoonetesse jm. haiglajuhid eeldavad, et arengukava kinnitades võtab riik ka endale kohustuse toetada selle elluviimist. paraku aga on lõuna-eesti, valga ja põlva haigla funktsionaalsed arengukavad esitatud sotsiaalministeeriumile juba juulis , kuid seni ei ole neid ilmselt läbi loetud ega nende suhtes seisukohta võetud. see jätab aga need asutused ebamäärasesse olukorda. r. kermes rõhutas (ilmselt on see kõigi üldhaiglate juhtide seisukoht), et kui haiglate arengukava kehtib, tuleb ka kõiges selle järgi talitada. kui olemasolev kava ei sobi, tuleb sellest ka selgelt kõigile asjaosalistele teada anda ja selle kehtivus lõpetada. viimasel juhul tuleb esitada uus arengukava, et asjaosalised saaksid end uute oludega kohandada. nagu rõhutas urmas siigur, ei esitata kliinikumi konverentsil õigeid või valesid arvamusi, kõigil on oma arvamus. korraldajad olid palunud esinema ka staažika arsti, haiglajuhi ja tervishoiukorraldaja peeter mardna. tema esitas oma ar vamused ja hinnangud seni tehtud ümberkorralduste kohta. Üld- hinnanguna arvas ta, et meie meditsiinil on läinud häbematult hästi eeskätt tänu meedikutele, kes on osanud oma tööd hästi teha. kindla materiaalse aluse meie meditsiinisüsteemile andis kindlustus- meditsiini juurutamine. olulisemaks valearvestuseks tervishoiu arengu kavandamisel osutus p. mardna hinnangul ndatel vastuvõtu vähendamine arstiteaduskonda. asjaomased instantsid ei arves- tanud arstiteaduskonna dekaani ants peetsalu argumenteeritud väiteid, et selline vastuvõetute arvu vähendamine maksab end hiljem arstide puudusena teravalt kätte. positiivsete arengusuundade kõrval, mida võimaldas meditsiinitehnika areng ja kitsam spetsialiseerumine, on negatiivne see, et kannatab arsti-patsiendi usalduslik suhe. tervishoiutöötaja muutumine teenindajaks ja raviprotsessi vaatlemine tervishoiuteenusena ei jäta arstile piisavalt aega ega motivatsiooni tegeleda patsiendi kui haige ini- mesega, selle all kannatab kindlasti ravitulemus. seniseid ümberkorraldusi eesti tervishoius ei saa vaadelda mustvalges spektris. edusammude kõrval on valearvestusi, möödalaskmisi ja puu- dulikke lahendusi. peamine õppetund on see, et ajad ja olud muutuvad kiiresti, nendega tuleb kohaneda. lahenduste leidmine on võimalik vaid kõigi asja osaliste koostöös ja see peab põhinema olemasoleva olukorral kainel ja objektiivsel ana- lüüsil. eestiarst@eestiarst.ee when will it ever end? and how? sexual harassment of female medical faculty eclinicalmedicine ( ) contents lists available at sciencedirect eclinicalmedicine journal homepage: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/eclinicalmedicine commentary when will it ever end? and how? sexual harassment of female medical faculty susan p. phillips queen's university department of family medicine, bagot st., kingston k l e , canada a r t i c l e i n f o article history: received february accepted february available online march the need for yet another study documenting aspects of ongoing sexual harassment of american medical faculty shows the breadth and intransigence of the problem and, more importantly, a failure of its resolution both within and beyond academia [ ]. sexual harassment and victims' fears of reprisals from naming it are older than the us and threaded through that country's, and most other's history. women in medicine have reported sexual harassment for decades [ ]. it has likely existed forever. most female physicians have a story to tell. there are some positive trends both outside medicine and within. raj et al report a decrease in sexual harassment over time among female academic physicians and fur- ther, that experiencing more severe harassment aligned with reach- ing a higher academic rank [ ]. several possible although untestable explanations for the latter, counterintuitive finding exist. perhaps those who stay despite severe sexual harassment have a drive and resilience developed in the face of past experience of threats. of course, this in no way justifies or suggests benefit from victimisa- tion. on the contrary, it is possible that greater determination to advance could have made some junior faculty more vulnerable to exploitation by those in power. unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on subordi- nates is one of many definitions of sexual harassment [ ]. most share a common focus on abuse of power rather than on sexual activity and consent. "no one should be subject to harassment or sexual violence of any kind in their workplace, whether it comes from an employer, a manager or a colleague" [ ]. so begins one of hundreds of government documents, this one canadian, spanning decades and proposing zero tolerance. why, then, is another study demonstrating that a problem exists of value? the answer lies par- tially in the longitudinal design of raj's research on associations between severe harassment and subsequent academic advance- ment. but what does the persistence of sexual harassment in doi of original article: http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . . e-mail address: phillip@queensu.ca https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . - /© published by elsevier ltd. this is an open access article under the cc by-n medical academia over time say about the will to acknowledge this abuse of power and eradicate it? the authors document a decrease in incidence over time among women (from % down to %) but an enduring environment of gender discrimination ( % in decreasing to % in ) that likely enables ongoing victimisation of in female faculty. across the developed world women's increasing naming of sexual harassment, spurred on by metoo, has led to public distain for perpe- trators. the resulting, and some might say, the only effective trials arising have often occurred in the media rather than the courts, even in countries where the rule of law is sacrosanct. what about the spe- cific setting of academic medicine? when medical students report sexual harassment their complaint is seen as a ‘one off ’, for which the complainant might be offered counselling and sick leave to recover from an individual 'problem', or told to humour the perpetra- tor because he is old and set in his ways [ ]. the medical practice environment is one of discussion about intimate matters and of dis- robing and physical contact. this openness about sexual matters does not alter power dynamics in medical schools but creates a milieu where the normalising of sexual discussion may make it easier for a perpetrator to act and for a victim to not immediately 'see what's happening'. it does not, however, explain the other reason that raj's paper remains relevant, decades after initial reports of similar find- ings. we remain stuck in deciding whether there is a problem rather than rectifying it. medicine and academia are no more honorable, moral, or egalitar- ian that the rest of society. many would argue that social problems require upstream social and systemic solutions. the pervasiveness of sexual harassment says that eradicating its causes is neither easy nor on the agenda. some have proposed interim and more downstream approaches. there has been some on-campus success in bystander training � essentially a process of enabling and encouraging those who view sexual harassment to either deflect, defuse or stop this behaviour [ ]. in other words, bystanders are asked to challenge c-nd license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /) http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . mailto:phillip@queensu.ca https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . http://www.sciencedirect.com http://https://www.journals.elsevier.com/eclinicalmedicine s.p. phillips / eclinicalmedicine ( ) those with greater power rather than ignoring egregious behaviour. not really a solution but a worthwhile start. the time has come to stop asking whether there is a problem and move on to solving it. maybe future research could assume that sexual harassment is alive and well and living in the corridors of academia [ ] and focus on methods to eliminate it so that a repeat resurvey of raj's study sample in years would be unnecessary. declaration of competing interest the author has no conflicts of interest to declare. author contributions dr. s. p. phillips is the sole author of this commentary. references [ ] raj a, freund km, mcdonald jm, carr pl. effects of sexual harassment on advance- ment of women in academic medicine: a multi-institutional longitudinal study. eclinicalmedicine . doi: . /j.eclinm. . . [ ] jagsi r, griffith ka, jones r, perumalswami cr, ubel p, stewart a. sexual harass- ment and discrimination experiences of academic medical faculty. jama ; : – . [ ] siegel rb. in: mackinnon catharine a, siegel reva b, editors. yale press; . [ ] harassment and sexual violence in the workplace � public consultation. govern- ment of canada ;canada.ca/publicentre-esdc. [ ] phillips sp, webber j, imbeau s, quaife t, hagan d, maar m, abourbih j. sexual harassment of canadian medical students: a national survey. eclinicalmedicine doi. org/ . /j.eclinm. . . . [ ] nickerson ab, aloe am, livingston ja, feeley th. measurement of the bystander intervention model for bullying and sexual harassment. j adolesc ; : – . [ ] national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. washington, dc: the national academies press; . doi: https:// doi.org/ . / . https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://org/ . /j.eclinm. . . http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / 	when will it ever end? and how? sexual harassment of female medical faculty 	declaration of competing interest 	author contributions 	references is serological testing a reliable tool in laboratory diagnosis of syphilis? meta-analysis of eight external quality control surveys performed by the german infection serology proficiency testing program journal of clinical microbiology, apr. , p. – vol. , no. - / /$ . � doi: . /jcm. . . – . copyright © , american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. is serological testing a reliable tool in laboratory diagnosis of syphilis? meta-analysis of eight external quality control surveys performed by the german infection serology proficiency testing program iris müller, volker brade, hans-jochen hagedorn, erich straube, christoph schörner, matthias frosch, harald hlobil, gerold stanek, and klaus-peter hunfeld* central laboratory of the bacteriologic infection serology study group of germany (bissgg), institute of medical microbiology, university hospital of frankfurt, paul-ehrlich-str. , d- frankfurt/main, germany received july /returned for modification august /accepted january the accuracy of diagnostic tests is critical for successful control of epidemic outbreaks of syphilis. the reliability of syphilis serology in the nonspecialist laboratory has always been questioned, but actual data dealing with this issue are sparse. here, the results of eight proficiency testing sentinel surveys for diagnostic laboratories in germany between and were analyzed. screening tests such as treponema pallidum hemagglutination assay (mean accuracy, . % [qualitative], . % [quantitative]), treponema pallidum par- ticle agglutination assay (mean accuracy, . % [qualitative], . % [quantitative]), and enzyme-linked im- munosorbent assays (elisas) (mean qualitative accuracy, %) were more reliable than venereal disease research laboratory (vdrl) testing (mean accuracy, . % [qualitative], . % [quantitative]), the fluores- cent treponemal antibody absorption test (fta-abs) (mean accuracy, % [qualitative], . % [quantita- tive]), and immunoblot assays (mean qualitative accuracy, . %). clearly, immunoglobulin m (igm) tests were more difficult to manage than igg tests. false-negative results for samples that have been unambiguously determined to be igm and anti-lipoid antibody positive accounted for . % of results in the igm elisa, . % in the vdrl test, . % in the igm fta-abs, and . % in the igm immunoblot assay. for negative samples, the mean percentage of false-positive results was . % in the vdrl test, . % in the igm elisa, . % in the igm fta-abs, and . % in the igm immunoblot assay. on average, . % of participants misclassified samples from patients with active syphilis as past infection without indicating the need for further treatment. moreover, . % of laboratories wrongly reported serological evidence for active infection in samples from patients with past syphilis or in sera from seronegative blood donors. consequently, the continuous partici- pation of laboratories in proficiency testing and further standardization of tests is strongly recommended to achieve better quality of syphilis serology. syphilis caused by the spirochete treponema pallidum is a re- emerging disease that is sexually transmitted and can progress in stages. in the united states, the rate of syphilis increased . % from . cases per , population in to . cases per , population in ( ). in germany, the number of newly reported cases of syphilis increased dramatically, � %, since and reached . / , people in ( ). there is rising evidence that the resurgence of syphilis in germany is partly due to an ongoing epidemic in men with male sexual partners in hamburg, berlin, frankfurt, and cologne ( ). evidence also exists for an increase of new heterosexual cases of syphilis owing to the commercial sex trade in those parts of germany that border eastern europe ( ). as a result, germany has the highest incidence of syphilis among the western european countries, and the robert koch institute urges a rapid expan- sion of surveillance and serological screening at epidemic foci, such as larger cities, and in the main core groups of the epi- demic (commercial sex workers and male sexual partners) to rapidly identify potential transmitters ( ). new molecular tests for syphilis are unlikely to replace serology in the short term because they are fairly expensive and require sophisti- cated equipment ( ). antibody detection by nontreponemal tests (anti-lipoid antibody detection) and treponemal tests (an- ti-t. pallidum antibody detection) is still regarded as the main- stay for diagnosing syphilis and for monitoring the success of subsequent antibiotic treatment ( , , , ). the accuracy of diagnostic tests is critical for successful control measures of epidemic syphilis outbreaks, including case finding, prompt therapy of infected individuals, and mandatory testing of po- tential transmitters ( , , , ). thus, promotion and quality control of diagnostic procedures is a relevant public health issue, but peer reviewed publications on that topic are sparse ( , , , , ). here, for the first time, the impact of test quality on the laboratory diagnosis of syphilis in germany is investigated by use of a meta-analysis of external quality con- trol program data obtained between and by the the bacteriologic infection serology study group of germany (bissgg) ( , ). materials and methods organization and structure of the german syphilis proficiency testing pro- gram. from march to september , eight syphilis serology proficiency testing surveys (table ) were conducted in germany by the central reference * corresponding author. mailing address: institute of medical mi- crobiology, university hospital of frankfurt, paul-ehrlich str. , d- frankfurt/main, germany. phone: . fax: . e-mail: k.hunfeld@em.uni-frankfurt.de. o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /jcm. . . - . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://jcm.asm.org/ laboratory for bacteriological serodiagnostics at the institute of medical micro- biology, university hospital of frankfurt/main, in cooperation with the institute of standardization in the medical laboratory e.v. (instand e.v.), düsseldorf, germany, and with the six reference laboratories of the bissgg. the organi- zation and structure of the german proficiency testing program for bacteriologic infection serology is summarized elsewhere in more detail ( , ). sera used throughout the german syphilis proficiency testing program, to . sixteen serum samples were obtained from voluntary donors after obtaining written informed consent. all subjects were clinically evaluated by experienced physicians. nine serum samples contained specific antibodies against t. pallidum, as determined by various commercial test systems. all antibody-positive donors could recall a known history of a current or past symp- tomatic syphilis infection, which also had been documented in the medical records of these patients by the treating physicians. seven samples tested nega- tive for specific antibodies against t. pallidum and were used as negative controls. a current or very recent syphilis infection was excluded in these donors by careful physical examination, evaluation of patients’ medical histories, and re- view of the medical records provided by the referring physicians. table pro- vides a detailed description of the clinical data available for all samples. preparation and shipment of serum samples. samples were prepared as pub- lished recently ( ) and then stored at � °c until use. subsequently, the samples were thawed, and -�l aliquots without preservatives were dispensed in . -ml polypropylene tubes (sarstaedt, germany). prior to shipment, samples were checked for microbiological sterility and tested for possible reactivity against hepatitis b and c antigens as well as for human immunodeficiency virus types and . prepared samples were than distributed into eight shipments (march , november , march , september , march , sep- tember , march , and september ). in each survey, two selected samples were sent to the participants without providing any additional clinical information. samples were shipped in polypropylene boxes and delivered by mail service for receipt within days. assessment of correct test results by reference laboratories. assessment of reference test results for each trial was performed according to the provisional guidelines for the performance of proficiency testing surveys in infection serology as proposed to the german general council of physicians ( ). each time, qualitative and quantitative reference test results were determined for each pair of serum samples during the proficiency testing survey by three to six different local specialized laboratories or university laboratories ( ) with extensive ex- pertise in the field of serodiagnostic testing for syphilis. each reference labora- tory examined the test samples using commercially available test kits from dif- ferent vendors. qualitative test results were graded positive, borderline, or negative according to the model of test results of the reference laboratories. the reference test results for quantitative tests were determined for each test by calculating the median from the results obtained for each method by the refer- ence laboratories. for immunoblot testing, only qualitative test results obtained in accordance with the instructions of the manufacturers of the test kits used by the reference laboratories were reported to define reference results for each sample. by means of the preceding measures, all samples were unambiguously characterized with regard to qualitative test results and the amount of titers of specific immunoglobulin m (igm) and igg antibodies against t. pallidum. the characteristics of the serum samples applied in the german syphilis proficiency testing program as determined by the six reference laboratories are shown in table . study conditions and evaluation of results. to date, participation in profi- ciency testing programs is not mandatory in any german legal institution. all laboratories were required to register at instand prior to their participation. no pretest criteria were established to exclude any laboratories from the survey. all participants were instructed to treat samples as routine samples and to perform their established serological test methods on the distributed samples blind to additional clinical information to guarantee maximum objectivity. qual- itative and quantitative results had to be reported together with the methods used, the lot number, test manufacturer, and the laboratory machinery utilized. moreover, the laboratories reported interpretative statements as to whether the test constellation suggested a possible syphilis infection and whether an active or latent infection was suspected. reports were made in standardized form on defined evaluation sheets by use of a predefined code to permit statistical analysis after the surveys. only one test result per test method (venereal disease re- search laboratory [vdrl] test, t. pallidum particle agglutination assay [tppa], etc.) was reported to instand by each participant. participants were re- quested to return their reports to instand for further computer-assisted evaluation of results within days after receipt of samples ( ). qualitative results from participants were accepted as being accurate if their reported test results were congruent with the model as determined by the reference labora- tories (see above). because the quantitative enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (elisa) results reported were so heterogeneous, owing to the different quan- tification methods of the test manufacturers, these results were not included in table . number of german and foreign participants in the syphilis proficiency testing program surveys conducted between and mo/yr no. of participating laboratories german foreign total / / / / / / / / table . german syphilis proficiency testing program: characteristics of selected serum samples as determined by the six reference laboratoriesa sample tpha tppa elisa (polyvalent) vdrl cft (cardiolipin) elisa (igg) elisa (igm) immunoblot igg immunoblot igm fta-abs igm clinical information (time of sampling after therapy) / p ( , ) p ( , ) p p ( ) p ( ) p p p p p ( ) syphilis stage ii ( wk) / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / p ( , ) p ( , ) p p ( ) p ( ) p p p p p ( ) syphilis stage ii ( mo) / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / p ( , ) p ( , ) p p ( ) p ( ) p b/p p p p ( ) syphilis stage ii ( mo) / p ( , ) p ( , ) p b/n (� ) b/n (� ) p n p n/b n (� ) syphilis stage ii ( yr) / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / p ( , ) p ( , ) p p ( ) p ( ) p p p p p ( ) syphilis stage ii ( wk) / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor / p ( , ) p ( , ) p b/n (� ) n (� ) p n p n n (� ) syphilis stage i ( yr) / p ( , ) p ( , ) p p ( ) p ( ) p n/b p n/b p ( ) syphilis reinfection stage ii ( mo) / p ( ) p ( ) p n (� ) n (� ) p n p n n (� ) syphilis stage i ( yr) / p ( , ) p ( , ) p b/p ( ) b/p ( ) p b/p p b/p p ( ) syphilis stage i ( mo) / n (� ) n (� ) n n (� ) n (� ) n n n n n (� ) healthy blood donor a legend: p, positive; b, borderline; n, negative. median titers determined by the reference laboratories are given in parentheses. müller et al. j. clin. microbiol. o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ the evaluation listed below. quantitative results of classical titer tests were accepted as being accurate provided results from participants were reported within a range of � log unit dilutions around the median of the test results obtained by the reference laboratories. a qualifying certificate was forwarded to successfully participating laboratories for each parameter under the condition that their microbiological commentary and qualitative and quantitative test re- sults for both samples determined with established assay systems met the above- listed criteria ( , ). results participating laboratories. from march to september , between and (mean, ) microbiological labo- ratories, including hospital laboratories, independent labora- tories, physicians’ office laboratories, and manufacturers of commercially available diagnostic syphilis assays, took part in each of the eight syphilis serology proficiency testing surveys (table ). on each occasion, between and laboratories from european countries (austria, belgium, czech repub- lic, finland, great britain, italy, lithuania, lichtenstein, slo- vakia, and switzerland) participated as well. application of assay systems. figure provides an overview of the relative frequencies of use of the various test systems by the participants during the surveys. classical treponemal tests, such as the treponema pallidum hemagglutination assay (tpha) and the tppa, were used more frequently than the more recently introduced diagnostic approaches like class-spe- cific or polyvalent elisas and whole-cell or recombinant im- munoblots (fig. ). as expected, most laboratories relied on stepwise diagnostic protocols, applying a sensitive polyvalent screening test (tpha, %; tppa, %; elisa, %) fol- lowed by confirmation of positive results with fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption test (fta-abs test; %) or immunoblotting ( %). confirmed cases were subjected to the vdrl test ( %) or cardiolipin complement fixation test (cft; %) to determine the potential activity of the disease, followed by igm class-specific assays like the fta-abs igm test ( %), igm immunoblot assay ( %), or igm elisa ( %) to test for the presence of specific anti-t. pallidum igm antibodies as an additional marker of active or recent syphilis infection. this diagnostic approach complies with the recom- mendations of most european scientific expert opinions and with the guidelines of the german society for microbiology and hygiene ( , ). general findings. throughout our surveys, the mean accu- racy of the reference laboratories was % (range, to %) for qualitative test results, % (range, to %) for quan- titative test results, and % (range, to %) for diagnostic comments. the mean percentage of participant laboratories that reported correct results by use of different assays on the serum testing samples sent out in the eight surveys of the german syphilis proficiency testing program from to are summarized in fig. . in general, qualitative results were more reliable (range of mean accuracy, to %) than quan- titative test results (range of mean accuracy, to %). ob- viously, the test results obtained with the various assays used by the participants were much less reproducible in samples with very low and very high antibody titers than in samples with intermediate amounts of specific antibodies (tables and ). from the broad range of quantitative results reported for the same specimen during the individual surveys, it can also be concluded that, in the routine laboratory, the quantity of de- tected antibody measured in titers (table ; fig. ) or quanti- fig. . number of diagnostic comments and relative frequencies of use of the test methods reported by participants (mean, ) during the surveys, to . blot, immunoblot; polyv., polyvalent; diag., diagnostic. bar markers indicate intervals of � standard deviation around the mean. fig. . (a) average percentage of correct qualitative test results for the given diagnostic methods used throughout the eight proficiency testing trials. bar markers indicate an interval of � standard deviation of the mean. (b) average percentage of correct diagnostic comments and correct quantitative test results for the given diagnostic methods used throughout the eight proficiency testing trials. bar markers indi- cate an interval of � standard deviation of the mean. blot, immuno- blot; polyv., polyvalent. vol. , quality of syphilis serology in germany o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ tative elisa units (data not shown) can vary widely for the same sample. accuracy of screening test results. screening tests such as tpha (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to . %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to . %), tppa (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to %), and polyvalent elisas (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to %) were much more reproducible and proved to be more sensitive and specific than fta-abs tests and class-specific elisas (fig. a). clearly, igm elisas (qualitative mean accuracy, %; range, . to %) were more difficult to manage than igg elisas (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to %) and frequently proved less specific (fig. ). although used by only a small number of participants ( %), polyvalent elisas turned out to be the most reliable and reproducible test system for the qualitative detection of specific anti-t. pallidum antibodies throughout our surveys (fig. a). accuracy of anti-lipoid antibody tests and t. pallidum-spe- cific igm test results. the qualitative and quantitative test results obtained by anti-cardiolipin antibody tests and fta- abs igm assays, which are often used to determine possible activity of the infection, demonstrated a very low degree of interassay standardization (table ; fig. ). the accuracy of the cardiolipin cft (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, to %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to %), however, was higher than that of the vdrl test (qual- itative mean accuracy, . %; range, to %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, . to . %). with regard to the detection of specific igm antibodies, qualitative igm elisa results (qualitative mean accuracy, %; range . to %) were more accurate than fta-abs igm test results (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; range, to %) (fig. ). qualitative igm immunoblot results (fig. a) showed substan- tial variability throughout our surveys (qualitative mean accu- racy, . %; range, . to . %). although for the fta-abs igm test (quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, to %) and vdrl test (quantitative mean accuracy, . %; range, to . %) the median titers of the participating laboratories mostly met the median titers calculated for the positive samples from the results of the reference laboratories, the ranges of titers reported by the participants showed high interlaboratory variability, probably owing to methodological difficulties in reading test results correctly and due to the known lack of standardization of the commercially manufac- tured assays used (table ; fig. ). if samples with borderline reactivity were excluded from the meta-analysis, for samples that had been unambiguously determined to be igm and anti- lipoid antibody positive (table ), the percentage of false- table . analysis of median antibody titers calculated from the vdrl and fta-abs igm test results of reference laboratories in comparison to the median titers calculated from the results of all participating laboratories assay date (mo/yr) reference laboratory result participant result sample no. median titer range no. of results median titer range acceptable range correct (%) total (%) vdrl / / – – – . . / – – – . . / / – – – . . / – – – . . / / – – . . . / – – – . / / – – – . . / – – . . / / – – , – . . / – – . . / / –� – . . . / – – – . / / – – – . . / – – . . / / – – – . . / –� – . . fta-abs igm / / – – , – . . / – � . / / – – – . . / – � . / / – � . . / – – , – . / / – � . . / – � . / / – – , – . . / – � . / / � � . . / � � . / / – – – . . / – � . / / – – , – . . / � � . müller et al. j. clin. microbiol. o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ negative results accounted for . % of the vdrl test results, . % of the igm elisa and cft results, . % of the igm fta-abs test results, and % of the igm immunoblot results from the participating laboratories. the mean percentage of false-positive results in clearly negative samples was % for the cft, . % for the vdrl test, . % for the igm elisa, . % for the igm fta-abs test, and . % for igm immunoblotting throughout our studies. clearly, the number of both false- negative and false-positive test results for anti-lipoid antibody tests and t. pallidum-specific igm tests as encountered in our surveys are correlated with the diagnostic method, the quality of the test kits (table ), and the amount of specific antibodies present in different sera (table ). accuracy of reported diagnostic comments. although most laboratories adhere to the current guidelines of stepwise sero- logic testing for syphilis in germany ( ), qualitative and quan- titative changes in serologic test results may be misleading and can emerge simply by using different assay systems in different laboratories (fig. ). in addition to these inconsistencies, on average, only % of the participants reported correct inter- pretative statements of test results throughout our surveys. in fact, on average, . % of participants in their diagnostic com- ments misclassified samples from patients with clinically and serologically defined active syphilis (table ) as a past infec- tion without recommending further treatment. moreover, . % of laboratories incorrectly reported serological evidence for active infection in samples from patients with past syphilis or in sera from seronegative blood donors. this means that, despite the application of a variety of test combinations on the same sample by most of the participating laboratories, a lack of expertise existed regarding whether or not the test constella- tion suggested possible syphilis and whether an active or past infection was suspected from the results of treponemal and nontreponemal assays. discussion in the scientific literature, the ranges of stage-dependent sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic assays for the serologi- cal detection of syphilis have been reported to be to % and to %, respectively ( ). the quality of routine sero- logical diagnosis of syphilis, however, has been questioned by several studies that found significant inter- and intralaboratory variability of test results ( , , , , , ). in the united states, the food and drug administration (fda) and the center for devices and radiological health enforce a complex regulatory system for new in vitro diagnostics ( ). for assays that represent a substantially new diagnostic approach, inde- pendent clinical testing is required in the process of so-called “premarket approval.” simple test remakes, the so-called “me- too tests,” can be cleared by complying with the (k) regu- lations which substantially require the manufacturer to com- pare its product against an established device that has already table . german syphilis proficiency testing program to : accuracy of test results for the most frequently used commercially manufactured vdrl and fta-abs igm tests a assay manufacturer qualitative testing quantitative testing no. of participants correct results (%) no. of participants correct results (%) vdrl ax ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) bn ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) is ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) bb ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) bw ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) zz ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) total ( ) . ( . ) ( ) . ( . ) fta-abs igm ax ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) is ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) ba ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) ma ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) zz ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) total ( ) . ( . ) ( ) . ( . ) a results are means, with standard deviations indicated in parentheses. ax, biomerieux; ba, bag; bb, biokit: bn, becton-dickinson; bw, dadebehring; is, innogenetics; ma, mast; zz, other. fig. . representative distribution of quantitative vdrl (a) and fta-abs igm (b) assay titers, as reported by the participants of the proficiency testing trial held in september . distribution of titers for the positive sample / (median vdrl test reference titer, ; median fta-abs igm test reference titer, ) clearly demonstrates that test results are dependent on the manufacturer of the assay (for characterization of samples, see table ). distribution of results as obtained by tests from different manufacturers is indicated by different gray scales. ax, biomerieux; bb, biokit; bn, becton-dickinson; br, biorad; bw, dade behring; is, innogenetics; ma, mast. vol. , quality of syphilis serology in germany o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ been cleared by the fda ( , ). in europe, in general, no independent clinical testing is necessary before placing in vitro diagnostic tests for syphilis on the market. this development resulted after the liberalization of the in vitro diagnostics (ivd) market in europe, and since the institution of the new european ivd directive in , the law no longer requires extensive, independent, and continuous standardized diagnos- tic as well as clinical evaluation of commercially available se- rological test kits for syphilis tests ( ). instead, the ivd direc- tive only enforces quality standards for the production quality and safety of in vitro diagnostic tests in their intended use ( , ). consequently, inexpensive test remakes are promoted and increasingly pushed onto the market. actually, in germany alone, different companies provide diagnostic tests for syph- ilis, and not surprisingly, the different methodological ap- proaches of diagnostic tests in themselves may account, in part, for substantial differences with regard to the variable test qual- ity, as noted in our sentinel surveys. in addition, the technically correct application of a test during diagnostic analysis and the individual operator’s experience in the evaluation and assess- ment of test results (e.g., for fta-abs and vdrl tests) play a pertinent role in the quality of the findings and their com- parability with results obtained by other laboratories ( , ). our investigations show that the vdrl test (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %), the igm fta-abs test (qualitative mean accuracy, . %; quantitative mean accuracy, . %), and igm immunoblotting (qualitative mean accuracy, . %), in part, perform less reliably than t. pallidum-specific screening tests in the routine diagnostic lab- oratory (table ; fig. and ). although our tests were some- what different in methodology, our proficiency testing survey results do resemble the findings of several preceding interna- tional studies demonstrating considerable deficiencies in the quality of syphilis serology in the united states, the united kingdom, and taiwan ( , , , ). similarly, a look at the college of american pathologists’ proficiency testing re- ports g-a and g-b revealed that qualitative vdrl and rpr testing (range of vdrl test accuracy, . to %; range of rpr test accuracy, . to %) tended to be less reliable than tppa testing (range of accuracy, . to %) (k. p. hunfeld, personal communication). according to our study, obviously, the sensitivity and specificity of test results and the significance of the diagnostic findings depend primarily on the expertise of the individual laboratory and the test manufac- turer (tables and ; fig. ). moreover, changes in test results may be misleading and can result simply from the use of dif- ferent assay systems or from failure to test follow-up samples in parallel with previously obtained samples from the same pa- tient. this is important because epidemiologists and physicians are known to correlate the disease activity and success of treatment with changes in laboratory tests. clearly, the level of accuracy for syphilis serology in germany is higher than that revealed in recent surveys on the quality of lyme disease or chlamydia pneumonia serology ( , ). however, mean accu- racy levels below % for qualitative tests and below % for quantitative tests are unacceptable for diagnosing syphilis whether in screening pregnant woman, blood products, or po- tentially infected patients. in addition, successful surveillance and control of the current syphilis epidemic in germany call for better test quality. furthermore, the fiscal impact of a flawed test on the health care system is probably largely un- derestimated. assuming a prevalence in germany of / , people and ca. , , syphilis tests/year, including blood bank testing, a difference of % in net sensitivity and of . % in net specificity as calculated for two different igg test com- binations (tpha screening tests: test sensitivity, %; test specificity, %; test sensitivity, %; test specificity, %; fta-abs confirmatory assays: test sensitivity, %; test specificity, %; test sensitivity, %; test specificity, . %) would account for false-negative cases, , false- positive cases, and a total of € , , (�$ , , ) in excess costs (€ , or �$ , per test) due to fta-abs confir- matory testing (n � , tests). these medical and eco- nomic considerations clearly warrant intensified efforts to achieve better quality and standardization in the laboratory diagnosis of syphilis, in general, and in germany in particular. guidelines for acceptance and evaluation of new syphilis tests ( ) as published by the cdc (centers for disease control and prevention), the regular participation of diagnostic laborato- ries in proficiency testing, and the establishment of medical advisory boards for the diagnosis of syphilis represent interna- tionally proven interventions for achieving better test standard- ization and for regulating the quality of infection serology in general ( , , , , ). over the years, the success of such policy options is strongly supported by the results of quality assessment schemes in other countries, including the united kingdom, taiwan, and the united states, where the perfor- mance of laboratories could be improved, particularly when guidance was provided to poorly performing laboratories ( , , , ). in addition, the use of standard preparations can increase accuracy levels � % ( , ). such interventions were successful in parameters like rheumatoid factor, parvovi- rus b serology, lyme disease serology, and tick-borne en- cephalitis elisa testing ( , , , , ). to improve the quality of syphilis serology in germany and possibly in europe, a network of independent specialist laboratories should deal with the issues of test evaluation, quality promotion, and in- terassay standardization of commercially available test kits on a more regular basis. acknowledgments this study was funded by a grant provided by instand e.v., düsseldorf, germany. we thank jeffrey n. gibbs for discussing legal aspects of licensing procedures for serologic tests in the united states. references . bundesministerium fuer gesundheit (bmfg). . bekanntmachung (akz - - / ) zur eg-richtlinie über in vitro diagnostika ( / / eg). bundesgesetzblatt : . . center for disease control. . guidelines for evaluation and acceptance of new syphilis serology tests for routine use. center for disease control, atlanta, ga. . centers for disease control and prevention and association of state and territorial public health laboratory directors (astphld). . proceed- ings of the nd national conference on serologic diagnosis of lyme disease (dearborn, mi). astphld, washington, d.c. . centers for disease control and prevention. . sexually transmitted diseases treatment guidelines . morb. mortal. wkly. rep. : – . 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[online.] http://www.stijournal.com/cgi/content/full/ / /e . accessed november . . robert koch institut. . syphilis, p. – . in infektionsepidemiolo- gisches jahrbuch für . mercedes-druck, berlin, germany. . snell, j. j., j. v. de mello, and p. s. gardner. . the united kingdom national microbiological quality assessment scheme. j. clin. pathol. : – . . taylor, r. n., k. m. fulford, v. a. przybyszewsky, and v. pope. . centers for disease control diagnostic immunology proficiency testing pro- gram results for . j. clin. microbiol. : – . . taylor, r. n., and k. m. fulford. . assessment of laboratory improve- ment by the cdc diagnostic immunology proficiency testing program. j. clin. microbiol. : – . vol. , quality of syphilis serology in germany o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ libraries, labour, capital: on formal and real subsumption sam popowich abstract: this article looks at librarianship from a marxist economic perspective, arguing that crises within the profession are due to material changes in the organization of production and labour relations. these changes are part of a transition from one “regime of accumulation” (industrial, fordist, keynesian) to another (neoliberal). the article suggests that any choice made to address these changes leads us further into relations of commodifcation which worsen the crises we face, and that only fundamental changes to the social, political, and economic system in which we work and live will solve the problems we currently face. keywords: capitalism, labour, libraries, marxism, neoliberalism, value this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . published march . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / it has been shown how not merely at the level of ideas, but also in reality, the social character of his labour confronts the worker as something not merely alien, but hostile and antagonistic, when it appears before him objectifed and personifed in capital. karl marx, “the results of the immediate process of production” ( ). the perennial crisis of librarianship is librarianship in crisis? if so, is the crisis cultural or material, organizational or political? how does a crisis of librarianship intersect with wider crises in capitalism itself? in the introduction to his book dismantling the public sphere, john buschman argues that librarianship has a “culture of crisis”: “we have been declaring crises for more than thirty years” . buschman ascribes this culture of crisis to the lack of a unifed understanding of what we now call neoliberalism and the changes to public discourse that entails, as well as to a curious lack of energy in librarians’ responses to challenges and threats. “if librarianship is merely reactive,” he writes, “we will continue to see the same rapid cycles of crisis-name and professional and institutional responses to the crisis of the moment” . for buschman, librarianship is in a constant state of crisis because it is unable to precisely formulate the nature of the challenges it faces. the initial step towards overcoming the culture of crisis, then, is understanding the nature of the challenge―that is, it is critique: if, as i have argued, we have a crisis culture in the profession and in turn have weakly defended librarianship in response to those ever-declared and poorly-analyzed crises, then our framework of analysis and defending librarianship must change and that change must begin in critique. the heart of this critique, buschman writes, is to identify “the core of librarianship’s challenge”, which in his view is the decline of the public sphere and the dismantling of the public role of libraries. buschman’s thesis is that librarianship is a classic case study of the dismantling of the public sphere in an era of radically market-oriented public philosophy towards public cultural institutions (like schools and libraries). the goal of buschman’s book is to recuperate a notion of democracy and the public sphere (based, in the end, on habermas) which would “connect [librarianship] to the project of democracy and cultural vitality” and place libraries “back in the ‘contested terrain’ of the critical and democratic public sphere” . buschman sees neoliberalism as a corruption of the golden age of the welfare state, rather than simply a response to falling rates of proft under the fordist-keynesian model of post- war capitalism. in a recent article on the connection between neoliberalism and identity buschman, john. dismantling the public sphere: situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy (westport, ct: libraries unlimited, ): . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . politics, buschman argues that there is a radical break between the modernist welfare state and the postmodern neoliberal period, which sees a “redistribution of wealth upward and elsewhere within the new economy” . buschman has elsewhere remarked that “what makes it neoliberalism is the infusion of economic and market principles into corresponding social arrangements and their extension into areas of society where we haven’t normally seen them” . for buschman, this infusion and extension mark something new, in which democracy and the public sphere are dismantled and replaced by a logic of entrepreneurialism and market freedom. this strongly implies that there was a period of “good capitalism” prior to the neoliberal period, in which the “critical and democratic public sphere” was a “contested terrain” to which we can (and should) return. what i will argue in this article is that, contrary to buschman’s position, neoliberalism is not something radically new, but is simply the latest reconfguration of capitalism to meet the needs of capital accumulation and labour discipline . this reconfguration has many aspects, but i will argue that the “culture of crisis” within librarianship is due to what marx called the subsumption of labour under capital. this process―which is incomplete, uneven, and ongoing―changes the material nature of the work of libraries, destabilizing and devaluing the labour of library workers. the crises that buschman identifes―mainly around technological change and declining fnancial support―are refections of a lower-level process of material transformation. indeed, to take two recent examples, professional crises can be understood as manifestations of underlying contradictions in the process of production itself. linda christian’s “a passion defcit: occupational burnout and the eew librarian: a recommendation report” ( ) describes a process by which additional surplus labour is extracted from librarians under the guise of professional responsibility. fobazi ettarh’s “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves” ( ) is about the ideological disciplining of library labour through mystifcation and reifcation. these accounts of subjective responses to librarianship as labour describe, explicitly or not, objective conditions of labour exploitation under neoliberal capitalism. stress, burnout, the psychological and emotional efects of structures of domination, exploitation, and aggression; these are all part of the crisis of librarianship, but the crisis has, i would argue, a deeper, more material cause. the crisis is no longer―if it ever was―restricted to “professional” elements like collections development, technological change, or cataloguing practices, though it continues to include these. it has expanded upwards into the subjective experiences of library workers, and downwards to the organization and discipline of library labour itself. these various levels are connected, in my buschman, john. “between eeoliberalism and identity politics: academic librarianship, democracy and eovember , ”, the journal of academic librarianship ( ), . https://doi.org/ . /j.acalib. . . buschman, john. “librarianship and the arc of crisis: the road to institutionalized cultural eeoliberalism”, mediatropes ( ), : - . for neoliberalism as “regime of accumulation”, see harvey, david. the condition of postmodernity (malden, mass: blackwell, ); for neoliberalism as process of labour discipline, see harvey, david. a brief history of neoliberalism (london: oxford university press, ). christian, linda a. ( ) “a passion defcit: occupational burnout and the eew librarian: a recommendation report”, the southeastern librarian ( ). https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/seln/vol /iss / ettarh, fobazi. “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves”, in the library with the lead pipe, january , . http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ /vocational-awe/ journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ /vocational-awe/ https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/seln/vol /iss / https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/ . /j.acalib. . . view, by the relationship of library worker to employer, to capital. following the epigraph by marx above, i will argue that the crisis of librarianship is fundamentally due to library workers’ relationship to libraries as capital, a relationship that is of relatively recent advent, and is still in development. i will begin with a discussion of the shift from welfare-state into “post-industrial” capitalism and its efects on libraries and their parent institutions. i will then proceed to analyze marx’s concepts of absolute and relative surplus value, and formal and real subsumption of labour to capital, with examples from within librarianship. the library in ‘post-industrial’ capitalism it is clear, from the vantage point of , that a transition within capitalism took place between roughly and , which saw a shift from mass, fordist, industrial capitalism to a capitalism that has been described variously as “post-industrial capitalism” or “the information-age”. a recent account of this shift focusing on technological development and globalization of capitalist labour is eick dyer-witheford’s cyber-proletariat . what is clear from all accounts, however, is that this shift moved from keynesianism to neoliberalism in economics and politics , modernism to post-modernism in art and culture . one of the efects of this transition was to reconfgure as commodities various artefacts that had previously resisted commodifcation. the most striking example is the commodifcation of money and fnancial transactions themselves (which led to the crisis of ), but the last twenty years have also witnessed the commodifcation of water, dictionary-words, education, and―with the advent of social media―people and identities. this process of colonization, of the transformation into commodities things that previously not been commodities, happens periodically under capitalism. each new recomposition or refnement of capitalist production reveals previously untouched kinds of commodities. a good example can be found in george gissing’s new grub street ( ), which describes the lot of hack writers― that is, writers as commodity producers―and the epistemological challenges of thinking of written texts as commodities. a couple of examples from the book will sufce to show the crisis in writing at the end of the th century: “there was no need to destroy what you had written. it was all good enough for the market.” “don’t use that word, amy. i hate it!” “you can’t aford to hate it,” was her rejoinder, in very practical tones. “however it was before, you must write for the market now. you have admitted that yourself.” * “eo, that is the unpardonable sin! to make a trade of art! i am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.” dyer-witheford, eick. cyber-proletariat: global labour in the digital vortex (toronto: between the lines, ). harvey, brief history of neoliberalism. harvey, the condition of postmodernity; jameson, fredric. postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (durham, ec: duke university press, ). gissing, george, new grub street (london: oxford university press, ): . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . he turned away in a passion of misery. “how very silly it is to talk like this!” came in amy’s voice, clearly critical. “art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. this is the age of trade.” the “age of trade” see the commodifcation of art, and the proletarianization of the artist. the periodic recomposition of capitalism expands the realm of capitalist production. in gissing’s day, capitalist production had left the mills and factories of the industrial revolution, and moved into the cities to transform the production of art. as david harvey explains in the condition of postmodernity, the commodifcation and commercialization of a market for cultural products during the nineteenth century (and the concomitant decline of aristocratic, state, or institutional patronage) forced cultural producers into a market form of competition. what we have seen since is yet another phase of this opening of new felds of commodifcation, with postmodernism as the “cultural logic” of the new period. it is a mistake, however, to understand these changes purely at the level of culture. the transformation of artefacts into commodities requires the transformation of the conditions of production. following marx, i will discuss later on the technical aspects of this transformation as a process of subsumption of labour under capital, but for now it is sufcient to say that, broadly speaking, libraries are included within the transformation of their parent organization into sites of commodity production (factories). considerations of space prevent me from going into the details of the role of pre-neoliberal universities and public services as organizations of hegemony (ideological reproduction and the state), but under neoliberalism both universities and governments have―like art in new grub street―been fully absorbed into the market. from maintaining hegemony to producing commodities, libraries―both academic and public―have followed suit. “librarianship must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time.” the mystifcation and reifcation of the capitalist mode of production requires that we not see ourselves as producing commodities directly. “vocational awe” requires that we focus on our transcendent values, our social mission, by ignoring the structures of domination and exploitation that allow the capitalist library to continue to reproduce itself and make proft. the closest we come to base, material considerations is when we admit to part in ensuring the university or municipality provides “good value” to tuition-paying students or tax-paying citizens. examples of both these categories abound: from the focus on “the student experience” and student “success metrics” in academic libraries, to the diferences in architecture, design, and services between inner-city and suburban branches of public libraries, or the various campaigns aimed at penalizing the homeless (i.e. non-taxpayers) in public library spaces. these processes are justifed through appeal to “common sense” (i.e. liberal, bourgeois) ideology. marx summed up the ideological efects of commodity production as follows: “in a social order dominated by capitalist production, even the non- capitalist producer is dominated by capitalist ways of thinking” . like the writers in ibid., . harvey, the condition of postmodernity: . marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy, volume (london: penguin classics, ): . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . gissing’s grub street, library workers may like to think of themselves as engaged in a higher purpose than commodity production, but that is a classic example of ways in which capitalism obscures the real relations of society with a veil of mystifcation. the reason such reconfgurations of capitalism are periodically required―the reason, indeed, that we can speak of “post-industrial” society―is that once the transformation of crafts, trades, and manufactures were converted to capitalist forms of production―once they were industrialized―the expansion of capitalist accumulation required fnding new sources of surplus value and proft. this in turn required fnding new sources of labour to exploit and commodities to exchange, even to the extent of creating commodities where there previously had been none (in government services, for example, or education). this transformation of previously uncommodifed artefacts into commodities entailed bringing into being exchange- value where there had been only use-value. use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value the heart of marx’s economic analysis is the commodity, which has the peculiar characteristic of possessing both use-value (e.g. socks keep your feet warm) and of exchange-value (e.g. socks can be exchanged for money). artefacts which are produced for use have use-value: if i knit a sweater to wear myself, to satisfy a need of my own, that sweater has no exchange-value, only value through the use i make of it. commodities, on the other hand, are produced for exchange. “to be sold” is an essential aspect of a commodity. if i produce a sweater to be sold in a shop, then i am aware of the costs of the materials and labour that i have put into its production, and how much, in the end, i need the sweater to be sold for. for marx, use-value is the product of particular kinds of labour (knitting, cooking, welding, etc.), while exchange-value is the product of a universalized, abstract labour. the various kinds of labour can be compared in the abstract by measuring time: one hour of knitting may be worth fve minutes of welding, etc. in conditions of generalized commodity production, these equivalences are abstracted away, and in the end all we see is the seemingly objective and simple equivalent of price. price hides the social relationships whereby we, as a society, judge various amounts of labour to be equivalent. a university education, up until the neoliberal period, was primarily a use-value. it instilled in the upper-classes the values, perspective, and ideology of their rule; it confrmed a distinction between the upper and lower classes (cf. the signifcance of fred vincy’s university accent in middlemarch); it maintained and reproduced a whole slate of hegemonic positions; and occasionally it actually educated someone or produced new knowledge. under neoliberalism, education is primarily an exchange-value. in increasing the time and raw- materials that go into producing a worker, education increases the value of that worker’s labour-power. a degree is proof of the value of a worker’s labour, hence creeping credentialism and professional gate-keeping. over the last thirty years or so, the university has gradually switched from primarily producing use-values to producing exchange-values, leading to a crisis in higher-education . as with other kinds of workers―the writers of new grub street, for example―academic workers are often blind to the ways in which capitalism has already transformed their labour. culture and ideology―subjectivity itself―lags behind a simple search for “neoliberal university” will demonstrate the extent to which this is the case. journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . economic development. academic workers―including academic librarians―hold to notions of transcendent use-value production and resist the idea that their labour and its products have already been commodifed. ettarh’s conception of “vocational awe” applies here not only to the library but to the academy as a whole. for municipalities, the logic of exchange arises in the idea that taxpayers exchange “their” money for particular services. we can see this in the idea that people shouldn’t pay taxes for things they don’t use, or that those who don’t pay taxes shouldn’t be allowed to partake of a given service. this is markedly diferent from the ideology of the welfare state, where the connection between tax dollars and government services was more communal. attacks on the ehs , on public libraries , public schools , and government itself , all argue that tax dollars should not be wasted on public goods; indeed, the idea of taxation in itself has been attacked; better, it is argued by those on the right, to let everyone pay for what they want, and let the market sort it out . eationalization of government institutions is but the thin end of the wedge in terms of the commodifcation of the state. even within government-run services the logic of exchange-value reigns supreme. marx famously described capital as “value in motion”, but the motion that capital describes is not circular. if only the same amount of value returned to the capitalist/entrepreneur as she put in, there would be no incentive to keep going. david harvey, in his most recent book, described the motion of capital as a spiral: each time capital passes through the process of production it generates a surplus, an increment in value. it is for this reason that capitalist production implies perpetual growth. this is what produces the spiral form to the motion of capital. eo sensible person would go through all the trials and troubles of organizing production… in order to end up with the same amount of money at the end of the day… the incentive is the increment which will be represented by monetary proft. the means is the creation of surplus-value in production. marx argued that all class-divided societies were based on the extraction of surplus-value, one way or another, from a labouring class, by forcing it to work more than it has to in order to satisfy its own needs. under slavery, this expropriation of labour is forced directly by the slaveowner. under feudalism, it is coerced through relationships of right and protection. under capitalism, the worker is theoretically free but compelled by the structure of the economic system (in the frst instance, private property), to sell their labour power on the open market. the wage the worker contracts for is, fundamentally, the value of the lister, john. “the eeoliberal epidemic striking healthcare”. ournhs, june , . https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/john-lister/neoliberal-epidemic-striking-healthcare swafeld, laura. “the uk eo longer has a eational public library system”, the guardian, october , . https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library- system-community pratt, eick. “eeoliberalism and the (internal) marketisation of primary school assessment in england”. british educational research journal ( ), : - . https://doi.org/ . /berj. hall, stuart. “the march of the eeoliberals”, the guardian, september , . https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /sep/ /march-of-the-neoliberals fanelli, carlo. “eeoliberalism and the city”, canadian dimension, september , . https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/neoliberalism-the-city harvey, david. marx, capital and the madness of economic reason (london: oxford university press, ): - . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/neoliberalism-the-city https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /sep/ /march-of-the-neoliberals https://doi.org/ . /berj. https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library-system-community https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library-system-community https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/john-lister/neoliberal-epidemic-striking-healthcare commodities needed to reproduce the worker as worker. but if the worker produced the value of their wage in four hours, but is contracted to work for eight hours, then four hours of value is given to the capitalist without payment to the worker. bear in mind that this is an economic model of what goes on under capitalism, abstracted from the concrete reality and lived experience of individual workers. what constitutes “commodities necessary to reproduce the worker” is diferent now than it was when marx was writing. for example, entertainment commodities are required now in part to keep the working class pacifed, whereas in marx’s time, the pacifcation of the working class was a matter, not for the commodity market, but for state and private repressive violence. below a certain stratum of the working class, even today, violence rather than commodities are employed to keep workers’ bodies docile, and this repression clearly breaks down along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and disability―as movements like #blacklivesmatter and #metoo clearly indicate. the physicality of violent repression is also diferent in the centres of capitalist production―the global north and west―than it is in the global south and east. having said that, the two ways in which the capitalist can expand the surplus-value extracted from labour is either a) to extend the total amount of work time (e.g. making the worker work for twelve hours, so that four hours of labour is paid while eight is unpaid) or b) to increase the productivity of labour, so that the value required to repay the worker is made up in a shorter amount of time (e.g. the worker not makes up the value of the wage in two hours, but continues to work for eight, rendering six-hours unpaid labour to the capitalist). marx called these two kinds of surplus value―that achieved by extending labour time and that by increasing the productivity of labour―absolute and relative surplus-value, respectively. we will discuss these concepts in the next section, as they fgure heavily in marx’s analysis of the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. formal and real subsumption in the published version of volume one of capital ( ), marx makes only one reference to subsumption, in his discussion of “absolute and relative surplus value” (chapter ): a merely formal subsumption of labour under capital sufces for the production of absolute surplus-value. it is enough, for example, that handicraftsmen who previously worked on their own account, or as apprentices of a master, should become wage labourers under the direct control of a capitalist. what marx is talking about here is the process by which scattered forms of industry were initially brought under the control of the capitalist. the labour of craftspeople were subsumed under conditions of capitalist production; they may have been brought together into a single factory, for example, while the actual labour they were engaged in remained much the same. the capitalist achieves economies of scale without transforming the labour process itself. as a result, the capitalist can only increase surplus value by absolute means, i.e. the extension of the working day. without transforming the practice of labour, the capitalist cannot increase the productivity of labour, and so an increase of relative surplus- value is ruled out. marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy, volume (london: pelican books, ): . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . until the s, there was no further insight into the nature of the subsumption of labour under capital. only when a manuscript draft of capital was made available in western europe between and , and published in english in , was more attention paid to this idea . “the results of the immediate process of production” has much to say about the connection between absolute and relative surplus value and formal and real subsumption . i have written above how exchange-value was combined with use-value in the process of commodifying artefacts that had previously not been commodities. the way this takes place is, in fact, through the formal subsumption of labour under capital. formal subsumption is based on the strict separation of raw materials from workers, brought together only under the auspices of the capitalist. without this separation, in pre-capitalist modes of production for example, the producers themselves chose when and how to produce, whether for use or for exchange. the formal subsumption of labour under capital, by alienating the producer from the raw material and the results of their labour, forces production only for exchange, in other words, the production of commodities alone. the production of commodities is required for the production of surplus-value. in marx’s terms, with formal subsumption the labour process becomes the instrument of the valorization process, the process of the self-valorization of capital―the manufacture of surplus value. the labour process is subsumed under capital (it is its own process) and the capitalist intervenes in the process as its director, manager. the actual process of labour does not change, but by being placed under capitalist management what was produced before is not produced solely as a commodity, as part of the cycle of surplus-value production. marx writes that “technologically speaking, the labour process goes on as before, with the proviso that it is now subordinated to capital” . the capitalist cannot be satisfed merely with extracting absolute surplus-value, however, for they rapidly run not only into the real limit of the length of the working day ( hours), but into political limits as well. in the stirring tenth chapter of capital, marx lays out the history of struggle around the length of the working day . facing both natural and political limitations on the extraction of absolute surplus-value, the capitalist must fgure out how to extract relative surplus-value by increasing the productivity of labour. this involves changing the process of labour that until now had only been formally subsumed under capital; thus arises the real subsumption of labour . given the capitalist requirement of always-expanding value, the process of deepening and murray, patrick. “the place of ‘the results of the immediate production process’ in capital”, in the mismeasure of wealth (chicago: haymarket, ): - . for an account of the philosophical background of subsumption as well as more current usage of the concept, see endnotes. “the history of subsumption”, in endnotes : misery and the value form. london: ak press, . marx, capital, volume : . ibid., . the capitalist continues to extract absolute surplus-value even today, through the extension of the working day through overtime and cultures of overwork. see, for example, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why- i-collapsed-on-the-job/ . “there now arises a technologically and otherwise specifc mode of production – capitalist production – which transforms the nature of the labour process itself and its actual conditions. only when that happens do we witness the real subsumption of labour under capital.” marx, capital, volume : - . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-collapsed-on-the-job/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-collapsed-on-the-job/ broadening the subsumption of labour, the transformation of the labour process, never ends. it becomes a part of the history of the industry or profession in question. as the endnotes collective writes, real subsumption has a historical directionality, for it entails a constant process of revolutionizing the labour process through material and technological transformations which increase the productivity of labour. from these secular increases in productivity follow broader transformations in the character of society as a whole, and in the relations of production between workers and capitalists in particular. real subsumption, as the modifcation of the labour-process along specifcally capitalist lines, is exemplifed in the historical development of the productive powers of social labour as the productive powers of capital. this occurs through cooperation, machinery, and large-scale industry. this ought to sound familiar, as the processes involved map directly onto librarianship, with cooperation (e.g. shared-cataloguing and resources via oclc), machinery (library automation and data initiatives), and large-scale industry (the rapidly monopolizing vendor ecosystem). these three processes are all aspects of the real subsumption of labour leading to the disruption (through capitalist rationalization and the extension of value-production) of the industry in question. in the next section we will look at the way these component parts have been implemented in librarianship. what i want to argue is that the disruption of librarianship, the ongoing feeling of crisis― both professional and subjective―that has attended the profession for the last thirty or forty years, is due to the material disruption caused by the gradual unfolding of subsumption of labour. for libraries, this is part of the same process unfolding within our parent institutions as they are brought in line with market forces under neoliberalism. the process is uneven: in some areas the process of real subsumption began before the formal subsumption was completed in other areas. the process of commodifcation of library work radically transforms both the work that we do, our relationship to that work, and the social relationships within which the work is performed. the cause of the crisis is not―as per buschman―a lack of a unifed identity or position, but rather the fundamental material disruption of the conditions of production in which library workers are engaged. formal and real subsumption in libraries to demonstrated the uneven way in which subsumption has taken place in libraries, i want to look at the history of catalogue cards, marc, and online library systems. these interrelated technologies demonstrate, in my view, the three processes at work in subsumption (cooperation, machinery, and large-scale industry). according to henriette avram, the library of congress (lc) began to investigate automating its catalogue-card production processes in the late s . by the mid- s―that is as the fordist/keynesian regime of accumulation was entering the period of crisis that would lead to neoliberalism―lc was reviewing various automation initiatives: endnotes: . avram, henriette d. marc: its history and implications. washington: library of congress, : . https://fles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed .pdf journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed .pdf during this same period, motivated by the increasing attention given to automation in libraries, clr [council of library resources] awarded a contract for a study of the possible methods of converting the data on lc cards to machine-readable form for the purposes of printing bibliographical products by computer. the machine-readable cataloguing (marc) pilot project took place between and , and the marc distribution service was launched in . avram sums up the benefts of marc and its distribution service in the following manner: although the primary advantage of the distribution service is considered to be the cost savings resulting from the centralized cataloguing and from centralizing editing and transcription of machine-readable records, another byproduct of marc is often overlooked. it is impossible to estimate the resources (people and time) saved by national and international organizations implementing automated systems through the use of marc publications… thus, through the eforts of a dedicated lc staf, signifcant cost savings have been efected throughout the world. here we have an explicit acknowledgement that the three processes involved in subsumption (cooperation, machinery, and large-scale industry) have increased the productivity of labour. the centralization of resources is both cause and efect of increased division of labour within library work; the automation of process is seen as a core means of increasing labour productivity; and economies of scale contribute to cost-saving across the industry. we must also take note how the language of commodity production (cost-saving) takes priority over the kind of “professional” concerns identifed by buschman, record-quality or local control, for example. david harvey has described the process whereby social actors get drawn into the language of commodity exchange, are forced to be “shamelessly market-oriented because that is the primary language of communication in our society”. harvey argues that even though “market integration plainly carried with it the danger of pandering to the rich and private consumer rather than to the poor and public needs” , we are powerless to resist such integration. in the case of the library of congress, we have a clear example of a public institution drawn into the logic and language of market integration. subsumption did not proceed evenly from the mid- s onwards, however. the automation of catalogue-card production as an act of only partial subsumption, somewhere between the formal and the real, for marc provided an automated way to produce cards that were the same as those produced by hand; the artifacts and the processes associated with them (fling them in card catalogues, search processes, etc.) remained unchanged. i suggest that this phenomenon of partial or incomplete subsumption is characteristic of technological development within librarianship. the partial nature of subsumption in one area leads, however, to the transformation of labour in another area. karen coyle, in her book on the functional requirements of bibliographic records (frbr), described how the need for an online library catalogue grew out of the backlog in fling marc catalogue cards at university of california. considerations of cooperation were also important in this development. as coyle writes, ibid. ibid., - . harvey, the condition of postmodernity: . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . the primary motivators for that catalog were the need to share information about library holdings across the entire state university system (and the associated cost savings), and to move away from the expense and inefciency of card production and the maintenance of very large card catalogs. at the time that the library developed the frst union catalog, which was generated from less than a half dozen years of marc records created on the systems provided by the ohio college library center (later known solely as oclc) and the research libraries’ group’s rlie system, the larger libraries in the university of california systems were running from , to , cards behind fling into their massive card catalogs. this meant that cards entered the catalog about three months after the book was cataloged and shelved. for a major research library, having a catalog that was three months out of date, and only promising to get worse as library stafng decreased due to budget cuts, made the online catalog solution a necessity. here we see the combination of cooperation, technological innovation, and the need to cut costs, all combining in a change to the process of labour taking place within an academic library. the processes of subsumption take place in increments, unevenly across library systems, but they have a single goal: the increase of frst absolute then relative surplus-value produced by the library system. one the results of these processes, of course, is to reduce the amount of human labour required, automating away library jobs. marx calls the ratio of human labour to raw materials and infrastructure the organic composition of capital, and argues that capitalists always seek to reduce the amount of human labour, because they see in labour not the source of their profts, but as the most expensive part of their capital outlay. indeed, once automated and online library systems became large business concerns in the late s and early s, staf complements in cataloguing departments began to decline: the years from to witnessed a decrease of % in the hiring of cataloguing professionals. these hiring reductions, coupled with technological advances, have caused many cataloguing departments to shrink. this process continues today, of course, with the prevalence of precarious or voluntary positions taking the place of full-time permanent positions which were more widespread during the period of the post-war consensus that ended with the advent of neoliberal labour discipline in the s. was the year of the frst dynix implementation, joining a growing number of proprietary software vendors that continues to be part of the library ecosystem. it is no coincidence that the interest of private capital in library work developed alongside the subsumption of library labour under capitalist conditions of production. this network of private corporations looking to proft from public funds is a major component in the integration of public institutions into commodity exchange and the market. in his discussion of capitalist modernization, harvey writes that the common material languages of money and commodities provide a universal basis coyle, karen. frbr, before and after: a look at our bibliographic models (chicago: ala editions, ): . boydston, jeanne m.k. and joan m. leysen, “observations on the catalogers’ role in descriptive metadata creation in academic libraries”, cataloging & classifcation uarterly ( ), : . https://doi.org/ . /j v n _ journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . https://doi.org/ . /j v n _ within market capitalism for linking everyone into an identical system of market valuation and so procuring the reproduction of social life through an objectively grounded system of social bonding. put simply, the more we “do business” with library vendors, the more our own processes, values, and views conform to the market logic of proft-making. it is through this process of bringing public institutions into the discipline of the market, of subsuming labour under capitalist relations of production, that we can best understand the feelings of crisis that plague librarianship. take, for example, the problem of credentialism and (de-)professionalization. on the librarian side, we have fear of competition―from both new graduates and non-degree holders―competition which might drive down wages and benefts, but which also leads to a reduction of agency and an increase of alienation in our work. our response is typically protectionism: calls to reduce the number of graduates, or to protect professional positions. but protectionism always fails against the inexorable process of capitalist rationalization and innovation (i.e. technological change and the real subsumption of labour). on the supply side, the infation of the number of qualifed graduates and the creation of alternative degrees within library schools attest to the schools’ own subjection to market forces, commodifcation, and subsumption. the commodity relations into which they are now forced by university administrations require that they, like libraries, “prove their value”. under neoliberalism, such proof can only take the form of commodity exchange value: tuition dollars for degrees. “success metrics” like student satisfaction are there to ensure that the fow of tuition dollars remains secure. in this question of professionalism and credentialism, we can clearly see the double bind of capitalist relations. the library degree becomes signifer of the value of professional labour, an indicator of the investment made by the student-entrepreneur in themselves, which is all the value the employer needs to recognize. concerns within the profession around diversity, treatment of non-degree holders, gatekeeping, etc., stand for nothing against the power of the “cash nexus” which is all that now connects us both within the profession and in society at large. the double bind consists in this: that whether we try to resist or embrace technical innovation, we make ourselves more attractive to private capital. if we are slow to change, there is more proft to be reaped by our modernization; if we are at the cutting edge, then the proftability of our commodities is higher. whether we try to dismantle professional power imbalances or we try to protect them, we end up further enmeshed in the logic of labour and competition. there is no way out of the double bind short of changing the entire system of production and the social relations that arise from it. in order to truly change the nature of librarianship and the social relations in which we fnd ourselves, we must fundamentally change the way labour, production, and social life are organized. i don’t think there are any easy solutions to this problem. the kernel of the double bind is, to my mind, located within the dual nature of the commodity itself. if, as harvey insists, “access to, and control over, information, coupled with a strong capacity for instant data analysis, have become essential to… corporate interests”, if “knowledge itself [has become] a key commodity, to be produced and sold to the highest bidder, under conditions that are harvey, the condition of postmodernity: . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . themselves increasingly organized on a competitive basis” , then we must be suspicious of any solution or act of resistance that does not deal with the commodity question. any act of resistance or progress must be analyzed with a view to whether it draws us further into the network of commodity relationships. it will take time―the revolution cannot occur overnight―but only by abolishing the commodity form itself can we free ourselves from the social relationships which maintain and reproduce the culture of crisis that aficts not only libraries, but capitalist society itself. references avram, henriette d. marc: its history and implications. washington: library of congress, . https://fles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed .pdf bodovski, katerina. “why i collapsed on the job”, the chronicle of higher education, february , . https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-collapsed-on-the-job/ boydston, jeanne m.k. and joan m. leysen. “observations on the catalogers’ role in descriptive metadata creation in academic libraries”. cataloging & classifcation uarterly ( ), : - . https://doi.org/ . /j v n _ buschman, john. dismantling the public sphere: situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy. westport, ct: libraries unlimited, . buschman, john. “librarianship and the arc of crisis: the road to institutionalized cultural eeoliberalism”. mediatropes ( ), : - . http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/mediatropes/article/view/ buschman, john. “between eeoliberalism and identity politics: academic librarianship, democracy and eovember , ”. the journal of academic librarianship ( ), : - . https://doi.org/ . /j.acalib. . . christian, linda a. “a passion defcit: occupational burnout and the eew librarian: a recommendation report.” the southeastern librarian ( ), . https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/seln/vol /iss / coyle, karen. frbr, before and after: a look at our bibliographic models. chicago: ala editions, . dyer-witheford, eick. cyber-proletariat: global labour in the digital vortex. toronto: between the lines, . endnotes. “the history of subsumption”. in endnotes : misery and the value form. london: ak press, . ettarh, fobazi. “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves.” in the library with the lead pipe, january , . http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ /vocational-awe/ harvey, the condition of postmodernity: - . journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ /vocational-awe/ https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/seln/vol /iss / https://doi.org/ . /j.acalib. . . http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/mediatropes/article/view/ https://doi.org/ . /j v n _ https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-collapsed-on-the-job/ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed .pdf fanelli, carlo. “eeoliberalism and the city.” canadian dimension, september , . https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/neoliberalism-the-city gissing, george. new grub street. london: oxford university press, . hall, stuart. “the march of the eeoliberals.” the guardian, september , . https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /sep/ /march-of-the-neoliberals harvey, david. the condition of postmodernity. malden, ma: blackwell, . harvey, david. a brief history of neoliberalism. london: oxford university press, . harvey, david. marx, capital and the madness of economic reason. london: oxford university press, . jameson, fredric. postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham, ec: duke university press, . lister, john. “the eeoliberal epidemic striking healthcare”. ournhs, june , . https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/john-lister/neoliberal-epidemic-striking-healthcare marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy, volume . london: pelican books, . marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy, volume . london: penguin classics, . murray, patrick. “the place of ‘the results of the immediate production process’ in capital.” in the mismeasure of wealth, chicago: haymarket, : - . pratt, eick. “eeoliberalism and the (internal) marketisation of primary school assessment in england.” british educational research journal ( ), : - . https://doi.org/ . /berj. swafeld, laura. “the uk eo longer has a eational public library system.” the guardian, october , . https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector- network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library-system-community journal of radical librarianship, vol. ( ) pp. – . https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library-system-community https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/ /oct/ /uk-national-public-library-system-community https://doi.org/ . /berj. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/john-lister/neoliberal-epidemic-striking-healthcare https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /sep/ /march-of-the-neoliberals https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/neoliberalism-the-city 	sam popowich 	the perennial crisis of librarianship 	the library in ‘post-industrial’ capitalism 	use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value 	formal and real subsumption 	formal and real subsumption in libraries 	references las torres de lucca - nro / julio-diciembre vol. | nº julio-diciembre : - issn: - lastorresdelucca.org esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista sketches for an antipunitivist feminism camila arbuet osuna universidad autónoma de entre ríos, argentina resumen a lo largo de su vasta historia, el movimiento feminista ha pensado, como problema político y como parte de su estrategia de lucha y sobrevivencia, las diferentes facetas del aparato represivo del estado. en diversos contextos el antipunitivismo —es decir, la respuesta política a la filosofía del castigo como el modo de (re)accionar a las cuestiones sociales— ha surgido como elemento crucial de las diatribas de los feminismos antisistémicos. sin embargo, no podríamos afirmar que existe algo así como una tradición, estructurante y estructurada, del feminismo antipunitivista, sino, más bien, lo que observamos es un conjunto de preocupaciones y aproximaciones políticas de algunos feminismos a las estrategias de castigo, en los momentos en los que las lógicas de la dominación patriarcal se entrecruzan con la selectividad sexo-genérica de los aparatos represivos de los estados. en el presente trabajo quisiéramos hacer el esfuerzo de deliberar la interacción entre estas aproximaciones para así enunciar qué elementos compondrían un feminismo antipunitivista. palabras clave antipunitivismo; cruces; feminismos; historia. abstract throughout its great history, the feminist movement has thought the different facets of the repressive apparatus of the state, as a political problem and as part of its strategy of struggle and survival. in different contexts, antipunitivism — that is, the political response to the philosophy of punishment as the way to (re)act to social issues— has emerged as a crucial element in the diatribes of antisystemic feminisms. however, we could not claim that there is something like a structuring and structured tradition of antipunitivist feminism. rather, what we observe is a set of concerns and political approaches of some feminisms to the strategies of punishment, in the moments in which the logics of patriarchal domination intersect with the gender-generic selectivity of the repressive apparatuses of the states. in the present work we would like to make the effort to deliberate the interaction between these approaches in order to enunciate what elements would compose an antipunitivist feminism. keywords feminisms; antipunitivism; crosses; history. https://doi.org/ . /palgrave.polity. vol. | nº julio-diciembre : - issn: - lastorresdelucca.org recibido received / / aprobado approved / / publicado published / / nota de la autora camila arbuet osuna, facultad de humanidades, artes y ciencias sociales, universidad autónoma de entre ríos, argentina; facultad de trabajo social, universidad nacional de entre ríos, argentina. este trabajo se enmarca en los proyectos de investigación “configuraciones del poder punitivo a escala local. juventudes y cuerpos marcados como femeninos en la historia reciente” de la universidad nacional de entre ríos y “(des)obedecer: políticas de la resistencia y de lo reivindicativo” de la universidad nacional de rosario, por los que ha sido financiado. agradezco las revisiones atentas de lxs evaluadorxs y las editoras de la revista, así como las de mis colegas, laura naput, sofía cáceres sforza, beatriz porcel y alejandro haimovich. además, este artículo duplicó su tamaño y ajustó varias de sus líneas gracias a la lectura y crítica de mi pareja, maría laura gutiérrez, con quien debatimos varios de los puntos aquí desarrollados en el dictado conjunto del seminario doctoral “debates teóricos y políticos de los feminismos contemporáneos." correo electrónico: camila_arbuet@hotmail.com dirección postal: almirante brown , facultad de trabajo social, universidad nacional de entre ríos, cp , paraná, entre ríos, argentina. orcid: https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /palgrave.polity. esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista para iniciar este esbozo consideramos preciso articular tres corrientes de la teoría política feminista que desde sus particulares combates han analizado y respondido a tres facetas distintas del aparato represivo del estado. la primera de ellas es la del feminismo negro, que ha pensado específicamente las políticas de encierro y las estructuras carcelarias como elementos constitutivos de (re) producción de sujetxs criminalizadxs, de comunidades marcadas, de mano de obra esclava y pseudoesclava, de imaginarios sociales sobre lo femenino y lo masculino vinculados al afuera y al adentro. la segunda es la del feminismo de las políticas sexuales o del activismo prosexo que, a través de sus historias de revoluciones y reacciones sexuales, y mediante sus intervenciones punzantes sobre las perturbaciones que otros sexos y sexualidades desviadas reconocibles producen en los más variados órdenes, ha reflexionado sobre los dispositivos jurídicos y simbólicos de punición social. finalmente, la tercera corriente de la que nos serviremos es la del feminismo latino, migrante, cuir, a veces enunciado como transfeminismo, que ha producido una valiosa teoría sobre el accionar de las fuerzas policiales y paraestatales, sobre los formatos de la represión en las calles, rutas y fronteras. vinculando elementos de análisis de estas tres prolíferas trayectorias, que a su vez se cruzan reiteradamente con las resistencias lgbttti, intentaremos, por una parte, sintetizar algunas de las embestidas feministas y de las disidencias sexuales, en diversos niveles, al aparato represivo y disciplinador del estado; y, por otra parte, exponer algunas de las encrucijadas que el punitivismo y el antipunitivismo plantean hacia el interior del movimiento feminista. antes de iniciar la labor, vale aclarar que pensar un feminismo antipunitivista como una matriz de acción, esbozando una reflexión sobre la historia de sus prácticas y discursos contra el castigo y las regulaciones fascistas de los estados, tiene en el contexto presente una enorme urgencia. por un imperioso motivo, saber, la necesidad de darnos estrategias de resistencia, en medio de circunstancias cada vez más hostiles, que combatan la duplicación de la lógica patriarcal de empoderamiento; que rompan los formatos de la horda; que estén dispuestas a ser revisadas cuantas veces sea necesario; que no olviden que combatimos gracias a —y no a pesar de— la potencia disruptiva de las particularidades eróticas, emotivas, corpóreas; que esgriman propuestas pedagógicas no normativizantes, no moralizantes, que no buscan éxitos; que habiten la incomodidad sin disculpar el dolor. camila arbuet osuna el feminismo negro y las políticas de encierro desde que la decimotercera enmienda a la carta magna estadounidense dictaminó, en , que “ni en los estados unidos ni en ningún lugar sujeto a su jurisdicción habrá esclavitud ni trabajo forzado, excepto como castigo de un delito del que el responsable haya quedado debidamente convicto” ( , xiii), es decir, desde que lxs negrxs pasaron de ser esclavxs a ser potenciales criminales, la historia de la resistencia negra quedó definitivamente ligada a la del antipunitivismo. dentro de esta resistencia, las feministas negras, que tempranamente denunciaron las continuidades y transformaciones del yugo, hicieron un audaz trabajo de análisis y denuncia sobre los sistemas de encierro y su peculiar generización. la terrible historia de explotación y dominación de las mujeres negras tiene a las formas de encierro como modo imperante de disciplinamiento, como su registro extremo del patriarcado. el encierro ha estado involucrado siempre con las formas patriarcales y racializadas de dominación. en el paso del uso de mujeres como paridoras en plantaciones del esclavismo, a los procesos eugenésicos de esterilización del siglo xx en internaciones forzadas o mal informadas (davis, ); en el sometimiento a las formas más precarias y abusivas del trabajo doméstico como único trabajo posible que replicaba la casa de los señores como un espacio de control y disposición total de sus cuerpos; en la criminalización y persecución de su activismo con la muerte y/o la cárcel como horizonte permanente. a lo largo de la historia de las mujeres negras, el encierro ha sido la amenaza constante del sistema para disciplinarlas. ocupando el lugar que el manicomio tenía para las mujeres blancas descarriadas, la prisión se erigió tempranamente en los estados unidos como el espacio de rehabilitación guética de la población de mujeres, lesbianas, travestis y trans negras. un lugar en el que —principalmente cuando aún funcionaba el ideal positivista y benefactor de la rehabilitación— se las recodificaba violentamente para procrear y servir; se las drogaba y denigraba con procedimientos vejatorios que reproducían los extremos más crudos de las prácticas patriarcales del afuera; y, desde fines de los ochenta, son utilizadas como mano de obra hiperbarata y precarizada para el complejo industrial penitenciario. obviamente, las prácticas de estos tres momentos no han sido superadas, sino que, en la actualidad, conviven estas prácticas siguen aplicándose en las cárceles de mujeres. un proyecto del del centro de informes de investigación descubrió que california había pagado a médicos para esterilizar al menos a reclusas embarazadas entre y . el médico que supervisó los procedimientos en una prisión aseguró que se ahorraba una gran cantidad en asistencia social pagando por estos niños no deseados. una oficial de otra prisión mantuvo que estas prácticas eran un problema de empoderamiento para las reclusas que, según ella, cometerían delitos para poder regresar a prisión y tener un mejor cuidado de su salud (beery, ). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista de manera perversa como supuestos, prejuicios y directrices que regulan el encierro de mujeres, lesbianas, travestis y trans negras, chicanas, indias, migrantes, pobres, trabajadoras sexuales... algunos ejemplos de estos usos que persisten hoy son tanto las características de los talleres de oficio en las cárceles de mujeres, organizados según la lógica sexista de los cuidados y profesiones naturalizadas como femeninas; como los alarmante niveles de medicalización de las presas denunciados por organizaciones como sisters inside, que las hace vulnerables a los más diversos abusos y dependientes del consumo para empresas farmacológicas. de estas atroces experiencias sostenidas durante más de un siglo se desprende una prolífera producción feminista que nos parece importante traer a colación para pensar la promesa final (vinculada in media res con la muerte, pero distinta de ella) de la punición estatal para/sobre los cuerpos feminizados: el encierro. angela davis ( ) nos habla de un pacto social que sostiene la prisión. un pacto implícito que explica nuestra convivencia abrumadoramente pacífica con este instrumento que ha demostrado ser ineficaz para los objetivos que enuncia como propios (aunque muy eficaz para los verdaderos: las prisiones producen más prisiones) y que, de forma muy perturbadora, aparece en el caso estadounidense como un horizonte de posibilidad real para un porcentaje altísimo de la población libre. de este modo, la prisión no es algo que le ocurre a otras personas, sino una cara constitutiva de los temores del imaginario social en sociedades como la estadounidense. sin embargo, nadie se levanta de su cama esperando no ser encarcelada ese día; lo que media en la distorsión constitutiva de lo real es una cadena extensa de producciones culturales sobre la seguridad, propias de la sociedad de control (garland, ), junto con una profunda mala conciencia que programáticamente no quiere saber que el encierro es parte del cimiento de la estructura económica, política y social del ideal del buena vida estadounidense. en este marco, la población de reclusas, que históricamente ha sido inferior que la masculina en todos los estados de eeuu, ha crecido de modo sostenido en un porcentaje mayor desde el giro punitivista gestado en este país entre finales de los años setenta y la década de los ochenta. entre y el , la tasa de crecimiento sisters inside [hermanas adentro] es una organización abolicionista y feminista australiana que interviene para asegurar los derechos de las mujeres en cautiverio y para denunciar los atropellos del complejo industrial penitenciario. y algunas versiones de las masculinidades disidentes cómo las lesbianas butch o los varones trans. según la investigación vertida en el documental de ava duvernay, enmienda xiii ( ), las posibilidades de ser actualmente encarcelado en eeuu son de sobre , para la población blanca; y de sobre para la negra. esto quiere decir que el , % de la población puede entrar en prisión en algún momento de su vida en ese país. camila arbuet osuna del encarcelamiento de mujeres fue del %; mientras que la de hombres fue del % (mauer, ). “ahora hay más mujeres en prisión en el estado de california que las que había en todo el país a principios de los setenta. de hecho, california tiene la población femenina reclusa más alta del mundo” (davis, , p. ). según las estadísticas oficiales del sistema penitenciario de california, en hay registradas en este estado . mujeres presas. más de la mitad de ellas están condenadas, en primer lugar, por crímenes contra otras personas; y, en segundo lugar, por crímenes contra la propiedad. en un estado donde —según el censo de — la población negra es del , %, la población encarcelada femenina se divide significativamente de esta manera: , % son latinas, , % son blancas y , % son negras. sin embargo, estas son estadísticas muy conservadoras, dado que si sumamos la población de mujeres encarceladas de las distintas prisiones del estado, obtenemos un número cercano a las . reclusas. el carácter racista del dispositivo de encarcelamiento matiza el presupuesto igualitario del punitivismo que sostiene que “todos podemos perder la libertad” (foucault, , p. ); para recordarnos la trampa de la igualdad mercantil que sustenta todo contrato y agrega que no todas las libertades valen lo mismo. en el caso de la raza, el color de la piel se torna una marca que solo se puede disfrazar, de modo intermitente y parcial, con dinero y género. en las últimas décadas en estados unidos se ha dado un desplazamiento importante respecto de este tema: comenzó a decaer el mito de largo recorrido del violador negro, reafirmado por el sobrenombre de “súper depredador," que fue tan popular en los años ochenta; de tal modo que en los años noventa fue posible que algunos hombres negros que cometieron delitos contra mujeres negras (y, en algunos casos, contra blancas, como el paradigmático crimen de o. j. simpson) tuvieran de su lado la estructura judicial sexista. las denuncias, tal y como lo destaca beth richie ( ), suelen quedar atrapadas hoy en día entre un movimiento antiviolencia propio del feminismo blanco, que puede ser reapropiado por cierta derecha; y la comprensible respuesta de las comunidades negras que reaccionan frente a la punición del estado. a su vez, si a estos cuerpos históricamente perseguidos se les suma un conjunto de prácticas desviadas de las feminidades y las masculinidades hegemónicas, obtenemos una peligrosa taxonomía. tal y como nos enseñó stonewall en y el tortuoso peregrinar por instituciones de encierro, antes prisiones que además están superpobladas: federal correctional institution ( presas); valley state prison (capacidad . , hay . presas); california institution for women (capacidad . , hay . presas); central california women’s facility (capacidad . , hay . presas). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista y después de la redada mítica, de las militantes marsha jhonson —travesti y negra— y sylvia rivera —drag queen, latina y lesbiana —. esta última cuenta cómo procedía la policía en las razzias: “la rutina era ‘maricones aquí, tortas aquí, bichos raros allí’ refiriéndose a mi bando dentro de la comunidad. si no tenías tres piezas de ropa masculina, ibas al calabozo. una torta butch tenía que tener tres piezas de ropa femenina, o de lo contrario iba al calabozo” (rivera y johnson, , p. ). esta forma de persecución se extiende como una constante, como lo confirma el conjunto de casos compilados y analizados por beth richie en arrested justice: black women, violence and america’s prison nation ( ), entre los que se encuentra el paradigmático ataque sexual a un grupo de lesbianas negras en greenwich village en , que terminó con cuatro de ellas en prisión por defenderse. al finalizar el libro, se comprende mejor por qué el delito más extendido de las mujeres no es ni la portación y comercialización de drogas, ni los delitos de la propiedad; sino los que el sistema decodifica como “crímenes contra otras personas." en referencia a los casos analizados richie señala: juntos, [los casos] representan un nuevo nivel de desdén hacia las mujeres negras que son jóvenes, pobres, queer o que viven en circunstancias vulnerables en medio de la construcción de la nación-prisión americana —grupos que los programas de la mainstream antiviolencia ignoran usualmente—. asimismo, buena parte de mi fuerte reacción a estas historias resultó de la ausencia de una respuesta formal organizada por alguna parte de las bases del movimiento feminista antiviolencia o por los grupos que trabajan en cuestiones de justicia racial ( , p. ). a su vez, si dirigimos la mirada al interior, las prisiones han tenido, desde siempre, una disposición generizada de su población, y en las cárceles de mujeres esta disposición se racializa y sexualiza de manera particular. si el fantasma de la locura ocupa un lugar privilegiado en el encarcelamiento y control de las presas, desde los orígenes de una institución que vino a apuntalar el ejercicio privado del castigo de los hombres (padres, esposos, hermanos, patrones, curas...) sobre las mujeres; este espectro se tensa con la figura de la delincuente en la distinción entre presas blancas, latinas y negras, para arrojar una grilla en la que existen locas, criminales y confundidas. si entendemos el crimen como un acto de virilidad desmesurada, las presas —especialmente las que lo están por crímenes violentos— no solo han roto la ley penal, sino también (y de forma más grave) el contrato sexual. esta ruptura se decodifica como una explosión de hybris que el racismo intrínseco de los aparatos punitivos del estado suele asociar con una característica de la negritud. dicha desviación camila arbuet osuna se contrarresta en las prisiones con un violentísimo y repetitivo proceso de hipersexualización, destinado a blanquear y heteronormativizar a las presas. esta conversión no es, exactamente, un proceso pacífico. las cárceles tienen su propia lógica interna y las presas crean, —en condiciones extremadamente crueles y en un sistema que las divide, schmittianamente, entre amigas y enemigas—, nuevas formas de resistencia —guéticas, maternas, lesbianas, etc.— que bloquean muchos de estas prácticas normativizantes, como por ejemplo los intentos de invisibilizar y combatir el deseo lésbico. la prisión como un caldo de cultivo para relaciones lésbicas es un dilema que aqueja al reformismo carcelario desde que se fundaron las cárceles de mujeres y frente al que se dieron distintas estrategias de regulación: todas fallidas. tras la negación de los primeros momentos —“un personal de custodia femenino, afirmaban los reformistas, minimizaría las tentaciones sexuales, que se veían como origen de la criminalidad femenina” (davis, p. )—; se llegó a lo que se podría llamar la “contención de daños." es decir, a la gestión biopolítica sexualizada y racializada de las cárceles de mujeres, tal y como lo demostró estelle freedman ( ) en su clásico their sister’s keepers: women’s prison reform in america, - , en el que destaca que las políticas históricas de segregación racial, en la prisión femenina de bedford hills, en nueva york, implicaban intentar evitar, al menos, las relaciones lésbicas interraciales, tolerando las que se daban entre mujeres de misma raza. actualmente, ambas estrategias se solapan, tienen diversos grados de virulencia y se acompañan de varios incentivos manipuladores para heterosexualizar las presas y volverlas “madresposas” (lagarde, ). sin embargo, estas medidas no suelen ser muy efectivas, en la mayor parte de los casos y suelen mostrar, más temprano que tarde, su ineficacia. en una institución total, como lo es la cárcel, donde la soberanía sobre los cuerpos es expropiada por el sistema penitenciario, que se atribuye entonces la capacidad de hacer vivir y hacer morir de la población presa; la racionalidad funcional, estratégica, del dispositivo penitenciario (reproducir mujeres domesticadas) convive con elementos perversos de una racionalidad instrumental, en la apertura de una zona en blanco para un goce que se regenera, entre el pasaje del afuera y el adentro. podemos pensar, perfectamente, en las experiencias de las presas, de lxs guardias y del personal general de las prisiones, que tanto ha mostrado hollywood; pero, además, también volvemos sobre nosotrxs, mirando esas escenas una y otra vez, erigiendo a la cárcel como fundación, permanente y consensuada, de las prácticas más feroces y admitidas del patriarcado. en este punto, la contribución del feminismo negro abolicionista es invaluable. frente a versiones del reformismo que esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista defienden formas, supuestamente, más humanitarias del encarcelamiento; la cofundadora de critical resistence, rachel herzing ( ), nos recuerda que la única reforma válida sería la que hiciera que el complejo industrial penitenciario (pic) no pudiera funcionar: if it is possible to get everybody to open all prison doors wide today, fantastic! if it is not, then what can we do to chip away, chip away, chip away so that the pic doesn’t have the ability to continually increase its power or deepen its reach and hold on our lives? [si es posible lograr que todos abran todas las puertas de la prisión hoy ¡fantástico! si no lo es, ¿qué podemos hacer para que el pic no tenga la capacidad de aumentar continuamente su poder o profundizar su alcance y aferrarse a nuestras vidas?]. dentro del antipunitivismo del feminismo negro, el abolicionismo tiene un lugar destacado que, ciertamente, aún no ha logrado en muchas otras corrientes del feminismo. esta comprensión ajustada de la imposibilidad de negociar con el complejo industrial penitenciario, que presenta claros vínculos con la historia del movimiento negro, también se puede extender y causar erosión sobre algunas comodidades de cierto feminismo mainstream. una característica de estas críticas es la comprensión, situada y contextualizada, de que los principios proclamados por feminismos con pretensiones hegemónicas pueden llevar a situaciones de extrema vulnerabilidad a poblaciones enteras de mujeres, lesbianas, travestis y trans. uno de estos casos se dio cuando en los años noventa el reclamo por un igualitarismo abstracto con los hombres llevó a ciertas voceras del feminismo a proponer que las cárceles de mujeres debían tener las mismas obligaciones (es decir, restricciones) que las de varones para poder apelar a los mismos derechos. esto produjo un recrudecimiento de las condiciones de sometimiento en los penales de mujeres, los guardias se proveyeron de mayor arsenal de armas y pasaron a esposar a las reclusas en actos académicos, los centros desguazaron programas educativos y de salud con la excusa de una critical resistence [resistencia crítica] es una organización, compuesta por activistas y académicos, que busca generar un movimiento de abolición del complejo industrial penitenciario. funciona desde y desde tiene una presencia muy importante dentro de distintos estados con programas de intervención de investigación y de asesoría legal. sitio oficial: http://criticalresistance.org nos referimos, particularmente, al feminismo que desea pactar con el estado, asimilacionista y cercano a la lógica del neoliberalismo y del patriarcado, que puede describirse, en una de sus facetas más visibles, como ese feminismo del % (fraser, ; fraser, arruzza y bhattacharya, ) y que puede hegemonizar y transformar ciertos programas para volverlos más cómodos y políticamente correctos, como un conjunto de prácticas y discursos esencializantes, tutelares y condescendientes. http://criticalresistance.org/ camila arbuet osuna austeridad igualatoria, etc. la respuesta del feminismo abolicionista fue aguda, pero minoritaria, en esta disputa igualitarista que engarzaba tan bien con los deseos del complejo industrial penitenciario y del estado. en caso como este, vendría bien recordar las palabras que suele repetir silvia federici: “no quisiera vivir yo como viven la mayor parte de los hombres." otra brecha se abre, de manera constante, en las críticas internas del feminismo abolicionista negro tanto hacia las corrientes del movimiento negro actual que no llegan a comprometerse del todo con el abolicionismo, esperando una extraña versión no selectiva del punitivismo; como hacia el feminismo punitivista que propone penas más duras como solución para los crímenes sexuales. sobre esta última vía de disputa puede ser interesante rescatar el intercambio de gina dent con angela davis, dado que tiene una claridad crucial sobre la potencia del abolicionismo para desequilibrar las osificaciones de un cierto feminismo tutelar. en palabras de dent: it seems that we’re back to the point that prisons have become not only a terrain for our activism, but also a challenge to our work as feminist intellectuals trying to think about the limits of feminisms and the terrain of new struggles. we can discuss, for example, the distinctions between an equality of sameness and an equality of difference, but what about an embodied theory that also considers agency? i’m thinking of two paradoxes that continue to hunt us: first of these is the incommensurability of women and the prison and the consequent symbolic use of women as the prison’s excesses. ai’s campaign image of the woman giving birth in chains is only one example. what if we set that picture up against a second example? in california, we know that one emerging “protection” for women is that no sexual relations between prisoners and guards will be considered consensual. the history of the resistances to women’s subordination in prison also constrain us, inasmuch as they assume that these women are not agents (dent y davis, , p. ). parece que volvemos a la cuestión de que las prisiones se han convertido no solo en un terreno para nuestro activismo, sino también en un desafío a nuestro trabajo como intelectuales feministas que estamos intentando reflexionar sobre los límites de los feminismos y el terreno de nuevas luchas. podemos discutir, por ejemplo, las distinciones entre el concepto de igualdad en la mismidad y en la diferencia ¿pero, por qué no pensar en una teoría integrada que también tenga en cuenta la agencia? estoy pensando en dos paradojas que nos siguen persiguiendo. la primera de ellas es la inconmensurabilidad del vínculo entre mujeres y prisiones, y el consecuente uso simbólico de mujeres para mostrar los excesos de la prisión. la imagen de una mujer encadenada pariendo, en la campaña de amnistía internacional puede ser un ejemplo; pero, ¿y si contrastamos esa imagen con un segundo ejemplo? sabemos que en california, una reciente “protección” a las mujeres establece que ninguna relación sexual entre prisioneras y guardias será considerada consensuada. la historia de las resistencias a la subordinación de mujeres en la cárcel también nos esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista esta inteligente intervención deja al descubierto cómo cada vez que se cuestionan las condiciones de decisión de todo un grupo de personas, argumentando a partir de las formas de la verdadera libertad que hacen válida una decisión, se obliteran un conjunto de posibilidades de deci(di)r y, como consecuencia, se trata como menores y se deja impotentes a ese grupo. la higienización del cuidado de sí, pero sobre todo del cuidado de lxs otrxs, es una tentación permanente para las formas hegemónicas del feminismo, principalmente en lo referido a la regulación de la sexualidad. las poblaciones de presas exacerban esos deseos normativos del feminismo, que están plagados de mitos de femineidad e implantaciones tutelares. lo que nos recuerda dent es que, si la tomamos en serio, la cárcel tiene la peculiaridad perturbadora de hacer que la relación entre el afuera y el adentro —de la prisión, pero también del patriarcado— presente una contigüidad que nos acusa en nuestro actuar. de este modo, si pensamos la cárcel de mujeres no como un exceso o una excepción, sino como parte de las condiciones de posibilidad de las reglas del afuera —eso es lo que supone el contrato carcelario al que nos referíamos antes— ya no hay lugar cómodo donde pararse desde un feminismo que negocie, tanto con su existencia como con los imperativos conductuales de una “buena vida” con versión única. en este punto el abolicionismo se expande, tal como lo pregona davis ( ), hacia una triple abolición que incluye los microfascismos que modulan la conducta; las formas de la tortura practicadas, explícita e implícitamente, en prisiones y la lógica misma del encierro. el activismo prosexo y las persecuciones judiciales decir prosexo es una interrogación incesante e incitante de las políticas sexuales y posturas antisexo en las leyes, normas institucionales y relaciones personales. es mantener una sospecha activa sobre los modos de represión y vigilancia en los espacios públicos e íntimos acerca de los cuerpos, las sexualidades y los deseos. decir prosexo es entender la militarización del espacio urbano, en especial de los barrios populares, como formas de control sexual, racial y de clase. (valeria flores, , p. ) como salvedad inicial de este apartado queremos destacar que somos conscientes de que el encarcelamiento y el enfrentamiento con la policía forman parte inherente de la historia combativa del activismo prosexo. sabemos que hay, por ejemplo, una preocupación intensa de lxs trabajadorxs constriñe, en tanto se presupone que esas mujeres no son agentes. camila arbuet osuna sexuales por las lógicas del encierro como parte del control y disciplinamiento de sus cuerpos: muchxs trabajadorxs sexuales son encerradxs en campos de rehabilitación, donde se lxs somete a ataques sexuales y a golpizas por parte de guardias y empleadxs. el encarcelamiento parece ser el universal global para la “rehabilitación” de lxs trabajadorxs sexuales, ya sea para aquellxs clasificadxs como trabajadorxs sexuales “voluntarixs” o “forzadxs." (daring, , p. ). esto es así, aunque sin embargo los análisis más importantes en este punto están vinculados a la lucha por reconocer el trabajo sexual como trabajo, es decir, por pensar en los dispositivos jurídicos y simbólicos que obstruyen esta compresión y este reconocimiento. por ello, en este apartado decidimos enfocarnos en las reflexiones de esta corriente sobre las formas de hostigamiento, persecución y segregación del aparato judicial a las distintas expresiones abyectas de las prácticas sexuales. tendremos en mente aquí, específicamente, dos combates cruciales del activismo prosexo desde las guerras del sexo (vance, ): uno, frente a las leyes contra el trabajo sexual en sus múltiples variantes y, otro, frente a la persecución judicial y patologización de diversas prácticas sexuales y sexualidades. también podríamos volver sobre el combate contra las leyes antipornográficas, pero eso haría de la extensión de este artículo, que intenta conjurar un punteo, inmanejable. por otro lado, como parte de estas aclaraciones preliminares, indicamos la distancia histórica, minada de peleas, que ha tenido el activismo prosexo frente a las versiones hegemónicas del feminismo que lo han combatido asiduamente. esta distancia involucra las críticas prosexo tanto al puritanismo y a las prácticas tutelares del feminismo, como al carácter mujeril del mainstream feminista; críticas que también sostuvieron una diferencia teórica entre opresión de géneros y opresión sexual. como parte de un feminismo antipunitivista también apostamos por pensar un feminismo prosexo, tantos años después del inicio de las discusiones sobre los múltiples cruces entre identidad y prácticas sexuales (butler, / ). gayle rubin escribe su ensayo pensando el sexo: notas para una teoría radical de las políticas sexuales en , en plena embestida de ronald reagan contra los derechos sexuales, especialmente los disidentes a la heteronormatividad. este gran texto, deudor del activismo prosexo pasado y de esta época, así como de las distintas historias de las sexualidades, estableció una nueva forma de periodizar (y por ende, de pensar) las prácticas de resistencia de cierta vertiente del feminismo radical desviado, pervertido. este nuevo modo de historizar, pensado en ciclos de reacción y revolución sexual —en la misma línea que kate millett había abordado años antes su política esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista sexual ( / )—, tuvo la particularidad de hacer foco en las tecnologías jurídicas que distintos gobiernos han desplegado para generar una persecución específica de cuerpos y de prácticas sexualmente inquietantes. rubin analiza las tandas de legislaciones que tienden a perseguir la pornografía, la prostitución, la homosexualidad y el prolífero mundo de las prácticas sexuales patologizadas, que van desde el fetichismo hasta el sexo intergeneracional; pasando por la transexualidad y el travestismo, entre otras. esta manera de periodizar, que se estructura sobre procesos de avance, resistencia y embestidas de/a los derechos sexuales, y que no deja nunca de recordar que dichos procesos diferencian sus dispositivos de operacionalización y selección por raza, estatus, geografías, etc., tiene la principal virtud de hacer más justicia a la polifonía de las historias de los feminismos que la de las olas delimitadas por el reclamo de ciertos feminismos hegemónicos. el texto de rubin es parte de una corrosiva invectiva contra los procesos de tutelaje, diagnóstico y control de las sexualidades, tanto hacia afuera como hacia el interior de las corrientes feministas. el foco de este antipunitivismo está en la crítica del (pre)juicio. se trata de un esfuerzo denodado por transparentar los preconceptos operantes en la clasificación de formas desviadas y rectas de vincularse sexualmente y por correr este conjunto de prejuicios hacia el terreno positivo de la creación de una “variación sexual benigna” que desactive el dispositivo represivo del pánico sexual (daich, ). estamos pensando, obviamente en una estructura del prejuicio, jerárquicamente asentada, con fuertes cargas punitivas inmediatas: vidas que valen menos que otras frente a la ley; cuyo empleo, vivienda y salud no están garantizados, cuyos espacios de sociabilidad son invadidos y estigmatizados, cuyos cuerpos pueden ser detenidos, requisados y violentados policial y socialmente, sin mayores problemas. con esto, rubin nos deja entrever que, si el problema solo fuese reagan o la estructura jurídica del estado, estaríamos en un mejor lugar. el dilema es la inmensa plataforma social que ese tipo de clasificación tiene como parte de, nuevamente, un pacto social que tranquiliza nuestras decisiones sexuales tiñéndolas de orientaciones naturales y que permea, reproduciendo, los comportamientos homo/trans/lesbófobos, xenófobos, racistas, capacitistas, sexistas y clasistas. el giro punitivista que acompañó al pánico sexual y a la reacción del feminismo prosexo desde finales de los años setenta en estados unidos se parece bastante al acaecido hacia mediados de los años noventa en argentina y al que tiene un reverdecer actual en el brasil de bolsonaro, en lo que respecta al esfuerzo sostenido de los gobiernos por controlar y castigar la visibilidad, las prácticas y el tránsito de las disidencias sexuales. en todos estos escenarios, camila arbuet osuna la invectiva antisexo, patrocinada por las derechas laicas y eclesiásticas, logró arraigarse de tal modo que, para responder a semejante virulencia, los colectivos de trabajadorxs sexuales y pervetidxs tuvieron que pergeñar fuertes alianzas entre sí y, en algunos casos, con otros movimientos. cuando estas alianzas se malograron la aplanadora neoliberal hizo lo que quiso. el feminismo prosexo advirtió, tempranamente, que el modo en el que ciertas legislaciones punitivistas llegaban a imponerse se basaba en, por un lado, un uso manipulador de ciertos topoi particularmente inquietantes para la sociedad; por ejemplo, cada vez que el sexo se relacionaba con la niñez y/o la juventud producía un apoyo tajante a leyes, ambiguas y muy difíciles de revocar, que le daban carta blanca a los gobiernos para perseguir y clandestinizar. por otro lado, también se daba mediante una apelación a la inclusión/asimilación de los colectivos disidentes relegados mediante la oferta de derechos liberales, planteados como equilibrantes y disuasivos a la discriminación. así es como en los noventa en estados unidos la militancia gay y lésbica logró acceder a un conjunto de derechos y de reconocimientos (protección legal contra la discriminación, derechos matrimoniales e inclusión militar) que terminaron, a su vez, por devorar una parte del movimiento, dado que un sector —una vez ingresado en “la cuenta” (rancière, )— comenzó a reclamar mayor seguridad, militarización y criminalización (fraser, ). a este respecto, el teórico y militante trans dean spade nos advierte sobre el carácter contraproducente de muchas de las reformas jurídicas que les reconocen a estxs nuevxs ciudadnxs, como la carta ciudadana de bienvenida, la capacidad de punir a otrxs individuxs como presuntos responsables personales del racismo, el sexismo, la homo/lesbo/transfobia, etc.; perdiendo de vista el carácter sistémico de estos comportamientos. spade analiza cómo la estrategia de las reformas jurídicas, que dio lugar a las leyes contra la discriminación y contra los delitos de odio, permitió tranquilizar las conciencias de muchxs mientras no se alteraba el statu quo y se seguía persiguiendo, negando y encerrando a las mismas personas: las leyes sobre delitos de odio no hacen nada para prevenir la violencia contra las personas trans, sino que se centran en movilizar recursos para responder a esta violencia con represión penal. como las personas trans suelen ser víctimas frecuentes de los sistemas de represión penal y sufren a diario una violencia extrema a manos de la policía y en las prisiones, invertir en este sistema para tratar cuestiones de seguridad no es sino incrementar el sufrimiento y la violencia. (spade, , p. ). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista las leyes sobre delitos de odio no tienen un efecto disuasorio. inciden en el castigo y no se puede afirmar que prevengan la violencia motivada por prejuicios. las leyes antidiscriminatorias no se aplican de forma adecuada. como la mayoría de las personas discriminadas no pueden costearse la asistencia jurídica, sus experiencias nunca llegan a los tribunales (spade, , p. ). las legislaciones antisexo fueron avaladas desde siempre como parte de las razones públicas asidas a la “protección” de ciertas poblaciones y espacios. es decir, que desde el inicio, partiendo de su capacidad para tutelar y tratar como menores, aún más, a cuerpos ya socialmente vulnerados (viejxs, jóvenes, niñxs, personas con discapacidad, pobres, mujeres...), lograron que lo personal comenzara a formar parte de la política policial, al enunciarlo como síntoma de problemas estructurales de moralidad y cuidado. por ende, responder a este tipo de legislaciones con proyectos que individualicen los daños a la inversa es, cuanto menos, una apuesta ingenua y, cuanto más, un desarrollo en pos de calmar la mala conciencia por desear pertenecer también a ese sistema de persecución y hostigamiento. como tempranamente advirtió marx en la cuestión judía ( / ), y como actualizó políticamente wendy brown ( / ), el reconocimiento de los derechos por parte del estado es siempre un arma de doble filo, dado que el estado reconoce, responde y codifica las demandas en sus propios términos de clase, de género, de raza. en lo que respecta al feminismo prosexo podríamos sostener que sus prerrogativas oscilan entre el reclamo de no intromisión estatal, en sus alas más radicales; y la demanda de reconocimiento de derechos sexuales, sociales y políticos, es sus alas más liberales. el álgido debate entre prostitución y trabajo sexual, que se sostiene hasta nuestros días, recorre en su versión prosexo el límite entre un ala y otra, cuando plantea las posibilidades abolicionistas, prohibicionistas y regulacionistas. a pesar de los solapamientos entre las dos primeras corrientes en la práctica, teóricamente debemos distinguirlas dado que mientras que el abolicionismo plantea la despenalización de la prostitución y la no injerencia del estado (apostando a que algún día la mercantilización del cuerpo no sea necesaria), el prohibicionismo insiste en ilegalizar, es decir clandestinizar aún más la práctica. por otro lado, la corriente regulacionista propone una regulación proteccionista del estado, que medie entre el trabajo sexual y el capital, asegurando el conjunto de los derechos laborales que la clase obrera ha conquistado a lo largo de siglos, sin que por ello dicho estado se arrogue el derecho de controlar, inspeccionar, distinguir los cuerpos de lxs trabajadorxs sexuales (por ejemplo, mediante las libretas sanitarias). un pedido altamente camila arbuet osuna necesario para dejar de ser presa fácil de proxenetas, jueces y policías; aunque sepamos que el reconocimiento sin regulación no es la especialidad del estado. el feminismo prosexo —como otra parte del gesto de sospecha sobre el reconocimiento estatal— es particularmente sensible al poder de policía no solo en lo que respecta a la persecución judicial y en razzias sexuales, sino también en lo que concierne a las vigilancias internas propias, a las prácticas punitivas que atraviesan nuestras actitudes y cosmovisiones como feministas y/o como activistas. así como reparamos en los peligros del tutelaje del feminismo vinculado a las cárceles; el feminismo prosexo nos señala agudamente las formas de ostracismo, exclusión, estigmatización, guetificación que se suelen dar en el interior de los movimientos feministas y lgbttti por la reproducción de lógicas puritanas, culposas y prejuiciosas de agenciamiento del sexo y la sexualidad. estos sistemas de exclusiones mutuas —que podríamos repasar en cada una de las siglas del colectivo lgbttti y de las agrupaciones feministas— han reconfigurado históricamente la pirámide de lxs pervertidxs, que identificara rubin en reflexionando sobre el sexo ( ); pero como una pirámide invertida interna, un sistema de castas, con sus propias cuentas y grados de “aceptabilidad," donde las posibilidades de punición social y estatal han jugado el papel de peldaños. estos largos debates pueden ser abordados, como lo hace nancy fraser ( ), como un problema entre las lógicas de redistribución y reconocimiento; o bien como un dilema en torno a qué queda por fuera de los principios de feminismo en cada momento, es decir, sobre el estado constitutivo de la injuria como parte del motor de los movimientos. en tanto que en el patriarcado no da lo mismo trabajar con las manos que con la vagina (daring, ), o usar un zapato para calzarse que para masturbarse (rubin, ); lo que el feminismo prosexo hace es tensionar la demanda liberal de autonomía sobre el propio cuerpo hasta ver estallar las comodidades de la “tolerancia." en ese punto, la negación de ese otro ser/hacer como válido y legítimo ha originado dentro de los feminismos y los colectivos lgbttti crudas purgas y persecuciones que han dado lugar, entre otras cosas, al movimiento queer/cuir: cuerpos lesbianos, trans, travestis, maricas con exceso de masculinidad o de feminidad, de carne o de hormonas, de voluptuosidades, de gustos, de indefiniciones, de versatilidad o de asexualidad. es así como la dialéctica histórica de lo cuir/queer supone una vuelta constante a los “estados del agravio” (brown, / ) y a las escenas de esas puniciones y autopuniciones. el registro de esos daños, para algunxs autorxs que se han dedicado a inteligir la potencia de los sentimientos negativos en las historias queers (love, ; ahmed, ; halberstam, esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista ), es quizás el antídoto más potente contra el peligro de la deglución estatal y social del reconocimiento dentro de la sociedad punitiva. sin embargo, la perpetuación de un daño social que nunca caduca puede ser productiva (como punto de recomposición propositiva para la lucha) siempre y cuando el trauma no tenga un nombre propio: siempre que no haya ni víctimas ni victimarios eternos, solo formaciones situadas que deben poder ficcionalizar su reparación de algún modo, incluso aunque sepamos que esta será siempre un fallido. si no somos capaces de inventar los términos particulares de esa ficción reparatoria, no hay movilidad posible, y puede llegar a suceder que el cambio de roles entre víctimas y victimarios se precipite, con bastante vértigo, en la estructura denunciante que encuentra monstruos detrás de cada delito. asimismo, la idea de que no hay reparación posible o que la misma no es un asunto social también ayuda a banalizar el acto de denuncia. finalmente, es necesario señalar que, pese a sus críticas externas e internas a distintas formas de punitivismo jurídico y colectivo, el activismo prosexo no es monolítico, es un territorio de disputas que también tiene versiones reaccionarias. somos conscientes de que acusar no es solo y siempre un acto persecutorio, es también en muchos casos —en una cultura de la violencia silente, socialmente aceptada— un acto de habla que nos empodera y reestructura subjetivamente. de esta manera, también nos podemos encontrar con otra tendencia prosexo que, desde un profundo clasismo y una cierta islamofobia, rechaza de forma descalificativa el feminismo entendido como ética del cuidado, y propone sustituirlo no por una comprensión más radical, inclusiva y politizada del mismo y por una marca de sus límites (como por ejemplo lo haría gayle rubin); sino por un achatamiento y caricaturización del feminismo, entendido como lo opuesto del machismo. se trata de un feminismo prosexo, blanco y acomodado, como el que encabezaron catherine millet y un conjunto de artistas francesas ante la ola de denuncias de acoso y abuso a cineastas y actores, a principios del , movilizada por el #metoo. en el escrito las mujeres toman la palabra, reproducido viralmente como el manifiesto contra el metoo#, queda muy claro cómo el borde de la invectiva contra el puritanismo también puede funcionar como garante de relaciones sexistas, si no se presta atención a las diferencias: de hecho, el #metoo ha provocado en la prensa y en las redes sociales una campaña de denuncias públicas de personas que, sin tener la oportunidad de responder o defenderse, fueron puestas exactamente en el mismo nivel que los delincuentes sexuales. esta justicia expedita ya tiene sus víctimas: hombres sancionados en el ejercicio de su profesión, obligados a renunciar, etc.; mientras que ellos solo se equivocaron al camila arbuet osuna tocar una rodilla, tratar de robar un beso, hablar sobre cosas “íntimas” en una cena de negocios, o enviar mensajes sexualmente explícitos a una mujer que no se sintió atraída por ellos. (millet et al., ). es allí, en el espacio gris que se abre en esa mala conciencia que presupone términos igualitarios en una sociedad desigual y autonomías equitativas en contextos que nos precarizan de forma diferencial todo el tiempo, es allí, donde se hace apremiante la necesidad de un reconocimiento de los daños, sin tutela ni escarnio; un reconocimiento que pueda pensar formas de reparación alternativas al castigo. coincidimos con millet en dos puntos. uno: en su preocupación por el giro punitivista dentro de expresiones hegemónicas del feminismo —donde se esgrime una peligrosa triada, aparentemente irrefutable, entre “mujer," “víctima” y “verdad”—. dos: en la necesidad de explicitar que el horizonte que nos mueve es uno donde los protocolos y las medidas cautelares no sean necesarios para la autodefensa, para que cada unx de nosotrxs pueda sostener el “no” y ser respetadx mientras lo hace. pero también es importante señalar dos insistentes omisiones del texto: por un lado, el carácter sexista del orden judicial, tanto en lo que no considera y desacredita, como en lo que sí considera, retroalimenta y reproduce. por el otro lado, la falacia de actuar como si estos —aún torpes— instrumentos de protección y denuncia fuesen innecesarios; falacia que supone, en un contexto de recrudecido patriarcado, negar cómo el carácter capilar y diferencial de la dominación sexista deshabilita voces, vulnera cuerpos y crea estructuras de complicidad. respecto a este último punto, destaca la observación de virginie despentes ( ), para quien se trata de un grupo de mujeres ricas molestas porque las chicas de la limpieza se quejan de abusos; o la de marie bardet ( ) que menciona el carácter biologicista e islamófobo de las afirmaciones de millet. ellas nos hablan, en efecto, de esta imposibilidad de considerar otros lugares del habla; así como de una vuelta a lo que la criminología feminista viene denunciado como parte del principio de corresponsabilidad de la victimología patriarcal (antony, ). transfeminismos y las políticas represivas de los márgenes intestinos en las borderlans tú eres el campo de batalla, donde los enemigos son familia; te sientes en casa, una fuereña, se han resuelto las disputas fronterizas el rebote de los tiros ha roto la tregua esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista estás herida, en combate perdida, muerta, devolviendo el golpe. (gloria anzaldúa, , p. ) los feminismos han vuelto en repetidas ocasiones a pensar las fronteras, territoriales, genéricas, culturales, sexuales. la historia del feminismo es una historia siempre geo y somatopolíticamente situada. el juego entre borde y desborde que caracteriza las migraciones poblacionales e identitarias ha arrojado reflexiones agudas sobre las expresiones más cruentas de la tanatopolítica y la necropolítica (valencia, ). esto funciona a nivel externo, es decir, como registro de los actuares (para)policiales, (para)militares, (para)estatales en las fronteras de lo visible: en rutas, ciudades y pueblos inhóspitos, zonas rojas y diversos espacios que se habilitan en la mezcla de lo público y lo siniestro. pero también procede a nivel endógeno, en tanto registro de la punición simbólica y material hacia y de lxs abyectxs, lxs inimigrantes, que son (re)presentadxs como víctimas y victimarixs. entre estos dos registros, interno y externo, de la otredad en las fronteras se inscriben los transfeminismos. una corriente ecléctica y fluida que abrió —en el marco de su revisión de las reacciones a las micropolíticas posidentitarias— debates en torno a la sexuación de ciertos crímenes que plagan estos espacios de ilegalidad, tráfico y mezcla. una corriente que vuelve, en algunos textos, a pensar la performatividad de la repetición de la escena de violación y del asesinato, como una forma perversa de construir sociedad desde los bordes de sentido. nos interesa en este apartado volver sobre las propuestas de deconstrucción de este proceso y sus resistencias, no solo por el choque entre formas retributivas y utilitarias del castigo; sino, especialmente, por los trabajos que esta corriente se ha tomado para revisar cómo la punición mediática de delitos sexuales, como acto ejemplificador, abona la cristalización y tratamiento como menores de las víctimas, la estigmatización de colectivos étnicos y la perpetuación de estructuras delictivas fuertemente sexualizadas. frente a esto, el transfeminismo arguye que: no vamos a entrar en el juego del estado disciplinario contra el mercado neoliberal. esos dos ya llegaron a un acuerdo: en la nueva europa, el mercado es la única razón gubernamental, el estado se convierte en un brazo punitivo cuya función se limitará a recrear la ficción de la identidad nacional agitando la amenaza de la inseguridad. (preciado, , p. ). el carácter monstruoso, aberrante, de quien delinque pareciera llegar a una nueva cumbre con los delitos sexuales, recordándonos que si bien todx presx es políticx y toda violencia está fuertemente sexuada, algunas politicidades y camila arbuet osuna sexuaciones golpean de forma tangencialmente distinta en la estructura de sentidos. esos crímenes para los cuales no pareciera haber castigo suficiente, resisten atávicamente a los intentos de reparación, rompen toda correlación sensata entre los delitos y las penas, abren un agujero negro en los intentos antipunitivistas de los feminismos. vamos a analizar aquí, exclusivamente, algunos elementos del debate sobre el femicidio, para plantear los puntos ciegos de esta falta de medida y lo que hacemos con ella. tomamos como observable el femicidio, reconociendo como tal un tipo específico de asesinato moralizante, ejemplificador y social, cuya sucesión —y consolidación como lenguaje reconocible de la violencia sexista— supone una estructura paraestatal de complicidad. lo elegimos, a su vez, porque al enunciar y castigar el tipo de violencia englobada en el femicidio se regresa sobre las fronteras intestinas de los movimientos feministas excéntricos (trans, cuirs, migrantxs), dado que ese otro victimario expresa una variación constituyente de la norma —los violadores en tanto los hijos sanos del patriarcado— que, sin embargo, se tiende a punir como una perversión, desviación, excepción. david garland describió, en su obra la cultura de control ( ), las características que asumió el giro punitivo en estados unidos e inglaterra, entre los años setenta y ochenta. dicho giro, que exige penas más duras, cárceles más austeras, edad de imputabilidad más baja, privatización y descentralización del control del delito, entre otras demandas, llegó a sudamérica con toda su fuerza dos décadas más tarde y, desde entonces, no ha dejado de fortalecerse. uno de los puntos cruciales de este giro es la idea de justicia expresiva, que hace alusión tanto al espectáculo que se crea en torno a la construcción de la víctima como representante de todos —menos del criminal, con quien se establece una situación de suma cero—, como a la idea de que los sentimientos de ira y venganza no solo no deben mitigarse por algún tipo de correccionalismo social, sino que deben expresarse y quedar plasmados en el aparato punitivo, como parte de la retribución al daño. durante la mayor parte del siglo xx era virtualmente tabú la expresión abiertamente asumida de sentimientos vengativos, al menos por parte de los funcionarios del estado. en los últimos años, los intentos explícitos de expresar la ira y el resentimiento públicos se han convertido en un tema recurrente de la retórica que acompaña la legislación y la toma de decisiones en materia penal. actualmente, se invocan frecuentemente los sentimientos de la víctima o de la familia de la víctima o de un público temeroso e indignado para apoyar nuevas leyes o políticas penales. (garland, , p. ). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista los hitos de la justicia expresiva, que dieron lugar a legislaciones penales ejemplificadoras con nombre propio, se vinculan especialmente con violencias sexuales; pero si, como hace rita segato, entendemos que esta forma de violencia no se trata de agresiones originadas en la pulsión libidinal traducida en deseo de satisfacción sexual, sino que la libido se orienta aquí al poder [dado que] mediante este tipo de violencia el poder se expresa, se exhibe y se consolida de forma truculenta ante la mirada pública, por lo tanto representando un tipo de violencia expresiva y no instrumental. ( , p. ). si realmente entendemos esto, es decir, si comprendemos el orden sistémico de la violencia sexual y no las falacias de su adjudicación individual; la respuesta a la violencia expresiva jamás debiera ser la justicia expresiva. esto se debe a que esta correlación entre una expresividad y la otra supone que un espectáculo se contesta con otro, sin alterar el código comunicacional, haciendo como si la construcción especular de víctimas y victimarios —convertidos en emisarios del malestar de la cultura— fuera traslúcida, inequívoca, inmediata e imperecedera. sin embargo, el desborde que produce la irrepresentabilidad cultural del crimen sexual hace que ese simulacro de justicia, tan prolífero para que las derechas afilen sus agendas de seguridad, haga que la propia segato sostenga que, para ella, no hay ningún tipo de dudas respecto a negar la libertad condicional a una persona que haya cometido un crimen sexual. frente al dictamen de un juez que, desoyendo los informes técnicos, concedió la libertad condicional a un preso por agresiones sexuales que al salir cometió un femicidio, segato plantea: lo importante es la mediatización y que la sociedad se entere que el juez que dio libertad condicional a wagner, está siendo juzgado. y la sociedad podrá ver cuál es el resultado de ese tribunal. esta es la eficacia simbólica de un acto de justicia como este y que podamos divulgar nuestros argumentos por los cuales pensamos que es necesaria una condena ejemplar hacia el juez. ( a). más allá de la discusión sobre la legitimidad o no del juicio, llama la atención que el corolario de su actuación en este caso (fue citada allí como especialista) es la reflexión de que no hay que hacer lugar a la libertad condicional para los violadores, porque los crímenes sexuales son estructuralmente tratados como “crímenes menores” por la justicia patriarcal y, por ende, la forma de desmontar esto sería que se los reconozca como “crímenes mayores," presuponiendo en este reconocimiento una pena acorde —es decir, cadena perpetua—. se trata las cursivas son nuestras. camila arbuet osuna de un reconocimiento que, cuando no llega al confinamiento prolongado sin excarcelación, da lugar en una gran mayoría de casos a la imprescriptibilidad social, de hecho, de los crímenes sexuales, es decir, al abandono de todo principio reformista o humanista; como lo han demostrado las incómodas defensas de grupos feministas de los mapas de agresores sexuales y pedófilos, como estrategias de seguridad (meiners, ). en este contexto, apremia encontrar expresiones de la justicia reparadora, que inventen un espacio entre la negación sexista de los crímenes y violencias sexuales, y las respuestas “aleccionadoras” a estos crímenes, que sabemos que no cumplen en nada su fin disuasivo. mientras tanto, la apelación a la mediatización de una condena ejemplar como forma de desandar el entramado sexista de la justicia — claramente existente y abigarrado— supone una réplica dentro del mismo código de poder; se trata de exponer esos cuerpos vulnerados como parte de una conquista política. si ensamblamos estas dos caras de la expresividad que los estados usufructúan, que dialogan y se presuponen entre sí; podemos ver cómo el cruce de ambas nociones delimita —erosionando las fronteras entre lo legal (justicia expresiva) y lo ilegal (violencia expresiva)— formas microfascistas, y fascistas, de afirmación soberana, así como nuevos signos para la producción de cuerpos precarios, dóciles y aterrados. la agenda de la seguridad ciudadana, de este modo, utiliza el dispositivo social de la expresividad del castigo para avalar el avance de políticas nacionalistas de cuidado poblacional, que vuelven a descargar sobre los cuerpos vulnerados nuevas formas cruentas de control, vigilancia y hostigamiento. en palabras de tamar pitch: [la seguridad ciudadana] se acoge a la retórica de la necesidad de defender a los “débiles," y a las mujeres en primer lugar, de amenazas externas, en italia típicamente identificadas en los últimos años con los emigrantes extranjeros. a esta retórica no son extrañas las batallas de las mujeres contra la violencia sexual y el acoso sexual, y en general su recurso a lo penal, contribuyendo así a relegitimarlo. pero nunca como en este caso resulta evidente cómo la “protección de nuestras mujeres” sirve de justificación de un control y de una esterilización del territorio, además de un endurecimiento de la represión penal de la ilegalidad (sobre todo) extranjera, que a las mujeres en absoluto les conviene, contribuyendo de hecho a esconder una vez más que los abusos y la violencia contra ellas ocurren normalmente en el ámbito de lo privado y son obra de conocidos y familiares (pitch, , p. ). el escarnio público, que es el instrumento social por excelencia de la justicia expresiva, ocupa un lugar privilegiado en esta nueva escena post giro punitivista, aparecendo intestina y peligrosamente dentro de los movimientos esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista feministas. la lógica del escrache se impuso en la política de muchos países, como elemento de protesta para visibilizar situaciones de injusticia que quedaban ocultas por abusos de poder, específicamente por parte de servidores públicos que incumplían —o malcumplían— sus funciones, bajo el amparo institucional de sus cargos o posiciones de privilegio. junto con la nueva escalada del feminismo en varios puntos del globo, desde el el escrache se ha extendido a aquellos momentos en los que el sexismo del aparato judicial subestimaba los casos de acoso sexual, de violación y de femicidio; o en situaciones en las que era el estado el que directamente perpetraba los delitos. en esta escalada, el mecanismo del escrache se masivizó en argentina y el estado español, llegando a convertirse en una práctica intestina de la estructura asamblearia feminista y disidente, como un acto que se daba, la mayoría de las veces, antes de activar los instrumentos jurídicos de la denuncia e, incluso, sin pretensiones de hacerlo en un futuro. esta “omisión," o falta de interés en recurrir a mecanismos jurídicos, se suele explicar en muchos casos de dos modos, ambos problemáticos: a) o ya no se reconoce al estado como un administrador legítimo de justicia y, por ende, se le disputa el monopolio de la violencia legítima (conviviendo con un conjunto de prácticas de justicia por mano propia, que el propio movimiento denuncia); b) o porque no se desea la cárcel como solución; y en este caso, el escrache aparece de forma paradójica como un método antipunitivista de justicia alternativa. ambas opciones llevan a escenarios donde el principio de inocencia se suele quebrantar burdamente, y donde los niveles de violencia se dan como en un discurso de doble estándar: la violencia causada solo puede ser conmensurada por la víctima (de modo que no tiene patrón); el escrache no es violento y, si lo es, no tiene parangón con la violencia causada (que, como ya dijimos, es inconmensurable). en el medio de estas dos posibilidades, se vuelve muy difícil discutir sobre lo que supone poner entre paréntesis todos los principios liberales —de los que conocemos sobradamente sus límites y peligros, pero han quedado como un momento superado, aunque nunca hayan sido asegurados en su completud—; sin ser sospechosa de ser defensora del patriarcado, minimizadora de los daños o crédula seguidora del orden constitucional. nos referimos a un discurso con capacidades masivizantes, que repone una lógica de amigo/enemigo y que esgrime como inapelable una razón pública colectiva, según la cual, el empoderamiento se confunde, en muchas ocasiones, estos principios dicen que el cuerpo es propiedad de unx, que los padres no son nuestros propietarios, que el estado tiene obligaciones para con nuestra persona, etc. y si bien, están pensandos, en efecto, para que el estado recodifique nuestras demandas, (re)produciéndonos como cuerpos dóciles, atomizándonos y despolitizándonos; también nos han servido —y nos siguen sirviendo— para librar importantes batallas políticas. camila arbuet osuna con un fuerte goce en el poder denunciante, linchador y estigmatizante de multitudes que claman: “el miedo cambió de bando." en palabras de un breve texto de catalina trebisacce, que llega muy oportunamente: ¿quién hubiera pensado que la visibilización de las apremiantes condiciones de producción de muerte en las que vivimos nos paralizarían al punto de suspender nuestras críticas a los dispositivos punitivos para terminar celebrando una normativa de intensificación de las penas? salimos una y otra vez a aclarar que no estamos queriendo brindar apoyo a ninguna iniciativa punitivista, pero por cada vez que lo decimos evidenciamos que algo de ese sentido ya está instalado y en nuestro nombre. la declaración antipunitivista, que nos esforzamos en hacer, se volatiliza entre la urgencia, el show tanatocrático, el pánico sexual y nuestras propias estrategias “caseras” de militancia. ( , p. ). por supuesto, esto no es lo único que sucede en medio de esta increíble vitalidad feminista actual que no deja de expandir los imaginarios sociales y horizontes de decibilidad; pero es importante poder decir públicamente que esto también sucede. las activistas del colectivo ni una menos de argentina advirtieron rápidamente sobre este punto: “el endurecimiento de la penalización y la ampliación de condenas no disuade los crímenes contra la vida. es demagogia punitiva ante la indignación social” (ni una menos, ). se sumaron así a la corriente de denuncias de diversos movimientos feministas y de los activismos lgbttti, aunadas bajo el lema “no en nuestro nombre / not in our name," frente al intento de utilización estatal de sus causas —bajo formas homonacionalistas— para recrudecer la represión. es también interesante, al respecto, observar cómo el juego de espejos entre justicia expresiva y violencia expresiva aparece adosado a una puja entre feminidades amenazadas —cada vez más extensivas, fuera del feminismo de mujeres cis, incluyendo a travestis, algunas lesbianas y a mujeres trans— y entre una masculinidad unívoca amenazante. segato escribe: no en nuestro nombre / not in our name es un movimiento que se inicia en , el año siguiente de los atentados a las torres gemelas, como contestación a la utilización de la comunidad lgbtti para avalar las represalias y el recrudecimiento del aparato de seguridad de estados unidos, enmarcadas discursivamente en una supuesta defensa del progresismo occidental, frente al atraso de medio oriente. amenazante y amenazada. no hay que olvidar que para segato ( b) los hombres son las primeras víctimas del orden de la masculinidad, reafirmando en modo espejo cómo su feminismo mujeril y punitivista necesita, todo el tiempo, actualizar la lógica víctima/victimario hasta en su escena fundante: los hombres son victimarios de sí mismos y configuran un orden que “los obliga” a hacer una cantidad de cosas para seguir perteneciendo a esa categoría unívoca. esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista la producción de masculinidad obedece a procesos diferentes a los de la producción de femineidad (…) para que un sujeto adquiera su estatus masculino, como título, como grado, es necesario que otro sujeto no lo tenga pero que se lo otorgue a lo largo de un proceso persuasivo e impositivo que puede ser eficientemente descrito como tributación. ( , p. ). a este respecto, creemos que los cuerpos abyectos de lesbianas (cis y trans) butch, de drag kings, de mavs (halberstam, ) que se le escapan a segato presentan una clave para pensar el contacto y promover el desequilibro de esta representación. la espectacularización del castigo como forma de justicia retributiva y la supuesta socialización del monopolio estatal de la violencia legítima requieren de personajes consistentes, coherentes, autónomos, cerrados sobre sí; es decir, requieren de caricaturas de personas. las coherencias del orden de la masculinidad, que hasta la propia segato ( b) reconoce como un endeble sistema que necesita ser actualizado todo el tiempo, forma parte de una ficción totalizante que es preciso demoler y hacer estallar, con ella, el par víctima/victimario, como descripción de compartimentos estancos dentro de nuestras representaciones sociales. en este punto, sayak valencia ( ) da algunos pasos reflexionando sobre la polifonía de masculinidades que construyen ese orden dominante y logran enunciar una masculinidad marginada y una masculinidad cómplice —conceptualizadas por zapata galindo ( )—, que son parte del entramado de ese sistema, al que se les enfrentan las subjetividades cuirs/queers, propias del transfeminismo. solo de este modo pueden tener lugar la restitución de la complejidad que nos debemos y la posibilidad de pensar otras formas de agencia. quizás, reconocer que ni todas las formas de feminidad son el apático soporte de perversiones masculinistas, ni todas las formas de masculinidad son tributarias de una quita a otrxs (sino que también hay feminidades y masculinidades que se toman mucho trabajo en labrar para sí mismxs afirmaciones de deseo y que no se consideran ni absolutas ni perennes), sea un paso en esa dirección: un aprendizaje desde las abyecciones que nos atraviesan y que hacen transitables nuestras escurridizas identidades. en este sentido, el transfeminismo nos indica que la frontera la tenemos también, inquietantemente, adentro y que, lamentablemente, no hay ninguna alquimia externa —llamada, a veces, tan livianamente en monolítico singular: perspectiva de género—, que nos salve. las fronteras estatales, así como las identitarias, los espacios de goce, dolor, cruce, deriva y transacción... son lugares delimitados con sangre por la gubernamentalidad estatal en sus expresiones de fascismo, legal e ilegal. qué hacer con los crímenes y violencias sexuales y sexistas en estos espacios camila arbuet osuna que delimitan la ciudadanía, cómo tramitarlos públicamente y explotar sus sentidos se ha convertido en el tenso sitio de disputa entre transfeminismos y punitivismo. los transfeminismos, históricamente, le han reclamado a la criminología feminista las consecuencias de pensar la violencia sexista exclusivamente sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres, obligando a esta perspectiva a analizar los vínculos de esa violencia con estados heterocisnormados que legitiman la existencia de cuerpos con derecho a ejercer el miedo y cuerpos obligados a padecerlo. en palabras de medeak: no negamos la violencia que la familia heterocentrada produce, es más, la entendemos como un enclave básico en la creación de poder del patriarcado, de ahí su extremismo. ahora bien, urge conectarla con otras formas o herramientas que normativizan y vulneran a otros cuerpos como el de las bolleras, el del transexual, el de las trabajadoras sexuales, el del indígena o racializado, el del diverso funcional, el del marica… […] se trata de generar estrategias propias de defensa y gestión de la violencia, lo que hemos traducido como autogestión de la resistencia transfeminista contra la violencia machista o sexista. estrategias que no pasen necesariamente por llamar a la policía y al estado para que nos salve de lo insalvable. ( , pp. y ) en este contexto, los diversos protocolos de actuación que poseemos son, en el mejor de los casos, paliativos o directrices que intentan hacerse cargo de una histórica falta que, sin embargo, exponen, una y otra vez, que aún no poseemos un guión alternativo a las prácticas punitivas con tendencias tutelares y que, cada vez que queremos salirnos de ellas, nos enfrentamos al riesgo de la negación o minimización del daño. avanzamos aquí sobre arenas movedizas, porque estamos intentando inventar una forma de actuar, feminista y antipunitivista, que aún no existe y esta osadía tiene sus costos, entre ellos, los que se dan a la hora de identificar, dentro de cada tradición, viejos enemigos y soluciones: el patriarcado del castigo es, en su carácter reticular, abrasivamente incómodo. es muy pedagógica, en esa dirección, la situación que se dio en junio de en la universidad de nueva york, tras la denuncia por acoso sexual hacia la profesora avital ronell. cuando la denuncia se hizo pública y se supo que las autoridades estaban evaluando la expulsión de ronell, un colectivo de docentes (entre los que se encontraba judith butler a la cabeza, pero que también incluía a jean-luc nancy, joan w. scott y gayatri ch. spivak, entre otrxs) se pronunció a favor de ronell (butler et al., ). en la carta se esgrimieron como argumentos de su inocencia: a) la trayectoria intelectual de la docente —damos fe de su honor, su aguda inteligencia y el compromiso esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista intelectual de la profesora ronell, y solicitamos se le concedan las prerrogativas que merece alguien de reputación y prestigio internacional como ella. si fuera despedida o relevada de sus tareas, la injusticia será ampliamente reconocida y objetada—; b) el carácter endeble de las pruebas —sostenemos que las acusaciones contra ella no constituyen evidencia real, más bien respaldan opiniones difamatorias que animan y sostienen esta pesadilla legal—; c) la labilidad del acusante —algunos de nosotros conocemos a la persona que ha librado esta campaña difamatoria en su contra—. tres meses después de esa carta semiprivada, que se hizo pública sin el consentimiento de sus participantes, en agosto de , en un gesto de revisión y justeza, butler pidió disculpas y se retractó: our aim was not to defend her actions — we did not have the case in hand — but to oppose the termination of her employment as a punishment. such a punishment seemed unfair given the findings as we understood them. in hindsight, those of us who sought to defend ronell against termination surely ought to have been more fully informed of the situation if we were going to make an intervention. moreover, the letter was written in haste and the following are my current regrets about it. first, we ought not to have attributed motives to the complainant, even though some signatories had strong views on this matter. the claims of sexual harassment have too often been dismissed by discrediting the complainant, and that nefarious tactic has stopped legitimate claims from going forward and exacerbated the injustice. when and where such a claim proves to be illegitimate, it should be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence alone. second, we should not have used language that implied that ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential treatment of any kind. status ought to have no bearing on the adjudication of sexual harassment. all faculty should be treated the same under title ix protocols, that is, subject to the same rules and, where justified, sanctions. (butler, ). las traducciones de los dos textos las hicimos con la profesora mariana saint-paul, urgidas por intentar pensar cómo se tramitaban en las asambleas de mujeres, lesbianas, travestis y trans las denuncias de violencia sexista, tras problematizar prácticas de escrache y expulsión, en el contexto de toma de las facultades nacionales argentinas en agosto y septiembre de . nuestro objetivo no era defender sus acciones —no teníamos el caso en nuestras manos— sino oponernos a la finalización de su empleo como castigo. tal castigo parecía injusto, dados los hallazgos tal como los entendíamos. en retrospectiva, quienes tratamos de defender a ronell contra su despido, seguramente deberíamos habernos informado mejor de la situación si íbamos a hacer una intervención. además, la carta fue escrita a toda prisa y lo que sigue es mi actual arrepentimiento al respecto. en primer lugar, no deberíamos haber atribuido motivos al demandante, a pesar de que algunos signatarios tenían opiniones firmes sobre este asunto. algunas denuncias de acoso sexual han sido descartadas, con demasiada frecuencia, al camila arbuet osuna ante casos como este, es preciso que la revisión permanente desplace la vigilancia, entre otras cosas porque —como señala kosofsky sedgwick en su texto sobre la paranoia ( )— es importante poder ver qué hace ese conocimiento (sobre las infinitas causas, móviles y elementos de la violencia sexista en cada particular caso) con nosotrxs: la hermenéutica de la sospecha sobre lxs otrxs, como prescripción política, llama todo el tiempo a la policía. conclusiones cuando en los revolucionarios rusos escribieron el nuevo código de familia, uno de sus redactores, alexander goikhbarg, anunciaba en su inicio que “el poder proletario redacta sus códigos y todas sus leyes en forma dialéctica, de modo tal que cada día su existencia socave la necesidad de su existencia” (goldman, , p. ). creemos que eso debería estar grabado en cada protocolo contra la violencia sexista; es decir, que la finalidad de estos códigos es que, si logran su cometido, terminen por ser obsoletos. en este sentido, el abolicionismo penal le da al movimiento feminista, principalmente y más allá de una estructura de sospecha, un horizonte que funciona como vector de acción en el largo y violento “mientras tanto." en el transcurso de este artículo, hemos intentado mostrar cómo hay un conjunto de saberes disponibles sobre cómo el castigo reproduce las estructuras del daño que ya, a estas alturas, no podemos despreciar ni separar —como en una estructura esquizofrénica— de las prácticas activistas feministas, entre otros motivos porque muchos de estos aprendizajes han sido producidos desde activismos feministas o están vinculados con los feminismos. las fricciones actuales entre los feminismos y el antipunitivismo en situaciones concretas —más allá de los enunciados genéricos, como evocación de principios—, no solo son los indicadores de encerronas; son también los problemas propios de un movimiento en expansión que piensa prácticas instituyentes y que tiene la capacidad real de alterar la percepción social sobre la sexualidad, la violencia, desacreditar al demandante, y esa nefasta táctica ha detenido el avance de reclamos legítimos y ha exacerbado la injusticia. cuando y si tal reclamo es ilegítimo debe demostrarse sobre la base de la evidencia. en segundo lugar, no deberíamos haber utilizado un lenguaje que implique que el estatus y la reputación de ronell le otorguen un tratamiento diferencial de cualquier tipo. el estatus no debe influir en la adjudicación del acoso sexual. toda la facultad debe ser tratada de la misma manera, bajo los protocolos del título ix, esto es, debe estar sujeta a las mismas reglas y, cuando esté justificado, a sanciones. para que quede más claro a qué nos referimos en este punto cabe ofrecer esta cita: “en un mundo donde no hace falta que nadie delire para encontrar pruebas de opresión sistémica, teorizar a partir de cualquier otra premisa que no sea una insistencia crítica paranoica se tiene por ingenuo, beato y complaciente.” (kosofsky sedgwick, , p. ). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista los vínculos sexo-afectivos, entre otras tantas cosas. colocar al signo como arena de la lucha ideológica, parafraseando a nicolai volóshinov ( ), no es un estado permanente del proceso de semiosis social, es el síntoma de una nueva relación de fuerzas, que conlleva posibilidades y responsabilidades reflexivas de esta posición. por otra parte, esta puja sobre lo que se puede decir y hacer, y lo que no, se da en el contexto de una fuerte embestida de las derechas a escala mundial, donde emergen contestaciones de un fascismo misógino de una virulencia inusitada. resistir a estas emergencias supone también resistir, en un esfuerzo titánico, a las formas de guetificación a las que estamos acostumbradxs en el repliegue. resistir al temor al litigio y la diferencia por la posibilidad de la fractura interna. resistir a la apelación a las figuras de la traición como parte de una estructura paranoica que vigila incansablemente la frontera entre el adentro y el afuera. resistir a las matrices esencialistas de identificación y diferenciación. citando a las activistas de sisters inside, en su campaña, la alerta es la misma para fuera que para adentro: “no llamemos a la policía.” como decíamos al iniciar este artículo, no poseemos un guión unificado para el feminismo antipunitivista, lo que poseemos son procesos de deconstrucción crítica llevados adelante por algunos feminismos y por el abolicionismo penal que nos dan herramientas para identificar puntos ciegos. nos referimos a tópicos que, históricamente, han utilizado las derechas para volver en nuestra contra programas y reclamos progresistas, y a prácticas de tutelaje que se deslizan sobre el deseo de control de sí y de otrxs, y que son susceptibles de ser expresadas como estrategias de cuidado. ni el abolicionismo penal ni los feminismos han resuelto aún, por ejemplo, qué podría sustituir el modelo positivista de rehabilitación, dado que se ha identificado que el retorno a “lo normal” sería como regar el desastre y que, a su vez, la salida neoliberal al estallido de la rehabilitación como programa supone producir, sistemáticamente, desechos humanos. buscamos contrapedagogías eróticas, afectivas y sexuales que trastoquen nuestras premisas sobre cómo desnaturalizar la cárcel y cómo buscar otras formas de seguridad y reconocimiento —de nuestras vidas y nuestros daños— distintas a las que propone el estado, pero estas aún exigen sujetos que ya hayan sido desactivados. volvemos, una y otra vez, a preguntar cómo obtener esas sensibilidades, si no podemos alterar significativamente las condiciones de posibilidad de producción de subjetividades aterradas, que emergen de marcos arrasados. nos preguntamos, de modo insistente, cómo somos atravesadxs por los derechos liberales a los que acudimos para defendernos. y aún quedan por pensar numerosos elementos camila arbuet osuna como estos, sobre un programa transicional de reducción e intento de no complicidad del/con el sistema represivo penal, judicial y social. a su vez, el anclaje geopolítico y contextual de cada lucha feminista impone con tremenda virulencia sus propias necesidades y muchas veces la reacción defensiva nos expone a decisiones inmediatas de agenciamiento y respuesta violenta que vulneran nuestros principios políticos, pero que son necesarias para la sobrevivencia. esta situación se incrementa en países tercermundistas y en las comunidades culturales, raciales, sexuales y étnicas más vulneradas. en dichos casos, es extremadamente importante poder hacer de esas decisiones —que siempre traen responsabilidades— un espacio colectivo de reflexión que ayude a no confundirlas —naturalizando y osificándolas— con programas políticos. lo que nosotrxs podemos hacer, lo que lxs compañerxas pueden hacer por nosotrxs, lo que necesitamos hacer para vivir, en qué nos transformamos mientras subsistimos, lo que colectivamente podemos pensar, lo que gozamos y aquello que sostenemos políticamente que deseamos, son todos elementos distintos que, pese a su íntima connivencia cotidiana, tienen que poder pensarse y enunciarse como cuestiones separadas. sabiendo que para pensar una alternativa a la justicia patriarcal estamos frente a una tarea titánica que tiene que comenzar por algún lado, estos esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista nos arrojan una serie de indicios, recogidos de las teorías y los activismos feministas actuales, que rápidamente podemos enunciar del siguiente modo: en términos de máxima: abolicionismo penal, deconstrucción social del par víctima/victimario como categorías cristalizadas y sexo-genéricamente estables, desarme del dispositivo espejado entre violencia expresiva y justicia expresiva, desplazamiento de las mujeres como sujetxs de una criminología crítica feminista, reconocimiento y crítica de las matrices sexuadas, racializadas y nacionalizadas de punición y seguridad estatal; intransigencia sobre la inscripción de derechos como figuras penales, alerta frente a la posibilidad de que las garantías constitucionales muten en tutela estatal y de las organizaciones; defensa de una justicia erótica no normativizante, no moralizante, circunscripta geopolíticamete, dispuesta a revisar sus principios y estrategias de reparación fuera de la lógica del castigo; desconfianza ante la enunciación de subjetividades que se (re)presenten más allá de las estructuras patriarcales; habilitación de nuevas formas de cuidado y defensa solidaria que no impliquen a la policía, como institución y como modo de hacer política (rancière, ). esbozos para un feminismo antipunitivista referencias bibliográficas ahmed, sara ( ). la política cultural de las emociones (c. olivares, trad.). ciudad de méxico, méxico: universidad autónoma de méxico. antony, carmen ( ). hacia una criminología feminista. violencia, androcentrismo, 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	_heading=h.ehyf ch ggpb 	_heading=h. lo vy k d 	_heading=h.ob divzf fh 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h. fob te 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h.yaldb p lth 	_heading=h. et p 	_heading=h. znysh 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h. et p 	bookmark=id.tyjcwt 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h. fob te 	_heading=h. znysh 	_heading=h. et p 	_heading=h.tyjcwt 	_heading=h. dy vkm 	_heading=h. t h sf 	_heading=h. d og 	_heading=h. s eyo 	_heading=h. dp vu 	_heading=h. rdcrjn 	_heading=h. in rg 	_heading=h.lnxbz 	_heading=h. nkun 	_heading=h. ksv uv 	_heading=h. sinio 	_heading=h. jxsxqh 	_heading=h.z ya 	_heading=h. j qqm 	_heading=h. y tw 	_heading=h. i ojhp 	_heading=h. ci xb 	_heading=h. whwml 	_heading=h. bn wsx 	_heading=h. x ik 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h. fob te 	_heading=h. znysh 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h. fob te 	_heading=h. znysh 	_heading=h. et p 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_heading=h.gjdgxs 	_heading=h. j zll 	_hlk 	_hlk 	_hlk 	_hlk 	_hlk 	_hlk 	_hlk science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ journal editors should not divide scientists scientists maryam zaringhalam, rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, jane zelikova and on behalf of women doi: . /science.aat ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ zeitschrift für soziologie ; ( ): – grit höppner* und anna wanka* un/doing age: multiperspektivität als potential einer intersektionalen betrachtung von differenz- und ungleichheitsverhältnissen un/doing age: the potential of multi-perspectivity for an intersectional analysis of social differences and social inequalities https://doi.org/ . /zfsoz- - zusammenfassung: in der aktuellen soziologie werden diskussionen über die herstellung von sozialen differenz- kategorien, deren wechselwirkungen und damit einher- gehenden produktionen sozialer ungleichheitsverhält- nisse insbesondere über intersektionale ansätze geführt. kritik an intersektionalen ansätzen richtet sich auf ihre fokussierung auf eine begrenzte anzahl bereits gut er- forschter differenzkategorien und auf konstruktionspro- zesse (doings), wobei tendenziell dekonstruktionsprozesse (undoings) ausgeblendet werden. der beitrag greift beide kritikpunkte auf, um sie für die intersektionale theorie- bildung fruchtbar zu machen. erstens wird statt auf die klassische trias aus race, class, gender das differenzmerk- mal alter fokussiert, um dessen relevanz als ‚metrische variable‘ deutlich zu machen. zweitens wird zusätzlich zu doing age ein undoing age als konzept ausgearbeitet. um die differenzkategorie alter einer intersektionalen be- trachtung zugänglich zu machen, entwickelt der beitrag damit einen multiperspektivischen analyserahmen. schlüsselwörter: un/doing age; de/konstruktion; alter als soziale differenzkategorie; multiperspektivität; soziale praktiken; soziale ungleichheit. abstract: current sociological debates about the con- struction of categories of social difference as well as their interdependencies and the accompanying production of social inequalities adopt predominantly intersectional approaches. criticism of such approaches focus primarily on a limited range of already well-researched categories of social difference as well as processes of their construc- tion (doings), whereas processes of their deconstruction (undoings) tend to be neglected. this paper addresses both points of criticism in order to enhance intersectional theory building. to do so, it focuses on the construction of age as a category and ‘metric’ of social difference (doing age) instead of the traditional triad of race, class, and gender. based on this, the concept of undoing age is in- troduced. to make age as a category of social difference accessible to intersectional analysis, the paper, in conclu- sion, develops a multi-perspective framework. keywords: un/doing age; de/construction; age as cate- gory of social difference; multi-perspectivity; social prac- tices; social inequalities.   einleitung in der aktuellen soziologie besteht über soziologische theorietraditionen hinweg konsens darüber, dass soziale differenzen nicht vorgängig oder natürlich existieren, sondern als konstruktionen zu verstehen sind. an kon- struktionsprozessen von differenzen sind unterschied- lichste gesellschaftliche akteur*innen  – von diskursen über individuen – beteiligt, und auch die forschung selber erzeugt, modifiziert oder neutralisiert differenzen mit (vgl. etwa bourdieu ; luhmann ; lutz/wenning ). differenzen gelten damit als kontingent, also als historisch und kontextspezifisch geprägt (hirschauer ). in dieser lokalen spezifik bringen sie soziale klassifizierungen und ordnungen unterschiedlicher reichweite hervor und sta- bilisieren und legitimieren diese. sie verdichten sich zu differenzkategorien wie geschlecht, alter, soziale oder *korrespondenzautorin: grit höppner, katholische hochschule nordrhein-westfalen, fachbereich sozialwesen, piusallee , münster. e-mail: g.hoeppner@katho-nrw.de anna wanka, goethe-universität frankfurt am main, fachbereich erziehungswissenschaften, institut für sozialpädagogik und erwachsenenbildung, dfg-graduiertenkolleg ‚doing transitions‘, theodor-w.-adorno-platz  , frankfurt am main, e-mail: wanka@em.uni-frankfurt.de https://doi.org/ . /zfsoz- - mailto:g.hoeppner@katho-nrw.de mailto:wanka@em.uni-frankfurt.de grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    ethnische herkunft oder behinderung, die ihrerseits wie- derum als grundlage zur organisation sozialer prozesse herangezogen werden. solche differenzkategorien ziehen häufig konsequenzen in den möglichkeiten der sozialen teilhabe und im verfügen über gesellschaftlich relevante ressourcen nach sich (burzan ; walgenbach ) und dienen dadurch als referenzkategorien für diskrimi- nierung, marginalisierung und soziale ungleichheit. soziologische diskussionen über die enge verzahnung von differenzkategorien und ungleichheitsverhältnissen werden in den letzten jahrzehnten insbesondere über ansätze der intersektionalität bzw. mehrfachzugehörig- keiten geführt (z.  b. knapp & wetterer ; crenshaw ; lutz et al. ; lutz & wenning ; walgenbach et al. ; winker & degele ). in intersektionalen an- sätzen wird davon ausgegangen, dass sich ungleichheits- verhältnisse weder über einzelne differenzkategorien  – und hier ist insbesondere die trias class, race, gender angesprochen  – erschließen und analysieren lassen, noch über deren bloße addition. stattdessen werden die wechselwirkungen und Überkreuzungen von differenz- kategorien in den blick genommen, um ungleichheitsver- hältnisse theoretisch zu durchdringen, zu analysieren und so die konsequenzen dieser kategorialen verwobenheiten für die verteilung von lebenschancen (burzan ) und die soziale platzierung von menschen abzubilden (giebe- ler et al. ). seit einiger zeit regt sich jedoch auch kritik an in- tersektionalen ansätzen. hier sind insbesondere zwei kritikpunkte zu nennen: erstens ihre fokussierung auf eine begrenzte anzahl bereits gut erforschter differenz- kategorien und zweitens ihr fokus auf konstruktions- prozesse (doings), wobei tendenziell dekonstruktionspro- zesse (undoings) ausgeblendet werden (hirschauer ). in bezug auf den ersten kritikpunkt wird also konstatiert, dass intersektionale ansätze und analysen, sowohl im deutschsprachigen als auch im angloamerikanischen raum, vor allem auf die differenzkategorien class, race, gender fokussieren. diese auswahl beruht auf in der his- torischen entwicklung von intersektionalen ansätzen bedingten setzungen, die zu einer hierarchisierung von differenzkategorien beigetragen haben. ebenso ungleich- heitsfördernde dimensionen werden dadurch seltener problematisiert oder ganz ausgeblendet  – etwa alter (als ausnahme siehe z.  b. denninger & schütze ; richter ; traunsteiner ) oder behinderung (als ausnahme siehe z.  b. dederich ; waldschmidt ). diese un- gleichbehandlung von differenzkategorien vermittelt den anschein, class, race, gender seien wirksamer als andere (denninger & schütze ). die auswahl von differenz- kategorien deutet jeweils hin auf eine „sinnhafte selektion aus einem set konkurrierender kategorisierungen, die erst einen unterschied schafft, der einen unterschied macht“ (hirschauer : ). welche differenzkategorien also wissenschaftlich identifiziert und als relevant gesetzt, welche hingegen eher marginalisiert, abgewertet oder ausgeblendet werden, ist folglich nicht beliebig, sondern eng an historisch geprägte und geographisch spezifische logiken sowie an diskurs- und machtpolitische entschei- dungen gebunden (walgenbach ). ein zweiter kritikpunkt bezieht sich auf jene pro- zesse, die von intersektionalen analysen untersucht werden. gemeinhin werden differenzkategorien über deren soziale konstruktionsprozesse auf ihre funktions- weise und ungleichheitseffekte hin betrachtet (hirschauer ). indem ungleichheitskategorien fokussiert werden, die individuen „totalisierend einschließen“ (ebd.: ), wird davon ausgegangen, dass diese immer und in allen lebenssituationen relevant werden. wird jedoch davon ausgegangen, dass jede person eine vielzahl an „mitglied- schaften“ aufweist, so können nicht alle dieser differenzen in jeder sozialen situation bedeutsam (gemacht) werden – sie müssen auch einmal „ruhen dürfen“ (ebd.: ). stefan hirschauer und kolleg*innen der dfg-forschergruppe „un/doing differences. praktiken der humandifferenzie- rung“ argumentieren dementsprechend, dass zur kon- struktion sozialer differenzen (doing) immer auch deren dekonstruktion (undoing) mitzudenken ist. mit dieser de- konstruktivistischen perspektive ist gemeint, dass etwa geschlecht nicht fortlaufend getan wird, sondern dass ge- schlecht zwischenzeitlich auch irrelevant gemacht, unter- laufen oder ausgesetzt werden kann. diese kombination aus konstruktivistischen und dekonstruktivistischen ele- menten ist vereint im konzept des un/doing differences. dieses äußert sich als „flüchtige[r] schwebezustand“, als ein „moment der ununterschiedenheit und in-differenz zwischen der relevanz und irrelevanz sozialer unterschei- dungen“ (hirschauer : ). der vorliegende beitrag greift beide kritikpunkte auf, um sie für die intersektionale theoriebildung fruchtbar zu machen. erstens wird daher im beitrag statt auf die trias aus race, class und gender das differenzmerkmal ‚alter‘ fokussiert. das geschieht keineswegs, um aus der trias ein quartett zu machen  – viel eher macht uns die kon- sequente, intersektionale berücksichtigung von alter als ‚metrischer variable‘ deutlich, mit welcher komplexität  damit ist keineswegs ein aussetzen der wirksamkeit von ge- schlecht gemeint. stattdessen steht solch eine dethematisierung von geschlecht für das funktionieren von geschlechterdifferenzen, das heißt hier ist die offensichtlichkeit, ja banalität dieser unterschei- dung angesprochen (siehe hierzu auch westheuser ).    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age und dynamik intersektionale theoriebildung umgehen können muss. bisher wurde alter als differenzkategorie in intersektionalen ansätzen nur selten konsequent berück- sichtigt, obwohl die wirksamkeit von alter ungebrochen ist – in der gegenwartsgesellschaft vielleicht noch stärker als in den vorherigen jahrzehnten. wichtig erscheint uns, die eigenständigkeit von alter als differenzkategorie sicht- bar zu machen und alter nicht nur als eine verstärkung von anderen ungleichheitsverhältnissen zu verstehen. zweitens plädieren wir dafür, dass neben den konstruk- tionsprozessen sozialer differenzkategorien auch deren dekonstruktionen konsequent mitgedacht werden sollten. neben der skizzierung eines intersektionalen doing age soll deshalb die gegenseite dieser medaille, nämlich ein undoing age, ausgearbeitet werden. in der alter(n)sfor- schung wurde die idee des undoing age erst in den letzten jahren vereinzelt und im vergleich zu undoing gender weniger ausdifferenziert aufgegriffen. daraus ergeben sich die drei ziele des beitrags: um alter stärker als bisher geschehen als differenzkategorie zu theoretisieren und intersektionale theoriebildung mit der kategorie alter voranzutreiben, wird erstens das doing age-konzept als pendant zum doing gender-konzept dar- gestellt. um zweitens das in der intersektionalitätsdebatte bisher zu wenig genutzte potential der dekonstruktion für eine ausdifferenzierung der kategorie alter deutlich zu machen und um – in anlehnung an hirschauer ( : – )  – altersindifferenzen zu beleuchten, wird dabei insbesondere auf die skizzierung eines undoing age ab- gestellt. durch die konsequente berücksichtigung des prozessualen charakters der differenzkategorie alter kann  – drittens  – deren mehrwert für eine betrachtung von differenz- und ungleichheitsverhältnissen nicht nur situativ-dynamisch, sondern auch in einer lebenslaufbezo- genen (zeit-)perspektive noch deutlicher gemacht werden. der so entwickelte multiperspektivische analyse- rahmen berücksichtigt somit ( ) über klassische ungleich- heitskategorien hinausgehend ( ) die konstruktion und dekonstruktion von mehrfachzugehörigkeiten sowie ( ) ihre prozessualität und dynamik, die nicht nur in einer situativen zeitlichkeit, sondern auch über die lebenszeit zu betrachten ist. dieser analyserahmen wird im beitrag anhand der differenzkategorien geschlecht und alter be- bildert. die auswahl der differenzkategorie geschlecht liegt in der intensiven auseinandersetzung mit geschlecht und geschlechterverhältnissen in der frauenforschung und den gender studies begründet, die ein umfangreiches theorierepertoire zur folge hatte, das für die argumenta- tion des beitrags produktiv genutzt werden kann. um das prinzip der multiperspektivität zu vertiefen, gliedert sich der beitrag in drei hauptteile. zunächst werden im sinne einer intersektionalen perspektive doing- ansätze zu geschlecht und alter und damit die konstrukti- onsweisen dieser zwei differenzkategorien vertieft. daran schließt sich als zweite perspektive und im sinne von un/ doing-differences eine auseinandersetzung zu undoing gender und undoing age an. da sowohl geschlecht als auch alter jeweils explizit fokussiert wird, kann dem vorwurf einer relativierung von differenzkategorien rechnung ge- tragen werden. die dritte perspektive bezieht sich auf die differenzkategorie alter mit ihren lebenslaufbezogenen implikationen. dazu werden die konturen der differenz- kategorie alter skizziert, und sowohl deren spezifika im vergleich zu anderen differenzkategorien herausgear- beitet, als auch konsequenzen für die weiterentwicklung von undoing age benannt, die in den begriffen materia- lität, kontinuität und prozesshaftigkeit zusammengefasst sind. ein fazit zu den potentialen einer so verstandenen multiperspektivität im rahmen einer intersektionalen be- trachtung von differenz- und ungleichheitsverhältnissen rundet den beitrag ab.   doing-ansätze: zur konstruktion der differenz- kategorien geschlecht und alter zunächst wendet sich der beitrag jenen soziologischen ansätzen zu, die differenzkategorien als durch soziale praktiken (doings) konstruiert verstehen. dabei werden zunächst doing gender-konzepte und im anschluss daran theorieansätze zum doing age diskutiert. seit den er jahren wurden in der soziologie vermehrt doing- ansätze entwickelt, die soziale differenzkategorien wie geschlecht, alter oder ethnizität als durch soziale prakti- ken hergestellte konstruktionen begreifen. ausgegangen ist diese theoretische ausrichtung insbesondere von der genderforschung: schon ende der er jahre machte der soziologe harold garfinkel auf der grundlage seiner ethnomethodologischen studien darauf aufmerksam, dass geschlecht nicht naturgegeben ist, sondern, dass geschlechterrollen und geschlechtsidentitäten durch bewusste und insbesondere durch unbewusste bewe- gungsmuster und handlungsweisen, die auf körperlich verankerten routinen basieren, hervorgebracht und ver- mittelt werden (garfinkel [ ]). candace west und don zimmermans weiterentwicklung von harold garfin- kels geschlechterverständnis in form des ansatzes des doing gender im jahr hat in der sozialwissenschaft- lichen geschlechterforschung die idee der sozialen kon- grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    struiertheit von geschlecht maßgeblich beeinflusst. west und zimmerman ( : ) unterscheiden dabei „sex“ als biologisches geschlecht, dessen klassifikation bei der geburt nach sozial vereinbarten äußeren geschlechts- merkmalen oder durch chromosomenanalyse erfolgt, von der „sex-category“, deren zuordnung im alltag auf der basis des zugeordneten biologischen geschlechts und der dadurch erwarteten darstellung beruht. unter „gender“ verstehen west und zimmerman das sozial erworbene ge- schlecht, das im alltag in interaktionen vollzogen und her- gestellt wird. während in diesem ethnomethodologischen verständnis von doing gender geschlecht als etwas der darstellung „vorgelagertem“ aufgefasst wird, betonen pra- xistheoretische und poststrukturalistische perspektiven, wie etwa von judith butler ( ) formuliert, die gleich- zeitigkeit der performativität von (sprech-)akten und der hervorbringung von geschlecht  – eine konzeptionelle differenzierung, die auch für undoing-ansätze relevant ist. die hinwendung zu vergeschlechtlichten konstruk- tions- und zuschreibungsprozessen hat die sozialwissen- schaftliche geschlechterforschung maßgeblich bereichert. denn mit ihr ging eine abkehr von einem verständnis einher, das geschlecht als eine biologische determinante auffasste, mittels derer vergeschlechtlichte annahmen na- turalisiert und als konsequenz einer körperlichen ‚grund- ausstattung‘ konzeptualisiert wurden (oakley ). der durch den verweis auf die soziale konstruiertheit von geschlecht in den analysefokus gerückte interaktive aus- handlungsprozess als zentraler motor der hervorbringung von geschlecht wurde in den er jahren auch in der deutschsprachigen soziologie weiter ausgearbeitet (u.  a. gildemeister & wetterer ; hirschauer ; lindemann ; villa ). dadurch konnte gezeigt werden, dass die interaktive hervorbringung von geschlecht auf kon- struktionen und zuschreibungen basiert, die in normali- sierungsprozesse eingebettet sind. diese verweisen wie- derum auf soziale ungleichheits- und machtverhältnisse, wie sie unter anderem in der erwerbsarbeit, etwa durch die feminisierung von pflegeberufen (wetterer ), sowie durch die arbeitsteilung bei paaren (grunow ; hochschild & machung ) relevant gemacht werden. mit dem konzept des doing gender wurde nicht nur auf die omnipräsenz von geschlecht in jeglichen sozialen situa- tionen aufmerksam gemacht, sondern auch gezeigt, dass geschlecht hervorzubringen immer auch bedeutet, eines von zwei geschlechtern zu ‚machen‘. unweigerlich wird somit durch die performanz von geschlecht eine binär strukturierte differenz hergestellt, die die norm der zwei- geschlechtlichkeit reproduziert (butler , ). bald nach der veröffentlichung von candace west und don zimmermans aufsatz zu doing gender wurde jedoch kritik an dem konzept laut. ein wesentli- cher vorwurf lautete, dieser ansatz würde lediglich weiße frauen der mittelschicht und deren herstellungsmodi von geschlecht berücksichtigen, nicht jedoch die von schwar- zen frauen. ungleichheitserfahrungen von frauen seien vielfältiger und müssen daher differenzierter betrachtet werden (z.  b. crenshaw ). dieser kritik begegneten candace west und sarah fenstermaker (west & fenster- maker ; fenstermaker & west ), indem sie nicht länger ausschließlich geschlecht, sondern auch soziale klasse und ethnizität in ihrem ansatz des doing difference als kategorien, die soziale ungleichheiten bedingen, be- rücksichtigten. die drei kategorien werden dabei nicht in einem vorab festgelegten verhältnis zueinander be- stimmt und deren jeweilige relevanz somit festgelegt. stattdessen wird angenommen, dass geschlecht, soziale klasse und ethnizität in sozialen prozessen gleichzeitigt hergestellt werden, und folglich „difference as an ongoing interactional accomplishment“ zu verstehen sei (west & fenstermaker : ). die verhältnisbestimmung des sich fortlaufend konstituierenden beziehungsgefüges erfolgt mittels des konzepts der intersektionen (Überlage- rungen). stefan hirschauer ( ) kritisiert und erweitert dieses verständnis, indem er statt von stabilen intersek- tionen von kontingenten und multiplen mitgliedschaften spricht. jedes individuum vereint dabei eine vielzahl an mitgliedschaften, die von identitär stärker vereinnahmen- den mitgliedschaften wie geschlecht oder klasse über for- malisierte mitgliedschaften in organisationen bis hin zu diffusen mitgliedschaften, wie die beteiligung an sozialen netzwerken, reichen. welche davon wie, wann, wo und von wem situativ relevant (doing) oder situativ irrelevant (undoing) gemacht werden, wird aus dieser perspektive zu einer empirischen frage. um der konzeptionellen verengung bezogen auf die drei prominenten differenzkategorien class, race, gender zu begegnen, wurden in der kindheitsforschung (z.  b. lee ), der kritischen erwachsenheitsforschung (z.  b. burnett ) und der altersforschung (z.  b. laz ; schroeter ) auch konzeptionen eines doing age ent- wickelt. dadurch wurde auch die theoretisierung der differenzkategorie alter angestoßen. in diesen feldern wurde die soziale konstruktion von alter zunächst his- torisch-institutionell hergeleitet, wie etwa in phillippe ariès ( ) thesen zur „erfindung von kindheit“ oder martin kohlis ( ) darstellung der entwicklung der altersphase mit der etablierung des rentensystems. aus diesen stärker strukturalistisch ausgerichteten ansätzen entwickelten sich jedoch in anlehnung an doing gender bald auch interaktionistisch-materialistische ansätze, die nicht lediglich die soziale konstruiertheit von alter    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age betonen, sondern diese auch in sozio-materiellen prak- tiken verorten. das interaktionistische konzept des doing age des alterssoziologen klaus schroeter ( , ) geht dem- entsprechend in analogie zu doing gender von der grund- legenden annahme aus, altern vollziehe sich als soziale praxis in alltäglichen interaktionsprozessen zwischen menschen und ist damit „ein sich mit jeder menschlichen handlung vollziehender fortlaufender prozess interakti- ver darstellung und sozialer zuschreibungen“ (schroeter : ). er verortet diese praktiken auf fünf ebenen: ) in symbolen und repräsentationen, ) in institutionen, ) in interaktionen, ) in körpern, dingen und räumen und ) in affekten und sinnen. während seine kon- zeption stärker auf (menschliche) körper, symbole und interaktionen fokussiert, finden sich in der kindheits- forschung ansätze, die bereits über einen reinen sozial- konstruktivismus hinausgehen und stärker nicht-mensch- liche akteur*innen mitberücksichtigen. kindheitsforscher nick lee ( ) versteht in diesem sinne kindheit etwa als „an emergent property of interactions between persons, discourses, technologies, objects, bodies etc.“ (lee : ) Ähnlich wie von lee wird auch in aktuellen weiter- entwicklungen des doing age-konzeptes im bereich der altersforschung argumentiert, in denen das verhältnis von alter(n) und materialität neu gefasst wird und dazu die wechselwirkungen zwischen alter(n) und körpern (höppner a, b), alter(n) und alltagsgegenstän- den, sowie neuen technologien (artner et al. ; depner ; endter ; wanka & gallistl ) und alter(n) und räumen (hahmann ; wanka ; wanka & oswald ) analysiert werden. diese arbeiten ermöglichen eine detaillierte beschreibung des zusammenspiels von menschlichen körpern, artefakten, technologien und räumen in der hervorbringung von alter(n), ohne diese materialitäten als natürliche tatsachen zu essentialisieren oder als kulturelle bedeutungsträger diskursiv aufzulösen. zusätzlich zur frage, wie sich alter(n) materiell vollzieht, problematisieren erste arbeiten auch, wo alter(n) vonstat- tengeht und welche materialität/en darin involviert bzw. hervorgebracht werden (höppner & urban ). anders als geschlecht ist alter jedoch immer gleicher- maßen zustand (einer person wird ein bestimmtes alter zugeschrieben) und prozess (diese zuschreibung schrei- tet kontinuierlich linear voran). dies wird in der alters- soziologie als „doppelköpfigkeit“ des alters bezeichnet  siehe hierzu auch das von der deutschen forschungsgemein- schaft finanziell unterstützte netzwerk „materielle gerontologie“, das im januar seine arbeit aufgenommen hat (https://material gerontology.wordpress.com/). (vgl. van dyk ). in den entsprechenden doing age- ansätzen wird diese doppelköpfigkeit jedoch noch wenig berücksichtigt (van dyk ). statt einer theoretisierung von doing age über den lebensverlauf finden sich, wie oben skizziert, konzeptionen in den nach lebensphasen getrennten sub-feldern der kindheitsforschung (z.  b. lee ), der kritischen erwachsenheitsforschung (z.  b. burnett ) oder der altersforschung (z.  b. schroeter ). dadurch wird die an sich metrische einteilung von alter zuerst kategorial in lebensphasen verdichtet, die wiederum in den ausdifferenzierten forschungsfeldern als binär betrachtet werden: es wird kindheit oder alter praktisch vollzogen oder negiert, und fällt eine person aus der entsprechend fokussierten kategorie, so wird sie im jeweiligen forschungsfeld nicht mehr oder nur noch als komplementäres „anderes“ berücksichtigt. die alters- forschung beschäftigt sich also beispielsweise mit der performanz des höheren erwachsenenalters, theoretisiert dabei aber weder die performanz von kindheit noch den performativen wechsel zwischen alterskategorien mit. insbesondere in der intersektionalen betrachtung mit anderen differenzkategorien verkompliziert die berück- sichtigung von alter das soziologische verständnis eines doings maßgeblich: so multipliziert sich einerseits die anzahl an möglichen überlappenden mitgliedschaften, wie hirschauer ( : ) soziale differenzmerkmale bezeichnet, durch die intersektionale berücksichtigung einer kontinuierlichen variable wie alter, die mögliche ausprägungen von bis über  jahre hat. andererseits dynamisiert die intersektionale berücksichtigung von alter diese komplexen vollzugswirklichkeiten auch noch, indem nicht nur beispielsweise die intersektionale mitgliedschaft „  jahre alte, schwarze akademikerin“ vollzogen werden muss, sondern dieses gefüge auch noch ständig in prozes- sualen verschiebungen begriffen ist, da wir ständig älter werden. das differenzmerkmal ‚alter‘ bringt besondere herausforderungen für die sozialkonstruktivistische inter- sektionale soziologie mit sich, für die bisher noch keine ausreichenden theoretisierungen entwickelt wurden. zusammenfassend lässt sich feststellen, dass so- ziologische doing-ansätze zunächst vor allem in der ge- schlechterforschung entwickelt wurden, sich jedoch bald darauf in andere forschungsfelder, wie die migrations-, bildungs-, kindheits- und altersforschung ausgebreitet und zunehmend intersektional ausgerichtet haben. dabei wurden in der altersforschung ansätze aus der geschlech- terforschung weitgehend übernommen, ohne den spe- zifika der differenzkategorie ‚alter‘ vollends rechnung zu tragen. allen solchen doing-ansätzen ist gemein, dass sie als grundlage für die herstellung sozialer differenzkate- gorien ein praktisches wissen ansehen, das intersubjek- https://materialgerontology.wordpress.com https://materialgerontology.wordpress.com grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    tiv (meissner ) und teilweise interobjektiv (höppner ) geteilt wird. geschlechtliche, altersbezogene oder ethnische zugehörigkeit wird also nicht nur performativ hergestellt, sondern muss vom gegenüber als solche erkannt und zugeordnet werden. ist ein mensch in solch einem intersubjektiven bzw. interobjektiven verständi- gungsprozess einmal als männlich oder weiblich, jung oder alt (differenz-)kategorisiert, werden alle seine folgen- den artikulationen vor diesem hintergrund interpretiert. diese annahme mutet insbesondere für eine poststruk- turalistische lesart von doing-ansätzen reichlich deter- ministisch an. es stellt sich also die frage, ob es aus dem vermeintlichen teufelskreis von performanz von etwas und anerkennung als etwas einen ausweg gibt  – oder, mit west und zimmerman ( ) gesprochen: „can we ever not do gender“ (und/oder alter, ethnizität, etc.)? um diese frage zu beleuchten, wenden wir uns im folgenden abschnitt undoing-ansätzen zu.   undoing-ansätze: zur dekonstruktion der differenz- kategorien geschlecht und alter wenn wir einerseits davon ausgehen, dass differenzkate- gorien in sozialen praktiken vollzogen, durch diese her- gestellt, reproduziert und/oder transformiert werden, so impliziert das andererseits, dass diese differenzierungen auch kritisch hinterfragt und deshalb anders (butler ; deutsch ) oder gar nicht vollzogen werden können (hirschauer , ): die annahme eines doings impli- ziert damit immer auch ein undoing (hirschauer : ). hirschauer hat bereits zu beginn der er jahre darauf hingewiesen, dass zusätzlich zum doing gender auch ein undoing gender denkbar sein müsse; auch wenn diese idee gefahr läuft, die semantik der gleichheit zu unterstützen, die zu einer nivellierung von geschlechterungleichheiten beitragen kann (u.  a. heintz & nadai ). in bezug auf undoing gender bestehen heute ver- schiedene ansätze: so fokussiert etwa judith butlers  interobjektivität im sinne bruno latours ( ) meint hier, dass nicht per se davon ausgegangen werden kann, dass sich in prakti- schen vollzügen ausschließlich menschen ihr alter gegenseitig an- zeigen. stattdessen ist in den jeweiligen situativen vollzügen von alter(n) zu problematisieren, wer oder was im prozess der hervor- bringung von alter(n) jeweils als altersakteur erkannt und adressiert wird. solch eine interobjektive sichtweise vermeidet durch die an- erkennung der materiellen vielfalt von alter(n) determinierende und kausale setzungen zugunsten des menschlichen körpers. ( ) verständnis von undoing gender auf individuelle, subversive praktiken, die sich restriktiven normen zu ge- schlecht und sexualität widersetzen. während sich butler ( ) in ihrem poststrukturalistischen verständnis von doing gender auf die gleichzeitigkeit von performativen (sprech-)akten und der hervorbringung von geschlecht bzw. zweigeschlechtlichkeit bezieht, so scheint ihre aus- legung von undoing gender von einer bereits hergestellten heteronormativen struktur auszugehen, die es mittels sub- versiver praktiken zu überwinden gilt  – es gibt also kein undoing ohne ein zeitlich vorgelagertes doing. Ähnlich angelegt ist das undoing gender-konzept von francine m. deutsch ( ), das die im doing gender-konzept an- visierte interaktive aushandlung von geschlecht in den blick nimmt und daraufhin befragt, welche potentiale sich durch eine gezielte verwendung von sprache eröffnen, um vorstellungen von weiblichkeit und männlichkeit zu problematisieren und zu kritisieren, mit dem ziel, einen wandel in geschlechtsbezogenen ungleichheitsverhält- nissen anzustoßen. hirschauers ( , , ) kon- zeption von undoing gender geht dagegen davon aus, dass soziale praktiken des doing gender auch unterbrochen oder vergessen werden können, ohne dass sich dies – wie bei butler – explizit gegen einen umstand y richtet. statt- dessen können sie auch nicht vollzogen werden, weil in einer bestimmten situation konkurrierende mitgliedschaf- ten relevant gemacht werden oder etwa aufgrund von ‚in- frastrukturellen löchern‘ keine geschlechtlichen adressie- rungen und re-adressierungen stattfinden (können) – sie werden zwischenzeitlich also schlicht irrelevant gemacht. um diese blickwinkelverschiebung zu konzeptualisieren, schlägt hirschauer vor, geschlechterkonstruktionen und geschlechterunterscheidungen nicht als omnipräsente prozesse aufzufassen, wie dies west und zimmerman ( ) tun, sondern deren episodenhaften charakter an- zuerkennen und stärker zu berücksichtigen. geschlecht kann dann stellenweise aus dem blick geraten, wenn es nicht permanent aktualisiert, also nicht wiederholt wird. „wird eine unterscheidung [anm.: aus einer reihe konkurrie- render differenzierungen] nicht selegiert, so findet sie bis auf weiteres nicht statt, sie ruht in einer art stand-by-modus. […] die nicht-zugehörigkeit oder ungebundenheit von personen entspricht einer mehr oder weniger dauerhaften indifferenz von differenzen.“ (hirschauer : – ) solch ein „aktives ‚absehen‘“ kann eine art „soziales ver- gessen“ (hirschauer : ) mit sich bringen: menschen nehmen sich während des undoings möglicherwiese nicht als weiblich oder männlich wahr und/oder ihr gegenüber, das „publikum“, adressiert sie nicht als frau oder mann. dann ‚ruht‘ ihre ‚gesellschaftliche mitgliedschaft‘ als an-    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age gehörige einer geschlechtergruppe quasi für eine gewisse zeit, und zwar so lange, bis ihr geschlecht wieder relevant gemacht wird und folglich auf geschlecht als soziale ord- nungskategorie rekurriert wird. wird also geschlecht in einer konkreten situation nicht als differenzmerkmal he- rangezogen, so wird es situativ undone  – kann allerdings in einer anderen situation wieder aktualisiert werden. gründe gibt es hierfür verschiedene: so können – ähnlich dem doing difference – andere differenzkategorien als ge- schlecht akzentuiert werden, geschlechterdarstellungen können heruntergespielt oder eine geschlechteradressie- rung kann abgewehrt werden. wie einfach oder schwierig es ist, eine differenzierung irrelevant zu machen, hängt nach hirschauer von ihrem „aggregatzustand“ ( : ) ab. diesen erkennt man u.  a. daran, wo, wie stark und wie weitreichend er sich in der sozialen welt materialisiert: etwa in sprachlichen struk- turen (z.  b. grammatik, personennamen), diskursiven repräsentationen (z.  b. redensarten, visuelle darstellun- gen), kognitiven schemata (z.  b. stereotypen), situierten praktiken (z.  b. arbeit, konsum), institutionellen infra- strukturen (z.  b. sozialen beziehungen, organisationen), im sozial geformten körper, in artefakten, technologien und architekturen. freiräume für undoing gender sieht hirschauer ( ) dementsprechend in der modifikation der „infrastruktur“ , die praktiken des doing gender auf- rechterhält: vornamen und produkte, die nicht nur eines der zwei geschlechter adressieren, freundschaften und paarbildung, die geschlechtlich nicht mehr klar verteilt sind, das internet, das gegengeschlechtliche erfahrungen ermöglicht, unsere sprache, die zunehmend gleichheit zwischen geschlechtern vermittelt, usw. in analogie zu konzeptionen eines undoing gender wurde in der altersforschung in den letzten jahren die denkfigur eines undoing age entwickelt. dieses kann als konstellation performativer praktiken verstanden werden, die restriktive und normative konzeptionen von alter an- nulieren, zurücknehmen, rückgängig machen, löschen, wi- derrufen, aufknoten, trennen, auflösen, öffnen, zerstören oder zunichtemachen (vgl. haller : ). diese vielzahl  als eine situative möglichkeit eines solchen undoings nennt hir- schauer die kreuzung mehrerer differenzkategorien, die in ihrem zusammenspiel die differenzwirkung einer der herangezogenen differenzierungen minimiert. die einordnung als arbeitnehmer*in überschreibt beispielsweise formal die einordnung als „jung“ oder „alt“ durch gesetzliche antidiskriminierungsregelungen.  mit dem begriff der infrastrukturen verstehen wir in anlehnung an hirschauer ( ) in diesem artikel keine präexistierenden, objekti- vierten entitäten, sondern phänomene, die selber erst im vollzug von intersektionalen beziehungsgeflechten und praktiken hervorgebracht werden, anderen vollzügen aber wiederum als trägermedien dienen. an verben verdeutlicht bereits, dass undoing age – ebenso wie undoing gender  – unterschiedlich ausgelegt werden kann. in der altersforschung finden sich dazu verschiedene interpretationen, die jedoch insbesondere auf das verleug- nen, negieren und reversieren von alter (vgl. haller ; pfaller ) einerseits und das abweichen und unter- laufen von altersnormen (vgl. martin ; schroeter ; sandberg & marshall ) andererseits fokussieren. beide dieser interpretationen gehen damit im sinne einer ethno- methodologischen perspektive von einem zeitlich vorgela- gerten doing aus, einer bereits hergestellten kategorie und den mit ihr verbundenen normen, erwartungen und adres- sierungen, an der sich das undoing abarbeitet (siehe oben). wenn wir also von einem undoing age sprechen, dann stellt sich zuallererst die frage, welche definition von alter eben nicht vollzogen wird: wird eine bestimmte art von alter getan, so wird im umkehrschluss immer min- destens eine andere art von alter nicht getan. anders als beim un/doing gender existieren dabei allerdings nicht nur zwei möglichkeiten  – männlich oder weiblich  – und deren verschiedene auslegungen, sondern eine vielzahl potentieller alterskategorien und -interpretationen. in heute hegemonialen konzepten wie dem aktiven und er- folgreichen alter (vgl. rowe & kahn ) wird ein „gutes“ altern damit gleichgesetzt, überhaupt nicht zu altern (mchugh ). alter in diesem sinne erfolgreich zu voll- ziehen bedeutet also alter gleichzeitig auf eine bestimmte art zu vollziehen und andere formen von alterspraktiken zu unterlassen: alter wird als mittleres erwachsenen- alter oder gar jugend inszeniert, während biologistische und defizitäre altersbilder negiert werden. man „tut“ also nicht gebrechlich, sondern fit, gesund, selbstständig und aktiv. besonders explizit macht diese ambivalenz zwischen aneignung spezifischer alterspraktiken und widerstand gegen andere larissa pfaller ( ) in ihren analysen von anti-ageing praktiken. in diesen, so die autorin, wird nicht nur das eigene alter(n) verhandelt, sondern es werden auch imperative von selbstsorge und einem „guten leben“ miteinander verknüpft und voll- zogen. diese praktiken des verleugnens, negierens und der versuch des reversierens von alter finden dabei nicht nur im drastischen beispiel von schönheits-operationen oder technologisch unterstützten körperoptimierungen ,  die idee, das alter unsichtbar zu machen, scheint auf offene ohren zu stoßen; dies legt jedenfalls der erfolg einer medizinischen konferenz in berlin mit dem titel „undoing ageing“ (https://www. undoing-aging.org/) mit über teilnehmenden im märz nahe, bei der es um die wiederherstellung von molekularen und zellulären schäden aufgrund von alter(n) ging. diese konferenz soll im mai mit demselben titel am selben ort nochmals stattfinden. https://www.undoing-aging.org https://www.undoing-aging.org grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    sondern auch in alltäglichen praktiken statt – etwa durch fitness und sportliche betätigung, durch physisches und kognitives self-tracking mittels smarter technologien, durch die performanz von sexualität und sexueller at- traktivität oder die alltägliche inszenierung von aktivität, geschäftigkeit und selbstständigkeit (vgl. ekerdt ; marshall & katz ). als effekt dieser form des undoing age ist eine ‚falsche‘ altersadressierung vorstellbar (im sinne von jünger oder älter aussehen als eine person ent- sprechend ihres kalendarischen alters ist) oder auch eine dethematisierung von alter, weil vorausgesetzt wird, dass eine person das ‚richtige‘ alter hat (siehe hierzu llewellyn zu altersadressierungen an der kinokasse). ansatzpunkt, um den sich viele dieser praktiken drehen, sind alternde körper und die sie umgebenden ma- terialitäten, wie kleidung oder nahkörpertechnologien. diese körperkonstruktionen sind eng mit identitätskon- struktionen verbunden und von altersnormen (und ent- sprechenden machtkonstellationen) durchzogen (siehe hierzu schon sontag sowie degele ; höppner ; schroeter ). eine weniger stark am körper an- setzende auseinandersetzung mit dem alter stieß dagegen der niederländer emil ratelbland an, der dafür klagte, sein kalendarisches alter von auf   jahre heruntersetzen zu lassen. diese reversierung sollte sich jedoch nicht, wie etwa bei anti-ageing-praktiken, in seinen körper, sondern in seine dokumente einschreiben. sein körper und sein geist, so der kläger, entsprächen bereits der jüngeren alterszahl  – nur sein rechtlicher status bilde dies noch nicht ab. dabei zog er in seiner argumentation analogien zur transgender-bewegung und der möglichkeit, sein ge- schlecht in offiziellen dokumenten ändern zu können. das undoing age besteht hier also nicht nur, so zeigt dieser fall sehr deutlich, in der aneignung hegemonialer alters- diskurse um ein „nicht-altern“, sondern kann durchaus als subversiver politischer akt verstanden werden. ent- sprechend finden sich auch auf politisch-institutioneller ebene praktiken eines undoing age: in einer dokumenten- analyse internationaler policy-organisationen wie der world health organization und der europäischen union zeigen aske lassen und tiago moreira ( : ) auf, wie durch die festschreibung von vorstellungen eines aktiven alter(n)s ein „unmaking of old age“ auf politischer ebene geschieht . das höhere alter in diesem sinne performa- tiv abzulehnen impliziert, wie diese beispiele zeigen, eine starke inszenierung anderer alterskodierungen, die  zu ähnlichen resultaten kommen silke van dyk und kolleg*innen in einer analyse politischer rahmenprogramme und medialer dar- stellungen von alter seit den er jahren in deutschland (van dyk et al. ). etwa mit dem jungen oder mittleren erwachsenenalter verknüpft sind. so wollte emil ratelbland nicht ohne de- finierbares alter (queer age) sein, sondern entschied sich für eine konkrete alterskategorie im mittleren erwachse- nenalter. während hohes alter also negiert wird, werden alterspraktiken anderer alterskategorien vollzogen und damit deren respektive altersnormen aktualisiert. eine zweite und etwas anders geartete interpretation des undoing age findet sich in ansätzen eines undoing age appropriateness (martin ), eines doing age in other ways (schroeter ) oder eines queering age (sandberg & marshall ). diesen ansätzen ist gemein, dass sie auf jene praktiken fokussieren, die explizit von alters- normen abweichen, diese unterlaufen und damit kritisch in frage stellen. in martins ansatz eines undoing age ap- propriateness plädiert sie für eine subversive expression des alters und alternder körper, die erwartungen daran, was dieser spezifische körper (insbesondere auf der thea- terbühne) tun sollte und wo er es tun sollte, zuwiderläuft (martin : – ). dabei versucht sie, ambiguitäten in der grenzziehung zwischen angemessenheit (appro- priateness), lächerlichkeit, würde und geschmack aus- zuloten, „transgressing what is conventionally understood as a respectful and dignified representation of age(ing).“ (martin : ) Ähnlich wie martins bühnenperformanzen, die alters- normen verdeutlichen, kritisch beleuchten und sich auch über diese lustig machen wollen, kritisieren sandberg und marshall aktuelle altersverständnisse. ihr konzept eines queering age „disrupts the ways that expectations of a good later life and happy aging are seen to adhere to some bodies and subjectivities over others.“ (sandberg & marshall : ) bezugnehmend auf feministische, queere und crip-theorien plädieren sie für ein generelles unterlaufen von altersnormen und chronormativität (vgl. freeman ), das schließlich  – wird es kollektiv be- trieben  – zu einem außerkraftsetzen von altersnormen und verstärktem zulassen von altersdiversität führen kann. ein queeres oder „anderes“ alter(n) verweist also auf der allgemeinsten ebene auf einen von normierten alterspraktiken abweichenden vollzug. wie bei der ne- gation von alter wird also im vollzug eines bestimmten alters (hier eines queeren oder „anderen“ alters) auch hier eine jeweils andere definition von alter (hier eines hegemonialen, „normalen“ alters) performativ abgelehnt. während ein negieren des alters sich dabei aber primär auf (alternde) körper bezieht, fokussiert ein queering age auf (alters-)normen. in der deutschsprachigen alterssoziologie beschäf- tigt sich schroeter ( ) mit solcherlei nicht-normati- ven altersvollzügen. er unterscheidet jedoch zwischen    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age einem doing age differently, also einer (akzeptierten) di- versifikation von alterspraktiken, die mittlerweile nor- malität geworden sei, und einem queering age. letzteres stellt nach seiner interpretation nicht nur einen weiteren lebensstil in einer spanne möglicher expressionen des altes dar, sondern eine „sich der otherness bewusste per- formanz des alterns, die sich diskursiv und praxeologisch ausdruck ihres ‚andersseins‘ verschafft und ihr recht auf eigensinn, dissidenz und ‚subversion‘ einfordert“ (schroeter : ). weitergedacht könnte dies, so seine Überlegung, zu einem a-alter (age(a)ness) bzw. nicht-vor- handensein von alter führen. zusammenfassend zeigen sich im hinblick auf un- doing-ansätze als konterpart zu doing-ansätzen wiederum eine erstmalige verortung in der geschlechterforschung und eine spätere ausbreitung u.  a. in der altersforschung. sowohl undoing gender als auch undoing age werden un- terschiedlich ausgelegt, und es zeigen sich dabei schnitt- mengen und auch unterschiede in diesen auslegungen zwischen der geschlechter- und der altersforschung: in beiden feldern wurden ansätze entwickelt, die ein undoing gender bzw. undoing age als ein set subversiver und widerständiger praktiken verstehen, welche sich res- triktiven hegemonialen geschlechter- oder altersnormen widersetzen. hier sind etwa die undoing gender-ansätze von butler ( ) oder deutsch ( ), sowie die konzep- tionen eines undoing age appropriateness (martin ), doing age differently (schroeter ) oder queering age (sandberg & marshall ) zu nennen. daneben finden sich in der kritischen gerontologie ansätze, die auf ein (individuelles) undoing age oder (institutionelles) unma- king old age mit der kehrseite eines doing youth abstellen (vgl. lassen & moreira ; pfaller ). eine solche auslegung findet sich in der geschlechterforschung (bei- spielsweise undoing male zugunsten eines doing female) nicht dezidiert. demgegenüber wurde für die geschlech- terforschung von hirschauer ( , , ) eine kon- zeption von undoing gender entwickelt, die praktiken des (temporären) aussetzens oder irrelevantmachens von ge- schlecht als sozialer differenzkategorie fokussiert. eine ähnliche auslegung wurde innerhalb der altersforschung noch nicht formuliert. der folgende abschnitt dieses ar- tikels befasst sich daher eingehender mit diesen unter- schieden zwischen un/doing gender und un/doing age- konzeptionen, und dementsprechend mit den spezifika der differenzkategorie alter, sowie ihrer implikationen für die weiterentwicklung eines undoing age.   un/doing age: spezifika der differenzkategorie alter im vergleich zu anderen differenz- kategorien und konsequenzen für die weiterentwicklung von undoing age wie einleitend erwähnt verfolgt der vorliegende beitrag drei ziele, die hier noch einmal wiederholt werden sollen: es soll erstens die intersektionale theoriebildung voran- getrieben werden, indem das differenzmerkmal ‚alter‘ fokussiert wird, und dabei zweitens nicht nur auf kon- struktions-, sondern ebenso auf dekonstruktionsprozesse und mit bezug auf alter insbesondere auf ein undoing age abgestellt werden. dies ist – und das soll drittens gezeigt werden  – deswegen von besonderem soziologischen in- teresse, da alter eine aufgrund seiner prozesshaftigkeit über den lebens(ver-)lauf besondere, sowohl aus intersek- tionaler als auch aus differenzierungstheoretischer per- spektive noch weitgehend untertheoretisierte differenz- kategorie darstellt. versteht man die einteilung in soziale differenzkategorien als eine praxis des differenzierens, so erfolgt diese etwa beim geschlecht nach dem prinzip ‚ent- weder (weiblich) – oder (männlich)‘, und diese einteilung bleibt in den meisten fällen bestehen. beim alter existiert hingegen eine vielzahl linear und konsekutiv gedachter zahlen (z.  b. , , ), die einem menschen analog jeden gelebten jahres zugeordnet wird, d.  h. die einteilung muss kontinuierlich angepasst werden, wenn menschen ‚älter‘ werden. alter ist damit zwar ebenso wie geschlecht oder ethnizität ein naturalisiertes merkmal, im gegensatz zu ihnen jedoch erstens weder binär noch kategorial, sondern kontinuierlich, und zweitens nicht statisch, sondern dyna- misch konzeptualisiert . was bedeutet das nun insbesondere für ein undoing von alter? vergleicht man doing-ansätze aus der sozio- logischen geschlechterforschung mit denen aus der altersforschung, so zeigen sich  – wie oben bereits zu-  dabei betonen die neueren gender studies und queers studies, dass etwa auch geschlecht keine binäre und auch nicht notwendiger- weise eine kategoriale differenz ist. stattdessen wird, wie beim alter, von einem kontinuum zwischen genderkategorien ausgegangen, sowie der möglichkeit, sich überhaupt außerhalb von geschlechter- grenzen zu bewegen. ein klassisches beispiel, das auch stefan hir- schauer ( ) aus einer doing-perspektive untersucht hat, ist der wechsel von geschlechtern und trans*-identitäten. nichtsdestotrotz bleibt das geschlecht im vergleich zum alter eine in den meisten lebensläufen zumindest als statisch imaginierte kategorie. grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    sammengefasst  – teilweise Überschneidungen und teil- weise differenzen. insbesondere fällt auf, dass eine an hirschauer ( , , ) angelehnte konzeption von undoing als temporales aussetzen oder irrelevantmachen für das alter noch nicht entwickelt wurde. dabei wird sowohl das hervorbringen als auch sein unterlassen als intersubjektive und interobjektive leistung beschrieben, diese aber auch in jener (geschlechtlichen bzw. alters- spezifischen) infrastruktur verortet, die sie als solche ermöglicht oder verunmöglicht, bedingt oder erschwert (vgl. goffman ; hirschauer ). während sowohl in der soziologischen geschlechter- als auch in der sozio- logischen altersforschung individuelle möglichkeiten zu heteronormativer kritik und zu alternativen bzw. subver- siven praktiken zur veränderung von geschlechts- oder altersbezogenen ungleichheitsverhältnissen erforscht werden (butler ; deutsch ; sandberg & marshall ; schroeter ), bleibt die analyse jener institutio- neller spielräume, in denen alter ausgesetzt oder irrele- vant gemacht werden kann, in der altersforschung bisher ausgeblendet. dort stehen eher die individuellen möglich- keiten zum verleugnen, negieren, reversieren von alter bzw. zum abweichen und unterlaufen von altersnormen im zentrum. der fokus auf das individuum, der in altersbezogenen undoing-ansätzen vorherrscht, kann durch die oben be- schriebene komplexität und dynamik des alters als diffe- renzmerkmal bedingt sein – infrastrukturen scheinen auf den ersten blick zu statisch, um diese dynamik zu fassen. hier kann es hilfreich sein, auf hirschauers ( : ) kon- zeption von aggregatzuständen, in denen sich geschlecht manifestiert, zurückzugreifen. aggregatzustände erkennt man daran, wo, wie stark und wie weitreichend sie sich in der sozialen welt materialisieren. sehen wir uns diese materialisierungen in bezug auf alter und im vergleich zu geschlecht an, so sehen wir etwa, dass alter sich in manchen der genannten bereiche expliziter manifestiert als geschlecht, in anderen impliziter verhandelt wird und in wieder anderen irrelevant gemacht wird. diese graduie- rung im ‚manifestationsgrad‘ von alter zeigt sich etwa an folgenden beispielen: – infrastrukturen des manifesten relevantsetzens von alter im sinne eines doing age bei zwischen- zeitlichem irrelevantsetzen von geschlecht: deut- lich explizit gemacht wird alter im praxisrahmen der erwerbsarbeit: hier bestehen, sowohl nach „unten“ als auch nach „oben“, explizite altersbegrenzungen im sinne eines verbots von kinderarbeit und eines gesetzlichen rentenantrittsalters. auch andere ge- setzliche rechte, pflichten und vorgaben  – etwa das aktive und passive wahlrecht, das recht zu heiraten, die schulpflicht oder die blutspende, die  – je nach organisation bis einschließlich oder   jahren durchgeführt werden darf – fungieren als infrastruk- tur eines doing age, denn sie sind explizit an das kalendarische alter gebunden. dementsprechend ar- gumentierte auch das gericht im fall von emil ratel- bland – seine klage abweisend –, dass eine rechtliche veränderung des alters, anders als des geschlechts oder des namens, deshalb nicht möglich sei, da zen- trale rechte und pflichten an das alter gebunden seien. könnte man sein alter formal ändern lassen, könnte man sich selbsttätig von diesen rechten und pflichten entheben oder aber sie eingehen, ohne dafür qualifiziert zu sein. auch in neue technologien ein- geschriebene skripte wie die von ambient assis ted living technologies stellen in gewisser weise eine infrastruktur von alter dar, denn sie sollen vor allem alte menschen auch mit mehreren handicaps im sinne eines „ageing-in-place“ (u.  a. andrews & phillips ) dazu befähigen, längst möglich in den eigenen vier wänden wohnen zu bleiben (schill- meier & domenech ). welchem geschlecht diese menschen angehören, ist bei der verwendung der in den wohnräumen installierten kameras und bei der nutzung der sensoren, die diesen menschen um den hals hängen oder die sie als uhr tragen, unwichtig. – infrastrukturen des latenten relevantsetzens von alter im sinne eines undoing age bei gleichzeiti- gem manifesten relevantsetzen von geschlecht: in bezug auf situierte praktiken des konsums wird alter weniger explizit gemacht als geschlecht: so wird beim friseur zwischen einem damen- und einem herrenschnitt unterschieden und es gibt frauen- und männerabteilungen in bekleidungsgeschäften, während dieselben klaren trennungslinien nach alter nicht gezogen werden. das heißt aber nicht, dass alter beim friseur oder beim kleidungskauf irrelevant gemacht wird  – im gegenteil. die alterskodierungen sind jedoch impliziter als in bezug auf geschlecht, und häufig spielen beide differenzierungen intersek- tional zusammen (z.  b. kleidungsnormen für ältere frauen versus ältere männer, vgl. twigg ). Ähn- liches gilt auch in bezug auf paarbeziehungen, bei denen altersdifferenzen je nachdem, wer der oder  man denke hier etwa an einen günstigen „altenschnitt“ oder eine unterwäscheabteilung für +. eine ausnahme stellt dabei die le- bensphase kindheit dar, deren konsumgüter klare altersbeschrän- kungen aufweist: so gibt es spielzeug für -jährige, kleidung für -jährige, haarschnitte für kinder und altersabhängige konsumver- bote für zigaretten und alkohol.    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age die jüngere und wer der oder die ältere partner*in ist, unterschiedlich akzeptiert sind (in beiden fällen ist die akzeptanz einer paarkonstellation jedoch höher als bei gleichgeschlechtlichen beziehungen). – infrastrukturen des zwischenzeitlichen irrele- vantsetzens von alter im sinne eines undoing age bei gleichzeitigem manifesten relevantsetzen von geschlecht: sehr manifest zeigt sich etwa in sprach- lichen strukturen, wo alter im vergleich zu geschlecht fast völlig undone wird  – weder grammatik, noch pronomen und personennamen weisen so eindeutig auf ein bestimmtes alter hin, wie sie ein eindeutiges geschlecht anzeigen. aber auch in fluideren, situati- veren vollzügen wie politischen bewegungen wird alter zwischenzeitlich irrelevant gemacht: #metoo versteht sich beispielsweise als plattformen, um auf geschlechtsspezifische sexualisierte gewalt aufmerk- sam zu machen. welches kalendarische alter die teil- nehmenden frauen haben, ist nicht relevant  – im gegenteil: hier sind frauen jeden alters angerufen, ihre gewalterfahrungen zu teilen. – infrastrukturen des zwischenzeitlichen irrele- vanzsetzens von alter im sinne eines undoing age bei gleichzeitigem irrelevantsetzen von ge- schlecht: hier können zum einen beispielhaft prak- tiken angesprochen werden, in denen alter und ge- schlecht zeitweise irrelevant gemacht werden, weil sie sich in spezifischen räumen vollziehen. dabei sind räume zu unterscheiden, in denen diese irrelevanz daraus resultiert, dass der zugang zu diesen räumen altersselektiv ist und die menschen, die sich dort auf- halten, schon strukturell altershomogen sind  – z.  b. im kindergarten, in der schule, im krankenhaus oder im pflegeheim  – und innerhalb dieser räume somit schließlich stärker auf leistungsfähigkeit als auf alter abgestellt wird. in anderen, implizit intergenera- tionalen räumen kann irrelevanz von alter und ge- schlecht aus der priorisierung anderer differenzkate- gorien, z.  b. religionszugehörigkeit in der kirche oder variablen wie der kaufkraft im supermarkt, resultie- ren. zum anderen können hier formalisierte und in- stitutionalisierte prozesse angeführt werden, die man durchlaufen muss, um bescheinigungen, urkunden oder finanzielle unterstützung zu erhalten. im fall einer verwitwung gilt etwa: ohne den ärztlich attes- tierten totenschein keine sterbeurkunde, ohne ster- beurkunde keine rente für hinterbliebene – und dies unabhängig von alter und geschlecht sowohl der ver- storbenen als auch der hinterbliebenen person. und auch über derart formalisierte abläufe hinaus können sich in stark vorstrukturierten prozessen situationen ergeben, in denen alter und geschlecht nicht relevant sind, man denke nur an die wartezeit beim arzt oder im bürgeramt bevor man zu einem termin aufgerufen wird. in diesem ‚infrastrukturellen leerlauf‘ zwischen terminen bzw. dem ankommen und dem aufgerufen- werden sitzen wartende neben wartenden – und dies häufig ohne als jüngerer mann oder als ältere frau adressiert zu werden. wir können also feststellen, dass un/doing age verschie- dene formen des vollzugs und des nicht-vollzugs von altersdifferenzierungen beschreibt und dabei immer in wechselwirkung mit anderen differenzkategorien (hier am beispiel geschlecht) steht. auffallend ist, dass diese wechselwirkungen nicht immer gleich sind. stattdessen haben wir vier verschiedene aggregatzustände von alter und geschlecht identifiziert, die sich in ihren infrastruk- turen unterscheiden. in diesen infrastrukturen wird entweder eine dieser differenzkategorien expliziter als die andere gemacht oder aber sowohl alter als auch ge- schlecht zugunsten einer anderen differenzkategorie oder variable wie etwa leistungsfähigkeit zwischenzeitlich relativiert. es zeigt sich auch, dass sich die differenzkategorie alter einerseits in den wechselwirkungen mit infrastruk- turen konstituiert, die die hervorbringung und bestä- tigung von alter unterstützen. andererseits können in- frastrukturen das verleugnen, negieren und reversieren von alter befördern; praktiken können dann von alters- normen abweichen oder sie unterlaufen; oder sie können dazu beitragen, alter insgesamt nicht zu thematisieren bzw. irrelevant zu machen. ein solches undoing age kann sich kurzfristig, in konkreten situationen, oder dauer- haft in spezifischen bereichen  – etwa im bereich der er- werbsarbeit oder des konsums  – und mit spezifischen fokussierungen  – etwa auf körper oder normen  – voll- ziehen. in all diesen facetten ähnelt undoing age jedem anderen undoing x  – undoing gender, undoing ethnicity, undoing class, etc. in anderen bereichen, wie etwa seiner metrik und lebenslaufspezifischen dynamik, gleicht alter anderen differenzkategorien aber nicht. aus den bisherigen ausführungen ergeben sich daher drei wesentliche konsequenzen für eine weiterentwick- lung bisheriger undoing age-konzepte und somit auch für eine intersektionale betrachtung der differenzkategorie alter: ) alter wird ebenso wie andere differenzkategorien nicht nur in intersubjektiven oder interobjektiven interaktionen hervorgebracht oder unterlassen, sondern materialisiert sich ebenso in verschiedenen aggregatzuständen in der sozialen, formalisierten grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    oder institutionalisierten infrastruktur. alter ist damit ebenso produkt alltäglicher (widerstands-)praxis, als auch resultat der materiellen manifestationen, in denen sich diese praxis vollzieht. eine konzeption von undoing age muss diese materialitäten  – auch über den als ‚natürlich‘ alternd verstandenen körper hinaus  – stärker berücksichtigen, als es bisherige konzeptionen aus der soziologischen altersforschung tun. ) alter wird, anders als andere differenzkategorien, nicht als kategoriales, sondern als kontinuierliches differenzmerkmal mit einer vielzahl konsekutiver ausprägungen (z.  b. von bis   jahren), die sich wiederum in lebensphasen (z.  b. kindheit, jugend, höheres alter) verdichten, verstanden. gerade in der intersektionalen betrachtung des doing age und undoing age ergibt sich daraus eine erhöhte komple- xität an möglichen zuschreibungen und grenzziehun- gen. ) alter ist, anders als andere differenzkategorien, kein (scheinbar) statisches, sondern ein prozessuales dif- ferenzmerkmal. während das geschlecht, die soziale oder ethnische herkunft bei den meisten menschen über den lebensverlauf konstant bleiben, verändern wir unser alter ständig, bewegen uns also über alters- kategorisierungen hinweg. dabei speichern wir einer- seits die erinnerung an vergangene lebensphasen und lernen andererseits stetig neue alterskategori- sierungen zu praktizieren, wir er- und verlernen al- tersbezogene konventionen und erleben womöglich altersspezifische diskriminierungen, weil wir etwas tun, wofür wir noch zu jung oder schon zu alt sind. das merkmal der prozesshaftigkeit ermöglicht es dem- zufolge, auf das lebensalter bezogene erwartungen und fähigkeiten als essentialismen zu identifizieren und diese zu kritisieren. dieses merkmal weist aber auch über die differenzkategorie alter hinaus, denn es betont den dynamischen charakter jeglichen un/ doing x, das zusammen mit un/doing age analysiert wird. alle drei oben genannten punkte  – die materialität, die kontinuität, die prozesshaftigkeit  – sollten in einer theoretisierung von un/doing age verankert werden. ein solches, so wollen wir argumentieren, kann jedoch nur ge- meinsam mit empirischen analysen abduktiv entwickelt werden. auch wenn die empirische Überzeugungskraft eines undoing bis heute diskutiert wird (u.  a. westheuser zum undoing gender), so braucht es mehr empirische forschung, die – konzeptionell sensibilisiert – ein solches verständnis von un/doing age weiter konkretisiert. west und zimmerman ( ) schlossen ihren aufsatz zum doing gender mit der frage „can we ever not do gender?“ für das alter wollen wir anders als die autor*in- nen diese frage mit „ja“ beantworten. wir sehen die chance, um solche spielräume eines un/doing age aus- zuloten, im unterschied zu anderen differenzkategorien gerade in der lebenslaufbezogenen dynamik und prozess- perspektive von alter: was heute noch die altersnorm trifft, kann nächsten monat schon als subversiv gelten, was letztes jahr noch passend war, kann heute irrelevant sein. gerade weil mit dem lebenslauf jeweils spezifische altersnormen, verpflichtungen, gesetzliche regelungen usw. auf den plan gerufen werden und andere nicht, er- möglicht es diese zeitliche graduierung im lebenslauf, altersindifferenzen ausfindig zu machen und zu nutzen.   fazit: potentiale von multi- perspektivität im rahmen einer intersektionalen betrachtung von differenz- und ungleichheitsverhältnissen der vorliegende beitrag hat aufgezeigt, dass ein multi- perspektivischer analyserahmen aus mehreren gründen für die intersektionale theoriebildung hilfreich ist. es wurde erstens deutlich, dass es sich durchaus lohnt, die konzeptionelle verengung der intersektionalitätsdebatte auf die differenzkategorien race, class, gender zu öffnen und bisher noch wenig erforschte differenzkategorien wie alter auf ihre spezifik hin zu befragen. denn diese diffe- renzkategoriale spezifik bestimmt die verwobenheit mit anderen differenzkategorien auf besondere weise. zweitens konnte der beitrag den erkenntnisgewinn verdeutlichen, zusätzlich zu herstellungsprozessen von alter auch prozesse des unterlaufens und irrelevantma- chens von alter in eine intersektionale betrachtung auf- zunehmen. die bedeutung von alter als differenzkatego- rie und als gesellschaftlicher platzanweiser erschließt sich demnach erst auf der grundlage eines interaktionischen, materialistischen, infrastrukturellen und lebenslaufdyna- mischen verständnisses von un/doing age und in den wechselwirkungen mit anderen differenzkategorien. eine de/konstruktivistische perspektive auf ungleichheits- verhältnisse einzunehmen, ermöglicht zum einen ein differenziertes verständnis über die konstruiertheit und wirksamkeit einer differenzkategorie, über die privilegien und unterdrückung gesteuert und positionen in unserer    grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age gesellschaft zugewiesen werden. zum anderen gibt eine de/konstruktivistische analyse aufschluss über intersek- tionale wechselwirkungen, sie sich kontinuierlich ändern und die wir anhand von vier aggregatzuständen von alter und geschlecht ausgeführt haben. eine dekonstruktive analyse soll keineswegs dazu beitragen, differenzkate- gorien unsichtbar zu machen, zu neutralisieren oder zu ent-problematisieren  – im gegenteil: gerade die dekon- struktion von differenzkategorien bietet ein besonderes potential zur kritischen reflexion von sozialen praktiken, lebenswirklichkeiten und infrastrukturen, die uns oft so normal erscheinen, die aber einen wesentlichen beitrag dazu leisten, differenzkategorien und damit einher- gehende soziale ungleichheiten aufrechtzuerhalten und zu legitimieren. so gehen wir drittens bereits davon aus, dass ungleich- heitsverhältnisse nicht statisch, sondern historisch und kontextuell eingebettet und daher variabel sind (giebeler et al. ). anders als andere differenzkategorien führt uns die differenzkategorie alter allerdings vor augen, dass sich ungleichheitsverhältnisse im lebensverlauf kontinuier- lich und prozesshaft verändern: abhängig vom lebens- alter bewirken kategoriale verwobenheiten mit anderen differenzkategorien besondere soziale platzierungen von menschen und intensivieren eine ungleiche verteilung von lebenschancen, teilhabe und ressourcen. die differenz- kategorie alter verdeutlicht, dass altersphasen nicht frei von bewertungen sind, sondern im gegenteil eine unglei- che bewertung von alter über die lebensphasen hinweg erfolgt. denn während die mittleren lebensjahre mit dem scheinbar entscheidungsfähigen, selbstbestimmten er- wachsenen als ideal gelten, so werden die lebensjahre an den „rändern des lebenslaufs“  – kindheit, jugend, höheres alter – als abweichung zu diesem normalzustand angenommen (vgl. hockey & james ; van dyk ). multiperspektivität im hier vorgeschlagenen sinne erhöht die komplexität einer intersektionalen analyse, was wiederum die intersektionale theoriebildung und empirische forschung auffordert, mit dieser komplexität umzugehen. denn offen bleiben empirisch zu adressie- rende fragen wie: wie hängen verschiedene praktiken des undoing, etwa das ‚ruhen-lassen‘, das ‚nicht-tun‘ und das ‚negieren‘ zusammen, wie werden sie situativ wirksam, und was bringen sie neues – abseits von alter oder 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altersbilder als körperbilder: doing age by bodyfication. s.  – in: f. berner, j. rossow & k.-p. schwitzer (hrsg.), individuelle und kulturelle altersbilder. expertisen zum . altenbericht der bundesregierung. band  . wiesbaden: vs. schroeter, k.r., : doing age in other ways – formen „anderen alterns“: weitere facetten der verwirklichung des alterns. s.  – in: h.p. zimmermann (hrsg.), kulturen der sorge: wie unsere gesellschaft ein leben mit demenz ermöglichen kann. frankfurt am main & new york: campus. schroeter, k.r., : doing age, korporales kapital und erfolg- reiches altern. spiel ( ): – . sontag, s., [ ]: the double standard of aging. s.  – in: v. carver & p. liddiard (hrsg.), an ageing population: a reader and sourcebook. new york: open university press. traunsteiner, b., : gleichgeschlechtlich liebende frauen im alter. intersektionalität, lebenslagen und antidiskrimi- nierungsempfehlungen. wiesbaden: springer vs. twigg, j., : dress and age: the intersection of life and work. 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paradigma zur analyse von ungleichheits-macht- und normierungsverhältnissen. vierteljahresschrift für heilpädagogik und ihre nachbargebiete / : – . walgenbach, k., g. dietze, l. hornscheidt & k. palm, : gender als interdependente kategorie. neue perspektiven auf intersek- tionalität, diversität und heterogenität. opladen: budrich. wanka, a., : withdrawal from public space – older urban residents and the social practices of spatial (dis-) engagement. universität wien, dissertation. wanka a. & v. gallistl, : doing age in a digitized world – a material praxeology of aging with technology. frontiers in sociology ( ), https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . wanka, a. & f. oswald, : „mapping age“ – das verhältnis von altern und raum neu denken. in: a. wanka & f. oswald (hrsg.), räumliche anordnungen des alter(n)s. schwerpunktheft der zeitschrift für gerontologie und geriatrie : – . west, c. & s. fenstermaker, : doing difference. gender / society ( ): – . west, c. & s. fenstermaker, : doing difference. s.  – in: s. fenstermaker & c. west (hrsg.), doing gender, doing difference: inequality, power, and institutional change. psychology press. west, c. & d.h. zimmerman, : doing gender. gender & society ( ): – . westheuser, l., : männer, frauen und stefan hirschauer. undoing gender zwischen praxeologie und rhetorischer modernisierung. gender: zeitschrift für geschlecht, kultur und gesellschaft : – . wetterer, a., : arbeitsteilung und geschlechterkon- struktion. „gender at work“ in theoretischer und historischer perspektive. konstanz: uvk. winker, g. & n. degele, : intersektionalität: zur analyse sozialer ungleichheiten. bielefeld: transcript. http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/soz_eth/geschlecht_als_kategorie/die_soziale_konstruktion_von_geschlecht_erkenntnisperspektiven_und_gesellschaftstheoretische_fragen/hanna_meissner.pdf http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/soz_eth/geschlecht_als_kategorie/die_soziale_konstruktion_von_geschlecht_erkenntnisperspektiven_und_gesellschaftstheoretische_fragen/hanna_meissner.pdf http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/soz_eth/geschlecht_als_kategorie/die_soziale_konstruktion_von_geschlecht_erkenntnisperspektiven_und_gesellschaftstheoretische_fragen/hanna_meissner.pdf http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/soz_eth/geschlecht_als_kategorie/die_soziale_konstruktion_von_geschlecht_erkenntnisperspektiven_und_gesellschaftstheoretische_fragen/hanna_meissner.pdf http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/gpo/soz_eth/geschlecht_als_kategorie/die_soziale_konstruktion_von_geschlecht_erkenntnisperspektiven_und_gesellschaftstheoretische_fragen/hanna_meissner.pdf https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . grit höppner und anna wanka, un/doing age    autorinnen grit höppner katholische hochschule nordrhein-westfalen, fachbereich sozialwesen, piusallee , münster, e-mail: g.hoeppner@katho-nrw.de grit höppner, geb. . studium der sozialen arbeit, gender studies und soziologie in leipzig und wien (a). von bis wissenschaftliche mitarbeiterin (prae-doc) der professur für gender studies, universität wien, mit forschungsaufenthalt am graduate center, city university of new york, usa. von bis wissen- schaftliche mitarbeiterin (post-doc) der professur für sozialisation, institut für soziologie, westfälische wilhelms-universität münster. seit professorin für theorien und konzepte der sozialen arbeit an der katholischen hochschule nrw. wichtige publikationen: g. höppner & a. s. richter ( ): neu- vermessung des alter(n)s. zum mehrwert einer affektbasierten und ungleichheitssensiblen bestimmung des verhältnisses von raum und alter(n). zeitschrift für gerontologie und geriatrie : – , doi: . /s - - - ; g. höppner g. & m. urban ( ): where and how do aging processes take place in every- day life? answers from a new materialist perspective. frontiers in sociology ( ), doi: . /fsoc. . ; g. höppner ( ): embodying of the self during interviews: an agential realist account of the non-verbal embodying processes of elderly people. current sociology ( ): - , doi: . / anna wanka goethe-universität frankfurt am main, fachbereich erziehungs- wissenschaften, institut für sozialpädagogik und erwachsenen- bildung, dfg-graduiertenkolleg ‚doing transitions‘, theodor-w.-adorno-platz  , frankfurt am main, e-mail: wanka@em.uni-frankfurt.de anna wanka, geb. in wien. studium der soziologie und rechts- wissenschaften in wien (a). von bis wissenschaftliche mitarbeiterin (prae-doc) am institut für soziologie, forschungs- schwerpunkt „familie, generationen, lebenslauf und gesundheit“, seit wissenschaftliche mitarbeiterin (post-doc) im dfg- graduiertenkolleg „doing transitions“ an der goethe universität frankfurt am main. wichtigste publikationen: a. wanka ( ): change ahead— emerging life-course transitions as practical accomplishments of growing old(er). frontiers in sociology. https://doi.org/ . / fsoc. . ; a. wanka, l. wiesböck et al. ( ): everyday discrimination in the neighbourhood: what a ‘doing’ perspective on age and ethnicity can offer. ageing and society, – . https://doi. org/ . /s x ; a. wanka & v. gallistl ( ): doing age in a digitized world—a material praxeology of aging with technology. frontiers in sociology : . https://doi.org/ . / fsoc. . mailto:g.hoeppner@katho-nrw.de mailto:wanka@em.uni-frankfurt.de https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . https://doi.org/ . /s x https://doi.org/ . /s x https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . https://doi.org/ . /fsoc. . reithmeier et al spatialities, social media and sentiment analysis: exploring the potential of the detection tool sentistrength gi_forum , issue page: - full paper corresponding author: reithmeier@geo.uni-frankfurt.de doi: . /giscience _ _s christina reithmeier, karoline buschbaum and detlef kanwischer goethe university frankfurt/main, germany abstract social media such as twitter or facebook not only create new spaces of interaction and communication, they also influence the way we perceive things and lead to changes in our self-perception and our own worldview. online data occur in various forms and can contain opinions or expressions of feeling. in this article, we explore the potential of sentistrength, a tool for sentiment analysis in geographic research. we analyse posts on twitter containing hashtags for possible constructions of spaces in ostend, a neighbourhood in frankfurt, germany. we collected tweets via the twitter api and used the sentistrength online application to conduct our sentiment analysis. in order to evaluate the results, we also classified our data manually for comparison. through its lexicon-based classification, the tool was able to identify positive and negative associations of ostend. however, we were also able to demonstrate the limitations of the tool compared to manual analysis. although it provides a quick and comprehensive overview of sentiments, sentistrength reaches its limits when other media such as images are involved. overall, the tool offers a good low-threshold approach for scientists to work with digital data. keywords: sentiment analysis, sentistrength, twitter, hashtags, construction of space introduction more and more aspects of our everyday lives are conveyed, expanded, produced and regulated by software-supported technologies. social media in particular, such as twitter, appear on the internet as a new space for interaction and communication. strohmaier and zens ( ) even attribute social media with the ability to change public social life structurally. poorthuis et al. ( ) describe this structural change as a ‘data revolution’, in which digital social data could become key elements of social interaction. the information disseminated by such media represents spatial data that has been provided by the users, either voluntarily by linking their location, or unintentionally. the postings implicitly reproduce geographical information, for example through geolocation, giving information about the user’s place of origin or referring in their content to geographical entities (places), through which the locations can be perceived differently and acquire new meanings reithmeier et al (stefanidis et al., ). whether in social networks, on television or as graffiti on house walls, we often encounter so-called hashtags (# symbols, such as #metoo or #blacklivesmatter). hashtags emphasize individual terms and bundle certain topics (bruns & stieglitz, ). the occurrence of hashtags can be very limited in time and still provide a large amount of up-to-date data (willis & fecteau, ). since two-thirds of all social media users provide information about their location in a number of ways – whether explicitly via geolocation or via hashtags – those data can be used to investigate spatial perceptions in social media (stefanidis et al., ). such material with information about geographical location as well as socio-scientifically relevant data can provide new insights. in particular, social media platforms provide an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyse fine- grained data about socio-spatial actions. combined with other sources of information and methods, the approach offers great potential for opening up a new field of research: understanding the (geo)web as a socially produced space (crampton et al., ). the internet, with its wealth of data, offers a supposedly fruitful research base. however, traditional rules and research methods cannot or can only partially be applied to internet- based data, which require new methodological approaches. in our explorative study, we focus on sentiment analysis as a method for detecting opinions and sentiment in social media on certain topics (thelwall et al., ). sentiment analysis can potentially give an overview of opinions and perceptions of certain places and help us to understand constructions of those spaces. these new computer-aided approaches usually require basic computing or programming skills, but social scientists often do not have this kind of knowledge and rely on low-threshold programs and tools. one of these tools is sentistrength, which can be used as a desktop version or online. for the purposes of our study, we used the online version because it is the access point with the lowest threshold and no advanced computing skills are needed. therefore, our underlying research questions are: how useful is a sentiment analysis using sentistrength regarding opinions about a neighbourhood? what problems arise in the exploration of spatial constructions from social media? this article starts with an outline of sentiment analysis in current non-spatial and geographic research, and gives a short overview of various tools for sentiment analysis. we present our case study: a brief explorative analysis of tweets that tagged frankfurt’s ostend neighbourhood, in which we trace and interpret opinions in social media through sentiment analysis using sentistrength. the paper closes with a discussion of whether sentistrength is a helpful tool for scientists lacking programming skills, and an outlook on how sentiment analysis can successfully be used in geographic research into questions of spatialities. sentiment analysis in current research sentiment analysis is a specialized method for identifying, classifying and measuring emotions, opinions or attitudes in textual form (thelwall et al., ; xia et al., ). it was originally designed to automatically extract customer opinions about certain products or brands (thelwall et al., ). sentiment analysis can be performed using computer-aided methods such as lexicon-based approaches or supervised machine learning, or a combination of both (dhaoui et al., ). lexicon-based approaches rely on a dictionary of opinion reithmeier et al words and classify sentiment as positive or negative (dhaoui et al., ). machine learning approaches can be conducted in pre-known or unknown categories via fully automated clustering, lda or computer-assisted clustering (amplayo & song, ; colace et al., ; habernal et al., ). with the proliferation of social networks and the digitization of research methods, sentiment analysis is increasingly applied to content from social media such as twitter or facebook (amplayo & song, ; habernal et al., ; xia et al., ). habernal et al.’s sentiment analysis looked at facebook posts written in czech that contained opinions on particular brands. lim et al. ( ) used sentiment analysis of data from social media to identify latent infectious diseases. they assumed that outbreaks could be traced through social media and suggest a clustering method to capture unknown categories. Öztürk and ayvaz ( ) used a lexicon-based approach for investigating public opinions and sentiments towards syrian refugees expressed on twitter. they analysed tweets in turkish and english and discovered that turkish-language tweets carried more positive sentiment towards syrian refugees than the english-language ones. at present, there is little research which combines sentiment analysis and geospatial research. the majority of studies deal with the spatial distribution and location of tweets containing opinions or sentiments about certain topics (coletto et al., ; cooper, ; daniulaityte et al., ; lu et al., ; mirani & sasi, ; zhu & newsam, ). for example, zhu and newsam ( ) analysed geotagged photos with a deep learning-based classifier that predicts the sentiment based on the image. they concluded that different emotions showed a variety of spatial distributions. lu et al. ( ) analysed tweets to explore underlying trends in positive or negative geographically-related sentiment with respect to disasters, aiming to reveal interesting patterns in disaster scenarios. they propose a visual analytics framework in order to observe the distribution of tweets, and study sentiment predictions generated by different models. however, these studies rely on georeferenced posts and do not go beyond the spatial location and distribution of opinions. therefore, this kind of research does not address possible implications for space or the social processes behind the geotags. sentiment analysis is often conducted by computer scientists, and little research has been done that focuses on spatial or geographic research questions. we found only two studies which deal with possible spatial ramifications and applications of tweets and other postings that contain opinions and sentiment. you and tuncer’s ( ) study aimed to develop a crowd-calibrated geo- sentiment analysis mechanism that would study public sentiment expressed in social media with regard to place design, the outcome of which could aid local authorities, urban designers or city planners. zhang and feick ( ) demonstrate how spatially referenced tweets can shed light on citizens’ transportation and planning concerns. they suggest that researchers can use sentiment expressed in geosocial media to identify geographies of public perceptions concerning public facilities and services. tools for sentiment analysis there are a variety of tools for performing a sentiment analysis in scientific research. the tools range from commercial social monitoring programs to free open source applications. reithmeier et al commercial tools are expensive and often do not meet researchers’ requirements, leaving open source applications as a good alternative. the java-based stanford core natural language processing toolkit provides a set of tools for analysing human language. the sentiment analysis tool is based on deep learning and uses decision trees (manning et al., ). another tool is sentiwordnet, which is based on the lexical dataset wordnet (baccianella et al., ). the weka software is a java-based collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining and includes tools for data preprocessing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules and visualization (university of waikato, ). another option is gate. its software is designed for solving text-processing problems and offers a variety of plugins (university of sheffield, ). all of these tools and applications are open source and can be downloaded; using them requires basic computing skills and knowledge. they also include a variety of languages. in contrast, sentiment viz is an online application for sentiment analysis. it offers a variety of features such as topic clustering and tag clouds. however, it is based on the twitter api and therefore only displays tweets from the last seven days. sentistrength is available as a downloadable windows-based version, as a commercial java-based version, and as an online application. it is based on a lexicon, divides sentences into words, and is available in multiple languages (thelwall, ). we took a closer look at weka, gate and the sentistrength desktop version but failed to get weka and gate to work properly. weka produced an error message when we tried to implement our dataset. gate was more user-friendly thanks to its interface, but still required a plugin for sentiment analysis, which was not installable. the sentistrength desktop version was the most-user friendly tool. implementing our dataset as a text file did not cause any problems. however, it only counted the number of words a tweet contained rather than giving results on the sentiment. we also tried to edit the lexicon file, but failed. consequently, we used the online version, which listed more complete results. sentistrength is the tool with the lowest threshold and thus seems to be a promising application for scientists with limited computing skills. case study: tweets containing #ostend #frankfurt in our current research project, ‘viral #constructions of space in cultural educational processes’, our aim is to examine teenagers’ perceptions of the frankfurt neighbourhood ostend in the age of digitalization, and to evaluate the implications for cultural education. ostend is a neighbourhood in transition and has a young population. teenagers are now growing up in a world mediated by social media, which shape their views and perceptions. thus research on such new media should deliver new insights into spatial and geographic questions. over a six-month period, we will be collecting posts on twitter, facebook and instagram that include hashtags referring to ostend in order to survey the various constructions of space of this neighbourhood that emerge from social media in general. furthermore, a sentiment analysis will be conducted to identify opinions concerning the neighbourhood. reithmeier et al this article presents a short exploratory study to test the applicability of a sentiment analysis for socio-spatial research purposes, using opinions on ostend as a test case. based on hashtags like #ostend #frankfurt, we evaluated the feasibility of using sentistrength for sentiment analysis to detect spatial constructions on twitter. our underlying research questions are: how useful is a sentiment analysis using sentistrength? what problems arise in the exploration of spatial constructions from social media? sentiment analysis poses a challenge for scientists since it requires certain skills. while every step in a sentiment analysis – from data collection to preprocessing to analysis – is largely based on programming skills, few social scientists have these skills. for those without programming skills, data collection via the twitter api and the classification of the tweets using the sentistrength online application are good options. moreover, sentistrength does not require the preprocessing step, which results in a reduction of data cleansing time. we are aware that sentiment analysis usually requires a certain topic, and that the collection will include all the posts containing that topic. in our case, the ‘topic’ is the tagged neighbourhood ostend. consequently, the tweets collected will include a range of topics relating to the neighbourhood. data collection and analysis first, we investigated tweets from october to december in which ostend frankfurt was marked with a hashtag. the intention was to create a small dataset, since we also wanted to be able to analyse our data manually. we used the twitter api’s search function to collect the tweets. however, in its basic version this search function usually provides only a selection of posts. in addition, our own preselection of hashtags excludes tweets without these hashtags. furthermore, online data is transitory. in order to capture as many relevant tweets as possible, we synchronized a glossary of search terms such as #ostend #ffm with the database. we searched for the hashtags in our glossary individually, before copying the results into an excel spreadsheet. here, we added information on user, date and url, and additional content such as pictures, videos and links. the data was then cleansed. since an area known as ostend can be found in multiple cities, we rejected those tweets that referred to anywhere other than frankfurt’s ostend. numbering , these ostend tweets were far more numerous than the frankfurt-related ones. we manually collected a total of frankfurt-related tweets written by different users. six further posts had to be excluded, since they were written in dutch and indonesian. this left tweets in german and in english. we then classified them into those that referred directly to the actual neighbourhood and those that did not. among the latter, for example, were tweets marked #ecb (european central bank), which is located in ostend, but the tweets were aimed at eu policies. we kept the tweets that did not refer directly to the neighbourhood in our database in order to help compare the automatic and the manual analyses. for the automated analysis, the online version of sentistrength, which classifies sentences based on individual words, was used to classify the collected data. if words occur which the program recognizes as positive, they are given a positive value, whilst those that are recognized as negative are given a negative value. the scale ranges from plus for very reithmeier et al positive scores to minus for very negative ones. the value zero represents a neutral attribution. sentistrength offers different classification forms: dual, binary, trinary and scale. we decided to use the dual scale, since it classifies the text from - to + (strong negativity to strong positivity) (thelwall, ). in a third step, for comparison, we classified the posts manually into positive, neutral and negative. during this step, we took a closer look at the topics of our collected tweets but did not create categories. results spatial construction of frankfurt’s ostend in social media through sentiment analysis overall, the sentistrength online tool classified % of the tweets as ‘neutral’ ( ) ( tweets), % as ‘not negative’ ( ) ( tweets) and % as ‘not positive’ (- ) ( tweets) (see figure ). for our categories ‘referring to the neighbourhood’ and ‘not directly referring to the neighbourhood’, sentistrength classified tweets referring to the neighbourhood as ‘neutral’ ( %), as ‘not negative’ ( %), and as ‘not positive’ ( %). tweets not referring directly to the neighbourhood were classified as follows: ‘neutral’ ( . %), ‘not negative’ ( . %), and ‘not positive’ ( . %). by comparison, we classified % of all the tweets as ‘neutral’ ( tweets), % of the tweets as ‘positive’ ( tweets), and % as ‘negative’ ( tweets) (see figure ). we identified tweets referring to the neighbourhood as ‘neutral’ ( %), as ‘positive’ ( %), and as ‘negative’ ( %). finally, we categorized ( . %) tweets not directly referring to the neighbourhood as ‘neutral’, as ‘positive’ ( . %), and as ‘negative’ ( . %). in sum, of all tweets, we classified in the same way as sentistrength, which presents % agreement. figure : sentistrength’s classification of all tweets referring to ostend frankfurt in comparison to manual classification (source: own illustration, ) reithmeier et al with tweets classified as ‘neutral’, as ‘not negative’ and as ‘not positive’, sentistrength leaves us with a few meaningful constructions of space. a tweet containing a reference to a free art exhibition at an adult education centre suggests that ostend is a place of culture. another tweet refers to improvement of kerbs in the neighbourhood, suggesting that transport issues are being dealt with. tweets in which users expressed their joy about the skyline give the impression that ostend is perceived as a beautiful place. the classifications ‘not positive’ and ‘neutral’ gave us an insight into some of the weaknesses of the online applications. as thelwell ( ) has already pointed out, sentistrength has difficulties detecting sarcastic or ironic content, and political or controversial comments. consequently, the tool will have a lower accuracy when applied to datasets that include a large number of such comments. some of the tweets we collected fall into this category (see figure ). figure : ironic tweet with photo attached (source: https://twitter.com/_blickwinkel_/status/ ) the tweet translates as ‘how can anyone live in a big city, so ugly’, which given the emoticons used and the photos attached is clearly an ironic statement. sentistrength classified this tweet as ‘not positive’. another problem we faced was the evaluation of nouns. sentistrength did not rate any of the nouns, but nouns can also convey sentiment or point towards a certain opinion. for example, tweets containing the nouns ‘tötungsdelikt’ (homicide offence) or ‘Überfall’ (robbery) were rated ‘neutral’. we also had two cases in which sentistrength rated ‘#germany’ and ‘#germandax’ as negative (- ) for no comprehensible reason, because the content of the tweets was not negative in any way. dialect or colloquial language also posed a problem. a tweet containing the word ‘morsche’, meaning ‘good morning’ in hessian but ‘rotten’ or ‘brittle’ in german, was rated ‘not positive’. in another example, sentistrength could not identify ‘#dopeshit’ as a positive sentiment due to it being colloquial (see figure ). https://twitter.com/_blickwinkel_/status/ reithmeier et al figure : tweet containing colloquial language (source: https://twitter.com/djmenelik/status/ ) the fact that the overwhelming majority of tweets were neutral can be ascribed to the fact that they contained a picture or a link to a picture on instagram, a photo-sharing application. although positive sentiment is often linked to a certain place in the picture, sentistrength is not able to analyse pictures or videos. for example, a tweet containing a picture tagged with ‘#frankfurtliebe’ (#frankfurtlove) was rated as neutral, as was a tweet containing a picture and the words ‘nett da’ (nice here). our own manual analysis of the material results in more positive constructions of space, as we identified a significantly higher number of positive tweets than sentistrength. we also classified the tweet praising the improved kerbs, the art exhibition and the skyline as positive. there are tweets in which deliberately positive vocabulary is used to praise food and restaurants, suggesting that the neighbourhood is a good place to eat. even though positive descriptive adjectives were used here, sentistrength rated these tweets as neutral. a high number of tweets contain an image, which establishes the positive sentiment towards a certain place within ostend or the frankfurt skyline. by contrast, some tweets contain negative sentiment. for example, regarding the police asking for assistance in the investigation of crimes, a negative feeling arises through associations such as danger and violence. in another tweet, a user expresses his complaints about the redesign of ostend. again, there is a negative feeling through the context in which the word ‘gentrifizierung’ (gentrification) is used, the context implying that the author disagrees with the transformation of the neighbourhood. while a rather positive impression of ostend emerges after the first manual analysis of the data, the automated sentiment analysis presents a surprisingly neutral picture. discussion: potentials of sentistrength in geographic research the automatic and manual sentiment analysis of our data gave a first impression of the neighbourhood ostend. by classifying the tweets into neutral, positive and negative, sentistrength helped us identify a variety of constructions of space. nonetheless, we encountered some difficulties and weaknesses with the online application. the desktop version of sentistrength offers an adaptable lexicon for the english and german languages and will probably solve some of the issues involved, such as how to judge nouns, exclamation marks, colloquial language and certain adjectives. this would involve a comprehensive initial adaption of the program. by modifying the lexicon, the evaluation of https://twitter.com/djmenelik/status/ reithmeier et al nouns and the weighting of adjectives or punctuation could be improved. the possibility of adapting the lexicon used for the online version could also lead to an improvement. however, issues with sarcastic or ironic content and tweets consisting of images or videos will persist (canhoto & padmanabhan, ; thelwall, ). it should be noted that different tools make different classifications, as lu et al. ( ) have pointed out. pang and lee ( ) also note that sentiment and subjectivity are always context-sensitive and domain- dependent. whether something is labelled positive or negative is not consistent across domains. a further problem is the limit of characters in the online version, which requires splitting up tweets, since twitter allows up to characters. an extension of the character limit could lead to a more accurate classification. evaluation tools such as sentistrength, which can be used without programming skills, have already been developed for sentiment analysis. however, when using such tools, researchers are forced to accept the presets and algorithms that are unknown to them (canhoto & padmanabhan, ). our manual analysis of the classified data material also reveals spatial constructions. it is clear that ostend is currently undergoing a transformation, which is changing the district not only structurally but also according to its demographics. this is evident in both positive and negative contributions. on the one hand, technological progress is evidenced by the fact that some companies based there use online platforms for self- promotion. of course, these contributions are deliberately positive since they are intended for advertising purposes. on the other hand, this same technological progress makes it easier for individuals to disseminate their political opinions to a broad section of the population, thus furthering the stigmatization of other individuals. sentiment analysis itself could be used for different scenarios. with this method, we can identify opinions and feelings about tagged neighbourhoods, but posts and tweets on specific topics tagged with the hashtag of the district name can also be analysed, and positive as well as negative aspects of a neighbourhood can be identified. such an analysis can serve as an overview on how the neighbourhood is perceived and produced in social media. canhoto and padmanabhan ( ) suggest that sentiment analysis needs also to consider the social context within which a conversation takes place. as zhang and feick ( ) show, the results of such an analysis have the potential to boost citizens’ contributions to society. this leads to the concept of spatial citizenship, in which citizens are able to access, read, interpret and critically reflect on spatial information, and express location-specific opinions using geo- media (gryl & jekel, ). data collection without programming skills is only possible with the platform-specific search tools (apis) of the various social networks, or commercial social monitoring programs such as talkwalker and twitcident. a good alternative is r, which requires only minimal training and knowledge, and enables social researchers to collect tweets automatically. all of these programs can help to collect the desired datasets, but they reach their limits when it comes to distinguishing between different places with the same name. this necessitates an initial visual identification and manual selection of possible hashtags with reference to certain places. searching for spatial hashtags and not for a certain topic, one will collect tweets containing different topics. in the next step, these tagged tweets can be categorized by topic. it is also worth pointing out that a larger dataset would probably require an automatic content analysis (reithmeier et al., ). reithmeier et al outlook so far, sentiment analysis has been used either within computer science research or for the purpose of showing the spatial distribution of postings. in these contexts, it has proved to be a useful instrument for obtaining new knowledge about spatial distribution patterns. however, as soon as qualitative research questions are posed, there are certain aspects that must be taken into account, as this exploratory study has shown. research questions that allow qualitative results and statements thus always refer to an evaluation of known topics and spatial limitations. although the hashtag ‘ostend’ represents a spatial limitation, no thematic categorization was conducted, making it difficult to relate spatial constructions to specific locations. it would therefore be necessary to ask about specific events or locations. for ostend, one could, for example, specifically ask about a favourite place among young people, which would make prior identification of such places indispensable. furthermore, sentiment analysis could focus on tweets on topics like gentrification and give a long-term overview of ongoing changes in a neighbourhood. this could also highlight spatio-temporal changes in perception. even in a larger study area, different spatial constructions can be identified using this method, which offers multiple potentials for geographers to explore new approaches. sentistrength online provides access to computer-based research methods for social scientists lacking basic programming skills, but it is not applicable to every research purpose. this is due to the preset algorithms, which most social scientists would be unable to change, because at least a basic knowledge of programming is necessary. in order to achieve ideal results, the preset dictionary would also have to be vastly extended and adapted for particular research topics. this leaves many researchers with a limited number of functions, and the full potential of the tool remains unused. further research in this area would have to adapt to the preset algorithms and dictionary extensions or develop its own classification methods. training in the utilization of different tools for sentiment analysis is absolutely necessary for conducting an extensive comparison between the different tools and methods. possible future research should also go beyond the posts and analyse the participating users, looking at their behaviour and intentions. this work was supported by the german federal ministry of education and research under grant jkd . reithmeier et al 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( ). spatio-temporal sentiment hotspot detection using geotagged photos. th acm sigspatial international conference on advances in geographic information systems (acm sigspatial gis ). 	 introduction 	 sentiment analysis in current research 	 case study: tweets containing #ostend #frankfurt 	 results 	 discussion: potentials of sentistrength in geographic research 	 outlook 	references the misogynous politics of shame humanities essay the misogynous politics of shame debra bergoffen , emerita professor of department of philosophy, george mason university, robinson hall b, va - , usa; dbergoff@gmu.edu department of philosophy and religion, american university, washington, dc , usa; bergoffe@american.edu received: january ; accepted: august ; published: august ���������� ������� abstract: joanna bourke’s account of the ways that changing ideas of rape reflect the gendered norms of the times, and eric reitan’s proposal that rape ought to remain a contested concept amenable to evolving principles of ethical sexual relationships, speak to the ways that social, cultural, and political contexts influence our understanding of sexual violence. though the criteria that are used to define rape change, one thing remains constant: the raped person is shamed. as she is shamed, she is degraded. this paper argues that until we understand the role that shame plays in enabling sexual violence by humiliating, silencing, and stigmatizing its victims, changes in our depictions of rape will neither disable the personal devastation of being raped nor dismantle the social practices and political institutions that rely on rape to maintain misogynous inequalities. following the introduction (section ) it is divided into three parts. section , the shame of being human, discusses the psychological and phenomenological accounts of shame. it alerts us to the ways that shame defines us insofar as it reveals the truth of human intersubjectivity and mutual interdependency. section , debilitating shame, describes the ways that shame has been exploited to enable and enforce sexed and gendered inequalities. section , shame: demanding justice, examines the ways that shame, in its role as the protector of the self, undermines the effects of debilitating shame and fosters a politics of sexual integrity by affirming the dignity of the interdependencies that tie us to each other. keywords: human; gendered; debilitating; isolating; silencing; social force; liberating . introduction social, cultural, and political contexts frame our understanding of what counts as sexual violence. joanna bourke’s discussion of the relationship between definitions of rape and the gendered norms of the times (bourke ), and eric reitan’s proposal that rape remain a contested concept amenable to evolving principles of ethical sexual relationships (reitan ), indicate that what is identified as the sexual violence of rape varies from time to time and place to place. despite these differences, one thing remains constant. the raped person is shamed. as shamed, she is degraded. the assault, more often than not, is tagged as her fault rather than his crime. this essay argues that as long as rape–shame is allowed to do its humiliating, stigmatizing, and silencing work, changes in the definition of rape will neither disable the personal devastation of being sexually assaulted, nor dismantle the misogynous social and political practices that foster sexual violence. as a species of shame, rape–shame relies on the role that shame plays in our individual and collective lives to do its misogynous work. undoing this work requires getting to the heart of the power of shame. toward this end, this essay is divided into the following three parts. section , the shame of being human, identifies the ways that shame indexes the complexities of human intersubjectivity. bringing a feminist lens to the psychological and phenomenological accounts of shame, it exposes the ways that the psychology and ontology of shame is exploited in sexed and humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of gendered norms of masculinity and femininity. section , debilitating shame, describes the ways that sexed and gendered shame has been manipulated to enable and enforce patriarchal values and violence. section , demanding justice, argues that shame is a pharmakon. it finds that shame, as an affect that is deployed to protect the self, can undermine the effects of sexist debilitating shame and foster a feminist ethics and politics of sexual integrity. . the shame of being human psychologists who study infant and toddler behavior and phenomenologists who describe us as uniquely intertwined with and vulnerable to each other teach us that though what is considered shameful differs from one historical period and culture to another, the experience of, and capacity for shame, is built into the human condition. emerging early in life (exactly when is a matter of dispute), it remains a powerful force throughout our lives. it is often referred to as a moral emotion because of the part it plays in enforcing social, cultural, and political values, and because of its role in protecting a person’s moral integrity. when collective values reinforce a person’s self worth, social norms can count on the compliance of individuals. when they do not, the shame that secures the status quo can change sides. it can, in its role as protector of the self, become a force that defends the self against degradation. recent events speak to the janus face power of shame. women, previously silenced by norms that shamed them for being sexually assaulted, are now shaming the men who, emboldened by perverted codes of masculinity, denigrate women’s sexual integrity. . . the psychologists psychologists studying shame dispute the when and why of its emergence. gerhart piers and jennifer biddle find that signs of shame appear early in life. they argue that it predates and is essential to the formation of the infant’s sense of self (biddle ; piers and singer ). on their account, the infant’s shame is a symptom of its confrontation with its ambivalent situation: a situation created by the absolute dependency of its premature birth and its desire to fend for itself. desiring to be loved by those entrusted with its life, the infant identifies with their standards of lovability. adhering to these standards, however, conflicts with its wish to distinguish itself from them (biddle , p. ). their observations indicate that shame, as an affect that predates the self, is formative of the self. as such, it cannot be disentangled from the self once it emerges. june tangney and michael lewis disagree with this account of infant shame. according to their observations, shame does not appear until the child is between and months, after a sense of self has been established in the child’s psyche (tangney and dearing , p. ; lewis , p. ). lewis’ observation that the self’s shame is not caused by a specific situation but by the person’s interpretation of the situation (lewis , p. ) is crucial for understanding the role that shame plays in feminist interventions in sexist norms. his studies indicate that though the child will unreflectively interpret the situation in accordance with the shame standards of its parents and culture, the reflective adult may not. they may interpret certain shame standards as unjust. on this reading, although shame as originally experienced is tied to established norms, it can become a force for critiquing these norms once/if the situation is interpreted differently. whether they find that shame predates the emergence of a self or announces the existence of an already present self, psychologists agree that shame is indicative of the tension between our dependence on others and on our wish to be independent. though shame is a feeling of self-betrayal, the self that is betrayed is ambiguous. as a social self beholden to its culture’s scripts, it shames itself for violating them. as a self asserting its independence, it shames itself for betraying its principles by succumbing to the demand to conform. in the first case, shame is a powerful tool for enforcing and re-enforcing social norms. it protects the intersubjective self by alerting it to the cost of alienating itself from its community: the loss of love, and the possibility of social death. in the second case, shame is a resource for critiquing and changing established norms that undermine the ability of the self to affirm itself. feminism and the “#metoo” phenomenon may be seen as a model of self affirming shame that, humanities , , of in the name of women’s integrity as persons, critiques and rejects the social and political values that demean them. here too, as we shall see, it is not a matter of disavowing the social dimensions of the self, but rather of creating a social world where shame does not enforce debilitating norms. . . the phenomenologists viewed from a phenomenological perspective, the developmental contingencies of shame, our premature birth and prolonged dependency, and the behaviors that manifest it, such as hiding for example, point to the non-contingent human condition of being a lived-body—the embodiment of a consciousness that experiences itself as an active agent at the center of the world and as a visible body-object within the world vulnerable to the power of others. like the psychologists, phenomenologists describe us as ambiguous to capture this state of affairs. stressing the non-contingent nature of shame, merleau-ponty argued that it registers the metaphysical fact that my body is at once an object for others and a subject for me, and that, “[i]nsofar as i have a body i can be reduced to an object beneath the gaze of the other and no longer count for him as a person” (merleau-ponty , p. ). from this perspective, shame is a self-protective affect. it expresses a person’s protest at having her ambiguity compromised in the visible part of herself, of being deprived of her status as a subject (merleau-ponty , p. ). by registering the inescapable reality of my visibility and vulnerability, shame speaks to the truth of my metaphysical ambiguity, for in becoming aware of my visibility, i become conscious that i am not the adequate cause of all that i am. “[m]y power for ontogenesis” is lost (merleau-ponty , p. ). in this account of shame, i am ashamed of a basic feature of human existence: my dependency on others and its corollary of vulnerability. clinging to the fantasy of ontogenesis and claiming to possess a power i never had, is one way of fleeing the truth of the interdependency that is intrinsic to my humanity. in describing the desire to be the adequate cause of all that i am as a universal human desire, merleau-ponty fails to notice what simone de beauvoir found impossible to ignore: this human desire to be seen as an independent subject is bifurcated in sexed and gendered norms of masculinity and femininity. positioned as the other of the subject man and defined as the sex, (beauvoir , pp. – ) women, depending on the ways their race, class, and nationality impact their status as the other, have either limited or no access to fantasies of ontogenesis. being a man, however, does not guarantee that one will have access to this fantasy. it is only available to those men whose race, religion, and nationality position them as subjects. from a feminist–phenomenological perspective, it is more than a matter of which sex gets to live the fantasy of ontogenesis. it is a matter of which sex is recognized as fully human. from this perspective, the politics of patriarchy is the politics of ontogenesis—a politics that all but denies the fact that as visible men cannot escape the shame entailed in their dependency, and that heightening women’s visibility ensnares them in the shame of dependency. by idealizing the fantasy of ontogenesis in ideals of masculine independence that are said to define those who are truly human, and gendering femininity in terms of the dependency that fails to realize this ideal, women and men are taught to see women as the inferior sex—the sex whose humanity is compromised in the hyper-visibility that over determines their intersubjective vulnerability. manipulating the fact that a woman’s body, like a man’s, is at once an object for others and a subject for herself, the norms of patriarchy imprison her in a body that cannot escape the vulnerability of its visibility, and give him a body that is almost invisible insofar as it can evade the threat of being seen and objectified by others. this threat is the theme of sartre’s ungendered account of “the look”. sartre sets the scene in a public park. a person is strolling alone in a park. so long as he is alone, he experiences himself as a free center of the world. passing someone sitting on a bench, everything changes. now, experiencing himself as an object in another’s world, he feels his freedom slipping away. this loss is not permanent. returning the look, the stroller turns the tables. he situates the person on the bench in his world, reasserts his freedom, and reestablishes the world as his (sartre , p. ). humanities , , of sartre uses masculine pronouns to refer to both the stroller and the person on the bench. if we change the pronouns, however, and identify the person strolling alone in the park as a woman and the person on the bench as a man, everything changes. it becomes clear that only equals can return each other’s gaze and contest each other’s claim to freedom without fearing for their lives or knowing that they will be degraded and shamed. in a world of sexual inequality, the dialectic of the look collapses. a woman walking alone in a park who dares to return a man’s look risks being harassed, assaulted, or raped. by returning the look, she can be interpreted as legitimating his entitlement to her body—as “asking for it”. aware of these risks, she looks down or looks away: behaviors that are indicative of shame. as the other, her freedom to refuse to be defined by others is compromised if not foreclosed. of course, the man on the bench and the woman walking in the park are not simply a man and a woman. ask emmet till about the risks of a black man returning a white woman’s look. a full description of the look, one that would take me too far afield, must take account of the realities of intersectionality and the ways that the privileges of race, for example, interrupt the neat binary power relationships of sex and gender. although sartre does not see how his account of the look misses the power structures of the gaze, he does know that it is an inadequate account of intersubjectivity insofar as it ignores the dynamics of shame. thus, he follows his discussion of the look with an account of the man who gets caught spying through a keyhole. the keyhole story makes the point that although i may be able to assert myself as a subject by returning the look, i cannot immunize myself from the judgment of others. sartre’s story of the man at the keyhole goes like this: a man suspecting that his lover is cheating on him spies through a keyhole to confirm his suspicions. so long as the spying lover believes that he is alone, jealously is the only emotion in play. once he discovers that he is being observed, the voyeur’s attention shifts from what is happening on the other side of the door to the way he appears to those footsteps down the hall. seeing himself as he is seen by the other—as an unsavory peeping tom—he is ashamed of himself. here, as in “the look”, the presence of the other moves the one being seen from the subject-center of his world into the world of the other as an object, but here, rather than challenging the other’s decentering power, the subject decenters himself. he actively judges himself as he is judged by the other and feels ashamed (sartre , p. ). this example of shame operates on two levels: one is phenomenological, the other is cultural and moral. at the phenomenological level, shame reveals that i cannot extricate myself from the ways that i am seen and judged by others. from this perspective, shame is the non-conditional experience that shatters the credibility of ontogenesis. all of the specific social and cultural definitions of shamefulness depend on the ontological fact that i can be shamed. what is unsaid in the keyhole description of ontological shame is that it is always experienced within specific value systems. for shame to come on the scene, both the spy and the person down the hall must agree that spying is reprehensible. both must accept the idea that the person belonging to those footsteps has the power and moral authority to pass judgment on the spy. phil hutchinson’s account of diognes of sinope, a citizen of athens in the fourth century bce, brings the contingencies of these power structures into focus. it speaks to the way the experience of shame depends on the status of the person who is shamed and the standing of the judge who passes the verdict. according to the story, diognes responded to criticisms of his masturbating in public by saying that he wished it was as easy to satisfy his hunger by rubbing his belly. he refuses to be shamed. he does not deny that he is a being-for-others, but rather insists that he can only be shamed by those he respects. he reminds those who assail his conduct that they too are beings for-others—him (williams , p. ). #metoo women may be read as taking their cue from diognes. unlike sartre, who does not interrogate the ways the scene at the keyhole relies on the assumption that the person down the hall and the person at the keyhole agree on the legitimacy of the values that inform the shaming judgment, these women, may be seen as modern day versions of diognes. they refuse to be complicit in their shaming. instead of submitting to the norms that shame them, #metoo women challenge humanities , , of their legitimacy. they reject the authority of those who enforce them. turning their backs on shame, #metoo women de-fang its misogynous power. discredit the norms. turn the tables on shame. a feminist phenomenology provides the ground for understanding the power dynamics of shaming. it shows how turning the tables is possible. it reveals that our relationship to others is always situated within social structures that code the ways that our raced, sexed, and gendered bodies place us either in the position of having the power to shame or being seen as shameful. the self that is shamed, however, is also a self that can defend itself against being degraded by shame. the woman who is shamed for not obeying her husband can, by calling on the self-affirming resources of shame, reject the legitimacy of the norm and the right of her husband to enforce it. invoking her authority in the name of the norm of her dignity she can turn the shame of not pleasing her husband into the accusation that shames him for being an abuser. in order for this to work, however, the husband, like the man at the keyhole, must accept the validity of her charge and her authority to enforce it. . debilitating shame none of this will be easy, especially when a woman has been subjected to debilitating shame—a self-destructive form of shame that, unlike the episodic shame depicted by sartre, forms the horizon of a person’s life. as the target of debilitating shame, she is overwhelmed by the other ’s judgmental look. relying on the ways that shame is used to enforce a culture’s values and the ways that these values can become part of a person’s sense of self, the distorted values that demean women are internalized. as constantly demeaned, a woman comes to see herself as unworthy and inferior. the self-affirming resources of shame that, in the name of the self’s integrity, might be called on to challenge these distorted values are undermined and silenced (steinbock , pp. , ; taylor , pp. , ; calhoun , p. ). by enforcing and legitimating misogynous values, the invisible violence of debilitating shame sets women up to believe that they “deserve what they get” when the silent violence of their lives becomes the overt violence of cat calls, a hostile work place, sexual harassment, or rape (bartky , p. ). the work of debilitating shame begins early in a woman’s life. its invisible violence is integral to the ways that, in simone de beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born but becomes woman” (beauvoir , p. ). exploiting the psychological fact that shame is intertwined with our identity and the phenomenological fact that it is inherent in the human condition, young girls and women are conditioned to see themselves as shameful (dolezal , pp. – ). while boys are encouraged to see their bodies as sources of pride and power, girls are taught to view such vital bodily functions as menstruation (functions that attest to a woman’s vitality) as unclean signs of their shameful inferiority. their developing breasts expose them to the salacious gaze of men. instead of being taught to take pride in becoming a woman, instead of being taught “to accept herself without excuses and without shame”, the adolescent girl learns that as the shamed subject of the look, “her sex condemn[s] her to a mutilated and frozen existence” (beauvoir , p. ). kathy lally, the washington post moscow bureau chief from – , is a woman who accepted herself without excuses and without blame. she was someone who did not allow herself to be positioned as the other. her description of the effects of being constantly belittled by the editors of exile, an english language tabloid published in moscow, however, testifies to the continued relevance of beauvoir ’s assessment of the way that shame condemns women to a mutilated and frozen existence. lally’s privileged professional position did not protect her from men’s taunts. it did not immunize her from its debilitating effects. she writes “ . . . you don’t have to grope a woman or force a kiss on her to humiliate her, to make her doubt herself, to silence and diminish her. the damaging effects of persistent denigration are insidious and difficult to root out” (washington post, december , b ). existing in the diverse materiality of their lived bodies, women’s vulnerability to the distorted values that legitimate their degradation takes different forms. a white woman’s integrity, threatened by the fact of being a woman, will be bolstered by her race privilege. the black woman’s race will be used against her. a muslim woman’s religion will compound her degradation. within the complexities humanities , , of of their stigmatization, women will share this: as women, they will be demeaned as cunts who deserve to be treated like whores if they forget their proper place, however that place is defined. the white woman’s race will not protect her from men’s denigration and aggression. if she is judged to be attractive, she will be dismissed as a dumb blond. if she is deemed unattractive, she will become the object of body shaming. as a raced body, the black woman will, like patricia williams ( ), be seen as too dangerous to be allowed into an upscale new york city boutique. gendered as a hyper-sexed body that is “asking for it”, however, the black woman’s sex will mitigate the idea that she is dangerous and invite men’s aggression. the muslim woman will be shunned for submitting to the authority of muslim men by not showing her face, hair, or body in public. one would think this deference to men would be applauded. the problem is that in deferring to the “wrong” men and refusing to become a spectacle for all men’s pleasure, she is denying the “right” men access to her. insofar as it leads women to take the practical steps of avoiding being shamed and of protecting themselves against men’s violence, debilitating shame will put them in the position of confirming the distorted values of patriarchy. take back the night events that assert women’s right to walk on campus at any time do not make the campus safe for a woman walking alone the following evening. the invisible curfew imposed on women remains in place. no campus secures women’s nightly access to the library or other campus venues by establishing a curfew for men. men will continue to have unlimited access to all places on campus. if he is assaulted while walking alone at night, he will not be shamed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. he will not be accused of deserving what he “got”. the rules that sustain women’s limited access to public places will not be applied to him. in case debilitating shame does not succeed in getting women to police themselves and abide by the values it legitimates, in case women speak out and resist the shame that silences them, their words will be discounted. they will be shamed for being irrational, for lacking adequate self-control, and/or for being unprincipled liars. depicted as untrustworthy for not trusting men to define them and playing by the rules of the sexist game, their status as moral agents will be discounted, demeaned, or vilified. their “immorality” will be used to justify treating them disrespectfully and abusively (calhoun , p. ). understanding the difficulty of overcoming the effects of debilitating shame and the public barriers women face in contesting sexist violence, we understand why women find it difficult to defend themselves against the invisible violence that attacks their self-esteem. there is nothing invisible about the “backlash” violence they face if they refuse to be silent. stepping out of a “better safe than sorry” life means putting oneself in real danger. the misogynous impact of debilitating shame is compounded by gender norms that blunt women’s ability to deal with demeaning shame. men are taught that they have a right to be aggressive and violent. invoking this lesson they tend to react to being shamed with anger/and or violence, emotions of potency and authority that assert their self worth. women are schooled differently. taught to be submissive and obedient, tend to become depressed when they are shamed. they exhibit isolating behaviors of hiding and withdrawal. rather than assaulting the codes of patriarchy that demean them, women tend to demean themselves for not living up to them. salman rushdie’s novel shame illustrates this gendered response to shame (rushdie ). though the sisters are not depressed, they isolate themselves in their castle rather than face or contest the shameful judgments of the world. the male protagonists, however, engage the world and each other. they respond to being shamed and humiliated with violence. the isolating effects of shame are particularly valuable to the patriarchal cause. this is why it is codified in the non-disclosure clauses embedded in the settlement agreements offered to women who break the rules and confront their abusers. silence, the legal price that individual women are forced to pay for justice, serves two purposes. first, it protects the perpetrator from being exposed, leaving him at liberty to abuse other women. second, it ensures that other women will not discover that their abuse is not an isolated event. humanities , , of whether self-imposed through shame or legally imposed as the condition of a settlement, isolation remains a barrier to collective awareness and action. undoing this isolation is essential for creating the sense of solidarity among those who are shamed and for bringing the institutional work of shame into focus (bartky , pp. – ; dolezal , pp. – ). thus the importance of #metoo, where women are finding each other and collectively protesting the distorted values that demean them and shelter their assailants. turning their shame into a weapon against those it previously shielded, women are protesting their degradation. they are bringing their shame out of hiding, exposing its violence and using shame’s self-protective powers to critique and reject the distorted values that demean them. attending to the self-protective dimension of shame reveals the relationship between the psychology of shame and the phenomenological account of the lived body’s ambiguous life. however dependent we were on others as infants and children, as adults, we are never passively in their grip. this is the important point of sartre’s the look. though the phenomenology of shame cannot predict when the self-affirming power of shame will lead those exploited by debilitating shame to rebel, its analysis of the self–other dynamic indicates that a politics of revolt remains a perennial threat to the politics of debilitating shame. the phenomenology and psychology of shame tie shame to the self. without a self that, in the name of its worth can condemn itself, shame cannot do its work (taylor , p. ). this means that despite the attempt to shame women into passively accepting their status as helpless victims, and despite the attempt to discredit their moral capacity and epistemic authority, shame, in requiring the presence of a self that can morally judge itself, can never destroy women’s sense of self worth (taylor , p. ). this sense of self provides a resource for protection against the other’s claim that she is shameful (taylor , p. ). the women speaking out on #metoo speak of feeling ashamed of what happened to them. they do not, however, accept the judgment that their shame is deserved. invoking the self-affirming power of shame, they are rejecting the values that demean them. turning the shame that degrades them against the persons and values that legitimate this degradation, they are contesting the integrity of a culture that denigrates women (hacker , p. ). the current #metoo phenomenon and the histories of slave and colonial rebellions also make it clear that individual self-affirmation is not the stuff of radical transformations. to undo the silent violence of debilitating shame, its isolating effects must be destroyed. thus, the importance of #metoo. breaking their self-imposed or legally mandated silence, women, discovering that they are not alone, are becoming a collective political force. refusing to submit to the deformed identities thrown at them, they are dismantling the social and political structures that enable the invisible violence of debilitating shame to do its self-destructive work. in the end, however, their success will depend on whether their personal escape from debilitating shame has staying power—on whether it takes hold culturally, socially and politically. . shame: demanding justice everything about shame speaks to/of our vulnerability—the vulnerability of being seen and judged by others, the vulnerability of being neither self-sufficient nor autonomous. shame announces the fact that the dependency inscribed in our premature birth is never outgrown. my i is part of a we. the singularity of my presence in the world is tied to and supported by a community of others upon whom i depend. endorsing shared values, supporting social norms, and participating in political institutions are some of the ways that we materialize this i-we. shame is the price that we pay for threatening the security of the we anchors of our social lives. shame, is not, however, the robotic servant of these social world structures. as an affect tied to a person’s sense of self, shame is the voice of the self—an ambiguous self embedded in its ownness and otherness. it alerts the self to its loss of dignity when it fails to live up to the ideals of its we. it defends the i against degradation when these ideals unjustifiably attack it. surveying the diverse ways that shame is part of the social fabric of people’s lives reveals that shame does not discriminate among the norms it enforces. whether the social world that shame humanities , , of legitimates is egalitarian or sexist, democratic or authoritarian, it operates in the same way. the integrity of the self protected by shame may belong to an adolf eichmann or a martin luther king jr. in its concrete operations, shame appears to be bereft of evaluative criteria. as an emotion that operates at the intersections of self and other, however, shame is an affect that registers the emotional element of the phenomenology of being-for-others and being-for-oneself that is inscribed in the vulnerability inherent in being human. from this perspective, shame may be subjected to ontological criteria for judging the diverse norms that it is called upon to serve (hutchinson ). do these norms protect the porous boundaries between the self and its others that foster the vitality of their intertwining? do they create spaces for an ongoing dialogue between the dignity of the “i” and the integrity of the “we”? can they be invoked against deformed norms of the we that threaten the dignity of the i? will they resist an authoritarian i who attempts to destroy the community of the we? seeing shame through the ontological criteria of the i and the we, it becomes clear that seeing others merely as objects in my world is not an innocent misrepresentation of their subjectivity. it is an attempt to erase the inerasable ambiguity of their humanity and to exempt, if not expel, them from the i-we dialogue. the ethical demands inscribed in the ontology of shame call out the injustice of a world that reduces some human beings to objects for the pleasure of others. in protecting the self who is treated merely as an object, shame, as we have seen, carries the seeds of rebellion. it also provides criteria for judging the aftermath of the rebellion should it succeed. if those who rebel in the name of their self-worth create a world where another group of people are shamed as less than human, they will betray the principles of their rebellion. they will be sowing the seeds of their own downfall. from this perspective, the current #metoo movement will be judged on two counts. one, whether it accurately identifies the invisible violence and institutional sources of the debilitating shame that stalks women and undermines their sexual integrity. two, whether it fosters the conditions that enable the i-we dialogue of democratic justice to emerge and thrive. as a movement that upends current gendered shame dynamics, will #metoo put an end to debilitating shame, or merely re-direct it? will the privilege of speaking out be reserved for women of privilege, or will women marginalized by their race, class, and religion also find it safe to come forward? will the impact of being identified as an abuser become a catalyst for reconstituting gendered norms of masculinity, or will it become the impetus for finding ways to not get caught? if #metoo succeeds in honoring the vulnerability of our humanity, it will reset our understanding of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. without losing sight of the fact that most of its victims are and have been women, it will teach us that this violence, by transforming the pleasures of sexual intimacy into a source of fear, pain, and shame, threatens the fabric of our communal life, for this life depends on trust and care—both of which are destroyed by sexual violence. as a movement that says no to degrading shame, the viability of #metoo will depend on the ways that it is heard, as saying yes to the gift we give to ourselves and each other of affirming the dignity of our sexual integrity. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references bartky, sandra. . femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. beauvoir, simone. . the second sex. translated by contance borde, and sheila malovany-chevallier. new york: vintage books. biddle, 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( ) have documented the prevalence of career exits due to negative experi- ences with scientific field programmes, particularly those that do not enforce codes of conduct. other scholars have emphasized that female scientists can fail to achieve the “visibility” of male peers, even when their work is equally impactful (e.g., oreskes ). the combined effects of these stressors may account for a greater portion of the so-called “leaky pipeline” effect (goulden et al. ), describing the progressive loss of female talent from the science labour pool, than has been previously understood (srt ). last month, the us national academies of science, engineering, and medicine released the results of a sweeping, multi-year study on harassment in the sciences (nasem ). their study found that between % and % of female students in us science, engineering and medicine reported having experienced harassing behaviour perpetrated by staff or faculty; more than % of faculty also said they had experienced harassment. lgbtq women and women of colour were more likely than their straight, white counterparts to have been harassed, and women of colour were more likely to report feeling unsafe because of their gender. the study also recog- nized a problematic dearth of data. contact sandra starkweather sandy.starkweather@noaa.gov cooperative institute for research in environmental sciences, university of colorado, ucb , boulder, co , usa polar research , vol. , https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf this dearth of data is true in the polar regions too, but the recent work of nash et al. ( ) provides an important first look. their survey of researchers in the australian antarctic program revealed that % of female participants experienced harassment, and, like the safe study, found that these incidents go largely unreported. meanwhile, media reports con- cerning female geologists working under the us antarctic program (scoles ) put a harrowing face on how such harassment can proceed unchecked in remote and isolated locations. data from non- western countries and data on arctic research are even scarcer. given these facts, a fresh round of examinations of polar work cultures is called for. the international polar year – opened many doors to researchers from around the world (krupnik et al. ), including women, so it was timely at the polar open science conference for a discussion focused on women’s experiences in polar research. the panel discussion—“from entering the field to taking the helm: perspectives of women in polar research”—took place on june and featured five women in disciplines ranging from marine biotechnology to organizational leadership to history of science. while the “taking the helm” event centred on the perspectives of women, it was impor- tant to the organizers to avoid essentializing “women” and further to recognize that gender is non- binary. further, it was important to recognize that many intersecting identities can result in overlapping challenges that require specific attention. panellists represented plural intersecting factors spanning career levels, research discipline, professional roles and national and ethnic identities. from the event the event drew more than participants represent- ing countries, who engaged in a vibrant, interactive dialogue with the panellists following interview ques- tions by independent journalist hannah hoag. hoag’s questions explored aspects of the panellists’ experiences including: landmark achievements; challenges related to retention, mentoring and the #metoo movement in science; and redefining leadership. hoag introduced the discussion by acknowledging her surprise at the relatively recent history of women’s inroads to polar work and the leading achievements of some of the panellists. hongkum lee, a former director of the korean polar research institute, was among the first women to assume the leadership of any polar institute. during her tenure as director ( – ), she oversaw the completion of korea’s first research icebreaker, aaron, and the jang- bogo antarctic research station in terra nova bay. lee noted that her position empowered her to budget for appropriately sized field equipment for female participants—a key safety advancement. susan barr, iasc’s first female leader, characterized her field experiences as overwhelmingly positive, even as she was blazing trails. while taking on a role that required extensive fieldwork in svalbard did expose her to improperly sized equipment and scepticism related to her abilities to operate firearms or outboard motors, she met these hurdles with a sense of humour. morgan seag, a doctoral candidate in geo- graphy studying women’s advancements into antarctic research, shared that her work was inspired by senior female researchers like these “who changed my conception of what my future could look like. i had assumed that my sixties and seventies would involve hammocks and grandbabies—these powerful women [in antarctica] showed me how narrow that idea was. i could [like them] be camping on the ice sheet, making discoveries.” seag went on to observe that the antarctic culture for female researchers is still mixed in spite of these pioneers’ contributions. in response to an audience question about sexualization of women in the field, she noted the enduring pre- valence of comparing and “rating” female field team members on their attractiveness across field sites on the continent. challenges are by no means limited to field sites. arctic researcher colleen strawhacker, an archaeolo- gist who works with indigenous communities in both alaska and the american south-west, recounted her own experiences with bullying during proposal pre- paration at the hands of senior male investigators, which caused her to note: “you can either fight for a seat at the table or build your own table. both are exhausting.” while she stood her ground against the bullying behaviour, she fears the type of retaliation that could await her through anonymous community processes like proposal or publication review. these anxieties were echoed by an audience member who had taken similar positions. these and other challenges prompted hoag to turn to the panellists for their ideas about how to move forward. chandy nath, the new executive director of scar, shared her view that “we need to reimagine what leadership looks like”. she and others acknowledged that there can be an unconscious image in our heads when we think about polar research, i.e., the frosty beard, and that it takes delib- erate efforts to broaden that view. or as others have noted: “if you aren’t being consciously inclusive, you are likely being unconsciously exclusive.” all panel- lists agreed that early career researchers should not let perceptions about barriers stand in their way. audience questions honed in on and amplified those sentiments of the panellists focused on barriers and challenges. multiple audience comments also focused on the low numbers of men present in the audience, who accounted for about % of the s. starkweather et al. participants. even if stemming from positive inten- tions, such as to allow women to have their own space, a lack of male participation in these conversa- tions was viewed as particularly problematic related to the road towards creating more inclusive polar research cultures. the event generated a strong response across social media platforms, where hundreds—both inside and outside the room—participated in the virtual conversa- tion following the hashtag #polarwomen , even- tually reaching a social media audience of more than panellists’ perspectives were augmented through the development of an instagram effort elicit- ing input through a series of questions. the instagram account has grown a steady following from zero to over followers in weeks. the resulting women in polar science compilation, which currently numbers profiles, continues to enrich our understanding of the plurality of experiences and achievements of women in polar research, and highlights the potentials and aspirations of a generation of women poised to impact the world. reflected in these profiles are the joys of collegiality and accomplishment in positive work envir- onments; the importance of believing in yourself, fol- lowing your instincts, supporting colleagues and not letting biases stand in your way; and a clear love of polar environments and people. moving forward the innovations required to address the next genera- tion of polar research questions surpass the bounds of the physical, chemical or biological sciences alone. future challenges will require systems thinking, inclusive collaboration and the dismantling of socially enmeshed barriers to progress. what better way to prepare a generation of scientists to meet the chal- lenges posed by rapid ecological change, much- needed interdisciplinary work and the paradigmatic shift towards knowledge co-production than through raising cultural awareness and equity within our own ranks? the overwhelmingly strong presence of early career researchers at the event suggests that there will be a continued demand to sustain inclusivity dialogues; some senior researchers were dismayed that “we still need to have these conversations”. these types of generational differences may reflect shifting norms, or they may reflect a subtler selection bias whereby certain types of adaptive strategies, nat- ural to some and quite foreign to others, improve survivorship in research settings (e.g., mcnutt ; willenbring ). as cheryl rosa of the us arctic research commission notes in her instagram profile, “[i]t would be nice not to need any strategy” to succeed as a woman in polar research. will the future impact of women in polar research be limited by their ability to strategize around gender barriers? or is our community willing to evolve culturally, to dismantle those barriers and broaden our image of who con- tributes to scientific excellence and how? the answer lies in part with our institutions, includ- ing international science bodies like iasc and scar. cultural shifts take time and deliberate remedies. the us national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine study recognized that solutions to harassment in the geosciences will require a “system wide change to the culture and climate”. system-wide change of this type starts with dialogue, an important objective of the “taking the helm” event. yet without stronger partici- pation from male colleagues, system-wide change will not advance. iasc executive secretary allen pope, a co- organizer for the event, asked on twitter: “do we have sufficient ‘buy-in’ to the staggering statistics about har- assment to make a change?” each of us who has per- sonally experienced such harassment might reflect on the value of sharing these experiences more openly to build such buy-in. further, we need to promote the types of culture and climate surveys that reveal the experiences of researchers in our proximal settings, including those who wish to remain anonymous. polar institutions like iasc and scar could play key roles in supporting surveys to establish a baseline of experiences against which we could formulate remedies and measure progress. in the meantime, it is imperative that organizations like the forum of arctic research operators and the council of managers of national antarctic programs continue to grow a role for them- selves in preventing and responding to sexual harass- ment in polar field settings. a beneficial starting point, as raised through the social media commentary, would be to help make acceptable norms of behaviour well understood and enforced. indigenous participants were notably under- represented at polar for a variety of reasons and absent from the panel itself. strawhacker chal- lenged the audience to investigate why these meetings are not more relevant for, or accessible to, indigenous communities. returning to the starting premise that intersectionality provides a valuable frame for cul- tural examination, co-organizer renuka badhe, of the european polar board, noted during closing remarks at the event that there are many other min- oritized groups who would benefit from an expand- ing dialogue about inclusivity in polar research. organizations like iasc and scar should consider ways to better integrate inclusivity dialogues into their meeting programmes, encouraging all attendees to participate, and to develop and enforce codes of conduct for their own organizations. if there was a unifying aspect of the “taking the helm” event, it was a shared aspiration to see a future for polar research that is ever more diverse, respectful and inclusive for all, one that supports a polar research vibrant community of researchers through all career stages and enables them to rise to the height of their potential. our collective efforts to better understand polar regions are impaired when we are not inclu- sive, and, at this critical time, we can’t afford that. let’s work together to evolve a more positive work culture for all so that the adaptive strategies that women, people of colour and others have developed to cope with discrimination can become a thing of the past. acknowledgements we would like to thank our sponsors for their support of the “taking the helm” event: antarctic and southern ocean coalition, arctic research consortium of the usa, iasc, international association of cryospheric sciences, international glaciological society, ocean expeditions, ltd., tinker muse prize, usa arctic research commission and an anonymous private donor. we would also like to thank our moderator, panellists and volunteer coordinator meredith lavalley. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. orcid sandra starkweather http://orcid.org/ - - - references bell r.e. & koenig l.s. . harassment in science is real. science , . carey m., jackson m., antonello a. & rushing j. . glaciers, gender, and science: a feminist glaciology fra- mework for global environmental change research. progress in human geography , – . clancy k., nelson r., rutherford j. & hinde k. . survey of academic field experiences (safe): trainees report harassment and assault. plos one , e , . /journal.pone. . glasberg e. . antarctica as cultural critique: the gen- dered politics of scientific exploration and climate change. new york: palgrave macmillan. goulden m., mason m.a. & frasch k. . keeping women in the science pipeline. annals of the american academy of political and social science 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f d% utm_medium=social% utm_source=twitter% utm_campaign=tweet https://www.outsideonline.com/ /harassment-problem-scientific-dream-jobs?utm_content=bufferf f d% utm_medium=social% utm_source=twitter% utm_campaign=tweet https://www.outsideonline.com/ /harassment-problem-scientific-dream-jobs?utm_content=bufferf f d% utm_medium=social% utm_source=twitter% utm_campaign=tweet https://science.house.gov/legislation/hearings/subcommittee-research-and-technology-hearing-review-sexual-harassment-and https://science.house.gov/legislation/hearings/subcommittee-research-and-technology-hearing-review-sexual-harassment-and https://science.house.gov/legislation/hearings/subcommittee-research-and-technology-hearing-review-sexual-harassment-and https://science.house.gov/legislation/hearings/subcommittee-research-and-technology-hearing-review-sexual-harassment-and http://www.sciencemag.org/news/ / /boston-university-rejects-geologist-david-marchant-s-appeal-termination http://www.sciencemag.org/news/ / /boston-university-rejects-geologist-david-marchant-s-appeal-termination http://www.sciencemag.org/news/ / /boston-university-rejects-geologist-david-marchant-s-appeal-termination https://speakingofgeoscience.org/ / / /the-elephant-in-the-women-in-science-room/ https://speakingofgeoscience.org/ / / /the-elephant-in-the-women-in-science-room/ https://speakingofgeoscience.org/ / / /the-elephant-in-the-women-in-science-room/ it will take a global movement to curb corruption in health systems comment on "we need to talk about corruption in health systems" it will take a global movement to curb corruption in health systems comment on “we need to talk about corruption in health systems” margot i. witvliet* id abstract corruption in health systems is a problem around the world. prior research consistently shows that corruption is detrimental to population health. yet public health professionals are slow to address this complicated issue on a global scale. in the editorial entitled “we need to talk about corruption in health systems” concern with the general lack of discourse on this topic amongst health professionals is highlighted. in this invited commentary three contributing factors that hamper public dialogue on corruption are discussed. these include (i) corrupt acts are often not illegal, (ii) government and medical professionals continued acceptance of corruption in the health systems, and (iii) lack of awareness within the general public on the extent of the problem. it is advocated that a global movement that is fully inclusive needs to occur to eradicate corruption. keywords: corruption, global governance, health systems, healthcare copyright: © the author(s); published by kerman university of medical sciences. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: witvliet mi. it will take a global movement to curb corruption in health systems: comment on “we need to talk about corruption in health systems.” int j health policy manag. ; ( ): – . doi: . /ijhpm. . *correspondence to: margot i. witvliet email: mgage @lamar.edu article history: received: may accepted: july epublished: july commentary department of sociology, social work and criminal justice, lamar university, beaumont, tx, usa. http://ijhpm.com int j health policy manag , ( ), – doi . /ijhpm. . the universal declaration of human rights outlines that all people have the right to security and a right to health. yet around the world, corruption can keep a person’s right to security and right to health out of reach. corruption is multifaceted and can manifest in many forms. several definitions exist. the world bank describes two types of corruption, namely (i) covert corruption which pertains to misdeeds carried out by those in service positions (ie, doctors, lawyers, and teachers) and (ii) overt corruption, which is associated to the high-profile misdeeds that usually goes viral on social media or makes the nightly news. - transparency international conceptualizes corruption in a global survey as ‘the abuse of public office for private gain.’ in this commentary both the world bank and transparency international definitions of corruption are thought of when discussing the problem of corruption in health systems. it is important that the reader keep in mind that not all corruption is considered illegal. nevertheless, corruption is particularly harmful to health systems since it hampers the ability for many to achieve adequate health care. take for instance some of the most common forms of corruption observed in the healthcare industry, such as bribery, theft of equipment, and forms of fraud including absenteeism and inflated costs. - for these reasons, the sustainable development goals for highlight the need to significantly reduce corruption around the world. in their editorial, eleanor hutchinson, dina balabanova, and martin mckee highlight their research agenda and plans to address corruption in health systems. one of their aims is to extend the conversation about corruption in health systems. the authors are correct to advocate that corruption in health research needs to be addressed. the united nations (un) highlighted this as well in the special rapporteur entitled “right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” the words corruption and health systems are not mentioned in the title of the un document. however, the report is entirely concerned with how corruption impedes the right to health. such as what is evident when clinical trials funded by industry produce biased results that support industry, as opposed to results produced by clinical trials with no industry funding. in this case industry profit is more of a concern then the right to health. the un special rapporteur provides recommendations, most notably being the need to raise awareness amongst the actors working in the health system and in the general population. the un also notes that it is advantageous to use the right to health framework since it provides a legal manner to address corruption in health systems. if we are going to amplify the conversation on corruption in health systems, then research agendas should include the recommendations made by the un. corruption is a global problem that affects all sectors of society in both high- and low-income countries. in this invited commentary three contributing factors impeding the amplified public dialogue on corruption are discussed. first, many corrupt acts are not illegal. in the us laws fuel https://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /ijhpm. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - witvliet international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – corruption in the health system. this form of corruption is closest to the conceptualization of corruption by transparency international. for example, it is entirely legal for an american policy-maker to accept funds from corporate political action committees (eg, healthcare or the pharmaceutical industries), and then go on to shape healthcare policy. in the united states, corporate backed policy-makers are not limited in the number of bills they can introduce or support that will later become laws. no laws exist in the united states that prevents the policy-maker or their family members and acquaintances from holding stocks in the corporations that funds the policy- maker’s time in political office. as such, the policy-maker is theoretically free to shape health policy that impacts health systems. this corrupt act is not illegal, yet it might influence the stock market and thereby provide financial rewards to the policy-maker or their family members and acquaintances that have stocks in the health market. canada on the other end of the spectrum is a country that recently took a step to curb the influence big corporations have on policy-makers. canadians implemented a new law that bans corporations from donating large sums of money to policy-makers. the aim for this change in law is to reduce the influence corporations might have on shaping policy, including health policy. policy-makers and decision-makers who have influence on the health system are often driven by self-interests. this makes it incredibly difficult to shape laws and regulations that effectively combat corruption in health systems. even when policy-makers and decision-makers are not corrupt, research shows that they might choose to implement anti-corruption measurements that will not fully eradicate corruption when it applies to their own work. this means that those who historically advocate for curbing corruption are not immune to rigging the system. prior research finds that decision- makers might implement weaker anti-corruption measures. this perhaps explains why even in countries where ethics committees are prevalent and anti-corrupt taskforces are in place, corruption is still rampant and in many cases the corrupt acts are legal. research suggests that if the decision-maker receives immunity from punishment, then this can motivate them to develop stricter anti-corruption policies. future corruption and health research will benefit from taking this phenomenon into account. in addition, conducting natural experiments on countries like canada to examine the effects of recent changes in how the political system is financed will be advantageous to the literature. the second factor that needs consideration is that corrupt acts are often not recognized as being corrupt, especially when government and medical professionals condone the act. in some nations bribery is part of the fabric of society, especially in countries within africa. in india, as in many other low- income countries, bribery payments to doctors is a huge problem. cases in india have been reported where women are forced to make a bribery payment to hold their babies after delivery. around the world costs of labor and delivery should be transparent and costs for deliveries without complications uniform. however, for many countries this is not the case. in the united states, hospitals are allowed to overcharge for pharmaceuticals. the price of headache medicine in a us store costs less than $ . , but in a hospital a single over-the-counter headache pill can cost over $ . hospital medical equipment and maintenance of the equipment is also expensive. this form of corruption is allowed by government in the united states and it is considered normative practice by medical professionals. americans view this corrupt act as normal because government has not stepped up to create laws against such practices. government has made price gouging in stores in most us states illegal and it should also be made illegal in health systems. in addition, researchers have even identified a link between increased payments of foreign aid and un security-council membership. third, in discussions on combating corruption in health systems increasing awareness about corruption in health systems and the subsequent harm caused by corrupt acts in the general public is key. most people are busy trying to sustain themselves and their families economically. the public has not become outraged enough about corruption in health systems to collectively advocate for change. most people are not aware that research shows corruption negatively affects child health outcomes and disproportionately harms the health of vulnerable groups. few people in the general public know that women and poor people are typically the victims of corruption in health systems and that this has a major impact on their health. although it is evident that in societies where corruption is rampant, everyone’s health suffers, government officials continue to allow corruption to have a place in society even at the sake of jeopardizing population health. all nations around the world share the commonality of corruption in health systems. a global anti-corruption movement must come with collective action. the authors of the editorial “we need to talk about corruption in health systems” are ready to ignite a collective conversation on corruption and health systems, but is the world and in particular is government ready? the #metoo movement was originally started by an african american woman over a decade ago, but the #metoo movement has only recently gained global awareness. what is clear is that this generation of health professionals are on the cusp of making a major change to health systems. internet has made us a global village. as such, we are not able to say we are not aware of our social problems. globalization is not a new phenomenon, but with the advent of modern technology it has transformed the world into a relatively smaller place. media has put a face to corruption occurring around the world. given that upcoming health professionals are highly informed about global problems, and interests in health systems are increasing, the elements for a successful global movement are in place. raising societal awareness about corruption in health systems is critical because the healthcare industry is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. any steps taken to eradicate corruption will need to account for the huge amount of diversity both between and within countries. this requires not only a multi-disciplinary approach, but also a fully inclusive approach that encompasses different perspectives from health researchers in both low- and high- income countries. witvliet international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – ethical issues not applicable. competing 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/socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci article moving with touch: entanglements of a child, valentine’s day cards, and research–activism against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures suvi pihkala *, tuija huuki and vappu sunnari faculty of education, university of oulu, fi- oulu, finland * correspondence: suvi.pihkala@oulu.fi received: may ; accepted: july ; published: july abstract: in this paper, we respond to feminist new materialist scholars’ calls to explore what research in the field of gendered and sexual violence can be, do, and become. this paper explores the microprocesses of change within the more-than-human child–card entanglements as part of our research–activist campaign addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. drawing on one of our creative workshops, we generate three analytical readings that map touch. we focus, first, on the intra-action of bodies, objects, and abstractions that reconfigures painful experiences of harassment for recognition; second, on the affective charge in moments and movements of response and resistance; and third, on what else touch can become when it travels across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. re-engaging with our research–activism, we propose that different kinds of touch converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that reconfigures painful experiences of gendered and sexual harassment for recognition, response, and resistance. connecting to feminist new materialist endeavors to envision and enact response-able research, we propose that ‘moving with touch’ helps us shed light on the microprocesses of change in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and invite movement. keywords: barad; children; creative methods; feminist new materialisms; research–activism; response-ability; sexual harassment; touch . introduction sexual harassment was brought to renewed attention in , prompted by the global ‘#metoo’ movement. having spent nearly years exploring gender and sexual power plays among children in school settings, our research team—including tuija, who was following the debate closely—was deeply affected by the discussion, which mostly ignored the ways sexual harassment connects to and permeates children’s peer cultures. this combination of the ‘hashtag feminism’ (mendes et al. ) against sexual harassment, the public debate, and our numerous research encounters with children marked the ‘beginning in the middle’ of our research–activist project. theoretically, our research– activist approach was inspired by feminist new materialist and, in particular, ‘phematerialist’ work (e.g., renold and ringrose ), which have generatively merged feminist research with deleuzian/spinozian activist philosophies (e.g., braidotti ) and the theories of micropolitics of change (manning ; massumi ) and affect (e.g., blackman and venn ) in order to envision ways of doing educational research capable of generating material changes in wider social spheres (e.g., renold ; ringrose et al. ). the creative arts-based research-activist project, titled #metoo postscriptum, that shaped the direction of this article, was designed and implemented by two of the authors—tuija and suvi— during the weeks before valentine’s day in . it emerged from tuija’s broader ongoing research soc. sci. , , of and from a long continuum of research on gendered and sexual force relations by the authors (huuki and renold ; huuki et al. ; holford et al. ; pihkala and huuki ; sunnari et al. ; sunnari ). although it is often discussed only in relation to adults, research shows that sexual harassment—verbal, physical, material, emotional, or psychological sexual abuses of power—also affect young people in multiple, contradictory manners as normalized, everyday hetero-sexisms circulating within young peer cultures, media, and the wider social and cultural discourses (gillander gådin ; holford et al. ; meyer ; renold ; stein ; sunnari ; sunnari et al. ). however, young people are left with insufficient support for navigating these often contentious terrains of gender and sexuality (renold ). drawing inspiration from child-led activism in wales (renold , ; renold and ringrose ), the #metoo postscriptum campaign engaged children aged – years in creative workshops to explore their experiences of sexual harassment and to communicate those experiences to decisionmakers and the public. in this paper, we return to and re-engage with one of the workshops, a workshop with a group of eight girls, and map the iterative intra-action of valentine’s day cards, girls, experiences of past harassment, the research–activist campaign, and our own engagements and entanglements during the campaign. in re-engaging with the workshop, we employ touch as a steering concept that reanimates and enlivens within and through three analytically enacted moments at focus in this paper. drawing on barad’s ( ) agential realism, with the first moment, we map more-than-human touch, focusing on the materiality of the workshop. we render visible how bodies, tables, movement, space, objects, postscripts, past, present, and research–activism intra-act, generating conditions of possibility for painful experiences to reconfigure for recognition. then, we map what else touch can do, focusing on the affective charge in the moments and movements of response and resistance in the intra-action of past experiences, valentine’s cards, and a makeshift mailbox. our third and final analysis maps what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains, reaching towards, sticking to us, and traveling to wider change-making terrains. mapping and moving with touch enable us to become open to the microprocesses and micropolitics of change and, as explored in this paper, to the ways in which painful experiences of harassment can be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance. as invested and interested in co-constructing and theorizing response-able, everyday practices of change-making (huuki ; pihkala et al. ; pihkala ), this paper contributes to the recent calls to envision response-able research and practice and to illuminate and theorize the microprocesses of change in our research endeavors (ringrose et al. ; renold ). ‘moving with touch’ within our creative research–activism sheds light on the affordances of feminist new materialism-inspired approaches that are attuned to materiality, relationality, and becoming. we argue that our research– activism, predicated on creative, multimodal, more-than-human sense-abilities, fostered conditions in which unwanted, painful, silenced, and unaddressed experiences could be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance in ways that exceed the limits of humanistic and talk-based modes of engagement. beginning from within entanglements and relationality, as opposed to pre-existing subjects and objects, enables us to attend to the material-discursive practices of body, object, gesture, movement, silence, voice, space, history, feeling, and touch and how these human and more-than- human elements intra-act, producing particular and contingent outcomes (barad ). we maintain informed by our long-term work with children around sensitive topics of gender and sexual harassment, the workshops were held in single-sex groups with the aim of ensuring safe possibilities for the participants to explore and communicate their experiences of their friendship and relationship cultures. within the scope of this research, it was not possible to address the children’s experiences of gender, but grounded in our long- term research on gender and power in child peer cultures, we were familiar with the specific context of our research–activism in finland. in this context, issues of gender are sensitive, unaddressed, and often silenced, which make them difficult to address. the grouping by assumed gender aligned with the accustomed and dominant practices of the schools. it was based on our previous experiences of working in mixed-gender groups where the sensitivity and difficulty of the topic causes anxiety and dominant modes of gender expression become enforced. in order to work with and rework gender dichotomies, the groups were thus divided by assumed gender. however, our approach during our engagements with the children remained sensitive to the children’s diverse gender expressions. soc. sci. , , of that working from within such entanglements enables elbow room for the unexpected and emergent and prompts us to not limit our inquiry to interpretations and instead invest in how research can be made to matter in the world (ringrose et al. ). by thinking with theory and moving with touch, we make a speculative gesture towards theorizing what else touch can be, do, and become. methodologically, mapping different kinds of touches causes them to converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that yields a nuanced account of the intra-active moments when subtle shifts of change occur. it does so in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and incite and invite movement. . each intra-action matters: envisioning the microprocesses of change in research against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures this paper connects to the expansive work inspired by feminist new materialist theories related to affect, materiality, and the relationality of human and more-than-human others (e.g., barad ; braidotti ; dolphijn and tuin ). this work has elicited heightened attunement and thoughtfulness in feminist research and social sciences more widely with respect to how bodies, objects, and discourses affect one another and are affected upon and how power, agency, and change, for example, are imagined (fox and alldred ; ringrose et al. ). in phematerialist work, the reimagination of how gender, power, and sexuality matter in children’s lives and, importantly, how change and transformation could be evoked (renold and ringrose ), has prompted—to use a term borrowed from barad ( ) and haraway ( )—response-able research and pedagogy (renold ; ringrose et al. ; taylor ). this call also acts as our motivation and inspiration to move with touch as we work to attune to and capture the subtle shifts of change within our research–activism. in gauging such ‘microprocesses of change’ as they occur, we employ three pivotal threads from barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology. barad ( ) introduced the idea of agential realism, proposing that the world and things ‘come to matter’ through agential cuts enacted through ongoing intra- action; that is, objects, abstractions, discourses, and even space and time do not pre-exist their relatings. this means that phenomena, such as gender and sexual harassment as the object of our inquiry and activism, too, must be understood to become intelligible through specific and contingent material-discursive arrangements or apparatuses of bodily production (barad ). it is perhaps particularly in the matterings of gender and sexuality—and sexual harassment—where barad’s thinking works to make visible the agential force of discursive practices upon matter, and vice versa. in this paper, intra-action, then, heightens our attention in relation to the dynamic ontological entanglements of human and more-than-human others—that is, how bodies, objects, movement, time, discourse, feelings, and gestures intra-act within and through the workshop. furthermore, for barad ( ), time does not work in a mode of linearity. this challenges the ways we understand change, which can no longer be perceived to follow from a past that once was but, rather, emerges through the iterative differentiating and reworking of a past that was never left behind and a future that is already present (barad ). in this sense, each intra-action matters as a more-than-human and more-than-present encounter that holds the possibility ‘to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (barad , p. x). considering the past experiences of pain, hurt, silence, and denial materializing for recognition through our research–activist apparatus against sexual harassment, barad’s thinking helps us attune to the intra-active entanglements anew. it helps us consider how, as we move, craft, and talk with the children, the intra-active entanglements of bodies, things, moments, and places come together and hold the possibility for making a difference in how sexual harassment matters. there is a breathtaking intimacy to this, as barad ( ) writes. she brings the ethico-onto-epistemology of agential realism in touch with touch, stating that ‘touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability’ (barad , p. , italics removed). indeed, the ethicality at the marrow of mattering—as captured in the hyphenated notion of ‘response-ability’ (barad ; haraway )—is ‘always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not- becoming’ (barad , p. ). it is an invitation and an obligation to enable and welcome the response of the other that inhabits ‘each meeting’ (barad ). soc. sci. , , of enriching our thinking about the intra-active entanglements of our research–activist encounters with touch and response-ability enables us to imagine the intra-activity at stake as materially crowded, affectively charged, and temporally rich—more-than-human and more-than-present— entanglements that are ethical from the get go. this thinking also reanimates ‘our responsibility to be in touch’ (barad ) in our research–activist endeavors. as we maintain, how we co-compose the materials, creative practices, and human and more-than-human others matters. it matters to the ways we can help children identify and share with others their experiences and concerns related to sexual harassment and how we can foster possibilities for change in children’s peer cultures. indeed, barad ( , p. ) asks us to ‘tak[e] responsibility for the fact that our practices matter; the world is materialized differently through different practices’. this ethics as ‘always-already’—response- ability (barad ; haraway )—casts a challenge and obligation to ‘cultivate the capacity to respond’ (haraway , p. ) and to reimagine the ethico-political potentiality in ‘each meeting’ in our attempt to both make inquiries into and co-compose conditions for co-flourishing. . method and materials: moving with touch as part of the #metoo postscriptum campaign, we organized and implemented arts-based workshop sessions focusing on gendered and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations with a total of children aged – years at schools in finland. when organizing the workshops, we endeavored to create specific conditions that provide access to new ground and enable safe and creative intra-action (barad ), so as to allow the participants to explore the ambivalences, contradictions, pains, and pleasures embedded in the gendered and sexual power relations of pre- teen peer cultures. such conditions could be understood to constitute what massumi ( ) calls ‘enabling constraints’, which propose a specific object of concern without, however, imposing preconceived notions about the final destination or outcome (massumi , p. ). enabling constraints, as we built upon them here, are carefully and purposefully made arrangements that cultivate conditions of response (barad ; haraway ) and that simultaneously mark our response-ability and accountability with respect to the becomings and not-becomings we help enact (barad ). the workshops involved activities related to the topic of sexual harassment. during the workshops, the children engaged in discussions and exploration of gendered and sexualized peer cultures and sexual harassment, created and drew valentine’s day cards, and—if they chose to do so—wrote their own experiences of harassment in the postscripts of their cards. in addition to the workshops with the children, a pop-up stand was set up in a university café to allow student teachers and faculty members to partake the campaign by sharing their own childhood experiences of harassment. through our research–activism, our aims were to generate data on children’s experiences of sexual harassment in peer relations, communicate those experiences with children to wider audiences, and engage in political debate and social transformation. as part of the latter, after the workshops, the research team collected and sent the cards to every member of the finnish parliament and published excerpts from the notes and cards on the campaign website (huuki and pihkala ). the cards with the postscripts were intended to remind decisionmakers and the finnish public of the need for systematic and consistent work to address sexual harassment, which affects not only adults but also children. the human and more-than-human ‘participants’ of the occurring in advance of valentine’s day, in our project, the #metoo became linked with the postscript section of a valentine’s day card. the postscript worked to make visible the often-ignored nature and the silence regarding sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations (pihkala and huuki ). using the hashtag connected the project to the momentum afforded by the digital feminist activism of the #metoo movement (mendes et al. ). as part of our wider interest in investigating gender and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, the workshops were video-recorded, accumulating a total of h of audio–visual recordings, pages of transcripts, pages of extended field notes, and digitalized cards, of which the data for this paper involve h and min of audio–visual recordings from the workshop session in question. soc. sci. , , of campaign, such as the children, researchers, public, the decisionmakers, hands, chairs, tables, space, paper slips, pens, and arts and crafts; and the multiple modalities of the creative activities, such as the movement, crafting, speech, and writing, were understood as active and lively coplayers that came together in unexpected ways, as well as through our purposeful material, research–activist engagements that aimed to foster possibilities for the children to explore, address, and communicate their experiences of harassment. the ethical considerations in relation to the project were ongoing before, during, and after our engagements with the children. as a ‘spin off’ and part of tuija’s ongoing research project, the #metoo postscriptum campaign had obtained a statement from the ethics committee of human sciences at the university of oulu, finland and followed the policies of the schools in all matters of child protection. the workshop participants were recruited by contacting local schools and teachers interested in participating in the campaign. information letters and consent forms were sent to the children and their legal guardians to be signed before participation. these letters included research- based information about gender and sexual harassment as the theme of the workshops, as well as information about the creative activities of the workshops and the campaign. they also included details about the use of the produced data and the possibility that the notes could be shared publicly and in research publications. these issues were discussed again with the children in the beginning of every workshop and additionally brought up whenever it seemed important. the activist orientation of the project was materially present in the creation of the valentine’s day cards as the children themselves chose the members of parliament to whom their cards would be sent. the children were able to withdraw at any time or negotiate their own way of participating. for example, in some of the workshops, a few of the participants created cards that they did not want to share as part of the campaign. those cards, or any cards that were ambiguous with respect to the children’s consent, were excluded from the project. even when carefully considering ethics as part of our praxis, engaging children in research– activism involves ongoing response-ability with respect to the project as it unfolds and, for example, becomes public. we maintain that staying with the complexities and trouble (haraway , , ) involved is important, as the entangled constellations of research and activism can produce processes of social change and transformation both within the lives of the children and within the wider terrains of social and educational policies and practices. particularly in relation to sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, which is a silenced and often unaddressed topic in schools, asking what matters to the children themselves is important. this, along with the premise of moving beyond merely stating the state of things in research on children’s peer and relationship cultures (e.g., huuki and renold ; renold ), guided our research–activist aim of helping children’s experiences and voices to be heard, sensed, and felt so as to cultivate conditions for co-flourishing. building upon the project, in this paper, we generated an analysis focusing on and departing from one of the workshops. the data are comprised of video-recordings of a workshop with eight girls, postscript notes in which the children described their experience and collaborative reflections, and personal field notes taken by the research team members. when returning to the data, our aim was not so much to gain access to some undisputable truth about the workshop. rather, the data helped us slow down—touch, sense, feel, and think—with the material, affective, and temporal entangledness involved. over the course of the research process—while we were engaged in the workshops, cataloguing the research materials, publishing results, and returning to the data to write this paper—the data were iterated upon, continuously reassembled, and engaged in diffractive encounters that ‘pulled in’ different times and spaces. theory is ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and tuin ) in the three analytically enacted moments— that is, moments enacted by us through agential cuts (barad ) within particular, contingent apparatuses of knowing (see also lenz taguchi and palmer ). in this paper, such cuts were inspired by touch. touch, as it unfolded for us here, carries resemblance to affect, as in ‘being affected’. it is also a bodily practice and a mundane moment, for example, a pen touching a paper or project ‘gender-based violence in pre-teen relationship cultures: how history, place, affect and arts interventions matter’, grant number . soc. sci. , , of a hand holding a paper slip. it is these affective and material tenors of touch that invited our attention. however, informed by and diffractively engaging with barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology, discussed previously in this paper, touch became removed from its human orbit. thus, in the three analytical sections below, we map, first, more-than-human touch focusing on the materially crowded moments within the workshops. in the second section, our focus becomes drawn to the affective charge, and we explore what else touch as a mode of material feeling and thinking does in moments of response and resistance. in the final analytical section, we focus on what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. by mapping and moving with touch, we engage touch as a more-than-human and more-than-present player that intra- actively engages in the material-discursive practices within and through which sexual harassment ‘comes to matter’ and, as we explore, potentially a player that engenders conditions of possibility for subtle shifts, marking and making differences that matter in the hurt, silence, normalization, and denial of gender and sexual harassment by enabling the opening up to change and transformation towards co-flourishing. . research–activist encounters below, we provide two accounts of the workshop. the accounts that we offer regarding the workshop must not be understood as a set of passive props but, rather, as a space–time entangled, affectively charged environment through and within which ‘what is “in” the foreground [is allowed] to acquire the shape that it does’ (ahmed , pp. – ). in addition to describing the process of the workshop, we attune to the affective atmosphere (stewart ) of the entanglements of the girls, the notes, movement, gestures, utterances, tables, chairs, and a makeshift mailbox, which will then be iterated in the following three analytical sections. . . the workshop similar to all the workshops, this workshop began with the children—eight girls in total— gathered in a circle of chairs. two student teachers led the session, and suvi participated. the student teachers read research-based statements about children’s friendship and relationship cultures. every time the participants agreed with the statement, they would stand up and switch seats. if they disagreed, or were unwilling or unable to take a stand, they would remain in place. the movement of one girl would easily stir movement in others. sometimes, amidst bodies anchored in place to be, then again, on the move, discussions would unfold, causing us to linger on a topic for longer. sometimes the topics would ‘touch’ the girls in a particular way, generating giggles or evoking stories—things the participants knew—about the ongoing relationships and romantic undercurrents within their peer relations. those ‘knowings’ were sometimes voiced aloud and other times evident only in quick glances and smiles. after the introduction to the topic of sexual harassment, the children were told about the research–activist campaign in more detail. they were instructed to craft valentines’ day cards and, if they chose, to write about harassment they had experienced. slips of paper with examples of some of the experiences disclosed in previous workshops with young people were put on the wall to prompt reflection. the notes described contentious and troubling touches and experiences with just a few words or a sentence, such as ‘i have been slapped on the butt’ or ‘some boys in our class groped between girls’ thighs with a ruler’. soon, the children began to collect materials to create their valentine’s day cards. they gathered in a close group around one of the tables, chatting while they cut and folded the base of the cards and decorated them with drawings, tapes, stamps, glitter glue, and colors. when the cards were nearly ready and the participants began to contemplate their postscripts, the atmosphere shifted. if they had previously been gathered together, they seemed to scatter around the classroom, taking their newly crafted cards or empty slips of paper with them. for some of the children, it seemed difficult to think of something to write. this was expected, as not all children are caught up in same ways within the flows of peer and relationship cultures. others hunched over their cards to shelter the affective, intimate, precarious space in which their experiences of harassment could be safely figured in words, soc. sci. , , of written down, attached to the card, and eventually, slipped into a makeshift mailbox that was set up on one of the tables. once placed in the mailbox, the notes and cards became part of the campaign. some of them were curated for publishing online, and all of them were mailed to decisionmakers. gradually, the workshop session came to a close as the children left the classroom to get lunch, leaving the research team with the video recordings and the to-be-written research notes, the box of cards, and lingering affects—as we will elaborate upon below—which became reassembled within the broader research–activist apparatus of change-making regarding sexual harassment (pihkala and huuki ). . . a girl with a note in the latter half of the workshop, one girl caught suvi’s attention. at this point, the girl had already put her valentine’s day card in the makeshift mailbox. she was one of the first participants to finish her card, but it did not include a postscript. suvi remembered telling her that this was okay, as we could use such cards if someone else had several bits of stories to share. after completing the activity, she returned to the table where the others were still making their cards. later, the girl began to meander around the room, walking from one table to the next and looking at the arts and crafts on the tables. we do not know what made her get up. perhaps she was prompted by the fact that others had begun to find more private spaces to write, or perhaps the request to share experiences was made more insistent by the movement of bodies and shift in attention. the girl halted by one of the tables, on which we had spread the notes that were previously hung on the wall to evoke discussion and reflection. she continued on but returned, pausing a bit longer by the table and whispering with another girl who had joined her there. having looked at the notes for a while, the girl asked, ‘could one write something like that?’ as she pointed to one of the notes. suvi confirmed that she could and encouraged her to write something down if she still wanted to. without saying much more, she took an empty slip of paper, returned to the table where she had been before, and began to write. moments later, the girl rose and walked to the makeshift mailbox, clutching the paper note, which was a little less than half the size of an a paper, close to her chest. then, carefully doubling the paper without folding it, as if to keep her writing sheltered from others, she reached towards the makeshift mailbox and slipped her note in. she stepped to the side, looked back at the box and then walked away, hands casually in her jumper pockets, but it felt that what just happened was anything but casual. after the workshop ended and we returned to our office to catalogue the cards, suvi noticed that very same paper note, remembering the color and size. she remembered how the girl moved and halted at the table, the pointing, the card, and the curve of the note as she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox. all the details were pulled into that moment of recognition in the office. in her note, which, as part of the campaign, became entangled in the wider mosaic of experiences of harassment, the girl shared her painful experience from a few years back. even though she sheltered the note from the eyes of her classmates, her slipping it into the makeshift mailbox, instead of the cards to be excluded from the project, gestured perhaps a political moment and movement of speaking out. we have not identified her experience in its singularity to ensure the girl’s anonymity and because our focus is not on the experience described on the note but, rather, on the microprocesses of change and the subtle shifts that unfolded within and through the workshop. however, to respect this movement from silence to speaking out and speaking up, we have elsewhere made parts of the children’s notes public (see huuki and pihkala ; pihkala and huuki ). . past–present child–card entanglements of response-ability in this section, we map touch through the three analytically enacted moments. each section, while entangled in nature, draws attention in specific ways to the productivity of the materiality, affective charge, and movements across time–space domains, as has been elaborated previously. soc. sci. , , of . . mapping touch as more-than-human the design of the workshops—its different modalities and creative activities, as elaborated previously in this paper; the size and composition of the group; and the attention to more-than- human—were co-constructed so as to enable an atmosphere that ‘touches’ enough to enable ‘responsiveness’, that is, to help children explore, communicate, and address experiences of harassment that easily tend to be overcast by deafening silence when addressed in the primary school classroom. during the workshop, the girls gathered together, moved about, and stayed still while crafting with papers, pens, glitter glue, tapes, and colors. the notes laid out on the table carried traces of experiences of harassment, connecting the workshop to the collective history of felt and sensed touches of sexual harassment, be it physical, verbal, or otherwise, enfolded in this entanglement of child-bodies, notes, circles, tables, and the campaign. this intra-action of bodies, movements, and materials opening up to the unexpected and emergent is our first analytical cut. for barad ( ), touching is not centered on a human being, nor is it only affective. it is ontological and epistemological. touching is what matter does. with this understanding of touch, the girls’ movements and haltings, rummaging through the arts and crafts materials, writing and drawing, and re-membering (barad ) past experiences fail to return to any one individual alone. similar to the girl with the pointed finger tentatively asking if it could be ‘something like that’, the ‘it’ that comes to matter fails to return to an individual imagination or recognition only. rather, within the intra-active entanglement of glitter glue, colors, paper slips, past-presents, and engaged bodies— sitting and moving in a circle and sharing experiences—it is not only the girls that touch and are touched. thinking along the lines of barad, both the girls and the matter—things, moments, and places—wander and wonder, curiously sensing and touching their im/possibilities, imagining, and inventing (barad , ). in these moments of moving, halting, inciting, and inviting human and other than human bodies, matter, in its curious and imaginative ‘self-touching’ form (barad ), reconfigures the girls’ experiences for recognition in new ways. as bodies move within the circle of chairs; smiles appear; pens touch paper; bodies shift and sway in proximity and distance; gazes fall on notes; and past experiences make themselves present, touches subtly shift and rework hurtful, painful, unaddressed, and deep-seated experiences—even an experience from two years ago—for recognition, bringing something within reach that was not present before and perhaps reachable in a way that was not possible before. . . what else touch can do: the affective charge in response and resistance our second analytical moment enacts a cut that draws focus to the affective charge in the intra- action of notes, bodies, and a makeshift mailbox. we return to the girl who clutched the note to her chest, carefully sheltering it from others, while also sharing it with others once she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox on the table. in the affectively charged mo(ve)ment of this ‘held-shared’ note from the intimacy of the girl’s chest to the public space of the makeshift mailbox, being touched does something else; it reconfigures conditions of possibilities for touching in response. when we returned to and re-engaged with this moment, we were caught by its force, as well as by our own visceral responses during the campaign. to elaborate, we had set up a pop-up stand in the university café to engage student teachers and faculty members in the campaign. the pop-up stand enabled passers-by to craft their own valentine’s day cards and include their stories of harassment during childhood as postscripts. while sitting by a table in a busy café, we also wrote down our experiences. more than once, we found ourselves confronted with the difficulty and discomfort of doing so. an array of charges passed through our bodies: who sees me; who passes by; who sees the painful experience that comes to matter and is made to matter in this moment. we understand such charges as sensed-felt resonances and dissonance between the sensitivity of the experience, deep-seated anxieties related to our experiences of harassment and abuse, and the publicity both in that moment and inherent in the promise of the campaign, which invited us to explore intimate experiences and make them matter for others. it is through those embodied affective encounters and similar experiences shared by colleagues that we began to speculate about the ways soc. sci. , , of the intra-active moment with the girl, the note, the moving–holding hands, and the makeshift mailbox was iteratively reconfigured from within the material and affective entanglements of the research–activist campaign. as we sensed-felt while writing our own notes about harassment, in this moment, with the girl and the note and the materiality and affects of our research–activist workshop, touch was a sensed- felt resonance that intra-acted with the cards, the pens, the tables, the public space of the café, the passing bodies, and the rhythm of academic work and time and opened up towards a possible other world, generating new patterns of diffraction. perhaps this touch is what clare hemmings ( ) calls affective dissonance, the incongruity of ontology and epistemology and of being and knowing, which is felt as a visceral force, such as uncertainty, shame, upset, decidedness, and courage. this force marks the sense and feel of something coming within reach that was not there before in a way that invites engagement. for hemmings ( , p. ), it is such dissonances that hold political possibility and the promise of movement. the movement within this entanglement of the girl—and, indeed, us as well—the note, and the embodied practice of holding the note close while reaching towards the makeshift mailbox unfolds as a mo(ve)ment of response, response-ability, and resistance. we contend that what touch as a more-than-human player does in this moment is that it co- constitutes a site and space of response—a space enfolded with affects, things, places, and moments and unfolding towards resistance. amplified by our own responses to writing down our pasts, we understand that the ability to be moved and affected to reach in resistance and to disturb the norms of what can be said, what can be resisted, what can be disrupted—be it the heterosexist normativities or intra-generational trauma (huuki and lanas )—is frail and precarious. yet, we maintain that the intra-active entanglement of the cards, the words written in the postscripts, the makeshift mailbox, and the promise and possibility of action enfolded in it allowed the past experience of hurt— the recognition—to reconfigure and to be not only known but to be resisted. . . what else touch can become: gathering up and holding together/apart across time–space domains as we curated the cards for the campaign website, the note became reanimated, making sense- able the response-ability and accountability it crafted by inviting and obliging us to care about it and to be careful with it without certainty if the ‘it’ is the card, the ‘data’, the words written in the cards, the girl who wrote it, the upsetting experience described in the note, the hurt embedded within it, or perhaps the academic writing about ‘it’. the intra-active entanglement of the child, cards, creative practice, research, and activism diffracts, sending out ripples that, no matter how small, hold the potentiality for ‘consequential meanings’ (haraway ). this touch of the girl’s response held its grip when we selected excerpts from the cards to publish on the campaign website and when the upset and hurt became realigned in the title of a news article in a national newspaper, (re-)making us as (modest) witnesses, complicit, and response-able (haraway , ). for haraway ( , p. ), this is exactly what touches can do: they shape and ramify accountability, where ‘[a]ccountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions’ but mundane practices of becoming with. as explored earlier in this paper, due to the affective charge sensed and felt by us while writing notes about our childhood experiences of harassment, there was a familiarity that resonated from the entanglement of the girl, the note, and the makeshift mailbox. it would be rather easy to foreground how we were emotionally affected by the girl’s story and how the touch–affect jumps back and forth, first during the workshop and again in the office, from us to the girl and from the girl to us or to all those ‘others’ who we can imagine being touched. perhaps it was the familiarity in the dissonance of holding close and disclosing that we recognize, of keeping hidden but wanting to seize the opportunity to disrupt conventional silences around touches that hurt—to reach and touch in resistance. the sense of familiarity moves us to speculate that we were not merely slightly grazed by this one experience and the touches surrounding it; rather, in being touched by the girl’s experience, matter, time, and space realigned and reinvented itself in a reiterative practice of reconfiguring (barad ). in effect, we argue that touch, as mapped here, reaches and holds across and beyond soc. sci. , , of space–time domains. our adult researcher bodies hold and carry ‘impressions’ of our own past touches—such as a re-membered slap—which, as barad ( ) notes, never left us. new touches stick to us, such as the touch–affect from the girl. these touches did not just stick and jump but became more-than-human and more-than-present players in this research–activist constellation. each touch invents new matter forms by gathering up and holding together/apart the past and present (barad ), the researcher-adult, the researcher-child, the girl with the note, the researcher with a note, and, perhaps, also the pre-teen girls that have been and will be affected by sexual harassment in their peer relations. neither the girl being touched nor we, who were being touched by the girl-being-touched, were contained in the ‘touch-encounter’. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), we enter into relations of response not because of what touches us from afar but because there were never separate parts to begin with. indeed, response-abilities are not crafted from a graze. in other words, they are not created by ‘knowing’ the girl’s troubling experience but from the capacity of us be(com)ing (with) in touch (see pihkala ), that is, the capacity of touch to draw times, spaces, and matter into new relations, inviting touch in response. . microprocesses of change and the possibilities of moving with touch knowing what we know and feeling what we feel, any of the notes from our research–activist campaign might be swarming with as many affects, times, and embodied materiality as surround the workshop or the girl with the note as discussed in this paper. nonetheless, in this particular entangled practice of engagement, this girl touched us, took hold of us, and pulled us to move with touch in response. furthermore, slipped into the makeshift mailbox, the girls’ notes, ‘crafted from and carrying their experience’ (renold , p. ), became ‘knotted’ with the wider change-making apparatus against sexual harassment: the campaigns, personal accounts, public debate, and (digital) feminist activism that have enabled young people to speak out against ‘rape culture’ in new ways (mendes et al. ). to claim how the campaign mattered to the girls—or any of the participants— would be speculative at best. however, the children’s need to address and explore their concerns related to gender and sexual peer cultures has been tangible time and time again as the children have voiced the need for safe spaces where sensitive topics could be discussed. for this, engaging children with creative activities can enable subtle shifts and minor gestures (manning ) towards sustainable alternatives in peer relations when imagined worlds are materialized through crafting, drawing, and writing. the research–activist encounters of our creative workshop against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures is materially rich, affectively charged, and temporally entangled. in gauging the microprocesses of change as they occur, we mapped touch and explored what else touch(es) can do. as we mapped in our analysis, the entanglement of the group of girls, valentine’s day cards, past, and present involved different kinds of touches in different registers, such as embodied, corporeal touches of gropes and slaps; verbal touches; material touches of pen on paper; present touches that leave impressions and linger; past touches that carry the residues of the past; the touch–affects that slip through cognition shooting straight through our bodies in resonances and dissonances; and the onto-epistemological touches that sense the virtual in an exploration of the possible, quantum, and queer touches, as discussed by barad ( ). just as touch seems to settle in senses, it is already on the move, reaching, holding, and gathering. the childhood slaps and gropes reached the valentine’s day cards in a café, the child-bodies reached a researcher-child, a finger reached for a pile of notes, a hand reached for the makeshift mailbox, the mailbox reached us, and the otherwise-made-possible reached the body-in-reach. we maintain that there is a particular benefit in thinking of the microprocesses of change with touch. for one, mapping touch, as we did here, enabled us to capture the subtle shifts in the children’s unaddressed, silenced, normalized, hurtful experience. rather than being here and there—or this or that—touches intra-acted within and through the workshop as more-than-human and more-than- present players and converged into an inventive, imaginative, sensing-feeling, matter-realizing apparatus, which activated recognition of, response to, and resistance against sexualized and soc. sci. , , of gendered force relations. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), this is what touch—when thought of in the quantum mode—can do: sense and feel and gather up and hold together/apart (barad , ). drawing matter into new relations, characterized by indeterminacy waiting to remake momentary alliances, touch reworks and recrafts response-abilities (barad ; haraway ). for another, the ethico-political tone of touch is intimate and entangled. with touch, it is impossible to keep one’s distance or disavow how we are touched and how the ways we touch shape and co-constitute the conditions of possibilities for touching in response and resistance to the ‘other’. our experience of being touched by the girls’ experiences and our research–activism, which brought disparate matters and modalities together, generating the imaginative, creative, sensing-feeling apparatus, knotted us in webs of manifold more-than-human and more-than-present touches that diffractively reconfigured ever-new possibilities for change. for us, as researchers and activists, thinking with touch engages theory in ways that moves and transforms relations, engagements, and accountabilities. we contend that this is the way feminist new materialist touch works: it is not only ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and tuin ) but becomes enacted when objects, bodies, abstractions, and moments intra-act—how they sense and feel, imagine and invent, reach in response, gather up, and hold together. finally, thinking about our research–activism with touch draws attention to the affective, material, and temporally entangled encounters that contest and remake what is possible, producing ‘differences that matter’. while the anatomy of these encounters cannot be laid bare, engaging them with new conceptual companions—as we did in this paper—can help enrich the ways we think, feel, and practice research in ways that can make a difference. indeed, moving with touch aligns with more-than-theoretical approaches to what research can do. it speaks to the power and potentiality of and responsibility to participate in co-composing research encounters that invite and enable response to the other. this demands that we carefully co-compose thick, material, and affective encounters that invite and enable children, researchers, and others to sense, feel, think, imagine, wander, and wonder with—to become with (haraway )—the postscripts, cards, pens, papers, space, and time and, through subtle shifts, make new kinds of, more livable, worlds. to close with a tentative gesture, mapping what touches do encouraged us to also imagine a touch that is of a world-making kind (haraway ) and one that creates accountability and response-ability (barad ). with this, we maintain that moving with touch is an open-ended endeavor but one imbued with conviction. touch not only brings other beings, spaces, and times together (or to matter) but also leaks out to other worlds by reaching in response and resistance, touching and carefully holding those other visions, worlds, and possibilities. at the same time, we are not left untouched; as we reach out, response and resistance stick to us. author 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of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). “seeing the actual physical betty kane”: reading the fille fatale in josephine tey’s the franchise affair in the age of #metoo literature, law and psychoanalysis how to cite: beyer, c “seeing the actual physical betty kane”: reading the fille fatale in josephine tey’s the franchise affair in the age of #metoo. open library of humanities, ( ):  , pp.  – . doi: https:// doi.org/ . /olh. published: december peer review: this article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of open library of humanities, which is a journal published by the open library of humanities. copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. https://doi.org/ . /olh. https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / charlotte beyer, ‘“seeing the actual physical betty kane”: reading the fille fatale in josephine tey’s the franchise affair in the age of #metoo’ ( ) ( ): open library of humanities. doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. literature, law and psychoanalysis “seeing the actual physical betty kane”: reading the fille fatale in josephine tey’s the franchise affair in the age of #metoo charlotte beyer university of gloucestershire, uk cbeyer@glos.ac.uk this article offers a feminist reading of josephine tey’s domestic noir novel the franchise affair, with a specific focus on the figure of the fille fatale. i investigate the gender-political dimensions of justice and the law, in order to establish the psychological, literary and legal contexts for representing female sexuality and social class in the late golden age crime genre. the article furthermore discusses pedagogy, specifically using the franchise affair as a teaching and learning case study for the employment of critical pedagogy in the contemporary diverse undergraduate classroom. https://doi.org/ . /olh. mailto:cbeyer@glos.ac.uk beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” introduction: framing betty kane josephine tey’s late golden age novel, the franchise affair ( ), is often read as a revisionist historical crime novel interrogating the th century case of elizabeth canning (bargainnier, : ; light, ). this revisionist lens is used to provide an intertextual and historical reading of the franchise affair. however, such a perspective minimises the highly problematic means used by the text for scrutinising and undermining the credibility and integrity of betty kane, a central female character in the story. in this article i argue that golden age novels are frequently discussed in a deferential light which minimises their problematic gender-political dimensions. i demonstrate that teaching golden age crime fiction in the age of #metoo provides a means of reclaiming the works and encouraging further discussion and debate around them. this might prevent texts such as the franchise affair from becoming fixed in certain readings. instead, in this article i argue for a contemporary fourth- wave feminist rereading of the franchise affair, using current terminology such as #metoo, slut shaming and toxic masculinity to investigate and reevaluate tey’s novel. the franchise affair is a domestic noir crime novel, written in a traditional descriptive golden age style with few references to violence and an intense focus on conflicting class and gender norms and values. set in milford in surrey, the franchise affair presents a linear crime narrative following solicitor robert blair who is called to defend two women, marion sharpe and her mother. the two women are disliked in the local community, and live in a large somewhat isolated house called the franchise. they stand accused of kidnapping, imprisoning and abusing a -year-old girl, betty kane, a wartime evacuee who has been adopted by a local family. in order to prove the sharpes’ innocence, robert searches for circumstantial the title quotation is taken from tey’s the franchise affair (n.p.). an earlier version of this paper was given at the literature, law and psychoanalysis, – conference (see beyer ). for the purpose of this article, i use an extended parameter of the golden age to encompass works such as tey’s the franchise affair which are perched on the boundary but whose literary discourse, setting and themes strongly link them to the golden age. thank you to christopher wells for drawing my attention to toxic masculinity, and for a very helpful discussion. beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” evidence to discredit betty kane. it is revealed that betty kane was not kidnapped by the sharpes, but was in a sexual relationship with an older, married man called barney chadwick, who took her with him to copenhagen on a business trip. in order to assemble the defence case and present the defence in court, robert relies on his irish lawyer friend from london, kevin macdermott. through robert and kevin’s discussion of the case, as well as robert’s private reflections, the reader is given a psychologised account of the reasoning behind betty kane’s behaviour, showing her to be the criminal falsely accusing the sharpes instead of the crime victim. robert is given an added incentive to defend the sharpes due to his attraction to marion. the dramatic court scenes and confrontations towards the novel’s end serve as the novel’s didactic closure which finds the sharpes innocent and betty kane guilty. this verdict is to a large extent achieved through the novel’s dramatic use of the crime genre’s conventions, in its visual framing and shaming of betty kane in the courtroom, and through the erasure of the fille fatale’s childhood and humanity. this article triangulates the three symbolic loci for the novel’s construction and representation of the schoolgirl villain/victim betty kane: character (the fille fatale of domestic noir), the courtroom (which serves as the site for othering and shaming female sexuality), and the contemporary undergraduate classroom (where these issues may be challenged and reclaimed through feminist critique). the methodology used is textual analysis drawing on crime fiction criticism and feminist theory. additionally, i’ll be drawing on foucauldian ideas of deviance, delinquency and discipline, and the idea of the ‘docile body’ articulated in his work discipline and punish. these concepts underpin my discussion of the fille fatale and the courtroom setting as a site for instigating punishment of the sexualised female body which has been insufficiently disciplined and therefore must be shamed. finally, i use tey’s novel as a starting-point for discussing teaching and learning in the contemporary diverse classroom and using crime texts as a means of debating problematic contemporary issues such as slut shaming and toxic masculinity. i argue that the courtroom of the s and the classroom of the st century occupy contrasting positions in their assessment of female sexuality, crime and the law. the three areas of investigation beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” examined in this article thus help us to assess the question of how to read the fille fatale betty kane, and to reclaim the novel by studying it through a contemporary feminist critical lens and vocabulary. domestic noir and the fille fatale in the franchise affair in the franchise affair, tey uses the crime genre’s conventions to scrutinise the construction of female sexuality. the domestic noir subgenre is defined a crime narrative set in the domestic sphere which concerns itself with female experience, and scrutinises the power politics of private relationships, thereby exposing the dangers that patriarchal society poses to women (crouch, ). at the heart of the franchise affair is the highly ambivalent and problematic domestic noir female character of the fille fatale. it is necessary to spend a little time unpacking the meanings of the fille fatale character, as this figure has not been widely discussed in the critical reception of the franchise affair thus far. however, the term is central to my reading which locates betty kane within a tradition of domestic noir fiction by women writers which scrutinises female sexuality, crime and agency. historically, the fille fatale is usually associated with postfeminist popular culture; however, we see the figure appearing in a proto-form in the franchise affair (lindop, ). the fille fatale is a younger, underage version of the femme fatale character familiar from hard-boiled crime novels such as raymond chandler’s the big sleep (jaber, ; lindop, ). the fille fatale is a sexualised “child-woman” who uses her erotic appeal to gain power over older men, reflecting the “fear that adolescent girls [are] increasingly vulnerable to corruption” and that the concept of a “normative girlhood” is increasingly outmoded (hatch , – ). the sexually provocative fille fatale is controversial due to her age and the challenges her character poses to conventional ideas about child innocence. the surrounding historical, literary and legal contexts for female promiscuity and sexual precocity are central to the franchise affair and its employment of the fille fatale figure. defining these transgressive female characters, megan hoffman argues that they exhibit “excessive or deviant sexuality, are often portrayed as victims and villains in golden age crime fiction, and looking closely at these depictions offers a means of examining attitudes towards nonconforming women in the first half of the twentieth century.” ( : beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” ) the controversial fille fatale connects in complex and problematic ways with popular cultural discourses and tropes such as the sexually precocious schoolgirl, a topic i will discuss in more depth in the teaching pedagogy section of this article. the domestic noir genre constructs the underage girl as a criminal who exploits her sexuality as a means to empowerment and agency within a patriarchal society which trivialises her perspective and silences her voice. as renáta zsámba points out, betty kane fights back against the patriarchal culture’s requirement of virtue and passivity ( : ). “framing girls this way, coupled with popular culture’s emphasis on powerful, active, highly sexualised, images of young woman in mainstream media suggests an increasing paranoia about the potentiality of young women”, lindop argues in her analysis of representations of the fille fatale. my reading here does not comment on the courtroom unravelling of betty kane’s alibi or condemn her criminality, as these are complex issues that deserve separate treatment in a lengthier format than the present article allows. i am, however, concerned with the actions of the adults around betty kane, particularly with the question of duty of care. betty kane’s background story is tragic, yet curiously, the novel withholds empathy towards her, refusing to consider trauma or circumstances in her adoptive family as causes behind her behaviour. having been evacuated to the aylesbury district during the war, betty kane is left an orphan after both her parents were killed. the family she was evacuated to took her in and adopted her; however, her liminal position as outsider is used in the text to enhance the idea of her otherness and the threat she is seen to pose to the cohesion of the local community. in her perceptive article on the franchise affair, sarah waters argues that the figure of betty kane poses a specific challenge to hierarchical class structures and the stability of the nuclear family: betty kane is an inflammatory figure because she’s such a powerful meeting point for anxieties about gender, sexuality and class […] the -year-old betty, tey’s novel suggests, is a dangerously liminal creature, able to pass herself off as a schoolgirl or a tart, depending simply on whether she’s wearing a blazer or lipstick. ( ) beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” the threat posed by the “inflammatory” betty kane is stressed repeatedly in the novel as she performs the various childlike identities available to her, such as innocent school girl, doting little sister, obedient daughter, and kidnapping victim (lindop, ). betty kane’s capacity for masquerade both intrigues and horrifies robert blair, as is evident in the novel’s first description of her physical appearance, described through his narrative perspective: the girl was wearing her school coat, and childish low-heeled clumpish black school shoes; and consequently looked younger than blair had anticipated. she was not very tall, and certainly not pretty. but she had— what was the word? — appeal. her eyes, a darkish blue, were set wide apart in a face of the type popularly referred to as heart-shaped. her hair was mouse-coloured, but grew off her forehead in a good line. below each cheek-bone a slight hollow, a miracle of delicate modelling, gave the face charm and pathos. her lower lip was full, but the mouth was too small. so were her ears. too small and too close to her head. an ordinary sort of girl, after all. not the sort you would notice in a crowd. not at all the type to be the heroine of a sensation. robert wondered what she would look like in other clothes. (tey, n.p.) through robert blair’s observations, betty kane’s body thus becomes a central symbolic locus for the slut shaming of the fille fatale. the revelation and unpicking of betty kane’s masquerade (and her alibi) are central to this shaming process which is similar to a public undressing. i find it rather troubling that robert blair’s first inclination here is to register inwardly that betty kane indeed has what he calls “appeal” (i.e. sex appeal), and to then go on to speculate about what she would look like in other clothes (or perhaps no clothes). however, the inappropriate and downright disturbing nature of his observations goes unquestioned in the text. the fille fatale betty kane provokes strong feelings in the other characters in the novel, including sexual desire and rage. waters comments on the degree of hostility in the novel towards betty kane (waters, ). this hostility can be seen in robert blair’s description of the spectacle presented by betty kane’s appearance in the courtroom and his response towards her: beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” its effect of inward calm, he decided, must be the result of physical construction. the result of wide-set eyes, and placid brow, and inexpensive small mouth always set in the same childish pout. it was that physical construction that had hidden, all those years, the real betty kane even from her intimates. a perfect camouflage, it had been. a facade behind which she could be what she liked. there it was now, the mask, as child-like and calm as when he had first seen it above her school coat in the drawing-room at the franchise; although behind it its owner must be seething with unnameable emotions. (tey, n.p.) here, betty’s kane’s fille fatale performance of sexual innocence is presented as a mask behind which she is presumed to conceal her true nature, rather than an underage girl who has been subjected to sexual exploitation and violently assaulted. this masquerade is typical of fille fatale characters, according to lindop, who argues that, “intrinsically, the fille fatale’s bad behaviour is aligned with her nubility, which she plays on in a variety of ways.” ( : ) robert blair’s obsession with betty kane’s appearance represents the patriarchal normative male gaze and its capacity to categorise and dismiss female agency. furthermore, his only partially concealed aggression towards betty kane is suggestive of the misogyny associated with most if not all of the male characters depicted in tey’s novel. the fille fatale is inevitably slut shamed and punished at the end of the franchise affair. this closure is an ideological necessity which has the purpose of reinforcing a threatened patriarchal structure and shoring up the integrity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. megan hoffman argues that, “[w]hen the young women in question engage in sexual activity outside marriage, they are either punished or, if they have sufficient potential for eventual marriage, are rehabilitated.” ( : ). in the franchise affair, we see both of these narrative moves – betty kane is shamed at the end of the novel, whereas marion sharpe is redeemed through her relationship with robert blair, as they fly off to canada together to start a new life. this oppositional treatment of female characters in the novel reflects unresolvable binaries in domestic noir’s representation of female sexuality and crime, which the beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” courtroom scenes highlight and problematise in their ritualised display of docile bodies. the fille fatale serves as an embodiment of these unresolvable tensions which are most in evidence during the courtroom scenes. i will move on now to investigate those courtroom scenes in more detail, in order to scrutinise the politics of their representation. the courtroom as a symbolic locus for shaming the second part of my discussion of the franchise affair focuses on the role of the courtroom as a space for formally inflicting slut shaming on the fille fatale. the novel’s representations of the courtroom scenes reveal the gender-political dimensions of justice and the law in crime fiction. the courtroom itself is a patriarchal space which serves a central function in formally proclaiming judgement and administering punishment on non-docile feminine bodies. in discipline and punish foucault is concerned with how external structures such as institutions of power produce subjects. the courtroom is one such external structure: highly ritualised, governed and overseen by a hierarchy of officials working for and empowered by the state. the use of courtroom settings and legal themes is relatively frequent in modern crime fiction, and serves a variety of generic and discursive purposes within the crime plot. commenting on the role that legal proceedings and courtroom dramas play in crime fiction, heather worthington notes that, “the legal novel seems to have become part of mainstream crime fiction from the s onwards […] the narrative structures of legal discourse and the drama of the courtroom lend themselves to fiction.” ( : ) the spectacle of courtroom confrontations and legal proceedings is central to tey’s novel and the way it uses the conventions of the crime genre in its interrogation of female sexuality (worthington, : ; see also walton, ). the courtroom serves as a normative space which reinforces who belongs in the community and who does not; as the outsider, betty kane is literally othered and cast out as a consequence of her crime. additionally, in the franchise affair, the jury as an entity is repeatedly invoked and called upon as a peer-led enforcer of patriarchal social and sexual norms. the jury is shown to be subjective and biased in their assessment of the case – to the extent that, eventually, the jury opts to waive hearing beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” more witnesses give evidence, and the council for the defence. this is because, as the foreman says, they’ve reached their verdict already: they have already judged betty kane, and found her guilty as charged. the franchise affair’s courtroom scenes are key to the processes of constructing and shaming the female victim/villain and her social-literary position through their formalised performances, which maintain and enhance the legality of slut shaming discourses. performance is a central aspect of the courtroom and the agents within it, linking judith butler’s “notion of ‘performativity’ [with] politics and legality.” (young, ) in his research on the significance of the courtroom as a symbolic and performative space, luke scott further argues that, one can read the court as theatre, a stage on which ideal representations of the real are enacted; as parliament, a venue for the dichotomy of oppositional debate, observed by its public; as library, a body of precedents and the accumulation of social histories; and as church, the moral arbiter to a society of subjects, on whom it relies in their observance of its power relations. ( , n.p.) it is precisely through the regimented mechanisms and ritualistic performances of the courtroom that the female victim/villain at the heart of the franchise affair is scrutinised and judged, and, finally, shamed. through the ritualistic regimentation brought to bear on the females within the confines of the courtroom itself, both betty kane and marion sharp are subjected to what foucault terms “the normalising gaze” ( : ). according to foucault, the “normalizing gaze [is] a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish […] in it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” ( : ) this “normalising gaze” is enacted through robert blair’s perspective as representative of patriarchal law. the franchise affair’s intense scrutiny of betty kane’s physical appearance in the courtroom, through the perspective of robert blair, is particularly significant in this regard. his observations emphasise the discrepancy between her appearance and beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” what he perceives to be her true promiscuous and evil nature, which is exaggerated and demonised in this passage: robert had not seen her since she stood in the drawing-room at the franchise in her dark blue school coat, and he was surprised all over again by her youth and her candid innocence. in the weeks since he had first seen her she had grown into a monster in his mind; he thought of her only as the perverted creature who had lied two human beings into the dock. now, seeing the actual physical betty kane again, he was nonplussed. he knew that this girl and his monster were one, but he found it difficult to realise. and if he, who felt that he now knew betty kane so well, reacted like that to her presence, what effect would her child-like grace have on good men and true when the time came? (tey, n.p.) this passage provides a powerful depiction of toxic masculinity and its demonisation of females. although not physically threatening in this instance, robert blair’s perception of betty kane represents a symbolic and physical loathing which has as its basis the threat that she poses to his masculinity and his own, only half-articulated and barely acknowledged, sexual attraction towards her. the “othering” of betty kane and the visceral categorisation of her as a “monster” seem chilling in light of the fact that she is an underage girl. the novel thus uses the courtroom convention as part of this othering of the fille fatale. robert blair’s determination to prove betty kane’s guilt is reflected in his anxiety over whether others, too, will be able to identify her as a slut and a liar. the courtroom in the franchise affair is thus revealed to be a patriarchally sanctioned symbolic space which makes a spectacle of girls and women and exposes female slut shaming. the courtroom scenes reveal patriarchal society’s reliance on ‘docile bodies’, to use foucault’s term, specifically female docile bodies. this representation suggests that the courtroom is not a neutral space, nor is the law a neutral instrument – rather, both are brought to bear on females in ways which are overdetermined by beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” the construction of female sexuality and the female body as promiscuous and evil. betty kane is judged on the basis of her gender, class, family status (adopted orphan, not blood relation), and age. her body is not compliant or docile, but demonic, although it masquerades as a socially acceptable version of femininity. eric dunning states that “foucauldian discipline requires that institutions individuate bodies according to their tasks as a means for training, observing, controlling and making them capable.” (dunning, : ) as we see in the franchise affair’s descriptions, the court case is taking its toll on the jurors’ bodies, as they are having to sit still for many hours and subject themselves to the regiments of the courtroom. as they adhere to the regulations and regimens of the courtroom, the jurors too are required to demonstrate mastery over their desires and represent docile bodies on behalf of the law. the playing out of the patriarchal drama of slut shaming the fille fatale culminates in the verdict stating the need for a disciplined body and sexuality, with the punishment of betty kane becoming, in foucault’s words, “the anchoring point for a manifestation of power” (quoted in scott, ). commenting on the courtroom as a symbolic performative realm, luke scott argues that, the courtroom and the stage each make distinctions between representation and the real conditions to which they refer, and both draw out – by means of a complete physical enclosure punctured by strategic portals – a place in which society as a subject may be isolated, analysed and criticised, under the mutual recognition that this re-enactment is deemed to represent what exists outside in the social realm. it thus creates a parallel space in which society can be safely dissected. ( ) the physical and visceral dimension of the courtroom’s exposure and shaming of the fille fatale victim/villain is highlighted in the novel’s representation of this space and the scenes set there. this physical and visceral dimension is further underlined by and echoed in the novel’s phrase, “seeing the actual physical betty kane”. the scopic economy defines betty kane as fille fatale and enables the deconstruction of her beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” persona to reveal the monster she harbours within. the courtroom scenes thus emerge as the primary formalised sites through which the novel enacts its condemnation of betty kane through its reliance on specific crime fiction conventions. #metoo: teaching the franchise affair in the third part of my article, i want to move on to discuss the contemporary classroom as a vital space for contemporary fourth-wave feminist intervention and critique. as we have seen, the franchise affair raises urgent and uncomfortable questions in regard to the representation and criminalisation of girls and young women, and their sexuality and agency. the franchise affair explicitly centres on femininity and female sexuality as sites for the construction and inscription of crime. the novel uses the crime fiction conventions of investigative analysis and clue puzzles, as well the fille fatale character, in order to mobilise its narrative of punishment of female transgression. the franchise affair would therefore make an excellent case study of the use of golden age crime fiction as a means of exploring and teaching feminist topics in the undergraduate english literature classroom. i argue that the contemporary diverse classroom may offer a resisting space in which to challenge the slut shaming and stereotyping of female sexuality embodied by the fille fatale. crime fiction foregrounds crime and criminality, and as such the genre is central to a feminist project which seeks to reassess the fille fatale and acknowledge her victimisation. in considering the challenges associated with teaching this text to undergraduate students, using critical pedagogy, i would reflect on the students’ likely mixed responses to the text, as well as examining my own ambivalence regarding the portrayal of betty kane. critical pedagogy (de jong et. al, : xiii–xvi) would connect textual study with contemporary thinking and students’ own ideas and experiences concerning the representation and performance of female sexuality and their gender-political dimensions. the classroom discussions resulting from these reflections would read the novel in light of the #metoo movement and feminist rejection of slut shaming, thus raising important questions for curriculum selection and pedagogical practices. seminar discussions of the franchise affair could thus present an opportunity to discuss contemporary concepts of slut shaming and the ‘docile’ female body. the issues raised in classroom discussions of this text might beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” illustrate, as bell hooks says, that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (hooks, : ). i argue that generating debate around the portrayal of the law and legal processes as upholding and endorsing the slut shaming and vilification of underage females may form an important part of decolonising the curriculum and interrogating the politics of representation within crime fiction. in the classroom, discussions may focus on one of the franchise affair’s central scenes of slut shaming the fille fatale, in order to examine the positions of the characters within it as part of a domestic noir crime plot, with a particular focus on female characters and their representation. using feminist critical theory, specifically to underpin examinations of tey’s use of the fille fatale character, classroom discussions may explore examples of the novel’s construction of betty kane and her sexuality as provocative and transgressive. these investigations of the representation of betty kane as fille fatale establish how a class- and gender biased perception of her character is used as justification for the violent treatment (physically and mentally) she receives, which are detailed in the scene where she is confronted and physically assaulted by barney chadwick’s wife. in this scene we see betty kane shamed and verbally and physically abused, called names such as “tramp” and compared to stereotypical images from films of sexually promiscuous females: a woman’s voice called from the bedroom: ‘is that you, barney? i’ve been so lonely for you.’ i went in and found her lying on the bed in the kind of negligée you used to see in vamp films about ten years ago. she looked a mess, and i was a bit surprised at barney. she was eating chocolates out of an enormous, box that was lying on the bed alongside her […] for some reason or other she got in my hair. i don’t know why. i had never cared very much on other occasions. i mean, we just had a good row without any real hard feelings on either side. but there was something about this little tramp that turned my stomach. (tey, n.p.) in this passage, it is very telling that mrs chadwick feels justified in assaulting betty kane despite the latter offering no provocation, nor presenting any form of physical beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” threat. paradoxically, the passivity and victimisation of betty kane in the face of this onslaught are seen to further establish her “guilt”, and to justify her deserved castigation. this scene might thus provide useful material for class room discussion of the extent to which the ‘othering’ of females central to the activity and sentiment of slut shaming is based on unconscious bias or unacknowledged prejudice, and the harmful implications of this for females. in fact, as my investigation of this slut shaming incident in the novel shows, the physical assault on betty kane is vindicated in the narrative through the assailant’s claim that there is “something” about her victim, suggesting she deserved it. this unarticulated and undefined “something” serves a central function within the novel’s female victim-blaming discourse which constructs betty kane as responsible for her own misfortune. classroom discussions could then focus on definitions of slut shaming, and the significance of the term to students in the contemporary diverse classroom. this is an important subject, as pedagogical scholars have established. deborah l. tolman et al. argue that, “neo- liberal sexual agency is a much-needed rendering of the rearticulated social and discursive landscape within which girls and young women navigate sexuality.” ( : ) these debates around female sexuality and its cultural construction could be linked to other recent critical discussions around the stereotype of “sexy schoolgirl” (ringrose : ), a cliché which has also been highlighted as problematic by female students (winters ). the complexity of betty kane’s position in the franchise affair reflects the insight by tolman et al. that “the one-dimensional “slut/ virgin” divide has become insufficient to account for alterations in gender norms and moral codes and the proliferation of language to describe young women’s engagements with their own and other girls’ sexuality.” ( : ) tolman et al. also problematise conflation of age groups, of girls and young women, and the impact on and significance for the way in which their evolving sexualities are regarded ( : ). this blurring of age boundaries and resulting confusion over sexual availability is a subject of central importance to both the franchise affair and related discussions of femininity and crime which we might embark on in the contemporary diverse classroom. tey uses the crime genre’s conventions to call attention to those blurred beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” lines and unstable boundaries, signalling them to be central in slut shaming the fille fatale. laina y. bay-cheng discusses the gendered sexual norms which dictate young women’s sexuality as reflected in the virgin-slut continuum. these norms form a part of what bay-cheng terms “enduring gendered prohibitions to constrain young women’s sexual expression and to reinforce the sexual stigmatization” ( : ) of girls and women. as brian n. sweeney states, “[a]s a form of social stigma, slut shaming involves creating categories of sexual normalcy and deviancy. shaming marks victims as different, as of a lower status, and as deserving of disrespect and mistreatment.” ( , n.p.) classroom discussion might focus on the centrality of the stigma of female sexuality and sexual expression to the franchise affair, specifically working-class female sexuality. indeed, the novel actively enhances and exaggerates the hypocritical stigma, which is carried by betty kane alone rather than the older male characters who desire her or have sex with her. references in the novel to betty kane the school girl, or dressed in a school uniform, are examples of the sexist cultural titillating stereotypes circulating around girls. these sexualised stereotypes reflect the fear in patriarchal culture over girls and young women owning their agency, attempting instead to reduce them to titillating uniforms and masquerade. students are concerned with this sexist fetishisation of underage girls implicit in schoolgirl imagery. in a recent article, female university students commented critically on the prevalence of the “sexy schoolgirl” stereotype used in playful dress-up costumes, which seem to conform to the ideas associated with the stereotype, rather than challenge or subvert it. describing her unease at “the unsettling representations of the school child” embodiments of sexual girl fantasies, student lydia winters argues that it “encourages the sexualisation of the school uniform.” ( ) the article clearly demonstrates that the fetishisation of the sexually precocious schoolgirl is highlighted by female students as problematic. the fact that such imagery is perpetrated by golden age crime fiction novels like the franchise affair is would be an obvious topic for discussion within the classroom as part of a feminist reading of the franchise affair. commenting on the treatment beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” of non-conforming female characters in crime fiction narratives, megan hoffman further argues that their importance “does not lie in their inevitable containment at the narratives’ conclusions, but in their disturbing potential for agency and the accompanying questions raised about the transgressive and the normal.” ( : ) reviewing teaching and learning practices of reading domestic noir and golden age crime fiction is very important for a revitalised critical engagement with the crime fiction genre. this is specifically the case for the franchise affair and its use of crime fiction conventions such as the fille fatale. as lindop points out, the problematic figure of the fille fatale serves as a locus for cultural anxieties around femininity and youth which impact in harmful and debilitating ways in young women and their experience of corporeality and sexuality: “framing girls this way, coupled with popular culture’s emphasis on powerful, active, highly sexualised, images of young woman in mainstream media suggests an increasing paranoia about the potentiality of young women” ( : ). engaging in these discussions is of vital importance, as liz clift states in her article on pedagogy: “as educators, we have a responsibility to talk about victim-blaming and slut shaming with students. by talking about the way society polices girls and women, based on the way they dress or their perceived sexual activity, we have the opportunity to foster caring learning environments, prevent suffering and save lives.” (clift, ) teaching tey’s the franchise affair in the #metoo age thus necessitates a re-evaluation of pedagogical strategies in the contemporary diverse classroom, decolonising crime fiction through a fourth-wave feminist interrogation of class and gender stereotypes in the age of #metoo. conclusion: reclaiming betty kane the interrogation of female sexuality is central to the crime plot of the franchise affair (zsámba, : ). this shaming process is enacted through the novel’s crime plot, and is chiefly focalised through the portrayal of betty kane as a sexually precocious fille fatale schoolgirl victim/villain. by investigating the triangulation of the fille fatale character, the representation of legal discourses and courtroom procedures, and pedagogy in the contemporary classroom, this article brings renewed urgency to the reading of tey’s the franchise affair and, in extension of this, golden age and domestic noir crime fiction generally. reading beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” the novel through a contemporary critical lens, utilising current generic terms of enquiry such as domestic noir and fille fatale to explain the novel’s function, throws new light on tey’s representations and their gender-political dimensions. by putting the fille fatale on trial, the franchise affair highlights the courtroom as a symbolic and ritualised setting which has as its central purpose the exposure and condemnation of female sexuality. insisting that betty kane is “seething with unnameable emotions” (tey, n.p.), robert blair’s callous dismissal of the girl’s experience confines her to a position of unknowable and unredeemable other. his worryingly “homicidal” toxic masculine rage at betty kane illustrates the intensity of the punitive judgment meted out to the fille fatale who transgresses patriarchal sexual norms for female conduct and expression. in contrast to its harsh judgment of betty kane, the novel’s romantic ending in the brief chapter constitutes an unsuccessful attempt to erase the problematic textual tactics through which one woman’s character has been ‘rescued’ at the expense of another’s. having initially turned down his proposal of marriage, marion sharp is stuck on a long-haul flight to canada with her ageing mother and robert blair who has gate-crashed her trip overseas in a rather predatory way. as we are informed that robert blair’s presence makes her laugh “softly and consumedly” (tey, n.p.), marion’s sexual respectability is bought at the expense of betty kane’s. waters describes the franchise affair as “an ingenious book, a crime novel without a corpse, a detective story in which the victim is justice itself and the main weapons are ignorance, prejudice and careless journalism.” ( ) slut shaming the fille fatale in the franchise affair constitutes the judicial and moral basis for the novel’s resolution and restoration of order. tey uses the crime genre’s conventions in order to condemn and banish the existence of the fille fatale from the novel’s exaggerated inward-looking small-town community which is almost like a caricature of golden age literary and cultural sensibility. however, despite the successful exiling of betty kane, the novel struggles to reconcile its own contradictions, evident in its treatment of the fille fatale who inhabits both positions of victim and villain. the courtroom provides a central symbolic locus for the judgment, disciplining and punishing of female sexuality. however, this patriarchally beyer: “seeing the actual physical betty kane” sanctioned space has a vital counter-representation in today’s diverse classroom in the age of #metoo. here, through feminist and decolonised teaching and learning, we may reassess the opposing female stereotypes presented in the novel and the role and function of normative male-oriented legal authority. as tolman et al. insist, “[a] s scholars, researchers and critical consumers of popular culture, to our continuous surprise and dismay, we find the slut/prude/virgin continuum to consistently be the primary hegemony that is imposed on girls.” ( : ) importantly, classroom discussions in the #metoo age can reevaluate the franchise affair by investigating it through a fourth-wave feminist critical vocabulary that moves beyond the novel’s construction of a biased, punitive scopic economy which frames “the actual physical betty kane” as a vamp and a villain, to an interrogation of the fille fatale character and the symbolic and generic spaces which inscribe and reinforce oppressive textual economies. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references bargainnier, e f women of mystery. bowling green, ohio: bowling green state university popular press. bay-cheng, l y living in metaphors, trapped in a matrix: the ramifications of neoliberal ideology for young women’s sexuality. sex roles, ( – ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - - beyer, c “seeing the actual physical betty kane”: slut-shaming the victim in josephine tey’s the franchise affair. conference paper. literature, law and psychoanalysis, – , – april , university of sheffield. unpublished. clift, l talk with students about slut-shaming. teaching tolerance, july, . 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the warwick tab. https://thetab.com/uk/warwick/ / / /school-uniform-fancy-dress- pervy-party- . accessed may . worthington, h key concepts in crime fiction. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. doi: https://doi.org/ . / - - - - young, s judith butler: performativity. critical legal thinking, november . h t t p : / / c r i t i c a l l e g a l t h i n k i n g . c o m / / / / j u d i t h - b u t l e r s - performativity/. accessed may . zsámba, r evil rides on the bus—space and female identities in margery allingham’s and josephine tey’s crime novels. eger journal of english studies, : – . zsámba, r “how are you getting on with your forgetting?” class, gender and memory in golden age crime fiction by women. phd thesis (unpublished). hungary: university of debrecen. how to cite this article: beyer, c “seeing the actual physical betty kane”: reading the fille fatale in josephine tey’s the franchise affair in the age of #metoo. open library of humanities, ( ): , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. published: december copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.theguardian.com/books/ /may/ /sarah-waters-books https://www.theguardian.com/books/ /may/ /sarah-waters-books https://thetab.com/uk/warwick/ / / /school-uniform-fancy-dress-pervy-party- https://thetab.com/uk/warwick/ / / /school-uniform-fancy-dress-pervy-party- https://doi.org/ . / - - - - http://criticallegalthinking.com/ / / /judith-butlers-performativity/ http://criticallegalthinking.com/ / / /judith-butlers-performativity/ https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	introduction: framing betty kane 	domestic noir and the fille fatale in the franchise affair 	the courtroom as a symbolic locus for shaming 	#metoo: teaching the franchise affair 	conclusion: reclaiming betty kane 	competing interests 	references / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / “o pyramide films ne must show the ear and study its cartilage closely, even if it’s covered with hair. it must be of a warm and transparent hue, except for the hole, which is always strong.” the voice of marianne (noémie merlant) utters these words in céline sciamma’s portrait of a lady on fire. marianne follows héloïse (adèle haenel) up an echoey staircase in the castle belonging to her mother, the countess (valeria golino). positioned between them, the april , •  ( # c o m m e n t s ) hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ https://screen-queens.com/ / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / camera �lms the back of héloïse’s head, her golden curls, and her ear, before cutting to a shot of marianne. it is the sound of the female voice, and not an exchange of looks, that activates a space of intimacy – a sort of connective tissue – between them. tellingly, later in the �lm, it is the ear that receives the �nal brushstroke in marianne’s portrait of héloïse. the act of listening, perhaps even more so than looking, con�rms héloïse’s active role as co-creator of her own image.  a romantic period drama set in -century brittany, sciamma’s �lm depicts a love a�air between a painter, marianne, and her unhappy subject, héloïse. héloïse’s refusal to have her portrait painted, which is to be sent to a male suitor in milan, requires marianne to paint her in secret. but after discovering the truth about marianne’s task, she agrees to sit for a second portrait, on the condition that her relationship with the painter is reciprocal.  the �lm has received much attention for its portrayal of the ‘female gaze’, but little has been written about the power of listening. i �nd this striking because the �lm’s ecstatic climaxes are overwhelmingly musical. the �rst features a group of local women chanting in front of a bon�re, producing a scene of community that nurtures the crescendo of desire between marianne and héloïse. it is héloïse’s love of music that brings the women closer together. when héloïse asks marianne to describe what it’s like to hear an orchestra (“tell me about it”), marianne says it’s di�cult to recount the experience in words. instead she plays a few bars from vivaldi’s the four seasons, communicating feelings through doing, not telling.  this scene foresees the dramatic �nale, when marianne attends a concert and sees héloïse across the room. héloïse, now married and with a child, doesn’t return her look. her muscles tense as the music �lls her body. she gives herself up to its sound, smiling, with tears rolling down her cheeks. the music �lls her with life. the memory of love sustains her, despite the straitjacket of heterosexual marriage, which never supersedes the lesbian romance. in this �lm, the th / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / absent husband ‘gets the girl’, but in no way does his presence defeat the lesbian love story, which holds its own at the centre of the screen.   pyramide films hearing the ‘female gaze’ reviews of portrait of a lady on fire exuberantly praise its assertion of the female gaze, something sciamma has highlighted in interviews, describing the �lm as a ‘manifesto about the female gaze’. in an openly lesbian �lm, that revolves around female-authored acts of creation, one must relish the desiring looks, words, and gestures that are exchanged. what i �nd more progressive, though, is the �lm’s portrayal of female bonding, which is conveyed most e�ectively by the soundtrack. sciamma negotiates the di�erences between platonic, maternal, and erotic female bonds but she avoids the perils of con�ating one with the other. the �lm refuses to de-eroticise the lesbian love story, but it also refuses to keep this story strictly separate from the scenes of female intimacy that forge a�nities between the di�erent groupings of women (sophie the maid, marianne the painter, héloïse the noblewoman, héloïse’s mother, the countess, the woman who performs the abortion, the chorus of local women, marianne’s students).  in my view, the selective attention given by critics to acts of looking over listening, causes the queer sonority of female desire to fall into the shadows. while historically, theories of / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / sexual di�erence tend to privilege sight over sound, sciamma’s �lm indulges us sonically in ways that shouldn’t be ignored. the �lm’s sound design asks us to lean in and listen to the queerness of the female bonding and desiring in play. shifting attention to what we can hear exposes the problem with interpretations that subdue the political force of the �lm’s queerness. for example, to lavish praise on sciamma for �ipping the script, by replacing the ‘male gaze’ with the ‘female gaze’, as some critics have suggested, implies that this neat strategy is capable of countering pervasive heteronormativity. but as alice blackhurst (https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/alice-blackhurst/) writes of the �lm, ‘its interests are less unilaterally scopic than cerebral, kinetic, and multisensory’. if the sonic dimension of cinema was probed to the same extent as the visual dimension, the narrowly de�ned ‘female gaze’ could be expanded and transformed, becoming more �exible and multisensorial. in the case of portrait of a lady on fire, when we listen to the relations of intimacy between the female characters, we gain a stronger sense of the subversive force of sciamma’s representation of queer female desire. indeed, through its soundtrack, the �lm challenges some of the dominant visual conditions on which lesbian legitimacy depend.  the sound of intimacy between women sciamma con�dently exploits ambiguity in ways that undermine cinematic strategies that objectify, fetishise, or erase lesbian sexuality on screen. predictably, as sciamma has revealed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzb ry- e w&t= s), her approach has provoked trite heterosexist kickback from interviewers along well-trodden lines (‘it’s lacking sex’, ‘it’s not sexy’, ‘you’re afraid of shooting a sex scene’, ‘where is the sex scene?’). the presence of ambiguity also in�ltrates the soundtrack. the soft crackling of �re seeps into the mise-en-scène. it replaces the familiar association between the smouldering �replace and hollywoodian heterosexual romance, with an excessive and disruptive crackling that lingers queerly in the background. however, beyond the obvious thwarting of representational conventions, what i �nd so beautiful and subversive about https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/alice-blackhurst/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzb ry-e w&t= s / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / the sound design is the way sonic proximities are formed that trace intensities and a�nities between the female characters. for example, the sound of crackling later merges with the liquid trickles of the women kissing, before evolving into the moist sound of héloïse mixing green paint with marianne’s paintbrush, contaminating the materiality and individuality of artistic creation with the liquidity of mutual attraction.  the crackling sound also accompanies marianne’s conversations with héloïse’s mother, and with sophie (luàna bajrami). after pouring marianne’s wine, marking the class division between them, sophie’s relationship with the painter changes: she sits down next to her and responds to questions about héloïse’s past, before reciprocating, posing questions to marianne in return. similarly, the rustling sound produced when marianne handles the green fabric of the dress, held by sophie, and later worn by héloïse, connects the three women together. in other scenes, the fragile sound of marianne’s charcoal touching the canvas, forms symmetries with the delicate sound of sophie running her �ngers over a sprig of rosemary, guided by touch more than sight, as she crochets an image of the herb. delicate symmetries of sound can also be heard in the layering of di�erent sorts of breath and vocalisation. the erratic breathy sound of marianne experiencing menstrual pain, joins up, in a delayed solidarity, with the terser sound of sophie’s gasps as she undergoes an abortion. these sounds, which give voice to social taboos that are rarely represented on screen, are again similar to, but entirely di�erent from, the later sounds of marianne and héloïse giving pleasure to each other in bed.  in sciamma’s �lm, héloïse’s dress catches �re, inspiring the painting called ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ that sits at the back of the art room where marianne teaches her students. the small circle of �re at the bottom of héloïse’s dress is like a miniature of the bon�re (signalling community), and the �re in the castle where marianne sleeps (signalling intimacy). likewise, our listening moves from the foreground detail of / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / crackling �ames to the ever-present ambient backdrop: the sound of the sea, the wind, the crackling, the friction, the silence. the background sound functions like an unruly swell of desire, the connective tissue that refuses to subside.  pyramide films stepping back: “when do we know it’s �nished?” it would be remiss not to mention the belgian �lmmaker chantal akerman’s pioneering exploration of lesbian sexuality in je tu il elle ( ), as well as her portrait of a young girl at the end of the s in brussels ( ). sciamma has cited the in�uence of akerman – her frontal shots, and her magnum opus jeanne dielman ( ) – on the kitchen scene in her �lm (‘i was thinking more of chantal akerman than vermeer’). akerman’s cinema invents its own codes, and sciamma follows in her footsteps. however, one key di�erence between sciamma and akerman is each artist’s approach to categorisation. akerman rejected attempts by commentators to categorise her, and her �lms, whether as ‘feminist �lmmaker’, or ‘lesbian �lm’, stating (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/ .pdf) ‘i’m not making women’s �lms, i’m making chantal akerman’s �lms’. by contrast, in a recent bfi screen talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzb ry-e w&t= s), sciamma refreshingly embraces the description of her �lm as a lesbian love story. she doesn’t accept that ‘lesbian’ is a label, nor does she accept that the word is limiting. for sciamma, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/ .pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzb ry-e w&t= s / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / lesbianism is an expansive ‘imaginary’. it represents something wide, dangerous, and exciting, embodying creation and invention.  the césar awards in france saw sciamma’s �lm receive nominations, including best film, best director (the only �lm by a woman in these categories), best actress, best original screenplay, best sound, with claire mathon awarded the �lm’s only prize for best cinematography. the category for best first feature film included a nomination for mati diop’s atlantics, with the prize going to mounia meddour’s papicha. meanwhile, the disgraced director roman polanski won best director, after receiving the highest number of nominations. this deplorable outcome prompted adèle haenel (https://www.dazeddigital.com/�lm- tv/article/ / /why-adele-haenel-roman-polanski-cesar-awards- walkout-france-metoo-�lm-industry) to walk out in protest, followed by sciamma and the portrait of a lady on fire team, and by aïssa maïga, who later joined protestors outside the ceremony. in her courageous speech (https://www.essence.com/entertainment/french-oscars-black-nominees/) at the ceremony, maïga drew attention to the stereotypical and minor roles regularly given to black actors in france, stressing that decision-makers, especially those in charge of funding and casting, need to take some responsibility in order to create change. as maïga rightly declared, it is a systemic problem: ‘it doesn’t only concern our hyper- privileged environment; it concerns all of society’.  last year, the french-senegalese �lmmaker alice diop made a series of crucial points in a podcast episode by ki�e ta race (grace ly and rokhaya diallo) called ‘césars so white’, that are important to recall. awarded the césar in for her short �lm towards tenderness, diop explains how critics in france tend to discuss her �lm chie�y for its ‘sociological perspective’ on the french suburbs. she is forced to become a ‘spokesperson’ for the suburbs, while the artistic value of her work – her questioning of society through formal inventiveness – is ignored. diop, ly and diallo then discuss the obstacles for non-white directors to make �ctional feature-length �lms, with black characters at their centre, https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/ / /why-adele-haenel-roman-polanski-cesar-awards-walkout-france-metoo-film-industry https://www.essence.com/entertainment/french-oscars-black-nominees/ / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / who aren’t always from deprived backgrounds, and who represent universal concerns. i am left wondering, could a black french female director have made a �ctional, commercial feature – a love story, indeed, a lesbian love story – that would become a universal manifesto about the ‘female gaze’? could she make a �lm that draws on - century western portraiture, focusing (non-voyeuristically) on the experiences of black female sitters, without the �lm being side-lined for being ‘about’ blackness? would she receive adequate funding? would her �lm be heard, or selectively unheard?  sciamma’s �lm is ravishing in its tender presentation of an adult lesbian love story. it prioritises images of women collaborating, taking the spotlight o� competitive-fuelled acts of desire. it de�es the heterosexist depictions of lesbian sexuality on screen that oscillate between fetishization or total erasure, and through its soundtrack, it loosens the sti�ness of ways of seeing, understood only in terms of looking, not listening. however, i feel that critics and reviewers of this �lm could re�ect more attentively on the partial exclusivity of the white female gaze. the ‘female gaze’ tends to be discussed as an empowering unmarked norm, as though race and whiteness are irrelevant in this context. confronting the �lm’s presentation of white lesbian subjectivity, one could begin by exploring the connotations of purity associated with the opening white screen. this image could be compared to the later haunting, almost deathly, visions of héloïse in her wedding dress. the purity, embodied by the �lm’s �rst image, is immediately tarnished when it is touched by a piece of charcoal. we hear an aural shimmer, like a sign of impurity, whose ubiquitous presence, like the crackling �ames, demands a closer listening.    by albertine fox albertine (https://screen- queens.com/tag/albertine-fox) is a lecturer in french film at bristol university in the uk. she teaches courses on francophone women th https://screen-queens.com/tag/albertine-fox / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / directors, the cinema of jean-luc godard, and co-teaches a course on gender, sexuality and cinema. she loves experimental �lm, and enjoys writing about chantal akerman’s work, most recently an article about akerman’s south.  albertine has an interview coming out later this year with the lebanese �lmmaker corine shawi, and at the moment she’s conducting conversations with other �lmmakers for a book on listening and documentary. / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ /  reply » this site uses akismet to reduce spam. learn how your comment data is processed (https://akismet.com/privacy/).  (https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female- intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-�re/? like_comment= &_wpnonce= e ea ) your focus on the rarely discussed sound design of the �lm is something which must be lauded. that and your lucid writing skills make this a cohesive essay on the ways of listening and watching a �lm because i, as a cinephile, always look at the cohesive aspects of the �lm including the sound and score. thank you for your gifts of interpretation. like reply april , rejecting the obedient woman in ’ things i hate about you’ thatcher’s britain is a bleak backdrop in ‘ray & liz’ an autobiographical https://akismet.com/privacy/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/?like_comment= &_wpnonce= e ea https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/?replytocom= #respond https://screen-queens.com/ / / /rejecting-the-obedient-woman-in- -things-i-hate-about-you/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-ray-and-liz/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /rejecting-the-obedient-woman-in- -things-i-hate-about-you/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-ray-and-liz/ / / hearing the crackles in the background: listening and female intimacy in ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ – screen queens https://screen-queens.com/ / / /listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/ / april , thatcher s britain is a bleak backdrop in ray & liz , an autobiographical family study april , director hisonni johnson talks through process, poverty and representation in his film, ‘take out girl’ april , ‘love wedding repeat’ is charming, but doesn’t live up to its full potential april , ‘make up’ is a debut film that demands your attention https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-ray-and-liz/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /interview-hisonni-johnson-take-out-girl/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-love-wedding-repeat/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-make-up/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-ray-and-liz/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /interview-hisonni-johnson-take-out-girl/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-love-wedding-repeat/ https://screen-queens.com/ / / /review-make-up/ s jed .. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences cambridge.org/eps editorial cite this article: sweeney a, perôt c, callard f, adenden v, mantovani n, goldsmith l ( ). out of the silence: towards grassroots and trauma-informed support for people who have experienced sexual violence and abuse. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences , – . https://doi.org/ . / s received: october revised: february accepted: february first published online: april key words: health service research; psychiatric services; sexual assault; trauma author for correspondence: angela sweeney, e-mail: asweeney@sgul.ac.uk © cambridge university press out of the silence: towards grassroots and trauma-informed support for people who have experienced sexual violence and abuse a. sweeney , c. perôt , f. callard , v. adenden , n. mantovani and l. goldsmith population and health research institute, st georges, university of london, cranmer terrace, london, uk; independent researcher, hon. research associate, university of bristol centre for academic primary care, population health sciences and king’s college london, london, uk; department of psychosocial studies, birkbeck, university of london, uk and focus- - , merton, london, uk abstract to experience sexual violence and abuse is to experience silence. this commentary explores some of the ways in which psychiatry reinforces the silencing of sexual violence survivors. we argue that current psychiatric responses to sexual violence typically constitute iatrogenic harm including through: a failure to provide services that meet survivors’ needs, a failure to believe or validate disclosures; experiences of medicalisation and diagnoses which can delegit- imise people’s own knowledge and meaning; ‘power over’ relational approaches which can prevent compassionate responses and result in staff having to develop their own coping strat- egies; and poorly addressed and reported experiences of sexual violence within psychiatric set- tings. we argue that these multiple forms of silencing have arisen in part because of biomedical dominance, a lack of support and training in sexual violence for staff, inconsistent access to structured, reflective supervision, and the difficulties of facing the horror of sexual violence and abuse. we then describe community-based and grassroots responses, and con- sider the potential of trauma-informed approaches. whilst this paper has a uk focus, some aspects will resonate globally, particularly given that western psychiatry is increasingly being exported around the globe. introduction trauma matters. it shapes us. it happens all around us. it destroys some of us, and it is overcome by many of us. to ignore it is to ignore who we are in all our complexity (filson, ). inter-personal trauma has at its core the abuse of power (see lovett et al., ). this paper focuses on power abuses that manifest as sexual violence in all its subtleties and complexities, whilst understanding that many survivors have experienced multiple forms of abuse over long periods meaning that their experiences often do not map neatly onto the distinct categories used in research and practice (perôt and chevous, ). we also write in the knowledge that it can take people many years to understand that what they have experienced constitutes sexual violence. estimates of the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse (csa) range from one in to as high as one in four, with girls disproportionately affected (felitti et al., ; radford et al., ). globally, it is estimated that % of women have experienced sexual or intimate partner violence, and that women are more likely to experience repeated and severe violence compared with men (oram et al., ). experiencing sexual violence is linked to significant mental dis- tress (khadr et al., ), with csa in particular linked to psychosis (bebbington et al., ). unsurprisingly, current and previous rates of sexual violence amongst people in contact with psychiatric services are high (e.g. grubaugh et al., ; mauritz et al., ; khalifeh et al., ). given that sexual violence is so commonplace and so impactful, what is psychiatry’s response? mainstreaming silence: psychiatric services and sexual violence the idea that people, predominantly girls and women, are too mad, too bad and too sad to be believed has been used to silence people since time immemorial (watts, ). silence typically characterises the experience of sexual violence, particularly in childhood. it is a silence that is demanded and coerced by perpetrators, and sanctioned by families, commu- nities and society. sexual violence survivors have long described the way in which psychiatry can reinforce this silence, causing further harm to an already shattered self (e.g. smith et al., ; bond et al., ). collectively, we may recognise the silencing of the past, of the wives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/eps https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s mailto:asweeney@sgul.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and daughters placed in victorian asylums. but we deny the silen- cing of the present, for psychiatry is different now, not like the representations of one flew over the cuckoo’s nest (kesey, ), but benign, expert, well-meaning. we may concede that psychiatry silenced sexual violence survivors in the s, maybe even the s, but surely not now. the experiential knowledge of survivors, shared in conversa- tions, blogs, book chapters and beyond reveals a different story. i broke down completely. my internal distress was mirrored by my exter- nal reality. i was in a seemingly endless nightmare and i was awake … it didn’t take long for the label of ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ to be pronounced over my dead spirit. i was tendered a large dose of largactil … to appease my reality (richie, , pp ). my first contact with mental health services was at the age of or . although i didn’t have the words to explain what had happened to me, after years of silence, and of feeling that i didn’t have a voice, my story was pouring out. i was closed down with medication and changes of topic. i still do not have the words to tell my story. twenty years earlier, my mum’s trauma had led her to sectioning, ect and a lifetime of contact with mental health services. i believe that our lives would have unfolded very differently if … staff had been supported to understand and engage with our pain - if we were encouraged to tell our stories instead of being shut down with looks, words, drugs and ect (sweeney, ). it is only in recent years that mainstream mental health research has established the role of gender-based violence in the develop- ment of significant mental distress (e.g. bebbington et al., ; khadr et al., ); this partially explains the paucity of research eliciting survivors’ views of support needs and services. sexual violence survivors may justifiably expect that psychiatric services have a long-held fundamental understanding of trauma and sex- ual violence, how it impacts on people and survivors’ subsequent support needs. it often comes as a shock when survivors attempt to access help and realise that not only is there very little well- funded support available, but that the response of psychiatry can be actively harmful (smith et al., ; bond et al., ). this can leave desperate people with a choice between harmful help, or no help (jensen, quoted in russo, , p. ). further, asking for help with nothing changing can replicate dam- aging early experiences (e.g. see smith et al., ). what do we mean when we describe psychiatric help as harm- ful? it is not uncommon, even in the #metoo era, for sexual vio- lence survivors to be disbelieved by psychiatric services, to be explicitly told ‘you were not abused, you have a mental illness’ (see also hughes et al., this issue). russo writes, ‘psychiatry is one of the best preventions of truth … becoming a mental patient was a good solution for everyone, except for me’ ( ). research has found that mental health staff often fail to validate disclosures because service users have psychiatric diagnoses (mantovani and allen, ), and frequently use ‘alleged’ when recording disclo- sures in medical notes (trevillion et al., ), a subtle form of silencing. alongside inflicting immense psychological damage, denying sexual violence jeopardises criminal proceedings and risks keeping people in abusive situations. connected to this, the power and authority of biomedical psy- chiatric interpretations of mental distress can delegitimise peo- ple’s own knowledge: i knew that what i was experiencing made sense, given what had taken place in my life. even then i understood my reactions as sane responses to an insane world. i was told, ‘whatever else might be going on with you is not relevant – it’s your mental illness that matters’. this drove me into a frenzy, for now help was just another perpetrator saying, ‘you liked it, you know you did; that wasn’t so bad; it’s for your own good.’ i was diagnosed and described as ‘lacking insight’ – ensuring that i would never be able to legitimately represent my self or my own experi- ences (filson, , pp. ). whilst experiences of diagnosis are idiosyncratic, receiving a diag- nosis can operate as a powerful signifier that it is you who are the problem, not your experiences, reinforcing silence. the label ‘per- sonality disorder’, for instance, locates the problem within the individual and de-legitimses the search for meaning in one’s responses to, and interaction with, the social world (coles, ). watson has observed, ‘what messages is society giving to abusers when victims are given disorders as the explanation for distress?’ ( ). similarly, shaw and proctor comment: i cannot understand how the vast majority of perpetrators of sexual vio- lence walk free in society; whilst people who struggle to survive its after effects are told they have disordered personalities (cited in coles, ). prominent psychiatrist and trauma researcher judith herman argues that help is always harmful when it mimics the original trauma by taking power away from the survivor ( ). everyday experiences of using psychiatric services can re-trauma- tise survivors and actively prevent healing. consider the use of restraint and forcible injection, which can physically re-enact rape and sexual assault. agenda, a uk-based non-governmental organisation, has found that one in five women and girls admitted to uk psychiatric units experience physical restraint, including repeated and face down, and that women and girls are more likely to be restrained than men and boys ( ). it was horrific… i had some bad experiences of being restrained face down with my face pushed into a pillow. i can’t begin to describe how scary it was, not being able to signal, communicate, breathe or speak. anything you do to try to communicate, they put more pressure on you. the more you try to signal, the worse it is (mind, ). the damage inflicted by ‘power over’ responses to distress also takes subtler forms, including overt and insidious pressures to accept prescriptions, treatments and diagnoses that may conflict with people’s own beliefs and needs. this replication of invalida- tion, coercion and force can be hugely damaging, not only to sur- vivors but also to staff, particularly those who are themselves survivors: research suggests that there are significant trauma rates amongst health and social care staff (e.g. bracken et al., ; esaki and larkin, ; mclindon et al., ). this is because the organisational expectation that staff will use ‘power over’ relational approaches can erode staff compassion (sweeney et al., ), with pessimism – rather than hope – protecting staff from feelings of helplessness (chambers et al., ). biomedical dominance, insufficient support and training in sexual violence and trauma-informed approaches, and inconsistent access to structured, reflective supervision can act as further bar- riers to compassionate responses to sexual violence survivors (see sweeney et al., ). furthermore, it is difficult for staff to face and accept the scale and horror of sexual violence and abuse with- out support (see sweeney et al., ). bond and colleagues ( ) interviewed csa survivors, and found: all the survivors who spoke to us described numerous encounters with support services that demonstrated an innate lack of empathetic epidemiology and psychiatric sciences https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core understanding, professional knowledge and expertise in how best to pro- vide appropriate support for adult survivors of csa. sexual violence within psychiatric settings perpetrators of sexual violence are able to operate in institutions where organisational cultures reinforce silence; where there is a ‘conducive context’ (lovett et al., ). following a recent investigation into the aid sector, the uk house of commons international development committee concluded: the delivery of aid, whilst providing lifesaving resources to people and communities in crisis, can also be subverted by sexual predators into a channel through which they can magnify their power and use possession of those resources to exploit and abuse some of the most vulnerable people in the world. we must not turn away from the horror of it. we have a duty to confront it ( , pp. ). psychiatric service users are also vulnerable to institutional sexual exploitation and violence, not least because psychiatric labels can undermine claims to truth and rationality (roper, ; rose, ). the few studies that have been conducted into sexual vio- lence on inpatient wards are deeply troubling. a survey of women in australia found that % had been sexually assaulted whilst an inpatient, and of the % who reported this to staff, the overwhelming majority ( %) found the response unhelpful (vmiac, ). one participant commented ‘if the assailant is not a patient but a nurse or doctor who can you trust or turn to for help?’. a recent investigation by england’s care quality commission found that on inpatient psychiatric wards over a -month period in , there were reports of rapes, sexual assaults and acts of sexual harassment, the majority against service users ( ). the report also concluded that recording rates may be low, partially due to staff desensitisation through the regularity of incidents (see hughes et al., this issue, for further discussion). police recording of sexual assaults on psychiatric inpatient wards has also been found to be inadequate (foley and cummins, ). whilst the uk has a policy of gender seg- regation on inpatient psychiatric wards, this cannot protect people from sexually violent staff, or perpetrators of the same gender. out of the silence: grassroots and community-based responses the uk has few statutory services for sexual violence survivors (coy et al., ; allnock et al., ; hawkins and taylor, ; kennedy and white, ), with national health service trauma clinics often excluding experiences of childhood abuse. this, coupled with experiences of statutory iatrogenic harm, means that many survivors are seen in community-based special- ist sexual violence services (bond et al., ). despite survivors’ generally reporting positive experiences of these services (bond et al., ), they are often underfunded, resulting in long waiting lists, session fees and time-limited therapy (smith et al., ). it is also uncommon for the sector’s specialist expertise to impact on psychiatric services: indeed, there are concerns that the direction of influence runs the other way, with a psychiatric ‘creep’ into anti-violence services, such as the increasing tendency to establish separate services for the ‘mentally ill’ (rubinsztajn, ). survivors who have experienced pathologisation and iatrogenic harm often move away from helper–helpee roles, connecting instead through mutual peer support (e.g. filson and mead, ). some survivors have established organisations fostering peer support, self-help, activism, campaigning and education, often simultaneously. in the uk, these include survivors’ voices (co-established/led by cp, http://www.survivorsvoices.org), butterfly (established by va, http://focus- - .co.uk/projects-ser- vices/) and the survivors’ collective (www.survivorscollective. co.uk). there are also important transnational sources of influ- ence and inspiration. endeavours like these are often run with lit- tle or no funding, reliant instead on the passion and commitment of key members. in reflecting on a berlin-based survivor-led sexual violence project, rubinsztajn observes: how powerful it can be when people realise that everybody else in the pro- ject is a survivor … it’s then, maybe for the first time, that the person is consciously in a space with other survivors and can physically grasp that they’re not alone in their experience … you find yourself among likeable, tough and funny people who have gone through similar things and decided not to bear those experiences and consequences on their own any- more, not to stay silent anymore (emphasis added, pp. ). carr writes of, ‘the persistent argument from service users, survi- vors, their organisations and communities … that we must have independent organisations, arenas and power bases from which to think and do for ourselves’ ( ). rubinsztajn also voices con- cerns that survivor-led sexual violence projects can come to mimic the mainstream services they critique; she describes the lack of a single ‘we’ in survivors’ needs and perspectives, with some experiences highlighted and others unspoken, such as of racism. adopting an intersectional approach is a shared core standard for a number of women’s anti-violence services, bench- marking good practice (imkaan et al., ). the hope of trauma-informed approaches the behaviours and thoughts that experts in some cultures label psychotic or schizophrenic are usually understandable reactions to our life events and circumstances. so rather than ask, ‘what is wrong with you?’ and ‘what shall we call it?’ it is more sensible, and useful, to ask, ‘what hap- pened to you?’ and ‘what do you need?’ (read, ). trauma-informed approaches may be a way of enabling all ser- vices – community and statutory alike – to come closer to meeting survivors’ needs, as well as improving staff experiences (e.g. see sweeney et al., ). trauma-informed approaches are an organ- isational change process that can be described as: a strengths-based framework that is grounded in an understanding of, and responsiveness to, the impact of trauma, that emphasises physical, psycho- logical and emotional safety for both providers and survivors, and that creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild a sense of control and empowerment (hopper et al., ). the aim then is to improve experiences, relationships and environments for staff and service users. whilst concepts like ‘strengths-based’ and ‘empowerment’ can seem almost meaning- less because of their overuse, they are hugely significant in this context, intended to reverse the ‘power over’ abuses that are at the heart of sexual violence and iatrogenic harm (see butler et al., ; sweeney et al., ). fundamental to trauma-informed approaches is ‘seeing through a trauma lens’ – that is, understanding the connections between experiences and coping strategies – and preventing (re) traumatisation. although further principles have been fairly well described (see e.g. elliot et al., ; butler et al., ; samhsa, ; filson, ; sweeney et al., ), the approach a. sweeney et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.survivorsvoices.org http://www.survivorsvoices.org http://focus- - .co.uk/projects-services/ http://focus- - .co.uk/projects-services/ http://focus- - .co.uk/projects-services/ http://www.survivorscollective.co.uk http://www.survivorscollective.co.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core is relatively complex and consequently, commonly misunderstood (sweeney and taggart, ). this increases the risk that where implemented, it could be diluted to the point of worthlessness (sweeney and taggart, ). change is required at a systemic level, including staff support, training and reflective supervision (bloom and farragher, ). alongside commissioning mean- ingful trauma-informed services (bush and brennan, ), com- missioners should develop and strengthen peer-led organisations, reinforcing local capacity to engage in service provision, peer sup- port and campaigning (e.g. bott et al., ). despite widespread interest in, and early implementation of, trauma-informed approaches, there is a lack of underpinning empirical research (see christie, ). and just as there are vast differences between grassroots and mainstream psychiatric ser- vices, so too there are vast differences between survivor-led and mainstream research approaches (e.g. see russo, ). research led by and co-produced with survivors is needed to understand whether and how services meet survivors’ needs, and to investigate the potential – and potential failings – of trauma-informed approaches. this research should itself be trauma-informed (shimmin et al., ) and occur within an epistemic injustice framework (understanding discrimination and exclusion in knowledge generation and against knowers) (fricker, ), with an understanding of how participation affects survivor researchers, particularly when working in partnerships (roper, ). the charter for organisations engaging survivors in projects, research & service development, currently being piloted, aims to provide a quality mark for safe, meaningful and effective sur- vivor involvement in research (perôt and chevous, ). closing thoughts survivors of sexual violence and abuse can feel let down over and over again – that the abuse was able to continue for so long; that perpetrators are able to continue abusing, including within psy- chiatric services; that the criminal justice system is stacked in per- petrators’ favour (as evidenced by low conviction rates, walby and allen, ); and that the psychiatric system, which should understand and support survivors, is more often harmful and pathologising of individual responses, rather than recognising people’s strengths and remarkable ability to adapt and survive. it is through validation (the act of believing) that a climate of sup- port and recognition for victims and survivors of sexual violence and abuse is created. our core belief, and one that is worth repeat- ing, is that the expertise about what we need to heal lies with us. acknowledgements. angela sweeney would like to thank dr steve gillard for helpful feedback on and discussions about an earlier draft. financial support. angela sweeney is funded by a national institute for health research post-doctoral fellowship (pdf- - - ). this paper presents independent research partially funded by the national institute for health research (nihr). the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the nhs, the nihr or the department of health. conflict of interest. none. references agenda ( ) briefing on the use of restraint against women and girls. available at https://weareagenda.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /restraint- foi-research-briefing-final .pdf (accessed october ). allnock d, radford l, bunting l, price a, morgan-klein n, ellis j and stafford a ( ) in demand: therapeutic 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the silence: grassroots and community-based responses 	the hope of trauma-informed approaches 	closing thoughts 	acknowledgements 	references introduction: hearing women’s stories all rights reserved ©, theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada this document is protected by copyright law. use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ this article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the université de montréal, université laval, and the université du québec à montréal. its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ document generated on / / : p.m. theatre research in canada recherches théâtrales au canada introduction: hearing women’s stories kim solga volume , number , uri: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi: https://doi.org/ . / ar see table of contents publisher(s) graduate centre for the study of drama, university of toronto issn - (print) - (digital) explore this journal cite this document solga, k. ( ). introduction: hearing women’s stories. theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/tric/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/tric/ -v -n -tric / https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/tric/ introduction tric / rtac • . / • pp - • hearing women / Écouter les femmes hearing women’s stories kim solga as i sit down to write this, it’s been exactly one year since the new york times broke the story of decades of sexual assault allegations by hollywood mogul harvey weinstein. i know, because i’ve been glued to the times website, like many women in north america and around the world, waiting to hear if the senate will vote to confirm republican supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh. kavanaugh gave an extraordinary performance of white male self-entitlement before the senate judiciary committee convened to grill him about accusations of sexual misconduct; this came hot on the heels of dr. christine blasey ford’s historic own testimony, in which she detailed her painful memories of his assault on her, and patiently taught the assembled senate panelists how human psychology works, and how trauma is retained in the brain. if you’ve also followed this story (and i bet you have), then you know the take-aways already. blasey ford was a picture of measured calm, despite the unbelievably risky, poten- tially re-traumatizing thing she had volunteered to do as a concerned american citizen. she had no choice but to be: “hysterical” women make too-easy targets for the media and are never believable, their narratives drowned in ungainly girlish feeling. kavanaugh, on the other hand, emoted to the heavens, so much so that matt damon’s imitation in his saturday night live cold open on september barely upstaged the original. and yet, of course; and yet. as i write this, it looks very much like kavanaugh’s narrative will prevail. (spoiler alert: it did.) as a woman, a feminist, and a citizen of north america i’m saddened and enraged by this apparent inevitability; as a feminist theatre researcher, however, i am not even remotely surprised. the ways in which women’s stories of sexual violence and domestic abuse have for centuries been shoe-horned into patriarchal narrative structures was the subject of my phd dissertation and my first book, violence against women in early modern performance: invisible acts. in its second chapter, i told the story of the rape script women in shakespeare’s time were expected to follow in order to have their assault first believed, and then pursued, by the respectable men of their communities. that script was detailed by the author of the treatise the lawes resolutions of womens rights, in an effort to help female victims of violence access some measure of social agency. the take-away from that -year old text: find a way to tell your story according to the expectations men have about what it should have felt or looked like. (that is, assuming you really weren’t consenting. assuming it really was kind of a big deal.) make yourself appear respectable and believable on their terms—because those are the only terms that count. what does it mean to listen—really listen—to women’s narratives now, in ? #metoo has galvanized a movement and gained incredible momentum in a very short time, and yet the recent evidence from washington speaks volumes not only about the very real limita- tions still placed around women’s ability to exert power and influence in the anglo-american introduction hearing women / Écouter les femmes • pp - • / . • tric / rtac public sphere, but also about the extent to which women’s stories (both lived testimony, and well researched evidence—both of which dr. blasey ford brought with her to washington) continue to be undermined, denigrated, or simply not heard. consider jian ghomeshi’s recent resurfacing in the new york review of books: he published a personal essay that reflects on his experience as “the guy everyone hated first” in a gesture plainly poised to capitalize on the fame of #metoo but also on its inevitable, growing backlash. tellingly, as many female commentators have noted, the essay is not an apologia; rather, it features ghomeshi hum- ble-bragging his way through his own side of the story and its aftermath, at great length and on a prestigious platform—even as the wrenching and horrific narratives of the women who accused him remain broadly misunderstood, their complexities having been mishandled by the prosecution in the trial that failed to bring them any sense of closure, or any justice. and so i ask again—this time as editor of tric/rtac—what it means, and what it might mean, to listen thoughtfully, carefully, and without prejudice to women’s stories now. this issue offers, i hope, some provisional answers to this difficult but urgent question. in the following pages you will find six full-length articles by seven women researchers, telling a host of other women’s stories—historical and contemporary, fictional and real, queer and straight, of colour and not of colour. following that, two more women occupy the pages of this autumn’s forum, with important news for our shared discipline. to open, laine zisman newman explores what she terms the “lesbian rush” in the work of toronto-based artist jess dobkin. zisman newman invites us to witness dobkin’s “rush” and then to question it, seeing in the rush’s performative arrest the possibility of hearing, in the gaps and silences dobkin’s the magic hour makes, a narrative that can’t be fully articu- lated on any other terms but its own. next, yasmine kandil and michelle macarthur explore danya buonastella and nina gilmour’s death married my daughter, a feminist clown show based on the deaths of shakespeare’s ophelia and desdemona. witnessing the political power of “seduction and provocation” in buonastella and gilmour’s bouffon labour, kandil and macarthur argue that their zombie-feminist clowns have much to teach applied theatre practitioners of all backgrounds—provided we are willing to listen carefully to the female dead. a pair of articles then take on canadian women’s histories, on the page and the stage: cathleen mckague heads into the archive to follow the breadcrumbs left by robertson davies as he prepared to produce the taming of the shrew in what we might now regard as an original-practices style for the peterborough little theatre, while shelley scott returns to the scene of gwen pharis ringwood’s iconic still stands the house. mckague painstakingly details what davies’ hit amateur production can tell us about canadian practitioners nego- tiating “british” alongside “canadian” techniques on the pre-stratford stage, while scott considers the interleaving of geography, climate, and violence in ringwood’s representation of settler-colonial gender roles and relationships. our final two articles, by kimberley mcleod and naila keleta-mae, each ask readers to question how the commonplace narratives we tell ourselves as researchers about the art we investigate can work insidiously to legitimize, and to recirculate, normalized perspec- tives about that art. mcleod looks closely at the comic nathan fielder and his spoof reality show nathan for you; fielder’s work, she argues, places theatre-of-the-real traditions in rich and complex conversation with reality television tropes, a move that allows us to question how, and why, cultural critics have implicitly hierarchized these genres as “valuable” and introduction tric / rtac • . / • pp - • hearing women / Écouter les femmes “dismissable” respectively. closing our articles section, keleta mae surveys trey anthony’s labour as both playwright and cultural impresario; she examines how anthony cultivates sell-out audiences of black women precisely by sharing those women’s stories, proudly and exclusively, on her stages. ignoring critics’ complaints about her work (often born of their own eurocentric, white expectations about what “good” drama looks and sounds like), anthony makes space for black women’s bodies, conversations, and catharsis in the auditoriums the critics choose to vacate; their loss is her black female audience’s gain. in the forum this issue, jill carter reflects on years of the centre for drama, theatre and performance studies at the university of toronto. carter pays particular attention to how the centre is actively working toward decolonizing its academic and artistic practices and considers the work that still remains to be done in that vein. then, in what we hope will become a bi-annual tradition of surveying recent trends in quebec theatre and perfor- mance scholarship, louise forsyth offers our first ever review essay of new work from the community’s major scholarly journals. following forsyth’s essay, our usual roster of book reviews rounds out the issue. nine women, nine narratives—exploratory, critical, unexpected, informative. all differ- ent, all presented here by tric/rtac’s proud team of seven hard-working female editorial staff: selena couture (book review editor), allison leadley (ea), sonya malaborza (trans- lator), nicole nolette (french language editor), cassandra silver (managing editor), jessica watkin (ea), and kim solga (general editor). we hope you enjoy. but please listen carefully. microsoft word - _pdfconv_b e a-a - e - -d e af .docx running head: #meaftertoo #meaftertoo the hashtag that toppled hegemons? a feminist narrative case study of #metoo by daphne simone a thesis submitted to the faculty of social and applied sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in professional communication royal roads university victoria, british columbia, canada supervisor: dr. jennifer walinga june , daphne simone, running head: #meaftertoo committee approval the members of daphne simone’s thesis committee certify that they have read the thesis titled #meaftertoo the hashtag that toppled hegemons? a feminist narrative case study of #metoo and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements for the degree of master of arts in professional communication: dr. jennifer walinga [signature on file] dr. jaigris hodson [signature on file] final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon submission of the final copy of the thesis to royal roads university. the thesis supervisor confirms to have read this thesis and recommends that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements: dr. jennifer walinga [signature on file] running head: #meaftertoo creative commons statement this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution-noncommercial- sharealike . canada license. to view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /ca/. some material in this work is not being made available under the terms of this licence: • third-party material that is being used under fair dealing or with permission. • any photographs where individuals are easily identifiable. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? table of contents table of contents .............................................................................................................. abstract .............................................................................................................................. acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... introduction #meaftertoo—the hashtag that toppled hegemons? a feminist narrative case study of #metoo ................................................................................... literature review ........................................................................................................... i. a divided feminist protest culture .................................................................. ii. a pandemic of normative gender bias and rape culture ............................... iii. shouting back: post-feminist collectivist empowerment via digital hashtag protest ............................................................................................................... iv. sexual assault: a dominantly female experience .......................................... v. a powerful female perspective ........................................................................ methodology .................................................................................................................... vi. a critical feminist theoretic framework ........................................................ vii. narrative interviews: a face and voice for experiences with systemic rape culture............................................................................................................... viii. collection and analysis of narrative lived experience data .......................... ix. assembling a critical feminist narrative documentary ................................. x. timeline and budgetary considerations ........................................................... xi. dismantling systemic patriarchal power structures ........................................ #meaftertoo: the documentary film (presentation and analysis of data) ........... conclusion ....................................................................................................................... xii. summary discussion ........................................................................................ xiii. confounding factors & limitations ................................................................. xiv. recommendations—a feminist future ........................................................... references ........................................................................................................................ running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? abstract unlike many less successful precursors, #metoo exploded onto social media in a way in which previous viral feminist hashtags had not. created by activist tarana burke and later picked up and amplified by multiple celebrity voices, such as alyssa milano and rose mcgowan, #metoo would be shared tens of millions of times by , becoming an amplified vehicle for women’s voices and a means of denouncing violence and patriarchy across the globe. so widely amplified, in fact, that it began to topple real-world hegemons and a feminist battle-cry was born. yet while some criticized hashtag activism as ‘slacktivism’, #metoo managed to achieve what other hashtags did not, and few feminist scholars have been able to articulate the reasons why. this study looks at what propelled so many more individual women to suddenly opt-in to public discourse than ever before. in the film #meaftertoo, i examine the ways that hashtag activism can evolve into visible, immutable, and compelling global protest, by highlighting several powerful individual narratives in order to uncover those ‘reasons why’. illuminating myriad intersecting themes such as a lack of institutionalized gatekeeping and a facility of participation without qualification, as well as a time and place where feminist anger had reached a watershed, (bolstered by the fact that literally anyone could post a single word online in order to join the conversation), simplicity emerged as key. to best display the data, the case study’s film speaks to individual women and experts from ontario, canada, placing each of these narratives in conversation with one another in order to showcase personal faces and voices alongside real testimonial on questions of female agency, gendered power imbalances, workplace harassment and complaint structures, as well as prevailing attitudes toward rape-culture and normalized micro-aggression. from a feminist constructivist point of view, participants all agreed: a proverbial ice-burg has broken free such that the socio-political time for an emergence of far- reaching and long-term feminist disruption is, quite literally, now. keywords #metoo, #meaftertoo, feminism, social media, sexual violence, rape culture, micro-aggression, sexual harassment, intersectionality, critical feminist theory, feminist constructivism. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? acknowledgements without the support of several wonderful beings, this passion project and the resulting film would not have been possible. first and perhaps most significant, as a solo mum, eternal gratitude and pride goes out to my sweet, brave, curious and wonderful (currently) -year-old son, liam. he gave up so much parent-time and asked me so often, “mommy, now are you done your masters?”. yes, baby boy, i believe i finally am! no less significant are the people in my life who have stood behind me, helping with moral, ethical, educational and/or very personal supports throughout this academic and social justice journey. to my amazing mother, liam’s gramma, geri carmelly: thank you for being my rock and for standing in with liam for me when i had to work all day or all night. you made this possible. to my sister, rochelle carmelly harrison, for being there for me when i needed a leg- up, or an ear, one hundred and ten percent of the time. to my dear friends and colleagues—too numerous to put into one page (many of you are in the film credits!). you volunteered your time, your insight, and your talent to a labour of love for me; many of you without pay, and you’re the reason that patriarchy won’t last. we’re going to make a difference. to the kind and courageous women who lent their voice, both interviewees and experts alike, in this documentary: by taking on additional risk of backlash in order to “go public” about subject matter which still holds significant stigma in our culture, you have demonstrated the power that the female voice is capable of wielding when we rise. you are my hope and my inspiration. i salute you and sincerely hope i’ve done your eloquent words as much justice as you wished for. finally, to my inspiring and outstanding academic supervisor and committee advisor, dr. jennifer walinga, my secondary committee member, dr. jaigris hodson, and to dr. virginia mckendry (who wasn’t on my committee but was always there for an ear!): each of you remarkable humans talked me off the wall at different stages of this master’s journey, more than once, and you never missed an email when i needed help. collaborating with brilliant, motivated and extraordinary educators like you is the reason i originally aspired to teach when i first began my career some years ago, and a great part of the inspiration for why i hope to be a lifelong learner, with humility and awe, regardless of where my career takes me on this mortal coil. to everyone else who chose (or might still choose) to be present for the film’s feminist journey, i know we can agree on at least one thing: patriarchy is so passé. let’s continue to rise together and smash it. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? introduction #meaftertoo—the hashtag that toppled hegemons? a feminist narrative case study of #metoo on october , , journalists megan twohey and jodi kantor at the new york times released a ground-breaking expose accusing hollywood media executive, harvey weinstein, of multiple acts of criminal sexual misconduct, assault, and rape (twohey & kantor, ). weinstein’s media indictment, alongside immediate and public outrage from influential celebrity social media users like @alyssa_milano, @rosemcgowan and others on twitter (cobb & horeck, ), sparked a storm of digital conversations between survivors of assault, feminist activists, and the media. millions of lived female experiences with misogyny and everyday sexism were shared, united under the hashtag #metoo; a social media moniker originally coined in by feminist activist, tarana burke (ohlheiser, ). as a means to call for and spread support and empathy toward women who had experienced systemic abuse, #metoo had already achieved noteworthiness. but subsequent to twohey and kantor’s media expose and celebrity amplification thereafter, the hashtag’s popularity exploded. a re-ignited digital feminist battle-cry, #metoo hit the public sphere and spread in a way that previous viral feminist hashtags had failed to (jackson, ). where prior social media events like ’s #yesallwomen and #beenrapedneverreported, as well as ’s #whyistayed saw thousands of sympathetic responses online (clark, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ; thrift, ), most were transient instances. hashtag feminist shoutback on social media had shown a pattern of rise-and-fall inefficacy, trapped within an ephemeral internet sea of shifting attention spans, and on-again-off-again interest from both popular influencers and the media (thrift, ; clark, ). yet, somehow, saw not one, but two groundbreaking investigative exposes on gender-based violence fill the lens of mainstream american journalism. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? as both the new york times and the new yorker published simultaneously damning accusations against longstanding entertainment industry hegemon, harvey weinstein (farrow, ; twohey & kantor, ), a tidal wave of a novel sort arose. internet feminist anti-violence activists took to unprecedented collective and individual battle stations (cobb & horeck, ), thousands of voices online grew to hundreds of thousands within a matter of days (peters & besley, ). journalist ronan farrow’s personal interviews with multiple women who alleged instances of weinstein’s criminal abuse, and the accompanied complicity of an unscrupulous hollywood industry (farrow, ), sparked outrage not only from the celebrity community, but from the public as well, manifesting with media-amplified cries for immediate legal action and justice (jaffe, ; peters & besley, ). bolstered by such powerful new visibility, feminists began to demand more mainstream recognition of gender bias, abuse, and sexual harassment, as immediate and epidemic social concerns (cobb & horeck, ). as such, the normative, transitory paradigm for digital feminist hashtag protest (as a reactive-only force) had irrevocably evolved. in terms of memetic events (thrift, ), where social media instantiated protest is amplified by mainstream media, #metoo transcended its predecessors when it jumped from online spaces into offline resistance. by sidestepping longstanding gatekeepers, this landslide of social media sharing of female lived experiences with normalized abuse and violence, engendered a new niche within the feminist collectivist communications space (keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ). certainly, the numbers showed an increase in attention, with #metoo instances in the millions by early (cobb & horeck, ). more importantly, and for the first time in digital feminist hashtag protest history, multiple powerful male hegemons began toppling like dominos from their proverbial towers. within weeks, harvey weinstein was indicted, actor bill cosby charged with rape, comedian louis ck and popular news host matt lauer, accused of abuse, while dozens of other men from celebrity positions in media, film, television, music, sports, running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? and fashion, were similarly exposed for abusive and rapacious behaviors (cobb & horeck, ; phipps & ringrose, et al., ; rodino-colocino, ). public discourse on gender and power had also shifted with #metoo, creating a landscape for what communications scholars, cobb and horeck, called “a mass disclosure event,” ( , pp. ), wherein social acceptance for normative gender-based violence and everyday sexism deteriorated in novel ways. in their paper, speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture, keller, mendes & ringrose ( ) also discuss the ways in which social media has begun to enable “the possibility of generating unprecedented connections and unexpected events” (p. ). today’s modern digital protest culture has evolved to employ the power of hashtag activism in disruptive ways which had only begun to be anticipated within the previous handful of years. feminist hashtag events, such as the aforementioned, #yesallwomen, #beenrapedneverreported, and #whyistayed, are three of over a dozen examples within the previous half-decade (horeck, ; thrift, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ; clark, ). still, while such events (as discourse) are often captured in scholarship, the individual narratives detailing personal reasons why so many women have recently begun to take both online and offline actions via feminist battle-cries like #metoo, remains largely unexplored. consequently, the potential for creating overly simplistic binaries when referring to online vs. offline protest/activism, may be growing increasingly problematic. i proposed the research question: what factors contributed to the #metoo movement’s unprecedented evolution from previously reactive patterns of online social media protest to a powerful feminist force for real-world collective disruption? furthermore, what were the individual reasons that so many female-identified voices suddenly chose to challenge pervasive personal and professional stigmas in order to share their very personal (often traumatic) stories online via #metoo? running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? narrative research into the reasons why individuals might choose to share personal lived- experience stories in the public sphere, specifically stories which surround issues such as trauma or abuse, is necessarily sensitive in nature. requisite is both an assured safe space to share, and well- informed participant consent. yet the result of collecting and analyzing these sensitive narratives may yield precious understanding of the ways in which individuals frame their personal experiences within the broader landscape of both individual and collective identities. by employing a narrative case study, situated within the qualitative paradigm of critical feminist theory, i planned to interview, document, and thematically analyze individual female- identified stories among four-to-six participants of the #metoo hashtag protest movement. the outcome of #metoo can be seen as remarkable, both online and offline, as it remains ongoing: hundreds of thousands of self-identified female voices who had previously been silent came forward via social media, while historically indomitable hegemons began losing their coveted public reputations, criminal immunities, and careers (peters & besley, ; cobb & horeck, ). discovering the individual and collectivist reasons that many women became emboldened to share publicly, as well as how the #metoo movement differed in the minds of its participants, from other feminist social media calls-to-action which had preceded it, would be key to understanding the shift that took place from reaction online to disruption in the real world. thematic analysis via narrative case study would assist me in uncovering both unique and overlapping themes within each participant’s narrative, as well as expose perceptions surrounding the socio-political landscape of the #metoo participant community. this form of research is therefore best positioned to help me extend and amplify the voice of the female lived experience herein. by doing so, it was also my hope to discover nuanced answers to questions of feminist agency and community empowerment, as well as expand current discourse on hashtag feminist protest as a growing medium for successful organization. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? literature review in the modern-day battle against gender-based violence, feminist discursive tacticians have employed multiple modes of message encoding for varied anti-violence communication strategies. themes of sexual assault emerge in the literature, some citing a dominantly female experience (peters & besley, ). the pros and cons of internet shoutback feminist protest tactics are argued (horeck, ), using myriad examples such as #yesallwomen, #whyistayed, #beenrapedneverreported, and others (clark, ; horeck, , thrift, ). it’s also clear that a prevalence of rape culture remains pandemic and relevant in all feminist discourse, as a mainstream social threat (keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ; cobb & horeck, ). yet alongside arguments both for and against using social media as a medium for post-feminist collective empowerment (jackson, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ; thrift, ), there remains dissent about how to successfully harness the potential power of organizing hashtag protest beyond the screen. concurrently, there is also little qualitative research into the individual narratives of female-identified persons who choose to share their stories as part of a movement toward an amplified feminist agenda to empowerment. this review of relevant literature will examine current scholarship and discourse surrounding the #metoo conversation; a movement which caught fire in a novel way among women on popular social media channels. in addition, this review will cite recent academic discourse on the paradigm of digital post-feminist hashtag protest culture as a progressively evolving trend, while navigating the relative absence of individual narratives within scholarship therein. a divided feminist protest culture division among feminist scholars regarding tactics for successful activism is not new to media discourse. some scholars have argued there may not yet be a successful way to mobilize a running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? hashtag effectively from an online space into an offline (real world) impact (thrift, ). others insist the key to longevity lies with amplification and that this responsibility lies with mainstream media (jackson, ; cobb & horeck, ). yet amidst the discourse on hashtag conversations, themselves, there is relatively little academic examination involving a deep dive into the individual lived experiences of the female identified persons who are currently making use of them. while feminist scholars like samantha thrift ( ), rosemary clark ( ), and tanya horeck ( ; ) do much to advance the conversation on hashtag feminist protest as a growing trend (cobb & horeck, , pp. ), little narrative research is being done involving interviews with individual women who have chosen to contribute their personal stories of gender-based trauma on today’s social media platforms—particularly in the public sphere. consequently, there remains a dearth of thematic representations cited in literature through which hashtag movements might effectively predict new opportunities to build future disruption for change (berridge & portwood-stacer, ; thrift, ). scholarship discussing feminist hashtag activism has also indicated frustration over the impermanence of social media protest, indicating a tendency toward ephemerality and an ineffectuality across time (baer, ; berridge & portwood-stacer, ; horeck, ). in their paper on feminism, hashtags and violence against women and girls, gender and diversity scholars, susan berridge and laura portwood-stacer ( ) also argue that hashtag protest mediums may foster discursive limitations by oversimplifying complex issues such as rape culture and gender bias (pp. ) in order to fit within truncated mediums. yet if this is indeed the case, then how did #metoo become such a visible exception? a pandemic of normative gender bias and rape culture for the purpose of this research, the term “gender bias” acknowledges the existence of pervasive hegemonic social perspectives in modern culture which continue to attribute female abilities, career competencies, strengths, and/or intrinsic characteristics, attributes and behaviors as running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? less valuable in potential than those of their male counterparts (keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ). the term “rape culture” first appeared in a book, entitled, rape: the first sourcebook for women, edited by noreen connell and cassandra wilson (keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ). it would later be adopted in a documentary by margaret lazarus and renner wunderlich, titled rape culture (peters & besley, ). their discussion noted the insidiousness of a patriarchal society which normalizes and excuses sexual violence against women and girls; making it difficult to prosecute or critically condemn such routine conduct (peters & besley, , p. ). within the landscape of current culture, women continue to find themselves in clear and present danger, lacking both the tools and socio-political structures to exercise their agency where necessary, and to report to authority if/when they feel violated. further, due to an increase in the amplification of these dangers, current scholarly discourse on post-feminist activism reports both feminism and misogyny as increasingly visible within modern conversation, as well as mainstream media (horeck, ; peters & besley, ). much of this current popularization may be due to the prolific sharing of lived experiences between women and girls on public social media platforms such as twitter (thrift, ). shared experiences involving gender biases and socially normative gender-based violence or everyday micro-aggression have recently begun to reach new levels growth (cobb & horeck, , pp. ). feminist sociology scholar, samantha thrift ( ), also argues that the term “rape culture” has seen rebirth as a social disruptor and a hashtag signifier (p. ), exposing the ways in which society perceives and behaves toward victims of sexual violence (and those who perpetrate such violence). many of today’s feminist scholars are attempting to build on grammar which sustains this (horeck, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ; clark, , peters & besley, ; phipps & ringrose, et al., ; rodino-colocino, ), thereby forging new road-maps for assisting in the creation of what media professor jessalyn keller calls “online cultures of support running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? for victims of sexual assault and violence, which can interrupt rape culture through a variety of creative [digital] interventions” (keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., , p. ). and support is critical, as this study will highlight. where women feel supported and able to access the agency required to pass their stories on without gatekeeping, powerful feminist forces for change may begin to emerge and resonate across boundaries. yet, while a plethora of scholarship has documented the fact that hashtag feminist protests have been growing in quantity since (horeck, ; thrift, , clark, , clark, , cobb & horeck, ; jaffe, ; peters & besley, ; phipps & ringrose, et al., ; rodino-colocino, , turley & fisher, ), few scholars cite the nuanced impact of sharing individual lived experiences while speaking of the women who choose to participate. likewise, few cite instances of every-day patriarchal micro-aggression as important signifiers. if a possibility does exist for feminist activists to (re)create the conditions optimal for mass disclosure events wherein large numbers of women would likely choose to contribute their individual personal stories on social media, and if we lower the bar for public outrage from a necessity of reporting rape to an agreement on that our definition of “assault” may also include acts of everyday micro- aggression and normalized patriarchal sexism, might that assist in the development of a sustainable roadmap for fostering further real-world feminist disruption? at the very least, it may finally become a predictable (and demonstrably powerful) outcome of a future where planned hashtag protest movements could rival or even exceed the magnitude of #metoo. in their article, quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest, scholars freelon, mcilwain & clark ( ) put forth that the power of any protest movement as it is exerted through social media can, indeed, be quantified, since “abstract concepts of power developed for offline social movements manifest and change over time in social media” (p. ). before we can reliably predict those changes, however, it’s likely we will also need to explore what motivates running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? individual people to participate in communities of mass disclosure. not all feminist scholars have historically agreed upon whether prolific social media conversations about gender-based violence actually leads to consistently positive outcomes, nor whether safe digital spaces can ever be maintained for those who choose to share their experiences in today’s volatile internet landscape (clark, ; jackson, ). platforms like twitter have inarguably amplified the female voice as it pertains to cultural depictions of rape, misogyny, and patriarchy (thrift, , cobb & horeck, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., , peters & besley, ), yet these same mediums have provided equal opportunity for the amplification of so-called trolls and abusers to discover ready access to new potential victims (jackson, , jackson , clark, ; cobb & horeck, ; turley & fisher, ). as horeck ( ) points out, “it is vital not to forget that social networks also promulgate sexually violent discourse and expand opportunities to shame and humiliate women” (p. ). feminist media scholarship may still have “yet to model the conditions under which activists can successfully and safely mobilize online” (clark, , pp. ), but as of , while safety may remain a wildcard, there does appear to be mounting evidence which demonstrates the potential political efficacy of hashtag activism in mobilizing new online-to-offline modes of anti-violence critique and post-feminist collectivity (cobb & horeck, ). if that is indeed the case, then research into both individual and collectivist motivation for participation must concurrently evolve, in order to predict the mechanisms through which a successful disruption of status quo is most likely to occur. shouting back: post-feminist collectivist empowerment via digital hashtag protest in her essay, hope in a hashtag, rosemary clark discusses how twitter hashtag #whyistayed evolved from the online release of explicit video footage showing an nfl player brutally beating his girlfriend, into a viral protest platform instantiated by women who gathered on social media to express their outrage and solidarity (clark, ). according to clark ( ), over running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? , female-identified participants took part within the first week, sharing personal experiences of domestic violence, and calling upon politicos for greater support mechanisms: imagine one hundred thousand domestic violence survivors demanding change, each shouting one reason why she stayed with her abuser, in a direct affront to the overly simplistic victim-blaming logic that dominates news coverage of violence against women (clark, , p. ). yet clark’s simultaneous criticism of a lack of longevity for the protest, alongside a dearth of existing scholarly literature on the themes which could illustrate a potential for hashtag protest as a possible discursive disruptor (clark, , p. ) illuminates a consistent trend. an accessible sense of affirmation and ‘unity,’ says freelon, mcilwain & clark ( ), is often more powerful than insecurity over worthiness (p. ). many current studies underestimate the political potential of digital hashtag-activist communities and concentrate solely on the size and amplitude of isolated mobilizations (clark, ). yet, in clark’s view, the discourse itself is a mode of activism, capable of eliciting change through what she calls, “connective action,” wherein social media posts can build further power through collectively constructed, thematically linked narratives which have the potential to transcend their internet spaces (clark, , p. ). in their analysis of social media landscapes surrounding the “black lives matter” protest, freelon, mcilwain & clark ( ) also illuminated that digital counter-public movements can indeed “attract elite attention via social media as their concerns are broadcast through news outlets” (p. ). such was the landscape into which #metoo emerged: new grammar was introduced to collective meaning-making surrounding sexual assault, misogyny, and rape (peters & besley, , p. ), and discursive debate surrounding the validity of digital media to produce “real” change within protest politics shifted. inarguably, corporations and government have since been forced to acknowledge their own complicity. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? beginning with harvey weinstein’s unprecedented firing for sexual misconduct, and his dismissal from several other organizations in which he held positions of authority (including the academy of motion picture arts and sciences), peters and besley noted that soon thereafter, “more than other men were similarly accused of sexual assault and forced to resign from their positions in hollywood, media and politics” (peters & besley, , p. ). since , the new york times would increase this number to well over . this landslide of feminist disruption came to be known as “the weinstein effect” (cobb & horeck, ). in her seminal book, living a feminist life, noted feminist scholar and activist, sarah ahmed ( ), also writes of the ways in which feminist theory can be shaped trough an examination of the “ordinary experiences of women at home and at work … since feminism, as a collective movement, is made out of how we are moved to become feminists in dialogue with others. and a movement requires us to be moved” (p. ). our individual and female lived experiences, says ahmed, are “not just of being worn down; these experiences also give us resources. what we learn from these experiences might be how we survive these experiences” (p. ). the powerful collective momentum of the #metoo movement had inarguably emboldened more women to step forward than ever before. where previously each individual may have remained intimidated to speak out amidst potential stigmatization, in this instance, the use of collective hashtag activism had clearly empowered a greater force for both community and individual protest action. sexual assault: a dominantly female experience in the midst of #metoo, a social watershed occurred: widespread, celebrity and media- bolstered recognition for the fact that sexual predation was not just concentrated in politics, movies and mass media but occurred everywhere in our patriarchal culture (peters & besley, ). furthermore, as the majority of victim statements rolled in, a trend long known to feminist activists had finally gone viral among the social media masses. most victims described personal experiences running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? of sexual assault perpetrated on women, by heterosexual men (peters & besley, p. ). by establishing this theme, peters and besley proposed that narratives exposing previously unspoken hegemonic gender imbalances had finally been amplified through collective action online, to such an extent that they were no longer ignorable offline. individual stories created a mosaic of millions of women who spoke of battling a culture where men of influence routinely used their unearned privilege to perpetrate acts of everyday sexism, or to coerce women into sexual situations (peters & besley, ). and media discourse had also begun a shift, moving beyond deliberately provocative exposes on salacious victim details into narratives of normative abuse. with such a mainstream shift in eye-line, came a concurrent shift in social attitudes (cobb & horeck, ). controversies surrounding so-called “ethical” cross-examinations of the backstories of female victims were, for the first time, beginning to take a discursive backseat to stories focused upon the individual perpetrators of violence, instead. a powerful female perspective as feminist scholars horeck and jackson, respectively, point out within their activist work, online protest movements can often be decentralized and “leader-full” (horeck, ; jackson, ). with multiple heads and conflicting (argumentative) agendas, a lack of strong direction or organized permanence has given social media activism a reputation for being feckless (clark, ; jackson ; kangere, kemitare, & michau, ). public interest rises and falls quickly in online spaces, and trends may be swayed by hegemon-controlled mass media (clark, ; horeck, ; rentschler, ; tufekci, ). yet the sharing of millions of personal stories in such a short period of time via #metoo could not be easily ignored, nor silenced; reaching social media platforms and news organizations worldwide within a matter of hours (cobb & horeck, ; peters & besley, ). celebrity and media participation assured a substantial increase in visibility for the protest as women began to forge new connections and establish better boundaries running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? for their own safety (keller, mendes & ringrose, ; clark, ; peters & besley, ). there hadn’t been a feminist movement with this level of amplification in decades. while literature analyzing previous feminist hashtag calls to action revealed that sharing and mobilization can effectively occur in digital spaces when individuals set aside personal agendas in favour of the needs of a collectivist agenda (thrift, ; cobb & horeck, ; peters & besley, ; jackson, ; clark, ), scholarship has yet to emerge which attempts to delve into the critical feminist reasons why individual women may have suddenly felt more emboldened through #metoo specifically. turkish sociology scholar zeynep tufekci ( ) posits that a comprehensive study of modern protest requires the researcher to include analysis of agency, technology and culture simultaneously (p. ). still, most feminist social media sharing-related data relies heavily on a quantitative overview, forming critical arguments based upon how many people participate in specific hashtag activist events (peters & besley, ; cobb & horeck, ; keller, mendes & ringrose, et. al., ), and this data matters, yet it presents an incomplete picture without paying particular respect to individual agency. based on her research with social media algorithms and influencer amplification techniques, tufekci believes that social media protest efficacy may indeed be predictable, and that modern digital technology use has inexorably changed the nature of collective action (tufekci, ). for this reason, the implications for advancing critical feminist scholarship via narrative case study work on movements like #metoo are myriad. the sheer pandemic diversity of woman-identified persons now willing to adopt anti- violence hashtags like #metoo into their own conversations, provides powerful mobilization potential and a vital conduit for modern post-feminist internet anti-violence activists. methodology a qualitative narrative case study grounded within the critical paradigm of feminist constructivism was conducted in order to answer my primary research questions. this study running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? employed hour-long, in-depth interviews with women who had chosen to participate in the #metoo movement online. focusing on their individual narratives as data, using film as a medium for disclosure, multiple interconnected and overlapping themes emerged related to socially extant power structures systemically embedded in current culture. data was analyzed using thematic content analysis in order to ascertain relevant codes and themes throughout the editing process for the film. as a longtime feminist activist, rape survivor, participant of #metoo and film producer/documentarian, it was my belief that i might be well positioned to present such opt-in participatory data from the feminist online anti-violence activist community. it was concurrently my hope to better understand and extend the power of digital feminist protest action through the gathering and qualitative analysis of these stories, in order to identify the factors, mechanisms and processes involved in collectivist disruption of rape culture and patriarchal hegemony. once key factors, mechanisms, and processes behind successful collectivist disruption are identified, it seems likely that future disruptive efforts may be both anticipated and successfully organized. a critical feminist theoretic framework feminism may be defined as “a range of social movements, political movements, and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve the political, economic, personal, and social equality of all gender identities and sexes” such that we can better understand and improve the lives of women (woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, , pp. ). central to all feminist theories are the concepts of gender and sex as distinct entities. gender is a social construct which may evolve through history and/or specific cultural contexts. sex, in contrast, is a biological assignment. gender biases may therefore influence expectations, social opportunities, and roles (wood, , pp. ). critical feminist theory, she further explicates, can be employed to identify prevailing structures and practices vis-à-vis gender or sex, which may “create or uphold running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? disadvantage, inequity, or oppression, and point the way toward alternatives that promote more egalitarian possibilities for individuals, relationships, groups, and societies” (wood, , pp. ). critical feminist theory in research seeks to discover how female identified persons may become empowered and, “in some cases, how they change dominant patterns and perhaps the ideologies that underlie them” (wood, , pp. ). feminist stances make issues of gender relationships and patriarchal power structures central to the design of their qualitative interviews (demarrais & lapan, ; berridge & portwood-stacer, ; woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). it was my intention to do the same. since the aim of my research was to uncover themes which may lead to new potential for the collective disruption of patriarchal hegemony, critical feminist theory presented as an ideal framework in which to situate my research. furthermore, a critical lens within my narrative analysis was foundational to presenting how new meanings and/or opportunities for individual and collective empowerment may have been engendered during the #metoo event; an essential element to my study. in their book, “feminist narrative research”, woodiwiss, smith & lockwood ( ) suggest that “in doing feminist narrative research, researchers need to look, not only at the stories being told, but also at the contexts within which women make sense of and narrate their lives” (pp. ). to that end, i chose a qualitative narrative case study, situated within the critical paradigm of feminist constructivism as a framework of inquiry for my research. this approach seeks to ascertain the ways in which knowledge may be gathered, created and shared collaboratively (woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). professor natasha mauthner ( ) also posits that the reasons how and why specific personal narratives may be shared during specific time periods has much to do with “the ways in which we listen” (pp. ). it is my belief that there may therefore be potential for predicting new and different trends toward emergent story-sharing and resultant potential for political disruption within socio-political contexts. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? phenomenology espouses a systematic examination of personal lived experiences (mcleod, , pp. ). qualitative phenomenological research examines human conceptions of reality “in individual, detailed ways, in order to discover the meanings which people place on their lived experiences” (demarrais & lapan, , p. ). thus in order to focus upon the ways in which meaning had been discursively constructed and agreed upon between collectivist actors (participants) in this study, it was important to collect and analyze their individual stories in-depth (moua & riggs, ; clark, ; woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ), as well as to dig into the socio-political contexts surrounding and influencing each lived experience. a research model which paid respect to feminist constructivism within the scope of narrative content analysis therefore became ideal. situated within an over-arching critical feminist framework, feminist constructivism played a key role in my study analysis, providing insight into issues of institutional, systemic, and political gender inequities (woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). feminist constructivists believe that reality is engendered subjectively through our lived experiences, most notably where these experiences intersect with sociopolitical factors. since hegemonic structures can be argued to exist concurrently within the landscape of each person’s lived experience, a feminist constructivist lens was apt for discovering where individual lived experiences with institutional hegemony may have influenced participant meaning-making in this study, and where such shared social creations could later be challenged as normative truths (charmaz, ). while more generalized feminist methodologies can be somewhat less clear-cut in terms of paradigmatic stages, as there is “little consensus in literature on whether there is any particular specifically feminist approach to doing social research” (allen, , pp. ), i do believe that by employing a feminist constructivist lens within the scope of my narrative analysis, there was useful latitude for drilling down into contextual influencers to the narratives collected—such as patriarchal social power imbalances and running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? the impact of experiences with persistent micro-aggression on the psyche of every participant in the study—overarching and institutionally perpetuated norms. worth noting as i began this study was the fact that i did share in conversation throughout the open-ended interview process, thus co-constructing some social relationships as well as some of the meanings established among my participants. as a rape survivor, myself, and a participant during #metoo, i could be classified by what interpretivist scholar harry wolcott ( ) identified to be “participant as observer,” and my research did therefore involve a transactional epistemology (demarrais & lapan, , p. ). social (and feminist) constructivism assumes that knowledge is created by an interaction between the knower and the known “where subject and object emerge as partners—inseparable—in the generation of meaning,” (demarrais & lapan, , p. ), thus my own previous knowledge of and interaction with rape and trauma survivors was not detrimental to the outcome of my research, rather it was instrumental in uncovering layers of nuance which were helpful in critical interpretive analysis. narrative interviews: a face and voice for experiences with systemic rape culture throughout recorded history, women have often remained silent victims of normalized social and institutional rape culture, gender bias, micro-aggression and sexual abuse (woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ; peters & besley, ). indeed, the stigma and backlash surrounding implications of admitting to these experiences has been so frightening for many women, that choosing to come forward into the public eye, even now, should be deemed an act of extreme courage (cobb & horeck, ). it is for this reason that a qualitative case study which lends both narrative voice and a physical face to the individual experiences of women who have felt empowered to rise and demand change in sharing the hashtag #metoo may transcend a simple research analysis and also become a strong feminist communications tool for the further disruption of patriarchal hegemony. to that end, i have produced and directed a documentary film entitled, running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? “#meaftertoo,” as a medium and a tool for presenting the data both collected and analyzed within the scope of my thesis. employing discursive theoretical analysis as a tool while editing and constructing the film’s narrative arc (berridge & portwood-stacer, ; woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ), this project was assembled using each of the individual stories obtained from the voices and faces of six ( ) women who choose to participate in the study, alongside concurrent narratives from three ( ) female-identified experts—an ontario mpp, phd, and advocate for women’s rights, one human rights and labour lawyer, as well as a popular feminist blogger, author and journalist. i chose a narrative case study particularly because the aim of narrative research fell directly in line with my intention for this thesis work: “to tell, and to study, the stories of our experiences” (clandinin, , pp. ). in his book, “narrative inquiry: a methodology for studying lived experience,” clandinin ( ) asserts that “people are individuals and need to be understood as such, but they cannot be understood only as individuals. they are always in relation, always in a social context.” (pp. ). thus, content analysis via narrative case study provided me with a means to better understand multi-dimensional experiences. it is also, in clandinin’s words, “a collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus” (pp. ). this is significant in that, as a researcher, we are able to enter a case in the midst or at the end of its progress, and even conclude our research inquiry still in the midst of living and telling, reliving and retelling, the stories of those experiences which occur amongst our participants lives, in both individual and social contexts (clandinin & connelly, , p. ). because of the richness of lived-experience data inherent in narrative case study research, it has become among the most popular modes of critical feminist inquiry within scholarship today. though the overarching aim of this thesis is to present findings obtained through narrative content analysis, gathering contextual data related to both the social and political landscape running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? surrounding this case and its participants could not be overlooked. in order to situate this research within a feminist constructivist framework (allen, ; charmaz & belgrave, et., al, ), i had also gathered texts which were publicly posted on twitter using the #metoo hashtag and organized them by theme and experience in order to ground my editing process for the film. by applying a similar thematic content analysis to each narrative i collected thereafter (lazar, ; baer, ; putri, sukma & ragil, et., al, ), i was able to cross-contextualize elements of each participant’s lived experience with other external and relevant influencing factors, including their views on institutionalized norms, the socio-political framework(s) for those norms, as well as other elements such as access and agency. collection and analysis of narrative lived experience data in her book, “foundations for research: methods of inquiry in education and social sciences,” kathleen demarrais ( ) defines the essential core of a narrative interview as: “not simply exchanges of questions and answers by researchers and participants, but a form of discourse where the researcher and participant engage in co-constructing meaning within a particular type of social relationship” (demarrais & lapan, , p. ). since qualitative interviews are among the most comprehensive of methods used by other critical scholars in obtaining useful data for interpretation in order “to gain in-depth knowledge from participants about particular phenomena, experiences, or sets of experience” (demarrais & lapan, , p. ), this study necessarily employed in-depth interviews to create as holistic a picture as possible from the words and experiences of each woman involved. it was my intention that primary data for the study’s narrative arc (contained within the documentary film) be collected using on-camera interviews with a minimum of and a maximum of opt-in adult female participants of the #metoo hashtag movement (those who had chosen to share their personal stories and experiences via public social media platforms like twitter. for the running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? purpose of this study, “opt-in female participants” may be defined as “female-identified adult persons who sign an agreement to participate in the narrative interview process,” and “an adult” will be defined as per the canadian legal age of majority across all provinces, or “an individual who has reached a minimum of years of age” (government of canada department of justice, n.d.). the acronym bipoc refers to “black, indigenous and people of color” as outlined in the bipoc project: a black, indigenous and people of color movement (bipoc project, n.d.). interviews were arranged directly with participants via invitation online (private email, private social media messaging) and/or text message, phone call, or in person request. as an active member of the online anti-violence-against-women community on social media, it was my intention to employ a network-based selection strategy for participation (demarrais & lapan, , p. ). initially, i reached out to my own social media and women’s empowerment networks online, spaces where women were already sharing their stories via truth-to-power communities. however, i did also offer the opportunity for volunteers to come forward privately and provided a dedicated email box where i could be contacted toward that end. interviews were to take place primarily in ontario and obtaining intersectional participation with women representing bipoc and/or those affected by other marginalization(s) within our hegemonic culture, were initially prioritized during recruitment. while the process unfolded, i received approximately a dozen applicants to participate, and was able to hold preliminary conversations with most of these. important to mention is the fact that women in disenfranchised and marginalized groups (bipoc) demonstrated greater concern with displaying their stories publicly throughout my recruitment process. while four women from marginalized groups signed up initially, three did also later drop- out of the film process within days of being interviewed due to concerns over potential eventual personal or professional backlash. two of these dropouts were women of colour with mba degrees. this would seem to further the established narrative that social privilege in systemic rape- running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? culture continues plays a significant role in who may even be able to find a way to ultimately report. interviews with the six ( ) women who did remain in the study were captured in-person, both at a private and safe studio space, as well as on location (where requested) at the participant’s home or office. given that the nature of these discussions was predictably triggering for some participants, i had felt it important to conduct all interviews at the sole discretion of the participant, in a location they deemed safe and without crossing any subject-matter boundaries which the participant was uncomfortable addressing. in her writings, kathleen demarris ( ) points out that by allowing themselves to be studied, research subjects have a right to the social power that comes from that knowledge (pp. ). thus, in order to establish additional informed consent prior to the start of any interview, each participant was also allowed to re-read all electronic invitational and study design materials, as well as to ask any questions they may still have had (demarris & lapan, ). individual interviews were casual in nature and generally ran approximately - minutes in length, including semi-structured and open-ended questions in order to obtain as comprehensive a personal narrative from each participant as possible (thomas & hall, ; allen, ; moua & riggs, ; clark, ; woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). semi structured interviews with conversational and open-ended questions were valuable to the process of engaging with subjects in a free manner, allowing them to contribute their ideas and communicate their challenges without restriction, thus providing a means to collaborate in the discovery and discussion of meaning(s). in keeping with the practice of qualitative phenomenological interviewing (demarrais & lapan, , p. ), participants were asked to identify what certain terms (such as “patriarchy” and “rape culture”) meant to them, and whether those definitions have changed from when they first assimilated the words (carter olsen, ). perceived meanings for these terms—previously running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? defined in literature review—arguably held significant weight among those who participated in #metoo. unpacking feminist theoretical themes during the interview process also assisted in starting a dialogue which lead to the sharing of richer narratives. in addition, interviewees were encouraged to talk about the types of voluntary social interactions they have had using the hashtag #metoo (or others in previous feminist calls to action). key to this process was asking each person to tell the story of any one (or more) particular catalysts which contributed to their choice to share previously sensitive or otherwise potentially traumatic lived-experiences in a public manner (demarrais & lapan, , pp. ). what sparked the decision? how did they feel beforehand, and then in the aftermath? from a narrative perspective, an inquiry which allowed participants the freedom to express their emotional underpinnings, engendered greater insight on my part during later analysis surrounding each individual’s motivation. similar to a study by carter olsen involving the hashtag #bringbackourgirls, effort was concurrently made to probe into the ways in which participation in #metoo may have moved from online into offline spaces, and/or fostered an individual or collectivist sense of empowerment (carter olsen, ). participants were asked to discuss revelations in terms of their own agency which may have arisen from their participation within the #metoo movement. these insights were contrasted with the ways in which they felt their point of view may have differed, prior to participation, or how it evolved. for the purpose of illuminating extant power imbalances which triggered the #metoo movement, unpacking the feminist theoretical themes and codes which speak to each woman’s individual challenges within a patriarchal status quo is requisite. as sociologist jo woodiwiss ( ) explains, “feminist narrative research must include an interest in the stories women (are able to) tell about their traumatic experiences. what is sometimes unclear or obscured in the process of collecting data, are the consequences to our storytelling. we can be imprisoned as well as liberated running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? by the stories we come to tell” (pp. ). given the nature of pervasive hegemonic structures still firmly in place, care was undertaken with each participant to allow for expression without censorship, and without judgement. additionally, inquiring into whether participants believe progress has (or has not) been achieved via the #metoo movement was manifest to predicting whether longer-term increases in personal agency could be bolstered through these types of hashtag protest events. if participants believed their actions had been helpful to dismantling social norms of pervasive institutional and/or social gender bias, potential did seem to exist through further empowerment and sharing to carry those feminist narratives forward into future action(s). at the conclusion of each interview process, those who wished to add to the conversation beyond the scope of the semi-structured inquiry were also given an opportunity to speak freely and voice their thoughts. qualitative data via each narrative obtained during the interview process was coded during the editing process for the film and themed through a critical feminist lens, within the well- established tradition of narrative content analysis (souto-manning, ; woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). emergent stages were apprehended using ryan & bernard ( )’s qualitative theming framework: “( ) discovering themes and subthemes; ( ) winnowing themes to a manageable few; ( ) building hierarchies of themes or codes; ( ) linking themes into (feminist) theory” (ryan & bernard, , p. ). my analysis was multilayered and interpretive. each story comprised a basic unit to be transcribed and reviewed in multiple stages (demarris & lapan, ). my lens examined the explicit manifestations of each narrative (the actual stories as these were told), as well as underlying individual and social (co)constructions of meaning (those biases and rationales which give each story shape). since storytelling is an abstract and collaborative process, so, too, was theming during this study. an inductive interpretation of each participant’s contribution to their own feminist narrative running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? played a key role. it was therefore important to discover which characteristic—“(phenomenon)- ness”—best captured meaningful results within each major theme as these emerged (ryan & bernard, ). major themes did emerge directly from patterns and recurrences observed within my participant answers. primary data “types” and their resultant meanings became apparent in the documentary, as did discursive representations of social constructions which intersected with one another. after transcribing each interview, an inductive thematic and open coding process (demarrais & lapan, , p. ) allowed me to pull out subcategories, as well as repeating representations of power and gender—integral to feminist paradigm (demarrais & lapan, ; thomas & hall, ; allen, ; moua & riggs, ; clark, ; woodiwiss, ). interviews were viewed as individual communication actions unto themselves, where participants were encouraged to articulate their meanings and share their own representations to describe each lived experience. my objective was to discover whether and how themes in evidence existed to establish the ways in which #metoo evolved from reactive online protest into disruptive real-world action to dismantle patriarchal power structures. further analysis involved searching for patterned data (codes) which was key to interpreting additional meanings and nuanced contexts. these included noteworthy commonalities between participants citing feelings of stigmatization, reticence to report ‘unworthy’ non-rape scenarios, and worry over outcome from ‘going public’ within a culture of patriarchal systemic imbalance. assembling a critical feminist narrative documentary capturing participant interviews on camera and interweaving these with expert testimony was integral to the method by which i wished to report upon the findings within the study process. as a documentarian, i know that video has the unique capacity to lend both voice and face (and potentially volume) to a subject-matter which is rarely discussed in such visible, personified, running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? spaces. subjects such as rape culture and gender violence have historically been shrouded in stigma and taboo (peters & besley, ), yet millions of women emerged onto public social media channels during the #metoo movement. by showcasing the faces of women who’ve empowered themselves to come forward (both individually and via collectivist channels) in order to challenge hegemonic patriarchy using #metoo, and bolstering their narratives alongside those of experts—all of whom had also experienced systemic rape-culture within their own female experiences—an opportunity was manifest to inspire and generate potential and visibility such that other women might also choose to come forward in future—and with wider-reaching audience potential than an academic paper alone. it was also my hope to better understand and extend the power of digital feminist protest action such that processes of collectivist disruption are identified, and future disruptive efforts may be both anticipated and successfully organized. only by collecting and connecting the individual stories and lived experiences of women who chose to share within the larger narrative of the #metoo movement, can a truly vital intersection between social media and collective identity assist us in discovering the reasons why so many women chose to share, in addition to the ways in which the movement evolved. this thesis documentary did ultimately encompass an individual-into-collective storytelling process, weaving together the narratives of multiple singular voices, alongside elements of my academic findings, into a collaborative story with interconnections through multiple layers of interpretive analysis. overlapping themes emerged through academic narrative research and by drilling down into each interview obtained, however it remains my belief that further themes may potentially be uncovered and continue to emerge into a broader discourse which may extend predictions for the future of online feminist activism. within the scope of the documentary, portions of each interview were necessarily edited or abbreviated to adhere to time constraints, running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? however narrative and context were not altered, such that shared stories and meanings have been authentically preserved in the manner the participant intended. it was my objective to craft a film which could transcend academic discourse alone and encourage a critical discussion and conversation within public spheres as well. timeline and budgetary considerations on camera interviews and research gathering for my thesis occurred between the months of january and march . during this time, principle photography for the documentary component (including both a & b roll) was shot, and footage was transcribed for analysis and editing. from late march until early may , my focus turned to editing, post-production, theming, and writing. since i was using my own equipment alongside volunteer crew resources to produce the documentary component, there were no external budgetary sources required in order to complete my work. dismantling systemic patriarchal power structures we know that major real-world social disruption occurred against patriarchal paradigms both online and offline in the aftermath of the #metoo hashtag activist event. from mainstream media indictments, to criminal prosecutions of decades-old gender-based violence, to what has become known as “the weinstein effect,” (cobb & horeck, )—normalized gender imbalances and paradigms where rape culture seems integral to everyday life, were challenged in unprecedented was across both institutional and social boundaries (paters & besley, ). yet the question of why so many women had suddenly felt empowered as individuals, to demand the observance of new meanings for old tropes—such that each was compelled to rise above potential stigma in order to share their personal traumas publicly—remains largely unanswered in scholarship (horeck, ). so, too, the question of how the #metoo hashtag acquired enough momentum to finally penetrate the ephemerality of previous feminist social media calls to action. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? a qualitative narrative case study, situated within a critical feminist paradigm, and assisted by thematic content analysis, was therefore requisite for the collection of my research data. it was also a potent “methodological soup” during the analysis of and visual assembly of the narrative arc for both my academic study, and what i feel is an important visual documentary component through which to disseminate my findings. an academic and filmic view toward sharing new feminist discursive paradigms which may help in the ongoing work of dismantling patriarchal status quos. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? #meaftertoo: the documentary film (presentation and analysis of data) please refer to film/media accompanying this thesis. film director’s cut: https://vimeo.com/ (password: please make requests directly to author, pending film distribution) running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? conclusion summary discussion digital hashtag activism has been virally mobilizing new voices in post-feminist critique and collectivism since the inception of social media (cobb & horeck, ). as a form of protest, hashtag feminism is inarguably reconfiguring the ways in which we experience and respond to constructs of sexual violence, misogyny and patriarchy (clegg, ; gerbaudo, ; baer, ; berridge & portwood-stacer, ; drüeke & zobl, ). headway has been made in feminist spaces, and certainly achieved via recent viral anti-patriarchy hashtags like #metoo. but there is still a great deal more work and education required—among all gender groups and in all intersections—before an iterative progress map may realistically be forged. in sociological terms, our truths, when collected via individual narratives, contain myriad valuable insights into the larger institutional paradigms which surround us collectively (gerbaudo, ). the personal stories of women who have experienced institutionalized rape culture must therefore also reflect elements of socio-political influences which work to shape their agency, and which are arguably concurrently affected by prevailing hegemonic institutions, like patriarchy, which surround us all. thus, uncovering individual incentives for participating in collectivism like #metoo revealed a motivational maelstrom as heavily influenced by external forces within each individual woman’s life, as those which were internal. the women in this study were unanimous in their opinion that by creating virtual access to “safe spaces” online where individuals are supported while their voices are amplified, those who participated in #metoo (alongside those who came after and continue to share in the aftermath), felt increasingly able to overcome institutional stigma and potential backlash in order to demand collective change. the incentive for each individual woman to ‘go public’ in greater numbers appears directly correlated with a sense of safety which those greater numbers represents. and it’s running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? working. in today’s social media landscape, recurring anti-patriarchal themes have begun to achieve worldwide recognition (cobb & horeck, ; grant, ). unsurprisingly, many intersecting feminist themes became immediately evident during my interview process as well. gender power imbalance. a critical feminist constructivist lens during uncovered several shared systemic personal and/or socio-professional instances of gendered power inequity. examples of harassment, assault, misogyny, lack of access to fair reporting structures, and personal fear were universal factors discussed by each woman and expert interviewed. mention of (male > female) hegemonic structures appeared even within discussions of otherwise ‘consensual’ sexual relationships discussed. the notion that women must still take responsibility for shouldering, shrugging off, or even accepting and excusing daily acts of aggression or micro-aggression was also a universal experience for participants in this study. stigmatization of reporting. in cases where participants noted that they could theoretically have ‘chosen’ to report on experiences with assault, harassment, or micro-aggression, both this study’s participant group and expert group agreed that normalized systemic rape culture made such reporting extremely difficult and steeped in feelings of shame and/or personal failure; significantly more-so for additionally marginalized persons. in general, women’s feelings of violation took second seat to the excuses or demands of their male colleagues during confrontation, and encounters often ended with a male either berating, scolding, patronizing, or otherwise gaslighting those women who did choose to confront. in more than one instance, testimony indicated that reporting of sexual harassment was actively discouraged by global and even ‘fortune ’ corporate organization(s). in more than one narrative, law enforcement had also failed to respond or take seriously a woman’s claims. recurrent testimony also indicated that reporting structures already in place (seemingly to accommodate persons coming forward with instances of harassment or other forms of violence in the workplace) were too public, inadequate, unsafe, and/or highly running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? skewed toward male-dominated decision-making during adjudication. women who testified to experiences of sexual violence at home were equally gaslit by their male partners and reported on shared feelings of deep shame and a desire to move on without having to live and re-live the memory of these assaults through our current legal system’s pedantic court and prosecutorial/victim-blaming culture. normalized micro-aggression. several interviewees spoke about feeling ‘silly’ for harboring shame and resentment over acts such as unwanted kissing, touching, or off-hand sexual commentary in the workplace; actions which, while not physically harmful, caused them to feel patronized and disempowered in front of their colleagues. acts of such micro-aggression were universally apparent in the discourse of each interviewee. equally universal was the entrenched sense that disclosing these within current power structures would make someone into a ‘tattle tale’ or ‘that person’ (assumedly someone that one does not want to be known as). yet all respondents also agreed that normalization of gender micro-aggression in any space should be viewed as a precursor to the normalization of other forms of gender-based violence. once again, systemic and ongoing rape culture played a significant role in perpetuating these norms such that each of the women interviewed continued to feel responsible for their own loss of agency; despite cerebral awareness of an over-arching and socio-political patriarchy surrounding them. clear internalization of blame. systemic acceptance of rape culture. for all female interviewees—participants and experts alike—frustration and anger at a culture steeped in normative violence against women, without consequence to perpetrators, was a key factor in their decision to participate with #metoo. while every participant had heard of rape culture prior to the #metoo movement, and each considered themselves a feminist, each also agreed (individually, through their testimony) that knowledge of inequitable gender-bias in our systems did not preclude those biased systems from running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? maintaining dominance or power over women, even today. in more than one interview, the subject of a ‘post-#metoo-era’ was discursively debunked. participants were united in their desire to see change, but unsure how best to achieve it safely, without significant backlash to themselves or their sister-activists. likewise, interviewees in this study universally indicated that, despite #metoo’s progress, they felt the current landscape continued to be unsafe for women. inclusivity through simplicity. perhaps the most inclusive element of the #metoo movement was its simplicity for participants. without explanation or judgement, all one needed to do was post the simple word ‘#metoo’ in order to hold space within the conversation and to receive support therein. for many of this study’s interviewees, it was this simplicity and the ease with which partaking seemed possible that initially compelled them to post online. in some cases, all they initially posted was #metoo. yet, uniting all testimony was a theme of feeling like there were no qualifying or exclusionary components to the movement, in the way other hashtags like #beenrapedneverreported or #whyistayed may have implied. no gatekeepers surrounded #metoo. that facility became critical to the success of the movement as a growing number of women swelling into a tidal wave of voices provided even greater motivation to victims who finally decided to share. sharing our truth to power matters. there was no disagreement between interviewees that sharing their truth might be a powerful tool for galvanizing other women and affecting potential collectivist change. whether they initially chose to share their narratives in testimonial spaces like blogs, on social media, or within the context of other groups with more potential for anonymity, like facebook, each of this study’s participant women agreed that they chose to share because the act of ‘putting it out there’ might manifest in it reaching someone who needed to hear they are not alone. in instances where calling out attackers or harassers could incur greater negative consequence for marginalized groups than those with more privilege, all women in the study group running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? agreed that those with greater privilege might (should) also consider taking on more of the initial ‘risk’. informed consent, however, was key to any decision wherein a woman might choose to take on such personal risk, regardless of her intersection. thus, a caveat that no one feel pressured, compelled or otherwise bullied to share, nor shamed over a personal choice not to was unilaterally espoused. to that end, it seems, there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to the question of whether to come forward and expose one’s personal experience(s) with rape culture. this study did note that for each woman who chose to go public, a sense of empowerment accompanied a sense of lingering fear over potential future backlash. given some women who initially signed up for the study also backed out of sharing after their interviews, it is also important to note that agency over the withdrawal of one’s personal narrative from any group narrative should be maintained wherever possible in order for future women and girls to feel safe expressing their stories. systemic racial disparity through texts and institutions. of those interviewed for this documentary study, each bipoc woman indicated a significantly heightened level of anxiety and fear over reporting publicly. more than one subsequently asked for their interview not to be used in the documentary, despite having initially expressed a desire to come forward and be heard. no withdrawals were recorded for women who identified as non-bipoc. important thematic information to capture. as dr. safia noble ( ) discusses in several of her scholarly articles, including race, media, and the politics of spectacle, it is not uncommon, but rather a norm that systemic racism is fundamental to the reasons why bipoc are less inclined to opt into systems which purport to ‘help’ those facing violence or stigmatization. indeed, deeply entrenched inequities favouring cis, white, hetero norms in power and privilege continue to apply to all mass political actions or protest engagements in today’s world, digital or otherwise. dr. noble points out that “pervasive personal and institutional racism by whites that presume inferiority of blacks running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? remains at the core of racial disparity in the reporting and prosecution of violence toward black america” (p. ). confounding factors & limitations as a feminist study, the data represented in this thesis was intersected by more than one hegemonic social consideration, including an inherent gender bias in utilizing theoretical paradigms historically designed, in large part, by male scholars (allen, ). critics of narrative analysis also cite its subjectivity, vis-a-vis the possibility that meanings may be distorted by direct and collaborative interaction between participants and researchers (woodiwiss, smith & lockwood, ). the ongoing possibility for retaliatory consequences (both social and/or professional) toward each of the women who participated also remained an ever-present issue, given the continued and present influence of our persistently patriarchal culture. despite consenting to come forward and appear in the film, all the women in this study expressed ongoing concerns relating to what might happen after going public with their testimony. these included losing current positions in the workplace, being blacklisted from opportunities for forward advancement, and of potential physical repercussions, including violence against their person. where larger and wealthier corporate entities were alluded to as complicit, more than one study participant indicated concern over a potential legal backlash. indeed, these concerns remain valid, and researchers who choose to stand behind the testimony of survivors of hegemonic harassment, assault or violence can (and do) concurrently shoulder a risk of litigation when making allegations public as well. yet in support of further research toward these ends and in order to continue to expose systemic inequity and ongoing patriarchal systems within our culture, it is this researcher’s opinion that the potential for change is ultimately worth those risks. without risking backlash from systemic oppressors, there can be no long-term exposure and amplification of truth to power. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? throughout the study’s recruitment process, maintaining informed consent between myself and each of the participants was relatively straightforward. all requisite papers were signed and each interview as entirely voluntary and successful. however, maintaining ongoing consent at every stage of the filmmaking process thereafter presented as more challenging than initially anticipated. as each woman began to consider her participation and eventually ‘watch’ her story on camera, requests did come in for the exclusion of certain narrative components previously discussed. one participant asked for her true name not to be cited. another requested her face not be used in film posters or advertisements, though she agreed to remain in the documentary. despite their having signed (otherwise legal) agreements to allow these, i felt it was not in the interest of the study objectives herein to defy anyone’s sense of agency, nor to compel them to put forward testimony or representation which they were uncomfortable with, so i did comply with all such requests, requiring more than one re-edit to the resulting film. noteworthy that every study participant did indicate satisfaction and even a sense of empowerment and excitement over the final cut of the film, as finally submitted. the opt-in nature of this study attempted take into consideration further increased potential risk to real-world consequence or backlash toward groups marginalized beyond gender (by race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.), however given the withdrawal of three bipoc subjects from the non-cis- white-hetero interviewee demographic (due to fear over potential future professional repercussions), it became clear that these risks and fears were indeed more prominently represented in demographics from disenfranchised groups. this resulted in a somewhat narrower range of cultural and ethnic diversity than initially hoped for among those volunteers willing to opt in after recruitment. finally, the potentially ephemeral and often ‘slacktivist’ nature of hashtag activism (chen, pain, et al., ) is worth noting. as dr. jill andrew ( ) eloquently pointed out during her running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? interview with me for the documentary, one cannot simply “press a button or donate a dollar,” in order to fix long-standing dangerous hegemonic and systemic socio-cultural toxicities. in their book, hashtag feminism: activism or slacktivism, sociology scholars chen, pain, et al., ( ) discuss the ways in which social media “provides a potent tool to give voice to the marginalized and silenced, and thus, contributes to social media’s role in fomenting social justice” (p. ). yet these same potentialities are purchased at the expense of a false sense of efficacy; a sense that one’s “very small actions online, such as posting a hashtag, may always have greater meaning than they do … thereby embracing the concept of ‘slacktivism,’ which is engaging in low-cost, low-risk online activism” (p. ). their findings on feminist digital activism provide evidence that there is indeed a necessity for continued academic study and discussion as it applies to hashtags used in modern-day protest, from a distinctly post-modern feminist perspective. due to timing, budgetary and geographical constraints, all in-person interviews for this study also took place within the province of ontario. had there been more budget and time, this would have been a national, or even international representation. given the more limited scope of this thesis, however, my hope was to lay the foundation for future (broader) inquiries which might span multiple geographic intersections and potential participant cultures—resulting in more generalizable data. as a film, #meaftertoo retains a focus both narrow and deep in order to respect, document, and analyze each lived experience explored. recommendations—a feminist future transforming a global culture which normalizes gender power inequity and violence against women is not a task which any single group can quickly achieve; nor even a single generation. as indicated or alluded to by each of the experts and testimonials who spoke during the documentary process, better education is imperative. a more robust education, as widely accessible as social media itself, over what constitutes harassment, rape-culture, consent, and even rape, must occur not running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? only among women (or those who identify as women), but among all spectrums of gender identity, and within every intersection. thereafter, a complete dismantling of current patriarchal systems and male-favoring hegemonic practices is requisite before any new system(s) may even begin to be implemented. it is inarguable that the challenge of dismantling systems of patriarchy—entrenched for hundreds (if not thousands) of years—is a much more complicated process than any one hashtag call-to-action may achieve. #metoo lent a shorthand to millions of women; a space to be heard, supported, and perhaps most importantly, to lend support and demand action for change. as a hashtag protest disruptor, it was, perhaps the first digital feminist battlecry to result in the toppling of real-world patriarchs from systems of entrenched power, on a worldwide scale. hundreds of attackers and harassers lost their positions, others were forced to step down. it was a start, perhaps even the start of a revolution in the way we look to digital counterpublic spaces for more powerful means of feminist mobilization. my hope is that future studies include more in-depth documentation of individual narratives from female-identified persons worldwide. especially women from disenfranchised groups. a future documentary might move forward to examine an even larger or more globalized group and discuss the ways in which a respect for and amplification of intersectional women’s narratives are more vital than ever to feminist progress. questions concerning a consensus on the format for and type of education required to affect successful forward momentum (drawing upon the assistance of male allies) are also still largely unanswered. further, private groups of women currently sharing in less public digital spaces may be approached and asked to discuss the ways in which their smaller community interactions within these spaces may have led to positive change outside of or offline from same. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? we are far from nearing any semblance of a “finish line.” as feminist scholar roxanne gay eloquently pointed out in her op-ed for the new york times, “despite everything we know about the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment today, women are still not believed. their experiences are still minimized. and the male perpetrators of these crimes are given all manner of leniency” (gay, r., , p. ). especially and continually true for bipoc women. delving into the deep emotional traumas of women affected by violence, harassment and assault was simultaneously a privilege and a challenging journey. as a survivor, myself, digital hashtag activism has long been an outlet for my own feminist participation with discourse and calling out patriarchal paradigms. in the aftermath of this documentary case study, it seems clear that #metoo presented many women with an unprecedently accessible support group, alongside a glimpse of hope for change. as a hashtag protest, i believe it likely that #metoo will sustain in some form, expand, and ultimately evolve. looking forward, the movement may be reviewed as both an emergent and successful digital protest/disruptor, and an amplification strategy for the use of collectivism within social media spaces in order to bolster individual narratives and support important feminist discourse. yet the march toward a global disavowal of problematic patriarchal systems is only burgeoning. groundswells like #metoo within a tumultuous and grander feminist journey are a firebrand for incoming digital feminist activists—propelling us all to plug in, learn more, judge less, and rise up—taking both digital and physical/offline action forward in order to dismantle patriarchy. today and for every generation who follows, hashtag protests like #metoo will present as important and unignorable components of a process through which activists may continue to collaborate on the progressive architecture of a truly feminist future. running head: #meaftertoo: the hashtag that toppled hegemons? references ahmed, s. 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( ). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press: new haven. isbn . https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/ /twitter-and-tear-gas british medical jouiu.i. july personal paper "me-toos," "me-agains," and the risk of drugs c r b joyce in the family and i made a double move-from london to basle and from university to industry. when asked why we had moved i sometimes answered, "after failing for years to persuade medical students not to prescribe drugs, why not try to persuade the manufacturers not to make them ?" but even without my help the drug industry nowadays is coming under more and more pressure not to make drugs. in the past ten years a steadily increasing proportion of the time, resource, and effort of many members of a productive industry has been spent in responding to the ever more clamorous demands of consumers as well as regulatory authorities. in part the problems arise from failure- so far-to deliver from pain and unforeseeable diseases the aging population that is to a certain extent a consequence of the industry's own earlier efforts, and in part from the earlier practices of some of the members of that industry. although the phase in which even large companies sometimes neglected ethical questions is over, vigilance is still required, as it is for the activities of any pro- ductive member of society-academic, bureaucrat, or industrial- ist. but delayed pursuit of the previously unsatisfactory may inhibit current research on the promising. defensive research although some outsiders may appreciate the ever more demanding requirements of regulatory authorities, they perhaps remain largely unaware of the magnitude and consequences of the resulting effort on new and future products. because the continually increasing time needed to bring a new drug to market comes out of the limited period in which it remains in patent, smaller resources are available for the fundamentally new. thus it may be safer for a company to spend on "me- toos," or "me-agains" (me-toos made by the same company); only maintaining or increasing the market share can bring the returns on investment necessary to maintain the research base. those so engaged sometimes have difficulty in accepting that support of the research base by working to preserve the market share represents the best use of their time, especially if this entails mainly so-called "defensive" research. any report that a marketed product has been suspected to cause a major toxic effect-usually tumorigenesis-in a labora- tory species or in an epidemiological study rightly requires an adequate response. (most large companies probably survey information about their products as a routine without waiting for external stimulation.) previous reports-experimental and clinical-must be checked for relevance, completeness, and accuracy; and additional scientific work may be needed to clarify obscure points. there will subsequently be much labour in keeping regulatory authorities informed and meeting their requests for a change in the indications or for a warning to be inserted in the package leaflet. the latency of chemically induced human carcinomas may be about or years or even more; so, not surprisingly, epide- miological methods have been brought to bear on drug problems of this kind only in the past few years. these methods can rarely be experimental; usually they violate the basic experimental necessity that the chances of individual allocation to treated and control groups be equal. although suspicion of a causal relation needs experimental support, prospective studies can seldom be carried out in man because the required time is long and the numbers are large; there are often important ethical impedi- ments too. the relevance of some of the animal models that take their place, such as the use of the beagle dog for studying oral contraceptives, is being questioned or has even been rejected. drug-effect epidemiology i am not qualified to comment on events in the animal laboratory, and scarcely more so on epidemiology. such even- handed ignorance allows me to express the belief that a toxi- cologist can as easily convince an epidemiologist about the soundness of his work as the reverse. either can convince the other more easily than he can one of his own colleagues. never- theless, some drug-effect epidemiology of recent vintage seems to me to have been unworthy oflaying down. surely investigating alleged drug-related illness requires the reliability of data about drug consumption to be as carefully established as that about the illness; yet some publications are not reassuring. valid inference is also sometimes in short supply. for example, retrospective case-control studies generally allow calculation of the relative risk, compared with controls, that those who had a given illness will have been exposed to a given agent. such a calculation can lead to a suspicion that the risk of acquiring the disease is increased by taking the drug, but it can never establish a causal connection and seldom makes possible an estimate of any increase in the risk of acquiring the disease associated with having taken the drug. this estimate, the attributable risk, is the ratio that matters clinically and socially, and it can be obtained only from prospective inquiries or adequately designed retrospective comparisons against base populations. yet the relative risk is often either mistaken for or taken to be a direct estimate of the attributable risk by many who should know better. few cases have been squarely laid against marketed drugs either by epidemiological or by toxicological endeavours. with some important exceptions the attributable risk, if calculable, has been small and has usually been considered to be outweighed by benefits from continued use of the drug. nevertheless, ciba-geigy, basle, switzerland c r b joyce, phd, sociopharmacologist, project innovation british medical journal july o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b r m e d j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ british medical journal july changes in labelling or package inserts have often been required even though questions about their relevance have been simul- taneously permitted. consequently, in the interests of regaining time and perhaps achieving other economies, i recently cir- culated among some colleagues a proposal for a universal package leaflet. it was received so stonily that i realised i had been serious by accident, and therefore decided to submit the proposal to a serious journal. here it is: the universal package leaflet ( ) the active principle of this drug will doubtless at some time in the future be shown to be highly toxic to one or more bacterial or other species, if indeed this has not already happened. ( ) a group of epidemiologists will also demonstrate that people who are ill are more likely than those who are not to have taken drugs. this discovery will be interpreted by some to mean that taking this drug has caused you to be sick with the disease for which you are taking it. ( ) because patients find it as difficult to understand the relevance of such findings as the finders do to admit their irrelevance to patients, you are strongly recommended to take this compound only ifit is essential thatyou do so. the last sentence contains advice with which, surely, no one will quarrel. today's treatment uses of anaesthesia the anaesthetist in the accident and emergency service peter j f baskett the basic training of the anaesthetist in the operating room is orientated around secure airway control, artificial ventilation, monitoring and support of the circulation, and the relief of acute pain. it is precisely these skills that are essential in managing the suddenly ill and seriously injured patients cared for by the accident and emergency services and departments (fig ). mobile resuscitation obstetric unit t> flying squad accident and major z* emergency disaster department operating intensive room therapy unit training doctors. nurses. ambulancemen fig -roles of the anaesthetist. prehospital care increasing awareness in several countries of the world of the value of expert prehospital care has led to the development in britain of schemes designed to bring skilled assessment and treatment to the patient on site and during transport to hospital. in certain rural areas general practitioners have organised on- frenchay hospital and bristol royal infirmary, bristol peter j f baskett, ffarcs, consultant anaesthetist site immediate care schemes. through training in hospital with anaesthetists in the anaesthetic rooms, operating theatres, and recovery rooms they have acquired the skills of intravenous cannulation and transfusion, airway control using endotracheal intubation, and reliable artificial ventilation with a self-inflating bag or mechanical resuscitator. in urban areas general-prac- titioner schemes are not so practical, and several centres have now followed the united states practice of training selected ambulance personnel to a paramedical standard, which includes the practical skills mentioned above combined with a thorough knowledge and understanding of the systematic assessment and monitoring of the seriously ill patient. all of these paramedical schemes rely on anaesthetists for a large part of their training and, in several instances, the entire scheme has been masterminded and organised by anaesthetists working in collaboration with their colleagues in the accident and emergency department and in the ambulance service. there are now moves to improve the efficiency of the emergency side of the ambulance service in britain by separating this part away from the routine transport service, thereby creating a top tier of highly trained men to concentrate on the patients requiring skilled emergency care. as this development is adopted by more and more centres, so anaesthetists will become increasingly concerned. it is important, however, that they do not confine their participation to training only. they should also work on site from time to time with the trainees in their own environment to appreciate the problems of attempting resuscitation away from the complex and organised surroundings of their hospital. obstetric flying squad with improving antenatal care by general practitioners and obstetricians and the increasing trend towards hospital rather than domiciliary confinement, the need for obstetric flying o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b r m e d j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ #foodie: implications of interacting with social media for memory original article open access #foodie: implications of interacting with social media for memory jordan zimmerman and sarah brown-schmidt* abstract background: social media is an increasingly popular outlet for leisure and social interaction. on many social media platforms, the user experience involves commenting on or responding to user-generated content, such as images of cats, food, and people. in two experiments, we examined how the act of commenting on social media images impacts subsequent memory of those images, using instagram posts as a test case. this project was inspired by recent findings of laboratory studies of conversation which found that describing a picture for a conversational partner boosts recognition memory for those images. here we aimed to understand how this finding translates to the more ecologically valid realm of social media interactions. a second motivation for the study was the popularity of food- and dieting-related content on instagram and prior findings that use of instagram in particular is associated with disordered eating behaviors. results: across two experiments, we observed that commenting on instagram posts consistently boosted subsequent recognition and that correct recognition increased with comment length. stable individual differences in recognition memory were observed, and “unhealthy” food images such as chocolates were particularly well remembered; however, these memory findings did not relate to self-reported eating behavior. conclusions: taken together, our findings show that the way in which we engage with social media content shapes subsequent memory of it, raising new questions about how our online lives persist in memory over time, potentially shaping future behavior. keywords: social media, memory, elaborative encoding, food, disordered eating significance statement engaging with other persons through social media plat- forms such as facebook, linkedin, twitter, pinterest, and instagram is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. ac- cording to instagram’s “year in review” publicity mate- rials, in , the heart emoji was used over billion times, and the hashtag #metoo was used . million times (instagram, ). food-related content is particu- larly popular on instagram, with #foodporn tagged on over million posts, #foodie on over million posts, and #vegan on over million posts. a notable feature of instagram is that users add comments such as “omg yummm,” or hashtag comments such as #food (used over million times) and #fitspo (used over million times). the sheer number of communicative acts demands a better understanding of the cognitive impli- cations of this type of social media engagement. the present research builds on prior studies of conversa- tional interactions which show that describing a picture to a communication partner boosts memory for that image. here we asked if commenting on instagram posts similarly boosts memory for those posts. across two ex- periments, we observed that commenting on instagram posts consistently boosted subsequent recognition and that correct recognition increased with comment length. stable individual differences in recognition memory were observed, and “unhealthy” food images such as choco- lates were particularly well remembered, but these mem- ory findings did not relate to self-reported eating © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. * correspondence: sarahbrownschmidt@gmail.com department of psychology and human development, vanderbilt university, appleton place, nashville, tn , usa cognitive research: principles and implications zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:sarahbrownschmidt@gmail.com behavior. taken together, our findings show that the way in which we engage with social media images shapes subsequent memory for them, raising new questions about how our online lives persist in memory, poten- tially shaping future behavior. introduction engaging with other persons through language and media is both common and impactful. according to the american time use survey (us department of labor, ), in , american civilians aged years and older engaged in leisure and sports activities . h/day, on average, including min/day socializing and com- municating and . h/day watching television. although the amount of time americans spent engaging with so- cial media per se is not reported, “playing games and computer use for leisure” was also popular, with an aver- age of min/day, though notably, this varied consider- ably by age, with – -year-olds reporting min/day and – -year-olds reporting min/day. blank and lutz ( ) examined a uk sample and reported that social media platforms such as facebook, linkedin, twitter, pinterest, and instagram are becoming increas- ingly ubiquitous and that, at the time of their study, instagram was the fastest-growing of these sites. accord- ing to instagram’s “year in review” publicity materials, in , the heart emoji was used over billion times on the platform, and the hashtag #metoo was used . million times (instagram, ). in its “year in review,” instagram reported a “global community of million” (instagram, ). one motivation for the present re- search is the popularity of food-related content on insta- gram, such as #foodporn (tagged on over million posts), #vegan (tagged on over million posts), @food- network ( . million followers), @foodgod ( . million followers), and @feelgoodfoodie ( . million followers). the popularity of social media makes it increasingly important to understand how engaging with this type of media shapes cognition. previous research suggests that memory for social media content is high among the gen- eral population: memory for facebook microblogs is sig- nificantly higher than memory for sentences from books, news headlines, and even human faces (mickes et al., ). the popularity of health- and dieting-related con- tent on instagram in particular emphasizes the import- ance of understanding how the act of viewing and interacting with these images impacts the viewer. poten- tially relevant to this question are cognitive processes underlying disordered eating, phenomena that are thought to be complex and multidimensional, being shaped by the external environment and social culture (culbert, racine, & klump, ; levine, smolak, & hayden, ; stevenson, doherty, barnett, muldoon, & trew, ). indeed, some prior work indicates a relationship between the use of media and disordered eating habits (harrison & cantor, ; turner & lefevre, ; also see mejova, hamed haddadi, anasta- sios noulas, & ingmar weber, ). here, we examined the cognitive processes that occur when engaging with social media content on instagram. a notable feature of the instagram platform is that in- stead of simply browsing through the content, users can also add comments to the images they see (and see others’ comments as well). these comments often fea- ture evaluations or descriptions of the image, as in “this pasta looks sooo darn good!,” “omg yummm,” or “#foodie.” this act of commenting was the primary focus of the present research. our research question was in- spired by recent findings from the study of conversation that the act of describing an image for another person boosts memory for that image (mckinley, brown- schmidt, & benjamin, ; yoon, benjamin, & brown- schmidt, ;). for example, yoon et al. ( ) exam- ined situations in which pairs of participants viewed four images at a time (on separate computer screens) and took turns describing the images to each other in a task in which the listener had to locate that image and click on it. despite the fact that the image descriptions were fairly simple (e.g., “the argyle sock,” “the bunny,”) over a series of experiments, speakers consistently exhibited better recognition memory than listeners for these refer- enced images. further, memory for viewed but nonde- scribed images was considerably worse than memory for images that the speaker had described. in a converging finding, mckinley et al. ( ) examined the length of image descriptions and found that longer descriptions promoted better recognition memory for those images. this observed memory benefit for describing images likely owes to the fact that the labels were generated and produced by the speakers, both of which benefit memory (i.e., the “generation effect” and “production effect”; faw- cett, quinlan, & taylor, ; macleod, gopie, houri- han, neary, & ozubko, ; slamecka & graf, ; zormpa, brehm, hoedemaker, & meyer, ; also see knutsen & le bigot, ). action memory is similarly better for self-performed actions than for observed ac- tions (koriat, ben-zur, & druch, ). these findings can more generally be considered a type of elaborative encoding effect (bradshaw & anderson, ), where the elaboration of the image with descriptive phrases promotes encoding of that image in memory. although it is clear that generating image descriptions for a partner in laboratory tasks with carefully selected images promotes image recognition, an unanswered question is how this might translate into more typical experiences with images in social media contexts. to this end, the present article presents the results of two experiments examining how the act of engaging with zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of social media posts, by commenting on the images, impacts subsequent memory for those posts. due to the aforementioned prevalence of food- and dieting- related content on this platform and associated com- ments generated by users (e.g., “we love cucumbers! #instafood #yummy”), we examined several categories of food and non-food-related images and used an established questionnaire to inquire about partici- pants’ eating behaviors. we then modeled the data using a quantitative technique that allowed us to examine whether there were stable individual differ- ences in memory for images in general and in mem- ory for food in particular. if so, we would then be positioned to ask whether a person’s eating behaviors relate to their memory for food-related content on social media. this research question is motivated by previous evidence of selective processing and atten- tional biases for pictorial stimuli among individuals with eating disorders (giel et al., ; nikendei et al., ; shafran, lee, cooper, palmer, & fairburn, ; stormark & torkildsen, ; also see castella- nos et al., ), as well as by findings that use of so- cial media platforms by young adults is marginally associated with depressive symptoms (lup, trub, & rosenthal, ; cf. aalbers, mcnally, heeren, wit, & fried, ). of note is that platforms such as insta- gram are used to share information relevant to eating disorder behavior (see chancellor, pater, clear, gil- bert, & de choudhury, ), and use of instagram in particular has been associated with higher rates of orthorexia nervosa (an obsession with eating healthy; turner & lefevre, ). if individuals who experi- ence disordered eating interact with social media on a daily basis and process social media differently on the basis of their symptomology, this could have major implications for how social media platforms affect an already vulnerable population. experiment the aims of experiment were twofold. first, we tested whether previously observed benefits of generating pic- ture descriptions (mckinley et al., ; yoon et al., ; zormpa et al., ) would generalize to the ubi- quitous practice of commenting on social media images. second, we evaluated whether there were stable individ- ual differences in memory for these images, particularly those related to food. if so, this would allow us to take the first step in investigating if and how eating behaviors shape memory for food in social media. methods this experiment was preregistered with the open sci- ence framework registries (https://osf.io/s ez ). participants participants were recruited thorough an online platform (amazon mechanical turk; www.mturk.com) and were compensated $ . for participating. criteria for partici- pation were a hit approval rate of % or greater, loca- tion as the united states, and number of approved hits as +. criteria for inclusion in the study were that the participant was a self-reported native english speaker (learned from birth) and that they completed at least % of the study. to achieve the final planned sample size of participants, participants completed the study. six participants were removed for reporting being other than a native speaker of english (n = ), and one was removed for completing the study twice with the same internet protocol (ip) address (the second partici- pation in the study was excluded). thus, the final sample size was . the average age of the sample was years (range, to ). participants reported gender as female (n = ), male (n = ), or genderqueer (n = ). materials the materials were assembled by perusing a large number of instagram posts gathered from instagram accounts cre- ated by the first author for this purpose. we focused on gathering images from one of five categories. posts featur- ing dogs, cats, or nature were used as control images. posts featuring food served as critical stimuli and were further divided into the categories of “healthy” and “un- healthy” food. note that categorization of the food images into “healthy” and “unhealthy” was based on group discus- sion and our intuition about popular cultural beliefs rather than quantitative analysis of nutritional properties. ex- ample “healthy” food images included berries, seafood, and salad. example “unhealthy” food images included brownies, cheeseburgers, and cake. posts that originated from private accounts were edited so that the usernames were obscured by overlaying the username with text such as “pics .” in total, the materials used for the study were instagram posts, in each of the categories. we intentionally used a : ratio of control to food-related im- ages in order to obscure the focus on food-related images. the instagram posts were rotated across condi- tions using four lists, counterbalancing which images were shown to participants in the exposure phase (“old” images at test) and which were not shown to partici- pants during exposure (“new” images at test). for old images, we also rotated across lists whether the partici- pant commented on them or not. to create list , half of the images in each of the five categories (“healthy food”, “unhealthy food”, cats, dogs, and nature) were randomly selected to be shown to participants in the exposure phase ( old items); the other half were to be “new” items at test. for each category, half of the “old” images were assigned randomly to the commenting condition, zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of https://osf.io/s ez and half were assigned to the no-commenting condition. list then swapped which were commented on and which not. lists and swapped which were old and new. as a result, on each list, the new items were drawn from among the same categories as the images viewed in the exposure phase. consequently, there was never a novel item from a completely new category that was not previously encoded. for example, across the whole ex- periment (study and test), participants saw five total im- ages of pizza, some of which were new items and some of which were old (which ones were old vs. new depended on the list). please see the appendix for a list of all of the food stimuli in the study for list . each par- ticipant was randomly assigned to complete the trials on a single list (list , n = ; list , n = ; list , n = ; list , n = ). procedure exposure phase after consenting to participate, partici- pants were given the following instructions: “in the fol- lowing section, you will see a series of instagram posts. some will require you to generate an original comment, while others will not. please think of appropriate and thoughtful comments for the pictures you will see, and simply attend to the posts that do not require comments. treat the following experience as you would scrolling through your own social media feed.” the instructions did not mention that there would be a subsequent memory test. participants then clicked to the next screen and began viewing a series of instagram posts, one per page. the posts were presented in a different random order for each participant. for half of the posts, the partic- ipants were prompted to provide a comment using the same phrasing as on the instagram platform (i.e., “add a comment….”). for comment trials, there was no restric- tion on the length of the comment, though the participant needed to type something in order to proceed to the next trial. these trials were self-paced. test phase after viewing the instagram posts, par- ticipants were then asked to complete a series of math problems. this task took about min and was intended to bring memory performance off ceiling be- cause recognition memory performance for pictures can be high (shepard, ); this is a method used in our prior work with success (yoon et al., ). participants were then told, “in the following section, your memory will be tested on the images you were previously shown. if an image is presented that you have previously seen (one you saw in the first part of the study), select ‘old.’ if an image is presented that is new and not previously shown, select ‘new.’” they viewed a series of im- ages, half of which were old and seen in the exposure phase ( images from each of the categories), and half of which were new ( new images from each of the categories). the images were shown one at a time in a dif- ferent random order for each participant, and the partici- pant was asked to respond “old” or “new” for each image. additional measures following the recognition memory task, participants completed the eating disorder examination question- naire (ede-q). the ede-q is the self-report version of the eating disorder questionnaire, which is used to de- termine the frequency and severity of behavioral features and the psychopathology of eating disorders. the ques- tionnaire provides a global score of severity as well as four subscale scores that correspond to certain aspects of psychopathology. the four subscales are restraint, eat- ing concern, shape concern, and weight concern. the range of ratings for each item is to , with being the most frequent or severe. to obtain a subscale score, the average of the ratings for the relevant items is calculated. to obtain a global score, the sum of the four subscale scores is divided by (fairburn, cooper, & o’connor, ). this examination is reported to be a valid meas- ure of eating disorder symptomology (mond, hay, rod- gers, owen, & beumont, ), and higher values on each of the scales reflect higher symptomology. finally, participants were asked to report their age, gender, and ability in the english language. predictions recent studies in our laboratory revealed that following conversation, partners had better memory for pictures that they described themselves than for ones their partner described (mckinley et al., ; yoon et al., ). if this generation benefit extends to written comments in online communication, we hypothesized that memory would be better for instagram posts for which individuals generated original comments than for posts that were passively viewed. further, we expected that the likelihood of correct recognition would increase the longer the comment. this pattern of findings would be expected if posting comments on social media pro- moted elaborative encoding of the post (bradshaw & anderson, ), compared with simply viewing them. there is, however, good reason to think that com- menting may not benefit picture memory. social media images are often selected to be glossy and captivating, and recognition memory for pictures tends to be good (shepard, ). thus, ceiling effects may obtain, such that commenting has no effect on memory despite the use of a filled delay between study and test. another possibility is that an elaborative encoding benefit of commenting trades off with an attentional shift toward the “add a comment…” box where the comment is typed, and inward toward one’s own reflections on the zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of image. memory for item and context can trade off (gopie & macleod, ; jurica & shimamura, ; koriat et al., ), such that manipulations that benefit item memory impair or have no effect on context mem- ory. if so, commenting may boost memory for the com- ment, but not the picture; in linguistic terms, it would be the reference and not the referent that receives the boost. such a pattern of findings would circumscribe the scope of generation-based memorial benefits following conversation, pointing to a distinction between reference and referent. in addition to effects of commenting, we tested the hy- pothesis that individual differences in memory for food vs. nonfood could be predicted by self-reported disor- dered eating behaviors. support for the idea that mem- ory for food might be linked with disordered eating comes from findings of attentional processing differ- ences for food-related stimuli in persons with an eating disorder (giel et al., ; nikendei et al., ; shafran et al., ; stormark & torkildsen, ) and a link be- tween hunger/satiation and attentional processing of food-related stimuli (mogg, bradley, hyare, & sui, ; placanica, faunce, & job, ; stockburger, schmälzle, flaisch, bublatzky, & schupp, ). these findings, along with evidence of a relationship between the use of media and disordered eating habits (harrison & cantor, ; turner & lefevre, ; also see mejova et al., ), led to the predictions ( ) that there would be stable individual differences in memory for food (vs. nonfood) images and ( ) that these individual differences would be related to a measure of disordered eating behavior. critically, however, examining the relationship between this digital generation effect and behaviors associated with disordered eating first requires us to demonstrate reliable individual differences in memory for the images and for food-related images in particular. to preview, while per- sons did exhibit stable individual differences in recogni- tion memory, the difference in memory between food and nonfood items was itself not a stable property of the indi- viduals we tested. unfortunately, this prevented us from testing hypotheses relating memory for food-related insta- gram posts to disordered eating behaviors. results each participant commented on of viewed insta- gram posts, followed by an old–new recognition memory test. performance in the recognition memory task is illus- trated using a measure of memory sensitivity (d′) in fig. . the primary analyses focus on memory for the posts, an- alyzed using a logistic mixed-effects approach to a signal detection theoretic analysis (see fraundorf, benjamin, & watson, ; wright, horry, & skagerberg, ). in addition, we characterize the relationship between the form of the comments and memory and finally explore whether there are stable individual differences in these effects. memory for instagram posts a logit-link mixed effects model for memory judgments (old = ; new = ) was fit to the , recognition mem- ory judgments in this dataset; note that one data point was lost due to computer error. planned analyses of fixed effects include orthogonal helmert codes for item type (old vs. new) and whether the image had been com- mented on (comment vs. no comment). we also con- sider two different effects of image type using a dummy- coding scheme where the control images (nature, dogs, or cats) were dummy-coded as baseline, allowing us to test if memory for healthy food differed from baseline fig. experiment : illustration of memory sensitivity (d′) by condition. error bars indicate by-participant standard deviation zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of and separately whether memory for unhealthy food dif- fered from baseline. note that the effects of item type and commenting can be interpreted as simple effects at the reference level (control images), and interactions with item type test whether these effects differ for healthy and for unhealthy food. the model included participants and items as crossed random effects. an initial model that included only the random intercepts revealed that there was very little variance in the intercepts by item, though slightly more variability among participants. on the basis of lack of item variability and the lack of hypotheses regarding in- dividual item differences, we did not attempt models with random slopes by item. while our analysis plan was to relate a person-level covariate (ede-q score) to the memory data, attempts to include random slopes by persons for each of the fixed effects were met with con- vergence failures. using a backward-fitting approach (barr, levy, scheepers, & tily, ), we simplified the model until we identified a model that included random slopes by person for the effects of item type (old vs. new), and commenting (for old items, whether the par- ticipant commented on the image). while this model failed to converge, refitting the model with different op- timizers using the allfit function (bates et al., ) re- vealed consistent estimates for each of the fixed effects to two decimal places, except for the intercept and the (nonsignificant) interaction between commenting and healthy food, which were consistent across optimizers only to one decimal place. for the random effects, esti- mates for the by-person random intercept and slopes were consistent to two decimal places, except for the by- participant random slope for item type (old vs. new) and commenting, which were consistent only to one decimal place. this model was taken to be satisfactory and is presented in table . the intercept term in the model was not significant, indicating there was no evidence for a significant re- sponse bias (participants responded “old” and “new” at similar rates). a significant effect of item type (z = . , p < . ) indicated good memory for the previously viewed images. a significant effect of commenting indi- cated that for previously viewed images, they were more likely to be correctly recognized if the participant had commented on them (z = . , p < . ). these effects were qualified by interactions with item type. healthy food was remembered less well than control images (z = − . , p < . ), whereas unhealthy food was remem- bered better than control images (z = . , p < . ). in addition, the effect of commenting was smaller for un- healthy food images than for control images (z = − . , p < . ), possibly due to the fact that memory was over- all better for the unhealthy food images. effect of comment length on memory for instagram posts this exploratory analysis investigated whether the length of the instagram comments modulated memory for those images. this analysis was restricted to old items for which participants generated a comment, as the pre- dictor variables are defined for those items only. the number of words per comment ranged from to (median = , mean = . ). on average, comments were longer for pictures that would ultimately be correctly recognized (mean number of words = . , sd = . ) than for pictures that were not recognized (mean = . , sd = . ). a logit-link mixed effects model for memory judgments (old = ; new = ) was fit to the data. fixed ef- fects include a centered measure of the number of words used to comment on the picture. the same dummy- coding scheme as in the primary analysis was used, where control images (nature, dogs, or cats) were dummy-coded as baseline, allowing us to test if the effect table experiment : memory by condition, model with random slopesa fixed effects estimate se z value p value (intercept) . . . . commenting (commented items = . , noncommented items = − . , new = ) . . . <. item type (old vs. new) (commented = . , noncommented = . , new = − ) . . . <. commenting * healthy food − . . − . . commenting * unhealthy food − . . − . <. item type * healthy food − . . − . <. item type * unhealthy food . . . <. random effects variance sd correlations item (intercept) . . subject (intercept) . . item type (old vs. new) . . . commenting . . − . . anumber of observations: , , items, participants zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of of comment length was different for healthy food and for unhealthy food (compared with baseline). note that the effects of the number of words can be interpreted as sim- ple effects at the reference level (control images) and in- teractions with item type test whether these effects differ for healthy food and for unhealthy food. participants and items were included as random inter- cepts. a null model was initially fit to the data and indi- cated very little variability by items but some variability by participants. thus, the effect of commenting was in- cluded as a by-participant random slope. this model converged. models with more complex random effects structures failed to converge with warnings indicating singular fits. thus, results of this converged model were taken to be satisfactory and interpreted (table ). the significant intercept term indicates that for these commented-on images (all of which were old), correct recognitions were more likely than not (z = . , p < . ). a significant effect of word count (z = . , p < . ) shows us that for each additional word pro- duced in the comment, the odds ratio of correct recogni- tion was . times greater at test. a significant interaction between word count and healthy images (z = − . , p < . ) indicated that the effect of commenting was smaller for healthy food images than for control im- ages (dogs, cats, or nature). participant variability and individual differences in order to ask questions about individual differences in these processes, it is first necessary to determine whether the models provided evidence that there were stable (reliable) individual differences in our memory measures. to this end, for the analysis of recognition memory presented in table , we extracted the by- person random effects as well as the standard errors of those random effects using the “arm” package in r (gel- man, su, yajima, hill, et al., ). following cho, shen, and naveiras ( ), we calculated the model-based reli- ability of the item type (old vs. new) and comment ef- fects. rho can be interpreted as the ratio of the estimated variance theta over the observed variance theta, with values closer to indicating better reliability. rho for the item type effect was fairly high, . , indicating stable individual differences in memory for the pictures. rho for the effect of commenting was less reliable, . . as noted above, more complex models including ran- dom slopes for image type (healthy and unhealthy food) failed to converge, and refitting these models revealed inconsistent fits with different optimizers as well as sin- gularities (random effects parameters being at or near zero), indicating poor model fit. together, these findings indicate that there was some consistent variability by persons in their memory for the images and in the effect of commenting on those pictures. however, we were not able to extract a stable measure of individual differences in memory for healthy or unhealthy food in particular (above and beyond overall measures of memory), making it impossible to conduct planned analyses of the rela- tionship between memory for food and the ede-q measure of eating behavior. for the second analysis of the relationship between comment length and memory (table ), inspection of the random effects indicated that while there was some variability in the by-person intercept (reflecting the cor- rect recognition rate) the effect of word count on correct recognition varied little across participants. model-based estimates of reliability (cho et al., ) indicated a me- diocre rho value for the by-person intercept (. ); the extremely small variance for the random slope for word count resulted in a negative rho (− . ). these findings indicate that there was very little evidence for reliable in- dividual differences in these effects, and they were not explored further. the person-level covariates in this sample include par- ticipant age, and the ede-q measures (restraint, eating concern, shape concern, weight concern, and the global score). descriptive statistics for these variables are shown in table . we took an exploratory approach to examining bivari- ate correlations between the ede-q measures (restraint, eating concern, shape concern, weight concern, and the global score), participant age, and the memory measures (by-person random effects for response bias, overall memory, and the effect of commenting). these correla- tions were computed and interpreted with respect to a bonferroni-adjusted alpha level of . . the bivariate correlations revealed the expected relationships among the ede-q subscales and the overall global score (table in appendix). in addition, the by-person random ef- fects for memory and commenting were positively re- lated (r = . , p < . ), indicating that participants with better memory also tended to benefit more from commenting on the images. there was also an unex- pected positive correlation between the memory random table experiment : effect of comment length on correct identification of old images fixed effects estimate se z value p value (intercept) . . . < . word count . . . < . words*healthy − . . − . <. words*unhealthy − . . − . . random effects variance sd correlations item (intercept) . . participant (intercept) . . word count . . . zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of effect and age (r = . , p < . ). the lack of stable indi- vidual differences in memory for healthy and unhealthy food in particular prevents examination of a relationship between those food types and scores on the ede-q. discussion the results of experiment revealed, for the first time, that the process of commenting on social media images boosts memory for those images. this effect can be interpreted as a type of generation effect (slamecka & graf, ). further, the fact that longer comments pro- duced better recognition extends prior findings from studies of in-laboratory image descriptions (mckinley et al., ) to a class of images – instagram posts – that are both ubiquitous and socially relevant. this effect can be considered a type of elaborative encoding effect (bradshaw & anderson, ) such that the more elab- orately the participant commented on the post, the bet- ter the memory. the memorial benefit for commented- on pictures may be enhanced in part by a longer time spent on trials where participants generated a comment. (unfortunately, the study software did not provide infor- mation about timing.) if so, such a timing difference would reflect properties of the natural phenomenon we intended to study: commenting on social media images. here we have shown that the memorial boost conferred by generating comments in communication extends to a new type of item with a high degree of social relevance: social media. experiment the primary aim of experiment was to replicate the findings of experiment . second, we aimed to examine whether interacting with instagram posts, in particular posts about food, would be particularly memorable for a sample of participants who are at a higher risk for exhi- biting disordered eating behaviors. while we did not find consistent individual differences in food-related instagram posts in experiment , the participant sample may have been too broad to capture the population of interest. lifetime prevalence of eating disorders in us adults is higher in women than in men and in younger adults (hudson, hiripi, pope jr, & kessler, ; udo & grilo, ; also see cheng, perko, fuller-marashi, gau, & stice, ). experiment is therefore a replication of experiment , but with a participant sample restricted to young females. methods the project was preregistered with the open science framework (https://osf.io/dqrge). experiment was identical to experiment , with two exceptions. first, we restricted the sample to participants who identified as fe- male and who were between the ages of and . sec- ond, we asked participants additional questions about their education level. participants as planned, we present an analysis of data of partici- pants. we used a % larger sample in this study be- cause whereas the results of experiment showed a large generation effect, attempts to fit models with more complex random effects structures were met with con- vergence issues. thus, the larger sample size was se- lected with the aim of reducing convergence issues. we used amazon mechanical turk premium qualifi- cations to select a sample of female participants, aged – . as in experiment , criteria for participation is a hit approval rate of % or greater, location as the united states, and number of approved hits as +. criteria for inclusion in the study were that the partici- pant was a self-reported native english speaker (learned from birth) and that they completed at least % of the study. repeated hits from the same ip address (includ- ing ip addresses from experiment ) are excluded (the initial hit is included). five additional participants completed at least % of the study but were excluded due to missing demographic information (n = ), reporting gender as male (n = ), or reporting as a non-native english speaker (n = ). we also note that despite using premium qualifications to select participants who were between the ages of and , of the participants included in the analysis, partici- pants reported an age of or . inclusion of these participants in the final sample results in an average age of . years (sd = . ) versus . if they are excluded. as this was unanticipated and the central tendency does not shift much by including them, we chose to include these participants in the final sample rather than remove them in a post hoc decision. the majority of participants ( %) had completed at least some college. table person-level covariates in experiments and , with means and standard deviations by participants in parenthesesa experiment experiment n age . ( . ) . ( . ) education – . ( . ) restraint . ( . ) . ( . ) eating concern . ( . ) . ( . ) shape concern . ( . ) . ( . ) weight concern . ( . ) . ( . ) global score . ( . ) . ( . ) anote that the education measure was not included in experiment . the eating disorder examination questionnaire measures are calculated for participants in experiment . see text for details zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of https://osf.io/dqrge materials the materials were identical to experiment , except that we additionally asked about participants’ educational ex- perience. specifically, at the end of the study, participants were asked the highest level of school they had completed or the highest degree received, the year they graduated from college, the year they received an undergraduate or bachelor’s degree, and whether they were currently en- rolled in school, along with the level of current enroll- ment. these questions were included in order to better characterize the sample, as prior work aims to understand the social and physical factors that contribute to unhealthy eating behaviors among college students (lacaille, dau- ner, krambeer, & pedersen, ). predictions we expected to replicate the finding that recognition memory for commented-on posts would be better than posts that were passively viewed and that the likelihood of correct recognition would increase with lon- ger comments. if participants were to demonstrate reliable individual differences in memory for food-related images in particular, this would allow us to then test the hypoth- esis that higher rates of disordered eating behaviors would result in better memory for food-related images. to pre- view, however, we again found that participants exhibited stable individual differences in recognition memory but that differences in memory between food and nonfood items was itself not a reliable measure. results as in experiment , our primary analyses focused on memory for the posts, analyzed using a logistic mixed- effects model. in addition, we characterized the relation- ship between the form of the comments and memory, and finally we explored whether there were stable individual differences in these effects. for illustration purposes, the memory data are plotted using a measure of memory sensitivity (d′) in fig. . a logit-link mixed effects model for memory judgments (old = ; new = ) was fit to the , recognition mem- ory judgments; note that one data point was lost due to computer error. planned fixed effects include orthogonal helmert codes for item type (old vs. new) and whether the image had been commented on (comment vs. no com- ment). effects of image type were coded using the same dummy-coding scheme as before, comparing memory for nonfood (baseline) with memory for healthy and un- healthy food. as before, the effects of item type and com- menting can be interpreted as simple effects at the reference level (control images), and interactions with item type test whether these effects differ for healthy and for unhealthy food. as in experiment , a null model indi- cated very little by-item variability but some by-subject variability. attempts to include the full random slopes structure by person were met with convergence failures. a backward-stepping procedure was used to remove random slopes one by one to improve model fit. the final model resulted in warnings, but refitting the model using the all- fit function indicated that estimates for the fixed effects were identical to two decimal places for each of the opti- mizers, indicating satisfactory model fit for inferences re- garding the fixed effects. this model (table ) included random intercepts for subjects and items and a random slope for the item type effect by subjects. a significant effect of item type (z = . , p < . ) indicated good memory for the previously viewed im- ages. a significant effect of commenting indicated that previously viewed images were more likely to be cor- rectly recognized if the participant had commented on them (z = . , p < . ). these effects were qualified fig. experiment : illustration of memory sensitivity (d′) by condition. error bars indicate by-participant standard deviation zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of by interactions with image type. unhealthy food was re- membered better than control images (z = . , p < . ). as in experiment , the effect of commenting was smaller for unhealthy food images, compared with control images (z = − . , p < . ); this interaction may be due to the overall better memory for unhealthy food in the first place. effect of comment length on memory for instagram posts given the observed positive relationship between com- ment length and recognition in experiment , this planned analysis was expected to reveal a positive rela- tionship between comment length and successful recog- nition. as before, the analysis was restricted to old items for which participants generated a comment. the num- ber of words in the comments ranged from to (mean = . , median = ). on average, comments were longer for pictures that would ultimately be correctly recognized (mean number of words = . , sd = . ) compared with pictures that were not recognized (mean = . , sd = . ). a logit-link mixed effects model for memory judgments (old = ; new = ) was fit to the data. fixed effects included a centered measure of the number of words used to comment on the picture. the same dummy-coding scheme as in the primary ana- lysis was used, comparing control images with healthy and unhealthy food. note that the effect of the number of words can be interpreted as a simple effect at the ref- erence level (control images) and interactions with item type test whether this effect differs for healthy and for unhealthy food images. participants and items were included as random inter- cepts. a null model was initially fit to the data and indi- cated very little variability by items but some variability by participants. thus, the effect of comment length was included as a random by-participant slope. this model converged. attempts to fit more complex models with interactions with image type were met with convergence warnings indicating singular fits; thus, the results of this model were taken to be satisfactory and interpreted (table ). the significant intercept term indicates that for these commented-on images (all of which were old), correct recognitions were more likely than not (z = . , p < . ). a significant effect of word count (z = . , p < . ) shows that for each add- itional word produced in the comment, the odds of correct recognition were . times greater. the remaining fixed effects were not significant, indicating similar memory performance across the image types. participant variability and individual differences the final model of recognition memory in experiment included a random slope for the item type effect by per- sons (table ). as indicated above, models that included more complex random slopes failed to converge, indicat- ing that there was not strong support for consistent indi- vidual differences in memory for healthy and unhealthy food over nonfood images. we calculated the model- based reliability for the by-participant effect of item type (old vs. new). as in experiment , rho for the item type table experiment : number of observations: , , items, participants fixed effects estimate se z value p value (intercept) . . . . commenting (commented = . , noncommented = −. , new = ) . . . <. item type (commented = . , noncommented = . , new = − ) . . . <. commenting * healthy food − . . − . . commenting * unhealthy food − . . − . <. item type * healthy food . . . . item type * unhealthy food . . . <. random effects variance sd correlation item . . subject . . item type (subject) . . . table experiment : effect of comment length on recognition of old images fixed effects estimate se z value p value (intercept) . . . < . word count . . . < . words*healthy . . . . words*unhealthy − . . − . . random effects variance sd correlation item (intercept) . . participant (intercept) . . word count . . . zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of effect was fairly high, . , indicating stable individual differences in memory for the pictures. for the model of the effect of comment length on correct recognition (table ), inspection of the random effects pa- rameters indicated that while there was some variability in the by-person intercept (reflecting individual differences in correct recognition), the effect of word count on correct recognition varied little across participants. model-based estimates of reliability (cho et al., ) indicated a poor rho value for the by-person intercept (. ); the extremely small variance for the random slope for word count re- sulted in a negative rho value (− . ). these findings indi- cated that there was very little evidence for reliable individual differences in these effects; thus, we do not ex- plore them further. measures of individual differences in this sample include the same ede-q measure as in experiment , as well as age and education level. ede-q scores for seven participants were missing, and those participants were excluded from this analysis. descriptive statistics for the remaining partici- pants are shown in table . the ede-q scores were higher in this sample than for the participants in experiment , con- sistent with prior work indicating a higher incidence of disor- dered eating in women (cheng et al., ; hudson et al., ). education level was recoded as a numeric variable ranging from to to reflect highest level of educational achievement attained ( = less than high school degree; = post-graduate degree). exploratory bivariate correlations between the ede-q measure, participant age, education level, and the by- person random effects for response bias and overall memory were computed and interpreted with respect to a bonferroni-adjusted alpha level of . . the bivariate correlations revealed the expected relationships among the ede-q subscales and the overall global score (table in appendix). none of the other relationships were significant. as in experiment , the lack of stable indi- vidual differences in memory for healthy and unhealthy food in particular prevents examination of a relationship between those food types and scores on the ede. discussion experiment repeated experiment on a sample of young adults who reported their gender as female. con- sistent with the literature on disordered eating behaviors, the average ede-q scores for this group were higher, though still within sd of published norms (fairburn et al., ). despite these differences, the central results of experiment were replicated. we replicated the find- ing that the process of commenting on social media im- ages boosts memory for those images, and we replicated the finding that longer comments result in more correct recognitions. we also replicated the curious effect that unhealthy images were correctly recognized more often than control images and that, in turn, the effect of com- menting was smaller for unhealthy food images. while the experiment failed to provide strong evidence for sys- tematic individual differences in memory for food- related instagram posts, thus preventing our relating food-specific memory to ede-q scores, we replicated the finding that there were stable differences in overall memory for the pictures. this finding indicates that fu- ture work could use this paradigm as a starting point to build an explanatory model of individual differences in memory for social media images. general discussion our most robust finding is that the act of commenting on an instagram post boosts memory for that post and, fur- ther, that the odds of correct recognition increase the lon- ger the comment. this finding, which was consistent across five image categories (“healthy” and “unhealthy” food, cats, dogs, and nature) indicates that the way in which a user engages with content on social media shapes memory for it. the instagram platform is designed to allow users to engage with content by commenting on it (with emojis, text, and other in-app actions such as “lik- ing” or sharing). our findings indicate that engaging in this way promotes the ability to later recognize those im- ages. another notable feature of the instagram experience is that users select what types of accounts to follow. while we did not explore the implications of choosing what con- tent to view, the fact that the observed relationship be- tween commenting and memory was apparent for all image types indicates that whatever content the user chooses to follow, when they choose to engage with that content, it is likely to impact memory. we investigated memory for images of food in particular due to their popularity on instagram (e.g., #foodporn, #foodie). prior arguments that individuals with disordered eating process food-related stimuli differently from healthy participants (nikendei et al., ; shafran et al., ), along with the fact that platforms such as instagram are commonly used to share information relevant to disordered eating be- havior (see chancellor et al., ), make it important to understand how interacting with these types of stimuli im- pacts the user. the present findings provide clear evidence against the idea that there are stable individual differences in memory for food, at least in a nonclinical sample. instead of an individual trait, the observed memory benefit for “un- healthy” food over control images may be a more general phenomenon, potentially related to the fact that food, par- ticularly high-calorie food, is rewarding (see frank et al., ; simmons, martin, & barsalou, ). while we do not find consistent individual differences in memory for food in particular, it is important to con- sider the fact that some users may curate their content in order to view primarily food- and/or dieting-related zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of content. our findings show that engaging with social media images through commenting extends the user ex- perience beyond the in-the-moment experience of the platform, promoting subsequent ability to recognize that content later. thus, an important question for future work is whether the observed memory effects impact future real-world behaviors associated with that content, particu- larly in clinical samples. social media users will retain memory for whatever content they choose to view; thus, choices over what to view may be relevant to consider- ations of how social media use impacts the user. finally, the lack of reliable individual differences in memory for food, despite a consistent finding across experiments of better memory for unhealthy food vs. control, may owe to the fact that low between-participant variance may be ne- cessary to produce a stable experimental effect – the “reli- ability paradox” (hedge, powell, & sumner, ). we also found that the “unhealthy” food images, which included posts featuring items such as cake, cheeseburgers, and pizza, were remembered better in both experiments than our control images, which in- cluded cats, dogs, and nature pictures. this unexpected finding may relate to the attention-captivating properties of high-calorie food (castellanos et al., ), along with arguments that thinking about the survival relevance of a stimulus boosts memory for it (nairne & pandeirada, ). a limitation of this explanation, however, is that nairne and pandeirada ( ) found that it is processing an item’s relevance to survival that boosts memory, re- gardless of whether those items were in fact relevant to survival. of course, explaining this item-specific effect would require further study and ruling out other expla- nations related to specific item properties. this project was inspired by previously observed bene- fits of generating picture descriptions for subsequent recognition memory (mckinley et al., ; yoon et al., ; zormpa et al., ). here we show that this result extends to the socially relevant domain of social media images. consistent with the present results are findings that sharing personal memories on social media plat- forms improves memory for memories that were shared compared with those that were not shared (wang, lee, & hou, ; see stone & wang, , for discussion). one issue that stone and wang ( ) raised is that in- formation that persons choose to share may be inher- ently more memorable. we note that in the present research, participants did not choose what to comment on; yet, we similarly observed a benefit to memory for engaging with the images. however, other research indicates that engaging with media and technology more generally can impair mem- ory. for example, the use of media to record or share thoughts during an experience harms subsequent mem- ory for that experience compared with not using media to memorialize the experience (tamir, templeton, ward, & zaki, ). similarly, the act of photographing objects can harm memory for those objects (henkel, ). the presence of smartphones nearby in the room impairs performance on working memory tests (ward, duke, gneezy, & bos, ), suggesting that even the potential to disengage may harm one’s ability to fully process the current experience. further, frequent use of social media is associated with poorer academic out- comes (feng, wong, wong, & hossain, ) and with memory failures (sharifian & zahodne, ). the present finding that engaging with social media through commenting improved memory for it is not ne- cessarily inconsistent with this evidence of technology- related memory impairment. the difference in findings may relate to the fact that extracting the self from an ex- perience long enough to memorialize it with media de- tracts from the experience itself. by contrast, generating a comment about a social media image may enhance the experience of the image through elaborative encoding (bradshaw & anderson, ). commenting on social media images may also invite rehearsal (roediger and karpicke, ) or offloading (storm & stone, ) ef- fects, promoting recollection (for discussion, see marsh & rajaram, ; stone & wang, ). thus, the im- pact of engaging with technology on memory may de- pend on the user experience and whether the experience interferes with the processing of the to-be-encoded event in the first place. more generally, understanding the cognitive implications of engaging with the internet and social media may require a better understanding of how usage patterns change with time and with increased use (see storm, stone, & benjamin, ). conclusion the tremendous popularity of social media as an outlet for leisure and social interaction makes it increasingly im- portant to understand how engaging with social media shapes cognitive processes. consider the fact that on instagram alone, the comment #foodporn has been used over million times, #food over million times, and even #omgyum over , times. the results of two ex- periments show that generating comments such as these changes the way those images are memorialized, offering an ecologically valid replication and extension of prior work (mckinley et al., ; yoon et al., ). the fact that “unhealthy” food images such as chocolates were par- ticularly well remembered raises new questions about the impact of engaging with food-related content on subse- quent cognition. taken together, our findings show that the way in which we engage with social media content shapes subsequent memory for it, raising tantalizing ques- tions about how our online lives persist in memory over time, potentially shaping future behavior. zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of appendix table descriptions of the “healthy” and “unhealthy” food items for list in the studya healthy food (old) unhealthy food (old) . diced watermelon with lemon . chocolate filled donuts . grilled shrimp + broccoli . pepperoni pizza, stuffed crust . salad with avocado and brown rice . slice of oreo cheesecake . strawberry yogurt + whole strawberries . cinnamon rolls . grain bowl with tofu + broccoli . whole chocolate cake filled with candy . sliced fruit with fruit juice . chocolate- and oreo-covered strawberries . toast with smoked salmon and zucchini . fudge brownies with pretzels . corn, avocado, and tomato salad . slice of red velvet cake . acai bowl topped with berries and banana . peanut butter brownies with m&ms . salmon, veggies, and quinoa . bacon double cheeseburger . sautéed vegetables . cheese and jalapeño pizza . tomato, cucumber, and avocado salad . pecan praline french toast . spaghetti squash . chicken wings + ranch dressing . tropical smoothie bowl . chocolate cannolis . bowl of berries and kiwi . milkshakes with whipped cream . vegetable kabobs . ice cream cookie sandwich . vegetable sandwich . whole nutella cake . bowl of strawberries, raspberries, and mangos . cheesy pizza missing a slice . fruit and nut granola . oreo candy bar . sautéed shrimp + orange slices . six whole chocolate cakes healthy (new) unhealthy (new) . bowl of watermelon, kiwi, and orange . slice of chocolate cake . rice bowl with tofu, greens, and tomato . cheesy pizza . fruit and nut cereal with milk . whole chocolate layer cake . tropical fruit bowl + flowers . whole chocolate truffle cake with cream . grilled shrimp + asparagus . chocolate-drizzled brownies . breakfast porridge with banana and mango . bacon cheeseburger with fries . fruit + nut yogurt bowl . oreo cookie milkshakes . bowl of strawberries, raspberries, and watermelon . box of chocolate-covered donuts . pumpkin + spinach pasta serving . cookie dough + sprinkles on ice cream . vegan dish of chicken, veggies, and brown rice . box of stuffed bagel bites . fruit kabobs . cookies and cream brownies . cauliflower rice, cucumber, and salmon bowl . basil pizza . bowl of mangos, kiwi, blueberries, and dragon fruit . multiple oreo candy bars . grain bowl with veggies, greens, and salmon . cheese pizza on the beach . banana and almond butter granola . large jalapeño and pepperoni pizza in a box . blueberries . barbecue sandwich with fries . avocado + egg cobb salad . chocolate and kit kat candy bar whole cake . caprese avocado toast . fried chicken + fries and dip . smoothie bowl with strawberries, cocoa nibs, and bananas . donut topped with candy, sprinkles, and cookie dough . cinnamon and raisin oatmeal . cadbury creme egg stuffed brownie aacross the four lists, we counterbalanced which items were old vs. new zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of table experiment : bivariate correlations between person-level covariates of age and eating disorder examination questionnaire subscales and global scale, as well as correlations with model-derived by-person estimates for response bias, memory, and the effect of commentinga bias memory comment restraint eating shape weight ede global age bias . memory . . comment − . . . restraint . . . . eating . − . − . . . shape . . − . . . . weight . − . − . . . . . ede global . . − . . . . . . age . . . . − . . . . . correlations that are significant at a bonferroni-corrected alpha level of . (for comparisons) are marked in boldface. the eating disorder examination ques- tionnaire (ede) included the following scales: restraint, eating, shape, weight, ede global table experiment : bivariate correlations between person-level covariates of age, education, and eating disorder examination questionnaire subscales and global scale, as well as correlations with model-derived by-person estimates for response bias and memorya bias memory education restraint eating concern shape concern weight concern global age bias memory . education . . restraint . . − . eating concern − . . − . . shape concern − . . − . . . weight concern − . . − . . . . global − . . − . . . . . age . − . . . − . . . . correlations that are significant at a bonferroni-corrected alpha level of . (for comparisons) are marked in boldface. the eating disorder examination ques- tionnaire (ede) included the following scales: restraint, eating, shape, weight, ede global zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of abbreviation ede-q: eating disorder examination questionnaire acknowledgements thank you to lisa fazio for helpful conversations about this research project. authors’ contributions the authors jointly conceived of, designed, and ran the experiments; analyzed the data together; and wrote the paper together. both authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding preparation of the manuscript was supported in part by national science foundation grants bcs - and bcs - to sbs. availability of data and materials the raw, de-identified data associated with this article are available at (https://osf.io/ gafu/). materials are available upon request. ethics approval and consent to participate the research procedures were approved by the vanderbilt university human research protections program, and all participants consented prior to participation in this research. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. received: september accepted: february references aalbers, g., mcnally, r. j., heeren, a., wit, s. d., & fried, e. i. 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( ). the production effect and the generation effect improve memory in picture naming. memory, ( ), – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. zimmerman and brown-schmidt cognitive research: principles and implications ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . /j.adolescence. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.adolescence. . . https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /brm. . . 	abstract 	background 	results 	conclusions 	significance statement 	introduction 	experiment 	methods 	participants 	materials 	procedure 	additional measures 	results 	memory for instagram posts 	effect of comment length on memory for instagram posts 	participant variability and individual differences 	discussion 	experiment 	methods 	participants 	materials 	results 	effect of comment length on memory for instagram posts 	participant variability and individual differences 	discussion 	general discussion 	conclusion 	appendix 	abbreviation 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	references 	publisher’s note the unbearable anxiety of being: ideological fantasies of  british muslims beyond the politics of security article (accepted version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk ali, nadya and whitham, ben ( ) the unbearable anxiety of being: ideological fantasies of british muslims beyond the politics of security. security dialogue, ( ). pp. - . issn - this version is available from sussex research online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. please see the url above for details on accessing the published version. copyright and reuse: sussex research online is a digital repository of the research output of the university. copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. to the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in sro has been checked for eligibility before being made available. copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or url is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ this is an author accepted manuscript, not the published article. accepted for publication by security dialogue (published by sage) on th june . the published version will differ from this pre-print. please cite the published version authors: dr nadya ali, lecturer in international relations, university of sussex dr ben whitham, lecturer in international relations, de montfort university corresponding author: dr ben whitham (ben.whitham@dmu.ac.uk), lecturer in international relations, department of politics, people and place, de montfort university, leicester. mailto:ben.whitham@dmu.ac.uk the unbearable anxiety of being: ideological fantasies of british muslims beyond the politics of security abstract since the advent of the 'war on terror' british muslims have been designated as a source of anxiety by politicians, journalists and publics alike. fears that began over terrorism have extended to the opening of islamic faith schools, the meaning of clothing and halal slaughter. critical scholarship that engages with these developments in the fields of politics and international relations tends to view them through paradigms of (in)security. whilst these contributions have been helpful in understanding the construction of a muslim 'problem', this article demonstrates how the array of issues incorporated by this problem exceeds the politics of security. the article develops an original conceptual and analytic framework, drawing upon slavoj Žižek's lacanian theory of ideology, to argue that political and media ‘scandals’ about what an imagined 'muslim community' gets up to are best understood as ideological fantasies. through analysis of three case studies, we show that these fantasies are mobilised to suture traumatic gaps and conceal contradictions in wider social practices around sexual abuse, education, and food production. we show how the unremitting focus on myriad aspects of british muslims’ imagined lives is symptomatic of what Žižek calls an ‘unbearable anxiety’. islamophobic ideological fantasies summon a ‘conceptual muslim’ figure as a means of preventing confrontation with the lacanian ‘real’: antagonistic and anxiety-inducing structures and practices underpinning british society, of which we do not speak. ‘i wanted to consider what divides communities and gives rise to anxiety’ dame louise casey ( ) the casey review: a review into opportunity and integration ‘what will we do about the muslim problem then?’ trevor kavanagh ( ) the sun . introduction on th may , britain’s highest circulation newspaper, the sun, led with a story that restaurant chain pizza express was using halal meat without the knowledge of customers (jones, ). the story came in the wake of similar revelations in april , that fast-food chain subway was selling halal meat in of its shops ‘in an effort to please’ muslims (poulter, ). similar tales have been in circulation in the press regarding the creeping infiltration of halal meat into schools, hospitals, prisons and even, as the daily mail notes with disdain, pubs (penman, ). this ‘media scandal’ (lull and hinerman, ) underscores wider fears about an islamic ‘takeover’ of britain. colin hart of the christian institute, describes the prevalence of halal meat as the ‘islamification of food’ (poulter et al, ), hinting at a more deep-seated anxiety about the spread of the muslim ‘contagion’ or an ‘enemy within’ (warsi, ). the takeover, spread, or infiltration of britain by muslims is also represented as occurring without the knowledge or consent of the population, as a conspiracy. stephen evans of the national secular society confirms this: ‘unsuspecting members of the public are routinely being duped into buying meat from religious slaughter methods’ (jones, ). this anxiety over secret muslim activity reveals a compulsion on the part of much of the national news media to link this social group to a whole set of activities around which there is significant social tension. these do not just include the obvious topics of terrorism and ‘radicalisation’ but also paedophilia, benefits fraud, female genital mutilation, illegal immigration, electoral fraud, gender-based violence, faith schools and dress codes. the casting of the figure of the muslim in these diverse narratives as deviant, depraved or barbaric calls for a fresh look at how and why this development has occurred. existing critical the casey review was commissioned by government to investigate ‘opportunity and integration’ in the uk yet in the -page report, muslims, islam and ‘islamism’ are mentioned times, by contrast to just mentions of christians and christianity, and mentions of jewish people and judaism. kavanagh is a former political editor, and now a columnist, at the sun. condemnation of this article for parallels with hitler’s ‘jewish problem’ and ‘final solution’ led the newspaper to remove the capital letters from ‘the’ and ‘problem’ in the online version. an ipso investigation found that the article ‘was capable of causing serious offence, given [...] the rhetoric preceding the holocaust’ but did not breach its editors’ code. accounts of the construction of the figure of the muslim in post- / international relations (ir) scholarship has drawn upon securitisation theory, the ‘suspect communities’ thesis and governmentality approaches. these contributions have been crucial in highlighting the processes of marking out and designating muslims as objects of (in)security, but have been unable to capture the more excessive, ‘fantasmatic’ elements of these efforts. this article draws upon psychoanalytic and social theory to demonstrate how the ‘conceptual muslim’ is not simply a source of societal anxiety in britain today, but is also constructed to manage a range of societal anxieties. inspired by slavoj Žižek’s lacanian understanding of ideology, we show how british society fantasises about muslims to avoid confrontation with contradictory and upsetting aspects of our social ‘real’. where pressing political problems rear their head, such as the large-scale sexual exploitation of women and girls, the implications of neoliberal educational reform, or the industrial production of meat, the conceptual muslim is invoked as a means of bypassing critical societal self-reflection. anxiety over these problems is channelled through the figure of the conceptual muslim who bears the blame for society’s ills and this tendency concretely forestalls the possibility for radical political change focused on challenging patriarchy, class inequality and anthroparchy. the focus of our analysis is on media coverage of three cases in particular: ‘muslim rape gangs’, the ‘trojan horse’ school controversy and the halal meat scandal. the aim of the analysis is to uncover the fundamentally fantasmatic quality of the muslim ‘problem’ in britain today. the article first constructs a conceptual and analytic framework through Žižek’s lacanian theory of ideology as a tool or heuristic to demonstrate how scholars can conceptualise the figure of the muslim ‘other’ as serving multiple political functions beyond the paradigm of security. the second part of the article explores the three exemplar media scandals set out above and demonstrates how they are united not by the actual practices of british muslims, but by the fantasmatic function they serve in managing societal anxieties about generalised but unspeakable practices. while british muslims are represented as deviants in relation to a range of issues, societal fantasies about secretive and deviant minority practices are, as our analysis demonstrates, really a means of uncritically addressing anxieties over the society we are collectively (re)producing. . a conceptual-analytic framework for ideology-critique . why ideology? moving beyond the security paradigm there is an extant literature in the fields of politics and international relations that addresses social policy and media constructions of muslims in the west through the conceptual lenses of ‘securitisation’ (cesari, ; brown, ; hussain and bagguley, ; bosco, ; fox and akababa, ), ‘suspect communities’ (pantazis and pemberton, ; choudhary and fenwick, ; hickman et al., ; awan, ; hc nikels et al, ; kundnani, ), and ‘governmentality’ (aradau and van munster, ; birt, ; de goede, ; de goede and simons, ; heath-kelly, ; o’toole, ). each of these lenses offers something useful, but each also remains tied to the paradigm of security as its key reference point. distinct concerns over schools, food, and sexual abuse, among other things, have been articulated through a series of media scandals, and while each is partly represented as overlapping with security concerns around terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, none is confined to this topic. we therefore need a conceptual and analytic framework that can speak to the more pervasive nature of anxieties about muslims. this article shows that the concept of ideology - specifically the lacanian version developed by slavoj Žižek - can provide such a framework. in the midst of the liberal triumphalism of the early post-cold war era, Žižek added his voice to attempts to resuscitate the concept of ideology, noting that the ‘idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence’ ( : xxiv). in addition to his first major work published in english, the sublime object of ideology ( ), Žižek penned a series of shorter interventions that were concerned with retrieving the concept of ideology and re-asserting its pertinence at a time when many were claiming that it had become a defunct or irrelevant category. Žižek’s lacanian concept of ideology provides a way of seeing policy and media representations of an imagined ‘muslim community’ as a confluence of fantasies and anxieties mobilised in the service of specific power relations and political strategies, which, we argue, makes for a deeper understanding of the wide range of ‘scandals’ relating to british muslims, and the prominence accorded to these in our public sphere. muslims are singled out for exceptional, sustained, multi-faceted and intensive vilification (alexander, : ). while critical security theory can contribute to explaining some aspects of this problem, there are important elements that are not accounted for. how has the figure of the muslim become the pre-eminent ‘monster’ in our news media, across such a wide spectrum of issues? what sort of investment do we have as a society in the existence and threat of this monster that renders it so ubiquitous and anxiety-inducing? to answer these questions, it is useful to engage in a form of ideology-critique. . which ideology? beyond truth and falsehood the marxian concept of ideology has faced compelling challenges from within the critical tradition of social theory itself. poststructuralist criticism has been articulated through a critique of claims to ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ ostensibly implied in the concept of ideology, and a consequent imagined ability to ‘step outside of discourse’ on the part of practitioners of ideology-critique. today, in the academic fields of politics and international relations, we find ideology counter- posed to foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ in the form of a vertical analogy wherein the former functions ‘top-down’ while the latter acts from the ‘bottom-up’ (springer, : ). contemporary foucauldian scholarship rejects ‘mere’ ideology as inadequate in explaining the complex modalities and generative capacities of power in the (post)modern world (for example: rose, ; vrasti, ). how can we salvage the concept of ideology from this powerful critique? Žižek has striven to actively dissociate it from the ‘representationalist’ paradigm, according to which ideology is simply falsehood obscuring from view the ‘truth’ of the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to capitalism (Žižek, : ). instead, Žižek proposes a concept of ideology as a ‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non- imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship’ ( : ). such a matrix is not imposed ‘top- down’, but consists in the basic interpretive frameworks, the ways of seeing (berger, ), that we engage in our everyday lives. ideology saturates everyday culture and communication, from film, literature, music and art to management practices and workplace training. we produce it ourselves, it belongs to us. Žižek is not alone in conceptualising ideology in a more spontaneous, less representationalist, way. stuart hall, for example, rejects conceptualisations of ideology as the top- down imposition of an illusion or ‘some simple, all-or-nothing distinction between the true and the false’ (hall, : ) - in favour of a sensitivity to the diffusion of ideology in social constellations, its operation in ‘logics’ and discourses, and in what gramsci called ‘common sense’. we agree with hall that ‘[i]deas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces’ (ibid.: ). but, as our analysis demonstrates, whereas hall and others remain skeptical about psychoanalytic concepts, Žižek’s reading of the concept of ideology through lacanian psychoanalytic theory is particularly insightful. in the the pervert’s guide to ideology ( ), Žižek uses the cult classic s film they live! to summarise his approach. the protagonist stumbles upon a box of sunglasses developed by a clandestine resistance movement who are struggling against ‘bodysnatcher’ aliens which, without the sunglasses, appear as ordinary people, and occupy all positions of political-economic power. when one dons the glasses, one sees through the illusion – the false consciousness – these aliens are broadcasting globally. billboards, magazines, even dollar bills appear as they ‘really’ are; blank and grey, with simple and brutal injunctions inscribed onto them: ‘obey and conform’, ‘marry and reproduce’. they live! thus provides a crucial insight into to the dynamics of ideology: according to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our ‘straight’ view. [in this view] ideology should be [understood as the] glasses, which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, like you take off the glasses so you can finally see the way things really are. this, precisely – and here the pessimism of the film, of they live!, is well justified – this, precisely is the ultimate illusion. ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive each meaning, and so on and so on. we, in a way, enjoy our ideology! (Žižek, ). ideology is something that societies buy into (emotionally as much as materially) and reproduce as the experience of a cohesive social totality, or what mandelbaum ( ) has called ‘the congruency fantasy’ with respect to ‘the discursive relations between state, nation and society in modernity’. ‘in the predominant marxist perspective’, as Žižek puts it, ‘the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own possibility’ (Žižek, : ). the concept of ideology need not, therefore, ‘always stand in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth’ (foucault, : ), but is rather constitutive of ‘truths’ as we experience them: ideology is thus not necessarily ‘false’: as to its positive content, it can be ‘true’, quite accurate, since what really matters is not the asserted content as such but the way this content is related to the subjective position implied by its own process of enunciation (Žižek, : ). thinking our problem through ideology in this sense therefore involves asking the questions: how do all of these stories around islam and muslims in st century britain function for us? why, as a society, are we telling ourselves these stories about muslims through our news media and national political conversation? . fantasy and anxiety: developing and applying Žižek’s lacanian conceptualisation of ideology Žižek’s conceptualisation of ideology rests upon a lacanian theory of the subject. as such, two aspects of lacan’s psychoanalytic theory are especially important to understanding how the social construction of british muslims can be conceived of as ‘ideological’: fantasy, and anxiety. these strands of lacanian theory are intimately interrelated to the point of imbrication in his theorisation of the subject (lacan, ), and we do not seek to describe each as a discrete phenomenon; to do so would be to fundamentally misunderstand both lacan and Žižek. nor do we offer a ‘doctrinaire’ account of Žižek’s lacanian conceptualisation of ideology. instead, we draw upon both thinkers, and others, to develop our own conceptual-analytic framework for ideology-critique. there have been important interventions that have mobilised lacanian psychoanalytic concepts in ir (eklundh, zevnik and guittet; ; epstein ; mandelbaum, ; zevnik a; b). however, these interventions do not explicitly engage with the concept of ideology, which yields fresh critical insight by attending to the ways in which power relations and political strategies are mobilised. through discussions of the fantasy of congruence, mandelbaum argues ‘possibilities of national/social congruency require an other, an empty signifier of sorts (e.g. the foreigner, the migrant, islam and so on)’ ( : ). this article engages in an analysis of an ‘other’, the conceptual muslim, and its ideological functions in concrete political struggles beyond security. the concepts of fantasy and anxiety are common to the freudian and kleinian psychoanalytic traditions that pre-date lacan. but it is in lacan’s seminar x that the two concepts become thoroughly imbricated, with fantasies acting to manage anxieties generated by the ‘constitutive lack’ at the core of the subject (lacan, : ; ormrod, : ). fantasmatic narratives about others allow us to conceal or escape deadlocks and antagonisms about ourselves, and in this sense fantasy is crucial to ideology. specifically, while ‘reality’ is never directly experienced, but always-already symbolised, that symbolisation is always incomplete. the ‘real’ (in the lacanian sense, aspects of social reality that remain non-symbolised) thus reasserts itself in the form of ‘spectral apparitions’ (Žižek, : ). these fantasmatic spectres serve to ‘fill up the hole of the real’ (ibid.), or to manage our anxieties about societal antagonisms. in this sense, anxiety plays a dual role in ideology - it is both cause and effect. we are anxious about social contradictions of which we do not speak and then, when they erupt into the symbolic realm, we are encouraged to focus instead on spectral apparitions which are, in turn, cues to (actionable) anxiety. in this engagement with the nomenclature of lacanian psychoanalysis we risk losing track of the concept of ideology itself. it is therefore important to emphasise that Žižek’s lacanian reconstruction of the concept is very much within that ‘critical’ tradition defined by john thompson wherein ideology is understood as ‘meaning in the service of power’ ( : ). for Žižek too ideology is often realised and communicated textually or linguistically. a lacanian concept of ideology does not contradict the claim of media discourse theorists and analysts like roger fowler that ‘[a]nything that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position: language is not a clear window but a refracting, structuring, medium’ ( : ) and that consequently ideology ‘literally constructs the news, as it is written about’ (ibid.: ). this is what Žižek means when he says that ‘facts never ‘speak for themselves’ but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices’. particular media representations are ideological to the extent that they serve the interests of maintaining existing social orders and forestall radical social change. such representations are not necessarily ‘consciously’ produced by a manipulative ruling class however, but may result from what jessop ( ) calls ‘strategic selectivity’, whereby policies, discourses and practices that favour and reproduce the social status quo are more likely to prevail. this model does not involve a spurious extrapolation from the ‘individual’ level of psychology to the societal level. in lacanian psychoanalysis, unlike dominant strains of social psychology today, no such methodological individualism obtains. in the lacanian view (which begins from a ‘constitutive lack’ at the core of the subject), the psychological is always-already social, there is no abstract ‘individual’; one of many parallels with marx (for example: marx, : ). in the parallax view Žižek rebuts the level of analysis objection in detail: the focus of psychoanalysis resides elsewhere: the social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate … to experience as an order which is minimally - reified, externalized. the problem, therefore, is not - how to jump from the individual to the social level (Žižek, : ). this differs crucially from ‘cognitive’ psychological models of ideology too. van dijk, for instance, explicitly rejects the critical concept of ideology employed by scholars like thompson for being ‘exclusively inspired by the social sciences’ (van dijk, : ) and instead draws upon cognitive psychology in an effort to avoid focusing too strongly on ‘discursive and social dimensions’ (van dijk, : ). this methodologically individualist psychological framing of ideology is almost diametrically opposed to Žižek’s lacanian model. to conceptualise ideology as meaning in the service of power, and as realised in the interplay between anxiety and fantasy is a productive strategy as our analysis will demonstrate. it is also an approach that has not, as yet, been brought to bear on the research problem at stake in this investigation: the mediatised social construction of british muslims beyond the politics of security. . ideology-critique and the unbearable anxiety of the ‘conceptual muslim’ the value added to our analysis by placing Žižek’s lacanian concept of ideology at the centre of our conceptual-analytic framework is prefigured by Žižek’s own discussion of nazi ideology, the fantasy of the ‘conceptual jew’ and a ‘jewish plot’. he argues that in nazi ideology ‘the jew is like the maternal phallus: there is no such thing in reality, yet for that very reason its phantom-like, spectral presence gives rise to an unbearable anxiety’ (Žižek, : ) [emphasis added]. it is the very gap between the ‘empirical’ jew, actual jewish people and their everyday lives, and the ‘conceptual’ jew-as-monster, the omnipotent and conniving figure of the jew, which reinforces the fantasy of the latter. nazi ideology consisted partly in fantasies about what the monstrous ‘conceptual jew’ got up to behind closed doors. such fantasies need not be limited to either nazi ideology or the ‘conceptual jew’. Žižek suggests that while general social ‘intolerance’ to ‘foreigners’ takes the form of complaints about ‘their’ loud voices, strange food, ugly clothing, or bad smell, such factors are found to be no more than ‘indicators of a more radical strangeness’, an ‘unfathomable je ne sais quoi’ ( : ). the role that these fantasies ‘about the other’s political and/or sexual omnipotence, about ‘their’ strange sexual practices, about their secret hypnotic powers’ (ibid.) play in ideological terms is their covering of the unarticulated or non-symbolised real. these are the ‘spectral apparitions’ to which Žižek refers. Žižek’s lacanian concept of ideology captures some of the ways that psychoanalytic categories, including fantasy and anxiety figure in political and social processes and events, and allows us to think of ideology as filling the gaps and voids in our social world to shore up our fragile identities. consequently, Žižek argues that: [one] mode of the critique of ideology that corresponds to this notion is that of the symptomal reading: the aim […] is to discern the unavowed bias of the official text via its ruptures, blanks and slips ( ). in response to donald rumsfeld’s (in)famous ‘known knowns’ speech on iraq, Žižek put it another way. he noted that what rumsfeld neglects to mention are ‘unknown knows’ – things we don’t know that we know (Žižek, ). this disavowed knowledge relates to the domain of the real; the parts of reality that remain non-symbolised. the aim of a symptomal reading is therefore to attempt to describe the function of a given ‘spectre’ or fantasy in relation to this disavowed knowledge or non-symbolised reality. the purpose of our ideology-critique is thus to carry out a symptomal reading that reveals powerful antagonisms underpinning and maintaining our social orders. ideological representations involve a fantasy of facticity and empirical clarity with regard to the spectre: one of the fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to some self-evidence – ‘look, you can see for yourself how things are!’. ‘let the facts speak for themselves’ is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology – the point being, precisely, that facts never ‘speak for themselves’ but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices (Žižek, : ). the critique of ideology thus consists in an attempt to reconnect fantasmatic spectres to the ruptured real. rather than revealing some ‘deeper’ reality that is concealed by ideological illusion or falsehood, this method of ideology-critique is about highlighting the functions of particular powerful fantasies in a symbolic order where fantasising itself is inescapable. the point is to undermine fantasmatic narratives that claim that ‘the facts speak for themselves’: when a racist englishman says ‘there are too many pakistanis on our streets!’, how – from what place – does he ‘see’ this – that is, how is his symbolic space structured so that he can perceive the fact of a pakistani strolling along a london street as a disturbing surplus? that is to say, here one must bear in mind lacan’s motto that nothing is lacking in the real: every perception of a lack or a surplus (‘not enough of this’, ‘too much of that’) always involves a symbolic universe (ibid.). milan kundera’s novel famously proposes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ in contradistinction to the heaviness of nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (kundera, ; nietzsche, ). we can think of the ‘unbearable anxiety’ generated by the figure of the muslim as precisely an instantiation of the eternal return of the ideological other; a fantasised ‘conceptual’ other who plots against and undermines our social whole. but the conceptual muslim cannot really spoil our happy social whole, since it is never there in the first place. our society is riven with difference and antagonism, with competing fantasies and aspirations. instead, this figure, which ‘appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity with itself’ turns out to be its ‘positive condition’. in other words, we can here substitute a ‘conceptual muslim’ for the ‘conceptual jew’ in Žižek’s analysis, such that: ‘by transposing onto the [muslim] the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible’ ( : ). the more tension is ratcheted up in contemporary britain, through ‘austerity’ and inequality, the rise of the far right, the split between ‘leavers’ and ‘remainers’ in the wake of the referendum on eu membership, and a spike in hate crimes against minority groups, the figure of the muslim becomes increasingly important in managing our political-economic neuroses. islamophobic depictions of muslims in british government and media can be considered ideological, in this sense. ideological fantasies are thus the narratives by means of which we avoid confrontation with the lacanian ‘real’ of political and economic power: the unarticulated and contradictory structures and practices that underpin our social order. these fantasies intensify when that real is close to ‘erupting’ into visibility. this differs from an ‘ideology as illusion’ conceptual model in that the fantasies are not necessarily ‘false’ in the content of their narratives about particular social events, actors and processes, but are rather a means of avoiding confrontation with the ways in which the same problems represented as ‘deviant’ by a fantasy narrative may in fact be at the heart of ‘normal’ life - an anxiety-inducing prospect indeed. in the second half of this article, we turn to three media scandal case studies in relation to british muslims. our aim here is to show how Žižek’s lacanian reconstruction of the concept of ideology, and this notion of the ‘conceptual muslim’ can be brought to bear to develop original insights into the political power dynamics of racialised othering and the demonisation of muslim minorities, beyond the politics of security. . the unbearable anxiety of being: child sexual abuse, education and food below we explore concrete examples demonstrating the ‘spectral apparition’ of the conceptual muslim in three british media scandals. the analysis of each fantasy is structured in two parts; the first examines the construction of the fantasy and second unpicks its ideological functions. an analysis of these fantasies shows the conceptual muslim to be both purveyor and manager of anxieties, enmeshed in broader political struggles, strategies and relations of power. . ‘muslamic ray guns’: muslim sexuality and paedophilia constructing the fantasy the concept of the ‘muslim rape gang’ went viral in through an interview with an english defence league member. asked why he is marching, he says ‘cos i want britain to be about british’, followed by a series of incoherent comments about ‘the muslamic infidel’ who is ‘trying to put their law’, and ‘their iraqi law’, ‘down on us’. he adds what sounds like ‘you’ve got muslamic ray guns’. but this incoherent explanation is important, since, despite its surface level absurdity, there is something intelligible about it. the ‘muslamic ray guns’ comment was significant because it was clear that he was really trying to say ‘muslim rape gangs’. that such a disturbing comment appears in such a surreal form is telling. as inarticulate and intoxicated as the man appears, he is attempting to describe a ‘muslim plot’, ranging from the imposition of sharia law in parts of britain to the infamous ‘rape gangs’. his comments can be read as a symptom (zevnik, ) of a wider complex of anxiety and fantasy regarding the sexually monstrous conceptual muslim. in , the cabinet minister and labour mp jack straw, claimed that men from the pakistani community were deliberately ‘grooming’ white girls in order to form sexual relations with them (prince, ). he argued that these men saw white girls as ‘easy meat’ (ibid). since , there have been a number of cases involving muslim men exploiting and raping young girls. in addition to rochdale, there have been prosecutions in oxford, birmingham, derby and high wycombe (bbc, ). explanations for these incidents of systematic sexual abuse has been directly linked to religion, race and misogyny (tufail, ). tory mp kris hopkins claimed that white girls are considered ‘available’ by muslim men because they do not dress modestly and baroness warsi said they were seen as ‘fair game’ (huffington post, ). labour’s shadow equalities minister sarah champion resigned in after arguing ‘britain has a problem with british pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’ in the sun. the link between religion, race and misogyny is made clear in these narratives: muslim men rape because of their ethnic and religious identity. allison pearson sums this up, ‘leaders of the pakistani muslim community – essentially a victorian society that has landed like doctor who’s tardis on a liberal, permissive planet it despises – are at pains to deny that the grooming gangs behaviour has anything to do with ethnic origin or contemptible attitudes towards women’ (pearson, ). the empirically observable fact of some groups of predominantly muslim men sexually abusing mostly white, non-muslim girls is thus ‘made to speak’, to borrow Žižek’s turn of phrase, to a broader fantasy about british muslims as a culturally deviant minority with sinister designs on ‘our’ (white, non-muslim men’s) women and children. the ideological functions of ‘muslim rape gangs’ fantasy stories of the serial historic sexual abuse have proliferated since the death of the television presenter jimmy savile in . savile abused up to children he encountered through his television work and charitable visits to hospitals and schools (bbc, ). the investigation into savile’s activities also triggered the metropolitan police’s ‘operation yewtree’, investigating other well-known figures including the dj dave lee travis, children’s television presenter rolf harris and publicist max clifford. media reaction to these cases varied. in the case of savile, shock was expressed by many members of the press despite the fact these allegations were known to many who worked with him (davies, ). but explanations for the actions of these men centred on their celebrity status at the bbc, their wealth, and the sexual permissiveness of the time (sillito, ; boyle, ; robertson, ). deborah orr offers a different take, ‘look at the crimes that were committed by one man under cover of a dangerously misogynistic permissiveness, and wake up to the fact that this is exactly what all those tedious feminists mean when they talk of “rape culture”’ (orr, ). but this ‘cultural’ narrative found little purchase in the media discussion, and was in any case not racialised (orr is not suggesting that, for example, the ‘whiteness’ of perpetrators may be to blame). most recently, fallout from allegations of abuse and rape levelled at american film producer harvey weinstein led to an outpouring of stories from women on social media about their experiences through the hashtag #metoo. these revelations extended to british politics too. several mps were ‘outed’ for sexual harassment and misconduct, with defence secretary michael fallon resigning his cabinet post over allegations against him (bbc, ). juxtaposing these two examples of systematic sexual abuse reveals that one is represented as stemming from an excess of power and the other from degenerate religious or racial characteristics. comparing the representation of sex offenders racialised as ‘asian’, ‘muslim’ or ‘pakistani’ versus those who were ‘white’, tufail ( ) found racial and religious signifiers to be absent in coverage of the latter. white sex offenders were simply paedophiles whereas those racialised as ‘muslim’ were doubly monstrous. there is, meanwhile, a strong historical precedent to describing muslim masculinities and sexualities as perverted and dangerous (battacharyya, ; puar and rai, ). the example of the prophet mohammed as a paedophile is a recurrent trope in far-right discourses on the threat posed by muslim men (bbc, ) and the youtube film innocence of muslims, which sparked international riots in , also depicted mohammed in this way (the innocence of muslims, ). polygamy and the availability of virgins in heaven upon martyrdom are oft-cited examples of the apparent strangeness of muslim sexual practices. from savile to weinstein to westminster, systematic sexual abuse by the dominant, non- muslim white male culture is almost never described a result of ‘cultural’ or racial failings. cultural misogyny appears as the sole property of muslim men who are ‘known’ to be sexually deviant, and this is the ideological function of the ‘muslim rape gangs’ fantasy. this fantasy obfuscates the wider problem of endemic child sexual exploitation and patriarchal violence at large in british society perpetrated overwhelmingly by (white, non-muslim) men. in making child sexual exploitation the work of muslim men, and bringing racial and religious identity into the causal explanation, ‘britishness’, and ‘british’ (white, non-muslim) men are absolved. as bell hooks puts it: ‘misogynistic attitudes tend to be portrayed by the dominant culture as always an expression of male deviance. in reality, they are part of a sexist continuum, necessary for the maintenance of patriarchal social order’ (hooks, : ). the muslim rape gangs fantasy allows us to say ‘look, it’s the pakistani, the muslim’ and ‘in comparison, we, white british people are more civilised’. this fantasy ensures the participation of many feminists in racist discourse about muslim men (what sara farris ( ) calls femonationalism) and makes the transformational work of anti-racist feminists more difficult (rashid, ). . the ‘trojan horse’ of birmingham: muslim ‘plots’ in the state education system constructing the fantasy in , a letter containing details of a supposed islamist plot to takeover of birmingham’s schools was sent to local educational authorities. following the publication of the letter in news media, then education secretary michael gove ordered new ofsted inspections of the schools concerned and appointed former head of counter-terrorism peter clarke to conduct a parallel inquiry (travis, ). the result of the ofsted inspections was to place three of the schools into special measures, despite the fact that two years previously two of them were rated ‘outstanding’ by the same team. the schools were accused of not preparing children for life in modern britain (hiles, ), of failing to teach pupils about the dangers of extremism, and of weak teaching around sex and relationships (bbc, ). however, the schools were not accused of ‘radicalising’ muslim schoolchildren. the letter that provoked the crisis is now considered a forgery but it was considered ‘real’ enough to warrant multiple inquires (cook, ). there were ongoing problems at the schools regarding external speakers, the sacking of head teachers and the alienation of teaching staff (ibid). but it did not matter whether there was a conspiracy because, as the ofsted reports suggests, these academy status schools are already problematic for being run by muslims. this view is reinforced by gove’s move (later overturned) to ban those involved in the alleged ‘plot’ from teaching or becoming school governors (gilligan, ). published years earlier, gove’s book celsius / contained a chapter entitled ‘the trojan horse’, where he argued islamists are trying to take over britain through attempts such as the one outlined in the now-debunked letter (gove, ). the spectre of the conceptual muslim was already in place for gove as he drew comparisons between uk muslims, nazis and communists in the scale of the threat they pose to ‘western civilisation’. speculation over what was really going on in the schools abounded (cook, ). charles moore at the daily telegraph provides an example par excellence of the kind of fantasising trojan horse enabled: i wonder what we shall learn about the curriculum. was evolutionary biology taught? were any dancing or singing classes allowed? were classes sexually segregated, with girls at the back, not allowed to ask questions? how were non-muslim teachers, parents and pupils treated? were there cultural exchange visits to mecca and did these exclude non-muslim pupils? were religious education classes on christianity contrived specially for external visitors (moore, ). the daily mail claimed that students were being taught ‘holy war’, for which their evidence was a religious education lesson that examined jihad and just war traditions (clark et al., ). the daily express claims that governors from one school: were demanding religious assemblies and regular time out of class for worship and generally turned the headteacher’s life into a nightmare. their intention was to remove dave peck but it is my view that it was their ultimate intention to take over the school and make it a muslim faith school with a muslim head (wheeler, ). the evidence for these claims was generated through fevered chains of linked speculation based on what is already ‘known’ about muslims, which was sufficient to enable and structure the trojan horse fantasy. the ideological functions of the ‘trojan horse’ fantasy writing about the trojan horse scandal, john holmwood and therese o’toole argue ‘from the outset, it seemed to us there was no basis at all to this narrative’ ( : ). five teachers who were accused of ‘professional misconduct’ by the department for education (dfe), had their cases brought to the national college for teaching and leadership (nctl) but this was subsequently dropped. the nctl accused government lawyers of ‘abuse of the process which is of such seriousness that it offends the panel’s sense of justice and propriety’. (adams, ). lifetime bans meted out to two further teachers by the dfe, were also overturned, with judge stephen phillips accusing government lawyers of ‘serious procedural impropriety’ and highlighting ‘considerable doubt as to the fairness’ of the proceedings (adams, ). however, what is at stake in the analysis of trojan horse is not only its veracity. the fantasy functioned ideologically to conceal wider tensions and contradictions in neoliberal educational reform and its reproduction of racialised, classed and gendered hierarchies, which these reforms were ostensibly designed to address. as education secretary, gove led wide-ranging changes, including significantly extending new labour’s academies and free schools schemes, taking more schools outside the control of local education authorities. these schools receive funding directly from dfe and have control over staff, budgets, admissions and curricula (uk government, ). according to the government this is about raising educational standards in disadvantaged areas (ibid). over half of english schools are now academies. as holmwood and o’toole point out, ‘social inequalities had previously been argued to determine outcomes, the focus was shifted to aspirations (on the part of parents and communities) and expectations (of teachers) in order to drive up standards regardless of circumstances.’ ( : ). simply put, schools and the communities in which they are embedded are responsibilised for overcoming structural disadvantages and fostering their own success. in , park view academy had been judged ‘outstanding’ by ofsted in spite of catering to some of the most disadvantaged students in britain. after the scandal broke in , it was judged ‘inadequate’ and put into special measures. the change in status hinged on the idea the school had an ‘islamic ethos’ which was not preparing children for ‘life in modern britain’, rather than on educational attainment or teaching quality (holmwood and o’toole, : - ). taken together, these concerns point to fears that schools runs by muslims are susceptible to being ‘islamised’. but without the expansion of academies, the trojan horse scandal would not have been possible. park view academy was an example of the wrong race and class of people enabling the wrong kind of success through neoliberal educational reform. christy kulz ( ) has argued that a ‘successful’ academy is one which attracts white, middle-class children and parents whose aspirational values provide an example or ‘oasis’ to unruly (working class, racialised) ‘urban’ children. the colonisation of academies by white middle class families, to improve the chances of working class and bme children, reproduces the classed, raced and gendered structures they were ostensibly created to reform. the trojan horse scandal brought some of these tensions to light, but, as the example of park view shows, the dfe and gove were ultimately concerned with the ‘misuse’ of decentralised power by muslims in the education system enabled by neoliberal reform. the fact this school was providing poor local students with the possibility of educational attainment was not relevant. what was at stake in the trojan horse scandal was the reproduction of white middle class values and privilege, which was subverted by the successful running of park view by muslims. . the ‘halal secret of pizza express’: muslims and the british food industry constructing the fantasy in may , the sun ran a front page story relating to food, under the headline ‘halal secret of pizza express’, preceded by ‘after subway ban on bacon…’ the use of halal meat by food outlets without labelling prompted newspapers to explain why this is problematic. the sun wrote that ‘islam says chicken can only be eaten if the bird’s throat has been slit while it is still alive’ (jones, ). the story provides details about reciting verses from the qur’an, facing mecca when making the cut, and the draining of blood from the animal. the daily mail sent an undercover reporter to a ‘halal’ abattoir who writes, ‘grabbing one lamb at a time, he pulls back its head and slits the throat with a swift movement from his razor-sharp knife. blood gushes everywhere as he recites the islamic bismillah prayer in arabic: ‘in the name of allah, the most gracious, the most merciful’’ (penman, ). the ‘halal’ process is thus palpably shrouded in a veil of ritualistic strangeness replete with references to allah, the spilling of innocent blood and the recital of prayers. the reporter’s preoccupation with these aspects of slaughter points to a sense of unease and simultaneously a morbid fascination with the practice. the undercover investigation which sought to uncover the ‘truth’ about the halal process only reveals its profound unfathomability. coverage of this food production story was in sharp distinction to the horsemeat scandal the preceding year. in , dna testing revealed that many supposedly ‘beef’ products available in supermarkets in fact contained little or no cow, but instead up to % horse. the sun’s front page on the horsemeat scandal took a light-hearted approach, joking that findus lasagne consisted of ‘shergar’ (the racehorse disappeared by suspected ira operatives in ) and pasta. most tabloid coverage consisted of noting the level of horsemeat contained within the food, and the ‘household name’ stores stocking it, together with details of investigations underway. major retailers including tesco and wal-mart-owned asda were selling ‘own-brand’ horsemeat lasagne wrongly labelled as ‘beef’. as the scandal unfolded, the narrative adopted – with active encouragement from the companies responsible for packaging horse as beef – was that the practice of substituting horse for cow was due to the involvement of ‘foreign’ factories in the production process. retailers apologised and promised to switch or discipline suppliers to resolve the problem. the ideological functions of the ‘halal secret’ fantasy both stories are unsettling in that they highlight increasing alienation from the processes of food production, the industrial slaughter of animals and the use of their flesh in ‘processed’ supermarket foods. however, whereas the horsemeat story is relatively light-hearted, with its shergar joke (later sun coverage noted that customers at a mongolian restaurant were ‘neigh bothered’ about the sale of horsemeat), the coverage of the sale of halal meat at pizza express is framed in a much more sinister way: a ‘halal secret’. this story is also explicitly linked to one the paper had run the previous week under the headline ‘ subways cutting out ham for muslims’, deepening the impression of a ‘plot’ or ‘conspiracy’ among uk food outlets to serve meat produced using halal slaughter methods ‘secretively’ to non-muslims. the pizza express story tells readers that the chain has been serving only halal-slaughtered chicken, ‘without telling us’. this ‘us’ (non-muslims) is therefore unwittingly eating meat from animals killed in accordance with the islamic faith. this is supposed to be intrinsically outrageous. yet outrage is only possible if we link this information up to the ideological network of other stories about muslims. they are taking our ham away from our branches of subway, they are radicalising our children at school, they are forming rape gangs and molesting white, non-muslim british girls; these are all elements of the ‘muslim plot’. in fact, as subsequent news coverage demonstrated, pizza express had trailed online their switch to halal-only chicken on grounds of cost effectiveness; it is cheaper to buy the meat in bulk, and hence all from one source (muir, ). hugh muir further notes that, unlike generic meat production, the standards of both care and hygiene are actually likely to be higher in many forms of religious slaughter, since at least some connection to the living animal and the meaning of its death is retained. the pizza express story, like the horsemeat story, speaks to societal anxiety about our meat industry and secretive industrial food production processes, hidden from sight in vast and remote factories across the world (singer, ; lymbery, ; foer, ). where meat comes from in contemporary britain, with its reliance on mass-produced and ‘convenience’ food, is a source of anxiety (blythman, ; lawrence, ). the animal itself, its life and death, has been conceptualised in critical scholarship as the ‘absent referent’ of the meat production process (for example: cudworth, ). in this instance, the spectre of the conceptual muslim rears its monstrous head to cover the real of our industrial meat production processes. that a majority of people might daily be consuming food of which they have little or no knowledge – of the country or even species of origin – is an intensely anxiety-inducing idea. the fantasy of a muslim halal ‘secret’ conspiracy provides a means of articulating and managing this anxiety. lobbying for bans on halal meat on grounds of animal cruelty delays confrontation with the grotesqueries of contemporary industrial meat production. conclusions this article provides a new frame through which to view media and political scandals surrounding muslims in britain. a series of highly publicised issues, including not only the ‘muslim rape gangs’, ‘trojan horse’ and ‘halal secret’ that form the focus of this paper, but also the building of mosques and the wearing of headscarves, have been articulated together in the popular imagination as a ‘muslim plot’. we have shown that thinking this problem through the concepts of fantasy and anxiety enables us to better access the ideological functions of this ‘plot’ and its central imagined agent, the ‘conceptual muslim’. the political labour which goes into ‘uncovering’ the muslim ‘plot’ functions to generate actionable anxieties, in order to complicate and block possibilities for wider social transformation. the spectral apparition of the conceptual muslim occupies areas beyond obvious security concerns - food, child abuse and education - because these scandals point to multiple and intersecting systems of domination and oppression in british society. through ideological fantasies about muslims, confrontation with fundamental antagonisms of our social reality that are inadequately symbolised in our political-economic discourse – from poverty and inequality, to patriarchy, misogyny and anthroparchy – are indefinitely suspended. we need not confront ‘our’ antagonisms while we can still focus on ‘their’ disturbing excess and strange practices. this form of anxiety is necessary for politics to continue with ‘business as usual’; and in britain this means as a racist, sexist, classed and anthroparchal order. implications for social movements agitating for radical change are stark. demands made by feminists, anti-racists, or socialists for more egalitarian societies can be disregarded, their aims de-legitimised, through the propagation of fantasies centred on the muslim as a sexist, devious character stealthily taking over britain. multiculturalism is depicted as ‘weakness’, rendering britain susceptible to the machinations of muslims; anti-racist campaigners as ‘politically correct’ naive accomplices. anti-racist struggles for gender equality are equally susceptible to such claims. zevnik’s words are instructive here: ‘anxiety can also mobilise and support political action’ ( : ); this includes support for measures targeting muslims like so-called ‘burqa bans’ or banning halal meat. as mandelbaum suggests, congruence between state, nation and society is the fantasy which underpins logics of security/insecurity, but we have shown here how fantasies of congruence can exceed security framings. congruence fantasies provide ‘an explanation accounting for the lack of a promised future’ (mandelbaum, : ), for why this future ‘cannot be attained’ (zevnik, : ). british policy and media elites deploy the conceptual muslim as means of avoiding 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( ) the pervert’s guide to ideology ( ), sophie fiennes (dir.), uk: zeitgeist films. international journal of recent technology and engineering (ijrte) issn: - , volume- issue- , september published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijrte.c . metoo movement analysis through the lens of social media p.asha, k. sri neeharika, t. sindhura abstract—sentiment analysis is an errand which is used to analyse people’s opinions which has been derived out of textual data seems productive for palpating various nlp applications. the grievances associated with this task is that, there prevails variety of sentiments within these documents, accompanied with diverse expressions. therefore, it seems hard to whip out all sentiments employing a dictionary which is commonly used. this work attempts at constructing the domain sentiment dictionary, by employing the external textual data. besides, various classification models could be utilised to classify the documents congruent to their opinion. we have also implemented topic modelling, emoticon analysis and optimized gender classification in our proposed system. many sectors have been identified where women are being abused. clusters are formed for these sectors and the most affected sector is also identified. keywords—sentiment analysis, cluster, classifier, modelling. i. introduction based on vast augmentation in networks, internet has turned out to be a basic need for human survival. this development in internet increased the connectivity among people around the globe. people are getting more exposed to social media platforms in every possible way. so public opinion analysis has become a trend in the society before any further step in any industry. hence the insistence for sentiment analysis along with opinion mining is burgeoning. in this era of machine learning sentimental analysis [ - ] plays a pivotal role in creating awareness through analyzing a big sample of social media users who share their thoughts, emotions and opinions. in this work, text mining helps is used to obtain results. as there are many social media platforms on the internet, one among them is twitter. the main use of this social network is that it contains hashtags which makes our task easier for data collection. ii. literature review probabilistic latent semantic analysis (plsa), an unsupervised learning technique was proposed, which was formulated on statistical latent class model. the authors affirmed that their approach seems to be more of principal oriented than the conventional latent semantic analysis (lsa), as it possess a strong statistical foundation which adopts annealed likelihood function as its optimization criterion [ - ]. revised manuscript received on september , dr. p.asha, asst. prof.,dept. of computer science and engineering, sathyabama institute of science and technology, chennai. ashapandian @gmail.com k. sri neeharika, asst. prof.,dept. of computer science and engineering, sathyabama institute of science and technology, chennai. neeharikasri @gmail.com t. sindhura, asst. prof.,dept. of computer science and engineering, sathyabama institute of science and technology, chennai. sindhura @gmail.com the privileges of this plsa is considered as a promising and productive unsupervised learning method, which covers a wide spectrum of applications with respect to text learning [ ].the authors stated the employment of semantic features in the twitter sentiment classification. they explored three other approaches for assimilating the collected tweets for effective analysis. these approaches include replacement, augmentation and interpolation [ ]. replacement includes replacing the words with meaningful words, deleting the unnecessary words. augmentation simply means adding. approaches in augmentation include adding noise and applying transformations on existing data. in sparse areas imputation and dimensional reduction are also used for augmentation in the data sets. interpolation is a process of drawing new data points from the existing range of known data points. mainly interpolation helped the model to achieve best results by interpolating the generative words into unigram language model of naïve bayes (nb) classifier [ ]. a new approach to sentimental analysis was introduced, which uses support vector machines (svm). mainly, this svm is used to bring together potentially pertinent information from different sources [ - ]. this also includes various favourability measures for phases and adjectives related to topic of the text in the tweet. merits of this approach includes the incorporation of various words (with the help of svm) where, previously it was limited to the specific words that are present in the tweets. due to this incorporation of words from various sources, efficiency of the model was declined. iii. proposed system initially data has been collected in the first step. later on it is pre-processed. the pre-processed data is used for getting valuable insights through different visualization techniques. finally clusters are formed and the most affective cluster is identified (fig. ). metoo movement analysis through the lens of social media published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijrte.c . fig . system architecture the input data has been collected from twitter using various hashtags (#metoo, #politics, #education, #work) using twitter consumer key, api, secret key. all the extracted tweets are stored in a .csv format. with the help of hashtags like politics, education and work abuses in those fields are identified and data will be stored under different sectors which helps in the formation of clusters. storage of tweets are done because extraction of tweets depends on the number of people tweeting using a particular hashtag. so if we take it dynamically sometimes the number tweets can be low. to avoid such constraints the required input data is stored in csv format. two dictionaries are formed with a catalogue of positive and negative words in it. data pre-processing is to be done to the collected input as it contains so much of noise. here noise includes like punctuations marks, numbers, stop words, tags, url’s, un- parliamentary language, missing end marks, splitting the sentence into words. words like rt, crt, amp, thi, crt are also removed. these words are present at the beginning of each tweet. so all the above stated things are removed during pre-processing. a. topic modelling topic modelling groups the similar words into one cluster which helps to identify the hidden patterns in it. b. emoticon analysis emoticon analysis is used to calculate the reaction of the tweeting person. in this analysis we replaced emoticons to a suitable word, so that we can take the emoticon into consideration while categorizing the tweet. c. gender classification twitter doesn’t disclose the gender of the tweeting purpose. but we can find out the gender of the user through their usernames. this can be achieved using traditional dictionary libraries. d. visualization generally visualizations are used to understand the reactions of the people in an easy manner. various types of visualizations helps us to recognize any hidden semantic patterns in a precise manner. some of the visualizations used in the project are . bar plot . histogram . word cloud iv. results and discussion calculation of the score of the tweet is an important step for this analysis because this distinguishes the type of tweet and further classifies it. this classification is done with the help of the dictionaries which includes a wide range of positive and negative words in it. hence all the extracted tweets including the cluster data undergoes this process. calculation of the score of a tweet involves the number of positive and negative words in it. the ultimate score will be the difference of positive and negative words. depending upon the final score, that particular tweet is further categorized into any one of the categories. these categories contain headers like most positive, positive, neutral, negative, most negative which is shown in figure . this is achieved by using laply function. hence the above stated process is done to the cleansed data obtained after pre-processing. fig . classification of tweets of #metoo international journal of recent technology and engineering (ijrte) issn: - , volume- issue- , september published by: blue eyes intelligence engineering & sciences publication retrieval number: c / ©beiesp doi: . /ijrte.c . fig . scores of the tweets a. identification of the most- affected cluster sentiment scores calculated are grouped into negative and positive. scores with a negative number falls under negative category and score with a positive number falls under positive category. so sentiment scores are calculated for the clusters and all the negative categories are compared and a bar plot is drawn to identify the most-affected cluster among the three of the clusters. fig . identification of the most-affected cluster fig . word cloud representing the most frequent words in tweets this is a word cloud that displays the most frequent words used in the tweets. the bigger the word is the bigger its size (occurrences) in the cloud. the specialty of this cloud is that if we hover on any of the word in the cloud it displays the frequency of that. v. conclusion data is collected from twitter and is not limited to a single platform. it can be collected from any social media platform, but the collected data should be accurate. hence the collected data is pre-processed. many pre-processing techniques are done to the data such that, the factual data is supplied as an input to the process. the pre-processed data is visualized to get valuable insights from it. visualizations include bar plot, word clouds etc. hence, the proposed strategy classifies the tweets based on the sentiment scores into different categories. for further analysis they are classified as positive and negative tweets, which boosts up sentiment analysis which assists in identifying the most affected sector. references . j. yi, t. nasukawa, r.b., niblack, w.: sentiment analyser: extracting sentiments about a given topic using natural language processing techniques. in: rd ieee conf. on data mining (icdm’ ). 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( ), – ( ) . chenghua lin, yulan he, richard everson, member, ieee, and stefan ru¨ger,” weakly supervised joint sentiment-topic detection from text”, ieee trans. on knowledge and data engineering, vol. , no. , june . . xiaohui yu,yang liu, jimmy xiangji huang, and aijun an,,” mining online reviews for predicting sales performance: a case study in the movie domain”, ieee trans.on knowledge and data engineering,vol. , no. , april . . danushka bollegala, david weir, and john carroll,” cross-domain sentiment classification using a sentiment sensitive thesaurus”, ieee trans. on knowledge and data engineering, vol. , no. , august . . xin chen, mihaela vorvoreanu, and krishna madhavan,”mining social media data for understanding students’ learning experiences” ieee trans. on learning technologies, vol. , no. , july- september . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ microsoft word - . rickard.docx interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies volume , issue summer review: maxime foerster, the politics of love: queer heterosexuality in nineteenth- century french literature (durham: university of new hampshire press, ) mathew rickard issn: - date of acceptance: may date of publication: june citation: mathew rickard, ‘review: maxime foerster, the politics of love: queer heterosexuality in nineteenth-century french literature (durham: university of new hampshire press, )’, volupté: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies, . ( ), – . doi: . /gold.v.v i . .g volupte.gold.ac.uk this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution- sharealike . international license. voluptÉ: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies | maxime foerster, the politics of love: queer heterosexuality in nineteenth-century french literature becoming modern: new nineteenth-century studies (durham: university of new hampshire press, ), pp. xi + . isbn mathew rickard queen’s university belfast published in a series that aims to explore the historical developments that inform our concepts of modernity on both sides of the atlantic, maxime foerster’s exploration of the politics of love: queer heterosexuality in nineteenth-century french literature arrives at a perfect time in the post-#metoo society in which we find ourselves. queer theory increasingly allows us to interrogate even the most monolithic of sexual realities, many of which find their basis in the french nineteenth century. indeed, despite recent french misgivings surrounding the rise of la théorie du genre, it is important to remember that both our conceptions of gender and sexuality and the deconstructions of them are equally (and ironically) informed by french thought. while the nineteenth century, and especially the french experience therein, has been held up by many as the century of patriarchal bravado in which transgressive female protagonists are didactically castigated, the issue of sexuality and gender has of late been reopened, re-examined and reconstituted. foerster’s opening epigraph, dedicating the book to ‘all those who continue to resist normalization today’ (p. vii), firmly situates the study in the countercultural tradition of the decadent novels that the author examines. perhaps more surprising to some, however, is the inclusion of romantic literature. while decadence is well known and well studied for its provocative treatments of perverse erotic inclinations, there is perhaps a tendency to assume that in comparison to its decadent offspring, romanticism is conventional, even tame, in its representations of the so-called politics of love. however, foerster at once links the two, suggesting that the familiar decadent perversion of love picks up from the less-acknowledged romantic reinvention of love. the introduction opens with a rachildean reimagining of the don juan legend in which a woman usurps the masculine role yet continues the patriarchal heteronormative paradigm, encapsulating what foerster refers to as ‘heterosexual trouble’, a framework the name of which evokes butlerian readings of gendered relations. don juan features as the supreme heterosexual lover throughout french literature of the nineteenth century, yet recent scholarship has demonstrated their queer potential, making them a good starting-point for discussion. firmly voluptÉ: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies | ensconcing his argument in the now axiomatic queer interrogations of heterosexuality of the late twentieth century, foerster’s overarching thesis is that the so-called norm of heterosexuality seemed not to work in the french century of revolutions. a key aspect of his argument is the gendered facet of the french language that so many feminist critics have suggested enforces gendered expectations, but which foerster demonstrates can be just as resistant to essentialism. this linguistic nuance is extended to foerster’s conceptualization of heterosexuality, ultimately distancing heterosexuality from heteronormativity, allowing for the queerness of ‘straight’ people that has been refused by other queer theorists (although increasingly common in anglophone french studies). foerster’s study spans the length of the long nineteenth century in french literature, encompassing both male and female canonical writers in the romantic period as well as those from the decadent tradition. finally, he comments on the legacy of nineteenth-century queer heterosexuality moving into the twentieth century. this breadth of material and gender balance demonstrates that while challenges to heteronormativity may often be perceived as a uniquely feminine concern, men also suffer under patriarchy and have just as often critiqued its reach. the politics of love tackles the often-thorny issue of masculinity in the french nineteenth century, a time when virility was championed in official discourse, yet simultaneously openly challenged and even ridiculed in both romantic and decadent fiction. similarly, any conceptions of the eternal feminine were thrown out of kilter by the nascent feminist movement across the long nineteenth century, equally represented in the fiction of the time. however, whereas many have had recourse to the blatantly different forms of masculinity and femininity that overtly challenged patriarchal norms, foerster’s return to the original aims of queer theory through his focus on the ‘default’ sexual order and the subsequent unsettling of any putative claims to normalcy it holds is a welcome addition to the burgeoning queering of the nineteenth century. the discussion of heterosexual love in the romantic period begins with the age-old question of whether or not the concept of heterosexual love is a ‘trap of masculine domination’ (p. ), and indeed, the romantic ideals of individualism and exploration of the self would seem to be at odds with traditional formulations of ‘romantic’ heterosexual love. foerster argues eloquently that this individualism paved the way for the decadent subject who turned erotic normalcy on its head. while thomas laqueur argued that the end of the enlightenment brought us from a one-sex to a two-sex model of gender relations, it is suggested here that the literature which followed seemingly continued to be at odds with this conceptualization. foerster demonstrates that the supposed contemporaneous divide between idealism (feminine) and realism (masculine) in romanticism was in reality indicative of the incompatibility voluptÉ: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies | of heteronormative ideal sexualities. his discussion of germaine de staël’s delphine ( ) and corinne; ou, l’italie ( ) develops the concept that romantic idealism allowed women far more agency than before, allowing for a radical reinvention of the heterosexual institution of love. both women refuse to bow down to what lee edelman would later come to refer to as [hetero]sexual futurism – the institutions of marriage with children – while the men suffer from an ‘odd reversal’ of masculinity. similarly, the discussion of the notoriously nonconformist george sand and her novels lélia ( ) and isidora ( ) reveals how the author not only questioned gender roles through her fiction and real-life interactions, but also queried how these gender deviations demonstrated the impossibility of heteronormative love. however, while it could be assumed that staël’s and sand’s critiques of heteronormativity are part-and-parcel of their position as gynocritics, foerster adroitly demonstrates that this heterosexual trouble was felt on both sides of the gender divide. the romantic task of reinventing heterosexual love was intimately connected with dismantling masculine domination, and so foerster balances his approach to the movement by referring to male romantic writers. of particular note is the inclusion of benjamin constant and alfred de musset, both known for their trysts with staël and sand respectively, adding a distinctly extratextual layer to foerster’s framework of heterosexual trouble, evidenced in real life as well as in the fiction of these lovers. both constant’s adolphe ( ) and musset’s la confession d’un enfant du siècle ( ) demonstrate the romantic urge to separate heterosexual (‘romantic’) love from the libertine legacy of the eighteenth century. the reinvention of love and the turbulence of revolution, warfare, and empire, however, remade masculinity and made it more difficult to define. théophile gautier’s mademoiselle de maupin ( ) demonstrates this gendered ambiguity, with its androgynous protagonist embodying the very concept of heterosexual trouble. the ambiguity of gender is compounded by the ambiguity of genre and language, with foerster revealing queerness at every level of the novel. foerster notes that by refusing to conform to ‘natural’ heterosexual functions, these romantic characters are often derided as unnatural or monstrous, paving the way for decadence and its lauding of artifice. foerster pinpoints the transition between romanticism and decadence as beginning in with the emergence of baudelaire’s degenerate poetics, and states that while romanticism was a pan-european movement, decadence ‘was first recognized as a distinctly french cultural phenomenon’ (p. ). of course, as most readers of volupté will agree, decadence studies has been expanded to include the most disparate of cultural milieux, yet its distinctly french origins remain a key characteristic of the tradition, and vital to foerster’s argument for the inimitability of heterosexual trouble in french decadent texts. however, the degenerate opposition that decadence voluptÉ: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies | offered did not fully hold sway until the fin de siècle, with which it is most often associated these days. the french humiliation during the franco-prussian war (amongst other national crises) gave decadence the foothold needed to assert itself and its poisonous poetics on a national stage. thus, as foerster argues, while romanticism wrote against the enlightenment ideals of heterosexual compatibility, decadence revelled in the degeneration of the nation, a macrocosmic rejection of heterosexual idealism. both charles baudelaire and jules-amédée barbey d’aurevilly lauded the male dandy while denigrating the female, yet by framing dandyism as the refinement of perversion, foerster reveals an often confrontational yet symbiotic relationship between the male and female dandy in their work, at once underscoring and undermining heterosexual trouble. in writing in le peintre de la vie moderne ( ) that women can rise above nature through engaging with artifice, baudelaire would seem to contradict what he wrote in mon cœur mis à nu ( ) – that women were inherently natural and thus excluded from dandyism. similarly, barbey d’aurevilly’s decadent misogyny ironically opens up a space for female dandyism, at once refusing to identify historic female dandies of the past in du dandysme et de george brummell ( ) yet wishing to celebrate the androgyny of lady emma hamilton and giving agency to monstrous women in his les diaboliques ( ). ultimately, both are shown by foerster to blur the line between gendered individualism and patriarchal complicity, despite professing the opposite. the discussion of dandyism dovetails with an exploration of the late nineteenth-century obsession with degeneration and normalization, with the last case study focusing on the decadent couple as embodied by the female patient and the male doctor. decadence, despite its remit of amorality, was borne out of a reactionary impulse to reclaim all that french positivism sought to eradicate. as foerster argues, with the rise of sexology as the new facet of masculine dominance, the male doctor and the hysteric woman were the troubled heterosexual couple par excellence, inevitably parodied by decadence in comparison to naturalism’s upholding of the sexological agenda. indeed, baudelaire blurs the lines between feminine and masculine by juxtaposing them together in the name of the protagonist of ‘mademoiselle bistouri’ (‘bistouri’ meaning lancet, the phallic metonym for the doctors his protagonist lusts after) while giving agency to the mad female rather than to the rational doctor. similarly, jean lorrain’s la dame aux lèvres rouges ( ) deals with two men’s inability to understand the morbid sexuality of the eponymous dame, taking the place of the male doctor in pathologizing and demonizing her, while ironically unable to stem the carnage she continues to wreak. finally, in providing us with a commentary on rachilde’s la jongleuse ( ), foerster demonstrates not only a parody of the doctor-patient construct, but also an additional example of heterosexual trouble so dysfunctional that even the most basic of voluptÉ: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies | heterosexual acts – that of sex itself – is out of the question, with autoeroticism and voyeurism replacing literal carnality. foerster ends his study with a welcome invitation of suggested routes of investigation readers of the politics of love may take, including those of drama and poetry, often overlooked in favour of novels. readers of volupté will also be pleased to note his acknowledgment of manifestations of queer heterosexuality in other national canons of decadence, as well as those of romanticism and naturalism/realism, providing fertile ground for future research. another welcome (though perhaps not original) addition is what foerster refers to as the ‘proustian step’, suggesting that nineteenth-century heterosexual trouble paved the way for new and more innovative iterations of the construct in the writings of both male (notably marcel proust) and female authors in the twentieth century, ultimately demonstrating the importance of both romanticism and decadence to our modern conceptions of gender and sexuality. while it may seem that foerster treads familiar ground by interrogating gender deviance and dysfunctional sexuality in nineteenth-century french literature, his focus on the ‘norm’ of heterosexuality and both canonical and reactionary literature reframes the argument in an innovative and informative manner. the breadth and depth of material covered in a deceptively slim tome ensures that this volume will be of interest to a wide cross-section of researchers of nineteenth-century literature of all shades and beyond. european journal of american studies , reviews - european journal of american studies reviews - lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states laura visser-maessen electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ issn: - publisher european association for american studies electronic reference laura visser-maessen, « lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states », european journal of american studies [online], reviews - , online since july , connection on may . url : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ this text was automatically generated on may . creative commons license http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states laura visser-maessen lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states durham and london: duke university press, . pp. . isbn- : - laura visser-maessen “if men do not help to secure equal pay for women,” lucy ann lobdell, an american working-class woman, wrote in her autobiography, they must “permit her to wear the pants, and breathe the pure air of heaven” while they “stay and be convinced at home with the children how pleasant a task it is to act the part that woman must act” ( ). such politically astute and blunt discourse is a far cry from the allegedly ‘feminine’ language we have come to associate with th-century antebellum women’s writings through classics like harriet beecher stowe’s uncle tom’s cabin and others. yet this sentimental tradition and the middle class ideals of domesticity from which it was derived are quintessential for understanding antebellum workingwomen, associate professor of english at georgetown university lori merish argues in her exciting new book, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states. through the analysis of a largely untouched but rich archive of literary expressions for, by, and about workingwomen, she skillfully demonstrates how representations of female wage labor became a “site of ideological contest.” in this, the realities of female breadwinners, women performing “men’s work,” workingwomen’s dissent, and cross-racial class identifications and conflict were mitigated through the middle-class, racialized rhetoric of “true womanhood” ( - ). this both hindered and facilitated workingwomen’s struggles of (self)definition and class power, suggesting that intersectionality is key in understanding workingwomen’s lives and (perceived) significance for american literary, cultural, and labor history. the insights she derives from this exercise then are not just lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in t... european journal of american studies , reviews - valuable for scholars working in these fields, but also mute any remaining discussions regarding the artistic and societal merit of working-class culture. merish’s compelling monograph, which complements her work on the ideological confines of th-century female consumption she developed in sentimental materialism (duke university press, ), comes at a fitting moment in academic and american history. as the first book-length study of antebellum workingwomen’s literary works, it tops the academic and popular interest in bottom-up history that has been steadily emerging since the mid- s. studies in grassroots leadership and the recent autobiography boom among others have fueled interest in the now increasingly accepted (international) field of “working-class studies.” the notion of putting the voices of those at the bottom central in the works about them is particularly pertinent in a time when the american middle-class is shrinking and poor rural whites drove donald trump’s presidential victory, while the majority of the working-class is set to become defined by people of color over the next decade due to a combination of technological innovations, globalization, and racism. despite the recent uptick in academic journals, books, and programs dedicated to working-class life, however, the field remains underdeveloped. as merish complains, in the us—built on the presumption of a classless society—the idea of a “working-class culture” still needs to register. let alone one that is considered ‘worthy’ to investigate, compile, or even keep from destruction, which subsequently hampered her research ( - ). within this forgotten ‘archive,’ the work of workingwomen authors, especially those of color, has been pushed even further to the margins. merish’s innovative goal then is not just the addition of class and workingwomen to th-century cultural studies ( ), but to challenge public memory of the nineteenth-century working class and working-class protest as ‘white.’ archives of labor accordingly uses an interdisciplinary and ‘dialogical’ framework for “radically historicizing workingwomen’s vision” and to “restore a sense of literary texts as sites of live and uneven social struggle—a perspective sorely lacking in nineteenth-century american literary studies” ( ). as such, she carefully balances textual analyses with the socio-historical contexts in which they emerged, introducing us to a variety of working-class women types and to the narrative spaces available to them to unravel the gendered and racialized “ways in which the female worker was positioned to represent the condition of class exploitation, subjection, and economic suffering” ( ). merish sets her story between the s and the onset of the civil war, when the united states radically transformed from an agricultural society to an industrialized, urban one. this crucial moment in its capitalist history coincided with a drastic revision of print culture through the development of the penny press in the s, paperback novels in the s, and an overall rise in popular democratic journalism and sensational fiction ( - ). with workingwomen as the core readership and often its producers, it stood to reason that these products would become part of a battle over the ideological constructions of their lives. views of white industrial workingwomen, however, provided an apt ideological lens for judging all workingwomen’s lives. the first three chapters are therefore devoted to women working in the textile industries, the foremost mass employers of female working-class labor in the th century. the first two detail the historical and theoretical framework—of the influence of the (racialized) construction of gender on the daily experience and narrative possibilities of workingwomen—that guides the rest of the book. lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in t... european journal of american studies , reviews - this is done through the deconstruction of the discourse related to these mill women as exemplified in the ‘myth of the lowell girl.’ in this, the lowell mill in massachusetts was touted as a sign of industrial progress and american exceptionalism, allegedly untouched by the class discontent that characterized the british mills. within this narrative, mill women emerged as nationalist icons, but in the process were ‘whitened’ and reduced to a temporary, depoliticized state—emphasized in the epithet ‘girl’—by middle-class reformers and activist working-class men. they deliberately stressed passivity and beauty as female virtues to create a positive vision of factory workers ( - , - , , ). to counter these images and the language of ‘respectability’ and paternalism used to describe them, workingwomen used labor periodicals like the voice of industry and the new urban genres of gothic literature, sensationalism, and melodrama to describe their more complex social realities ( , - ). so-called ‘seduction tales’ (depicting women ‘lured’ to the urban factories) especially revealed a world in which industrial women were subjected to various forms of economic and sexual exploitation. but stories like “anna archdale,” published anonymously in the cheap story paper flag of our union, and others revealed they also displayed meaningful forms of “desire, independence, and agency” ( ) through the money they earned. merish continues by chronicling how moral reformers, to offset the dangers of the sexualized and interracial environment of the mills and working-class urban neighborhoods, then elevated the stereotypical figure of the lonely seamstress in their writings as the epitome of the ‘deserving poor’ (chapter ). subjugating her to the middle-class discourses of womanhood works like charles burdett’s the elliott family and other writings, the seamstress was turned into a ‘poor helpless female’ in need of a “reformed (domestic) paternalism” (p. ), despite the complex and radical democratic vision, agency, and sexuality encountered in the writings of actual seamstresses. her intriguing study of domestic servants of color in the ‘free’ north and west, who took over the vacancies left after white women’s ‘flight’ to the urban factories, in the final three chapters underscore the racialized aspects of the middle-class feminine discourse used to define working-class women. through harriet wilsons’s our nig (chapter ) and e.d.e.n. southworth’s the hidden hand (chapter ), merish shows how the definition of domestic labor as ‘non-work’ allowed white women to enforce race and class discipline. but she also reveals how these servants exercised power amid households characterized by a fluid combination of racial mixing and conflict that underline the actual precariousness of contemporary race and class categories. moreover, they effectively wielded political and narrative agency in combining conventional modes of storytelling to undermine the gendered language on which these conventions were based in order to reveal the hitherto “invisible interior of free black life” ( - , ). by adding the experiences of mexican-american servants living in mexican californian missions during annexation to the united states as described in their first-person testimonios and in novels (chapter ), merish successfully transplants her race-class analysis “within the frame of us empire building and territorial expansion” ( , ). particularly the work by apolinaria lorenzana, eulalia pérez, and maria amparo ruiz de burton convincingly “affirm mexican women’s labor as ‘socially and culturally valuable’” ( ), despite these women being subjected to white middle class racialized notions of mexicans’ class and gender identities that were forged against the background of slavery and emergence of ‘free’ black domestic workers. lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in t... european journal of american studies , reviews - interwoven in archives of labor are many other worthwhile discussions that speak to workingwomen’s agency and depth, like the author’s examination of female labor organizers’ speeches, the attitude mill women had towards clothing—both as a product of their labor and means to establish social status and femininity—or workingwomen’s proud portrayal of prostitution as an adventurous “female entrepreneurial ‘ambition’” ( ). because of the limits posed on available research material, merish’s case studies may at times feel inconclusive, particularly in regards to literary products by workingwomen of color. the richness of the primary sources and wide range of authors investigated nonetheless are impressive; particularly the testimonios present a fascinating read. this, combined with her lucid and passionate writing style and extensive and detailed textual analyses, makes her case persuasive. the book moreover serves as a valuable addition to works like amy kaplan’s anarchy of empire, studies on (late) th-century feminist and immigrant literature (anzia yezierska comes to mind) and working-class history and culture in general by evoking broader discussions relating to working-class literary studies, like questions of merit, characteristics, ownership, or the role of politics in art, as developed by scholars like paul lauter, paula rabinowitz, constance coiner, sherry linkon, and others. yet merish’s greatest accomplishment lies in the interdisciplinarity with which she approaches her sources. for the first time bringing together the individual insights us cultural and american studies scholars, labor historians, and academics in the fields of literature, women’s and race studies have compiled on antebellum workingwomen’s lives, her work holds great promise for exciting future research. she mentions revising interpretations of the ‘classical’ literary texts of the th century and beyond by adding class analyses, particularly to works that have been viewed predominantly through a gender, race, ethnic, or lgbtq-lens; rethinking the relationship between working-class literary and performance cultures; and the ramifications of working-class culture for understanding america in a global context. but countless other avenues can be imagined. think of (dis)continuities between th century working-class literature and the proletarian writings of the s, the new scholarship on frontier women, or connections between literary works by and about ‘free’ blacks and slave narratives, among others. above all, lori merish’s archives of labor reminds us to take seriously the working-class, not just as a force that decides elections, but as a window into the human condition. that its produced fiction incidentally helps to further deride the discourse of ‘true womanhood’ in the current era of #metoo and increased political activism by women as just that—fiction—serves as additional proof of poetic justice. lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in t... european journal of american studies , reviews - 	lori merish, archives of labor: working-class women and literary culture in the antebellum united states complex, critical and caring: young people’s diverse religious, spiritual and non-religious worldviews in australia and canada religions article complex, critical and caring: young people’s diverse religious, spiritual and non-religious worldviews in australia and canada anna halafoff ,* , heather shipley , pamela d. young , andrew singleton , mary lou rasmussen and gary bouma school of humanities and social sciences, deakin university, melbourne, vic , australia department of classics and religious studies, university of ottawa, ottawa, on k n n , canada; hshipley@uottawa.ca school of religion, queens’s university, kingston, on k l n , canada; youngpd@queensu.ca school of humanities and social sciences, deakin university, geelong, vic , australia; andrew.singleton@deakin.edu.au school of sociology, australian national university, canberra, act , australia; marylou.rasmussen@anu.edu.au school of social sciences, monash university, melbourne, vic , australia; gary.bouma@monash.edu * correspondence: anna.halafoff@deakin.edu.au received: february ; accepted: march ; published: april ���������� ������� abstract: recent scholarly and media perspectives on religion and youth have often depicted young people as being apathetic when it comes to religion. the methods used in research on religion are also typically informed by outdated, fixed idea of religious identity that are no longer applicable, especially to young people. this paper confronts these issues by applying contemporary theories of religious diversity, including lived religion and religious complexity, to the findings of the canadian religion, gender and sexuality among youth in canada (rgsy) study, the australian interaction multifaith youth movement project, and the worldviews of australian generation z (agz) study. these three studies revealed that young people negotiate their worldview identities in complex, critical and caring ways that are far from ambivalent, and that are characterised by hybridity and questioning. we thereby recommend that policies and curricula pertaining to young people’s and societies’ wellbeing better reflect young people’s actual lived experiences of diversity. keywords: religion; diversity; young people; spirituality; non-religion; complexity; hybridity . introduction dominant thinking on religion and youth assumes that young people are largely apathetic about religion (carlson ; lucas ; lunau ; ron ), and contemporary research on religion often uses outdated, fixed frameworks of religious identity to determine its methods. as a result, people’s and notably young people’s, lived and fluid experiences of negotiating religious, spiritual and non-religious diversity are frequently inadequately described (halafoff and gobey ; mcguire ; shipley ; young ). three co-authors of this paper, anna halafoff, heather shipley and pamela d. young first raised these concerns, which emerged from their respective and then yet-to-be-published religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of research findings in australia and canada, at a workshop on ‘religion, youth and identity’ held at the university of ottawa as part of the religion and diversity project in . this paper addresses these issues by discussing the findings of halafoff’s interaction study, young’s and shipley’s religion, gender and sexuality among youth in canada (rgsy) study, and singleton’s, rasmussen’s, halafoff’s and bouma’s worldviews of australian generation z (agz) study. the latter study was in part informed by the prior two studies’ findings. all three research projects revealed three main themes, in contrast to dominant opinions on religion and youth: that young australians and canadians display a far from ‘whatever’/ambivalent attitude toward religion, and that their worldviews are characterised by hybridity and questioning. we also argue in this paper that young australians and canadians negotiate their worldview identities in complex, critical and caring ways. this aligns with contemporary theories of religious diversity, including meredith mcguire’s lived religion ( ), nancy ammerman’s everyday religion ( ), linda woodhead’s ‘new style religion’ ( ) and inger furseth’s application of complexity theory ( a, b) to the study of religious diversity. these theories have arisen from research that was mainly focused on adults in the usa, uk, and the nordic countries, which will be explored in more detail below. moreover, as steven vertovec ( ) noted over a decade ago, public policy, understanding and research still does not adequately reflect the complex, lived superdiverse realities of peoples’, and in this case, young people’s lives. we thereby also recommend that young people’s worldviews be considered more seriously among stakeholders responsible for policies, and also curricula pertaining to diversity and wellbeing, to better match these young people’s actual lived experiences. . methods as stated above, this paper reports data from three studies of the worldviews and religious identities of australian and canadian youth—the interaction study, the religion, gender and sexuality among youth in canada (rgsy) study, and the worldviews of australian generation z (agz) study. the interaction study, conducted in – , comprised interviews with religious and non-religious young persons, aged between – , who were all engaged in the australian interfaith youth movement interaction (halafoff and gobey ). the religion, gender and sexuality among youth in canada (rgsy) study, conducted in – , surveyed , – -year-old participants from a wide variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds (young and shipley ). the worldviews of australian generation z (agz) study, conducted in – focused on religion, sexuality and young people. the agz study comprised three stages: focus groups with a total of students in years and (ages – ); a nationally representative random-digit-dial (rdd) telephone survey of people aged – ; and in-depth, follow-up interviews with survey participants (singleton et al. ). the findings of these studies are presented thematically below, as they relate to contemporary theories of religious diversity outlined in the next section. . risks and religious complexity the events of september and the london bombings catapulted religion into the public mind and resulted in a securitisation of religion. fears of homegrown terrorism resulted in young people being seen as at risk of radicalisation, and consequently as risks to broader society (lentini et al. ; mansouri and halafoff ). following these events, scholars in the us such as ammerman ( ) and mcguire ( ) chose, by contrast, to highlight ‘lived’ and ‘everyday’ aspects of religion and spirituality. this research uncovered the fact that dominant frameworks and methods these workshop papers were published in in youth, religion and identity in a globalizing context, eds. paul l. gareau, spencer culham bullivant and peter beyer. leiden: brill—see references for details. religions , , of for understanding religion and spirituality in contemporary societies were inadequate and needed to better reflect people’s actual experiences. mcguire ( ) observed how complex and diverse the contemporary religious lives of adults in the usa are. rather than subscribing to the beliefs, norms and practices of a single religious organisation, she instead found that an individual’s religious experiences are ‘ever-changing, multifaceted . . . messy—even contradictory’ (mcguire , p. ). people blend “traditional” religious practices with newer religious and/or spiritual expressions, and the boundaries between these are often blurry. she also found that ‘people construct their religious worlds together’, through shared experiences and meanings, so they are relational and social (mcguire , p. ). people can also be critical of religion, including their own religious leaders, and at the same time be inspired by their religious teachers and teachings to stand up against injustices. consequently, mcguire called for scholars to examine ‘everyday religion as lived’ with a focus on embodied practices, experiences and expressions (mcguire , p. ). ammerman ( ) also problematised the binary where typically, religion is thought to be organised, communal, and declining, while spirituality is viewed as more individual, innovative and increasing in popularity. instead she found, in her research based on adults in the us, that religion and spirituality actually shared many common characteristics, such as believing in god or a divine power, participating in shared practices, and following ethical frameworks. she also stressed that people could be spiritual and religious concurrently (ammerman ). when summarising the findings of her religion and society programme in the uk, which involved studies of adults and young people, woodhead ( ) similarly argued that while ‘old style religion’ centred on identification with one religious tradition and abiding by its rules, combined with regular attendance and participation in local religious practices, ‘new style religion’ is characterised by individual choice, fluidity, and hybridity. she also noted that the new style hasn’t simply replaced the old, but that rather ‘everything [is] going on at once’, with both old- and new style religion existing alongside a rise of spirituality and the non-religious, and at times overlapping with one another. more recently, furseth ( a, b), in her research on the changing demographics and public role of religion in the five nordic countries, relatedly argued that ‘religious complexity’ best describes contemporary religion, with ‘seemingly contradictory trends,’ of ‘religious decline, growth, and change’ happening concurrently (furseth a, p. ). these include a decline in individual religiosity, a growth in religious diversity, an increasing interest in alternative spirituality and ‘public visibility of religion’, but also a continuity of religion’s presence in the public sphere (furseth b, pp. – ). it follows that contemporary expressions of worldviews—be they religious, spiritual and/or non-religious—in the usa, uk and in nordic societies, can be categorised as complex, changeable and hybrid, and that these worldviews also often inform people’s ethical positions and actions. while most of the above research has focused on adults, our data on young australians and canadians certainly also support these assertions and provide additional details about how young adults negotiate their intersecting and fluid worldviews. generations y and z have been raised in a time where religion has been more prominent in the media and public life following the events of september . concurrently, there has been a dramatic rise in people declaring themselves to have ‘no religion’, particularly in western societies such as australia and canada, and a robust critique of religion in the public sphere. a total of % of canadians and % of australians describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated (lipka ; abs ). our research has found that there is a growing trend among young people to identify as non-religious, or spiritual but not religious, at the same time as some of them remain religiously committed. young people also live, study and work in increasingly superdiverse societies, in terms of not only religion and culture, but also gender and sexuality. as a result, they have been exposed through the media to public debates pertaining to various diversities and contestations between them, such as in marriage equality debates and through the #metoo movement. at the same time, both australia and canada provide very little education about religious, gender and sexuality diversity in state schools, religions , , of and these are also ‘hot’ and controversial topics (rasmussen ; bouma and halafoff ; singleton et al. ; young and shipley ). all three studies—interaction, rgsy and agz—have examined these issues to some degree. we now turn to three main themes that emerged from the three studies’ findings on young australians and canadians worldviews, namely, a lack of ambivalence/‘whatever’ attitudes, and growing hybridity, and questioning pertaining to religion among this cohort. we also examine how these young people negotiate their worldview identities in complex, critical and caring ways. these assertions are explored in more detail below. . whatever? previous analyses of religion and youth in australia have focused on how secularism, individualism and consumerism have led to a decline in religious affiliation, and a general lack of interest in, and ignorance about, religion among australian youth. they have presented young people’s engagement with religion and spirituality as being largely trend-based and somewhat shallow, and strongly influenced by social media and popular culture (halafoff and gobey ; lucas ; possamai ). by contrast, halafoff and gobey ( ) in their interaction study provide a signpost to the importance of religion in the lives of young people who are committed to interfaith activism, evident in their career and lifestyle choices. these young australians, including buddhist, christian, hindu, muslim and atheist participants, certainly did not hold a ‘whatever’ (lucas ), ambivalent or indifferent view of, or approach toward, religion. far from it, they took religion seriously, and were deeply engaged in religious thought and practices, and/or in critiquing religion from a young age. as this study only included interviewees active in an interfaith movement, it’s findings certainly weren’t representative of all australian youth, but were nonetheless interesting as they challenged previous assumptions regarding the religious indifference believed to characterise the entirety of gen y. shipley ( , p. ) also noted how young people’s religious identities are often ‘essentialised’ and ‘frequently represented’ and ‘misunderstood as apathy’ (carlson ; lunau ; ron ). the rgsy study instead found that young canadians had ‘articulate passionate, engaged and dynamic religious identities’ (shipley , p. ). participants in the canadian study were deeply concerned about justice, values and making the world a better place, whether or not they explicitly articulated these goals as religious. participants also worked hard to negotiate their (non)religious lives in relation to their other cultural and social values (young and shipley ). the agz findings clearly establish the dynamism that characterises young people’s religious affiliations. the agz study used latent class analysis of the teens’ worldviews to identify six statistically distinct types: % ‘this-worldly’/non-religious, % indifferent, % spiritual but not religious, % religious and spiritual, % nominally religious and % religiously committed (singleton et al. ). these are significant findings, as they document the complexity of worldviews held by agz teens. the agz study highlights the differences among those who are non-religious as being either ‘this-worldly’, ‘indifferent’, or ‘spiritual but not religious’. at the same time, the substantial presence of the religious types, the ‘religiously committed’, ‘nominally religious’ and ‘religious and spiritual’, of young people further complicate the picture in this study. as the vast majority of agz teens chose to identify as ‘this-worldly’, ‘spiritual but not religious’, ‘religious and spiritual’ and ‘religiously committed’, with only a minority of % who are religiously indifferent/‘whatever’ and % who are nominally religious. it follows that their non-religious, religious and/or spiritual worldviews are important to most agz teens. to illustrate, one agz interviewee was born into a buddhist family but this wasn’t particularly central to her until as a teenager she became involved in regular charity work, by volunteering to fundraise for natural disaster aid, conducted by percentages may not add up to due to rounding. religions , , of her local buddhist temple. she described this as a ‘life-changing’ experience. she now attends the temple regularly and lights incense and prays each night at her family’s home altar with her mother. this section has highlighted how, while a significant proportion of young australians and canadians are religiously indifferent, they are a minority, and ambivalence certainly does not categorise the entire cohort. instead, their religious, non-religious and spiritual identities are complex, similar to what furseth ( a, b) has observed. they haven’t replaced old style with new style religion, and aren’t all turning away from religion either (woodhead ). religion, being this-worldly and/or spirituality, are all things they identify with, and that many of them care about and take seriously. this also, at times, inspires them to be caring toward others, as mcguire ( ) also noted. it is indeed, as woodhead ( ) exclaimed, all going on simultaneously! . hybridity another theme that emerged across the three studies was hybridity when it came to young australian and canadian’s diverse worldviews. this hybridity and complexity, as scholars have previously noted (mcguire ; halafoff and gobey ; shipley ), needs to be considered in terms of the methods used to ascertain people’s worldviews. asking people to simply tick one box on a census form or specify a religious or non-religious identification is no longer an adequate measure of what young people believe, or of what institutions they embrace or reject. this has implications for law, policy and curricula that focus on religion and belief, as a single, old-style category of practice and belonging. asking questions linked to religiosity only tends to overstate the significance of dominant religions and to obfuscate young people’s other worldviews, both religious and non-religious. the interaction and rgsy studies revealed these limitations and hybridity as a significant trait among this cohort. the agz study’s design, informed by the interaction and rgsy’s findings, set out not to simply offer limited, fixed categories for participants to choose from. it provided opportunities for agz teens to identify not only as non-religious, religious and/or spiritual, as described above, but as having more than one religious identification. it also presented a wide range of choices pertaining to sexual identity, allowing for more complex and hybrid identifications. the interaction study found that hybridity was a central characteristic of young australians’ religious identities. this was largely as a result of processes of globalisation and their, and their parents’ off and online mobility. this included conversion from christianity to tibetan buddhism, and from judaism to eckankar among their parents, and interests in and identification with spirituality and religion, or spirituality and non-religious worldviews (halafoff and gobey ). in the rgsy study, shipley ( , p. ) also identified hybridity as a characteristic of this cohort, whose religious, non-religious and/or spiritual identities were ‘varied and complex’ (shipley , p. ). in the final rgsy english survey, respondents identified as follows: buddhism . %, christianity %, hinduism . %, islam . %, judaism . %, sikhism . %. as non-religious . %, spiritual but not religious . % and other . % (includes theist, agnostic, wiccan, combination of religions, etc.). the rgsy study also revealed a substantial hybridity among the sample of christian participants who also engaged with and practiced other traditions such as wicca, buddhism, and other spiritual practices (shipley , p. ). respondents described how they were exposed ‘to multiple types of religiosities and practices at home, in school, in religious organisations, and online’ (shipley , p. ) and how they often engaged in a variety of diverse religious practices. many participants were not content to claim one (non) religious identity. the often claimed several (young and shipley ). the agz study set out to further investigate religious and/or non-religious hybridity, and by doing so it revealed two main types of hybridity among australian teens. firstly, it provided respondents a detailed elucidation of the methods employed in the agz study is contained in rasmussen, m., graefenstein, s., singleton, a., halafoff, a., and bouma, g. (forthcoming). ‘methodological challenges of designing a survey to capture young people’s (non-binary) affiliations in relationship to religion, sexuality and gender,’ international journal of social research methodology. eckankar is a new religious movement, founded in . religions , , of with the capacity to select more than one religious identity in the survey. eight per cent of participants who identified as religious identified with more than one religious tradition (approximately % of all teens), and this was largely as a result of having parents from different religious traditions. participants were asked to identify with only one religion or non-religion first, so that the agz data could be compared with previous studies that only allowed for one religious identification. once they had done so the agz participants were then given the opportunity to also identify with other traditions. of the christians, teens identified with more than one christian tradition, seven identified with christianity and buddhism, six identified with christianity and an other religion, two identified with christianity and islam. of the buddhists, two identified as christian also, and one identified as another religion as well. of the hindus, one identified as christian also, and one identified as sikh as well. of the muslims, one identified as christian also. of the jews, one identified as christian as well. while this is a small sample of the participants in the agz survey, it is nonetheless still a significant finding. in the agz focus groups, students noted both the benefits and challenges of growing up in families with two religious traditions. one student favourably described their jewish–christian family and how they celebrated both customs: ‘ . . . some people are, like half jewish, half christian or, like, have a bit of christian. so, like . . . i celebrate christmas and stuff. so i feel like—there—like a lot of us are jewish but then also have other cultures that they celebrate with their families.’ another student, by contrast, noted the tensions of being raised in a dual religious family and negotiating their hybrid religious identity. they said, ‘[m]um’s side is catholic and my dad’s side is buddhist . . . and it’s kind of contradicting.’ the second, and more prevalent, form of hybridity in the agz sample was that of being spiritual and religious, or spiritual and [but] not religious. while % of respondents said they were neither religious or spiritual, and % were ‘religious but not spiritual’, % said they were ‘spiritual but not religious’, and % were ‘religious and spiritual’. fourteen percent could not choose from those categories. in terms of the agz teens’ spiritual alternative practices and beliefs, % believed in astrology, % in reincarnation, % in karma and % had practised yoga and % had practised meditation (outside of school) (singleton et al. ). for example, when pondering her relationship to spirituality and religion, one agz interviewee said, ‘i would say i am, um, spiritual i guess’. she explained, to her, that being spiritual meant that ‘you believe there is like a higher order out there somewhere.’ she described how she is ‘a firm believer in like karma and like if you do good things in the world you will receive good things’ which she acknowledged came ‘definitely from the buddhist side’ of her family, given that her parents were buddhist and she had been raised ‘sort of buddhist’. however, she also said she was ‘agnostic’ about rebirth/reincarnation. despite not identifying as, or necessarily being, religious, this interviewee was aware of the influence that elements of both buddhism, from her parents, and catholicism, and catholic values from her catholic schooling, had had in shaping her spiritual identity and beliefs. another agz interviewee described how she was vegan, concerned about animal rights and had some interest in crystals and meditation. her main spiritual practice was tarot cards and she explained how, ‘tarot cards are something if i don’t know what to do in a certain situation, i would use them and then try and like get some clarity. and i think that’s probably what people do with religion too.’ this interviewee was introduced to various spiritual and religious practices and beliefs by her father, who had been religiously experimental throughout his life (as many parents of the agz interviewees were). as she describes it: ‘he was really into christianity at one point and then he was really into buddhism and stuff like that.’ while she didn’t describe herself as religious, she spoke about her attraction to all religions. in addition to her father’s influence, her understanding of her own religious and spiritual life was significantly shaped by her studies of religion course in her final years of schooling. it was through the course that she ultimately came to think of herself as ‘new-age kind of religious’. these findings reveal that similarly to what mcguire ( ), ammerman ( ) and woodhead ( ) have argued, hybridity and complexity are factors in these young australian and canadian’s religions , , of religious, non-religious and/or spiritual identities, and that these findings should inform research methods, and questions, as well as policy and curricula related to religion, spirituality and young people. . questioning questioning of religion among young people, pertaining to their identity but also, more broadly, religion in society, was another major finding of the interaction study. while most participants’ religious identities were more influenced by their parents than other factors, such as their peers, school or popular culture, many of them were adhering to their parent’s religious traditions and questioning them concurrently. they certainly frequented websites and blogs, but not in a superficial or consumerist manner. rather, they searched the internet with intention, to answer their genuine questions about religion and life’s meaning. their attitude to religion was critical and deeply considered. they were broadly accepting of religious diversity, curious about religions, and wanted to know more about them. once again, they certainly cared about these issues (halafoff and gobey ). for example, one of the interaction christian interviewees stated: i’m struggling with that a little bit at the moment and i think i would more call myself spiritual rather than . . . it’s sort of tough. i think it’s an age thing . . . i’m not really sure whether christianity as such and anglicanism . . . is really where i’m at entirely so . . . another interaction respondent explained how he became an atheist, both through questioning religious belief and through researching religion on the internet: it was through, for me an experience when i was years old. i went on student exchange and i was situated in . . . the bible belt in the united states. and so staying in america and living with a family that was very religious and all of my high school friends were very evangelical christian believers. that sort of forced me to make up mind about what i believed in and you know the questions were ‘is there a god, is the bible the word of god, was jesus the son of god, is evolution true,’ all of these questions all of a sudden were very important to me . . . arriving at my own conclusion, i guess that science was the best tool to figure out the reality of the world. . . . i did a lot of reading online and i read a lot of books . . . there were a lot of atheist sort of blogs. and . . . it was just something i was really passionate about ... shipley ( , p. ) also identified hybridity and ‘questioning’ as characteristics of the rgsy cohort. for example, one -year-old spiritual but not religious canadian respondent, who had been raised catholic, stated: right now, i’d say i’m at a confused stage, to say the least. i’m—i’m very interested in different aspects of different religions... i’ve also been in contact with quite a lot of indigenous traditions . . . and that has also been quite influencing [sic] ... i haven’t, you know, given up believing altogether, but i’m also very confused and can’t really identify where i stand. shipley ( , p. ) has highlighted that questioning of and complicated attitudes about religion often arose in young people as a result of conflicting views that some religions had pertaining to gender identity and sexuality equality. for example, one of the rgsy respondent’s religious identity has been ‘complicated . . . by living in a common-law relationship with a transgender (female to male) partner’. in the respondent’s conservative catholic community, being transgender is unacceptable, and so this created ‘a barrier in her personal self-identification as religious’ and made her question religion more generally. another respondent specified her religious identity as ‘questioning’, given she was ‘working through her personal disagreements with catholic teachings (such as sex outside marriage, treatment of the lgbtqi community, and women’s ordination)’. at the same time, she said that ‘she feels strongly that she wants to raise her children within the catholic tradition and get married in a catholic church . . . wanting similar experiences and the community that it has offered to her ’ (shipley , pp. – ). another respondent was raised in a catholic household, but didn’t experience a ‘personal connection’ with the catholic teachings she received at home and in church. she questioned her religious identity and converted to islam. at the time of her interview, she was engaging in both personal and online religions , , of islamic practices, as she could no longer attend her local mosque given what she described as its ‘sexist, racist and homophobic’ attitudes. she hoped to find a more progressive and inclusive mosque in future (shipley , p. ). it is important to note that participants in all three of these studies, while critically aware of religion’s capacity to impinge at times upon the rights of others, were not entirely negative about religion. in the rgsy study, they also highlighted positive aspects of religion, such as its capacity to provide community and good values, such as respect for others, as things they valued (shipley , p. ; young and shipley ). this type of questioning regarding religion during teen years was also evident in the agz study. for example, one of the agz study interviewees, who has a parent who is a committed member of the church of latter-day saints, described how, when she was a teenager, she went through an important time of personal questioning, to be sure that her religion was right for her and that she wasn’t simply following convention. she explained how: i was really young, like, from a baby on i’ve been part of that religion and then there was a point in time where i was like, when you’re a teenager and you’re thinking, there are so many options for me, what’s going on, is this real, is this right, is this true, and it—it really did hit me and i was like, what am i doing? . . . i didn’t want to just go into life and be like yeah, this is the religion that i’m in and just like a follower. it was more like i wanted to make my choice and to see for myself if it was making me happy, and me ‘me’. alongside this questioning, and similarly to the rgsy study, the vast majority of agz teens have a positive view of religious diversity and religious freedom. however, these positive views were often moderated when participants perceived conflicts between religious practice and the rights of others. while % of participants agree with the statement: ‘having people of many different faiths makes australia a better place to live’, agz teens’ opinions were far more divided on issues where religion may have the capacity to impinge on their rights or to offend people. half of australia’s teens ( %) thought that people with very strong religious beliefs are often too intolerant of others and % thought that religion causes more problems than it solves (singleton et al. ). these results display a critical awareness and strong questioning of religions’ place in society, particularly in negotiation with other freedoms and rights. students in one of the agz focus groups stated a variety of orientations toward questioning: p : . . . i think a big thing about it is . . . how we view religion can be in a sense altered by . . . to an extent some people believe that [their] religion has to be the right one . . . p : i’ve only really disagreed with people about things, such as like i guess you could kind of call it political view or something or people who are like homophobic or something . . . p : well, i only have an issue with it if—i don’t generally care what—what a person believes, as long as they don’t try and implement the way they think on the way i think. p : yeah, or—or as long as they are not, um, making specific reference or offending people with like their views. in this exchange, we see participants concerned about religious people asserting that their faith is the “right one”. political views and homophobia are deemed ripe for contestation, especially if they are seen as offensive or imposing on individual beliefs. one of the spiritual but not religious agz interviewees echoed these sentiments when he described how his circle of friends had a ‘variety of beliefs and religions’, and that they ‘all got along fine’. he added, ‘the main thing was, i don’t mind whatever you identify as, as long as you don’t try and force your beliefs upon me.’ another nominally hindu agz interviewee explained how: i’ve noticed that it—it does kind of affect more when people push religion and their values. like, i’m happy to know about it and respect theirs, but . . . it kind of bothered me . . . i think as long as religions , , of people respect everyone’s, um, kind of boundaries and their own beliefs, it’s—it’s justified to, um, be religious i guess. in the excerpts above, agz participants repeatedly questioned beliefs that impacted upon the views and rights of others, but this discomfort with infringement is somewhat qualified (‘kind of’, ‘i only have an issue if’). one senses that participants are inclined to live and let live, except when people are perceived to cross boundaries by imposing their beliefs on others, or if they’re being explicitly intolerant. potentially, this tendency towards qualification was a function of the methodology utilised in the study. speaking with young people in focus groups meant they had to enunciate different types of worldviews in front of peers, a vulnerable move at any age. qualification may provide focus group participants with an opportunity to voice opinions without appearing too strident themselves. similarly to the rgsy study findings, clashes between religious freedom and sexuality rights appeared to be a highly charged issue for participants. the agz survey was, coincidentally, conducted at the same time as australia’s non-compulsory postal vote on same sex marriage. agz teens, who were excluded from voting on the question of marriage equality, were highly supportive of sexuality diversity. eighty-two percent of teens supported marriage equality, compared to the % of adults who voted for it in the marriage equality survey (singleton et al. ). some students who participated in the agz focus groups were highly aware of internal tensions between progressive and conservative movements within religions. moreover, in the post-survey interviews, when asked about religious exemptions to hire/fire staff in religious organisations, including schools, most agz teens were surprised that these exemptions even existed and were strongly opposed to them, especially when lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (lgbtq) staff or students could be discriminated against on the basis of their gender or sexuality. this once again displays a strong critique of religion and a deep level of care about how lgbtq people can be impacted by discrimination related to religious freedom. in the surveys and interviews a direct relationship between religiosity and lgbtq rights was also noted. strongly held religious beliefs, among the ‘religiously committed’, were the most powerful indicator that a participant would be against lgbtq rights and freedoms. this also portrays a level of critique of progressive pro-lgbtq views and a strong sense of investment in these issues, although it also arguably depicts a lack of empathy regarding the negative impacts of prejudice against lgbtq individuals and communities. one religious and spiritual agz interviewee queried ‘so they can still do that?’, with regard to religious exemptions against lgbtiq pupils and teachers. one religiously committed buddhist said it was ‘ridiculous’ and a this-worldly non-religious teen simply incredulously said ‘wow’. a this-worldly agz teen said: ‘i just don’t agree with that at all . . . just i think having to fire someone because—or like exclude a certain student or teacher from just being themselves, i think is just outrageous.’ finally, another agz this-worldly interviewee explained the hypocrisy of the conservative religious position in the religious freedom debate, which fights for the right to discriminate against others in the name of freedom, but only for their religious group at the expense of the rights of others: i’m not particularly aligned with the concept of religious freedom. i figure if they’re the set of rules, it doesn’t really matter what you practice, you have to follow those rules. like, also if, there’s a lot of white australians trying to fight the people wearing burqas, to take them off . . . and they’re quite opposed to having lgbt classes in the school, which is kind of along the same lines, when you think about it. so, religious freedom, but only for us. young australian’s and canadians are often questioning their own religious, spiritual and/or non-religious identities, and these are fluid, and changing over time, similar to characteristics mcguire ( ) and woodhead ( ) have observed regarding contemporary religious identity and participation. in addition, young australian’s and canadians were most likely to question religious freedom when it impacts on others’ rights, particularly rights pertaining to sexual and gender diversity and equality. this demonstrates their capacity for critical reflexivity and a sense of care pertaining to these issues, and particularly for lgbtq persons, who may be subject to negative judgements and discrimination and religions , , of impacted by state-sanctioned religious exemptions. strongly religious young people, with anti-lgbtq views, also provide evidence of questioning the dominant social norms of their peers, who largely favor lgbtq equality. in all of the above cases, these are indubitably issues that young people take seriously. . conclusions this paper has explored how all three research projects, the interaction, rgsy and the agz studies, revealed three main themes that young australians and canadians have a far from ‘whatever’/ambivalent attitude toward religion, and that their worldviews are characterised by hybridity and questioning. we also revealed that young australians and canadians negotiate their worldview identities in complex, critical and caring ways. halafoff and gobey ( ) found that the interaction participants questioning did affirm narratives of individualism, as they were ‘reflexively constructing, reevaluating, and reconstructing their own religious, spiritual and non-religious identities’. concurrently, they noted that these young people’s choices weren’t simply made individually, as they were highly influenced by socialising agents such as their parents, peers, schools, and media. they thereby concluded that these young australians religious, spiritual and/or non-religious identities were ‘fluid, changing, and in many cases contain[ed] significant reflexive pauses’ and that ‘hybridity, mobility, commitment, questioning, and interconnectivity’ characterised these young people’s religious identity formation and interfaith youth engagement. shipley ( , p. ) also emphasised that the ‘rgsy respondents are carefully negotiating these multiple aspects and possibilities’ of being religious, spiritual, non-religious and/or questioning’. she added: being self-identified as questioning, spiritual but not religious (sbnr), or religious does not define in strict terms their identities or place them in neat boxes . . . and the limited language could be a factor in widespread assumptions regarding youth’s disinterest or apathy toward religion, beliefs and spirituality ... the language of religiosity is evolving and . . . youth studies regarding religious identity lay bare the linguistic restrictions. shipley ( , p. ) also concluded that ‘the evolving nature of belief, faith, identity and practice’ of the rgsy religious and non-religious respondents, is ‘thoughtful and considered’, and influences the ‘clear choices’ they are making in ‘their notions about social justice, kindness, compassion, and honesty’. issues of sexuality equality, in particular, have had a profound impact on how they engage or chose not to engage with conservative religions. the agz study’s six worldview types provide further empirically robust evidence of religious complexity in australian society, and evidence that only a minority, %, of agz teens are indifferent regarding religion and spirituality, and only % are nominally religious. this-worldly agz teens have strong opinions about religion and chose not to be identified as religious—this is a considered position. similarly, spiritual but not religious teens have decided not to identify as religious, but rather as spiritual, and are engaged in a variety of spiritual practices and hold spiritual worldviews. religion certainly plays an important role in the religiously committed teens’ lives. moreover, the agz focus group and interviewee data are rich with examples of religious hybridity and critical reflexivity when it comes to identity and debates on religious freedom, and the impact this may have on the rights of others and especially of lgbtq persons. whether they respected sexual diversity or not, agz teens really cared about these issues and, for the most part, thought that religious rights should not triumph over the rights of others. the findings of these three studies on young australians’ and canadians’ worldviews, and particularly the three themes of a lack of ambivalence/’whatever’ attitudes, hybridity, and questioning, as well as the three complex, critical and caring ways in which they negotiate their worldview and identities, align with mcguire ( ), ammerman ( ), woodhead ( ) and furseth’s ( a, b) studies. they also highlight the need for a greater awareness of the complexity of young people’s lived realities when it comes to religion, spirituality and non-religion. this is of great significance when it comes to education, health and wellbeing policies, curricula and practices for young people, which are religions , , of still often informed by outdated and limited understandings or biases when it comes to religion. our findings may also inform other scholar’s research on religion and young people in diverse contexts, and research on religion in contemporary society more broadly. finally, young australian and canadian’s exposure to public debates involving religious freedom and other rights – notably sexuality rights – and their cognizance and criticisms of religions’ capacity to impinge upon the rights of others, is having a profound effect on shaping young people’s identities and worldviews. this may indeed be a significant factor related to future decline in religious affiliation. the opinions of young people must be considered in these debates, as the majority of them will not abide with religious rights being able to triumph over and above the rights of others, and certainly not when it comes to sexuality rights. consequently, we argue that current policy and legal debates on lgbtq rights, religious freedom, and religious exemptions, heed the complex, critical and caring voices of young people. author contributions: conceptualization, a.h., h.s., p.d.y., a.s., m.l.r., g.b.; formal analysis, a.h., h.s., p.d.y., a.s., m.l.r., g.b.; writing—original draft, a.h., h.s., p.d.y., a.s., m.l.r., g.b.; writing—review and editing, a.h., h.s., p.d.y., a.s., m.l.r., g.b.; all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: the interaction study was supported by deakin university’s central research grants scheme; the rgsy research was supported by the religion and diversity project (social sciences and humanities research council of canada major collaborative research initiative, led by lori g. beaman); the agz research was supported by the australian research council, arc discovery project: dp . conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references abs. . . —australian standard classification of religious groups. canberra: australian bureau of statistics. ammerman, nancy t., ed. . everyday religion: observing modern religious lives. oxford: oxford university press. ammerman, nancy t. . spiritual but not religious? beyond binary choices in the study of religion. journal for the scientific study of religion : – . [crossref] bouma, gary d., and anna halafoff. . australia’s changing religious profile—rising nones and pentecostals, declining british protestants in superdiversity: views from the census. journal for the academic study of religion : – . [crossref] carlson, kathryn blaze. . organized religion on the decline: growing number of canadians ‘spiritual but not religious’. national post, december . furseth, inger. a. introduction. in religious complexity in the public sphere: comparing nordic countries. edited by inger furseth. cham: palgrave, pp. – . furseth, inger. b. secularization, deprivatization, or religious complexity. in religious complexity in the public sphere: comparing nordic countries. edited by inger furseth. cham: palgrave, pp. – . halafoff, anna, and laura gobey. . ‘whatever’: religion, youth, and identity in st century australia. in youth, religion and identity in a globalising context. edited by paul l. gareau, spencer culham bullivant and peter beyer. brill: leiden, pp. – . lentini, pete, anna halafoff, and ela ogru. . perceptions of multiculturalism and security in victoria: report to the department of premier and cabinet, state government of victoria. melbourne: monash university. lipka, michael. . facts about religion in canada. facttank, pew research centre. july . available online: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / -facts-about-religion-in-canada/ (accessed on march ). lucas, ben c. . (director) . y god. available online: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt / (accessed on march ). lunau, kate. . youth survey: teens lose faith in droves, islam and atheism are on the rise while christianity fades. maclean’s, april . mansouri, fethi, and anna halafoff. . introduction: migrant youth, intercultural relations and the challenges of social inclusion. journal of social inclusion : – . [crossref] mcguire, meredith. . lived religion: faith and practice in everyday life. new york: oxford university press. http://dx.doi.org/ . /jssr. http://dx.doi.org/ . /jasr. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / -facts-about-religion-in-canada/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt / http://dx.doi.org/ . /si.v i . religions , , of possamai, adam. . sociology of religion for generations x and y. london: equinox. rasmussen, mary lou. . becoming subjects: sexualities and secondary schooling. new york: routledge. ron, james. . “canada adrift in religious world. the star, july . shipley, heather. . apathy or misunderstanding? youth’s reflections on their religious identity in canada. in youth, religion and identity in a globalising context. edited by paul l. gareau, spencer culham bullivant and peter beyer. leiden: brill, pp. – . singleton, andrew, mary lou rasmussen, anna halafoff, and gary d. bouma. . australia’s generation z study: australia’s teenagers negotiating religion, sexuality and diversity. project report. melbourne: deakin university. vertovec, steven. . superdiversity and its implications. ethnic and racial studies : – . [crossref] woodhead, linda. . new forms of public religion: findings and reflections from the ahrc/esrc religion and society programme. paper presented at the new forms of public religion conference, st. john’s college, cambridge, uk, september – . young, pamela d. . influences of religion on the sexual attitudes and practices of canadian youth: the case of premarital sex. in youth, religion and identity in a globalizing context. edited by paul l. gareau, spencer culham bullivant and peter beyer. leiden: brill, pp. – . young, pamela d., and heather shipley. . identities under construction: religion, gender and sexuality among youth in canada. montreal: mcgill queen’s university press. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	methods 	risks and religious complexity 	whatever? 	hybridity 	questioning 	conclusions 	references women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse: self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame george veletsianos shandell houlden jaigris hodson chandell gosse abstract although scholars increasingly use online platforms for public, digital, and networked scholarship, the research examining their experiences of harassment and abuse online is scant. in this study, we interviewed women scholars who experienced online harassment in order to understand how they coped with this phenomenon. we found that scholars engaged in reactive, anticipatory, preventive, and proactive coping strategies. in particular, scholars engaged in strategies aimed at self-protection and resistance, while often responding to harassment by acceptance and self-blame. these findings have important implications for practice and research, including practical recommendations for personal, institutional, and platform responses to harassment, as well as scholarly recommendations for future research into scholars’ experiences of harassment. veletsianos, g., houlden, s., hodson, j., gosse, c. (in press). women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse: self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame. new media & society. this is a post-peer review version of the article. the publisher’s copy is available at https://doi.org/ . / coping with harassment women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse: self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame scholars use online platforms such as blogs, twitter, and facebook for a diverse assortment of personal and professional purposes such as maintaining contact with colleagues and family members, sharing their research, teaching, conducting public scholarship, and engaging in advocacy and activism (manca and ranieri, ; veletsianos, ). scholars’ online practices are often met with optimism and highlighted as desirable. yet, while many researchers are hopeful about the potential positive impacts that scholars’ online presence may engender (e.g., brady, holcomb and smith, ; gruzd, staves and wilk, ; mbatha, ; thelwall, ), concerns around social media use have also been reported in the literature. these include tensions around scholars’ use of time, commercialization, establishing personal and professional boundaries, and perceived usefulness or lack thereof (friesen and lowe, ; jordan and weller, ; veletsianos and kimmons, ). one negative phenomenon that remains understudied is that of faculty harassment online, and specifically women scholars’ harassment. though there is increasing concern over the incivility, abuse, and vitriol facing scholars online (e.g., cassidy, faucher and jackson, ; vera-gray, ), little empirical research examines the experiences of women scholars with online harassment. as the american association of university professors notes (aaup, ), online abuse has become an increasingly concerning issue, particular at a historical moment of intensifying ideological division in the u.s. and beyond. as scholars are encouraged to be online as part of their jobs, or want to be online for a variety of scholarly purposes such as knowledge mobilization, the harassment that women scholars face online becomes an important issue to study. online harassment seeks to silence and marginalize women scholars’ voices, and coping with harassment adversely impacts not just women’s personal and professional lives but also the public’s access to scholarship. this comes at a time when online abuse more generally has garnered widespread media coverage as revealed through movements such as #metoo and #timesup. we address this identified gap in the literature by reporting on the ways that fourteen women scholars coped with this phenomenon. we first review literature relevant to this topic. next we present the methods used to conduct this investigation. finally, we report the results of this study and discuss its practical and scholarly implications. review of relevant literature little is known about the topic of faculty harassment online, and much less is known about the experiences of women scholars online, specifically. researchers often assume that scholars’ online participation is egalitarian (veletsianos & kimmons, ) and often suggest that scholars’ online experiences may be the same regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnic origin, ability, age, and so on. yet, women are more likely than men to report being harassed online (hess, ), and are more than twice as likely to experience severe forms of abuse such as stalking or sexual harassment (angus reid, ). citing a pew survey, fox, cruz, and lee ( : ) note “women report greater emotional distress as a result of online harassment, indicating that their experiences are particularly insidious and likely qualitatively different than those of men.” women who are in the public eye or who use technology to promote their work – such as scholars – are placed at even greater risk (duggan, ). nevertheless, empirical evidence describing women scholars’ experiences with online harassment is lacking. in response to the dearth of literature on the subject, many scholars have recently called for further research into the severity, prevalence, and nature of harassment against women (e.g., henry and powell, ; mantilla, ; megarry, ; vitak, et al., ). as vera-grey coping with harassment ( : ) observes, such research is especially urgent because women’s increased internet usage intersects with “the continual development of new tools for online social networking,” thus creating “greater opportunities for sexist harassment.” our research seeks to fill in some of these gaps. in two recent large-scale surveys conducted in the united states it was reported that over % of surveyed internet users experienced some form of online abuse (duggan, ; lenhart, ybarra, zickuhr and price-feeney, ). a similar survey found that % of canadian social media users had experienced online harassment (angus reid, ). these numbers may be much larger as researchers use “different definitions, operationalizations, and cut-off criteria” (staude-müller hansen and voss, : ). moreover, as scaraduzio, sheff and smith ( ) observe, these definitions evolve with the development of new harassing behaviours. indeed, while the prevalence of abusive behavior online is indisputable, a recent pew survey ( ) indicates that what counts as abuse (or harassment), and how severe abuse must be before requiring intervention, is much less clear cut. yet, in all three of the above cited surveys, respondents who had experienced harassment reported emotional distress and fear. as citron ( : ) suggests, “threats of violence, privacy invasions, reputation-harming lies, calls for strangers to physically harm victims, and technological attacks” should be regarded as intentional acts to inflict harm, not merely as harmless comments. while the scholarly literature focusing on the online harassment of women is growing (eckert, ), little attention is paid to the experiences of women scholars. previous literature on online harassment has focused on cyberbullying, especially of youth (tokunaga, ; willard, ; ybarra et al., ), online domestic and inter-relational violence (borrajo, gamez-guadix and calvete, ; henry and powell, a, ), and online feminist spaces coping with harassment (clark-parsons, ). in the context of higher education, most research has focused on the experience of students (rather than faculty), with particular emphasis on the prevalence of cyber bullying (faucher, jackson and cassidy, ; schenck and fremouw, ). while a number of accounts of women in academia experiencing harassment appear in the wider scholarly literature (citron, ; jane, ), only a handful of studies focus exclusively on women scholars. this even as online gender-based harassment is more visible in mainstream media, and women come forward with their experiences of harassment as scholars online. backlash toward scholars at the time of writing seems to be connected to polarizing sociocultural and sociopolitical issues as evidenced by the experiences of scholars such as that of professor beard who received a deluge of abusive comments in response to her work on immigration (dowell, ) and diversity (boseley, ). furthermore, scholars of new media and videogames have noted disturbing patterns in the gendered nature and content of online harassment. barak ( : ) notes that “gender harassment in cyberspace is very common,” a point reiterated in poland’s more recent scholarship ( ) where she argues that online spaces are fraught with vitriol against women. in addition to women being more likely to experience severe and sustained forms of online abuse (duggan, ), the types of harassing comments women receive are often qualitatively different than those directed to men. women are more likely than men to receive insults and abuse based on physical appearance, and are more than twice as likely to be sexually harassed online (angus reid, ; duggan ). such experiences and findings echo the results of studies of offline harassment; for example, an american association of university women survey ( ) shows that while both genders experience sexual harassment, girls experience it with significantly more frequency ( percent vs. percent). in research by staude-müller, hansen, and voss ( : ), which examined stress and online victimization, coping with harassment percent of respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment online, but with “female respondents being far more strongly exposed.” perhaps unsurprisingly, when scholars go online they are not exempt from the disproportionate amount of abuse faced by women. in a survey of faculty members at one canadian university, cassidy, faucher, and jackson ( ) uncovered a highly gendered experience of harassment. female faculty members reported a higher level of online harassment ( % reported being harassed in the past year compared to % of males), and were much more likely to complete the survey and volunteer for interviews. most of the harassment these women reported was perpetrated by students or colleagues, and occurred through email, course-related sites, or social media. the consequences of gendered harassment are significant. in addition to psychological distress, such as fear, shame, or self-loathing for the actions that might have caused the harassment in the first place, women who are the victims of online harassment frequently respond by self-censoring their online participation, deleting their profiles, and generally removing themselves from online spaces (citron, ; duggan, ; vitak, et al., ). these impacts illustrate the critical importance of this issue and its broader social implications: if women curtail their online participation as a result of harassment, the end result is likely a reduction in diversity of thought and opinion in the commons as well as within academia more generally. indeed, as salter and blodgett ( : ) note, the “same technologies that appear to offer spaces for shared discourse can just as easily be used for the suppression of political views, and thus can further alienate women.” such critiques are not new; more than a decade ago barak ( : ) suggested that sexual harassment on the internet disrupts its “free, legitimate, functional, and joyful” use. coping with harassment gendered harassment also impacts women’s professional lives. in addition to feeling too intimidated to continue participating online, victims describe losing time from work when trying to take legal action, and losing their reputation and employability due to what has been posted about them online. in one example, the repercussions faced by one victim involved “thousands of dollars in legal fees, hundreds of hours of lost work time, [and] the dismantling of [her] chosen career” (citron, : ). but the boundaries between the professional and personal are not always clear and can readily be transgressed. in a detailed account of her experiences as a feminist blogger, hess ( ) explains both the lengths perpetrators go to victimize and disrupt women online, and the consequent amount of time and energy expended in order to achieve redress, but more importantly, to remain safe, as online harassment overflows into the offline world. in another example, baker ( ) writes about receiving death threats after an interview she gave on msnbc live. the anger and fear she experienced as a result of the harassment caused her to “wonder if writing about white supremacy or sexism is worth it,” “to wonder if being a woman writer in the internet age is worth the threats and harsh words that follow my work,” and especially significantly, to “wonder if it wouldn't be easier to keep [her] head down and [her] mouth shut.” when faced with harassment, online or otherwise, the person who experiences the harassment will tend to adopt one or more strategies to deal with the harassment as a form of coping. we theorize coping by drawing from the basic definition of self-protection from psychological or emotional harm, involving steps taken to mitigate or eliminate stress (girdano, dusek and everly, ). in general, women who have experienced harassment engage in coping behaviors that may fall along a framework of avoidance, denial, negotiation, advocacy seeking, and social coping (knapp et al., ; wasti and cortina, ). early work on coping by coping with harassment lazarus and folkman ( ) polarizes coping strategies between problem-focused and emotion- focused, or efforts that aim to ameliorate the circumstances of the abuse contrasted with efforts to avoid, manage or mitigate stress. left unaddressed in the work of lazarus and folkman however, is coping mechanisms that orient toward future stressors, such as the potential for harassment. scarduzio, sheff and smith ( ) interviewed women who had experienced sexual harassment in both online and offline contexts, and discovered that coping strategies could be grouped into three categories: problem-focused, active emotion-focused and passive emotion-focused. similarly, schwarzer ( ) offers a nuanced picture of coping structured through four categories: reactive, anticipatory, preventive, and proactive. reactive coping orients towards already experienced harm; anticipatory coping orients to likely near-future harm; preventive coping orients toward potential though uncertain harm; and proactive coping orients toward goal-management and the accumulation of resources for growth rather than harm or stressors (biggs, brough and drummond ). within workplace settings, such as academia, the question of how to cope with abuse becomes even more complicated as women deal with both professional and personal repercussions of harassment (shrivastava, ). a small but important body of literature is beginning to explore how female scholars respond in the face of harassment. this is the work by women who self-identify as having been harassed and that then subsequently redirect that harassment into research itself, whether indirectly as the topic of an article or essay, or directly as datasets to be worked with and analyzed. in addition to hess ( ) and baker ( ) cited above, we note hurley’s ( ) collection of essays that examine geek culture in relation to gender, misogyny, and online harassment. more explicitly scholarly in nature, vera-gray ( ) uses the data from the trolling of her online recruitment call for a project examining street harassment in order to wager a coping with harassment feminist position on the added labor endemic to the work of feminist researchers. campbell’s ( ) experiences with trolling of her autoethnographic work also reflects this strategic re- deployment of harassment, and cottom ( ) has taken a similar strategy in using the racist commentary on her widely-read blog as a dataset for sociological analysis. chess and shaw ( ) have also used their own experiences with online harassment to critically explore their roles as feminist gaming scholars. these examples highlight the need for further investigation into the phenomenon of online harassment as well as the lived experiences of those who experience it (henry and powell, b). an important thread in this research is to examine the aforementioned reactions to gendered harassment, both online and offline, in order to consider how women scholars cope with such abuse. this is the gap that our research fills. we use schwarzer’s ( ) four categories described above as a theoretical framework to understand scholars’ coping strategies. while there is a growing body of literature of sexual harassment coping strategies, there has been no systematic investigation specifically into how female scholars cope with online abuse, even as the studies we’ve cited above have shown that the impacts of abuse are significant and wide- ranging. methods our goal in this paper is to identify, describe, and make sense of harassment faced by women scholars. with this goal in mind, our research question is: how do women scholars’ cope with online harassment? participants potential participants were women scholars in various higher education careers and positions, from tenured and adjunct faculty members to university students and independent coping with harassment scholars who had experienced online harassment. in other words, the term scholars refers to a diverse group of individuals who engage in scholarly activities beyond faculty members. we directed potential participants to an invitation to participate in this research via two means: first, we emailed all faculty members at one of the authors’ institutions. when this resulted in few participants, the invitation to participate in the study was posted on twitter and facebook by @academicssay. others further disseminated this information via standard social media processes (e.g., re-tweeting the twitter post). more than scholars responded to this call, and fourteen individuals were recruited for interviews. we interviewed these women in an iterative manner. we started by interviewing six individuals and continued interviewing people until we felt that we had reached a point where we were confident that we could answer our research question using the data collected. this is a common and acceptable method to reach saturation in qualitative research (baker and edwards, ). in selecting who to invite for interviews out of the individuals who expressed interest in being interviewed, we sought diversity by choosing a range of ages and employment positions (e.g., tenured vs. tenure-track vs. adjunct). participants are listed in table . participants’ age ranged from to years of age (mean = ; s.d = . ; median = . ). at the time of writing, participants were in a wide range of fields, and lived in three countries: the united states of america ( ), canada ( ), and the united kingdom ( ). they held a variety of positions: five were tenured faculty members, and one of these individuals served in an administrative role; three were independent scholars; five were faculty members on fixed-term contracts not on the tenure-track; and one was a librarian. one person held an ma degree, and the rest held a doctorate. all individuals described coping with harassment online scholarly activities as being the triggers that resulted in harassment. one individual noted receiving harassing comments in relation to her teaching as well. --insert table about here-- data collection two data sources informed this study: interview transcripts and examples of harassment shared by interview participants. using a semi-structured interview protocol, we interviewed participants via telephone or skype. using this protocol, we asked participants to describe their experiences of online harassment, their reactions to it, the personal and professional impacts of it, the reactions of others to it, and their perceptions of steps that could be taken to mitigate harassment. the semi-structured nature of the interviews allowed us to probe for additional comments on topics that arose. all interviews lasted between and minutes. the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. while some participants did not keep records of harassment they received, others did and and shared those records with us in the form of screenshots (e.g., on facebook or twitter). these screenshots were used to triangulate the types of harassment received and participants’ responses to it. data analysis we (the four researchers) analyzed the interviews and harassment records using an iterative process. we began our inquiry by analyzing the data independently using the same process: we each read the data and wrote open codes to describe experiences of harassment. we used an open coding process partly due to a lack of research focusing on the particular subpopulation of interest, partly because an open coding process enables us to make sense of general characteristics of the phenomenon of interest as it emerges from the raw data, and partly coping with harassment because this process allows us to remain open to facets of the experience that can emerge from the raw data without the predetermined categories that are applied in cases of using a pre- existing codebook. after each round of independent analysis, we met multiple times to discuss the data and the emerging categories we were seeing in the data. next, we classified data according to three emerging areas: affect, impact, and response. in exploring, interrogating, discussing, and attempting to confirm/refute these areas, we identified “ways of coping” as a recurring pattern in the data. we then returned to the data and categorized them in ways that described efforts to cope with the experience of harassment. this activity was guided by the constant comparative approach (glaser and strauss, ) as follows: two researchers read each piece of data (e.g., a sentence, a full response to an interview question, a screenshot of a social media message) and assigned a code to it describing ways of coping. next, researchers read the next piece of data (e.g., the next sentence) and compared it to the first generated code. if the code captured the meaning of the data, the data was assigned the code and the researchers moved to the next piece of data. if the code did not capture the meaning of the data, a new code was generated describing the data. the analysis process thus becomes one of constantly comparing the emerging codes to the data. this procedure resulted in a list of codes describing the data. next, the four researchers discussed the codes and the thematic categories they saw describing codes. we repeated this process until we felt that the data had been saturated and the identified themes captured the ways that participants coped with online harassment. rigor we took a number of steps to reduce the incidence of biases in the analysis. first, we analyzed data independently in order to avoid influencing each other’s interpretations. second, after analyzing data independently, we discussed our emerging interpretations, identified coping with harassment consistent interpretations, asked probing questions of one another, and critiqued our shared understanding of the phenomenon. third, we analyzed data collaboratively in order to mitigate individual biases. fourth, we provide ‘‘thick descriptions’’ of results to enable readers to determine whether findings are applicable to their own contexts (merriam ). fifth, we conducted member checks with participants by emailing them a summary of major findings and asking them to comment on whether findings accurately depicted their experience. seven of fourteen participants responded and all stated in the affirmative that the findings reflected their experiences and feelings. ethical considerations this study was reviewed and approved by an institutional ethics board per the tri- council policy statement on the ethical conduct for research involving humans (panel on research ethics, ). numerous steps were taken to seek free and informed consent; ensure privacy, confidentiality and anonymity; and eliminate undue influence. for instance, audio recordings were erased immediately following transcription; transcriptions and examples of harassment were de-identified; consent was secured digitally prior to the interview and confirmed verbally at the commencement and throughout the interviews; individuals were informed about the potential risks of participating in this project; and participants were provided with an opportunity to review and comment upon draft findings. findings coping offers a framework for understanding experiences of harassment, and is useful for understanding the effects of these experiences. in part, this enables an accounting for something that is difficult to quantify as the individual reaction to and understanding of harassment varies significantly. by focusing on coping, we emphasize the individual’s subject position and affect coping with harassment rather than being beholden to definitions of harassment that may or may not account for the full spectrum of harmful encounters described by the women in the interviews. it is also important to highlight that coping with harassment does not necessarily have a positive outcome that safeguards scholars’ well-being. all participants reported negative emotions and many reported feeling fatigued, tired, angry, and anxious. we recognize that coping is a form of emotional labor (hochschild, ), and as such can be distressing in itself, even in the cases of relatively positive outcomes (wharton, ). supporting previous findings on coping after harassment (scarduzio, sheff and smith, ; schwarzer, ), our data suggests that coping breaks down into multiple categories, many of which overlap, which is to say that the use of one coping strategy does not preclude the use of another, even if apparently contradictory in approach or outcome. as mentioned earlier, we draw on a coping rubric that accounts for reactive, anticipatory, preventive, and proactive coping, thereby addressing the different temporal aspects of the strategies used by women (schwarzer, ). we categorized coping strategies based on individual responses and what those responses suggest about an interviewee’s orientation toward the harassment. this accounts for potentially conflicting coping strategies as these strategies are employed with different ends in mind. significantly, the most common coping strategies were reactive in nature, with some anticipatory and preventive measures taken. the main coping themes that emerged were self- protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame (table ). we describe each of these categories below. -- insert table here--- self-protection the single most dominant category of coping which unified a set of responses from coping with harassment interviewees were practices of self-protection. all participants described strategies enacted as modes of self-protection and interview excerpts were coded as such. self-protection took the form of a cluster of behaviors that occurred before, during, and after harassment. in other words, self-protection encompasses a temporal dimension. reactive self-protection sought to reduce exposure to and impact of ongoing harassment. anticipatory self-protection sought to reduce the vulnerability to potential harassment, and preventive self-protection sought to eliminate harassment altogether. the reduction of vulnerability and exposure to harassment, while related, are two distinct orientations towards harassment. in the former, interviewees emphasized strategies that center defensive prevention of harassment predicated on knowledge of the possibility or likelihood of harassment. this took shape in the form of engaging in activities like compartmentalizing professional and personal online identities, refining security settings, avoiding of certain social media platforms, broadening of work networks, and turning to silence. silence manifested as both a kind of refusal to participate, as in zoe’s uncertainty or feeling “gun shy” about continued writing and public engagement on controversial topics, as well as refusal to share personal histories, as in jasmine’s decision to refrain from informing colleagues within her field about the online abuse perpetrated by scholars within their community. in both cases, as with other examples, the targeted women weighed the risk of potential violence and backlash against their desires for justice or rightness. the reduction of exposure to ongoing harassment was less future- or possibility- oriented (ie., it wasn’t about potential harassment) and instead covered ways to manage harassment as it was already occurring. this management included strategies such as blocking and ignoring, deleting comments, as well as outsourcing the reading of comments or management of one’s account to a loved one in order to avoid seeing comments. beyond these two groups of strategies, there was also a common expression of efforts to coping with harassment reduce the impact of ongoing harassment, to reduce harassment more generally, as well as to eliminate it altogether. as reactive coping strategies, the reduction of harassment’s impact typically fell into two streams, one which provided a kind of emotional buffering such as with humor and sarcasm. abby wryly noted that: on a good day, i can laugh about it. you know, i mean, the sheer ignorance and absurdity of some of them [the comments] are boggling. you know, you wonder how do you make it through the day if these are the reasoning skills you are working with? another form of emotional buffering worked to disavow the impacts by focusing on work, refusing to worry about harassment, and more broadly to simply move on. interestingly, jasmine noted that for the sake of her career, she sometimes felt to some degree obligated to “play along” with known harassers out of fear of reprisal and thus made her feel as though she was compromising her integrity. the difficult vulnerability of her position suggests that online harassment of female scholars is perpetrated not only by anonymous users, but also by people known to the target. as such, the impact of online harassment in some instances echoes the impact seen in the currently ongoing ( - ) media exposure of powerful men harassing and assaulting women actors, celebrities, and journalists alike, and reflects research that examines the role of technology in domestic abuse. reactive coping strategies for the reduction of harassment more generally included the understanding to “not feed the trolls,” refusal to engage online, and to defuse difficult or inflammatory situations. attempts to eliminate harassment reflect a more preventive orientation, and relied both on a sense of individual responsibility, as in self-censorship and holding back, as well as a turn toward outside forces for intervening aid, such as in reporting harassment to social media platforms as well as to the police. coping with harassment resistance next to self-protection, all interviewees engaged in resistance, which is a term we use here to describe scholars’ refusal to accept or remain silent or passive in response to harassment. fifty-four interview excerpts were included in this theme. resistance is a reactive coping strategy and strategies in this theme included persistent attempts at dialogue, persistence more generally, asserting one’s voice and authority, turning toward community, and the use of self- protection. interviewees noted that in spite of risks of abuse, they desired to continue using social media and to engage in dialogue, even with online users that might not be responsive. for zoe, this also included writing publicly about her experience with online harassment as a means to open up discussion about the abuse of women scholars online. relatedly, eight interviewees acknowledged the need to persist more generally in the face of abuse. jasmine framed it thusly: “i am not quitting. i've been at this too long to throw it out the window just because someone with a y chromosome thinks that they get to throw some sort of fit, and i'm just gonna disappear off the face of the planet.” in other words, it was not simply about expanding or maintaining open discourse, but that given the discouraging reality of being a woman online, continuing scholarly work and teaching in itself required determination and resilience. as such, simply continuing became an act of resistance. while asserting one’s voice might at first appear to simply belong with the desire to engage in dialogue, responses in this category relied on a willingness to engage more aggressively than those that emphasized shared dialogue. for example, some women framed their own responses as speaking out, calling out, and trolling back. lucy understood it as fighting “the good fight.” in each instance, the woman in question turned more actively towards using her voice, rather than the back and forth of speaking and listening as in dialogue. olivia, for coping with harassment example, initially responded by blocking, but eventually began to troll back, to find “ways to kind of mock or find humor in it.” another strategy that emerged was the willingness to share their experiences with others, be they family, friends, colleagues, or students. though sharing might not typically be seen as a form of resistance, by not remaining silent and developing community around shared experiences, women were able to push back against harassment. stella shared her experience with her students, family, and a colleague “who was equally if not more pissed off” than she was, which helped validate her feelings about the experience. this development of community as resistance was especially prominent for women who spoke with other women or chose to work with female mentors or colleagues with more regularity. the final significant strategy within resistant-type responses was that of self-protection. self-protection strategies have been discussed at length above, but for the purposes of resistance, they also take the form of refusal to engage the voices of abusers as a way for women to continue their online participation in safer and more doable terms. acceptance another significant theme that emerged was tied to responses that suggested acceptance of the problem. this theme represents the recognition that the problem of harassment was unlikely to go anywhere any time soon, and thus coping strategies focused on emotional responses to harassment. nine participants were included in this theme, and twenty-five interview excerpts were coded as such. the strategies included here were primarily reactive coping strategies. again, many of the responses within this category can also be tied to other themes; for example, self-censorship and increased privacy settings are modes of self-protection, but they are also behaviours suggestive of a recognition that online harassment could happen again in the future. in other words, self-protection and acceptance are at times two sides of the coping with harassment same coin. further examples include blocking and ignoring, avoiding use of social media to avoid the potential for harassment, continuing use of social media but in ways that minimize the effects of harassment (e.g., ignoring abusive comments), feeling unsurprised by the advent of harassment, feeling the need to move on or not to worry about it, and feeling a general sense of acceptance itself. hannah, for example, suggested that harassment is something “you just have to get used to… it almost seems like it’s the price to pay if you want a voice in things, and you’re going to have to learn to get over it.” it should be noted that acceptance is by no means necessarily a statement of being complacent with or condoning harassment, but instead reflects a feeling that there are few opportunities for immediate and decisive change. as lucy suggests, … it’s kind of almost like, there’s a phrase for this, where you’re just sort of used to it because it’s happened so many times and you share it. it doesn’t even bring you closer to women anymore because you’re just like yeah, great, that happened again, cool, like the sun came up. self-blame the last theme that emerged was that of self-blame, in which eight participants in eighteen coded excerpts described how they felt they needed to compromise their own values, had to apologize and monitor their own behavior, and most commonly, minimize their experiences of harassment. this latter response of minimization was mentioned even by women whose harassment could readily be described as extremely abusive. in a clear example of minimization, jessica said that, “compared to some of the other people who got harassed, mine was relatively minor,” even though she received death threats and was doxed. in another case, jasmine so regularly received online harassment that during her interview she limited her discussion to some of the more egregious violations; general comments about physical coping with harassment appearance, while annoying, were not as problematic as solicitations for sex or intimidation, for instance. another common thread that emerged was that some women felt that to some degree they were responsible because they were naïve about how social media and online engagement actually work. these kinds of self-blame and minimization are best characterized as emotional responses to the abuse, and as such, are forms of reactive coping. discussion and implications the women who were interviewed for this study coped with online harassment by engaging primarily in reactive, problem-focused coping like self-protection and resistance, and emotion-focused coping, like acceptance, and more negative experiences like self-blame. no single individual engaged in one single strategy, while nearly all of them engaged in at least two of these approaches to coping with harassment. these coping approaches are similar to the coping expressed by women who experience more general forms of harassment, as detailed in prior literature (knapp et al., ; lazarus and folkman, ; scarduzio, sheff and smith, ; schwarzer, ; wasti and cortina, ). by using coping as the framework of analysis, we address the concerns of numerous scholars who insist on the need for further research in the effects of online abuse on women (henry and powell, ; mantilla, ; vitak, et al., ). moreover, by centering coping as a form of emotional labor, this research makes visible the hidden labor (vera-gray, ) often associated with gendered experience online, thus contributing to a body of literature that examines the impact of gendered harassment in online spaces and works to make legible structure inequalities therein (cassidy, faucher and jackson, ; citron, ; jane, ; mantilla ; salter and blodgett, ). these findings have meaningful implications for practice and research. first, this research adds much-needed insight to the extant literature on women scholars’ experiences of coping with harassment online harassment. while the current literature includes a number of personal accounts of women scholars facing harassment (e.g., chess and shaw, ; cottom ( ), this study develops broader account harassment across a number of scholars. yet, the findings reported here are reflective of the broader literature describing the way that women overall experience and respond to harassment (scarduzio, sheff and smith, ). study participants expressed the range of avoidance, denial, negotiation, advocacy seeking, and social coping strategies detailed in knapp et al. ( ) and wasti and cortina ( ). these findings thus show that women scholars cope with harassment in ways that are consistent with how women in general cope with it, although scholars may face institutional and peer pressures to be online due to their work. given the findings of this study, future research might inquire deeper into particular experiences of abuse or examine the prevalence of this issue, especially with regards to the frequently gendered nature of this abuse. for instance, researchers may ask: what is the lived experience of particular types of online abuse (e.g., being doxed, sexual harassment, rape threats), and how does the emotional labor required to navigate such experiences compare with other forms of emotional labor required by academia and scholarly work? what personal, institutional, or platform strategies result in mitigating harassment and its effects? what proportion of women scholars face online harassment, and how does the type of harassment women scholars face compare to their male counterparts? who is harassed, in what ways does that harassment differ based on a variety of factors (e.g., demographics, academic rank), and why? what are the outcomes associated with typical coping strategies that scholars engage in? second, the potential of social media being used for harm and abuse needs to be accounted for into any expectations, institutional or otherwise, placed on social media uptake in higher education. while online participation in higher education contexts is often seen positively, coping with harassment and scholars are regularly encouraged to engage in public and networked scholarship (cf veletsianos ), this research highlights the potential and far-reaching consequences that some women scholars experience when they go online. in practical terms, higher education institutions must acknowledge this potential, resist the pressure to create an overwhelmingly positive depiction of online platforms when encouraging scholars to “go online,” and take steps to prepare scholars to face unsavory audiences. future research focusing on this area could investigate the different ways that scholars face pressures to go online as well as examine whether and how institutions of higher education acknowledge and respond to instances of online harassment. third, this research shows that higher education institutions need to provide training for navigating social media both as representatives of the institutions and as public intellectuals. at a basic level, universities need to be clear about their position on public scholarship and how that will affect how they support harassed faculty. such support should first be reflected in harassment prevention measures, which on a practical level should include training and resources to develop self-protective abilities, including familiarizing scholars with things like two-factor identification, password management systems, and how to employ applications developed to mitigate the onslaught of harassment. this kind of training will emphasize anticipatory and preventative coping techniques. it should also include awareness campaigns around what kind of work is targeted for harassment and what this harassment typically might look like. this too is another area ripe for future research. for example, the risks surrounding public engagement of particular content (feminist, critical race etc.) and particular research agendas, and the varying nature of targeted harassment should be determined, so that the potentially impacted scholars are prepared and supported. in other words, future research should identify root causes of and types coping with harassment of content that trigger harassment, and ideally, such research should emphasize continued public engagement. additionally, research into training and resources in the event of harassment, such as support networks for victims, as well as training for colleagues of victims, would be useful. this, in other words, will be a form of institutionalized anticipatory coping that facilitates effective reactive coping. fourth, as the previous paragraph highlights, our research shows that self-protection will not solve the problem. no matter the steps taken by individuals to prevent harassment, public scholarship on social media comes with risk. moreover, self-protection is a form of emotional labor that may result in fatigue and withdrawal from public discourse, and future research should attend to this reality (vera-gray, ). if the alternative to harassment is silence, higher education institutions, as well as social media platforms, have an obligation to respond to this problem – the onus cannot be entirely on victims or women more generally lest they become overburdened and isolated. significantly, we strongly recommend that women and other targeted groups need to be involved in decision-making, software development/consulting, and policy- development as it their experiences will inform how to respond, and hopefully resolve, the problem of harassment. fundamentally, institutions should be clear about what steps both the individual might and the institution will take in the instance of online harassment, and these steps need to be developed with the insights of those who have experienced harassment. fifth, this study highlights the agency and strength with which these women scholars confront vitriol and abuse. considering the broader environment that these scholars find themselves in (i.e. an environment in which institutional supports were mostly absent, social media platforms did little to curtail it, and the broader culture accepts it), the story of scholars facing harassment is not just a story of abuse, intimidation, and caution, but it is also a story of coping with harassment strength, courage, and determination, much as the research that utilizes experiences of online abuse shows (campbell, ; chess and shaw, ; cottom, ; vera-gray ). this finding stands in contrast to editorials and advice columns recommending to scholars to “watch what they say” online (donoghue, ; pryal, ). in investigating this phenomenon, we recommend that future researchers further investigate courageous practices of resistance and defiance, and shine more light upon the strength women scholars exhibit when faced with harassment. sixth, it is important to highlight that even though this study presents a first step in a broader examination of targeted harassment against women scholars, the field will benefit from research that examines subpopulations of scholars targeted for harassment and make relevant recommendations. for example, in analyzing her own experiences of harassment cottom ( ) theorizes the relationship between race and abuse as something different for black women. cottom’s experiences vividly point out the ways in which gender and race mediate individuals’ experiences of online participation. as an example to how the results of this study could be further interrogated, consider the finding that women scholars resist harassment by persisting in their efforts. researchers need to investigate whether the notion of resistance to harassment necessarily holds true for scholars across demographics. who engage in resistance and who do not? why do some resist and others don’t? do white scholars, scholars of color, and transgender scholars resist in the same ways? whose methods of resisting are deemed “acceptable” and whose are not, and in what ways are acceptable methods of resisting intersecting with scholar demographics? furthermore, any training on this topic should not just address gender but ultimately race, sexuality, and so on, as well as examine and identify the specific ways various groups are targeted. coping with harassment finally, it is important to note that this study faces a number of limitations. the data are drawn from participants residing in affluent, english-speaking, and western nations, and may not necessarily be representative of the experiences of those scholars facing dissimilar contexts. moreover, we do not report on how scholars’ experiences may differ in relation to demographics, academic positions, digital platforms, locations, or areas of expertise. gender is not the only factor that shapes harassment and its frequency and severity, and future research should further interrogate how online harassment is experienced differently by different subject positions. by design, this study does not aim to examine the prevalence of harassment nor does it make comparisons regarding the prevalence of harassment toward specific groups, or capture all the ways that individuals cope with and respond to harassment. nevertheless, this study provides the first systematic investigation of how a group of women scholars’ cope with online harassment and establishes the groundwork for future research into scholars’ experiences of online harassment that addresses the aforementioned limitations. conclusion while efforts to engage in emerging forms of scholarship that include digital and networked means are often seen with a positive light, this research demonstrates the contested terrain that some female scholars face when they are online. as online harassment adversely impacts scholars and disproportionately impacts women, their institutions, and the societies that scholars seek to serve by mobilizing their scholarship, this phenomenon is significant to study. while instances of women facing harassment and abuse have been reported in the broader literature examining online spaces since the early ’s, this study reveals a variety of ways that female scholars use to cope with it. beyond gaining an understanding of this phenomenon, we urge academics, faculty trainers, administrators, technology companies, and policymakers to use coping with harassment the recommendations provided herein to take steps to not only support scholars who are facing harassment, but also take steps to mitigate the 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usa magda non-tenure-track academic on a fixed- term contract physics phd usa olivia tenured academic political science phd usa sarah tenured academic - administrator education phd usa sophia non-tenure-track academic on a fixed- term contract human resources and management phd canada coping with harassment stella non-tenure-track academic on a fixed- term contract couple and family therapy phd usa stephany non-tenure-track academic on a fixed- term contract neuroscience phd uk zoe independent scholar religious studies phd usa coping with harassment table themes describing the ways women scholars cope with online harassment theme description examples self-protection self-protection refers to a cluster of behaviours that took place before, during, and after harassment occurred. its aim was to reduce exposure to, and impact of ongoing harassment, to reduce the vulnerability to potential harassment, and to eliminate harassment altogether. increased security settings, avoiding certain social media platforms, outsourcing readings of comments to others, self- censorship resistance resistance refers to scholars’ refusal to accept or remain silent or passive in response to harassment. speaking out, trolling back, refusing to remain silent, attempting to engage harassers in dialogue acceptance acceptance refers to the recognition that the problem of harassment was unlikely to disappear any time soon, and thus coping strategies were reactive in nature and focused on emotional responses to harassment. avoiding social media, increased privacy settings, feeling unsurprised by harassment self-blame self-blame refers to participants feeling that they needed to compromise their own values, apologize and monitor their own behavior, and minimize their experiences of harassment. comparing harassment to others’ experiences, blaming one’s own naiveté, feeling stupid 	 	 	 	 	 reimagining global health as the sharing of power rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - reimagining global health as the sharing of power kumanan rasanathan, jennifer j k rasanathan editorial to cite: rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. reimagining global health as the sharing of power. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . / bmjgh- - received march accepted march health systems global, phnom penh, cambodia bmj publishing group, london, uk correspondence to dr jennifer j k rasanathan; jjkrasanathan@ gmail. com © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re- use permitted under cc by- nc. no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. the foundational documents of global health, including the who constitution and the declaration of alma- ata, affirm and reaf- firm the importance of equality, equity and the human rights principles of participation, non- discrimination and accountability—as important ends in themselves, but also as essential to achieve improvements in health outcomes. in recent years though, the system of organisations and structures that comprise ‘global health’ has been increasingly indicted on the extent to which it reflects these values in its own operations—in particular, who is represented in decision- making and alloca- tion of resources, and who is excluded. gender inequalities in global health institu- tions have been challenged by organisations such as women in global health and global health / (gh ), while the #metoo social movement has shown that global health is not a safe space from sexual harassment. allied to growing calls to ‘decolonise’ global health (problematising the typical modus operandi of institutions and individuals in and from high- income countries acting on issues and individuals in low- income and middle- income countries), there is a growing intersectional interrogation of the political economy of global health. in this context, we welcome the publica- tion of the third annual gh report and accompanying gender and health index, timed to coincide with international women’s day. taking gender analysis as an entry point, the report examines the policies and compo- sition of organisations working in global health and argues that global health is not fit- for- purpose to deliver on its sustainable development goal (sdg) mandate to ensure health and well- being for all people. here, we highlight three of its key findings and offer our reflections on the implications and ques- tions the report raises. first, despite a reported increase in the availability of workplace gender equality poli- cies among the organisations assessed over years (from % in to % in ), there has been little progress in parity at the top. gender parity in senior manage- ment, the report forecasts, will not be reached for another years at the current rate of change. few organisations address gender in a transformative manner, and more organ- isations have policies on gender equality in recruitment than other aspects of workforce diversity. second, the report finds that only % of global health leaders are nationals of low- income or middle- income countries, while only % of global health organisations are headquartered in low- income and middle- income countries. third, and most striking, the report demonstrates the mismatch between the programmatic focus of most global health organisations compared with sdg health targets by using sex- disaggregated data on the burden of disease associated with each target. in so doing, the authors point to the larger focus on maternal mortality compared with work on non- communicable diseases (ncds), tobacco use, alcohol and substance use and traffic injuries, all of which disproportionately impact the health of men and boys. the applicability of these findings and the follow- on consequences and imper- atives for action deserve consideration and scrutiny by all in global health. as the report itself acknowledges, improve- ments in the metrics the report uses on gender equality do not necessarily translate to a fuller appreciation of the relationship between gender and health in global health organisations’ workforce policies and way of working. we need much faster progress towards gender- balanced boards and gender- equal leadership in global health as ends in themselves. but we also need to mitigate the risk that gender equality policies are token- istic, ‘tick box’ exercises that allow organisa- tions to get a better gh score without substantively changing workplace culture, making opportunities for advancement more equitable or, crucially, enabling them to o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n m a rch . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjgh- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://gh.bmj.com/ rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health do their jobs better. will greater gender parity in global health leadership improve the chances of achieving the sdg health- related targets? we need mechanisms that ensure that global health institutions take a gender- transformative approach, as critical to the pursuit of health for all, to ensure this is so in practice. the intersectional lens the report applies to its anal- ysis of today’s global health architecture is much needed. the sobering but probably unsurprising findings lead us to ask: what are the consequences of having almost % of global health organisations’ headquarters in high- income countries? or of having women from low- income and middle- income countries in only % of global health leadership roles? the report does not measure class as a factor. efforts to improve diversity in elite settings (which global health undoubtedly is) tend to be captured by elite members of under- represented groups—those most fluent in the dominant discourses and with the social capital to be able to enter and function in these spaces with minimal disruption. perhaps even more important than efforts to diversify global health leadership (espe- cially given the entry barriers to these roles) is ensuring that rights- holders who are the intended beneficiaries of global health practice are included, consulted and employed in strategic planning, programmatic priority setting, implementation and accountability mechanisms. the report’s most interesting and original finding is its highlighting of the lack of attention to the health of men and boys, perhaps a vestige of the dominance of the millennium development goals’ (mdgs) health agenda even years into the sdg era. again, the implication is that ‘gender and health’ has too often served as a proxy for ‘women’s health’, rather than engaging with context- specific gender norms, roles and behaviours that mani- fest in divergent health outcomes among and between women, men and transgender people. the nuance that this report adds is that this disproportionately leads to neglect of the health of men and boys linked to ncds— and moreover, that unless we address this neglect and tackle the determinants of these inequalities, increasing equality in gender roles will perversely lead to worsening ncd outcomes for women as they adopt behaviours prev- alent in men. we do not think the implication is that we should devote less attention in global health to repro- ductive and maternal health, given the global failure to achieve mdg and continuing challenges with sexual and reproductive health and rights. but highlighting this gap is a further stimulus to more fully engage with the relationship between gender and health, and merits serious consideration and follow- up by global health funders, policy- makers and implementers. although the report recognises the differing size, influence and power of the organisations it assesses, we would welcome a more detailed power analysis taking funding levels and impact into account, particularly disaggregating the quantitative findings further. in conclusion, the gh report calls not just for a moment of reflection but instead a moment of imag- ination for global health. we applaud the scale of the review of organisations, and especially the courage of the authors in moving beyond gender equality to a more comprehensive diagnosis of global health and its discon- tents. their findings raise the uncomfortable question of whether global health leadership can be anything other than an elite activity. we hope the next edition will include qualitative research or even similar assessments in national contexts to further our understanding of the culture of global health. in the meantime, we should closely consider these findings and continue the task of reimagining global health as a practice of liberation and the genuine sharing of power. twitter kumanan rasanathan @rasanathan funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; internally peer reviewed. data availability statement no additional data are available. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by- nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non- commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non- commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . /. references world health organization. constitution of the world health organization. geneva: world health organization, . world health organization, unicef. declaration of alma- ata. ussr: alma- ata, . dhatt r, thompson k, lichtenstein d, et al. the time is now – a call to action for gender equality in global health leadership. glob health epidemiol genom ; :e . clark h. report card shows gender is missing in global health. lancet ; : – . #metoo meets global health: a call to action. health hum rights ; : – . zarocostas j. hiv/aids community divided over allegations about unaids. lancet ; : . saha s, kavattur p, goheer a. the c- word: tackling the enduring legacy of colonialism in global health. available: https://www. healthsystemsglobal. org/ blog/ / the- c- word- tackling- the- enduring- legacy- of- colonialism- in- global- health. html [accessed march, ]. kapilashrami a, hankivsky o. intersectionality and why it matters to global health. lancet ; : – . global health / . the global health / report : power, privilege and priorities. london, uk, . https:// globalhealth . org/ report/ gupta gr, oomman n, grown c, et al. gender equality and gender norms: framing the opportunities for health. lancet ; : – . horton r. offline: the pretensions of global health elites. lancet ; : . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n m a rch . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/rasanathan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /gheg. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /gheg. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://globalhealth .org/ report/ https://globalhealth .org/ report/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://gh.bmj.com/ 	reimagining global health as the sharing of power 	references the notion of truth and our evolving understanding of sexual harassment the notion of truth and our evolving understanding of sexual harassment patricia r. recupero, jd, md the notion of truth and its determination in legal proceedings is contingent on the cultural setting in which a claim is argued or disputed. recent years have demonstrated a dramatic shift in the public dialogue concerning sexual harassment. this shift reflects changing cultural mores and standards in the workplace and society as a whole, particularly with respect to the validity of women’s voices. the subjective reality experienced by victims of sexual harassment is inherently tied to the legal system’s treatment of women throughout history. in determinations of truth, our understanding of which information and perspectives are relevant, and our expectations regarding the credibility of complainants and the accused, are undergoing a period of rapid change. the discourse surrounding the #metoo movement suggests that the “reasonable-person” standard so often applied by courts is poorly suited to sexual-harassment litigation. as our understanding of what constitutes “severe,” “pervasive,” and “unwelcome” conduct continues to evolve, forensic psychiatrists must strive to uphold the values of respect for persons in the search for the truth. j am acad psychiatry law : – , in his presidential address, michael norko touches on ezra griffith’s work on cultural formulation and concern for nondominant groups in the context of truth-finding in forensic psychiatry. these concerns are especially relevant today, in light of the recent #metoo movement and our changing understand- ing of sexual harassment. norko particularly empha- sizes griffith’s interest in the role of “truth-telling” in the courtroom and its potential impact on disadvan- taged groups. how does society decide what infor- mation is relevant to determining truth in legal pro- ceedings? when a party in a case is a member of a minority group (e.g., ethnic and racial minorities and women), “truth” can be used in harmful ways or be completely disregarded in the adversarial process by attorneys who are ethically bound to protect only their own client’s best interests. in this commentary, i address the impact of recent cultural changes, as re- flected by the #metoo movement on the acceptance of women’s truth in sexual harassment litigation. i do not discuss the perspectives of male complainants, whose truth may face even more daunting barriers than the traditional women’s truth, as current events have not been focused on these cases, but they also may experi- ence a new appreciation of truth’s being a complex problem with multiple dimensions that have heretofore been ignored or minimized. as norko noted, truth-finding missions in the legal process are typically framed around the require- ment for binary judgments: misconduct did, or did not, occur; an offense did, or did not, take place. the answers to these questions, however, may change over time in response to evolving cultural norms. sexual harassment law in the united states has been built primarily upon the legal concept of the “reason- able person.” in this commentary, i argue that this standard ignores the historically disadvantaged status of women and its relevance to the subjective truth experienced by victims of harassment. in light of the growing public recognition of women’s voices in re- cent years through phenomena like the #metoo movement, the criteria by which we evaluate individ- ual elements of a sexual harassment claim may be changing. historically, these claims were often re- ceived by courts and forensic psychiatrists with doubt and suspicion, and a general belief that sexual harassment was an uncommon occurrence. recent developments, however, have potentially dramatic impact on our assumptions and presumptions about truth in sexual-harassment litigation. dr. recupero is clinical professor of psychiatry, alpert medical school of brown university, and senior vice president, education and training, care new england health system, providence, ri. address correspondence to: patricia r. recupero, jd, md, butler hospital, blackstone boulevard, providence, ri . e-mail: precupero@carene.org. disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: none. volume , number , c o m m e n t a r y the historical context of women and the law the notion of truth is central to the dialogue sur- rounding society’s evolving understanding of sexual harassment, and questioning the veracity of a wom- an’s experience (or dismissing it outright) has roots reaching far back into ancient history. for many years, the legal system has been characterized by the treatment of women as objects, not subjects; a wom- an’s subjective experience and agency were consid- ered irrelevant. for example, the legal prohibition of sexual assault arose to protect men’s interests: a woman who was raped was viewed as damaged goods, and rape entered the law as analogous to a property crime committed by one man against an- other man. this bias persisted through the marital rape exemption until the very recent past. until the s, u.s. law in most jurisdictions did not allow a woman to file charges of rape against her husband. the marital rape exemption continues to affect per- ceptions of women’s experiences today. throughout much of recorded history, women have not been considered competent to give court- room testimony, to own property, to enter into con- tracts, or to vote. they have been systematically pre- vented from participating in the life of commerce and political discourse. in the case of bradwell v. illinois, the u.s. supreme court upheld the state of illinois’s exclusion of women from the practice of law in , arguing that: [t]he natural and proper timidity and delicacy which be- longs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . . a married woman is incapable, without her husband’s consent, of making contracts which shall be binding on her or him. this very incapacity was one circumstance which the supreme court of illinois deemed important in rendering a married woman incompetent fully to perform the duties and trusts that belong to the office of an attorney and counselor (ref. , p ). the decision was based on a prevalent cultural belief at the time: women and men were destined “to occupy different spheres of action” (ref. , p ), later known as the “separate spheres” doctrine. the case formalized and institutionalized the concept that women lacked the capacity to participate mean- ingfully in legal proceedings and should remain si- lent, in the domestic sphere of the home. in a society in which women could not enter into a contract, the testimony of women about concerns in the work- place could easily be disregarded or minimized as an irrelevant truth. the separate spheres doctrine persisted well into the mid- th century in u.s. courts. , even today, these ideas continue to have currency. our current vice president, mike pence, recently made headlines when he announced that he would not have a meal alone with a woman other than his wife. although some, particularly in conservative religious groups, have lauded this policy as honor- able, it reinforces the prevailing cultural belief that a woman’s place is in the home, not in settings where important business or political decisions are being made. such a policy tends to enforce “old boys’ club” attitudes that have served to exclude women’s voices from full participation in civil society. society’s tendency to dismiss a woman’s subjective truth as irrelevant and unworthy of consideration pervades public discourse, with victims of sexual ha- rassment often derided as lacking credibility: not uncommonly, when a woman says something that im- pugns a man, particularly a powerful one . . . especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so. generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspirato- rial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once. this bias, too, has deep roots in history, and all too often physicians have played a complicit role. in the nineteenth century, a woman whose truth was un- acceptable was often diagnosed with “hysteria,” a condition inherently linked to her status as a woman [ref. , p ]. legal definition of reasonable person the concept of sexual harassment was nonexistent in u.s. law until the past few decades. during the drafting of the bill that would become the civil rights act of , lawmaker howard smith (an opponent of the bill) proposed a last-minute amend- ment to include sex as a protected class to the title vii provisions that would prohibit discrimination in the workplace, an action that some have argued was intended to defeat the bill. treating the concept of sex discrimination as so laughable that it could sink an entire civil-rights statute is an illustration of the low status of women’s truth and experience in polit- ical discourse, even in modern times. nonetheless, the bill passed, making discrimination on the basis of sex unlawful in the united states. sexual harassment law in the united states devel- oped in the context of sex-discrimination claims truth and our evolving understanding of sexual harassment the journal of the american academy of psychiatry and the law based on the doctrines of disparate impact and dis- parate treatment, first applied in race-based discrim- ination cases in the late s and early s. feminist scholarship regarding sexual harassment developed in the s, and in , the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) published guidelines declaring sexual harassment in the workplace an unlawful form of sex discrimina- tion. catharine mackinnon has noted the critical importance of women’s voices in shaping modern views of sexual harassment: “. . . [s]exual harassment doctrine did not historically arise because or when legislatures passed sex discrimination laws. it was ju- dicial engagement with the experiences of sexually harassed women presented to courts on an equality theory, in phenomenological depth and one case at a time, that made it happen” (ref. , p ). the first u.s. supreme court case to recognize hostile envi- ronment-based sexual harassment a violation of title vii, was meritor savings bank v. vinson, decided in . the meritor opinion set forth standards by which courts in the future could determine whether an alleged harasser’s conduct was so unwelcome, se- vere, and pervasive that it rendered the work environ- ment hostile. most courts in sexual harassment litigation apply a test based on the reasonable-person standard: to be actionable, the harasser’s conduct must be unwel- come, severe, and pervasive in the eyes of the average reasonable person (male or female). the eeoc also endorsed the reasonable-person standard for sexual harassment cases in a policy guideline released in . the reasonable person standard was not unique to sexual harassment jurisprudence, however; the concept dates back at least as far as in eng- lish law, a time when a woman’s subjective experi- ence was usually treated as irrelevant by courts. in the late th century, the u.s. supreme court held that “person” was to be interpreted to mean “male per- son” in a virginia statute. in , some important developments emerged in our understanding of sexual harassment. the pas- sage of the civil rights act of expanded rem- edies to victims, and was also the year in which anita hill testified regarding her sexual harassment by clarence thomas. in the same year, the ninth circuit decided ellison v. brady, applying a reasonable-woman standard, explaining: “we adopt the perspective of a reasonable woman, pri- marily because we believe that a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-based and tends to systemically ignore the experiences of women” (ref. , p ). the ellison court was not the first to propose the adoption of a reasonable woman standard. in fact, the reasonable woman standard was suggested for sexual harassment cases as early as . nonethe- less, today many courts still apply the reasonable per- son standard when deciding sexual-harassment cases, although some, such as the third circuit, have ap- plied the reasonable-woman approach. in , the supreme court held in harris v. forklift systems that a plaintiff in a title vii sexual harassment case need not prove that she has suffered psychological harm when the work environment would be perceived by a reasonable person as hostile. the harris case is significant in part because it took the subjective experience of a harassed woman seri- ously: why require exposure and interrogation of her mental state when it was not her conduct that was objectionable? however, the court rejected the com- plainant’s argument that it should apply the “reason- able woman” or “reasonable person in the position of the plaintiff” in cases of sexual harassment (ref. , p ). a more comprehensive approach to identifying truth was applied by the supreme court in a sexual harassment case when it was brought by a male plain- tiff who allegedly experienced harassment from his male coworkers. in oncale v. sundowner offshore services, the court applied a “reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position” standard. the court in on- cale also noted the importance of “careful consider- ation of the social context in which particular behav- ior occurs and is experienced by its target” (ref. , p ). the principle of considering the social context and a target’s subjective experience may have been more readily understood by the court in this case because the perspective was that of a male complain- ant. in meritor, for example, the plaintiff was not permitted to introduce evidence about the general work environment and its sexual content. none- theless, oncale demonstrates an evolving recognition of the nuances of truth in the subjective experience of sexual harassment. credibility and the complainant many sexual harassment allegations are character- ized by courts as “he-said, she-said” disputes: recupero volume , number , the phrase [he-said, she-said] now dominates the accounts of what lawyers used to call formally material fact disputes, and more colloquially swearing matches. . . . now the phrase most often means “testimony in direct conflict,” with an implica- tion that truth is therefore undiscoverable. to prevail in a he-said, she-said type of dispute, one must be perceived as competent and credible. impeaching the credibility of a complainant or wit- ness has long been a favored tactic among attorneys seeking to undermine or exclude the testimony pre- sented by opposing counsel. arguments and tactics are commonly employed by the accused or his associates to diminish and un- dermine the credibility of a woman who has leveled accusations of sexual harassment against him. these tactics (ad hominem attacks) exploit extrinsic factors and irrelevant material to obfuscate the truth the complainant seeks to present. common allegations and attacks designed to suppress women’s truth fall into several recognizable categories: attention or publicity: the complainant was ly- ing to attract attention (e.g., kristen anderson and monica lewinsky). greed and money: the complainant was lying to get a payoff (e.g., bill cosby’s accusers and bill o’reilly’s accusers). politically motivated: the complainant was lying for political reasons or to disparage the accused (e.g., ms. hill, mariah billado, tasha dixon, jessica drake, mr. o’reilly’s accusers, roy moore’s accus- ers, and donald trump’s accusers). vindictive and scorned woman: the complainant resented the accused’s power, or charges were motivated by a desire for revenge for rejection (e.g., ms. hill). crazy, confused, or exaggerating: the complain- ant was crazy, confused, overreacted, misunder- stood the situation, or was hypersensitive. she does not remember events accurately, or she is distorting the truth (e.g., ms. hill). implausibility: the complainant’s allegations are so absurd as to be implausible (e.g., jill harth, cathy heller, temple taggart, and several of harvey weinstein’s accusers). a variant of the implausibility tactic is for the accused to claim that because he was not at- tracted to the woman (or because she was not perceived as objectively attractive), it could not have happened. another variant is for the alleged perpetrator to be portrayed as “such a nice guy” that he could not have engaged in the reported acts (e.g., the reaction to allegations against bill clinton, mr. cosby, and matt lauer). it was consensual: the accused admits to sexual contact but states that “she wanted it” or “it was consensual” (e.g., ivana trump, nate parker’s accuser, and mr. weinstein’s accusers). never interacted: the accused admits no involve- ment with the complainant (e.g., lisa boyne, ms. drake, victims of mr. moore, and victims of james toback). simple denial: the alleged incident or behavior did not happen, there is no proof that it hap- pened, or both (e.g., rachel crooks, jessica leeds, bridget sullivan, and ms. lewinsky). no comment: the accused will not deign to dig- nify the complaint by taking it seriously; the allegations do not deserve a response (e.g., sa- mantha holvey, ninni laaksonen, melinda mcgillivray, and cassandra searles). why didn’t she complain when it happened?: reference made to the length of time elapsed since an incident and the airing of an allegation (“if this happened, and if it bothered her, why didn’t she report it at the time?” “it must not have happened, or she remembers it inaccu- rately.”) (e.g., ms. harth, natasha stoynoff, and ms. hill). these tactics share a tendency to minimize the credibility of the complainant herself (not merely the allegations) and to imply that her truth is unworthy of consideration, owing to her status as a woman. it has recently been disclosed that women who accuse members of congress of sexual harassment are re- quired to undergo days of counseling before they can press their claims and that their settlements in- clude nondisclosure clauses. this system is discrimi- natory and designed to prevent the truth from being told. first, the requirement of counseling is an added burden, and, if the claimant is able to navigate the other obstacles, she is contractually silenced. disputes about the truth of the matter have dom- inated public discourse surrounding recent allega- truth and our evolving understanding of sexual harassment the journal of the american academy of psychiatry and the law tions of sexual harassment by public figures in recent years. in october , the washington post released a video recording from an access hollywood taping in in which donald trump is heard bragging about his sexually inappropriate behavior toward women. following the release of the recording, mr. trump initially acknowledged having made the comments. (“i said it, i was wrong, and i apologize.”) outrage over the language in the tape and mr. trump’s continued rise to power despite reports of his inappropriate conduct toward women helped to spur the women’s march on washington in january . in recent months, mr. trump and his staff have disputed the legitimacy of the access hollywood recording and have claimed that he did not make the comments heard on the tape. so far, at least women have come forward publicly with allegations of his sexual misconduct toward them. their ac- counts share striking similarities, and several of the incidents were witnessed by others who corroborated the victims’ accounts. mr. trump has denied all of these allegations, characterizing the accounts as “fake news.” the existence of multiple accusers and cor- roborating witnesses has made undermining an indi- vidual complainant’s credibility more challenging. barriers to truth-finding and recent developments in october , several news outlets (including the new yorker and the new york times ) pub- lished accounts of women who reported having been victimized by entertainment industry executive har- vey weinstein. after these reports, there has been a seemingly endless stream of accounts of similar sex- ual misconduct by other prominent executives and public figures, fueled in part by a social media cam- paign (#metoo). time magazine recently named “the silence breakers” (i.e., women who went public with allegations of sexual harassment and abuse) the person of the year. being the first person to level sexual harassment allegations against someone in a position of power is often an extremely risky decision for a complainant. frequently, the accused denied the allegation, and his supporters deride the complainant as crazy or manipulative. many com- plainants are subjected to retaliatory harassment. there is safety in numbers, however, and, as more persons come forward, the objectionable character of the accused’s behavior becomes progressively more difficult to ignore. the case of mr. weinstein illustrates many exam- ples of silencing tactics that are used prejudicially to prevent potential complainants from telling their truths. to keep victims quiet, perpetrators of ha- rassment may conduct surveillance on the victim, as when mr. weinstein had a private investigator fol- low a male associate with whom he was involved in litigation, even as the associate and his wife dropped their children off at school. potential claimants may also be subjected to increased harassment, not just by the original perpetrator but by his supporters as well. perpetrators in positions of power may also mention “friends in high places;” mr. weinstein, for example, frequently made reference to his high-ranking polit- ical associates, such as bill and hillary clinton. hush money, whether paid via legal settlements outside of court or “off the books,” is another com- mon tactic, as seen in the cases of mr. o’reilly, mr. weinstein, and roger ailes: steve hutensky, a miramax lawyer nicknamed the cleaner- upper by some colleagues, helped write an agreement with ms. perkins in that barred her from disclosing mr. weinstein’s name, even to a therapist, and required her to provide “reasonable assistance” to miramax if the company chose to contest any criminal investigation that might arise. mr. weinstein also used a tactic known as “catch and kill,” wherein a publisher connected to the perpetrator acquires exclusive rights to damaging in- formation, then never publishes it. requiring new employees to sign nondisclosure agreements and mandatory arbitration contracts as a condition of employment (which appears to be growing more common) may prevent future victims of workplace sexual harassment from making the public accusa- tions that are often necessary to put other potential victims on notice. with legal “gag clauses” in place, sexual harassment can be, and has been, hidden or covered up for decades, often facilitating its contin- ued presence and escalation. the threat of retaliatory counterlawsuits in tort (e.g., defamation) and strate- gic lawsuits against public participation (slapp) is another favored tactic to keep victims from voicing their truth. some victims experience hints or outright threats of other forms of retaliation. these may include threats of violence and bodily harm to the victim or her family, the prospect of damage to the victim’s career and reputation, or the possibility of public humiliation from exposure of private information about the victim if the victim takes her complaint recupero volume , number , public. , the most vulnerable groups (e.g., per- sons of color, persons with disabilities, and sexual orientation and gender identity minorities) are fre- quent targets of harassment and abuse related to the power differential. often, they have the most to lose: income, social support, or even their physical safety. undocumented immigrants or their family members are frequently singled out and targeted for sexual harassment because the threat of possible de- portation often dissuades victims from complaining. perpetrators may also threaten to use their power to harm those close to the victim if allegations come to light. one of mr. weinstein’s victims reported that he “somehow knew personal information about [her], mentioning her student loans and where her younger sister attended school and saying he could have her kicked out.” even when victims of harassment are successful in obtaining monetary compensation for damages through a legal settlement, many of the silencing tac- tics deployed by perpetrators are designed to elimi- nate the possibility that the truth will ever be brought to light in a public forum. unfortunately, as schep- pele noted: . . . [t]ruth-finding is a socially situated practice. . . . most of the time, we are successful enough or blind enough to the consequences of our inaccuracies not to reevaluate our prac- tices. whenever our failures call attention to our inadequa- cies in this regard, we engage in a patch-up effort to work out what went wrong in the case, but we rarely rethink our entire scheme for evaluating the evidence that daily life presents us [ref. , p ]. the guidance of griffith and norko regarding the importance of individual, subjective truths can help us avoid these pitfalls. factitious allegations determining or verifying truth in he-said, she-said disputes can be an extremely challenging and some- times impossible task. although they likely com- prise a minority of sexual harassment complaints, false allegations do sometimes occur. how is truth verified in cases involving only one complainant and no confirmatory evidence? in such instances, forensic psychiatrists are sometimes called upon for assis- tance. typically, “ultimate issue” questions, such as whether discriminatory and unlawful harassment oc- curred, are left to the fact finder in a case (i.e., the judge or the jury), and the expert witness’s role is to provide additional information that may be helpful to the trier of fact in weighing different evidence in a case. we may be asked, for example, whether a complainant’s behavior is consistent with that of confirmed victims of sexual harassment, or whether the complainant exhibits symptoms of factitious dis- order or other relevant psychiatric diagnosis. as gutheil and sutherland explained, the cred- ibility of a complainant may be the ultimate question in a case of alleged sexual harassment. the admissi- bility of expert-witness testimony concerning witness credibility remains a contested area of the law. at a minimum, the forensic psychiatrist must remain cognizant of existing biases, which can play a signif- icant role in one’s interpretation of sexual harassment allegations. binder and mcniel provided helpful recommendations for forensic experts engaged in such cases, where there is no confirmatory or corrob- orating evidence. implications for forensic psychiatrists as yet, it is too early to know what effect the #metoo movement will have on the future of sexual harass- ment law in the united states. one potential unfore- seen complication may be the overvaluation of the importance of having multiple accusers: when there is only one complainant, will he or she be believed? the truth-finding process in sexual harassment liti- gation, while it may show a growing acceptance of women’s claims, may cause not only the backlash that many fear, but also the diminution of the indi- vidual victim’s experience. psychiatrists consulting or testifying in sexual-harassment cases must strive to remain objective and open to information from mul- tiple sources, especially as our understanding of wel- come and unwelcome conduct in the workplace con- tinues to evolve. forensic psychiatrists should be on guard against attorneys’ efforts to exploit mental health evidence for credibility attacks, particularly when the com- plainant is a member of a disadvantaged, nondomi- nant group. the existence of mental illness in a com- plainant does not negate the possibility of her having been subjected to sexual harassment, nor does it prove that harassment occurred (e.g., in the case of posttraumatic stress disorder). such nuances may be lost on the triers of fact, however; and even true facts regarding a complainant’s or defendant’s mental health may be presented in ways that unfairly preju- dice one party’s side in a dispute. as in the th century, someone whose experience is depicted as hysterical often will not be heard or taken seriously. truth and our evolving understanding of sexual harassment the journal of the american academy of psychiatry and the law it seems that we are in a time and social climate when the understanding of what is unwelcome, se- vere, and pervasive has begun to grant women more credibility. public opinion appears to be shifting to- ward an approach similar to that employed by the court in oncale: the complainant’s point of view should be considered in light of all the circumstances, including the unique perspective of a woman as a member of a nondominant group. i am not suggest- ing that the legal standard has changed, but rather that the lived experience of women is being given greater credence. in the judicial process, the fact- finding process may be influenced by the #metoo environment; women’s allegations of sexual harass- ment may face a lower barrier in the assessment of credibility. if so, and if we are indeed moving toward adoption of the reasonable-woman standard, such a development has implications for both the com- plainant and the accused. concluding thoughts we are at an inflection point where women’s sto- ries and the social contexts of women’s lives may produce a truth that has heretofore been unexplored. “i believe the women” has become a cultural and political mantra. as zacharek and colleagues wrote, “in early october [ ], the dam finally broke,” and the number of allegations of sexual harassment by both men and women is flowing at an unprece- dented rate. this flood of cases represents decades of fears about one’s truth not being believed, fear of being the first one to speak when others have been silent, and a growing consensus that victims’ truths have gone unheard for far too long. the impact of the evolving understanding of truth in cases of sexual harassment in the workplace is still in transition. one of the lessons from the #metoo movement is the almost universal presence of harassment in women’s work experience. perhaps we should be wondering as a society why we have not heard the truth for so long. we cannot reflexively adopt the i-believe-the- women position in performing our evaluations. par- ticularly in post-traumatic stress disorder evalua- tions, we need to evaluate our criteria for assessing the existence of an event that may be the precipitant, given the new knowledge of the ubiquity of women’s experiences of sexually harassing experiences in the workplace. the truth of the event and its sequelae cannot be a truth defined by a male perspective. rather, we need to recognize that the truth in these contexts is complex, and the impact of some events on women shapes a truth that has not heretofore been heard in american jurisprudence. it is up to the forensic psychiatrist to remain committed to gather- ing that truth in all of its complexity, and we must be prepared to adapt our approaches to truth identifica- tion in the context of these ongoing developments throughout the process of change. references . norko ma: what is truth? 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-bf a- d eeed _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in- / / / / b ce - cb - e -bf a- d eeed _story.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /all-of-the-women-who-have-accused-trump-of-sexual-harassment-are-lying-the-white-house-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /all-of-the-women-who-have-accused-trump-of-sexual-harassment-are-lying-the-white-house-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /all-of-the-women-who-have-accused-trump-of-sexual-harassment-are-lying-the-white-house-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /all-of-the-women-who-have-accused-trump-of-sexual-harassment-are-lying-the-white-house-says/ https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/harvey-weinstein-complicity.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/harvey-weinstein-complicity.html religions article revisiting the “secret consort” (gsang yum) in tibetan buddhism holly gayley department of religious studies, university of colorado, boulder, co , usa; gayley@colorado.edu received: april ; accepted: may ; published: june ���������� ������� abstract: this article revisits the question, first introduced by feminist scholars in the mid- s, about whether sexual practices within buddhist tantra (heterosexually conceived) are empowering or exploitative to women. the purpose here is to complicate this question, given the different geographic settings and cultural contexts in which consort relationships have been embedded—from eastern tibet to north america—and to nuance our understanding of the potential and pitfalls of sexuality in tantric contexts. to do so, i query the dynamics of secrecy and sexuality in tantric practice, examining twentieth century examples of female practitioners of tibetan buddhism who have participated in such relationships and thereby highlighting the localized ways that the “secret consort” (gsang yum) has been invoked as a social role. this issue is especially relevant today in light of the global #metoo movement and recent disclosures of sexual improprieties and alleged abuse involving tibetan teachers at the head of buddhist communities in europe and north america. for this reason, to conclude, i discuss shifting perspectives on sexuality as buddhist tantra has spread beyond asia and draw attention to current voices calling for greater transparency and community accountability. keywords: buddhism; gender; sexuality; tantra; consort relationship; women in religion let me begin with a cautionary tale from tibet regarding the judgment pronounced by yama, the lord of death, to a woman who refused to serve as the consort for a buddhist teacher or lama (skt: guru, tib: bla ma). the young lady from a well-to-do family, named chödrön, had sought out buddhist teachings from numerous esteemed lamas. one of them, the itinerant zhönu gyaltsen, asked her to be his “secret consort,” but she refused. the request caused her to lose faith in the lama and leave the gathering before receiving the complete instructions. later, she told girlfriends about the incident. in yama’s assessment, since zhönu gyaltsen was a master of esoteric teachings, chödrön had breached her tantric commitments (skt: samaya, tib: dam tshig) on several counts: not complying with the lama’s request, not completing the training in his teachings and (worst of all, it seems) speaking about the incident with other women. when chödrön protests that if the lama was realized, it was inappropriate for him to take a sexual interest in her, yama counters that when zhönu gyaltsen died, numerous relics and miraculous signs occurred, attesting to his high degree of realization. positioning her as a gossip, he avers that she caused numerous others to lose faith, thereby harming the lama and his disciples. he concludes, “it is a greater sin to denigrate and slander lamas and teachers than it is to murder a thousand living beings,” and condemns her to suffer the torments of the hell realms. this tale comes from the visionary account of a tibetan revenant or delok (tib: ’das log), said to journey to the realms beyond death and return to tell stories of the deceased, at times recommending this tale comes from the biography of lingza chökyi, a female revenant, as translated and discussed by bryan cuevas in tales of the netherworlds (cuevas , pp. – ). yama is the figure believed to weigh one’s positive and negative deeds and pronounce judgment in the bardo or “intermediate state” (bar do) between death and rebirth. (cuevas , p. ). religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of rituals for their living relatives to perform in order to ameliorate their suffering. as bryan cuevas has pointed out, these tales can involve the dramatic scene involving the “trials of the damned,” which seek to educate the living about buddhist ethics. cuevas states: “always in the end the message is clear: have faith in the monks and lamas, practice religion with great devotion, and avoid committing sinful acts; otherwise, a horrible destiny awaits.” as a literary representation of normative ethics, we should read chödrön’s disturbing tale as prescriptive (rather than descriptive): conveying how women should or should not act regarding the sexual advances of buddhist lamas. therein is a potent message that capitulation to the teacher’s wishes is virtuous and defiance has dire consequences as does breaching the secrecy that typically surrounds such encounters. nowhere is it questioned (and the tale is attributed to a female delok from the sixteenth century, lingza chökyi) whether a realized master could act unethically or whether his sexual advances may have harmed chödrön. her tale raises questions about religious authority, misconduct, and secrecy that remain salient as ever today. as the #metoo movement continues to reverberate around the world, it is timely to revisit the consort relationship in tibetan buddhism. this is especially the case given recent disclosures of sexual improprieties and alleged abuse in tibetan buddhist communities in north america and europe. in july , just months before the #metoo movement began, a group of former leaders and longtime members of the international buddhist organization rigpa (based in france) wrote a public letter to their teacher and then head of rigpa, sogyal rinpoche, supporting longstanding allegations of abusive behavior. the letter broke the silence on what had been a wall of secrecy within the organization, reporting numerous instances of sexual and other forms of abuse. as the letter makes clear, complaints were routinely dismissed or interpreted as teachings, employing buddhist language such as “skillful means” (skt: upāya; tib: thabs) and the neologism “crazy wisdom” (tib: ye shes ’chol ba), referencing the sometimes unconventional methods used by tantric masters to guide their disciples along the path to enlightenment. this is not an isolated case. in april the same year, six women stepped forward with disclosures of inappropriate sexual relations pursued by lama norlha, head of thubten chöling monastery in upstate new york, prompting a formal apology and his retirement as the monastery head before he passed away in february . on the gendered dimensions of deloks, see alyson prude ( ). (cuevas , p. ). for an overview of sexuality in normative buddhist ethics, see amy langenberg ( ). cuevas states that the author of lingza chökyi’s biography is unknown, though the level of personal detail in it makes it credible to think that the author heard accounts of the delok’s visionary sojourns directly from her (cuevas , p. ). the first days of “#metoo” in social media around the world are chronicled in “the #metoo shockwave: how the movement has reverberated around the world” by louise burke in the telegraph, published march (https://www.telegraph.co. uk/news/world/metoo-shockwave/). the authors of the letter included a former rigpa u.s. board member, the head of household in the u.s. for sogyal rinpoche, director and co-director of rigpa educational and technology units, and several monastics and personal attendants of sogyal rinpoche. a link to a pdf of the letter was published on the buddhist blog, lion’s roar, on july (https: //www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse-allegations/). prior to that, there had been online accusations, news reports, and even a documentary attempting to bring sogyal rinpoche’s behavior to light, but no official response from the rigpa organization acknowledging and addressing the issue head on until after the publication of this letter. an early example is the guardian article by mary finnigan, “lama sex abuse claims call buddhist taboos into question,” published on july (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ / jul/ /lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist). the documentary, in the name of enlightenment—sex scandal in religion, aired on canadian television in was later posted to youtube on september ; it had received , views by the time of finalizing this article (https://youtu.be/ywhiivvmmnk). this term was coined by chögyam trungpa rinpoche and appears in the title of the book, crazy wisdom (trungpa ), containing talks he gave on the eight manifestations of padmasambhava in at two different “crazy wisdom seminars,” one in jackson hole, wyoming and the other at karme chöling in vermont. see (divalerio , pp. – ). see ann gleig, “the shadow of the roshi: sex, scandal and secrecy in american zen buddhism,” for an overview of sex scandals in american zen buddhism, published on september , on sweeping zen (http://sweepingzen.com/the- shadow-of-the-roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/). this was reported on tricyle magazine’s blog on july (https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/kagyu-thubten-choling- monastery-working-sex-impropriety/). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/metoo-shockwave/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/metoo-shockwave/ https://www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse-allegations/ https://www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse-allegations/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /jul/ /lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /jul/ /lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist https://youtu.be/ywhiivvmmnk http://sweepingzen.com/the-shadow-of-the-roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/ http://sweepingzen.com/the-shadow-of-the-roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/ https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/kagyu-thubten-choling-monastery-working-sex-impropriety/ https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/kagyu-thubten-choling-monastery-working-sex-impropriety/ religions , , of these recent disclosures, and the delok tale recounted above, reanimate a question raised by feminist scholars in the mid- s: is the consort relationship (most often between a male tantric master and a young woman recognized for her special qualities) exploitative or liberative? at stake are interpretations and appropriations of esoteric practices outside the monastic domain, in tantric circles, that involve sexuality as a ritualized means to liberation. positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum, in traveller in space (campbell ), june campbell made cautionary remarks about the androcentric bias of buddhist tantra and surfaced allegations of abuse by tibetan lamas in north america while, in passionate enlightenment (shaw ), miranda shaw drew on medieval indian sources to claim that the ritual and symbolic elevation of the feminine in buddhist tantra indicated its gynocentric origins and correlated to the empowerment of women. even if it is not possible to decide this question once and for all, given the different geographic settings and cultural contexts in which this practice has been embedded, it is worthwhile revisiting in light of recent studies and a small but growing body of materials by and about tibetan women who were buddhist masters in their own right and also participated in tantric partnerships. this will allow us to recognize the localized ways that the “secret consort” has been invoked as a social role and experienced by women at specific times and places. their perspectives and other examples of consort relationships from twentieth century tibetan contexts can help nuance our understanding of the potential and pitfalls of sexuality in tantric contexts. in particular, i am interested in the dynamics between secrecy and sexuality. secrecy can serve the interests of the powerful, by compartmentalizing public accomplishments and private indiscretions, or it can be used as “hidden transcripts,” to employ james scott’s evocative term, for subverting existing modes of authority and norms, thereby incubating the seeds of social transformation. the antinomian nature of buddhist tantra and its early surreptitious networks in medieval india provides a poignant example of such a transformation, indelibly reshaping buddhist teachings, practices, and institutions prior to their transmission into tibet. yet, as josé cabezón points out, sexuality in buddhist tantra existed in a dialectic “push-and-pull” with the renunciatory ideal embodied in monastic celibacy and expounded in scholastic hermeneutics. that meant an ongoing negotiation of buddhist norms and structures over the course of tibetan history. by historicizing sexuality in this way, it becomes possible to recognize significant shifts in how secrecy and sexuality have been practiced among buddhist tantric communities across temporal and spatial distances. for this reason, there are moments of congruence and dissonance between the centuries-old parameters of secrecy surrounding tantric practice, its public dimensions among tibetan communities, and the current trend of scandals and disclosures in europe and north america. given the danger of secrecy when combined with sexuality, it is important to explore the ways in which women have experienced benefit or harm within a tantric framework, including specific ritual practices involving sexuality and teacher-student relationships. my hope is that this exploration can help inform outside observers as well as those in buddhist communities who today find themselves in the midst of reevaluating their own histories and addressing issues of power and privilege in light of the #metoo movement and broader concerns with respect to social justice. . tantra and sexual union the term tantra describes a heterogeneous body of indian texts, which espoused esoteric and often antinomian practices promising expedient means to liberation. tantric materials and associated for assessments of the respective arguments in these works, see adelheid herrmann-pfandt’s review of traveller in space in numen / ( ): – and liz wilson’s review of passionate enlightenment in history of religions / ( ): – . (scott ). (cabezón , pp. – ). cabezón invokes the work of michel foucault (foucault [ ] ) in discussing this dialectic around sexuality in buddhism. see also bernard faure ( ). see hugh urban ( ), especially chapter , for a genealogy of how the term tantra emerged in scholarly literature. christian k. wedemeyer ( ) provides a salient typology of scholarly tropes used in characterizing the history of buddhism and its culmination in “tantric buddhism.” religions , , of practices involving sexuality emerged in india circa the seventh century ce within both śaivite and buddhist circles. in this article, i limit my discussion to buddhist tantric materials, the practices based on them, and the communities that formed around such practices with specific attention to nyingma traditions from eastern tibet in recent history. the terms “secret mantra” (skt: guhyamantra; tib: gsang sngags) and “adamantine vehicle” (skt: vajrayāna; tib: rdo rje theg pa) refer to the teachings and practices deriving from the tantras, and their esoteric “secret” nature distinguish them from exoteric teachings of the so-called hı̄nayāna and mahāyāna found in the sūtras and their commentaries. to enter into the vajrayāna requires the completion of a rigorous set of preliminaries, followed by initiation from a vajra master, and the pledge to adhere to a set of commitments grouped in the samaya vow. the samaya vow includes stipulations to respect the vajra master as well as those who have taken initiation with the same teacher, and indeed all women. included is a pledge of secrecy, not to reveal tantric methods to the uninitiated, understood to not yet be spiritually mature or ready for vajrayāna teachings and practices. the issue of secrecy is central to the interpretation of the tantras, regarding whether their language should be taken literally or as “coded language” (skt: sandhyā-bhās. ā). tantric codes may have initially functioned as a means to communicate along secretive networks in ways that only the initiated could understand. however, ronald davidson has argued that late medieval indian exegetes used the idea of coded language to “explain away” the antinomian aspects of buddhist tantra that offended social conventions of their own day, such as drinking liquor or engaging in sex among the mahāsiddhas or “great accomplished ones” who served as founding figures of buddhist tantric lineages. this was also a point of contention in tibet where rituals of “union” and “liberation” (tib: sbyor grol) were condemned by reformers in the late tenth century. buddhism had first entered tibet under imperial patronage and supervision during the seventh to ninth centuries. with the collapse of empire in ce, monastic institutions went into decline, while localized tantric lineages continued to flourish. reformers who galvanized a buddhist renaissance regarded the previous period as a dark age of perversion due to the literal practice of the tantras. as monasticism became reestablished, the sexuality of early tantra was, for the most part, sublimated into visualized imagery for meditation practice rather than literally performed, particularly by monastics. male and female deities in union, representing the conjoining of skillful means and wisdom (tib: thabs shes), were invoked through david gordon white ( , p. ) and ronald davidson ( , pp. – ). together these make up the buddhist canon in tibet, which is divided into two main sections. the sūtras and tantras constitute the kangyur (tib: bka’ ‘gyur) or sermons considered to be the words of the buddha or equivalent, translated into tibetan, while the translated commentaries are found in the tengyur (tib: bstan ‘gyur). in references to the samaya vow, throughout this article, i draw on “three vows” (tib: sdom gsum) literature, primarily as found in book v of jamgön kongtrul’s treasury of knowledge (shes bya mdzod), published as buddhist ethics (kongtrul a). as a magnum opus from nineteenth-century kham, this would be one of the relevant sources for kagyu and nyingma circles from eastern tibet in recent history. according to kongtrul, the first root downfall is to disrespect one’s vajra master, including harming him or her through body, speech, or mind (i.e., striking, criticizing, or harboring contemptuous thoughts). the third is, out of anger, to harm one’s spiritual siblings through body, speech, or mind, referring especially to those who have received initiation from the same master. the fourteenth root downfall is to disrespect women, especially to speak about them disparagingly. see (kongtrul a, pp. – ; sparham ). this relates to the seventh root downfall: “to disclose secrets to immature persons” which include worldly people, non-buddhists, as well as the śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas of the so-called hı̄nayāna. this is reiterated in a list of secondary downfalls and includes showing secret articles such as images of tantric deities, ritual implements, hand gestures, and tantric texts to the uninitiated. see (kongtrul a, pp. , , , n. ). per kvaerne reviews translations of this term in (kvaerne , pp. – ). these could function, for example, as a way for tantric initiates to identify each other for a feast gathering (skt: gan. acakra). see ronald davidson ( , pp. – ). (davidson , p. ). while “union” (tib: sbyor ba) in this compound refers to ritual practices involving sexuality, the term “liberation” (tib: grol ba) here describe exorcism rites that seek to destroy harmful spirits or adversaries of various kinds and “liberate” them into a pure land. on violence in tibetan ritual, see jacob dalton ( ). see “the ordinance of lha bla-ma ye-shes-‘od” in (karmay ) and also (cabezón , pp. – ). see (davidson , pp. – ). religions , , of visualization and the repetition of mantras in order to cultivate their enlightened qualities or harness their power in ritual action. while the tantric rite of sexual union had been integral to initiations in medieval india, it became a more rarefied practice among buddhists in tibet, the exclusive purview of advanced tantric adepts who operated beyond the monastic establishment. sarah jacoby provides an elegant threefold typology of the rationale for engaging in sexuality within tantric contexts: ( ) the soteriological goal of enlightenment; ( ) the hermeneutical goal of revealing teachings through visionary means; and ( ) the pragmatic goal of promoting longevity and healing illness. with respect to the soteriological goal, sexuality is employed as a method to manipulate elements of the subtle body in order to produce states of bliss conducive to realization, culminating in “spontaneously-arisen bliss” (skt: sahajānanda; tib: lhan skyes kyi dga’ ba). this provides an expedient method for liberation, ideally benefitting both partners in the process. for visionaries in the nyingma tradition, the tantric rite of sexual union has also been instrumental in the distinctively tibetan process of revealing terma or “treasures” (tib: gter ma), teachings traced to the advent of buddhism in tibet. this corresponds to the hermeneutical goal, the production of hitherto unknown teachings attributed to authoritative masters of the past, particularly the eighth-century indian tantric master, padmasambhava, a key figure in the mythology of buddhism’s founding moments on the plateau. padmasambhava and his tibetan consort yeshe tsogyal purportedly hid away teachings for future times of decline and strife throughout the tibetan and himalayan landscape and in the minds of specifically appointed disciples, male and female, who in subsequent lifetimes would reveal them with the help of a consort. finally, the pragmatic goal of promoting longevity and healing illness has served as a crucial intervention in the lives of numerous great masters. take for example, dilgo khyentse rinpoche ( – ), who was responsible for training many of the current generation of nyingma masters in exile. at the age of twenty-five, he disrobed and found a consort after almost dying from a fever. even though he did so for the purpose of healing, as a result of their union, he began to reveal treasures. in this way, sexuality was gradually contained in buddhist tantric contexts in tibet by circumscribing who engaged in it as a literal practice and to what end it was performed. according to josé cabezón, a process of domestication that treated antinomian practices “allegorically as symbols of abstract philosophical ideals, or as practices that were only to be visualized” was not the sole approach; there were also attempts to further delineate its literal practice by proscribing attachment to pleasure in tantric contexts or to supersede it altogether with claims to more advanced gnostic practices. over time the antinomian dimensions of tantra become routinized, thereby eroding its transgressive qualities and allowing it to enter the public domain and become a mainstream part of tibetan culture. . the secret consort though secrecy is central to the rhetoric of buddhist tantra, especially with regards to sexuality, many of its ritual forms and iconography have long been on display in murals at buddhist monasteries traditionally there are four types of ritual acts (tib: las bzhi) in buddhist tantra: pacification (tib: zhi) for healing illness or pacifying obstacles, enrichment (tib: rgyas) for promoting longevity, protecting crops and livestock, and the like; influence (tib: dbang) for extending dominion, and subjugation (tib: drag) for exorcising evil spirits and forces. (white , chps. – ; davidson , pp. – ). (cabezón , pp. – ). as he points out, this was also the case in the late indian traditions of buddhist tantra. see also (wedemeyer , p. ). jacoby provides a thorough description of each of these three goals and the associated practice in (jacoby , pp. – ). for a discussion of the specifics of this practice, see (gyatso , pp. – ; jacoby , pp. – ). an overview of treasure revelation can be found in (gyatso ; thondup ; doctor ; gayley ). the role of sexuality in the revelatory process is discussed in (thondup , pp. – , – ). see (khyentse , pp. – ), and “dilgo khyentse tashi peljor” by alexander gardner, published on the treasury of lives in december (https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/dilgo-khyentse-tashi-peljor/ ). his consort’s name was khandro lhamo and they had two daughters together. (cabezón , pp. – ). on this point, see also (jacoby , p. ). https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/dilgo-khyentse-tashi-peljor/ religions , , of and temples throughout tibet and on public ritual occasions. tantric deities in union, heterosexually conceived as yabyum (male and female, tib: yab yum), are a mainstay feature of tibetan buddhist art, while ritual implements, gestures, mantras, and iconography (in the form of miniature tsakali cards) are displayed in public initiations (tib: khrom dbang) given by tibetan lamas as a blessing to large gatherings with thousands in attendance. that said, the oral transmission that gives permission to practice a specific liturgy and explains its meaning remains restricted to those who have completed the preliminaries. in addition, the antinomian practices of the “holy madmen” (tib: smyon pa) discussed by david divallerio sometimes entailed a public performance of behavior defying ordinary social conventions as a test of the practitioner’s ability to transcend worldly concerns. transgression also features prominently in often repeated stories of the indian mahāsiddhas and the exploits of later tantric masters in tibetan and himalayan areas who emulated them as found in hagiographies and oral tradition. along similar lines, it turns out that the “secret consort” or sangyum (tib: gsang yum) in tibetan buddhism is not so secret after all. in practice, the term is used as a title before the names of the publically acknowledged and esteemed consorts of great buddhist masters, who function in the role of wife or companion. this stands in contrast to the ideal consort of indian tantric literature, which was the parakı̄yā, or “one who belongs to another,” connoting an illicit affair. in the nyingma tradition, lamas routinely marry and pass their lineages of teachings through the family, so the sangyum (sometimes shortened as yum, an honorific term for “consort,” “wife,” and “mother”) holds a place of honor in her local community and in wider networks of religious affiliation. eminent ninetieth and twentieth century examples include dudjom rinpoche jigdral yeshe dorje ( – ), the first head of the nyingma lineage in exile, who had two consorts—sangyum kusho tseten yudrön and sangyum kusho rigzin wangmo—mothers of his five sons and six daughters, and his predecessor, the visionary dudjom lingpa ( – ) in eastern tibet, who had three consorts—traza sönam tso, keza sanggye tso, and akyabza kalzang drönma—mothers to his eight sons and four daughters. a number of their children were recognized as reincarnate lamas, became influential teachers and visionaries, and served as lineage holders. as testimony to their elevated public stature, consorts remain revered figures in tibetan communities well beyond the passing of their partners. this is important especially when consorts serve as companions to esteemed buddhist lamas in their final years since, as mentioned before, one of the benefits ascribed to the tantric rite of sexual union is longevity. a case in point is khandro tsering the only room that is typically off-limits to pilgrims (especially to women) is the shrine dedicated to protector deities, featuring wrathful and violent imagery. see examples of tsakali cards for various ritual cycles on himalayan art resources: https://www.himalayanart.org/search/ set.cfm?setid= . these correlate to the reading transmission (tib: lung) and explanation (tib: khrid) in the three-fold transmission process that begins with initiation or empowerment (skt: abhis. eka, tib: dbang). traditionally all three must occur for the transmission of a set of esoteric teachings to be complete. see david divalerio ( ), especially chapters and . see robinson ( ) for a translation of a prominent collection of mahāsiddha tales and divalerio ( ) on sources for “holy madmen” in tibet and himalayan areas who emulated the mahāsiddhas. see charlotte vaudeville ( ) and lee siegel ( ). their views are anchored in non-buddhist sources but seek to characterize tantra in general. for counterexamples among late medieval indian tantric sources, see (biernacki , chp. ). the rigpa shedra has published a helpful online genealogy, “dudjom rinpoche’s family lineage” (http://www.rigpawiki. org/index.php?title=dudjom_rinpoche% s_family_lineage). see also dongyal ( ) and norbu ( ). while his sons were renowned buddhist masters, his daughters are lost to the historical record according to family genealogy found in (pad ma ‘od gsal mtha’ yas ). the prefix to his consorts’ names indicates their clan, so traza is the lady of the tra clan (khra bza’), keza is the lady of the ke clan (ske bza’), and akyabza is the lady of the akyab clan (a skyabs bza’). among dudjom lingpa’s children, the most famous were jigme tenpai nyima ( – ), the third in the eminent dodrupchen line of reincarnations, affiliated with dodrupchen monastery in golok, and drime Özer ( – ), a visionary in his own right to be discussed below. prominent among dudjom rinpoche’s children was thinley norbu rinpoche ( – ) who settled in new york and shenphen dawa rinpoche ( – ) who taught internationally. with respect to khandro tsering chödrön, alak zenkar stated, “without khandro-la, jamyang khyentse chökyi lodrö’s life would have been much shorter. if his life had been shorter then not so many high lamas would have received these https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setid= https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setid= http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=dudjom_rinpoche% s_family_lineage http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=dudjom_rinpoche% s_family_lineage religions , , of chödrön ( – ) who served as the sangyum of jamyang khyentse chökyi lodrö ( – ), one of the great ecumenical masters of the early twentieth century. coming together in , after he had been seriously ill for several years, tsering chödrön spent eleven years as his companion and outlived him by another fifty-two years. for the most part, she lived out her days at the tsuklakhang in the royal palace compound on the hilltop above gangtok, sikkim where chökyi lodrö had stayed after leaving tibet in and where his reliquary remained. eulogies to her after her passing in include praises of her unassuming character and profound realization. one sikkim official extolled the “tender wisdom of her presence” as a buddhist adept “honoured by all, even though she herself has tried as far as possible to remain in the background, in the hidden and austere life of an ancient contemplative.” tsering chödrön is said to have passed away in thukdam (tib: thugs dam), a state of meditative concentration in which the body reportedly does not decay for a number of days after death. indicating the high-degree of realization attributed to her, prominent buddhist masters performed rituals on her behalf, issued public statements eulogizing her, and attended the consecration of a sizeable stūpa in her honor at lerab ling in france. tantric texts that detail the qualities of a consort almost invariably take a heteronormative male perspective by detailing the attributes of suitable women according to various typologies. however, this does not exclude the possibility of female adepts having male consorts. while the term sangyum is gendered female, the terminology for “consort” has gender-neutral expressions and applications as well. notably, in the best-known account of her life, revealed by the seventeenth-century visionary taksham nuden dorje, yeshe tsogyal served not only as consort to padmasambhava, but also took on a consort, atsara sale, a nepali man whom she ransomed from slavery and brought home to tibet. in this account, the practice of sexual union is even presented from a female vantage point as instructions given to yeshe tsogyal by her guru. otherwise, it is more typical for a male lama or adept to take on a younger female consort. despite the structural imbalance, the equality of realization between tantric partners is sometimes asserted. extraordinary teachings, in particular the damngak dzö.” posted on june on the blog “in memory of khandro tsering chödrön” (https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ / / /alak-zenkar-rinpoche/). his biography can be found in (khyentse ) and on the treasury of lives, published by alexander gardner in december (https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/jamyang-khyentse-chokyi-lodro/p ). a brief account of her life can be found in chapter of dakini power: twelve extraordinary women shaping the transmission of tibetan buddhism in the west (haas ). “thoughts from sikkim,” posted july on the blog “in memory of khandro tsering chödrön” (https:// khandrotseringchodron.org/ / / /thoughts-from-sikkim/). an assortment of public eulogies can be found on the blog “in memory of khandro tsering chödrön” (https:// khandrotseringchodron.org/). sakya trizin presided over the consecration in july . this event is described in (haas , pp. – ). note that tsering chödrön is the aunt of sogyal rinpoche and spent the final years of her life at lerab ling. see judith simmer-brown ( , pp. – ). several tibetan terms for “consort” use a feminine ending (such as tib: rig ma and shes rab ma, literally “awareness lady” and “knowledge lady” respectively), echoing the association of the feminine with transcendent knowledge (skt: prajñā, tib: shes rab) in buddhism. a gender neutral terms is “friend” (tib: grogs), which can connote a “lover” in ordinary contexts and also “companion” or “consort” in tantric ones; it can take a masculine or feminine ending. in addition, “spiritual consort” (tib: thugs kyi gzungs ma) is gendered female, but there is also a corresponding gender-neutral term, “spiritual support” (tib: sems kyi rten); see (gayley , p. ). in indian tantric literature, the relevant term is karmamudrā, which literally means “ritual seal” (tib: las kyi phyag rgya). it can refer to a female consort or consort practice more generally. this has been translated in (padmakara translation group ). see (gyatso ) on the historicity of yeshe tsogyal. the source that janet gyatso introduces in her article, a biography of yeshe tsogyal revealed in the fourteenth century by drime kunga, has recently been translated by chönyi drolma in the life and visions of yeshé tsogyal: the autobiography of the great wisdom queen (drolma ). this description can be found in (padmakara translation group , chp. ). for example, with respect to yeshe tsogyal, the contemporary author pema Ösal thaye boldly states: her emanation body was the equal to that of padmasambhava, the second buddha, having attained mastery over all apparent phenomena. equal to his speech, she overflowed with dharma teachings on sūtra and tantra. equal to his mind, she benefited beings through wisdom and method. equal in discernable qualities, she accomplished great benefit for dharma and beings. equal in performing actions, she spontaneously adhered to the actions of pacifying, enriching, magnetizing and destroying (gayley forthcoming) https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ / / /alak-zenkar-rinpoche/ https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/jamyang-khyentse-chokyi-lodro/p https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ / / /thoughts-from-sikkim/ https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ / / /thoughts-from-sikkim/ https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ https://khandrotseringchodron.org/ religions , , of as with tsering chödrön, consorts may also hold the exalted title, khandro. this is the tibetan translation of the sanskrit term d. ākinı̄, referring to a class of female tantric deities prominent in tibetan buddhist iconography, ritual, and visionary experience. the d. ākinı̄ is invoked in rituals as the embodiment of wisdom and enlightened passion, either alone or in union with a male heruka, and she can appear in the visionary experience of tantric masters, both male and female, to advise, cajole, rebuke, and teach them. the title khandro is given to tibetan women in public recognition of their special qualities and realization as either consorts or teachers in their own right. contemporary examples of renown female teachers bearing this title include the monastic jetsün khandro rinpoche (b. ), daughter of mindrolling trichen rinpoche and heir to the mindrolling tradition in exile, and the non-monastic khandro tāre lhamo ( – ), daughter of the visionary apang terchen and a significant figure in the revitalization of buddhism in the tibetan region of golok after the cultural revolution. as daughters of esteemed lamas, both received an esoteric training in youth, preparing them to serve as teachers and holders of family lineages. in such cases, the d. ākinı̄ provides an authoritative tantric model through which the realization and accomplishments of actual tibetan women become culturally legible and publically acknowledged. the d. ākinı̄ has also been appropriated as an empowering symbol among american converts to tibetan buddhism. in a recent anthology, dakini power: twelve extraordinary women shaping the transmission of tibetan buddhism in the west ( ), micheala haas showcases the spiritual journeys of three tibetan, one british, and eight american women who are buddhist tantric practitioners, including lamas, nuns, and consorts. those americans who married lamas, such as elizabeth mattis-namgyel (wife of dzigar kongtrul rinpoche) and chagdud khadro (widow of chagdud tulku), have now become teachers in their own right. in some sense, this is a step forward into the limelight beyond figures like tsering chödrön (also included in the anthology), since tibetan consorts often remained in the background and refused to teach, a gesture of humility, as well as adherence to social convention. that said, the role of the consort beyond tibetan communities remains shrouded (with certain exceptions). as elizabeth mattis-namgyel has wryly remarked, “there is not a sangyum club or a website one can go to and ask for advice.” in north america, chögyam trungpa rinpoche ( – ) was unique in naming seven women as sangyum, who served as his companions and personal representatives toward the end of his life. they remain respected members of the shambhala community, given prominent seats at events and addressed with the title sangyum before their names. in addition, diana mukpo, whom trungpa rinpoche married in england after disrobing in comparable terms, with reference to tsering chödrön, khandro rinpoche asserts that “the wives of these great lamas are not just called sangyums . . . but they embody everything you see in the teachers themselves, they are equal in their practice, their realization, capability, and love” (haas , p. ). in medieval india, the d. ākinı̄ was elevated from her status as a flesh-eating demoness who haunted the charnel grounds to a semi-wrathful enlightened deity, symbolizing wisdom. in tibetan buddhist art, she is both fierce and seductive, dancing naked in open space, wearing bone ornaments from the dismantling of ego, and carrying a hooked knife in one hand and a trident with freshly severed heads in the other. see janice willis ( ), janet gyatso ( ), and judith simmer-brown ( ) for insights into various dimensions of the d. ākinı̄. on this point, see (gyatso , chp. ; jacoby , chp. ). jetsün khandro rinpoche presides over an international buddhist community with retreat centers in india and north america. a biographical sketch can be found in chapter of (haas ), and her official website is: https://www. khandrorinpoche.org/. note that jacoby ( ) discusses a different khandro rinpoche in eastern tibet. see (gayley ) for a study of her life and correspondence with namtrul rinpoche ( – ). my translation of the source material for this study is forthcoming from shambhala publications. see (willis ; shaw ; simmer-brown ; klein ; allione ). haas ( ) dedicates chapters and to these figures. sangye khandro (nancy gustafson), who served as the consort of gyatrul rinpoche, is also included in the anthology (chapter ), but she has decided to remain primarily focused on translating rather than teaching. note that chagdud rinpoche’s wife spells the second part of her name “khadro” rather than “khandro” as i do throughout the rest of this article. her given name is jane dedman. (haas , p. ). the sangyum were empowered in , just two years before trungpa rinpoche passed away. their names and a description of the ceremony to empower them can be found in an article by valerie lorig (sangyum drukmo tinkar), “sangyum anniversary recollection” on the shambhala times, may (https://shambhalatimes.org/ / / /sangyum- anniversary-recollection/). see also (midal , pp. – ). https://www.khandrorinpoche.org/ https://www.khandrorinpoche.org/ https://shambhalatimes.org/ / / /sangyum-anniversary-recollection/ https://shambhalatimes.org/ / / /sangyum-anniversary-recollection/ religions , , of in , received the title sakyong wangmo, a royal designation from eastern tibet. still today, she and several of the sangyum teach advanced trainings in the shambhala teachings based on terma that trungpa rinpoche revealed in the late s. the public nature of these contemporary women’s roles—from tsering chödrön to diana mukpo—has given them a stature that illicit trysts, tantric or otherwise, do not. nonetheless, by their own accounts, the role is not an easy one to navigate. . tantric partnerships recent studies have shed light on sexuality in buddhist tantra from the vantage point of tibetan women who were considered realized masters in their own right and also participated in tantric partnerships. here i focus on the visionaries, sera khandro ( – ) and khandro tāre lhamo ( – ), prominent in the nyingma tradition of golok and linked through a line of emanations going back to yeshe tsogyal. despite the continuities in region and emanation status, their lives were radically different due to the specific ways each was embedded in the social context of nomadic golok and their contrasting historical moments. sera khandro lived in the first half of the twentieth century before the chinese communist invasion, whereas tāre lhamo came of age during the socialist transformation of tibetan regions, survived the cultural revolution, and became a leader in the post-mao era revitalization of buddhism. for my discussion of sera khandro, i rely on sarah jacoby’s ground-breaking study, love and liberation: autobiographical writings of the tibetan buddhist visionary sera khandro ( ), which explores the consort relationship in buddhist tantra through the first-person account of a female visionary. for my discussion of tāre lhamo, i draw on my own research and monograph, love letters from golok: a tantric couple in modern tibet ( ), which examines the gendered dimensions of a tantric partnership in letters she exchanged at the cusp of the post-mao era with namtrul rinpoche and their collaboration in restoring buddhist teachings, practices, and institutions in golok during the s and s. the perspectives found in the lives and writings of sera khandro and tāre lhamo offer notable touchstones on issues of secrecy, female agency, and the potential and pitfalls of a tantric partnership for women. sera khandro was born into an aristocratic lhasa family but as a teenager fled eastward to the nomadic region of golok to follow her destined partner, the visionary drime Özer ( – ). upon arrival, she faced considerable hardship due, in large part, to rivalries with other women. after a fraught decade-long marriage to another lama, garra gyalse of banak monastery, she enjoyed a few short years with drime Özer before his untimely death at the age of . after that, sera khandro went to live at sera monastery in serta, at the invitation of sötrul natsok rangdrol, and used that as her base for the rest of her life. on a number of occasions, sera khandro was summoned to extend the lives of buddhist lamas, monastic and non-monastic alike, through the tantric rite of sexual union. secrecy was paramount in her liaisons with monastic hierarchs, like gotrul rinpoche of payul tarthang monastery, who technically-speaking should have remained celibate. some invitations came from renowned (non-monastic) visionaries, such as adzom drukpa ( – ), and her liaison in this case augmented her stature. given the vagaries of such encounters, sarah jacoby cautions that tantric consorts should not be viewed as either “agents” or “objects,” since the picture is usually more complicated. in sera khandro’s case, she portrays herself as passively complying with the wishes of senior lamas while worrying that she would ruin their reputations (not to mention her own). this was especially the case when a liaison took place with a monastic, though she sometimes did refuse such encounters. see (mukpo and gimian ; haas , chp. – ). note that their dates do not easy align into an emanation sequence, since tāre lhamo was born in and sera khandro passed away in . my translation of their life stories and love letters, inseparable across lifetimes: the lives and letters of the tibetan visionaries namtrul rinpoche and khandro tāre lhamo is in press with shambhala publications. (jacoby , pp. – ). religions , , of deflecting agency to male authority allowed sera khandro to fashion an autobiographic portrait of herself as both virtuous by ordinary social norms (reluctant to engage in sexuality, yet devoted in complying with the wishes of the lama) and, at the same time, a tantric virtuoso skilled at extending the lives of esteemed masters. jacoby makes a point to emphasize the benefits sera khandro derived from sexual practices. not only were her own illnesses, including chronic arthritis, alleviated in such encounters, but she also engaged sexuality to reveal her own treasures alongside drime Özer. in her autobiography, sera khandro depicts her final years with drime Özer in glowing terms, including their union as “the two, method and insight, actually merging into one taste.” jacoby refers to this as “collective enlightenment in which the energetic knots at all five cakras within the subtle body of yab and yum were liberated together.” yet the challenges were also enormous. sera khandro faced jealously from others, especially akyongza, the influential consort of drime Özer. as a result, not only was sera khandro blocked from living with him when she first arrived as a teenager in golok, but more than a decade later, after spending three years with drime Özer, sera khandro was thrown out soon after he passed away. despite being of lhasa aristocratic stock, she had little way to protect herself in the clan-based social structure of nomadic golok, where family ties meant everything. sera khandro lived precariously at the edge of social life, moving from place to place except when sheltered by male lamas, first garra gyalse, then drime Özer, and finally sötrul rinpoche at sera monastery. moreover, in the role of consort, she faced the constant threat of gossip for her unconventional religious calling on top of other forms of gender discrimination. jacoby concludes that “sera khandro’s accounts of consort practices casts a pall on arguments that claim buddhist tantra is pro-woman or sex-positive, given the many indignities she suffered and the endless talk against her, but they simultaneously speak volumes about women’s potential for liberation through vajrayāna buddhist methods.” by contrast, khandro tāre lhamo was born into her religious vocation as the daughter of the visionary, apang terchen ( – ), and recognized in infancy as the reincarnation of two local religious figures, sera khandro and the monk tra gelong ( – ). as part of the nyingma elite, she trained with the great masters of her day, including rigdzin jalu dorje, the fourth in the eminent dodrupchen incarnation line, and dzongter kunzang nyima, the grandson of dudjom lingpa. she married into the dudjom line to the son of kunzang nyima, mingyur dorje ( – ), and the two joined his inner circle receiving esoteric teachings at his encampment. tragically, her marriage and training were cut short by the socialist transformation of tibetan areas, by then under chinese communist rule. in the late s, her three brothers, all reincarnate lamas, and husband were imprisoned as “class enemies” and died in prison. tāre lhamo was likely spared imprisonment as a woman, and instead was consigned to manual labor herding livestock and doing construction work. the years leading up to and including the cultural revolution ( – ) was a time of tremendous upheaval on the tibetan plateau with monasteries destroyed, texts burned, monastics forced to defrock, and religious practice by and large forbidden. within this chaos and devastation, tāre lhamo served as a beacon of hope, performing minor miracles for her local community. during the famine between and , coinciding with the great leap forward, she is credited with multiplying a measure of rice to feed her entire work unit and bringing back blessed and nourishing substances from her jacoby makes this argument in chapter of her book; see especially (jacoby , pp. – ). sera khandro’s treasure corpus (gter chos) survives in four volumes, whereas the corpus of drime Özer ’s revelations, which she compiled has yet to be recovered as far as i know. (jacoby , pp. – ). (jacoby , p. ). her two main teachers died around this time as well, rigdzin jalu dorje ( – ) in prison and dzongter kunzang nyima ( – ) of natural causes. monasteries in golok were closed for nearly twenty years, but a group of eight were permitted to reopen between and . (don grub dbang rgyal and nor sde , p. ). religions , , of visionary sojourns to other realms. in d. ākinı̄ fashion, she also appeared in the visions of imprisoned lamas to offer consolation, and her prophecies and letters are credited with effecting the release of at least two of them. the extreme hardship of this period continued until the death of mao in , followed by a gradual process of economic and cultural liberalization across china that reached tibetan areas by the early s. reversing the typical pattern, in , in her early s, tāre lhamo initiated a courtship and correspondence with namtrul rinpoche ( – ), a lama six years her junior. namtrul rinpoche was young enough to be spared imprisonment in the late s and served as a secretary for his work unit based on his early scholastic training. at the age of eight, he had been enthroned as the fourth namkhai nyingpo incarnation of zhuchen monastery and, at thirteen, received monastic ordination though he later disrobed in accordance with the times. initially, secrecy played a role in their courtship since they were separated by province borders, her in padma county of qinghai province and he in serta county of sichuan province, at a time when travel was highly restricted. even so, they exchanged fifty-six letters over more than a year, sent in batches by secret messenger across the rugged terrain dividing them. almost entirely in verse, their letters contain a blend of prophetic passages related to their destiny as a couple to reveal treasures, veiled references to the tantric rite of sexual union, recollections of their past lives together as a couple, naturalistic images suggesting their mutual compatibility, and effusive declarations of personal affection in a variety of folk song styles. eventually their courtship and correspondence led to a lifelong partnership after tāre lhamo left her homeland in to join namtrul rinpoche in serta. as they engaged in the “sport of attraction” (tib: ‘dod pa’i sgyu rtsal) across their correspondence, rather than speak of sexuality directly, they used tantric code to generate tantalizing innuendos and flirtatious moments. for example, at one point, tāre lhamo invited namtrul rinpoche as a bee to enjoy the nectar of the lotus, whereby the lotus stands for the female sexual organ. coyly, she conveyed, “lotus juice, when longing to enjoy the nectar: / hey you, the bee! oh, if you circle, bliss! / in my mind, the etchings become clearer. / do you recall? oh, talk straight—no secrets!” of course, the metaphor of bee and lotus does not require much imagination to decode, and otherwise she encourages directness in their communication. still she chose to playfully mask her reference to sexuality and how it is understood to activate visionary modes of memory in the treasure tradition. this may indicate a cultural taboo against directly referencing sexuality as much a tantric proclivity for secrecy. overall, they refer to tantric practices involving sexuality in euphemistic terms as methods to invoke “bliss-emptiness” (tib: bde stong) as when namtrul rinpoche wrote: “in the cool domain of tibet, the land of snow mountains, / we came together across seven lifetimes. / we practiced the profound path of secret mantra, / engaging in the four joys, means to bliss-emptiness.” nonetheless, tāre lhamo and namtrul rinpoche had little hesitation openly proclaiming their affection for one another. in decidedly human terms, she professed in one letter to missing him continually: “one hundred times a day, pining away for the spiritual support, / my congenial friend comes to mind. / the sketch of past lives becomes clearer; / mind yearning, my loving affection the information in this sentence and the next comes from oral sources and her life story, spiraling vine of faith: the liberation of khandro tāre lhamo (mkha’ ‘gro tā re lha mo’i rnam thar dad pa’i ‘khri shing) in (pad ma ‘od gsal mtha’ yas ). their letters are divided by author into two collections: adamantine garland: the collected letters by the lord of refuge, namtrul jigme phuntsok, to the supreme khandro tāre lhamo (skyabs rje rin po che nam sprul ‘jigs med phun tshogs kyis mkha’ ‘gro rin po che tā re de vı̄ mchog la phul ba’i zhu ‘phrin phyag yig rnams phyogs bsdus rdo rje’i phreng ba; mkha’ ‘gro tā re lha mo. ca ( )) and garland of lotuses: the collected letters by the mantra-born one, khandro tāre lhamo, to the supreme namtrul jigme phuntsok (sngags skyes mkha’ ‘gro rin po che tā re de vı̄s nam sprul rin po che ‘jigs med phun tshogs mchog la phul ba’i zhu ‘phrin phyag yig rnams phyogs bsdus padma’i phreng ba; nam sprul ‘jigs med phun tshogs. ca ( )). for this reason, here and elsewhere, i refer to individual letters by their sequence in each collection, so their initial letters would be ktl (hers) and njp (his) respectively. page numbers come from the facsimile edition to their treasure corpus. see note below regarding the published versions of their correspondence. ktl : . – . . note that khandro tāre lhamo used a scribe. having received an esoteric training in youth but not a scholastic one, she could read but not write tibetan. njp : . – . religions , , of increases.” in turn, in a love song toward the middle of the correspondence, namtrul rinpoche confessed to being caught on the “iron hook” (tib: lcags kyu) of her “loving affection” (tib: byams brtse) and cherishing tāre lhamo more than his own eyes and heart, thereby suggesting that he could not live without her. as they imagined themselves as inseparable across lifetimes, karmically bound and mutually compatible like a snow lion and mountain peak, they established a strong personal bond and sense of commitment as the context for their future practice of tantric techniques involving sexuality. thus, unlike the illicit trysts of medieval india or the discretion observed by sera khandro to avoid gossip, tāre lhamo and namtrul rinpoche envisioned their union as a lifelong and socially-recognized partnership to reveal treasures as part of their broader aim to restore buddhist teachings, practices, and institutions in the post-mao era. through the metaphor of healing, they affirmed their union as a potent means to activate their visionary propensities and thereby “heal the damage of the degenerate times,” a veiled reference to previous two decades of the maoist period. once united, they traveled and taught together during the s and s, side by side on elevated thrones, as they discovered and disseminated their treasures throughout golok and beyond. this kind of public display of a tantric partnership, in which both partners lead large-scale ritual gatherings together, is rare despite the ubiquity of images of tantric deities in union in tibetan art. during their lifetime, and even after tāre lhamo’s passing in , their partnership was visibly emphasized in publications of their biographies, revelations, and audio-visual materials under the auspices of their main seat, nyenlung monastery, and in one instance a serta government office. even their correspondence, initially exchanged in secret, was eventually published as an addendum to their treasure corpus. whereas other contemporary khandromas that i encountered in eastern tibet, if they teach at all, tend to do so in a circumspect way within their own locale, tāre lhamo’s partnership with namtrul rinpoche gave her a much wider sphere of influence. at the same time, her stature as a visionary was not dependent on him. tāre lhamo had revealed treasures in her youth and, at the outset of their partnership, she had greater renown as the daughter of apang terchen. indeed the couple served as the main lineage holders of her father ’s treasure teachings, since she was his only surviving descendent. moreover, their first large-scale teaching took place in at tsimda gompa, the monastery her father founded in the mar valley of padma county, and on that occasion the couple transmitted the entirety of his treasures corpus to lamas and monastics throughout the region. in some sense, tāre lhamo’s rise to prominence was an accident of history since her older brothers, had they survived, would have more likely stepped forward as lineage heirs. even so, she was never simply a “secret consort” and instead served as a genuine partner in her revelatory and teaching activities with namtrul rinpoche. these examples, in this section and the previous one, show the diversity of tibetan women’s experiences as consorts, the stature accorded to them when tantric partnerships are public in nature, ktl : . – . this is an amdo love song (tib: la gzhas) from njp : . – . . the lines mentioned here can be found on . and . – . . on the metaphor of healing in their correspondence, see (gayley , pp. – ). for another salient example, the bön couple, dechen chökyi wangmo (b. ) and sang-ngag lingpa (b. ), also traveled, revealed treasures, and gave teachings together according to a study of her biography by donatella rossi ( ). these include their jointly-attributed corpus of treasure teachings (tib: gter chos), the compilations of their biographies into a single volume, and audio-visual representations of them together in posters, photographs, and video footage used in vcds (video compact discs) featuring devotional songs. for more details, see the introduction and epilogue to (gayley ). his life story, jewel garland: the liberation of namtrul jigme phuntsok (nam sprul ‘jigs med phun tshogs kyi rnam thar nor bu’i do shal) and hers, spiraling vine of faith: the liberation of khandro tāre lhamo (mkha’ ’gro tā re lha mo mchog gi rnam thar dad pa’i ‘khri shing) were published together in a single paperback volume in padma ‘od gsal mtha’ yas , commissioned by the couple and published in cooperation with the county office of the bureau for cultural research. when i visited nyenlung for the first time in , namtrul rinpoche gave me a facsimile edition of their correspondence (a limited edition published by nyenlung monastery ca. ) that served as an addendum to their treasure corpus. it was more fully integrated in the paperback version published in vol. of (nam sprul ‘jigs med phun tshogs and mkha’ ‘gro tā re lha mo ). on the different ways tāre lhamo’s life has been framed in the available biographies of her, see my article, “gendered hagiography in tibet: comparing clerical representations of the female visionary, khandro tāre lhamo,” in a forthcoming anthology edited by karma lekshe tsomo, buddhist feminisms and femininities. religions , , of and the various ways that sexuality can be harnessed in tantric contexts. when we find access to women’s own voices in exchange with their tantric partners, whether through the autobiography of sera khandro or the love letters between tāre lhamo and namtrul rinpoche, it becomes clear that consort relationships, as they have existed in recent history among tibetan communities, can benefit women and also include enduring bonds of affection. yet still there are considerable challenges due to social and historical circumstances, like sera khandro twice being forced to leave drime Özer’s residence or tāre lhamo losing her first husband in the turbulence of socialist transformation and later in life forging ahead, against gender norms, to initiate a new partnership. it is interesting, in both these cases, that secrecy seems important initially but eventually relaxes over time. what were once secret liaisons sera khandro chose to include in her autobiography for posterity, and the letters exchanged secretly between tāre lhamo and namtrul rinpoche were later published as an addendum to their treasure corpus. there is something healthy in this impulse to disclose what was once hidden, a kind of reckoning in order to set the record straight and provide a more multifaceted picture of human relationships than public facades tend to, especially for religious figures. the voices of women, here and elsewhere, complicate any facile conclusions about sexuality in tantric contexts, showing a broad range of experiences as well as changes in how relationships are viewed over time. . gurus and secrecy cabezón’s dialectic framework accounts for the ongoing negotiation around secrecy and sexuality in tibet and also helps to illuminate how tantra has taken on new contours beyond asia. the first wave of neo-tantrists were self-made americans and europeans like pierre bernard ( – ) and aleister crowley ( – ) who, as hugh urban suggests, helped to transform tantra in the western popular imagination from “a religion of black magic and occult power” to “the pursuit of sensual pleasure and erotic bliss.” in this transformation, tantra became the “ideal wedding of sexuality and spirituality” providing “a much needed corrective to the prudish, repressive, modern west.” though plagued by scandal, pierre bernard’s tantrik order in america (founded ca. – ) attracted wealthy socialites and businessmen to his country club and tantric clinics for secret practices “centered around full enjoyment of the physical body and complete liberation of sexual pleasure.” in a similar vein, aleister crowley gained notoriety for promoting “sex magick” as a member of the occult movement, ordo templi orientis. urban credits these two controversial figures with the sensationalization of tantra, its reinterpretation in primarily sexual terms, and its synthesis with western occultism in a way that was both transgressive and tantalizing in the early decades of the twentieth century. all this contributed to the favorable reception of tantra during the era of sexual liberation in the s and s, but also led to confusion and paved the way for the improprieties coming to light today. in the early s, in the founding era of tibetan buddhism in north america, chögyam trungpa rinpoche was quite open about his behavior, sipping beer or sake during public talks and having affairs with students in full view. his behavior may not have fit well with the western image of a saintly person but it suited the times. his teachings captured the imagination of the hippie generation, many of whom became devoted students of tibetan buddhism, trained rigorously in a delineated path of practice and study, and built a worldwide network of dharma centers, all the while never tiring of telling stories of their teacher. in cutting through spiritual materialism (trungpa [ ] ), trungpa rinpoche goes to great lengths to describe the problem of fetishizing gurus and putting them on pedestals, seeing them as “perfect beings” and rationalizing everything they do as “an act of wisdom see chapter in (urban ); quotations are taken from p. . (urban , pp. , , respectively). (urban , p. ). trungpa rinpoche had already disrobed and married in before coming to north america later the same year. his widow and students do not seem concerned with white-washing his legacy regarding his affairs; see (mukpo and gimian ), (midal ), and also the film, crazy wisdom: the life and times of chögyam trungpa rinpoche, directed by johanna demetrakas ( ). religions , , of on the part of the guru.” instead, he emphasized giving up expectation and fascination, experiencing disappointment, and sharpening one’s own intelligence through an eye-level relationship and mutual communication with the teacher beyond pretense or deception. perhaps the most unconventional thing that trungpa rinpoche did, for his day, was to ask the hippies to shave and cut their hair, wear suits and dresses, and develop decorum in order to properly host his holiness the sixteenth karmapa right after the heady first summer of the naropa institute in . against the grain of “turn on, tune in, and drop out” of the counterculture era, eventually trungpa rinpoche encouraged his students to marry, settle down, get jobs, and become part of society, envisioning a householder path of spiritual cultivation in order to transform society from the inside out. but times change and so do social views and norms regarding sexuality. already by , when a group of twenty-two western buddhist teachers from various traditions (tibetan, zen, theravāda) gathered to meet with his holiness the dalai lama in dharamsala, the topic of misconduct among buddhist teachers was a significant issue. under the rubric of “teachers and ethics,” questions were raised about the issue of secrecy if students witnessed or experienced misconduct by buddhist teachers. the dalai lama responded by suggesting that it is “worthwhile to publicize these things” in order to make “a clear distinction [between] what is true buddhist teachings [and] this individual’s behavior;” otherwise it is "very harmful to the buddhadharma.” yet he admitted that the samaya vow complicates how to handle this since, according to its commitments, one should never disparage the teacher. still, in publication soon thereafter, he reiterated the importance of open communication: “if students sincerely point out the faults of the guru and explain any contradictory behavior, this will, in fact, help the guru to correct that behavior and adjust any wrong actions.” a legal case against sogyal rinpoche was filed just a year later in and settled out of court, but allegations of sexual abuse continued to surface online and in news reports. the group of former leaders and longtime members of rigpa, who released an open letter in july , began by invoking statements by the dalai lama at the conference, and then proceeded to describe physical and psychological abuse they witnessed and experienced, citing an incident in the summer of when (trungpa [ ] , p. ). in her autobiography, his widow diana mukpo recounts, “cutting through spiritual materialism was published in , and sales of the book were taking off. it came onto the spiritual scene in america at just the right time to spark tremendous interest. it sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the first two years, which was a lot of books for that time. it spoke to the counterculture of that era in a direct, intimate way” (mukpo and gimian , p. ). see (trungpa [ ] ), chapters on “surrender” and “the guru.” diana mukpo elaborates, “when rinpoche first came to america, he was careful not to create a barrier between himself and others. he wanted to experience fully the world he was entering and meet people at eye level. he gave up his robes because he did not want to create an exotic impression where people would indulge their fantasies about him. he wanted them to see him not as a mystery man from tibet but as a human being” (mukpo and gimian , p. ). timothy leary’s famous phrase became somewhat of a mantra for the drug culture of the late s and into the s, whereas early on trungpa rinpoche dissuaded his students from smoking marijuana, casting it as a form of self-deception. see interview with christie cashman in (demetrakas , : – : ). this approach crystalized through the development of shambhala training and publication of shambhala: sacred path of the warrior (trungpa ). the aids crisis in the late s was an important factor in changing attitudes and behaviors around sexuality. in a scandal from this period, trungpa rinpoche’s regent Ösel tendzin (thomas rich) infected at least one of his students with the hiv virus through unprotected sex before passing away on august . see article in the la times by john dart, “buddhist sect alarmed by reports that leader kept his aids a secret” published on may (http: //articles.latimes.com/ - - /news/mn- _ _american-buddhist). these quotations are transcribed from the first in a series of eight videos from the conference found on the meridian trust website (http://meridian-trust.org/category/conference/?sub-categories=the-western-buddhist-teachers-conference); see : – : . the dalai lama discusses the complications that arise with the samaya vow at : – : , suggesting students distance themselves from the teacher if abuse occurs. (dalai lama , p. ). for example, mary finnigan, “lama sex abuse claims call buddhist taboos into question” published in the guardian on july (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /jul/ /lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist). see also a timeline in the telegraph article below (note ) and “a brief history of abuse allegations in rigpa” on the blog, how did it happen? understanding and healing abuse in buddhist communities by sandra pawula, published on september (http://howdidithappen.org/history-abuse-allegations-rigpa/). http://articles.latimes.com/ - - /news/mn- _ _american-buddhist http://articles.latimes.com/ - - /news/mn- _ _american-buddhist http://meridian-trust.org/category/conference/?sub-categories=the-western-buddhist-teachers-conference https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /jul/ /lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist http://howdidithappen.org/history-abuse-allegations-rigpa/ religions , , of sogyal rinpoche apparently punched a nun in front of a thousand students during a teaching at lerab ling. it is worth quoting from the twelve-page letter at length: we have received directly from you, and witnessed others receiving, many different forms of physical abuse. you have punched and kicked us, pulled hair, torn ears, as well as hit us and others with various objects such as your back-scratcher, wooden hangers, phones, cups, and any other objects that happened to be close at hand. we trusted for many years that this physical and emotional treatment of students—what you assert to be your “skillful means” of “wrathful compassion” in the tradition of “crazy wisdom”—was done with our best interest at heart in order to free us from our “habitual patterns”. we no longer believe this to be so. we feel that we and others have been harmed because your actions were not compassionate; rather they demonstrated your lack of discipline and your own frustration. your physical abuse—which constitutes a crime under the laws of the lands where you have done these acts—have left monks, nuns, and lay students of yours with bloody injuries and permanent scars. this is not second hand information; we have experienced and witnessed your behavior for years. the letter calls attention to the disjuncture between sogyal rinpoche’s public face and private actions, the “massive efforts” to hide abuse, and the organizational culture of “absolute secrecy.” reference to sexual abuse occurs in a single paragraph, whereas it is the main topic of a documentary, in the name of enlightenment: sex scandal in religion, aired on canadian television in and posted to youtube in . in the documentary and an interview that followed in a french magazine, a young woman mimi describes being part of the inner circle of “d. ākinı̄s” who served as personal attendants to sogyal rinpoche. after two months in that role, she describes a moment alone together in his room when he told her to undress. initially, she took this to be “another test of devotion.” according to her account, thereafter sogyal rinpoche made her swear to secrecy about their sexual encounters and assured her, as she puts it: “that it is a very beneficial moment for me to have this connection to my master and that anything that i might do against it or if i talk about it would sever this connection.” as a general rule, it is considered an honor and meritorious to serve the guru, deemed to be “the source of blessings” (tib: byin rlabs kyi rtsa ba). however, a sexual liaison is another matter, and women can and do say “no.” still the question of consent is complicated by the centrality and authority of the guru vis-à-vis a student’s spiritual path in tibetan buddhism. the july letter gave credence to allegations of abuse based on the insider knowledge of the former leaders and longtime members who signed it. shortly after the letter circulated publically, the rigpa the incident is mentioned in a footnote in the letter and described in an article in the telegraph by mike brown, “sexual assaults and violent rages . . . inside the dark world of buddhist teacher sogyal rinpoche,” published on september (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sexual-assaults-violent-rages-inside-dark-world- buddhist-teacher/). the public letter to sogyal rinpoche from former rigpa leaders, dated july , was posted as a pdf on the lion’s roar on july (https://www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse- allegations/). the quotation comes from the third page. see note above; this quotation comes from the second page. the documentary was posted to youtubeyoutube on september (https://youtu.be/ywhiivvmmnk). an interview by julia mourri with mimi, a young women in his inner circle, was later published in le plus de l’obs on june : “ferme la porte à clés.” j’ai été dévouée à un grand maître bouddhiste, avant de m’enfuir" (http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/ -ferme-la-porte-a-cles-j-ai-ete-devouee-a-un-grand-maitre- bouddhiste-avant-de-m-enfuir.html). mimi’s testimony in the documentary, in the name of enlightenment: sex scandal in enlightenment (see note above), begins from : – : and is interspersed throughout. see the white paper on “clergy sexual misconduct and the misuse of power” by the olive branch, founded in by rev. kyoki roberts of the pittsburgh zen center to offer trainings, mediation, and intervention for spiritual communities and non-profits dealing with situations of conflict and misconduct. the white paper, prepared by katheryn wiedman and leslie hospodar in december , is available at: https://an-olive-branch.org/sites/default/files/an% olive% branch% white% paper% on% clergy% misconduct% and% the% misuse% of% power.pdf. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sexual-assaults-violent-rages-inside-dark-world-buddhist-teacher/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sexual-assaults-violent-rages-inside-dark-world-buddhist-teacher/ https://www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse-allegations/ https://www.lionsroar.com/letter-to-sogyal-rinpoche-from-current-and-ex-rigpa-members-details-abuse-allegations/ https://youtu.be/ywhiivvmmnk http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/ -ferme-la-porte-a-cles-j-ai-ete-devouee-a-un-grand-maitre-bouddhiste-avant-de-m-enfuir.html http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/ -ferme-la-porte-a-cles-j-ai-ete-devouee-a-un-grand-maitre-bouddhiste-avant-de-m-enfuir.html https://an-olive-branch.org/sites/default/files/an% olive% branch% white% paper% on% clergy% misconduct% and% the% misuse% of% power.pdf https://an-olive-branch.org/sites/default/files/an% olive% branch% white% paper% on% clergy% misconduct% and% the% misuse% of% power.pdf religions , , of organization responded by stating that sogyal rinpoche had decided “to step back and to enter a period of retreat and reflection” while the organization seeks professional guidance. in august , dzongsar khyentse rinpoche published a lengthy response to the situation on facebook, titled the “guru and student in the vajrayana.” his response did not defend sogyal rinpoche as an individual nor his actions, training as a teacher, or level of insight. instead, it contains a forceful articulation of the samaya vow and the secrecy that should be upheld around the activities of one’s guru or lama, by which he refers explicitly to the master who presides over a tantric initiation. dzongsar khyentse asserts that so long as students are properly prepared and informed about the unconventional nature of the vajrayāna path and the centrality of the guru-disciple relationship within it, and they consciously enter into this relationship by taking initiation, then whatever the guru says and does must be understood as a teaching and viewed with pure perception. although he concedes that tibetan lamas do not always give the proper warnings due to a gap in cultural understanding, nevertheless, in his assessment, critical thinking should be applied prior to entering into the vajrayāna, rather than afterwards, by conducting a thorough examination of the teacher. it is true that tibetan writings about the guru-disciple relationship emphasize such a prior examination. but what is the recourse for people who witness questionable behavior or experience harm only after joining a tantric community? if secrecy is closely held, there would be no way for them to have prior knowledge. so this is a real dilemma, especially if one admits (as he does) that not all gurus are enlightened. but rather than face that possibility squarely, dzongsar khyentse admonishes the students who wrote the public letter about sogyal rinpoche’s behavior for breaking their samaya by openly criticizing him. this does not take into account that these very same students may have been trying for years to create change within their own community, discuss matters with their teacher, and only published the letter as a last recourse to prevent further harm. at stake in this situation, and the concerns of western buddhist leaders in conversation with his holiness the dalai lama back in , is the question of secrecy when a buddhist teacher engages in misconduct, especially the vajra master. does the samaya vow require silence on all matters? what is a teacher’s responsibility to students and what if he or she contravenes it? the nineteenth-century ecumenical master jamgön kongtrul includes under a list of qualifications for a varja master: being knowledgeable about esoteric teachings and ritual forms, being honest without misleading others, and being patient and caring toward students. if teachers go astray, even after forging a connection through initiation, kongtrul states that students with discernment should distance themselves. moreover, in kongtrul’s section on ethics within his magnus opus, the treasury of knowledge, he makes clear that a breach of samaya has only occurred if certain factors are in place, including that the the response from the rigpa organization was posted on the lion’s roar on july (https://www.lionsroar.com/rigpa- press-release-responds-to-allegations-of-abuses-by-sogyal-rinpoche/). dzongsar khyentse rinpoche (b. ) is a prominent nyingma lama, the son of thinley norbu rinpoche and a recognized reincarnation of jamyang khyentse chökyi lodrö, as well as a bhutanese film-maker. his response was posted to his facebook page on august (https://www.facebook.com/djkhyentse/posts/ ). in the opening of the letter, he asks that it not be edited or pieces excerpted so, out of respect for his wishes, i have not used any quotations here and try to summarize its main argument fairly. for his teachings on the guru-disciple relationship, see also dzongsar khyentse ( ). for two prominent nineteenth-century examples of this approach from eastern tibet, see (kongtrul b, part iii: chp. ; patrul rinpoche , part i: chp. ). more recently, he addressed this possibility in a public talk, “buddhism in the west: the challenges and misunderstandings of our times” at the rigpa center in paris on march , posted to youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= mlsdovko o ); in particular, see : – : : . he also clarified the responsibility of the guru toward his or her students, starting at : . (kongtrul b, part iii: chp. ). the dalai lama made a similar point back in the conference discussed above. here kongtrul quotes an earlier authority on this point, the great thirteenth-century scholar sakya pan. d. ita: “the lamas who cling to enjoyments, are careless, use harsh words, and are endowed with desiring the objects of the sense faculties—those people should be rejected by intelligent disciples, as if rejecting hell as a cause for complete awakening.” this topic is treated in part iii: chapter of (kongtrul b) with the quotation on p. . note that i removed a parenthetical providing the tibetan term for sense faculty (tib: dbang po). https://www.lionsroar.com/rigpa-press-release-responds-to-allegations-of-abuses-by-sogyal-rinpoche/ https://www.lionsroar.com/rigpa-press-release-responds-to-allegations-of-abuses-by-sogyal-rinpoche/ https://www.facebook.com/djkhyentse/posts/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsdovko o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsdovko o religions , , of vajra master is an authentic teacher, i.e., possesses the appropriate qualifications. however, no adjudicating body exists in tibetan buddhism to decide who is an authentic teacher, apart from the court of public opinion and the legitimizing association of other lamas. so there is ample gray area for misunderstanding, but also, as a result, space for new clarifications and practices to create transparency and accountability. . conclusions sexuality and secrecy in buddhist tantra may have always presented the danger of abuse alongside the potential for liberation. add to that cultural differences as buddhism enters into new contexts, not to mention the romanticization of all things tibetan in the western popular imagination, and it can turn into the perfect storm. when misconduct occurs, it may be partly due to cultural misunderstanding, as dzongsar khyentse suggests. after all, the role of consort and what that entails—ritual methods, companionship, a casual affair—are neither transparent, nor consistent outside of tibet. moreover, the veil of secrecy around buddhist tantra makes it difficult for students to gain access to vital information to help them make informed choices. lama willa miller calls secrecy about sexual liaisons “toxic” because it can lead to confusion and distrust in the community surrounding a teacher, not to mention isolation and shame for the female students involved, whether or not they see themselves in the role of a “consort.” candid conversations within convert buddhist communities (now into their second and third generations) could clarify the application of samaya, the parameters of the teacher-student relationship, standards for ethical conduct and the dynamics of power and privilege. jetsün khandro rinpoche emphasizes the importance of education and investigating situations with respect to conduct: “there is a lot of goodness in questioning. if it doesn’t make sense, question it! when we find careless ethical conduct, we need to ask, why is this happening?” though tailored to the individual, her advice could also apply collectively. in north america, europe and other places where buddhism has recently taken root, buddhist communities could go further in examining what attitudes, biases and taboos create the conditions for misconduct and silence around it. in addressing this issue in october , yongey mingyur rinpoche suggests that, if there are serious ethical violations, then “it is in the best interest of the students, the community, and ultimately the teacher, to address the issues,” either internally within the community if teachers are willing to accept responsibility or publicly if they are not. (kongtrul a, p. ). the student’s motivation is also important; it is a samaya breach if criticism is made out of selfish concerns rather than for the benefit of others. on the western fascination with tibet, see donald lopez ( ), prisoners of shangri-la. an american-born lama who completed the traditional three-year retreat (twice) and founded the natural dharma fellowship, willa miller initiated the effort to confront sexual misconduct by lama norlha and shares her story in the latest issue of buddhadharma (summer ). in the article, she grapples with competing terms and frames of reference for the “painful and disempowering” situation she found herself in during her early twenties as a recently ordained nun. these include “consort” or “partner” in tantric terms and “victim” or “survivor” in the current literature on sexual misconduct. with respect to secrecy, she highlights its effects on the community as follows: “in most sanghas where misconduct is occurring, there is a circle of people in the know, but incredibly they may not be aware of each other. in other words, there is not just a secret; there is a culture of secrecy. acts of deception, enabling, and dissimulation sometimes become so habitual that they seem perfectly normal, like brushing your teeth. if a community is going to heal from misconduct, it is important not just to address the misconduct but also to unveil the underlying culture that enabled it.” published online on may at: https://www.lionsroar.com/breaking-the-silence-on-sexual-misconduct/. quoted in (haas ). khandro rinpoche continues, “apart from the obvious misconduct of using force, taking advantage of your own position and the naïveté of a student is abuse and very painful to see. abuse is when there is pretense, conceit, or lying. pretending someone has more realization than they actually have and thus misleading the student is very, very harmful. there is no shortcut to enlightenment . . . and anyone who offers one should be treated with suspicion.” elizabeth mattis-namgyel also emphasizes discernment and questioning in her book, the power of an open question (mattis-namgyel ); see especially chapters and on devotion and the teacher-student relationship. yongey mingyur rinpoche (b. ) is one of tulku urgyen rinpoche’s illustrious sons who teach across the kagyu and nyingma traditions and leads the tergar meditation community. his article, “when a buddhist teacher crosses the line,” was posted to lion’s roar on october (https://www.lionsroar.com/treat-everyone-as-the-buddha/). https://www.lionsroar.com/breaking-the-silence-on-sexual-misconduct/ https://www.lionsroar.com/treat-everyone-as-the-buddha/ religions , , of as more disclosures come to light, it may be time to go beyond the scandal cycle, which makes it all too easy to scapegoat a specific teacher and feel the problem is fixed if they step down from their role. this approach obviates the need for further inquiry into deep-rooted and systemic issues having to do with power and its potential for abuse. in a interview in tricycle magazine, titled “sex in the sangha . . . again,” a group of four california-based teachers from different buddhist traditions—jack kornfield, grace schireson, lama palden and shinzen young—weighed in on systematic factors contributing to sexual misconduct within buddhism as it has evolved beyond asia. their observations underscore the present confusion about the teacher-student relationship, top-down structures with power held by those closest to the teacher and idealization that elevates the teacher above ordinary rules of conduct. this idealization, jack kornfeild warns, can be isolating for teachers who lack peer feedback and other safeguards for their behavior. moreover, it is important to recognize, as shinzen young suggests, that a teacher may have great insight and realization that has yet to be fully integrated with their conduct. as grace schireson puts it, “we teachers, we’re all going to make mistakes. it’s not a question of if. it’s just a question of when and how many and how serious. the real questions are: how approachable are we about our mistakes? how honest is the community about what is going on?” in order to shift systemic factors, and go beyond a black-and-white approach to the problem, an “ethic of transparency” is emerging, which goes against the grain of secrecy in buddhist tantra and introduces a more democratic model of community accountability. needless to say, secrecy may no longer be feasible given the global spread of tibetan buddhism in the digital age. translations of esoteric teachings are being published and available through mainstream booksellers, often under the aegis of tibetan lamas; buddhist art featuring tantric deities and ritual artifacts are routinely on display in museums and other secular venues; digital databases of tibetan texts and buddhist art are now searchable on the internet; while social media and blogs have brought new voices to the fore in shaping the contours of buddhist discourse. in the process, buddhist communities in north america, europe and beyond are being called to face uncomfortable truths regarding discrimination of various kinds (race, gender, class, age, ability and sexual orientation), as well as misconduct, from micro-aggressions to abuse. depending on one’s perspective, this new openness could be a sign of degeneration, and the eventual demise of buddhism, or a healthy development in correcting age-old inequities, regarding the status of women and more. on february , the governing body of shambhala international, called the kalapa council, released a statement on facebook acknowledging “instances of sexual harm and inappropriate relations between members and between teachers and students” in its history (https://www.facebook.com/shambhala.org/posts/ ). different perspectives on this history were presented in a cbc podcast featuring andrea winn (project sunshine) and joshua silberstein (chair of the kalapa council) on may : http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/information-morning-ns/segment/ . the #metoo movement has shown the pervasiveness of the problem in various institutional arenas: sports organizations, the entertainment industry, college campuses, business and non-profits, as well as religious groups. within religious studies as a discipline, robert orsi is pioneering an approach that investigates systemic factors specific to a tradition (in his case catholicism) that permit and perpetuate abuse. for example, see chapter in (orsi ). interview conducted by andrew cooper and emma varvaloucas, published in the fall issue of tricycle and available online at http://tricycle.org/magazine/sex-sangha-again. their choice to select teachers from different traditions acknowledges that the issue of sexual misconduct cuts across buddhist communities. see also the interview, “confronting abuses of power,” posted to lion’s roar on november (https://www.lionsroar.com/confronting-abuse-power). i borrow this term from ann gleig in her article, “the shadow of the roshi: sex, scandal and secrecy in american zen buddhism,” published on september on the blog, sweeping zen (http://sweepingzen.com/the-shadow-of-the- roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/). specific recommendations in the tricycle interview include: fostering honesty when teachers make mistakes, providing mechanisms for peer feedback, handling cases of misconduct through an independent process outside the institutional hierarchy, creating forums for reconciliation and healing, and taking collective responsibility for the safety, health, and education of the community. there is even a newly published set of teachings on karmamudrā that introduce a more outer version of the practice, explicitly dedicated to those who have suffered from sexual abuse, titled karmamudra: the yoga of bliss (chenagtsang ) by dr. nida chenagtsang. for example, the buddhist digital resource center, formerly the tibetan buddhist resource center (www.tbrc.org) and himalayan art resources (www.himalayanart.org). see jan nattier ( ) on buddhist prophecies of decline. https://www.facebook.com/shambhala.org/posts/ http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/information-morning-ns/segment/ http://tricycle.org/magazine/sex-sangha-again https://www.lionsroar.com/confronting-abuse-power http://sweepingzen.com/the-shadow-of-the-roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/ http://sweepingzen.com/the-shadow-of-the-roshi-sex-scandal-and-secrecy-in-american-zen-buddhism/ www.tbrc.org www.himalayanart.org religions , , of conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references allione, tsultrim. . wisdom rising: journey into the mandala of the empowered feminine. new york: enliven books. biernacki, loriliai. . renowned goddess of desire: women, sex, and speech in tantra. oxford: oxford university press. cabezón, josé. . sexuality in classical south asian buddhism. boston: wisdom publications. campbell, 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[crossref] wedemeyer, christian k. . making sense of tantric buddhism: history, semiology, & transgression in the indian traditions. new york: columbia university press. white, david gordon. . kiss of the yogini. chicago: the university of chicago press. willis, janice. . d. ākinı̄: some comments on its nature and meaning. in feminine ground: essays on women in tibet. edited by janice willis. ithaca: snow lion publications. © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. correlating crime and social media: using semantic sentiment analysis (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org correlating crime and social media: using semantic sentiment analysis rhea mahajan , vibhakar mansotra department of computer science and it, university of jammu, jammu, india abstract—crimes occur all over the world and with regularly changing criminal strategies, law enforcement agencies need to manage them adequately and productively. if these agencies have prior data on the crime or an early indication of the eventual felonious activity, it would encourage them to have some strategic preferences so that they can deploy their restricted and elite assets at the spot of a suspected crime or even better explore it to the point of anticipation. so, integration of social media content can act as a catalyst in bridging the gap between these challenges as we are aware of the fact that almost all our population uses social media and their life, thoughts, and, mindset are available digitally through their social media profiles. in this paper, an attempt has been made to predict crime pattern using geo-tagged tweets from five regions of india. we hypothesized that publicly available data from twitter may include features that can portray a correlation between tweets and the crime pattern using data mining. we have further applied semantic sentiment analysis using bi-directional long short memory (bilstm) and feed forward neural network to the tweets to determine the crime intensity across a region. the performance of our prosed approach is . for each class of sentiment. the results showed a correlation between crime pattern predicted from tweets and actual crime incidents reported. keywords—crimes; social media; twitter; bilstm; semantic sentiment analysis i. introduction with the upsurge of online media, the web has become an energetic and enthusiastic domain wherein billions of people all around the globe associate, offer, post and share their daily activities. data which is generated by social networking sites is an extremely large data which is growing exponentially at an unprecedented pace. mountains of raw data is generated daily by individuals on these social networking sites [ ]. these sites have changed our lives drastically and their impact on society cannot be overlooked. facebook, instagram, and, twitter are the most popular social net-working sites with . billion, billion and, . billion users respectively all over the world and million, million and million users respectively in india. these numbers vary every day and this rapid growth in the volume of users has provided the predictive ability in extensive fields such as personality prediction [ ], stock market trends [ ], election results [ ], the box office performance of movies, etc. [ ]. social media allows its users to share their apprehensions, ideas and daily activities on the web. this shared content by the individuals when joined together provides a rich resource of naturally occurring data. status updates from facebook, tweets from twitter and pictures from instagram provide information about the social behavior of its users. our enchantment to social media has grown in the last decade to the pinnacles which can only be compared to the billions they have been valued for. its growth and impact is unparalleled, to say the least. while they have developed into different entities, their usefulness and social impact have always been a subject of debate. the influence can be judged from the fact that the fake news travels or gets viral faster than the real and valuable information. this effect has only increased and sometimes does get morphed into something unpleasant and hostile, where these interactions have gravitated towards the unconstructive side of things which includes bullying, trolling, stalking, social media trials etc. this impact is also tipping the scale towards more and more pessimism. the present crime prediction models commonly depend on relative static highlights including long haul verifiable data, topographical data, and, segment data. this data changes gradually after some time, which means these conventional models couldn't catch the transient varieties in criminal activities [ ]. the primary downside of these models is that they diminish the social setting to verifiable criminal records while disregarding information on the social conduct of the users of available on social networking sites including the victim and the criminal as keeping an on eye the social behavior information of an enormous society is a difficult and challenging task [ ]. twitter is picked over other online social media sites because it is one of the most popular micro-blogging sites for its political potential value and transparency and the way that anybody can get to geo-tagged tweets created in a given region or territory. moreover, people are very vocal about their views and opinions and do not hesitate to express them through their tweets. so, this research is inspired by the fact that the enormous data available on these sites can be used to bring out a significant amount of information for the administration and law authorities which will eventually be used to predict criminal behavioral patterns. in this paper, an attempt has been made to predict crime pattern using geo-tagged tweets from five regions of india. we hypothesized that publicly available data from twitter may include features that can portray a correlation between tweets and the crime pattern using data mining. we have further applied semantic sentiment analysis using bilstm and feed forward neural network to the tweets to determine the crime intensity across a region. bilstm is a variant of lstm and is more powerful than lstm as it overcomes the problem of gradient explosion that occurs in lstm. the results showed correlation between crime pattern predicted from tweets and actual crime incidents reported. fig. shows framework of the proposed research. (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org fig. . framework of the research. this paper is organized as follows: after brief introduction in section i, section ii provides a summary of related works in area of crime prediction using data from social networking sites. section iii gives the description of the data set and process of data acquisition. section iv describes the proposed approach, which is followed by section v, where performance of the classifier on various evaluation metrices is presented. section vi and section vii presents correlation analysis and hypothesis testing, respectively. finally, we have concluded the paper with some future work guidelines in section vii. ii. related works recent studies have attempted to fit in data from twitter into their predictive models for crime assessment. the purpose of integrating twitter data for crime prediction is to take into account significant amount of information available on twitter about the social conduct and mobility of the users. geber [ ] is the first one to introduce social media content to model crime prediction. to address the use of tweet content in determining the crime pattern of a particular location, geber used latent dirichlet allocation on tweets that showed an improvement on models using conventional historic data as crime predictors for stalking, criminal damage and gambling. even though, it is the foremost study to examine tweet text, gerber’s use of lda is challenging given that it is an unsupervised technique, which meant correlation between word clusters and the crimes are not driven by previous theoretical insights. this resulted in correlations that seemed comparatively worthless. wang et al. [ ] extracted event-based topics from real time tweets to predict hit-and-run incidents in virginia. even though their approach was novel, the source of data was limited to a set of manually selected news portals and the massive amount of information backed by the citizens was neglected. chen et al. [ ] utilized the sentiment in tweets together with weather data in kde for predicting the time and location of the theft. however, their study was restricted to spatial information such as weather data for specific time and location brandt et al. [ ] studied the relationship between mobile populations as recorded by twitter’s geotagging facility and the location of different types of crime. they concluded the absence of tweets was predictive of assaults and thefts. similarly, malleson et al.[ ] have used a number of geographic analysis methods to model crime risk using tweets for mobile populations. the main drawback of these studies was that tweet text was not taken in consideration, instead focusing purely on geolocation data. it was also concluded that kde is a location dependent technique cannot be easily generalized. there may be some type of crime that does not occur in the vicinity of previous locations and incidents and the population of an area can change frequently. in addition to the above studies, sentiment analysis has also been a key instrument in crime detection and prevention. zainuddin et al. [ ] applied sentiment analysis to crime related tweets through the use of model that was based on natural language processing techniques and sentiwordnet, the model had the capability to detect the subjectivity of crime and then predicted crime through hate tweets. machine learning algorithms has also been used to solve the task of sentiment analysis of tweets [ ][ ]. pang et al. [ ] performed a comparative study involving algorithms such as naïve bayes, support vector machine and maximum entropy to determine sentiment polarity for movies reviews. these studies were effective but ignored the ignored the semantics to capture the meaning of the tweets. in this paper, we have tried to overcome the drawback of above studies by collecting real time tweets for a period of days across five regions of india to capture dynamic movement of the user. further, we have used combination of bilstm and feed forward neural network to find sentiment polarity of the tweets. the strength of bilstm is that it provides extra training by traversing the text twice from left to right and right to left ,there by extracting the semantics of the words in context of the information preceding and succeeding it and therefore can capture long term contextual dependencies and global features from the sequential text. so, keeping in view the various trends of research carried out using social media in particular twitter, it needs no mention that social media mining is an important area of research and by the application of various data mining techniques can generate very impressive and interesting patterns as well as outcomes which can be analysed, interpreted and can be used for the benefit of the society especially in crime prediction and detection and in the scenario of evolving protest and riots. table i lists some of the important works done in area of crime prediction using tweets. (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org table i. lists some of the important works done in area of crime prediction using tweets author application technique used dataset used evaluation results geber( )[ ] twitter-based model for crime trend prediction to determine crime rates in the prospective time frame. text analysis- filtering including stop word reduction and low- frequent term reduction predictive analysis-linear support vector classifier historic tweets were collected from chicago city for a period of three years combined with other datasets such as unemployment rates and weather conditions. results revealed correlation between features extracted from content as content-based features and the crime trends. wang et al. ( ) [ ] twitter based criminal incident prediction on hit and run cases. text analysis-semantic role labelling (srl) and dirichlet allocation predictive analysis-linear modelling real-time tweets using twitter api f score- %of verbal srl and %of nominal srl chen et al.( ) [ ] twitter based model for time and location prediction in which specific type of crime will occur. text analysis-sentiment analysis by the lexicon-based method predictive analysis-linear modelling via logistic regression comparative analysis- hot spot mapping with kernel density estimation(kde) gps tagged tweets from chicago city of us; combined with weather data and historic crime data from chicago performance measure -area under surveillance curve(auc) predicted auc- . actual auc- . error- . % aghababaei et al. ( ) [ ] twitter based criminal incident prediction on types of crime. text analysis-statistical language processing and spatial modelling predictive analysis-logistic regression comparative analysis- hot spot mapping with kernel density estimation(kde) geo-tagged tweets from chicago city of us and historic criminal data. of the crime types, showed improvements in area under surveillance curve (auc) when adding twitter topics to the kde-only model. almehmadi ( ) [ ] twitter-based model to predict crime by analysing language usage in tweets as a valid measure. text analysis-weka and ranker algorithm predictive analysis- svm classifier was used to classify the data to the proposed class: offensive or non- offensive language gps tagged tweets were collected from houston and new york for three months. with a binary svm classifier, . % correct classification accuracy was achieved. results show accuracy by class for cross-validation with roc %. ristea ( ) [ ] twitter based opinion mining and spatial crime distribution for hockey events in vancouver. spatial clustering, opinion mining and regression analysis was used in order to find meaningful explanatory variables for crime occurrences. crime data for vancouver was obtained from vancouver open data catalogue. geo-referenced tweets were obtained using the twitter streaming application for - i.e. for two hockey seasons. results showed the influence of social media text analysis in describing the geography of crime along with the importance of additional criminogenic factors siriaraya et al. ( ) [ ] twitter based crime investigation tool that provides contextual information about crime incidents by visualizing spatial and time-based characteristic s of a crime. various tweet vectorization strategies (pre-trained word vectors from the glove model , doc vec etc.) and classification models (logistic regression, svm etc.) were used to investigate the performance in classifying negative tweets. geo-tagged tweets were collected for a period of one year from san francisco. the results showed that using the glove model to represent the tweet words and the linear kernel svm to perform binary classification resulted in the best performance (a stratified fold-cross validation showed an f-score of . as opposed to . for the svm-doc vec model) (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org iii. dataset description we began our research by identification of five regions of india; determined by nation crime records bureau as per prevailing crime rate. they are uttar pradesh, madhya pradesh, maharashtra, bihar and delhi-ncr. then, we collected crime related tweets from twitter and crime data from various national and local online news portals and ncrb from december to december . crime against women, crime against children, murder, suicide, cyber crime and violence due to riots and protests were six categories of crime for which data has been collected. to extract the data from twitter, we need to create an account on twitter. then, twitter requires its users to register an application. this application authenticates our account and provides the user a access token and consumer key which then can be used to connect with twitter and download tweets. crime related and geo-tagged real-time tweets were collected from above mentioned indian regions using geo-tag filter of twitter streaming api. we ran the data collection process which resulted in over , tweets from users in our database shown in fig. . this data contains information such as user id, the screen name, number of followers, date, the tweet itself, device used to post the tweet source, the user-defined location, coordinates, agender, retweets and user mentions. fig. . distribution of tweets day-wise from five regions across india. an english language filter was applied and different keywords were used while streaming real-time tweets. tweets were collected using a keyword search strategy [ ]. keywords used to identify a specific crime type were rape, dowry, abduction, kidnapping, child labor, depression, anxiety protest, etc. are listed in table ii. the tweets were extracted in json format imported to a pandas data frame in python and were finally downloaded in csv file format. we extracted the tweets using the geo-tag filter option of twitter’s streaming api and bounding box. tweets were then clustered on the basis national crime records bureau https://ncrb.gov.in/en of similarity i.e. crime type and location using k-means clustering and jaccard distance metric to make them organized as shown in fig. . table ii. key words s. no. crime type key words . crime against women dowry,rape,assault,abduction,metoo . crime against children kidnapping, child labor, minor . murder kill, gun, shot, arms, murder . suicide depression, suicide, anxiety mentalhealth . cybercrime fraud, stalking, trolling, bullying . violence due to protest and riots anticaa, anti-nrc, hateindia, protest ,justice, violence, riots fig. . tweets clustered on the basis of crime type and location. once the tweets were collected, nltk package with pip package manager in python was used for processing text in tweets. the steps include removal of extra places, url, stop words, tokenization which refers to dividing the text into a sequence of words and lemmatization i.e. reducing different types of words with similar meaning with their root. tweets were then embedded into vector form using word vec vectors using google news vectors for obtaining vector representations of words with skip-gram architecture. iv. semantic sentiment analysis we have used bilstm and feed forward neural network as shown in fig. to determine the sentiment polarity of the tweets. conventional rnns can only process the data in one direction and none of the attention is given to process future information. to overcome this limitation, the concept of bidirectional rnn came into existence. bi-directional rnn has the ability to traverse the data in both directions with different hidden units acting as forward layers and backward layers. bidirectional lstm (bi-lstm) was introduced by graves et al. [ ] combining bidirectional rnn with lstm https://www.nltk.org/book/ch .html (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org cell. the output of forward states is not used as an input for backward states and vice-versa in bilstm thus, overcoming the problem of gradient explosion. sentiment data set from kaggle has been used to train our classifier. it contains . million tweets extracted using the twitter api. the tweets have been annotated as negative, positive and neutral with respective sentiment scores and they can be used to detect sentiment of the brand, product, or topic on twitter .the input to the bilstm is set of word vectors w={w , w …… wn}. at each step from i….n, a forward long short memory (lstm) takes the word embedding of word wi and previous state as inputs, and generates the current hidden state. a backward lstm reads the text from wn to wi and generates another state sequence. the hidden state hsi for word wi is the concatenation of hsi vector forward and hsi vector backward thereby capturing the semantics of the word in context of the information preceding and suceeding it . the output of bilstm is fed into the feedforward neural network. finally, the probability of a tweet ti belonging to a sentiment class s is obtained using softmax function 𝑝(𝑡𝑖 |�̂�) = exp(𝛽𝑖 𝑇 �̂� ) ∑ exp(𝛽𝑗 𝑇 �̂�) 𝑆 𝑗= where βi (weight vectors)are parameters in softmax layer. the activation function for neural network is relu. in order to prevent the over-fitting in the training process and co- adaptations of units, dropout of . is applied. hyperparameters epochs learning rate optimizer max length dropout batch size nodenum vector size - adams . the output from this sentiment analyser in the form of heat map and corresponding sentiment score is shown in fig. . in the heat map, intensity of blue colour shows the accumulated sentiment of tweets on a particular day. tweets that were categorized as negative (dark blue) were identified as contributing to the crime intensity of that place. https://www.kaggle.com/kazanova/sentiment fig. . heap map and corresponding sentiment score during observed time. v. evaluation metrices we have evaluated our classifier on various metrices. precision, recall, and f-score have been used for assessing the performance of the proposed model by finding the confusion matrix which contains information about actual and predicted classifications done by a classification system. the performance of classifier shown in table iii has been calculated by taking the average of the three metrics for each class of sentiment. precision =true positive/ (true positive + false positive) recall = true positive / (true positive + false negative) f -measure= [ *(precision*recall/(precision+ recall) table iii. performance of the classifier positive sentiment precision recall f-measure performance . . . . neutral sentiment precision recall f-measure performance . . . . negative sentiment precision recall f-measure performance . . . . (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org algorithm input: sentiment ( ttrain), real-time crime related geo-tagged tweets output: probability of tweet belonging to sentiment class s step : install dependencies tweepy, tensorflow, keras step : import packages os, json pickle, numpy, myplot step : authentication with twitter using acess keys and tokens step : extract tweets using twitter streaming api using geo-filter and keyword search strategy step :cluster the tweets on basis of similarity using jaccard distance. step : :obtain the set of word vectors t={w , w ………wn} using word vec from google news step : process the tweets using nltk package and prepare the data for model fitting step : initialize bilstm model hyperparameters step : for each sentence t ∈ ttrain  generate expression sequence and output eigenvector hs={hs ,hs ….hsn} through bilstm  the output of bilstm is fed to feed forward neural network  apply back propagation algorithm to adjust model parameters and word vectors;  apply activation function softmax to calculate the output probability of tweet belonging to sentiment class s. 𝑝(𝑡𝑖 |𝜃) = exp(𝛽𝑖 𝑇�̂� ) ∑ exp(𝛽𝑗 𝑇 �̂�) 𝑆 𝑗= step : for each t ∈ ttest classify the sentiment polarity of the real time tweets using trained model. fig. . working of sentiment analyser. (ijacsa) international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. , no. , | p a g e www.ijacsa.thesai.org vi. correlating crime and tweets we have used pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) as a statistical measure of the strength of a linear relationship between predicted crime pattern (fig. ) from tweets and actual crime reported by news portals and media (fig. ). the correlation(r) between crime predicted and crime reported is shown in table iv. pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) r=n⅀xy-(⅀x⅀y)/{sqrt[(n⅀x –(⅀x) )(n⅀y -(⅀y) )]} r =(n⅀xy-(⅀x⅀y)/{sqrt[(n⅀x –(⅀x) )(n⅀y (⅀y) )]}) fig. . crime incidents reported from dec to dec as per ncrb and news portals. fig. . crime pattern predicted from tweets from dec to dec . table iv. hypothesis testing r r t-test stat p-value crime against women . . . . crime against children . . . . murder . . . . suicide - . . - . . cyber crime . . . . . violence protest . . . . vii. hypothesis testing null hypothesis ho: publicly available data from twitter do include features that can portray a correlation between crime pattern predicted from tweets and the actual crime incidents reported. alternative hypothesis ha: publicly available data from twitter do not include features that can portray a correlation between crime pattern predicted from tweets and the actual crime reported. p-value: the p-value tells us if the result of an experiment is statistically significant (significance level= . ). the p-value is calculated using a t-distribution, with (n- ) degree of freedom. t-test statistics={[r*sqrt(n− )]/sqrt( −r )} since the p-value is larger than . as shown in table iv, we fail to reject null hypothesis and we cannot conclude that a significant difference exists. viii. conclusion in this paper, we have tried to predict crime pattern using geo-tagged tweets from five regions of india. we hypothesized that publicly available data from twitter may include features that can portray a correlation between tweets and the crime pattern using data mining. we have further applied semantic sentiment analysis using bilstm and feed forward neural network to the tweets to determine the crime intensity across a region. bilstm is a variant of lstm and is more powerful than lstm as it overcomes the problem of gradient explosion that occurs in lstm. the purpose of combining these two approaches was to exploit the strength of bilstm and feed forward neural network. the performance of the classifier is . for each class of sentiment. the results showed correlation between crime pattern predicted from tweets and actual crime incidents reported. the main limitation of our study was unavailability of geo-tagged tweets as more than half of twitter users prefer to conceal their location due to privacy issues. we hope to further make our research effective by using open mapping from google. the data used in the research is available on-line on twitter to support further investigation. references [ ] m. a. russell, mining the social web. oreilly, nd ed. october . 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È una missione volta a riportare il personale su un piano politico e rendere il politico uno strumento per cambiare il personale. pensiamo ai recen- ti movimenti quali il #metoo, black lives matter o, in generale, la rivoluzione queer: non sono forse l’espressione del personale, dell’esperienza “privata” che diviene pubblica, dunque politica? È in riferimento a queste tematiche che può essere analizzata la serie tv we are who we are ( ) diretta da luca guadagnino per hbo e sky atlantic. guadagnino, per la prima volta autore di un prodotto seriale, non è nuovo in un certo racconto di formazione che fa della sessualità, dell’amicizia e dell’amore gli strumenti per indagare l’identità di genere (si pensi a call me by your name, ). supportato dalla possibilità di una narrazione estesa offerta dal formato seriale, guadagnino rilancia ed esplora in profondità i temi trattati in precedenza. stavolta, dedica il suo racconto al legame tra fraser wilson (jack dylan grazer) e caitlin poythress (jordan kristine seamón), due adolescenti americani che vivono con le loro famiglie in una base militare americana a chioggia, in italia. la serie si inserisce in un recente contesto produttivo seriale italiano che vede la rinascita del teen drama. per citare un caso significativo di produzioni teen oriented, la serie skam italia ( – ) che, al pari di we are who we are, ha goduto di grande successo internazionale. pur diversi tra loro nelle modalità di rappresentazione dei personaggi e dell’universo narrativo, entrambi i prodotti seriali sono accomuna- ti dal racconto di una generazione, la generazione z, che nella fluidità di genere e nella valorizzazione della diversità trova suo fondamento; una generazione non politicizzata ma politica. per intenderci, pa- radossalmente nessuno degli adolescenti rappresentati è impegnato politicamente eppure il loro agire nel mondo è politico. cosa lo rende tale? in we are who we are ogni personaggio deve fare i conti con l’eterno dilemma dell’essere ciò che è o ciò che dovrebbe essere: la serie sembra ricordarci in continuazione che l’identità richiede un altro, un * università di bologna (italy);  ylenia.caputo @unibo.it . vanesa miseres, “the personal is political”, in teaching gender through latin american, latino, and iberian texts and cultures, eds. gómez l., horno-delgado a., long m.k., silleras-fernández n. (rotterdam: sense publishers, ), https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ . copyright © ylenia caputo the text of this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / we are who we are: futuristic teen agers zmj. vol. n. ( ) pubblico, un interlocutore. i suoi protagonisti mostrano che esistiamo solo in relazione a qualcun altro. il modo in cui gli altri ci vedono non ci definisce (siamo ciò che siamo, dopotutto), eppure crea crepe nel modo in cui ci vediamo, costringendoci a cercare ancore che rendano la nostra identità leggibile agli altri così come lo è per noi. guadagnino mostra tale conflitto in tanti e differenti modi. in questa sede interessa, tuttavia, far emer- gere la stretta connessione tra rivoluzione identitaria e moda, dove la moda è intesa sia in senso lato — associabile al concetto di fashioning of the self — che come fashion in quanto tale. la moda assume ruolo fondamentale nel percorso di formazione di caitlin e fraser: è mezzo di ricerca identitaria per l’u- na e di espressione per l’altro. prendiamo caitlin, sospesa nella sua identità di genere, tra il suo apparire donna e il sentirsi uomo. l’espressione del suo conflitto interno si traduce nell’ alterazione del proprio viso, dai peli incollati sulle labbra a mò di baffi, fino al gesto — per lei estremo — di tagliare i lunghi e caratteristici capelli. il simbolico restyling, vagamente posticcio, le è funzionale per creare una versione di sé stessa più virile in modo che gli altri possano vederla come lei desidera essere vista. significativo il monito “gender fluid” di fraser: «davvero pensi che essere maschio significhi saper sparare, fare pipì in piedi e avere peli sul viso?». eppure, per caitlin, adeguarsi al pensiero binario è l’unico modo tangibile per esprimere la rivoluzione che c’è in lei: pur essendo ciò che è, ha bisogno che gli altri la vedano come lei vede sé stessa. ricorda il concetto di self-fashioning di stephen greensblat: il processo di costruzione della propria identità e personalità pubblica secondo una serie di standard socialmente accettabili e lo sforzo cosciente di imitare un modello socialmente condiviso. al polo opposto, fraser. come un moderno flâneur baudeleriano, il ragazzo dallo sbadiglio facile è l’es- senza di ciò che si dà nella transitorietà, nella fluidità: è solitario e malinconico, tuttavia ama perdersi nella folla; pur sentendosi forse diverso, un osservatore esterno, non può fare a meno di essa. nel non- luogo di divise militari e omologazione in cui vive, fraser è un outsider che sente su di sé tutta l’estraneità di un mondo alienante e brutale in cui non può in alcun modo riconoscersi. se il flâneur, così come in walter benjamin, critica la moderna società capitalistica e il turismo mordi e fuggi, così fraser si oppone alla caducità del fast fashion (e del fast feeling, diremmo). così provoca caitlin: « mi piace la poesia per- ché non è come i tuoi vestiti, moda usa e getta; compri una cosa che ti piace adesso e tra due mesi la butti. cerco qualcosa che abbia significato». È lì che fraser trova ed esprime il suo significato: nelle poesie che legge e in ciò che indossa; ammira demna gvasalia, direttore creativo di balenciaga e fondatore di ve- tements, che «porta il realismo sulla stoffa»; indossa felpe come quella, già iconica, del brand human made — rivolto a una nicchia di persone rivoluzionarie e controcorrente — il cui slogan è “gears for futuristic teen agers”. quanto visto finora conduce alla riflessione conclusiva: i corpi e gli abiti che li vestono sono strumenti per esplorare e affermare l’identità dei personaggi. in tal senso, con la gen z, lo slogan “il personale è politico” si riconfigura: la rivoluzione è dei corpi, narrati in poesia o costantemente mostrati nelle lo- ro trasformazioni, che siano completamente nudi o vestiti di significativi abiti. i corpi divengono corpi politici, strumenti per sfidare il razzismo, la repressione sessuale, l’imposizione di binarismi di genere interiorizzati. gli abiti indossati, così come la mera esposizione del corpo sanguinante di caitlin o l’in- timità senza filtri dei personaggi della serie — tra genitali esposti e rapporti sessuali promiscui — sono rivoluzionari simboli di resistenza, fonte di potere e di normalizzazione di quelli che vengono considera- ti tabù sociali (il ciclo sessuale, il desiderio sessuale, l’identità sessuale). al riguardo, il fatto che la storia sia collocata temporalmente nel , durante il periodo delle elezioni presidenziali e dell’inaspettata vittoria di trump, è piuttosto significativo. . stephen greensblat, reinsassance self-fashioning (chicago: the university press of chicago, ). https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / biomed centralretrovirology ss open accereview raltegravir, elvitegravir, and metoogravir: the birth of "me-too" hiv- integrase inhibitors erik serrao, srinivas odde, kavya ramkumar and nouri neamati* address: department of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, university of southern california, school of pharmacy, zonal avenue, los angeles, ca , usa email: erik serrao - eserrao@usc.edu; srinivas odde - odde@usc.edu; kavya ramkumar - ramkumar@usc.edu; nouri neamati* - neamati@usc.edu * corresponding author abstract merck's mk- , known as raltegravir, has recently become the first fda-approved hiv- integrase (in) inhibitor and has since risen to blockbuster drug status. much research has in turn been conducted over the last few years aimed at recreating but optimizing the compound's interactions with the protein. resulting me-too drugs have shown favorable pharmacokinetic properties and appear drug-like but, as expected, most have a highly similar interaction with in to that of raltegravir. we propose that, based upon conclusions drawn from our docking studies illustrated herein, most of these me-too mk- analogues may experience a low success rate against raltegravir-resistant hiv strains. as hiv has a very high mutational competence, the development of drugs with new mechanisms of inhibitory action and/or new active substituents may be a more successful route to take in the development of second- and third-generation in inhibitors. overview though many potent inhibitors of the viral life cycle have arisen over recent years, hiv persists as a global pandemic with eradication unlikely in the near future. over mil- lion people, including . million children, are living with hiv worldwide as of december, [ ]. almost people are newly infected with hiv, and around die from aids, each day. due to the lack of educa- tion about risky behaviors and the lack of access to treat- ment, low- and middle-income countries remain the largest producers of new hiv infections, with aids being the leading cause of death in sub-saharan africa. five per- cent of all adults are living with hiv or aids in this region [ , ]. worldwide spending on hiv/aids research, treat- ment, and prevention has risen from $ million in to an estimated $ billion in , but the global need is projected to be much higher [ , ]. although novel estimation procedures have contributed to a more accu- rate, reduced global estimate of those living with hiv and aids in comparison to the past few years, this number remains staggering and ever increasing [ , ]. the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (haart) has brought with it a significant decrease in aids-related deaths over the last ten years. prior to the development of raltegravir, haart had been recom- mended to consist of at least three different drugs target- ing separate stages of the hiv life cycle: two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, plus either a non-nucleo- side reverse transcriptase inhibitor such as efavirenz, or a protease inhibitor [ , ]. studies have shown that effective administration of these haart regimens can result in a published: march retrovirology , : doi: . / - - - received: january accepted: march this article is available from: http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / © serrao et al; licensee biomed central ltd. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. page of (page number not for citation purposes) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=abstract&list_uids= http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . http://www.biomedcentral.com/ http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/charter/ retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / large-scale decrease in plasma levels of viral rna, as well as a significant increase in cd cell count [ - ]. further- more, haart has been shown to reduce the incidence of opportunistic infections and hiv-associated cancers, con- tributing to the significantly decreased number of hiv- and aids-related deaths each year (and correspondingly contributing to the much increased amount of people liv- ing with the disease each year) [ ]. however, haart reg- imens have been incapable of viral eradication, due in part to the viral establishment of reservoirs within latently infected and resting cd + t cells and cd + t cells [ - ]. also, haart has frequently led to the emergence of drug resistant viral strains [ , ]. hence, much innovation is essential for the success of future anti-hiv drug research. an area of much recent progress has been that of hiv- in inhibitor design. in is an essential enzyme for viral repli- cation, and it has no human homolog [for a recent review, see reference [ ]]. in catalyzes the insertion of reverse transcribed viral cdna into the host cell genome via a multi-step process. the first step in integration occurs in the host cell cytosol and is referred to as '-processing. during this step, in cleaves a dinucleotide from each viral dna terminus at a conserved ca sequence, yielding two reactive ' hydroxyl groups. following this processing step, in associates with a number of viral and cellular pro- teins, forming a pre-integration complex (pic), and then migrates to the nucleus. within the nucleus the reactive hydroxyl groups are utilized in nucleophilic attack upon the host cell genome, a process known as strand transfer [ ]. in multimerization is also required for formation of the pic. as a dimeric in species is required for '-process- ing, the strand transfer step calls for a tetrameric in arrangement. proper integration of viral dna into the host cell genome leads to viral protein expression, matu- ration, and propagation [ ]. in catalysis is vital to proper hiv- replication and sustained infection, and potent small-molecule in inhibitors have been avidly sought over the last ten years as a supplement to haart and a novel angle of attack against drug resistant viruses. the birth of the diketo acids and the emergence of raltegravir a previous large-scale, random screen of over , compounds yielded potent inhibitors, and the most active compounds proved to be -aryl- , -diketobutanoic acids, containing a distinct β-diketo acid (dka) moiety that was capable of coordinating metal ions within the in active site [ ]. the active dka containing compounds from this study showed a significant preference for strand transfer inhibition over that of '-processing in vitro. for example, the most potent compound, l- , , exhibited a - fold higher ic value of μm for '-processing compared to its nm ic value for strand transfer inhibition. importantly, l- , exerted a completely inhibitory effect upon hiv- infection in a cell-based assay at a con- centration of μm. in a follow-up study [ ], it was found that the dka and target dna binding sites on in overlap and are both distinct from that of the viral dna, and also that the dkas bind with a -fold higher affin- ity to in in complex with '-processed viral dna than to non-complexed in ( – μm versus nm). simultaneously, a different group discovered and devel- oped potent dka compounds, leading to both the first inhibitor co-crystallized with in ( citep, figure ) and the first clinically tested inhibitor (s- , figure ). citep was included in this group's patent [ ], which covered dkas containing various indole and sub- stituted indole groups. specifically, citep possessed a tetrazole group in place of the common dka carboxylic acid moiety. citep inhibited in '-processing and strand transfer at ic values of μm and . μm, respectively [ ], and it was subsequently reported in complex with in in the vicinity of the active site residues asp- , asp- , the structure of diketo acid-based hiv- integrase inhibitorsfigure the structure of diketo acid-based hiv- integrase inhibitors. page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / and glu- , providing the first crystal structure informa- tion about in [ ]. further modification led to the inclu- sion of heterocyclic groups in place of the indoles, culminating in the development of multiple nitrogen and oxygen-containing heterocyclic analogs, all of which were covered in a patent [ ]. s- , or (z)- -[ -( - fluorobenzyl)furan- -yl]- -hydroxy- -( h- , , -triazol- -yl)propenone, was the most promising of these com- pounds and went on to become the first clinically tested hiv- in inhibitor. it exhibited a nm ic for in inhi- bition in vitro, and it accomplished inhibition of hiv rep- lication in mtt assays with ec and cc values of nm and μm, respectively [ , ]. acceptable safety and toxicology profiles were attained in animal models, and phase i trials showed good pharmacokinetics in a group of healthy hiv-negative humans [ ]. however, s- failed efficacy studies due to its reduction in humans at the carbon linked to the triazole heterocycle, yielding an inactive metabolite that was rapidly cleared through glu- curonidation in the non-cytochrome p pathway [ ], and its development was soon abandoned. the dka pharmacophore was subsequently transferred to a naphthyridine carboxamide core, conferring similar antiviral activity and strand transfer selectivity [ ]. the most active inhibitor from this class, l , (figure ), showed very promising activity, with ic values as low as nm against multidrug-resistant viruses [ ]. l , soon became the second in inhibitor to enter clinical tri- als. however, liver and kidney toxicity surfaced after long- term treatment in dogs, bringing a premature end to the drug's clinical progress [ ]. this relative success with diketo acid structural analogs led to the derivation of a class of n-alkyl hydroxypyrimidinone carboxylic acids, which showed nanomolar activity against hiv- in in enzymatic assays and a good pharmacokinetic profile (modest oral bioavailability, low plasma clearance, and good half-life) in rats [ ]. mk- , also known as ralte- gravir (figure ), emerged as the most promising pyrimid- inone carboxamide derivative and soon became the first in inhibitor to progress into phase iii clinical trials. though multiple resistant mutations have surfaced in both treatment-experienced and treatment-naïve patients [ ], mk- has exhibited low nanomolar and strand transfer selective in vitro in inhibition, an ic value of nm in the presence of normal human serum (nhs), and synergistic effects in combination with multiple current antiretroviral drugs [ , ]. raltegravir (a.k.a. isentress™) became the first fda approved in inhibitor in october of and is currently being administered as a new addi- tion to haart regimens. me-too drugs comparable to every innovation, promising new drugs will be quickly followed into the market by multiple ana- logs, most striking in their similarity to the original. with an average cost of $ billion to bring a single drug to mar- ket [ ] and only one in three drugs producing revenues that match or exceed these average research and develop- ment costs [ ], one can imagine the temptation for phar- maceutical companies to forego the pains of innovation and rather simply modify current leads. there have been differences of opinion regarding the value of these so- called "me-too" drugs [ , ]. some view that me-too products are essential for drug optimization and progress, and that they generate vital marketplace competition, leading to better quality and lower costs. still others argue that slight structural modifications producing negligible improvements in drug activity are a waste of time and effort, and that the vast amount of money spent on com- petitive advertisement could be invested instead into actual innovation or the development of orphan drugs. one of the clearest examples of me-too product genera- tion can be seen in the statin drug market. there are cur- rently six -hydroxymethylglutaryl coenzyme a reductase inhibitors (statins) commercially available. however, there has yet to be a large, randomized trial comparing the clinical effects of equivalent doses of each statin upon pre- vention of vascular disease. the six drugs differ slightly in pharmacokinetics, and knowledge gained throughout their design and development about the health implica- tions of high cholesterol has been beneficial. however, their structures, functions, and clinical effects are highly homologous, and over % of physicians have been shown to utilize at most three different statins for all of their incident prescribing [ ]. another obvious instance of me-too production has been the evolution of astra- zeneca's prilosec (omeprazole) to nexium (esomepra- zole). there are only two differences between the two drugs – prilosec contains a racemic mixture of the d- and s-isomers of omeprazole while nexium contains solely the more potent s-isomer, and nexium is protected by patent and far more expensive than prilosec. furthermore, nexium has been shown in clinical trials to be only mar- ginally more effective than prilosec in control of stomach acid levels [ ]. though there have been several examples of me-too drugs providing a substantial increase in effica- ciousness or decrease in toxicity – such as derivatives of the anthracycline chemotherapeutic daunorubicin [ ] and the beta blocker propanolol [ ] – very few fda approved me-too drugs actually exhibit a significant enhancement of activity in comparison to their predeces- sors. in fact, of the drugs approved by the fda between and , only contained new active substituents, and less than half of these received a priority fda review due to the low likelihood of providing a sig- nificant advantage over existing treatments [ ]. an area in which me-too drug generation has been espe- cially prevalent recently is that of hiv- in inhibitor page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / design. although raltegravir has become a modern block- buster anti-hiv drug, multiple viral amino acid mutations have already been identified that confer robust viral resist- ance to the drug [ ]. specifically, mutations causing invulnerability to raltegravir have been shown to contrib- ute to an almost % virological failure rate within months of treatment [ ]. this viral drug resistance most often results from the substitution of one of three amino acids – y , q , or n – usually in combination with at least one other mutation [ ]. the specific substi- tutions of g s and e q are typically associated with n and q mutations, and the g s/q h/r double substitution has been shown to result in a > - fold viral resistance to raltegravir [ ]. while the g s mutation displays only a weak resistance to raltegravir (ic = nm), the q h in mutant is strongly resistant (ic > nm). interestingly though, g s has recently been shown to effectively restore the poor replication abil- ity of q h to near wt levels, illustrating its compensa- tory nature [ ]. even with this resistance profile, raltegravir has been the target of an excessive amount of me-too research and development over the last two years. though, again, there have been historical instances of me- too drugs significantly benefiting patients and instigating medical progress, they have for the most part only bene- fited pharmaceutical companies. although it is definitely possible that the next blockbuster anti-hiv drug could be a raltegravir lookalike, we hypothesize that raltegravir me- too drugs, targeting a virus that exhibits an extraordinary rate of resistance evolution, will experience a low proba- bility of success in the clinical setting due to viral resist- ance and cross-resistance issues. me-too or second generation? in contrast to me-too drugs, second generation hiv- in inhibitors benefit patients. in order to be considered a bona fide second generation inhibitor, a compound of interest must meet at least one of three criteria (figure ). first, a second generation inhibitor may exhibit a new mode of action and/or contain novel active substitu- ent(s). a second generation inhibitor may also possess significantly improved potency and/or significantly decreased toxicity. thirdly, a second generation inhibitor may exhibit potency while avoiding cross-resistance from mutants resistant to similar drugs. obviously, the more criteria a selected drug meets, the more success it will enjoy in the clinical setting and in the global market. a recent example of a second generation drug that has nar- rowly avoided me-too labeling is the protease inhibitor, darunavir. darunavir is the th protease inhibitor to be marketed in the united states, and it was approved by the fda on june , . darunavir's chemical structure is almost identical to its precursor, amprenavir, in that it simply contains a double-ringed terminal bis-tetrahydro- furan group in place of the single-ringed terminal tetrahy- drofuran on amprenavir. additionally, darunavir and amprenavir occupy a highly overlapping volume in the protease active site. however, darunavir's two additional oxygen atoms upon its bis-tetrahydrofuran moiety con- tribute to a two order of magnitude increase in binding affinity in comparison to amprenavir, by forming strong hydrogen bonds with the main chain atoms of amino acids asp- and asp- [ ]. this tighter binding leads to an increased ability of darunavir to fit within the pro- tease envelope and to exhibit potent activity against even multi-drug resistant viral strains. darunavir specifically retains nanomolar ic values in the presence of muta- tions resistant to ritonavir, nelfinavir, indinavir, saquina- vir, and even amprenavir (mutations at l f, v i, m i, i m, a v, and i v) [ ]. so, although darunavir's structural and mechanistic properties are me-too-like, its resistance profile created by its relatively high binding affinity is much different than all preexisting protease inhibitors. it is therefore considered a second generation drug. the structural and mechanistic properties of recent raltegravir me-too compounds are highly analogous, as are the pharmacokinetics. we predict that the resistance profiles will be nearly identical as well, precluding much clinical success. raltegravir me-too analogs most of the recent raltegravir me-too drugs comply with the general diketo acid pharmacophore structural require- ments – or a hydrophobic aromatic (usually fluoroben- zyl) component and a variable acidic component linked to either side of a dka linker (figure ). this linker usu- ally consists of a γ-ketone, an enolizable α-ketone, and a carboxylic acid, but the carboxylic acid has been substi- tuted with other acidic (tetrazole and triazole) and basic (pyridine) bioisosters [ ]. whereas the aromatic dka requirements for "second generation drug" classificationfigure requirements for "second generation drug" classifi- cation. page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / pharmacophore substituent confers strand transfer selec- tivity, the acidic component contributes to '-processing inhibitory potency [ , ]. clinically tested me-too in drugs mk- research into second generation dka inhibitors shortly after the fda approval of mk- led to the design of a set of tricyclic hydroxypyrroles that mimicked the com- mon dka metal binding pharmacophore. optimization of a derived set of -hydroxy- , -dihydropyrazinopyrrol- opyrazine- , -dione compounds resulted in one of the first raltegravir me-too leads, mk- (figure ). mk- has exhibited an ic of nm in the presence of % nhs, favorable pharmacokinetics, and potent antiretroviral activity against four in mutants displaying raltegravir resistance [ , ]. gs- (elvitegravir) early modification of the dka motif by japan tobacco resulted in the design of a group of -quinolone- -glyox- ylic acids [ ] that retained the coplanarity of dka func- tional groups. a potent compound from this original study contained only a β-ketone functional group and a carboxylic acid functional group, which were coplanar, and showed a . μm ic value in a strand transfer assay. derivatives of this parent compound exhibited up to a . nm ic value in strand transfer assays and a . nm ec in an antiviral assay. this activity proved that a monoketo motif could be an efficacious alternative to the accepted dka. a license agreement between japan tobacco and gilead sciences led to the clinical development of gs- (a.k.a. elvitegravir) [figure , [ ]], a quinolone car- boxylic acid strand-transfer specific inhibitor that dis- played an ic of nm against in and an antiviral ec of . nm in the presence of nhs. in terms of pharmacoki- netics (additional file ), in rat and dog elvitegravir dis- played a % and % bioavailability, a . h and . h half-life, and a . ml/min/kg and ml/min/kg clear- ance, respectively. interestingly though, its half-life in human was shown to increase from hours when dosed alone to hours when boosted with the protease inhibi- tor, ritonavir [ ]. similarly, its bioavailability increased -fold when administered in combination with ritona- vir. these observations back a valid argument that elvite- gravir may become a second-generation in inhibitor, in that its significantly improved pharmacokinetic profile when boosted may increase patient compliance by allow- ing a simple once daily treatment (raltegravir is adminis- tered twice daily). similar to raltegravir, though, elvitegravir has been shown to provoke t i and e q viral resistance mutations, as well as substitutions of amino acids flanking raltegravir-induced substitution sites (q p and s g) [ ]. gsk- in studies to develop follow-on analogs of s- , the two involved groups jointly discovered a novel lead naphthy- ridinone, gsk- (figure ). this compound con- tains a hydrophobic fluorobenzyl substituent flexibly linked to a chelatable quinolone region. gsk- inhibited in in an in vitro strand transfer assay with an ic of nm, and it showed an antiviral ec value of nm in mt- cells in the presence of % nhs. acceptable pharmacokinetics were achieved, with bioavailabilities of %, %, and %; half-lives of . h, . h, and . h; and clearances of . ml/min/kg, . ml/min/kg, and ml/min/kg in rat, dog, and rhesus monkey, respectively (additional file ). however, when tested against mutant viruses, the compound exhibited greatly decreased activity – -fold reduction against t k, -fold reduction against q k, -fold reduction against q r, and - fold reduction against n s [ ]. bms- a pyrimidine carboxamide similar in structure to raltegra- vir was recently propelled into phase ii clinical trials by a separate group. this compound was different from ralte- gravir in that raltegravir's , , -oxadiazole group was sub- stituted with a cyclic sulfonamide moiety (figure ), but its in vitro potency was similar with an ic value of nm. however, multiple mutations were almost immedi- ately observed to have occurred in viral response to treat- ment with bms- , which included v i, q r, v i, and g r [ ]. unfortunately, the severity of resistance conferred by each of these mutations has not been disclosed, nor have pharmacokinetic properties of the drug. what is known, however, is that the drug did not last long in phase ii trials, and testing was abruptly termi- nated in early [ ]. an explanation of the termina- tion of the trial has not been publicly provided. novel me-too classes dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxamides soon after promising clinical data regarding the progress of mk- became available, a novel dka-related class of in inhibitory compounds (figure , additional file ) was developed through screening of inhibitors of hcv polymerase, which demonstrates a high degree of struc- tural similarity to in [ ]. specifically, in and hcv polymerase possess a similar active site amino acid geom- etry, and both utilize two magnesium ions in their cataly- sis. a class of dihydroxypyrimidine carboxamides was derived as hcv polymerase inhibitors from dkas, and they were found to exhibit improved drug-like properties and correct mg + binding geometry. most of these com- pounds were inactive against in, but a substitution of the free carboxylic acid with a benzyl amide yielded com- pound , with nanomolar in inhibitory activity in enzy- matic assays. compound showed a decent page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / pharmacokinetic profile, with a bioavailability of %, plasma clearance of ml/min/kg, and a half-life of hours. further structure activity relationship (sar) studies upon the amide moiety of led to the identification of a superior para-fluorobenzyl substituent (compound ). compound exhibited an ic of nm in the enzymatic assay, as well as an improved oral bioavailability in rats of %. however, both compounds and were inactive in cell-based assays, due to poor solubility, poor cell perme- ability, and significant plasma protein binding [ ]. this group pushed on in their search for raltegravir me- too drugs with further sar studies upon the above n-alkyl hydroxypyrimidinone lead compounds (figure ). as a benzyl amide substitution of a free carboxyl instilled nanomolar activity upon said compounds, a library of over different amide modifications was synthesized and screened for inhibitory potency [ ]. a -fluoro-sub- stituted benzene was shown to be optimal for in inhibi- tion, with an ic value in enzymatic assays of nm. however, though compounds optimized in this fashion were active in the enzymatic assay, they lacked potency in cell based assays. the thiophene ring in the -position of the pyrimidine core was shown to have little effect upon the interaction of the compound with in, and so this posi- tion was chosen for more dramatic changes influencing physiochemical properties of inhibitors. introduction of a basic group to a -benzyl derivative resulted in increased cell permeability and inhibition of viral replication in the presence of fetal bovine serum (fbs) with a cic of nm (compound ). this compound showed an oral bioa- vailability of % and %, a half-life of . h and . h, and a plasma clearance of ml/min/kg and . ml/ min/kg in rats and dogs, respectively. however, weak activity in the presence of % nhs exposed the mobile nature of chosen -position substituents. in response the phenyl group at this position was removed and the nh methylated, to confer reduced lipophilicity (and reduced plasma protein binding) but maintain the presence of the mandatory amino group. compound was thus born, exhibiting a % human plasma protein binding and a nm cic in the presence of % nhs. pharmacoki- netics of compound included an oral bioavailability of % and %, a half-life of . h and . h, and a plasma clearance of ml/min/kg and ml/min/kg in rats and dogs, respectively. separately, smaller acyclic amines were substituted into the position and similarly assayed for activity [ ]. it was found that a dimethylami- nomethyl substituent separated by an sp -carbon spacer bestowed significant cell based potency, at a cic of nm in % nhs (compound ). in rats, dogs, and mon- keys, compound had a prolonged plasma half-life ( . , . , and . h, respectively), moderate to low clearance ( , . , and ml/min/kg, respectively) and moderate to excellent oral bioavailability ( %, %, and %, respectively) [ ]. n-methylpyrimidones to improve cell-based potency and bioavailability of the above molecules, this group began to study the effect of methylation of their n- pyrimidine nitrogens (figure , additional file ). the rationale for this decision was based upon their discovery that the amine contained in the ring must occupy the benzylic position with respect to the pyrimidine and that small alkyl groups are preferred on the nitrogen of the saturated heterocycle [ ]. a methyl group was initially scanned on the pyrrolidine ring, and substitution on position gave the best enzy- matic activity. substitution of the free hydroxyl group of a resulting trans- -hydroxy pyrrolidine with a methoxy sub- stituent produced potent activity (compound ) in both in vitro (ic = nm) and cell-based assays (cic = nm in % nhs) [ ]. from here the group tested other the evolution of dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxamidesfigure the evolution of dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxam- ides. n n oh oh s o h n n n oh oh s o h n f n n oh oh o h n f n n n oh oh o h n f n n n oh oh o h n f n the evolution of n-methylpyrimidonesfigure the evolution of n-methylpyrimidones. n n o oh h n o f n h co n n o oh h n o f n f n n o oh h n o f n f f n n o oh h n o f o n n n o oh h n o f n n n n o oh h n o f n h o n n o oh h n o f nh o n n o oh h n o f nhch ch o n n o oh h n o f nhch(ch ) o n n o oh h n o f s o o page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / substitutions, of which a fluorine (compound – cic = nm) or a difluoro derivative (compound – cic = nm) were well accepted. activity was found to be fur- ther augmented by substituting a six-membered derivative in position of the pyrimidine, and the morpholine derivative and piperidine derivative displayed slightly improved cell-based potencies ( nm and nm cic in % nhs, respectively). in terms of pharma- cokinetics, the morpholine derivative was the most ideal candidate for further testing, with bioavailabilities of %, %, and %; half-lives of . h, h, and . h; and plasma clearance rates of ml/min/kg, ml/min/ kg, and ml/min/kg in rat, dog, and rhesus monkey, respectively [ ]. a further optimization study analyzed the enzymatic and pharmacokinetic implications of a different, tbutyl substi- tution at the c- position of the pyrimidine scaffold of the above compounds [figure , [ ]]. further introduction of a benzylamide to the right side of the scaffold proved necessary for activity in serum conditions. multiple deriv- atives were designed using the n-methyl pyrimidone scaf- fold, including a sulfone (compound ) and an n- methyl amide (compound ) that showed cic s of nm and nm in % nhs, respectively. this encourag- ing data inspired further substitutions of the -n-methyl carboxamide, for optimization of pharmacokinetic behavior. an unsubstituted amide exhibited a promis- ing inhibitory profile (ic = nm in enzymatic assay, cic = nm in % nhs), prompting multiple further substitutions of the n-methyl residue with an n-ethyl (compound ) and an in-propyl (compound ). the pharmacokinetic profiles of , , and were not opti- mal (additional file ), and none of these substitutions were beneficial in this respect. bioavailability was %, %, and %; half-life was . h, . h, and . h; and plasma clearance was ml/min/kg, ml/min/kg, and ml/min/kg in rat for , , and , respectively [ ]. dihydroxypyrido-pyrazine- , -diones parallel to the above n-methylpyrimidone studies, the same group was working toward optimization and cyclic constraint of the dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxamide amide side chain, yielding a novel class of dihydroxypyri- dopyrazine- , -dione compounds [figure , [ ]]. coplanarity of the amide carbonyl group in the con- strained ring with respect to the dihydroxypyridinone core and a resulting limitation of flexibility of the -fluoroben- zyl side chain (compound ) were shown through molecular modeling to be essential for inhibitory activity. compound inhibited in strand transfer in vitro at an ic of nm and hiv replication in cell culture at a cic of nm, with little cytotoxicity. limited pharma- cokinetic data has been provided for this class of com- pounds, but compound was shown to have a % oral bioavailability in rats, and plasma concentrations were maintained between . and . μm from the second to the twenty-fourth hour (additional file ). there was con- cern about the dihydroxypyrimidone core and its metab- olites irreversibly associating with liver microsomal proteins, but only a non-significant level (< pmol equiv/mg/ min) of interaction was observed [ ]. bicyclic pyrimidones recently, the aforementioned importance of a β-amino substituent in the -position of the pyrimidine scaffold and the beneficial effect of the n-methylation were exploited in a systematic constraint of the n-methyl on the n-methylpyrimidinone scaffold (figure , addi- tional file ). with unsubstituted benzylmethylamine derivatives showing nanomolar enzymatic inhibition pro- dihydroxypyrido-pyrazine- , -dione representative examplefigure dihydroxypyrido-pyrazine- , -dione representative example. n n o oh oh o f the evolution of bicyclic pyrimidonesfigure the evolution of bicyclic pyrimidones. n n o oh h n o f n o s n oo n n o oh h n o f n s o o n n o oh h n o f n s n o o n n n o oh h n o f n s n o o n n o oh h n o f n o n o n n o oh h n o f n o n o page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / files similar to those of derivatives with saturated ring side chains (though little inhibition of viral replication in cell culture), it was decided that the - -nitrogen would be modified to optimize physiochemical properties of pyrimidone compounds [ ]. for example, introduction of a sulfonamide (compound ) resulted in a low shift in activity in serum conditions, suggesting an increased level of cell permeability. the (r)- enantiomer displayed a nm enzymatic ic value, a nm cic in % nhs (two-fold more potent than its (s)- enantiomer con- temporary), and acceptable pharmacokinetics including a % bioavailability and ml/min/kg plasma clearance in rat. sulfonamide derivatives showed similarly decent profiles (compound = nm ic against strand trans- fer, nm cic in cells in % nhs, and a % bioavail- ability and ml/min/kg plasma clearance in rats). however, an even more significant improvement in potency occurred upon changing the sulfonamide moiety to a tetrasubstituted sulfamide (compound ). the (r)- enantiomer inhibited in with an ic value and a cic value of nm and nm, respectively, but pharma- cokinetics ( % bioavailability in rhesus monkey) were inadequate. introduction of a more polar n-methylpiper- azine (compound ), however, produced a compound whose (s)- enantiomer inhibited in at a cic of nm in cell culture in the presence of % nhs. this com- pound was much more stable toward glucuronidation than its sulfamide counterpart, but low bioavailability and high plasma clearance in rats and dogs neutralized its promise. it was hence necessary to make use of other nitrogen functionalizations in order to optimize these pharmacological properties. the substitution of ketoam- ides and enlarged rings (compounds and , respec- tively) resulted in potent inhibition of in in cell based assays and much improved pharmacokinetics. the (s)- enantiomers of both compounds achieved cic s of nm and nm in cell culture, respectively, as well as mod- erate pharmacologic properties in rats, dogs, and (com- pound (s)- only) monkeys [ ]. pyrrolloquinolones a different group has recently built upon their prior opti- mization of the clinically efficacious l , [ , ] by varying c substituents within their compounds' tricyclic scaffolds (figure , additional file ). they originally developed the tricyclic scaffold to provide a pre-organ- ized, energetic improvement to l , 's unfavorable energy consumption upon rotational conversion from free state to bound state, leading to a more soluble and potent compound [ ]. in their recent work, c - amino derivatives were prepared and assayed for improve- ment in strand transfer inhibitory potency and pharma- cokinetics, due to their projected higher stability against hydrolysis than analogous carbamates or sulfamates [ ]. the most promising leads turned out to be a c sulfona- mide (compound ), a c sulfonylurea (compound ), and a c sultam (compound ). compounds and retained potency in the presence of serum albumin and α- acidic glycoproteins, while was negatively affected. though the sultam showed a lower ic than the sul- fonamide and sulfonylurea in enzymatic assays ( nm as opposed to nm and nm, respectively), it lacked potency in cell culture in % nhs (ec nm as opposed to . nm and . nm, respectively). it is impor- tant to note that raltegravir showed an ec value of nm in cell culture in the presence of % nhs. com- pound was additionally lacking in bioavailability in both rat ( %) and dog ( %). however, compounds and showed slightly more promising profiles, with bio- availabilities of %/ % and %/ % and half-lives of . h/ . h and . h/ . h in rat and dog, respectively [ ]. this study exemplified the importance of rigidifying inhibitor pharmacophores in terms of conferring favora- ble potency and pharmacokinetic properties. validation of resistance profiles of me-too raltegravir analogues though there is minor variation in the in vitro activity of the above me-too in inhibitors, their structures, mecha- nisms of action, and pharmacokinetics are highly similar. we believe that the development of me-too compounds may yield a relatively low amount of clinical success due to their similarities, and also due to the fact that nearly identical resistance profiles will be evoked by their appli- cation. however, we would like to note that it is definitely possible for a raltegravir me-too analog to evolve into a second-generation in inhibitor. to further elucidate our viewpoint, we utilized the molecular docking program gold version . to conduct a docking study, using both the x-ray determined structure of bl in complexed with an mg + ion, and a collection of significant, above- described me-too compounds (figure ); for a detailed the evolution of pyrrolloquinolonesfigure the evolution of pyrrolloquinolones. n n f o n oh s o o n n f o n oh s o o n n n f o oh n s o o n n f o oh no o page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / procedure, see [ ]. we propose that residues essential to the compounds' interaction with in will obviously be prime candidates for resistance mutation. furthermore, we hypothesize that the test of time will show that all of these me-too inhibitors will probably exhibit highly sim- ilar resistance profiles. as raltegravir has undergone exten- sive resistance profiling since the inception of its clinical employment (table ), we first compared our predicted interaction residues (figure ) to these experimental pro- files, as a validation of the reliability of our technique. we found that five of our predicted interaction residues (t , e , y , q , and n ) have been already observed to confer a range of anywhere from - to -fold resist- ances to raltegravir inhibition of viral replication, respec- tively [ - ]. we also saw that raltegravir makes direct interactions with the three residues encompassing the in catalytic dde motif (d , d , and e ), including a hydrogen bond with the glutamate. with this technique corroboration in hand, we decided to similarly predict the interaction residues of raltegravir's progenitors and a few me-too analogues, in order to provide evidence for our assertion that these compounds will ultimately experience a low probability of success in viral eradication, due to their generation of identical resistance profiles. as s- was the first clinical in inhibitor candidate, we thought it would be interesting to evaluate the similarity between its predicted interaction profile with bl (figure ) and that of raltegravir. we found that an identical interaction occurs between the two drugs and in (d , t , d , y , q , e , and n ), but predicted an addi- tional interaction of raltegravir with e . this observation has been verified in clinical experimental resistance profil- ing, as mutation of e has not been observed for s- , but the e q mutation has conferred up to a -fold viral resistance to raltegravir [ , , ]. we next observed the interaction profile of bl with l , (figure ), as this is the naphthyridine carboxamide compound that directly led to the development of pyrimidinone carboxa- mides. we found that l , and raltegravir similarly interacted with d , t , d , q , e , and n . however, we saw here that only raltegravir interacted with e . though this residue has been observed to be mutated to a glutamine in response to l , treatment, the mutation has conferred at most only a -fold resistance to the drug, while the same mutation confers up to a -fold resistance to raltegravir (table ) [ , ]. the fact that we did not observe a significant interaction between l , and e in our docking study further confirms the relatively decreased importance of this residue in viral resistance to the compound. along the same lines, we did see an interaction of l , with v , an interaction that was not present in our docking of raltegravir. in clin- ical experimental resistance profiling, the v i mutation has been observed to confer up to an -fold resistance to l , , while the same mutation had a negligible effect on viral resistance to raltegravir (table ) [ , ]. the highly homologous naphthyridine carboxamide candi- date, l , , has shown an interaction profile virtually identical to that of l , in our docking study, and experimental resistances obtained in clinical observation have been identical as well [ , ]. as elvitegravir (gs- ) and gsk- have already been shown to exhibit near identical resistance profiles to raltegravir (table ) [ , - ], we next used our docking technique to attempt to effectively predict these interactions (figure ). for gsk- , we were able to predict the interac- tion with in residues y and q , as well as the three members of the dde motif. we then predicted that, sim- ilar to raltegravir, elvitegravir interacts with t , e , y , q , and the d and e of the dde motif. we also saw that elvitegravir interacts with g , and the g s mutation has been shown to be associated with a docking poses of selected hiv- integrase inhibitors upon the bl in crystal structurefigure docking poses of selected hiv- integrase inhibitors upon the bl in crystal structure. a, mk- ; b, s- ; c, l , ; d, gsk- ; e, gs- ; f, com- pound ; g, compound ; h, compound ; i, compound ; j, compound . a b d fe c h j g i page of (page number not for citation purposes) retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / page of (page number not for citation purposes) table : effect of single mutations on in sensitivity to clinically tested inhibitors. mutation s- l , mk- gs- gsk- t i ++ + ++ +++ + l v + + l i + + v i + ++ l m ++++ + + ++ e q ++ + ++ +++ ++ q k ++ ++ f y +++ ++ ++ +++ +++ t a + + t k + + + e k + + + + g s ++ + ++ p s ++ + q r ++ + +++ + s g ++ + ++ q h +++ +++ ++ q r ++++ +++ +++++ ++++ q k ++++ +++ ++++ +++++ v ii +++ + ++ s y ++ + ++ + n h ++ +++ +++ n s +++ ++ ++ +++ e q ++ r k ++ e q/n h ++++ ++++ f y/t k ++ ++++ g s/q h +++++ +++++ v i/f y/t k/v i +++++ +++++ fold change in potency compared to wild type: + < , ++ – , +++ – , ++++ – , +++++ > retrovirology , : http://www.retrovirology.com/content/ / / -fold viral resistance to the drug, while the same muta- tion confers only a . -fold resistance to raltegravir (table ). again, the fact that we did not observe a significant interaction between raltegravir and g in our docking study further confirms the relatively decreased importance of this residue in viral resistance to raltegravir, but rather its nature of compensation for more meaningful muta- tions, such as q h. prediction of future me-too resistance profile similarities with the above data significantly validating the reliability of our docking technique, we moved forward with the prediction of resistance profiles of selected me-too ralte- gravir analogues (figure ). here, we will describe the interactions of one of the most potent (in terms of in vitro ic inhibition of in) compounds from each of the above- described classes of me-too inhibitors with the bl in crystal structure. the dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxam- ide compound exhibited an ic value of nm against in [ ]. however, our predicted interaction profile for this compound shows that it will most likely be ineffective against raltegravir-resistant viruses. we show that com- pound interacts with bl in residues d , t , e , d , q , e , s , and n – virtually the exact binding pocket as raltegravir. the n-methylpyrimidone compound exhibited an ic value of nm against in [ ]. our predicted interaction profile for this compound encompasses the bl residues d , t , e , d , g , y , q , e , and n – virtually the exact binding pocket as raltegravir. the dihydroxypyrimido- pyrazine- , -dione compound had a moderate ic value of nm against in [ ]. our predictive docking procedure calculated an interaction profile including in residues d , e , d , and q . e q and q r mutations have already been observed to confer -fold and -fold resistances to raltegravir, respectively. the bicyclic pyrimidone compound has displayed a potent ic value of nm against in in vitro [ ]. however, our predicted interaction profile implicates the bl residues d , t , e , d , y , q , and e as contact points. this is virtually the same binding pocket as that of raltegravir. finally, the pyrrolloquinolone compound has exhibited an ic value of nm against in [ ]. again however, we show that this compound will interact with in in a considerably similar manner to that of ralte- gravir, contacting residues d , e , d , g , and e . if our predictions prove to be correct, these candi- date drugs will probably fail to replace raltegravir. though me-too evolution into a new blockbuster drug is always a possibility, the above in me-too drugs appear to have a small chance of improving the clinical outlook of hiv patients with raltegravir-resistant viral strains. conclusion as me-too drugs have been historically shown to be min- imally progressive in terms of improvement of disease prognosis, their lack of utility is exemplified in the case of hiv. a plethora of polymorphic resistance mutations have almost instantly arisen in response to both raltegra- vir and the purported second-generation in inhibitor, elvitegravir [ ]. it is clear to see that the virus is capable of eventually avoiding interaction with many a once potent inhibitor, and attempts at recreating these original interactions will most likely fall victim to the same mode of viral escape. although some pharmacokinetic proper- ties may be optimized through me-too drug development research, and some profitable drugs may be cleared for marketing, the long term efficacy of most of these drugs will likely be susceptible to the ever present mutational ultra-competence of hiv. as stated earlier, there is a thin line between drug development and me-too spawning. simple pharmacokinetic improvement can drastically augment the daily lives of patients and the quarterly prof- its of companies, but the simple fact remains that hiv will most likely not be eliminated by a % increase in oral bio- availability. dramatically diverse classes of molecules look to be required for inhibition of viral enzymes in a long term fashion. thus, in our eyes, the only hope for complete viral eradication is innovation. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. authors' contributions es and nn conceived the article. es wrote the article. so performed docking studies. kr provided information regarding novel me-too in inhibitor classes. all authors have read and approved the final manuscript. additional material references . unaids: aids epidemic update. 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the clinical trial drug s- . aids , ( ): - . . kobayashi m, nakahara k, seki t, miki s, kawauchi s, suyama a, wakasa-morimoto c, kodama m, endoh t, oosugi e, matushita y, murai h, fujishita t, yoshinaga t, garvey e, foster s, underwood m, johns b, sato a, fujiwara t: selection of diverse and clinically relevant integrase inhibitor-resistant human immunodefi- ciency virus type mutants. antiviral res , ( ): - . . kodama e, shimura k, sakagami y: in vitro antiviral activity and resistance profile of a novel hiv integrase inhibitor jtk- / gs- . th interscience conference on antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy sep – , . san francisco, ca . . nakahara k, wakasa-morimoto c, kobayashi m, miki s, noshi t, seki t, kanamori-koyama m, kawuchi s, suyama a, fujishita t, yoshinaga t, garvey ep, johns ba, foster sa, underwood mr, sato a, fujiwara t: secondary mutations in viruses resistant to hiv- inte- page of (page number not for citation purposes) 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hiv- group m integrase: implications for a new class of antiretroviral inhibitors. retrovirology , : . page of (page number not for citation purposes) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=abstract&list_uids= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=abstract&list_uids= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=abstract&list_uids= http://www.biomedcentral.com/ http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/publishing_adv.asp http://www.biomedcentral.com/ 	abstract 	overview 	the birth of the diketo acids and the emergence of raltegravir 	me-too drugs 	me-too or second generation? 	raltegravir me-too analogs 	clinically tested me-too in drugs 	mk- 	gs- (elvitegravir) 	gsk- 	bms- 	novel me-too classes 	dihydroxypyrimidine- -carboxamides 	n-methylpyrimidones 	dihydroxypyrido-pyrazine- , -diones 	bicyclic pyrimidones 	pyrrolloquinolones 	validation of resistance profiles of me-too raltegravir analogues 	prediction of future me-too resistance profile similarities 	conclusion 	competing interests 	authors' contributions 	additional material 	references building an informing science model in light of fake news volume , editorial perspective. cite as: cohen, e. ( ). building an informing science model in light of fake news. informing science: the inter- national journal of an emerging transdiscipline, , - . https://doi.org/ . / (cc by-nc . ) this article is licensed to you under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license. when you copy and redistribute this paper in full or in part, you need to provide proper attribution to it to ensure that others can later locate this work (and to ensure that others do not accuse you of plagiarism). you may (and we encour- age you to) adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any non-commercial purposes. this license does not permit you to use this material for commercial purposes. building an informing science model in light of fake news eli cohen informing science institute santa rosa, ca, usa elicohen@informingscience.org many disciplines have addressed the issue of “fake news.” this topic is of central concern to the transdiscipline of informing science, which endeavors to understand all issues related to informing. this paper endeavors to build a model to address not only fake news but all informing and misin- forming. to do this, it explores how errors get into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the models previously created to explore the complexity of informing. that is, this paper examines mod- els and frameworks proposed to explore informing in the presence of bias, misinformation, disinfor- mation, and fake news from the perspective of informing science. it concludes by introducing a more nuanced model that considers some of the topics explored in the paper. setting the stage: defining bias, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and propaganda this paper uses these working definitions of some of the keywords as they will be used in this paper, and by doing so, to present relevant research findings. ) informing occurs when, as the result of the informing process, the informed has a better and stronger understanding of reality. this paper does not concern itself with fideism or psy- chedelic revelation, for example. ) the science of misinforming crosses disciplinary boundaries. lazer et al.’s ( ) study of the science of fake news, published in science, explored fake news from the disciplinary perspectives of its authors, crossing the boundaries of network science, social science, government, law, political science, informatics and engineering, communications, govern- ment, psychology, and journalism. ) to err is human. errors in informing systems are inevitable due to constraints in psychol- ogy and technology. many occur unconsciously on the part of the informer (if there is one) or the informed. one type of these errors is due to bias. others involve other limitations in human and technological processing of information. cohen ( b) outlined four major types of such honest mistakes in informing systems, from transcription errors to solving the wrong problem. figure summarizes these errors. https://doi.org/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / mailto:elicohen@informingscience.org building an informing science model in light of fake news figure . four types of errors that create misinforming systems (source: cohen, b) ) the term bias, as used in this paper, is an element of human frailty and imperfection. it is an artifact of how our brains process information; brains have limited bandwidth for percep- tion, attention, memory, and thinking. bias is pervasive and mostly unacknowledged in sci- ence. all academic authors are biased, at the minimum in the topics they choose to explore and which to ignore. philosophers cailin o’connor and james owen weatherall’s book the misinformation age ( ) describes the role of bias in the spread of false beliefs. even technology based on human bias demonstrates bias. even artificial intelligence built on neural expert systems (learning from human decisions) absorbs bias from humans. ai trained on adult white urban males to develop best practice recommendations regarding di- agnosing medical issues, for example, are biased and so of limited use for other populations, such as youth, non-white, rural residents, and women. marshall mcluhan ( ) titled chapter of his book understanding media as “the medium is the message,” pointing out the medium used to convey a message impacts (biases) the re- ceiver. for example, images of a crying child convey a more substantial impact on the re- ceiver than providing statistics about children’s health. one type of bias often mentioned in the news, confirmation bias, is the predisposition to fo- cus our attention on and remember information that confirms our existing prejudices. it can be characterized as “my mind is made up; don’t confuse me with facts.” however, it is hardly the only bias problem for informing. a compendium archived at “list of cognitive biases” (n.d.) lists and describes almost others, including cognitive biases, social biases, and memory biases and effects. figure illustrates of these. cohen figure . cognitive biases. (source: lebowitz & lee, ) building an informing science model in light of fake news ) “misinformation” is dictionary.com’s word of the year (funke, ). misinfor- mation refers to incorrect information in general. bias and the other errors mentioned above are inherent in informing and so can lead to misinforming. misinformation can result from these problems. (for this series, misinformation is incorrect information spread without any intention to mislead.) the problem with misinformation is even more profound. as pointed out in cohen ( a, b), the future will likely disprove much of that which is now dis- seminated as information, as has happened throughout history. all information has a half- life. for example, medical science has abandoned bloodletting and our best understandings in history, paleontology, and even programming techniques are refined or replaced through- out the ages. ) disinformation is misinformation disseminated with the intention to deceive. disinformation is a relatively new word, meaning “deliberately false or distorted information given out in order to mis- lead or deceive” (wilson, , p. ). misinformation, a much older word, means “inaccurate or erroneous information, usually provided without conscious effort at misleading, deceiving or persuading one way or another… the suppression of information can, of course, play a part in [both]” (wilson, ). when disinformation is used as a weapon, the term psyop, for psychological operations, is often employed. psyops are used to influence any element of society (individual, group, gov- ernment) to act in the desired way. the term black psyops is used when psyops are “laun- dered,” that is the source of the disinformation is disguised so as to make it seem credible. former fbi special agent asha rangappa ( ) gave an example of black psyops in a twit- ter feed about how the ussr placed an article in an indian newspaper that the usa created aids to kill blacks and gays. it then cited that article in a soviet run journal as proof coming from a democratic country. spin. spin can be seen in this example of one who strives to conceal the essential implica- tions about a public hanging using words like “while attending a large public event, the indi- vidual died when the platform on which she had been standing suddenly collapsed.” in this case, the spin, while wholly accurate, hides from the reader or viewer essential facts and con- text. lakoff ( ) developed a theory on the idea of “spin” in his conceptual metaphor the- ory. o’sullivan ( ) reports, “agents of disinformation today mix factual and false information, making it more difficult for audiences to determine what is real and what is fake.” spin and terminology. britannica defines spin in politics as “the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message” (braun, n.d.). words possess both denota- tion (meanings) and connotation (feelings). they have both rational and emotional loading (condon, ). in this way, the choice of words and terminology can be used as a tool of spin. are you pro-life or pro-choice? are you for or against a “death tax” or taxing unearned inherited wealth? in other words, the terms one selects convey one’s bias. ) propaganda. lexico.com defines propaganda as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view” (“propaganda,” n.d.). propaganda draws upon the public relations techniques created by the american edward bernays for applying techniques of psychology to influence people’s thinking. bernays, the double nephew of sig- mund freud, is considered a father of public relations, modern advertising, and psychologi- cal warfare, and his books, including crystallizing public opinion ( ) and propaganda ( ), delve into his ideas. his “accomplishments” include convincing the public to use dis- posable paper dixie cups instead of glassware and making it socially acceptable and desirable for women to smoke cigarettes. propaganda works because, as reed anfinson ( ) points out, the truth cannot compete with it on social media. newman ( ) found that social media is preferred as the source for news, beating out television and printed news. fake news blossoms on social media since anyone can publish with fact-checking. cohen ) the term agitprop refers to political propaganda in popular media, particularly those com- ing out of the ussr, including films, plays, and literature as well as on social media and fake news. ) narratives and false narratives. narratives are stories about real or imagined events. these stories may find their basis in objective facts or, for false narratives, are based in full or in part on artificiality. narratives and the words used to express them deliver both objective (denotative) and emo- tive (connotative) content. they can be used to convey the truth (either objective truth or a more in-depth understanding about a significant issue), spin the truth, or, in the case of false narratives, convey falsehoods. garry and wade ( ) found that false narratives are potent ways to deceive. their study found that while fake photographs lead to false memories in their experimental study’s sub- jects, false narratives produce even stronger fake impressions. ) fake news is a type of disinformation circulated as truthful news. it was dictionary.com’s word of the year for (funke, ). often fake news is used to support a false narra- tive. it may be created and disseminated to disinform, for example, as propaganda, and for other reasons, such as using it as clickbait for gaining personal profit. we need to be wary when defining “fake” since simply being incorrect does not make infor- mation fake. for instance, it may be just stale information. information has a limited useful life, the period between when it is generated until it is corrected. for example, current devel- opments make obsolete the teachings of history, paleontology, and even programming tech- niques. second, honest mistakes are part of life. eyewitnesses get things wrong; memory is malleable and fallible (cohen, a, b; garry & wade, ; loftus, ). ) trust (and mistrust) of potential sources of information. a study conducted by new- man, fletcher, kalogeropoulos, and nielsen ( ) found that there is a decline in the trust given to news media worldwide. they write, “less than half ( %) agree that they trust the news me- dia they themselves use” (p. ). similarly, newman ( ) writes, “various forms of misinformation is helping to further undermine trust in media.” putting this together, alarmingly, we are seeing a spi- ral of fake news from social media that contradicts factual reporting of news by the media undermining trust in the fact-based news reports. ) framing, spin, and selection of terminology. the term framing has a variety of mean- ings and definitions. a simplified version of the term is seen on a website that calls itself “psychology students’ best friend” (“framing,” n.d.). it defines framing as selecting how to phrase a question to elicit the preferred response. similarly, myers ( ) defines it as determining which facts to include in an argument and which to exclude. likewise, linvill and warren ( ) write, “is- sues that have been central to important social movements like black lives matter and #metoo — they are framed to serve russia’s interests in undermining americans’ trust in our institutions.” these definitions use the term as a synonym for spin, the deliberate and intentional filtering in the conveying (telling) of an event. (another definition not used here is the one by psychologists and econ- omists who follow the technical definition provided by tversky and kahneman, . for them, framing refers to a type of cognitive bias that, when given two choices yielding identi- cal outcomes, lead people to avoid risk when the alternatives are wording in one way but seek risk when the same alternatives are worded differently.) the choice of which facts to present and particularly how they are processed, sequenced, and formatted has a significant effect on what impact they will have on the informed. fram- ing can be used as a mask to conceal intentions. those seeking to destroy can use framing to building an informing science model in light of fake news mask their message as one of peace. those seeking to divide can present messages that ap- pear to be of solidarity. figure graphically illustrates this idea. this definition of framing is similar to the one for political spin, which was defined in the encyclopedia britannica as “the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message” (braun, n.d.). figure . spin and framing can mask the message. (source: ministry of strategic affairs and public diplomacy, ). ) information dominance creates illusory truth. the term information dominance refers to a source or view having a significant influence on the thoughts and opinions of the in- formed. the importance of this is that people tend to believe that which comes readily to mind. adolf hitler wrote in mein kampf that “slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea.” hasher, goldstein, and toppino ( ) and fazio, brashier, payne & marsh ( ) empiri- cally verified hitler’s observation. they found in their study that subjects rated repeated statements as more probably true than new statements. repetition gives an illogical basis for truth, the illusion of truth. more recently, effron and raj ( ) found similar results, and de keersmaeacker et al. ( ) found that the results are valid across all types of cognition styles. likewise, people tend to look for information sources to confirm their existing bias. in the us, fox news is the dominant news source for people whose beliefs place them on one end of a political spectrum, while msnbc is the dominant source for those on the other end (grynbaum, ). in countries without access to a free press, information dominance is even more pronounced. information must be available to have an impact on beliefs. in short, several factors influence people’s beliefs, including the availability of information, repetition, framing, including the connotation of the verbiage used, and cognitive biases. this begs the ques- tions, does reality have anything to do with beliefs and, for that matter, what is truth? philosophical underpinning for truth bernstein ( ) examined knowledge from the viewpoints of various disciplines. an even more fun- damental assumption in the study of fake news and disinformation is that there is such a thing as truth and reality. if not, are not facts the same as opinions and opinions as facts? what do philosophers think about reality? this brief exploration leads us down a lewis carroll rabbit hole on a difficult journey full of problems. cohen the three main areas of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. all three relate to an examination of informing, misinforming, disinforming, and promoting fake news. the paper now looks at each in turn. m etaph ysics the metaphysical field of ontology examines the nature of reality. to assert that this is true and that is false assumes a shared vision of reality. truth and falsity rely on sharing a mutual sense of reality. keep in mind that science, including the transdiscipline of informing science, assumes that a unique understanding of reality exists. this point is recognized by gackowski ( ), who relates metaphysics to the issue of informing. his paper shows how the thoughts of philosopher arthur schopenhauer relate to the issue of informing, particularly schopenhauer’s ideas on will, representation, and the interplay between them. gackowski writes that arthur schopenhauer’s concept “is a logical equivalent to a contemporary information model of deci- sion situations in which one takes inventory of what is already known by the decision-maker (data), what is not yet known and must be acquired (information), and the applicable rules of reasoning (knowledge)” (p. ). epistem ology the philosophical field of epistemology considers the nature of knowledge and so relates to distin- guishing justified belief from opinion. it examines the nature of truth, belief, and justification. modern science imposes its own rules for accepting something as real, based on observations and ex- perimentation. to be accepted as factual, phenomena need to be observable, replicable, and testable. these conditions are not required for what might be called religious truth, by which truth may be re- vealed in the writings of sacred texts. a related epistemological concept is skepticism, a questioning of the truth even of a commonly held, putative, belief. at a time that socrates argued with sophists that the goal of discourse should be the search for truth, he identified in his sophistical refutations (sophistici elenchi), thirteen fallacies used by sophists. the relevance for today’s topic is that these fallacies are used by today’s sophists to argue and spin the truth. this point is particularly relevant in that few models in the informing science per- spective deal adequately with deliberate disinforming. logic and semantics. logic is a tool of epistemology. semantics is the field of study in linguistics and philosophy that studies meaning in language and, more recently, in programming languages. the theory of semantic information applies formal logic to the study of communications. see, for exam- ple, floridi ( ). words can be viewed as symbols to represent information, but words have limitations: ( ) inexacti- tude (hence specialized vocabulary) not only in denotation, but also connotation (emotive elements); ( ) words contain non-verbal elements (context, tone and quality of voice used, and facially expres- sion in oral use and placement on page, email for written, or placement in a radio broadcast, for ex- ample). some positions attract attention while others dissuade attention. christopher john fox ( , p. ) took the following formal logic approach of applying logic to discerning information from disinformation and informing from misinforming.  x misinforms y that p if  x informs y that p, and  p is false building an informing science model in light of fake news eth ics the issue of ethics in the context of informing has been explored from the viewpoint of journalism (e.g., see borden & tew, ; for survey research conducted by the pew research center, see pew research center (n.d.) even ethical issues around the epidemiology of fake news has been examined (kucharski, ). from the perspective of informing science, wang and lu ( ) looked at the is- sue of the ethics of misinformation on online (cyber) dating sites. on a less perilous theme, grant and cohen ( ) delve into the ethics in holy scriptures when the divine dissembles. even museums, which, like libraries, are society’s bastion for knowledge collection and display of truth, are under fire for operating with policies that run counter to the changing ethical norms. prac- tices there were once viewed as ethical at times now raise ethical criticisms. for example, museums are now coming under fire for providing defective or politically incorrect interpretations of various subject matters, ranging from dinosaurs to the displaying of cultural artifacts. museums must now confront the question of whether relics of ancient civilizations should be retained for display to edu- cate their nation’s public or should they be returned to the lands from whence they were collected, notes rothstein ( ). in sum, philosophers and philosophies do not have a definitive answer to the question if truth exists. the paper now turns to the question of “is the truth required in order to inform?” does informing require truth? the above briefly points out major philosophical areas and highlights a question for informing sci- ence regarding truth. does informing require truth or even its existence? how have researchers in the informing science arena explored these issues? stahl ( ) examines how modern philosophies understand the nature of and necessity for truth. his paper examines the question from the perspectives of jürgen habermas and michel foucault and notes that these philosophers do not agree on the nature of truth. it further concludes that all re- search is biased based on the researcher’s biases and is influenced more by the researchers’ values than by truth. as shown in figure , gill posits that some things can be useful even if they are not true (gill, ). scarantino and piccinini ( ) and lundgren ( ) explore the topic of value in untruth from a metaphilosophical perspective. readers with a philosophical bent who are interested in the bar-hil- lel–carnap paradox and the scandal of deduction should read gorsky ( ). the crux of these pa- pers is that informing can occur in the absence of truth. figure . models, theories and conceptual schemes (source: gill, ). cohen in a related way, bednar and welch ( ), using a semiotic approach, derive a complementary con- clusion that even those endeavoring to provide the truth can misinform. their paper contrasts the logical empiricist school of thought with that of hermeneutic dialectics and concludes that philo- sophical underpinnings create what they term a tyranny of ‘truth.’ together, these two conclusions lead to the perplexing quandary that ( ) one can be informed in the absence of truth, and ( ) true statements can misinform. this difficulty may lead us to question the value of truth. does truth matter or are we now living in an age of post-truth? post-truth if truth and falsity grow from sharing a common sense of reality, what happens when a shared sense of reality is lacking? the term for this is post-truth. the oxford dictionary declared “post-truth” as its word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less in- fluential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (“word of the year is …”, n.d.). (likewise, in the same year dictionary.com named it the word of the year [funke, ]). illing ( ) defines post-truth more succinctly as “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth.” sacha baron cohen ( ) said in his acceptance speech upon receiving adl’s international leadership award, “the age of reason, the era of evidential argument, is ending … democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat and autocracy which depends on shared lies is on the march.” martin shovel’s cartoon ( ), dis- played as figure , expresses this idea more playfully. figure . truth vs. post-truth (source: shovel, ) the quest then is to create a model or framework of informing considering alternative understand- ings of reality. for the most part, the models of informing and disinforming created so far require the assumption of a shared sense of reality; from many philosophical perspectives, this shared sense is a requirement for truth. however, as witnessed by the many religious wars throughout history, humans have argued over and gone to war over different sources for the truth. one group’s sense of divine revelation is for others but a myth. even today, members of the us congress wage war on eviden- tiary reality, some denying facts or offering opinions as facts (kroll, ). linvill, boatwright, grant, and warren ( ) and linvill and warren ( ) explore the importance of post-truth as a feature of fake news and propaganda, pointing out that adversaries create dissension via fake news to disrupt and divide us by manufacturing alternative narratives of reality. building an informing science model in light of fake news with this in mind, the paper now explores some of the many models or frameworks put forth for in- forming science to date. these models require and assume a single source for truth and reality. the paper then concludes with an initial framework that removes this “truth” assumption by dealing with alternative sources for the truth. the final model further adds the dimension of competition in the informing process. shannon-weaver basic model for communications and adaptations for misinformation and disinformation the most common frameworks for informing are elaborations of the shannon-weaver communica- tions model (shannon & weaver, , p. ), depicted as figure , to explain the magic that occurs to get information from a source to its destination. the shannon-weaver model notes that this magic includes a transmitter, signal, noise, and a receiver. figure . the shannon-weaver basic model for communications. the shannon-weaver basic model is often used to explore human communications, yet shannon and weaver never intended for the framework to be used outside of mathematical information theory. carnap and bar-hillel ( ) quote shannon as writing, “these semantic aspects of communication are ir- relevant to the engineering problem” and “it is important to emphasize, at the start, that we are not concerned with the meaning or the truth of messages; semantics lies outside the scope of mathematical information theory.” nonetheless, the model is useful for explaining the “magic” that must occur between the sender and the receiver for humans to be informed. the model spawned myriads of adaptations and refine- ments, some of which are shown below. for example, one team of researchers has, for over a decade, used the model to examine risk in the informing and misinforming processes. christozov, chuckova, and mateev ( ) adapted the shan- non-weaver model to account for both misinformation and interpretation and applied it to create a mathematical assessment of risk. figure displays their model. over the next decade, the researchers continued to develop the model’s underlying mathematics. cohen figure . a model to account for misinformation in the communications process. (source: christozov et al., ) cohen ( ) adapted the shannon-weaver model by collapsing the transmitter-signal-receiver com- ponents as “media magic” and instead focused on the people, the informer, and the client (informed) and did so from an informing science perspective, as seen in figure . that paper brought forth the environment (or context) of both – their needs, and their biases. figure . cognitive aspects of an informing system. (source: cohen, ) building an informing science model in light of fake news jamieson and hyland ( ) expanded the shannon-weaver model by adding details on the role of bias in an informing system, including information bias, cognitive bias, risk bias, and uncertainty bias, as seen in figure . figure . bias in an informing system (source: jamieson & hyland, ) building on jamieson and hyland, gill ( ) further explored the filters between the sender and the client, as shown in figure , in the client resonance model by explicitly including filters for the chan- nel, attention, risk, and more. figure . gill’s client resonance model (source: gill, ). cohen figure . single client resonance model mapped against the success framework. fake news often addresses these questions. (source: gill, ) in , gill added balloon explanations to combine the single client resonance model he created in with the success framework of heath and heath ( ). fake news purveyors often comply with the specifications of this model, he writes. see figure the above models are but a representative sampling of efforts to adapt the shannon-weaver model to the complexities of human communications. the paper now presents yet another attempt. this latest attempt adds the complexity derived from earlier in this paper, that there is no single source for truth and untruth and that there is a competition of informational sources. t h e competition fram ework the paper now provides creating a fuller model that deals with some of the elements addressed above. the models above rely on a single source for information and use a single sender. in life, there are multiple sources of messages (informers, misinformers, and disinformers), and there are multiple channels for obtaining information. the following adaptation recognizes multiple, alterna- tive information sources all in competition for attention. the fuller model recognizes the following: a) facts and artifacts. both objective truth and false narratives present artifacts that compete for attention, to inform or misinform. some messages use artifacts drawn from objective truth while others use artifacts drawn from false narratives building an informing science model in light of fake news b) objective truth is not necessarily reflective of reality. as philosopher vladimir mokiy (personal communication) points out, even objective observed truth does not always reflect reality. as shown in figure , objectively, the spoon in water appears to be bent, yet in real- ity, it is not. only an appropriately bent spoon will appear straight when placed in water. c) honest and dishonest reporters. some informers, even those who make an honest effort to convey objective truth, are influenced by numerous biases and agendas that filter and bias their endeavors. other informers strive to advance a false narrative through spin and disin- formation. d) trust affects information’s impact. trust in the source is important, but even friends and others who are trusted will, from time to time, convey messages (rumors, gossip, retweets of fake news, and such) that have no or limited objective basis. e) filtering occurs throughout the informing system. all informers and informees (the ones who receive the message) operate under the limitations of various filters. these filters include biases and agendas, the strength of the signal, and trust. figure . vladimir mokiy (personal communication) figure . a framework for informing (source: cohen, b). cohen while not explicitly stated in figure , the informer selects, processes, sequences, and formats the artifacts to best meet informee’s needs. that is, the word model of informing science shown in fig- ure remains useful. it suggests that to understand informing we need to analyze the selection of artifacts, the processing applied to the artifacts (in light of the various filters), how these artifacts are presented (their sequence and formatting), and the problems the clients (informee) face given their current knowledge and uncertainties and their biases and filters. filters and noise. the informer is biased, not the least of which as to which artifacts (such as news item) to notice (perceive) and attend. that is both a perceptual issue as well as an issue of attention (perception and memory), and so the research on these areas bears consideration. other filters are trust, context, aspirations, and personal history. similarly, the receiver (informed or informee) has its own set of filters. the channel itself imposes filters. also, the channels themselves impose their own filters. for ex- ample, in newspapers the selection of the news is made in light of the biases of the editor and the headline writer, the placement of the article in the newspaper, what other news is competing for this space, the amount of space given the article, and, if available space is limited, what to omit. advanta- geous placement, amount of space/time given, and repetition strengthen a message’s impact. these same types of filters exist in stocking groceries in stores, listing news on websites, and beyond. news programs on radio and tv are of fixed length, so their editors select which news items to include and exclude and how much length to provide to each. with this in mind, figure offers the following; an initial informing science framework that re- moves the assumption of the singularity of truth and reality and that provides a multi-source frame- work for understanding informing, misinforming, and disinforming. to save space, this rendering of the framework omits the lines connecting boxes to boxes from left to right. each box on the left connects to the box on its right. this figure shows only one set of boxes for the filtered informer, channel, and informee but understand that these boxes with a white background are replicated for each information source. for example, the new york times newspaper has its own filters, channel filter, and informee filter as does each news radio source and each email source. the models in this paper all reflect an idealized framework for understanding how information and disinformation sources influence people. researchers are now endeavoring to understand how disin- formation impacts people and their decision making. an upcoming paper by brashier and marsh ( ) affirms that people more readily accept information that fits their biases and to which they have ready access; repetition of lies makes them more believable. a recently published paper by cor- onel, poulsen, and sweitzer ( ) shows experimentally that people tend to believe as true infor- mation provided to them, but their biases affect what they remember. in the experiment, subjects told others what they had just learned. the study found that people can and do generate their own misinformation. people’s biases impact not only which messages hold their attention, but also how they remember those messages. people’s biases garble how people remember the message and also on how people tell the message to others. via this process, people self-generate misinformation. building an informing science model in light of fake news figure . multi-source competition framework for understanding informing, misinforming, and disinforming. an array of informing artifacts, only some drawn from objective truth, are available to the informer. the informer’s filters impact which artifacts receive attention when packaging a message and placing it into one or more informing channels. channels them- selves have filters often based on limited bandwidth (space) and channels compete for the attention of the informee. informees have their own filters for what messages they will re- ceive and which will impact their beliefs. conclusion the issue of informing and disinforming crosses many disciplinary perspectives. each discipline puts on blinders that limits what it can contribute to its understanding of research topics. it is like trying to study a forest by seeing only the trees and not the animals or the animals but not the trees. re- search perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries are needed to more fully understand complex phenomena. this paper lays out some fundamental cross-disciplinary issues including how errors find their way into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the frameworks used to model this phenomenon. future developments. this paper is just a start. the elements of the competition model need to be fleshed out and then tested to determine their explanatory power. limitations: the concluding framework offers insights into understanding informing and disinform- ing. but this framework offers no insights into other forms of informing that are less well explored, such as song, dance, physical art, and architecture. likewise, this framework does nothing to help the understanding of informing via fideism or psychedelic revelation. cohen references anfinson, r. 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( ). the framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. science, ( ), - . retrieved from http://pages.ucsd.edu/~aronatas/project/aca- demic/tversky% and% kahneman% framing.pdf and https://doi.org/ . /science. wang, h., & lu, x. a. ( ). cyberdating: misinformation and (dis)trust in online interaction. informing science: the international journal of an emerging transdiscipline, , - . https://doi.org/ . / wilson, k. g. ( ), the columbia guide to standard american english. retrieved from http://citese- erx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf word of the year is … (n.d.). oxford dictionaries. retrieved from https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the- year/word-of-the-year- biography eli cohen serves as a governor and executive director of the informing science institute. he focuses his current research on bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. http://pages.ucsd.edu/% earonatas/project/academic/tversky% and% kahneman% framing.pdf http://pages.ucsd.edu/% earonatas/project/academic/tversky% and% kahneman% framing.pdf https://doi.org/ . /science. https://doi.org/ . / http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year- https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year- 	building an informing science model in light of fake news 	setting the stage: defining bias, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and propaganda 	philosophical underpinning for truth 	metaphysics 	epistemology 	ethics 	does informing require truth? 	post-truth 	shannon-weaver basic model for communications and adaptations for misinformation and disinformation 	the competition framework 	conclusion 	references 	biography russell, y. ( ). book review: rape and resistance. social and legal studies, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / peer reviewed version link to published version (if available): . / link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the author accepted manuscript (aam). the final published version (version of record) is available online via sage at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/f e f -ea b- - - a b d a https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/f e f -ea b- - - a b d a linda martÍn alcoff, rape and resistance. cambridge: polity, , pp. , isbn: - - - , £ . (pbk). linda m. alcoff’s book rape and resistance makes a timely entry into the small but lively canon of feminist theoretical work on sexual violence. the first major work of theory to be written after the #metoo movement and cultural phenomenon commenced, alcoff’s aim is to maximise the current moment of political visibility of sexual violence to engender social change (pp. - ). she urges us to resist shying away from the complexity of sexual violence, and to eschew simplistic binary categories and claims, often caricatured in accounts of feminist discourse on sexual violence, that rape is about power but not sex (p. ). in framing the current political moment, alcoff relies on josé medina’s notion of ‘meta- lucidity’, which refers to how we come to know, and how we may be impeded in knowing (medina ). meta-lucid subjects, explains alcoff, ‘are those who are aware of the effects of oppression in our cognitive structures and of the limitations in the epistemic practices grounded in relations of oppression’ (p. ). in order to foster a community of meta-lucid subjects who can mobilise in resistance to sexual violence, two other aspects of medina’s framework are necessary. a moment of reckoning brought on by the tension in conflicting knowledge claims, or ‘epistemic friction’, is required to ‘motivate change in our conventional norms and practices of knowing’ (p. ). epistemic friction must also be accompanied by a process of ‘echoing’: making portable a claim or idea across contexts (p. ). the current political moment is such a time in which the epistemic friction around sexual violence has the potential to produce a polity with enhanced meta-lucidity (p. ). a key factor in continuing this process, says alcoff, is to increase the circulation of survivor speech. survivor testimony is the key to generating the epistemic friction necessary to encourage meta- lucidity. but for this to have purchase we must rework the discursive conditions that interpret and circulate our speech (p. ). in order to do this, alcoff presents a new agenda for theory centred around six key points (pp. - ). these include developing venues of communication, further educating the public on the history of intersecting oppressive structures, and an exaltation to ‘push back against the hegemony of the legal domain’ (p. ). alcoff returns to familiar theoretical territory in her appraisal of anti-rape politics, by relying on foucault to both understand the harm of rape and to think about the question of resistance. his framework, she argues, advances a theoretical agenda ‘necessary for the movement’s progress’ (p. ). alcoff’s analysis of the value of narrative and the importance of investing survivor speech with epistemic authority is the central theoretical focus of the book, and is a welcome contribution to the literature on rape, feminism and the ‘speak out’ (see further: brown ; cahill ; gavey , heberle ; mardorossian ; scott ; serisier ). alcoff argues for centring survivor experience to the feminist project of resistance to rape. experience, she notes, is not ‘pre-theoretical’, nor is theory separable from experience (p. ). social change, therefore, does not need to ‘get beyond’ the personal narrative or even the confessional in order to become political, but rather needs to analyze the various effects of the confessional in different contexts and struggle to create discursive spaces in which we can maximize its socially transformative effects (p. ). what does need to transform, however, so that we can hear the truly subversive speech of the survivor, are the arrangements of speaking in which survivors are rarely authorized to act ‘as both witnesses and experts, reporters of experience and theorists of experience’ (p. ). while gender haunts the pages of alcoff’s book, it is never addressed as a central category for theoretical attention. women are the ‘hermeneutically weaker’ party, upon whom the burden of consent falls (p. ), consent as a concept is ill-equipped to protect women (p. ), women and girls are disproportionately targeted for sexual violence with little historical or geographical variance (p. ), and we cannot assume that women have today attained the status of free and equal members of society (p. ). this lacuna in the analysis is starkest in alcoff’s attempt to think sexual subjectivity. our central concern with sexual violations, she says, ‘should be their inhibiting and transformative effects on sexual subjectivity or self-making capacities’ (p. ). alcoff turns to foucault’s care of the self to ground this understanding of sexual subjectivity as central to the process of self-making. through attentiveness to one’s self and one’s own sexual imaginary, ‘human beings across historical and cultural difference’ can craft a reflexive self capable of developing a sexual subjectivity (p. ). alcoff notes both that the ‘…problem of sexual violation cannot be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself’ (p. ) and ‘the empirical findings also make clear that ideologies about gender and sexual differences have an impact on what things we do sexually, and who does them’ (p. ). however, critical attention to the particularities of sexual difference are still not addressed. instead we need a ‘more open-ended conception of sexuality’ (pp. - ) like the one foucault’s framework provides, which has the capacity to understand a ‘model of causation that is plausibly holistic and multi-dimensional, incorporating material and social elements as well as the vagaries of individual interpretation, all in mediated relations with one another…’ (p. ). this will involve rethinking key concepts like desire and pleasure, and problematising the hermeneutic hegemony of consent. alcoff attests to the centrality to the feminist project of creating the conditions in which women can ‘speak for themselves’ when they speak of sexual violation (p. ). however, she asserts this having paid no attention to what a specific feminine sexual subjectivity would entail. attempting, perhaps, to avoid the dreaded gender binary (she intimates as much, see p. ) alcoff, i would argue, advances a programme that stops short of doing what it says it will do: she insists on sexual subjectivity as central to her agenda for theory and resistance, but her attempt to do this without any reference to sexual subjectivity as sexed means that her analysis waives the opportunity to truly think sex and sexuality differently. given the key concerns of the book, louise du toit’s work is a notable omission. du toit’s book a philosophical investigation of rape ( ) addresses the question of sexual subjectivity in great detail and attempts the difficult process of rethinking the feminine outside the monologic of normative neutral (masculine) subjecthood. she does this in a way that neither reifies essentialist notions of womanhood, nor forecloses the possibilities of multiple morphologies of difference. reference to drucilla cornell’s dynamic re-thinking of feminine sexuality in political context in the imaginary domain ( ) may have also assisted here, particularly in light of alcoff’s acknowledgment that access to one’s own sexual imaginary is crucial to the project of rethinking sexual subjectivity (p. ), and the process of ‘concernful and agential self-making’ (p. ). alcoff concludes rape and resistance with a call for a thoroughly intersectional feminist anti-rape agenda, in which privileged women no longer function as the paradigmatic victim (p. ), and there is a shared commitment to developing our understanding of how all forms of oppression exacerbate the problems of sexual violence (p. ). her call is one well-made and her commitment throughout this text to centre multiple or indeed the work of elizabeth grosz ( ) whose research on experimental desire includes a fruitful engagement with foucault. and intersecting forms of oppression is a brave and necessary intervention into this body of literature. she insists that anti-rape strategies that focus on individualising defensive responses to sexual violence must give way to ‘concrete forms of justice’ which approach the needs of different communities in a holistic way (p. ) and, importantly, links the fight against rape to the fight against imperialism and for democracy (p. ). while i am not in agreement with important theoretical interventions in this book, it is a compelling and thought-provoking contribution to the field and is likely to demand attention for many years to come. yvette russell university of bristol, uk references brown w ( ) states of injury. princeton university press. cahill a j ( ) rethinking rape. cornell university press. cornell d ( ) the imaginary domain: abortion, pornography and sexual harassment. routledge. du toit l ( ) a philosophical investigation of rape: the making and unmaking of the feminine self. routledge. gavey n ( ) just sex? the cultural scaffolding of rape. routledge. grosz, e a ( ) space, time, and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies. routledge. heberle r ( ) ‘deconstructive strategies and the movement against sexual violence’ hypatia ( ): - . mardorossian c m ( ) ‘towards a new feminist theory of rape.’ signs ( ): - . medina j ( ) the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford university press. scott j w ( ) ‘“experience”’ in feminists theorize the political, eds. butler j and scott j w pp. - . routledge. serisier t ( ) speaking out: feminism, rape and narrative politics. palgrave macmillan demand, distribution, productivity, structural change, and (secular?) stagnation working paper no. demand, distribution, productivity, structural change, and (secular?) stagnation by michalis nikiforos levy economics institute of bard college january the levy economics institute working paper collection presents research in progress by levy institute scholars and conference participants. the purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals. levy economics institute of bard college, founded in , is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the united states and abroad. levy economics institute p.o. box annandale-on-hudson, ny - http://www.levyinstitute.org copyright © levy economics institute all rights reserved issn - x abstract the present paper emphasizes the role of demand, income distribution, endogenous productivity reactions, and other structural changes in the slowdown of the growth rate of output and productivity that has been observed in the united states over the last four decades. in particular, it is explained that weak net export demand, fiscal conservatism, and the increase in income inequality have put downward pressure on demand. up until the crisis, this pressure was partially compensated for through debt-financed expenditure on behalf of the private sector, especially middle- and lower-income households. this debt overhang is now another obstacle in the way of demand recovery. in turn, as emphasized by the kaldor-verdoorn law and the induced technical change approach, the decrease in demand and the stagnation of wages can lead to an endogenous slowdown in productivity growth. moreover, it is argued that the increasingly oligopolistic and financialized structure of the us economy also contributes to the slowdown. finally, the paper argues that there is nothing secular about the current stagnation; addressing the aforementioned factors can allow for growth to resume, as has happened in the past. keywords: stagnation; demand; distribution; technical change; institutions jel classifications: e ; e ; e ; e ; e ; e ; o . introduction secular stagnation refers to the tendency of the real gdp growth rate in the united states and other capitalist economies to decrease and remain low. indeed, as we can see in figure a, the us economy experienced robust growth in the three decades between and . however, the average real gdp growth rate never recovered from the “stagflation” crisis of the s. if anything, the average growth rate decreased slightly in the s and s, and then collapsed in the first two decades of the new millennium. the average real gdp growth rate for the s and s was below percent. the trend in productivity is not as clear. in the same figure we can see that the growth rate of productivity decreased in the s and s, then recovered in the following two decades, and has collapsed together with the growth rate of output after the great recession of – . figure b presents the trajectories of real gdp in every postwar economic recovery. two things stand out. first is that the last three recoveries have clearly been the slowest in the postwar period. second, the current recovery, which started in the third quarter of , is the slowest of them all. figure c shows that labor productivity’s growth in the current recovery is also the slowest among all postwar recoveries (a fact that corroborates the collapse of productivity in the s in figure c). finally, despite the low productivity growth, the increase in the employment-to-population ratio also stands out as the slowest among all postwar recoveries (figure d). the term “secular stagnation” was coined by alvin hansen ( , ) in response to the great depression and the sharp downturn of – . hansen proposed a demand-based explanation for the us economy’s tendency to stagnate. investment opportunities, according to his explanation, had declined because of the decline in the expansion of the markets, slower population growth, and new technologies that were less capital intensive. hansen framed his theory in terms of knut wicksel’s loanable funds approach for the determination of the interest rate (e.g., hansen , ) and for that reason he has been the starting point of recent new keynesian discussions of figure : main macroeconomic variables source: bureau of economic analysis note: panel (a) presents the average growth rate of the two variables by decade. panels (b)–(d) present the trajectories of the respective variables in each postwar business cycle (trough to peak). the value for each cycle’s trough is normalized to . stagnation. joseph schumpeter ( ) criticized hansen’s explanation and attributed the downturn to the new deal policies that were hostile to businesses (and the heroic schumpeterian entrepreneur). part of this “stagnation circle” at harvard at this time, first as a student and then as an instructor, was paul sweezy, who wrote extensively on stagnation in the following decades, but from a more marxian vantage point (e.g., baran and sweezy ; sweezy ). finally, another important contribution in the postwar period was made by joseph steindl ( ). however, the postwar period’s relatively robust growth led to a demise in the interest in stagnation. it was only after the recent crisis and the developments summarized in figure that                                                         for a history of the idea of secular stagnation, see backhouse and boianovsky ( ). there has been a revival of interest and contributions discussing the prospect of stagnation in the us economy. two approaches have been put forward by neoclassical economists. first, robert gordon ( ) provides a purely supply-side explanation, where the slowdown in output and productivity growth is due to an exogenous slowdown in innovation. on the other hand, new keynesian economists (e.g., summers ; krugman ) have offered demand-based explanations. as usual in new keynesian models, demand plays a role because of nominal rigidities—in this case it was the so-called zero lower bound of the interest rate. the present paper provides an alternative explanation that emphasizes the role of demand in the slowdown of output growth, but in a more straightforward way and without resorting to nominal rigidities. it will be argued that the us economy experienced three main shocks to demand between the through the s. first, there was a decrease in the us economy’s net exports, as foreign producers managed to outcompete american producers. second, starting in the s, the traditional keynesian macroeconomic management of the economy was abandoned in favor of fiscal conservatism; the fiscal policy of the s and the s has no precedent in the postwar us economic history. finally, another important change in recent decades has been the increase in income inequality. from a demand point of view, the increase in inequality implies the transfer of income shares from households with a high propensity to consume to households with a low propensity to consume and puts negative pressure on consumption. to the extent that redistribution does not lead to increases in investment or exports that compensate for the decrease in consumption (which has been the case recently), the increase in inequality also has a negative effect on aggregate demand. it is also important to note that the negative effects of these developments on demand were compensated for, especially until the crisis of , with the private sector’s debt-financed expenditure. in the aftermath of the crisis, households’ debt overhang is another factor that contributes to slow consumption growth. these changes also have important consequences for productivity growth. as emphasized by a long line of economists going back to adam smith, changes in the growth rate of output affect technical change. hence, a negative demand shock that leads to a decrease in output growth can also have secondary negative effects on productivity growth. second, as emphasized by karl marx, and more recently by the theory of induced technical change, the main motive for the introduction of labor-saving technical change is the cost of labor. when the cost of labor stagnates, the incentive for capitalists to introduce new production techniques with higher labor productivity diminishes. hence, besides its demand effect, the increase in inequality also accounts for the slowdown in productivity. moreover, overindebted firms are also less likely to innovate as they struggle to repay their debt. finally, two more related aspects of the us economy’s structural transformation are worth mention. one of them is the financialization of the us economy, which has increased the size and influence of the financial sector. an important aspect of this process has been the decoupling of investment from cash flows. over the last four decades, corporations increasingly use their profits on paying dividends and share buybacks instead of investment. this has an obvious effect on demand and productivity growth. second, the same period has also seen an increase in the monopoly power of large corporations. large monopolies contribute to stagnation because they tend to invest less, they have less incentive to innovate, and, because of entry barriers, they also have a negative effect on other firms’ innovation. . neoclassical explanations of secular stagnation a recent well-known explanation of the slowdown in output and productivity growth has been provided by gordon ( ) in his book, the rise and fall of american growth, which examines the us economy’s growth performance over the last one-and-a-half centuries. gordon argues that in the century after the civil war ( – ) there was synchronous technological advancement on many different fronts: the advent of electricity and indoor plumbing; the introduction of trains, motors, and later airplanes in transportation (replacing horses as the main transportation means since antiquity); the improvement in telecommunications; and the introduction of assembly-line production. these changes revolutionized production and formed the basis for the rapid output and productivity growth over this period, and, together with other improvements, such as medical advances or the introduction of air conditioning—only an american could give such a central role to air conditioning—led to a rapid improvement in living standards and an increase in life expectancy by years (from to years) over the same period. however, gordon argues these tautochronous technological changes in the century after the civil war were a historical coincidence. he attributes the slower growth of productivity and output of the last fifty years to technical change being concentrated only in the information and telecommunication sectors, and, as a result, not having the all-encompassing and revolutionary effect of the previous period. he concludes that there is no reason to expect that in the future technical change will accelerate and criticizes this belief as naive techno-optimism. finally, he attributes part of the slowdown in output growth to demographic factors. gordon’s argument is consistent with the neoclassical approach to growth. in the steady state of the canonical neoclassical growth model (ramsey ; solow ), the growth rate of output is determined by the natural growth rate—the sum of (harrod-neutral) technical change and population growth—both of which are exogenous. hence, the rapid growth of the period – was due to a coincidental exogenous increase in the natural growth rate. in turn, the secular stagnation of the last fifty years is the result of a decrease in the natural rate, which is also exogenous. gordon’s book is a very interesting presentation of the us economic history of the last century and a half; however, his main argument suffers on many fronts. first, it completely disregards the role of effective demand and focuses entirely on supply-side factors. as keynes and kalecki emphasized, we cannot understand the workings of a modern capitalist economy without reference to demand. for example, it is very hard to make sense of the recent crisis and the slow recovery that has followed without an examination of demand factors. second, there is a long economic tradition that goes back to smith and marx, which emphasizes the endogenous character of                                                         for a methodological discussion of this, which argues that the relevance of aggregate demand in the short and long run is an essential feature of capitalism, see nikiforos ( ). technical change. from this point of view, the rapid technical change of the last two centuries in the united states and other capitalist economies is not exogenous, but rather due to some basic characteristics of capitalist accumulation. hence, we should try to understand what factors have contributed to the slowdown of technical change. finally, and this is also related to the importance of demand, the slowdown in productivity growth is not as dramatic as the slowdown in output growth. as figure a shows, there is a lot of diversity within the period from the s until ; in the s, despite the slow output growth, productivity growth was comparable with that of the early postwar decades. the role of aggregate demand as a determining factor for the past years of secular stagnation has been highlighted by new keynesian authors like lawrence summers ( ) and paul krugman ( ). as in every new keynesian model, the starting point of their analysis is neoclassical, hence the role of demand is introduced through nominal rigidities. in particular, the rigidity that gained prominence in the postcrisis years—because of the aforementioned contributions of krugman and summers, and other works such as krugman ( ) and eggertsson and krugman ( )—was the so-called zero lower bound of the nominal interest rate, which, within a neoclassical framework, does not allow the loanable funds market to clear. it is beyond the scope of the present paper to provide an extensive critique of the new keynesian theory or the loanable funds approach to the determination of the interest rate. it suffices here to say that the hype around the zero lower bound evaporated after the bank of japan and the european central bank introduced negative interest rates, showing that in reality there is no such rigidity. in what follows, i provide an explanation of stagnation based on demand factors but without having to resort to any nominal rigidity. these demand factors interact with distribution, productivity, and other structural changes that have taken place over the last several decades and provide a more satisfactory explanation of the slowdown of output and productivity growth. . demand effects a good starting point for understanding the structure of an economy and the sources of aggregate demand is provided by the financial balances (or the net lending) of its three major institutional sectors—private, government, and foreign—in conjunction with the growth rate. as was emphasized by wynne godley (e.g., godley ), basic accounting principles imply that the three balances sum to zero: if one sector runs a deficit then at least one other has to run a surplus. figure : financial balances of the three institutional sectors of the us economy source: bureau of economic analysis the us economy’s three balances for the period – are presented in figure . a few observations can be made. first, the growth rate slowdown in the last four decades coincides with an increase in the current account deficit. the current account deficit increased in the first part of the s, but reverted back toward zero by the end of the decade. starting in the early s, there was a monotonic increase in this deficit, which lasted until the eve of the great recession in                                                         for a more detailed discussion, see nikiforos and zezza ( , especially section ). when the economy started to slowdown. the current account deficit increased from around zero in to around percent in . as one would expect, and as confirmed in figure , the reason behind the current account deficit’s deterioration is the deterioration of the trade deficit of a similar magnitude. this increase in the trade deficit was due to foreign competitor firms’ successful invasion of markets in the united states and abroad. to a certain extent it was also related to technological change over that period, but it was also implicitly encouraged by us trade policy, as “free trade” was used as a way to undermine the power of labor and trade unions. this increase in the trade deficit was a major drag on aggregate demand, which contributed to the slowdown of the growth. besides these demand effects, the prolonged increased in the trade deficit implied a demise of american manufacturing, which had important consequences for regions of the country whose economy was based on it. in turn, this had important political repercussions. figure : trade balance of the us economy source: bureau of economic analysis in the period after the crisis, the current account deficit has not increased to its previous levels. this is mostly due to the shale gas extraction methods that were successfully applied after and have led to the decrease in the trade deficit of petroleum goods to close to zero (from percent before the crisis). otherwise the trade deficit of goods other than petroleum has returned to its precrisis levels. another major source of deficient aggregate demand has to do with the us government’s generally conservative fiscal stance in the last four decades. going back to figure , we can see that in the first three decades of the sample, government was a net borrower and government deficit fluctuated procyclically around percent of gdp. things changed in the s, starting in , when the deficit was around . percent of gdp; the government’s fiscal stance became increasingly restrictive and was the only year in—at least postwar—us history that the government balance was positive. figure : government expenditure in postwar us recoveries source: bureau of economic analysis note: the figure presents the trajectories of real government consumption expenditures and gross investment in each postwar business cycle (trough to peak). the value for each cycle’s trough is normalized to .                                                         for a discussion, see papadimitriou, nikiforos, and zezza ( , – ). after the crisis of , government’s net lending increased and remained high. this is mostly due to the period’s low growth rates and the increase in defense expenditures to fund the wars in afghanistan and iraq. nondefense expenditure remained subdued. government deficit increased with the crisis of – and remained relatively elevated for a fairly long time due to the slow recovery (it has also increased recently due to the tax cuts). however, as figure shows, the post- recovery stands out as the recovery with the slowest growth rate in real government expenditure. as of q , more than ten years into the recovery, real government expenditure is still slightly below its level at the beginning of the recovery. if demand from government expenditure and net exports is deficient, then growth can only come about through private expenditure. in fact, as the current account deficit increased and government deficit decreased, growth became dependent on the private sector becoming a net borrower. figure shows that until the early s the private sector was a net lender, with some cyclical fluctuations in its position. in the s, as the balance of trade turned very negative and the government consolidated its budget, the private sector became a net borrower for the first time in the postwar period. this situation persisted until the eve of the great recession (with an exception in the early s). it was actually this reversal in the private sector’s stance—essentially the increase in its saving rate—that triggered the slowdown and then the crisis. importantly, accounting consistency also implies that net borrowing leads to accumulation of net financial liabilities. therefore, given the us economy’s aforementioned structural characteristics, growth is dependent on the private sector accumulating debt. if we want to use hyman minsky’s ( ) classification, growth is dependent on the private sector moving from a hedge, to a speculative, and then a ponzi position. indeed, this is how growth was sustained until . figure shows that since the mid- s and until the recent crisis there was a rapid increase in the private sector’s total debt-to-gdp ratio—especially that of households. as godley ( ), pointed out such a process is unsustainable, and sooner or later has to stop. figure : ratio of liabilities of the private sector to gdp source: bureau of economic analysis; federal reserve board the crisis of – marked exactly the stop of this process, when households finally increased their saving. in the aftermath of the crisis, households did not increase their indebtedness and, as figure showed, the economy stagnated. the debt that allowed the economy to grow is now an overhang that contributes to stagnation in its own right. it is also worth mentioning that such a process of increasing indebtedness is usually accompanied by some sort of asset bubble, another minskyan process. the bubble—as long as it lasts—makes the balance sheets of both the lenders and borrowers look better and allows the process to continue for longer. the asset bubbles that have become endemic in the united states over the last decades (e.g., the stock market bubble of the s or of the present days, the real estate bubble of the s, etc.) can be understood along these lines. to sum up the argument of this section, given some of its structural characteristics—which have led to a decrease in net export demand—and the pervasive fiscal conservatism that has prevailed in washington over the last four decades, the us economy faces a dilemma between stagnation and financial instability. the economy can avoid stagnation at the cost of private sector balance sheets becoming more fragile—a fragility that will eventually become in itself a contributing factor to stagnation, as has been happening since the early s. . income distribution another major structural change that has taken place in the united states over the last four decades is the increase in income inequality. figure presents several aspects of this increase. panel (a) shows that starting in the late s the share of income of the top percent of the population figure : income distribution sources: bureau of economic analysis; bureau of labor statistics; alvaredo et al. ( ) started increasing and is now at a higher level that in the late s, when it had reached its previous peak. panel (b) shows that the increase in income inequality is also visible if we focus on the wage share, which has also decreased the last decades. if we exclude the share of wages of the top percent of the population, the decrease is much bigger: the wage share of the bottom percent has decreased by close to percent of gdp compared to the early s. panel (c) presents another way of seeing the decline in the wage share. it shows that in the early postwar decades the real wage was growing at the same pace as labor productivity. since the early s, the real wage has been increasing much slower. in the years between and the real wage doubled, while in the almost fifty years that followed it only increased percent. this implies a rate of increase that is four times slower than in the previous period. finally, panel (d) shows that the average real income of the bottom percent has stagnated over the same period; today it is slightly below its level from the early s. from a macroeconomic point of view, this increase in inequality implies a redistribution of income from households with a high propensity to consume to households with a low propensity to consume. therefore, ceteris paribus, it leads to a decrease in consumption and aggregate demand. on the other hand, an increase in inequality can lead to an increase in aggregate demand, if it has a strong effect on investment and net exports. it was already shown that this has not been the case with net exports; investment has also not been very responsive to the increase in profit margins, at least in the last few decades. figure a shows that the effects of inequality on consumption are visible. as one would expect, since consumption is by far the largest component of aggregate expenditure, consumption’s trajectories in postwar recoveries are similar to gdp in figure b: the last three recoveries have been the slowest, and the current one has been by far the slowest of them all. given the magnitude of the increase in inequality, the decrease in consumption should be even larger. going back to figure d, we can see that up until the early s, average consumption expenditure increased at the same rate as the income of the bottom percent. afterward, the latter stagnated but consumption kept increasing. it is thus obvious that to the extent that this increase in consumption did not come from the households in the top percent income bracket, it had to come through borrowing on behalf of the bottom percent of households. indeed, as figure b shows, the increase in households’ debt-to-income ratio was very unevenly distributed. as it was explained above, the aggregate increase was enormous and unsustainable, but the increase in the bottom percent of households’ debt-to-income ratio is stunning. when the crisis started in , their debt-to-disposable-income ratio reached . . on the other hand, the ratio did not increase for the households at the top, as the increase in their incomes counteracted the increase in the stock of debt. figure : consumption and household–debt decomposition sources: bureau of economic analysis; federal reserve board; taylor et al. ( ) note: panel (b) presents the trajectories of real personal consumption expenditure in each postwar business cycle (trough to peak). the value for each cycle’s trough is normalized to . edward wolff ( , ), in a paper with a painstakingly detailed examination of the balance sheets of the american “middle class,” confirms that the increase in indebtedness was related to consumption expenditures: “where did the borrowing [of the middle class] go? some have asserted that it went to invest in stocks. however, if this were the case, then stocks as a share of total assets would have increased over this period, which it did not [...]. moreover, they did not go into other assets. in fact, the rise in housing prices almost fully explains the increase in the net worth of the middle class [...]. instead, it appears that middle class households, experiencing stagnating incomes, expanded their debt in order to finance normal consumption expenditures.” this kind of behavior of middle- and lower-income households can be explained in two ways. first, as some basic services (such as education or healthcare) became more expensive, households had to borrow in order to finance the consumption of this services. second, emulation effects à la veblen ([ ] ) and duesenberry ( ) might have also played a role. no matter what the behavioral explanation is, this discussion adds another layer to the dilemma described in the previous section. the increase in inequality puts heavy downward pressure on consumption and demand. thus, there has to be a choice between debt-financed consumption, which makes the balance sheets of middle- and lower-income households more fragile and eventually leads to a financial crisis, or stagnation. the american economy and society chose the first path in the decades before the crisis. in the period after the crisis, when the debt-financed consumption did not happen, consumption, demand, and output stagnated. also, in this case, the debt overhang is now an additional factor contributing to stagnation. . endogenous technical change starting in the very first chapters of the wealth of nations, smith ([ ] ) emphasizes the endogenous nature of technical progress. increases in labor productivity—as a result of economies of scale achieved through a higher division of labor—are limited by the extent of the market. smith describes a virtuous cycle where technical progress allows for a larger sized market, which in turns allows for more technical progress.                                                         a more detailed discussion of the behavioral explanations of the increase in debt-financed expenditure, together with a formal treatment of the relation between distribution, growth, and debt within a stock-flow consistent framework, can be found in nikiforos ( a). these ideas—which were also discussed by alfred marshall ([ ] ) and allyn young ( )—underlie what later came to be known as the kaldor-verdoorn law (verdoorn ; kaldor ) as well as gunnar myrdal’s ( ) principle of circular and cumulative causation. petrus verdoorn ( ) provided an empirical examination of output growth’s effects on productivity growth, while nicholas kaldor ( ) defined a technical progress function where productivity growth is a function of the capital–labor ratio’s growth rate. myrdal is more concerned with development’s institutional aspects, but his main idea is similar, as he describes a virtuous (or vicious) cycle among development and technical and institutional change. another important tradition in the theory of technical change that also goes back to classical political economy—especially ricardo ([ ] ) and marx ([ ] )—emphasized the introduction of techniques of production with higher labor productivity as a way to save labor and increase profitability. more generally, from this point of view the cost of factors of production is an important determinant for technical change; the more expensive a factor of production is, the more incentive firms have to introduce new techniques of production that economize on it. for example, when labor becomes more expensive—and the wage share increases—firms have a stronger incentive to introduce labor-saving technical change by adopting techniques with higher labor productivity. these approaches to technical change, in conjunction with the discussion on demand and distribution in the previous sections, provide a better way to understand the slowdown in the rate of productivity growth compared to gordon’s ( ) neoclassical approach, where productivity growth’s rise and fall is exogenous. to begin with, as it was explained in the previous sections, deficient net export, government expenditure, and consumption demand (the latter because of the                                                         it is important to note here that the steady state growth rate is not exogenous in all neoclassical growth models. in the so-called endogenous growth approach that was developed in the early s, the neoclassical model was transformed to produce endogenous growth through some externality-producing mechanism (lucas ; romer ; barro ; rebelo ). these models have some severe implications for the neoclassical approach to growth. the most important is that because of the externalities, the neoclassical production function is turned into an ak production function (with no decreasing returns to each factor of production), and therefore the long-run growth rate is not the same as the natural growth rate—which brings us back to the issues raised by harrod ( ). second, because of the externalities, market mechanisms cannot guarantee efficient resource allocation. efficient allocation requires the intervention of a “benevolent central planner.” increase in inequality) lead to a decrease in the growth rate of the economy. based on the kaldor- verdoorn law, this decrease can, in turn, have second-round negative effects on productivity growth. moreover, to the extent that productivity growth contributes to demand growth (because, for example, it encourages investment), this process can lead to a vicious circular and cumulative process with lower output and productivity growth. a second factor that is responsible for the slowdown in productivity growth is the stagnation in wage cost (see figures b and c and the discussion in the previous section). given this dramatic decrease in the cost of labor, firms have a much weaker incentive to adopt labor-saving production techniques. interestingly, gordon ( ) says that much in chapter of his book—in a discussion that contradicts the book’s main thesis. the chapter examines the factors that contributed to the “great leap forward of the american level of labor productivity that occurred in the middle-decades of the twentieth century” (p. ), which gordon calls “one of the greatest achievements in all of economic history.” he identifies two main factors for the great leap. first are the new deal institutions and strong labor unions, which led to increases in the real wage. gordon ( , – ) mentions several transmission channels through which higher wages translated into productivity increases (such as the effect of higher wages and shorter hours on reducing worker’s fatigue and increasing their productivity). however, he concludes that: “the main upward stimulus to productivity must have come from the impetus of higher hourly wages, particularly in the s, that led firms to economize on the use of labor. this helps us understand the explosion of productivity during world war ii.” gordon makes his argument with the use of a neoclassical production function, where an increase in real wage causes a substitution of labor for capital. however, it is well-known that this is equivalent to a process where the increase in the real wage induces labor-saving technical change.                                                         gordon ( , ) calls his explanation “basic economic theory.” however, it is noteworthy that this explanation contradicts the neoclassical theory of distribution. the second factor gordon ( ) identifies is world war ii. because of the increase in government expenditure: “as early as , the economy was straining against a shortage of capacity [...], the owner of a leading machine tool supplier shook his head at the backlogs stating that ‘demand is infinite’” (gordon , ; emphasis added). in turn, this increase in demand and growth led to increases in productivity in the manufacturing of war equipment, which then persisted when companies switched back to peacetime production. gordon ( , ) also mentions that “the war created household saving that after was spent on consumer goods that had been unavailable during the war.” in other words, the government deficit during the war was mirrored by a private sector surplus that led to an increase in their financial assets, allowing for the increase in consumption after the war. gordon calls the assertion that the war was the most important contributor to the great leap “the most novel aspect of the chapter.” although the novelty of this argument is questionable—these points have been repeatedly made by several heterodox economists—its essence is in line with the present paper’s argument. gordon describes a situation where high government expenditure demand and increases in wages led to improvements in productivity, in line with the discussion of this section’s previous paragraphs. also, the aforementioned effect of wartime government deficits on household balance sheets is basically the opposite of what has been happening over the last four decades and was discussed in the previous sections. . monopoly capital and financialization for reasons of completeness of the argument, the role of two more factors should be touched upon very briefly. first, it seems possible that a contributing factor to secular stagnation is the us economy’s increasingly oligopolistic and monoplisitic—and monopsonistic—structure. this is an issue that has been recently emphasized by neoclassical economists (e.g., teulings and baldwin ; summers ; philippon ). probably without realizing, these economists recycle arguments that were put forward several decades ago by josef steindl ( ) in his maturity and stagnation in american capitalism and paul baran and paul sweezy ( ) in monopoly capital. both books emphasize how the emergence of large oligopolies and monopolies increase the share of profits and therefore savings, while at the same time the increases in demand are not enough to match this increase in savings. according to steindl, in oligopolistic markets firms tend to operate with excess capacity—which discourages the entrance of new firms in the market—because there is no market mechanism to eliminate it. in competitive markets, the elimination of excess capacity takes place through price- cutting, which forces less competitive firms out of the market, but in oligopolistic markets firms have the power to set the prices. in turn, this excess capacity weakens investment incentives and leads to stagnation. baran and sweezy also emphasize the surplus absorption problem that tends to increase under monopolies. aside from investment, they also examine the role of aggregate demand’s other sources, such as capitalist consumption, the sales effort, civilian and military government expenditures, etc., and they conclude that overall demand will not be sufficient to realize the surplus and therefore the monopoly-capital economy will tend to stagnate. the insights provided by steindl and baran and sweezy fit within the framework outlined above and are relevant for understanding the structure of the us economy today, the increase in income inequality, and investment’s nonresponsiveness to the increases in the profit margins. another important and related development has been the us economy’s so-called financialization. financialization has many different dimensions: changes in corporate governance and sources of profits, as well as the importance of financial motives, markets, institutions, and elites, etc. it is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the details of all these. a few things are important here. first, part of the financialization process is related to the financial sector’s increasing                                                         hansen ( ) wrote a favorable review of the book. for a discussion of financialization, see boyer ( ), lazonick and o’sullivan ( ), stockhammer ( ), epstein ( ), orhangazi ( ), and lazonick ( , ). concentration, hence the arguments on monopoly capital can be conditionally extended. second, financialization is related to the increase in income inequality. finally, part of financialization has been the decoupling of cash flows and accumulation, as it becomes increasingly attractive or even imperative for firms to channel their profits into financial markets and share buybacks, or to distribute them. these aspects of financialization are part of the story outlined above and contribute to economic stagnation. related to that, nonfinancial corporations are now more indebted than ever (see figure , above). importantly, this debt accumulation has also been decoupled from investment and borrowed funds have, to a large extent, been used for share buybacks. besides the record level of indebtedness, according to a recent report by the bank for international settlements (bis ), the leverage of us corporations is also above its pre- level. in the same report it is also mentioned that the percentage of issuers with bbb corporate debt (the lowest investment grade rating) and the share of mutual fund portfolios comprised of bbb bonds have also increased. moreover, the number of firms whose cash flows are not enough to cover interest payments on their debt—what minsky ( ) called ponzi firms and what some more recent literature calls zombie firms (caballero, hoshi, and kashyap ; mcgowan, andrews, and millot ; banerjee and hofmann )— is also elevated despite the last decade’s record low interest rates. finally, at the same time, and despite the very slow recovery, the stock market valuation is higher than its level in the early fall of , and, according to some measures, also higher than its level in the late s. these processes are also clearly unsustainable and when they are over they will be another factor contributing to the us economy’s stagnant state.                                                         sweezy ( ), in one of his last published articles, referred to the “financialization of the capital accumulation process.” for a more detailed discussion of the data, see papadimitriou, nikiforos, and zezza ( , ). . instead of conclusion: stagnation, is it secular? the present paper discussed a set of interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors that can explain the stagnation of output and productivity growth of the last decades. the role of demand was emphasized, and it was explained that the us economy has been experiencing deficient aggregate demand because of net export’s weak performance, the fiscal conservatism that has dominated (most of) the last four decades, and the increase in income inequality, which puts downward pressure on demand. it was also stressed that because of these developments the us economy’s growth before the crisis rested on the private sector’s increasing indebtedness, especially households at the bottom of the distribution. this debt that allowed the us economy to grow before the crisis is now another factor contributing to stagnation. it was also explained that the slowdown in productivity growth is better explained based by endogenous productivity theory, as opposed to the exogenous approach adopted by gordon ( ). in particular, two approaches to technical change are relevant: the kaldor-verdoorn law and the induced technical change hypothesis, which posit that labor productivity responds to the growth rate of output and the increase in the cost of labor. these approaches to technical change taken together with the aforementioned demand factors provide a consistent explanation for the stagnation of demand, output, and productivity. finally, it was argued that two related factors that contribute to stagnation are the us economy’s increasingly oligopolistic and financialized structure. a last question to be answered is if the stagnation we are experiencing is secular or not. in other words, are there endogenous forces that can pull the economy out of its current stagnant state or should we expect it to last for a long time (unless by accident or an exogenous factor)? as it was explained above, gordon’s ( ) answer is that there are no endogenous forces. the “rise of american growth” was exogenous in the first place and the current stagnant conditions are the norm. sweezy ( ) reaches the same conclusion, albeit working within a very different theoretical framework. in an article entitled “why stagnation?” he concludes with a discussion of “whether or not the history of capitalism has been characterized by a long cycle of some fifty years’ duration (what schumpeter called the kondratieff cycle).” he suggests that although “it is the nature of an investment boom to exhaust itself, […] the stagnation phase of a long wave does not generate any ‘forces of reversal.’ if and when such forces do emerge, they originate not in the internal logic of the economy but in the larger historical context within which the economy functions.” thus, sweezy also argues that solutions to stagnation are exogenous and coincidental rather than endogenous. in two recent papers (nikiforos b, ), i express a rather different opinion. although i agree that there are no strictly speaking economic forces that can pull an economy out of stagnation, i argue that crisis and stagnation act as catalysts for endogenous political-economic responses. as karl polanyi ([ ] ) argued, crisis induces spontaneous reactions that try to resolve it. indeed, after the recent crisis there have been different manifestations of these sorts of reactions. income inequality has been at the center of different movements—such as occupy wall street, black lives matter, and the #metoo movements, as well as teacher’s strikes that have taken place across the country—and it has become one of the main issues of political discourse. the dominance of fiscal conservatism and free trade ideology has also been questioned, and people and politicians are becoming increasingly critical of financial institutions and large monopolies. as it was discussed in this paper, these issues that were in the margins of public discourse until recently are the main factors that have led to stagnation. moreover, to the extent that history is a useful guide for the future, it teaches us that the forces of reversal exist. to a large extent, the american economy was pulled out of the crisis of the early th century by forces of this kind: the progressive era 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m.vermeulen@rutgers.nl (m.v.) * correspondence: m.cense@rutgers.nl received: october ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: young people are not satisfied with the sexuality education they receive in dutch high schools. they rate their sexuality education as mediocre ( . on a scale of one to ten). in cooperation with young peer researchers, we explored what good sexuality education looks like from the point of view of young people. the peer researchers collected data in their own high school, using mixed methods, starting with individual interviews, followed by focus group discussions and photovoice sessions to get more in-depth views on topics, class atmosphere, and teacher skills. in total, pupils aged – participated in the research. our findings demonstrate that young people want more sexuality education, during their whole school career. they want sexuality education to move beyond biological functions, sexually transmitted diseases, and reproduction into issues like dating, online behavior, sexual pleasure, relationships, and sexual coercion. moreover, pupils want sexual diversity integrated and normalized in all content. one of the main issues is that sexuality education should be given in a safe class atmosphere, which demands sensitivity from the teacher. in addition to the findings of the study, this article reflects on the steps to be taken to realize the changes desired by young people. keywords: sexuality education; sexuality; sexual agency; youth; student voice; youth participatory action research; the netherlands . introduction although the netherlands is seen as a forerunner when it comes to sexuality education [ , ], dutch high school pupils think the sexuality education they receive can be improved. young people rated the information they received in school as mediocre ( . on a scale of one to ten), as shown by the dutch survey sex under the age of [ ]. lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth-rated it even lower with a . . from the survey, we cannot distinguish the reasons for these low ratings, but they clearly raise concerns about the current practice of sexuality education in the netherlands. this is reflected in an inquiry by the dutch inspectorate of education in [ ], which showed that sexuality education at schools was dependent on the teacher and not delivered on a structural basis, but randomly. what is considered sexuality education varies across countries and programs? often, sexuality education is shaped by a narrow understanding of sexuality, focusing on sexual contacts, sexual anatomy, reproduction, birth control, and disease prevention [ ]. our interpretation of sexuality education is based on the world health organization european expert group on sexuality education [ ], looking at sexuality education as a lifelong learning process of acquiring information and of forming attitudes, beliefs, and values about relationships, intimacy, and identity. sexuality education has been mandatory in dutch primary and secondary schools since . however, the national education curriculum merely says that schools must pay attention to sexual diversity and sexuality, without giving any guidelines on content, frequency, or number of classes. the dutch constitutional int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of principle of freedom of education creates a barrier for a nationwide implementation of sexuality education, as dutch schools are free to determine the amount of time, the approach, and the methods they use. comprehensive sexuality education (cse) is characterized by a positive approach to sexuality that accepts sexual feelings, desire, and pleasure as essential components of young people’s sexuality [ , ]. a comprehensive approach puts sexuality in a wider perspective of personal growth, development, and building up mutually consensual (sexual) contacts and relationships [ ]. dutch evidence-based, comprehensive sexuality education methods are available for use in- and outside of biology, but the implementation of these methods highly depends on contextual factors, such as teacher training, school policy, governing body support, and student response [ ]. at present, sexuality education is predominantly taught within a biology framework, linking sexuality to puberty, sexual reproduction, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (stds), and unintended pregnancies [ ]. consequently, dutch pupils often only receive sexuality education from to years as many pupils quit biology in senior grades. sexuality education has frequently been criticized for its failure to meet the needs and hold the interest of young people [ – ]. this should not be a surprise, as increased efforts to provide young people with sexuality education often emerge from moral panic around higher rates of teenage pregnancy, stds, or sexting, with the aim to control young people’s sexualities, displaying coherent medical and moral values [ ]. allen’s study amongst young people aged – in new zealand showed that content that does not address the questions and issues young people deem important may be dismissed as irrelevant [ ]. one of the main issues allen found was that the content of many sexuality education programs is very protective and directed towards risk management, offering young people very limited space for sexual agency, which does not register with their own sense of self and entitlement and even disempowers them. scholars also pointed out that many sexuality education materials and practices are not tailored to fit the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (lgbtq) youth [ – ]. the higher rates of dissatisfaction with sexuality education amongst young people who differ from cultural ‘normalcy’, for instance, by being non-heterosexual, can be explained by the link between sexuality education and the dominant sexual culture. sexuality education runs the risk of reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities and injustice, as it reflects the values, ideas, and stereotypes of the dominant culture [ , ]. sexuality education may easily reproduce existing sexist, racist, and classist notions of sexuality, thereby ‘projecting a particular message and vision of who and how teens are and should be’ [ ] (p. ). this plays out not only on heteronormativity, but also on gender inequality, classism, and racism [ – ] and secularism/religious diversity [ – ]. another field of concern that is illuminated by many scholars is the lack of a safe class atmosphere during sexuality education [ , , – ]. sexuality is not just the subject of sexuality education; it is present all the time within and outside classrooms. the school is a space where sexuality is played out [ , ]. krebbekx’ ethnographic study of sexuality education practices in dutch schools shows how sexuality education classes can be used by young people to reproduce existing popularity hierarchies in class and how the probing by teachers to open up about their experiences can lead to bullying or publicly ’outing’ someone as sexually active [ ]. clearly, creating a safe atmosphere is closely linked to teachers’ pedagogic strategies, which is an area that arises in several studies on what young people voice as a concern in how sexuality education is delivered [ – , ]. a meta-analysis of qualitative studies on sexuality education in ten countries illuminated three main problems [ ]. the studies originated from the uk, ireland, the usa, australia, new zealand, canada, japan, iran, brazil, and sweden. firstly, schools take insufficient account of the ‘specialness’ of sex as a topic: ‘[s]ex is a potent subject that can arouse strong emotions, reactions, and feelings ( . . . ) yet the prevailing approach within schools appears to be to deny that there is anything exceptional about the topic and to attempt to teach sexuality education in the same way as other subjects’ [ ] (p. ). secondly, the study suggests that schools struggle to accept that some young people are sexually active, leading to sexuality education content that is out of touch with the lives of sexually active young int. j. environ. res. public health , , of people. finally, the evidence indicates that young people dislike having their own teachers deliver sexuality education. other studies illuminating young people’s perspective put emphasis on the desire for different content in sexuality education: young people want less information about biological aspects of sexuality, and more explicit and accurate information about gender and sexual diversity, violence in relationships, intimacy, sexual pleasure, and love [ , ]. studies also highlight that young people not only want classroom-based sexuality education, but also online sexuality education programs, with practical, age-appropriate content in the age range from primary school through to university [ , ]. as sexuality education, sexual culture, and the sexual practices of youth are strongly embedded in the cultural context, we cannot simply transfer the findings of international studies to the netherlands. this paper explores what good sexuality education looks like from the point of view of dutch young people. . materials and methods . . study design to reveal young people’s perspectives on sexuality education, we chose a participatory approach. working with young people as peer researchers allowed us to reveal the pupils’ perspective on classroom practices of sexuality education from an insiders’ perspective. the insider status of peer researchers increased access to study informants and empowered young people [ , ]. the literature suggests that peer researchers may establish a strong rapport with informants leading to a greater depth of the data and improved research of sensitive topics such as sexual health [ , , ]. studies show that with appropriate and adequate resources (time, financial investment), peer interviewing produces a positive, capacity building experience for peer-interviewers, participants, and researchers [ , ]. this study addresses four main research questions: ( ) what does good sexuality education look like from the pupils’ point of view? (sub-questions: what content, what is needed to feel comfortable, when/by whom, and how should sexuality education be delivered?) ( ) what do pupils value in the sexuality education they receive(d) during high school? ( ) what elements are seen as problematic or missing? ( ) are there differences between pupils’ needs and wishes, related to differences in gender, sexual, cultural, and religious identities or level of education? as the peer researchers participating in our study were young and had not yet received any scientific education, we had to choose methods that fitted their skills. as inexperienced social researchers can lack skills in effective probing techniques, we asked the peer researchers to carry out short semi-structured interviews to explore the range of issues connected to how pupils experienced sexuality education at school. subsequently, the issues raised were analyzed and explored more in-depth in focus group discussions (fgd). fgd prove to be an effective method to explore the perceptions, ideas, opinions, and thoughts of participants [ ]. as a third method, photovoice sessions, were included to create a more open space for pupils to reflect on how sexuality education could be. photovoice is a qualitative research method by which participants take photographs in response to a research question. the photographs are then analyzed by the same participants who work in small groups to identify common themes [ ]. a review of the literature shows that photovoice contributes to an enhanced understanding of community assets and needs and to the empowerment of participants [ ]. table shows how the three methods contributed to the research questions and what questions were asked. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . aims and questions per research method. method aim questions semi-structured interviews contributes to research question , , and by exploring: • the level of felt importance of sexuality education; • the aspects pupils are satisfied with and the aspects they find problematic in the sexuality education they received. • do you think it is important that you are taught about relationships and sexuality? • have you already had sexuality education in high school? • when did you have sexuality education in high school? • what was it about? are those the things it should be about? did you miss things? • what did you like about the lesson(s)? • what would you change about the lesson(s)? focus group discussions contributes to research question , , , and by exploring more in-depth: • whether they feel sexuality education is relevant and important to young people; • the experiences of participants with sexuality education at school; • the topics pupils find important to be addressed; • when, by whom, and by which methods sexuality education should be taught; • the conditions that are needed to create a safe atmosphere. • how do you experience sexuality education at school? • is the content of sexuality education relevant to your life? • what makes it relevant, and what doesn’t? • what topics do you find important in sexuality education? • how should sexuality education lessons be taught? • what conditions are needed to make you feel safe when you are taught about relationships and sex? • in which grade(s) do you think sexuality education should be given? • who should be teaching sexuality education? photovoice sessions contributes to research question by exploring in a visual way: what good sexuality education looks like, in the eyes of pupils what does good sexuality education look like? . . recruitment of the peer researchers in the preparation phase, we discussed with teachers and pupils how pupils could be motivated to join the research team. the best option was to offer the research project as an assignment in the last year of high school where each pupil had to conduct a small-scale study (‘profielwerkstuk’ in dutch). pupils are free to choose their own subjects for this study. our aim was to recruit around peer researchers, working together in teams of three to four peer researchers per school. we recruited peer researchers by publishing a call for co-researchers on different websites aimed at high school pupils, young people in general and lgbtq youth. we conducted the research with peer researchers, aged between and years old, based at six schools, spread throughout the country. we strived to recruit peer researchers of different genders, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds, but succeeded only partly, with only four male and female peer researchers, three peer researchers identifying as lgbtq, and three people having a migrant background. table presents the gender and team division of the peer researchers who participated in this study. three groups consisted of two peer researchers, one with three participants and two with four participants. the numbering of the schools corresponds with the schools in table . int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . gender and division in teams of peer researchers (n = ). school girls (n = ) boys (n = ) other (n = ) total (n = ) table . school locations, education types, religious affiliation, the composition of the school population, and sexuality education programs. school location education type religious affiliation composition school population sex education methods boxtel (rural) havo/vwo (middle and higher level) roman catholic mainly white biology textbooks rotterdam (urban) gymnasium (higher level) christian mainly white biology textbooks hengelo (rural) havo/vwo (middle and higher level) public mainly white biology textbooks almere (urban) vmbo/havo/vwo (all levels) christian multicultural biology textbooks althorn (rural) havo/vwo (middle and higher level) roman catholic multicultural biology textbooks, gender and sexuality alliance breda (urban) vmbo/havo/vwo (all levels) public multicultural biology textbooks; method long live love as the schools were connected to the peer researchers, we did not explicitly select the schools participating in our research. fortunately, the schools were in different parts of the netherlands, in urban and rural environments, and located at different levels of education. table presents the school locations, education types, religious affiliation, composition of the school population, and sexuality education methods used per school. . . capacity building and coaching of peer researchers building upon the explore toolkit developed by rutgers and ippf [ ] on meaningful youth participation in research, two two-day capacity building trainings were organized during residential weekends. the first training was aimed to provide the peer researchers with enough tools to collect data at their schools. the first residential weekend also allowed the young researchers to meet each other, learn about the objectives of the research project, and reflect on their own norms and values regarding sexuality. the capacity training involved sessions on qualitative research techniques (how to conduct interviews and fgd, how to ask open questions) and on ethics. during the weekend, the peer researchers tested and adapted the interview topic list. after the weekend, a research supervisor was allocated to each team of peer researchers. this supervisor actively supported the peer researchers, gave feedback on their data collection, and arranged debriefings to discuss any difficulties. the supervisor also supported on a practical level by leading fgd and photovoice assignments. the second two-day capacity training took place after the data collection and before the data was analyzed. the training was dedicated to a preliminary analysis of the research findings and a joint reflection on the research process and experiences of peer researchers. . . data collection the peer researchers recruited participants at their own high school. they were explicitly instructed to recruit pupils of all ages, levels of education, genders, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds. this resulted in a diverse group of pupils, aged – , at various levels of education (see table ). participants were asked what cultural group they felt they belonged to (see figure ). around a quarter considered themselves culturally as non-dutch (i.e., having a migrant background and adhering to the cultural values associated with this background). for ethical reasons, the peer researchers were asked not to inquire about someone’s sexual orientation: this could potentially feel unsafe for the participants, and they might not have been ‘out’ in the school environment. as for the int. j. environ. res. public health , , of representation of diverse backgrounds, we succeeded in including a broad group of pupils in our research and believe the age and gender division in our sample reflect parts of the diversity of young dutch people. however, we did include relatively many participants attending the middle and higher levels (theory-based) of dutch secondary education. table . participant characteristics (n = ). participants. girls (n = ) boys (n = ) other (n = ) educational level educational level practice-based theory-based practice-based theory-based total peer researchers participants interviews participants fgd photovoice participants int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of table . participant characteristics (n = ). participants. girls (n = ) boys (n = ) other (n = ) educational level educational level practice-based theory-based practice-based theory-based total peer researchers participants interviews participants fgd photovoice participants figure . cultural belonging participants. the peer researchers started their data collection with short interviews. to ensure consistency of the collected data, we asked the peer researchers to fill out an online questionnaire in google forms, while carrying out the ten-minute interviews that they would directly submit after the interview. as such, we were able to monitor the progress made and the results obtained. they also recorded the interviews, which were transcribed afterward. the interviews turned out to be manageable for the peer researchers. however, some interviews were limited in-depth, which might have been caused by a lack of confidence of some peer researchers to use probing questions, but it may also reflect the discomfort of participants on being interviewed on this topic individually. after the interview phase, the peer researchers organized nine fgd, and in two schools also three photovoice sessions. to promote social safety for participants, we worked with small, gender-specific groups (four to six participants). at one school, we also conducted an fgd with the members of the gender and sexuality alliance (gsa), consisting of pupils striving to achieve a safe climate at school for people of all gender and sexual identities. the fgd and photovoice sessions were led by senior researchers. after the data collection of the peer researchers, the senior researchers conducted another six photovoice assignments at a seventh school, with a very multicultural school population, with the aim to increase the cultural diversity of our sample. all fgd and photovoice sessions were recorded and transcribed. the fgd lasted between and min, and the photovoice sessions between and min. these methods held a higher threshold for recruiting participants. compared to the interviews, however, the participants of the fgd were more candid and shared personal experiences more openly, and data from fgd and photovoice assignments transpired to be the most important source of information during analysis. . . data analysis as data analysis is a delicate and lengthy process, only a partial analysis could be achieved by the peer researchers in the limited time they had available. after the second weekend, dedicated to the analysis and writing a research report, the peer researchers analyzed their own data and wrote their report on the needs and wishes of pupils of their own school. the senior researchers analyzed figure . cultural belonging participants. the peer researchers started their data collection with short interviews. to ensure consistency of the collected data, we asked the peer researchers to fill out an online questionnaire in google forms, while carrying out the ten-minute interviews that they would directly submit after the interview. as such, we were able to monitor the progress made and the results obtained. they also recorded the interviews, which were transcribed afterward. the interviews turned out to be manageable for the peer researchers. however, some interviews were limited in-depth, which might have been caused by a lack of confidence of some peer researchers to use probing questions, but it may also reflect the discomfort of participants on being interviewed on this topic individually. after the interview phase, the peer researchers organized nine fgd, and in two schools also three photovoice sessions. to promote social safety for participants, we worked with small, gender-specific groups (four to six participants). at one school, we also conducted an fgd with the members of the gender and sexuality alliance (gsa), consisting of pupils striving to achieve a safe climate at school for people of all gender and sexual identities. the fgd and photovoice sessions were led by senior researchers. after the data collection of the peer researchers, the senior researchers conducted another six photovoice assignments at a seventh school, with a very multicultural school population, with the aim to increase the cultural diversity of our sample. all fgd and photovoice sessions were recorded and transcribed. the fgd lasted between and min, and the photovoice sessions between and min. these methods held a higher threshold for recruiting participants. compared to the interviews, however, the participants of the fgd were more candid and shared personal experiences more openly, and data from fgd and photovoice assignments transpired to be the most important source of information during analysis. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . data analysis as data analysis is a delicate and lengthy process, only a partial analysis could be achieved by the peer researchers in the limited time they had available. after the second weekend, dedicated to the analysis and writing a research report, the peer researchers analyzed their own data and wrote their report on the needs and wishes of pupils of their own school. the senior researchers analyzed the data of all six schools and the data from the additional seventh school. for this analysis, the qualitative software maxqda (verbi gmbh, berlin, germany) was used. the method used was a thematic analysis [ ]. the first author analyzed the first ten transcripts and drafted a preliminary coding scheme. the second author examined the same ten transcripts using the codebook. the first and second authors then discussed discrepancies in their conceptualizations and amended the coding scheme accordingly. the authors then separately coded all the remaining transcripts. the codes were compared and sorted into new categories. these categories were assigned to themes. when complete, the authors met to resolve any discrepancies, so that all applied codes, categories, and themes were mutually agreed upon. the interviews yielded codes on three main themes: experienced importance of sexuality education; desired content of sexuality education; conditions for a safe atmosphere. the interviews gave a good impression of the perception of sexuality education to a wide range of pupils. the fgd generated much more details on how participants experienced current sexuality education practices, in what kind of situations they felt uncomfortable, what subjects they missed and how they felt sexuality education should be improved. this led to new codes under the same three main themes and added, for instance, much more codes on teacher skills under conditions for the safe atmosphere. another main code was added, which was ‘methods to be used in sexuality education’. the discussions during the photovoice sessions yielded mainly codes about the desired content of sexuality education and about methods. the photovoice sessions added an extra source, which were visual images (see figures and for examples). sometimes these pictures were plain photographs of contraception, condoms, a #metoo poster, a rainbow flag, or a baby growing inside a belly, illustrating subjects that participants felt should be covered in sexuality education. in other cases, the explanation given by the participant revealed not just a subject, but another aspect of what she or he felt sexuality education should be about, like this girl explaining one of her pictures: “this is a picture of a chair in an abortion clinic. every woman must be able to make her own choice. that should be part of sexuality education too.” the explanations are given and discussions in the photovoice groups were coded in the same way as the fgd. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of the data of all six schools and the data from the additional seventh school. for this analysis, the qualitative software maxqda (verbi gmbh, berlin, germany) was used. the method used was a thematic analysis [ ]. the first author analyzed the first ten transcripts and drafted a preliminary coding scheme. the second author examined the same ten transcripts using the codebook. the first and second authors then discussed discrepancies in their conceptualizations and amended the coding scheme accordingly. the authors then separately coded all the remaining transcripts. the codes were compared and sorted into new categories. these categories were assigned to themes. when complete, the authors met to resolve any discrepancies, so that all applied codes, categories, and themes were mutually agreed upon. the interviews yielded codes on three main themes: experienced importance of sexuality education; desired content of sexuality education; conditions for a safe atmosphere. the interviews gave a good impression of the perception of sexuality education to a wide range of pupils. the fgd generated much more details on how participants experienced current sexuality education practices, in what kind of situations they felt uncomfortable, what subjects they missed and how they felt sexuality education should be improved. this led to new codes under the same three main themes and added, for instance, much more codes on teacher skills under conditions for the safe atmosphere. another main code was added, which was ‘methods to be used in sexuality education’. the discussions during the photovoice sessions yielded mainly codes about the desired content of sexuality education and about methods. the photovoice sessions added an extra source, which were visual images (see figures and for examples). sometimes these pictures were plain photographs of contraception, condoms, a #metoo poster, a rainbow flag, or a baby growing inside a belly, illustrating subjects that participants felt should be covered in sexuality education. in other cases, the explanation given by the participant revealed not just a subject, but another aspect of what she or he felt sexuality education should be about, like this girl explaining one of her pictures: “this is a picture of a chair in an abortion clinic. every woman must be able to make her own choice. that should be part of sexuality education too.” the explanations are given and discussions in the photovoice groups were coded in the same way as the fgd. figure . photovoice pictures selection of a subgroup. (text saying: there are nicer ways of getting sexuality education, like watching movies). figure . photovoice pictures selection of a subgroup. (text saying: there are nicer ways of getting sexuality education, like watching movies). int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . photovoice pictures of another subgroup. . . ethics the research was conducted according to dutch legal and ethical guidelines for responsible research, including voluntary participation, safeguards against participant identity disclosure, and respect for participants [ ]. we explicitly asked the co-researchers and participants for their written consent, and naturally, participation was voluntary. parent/guardian consent, however, was not necessary to obtain as the study was conducted within the school context, as part of the school curriculum. the confidentiality of participants was strictly safeguarded. to ensure that peer researchers could protect themselves and knew how to ensure the safety and confidentiality of their participants, we trained them on ethical principles during the first residential weekend. to illustrate, we taught the peer researchers how to create a safe atmosphere and find a place for the interview where nobody could listen in. they were also trained not to disclose any information and use only anonymized information in their report. each group of peer researchers was assigned one of the professional researchers for support and guidance. some studies reported special ethical challenges related to peer research [ ]. participating as a peer researcher can cause distress to the young people involved when they hear about problems or sexual trauma. their involvement in a study on sexuality may also impact their social position. bailey et al. [ ] demonstrate in their systematic review that the benefits of participating for peer researchers outweigh the challenges, including greater confidence, new skills, and having their voice heard. . results . . young people express a strong need for more sexuality education during their whole school career most research participants voiced they want sexuality education at high school to be given more attention. the few participants who did not value sexuality education at school argued that they already know all there is to know, they do not need to know because they are not sexually active, or they feel too uncomfortable during sexuality education lessons. clearly, younger participants ( – years old) had weaker ideas about sexuality education compared to participants aged and older. “well, you should know about it, because it is part of life. so, it is useful to get some information.” many participants underlined that sexuality education prepares them to make good decisions in the future. “so you know what to expect, what are sensible choices and what are not.” others stressed that sexuality education is relevant for their lives at this moment, as relationships and sexuality are very important issues to them. they emphasized the importance of continuity in sexuality education when they grow figure . photovoice pictures of another subgroup. . . ethics the research was conducted according to dutch legal and ethical guidelines for responsible research, including voluntary participation, safeguards against participant identity disclosure, and respect for participants [ ]. we explicitly asked the co-researchers and participants for their written consent, and naturally, participation was voluntary. parent/guardian consent, however, was not necessary to obtain as the study was conducted within the school context, as part of the school curriculum. the confidentiality of participants was strictly safeguarded. to ensure that peer researchers could protect themselves and knew how to ensure the safety and confidentiality of their participants, we trained them on ethical principles during the first residential weekend. to illustrate, we taught the peer researchers how to create a safe atmosphere and find a place for the interview where nobody could listen in. they were also trained not to disclose any information and use only anonymized information in their report. each group of peer researchers was assigned one of the professional researchers for support and guidance. some studies reported special ethical challenges related to peer research [ ]. participating as a peer researcher can cause distress to the young people involved when they hear about problems or sexual trauma. their involvement in a study on sexuality may also impact their social position. bailey et al. [ ] demonstrate in their systematic review that the benefits of participating for peer researchers outweigh the challenges, including greater confidence, new skills, and having their voice heard. . results . . young people express a strong need for more sexuality education during their whole school career most research participants voiced they want sexuality education at high school to be given more attention. the few participants who did not value sexuality education at school argued that they already know all there is to know, they do not need to know because they are not sexually active, or they feel too uncomfortable during sexuality education lessons. clearly, younger participants ( – years old) had weaker ideas about sexuality education compared to participants aged and older. “well, you should know about it, because it is part of life. so, it is useful to get some information.” many participants underlined that sexuality education prepares them to make good decisions in the future. “so you know what to expect, what are sensible choices and what are not.” others stressed that sexuality education is relevant for their lives at this moment, as relationships and sexuality are very int. j. environ. res. public health , , of important issues to them. they emphasized the importance of continuity in sexuality education when they grow older and have more sexual experiences. “i have the idea our teachers think you should know it all when you are . but that is not true for everyone. if you are , you don’t know all the implications. they throw you in at the deep end. go discover it yourself, we won’t help you anymore.” most participants indicated sexuality education should be given throughout their school careers, starting from elementary school. “by repeating more often and more frequently, it becomes a more normal thing to talk about from childhood onwards.” other reasons why they found sex education at school important, is that not everybody gets good information at home, and some participants argued that it’s hard to find proper and reliable information on the internet. and proper information is needed to empower young people to make their own decisions: “there are families where contraception is taboo. but well, you should be able to think for yourself, without your mother deciding everything for you.” other studies among young people conform to a strong need for school-based sexuality education [ – ]. however, the specific demand to extend sexuality education to senior classes does not explicitly emerge from other studies, probably because it is more common in other countries that sexuality education is (still) taught to young people aged over years. . . sexuality education should cover more issues although almost every participant received some information about sexuality at school, this information in most cases only concerning contraception, reproduction, and stds/hiv, usually provided in biology. participants argued they want more sex-positive education. “now it is quite negative, while sex can be good too. they just tell you half the story. when nobody tells you how it should be, how can you recognize being in a bad relationship? so, i feel both sides have to be told.” female pleasure should be getting more attention, as a girl clarifies: “it is important that sexuality education makes clear that girls need to have pleasure too, so boys do not feel sex is just for them. boys need to know about vaginas, you know, about the most sensitive part, the clitoris.” participants particularly missed education about subjects that are relevant for them at present, not in the future, about feelings, relationships, dating, sexual harassment, communication, and online and offline sexual behavior. “sexuality education is focused too much on ovaries and too little on how it feels, or what you like. or on how do you talk about sex together?” participants also missed information on how to deal with problems and conflicts: where to get a sexually transmitted infection test, how does a pregnancy test work, where to turn to when you need an abortion, how to find help after sexual violence? they wanted concrete scripts for situations they encounter: “when you do not want to have sex . . . how do you say that? and how can you be clear you want to move forward?” both girls and boys disclosed that gendered social norms influence their self-esteem and their sexual agency. girls protested the double standard and want to have this addressed in sexuality education. “i think it is so wrong . . . the difference people make between girls and boys . . . when a girl has sex once, she is a slut, but when a boy has sex ten times, he is the hero for all the boys..“ in one of the focus groups, boys discussed the shaming and blaming of girls sending sexy selfies: “i do understand why some girls are called a slut, if you see the selfies they post.. they just want attention.” another boy responded: “if a boy sends a dickpic, do you think he is a whore too?” the answer of the group: “no, no, he is just a fool.” another area where gendered norms play out are uncertainties about their bodies. participants argue sexuality education can play a role in diminishing uncertainties: “many boys and girls are insecure about things that are very normal. it is important to talk about this, to know that it is not crazy. that sex is not shameful. relationships are also important to talk about. just to break the taboo.” participants also emphasized that it is important to know that everybody develops physically and emotionally at their own pace. “so, you don’t need to be ashamed if you are late having sex or getting your period. we need more diversified examples. different stories. to learn that development is not one-dimensional. everybody is different.” moreover, especially girls wanted to know more about their rights: “it is good to know when you are entitled to say no, to know your rights, especially around #metoo. when can you stop and say ‘this is it! these are my rights. i do not want this!’” int. j. environ. res. public health , , of when it comes to sexual and gender diversity, many participants reported that it is often dealt with in a very limited way. “yes, they do admit it exists, but we don’t talk about it. we don’t really address it. i feel it should be dealt with differently. not just mentioning that bisexual, gay, and transgender people exist, but also mention heterosexuality ( . . . ) so not to pretend heterosexuality is the norm. just talk about all sexualities.” participants wanted sexual diversity integrated into the whole area of sexuality education, not isolated as a single issue. they want to have a more comprehensive approach to sexuality education, including subjects like sexual orientation and gender identity, consent and coercion, online sexual behavior and sexual pleasure. this is in line with findings in other countries of the needs of young people regarding the content of school-based sexuality education [ – ]. studies also confirm that current dutch sexuality education fails to address the social norms that limit young people in their sexual development and relationships and reproduce inequalities [ , ]. . . sexuality education requires a safe atmosphere and a self-confident and sensitive teacher according to the participants in our study, sexuality education can only succeed if there is a safe atmosphere in the classroom. if they felt uncomfortable, they would not talk about sexuality. “just a nice atmosphere in which you can feel comfortable. so, you don’t have to be afraid to show who you are. that you can just be yourself.” participants thought differently about sharing personal experiences. some participants did not want to share anything personal, while others very much want to. “i do want sexuality education, but if you have no questions or you don’t want to talk in a small group, i feel it should be not mandatory, you know like ‘you have to talk about it’.“ participants shared stories about friends being bullied after sharing personal information. “of course people are allowed to make jokes, but not nasty jokes . . . like they do about homosexuality or racist jokes . . . ” participants argued they need teachers to be sensitive to this risk of exposure and bullying and not to expect them to open up in front of a whole class about their own experiences. the possibility to ask questions anonymously, working with available stories (in films, or written), and working in small groups helped to increase safety. many pupils liked their own teacher (biology, social science, or mentor) to teach sexuality education as they were familiar with him or her. some participants preferred having a different expert teaching sexuality education because it felt too intimate to share sexual content with their own teacher. ultimately, it depended on the competence of the teachers. participants mentioned four competencies of teachers that are crucial. first, teachers should be at ease with giving sexuality education. “a teacher should be self-confident in teaching sexuality education. not someone who hesitates all the time and obviously feels shy. then i think ‘never mind’ . . . ” second, teachers should encourage young people to form their own judgment. for instance, when discussing porn, a participant warned about moral judgments: “of course, porn is exaggerated. but you must be careful not to pressure people how sex ought to be. that is up to the person themselves. maybe there are women who like anal sex, who knows? so, it is not right if a teacher says that porn is not realistic, and women do not want to be treated that way. it makes no sense to start about different sexualities, hetero, gay, bi, to make people accept each other, and then continue that certain forms of sex are not ok. what you should say is that porn gives an idealized image of breasts, vulva, large penis, that does not match reality.” third, teachers should take young people and sexuality education seriously. participants explained that a teacher must find a delicate balance between seriousness and humor. “the atmosphere should not be too tense, because nobody will interact, but it should also not be too treated like a laughing matter, because people will not feel safe to open up.” fourth, pupils want a teacher they can trust, someone they can turn to if something bothers them. it does not matter to most participants whether the teacher is young or old, a man or a woman. mentors were often referred to as good teachers, because they are a little closer to young people. the finding that it is not the gender or age of the teacher that matters, but their competence to talk openly, be trustworthy, and facilitate meaningful discussion, corresponds with findings by other scholars [ , ]. one of the main issues pound, langford, and campbell [ ] found was that young people felt sexuality was dealt with too casually. this need for sensitivity to the ‘specialness’ of sexuality is mirrored in the urge for a safe atmosphere. however, unlike the young people in the ten countries included in the meta-analysis of int. j. environ. res. public health , , of pound, langford, and campbell [ ], dutch young people obviously do not feel that teachers neglect or deny the fact that they are sexually active. probably this is connected to the dutch dominant cultural logic, which accepts adolescent sexuality [ ]. in fact, young people voiced that the lack of sexuality education in senior grades gave the impression that they were supposed to know everything at the age of and be self-sufficient and agentic in their sexual experiences. . . young people want diverse teaching methods participants expressed their need for diverse sexuality education teaching methods in the classroom: discussions, practical assignments, tips, movies, and games. they did not want to listen to lengthy explanations from their teacher but wanted to work through more interactive methods. “for instance about stds, you can also make small groups and each group gets the assignment to explain about one std, how can you get infected, is it a bacterium or a virus, how is it treated, what are the consequences, etc. then you get more interaction between pupils and not just your teacher talking all the time.” participants had different ideas about splitting the class into separate boys’ and girls’ groups. some argued it would create more safety to ask delicate questions when you have separate boys’ and girls’ groups, where others felt it should be mixed so you can learn about the other sex as well. “just together, because you also have to know how the other sex feels about things. recently there was a boy who asked me, how many times do you have your period, four times a year? i thought ‘really!’” participants also stressed the importance of hearing people with different opinions. “it is good to get out of your comfort zone and hear people who are looking from another perspective, to understand their views.” according to our participants, guest speakers and ‘experience experts’ are a good addition to the lessons of a teacher. “especially about things that are not accepted by society. then you have a very quick tendency to judge because you feel it’s not normal. but if there is a guest speaker who has experienced it themselves, then you know someone, and you feel much more respect for such a person.” participants wanted variation in the lessons and methods, to get the opportunity to form their own ideas and points of view on socially sensitive topics, such as abortion, sexting, and sexual violence. this finding corresponds with the recommendations by other scholars to provide multiple stories in sexuality education, to enable young people to form their own views and identities and learn to navigate conflicts [ , , ]. naezer [ ] (p. ) concludes from her study of dutch youth, ‘finding people who are able and willing to confirm the “normalcy” of certain feelings, experiences and identifications requires the availability of a multitude of perspectives, a requirement that is absent from dutch sex educational policies.’ . discussion in this section, we will reflect on the main findings and make suggestions for the steps to be taken to realize the changes in sexuality education desired by young people. firstly, dutch youth participating in our study clearly voice the need for more lessons of sexuality education, delivered throughout their whole school careers, starting from elementary school and continuing as they grow older and start having romantic relationships and sexual experiences. this is a clear message to developers of school curricula and teachers to expand the amount of time spent on sexuality education and ensure that it does not stop when pupils are years old. currently, the debate about sexuality education in the netherlands has a strong focus on what age to start with sexuality education. less attention is paid to the age at which to end sexuality education. our study underlines the importance of continuing sexuality education after the age of . secondly, our study clearly illuminates the need for a truly comprehensive and sex-positive sexuality education. young people miss information on sexual consent and sexual coercion, sexual diversity, sexual pleasure, relationships, dating, online and offline communication, and sex in the media. “sex is more than biology”, as one of our participants voiced. although this has been voiced by many young people over the past years, the sexuality education that is taught at many dutch schools still has a very limited scope. a possible way forward could be to integrate comprehensive sexuality education into a broader curriculum than biology, for instance, in civic int. j. environ. res. public health , , of education, social sciences, or ‘citizenship competences’, as a relatively new course taught in dutch schools. citizenship competences are defined as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and reflection needed by young people to fulfill social tasks that are part of daily life in a democratic and multicultural society [ ]. this study demonstrates that many young people experience tension, which arises from the collision between their needs and feelings and what they perceive as social norms regarding good decision-making, heterosexuality, and gender roles. sexuality education will benefit from broadening the scope beyond lessons on individual decision-making to address norms collectively and offer learning opportunities and reflectivity [ , ]. thirdly, one of the most crucial conditions for good sexuality education, is a safe class atmosphere, which enables young people to feel comfortable and relates to the issues presented. this means teachers must be aware and sensitive regarding the social dynamics going on during sexuality education, and outside of the classroom. teachers should be aware that sexuality is enacted through collective practices, which brings about social effects of popularity, ethnicity, and gender [ ]. for instance, by being aware of the kind of questions that can be asked publicly, and the ones that cannot, by giving space for anonymous questions, by carefully structuring lessons, and by using methods that support social safety. a safe space is especially important for young people fearing social stigma or judgments, like lgbtq youth. as teachers are also immersed in a dominant heteronormative culture, they need to reflect on their own assumptions and prejudices. research indicates that teachers might unintendedly reinforce stereotypes and contribute to inequality [ , ]. methods used to address homophobia may be contra-productive when lgbtq people are positioned as ‘different’ and vulnerable, and by doing so, could reinforce the presumption of heterosexuality. classroom discussions of homosexuality might encourage controversy [ ] and can even initiate hate speech [ ]. teachers need education and training to update their knowledge on young people’s varying sexual identities, relationships, and sexual cultures. they need to be aware of various ways of promoting inclusivity, such as by using inclusive terminology (for instance, using partner instead of boy- or girlfriend, avoiding using sex synonymously with sexual intercourse) and resources that represent sexual diversities [ ]. fourthly, the need for diversity and interactivity in teaching methods requires an innovative approach. in its guidance, unesco promotes a learner-centered approach to sexuality education and encourages collaborative learning strategies [ ]. when sexuality education aims to empower youth, rather than diminish health risks, teaching methods will become an important object of scrutiny [ ]. empowering methods need to put young people at the center and be sensitive to (the heterogeneity of) their concerns, realities, suggestions, interests, and resistance [ ]. moreover, methods should include supporting young people’s own ways of knowledge building and learning strategies [ ]. developing sexuality education that builds on young peoples’ active participation will ensure content that is much more relevant to their lives, and additionally, it will always be up to date in language, dating trends, and technological developments. this study has some limitations. the main limitation is that we were unable to explore whether differences between pupils’ needs and wishes were related to differences in sexual, gender, cultural, and religious identities. as we did not gather much information on the sexual orientation and ethnic background of participants, we cannot make proper distinctions based on these categories within our group. ethically, this was information that could not be obtained using face-to-face research methods among pupils in a school context. a recommendation for future research would be to combine face-to-face methods with more anonymous data collection methods. . conclusions this study explored what sexuality education should be like, from the perspective of dutch young people, aged – . seventeen young peer researchers collected data at their own high school, among participants. our study endorses that the benefits of participatory research outweigh the challenges [ ] both for the quality and reach of the study as for the development of the peer researchers. the findings of our study demonstrate that most young people want more lessons, int. j. environ. res. public health , , of and more comprehensive sexuality education than they currently receive. they want sexuality education to move beyond biology and focus on matters that are relevant in their actual lives, such as dating, online behavior, sexual pleasure, relationships, and sexual coercion. moreover, they want sexual diversity integrated and normalized in all sexuality education content, instead of treated as a separate issue. one of their main issues is that sexuality education should be taught in a safe class atmosphere, which requires a teacher who is sensitive enough to know which questions can be answered publicly, and which cannot, and who takes young people seriously and encourages them to form their own judgments. the future challenge for developers of sexuality education and teachers is to move away from considering the teacher as an expert transferring knowledge towards a participatory, learner-centered approach. the role of the teacher will change into a facilitator of learning and empowerment by encouraging young people to discover different sexual cultures and identities, exchange knowledge, and take a stance. an active role of young people will ensure that the content of sexuality education is more relevant to young peoples’ lives and provide more opportunities to develop their sexual agency. author contributions: conceptualization, m.c., m.v. and s.d.g.; methodology, m.c. and s.d.g.; software, m.c. and s.d.g.; validation, m.c. and s.d.g.; formal analysis, m.c. and s.d.g.; investigation, m.c. and s.d.g.; resources, m.c., m.v. and s.d.g.; data curation, m.c.; writing—original draft preparation, m.c.; writing—review and editing, m.c. and s.d.g.; visualization, m.c.; supervision, m.c.; project administration, m.c.; funding acquisition, m.c. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.” funding: this research was funded by the dutch fund for scientific research of sexuality, grant number . . acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank all the young people who participated in the study as peer researchers and as participants. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . lewis, j.; knijn, t. the politics of sex education policy in england and wales and the netherlands since the s. j. soc. policy , , – . 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.rutgers.international/our-products/tools/explore http://dx.doi.org/ . / qp oa https://fgb.vu.nl/en/images/ethiek-reglement-adhlandelijk-nov- _tcm - .pdf https://fgb.vu.nl/en/images/ethiek-reglement-adhlandelijk-nov- _tcm - .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /cch. http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /acrefore/ . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	study design 	recruitment of the peer researchers 	capacity building and coaching of peer researchers 	data collection 	data analysis 	ethics 	results 	young people express a strong need for more sexuality education during their whole school career 	sexuality education should cover more issues 	sexuality education requires a safe atmosphere and a self-confident and sensitive teacher 	young people want diverse teaching methods 	discussion 	conclusions 	references the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there article how to cite: frühstück, sabine. . “the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there.” asianetwork exchange ( ): pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ane. published: july peer review: this article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of asianetwork exchange, which is a journal of the open library of humanities. copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: asianetwork exchange is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. the open library of humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. https://doi.org/ . /ane. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / sabine frühstück ‘the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there’ ( ) ( ), pp.  – asianetwork exchange. doi: https://doi.org/ . /ane. article the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there sabine frühstück uc santa barbara, us fruhstuck@eastasian.ucsb.edu this essay is an attempt to think about how concerns regarding disciplinary boundaries and distinctions intersect with the most current critique of asian studies in the wake of the multi-disciplinary call for “transnational” or “global” approaches to scholarship and pedagogy. this constitutes no manifesto—simply an encouragement of what i call “globally sensitive asian studies.” keywords: area studies; japanese studies; asia knowledge; discipline; teaching; visual culture https://doi.org/ . /ane. mailto:fruhstuck@eastasian.ucsb.edu frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there this essay is an attempt to think through concerns about disciplinary boundaries and distinctions and how those intersect with the most current critique of asian studies in the wake of the multi-disciplinary call for “transnational” or “global” approaches to scholarship and pedagogy. it constitutes no manifesto—just an encouragement of what i call “globally sensitive asian studies.” borrowing the spirit from martha nussbaum’s notion of “globally sensitive patriotism” (nussbaum ), the “globally sensitive asian studies” i propose would not rest on apolitical connoisseurship, nor would such an education be pursued in the interest of “the american (or some other) people.” instead, it would embrace collaboration and interdependence, welcome vulnerability and discomfort, and honor incomplete identities. our core goal would be training culturally and linguistically knowledgeable “students of the world” who would readily recognize the increasingly dynamic relationships among the local, the regional, and the global—recognition that would enable us to overcome the boundaries of nation states as key parameters of scholarship, return the individual to her rightful place at the center of our stories, and take seriously institutions and the public sphere. globally sensitive asian studies rest on two premises that generally guide my teaching. premise # is really theodor w. adorno’s: “the value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar” (adorno [ ] : ). premise # is, at least in spirit, michel foucault’s: a core goal in life and in university-level teaching is becoming someone else, someone you were not in the beginning. accordingly, i pursue three things with my teaching. first, i strive to create a class culture that balances nurture and discomfort; second, i design courses that de-familiarize my students with the world in which they live; and third, i help students to develop the analytical tools information, the questions to challenge their views, and the intellectual instruments to help them think through the social and political implications of their attitudes and opinions. my own area of scholarship is in japanese studies. as an instructor of undergraduates, from to at a time, i teach transnationally, comparatively, historically, sociologically, and anthropologically. i combine humanistic and frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there social-science approaches and borrow from feminist studies, visual culture studies, and sometimes literature. how i experience and practice the teaching of undergraduates regarding modern and contemporary japanese culture will, for the most part, tame my remarks in the following pages. the current cohort of undergraduates is ethnically and socioeconomically the most diverse in my twenty years of teaching at the university of california, santa barbara. and though many students grew up consuming vast amounts of japanese popular culture in the us or elsewhere, and though quite a few are also fans of k-pop, for the majority of my students my course is the first they have taken on things japanese. i will share some of my strategies for mobilizing interdisciplinary perspectives, employing a range of methodologies and sources, and integrating knowledge on japan while addressing life-and-death questions transnationally and comparatively. but first, let us consider how we got here. the question of what asia expertise and teaching about asia ought to be is an essential one; its shape and status impact the future world we are creating, particularly within but also beyond academia. in addition, there are several local, transnational, and global “worlds of relevance” (limoges ) at play that connect in a variety of ways. coined in the context of public debates about science, the notion of more than one “world of relevance” suggests two things: first, that our collective attempt to better integrate asia knowledge into undergraduate teaching might take on different shapes in different political, religious, and/or cultural arenas; and, second, that what is at stake evolves over time as “worlds of relevance” converge or diverge (limoges : ). we ought to keep in mind the idea of areas critical of “meta-geography,” namely, that “areas” need to be thought about as the result of processes, including research processes, rather than as objective clusters of cartographic, cultural or material facts (guneratne, appadurai, bhabha, and collins ). these processes are increasingly impacted by both the demographic shifts in asia (reid , mandler , szanton ) and the almost complete lack of attention to africa (auerbach ). while i cannot critically address these issues here, i hope that my observations and strategies will open up ways to critically address them. frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there connectivities and learning crowds without rehashing the history of the origin of area studies, i do wish to recall some of its key moments beginning with a consideration of various terminologies. the french word “cosmopolite” represents a “free citizen without a permanent home and [without] ties of citizenship to a particular fatherland.” the german term “weltbürger” signifies a “person with a worldly disposition,” at once a “citizen of the whole world” and a “fellow-citizen of the whole” or, in goethe’s terms, one who is “at home everywhere” (ette : ). in the spirit of the enlightenment, “cosmopolitan conceptions” were presented in opposition to “feudalistic provincialism.” in subsequent decades, cosmopolitanism was resignified several times before it lost its progressive legitimacy and instead appeared reactionary, especially in contrast to the more recently coined concept of “internationalism.” thereafter, from a socialist point of view, cosmopolitanism served as the underbelly of bourgeois nationalism and chauvinism, and was blamed for national betrayal and as the foundation and legitimization of the international unification of capital (ette : ). in the united states, the concept of the cosmopolite resurfaced after world war ii in a dramatically different light. in , earl james mcgrath proposed that educators’ roles in turning americans into “world citizens” lay in the twofold goal of educating “our own citizens concerning the changed position of the united states in world affairs” and “attempt[ing] to educate the citizens of other nations concerning the purposes and objectives of the united states” (mcgrath : ). he considered the “vigorous … development of area studies” to be crucial to achieving this twofold goal, and advocated that “every student be required to study the life of at least one other nation or area.” area studies— one enduring framing for asian studies—would acquaint students with another way of life, preparing them for a “tolerant and constructive understanding” of different perspectives. area studies would contribute to the “cultivation of international harmony” through an understanding of difference this is an extended version of a keynote address delivered at the th annual asianetwork conference—asia in undergraduate education: integration, enhancement, and engagement, university of san diego, april – , . frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there and would facilitate the appreciation and respect of the individual, regardless of place, race, creed, or nationality (mcgrath : ). in the political environment of the cold war, and upon “reexamination of international relations,” mcgrath reversed his prior opinion and became a strong advocate of the study of foreign languages, albeit with two reservations: students who showed “obvious incapacity” should be exempt, and the emphasis on instruction should be on the spoken rather than written word (mcgrath : ). he was aware of potential obstacles to his cosmopolitan educational vision, namely, the lack of properly qualified instructors, inadequate interdepartmental co-operation, and conflict with advocates of further professional specialization. yet he urged, “the fact remains (that) understanding of other peoples and cultures is fundamental to enlightened citizenship in our mid-century democracy.” mcgrath joined many other visionaries in considering how education could be tied to national security objectives. one in particular, mortimer graves of the american council of learned societies, thought about area studies in terms of “the national security problem,” noting that “deeper understanding of the world is the foremost ingredient of the calm leadership which alone will avert crises” (mcgrath : ). others saw area studies as “a neglected field of academic responsibility.” marshall k. powers, for instance, envisioned area studies as the basis for preventing war and achieving durable peace by “keeping our nation prepared.” siding with julian h. steward, he saw the four basic objectives of area studies as providing knowledge of practical value about important world areas; giving students and scholars an awareness of cultural relativity; providing understanding of social and cultural wholes as they exist in areas; and furthering the development of a universal social science (powers : ). indeed, he envisioned “a valuable contribution to the concept of total peace…through the creation of soundly conceived and wisely administered area-studies programs.” he also saw interdisciplinary training as essential to the success of area studies programs, and believed instructor qualifications must include a period of residence in the region, command of its language(s), and solid training in disciplines other than area competence (powers : – ). frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there many others have since chimed in, whether declaring progress or resurrecting old accusations. one former president of the association of asian studies declared in that area studies had long “disengaged from the circumstances of their origin,” and that its practitioners were driven by the “burning interest in areas such as india, china, and japan that…leads them to communicate with each other across the formidable barriers and jargons set up by their disciplines” (schwartz : ). speaking decisively and more loudly, others cite the importance of studies that further american interests, hegemony, and preparation for future conflict, rather than the prevention of such. for example, one facet of the us human shield program employed hundreds of so-called “embedded anthropologists” with area expertise so as to “increase the us army’s cultural iq” (shay ). in his report on that program, dahr jamail joined a majority of anthropologists in pointing to the history of anthropology as the “handmaiden of colonialism,” warning it could become “just another weapon” rather than a “tool for building bridges between people” (jamail ). of course, given the history of anthropology, this criticism feels somewhat cheap, for it overlooks the fact that the majority of anthropologists has specifically neglected the study, analysis, and critique of the very institutions that embody and drive armed conflict (frühstück ). the work some of us do has been critiqued from another corner of academia as well. while literary theorist and feminist critic gayatri spivak has acknowledged that area studies “exhibit quality and rigor,” that “the quality of the language learning is generally excellent,” and that “the data processing is sophisticated, extensive, and intensive,” she also claims that these elusive traits are “combined with openly conservative or ‘no’ politics”—that practitioners are “tied to the politics of power and their connections to the power elite in the countries studied” (spivak : ). indeed, historian harry harootunian ( : ) has repeatedly declared as much about japanese studies while, ironically, appearing unaware or being utterly disinterested in japanese studies practiced outside of the u.s. and beyond the shadow of the cold war. others have mounted a formidable defense. anthropologist thomas looser, for example, suggests that without area studies, “the disciplines risk becoming frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there increasingly generic, self-identified, and indifferent to each other” (looser : ). without area studies effectively serving as mediating grounds for other disciplines, “a common mediating basis for the social [might be] dissipating” (looser : ). more importantly, our vision and knowledge of the world outside ourselves becomes ever more shaped by the world within, without area studies. moreover, do we not forget the substantial changes to the student body? today, i teach many more students than ever before who already embody the makings of globalized citizens of one sort or another. i am no longer surprised to speak to, let’s say, a young man of chinese ethnicity, with italian as a native language and an italian accent in english, and with pretty good but far from perfect mandarin reading and writing skills. discipline and disciplinarity in conjunction with the ever-evolving issues of area studies in general and asian studies in particular, discipline and disciplinarity have generated their own problems and debates. scholars on the disciplines’ side of the imaginary fence between area studies and the disciplines readily acknowledge that discipline as academic orderliness “has been in bad odor” (hunt : ). lynn hunt, for example, a historian who has significantly pushed the boundaries of historiography insists that “[i]nterdisciplinarity cannot live without the disciplines,” and that one cannot cross boundaries if one doesn’t know where they are (hunt : ). thus, the disciplines provide potential interdisciplinarians with necessary vantage points. in addition, hunt acknowledges that “learning a new language, learning how to translate, can open up previously unsuspected riches….” and yet, “[i]n order to learn from other disciplines’ otherness and from one’s efforts at translation requires that those other disciplines remain foreign” (hunt : ). this is a strange claim coming from a specialist in the history of france, and is in contradiction to hunt’s insistence that “[a] good interdisciplinary conversation depends…not on giving up one’s own [discipline], but on following the other at least part of the way in which it leads. such a commitment, like learning a foreign language and experiencing a foreign culture, creates a different relationship to one’s own discipline. one gains a certain distance from one’s own discipline and a measure of imperviousness to the conventions that frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there define it” (hunt : ). hunt worries that “the creation of a true interdisciplinary space (taking the methods and sources of the other discipline seriously) makes you vulnerable to new kinds of criticism…but at the same time gives you permission to try out approaches that our own discipline may discourage” (hunt : ). i join julie thompson klein in thinking that hunt overstates the case against interdisciplinarity on two counts. one, when we speak of a discipline we speak of a body of knowledge and a set of practices by which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved, and reproduced. to invoke the authority (or continuity and stability) of a discipline is to suggest a regulative idea of a disciplinary unity that is false. two, to invoke the authority of a discipline would also minimize or deny differences that exist across the plurality of specialties grouped loosely under a single disciplinary label; would undervalue the connections across specialties of separate disciplines; and would discount the frequency and impact of cross- disciplinary influences (klein : ). besides, in research in the humanities and social sciences these boundaries have already long given way to a wealth of interdisciplinary conversations and flows of knowledge. the humanities and the social sciences are not mono-paradigmatic but multi-paradigmatic: they “allow many theoretical flowers to bloom simultaneously” (schäfer : ). in short, we need to recognize that the bounds of disciplines have been more flexible and vulnerable than some have stated they are; we need to continue to probe which “intellectual work is real and good (as opposed to [that which is] merely ‘tactical’ or ‘pragmatic’ within the micro-arbitraging cosmology of homo academicus)” (community of inquiry : xii). and, again, our students already bring at least snippets of essentially decentered area studies and/or interdisciplinary sensibilities into the classroom. some know, let’s say, east asian history through the lens of korean nationalism, for instance; others, being global studies majors, are equipped with a strong sense of justice and intend to save the world without being able to speak its many languages (other than english). more pragmatically, comparative literature specialists francoise lionnet and shu-mei shih noted that “disciplinary boundaries…would keep us on very different frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there professional tracks, and thus not lead us to meet with each other” (shih and lionnet : ). instead, crossing boundaries opens up the many benefits of collaboration. collaborating requires constant translation from one language into another, one methodology into another, one intellectual style into another. it makes visible the edges of our comfort zones, our vulnerabilities, and our biases. this distance, discomfort, and vulnerability is instructive, productive, and useful precisely because it forces us and our students to look at the world from different angles, [to] recognize networks and connectivities (cooppan ). as actor willem dafoe put it, “[y]ou do your best things when you’re a little off-balance, a little scared” (rose ). there is something else we need to be aware of, as shih and lionnet state: the “logic of globalization is centripetal and centrifugal at the same time and assumes a universal core or norm, which spreads out across the world while pulling into its vortex other forms of culture to be tested by its norm. it produces a hierarchy of subjects between the so-called universal and particular with all the attendant problems of eurocentric universalism. the transnational, on the contrary, can be a space of exchange and hybridization, and where cultures can be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center. while being part and parcel of the process of globalization, the transnational can be less scripted and more scattered. the transnational, therefore, is not bound by the binary of the local and the global and can occur in national, local, or global spaces across different and multiple spatialities and temporalities” (shih and lionnet : ). many of my students are inherently transnational and only need help in the classroom (and possibly beyond) with recognizing and fearlessly articulating how their specific vantage points enrich our understanding of the world. incomplete identities just as every frame reveals and obscures a different portion of a picture, every discipline illuminates and shadows a different angle of the world. if we are to effectively integrate asian studies into undergraduate education, we need to fully experience what leon wieseltier calls “the opposite of homesickness,” to develop a frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there tolerance for the vulnerability that comes with stepping outside our disciplines. only then can we “concentrate [ourselves] without references, to vibrate in a featureless environment, entirely out of [our] own powers, with an energy that owes nothing to the energy of origins” (wieseltier : ). “the opposite of homesickness” is more than sickness of home. it is a mindset wherein questions can be raised that disciplinary boundaries and practices make invisible. it is where challenging the disciplinary order of the world we live in prompts us to shake up the bag of questions we allow ourselves to ask. when writing about identity here i mean disciplinary identity, keeping in mind that “[t]he vigorous expression of identity in the face of oppression is…an exercise of heroism.… [i]t is impertinent to address the criticism of identity to those whose existence is threatened” (wieseltier : ). in what leon wieseltier refers to as “good times,” by contrast, the habitual clinging to boundaries easily degenerates into laziness, into habit devoid of intellectual rigor. for example, i have never understood why people ask whether i am an historian, an anthropologist, or a sociologist. what could the answer possibly reveal they don’t see in my scholarship? in such questions i hear only “who are you like?” i see disciplinary identity as “an insulation; a doctrine of aversion; an exaltation of impassability” (wieseltier : ). to my mind, if the interrogator belongs to a different discipline, she has decided she doesn’t need to occupy herself with the questions i raise or the problems i address. appropriating wieseltier’s aphorisms on identity just slightly, the lure of disciplinary identity is “the lure of wholeness. it proposes to bind up the parts and the pieces of a life and transform them into a unity, into a life that adds up. it promises coherence, consistency, sameness, and loyalty.” but is there really nothing worse than a life that does not add up? perhaps erik erikson was right to remark that “an increasing sense of identity… is experienced as a sense of psychosocial well-being,” but “the thirst for wholeness is [also] indistinguishable from the thirst for death” (wieseltier : ). though it will remain difficult to achieve globally sensitive asian studies, we must remember what is at stake: a vastly distorted view of the world, an impoverished archive of human experience, and far fewer approaches with which to address the frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there formidable problems of the twenty-first century. a number of japanese studies experts have examined the place of “japan knowledge” (to adopt the name of a database) in the humanities and social sciences: in literature (tansman , treat ), anthropology (robertson ), history (gordon , harootunian ), or religious studies (hardacre ). variously, they have critiqued its political embeddedness, noting its lack of impact, and its marginality within academia. these experts have contemplated japanese studies’ relationships to a range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. they have also ascribed this reality to various causes: a lack of interest on the part of japanese scholars to converse across national and linguistic boundaries; the difficulty of the japanese language, especially in that it hinders disciplinary experts from engaging with, producing, and incorporating japan data into their studies; and the fact that area studies specialists embrace a japanese exceptionalism that undercuts transnational and comparative projects. a range of reasons more specific to individual disciplines just adds to the list. i recount three examples: the history of philosophy, world history, and transnational history. the first concerns who can take part in the conversation; the second concerns whose stories get told; and the third concerns what questions can be asked. all three necessitate deep area-studies knowledge combined with the “deep craft culture” of the humanities—“its attention to the contours and effects of language and rhetoric, cultural specificity, historical change, logical argument, complex causality, narratives of imagined worlds, subjective experience, and the aesthetic power of form” (reid : ). historian of philosophy c. s. goto-jones, for instance, asked, “if the past is a different country, are different countries in the past?” interestingly, he found that philosophy is one of many disciplines where japan is “unusually under-represented,” despite the japanese canon of philosophy being a “particularly useful example of a school of philosophy which can shed wisdom on the question of how to internationalize the history of philosophy” (goto-jones : ). julia adeney thomas ( : ) has found the same to be true for history. she writes that, “[d]espite the best efforts of world historians, the discipline of history does not encompass the world.” in fact, in the united kingdom and the united frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there states, more than three-quarters of all historical research concerns europe, the us, and canada. for north atlantic scholars, “east asia” hardly figures at all. it attracts less tha[n] percent of american historical research, less than percent of canadian research, and a measly . percent of uk attention” (thomas : ). similar “small world geopolitics” exist around the world. yet, as compared to goto-jones’s findings, it is not so much the problem of “disproportionate representation” that is at issue. it is the “inadequate presentation” of places that are vital to essential current- day questions, such as the roots of environmental degradation, the persistence of gender inequality, and alternatives to modern growth economies (thomas : ). since “vigorous critiques of this ‘small world’ geopolitics emerging from area studies, postcolonial studies, environmental history, and world history have done little to dislodge it,” thomas proposes to “remap history’s worlds” so as to help us better understand and critique such processes as those which have led to planetary environmental degradation (thomas : , ). could such remapping be accomplished by transnationalizing nation-centered histories and area-centered scholarship alike? sheldon garon proposes just that. transnational history, he writes, can “explain local and global developments in ways that nation-centered historians and area specialists cannot” ( : ). garon recommends we “think of emulation as a multidirectional process within a global marketplace of ideas and practices,” and suggests that “scholars of japan could make valuable contributions to global history if we started thinking more transnationally about japan” (garon : – ). while there is no one way to write transnational history, prime attention to connections, comparisons, and causality ought to be its core features. at the same time, garon notes, “we must not ‘flatten’ the differences in our cases,” we must “broaden the frame” so as to not restrict our inquiry to japan plus one other country, and “we must consider our ‘positionality’” in order to refrain from being locally centered in europe or the united states (garon : – ). and so we might reconsider which approach would be best: goto-jones’s vision of the rescue mission of philosophy, thomas’s remapping of history’s world, or garon’s transnationalizing of japan’s history. but note that none of these strategies can do without the “accumulated regional knowledge, cultural fingerspitzengefühl, and frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there linguistic competence of area studies”—in short, “the flesh and bone of our brave new world” (schäfer : ). all three scholars have nation-centered and area- studies expertise—though the difference one makes out among the national, regional/area, and the transnational lies as much in the questions one asks as in different skill sets. transnationalizing any area-studies field, then, will require all the area-studies expertise we have to offer. it also requires the will to collaborate, to learn additional languages, to embrace vulnerability (interdependence and interdisciplinarity), and to acknowledge that identity may remain forever incomplete. the popular culture of life and death the pasts of the disciplines and disciplinarity and of asian studies may well seem to us a different country. how do we make the future less foreign? my own offerings to that end combine a transnational and comparative perspective, an interdisciplinary frame, and the employment of popular culture. i will briefly describe my experiences teaching my course “representations of sexuality in modern japan,” which addresses culturally and historically bound values; identitarian politics; life-and-death questions; and practices laden with legal and ethical norms. most generally, the course traces the history of various sex/gender/sexuality themes from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. this includes the role of sexuality in nation-, state-, and empire-building; sexual slavery and other instances of sexual violence; the politics of prostitution; gender ambivalence; lgbtqi history, activism, and identities; traditional, new, and international women; family planning from infanticide to adoption; and representations of sexuality in visual culture and literature. needless to say, the course offers plenty of life-and-death issues to examine through these prisms. note that many of my students already consume a great deal of japanese popular culture—manga, anime, and video games. given that fact, i have found it most effective to start at the opposite end of the spectrum, where there might be the greatest potential friction arising from, shall we say, “prim” sensibilities, and from there work toward nuanced, historically and culturally informed analyses, thereby opening paths to other as-yet undiscovered realms of japanese culture. perhaps particularly with respect to sexuality, popular cultural lenses also serve as tools in the struggle with current-day (american) sensibilities. frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there take, for instance, infanticide and other methods of family planning, which had long been the object of many folk stories—and which, beginning in the late nineteenth century became the object of increasing control and criminalization by the japanese nation state. as our students today witness yet another onslaught on reproductive rights in this country, very productive discussions are sure to emerge from sharing with them the story of a certain suzuki fumi. born in , she had survived a botched attempt to be killed as a baby on account of her “terrible ugliness,” phrasing that most likely speaks of a disfiguring disability (saga : – ). another take on the life-and-death question is told by none other than yanagita kunio, founder of folklore studies and compiler of the legends of tôno. in that collection of legends, he writes that “certain children” who were deemed “grotesque” were “hacked to pieces, put into small wine casks, and buried in the ground.” in stark contrast, today’s educational campaigns tend to heavily employ the techniques of popular culture, ranging from colorful and cheerful elements to cute and endearing imagery (frühstück : – , : – ). for our in-class discussion about the historically evolving approaches to contraception, family planning, safe sex, and reproductive rights, i use examples that exemplify the amalgamation of education, popular culture, and advertising. we might analyze, for instance, current-day advertisements for condoms, for which a full-page ad in the july issue of the youth magazine popteen is a perfect start. a smiling, pretty young woman holds a large number of single-condom packages decorated with colorful images; the ad includes the slogans “original condoms” and “this is something very important.” next, i might show a commercial for okamoto zero one condoms featuring two copulating dinosaurs ostensibly from “ million years ago,” when “the world had no love.” after a certain amount of thrusting the female pulls away and ferociously growls at the male, who turns away in shame. next come the slogans “mankind has okamoto,” followed by “let’s wear ‘love.’” thus, love and condoms are equated with conscientious copulation. i might then contrast these i am grateful to ann wehmeyer of the university of florida for pointing me to the folk stories mentioned in this essay. https://youtu.be/eq px v sii https://youtu.be/eq px v sii frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there ads for contraceptives with a u.s. abstinence-campaign poster from the george w. bush era in which three ethnically ambiguous, fresh-faced teenagers in a boy-girl- boy line-up proclaim, “because i value my virginity,” “because i don’t want warts,” and “because abstinence has given me a second chance.” the lines “abstinence is my choice,” and “because not everyone wants warts,” serve as a subtitle to the entire appeal. such a trio of advertising examples sets a productively wide frame for discussing the legal, religious, cultural, and historical conditions within which these and numerous other pronouncements have emerged. in another example of exploring modern-day issues, starting from the point of how several states within the united states have recently legalized assisted suicide, i might launch a discussion of the transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary potential of the historical practice of a passive euthanasia that in japan has been narrated countless times under such titles as “the mountain where old people were abandoned.” one narration of this legend goes as follows: “long ago when people had reached the age of sixty and were unable to do anything, they were thrown into a mountain canyon. this was known as ‘sixty canyon abandonment.’” given that such legends appeared as early as in the eleventh-century konjaku monogatari, this tale reports a japanese historical practice while also linking the premodern with the modern and contemporary. the tale also serves as the subject of a global excursion, since it is “scattered throughout europe” where it has often been ascribed to king solomon. it also appears in six variants in china, and in five in india, highlighting unacknowledged connectivities and offering rich material for comparative perspectives on dramatic reconfigurations and ruptures (dorson : ; seki [ – ] : – ). in japan, popular cultural representations of sex have long worked as objects of humor and play (linhart ). to be sure, there is much amusement to be found in katsushika hokusai’s strange print (circa ) whose title was translated by at least for a study of the abstinence campaign, see jesseca boyer, “new name, same harm: rebranding of federal abstinence-only programs,” guttmacher policy review ( ) vol. , https://www. guttmacher.org/gpr/ / /new-name-same-harm-rebranding-federal-abstinence-only-programs (accessed may , ). https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/ / /new-name-same-harm-rebranding-federal-abstinence-only-programs https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/ / /new-name-same-harm-rebranding-federal-abstinence-only-programs frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there one cataloguer as “mr. prick and ms. cunt,” or in the egg sequence in nagisa Ôshima’s film about abe sada, in the realm of the senses. indeed—to take up one of shimada yoshiko’s feminist and pacifist credos—there is much of interest in “art that makes you uncomfortable.” as for tamer examples, kim longinotto’s documentary shinjuku boys ( ) features a queen show whose transgendered host solicits confirmation from the audience regarding how, “despite one performer’s remarkable shoe size, she is still a beautiful woman (see figure ).” to this, most of my students laugh as readily as does the show’s television audience. it is also quite obvious to my students that the participants in annual festivals such as the festival of the steel phallus (kanamara matsuri) or the naked festival (hadaka matsuri) enjoy the queer reinvention of much older rituals designed to celebrate virility and fertility and (admittedly strictly) heterosexual masculinity and femininity. (these festivals were once prohibited by the nation- and empire-builders of late-nineteenth-century japan). when i relate to my students the above range figure : a still from shinjuku boys ( ), directed by kim longinotto and jano williams. https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/shimada-yoshiko-art-that-makes-you-uncomfortable/period/past https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/shimada-yoshiko-art-that-makes-you-uncomfortable/period/past frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there of historical settings in japan i’m able to shift the parameters of sexually inflected humor and reexamine the mostly male and mostly heterosexual norms of their production, from a geographically and culturally different angle. i am able to draw an arc from the significance and uses of erotic wood block prints in the nineteenth century, to Ôshima’s in the realm of the senses take on abe sada in the late twentieth century, continuing to current-day media mocking heterosexual partner-matching game shows. more broadly, we reevaluate the role of humorous sexual rhetoric in the public sphere. i would like to end with some of my students’ responses to controversial class content. i have always liked screening at least parts of Ôshima nagisa’s work in the realm of the senses (ai no koriida) (see figure ). an artsy critique of s sexual morals in japan, the film includes many explicit sex scenes that provoked scandal and censorship in japan and abroad. figure : a still from in the realm of the senses (ai no korrida, ), directed by nagisa Ôshima. frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there in the course, the film also serves as one of three different takes on the real- life story of abe sada together with william johnston’s geisha, harlot, strangler, star: a woman, sex, and morality in modern japan ( ) and christine l. marran’s treatment of sada and other transgressive female figures in poison woman: figuring female transgression in modern japan ( ). this portion of the story of abe sada ( – ) is set in the s. a former geisha and prostitute, she pursues an extended, intense sexual relationship with the owner of the inn where she works as a maid. after strangling him in the height of passion, she cuts off his penis and testicles and leaves the scene. since the film ends at that moment, it does not convey how the actual abe sada was caught by police just days after the incident, still carrying her unusual keepsakes. abe became notorious; her story was widely covered by the print media of the time and has since been frequently adapted as a literary subject and studied and examined by a number of experts from various fields of medicine and law. the film also features a fair amount of witty conversation, playful teasing, and laughter, not all of which include explicit sexuality. in previous years, in the dark of the lecture hall, students laughed at some of the playful, erotically charged scenes. they also occasionally shrieked or (rather light-heartedly, it seemed to me) articulated disapproval of certain scenes. for instance, an audible murmur often went through the room when abe sada exchanged sex for money with an elderly man whom she referred to as “teacher.” and some scenes prompted the occasional “eew” from the audience—though none as noisily as did the bloody end. screening the film in class offers me the opportunity to discuss what made modern japanese sexuality modern; the production of scientific knowledge; erotic art versus pornography; and feminism, agency, and gendered standards of morality. but i also screen parts of the film in the hope that its s radicalism may help students approach more-current mainstream popular culture and its treatment of sexual themes with fresh eyes. in our discussions we collectively question the widespread assumption that sexual mores travel on a continuous path toward liberation and freedom. i have come to think that perhaps what was shocking in the frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there eyes of many audiences in the s differs from what occupies the undergraduates of my course today. in recent years (prior to the #metoo movement), more than the usual handful of students start walking out less than minutes into the film. i have wondered whether particular parts of the film, or maybe the fact that i screened it in class, offended their sensibilities. i speculate that one reason might lie in the fact that sex, and nudity more specifically, have become carefully sanitized in mainstream u.s. media culture. or perhaps they are surprised that the nude scenes do not include body doubles? or have the products of contemporary body enhancements distorted people’s expectations of what a naked body looks like? (this seems likely, given the general anxiety about nudity in american mainstream culture, the obsession with bodily imperfections, and the simultaneous rise of ever-more-perfectly obese bodies.) or were these responses just the result of staunch conservative or religious fundamentalist backgrounds? to explore this more, i developed a paper assignment: students were to read my earlier deliberations and then write a short anonymous response to the visual materials presented in class. the following are several examples of what they wrote, grouped by topic. specifically, on the bloody end of in the realm of the senses, one student wrote: “would a similar bloody scene that depicted an arm or a leg being cut off as opposed to a penis garner as much of a reaction? when i asked myself this, i came to a realization. the sensitivity of male genitalia is a concept familiar to most people of any gender. even as a cisgender woman, i know this because the media i grew up on would often emphasize this fact, usu- ally humorously. thinking about it, it feels rather strange that i, who never had a penis, still wince in pain whenever i am shown that particular area of a man being harmed in some way. what’s even more unsettling is how much people are unfamiliar with female genitals in comparison… i became keenly aware, more than ever, of the media’s constant, usually unconscious, pandering to male audiences and their problems.” frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there some students found the film and other visual materials eye-opening: i am glad that the film was shown because it opened my mind and allowed me to take off the taboo element surrounding sex as an open discussion topic… without the film, i would have no idea what the term “erotic art” means. the sex was a crucial part of the plot, so i see why the filmmaker included it. the final scene did cause some discomfort because of the graphic con- tent. i also feel that if it was animated rather than live action, i would have responded much differently to the cutting off of the penis. i think i would have found it more funny, instead of being horrified by what i was watching. i believe the goal of opening us up to analyze and understand another cul- ture’s perspective was reached. when used appropriately, popular culture is a great way to connect concepts of sexuality in modern japan with their tangible, real-world effects. in the beginning, i found many of the visuals very uncomfortable. it was not the content that fazed me, but rather, the company. something about see- ing visuals such as mr. prick and ms. cunt in the presence of my fellow peers was extremely uncomfortable. nevertheless, as the course progressed, it occurred to me that the discomfort was part of the learning process… when professor frühstück first showed the film, i noticed that my peers were more intrigued by the audacity of frühstück and her ability to show such a film without approaching it like a high school teacher would a love scene in a rated movie. some students grapple with the class content to the very end: thanks to a rollercoaster of emotions and intriguing visuals, i am able to see beyond my judgments and look deeper into the many disciplines regarding japanese modern sexuality. frühstück: the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there much as michel foucault believed that “the main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,” i walk out of this course with an open mind and memories of images both hilarious and horrific. concluding remarks it seems to me that the more universal (or natural or normative) certain topics appear to be—sex, war, death—the more essential it becomes to denaturalize both students’ individual beliefs and attitudes and that which they understand to be “japanese culture.” of course, accomplishing this might mean quite different things at different institutions, and could easily be complicated and enriched by a number of factors, including the political climate at a particular moment in a particular place, the composition of students’ collective knowledge and sensibilities, and the sources of information they draw from beyond formal university education. what might be hypersensitive at one institution might meet complacency in another. regardless, collegiate discussions of life-and-death questions, whether situated in recent history or earlier, typically succeed in creating the distance necessary for students to consider the familiar with fresh eyes. i envision a globally sensitive asian studies that embraces collaboration and interdependence, welcomes vulnerability and discomfort, and honors incomplete identities. note the history and future of area studies, even regarding various incarnations of asian studies, has produced a substantial body of commentary: “area studies under the axe” ; coppaan ; gordon ; guneratne, appadurai, bhabha, and collins ; hardacre ; harootunian ; katzenstein ; krämer ; looser ; mcgrath ; morris-suzuki ; powers ; rausch ; robertson ; schäfer ; schwartz ; szanton ; tansman . competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references adorno, theodor w. 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( ) . the legends of tōno, trans., with an introduction, ronald a. morse, . tokyo: kodansha. how to cite this article: frühstück, sabine. . “the future is also a different country and we should do things differently there.” asianetwork exchange ( ): pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ane. published: july copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access asianetwork exchange is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. https://doi.org/ . /jwh. . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /ane. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	connectivities and learning crowds 	discipline and disciplinarity 	incomplete identities 	the popular culture of life and death 	concluding remarks 	note 	competing interests 	references 	figure 	figure wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ s x xjra .. vos estis lux mundi: too far or not far enough? helen costigane shcj programme director in theology, st mary’s university, twickenham in the light of the abuse crisis in the roman catholic church, several inquiries have given recommendations on what should be done in the future, to ensure that such crimes are dealt with both civilly and canonically. in , the royal commission of australia produced a number of specific points to be addressed. two years later, pope francis introduced guidelines to be observed universally whenever cases are reported, and these addressed many of the commission’s recommendations. a question remains as to whether these have gone too far or far enough. keywords: safeguarding, canon law, vulnerability the apostolic letter vos estis lux mundi (‘you are the light of the world’), issued by pope francis in , was an attempt to address the global scandal of sexual abuse within the roman catholic church. the document itself augments what was already in the code of canon law, while also taking into account issues that had come to the fore in the public domain through the tes- timony of survivors, and various inquiries held in a number of countries. this article considers whether the provisions of francis’ letter go far enough by con- sidering the types of abuse that have been reported, what was already in canon law to deal with it (and why it may not have been effective) and what the report of the royal commission of australia has recommended. the discussion will then look at the text of vos estis lux mundi itself, noting the positive aspects, but also pointing out some potential issues in its implementation. worldwide abuse the website bishopaccountability.org gives an indication of the worldwide scale of the abuse problem. though the website itself is careful to indicate that it is reporting allegations rather than criminal convictions, there are various other pope francis, vos estis lux mundi, , <www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/docu- ments/papa-francesco-motu-proprio- _vos-estis-lux-mundi.html>, accessed november . though there have been a number of investigations in countries such as ireland, scotland, austria, germany, the netherlands and the usa, the royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse (rcircsa), final report ( ), provided very specific recommendations to the catholic church on what action should be taken. the report is available online, <https://www. childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report>, accessed june . ( ) ecc lj – © ecclesiastical law society doi: . /s x x terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/papa-francesco-motu-proprio- _vos-estis-lux-mundi.html http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/papa-francesco-motu-proprio- _vos-estis-lux-mundi.html https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s x x&domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core sources which corroborate the scale of the problem. the website indicates that the issue covers all continents, and that there are different aspects to the ques- tion of ‘abuse’. while the physical sexual abuse of minors has received most publicity, seminarians and young priests, sisters in religious congregations and vulnerable adults have themselves been the target of sexual predators. however, the abuse crisis relates to more than physical acts of various levels of intrusiveness and severity. the growth and prevalence of internet activity since the creation of the world wide web by tim berners-lee in has opened up another channel of exploitative and immoral activity, that of down- loading, possessing or distributing indecent images of children. the explosion of the number of websites featuring such material has led to various studies being done on its prevalence and initiatives being taken to combat the sexual exploitation of children. indeed, the recognition that this problem extends to members of the clergy is demonstrated in its inclusion in various safeguarding documents issued by bishops’ conferences, and not least because of a number of convictions of priests for this crime, even up to the present day. such abuse was further compounded in the way that reports of abuse were dealt with. in , the boston globe exposed the extent of the cover-up of crimes by priests in the archdiocese of boston. not only were the crimes kept secret and not reported to civil authorities, but priests were often moved around parishes, giving them the opportunity to re-offend. subsequent two of the most prominent clergymen to be accused in recent years are keith o’brien, former cardinal archbishop of the archdiocese of edinburgh and st andrews, and theodore mccarrick, former cardinal archbishop of washington, dc. see ‘pope admits clerical abuse of nuns, including sexual slavery’, bbc news, february , <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- >, accessed june . this was not news in the sense that in sr maura o’donohue, who had worked in africa, compiled a report detailing such abuse, not only in africa, but also in the united states, india, ireland and italy. see p mcgarry, ‘the irish woman who exposed abuse of nuns by priests years ago’, irish times, february , <https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/ the-irish-woman-who-exposed-abuse-of-nuns-by-priests- -years-ago- . >, accessed january . this raises a question about the definition of ‘vulnerable adult’, which will be discussed later. see j-c larchet, the new media epidemic: the undermining of society, family, and our own soul (jordanville, ny, ), p . for example, see ecpat international, trends in online child sexual abuse material (bangkok, ), available at <https://www.ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /ecpat-international-report-trends- in-online-child-sexual-abuse-material- .pdf>, accessed january . see, for example, commission of the european community, ‘report from the commission based on article of council framework decision of december on combating the sexual exploit- ation of children and child pornography’ (brussels, ), <https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/ eu-policy/report-commission-based-article- -council-framework-decision- jha- -december- _en>, accessed june . see united states conference of catholic bishops, ‘promise to protect, pledge to heal: charter for the protection of children and young people’, june (revised), <www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/ child-and-youth-protection/upload/charter-for-the-protection-of-children-and-young-people- - final.pdf>, accessed january . the report was later made into a film, spotlight, in . the subsequent scandal after the report saw more victims coming forward, and the resignation of cardinal law. e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/the-irish-woman-who-exposed-abuse-of-nuns-by-priests- -years-ago- . https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/the-irish-woman-who-exposed-abuse-of-nuns-by-priests- -years-ago- . https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/the-irish-woman-who-exposed-abuse-of-nuns-by-priests- -years-ago- . https://www.ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /ecpat-international-report-trends-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-material- .pdf https://www.ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /ecpat-international-report-trends-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-material- .pdf https://www.ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /ecpat-international-report-trends-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-material- .pdf https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/eu-policy/report-commission-based-article- -council-framework-decision- jha- -december- _en https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/eu-policy/report-commission-based-article- -council-framework-decision- jha- -december- _en https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/eu-policy/report-commission-based-article- -council-framework-decision- jha- -december- _en https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/eu-policy/report-commission-based-article- -council-framework-decision- jha- -december- _en http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/charter-for-the-protection-of-children-and-young-people- -final.pdf http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/charter-for-the-protection-of-children-and-young-people- -final.pdf http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/charter-for-the-protection-of-children-and-young-people- -final.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core investigations into child sexual abuse in other parts of the world revealed similar failures. the report into the irish diocese of raphoe noted that the judgement of successive bishops was often clouded, with too much emphasis placed on the situation, needs and presumed right to ministry of the accused priest, and where presenting problems such as alcohol abuse were seen to mitigate the actual offence. the report dealing with the diocese of ferns noted that between and the bishop at the time treated child sexual abuse by priests as a moral problem, though the report suggests that the bishop’s response reflected the growing understanding by the medical profession and society in general of the nature of child sexual abuse and the harm it did. the murphy report, dealing with the archdiocese of dublin, notes that the pre- occupation in dealing with cases of abuse up until the mid s was maintain- ing secrecy, avoiding scandal and protecting institutional reputation and assets. and in england and wales, the wide-ranging institutional inquiry into child sexual abuse (iicsa) noted similar failures in reporting, but also that, when cases were dealt with after measures were put in place, there were deficiencies in case management and the recording of actions. what we have seen, therefore, is that the concept of ‘abuse’ is multi-faceted, involving not only the physical sexual abuse of children, but also their abuse through the proliferation of child abusive imagery. sexual abuse cases have also involved adults, both men and women, deemed to be ‘vulnerable’. finally, this abuse has been compounded (and may also be said to be a form of abuse) by the way in which such cases have been handled when reported. this raises the question of what provisions were already in the code of canon law, and why they were not implemented effectively in these cases. national board for safeguarding children in the catholic church, ‘review of safeguarding practice in the diocese of raphoe’, august , <https://www.safeguarding.ie/images/pdfs/dioceses_reports/ diocese% of% raphoe.pdf>, accessed june . f murphy, h buckley and l joyce, the ferns report, presented by the ferns inquiry to the minister for health and children (dublin, ), available at <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ferns>, accessed january , executive summary, p . department of justice and equality, report by commission of investigation into the catholic archdiocese of dublin, november , <http://www.justice.ie/en/jelr/pages/pb >, accessed june (hereafter murphy report). iicsa, the roman catholic church case study: archdiocese of birmingham investigation report, june , <https://www.iicsa.org.uk/publications/investigation/birmingham-archdiocese>, accessed june . this report noted the failure to report abuse cases to the police prior to , with the default position being to take no action or move a priest to another parish, together with a culture of secrecy and protection of the institution (s e : conclusions, points and ). the same issues were noted in case studies related to the schools operated by the english benedictine congregation. see iicsa, ampleforth and downside investigation report, august , <https://www. iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/ /view/ampleforth-downside-investigation-report-august- .pdf>, accessed january . archdiocese of birmingham investigation report, s e : conclusions, point . v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.safeguarding.ie/images/pdfs/dioceses_reports/diocese% of% raphoe.pdf https://www.safeguarding.ie/images/pdfs/dioceses_reports/diocese% of% raphoe.pdf https://www.safeguarding.ie/images/pdfs/dioceses_reports/diocese% of% raphoe.pdf http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ferns http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ferns http://www.justice.ie/en/jelr/pages/pb http://www.justice.ie/en/jelr/pages/pb https://www.iicsa.org.uk/publications/investigation/birmingham-archdiocese https://www.iicsa.org.uk/publications/investigation/birmingham-archdiocese https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/ /view/ampleforth-downside-investigation-report-august- .pdf https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/ /view/ampleforth-downside-investigation-report-august- .pdf https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/ /view/ampleforth-downside-investigation-report-august- .pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core what was already in canon law? there was already much in the code of canon law which addressed such activities. in terms of expectations, clerics are obliged to observe ‘perfect and per- petual continence’ and are ‘bound to celibacy’. however, celibacy is more than being continent (or abstaining from sexual relations), simply remaining unmar- ried or avoiding exclusive one-to-one relationships. it is described as ‘the reli- gious practice of non-marriage or the choice of a commitment to the single life for specifically religious reasons’. for the roman catholic priesthood, cler- ical celibacy is an obligation (with the exception of former married anglican priests who have been ordained in the roman catholic church). for diocesan clergy this involves making a promise to remain celibate, and for priests in reli- gious orders it involves the taking of a vow. this difference, however, is not sig- nificant in terms of the obligations undertaken or the challenges involved in living as a celibate. canon is also relevant in that it mentions sanctions for someone ‘who abuses ecclesiastical power or an office’. as one commentary notes, ‘all power in the church . . . is to be exercised for the good of the faithful’, but a strict interpretation of the text (in accordance with canon ) requires that ‘there must be a deliberate misuse of one’s authority or position which results in injustice or injury to others’. therefore, ‘sexual misconduct’ has two aspects: the violation of clerical celibacy and the intentional misuse of power and abuse of ministry. in terms of dealing with a perpetrator, several reports on the failure of the church to deal adequately with the question of child sexual abuse by clergy noted that the code of canon law in fact contained detailed regulations for legal proceedings to be initiated. canon states that a major superior (an ordinary of a diocese, or superior general or a provincial superior of a reli- gious congregation) is to enquire carefully about the facts and circumstances, and about the imputability of the offence, when he receives report about an offence which has at least a semblance of truth (§ ). care, however, is to be taken that the investigation does not call into question anyone’s good name (§ ). after this preliminary inquiry, the major superior is to decide on various courses of action–imposing or declaring a penalty, initiating a judicial process or proceeding by means of an extra-judicial decree. code of canon law , canon § . d goergen, ‘celibacy’, in the new dictionary of theology (dublin, ), pp – at p . canon law society of great britain and ireland, the code of canon law, letter and spirit (london, ), p . one of the most recent cases is that of jean vanier, founder of the l’arche community, who has been accused of instigating sexual relations with women, usually in the context of giving spiritual guid- ance. see ‘summary report from l’arche international’, february , <https://www.larche. org/documents/ / /inquiry-summary_report-final- _ _ -en.pdf/ f e c- fe- e -a b-dd ede b>, accessed june . for example, see murphy report, ch . e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.larche.org/documents/ / /inquiry-summary_report-final- _ _ -en.pdf/ f e c- fe- e -a b-dd ede b https://www.larche.org/documents/ / /inquiry-summary_report-final- _ _ -en.pdf/ f e c- fe- e -a b-dd ede b https://www.larche.org/documents/ / /inquiry-summary_report-final- _ _ -en.pdf/ f e c- fe- e -a b-dd ede b https://www.larche.org/documents/ / /inquiry-summary_report-final- _ _ -en.pdf/ f e c- fe- e -a b-dd ede b https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core however, there appear to have been two major issues which meant that the provisions above were not adequately implemented, if at all. an instruction, crimen sollicitationis, first issued in and reissued in , established a pro- cedure for canonical cases where priests were accused of abusing the confes- sional to proposition penitents sexually. the contents of the document were not limited to cases involving solicitation. there were norms to deal with four distinct crimes (classed as de crimine pessimo–‘the worst crime’): solicitation for sex in the forum of sacramental confession; homosexual sex; sexual abuse of minors, male or female; and bestiality or sex with animals. a major feature of the document was its emphasis on the inviolable observation of confidential- ity for all those taking part in the process and all who had knowledge by reason of office. unfortunately, because this document was not widely distributed, virtu- ally no one knew about it or used it. the document came under investigation when it was reported in the media in , by which time it has been super- seded by another document, sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela ( ). the media alleged that, being covered by pontifical secrecy, the document was intended to cover up cases of sexual abuse. canon lawyers maintained that the document imposed secrecy only on canonical procedures, and did not pro- hibit anyone from reporting criminal abuse cases to the statutory authorities. whatever the case, there is no doubt that these laws mandating secrecy exacer- bated the sexual abuse scandal. a second issue relates to the definition of paedophilia and the canonical concept of imputability. the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) of the american psychiatric association, which has undergone a number of revisions since it was first published in , provides criteria for a range of psychiatric disorders, as does the international statistical classification of diseases and related health problems, maintained by the world health organization. both provide criteria for a range of psychiatric disorders, among the listing of which is ‘paedophilia’, and both report that the fantasies, sexual urges or behaviours associated with this disorder ‘cause clinically sacred congregation of the holy office, ‘instruction on the matter of proceeding in causes involving the crime of solicitation’, , para , available at <www.vatican.va/resources/resources_crimen- sollicitationis- _en.html>, accessed january . see murphy report, ch , s ( ). in fact, the ‘pontifical secret’ referred to the responsibility of confidentiality and was not a commit- ment to keeping things secret. unfortunately, unhealthy secrecy became the norm in such matters rather than the positive values of confidentiality and discretion. see j allen, all the pope’s men: the inside story of how the vatican really thinks (new york, ), p . see n cafardi, ‘the scandal of secrecy: canon law and the sexual-abuse crisis’, commonweal, august , <https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scandal-secrecy>, accessed january . dsm-ii was published in ; dsm-iii in , with a revision in ; dsm-iv in , revised in ; dmm- is the most recent edition, published in . first used in , the th edition comes into effect in . v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_crimen-sollicitationis- _en.html http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_crimen-sollicitationis- _en.html https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scandal-secrecy https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scandal-secrecy https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of func- tioning’. when this ‘medical model’ of paedophilia is allied with the canonical concept of ‘imputability’ (canon ), where it can be extinguished if a person habitually lacks the use of reason (canon ) and does not function ‘freely and deliberately’, or diminished if there are factors affecting knowledge or freedom such as drunkenness or mental disturbance, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that it was treated as an illness (and/or a moral failure) rather than a crime, with abusers being sent for therapeutic intervention. what was asked for? in the various inquiries held in different countries a number of conclusions were drawn and recommendations made in the light of the issues mentioned above. this section looks specifically at those of the royal commission of australia in because they are particularly clear, focused and specific. recommendation ( ) addressed the issue of child sexual abuse itself and outlined suggestions to the australian catholic bishops conference that they request the holy see to create new canons in the code of canon law spe- cifically relating to this crime. the first of these was that all delicts relating to child sexual abuse should be articulated as canonical crimes against the child, not as moral failings or as breaches of the ‘special obligation’ of clerics and reli- gious to observe celibacy. it might be argued that it would be have been better to have put ‘not only as moral failings’ since sexual abuse is both a crime and a sin. nevertheless, it gives more than a nod to the fact that sexual abuse in a church setting may be committed by a lay person not bound to celibacy, and it could have been argued that it weakens the link between ‘celibacy’ and ‘child sexual abuse’, save for the commission’s recommendation ( ( )) that the australian bishops should request the holy see to consider introducing voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy. a second suggested change was that all delicts relating to child sexual abuse should apply to any person holding a ‘dignity, office or responsibility in the church’ regardless of whether they are ordained or not ordained. as rik torfs notes, at the time when the code was promulgated in , ‘lay people were less active in the church, certainly on a professional basis, than they are dsm-iv, p . canon law society of america, new commentary on the code of canon law (new york, ), pp – . in the murphy report it was noted that paedophilia could be made an actual defence to a claim of child sexual abuse, just as insanity would be a defence in the law of the state (ch , s ( ), p ). it was further noted that the penal process was set aside in favour of a purely ‘pastoral’ approach (s ( ), p ). in testimony to the scottish child abuse inquiry (scai), monsignor peter smith noted that it had been believed that child sexual abuse was a moral issue that could be sorted out by therapy (scai, trn. . . , june , p ). e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core today’. this recommendation reflects changes since then, in that such offices and responsibilities not only include priests or male and female members of religious congregations but also laypeople, whose work might range from giving spiritual direction or acting as parish catechists and directors of religious formation, to individuals or teams in parishes visiting prisons and hospitals, care facilities or people in their own homes. in the code of canon law, a delict is committed against the sixth com- mandment if the minor is under the age of . this age was raised to by pope john paul ii in sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela in . there is no mention of pornography in either of these and it was not until revised norms were issued in by pope benedict xvi, normae de gravioribus delictis, that there was inclu- sion of a delict relating to the acquisition, possession or distribution of porno- graphic images of minors. given that the age limit for minors in this category is specified as , one interpretation is that somehow pornography is not as dam- aging to a minor as are physical sexual acts. in what appears to be an acknowl- edgement that both delicts are as damaging as each other, the royal commission made a recommendation that this age be raised also to , now given effect–perhaps rather late in the day–in vos estis lux mundi. in relation to the question of imputability and the use of a medical model in terms of paedophilia, the royal commission in its report urged the bishops’ conference to ensure that the ‘pastoral approach’ was not an essential precondi- tion to the commencement of canonical action relating to an allegation of child sexual abuse. moreover, it urged the bishops to petition the holy see to amend the imputability test in canon law so that a diagnosis of paedophilia was not rele- vant in the case of a civil prosecution or a canonical trial. in other words, the commission argued that any child sexual abuse is a criminal offence, and that a diagnosis of paedophilia cannot be used as a defence, in the first instance at least. in relation to the issue of secrecy, the commission called on the bishops to ask the holy see to amend canon law so that the ‘pontifical secret’ would no longer apply to any aspect of allegations or canonical disciplinary processes relating to child sexual abuse. however, there was also a call for less secrecy, and more trans- parency, in relation to governance and processes generally. recommendation ( ) called for a review of the governance and management structures of dioceses and parishes. specific issues to be considered included transparency, accountability, consultation and the participation of laymen and laywomen. further, there was a call for the publication of selection criteria for bishops and a more transparent r torfs, ‘canon law and the recommendations of the royal commission’, canon law society of great britain and ireland newsletter, april , – at . rcircsa, final report, recommendation ( ). ibid, recommendation ( ). ibid, recommendation ( ). v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core process in their appointment, which should have the direct participation of lay- people. finally, in terms of processes, it was recommended to the australian bishops that they request the holy see to introduce measures to ensure that vatican congregations and canonical appeal courts always publish decisions in dis- ciplinary matters relating to child sexual abuse. one issue that was not mentioned in the royal commission’s recommenda- tions was that of the abuse of vulnerable adults. this is perhaps unsurprising, given the commission’s remit of focusing on children. nevertheless, given that the issue of ‘vulnerability’ has come to the fore in recent years, this is an area that needs to be addressed adequately by the church. the next section con- siders how the present pope has responded to these particular challenges, and whether problematic areas remain. vos estis lux mundi with the opening words ‘you are the light of the world’, the letter of may is addressed to all believers, each of whom is called to be ‘a shining example of virtue, integrity and holiness’. addressing the issue of ‘the crimes of sexual abuse’, the letter notes that ‘a continuous and profound conversion of hearts is needed, attested by concrete and effective actions that involve everyone in the church’. while ‘personal sanctity’ and ‘moral commitment’ are mentioned, the document is clear that sexual abuse is a ‘crime’ and not simply a moral failing. in this sense, it follows the recommendation of the royal commission. however, the scope of application of the norms applies ‘to reports concerning clerics or members of institutes of consecrated life or societies of apostolic life’ and, while it does not explicitly say so, an observation might be made that, given this, sexual abuse is also (and still seen) as the breach of the obligations of celibacy. given that the introduction mentions ‘all those who, in various ways, assume ministries in the church . . . or are called to serve the christian people’, it is surprising that the document does not appear to consider laypeople who may hold ecclesiastical office or who are active within the church. the document establishes the content of potential canonical crimes. the offences listed are delicts against the sixth commandment of the decalogue, out- lined as consisting of: i. forcing someone, by violence or threat or through abuse of authority, to perform or submit to sexual acts; ii. performing sexual acts with a minor or a vulnerable person; ibid, recommendation ( ). e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core iii. the production, exhibition, possession or distribution, including by elec- tronic means, of child pornography, as well as by the recruitment of or inducement of a minor or a vulnerable person to participate in porno- graphic exhibitions. for the purposes of these norms, ‘minors’ are defined as ‘any person under the age of eighteen’ (thereby reflecting the wish of the royal commission), or any person who is considered by law to be the equivalent of a minor. the defin- ition of ‘child pornography’ is rather more fulsome than that of the commission, describing it as ‘any representation of a minor, regardless of the means used, involved in explicit sexual activities, whether real or simulated, and any representation of sexual organs of minors for primarily sexual purposes’. the emphatic reminder at the beginning of the document that it is the responsibility of bishops, as the successors of the apostles, to undertake concrete and effective actions and adopt universal procedures, is then followed by a ref- erence to civil and canonical investigations. bishops, among others, are not to inter- fere in these, either by action or omission, where an allegation has been made against a cleric or a member of a religious congregation. notwithstanding canon of the code of canon law, pope francis makes it clear that compli- ance with civil law is obligatory and non-negotiable. additionally, the document imposes a canonical obligation on priests and religious to report abuse, and that episcopal conferences should establish a reporting mechanism that can be used by anyone. further, the document emphasises the care due to victims, that whistle-blowers should not be punished and that timetables and deadlines should be established for each stage of the process. minding the gap: the question of vulnerability vos estis lux mundi defines a ‘vulnerable person’ as one who is ‘in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal liberty which, in fact, even occasionally, limits their ability to understand or to want or otherwise resist the offence’. although this is an expansion on the definition in the code of canon law, which defines a vulnerable person as one ‘habit- ually lacking the use of reason’ (canon ), a question arises as to whether it is a wide enough definition. ‘vulnerability’ in health and social care terms is these are listed in vos estis, article , and include cardinals, bishops, patriarchs, papal legates, clerics who have been the pastoral heads of personal ordinariates or personal prelatures, and supreme mod- erators of institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, as well as autonomous monasteries. canon : ‘when the law of the church remits some issue to the civil law, the latter is to be observed with the same effects in canon law, insofar as it is not contrary to divine law, and provided it is not otherwise stipulated in canon law.’ v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core variously defined but includes those adults who have care and support needs, who are experiencing or are at risk of abuse or neglect and who, as a result of having such needs, are unable to protect themselves from either the risk or experience of abuse or neglect. adults in such positions of vulnerability may include those with dementia or learning disabilities, or those suffering from mental ill-health or substance misuse. abuse of such vulnerable adults may include violence, neglect or exploitation (including financial). at the same time, it can be argued that not all adults who have been, or might be, victims of abuse or inappropriate behaviour are vulnerable under this defin- ition. many of the people who have claimed or suffered abuse (both inside and outside the church) were capable adults made vulnerable because of their situ- ation, often because they worked for the abusers or were afraid that their careers would be affected. in terms of the church, the claims of the abuse of sisters by clergy, of seminarians by their formators and of young priests by bishops sug- gests that it can be argued that not all adults who have been victims of abuse or inappropriate behaviour are ‘vulnerable’ in what has been the accepted sense previously. while vos estis lux mundi gives a nod to canon , it makes explicit some of the content of that abuse which is not in the original canon, in terms of forcing someone to perform or submit to sexual acts. however, it is the idea of ‘force’ which is particularly interesting, and how this is interpreted. the document mentions ‘violence or threat or through abuse of authority’ on the part of the per- petrator, but this suggests that the potential victim is in a situation of vulnerabil- ity because of certain circumstances. this could mean forced sexual activity to avoid even greater physical or psychological violence, threat (such as exclusion from a seminary or a convent) or intimidation because of the office held by the perpetrator. it can also be due to the desire on the part of a person in forma- tion (the early stages of training for priesthood or life as a religious sister or brother), or in any pastoral relationship, to please the person who has more power. such an imbalance of the power relationship can lead to manipulation and exploitation of goodwill and trust. such potential victims may be normal, capable and confident adults: not ‘vul- nerable’ in the usual sense, but made vulnerable because of their situation. all this suggests that the category of ‘vulnerable adult’ needs to be expanded, either implicitly or explicitly, to reflect the idea of adults ‘in situations of vulnerability’. see, for example, care act (england), <www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents/ enacted>, accessed march ; adult support and protection (scotland) act , <www.legis- lation.gov.uk/asp/ / /contents>, accessed march . acknowledgement to brendan geary fsm, who alerted me to this distinction. following sexual abuse allegations against the american former film producer harvey weinstein, the #metoo movement began on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. as it went viral, there were a number of responses from female american celebrities, claiming harassment or sexual assault. e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents/enacted http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents/enacted http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/ / /contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/ / /contents https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core in such circumstances, abuse becomes possible because of a significant power imbalance where a person with more status and authority can exploit the situ- ation in order to abuse. the definition should also be expanded to take in sexual acts with anyone who has been entrusted to the ministry of a pastor, par- ticularly (but not exclusively) if that person is recognised as a vulnerable adult in the wider sense. minding the gap: gradation of crimes the question of defining ‘vulnerability’ in a wider sense, coupled with the emphasis on a potential abuse of office, itself raises another issue. in a recent article, concern was aired regarding how the law as expressed in vos estis lux mundi is to be applied, and whether there will be an escalating gradation of crimes with corresponding penalties. the issue is illustrated by grenz and bell, drawing on marie fortune, who identify three categories of possible offence. the first is the clerical ‘lover’ who falls in love with a member of his congregation, which is not necessarily problematic if handled maturely, though does become problematic if it progresses to sexual relations. a second category, described as ‘the wanderer’, is one who may transgress boundaries when faced with an overwhelming crisis or major life change. ‘the predator’, the third category, is the most dangerous of all as there is an element of premedi- tation and exploitation on his part, being ‘manipulative, coercive, controlling, predatory and sometimes violent’; for such ‘the ministry presents an ideal opportunity for access to possible victims of all ages’. much will depend on how the phrase ‘sexual acts’ will be interpreted. civil legislation resonates with the categories identified in vos estis lux mundi in terms of offences against children and abuse of office. nevertheless, the ques- tion is raised as to how widely the term ‘abuse of authority’ is interpreted, whether it applies to a member of the clergy just because they are in a position of authority, and the extent of the vulnerability in the alleged victim. this being the case, there needs to be careful examination of allegations made in terms of it would perhaps be pushing the boundaries of the category too far to suggest that any and all members of a parish community (or any other adult community in which a priest ministers) are ‘vul- nerable adults’. however, it is wise to recognise the imbalance of power when a priest is dealing with someone who may be particularly vulnerable because of bereavement, divorce or any other kind of emotional distress, whether temporary or permanent. e condon, ‘analysis: “vos estis” and “vulnerability”’, catholic news agency, may , <https://www. catholicnewsagency.com/news/analysis-vos-estis-and-vulnerability- >, accessed january . m fortune, is nothing sacred? when sex invades the pastoral relationship (san francisco, ca, ), p , cited in s grenz and r bell, betrayal of trust: confronting and preventing clergy sexual misconduct (second edition, grand rapids, mi, ), pp – . see the uk’s sexual offences act , <www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents>, accessed march . v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/analysis-vos-estis-and-vulnerability- https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/analysis-vos-estis-and-vulnerability- https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/analysis-vos-estis-and-vulnerability- http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core the action itself and the circumstances in which it was alleged to have taken place. minding the gap: involvement in the process the emphasis on the role of the bishops in safeguarding at the beginning of vos estis lux mundi is reflected in the concrete provisions for reporting. article states that a cleric or member of a religious institute who has knowledge of a delict is obliged to report it promptly to the local ordinary (though ‘any person’ may submit a report). in terms of secrecy, article makes clear that this is not deemed to violate office confidentiality, nor is there an obligation for that person to keep silent regarding the contents of such a report. article deals with the care of those who are believed to be victims and includes various forms of support, with the added injunction that the good name, privacy and confidentiality of data of the people involved be protected. however, the document is not entirely clear as to whether this protection extends to the people who have been accused, though article ( ) reminds us that the alleged perpetrator enjoys the presumption of innocence until found guilty. the rest of the document deals with procedural norms involving bishops and their equivalents. if a report is made against a bishop of the latin church, the authority receiving the report transmits it to the holy see and the metropolitan bishop of the ecclesiastical province where the person reported is domiciled. the metropolitan requests from rome that he be assigned to commence the investigation, though there is provision that someone other than the metropolitan can be entrusted to carry out the investi- gation. other qualified people may be involved, but only at the invitation of the metropolitan. there are two major issues arising from these provisions. the first relates to the idea of bishops (or metropolitans) taking the lead in the processes. history has shown that not only did bishops fail to report abuse cases that came to their attention, but that they themselves were accused of perpetrating sexual abuse. this is not a phenomenon confined to a particular part of the world but involves countries in north and south america, europe, and africa, and stories of the sexual abuse of religious sisters by bishops in india have emerged more recently. moreover, several of those accused were not only bishops but metropolitans. if it is a bishop of the eastern catholic churches, reports are forwarded to the relevant patriarch, major archbishop or metropolitan. if it is against the metropolitan himself, the report is forwarded to the holy see and the senior suffragan bishop in the archdiocese (and the equivalent in the eastern churches). see ‘bishops accused of sexual abuse and misconduct: a global accounting’, bishopaccountability. org, updated january , <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/bishops/accused/global_list_of_ accused_bishops.htm>, accessed january . e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.bishop-accountability.org/bishops/accused/global_list_of_accused_bishops.htm http://www.bishop-accountability.org/bishops/accused/global_list_of_accused_bishops.htm http://www.bishop-accountability.org/bishops/accused/global_list_of_accused_bishops.htm https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core further, there is the question of the dependence on bishops for the proper working of the process. the murphy report noted that, at the time of writing, the structures and procedure that had been set up were working well. however, their effectiveness was heavily dependent on two people, the arch- bishop at the time and the director of the child protection service. given this, the report recommended that ‘institutional structures need to be suffi- ciently embedded to ensure that they survive uncommitted or ineffective per- sonnel’. more recently, the iicsa observed that canon law gives the bishop autonomy over what happens within his diocese, and drew attention to the safe- guarding document of the scottish bishops’ conference which begins with the affirmation that bishops have full executive, legislative and judicial power in their territories ‘by divine law’. episcopal conferences are assemblies of bishops in a particular country or territory which exercise certain pastoral offices, but the power of the diocesan bishop generally remains intact, as these conferences exist by reason of ecclesiastical, not divine, law. this means that diocesan bishops have no real lateral or downward accountability, and this has implications for any episcopal conference seeking to develop a unified structure of safeguarding. secondly, although the norms of vos estis lux mundi stipulate that qualified (lay)people may be appointed by metropolitans to assist in investigations, this is not mandatory. further, there is no requirement that they be independent (for example, not employed by the diocese), nor is there any indication as to what qualifications such laypeople may need. while the norms state that such advisers are to act impartially and be free from conflicts of interest, there is no mechanism embedded to ensure that this will be the case. given that the royal commission of australia called for lay participation in processes, and more transparency about those processes, the provisions here fall short of those recommendations. moreover, those who have expressed concerns about the effect and impact of clericalism on the whole sexual abuse crisis cannot fail to notice that the process introduced in these norms by pope francis can be carried out entirely by clerics. conclusion this discussion began with the question as to whether vos estis lux mundi had gone far enough or too far. a review of the document against the background murphy report, ch , p . bishops’ conference of scotland, in god’s image: safeguarding in the catholic church in scotland, , <https://www.bcos.org.uk/portals/ /in% gods% image% web.pdf>, accessed january . see code of canon law , canons – . vos estis lux mundi, article , ‘involvement of qualified persons’. v o s e s t i s l u x m u n d i terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.bcos.org.uk/portals/ /in% gods% image% web.pdf https://www.bcos.org.uk/portals/ /in% gods% image% web.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core of the situation, canonical considerations and recommendations from the royal commission of australia shows that a number of issues have been addressed. nevertheless, some questions remain relating to definitions of ‘vulnerability’ and possible gradations of crime. the most significant aspect of the document is that there is no mandatory involvement of laypeople in the processes outlined within it. while it is true that people employed to deal with safeguarding mea- sures in the church could well be involved, it raises the question of whether they can be truly impartial. the ongoing independence of bishops secured in canon law and the non-involvement of independent laypeople in these new measures do little to reassure those who believe that the catholic church is unable to govern itself effectively in relation to the issue of safeguarding. e c c l e s i a s t i c a l l aw j o u r n a l terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core 	vos estis lux mundi: too far or not far enough? 	worldwide abuse 	what was already in canon law? 	what was asked for? 	vos estis lux mundi 	minding the gap: the question of vulnerability 	minding the gap: gradation of crimes 	minding the gap: involvement in the process 	conclusion guilt and its purification guilt and its purification the church and sexual abuse katharina von kellenbach a midst the horror of ongoing revelations about the roman catholic church’s complicity in sexual predation, a theological reflection on christian teachings about guilt and reconciliation is enlightening. flawed notions of christian forgiveness have brought us to this point where priests are absolved of crimes by their colleagues and reassigned to different posts in blind faith in their resolve to begin anew. the mys- tery of redemption is at the heart of the christian message, which makes this systemic failure sadly predictable and particularly painful. what is wrong with the christian theory and practice of sin and forgiveness that it fails to resist devastating complicity? shifting focus from redemption to guilt invites reflection on the problematic metaphors that facilitate quick release and premature closure. the language of guilt invokes the imagery of stains and impurities that must be purified (by the sacrificial blood of christ) or of burdens and weights that can be lifted and carried away (by a substitutionary scapegoat). in either case, guilt disappears as if by magic. this essay questions this imagery and draws on ecologically informed, sustainable practices of purification in order to propose a sequence of ritual steps to transform personal and collective guilt in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis. we rarely stop to define guilt, because it is immediately linked to for- giveness. guilt and forgiveness, sin and redemption are paired concepts that are mentioned in the same breath. but what is guilt? is it an individ- ual feeling or an objective condition? the term is often used interchange- ably, although the emotion and the state of being guilty are, © the authors. crosscurrents published by wiley periodicals, inc. on behalf of association for religion and intellectual life this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs license, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. . s e p t e m b e r http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / unfortunately, very different experiences. in fact, it is one of the cruel iro- nies that victims feel guilty, while perpetrators remain indifferent to and oblivious about the harm they caused. it is the victims who are wracked by guilt feelings, sometimes severely so. depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and nightmares are common experiences among survivors. the symptom of survivor guilt would eventually be incorporated into the emerging concept of “trauma” and its official clinical diagnosis as ptsd, post-traumatic stress syndrome. among its four symptoms, listed by national institute of health, are “distorted feelings like guilt or blame” and “negative thoughts about oneself or the world.” much of the psycho- analytic discourse on guilt is victim-centered since research is driven by patients who consult psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. and it is the victims of traumatic violence who are plagued by intense emotions of guilt, rage, shame, and powerlessness. perpetrators rarely consult thera- pists, counselors, or confessors. as long as perpetrators do not present with symptoms or are required by law to sign up for therapy [as pedo- philes and sex offenders must do according to german law], there are few empirical studies on the symptomology of a “perpetrator syndrome.” the diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress syndrome” describes the experi- ence of victims rather than perpetrators. martin buber insisted on the difference between “real” or “ontic” guilt and guilt feelings in a lecture at a conference on medical psy- chotherapy in , which was subsequently published as “guilt and guilt feelings.” a therapist, buber warned, should not ignore the “exter- nal life of his patient and especially the actions and attitudes therein, and again especially the patient’s active share in the manifold relation between him and the human world.” there is a difference, buber argued, between the emotional (neurotic) response and the actual viola- tion of the order of being (seinsordnung). guilt and guilt feelings are inver- sely related: perpetrators lack feelings of guilt, while victims are wracked by self-blame, shame, and guilt feelings. the symptoms of guilt manifest as lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity, an obstruction of moral response to the suffering of others. to harm another requires a barrier that shields against responsiveness to suffering. every act of violence involves a hardening of the heart, to use the biblical concept, on the part of the perpetrator. we will leave aside the theological question of ultimate responsibility and whether it is “the s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h lord [who] hardened pharaoh’s heart” (ex : ; : , : ; : ; jos : ). psychologically, denial is cause and effect of harming another being. it is intrinsic to the infliction of harm. “he has blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart, so that they might not look with their eyes and understand with their heart” (john : ). perpetrators avert their eyes and block their ears to avoid seeing, feeling, and hearing the pain inflicted on victims. this is true for all acts of violence, but especially so for agents who act within structures of authority that use legitimate force to maintain order. hierarchical systems give some people power over others who are deemed essentially different and in need of control because of some perceived lack of rationality, authority, or agency. ideolo- gies of gender, sexuality, age, ability, race, and class justify why certain people deserve less protection of their integrity and autonomy and some- how feel less pain and suffering. as long as such ideological force fields remain operative, there is no consciousness of culpable wrongdoing. atrocities, which on claudia card’s definition include sexual and domes- tic violence against women and children, suck entire communities into moral indifference, complicity, and denial. if the dis-ease consists in the absence of cognitive and emotional guilt awareness, then the cure cannot rightly promise release from its burden or purification of its remainders. but this is exactly what the liturgical and sacramental language of reconciliation promises. built on biblical models of sacrificial atonement, christ’s death saves because his blood washes away sin and because he bears the weight of iniquity. such meta- phors are invoked to explain his death for the “forgiveness of our tres- passes” (eph : ), “that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds” (titus : ). in the sacraments of baptism, “you were washed, you were sancti- fied, you were justified” ( cor : ) and of the eucharist, where the “blood of jesus christ his son cleanses us from all sin” ( john : ). this language is not unique to christianity. sacrificial blood and sacred water are universal detergents to cleanse spiritual and social violations of the social and symbolic order. in the hebrew bible, trespasses against god’s divine ordinances require expiation that take the form of rituals of purifi- cation, often involving the entire community, which is mandated to pur- ify in response to violation of the sacred law. unless the culprit is punished, the entire community is implicated in guilt by association, . c r o s s c u r r e n t s g u i l t a n d i t s p u r i f i c a t i o n which pollutes the land, undermines social cohesion, and obstructs rela- tions with g-d: you shall not pollute the land in which you live; for the blood pol- lutes the land, and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. you shall not defile the land in which you live, in which i dwell; for i the lord dwell among the israelites. (num : – ) on the biblical paradigm, it is the entire community that is impli- cated and under obligation to respond, prosecute, and punish the culprit. only some people in a community are guilty, but all are responsible. unless and until a community vindicates the victims by imposing the rule of law, the pollution of moral violation spreads. while this may sound like an ancient tribal blood feud custom, we can see this dynamic clearly playing out in the current church crisis, which stems from the commu- nity’s failure to mark wrong and punish wrongdoing. the cover-up becomes the pollution, in addition and quite distinct from the original crime of sexual predation. retribution checks this contamination and restores moral health to the community. the scapegoat ritual provides the other setting by which a community rids itself of personal and com- munal guilt: then aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (lev : – ) this ritual visualizes sin and guilt as a burden that can be loaded and carried away. in christianity, christ takes on the role of sacrificial substi- tute who carries away the weight of iniquity and disposes it somewhere safely in a remote corner of the universe. this language must be chal- lenged on moral and ecological grounds: the remainders of wrongdoing do not disappear magically, and they do not drain down mysterious pipes s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h or vanish on the backs of waste management scapegoats. but these meta- phors are suggestive and can be used to imagine new approaches to guilt contagion by association. a toxic pile radiates, pollutes, and contami- nates. guilt accrues as a result of a community’s inability and unwilling- ness to censure evil and does not magically evaporate. it must be cleaned-up, bioremediated, and composted. the metaphor of composting affirms the messy materiality of the past and enriches existing imagery of washing and waste removal. com- posting the remainders of wrongdoing requires patience and engagement, strategy and supervision. the etymology of the word is derived from the latin compositum (later compostum) which the oed defines as “( ) composi- tion, combination, compound, ( ) literary composition, compendium, as well as ( ) a mixture of various ingredients for fertilizing or enriching land, a prepared manure or mould.” it is the exact opposite of purity, which is defined as “the state or quality of being free from extraneous or foreign elements, or from outside influence; the state of being unadulter- ated or refined.” purity is white and clear, immaculate and untouched, while compost is rich, dark, smelly, and blended. when pope john paull ii spoke of the “purification of memory” to guide the millennial celebra- tions in , he invited the church to come to terms with history, including the crusades, the inquisition, the slave trade, colonialism, and the holocaust. he invoked the image of the virgin mary, whose purity consists of youth, innocence, and intactness. the old is never innocent, and that is true for individuals as much as for religious heritages and national histories. age, inevitably, accumulates breakage and malfunc- tion, failure and debris. by envisioning purity in the image of the virgin, the untouched bride, “dressed in a simple robe of white linen, the finest linen, bright and pure” we scorn processes of maturation and ripening. by contrast, symbols such as fermented wine or leavened bread could be used to appreciate processes of fermentation and aging. wine gets better with age. sour dough enlivens tasteless and bland flour into flavorful bread. purity that derives from composting validates the digestion of the old, broken, discarded, and the guilty into rich, new ground for being. even the most poisonous remainders can be digested into basic stable elements. scientists have only recently begun to use composting for the most protracted cases, known as poc (persistent organic compounds) that resist natural biological degradation. bioremediation proves promising . c r o s s c u r r e n t s g u i l t a n d i t s p u r i f i c a t i o n and often successful. but even if it did not, what else, exactly, is supposed to happen to toxic garbage, including radioactive waste? neither our material garbage nor our moral legacies dissolve into thin air. compost- ing sequesters detritus but does not pretend its magic elimination. the new always grows out of the old. putrefaction and fermentation create the conditions in which the new takes root and grows. the catholic church has a sacramental system of penance that lends itself to sustainable practices of critical engagement with past wrongdo- ing. its performative sacramental process prescribes three distinct steps before absolution. this sacrament aims at spiritual reconciliation with god and is facilitated by an ordained priest, but its basic grammar is applicable to any process of repair of relationship and recovery of per- sonal integrity. the three steps are: contritio cordis, heartfelt contrition, confessio oris, verbal confession, and satisfactio operis, acts of penitential restitution. they are self-explanatory. the most secular people expect cul- prits to show some remorse, to admit their wrongdoing, and to repair the damage as much as possible. these are the cues that people are look- ing for, for instance, when we watch prominent men who have been accused by the #metoo movement apologize and attempt to return to public life. in private and public, we decide, based on the performance of these steps, whether we are willing to grant forgiveness. what makes the language of sacraments intriguing is precisely their performative, external character. sacraments are “outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible grace.” this makes them relevant to the real world, where actions count. it is the visible performance of penance that establishes credibility and integrity more so than the internal changes to the soul. of course, martin luther was right to observe that the depth and quality of a person’s contrition can never be measured or proven. every apology is a performance, which may or may not be heart- felt. luther concluded from this fact that contrition should not be made the condition of god’s grace and justification. on his view, contrition is the gift of justification, which is received unconditionally and works to open the eyes and soften the heart. penance and sanctification follow after this change of heart has occurred. god’s unconditional justification works to convert the sinner and to generate internal feelings of remorse and contrition. s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h luther was right that contrition is a precious gift. the evidence that contrition is lacking and woefully incomplete is overwhelming. we cer- tainly also observe that in the case of the roman catholic hierarchy. just the other week, retired pope benedict xvi issued a statement blaming the “scandal of sexual abuse” on secular culture, declining faith in god, and resistance to the doctrinal authority of the church. his rambling let- ter left open the possibility that the scandal was caused by the audacity and insolence of the victims rather than the moral bankruptcy of the leadership. pope benedict xvi, who has controlled the highest levers of power in the church for decades, does not feel any remorse. in his view, the injured party is the church (and he himself) rather than the victims of clergy sexual abuse, who are barely mentioned. he does not apologize. how does one purify recalcitrance? conversions do not happen instantaneously. they require time and active engagement, which makes the metaphor of composting apt and compelling. the roman catholic sacrament mandates a threefold engagement with wrongdoing: contritio cordis cultivates intellectual recognition and moral knowledge of what has happened; confessio oris exacts transparency and seeks language that can convey the truth of events that are unimaginable and indescribable; satis- factio operis implements reparative action to recompense the victims and to work toward institutional change of the conditions that enabled the wrongdoing. this process is not chronological or sequential, there is no beginning, middle, and end. it is an interlocking spiral that is cumulative and transformative. contritio cordis: rituals of repudiation contrition must be cultivated in rituals of repudiation, in which and through which communities mark wrongdoing. rituals of repudiation are speech acts that take the form of, for instance, apologies, court room tri- als, and removal from power and authority. they are symbolic and exem- plary and signal a community’s normative negotiations over the boundaries of right and wrong. without such rituals of condemnation, contrition does not emerge. as paul ricoeur pointed out in the symbolism of evil, evil “is not a taint that exists absolutely without reference to a field of human presence, to words that express defilement. a man is defiled in the sight of certain men, in the language of certain men. only . c r o s s c u r r e n t s g u i l t a n d i t s p u r i f i c a t i o n he is defiled who is regarded as defiled; a law is required to say it; the interdict is itself a defining utterance . . . this ‘education’ of the feeling of impurity by the language which defines and legislates is of capital impor- tance.” as long as a community fails to mark the boundaries of good and evil, contrition does not emerge. as long as perpetrators, such as car- dinal mccarrick of washington, dc, whose coercive escapades with semi- narians had long been known, ascended through the ranks of power, there was no contrition. apologies, criminal prosecution, and loss of power and authority create the preconditions for experiences of contrition. apologies have become routinized. words are cheap. but they still do not come easy. apologies are contested, demanded, delivered, debated, rejected, or accepted. when a pope (or head of state, or ceo) issues a for- mal apology on behalf of an institution, they signal a community’s dis- avowal of practices, policies, and persons that were previously tolerated. public apologies accept personal and institutional responsibility and denounce particular behaviors. apologies remain controversial, and we can all think of instances, where apologies were refused or delivered half- heartedly. successful aologies are not singular events, but are repeated. germany, for instance, is routinely delivering apologies, when invited to commemorations, while japan seems to assume, falsely, that one apology should suffice. to work as ritual events, apologies must be repeated and become better, more precise, and factually more accurate over time. the precision, veracity, and integrity of apologies provide a fairly precise mea- sure of the degree of change after wrongdoing. court proceedings are another ritual of repudiation. of course, it is usually only a few exemplary offenders who are brought to justice and sub- jected to the drama of indictment and defense, deliberation, and sentenc- ing. the majority of criminals, in all societies, get away. but some are caught, prosecuted, and declared guilty. their punishment follows a finely grained system of codes that mark the severity of the offense in the cur- rency of pain and harm. the worse the offense the harsher the penalty. in the contemporary world, most societies measure crime in prison time. but historically, there have been other methods involving physical harm or financial compensation for lost eyes, teeth, limbs, and life. punishments have always been symbolic forms of marking and renouncing wrongdoing and criminality. over the course of history, communities have s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h experimented with exile and expulsion, physical punishments, monetary restitution, stigmatization and enslavement. modern western societies seem to have settled on incarceration. this may require rethinking and revision. but while we may need to reconsider the nature of punitive pain in light of the crisis of mass incarceration, we cannot forego punishments altogether without risking communal complicity. bishops may not need to go to prison, but their impunity signals lack of respect for victims. punish- ments express a community’s normative values that determine whose lives matter, who deserves protection, and whose voice shall be heard. rape, incest, and the sexual abuse of children have always been prohib- ited. but, despite universal criminalization, victims find it exceedingly hard to speak, to find support, to seek justice, and to move communities to sanction their tormenters. even in war zones, victims of political and military mass rape know to remain silent. they cannot trust their own families to take their side over the side of their torturers. no victim of a catholic priest could ever assume that their family, their teachers, their counselors, or the police would believe them. the sexual exploitation of women and children is not a minor failure or marginal flaw but intrinsic to patriarchal organizations that prescribe silence and submission as the divinely ordained vocation of women and children. vulnerability is com- pounded by invisibility and powerlessness. the “scandal of sexual abuse,” which has gathered steam over the last twenty years, is the result of the cultural empowerment of women and children. for the most part, the church hierarchy has resisted these changes and conspired to silence its most vulnerable and weak members. rituals of repudiation, in the form of apologies, court trials, and resig- nations, shift the discursive field. they also purge institutions in instrumen- tal ways. the entire structure of an all-male, celibate hierarchy (greek: hieros-archy = sacred rule of priests) is at stake. contrition involves more than recognition of individual failure and exemplary resignations to recon- sider the power arrangements that have shaped distorted interactions between clergy and laity, men and women. nobody knows, at this point in time, what new orders will emerge from this composting approach to the sexual abuse crisis. but this metaphor communicates a strong sense of hope that something will sprout from the toxic trauma of guilt. the recognition of fault will lead to new insights and perspectives. the community will learn to see with new eyes and hear with different ears. . c r o s s c u r r e n t s g u i l t a n d i t s p u r i f i c a t i o n confessio oris: rituals of transparency the shock of the brazen lies of the roman catholic hierarchy that calmly denied knowledge of sexual abuse for decades all the while frantically protecting its perpetrators from exposure, dismissal, and prosecution is only slowly sinking in. it has taken the tenacity of victims and their orga- nizations, the detective work of investigative journalists, and the prosecu- torial methods of state’s attorneys’ offices to break through the walls of denial. now that these walls have been breached, academic research can begin, psychologists can survey and collect data, prepare statistical analy- sis and psychological theories. what are the causes and conditions of abuse, the scope and solutions? we have no idea. how long has this been going on? we do not know. the archives remain closed. historians have not (yet) been given access to the files. as an institution, the church resists requests for information as strenuously as any recalcitrant teen- ager. why is a religion that professes faith in christian reconciliation on the basis of contrition, confession, and satisfaction so utterly opposed to any and all of it? it is, of course, exceedingly hard to put our most shameful and trau- matic secrets into words. while not all religions practice confession, all religions value truth and truthfulness as signs of integrity and purity. in the jewish and christian traditions, confession is mandatory for teshuvah and repentance. while there is no mediating priest in the jewish tradi- tion, maimonides interpreted the commandment in leviticus : that “he shall confess the sin he has committed upon” the sacrificial sin offering at the altar, to make confession mandatory. otherwise, he argued, “un- spoken matters that remain in the heart are not significant matters” (kid- dushin b). the verbal articulation turns secret acts into real and actionable events. confessions can be public or private, before god or a priest, communal or individual. the mandate for language and the quest for the truth is rooted in the insight that wrongdoing creates blind spots. guilt shades the truth and thick layers of deception prevent its exposure. the truth about sexuality is notoriously elusive. human civilizations seem to swing between puritanism and promiscuity, double standards and moral panics. and yet, we will need truthful stories to create narra- tives that can write new laws, create new support structures, and invent new procedures that help people live embodied and sexual lives. how do s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h we speak about sexuality and its violation? which words will children use, how will women reclaim sexual agency, and perpetrators wrestle with their desires? what constitutes rape culture? how do we define the problem: male sexuality, homosexuality, pedophilia? violence, assault, submission? celibacy and abstinence? consent, seduction, coercion? speaking truthfully about sexuality has never been an easy task. despite confession fatigue, we cannot leave it to the professional experts, the con- fessors and therapists, researchers and historians to define appropriate sexual conduct. we need the entire community, with its artists and musi- cians, poets and prostitutes to engage in truthful dialogue. that the truth will make us free, is a statement of faith that is more easily pro- fessed than practiced in embodied and institutionalized ways. satisfactio operis: rituals of penitential restitution punishment, penance, and penitence have become problematic. in the mainline churches, including roman catholicism, the god of forgiveness, love, and mercy is emphasized. the god of wrath and revenge, who used to consign sinners to eternal hellfire or to temporary purgatory torture has fallen out of fashion. liberal christianity has become tolerant and conciliatory, and nothing seems unforgiveable to this god. christians see themselves as peaceful and are exhorted to forgive their trespassers seven times seventy times (mt : ). this abandons victims of atrocity who are denied retribution and vindication. the desire to see perpetrator suffer the consequences becomes immoral. the latin word poena means pain, pun- ishment, penalty and is derived from the greek term poinḗ (pοιmή) mean- ing blood money, fine, penalty, and punishment. of course, the line between punishment and abuse has always been exceedingly thin, and the historical experience of religious practices of flagellation and hair shirts, starvation and indulgences are not reassuring. neither is the cur- rent state of the sprawling prison industrial complex. penitential suffer- ing could be a pointless exercise in cruelty. traditionally, the church imposed penitential works of satisfactio operis alongside and in addition to retributive justice delivered by the “sword” of the state. penances involved prayer and austerities, such as fasting, charity, abstinence, self-mortification, and self-denial and aimed at atonement and reconciliation. restorative justice theorist robin antony duff is intrigued by penitential practices because they seek to reform and reintegrate . c r o s s c u r r e n t s g u i l t a n d i t s p u r i f i c a t i o n perpetrators into the community. penances are pre-emptive and seek to avoid permanent exclusion by excommunication, exile, and execution. but penances are painful and deprive a person of status, honor, freedom, and money. hard treatment, writes duff is a structured exercise that aims to focus a “sinner’s attention on his sin and its implication.” suffering, argues orthodox jewish philosopher dov soloveitchik, is the “currency in which the sinner pays the almighty to regain ownership over himself after he repents.” suffering redeems, changes, transforms. in modern secular socities, this link is no longer self-evident. but there are other contexts, in which modern secularists accept physical suffering as productive and meaningful. consider the dif- ference between the physical pain of torture and the physical pain of extreme sports. one form is undertaken voluntarily, the other is inflicted against one’s will, for different reasons and with different outcomes. while the physical pain itself may be similar, its meaning is different: torture is debilitating and disempowering, while climbing mount everest is empowering and exhilarating. penitential suffering should be com- pared more to hiking in the himalayan mountains than to torture. its torment is ennobling and ultimately rewarding. the difference is decisive and elusive, as any educator who penalizes bad behaviors, knows. one easily slips into the other. what kinds of suffering could members of the roman catholic hier- archy undertake to channel retributive rage into reparative action that renews dignity and respect? a fast day for the entire roman catholic clergy? a public relinquishment of church treasure to support the wellbe- ing of victims? a month of sackcloth for bishops? a vow of silence on matters of controlling the sexual lives of others? a day of remembrance to respect victims and survivors? the pope crossing the alps barefoot, as king heinrich iv did from germany to canossa in to ask for forgive- ness? there is actually little public appetite for such symbolic acts of degradation. but we should not discount their potential to preempt anger and to firm up resolve to engage in meaningful action. there is rich repertoire of penitential affliction that transforms silent, speechless shame into active obligation to reach out and serve. rites of affliction cul- tivate contrition, elicit respect, and (re)generate trust. rituals of peniten- tial restitution include financial settlements, charity, and support for survivor organizations; administrative reform, the removal of implicated s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h religious elites, education about sexuality, empowerment of women and children, dialogue, as well as commemorative events to honoro victims. the call to “clean house” and purify the church easily means “white- washing” or, worse, “sweeping the dirt under the rug.” sending predator priests into retirement (finally) and demoting their complicit supervisors, while huge, will not suffice. guilt and the guilty do not magically disap- pear. guilt must be decontaminated, remediated, composted in cycles of sustainable intervention and transformative strategies. it becomes the fer- ment that turns the refuse into new ground. composting provides a pro- ductive and hopeful metaphor for purification, because it requires more than washing away the guilt. instead, it approaches guilt as ferment and leaven that transforms the raw material of failure into life-giving wine and bread. unless the patriarchal and feudal power arrangements that created the conditions for sexual abuse are decontaminated, fermented, and transformed, these wounds will fester. notes . leys, ruth, from guilt to shame: auschwitz and after (princeton: princeton university press, ). . leys, ruth, trauma: a genealogy (chicago: chicago university press, ). https://www. nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml [january , ]. . moss, thorsten, and engert, stefan, eds. vom umgang mit schuld: eine multidisziplin€are ann€aherung (frankfurt: campus verlag, ). . borneman, john, cruel attachments: the ritual rehab of child molesters in germany (chicago: chicago university press, ). . buber, martin, schuld und schuldgef€uhle (heidelberg: verlag lambert schneider, ). . buber, schuld und schuldgef€uhl, . . ophir, adi, the order of evils: toward an ontology of moral, transl. by rela mazali and havir carel (new york: zone books, ). . card, claudia, the atrocity paradigm: a theory of evil (new york: oxford university press, ). . douglas, mary, purity and danger: an analysis of concept of pollution and taboo (new york: routledge, ). . kant, immanuel, the metaphysical elements of justice: part i of the metaphysics of morals, ( ), transl. john ladd, nd ed., (indianapolis, ), . . duncan, martha grace, romantic outlaws, beloved prisons: the unconscious meanings of crime and punishment (new york, new york university press, ). . oxford english dictionary, online, third edition, ( ), s.v. 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(spring, ); henry abramson, maimonides on teshuvah: the ways of repentance, (touro scholar, ) https://touroscholar.touro.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar ticle= &context=lcas_books [january , ]. s e p t e m b e r . k a t h a r i n a v o n k e l l e n b a c h http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_ _memory-reconc-itc_en.html http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_ _memory-reconc-itc_en.html https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-of-benedict-xvi-the-church-and-the-scandal-of-sexual-abuse- https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-of-benedict-xvi-the-church-and-the-scandal-of-sexual-abuse- https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-of-benedict-xvi-the-church-and-the-scandal-of-sexual-abuse- http://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/ahda/political-apologies https://www.imdb.com/title/tt / https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/arte-missbrauch-kirche-doku- . https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/arte-missbrauch-kirche-doku- . https://touroscholar.touro.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= &context=lcas_books https://touroscholar.touro.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= &context=lcas_books beauvoir on women's complicity in their own unfreedom university of groningen beauvoir on women's complicity in their own unfreedom knowles, charlotte published in: hypatia. a journal of feminist philosophy doi: . /hypa. important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): knowles, c. 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(spring ) © the authors. hypatia published by wiley periodicals, inc. on behalf of hypatia, inc. this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. beauvoir on women’s complicity in their own unfreedom charlotte knowles in the second sex, simone de beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. but why women become complicit remains an open question. the aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s account. i begin by evaluating susan james’s interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situa- tion of women as the primary cause of their complicity. i argue that james’s analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women’s current existence and fails to adequately account for beauvoir’s claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. i then draw out the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize beauvoir’s account of women’s oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. i argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom. men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss. —catherine deneuve, open letter in le monde, january “there were a couple of men that were a bit gropey [working in the uk parliament in the s]. but do you know what? i was flattered.” —petronella wyatt on bbc radio ’s today programme, november in late the #metoo campaign drew public attention to the continued preva- lence of sexual harassment in contemporary society. the campaign was seen by many https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - as a positive move toward combating gender oppression and ushering in a more equal age where women no longer have to fear harassment in the workplace or on the streets. but the backlash soon began in earnest. among the critics of #metoo were a number of prominent women, including the french actor catherine deneuve and the british journalist petronella wyatt, who both implied that #metoo confused courtship with harassment. deneuve denounced #metoo campaigners as “puritanical” and branded the movement a “witch hunt” (deneuve b); wyatt claimed that “a lot of abuse or sexual harassment is a breach of good manners,” and that this is in part women’s fault because “women have waived their right to gallantry by saying we’re the same as men” (wyatt ). criticism was made of deneuve and wyatt on the basis that their comments denied the reality and harms of sexual harassment and the role it plays in the subordination and oppression of women. in response, deneuve invoked simone de beauvoir in an attempt to present her views as consis- tent with the legacy of a beauvoirean feminism of freedom (deneuve a; deneuve b). what deneuve overlooked, however, is that beauvoir is also a cen- tral theorist of female complicity, and that this analysis provides an alternative way to interpret deneuve’s and wyatt’s responses to the #metoo campaign. complicity describes the way in which an agent can help to reinforce or perpet- uate their own unfreedom. the classic case of complicity is the rarefied example of the voluntary slave, who chooses to adopt a way of life that alienates them from their own freedom. but for beauvoir, complicity is a commonplace feature of female existence (beauvoir / , ). the second sex offers various compelling examples of the different ways in which women can be complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom, including by embracing and defending their position as sexual objects ( ). beauvoir interlaces materialist, existentialist, and phenomenological analyses to create a rich picture of the unfree situation of women in society, but why women become complicit in their own unfreedom remains an open question. the aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of agents’ complicity in their own unfreedom by focusing on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s account. i begin by examining beauvoir’s understanding of complicity in the second sex, before evaluating susan james’s interpretation of complicity in terms of seventeenth-century accounts of slavery and republican free- dom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. james’s analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but i argue that it makes complicity seem like the inevitable outcome of female existence and fails to adequately take account of beauvoir’s claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. to overcome these objections, i propose an alternative interpretation of complicity by drawing out the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis. i demon- strate how this approach enables us to systematize the active role agents play in reinforcing their own unfreedom with the role situation plays in drawing women into complicity, thus giving equal weight to the coercive social setting and to the active role of the agent in its explanation of complicity. i argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but is better able to account for instances where complicity may not be inevitable—such as in the case charlotte knowles of privileged, wealthy, women like deneuve and wyatt—and yet agents still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom. i. complicity in the second sex beauvoir begins the second sex with an impassioned discussion of the way in which women have been, and continue to be, unfree, a characterization that still has con- temporary resonance: woman has always been, if not man’s slave, at least his vassal; the two sexes have never divided the world up equally; and still today, even though her condition is changing woman is heavily handicapped. . . even when her rights are recognized abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested. economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. (beauvoir / , ) here beauvoir offers a material account of women’s unfreedom, explained in terms of their unequal position in society and their subordination to and dependence on men. this idea finds its philosophical articulation in the notion of woman as “other.” not only are women unfree in a material sense, having fewer resources and fewer opportuni- ties than men, but at a more universal level women are unfree because they are con- ceived of as the “other.” this existential otherness, beauvoir argues, defines the general situation of woman and helps to explain her material and social unfreedom. to be other in this existential sense means to be the passive object to man’s active subject: “she determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. he is the subject, he is the abso- lute. she is the other” ( ). beauvoir is clear that man casts woman into this position, but she also acknowledges that “[t]he man who sets the woman up as an other will thus find in her a deep complicity” ( ). that is to say, woman does not reject her position as the other, as man’s passive and dependent counterpart, rather she accepts and even embraces this position, despite the fact that it is one in which her “humanity is effec- tively denied” and her freedom is “effective[ly] suppress[ed]” (kruks , ). how then does beauvoir explain this perplexing state of affairs? why do women embrace rather than resist their own unfreedom? the situation of woman, the benefits of complicity, and james’s republican interpretation a central aspect in beauvoir’s explanation of female complicity is woman’s situa- tion. for beauvoir, an agent’s “situation” does not just mean the brute facts of her hypatia environment, her body, or her life, although it does include these. rather, our situ- ation “is our grasp on the world and a sketch of our projects” (beauvoir / , ). for beauvoir we are both in a situation and (our bodies) are a situation. that is to say, with regard to complicity, woman’s situation not only describes how women are unfree in society from an external point of view: being subordinate to and dependent upon men, having fewer resources and opportunities than they do. woman’s situation also speaks to the way women experience this unfreedom, how it comes to shape how women view themselves, their capabilities, and the opportu- nities that are open to them. beauvoir’s account of situation gives a constitutively relational picture of human existence. moreover, two people may be in the same physical environment, but occupy very different situations. for example, a woman walking down a street may feel threatened, or find herself constantly having to dodge out of other people’s way, whereas a man walking down the same street may stride confidently along the pavement without having any of these experiences. our situation describes the particular way in which we are opened onto the world and “encompasses both the objective and subjective aspects of experience” (moi , ). in her interpretation, susan james implies that situation is the key determinant of women’s complicity, although she develops this analysis through the lens of seven- teenth-century accounts of slavery and republican freedom. james argues that for beau- voir, as for the republican theorist, “freedom can only exist between equals who are not bound by relations of dependence” (james , ). since woman’s situation is one of extreme dependence on man, james argues beauvoir conceives of woman as a slave in a sense “continuous with one to be found in seventeenth-century accounts of social hier- archy” ( ). in this republican sense, to be a slave is not necessarily to lack political freedom, but rather to be “socially and psychically unfree” because one exists in a situa- tion of dependence ( ). on this reading, “complicity is not a matter of choice” ( ). rather, women’s situation of dependence and subordination distorts their psy- chology, leading women to become complicit in ways of life they would not otherwise choose. beauvoir undeniably sees women’s material situation of dependence and subordi- nation as central to her explanation of female complicity. however, in addition to her emphasis on situation, beauvoir also suggests that there may be certain benefits to being complicit: refusing to be the other, refusing complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them [women]. lord-man will materially protect liege-woman and will be in charge of justifying her existence: along with the economic risk, she avoids the metaphysical risk of a freedom that must invent its goals with- out help. (beauvoir / , ) james notes the material benefits of complicity, but downplays what beauvoir says regarding the metaphysical benefits, ultimately giving primacy to women’s situation of subordination and dependence in her interpretation of beauvoir’s analysis. charlotte knowles the limitations of the republican interpretation as far as it goes, james’s interpretation of complicity is compelling. it enables us to see why women may accept their subordinate position and not struggle against their own unfreedom, since their dependent situation forms them into compliant subjects. as beauvoir herself states, and as james emphasizes, woman’s “whole education con- spires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure” (beauvoir / , ). but by rooting the cause of woman’s complicity primarily in factors “external” to her, that is, explaining complicity in terms of the way woman’s situation leads her to accept ways of life she would not otherwise choose, one fails to do justice to beauvoir’s account of active complicity. it is not simply that women accept their position as the other because they have no other option. indeed, if they did this would not, strictly speaking, be a case of complicity. complicity implies the ability to do otherwise. i cannot be complicit in something i cannot avoid doing. the unfreedom of complicity is not simply something that is imposed from without, as is the case with most instances of oppression. rather, as we see elsewhere in the second sex, the unfreedom of complicity is something that is embraced from within. as beauvoir puts it, woman “chooses to want her enslavement [son esclavage] so ardently that it will seem to her to be the expression of her freedom [libert�e]” ( ). complic- ity is thus distinctive in being a form of unfreedom that is reinforced and perpet- uated by unfree agents themselves, even if they are not the initial cause of this unfreedom. to fully grasp the richness of beauvoir’s account of complicity, we need to temper the emphasis on the dependent situation of woman with an attention to the active role agents can play in embracing and reinforcing their own unfreedom, something that can be done by drawing out the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis. ii. the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis beauvoir’s philosophical framework is most often analyzed in its relation to the work of jean-paul sartre and g. w. f. hegel. however, as james argues, with regard to the notion of complicity, appeal to these philosophers fails to shed light on beau- voir’s distinctive analysis, and thus the question of her place in the history of philoso- phy remains open (james , ). james chooses to draw out the connection between beauvoir’s account of complicity and the work of republican theorists, but i argue a more fruitful analysis can be generated by turning to heidegger. it is well known that existentialism owes an intellectual debt to heidegger’s philosophy, and in particular to being and time. but although the title of sartre’s being and nothing- ness is perhaps the most obvious homage to this text, in recent years scholars have drawn attention to the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s work. both nancy bauer and eva gothlin have suggested that by appreciating heidegger’s influence on beau- voir’s writing we can gain a deeper understanding of her philosophy (gothlin ; hypatia bauer ), and it is in accordance with this insight that i pursue my interpretation of complicity. one might think beauvoir’s initial characterization of complicity is distinctively sartrean, as she describes complicity in terms of the “temptation of flee[ing] freedom” and the possibility of eluding the “anguish and stress of an authentically assumed existence” (beauvoir / , ). but in making this jump, one ignores the hei- deggerian roots of the ideas of authenticity, anguish (or anxiety), and a flight from freedom. as gothlin argues, drawing out the heideggerian connection in beauvoir’s work helps to demonstrate where she and sartre come apart in their relation to heideggerian ideas (gothlin , ), and by taking seriously the heideggerian influence on beauvoir’s thought, one can no longer assume beauvoir is simply taking over and employing sartre’s existentialism, but instead must appreciate her as a thinker in her own right. to draw out the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis is not to claim that she simply reproduces or passively employs heideggerian ideas. rather, i aim to draw attention to the active way in which beauvoir can be read as making use of heideg- gerian notions for her own purposes. to take seriously the heideggerian influence on beauvoir’s philosophy is to bring to light new possibilities and insights in the work of both authors, possibilities that do not fully come to light without highlighting this connection. in particular, with regard to the notion of complicity, by attending to the heideggerian aspects of beauvoir’s analysis, i aim to show that we are furnished with new ways of thinking about and interpreting what it is to be complicit in one’s own unfreedom and why agents become complicit, as well as having implications for how such complicity may be addressed in real-world cases. in terms of thinking about heidegger’s texts, exploring the ways beauvoir can be read as engaging with his phi- losophy has implications for how we think about heidegger’s work as a potential resource for feminists. in examining beauvoir’s understanding of complicity, i shall argue that her appre- ciation of the way situation can limit our freedom is far closer to heidegger’s under- standing than to sartre’s. one sees this, for example, in beauvoir’s use of distinctively heideggerian terminology like mitsein, which she uses to develop her characterization of complicity. beauvoir argues that “the tie that binds her [woman] to her oppressor is unlike any other,” owing to an “original mitsein”—literally “being- with”—that enforms her relation with man (beauvoir / , ). this compound german word comes from being and time and signals the idea that dasein (heideg- ger’s term for the human being and the human way of being) is always “with” others, even if other dasein are not physically present. being-with can be read as an indica- tion of heidegger’s relational understanding of dasein’s existence. it indicates the way our situation and our relations with others, as lauren freeman puts it, “not only help to constitute what we know, they also help to constitute an essential part of who we are, who we were and who we can become” (freeman , ). similarly, for beauvoir the primordial mitsein of man and woman helps to explain woman’s existence as the other in relational terms. even if men are not physically present, the “necessary link connecting her to man” means that woman is never free from the charlotte knowles domination that pervades her situation, informs her character and limits her possibili- ties and her freedom (beauvoir / , ). as i shall argue, the understanding of how our situation and our relations with others can influence our possibilities, and our possibility for freedom at an existential level, is an insight that beauvoir and heidegger share. but it is an insight that is unavailable to the sartre of being and nothingness, who argues that our situation can never truly limit our freedom; insisting instead that it is “our freedom which consti- tutes the limits which it will subsequently encounter” (sartre / , ). focusing on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis will enable us to system- atize her account of situation with the idea of woman’s active complicity, giving a richer and more nuanced account of complicity than by appealing to either a republi- can framework or to sartre’s existentialism. beauvoir and heidegger: situation and the social dimension of complicity in the opening lines of her chapter on “woman’s situation and character,” beauvoir offers a summary of the indictments that have been made against women and that have “remained the same throughout superficial changes” since the time of the greeks: “she ‘wallows in immanence,’ she is argumentative, she is cautious and petty. . . she lacks morality, she is vulgarly self-serving, selfish, she is a liar and an actress” (beauvoir / , ). despite the consistency of this view of woman, beauvoir argues that “the types of behaviors denounced are not dictated to woman by her hormones or predestined in her brain’s compartments: they are suggested in negative form by her situation” ( ). here beauvoir coheres with the heideggerian and sartrean notion of our existential—or to use heidegger’s term, “ontological”— freedom: human existence is fundamentally free in the sense that we have no prede- termined essence in accordance with which our life or our “character” unfolds. but contra sartre, who concludes from this “the absolute freedom of human conscious- ness” (gothlin , ), beauvoir develops a more nuanced account, closer to hei- degger’s understanding. for both beauvoir and heidegger, despite humans’ existential freedom and lack of determination, our situation can still limit our possibilities and suppress our freedom. as beauvoir famously argued, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (beauvoir / , ). a key aspect of this becoming lies in her distinctive situ- ation as the other. rather than being presented with a world of possibilities, beau- voir argues that woman encounters the world as a “stubborn, indomitable resistance” ( ). whereas man is free to manipulate his surroundings and pursue his own goals, woman finds herself restricted by her situation and the dominant understanding of her as the other, which serves to undermine and suppress her existential freedom. exactly how this is supposed to occur can be illuminated by considering heidegger’s account of dasein’s existence in division i of being and time. although dasein is fun- damentally free at an existential or “ontological” level, division i of being and time concerns itself with dasein in an “inauthentic” mode of existence. this analysis, as hypatia sacha golob argues, is “heidegger’s attempt to understand one of the central and distinctive ways in which dasein may fail to be free” (golob , ). a key aspect of inauthentic, unfree modes of existence is our tendency to “fall into das man,” that is, to be absorbed in the social world and the dominant—if mis- leading—way that things are understood (heidegger / , ). das man is heidegger’s term for the social world, the normative sphere, consisting of the behav- iors, practices, and social roles that direct and shape our everyday existence. more- over, as with beauvoir’s understanding of situation, das man also shapes the way we first encounter others and come to understand ourselves ( ). the way we are first opened onto ourselves and others by das man is in terms of social roles. this way of understanding ourselves and others is misleading because it obscures our existential or “ontological” freedom. it is a self-relation in which we come to understand our existence as fixed, viewing our behavior as determined by the social role or archetype in terms of which we are understood on the basis of, for example, our gender, race, or ethnicity. nancy holland exemplifies this phenomenon in her discussion of the gendered scripts of das man and how they limit the ways women can understand themselves and what they believe they are capable of. as she argues, “the traditional upper- or middle-class script for women ends with marriage and motherhood. once that happily-ever-after is accomplished, there is nothing more for a woman to do with her life” (holland , ). such limiting “scripts” or social roles are not sim- ply ones that women freely adopt from a range of possibilities that may be more or less restrictive. rather, das man is described by heidegger as a “dictatorship,” “pre- scrib[ing] what can and may be ventured” (heidegger / , – ). heideg- ger’s account of falling into das man is not analogous to the sartrean notion of bad faith. it is not an account of the artificial obstacles we put in our own way, obsta- cles that can never really constrain us or limit our freedom. rather, heidegger’s account of das man speaks to the way oppressive social settings can play a central role in restricting our self-understandings and what we believe we are capable of, thereby limiting our possibilities for existence and suppressing our existential freedom. with regard to the situation of woman, we can say that the das man of western patriarchy disseminates the view of woman as other, promoting it as the primary way in which woman should be understood and should understand herself. through prescribed narratives, social roles, or to use beauvoir’s term, “myths,” woman comes to understand that she is—and has always been—the other (beauvoir / , ), and thus what she can do or be is limited in line with this (self-)understanding. despite the fact that these myths or female identities are multiple and often contra- dictory, beauvoir claims that they are all at base an articulation of woman as other ( ). to get outside of such an understanding and live other than as other would involve rejecting the dominant narratives of society and the shared and “agreed upon” understanding of what it is to be a woman, which, as both beauvoir and hei- degger recognize, is a very difficult thing to do. in her discussion of the liberated woman who has partially resisted her complicity, beauvoir still notes the continued pressure on her to adhere to the standards of femininity ( ). similarly for charlotte knowles heidegger, das man is said to shut down alternative understandings that do not fit the dominant narrative “keep[ing] watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore” (heidegger / , – ). for both beauvoir and heidegger, human agents are fundamentally free and unde- termined at an existential level. however, in any given concrete manifestation of a human agent, this fundamental freedom may be effectively denied by the particular situation in which agents find themselves. the central role of das man in heidegger’s account of dasein’s everyday unfreedom illuminates beauvoir’s account of the role oppressive situations can play in alienating women from their own freedom. it goes beyond the sartrean account in its understanding of how situation can serve to occlude and suppress our existential freedom. but it also goes beyond the republican interpretation. rather than concluding that the oppressive social setting offers the whole explanation for woman’s complicity in her own unfreedom, attending to the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s account enables us to integrate this analysis with an understanding of the way in which agents can be active in embracing their own unfreedom, therefore doing justice to the idea that woman “chooses to want her enslavement” (beauvoir / , ). active complicity although beauvoir recognizes that woman is cast into the position of the other by man, she also discusses the way women can cling to their chains, embracing their role as other and thereby reinforcing their own unfreedom. beauvoir describes woman as “actively playing the role of passivity” (beauvoir / , ), arguing that man “wants her to be object: [so] she makes herself object” ( ). these descrip- tions demonstrate that woman’s existential freedom is not totally eclipsed in such acts of self-objectification, since making oneself an object is the expression of “a free activity. . . the most docile, the most passive woman is still consciousness” ( ). but these descriptions also serve another purpose; they demonstrate that woman is active in reinforcing and upholding her position as the other and helping to perpetuate her own unfreedom: she makes herself an object, she actively plays the role of passivity. once again, we can gain a systematic understanding of this phenomenon by turning to heidegger. heidegger doesn’t just argue that dasein falls into das man; he argues that dasein “flees” into it (heidegger / , ). to focus on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis is thus to take seriously the idea that agents who are complicit in their own unfreedom actively embrace unfree ways of life. if the power and influence of das man meant that dasein could not free itself from das man’s limited and limit- ing grasp, then heidegger’s account of das man would not feed into an account of complicity. rather, it would be an account of structural oppression. although falling is an ontological constituent of dasein’s being, that is, it is an essential feature of human existence ( ), dasein can respond to falling in one of two ways: dasein can give in, or it can resist. that is, it can flee from its existential freedom and hypatia embrace the dominant, restrictive social understandings of das man; or it can struggle against these distorted understandings and seek to “discover the world in its own way” ( ). one finds a similar account in the second sex where beauvoir argues that to overcome her complicity in her own unfreedom, “there is no other way out [for woman] than to work for her liberation” (beauvoir / , ). for beau- voir, woman’s complicity involves a kind of “resignation” to the unfreedom of her current situation, accepting and even embracing unfreedom by “think[ing] that nei- ther people nor things can be different from what they are” ( ). similarly, heideg- ger characterizes the unfreedom of inauthenticity as the state from which dasein must emerge. although our existential freedom may be more or less occluded by the particular situation in which we find ourselves, in most cases agents themselves play a central role in accepting and even embracing their own unfreedom. in such cases, the dependent, oppressive situation of woman is not the cause of this acceptance, as the republican interpretation of complicity suggests. rather, beauvoir and heidegger both develop explanations for why agents embrace their own unfreedom with regard to the “benefits” of complicity and their particular understanding of agents’ relation to their own freedom. rather than assuming people will naturally gravitate toward free- dom as long as there is no “blockage,” this assumption is precisely what is at issue in the work of both beauvoir and heidegger. the benefits of complicity as we have seen, beauvoir argues that “[r]efusing to be other, refusing complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them [women]” (beauvoir / , ). if woman complies with her role as the other she may be rewarded with social approval, admiring suitors, a rich husband, a big house. but underlying such social and material benefits are the metaphysical benefits of complicity. beauvoir argues that complicity in her role as other enables woman to “[elude] the metaphysical risk of freedom that must invent its goals without help” and avoid “the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence” ( ). for heidegger, such “benefits” are also central in his explanation of why dasein “flee[s] in the face of itself and in the face of its authenticity” (heidegger / , ), embracing and falling back onto the self-(mis)understandings pro- moted by das man and the unfreedom they entail. heidegger argues that dasein is the entity for whom its being is always an issue (heidegger / , ). rather than having an essence in accordance with which its life unfolds, “the essence of dasein lies in its existence” ( ), meaning that dasein “creates its essence” through existing: the choices we make and what we do are the only things that ultimately define who we are. as a result, existence, or in other words the issue of dasein’s being, “become[s] manifest as a burden [last]” ( ). because there is nothing to determine dasein, it has to take ultimate responsibility for its existence, and this is a frightening prospect. charlotte knowles similarly, for beauvoir, on a metaphysical level all human beings are characterized by an ambiguous pull between transcendence: that which manifests my existential freedom, my lack of essence and my ability to choose my projects, and immanence: my objectification, the facts of my material situation, being acted upon rather than acting. such ambiguity is troubling, and thus woman—like man—attempts to “re- solve” her own existential ambiguity. the particular way in which woman does this, however, is conditioned by the limits of her situation. woman’s situation as the other contradicts her ambiguity—her worldly possibilities are limited to being an object, a thing, rather than a subject. therefore the particular way in which women attempt to “resolve” their ambiguous existence often takes the form of “trying to jus- tify their existence within their own immanence, that is to achieve transcendence through immanence” (beauvoir / , ). rather than resisting unfreedom and “refus[ing] the limits of her situation,” woman embraces her role as the other in an attempt “to convert her prison into a heaven of glory, her servitude into sovereign freedom” ( ). ultimately, in an attempt to resolve the ambiguity of her existence, woman ends up reiterating the patriarchal narrative of woman as other and thus reinforcing her own, as well as other women’s, social and material unfreedom. this account does not exempt women from responsibility regarding their complicity in their own unfreedom. as beauvoir argues, “if woman discovers herself as the inessen- tial and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself” ( ). but it does enable us to acknowledge that the particular way in which complicity manifests itself will be influenced by our situation. we find a similar account in being and time, where das man plays a key role in heidegger’s explanation of how dasein flees the burden of its own existence. hei- degger argues that das man “accommodates” and “disburden[s]” dasein (heidegger / , ). one way in which das man does this is by enabling dasein to filter its agency through social roles. rather than dasein deciding for itself how to act, dasein defers this onto the prescriptive scripts and social roles disseminated by das man, binding itself unquestioningly to particular norms and dominant social inter- pretations of its existence. in the case of woman, by embracing her role as other and resigning herself to her oppressive situation as if it were something she had freely chosen, she further alienates herself from the existential freedom her social context has already sought to suppress. contrary to the republican interpretation, woman’s oppressive situation is not the cause of her flight from freedom. woman’s situation only explains the form her fleeing takes; it does not offer the full explana- tion for why she flees. however, this does not mean beauvoir simply reproduces the sartrean analysis of bad faith. although heidegger’s characterization of fleeing the burden of existence may form the basis of bad faith, in heidegger’s hands our flight from freedom is not only explained in terms of an individualistic attempt to evade our lack of essence and the ultimate responsibility we must take for ourselves. instead it enables us to appreciate that the way we flee our existential freedom can have consequences for our social and material freedom. and, vice versa, our social and material freedom can have consequences for our ability to live in light of, and exercise, our existential freedom. hypatia accounting for women’s everyday unfreedom although beauvoir argues explicitly that women are complicit in their own unfree- dom, she also observes that such a tendency is “common even in men. . . destined like the woman to the repetition of daily tasks, alienated in ready-made values, respecting public opinion, and only seeking vague comforts on earth” (beauvoir / , ). similarly, for heidegger, it cannot be that women, in virtue of some facet of their existential make-up, are more complicit than men, because hei- degger does not distinguish between men and women at an ontological level. in the metaphysical foundations of logic, heidegger makes it clear that the “neutrality” of the term dasein is not coincidental, but is “essential, because the interpretation of this being must be carried out prior to every factual concretion” (heidegger / , ). every claim heidegger makes about dasein is meant to be a claim that pertains to all people, men and women, regardless of factical matters such as gender, race, class, or sexuality. however, this does not mean we cannot acknowledge that at an everyday level, complicity appears to be distinctive of women’s situation and that in their everyday existence, women, on the whole, appear to be more unfree than men. as i have argued, both beauvoir and heidegger offer a relational picture of human existence. the specific situations into which we are thrown and the relations we have with others have a real effect on our freedom because our situation can limit our possibilities, and our possibilities are what we fundamentally are. as beauvoir puts it: woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized. (beauvoir / , – ) similarly, for heidegger, “dasein is its possibility” (heidegger / , ). dasein has no fixed essence and must be understood in terms of what it could do or become. however, in falling into the social world of das man, “dasein drifts along towards alienation [entfremdung]. . . this alienation closes off from dasein its authenticity and possibility, even if only the possibility of genuinely foundering” ( ). for both beau- voir and heidegger, the more possibilities we have, the freer we are, because possibili- ties are that in terms of which our existential freedom manifests itself. a middle-class woman living in a privileged, euro-american context is freer than a woman living in a harem under an oppressive patriarchal regime, because the woman in the euro- american context has more opportunities to express and live out her existential free- dom owing to the wider field of possibilities, opportunities, and choices that are open to her. as beauvoir puts it, “the possible does not exceed the real” (beauvoir / , ). for women to be able to realize their existential freedom, there must be genuine worldly possibilities in which they can do so. one finds this idea articulated in heidegger’s own philosophy where he argues there has to be a certain “match up” between the possibilities of existence we project charlotte knowles and possibilities that are available to us in the world. in history of the concept of time, heidegger discusses “pseudo-understanding”: “a semblance of understanding, a look-alike, as though this incomprehension were still genuine comprehension” (heidegger / , ). consider don quixote: he may understand himself as a knight and even attempt to carry out certain tasks that reflect this understanding, but nevertheless he is not a knight. what this tells us is that (self-)understanding is not simply something “in my head,” but extends beyond the isolated individual and nec- essarily involves the world. in order to count as free, woman cannot just understand herself as free or attempt to behave as if she were free in situations that contradict her freedom. the woman who tries “to achieve transcendence through immanence” is described by beauvoir as “ridiculous” and “pathetic” (beauvoir / , ) because she fails to engage with reality. she does not achieve genuine freedom, but only deceives herself that she is free in a situation that undermines and contradicts her freedom ( ), thereby further alienating herself from the freedom her social con- text has already sought to suppress. in order to count as genuinely free, women must have real-world possibilities through which they can express their existential freedom. however, in the situation of women under patriarchy that beauvoir describes, such possibilities are often denied to women or at least severely curtailed. on this reading we can say that both men and women may flee their existential freedom and absorb themselves in the misleading scripts and roles disseminated by das man. however, the social roles in which women immerse themselves, and the scripts with which they come to identify, are more limited, limiting, and more obvi- ously oppressive and incompatible with their social and material freedom and thus with their ability to express their existential freedom, than the roles and identities that are open to men. therefore, in contrast to men, in identifying with such roles, women appear (more) complicit in their own unfreedom and are genuinely more unfree in their everyday existence than their male companions. on this account we need not say that women have a greater tendency toward complicity than men, but only that when women are complicit this has greater negative effects for them. for example, the man who understands himself as essentially defined by his role as the patriarchal head of a household may be as complicit in fleeing from, and concealing from himself, his existential freedom as the woman who understands herself as essen- tially a subservient housewife, since both ignore the contingency of social narratives and take their social roles to be essentially binding on them. nevertheless, we can still say that the subservient housewife is less free than the patriarch in her day- to-day life, because the content of her social role and its concomitant norms, expectations, and behaviors are more limited and limiting than those associated with the role of the patriarch. refining the account of active complicity what this analysis implies is that we must revise our understanding of complicity from something distinctive of woman’s situation, or as some kind of pathological hypatia anomaly, to an understanding of complicity as a more everyday phenomenon and as something of which we are all at risk of falling foul. on the interpretation i have developed, complicity is best understood in terms of a dual analysis, involving an understanding of the oppressive social context of the agent as well as an understand- ing of the attitudes the agent has toward the dominant social roles, narratives, and norms that are prescribed to them. in terms of this second element, we can say that a key aspect of complicity is agents’ tendency to absorb themselves in social roles and relate unquestioningly to the ways of understanding themselves prescribed to them by their social context. we see this clearly in the “imprisoned woman who [attempts to] convert her prison into a heaven of glory, her servitude into sovereign freedom” (beauvoir / , ). rather than resisting or questioning her situa- tion and the oppressive social narratives and self-understandings that are prescribed to her, she accepts and embraces her position as the other as if it were something she had freely chosen. this tendency to accept and embrace social roles and narra- tives even when they may restrict our freedom, is explained by the analysis developed in the second and third parts of section ii (“active complicity” and “the benefits of complicity”) regarding our tendency to flee from our existential freedom and the atti- tudes that enable such flight. beauvoir describes women who are complicit in their own unfreedom as having attitudes of “acceptance” and “resignation” in relation to their situation of subordina- tion and the understanding of themselves as the other (beauvoir / , ). having these attitudes means that rather than resisting their oppressive situation they accept it with a “calm stubbornness. . . “think[ing] that people nor things can be dif- ferent from what they are” ( ). similarly, heidegger argues that inauthentic, unfree modes of existence are characterized by an attitude of “stubbornness [versteifung] about the existence one has achieved” (heidegger / , , translation modi- fied). this stubbornness leads dasein to take the social roles and self-understandings presented to it by das man as somehow unquestionable and essentially binding on it, thereby concealing from itself its existential freedom and the understanding that the only norm binding on dasein qua dasein is that “there are no norms binding on dasein qua dasein” (golob , ). we can understand the stubborn way dasein relates to dominant social narratives as an example of active complicity. for heidegger, the reason that dasein becomes stubborn with regard to its current existence and the roles, narratives, and behaviors prescribed to it, is that stubbornness enables dasein to remain absorbed in das man. as we saw in the third part of section ii (“the benefits of complicity”), absorption in das man enables dasein to disburden itself of the issue of its own being and the ultimate responsibility it must take for itself. through its stubbornness dasein turns away from its existential freedom by taking the social roles and dominant narratives prescribed by das man to be definitive of its own existence, essentially binding on it, and thus unchallengeable. being stubborn with regard to the social roles and narra- tives in terms of which dasein currently understand itself can thus be interpreted as a central way in which dasein flees the burden of its own existence and becomes complicit in its own unfreedom. charlotte knowles one finds a similar account in the second sex where beauvoir argues that “resig- nation [to one’s oppressed position] is only a surrender and an evasion” (beauvoir / , ). attitudes of resignation, acceptance, and stubbornness with regard to one’s current existence mean that women conceal from themselves the possibility of resistance. they therefore become complicit in perpetuating the unfreedom of their current situation because they do not believe it could be any different and thus do not strive to resist it. but such resignation is not simply the passive acceptance of one’s oppressed position. rather, beauvoir argues that “woman’s faults are amplified all the more to the extent that she will not try to combat them but, on the contrary, make an ornament of them” ( ). rather than passively acquiescing to her oppres- sive situation and the dominant social understanding of her as the other, beauvoir paints a picture of woman as actively and stubbornly embracing this position. returning to beauvoir’s metaphysical understanding of human existence, we can view woman’s stubbornness and resignation as an attempt to resolve the ambiguity of her existence by reifying it in terms of a fixed social position or dominant social nar- rative. for beauvoir, as for heidegger, attitudes of stubbornness and resignation can be understood as a central way in which active complicity manifests itself. iii. an examination of the #metoo backlash highlighting the ways in which beauvoir can be read as employing heideggerian ideas in service of her analysis of complicity, enables us to give equal consideration to the coercive social world with its tendency to direct us into unfree ways of being, and to the active role of agents in fleeing their freedom and embracing unfreedom. the analysis of complicity i have outlined can thus account for cases where complic- ity may be almost inevitable, owing to the extreme oppression and restriction of the agent’s social setting, and yet we find defiant agents who are not simply the passive victims of their oppressive circumstances. but it can also account for cases where the social setting of the agent does not appear to offer the full explanation for their complicity—such as in the case of privileged, wealthy, european women like deneuve and wyatt—and yet agents still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom. in analyzing the #metoo backlash it cannot be taken for granted that comments like wyatt’s and deneuve’s are simply the result of their oppressive social setting. this does not give enough agency to the women themselves, nor does it acknowledge the role that an agent’s own attitudes and self-understandings can play in shutting down or opening up particular possibilities. although patriarchy provides the context for the development of their views and a certain pressure to adhere to or reiterate them, deneuve’s and wyatt’s privileged social and material status by no means makes it inevitable that they will simply reproduce patriarchal narratives about sexual objec- tification. indeed, their financial, educational, and class privileges arguably buy them a certain distance from the necessity of such reproduction. and yet, they continue to espouse views that reinforce their own unfreedom and the unfreedom of other hypatia women by contributing to a social context in which sexual harassment is trivialized and deemed acceptable. in order to fully understand the complicity of deneuve and wyatt, then, we must attend not only to their social setting, but also to how these women play an active role in reinforcing their own unfreedom, in beauvoir’s terms, how they do not simply have sexual objectification forced upon them, but how they seem to “[choose] to want” it (beauvoir / , ). deneuve’s and wyatt’s active complicity is manifested in their attitude toward sexual harassment and what this reveals about the way they understand themselves and women more generally. contra the #metoo movement, deneuve “defend[s] a freedom [for men] to bother as indispensable to sexual freedom,” and argues that movements like #metoo express a “hatred of men and sexuality” (deneuve a). meanwhile, wyatt defends unsolicited groping as “flatter[ing]” (wyatt ). both women appear stubborn with regard to the patriarchal status quo and the understand- ing of women in general (and themselves) as sexual objects. they refuse to give up narratives that trivialize sexual harassment, or present it as something other than a necessary part of courtship. there may be many reasons for these attitudes. we can observe that to destabilize norms, ideas, social dynamics, and roles that have become central to one’s self-understanding and to grasping one’s position in the world and one’s relation to others can be a very unnerving thing to do, and thus it may be something that people understandably resist. moreover, the unseating of dominant narratives and self-understandings may be even more strongly resisted if revising one’s self-understanding also involves recogniz- ing one’s powerlessness. deneuve’s narrative in particular stresses that she takes the #metoo movement as one that is “claiming to promote the liberation and protection of women, only to enslave them to a status of eternal victim” (deneuve a). on this reading, one can see deneuve’s and wyatt’s attitudes as part of a strategy of complicity, a misguided attempt to avoid the reality of their oppressive situation and “empower” themselves by identifying with their position as other. however, as we saw in the fourth part of section ii (“accounting for women’s everyday unfree- dom”), in so doing they do not engage with reality and so only end up deceiving themselves about their freedom. by presenting their oppressive situation to them- selves as something they desire (wyatt), or as something liberating (deneuve), we can understand deneuve’s and wyatt’s attitudes and comments as a stubborn reluc- tance to give up the dominant social narratives in terms of which they understand themselves. on this account, although deneuve and wyatt may be active in their complicity, we need not claim that they are conscious of this. indeed, for social roles and domi- nant social narratives to be able to function as they do, we must conceal from our- selves the tension that lies at the heart of them. rather than experiencing themselves as deceiving themselves about the reality of sexual harassment, deneuve and wyatt may understand themselves as simply being “realistic” or practical. but, in following the beauvoirean analysis of complicity i have outlined, we can see the acceptance of sexual harassment and the “resignation” to a world in which it is just part of everyday life, not as a pragmatic approach, but as “a surrender and an charlotte knowles evasion” (beauvoir / , ). it is a flight from the possibility of resistance and manifests deneuve’s and wyatt’s active complicity in accepting and helping to perpetuate the idea of women as sexual objects, an understanding of women that limits their social and material freedom and suppresses their possibility to express and live in light of their existential freedom. on the interpretation i have developed, the way in which complicit agents are active in their own complicity can be understood as a kind of self-deception, resulting from a reluctance to destabilize the norms, self-understandings, and social roles in which agents have immersed themselves. rather than problematizing and putting into question limiting social roles and dominant social narratives, the complicit agent becomes stubborn with regard to these. interpreting complicity in terms of a dual analysis involving the oppressive roles and narratives prescribed by one’s social situa- tion, and a reluctance on the part of the agent to put these into question, enables us to develop a more nuanced analysis of cases like deneuve’s and wyatt’s by offering us reasons and explanations beyond their social setting for why these women may have become complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. the aim of this analysis is not necessarily to establish that we have more reason to blame deneuve and wyatt for their complicity than women in more oppressive circumstances with less opportu- nity to resist. rather, the aim has been to better understand the different ways in which complicity can manifest itself and the different reasons why agents may become complicit, as well as what mechanisms may be at play in agents remaining complicit. my aim in developing this analysis has thus been to put us in a better position to address and overcome gendered complicity in all of its forms, and move toward feminist liberation. iv. analyzing and overcoming complicity: toward a dual approach drawing out the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis means that complicity is not reduced to a kind of structural oppression and explained simply in virtue of the pressures of the unjust social setting forcing women into complicit ways of life by giv- ing them no other option than to be complicit in their role as other and the unfree- dom it entails. nor does the heideggerian approach take the republican route and assert that the situation of subordination and domination in which women find them- selves distorts their psychology so that they accept unfree ways of life that they would not otherwise choose, an approach that relegates comments about the metaphysical benefits of complicity to a secondary status. but it also does not reduce complicity to a sartrean analysis of bad faith, ignoring the pressures of the social world to under- stand ourselves in ways that alienate us from our fundamental freedom. rather, focus- ing on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis achieves a synthesis of the sartrean and the republican interpretations of complicity, incorporating the strengths of both while going beyond what each offers in isolation. highlighting the ways in which beauvoir can be understood to employ heideggerian notions in service of her analysis of complicity enables us to preserve the virtues of james’s republican hypatia interpretation, while integrating this with beauvoir’s notion of active complicity and her claim that woman “chooses to want her enslavement” (beauvoir / , ) to ultimately produce a richer and more nuanced analysis of complicity that never- theless remains faithful to beauvoir’s original text. but beyond its appropriateness as an interpretive tool, we can see that focusing on the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis will have consequences, both for how we conceive of complicity and for how we think it will be overcome. in analyzing the potential complicity of an agent, attention will need to be paid to how agents understand themselves and relate to the social roles, norms, and dominant narratives prescribed by their social settings: whether they have stubbornly resigned themselves to these, or whether they have resisted complicity by being open to new understand- ings of themselves and their situation that may be more able to reflect their own existential freedom. on the account i have developed, it will not be assumed that the particular way of understanding and relating to themselves that agents have is necessarily caused by their social setting. rather, the beauvoirean approach to com- plicity i have outlined acknowledges that there can be other motivations and mecha- nisms at play in explaining why people understand themselves and relate to particular roles, norms, and narratives in the way that they do. this implies that overcoming complicity will be a twofold process, requiring changes in the oppressive social setting of agents and in agents themselves. beauvoir indicates this in the con- clusion to the second sex, where she argues that liberation will involve the attain- ment of “perfect economic and social equality” with men and an “inner metamorphosis” that will stop women from actively embracing their own unfreedom (beauvoir / , ). since both the oppressive situation of agents and agents themselves play an active role in the explanation of complicity, both aspects must be addressed directly in its resolution. it cannot be assumed that a change in agents’ external situations will necessarily lead to a change in agents’ attitudes and self- understandings. by attending to the heideggerian strands of beauvoir’s analysis we are able to see more clearly why this dual approach is necessary, and thus are better placed to analyze the ways in which some women may be complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom, as well as the strategies by which this unfreedom may be suc- cessfully overcome. notes . this definition should be distinguished from more legalistic understandings of complicity such as christopher kutz’s. for kutz, complicity refers to “cultural and legal practices, surrounding relations of an agent to a harm that are mediated by other agents” (kutz , ). my concern, however, is with the way agents can directly contribute to their own unfreedom. i elaborate this further in the second part of section i (“the limita- tions of the republican interpretation”). . i use the phrase “complicity in one’s own unfreedom” rather than “complicity in one’s own oppression” because the notion of oppression suggests an identifiable charlotte knowles oppressing agent (haslanger , ). however, in cases of complicity, “the line between oppressor and oppressed is far from unambiguous” (kruks , ). i take unfreedom to encompass cases of oppression, but to allow for a broader scope of analy- sis. i discuss this further in the second part of section i (“the limitations of the repub- lican interpretation”). . although beauvoir’s analysis does still speak to the way in which women are oppressed on the basis of their gender in a patriarchal society, an important worry is that her analysis privileges gender over other forms of oppression and is blind to issues of inter- sectionality. for a detailed discussion of these issues, see gines . . like beauvoir, i use the term woman “to refer to no archetype, to no immutable essence; ‘in the present state of education and customs’ must be understood to follow most of my affirmations” (beauvoir / , ). moreover, the use of “woman” does not mean beauvoir erases the differences between women. see kruks , – . . i discuss this further in section ii. . james’s is the only detailed analysis of beauvoirean complicity i know of. kruks briefly discusses complicity, but within the broader context of an analysis of oppression in beauvoir’s work (kruks , – ). . beauvoir’s conception of women’s slavery is usually understood in the context of hegel’s master-slave dialectic, to which beauvoir explicitly draws a parallel (beauvoir / , ). one key omission in beauvoir’s slave analogy, kathryn gines and sabine broeck both argue, is that she does not develop the woman-as-slave analogy in the con- text of institutional slavery, thus ignoring women who were literal slaves and codifying women in her account as implicitly white. for detailed discussions of slavery in the second sex, see gines , esp. – ; and broeck . . for example, woman’s situation of dependence means “she struggles for forms of self-respect that are precarious and liable to be self-defeating” (james , ). . on the notion of active complicity see kruks , . . sonia kruks also makes this point (kruks , ). . sally haslanger defines oppression in terms of “an agent or agents misusing their power to harm another” (haslanger , ) thus suggesting an external oppressing agent. . i take “choosing to want her enslavement” to describe how woman comes to identify with and embrace the situation of otherness and unfreedom described in section i. i develop this analysis further in the third part of section ii (“the benefits of complic- ity”). . as kruks argues, “the second sex is to a significant degree philosophically incom- patible with being and nothingness” (kruks , ). . this is similar to the way in which bauer understands beauvoir as actively engaging with the ideas of canonical figures, in particular sartre and hegel. see bauer , . . for the most part, heidegger’s work has been overlooked in this respect, although with a few notable exceptions. for feminist engagements with heidegger’s later work on language, see graybeal ; and on nature, see bigwood . feminist engagement with heidegger’s early work tends to take the form of articles, rather than more sustained investigations. see, for example, the first four chapters of holland and hypatia huntington, , as well as guenther and freeman . of this list, freeman’s is perhaps the best example of a work that tries to appropriate heidegger’s philosophy for feminist ends. . i refer here and throughout the article to sartre’s early philosophy and in particu- lar to his understanding of freedom and situation in being and nothingness. the difference in sartre’s and beauvoir’s understanding of situation and its relation to freedom is also noted by kruks , , and gothlin , . . in sartre’s later work he revises his understanding of the relation between situa- tion and freedom, bringing him closer to the beauvoirean and heideggerian understand- ings. . just as for the existentialist, “existence precedes essence,” for heidegger, “the essence of dasein lies in its existence” (heidegger / , ). . for a detailed discussion of freedom and its relation to authenticity, see golob . . although heidegger does not explicitly refer to social roles when describing dasein’s self-understanding in das man, this is a common way of interpreting heidegger on this point. see dreyfus , – . . hans bernhard schmid makes a similar point: “being oneself and playing a social role are in fundamental tension with one another . . . playing any role involves a basic self-misapprehension, or self-misunderstanding” (schmid , ). . for example, sartre’s waiter exhibiting bad faith by enslaving himself to his alarm clock and “behaving as if it were not [his] free choice to get up each morning at five o’clock or to remain in bed” (sartre / , ). . i discuss this further in the fourth part of section ii (“accounting for women’s everyday unfreedom”). . again, i refer to the sartre of being and nothingness. . this does not mean that freedom and authenticity can be found by isolating one- self from the social world. rather, it means that in free and authentic modes of being, dasein develops a new relation to das man. on this point, see knowles . . taylor carman also makes this point (carman ). . stephen mulhall makes the similar point that the freedom of authenticity must always be understood as an “achievement” (mulhall , ). . in some cases—like beauvoir’s example of women in a harem (quoted in kruks , )—our oppressive situation may completely cut us off from the possibility of real- izing our existential freedom. these women are not considered complicit, as there is no real possibility of resistance. but the harem example is not representative of the more “ev- eryday” situations in which beauvoir is primarily interested. . attempting to “resolve” ambiguity, either by identifying with pure immanence or pure transcendence, is always wrongheaded. rather, one must reconcile oneself to the ambiguity of human existence. . kruks makes a similar point (kruks , ). . thereby they view their existence as fixed and alienate themselves from their existential freedom. . to relate unquestioningly to one’s social roles does not necessarily mean one does not examine or interrogate them at all. as heidegger argues, one can engage in “the charlotte knowles most exaggerated ‘self-dissection’” and still fail to question one’s identity in a fundamental way (heidegger / , ). to relate unquestioningly to one’s roles thus means that one does not question them in the right way, that is, in a way that would reveal the inad- equacy of dominant social narratives and roles for capturing what is central to our exis- tence—namely that we are fundamentally free at an existential level and thus no social role can ever be binding on us or fully capture what we are. . again, these attitudes are not caused by the agent’s social context, but are explained in terms of the analysis of the benefits of complicity developed in the third part of section ii. . william blattner also makes this point (blattner , ). . it should be noted that my analysis does not deny that social roles play an important part in understanding ourselves and how we live in the world, nor does it claim that to manifest one’s existential freedom one has to forgo all social roles. overcoming complicity will not mean rejecting all social roles. rather, it will involve developing a new relation to one’s roles and the narratives that structure one’s self-understanding. in the case of particularly oppressive social roles that restrict one’s social and material free- dom, it may mean rejecting these roles and narratives in favor of ones that are more com- patible with the expression of one’s existential freedom. however, the key aspect of the transformed relation to one’s social roles is a recognition of their contingency, which is necessary in order to grasp one’s own existential freedom. for an indication of what this transformed relation to one’s social roles might look like, see knowles . . one finds a similar argument in the work of mary wollstonecraft, who argues that “[t]aught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison” (woll- stonecraft / , ). . see the third part of section ii (“the benefits of complicity”). . on the republican account, where agents’ situation of dependence is the primary focus in the explanation of their complicity, it seems difficult to account for agents who, although existing in the same oppressive social context, are not themselves complicit in their own unfreedom. . kruks argues that beauvoir sees complicity as particularly pervasive among mid- dle-class, european women (kruks , ). see also beauvoir’s claims that “women of the high bourgeoisie and aristocracy . . . do not hesitate to radically sacrifice their auton- omy as human beings . . . they parrot conventional wisdom, they identify with the ideal imposed on them by the male code” (beauvoir / , ). . at the outset of the second sex, beauvoir describes women’s everyday unfreedom in terms of their unequal socioeconomic status, and particularly women’s financial depen- dence on men (beauvoir / , ), presenting this as an important factor in explain- ing women’s complicity. similar arguments can be found in the work of other female writers of the time, such as virginia woolf, who also sees financial independence as removing, or at least lessening, the necessity of conforming to male expectations and patriarchal norms. see woolf / , . . as we see with the case of deneuve and wyatt, although financial independence may remove the necessity to conform to patriarchal narratives, financial independence alone does not necessarily guarantee that one will no longer reproduce such narratives. hypatia . ann levey makes a similar point (levey , ). moreover, although beau- voir ultimately calls for “revolt” if women are to be liberated, she acknowledges that this is a frightening prospect and impossible if not pursued “collective[ly]” (beauvoir / , ). for the individual woman not engaged in collective liberation, it will seem to her that she “needs to respect the male universe; if she contested it entirely, she would feel in danger, and without a roof over her head” ( ). speaking about the particular ways in which, and reasons why, people may resist destabilizing their current self-under- standings can be interpreted as the concrete ways in which our existential flight from free- dom and from the burden of our being or the ambiguity of human existence manifests itself. . beauvoir comments that woman “projects her magic conception of reality . . . [and in so doing] what she vainly tries to ward off in her long, despondent ruminations is the spectre of her own powerlessness” (beauvoir / , – ). . see note . . indeed, this seems to be the narrative of many women who have been critical of the #metoo movement. . levey makes a similar point (levey , ). references bauer, nancy. . simone de beauvoir, philosophy, and feminism. new york: columbia university press. ———. . beauvoir’s heideggerian ontology. in the philosophy of simone de beauvoir: critical essays, ed. margaret simons. bloomington: indiana university press. beauvoir, simone de. / . the second sex. trans. constance borde and sheila malovany-chavallier. new york: vintage. bigwood, carol. . earth muse: feminism, nature, and art. philadelphia: temple university press. blattner, william. . authenticity and resoluteness. in the cambridge companion to heidegger’s being and time, ed. mark wrathall. cambridge, uk: cambridge univer- sity press. broeck, sabine. . re-reading de beauvoir “after race”: woman-as-slave revisited. international journal of francophone studies ( – ): – . carman, taylor. . must we be inauthentic? in heidegger, authenticity, and modernity: essays in honor of hubert l. dreyfus, volume , ed. mark wrathall and jeff malpas. cambridge, mass.: mit press. deneuve, catherine. a. full translation of anti #metoo letter signed by catherine deneuve. originally published in le monde, january . https://www.worldcrunch.c om/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-ca therine-deneuve. ———. b. catherine deneuve: rien dans le texte ne pr�etend que le harc�element a du bon, sans quoi je ne l’aurais pas sign�e. liberation, january . http://www.liber ation.fr/debats/ / / /catherine-deneuve-rien-dans-le-texte-ne-pretend-que-le- harcelement-a-du-bon-sans-quoi-je-ne-l-aurais_ . charlotte knowles https://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-catherine-deneuve https://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-catherine-deneuve https://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-catherine-deneuve http://www.liberation.fr/debats/ / / /catherine-deneuve-rien-dans-le-texte-ne-pretend-que-le-harcelement-a-du-bon-sans-quoi-je-ne-l-aurais_ http://www.liberation.fr/debats/ / / /catherine-deneuve-rien-dans-le-texte-ne-pretend-que-le-harcelement-a-du-bon-sans-quoi-je-ne-l-aurais_ http://www.liberation.fr/debats/ / / /catherine-deneuve-rien-dans-le-texte-ne-pretend-que-le-harcelement-a-du-bon-sans-quoi-je-ne-l-aurais_ dreyfus, hubert. . being-in-the-world: a commentary on heidegger’s being and time, division . cambridge, mass.: mit press. freeman, lauren. . reconsidering relational autonomy: a feminist approach to self- hood and the other in the thinking of martin heidegger. inquiry ( ): – . gines, kathryn. . comparative and competing frameworks of oppression in simone de beauvoir’s the second sex. graduate faculty philosophy journal ( – ): – . golob, sacha. . heidegger on concepts, freedom and normativity. cambridge, uk: cam- bridge university press. gothlin, eva. . reading simone de beauvoir with martin heidegger. in the cam- bridge companion to simone de beauvoir, ed. claudia card. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. graybeal, jean. . language and “the feminine” in nietzsche and heidegger. bloomington: indiana university press. guenther, lisa. . being-from-others: reading heidegger after cavarero. hypatia ( ): – . haslanger, sally. . oppressions racial and other. in racism in mind, ed. michael p. levine, and tamas pataki. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. heidegger, martin. / . history of the concept of time: prolegomena. trans. theodore kisiel. bloomington: indiana university press. ———. / . being and time. trans. john macquarrie and edward robinson. southampton, uk: basil blackwell. ———. / . the metaphysical foundations of logic. trans. michael heim. blooming- ton: indiana university press. holland, nancy. . the universe is made of stories, not of atoms: heidegger and the feminine they-self. in feminist interpretations of martin heidegger, ed. nancy holland and patricia huntington. university park: pennsylvania state university press. holland, nancy, and patricia huntington, eds. . feminist interpretations of martin heidegger. university park: pennsylvania state university press. james, susan. . complicity and slavery in the second sex. in the cambridge companion to simone de beauvoir, ed. claudia card. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. knowles, charlotte. . das man and everydayness: a new interpretation. in from con- ventionalism to social authenticity: heidegger’s anyone and contemporary social theory, ed. hans bernhard schmid and gerhard thonhauser. cham, switzerland: springer. kruks, sonia. . simone de beauvoir and the limits of freedom. social text (autumn): – . ———. . simone de beauvoir and the politics of ambiguity. oxford: oxford university press. kutz, christopher. . complicity: ethics and law for a collective age. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. levey, ann. . liberalism, adaptive preferences, and gender equality. hypatia ( ): – . moi, toril. . what is a woman? and other essays. oxford: oxford university press. mulhall, stephen. . routledge philosophy guidebook to heidegger and being and time. nd ed. new york: routledge. hypatia sartre, jean paul. / . being and nothingness. trans. hazel barnes. london: rout- ledge. schmid, hans bernhard. . authentic role play: a political solution to an existential paradox. in from conventionalism to social authenticity: heidegger’s anyone and contempo- rary social theory, ed. hans bernhard schmid and gerhard thonhauser. cham, switzerland: springer. wollstonecraft, mary. / . political writings: a vindication of the rights of men, a vindi- cation of the rights of woman, an historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the french revolution. oxford: oxford university press. woolf, virginia. / . a room of one’s own. london: penguin. wyatt, petronella. . today, bbc radio , november. transcribed in http://www. huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/journalist-petronella-wyatt-flattered-groping-westminster_ uk_ fc fbce b a b . charlotte knowles http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/journalist-petronella-wyatt-flattered-groping-westminster_uk_ fc fbce b a b http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/journalist-petronella-wyatt-flattered-groping-westminster_uk_ fc fbce b a b http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/journalist-petronella-wyatt-flattered-groping-westminster_uk_ fc fbce b a b reclaiming our humanity- a cornerstone for better management editorial reclaiming our humanity- a cornerstone for better management michael pirson published online: february # springer international publishing ag, part of springer nature when we started the humanistic management journal we did so not because we felt we needed yet another journal (pirson , b). we did so because we felt there is a gaping need to share research, knowledge, insights, and possibly wisdom on how we can reconcile our fundamental humanity with our current approaches to organizing and management (pirson b). while we have plenty of outlets that publish research on instrumental aspects of managing teams as well as organizations and an increasing amount of journals that focus on the normative aspect of what should be done, we were hoping to provide an outlet that can follow the maxim that ethically sound management is simply pragmat- ically better. and we need more insights on how this can be done without the constant debate of whether it can be done or whether it is being done. we also wanted to make this journal a place where ideas can be shared, bigger ideas than what we typically digest in the leading journals of our field. ideas that can help us reclaim our humanity within the organizing processes that surround us. therefore, the humanistic management journal focuses on how we can protect dignity and promote well-being through our organizing processes. with dignity we refer to everything that does have an intrinsic value such as life and humanity and therefore escapes the price mechanism or the “business case” logic. furthermore, the humanistic perspective on manage- ment focuses on how we can organize so that we protect the intrinsic value of life and promote wellbeing above a dignity threshold (pirson , a, b). this endeavor can seem hopelessly misplaced in a world where dignity violations and threats regain legitimacy and civility is seen as a weakness. at the same time there probably has never been more need for better management theory, research, teaching, and practice. we witness a world with increasing needs for solutions to existential problems. none of these problems will ultimately be resolved with incivility. new conflicts will emerge as a result of dignity violations. humanist manag j ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * michael pirson pirson@fordham.edu fordham university, bronx, ny, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:pirson@fordham.edu we need to reclaim our humanity and dignity through a novel civility that is not rooted in fear and politically correct norms; a civility that respects our intrinsic value as human beings and allows us to engage freely with each other based on love and compassion (words normally not used in management journals). a civility that respect the fact that we are unconditionally worthy and not only vessels for power and status games; but rather life forms that wish to flourish and thrive. true dignity is expressed by acknowledging the human condition, the suffering and the imperfection; the missteps and the potential for forgiveness. an overly rule-based society is a fearful society. organizing norms of political correctness can help but are often a signal of such fear. fear of our true human nature and the possibility that we are not only good. on the flipside appealing to our inner weaknesses provides permission to be human but only to the degree that we are expressing the dark side. is there space that allows for the dark side while appealing to the better angels of our nature. allowing space for the best in us, without regulating it? this is what managing excellence typically achieves (collins and porras ; drucker ). it is a difficult process, an error prone, fragile process with many steps forward and several back, a tiring and exhausting process, but nevertheless one worthwhile. the #metoo debate is a current signal of people reclaiming humanity even though these movements have a tendency to result in a compensatory, ethical zeal that can result in the opposite. to move forward in a more constructive way (maybe after we have exhausted all the destructive pathways) we need to recognize once more that we need to honor our deep fundamental humanity. once we recognize ourselves and each other as human beings with shared dignity our relations with ourselves and others change; − management changes. while this is not a space for self-help pep talks, we want to show that we take ‘being human’ seriously. as editors of this journal we invite everyone to contribute with insights on how we can reclaim our humanity with dignity. we invite research that allows us to understand better how we can develop and reinforce processes that allow people to be heard. we also invite research on how we can rethink our governance processes and can share power effectively. we invite research that explores how we can screen people that get into positions of power, for example by screening for narcissism, psychopathy, and all types of anti-social disorders. we invite research that explores how those mechanisms can be implemented without dignity violations. we also invite re- search on how we can ensure processes of meaningful co-creation of solutions that allow us to protect our dignity and enable survival and thriving. this current issue to start this issue off, the editors intentionally include conceptual work on freedom and its relationship with modern managerial practice. the notion of freedom is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of western civilization. many scholars view the notion of freedom as it is currently understood in the political and economical discourse (e.g. friedman ) as unenlightened. they argue that it is a stepping stone towards an amoral society where anything goes and where moral principles of community are undermined (berry ; dierksmeier ; dierksmeier and pirson ; gould ; gratton ; sachs ; sen , ). claus dierksmeier presents a more foundational perspectives on how a different understanding of freedom can provide a humanist manag j ( ) : – theoretically rigorous understanding that can enrich our lives and guide us to better managerial practice (dierksmeier ). whereas globalization was largely a process in the name of freedom and progress, dierksmeier states that “today’s global economic system is in need of a global economic ethos of responsibility so as to assure its social and ecological sustainability (dierksmeier ).” because not all ideas of freedom equally allow the conceptualization of responsibil- ities, he argues that we need to pay more attention to our underlying understanding of basic categories that we build our social systems around. dierksmeier develops further a notion he has labelled a qualitative conception of freedom. he juxtaposes this conception to the dominant conceptualization of freedom which he calls quantitative. as his articles makes clear “quantitative models hinder the integration of responsibility into models of economic ratio- nality whereas qualitative conceptions advance it.” he suggests that efforts to promote a humanistic paradigm of economics and management fare better when oriented at a qualitative idea of freedom. allowing for a qualitative deliberation of choices, this idea of freedom permits more aspects of our humanity as valid in our quest for a better life for all. the idea of qualitative freedom and the notion of responsibility require a different approach to organizing practice, one that is normatively guided yet pragmatically human rather than technocratic and algorithmic. practical wisdom uses general insights about human behavior and enables its application in a particular situation in real life. the notion of practical wisdom is often invoked as a key to wise management and better leadership. in their article claudius bachmann et al. ( ) suggest that rather than technical and algorithmic decision making, practical wisdom is increasingly perceived as a necessary resource for excellence in judgment. they also point out that so far, little effort has been devoted to provide substantive guidance on how to apply practical wisdom into day-to-day managerial decision-making processes. in order to close this gap, they propose an item- based guideline for self-guided decision-making, which explores the specific aspects a practically wise decision-making process inherently entails. such practical wisdom is often challenged by the human experience. reclaiming our humanity does not mean we should be ideological and naïve. practical wisdom means in many ways that we need to be more fully aware of our limitations and what it means to be human, including our frailties and weaknesses. rather than proclaiming funda- mentalist, ethicalist norms that serve as sunday proclamations, humanistic management is utterly practical. one central approach to better management that allows us to reclaim and restore our humanity is compassion. in many ways compassion has become a central topic within the positive organizational scholarship community. it is in much need, yet it is important to ensure that we understand the boundaries of such approaches in order to apply compassion wisely- and with practical wisdom. spiritual figures such as the dalai lama and popes benedict xvi and francis have repeatedly highlighted the central role of compassion to alleviate the pain caused by existential crises. so far, however, compassion related concepts have played a marginal role within management research. dutton et al.’s administrative science quarterly ( ): – ( ) seminal paper offers a much needed perspective as it allows to conceptualize compassion as an organizational focal point. in a paper that was separately reviewed, i set out to examine boundaries to the general applicability of compassion organizing theory (pirson ). i start by examining the assumptions regarding the human capacity for compassion presented by dutton et al. ( ). i further develop a set humanist manag j ( ) : – of boundary conditions of individual level compassion capability, a precondition for compassion organizing. i then develop a typology of compassion capability proposing four archetypes of individual level compassion capability, and transpose the insights generated onto a typology of organizing modes. this typology allows distinguishing the various modes of compassion organizing, and helps identifying the structures and mechanisms that undermine compassion organizing. as such, i hope to contribute to a better understanding of the potential for compassion organizing in theory and practice. when we extend ourselves in terms of our compassion we often need to reclaim our humanity and restore ourselves. when compassion fatigue has set in erica steckler and sandra waddock write that we need a structured support system (steckler and waddock ). they propose a retreat system for healing and self-compassion. they advance a framework of three types of “retreats” – reflective, relational, and inspira- tional – that social change agents can use to sustain themselves through challenges inherent in their work. they define retreats as intentionally crafted spaces that provide opportunities for reflective practices, relational presence, and inspirational resources. the retreats framework is based on the experiences of a set of successful social entrepreneurs who have played a prominent role in establishing new organizations at the intersection of business in society. as such the authors bridge ideas of humanistic management, integral practice, and positive organizational scholarship to identify and detail the personal practices that enable social change agents to fortify themselves as they work toward establishing new institutions and successfully implementing impactful work over time. findings from their study suggest that the ability for social change agents to sustain themselves is facilitated through the cultivation of retreats that enable these individuals to persevere through adversity in organizational settings, build resilience, advance personal well-being, contribute to humanity’s welfare, and achieve success in their transformational endeavors. finally, we are very honored to publish a speech delivered by cardinal peter turkson which highlights the relevance of humanistic management ideas in the broader societal context of human development. in his speech he presents “pope francis’s teaching on integral human development as an agenda/proposal for an inclusive growth.” he outlines his notion of “inclusive growth,” and then explores the sense of “integral human development.” he develops and applies integral human development as a notion within the social magisterium of the church from pope paul vi to pope francis through john paul ii and pope benedict. he observes how this teaching in the social doctrine of the church helps realize inclusive growth. indeed, he argues, integral human development has been the church’s way of pursuing, for ages already, dignity for all in “inclusive growth” and now in the united nations sustainable development agenda (cardinal turkson ). we appreciate the possibility to publish cardinal turkson’s speech yet want to qualify that its publication does not endorse a particular catholic belief system as humanistic. in fact, we subscribe to a notion that humanistic management traditions develop from all religious and spiritual traditions. along those lines, we wish to highlight the work of hans kueng on the global ethos as a shared notion of the global religious traditions and ancient wisdoms that can inform a globalized enactment of humanistic management. jonathan keir and christopher gohl are organizing a special issue of the humanistic management journal focused on the global ethos and how it can support further conceptual, practical and pedagogical approaches within humanistic management. humanist manag j ( ) : – humanistic management thinkers and doers are many, probably a silent majority. we have powerful allies and many potential forms of collaboration await. however, we need to step forward and reclaim our shared humanity together. as researchers, teachers, practitioners, and policy makers, we need to rethink our foundational theories of organizing that prevent us to be human much more thoroughly. we therefore kindly invite your thoughts and research at the humanistic management journal, so we can advance at a quicker pace. references bachmann, c., l. sasse, and a. habisch. . applying the practical wisdom lenses in decision-making: an integrative approach to humanistic management. humanistic management journal ( ): – . berry, w. . sex, economy, freedom & community: eight essays. ny: pantheon books. cardinal turkson, p.k.a. . pope francis’ integral human development: an inclusive growth proposal. humanistic management journal ( ): – . collins, j., and j. porras. . built to last. new york: harpercollins. dierksmeier, c. . the freedom-responsibility nexus in management philosophy and business ethics. journal of business ethics ( ): – . dierksmeier, c. . qualitative freedom and cosmopolitan responsibility. humanistic management. journal ( ): – . dierksmeier, c., and m. pirson. . freedom and the modern corporation. philosophy of management (formerly reason in practice) ( ): – . drucker, p. . management challenges for the st century. new york: harpercollins. dutton, j.e., m.c. worline, p.j. frost, and j. lilius. . explaining compassion organizing. administrative science quarterly ( ): . friedman, m. . capitalism and freedom, ( nd edition (september , )). chicago: university of chicago press. gould, c.c. . rethinking democracy: freedom and social co-operation in politics, economy, and society. cambridge: cambridge university press. gratton, l. . the democratic enterprise: liberating your business with freedom, flexibility and commitment. london: financial times. pirson, m. . editorial: welcome to the humanistic management journal. humanistic management journal ( ): – . pirson, m. . exploring the boundaries of compassion organizing. humanistic management journal ( ): – . pirson, m. a. humanistic management-protecting dignity and promoting well being. cambridge: cambridge university press. pirson, m. b. in a time of global upheaval-humanistic management thinking needed more than ever. humanistic management journal ( ): – . sachs, j. . globalization - in the name of which freedom? humanistic management journal ( ): – . sen, a. . development as freedom. oxford: oxford university press. sen, a. . rationality and freedom. cambridge. london: harvard university press. steckler, e., and s. waddock. . self-sustaining practices of successful social change agents: a retreats framework for supporting transformational change. humanistic management journal ( ): – . humanist manag j ( ) : – 	reclaiming our humanity- a cornerstone �for better management 	this current issue 	references s jra .. embodiying disruption: queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies katherine cook department of anthropology, university of montreal, canada inclusive approaches to archaeology (including queer, feminist, black, indigenous, etc. perspectives) have increasingly intersected with coding, maker, and hacker cultures to develop a uniquely ‘do-it-yourself’ style of disruption and activism. digital technology provides opportunities to challenge conventional representations of people past and present in creative ways, but at what cost? as a critical appraisal of transhumanism and the era of digital scholarship, this article outlines compelling applications in inclu- sive digital practice but also the pervasive structures of privilege, inequity, inaccessibility, and abuse that are facilitated by open, web-based heritage projects. in particular, it evaluates possible means of creating a balance between individual-focused translational storytelling and public profiles, and the personal and professional risks that accompany these approaches, with efforts to foster, support, and protect traditionally marginalized archaeologists and communities. keywords: digital archaeology, queer, feminist, inclusive scholarship, public archaeology, diversity digital technologies (especially the web) were sold to us as democratizing tools that would transform the inequities inherent in communications, research, and institu- tional structures. when the shortcomings started to become visible, risk and danger were marketed to us as part of what every- one goes through to create good research and art, to innovate, to be successful. but that was not true either: some people are forced to take on more risk than others. the lines of privilege and power are far more insidious in our technology- drenched worlds than those who benefit from it care to recognize, let alone address, and there is a very troubling pattern intensifying before our eyes. risk-taking has long been a central part of both art and the sciences. its role in archaeological research is perhaps less clear, particularly when we focus on risk to archaeologists (as opposed to the physical risks of damaging or destroying archaeo- logical sites and materials, or abstract risks of knowledge loss). while early antiquar- ians chose (from a secure place of privil- ege) to face dangers of colonial (aka conquest) approaches, more and more archaeologists are forced to put their own well-being, their careers, and their work on the line to push forward a more inclu- sive past and present. what emerged out of post-processual, feminist, queer, indi- genous, black, and post-colonial discourses was the centrality of who does archaeology and whom that archaeology affects. unfortunately, we still seem to be coming to terms with the impact of this shift; the push to make room for alternative ways of knowing and inclusive or equitable european journal of archaeology ( ) , – © european association of archaeologists doi: . /eaa. . manuscript received december , accepted april , revised march https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core participation necessitates individuals to be ‘the first’, and in turn to face all the blow- back and take on the long process of re-education when it comes to the recog- nition of pervasive sexual harassment, abuse, and discrimination in the discipline and beyond. at the same time, public, translational, and engaged scholarship de- mands researchers, volunteers, and com- munities to be in the spotlight in a way that we have not seen in the past. digital technology is playing a significant role in this transformation, providing the oppor- tunities to disrupt conventional archae- ology in creative ways, but also creating intensively individualized and public pro- files embedded in new channels for abuse, particularly in the age of internet trolls and cyberbullies. the history of digital disruptions of archaeology, history, and heritage is critical to understanding the relationship between intersectional identities (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, health, etc.) and risk- taking, particularly motivated by social change mediated or facilitated by techno- logical innovation. this includes the increasingly common practice of leveraging scholars’ own identities, experiences, and perspectives to make and take up space for multivocality, fluid positionality, and counter structures of privilege. this paper will trace the ways in which queer, feminist , and more broadly inclusive dis- ruptions of traditional forms of communi- cation, values of objectivity, and gate- keeping of knowledge increasingly draw on creative uses of digital and hybrid platforms, taking on many of the goals of transhumanism and posthumanism to unlearn, unmake, unbecome traditional social structures and restrictive identities. however, in so doing, the individuals and communities behind this work risk far more than ‘normal’ levels of failure encom- passed by experimentation, research, and innovation (loss of time, resources, materi- als, etc.); in activating our own identities and past traumas, we risk ourselves more than anything. with growing documenta- tion of harassment and threats, impact on mental health, and the high rate of burnout, are humans part of the collateral damage of this transhumanism? and if so, are the potential outcomes of do-it- yourself digital disruptions truly worth the risk? cultures of inclusivity it is no coincidence that researchers com- mitted to inclusivity and equity increas- ingly connect with the ethos of a creative and open digital scholarship that breaks and confronts academic norms. this translates into a tradition of risk-taking in several ways, including challenging con- ventional research and dissemination prac- tices, transforming representation of people in the past, and supporting margin- alized scholars in the face of the exclusion- ary structures, abuse, and trauma of research spheres. queer scholars, for instance, who by nature do not easily move through the biased structures of these research spheres, this article comes from a queer, feminist, cis- female, white, settler perspective, a position that holds a great deal of privilege. while i highlight and honour indigenous, black, trans, and other diverse voices, i neither wish to speak over nor appropriate their words or experiences. at times, this discussion is, therefore, weighted more heavily towards queer, feminist theory, but i emphasize the importance of the cited literature to truly explore and support diverse perspectives in (digital) archaeology. risk includes, but is not limited to, interconnected professional risks (in education and training, employ- ment and career progression, with economic, personal and social implications) and personal risks (mental/ physical health, well-being, safety), through exclusion, discrimination, harassment, abuse, assault, hate crimes, etc. this article uses ‘risk’ to encapsulate all these facets, as they often come as a package, but, where relevant, will specify which facet of risk in particular is at work. cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core being more likely to be excluded from conventional funding opportunities, publi- cation structures, and even career models, are often correlated with innovation and breaking convention (dowson, ; halberstam, ). in the frank words of halberstam ( : ): ‘failing is some- thing queers do and have always done exceptionally well.’ the sheer impossibility of ‘succeeding’ through normative models can push these ‘unconventional’ scholars to take greater risks because they already occupy uncharted territory and, therefore, by default take unconventional ‘do-it- yourself’ approaches, which in turn blaze a trail for more conventional scholarship to follow (halberstam, : ). these ‘rogue intellectuals’ are also more likely to recognize and react to heteronormative representations of the past and fight for inclusive interpretative paradigms. early texts in queer archaeology high- lighted the ways in which homosexual men and women negotiated academic, dis- ciplinary, and structural homophobia (obvious or subtle) by choosing when and how to deny, downplay, or share their sexuality in relation to maintaining author- ity and place within the discipline (cf. dowson, : – ). these asymmet- rical relationship between homosexuality and heterosexuality only really represent the most visible tip of a much wider set of entangled identities and related issues, including bisexuality’s problems of bi- erasure, biphobia, and lack of representa- tion, asexuality’s lack of recognition, or trans identities and the challenges of gender-sex-sexuality conflation and very particular modes of transphobia (weismantel, ). queer archaeology also includes challenging the pervasiveness of heteronormativity in archaeological interpretations, with a substantial role to play in transforming assumptions, expecta- tions, and normative structures for people past and present. nevertheless, recent political, legal, and social threats to these identities have shown the ongoing dangers of being (or being perceived to be) queer or ally archaeologists. naturally, queer archaeology cannot be wholly and completely separated from feminist archaeology. the complexity of internalized/auto homophobia, ongoing conflation of gender and sexuality in con- temporary society, and the complex inter- sections with race, ethnicity, class, and religion (claassen, : , ) blur the lines between homophobia and mis- ogyny and, therefore, queer and feminist reactions or disruptions. influenced by the layering of discrimination, fear, and hate levelled at scholars along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and indi- geneity, it is no stretch to say that femin- ism in archaeology is multi-dimensional, multi-scalar, and multi-directional. it includes, but is not limited to, making women visible in the past, exploring gender and sexuality, making the discip- line more equitable and less exploitative (wylie, ; conkey, : – ; battle-baptiste, ) as well as using archaeology as broader political action (wylie, : – ). constantly evolv- ing, ebbing, flowing, and re-evaluating theory and practice, the position of femin- ism in archaeology is also ever in flux, as is its potential to influence broader discourse, methodologies, and theory. the feminist discourse of the visual lan- guage and representation of archaeological knowledge (gifford-gonzalez, ; conkey, ; moser, ) heavily influ- enced early applications of digital media in archaeology. if imagery in print or visual media was not neutral, we certainly cannot expect that digital media will naturally address issues of representation, essential- ism, and patriarchal values. the values of colouring outside the lines have given rise to a particular brand of inclusive archae- ology, defined by innovative digital european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core visualization and communication practices that challenge our assumptions about what people looked like, what roles they played, and how they moved through and experi- enced the landscape throughout history (morgan, ). these projects actively employ non-traditional means of storytell- ing (beyond articles or monographs), often through compelling translational narra- tives, to further challenge research norms through disruption and activism (cf. ulysse, ). digital communities and inclusivity maker and hacker cultures have also con- nected technological innovation with social disruption, challenging not only dominant tech culture but also broader social structures of inequity and exclusivity (richterich, ; smith, : – ). the maker movement in particular was ‘founded on a philosophy that values the sharing of diverse knowledges. it is an extension of the “do it yourself” (or diy) movement and … the democratisation of knowledge and technology, and experi- mentation and innovation through the use of shared resources’ (compton et al., : ). these hives of engagement and learning serve as hubs for shared technol- ogy, tools, and materials (richterich, ). framed by the values of low-barrier entry (economics, education, skill level), flexible and experimental processes, and an ethos of collaboration, makerspaces are becoming social statements. critical making is being used for activism (or mak- tivism, morgan, : – ) through shared resources, experiences, memory, heritage, and trauma, with a nod to a longer history of marginalized communi- ties using crafting circles as nodes for activism (rogers, , ; crooks et al., ; riley et al., : – ). despite these grassroots beginnings, makerspaces are becoming heavily institu- tionalized, finding their place on university campuses and in museums, galleries, and libraries. although this shift has made makerspaces more easily accessible to archaeologists, it has split up communities, setting up new barriers of access and approaches. these spaces also struggle with equity and a tendency to become dominated by heterosexual, white, cis- male individuals (taylor et al., ), and there is a documented history of discrim- ination and harassment targeting indivi- duals who do not fit the normative tech moulds (martin, ). today, the maker movement embodies a number of ‘digital divides’, at once creating and challenging inequities and human limitations, but also as a mainstream/technoscientific move- ment while its style is deeply grassroots and even ‘guerrilla’ (wajcman, : – ). the contributions and value of diverse scholarship in all these settings are clear, but there is much more ground to cover in making truly inclusive communities of practice. queer, feminist, and maker com- munities, for instance, have been critiqued for not doing enough to recognize or stand in solidarity with their trans, indi- genous, and/or black members in pre- and post-digital eras. this has perhaps most clearly been articulated by ann ducille ( : ) who, more than two decades ago, drew attention to the crisis of scholar- ship resulting from ‘the hyper-visibility, super-isolation, emotional quarantine and psychic violence of … precarious positions in academia’ for black female intellectuals. considering recent political developments and the ways in which discrimination is enacted and weaponized in online and digital worlds, this situation has only been exacerbated since this seminal work. inclusive intellectual communities-cum- paradigms, such as feminist, queer, black, indigenous scholarship, embody at once cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core their own but also more collective history of exclusion, resistance, and proliferation. the resulting complexity of targeted exclusion and discrimination, and their connection to digital scholarship, is critical when examining contemporary interplays between disrupting normativity and cre- ativity (as epistemological and pedagogical tools) that are transforming traditional archaeology. disruptive digital archaeologies born out of inclusive archaeologies, digital innovations have been increasingly har- nessed as part of an empowered sense of diy and the ability to creatively amplify unconventional voices. strategic applica- tions of technologies and media to defy, to confront, to derail, to remix, to subvert can be characterized as digital archaeolo- gies that: i. confront the archaeological past we have created ii. confront the present (particularly of the discipline) iii. confront authorship and authority iv. act as platforms to support the above. while these waves of initiatives and projects may work independently or be interwoven, it is the collective impact of these digital archaeologies and the reac- tions they stimulate that join them together in a wave of disruption. confronting the past today, many digital projects seek to chal- lenge the narratives traditionally presented in archaeology, breaking norms, con- fronting assumptions, and demonstrating diversity and fluidity of identities in the past. early applications, particularly within the realms of visualization and communications, intended to shift per- spectives and the positioning of people in the past, have a distinctively feminist flavour. what has been described as ‘add women and stir’ has transformed into the progressive upending of normative assumptions and recognition of greater diversity. importantly here, and perhaps defining what separates these projects from more traditional archaeologies chal- lenging identity in the past, digital media transform our methods of ‘writing’, editing, presenting, and collaborating in archaeological narratives (see also tringham, : – and lopiparo and joyce, ). in reconfiguring structures of engagement, intimacy, immersiveness, layering, and temporality, digital archae- ology has embraced the creativity of early feminist and queer narratives and run with it. from early works, such as joyce et al.’s ( ) sister stories and tringham’s ( : ) chimera web using hypertext (see also joyce & tringham, ), via more contemporary uses of social media and websites (morgan & pallascio, ) to virtual and augmented realities and gaming (morgan, ; perry et al., ), the flexibility and ‘democratizing’ ideals of digital formats and open access are often noted as points of attraction for archaeologists seeking to construct more diverse narratives of the past. these pro- jects are also part of a much wider, inter- disciplinary push to use public digital resources to challenge normative, main- stream, and exclusionary views of the past (see for instance the tumblr resource people of color in european art history, ). tringham’s ‘dead women do tell tales’ ( ) highlights a further emer- ging trend: the integration of digital data- bases, visualization, and narration to weave together more complex histories without losing the appeal for broad audiences to engage not only with the past but the european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core ways in which we construct it (tringham, : , see also tringham, ). building on tringham’s earlier work on life histories and narratives of people in the past, using creative expression and embracing ambiguity (tringham, , ), the project spotlights the all too often opaque process of archaeological interpretation by employing imagined nar- ratives of the life histories of women at Çatalhöyük to demonstrate their connec- tion with primary data. it is not merely adding women to the past but reconfigur- ing the construction of identity in archae- ology to make space for alternative narratives and critical evaluation of trad- itional interpretations. following the public debates over the bbc’s portrayal of life in roman britain in and other recent exclamations over political correct- ness, the need to present alternatives with evidence and critical discussions should not be underrated. however, it is not without risk, as we have seen with the overwhelming levels of abuse and threats that many women, queer, indigenous, and black scholars have received over defend- ing alternative narratives (cf. beard, ). creating narratives that challenge contem- porary normative values and systems of oppression, or defending them, is a mix of russian roulette and poking a hornet’s nest; while some projects seem to go unnoticed, catching the attention of even one internet troll sets a whole system of hate in motion. it should also be recognized that the risk is not entirely limited to the research- ers creating or defending inclusive narra- tives. increasing engagement with marginalized archaeologies necessitates participation in difficult heritage and intensely political positions (for instance the projects mapping the du bois philadelphia negro project (http://www. efishdesign.com/sites/dubois/overview.php), digital harlem (http://digitalharlem.org/), the trans-atlantic slave trade database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/?xid = ps_ smithsonian); see also morgan & pallascio, : – , kamash, ). given the deep history of discrimination and inequity, this model of digital archae- ology comes with potential to harm des- cendant communities, the public, and archaeologists due to the emotional trauma often connected and resuscitated through these practices. these tensions and traumas, however, can be mobilized to address legacies of discrimination, injust- ice, and their connections to contemporary inequities, particularly through technolo- gies that layer the past on the present to connect the familiarities of everyday life with their dark heritage (figure ). the careful use of discomfort and connection to emotion through narratives, disruptive imagery, and media, and the juxtaposition of the familiar present with unexpected or unknown histories can be a very powerful use of digital technology. but it takes a great deal of skill and collaboration to mediate potential risk for contemporary communities, who are already dealing with extreme levels of systemic discrimination and trauma. confronting the present although archaeologists have, in the past, played almost invisible or at the very least non-personal roles in public dissemin- ation, there is greater emphasis on archae- ologists’ identities, and particularly the diversity of who can be an archaeologist, to create a more inclusive field. this work can also be branded as activist archaeology and translational storytelling, but also as aligning with work to address discrimin- atory and unequal structures and norms. it often emerges most strongly in the face of work action and concerns over equity, inclusivity, and security in the workplace. cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.efishdesign.com/sites/dubois/overview.php) http://www.efishdesign.com/sites/dubois/overview.php) http://www.efishdesign.com/sites/dubois/overview.php) http://digitalharlem.org/ http://digitalharlem.org/ https://www.slavevoyages.org/?xid&thinsp;=&thinsp;ps_smithsonian https://www.slavevoyages.org/?xid&thinsp;=&thinsp;ps_smithsonian https://www.slavevoyages.org/?xid&thinsp;=&thinsp;ps_smithsonian https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core however, it also looks to attract more diverse people to the field of archaeology to challenge the persistent underrepresen- tation in this discipline (cf. agbe-davies, ). a number of projects under the banner of archaeogaming playfully fit this descrip- tion. for example, the c- dating game (https://www.winterwolves.com/c dating. htm) is a simulation game where players take the role of an undergraduate intern. importantly, the game-play includes finding friends and romance without any gender expectations or structures in place. seemingly a very simple element, it is rela- tively revolutionary when representation of queer archaeologists remains ambiguous at best in most narratives; the opportunity to choose begins to challenge those expecta- tions and make space for diverse indivi- duals. the frameworks that we create for participation in archaeology, whether through games or other media, and the identities we craft in archaeological ‘char- acters’ that populate these media, shape user experiences but they also frame public and disciplinary expectations and imagina- tions (see also dennis, ). the trowelblazers project (https://tro- welblazers.com) also challenges representa- tions of archaeologists. triggered by a conversation on twitter, leading to a network of digital and analogue resources on women in archaeology, geology, and palaeontology, this project has stitched together the full range of digital technolo- gies (hassett et al., ). their recent ‘raising horizons’ initiative was a collage including crowdfunding, the contribution of artists working in a range of mediums, social media, digital and print resources, and physical exhibits or events to showcase contemporary and historical women in these disciplines, creatively drawing con- nections between their experiences and points of view. one part social media, one figure . conceptual art for ‘built on bones’, an augmented reality app to draw attention to the dark legacies of colonialism by augmenting contemporary cities with the bones of the past (cook, ). european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.winterwolves.com/c dating.htm https://www.winterwolves.com/c dating.htm https://www.winterwolves.com/c dating.htm https://trowelblazers.com https://trowelblazers.com https://trowelblazers.com https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core part crowdsourcing, and one part creative media creation, feminist voices and activ- ism have been mobilized through largely web-based communications. nevertheless, the emphasis on real-life archaeologists requires real people to take the risk of sharing themselves as part of their work. while the ideals of reflexivity and self- awareness would beg the question ‘why not?’ (after all, we are part of our interpre- tations), in the age of the internet, this level of openness and individuality of the strategy takes on a more sinister risk (see below). confronting authorship/authority digital technologies can also confront the exclusionary view of archaeologists as the only experts in reconstructing the past. influenced by indigenous, black, and post- colonial archaeologies in particular, the social networking, communication oppor- tunities and interactivity of web-based platforms lend themselves well to the equalizing ideals of collaborative archae- ology today. one of the earliest websites mobilizing the internet to promote com- munity collaboration is carol mcdavid’s ( ) levi jordan plantation website (http://www.webarchaeology.com/html/ default.htm), part of a project examining slavery and african-american culture on a plantation in texas (see also mcdavid, ). using what now seems like very simple web-based feedback forms, along- side non-web-based interviews and partici- pation, the project invited dialogue, participation, and contributions from des- cendant communities, local communities, adults and children alike, anyone with an interest. mcdavid ( ) noted: ‘we wanted to learn if computers can be used to create “conversations” about archaeology and history among lots of different people.’ this project’s legacy is echoed in many community archaeology projects today, such as terry brock’s ( ) all of us would walk together website, which provided opportunities for descendant communities and the general public to participate, share stories, and build family trees (see also mcdavid & brock, ). social media have also significantly con- tributed to combating the privileging of (eurocentric) archaeological discourse, research, and interpretations. archaeologist joanne hammond (@kamloopsarchaeo) has infamously used twitter with edited images contrasting the problematic com- memorative signage in canada, typically erasing indigenous heritage to celebrate european colonization, with newly written narratives that decolonize our perspectives on the past (see for instance https://twitter. com/i/moments/ ). kisha supernant (@archaeomapper), a métis archaeologist, has also used twitter to challenge ways of knowing the past and highlight the discriminatory structures, attitudes, and treatment of indigenous scholars through courageously frank and honest posts about her own experiences. although framed once again by personal and professional risk, these voices blur the lines of authority, participation, and ways of knowing which are critical to repairing and reshaping relationships between archaeologists and descendant communi- ties, as well as challenging us to review our approaches to (public) archaeology. recognizing the problems of authority, authorship, and control of the past also includes acknowledging that not all appli- cations of digital technology are necessarily appropriate, even when motivated by a goal of ‘representing’ or ‘including’ that heritage in wider discourses and adopting increasingly mainstream approaches. the work of beth compton ( ), which examines complexity of authenticity, ontology, and materiality when it comes to d models and d prints, is particularly cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.webarchaeology.com/html/default.htm http://www.webarchaeology.com/html/default.htm http://www.webarchaeology.com/html/default.htm https://twitter.com/kamloopsarchaeo https://twitter.com/i/moments/ https://twitter.com/i/moments/ https://twitter.com/i/moments/ https://twitter.com/archaeomapper https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core powerful in this context and challenges perceptions of objects (with which we think we are deeply familiar) and technol- ogy (with which we often overestimate our familiarity) (see also brown & nicholas, ; cook & compton, ; jones et al., ). challenging authority in contemporary archaeology necessitates a much more critical application of ethics and commitment to collaborative research, recognizing both the lack of understanding of data access and preservation but also the tech-influenced emphasis that is placed on doing what is innovative over what is right or responsible. platforms for support space-making initiatives, that is, the design of platforms, publication venues, and support for more diversity in the dis- cipline and narratives of the past, have played a critical role in encouraging the types of inclusive and equitable digital archaeologies described above. the goal here is to showcase the voices of diverse scholars and creators to increase their impact and support their progression. when approached as more than tokeniza- tion or shallow pr stunts, transformative diversity and inclusion work can create the conditions for social change in the struc- ture of archaeology and beyond, amplify- ing marginalized voices, challenging our perspectives on the past, and in turn dem- onstrating the relevance of the discipline in contemporary society. the heritage jam, the brainchild of sara perry and anthony masinton, has been a pioneering platform for innovative digital archaeology and heritage practice since . with their open call to ‘anyone interested in the way heritage is visualised’, free entry, and flexible formats, timelines and engagement, the heritage jam has been successful in bringing together a range of individuals interested in heritage (both within and beyond pro- fessionals and students of archaeology), showcasing diverse histories and perspec- tives on the past (heritage jam, ). the inclusiveness policy and code of conduct are two cornerstones of the jam; their aim is to ‘provide a safe, inclusive and welcoming environment … where everyone is free to express themselves regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, appearance, ethnicity, citizenship, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs or age’ (heritage jam, ). it also asks par- ticipants and audiences to celebrate indivi- duals making an extra effort to be inclusive and welcoming, while prohibiting harassment, abuse, discrimination, deroga- tory or demeaning speech, etc. finally, the website serves as an archive for jam entrants; with a huge audience and reach, this has been particularly successful in pro- moting the work of diverse people, provid- ing international reach and networking opportunities. it is perhaps no surprise that many of the entrants and the projects created and submitted to the heritage jam over the years have exemplified inclusive approaches to the past and the present (including cook, and tringham, cited above). more recently, epoiesen, an online pub- lication initiative based at carleton university in canada and established by editor-in-chief shawn graham, has taken up the challenges of making space for diverse and alternative media formats and knowledge in archaeology and history (cf. pálsson and aldred ; heckadon et al., ). characterized as ‘a journal for exploring creative engagement with the past, especially through digital means … [primarily through] “paradata” or artist’s statements that accompany playful or unfamiliar forms of singing the past into existence’ (epoiesen, ), the journal provides an opportunity to publish on european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core open access without any fees (lowering the cost of entry) and showcases alternative ways of engaging with the past. it regularly publishes the work of students, profes- sionals, and individuals ‘outside’ traditional careers in archaeology or history, in add- ition to allowing annotations and further engagement between authors/creators and readers. with a diverse editorial board, authorship, and audience, the journal has also been at the forefront of important conversations about inclusive publishing policies. other relevant endeavours include building digital communities for collabor- ation and support, such as the women’s digital archaeology network (https://caa- international.org/ / / /womens-digital- archaeology-network/) and the reciprocal research network (https://www.rrncommu- nity.org/), or initiatives providing inclusive community building and training opportun- ities, such as michigan state university’s institute on digital archaeology’s (lynne goldstein and ethan watrall) inclusion of participants at no cost (for students through to established researchers) and effort to build inclusive and equitable environ- ments. the value of creating more plat- forms like these, and the explicit outlining of inclusive policies, should not be under- estimated, making space for more diverse scholars, encouraging equity and allyship among all participants, and putting pres- sure on more traditional publication venues and institutions to transform their own practices. at the same time, these initiatives take time, effort, and funding. often working above and beyond their typical duties, the individuals creating these support platforms also take on incredible weight, stress, and risk. those responsibilities and the service provided by these pioneering communities and their value to building inclusivity should not go unrecognized, but rather must be acknowl- edged and protected in their own right. the dark side of disruption while these projects serve as markers of active disruption and points of inspiration, it is the people behind them and their experiences of moving through these worlds of archaeology, technology, aca- demia, and beyond that highlight how far we still have to go. notably, a growing archive of documented harassment and abuse (cf. clancy, ; nelson et al., ) is only just beginning to hint at the widespread challenges and emotional toll that targeted members of the archaeo- logical community continue to face. it is true that structures of discrimination, intimidation, and harassment have an unconscionably long history in archae- ology, including in the specialization of digital archaeology. ruth tringham, for instance, in her discussion of ‘dead women do tell tales’ and earlier web- based work, notes that ‘without the support of meg conkey, janet spector, and rosemary joyce, i might have been discouraged from this endeavour in the resistant atmosphere of the early s’ (tringham, : ). why is it different now? because technology, contrary to the hopes that it would enhance and overcome human limitations, has in fact opened the door wider for abuse via the web, particu- larly for individuals and groups that were already at risk. the publicness of archae- ology on the web has attracted a great deal of attention and developed a global reach, but this can be a double-edged sword. the emphasis that is placed today on sharing personal histories, developing an individual profile, and being a ‘public face’, coupled with the ease with which personal informa- tion, including contact details, can be acquired online is a dangerous combination. it is particularly accentuated by the degree to which we remain connected to the internet at all times through mobile devices, applications and automated notifications. cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://caa-international.org/ / / /womens-digital-archaeology-network/ https://caa-international.org/ / / /womens-digital-archaeology-network/ https://caa-international.org/ / / /womens-digital-archaeology-network/ https://caa-international.org/ / / /womens-digital-archaeology-network/ https://www.rrncommunity.org/ https://www.rrncommunity.org/ https://www.rrncommunity.org/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core abusers and harassers can reach individuals at all times. finally, the interplay of public and private online communications (perry, : – ) lends itself to manipulation, allowing individuals to remain publicly friendly or polite and privately abusive, or even to use public communications to incite widespread harassment. martin ( ), considering the position of women in makerspaces, outlines the ways in which persistence in tech-domi- nated fields brings out both subtle and overt forms of discrimination and abuse, ranging from ‘suspicion’ that women are not actually the masterminds behind innovative digital products, to more direct forms of public harassment and defam- ation via social media or blatant exclusion from events. similarly, dennis ( ) has drawn attention to the significant issue of ‘problematic participants’ in gaming culture, which includes ‘elements of mis- ogyny, white supremacy, and anti-intellec- tualism’, and manifests itself in targeted online abuse and even escalating to offline harassment. most recently, geraldine deruiter’s effort to study online abusers through interviews demonstrated the com- plexity of the psyche of online abusers and the resulting volatility of hate, misogyny and harassment online but also that: ‘while we regard online misogyny and abuse of women as something wholly separate and different from its so-called “real-world” counterparts, these are all components of the same system. we dismiss sexual harassment that happens on the internet in the exact same way that we dismiss sexual harassment that happens face-to-face, even though these experiences are often just as bad —if not worse—for the victim, often due to the mechanics of the anonymity of the internet.’ (deruiter, ) particularly concerning is the system of teaching victims of online and offline abuse to believe that they brought the abuse upon themselves and, therefore, to willingly put up with further damage to themselves. after recording high levels of inappropriate digital engagement, perry ( : – ) draws attention to the lack of recourse or means of protection, with corresponding low rates of reporting and rare institutional support, despite many institutions now mandating public and private digital engagement. this is critical to any discussion promoting digital archaeology for public engagement, net- working, and dissemination. whether it is in official commissions of such work or through more subtle promotion of the ethos of community-engaged scholarship (which also has its own problematic history of inequity and responsibility placed on women, indigenous scholars, people of colour, etc.), if no form of support or protection (despite well docu- mented abuse and danger) is offered, then it knowingly puts these individuals in danger, expects self-sacrifice and risk on their part only, and in turn profits from it. this should never have been acceptable and addressing these risks must be a prior- ity in future for every single individual or institution associated with archaeology and heritage. conclusion: the collateral damage of transhumanism ‘we have the right to a safe, secure and non-threatening working and living environment. we do not tolerate any form of discriminatory, abusive, aggres- sive, harassing, threatening, sexually—or physically-intimidating, or related prob- lematic behaviours that compromise the wellbeing, equality, security or dignity of other human beings.’ (perry, ) without risk, there is no reward. the person who risks nothing does nothing. european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core when we risk going too far, we discover how far we can go. in today’s era of motivational speak, risk has been singu- larly rebranded as a badge of honour. in turn, risk is considered a cornerstone of art, innovation, creativity, and ultimately, change. perhaps ironically, then, it is the #metoo, idle no more, and black lives matter movements, among others, that have shone a light on the dark underbelly of taking chances: the demand for indivi- duals to step forward and share their voice paints targets on the already vulnerable and marginalized for fear- and anger-filled hate and aggression, repeatedly and relent- lessly beating down the voices of change. often forced to choose between the long- term, abstract risk of doing nothing (and, therefore, nothing ever changing for the better) and the immediate and often per- sonal risk of trying to confront the system, the individuals leading the charge of these movements, in the name of equity, secur- ity, and inclusivity, face harassment, abuse, suspicion, imprisonment, and violence. this has been part of the growing critique of positive thinking, this ‘mass delusion’ (ehrenreich, : ) centred on per- sonal responsibility, where hard work leads to success and poor choices lead to failure, rather than recognizing the true force and pervasiveness of underlying structural con- ditions (halberstam, ). this is perhaps the greatest flaw in transhuman and posthuman philosophies: the unflinching commitment to technol- ogy and science to evolve beyond human conflicts and limitations fails to protect humans now, risking the creation of greater fissures rather than making pro- gress. the digital has reformulated the ways in which we engage with the past and produce knowledge in the present, but we have taken many steps backward much faster than the individuals cited above (and many others) have clawed their way forward to envision the past in new ways through creativity, making, and inclusivity. it would be easy to present this as a narra- tive of ‘no risk, no reward’. however, the number of individuals who contribute so much in the name of diversity, and who are now reaching their breaking points— having battled misogyny, racism, trans- phobia, homophobia, ableism, and every other brand of hatred possible, for too long and in too high a concentration (thanks to the internet)—must be taken as a serious warning for the ways in which we put people in the firing line to try to repair what was already broken and what the digital has, at the very least, augmen- ted. the challenge for everyone, and it will need everyone, including those who have benefitted for so long from the privi- leges afforded to them, will be how to invest in better protections, buffers, and reformulate our approach to digital schol- arship. these efforts need to be bolstered and amplified by more funding, more plat- forms for dissemination, more institutional support, more regulation, and perhaps most importantly, more respect and acknowledgement of the truth of abuse when reported. there is nothing new in this statement, it is echoed across the web, in tweets and blogs, and increasingly in policy state- ments and organizational missions. and while all these elements are indeed needed, are they radical enough to con- front decades of technological evolution that has opened the pandora’s box of dis- crimination, hate, and abuse? the greatest progress appears to lie in the alternative platforms that have emerged, as described above, to make space and valorise disrup- tions to mainstream and traditional archaeologies. these do indeed require a great deal of labour, but at least the labour is not profiting commercial interests (i.e. publishers and corporate presses). if we all commit to reading and citing these plat- forms first, in addition to participating, cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core offering our time, labour, and perspectives as a priority over traditional and very broken systems of dissemination, there is hope for a transformation in the value, security, reward, and allyship to confront targeted oppression and systemic ‘other- ing’. this should be coupled with means to protect and shelter at-risk voices, such as by mediating, blocking, or even not permitting comments, but also by valuing and recognizing that what is often branded as ‘academic kindness’ is in fact the threads that will weave empathy, respect, collegiality, and indeed humanity back into the trans- or posthuman future of archaeology. the future will be digital, but it will only be diverse and inclusive if, together, we make it so. the stubbornly diy mentality that has come to character- ize digital archaeology powered by and for inclusion and diversity emerged out of structures of inclusion and inequity but addressing the true crisis of scholarship endangering scholars today must be a do- it-collectively priority. references agbe-davies, a.s. . black scholars, black pasts. saa archaeological record, : – . battle-baptiste, w. . black feminist archaeology. new york: routledge. beard, m. . roman britain in black and white. the times literary supplement [online] [accessed , april ]. available at: <https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ roman-britain-black-white/>. brock, t.p. . all of us would walk together [online] [accessed march ]. available at: <http://hsmcwalkto- gether.org>. brown, d. & nicholas, g. . protecting indigenous cultural property in the age of digital 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assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the university of montreal, specializing in public archaeology and digital applications. her research examines memory, identity, power, and politics in the early colonial history of the atlantic (europe, north america, africa), while exploring the applications of digital media, open data, technology in increasing access, engage- ment, and understandings of cultural diversity past and present. address: katherine cook, département d’anthropologie, université de montréal, pavillon lionel-groulx, cp , succur- sale centre-ville, rue jean-brillant, montréal qc, h t n , canada. [email: katherine.cook@umontreal.ca]. incarner et bricoler pour bouleverser la donne : allosexualité, féminisme et inclusivité en archéologie numérique les démarches qui cherchent à promouvoir l’intégration en archéologie (y compris les perspectives allosex- uelles, féministes, black ou indigènes) se recoupent de plus en plus avec celles des communautés associées au codage, à la réalisation et au piratage numérique dans le but de créer un style ‘bricolé’ de contestation et d’activisme. les technologies numériques offrent des possibilités de remettre en question les représentations traditionnelles de personnes du passé et de nos jours de façon créative, mais à quel prix ? dans cet article, une évaluation critique du transhumanisme et de l’ère numérique sert de point de départ à une présentation d’exemples numériques convaincants de pratique d’intégration mais aussi de l’omniprésence du privilège, de l’inégalité, du manque d’accès et des abus facilités par des projets d’accès libre sur internet concernant le patrimoine. on cherchera surtout à évaluer les moyens d’établir un équilibre entre la transposition de récits centrés sur des individus et un profil public et de prendre en compte les risques personnels et professionnels associés à ces approches dans le but de promouvoir, soutenir et protéger les communautés et archéologues marginalisés. translation by madeleine hummler mots-clés: archéologie numérique, allosexualité, féminisme et inclusivité, recherche inclusive, archéologie publique, diversité störende selbstgemachte verkörperungen: queer, feministische und inklusive digitalarchäologie integrative ansätze in der archäologie (einschließlich der queeren, schwarzen, feministischen oder ein- heimischen anschauungsweisen) haben sich zunehmend mit der kultur der programmierer, macher und hacker überschnitten um einen einzigartigen „gebastelten” stil von zerrüttung und aktivismus zu entwickeln. die digitale technologie bietet die möglichkeit, konventionelle darstellung von personen in der vergangenheit und in der gegenwart kreativ infrage zu stellen, aber zu welchem preis? als kri- tische betrachtung von transhumanismus und des zeitalters der digitalen wissenschaft verfasst, bes- chreibt dieser artikel überzeugende anwendungen der digitalen praxis aber auch die durchdringenden strukturen des privilegs, der ungerechtigkeit, der unzugänglichkeit und des missbrauchs, die in zugänglichen, webbasierten projekten im bereich des kulturerbes entstanden sind. insbesondere bewertet cook – queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:katherine.cook@umontreal.ca https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core die studie mögliche mittel eines ausgewogenen verhältnisses zwischen auf einzelpersonen ausgerichteten erzählungen und öffentlichen profilen zu finden; sie bewertet auch die die persönlichen und beruflichen risiken, die mit diesen ansätzen verbunden sind und die sich bemühen, traditionell marginalisierte archäologen und gemeinschaften zu fördern, unterstützen und schützen. translation by madeleine hummler stichworte: digitalarchäologie, queer, feminismus, integrative wissenschaft, öffentliche archäologie, vielfalt european journal of archaeology ( ) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /eaa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	embodiying disruption: queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies 	cultures of inclusivity 	digital communities and inclusivity 	disruptive digital archaeologies 	confronting the past 	confronting the present 	confronting authorship/authority 	platforms for support 	the dark side of disruption 	conclusion: the collateral damage of transhumanism 	references medical students’ self-reported gender discrimination and sexual harassment over time research article open access medical students’ self-reported gender discrimination and sexual harassment over time marta a. kisiel *, sofia kühner , karin stolare , erik lampa , martin wohlin , nina johnston , and anna rask-andersen abstract background: gender discrimination (gd) and sexual harassment (sh) occur at all academic institutions worldwide. medical students report high prevalence of gd and sh, which may negatively affect their education and health. there are indications that policies and reforms on reducing gd/sh are insufficient. swedish medical students’ experiences of gd/sh are monitored by course-evaluations and bi-annual student union evaluations; however, the response rate is usually low. the aim of this study was to compare the exposure to and context of self-reported gd/sh over an -year period amongst medical students at a swedish university. methods: in , a questionnaire (n = ) was mailed to medical students’ home addresses. it was repeated in and then distributed during mandatory lectures (n = ). the questions used a behavioristic approach and asked about specific gh/sh experiences. participation was voluntary and anonymous. the changes in prevalence over time were calculated by sampling weights in order to obtain comparable estimates, representative of both cohorts. results: the response frequency was % ( % women) in and % ( % women) in . the prevalence of gd tended to decrease for male and clinical students in comparison to female and pre-clinical peers. however, the prevalence of sh increased for female compared to male students. the ratio of sh for female pre-clinical students doubled in many instances; most often, the mistreatment occurred in the clinic. medical doctors were indicated as perpetrators up to five times more often by all students in . conclusion: our results show a disproportional change in exposure to gd/sh between female and male medical students, resulting in a widening of the gender gap regarding prevalence of gd and sh between and . in particular, personal experiences of sh increased for both sexes. it is proof that institutional efforts to fight mistreatment might be ineffective. keywords: gender discrimination, sexual harassment, medical students, swedish university © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: marta.kisiel@medsci.uu.se department of medical sciences, environmental and occupational medicine, uppsala university, dag hammarskjölds väg, uppsala, sweden full list of author information is available at the end of the article kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:marta.kisiel@medsci.uu.se background gender discrimination (gd), including gender harass- ment, and sexual harassment (sh), occur at academic institutions worldwide [ , ]. of all students and aca- demic employees, medical students report high preva- lence of gd and sh [ , ]. although women constitute the majority of medical students, men are, still, more often in decision-making positions at med- ical institutions [ ]. students’ dependence on supervi- sors is a known risk-factor for gd and sh and facilitates potential exposure to mistreatment at med- ical schools. these factors affect both genders but in particular women [ – ]. a recent systematic review on international studies, the majority conducted in the united states, canada, pakistan, the united kingdom, showed that – % of all medical students have experienced at least one type of gd or sh during medical school and that female stu- dents are more affected than their male peers [ ]. the studies underline that medical students are not overly sensitive to gd/sh [ ] and may rather underreport mis- treatments [ – ]. it is shown that the occurrence of gd and sh is higher in the clinical environment than in pre-clinical education [ , ]. one proposed explanation for this is that the nature of clinical practice with, for ex- ample, examination of undressed bodies of both patients and students, contributes to the breakdown of social and sexual barriers [ , , ]. the students’ acceptance of mistreatment seems to in- crease with the duration of the studies [ ] and it is higher among junior doctors in comparison to students. it is suggested that medical students are progressively in- doctrinated to accept mistreatment during medical school [ ]. the socialization process of becoming a doctor is largely impacted by the clinical environment, where formal curricular frames meet reality. coining the terms “informal” and “hidden” curriculum, an important factor for developing professional identity. the hidden curriculum is a known influencer of educational out- comes, including not openly taught norms, values and believes of the educational social environment. much of this socialization occurs in the educational social envi- ronments. while formal instruction promotes empathy, collegiality and equality, the hidden curriculum can refuse those values and result in the acceptance of mis- treatment [ , ]. research have shown that exposure to gd/sh in education creates an adverse learning environment for affected students but also for those observing the mistreatment of others. the experience contributes to a reduction in their confidence, learning ability, and motivation to complete their education. there are also indications of long-term negative consequences on the individual’s health, including post-traumatic stress, burnout, depression, anxiety, and chronic pain [ , , , ]. in sweden, the first law regarding equal treatment of students in higher education was established in [ ]. it was followed by the incorporation of aspects on gender inequality in the curricula of swedish univer- sities. at the medical program at uppsala university (uu), gender perspective was introduced in the syllabus as part of a larger reform in . an earlier elective course on gender issues, attended by % of medical stu- dents, was replaced by mandatory course on gender medicine with focus on biological difference between sexes and their clinical significance. this course also in- cluded some examples of gender issues as aspects and concerns related to women’s and men’s lives and gender differences in society. also, in , problem based learning was introduced at all levels, aiming to enhance understanding of the integration between basic science and clinics [ ]. although the gender equality in higher education is considered important, there is a lack of long-term studies monitoring the prevalence of gender-based dis- crimination. the knowledge on medical students’ experi- ences of gd/sh at uu is mainly based on course- evaluations and bi-annual reports from the student unions [ , ]; however, in both these surveys, the re- sponse rate is usually low. therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate whether there was a change in the prevalence and context of self-reported gd and sh among medical students at uppsala university between and . methods the study design this questionnaire-based study examines changes in self-reported gender discrimination (gd) and sexual harassment (sh) of medical students over an -year period at uppsala university (uu) in sweden. the first voluntary and anonymous survey was performed in and then repeated in , when the new curriculum and the mandatory course in gender medicine intro- duced in , was established [ ]. the aim with wait- ing several years was also to have a new set of students participating in the , year long program not have the same student responded twice. directly after the questionnaire study was conducted, we summarized its results in swedish and published them on the uu website [ , ]. in the current project, we combined data from and and performed a repeated cross-sectional study [ ]. we compare the re- sults of two questionnaires with advance comparative statistics. in accordance with swedish law, international regula- tions [ , ] and local policies at the university, gender kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of discrimination (gd) is defined as mistreatment due to gender and includes gender harassment (a type of gen- der discrimination that includes a violation of someone’s dignity). sexual harassment (sh) is defined as an act of a sexual nature that violates someone’s dignity. the questionnaire used in this study was developed in by werner and grave [ ] and is based on a previ- ously published and validated survey [ ]. it included questions on students’ demographics and specific exam- ples of behaviors that constitute gd and sh (supple- mentary table ). this behavioristic approach is shown to give the most accurate picture of self-reported experi- ences of mistreatment [ , ]. similar questionnaires have been used in international studies [ ]. the ethical review board in uppsala decided that the study did not require ethical approval (dnr / ). data collection and study populations all participants gave written informed consent. in , all registered medical students (n = ) at uppsala uni- versity were invited to participate, and the questionnaire was mailed to the student’s home address with a request for its return. in , the questionnaire was distributed to medical students in semesters – and (n = ) during lectures, excluding semester (n = ) as the students were writing their research project and spread out at the campus. in order to avoid bias, the students in the th semester (n = ) were excluded from the co- hort of . the inclusion criterion in both the studies was a completed questionnaire. the medical program at uu is a traditional program, divided into pre-clinical (semesters – ) and clinical se- mesters (semesters – ). in , the students in se- mesters – mainly had pre-clinical theoretical education and only sporadic contact with the clinical en- vironment. in , a new approach was adopted, result- ing in students starting their regular clinical rotations in primary care units earlier. therefore, in , medical students had contact with the clinical environment already in the first semester. statistics the students in both cohorts were stratified into groups, according to the stated sex (female/male) and current study stage (pre-clinical and clinical groups). each stu- dent was assigned a sample weight reflecting his or her probability of inclusion, given the age and gender distri- butions in and . the weights were further cali- brated [ ] to match the population totals of males and females and age groups of the different semesters in each year. prevalence and ratios between the prevalence in the different years or between males and females were calculated by taking the sampling weights into account in order to obtain estimates that were representative of the two populations. ratios are used as they have a natural interpretation as percent increase or decrease. while absolute difference in percentage is also useful measure of change, percentage point usually is misin- terpreted as percentage [ ]. confidence intervals are wald type confidence intervals calculated on the logit scale and back transformed to the probability scale and can thus be asymmetric. all analyses were con- ducted using r [ ] version . . using the survey add-on package [ , ]. results demographic data in , ( % of all distributed surveys) medical stu- dents completed the questionnaire, % were women, % (n = ) were from the pre-clinical semesters. to our knowledge, ten surveys failed to reach the student due to incorrect addresses being registered. the response rate was higher in , and a total of individuals ( % of distributed surveys) returned the completed questionnaire, % were women, % (n = ) students from the pre-clinical course. table shows the detailed demographic characteristics. gender discrimination and sexual harassments the changes in the prevalence (ratio) of gd and sh in medicals students between and are presented in supplementary table and summarized in fig. . one student could report one or several types of expos- ure and indicate its frequency as ‘never,’ ‘once,’ or ‘more than once.’ we also calculated if there was any signifi- cant difference between women and men in the ratio of different behaviors. gd: the prevalence of gd among clinical students de- creased between and . in three types of behav- iors such as ‘being ignored,’ ‘being disrespected,’ and ‘being ridiculed,’ the decrease was significantly higher in men compared to women. in the pre-clinical group, the prevalence of gd in- creased in females. the prevalence of ‘being disre- spected’ more than once doubled in women between and (ratio: . ci: . – . ). also, the number of men who experienced this behavior once in- creased (ratio: . ci: . – . ). sh: female pre-clinical students reported an increase in the prevalence for five out of six stated behaviors be- tween and . for three behaviors, the ratio dou- bled (supplementary table and fig. ): – ‘unwanted comment on my clothes and appearance,’ more than once (ratio: . ci: . – . ) – ‘sexually offensive comments directed toward me,’ more than once (ratio: . ci: . – . ) kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of – ‘sexually offensive jokes,’ once (ratio . ci: . – . ), more than once (ratio: . ci: . – . ) – ‘pointed out as a sexual object,’ once (ratio: . ci: . – . ) the ratio of several behaviors also increased among the female clinical students. there was a decrease in the ratios of prevalence of sh noted in the male group, in particular among the pre-clinical students. in , there were almost no reports of ‘receiving demands of sexual services.’ these reports, however, increased in numbers in . observing mistreatment of others the medical students were asked if they had observed other students being mistreated or favored due to gen- der. the students reported a decrease in observing other students being mistreated and favored (table ). how- ever, observations of ‘discrimination’ were reported more often by male pre-clinical students in than in (ratio . ci: . – . ). the contexts and indicated perpetrators the students were asked to indicate the attributes of the perpetrator (table ). we found that mistreatment of fe- male pre-clinical students increased at all learning con- texts between and ; specifically, occurrences in the clinical context were five to seven times as common in . male pre-clinical students also experienced an increase in mistreatment during clinical training. clinical students reported a decrease in mistreating behaviors during the theoretical parts of the education. in parallel with those results, there was an increase in medical doctors of both sexes being reported as perpe- trators, which was noted for all medical students (table ). pre-clinical female and clinical male students were more often mistreated by nurses or other medical personnel in than in . the opposite was noted for pre-clinical male students. reports of other peers as perpetrators were generally consistent but decreased for pre-clinical male students. discussion in this study, we analyzed the changes in prevalence and the pattern of self-reported experience of gender dis- crimination (gd), including gender harassment, and sex- ual harassment (sh) of medical students between and at uppsala university (uu) in sweden. in this study we separated sh from other gd as those types of behaviors are the most alarming and must be highlighted [ ]. in the presentation of the results, we focus on increased ratios as it is the most important to define what interventions are needed for the future. the main result of our study is that although the prevalence of several examples of gd showed a tendency to de- crease between and , these results are compli- cated by an increased difference between the sexes, widening the gender gap for prevalence of gd and sh. alarmingly, the prevalence of sh increased for both women and men, but particularly in pre-clinical settings, table total number of medical students that completed the questionnaire in and , stratified by pre-clinical and clinical semesters, age, year, and gender. percent (%) is the percent of all females and males or the percent of the total of medical students in the cohort from and semester age females n (%) males n (%) total n (%) females n (%) males n (%) total n (%) pre-clinical < ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) – ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( , ) ( , ) – ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( ) – ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( , ) ( , ) – ( , ) () ( , ) ( ) ( ) ( ) > ( , ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) total ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( ) clinical < ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) – ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) – ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( , ) ( ) ( , ) – ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) – ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) > ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) total ( ) ( ) ( ) ( , ) ( ) ( ) kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of where the prevalence of some behaviors doubled. the most severe form of sh, the demand for sexual acts, was uncommon in but more common in . based on the fact that sh-experiences increased but not the observations of others being subjected to these behav- iors, we can suspect that these interactions occur behind the scenes, making it harder for others to notice. our previous studies concluded that the total preva- lence of self-reported gd/sh was higher in students during clinical rather than pre-clinical training and af- fects women more than men [ , ]. in this study, the graphics in fig. support these conclusions. it is worry- ing but not surprising as several other studies and the recent meta-analysis presented similar outcomes [ , ]. several studies showed that discriminating behaviors lead to negative consequences for medical students and their professional future [ , , ]. in addition, even observations of other students being mistreated have a negative impact [ ]. therefore, we also analyzed if medical students observed other students being discrimi- nated against, which was common. pre-clinical male stu- dents who between the years became less subjected to gd themselves noticed a higher prevalence of mistreat- ment of other students, which supports the self-reported increase in experiences among pre-clinical female students. the reason of increasing reporting of gd/sh in compared to is most probably due to raised fig. mean values shows the frequency of exposures to gender discrimination (gd) and sexual harassments (sh) experienced by female and male medical students at pre-clinical and clinical semesters in and . scale: never = , once = , more than once = kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of awareness of those behaviors among students. this can be a result of universities’ attempt to address discrimina- tions, such as curricular changes done at uu in [ ] but also conventional media and culture. also, so- cial media had increasingly offered information on the topic, even long before #metoo. in our opinion rising awareness of gender equality and understanding gender discrimination might contribute to higher response rate in than in . also, the distribution during lectures as done in was prob- ably more effective than using postal service in . between and , the context of mistreatment changed and was less common during the theoretical moments but increased in the clinical context, most noted in the pre-clinical group and especially in the fe- male pre-clinical group. in this group, the occurrence of mistreatment during clinical training increased five times by female supervisors and seven times by male supervi- sors between and . this is probably partly ex- plained by changes in the educational program at uu, where pre-clinical students in the cohort have had regular clinical rotations in primary care since the first semester. out of all the clinical supervisors, medical doctors were most often identified as the perpetrator in . although male students’ experiences of gd in general changed for the better, reports on medical doctors as perpetrators increased also in this group. evidently, these curricular interventions fail to reach the clinical environment. when mistreatment is not addressed properly, studies suggest that students may incorporate the bad norms and attitudes of the teaching physicians as part of the hidden curriculum [ , ]. when the teaching physician is being discriminatory, it may cause a negative spiral of these behaviors. the acceptance of mistreatment may increase and even worse, people who suffered from mistreatment often become perpetrators themselves [ ]. strengths and limitations our research benefited from two independent cohorts of medical students. because of the large number of partici- pants and high response rate, our results may be generalizable to other medical schools with similar edu- cational structure. another advantage is the use of previ- ously validated behavioristic questions, which helped to decrease the risk of bias. there are however limitations to this study. it is cross- sectional with no control group. the questionnaires use closed-ended questions, where respondents are not able to clarify their choice or verify if the interpretation was the one intended. with self-reports, there is always a perception bias and participants offer their subjective ex- periences. the examples of gd/sh may be differently interpreted between individuals and groups, and there may be a risk for result bias. the study evaluated only the experience of medical students (victim’s perspective). some aspects that may impact the answers were not table the medical students in the primary and secondary cohort, divided into pre-clinical and clinical courses as well as gender (female/male), were asked the question: “did you notice other students being discriminated / favored /receiving unwelcome comments due to her/his gender?” prevalence (percent) of the medical students who answered ‘yes’ to this question (weighted to represent the total population of medical students during and , respectively). ratios presented are the prevalence in divided by the prevalence in , with corresponding % confidence intervals. a ratio > indicates that the condition has an increased prevalence in . the p-values result from tests where the null hypotheses are that the ratios are the same between the males and the females. thus, a p-value < . indicates a statistically significant ratio between the sexes over the time period did you notice that other students experienced ......due to her/his gender? cohort pre-clinical clinical females males females males (… discrimination … (percent) . . . . (percent) . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) p-value . . … favoritism … (percent) . . . . (percent) . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) p-value . . …. intrusive unwelcome acts … ). (percent) . . . . (percent) . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) p-value . . kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of considered in the study such as other minority identities reflecting other grounds of discrimination and social sta- tus of the participant. another limitation may be that the authors analyzed data from their own institution. study implications with this study, we want to show that medical students experience gd/sh during their medical education. moreover, the context of those experiences is often the clinical environment, which can be hard for universities to monitor and change. efforts by universities to detect gender discrimination with the currently used instru- ments such as course evaluations might not be adequate as underreporting is a known problem [ – ], and re- sponse rates are usually low. recurrent mistreatment of medical students by faculty staff was showed to be of the driving forces of burnout, and psychiatric disorders [ , ]. evidence-based strategies to decrease gd/sh in- volved education of staff and students including know- ledge of student’s rights, proactive encouragement of reporting, and regular monitoring of discriminatory be- haviors [ , , , ]. also, teaching on gender equality may play a pivotal role in bridging the gap from gender bias to gender awareness [ ]. change might depend on educating and promoting reflexive abilities and well- being among clinical supervisors [ ]. all this to align the formal curriculum including confident engaging in learning activates supported by teaching stuff with the informal or hidden one, thus creating a good learning environment for students. conclusions our study may be the first study documenting the prevalence and contextual changes of gd/sh among table the stratification of the individuals reported as perpetrators (other student/supervisor or teacher/medical doctor/ nurse or other medical personnel) of sexual harassments. the medical students from the primary cohort ( ) and the revision cohort ( ) were stratified by pre-clinical and clinical semester and gender (females/males). prevalence (percent) of the medical students who answered ‘yes’ to this question (weighted to represent the total population of medical students during and , respectively). ratios presented are the prevalence in divided by the prevalence in , with corresponding % confidence intervals. a ratio > indicates that the condition has an increased prevalence in . the p-values result from tests where the null hypotheses are that the ratios are the same between the females and the males semester gender cohort other student who was supervisor/teacher who was medical doctor who was nurse or other medical personnel who was females males females males females males females males pre- clinical female (percent) . . . . . . . . (percent) . . . . . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) male (percent) . . . . . . . . (percent) . . . . . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) p-value . < . . . . . . . clinical female (percent) . . . . . . . . (percent) . . . . . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) male (percent) . . . . . . . . (percent) . . . . . . . . ratio ( / ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) . ( . – . ) p-value . . . . . . . . kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of medical students over such a long time as years. the study shows that the prevalence of gd/sh in many cases decreased in male students and increased, particu- larly among female pre-clinical students, widening the gender gap for prevalence of gd/sh. alarmingly, the prevalence of sh increased, especially among female stu- dents. the exposure to gd/sh increased mainly in the clinical context; nonetheless, this should not be tolerated by universities and hospitals. medical doctors are often indicated as perpetrators, and curricular interventions to decrease gh/sh seldom reach this part of the educa- tion. in order to improve awareness of gender equality in health care workers, the interventions countering gd/ sh should be considered an essential investment improving health care quality [ ]. for example, a mandatory course on gender equality could be a part of medical doctors’ professional education. further, we will repeat this investigation with medical students at upp- sala university in . we hope for a “#metoo effect” that improves awareness of gd/sh and put end to the existing mistreatments. supplementary information the online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi. org/ . /s - - - . additional file : table s . the questions used in the study and selected from the questionnaire. table s . the frequency, defined as once or at least twice of different examples of self-reported gender dis- crimination and sexual harassments, was calculated. the and cohorts were stratified into pre-clinical and clinical students and gender in cohort and . prevalence (percent) of the medical students who answered ‘yes’ to this question (weighted to represent the total population of medical students during and , respectively). ra- tios presented are the prevalence in divided by the prevalence in , with corresponding % confidence intervals. a ratio > indicates that the condition has an increased prevalence in . abbreviations gd: gender discrimination; sh: sexual harassment; uu: uppsala university; ci: confidence interval; #metoo: or the metoo international movement against sexual harassment and sexual abuse on social media acknowledgments we acknowledge all medical students that answer the questionnaire in and . authors’ contributions m a k – design of the work, analysis, interpretation of data, draft of the work. s k – analysis, interpretation of data, draft of the work. k s - design of the work, analysis. e l - design of the work, analysis. m w - design of the work, analysis, draft of the work. n j – design and draft of the work. a r-a - design of the work, interpretation, draft of the work. all the authors approved the submitted version and have agreed to be personally accountable for the author’s own contribution. funding no external founding was provided. open access funding provided by uppsala university. availability of data and materials the data is available in corresponding author data base and is available for all coauthors. it can be shown if requested. ethics approval and consent to participate we sent the application for ethical review of this study to our local ethical committee (the ethical review board at uppsala university in sweden). the ethical review board at uppsala university in sweden decided that the study did not require ethical approval. this decision has reference number / . the participation in the study was anonym and voluntary. the participants were informed about the purpose of the study, potential risk and benefits of participating in the introduction to survey. the participant gave their written consent before starting the survey. they gave also written consent to publish their own quotes. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. author details department of medical sciences, environmental and occupational medicine, uppsala university, dag hammarskjölds väg, uppsala, sweden. department of medical sciences, uppsala university, uppsala, sweden. department of psychiatry, uppsala university, uppsala, sweden. ucr-uppsala clinical research center, uppsala university, uppsala, sweden. department of medical sciences, cardiology, uppsala university, uppsala, sweden. received: june accepted: december references . henning ma, zhou c, adams p, moir f, hobson j, hallett c, webster cs. workplace harassment among staff in higher education: a systematic review. asia pac educ rev. ; 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( ): – . . nora lm, et al. gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medical education: perspectives gained by a -school study. acad med. ; ( pt ): – . . richardson da, et al. assessing medical students' perceptions of mistreatment in their second and third years. acad med. ; ( ): – . . baldwin dc jr, daugherty sr, eckenfels ej. student perceptions of mistreatment and harassment during medical school. a survey of ten united states schools. west j med. ; ( ): – . . kulaylat an, et al. perceptions of mistreatment among trainees vary at different stages of clinical training. bmc med educ. ; ( ): . . doja a, et al. the hidden and informal curriculum across the continuum of training: a cross-sectional qualitative study. med teach. ; ( ): – . . hafferty fw. beyond curriculum reform: confronting medicine's hidden curriculum. acad med. ; ( ): – . . oser tk, et al. frequency and negative impact of medical student mistreatment based on specialty choice: a longitudinal study. acad med. ; ( ): – . . lag om likabehandling av studneter. i högskolan, in . , sfs: sweden. kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . birgegård g, sandler s, bergsten j, nilsson o. den nya läkarutbildningen i uppsala. fallbaserad, integrerad och med tidig patientkontakt. läkartidningen. ; 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(sylf), s.y.l., upplevddiskirmineringiunderläkarkåren - en fördjupat anlys. : stockholm, sveden. . grave k, w.c., tjejer med auktoritet, killar med empati. om jämställdhet och genusperspektiv på läkarprogrammet vid uppsala universitet. , in uppsala universitet. . . s, s., det var ju inte illa menat. en longitudinell enkätstudie om genusmedvetenhet könsdiskiminering och sexuell trakasserier bland uppsala universitets läkarstudenter. , in uppsala universitiet. . . . julia l yee, d.n., advantage and disadvantage: longitudinal vs. repeated crorss- section survey. project battelle – . . . convention against discrimination in education. , united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco): interantional. . uk public general acts. equality act , https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/ / /contents.: uk. . hensing g, l.c., studiemiljö och kön: en kartläggning av förekomsten av sexuella och könsrelaterade trakasserier bland studenter och doktorander vid göteborgs universitet. , in göteborg: univ. . . statens offentlig utredning, agenda för jämlikhet och social sammanhållning. slutbetänkande av utredning om makt, integration och strukturell diskriminering., in sou : . : sweden. . carstensen, g., sexuella trakasserier finns nog i en annan värld: konstruktioner av ett (o) giltig provlem., in sociologiska instytutionen. . , uppsala. . rautio a, et al. mistreatment of university students most common during medical studies. bmc med educ. ; : . . särndal c-e, swensson b, wretman j. model assisted survey sampling. in: s. s.i. statistic. new york: springer-verlag; . . g. wentworth, d.e.s., h d harper ‘ratio and proportion” fundamentals of practical mathematics. : ginn and co. . r:, r.c.t. a language and environment for statistical computing. . . lumley, t. "survey: analysis of complex survey samples". r package version . – .. . . lumley t. analysis of complex survey samples. j stat softw. ; ( ): – . . baldwin dc jr. and s.r. daugherty, distinguishing sexual harassment from discrimination: a factor-analytic study of residents' reports. acad med. ; ( suppl):s – . . fried jm, et al. eradicating medical student mistreatment: a longitudinal study of one institution's efforts. acad med. ; ( ): – . . kristoffersson e, et al. experiences of the gender climate in clinical training - a focus group study among swedish medical students. bmc med educ. ; ( ): . . wear d, aultman j. sexual harassment in academic medicine: persistence, non-reporting, and institutional response. med educ online. ; ( ): . . kristoffersson e, et al. to select or be selected - gendered experiences in clinical training affect medical students' specialty preferences. bmc med educ. ; ( ): . . sue dw. microaggressions in everyday life, race, gender and sexula orientation: john wiley and sons, inc; . https://books.google.se/books/ about/microaggressions_in_everyday_life.html?id=jyzcuvgtaimc&source= kp_book_description&redir_esc=y. . kulaylat an, et al. aligning perceptions of mistreatment among incoming medical trainees. j surg res. ; : – . . reddy rm, et al. the looking to the future medical student program: recruiting tomorrow's leaders. ann thorac surg. ; ( ): – . . siller h, et al. gender differences and similarities in medical students' experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators. bmc med educ. ; ( ): . . nagata-kobayashi s, et al. medical student abuse during clinical clerkships in japan. j gen intern med. ; ( ): – . . chung mp, et al. exploring medical students' barriers to reporting mistreatment during clerkships: a qualitative study. med educ online. ; ( ): . . ishak w, et al. burnout in medical students: a systematic review. clin teach. ; ( ): – . . cook af, et al. the prevalence of medical student mistreatment and its association with burnout. acad med. ; ( ): – . . verdonk p, et al. from gender bias to gender awareness in medical education. adv health sci educ theory pract. ; ( ): – . . white ge. setting and maintaining professional role boundaries: an educational strategy. med educ. ; ( ): – . . newman c, et al. integration of gender-transformative interventions into health professional education reform for the st century: implications of an expert review. hum resour health. ; : . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. kisiel et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://slf.se/student/app/uploads/ / /klinisk-handledning- .pdf https://slf.se/student/app/uploads/ / /klinisk-handledning- .pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /contents https://books.google.se/books/about/microaggressions_in_everyday_life.html?id=jyzcuvgtaimc&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y https://books.google.se/books/about/microaggressions_in_everyday_life.html?id=jyzcuvgtaimc&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y https://books.google.se/books/about/microaggressions_in_everyday_life.html?id=jyzcuvgtaimc&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusion 	background 	methods 	the study design 	data collection and study populations 	statistics 	results 	demographic data 	gender discrimination and sexual harassments 	observing mistreatment of others 	the contexts and indicated perpetrators 	discussion 	strengths and limitations 	study implications 	conclusions 	supplementary information 	abbreviations 	acknowledgments 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note gender, language and a lipstick: creating cultural change in a world of paradoxes humanities article gender, language and a lipstick: creating cultural change in a world of paradoxes angeliki alvanoudi , id institute of modern greek studies, aristotle university of thessaloniki, thessaloniki , greece; aalvanoudi@ece.auth.gr language and culture research centre, james cook university, cairns, qld , australia; angeliki.alvanoudi@jcu.edu.au received: june ; accepted: august ; published: august ���������� ������� abstract: this paper addresses the paradoxes and possibilities for academic feminism in the third millennium drawing on feminist linguistics. it targets the role of language in the construction of social gender, focusing on data from greek, and shows that gendering discourse can effect cultural change. it is suggested that academic feminists can be agents of cultural change when they promote feminist language reform in the service of challenging the dominant gender order. keywords: social gender; grammatical gender; language reform; culture; cognition . introduction third millennium feminist scholars find themselves in a world of paradoxes and possibilities. this world is governed by old monsters, such as heteronormativity, racism and white male domination, and new gods, such as neo-conservatism, anti-intellectualism and pessimism. it is argued that feminism can fuel the engine of sociocultural transformations and give rise to alternative ways of thinking and living. the argument in the paper is structured as follows. first, three key paradoxes operative today are described: (i) the double bind of present-day academia as a corporate institution and a site for critical knowledge production, (ii) the free flow of knowledge in info-capitalism vs. the neoliberal anti-intellectual turn that demonizes nondiscriminatory or so called ‘politically correct’ language (henceforth pc language), and (iii) the power and limits of naming/labeling practices in the #metoo movement. second, these paradoxes are addressed from a feminist perspective. more specifically, the paper targets the role of naming/labeling practices drawing on language and gender research and shows that gendering discourse can effect cultural change. it is proposed that academic feminists can be agents of cultural change when they re-appropriate the notion of pc language in the service of challenging patriarchy and becoming women. this paper is an ‘exercise’ in breaking through paradoxes: it navigates the third millennium social landscape and seeks to identify ways for dismantling old monsters and displacing new gods with undutiful daughters. . paradoxes in the third millennium: old monsters and new gods in the prologue of metamorphoses braidotti ( , p. ) argues that the point for feminists is not to know who we are but what we want to become. in order to provide new figurations, that is, “materialistic mappings of situated, or embedded and embodied, positions”, we need to create cartographies that account for our locations “in terms both of space (geo-political or ecological dimension) and time (historical and genealogical dimension),” and provide alternative representations for these locations “in terms of power as restrictive (potestas) and also as empowering or affirmative (potentia)” (braidotti , p. ). in line with braidotti’s argument, this paper raises the following questions: where do feminists find themselves in the third millennium? what is the context in which humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of our identities take place? what are our socio-economic and symbolic locations? what are the possible sites and strategies for resistance? feminists in western postmodern capitalist societies find themselves in a web of paradoxes, addressed below. paradox : the double bind of present-day academia as corporate institution and site for critical knowledge production. in the third millennium, capitalism has shifted into a type of cognitive info-capitalism in which ‘immaterial’ intellectual labor (hardt and negri , p. ) is the new source of surplus value. this means that most aspects of human social life and activities, including thought, imagination, creativity, emotions, and communication, are subjected to capitalist exploitation. that is, anything can be converted into a commodity that makes profit (cf. negri , p. ) including knowledge produced by intellectual labor in corporate universities. this knowledge is a commodity shaped by the market and purchased by customers (students) at high or low prices (fees) (alvanoudi ). the scientific ‘precariat’ working in corporate universities, that is, teachers and researchers, is exposed to ‘toxic’ academic cultures (gill ) that generate intense workloads and make the articulation of activism and academic work difficult (pereira ). moreover, universities sustain power structures, such as “exclusionary systems of access, eurocentric canons and curricular structures, sexist and racist campus cultures and the simultaneous marginalization and cooptation of feminist, race and ethnic, and gay/lesbian/queer studies agenda in the service of the corporate academy” (mohanty , p. ). yet, in spite of its toxic nature, academia remains a prominent site “of struggle and contestation” and “a crucial locus of feminist engagement” (mohanty , p. ). paradox : the (free) flow of knowledge in info-capitalism vs. the neoliberal anti-intellectual turn that demonizes nondiscriminatory language. third millennium young workers are highly educated, ‘connected’/networked individuals (mason ) who have access to unlimited information via smartphones, tablets and laptops anywhere in the world, and participate in ‘cultural industries’ and ‘knowledge-based’ economies (fairclough , p. ). yet, in spite of technological advances and scientific progress, neoliberal right-wing movements adopt an anti-enlightenment stance, which boils down to rejection of science and radical thinking, prejudice, sexism and racism. president trump is an advocate of this anti-intellectual movement, when he expresses his mistrust against experts (e.g., denial of climate change) and targets pc language via his systematic political incorrectness. in making public statements about mexico sending immigrants to the us who bring drugs, crime and they are rapists (washington post staff , n.p.), trump legitimizes racism in discourse and he also inaugurates a new type of extreme right, white, male, neoliberal rhetoric that fuels public debates in the us and worldwide. the disregard of anti-sexist and anti-racist language is another way of colonizing public discourse and exercising power in terms of gender, race and class. words matter. this brings us to the third paradox. paradox : the power and limits of labeling practices in the #metoo movement. trump’s election and the reports of weinstein’s sexual predation have brought a revival of interest in feminism, as shown by women’s massive marches on january , and the #metoo digital movement. the origin of the #metoo movement is traced back to , when tarana burke, an african-american civil rights activist, started using the phrase me too to raise awareness of sexual abuse and assault in society and make survivors visible. the phrase developed into a hashtag following weinstein’s sexual abuse allegations. a few months later the following paradox emerged: handy candy makeup applied to trademark me too for fragrances and makeup. the neoliberal market was about to incorporate radical difference into the profit-making enterprise. in postmodern capitalism which views language as commodity, a phrase that serves as a tool of feminist struggle can be transformed into a tool of women’s covert oppression. this paper addresses the ways in which we feminists can rethink and reinvent ourselves in a world of paradoxes. one can view paradoxes either as sources of depression and fear that lead to pessimism and ‘no way out/no alternative’ ideologies or as historical situations that expose new power relations and create possibilities for becoming new social subjects and building new narratives and alliances. in order to create a “room of our own” (woolf ), we need to look into our “feminist humanities , , of survival toolkit” (ahmed , p. ). what are the conceptual tools and practices that will help us dismantle patriarchy, subvert regimes of power and subordination and redesign our ‘feminine’ condition (braidotti )? my disciplinary location is linguistics. therefore, my survival toolkit includes language, among other things. the paper follows a non-linear discussion of the three paradoxes presented above. in section i reconsider ‘old debates’ in feminist linguistics about the role of language in the maintenance of sexism drawing my examples from greek, that is, a less-discussed language in the english-centered literature on gender. the discussion targets the interface between language, gender and cognition in talk-in-interaction and addresses issues related to paradoxes and . in section i raise the issue of agency in implementing feminist language reforms. this brings us to academic feminism and paradox . . gendering discourse: words and why they matter in the third millennium ‘wars of words’ (cameron , p. ) are high on the agenda of mainstream politics generating paradoxes and challenges for feminists. in this section i discuss the role of gender linguistic structures in maintaining and reproducing the dominant gender order and i argue that language reform is a site of struggle and resistance for academic feminists that can effect cultural change. what follows is an attempt to create links between my prior work on language and gender and feminist politics. in the postmodern era of cognitive capitalism, politics is defined by a ‘language turn’ (fairclough ). language is a semiotic tool that we use to navigate the social landscape and perform culture, that is, encode knowledge and values, maintain habits of behavior, sustain our symbolic and artifactual environments and make sense of what is happening in social interaction (enfield , p. ). therefore, language is central in social life. knowing a particular language includes knowledge of grammar as well as knowledge of the social and cultural rules of using this grammar (hymes ). if language has been important from the outset, what makes it particularly prominent in current political agendas (paradoxes and )? as fairclough ( , p. ) insightfully points out, “the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘language turn’ are first of all ‘turns’ in social life itself, and only secondarily turns in philosophy and social theory.” ‘informational’ or ‘knowledge-based’ and ‘knowledge-driven’ economies make culture and discourse significant in economic production and consumption (fairclough ) and invite people to reconsider verbal hygiene (cameron ) and the role of language as a political strategy to accomplish social and political change. . . language and gender: ‘doing’ culture languages genderize discourse via grammatical and lexical gender, that is, linguistic items grammatically or lexically marked for female or male sex. the grammatical category of gender is a type of classifier systems, which categorizes nouns and nominals, and is found in many languages of the world (aikhenvald , pp. – ). in greek and other indo-european languages with two or three class systems, gender assignment in nouns with human reference is sex-based. in general, nouns denoting female humans are grammatically feminine, while nouns denoting male humans are grammatically masculine. thus, there is a match between grammatical gender and referent’s sex (cf. hellinger and bussmann – ). in greek, grammatical gender is distinguished in nouns, articles, pronouns, adjectives, participles and demonstratives. these linguistic items codify referent’s sex grammatically, as shown in ( ) and ( ): ( ) aθlitís aθlítria athlet(m).nom.sg athlet(f).nom.sg ‘male athlet’ ‘female athlet’ although gender assignment in nouns with human reference is clearly semantically motivated, gender assignment in nouns with inanimate reference is semantically arbitrary. humanities , , of ( ) ikanós ikaní skilled.m.nom.sg skilled.f.nom.sg ‘skilled’ ‘skilled’ the gender of the noun controls agreement with other elements in the noun phrase or the predicate. in the noun phrases in ( ) and ( ) the gender of the head noun controls agreement with the article and the adjective: ( ) o ikanós aθlitís def.m.nom.sg skilled.m.nom.sg athlet(m).nom.sg ‘the skilled male athlet’ ( ) i ikaní aθlítria def.f.nom.sg skilled.f.nom.sg athlet(f).nom.sg ‘the skilled female athlet’ moreover, referent’s sex can be codified lexically. the lexical marking of nouns as female or male-specific is known as lexical gender. for example, the english nouns woman and man and the greek nouns jinéka ‘woman’ and ándras ‘man’ encode lexically the semantic property of femaleness and maleness respectively. linguistic items that codify referent’s sex grammatically or lexically index referent’s gender referentially and directly (ochs ). they ascribe female or male sex to the referent and, thus, categorize the referent as woman or man on the basis of a binary gender order. the use of referential indexes of gender communicates gendered messages of various types, such as woman as deviant other via the semantic derogation of women (cf. schulz ) and man as norm via the generic use of the masculine (e.g., hellinger and bussmann ; martyna ). the generic use of the masculine is what we turn to now. in many indo-european languages, the masculine gender is used for generic or indefinite reference, that is, for reference to female and male referents, or to referents whose sex is unknown, as shown in ( ): ( ) i fitités ðínun eksetásis def.m.nom.pl student(m).nom.pl take. pl.prs exam(f).acc.pl ‘(male) students take exams.’ feminists criticize this practice for reflecting gender hierarchy at the social level and maintaining and enforcing men’s dominance and women’s subordination (cf. hellinger and bussmann ). the generic use of the masculine discloses the tacit and routine ways in which power works in discourse. it passes unremarkable by participants as part of our taken-for-granted knowledge about the world, it ‘is there’ when nothing special is happening, it is unnoticed and yet ‘seen’. to illustrate this point, i examine one segment of talk-in-interaction (first analyzed in alvanoudi , pp. – ), using the tools of conversation analysis. data analyzed in this paper stem from the corpus of spoken greek (institute of modern greek studies). excerpt pol: pos ta páte peðjá me ton ée↑ró?= ‘guys how do you cope with the weather?’ vas: =ti na ta páme. na. eðó:, ímastan ap to ‘so and so. here. we have been here since’ savato[: ◦e:] ‘saturday eh:’ nat: -> [apokli]zmé[:ni, ] female-specific nouns tend to be associated with negative or pejorative meanings (e.g., spinster vs. bachelor). humanities , , of blocked.m.part.nom.pl ‘blocked.m,’ vas: -> [apo]klizméni, >méxri blocked.m.part.nom.pl until ‘blocked.m, until’ tin detarti to vráði.< ‘wednesday night.’ in line , polikseni initiates a new topic, asking her co-participants how they have been coping with the bad weather. she selects vasilis and natasa as next speakers via the address term peðjá (‘guys’). natasa and her husband, vasilis, respond in the next lines in a collaborative manner (lerner ). in lines and , vasilis deploys the first person plural verbs páme (‘we go’, meaning ‘so and so’) and ímastan (‘we were’) to refer to a relational collectivity, i.e., a couple, that includes himself and his wife, natasa. in line , natasa continues the response that vasilis started by using the masculine participle apoklizmé:ni (‘blocked’) to describe the collectivity. this response is brought to completion by vasilis (lines – ) who repeats the masculine participle that natasa used to describe the relational collectivity. in this segment, nothing special is happening with respect to participants’ gender identities. speakers get on with their usual business and use the male categorization of referents as a tool to achieve generic reference, that is, to refer to male plus female persons. yet, their utterances routinely construct a web of gendered inferences. in using the masculine gender for generic reference, speakers tacitly presuppose the stereotypical association of man with the norm as an unquestioned assumption about the way in which the ordinary social world is organized. male sex, which is morphologically codified, activates metonymically the category of human/universal, and guides speakers to interpret referents as not exclusively male (alvanoudi , pp. – ). that is, the concept of male sex serves as the vehicle through which the human/universal (target) is accessed and understood. if reference is successfully achieved, things get done and speakers move on with their daily business, why should the generic use of the masculine be a problem? is a feminist approach to language use just another moment of being a feminist killjoy? the generic use of the masculine matters because it uncovers the tacit work of power structures and displays “patriarchal reasoning” that, in ahmed ( , p. ) words, “goes all the way down, to the letter, to the bone.” the heterosexual couple in this segment exists in the he that makes female difference invisible. as ahmed ( , p. ) argues, words and worlds are not open to everyone: “he does not include she.” in the next section, i discuss empirical data that provide evidence towards this direction. . . language and gender: speakers’ cognition a number of studies within psycholinguistics and cognitive and social psychology (e.g., braun et al. ; gabriel and gygax ; gygax and gabriel ; irmen and kurovskaja ; irmen and rossberg ; stahlberg et al. ) provide ample empirical evidence for the correlation between the generic use of the masculine gender and speakers’ strong tendency to interpret referents as male. more specifically, these studies report that masculine forms guide speakers to gender-specific rather than generic interpretations. for example, in a series of experiments gygax and gabriel ( ) asked french speakers to decide whether a person introduced by a kinship term, such as sister, could be part of a group represented by a role name, such as nurse or musicians. participants were given role names in the masculine form or in the masculine or feminine form. gygax and gabriel ( ) found that regardless of role name stereotypicality, speakers had more difficulties in relating female kinship terms to role names in the masculine form. in other experiments, gygax et al. ( ) presented french and german speakers with pairs of sentences: the first sentence introduced a role name which was stereotypically gender-specific or indefinite (e.g., the social workers were walking through the station), and the second sentence mentioned the gender of some of the members of the group (e.g., since sunny weather was forecast several of the women weren’t wearing a coat). speakers had to decide whether the second sentence was a sensible continuation of the first one. gygax et al. ( ) found that the humanities , , of proportion of positive and negative judgments depended on the grammatical gender of the role names deployed, that is, speakers tended to provide negative answers when role names were written in the masculine form and the second sentence represented women, independently of the stereotype portrayed by the role names. overall, the generic use of the masculine is shown to increase the salience or visibility of men in discourse and make women invisible. this finding is not surprising given the role of grammar in mediating speakers’ cognition. gender systems are grammatical categories that limit which aspects of experience speakers verbalize (boas , pp. – ), and guide speakers’ thinking about the world at least at the time of speaking, that is, when speakers think for speaking (slobin ). when speakers of a language with a sex-based gender system design and produce utterances, they choose to codify particular aspects of experience depending on what is grammaticized in the language they speak, that is, they codify referent’s sex in an obligatory way. in this way, their thinking is attuned to the conceptual distinction of sex. indications of the correlation between the masculine gender and the interpretation of referent(s) as male are also found in naturally occurring interaction (alvanoudi ). this is what we turn to now. referent’s gender is often displayed in the course of actions in conversation, without carrying any interactional relevance, as shown in excerpt , and in the following exchange among three friends, vaso, yanna and katerina (alvanoudi , pp. – ): excerpt ( . ) vas: peðjá:,= ‘guys,’ yan: =borí na páo tin bémpti. ‘i may go on thursday.’ ( . ) vas: ðe siko[nómaste ópos] ímaste, hh >na páme na ((in a laughing tone................................................... ‘why don’t we stand up, hh and go to’ yan? [◦(.....................)] vas: ðúme< ton árxoda ton ðaxtili[ðjó:n¿ ] ..................................................................)) ‘see the lord of the rings¿’ yan: [θa prépi] ‘you should’ na çis klísi polí norítera isitíri[o.] ‘have booked a ticket much earlier.’ vas: [e] tóra, ‘eh now,’ éçi paló:si moré. íne ‘it became old you foolish. it’ s been’ [ðjo vðomáðe:s.] ‘two weeks.’ kat: -> [egó ñóθo polí kura]zméni peðjá apó i feel. sg.prs very tired.f.part.nom.sg guys prep ‘guys i feel very tired.f since’ ◦xθe:s. ðilaðí, >ðe boró na páro ta póðjá mu.◦< = ‘yesterday. that is, i cannot move my legs.’ humanities , , of vas: =xθes ékatses méxri tis téseri:s? ‘yesterday did you stay until four?’ in lines , and , vaso suggests that they should go to the movies and katerina rejects the suggestion in lines – . she refers to herself via the personal pronoun egó (‘i’) and the first person singular verbs ñóθo (‘i feel’) and ðe boró na páro (‘i cannot move’). the speaker uses the grammatically feminine participle kurazméni (‘tired’) to describe herself and give an account for her rejection. the gendered form makes the information of speaker’s gender available in interaction as a covert assumption produced in routine ways when grammatical gender is used in individual self-reference. yet, in this segment, katerina uses the grammatically feminine form to implement a response rather than to invoke her feminine gender attributes. on different occasions, gender can be advanced from “background to focal status” (hopper and lebaron , p. ) and become a relevant feature of the context, as in the following excerpt: excerpt ver: j↑álo sizi>túsame, eména ðe máfises< ‘we were talking about something else, you didn’t let me’ na olokliróso ja tin americí pu íθe[la:. ] ‘finish what i wanted to say about america.’ pet: [e áde] pes ‘eh come on you can talk’ ja tin americí, ce metá: θa púme ja to internet. ‘about america and then we will talk about the internet.’ ver: e: óti tus éxo polí áxti:, ( . ) óti ðen dus: ‘eh [i want to say] that i despise them, ( . ) that i don’t’ -> sibaθó iðiétera tus amerikanú:s, like. sg.prs particularly def.m.acc.pl american(m).acc.pl ‘particularly like americans,’ ( . ) e: >pistévo< óti íne mña xóra men ‘( . ) eh i believe that it is a country’ [me texno↑lojicí::, ] ‘that has technological’ pet: -> [tis amerikánes ómos?] def.f.acc.pl american(f).acc.pl but ‘but what about female americans?’ (.) pet: [(ci) ómos] ‘and yet’ ver: [>úte tis] ame-< tis θeoró <i↑lí:θies.> ‘i don’t like female ame- either i think they are stupid’ pet: ne. alá eména mu arésun. ‘yes. but i like them.’ ( . ) in lines – , vera delivers an argument and refers to americans as a group via the noun phrase tus amerikanú:s (‘the americans’). this phrase is an initial non-recognitional form (schegloff ) that consists of a masculine head noun and a masculine definite article. in line , petros challenges vera’s claim via a question that distinguishes female americans from male americans. he repeats the initial non-recognitional form using the feminine gender (tis amerikánes) and, thus, attends to referents’ humanities , , of feminine gender and brings heteronormativity to focused attention. gender relevance is extended in the next turns and becomes a resource for subsequent talk. vera claims that female americans are stupid (line ) and petros claims that he likes them, displaying his heterosexual masculine identity (line ). in this segment, petros’s use of the feminine form in line makes gender interactionally relevant. how is this done? the masculine form in vera’s prior turn triggers a male sex-specific rather than a generic interpretation. petros’s next turn publicly displays this understanding (sacks et al. ) by distinguishing female from male americans and targeting female referents only. thus, in this segment, we find indications of the cognitive role of grammatical gender by analyzing speakers’ publicly observable behavior (see (alvanoudi ) for more examples). if grammar matters, how do feminists reclaim it? this question is addressed in the next section. . academic feminism as political activism: the rise of undutiful daughters feminist linguists have been advocates of language reform since the s. women experience inequality in the way in which they are treated by language (lakoff ) and find themselves silenced in a language shaped by a man-made worldview (spender ). for this reason, language reform has been a key element in feminist political agendas. the non-sexist use of language is considered a tool for eliminating linguistic sexism and bringing about social change. academic feminist initiatives on language reform deal with the following challenges. (a) how can female difference be represented through language in positive ways? reform practices target the semantic derogation of women and the generic use of the masculine (see (nilsen ; miller and swift ; kramarae and treichler ; frank and treichler ) for reform proposals for english, (tsokalidou ) for greek, and (pauwels ) for various languages, among other). with respect to the generic use of the masculine, two reform strategies have been proposed: feminization or gender-specification, that is, adding the feminine gender whenever the masculine gender is used for generic reference, and gender-neutralization, that is, avoiding denoting male or female sex and minimizing the linguistic expression of gender in relation to human referents (pauwels ). for instance, instead of employing the masculine gender for generic reference (example ), one can refer to both male and female students by using the feminine noun together with the masculine noun (example ) or by de-gendering referents (example ). ( ) i fitités ce i fitítries tu def.m.nom.pl student(m).nom.pl and def.f.nom.pl student(f).nom.pl def.n.gen.sg prótu étus ðínun eksetásis first.n.gen.sg year(n).gen.sg take. pl.prs exam(f).acc.pl ‘first-year male and female students take exams.’ ( ) to próto étos ðíni eksetásis def.n.nom.sg first.n.nom.sg year(n).nom.sg take. sg.prs exam(f).acc.pl ‘first-year students take exams.’ although gender-specification provides a symmetrical representation of women and men, it is not linguistically viable given the structural properties of greek (cf. pavlidou , p. ). as mentioned in section . , a great number of linguistic items in greek, such as nouns, adjectives, articles and participles, are inflected for grammatical gender in an obligatory manner. moreover, the gender of the noun controls agreement with other elements in the noun phrase or the predicate. this means that the explicit marking of feminine and masculine gender of nouns and other elements in the clause is a non-economical practice, as speakers must repeat linguistic items in both genders when they speak or write. this strategy runs counter to the principle of informativeness (levinson ), according to which speakers should produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve their communicational ends and recipients should amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance. the use of a default grammatical gender for generic reference is in line with this heuristic: the male sex activates the inference of human/universal and, thus, what is expressed humanities , , of simply is stereotypically exemplified. when speakers start using two grammatical genders instead of one, they deviate from the preference for minimization in communication, as shown in the following examples: ( ) ópços/ópça fititís/fitítria θéli whoever.m.νoµ/whoever.f.nom student(µ).nom.sg/student(f).nom.sg want. sg.prs na ði to graptó tu/tis sbjv see. sg.pfv def.n.acc.sg exam paper(n).acc.sg his/her ‘every male and female student who wants to see his/her exam paper’ ( ) i fitités ce i fitítries íne def.m.nom.pl student(m).nom.pl and def.f.nom.pl student(f).nom.pl cop. pl.prs étimi ce étimes ja tis eksetásis ready.m.nom.pl and ready.f.nom.pl for def.f.acc.pl exam(f).acc.pl ‘male and female students are ready for the exams.’ instead of symmetrically marking gender, feminists can opt for an alternative strategy, that is, the generic use of the feminine gender (at least when most referents are female). this strategy exploits the preference for minimization and economy in communication and shifts the cultural pattern in invoking the metonymic inference ‘female is human/universal’. when female sex serves as the vehicle through which all humans (target) are accessed and understood, women are construed as prototypical humans and empowered subjects. in the process of becoming women, feminization is ‘strategic essentialism’ (spivak ) that challenges the patriarchal symbolic economy, which theorizes male as the one and the same universal subject and female as the negative subordinate other (irigaray a). in reclaiming grammar, women represent female difference in positive ways, start to speak ‘as women’ and build a new feminine imaginary (irigaray b) in which categories have shifted (‘woman’ can stand for ‘human’) and new meanings are produced. a ‘feminist’ grammar prompts and sustains new habits of thinking about the world and the subjects we want to become (braidotti , cf. section ). new ways of speaking and thinking involve the positive affirmation of female difference as well as playing with the fuzzy boundaries of the male/female binary enforced by grammar. as livia ( , p. ) observed, grammatical gender may act as a ‘trap’ that limits speakers to a static bipolar gender order but at the same time it can be used as a tool to express gender fluidity. one such case is found in the usage of grammatical gender by hijras in india (hall and o’donovan ). hijras deploy the feminine and masculine grammatical gender in creative ways to construct a ‘third gender’ identity and transgress the female/male bipolarity. for example, they use the feminine gender in self-reference, whereas in referring to other hijras they switch between the feminine and the masculine gender depending on whether they want to express solidarity and social proximity or power and social distance. (b) how do we break through to feminist futures? given the role of language as a product of symbolic value exploited in late postmodern capitalism (cf. paradox ), we need to ensure that feminist naming/labeling strategies will enhance women’s differences as positive categories and that our hashtags do not end up on lipsticks and make-ups in the free market economy. feminist academics can play an important role in this by implementing gender-fair language reforms and being in the vanguard of radical language planning and ‘feminist linguistic activism’ (pauwels ). this encompasses processes of documenting sexist usages across different languages, developing proposals of change in different national contexts, implementing the changes in cooperation with educational and legislative authorities and the media, and assessing the success of language planning (pauwels ). i argue that language reform and the re-appropriation of meanings is an essential part of feminist academic activism. feminist academics are telling stories of feminist futures. in telling these stories, we speak as women and create cartographies of our different locations, and, for this reason, we need a ‘feminist’ grammar that can express female sexual difference and differences within the category of woman. how can gendered forms that presuppose and enforce gender binaries become signifiers of multiplicity and difference? who are the women found in she? the answer to this question is political. an inclusive she humanities , , of presupposes multiplicity among the users of feminine forms, that is, among the undutiful daughters who implement language and social reform strategies. a feminist movement, that engages women of different locations in terms of age, class, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, can give rise to multiple voices and generate concepts in which the prototypical woman is not necessarily white or heterosexual. the arguments presented in this section are related to paradox and the question of agency in corporate academia. how can third millennium feminist academics become agents of social reform? how do we deal with the tension between the negative ways in which we experience academic labor and the role of labor as an active force of affirmation? on the one hand, gill ( , p. ) describes labor in neoliberal university as participation in a culture of exhaustion, stress, aggression, shame and guilt related to precarious jobs and a / workload. on the other hand, hardt and negri ( , p. ) argue that living labor is “the internal force that constantly poses not only the subversion of the capitalist process of production but also the construction of an alternative.” i propose that identifying ways in which feminist knowledge produced in academia can effect social change is one strategy of resistance that can transform our labor into a force of subversion and enable us to rethink our locations in terms of power as potentia (cf. section ). . conclusions to sum up, this paper makes an argument about feminist politics in academia. the analysis of gendering linguistic practices in greek shows that language constructs gender on the basis of social asymmetry and guides speakers to biased conceptualizations of gender. it is argued that ‘old debates’ about feminist language reform have become prominent sites of political struggle in postmodern capitalism and feminist academic activism. feminist politics can take place in corporate academia in the third millennium, when walls are dismantled from within. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. abbreviations first person second person third person acc accusative cop copula def definite f feminine gen genitive m masculine n neuter nom nominative pαrt participle pfv perfective pl plural prs present prep preposition sg singular sbjv subjunctive references ahmed, sara. . living a feminist life. durham: duke university press. aikhenvald, alexandra y. . classifiers: a typology of noun categorization devices. oxford: oxford university press. humanities , , of alvanoudi, angeliki. . teaching gender in the neoliberal university. in teaching with the third wave—new feminists’ explorations of teaching and institutional contexts. edited by daniela gronold, brigitte hipfl and linda lund pedersen. stockholm: athena advanced thematic network in women’s studies in europe, university of utrecht and centre for gender studies, stockholm university press, pp. – . alvanoudi, angeliki. . grammatical gender in interaction: cultural and cognitive aspects. leiden: brill. boas, franz. . language. in general anthropology. edited by franz boas. boston. new york: d.c. heath and company, pp. – . braidotti, rosi. . patterns of dissonance: a study of women in contemporary philosophy. oxford: polity. braidotti, rosi. . metamorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming. cambridge: polity. braun, friederike, sabine sczesny, and dagmar stahlberg. . cognitive effects of masculine generics in german: an overview of empirical findings. communications : – . 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[the gender of language: a guide to non-sexist language for public greek speech]. athens: syndesmos ellinidon epistimonon. washington post staff. . full text: donald trump announces a presidential bid. washington post staff. june . available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /full-text- donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad c cddbb (accessed on june ). woolf, virginia. . a room of one’s own. london: penguin books. first published . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /lan. . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad c cddbb https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad c cddbb http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	paradoxes in the third millennium: old monsters and new gods 	gendering discourse: words and why they matter 	language and gender: ‘doing’ culture 	language and gender: speakers’ cognition 	academic feminism as political activism: the rise of undutiful daughters 	conclusions 	references ecotrophic • { ) : - issn: - analisis efekt ifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitan (ubp) bali berbasis microsoft visual foxpro n. ngr.adisanjaya , ), iwbudiarsa suyasa , ), k. sunora ) ) dinas pu provinsi nusa tenggara barat ) program sudi i/mu :lingkungan pps unud ) fmipa unud email: ngurah.bagus@gmail.com abstrak pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitan (ubp) bali merupakan badan usaha milik negara (bumn) yang bergerak dibidang ketenagalistrikan jawa dan bali. perusahaan ini mengelola unit pembangkit listrik, pltd dan pltg dimana total daya yang dihasilkan , mw. besarnya daya tersebut akan menghasilkan debit limbah yang besar pula sehingga diperlukan teknologi proses pengolahan limbah yang baik dan efektif. penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui kualitas tingkat pencemar air limbah dan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbahnya. analisa data dan pengolahannya menggunakan bahasa pemrograman microsoft visual foxpro. pengambilan sampel dilakukan pada bulan februari dan maret tahun dengan parameter temperatur, ph, zat padat terlarut (tds), minyak dan lemak, bod s , cod, sulfida (h s), cadmium (cd), timbal (pb) dan besi terlarut (fe). penelitian ini bersifat deskriptif dengan metode pengambilan data secara primer dengan uji laboratorium. penelitian dilakukan dengan membandingkan kualitas air limbah pada ts i yaitu pada inlet separator i, ts ii yaitu pada outlet separator ii dan ts iii yaitu pada outlet proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan dengan balm mutu yang ditetapkan. hasil yang didapat adalah kurang optimalnya efektifitas poses pengolahan limbah pada cadmium (cd) yaitu dengan nilai rata-rata sebesar , % karena masih berada dibawah standar efektifitas yang berlaku yaitu dengan nilai rata-rata sebesar , % sehingga kualitas effl.uent nya dengan rata-rata sebesar , ppm melebihi baku mutu yang ditetapkan yaitu sebesar , ppm. hal ini disebabkan karena belum adanya altematif dalam proses pengolahan limbah untuk menurunkan kandungan logam berat khususnya cadmium (cd) dan untuk meningkatkan efektifitas sebelumnya. kata kunci : kualitas, efektifitas, proses pengolahan limbah, pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitan (ubp) bali abstract indonesia power generating business unit bali is a state-owned enterprises (soe. ) engaged in the electrification of java and bali. this company manages units of power plants, diesel and pltg which total . mw of power generated. the amount of power it will produce a greater flow of waste so that waste processing technology needed a good and effective. this study aims to determine the quality of waste water pollutant levels and the effectiveness of waste processing, that data analysis and processing using microsoft visual foxpro programming language. sampling was conducted in february and march of with the parameters of temperature, ph, dissolved solids (tds), oil and grease, bod s , cod, sulfide (h s), cadmium (cd), lead (pb) and dissolved iron (fe). this study is descriptive with a primary method of data collection with laboratory tests. the study was conducted by comparing the quality of waste water in ts i, which on the inlet separator i, ts ii; namely the outlet separator ii and ts iii, namely the outlet waste treatment process as a whole with the specified quality standards. the results are less optimal effectiveness of wastewater treatment poses on cadmium (cd) by the average value of . % because it is below the prevailing standards of effectiveness by the average value of . % so that its effluent quality with average of . ppm exceeds the standard set that is equal to . ppm. this is due to the absence of alternative waste treatment processes to reduce the content of heavy metals, especially cadmium (cd) and to improve the effectiveness of the previous. keywords : quality, effectiveness, waste treatment process, indonesia power generating business unit bali ecotrophic • volume nomor tahun pendahuluan seiring dengan perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan dan teknologi serta p e satnya pertumbuban ekonomi yang secara tidak langsung telab memicu pertumbuban industrialisasi di kota-kota besar. kegiatan industrialisasi jika tanpa pengawasan dari pibak terkait dapat menimbulkan permasalahan terutama dibidang lingkungan. sistem pengolahan limbah mutlak diperlukan karena kegiatan industri dapat menghasilkan limbah dan apabila tidak serius ditangani akan menimbulkan efek samping. adapun efek samping dari limbah adalah dapat membahayakan kesebatan manusia, merugikan dari segi ekonomi karena dapat menimbulkan kerusakan benda atau bangunan. selain itu limbah juga dapat membunuh biota air seperti ikan-ikanan atau binatang lain dan dapat merusak lingkungan jika kandungan limbab tersebut mengandung logam berat dan telah melebihi baku mutu yang ditetapkan (sugiharto, ). jika pemilik industri tidak menangani secara serius masalah limbah ini, sudab tentu bal tersebut akan berdampak negatif bagi lingkungan dan masyarakat sekitar. oleb karena itu salab satu upaya yang dilakukan oleh pemilik industri dalam pengolaban limbahnya dengan beberapa rangkaian kegiatan yang meliputi : penyimpanan, pengumpulan, pengangkutan, pemanfaatan, pengo laban li mbab termasuk penimbunan basil pengolahan, sebingga pengolahan ini dapat menekan seminimal mungkin pencemaran yang diakibatkan limbah tersebut. salah satu contoh industri di bali yang telah melakukan upaya pengolahan limbah adalab pt. indonesia power ubp bali. perusahaan ini adalah perusahaan yang merupakan badan usaha milik negara (bumn) yang bergerak dibidang usaha pembangkit listrik yang menjadi rekanan pln dalam pemasok listrik jawa dan bali, yang dalam pelaksanaan kegiataannya mempergunakan mesin-mesin pembangkit listrik tenaga diesel (pltd) dan pembangkit listrik tenaga gas (pltg) untuk pembangkit listrik. perusahaan ini mengelola unit pembangkitan listrik yang terdiri unit pembangkit listrik tenaga diesel dan empat unit pembangkit listrik tenaga gas, dengan total daya terpasang , mw. operasional pembangkit listrik pt. indonesia power ubp bali pada bulan januari-desember · mengbasilkan limbah , diantaranya minyak kotor . liter, kain majun terkontaminasi b kg, toner printer . kg, botol bekas kemasan b . kg, lampu tl bekas kg, slude penampung bak i sebanyak . kg dan slude penampung bak ii sebanyak . kg. pada tanggal agustus melalui kementrian lingkungan hidup republik indonesia, pt. indonesia power ubp bali memberikan basil penilaian peringkat kerja terbadap perusabaan dalam pengelolaan lingkungan bidup (proper) adalah biru minus, yang artinya untuk usaha dan atau kegiatan yang telah melakukan upaya pengelolaan lingkungan yang issn : - dipersyaratkan sesuai dengan ketentuan dan peraturan perundang-undangan yang berlaku namun perlu adanya peningkatan pengelolaan lingkungan. hal ini dikarenakan ada beberapa parameter air limbah dari sistem pengolahan limbabnya masib melebibi baku mutu lingkungan seperti cadmium (cd) dan bod dimana sebagai pembanding baku mutu digunakan peraturan gubemur no. tahun tentang baku mutu lingkungan hidup dan kriteria baku kerusakan lingkungan bidup. oleh karena itu diperlukan analisis lebib lanjut mengenai efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali dan untuk mempermudah dalam menganalisis dan mengolah data dari keefektifan proses tersebut maka digunakan sistem komputerisasi dengan microsoft visual foxpro. program ini merupakan pengembangan dari industri microsoft yang difungsikan untuk aplikasi database yang berkaitan erat dengan sistem pengolahan data. perpaduan antara sistem komputerisasi dan sistem pengolahan limbah diharapkan mampu menghasilkan sistem analisis data proses pengolaban limbah yang berbasis teknologi komputerisasi yaitu teknologi yang berbasis microsoft visual foxpro. penelitian ini bertujuan untuk : ( ) mengetahui kualitas air limbab basil dari proses pengolahan pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali dengan menggunakan bahasa pemrograman microsoft visual foxpro. ( ) untuk mengetahui tingkat efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali dengan menggunakan pemrograman microsoft visual foxpro. metodelogi penelitian penelitian dilakukan pada proses pengolahan lim­ bah pt. indonesia power ubp pesanggaran bali dan waktu penelitian dilakukan selama tiga bulan yaitu bulan januari-maret . sumber data yang digunakan adalah data primer dan data sekunder. data primer diperoleb dari basil analisis kualitas dan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali sedangkan untuk data sekundemya diperoleb melalui studi pustaka dari pt. indonesia power ubp bali, studi literatur buku dan internet. teknik pengambilan sampel yang digunakan disini adalah teknik purposive sampeling. dalam penelitian ini terdapat tiga titik pengambilan sampel yaitu ts i, ts ii dan ts iii. dari masing-masing titik sampel dilakukan pengulangan pengambilan sampel sebanyak tiga kali, sehingga total terdapat sampel. sampel­ sampel tersebut kemudian dibawa ke laboratorium upt. balai hiperkes dan keselamatan kerja bali untuk dianalisis lebih lanjut sesuai dengan peruntukannya. pengukuran sampel limbah pada ts i, ts ii dan ts iii yang dianalisis adalah parameter fisika dan kimianya. adapun parameter fisikanya berupa temperatur dan zat padat terlarut (tds), sedangkan parameter kimianya adalah parameter ph, minyak dan lemak, bods, cod, analisis efektifitas proses pengolahon limbah pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitan (ubp) bali ..... [n. ngr. adisanjaya, i w budiarsa suyasa, k. sundraj sulfida (h s), cadmium (cd), timbal (pb) dan besi (fe). parameter fisika dan kimia yang dianalisis akan dibandingkan dengan peraturan gubernur bali no. tahun (kelas iv) tentang baku mutu lingkungan hidup dan kriteria kerusakan lingkungan hidup dan peraturan menteri negara llngkungan hidup no. tahun tentang baku mutu air limbah bagi usaha dan atau kegiatan pembangkit listrik tenaga termal. tabel parameter, satuan, metode analisis, alat analisis dan baku mutunya no parameter fisika l temperatur zat padat terlarut (tds) kimia l ph minyak dan lemak bod, cod s sulfida (h s) cadmium (cd) nmbal (pb) besi terlarut (fe) satu- an ·c ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm metode analisis pemuaian air raksa gravimetrik spekto· pothometrik ntrimetrik titrimetrik spekto· pothometrik spekto· pothometrik spekto· pothometrik spekto· pothometrik keterangan (•): permen. lh no. tahun ••) : pergub. bali no. tahun (-) : tidak dipersyaratkan berdasarkan baku mutu alat analisis baku mutu thermo· deviasi s•• meter timbangan •• analitik ph meter . •• spektopo· • tho meter buret •• buret •• spektopo· (·) thometer spektopo· , •• tho meter spektopo· l •• thometer spektopo- • tho meter variabel dalam penelitian ini dibedakan menjadi dua yaitu kualitas air limbah dan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali. data analisis kualitas proses pengolahan limbah diperoleh dengan membandingkan hasil analisis parameter di laboratorium upt. balai hiperkes dan keselamatan kerja bali pada ts i, ts ii dan ts iii dengan pergub. bali tahun dan permen. lh no. tahun , sedangkan untuk menentukan efektifitas atau efisiensi (q) proses pengolahan limbah dibedakan menjadi dua tahap yaitu tahap i dan tahap ii. tahap i, dimana dianalisa efektifitas (q) dari inlet separator i (qo) dengan outlet separator ii (qi) sedang tahap ii dianalisa efektifitas inlet separator iii (qi) dan outlet akhir proses pengolahan limbahnya (qa) dengan menggunakan rumus efektifitas efektifitas ( ) menurut metcalf & eddy ( ) : % efektivitas = keterangan a-b a x % ······················· ( ) a : nilai parameter awal (inlet) diperoleh dari data kualitas air sebelum air limbah masuk kedalam suatu proses pengolahan limbah. b : nilai parameter akhir (outlet) diperoleh dari data kualitas air setelah air limbah keluar dari suatu proses pengolahan limbah. dari analisis efektifitas pada tahap i (q dan pada tahap ii (q ) yang dihitung dengan menggunakan rumus efektifitas ( ) akan digunakan untuk menentukan analisis nilai efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (�q), proses pengolahan limbah ini mencakup proses pengolahan limbah pada separator i, separator ii, separator iii, septik aerasi, septik biofiltrasi dan aop ozone. dari hasil analisis efektifitas pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (�q) dapat dianalisis keefektifan atau efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali terhadap beberapa parameter air limbah yang dihasilkan, seperti parameter minyak dan lemak, bod , cod, cadmium (cd), timbal (pb) dan parameter iaf nnya dengan standar efektifitas baku mutu (sutansyah, ). standar efektifitas baku mutu diperoleh dari hasil analisis terhadap data primer dan sekunder kualitas air limbah yang dibandingkan dengan baku mutu yang berlaku menggunakan rumus efektifitas ( ) sehingga diperoleh : qo- qbm %efektivitas = ---=---=- x % .................... ( ) q o keterangan � : nilai parameter awal (inlet) diperoleh dari data kualitas air sebelum air limbah masuk kedalam suatu proses pengolahan limbah. q m : nilai baku mutu diperoleh dari standar baku mutu pameter yang ditetapkan. hasil perbandingan kualitas air limbah dengan baku mutu yang berlaku digunakan untuk menentukan keefektifan terhadap baku mutu, dimana kualitas air limbah tersebut apakah telah melampaui atau tidak baku mutu yang ditetapkan. setelah dilakukan analisis terhadap keefektifan baku mutu, data efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (�q) akan dibandingkan dengan standar efektifitas. perbandingan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah (�q) dengan standar efektifitas baku mutu akan digunakan untuk menganalisa hasil efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (�q) apakah telah memenuhi atau tidak standar efektifitas yang berlaku. data kualitas dan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah kemudian akan ditampilkan dengan bahasa pemrograman microsoft visual foxpro. program ini merupakan program pengolahan database, dimana data-data yang diperoleh akan ditampilkan dalam bentuk grafik sesuai dengan peruntukannya sehingga memudahkan dalam proses analisa dan studi lebih lanjut mengenai proses pengolahan limbahnya pt. indonesia power ubp bali. hasil dan pembahasan prinsip kerja proses pengolahan limbah yr. indonesia power ubp bali lim bah cair yang dihasilkan dari proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali berasal dari minyak kotor yang terbuang karena adanya kegiatan pemeliharan mesin-mesin diesel dan berasal dari air sumur resapan yang dipompa ke permukaan agar parit­ parit (duck) kabel listrik tidak tergenang air, hal ini ecotrophic • volume nomor tahun clisebabkan lokasi pltd/g pesanggaran berada pada dataran rendah dekat pantai. proses pengolahan limbahnya menggunakan tiga buah separator diantaranya separator i, separator ii dan separator iii, septik aerasi dan biofiltrasi serta sistem perpompaan dan aop ozone seperti terlihat pada gambar . sis tem pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubppesangaranbau q------------ i gambar . proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali hasil kualitas lim bah cair pt. indonesia power ubpbali hasil kualitas air limbah pada proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali diperoleh dari hasil analisis beberapa parameter pengambilan sampel dari tiga kali pengulangan pada tsi, ts ii dan ts iii dari laboratorium upt. balai hiperkes dan keselamatan kerja bali. hasil ini nantinya akan clibandingkan dengan pergub. bali no. tahun (kelas iv) tentang baku mutu lingkungan hidup dan kriteria kerusakan lingkungan hidup dan permen. lh no. tahun baku mutu air limbah bagi usaha dan atau kegiatan pembangkit listrik tenaga termal. hasil pemeriksaan kualitas air limbah pada tsi setelah diperoleh hasil analisis kualitas air limbah pada pengambilan sampel pada ts i yaitu titik sampel pada saat air limbah masuk untuk pertama kali ke proses pengolahan limbah (influent), dilanjutkan dengan membanclingkan hasil tersebut dengan baku mutu sehingga cliperoleh seperti tabel . tabel . perbandingan kualitas air limbah ts i dengan baku mutu no. parameter satu- an tempratur ·c . ph . tds ppm . minyak & lemak ppm . bod, ppm . cod ppm . sulfida ppm . cadmium ppm . nmbal ppm . besi terlarut ppm . kualitas ts i baku rata-rata mutu . . . deviasi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . . . • . • . _ • . . • . ket. : ' = meleb,hi baku mutu yang d tetapl<an pada ts i, kandungan bod , cod, cadmium dan timbal melebihi baku mutu y;ng ditetapkan. kadar bods yang tinggi merupakan inclikasi perairan tersebut issn : - tercemar dimana pengujian idealnya dalam waktu lima hari oleh organisme pengurai aerobik dalam suatu volume limbah pada suhu °c atau sering disebut sebagai bods (lina, ). kegiatan pencucian mesin yang menghasilkan air limbah banyak mengandung cadmium karena beberapa mesin yang terbuat dari baja dilapisi oleh seng (zn) dimana logam ini merupakan sumber utama dari cd sehingga produksi cd sangat clipengaruhi oleh zn (sugiharto, ). bahan timbal (pb) juga sering digunakan sebagai bahan pelapis logam (coating) karena sifatnya yang tahan karat, pada proses pemeliharaan mesin-mesin diesel atau cuci-cuci mesin beberapa lapisan mesin coating nya sudah tidak maksimal melapisi mesin sehingga hasil pencucian mesin menghasilkan air limbah yang mengandung timbal (pb) yang masih tinggi (heryando palar, ). hasil pemeriksaan kualitas air limbah pada tsii setelah cliperoleh basil analisis kualitas air limbah pada pengambilan sampel pada ts ii yaitu titik sampel pada saat air limbah telah melewati separator i dan separator ii, clilanjutkan dengan membanclingkan hasil tersebut dengan baku mutu cliperoleh seperti tabel . tabel . perbandingan kualitas air limbah ts ii dengan baku mutu no. parameter satu- kualitas ts ii baku mutu an rata-rata tempratur ·c . . . . deviasi s ph . . . . - tds ppm . minyak & ppm . . . . lemak bod, ppm . . . . • cod ppm . . • sulfida ppm . . . . cadmium ppm . . . . * . timbal ppm . . . . * besi terlarut ppm . . . . ket. : • = melebihi baku mutu yang ditetapkan masih tingginya kandungan cod, bods. cadmium dan timbal pada ts ii menginclikasikan belum optimalnya proses pengolahan limbah pada separator i dan ii. salah satu metode yang digunakan adalah metooe filtrasi yang belum optimal menurunkan kandungan limbah terutama logam berat. menurut fajri dan hadiwidodo m. ( ), setelah filtrasi digunakan beberapa saat jika tidak clibersihkan akan mengalami penyumbatan sehingga perlu dibersihkan dengan pencucian udara dan pencucian air seperti penyemprotan permuakaan filter dan penyemprotan dengan backwash. pada proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali penanganan dalam pembersihan filter dan separator belum maksimal karena sering dijumpai terjadinya penyumbatan pada filtrasi sehingga efektifitas dari separator tersebut tidak maksimal untuk menurunkan kandungan limbah, terutama logam berat. hasil pemeriksaan kualitas air limbah pada ts iii setelah diperoleh hasil analisis kualitas air limbah pada pengambilan sampel pada ts iii yaitu titik analisis efektifitas proses pengolohan limbah pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitan (ubp) bali ..... [n. ngr. adisanjayo, i w budiorsa suyasa, k. sundro] sampel air limbah pada saat setelah melewati proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (effl.uent), dilanjutkan dengan membandingkan basil tersebut dengan baku mutu diperoleh seperti tabel . tabel . perbandingan kualitas air limbah ts ill dengan baku mutu satu- kualitas ts ill baku no. parameter an rata- mutu rata tempratur ·c . deviasi ph .s . . . - tds ppm . minyak & lemak ppm . . . . bod, ppm . . . . cod ppm . . . . sulfida ppm . . . . cadmium ppm . . . . • . nmbal ppm . . . . besi terlarut eem . . . o.q ket. : ' = meleb h baku mutu yang ditetapkan pada ts iii, yang merupakan titik sampel di akhir proses pengolahan limbah masih ditemukan kandungan cadmium rata-rata , ppm yang melebihi baku mutu yang ditetapkan yaitu sebesar , ppm. hal ini disebabkan belum optimalnya proses pengolahan limbah pada separator i dan separator ii, separator ill, septik aerasi, biofiltrasi dan aop ozone untuk kandungan logam berat khususnya cadmium. selain belum optimalnya proses filtrasi pada separator i, ii dan iii dimana sering dijumpai adanya penyumbatan pada proses pengolahan limbahnya, adanya blower pada septik aerasi yang sering tidak berfungsi juga menyebabkan septik aerasi tidak maksimal dalam proses pengolahan limbahnya. fungsi septik aerasi menyediakan oksigen bagi mikroorganisme, karena dengan menambahkan oksigen dari blower ke septik aerasi maka dapat membantu meningkatkan oksigen terlarut dalam air limbah dan memperbanyak penguraian bahan anorganik seperti sulfida. setelah melalui septik aerasi ini dilanjutkan ke septik biofiltrasi dimana proses pengolahan ini merupakan pengolahan limbah secara biologi, menurut budhi priyantho dan joko prayitno ( ), merupakan suatu sistem dimana tanaman tertentu yang bekerjasama dengan mikrooganisme dalam media (tanah, koral dan air) dapat mengubah zat kontaminan (pencemar atau polutan) menjadi kurang atau tidak berbahaya. pada proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali masih dijumpai adaanya penyumbatan aliran dari septik aerasi ke biofiltrasi karena kurangnya pemeliharan seperti pengurasan, pembersihan dari bak biofiltrasi sehingga proses pengolahan limbahnya tidak optimal. hasil efekti:fitas proses pengolahan limbah yr. indonesia power ubp bali perhitungan nilai efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali dibagi menjadi dua tahap yaitu tahap i dan tahap ii. masing-masing tahap nilai efektifitasnya diperoleh dari perhitungan data primer dan sekunder dari nilai rata-rata kualitas air limbah di ts i, ts ii dan ts iii terhadap parameter bod , cod, sulfida (h s), cadmium (cd), timbal (pb) dan esi terlarut (fe) dengan rumus efektifitas ( ). hasil perhitungan efekti:fitas nilai pada tahap i setelah dilakukan perhitungan terhadap data primer dan sekunder dari rata-rata kualitas air limbah pada inlet separator i (qj dan outlet separator ii (q.) maka nilai efektifitas pada tahap i (q,) diperoleh seperti tabel . tabel . tabel pengukuran efektifitas pada tahap i no. parameter rata-rata ( ,,) rata-rata (cl,) efektifitas (q,) (eeml !eeml (%) tds . . minyak & lemak . . . bod, . . . cod . . . sulfida . . . cadmium . . . nmbal . . . besi terlarut . . . hasil perhitungan efektifitas pada tahap i yaitu dari inlet separator i dan outlet separator ii untuk parameter tds, minyak & lemak, bod , cod, sulfida, cadmium dan timbal memiliki persentasi lebih kecil dari % dan hanya besi terlarut memiliki nilai , %. kurang optimalnya proses pengolahan limbah pada separator i dan ii sangat mempengaruhi efektifitas pada tahap i, selain kurang optimalnya proses filtrasi, kurangnya pemeliharan dari masing-masing separator seperti pengkurasan, pembersiahan, dimana hal ini menyebabkan aliran limbah terganggu (overflow), selain itu mesin pengkuras yang ada pada separator i dan ii masih sering tidak berfungsi sehingga menggangu proses pemeliharaan. hasil perhitungan efektifitas nilai pada tahap ii setelah dilakukan perhitungan terhadap data primer dan sekunder dari rata-rata kualitas air limbah pada outlet separator ii atau inlet separator iii (q) dan outlet akhir proses pengolahan limbah (q a ) maka nilai efektifitas pada tahap ii (qn) diperoleh seperti tabel . pada tahap ii, yaitu proses pengolahan limbah dari separator ill, septik aerasi, biofiltrasi dan aop ozone lebih efektif dari tahap i. hal ini disebakan karena pda tahap ii proses pengolahan limbah tidak terbatas pada proses filtrasi namun dipadukan dengan proses pengolahan limbah dengan metode aerasi, biofiltrasi dan aop ozone. tabel . tabel pengukuran efektifitas pada tahap ii no. parameter rata-rata (cl,) rata-rata (q,) efektifitas (cl,,) !eem) (eem) (%) tds . . minyak & lemak . . . bod, . . . cod . . . sulfida . . . cadmium . . . nmbal . . besi terlarut . . ecotrophic • volume nomor tahun hasil perhitungan nilai efektifitas proses pen­ golahan llmbah secara keseluruhan (llq) setelah dilakukan perhitungan terhadap data primer dan sekunder dari kualitas air limbab pada inlet separator i (q ) dan outlet proses pengolahan limbah (q a ) nilai efektifitas proses secara keseluruhan (aq) diperoleb seperti tabel . tabel . tabel pengukuran efektifitas proses secara keseluruhan ( } no. parameter tos minyak & lemak bod, cod sulfida cadmium timbal besi terlarut rata-rata ( ,,) !eem) . . . . . . . . rata-rata (q,) efektifitas akhir !eem) (liq)(%) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . perbitungan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan menghasilkan kandungan bod yang memiliki efektifitas dibawah % yaitu sebesar %, sedangkan untuk kandungan tds, minyak dan lemak, cod, sulfida, cadmium, timbal dan besi terlarut memiliki tingkat efektifitas diatas %. hasil perhitungan standar efektifitas setelah dilakukan analisis terhadap data primer dan sekunder tentang kualitas air limbah maka basil tersebut akan dibandingkan dengan baku mutu yang berlaku dengan rumus standar efektifitas baku mutu ( ) sehingga diperoleh nilai standar efektifitas baku mutu seperti tabel (sutansyah, ). tabel . tabel standar efektifitas rata-rata baku keterangan standar no. parameter ( ,,) mutu efektifi- (ppm) (ppm) tas (%) tos . dibawah baku mutu minyak & lemak . dibawah baku mutu bod , . • melampaui baku mutu . cod . * melampaui baku mutu . cadmium . * . melampaui baku mutu . timbal . * melampaui baku mutu . besi terlarut . dibawah baku mutu hasil perbandingan efektifitas proses pengolah­ an llmbah dengan standar efektifitas setelah dilakukan analisa terbadap kualitas dan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan (tabel ) kemudian hasil tersebut dibandingkan dengan standar efektifitas (tabel ) sehingga diperoleh tabel perbandingan efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah dengan standar efektifitas diperoleh seperti tabel . hasil perbandingan nilai efektifitas akhir proses pengolahan limbah (aq) dengan standar efektifitas diperlukan untuk mengetahui keefektifan proses pengolahan limbah masing-masing parameter. berdasar tabel diperoleh parameter cadmium tidak efektif berdasarkan baku mutu karena nilai efektifitas proses pengolahan limbahnya , % lebih kecil dari standar efektifitas yang ditetapkan yaitu , %. issn : - tabel . hasil pebandingan proses pengolahan limbah dengan standar efektifitas no. parameter satu- inlet o utlet baku efek- stan- keterangan an rata-ra- rat a- mutu tifitas dar ta (qo) rat a proses efek- (qa) {liq) tifitas tos ppm . . . . . dibawah baku mutu minyak & ppm . . . . . dibawah lemak baku mutu bod, ppm . . . . . diatas baku mutu cod ppm . . . . . di atas baku mutu cadmium ppm . . . . . diatas baku mutu timbal ppm . . . . . diatas baku mutu besi ter- ppm . . . . . dibawah la rut baku mutu hasil pembuatan program setelah diperoleb basil analisa kualitas dan efektifitas dari proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan baik pada ts i, ts ii dan ts iii maka dilanjutkan dengan pembuatan program dengan menggunakan microsoft visual foxpro seperti terlihat gambar . bagian a merupakan tempat pengguna program memasukan input data yang diinginkan, seperti pengambilan ke, jenis parameter, nilai kualitas air limbah pada tsi, ts ii dan ts iii. selain itu pada bagian ini juga terdapat dua icon atau tombol run (v) dan edit yang berfungsi untuk menjalankan perintah selanjutnya setelab memasukan atau input data. bagian b merupakan tampilan data sementara setelah memasukan data yang diinginkan dan menjalankan perintah run. bagian c merupakan tombol atau icon yang memiliki fungai tambaban yang disesuaikan dengan keperluan pengguna atau user program, seperti tombol delete untuk mengbapus, save untuk menyimpan dan lain sebagainya. -- "= a � ��b c gambar . tampilan program kualitas dan efektifitas pengolahan limbah simpulan dan saran simpulan . hasil proses pengolaban limbab pt. indonesia power ubp bali untuk parameter cadmium (cd) terindikasi tercemar dengan rata-rata sebesar , ppm yang melebibi baku mutu perbub. bali no. tahun (kelas iv) sebesar , ppm sedangkan untuk parameter zat padat terlarut (tds), minyak dan lemak, bod cod, timbal (pb) dan besi analisis efektifitds proses pengolahan umbah pt. indonesia power unit bisnis pembangkitdn (ubp) bali ..... [n. ngr. adisanjaya, i w budiarsa suyasa, k. sundra] terlarut (fe) masih berada dibawah baku mutu yang ditetapkan dimana hasilnya dapat ditampikan dengan menggunakan pemrograman visual foxpro. . tingkat efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah pt. indonesia power ubp bali untuk parameter cadmium (cd) rata-rata , % masih kurang optimal dalam menurunkan kandungan logam berat tersebut karena masih dibawah standar efektifitas yang ditentukan yaitu rata-rata , % sedangkan untuk masing-masing parameter bod rata-rata , % standar efektifitas rata-rata , %, cod rata-rata , % dengan standar efektifitas rata-rata , % dan timbal (pb) rata-rata sebesar , % dengan standar efektifitas rata-rata , % telah optimal dalam proses pengolahan limbahnya karena melebihi standar efektifitas yang ditetapkan dan tingkat efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah dari masing-masing parameter tersebut dapat ditampilkan dengan menggunakan pemrograrnan visual foxpro. saran . diharapkan kepada pt. indonesia power ubp bali agar dapat memenuhi efektifitas proses pengolahan limbah secara keseluruhan dengan menggunakan metode pengolahan air limbah khususnya untuk penanganan logam berat yang terbaru, karena dari basil penelitian ditemukan adanya kandungan cadmium (cd) yang masih melebihi baku mutu yang ditetapkan sehingga keefektifan untuk parameter tersebut masih belum memenuhi standar efektifitas baku mutu yang ditetapkan. . disarankan kepada pt. indonesia power ubp bali untuk melakukan penambahan teknologi informasi dengan sistem komputerisasi yang memiliki kemampuan penyimpanan, pengolahan dan analisa data yang bail<, salah satu sistem komputerisasi yang dapat digunakan adalah bahasa program microsof visual foxpro. daftar pustaka anonim (a), . limbah. [cited april ]. available at: http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/limbah. anonim (b), . pencemaran tanah. [cited april ]. available at: http://www.e-dukasi.net anonim (c), . dasar-dasar teknologi pengolahan limbah cair. [cited sept. ]. available at: url:http://www. dephut.go.id anonim (d), . modul prakti.kum foxpro. [cited maret ]. available at: http://ramson.parnaraya.ac.id/modul_ praktikum_foxpro.pdf anonim (e), . dasar teori visual foxpro. [cited jan. ]. available at: http://storage.jak-stik.ac.id/students/ful % paper /penulisan% ilmiah bahdir, . pengolahan limbah cair dengan proses evapo­ rasi. [cited april ]. available at: http://digilib.batan. go.id/e-jurnal djaswadi, . rancang bangun dan kinerja cpi untuk pemisah limbah gair minyak. [cited feb. ]. available at: http://eprints.undip.ac.id effendi h, . telaah kualitas air. yogyakarta : kanisius. fajri dan hadiwidodo m., . evaluasi desain lnstalisasi pengo­ lahan air pdam kata kecamatan prambanan kabupaten klaten. [cited feb. ]. available at: http://jurnal.pdii. lipi.go.id/admin/jurnal. fardiaz, . polusi air dan udara. yogyakarta : kanisius. fitria t, . pemanfaatan limbah sandblasting dan clay pt. pertamina up iv cilacap sebagai bahan pembuatan keramik dengan metode solidijikasi. [cited april ]. available at: http://rac.uii.ac.id hariyadi s, . bod dan cod sebagai parameter pencemaran air dan baku mutu air limbah . . [cited okt. ]. avail­ able at: http://www.rudyct.com/pps -ipb hendriani, . pengolahan limbah cair. [cited april ). available at: http://www.pedulisampah.org heryando, p. . pencemaran dan toksilogi logam berat. jakarta : rineka cipta. hidayat, . teknologi pengolahan limbah b . [cited april ]. available at:http://majarimagazine.com/ / / teknologi-pengolahan-limbah-b / hutagalung, . teknologi pengolahan limbah gas. [cited april ]. available at: http://majarimagazine.com/ lestari dan edward, . dampak pencemaran logam berat ter­ hadap kualitas air laut dan sumberdaya perikanan (studi kasus kematian massal ikan-ikan di telukjakarta). [cited jan. ]. available at: http://joumal.ui.ac.id lina ,w. . pencemaran air: sumber, dampak dan penang­ gulangannya. [cited nop. ). available at: www. rudyct.com/pps -ipb mangkoedihardjo, . seleksi teknologi untuk pemulihan eko­ sistem laut tercemar minyak. [cited april ). available at: http://www.its.ac.id. marzoeki, . mewaspadai logam bera/. [cited april ]. available at: http://achmadmar zoeki.blogspot.com/ /l l/ mewaspadai-logam-berat.html metcalf & eddy, tcobanoglous, g., burton, f.l, stensel, d. . wastewater engineering: treatment and reuse (four/ edition). mcgraw hill. new york. peraturan gubemur bali nomer tahun tentang baku mutu lingkungan hidup kriteria baku kerusakan lingkungan hidup. bali peraturan menteri negara lingkungan hidup nomer tahun tentang baku mutu air limbah bagi usaha dan atau kegiatan pembangkit listrik tenaga termal. jakarta. priyantho, b., dan prayitno, j. . fitoremediasi sebagai teknologi pemulihan pencemaran, khususnya logam berat. [cited jun. ]. available at: http://lt) bppt tripod com/ reinhard, h. . analisis resiko paparan hidrogen sulfida pada masyarakat sekitar tpa sampah terjun kecamatan medan mare/an tahun . [cited jan. ]. available at:http://repository.usu.ac.id sastrawijaya, . pencemaran lingkungan. jakarta : rineka cipta. setyoko dito, . jumal setyoko d (metode pemisahan stan­ dar). [cited feb. ]. available at:http://industri di­ tosetyoko.blog.mercubuana.ac.id subagya, . dampak perkembangan kawasan lndustri ter­ hadap perkembangan kota di sekitamya. [ cited sept. ]. available at: http://majarimagazine.com sugiharto. . dasar-dasar pengelolaan air limbah. jakarta: universitas indonesia-press. supardi, . microsoft visual foxpro .o. jakarta : pt. elex media komputindo. sutansyah, . efektifitas sistem pengolahan limbah cair di pt. bristol-myers squibb indonesia tahun ._[ cited jan. ]. available at: http://eprints.ui.ac.id/ wibowo, . microsoft v,sual foxpro. [cited jan. ]. available at: http://downloads.ziddu.com/downloadfiles/ /fox-l .pdf wijaya, h. . penggunaan tanah laterit sebagai media ab­ sorbsi untuk menurunkan kadar cod pada pengolahan limbah cair dirumah sakit baktiningsih klepu yogyakarta. [cited april ]. available at:http://rac.uii.ac.id wijanto, . limbah dan kesehata . [cited feb. ]. avail­ able at: ht tp://www.dinkesjatim.go.id  abstract--this research discusses the reasons of academic sexual harassment in chinese college. the focus of this research is on college students as victims of academic sexual harassment. several hypotheses were made based on the theory of discipline power and micro- power by michel foucault. the result indicates that discipline power has an effect on the college students in the family, society and college. what is more, micro-power functions as a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to to p and laterally, and affects those college students. these powers penetrate into college students, making them easier to accept as standard principle in daily life, then leading students to receive academic sexual harassment unconsciously. index terms—aca demia, sexual harassment, chinese college, discipline power i. int roduct ion the me too movement is a move ment against sexual harassment and assault, especially in the workplace. on october , , actress alyssa milano first spread the hash tag #metoo, to encourage victims of sexual harassment to tweet about it and in orde r to dra w much mo re attention to sexual assault and harassment. after that, the phrase "me too" was tweeted more than , t imes by october , and the me too movement spreads round the world quickly. this hash tag has trended in at least countries, inc luding china. dr. luo xixi, an acade mic, was encouraged by this trend and revealed being sexually harassed by her professor at beijing university of aeronautics and astronautics when she was in her years old. following, university students were encouraged to reveal being se xually assaulted or harassed by professors or leaders one after another in co lleges , which attracted much attention around the chinese society. a study on academic se xual harassment is of great concern now. when measured by the quality of journal a rtic les, se xual harassment has been talking in many fie lds, inc ludin g tourism, hospitality, workplace [ ],[ ].accordingly, voluminous studies focusing on academic se xual harassment in other countries give a good exa mp le for ch ina to solv e with this problem[ ]-[ ]. the study also tries to explore and document sexual harassment in educational setting in hongkong, but the study about it in ma in land of ch ina is still lack of. this research could not represent and cover the all fact of ma inland, ch ina[ ]. what is more, previous study also demonstrated gender harassment in the conte xt of christian manuscript received july , ; revised oct ober , . this work was supported in part by t he innovat ive p roject of cult ivat ing int ernat ional t alents for post graduat es, guangdong university of foreign st udies. weiwei wang is with the guangdong university of foreign st udies, china (e-mail: aut hor@ boulder.nist.gov). higher education[ ]. furthermore, a lthough a board range of survey have been done for demonstrating sexual harassment, litt le attention has been paid to perceive the academic se xual harassment on college students , especially in main land of china. t able i: why do the victims choose to keep silence react ion of victims when being harassed rat e not realize they suffer sexual harassment . % not know how t o revolt and resist . % could not find t he evidence . % have a bad effect in t he relationship and communication . % feel t oo ashamed and embarrassed % feel t hat it is not a big deal . % ot hers . % the table i is made by the statistics of the investigation of se xual harassment of chinese undergraduates and graduates. this investigation was started by t ingting wei, and finally rece ived questionnaires[ ]. th is investigation have demonstrated that when they had been suffered sexual harassment in college, there are . %of investigators that did not realize they suffer se xual harassment, . % of investigators did not know how to revolt, resist and defend themselves, and . % of investigators feel that it is not a big deal. therefo re, previous studies have shown that ma jor chinese undergraduates and graduates are at risk of beco ming victims of acade mic se xual harassment, and even d id not rea lize and not know how to defend against. the purpose of this study is an attempt to e xpla in why did academic sexua l harassment happens in chinese college fro m the perspective of power discipline of foucault michel. ii. concep t ual framework a lot of definitions about sexual harassment have e xisted, while the definit ion of academic sexua l harassment was first proposed by frank j.t ill in . in this artic le, as frank defined in his report, the working defin ition g iven by the council is that “academic se xual harassment is the use of authority to emphasize the se xuality or se xual identity of a student in a manner wh ich prevents or impairs benefits,climate, or opportunities”. what is mo re, it inc ludes these common ele ments: “distortion of a forma l, se x neutral relationship(e.g., teacher/student, counselor/client) by an unwelco me, nonreciproca l, e mphasis on the sexuality or sexual identity”[ ]. accordingly, we refe r academic se xual harassment as that victims in co llege have had direct sexual assault, received unwanted sexual invitation,or e xperienced verbal or physical advances. discipline power: a cathedral of research on the academic sexual harassment in chinese college weiwei wang international journal of social science and humanity, vol. , no. , november doi: . /ijssh. . . . before launching into the rationalization for specific hypotheses, it is of vita l to ground our study in the discipline power method proposed by michel foucault. michel foucault ( )‟s theory of discipline powe r ma inly contends that the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former usually functions as controlling and defining the latter. as steve noted that discipline is a form of power which appeared in western society in nineteenth century, which is used as social control[ ]. here, discipline power means that people will be controlled by those disciplines that are contended into knowledge produced in fa mily, society and school. the statue of knowledge affects the statue of truth. those knowledge will produce power to control mu ltiplic ities of body and force. furthermore , micro power also functions as a network of re lations and affects them not only fro m top to bottom, but also to a certain e xtent fro m bottom to top and laterally. th is paper aims to offer a new perspective to e xplore why did undergraduates experience the academic sexual harassment in chinese colleg e. iii. corp oreal discip line discip line power e xpands and penetrates in ch inese society in many fields, inc luding five social institutions of school, army , factory, hospital, school, and prison. the finding that it has an effect on college students from the family, college and society. in society, ch ina has always had the fine tradition o f honoring the teachers and their teachings. it is also called “zun shi zhong dao” in chinese. this spirit has been carried on and further pro mote in ch inese society for t housands of years. “zun shi” in chinese means showing great respect to the teachers, which first cited fro m ba i hu tong, an important work in chinese philosophy history [ ]. in china, “dao” means road or way first, and then has further meaning, that is “spirit, principle and way”. in tradit ion, learning is mostly determined by teacher. an excellent and great teacher could cultivate a smart and great student. as the famous philosopher in tang density --han yu saying in shi shuo, where there is truth, there is a teacher. if you want to get the truth, become smart and have great thinking. you should learn fro m the great teacher. teachers have great and higher statue in chinese society all the time . in the ch inese warring states period, it is said that 'one-day teacher, life-long father' in lv shi chun qiu. it means that “he who is a teacher for a day is the father for a lifetime”. there fore, many students treat their teacher as respectful as their parents. furthermore, traditional patriarcha l thinking and confuc ianism affect many chinese, which fo rce them to used to following traditional ethics ideology and feudal spirit. three card inal guides (“three gang”) and six of confucian d iscipline (six ji) represented by the chinese culture has interpreted into concrete social system. here, "three gang" in chin ese means rule rs and subjects should be loyal to each other, parents and children should love each other, and husbands and wives should live in harmony. as foucault argued that “in every society, the body was in the grip of every strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations”[ ]. although chinese do not have to apply to these principles anymo re, these princip les have penetrated in them day by day, year by year. chinese accept these principles as a virtue, as a standard, but disobey it. therefore, there are many poems and essays that appreciate these traditional virtues. here, it is not to appeal chinese to critic ize and abandon these virtue totally. ho wever, these behavior and culture also return to penetrate into body, eventually, the body becomes into a “docile body”. it will lead to student's loss of subjective consciousness and mental ossification, if they have not received dialectical thinking for a long term. when college students faced academic se xual harassment, their bodies do not know how to re ject and defend against, even not connect it with se xual harassment. this is the power of docile body joined with the discipline.the concept of “docile” becomes a virtue, and people become docile. in fa mily, ch inese fa milies have paid great attention to education, especially to teachers. in ancient times, teacher would be treated as another father and as respectful as parents. listening to and following to what teacher ask ones to do is a great virtue. no wadays, “well-behaved” still be taken as a great stander and appreciation for children in china. if people would like to appreciate someone, they would describe he/she, especially a child, as “well-behaved”, or “guai” in chinese, people often mean that they behave in a way that adults usually like and think is correct. here, “ well-behaved”, or “guai” in ch inese means obedience, co mpliance and docility. throughout the history, many chinese fa milies have fa mily precept or fa mily instruction, in order to define their children‟s behavior. in tradit ion, chinese fa milies had many kinds of fa mous fa mily instructions, such as fa mily instruction of yan clan, fa mily instruction of zhu xi, and advice to my son and so on. these family instructions presents principles made and could not be broke. and their bodies gradually accept this rule and apply to it. as foucault noted in the discipline and punish, body could be man ipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. a docile body easily fo llo ws those principles [ ]. fa mily is the first and the most importance place for education. “knowledge priority” is to pra ise highly in many chinese fa milies. there fore, children are forced to follow princ iples of college and what teachers ask them to do. these family precepts gradually penetrated into children‟s thought would change and man ipulate their behaviors. their bodies are docile and try to be well-behaved, and not reject anything. because when they were very little kids, they have been always taught by their parents to obey and follow the teacher‟s instruction. they were e xpected to be we ll-behaved children at ho me and well-behaved students in school, but those who dare to challenge the authority. furthermore, s o me parents even don‟t like children a lways ask why, which is looked as challenging the authority in ancient times, and still as not a good behavior or trouble-making until today. these docile students makes efficiency in government and monitor for fa mily and college, conversely, they are turned into subjected body and practised body. when they encountered academic sexual harassment, they did not know how to re sist and protect themselves. because teachers and school represent the authority, and they could not dare to challenge them. challenge means that children do not show respect to them. as a result, when they face dile mma, they always have international journal of social science and humanity, vol. , no. , november negative attitude towards. in college, there is time -table, enclosure, all kinds of school discipline and regulations that provide good condition for forming we ll-d isciplined body.first, a co mparatively fixed time-table prov ided by college is the good condition of becoming docile body for students. school life would begin in childhood, when young children would be taught to keep their pace with the timetable in „school manors ‟,and each must be adjusted to the time of the others in such way that it would end up a fo rm of mechanical docile body. when they enter in college, students still have an arrange ment in universities, including that when they read in the morning, have classes all the day, take school activities in the evening, go to sleep at night and so on.as foucault noted “time measured and paid must also be a time without impurities or defects;a time o f good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its e xe rcise. prec ision and applicat ion are,with regula rity,the fundamental v irtues of discip linary time”[ ].th is could establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition,wh ich helps form a docile body. second, enclosure is the prerequisite of training the body. college works space in a much more fle xib le and detailed way. although college students are more free than h igh school students in ch ina, they are still under monitor and manage. the reason of it is two -fo ld: one is ch inese students are more dependent on their parents than those western college students. they cannot solve the problems independently sometimes , because they are used to following the guides fro m parents and teachers year by year. the other is that chinese parents and students are not willing to take the responsibility, but the university have to shoulder complete responsibility, when college students have any accidents unexpectedly. that is why universities in china have to monitor and control those students‟ behavior. therefore, many p laces in ca mpus like panopticon raised by foucault install mon itors, such as classroom, dormitory, gates of school, and the inside of the ca mpus. this enclosed, segmented campus is observed and monitored at every point. then they would know where students are clearly when each individual has his own place. in addition, when students left campus, they have to report to their counselors and ask for leave. counselors and ass istants would record their behavior and everything happened in college fro m day to day ,moth to month, year to year. then stuff of university could really take students in control. third, discipline offers up a form of micro -power,which easily ma kes the bodies become docile. school regulations, rules of dormitory, behavior of students are knowledge be taught by teachers in the co llege, wh ich is beneficia l to ma ke students accept the principles and be submissive. however, these disciplinary methods have long been in e xistence in university so that their bodies become shaped and docile. therefore ,time -table, enclosure, a ll kinds of school discipline and regulations helps easily produce subjected and docile bodies. in college, fa mily, and society, students are being manoeuvred repeatedly for a long time, forming their bodies with the same stander. all these constitute a compact model of the disciplinary mechanis m. as steve argues that “discipline aims to mold and shape individuals to increase both their productive powers and their willingness to submit to authority in order to ensure the smooth functioning of society as a whole”[ ]. discipline is little things. ho wever, as foucault argues that “the meticulousness of the smallest frag ment of life and of the body will soon provide, in the context of the school, the barrac ks, the hospital or the workshop, a laic ized content, an economic or technical rationality for th is mystical ca lculus of the infinitesima l and the infin ite”[ ]. the a im of discip line is to transfo rm, use, subject the body, making their bodies become submissive and docile. it is easier to let the docile body accept any sexual harassment. academia should be pure and full of passion. it is recognized and la mented that academic se xual harassment is a s tain of some academic life in ca mp. because of docile body, facing of sexual harassment by their teachers or leaders of university, chinese college students dare not challenge the authority of teacher and resist, while usually choose to bear. iv. micro-power m icro-power proposed by foucault means not the traditional centralized power, while is an automatic,mu ltip le, omnip resent and anonymous power spreading around the campus life of everyone. its functioning is that of a network of re lations fro m top to bottom, but also to a certain e xtent from bottom to top and laterally. first, the harasser have power in college, so that their requests represent a kind of power, form mic ro -power around the students. usually, the harasser in the context of academic sexual harassment is the professors or the leaders of the college.they have the right of deciding the distribution of benefits for students ,which forms mic ro-power for students . in china, the professors have a closed relationship with college students, especially graduates. for undergraduates, professors maybe just decide the performance and the score of one course, while for graduates, professors maybe control all their study life and career. they have right to train, conduct, evaluate, and recommend students. most graduates are the assistants for help ing professors teaching and doing research. and the professors pay for the m in return. in this case, professors are also the boss of students. and the leaders have the specialized ad ministrative adjudication right. all these rights constitute a compact model of power, which is productive and beneficial for others known by everyone. second, knowledge could change into a kind of micro-powe r. as brad elliott stone noted in h is artic le power that knowledge is itself the result of power relat ions. terms that foucault often use are like “power/ knowledge” and “truth - power”, which are not neutral a rbitrator between two conflicting powers. that is to say, knowledge is not neutral, so is power[ ]. knowledge is a form of power, delivering the thought of passer-on. some professors or leaders offer up a new form of knowledge as a tool to pass on some message like this, “if students do not follow what teachers ask, they are not well-behaved students.” the knowledge‟s power forces students to adjust to the authority, gradually their bodies are trained and manipulated by authority. what is more , ch inese regard respecting and submit to superiors as virtue. who resist this virtue would therefore be essentially corrective. those students would be isolated or revenged by professors or leaders. third, ch inese students hardly say no in the context that teachers are always supposed right. in chinese society, teachers are supposed right, so that parents international journal of social science and humanity, vol. , no. , november taught their children to submit to their teachers when they were kids. that is to say, most people in society believe in teachers and regard them as authority. in such case, students do not follow what teacher de mand, they would be regarded as challenge the authority, even the whole society. therefore, students are in the grip of micro-powe r every mo ment, which imposed on them constrains and prohibitions. because micro -power is around them, gradually they lose the thoughts of their own and dare not resist. v. conclusion the current study has empirica lly analy zed the relationship between discipline power and micro -powe r by foucault of academic se xual harassment in ch inese college, and finds out that discipline power and micro -power have effect on ch inese college students. these powers penetrate into college students, ma king them easier to accept as standard principle in daily life , then leading students to receive academic se xual harassment more easily or unconsciously. though this study is a perspective of academic se xual harassment, it is hoped that this study will provide a foundation to enable future research in academia to be more deeply engaged with psychology of college students and intention of the harassers. it is sincerely hoped that this study would be conducted to prevent and manage the academic sexual harassment in chinese college. reference [ ] c. t. andrea and r. p . z. wasifa. p revent ion and management of unprofessional behaviour among adult s in the workplace: a scoping review/ p losone. [online]. ( ). pp. - . available: ht t ps://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. . [ ] y. ram, j. tribe, and a. biran, “ sexual harassment : overlooked and under-researched,” international journal of contemporary hospitality management, vol. , pp. - , . [ ] k. bursik and j. gefter, “ st ill st able aft er all these years: p ercept ions of sexual harassment in academic cont ext s,” the journal of social psychology, vol. , no. , pp. – , . [ ] m. takeuchi, k. nomura, s. horie, h. okinaga, c. r. p erumalswami, and r. jagsi,“ direct and indirect harassment experiences and burnout among academic faculty in japan,” tohoku university medical press, vol. , pp. - , . [ ] k. mckinney, “ sexual harassment of universit y faculty by colleagues and st udent s,” sex roles, vol. , nos. / , . [ ] c. so-kumtan, s. michelle, s. m. yik, m. phil., f. m. c. cheung, p . k. choi, and k. c. m. a. au, “ sexual harassment of chinese college st udent s,” archives of sexual behavior, vol. , no. , . [ ] m. e. l. hall, b. christ erson, and s. cunningham, “ sanct ified sexism: religious beliefs and the gender harassment of academic women,” psychology of wom en quarterly, vol. , pp. - , . [ ] t. wei. ( ). an investigation of sexual harassm ent of chinese graduates and undergraduates. [online]. available: ht t p://www.sohu.com/a/ _ . [ ] f. j. till, “ sexual harassment : a report on t he sexual harassment of st udent s,” published by national advisory council on wom en’s educational programs, p. , august ． [ ] s. t ammelleo. "discipline," underst anding foucault , underst anding modernism. by scott david. london: bloomsbury academic, pp . – , . [ ] l. chen, z. y. wu, and b. h. tong, beijing: zhonghua book company, , p. . [ ] m. foucault , discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, new york: random house, pp. , . [ ] e. s. brad, "p ower." understanding foucault , underst anding modernism.by scott david. london: bloomsbury academic, , pp. – . weiwei wang was born in zhangjiang cit y, guangdong province, in may, , and now is a doct oral st udent of the guangdong universit y of foreign st udies. the major filed of the st udy is feminism and comparison bet ween east ern and west ern cult ure. she is also a lect urer in guangdong university of finance and economics. now, she had published three art icles about feminism. international journal of social science and humanity, vol. , no. , november http://www.sohu.com/a/ _ . _april_ea_ .indd töökeskkonna areng ettevõtetes, tööandjate ja töö- ta jate tööohutusteadmiste paranemine, muutused tööohutus- ja töötervishoiupoliitikas on muutnud ka oluliselt töötervishoiu teenuste osutamist. töö- tervishoiu ja tööohutuse seaduse järgi on üheks tööandja töötervishoiu- ning tööohutusalaseks põhikohustuseks teha töökeskkonna riskianalüüs, mille käigus selgitatakse välja töökeskkonna ohutegurid, mõõdetakse nende parameetrid ja hinnatakse ohutegurite mõju töötaja tervisele. riski- analüüsi põhjal koostatakse kirjalik tegevuskava tervise riskide haldamiseks. riskianalüüsi* tegemiseks on eestis välja antud mitu juhendit: “riskide hindamine ” ( ), “riski analüüsi viis sammu” ( ). tööinspektsiooni spetsialistid on eesti keelde tõlkinud euroopa komisjoni tööhõive, töösuhete ja sotsiaal küsimuste pea direkto raadi väljaande “juhend riskihinda- mise kohta tööl” ( ). ajakirja eesti töötervishoid erinevates numbrites on avaldatud ar tikleid nii füüsikalistest, keemilistest, füüsilistest kui ka psühhosotsiaalsetest ohuteguritest põhjustatud terviseriskide hindamise ning haldamise kohta ( – ). kuvariga töötamis kohtade riskianalüüsi alusdoku- mentidest ja vastavatest metoo di listest materjali- dest on artikli autorid andnud ülevaate ajakirjas eesti töötervis hoid ( ). riskianalüüsi on küll tööandjad tänapäeval aktsepteerinud, kuid raskuspunkt langeb meie koge- muste põhjal riskianalüüsi käigus välja selgitatud tööohutus probleemide lahenda misele. kuvariga töötamiskohtade riskihindamine milvi moks, hubert kahn – tervise arengu instituut kuvar, riskihindamine, lihassüsteemi ülekoormus kuvariga töötajate töötingimuste selgitamiseks tehti töökeskkonna riskianalüüs. saadud andmed võimal dasid hinnata ohutegurite mõju töötajate tervisele, eeskätt tööga seotud ülekoormushaiguse osas, ja koostada tegevuskava terviseriskide haldamiseks. Üle poolte uuritutest töötas kuvariga enam kui % oma tööajast, ligikaudu %-l töötajatest esines õlavöötme, ülajäsemete ja/või seljalihaste ülekoormuse tunnuseid. kasutades riskianalüüsi tulemusena saadud andmeid, saab negatiivseid mõjutusi oluliselt vähendada töötamiskohta tööohutusnõuete alusel ergonoomiliseks disainides ja töötajaid nõustades. artikli eesmärgiks on a) iseloomustada kuvariga töötajate töötingimusi; b) juhtida tähelepanu kuvariga töötamiskohtade riskianalüüsi mõnedele aspektidele; c) vähendada terviseriski võimalusi; d) esitada andmed kuvaritöö toimest lihaskonnale. metoodika tervise arengu instituudi töötervishoiuspetsialistid tegid ettevõtte kuvariga seotud töötamis- koha riskianalüüsi. selle töö käigus tehti tööruu- mide ja töötamis kohtade ergonoo mi line ülevaatus, töötajaid küsitleti vastavate formularide abil, intervjueeriti tööandja esinda jaid ning töötajaid töötamiskohal. töötervishoiu spetsialistide käsu- tuses olid eelne vate riski analüüside aruanded, töökeskkonna mõõtmis protokollid ja muud ette- võttesisesed töö ohutus dokumendid. terviseriski hindamisel võeti aluseks briti standard , mille järgi määratakse riskitase olene valt ohu esinemise tõenäosusest ja võimalike tagajärgede raskusest. see annab võimaluse hinnata riski viiel tasemel: i (vähene risk) – tervise kahjus tuste tek- kimise võimalus on ebatõenäoline; ii (vastuvõetav risk) – tervisekahjustuste tekki mine on võimalik teatud tingimustel; iii (keskmine risk) – ohutegur on arvestatav ja võib põhjustada tervise kahjustusi; iv (suur risk) – tegevust töökohal ei tohi alustada enne, kui riski on vähendatud; v (talumatu risk) – tööd ei tohi alustada ilma kardinaalsete meetmete rakendamiseta. eesti arst ; ( ): – uurimuseduurimused * eesti töötervishoiu ja tööohutuse õigusaktides ning praktikas kasutatakse riskihindamise sünonüümina mõistet riskianalüüs. nimetatud ettevõtetes korraldati kuvariga tööta- vate inimeste tervise kontroll, lähtu des sotsiaalministri määrusest nr “töötajate tervisekontrolli kord” ja vabariigi valitsuse määrusest nr “kuvariga töötamise töötervishoiu ja tööohutuse nõuded”. tervise kontrollil pöörati suuremat tähelepanu kuvari- tööst tingitud lihaste staa tiliste ülekoormus tunnuste tuvastamisele. selleks märkis iga uuritav oma valu- ja väsimus piirkonnad inim kuju tisega plangile, täpsustati nende kaebuste iseloomu ning selgitati nende võimalik seotus kuvaritööga. Ülekoormuse objektiivseks hindamiseks määrati subjektiivseid vaevusi põhjustavate lihaste-liigeste funktsioon, hinnati lihas pingete ja valutundlikkuse taset. kokku osales tervise kontrollis isikut, nendest , % oli mees- ja , % naistöötajad. uuringus osalenute keskmine vanus oli , ± , ; min , ; max aastat (vt tabel ). meeste ja naiste keskmine vanus oluliselt ei erinenud (vastavalt , ± , ; , ± , aastat). keskmine tööstaaž ettevõttes oli , ; min < ; max aastat. tulemused riskianalüüsi käigus korraldatud ankeetküsitluse andmete analüüsist selgus, et enamus ( , %) uuritutest töötas personaalarvutiga, , % süle- arvutiga. , % spetsialis tide töö nõudis lähtudes tööülesandest mõlema arvuti kasutamist. ainult , % kasutas püsi töötamis kohas sülearvutit prot- sessorina, mis oli ühendatud ergonoomika nõuete tagamise eesmärgil personaalarvuti kuvari, klavia- tuuri ja/või hiirega. Ülejäänud ( , %) töötasid kassaaparaadiga. töö käigus analüüsiti töötajate enesehinnanguid kuvariga töötamise aja, töö vahel dumise, tööoskuste (andmete sisestamise tehnika), puhkepauside arvu ja kasuta mise kohta. uuritavate jaotumine kuvariga töötamise aja kohta on esitatud tabelis . andmetest selgub, et naiste töö nõuab sageda- mini (üle % tööpäevast) kuvariga töötamist kui meeste töö. enamuse ( , %) uuritute puhul määrab töö vaheldumise töölaad ja -koormus. teadlikult kasu- tab töö vaheldamist ainult , % küsitletutest. % uuritutest peab oma tööd täiesti üksluiseks. Üle- jäänud , %-l uuritutest puudub kindel seisukoht ja nad on andnud küsimusele mitu vastust sõltuvalt olukorrast. andmete sisestamist kümnesõrmesüsteemi meetodil valdab ainult , % küsitletutest. enamus ( , %) sisestab andmeid kas ühe käega või kasutab mõlemat kätt, kuid süsteemitult. Üle- jäänud isikute ( , %) töö nõuab põhiliselt hiire kasutamist. ainult , %-l küsitletutest võimaldas töökorraldus teha regulaarselt – min pikkuseid puhkepause iga tunnise kuvariga töö järel. , % hinnangul on puhke pausid eba regulaarsed. Ülejäänud kasutavad kahte ( – min), ainult lõuna vaheaega või ei oma kindlat seisukohta selles küsimuses. tabel . uuritute vanuskoostis vanus (aastat) kokku mehed naised arv % arv % arv % < , , , – , , , – , , , – , , , > , , , kokku , , , kuvariga töötamise aeg tööpäevast kokku mehed naised arv % arv % arv % ebaregulaarne või alla % , , , – % , , , Üle % , , , kokku tabel . uuritute enesehinnangud kuvariga töötamise aja suhtes uurimused puhkepause kasutatakse väga erinevalt: kohvi joomiseks, tööprobleemide lahenda miseks, viibi- miseks puhkeruumis (värskes õhus), mõttelõõgas- tuseks, aja lehtede lugemiseks jne. märkimisväärne on asjaolu, et lõõgastusharjutusi sooritab ainult , % töötajatest. ainult ühes ettevõttes kasutati töötervishoiuõe püsiteenust. töötervishoiuarst-ergonoomi antud hinnan- gute põhjal ei sobinud , % analüü si tud tööruumi- dest kuvariga töötamiskohtade kujundamiseks, , %-l uurita va test ei olnud kindlat tööruumi ja töötamiskohta, nad töötasid nn mobiilsetel töökohtadel. töötamiskohtade kujunduse, tööasendite ja -liigu- tuste hinnangu põhjal selgus, et ülajäsemete, kaela, õlavöötme, selja ning alajäsemete füüsiline üle- koormus sõltub töötamiskoha kujundusest, töötajate teadlikkusest ja harjumustest. Ülajäsemete, õlavöötme, kaela ja seljalihaste üle- koormuse sagedasemad põhjused on järgmised: • hiir ja klaviatuur asuvad eri tasanditel, puudub küünartugi või randmetoega hiire matt, mistõttu “hiirekäsi” töötab ettesirutatult, ei toeta kätt või toetab rannet töölaua servale; • klaviatuuril puudub randmetugi või toetub ranne klaviatuurilaua puidust teravale äärele; • kuvar asub töötaja suhtes madalal (sülearvuti või väike lcd-kuvar), pea on kallu ta tud ettepoole, või kõrgel (spetsiaalsel riiulil või arvuti peal), pea on kallutatud taha poole, vaade on suunatud üles; • klaviatuur asub töötaja suhtes madalal, pea on kallutatud ettepoole; • töötaja ei valda sisestamist kümnesõrmesüsteemi meetodil, mistõttu ülakeha ei ole tasa kaalus ja ei ole võimalik täita ühte kuvariga töötamise põhinõuet – hoida õlavarsi keha lähedal küünarvarte suhtes o nurga all ning toetada kätt ergonoomikanõuete kohaselt; • klaviatuur ei asu kuvari ees, kuvar ei ole otse vaateväljas, mistõttu töötaja jälgib kuvari ekraani pea roteeruvas asendis; • selgroog ei ole toetatud, lähtudes töötaja anatoo- mi listest kõverdustest rinna ja/või nimme piirkonnas. selle põhjused on, et töötool ei vasta töötaja antropomeetrilistele iseärasustele, töötaja ei oska tooli regulaatoreid kasutada, tooli regulaatorid ei toimi või ei ole piisavad, töötaja ei pea vajalikuks tooli seljatuge kasutada (puudub vastav koolitus, harjumuslik asend, klienditeenindajate hinnangute järgi võib see häirida klienti); • soov töötada vabas mugavas asendis. alajäsemete, selja nimme-ristluu piirkonna üle- koormus on tavaliselt seotud vale isteasendi, jala-, põlveruumi ebaõige kujunduse (klaviatuurilaud või -sahtel toetub reitele, töölauakapid, protsessori - sahtlid, abivahendite pakid, klaviatuurisahtli metallist regu laa tor jms asuvad põlveruumis) ning jalatoe puudumisega. Õiget asendit kuvariga tööta miseks kujutab joonis. silmade ülepinge tuleneb töö üldisest koormavu- sest, valgustustingimustest (valgus allikas on otse vaateväljas või selja taga, liiga heledad alad nägemisväljas, kuva terminal on valgusti paigutuse tõttu ebaühtlaselt valgustatud, valgusvoo värelus, tööks mittesobiva värvi esitusega valgusallikad jne), joonis skemaatiline joonis. kuvariga töötamise tööohutus- nõuetele vastav asend: – dokumendihoidja ekraani kõrgusel; – reguleerimisvõimalustega töötool, seljatugi toetab alumist seljaosa; , – käteasend – küünarvarred õlavarre suhtes o nurga all, randmed otse – soovitatav kasutada küünar- või randmetuge; – põlve- ja jalaruum on vaba; – jalad toetuvad põrandale, vajaduse korral vajalik jalatugi. uurimused kuvari ebaõigest asendist (vale kaugus silmadest, kuvar asub töötaja suhtes kõrgel, vaade on suunatud üles, mis takistab pisarate välju mist), andmete sises- tamise meetodist (pimesüsteemi mittevaldamise kor- ral jälgib töötaja nii klaviatuuri kui ka ekraani ning koormus silmadele on suurem), kuvari ekraani hool dusest (ekraanil on tolm, puhastusvahendite või sõrmejäljed) ning töölaadist. silmade ülekoormust soodustab ebasoodne tööruumide sisekliima. riskianalüüsi põhjal võib väita, et kõik uuritud on eksponeeritud töö keskkonna ohu tegurite komp- lekssele toimele, kusjuures põhiohuteguriteks on füüsiliselt koormavad asendid ja liigutused, silmade ülepinge ning töölaadist ja kaasu vatest töökesk- konna ohuteguritest (müra, ebasobiv sisekliima jt) tulenev vaimne pinge. terviseriskitaseme hinnang on esitatud tabelis . tervisekontrolli käigus diagnoositud lihaskonna ülekoormuse esinemis sagedus naistel ja meestel on esitatud tabelis . lihaskonna ülekoormuse i astme tunnuseks peeti subjektiivset lihaspingete tekkimist tööpäeva lõpuks; ii astet iseloomustab subjektiivsete ja objektiivsete tunnuste olemasolu, mis püsivad tööpäevade jooksul, kuid puhkepäeva- del taanduvad; iii astme korral on tegemist püsiva iseloomuga lihaskonna ülekoormusega. tabelis esitatud andmetest selgub, et , %-l meestöötajatel ei täheldatud lihaskonna ülekoormust, kuid naistöötajatel vaid , %-l. korrelatsioon- analüüsi tule muste põhjal sõltub lihaskonna ülekoormus kuvariga töötamise ajast (r = , ; p < , ). riskianalüüsi käigus terviseriski vähendamise eesmärgil nõustati töötajaid ja või ma luse korral kujundati töötamiskoht, lähtudes kuvariga töötamise tööohutus nõuetest. kõi ki dele töötajatele anti konk- reetseid nõuandeid, lähtudes probleemidest. koos- tati vastav aru anne, anti soovitused töötingimuste parandamiseks (riskide halda miseks), et vähendada riske nende tasemest lähtudes: i – vähene risk, erilisi meetmeid ei vaja. vajalik on töövõimet alalhoidev ja arendav tegevus tervise- spordi, tööalase tervisekasvatuse, töö ja puhkuse õige vahekorra taga mise (puhke pausidele kuluv aeg peaks moodustama % kuvariga töötamise ajast) ning lõõgastus võtete kasutamise, vajalike arvutiprogram- mide kasutamise ja erialalise täienduskoolituse kaudu. ii – vastuvõetav risk. riski on võimalik vältida teadliku suhtumisega. töötamis koha kujundamine ergonoomikanõuetele vastavaks ei nõua suuri rahalisi kulu tusi. vajalik on kuvariga töötamise tööohutusnõuete järgimine, tööohutus kooli tus, riskide kontroll ja preventsioon, tervisekontroll ning töötervishoiuarsti nõusta mine. iii – keskmine risk. tuleb kasutusele võtta meetmed riskide vähendamiseks. kuva riga töötamiskohtade riskitase mehed naised uuritud isikute üldarv arv % arv % arv % , , , – , , , , , , – , , , , , , – , – – , – – , , kokku , , , tabel . uuritute jaotumine terviseriskitaseme järgi uuritud isikud/lihaspingete aste kokku mehed naised arv % arv % arv % lihaskonna ülekoormus puudub , , , lihaskonna ülekoormus – i aste , , , lihaskonna ülekoormus – ii aste , , , lihaskonna üle koormus – iii aste , , , kokku , , tabel . kuvariga töötajate jaotumine lihaskonna ülekoormuse astme järgi uurimused kujundamine ergonoomikanõuete kohaseks ei ole võimalik riski analüüsi käigus, kuna see nõuab raha- lisi kulutusi, nt uue töölaua hankimine, uue arvuti või vajalike abivahendite muretsemine. abinõud tuleb rakendada võimalustest lähtudes – kuu jooksul pärast riski hindamist. kui töökeskkonna ohu- teguritega kaasnevad tervisehäired, siis tuleb lisaks preventiivsetele meetmetele rakendada taastusravi võtteid. vajaduse korral teostada uus kompleksne riskihindamine sündmuse tõenäosuse selgitamiseks koos tervisekontrolli tegevate töötervishoiu arstidega. hädavajalik on töötervishoiuõe püsiteenuse kasu- tamine. iv – suur risk. tegevust töötamiskohal ei tohi alustada enne, kui töö keskkonna ohu teguri(te) kahjulikku toimet on vähendatud. tööruum ja töötamiskoht kujundada vastavalt kuvariga töö- tamise tööohutusnõuetele ning võtta kasutusele uued töökorraldus meetmed. taastusravi võtete kasutamist rakendada tervise häirete ise loomust lähtudes. vajalik töö tervishoiuarsti püsinõusta- mine, kusjuures edasise tervise kontrolli sageduse määrab töö tervishoiuarst. kui tööd pole võimalik katkes tada, rakendada ajutisi riski leevendavaid meetmeid ja vajalikud meetmed võtta kasutusele – kuu jooksul. v – talumatu risk. töid ei tohi jätkata ega alus- tada enne, kui riski on vähen da tud. arutelu infotehnoloogia areng eestis on jõudnud tasemeni, kus peaaegu igas asutuses/ettevõttes on inimesi, kes töötavad kuvariga. esitatud andmete alusel teevad % uuritud töötajatest seda üle % tööpäevast, pooled aga koguni % ja enam oma tööajast. kirjanduse andmeil ( , ) põhjustavad kuvari- tööst tingitud koormavad asendid ja liigutused füüsilist ülekoormust peamiselt siis, kui töö kuvariga ületab % piiri. seega on reaalne oht, et paljudel kuvariga töötavatel inimestel kujuneb aastate jook- sul tööga seotud ülekoormushaigus, mis väljendub krooniliseks muutunud valude näol kaela, selja ja käte lihastes ning nende funktsiooni pärssumises. oluliselt võib kuvaritööst tulenevaid negatiivseid mõjutusi vähendada töötamis koha riskianalüüsi tule- musena saadud andmete asjatundliku kasutamisega töötamiskoha ergo noo miliseks disainimiseks ja töötaja nõustamiseks. sageli ei nõua see suuri investeerin- guid ega ümberkorraldusi, küll aga olemasolevate võimaluste mõistlikku kasutamist ja töötaja enda sättumust antud soovituste elluviimiseks (vt foto). foto . kuvaterminal: reguleerimisvõimalustega töölaud ja -tool, spetsiaalne küü- nartugi, reguleeritava kõrgusega lcd-kuvar. uurimused meie uuritud töötamiskohtade jagunemine tervise- riskitaseme järgi näitab, et ligemale veerandil töötamis- kohtadest on keskmine riskitase ja seega ohutegur arves tatav ning töö niisugustes tingimustes võib põhjus- tada tervisekahjustusi. saadud koge mused näitavad, et kuvariga töötamiskohtade riskihindamine ja sellest tulenev kuva terminali kujundamine vastavaks kuvariga töötamise tööohutusnõuetele on oluline kuvaritööst tingitud võimalike tervisehäirete preventsiooniks. mis puutub füüsilisest ülekoormusest tingitud lihaste seisundi objektiivsesse hindamisse, siis tuleb tõdeda, et praegu on see reaalses arstipraktikas ebapiisav ja piirdub lihaste palpeerimisega ning lihaste funktsiooni hindamisega. seoses sellega peame perspektiivseks tartu Ülikooli eksperimen- taal füüsika ja tehnoloogia instituudi füüsiku bioloo- giadoktor arved vaini konstrueeritud originaalse müomeetri kasutusele võtmist, mis võimaldab mää- rata uuritava lihase toonust, elastsust ja jäikust. lähemas tulevikus on meil kavas publitseerida koostöös a. vainiga esimesed võrdlusandmed lihaste müomeetrilise mõõdistamise ja kliinilise uuringu kohta. järeldused . Üle poolte uuritutest töötab kuvariga enam kui % oma tööajast. niisugusest tööst tulenev sund- asend on potentsiaalselt tervist ohustav. . kuvariga töötamiskohtade riskianalüüs nõuab töö- tamiskohtade detailset ja asja tundlikku ergonoomilist hindamist ning disainimist ja töötajate nõustamist. . juba nüüd, kui kuvariga töötamise staaž on ena- mikul töötajatest veel suhteliselt väike, on ligemale %-l töötajatest õlavöötme, ülajäsemete või/ja seljalihaste üle koormuse tunnused. . kuvaritöö massilisuse ja sellest tuleneva lihaskonna kahjustuste sagenemise tõttu muutub järjest aktuaal- semaks selliste meetodite kasutusele võtmine, mis võimal davad objektiivselt hinnata lihaste seisundit. märkus. artikkel on valminud tartu Ülikooli ja tervise arengu instituudi ühise rakendusliku ise loo muga teadus- uuringu “mitteinvasiivse meetodi – müomeetria – või- malused lihasaparaadi seisundi ja üle koormus haiguse erinevate raskusastmete objektiviseerimiseks” raames, mida on rahastanud oÜ müomeetria. kirjandus . tint p. riskide hindamine. tallinn: oÜ ten-team; . . riskianalüüsi viis sammu. tallinn: ev sotsiaalminsteerium; . . juhend riskihindamise kohta tööl. http//osh.sm.ee/ goodpractice/riskihindamise-juhend.pdf. . tint p. riskianalüüsi vajalikkusest. eesti töötervishoid ; : – . . seiler a. mõned mõtted seoses töökeskkonna riskiana- lüüsiga. eesti töötervishoid ; : – . . tint p. riskihindamine ja keemiariski haldamine. eesti töötervishoid ; : – . . kahn h, moks m, pille v, tuulik v. füüsilise ülekoormus- haiguse diagnoosimine vajab detailsemat riskianalüüsi. eesti töötervishoid ; : – . . moks m, kahn h. kuvariga töötamine töötervishoiuarsti pilgu läbi. eesti töötervishoid ; : – . . ong cn, chia se, jeyaratnam j, tan kc. musculoskeletal disorders among operators of visual display terminals. scand j work environ health , : – . . brisson c, montreuil s, punnett l. effects of an ergonomic training program on workers with video display units. scand j work environ health , : – . uurimused summary risk assessment of video display terminal workplaces the aim of the present study was to characterise the working conditions of the workers of video display terminals (vdt) and to reduce health risks by using an erogonomic design of workplaces and counselling of workers. methods. in the course of the present study the ergonomic inspection of working rooms and workplaces was carried out, and the questioning of workers, by using special forms, and the interviewing of representa- tives of employers and employees were performed. risk uurimused assessment was performed on the basis of british stand- ard . the employees passed health examination in accordance with legal acts valid in estonia. within health examination more attention was paid to the detection of symptoms of the static overload of muscles caused by computer work. for objective estimation of overload symptoms, the function of the muscles and joints causing subjective complaints was determined, and the levels of muscle tension and pain sensitivity were estimated. results. risk assessment was carried out in workplaces of enterprises and the health examination of workers of vdts was simultaneously performed. altogether persons participated in the study, . % of them male and . % female workers. in the course of the ergonomic inspection of workplaces, a number of shortcomings were found, among which some of them can be easily eliminated without additional investments. according to british standard , the risk level in % of the vdt workplaces was estimated at least as satisfactory, which means that the risk factor is appreci- able and may cause health disorders. nearly % of the vdt workers were diagnosed with work-related overload symptoms in the muscles of the shoulder region and the upper limbs or/and the back. conclusions. . more than half of the investigated vdt workers use video displays during more than % of their working time. the compulsory posture resulting from this working process poses potential health risk. . the risk assessment of vdt workplaces requires detailed and competent erogonomic inspection and design, as well as counselling of workers. . even today when the length of service of vdt workers is considerably short, overload symptoms in the muscles of the shoulder region and the upper limbs and/or back are diagnosed in nearly % of the workers. . as working with video display terminals is widespread and causes muscular damage more often, it becomes more relevant to improve the techniques of risk assessment and make use of such methods which objec- tively enable to estimate the condition of the muscular system of vdt workers. milvi.moks@ttk.ee postscript: feminist legal theory in the st century laws editorial postscript: feminist legal theory in the st century margaret thornton anu college of law, the australian national university, canberra, act , australia; margaret.thornton@anu.edu.au received: july ; accepted: july ; published: july ���������� ������� abstract: this editorial takes the form of a short postscript to a special issue of laws published in – . it shows how feminist legal theory (flt), a corollary of second wave feminism, was initially embraced by law schools but soon subjected to a backlash. flt was nevertheless able to turn around the negative discourse of post-feminism to show that the “post” can mean not just the end but a new beginning. the special issue attests to the resurgence of flt in the st century. keywords: feminist legal theory; backlash; post-feminism; st century as is the case with many political movements, the fortunes of feminism have ebbed and flowed. feminist legal theory (flt) emerged as a corollary of second wave feminism and the critiques of knowledge that were central to it. feminist scholars were able to show that the claimed universals, or what catharine mackinnon ( , p. ) referred to as “point of viewlessness”, were in fact partial and invariably represented a masculinist point of view. the humanities and the social sciences led the way in critiquing universality (e.g., okin ; smith ; code ). the fundamental question was: how can claims to universality be valued if the voices of per cent of the population are missing? of course, this figure is likely to be much greater when we take into account the absence of the voices of indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups. the critique of universalism struck a particular chord with feminist legal scholars as legal positivism, the favoured mode of adjudication in the common law world, averred that law was neutral, objective and true and could be relied upon to produce “right answers”. as well as exposing the masculinity of the paradigmatic legal person—“the man of law” (naffine )—feminist legal theory sought to shift the critical gaze from the public to the private sphere in accordance with the central trope of the feminist movement: “the personal is the political”. thus, attitudes towards issues of sexual assault, violence and bodily autonomy began to change and the criminalisation of harms against women began to be taken more seriously. flt had a particular interest in the affective side of life, as opposed to the conventional doctrinal and applied focus on property and profits that typified the law curriculum in most law schools and were deemed necessary for admission to legal practice. what was significant about the methodology of flt was the nature of the questions asked and the giving of voice to those conventionally discounted by law, such as the survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. flt did not restrict its focus to issues conventionally regarded as “women’s issues” as it also developed critiques of fields of law from which a feminist presence had been either excluded or marginalised, such as international law (e.g., charlesworth et al. ). the scholarly endeavours of feminist legal scholars resulted in flt being included in the curricula of many law schools and received the endorsement of academic gatekeepers. this even led to the australian government funding gender-sensitive materials for inclusion in the compulsory core of the law curriculum (thornton , p. ). the apparent embrace of flt was nevertheless short-lived, with the very success of feminism resulting in a backlash against it and the category “woman” being attacked as essentialist (e.g., behrendt ). popular culture began to deride feminism as a movement that was passé and belonged to a laws , , ; doi: . /laws www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws laws , , of previous generation. the hostile environment led to the emergence of the discourse of “post-feminism”, which some feminists saw as a ploy designed to depoliticise feminism. as chandra mohanty notes (mohanty , p. ), through depoliticization, “the state is made postfeminist before feminists achieve gender justice”. the reaction against feminism coincided with the neoliberal turn, which resulted in disinvestment by the state in higher education, a problem that was exacerbated by the global financial crisis of – . the cost of tuition was passed onto students, which encouraged them to be utility maximisers—that is, to focus on applied subjects that they believed would make them more attractive in the job market (thornton ). they began to say that they no longer wanted flt on their testamurs, in the belief that it could harm their chances of employability. austerity measures by law schools also encouraged a more applied focus in the curriculum, creating a parlous environment for the future of flt. however, the “post” in “post-feminism” is ambiguous: it can suggest that feminism’s days are numbered, but it can also signal a new beginning as a result of an epistemological break (lewis , p. ). as flt did not fade away, i suggest that the latter meaning is more appropriate. it was sexual harassment that gave feminism an adrenalin shot in the arm in accordance with the positive understanding of the “post”. the catalyst was the revelation that hollywood movie mogul, harvey weinstein, had sexually harassed multiple women, including prominent movie stars (entertainment news ). however, it was not as though sexual harassment had ever gone away as it has always been a corollary of the lives of working women, as catharine mackinnon ( ) compellingly showed more than years ago. the international publicity that weinstein attracted encouraged other women to speak up. this resulted in the exposure of predatory behaviour by prominent men elsewhere and #metoo became a global movement. the impact of the #metoo movement on the resurgence of feminism and flt was extraordinary. one striking response was that of the international bar association (iba), which commissioned a survey of legal professionals in countries and produced a landmark report, us too? (pender ). the iba has continued to play a leadership role in respect to sexual harassment in law firms globally, with the development of proactive tools, conferences and webinars. more recently, six women associates lodged a formal complaint against former high court judge, dyson heydon, which was upheld (mcclymont and maley ). the chief justice of the australian high court, susan kiefel, went further than the typical male organisational head in that she not only apologised to the women but issued a public statement stressing her “shame” that the harassment had occurred at the high court (mcclymont and maley ). more generally, interest in feminist legal theory on the part of young women has revived, with the demand for autonomy over their bodies, demands for equal pay and freedom from violence, particularly as women are killed very week by their partners. the neoliberal turn, in conjunction with the wave of moral conservatism that has engulfed many parts of the world, has inspired young women to take a stance as they realise the fragility of the gains of the past. these changes inspired me to suggest that it was opportune to pursue the theme of feminist legal theory in the st century as a special issue of laws. the call for papers pointed out that, far from being a spent force, flt was a vital means of making sense of a rapidly changing world. contributors therefore had considerable scope in which to address a topic of interest. i am pleased to report that the following articles were published in the special issue. they encompass an array of topics and represent diverse jurisdictions: . paul baumgardner, princeton university, usa: “ronald reagan, the modern right, and . . . the rise of the fem-crits” (baumgardner ). this article explores the foundational role of feminist critical legal scholars, colloquially known as the “fem-crits”. baumgardner questions whether the resistance of the fem-crits to the conservatism of the s might provide lessons for progressive lawyers and feminist legal theorists in responding to the conservative agenda of the laws , , of trump administration today. he argues that the successors to the fem-crits are indeed able to play an essential role in strengthening progressive movements. . adrian howe, independent researcher, melbourne, australia: “‘endlessly valuable’ discursive work–intimate partner femicide, an english case study” (howe ). this article addresses the ongoing issue of violence against women, with particular regard to intimate partner femicide. howe focuses on the reform of provocation defences in england and wales. she invokes insights from carol smart’s text, feminism and the power of law. howe argues that smart’s methodology enables legal texts to be read as sites in which the law’s truth about gendered relationships can be contested. she illustrates this proposition with reference to recent cases. . karen o’connell, university of technology, sydney, australia, “can law address intersectional sexual harassment? the case of claimants with personality disorders” (o’connell ). this article addresses a unique dimension of intersectional discrimination in the context of sexual harassment, namely that of claimants with personality disorders, a notably stigmatised manifestation of disability discrimination. while there are few reported cases, o’connell argues that, far from strengthening the relevant provision in the australian federal sex discrimination act, the decisions that she analyses may actually undermine the provision. . kcasey mcloughlin and alex o’brien, university of newcastle, australia, “feminist interventions in law reform: criminalising image-based sexual abuse in new south wales” (mcloughlin and o’brien ). while agitation for law reform is a familiar pursuit of feminist legal scholars, image-based sexual abuse is very much a st century issue. the article examines the process surrounding the criminalisation of this harm in the state of new south wales (australia), paying particular attention to the contradictions associated with “using the master’s tools” in law reform. the authors were surprised at the positive reaction to feminist scholarship in this instance as scholars were not only listened to but were also able to set the agenda. . dorota anna gozdecka, university of helsinki, finland, “backlash or widening the gap?: women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century” (gozdecka ). this article is concerned with the ongoing struggle by women for autonomy over their reproductive rights. with particular regard to ireland and the united states, gozdecka argues that the contemporary backlash is a product of the historical fragility around reproductive rights that is enmeshed in issues of religion and political conservatism. she emphasises the elusiveness of lasting reform and doubts the ability ever to be able to claim “victory”. . ana oliveira, university of coimbra, portugal, “subject (in) trouble: humans, robots, and legal imagination” (oliveira ). this article sets out to problematise the meaning of the legal subject, which may now transcend that of the human to include the posthuman, anthropomorphised manifestations of nature or robots. in considering some intriguing contemporary examples, oliveira identifies the biopolitical and epistemological challenges that the new subject presents for law. she argues that the legal subject is “in trouble” but this is always contingent on the cartography of power and knowledge. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references baumgardner, paul. . ronald reagan, the modern right, and . . . the rise of the fem-crits. laws : . [crossref] behrendt, larissa. . aboriginal women and the white lies of the feminist movement: implications for rights discourse. australian feminist law journal : – . [crossref] charlesworth, hilary, christine chinkin, and shelley wright. . feminist approaches to international law. american journal of international law : – . [crossref] http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / laws , , of code, lorraine. . what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca: cornell university press. entertainment news. . timeline: the harvey weinstein story—from studio to courtroom in years. reuters. february . available online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-harvey-weinstein-timeline/ timeline-the-harvey-weinstein-story-from-studio-to-courtroom-in- -years-iduskcn i yv (accessed on july ). gozdecka, dorota anna. . backlash or widening the gap?: women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century. laws : . [crossref] howe, adrian. . “endlessly valuable” discursive work–intimate partner femicide, an english case study. laws : . [crossref] lewis, patricia. . postfeminism, femininities and organization studies: exploring a new agenda. organization studies : – . [crossref] mackinnon, catharine a. . toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge: harvard university press. mackinnon, catharine a. . sexual harassment of working women: a case of sex discrimination. new haven: yale university press. mcclymont, kate, and jacqueline maley. . high court inquiry finds former justice dyson heydon sexually harassed associates. sydney morning herald. june . available online: https://www.smh.com.au/national/high-court-inquiry-finds-former-justice-dyson-heydon-sexually- harassed-associates- -p w.html (accessed on july ). mcloughlin, kcasey, and alex o’brien. . feminist interventions in law reform: criminalising image-based sexual abuse in new south wales. laws : . [crossref] mohanty, chandra talpade. . transnational feminist crossings: on neoliberalism and radical critique. signs: journal of women in culture and society : – . [crossref] naffine, ngaire. . law and the sexes: explorations in feminist jurisprudence. sydney: allen & unwin. o’connell, karen. . can law address intersectional sexual harassment? the case of claimants with personality disorders. laws : . [crossref] okin, susan moller. . women in western political thought. london: virago. oliveira, ana. . subject (in) trouble: humans, robots, and legal imagination. laws : . [crossref] pender, kieran. . us too? bullying and sexual harassment in the legal profession. london: legal policy & research unit, international bar association. smith, dorothy e. . the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. milton keynes: open university press. thornton, margaret. . privatising the public university: the case of law. abingdon: routledge. thornton, margaret. . the feminist fandango with the legal academy. in feminism, postfeminism, and legal theory: beyond the gendered subject. edited by dorota gozdecka and anne macduff. london: routledge, pp. – . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-harvey-weinstein-timeline/timeline-the-harvey-weinstein-story-from-studio-to-courtroom-in- -years-iduskcn i yv https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-harvey-weinstein-timeline/timeline-the-harvey-weinstein-story-from-studio-to-courtroom-in- -years-iduskcn i yv http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.smh.com.au/national/high-court-inquiry-finds-former-justice-dyson-heydon-sexually-harassed-associates- -p w.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/high-court-inquiry-finds-former-justice-dyson-heydon-sexually-harassed-associates- -p w.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	references understanding and addressing gender equity for women in neurology contemporary issues: horizons understanding and addressing gender equity for women in neurology julie k. silver, md neurology® ; : - . doi: . /wnl. correspondence dr. silver julie_silver@ hms.harvard.edu abstract despite the fact that the percentages of women among physicians and neurologists have been rising, gender-related disparities in numerous metrics persist, notably in compensation, pro- motion, funding, recognition, leadership, publishing, and speaking. simultaneously, women working in academia, including medicine, face high rates of sexual harassment. leaders of all health care-related organizations must accept the moral and ethical imperative to expeditiously address both gender-related discrimination and harassment (inclusive of but not limited to sexual harassment) of women in medicine. at this unique time in history, there is an oppor- tunity for leaders in neurology to strategically accelerate efforts to address workforce gender disparities and ensure harassment-free training and work environments. leaders will have to plan an intentional path forward, using a systematic process, metrics, and strategies unique to their own organizations, to overcome barriers to an equitable and safe work environment for women. moreover, leaders in gatekeeper organizations—medical schools/academic medical centers, funding agencies, journals, and medical societies—must hold each other accountable for gender equity as their own success and financial return on investment is dependent on the efforts of those in the other categories. in short, the path forward is to focus on ethical principles and behavior when it comes to addressing workforce gender disparities for women in medicine. from the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation, harvard medical school; spaulding rehabilitation hospital; massachusetts general hospital; and brigham and women’s hospital, boston, ma. go to neurology.org/n for full disclosures. funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the author, if any, are provided at the end of the article. copyright © american academy of neurology copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. published ahead of print on july , as . /wnl. http://dx.doi.org/ . /wnl. mailto:julie_silver@hms.harvard.edu mailto:julie_silver@hms.harvard.edu https://n.neurology.org/lookup/doi/ . /wnl. a landmark moment occurred in , when for the first time women accounted for more than half ( . %) of in- coming us medical students. one might think then that medicine, with its large proportion of intelligent and highly trained women physicians and scientists, is leading the way in gender equity. yet it is not. in fact, in many cases research shows slow progress, no progress, or even regression , in workforce gender equity. a robust evidence base, primarily reflecting that most gender equity research occurs in aca- demic medicine, demonstrates disparities for women in compensation, promotion, research funding, recognition awards, , – journal editorial board representation, , publishing, , speaking, – workplace environments, and recruitment/retention offers. disparities in promotion start early in women’s careers and the gaps become more pronounced over time. for example, women account for . % of assistant professors ( , of , ), . % of associate professors ( of , ), and . % of professors ( of , ) in neurology. although the greatest dis- parities for women in the academic track occur at the pro- fessor level, including in neurology, schor found that among senior level leadership, only % of us medical school deans were women. even in surgical specialties, the low number of women at the highest levels is inconsistent with the available pipeline, and dr. keith lillemoe stated the following in his presidential address to the american surgical association: “the number of outstanding, qualified female candidates is more than adequate to fill every open surgical leadership position in america today. the problem is not the pipeline—it is the process.” despite the disparities, carr et al. found that % of the aca- demic institutions they studied had no programs for recruiting, promoting, or retaining women (frequently describing such programming as unnecessary). indeed, structural and in- stitutional bias are increasingly recognized as factors in gender disparities, while conventional reasons such as lack of qualified women (insufficient or leaky pipeline) are being refuted. , , however, midcareer and senior women in medicine, including but not limited to those in neurology, have faced years of implicit (unconscious) bias, which at times rose to the level of explicit (conscious) bias—slowing their career growth, causing them to be overlooked for well-deserved recognition and promotions, and making them uncomfortable and even unsafe in their workplaces. importantly, although this report is focused primarily on women physicians and researchers, there is no doubt that it is imperative to address inclusion and safety for every worker, student, and patient—across gender, ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, ability level, and other factors that may make them vulnerable to mis- treatment such as bullying, harassment, bias, or discrimination. the inequity spectrum research on gender disparities demonstrates a spectrum of inequities that range from microinequities to macro- inequities, with the latter having easily identifiable and quantifiable metrics (e.g., compensation or promotion). while studies of microinequities are frequently quantitative and report data, the metrics used are often unique and sometimes quite creative. for example, one microinequity study demonstrated via video recordings of grand rounds speaker introductions that when compared with men, wom- en’s professional titles were used less frequently. in a study assessing the representation of men and women physicians (and information about their work) in newsletters published by the american academy of physical medicine and re- habilitation over a period of more than years, my colleagues and i found that while men were always included, women were completely excluded from more than one-third of the newsletters. in another study, we found that women were represented at lower than expected levels among authors of perspective-type articles published in the highest-impact pediatric journals. these types of studies have added to a growing body of evidence demonstrating how women are often subtly marginalized, silenced, or made invisible. the building of one’s professional reputation is both vital and nuanced, and the cumulative effect of many subtle slights may have a more pronounced effect on women’s careers than previously recognized. gender bias and sexual harassment gender bias and disparities likely provide fertile ground for sexual harassment, and it is clear that medicine has a serious problem with these issues. the landmark report from the national academies of science, engineering and medicine (nasem) titled sexual harassment of women: climate, cul- ture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine stated that “gender discrimination itself harms women and the broader meritocracy of science. and thus we conclude that together, gender discrimination and male domination are features of the academic science, engineering, and medicine climate that create a permissive environment for sexual harassment.” the report describes the normalization of gender-related harassment (including but not limited to sexual harassment) in medicine, and sheds light on the current literature. relevantly, the true incidence and prevalence is likely underestimated for a variety of reasons (e.g., under- reporting by those affected, reluctance to label offending, demeaning, or intrusive behavior as harassment, or failure to follow good research practices). as the report explains, large glossary aan = american academy of neurology; cv = curriculum vitae; nasem = national academies of science, engineering and medicine; roi = return on investment. neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, neurology.org/n copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n proportions (and in some studies the majority) of women in academia in general, inclusive of health care training environ- ments such as medical schools and academic medical centers, are targets. for example, surveys of large institutions revealed that % to nearly % of women medical student respondents had experienced incidents of faculty/staff-on-student sexist hostility. moreover, women medical student respondents were more likely to have experienced faculty/staff-on-student sexist hostility than their same-institutional-system peers in undergraduate, graduate, non–science-engineering-medicine, science, and engineering studies. importantly, it is becoming increasingly clear that in some instances medical schools and other health care organizations have one or more serial har- assers who have continued their behavior over the course of many years and affected many targets (generally women, but men and others across the gender spectrum as well). bystanders who have witnessed or heard about this behavior also may have been negatively affected (figure ). although the vast majority of men in medicine are professional and respectful of those with whom they interact and there is no evidence to suggest that most men are guilty of harassment, authors of the nasem report concluded that “environ- ments where men outnumber women, leadership is male dominated, and/or jobs or occupations are considered atypical for women have more frequent incidents of sexual harassment for women.“ therefore, likely a small group of people, primarily though not exclusively men, who are too often serial harassers or predators are poisoning medicine’s learning and working environments. the key to changing the normalization of sexual harassment then is to recognize that health care leaders’ actions aimed at ridding their institutions of toxic behavior exhibited by a proportionally small group of people will determine what happens in the future to a much larger group of people. for example, a few months following the release of the nasem report, nih director francis collins acknowl- edged that sexual harassment is “morally indefensible, it’s unacceptable, and it presents a major obstacle that is keeping women from achieving their rightful place in sci- ence.” he went further to issue a formal apology, stating, “to all those who have endured these experiences, we are sorry that it has taken so long to acknowledge and address the climate and culture that has caused such harm.” fi- nally, he acknowledged, “we are concerned that nih has been part of the problem [and] we are determined to be- come part of the solution.” in response, the nih launched a website with new resources and policies aimed at reducing sexual harassment in academic medicine. similarly, time’s up healthcare launched in early as a not-for-profit affiliate of the time’s up organization formed in response to the #metoo movement and focused on ensuring an equitable and safe environment for everyone. whatever form they take, the evidence demands that both gender discrimination and sexual harassment, which are overwhelmingly directed at women, must be recognized by the medical and scientific community as morally indefensible and unethical: . discrimination is antithetical to the tenets of pro- fessionalism in medicine. . gender discrimination itself harms women, and supports organizational environments in which sexual harassment has been normalized. . sexual harassment itself is a form of discrimination. . academia has a high prevalence of sexual harassment. . “by far, the greatest predictors of the occurrence of sexual harassment are organizational.” . gender equity is a moral imperative. therefore, we must conclude that leaders of all health care– related organizations have a moral and ethical imperative to expeditiously address both gender discrimination and sexual harassment of women in medicine. gender-related disparities for women physicians in neurology the evidence base regarding disparities for women in neurology—where women constitute approximately % of trainees, % of neurologists in practice, and % of faculty in academic medicine —is growing and issues identified in- clude compensation, academic promotion, , leadership, , recognition awards given by the american academy of neu- rology (aan), , journal editorial board representation, , and publishing. figure sexual harassment in medicine this graphic is inclusive of all genders and is intended to show that the proportion of serial harassers or predators (which is unknown) is a much smaller group compared to targets and bystanders. neurology.org/n neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n physician compensation there is a spectrum of inequities that range from micro- inequities to macroinequities, but there is no doubt that compensation is among the most important. a growing body of published research and national surveys from doximity, medscape, and specialty societies collectively and undeniably demonstrate that disparities in compensa- tion for women in medicine often exist even after ac- counting for variables such as part-time employment and differences in productivity. for example, in a study by jena et al. looking at gender-related differences in academic physician salary in us public medical schools across states (n = , physicians; , women), researchers found that men in neurology (n = ) were paid an av- erage of $ , ( % confidence interval $ , to $ , ) more than women annually (n = ) even after adjusting for gender, age, years of experience, faculty rank, scientific authorship, nih funding, clinical trial participa- tion, and medicare reimbursements. from these data, researchers estimated that women academic neurologists were making approximately cents for every dollar or % of the adjusted salaries paid to colleagues who were men. , while limitations are applicable to any research, including the jena et al. study, i found it interesting to consider how com- pensation in neurology was ranked among the different surgical and nonsurgical specialties included in the report. among the groups of men or women across specialties, women in neurology were ranked last—earning the least amount annually compared to all of the others (figure ). my comparison of same-specialty gender-related adjusted salaries revealed that the largest gap for women when compared with men among the specialties was in neurology ( %; range − . % to %). furthermore, women in neurology had the largest gap in salary as a percentage of same-gender specialty- related adjusted salary (figure ; . %; range − . % to . %). to demonstrate the profound negative consequences this kind of pay disparity can have over the course of a woman neurologist’s career, i utilized a set of publicly available online financial mod- eling tools. i found that if a woman received an additional $ , in salary each year, after years of investing and with adjustment for inflation, she would have a net return of $ , , (figure ). – arguably, this is a conservative analysis, not taking into account that her return on investment (roi) may be negatively affected by the possibilities that ( ) at the beginning of her career, she could be paying a higher proportion of her salary toward debt and the money she owed may have been associated with an interest rate higher than the historical rate of return; and ( ) as her career progressed, her rate of promotion may be slower and to a lower level overall (never reaching the highest levels) than her colleagues who are men. although readers may take issue with elements of this example, no one should miss the main point: disparities in pay can generate a huge deficit in a person’s financial standing over the course of a career. leadership, academic promotion, and publishing women neurologists also have been underrepresented in lead- ership positions and academic promotion, particularly to pro- fessor level, in neurology. , , , disparities in representation on editorial boards, especially at the highest levels, is also a pervasive problem in neurology as well as other specialties. lack of equi- table representation on journal editorial boards is itself a gender- related disparity and it may also contribute to other disparities including those in publications, grant funding, academic pro- motion, leadership positions, and compensation. , , however, editorial board disparities have been shown to be relatively simple and inexpensive to fix and a number of journals, including some with high impact factors, have done so. a comment published by editors at the lancet stated the following: we have been involved in, and support efforts to expand, the adoption of the sex and gender equity in research (sager) guidelines that address the inclusion of sex and gender analysis in research content. complementary guidelines are under development (sager ii) to provide a framework for publishers and journals to strive for gender balance in their workforce. the academic publishing community must recognise that it is not immune to sexism and gender bias. now is the time to take decisive action to challenge the status quo. importantly, the journal neurology® is currently addressing disparities on its editorial board in an effort to be more diverse and inclusive. when my colleagues and i studied the largest or most in- fluential professional societies associated with different specialties, we found that during the most recent decade ( – ), societies ( %), including the aan, had years with a woman as president. among these socie- ties, the aan was associated with the third highest proportion of women in the specialty ( %). the societies associated with higher proportions of women in the field than neurology were dermatology ( %) and pathology ( %). the remaining societies with years with a woman as president were associated with specialties having much lower pro- portions of women in the field ( %– %), including surgical specialties. notably, specialty societies associated with lower percentages of women in the field than neurology (< %; and including surgical specialties) had more years with a woman as president ( – years) than the aan. in the -year history of the aan, there has been only woman president, sandra olson, md ( – ), and thereafter no woman led the aan for decades. in the future, orly avitzur, md, mba, is slated to be the second aan president who is female ( – ). given the growth of women in neurology and among members of the aan, if history repeats itself and dr. avitzur is the sole woman president of the society during the next couple of decades, women would continue not only to be in- equitably represented among presidents, but metrics would demonstrate a regression in progress toward gender equity in leadership. neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, neurology.org/n copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n this example demonstrates a serious issue in gender equity research—there is a difference between celebrating a woman’s accomplishments (drs. olson’s and avitzur’s elections) and suggesting that these accomplishments represent organiza- tional progress in gender equity. instead, to avoid under- mining real progress in gender equity as well as identify and address gaps, we must use scientific methodology along with a comprehensive set of metrics and longitudinal data analysis to confirm conclusions. for example, membership data from the aan’s insights report (personal communication, orly avitzur, md, mba) reveals that the percentage of women members has been increasing and in nearly % of all members and % of junior members (i.e., physicians in neurology training programs or postdoctoral fellows in re- search training programs) were women. therefore, a reason- able target for equitable presidential representation at the aan over the next decades would be approximately %– %—or – of years or – of the ten -year terms. however, to achieve equitable presidential leader- ship at the aan, the society’s leaders and members will need to analyze and address its culture and processes. as a medical ethicist stated, “leaders establish and maintain an organization’s moral culture, leading to implicit and explicit behavioral norms…the ethical response is to systemati- cally promote women and diverse people into leadership positions.” knowing that some people might assume women do not want to run for or hold elected leadership positions, shillcutt et al. published a follow-up survey study of more than , women physicians, inquiring about their experience and interest in elected positions. we found that . % (n = ) ran for office during high school and medical school compared with . % (n = ) thereafter. however, the majority of women surveyed (nearly %) reported that they would consider running for office at their workplace and figure rank of academic physicians’ salary by specialty and gender to examine the rank of academic physicians’ salary by spe- cialty and gender, the adjusted salaries* of men and women practicing in specialties at us medical schools across states as determined by jena et al. were sorted from largest to smallest. women physicians in neurology were ranked of , and steps below men physicians in neurology (+). *adjustments included those for gender, age, years of ex- perience, faculty rank, scientific authorship, nih funding, clinical trial participation, and medicare reimbursements. neurology.org/n neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n approximately % would run for office in their medical society in the future. in addition to reporting a loss of family time as a barrier, respondents noted that lack of encouragement by their boss or supervisor was a major obstacle. they also stated that mentorship and gaining further experience would be helpful. recognition awards in previous work, my colleagues and i also explained the power of zero—citing how an “inexorable zero” (a true zero or near zero level) often has been used by us courts as a prima facie inference of discrimination. using recognition awards as a metric, we showed that inexorable zeroes existed for women among recipients of recognition awards in medical spe- cialties, including neurology, and in different medical so- cieties, including the aan and the american neurological association. subsequently, we studied recipients from the aan further, concluding the following: although it has been more than decades since the proportion of women among us neurologist members of the aan was lower than %, in aan award categories demonstrated %– % representation of women among physician recipients during the most recent decade. figure rank of women academic physicians’ specialty-related salary gap as a percentage of income to examine the rank of women academic physi- cians’ salary gap by specialty, the differences be- tween adjusted salaries* of men and women practicing in specialties at us medical schools across states as determined by jena et al. were normalized by dividing the differences by the respective adjusted salaries for women ac- ademic physicians in the field. among special- ties, women in neurology were ranked no. and face the largest normalized salary gap as per- centage of income. *salary adjustments included those for gender, age, years of experience, faculty rank, scientific authorship, nih funding, clinical trial participation, and medicare reimbursements. figure consequences of salary gap on a woman academic physician’s personal investment income using a set of publicly available online financial modeling tools, , i examined the consequences of salary disparities on long-term income. i started with the assumption that a woman received an additional $ , in salary each year; that is, the dollar amount that would negate the salary gap jena et al. identified for women in neurology. using the marginal tax rate for a single or separately filing taxpayer with a $ , income ( . %), i calculated that this woman would have $ , of additional income available after taxes annually. after a % adjustment for inflation and in today’s dollars, over years she would have earned an additional $ , of income. if she invested that gap-related additional income in a balanced mixed portfolio of % bonds and % stocks with a historical ( – ) average an- nual compounded investment return of . %, after a % adjustment for inflation and in today’s dollars, over years she would have accumu- lated $ , , of pre-tax investment income and booked a net return of $ , , . neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, neurology.org/n copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n in a letter to the editor published in neurology regarding our study of aan recognition awards, one reader attributed the disparities to childbearing, even though we pointed out that a lack of qualified women neurologists was likely not an issue as there was a sufficiently large and documented pool of highly accomplished candidates at the professor and associate pro- fessor levels. indeed, causality is multifactorial and not well- understood; however, in one study in which we analyzed nomination data, we found that women were nominated for training and early career awards but were not selected by the committee as recipients, while no women were nominated for prestigious later career awards. physician burnout and gender disparities physician burnout is a crisis issue among all specialties. however, neurology has been ranked among the top spe- cialties at risk for burnout, – and risk is likely more pro- nounced in women. admittedly, there is a need for more research on how bias and discrimination affect symptoms of burnout; nevertheless, it is logical to conclude that treating workers unfairly almost certainly influences how they feel about their job. after all, because promotions tend to increase autonomy and a sense of control, slow or stalled career ad- vancement may increase the risk of burnout. similarly, maintaining a sense of personal accomplishment (a risk factor for burnout) may be more challenging for women if they are not fairly compensated and valued by others. men and the collateral consequences of gender disparities in academic medicine to drive change, one must not only understand the various perspectives of those directly affected, but also the perspectives of those who bear witness to what is happening. for example, a man who is in mid or late career is far more likely than a woman at the same stage to have personally benefited from or at least felt supported by an inequitable recognition, reward, and career advancement system. however, because these metrics do not tell the whole story, we might wonder whether men have truly been as fortunate as the data suggest. moral people must certainly feel a heavy emotional toll when they are participating in, working in, or witnessing an unjust system in which women are systematically mistreated. as the nasem report points out, sexual harassment negatively affects not only targets but also bystanders who are witness to the mis- treatment. therefore, even men who have enjoyed the ben- efits of privilege may be paying an emotional price in the form of moral distress or burnout symptoms if their success is due in part to the systematic oppression of women. interestingly, men were undercompensated in one of the specialties examined by jena et al. —radiology—even after accounting for variables that could affect income. recently, google began examining its compensation data as well, and found that in some cases men were being underpaid when compared with women. thus, men too are at risk of losing millions of dollars over time due to compensation inequities. moreover, this risk may increase if women who ascend to leadership positions adopt the practices of current leaders that favor same-gender compensation outcomes. therefore, it is in everyone’s best interest—including men—to use an impartial and scientifically driven approach to compensation that ensures that all workers, regardless of gender, are paid fairly. gatekeepers and the collateral consequences of gender disparities in academic medicine career advancement in academic medicine may involve var- ious types of promotion, and advancement from instructor to professor relies on several factors that a promotions com- mittee must consider. many of these are reported in the curriculum vitae (cv)—a formulaic document that has sec- tions for grant funding, publications, recognition awards, committee assignments, and leadership positions. more- over, the number of publications as well as their impact (i.e., bibliometrics such as number of citations and hirsch index) are part of the analysis. , therefore, although the promotions committee resides at the faculty member’s home institution, gender bias or disparities occurring at the level of funding agencies, journals, and medical societies may severely limit a woman’s ability to be promoted. while many medical institutions are making large financial investments in im- proving diversity and gender equity, none of these invest- ments will be fully realized if barriers to women’s success are imposed by any of gatekeepers who affect an academician’s cv: ( ) medical schools/academic medical centers them- selves, ( ) funding agencies, ( ) journals, and ( ) medical societies. importantly, if any of the gatekeepers does not treat women fairly, then the success of efforts (and financial investments) that the others make in driving and achieving diversity and gender equity will be reduced, and rois remain unrealized (figure ). for example, in a recent study published in jama by oliveira et al., among first-time principal investigator nih grant awardees across all grant types and institutions, women re- ceived a median award $ , less than men ($ , vs $ , , respectively). at big ten and ivy league univer- sities, where some of the most talented scientists are working, disparities for women amounted to a median difference in funding when compared with men of $ , and $ , , respectively. these deeply troubling findings highlight the negative consequences of gender disparities on ( ) women researchers’ ability to obtain grant funding to advance their careers; ( ) institutional roi—often astronomical and in- calculable financial and human resource investments made by the home institutions in the recruitment, retention, and suc- cess of a large proportion of their scientific workforce , – ; neurology.org/n neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n and ( ) advancement of the science and medicine women are investigating. in addition, disparities in nih funding of this nature likely reduce the success of administrative efforts of top-level leaders (i.e., deans and chairs, who are mostly men) to support a diverse scientific workforce at the researchers’ home institutions. because gatekeepers are interdependent, even the careers of men at the highest levels of academic medicine may be negatively affected when one or more of the other gatekeepers treats women inequitably. similarly, if journals or medical societies demonstrate bias against women in academic medicine—negatively affecting their ability to publish, present, or be recognized for their work through recognition awards, plenary or other lectures, and newsletter articles—then financial and other negative consequences may extend far beyond the women who are most directly affected, to their home institutions and funding agencies. medical schools and academic medical centers, too, may be inadvertently undermining the investments that other organizations are making. for instance, the aan has invested financial and other resources in the women leading in neurology program. if women neurologists who have com- mitted their time have lost clinical compensation or have self-funded their participation are not provided equitable figure consequences of gender bias on return on investment even if a gatekeeper—an institution whose environment or actions di- rectly affect the careers of physicians and scientists, particularly in aca- demic medicine—makes investments in diversity by hiring, funding, and supporting women, the gatekeeper’s return on investment may be nega- tively affected if any of the other gatekeepers fail to treat them equitably. the icons used in figure were found via bing search through microsoft word’s insert online pic- ture function, designed by unknown authors, and inserted unchanged except for colorways under crea- tive commons licensing (crea- tivecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, neurology.org/n copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://neurology.org/n opportunities for advancement in their workplace, the aan’s roi of financial, administrative, and human resources is re- duced as well. treating women in medicine unfairly hurts everyone—obstructing women who seek career advance- ment, impeding their leaders (mostly men) who are charged with improving diversity and inclusion, and causing unrealized roi for many organizations (institutions, funding agencies, journals, and societies) in the health care system. driving gender equity in academic medicine the best way to accelerate gender equity for women in aca- demic medicine is for all of the gatekeepers to hold each other accountable. this means that they must turn away from leaders who are supporting the status quo or the normalization of gender discrimination and sexual harassment and toward eth- ical leaders who are committed to organizational culture and climate change. in , i developed the be ethical cam- paign to encourage leaders in the key gatekeeper groups to use a -step process (table ) and a comprehensive set of unique and customizable metrics with longitudinal data analysis to uncover, address, and accelerate workforce gender equity, including the removal of bias, discrimination, and harassment. avoiding critical thinking errors during this process is crucial, because they are pervasive in gender equity discussions and tend to slow or derail efforts (table ). importantly, every medical specialty, including neurology, needs to examine its own history, particularly over the last decades, as this is the timeframe most relevant to the majority of women who are in the specialty currently and interventions enacted now will affect their career trajectory for the coming years. what might an ethical path forward in neurology look like for mid- career us women neurologists who have been represented at markedly disproportionate levels as professors, department chairs, medical society presidents, recognition award recipients, and senior editors of neurology journals and who have not re- ceived equitable compensation or research funding? if the situ- ation was reversed and over the last decades a large body of evidence showed that men were not fairly compensated, pro- moted, or recognized, and they were often ignored and silenced, what would today’s leaders do now to address this? many organizations have been increasing their efforts to ad- dress gender equity, inclusion, and safety, and, while a com- plete list is beyond the scope of this report, some examples include the following: association of american medical colleges’ “promising practices for understanding and addressing salary equity at us medical schools” ; american college of physicians’ “achieving gender equity in physician compensation and career advancement” ; association of women surgeons’ “strategies for identifying and closing the gender salary gap in surgery” ; american surgical associ- ation’s “ensuring equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic surgery” , ; and the american medical women’s associa- tion’s “revolution by resolution.” moreover, professional societies and other organizations are launching initiatives aimed at working together and sharing resources and best practices. for example, the american academy of pediatrics, american academy of family physicians, american college of physicians, american college of obstetricians and gyne- cologists, american psychiatric association, and american hospital association recently launched “women’s wellness through equity and leadership,” which will train a cohort of health care professionals in critical leadership skills and de- velop principles regarding healthy work environments for physicians. recently, neurologists have been focusing on their own culture of diversity and inclusion, including but not limited to equity for women neurologists, and both formal and informal ini- tiatives and networks are supporting this work. table lists some important initiatives by neurology organizations, in- cluding the aan’s women’s leadership program, which are focused on closing leadership gaps and addressing other dis- parities for women in neurology. still, the field has some catching up to do, and “recent data in neurology show that we lag behind the rest of medicine with continued gender dis- parities.” in an editorial i wrote titled “can neurologists come from behind and lead the way in physician gender equity?” i commented that this specialty might be the dark horse that surprises us all, in part because neurologists are used to solving challenging problems and embracing scientific methodology. i recommended getting houses in equitable order as quickly as possible—neurology medical societies and journals—because these organizational gatekeepers tend to set the tone for a specialty. further, if the most influential leaders from the gatekeeper groups in neurology convened and each agreed to use the -step process outlined in table , neurology would be among the first specialties to use an aligned and scientifically driven strategy to accelerate progress for women in medicine. neurologists need to unite and commit to treating their tal- ented women fairly. when that happens, everyone wins. table systematic -step process toward achieving organizational gender equitya step action examine gender data through the lens of an organization’s mission, values, and ethical code of conduct report the results transparently to all stakeholders investigate causes of disparities implement strategies to address disparities track outcomes and adjust strategies as needed report/publish results health care institutions and affiliated organizations must take a systematic approach to addressing gender disparities that involves unique and cus- tomized but defined metrics and transparent reporting to all stakeholders. a table reproduced with permission from the be ethical campaign report. neurology.org/n neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. http://neurology.org/n discussion at this unique time in history, there is an opportunity for leaders in neurology to strategically and expeditiously address its workforce gender disparities. to do so, there will need to be a concerted effort among the gatekeeper organizations: ( ) medical schools/academic medical centers, ( ) government and other funding agencies, ( ) neurology journals, and ( ) neu- rology professional societies. leaders will have to plan an in- tentional path forward, and in their own organizations overcome barriers to an equitable and safe work environment for women. moreover, leaders in all types of organizations must hold each other accountable for gender equity as their own success and financial roi is dependent on the efforts of those in the other categories. in short, the path forward is to focus on ethical principles and behavior when it comes to addressing workforce gender disparities for women in medicine. author contributions j.k. silver: drafting/revising the manuscript, data acquisition, study concept or design, analysis or interpretation of data, accepts responsibility for conduct of research and final ap- proval, acquisition of data, statistical analysis. acknowledgment the author thanks orly avitzur, md, mba, faan, aan president-elect nominee; divya singhal, md; kathrin lafaver, md, faan; and amy nostdahl, senior manager for leadership development at the aan, for providing information about various initiatives that support women in neurology; and julie poorman, phd, for her assistance with manuscript preparation. the icons used in figure were found via bing search through microsoft word’s insert online picture function, designed by unknown authors, and inserted unchanged except for colorways under creative commons licensing (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). study funding no targeted funding reported. disclosure j.k. silver has personally funded the be ethical campaign and proceeds from the campaign support disparities re- search. as an academic physician, j. k. silver has published books and receives royalties from book publishers, and she gives professional talks such as grand rounds and medical conference plenary lectures and receives honoraria from conference organizers. j.k. silver has grant funding from table critical thinking errors related to gender equity critical thinking error example perpetuating myths leaders and colleagues thinking that there are not enough qualified women to fill positions, particularly leadership positions holding the affected group responsible for the problem leaders and colleagues blaming women for gender-related disparities in compensation, promotion, and publishing, and expecting women to fix the disparities themselves preserving willful ignorance about the problem failure of institutional and organizational leaders and colleagues to read, understand, and respond in a timely manner to the growing evidence-based gender disparity literature presuming that the affected group should conform to the establishment culture leaders and colleagues failing to understand that outdated organizational processes, criteria, and rules—such as, but not limited to, hiring and admission practices and evaluation and promotion standards—may not support equitable inclusion of a diverse workforce table organizational initiatives for women in neurologya sponsor initiative description and purpose aan leadership for women subcommittee subcommittee of the leadership development committee responsible for the following: • development and implementation of the women leading in neurology program • implementation of additional annual meeting and regional programming focusing on women in leadership women leading in neurology program a -year midcareer leadership training program for up to women neurologists requiring the following: • participants to attend leadership retreats, coaching calls, and small group calls • the aan to cover all program-related expenses for the selected participants women’s issues in neurology section section of the aan, with nearly members, focused on the following: • integrating sex and gender into neurology research • supporting women neurologists’ careers through activities such as mentorship network, speaker nominations, committee membership, and faan applications independent women’s neurology group facebook group of more than , members that provides an online community through which women neurologists can share professional information and expand their professional network abbreviations: aan = american academy of neurology; faan = fellow of the american academy of neurology. a this is not intended to be a complete list. neurology | volume , number � | month ▪▪, neurology.org/n copyright © american academy of neurology. unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://neurology.org/n the arnold p. gold foundation (physician and patient care disparities research) and binational scientific foundation (culinary telemedicine research). go to neurology.org/n for full disclosures. publication history received by neurology march , . accepted in final form june , . references . kirch dg; association of american medical colleges. aamc news: a landmark for women in medicine. available at: news.aamc.org/medical-education/article/word- president-landmark-women-medicine/. published . accessed march , . . helitzer dl, newbill sl, cardinali g, morahan ps, chang s, magrane d. changing the 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http://n.neurology.org/cgi/collection/all_equity_diversity_and_inclusion http://n.neurology.org/cgi/collection/methods_of_education http://n.neurology.org/cgi/collection/professional_conduct_and_ethics http://www.neurology.org/about/about_the_journal#permissions http://n.neurology.org/subscribers/advertise education for sustainable development goals (esdg): what is wrong with esdgs, and what can we do better? education sciences article education for sustainable development goals (esdg): what is wrong with esdgs, and what can we do better? helen kopnina international business, the hague university of applied sciences, en the hague, the netherlands; h.kopnina@hhs.nl received: september ; accepted: september ; published: september ����������������� abstract: this article will discuss social, environmental, and ecological justice in education for sustainable development (esd) and education for sustainable development goals (esdg). the concept of sustainable development and, by extension, the esd, places heavy emphasis on the economic and social aspects of sustainability. however, the esd falls short of recognizing ecological justice, or recognition that nonhumans also have a right to exist and flourish. an intervention in the form of an undergraduate course titled politics, business, and environment (pbe) will be discussed. as part of this course, students were asked to reflect on the three pillars of sustainable development: society, economy, and environment, linking these to the fourth concept, ecological justice or biospheric egalitarianism. biospheric egalitarianism is characterized by the recognition of intrinsic value in the environment and is defined as concern about justice for the environment. some of the resulting exam answers are analyzed, demonstrating students’ ability to recognize the moral and pragmatic limitations of the anthropocentric approach to justice. this analysis presents ways forward in thinking about the role of “ecological justice” as the ultimate bottom line upon which both society and economy are based. keywords: biospheric egalitarianism; ecological justice; education for sustainable development; environmental justice; sustainable development . introduction this article questions the education for sustainable development goals (esdg) through the lens of critical theory and ecopedagogy. critical theory was developed, among others, by ivan illich ( – ), a polymath and teacher; erich fromm ( – ), a marxist psychoanalyst and philosopher; and by paulo freire ( – ), brazilian neo-marxist educator. illich [ , ] fixes attention on the oppressive structure of institutionalized education, describing it as stringent and hegemonic. fromm [ , ] believed that education makes learners internalize the alienation inherent in capitalist society and increases uncritical adherence to the dominant values espoused in these societies. to oppose uncritical adherence to dominant ideology, an educator is required “to stick to one’s convictions even though they are unpopular” [ , ]. to do what was right, one had to call forth “the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values” [ , ]. in his pedagogy of the oppressed, freire [ ] warns that education hardens any idea into a standardized system, thus threatening to become a tool to sustain oppression. critical pedagogy was consequently developed to include a clear focus on environmental sustainability by ecopedagogical scholar richard kahn [ ]. kahn noted that the issue of social justice and economic inequality is often placed to the fore of educational agendas, while ecological injustice in the form of discrimination against nonhuman species is hardly addressed. similar to educ. sci. , , ; doi: . /educsci www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /educsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= educ. sci. , , of critical pedagogists, kahn sees education as a form dominating bureaucracy that annihilates creativity. kahn discusses this annihilation based on fromm’s and freire’s work in the context of modern capitalist society and sustainable development discourse. this discourse nestles within the pedagogy of “technoliteracy”, delimited in terms of computer-based vocational education, such as business education, which will be discussed in this article [ ]. while critical of “capitalism” in pedagogical practice, kahn has identified reliance on technical fixes, industrial development and anthropocentrism as the key obstacles to true liberation, not just for oppressed learners but for other species [ ]. ecological pedagogy or ecopedagogy points out that biospheric egalitarianism, the view that there is an intrinsic value to all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility [ ], is rarely taught. this ecopedagogical critique is based on the distinction between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism [ ]. the term ecocentrism, or ecology- or ecosystem-centredness, derives from the concept of “deep ecology” [ ], which recognizes the intrinsic value of nonhuman beings and supports ecological justice in conservation [ – ] and education [ – ]. by contrast, anthropocentrism, or human-centredness, refers to the interests that are not just centered on a single (human species) but simultaneously excuse moral, political, or legal concern with nonhuman beings [ ]. more recently, this criticism has turned toward sustainable development goals (sdgs), seventeen goals primarily addressing social and economic development [ ]. the criticism concerns the oxymoronic aims of sdgs and education for sustainable development goals, or esdg. for example, when the first two aims of the sdgs, eliminating poverty and hunger, are addressed, “inclusive and sustainable economic growth” is highlighted as a solution for sustainability challenges. however, continuous (and “sustained” in a sense of continuing to perpetuity) economic growth is likely to result in increased consumption of natural resources, thus exacerbating environmental crises [ ]. as haydn washington [ ], an environmental scientist has stated, sustainability is not the same as sustainable development. ‘sustainability’ refers not just to natural resources but to the lives and flourishing of all beings on a finite planet, while ‘development’ typically refers to industry and economy. growth fueled by demand for resources exacerbates environmental crises though overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation [ ]. environmental crisis, in turn, is likely to affect the long-term social and economic development [ ]. it was noted that unesco’s teaching and learning for a sustainable future program essentially stresses social and economic priorities with the exclusion of eco-philosophical principles [ ]. this article will compare and contrast ecopedagogy with education for sustainable development and education for esdgs. this comparison will be based on a critical scholarship that has exposed sustainable development’s hegemonic tendencies that influence both practice (policy) and underlying ethics (morals) [ – ]. sustainable development, according to critical educational scholars, reflects “highly anthropocentric and economist motives that lead to nature being seen essentially as a resource” [ ] (p. ). this article questions how sustainable development discourse, the sdgs, and esdg fail to address the ideology of prioritizing economic growth, continuing industrial production, and anthropocentrism [ ]. while the sdgs are presented as largely democratic and inclusive, the goals are silent on the subject of the representation of non-human species, so the “inclusiveness” only applies to a single species [ ]. the challenge of biospheric egalitarianism remains. this leaves a question as to what extent the interests of non-humans should be considered in the decision-making process [ ], exposing a problem with esdg, which favors social and economic justice above biospheric egalitarianism. to illustrate this problem with an empirical example, the case study of educational intervention will be examined. this intervention involves the undergraduate critical thinking course, part of the sustainable business minor, titled politics, business, and environment (pbe). this course was taught by the lecturer and author of this article at the hague university of applied sciences, international business department, in the spring semester of . as part of this course, international (third year) educ. sci. , , of undergraduate students were asked to consider literature, films, and online (due to covid- ) guest lectures that exposed them to various schools of thought about sustainable development. in their assignments, the students were asked to reflect on the concepts related to the social, economic, and environmental pillars of sustainable development, linking these to “justice”. . critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy critical pedagogy, which inspired ecopedagogy, has pointed out that elements of indoctrination are unavoidable in educational practice as all education is based on values [ – ]. both fromm and illich suspect that education creates individuals that appear rational, but in fact, succumb to the consumerist tendencies of the industrialist age. in his limits to medicine, illich [ ] is critical of the elites that create an illusion of progress, as in developing medical technologies, while denying the reality of death, pain, and sickness, and thus dehumanizing society. this reflection is especially relevant in the time of the coronavirus (covid ) epidemic in . in the effort to stamp out the virus, the massive, resource-intensive machinery is put in place, fueled by concerns of lost productivity due to slowing the economy. the lives of billions of laboratory animals are claimed in order to create a vaccine, while the efficiency of animal-tested medicines on human subjects and the lack of ethical justification for experimentation are disputed [ ]. at the institutional level, increasing internal and external research collaborations with scholars may increase the performance of academic institutions [ ], but when the efforts of medical scientists and academics are not complimented by educational specialists in ethics or environmental sustainability, this can result in limited progress. in education, as helena pedersen [ ], a critical animal studies scholar notes, this translates into normalizing animal experimentation as animals are routinely incorporated in the science curriculum, with students taught to “utilize, dominate, or control other species as dissection specimens for hands-on training of certain skills in science classrooms”. this type of education, or “technoliteracy” [ ] and “scientism” [ ], which, in this case, disregards the interests of nonhuman species, is typical of the esd [ ]. concern for human benefit at the expense of animals is very clear during the pandemic. simultaneously, the root causes of the pandemic, the growing human population, and an increase in consumption of meat and wildlife trade remain in the background [ ]. as eileen crist [ ] writes: “by increasing our numbers, locally and globally, and by flouting the population question altogether in mainstream and other circles, humanity has magnified habitat destruction and defaunation, and thus the spread of zoonotic diseases as well . . . eating wild and domestic animals and their products is completely out of kilter with earth’s integrity, animal well-being, and human health” (https://blog.ecologicalcitizen.net/ / / /the-covid- -mirror/). the sustainable development rhetoric hardly mentions the questions of human population growth or consumerism, which were raised from the s onwards. fromm [ ] is concerned about the notion of progress that comes at the expense of other values. in the heart of man, fromm [ ] writes that he does not believe that man is either good or evil, but he may become either depending on his relationship with the world. fromm [ ] is explicitly critical of consumerism, not just the elites, but the masses who are influenced by the educational system. according to fromm, the educational system helps to produce students who can be easily used by the economic system to become perfect consumers. higher ideals, such as freedom, justice, and unity with nature, are then submerged. fromm [ ] believes that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through three orientations: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom. both fromm and illich warn that the supposedly higher ideals that are taught at schools (and universities) fall short of realizing the real freedom of human spirit and justice. indeed, freire [ ] speaks of the oppressor consciousness that tends to transform its surroundings, including the earth and artifacts created by laborers, but also people themselves, to the status of objects at its disposal. this oppressor consciousness is not necessarily anthropocentric (or human-interest centered), as david https://blog.ecologicalcitizen.net/ / / /the-covid- -mirror/ educ. sci. , , of kidner [ ] proposed. rather, this consciousness creates a system that is harmful to both the natural environment and human flourishing. while what kidner [ ] (p. ) calls the “new symbolic framework based on scientific and economic concepts”, it clearly has human origins, redefining the external nature and human beings themselves as objects. in this framework, human beings fit into the new order as cogs in the wheel, and education serves, to return to the term “technoliteracy” [ ], as a tool of indoctrination. kahn [ ] discusses these scientific concepts in the context of education and environmental justice. the common use of the term “environmental justice”, apart from the way it is used by schlosberg [ ], refers to social justice. social justice concerns the distribution of environmental goods (such as natural resources) and harms (such as pollution), presenting “environment” or “nature” in utilitarian terms [ ]. by contrast, ecological justice [ – ] is concerned with the moral status of other species, associated with biospheric egalitarianism. biospheric altruism is a concern with the environment or individual nonhumans independent of their utilitarian use for humans, as discussed by environmental philosophers arne naess [ ], paul taylor [ ] and stan rowe [ ]. however, while education is strongly influenced by hegemonic ideologies—for example, by capitalism or neoliberalism, forms of emancipatory learning are also possible. translated into educational practice, the guidelines for this education were developed at the un conference on the human environment in stockholm. in , responding to the need to address the environmental issues caused by human activities, the so-called belgrade charter was produced. it stated: “the goal of environmental education is to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations, and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones (https:// www.gdrc.org/ uem/ ee/ belgrade.html)”. to achieve these objectives, many forms of ecology-centered (or ecocentric) education have emerged [ , ]. indeed, ecopedagogy is driven by the ideas espoused in the belgrade charter. typically, this ecology-centered education included critical studies addressing the root causes of unsustainability, namely the limits to industrial development and population growth [ ]. however, earlier initiatives of environmental education to prioritize environmental protection and care while focusing on ecocentric ethics and justice have given way to education for sustainable development. critics have noted the tendency of educational institutions to embrace, uncritically, education for sustainable development and the sdgs [ ]. one of the central concepts encompassed by all sdgs is “sustainable and inclusive economic growth” (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs). in their article in harvard business review discussing the sdgs and business, kramer and colleagues [ ] asked: “are companies advancing serious solutions or are they simply embarking on a massive global public relations charade?”. a similar question emerged in our case study of (sustainable) business education. kramer et al. [ ] are concerned about the vagueness of sdgs, noting, for example, that sdg , “to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all” can encompass just about anything. the added concern in this article is the price paid for actually achieving such goals. ignoring the robust literature placing economic growth and industrial development at the root of environmental problems [ , – ], the sdgs bask in naïve or manipulative optimism attempting to successfully combine social, economic and environmental objectives. the sdgs might be focusing on the symptoms of injustice and ignoring the causes, such as the highly imbalanced relationship of people with the natural world, both in terms of ethics (biospheric egalitarianism) and pragmatically, in solving environmental challenges [ ]. thus, instead of seeing the planet as a basis upon which people can profit, the triple ps are seen as perfectly “balanced”, with profit not only unquestioned but seen as essential for achieving some of the sdgs [ ]. population matters, a charity that focuses on human rights, equality, and sustainability, has emphasized that the sdgs also conspicuously ignore the question of population growth (source: https://populationmatters.org/urge-un-act-population). see figure . https://www.gdrc.org/uem/ee/belgrade.html https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs https://populationmatters.org/urge-un-act-population educ. sci. , , of educ. sci. , , x for peer review of figure . population matters (source: https://populationmatters.org/urge-un-act-population). thus, in a nutshell, critical examination of sustainable development and sdg rhetoric reveals a strong focus on social and economic issues such as poverty and hunger reduction (the first two of the sdgs), with the environment often discussed as a tool to achieve these ends, as in “sustainable use (sic) of biodiversity” [ ]. while poverty alleviation and hunger reduction are certainly worthy causes, the sdg text suggests that both can be achieved through economic means, as well as technological progress, including the intensification of agriculture (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/). this intensification does not consider negative effects such as toxicity, the creation of monocultures that threaten biodiversity, and increasingly poor farm animal welfare [ ]. the needs of nonhumans, ecological justice, and biospheric egalitarianism are ignored in sdg’s objectives, as “inclusion” is unquestionably assumed to apply only to one species [ ]. even purely anthropocentric objectives are not met, as the destruction of the environment is unlikely to lead to world peace, poverty, and hunger reduction [ ]. these tendencies refer to a disjuncture between anthropocentrism of environmental justice proponents with their lofty ideals of equity and equality, and a distinct ferocity in the way these ideas are expressed, amplified by the supporters’ humanistic rhetoric. while ‘raising the standard of living’ may be nebulous shorthand for the worthy aim of ending severe deprivation, it is in effect a euphemism for the global dissemination of consumer culture [ ] (p. ) which will lead to a deepening of the resource crisis for the vulnerable groups [ ]. as adelman [ ] has argued, the growth-driven development that the sdgs support is intrinsically ecologically unsustainable because it destroys ecosystems and breaches planetary boundaries in its quest for economic growth. the very term “sustainable development” is oxymoronic “because it erroneously fosters the illusion of combining endless economic growth on a finite planet, social justice, and environmental protection” [ ] (p. ). the sdgs perpetuate an anthropocentric conception of development and sustainability antithetical to effective responses to the rupture of the earth system [ ] (p. ). figure . population matters (source: https://populationmatters.org/urge-un-act-population). thus, in a nutshell, critical examination of sustainable development and sdg rhetoric reveals a strong focus on social and economic issues such as poverty and hunger reduction (the first two of the sdgs), with the environment often discussed as a tool to achieve these ends, as in “sustainable use (sic) of biodiversity” [ ]. while poverty alleviation and hunger reduction are certainly worthy causes, the sdg text suggests that both can be achieved through economic means, as well as technological progress, including the intensification of agriculture (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ sustainable-development-goals/). this intensification does not consider negative effects such as toxicity, the creation of monocultures that threaten biodiversity, and increasingly poor farm animal welfare [ ]. the needs of nonhumans, ecological justice, and biospheric egalitarianism are ignored in sdg’s objectives, as “inclusion” is unquestionably assumed to apply only to one species [ ]. even purely anthropocentric objectives are not met, as the destruction of the environment is unlikely to lead to world peace, poverty, and hunger reduction [ ]. these tendencies refer to a disjuncture between anthropocentrism of environmental justice proponents with their lofty ideals of equity and equality, and a distinct ferocity in the way these ideas are expressed, amplified by the supporters’ humanistic rhetoric. while ‘raising the standard of living’ may be nebulous shorthand for the worthy aim of ending severe deprivation, it is in effect a euphemism for the global dissemination of consumer culture [ ] (p. ) which will lead to a deepening of the resource crisis for the vulnerable groups [ ]. as adelman [ ] has argued, the growth-driven development that the sdgs support is intrinsically ecologically unsustainable because it destroys ecosystems and breaches planetary boundaries in its quest for economic growth. the very term “sustainable development” is oxymoronic “because it erroneously fosters the illusion of combining endless economic growth on a finite planet, social justice, and environmental protection” [ ] (p. ). the sdgs perpetuate an anthropocentric conception of development and sustainability antithetical to effective responses to the rupture of the earth system [ ] (p. ). https://populationmatters.org/urge-un-act-population https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ educ. sci. , , of . education for sustainable development goals (esdg) returning to illich [ ] and fromm [ , ], we note that in application to the present-day celebration of sdgs at schools, the supposedly higher ideals fall short of realizing the real freedom of human spirit and justice in favor of more consumerism and short-term thinking. oblivious to this critique, many (western) universities seemed to have embraced education for sustainable development goals (esdg). as kopnina [ ] (p. ) wrote: “perhaps one should not suspect the esdg as anything as grand as a neoliberal conspiracy or a cunning ploy to maintain the status quo. the rapid spread of the sdg-supporting institutions, including the author’s university, is probably due to nothing more sinister than indifferent management, and a dull-minded rehearsal of received “truths” (e.g., the triple bottom line), rather than a serious effort to rein in alternative visions . . . still, it does seem that in our current political and cultural climate, the barrage of immediately urgent economic, social and moral pursuits (racial and gender equality, equal pay, etc.) that progressive western education strives on, leaves little room for perceivably more distant issues. one of these “back of the mind” issues is the loss of biodiversity, which may not pose an immediate threat to an identifiable group of people (as opposed to other forms of life). the arguably justified attention to the various social upheavals has meant that the failures of environmental policy to address anything from biodiversity loss to climate change is attracting much less criticism than it otherwise would. the more radical, revolutionary, and powerful education for the environment can only be realized if the survival of other species and the long-term consequences of environmental degradation on people are considered not just as one of many issues, but as a priority”. to provide an example as to how an educational program can make environmental integrity a priority, the case study below examines how both cognitive (knowing about the problem) and empowerment (being able to actively address the problem) issues can be addressed. since critical thinking relies on a non-traditional pedagogy, the course aims to promote behavioral change. . methodology: a case study twenty-six international students of a sustainable business minor, an elective course at the international business department, have been introduced to social, political, economic, environmental, and ethical topics related to business. the minor consisted of five parts (modules): . politics, business, and environment (pbe); . introduction to sustainable business; . essay; . csr and global supply chains; . weekly guest speakers from different industries. the module discussed in this case study is pbe, offered between february and june . pbe links the subjects of business, politics, environmental ethics, sustainability, and economic development. these questions, used to promote critical thinking, were raised in the course: can poverty reduction be decoupled from economic growth and increase in consumption of natural resources? if the alternative path to economic development cannot be found, how can striving towards a better standard of living avoid potentially catastrophic impacts on the global ecosystem? since the future generations are not born yet and non-human species cannot speak for themselves, how can they be represented in democratic systems? how can businesses help overcome sustainability challenges? this module also focuses on considerations of justice, development, resource use, social equality, and biological conservation in the context of sustainable business. the course also considers alternatives to conventional sustainability approaches and ecologically benign models of production. as part of the course, some of the literature named in the introductory section above is discussed. the students are asked to present and actively discuss the literature related to the paradoxes of combining ethics and educ. sci. , , of sustainability [ ], as well as pragmatic solutions such as degrowth [ ], steady-state-economy [ ]. this literature is also intertwined with related modules of the minor, for example, the guest speakers and company visits. some of the guest speakers from non-governmental organizations (ngo’s), for example, tell students how businesses can help their charities to function more professionally, reflecting a trend towards a more socially and ecologically involved corporation [ ]. invited ngo’s included the world wide fund for nature (wwf), with the speaker presenting a case akin to the ecopedagogical method of active engagement and participation of students in activist organizations. one of the guest speakers in the course described in this case study was haydn washington, whose work is cited in the literature list. see figure . figure . presentation haydn washington “the economics of sustainability”, may , copyright: author. as part of pbe, the students were asked to engage in debates (the preposition discussed for one of the debates was “poverty reduction can be decoupled from an increase in consumption of natural resources”). another full-class activity included a role-play (enacting different stakeholders of shell, oil company, including the ceos of the company, shareholders, dutch and english heads of state, and environmental protestors. this role-play is intended for students to better understand how political, economic, and environmental objectives are weighed). the students were also asked to present their opinions after the debate, discussing assigned articles and films. one of the films shown to students is if a tree falls; a story of the earth liberation front [ ]. the film discussion uses ecopedagogical approaches developed by kahn [ ], asking complex questions about the role of society in framing what is seen as normal and as radical. the empirical segment presented below presents one (out of ) answers to open questions as part of the pbe exam (worth half of pbe’s total grade, with the rest consisting of individual assignments and group presentation). one of the questions was: (a). what is meant by biospheric egalitarianism)? educ. sci. , , of (b). what implications does biospheric egalitarianism have for conducting business? an anonymous (although the student’s gender and country origin are identified) sample of out of exams was selected randomly based on the time of online submission of the exam. . student exam answers . . swedish female biospheric egalitarianism simply means taking into account non-human nature. it takes into account the rights of non-human species, regardless of human interest. it moves away from anthropocentrism and towards ecocentrism. one impact of biospheric egalitarianism that some businesses will feel is the respect for animals and their welfare. the meat industry for example will have to fundamentally change its ways by biospheric egalitarianism, reducing mass production of meat and providing animals with better lives. it will require many companies to switch from using animals as mere resources without respecting them, to respecting them and their rights to a good life. . . slovakian female biospheric egalitarianism: considering non-human nature. it concerns the rights of other species independent of human interests. it is considering the value of species we depend on and don’t depend on. this is what we define as ecocentrism. a good example of biospheric egalitarianism is the meat and dairy industry, in which case we are contributing to human welfare by producing food for our populations. however, there isn’t any thought given to the rights and wants of the animals who are being injected with viruses, experimented on, and killed to benefit human welfare. animals are slaughtered every day under horrendous conditions without taking the suffering and the rights of these animals. we need to consider the rights of animals apart from only considering our welfare. . . german male biospheric egalitarianism concerns the rights of other (non-human) species independently of human interest. for conducting business, biospheric egalitarianism has different implications: applying biospheric egalitarianism as a business value means to respect ecosystems (i.e., not harvesting a forest to build a factory) or integrating business buildings into nature (i.e., by greening the walls and roofs, so that animals can use it as their habitat). of course, it also means that businesses should not engage in animal testing and produce products that contain no materials harmful to the environment. but first and foremost, the company’s business model has to be clear about biospheric egalitarianism, so that, by its existence, the business contributes towards ecological justice. . . mixed ethnic background dutch male bioshpheric egalitarianism refers to the rights of non-human species independent of the priorities of humanity. this would include adopting the rights of plant and animal species into existing legal frameworks. furthermore, it calls on a shift in our perception of non-human species or life as intrinsic and more than resources that fuel humanity’s unending expansion. currently, human supremacy is deeply rooted in all aspects of humanity including our even our linguistics and our interactions with non-human species. it would require a fundamental shift in global thought to recognize the value of non-human life and protect it through the avenues of legal and political enforcement. the ramifications on how business is conducted with biospheric egalitarianism are numerous. primarily, existing businesses that violate the rights of non-human life would need to radically change or more likely die out. for example, will we be still able to consume animals if we fully recognize their intrinsic value? this will affect billions of people’s dietary patterns and hundreds of millions of jobs around the world. it would wholly reinvent the parameters of how business is done . . . biospheric egalitarianism is where we see all species as equal to our own and take their welfare into account when we make decisions. it is about the value of animals and plants relating to humans and educ. sci. , , of that they have their rights. it can be used for industries where deforestation is a problem as it destroys the habitat and lives of animals. the habitat of animals and their welfare should be taken into account when conducting businesses. taking the life of animals into account when conducting business. . . dutch male biospheric egalitarianism is the idea that the needs of humanity and all of the environment should be considered and that the environment has its right to also safeguard their future on this planet. ecocentrism focuses on the benefit of the environment as a whole as opposed to only humanity’s benefit. one complication that this could cause for the agricultural industry is that they would have to stop the use of harmful pesticides which cause significant environmental impacts. although this would reduce the poisoning of wildlife and rivers, it would significantly damage the number of crops that can be yielded. . . spanish male biospheric egalitarianism exposes a love for nature as a total abstract being; it is related to the gaia hypothesis. unlike anthropocentrism and biocentrism, ecocentrism is concerned with preserving ecosystems and species, not with preserving the lives of specific individuals. the implications with this are that if you are a business trying to enter the sustainable business industry a great way to sell yourself is to say you are fighting for a biospheric egalitarian world, with the same right for both us and the animals that are the ones that live in the ecosystem that we destroy to build highways or hotels. . . white male from malawi biospheric egalitarianism is concerned with the rights of other species independent of their interactions with humans. meaning not just pets rights or livestock rights but also those of animals in the wild. when conducting business anthropocentrism is the way of the world, we as humans value human life first. however, this is not to say we will look after human rights as can be seen with many industrial disasters of the past as well as workers’ rights in places like china. if we are to take biospheric egalitarianism into account when creating business models it is important to look at the external costs of the business. is there habitat destruction? is there pollution? next, we must look if there are any other things harmed when the good or service is rendered. this may seem obvious but could include things as complicated as seepage killing micro-organisms in surrounding wetlands. i think this is something that not many businesses take into account but is worth considering in developing countries with industries such as agriculture and resource extraction, where huge habitat destruction is likely to occur. . . german female biospheric egalitarianism is described as considering and acknowledging the rights and interests of non-human species independently of human interests. it is the opposite of anthropocentrism, which prevails nowadays. so basically it is about turning away from a purely human-centered perspective and considering other species as well. taking biospheric egalitarianism into account when conducting business, is more and more important. until now, businesses have operated to generate as much profit as possible, which is logical. but given the environmental circumstances and challenges we are facing increasingly, it is more than clear, that business as usual, where the environment and non-human species are neglected, cannot continue. attempts such as the triple bottom line have already been established in many companies, leading to an increased focus on the planet, but efforts have to increase. educ. sci. , , of . learning from student exam answers: ways forward the issues discussed by students concerning business and ethics are very diverse, with the following questions raised: “is there habitat destruction? is there pollution?” or “things as complicated as seepage killing micro-organisms in surrounding wetlands” and others directly related to animal welfare. one aspect of student learning evident from the assignments is increased awareness of the issues. while it is too early to tell what students intend to do about the issue of ecological injustice (as the effects of learning may take years of “incubation” and multiple influences to develop further), one of the significant aspects discovered at the end of the course was students’ eagerness to engage with organizations that prioritized environmental protection. as is discussed above, part of the minor sustainable business involves company visits and guest speakers, one of which is patagonia, an outdoor equipment company that donates some of its profits to biological conservation. another opportunity was the sustainability department of the ing bank, which invests in circular economy projects that limit material consumption and waste. almost one-third of the class expressed interest in applying for an internship for these companies. the general observation from the exam answers above is that most students realize that biospheric egalitarianism does not mean business as usual. one student notes, for example, that the meat industry “will have to fundamentally change”. we note that this claim would require action and radical lifestyle change. a path between reflection and action in the context of this course will yet need to be tested in follow-up longitudinal studies. one way of doing it is through the habitual practice of students to connect to their lecturers via linkedin and keep in touch after the course, reflecting on their professional progress. follow-up interviews with students addressing their (changing or not) attitudes and ability to “live up” to their ideals could be organized for a follow-up study. another student reflects that “when conducting business anthropocentrism is the way of the world”. considering the agricultural industry, this student notes that having to “stop the use of harmful pesticides which cause significant environmental impacts” will fundamentally alter the way food is produced. this implies that biospheric egalitarianism will come at a cost and will not be a simple win–win, with one student reflecting that its implementation: “would reduce the poisoning of wildlife and rivers, it would significantly damage the number of crops that can be yielded”. even broader, another student reflects that the application of biospheric egalitarianism “would require a fundamental shift in global thought to recognize the value of non-human life”. another student writes that since “human supremacy is deeply rooted in all aspects of humanity”, the shift needs to be radical. indeed, as this student writes since businesses that “violate the rights of non-human life would need to radically change”, this “this will affect billions of people’s dietary patterns and hundreds of millions of jobs”. we note that this is not the sacrifice demanded by the more vague and optimistic aims of the sdgs, which focus on balancing the needs of present and future generations (of people). the need for a radical shift is recognized more easily in critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy. hegemony, in this case, is not just capitalism (or, for that matter, socialism), that anthropocentric status quo. by implication, the task is not just a fantasy of continuing (industrial, agricultural, economic) development by making it sustainable, but of fundamentally shifting the focus towards planetary-wide sustainability. some examples of such a radical, revolutionary, and powerful education for the environment are embodied by ecopedagogy [ ], as discussed in the introduction. drawing upon a range of theoretical influences as well as the cognitive praxis produced by today’s grassroots (or “radical”) activists, such as the earth liberation front and animal liberation front [ ], ecopedagogy empowers learners to return to freedom of thought. ecopedagogy results in emancipatory learning, inspired by civil rights liberation movements, such as, recently, the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter campaigns. while the answers to the exam presented above by no means reveal a greater potential of the pbe course to engage students in emancipatory learning, they do indicate a direction of continuous educational effort in an attempt to provide justice for human and nonhuman beings. in its effort of making students reflect upon biospheric egalitarianism, which supports the flourishing of all planetary citizens within the multi-species community [ ], the esdg is a far cry from this objective. educ. sci. , , of a larger lesson from the course is that students are asked to contemplate a less conventional concept of justice. rather than a step forward in recognizing injustice towards nonhuman species, sdgs seems to be a step back towards denial. cohen [ ] usefully divides denial into three categories: ( ) literal denial (an assertion that something is or is not true), ( ) interpretive denial (when facts are not denied but given different interpretations), and ( ) implication denial. the latter form of denial is perhaps the most complex as, unlike literal or interpretive denial, knowledge itself is not the issue, but “doing the “right” thing with the knowledge” [ ]. this type of denial applies to, for instance, a failure to incorporate knowledge into everyday life and transform it into political action without actually denying an environmental problem (commonly climate change) or its cause. these three types of deniers might argue that it is too late to stop global warming, so we should adopt the idea that warming might be good, or that we must balance climate action with ‘concern for the economy’ [ ]. within sdgs and esdg, the denial consists of trying to keep your cake and eating it too—keeping the health of ecosystems intact while feeding an increased population with high material demands. even a limited sample of student exam answers here shows that some of them have (at least for assessment) developed an ability to problematize, as one student phrases it, “business as usual”. some students also see (business) opportunities, with biospheric egalitarianism as a clever marketing tool, or as this student puts it, “a great way to sell yourself is to say you are fighting for a biospheric egalitarian world”. another student notes that “given the environmental circumstances and challenges”, business as usual cannot continue, and considers ways forward. the possibilities include pragmatic solutions covered in the course, including degrowth [ ], steady-state-economy [ ], cradle-to-cradle, and circular economy [ ]. at the institutional level, increasing internal and external research collaborations with scholars devoted to the same subjects can increase not only the scientific performance of academic institutions [ ], but also the pedagogical benefits of having a more robust and interconnected critical thinking curriculum. concretely, this implies connecting both research fields of critical sustainability studies and (environmental) ethics with the pedagogical approaches discussed in the introduction, namely critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy. critical pedagogy’s and ecopedagogy’s focus on environmental sustainability as well as ecological injustice finds expression in a curriculum that critiques “technoliteracy”, such as conventional business education, and applies alternatives, as shown in the case study above. as kahn [ ] (p. ) has expressed, we must seize the “opportunity to critique present-day technopoly”. the critical questions raised in the pbe course (and other modules of the minor discussed here) offer suggestions as to how an understanding of key concepts challenging hegemonic assumptions, critical thinking, and alternative models of sustainability can be achieved. by introducing students to select articles and films that differ from conventional sustainable development or sdg approaches, interactive discussions, role play and debate on complex issues such as poverty, resource consumption and social and environmental ethics, the pedagogical benefits of educating critical, active, and engaged citizens come to the fore. this can potentially lead students (and longitudinal follow-up research can delve into this) to substitute the rehearsed slogans of the esdg (e.g., “inclusive and sustainable economic growth”) into transformative understanding and action. this action involves engaging a set of practical solutions, such as thinking of a business and society that can flourish while embracing degrowth, through de-materialization (e.g., using no new materials through leasing rather than ownership), and circular production models that emphasize reuse rather than a waste of resources. another set of solutions is ethical, having to do with transitioning toward a less anthropocentric mindset—something that the students of this course might have started to achieve. . conclusions the critical course politics, business, and environment has generated a few significant ideas in business students interested in advancing environmental sustainability. the exam answers presented above are by no means exhaustive of the set of ideas, values, and practical tools that the students of sustainability learn, including the need to transition from the dominant ideology of growth and educ. sci. , , of denial through the soothing and vague prescriptions of sustainable development towards a radical change. this transition will not occur after students’ writing the exam or completing the course—it is a long process that involves, as the belgrade charter suggests, both knowledge and motivation. this motivation can potentially initiate behavioral change. the objective of the course described in this article is to help students start this journey. a follow-up longitudinal study that follows students’ personal and professional development has the potential to reveal the true extent of lessons learned. in the case of business students, the effects are likely to be revealed through the types of companies or ngos they will be employed by, and the type of work they will do. whether this work will be in line with the ideals of biospheric egalitarianism, or more down to earth, with any pragmatic efforts to maintain the ecological integrity of business operations, remains to be seen. however, the seeds of radical, revolutionary education, which is not education for sustainable development or sdgs, might have been planted. a modest advancement in student understanding (at least for the period of the exam) of what might be missing from the three supposedly equal pillars of sustainable development, society, economy and environment, and the students’ understanding of justice in the form of biospheric egalitarianism are promising. critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy’s call to reform education in such a way that it becomes critical but also emancipated may offer much more than the unreflective quest for economic growth or the optimism of denial espoused by the sdgs. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references . illich, i. deschooling society; calder and boyers: london, uk, . . illich, i. limits to 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polity press: cambridge, uk, . . kopnina, h.; blewitt, j. sustainable business: key issues, nd ed.; routledge: new york, ny, usa, . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy 	education for sustainable development goals (esdg) 	methodology: a case study 	student exam answers 	swedish female 	slovakian female 	german male 	mixed ethnic background dutch male 	dutch male 	spanish male 	white male from malawi 	german female 	learning from student exam answers: ways forward 	conclusions 	references psr_ .. american political science review ( ) , , – doi: . /s © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the american political science association. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power danielle m. thomsen university of california, irvine aaron s. king university of north carolina wilmington the leading explanation for the underrepresentation of women in american politics is that womenare less likely to run for office than men, but scholars have given less attention in recent years to thegender makeup of the pipeline to elected office. we examine the gendered pipeline to power across three potential candidate pools: lower-level officeholders, those named in newspapers as likely candidates, and lawyers who made political contributions. we find some evidence that women are less likely to seek elected office; however, the dearth of women in the pipeline plays a much greater role in the lack of women candidates. for the gender disparity in candidates to close, women have to be far more likely to run for office than men, particularly on the republican side. our results highlight the need to consider the gendered pipeline to power alongside rates of entry in studies of women’s underrepresentation. one of the central puzzles in the study of genderand politics is why women are underrepre-sented in elected office. scholars of compara- tive politics have examined a range of structural and institutional factors including electoral systems, gender quotas, and labor force participation. in the american context, the first wave of research on female under- representation similarly pointed to the political oppor- tunity structure and the absence of women in the careers that feed into politics. the finding that “when women run, they win” at equal rates as men further spurred the shift away from voter biases (burrell ; carroll ; darcy, welch, and clark ; duerst- lahti ; seltzer, newman, and leighton ). the expectation at the time was that as more women entered the pipeline professions and ran as incumbents, women’s representation would increase. however, in the years that followed, the number of women in office stagnated, and levels of representation across offices have remained far below parity. even after the notable gains in , % of members of congress, % of governors, % of state legislators, and % of mayors are men (cawp ). since then, research on women’s underrepresenta- tion in the united states and abroad has taken differ- ent trajectories. while a large comparative literature grew around the adoption of gender quotas, scholars in the candidate-centered american context turned to individual-level differences between men and women and the study of candidate emergence in particular. for the past two decades, the leading explanation for the dearth of women in american politics has been that women are less likely to run for office than similarly situated men. scholars have identified a var- iety of reasons for why this is the case. the most prominent of these highlights a gender disparity in political ambition. lawless and fox ( ; ; fox and lawless ; ) have been at the forefront of ambition research. in a two-wave study of nearly , men and women in the most common careers that feed into politics, including law, business, education, and political activism, they find that women are less likely to consider running for office and less likely to be encouraged to run than their male counterparts. they describe a persistent winnowing effect that occurs over multiple stages of the candidate emergence process, which ultimately results in fewer women who run. others attribute women’s lower rates of entry in the us to gender differences in recruitment patterns and election aversion. several studies show that party danielle m. thomsen assistant professor, department of polit- ical science, university of california, irvine, dthomsen@uci.edu aaron s. king associate professor, department of public and international affairs, university of north carolina wilmington, kinga@uncw.edu we thank andrea aldrich, tiffany barnes, sue carroll, mirya hol- man, kris kanthak, mona krook, tali mendelberg, diana o’brien, jennifer piscopo, spencer piston, jessica preece, kira sanbonmatsu, dawn teele, ian turner, and four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and feedback. we are also grateful to seminar participants at the empirical study of gender research network meeting, the pipe workshop at the university of southern california, and rutgers university. we thank adam bonica, steve rogers, maya sen, and jason windett for generously sharing data. replication materials can be found on dataverse at: https://doi.org/ . /dvn/fczdkd. received: june , ; revised: april , ; accepted: may , . although women win as often as men, others have also cast doubt on the notion that elections are gender neutral (i.e., anzia and berry ; fulton ; lazarus and steigerwalt ; pearson and mcghee ). sanbonmatsu ( ) finds that voters have a “base- line gender preference,” and mo ( ) identifies implicit biases among voters. a host of stereotype studies indicate that female candidates are perceived through a gendered lens (bauer ; cassese and holman ; ditonto, hamilton, and redlawsk ; holman, merolla, and zechmeister ; schneider and bos ). teele, kalla, and rosenbluth ( ) find limited evidence of outright discrimination or double standards but show that voter and elite preferences result in a double bind that hinders women candidates. in general, comparativists tend to examine variation in the percentage of women in office cross-nationally and over time rather than individual-level attitudes or behavior. however, there are a growing number of individual-level studies of political ambition outside the us that are discussed below (see also piscopo and kenny ). d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://doi.org/ . /s http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:dthomsen@uci.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:kinga@uncw.edu https://doi.org/ . /dvn/fczdkd https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s leaders fail to recruit women as often as men and screen ambitious women out of seats they believe women cannot win (crowder-meyer ; fox and lawless ; niven ; sanbonmatsu ). carroll and sanbonmatsu ( ) find that women’s decision to seek office is influenced more by their relationships with others, and gender biases in recruitment efforts may disproportionately depress female candidacies as a result. kanthak and woon ( ) instead point to the competitive nature of campaigns and gender differences in election aversion. they use a unique experimental design and show that women are equally likely to vol- unteer as a candidate when the representative is chosen randomly but less inclined to do so when the represen- tative is chosen by an election. preece and stoddard ( ) additionally demonstrate that priming individuals to consider political competition has a negative effect on women’s interest in politics but not on men’s interest (see also schneider et al. ). all of these factors likely play a role in women’s absence from politics. yet by comparison, the gender makeup of the pipeline to office has received virtually no attention in recent studies of female underrepre- sentation. there are several reasons why the gender makeup of the pool has been overlooked. for one, most samples of potential candidates are intention- ally gender balanced. lawless and fox ( , ) disproportionately stratified their sample by sex to include equal numbers of women and men. their goal was not to replicate the gender makeup of these profes- sions (lawless , ; lawless and fox , ), and the sample allowed them to make comparisons within and between subgroups of men and women. kanthak and woon ( , ) similarly recruited gender- balanced groups in their analysis of election aversion. while gender-balanced pools do increase the number of women in our samples (and reflect the makeup of the public), this sampling choice has hindered our ability to examine gender disparities in supply alongside gender disparities in candidate emergence. the few studies that do use gender-imbalanced samples give little attention to the gender skew and instead focus on rates of entry (maisel and stone ; mariani ). conversely, others who consider dis- parities in the supply of candidates either do not explore the actual decision to run for office or do not address how much more likely to run women would need to be to reach parity with men. crowder-meyer and lauderdale ( ) use a novel empirical design and identify potential male and female candidate pools based on the characteristics of high-level offi- ceholders. they show that the proportion of women in the democratic pool of potential candidates is now two to three times larger than the proportion of women in the republican pool, but they do not analyze who runs for office. thomsen ( ) and brown et al. ( ) examine the decision to run for congress across state legislators, but neither delves into the level of entry that would be needed for parity. in sum, there are no studies that place the decision to run for office in the context of the gender makeup of the potential candidate pool. the problem with this is that the representational implications of gender dis- parities in rates of entry are closely tied to gender disparities in the eligibility pool. for example, lawless and fox ( ) find that % of women and % of men in their sample ran for office, and mariani ( ) finds that % of men and % of women in his sample did so. yet we might wonder what these averages are a percentage of. if women comprise % of the pool, these gaps have different consequences for the num- ber of female candidates than if women comprise % of the pool. moreover, even across studies of candi- date emergence, the outcome of interest is rarely the actual decision to run for office. scholars have mostly focused on disparities in the precursors to and correl- ates of running for office, such as the consideration of a candidacy or attraction to a political career, but we know less about rates of entry across eligible or likely candidates. as a result, we lack satisfactory answers to basic but important questions like whether the gender gap in candidates would close if women were as likely to run as their male counterparts. in this article, we seek to spark a renewed discussion of how the gendered pipeline to power matters at least as much as rates of entry, if not more, for future prospects of gender parity. we examine the gender makeup of three pools of potential candidates: lower- level officeholders, those named in newspapers as likely candidates, and lawyers who donated to political campaigns. the main strength of these datasets is that we can analyze actual rates of entry in conjunction with the gender composition of the pool. another advantage is that our data capture traditional and non- traditional pathways to office and include individuals with different propensities to run. we find some evi- dence that women are less likely to run for office than men; however, the dearth of women in the pipeline plays a much greater role in the lack of women candi- dates. depending on the office, women have to be at least three times more likely to run than their male counterparts for the gender disparity in candidates to close. due to the stark gender imbalance in the gop bench, republican women have to be five or six times more likely to run than men for the number of republican women candidates to equal the number of republican men. while the decision to run for office is less applicable in contexts where parties control nominations, our findings have implications for comparative politics as well. as piscopo and kenny ( , ) write, “the assumption that women lack political ambition rela- tive to men has gone global.” the growing number of studies of political ambition outside the united states also use similar empirical designs (i.e., allen and cutts ; ; davidson-schmich ; kage, rosen- bluth, and tanaka ; norris and lovenduski ; piscopo and kenny ; pruysers and blais ; ; schwindt-bayer ). due to the different methods of candidate selection across countries, the dependent variable ranges from considering a candidacy to being willing to stand for office to accepting a party nomination. yet there is less attention to the decision to stand for office itself, and gender-balanced samples danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s are common. some pipelines may, in fact, include half women but most likely do not, and this variation matters for whether gender parity in ambition or party recruitment is sufficient to close the gender gap in candidates. one extension of our results is that party gatekeepers may need to be more likely to recruit women than men to achieve gender balance in party lists. indeed, davidson-schmich ( ) finds that, in germany, women in parties with gender parity quotas are more likely to be asked by the party to run than their male counterparts (see also allen and cutts ). thus, while the outcome of interest will differ across settings, the central question we are posing—is gender parity enough?—is relevant to scholars of american and comparative politics alike. our focus is on female underrepresentation in the united states, but we think the gender makeup of the pool of poten- tial candidates is a key part of the answer to this question across political contexts. the male eligibility pool the main reason why the gender makeup of the pipe- line deserves renewed attention is that the vast majority of potential candidate pools remain heavily skewed by gender. even if women were as likely to run as men, the likelihood that a candidate would be a woman is low due to the much smaller number of women in the pool. for one, lower-level offices, a common stepping stone to higher office, are overwhelmingly male and have changed only minimally over the last two or three decades. men have comprised between % and % of state legislatures, a typical pathway to congress, since the early s. even after the electoral gains in , men still make up % of state legislators. at the local level, more than % of mayors of u.s. cities with populations over , are men (cawp ). figures from the national league of cities show that, in , men made up % of city councilors in small cities and % in medium and large cities, and there was no more gender diversity in than in (nlc ). men are overrepresented in the careers that feed into politics as well. law has long been a common path to politics. bonica ( ) shows that, even when com- pared with other professionals, lawyers are much more likely to run for office and much more likely to win. while female enrollment in law schools has been near parity with male enrollment since the late s, the legal profession is still majority male (aba ; ). data from the american bar association show that men make up % of practicing attorneys (aba ). among judges, men comprise % of federal district court judges and % of state court judges (aba ; nwlc ). besides law, many candi- dates have backgrounds in business. the same pattern holds: data from the annual survey of entrepre- neurs show that about % of businesses nationwide are owned by men (u.s. census ). the figures are also dismal in the military, which has historically been an avenue to politics, where men constitute % of the enlisted forces and % of the officer corps (reynolds and shendruk ). to be sure, the professional pathways to some offices do differ for men and women. carroll and sanbon- matsu ( , ) show that % of female state repre- sentatives had backgrounds in education and % of women had backgrounds in law. by comparison, % and % of male representatives had backgrounds in education and law, respectively. deckman’s ( ) survey of school board members finds that % of women are educators, compared with % and % who are executives and professionals, respectively. however, women teachers outnumber women lawyers in the workforce nine to one (u.s. department of labor ), and across samples of officeholders and candi- dates, the ratio of women teachers to lawyers does not come close to this margin. among current u.s. house members, more women have backgrounds in law than education ( % vs. %; chinoy and ma ), despite the disparity in workforce patterns. we fully expect the pipeline to vary by office, and in contexts where more legislators do come from female-dominated profes- sions, we would expect to see more women in office than in contexts where more legislators come from male-dominated professions (see crowder-meyer ). we leverage variation in occupational pathways to office in state legislatures later in the article to explore this possibility. apart from the professional pathways to office, men are more prominent actors in electoral politics too. women are as likely to vote as men and report similarly high levels of political interest, but men are more likely to donate money and they give far more than women (burns, schlozman, and verba ; lawless and fox ; thomsen and swers ). at the congressional level, male donors give more than twice as much money to incumbent democrats and three times as much to incumbent republicans (thomsen and swers ). bonica and sen ( ) find that % of female lawyers have donated to candidates, compared with % of male lawyers. because men are already overrepre- sented in the legal profession, the disparity in donations results in a much larger number of male lawyers who are engaged in elite-level electoral politics. davidson- schmich ( , ) draws on a unique survey of elite political actors in germany—party leaders at the grass- roots level—and finds that party groups there, too, are allen and cutts ( ) and davidson-schmich ( ) include the decision to run in the british and german cases, respectively, but neither considers the rate of entry that would be needed for gender parity. studies also vary in whether they consider nascent, static, or progressive ambition, but regardless of the type of ambition, there is little discussion of how much more ambitious women would need to be for the gender gap in candidates to close. franceschet and piscopo ( ) similarly show that, in argentina, women politicians are less likely to be lawyers and businesspeople and more likely to be teachers and activists (but see schwindt-bayer ). the pathways to office are likely to vary across countries, and potential candidate pools should be tailored to the particular context. women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s mostly men ( % on average; % in parties without quotas). indeed, scholars of comparative politics have given significant attention to how the presence of women in the labor force—another way to measure the eligibility pool or the supply of women candidates—is related to cross-national variation in female representation (i.e., iversen and rosenbluth ; matland ; moore and shackman ; rule ). kenworthy and malami ( ) find that the share of women in professional occupations is associated with the number of women in office, but the share of women in the general labor force is not. norris and lovenduski ( ) also argue that the traditional pathways to office hinder the entry of women because women are often concentrated in occupations that are less likely to provide the time, flexibility, financial security, and networks that enable political careers. recent studies of quotas additionally point to the importance of the pipeline in the advancement of women to leadership positions. o’brien and rickne ( ) show that quotas are especially effective when they increase the number of women in the pool from which leaders are selected (see also o’brien ). we build on these insights, but our empirical approach instead considers the gender skew in the pipeline alongside rates of entry due to the emphasis on candidate emergence in the american context in recent years. in sum, while the routes to some offices differ for men and women, the most common pathways to office for men and women alike are overwhelmingly male. moreover, the percentage of women in state legisla- tures with law or business backgrounds has increased since the s (carroll and sanbonmatsu ) and so has the percentage of women in congress with state legislative backgrounds (elder ). as a result, we think it is worth examining the decision to run for office within the gendered pipeline to power. the vast major- ity of elected officials come through tried and true pathways. one common pipeline includes those in lower-level positions who are well situated to seek higher office. another pipeline includes individuals who work in the professions that often feed into polit- ics, particularly law. other pipelines include those who are influential actors in elections. women are grossly outnumbered in all of these, and the gender disparity across a variety of potential candidate pools has import- ant implications for the number of men and women who run. the selection of men into the traditional pathways to office may in part reflect the gender differences in political ambition that lawless and fox ( ) uncover. it is plausible that young people select into careers and activities based on their latent desire to hold office, and fox and lawless’s ( , ) own research highlights a gendered winnowing of career interests in college. in this way, our argument is compatible with a variant or extension of the ambition argument that emphasizes the screening out of women from politics before they enter the pipeline rather than once they are there. yet as it is currently stated, the ambition model gives little attention to any implications of its argument for the supply of women and men in the eligibility pool, which, notably, is reflected in the use of gender-balanced samples of potential candidates. and perhaps most importantly, we depart from the main expectation that underlies ambition research—that equal rates of entry will close the gender gap in candidates—precisely because of the gender skew in the pipelines to office that we emphasize here. potential candidate pools we draw on three distinct potential candidate pools to examine rates of entry within the gendered pipeline to power. while each has strengths and weaknesses, we leverage these data to better understand how the gender makeup of the potential candidate pool con- tinues to matter for women’s underrepresentation. the first pool includes , state legislators who are well situated to run for the u.s. house (thomsen ). we use bonica’s ( ) data to identify the sample of state legislatorsfrom to . this design istypical in studies of candidate entry, as serving in lower-level office often provides individuals with the skills and resources to run for higher office (i.e., jacobson ; jacobson and kernell ). state legislatures are the most common stepping stone to the house, and more than half of house members came through this pathway (manning ). there is no significant gender or party difference in the percentage of members of congress with state legislative backgrounds either: % of men and % of women, and % of democrats and % of republicans, have state legislative experience (carnes ). the pool of state legislators offers insight into pro- gressive ambition, or the decision to run for higher office (schlesinger ). yet it is also the case that candidates come from other avenues (carroll and san- bonmatsu ), and we seek to examine gender dif- ferences beyond previous officeholders as well. our second pool includes , individuals, all nonincum- bents, who are identified in local and statewide news- papers as potential u.s. senate candidates for all primary elections from to (king ). the local knowledge that journalists have of the polit- ical landscape results in a unique pool of potential candidates who are much closer to the decision to the potential senate candidate dataset was not constructed based on occupation, but we also explored whether the men and women in this sample have distinct occupational backgrounds in light of carroll and sanbonmatsu’s ( ) findings. in this dataset, the percentage of women with backgrounds in law, education, and business is , , and %, respectively. the percentage of men with backgrounds in each is , , and %, respectively. thus, while women are more likely to have backgrounds in education than men, it is also the case that more women in this sample come from law than education, despite their much lower numbers among employed women. for the senate pool, we additionally considered the possibility that journalists are more likely to name men than equally qualified women. we examined whether male u.s. house members in a state were more likely to be named in newspapers than female house members, but we found no indication of gender differences. danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s run, and this sample allows us to uncover gender disparities in the late stages of candidate entry. these individuals come from a variety of backgrounds, ran- ging from novices to career politicians. specifically, % have held elected office and % have not, which shows journalists’ coverage of potential candidates extends beyond well-known political figures. this sam- ple is especially valuable for examining women’s under- representation in the senate because female senators are less likely to follow the traditional pathway from the u.s. house to the senate than male senators. the pools above offer a window into those who are among the most likely to run for congress. however, because these women already have an interest in run- ning, they may flatten gender differences in rates of entry. we draw on a third sample of nearly , lawyers who made political contributions (bonica and sen ). lawyers are times more likely to run for congress than the average american, and lawyer-donors are particularly influential because they provide early money that signals candidate viability (bonica ). law is a common pipeline to congress for both men and women: % of men and % of women who were elected to the u.s. house from to had law degrees (p < . ; calculated by authors with data from bonica ), and the gap has further decreased since ( % of men and % of women in the th house have law degrees; chinoy and ma ). moreover, male and female lawyers alike are more likely to win than nonlawyers (bonica ). among nonincumbent win- ners from to , % of women and % of men had law degrees (calculated by authors with data from bonica ). we use the sample of lawyer-donors in the martindale-hubbell directory that bonica and sen ( ) combined with fec records, and we mergedthem with bonica’s ( ) dime dataset to identify whether they ran for state or federal office from to . , descriptive statistics of the three pools are provided in table . rates of entry and the total number of individuals are shown by party. the variation in rates of entry reflects the nature of the samples, but the bivariate gender differences within each pool are not especially large. among the state legislators, . % of women and . % of men ran for the house, and no statistically significant gender differences emerge by party. because the potential senate candidates have been named as likely candidates, their rates of emer- gence are much higher. the gender disparity is statis- tically significant but not especially large— % of women and % of men ran—and it is not significant among democrats. among lawyer-donors, women are statistically less likely to run for office than men, but the table . rates of entry and number of potential candidates across pools and by party sample: source: office sought: ( ) state legislators thomsen ( ) u.s. house ( ) named in newspapers king ( ) u.s. senate ( ) lawyer-donors bonica and sen ( ) state or federal office all women men women men women men rate of entry (%) . . . ** . . ** . raw number , , , , , total candidates , , democrats women men women men women men rate of entry (%) . . . . . ** . raw number , , , , , total candidates , republicans women men women men women men rate of entry (%) . . . ** . . ** . raw number , , , , , total candidates note: **p < . , *p < . . in the – th congresses, % of male senators and % of female senators had house experience. offices are coded by the federal election commission. state-level offices include state-level executive and legislative offices; judicial offices are excluded because not all judicial candidates need to raise money so their coverage in the dime data is more limited. federal- level offices include the presidency, the u.s. house, and the u.s. senate. in appendix a, we provide a full discussion of how we validated this measure. lawyer-donors are coded as republicans (democrats) if they give more than half of their donations to republican (democratic) candi- dates. the vast majority contribute to one party: the lawyer-donors coded as democrats give, on average, % of their donations to democrats,and those coded as republicans give % of theirdonations to republicans. about % of the lawyer-donors who ran did so as independents, but they are coded as democrats or republicans if they fit the criteria above. the results are the same when they are excluded. this differs from the finding in brown et al. ( ), who use an rdd to show that the effect of state legislative service on running for congress is twice as large for men as women. however, their sample is limited to mixed-gender close elections and is not reflective of the gender makeup of state legislative candidates. as a result, they are unable to consider how much more likely to run women would need to be to reach parity with men. women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s difference is not overwhelming: . % of women and . % of men ran for state or federal office. had women run at the same rate as men, this would have resulted in more female candidates in this -year period, or about per cycle. but male candidates still would have outnumbered women nearly fourfold. gender differences, or a lack thereof, in average rates of running can obscure gender and partisan dis- parities in the raw number of men and women in each pool. among the state legislators, there are , democratic men and , republican men, com- pared with , democratic women and , repub- lican women. women make up an even smaller proportion of likely senate candidates. in this sample, there are , democratic men and , republican men, compared with democratic women and republican women. men dominate the pool of lawyer-donors as well: of the , lawyer-donors, , are democratic men, , are republican men, , are democratic women, and , are republican women. this gender skew has serious impli- cations for the number of male and female runners, above and beyond statistically significant gender differences in rates of entry. to be sure, scholars can and do draw on a variety of potential candidate pools to study political ambition and candidate emergence. the strength of these pools is that they allow us to examine individuals with traditional and nontraditional backgrounds and those with varying likelihoods of running for different offices. although we do not delve into why these pools are male dominated, we use the year that lawyer-donors were admitted to the bar to look at the gender com- position by age cohort in this sample (bonica and sen ). the average female lawyer-donor is years into her career, or probably around years old. among democrats, women make up % of lawyer- donors who are less than years into their careers but only % of those in the profession for longer. among republicans, women comprise % of lawyer-donors who are less than years into their careers and a mere % of those in the profession for longer. much of this reflects the entry of more women into law over time, but some of it may be due to women exiting as well. we also split the sample in table to examine candidate emergence among lawyer-donors by age, and the gender gap is far more pronounced among younger lawyer-donors. even so, we think the larger number of younger women bodes much better for the future of women’s representation. the many reasons why there are fewer women in the pipeline are beyond the scope of our analysis, but we are more interested in how the gender makeup of any typical pathway to office inter- acts with gender disparities in candidate emergence. women have to be far more likely to run than men the main benefit of using samples that reflect the actual gender makeup of the pipeline is that we can examine the rate at which women would need to run to match the number of male candidates. the gray bars in figure show the rates of entry for male and female state legislators (left panel) and lawyer-donors (right panel) for the full sample and by party. the black bars depict the rate at which women would need to run to reach parity with men given the gender makeup of the pools. as noted above, in the sample of state legislators, . % of men and . % of women ran for the u.s. house, which resulted in male candidates and female candidates. if women had run at the same rate as men, the number of women candidates would have increased to , but this falls far short of the number of men. in fact, women would have to be three times more likely to run than men to match the number of male candidates ( . % vs. . %). the par- tisan disparities are even starker due to the dearth of gop women. to reach parity with men, republican women would have to be nearly five times more likely to run than their male co-partisans ( . % vs. . %), whereas democratic women would need to be nearly two and a half times more likely to do so than demo- cratic men ( . % vs. . %). in the sample of lawyer-donors, . % of men and . % of women ran for state or federal office, which amounted to , male candidates and female candidates. here, too, women would have to be three and a half times more likely to run than men to match the number of male candidates ( . % vs. . %). if we split the sample by party, we see the same pattern as in the sample of state legislators: among democrats, . % of men and . % of women ran for office, which totaled , men and women candidates. democratic women would have to be three times more likely to run than democratic men to reach parity ( . % vs. . %). among republican lawyer-donors, . % of men and . % of women ran, which totaled male and female candidates, but republican women would have to be six times more likely to run than their male co-partisans to equal the number of men ( . % vs. . %). in appendix b, we more fully examine the relation- ship between gender and candidate emergence across these samples and account for a variety of electoral and partisan factors. we do not present those results here because they are less directly relevant for our argu- ment, but the relationships are similar to those in table . in the pool of state legislators and potential senate candidates, there is no significant gender differ- ence in the likelihood of running for office, and in the pool of lawyer-donors, women are significantly less likely to run for state and federal office than their male rates of entry for women and men in the first years of their careers are . % and . %, respectively, whereas the rate of entry for both women and men in the profession for longer is . %. this pattern is consistent with research showing that older women are more likely to run for office because their family responsibilities have diminished (carroll and sanbonmatsu ; see also teele, kalla, and rosenbluth ). the potential senate candidates are not shown in figure because even if all women had run, the number of male candidates still would have tripled the number of female candidates. danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s counterparts. a full description of the data and vari- ables is provided in appendix b. the size of the “return” on equal rates of entry—that is, the number of additional women who would run— varies depending on the actual disparity in these rates and the number of women in the pipeline. the advan- tage of the design here is that we are able to measure both of these. table shows how the overall number of women candidates would change in these pools if women’s rates of entry were the same as men’s. if women state legislators had sought higher office at the same rate as men, the number of female house candi- dates would have increased only minimally, from to . by comparison, the returns are larger in the senate pool and the lawyer-donor pool. in the senate pool, equal rates of entry would have resulted in an increase of women candidates (from to ). in the lawyer-donor pool, if women had run at the same rate as men, the number of women would have risen by , from to . yet we want to emphasize that, in all of these scenarios, equal rates of entry would still result in dramatically more male candidates than female candidates. table also illustrates how the number of women candidates would change if women ran at the same rate as in our samples but instead comprised half of each pool. in all three pools, the number of women candi- dates would double, triple, or quadruple the number of actual women candidates regardless of whether women were less likely to run than men. one implication is that women’s organizations and candidate training programs could focus their attention on, for example, the kinds of legal careers that attract more women, because even small increases in rates of entry would translate into larger numbers of women candidates. for those concerned about gender parity in both parties, the dearth of republican women candidates is likely to be a persistent problem due to the lack of gop women in the pipeline. the findings echo those in crowder-meyer and lauderdale ( ), who simi- larly show that republican women are dramatically outnumbered among potential candidates. for the most part, scholars have examined the growing parti- san gap in women’s representation through the lens of fundraising patterns, regional realignments, and ideo- logical changes in the parties (i.e., crowder-meyer and cooperman ; elder ; thomsen ; thomsen and swers ). yet the disparity across pools sheds light on the distinct benches of the two parties and suggests that solutions to underrepresen- tation will likely differ by party as well. to elect republican women, organizations may want to iden- tify a number of targets and throw their support behind these individuals. on the democratic side, resources could be more evenly distributed across women due to their larger numbers. scholars in multi- party systems might also consider different figure . women have to be more likely to run than men to equal the number of male candidates, especially among republicans . . . . . . . . . r a te o f c a n d id a te e n tr y (% ) all democrats republicans state legislators men, actual women, actual women, needed for parity . . . . . . . . . r a te o f c a n d id a te e n tr y (% ) all democrats republicans lawyer-donors men, actual women, actual women, needed for parity note: rates of entry are calculated from the samples of state legislators and lawyer-donors used in table . we also used palmer and simon’s ( ) measure of women- friendly congressional districts to examine districts with demographic profiles that are more favorable to the election of women—namely, more urban, diverse, and wealthier districts. we interacted women- friendly district with gender to see if women were more likely to run in these districts, but the interaction is insignificant across models (see appendix c). however, women do make up a greater proportion of the sample in women-friendly districts. women comprise % of the sample of state legislators in more women-friendly districts (meas- ured as the median and above), vs. % in less women-friendly districts. as a result, the pool of likely women candidates is much larger, which lends additional support to the argument that the gender makeup of the eligibility pool plays a key role in patterns of women’s representation. women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s prescriptions by party depending on the gender makeup of the pipelines to office. expanding the occupational pathways to office another way to increase women’s representation that departs from the analyses above is to change what the pipeline professions are. over two decades ago, darcy, welch, and clark ( , ) wrote, “women’s occupations and activities have not provided the same sort of gateway to political office as prestigious male occupations.” indeed, women and men alike still enter office through male-dominated professions, but there are important differences across legislative institu- tions with respect to occupational pathways. in the american context, some state legislatures have more teachers in office, while others have more lawyers and business owners. one implication of our argument is that women should make up a greater proportion of legislators in states where more officeholders come from female-dominated occupations like education and health care, and women should make up a smaller proportion of legislators in states where more office- holders come from male-dominated occupations like law and business. we could also leverage variation in pathways to office across countries to test whether women’s representation increases when more legisla- tors come from female-dominated professions. to briefly examine this possibility within the united states, we draw on occupational data from the national conference of state legislatures that extend over four years ( , , , and ). the dependent variable is the percentage of women in state legislative office. the independent variables are the percentages of legislators with backgrounds in law, business, edu- cation, homemaking, health care, and agriculture. state and year fixed effects are also included in the model. other factors certainly play a role in these patterns, but the relationships in table conform to expectations. women’s representation is lower in contexts where more legislators have backgrounds in law and higher in contexts where more legislators have backgrounds in education and homemaking. figure shows the predicted values of women’s representation in state legislatures as the percentage of lawyers and educators changes. an increase from the minimum to the maximum percentage of legislators withbackgroundsinlaw correspondstoa nine percentage point decrease in the percentage of women in office. a similar increase in the percentage of legislators with backgrounds in education corresponds to a four point increase in the percentage of female legislators. to provide historical perspective, it has taken nearly three decades for the average level of women’s representation in state legislatures to increase by nine percentage points. with the exception of , the largest single- year increase in women’s representation in state legisla- tures since the early s has been one percentage point (cawp ). the historic elections resulted in a three and a half point increase in women’s repre- sentation in state legislatures and a three point increase in women’s representation in congress (cawp ). in light of the significant gains made in , particu- larly among democratic women, we briefly consider the election in the context of our argument about the gender skew in the pipelines to office. we examine table . how rates of entry and supply affect the number of women candidates sample: office sought: ( ) state legislators u.s. house ( ) named in newspapers u.s. senate ( ) lawyer-donors state or federal office all women candidates, actual if rate of entry equaled men’s if women comprised half of pool democrats women candidates, actual if rate of entry equaled men’s if women comprised half of pool republicans women candidates, actual if rate of entry equaled men’s if women comprised half of pool due to data limitations, we are unable to compare average rates of entry for teachers and lawyers. teachers are less likely to run for office than lawyers given their numbers in office compared with their numbers in the workforce, but we are unable to evaluate how much more likely to run teachers would need to be for the gender gap to diminish. another implication is that women should make up a greater proportion of state and federal (congressional) candidates when they comprise a greater proportion of lawyer-donors (state legislators). we find preliminary support for this expectation. the results are not shown here due to space constraints but are provided in appendix d. danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s whether was unique in terms of the occupational pathways to office for women candidates. if the profes- sional backgrounds of women runners or winners were distinct in , it may indicate either that the election was an outlier or that the traditional avenues to office have shifted. however, if the women who ran and were elected in had similar backgrounds as those in previous years, it would suggest that contextual factors like the election of donald trump, the #metoo move- ment, and the general sense that sexism became more brazen in american politics after the elections are a better explanation for the increase in women’s candida- cies in than changes in the typical pathways to office. we use data from project vote smart to compare the backgrounds of the women who ran for the u.s. house in with those who ran in the previous four elec- tions ( – ). we focus on nonincumbent demo- cratic women since they drove the gains, with occupations divided into education, law, business, and health care. the number of women increased across these occupation types, but their makeup was not much different than in the previous four cycles. in , % had backgrounds in education, % in law, % in business, and % in health care, whereas from to , these percentages averaged , , , and %, respectively. the makeup of female winners also did not differ: newly elected women were not more likely to have backgrounds in education or health care than women elected prior to , nor were they less likely to have law or business backgrounds. further- more, and similar to other years, women lawyers from both parties were more likely to be elected to office than women nonlawyers ( % vs. % in , com- pared with % vs. % in – ). in fact, of the women currently serving in the house, % of the women elected in have law degrees compared with % of the women elected in other years (chinoy and ma ). these patterns make our argu- ment even more compelling given our emphasis on the dearth of women in the traditional pathways to office. one key factor that shaped women’s success in was that democratic women were far more likely to win. indeed, the primary victory rate of democratic women doubled that of their male co-partisans (cawp ). among democratic lawyers in our occupational data, women were nearly three times more likely to be elected than men ( % and %, respectively) and also more likely to be elected than women in previous years ( % and %, respectively). among democratic non- incumbents who won in , the raw number of women with law degrees actually surpassed the number of men with law degrees ( and , respectively; chinoy and ma ). thus, while more women ran for office, it is clear that demand-side factors favoring the election of women contributed to their successes as well. despite these gains, we think a more reliable path to gender parity in legislative office is one in which the number of male and female candidates is equal. it is important to note that we are not arguing that legislators should have backgrounds in law or business rather than education. to the contrary, we think the traditional pathways to office are a hindrance to the election of women. moreover, there is ample evidence of the representational and policy drawbacks of the overrepresentation of lawyers and white-collar profes- sionals in politics (bonica ; carnes ; ). our argument is instead that since many male and female candidates do come through male-dominated pipelines, we need to more seriously consider gender disparities within these pathways to understand the continued underrepresentation of women and republican women in particular. conclusion over the last two decades, most of the gender research in american politics has focused on the reasons for the ambition gap between men and women and various ways to foster women’s political ambition. there is substantial evidence across studies that recruitment and support from party and community leaders is a crucial mechanism for the advancement of women in politics. candidate training programs have emerged within the united states and abroad to help translate women’s political interest into candidacies (kreitzer and osborn ; piscopo ; sanbonmatsu ). these efforts are invaluable for encouraging the near runners to throw their hats in the ring. however, we table . occupational pathways to office and women’s representation percentage of women in state legislature law - . ** ( . ) business - . ( . ) education . * ( . ) homemaking . ** ( . ) health care . ( . ) agriculture - . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) observations r . note: entries are ols regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. the dependent variable is the percentage of women in state legislative office. ncsl occupational data are for all states in , , , and . the model includes state and year fixed effects. **p < . , *p < . . dittmar ( ) finds that almost half of all democratic nonincum- bent female house candidates expressed urgency, anger, frustration, or threat in explaining why they ran for office in . just one in five gop women described any of these feelings as motivating their candidacies. women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s think the hurdles to gender equality in legislative insti- tutions are greater than the ambition deficit, and we are skeptical that equal rates of running will result in an equal number of male and female candidates. in this article, we leveraged a variety of datasets to shed new light on how the gender skew in the potential candidate pool continues to matter for the election of women to office in the american context. although educational and labor force patterns have changed over time, the pipeline to political power remains over- whelmingly male. as a result, women have to be far more likely to run for office than men for the gender gap in candidates to close, particularly on the republican side. the upshot is that women need to have higher levels of political ambition, lower levels of election aver- sion, and be more likely to be recruited thanmen to reach gender parity. an additional question for future studies of candidate emergence—within the gender and politics subfield and beyond—is whether potential candidate pools should be based on those who are most likely to run, those who are more numerous in the legislature (but may be less likely to run, on average), or those who are most likely to win. these answers are sometimes the same, but not always and not across institutions. to be sure, the pathways to office and methods of candidate selection vary dramatically by context. our focus is on the united states, but scholars of compara- tive politics might similarly examine gender disparities in the potential candidate pools from which party lead- ers recruit. while quotas have become increasingly common cross-nationally, party gatekeepers can still hamper women’s success (i.e., krook ; schwindt- bayer ). importantly, women may be disadvan- taged twice: first, in a biased selection rate, and second, due to the overrepresentation of men in the pipeline to office. a clear extension of our findings is that party gatekeepers may need to be more likely to recruit women to achieve gender parity in party lists (see davidson-schmich ). some pipelines to office likely include more women than others, and scholars can leverage variation across contexts to examine how the gendered pipeline to office matters for both candidate emergence and recruitment efforts by party leaders. in sum, the broader goal of this article is to generate a new conversation about how to study women’s under- representation. first, we think scholars should engage more directly with the actual decision to run or stand for office. there is substantial empirical distance between considering a candidacy and running for office, and we need to know more about gender differ- ences in the decision to run itself. in addition, the gender makeup of the potential candidate pools in our research should more closely mirror that of actual potential candidate pools. only then can we know whether equal rates of entry are enough to close the gender gap in candidates. we are certainly not the first to highlight the gender skew in the pipeline, but we are the first to consider how rates of entry interact with the pipeline and matter for the number of women who run. we hope that our findings offer a compelling starting point for a renewed discussion of the gendered pipeline to power. recent empirical advances and the availabil- ity of more data across offices make this an increasingly feasible endeavor for scholars of gender and politics. supplementary materials to view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/ . /s . replication materials can be found on dataverse at: https://doi.org/ . /dvn/fczdkd. references allen, peter, and david cutts. . “aspirant candidate behaviour and progressive ambition.” research and politics ( ): – . figure . lawyer-legislators (educator-legislators) are negatively (positively) associated with women’s representation w o m e n s ta te l e g is la to rs ( % ) percent lawyers w o m e n s ta te l e g is la to rs ( % ) percent educators note: values are calculated from the model in table . danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s http://dx.doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /dvn/fczdkd https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s allen, peter, and david cutts. . “personality and the gender gap in political ambition.” european journal of politics and gender ( ): – . american bar association (aba). . “a snapshot of women in the law in the year .” accessed february , . https:// www.americanbar.org/. american bar association (aba). . “a current glance at women in the law.” accessed february , . https:// www.americanbar.org/. anzia, sarah f., and christopher r. berry. . “the jackie (and jill) robinson effect: why do congresswomen outperform congressmen?” american journal of political science ( ): – . bauer, nichole m. . “who stereotypes female candidates? identifying individual differences in feminine stereotype reliance.” politics, groups, and identities ( ): – . bonica, adam. . “mapping the ideological marketplace.” american journal of political science ( ): – . bonica, adam. . “why are there so many lawyers in congress?” legislative studies quarterly ( ): – . bonica, adam, and maya sen. . “the politics of selecting the bench from the bar: the legal profession and partisan incentives to introduce ideology into judicial selection.” journal of law and economics ( ): – . brown, ryan, hani mansour, stephen d. o’connell, and james reeves. . “gender differences in political career progression: evidence from u.s. elections.” iza discussion paper no. . burns, nancy, kay lehman schlozman, and sidney verba. . the private roots of public action: gender, equality, and political participation. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. burrell, barbara c. . a woman’s place is in the house: campaigning for congress in the feminist era. ann arbor: university of michigan press. carnes, nicholas. . congressional leadership and social status (class) dataset, v. . 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( ). management education in turbulent times: journal of management education special issue. journal of management education, ( ), - . accepted for publication | may , orcid number: - - - doi: https://doi.org/ . / lisa anderson professor of management development, associate dean postgraduate vice chair management knowledge and education, british academy of management liverpool university, liverpool, l bx paul hibbert, professor of management, dean of arts & divinity university of st andrews school of management, fife, ky rj christine rivers co-director centre for management learning university of surrey, surrey business school, guildford, surrey gu xh katy mason professor markets, marketing and management lancaster university management school lancaster, la yx http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/ . / http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/ . / http://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . % f http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/ https://www.facebook.com/lancastermanagement https://twitter.com/lancastermanage http://www.youtube.com/user/lancastermanagement http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid= &trk=anet_ug_hm http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/about/reputation/accreditation/ management education in turbulent times introduction this special section was initiated and curated by us, as members of the british academy of management’s management knowledge and education (mke) project. mke is an academy- wide initiative, launched in to advance the creation and circulation of innovative and transformative research that deepens and broadens our understanding of management knowledge, knowing, education and learning. mke sets out a framework to support both theory-driven and phenomenon-driven research within and across the wide variety of setting where knowledge generation, learning and management education unfolds. for our members, in common with the authors of the journal of management education, the sites of inquiry are varied, ranging anything from the traditional classroom and lecture theatre (cf. durant, carlon and downs , dyer and hurd ), to organizational setting where researcher-practitioner working spaces generate insights through action-oriented, collaborative research (cf. cunliffe and scaratti , radaelli et al. ). interests extend to educational and learning encounters in virtual and digital spaces, and the use and assemblages of new technologies, forms of expertise and capabilities that are generating new learning experiences (arbaugh , martins and kellermanns ). many of these innovations are responses to the turbulent and rapidly changing management environments that our students and management learners are encountering (see for example, hibbert , wright and katz ), which contrasts sharply with the speed and time it often takes to learn and generate transformative insight (dean and forray ). our aim then is to support our community in striving to understand management learning and education however and wherever it happens in these turbulent times. turbulent times in the higher education context for business schools turbulence: a state of conflict or confusion (oxford english dictionary, ) the timing of the mke initiative is no accident. it emerges in a context of critical commentaries concerning the higher education (he) landscape which are proving unsettling for many institutions. i in the us and uk in particular there are increasing political concerns about the cost of he, and who accesses, pays for and profits from it. these concerns have led some commentators to question the relevance of skill sets developed in universities, the power of these skill sets to open up job opportunities for graduates, and the capabilities of he institutions to support workplace transition (craig ). in the uk, these types of concerns have already resulted in a new regulatory framework. on th april , the uk passed the higher education and research act, creating an office for students with a responsibility to further develop the regulatory framework to deal with such issues. ii for some, the very value of management education is in question, for others the value is much clearer (bennis and o'toole ). in the context of this debate, in a recent article in times higher education (cameron ), the vice chancellor of aston university urges us to rethink the role of business and management schools within universities and argues that we can no longer afford to view business schools as a ‘cash cow’. drawing on trends observed at uk and australian he institutions, cameron argues that the value of business schools lies in the impact and engagement that business and management academics generate with extra-institutional agencies and actors: “ …greater recognition of research impact beyond its academic impact… is a natural strength for business schools and their engagement with business often opens the doors for engagement from other disciplines in the university.” (alec cameron, vc aston university) developing links between business and management schools through what is often referred to as the ‘real world engagement’ or ‘knowledge exchange’ activities is becoming critical as these external stakeholders are increasingly recognized as not just the beneficiaries of he provision but increasingly as co-creators of valued management knowledge, theory and practice (beech, macintosh and maclean ). knowledge exchange is also an important consideration for most research funding agencies. in the knowledge exchange and research council institutes report (hughes et al. ), for example, % of the respondents surveyed reported engagement with external organizations, with % of respondents spending at least % of their time engaged in knowledge exchange activities. on average staff reported spending % of their work time on engagement in knowledge exchange activities with external organizations. iii while these findings extend beyond the field of management, they act as a useful benchmark for our field as a key concern here is commercialization, economization and capitalizations of scientific knowledge – all central areas of expertise within the management field. the criticality of funding for the engagement and impact program and to the rethinking of what management education might look like, and how and where management education might happen in the future, is further amplified in the uk context by brexit. brexit threatens to remove important streams of research and engagement funding from the uk he sector. as angus laing, dean, lancaster university business school observed in the he forum wonkhe iv , “…business schools have been successful in securing funding to support sme development from the private sector, whether in the form of bank funding such as the goldman sachs small businesses programme, or in the form of bae systems support for innovation in their sme supply chain. however, such funding cannot support the wider range of business support activities which business schools are distinctively well placed to delivery.” (laing ) we argue that the impact agenda offers new opportunities for management education: new opportunities to consider how and where management education and learning can be best situated, offering opportunities to develop innovative forms of learning that speak to both the turbulent environment of he and the inextricably linked turbulent business environment, of which management education is so much a part. in what was a the time considered by some as a shocking argument, bennis and o'toole ( : ) claim that for a while business schools have been on the wrong track. for them, the ‘crisis’ in management education can be traced to a dramatic shift in the culture of business schools: “during the past several decades, many leading business schools have quietly adopted an inappropriate—and ultimately self-defeating—model of academic excellence. instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculties understand important drivers of business performance, they measure themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. they have adopted a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology. some of the research produced is excellent, but because so little of it is grounded in actual business practices, the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed—and less and less relevant to practitioners.” an outcome of this shift has been the need to persuade a jury of sophisticated peers (mccloskey ) of the merits of a scholarly publication at the expense of making research accessible to managers. today, few practicing managers find management research presented in a form that they find useful (markides ). in a recent special issue on ‘impact and management research’ in the british journal of management, macintosh et al. ( ) argue that the field of management would make serious gains by seeking to explore and exploit the integrated nature of education, practice, research and scholarship, and that our field has much to learn from other disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven. in the same si, (anderson, ellwood and coleman ) question the way the ‘gap’ between researchers and practitioners is understood and show how a more equal relationship (bartunek and rynes ) can be created through ‘relational management education’. their approach builds a community of inquirers by reassembling the various actors and activities in and associated with business schools: publication, researcher-educators, teachers of full- and part-time students, future and current practitioners, and executive educationalists and consultancies. the crucial factor is that all such activities are undertaken in a scholarly fashion – that is, that they foster critical thinking rather than technical or instrumental training or application of ideas. the focus then becomes the co-creation of ideas, the challenging of existing ideas and practices and a willingness to disrupt and experience discomfort while learning. such approaches are opening up opportunities for us to generate new understandings about what management practitioners do with the theories and management tools we equip them with, how they come to work out what is worth doing and what is valuable to them and their work (mason, kjellberg and hagberg ). a key challenge for our community is therefore in making knowledge exchange and collaboration connections work well for educators, learners and their respective institutions and organizations. but this is less than straightforward. evans and plewa ( ) discuss the challenges that australian business schools have faced in attempting to do this, evidencing their claim with the australia’s poor performance at nd in the world ‘innovation efficiency ratio’ rankings: a measure comparing innovation inputs to outputs. in a survey of academics in south australia, evans and plewa ( ) found that % of respondents said that engaging with end users is difficult, that they don’t have relevant skills, or personal contacts or that it would detract them from undertaking other research. it seems that while academics do want to engage, they need more institutional support to enable them to do so. one such example of this can be found in the university of surrey’s centre for management learning that aims to bring academia and practice closer together. in many ways, the mke initiative is a reaction to this changing and turbulent environment. the british academy of management and the mke initiative in particular, has become concerned with how these concerns are being discussed and addressed in different forums. it is also a response to calls from our community for learned societies to have a louder voice in shaping the policy debates, unfolding understanding of scholarship in policy-making and non-he arenas, and critically, to support and celebrate the innovations and improvements the practice of management education so often generates. by arguing that these three elements - policy, scholarship and practice of management education - are mutually reinforcing rather than operating in isolation, we think our community has much to gain and is well positioned to influence a holistic, cohesive and coordinated effort to make progress. we argue that by exploring the relationships between social and economic value we can develop, more effectively, management education that works for the varied stakeholders that constitute our management communities. we have explored, earlier, some of the tensions within those relationships, and we acknowledge that a sense of dissonance can also allow genuine innovation to be achieved in ways that also justify effort and investment in better management scholarship and education (cf. stark ). this special section represents an intervention to take a first innovative step on our journey: to encourage and develop scholarship that both reflects and influences the turbulent policy and practice contexts in the field of management education. paying due regard to the breadth of those contexts, we are delighted that bam’s international membership is reflected in this special section on management education in turbulent times. turbulent times in the broader socio-economic context we introduced this special section by considering what turbulence means for the he sector and for the business and management field in particular. yet the idea for this special section came about in late at a time of unanticipated political schisms and following a series of world events that presented themselves as unsettling juxtapositions – and widely addressed in the media through a business and management practice lens. this lens repeatedly illustrated the inseparability of social and economic values. in multiple politic arenas, extreme views became popular and were legitimized through the ballot box, leading to divisions in opinion that were characterized by acrimony and recrimination; the election of donald trump and the uk’s brexit vote have dramatically changed western politics and are raising questions about the world order and global trade. in the preceding year, a modern diaspora in the shape of the syrian refugee crisis saw sunbathers on greek beaches witnessing the arrival, in dinghies, of desperate families trying to find safe haven from the murderous conditions of their homeland. the divide between the world’s richest and poorest people continued to grow to the extent that it now takes four days for the chief executive of one of the world’s five largest fashion retailers to earn as much as a bangladeshi garment worker will earn in his or her lifetime (oxfam ). despite reports in that a global recession was likely, the economic forecast now appears to be more optimistic (behravesh ) and the threats of a repeat of the financial crisis of ten years ago have dissipated. however, there are still questions about the neoliberalist and free market capitalist model upon which this growth is based, in particular, how it affects the weakest members of society and its role in engendering extreme political views because of its potential to create turbulence and shocks such as those of (see bridgman et al. in this issue). as the wider backdrop to all of this, our natural environment is no longer stable, with climate change cited as the biggest threat faced by the world with its attendant economic and social implications (wwf ). these political, economic, social and environmental conditions all have a significant impact on organizations and on managers in particular. in the period of development of the papers in this section, there have been numerous high-profile events that have made many of us question whether organizations are managed in the way we might have once thought. for example, facebook users who benignly and unknowingly offered up their personal details have learned that their data may have been harvested to target voters in the us presidential election and possibly in the referendum that led to brexit (greenfield ); the #metoo movement has exposed widespread sexual harassment in hollywood and beyond and there are accounts of aid workers sexually abusing children in the aftermath of the earthquakes in haiti (dearden ). these events, along with many others, have raised questions about the way in which work is defined, how it should be conducted and the power relationships that underpin it. in the midst of what appears to be a moral crisis, companies are under pressure to manage the triple bottom line and justify corporate behaviour by evaluating environmental, social and governance performance (elkington , tamimi and sebastianelli ). hahn et al. ( : ) suggest that organizations need ‘to address multiple desirable but conflicting economic, environmental and social outcomes at firm and societal levels that operate in different time frames and follow different logics’. this in turn creates a number of tensions for managers charged with corporate sustainability that emanate from having to make choices between business and values, long-term and short-term goals (carollo and guerci ). managers at every level and in every discipline have always dealt with a certain degree of messiness but as we look forward to the third decade of the twenty first century, this messiness is overlaid with a stronger sense of unpredictability (roberts , van bueren, klijn and koppenjan ). this means that managers are likely to be dealing with ‘wicked’, intractable and ill-defined issues and problems as a matter of course, in an environment that is characterized by conflict and confusion, in other words, turbulence. the role of management educators the question we posed as a starting point for this special section was: as educators, what should we be doing, and helping future managers learn how to do, to deal with turbulent times? we have argued that business schools and management educators are in a unique position to influence current and future managers to both respond to and initiate change in the face of societal change because it manifests itself strongly in organizational life. managers’ actions and the values that underpin them have become increasingly pivotal in the everyday work of colleagues and the long-term futures of colleagues and stakeholders. in the british academy of management, in conjunction with the higher education academy (now named advance he) carried out a study asking management education practitioners how they understood the challenges they faced in the future (bulman , mason ). the findings were published in a white paper, ‘innovating learning and teaching for excellence in management’ (mason ). many of the issues raised in that report have been discussed above; but one of the more surprising findings was that respondents told us that those publishing in the management education area are often not recognized by their institutions as key contributors to the field. in response, this si demonstrates and celebrates the dexterity and creativity inherent in the scholarship of management education. it recognizes the plurality of approaches that are potentially useful for addressing the contemporary challenges and criticisms of management education and we think it illustrates the valuable contributions of scholars in field, dealing with contemporary management practice issues. we highlighted three approaches in particular: using management theories to characterize and understand the nature of turbulence recent research approaches to characterizing and addressing turbulence include work that is focused on industry turbulence and contingency theory (karim, carroll and long ), environmental uncertainty and responses to it, based on resource dependency (bogers, boyd and hollensen ), and exploration of how inter- and intra-organizational networks provide resilience and a basis for organizational innovation in crisis circumstances (lundberg, andresen and törnroos ). we see value in management educationalists taking up these kinds of research in the classroom as part of conventional management education classes. understanding the different forms that turbulence takes, the strategies and approaches managers have adopted to overcome challenges and seek out and create innovative opportunities for collective action in times of turbulence seems particularly pertinent to the demands made on and for reflexive managers, who are able to learn from, react to and quickly reassemble new, productive futures. developing new curricula, content and educational processes to fit the changing times management educators have already given some thought to the content and processes, in and out of the classroom, that are appropriate for changing times. interesting recent examples include re-examination of the case method and the legitimacy of business schools (bridgman, cummings and mclaughlin ), integrating sustainability issues and study abroad experiences in the curriculum in order to develop globally aware, responsible managers (pesonen , sroufe et al. , viswanathan ), developing management classes around emerging educational approaches such as threshold concepts (burch et al. , hibbert and cunliffe , wright and gilmore , yip and raelin ), and employing critical approaches that challenge the status quo (kark, preser and zion-waldoks ). developing adaptive, reflexive approaches to support personal resilience and flexibility there may be a need for both students and educators to develop resilience in turbulent times, but resilience can take many forms. practically, organizational and personal resilience are argued to be related, and rely on ‘soft skills’ as well as adequate resources to enable change (richtnér and löfsten ). however, there needs to be some concern for how this feeds into moral decision making if our responses to turbulence are not to involve a ‘race to the bottom’. ethical resilience builds on critically reflexive understandings of the existential, relational and moral character of leadership and management (cunliffe , cunliffe ) , so that one is aware of the need to change while remaining aware of the consequences and effects of change on others. focusing these insights more clearly on management education may require developments of critical pedagogies and multidisciplinary approaches, especially if we expect students to be adaptive and creative in the face of complex challenges and, perhaps, also agents of positive social change (dehler , welsh and dehler ). inherent in all three of these approaches (and in the papers that are included in the special section) is the notion that business schools should consider the ways in which managers engage with knowledge in order to develop new ways of framing wicked, complex and perplexing problems (dewey ). complex situations require managers to develop ‘complicated understanding’ to increase the variety of ways in which situations can be understood (bartunek, gordon and weathersby ). however, recent moves in the university sector in the uk, most markedly, the introduction of student fees and the introduction of league tables of everything remotely measurable in he, has resulted in ‘consumers’ of higher education being encouraged and led to expect that the main purpose of studying for a degree is to command a higher salary on completion than would have been possible without the qualification. this had led to an increasing marketization of the management classroom, where knowledge is viewed as a commodity that will produce a positive return on investment, rather than the outcome of the development of scholar- practitioners who approach their work with insight, good judgment and an orientation to problematizing before problem-fixing. this is another of those unsettling juxtapositions that we alluded to earlier, and one that affects management educators on a daily basis. we are particularly keen in this issue to emphasize the centrality of a situated and critical view of knowledge in learning about business and management. knowledge understood this way is not just a problem-solving tool or commodity, but as an evolving resource; as learners are ‘struck’ (cunliffe : ) by changes in contexts, they develop the skills of judgment and resilience that allow knowledge to be reconfigured, reframed and reconceptualized. this is the kind of knowledge and associated reflexive learning approach that managers require in a world that changes quickly, in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. we summarize the d e v e lo p in g r e sp o n si v e a n d r e si li e n t m a n a g e m e n t e d u ca ti o n aspects of turbulent environments potential ways in which this reflexive learning approach can be developed in response, in table , after which we introduce the contributions to this special section. political social-economic scientific- technological characterizing turbulent contexts (see: günther, hillmann, duchek and meyr, this issue) explore the plausibility of extreme social movements consider alternative paradigms and ethical failures use future-scoping and imagination developing new educational content (see: bridgman, mclaughlin and cummings, this issue) situate evolving ideas in their (ideological) history link economic and social factors within an ethical framework ground theory specifically but enable use speculatively innovation in curriculum development and delivery (see: schumacher and mayer, this issue) encourage collaborative and informed student engagement situate student engagement in a responsible business model / framework enable a creative design approach to problem framing and solving outcomes: situating adaptive and reflexive personal learning enable students to be informed knowledgeable agents engage students critically in the analysis of business contexts empower student creativity as a means of responsive resilience table : a framework for reflexive learning in turbulent times. as we indicate in table , the papers in this special section overlap – to some degree – with the contributory processes that can lead to responsive and resilient management education in times characterized by political, socio-economic and technological turbulence. we now go on to introduce those papers in more detail. the papers in this special section bridgman, mclaughlin and cummings present a way of using the case method underpinned by principles of critical management education and drawing on arguments that question the legitimacy of management education that is almost universally based on a neoliberal worldview. in particular, they discuss how the case method, ‘the dominant mode of management education for a century’ with its narrow focus on solving problems, can continue to be meaningful when the capitalist structure that dictates the way in which firms operate is under scrutiny. they propose a reflexive role for theory as a means of enabling learners to appreciate a range of views and to understand the broader context of management work. they argue that theory should play a greater role than simply providing a tool for problem solving. they explain how they have used theoretical tools from sociology, political economy, law and industrial relations to unpack the complex relationship between business and society and to offer a set of ‘conceptual lenses’ to work on complex cases. in the conclusion, the paper points to the need to fundamentally rethink the relationship between business and society and to re-examine the role of business schools in order ‘to seize the window of opportunity that turbulent times present’. the use of theories from outside mainstream management writing provides an opportunity for learners to construct new frames of reference and to question the underlying economic, political and social structures within which organizations and managers operate. günther, hillmann, duchek, and meyr’s contribution addresses the manager’s role in creating organizational resilience in times of turbulence. they argue that strategic management education teaches outdated frameworks that do not equip managers to deal with the complex environment in which they operate and that they need to develop personal resilience in the face of such challenges. they also stress that managers must learn to deal with uncertainty and complexity, to think creatively and become critically reflexive managers. they describe an intervention in which they help mba students acquire the knowledge and skills required in effective scenario planning using a case-based method and experiential learning. however, one group had received input on scenario planning whilst another, control group had not. they recorded the interactions of both on video in order to analyze group processes and outcomes and found that the group that understood how to use scenario planning had a clear vision of their aims and experienced less intra-group conflict than the group that did not. they were also more creative, acknowledged ambiguity and became ‘strategic bricoleurs’. as in bridgman et al.’s paper, gunther et al. also show how theoretically informed questions, in this case underpinned by knowledge of scenario planning, can help strategic decision making and lead to greater insight. furthermore, they also show how theory and its clear positioning in pedagogical design can develop relevant competencies. schumacher and mayer also construct a model for teaching around a particular theory. they argue that design thinking helps students prepare to work in turbulent contexts and that its use also creates opportunities for innovation. they offer a conceptual paper with detailed accounts and illustrations of how they teach the core principles of design thinking. their perspective on turbulence proposes that it is due to technological innovations, business model changes and shifting consumer habits that require managers to be able to solve problems and to move from what they call a traditional decision-making attitude to a design-creating attitude. they also build on bicen and johnson’s ( ) work in lean manufacturing and innovation which offers the idea of managers working as bricoleurs with scarce resources and relying on market feedback in order to solve wicked problems. the paper draws on a very current literature to explain the generative potential of design thinking in encouraging students to frame problems as though they were designers and offer two ways of teaching design thinking; an introductory session covering design thinking in one hour and a two and a half day exercise, all with examples from their own practice and based on a set of teachable principles. conclusion our two main conclusions are that: (i) we have only scratched the surface of our special section theme; and (ii) further wide-ranging and collaborative work will be necessary in order to continue to develop management education to support responsiveness and resilience in turbulent times that show little sign of stabilizing. bearing in mind the importance we place on further collaboration, it is important to acknowledge the collaborative context of our won endeavor. accordingly, we would like to thank the contributors to this special section, for helping us to open up an initial conversation about how management education can respond to turbulent times. it is perhaps symptomatic of these turbulent times that there were eighteen further contributions that did not make it to the special section, some of which took a broader position and others that were at a more exploratory stage of development than our editorial timelines could accommodate. nevertheless, we hope that all those developing contributions will find their place in the right part of the debate in due course, and we are grateful for the challenges they already contributed to our thinking. in addition, we recognize that useful innovation often builds on solid foundations; in this case, the long and continuing history of leadership in the scholarship of teaching and learning that underpins the prominence of the journal of management education. so, above all, we are grateful to the editors-in-chief of the journal for providing a home for our conversation, and for their support in helping us to bring it to a (temporary!) conclusion. references anderson, l., ellwood, p. and coleman, c. 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( ). threshold concepts and modalities for teaching leadership practice. management learning ( ), - . i https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/role-business-schools-within-universities ii on rd june , sir michael barber, incoming chair of the new office for students, gave his inaugural speech at universities uk. the ofs is the new regulator for higher education in england and it is due to be established formally from april . in the context of the recently passed higher education and research act higher education and research act r education in england and it is due to be established formally from april .ties uk. o as the 'jewel in the nation's crown'. read the speech: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/documents/sir-michael-barber-speech-uuk-june- .pdf; see video http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/pages/sir-michael-barber-speech-uuk-june- .aspx iii the national centre for universities and business (ncub) is an independent and not-for-profit membership organisation that promotes, develops and supports university-business collaboration across the uk. the national centre's council, is constituted from senior business leaders and vice-to review and make recommendations on the uk’s long-term skills, graduate talent and innovation needs, to deliver collaborative thinking on the big issues of sustainable growth and industrial strategy, and strengthen understanding with government and policy-makers through high level networking. http://ncub.co.uk/reports/knowledge-exchange-and-research-council-institutes.html https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/area-of-work/climate-change-and-energy?pc=arg &pc=arg &gclid=cjwkcajw hwbraweiwadzefxg golk-hqhqrd stu vxkcubxijrzxsg weyyx lot dzpeta v bocjhuqavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/area-of-work/climate-change-and-energy?pc=arg &pc=arg &gclid=cjwkcajw hwbraweiwadzefxg golk-hqhqrd stu vxkcubxijrzxsg weyyx lot dzpeta v bocjhuqavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/area-of-work/climate-change-and-energy?pc=arg &pc=arg &gclid=cjwkcajw hwbraweiwadzefxg golk-hqhqrd stu vxkcubxijrzxsg weyyx lot dzpeta v bocjhuqavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/area-of-work/climate-change-and-energy?pc=arg &pc=arg &gclid=cjwkcajw hwbraweiwadzefxg golk-hqhqrd stu vxkcubxijrzxsg weyyx lot dzpeta v bocjhuqavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/area-of-work/climate-change-and-energy?pc=arg &pc=arg &gclid=cjwkcajw hwbraweiwadzefxg golk-hqhqrd stu vxkcubxijrzxsg weyyx lot dzpeta v bocjhuqavd_bwe&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/role-business-schools-within-universities http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/documents/sir-michael-barber-speech-uuk-june- .pdf http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/pages/sir-michael-barber-speech-uuk-june- .aspx http://ncub.co.uk/success-stories http://ncub.co.uk/leadership-council-search.html http://ncub.co.uk/reports/knowledge-exchange-and-research-council-institutes.html iv founded in , wonkhe ‘is the home of higher education wonks’: those who work in and around universities and anyone interested and engaged in higher education policy, people and politics. their mission is to improve policymaking in higher education and provide a platform for the new or previously unheard voices and perspectives in the sector. https://wonkhe.com/about-us/ https://wonkhe.com/about-us/   open peer review discuss this article  ( )comments research article    effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust  reversals due to environmental disturbance [version ; referees: approved] samira abdulai-saiku ,     akshaya hegde , ajai vyas, rupshi mitra school of biological sciences, nanyang technological university, singapore,  , singapore  equal contributors abstract  the behavior of animals is intricately linked to the environment; abackground: relationship that is often studied in laboratory conditions by using environmental perturbations to study biological mechanisms underlying the behavioral change.   this study pertains to two such well-studied and well-replicatedmethods: perturbations, i.e., stress-induced anxiogenesis and toxoplasma gondii -induced loss of innate fear. here, we demonstrate that behavioral outcomes of these experimental manipulations are contingent upon the ambient quality of the wider environment where animal facilities are situated.  during late   and early  , a building construction projectresults: started adjacent to our animal facility. during this phase, we observed that maternal separation stress caused anxiolysis, rather than historically observed anxiogenesis, in laboratory rats. we also found that toxoplasma gondii infection caused an increase, rather than historically observed decrease, in innate aversion to predator odors in rats.  these observations suggest that effects of stress and conclusion:  are dependent on variables in the environment that often gotoxoplasma gondii unreported in the published literature. keywords anxiety, fear, construction, housing environment, replicability * * *    referee status:   invited referees      version published  jan  version published  dec    report report report , charles university injaroslav flegr prague, czech republic , university ofterence y. pang melbourne, australia    dec  ,  :  (doi:  )first published: . /f research. .    jan  ,  :  (doi:  )latest published: . /f research. . v page of f research , : last updated: may https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://f research.com/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /f research. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - -    rupshi mitra ( )corresponding author: rmitra@ntu.edu.sg   : conceptualization, investigation, writing – original draft preparation;  : conceptualization, investigation,author roles: abdulai-saiku s hegde a writing – original draft preparation;  : conceptualization, supervision, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review & editing; vyas a mitra : conceptualization, supervision, writing – review & editingr  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests:  abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a and mitra r. how to cite this article: effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust reversals     ,  :  (doi:  )due to environmental disturbance [version ; referees: approved] f research . /f research. .  ©   abdulai-saiku s  . this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the  ,copyright: et al creative commons attribution licence which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. data associated with the article are available under the terms of the   (cc   .  public domain dedication).creative commons zero "no rights reserved" data waiver  this work was financially supported by ministry of education, singapore (grant rg /  and rg  / ).grant information: the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.    dec  ,  :  (doi:  ) first published: . /f research. . page of f research , : last updated: may http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. . introduction multiple laboratories have reported that stress causes anxiogenesis in rats – . similarly, well-replicated studies indicate that infection of rats with protozoan toxoplasma gondii reduces innate aversion to predator odor – . effects of toxoplasma gondii infection on fear are not absolute. rather effects of the infection on aver- sion follow a non-monotonous function roughly resembling an inverted-u . similarly, effects of stress on anxiety are also open to environmental modifications. anxiety induced by stress can be reliably prevented if housing conditions of animals are changed , or if animals have opportunity of voluntary exercise – . these observations suggest that effects of both the infection and stress on animal behavior are responsive to environmental modifications. in this backdrop, this report describes our serendipitous observations that the direction for both behavioral changes is intricately dependent on the broader environment where animal facilities are situated. the primary aim of our experiments was to study proximate mechanisms of anxiogenesis and innate aversion in rats. we used routine paradigms of maternal separation and toxoplasma gondii infection that cause anxiogenesis and loss of innate aversion, respectively. however, construction of a building was initiated during the experiment adjacent to the animal holding facility. results from this quasi-experimental change provided us with an unplanned opportunity to study the effects of change in environment on rat anxiety and defensive behaviors. methods animals adult male and female wistar han rats ( to weeks at the start of the experiments) were procured from invivos, singapore. rats were housed in groups of two per cage (males and females were housed separately) with ad libitum access to food and water ( – °c; – % relative humidity; h light-dark cycle with lights on at h). for all tests, animals were allocated to groups in a random manner. experiments were conducted by sa-s and ahn who were blind to group allocations. analysis was conducted by av who was also blind to group allocations. all procedures were approved by the institutional animal care and use committee of the nanyang technology university. all efforts were made to ameliorate any suffering of animals. none of our procedure involved induction of sustained pain requiring pharmacological interventions. animals were daily observed to confirm lack of sickness related behaviors and weighed weekly. the behavior tests do not involve any use of shock or other painful stimuli. the dose of parasites used in this study does not result in weight loss or sickness behavior in this strain of rats. at the end of all experiments, animals used in the toxoplasma infection paradigm were sacrificed by decapitation and their brains were removed and flash frozen. in the case of the stress paradigm, animals were sacrificed by cardiac perfusion using cold phosphate buffered saline (pbs) followed by cold % paraformaldehyde. toxoplasma gondii infection and quantification of aversion to cat odor female rats were either injected with tachyzoites of type prugniaud strain of toxoplasma gondii ( x tachyzoites in µl phosphate buffered saline, i.p.;) or mock injected with the buffer alone between pm and pm. parasites needed for the infection were maintained in vitro in human foreskin fibroblast cultures and were harvested using syringe lysis. behavioral experiments were conducted seven weeks post-infection; a time- window consistent with chronic phase of the infection. toxoplasma gondii infection did not cause significant change in body weight of animals ( . ± . , n = for uninfected; . ± . , n = for infected; p = . , independent sample t-test). aversion to cat odor was quantified in two different manners. for each run of the experiment, there was one uninfected group and one toxoplasma-infected group. fifteen animals were used in total for experiment ( uninfected, infected) and nineteen animals were used in total for experiment ( uninfected, infected). aversion was first quantified in a rectangular arena with two opposite and identical arms (figure a; x cm each), separated by a central part ( x cm in size; white perspex). ani- mals were habituated to the arena for three consecutive days for minutes each day. on the subsequent day, cat odors were pre- sented in one bisect of the maze ( ml each; bobcat urine from maine outdoor solutions, usa). animals were placed in the center of the maze and exploration time in both bisects of the arena was measured for minutes. trials were video recorded with offline analysis conducted using anymaze (stoelting, usa). in this batch of animals, each received µl of buffered saline intraperitoneally thirty minutes before the behavioral test. aversion to cat odor was also quantified in a circular arena (figure a; diameter = m) that was arbitrally divided into four quadrants. animals were habituated to the arena for three consecutive days for minutes each day. on the subsequent day, cat odor, vanilla essence, water and the bedding from the animal’s home cage were presented in each quadrant of the maze. animals were placed in the center of the maze and explo- ration time in all quadrants of the arena was measured for             amendments from version  we have expanded the introduction by including prior work related to non-monotonic nature of toxoplasma effects; and also, environmental responsivity of the maternal separation effect. figure has been revised to include schematics of test arenas. figure has been revised to include percentage open arm time as a measure of anxiogenesis. associated changes have been made in results and figure legends. we have also revised the discussion to include plausible proximate mechanisms including epigenetic changes and monoamines. latin names have been italicized. revised manuscript includes body weight of uninfected and infected animals. see referee reports revised page of f research , : last updated: may figure  . toxoplasma gondii-infected female rats showed increased aversion to bobcat odor in two sequential experiments. panel a depicts schematics of test arenas used in the experiments later depicted in panels b and c. ordinate for panel b and panel c depicts time spent by female rats chronically infected with toxoplasma gondii near bobcat odor. line graphs depict mean and standard error of the mean for control (black) and infected (gray) female rats. *, p < . ; unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test (n = uninfected and infected animals for panel a; and uninfected and infected animals for panel b). minutes. trials were video recorded with offline analysis conducted using anymaze (stoelting, usa). stress paradigm and quantification of anxiety eight week old breeders obtained from invivos were allowed to acclimatize for at least days before setting up breeding pairs (one male and one female per cage). breeding cages were changed once a week as per normal, but with gentle handling of female, in case of pregnancy. once pregnancy was certain (approx. weeks), male was removed. days after breeding pairs were set up (or if visually heavily pregnant), cages were checked daily for litters. day of birth is assigned p . maternal separation was used as the stress model (p -p , daily). animals were used in total; stressed, unstressed. on each of these days, the dam was removed from the cage and placed in a new cage with unsoiled bedding. pups were then retrieved into another cage with unsoiled bedding, transported to a separate room and put on a heating pad for three hours every morning. at the end of the separation period, pups and then dam were sequentially returned to the original soiled cage. also, soiled bedding was changed on postnatal day , and ; by returning pups to a clean cage that had been supplemented with a scoop of soiled bedding and nesting material from the original cage. this practice was repeated on postnatal day if the bedding was considered significantly soiled in case of large litter sizes. pups were weaned on postnatal day . anxiety was quantified when the male pups reached adulthood ( – weeks of age). anxiety was measured using home cage emergence assay (adapted from ) and elevated plus-maze . in the home cage emergence assay, a rat placed in its home cage was transported to a well-lit room and habituated for five minutes. the cage was then left open by removal of the lid. the rat was offered a possibility of emerging from the home cage through a wire grid placed within the cage. the latency of page of f research , : last updated: may emergence was recorded. emergence was defined when all four limbs of the rat were placed on the grid. trials were terminated at the emergence or at five minutes, whichever occurred earlier. trials were video recorded and scored manually. the elevated plus-maze consisted of a plus-shaped arena with two open ( × cm, cm wall, – lux illumination) and two enclosed arms ( × cm, cm wall). the arena was elevated to a height of cm above the ground. the animal was placed at the center at the start of the trial. exploration in open and enclosed arms was quantified for five minutes each. all experiments for the stress paradigm were done using two groups of mice: stressed and unstressed. statistical analysis the probability of type error was calculated using unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test. the standardized effect size was calculated using cohen’s d ; with values above the magnitude of . interpreted as being of robust scale. negative d values correspond to the comparisons where mean of experimental treat- ment was greater than that of respective controls. mean inter- group difference was also calculated with % confidence intervals. data is graphically presented as mean and standard error of the mean (sem), along with individual values for each animal for each endpoint. number of animals in each experimental group is noted in the figures. all statistical analysis was conducted using graphpad prism. results toxoplasma gondii infection increased aversion to cat odor in the first set of animals, aversion to cat odor was quantified as percentage time in bisect containing cat odor relative to total trial duration. rabbit odor was placed in the opposing bisect as a novel non-predator odor. inter-group differences did not reach pre-determined threshold for statistical significance (figure b; t = . , p = . ). despite the lack of sufficiently low type error, the effect on mean was of robust magnitude (cohen’s d = . ; ∆ = - . % with % confidence intervals - . to . %). the maximum of animals from the infected group was below the median of the uninfected animals. the robust effect size and the observation that infected mean was lower than uninfected animals in contrast to the multitude of published studies, led us to plan a further experiment to increase the statistical power. in this second set of animals, aversion to cat odor was quanti- fied in a circular arena congruent to the initial design of reported infection effects. one quadrant contained soiled bedding from home cage of the animal, serving as the home base for explora- tory sorties. cat odor and a novel vanilla odor were placed in two adjoining quadrants. the ratio of time spent in cat quadrant relative to sum time spent in both cat and novel odor quadrants was calculated (chance = %). toxoplasma infection, in contrast to earlier observations in the similar design, reduced percentage time spent near cat urine (figure c; t = . , p = . ). the effect of infection on innate aversion was of robust magni- tude (cohen’s d = . ; ∆ = - . % with % confidence intervals - . to - . %). the maximum of animals from the infected group was again observed to be below the median of the uninfected animals. serological examination confirmed that all animals in the infected groups sustained chronic infection with toxoplasma gondii. early life maternal separation stress resulted in anxiolytic behavior in male rats animals subjected to early life maternal separation stress were tested in the elevated plus maze and home cage emergence test to determine the effect of maternal separation on anxiety behavior during adulthood. stressed animals, in contrast to earlier observations in a similar design, exhibited significantly less anxiety compared to unstressed controls. this was evident as increased percentage entries into anxiogenic open arms of elevated plus-maze (figure a; t = . , p = . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was of robust magnitude (cohen’s d = - . ; ∆ = . % with % confidence intervals . to . %). the minimum of animals from the stressed group was higher than all but one animal from the unstressed group. experimental treatment did not cause significant differences in number of entries made into non- anxiogenic enclosed arms of the maze (t = . , p = . ). to preclude effects of entries in enclosed arms on open arm exploration, we further conducted a univariate analysis of variance for percentage open arm entries while employing number of enclosed entries as a covariate. furthermore, stressed animals spent more time in open arms during the test duration compared to unstressed counterparts (figure b; t = . , p < . ). this analysis revealed a significant increase in open arm explo- ration due to the stress independent of inter-group differences in enclosed arm entries (f , = . , p = . ). this is congru- ent with significant increase in number of head dips made during the trial by stressed animals (t = . , p = . ; ∆ = . with % confidence intervals . to . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was also confirmed by home cage emergence test. in this assay, anxiolysis manifests as reduced latency to emerge into a novel environment from home cage. stress significantly decreased the latency of home cage emergence (figure c; t = . , p = . ). stress-induced anxiolysis was also of robust magnitude in this assay (cohen’s d = - . ; ∆ = - . s with % confidence intervals - . to - . s). the maximum latency of animals from the stressed group was lower than median latency from the unstressed group. page of f research , : last updated: may figure  .  early  life  maternal  separation  stress  resulted  in  increased  anxiolytic  behavior  in  male  rats.  ordinate depicts number of entries and into the open arm relative to total entries in open and enclosed arms of the elevated plus maze (a and b, respectively) and latency to emerge from the home cage into a novel environment (c). line graphs depict mean and standard error of the mean for unstressed (black) and stressed (gray) male rats. *, p < . ; **, p < . ; unpaired two-tailed student’s t-test (n = animals in each experimental group). dataset  . cat odour avoidance assay http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d percentage time spent exploring the cat odour stimulus by uninfected and toxoplasma-infected rats in both experiment and . dataset  . elevated plus maze anxiety test http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d escape latency and percentage open arm entries for stressed and unstressed animals. discussion experimental treatment in the present report caused robust effects, as evidenced by substantial effect size and clear departure of mean differences from the chance. the direction of these effects is in stark contrast to those observed in previous reports , – , – . for example, multiple experiments in several laboratories indicate that chronic toxoplasma gondii infection causes loss of innate fear to predator odor in male and female rats – . data in the present report, however, argue for a significant increase in innate fear post-infection. similarly, stress-induced anxiogenesis has been reported across several laboratories and several paradigms. the current dataset, in contrast, exhibits significant anxiolysis post- stress. the cause of this discrepancy cannot be ascertained with confidence. in fact, we have observed stress-induced anxiogenesis and the infection-induced loss of fear in the same animal facility and same animal strain before these experiments , – , . the only difference between the experimental circumstances has been a construction project that was ongoing during the present experi- ments. the construction started across the road from the animal facility after our preceding baselines were conducted and during the present period of the behavioral testing. in fact, we observed reversal to toxoplasma-induced loss of fear in female rats in experiments conducted in the animal facility after the cessation of building construction . it remains unclear if the effects of construction related to the change in ambient vibrational environment or some hitherto unknown variable. although the acoustic noise in frequency range audible to humans remained unchanged during the period, we are not confident that the construction did not change the acoustic environment in sub-audible frequencies. it is interesting page of f research , : last updated: may http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d references that the effects observed here do not correspond to a simplis- tic notion of greater baseline stress during the period. effects of stress on anxiety are often presented to have an inverse u kind of reaction norm, whereby increasing stress enhances its effects on the behavioral and health parameters – . we observed an anxi- olysis by experimental stress rather than greater anxiogenesis due to the accumulative stress of the treatment and environmen- tal change. thus, the present observations reiterate the often complex interactions between environment and behavior that could impose significant bounds on the interpretation of laboratory experiments. related to this, same transgenic mice are known to exhibit divergent behavioral phenotypes across three experi- mental locations despite careful alignment of experimental protocols . proximate mechanisms of atypical observations in the current study remain unknown, although several possibilities can be posited based on the previous literature. long-term effects of environment on the behavior often take form of epigenetic modi- fications in the brain. toxoplasma gondii infection, for example, causes dna hypomethylation in arginine vasopressin promoter within medial amygdala . similarly, maternal separation results in robust hypomethylation in insulin signaling pathway within rat hippocampus . it is thus plausible that environmental disturbance influenced behavior through epigenetic modifications within the brain. alternatively alterations in central monoamine levels could also cause the behavioral change. maternal separation increases monoamine levels within hippocampus and amygdala while toxoplasma gondii infection reduced dopamine concentration within nucleus accumbens . it is plausible that environmental modification changed the nature of monoamine response consequent to the stress or the infection. conclusions often, unforeseen changes in the environment near animal facilities can significantly alter the direction of experimental effects in rodent research. this highlights the crucial role of often unreported and unquantified environmental context in the interpretation and replicability of the behavioral data. data availability dataset : cat odour avoidance assay. percentage time spent exploring the cat odour stimulus by uninfected and toxo- plasma-infected rats in both experiment and . . / f research. .d dataset : elevated plus maze anxiety test. escape latency and percentage open arm entries for stressed and unstressed animals. . /f research. .d competing interests no competing interests were disclosed. grant information this work was financially supported by ministry of education, singapore (grant rg / and rg / ). the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. . ashokan a, hegde a, mitra r: short-term environmental enrichment is sufficient  to counter stress-induced anxiety and associated structural and molecular  plasticity in basolateral amygdala. psychoneuroendocrinology. ; : – . pubmed abstract | publisher full text  . hillerer km, neumann id, 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s, estrada-camarena e, lopez-rubalcava c: maternal  separation induces long-term effects on monoamines and brain-derived  neurotrophic factor levels on the frontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus:  differential effects after a stress challenge. behav pharmacol. ; ( ): – . pubmed abstract | publisher full text  . tan d, soh lj, lim lw, et al.: infection of male rats with toxoplasma gondii  results in enhanced delay aversion and neural changes in the nucleus  accumbens core. proc biol sci. ; ( ): . pubmed abstract | publisher full text | free full text  . abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a, et al.: dataset   in: effects of stress or  infection on rat behavior show robust reversals due to environmental  disturbance. f research. . data source . abdulai-saiku s, hegde a, vyas a, et al.: dataset   in: effects of stress or  infection on rat behavior show robust reversals due to environmental  disturbance. f research. . data source page of f research , : last updated: may 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /science. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ejn. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /fbp. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /rspb. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .d   open peer review current referee status: version january referee report doi: . /f research. .r    terence y. pang florey institute of neuroscience and mental health, university of melbourne, parkville, vic, australia the authors have satisfactorily addressed the previous concerns i raised.  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: referee expertise: rodent behaviour testing, anxiety, stress i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. version december referee report doi: . /f research. .r    terence y. pang florey institute of neuroscience and mental health, university of melbourne, parkville, vic, australia this is a well-written, clearly presented manuscript describing unexpected behavioural phenotypes of two well-established rodent models which routinely lead to rats having anxiolytic or anxiogenic behaviours. in the field of behavioural neuroscience where robustness of results and reproducibility is vital, the reporting of negative or contrary outcomes remains important. this report raises substantial concern for the rodent research occurring across that time period. it is crucial that universities and research institutes be educated on the impact that infrastructure development has on researchers, and the time and financial costs it imposes on research teams/projects.   in the introduction, which is rather short, it would be useful to include one or two paragraphs referencing evidence that both toxoplasma infection and maternal separation models are prone to environmental modification. one of the included references (koe et al., transl psychiatry  ) is an example of environmental modification of a robust maternal separation-induced adult phenotype. see also sahafi e et al., physiol behav   as another example of an external modifier of anxiety behaviour.   this manuscript is limited in that there is no molecular data to be paired with the interesting behavioural page of f research , : last updated: may http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .r http://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .r http://orcid.org/ - - -   this manuscript is limited in that there is no molecular data to be paired with the interesting behavioural phenotype. a comparison of monoamine-relevant genes ala récamier-carballo s et al., behav pharmacol   would have been ideal. but this can be speculated upon in the discussion. could also mention the involvement of environment-induced epigenetic changes, see mccoy cr et al., eur j neurosci   : dna methylation changes in the hippocampus.   the major shortcoming of this manuscript is that i am unsure about how one would go about quantifying structural disturbances. is it based solely on the unexpected behavioural phenotype observed? or has the phenotypes consistently shifted during the stated period before returning to “normal”? have there been anecdotal accounts of construction noise in the rodent facility? is there any data about building vibrations? (civil engineers would have the equipment to measure structural vibrations).   assuming the significant external source of variability (as compared to a new experimenter who is a inexperienced at handling rodents and conducting the behavioural tests), it would be useful to include litter sizes and m/f sex ratios. is there body weight data in the event that feeding behaviour was also altered?   it is unusual to only present epm data as % entries in open arm. what about total time in open arms as a % of the test duration?   is it possible to include schematics of the different test arenas for figure  ? do the authors have habituation data (total time spent moving, distance travelled) for odor aversion tests? if the infected rats are anxious, they could be observed to display non- or lesser habituation even at baseline in the absence of a predator odor. if this was the case, it would only serve to strengthen the interpretation. is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? partly is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? partly if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? yes are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? partly are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: referee expertise: rodent behaviour testing, anxiety, stress i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that page of f research , : last updated: may   i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however i have significant reservations, as outlined above. author response   dec  , nanyang technological university, singaporerupshi mitra we thank reviewer for suggestions and comments. this has helped us to improve this manuscript during the revision. we have now submitted version   of this manuscript to the f research. introduction has been modified in version   to include prior work showing that effects of toxoplasma infection and maternal separation are subject to environmental modification (references   through   in the bibliography). we have also revised the discussion to include plausible proximate mechanisms including epigenetic changes and monoamines. please see paragraphs immediately preceding the conclusions. we now return to the reviewer’s comment about ambivalent nature of quantifying structural disturbances. we have indeed observed return to stress-induced anxiogenesis and toxoplasma-induced loss of fear once construction project abated. toxoplasma effects were eventually published (reference   in the revised bibliography; doi:  ). . /j.bbi. . . same set of experimenters conducted experiments before, during and after the construction project. thus, congruent stress- and infection- effects before and after construction project suggest that the environmental modification brought about by the construction explains atypical effects in the interim. experimental groups were coded during the experiment. for example, in case of toxoplasma infection, experimenter did not know infection status of the individual animals; and groups were merely identified with codes during the statistical analysis. hence we did not notice the reversal until long after the experiment was over, data was analyzed and infection status was confirmed using serology. this precluded systematic investigation of the environmental variables during the period of experiment itself. although the acoustic noise in frequency range audible to humans remained unchanged during the period, we are not confident that the construction did not change the acoustic environment in sub-audible frequencies. similarly we did not have opportunity to measure structural vibrations as the project was finished while we were analyzing the data and confirming group assignments using serology. toxoplasma gondii infection did not cause significant change in body weight of animals ( .  ± . , n =   for control;  .  ±  . , n =   for infected; p =  . ). this information is now included in methods section of the revised manuscript. we have revised the manuscript to include date for percentage open arm time (  <  . ) for epm in figure  . we have also included schematics ofp test arena in revised figure  . please note that this has changed panel number for figures in the results and legends. unfortunately, we did not record videos for habituation sessions. we have earlier shown that toxoplasma infection does not affect locomotion or exploration in open field arena.   no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: page of f research , : last updated: may https://doi.org/ . /j.bbi. . .   december referee report doi: . /f research. .r    jaroslav flegr department of biology, charles university in prague, prague, czech republic the authors present interesting data showing that, most likely, an unknown environmental factor or factors can qualitatively modify the behavioral responses of experimental animals on various standard stimuli (here the maternal separation stress and the   infection), which could result intoxoplasma unexpected results of standard experiments. the methods are clear and with sufficient details described, and the collected data are analyzed, presented and interpreted in a proper way. the authors suggested that the most probable factor that influenced the outputs of their experiments was (acoustical or mechanical) disturbance from a building construction project that had started adjacent to their animal facility during their experiments. this explanation seems to be reasonable, however, it would be a little bit difficult (and expensive) to test its validity. i consider the results (and conclusions) of this study to be not only very interesting, but also very important. it is highly probable that the same or similar phenomena are frequently seen by many researchers, however, they are mostly considered to be just the results of some technical error – “this new student/technician is really terrible, he certainly confused the labels on the cages/test tubes!”. we can just hope that the publication of the present paper will have the “#metoo effect” – that it will encourage other researchers to publish their own puzzling results. i agree that the inverted-u shape (or u-shape) relations between many physiological variables is mostly responsible for frequently observed opposite reaction of a biological system on the same stimuli. under one situation (e.g., when no building construction project is going on) the background level of stress is low and adding some stress factor, e.g., infecting animals with  , will shift the behavioral responsetoxoplasma toward the maximum of the inverted-u function. under another situation, when the background level of stress is higher (when the building construction project is going on) additional stress (e.g., the infection with  ) will shift the behavioral response behind the maximum of the inverted-u function, whichtoxoplasma will result in an opposite behavioral reaction on the infection. in the review article on the methodological problems of studying the effects of toxoplasmosis using  -human model (flegr,  ), itoxoplasma showed that on genetically polymorphic outbred animals, including humans, the same factor often influences some individuals in one way and another individuals in an opposite way, depending on their (unknown) genotype. very often, we can see that population means of the output variable in the affected individual and in the controls remains the same; however, variance of the output variable in the population of affected individuals grows significantly. for example, comparison of cattell’s  pf personality profiles of women showed that infected women had higher intelligence and lower guilt proneness than  -free women. at the same time, they differed in the variance of four other personality factors,toxoplasma namely protension, surgency, shrewdness and self-sentiment integration (flegr and havlíček,  ). it is therefore very important to study the effects of particular factors not only on population mean of the output variable but also on the variance of this variable. we should never forget that the f-test (or a permutation test performed on squared z- scores) is not just a pesky technique for testing presumptions of parametric statistical tests, but often it can also be an important and powerful tool for detecting biologically relevant effects of the factor under study. exactly the same mechanism can explain why males and females so often react to the same factor in an page of f research , : last updated: may http://dx.doi.org/ . /f research. .r http://orcid.org/ - - -   exactly the same mechanism can explain why males and females so often react to the same factor in an opposite way. in most animal species, males and females are not same. therefore, many physiological parameters of males and females differ in their (mean) position in relation to the maximum of the inverted-u function. consequently, they will respond to the same factor by the opposite-direction shifts. for example,   of   cattell’s personality factors are shifted in an opposite direction in men and women in reaction to the   infection (flegr  ,  ; flegr  ,  ). similarly, toxoplasma et al. et al. toxoplasma -infected men rate the smell of highly diluted cat urine as more attractive while infected women rate this smell as less attractive than their non-infected peers (flegr  ,  ). it is worthwhile in the context ofet al. the present abdyla-saiku   article to mention that our recent study showed the very opposite pattern,et al. namely higher attractiveness of the smell in the infected women and lower in the infected men, when undiluted cat urine was used as the stimulus (flegr    ). et al. back to the present article. it can be published in its present form. i would just suggest that the authors cite the old study (vyas  ,  ) showing the inverted-u shaped response of infected rats on the smellet al. of cat urine. when describing their experimental setup, the authors should better emphasize the fact that stressed mothers, not stressed pubs were used in all ethological tests. authors should also double-check whether all latin names of species and genera are printed in italic, both in the main text and in the references.  references . flegr j: influence of latent toxoplasma infection on human personality, physiology and morphology: pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. .  ;j exp biol  (pt  ):  -    |    pubmed abstract publisher full text . flegr j, havlícek j: changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis.folia .  ;   ( ):  -  parasitol (praha) pubmed abstract . flegr j, kodym p, tolarová v: correlation of duration of latent toxoplasma gondii infection with personality changes in women. .  ;   ( ):  -  biol psychol pubmed abstract . flegr j, lenochová p, hodný z, vondrová m: fatal attraction phenomenon in humans: cat odour attractiveness increased for toxoplasma-infected men while decreased for infected women.plos negl .  ;   ( ): e    |   trop dis pubmed abstract publisher full text . flegr j, zitková s, kodym p, frynta d: induction of changes in human behaviour by the parasitic protozoan toxoplasma gondii. .  ;  :  -  parasitology ( pt ) pubmed abstract . flegr j, milinski m, kaňková Š, hůla m, hlavačová j, sýkorová k: effects of latent toxoplasmosis on olfactory functions of men and women.  .  .   biorxiv reference source . vyas a, kim sk, sapolsky rm: the effects of toxoplasma infection on rodent behavior are dependent on dose of the stimulus. .  ;   ( ):  -    |   neuroscience pubmed abstract publisher full text is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? yes is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? yes if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? yes are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? page of f research , : last updated: may http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jeb. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://https://doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.neuroscience. . .   are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? yes are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: referee expertise: evolutionary biology, evolutionary parasitology i have read this submission. i believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. author response   dec  , nanyang technological university, singaporerupshi mitra we thank reviewer for suggestions and comments. this has helped us to improve this manuscript during the revision. we have now submitted version   of this manuscript to the f research. in the version  , we have included a discussion of non-monotonic response of toxoplasma in the introduction. we would also like to clarify that we tested stressed pups not their mothers. pups were maternally deprived before weaning, allowed to reach adulthood and then tested. this has now been made clear during the revision. we have carefully checked and corrected all latin names.   no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: the benefits of publishing with f research: your article is published within days, with no editorial bias you can publish traditional articles, null/negative results, case reports, data notes and more the peer review process is transparent and collaborative your article is indexed in pubmed after passing peer review dedicated customer support at every stage for pre-submission enquiries, contact   research@f .com page of f research , : last updated: may s jra .. vietnamese media going social: connectivism, collectivism, and conservatism giang nguyen-thu keywords: censorship, cybersecurity, digital governance, facebook, late-socialist politics, media, social media, vietnam introduction june was an intense time in vietnam when one saw the role of social media inrevealing and facilitating the (dis)congruity between connectivism, collectivism, and conservatism. on june , the national assembly of vietnam passed the controversial cybersecurity law by a landslide of percent agreement despite widespread public dissent, including an online petition signed by more than sixty-five thousand people. the new cybersecurity law was said to further restrict the already limited freedom of expression in vietnam and grant too much power to the police in surveying and punishing online citizens. the adoption of the cybersecurity law happened just three days after the assembly postponed its vote for the special economic zone law, another contentious bill that would allow foreign investors to obtain up to ninety-nine-year land leases in selected areas. this delay appeared to be an effort to soothe public anger, which had been fervidly manifested on facebook in the previous weeks, that the special economic zone law would only enable china to encroach on vietnamese land in the name of economic development. despite the postponement, protests driven by an anti-china sentiment erupted across the nation on june and , including a violent riot in the southern province of binh thuan. mainstream media in vietnam provided minimal information on these events, using carefully selected terms such as “gathering” or “traffic congestion” to down- play any significant social instability. censorship over the mass media, however, could no longer prevent people from knowing what was happening. the protests were covered on a real-time basis on facebook thanks to constant updating of statuses, photos, and live- stream videos. anyone connected to social media during these days could feel as if they were witnessing the event live and irresistibly engaged in a collective mixture of anger, anxiety, curiosity, and enthusiasm. thanks to the facilitating role of social media, political disruptions in vietnam were literally a few clicks away. the passing of the cybersecurity law on june , right after the ebbing of the dem- onstrations, provided a pessimistic end to a cascade of spirited online and offline public giang nguyen-thu (giang.nguyenthu@asc.upenn.edu) is postdoctoral fellow at the center for advanced research in global communication in the annenberg school for communication at the university of pennsyl- vania. she is also on-leave lecturer at the university of social sciences and humanities at vietnam national university in hanoi. the journal of asian studies vol. , no. (november) : – . © the association for asian studies, inc., doi: . /s at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:giang.nguyenthu@asc.upenn.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core activism. while some activists continued to lament about the intensified restrictions on freedom of expression, most facebook users gradually returned to their banal routines. the world cup, opened on june , soon marginalized political debates, reminding us how facebook has been first and foremost a part of ordinary pleasure and concerns. but on june , when the graduation examinations for high school students commenced, facebook postings again erupted, albeit with less intensity, when people took the oppor- tunity to share their views on the quality of the tests while cleverly mocking the state’s consistent failure to make any meaningful change in the educational system. the constant coming and going of facebook-based public debates remind us that counterpolitical dis- cussion on social media, whether subtly invested in a sarcastic tone or frankly manifested in an activist message, never completely disappears, but is always latent in the banality of the everydayness, where ordinary people constantly surf through the trending informa- tion endlessly fed to their digital “walls.” there are several things one can learn about the vietnamese media landscape from the unfolding of multiple facebook-based social movements in june . most clearly, social media increasingly play an essential role in driving public opinions in vietnam. the case of collective resistance against controversial legislation in june was just one among multiple examples in which facebook served as a platform to defend the per- ceived public good. but the adoption of a restrictive and conservative cybersecurity law in june indicates how the internet and social media have become urgent con- cerns for the vietnamese party-state, allowing it to justify the escalation of political oppression in the name of national security. the fact that the special economic zone law was postponed under intense public pressure while the cybersecurity law was adopted despite significant dissent reminds us that the party-state regards this as a crucial battleground. whatever social media means to the public and the party-state, it is an undeniable fact that the vietnamese media landscape is complicated, if not signifi- cantly transformed, by the surging expansion of social media in the last ten years. this article provides a broader context to help understand the current dynamics of the vietnamese media. this task requires a review of how the vietnamese media system operates, including its censorship mechanisms, its commercial impulse, and its struggle to balance between the state, the market, and the public demand for quality information. against this background, i provide a short history of social media (predom- inantly facebook) in vietnam and how it is driven by an escalating sense of political and social precarity. in so doing, i hope to engage readers in a more nuanced description of mediated activities in vietnam beyond the state-centric view and to diagnose the governing rationality of the party-state behind the adoption of the cybersecurity law. the “traditional” media landscape in vietnam, the mass media are state institutions by law, meaning that there is strictly no private ownership of newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting services. the media system is regulated by two main regulatory bodies: the ministry of information and com- munication (bộ thông tin và truye ̂ǹ thông) and the central propaganda and education commission (ban tuyên giáo trung Ương). the former mainly governs legal, technical, and economic aspects of the media industries, while the latter deals exclusively with giang nguyen-thu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ideological gatekeeping. operating directly under the communist party, the central pro- paganda and education commission is the top media censor, working hard to ensure that despite extensive changes in media technology and economy, media practitioners remain committed to the party’s agenda. although censorship, by nature, operates in secrecy, there is at least one publicly known censoring mechanism in vietnam: the weekly and mandatory meetings in hanoi between the central propaganda and education commission and leaders of all media institutions. these meetings provide a review of media activities in the previous week and deliver specific guidance on what should and should not be published in the coming week. the most visible effect of these weekly closed-door meetings is the con- certed and uniform coverage of many politically important events. for example, in march , after decades of collective silence, all major newspapers in vietnam promul- gated extended features with elaborate infographics to commemorate the fallen soldiers in the naval battle between vietnam and china at gạc ma island thirty years before. in the context of heated territorial disputes in the south china sea, the fact that this topic returned so boldly in mainstream media after a few years of simmering facebook-based commemoration indicated that the state had finally given a green light for a public review of this muted trauma. but the boundary of what can be said was also clearly indicated. all mainstream stories honored the forgotten martyrs without any critical discussion of con- temporary vietnam-china relations, showing how the stories about gạc ma island were permitted but should not get too hot to fan the latent anti-chinese flames, which were commonly coupled with an anti-state sentiment. a more hidden and possibly more thorough mechanism of media governance in vietnam is self-censorship. silently embedded in journalistic anecdotes, editorial pro- cesses, and lessons at journalism schools, political censorship is a naturalized part of media production. very early in their career, journalists learn to imagine and anticipate the censor’s reaction for almost everything they produce. the taboos for mainstream media are well remembered: no critical review of socialist history, no defaming of national heroes and socialist leaders, no encouragement of political plurality, no promotion of democracy, and no criticism of human rights. grey areas include, for example, stories about major corruption cases, environmental pollution, and land disputes, as well as crit- ical reviews of important policies. this does not mean that vietnamese journalists only write what they are told to, but that an essential part of their job is to identify risk, to avoid being negatively listed, and to be creative in the grey area that is expanding or shrinking depending on different political situations. crossing the censorship boundary requires strategic calculation and in many ways exposing oneself to the risk of being pun- ished. taking this risk, however, is necessary for maintaining a media outlet’s professional pride and public credibility. working with and against censorship is thus an art, resulting in a constant tension between journalists, editorial teams, and the governing system. regarding media reception, one of the key consequences of blunt political pro- paganda is that it could never fully convince the audiences. an average reader in vietnam would know that most news stories are politically monitored. instead of being passive receivers of propagandist messages, many readers master the skill of reading between the lines. mocking mainstream narratives is highly common, being a pervasive form of cultural intimacy from urban to rural areas. readers or viewers today often share their political concerns on facebook, comparing news sources, highlighting their vietnamese media going social at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core skeptical interpretation of official information, and many times inventing their own con- spiracy theories based on inputs from both the state-run media and alternative sources. it would be misleading, however, to talk about media governance in vietnam with a sole focus on political restrictions, a topic that is central to most international discussions of vietnamese media. extensive commercialization is another key feature that signifi- cantly shapes the post-reform media landscape. since the s, the market has steadily permeated all aspects of the media system and fundamentally transformed the way prac- titioners conduct their professional life. journalists certainly feel disappointed by restric- tive rules imposed from above, but what makes them most anxious is actually the market. top-down surveillance, after all, is relatively stable and in many ways predictable. the market, on the contrary, is volatile and getting more competitive each year. turning to the market as a source of funding and agency, media practitioners are inevitably trapped between their profitmaking duty and their political obligations. regarding its the relationship with the market, the party-state is more responsive than repressive. soon after the reform, the party-state actively outsourced the burden of funding the media to the market. in the television industry, for example, producers started providing viewers with a daily dose of popular entertainment in the s after decades of cultural hunger. soon these programs generated a stable source of income from advertisements, creating a strong inducement to produce more. within less than a decade, foreign and domestic dramas, game shows, talk shows, and reality programs quickly saturated broadcasting time, turning the television industry into a major profit- making platform. producers are encouraged, if not forced, to make self-funded shows, almost entirely for entertainment purposes, without much restraint from above. in , the state officially allowed television stations to collaborate with private partners in production activities, with the exception of news and current affairs (ministry of infor- mation and communication ; vietnamese government ). the result is that private ownership of television is strictly banned, but private production of television content is highly common. a similar process also happens in the production of lifestyle magazines and many newspapers. in , advertisement and commercial sponsorship serve as key sources of funding for many free-to-air television stations, and all major newspapers and lifestyle magazines, putting media practitioners in an intense race of money-making. the defining characteristic of the contemporary vietnamese media is thus not just political censorship, but the raw combination of political surveillance and commercializing pressure. businesspeople increasingly have influence over the media, many times acting as hidden censors of nonpolitical content. market-based power relies on an intricate and flexible network of financial incentives, collaborative partnership, informal friendship, and political investment. commercial sponsorship is extremely common in the television industry, which is easily detected by pop-up logos on the backdrops of almost all popular shows, sometimes even in news and current affairs. securing a commercial sponsor is one of the key criteria to grant permission for a new program, and rewriting the content to fit the taste of the sponsor has become a norm. consider, for example, the case of oppo, a chinese smartphone brand recently gaining a significant presence in vietnam. since , the green logo of oppo has pervaded many top-rated game shows, comedy shows, and reality shows on the national airwaves, where participating celebrities are intentionally chosen to be the brand’s ambassadors. vov, the national radio system, giang nguyen-thu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core also regularly announces its “partnership” with major businesses, such as a major milk company or a giant real estate group (lưu ; phương ). it is now a public secret that the media in vietnam relies on its relationship with businesspeople for funding, either through direct sponsorship or more concealed forms of public relations. drawn into a rapid process of marketization, vietnamese media practitioners increasingly choose to detour from “sensitive” topics to focus on commercially rewarding but politically benign content. soon the commercialized content gained more popularity than politically laden messages, inevitably lessening the dominance of political propa- ganda. the market thus adds more distraction and fragmentation than significant refor- mation to the vietnamese media landscape. overall, the media remains committed to the political interest of the party-state, while is also inclined to provide a voice for rising busi- ness elites and to represent the tastes of the middle class. in many ways, the combination of state and the market further marginalizes radical voices and genuine political debates, redirecting the audience away from critical awareness of structural oppression in both political and economic aspects. social media and the new dynamics of vietnamese media in , when yahoo! officially closed, vietnamese bloggers flooded into face- book, then an unfamiliar medium of digital connectivity, to continue their online inter- actions. it took a couple of years until users could access facebook without expecting technical hindrances, although the vietnamese government never admitted to estab- lishing a firewall targeting this global social network. in , facebook experienced a major surge with an increase of nearly percent from . million to . million users within just a year, officially surpassing zing me, the largest indigenous social media platform in vietnam (mueller ). in early , when the number of face- book users reached million, vietnamese prime minister nguyễn ta ̂ń dũng declared that “it is impossible to ban or prevent people from posting information on the inter- net,” urging the government to provide timely and accurate information for the public on social media (hoàng ). this announcement was delivered at a time when there had been a widespread rumor in the blogosphere and on social media that nguyễn bá thanh, the former party secretary of Đà nẵng city, was poisoned to death by his political rivals. by july , vietnam had about million active facebook users, serving as one of the most thriving digital markets in the world (hà ). within less than a decade, facebook has become a ubiquitous digital platform in a country with strict censorship over the media. in the first few years since its arrival in vietnam, facebook was mainly used for benign online interactions, but since around , when it became a dominant platform, facebook has increasingly acted as a dynamic and disruptive element in the vietnamese media system, significantly destabilizing and undermining the traditional forces from the party-state and the market. proving itself to be a potent medium for agenda setting, face- book directly competes with mainstream media outlets in attracting public attention and framing a salient perspective to social and political controversies. the most valued trans- formation from the perspective of civil society has been the emergence of multiple coun- terpolitical movements that were previously marginalized by both the state and the vietnamese media going social at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core market. in the wake of social media’s surging popularity, as thiem hai bui ( ) argues, the space of civil society in vietnam is much thickened by more critical voices with stron- ger influence over elite politics. a culture of protest was formed, against which the party-state felt compelled to respond or repress. there have been a number of cases in which social media provided a public forum for collective resistance against govern- ment policies and directives. the successful campaign to protect , trees from being chopped down on the order by hanoi’s authorities in march was one of the earliest and most discussed examples (bui ; le et al. ). another well-known event was the “i choose fish” movement in june in response to the environmental crisis caused by formosa, the taiwanese steel company based in the central province of ha tinh. in july , facebook continued to serve as a vital channel for publicizing a political scandal related to a land dispute, something the party-state would certainly have concealed in the past. in the dong tam commune of hanoi, dozens of policemen and officials were taken hostage for more than a week by a group of villagers, who risked their lives to protect their land from being appropriated by viettel, a military telecom- munications group. as the hostage crisis escalated, leaked information, mainstream news, and casual commentaries were liberally shared on facebook, connecting social media users into an acute imagined community of witnessing citizenship. the case was resolved peacefully when the villagers reached a satisfactory settlement with hanoi’s authorities. this relieving “happy ending” largely resulted from intense public pressure for a nonviolent solution, which was collectively expressed on social media by activists and common people alike. in june , as mentioned earlier, face- book once more set the nation on fire when the proposals for the special economic zone law and the cybersecurity law sparked widespread opposition. after the disap- pointing adoption of the cybersecurity law, facebook users continued to update their walls, knowing that their online activities were officially regulated. in this context of a contested digital future, social media users curiously wait for a new political scandal to test the waters and assess the oppressive intention of the government. narrowly focusing on political dissent, however, risks overlooking the dispersed and amorphous power of facebook, driven more by a techno-economic mechanism than a shared political rationality. facebook operates in a far more complex way than being an automatic and organized instrument of political resistance. its algorithm gives prom- inence to all trending messages, politically driven or not. on a daily basis, facebook con- stantly facilitates public awareness and social interpretation of numerous economic, social, and cultural issues without an explicit political implication. the repertoire of meanings, feelings, and tensions within which vietnamese people navigate is broadened and thickened, ceaselessly drawing its symbols, myths, significance, and contradictions from the contemporary landscape of globalization and the historical depth of collective glories, yearnings, and sufferings. this expanding repertoire is archived, indexed, catego- rized, and disseminated in a many-to-many model, interwoven into and contaminating the traditional one-to-many model of the mass media. almost unnoticeably, citizens have become more alert, more informed, and less cautious in raising their critical voice and in expressing their sentiments about virtually all aspects of collective and private living. as a result, the space for civil society expands with facebook, but uncivility, mere banality, blatant sentimentality, viral populist messages, and the hegemonic power of the market are also on the rise. at the micropolitical intervention of facebook, public giang nguyen-thu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core life becomes more observable, political criticism seems more synchronized, but living itself becomes more tangled, overwhelming, constantly changing, and filled with precarity. there are plenty of examples of how facebook stirs up social life and amplifies col- lective sentiments at the level of ordinary living. consider, for instance, the story of the vietnamese football team u , who made history by winning second place at the asian football confederation youth championships in january . vietnamese people have always been ardent football lovers, but this time, facebook added much more emotional intensity and symbolic substance to existing sports fandom. each match was turned into a striking collective event, where watching was inseparable from facebooking. the conta- gion of popular nationalist sentiments was unprecedented for a sports event when the u team was welcomed home by massive traffic congestion right from the airport and by more than forty thousand people waiting at the national stadium to meet their overnight idols. possibly all facebook walls in vietnam during those days were flooded by images of the young team, news and editorials, memes and comics, flags and quota- tions, and, many times, clever ambush advertising messages. facebook’s principles of connectivity, narrativity, and intimacy had allowed this platform to exceedingly amplify the youthful spirit of the team, helping to elevate the whole country, at least for a few days, at a time of pervasive social pessimism. similar cases of facebook-based social events are countless: a housewife-led boycott against a top singer for her love affair with a married man, the problematic deaths of vaccinated infants, a food safety crisis related to arsenic-laced fish sauce, a #metoo story of celebrity sexual abuse, a multi-million-dollar divorce between the owners of a national coffee brand, a british royal wedding, the world cup, and so on. people increasingly make use of facebook as a place to express their emotions, most predominantly the feelings of anxiety and dis- appointment, while also to cultivate new hopes and fantasies commonly driven by a neo- liberal impulse. predictably, the power of social media in framing the public agenda in vietnam creates an escalating pressure on the party-state, not only when there is a radical political event but also at the level of daily regulation. for the first time, the party-state completely lost its ownership and direct control over a media platform. the prolific, borderless, and technologically sophisticated nature of social media increasingly eluded existing mecha- nisms of media governance. already busy with the task of monitoring the mass media, which never fully obey the rules, the government now spends even more time responding to viral events on facebook. in the first six months of , there have been multiple cases where public debates on social media directly shaped the outcome or impact of a social event, forcing the authorities to join the discussion. in march , for example, the ministry of health had to spend a week of intense investigation just to confirm that the widely shared story of a young woman dying at home after giving “natural” birth to her child was just a pure hoax. in may, a clip of an english teacher ver- bally abusing an adult student fueled heated debates about educational ethics in vietnam, forcing the department of education and training in hanoi to comment on the case and then to permanently close the teacher’s english center. also in may, facebookers were outraged when a child molester managed to gain a reduction of his sentence from three years in jail to eighteen months of suspension. what infuriated the public even more was that this shortened sentence was justified by the man’s old age, his previous vietnamese media going social at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core position as a director of a bank, and, most ironically, his communist party membership. an online petition to demand a review of the case was launched and immediately went viral, gaining fifty thousand signatures within a week. in an effort to calm public anger, the supreme court in ho chi minh city revoked the commutation and reinstated the original sentence. media practitioners and journalists tend to add more fuel to the fire, seeing social media as an essential source of information, but also a key rival. mainstream outlets often follow up and elaborate on viral content on facebook in order to attract more viewing traffic and to assert their relevance to public life, significantly participating in and intensifying the debates on social media, and consequently increasing the coordina- tion of information circulated online. anytime it is possible, the mainstream media relies on the public momentum facilitated by social media to expand the boundaries of political discussion, pushing the authorities to comment on the case and take responsibility. many journalists also choose to directly express their views, often nonorthodox ones, on face- book to boost their personal brands or to draw more attention to their official stories on mainstream outlets. the practice of writing for mainstream media in one voice and explaining the same story in another voice on facebook with more nuances and criticism is now quite common among media workers. the rise of facebook has added new dynamics to the existing blogosphere that has long served as alternative sources of political news and opinion in vietnam. in compar- ison to previous forms of non-mainstream discourses, facebook is the only medium that can effectively mobilize and mass-customize public sentiments at the capillary level of ordinary life. while counterpolitical blogs and alternative publishing mainly rely on the aura of unique political voices to claim their influence over the vietnamese public sphere, hence promoting the logic of rarity, facebook works by synchronizing elite voices with the abundance of mass political dissatisfaction embedded in the ordinary sphere of daily life. facebook thus generates an unprecedented amount of banal social debates, putting an end to the scarcity of engaged political and social discussions in vietnam. precisely thanks to the voluntary formation of more plural, alert, and vocal publics through facebook’s constant and contingent feeds of the quotidian, intimate, and controversial stories of a common life, the collective momentum of political disrup- tion is greatly strengthened. in other words, what is important about the impact of social media in vietnam is not just the will to resist, but that social media has enabled an organic connection between the radical political agendas and the mass grievances. such a connec- tion was significantly missing in the former blogosphere occupied mainly by a few high- profile activist writers. facebook and the blogosphere thus well complement each other, albeit with different political functions and effects. in the age of social media, the greatest challenge in censoring digital discourses, if that is the party-state’s ambition, is thus no longer about punishing a few activists or settling specific political protests but about dis- tracting and diluting the negative sentiments over a range of issues that have become much thicker and more articulable due to the thorough penetration of social media into everyday life. for a review of the vietnamese blogosphere, see duong ( ). giang nguyen-thu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the cybersecurity law and the problem of fear-based censorship the adoption of the cybersecurity law in june was the culmination of the party-state’s escalating campaign against social media. in the preceding year, different strategies to cope with new digital challenges were announced in preparation for the passing of the bill. in early , the government banned major vietnamese firms from advertising on youtube in an effort to pressure google to remove “toxic content” from its global video-sharing platform. this campaign was considered successful, as the ministry of information and communication later claimed that google had removed , videos and facebook had terminated accounts for “defaming viet- namese leaders” (luân ; tra ̂ǹ ). in december , the ministry of defence declared its “cyberwarfare” against the negative impact of the internet, proudly introduc- ing a unit of ten thousand members entitled “force ” that works “every hour, every minute, every second” to fight against “erroneous views” online (mai ). in this increasingly hostile discourse against social media and the internet, terms such as “fake news,” “trash information,” “toxic content,” “erroneous views,” and “hostile voices” are used interchangeably without any clear definition or differentiation. it is quite obvious, however, that the party-state simply equates these terms with any content that violates the censorship taboos traditionally applied to the mass media. there are two points in the cybersecurity law that activists find particularly worri- some. first, the law requires online citizens to comply with an ambiguous and lengthylist of forbidden behaviors, many of which directly restrict the right to raise a critical voice. people are banned from using online platforms to, for instance, “insult great men, national leaders, historical figures, and national heroes,” to “distort history, negate revolutionary achievements, and undermine the national solidarity,” or to disseminate “untrue informa- tion that stirs obfuscation among the people” (ministry of defence ). second, all digital platforms must store vietnamese users’ data within the country, provide users’ data upon request, and remove all content that violates the law. the police, the military, and other authorities are invested with the power to audit, collect data, block, terminate, and prosecute any online platform that poses a danger to national security. the cyberse- curity law demonstrates that ideologically, the party-state wants to control social media by relying on the same political restrictions long imposed on the mass media. technically, the party-state aims at turning global platforms into more or less subordinate units under its command, trying to use the “carrot and stick” strategy similar to the way it treats domestic media outlets. overall, the cybersecurity law manifests un unconcealed thirst for digital sovereignty, highlighting the party-state’s key concerns and strategies in the digital age. but it is precisely because the cybersecurity law is so absolute in its protection of digital sovereignty that this new bill allows us to identify a major problem of internet gov- ernance in vietnam: the party-state does not seem to understand the difference between mass media and social media. there is no paradigmatic shift in the ideological and tech- nical vocabulary that the party-state uses to talk about social media. in other words, the “what” and the “how” of digital control in vietnam still adhere to the old model of mass media discipline, which is performed primarily through direct determination between right and wrong, and immediate punishment upon detectable faults. a comparative view from the case of china will be useful to explore the implication of the vietnamese cybersecurity law. in her study of the chinese censorship system, vietnamese media going social at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core margaret e. roberts ( ) convincingly demonstrates that the resilience of authoritar- ianism in the digital age relies on the capacity to govern online data beyond the traditional mechanism of punishment-based censorship. internet control requires a clever amalgam- ation of ideological ambition and technological sophistication. regarding china’s desire for digital sovereignty, the “what” of authoritarian censorship remains, but the “how” has significantly grown out of the old model. in addition to its fear-based control, china has systematically and effectively deployed two new forms of digital control: fric- tion and flooding, resulting in a model of “porous censorship” that allows the government to eschew the wholesale application of visible oppression (roberts , ). the strategy of friction involves the extensive blockage by the great firewall. in the last ten years, one by one, china has blocked almost all major online platforms from the west: google, facebook, youtube, wikipedia, instagram, and pinterest. almost all inter- national news sources are banned, and many take an extremely long time to load. the strategy of friction can be easily circumvented by tech-savvy users and politically con- cerned citizens—hence it is incomplete—but it works well upon “the impatience and indifference” of the majority, who are generally too busy to sacrifice their time and energy to be informed about what is missing from mainstream media (roberts , ). the key impact of the friction strategy is that it intensifies the disconnection between the dispersed momentum of the masses and the politically active elites in china, and consequently “prevents coordination of the core and the periphery, known to be an essential component in successful collective action” (roberts , ). it is only when a wedge is driven between the masses and the elites that the targeted punish- ment of a few high-profile activists becomes effective. at the heart of chinese internet censorship is thus the capacity to customize its digital control over different political seg- ments of the population. the strategy of flooding is performed by the constant production and circulation of hundreds of millions of politically neutral and misleading messages to mold the results of algorithm-based information flows. it is estimated that the chinese government employed as many as two million people, the so-called “ -cent-party,” to post a massive amount of distracting and confusing messages, about million social media comments a year (king, pan, and roberts ). this results in a diluted online environ- ment without strong coordination of politically controversial information, making it less likely for the algorithm to identify and amplify collective grievance or negative voices. the flooding strategy also makes it more time-consuming for readers to differentiate between valuable information and spam, which again discourages impatient readers and further disconnects the few politically sophisticated people from the politically inactive masses. most importantly, the two techniques of friction and flooding are applied in a thriving and self-sustaining nationalized world of chinese apps and platforms, which provides suf- ficient online services for a population of . billion people without having to rely on any western platform. internet control in china has thus significantly grown out of the tra- ditional model that seeks merely to threaten, remove, or punish violators. this system uses multiple clever and costly methods of data manipulation and digital nationalization that aim to alter the very condition of possibility for data production and coordination. such power to govern at the environment-setting level demonstrates how digital control in china has structurally departed from traditional forms of media censorship. giang nguyen-thu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the vietnamese cybersecurity law is commonly criticized as a duplicate of its chinese counterpart. indeed, this is a valid argument if one looks at the party-state’s ambition to impose ideological discipline on online discourses. but this might be a mis- leading diagnosis if we consider the technological reality on the vietnamese side. the key strategy of digital governance in vietnam is still punishment-based. punishment can only be performed upon detectable targets, which is useful to terminate radical resistance and high-profile dissenters. but given the daily production and coordination of an immense amount of data online, it is impossible for this strategy to alter the formation and ampli- fication of collective grievance and ordinary dissent. blatant fear-based censorship can actually backfire in the age of digital freedom because it only intensifies the desire to resist and to circumvent the concealing techniques, which is precisely what has been hap- pening in vietnam. the more the government tries to block and punish specific cases of dissenting voices, the more people become curious to find out what actually happened, and come up with conspiracy theories that cast the party-state in an unflattering light. regarding the flooding strategy, the so-called “force ” in vietnam is hardly com- parable to its chinese counterpart. the vietnamese team (ten thousand members com- pared to two million in china) seems to work by engaging in polemics to defend the party-state, rather than by diluting the information environment using neutral or mislead- ing comments. as far as facebook’s algorithms work, the more engagement on a certain topic, regardless of its ideological tendency, the more likely the topic starts trending. the strategy of directly fighting against “toxic content” by force might backfire and fuel the anti-state flames by thickening the information flows into the debates. the fact that facebook still powerfully frames public discourse in vietnam in an anti- state tendency in the last few years, despite the expansion of force , indicates that this team is far from being able to distract vietnamese users from public discussions of politically sensitive topics. regarding the friction strategy, the vietnamese party-state is much less likely to block all global platforms due to a severe lack of domestic alternatives. whereas baidu and weibo, the most dominant and still thriving search engine and social media platform in china, were launched in and respectively, as of , the vietnamese authorities only promised that they would build indigenous platforms to replace google and facebook “in the next five or seven years” (nguyen ). currently, vietnam blocks many dissent blogs, particularly the ones using the vietnamese language, but major global platforms with a significant role in promoting knowledge, entertain- ment, and social and economic connectivity, such as google, wikipedia, youtube, face- book, and instagram, are accessed freely. the young and tech-savvy population in vietnam has enjoyed the benefits of global communication since the inception of the internet in the country in , and are keen on fighting for these benefits. the eco- nomic, social, and developmental cost of blocking vietnam from the global world of digital flows is too high because it can undermine economic growth, social stability, and global engagement—all key indexes to maintain the party-state’s already shaky legit- imacy. a technologically weak country like vietnam is not in the position to resist digital globalization in the same ways as china has been doing. the passing of the cybersecurity law thus indicates an oppressive tendency in the ways the party-state handles online dis- courses, but this does not mean that the party-state is actually capable of preventing online platforms from dispersedly mobilizing social dynamics. vietnamese media going social at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core conclusion the immense world of big data appears as mysterious as the concealed world of authoritarian censorship. it is thus difficult to predict the future of both, in vietnam or elsewhere. but there are several things we can conclude about the vietnamese case by drawing from our understanding of the post-reform media settings, as well as the unfold- ing of public discourses related to social media in vietnam and the recent adoption of the vietnamese cybersecurity law. first, the media landscape in vietnam has long been destabilized by market forces, and in recent years, further transfigured by new pressure from the internet and social media. in order to grasp the nuances of mediated activities in vietnam, it is important to go beyond the simplistic view that tends to reduce the com- plexity of the vietnamese media landscape to a simple problem of direct political antag- onism. second, while the party-state is responsive to the market and the internet, it stays committed to its centralized model of censorship, and is getting more repressive toward online discourses. the adoption of the cybersecurity law demonstrates the determination of the party-state to govern the digital world through the application of direct surveillance and punishment. this worrying fact confirms recent international concerns regarding the intensification of the party-state’s discipline of political dissenters (reuters ; washing- ton post editorial board ). but the persistence of fear-based censorship also indicates that the party-state largely fails to recognize the sheer impossibility of monitoring online data by direct punishment. the party-state performs no significant effort, at least as evinced in the content of the cybersecurity law and its recent history of digital control, to governmentalize its traditional mechanism of censorship, as seen in the case of china. during the first week of july , when these concluding remarks were being written, about one hundred thousand vietnamese registered their new accounts on minds, a self-acclaimed “decentralized” social network, in fear of facebook’s collabora- tion with the party-state (giang ). within less than a month, facebook had lost a bit of its symbolic valence as a liberating tool of bottom-up activism in vietnam, while minds emerged as a new trend among those with an activist agenda, at least for a couple of weeks. while the party-state has done nothing particularly threatening to the future of facebook since its adoption of the cybersecurity law, online vietnamese citizens are already prepared for negative effects by looking around for other online platforms as alternatives to facebook. as we are all waiting to witness the unfolding future of social media in vietnam, there are two things that we are sure about: first, the speed of technolog- ical change is much faster than legislative and political adjustment in vietnam, and second, vietnamese internet users are keen on surfing new technological trends and are eager to use their tech savvy-skills to circumvent the party-state’s ambition to turn vietnam into a land of digital isolation. failing to alter the conditions for the production and coordination of digital content, the party-state is trapped between its technological and financial inadequacy and its ideological ambition to build its world of digital sovereignty. acknowledgments this research is funded by the vietnam national foundation for science and tech- nology development (nafosted) under grant number . - . . giang nguyen-thu at 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http://vanban.chinhphu.vn/portal/page/portal/chinhphu/hethongvanban?class_id= &amp;_page= &amp;mode=detail&amp;document_id= http://vanban.chinhphu.vn/portal/page/portal/chinhphu/hethongvanban?class_id= &amp;_page= &amp;mode=detail&amp;document_id= https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vietnam-is-systematically-snuffing-out-voices-of-dissent/ / / / ae dae- f f- e - d -eba ed cc_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c fbea https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vietnam-is-systematically-snuffing-out-voices-of-dissent/ / / / ae dae- f f- e - d -eba ed cc_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c fbea https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vietnam-is-systematically-snuffing-out-voices-of-dissent/ / / / ae dae- f f- e - d -eba ed cc_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c fbea https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vietnam-is-systematically-snuffing-out-voices-of-dissent/ / / / ae dae- f f- e - d -eba ed cc_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c fbea https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vietnam-is-systematically-snuffing-out-voices-of-dissent/ / / / ae dae- f f- e - d -eba ed cc_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c fbea https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	vietnamese media going social: connectivism, collectivism, and conservatism 	introduction 	the “traditional” media landscape 	social media and the new dynamics of vietnamese media 	the cybersecurity law and the problem of fear-based censorship 	conclusion 	acknowledgments 	acknowledgments 	list of references contraceptive consultations: a cross-sectional study of norwegian women's experiences and opinions european journal of midwifery research paper published by european publishing. © forsberg k.e. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non commercial . international license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . ) kristin e. forsberg *, ragnhild lassemo , *, mirjam lukasse , abstract introduction access to contraceptive consultations and the content of these consultations are important to achieve a safe and satisfying sexual life and successful reproduction when desired. the aim of this study was to investigate norwegian women’s experiences of and opinions on contraceptive consultations. methods we conducted a cross-sectional study with a questionnaire distributed via facebook with respondents of age ≥ years. descriptive analyses were used. results few women found it hard to access consultations ( %). across all age groups, side effects were the most common topic that women ( %) wanted more information about. concern about side effects was also the most frequent reason given ( %) for not using hormonal contraceptives. among women aged – years, % wanted to know more about different available contraceptives. the majority of women deemed issues of sexual wellbeing important to address during a contraceptive consultation. few women reported that these topics had been raised. just under half of the women found it appropriate to see a midwife for contraceptive/sexual health consultations. only one-third knew that midwives can prescribe and administer long-acting reversible contraceptives (larcs). conclusions women want contraceptive consultations to include more information on side effects and available hormonal contraceptives. women want to be asked about their sexual health and wellbeing during contraceptive consultations. women should be made aware that midwives can provide contraceptive services including larcs. introduction reproductive health, sexual wellbeing and the use of contraceptives are closely linked. the united nations (un) states that reproductive health implies that people should be able to decide if and when they want to reproduce, and also that their sex life should be safe and satisfying . the un reports that % of married or in-union women worldwide use contraceptive pills, % use intrauterine contraceptive devices (iuds), and % rely on female sterilization . short-term and reversible methods are more common in africa and europe, whereas long-acting and permanent methods are preferred in asia and northern america . among women of fertile age in norway, % use h o rm o n a l c o n t r a c e p t i ve s o r n o n - h o rm o n a l i u d s . approximately half of these women are using combined oral contraceptives (‘the pill’) . the extent of the use of emergency contraceptives such as ‘the morning after pill’ or retrospect insertion of iuds is not known in norway. sale statistics for ‘the morning after pill’ indicate that they add little to the total volume of contraceptives used . there are a number of non-hormonal ways to limit the chances of pregnancy, such as: barrier methods, withdrawal method, breastfeeding, and ‘safe period’ during the menstrual cycle . sales of barrier devices are not registered and neither is affiliation department of nursing and health sciences, faculty of health and social sciences, university of south-eastern norway, kongsberg, norway akershus university hospital, nordbyhagen, norway institute of nursing and health promotion, faculty of health sciences, oslo metropolitan university, oslo, norway *contributed equally correspondence to mirjam lukasse. department of nursing and health sciences, faculty of health and social sciences, university of south-eastern norway, kongsberg, norway. e-mail: mirjam.lukasse@usn.no orcid id: https://orcid.org/ - - - keywords midwife, hormonal contraceptives, side effects, contraceptive consultations, sexual wellbeing received: december revised: may accepted: june eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ contraceptive consultations: a cross-sectional study of norwegian women's experiences and opinions european journal of midwifery eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ research paper the use of natural family planning methods, nor did we find up-to-date research information on their use in norway. the norwegian government, in line with current research, recommends that more women should use long-acting reversible contraceptives (larcs) , . the pearl index, an index showing the number of unintended pregnancies while using any given contraceptive, is showing that larcs are the best alternatives to avoid pregnancies. the index is based on how many out of women conceive during a year of both typical and perfect use of a specific contraceptive. imperfect use is low when the contraceptive is in situ, and not dependent on the user applying or digesting the contraceptive on frequent intervals. as an example, oral contraceptives have a pearl index as low as . with perfect use, but as high as with typical use. in comparison, the hormonal iud has the same typical and perfect use index of . . except for the ‘morning after pill’, all hormonal contraceptives are provided through a contraceptive consultation. easy access to a contraceptive consultation is thus important and essential. one aspect of this consultation is for the provider to ensure there is no predisposition for serious but rare side effects such as deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary thrombosis, myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular accidents . however, less serious but more common side effects such as unplanned pregnancies due to poor compliance, altered bleeding patterns, genital dryness, mood changes, effects on mental health, changes of libido etc. should also be discussed, as they carry great importance with the women who have to live with these effects in their daily life . there is limited research about norwegian women’s o p i n i o n o n t h e a c c e s s t o a n d i n fo rm a t i o n a b o u t contraceptives. however, one large intervention study was conducted by sintef (the foundation for scientific and industrial research at the norwegian institute of technology) among women aged – years in four norwegian municipalities in the period – . in two municipalities, women received free contraception and easy access to care, while women in two other municipalities received standard care. the number of women who used hormonal contraceptives did not differ between the groups . however, in the intervention group there was a significant increase in the proportion of women using larcs . concern about side effects, reluctance to add hormones to the body, lack of information on side effects and suitable alternative contraceptives were all major barriers to more women using contraceptives . more recent studies involving all women of fertile age have not been conducted. since the sintef study, the norwegian government has implemented new guidelines encouraging the increased use of larcs , . the effect these implementations have had on women’s experiences and opinions on contraceptive use and contraceptive counselling has not been examined. besides the prescription of contraceptives and information about their side effects, the contraceptive consultation offers the opportunity for health care professionals to inquire about women’s sexual health and wellbeing. neither the sintef study nor any other norwegian study, that we have found, has investigated aspects of sexual health and wellbeing as part of the contraceptive consultation. however, we found one swedish cross- sectional study by wendt et al. of women, which addressed these aspects in a gynecological consultation. this study showed that while few women had been asked, close to % of the women considered it appropriate and useful to be asked about sexual health and wellbeing during a gynecological consultation . the aim of the present study was to investigate norwegian women’s experiences of and opinions on contraceptive consultations. methods the norwegian setting norwegian youth aged – years have had access since to free consultations on sexual health and contraceptives through the public health clinic for youth or school health services. here they can get prescriptions for free or subsidized contraceptives, including larcs . this service is offered mainly by public health nurses (phns) and some midwives, who have been authorized to prescribe hormonal contraceptives to women aged – years since . before this, prescriptions for contraceptives were only available from doctors, with a payable fee both for consultations and contraceptives. in , the norwegian government extended the right of midwives and phns to prescribe contraceptives to all women of fertile age, not only those – years of age . this means that women can now choose to see a midwife or a phn for their contraceptive needs. most midwives and phns work at a public health clinic. access to a contraceptive consultation has thus, in theory, become easier. however, due to lack of resources, in particularly midwives, most public health clinics still only offer appointments to women under the age of years, and pregnant women, as required by the norwegian law , . other services are offered at each clinic’s discretion. method, sample and design we conducted a cross-sectional study with a questionnaire distributed via the internet. data collection started on the december and finished february . the survey was distributed with a link to questback.com on facebook pages such as sexogsamfunn.no, women’s groups, political organizations, and students’ organizations. inclusion criteria were women who perceived themselves to be of fertile age, from years of age with no upper age limit defined by the authors. all authors were involved in the development of the questionnaire. the full questionnaire is available as a supplementary file (supplementary file ). it was compiled by questions adapted from the sintef survey regarding access and information given during contraceptive consultations, and questions adapted from the wendt et al. study regarding sexual wellbeing. the sociodemographic (independent) variables included were age, employment and european journal of midwifery eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ research paper size of municipality. to ensure anonymity, age was asked for in categories. the second section was about access and information on contraceptives. women were asked how many times they had been to a consultation regarding contraceptives the previous year: none, – or ≥ . participants currently not using hormonal contraceptives were asked if a different access would make them consider using them. all participants were asked how easy or difficult they found it to access consultations. only women who had been to consultations regarding hormonal contraceptives were asked what topics they wanted more information on. if the participants had not used hormonal contraceptives in the last six months, they were asked why not. this question had answering options and the women could tick off all relevant ones. in addition, women were asked if they had an unplanned pregnancy during the last year. the third section included questions on sexual wellbeing. women were asked if questions on sexual wellbeing had been raised during contraceptive consultations they had attended, and whether they deemed the topic important or not. in the last section of the questionnaire participants were asked if they would find it appropriate to see a midwife regarding questions on contraceptives, sexual health and wellbeing, and if they were aware that midwives can administer iuds and contraceptive implants. finally, there was a section for free comments. data analysis we performed descriptive statistical analysis; frequencies and proportions as well as cross-tabulation. the statistical package for social sciences (spss) version for windows was used to perform the analysis. bivariate analysis was also performed, using a pearson chi-squared test with % confidence intervals. there were little missing data, and missing values were not replaced. the cross tabulations by municipality and employment status showed no significance regarding the dependent variables. therefore, bivariate analyses presented in the tables are performed with age groups and the dependent variables only. for analysis, age was recoded into three age groups: – , – and ≥ years. answers to the question considering consultation access were recoded to binary results showing how many women found it hard to access consultations. similarly, on whether women would use hormonal contraceptives if the service was different, answers were dichotomized to ‘yes’ with all other answers becoming ‘no’. ethics nsd, norwegian centre for research data, was consulted for initial approval, but application was not needed as total anonymity was ensured . information about the purpose of the survey and how the anonymity of the respondent was secured were stated in the introduction of the questionnaire (supplementary file ). responding to the questionnaire was considered consenting to the use of the gathered data. we considered the possibility that painful emotions could be provoked due to the intimate nature of some of the questions. however, this was outweighed by the likely positive effect that women could become more aware that they can raise such issues next time they seek contraceptive counselling. the participants ip addresses were not accessible at any stage during the research. the data were stored at questback.com and the results were sent by email as an spss data file. results a total of women responded to the questionnaire. of all the women participating, % were under years of age and % were students (table ). among the age group – years, % were currently undertaking studies. of all participants, % reported that they had been using hormonal contraceptives the last six months and % of the women had had an unplanned pregnancy the last year (table ). the youngest women ( – years) were the most frequent users of contraceptive consultations, with % seeing a health care professional at least once during the last year, compared to % of those ≥ years (table ). almost none of the women found it hard to get an appointment for a contraceptive consultation (table ). the majority of women across all age groups wanted more information about side effects, with no significant differences between the age groups. the women also expressed a need for more information on alternative available contraceptives. this was significantly more important for the women aged – years compared to those ≥ years (table ). variable n (%) age – ( . ) – ( . ) ≥ years ( . ) size of municipality by inhabitants > ( . ) – ( . ) < ( . ) missing ( . ) employment status employed ( . ) student ( . ) unemployed ( . ) other ( . ) missing ( . ) using hormonal contraceptives last months ( . ) unintended pregnancies last year ( . ) table . characteristics of the participants (n= ) european journal of midwifery eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ research paper the most common reason for not using hormonal contraceptives was concern about the side effects (supplementary file ). there were significant differences between the age groups regarding which topics of sexual health and wellbeing were deemed important to be raised in a contraceptive consultation (table ). for example, control over one’s sexuality and/or pleasure in sexual relationships is rated considerably more important by women less than years compared to women years and older (p< . ). item age group total pb – n (%) – n (%) ≥ years n (%) n (%) consultations last year (n= ) none ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . – ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . ≥ ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . missing ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) access to consultations (n= ) find it hard to access ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . easy/neither easy nor hard ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) missing ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) table . frequency of and access to contraceptive consultations by age groupsa (n= ) a column percentages. b chi-squared test for significance. item age group total pb – n (%) – n (%) ≥ years n (%) n (%) available contraceptives ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . side effects ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . general information ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . other subjects ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . table . wish for more information by women who had ever used hormonal contraceptivesa (n= ) a multiple choices available. b chi-squared test for significance. item age group total pb – n (%) – n (%) ≥ years n (%) n (%) ‘how are you?’ subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . control/pleasure in sexual relations subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . body image/self-esteem subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . genital discomfort or pain subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . feeling of guilt or shame subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . sexual abuse and/or violence subject raised ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . deemed important ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) < . table . women’s opinions on questions regarding sexual health and wellbeing during contraceptive consultations (n= ) a chi-squared test for significance. european journal of midwifery eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ research paper significant discrepancy was observed between whether the topics had been raised during the consultation or the women found it important that the topics were raised (table ). this applies to all the questions on sexual health and wellbeing (table ). close to half of the women found it appropriate to see a midwife for contraceptive counselling or about issues concerning sexuality (table ). one-third knew that midwives could administer larcs. there were no significant differences between the age groups (table ). discussion very few women found access to contraceptive consultations to be an issue. over two-thirds of all women wanted more information on side effects when attending contraceptive consultations. insufficient information was also the main reason for non-use of hormonal contraceptives. all the different aspects of sexual wellbeing were deemed important to talk about during contraceptive consultations by over % of the women across all age groups. the women also indicated that the sexual wellbeing aspect of contraceptive care was under-communicated during these consultations. almost half of the women found it appropriate to see a midwife for contraceptive/sexual health counselling. only one-third knew that midwives can prescribe and administer long-acting reversible contraceptives (larcs). very few women in our survey found it hard to get an appointment for contraceptive consultation. the access to contraceptive consultations in norway differs slightly from other comparable european countries. in the united kingdom contraceptives are available from most general practices, specialist community contraception clinics, sexual health clinics, some genitourinary medicine clinics and pharmacies . swedish women mainly see midwives in community health clinics where they also get general care for their health and wellbeing. one could argue that the norwegian setting, as described earlier, puts more limits on women’s access to contraceptive consultations. however, the women included in our study reported very little difficulty regarding access to contraceptive consultations. across all age groups, women wanted more information about the side effects of contraceptives. the youngest women expressed a significantly higher need for general information on contraceptives compared to the other age groups. this increased need for general information among the youngest participants could be due to their lack of experience with contraceptive use, compared to the women of older age. still, the youngest women in our study expressed a higher need for general information than the women in the sintef study where % of women wanted more general information . the difference might be explained by increased focus in media on side effects, rising incidence of sexually transmitted infections , and more focus on larcs since the time of the sintef study. in our study, % of the participants had not used hormonal contraceptives the past year, slightly less than in the norwegian national statistics . the difference could be due to the fact that our study included a higher proportion of younger women. concerns about side effects were given as the main specific reason for non-use in all age groups. this is in line with findings from other, international studies, which looked at reasons for contraceptive non-use among women - . considering heavy news coverage of recent research on hormonal contraceptives increasing the incidence of depression and suicide , , it is reasonable to believe that women can be reluctant to use them. women need to receive information on the rare but serious side effects of contraceptives. in addition, other more common but less serious side effects such as irregular bleeding, weight gain, mood changes, changes in libido etc. should be discussed with the women’s personal preferences and needs in mind. bitzer et al. suggest a method of personalized interactive consultations that allow these individual needs to be addressed and also for the choice of contraceptive to be assessed and re-evaluated with regard to its effect on a woman’s biopsychosocial life . in our sample, only a small proportion of the women had been asked questions on sexual wellbeing during contraceptive counselling, while a high proportion thought it to be important. the subjects of genital discomfort or pain, and history of sexual abuse or sexual violence, stood out as the topics that women of all age groups found most important to address in these consultations. yet, very few had been asked about these issues. compared to the findings of wendt et al. , women in our study were asked about these issues more often. there has been an increasing focus on sexual violence and abuse both internationally and in norway over the past few years, with item age group total pb – n (%) – n (%) ≥ years n (%) n (%) ‘would you consider it appropriate to see a midwife about contraceptive/sexual health needs?’ ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . ‘did you know midwives can prescribe and administer larc?’ ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) . table . midwives as counsellors on contraceptive and sexual health issues (n= ) a chi-squared test for significance. european journal of midwifery eur j midwifery ; (june): https://doi.org/ . /ejm/ research paper a dedicated who directive and norwegian governmental guidelines . this might be an explanation for the increase. unorganized movements such as #metoo are also currently raising awareness around women who have been subject to unwanted sexual attentions and abuse. this too might affect the views that women have on talking about their own experiences with a health care professional. the subject of ever having experienced sexual abuse or violence was broached with the women of the youngest age group more frequently than with the other groups, but rated as equally important by all women aged – years. almost one in ten women in norway has been subject to rape, and the likelihood of having experienced sexual abuse increases with every year lived , making this a relevant subject across all age groups. it can be difficult for women to find a person they can confide in when experiencing problems with shame, body image, genital pain, control over their sexuality or similar issues. however, over half of the women across all age groups found all the subjects raised in the questionnaire important to talk about in a contraceptive consultation. it is easier to answer directly asked questions than to bring up subjects oneself. therefore, it would be appropriate if health care personnel ask questions and invite open dialogue about the wider perspective on sexual health and wellbeing . contraceptive consultations offer an opportunity to discuss these issues. all women rated vaginal pain and discomfort important to talk about, but women years and older were asked significantly more often. this might indicate that health care personnel consider it more appropriate to talk about this with women who have gone through childbirth with the accompanying trauma to the tissues. similarly, women are more likely to start developing menopausal symptoms such as vaginal dryness and thinning of the mucous membranes after the age of years. younger and/or nulliparous women might be considered less likely to experience genital pain. however, the presumption that questions about vaginal pain and discomfort are more appropriate with increasing age is not accurate. seventy-five per cent of all women who have vulvodynia (vaginismus, vulvar vestibulitis and generalized vulvar pain) experience the onset before the age of years , and up to % of women experience this pain syndrome . close to half of the women across all age groups considered midwives appropriate health care personnel to consult when they have questions about contraceptives or need advice on sexual health. we had expected fewer among the youngest women to give this answer, as less of them have yet met the midwife through community antenatal care. only about one-third of the women were aware that midwives can prescribe and administer larcs. this shows that there is a lack of knowledge among women about what services midwives can provide. besides midwives being given the authority to prescribe, women need to be informed about their options and sufficient midwives need to be employed at community health centers. limitations and strengths the questionnaire was electronic and spread via the internet, mainly through facebook, so women needed access to the internet, a computer, and in many instances also a facebook account, to participate. the questionnaire was in norwegian only, requiring the women to being able to read and comprehend the language. this could lead to selection bias; thus our sample may not be representative for the norwegian population in general. we did not ask about ethnicity and therefore do not know how many non- native norwegian speakers participated. overrepresented in our sample are women – years of age, with less respondents from age groups – and > years. this might be because the youngest women frequent facebook less than other social media platforms, and that the older women felt the questionnaire did not apply to them. as the results are presented by age groups, it is easy to interpret the findings for the different age groups without generalizing to all women. it is uncertain whether anyone chose to answer multiple times, or if in fact all respondents were female. a strength of our study is that we have a large sample. another strength is that we included questions previously used by experts in the field , , even though a couple of questions were modified. a weakness of our study is that the results are descriptive only, and no multivariate regression analyses were performed. however, these analyses should be used with caution in a cross-sectional study. conclusions access to contraceptive consultations was not a significant obstacle to contraceptive use. women want consultations to include significantly more information on side effects and available alternative hormonal contraceptives. they also want information and communication about general sexual wellbeing such as vaginal pain and discomfort, and history of sexual violence and abuse. just under half of the women view midwives as appropriate health care professionals to see on these matters. more focus needs to be placed on meeting the woman’s individual needs during the contraceptive consultation. not only on the right type of contraceptive, but also her general sexual health and wellbeing. women need to be made aware that midwives can 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queering lizzie borden in lizzie ( ) barbara braid (university of szczecin, poland) abstract: the borden murders committed in in fall river, massachusetts, have sparked a number of neo-victorian textualisations. from the perspective of the ‘lethal lesbian’ trope known in queer cinema, this article discusses the famous suspect in this case, lizzie borden ( – ), as depicted in lizzie ( , dir. craig macneill). it shows that the titular character (chloë sevigny) is queered in this film – not just by her lesbian relationship with the maid, bridget sullivan (kristen stewart), but also as a madwoman and a spinster who repeatedly refuses to adhere to social and gender codes of nineteenth-century new england. the article examines these various facets of queer disruption of victorian norms, complicating the discussion by employing an intersectional perspective which points out more nuanced aspects of power relations between characters and the ethical implications of casting female criminals as neo-victorian, feminist, and/or queer heroines. keywords: adaptation, bryce kass, lesbian, lizzie borden, lizzie, craig macneill, neo- victorian, queer, textualisation. ***** lizzie borden is a particularly elusive, queer spectre of late nineteenth- century massachusetts. on a stuffy summer day on august , she allegedly murdered her father and step-mother with an axe. having been acquitted, as no sufficient evidence of her guilt was found, she remained silent on her true role in the case. the enigma prevailed, and with most historians and true crime afficionados believing in her guilt, she has secured herself a place amongst the highest ranks of notorious victorian killers. her exceptional status in both the history of american crime and popular culture is evidenced, among other things, by the continuing dissemination of cultural representations of lizzie borden and her potential misdeeds in a range of adaptations, or, rather, textualisations – as what is being adapted here is a historical event, not a text. almost since the incident itself, press accounts, non-fictional books, novels, plays, films and television series have mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd worked with and re-worked the events in fall river, some offering a queer reading and trying to, variously, explain the urgency of the crime, make lizzie’s case relatable to a contemporary audience, or capitalise on sensationalism. as such, lizzie borden’s story is a prime example of how textualisation, understood as “the processes by which some intertexts become sanctified as texts while others do not” (leitch : ), has a performative function – not so much recording as creating historical memory of an exceptional victorian woman. this article will focus on the latest addition to this body of textualisations, that is, the film lizzie (dir. craig macneill, written by bryce kass), starring chloë sevigny as lizzie borden and kristen stewart as the borden irish servant bridget sullivan, against the backdrop of previous adaptations that together create a palimpsestic tapestry of myth and speculation. the queering of lizzie borden’s figure that this film replicates (although not initiates, as will be shown) involves, of course, the lesbian relationship between her and bridget sullivan, the only other person present in the house during the murders. in addition, the article proposes to locate queer deviance in lizzie’s precarious physical and mental health as depicted in the film, and in her strategies of resistance against the power held by the masculine members of her family and patriarchal society at large. this treatment of queerness as, broadly, a “deviation from normalcy” (butler : ) follows queer studies’ investment in recognising and imagining lgbtqia histories, identities and experiences, which were typically veiled by opaque encryptions and metaphors. indeed, queer studies situates queerness as transgressing and resisting different kinds of norms, as non- conforming and exposing the “fraudulent artifice of mainstream society’s most centrally constitutive taboos and prohibitions” (schoene : ). early on, sue-ellen case pinpoints the queer not only as a matter of gender and sexuality, but as “work[ing] at the site […] of ontology” as a “taboo- breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny” (case : ; see also hall : ). david halperin has suggested that “[q]ueer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (halperin : ). these propositions facilitate a wider understanding of queer as a methodological tool that can be applied to figures that, as case’s essay shows, are monstrous: “[l]ike the phantom of the opera, the queer dwells underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music” (case barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd : ). crucially, in the context of this article, such a methodological approach overlaps with andrew scull’s definition of madness as a cultural phenomenon and motif, positing the mad as “those who are profoundly at variance with the conventions and expectations of their culture” (scull : ). the present article suggests that lizzie merges notions of queerness, madness, and violation in ways that bind queer themes to notions of danger and depravity – themes of queer cinema that alex jung praises as truly subversive (jung : n.p.) – yet that are also potentially politically ambiguous. of course, the motif of murderous lesbians is not new; b. ruby rich even identifies a ‘lethal lesbian’ genre (rich : ) and sees its proliferation in s cinema as the deconstruction of a filmic trope where lesbians kill themselves or their lovers at the end of the movie, stressing the impossibility of their relationship and perpetuating the limitations of gender and sexuality in a heteronormative society. macneill’s film includes most of the elements enumerated by rich as staples of the ‘lethal lesbian’ genre (rich : - ). it features a lesbian couple (lizzie and bridget) who are supposed to commit the murder together; the murder plan has elements of a frenzied, erotic ceremony as both undress to commit it; lizzie and bridget are abused by the borden family, which is one of the reasons for their retaliation; and they are non-glamorous women “lashing out against female authority figures” (rich : ) – in this case abby borden, as well as the patriarchal figure of andrew borden. moreover, the murder is brutal and gory, emphasising blood that is symbolic of female sexuality (rich : - ), and the murder is apparently designed to avoid lizzie and bridget’s separation. while indicating the historical longevity of the ‘lethal lesbian’ trope (after all, from the very beginning, textualisations of the borden case frequently paired lizzie’s murderousness with queer innuendos) and innovatively merging specific capabilities of neo- victorianism with the conventions of a more presentist queer cinema, lizzie also extends and subverts some aspects of the prescribed trope. when rich coined the term ‘new queer cinema’ (nqc) in the s, she called it “homo pomo” (homosexual postmodernism) and defined it as characterised by “appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as reworking of a history with social constructionism very much in mind” (rich : ). while, admittedly, lizzie fulfils the latter requirement of nqc, and could be understood as an appropriation of historical facts into queer fiction, it lacks mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd the postmodern tongue-in-cheek radicalism that is so characteristic of independent nqc. in contrast, its depiction of ‘lethal lesbian’ violence is much more thoughtful and severe. on the basis of historicising textualisations of lizzie borden that focus on queerness, this article will offer an interpretation that renders overt the more intricate, at times ambiguous and problematic, relations of power and features of the film. these complicate not only the relationship between the characters but also the film’s relationship with queer politics, as dictated not least by the denouement of the film’s plot. . queer lizzie before lizzie the notorious case of the borden murders that took place in in fall river, massachusetts, sparked a number of cultural texts and performances in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. lizzie borden’s class and gender status, the speculations on her possible romance with an unknown man, or a lesbian relationship with her servant bridget, and the evidence of her desire for financial independence as a possible motive for the crime make her an obvious favourite for a queer-feminist rewriting. nineteenth- century gender codes and their violation through, for instance, committing crimes – such as the murders in the borden family – is also an attractive point of departure for neo-victorian cultural texts, where the element of sensationalism and voyeurism is married with a discussion of gender politics and its various intersectionalities. what is characteristic of textualisations of the borden case is the palimpsestic nature of the lizzie borden myth. its archive of facts and factoids, or pure conjecture, is transmitted from one text to another, and it is almost impossible to distinguish their origins, and whether they are indeed mentioned in the court transcript (the holy gospel for the bordenites) or re- told rumour or speculation. the long list of these elements – including lizzie’s mental illness, epilepsy, kleptomania, and romantic affairs – indicates that lizzie’s fictionalisation begins with her very trial: “she becomes not some sort of objective truth but a text as equally shaped by ideology and culture as are her fictions” (schofield : ). these recurring motifs fuel the ever-growing body of bordeniana, a palimpsest of textualisations including equally press reports, non-fictional accounts, fictions, and popular appropriations. one of the recurring motifs is the suspicion that lizzie had an accomplice – a lover, and, in some of these barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd fictions, a female one. as ann schofield notes, lizzie borden’s narrative is one in which gender plays a crucial role, for it has followed “either a romantic formula or a formula of an individual’s quest for freedom and self- actualization” (schofield : ) – a limiting dichotomy, as schofield stresses (see schofield : ), yet one which is collapsed into the queer narrative of macneill’s lizzie. even in its initial textualisations, lizzie borden’s case was affected by rumours of a love affair resulting in an illegitimate pregnancy – a story fabricated by a boston reporter which was later retracted (gage : n.p.). yet many of the aforementioned textualisations involved love relationships, indicating the wide-spread understanding that a woman might only be murderous in pangs of passion. thus, melodrama abounds, for instance in agnes de mille’s ballet fall river legend ( ) where lizzie’s romance with a minister, once thwarted by her stepmother, becomes the cause of her rage; similarly, jack beeson’s lizzie borden opera puts lizzie in a love triangle with her sister’s lover, a sea captain (schofield : ). among these fictions of lizzie’s romantic life, there are a number of stories that suggest a lesbian relationship as the original secret and motif behind this ‘why-dunnit’. it is difficult to ascertain where and when speculations about lizzie’s lesbianism originated, although victoria lincoln’s a private disgrace offers a suggestion that perhaps such rumours were present already in lizzie’s youth (lincoln qtd. in english : ). lincoln’s account is coloured by more than a tint of prejudice, which allows her to see lizzie’s possible lesbian desire – evident in her teenage crushes and friendships, and later in her relationship with boston actress nance o’neil – as immature and sentimental, and impossible to consummate. lizzie’s attachment to nance (which took place several years after the murders) was the most scandalous of her female friendships, and it was the notoriety that surrounded this couple that could have been the trigger for lizzie’s estrangement from her sister emma borden (gage : vi; jones : - ). as the boston herald pronounced in an article in , “[a]ll sorts of reasons for the quarrel between the sisters have been afloat, but the best founded ones involve the name of miss nance o’neil, the actress” (reprinted in kent and flynn : ). evan hunter, in the afterword to his novel lizzie ( ), also mentions a mysterious quarrel between the sisters that led to their estrangement, as well as a divorce case connected to lesbianism in which a lizbeth a. borden (a spelling of her name adopted by mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd lizzie after the trial) was the guilty party (hunter : ). another clue that would provide grounds for perceiving lizzie as a lesbian is her apparent friendship with sarah orne jewett and the latter’s partner annie fields, which alice morris describes in her autobiography. as carolyn gage notes, this might show that lizzie “had most likely found her way into boston’s most elite network of lesbians” (gage : vi). moreover, gertrude stein included references to lizzie in her detective fiction – most notably blood on the dining-room floor, written in and published in (english : ). this ‘evidence’ is more opaque, however, as lizzie does not appear there as a recognisable character of true crime fiction, but rather as an invisible narratee, a sort of silent interlocutor to whom the narrator addresses herself frequently and with whom, as elizabeth english suggests, stein also felt a lesbian affinity. in a reverie for borden, stein “use[d] her to articulate a passionate critique of heterosexual familial dynamics” (english : ). it is therefore evident for english that lizzie borden “may have been understood or available to stein […] essentially as a lesbian criminal” (english : ). if english is right, this might indicate that, in stein’s lifetime – her detective fiction more or less chronologically coincides with borden’s death in – lizzie borden could have been renown in lesbian circles of new england as one of theirs. literary textualisations of lizzie borden that followed in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century evoke her lesbianism in more sensational and, at times, melodramatic ways. sally pollock’s drama blood relations ( ) only fleetingly hints at lizzie’s relationship with the actress (a reference to nance o’neil) many years after the murder; it is the actress’s curiosity about the truth of the case that spurs the rest of the play, whereby the two women re-enact the events of , with lizzie undertaking the role of bridget and the actress playing lizzie. hunter’s already mentioned novel lizzie puts lizzie’s lesbianism much closer to the heart of the murders as a hidden motif. during her trip to europe in , lizzie borden meets alison, a rich aristocrat, and undergoes a journey of sexual self-discovery when the two of them start a relationship. after her return to fall river, distraught and abandoned, lizzie does what alison warned her against – she seduces the irish maid bridget sullivan. when the two of them get caught in flagrante delicto by her stepmother abby, lizzie lashes out at her, and then kills her father so that he will not discover the murder of mrs borden. elizabeth engstrom’s lizzie borden ( ) similarly barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd hints at lizzie’s relationships with women and includes scenes of lesbian erotica and more, as engstrom imagines a scenario of incest and a love triangle in which “lizzie became her dead mother’s sexual surrogate as a child and as an adult shared a bisexual female lover with her father” (schofield : ). the possibility of a lesbian relationship is also presented in the rock musical lizzie ( , music by steven cheslik- demeyer and alan stevens hewitt, lyrics by cheslik-demeyer and tim maner), in which lizzie has an affair with her friend and neighbour alice russel, following the traumatic experience of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her father. as marc napolitano suggests, “the fact that lizzie is grounded in historical detail grants a strange authenticity to the queer reinterpretation, as though the creative liberties reveal a possible, albeit undocumented, historical actuality” (napolitano : ). nevertheless, the narratives that use lizzie’s lesbianism as a sensational motif are hardly “positive or empowering” (schofield : ). lizzie is shown in these set-ups as the submissive one to her more dominant lovers, easily manipulated by them and driven to murder, “as though the authors are saying that one kind of ‘unnaturalness’ leads to another” (schofield : ). by doing so, these authors are uncritically tapping into the aforementioned stereotype of the evil, violent lesbian, corrupting the innocent (see faderman : ). more recently, gage has written two short plays, lace curtain irish ( ) and the greatest actress who ever lived ( ), in an attempt to re-cast lizzie’s lesbian relationships with bridget and nance in ways that seek to overcome stereotyping and offer a more positive lesbian scenario. however, as i will show, macneill’s film interestingly manipulates this stereotype beyond a simple dichotomy of the deviant versus the benign lesbian. . macneill’s lizzie: lesbian readings and queer re-readings it is difficult to tell whether lizzie’s producer chloë sevigny – for whom the film was a passion project since (jacobs : n.p.) – was in any way inspired or influenced by the above narratives when she asked her friend and colleague bryce kass to write the script. the film offers a range of possible motives for the crime: lizzie borden suffers from epilepsy attacks, which, in combination with her rebellious behaviour such as unattended trips to the theatre, are reason enough for her father to contemplate sending her to a lunatic asylum. moreover, andrew borden is being manipulated by lizzie’s mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd brutal and misogynistic uncle, john, to draft a will in which john himself is named the sole beneficiary of the borden fortune and the guardian of the borden women – a prospect which, as lizzie understands, would leave her penniless and, perhaps, institutionalised. last but not least, the stifling atmosphere of the borden household affords no respite except brief moments of joy lizzie and bridget share in their secret relationship. ultimately, the film proposes an interpretation of the fall river murder mystery that posits a thirst for freedom as the real motive. this interpretation is supported by chloë sevigny’s interviews: we just really wanted to focus on how she went about finding [her freedom] and how important that was to her and what that meant to her, […] whether it was through the relationship with [her maid] or ultimately killing her parents for money — because money equaled freedom then. it still does. i wanted it to be this rousing, smash-the-patriarchy piece. (sevigny qtd. in jacobs : n.p.) although the film does pinpoint the economic, sexual, and social oppression of women, it also shows that, as queer theory explicates, the workings of power are more intricate than a simple oppressor-oppressed axis, and total freedom is not possible. lizzie’s queer position as a character who crosses the limits of what is regarded as feminine, in more subtle ways than simply refusing to conform to the norms of victorian femininity, is evident from the outset. the film uses its visual devices to signal both lizzie’s desire for bridget and her more dominant, active position toward the servant. in one of the opening scenes of the film, the moment bridget first enters the borden household, lizzie observes bridget from the vantage point of her bedroom window (macneill : : : - : : ). she assumes the position of the subject who holds an erotic gaze, which conventionally is that of a male gazer onto a female gazee. thus, the scene additionally undermines the (potentially) heteronormative gaze of the viewer, merging it with lizzie’s lesbian one. the upper window also suggests lizzie’s upper, dominant position, continued when lizzie enters bridget’s room to start actively pursuing her and to gain her attention (macneill : : : - : : ). lizzie becomes bridget’s protector when she refuses to join her family’s barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd xenophobic insistence to call bridget ‘maggie’, like all other irish maids, or when she teaches bridget to read and write, which not only forms an act of rebellion, but also a vehicle for their desire, as they start exchanging notes. this same motif can also be found in earlier queer neo-victorian fiction, e.g. by sarah waters, where acts of writing and reading establish a shared intimacy between lesbian characters, for instance at the end of fingersmith ( ). in this vein, the film seems to be following in the footsteps of gage’s plays which show lizzie as the embodiment of the guardian/rescuer butch lesbian archetype (gage : vii-viii), in contrast to the evil, murderous lesbian stereotype that prevails in the depiction of lizzie borden’s case. nevertheless, kass’s script shows lizzie borden not only as a “lesbian marching out of the kitchen with a bloody ax” (jones qtd. in english : ), but also as a woman implicated in the victorian discourse of female insanity, a go-to diagnosis for any kind of non- normalcy. one of the initial scenes of the film depicts lizzie on an outing to the theatre, where she is suddenly gripped by a seizure which – with reference to victoria lincoln’s speculation – might be read as an epileptic fit (macneill : : : - : : ), yet is never described as such by the film’s characters. instead, lizzie’s quarrel with her parents about her evening out on her own suggests, first of all, a gossip mill in town that already identifies her as ‘eccentric’, but also that such stigmatisation of her behaviour as insane is similarly engaged in by her parents. lizzie has more of those fainting spells in the course of the film, and these fits appear in moments of emotional intensity, such as for instance in her rage after her father kills her pet pigeons (macneill : : : - : : ). on the whole, however, viewers may observe a restrained and level-headed lizzie, who much more shrewdly than her father recognises uncle john’s plot aimed at seizing the borden fortune after andrew’s death. the proclamations her father makes to the doctor who visits after one of her seizures thus take on a still more ironic edge: “she’s always been very emotional” (macneill : : : - : : ). andrew borden later remarks to john that “[my daughters] know nothing of the matters of the world, especially lizzie” (macneill : : : - : : ). in his conversation with john, andrew admits that dr bowen recommends the institutionalisation of lizzie, thus proclaiming her insane and incapable of self-governance, and advises her future guardian to act without sentiment. mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd there is no doubt that the male figures of power – father, doctor, uncle/potential guardian – use language pertaining to victorian insanity discourses to control lizzie’s aspiration to overcome the limits of prescribed female behaviour, which might become threatening to their social positions and financial privilege. thus, lizzie’s attempts at taking control of her own and emma’s future, and her efforts to protect herself and other women in her family, are both read as queer. deemed conventionally masculine, they are perceived as ‘unnatural’ in her as a woman – and pathologised. in the midst of the conflict between a queer, ‘mad’ lizzie (who wants to regain economic and social control) and male figures of authority (who will not relinquish it), a lesbian romance with bridget provides lizzie with a degree of self-realisation and freedom. for one reviewer, the film’s subtle and silent cinematography used to evoke lizzie’s and bridget’s budding feelings signifies female passivity: “[t]hat [strong, ferocious] lizzie vanishes after the first half-hour and the two lovers eventually go near-mute, which underlines the film’s ideas about female passivity” (nicholson : n.p.). yet, this representation of lesbian intimacy defies easy categorisation into active/ masculine and passive/ feminine binaries. the strong, dominant lizzie becomes quiet and subdued in moments of emotional significance, while the timid bridget speaks out to rescue lizzie from her uncle’s threatening behaviour (macneill : : : ). what is more, lesbian intimacy is here contrasted with heterosexual intimacy, which is depicted as characterised by rape and sexual abuse. this shocking disparity helps to evidence that heterosexuality is, ultimately, an oppressive institution, and, within it, sex is an exercise in power. andrew borden’s sexual abuse of bridget starts when he notices lizzie and bridget in a friendly conversation (macneill : : : - : : ), as if to assert his dominance over his younger daughter and her relationships to others, and to re-claim the position of alpha male (allegedly) threatened by ‘queer’ lizzie. similarly, uncle john’s attempt at raping lizzie (macneill : : : - : : ) is not spurred by lust but designed to threaten her into submission and self- contempt. thus, heteronormative sex, in the world of the borden household at least, becomes a policing device and the ultimate form of violence. desire and intimacy function as a queer form of resistance in this context. the problematic position of a lesbian couple in the midst of the heteronormative institution of a victorian family is epitomised by the barn, which not only plays a crucial role in the borden case as lizzie’s alibi but is barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd also significant in macneill’s film. at first, it is a queer space of intimacy, actualising sara ahmed’s concept of queer orientation as “a matter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with” (ahmed : ). while the borden house is the space of heterosexual violence, the barn is where lizzie escapes to be free from her parents’ policing gaze and to read shakespeare’s sonnets (macneill : : : - : : ), a symbol of her own unbridled queer desire, while bridget hides there to give way to emotion which she is expected to rein in due to her subordinate social position (macneill : : : - : : ). thus, the barn is the space where both women can, metaphorically, shake off the manacles of the social institutions that they are part of. gradually, the barn becomes a space where lizzie and bridget hide to read together and, finally, to follow their queer desire (macneill : : : - : : ). the camera does not shy away from the display of lesbian eroticism, overcoming the demureness of other lgbtqia films of its time, bemoaned by jung (jung : n.p.). and yet, this is not a space of total freedom, as nicholson notes: “even when lizzie and bridget first kiss in the barn and their faces flood with sunlight, the camera pulls back from their joy to remind us that they’re still stuck in andrew’s domain” (nicholson : n.p.). indeed, when they are spied upon by andrew borden (macneill : : : ), we are reminded of the heteronormative gaze that lizzie and bridget nevertheless remain imbedded in, even in the barn, and in spite of their attempts to escape its relentless surveillance. after what he has seen, andrew decides to dismiss bridget in order to separate her from lizzie and stop their “unhealthy attachment” (macneill : : : ), which ultimately leads to his demise at the hands of his daughter. the scene where andrew looks into the barn through a window to see the women engaging in lesbian sex pinpoints the impossibility of total freedom from patriarchal panopticism, and thus the potential of the barn as a queer space of liberty is ultimately undermined. finally, the murders themselves constitute lizzie’s complete break with victorian ideas of femininity, marked by the symbolic moment when she tears off the necklace she has been wearing (macneill : : : ). the locket with her mother’s photograph hidden inside represents the need to conform to the gender conventions imposed by her father, who earlier declares, as he presents the photograph to her, “your mother was just about your age when that was taken. too often i forget how beautiful she was. mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd […] i want us to make a new beginning” (macneill : : : - : : ). the image of her mother posed as a role model for her – timid, self-sacrificing, beautiful – is rejected the moment lizzie decides to commit murder. the choice she makes is conventionally masculine; from the point of view of normative gender discourse, the anger of a victorian woman, unspoken and repressed, would be directed against herself, through hysteria, anorexia, or self-harm. such an outlet, pathologised as madness, would be nevertheless perceived as being in concordance with gender expectations. however, the path lizzie chooses – directing her anger against those who are its cause, through violence and slaughter – is what victorian society would expect of a man. thus, yet again, lizzie crosses the lines of gender dichotomies, literally “smashing the patriarchy” (sevigny qtd. in rathe : n.p.) through smashing the skulls of those that represent its institutions. like other ‘lethal lesbians’, lizzie “converts introjected rage into outer-directed action” (rich : ), refusing to be victimised for her desire. like previous movies about lizzie borden, macneill, too, paints a scenario of killing in the nude. in accordance with the plan lizzie and bridget must have made outside the reach of the camera (the murder is only depicted as a flashback when lizzie and bridget meet in prison), lizzie strips naked to kill abby, while bridget is supposed to kill andrew, also in the nude. this suggests a form of revenge contract, where bridget is given a chance to annihilate her rapist. however, she does not go through with it, instead leaving lizzie to finish the deed. the scene of the nude murderer wielding the axe (macneill : : : - : : ) attracts the viewers’ attention with an emotional intensity that is, in chloë sevigny’s words, “cathartic” and “sexual” (sevigny qtd. in jacobs : n.p.). lizzie is “so constrained in the whole movie”, sevigny notes, that it becomes “cathartic, for her and the audience” (sevigny qtd. in rathe : n.p.). the moment of abby’s murder is preceded by a long shot that travels from the imminent victim, fully dressed, to the naked perpetrator, depicting in detail the interior of a victorian bedroom: the wallpaper, lamps, furniture, and curtains, layers upon layers of fabrics, wood, and paper (macneill : : : - : : ). in this context, lizzie’s nudity is queer, abnormal, and deviant, stripped of the victorian conventions of civilised behaviour to the most primal core; when she kills, she becomes a “blood-smeared mammal” (nicholson : n.p.). the building suspense of the scene creates more barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd erotic tension (much more so than in the image of andrew borden’s murder), thus doubly queering it. a similar scene is repeated when the naked bridget (sans her necklace – a christian cross, representing the fact that she needs to reject her catholic morality if she is to co-commit this crime) stands in the living room, ready to axe andrew borden, yet the spell is broken when she is too afraid to go through with it (macneill : : : - : : ). this time, andrew again reads the scene as “some kind of attack” (macneill : : ), pathologising the threat of female violence, and in his final moments, as before, he reads female anger as madness. bridget’s refusal to perform her part of the plan is the first sign that the film’s ‘lethal lesbians’ scenario is subverted. instead of the common celebration of their desire and a powerful vengeance that lizzie and bridget could relish in together, bridget leaves lizzie to finish the deed and later examines her conscience whether to confess the truth about the murder in court. in the end, when lizzie offers her a life together as a lesbian couple, bridget refuses to acknowledge that such a utopian ending to their story is at all possible. thus, not only does lizzie dismiss the prospect of a happy ending, where the ‘lethal lesbians’ may “get away with murder […] and, most of all, each other” (rich : ), but the film also rejects the possibility of queer defiance. this would be true, if one stopped at a lesbian reading of this film, disregarding other intersectional factors. but lizzie’s and bridget’s queer relationship and their bloody plot of queer rebellion cannot be understood outside the context of social, racial, and especially class dependencies that reflect the intricacies of power and reveal that both characters in the film are not always on the same side of the axis of oppression. when it comes to lizzie, her privileged position as the member of an affluent new england family is mediated by her status of a spinster, which casts her in a liminal social position (roggenkamp : ). historically apparitional, like the hysteric and the lesbian (carroll : ), the victorian spinster was often suspected of deviance, lesbianism, or mental instability (roggenkamp : , ). as roggenkamp estimates, “[n]early ten percent of american women born between and never married” (roggenkamp : ), and even though victorians tended to see spinsters as pathetic and miserable, more recently “feminist scholars have sought to emphasise [their] autonomy and agency […], while lesbian feminist scholars in particular have recovered hidden histories of same-sex desire and lesbian identity” mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd (carroll : ). still, in the nineteenth-century cultural milieu a belief prevailed that a spinster’s unnatural position in terms of her biological and social destiny as a woman made her prone to mental, sexual, or even murderous abnormalcy. one of lizzie borden’s contemporaries, in an anonymous article, defined a spinster as “the pest and scourge of the circle in which she moves; […] she is little less than a she-fiend”, and even her looks mark her as unfeminine: “a quaint untidy dress, a shriveled skin, a lean figure, a bearded lip, shattered teeth, harsh grating voice, and manly stride, and the typical ‘old maid’ is complete” (anon. qtd. in roggenkamp : ). similarly, a conventionally masculine appearance – and thus, crossing the lines of gender binary – was stressed in journalistic accounts of lizzie borden’s trial: the press at first drew upon the discourses of gender abnormality, defeminizing lizzie’s appearance. upon her arrest she was described in the press as having ‘thick protruding lips, pallid from sickness, and a mouth drawn down into very deep creases that denote either a melancholy or an irritable disposition […] her jaws are strong and conspicuous’. (jones : ) this is a queer position to be in, irrespective of whether ‘spinster’ was always a code-word for ‘lesbian’; the spinster is a queer figure due to her ambiguous gender and social position and her inadvertent undermining of heteronormativity (carroll : ). the description of an old maid recalls various stereotypes of lesbians, especially butch ones, that macneill’s film depicts in the scene of uncle john’s humiliation of lizzie. he says, “you think pretty highly of yourself, don’t you? […] you’re nothing to no-one. you never were, you never will be” (macneill : : : - : : ). of course, this is how heteronormativity frames the lesbian spinster, signalling its power to “categorise borden as deviant, regardless of her class” (roggenkamp : ) – or her actual guilt. at the same time as being marginalised as a spinster and overlooked by and financially dependent on the male family members, lizzie’s position is that of an upper-class lady which, in comparison to the irish servant, bridget, incorporates no small degree of privilege. it might seem at first that the women share economic perils: lizzie burns the new will and kills first barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd mrs borden and then her father to avoid being financially dependent on her step-mother or her uncle, while she wants to free bridget from an employer who abuses his position of power in demanding sexual favours. yet, things are more complicated for bridget – she is irish, which puts her near the bottom of the social ladder even among the working class. her becoming involved with lizzie and implicated in murders is a greater danger for bridget, as she can be more easily and believably accused of the crime. moreover, she has little claim to the freedom lizzie achieves by gaining access to the family fortune, again putting her at a disadvantage. one could even venture to say that bridget exchanges one sexually manipulative employer for another. although lizzie’s seduction of bridget is more of a coaxing and encouragement than andrew’s blatant abuse, her incessant pursuit and wooing of bridget could be seen as based on her need to find an ally to follow through with her plan, and lizzie’s emotional detachment makes it ambiguous for the viewer to decide whether true affection or manipulation is a more plausible interpretation. even if one sees lizzie as genuinely in love with bridget, lizzie’s double-privilege as an upper-class woman and bridget’s employer still puts her in a position of power over and responsibility towards bridget. therefore, striking up a sexual relationship with bridget, from which the servant cannot easily escape without compromising her standing in the house, itself represents an abusive behaviour on lizzie’s part. this becomes particularly clear after the murders, when lizzie becomes a self-governing heiress of a fortune, free to do what she will. the fact that lizzie takes bridget’s participation in the murders for granted, and then similarly assumes she will lie for her in court and spend the rest of her life with her shows that lizzie’s privilege allows her to be blind to bridget’s situation and social limitations. the relationship with bridget that lizzie envisages after the trial would still be one of dependence; after all, it is lizzie who inherits money, not bridget. the economic freedom that is the basis for social freedom is not available to bridget, and thus the servant performs the only act of liberty to which she has access; i.e., she decides to leave lizzie and move away from fall river. if seen from this perspective, the romantic interpretation of lizzie’s and bridget’s lesbian relationship is called into question; the barn is then not a queer space, but a panoptical one where lizzie observes bridget to see how easy it would be to manipulate her, as, in turn, the two are observed by andrew (and the viewer). what transpires, therefore, is not a dichotomy of mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd domination and submission aligned with the division between heteronormative and non-normative, but a concentric structure of power as seen from a queer perspective, that is, a perspective that is sensitive to the manifold workings of oppression and marginalisation. . conclusions: neo-victorian queer spectrality like queerness, neo-victorianism can be understood as a “deviation from normalcy” (butler : ), insofar as it resists categorisation as historical fiction, situating itself in-between fact and fiction. self-reflexive, metafictional, and performative, neo-victorianism questions the fictions of authenticity and the coherence of conventional narratives and understandings of the past. it is, therefore, a project of queer history- making, one which is a “game of truth and fiction – or if you prefer, of evidence and fabrication – [which] will permit us to see clearly what links us to our modernity and at the same time will make it appear modified to us” (foucault qtd. in halperin : ). since the rise of neo-victorian studies in the s, the role of this new cultural phenomenon has been perceived, like queer historiography, as a postmodern project of “writing the history of those without one”, what carla freccero terms “a fantasmatic activity that describes an impossible wish; it involves following traces that are lost [and] listening to voices that ‘could have’ spoken (but, it is implied, did not)” (freccero : ). neo-victorianism is thus a queer venture of fleshing out the spectres of the past, whose gender and sexuality – but also class, race, ethnicity, or embodiment – is often inconspicuous in historiography. the constant collision between fact and fiction, formal experimentation, presentism, and anachronisms, and other neo-victorian techniques that destabilise normative perspectives on the past are paramount for the queer other to be voiced. lizzie borden’s second life in culture seems to follow this pattern, as is evidenced by the discussed examples. the fantasy of queer lizzie in macneill’s film is especially attractive as it seems to be “befitting of the #metoo generation” (felperin : n.p.), depicting, it might appear, a cathartic resistance to stifling victorian heteronormativity and social oppression. nevertheless, a closer queer look at this narrative yields more complicated readings of power structures involved in lizzie borden’s attempt to ‘smash the patriarchy’. as jennifer jones notes, lizzie borden did not leave any confession, and neither disclaimed nor admitted her guilt. therefore, “each of us in turn has filled her silence with our own barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd desire for coherence” (jones : ). the loopholes and inconsistencies in the story of lizzie borden make her narrative a queer spectre of the past – impossible to grasp, pin down, or explain, yet inevitably undergoing new attempts at interpretation and clarification. in this way, lizzie’s cultural textualisations replicate the efforts of the attorneys and press during lizzie’s trial to ventriloquise the spectre of the lesbian spinster in lieu of her silence (jones : ). at the same time, the queer spectre, remaining ambiguous and incoherent, becomes “an agent of disruption” which “captures our gaze” (adler : n.p.). the audience’s implication in this process lies in our acceptance of the myth disguised as an authentic rendering of the lizzie borden case (jones : ). as such, lizzie can be seen as a spectre that haunts even the expectation that neo-victorianism might invariably empower marginalised individuals or groups – or that its voicing of the past’s spectres is disinterested. the project of queer historiography is paradoxical, as it both sheds light on the others in history, but at the same time attempts to grasp them within logocentric and coherent narratives, creating “scriptural tombs” for the spectre, as michel de certeau has put it: this project aims at “understanding” and, through “meaning”, at hiding the alterity of this foreigner; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs. (de certeau : ) the neo-victorian “scriptural tombs” cannot hold the other and, as de certeau states, the spectre returns to “‘re- bite’ the space from which they were excluded; they continue to speak in the text/tomb that erudition erects in their place” (de certeau : ). therefore, the voices rendered intelligible by neo-victorianism often take on a form of ventriloquism (see davies : ), yet one which the spectre – being queer – perpetually resists and escapes. the palimpsest of the borden trial documents, journalistic accounts of the murders, and their fictional and non-fictional adaptations have created a myth with an unrecognisable source. thus, “any artist who decides to retell the story is left shuffling and reshuffling the million pieces of bordenalia” (telfer : n.p.). and given the indeterminability of the spectre, another question should haunt us here: even mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd if we assume that the role of neo-victorian fiction was to “let [the spectre] speak” (derrida : ), as is often claimed in neo-victorian studies, then whose spectre is it, or should it be – the victim’s (the bordens’ perspective is never shown in textualisations) or the perpetrator’s? the question of the female voice is indeed key. as ariella van luyn writes, since “the subjects of these novels are unable to give their consent, representing them is a fraught act […], reinforcing the very structures these novels seek to disrupt” (luyn : - ). in other words, textualisation of female criminals usually takes place long after they are gone, and therefore their identity and heritage become appropriated and commodified. critics may claim that neo-victorian biofictions featuring female criminals potentially “invite an understanding of women’s crimes as products of complex power structures, draw attention to the subjective nature of constructions of the past, and give agency to voices silenced in the archives” (luyn : ). yet such claims are somewhat marred by the fact that these depictions may also be used and abused for a similar sadistic titillation of the viewer or the reader as that practiced by the victorian popular press. another possibility, and one that various neo-victorian critics have called attention to, is that revisionist narratives that pinpoint gender injustices and inequalities in nineteenth-century contexts simultaneously, and perhaps unintentionally, justify or humanise psychopathic murderers. as marie-luise kohlke rightly states, in such fictions “criminals are re- humanised and in part exonerated by deflecting blame onto repressive familial, socioeconomic, and political conditions” (kohlke : ), and benjamin poore, in his discussion of what he calls the ‘villain effect’ in neo- victorian fiction, notes that “to give a villain a backstory – a childhood, a family, disappointments, school friends – all this is to humanise the villain but also to explain and understand” (poore : ). the question arises to what extent feminist neo-victorian biofictions of female criminals paint over and hence side-line their crimes, and whether, while looking for justice for women confined in debilitating sexual and gender roles, these narratives simultaneously excise the justice to which these women’s victims would be entitled. this is certainly true about many lizzie borden textualisations, although macneill’s film manages to create a more ambiguous image of lizzie. even though the audience sympathise with her at the beginning, the realisation of the unequal (and exploitative) power relations between lizzie and bridget undermines reading lizzie as a victim of victorian social codes. barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd if she manipulated bridget to have a co-conspirator and later used her as an alibi, then the lesbian reading of lizzie’s and bridget’s relationship – as one that brings freedom to both – is also challenged. however, this means that the audience have also been manipulated: if they root for a non- heteronormative relationship and the women’s happy ever after (as per neo- victorian convention), what they get is ambiguity at best, being duped by lizzie at worst, and a good dose of ‘lethal lesbianism’ (as per the conventions of queer cinema). while the historical lizzie borden used the gender norms of her times to escape punishment for her deed, in macneill’s film the viewers’ expectations of queer relationships being liberating for both partners and representing long-demanded vindication of victimised minorities has been used against us to sympathise with the villain. as these considerations indicate, if indeed lizzie borden was the perpetrator of a violent, bloody crime – as macneill’s film would have it – the question remains whether the particular collision of queerness and violence in the movie actually fosters confirmation of the queer as the monstrous and, as such, too dangerous to accept. nevertheless, the ‘lethal lesbian’ trope that is used in the film epitomises the radical power of this cinematic motif in general and of lizzie borden as a queer figure in particular. this trope as used in macneill’s film is perhaps less idealistic than what queer cinema usually offers; its resolution is neither that of bleak self-annihilation nor utopian bliss. instead, the queer characters of the film achieve some form of freedom – from patriarchy, and also from each other. the film’s neo-victorianism thus not only allows the filmmaker to queer the past, but also the present, undermining viewers’ expectations of what a victorian lesbian story should be like. macneill’s lizzie, even if violent, is powerfully defiant; and whether her relationship with bridget is perceived as an attempt at forging a genuine connection in the bleak patriarchal regime of victorian domesticity, or as a gross manipulation of the less privileged bridget, lizzie’s appearance as mad, bad, and dangerous potentially prevails. notes . in my use of the term ‘palimpsestic’ i am referring to, above all, linda hutcheon’s concept of palimpsestic/palimpsestuous adaptation: “we mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd experience adaptations […] as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation” (hutcheon : ). hutcheon’s theorisation of adaptation allows me to perceive the process of textualisation of historical events in a similar vein, where newly-created cultural texts adapt not only the event to which they ostensibly refer, but also elements of previous textualisations and appropriations of this event. . on the one hand, queer scholars have been looking for recognisable codes of same-sex desire, “recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviours, and meanings” (traub : ) that would testify to a continuous presence of queer histories, but, at the same time, also presuppose an essentialist understanding of gay and lesbian identity. on the other hand, especially as a result of michel foucault’s acknowledgement that sexuality is a discourse dependent on its historical and cultural context (see schoene : ), social constructivist queer theory has stressed the impossibility of retrospectively applying current labels and understandings of queer desire to historical subjects, thus questioning the possibility of an identifiable queer ‘essence’. perhaps, then, the fantasmatic nature of historiography (including a queer one) is the result of the unfeasibility of reconciling these two tendencies (see freccero : ). . films such as, for instance, thelma and louise ( , dir. ridley scott), basic instinct ( , dir. paul verhoeven), heavenly creatures ( , dir. peter jackson), sister my sister ( , dir. nancy meckler) and, later, monster ( , dir. patty jenkins), have depicted lesbians killing heterosexual males, thus symbolising social anxiety surrounding lesbianism (rich : - ). . an explicit distinction between the terms ‘queer’ and ‘lesbian’ as used in this article should be made. although i agree with clara bradbury-rance that replacing ‘lesbian’ with the umbrella term ‘queer’ might render lesbian experience barely visible or forgotten (bradbury-rance : ), this is not the main reason why i am using both terms. i would like to make this distinction to show queerness as a wider concept, as discussed above, one which includes not only sexuality, but also points out other aspects of non- normativity in one’s subjectivity, behaviour and social positioning, while the term ‘lesbian’ helps me stress the erotic connection between the characters as well as traditional representation of same-sex desire in history and film. . these include e.g. true crime and journalist texts, such as edwin h. porter’s the fall river tragedy: a history of the borden murders ( ), edmund pearson’s studies in murder ( ) and trial of lizzie borden ( ), and victoria lincoln’s a private disgrace: lizzie borden by daylight ( ); barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd theatrical plays, such as john colton and carlton miles’s nine pine street ( ), lillian de la torre’s goodbye, miss lizzie borden ( ), tim kelly’s lizzie borden of fall river ( ), and sally pollock’s blood relations ( ); agnes de mille’s ballet fall river legend ( ); jack beeson’s opera lizzie borden ( ), and steven cheslik-demeyer, alan stevens hewitt and tim maner’s rock musical lizzie ( ). the literary adaptations of the borden case range from short stories, such as angela carter’s famous ‘the fall river axe murders’ ( ) as well as novels such as evan hunter’s lizzie ( ), elizabeth engstrom’s lizzie borden ( ), or, more recently, sarah schmidt’s see what i have done ( ). popular fiction also offers mash-up novels like owen haskell’s sherlock holmes and the fall river murders ( ) or c. a. verstraete’s lizzie borden, zombie hunter ( ); rick geary’s comic book series treasury of victorian murder which includes an issue titled ‘the borden tragedy’ ( ); and a recent young adult novel lizzie ( ) by dawn ius and richard behrens’s series lizzie borden, girl detective ( – ). the most prominent film adaptations of lizzie borden’s case include the legend of lizzie borden ( ), directed by paul wendkos and starring elizabeth montgomery as lizzie borden, and more recently lizzie borden took an ax ( ), directed by nick gomez and starring christina ricci as lizzie. the latter was followed by a spin-off television series, the lizzie borden chronicles ( ) produced for lifetime. for a commentary and a critical discussion of these textualisations, see e.g. adler , kabatchnik , kent and flynn , miller , murley , napolitano , roggenkamp , schofield , and taylor . . the queerness of william shakespeare’s sonnets is a well-researched topic; in the seminal shakespeare, sex and love ( ), stanley wells includes sonnet , quoted by lizzie in this scene, “among the long group of poems generally supposed to be addressed to a man” (wells : ). the opening line read aloud by lizzie, “let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments”, is a form of foreshadowing of further events. . another interesting symbol of (queer) freedom may be represented by lizzie’s pet pigeons that live in the barn. their flying represents lizzie’s hope to be able to escape her family one day; when andrew kills them, this becomes a turning point in lizzie’s plan to murder her parents. interestingly, marc napolitano, in his discussion of the rock musical lizzie ( ) also sees pigeons as representation of lesbian desire, especially as they are called ‘filthy’ and ‘sick’ by andrew (napolitano : ). even more suggestively, in macneill’s film, lizzie kills her remaining pigeons the night mad, bad and dangerous _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd before the murder, which shows her desperation and readiness to sacrifice a queer bliss for her plan. . most famously, wendkos’s the legend of lizzie borden features a scene where lizzie disrobes and, having ensured her victims are aware of her presence and sufficiently shocked by her nakedness, first slaughters them and then washes the blood off her naked skin. such a method is both practical (it would explain why no spot of blood was evident on lizzie’s outfit that day) and sadistic, as well as disturbingly erotic. the scenes in the nude are later replicated in gomez’s lizzie borden took an ax. bibliography adler, gabriela schalow. . ‘but she doesn’t look like a fiend…’, ucla film & television archive, n.p., http://old.cinema.ucla.edu/women/adler/adler .html (accessed august ). ahmed, sara. . ‘orientations: toward a queer phenomenology’, 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[dvd] miller, stephanie. . ‘“how unbearably heavy these skirts can be’: popular feminism in s america and the legend of lizzie borden’, women: a cultural review, : , - . murley, jean. . the rise of true crime: th-century murder and american popular culture. westport, connecticut & london: praeger. napolitano, marc. . ‘musical madness: biofictional performances of the lizzie borden murders’, in kohlke, marie-luise, and christian gutleben (eds.), neo-victorian biofiction: reimagining nineteenth-century historical subjects. leiden & boston: brill|rodopi, - . nicholson, amy. . ‘film review: lizzie’, variety, january, https://variety.com/ /film/reviews/sundance-film-review-lizzie- (accessed march ). poore, benjamin. . ‘the villain-effect: distance and ubiquity in neo- victorian popular culture’, in poore, benjamin (ed.), neo-victorian villains: adaptations and transformations in popular culture. leiden & boston: brill|rodopi, - . rathe, adam. . ‘the original preppy murder: chloë sevigny takes the lead in her new film about lizzie borden’, town and country, january, https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and- culture/a /chloe-sevigny-interview-lizzie-borden-august- (accessed april ). rich, b. ruby. . new queer cinema: the director’s cut. durham, north carolina: duke university press. roggenkamp, karen. . ‘lizzie borden, spinster on trial: journalism, literature, and the borden trial’, in bendixen, alfred and olivia carr edenfield (eds.), the centrality of crime fiction in american literary culture. new york: routledge, - . schoene, berthold. . ‘queer politics, queer theory, and the future of “identity”: spiralling out of culture’, in rooney, ellen (ed.), the cambridge companion to feminist literary theory. cambridge: cambridge university press, - . https://variety.com/ /film/reviews/sundance-film-review-lizzie- https://variety.com/ /film/reviews/sundance-film-review-lizzie- https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a /chloe-sevigny-interview-lizzie-borden-august- https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a /chloe-sevigny-interview-lizzie-borden-august- barbara braid _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd schofield, ann. . ‘lizzie borden took an axe: history, feminism and american culture’, american studies, : , - . scull, andrew. . madness in civilization. a cultural history of insanity from the bible to freud, from the madhouse to modern medicine. princeton, new jersey & oxford: princeton university press. taylor, judith. . ‘did she or didn’t she? mystifying women’s oppression’, women and film, : , - . telfer, tori. . ‘the problem with ‘re-imagining’ lizzie borden’, variety, september, https://www.vulture.com/ / /the-problem- with-reimagining-lizzie-borden.html (accessed june ). traub, valerie. . ‘the present future of lesbian historiography’, in haggerty, george e. and molly mcgarry (eds.), a companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies. oxford: blackwell publishing, - . wells, stanley. . shakespeare, sex and love. oxford: oxford university press. https://www.vulture.com/ / /the-problem-with-reimagining-lizzie-borden.html https://www.vulture.com/ / /the-problem-with-reimagining-lizzie-borden.html microsoft word - _atifi et touati _.docx essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no ( )/ : - eissn - x © essachess nouvelles revendications féministes et médias numériques. contournement des interdits sociaux et religieux en tunisie et maroc maître de conférences hassan atifi tech-cico / institut charles delaunay, université de technologie de troyes france hassan.atifi@utt.fr maître de conférences zeineb touati idees, université le havre normandie france touatibz@univ-lehavre.fr résumé : nous proposons, dans cet article, d’explorer la question de la présence des femmes tunisiennes et marocaines sur les réseaux sociaux en montrant comment ces femmes s’emparent de ces outils numériques et rendent visibles de nouvelles revendications pour la promotion de leurs droits. notre méthodologie et questionnements relèvent essentiellement de l’ethnographie de la communication électronique et de la sémio-pragmatique. notre objectif est d’observer et de décrire les dispositifs, les usages et les acteurs engagés dans ces nouveaux médias de mobilisation et d’activisme en ligne au profit des femmes en tunisie et au maroc. nous analysons un double corpus web. le premier corpus est issu d’une veille régulière sur des comptes facebook d’associations, de militants et d’internautes ordinaires en tunisie. le second corpus est composé de la totalité de épisodes de la série web « marokkiates » diffusée sur facebook et youtube en - . ce double corpus permet une étude contrastive des nouvelles formes numériques de mobilisation, de contournement des interdits sociaux ou religieux, d’activisme des femmes pour des droits nouveaux et l’analyse des usages actuels du féminisme dans les deux pays. mots-clés : femmes, islam, luttes féministes, appropriations, médias numériques *** h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… new feminist claims and digital media: circumvention of social and religious prohibitions in tunisia and morocco abstract : this paper deals with the question of tunisian and moroccan women presence on social networks. an analysis of how they grab these digital tools to make their new right claims visible. our methodology and our questions arise essentially from the ethnography of electronic communication and semio- pragmatics. our objective here is to observe and describe devices, uses and actors involved in these new online mobilization and activism media for women benefit in tunisia and morocco. two web corpuses are analyzed. the first corpus comes from a regular watch on facebook accounts of associations, activists and ordinary net users in tunisia. the second one is made up of episodes of “marokkiates” web series broadcast on facebook and youtube in - . these corpuses have led to a contrastive study of new digital forms of mobilization, circumvention of social or religious prohibitions, activism for women new rights detailing as well the current feminism uses in the two north africa countries. keywords: women, religion, feminist struggle, social media *** introduction le statut des femmes et la place qu’elles occupent dans la société et dans l’espace public sont depuis des décennies au cœur des tentatives de réformes et des projets de société de plusieurs pays arabes. cette centralité de la question de la femme découle historiquement de la culture patriarcale qui régit ces sociétés et de l’interprétation faite de la religion musulmane, religion majoritaire dans les pays arabes et qui régit le public et le privé, les relations sociales et les rapports sociaux de sexe. les lois et les normes sociales issues des interprétations de l’islam ont cantonné la femme à l’espace privé en la privant de l’espace public, de la liberté de disposer de son corps, et par conséquent de nombreux droits universels et fondamentaux. le confinement des femmes, pendant des siècles, dans l’espace domestique et l’assignation de rôles sociaux classiques (mères et épouses, gardiennes des traditions et détentrices de l’honneur familial) ont longtemps façonné l’identité des femmes et les représentations sociales et médiatiques qui en sont faites tout en renforçant la domination des hommes et la consécration de leur supériorité concrète et symbolique. dans le monde arabe, la situation des femmes diffère selon l’histoire nationale, la place accordée à la religion au niveau législatif et le degré d’ingérence de la pratique et du fait religieux dans le quotidien. les pays qui ont connu le développement et la lutte d’un mouvement féministe, résistant à l’idéologie patriarcale et religieuse, disposent aujourd’hui de législations plus souples et surtout d’une participation active des femmes à la vie sociale et économique. en tunisie et au maroc, les mouvements féministes, relativement anciens dans les deux pays, ont lutté pour l’amélioration du statut des femmes et ont contribué, à différents degrés, à essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / l’adoption de deux cadres législatifs avant-gardistes dans le monde arabe (le code du statut personnel adopté en tunisie en et la moudawana (code du droit de la famille marocain) introduite en et réformée au maroc en (naciri, ). dans les deux pays, les luttes féministes ont repris depuis quelques années avec de nouvelles revendications audacieuses qui s’expriment principalement sur les réseaux sociaux. c’est pourquoi, nous proposons, dans cet article, d’explorer la question de la présence des femmes tunisiennes et marocaines sur les réseaux sociaux dans un espace public élargi en montrant comment ces femmes s’emparent des outils numériques et rendent visibles de nouvelles revendications pour la promotion de leurs droits. . Éléments de cadrage et contexte plusieurs raisons motivent notre choix de travailler sur la tunisie et le maroc dont notre bonne connaissance des deux terrains et notre aisance avec les usages et les pratiques médiatiques et numériques, des acteurs et publics tunisiens et marocains, étudiés à l’occasion d’autres recherches. malgré leurs différences historiques, économiques, sociales et de systèmes politiques, les deux pays offrent un terrain riche et foisonnant pour étudier l’évolution des revendications féminines et féministes à l’ère du numérique. en effet, plusieurs aspects rapprochent les deux pays et nous permettent de les étudier conjointement : cadres juridiques, bouleversements politiques récents, évolution récente des champs médiatiques et des usages numériques. les deux pays se distinguent dans le monde arabe par une législation aujourd’hui proche d’une égalité dans les droits entre hommes et femmes. la tunisie pays pionnier, dans les droits des femmes dans le monde arabe, s’était dotée dès du code du statut personnel qui abolissait la polygamie et la répudiation en accordant à la femme plusieurs droits avant-gardistes. ce texte législatif est rapidement complété par des lois autorisant l’avortement et la contraception,… ces acquis sont dus en partie à une volonté politique de faire de la femme un acteur de la nouvelle politique sociétale. des améliorations dans les droits sont apportées à partir de mais leur portée symbolique reste limitée. elles ne répondent pas aux revendications des associations féministes sur les questions sensibles telles que la libre disposition du corps ou l’égalité dans l’héritage. le binôme politique/féminisme marque aussi l’histoire au maroc avec le rôle joue ́ par la monarchie et les élites politiques dans le débat sur les droits de la femme et sa place dans la société. la responsabilité du roi mohamed vi dans l’acceptation de la nouvelle moudawana, texte initialement largement réfuté par la population , en , un projet de réforme de la moudawana, porté par le premier ministre a. el youssoufi, a été retiré face à la forte mobilisation de la population contre : tollé dans les mosquées, prêches incendiaires, h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… prouve l’étroite relation entre féminisme et politique. comme l’avait fait le président tunisien h. bourguiba en (pour justifier le csp), le roi du maroc présente la moudawana en s’appuyant sur la religion et l’ijtihad (exégèse) dans un discours émaille ́ de versets coraniques et de références a ̀ la charia’a. la réforme se fait donc dans le respect des textes et de la tradition musulmane. cette nouvelle moudawana apporte de nouveaux droits pour la femme marocaine : l’âge minimum légal de mariage pour les filles passe de à ans, la famille est placée sous la responsabilité des deux époux, la polygamie est quasiment impossible et la répudiation ne dépend plus seulement des juges religieux (adouls) mais nécessite un accord judiciaire (murgue, ). ainsi, l’évolution des revendications et des acquis offre des similitudes, en dépit des différences en termes de temporalité et de symbolique de certains acquis. dans les deux pays, le politique est intimement lié au féminisme, les deux sont indissociables au maghreb (daoud, ). l’écart entre les textes législatifs et le quotidien des femmes est considérable. les femmes souffrent de violences symboliques et physiques, d’interdiction de certains espaces publics, d’inégalité salariale dans certains secteurs, d’invisibilité sociale de certains métiers, de manque de reconnaissance, d’une moindre visibilité médiatique… même si les textes juridiques semblent s’orienter vers une forme d’égalité entre les deux sexes, la réalité sur le terrain prouve la résistance sociale et la domination masculine qui s’expriment dans les actes individuels, dans les discours médiatiques et qui se voient dans les institutions étatiques et les instances gouvernementales (mode vestimentaire, manque de représentativité des femmes, place et positionnement lors des cérémonies…). les phases de bouleversements et de revendications qu’ont connues les deux pays depuis marquent un autre point de similitude même si l’impact et les incidences des deux phases sont loin d’être aussi importants au maroc qu’en tunisie. cette dernière vit depuis le soulèvement populaire de une phase de transition tumultueuse avec beaucoup d’instabilité politique et une crise économique. dans la lignée des vagues de revendications et de soulèvements de , le maroc a également connu le mouvement du février (m ) qui n’était pas sans conséquences sur la vie politique. cette vague de protestations a entraîné ́ manifestation monstre à casablanca le mars réunissant plusieurs centaines de milliers de réfractaires au texte. soulèvement ayant entraîné la chute du régime de ben ali, la mise en place d’un gouvernement de transition et depuis une phase d’instabilité avec la multiplication des gouvernements transitoires, deux assassinats politiques, etc. les principales revendications du m telles que énoncées dans le communique ́ du février sont: une réforme de la constitution, la dissolution du parlement et la destitution du gouvernement en place, une justice indépendante et une vraie séparation des pouvoirs, la reconnaissance de la langue amazighe (berbère), la libération de tous les prisonniers politiques et d’opinion, l’intégration des diplômés chômeurs dans la fonction publique, l’augmentation des salaires et du smic. essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / des modifications importantes dans la gouvernance du pays notamment avec l’arrivée au pouvoir du parti justice et développement (pjd), parti islamiste grand vainqueur des élections législatives de et la tenue d’un référendum aboutissant a ̀ la validation d’une nouvelle constitution en juillet . cette constitution offre la principale retombée pour les femmes grâce a ̀ l’article qui répond a ̀ une grande partie des revendications féministes avant et depuis l’avènement du m . en effet, cet article instaure et constitutionnalise l’égalité entre hommes et femmes. il stipule « l’homme et la femme jouissent, a ̀ égalité, des droits et libertés a ̀ caractère civil, politique, économique, social, culturel et environnemental, énoncés dans le présent titre et dans les autres dispositions de la constitution, ainsi que dans les conventions et pactes internationaux dûment ratifiés par le royaume et ce, dans le respect des dispositions de la constitution, des constantes et des lois du royaume.(…) ». la principale nouveauté pour les femmes c’est la constitutionnalisation de la notion de parité et la création d’un organisme qui va veiller a ̀ sa mise en application afin d’éviter qu’elle soit encore un texte sans effet. la tunisie a également connu l’arrivée au pouvoir du parti islamiste ennahdha, suite a ̀ l’élection de la constituante du octobre et après les élections législatives de . le pays s’est doté, en janvier , d’une nouvelle constitution qui accorde plus de place aux droits de l’homme et aux libertés et confirme le maintien du code du statut personnel (csp) que certains pensaient menacé par les islamistes. depuis, les droits et les acquis des femmes sont sujettes à des débats politiques et de polémiques médiatiques étant donné les divisions idéologiques qui tenaillent la société et structurent la vie politique. les enjeux de la révolution tunisienne de janvier se sont d’emblée situés au niveau de la gestion de la vie dont dépendra finalement le futur modèle de la société. plus encore que les « modernistes’ et les « islamistes » ne s’y sont pas trompés, investissant non seulement la scène politique, mais aussi le gouvernement des corps. une certaine conception de l’islam fonctionne aujourd’hui comme une puissante machine biopolitique qui a affaire à la population comme ‘problème de pouvoir’. les préceptes, conduites et comportements avancés au nom du respect de l’islam pénètrent toute la société et s’introduisent dans ses articulations les plus fines. les femmes traversent pour une bonne part ce dispositif. elles en constituent même l’un des enjeux centraux (kilani, , p. ). très régulièrement, la question des droits des femmes se retrouve sur la scène publique (et politique) toujours envisagée dans la même dichotomie historique et idéologique entre une vision conservatrice et une autre dite moderniste. dans les deux pays, les luttes féministes ont repris pendant ces phases de bouleversement, de transition avec de nouvelles revendications audacieuses dans la forme et le contenu. l’arrivée de partis islamistes conservateurs au pouvoir a réveillé certaines peurs, remis en débat des questions identitaires et créé une h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… confrontation entre deux projets de sociétés. le corps féminin et la liberté des femmes cristallisent le débat et centralisent les polémiques. ainsi de nouvelles féministes au maroc dénoncent le harcèlement sexuel et fustigent la morale vestimentaire, justifiant le viol, en cas de non-respect des codes restrictifs. parfois des manifestantes arborent des banderoles affichant clairement « mon corps m’appartient ». la religion n’est pas absente de leurs revendications, mais sans en constituer l’élément clé. (alami m’chichi, ). il en est de même en tunisie, qui a vu depuis apparaitre de nouvelles formes de militantisme féministe et féminin sur internet (touati, ) ainsi que l’émergence de nouvelles revendications comme le droit à la libre disposition du corps en affichant une nudité intégrale ou en assumant publiquement une sexualité hors mariage. ces revendications sont d’autant plus importantes que le facteur commun dans les deux est le recours aux médias numériques pour exprimer ces revendications dans un contexte de banalisation et de généralisation des usages du numérique. en effet, les deux pays auxquels nous nous référons offrent certaines similitudes en termes de foisonnement médiatique (plusieurs chaînes de télévision publiques et privées, réception de dizaines de chaînes satellitaires, diversité des stations de radio privées et publiques ainsi que des titres de presse) et de ferveur pour internet, les réseaux sociaux et la téléphonie mobile. la connectivite ́ croissante de la population des deux pays est incontestable. le maroc se classe, depuis quelques années, parmi les premiers pays au niveau africain en ce qui concerne la connexion a ̀ internet. en février , le nombre d’internautes atteint les , millions . les internautes représentent % de la population avec un peu plus de millions d’utilisateurs des réseaux sociaux. whatsapp arrive en tête avec % d’utilisateurs suivi de près par facebook ( %) et youtube ( %). les utilisateurs de facebook et youtube déclarent un usage quotidien d’environ heures, se connectant principalement depuis leurs téléphones mobiles. c’est d’ailleurs ce qui explique l’intérêt porté dans notre corpus à la plateforme youtube. nous précisons qu’il y a, dans les deux pays, des disparités existantes dans l’accès a ̀ internet entre citadins et ruraux, en fonction de l’âge (plus élevé chez les jeunes) et de la classe sociale. les chiffres sont issus du rapport digital (sur la base de l’année ) réalisé par hootsuite et l’agence we are social. le rapport est disponible sur : https://wearesocial.com/fr/blog/ / /global- digital-report- . une analyse en est proposée sur : https://www.mediamarketing.ma/article/zzdphggh/ae_digital_ _au_les_marocains_praefaere nt_whatsapp_facebook_et_youtube.html. (consulté le / / ) la population marocaine compte habitants selon les projections du haut-commissariat au plan . source : https://www.hcp.ma/demographie-population_r .html (consulté le / / ). % des facebookers sont des hommes et % des femmes. essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / en janvier , la tunisie comptait , millions d’internautes dont . . sont des utilisateurs de facebook soit % de la population . les utilisateurs de facebook sont % des hommes et % des femmes . facebook est le réseau social le plus utilisé en tunisie, il devance de loin instagram qui compte . . abonnés ( , % de la population) et twitter qui attire moins de utilisateurs. il représente le principal espace d’expression virtuel et médiatique des tunisiens. la crédibilité de facebook s’est affirmée après le soulèvement de et la discréditation des médias classiques, devenant une source d’information pour les journalistes, un prescripteur des thèmes à débattre, un média d’expression pour les hommes politiques qui y déclarent leur candidature, commentent l’actualité et organisent le débat public depuis cette scène virtuelle. c’est en raison de la place importante occupée ou accordée à facebook dans l’espace médiatique et politique tunisien que nous nous y intéressons particulièrement dans cette recherche. malgré les différences historiques, politiques et culturelles et ce qu’elles impliquent dans les constructions identitaires et les imaginaires collectifs qui régissent ces sociétés, les deux pays nous offrent un terrain privilégie ́ pour l’observation et l’analyse a ̀ partir de faits précis et révélateurs des évolutions sociales et des revendications émergentes. nous ne prétendons pas ici a ̀ une analyse exhaustive de tout l’éventail des usages d’internet dans les deux pays. nous nous limiterons dans cette contribution a ̀ l’analyse de certaines idées et revendications exprimées sur facebook et youtube par des internautes/acteurs dans les deux pays pour contourner les interdits sociaux et les tabous religieux. . problématique, méthodologie et corpus notre étude relève du champ de la communication électronique (herring, ) mais en portant un intérêt particulier aux médias émergents. elle s’inscrit dans la continuité des recherches sur l’internet solidaire et les nouvelles formes de participation et de mobilisation au bénéfice des personnes et groupes marginalisés ou fragilisés, comme les communautés diasporiques (mattelart, ), les groupes politiques (cardon & granjon, ; mabi & théviot, ), les minorités sexuelles (lévy, dumas, ryan & thoër, ) et les féministes (baer, ). elle prolonge nos travaux antérieurs sur les vidéos en ligne de mobilisation des personnes malades (atifi, ) et les vidéos de doléances des victimes de spoliation immobilière (atifi, ), ainsi que nos recherches sur les nouvelles les chiffres sont issus du rapport digital (sur la base de l’année ) réalisé par hootsuite et l’agence we are social. une présentation en est faite sur : https://fr.slideshare.net/datareportal/digital- -tunisia-january- -v . sur une population de près de millions d’habitants. % d’entre-eux se connectent sur des mobiles et déclarent un usage quotidien du réseau social. les - ans et les - ans arrivent à égalité en tête des utilisateurs et forment % des connectés. h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… formes d’expression féminines et les revendications féministes sur internet (touati, , ). concrètement, nous proposons dans cette contribution de montrer le rôle des réseaux sociaux dans la formalisation et la médiatisation des nouveaux rapports à la religion (remise en question, affirmation du rejet ou de l’athéisme), la médiatisation et la défense de revendications collectives (égalité dans l’héritage entre hommes et femmes) ou individuelles (le droit à la libre disposition du corps), mais également des nouvelles façons de vivre sa foi basées sur la monstration des actes et des pratiques liées aux obligations religieuses (jeûne, prières collectives). il s’agit ici principalement d’acteurs indépendants, anonymes, militants ou ordinaires qui étaient jusque-là privés de visibilité dans les médias classiques. en donnant la parole aux femmes, les médias numériques leur permettent de s’approprier l’espace public et de s’imposer. par exemple, au maroc, avec « marokkiates », un format de web vidéo tourné dans les rues de casablanca, des femmes marocaines prennent la parole et brisent les tabous en parlant à visage découvert de viol, d'homosexualité, de harcèlement dans la rue, des carcans vestimentaires et des interdits sociaux ou religieux... notre problématique principale est de comprendre comment les médias numériques se constituent en alternative médiatique pour les femmes et les groupes qui luttent contre la domination masculine ou l’application de certains préceptes de la charia’a (loi islamique) en portant de nouvelles revendications. pour aborder cette problématique, nous déployons une méthodologie basée essentiellement sur l’ethnographie de la communication électronique. nous observons, décrivons et analysons les dispositifs, les usages et les acteurs engagés dans ces nouveaux médias d’expression, de mobilisation et d’activisme en ligne au profit des femmes en tunisie et au maroc. nous soumettons nos corpus aux principales questions suivantes : quelles sont les formes numériques émergentes d’expression féminines relatives au droit des femmes? qui sont les acteurs porteurs de ces nouvelles revendications en tunisie et au maroc ? quelles sont les revendications à dimension sociétale ou religieuse ? quels sont les enjeux, les finalités et les limites de ces nouvelles revendications ? et quels sont les processus de médiation permettant de déplacer les revendications du web à la scène médiatique classique ? pour répondre à ces questions, nous nous référons à l’analyse de contenu et à l’analyse sémio-pragmatique d’un double corpus web. le premier corpus, issu d’une veille régulière sur vingt-cinq comptes facebook suivis depuis décembre , se nous nous référons aux résultats d’une veille active conduite sur facebook tout au long du soulèvement populaire et la période de transition qui a suivi. nous avons stocké et imprimé toutes les données figurant sur les profils de vingt-cinq comptes facebook de tunisiens. nous avons commencé cette veille le décembre ( jours après l’immolation par le feu de mohamed bouazizi) et nous continuons depuis avec la même régularité. le corpus progressivement constitué a été utilisé dans plusieurs travaux relatifs à la mobilisation pendant la révolution, les usages des réseaux sociaux pendant les élections et l’analyse des nouvelles formes d’engagement qui émergent en tunisie. les pages sont ainsi régulièrement suivies depuis fin (la fréquence du suivi et des téléchargements des données est essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / compose des publications, posts et commentaires relatifs à des polémiques ou évènements politiques en relation directe avec la question des femmes et des libertés individuelles. le corpus se réfère à deux types d’expression : la parole militante et engagée et celle des internautes anonymes. ainsi, nous suivons pages d’associations féministes comme l’association tunisienne des femmes démocrates (atfd), de quatre militantes féministes, de trois syndicalistes hommes, et de deux avocats membres de l’association des jeunes avocats (association très impliquée dans la société civile, dans la défense des droits des femmes et des libertés individuelles). la veille régulière englobe également autres pages suivies qui ont été sélectionnées suite aux interactions avec les pages des associations, des militantes, des jeunes avocats . il s’agit de facebookers anonymes (dans le sens de gens ordinaires) qui prennent part au débat public via les réseaux sociaux. pages facebook qui ont fait la une de l’actualité en sont également retenues pour l’analyse . suivi depuis plusieurs, ce corpus nous permet d’entrevoir l’évolution des usages et des pratiques des facebookers suivis, de détecter les changements dans les contenus, les thématiques discutées et les positionnements idéologiques. elle nous permet surtout d’étudier l’évolution des formes d’expression, des formats utilisés (photos, vidéos, caricatures…) et des processus symboliques mis en œuvre dans les interactions. le second corpus est composé de la totalité de épisodes de la série web « marokkiates » qui seront présentés dans la deuxième partie de cette contribution. notre corpus composé d’un côté d’une série de publications et d’échanges sur facebook et de l’autre d’une série de vidéos est certes hétérogène. mais il correspond à la diversité des productions en ligne qui permet une étude contrastive des nouvelles formes de mobilisation et d’activisme des groupes (femmes, non jeûneurs), pour des droits nouveaux et l’analyse des usages actuels du féminisme dans les deux pays. cela permet, enfin de saisir les discours et contre-discours produits, par exemple dans les commentaires des vidéos en ligne ou les réactions aux publications sur facebook, par des représentants de certains conservateurs d’obédience religieuse. plus élevée lors des évènements importants et des polémiques). les facebookers sont composés d’hommes et de femmes âgés de à ans, résidant dans les principales villes du pays (dont tunis, sfax et sousse). en plus des avocats, il y a dans le corpus des enseignants, des retraités, deux médecins, des chômeurs, des femmes au foyer, des employés et des salariés du privé. ce corpus ne prétend pas l’exhaustivité, ni la représentativité de la blogosphère tunisienne. les comptes de facebookers ont été suivis de façon « aléatoire » suivant les fils des publications et des réactions lors des premiers jours de soulèvement en , une période à laquelle les usages de facebook étaient encore principalement des usages de divertissement. en relayant des appels à la mobilisation ou des informations relatives aux droits individuels et aux droits des femmes. a ces pages, nous avons ajouté en la page de amina tyler et celle de l’initiative chmeta fi adel almi présentées ultérieurement. h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… . facebook : mise en visibilité de nouvelles causes et contournement des interdits dans les deux pays, les usages d’internet sont avant tout des usages de divertissement avant d’être des usages de revendication ou de militantisme. plusieurs travaux se sont intéressés a ̀ un pays en particulier ou ont établi des études comparatives montrant que les usages engagés se limitent a ̀ une minorité (lecomte, , ; touati, , hibou, ; benchenna, ). depuis , les usages engagés ont augmente ́ en raison de l’efficacité d’internet dans la mobilisation, sa disponibilité et ses coûts faibles. les causes traitées sur internet relevaient principalement du politique, des droits de l’homme et de la liberté d’expression. le tabou politique pouvait être remis en question par des opposants, par des blogueurs avertis, mais les tabous sexuels et religieux étaient jusqu’à récemment infranchissables y compris sur la toile. on assiste, depuis - , a ̀ l’émergence de nouvelles formes de revendications qui s’attaquent a ̀ quelques-uns des tabous les plus anciens mais aussi les plus ancrés dans ces sociétés a ̀ savoir le corps féminin symbole de chasteté prénuptiale, de pureté, garant de l’honneur de la famille ; et la pratique religieuse notamment l’obligation du jeûne partagée par tous les musulmans et très suivie au maghreb. internet est, comme déjà établi, un espace de sociabilité (hugon, ), d’expression de l’intime, de défoulement grâce a ̀ l’anonymat et l’impression d’intimité. pour dépasser les tabous et contourner les interdits beaucoup d’internautes utilisaient internet de façon anonyme. mais ce qui nous interpelle c’est la dimension que prennent la transgression et le défi émanant de certaines publications d’internautes qui ne se cachent pas derrière un pseudo. on assume ses idées, ses croyances et ses revendications de liberté, de libre disposition du corps qui ne pouvaient pas être discutées dans les médias classiques. dans les deux pays, les chaînes de télévision censurent les scènes de sexualité ou celles jugées érotiques et même sensuelles, évitent le plus souvent les thèmes sensibles dans les émissions culturelles et sociétales (analyse critique de la religion, sexualité, etc.). en nous arrêtant sur des exemples précis de deux faits médiatisés en tunisie, nous allons montrer l’importance de la transgression religieuse et sociétale dans certains faits, actes et publications et les différentes manières de les présenter, de les défendre ou de les combattre sur facebook. . . facebook comme espace de transgression nous nous arrêtons ici sur deux exemples marquants qui remontent à et qui ont imposé sur la scène médiatique et politique le débat sur la liberté de culte et le droit à la libre disposition du corps. ces revendications n’étaient pas des priorités des associations féministes dissidentes et étaient totalement absentes des idées des associations féminines et féministes proches du pouvoir telles que l’union nationale des femmes tunisiennes (unft), qui par leurs ancrages idéologiques, leurs programmes et leurs actions confortent le féminisme d’État. « le féminisme » tunisien n’est pas sous-tendu par des revendications pour l’égalité sexuelle entre les sexes en (en termes de pratiques, de choix du partenaire…), alors que la loi autorise l’avortement et la contraception et donne donc aux femmes la possibilité de réguler essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / les conséquences de leur activité sexuelle (pensée légitime dans le cadre sacré du mariage). aussi « libres » et « émancipées » qu’elles soient, les femmes tunisiennes ne disposent pas de leur corps qui reste embrigadé par le contrôle social et par le législateur. l’affaire amina sboui (amina tyler). lycéenne de ans, amina s’était rendue célèbre en publiant, le er mars , sur internet et sous le pseudonyme amina tyler des photos d’elle seins nus avec l’inscription « mon corps m'appartient et n'est source d'honneur pour personne ». les photos de la jeune tunisienne, considérée par les médias comme la première femen tunisienne, ont rapidement fait le tour de la blogosphère arabe et entraine ́ des centaines de réactions de soutien ou de réprobation en tunisie, Égypte, maroc, algérie et d’autres pays du proche orient. plusieurs groupes de soutien se sont créés sur facebook suite a ̀ la première incarcération de amina. sans affiliation politique ou associative, amina parle de son choix individuel de montrer son corps et de l’imposer à une société et à des normes qui la briment au quotidien. l’acte de se déshabiller dans des pays ou ̀ le corps féminin est un tabou, ou ̀ la sexualité relève strictement du prive ́ et ou ̀ la femme d’une façon générale est la gardienne de l’honneur familial, vise a ̀ choquer et a ̀ provoquer. il s’agit d’un acte de rébellion contre l’autorité paternelle et contre le patriarcat régnant et non d’un acte politique. pourtant sur la toile et dans les médias classiques, amina est présentée comme une femen et militante des droits de l’homme. le débat est tellement important sur facebook qu’il s’impose à la télévision tunisienne après avoir été repris dans la presse nationale. les associations féministes se positionnent, les défenseurs de la morale et de la religion également et le bras de fer entre les deux tendances antagonistes qui sous-tendent le débat politique y trouve un nouvel objet de leur affrontement. avant l’acte de amina (possible sur facebook et inenvisageable ailleurs selon la protagoniste elle-même), la nudité du corps féminin n’a pas fait la une de la presse, ni été discutée dans les émissions politiques et sociétale. il s’agit d’un tabou majeur dans l’imaginaire collectif et la culture tunisienne. la question avait été décriée lors de polémiques autour de films cinématographiques tunisiens dont les scènes de nudité féminines avaient été systématiquement censurées. l’initiative chmata fi adel almi. ce mouvement s’est construit autour de la création d’une page facebook intitulée « photos prises durant ramadhan chmeta fi adel almi » créée le juillet a ̀ l’occasion du ramadan mois de jeûne pour les musulmans pratiquants. cette page a été ́ lancée en réaction aux propos de adel almi qui voulait filmer les non-jeûneurs afin de les punir et qui a appelé ́ les photos encore disponibles sur son compte facebook : https://www.facebook.com/pg/aminafementunez/photos/?ref=page_internal page disponible sur : https://fr-fr.facebook.com/photosprisesdurantramadhanadelelminonjeuneurs/ président de l’association centriste de sensibilisation et de réforme. association reconnue en février . officiellement elle œuvre dans le domaine de la promotion de la vertu et la prévention du vice, h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… musulmans a ̀ éviter les plages afin de ne pas voir des « femmes nues ». son idée de prendre en photos les non-jeûneurs et les baigneurs et de publier leurs clichés a été ́ détournée et reprise par les internautes non-jeûneurs. en créant la page pour publier leurs propres photos mangeant, buvant et se baignant pendant la période de jeûne, ils défiaient a. almi et les islamistes, dont ceux du parti au pouvoir. le descriptif de la page annonçait la couleur « cette page est ouverte a ̀ toute personne qui lance un défi a ̀ adel almi, en l’occurrence, on ira a ̀ la plage et on prendra des photos nous- mêmes ». en quelques jours, la page attire des milliers d’internautes. les internautes qui apprécient et recommandent les liens de la page semblent adhérer a ̀ cette mobilisation de défense des libertés individuelles et de la liberté ́ de culte ouvertement malmenée depuis l’arrivée des islamistes au pouvoir. la page se base essentiellement sur les photos accompagnées le plus souvent de commentaires et de posts relativement courts. certaines des photos comportaient elles-mêmes du texte puisque les internautes posaient en tenant des pancartes par exemple. dans l’acte de amina et ceux des non-jeûneurs, nous notons un dénominateur commun la provocation, le défi et la défense des libertés individuelles. la remise en question de l’ordre social établi, des obligations religieuses et des normes se fait de façon assumée. amina montre son visage et son corps, prend la parole dans les médias. les facebookers qui postent leurs photos en transgressant l’obligation du jeûne le font pour certains à visage découvert et avec des profils publics. il y différents niveaux de défiance et de transgression. le premier se situe dans l’acte de se dénuder et de publier ses photos à visage découvert. dans plusieurs commentaires, des proches de amina mais aussi des personnalités publiques ont essayé de minimiser l’affaire en la réduisant à « une erreur de jugement d’une adolescente qui a été manipulée sur internet », comme pour s’assurer qu’il ne s’agit pas d’un choix délibéré d’engager son corps nu afin de dénoncer le contrôle social et politique qui lui est imposé à travers des règles, des normes, des regards et des interdits langagiers, physiques et comportementaux. le second niveau de transgression est jugé plus grave parce qu’amina « s’enfonce dans le péché et la faute» en déclarant être consciente et convaincue de ses actes, et surtout en se mettant à nouveau en scène nue notamment à l’étranger (tout en publiant sur facebook des photos de ses nouvelles transgressions). elle a défié l’autorité paternelle mais aussi celle de la famille dans sa totalité en bafouant l’honneur des mâles de cette famille (plusieurs membres de la famille ont déploré publiquement les propos et actes de amina). elle défi aussi une partie de la société très attachée à ses valeurs traditionnalistes et conservatrices et dont la matrice est la pudeur, la chasteté et la protection de la femme. amina, n’a pas choqué que des hommes. parmi les commentaires les plus virulents ceux de femmes qui s’indignent des actes d’une jeune irresponsable qui ne les représente pas. elles endossent le rôle qu’on leur assigne, une fois épouses et mères, à savoir celui des gardiennes des traditions considérée par de nombreux médias et personnalités politiques comme une association fondamentaliste et extrémiste. il a fondé un parti politique « tounes azzaytouna » autorisé en avril . essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / et de la morale musulmane et s’érigent en défenderesse de l’honneur des femmes tunisiennes. les femmes se font, dans les commentaires et les posts, plus agressives et plus insultantes que les hommes. dans le deuxième cas d’étude, la transgression et le défi peuvent être classés en différents niveaux en fonction des photos et des commentaires les accompagnants. dans un premier niveau, nous trouvons les photos de nourriture, d’alcool, etc. sans revendication personnelle (anonymat) en l’absence du nom ou de la photo de la personne. un deuxième niveau comprend les personnes qui se mettent en scène avec la nourriture, l’alcool, les cigarettes, etc. comme l’illustre dans la figure ci- dessous, la publication le juillet de ibrahim ltaief, réalisateur et producteur, qui s’affiche sous sa vraie identité et à visage découvert ce qui lui vaut quelques commentaires désagréables comme « fais ce que tu veux mais tu dois respecter celui qui est jeûneur, tu n’es alors qu’un débile et non un humanitaire ». figure . la transgression par ibrahim ltaief le troisième niveau que nous considérons comme le plus avance ́ et qui comprend une dimension de revendication, ou ̀ les internautes parlent de rébellion et d’une communauté ́ de rebelles et qui se compose des photos nominatives ou ̀ les personnes apparaissent a ̀ visage découvert en train de manger ou de boire le plus souvent avec un journal indiquant la date (pour prouver que c’est pendant le mois de ramadan) ou avec un écran ou une horloge dans le cadre (afin d’indiquer qu’il y a bien transgression de l’horaire de jeûne). dans ce troisie ̀me niveau les internautes revendiquent dans les commentaires la liberté ́ de culte, les libertés individuelles, le refus de l’islamisme, le refus de l’ingérence dans la vie privée et se déclarent publiquement pour certains athées ce qui peut les exposer à des représailles. dans ce niveau, la transgression peut-être simple, double ou triple en fonction du nombre d’interdits transgressés sur une même photo. simple (en train de manger), double h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… (manger avec de l’alcool a ̀ table ou une bière a ̀ la main) et triple (manger en tenant une bière ou une cigarette en étant torse nu ou accompagne ́ de filles en maillot de bain, embrassant une fille). figure . une triple transgression la figure est une photo publiée le / / montrant l’internaute fumant une cigarette et buvant du coca en plein créneau de jeûne, torse nu à la plage. comme pour les autres publications, les réactions sont divisées. un commentaire féminin de mara dit « sahha » (profites bien) et un internaute amin se place à l’opposé et écrit « un vrai pd lol ». la transgression de l’interdit religieux s’exprime aussi dans les commentaires des amis de la page. les commentaires peuvent être positifs « bechfa » (bon appétit) qui revient plusieurs dizaines de fois en juillet , « bravo inti rajel » (bravo, tu es un vrai mec) laissant entendre ici que la transgression est synonyme de virilité ́. ils sont aussi ponctués d’humour en faisant appel a ̀ des blagues populaires ou des proverbes. les commentaires sont aussi négatifs de la part des détracteurs qui condamnent, renvoient a ̀ l’obligation du jeûne dans les textes religieux, font référence au prophète et rappellent les châtiments prévus pour les non-jeûneurs. ci-dessous, une publication de amani derbali le juillet (figure ) qui appelle, via un verset du coran, les membres de la page non-jeûneurs « à ne pas suivre les pas de satan ». essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / figure . verset coranique en réaction à une photo de non jeûneur ces commentaires entrainent des discussions d’ordre religieux avec des citations de penseurs et théologiens. la page a le mérite, de montrer publiquement une pratique diffuse dans la population tunisienne notamment parmi les jeunes qui refusent le jeûne mais se cachent pour manger ou boire. elle a également mis en évidence la possibilité que des filles et des femmes ne jeûnent pas ce qui est moins acceptable socialement, les femmes étant les gardiennes des traditions et responsables de la transmission des normes. les femmes se montrent d’ailleurs beaucoup moins sur les photos comme le montrent les deux captures d’écrans ci-dessous (figure ). figure . la transgression au féminin dès les premières photos montrant des filles transgressant la règle du jeûne, les commentaires deviennent plus virulents et les insultes se concentrent particulièrement sur les protagonistes femmes. les propos sont dégradants et très sexistes comme dans les commentaires à cette publication suivante (figure ). h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… figure . rejet de la transgression assumée (publié le / / ) la mise en scène sur facebook du corps féminin dénudé ou transgressant l’interdiction du jeûne fait réagir, interpelle. elle permet par la sensibilité sociale de la question du corps et surtout de la nécessité sociale et politique de contrôler le corps des femmes d’imposer le débat sur la scène publique. le corps féminin censuré, dénigré ou totalement absent dans les médias classiques, trouve une forme de visibilité sur facebook et par conséquent une visibilité sociale et médiatique au moins pour la communauté des internautes. contrairement aux médias classiques, les médias numériques constituent un lieu de théâtralité ou ̀ sont mises en scène des identités plurielles. se montrer, montrer son corps ou le vêtir a ̀ outrance, montrer sa désobéissance aux pratiques religieuses sont autant de manières pour affirmer son identité ́ et revendiquer son appartenance a ̀ une culture (mezrioui et touati, , p. ). . . facebook : plateforme de structuration et de mobilisation féminine et féministe pendant la phase de transition, facebook a régulièrement servi la cause féminine et féministe en permettant aux associations féministes, composantes de la société civile et aux intellectuels de mobiliser contre d’éventuelles menaces des acquis des femmes. il a permis d’alerter des internautes non engagés, « non informés » sur ces menaces, de les mobiliser et d’en faire des acteurs de la lutte des droits des femmes. les féministes et les militantes associatives se sont emparées de facebook pour alerter l’opinion publique et les médias classiques. grâce au caractère prescripteur essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / détenu par facebook en tunisie pendant la phase transitoire, les féministes ont réussi à imposer leurs causes aux agendas des médias classiques. en , la polémique enfle à tunis autour de l’article discuté, dans le cadre de l’avant-projet de la nouvelle constitution, à l’assemblée constituante. l’article stipule la complémentarité de la femme avec l’homme et non l’égalité entre les sexes. une députée et des féministes se saisissent de l’information, la diffusent sur leurs comptes facebook, mobilisent leurs contacts et organisent progressivement la riposte. un collectif réunissant des associations féministes et la ligue pour les droits de l’homme se met en place pour alerter la population sur les risques de la suppression du principe d’égalité entre les sexes. le collectif est très actif sur facebook et la lutte (sensibilisation et organisation de la mobilisation) s’organise via les pages et les comptes de la plateforme. s’en suit manifestations et contre- manifestations dans les rues de la capitale et surtout une confrontation assez violente entre « conservateurs » et « laïcs » sur facebook. la confrontation s’exprime dans les posts, dans les commentaires mais aussi dans les photos de profils. fleurissent alors les photos de profils avec le drapeau tunisien ou des représentations de femmes connues (militantes pour l’indépendance ou pour les droits des femmes, personnages féminins historiques comme elyssa, des déesses carthaginoises). vidéos et parodies sont également de la partie et les facebookers engagés des deux côtés se font face sur la plateforme et dans la rue lors des mobilisations annoncées sur la plateforme. il en est de même pour le débat sur l’égalité dans l’héritage entre hommes et femmes. dans la tradition du féminisme d’État et en espérant gagner le soutien et les voix des féministes et des intellectuelles de gauche, b. caid essebsi, président de la république de à , lance en août la réflexion sur l’égalité entre hommes et femmes en matière d’héritage et la suppression de l’interdiction pour les tunisiennes musulmanes d’épouser des non-musulmans. il crée la commission des libertés individuelles et de l’égalité (colibe). levée de boucliers sur facebook, les comptes des conservateurs, des membres des partis islamistes s’activent et organisent la mobilisation d’une partie de la population en appelant à manifester contre cette réforme et en organisant des débats publics autour de l’adéquation du rapport de la colibe avec les préceptes de l’islam. plusieurs manifestations réunissant des imams et des citoyens sont organisées dans plusieurs villes, et elles sont relayées avec des photos et des vidéos sur facebook. les partis politiques classiques ne se sont pas positionnés en attendant de voir l’évolution de cette question épineuse et n’ont pas commenté le rapport. alors que le parti islamiste ennahdha s’est exprimé rapidement publiquement sur la page officielle et sur les pages de ses différents dirigeants, contre le rapport le jugeant contraire aux préceptes de l’islam. là aussi, facebook impose le débat aux médias classiques qui alimentent, notamment sur les chaînes al hiwar ettounsi et nessma, des émissions quotidiennes en diffusant en direct des captures d’écrans des échanges sur facebook entre hommes politiques, spécialistes du droit mais aussi à partir de comptes d’anonymes qui s’expriment sur la question. le passage du débat de facebook aux h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… médias classiques et la place qu’il prend dans la société amènent les différents partis à se prononcer et à prendre part aux débats télévisés. facebook a également permis récemment de mettre en évidence les pratiques de harcèlement moral et sexuel dont souffrent les femmes tunisiennes dans la rue, dans les transports, dans l’espace public encore vécu et perçu comme un espace masculin régi par les règles de la domination masculine. sous l’influence du #metoo, les féministes et des femmes tunisiennes s’activent sur facebook pour décrire ce qu’elles subissent au quotidien, en décrivant de façon crue les gestes, les mots et les agressions subies. plusieurs déclarent qu’elles n’ont jamais pu s’exprimer publiquement ou se confier à des proches par honte, par peur. sur facebook, elles se libèrent même si elles témoignent sur des profils publics et qu’elles sont identifiables. nous précisons ici que twitter qui a été largement mobilisé ailleurs dans le monde pour dénoncer le harcèlement sexuel que subissent les femmes, n’est pas très utilisé en tunisie. il est principalement utilisé dans le domaine professionnel (par les entreprises, les marques…). ce n’est qu’en octobre que le # enazeda (moi aussi) est créé. c’est donc facebook qui s’est substitué à twitter pour exprimer le malaise des femmes et leur permettre ce dont les médias classiques (télévision et radio) les privent : dénoncer le harcèlement et les attouchements dont elles sont fréquemment victimes dans l’espace public. les médias classiques comme les différentes composantes de la société tentent d’ignorer ce phénomène parce qu’il touche au même tabou : le corps physique de la femme quand il s’agit d’attouchements dans les transports par exemple ou d’agressions physiques et à toute la symbolique que suscite le corps féminin en termes de désir et de fantasme quand il s’agit de harcèlement. plusieurs mois après la remise officielle du rapport de la colibe, le débat est toujours d’actualité sur facebook. d’un côté, les associations féministes comme l’atfd appellent sur leurs pages les députés à accélérer l’application des mesures annoncées, de l’autre des islamistes et des anonymes continuent de fustiger le rapport et de dénigrer les revendications d’égalité comme en témoigne l’échange suivant datant du juin sur la page de l’atfd. réagissant à l’appel aux députés lancé par l’atfd, om youssef de tunis écrit « c’est un projet contre la volonté divine et la charia. que dieu l’empêche. on s’est débarrassé de bochra (en allusion à la présidente de la colibe), on trouve celle-là (en référence à la présidente de l’atfd ». en réponse, khouloud une jeune internaute sympathisante de l’atfd répond « la tunisie est un etat civil ». le caractère civil irrite rapidement les facebookers en raison de la séparation qu’il sous-entend entre État et religion. chose qui interpelle nabil thamri qui riposte « par État civil, tu veux dire un état infidèle ?????? parce que dans l'islam, tous ceux qui annulent ou changent les décisions de dieu sont infidèles. c’est juste une question, sinon je serai accusé de vous taxer de blasphème ou de mécréance ! hahaha ». plus d’un an après la présentation du rapport de la colibe, les tensions qui ont accompagné les travaux de cette commissions et les arguments et références qui soutenaient les discours des différents protagonistes et observateurs sont toujours présents sur facebook : les conservateurs rappellent la essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / parole divine, les modernistes font appel au caractère civil de l’État et à la séparation entre l’État et l’islam (religion du peuple et non de l’État). pour conclure cette première partie, nous rappelons que la liberté de culte et le droit à la libre disposition de son corps ne faisaient pas partie des revendications prioritaires portées par les associations féministes tunisiennes et étaient totalement absentes des idées des associations féminines et féministes proches du pouvoir telles que l’union nationale des femmes tunisiennes (unft). en dépit de toutes les avancées juridiques et les acquis législatifs et économiques des femmes en tunisie, elles restent soumises à un contrôle social et politique dans ce qu’elles ont de plus intime et personnel : leur corps. ce dernier est l’objet de lois, codes, normes, règles et interdits établis par le législateur, la religion, la société, défendus par les hommes pour maintenir leur domination et surtout appliqués et respectés par les femmes elles-mêmes qui s’imposent ainsi au quotidien une forme de violence symbolique. elles s’enferment, se couvrent et quand elles s’émancipent et se libèrent, ne débordent pas le cadre dessiné par les normes et les lois. l’acte d’amina tyler, qui a d’ailleurs été copié par d’autres jeunes filles, a mis sur la scène publique une demande audacieuse de liberté en transgressant un interdit religieux. les médias classiques privilégiant des images normatives des femmes et des discours politiquement corrects, ils évacuent toute possibilité de représentations et de revendications audacieuses, contraires à la religion et aux normes sociales. face à cette absence d’espace d’expression, facebook s’impose comme un média alternatif en donnant de la visibilité à celles et ceux qui ne correspondent pas au standard du féminisme et des revendications classiques pour les droits de l’homme ou la liberté d’expression. c’est ainsi que les non-jeûneurs se tournent d’office vers facebook pour organiser la riposte et réclamer le droit de ne pas jeûner, de ne pas respecter toutes les règles de l’islam et pour certains de ne pas y croire tout simplement. facebook est donc un média alternatif pour des revendications non- conventionnelles, jugées illégitimes ou trop avant-gardistes. il est aussi un moyen de s’organiser pour lutter, alerter et dénoncer comme c’est le cas avec les articles et posts sur l’égalité entre les sexes, l’égalité en matière d’héritage et la dénonciation des violences et du harcèlement faits aux femmes. nous devons toutefois rappeler ici que, malgré les réussites médiatiques et l’imposition de certaines causes dans le débat public, facebook et internet d’une façon générale restent circonscrits à une partie de la population qui doit être connectée. nous précisons aussi que la portée de la médiatisation de ces causes et de ces revendications reste limitée à ceux qui ont un usage engagé et élitiste de facebook. une partie de la population, y compris féminine, est exclue de ce débat faute de pouvoir y participer, ou parce que les considérations relatives au corps féminin, au jeûne et à l’égalité de l’héritage relèvent à leurs yeux de questions métaphysiques. une autre partie s’auto-exclue de ces débats qui lui paraissent élitistes et très éloignés de leurs problèmes quotidiens (chômage, pauvreté, violence conjugale…). ainsi, le juin , eya atyaoui interpelle les féministes et le gouvernement en écrivant : « arrêtez de presser l’application de l’égalité en h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… héritage. activez la loi sur les congés maternité, ce serait mieux, c’est ce dont les tunisiennes ont besoin…la dignité… du temps avec leurs nouveaux nés…un salaire (c’est un droit) mais pas ces histoires d’héritage et d’élections.» . les vidéos en ligne des « marokkiates », nouvel espace d’expression et d’engagement pour les marocaines pour cette deuxième partie de l’étude, notre corpus est constitué de la totalité de vidéos ou épisodes de la série web « marokkiates », créée par sonia tarab et diffusée sur la page facebook de la plateforme forme jawjab (espace collaboratif mixte dédié aux créateurs de contenus digitaux au maroc) durant l’année - . sonia tarab (journaliste, écrivaine et réalisatrice) a conçu avec fatine benchekri, (directrice de jawjab), le programme jawjabt, plateforme dédiée aux femmes, pour les inciter à prendre la parole sur internet car le web marocain est majoritairement accaparé par la parole masculine alors que la présence féminine est faible, difficile et soumise à la pression et aux diktats sociaux . c’est dans le cadre du projet jawjabt, que sonia terrab, inspirée par la page facebook "humans of new york", qui dresse les portraits de différentes personnes croisées dans la mégalopole a lancé un nouveau format web baptisé « marokkiates » (marocaines en dialecte marocain). a travers des capsules vidéo d’une minute, elle offre une cartographie des femmes marocaines en faisant intervenir des femmes de tous âges, de toutes catégories socio-économiques. la web série est toujours consultable sur facebook et youtube . . . les marokkiates debout dans la rue et sur internet pour commencer, signalons que pour la réalisatrice, la libération de la parole des femmes doit leur permettre de réaliser un double objectif, se réapproprier l’espace public (la rue) et investir le nouvel espace numérique : « je me suis dit, je vais mettre ces femmes dans cette rue qui ne leur appartient pas, qu’elles se contentent de traverser très très vite, la boule au ventre car elles ont très peur de se faire il s’agit de notre traduction. la publication a été postée en arabe « « brabi entouma tsar ou sar oulna f anoun "l congés de maternité" irelkom... hedha chnowa mest akin les femmes tunisiennes... la dignité. du temps avec leurs nouveaux nés... un salaire (eli howa leur droit) mouch kayet fergua pour les élections ». jawjab.ma (premier espace collaboratif dédié aux créateurs de contenu sur le web en afrique du nord.) les filles ne sont pas bonnes qu'à faire du make-up, du lifestyle et de la mode sur le web. nous voulons surtout leur donner la possibilité de se réapproprier la parole sur des sujets qui les concernent", déclare au huffpost maroc fatim-zahra bencherki, directrice générale de la plateforme jawjab. https://www.facebook.com/jawjabma/videos/marokkiat-ep -par-sonia-terrab/ / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krgmraknojg&list=plinantzajacultxma nxcgxn oqh bcva essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / harceler, elles ont peur de se faire agresser parfois, qu’elles investissent cet espace le temps de cette prise de parole et ensuite quand on poste la vidéo sur le web qu’elles investissent aussi le web » . par ailleurs, la réalisatrice semble intéressée par le vécu et non par l’opinion des femmes. dans une déclaration à l’afp , elle affirme que chacune est invitée à raconter son quotidien en tant que femme marocaine. les femmes livrent un message court, brut, parfois cru, spontané et monologal. elles racontent à visage découvert et face camera des tranches ou récits de leur vie quotidienne en dévoilant leur vulnérabilité, leurs peurs mais aussi leur courage et audace . leurs vidéos ont rencontré un vif succès en réalisant millions de vues et , millions d’interactions en quatre mois. elles ont suscité, selon la réalisatrice, de nombreuses envies de participer au projet en devenant une marokkiates. elles ont aussi bénéficié d’une très large couverture sur les médias classiques et numériques. les douze femmes témoignent donc debout dans un acte symbolique d’appropriation de la rue, espace accaparé par les hommes comme le déclare sonia : « le fait, qu’elles se mettent debout dans cette rue pour raconter quelque chose sur elles, elles prennent possession de cette rue. elles se l’approprient le temps d’une prise de parole forte. » le filmage se fait en plan large et laisse voir la rue, les murs sales ou tagués et des passants. deux vidéos sont tournées le soir ou à la tombée de la nuit. ce choix de laisser voir la saleté de la ville est un acte volontaire de la part de la réalisatrice qui voulait que les vidéos soient tournées dans l’espace public de la grande métropole casablanca, environnement urbain masculin et hostile. . . qui sont les marokkiates ? et que disent-elles ? elles s’appellent zahra, nada, khadija, meriem, rihab, ghislaine, aya, fatma, salima, bouchra, selam, umaima. ce sont toutes des marocaines sauf une qui se revendique maroco-algéro-française. elles sont de tous âges et catégories socioprofessionnelles. la plus jeune a ans et la plus âgée ans. elles sont lycéenne, étudiante, vendeuse, entrepreneuse, chef d’équipe, retraitée, adoptée, voilée, tatouée, bisexuelle. ces femmes ne sont pas anonymes. elles sont toutes visibles, identifiables et reconnaissables puisque aucun visage n’est flouté et aucune voix n’est transformée. mais cette visibilité a des limites puisque les éléments identitaires civils ou professionnels ne sont pas tous dévoilés. en effet, seul le prénom est montré dès les premières secondes de chaque vidéo, en lettres capitales jaunes et en surimpression sur l’écran et aucunement le nom de famille. parfois, elles livrent leur âge comme https://mobile.twitter.com/lesinternets/status/ , consulté juin afp, mars . voir :https://telquel.ma// / / /video-marokkiate-jawjabt-sonia-terrab-libere-parole-femmes- internet_ , consulté en juin . h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… fatma : « je suis un mélange, c’est ce que j’aime. marocaine, algérienne et française. j’ai ans et l’avantage qu’on a à cet âge c’est quand même d’avoir une certaine liberté. » mais toutes sont des citoyennes lambda ou ordinaires . en effet, il n’y a pas d’expertes, de militantes, de politiques ou de féministes reconnues qui témoignent dans ces vidéos. cette pratique médiatique qui consiste à donner la parole aux gens ordinaires pour témoigner de leur vécu n’est pas nouvelle. elle s’apparente fortement aux usages de la télévision de l’intimité bien décrits par d. mehl ( ) puisque ces témoins « sont invités sur les plateaux pour faire part de leur vécu dans la vie de tous les jours : ils livrent des fragments de récits de vie, racontent leurs histoires personnelles en famille ou en société. ils promeuvent la figure du témoin qui raconte sa propre existence et ses propres expériences ». les marokkiates dressent un portrait assez sombre de la condition de la femme au maroc mais déploient en même temps un acte d’insoumission, d’affirmation et d’engagement pour soi et les autres. il est vécu comme un soulagement cathartique par ces femmes rabaissées. en même temps, aidées par les réseaux sociaux, les femmes marocaines, comme toutes les femmes du monde, semblent avides de participer à ce grand mouvement de libération de la parole initié par le mouvement #metoo. en dénonçant certains travers de la société patriarcale marocaine comme le harcèlement, les agressions sexuelles ou le viol, ces femmes s’engagent pour plus de droits. avec les réseaux sociaux et le phénomène #metoo, à travers le monde, on assiste à une troisième révolution féministe. surtout chez les jeunes femmes, animées par un vrai désir d'émancipation, la prise de parole dans la rue et dans l'espace virtuel est plus assumée. ainsi, le dévoilement est vu à la fois comme un acte d’expression de soi et d’engagement pour les autres. . . expression de soi des marokkiates en ce qui concerne les principaux thèmes abordés par les femmes dans les vidéos, on trouve essentiellement les thèmes suivants : l’amour impossible avec un marocain, le harcèlement dans l’espace public et les carcans vestimentaires, la femme comme proie ou objet sexuel, la difficulté d’aimer, la bisexualité, le viol, la violence verbale, la liberté de disposer de son corps et de ses mouvements, la liberté de porter un tatouage et de fumer, la domination masculine, le poids des normes et l’injonction de se marier. la parole ainsi libérée dévoile les tentatives de ces femmes de s’exposer et de s’insurger contre divers tabous, maux et normes archaïques de la société marocaine. zahra clame dans le premier épisode, l’impossibilité de l’amour avec un marocain décrit comme un profiteur : « y a pas d’amour avec le marocain ? au maroc, l’amour c’est le business. ne laisse personne te dire le contraire. quel amour ? il https://www.telerama.fr/television/marokkiat,-la-web-serie-coup-de-poing-qui-fait-parler-les- marocaines,n .php essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / n’y a que des profiteurs ». cette impossibilité d’aimer est réaffirmée dans le témoignage d’une femme adoptée et souffrant de carence affective. on peut de manière synthétique relever thématiques et les illustrer par des propos de marokkiates : femme infériorisée et exclue de l’espace public. beaucoup de marokkiates évoquent la peur d’être agressées dans la rue, surtout la nuit, comme selma : « je m’enferme à double tour, je brûle les feux. quand j’arrive, je demande au gardien de m’accompagner au restaurant jusqu’à l’intérieur. je lui demande de m’attendre pour me ramener à la voiture. c’est un quotidien de stress, surtout la nuit ou en tant que femme, jeune femme célibataire, c’est pas évident à vivre ». d’autres racontent leur statut de demi-êtres, exclues de l’espace public et soumises aux normes, par exemple vestimentaires, imposées par les hommes comme le dit nada: « la fille doit suivre des normes. elle ne doit pas sortir après minuit. elle doit s’habiller dans la rue selon les principes des hommes pour qu’ils ne soient pas tentés… n’importe quoi donc… tu vois… on est des demi-êtres et ça, ça me dérange. ! » selon les sociologues a. dialmy et s. n. guessous , au maroc la mixité n'est pas encore normalisée et banalisée dans l'espace public et les hommes continuent de considérer cet espace comme leur propriété exclusive face aux femmes perçues comme des intruses. ils ajoutent que la raison principale est la frustration sexuelle des marocains vivant dans une société qui interdit les relations sexuelles hors mariage qualifiées de «haram» [illicites] c’est-à-dire contraire à la religion, et punies d’emprisonnement d’un mois à un an selon l’article du code pénal marocain. de plus, le recul de l'âge du premier mariage, pour des raisons principalement économiques, prolonge cette frustration sexuelle. de plus, les femmes marocaines, par exemple les célibataires, subissent une pression familiale et sociale intense car une femme doit être mariée comme en témoigne selma : « comment c’est possible que tu sois célibataire à ans ? « t’as pas trouvé ? » « tu t’es pas marié ? » « comment ça se fait ? » « c’est trop tard… « tu as raté le coche… » c’est le genre de remarques que j’entends chaque jour qui te met une pression et ça te dégoute. » selma ajoute que contrairement aux femmes à l’étranger, les filles marocaines qui utilisent les réseaux de rencontre sont considérées comme des filles faciles voire des prostituées : « si quelqu’un a vu que… tu utilises tinder, tu es considérée comme… tu es à l’affût des mecs ou que tu es une fille sale ou trop légère alors que mes amies qui utilisent tinder à l’étranger, personne ne les dérange ». https://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/abdessamad-dialmy/analyse-sociologique-agression-sexuelle-bus- casablancais_b_ .html https://www.liberation.fr/planete/ / / /au-maroc-la-femme-dans-la-rue-est-une-proie-potentielle- ou-une-bete-a-abattre_ h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… la femme objet sexuel, victime de violence et de cyber harcèlement. les femmes évoquent le contrôle des hommes sur leur corps et parlent de leur sexualité. ces femmes décrivent le regard des hommes qui perçoivent les femmes, même voilées, avant tout comme un objet sexuel ou une chose : « j’ai compris que je vivais dans une société que tu sois nue, habillée, en burqa ou que tu sortes même cachée sous un drap l’homme te regardera comme une chose qu’il doit découvrir en dessous » explique khadija, ans, racontant ce qu’elle vit depuis qu’elle porte le voile. d’autres témoignages émanent de femmes victimes d’agressions sexuelles, d’attouchements ou de viol : « quand j’étais petite, j’ai été agressée sexuellement par un membre de ma famille, genre c’était un harcèlement physique où y’ a eu des attouchements y’ a eu… un contact entre… membre et mon corps, et… voilà. et quand je l’ai dit à des membres de ma famille qui avaient mon âge à cette époque entre et ans, je l’ai dit à mes cousines et tout. elles ne m’ont pas cru ». une jeune femme, rihab, parle de sa vie de bisexuelle au maroc, avec ses risques, mais aussi ses relatifs avantages. elle soutient que l'homosexualité des femmes est plus tolérée que celle des hommes : « pour être claire, je mène la vie d’une personne bisexuelle juste le fait que je ne trouve pas ce terme dans le dialecte marocain pour le dire prouve plusieurs choses … l’homosexualité ou la bisexualité des filles au maroc est plus acceptée que celle des garçons ». certaines racontent les violences verbales, insultes, moqueries et menaces reçues à la suite d’une une prise de parole dans une manifestation contre les violences faites aux femmes comme aya qui a osé brandir une pancarte adressée aux hommes et sur laquelle était écrit : « masturbez-vous! que dieu vous bénisse !» lors d’un sit-in à rabat organisé par un collectif de jeunes activistes, en signe de solidarité avec une fille victime d’une agression sexuelle collective à casablanca. « j’ai lu les commentaires % des gens m’insultaient. ils n’insultent même pas ce qui est écrit, ils insultent mon apparence : « comment elle est moche », « regardez-la, elle sourit », « elle s’en fout de son pays ». j’avais peur de sortir. je pensais qu’ils allaient me jeter une pierre ou même me violer aussi ou des trucs comme ça ». salima, ans, chef d’équipe dans un groupe d’e-commerce, a choisi de raconter les agressions verbales provoquées par son tatouage, « perçu dans la rue comme un très gros acte de rébellion ». d’autres évoquent la souffrance liée à l’essor du cyber harcèlement et du chantage exercé par certains hommes qui les menacent de scandale à la suite de la divulgation de photos intimes ou personnelles sur les réseaux sociaux, comme le raconte une victime coupable d’être filmée chez elle en train de danser : « les filles souffrent de ce genre de situations. quelqu’un lui prend son téléphone ou bien son petit copain prend une photo d’elle dans une position compromettante, puis il lui fait du chantage : « viens chez moi », « ou je vais partager ce que j’ai ». maintenant, avec les réseaux sociaux, vous savez… tu postes un petit truc et ça fait boom ». le portrait dessiné dans ces témoignages de la condition de la femme marocaine est celui d’une femme harcelée, épiée, agressée, dépossédée de son corps, essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / évincée de l’espace public, infériorisée, soumise au contrôle des hommes et écrasée par des normes sociales patriciales et archaïques. il s’agit bien sûr d’un portrait non exhaustif qui ne couvre pas la totalité des causes et combats menés par les féministes marocaines comme la lutte contre le mariage des mineures, l’inégalité de l’héritage entre hommes et femmes, le travail des « petites bonnes à domicile » et pour plus de droits pour les mères célibataires et la dépénalisation des relations sexuelles hors mariages, etc. en échos avec ces propos tenus par les marokkiates, plusieurs études et rapports internationaux pointent la réalité de la domination masculine et de la violence subie par les marocaines. paradoxalement au maroc, promoteur d’un islam tolérant, les femmes n’ont pas l’obligation de porter le voile mais marcher, surtout seules, dans la rue les exposent aux remarques malveillantes, insultes et agressions. ces dernières années, plusieurs cas d’agressions filmées ont fait la une des médias comme en août avec une vidéo montrant une agression sexuelle collective contre une jeune femme dans un bus de casablanca. en effet, au maroc, réseaux sociaux, ong et médias alertent sur le fléau de la violence, en particulier le harcèlement subi par les femmes dans l’espace public. ainsi, les lieux publics sont les endroits où la violence à l’égard des femmes est la plus manifeste. d’après une étude de l’observatoire national de la violence faite aux femmes et selon la ministre de la famille, de la solidarité, de l'égalité et du développement social, bassima hakkaoui, % des cas de violence à l'égard des femmes se produisent dans les lieux publics . d’autres chiffres appuient ce constat : plus d'un marocain sur deux reconnaît avoir déjà harcelé sexuellement une femme dans l'espace public et plus de % des femmes déclarent avoir déjà été victimes de ce type d'agression, selon une récente étude publiée par l'onu femmes maghreb . symptomatiquement, les femmes sont plus nombreuses que les hommes à estimer que l'apparence de la victime provoque le harcèlement, selon cette étude. pour % des hommes, les femmes doivent tolérer la violence afin de préserver l'unité familiale et % reconnaissent avoir eu recours à la violence physique contre leur épouse, indique une récente enquête d'onu femmes maghreb. . engagement pour soi et pour les autres des marokkiates cette expressivité personnelle des marokkiates n’est pas uniquement une expression individuelle plaintive mais c’est aussi une forme nouvelle de mobilisation et d’engagement dénonciateur des injustices et des normes traditionnelles. en même temps ces femmes parlent, se battent, résistent et s’assument. ces femmes ordinaires ne font pas que témoigner mais produisent une parole d’engagement et d’action. il s’agit d’une parole ordinaire politique que certains chercheurs qualifient de https://www.h info.ma/maroc/violence-a-femmes-lieux-publics-hausse/ https://info.arte.tv/fr/marokkiat-la-rue-leur-appartient h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… mediactiviste (cardon, granjon ) ou d’alteractiviste (pleyers, capitaine, ). cet alteractivisme marque un renouveau de l’engagement citoyen et se réalise loin des espaces institutionnels dominés par les politiques et les journalistes. pour ces alteractivistes, construction de soi et changement social y sont fortement liés. comme le soulignent g. pleyers, et c. brieg ( ) en s’affirmant comme sujet, l’individu devient acteur de sa vie et, en se transformant lui-même, il transforme le monde. les auteurs ajoutent que pour comprendre cet alteractivisme, il ne faut pas se limiter à la dimension publique et politique des individus mais prendre en compte leurs émotions, leur subjectivité et leur créativité ainsi que la centralité du rapport à soi. les marokkiates sont conscientes des risques encourus mais choisissent de franchir le pas, par esprit d’engagement, d’activisme et de militantisme contre les discriminations et la stigmatisation et pour la dignité et l’acceptation des personnes concernées comme rihab, ans, qui en faisant connaitre sa bisexualité, fait certes connaitre une facette de son identité auprès du grand public mais surtout elle espère mieux aider d’autres filles à mieux s’accepter. elle explique : « je me suis demandée si j’étais prête à faire ça si j’étais prête à montrer mon visage au monde et dire « oui, voilà comment je suis » sachant les conséquences terribles dont je pourrais souffrir au maroc mais au final je me suis dit que tôt au tard quelqu’un doit le faire et peut-être parmi les spectateurs qui regardent ton projet, existe une fille qui vit une situation similaire mais qui ne sait pas quoi faire, j’espère que les gens dans ce cas seront inspirés pour être plus à l’aise avec leur vie et leur identité ». d’ailleurs, parler ouvertement de bisexualité n’est pas sans risques. par son témoignage, rihab, devient une sorte d’icône de la cause lgbt mais risque la prison car l’homosexualité est un délit au maroc . . se réapproprier l’espace public et disposer de son corps les femmes marocaines veulent se réapproprier l’espace public, comme nada qui déclare: « en tant qu’être humain la rue m’appartient aussi. j’ai le droit de sortir et de rentrer quand je veux ». elles revendiquent aussi le droit de disposer librement de leur corps, de leur sexualité et remettent en cause la domination masculine comme bouchra qui s’insurge contre cette domination et le fait de devoir dépendre des hommes pour réussir : « derrière chaque homme, il y une femme. pourquoi pas derrière chaque femme, il y a un homme pourquoi ? c’est impossible ? … toi, tu racontes tes ambitions, et au final un type te demande si tu as un copain pour t’aider… un homme, pourquoi un homme ? un homme n’est pas dieu… il n’y a qu’un seul dieu, et c’est allah ». cette volonté de disposer librement de son corps est un leitmotiv qui revient souvent dans les témoignages et à tout âge, comme dans le récit de fatma, ans qui clame: « mais je suis toujours en vie. je mets ce que je veux. je pars au café que je veux dans des endroits où il n’y a que des hommes. cette période de ma vie j’ai ans et l’avantage qu’on a à cet âge c’est quand même d’avoir une certaine liberté… et pour cette liberté, je vais me battre…jusqu’au dernier jour ». certaines essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. ( ) / femmes revendiquent tout simplement le droit de s'habiller comme elles l'entendent, de porter ou non le voile, d’avoir, par exemple un tatouage, sans avoir à subir de réflexions désobligeantes de la part des hommes. ainsi, malgré l’opposition, les sarcasmes et l’hostilité de la société, salima affirme: « je suis allée me faire un tatouage je l’ai fait ici… (au-dessus du sein gauche) quand je l’ai fait, pour moi, c’était un endroit anodin. sauf que non. pour les gens, c’était absolument pas anodin… c’est bon, vous m’insultez à cause de ça ? c’est cool, il n’y a pas de problèmes. et j’allume même une cigarette. vous m’insultez pour ça aussi ? allez-y foncez ! ». . . agir pour changer les mentalités et plus de droits certaines marokkiates veulent être actrices du changement des mentalités, de la société et prolongent le témoignage par une volonté d’action, d’engagement et de militantisme. a l’instar de salima dhaibi qui déclare, dans un reportage diffusé sur la chaine france , vouloir être plus dans l’action : « j’ai subi la rage des hommes dans la rue, des femmes aussi juste parce que je portais un petit tatouage sur le sein gauche. grâce à ce projet, j’ai plus envie de faire quelque chose, mais avant c’est vrai j’étais plus dans la résilience » . une autre, oumaima raquas, marokkiates jeune responsable administrative de ans et première femme marocaine à avoir porté plainte contre le harcèlement sexuel, a choisi de ne pas se taire et de porter plainte pour dénoncer une situation vécue quotidiennement par de nombreuses femmes au maroc. À la faveur de l’entrée en vigueur mercredi septembre de la loi . sur la violence faite aux femmes, elle pourrait bien devenir la première marocaine à bénéficier des dispositions de cette loi adoptée en février . en définitive, la publicisation, qui consiste à médiatiser et rendre publique la parole privée, permise hier par la télévision et grandement facilitée aujourd’hui par les réseaux numériques, révèle et renforce une mutation significative des rapports entre espace privé et espace public. désormais, les frontières sont poreuses et les territoires se superposent. surtout, cette intrusion du privé dans l’espace public révèle des enjeux de société puisque cette libération de la parole en médiatisant et rendant plus visibles les préoccupations des femmes marocaines peut nourrir la réflexion de la société sur elle-même. concrètement, raconter des récits de vie quotidienne peut induire des évolutions sociales : briser certains tabous, encourager les attitudes d’ouverture, par exemple changer le regard sur le harcèlement ou sur l’homosexualité, faire bouger les mentalités et réclamer plus d’égalité, de tolérance et de partage de l’espace public comme l’espèrent la réalisatrice et les marokkiates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcj _a wmq https://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/entry/loi- -portant-plainte-pour-harcelement-sexuel-cette- casablancaise-pourrait-etre-la-premiere-marocaine-a-en- beneficier_mg_ b e b db e f?utm_hp_ref=mg-harcelement-sexuel h. atifi & z. touati nouvelles revendications féministes et médias… conclusion dans les deux cas étudiés, nous observons clairement une invisibilité des nouvelles revendications des femmes dans les médias classiques qui privilégient des images normatives des femmes correspondant aux idéaux sociaux et religieux. ainsi, les femmes et les groupes minoritaires se retournent vers les réseaux sociaux et les médias numériques pour avoir un espace d’expression. dans l’exemple tunisien, facebook devient un espace alternatif pour donner de la visibilité à celles et ceux dont les voix sont brimés par la société, les instances officielles et associatives et les médias classiques. il est perçu et utilisé comme un média alternatif pour des revendications non-conventionnelles, jugées illégitimes ou socialement inacceptables. il permet donc de mettre sur la scène virtuelle, et par la suite la scène médiatique, des revendications nouvelles comme il permet d’alerter et de structurer les mobilisations et les luttes pour les droits des femmes : égalité en matière d’héritage, lutte contre le harcèlement et les violences. dans le cas marocain, les vidéos étudiées montrent des femmes marocaines ordinaires qui utilisent les nouveaux médias numériques, ici la vidéo en ligne, pour investir l’espace public, physique et virtuel, afin de médiatiser leurs vulnérabilités individuelles et de créer de nouvelles capacités de mobilisation, d’action collective et d’évolution sociale. cette évolution sociale emprunte plusieurs chemins complémentaires. il s’agit, dans un premier temps, de porter dans l’espace public des thèmes chers aux femmes marocaines. on peut dire, que le combat actuel pour les marokkiates est la reprise de l’espace public et de la rue. cela entre en résonance avec certaines revendications portées dans des manifestations récentes au maroc et indiquant comme prioritaire le droit pour les femmes marocaines de partager la rue avant de partager l’héritage : avant de partager l’héritage, partageons la rue. ensuite, cette prise de parole de témoignage est complétée par des engagements effectifs hors ligne à l’image de ces marocaines de plus en plus engagées dans l’action, l’activisme et les actions en justice. en dernier lieu, cette libération de la parole peut favoriser des changements institutionnels ou juridiques favorables aux femmes. ainsi, le parlement marocain a adopté en février une loi contre les violences faites aux femmes. la loi incrimine pour la première fois « certains actes considérés comme des formes de harcèlement, d’agression, d’exploitation sexuelle ou de mauvais traitement », selon une note du ministère de la famille. elle durcit également les sanctions pour certains cas et prévoit des « mécanismes pour prendre en charge les femmes victimes » de violences . cette loi représente une réelle avancée pour le droits des marocaines mais est critiquée par des voix féministes car elle ne pénalise pas, par exemple, le viol conjugal, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/ / / /apres-des-annees-de-lutte-les-marocaines-enfin- defendues-par-une-loi_ _ .html essachess. journal for communication studies, vol. , no. 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( ). les réseaux sociaux et la parole des femmes tunisiennes entre espace de libération et exutoire virtuel. in actes du colloque international «usages et pratiques des publics dans les pays du sud : des médias classiques aux tic (pp. - ). agadir : univerité ibn zohr. exposure to family violence from childhood to adulthood research article open access exposure to family violence from childhood to adulthood margot shields , lil tonmyr * , wendy e. hovdestad , andrea gonzalez and harriet macmillan , abstract background: both childhood maltreatment (cm) and intimate partner violence (ipv) are public health problems that have been related to a wide range of adverse health consequences. however, studies examining associations between specific types of cm and experiencing ipv in adulthood have yielded conflicting results. methods: using data from , men and , women aged or older from canada’s general social survey, we examined associations between three types of cm—childhood physical abuse (cpa), childhood sexual abuse (csa), and childhood exposure to ipv —and subsequent intimate partner violence (ipv) in adulthood (physical, sexual or emotional). results: when potential confounders were controlled, cpa, csa and childhood exposure to ipv were associated with ipv in adulthood for both sexes (odds ratios, . , . and . for men, and . , . and . for women). when severity and frequency of cm were examined, a dose-response relationship between all three types of cm and ipv in adulthood was observed among women (meaning that as the severity/frequency of cm increased, the likelihood of reporting ipv also increased); among men, a dose-response relationship was observed only for cpa. conclusions: the association between cm and ipv in adulthood is particularly concerning because experiencing multiple forms of trauma has cumulative effects. lifespan studies have shown that individuals who experience multiple incidents of abuse exhibit the highest levels of impairment. this underscores the importance of programs to eradicate both cm and ipv. this underscores the importance of programs to eradicate both cm and ipv. future research should focus on assessing interventions designed to promote healthy relationships and the provision of emotional support and coping mechanisms to children and families in abusive situations. keywords: intimate partner violence, physical abuse, sexual abuse, childhood exposure to intimate partner violence, domestic violence background the world health organization defines intimate partner violence (ipv) as any “behaviour by an intimate partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, includ- ing acts of physical aggression, sexual coercion, psycho- logical abuse and controlling behaviours. this definition covers violence by both current and former spouses and other intimate partners” [ ]. ipv victimization is associated with short- and long-term health consequences including injury and other physical health conditions, mental health symptoms and disorders, and death [ ]. those experiencing ipv use proportionately more health care services (primary care, emergency, and hospital), even when confounding factors such as socioeconomic status are taken into account [ ]. the causes of ipv are complex. the ecological model contends the multiple risk factors are involved including individual, relationship, community, and societal factors [ – ]. an extensive body of literature has examined childhood maltreatment (cm) as a risk factor for being © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: lil.tonmyr@canada.ca public health agency of canada, carling ave. th floor, ottawa, on k a k , canada full list of author information is available at the end of the article shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -y&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:lil.tonmyr@canada.ca victimized by ipv in adulthood, with the majority of studies focusing on associations with childhood sexual abuse (csa) [ – ] and childhood physical abuse (cpa) [ – , , , – ]. studies of associations with other types of cm, such as childhood exposure to ipv, emo- tional abuse, and neglect, are less common [ , , – , – ]. many of these studies have samples comprised exclusively of women [ , , , , , , , ]. however, findings tend to be inconsistent. some studies have found that cm increases the likelihood of ipv in adulthood; others have reported null associ- ations between specific types of cm and ipv [ – , – , , , , , – ]. two meta-analyses [ , ] of associations between specific types of cm (cpa, csa, childhood exposure to ipv, neglect, and emotional abuse) and ipv in adulthood concluded that associations were weak, but statistically signifi- cant. one of these studies [ ] focused on associa- tions between cm and ipv among men and noted a need for research on different kinds of cm and the co-occurrence of cm in relation to ipv victimization and perpetration among men. evidence is also mixed about whether greater severity of cm heightens the risk of ipv in adulthood [ , , , , – , , ]. it has been argued that simply being ex- posed to cm, regardless of severity, increases the risk for future abuse [ ]. some studies have suggested that the number of types of maltreatment that a child experiences is more important in predicting ipv in adulthood than is the severity of a specific form of maltreatment [ , ]. a canadian study using data from the population- based general social survey (gss) found an associ- ation between csa and ipv in adulthood for both sexes, although the relationship was weaker for men [ ]. the gss identified csa and cpa with questions about life-time history of sexual and physical assault and age of onset; respondents reporting assault before age were classified as having experienced csa/cpa [ ]. for the gss, the questions were broadened to include items to measure csa, cpa, and childhood exposure to ipv [ ]. an analysis of gss data observed an as- sociation between csa/cpa and severe ipv in adult- hood (being beaten, choked, threatened with a gun or a knife, or forced or manipulated into unwanted sexual ac- tivity) [ ]. however, this study did not examine if in- creases in severity of cm augmented the likelihood of adult ipv victimization. childhood exposure to ipv was not considered nor were sex differences in associations between cm and ipv victimization in adulthood. this article uses data from the gss to meet three objectives: . to examine associations between three types of cm (cpa, csa, and childhood exposure to ipv) and being victimized by three types of ipv in adulthood (physical, sexual and emotional); . to investigate whether greater severity and frequency of specific forms of cm and the co- occurrence of different types of cm increase the risk of ipv in adulthood; and . to determine if associations between cm and ipv in adulthood differ by sex. examining these questions will address important gaps in the literature; associations between cm and ipv have rarely been examined among men and more studies are needed to clarify if the co-occurrence and severity of particular types of cm increases the likeli- hood of ipv. in this article we use the terms “experienced” ipv or “reported ipv” to refer to “being victimized” by ipv. the article does not address ipv perpetration (see limitations). methods data source data are from statistics canada’s general social survey: victimization. the gss target population was household residents aged or older living in the provinces and territories. two samples were se- lected (one for the provinces; one for the territories) using complex multistage sampling designs that uti- lized a sampling frame derived from the census and various administrative sources, which combined land- line and cellular telephone numbers. more informa- tion about the sample design is available in the gss microdata user guide [ ]. the response rate was . % for the provinces ( , respondents) and . % for the territories ( respondents). the two samples were pooled to produce estimates for all canadians. the study population for the present analysis was re- spondents aged or older currently living with a spouse/partner or who had contact with an ex-spouse/ ex-partner in the past years ( , men and , women). respondents aged to years were excluded since our objective was to examine cm in relation to ipv in adulthood. measures child maltreatment cpa, csa, and childhood exposure to ipv were assessed retrospectively by asking respondents about “events that may have happened before you were ” using the items in fig. (adapted from shields et al., [ ]). the items for cpa and childhood exposure to ipv are from the childhood experiences of violence question- naire (cevq) [ ]. for each type of abuse, binary shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of variables (yes/no) were created following cevq guide- lines. as well, variables were derived to indicate the se- verity and frequency of abuse (fig. ). we also examined the co-occurrence of the three types of cm maltreat- ment as well as each type of cm occurring in isolation. we created a variable to indicate: � no cm, � cpa only (no csa/childhood exposure to ipv), � csa only (no cpa/childhood exposure to ipv), � childhood exposure to ipv only (no cpa/csa), � or more types of cm. we attempted to consider two co-occurrence categor- ies separately (i.e., types and types) but there was in- sufficient sample size to consider types. for cpa and csa, all incidents of abuse were in- cluded regardless of the relationship of the perpetrator to the child (e.g., parent, stepparent, other family mem- ber, teacher, stranger etc.). fig. childhood maltreatment items and definitions. cpa = childhood physical abuse. csa = childhood sexual abuse. ceipv=childhood exposure to intimate partner violence. note: fig. is adapted from shields et al., [ ] shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of intimate partner violence in adulthood to identify physical, sexual and emotional ipv in adult- hood, questions were asked about the respondent’s current spouse/partner, and then, about the respondent’s ex-spouse/ex-partner (if applicable and if they had con- tact in the past years). respondents in same-sex rela- tionships are included in the study. ipv that occurred in dating relationships was excluded. the ipv items are based on the conflict tactics scales [ , ]. questions about physical and sexual ipv pertained to experiences that occurred over the past years; no time frame was specified for emotional ipv. table displays the items used to measure ipv. covariates selection of potential confounders to use in the multi- variate regression models was based on a review of the literature examining socio-demographic risk factors for cm and ipv [ , – ] as well as socio-demographic controls used in other studies investigating cm in rela- tion to ipv in adulthood [ – , – ]. the control var- iables used in this study include: current age ( – , – , – , – , or older), born in canada (yes/ no), indigenous status (first nations, métis or inuk (inuit)/non-indigenous), marital status (married, living common-law, widowed, divorced, separated, single/never married), household income (less than $ , , $ , –$ , , $ , –$ , , $ , –$ , , $ , –$ , , $ , or more), highest level of educa- tion attained by respondent (less than high school graduation, high school diploma, postsecondary certifi- cate/diploma, university degree), and highest level of education attained by respondent’s mother and father (less than high school graduation, high school diploma, some postsecondary, postsecondary certificate/diploma, university degree). analysis frequency estimates were produced to describe the prevalence of cm and ipv among the study population. associations between cm and ipv in adulthood were examined using cross-tabulations and logistic regression models that controlled for potential confounders. two sets of analyses were conducted to address objectives and ; one based on binary (yes/no) cm variables, and the other to examine severity. the small proportion of respondents with missing data for the cm and/or ipv variables (table ) were excluded from the analyses. all analyses were based on weighted data. weights created by statistics canada ensured that the data were representative of the canadian population in . to account for the survey design effect of the gss, standard errors, coefficients of variation, and % confidence in- tervals were estimated using the bootstrap technique [ ]. differences between estimates were tested for stat- istical significance, which was established at the p < . level. all analyses were conducted using sas . (sas institute inc.; cary, north carolina, usa). preliminary analyses considered cm in relation to the three types of ipv in adulthood: physical, sexual, and emotional. sample size was not sufficient to examine asso- ciations with sexual ipv separately; therefore, sexual and physical ipv were combined. owing to the overlap be- tween physical/sexual and emotional ipv, we examined associations between cm and three outcomes: emotional ipv alone (no physical/sexual ipv); physical/sexual ipv alone (no emotional ipv); and both emotional ipv and physical/sexual ipv. sample size was insufficient to deter- mine associations between cm and physical/sexual ipv with no emotional ipv. when the outcomes were emo- tional ipv with no physical/sexual ipv or physical/sexual table intimate partner violence (ipv) items and definitions physical ipv: reporting at least one of the following experiences during the past years, has your spouse/partner or ex-spouse/ex- partner: threatened to hit you with his/her fist or anything else that could have hurt you? thrown anything at you that could have hurt you? pushed, grabbed or shoved you in a way that could have hurt you? slapped you? kicked you, bit you, or hit you with his/her fist? hit you with something that could have hurt you? beaten you? choked you? used or threatened to use a gun or knife on you? sexual ipv: reporting at least one of the following experiences during the past years, has your spouse/partner or ex-spouse/ex- partner: forced you into any unwanted sexual activity, by threatening you, holding you down, or hurting you in some way? subjected you to a sexual activity to which you were not able to consent. by this i mean were you drugged, intoxicated, manipulated or forced in other ways than physically? emotional ipv: reporting at least one of the following experiences your spouse/partner or ex-spouse/ex-partner: tries to limit your contact with family or friends; puts you down or calls you names to make you feel bad; is jealous and doesn’t want you to talk to other men or women; harms, or threatens to harm, someone close to you; harms or threatens to harm your pet(s); demands to know who you are with and where you are at all times; damages or destroys your possessions or property. shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of table percentage experiencing intimate partner violence (ipv) in adulthood and childhood maltreatment (cm), by sex, household population aged or older, currently living with a spouse/partner or who had contact with an ex-spouse/partner during last years, canada, men women sample size weighted percent % ci sample size weighted percent % ci ipv in adulthood any ipv yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing emotional ipv yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing physical ipv yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no , . ( . , . ) , . ( . , . ) missing sexual ipv yes f . * ( . , . ) no , . ( . , ) , . ( . , . ) missing physical or sexual ipv yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no , . ( . , . ) , . ( . , . ) missing emotional ipv and/or physical/sexual ipv both emotional ipv and physical/sexual ipv . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) emotional ipv, no physical/sexual ipv . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) physical/sexual ipv, no emotional ipv . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) no emotional ipv and no physical/sexual ipv . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing childhood maltreatment any cma yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing cpa yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing cpa severity and frequency severe and frequent cpa . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) severe cpa (≤ times) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) cpa (excluding severe cpa) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no cpa . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of ipv and emotional ipv, associations with cm were simi- lar. therefore, only the results for any ipv (physical, sex- ual, or emotional) are presented. to examine sex differences in associations between cm and ipv, logistic regression was used to test for in- teractions with sex and cm. a significant interaction in- dicates that the strength of the association between cm and ipv differs by sex (for example, if a statistically sig- nificant interaction greater than . is found between cm and ipv for being female, the association with ipv is stronger for women than for men). when significant interactions terms were found, we reported on relative risks based on rates since it is not appropriate to com- pare odds ratios across models. results estimates of ipv among people aged years or older currently living with a spouse/partner or who had contact with an ex- spouse/partner in the last years, a slightly higher per- centage of men than women reported any ipv victimization (physical, sexual or emotional): . % ver- sus . % (table ). men were more likely than women to report physical and emotional ipv, while women were more likely to re- port sexual ipv. based on statistics canada guidelines, the sample size for men who reported sexual ipv was too small for the estimate to be published; therefore, the combined percentage reporting physical/sexual ipv is presented. table percentage experiencing intimate partner violence (ipv) in adulthood and childhood maltreatment (cm), by sex, household population aged or older, currently living with a spouse/partner or who had contact with an ex-spouse/partner during last years, canada, (continued) men women sample size weighted percent % ci sample size weighted percent % ci csa yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing csa severity and frequency severe and frequent (≥ times) csa . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) severe csa (≤ times) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) sexual touching (excluding severe csa) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no csa . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) missing childhood exposure to ipv yes . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no . ( . , . ) , . ( . , . ) missing frequency of childhood exposure to ipv more than times . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) three to times . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) never, once or twice . ( . , . ) , . ( . , . ) missing co-occurrence of cm no cm . ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) cpa only (no csa/childhood exposure to ipv) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) csa only (no cpa/childhood exposure to ipv) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) childhood exposure to ipv only (no cpa/csa) . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) two or types of cm . ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) missing source: statistics canada: general social survey: victimization cpa: childhood physical abuse; csa: childhood sexual abuse a cpa, csa or childhood exposure to ipv * significantly different from men (p < . ) f too unreliable to be published shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of the percentages of men and women reporting both emotional ipv and physical/sexual ipv were similar ( . and . %, respectively). reporting physical/sexual ipv with no emotional ipv was rare for both sexes ( . and . %, respectively). among the population who reported physical/sexual ipv, it was very common to also report emotional ipv; . % among men and . % among women (data not shown). estimates of cm men were slightly more likely than women to report any cm: . % versus . %. a higher percentage of men than women reported cpa ( . % versus . %), but women were more likely to report csa ( . % versus . %) and childhood exposure to ipv ( . % versus . %). similarly, men were more likely than women to report severe/frequent cpa, while women were more likely to report severe/frequent csa and frequent childhood ex- posure to ipv. a higher percentage of women than men reported co-occurrence of two or more forms of cm ( . % versus . %). associations between cm and ipv for both sexes, those who had experienced any cm were more likely to report being victimized by ipv in adult- hood (table ). among men reporting any cm, . % reported ipv in adulthood, compared with . % of those who did not experience cm; among women, the corresponding figures were . and . %. men and women who had experienced each type of cm (cpa, csa and childhood exposure to ipv) had higher rates of ipv than did those who had not. the associations between the three individual types of cm and ipv in adulthood persisted when potential socio-demographic confounders were taken into ac- count. for both sexes, the adjusted odds ratios for reporting ipv were significant for each type of cm. when we simultaneously controlled for the co- occurrence of cm, all three types remained statistically significant for both sexes, demonstrating that each type is independently associated with ipv in adulthood. associations between severity of cm and ipv when severity/frequency of cm was considered, a dose- response relationship between cpa and ipv in adult- hood emerged for both sexes—as the frequency/severity of cpa increased, so did the likelihood of reporting ipv (table ). the highest ipv rates were among those who had experienced severe/frequent cpa ( . % for men and . % for women), substantially exceeding the rates among those who had not experienced any cpa ( . % for men and . % for women). among women, a dose-response relationship emerged between severity/frequency of csa and ipv. by contrast, among men, there were no statistically significant differ- ences by severity/frequency of csa. also, for women, a dose-response relationship was ob- served between the frequency of childhood exposure to ipv and ipv in adulthood; this was not the case for men. women who had experienced two or more types of cm had a higher likelihood of reporting ipv in adult- hood than did those who had experienced only one of the three types. however, among men, having experi- enced multiple types of cm was not associated with a higher rate of ipv; rates were similar among those who had experienced two or more types of cm and those who had experienced one type. the bivariate associations between the severity/fre- quency cm variables and being victimized by ipv in adulthood persisted when controlling for potential socio-demographic confounders. sex differences in associations between cm and ipv to examine sex differences, we combined the sexes, and using logistic regression, we tested for interactions be- tween sex and cm in relation to reporting ipv in adult- hood, while controlling for potential socio-demographic confounders. a significant sex interaction was observed for cpa—the association between cpa and ipv in adulthood was stronger for women than for men. women who reported cpa were . times more likely to experience ipv in adulthood than were those who did not report cpa ( . / . ) (table ). for men, the dis- parity was smaller, with those reporting cpa being . times more likely to experience ipv in adulthood than were those who did not report cpa ( . / . ). significant sex interactions were also observed for cpa severity. compared with men who reported no cpa, experiencing ipv in adulthood was . times higher ( . / . ) for those reporting severe and fre- quent cpa, . times higher ( . / . ) for severe cpa, and . times higher ( . / . ) for cpa, excluding se- vere cpa (table ). associations were stronger for women—compared with those reporting no cpa, ex- periencing ipv in adulthood was . higher for severe and frequent cpa, . for severe cpa, and . for cpa, excluding severe cpa. similarly, men who reported at least two types of cm were . times more likely to experience ipv in adult- hood than those who reported no cm. for women, the gradient was steeper, with those reporting at least two types of cm being . times more likely to experience ipv in adulthood. discussion this study, based on a large, representative sample of the canadian population in , found that cm is shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of associated with ipv in adulthood. for both sexes, cpa, csa and childhood exposure to ipv were independently associated with subsequent ipv. associations between cpa and ipv were stronger for women than for men. among women, a dose-response relationship emerged between each of the three types of cm and ipv in table prevalence of and adjusted odds ratios for experiencing any intimate partner violence (ipv) in adulthood, by sex and childhood maltreatment (cm), household population aged or older, currently living with a spouse/partner or who had contact with an ex-spouse/partner during last years, canada, any ipv in adulthood % % ci odds % ci men any cma yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … cpa yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … csa yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … childhood exposure to ipv yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … simultaneously controlling for other cm types cpa (reference no cpa) . * ( . , . ) csa (reference no csa) . * ( . , . ) childhood exposure to ipv (reference no childhood exposure to ipv) . * ( . , . ) women any cma yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … cpa yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … csa yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … childhood exposure to ipv yes . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) no (reference) . ( . , . ) . … simultaneously controlling for other cm types cpa (reference no cpa) . * ( . , . ) csa (reference no csa) . * ( . , . ) childhood exposure to ipv (reference no childhood exposure to ipv) . * ( . , . ) source: statistics canada: general social survey: victimization cpa: childhood physical abuse; csa: childhood sexual abuse a cpa, csa or childhood exposure to ipv * significantly different from reference (p < . ) note: odds are adjusted by age group, canadian-born, indigenous status, marital status, household income, highest level of education of respondent, and highest level of education of respondent’s father and mother … not applicable shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of t a b le pr ev al en ce o f an d ad ju st ed o d d s ra ti o s fo r ex p er ie n ci n g an y in ti m at e p ar tn er vi o le n ce (ip v) in ad u lt h o o d ,b y se x an d co -o cc u rr en ce o f ch ild h o o d m al tr ea tm en t (c m ) an d c m se ve rit y, h o u se h o ld p o p u la ti o n ag ed o r o ld er ,c u rr en tl y liv in g w it h a sp o u se /p ar tn er o r w h o h ad co n ta ct w it h an ex -s p o u se /p ar tn er d u rin g la st ye ar s, c an ad a, a n y ip v in ad u lt h o o d % % c i o d d s % c i m en c p a se ve ri ty an d fr eq u en cy se ve re an d fr eq u en t c pa (> ti m es ) . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) se ve re c pa (≤ ti m es ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c pa (e xc lu d in g se ve re c pa ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n o c pa (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … c sa se ve ri ty an d fr eq u en cy se ve re an d fr eq u en t (≥ ti m es ) c sa . * ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) se ve re c sa (≤ ti m es ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . ( . , . ) se xu al to u ch in g (e xc lu d in g se ve re c sa ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n o c sa (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … fr eq u en cy o f ch ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v m o re th an ti m es . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) th re e to ti m es (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n ev er ,o n ce o r tw ic e (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … c o -o cc u rr en ce o f c m n o c m (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … c pa o n ly (n o c sa /c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c sa o n ly (n o c pa /c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v (n o c pa /c sa - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) tw o o r ty p es o f ch ild h o o d m al tr ea tm en t . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) w o m en c p a se ve ri ty an d fr eq u en cy se ve re an d fr eq u en t c pa (> ti m es ) . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) se ve re c pa (≤ ti m es ) (r ef er en ce ) . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c pa (e xc lu d in g se ve re c pa ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n o c pa (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of t a b le pr ev al en ce o f an d ad ju st ed o d d s ra ti o s fo r ex p er ie n ci n g an y in ti m at e p ar tn er vi o le n ce (ip v) in ad u lt h o o d ,b y se x an d co -o cc u rr en ce o f ch ild h o o d m al tr ea tm en t (c m ) an d c m se ve rit y, h o u se h o ld p o p u la ti o n ag ed o r o ld er ,c u rr en tl y liv in g w it h a sp o u se /p ar tn er o r w h o h ad co n ta ct w it h an ex -s p o u se /p ar tn er d u rin g la st ye ar s, c an ad a, (c o n tin u ed ) a n y ip v in ad u lt h o o d % % c i o d d s % c i c sa se ve ri ty an d fr eq u en cy se ve re an d fr eq u en t (≥ ti m es ) c sa . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) se ve re c sa (≤ ti m es ) (r ef er en ce ) . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) se xu al to u ch in g (e xc lu d in g se ve re c sa ) (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n o c sa (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … fr eq u en cy o f ch ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v m o re th an ti m es . *a ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) th re e to ti m es (r ef er en ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) n ev er ,o n ce o r tw ic e (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … c o -o cc u rr en ce o f c m n o c m (r ef er en ce ) . ( . , . ) . … c pa o n ly (n o c sa /c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c sa o n ly (n o c pa /c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) c h ild h o o d ex p o su re to ip v (n o c pa /c sa - re fe re n ce ) . * ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) tw o o r ty p es o f ch ild h o o d m al tr ea tm en t . *a b c ( . , . ) . * ( . , . ) so u rc e: st at is ti cs c an ad a: g en er al so ci al su rv ey :v ic ti m iz at io n c p a :c h ild h o o d p h ys ic al ab u se ;c sa :c h ild h o o d se xu al ab u se * si g n if ic an tl y d if fe re n t fr o m re fe re n ce (p < . ) a si g n if ic an tl y d if fe re n t fr o m re fe re n ce (p < . ) b si g n if ic an tl y d if fe re n t fr o m re fe re n ce (p < . ) c si g n if ic an tl y d if fe re n t fr o m re fe re n ce (p < . ) n o te : o d d s ar e ad ju st ed b y ag e g ro u p ,c an ad ia n -b o rn , in d ig en o u s st at u s, m ar it al st at u s, h o u se h o ld in co m e, h ig h es t le ve l o f ed u ca ti o n o f re sp o n d en t, an d h ig h es t le ve l o f ed u ca ti o n o f re sp o n d en t’ s fa th er an d m o th er … n o t ap p lic ab le shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of adulthood—increases in the severity and frequency of the cm were associated with increases in the likelihood of reporting ipv; among men, a dose-response relation- ship was observed only for cpa. for women, but not men, having experienced two or more types of cm was more strongly associated with ipv than was experien- cing one type. consistent with results of a study based on data from a canadian survey [ ], the present analysis found that women were more likely than men to report csa and childhood exposure to ipv, while men were more likely than women to report cpa. the present study found that men were slightly more likely than women to report ipv in adulthood. other studies have also found that women are equally, or somewhat less likely, than men to report ipv, particu- larly when ipv is broadly defined to include any type of hitting and/or emotional ipv [ , ]. however, it is im- portant to note that women are at increased likelihood of experiencing severe/frequent ipv, as well as serious consequences, such as psychological harm, physical in- juries and mortality [ – ]. many other studies have found that ipv in adulthood is more common among people who have experienced csa [ – ] and cpa [ – , , , – ]. fewer studies have examined ipv in relation to other types of cm, but associations have been found for childhood exposure to ipv [ , , – , – ], neglect [ , , , , , ], and childhood emotional abuse [ , , , , ]. none- theless, results have been inconsistent, with some studies finding a null association between specific types of cm and ipv [ – , – , , , , , – ]. this likely reflects differences in the definitions of cm and ipv, the reference periods for cm and ipv, the control variables in the analyses (including simultaneously controlling for multiple types of cm), the study population, and the sample size. cm severity in relation to ipv in adulthood has been studied less frequently. it has been suggested that expos- ure to cm, regardless of severity, increases the risk of subsequent abuse [ ]. two meta-analyses of associa- tions between cm and ipv published in (one based solely on men and one on both sexes) [ , ] reported weak but statistically significant associations. failure to account for severity of the cm may have masked the full nature of the association. according to our analysis, se- verity was an important factor, especially for women. much of the research examining associations be- tween cm and ipv has been based solely on samples of women; sex differences have rarely been examined. it has been suggested that the lack of studies on male ipv victimization reflects the more serious conse- quences experienced by females victimized by ipv [ ]. similar to our results for women, other studies revealed a dose-response relationship between the number of types of cm and ipv in adulthood [ , , , , – , , ]. we found that associations be- tween cpa and ipv were stronger among women, but the association was also significant among men. additional work is needed using mixed gender sam- ples in which multiple types of cm and ipv are con- sidered. most studies based on men have focused solely on ipv perpetration [ ]. however, studies in- cluding males victimized by ipv are important to in- form both the general population and health care professionals of the importance of recognizing that men also experience victimization and for the devel- opment of interventions aimed at reducing male ipv victimization [ ]. the most common framework for interpreting ipv risk factors is the ecological model [ , ]. this model ex- tends beyond individual characteristics to encompass family, community, and societal factors. it recognizes that individuals evolve within a set of nested environ- mental structures and attempts to identify mechanisms that contribute to vulnerability to repeated abuse. exo- system and macro-system variables, such as a scarcity of resources, lack of social support, and cultural tendencies to blame the victim, may increase the likelihood that people who experienced cm will be exposed to ipv in adulthood, independent of their individual characteris- tics. for example, lack of access to affordable housing and well-paying jobs may increase the likelihood that in- dividuals with histories of cm will enter and maintain intimate relationships with people who are violent to- ward them. cm is associated with numerous negative long-term economic outcomes including unemployment, low income, homelessness, and lack of job skills [ ]. this is further exacerbated by experiences of adult ipv victimization which have been shown to inhibit job sta- bility [ ]. another ecological consideration is that the abusive and violent behaviours towards children and partners may not be condemned universally. if people grow up and continue to live in a social milieu where violence is sometimes regarded as acceptable, exposure to frequent and severe violence in childhood may be a marker for exposure to violence in adulthood. this is consistent with the social learning theory model which contends that cm may serve as a model for future interpersonal relationships [ ]. children who experience abuse or have a caregiver who is abused may perceive violence as a normal part of a relationship. initiatives such as the #metoo movement (https://metoomvmt.org/about/) may have a role in decreasing ipv. the movement may reduce the likelihood of accepting abuse of any kind in intimate relationships, regardless of past experiences of violence. research based on canadian administrative shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of https://metoomvmt.org/about/ data found an increase in reporting sexual assaults to the police after the emergence of #metoo, particularly cases involving a known perpetrator [ ]. the ecological model also incorporates the idea that the family environment in which the cm initially oc- curred may be associated with future abuse. a system- atic review of risk and protective factors for revictimization after csa found that the perception of parental care acted as a buffer, reducing the risk of revic- timization [ ]. a study [ ] found that positive childhood expe- riences reduced the risk of poor mental health in adult- hood, independent of childhood abuse and neglect and household dysfunction (such as parental substance abuse). the measures of positive childhood experiences included items such as participation in community tradi- tions, a sense of belonging in high school, and social support from friends. these findings demonstrate the utility of the ecological model when investigating associ- ations between cm and other negative outcomes in adulthood such as ipv. strengths and limitations this study has notable strengths: it is based on a large, representative sample of the canadian population; mul- tiple behaviour-specific items were used to measure cm and ipv; and these measures have been shown to have greater validity and reliability than broad, subjectively defined items [ , , – ]. as a result, it was possible to examine cm severity in relation to ipv in adulthood and to test for sex differences in associations. however, the analysis has limitations that should be considered when interpreting the findings: � all information was based on retrospective self- reports. recall bias may have influenced the ob- served associations between cm and ipv. people who experienced violence in adulthood may more readily recall cm, which could have inflated associa- tions. on the other hand, those who experienced cm may be less likely to report ipv in adulthood because of habituation to violence in general; this would weaken associations. � individuals who experienced cm and/or ipv may have been reluctant to disclose these experiences in a survey. � the items used to measure ipv in adulthood were asked only of respondents with a current spouse or common-law partner and/or those who had contact with an ex-spouse/common-law partner in the past years. ipv that occurred in dating relationships was excluded. evidence suggests that the association between cm and ipv is stronger for dating couples than for married ones [ ]. � the gss questionnaire did not include measures of childhood emotional abuse and neglect, which have been shown to be associated with ipv [ , , , , , ]. � in the regression models, it was not possible to control for some potentially important confounders (such as overall family dysfunction) due to unavailability in the gss. it has been hypothesized that family dysfunction may be more strongly related to negative outcomes than is cm, but some research indicates that each is independently related to dysfunction in adulthood [ ]. socioeconomic status during childhood was partially controlled by inclusion of highest level of education of the father and mother in the regression analyses; family income data would have offered a more complete control for childhood socioeconomic status. � the coverage of the gss excludes people who are homeless and those living in institutions—populations for which experiences of cm and ipv are more prevalent. � the extent to which the low gss response rate ( . % for the provinces; . % for the territories) affects associations between cm and ipv is unknown. an analysis of data from statistics canada’s canadian community health survey (an ongoing annual health survey) reported steady declines in response rates over time. the characteristics of respondents and non-respondents differed in ways that cannot be fully corrected via weighting [ ]. furthermore, vulnerable populations (for instance, lower socioeconomic status and poor health) [ , ] are the least likely to respond to surveys. � previous studies have found that cm is associated with ipv perpetration, particularly among men [ , , , , ], and reciprocal ipv [ , , ]. however, the gss did not include questions on ipv perpetration so it was not possible to examine cm in relation to ipv perpetration. � it is possible that there are subpopulations for which the associations between cm and ipv in adulthood are stronger such as indigenous peoples [ ]. the child’s relationship to the perpetrator may also be an important factor [ ]; children who experience abuse from a parent or caregiver may be at a heighted risk of experiencing ipv compared with those whose relationship to the abuser was more distant. we did not have adequate sample to examine interactions with these variables. future research should examine other types of cm such as neglect and emotional maltreatment in relation to ipv in adulthood. a survey with a larger sample size shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of would be instrumental in identifying subpopulations with elevated associations between cm and ipv who are particularly in need of early interventions. more research on the effectiveness of community-based interventions such as fostering a sense of belonging to school and community traditions is warranted [ ]. conclusion numerous studies have found that both cm and ipv are associated with an increased risk of a wide range of physical and mental health conditions [ – ]. the negative outcomes of physical ipv are immediate and apparent, including injury, physical disability, and in se- vere cases, mortality [ ]. however, emotional ipv also has serious ramifications; emotional ipv is strongly re- lated to numerous adverse conditions, including chronic disease and poor mental health [ ]. the association be- tween cm and ipv in adulthood merits attention be- cause of cumulative effects—lifespan studies have shown that individuals who experience numerous incidents of abuse exhibit the highest levels of impairment [ , ]. costs to the health care system and the burden to indi- viduals experiencing multiple incidents of abuse under- score the importance of intervention programs to eradicate cm and ipv. interventions aimed at promot- ing healthy relationships and providing emotional sup- port and coping mechanisms to children and families in abusive situations are key components to ending the cycle of violence and preventing ipv in adulthood [ ]. abbreviations ci: confidence interval; cpa: childhood physical abuse; csa: childhood sexual abuse; gss: general social survey; ipv: intimate partner violence acknowledgements not applicable. authors’ contributions ms, lt, wh, ag and hm conceived and designed the study. ms analyzed the data. ms and lt drafted the manuscript. wh, ag, and hm commented on and critically revised the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding no funding was received to conduct this research. hm is supported by the chedoke health chair in child psychiatry. availability of data and materials the data are available for analysis from statistics canada. ms conducted the analyses as an employee of statistics canada, under a contact between the public health agency of canada and statistics canada. ethics approval and consent to participate data for the gss were collected by statistics canada under the provisions of the statistics act. before starting the survey, gss respondents were informed that the information they provided would be used for statistical purposes, that their answers would be kept strictly confidential, and their participation in the survey was voluntary. this article is based on data from an existing file and thus the project did not undergo ethics review. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare they have no competing interests. author details public health agency of canada, carling ave. th floor, ottawa, on k a k , canada. department of psychiatry & behavioural neurosciences, mcmaster university, main street west - mip a, hamilton, on l s k , canada. department of psychiatry & behavioural neurosciences, and of pediatrics, mcmaster university, main street west - mip a, hamilton, on l s k , canada. received: may accepted: october references . world health organization. responding to intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women: who clinical and policy guidelines. geneva: world health organization; 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an evaluation of the conceptualization, operationalization, and methodological approaches in the study of the phenomenon of cumulative abuse. trauma violence abuse. ; ( ): – . . kimerling r, alvarez j, pavao j, kaminski a, baumrind n. epidemiology and consequences of women's revictimization. womens health issues. ; ( ): – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. shields et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	methods 	data source 	measures 	child maltreatment 	intimate partner violence in adulthood 	covariates 	analysis 	results 	estimates of ipv 	estimates of cm 	associations between cm and ipv 	associations between severity of cm and ipv 	sex differences in associations between cm and ipv 	discussion 	strengths and limitations 	conclusion 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access how, why, for whom and in what context, do sexual health clinics provide an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence: protocol for a realist review rachel j caswell , ian maidment , jonathan d c ross, c bradbury- jones to cite: caswell rj, maidment i, ross jdc, et al. how, why, for whom and in what context, do sexual health clinics provide an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence: protocol for a realist review. bmj open ; :e . doi: . / bmjopen- - ► prepublication history and additional material for this paper are available online. to view these files, please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bmjopen- - ). received february revised may accepted may department of sexual health and hiv medicine, university hospitals birmingham nhs foundation trust, birmingham, uk school of life and health sciences, aston university, birmingham, uk school of nursing, university of birmingham, birmingham, uk correspondence to dr rachel j caswell; rachelcaswell@ nhs. net protocol © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re- use permitted under cc by- nc. no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. strengths and limitations of this study ► proposes the use of realist approach to explore contextual factors and underpinning casual mech- anisms for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence in a healthcare setting. ► will integrate a wide range of evidence to consid- er what works, how and for whom when disclosing sexual violence in sexual health services. ► will integrate secondary data, from a wide range of sources of literature including academic and grey literature, and primary data in the form of key infor- mant interviews. ► will be guided by an advisory group where the pro- gramme theories will be developed and refined. ► the findings of the realist review will not be general- isable, although may be transferable, and therefore application of the findings to other settings should be considered carefully. abstract introduction supporting people subjected to sexual violence includes provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare. there is a need to ensure an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence in these clinical settings. the purpose of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of how, why, for whom and in what circumstances safe and supported disclosure occurs in sexual health services. methods and analysis to understand how safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence works within sexual health services a realist review will be undertaken with the following steps: ( ) focussing of the review including a scoping literature search and guidance from an advisory group. ( ) developing the initial programme theories and a search strategy using context- mechanism- outcome (cmo) configurations. ( ) selection, data extraction and appraisal based on relevance and rigour. ( ) data analysis and synthesis to further develop and refine programme theory, cmo configurations with consideration of middle- range and substantive theories. data analysis a realist logic of analysis will be used to align data from each phase of the review, with cmo configurations being developed. programme theories will be sought from the review that can be further tested in the field. ethics and dissemination this study has been approved by the ethics committee at university of birmingham, and has health research authority approval. findings will be disseminated through knowledge exchange with stakeholders, publications in peer- reviewed journals, conference presentations and formal and informal reports. in addition, as part of a doctoral study, the findings will be tested in multisite case studies. prospero registration details crd . dates of the planned realist review, from protocol design to completion, january to july . introduction what are the sexual and reproductive health consequences of sexual violence? the association between sexual violence and poor sexual and reproductive health of individuals is known; links with unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (stis), hiv/aids, hepatitis b, recurrent urinary tract infection, pelvic pain and pelvic inflammatory disease as well as genital injury and trauma are reported. – for example, a large prospective uk- based cohort study of adolescents treated after sexual assault, found the pregnancy rate at months was high ( %) relative to population estimates for young women ( % in girls aged to years and < % in those younger than years) and the sti rate was higher than expected ( %, compared with population estimates for new stis at %). however, the relationship between sexual violence and sexual and reproductive health consequences is not straightforward. for example, where higher rates of stis are reported it is not clear whether they are directly related to the assault or more indi- rectly associated. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjopen- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access a canadian team demonstrated an association between sexual assault as an adult and acquisition of a sti in the past year, however the survey of more than partic- ipants was unable to tell whether the sti occurred as a consequence of the assault or whether the association was indirect, for example, the trauma of sexual assault has increased subsequent sexual risk taking, or whether sti acquisition was increased in this group independent of the sexual assault. the authors of this current review based in the uk, argue, irrespective of the reasons as to why poor sexual outcomes are higher in this group, a healthcare response is warranted. indeed, sexual and reproductive health problems are the most frequently reported physical health concerns in those subjected to sexual violence. sexual healthcare services it follows that services beneficial for those subjected to sexual violence will include pregnancy testing, pregnancy prevention (ie, emergency contraception), abortion services, sti testing and/or prophylaxis, treatment of injuries and psychosocial counselling. one online survey from the usa of women identified prevention of medical and physical consequences as the main reasons to disclose sexual assault. however, it is well recognised that many do not access this healthcare. in an us study looking at post- rape medical care of women, only ( % of victims) received medical attention. the majority of those who did seek medical attention were concerned with sti acquisition and pregnancy. an earlier study reported similar findings with just over a quarter of women who had experienced rape as an adult receiving medical care. here also they found the post- rape concerns of stis, specifically hiv/aids acquisition, were identified on receipt of medical care. in the uk, sexual healthcare is delivered by primary care, third sector and community- based organisations as well as through integrated sexual health services. the latter, and where this review focusses, are expected to offer a full range of sti and blood borne virus testing, treatment and management and a full range of contracep- tive provision, along with health promotion and preven- tion activity. local data collection at one of the largest integrated sexual health services in europe, covering a population of . million, found that one adult per day attended to seek help after sexual violence (umbrella sexual health service, birmingham, uk; internal report ). a national service specification for integrated sexual health services recommends that all patients should be screened for sexual violence. additional guid- ance on sexual violence screening comes from bashh (british association of sexual health and hiv), the nhs (national health service) and healthcare improvement scotland. – the guidelines and standards set out the expectations for sexual health service provision for those seeking care after sexual violence. individuals have further needs in addition to imme- diate sexual healthcare, and the sexual health sector can act as an important referral point for other services, for example, for forensic medical examination, social welfare support, community mental health support and legal aid. all individuals should be provided with access to the crim- inal justice system and there will be those in whom timely referral to forensic services is warranted. an important referral pathway, particularly for those who wish (or are unsure) to report to police, is for a sexual assault forensic examination. in the uk, sexual assault referral centres offer a range of services including forensic examinations that allows evidence to be stored and reporting to be considered at a later date. a systematic review identified key themes regarded by patients as priorities for delivering a high- quality service after sexual violence as being patient focussed, trauma informed and empowering. underpinning this is the need for healthcare professionals to convey their belief in the patients’ experience. – what are the issues around disclosure of sexual violence? the process of disclosure itself is not proven to be helpful in reducing mental health sequelae after sexual violence; the lack of significant differences in poor mental health sequelae between the disclosure and non- disclosure groups in the study by carretta et al suggests that rape trauma is present irrespective of disclosure; but it may be that disclosure opens a gateway to further services and support. while changes in societal norms have led to an increase in disclosing sexual violence, most of it remains hidden. – the latest crime survey for england and wales shows that around five in six victims ( %) did not report their experiences to the police with annual figures for non- reported episodes around . many do not disclose because of stigma, victim- blaming, secrecy and self- silencing and self- blame. despite recognising that sexual health services are selected by individuals as a place to disclose sexual violence and get help, it is not known what aspects of the sexual health service create a conducive environment for safe disclosure of sexual violence. with a wide range of people accessing this setting, for example, in respect of age, gender and ethnicity (the realist ‘context’), the service may need to adapt its environment and how it works (the realist ‘mechanism)’ if it is to meet the specific needs around safe disclosure (the realist ‘outcome’). an example of the contextual diversity in relation to accessing appropriate sexual healthcare is demonstrated by du mont et al were they found women who were sexu- ally assaulted by a current or former partner were less likely than those assaulted by another known assailant or stranger to have been administered emergency contra- ception (p< . ) or prophylaxis for sexually transmitted infections (p< . ), or counselled for the potential use of hiv post- exposure prophylaxis (p< . ). this review will employ a realist approach to under- stand how, why, for whom and in what context, sexual health clinics provide an environment, for safe and o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access box a context- mechanism- outcome configuration related to sexual health clinics providing an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence if healthcare professionals are trained in trauma- informed care (‘con- text’) they will recognise the importance of, and offer, patient choice (‘re- source of mechanism’), so that patients feel empowered (‘response of mechanism’) and become more likely to make a disclosure (‘outcome’). supported disclosure of sexual violence. the authors are also aware that disclosure can have harmful psycholog- ical consequences, particularly when individuals are faced with negative responses. studies have reported an associ- ation between negative disclosure experiences and higher risk of onset of mental disorder, such as post- traumatic stress disorder. if reactions to disclosure are critical in the recovery process, it is important to consider what is meant by negative responses, and to consider how we create the space for ‘safe’ disclosures in health settings. aims and objectives the objectives are to: . understand how and why any potentially relevant at- tributes of sexual health services optimise safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence for particular groups of adults in certain contexts. . synthesise the findings from objective into initial programme theories that can be tested in future case studies. context of the review the review is part of a larger project and forms the basis of doctoral work for rjc. the programme theories gener- ated during the review process will be tested and refined during later stages of the phd using a variety of research methods as part of a realist evaluation. the overall inten- tion is to build a framework for sexual health services to use in order to maximise safe and supported disclosure for those who have experienced sexual violence. methods and analysis methodology a realist approach is fitting for this complex area of health- care and will allow for a deeper understanding of how safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence works within sexual health services. whereas traditional research modalities emphasise the usual cause- and- effect of a posi- tivist paradigm, the realist approach goes beyond asking if the intervention works, or comparing one intervention to another, and instead sets out to understand why an inter- vention works, for whom it works and in what circum- stances it works. the realist approach will consider the way different contexts produce differing responses to the intervention. the intervention in this case is sexual health service delivery and the desired outcome is safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence, although unintended outcomes will be examined. the authors are aware that harmful or unhelpful outcomes can occur in relation to disclosure and these will be reported where identified. pawson and tilley ( ) developed the following formula as a way to represent how interventions work: context (c) + mechanism (m) = outcome (o) (cmo). the cmo is considered a heuristic; a method proposed to unravel the assumptions surrounding the theory (in realist terms and programme theory) of how the intervention works given contextual influences and underlying mechanisms of action. mechanisms, in realist terms, are underlying causal processes. pawson and tilley construct programme mech- anisms as comprising both ‘reasoning and resources’. here, mechanisms seek to explain how and why people respond (also referred to as ‘reasoning’) to resources offered by sexual health services to produce the outcome of safe and supported disclosure. mechanisms are not components of the sexual health service but are better conceptualised as responses that individuals have to resources within that service such as trust, engagement, motivation and confidence in response to an aspect of the service. the review will search for the real, underlying and probably invisible causes of how safe and supported disclosure is realised. box provides an example of a cmo, depicting the resource and response of the realist mechanism. the ‘c’ of cmo, contexts, are considered factors that make the mechanisms more or less likely to be triggered. in this review, the potential key contexts include partic- ipants’ sexual identities, gender, immigration status, ethnicity and age, as well as aspects of the service such as healthcare professional attitudes and beliefs, as each is likely to influence an individual’s response to engage- ment with sexual health services. as put during a critique of realist research, ‘context matters – a lot’. applied realism aims to move beyond identifying which context enables a mechanism to be triggered, and instead to ‘explain(s) why the explanations are different in different contexts or for different subgroups.’ westhorp encour- ages a deeper understanding of the way contexts work when facilitating the triggering of mechanisms. she argues there is an additional mechanism at work within the context itself, allowing the programme mechanism to fire (or constrain its firing). as summarised by jagosh ‘the advantage of the theory- driven approach (used in the realist review) is in addressing aspects of causation as this provides explan- atory power about why a programme worked or failed given the resources offered through an intervention and the response to those resources’. during this review, programme theories will be developed and underlying causal mechanisms identified as to how and why certain attributes of sexual health services optimise safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence. while the findings from this realist review may not be generalisable as interventions work differently in different o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access contexts and through different mechanisms, the theory- based understandings about the influences of contexts on mechanism and outcomes will be transferable to different contexts. patient and public involvement involvement in the review will take two main forms. first, participation in the advisory group involves patient advo- cates and other public stakeholders. this group advises on patient priorities and patient preferences on how best to support disclosure of sexual violence in healthcare settings. second, patients will be recruited for informant interviews and will steer the project as they support or refute theory development and ensure the relevance and importance of findings. current stage of the review work despite the iterative nature of realist reviews, it is possible to produce a protocol that reflects the planned review’s intentions, the methods to be employed, the direction of work to date and the initial findings that form a guide for the next steps of the review. a reflective account will be maintained so that the sources of programme theories developed are transparent and the programme theories can be tracked back to sources. an advisory group was created at the outset of the project, that includes the researcher, rjc, two academics (with interests in researching the area of sexual violence and abuse, vulnerable groups and critical realism), a healthcare professional working in a london- based sexual health service with a special interest in sexual violence, a manager and an advocate from in a third sector agency supporting adults and children of all ages and genders after sexual violence, and a patient advocate working in lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) sector. engagement with the advisory group is ongoing as initial ideas and programme theories are discussed and refined drawing from their experience and expertise. three initial cmo configurations were agreed from the findings of an initial literature scoping exercise, a discus- sion with the advisory group and a meeting with doctoral supervisors. planned review strategy the review protocol was registered on the prospero database. the following proposed steps conform to the rameses (realist and meta- narrative syntheses: evolving standards) standards of realist review: . focussing of the review. . developing the initial programme theories and a search strategy using cmo configurations. . selection, data extraction and appraisal based on rele- vance and rigour. . data analysis and synthesis to further develop pro- gramme theory, context, intervention and mechanism configurations with consideration of middle- range and substantive theories. focussing of the review the focussing of the review is to develop initial realist programme theories that hypothesise whether or not, how and why, sexual health clinics provide an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence. it will theorise contextual influences and the underlying mech- anisms of action that support this disclosure outcome. the underlying causal mechanisms will be considered from different viewpoints, with input from multiple stake- holders including service users, healthcare professionals and other support staff. an initial scoping exercise was undertaken by rjc using database searches (see online supplementary file for broad search terms). all titles were reviewed by rjc. during this exercise the reviewer sought to capture broad and recurring themes about disclosure of sexual violence in order to theorise potential cmo configura- tions. sixty- three articles, more relevant to the topic area, were reviewed in more depth as they provided potential key realist contexts and mechanisms. examples of possible mechanisms identified during the scoping exercise included responses to the applica- tion of trauma- informed care. trauma- informed care brings about a different approach to service users, for example, an awareness of the need for psychological safety during the consultation and when offering phys- ical examinations, with patient choice being central in the health consultation – possible responses from indi- viduals receiving this form of care are feelings of being understood and of feeling empowered. wider contextual issues were also noted in the literature including stigma, victim- blaming and fear in relation to disclosure of sexual violence. – additionally there were challenges faced by particular patient groups in accessing care beyond that of the fear and stigma itself. for example, men, older age groups, those with pre- existing mental health complaints and sexual violence occurring within intimate partner relationships were identified in the scoping exercise as groups experiencing additional barriers when consid- ering disclosure of sexual violence. – each of these may be important contexts during programme theory development. developing the initial programme theories and search strategy using cmo configurations findings from the scoping exercise were discussed with the advisory group. themes were prioritised with what were felt to be important contexts and potential mecha- nisms for addressing the review question; what are the key underpinning mechanisms, in differing contexts, leading to safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence? the initial programme theories (ipts) resulting from the scoping review and advisory group meeting are expressed initially using the cmo configuration (see box ). the advisory group also discussed the desired outcome and the importance of recognising that disclosure is not always beneficial for individuals, particularly if healthcare o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access box cmo frameworks level of individual: service users’ backgrounds (eg, differences in age/ gender/sexuality/disability/ethnicity) (context) create differing respons- es to aspects of the sexual health service, which in turn contribute or constrain a response (mechanism), thereby modifying the disclosure (outcome). service level: those subjected to sexual violence, attending a sex- ual health service where a trauma informed approach is promoted within the service (context), will identify the service as responsive to their needs (mechanisms) resulting in safe and supported disclosure (outcome). service and community level: sexual health services cognisant of social influences (eg, stigma/victim- blaming/cultural norms) and social move- ments (eg, #metoo) (context) and that create environments sensitive to these social factors, either to counteract or to promote these wider social factors (mechanism) will result in safe and supported disclosure of those attending (outcome). ta b le s e a rc h c ri te ri a in c lu si o n c o n te xt a d u lt s (a g e d y e a rs a n d o ve r) ; su b je c te d t o s e xu a l v io le n c e a n d a b u se ; so c ia l c o n te xt s th a t m a y im p a c t in te rv e n ti o n s o r se rv ic e p ro vi si o n ( e g , st ig m a /v ic ti m - b la m in g /c u lt u ra l n o rm s) a n d m o ve m e n ts ( e g , # m e to o ). s e tt in g s to in c lu d e s e xu a l a n d r e p ro d u c ti ve h e a lt h c a re s e tt in g s. m e c h a n is m (r e so u rc e a n d r e sp o n se ) d iff e re n t se rv ic e p ro vi si o n s, f o r e xa m p le , tr a u m a in fo rm e d c a re , ro u ti n e e n q u ir y, t ra in in g a n d e d u c a ti o n , u se o f te c h n o lo g y in t h is s e tt in g , so c ia l m e d ia a n d o n lin e p u b lic it y fo r th e s e xu a l h e a lt h s e rv ic e . c re a ti n g r e sp o n si ve s e rv ic e , b u ild in g t ru st , a n d s o o n . o u tc o m e d is c lo su re , sa fe d is c lo su re , su p p o rt e d d is c lo su re ; u n in te n d e d o u tc o m e : re - t ra u m a ti sa ti o n a n d v ic ti m - b la m in g . e xc lu si o n w e p la n t o e xc lu d e t h e f o llo w in g c o n te xt s (w it h ju st ifi c a ti o n in b ra c ke ts ): s tu d ie s fo c u ss e d o n a d u lt s d is c lo si n g c h ild s e xu a l a b u se , o r in ti m a te p a rt n e r vi o le n c e w h e re s e xu a l v io le n c e is n o t sp e c ifi e d . s tu d ie s p ri o r to n o t in it ia lly in c lu d e d ( ju st ifi c a ti o n : tr a n sf e r o f p u b lic h e a lt h , in c lu d in g se xu a l h e a lt h c o m m is si o n in g in u k t o lo c a l g o ve rn m e n t in , a n d g ro w th o f m o ve m e n ts s u c h a s # m e to o in s o c ia l m e d ia s in c e t h is t im e ). n o n - o e c d ( o r g a n is a ti o n f o r e c o n o m ic c o o p e ra ti o n a n d d e ve lo p m e n t) c o u n tr ie s, a n d n o n - h e a lt h c a r e s e tt in g s (ju st ifi c a ti o n : si g n ifi c a n t c o n te xt u a l d iff e re n c e s) . providers are unaware of the potential harm that can occur during the disclosure process. using these cmo frameworks, an iterative searching scheme with inclusion and exclusion criteria was devised (table ) and are planned for the following databases: amed (allied and complementary medicine), bni (british nursing index), cinahl (cumulative index of nursing and allied health literature), cochrane data- base, embase, hmic (health management information consortium), medline, psycinfo and pubmed. cita- tion tracking will be used in ssci (social sciences cita- tion index) via the web of science, scopus and google scholar, and reference list screening of included studies. this iterative component is integral to the realist review. inclusion and exclusion criteria provide a searching framework but unlike traditional systematic with rigid criteria, a broader range of evidence will be considered if relevant to develop or refine ipts. additional, separate searches may be conducted to identify literature relating to particular mechanisms. around four to six key informant interviews (kii) are planned. individuals, including service users who have experienced sexual violence, healthcare professionals and third sector professionals with relevant expertise, will provide a source of primary data contributing to theory building. in addition kii, will serve as a check of the rele- vance of the theories already proposed. selection, data extraction and appraisal a realist review uses iterative, purposive sampling from a wide range of evidence to develop, refine, confirm and refute theories about how and why an intervention works, for whom and in what circumstance. therefore the searches will include sources from a range of fields so that learning from other settings can be incorporated into the review and contribute to greater understanding of potential contexts and mechanisms. for example, one cmo identified healthcare staff trained in trauma- informed as an important context, with the potential to o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access trigger causal mechanisms. the authors plan to employ searches that include the concept of trauma- informed care beyond that found in sexual health setting. this will include searches from other specialist domains such as from mental health and substance abuse practice and research. a clear audit trail of the source of included pieces of evidence will be maintained. a grey literature search will include relevant policy documents. in addition, forward and backward citation tracking of key papers will be used together with hand searching of relevant journals. any key papers already known to the authors and identified through initial scoping exercises will also be eligible for inclusion, as well as any recommended by members of the advisory group. at this stage the inclusion and exclusion criteria are guided by the focus of the review (see table ), and the articles will be screened by title and abstract by rjc. a % random sample will be checked by cb- j and disagree- ments resolved with jdcr until consensus is achieved. the full texts will then be obtained and screened by rjc with a % sample checked by cb- j and again disagree- ments resolved by jdcr. inclusion and exclusion decisions for full texts will be based on relevance and rigour in keeping with realist review methods as described in the rameses publica- tion standards: realist syntheses: ► relevance - whether it can contribute to theory building and/or testing; and ► rigour - whether the methods used to generate the relevant data are credible and trustworthy. this pragmatic approach judges the quality of the data and its sources by evaluating trustworthiness, plau- sibility and coherence. judgements on each study will be recorded in a data extraction table. furthermore, limitations of studies will be recorded when decisions are being made as to the ‘weight’ of studies in influencing the generation and refinement of the initial programme theories. searching will continue until sufficient data are found (‘theoretical saturation’) so that the initial programme theories are sufficiently coherent and plau- sible. this will involve agreement from the literature findings as well as from key informant interviews and the advisory group. the full texts of all relevant documents will be imported into nvivo (a qualitative data analysis software tool). a core set of descriptors for each study will be recorded (author, title, year, country), type of data (primary evidence and study type, review, opinion piece), patient group, health setting, intervention description and outcomes. data will be coded as context, mechanism or outcome. in addition, data will be recorded as containing evidence for the generation of ipt, for supporting or contradicting the ipt and evidence that provides explan- atory reasoning that contributes to the theory of how the intervention works. analysis and synthesis to further develop programme theory, and context, intervention and mechanism configurations as wong et al states, the basic analytical task in a realist review is to find and align the evidence to demonstrate that particular mechanisms generate particular outcomes and to demonstrate which aspects of context matter. therefore, at this stage, the analysis will work to refine or generate new context- mechanism- outcome configu- rations to explain whether and to what degree, mecha- nisms are activated within a particular context to produce the outcome of safe and supported disclosure. patterns of demi- regularity (semi- predictable patterns) across differing but related contexts and research fields will be considered. during this stage of analysis, the cmo find- ings will be synthesised back into the initial programme theories, and the ipts refined as appropriate. future advisory group meetings are planned to ensure ipts continue to be viewed as important and relevant. the advisory group will help prioritise the explanatory accounts, and if these programme theories are felt to be described in insufficient detail by the literature identified in the initial searches, supplementary targeted searches of the academic and grey literature and additional key informant interviews will be performed. additionally, input from the doctoral supervisors will include verifica- tion of the data and their agreement with the ipts. middle- range theories will be considered; these are the theories that ‘…involve abstraction, …but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in proposi- tions that permit empirical testing.’ the final task will involve drawing on substantive theory to help further identify mechanisms and features of context, and in order to make sense of the pattern of findings. possible rele- vant substantive theories include candidacy theory and social cognitive theory. other theories used in papers identified during the review will be considered, as well as further searching for theories with good explanatory fit by the authors if a gap still exists. ethics and dissemination as key informant interviews are planned ethical approval was sought and obtained (health research authority obtained, rec reference /wm/ iras project id ). informed consent will be obtained for all inter- views. support for both participants and the interviewer is available and safeguards during the interview itself are agreed. rjc will perform all the interviews and is experi- enced in working with those subjected to sexual violence. the review will be published in a peer- reviewed journal and the authors will make the findings available to rele- vant interested bodies including third sector organisa- tions. the findings will be relevant for policy, decision makers and clinicians working in healthcare, particularly sexual health; the findings are also expected to be trans- ferable to other healthcare settings. in addition, the find- ings from the review will be of use to other researchers and academics in the field of violence and abuse, and o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ caswell rj, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access can be used as a basis for further work. finally, the review findings will be used for the next stage of the doctoral project and the theories about why, how and for whom this service works for disclosure of sexual violence will be ‘tested’ within two sexual health services in england. the development of coherent and plausible theoretical expla- nations of how, why and for whom sexual health services provide a safe and supportive environment for disclosure, will be invaluable for service user and professional alike. contributors all authors contributed to the conceptualisation of the review. rjc wrote the first draft. cb- j, jdcr and im critically reviewed it and provided comments to improve the manuscript. all authors have read and approved the final manuscript. funding this work was supported by university hospitals birmingham research and development, as part of a doctoral study by rjc. competing interests jdcr reports personal fees from gsk pharma, hologic diagnostics, mycovia and janssen pharma as well as ownership of shares in gsk pharma and astrazeneca pharma; and is author of the uk and european guidelines on pelvic inflammatory disease; is a member of the european sexually transmitted infections guidelines editorial board; is a member of the national institute for health research funding committee (health technology assessment programme). he is an nihr journals editor and associate editor of sexually transmitted infections journal. he is an officer of international union against sexually transmitted infections (treasurer), and a charity trustee of the sexually transmitted infections research foundation. patient and public involvement patients and/or the public were involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research. refer to the methods section for further details. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by- nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non- commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non- commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . /. orcid ids rachel j caswell http:// orcid. org/ - - - ian maidment http:// orcid. org/ - - - references grose rg, chen js, roof ka, et al. 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http://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - http://www.ramesesproject.org/media/realist_reviews_training_materials.pdf http://www.ramesesproject.org/media/realist_reviews_training_materials.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - x. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /hir. http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ 	how, why, for whom and in what context, do sexual health clinics provide an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence: protocol for a realist review 	abstract 	introduction 	what are the sexual and reproductive health consequences of sexual violence? 	sexual healthcare services 	what are the issues around disclosure of sexual violence? 	aims and objectives 	context of the review 	methods and analysis 	methodology 	patient and public involvement 	current stage of the review work 	planned review strategy 	focussing of the review 	developing the initial programme theories and search strategy using cmo configurations 	selection, data extraction and appraisal 	analysis and synthesis to further develop programme theory, and context, intervention and mechanism configurations 	ethics and dissemination 	references byz_ a alternative source-based understanding of the relationship between the church and the ottoman state over the centuries, papademetriou’s provides an important new perspective on the field and a fascinating account, introducing a rich ottoman vocabulary indicative of the author’s broad insight and linguistic proficiency. unfortunately, the glossary is somewhat inadequate and the author seems to have been let down by the copy-editor, as the text suffers from many errors, repe- titions and inconsistencies that do not serve as a fair presentation of the study’s effort to challenge previous ways of seeing the orthodox church exclusively from the perspective of the conquered and its spiritual mission. in spite of these caveats, render unto the sultan is a refreshing scholarly contribution that pragmatically observes the church as deeply embedded in the ottoman state and not simply as a dormant ethno-national community awaiting redemption. trine stauning-willert copenhagen a note from the reviews editor the modern greek reviews section of this issue is dedicated to translations of modern greek lit- erature. since so many of the modern greek books received by bmgs for review are new literary translations, it seems appropriate to celebrate not only the art of the translators but also the dedi- cation of the small independent publishers producing them. konstantinos theotokis, the life and death of hangman thomas (tr. j. m. q. davies) london: colenso books and konstantinos theotokis, corfiot tales (tr. j. m. q. davies) london: colenso books, . doi: . /byz. . literary works in translation are, for better or worse, often taken by readers as representative not only of a particular artistic endeavour but of the broader culture, society, or nation from which they are taken to ‘originate’. this readerly approach seems deeply unfair: why should a novel, short story, or play written in another language be asked to bear a burden of representation that literature ‘originally’ written in one’s own language is not? why should translated literature be expected to provide not just a narrative or aesthetic experience but ethnographic ‘information’ as well? precisely because i dislike such habits of reading, i am often on guard against them, both as a translator and as an educator, which affects both what i choose to translate or teach, and how i choose to do so. as i read j. m. q. davies’ new translations of konstantinos theotokis’s corfiot tales and the life and death of hangman thomas, i found myself wondering how, particularly in our current ‘#metoo moment’, i would discuss these texts with english-speaking students who might be tempted to take these fictional works as indicative of greek rural life, albeit of the past. how would i frame a discussion so as to responsibly treat the sexual violence, patriarchal societal structures, and pervasive cruelty and aggression that saturate every page of these works, while also checking the temptation to read theotokis’s villages as stand-ins for some larger greek reality? theotokis’s work is, of course, often taken even in greece as skirting the edge of ithografia, engaging in a kind of folkloristic naturalism while also incorporating expressionist hues and fig- ures—combining, that is to say, literary and artistic trends operative in greece in the late th and early th century with those of western europe. theotokis was well acquainted with these larger trends, given his birth to a wealthy corfiot family, his polyglot education, and his early adult life in paris and venice. the stories contained in corfiot tales (most of which were first published in literary journals between and and again in a posthumous collection in ) and the novella the life and death of hangman thomas, first published in , are all set in corfiot villages and towns, offering scenes of daily labour, describing wedding rituals, dances and dress, even the habits of livestock. and while there are fleeting moments of joy - merriment and laughter during carnival festivities in ‘village life’ or the carefree singing of two young shepherdesses on a hillside in ‘reputation’ - the overwhelming cumulative impression of both volumes is of a harsh, reviews https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /byz. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://dx.doi.org/ . /byz. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /byz. . https://www.cambridge.org/core unforgiving life, typified by the lack of creature comforts in the humble homes and shacks where the characters live, and by the brutality with which they treat their relations and fellow villagers. consider the astonishing bleakness of interpersonal relations in the life and death of hangman thomas. upon the death of his wife, so neglected on her sickbed that maggots begin eating her flesh even while she’s alive, the eponymous character of the novella is tricked by his wealthier neighbor argyris into surrendering his home in return for a life annuity. argyris is what davies describes in his introduction as the consumptive capitalist of the piece, who exploits both the labor and good nature of his younger, ‘more proletarian’ brother yannis (xv) and the physical charms of yannis’s attractive wife maria, after whom thomas lusts. but argyris is cer- tainly not the only calculating character: just as thomas is dispossessed of his home, so too is maria’s elderly father, the village notary, by none other than his other daughter and son-in-law, the village priest. this relentless scheming at the expense of relatives and neighbors is augmented by the casual cruelty displayed by almost every character in the book, from the most minor to the most central: the village children who mock thomas by calling out his hated nickname; the masons who laugh and joke as they cut down thomas’s body after his suicide; maria, who con- tinually mocks thomas in life and gestures obscenely at his corpse after his death; and of course thomas himself, who treats his wife and sister heartlessly and, after losing his house, inflicts harm on innocent neighbors simply out of a desire for others to suffer as he does. most shocking to me as a reader were the casual references throughout the book to domestic and sexual violence, including several scenes in which thomas attempts to rape maria. and these attempts have, we learn, a long history in these characters’ lives: late in the book, thomas recalls having ‘leapt into the ditch and nearly caught you, and you’d have enjoyed it, too, as i was still young in those days, though already married’ ( ). while undoubtedly the victim of these violent attacks, maria behaves in ways that complicate our moral calculus, taunting thomas with her naked body, just as she has mocked and derided him throughout the story, comparing his with- ered body to that of her young, virile husband. and beyond those scenes, she is a generally unsympathetic character, behaving with continual unkindness to argyris’s older ‘mummy’ of a wife, chrysanthi, and treating even the good-natured yannis with derision. there is something extremely discomfiting about a narrative universe in which almost everyone we meet is worthy of blame, a world almost devoid of kindness. after all, as thomas tells himself at one point late in the book, ‘[in] such an unjust world kindness received no reward, nor would crimes be punished’ ( ). while hangman thomas is a litany of interpersonal wrongs that do indeed seem to go unpunished, corfiot tales struck me as a far more sophisticated series of reflections on what con- stitutes a ‘wrong’ to begin with. the last story in the volume, ‘was it a sin?’ makes this explicit, as a priest wonders whether it would be a sin to give communion to a young woman who has confessed an illicit passion to him, thereby saving her from her father’s suspicious wrath; the title’s question thus refers both to the girl’s ‘sin’ of a love as of yet unacted upon and his own sin of potentially misplaced compassion. many of the other stories likewise pit multiple wrong- doings, and multiple punishments, against one another, often escalating the violence in ways that render the original sinner a victim of seemingly disproportionate viciousness. in ‘face down’, the brutal opening story, a man returns after years away to find his wife caring for her child by another man. he forces her to bury the baby alive, face down in a grave he digs as she watches. in ‘not done yet?’ a man kills his pregnant wife for adultery. in ‘illicit love’, stathis lusts after his daughter-in-law and eventually forces himself on her, conceiving a child. there may be a kind of punishment here, in that stathis loses his mind and flees the village - and yet those who suffer the most are his victims, whose own suffering precipitates his madness: chrysavgi dies in child- birth, and the baby soon after. these misplaced or outsized judgments or punishments comprise a theme that is developed and mused upon throughout these stories. along the way, readers are also invited to engage not only with specific cases of interpersonal justice gone awry, but with larger social ills such as class inequality and the oppression of women. ‘village life’ contains one striking scene of class upris- ing, as nearly the entire village comes together to force a wealthy landowner’s son to marry a peasant girl whose honour he has compromised. and while hangman thomas makes it hard to sympathize with maria, the victim of sexual assault, the women in these tales who are killed, raped, beaten, and otherwise harmed are far more sympathetically portrayed. the stories also comment explicitly on the patriarchal nature of the society they describe: in ‘illicit love’, for instance, chrysavgi’s mother-in-law warns her that ‘a woman is merely a commodity, bought today and sold to someone else tomorrow’ ( ). this kind of trenchant social criticism, while something i value in the greek context, is precisely what makes me nervous about sharing these books with students. social criticism from elsewhere, when translated for an anglo-american reviews https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /byz. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /byz. . https://www.cambridge.org/core readership, can encourage a sense of cultural superiority whose real-life consequences can be quite dire. one way of countering this way of reading might be to address the issue head on, engaging in a meta-conversation about this very tendency to read literature as straightforward description, as ‘naturalistic’ - a tendency that, as i note above, we find even in the greek context, in which the largely urban scholarly and critical community sees theotokis’s corfiot villages as, in essence, another world. in his introduction to the most recent greek edition of corfiot tales, giannis dal- las suggests that the stories present ‘a world that is immovably traditional, in an era when in greece social life has, even in literature, become urbanized’ ( ); even in the moment of their composition, dallas writes, they presented a place that was already a thing of the past, if it ever existed at all. yet in my view, the stories in corfiot tales - if not hangman thomas - present a world that is anything but immovable. rather, they are concerned throughout with shifting social norms: the icon painter in ‘the two loves’ wonders if he will be the town’s last artist, as interests shift elsewhere, while in ‘stalakti’s wedding’, one character imagines the poor burning down the houses of the rich and fomenting revolution. harnessing these moments of tension in a classroom discussion could lead to very rich discussions of both theme and style. of course any discussion of style, when dealing with literature in translation, is inevitably a discussion of the interpretive decisions the translator has made in presenting the text at hand to his or her readers. here, too, there is much to consider. theotokis’s writing is relatively spare and simple, with elements of dialect in the dialogue between characters: dallas’s greek-language edition comes with a substantial glossary at the end. davies seems to approach the challenge of conveying the linguistic richne```ss of theotokis’s prose by engaging a fascinating mix of registers. we find references to ‘spooks’ and ‘coolies’, and colloquial phrases such as ‘get stuffed!’ - but also high-language phrases from dialect-speaking characters, such as ‘i’d have collapsed if i could no longer vent my spleen’, or ‘now that the wastrel has aba```ndoned me’. lawrence venuti has suggested that, in choosing texts to introduce in a pedagogical setting, teachers should seek out translations with what he calls a ‘rich remainder’, whose surface irregularities or seeming oddities ‘[offer] an efficient articulation of the issues raised by translation’ ( ). davies’ translations in both these volumes are certainly cases in point: the boldness of his decisions invites students to consider how one might translate dialect or texts from distant time periods, even if they can’t access the greek text at all. as so often, then, an examination of a translator’s (or editor’s) specific choices can offer a way into larger conversations about the status of literary texts as always multiply mediated, and the worlds they create as never truly representative of external realities. one might consider even the troubling themes and scenes that davies had to tackle in his translations of these texts as another form of ‘rich remainder’: vexing stones in the reader’s path that force us to stop and con- sider precisely how we wish to move forward. karen emmerich princeton university martin mckinsey, clearing the ground: c. p. cavafy poetry and prose, - . translations and essay by martin mckinsey. chapel hill: laertes publishing, . pp. + xii. doi: . /byz. . this beautifully-produced book represents a creative and critical engagement with a crucial ten- year period in cavafy’s artistic development, from the year of apparent writer’s block that pre- ceded the ‘philosophical scrutiny’ (cavafy’s statement of intent to review, revise and, where unsatisfactory, destroy his poetic output to date) to the year in which he published his most famous poem, ‘ithaca’. the volume opens with a brief introduction, which explains mckinsey’s project, and closes with an extended essay on ‘the aesthetics of pleasure’. an appendix contains an unfinished essay by cavafy on the chronicle of the morea. in the body of the book, mckinsey interleaves cava- fy’s poetry and prose writings from – in chronological order of composition, a fraught enterprise given the difficulty of interpreting the available information. much of the prose included is dated by cavafy himself on the relevant manuscripts but for the dates of poems, reviews https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /byz. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://dx.doi.org/ . /byz. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /byz. . https://www.cambridge.org/core confronting the digital mob: press coverage of online justice seeking full length article confronting the digital mob: press coverage of online justice seeking daniel trottier erasmus universiteit rotterdam, the netherlands abstract this article offers an exploratory account of press coverage of digitally mediated vig- ilantism. it considers how the uk press renders these events visible in a sustained and meaningful way. news reports and editorials add visibility to these events, and also make them more tangible when integrating content from social media platforms. in doing so, this coverage directs attention to a range of social actors, who may be perceived as responsible for these kinds of developments. in considering how other social actors are presented in relation to digital vigilantism, this study focusses on press accounts of those either initiating or being targeted by online denunciations, and also on a broader and often amorphous range of spectators to such events, often referred to as ‘internet mobs’. relatedly, this article explores how specific practices related to digital vigilantism such as denunciation are expressed in press coverage, as well as coverage of motivations by the public to either participate or facilitate such practices. reflecting on how the press represent mediated denunciation will illustrate not only how tabloids and broadsheets frame such practices, but also how they take advantage of connective and data-generating affordances associated with social platforms. keywords denunciation, digital media, internet, vigilantism, press coverage corresponding author: daniel trottier, erasmus universiteit rotterdam, burgemeester oudlaan, dr rotterdam, the netherlands. email: trottier@eschcc.eur.nl european journal of communication ( ) – ! the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/ejc https://orcid.org/ - - - x mailto:trottier@eschcc.eur.nl http://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions http://dx.doi.org/ . / journals.sagepub.com/home/ejc http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - it’s very well naming and shaming but that’s not going to get people charged or fined by the police. citizen-led justice seeking stands in contrast to state-led and other institutional responses. the above quote, attributed to a local councillor, appears in a newspa- per article reporting on a facebook group in northeast scotland. the group uploads and distributes photos of what appears to be bad parking to shame and deter such events. the councillor’s statement concedes that this practice is some kind of societal intervention, but one that sits outside acceptable socio-legal options. beyond this article, the press in the united kingdom and elsewhere reg- ularly reports on digitally mediated denunciation and shaming. in doing so, it brings together a set of incidents, organisations and practices we can approach from the perspective of digital vigilantism (trottier, ). while these groups are clearly enabled by social media platforms like facebook as well as mobile devices, the reconfiguration of relations between social actors – such as between citizens as well as citizen–state and citizen–press relations – also emerges as a pressing schol- arly and societal concern. the aforementioned article includes terms such as ‘vig- ilantes’, ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’ in its opening lines, which serve to underscore the grave and potentially criminalised relations between citizens. such a tone is sup- ported with opinions and quotes that are sourced from the target of shaming, the administrator of the facebook page, the police and the politician quoted above. the types of offences that trigger citizen-led justice seeking vary in terms of context and severity. the above article also contextualises practices by making reference to a similar initiative reported on week prior, which solicited its fol- lowers to share pictures of intoxicated people in and around aberdeen. individual (citizen-led) denunciations against others and coordinated responses have a lengthy history, which has typically been expressed through news reports (girling et al., ). even when focussing on the internet as a domestically avail- able technology, as early as the uk press reported on ‘[c]omputer hackers (. . .) becoming cyber vigilantes’ against paedophiles. the figure of the cyber vigi- lante is invoked under curious circumstances, as this article was published shortly after the press complaints commission denounced the role of the press in vigilante-style attacks against child sexual abuse suspects (butler, ). while internet-led vigilantism may have been reported in the united kingdom for over years, during this time, there has been a widespread adoption of mobile devices and social platforms that together facilitate similar kinds of open denun- ciation. contemporary digital tools and related cultural practices allow people to intervene in and comment more easily on the lives of others. they extend the temporal and spatial fields of practice for denunciation and shaming, as offending acts and calls for action are both retained and transmitted to a potentially immea- surable audience. moreover, mobilising audiences involves a wide range of prac- tices and subject positions for them to enact. a digital media user may launch a denunciation of someone by uploading content to a platform. they may otherwise european journal of communication ( ) contribute to that denunciation by commenting on the post, or offering commen- tary, or uploading additional content, or sharing the content with their own net- work of peers. even seemingly passive activities like viewing content or lurking on a platform will likely generate views and other data, contributing to an imagined audience of a denunciation. although scholarship typically considers vigilantism – including digitally medi- ated vigilantism – primarily in terms of citizen–state relations (burr and jensen, ; johnston, ), the press can be understood as a prominent institutional actor that both reports on relevant events, while operating out of self-interest in seeking revenue as well as agenda-setting on partisan grounds (chalaby, ; cross and lockyer, ). digitally mediated vigilantism is made socially mean- ingful by various participants, practitioners and interested parties. here also, the press editorialises what is possible and appropriate regarding the latest devices and practices (cf. haller, ). while editorials explicitly assert a position towards mediated shaming, news reports may include seemingly neutral descriptions of events that support particular understandings of these practices. moreover, the press is simultaneously contributing to the exposure it reports on when directing the newspaper’s own readership to specific cases, groups and practices. it can assist vigilantes by directing public scrutiny towards their chosen targets, all while describing a broader media landscape in which their own power and influence is ‘unperceived or assumed away’ (walker, : ). potentially, we may witness the press readership joining (or perceived as joining) those denouncing and sham- ing the target of vigilante interventions. likewise, it may mobilise counter- denunciations against what it regards as inappropriate shaming incidents. while readers would unlikely self-identify as vigilantes in a conventional sense, they may be understood as part of an opinion-holding public (cushion, ) and at least implicitly endorse such interventions. this article offers an exploratory account of press coverage of digitally medi- ated vigilantism. it considers how the uk local and regional press renders these events visible in a sustained and meaningful way. news reports and editorials add visibility to these events, and also make them more tangible when integrating content from social media platforms. in doing so, this coverage directs attention to a range of social actors, who may be perceived as responsible for these kinds of developments (either responding to an initial offence, or to the denunciation and persecution that may follow). the press exploits and indeed augments the visibility of those involved in denunciatory events. it simultaneously directs attention to individuals under severe scrutiny and reports on this process, framing the internet as the main culprit. this portrayal rests on a questionable distinction between the internet as a clustering of abusive users, and its own readership, who may be reading, sharing and commenting on such articles through the paper’s webpage or social media presence. in considering how other social actors are presented in relation to digital vigilantism, this study focusses on press accounts of those either initiating or being targeted by online denunciations, and also on a broader and often amorphous range of spectators to such events, often referred to as ‘internet trottier mobs’. relatedly, this article explores how specific practices related to digital vig- ilantism such as denunciation are expressed in press coverage, as well as coverage of motivations by the public to either participate in or facilitate such practices. methods while understood as a digitally mediated process, press coverage of digital vigi- lantism arguably serves an agenda-setting role in making such practices meaning- ful. social media content surrounding such events can itself be removed shortly after a denunciation, either for violating a platform’s terms of service, or simply as part of a denouncer’s broader strategy. despite the possibility of removal follow- ing public outcry or a negative assessment by an independent regulator, press coverage stands as a potentially more enduring as well as digitally accessible account of events. the uk context in particular offers both recent high-profile cases including anti-paedophile groups alongside a spate of cases responding to comparatively less serious offences that provide an understanding of acceptability in more routinised circumstances. this study focusses on coverage of prominent recent cases. by searching lexis-nexis for keywords associated with five such incidents since , i draw upon a corpus of articles. these cases involve user-led denunciations against relatively minor instances of uncivil behaviour in public spaces as well as on digital platforms. i performed an additional query of uk press using search terms related to the above cases such as shaming and vigilantism alongside relevant synonyms. this yielded an additional articles that date back to . while results with a high match were excluded from these searches, many articles shared some overlap in terms of content. likewise, while articles that only briefly touch upon these practices are included, those that invoke them to consider fictional accounts (e.g. recaps of television programmes featuring vigilante themes) were excluded from the analysis. while the majority of articles are from tabloids, articles from broadsheets are included in the analysis. tabloids may serve a particular function in making criminal events meaningful in the uk context (cross, ), yet reports and editorials that appear in broadsheets also command a significant readership, and should not be categorically excluded. while scholarship on mediated shaming and digital vigilantism (author, ; johnston, ) provided conceptual guidance when analysing articles, it was important to remain mindful of emergent patterns in the data that reflect cultural and institutional contexts. when reporting on the cases below, no identifiable details of the individuals involved are reproduced. this includes names of either the target of mediated denunciation, those who initiate these movements, as well as those who comment on them. while maintaining a scholarly interest in the man- ners in which individuals can be harmed through mediated scrutiny, no further infamy or harm should be brought upon them. this study considers phenomena that are brought together by new regimes of visibility (thompson, ), such that politicians, paedophiles and bad parkers are all equally subject to similar digital media backlash. in particular, the common refrain in press coverage that digitally european journal of communication ( ) mediated naming and shaming ‘could lead to vigilante attacks’ emphasises a cou- pling between non-journalistic communicative practices and tangible harms. reconciling vigilante practices and the press exploring mediated denunciation and justice seeking through the lens of vigilan- tism implies potential for extra-judicial violence. while this remains a possibility when such practices are manifest through digital tools, of particular interest is how this lens calls attention to the expression of norms and collective values (johnston, ). the kinds of values expressed through vigilante activities have typically been understood as hegemonic within a given context (kasra, ), as such practices may simultaneously undermine state authority while reinforcing its underlying principles. yet we have also seen the emergence of movements, such as #metoo, which seek to direct attention to and challenge forms of sexual harass- ment and assault that have remained tolerated within institutions like the enter- tainment industry. the role of denunciation in these cases is especially potent, as it articulates an indictment against behaviours that are no longer meant to be toler- ated (cf. amicelle and favarel-garrigues, ). vigilantism – as well as a broader state of vigilance among citizens – is invoked as a means to make others account- able. instances of citizens targeting other citizens can also be understood from a surveillance studies perspective, notably as peer-to-peer or lateral forms of scrutiny (andrejevic, ). the emergence of digital media technologies in recent years has led to individuals renegotiating their own (self-)scrutiny practices (trottier, ), in conjunction with other social actors such as the state and the press. the possi- bilities and fears that are evoked in such coverage may contribute to surveillance imaginaries (lyon, ), in other words, representations of the way in which we are rendered visible and accountable through digitally mediated practices. and while citizen-led justice is by no means a new development, the scholarly challenge here is to consider so-called ‘internet mobs’ in relation to other kinds of mediated publics, such as those assembled through the press. prominent cases of shaming and denunciation through the press include cate- gories of targets like war criminals and celebrities, as well as particular offences, such as business fraud and child exploitation (drury, ; petley, ). while user-led-mediated shaming may cover a wider gamut of targets, there is also over- lap in terms of actionable offences, as well as related practices like doxing or shaming. in considering press coverage of vigilante practices, we may address a tension that shapes journalistic practices and strategies. on one hand, both tab- loids and broadsheets are understood as having political and ideological commit- ments that they will seek to preserve when reporting on incidents that trigger public denunciation (antony and thomas, ). yet journalists may be increas- ingly reliant upon both the content and the opinions of digital media users when producing the news, and may mobilise contesting and conflicting accounts about new technologies and practices in their reporting. the press is thus conveying statements from multiple kinds of sources, yet this is ostensibly assembled in a trottier way that maintains a degree of ideological coherence. we can consider this in the context of what chadwick ( ) calls a ‘hybrid media system’, in which journal- ists routinely mobilise digital media to both source and circulate news content. this may be understood as part of a broader response by journalists to cutbacks by furthering ‘symbiotic relationships’ with ‘hyperlocal entities to produce public interest news for local communities’ (carson et al., : ). as this can include state representatives such as the police, we may consider the extent to which such relations conceptually overlap with surveillant assemblages (haggerty and ericson, ), in which data collection practices are effected through temporarily sustained networks of institutionally and contextually dispersed actors. in other words, scholars should remain attentive to the confluence between rendering targeted individuals visible, and reporting on the process by which individual targets are made visible. digital media users – notably those engaging in mediated shaming and denun- ciations – matter in contemporary journalistic practices. by calling attention to other forms of unsanctioned justice seeking, tabloids and other newspapers implic- itly assert their role and their stake in denunciations. this assertion is marked by an ambivalent condition where newspapers do not have full control over how these practices and these cases are understood, and to a degree depend on content gen- erated in these cases to produce news items. yet they can contribute to public understandings of these practices based on information that is included or omitted, references that approximate one case to another, and other ways of making these developments meaningful. making sense of mediated denunciations online justice seeking and denunciations include a broad set of practices. such incidents do not always involve explicit calls for concrete action, but some expect- ations of a response may be implicitly communicated when posted to a public forum that facilitates sharing and responding (van dijck and poell, ). given that these are practices united by loose characteristics rather than an agreed-upon label and institutional or cultural context, it seems important to con- sider how it is made meaningful, including by prominent media and press actors. in terms of descriptions of incidents, there are explicit moments in which denun- ciatory events are arranged and likened to each other. a -word editorial published in warns about what the title calls ‘cyber vigilantes’, but are also called ‘online’ and ‘web vigilantes’ as well as ‘pitch-fork wielding cyber- mobs’ further on. the editorial invokes four cases involving backlash against offensive behaviour either caught on camera or knowingly posted online. it under- scores the speed with which vigilantism unfolds (‘just hours’; ‘tracked down within hours’) and the disproportionality of the response (‘the kind of abuse usu- ally reserved for war criminals’; ‘immediately earned the violent hatred of every- body in china’), and also the fact that digitally mediated practices allowed users to pinpoint targets’ location (‘they found out where she lived, and posted a google european journal of communication ( ) map of that address’; ‘the real trouble started when somebody found out her address’.). in comparing cases from china, the united states and the united kingdom, the author seeks to portray digitally mediated vigilantism as rooted in local cultures and norms, while also characterised by attributes that appear to transcend these contexts. other reports offer a broader warning to readers when linking open denuncia- tions to unsanctioned violence. the claim that naming and shaming leads to vig- ilantism features prominently in coverage of initiatives to publicly denounce a range of targets, including child sexual abusers, drug dealers and young offenders. while these concerns are raised in relation to user-led denunciations, state initia- tives are also said to cause ‘vigilante action’ and ‘lead to vigilante attacks’. as well, the now-defunct tabloid news of the world is frequently associated with vigilante reactions after publishing the identities of paedophiles in . links between public denunciation and vigilantism are manifest over the years of press coverage, and include a range of user and institutional initiatives. likewise, those quoted as making this link include journalists themselves as well as police and members of civil society. while typically invoked in response to actionable offences like child abuse, such framing may not be exclusively limited to this context. this reporting may still refer to generalised practices, instilling a discourse that naming and shaming broadly results in unsanctioned violence. largely the reader is left to imagine what may come in response to lesser forms of naming and shaming. as a prominent expression of denunciation, naming and shaming is presented in press coverage as a crowdsourced emotion, in the sense that it mobilises other actors to bring about disproportionate consequences. such framing appears to exclude the possibility of reintegrative shaming such as restorative justice (braithwaite, ; saulnier and sivasubramaniam, ). reintegration as a pro- cess is narrowly discussed, and only as an imagined and unattainable alternative. such representation is especially relevant when considering use of shame by press in the united kingdom. while shaming by tabloids is typically framed in terms of ‘public interest’ (rowbottom, ), this claim – and the language of public inter- est more broadly – may be invoked for opportunistic ends (carlson and berkowitz, ). in questioning who is entitled to denounce others, one can understand digital media uptake as a disruption of journalistic practices. representation of principal social actors press coverage of cases typically begins shortly after the initial denunciation on social media. articles typically repurpose the text, accompanying images and com- ments generated in these posts. initial reports that are centred on the denouncer make use of terms like ‘branded’ and ‘blasted’ stressing the force and social harm that the denouncer may exert over the accused target, as well as the possibility of a lasting imprint on the body. more broadly, press coverage employed terms, such as ‘posted’, ‘shared’ and ‘uploaded’ that emphasised the mediated nature of their trottier actions, and also ‘reprimanded’, ‘accused’ and ‘slammed’, which also point to the socio-cultural implications of making someone else visible in a moralising context. articles emphasise the denouncer as generating mediated shaming through their actions, sketching a media landscape in which the press is curiously absent. one report underlines the severity and social reach of such actions when claiming a woman triggered ‘a fierce debate after publicly shaming’ a professional peer after being sexually harassed by them. a separate newspaper touches upon this theme as well when looking back on this incident, noting ‘the entire country got caught up in debating inter-gender office relations when’ the denouncer ‘raged against his behav- iour across social networks’. in stating that the fall-out ‘dominated headlines’, the press appears to erase its own agency, absolving itself of responsibility in deciding to cover these incidents. it bears noting that this was the case that received the most coverage, and generated the most evident split in opinions. likewise, many tabloids took an unsympathetic approach to the denouncer, using vitriolic language to claim that she was seeking publicity, and also publicising separate articles about disputes within her family, and potentially sexist comments she had made on social media. taken together, the press exposes stigmatising details about her to a broader public, while accusing her of desiring such exposure. one can draw parallels between the kinds of information sourcing that took place to generate such articles, and the kinds of doxing practices performed by digital vigilantes, in that media, actors are seeking and publicising personal information about a target that may harm their reputation. the press augments the visibility and vitriol surrounding an incident, and moreover, directs public opinion by contributing to a counter-denunciation against a woman who spoke out against unsolicited harassment. coverage of this case also serves to formulate a criticism of a particular under- standing of the so-called feminist ‘outrage’. when describing the denouncer’s actions one tabloid article writes, instead of giving him the brush-off, she decided to ‘call out’ (the fashionable vernac- ular for making a gigantic spectacle of oneself on twitter) his alleged fascist piggery, over-reacting to what was little more than a rather embarrassing chat-up attempt. of particular note is the author’s assessment of the so-called call-out culture, as evidenced by the use of scare-quotes as well as the description that the denouncer in this case is making ‘a gigantic spectacle of oneself’. while mediated denuncia- tions primarily direct attention to the target being accused of some offence, this statement redirects attention back to the person making the accusation. the press simultaneously renders the denunciator a visible target of derision, while erasing its own responsibility by implying that she wilfully sought such visibility. given the underrepresentation of female public figures in press coverage (humprecht and esser, ), it is not surprising that a professional woman rendered visible to a popular audience would receive unsympathetic coverage. the author of the above- quoted article presents a ‘brush-off’ as what they consider to be a more reasonable alternative to her denunciation. this implies that the lawyer would not have european journal of communication ( ) become the target of such a counter-denunciation had she responded to her target in a more ‘civil’ and presumably less visible manner. while this case features an especially pronounced counter-denunciation of the initiator, this tendency is seen to a lesser extent in other cases. as with the above, journalists may condemn them directly, but are more likely to express disapproval by way of the quotes of others, be they digital media users or their own readership. in such cases, they may even attribute responsibility to the initiator themselves, noting, for example, that they ‘sparked a backlash’ in speaking out. while targets of mediated denunciation may eventually be able to express them- selves, in the early stages of press coverage they are typically presented as the passive recipient of online abuse. given the reliance of the press on the initial accusatory post at this stage, it seems reasonable that it would remediate its representation of the target, even if not directly endorsing such views. other actors may also be invoked to render the target visible, including bystanders, representatives of relevant organisations, experts and commenters on the original social media post, and also those sourced through press coverage. in reaction to the denunciation of a pair of women deemed to be dressed inappropriately in a grocery store, one tabloid featured an article with the quote ‘’it’s lazy, disgusting and slobbish behaviour’’ in its title. this quote is both attributed to a ‘public reaction’ later in the title, and further on as coming from ‘readers of our sister newspaper’. targets are also presented as though they should have anticipated such online backlash, based on assumed shared under- standings of the composition of the internet. even if denunciations to some degree are problematised in the press, there seems to be ambivalence in opinion when including statements that justify their occurrence. framing a broader network of participants in addition to those both initiating and targeted by denunciations, press reports also cover additional social actors who participate in the aftermath of the mediated shaming of the target. the extent to which they participate in denunciation or counter-denunciation may vary, from simply viewing a post, to offering their own opinions, or even additional information about the person under scrutiny. the press may refer to individual commentators by name. yet it also refers to partic- ipators as a type of mass gathering. for example, one article opens by warning the reader: ‘[i]f you are planning to be nasty to a cat or criticise earthquake victims for keeping your favourite shows off tv, watch out for the internet lynch mobs’. by characterising those witnessing and responding to these cases as ‘internet lynch mobs’, this statement collapses these actors into a social mass that is both singular and harmful. vigilante participants are also not explicitly named in terms of their origin, but attributed to an unspecified assembly of actors, that may be similar to other kinds of amorphous crowds, such as tabloid audiences. this amounts to an erasure of the identities of those (admittedly mostly anonymous) participants. one prominent way that a broader assembly of users is expressed is through metrics. as the activities covered are digital and typically quantifiable, this allows trottier journalists to point to what appears to be a tangible measure of collective specta- torship and denunciation. in some cases, it is the digital media users themselves who are quantified, as in statements that denunciatory content ‘has been shared by thousands of facebook users’. in other cases, the online activity itself is fore- grounded, as in reference to ‘tens of thousands of views’ or ‘thousands of postings of online vitriol’. for one incident, the amount of times a post denouncing an airline passenger has been shared rises from , to , to , within a -hour news cycle. although we are not able to attribute the doubling of shares to specific factors, it would seem reasonable to consider that national press coverage contributed to this spike in activity. while reporting on the various embodied and digitally mediated actors contributing to this incident, the press does not acknowl- edge its own role in this production. beyond a discursive confluence between people and online activity, reporting on these incidents also expresses further ambivalence about the status of vigilante audiences. this includes the use of prefixes such as ‘virtual’ and ‘cyber’ that serve to qualify participants as intangible. likewise, terms such as ‘the internet’s “collective hive mind’’ not only refer to such groups as a kind of dehumanised assembly, but also attribute this as belonging to a distinct mediated environment. in terms of social justice, this collective is understood as delivering an ‘immediate and wildly overblown retribution’. another report on the same case refers to ‘the moronic inferno of the internet’, which accomplishes the same rhetorical purpose in erasing individual agency and characteristics (other than malice), and attributes this en masse to a mediated platform. while press coverage of these audiences portrays them largely as a destructive force, at times it is more restrained, notably when their actions are closely aligned with journalistic practices involving reader responses. cases that are said to have ‘sparked a national debate’ imply a situated as well as more civilised form of expression. in such cases, the topic of debate is multifaceted, for instance when ‘thousands have commented online’ on issues such as ‘train etiquette, the rights and wrongs of giving up a seat for a woman and whether [the initiator] was in the wrong for posting the internet photo’. not only are many steps in the incident subject to debate, but it also remains unclear from this statement if this debate is taking place exclusively in the comments section of the newspaper, in the replies to the original social media post, or on another online forums. this quote is followed by a series of comments from both those known to the individuals present at the incident, as well as strangers. while these are largely attributed to the newspaper’s web presence, there is no clear distinction between such exchanges and abusive vitriol, or in other words between fruitful debate and the moronic inferno. motivations to name and shame press coverage presents a range of tangible and intangible motivations for partic- ipating in mediated shaming. the implicit message is that there is no shortage of reasons why people denounce others. denunciations are often represented as european journal of communication ( ) motivated by offences, which are generalised to broader causes or concerns. in addition to descriptions of the offences themselves, reports may also include refer- ences to statements that provide socio-political context to denunciations. for instance, an article frames a particular denunciation as ‘refusing to put up with what most successful women endure every single day and most have long given up trying to defeat’. an instance of sexual harassment is presented as only the latest of a series of pervasive offences that have gone unaddressed. mediated denunciations appear to be a tangible way to direct attention to under-represented causes. this is also evident when a denouncer seeks to ‘make the public more aware and sensitive towards the needs of disabled children’. coverage provides context when pointing to specific vulnerabilities of those involved. when considering those who are tar- geted one denunciator ‘had felt compelled to “out” [target name] because he was a senior figure in the profession and had a duty to uphold laws against sexual dis- crimination’. while relatively favourable accounts of such incidents would point to potential inequity between parties involved, those that are less sympathetic to denunciations may focus primarily on the social capital and privilege held by the initiator. in either case, practices are presented as rooted in established power relations. beyond such contexts, mediated denunciation is also made meaningful in rela- tion to more abstract values and character traits. when expressing support for a recent denunciation involving an incident on a rail journey, one editorial states that they are ‘all for assertiveness, but not when it comes packaged with a sense of entitlement’. positioning appropriate conduct between these traits, the author advocates ‘to re-set the line between acceptable public behaviour and not’. such statements appear to support a broader mobilisation on the basis of the values that initially compelled the denunciation in question. such statements are also pre- sented in terms of national character, for example, when one editorial asserts that ‘[p]eople go wild about such behaviour because we are, after all, a nation built on dress codes and protocol’. while the article itself expresses ambivalence about the case in question, the user-led initiative is situated in a legible cultural context. the above motivations are not directly linked to digital media affordances. yet the ability to reach out to a pre-existing or spontaneously assembled community or network stands as a prominent motivation in press reports. one initiator is quoted as motivated by a desire ‘to know how many other women’ had faced similar offences. even in cases where this does not appear to be the primary motivation, such outreach may be presented as a desirable or at least productive outcome. another initiator is quoted as having been ‘contacted by hundreds of other parents who say they have had similar ordeals, most of them only recently’. reflecting on this outcome, this person expresses a hope ‘that by sharing what we experienced it might make people think before reacting like this’. through such statements, dig- ital platforms are presented not only as viable means to communicate with those sharing similar experiences and beliefs, but also as a potential tool for mobilisation. trottier even in presenting digital vigilantism as disproportionate and problematic, it is generally also framed as understandable. while the process and outcomes may be framed as irrational or mob-like, in most cases, its origins are meant to be under- stood by the reader, suggesting that there is a rational core to such practices. more generally, denunciatory practices and mediated vigilantism are made meaningful in the press through specific forms of ambivalence. although coverage typically includes a clear sense of concern over ‘digital mobs’, when dwelling on specific cases and weighing offending acts against responses and potential social outcomes, denunciations and related practices are understood as being at least partly desir- able. this is especially noticeable when there may be a contextual history of non- response or insufficient response by formal authorities. such ambivalence is expressed in terms of public approval, for example, when an editorial referencing several incidents states that as ‘over-the-top as these tactics may be, you can understand the temptation. (. . .) it would be so nice to exact some sort of revenge, if only we weren’t so mature’. here, the reader is positioned as too mature to engage in mediated vigilantism, all while understanding the appeal and even desir- ing it to some degree. institutional actors are also portrayed as having nuanced opinions, for instance, when police are presented as ‘frown[ing] upon this kind of vigilantism, while admitting that, if they had the resources, they’d conduct similar operations’. in this case, the primary barrier to police uptake of mediated initia- tives against child sexual abuse seems to be funding, rather than legal or normative concerns. in seeking to establish boundaries of acceptable behaviour, some press coverage arranges various forms of denunciation to call attention to what appears to be a moral grey area: slut-shaming is wrong. we all know that – even robin thicke could probably hazard a guess in that direction. ditto fat-shaming. it’s never ok to publically humiliate someone because of their gender, weight or relationship history. but what about shaming someone for being sleazy? by aligning various forms of gender-based discrimination, such reporting points to the difficulty in drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable denunciations. it bears noting that depending on how terms like sleazy and slut-shaming are defined, this amounts to contrasting denunciation as sexual predation with denun- ciation of sexual predation. in taking a more critical stance against mediated denunciations, police are typ- ically presented as a standard of appropriate conduct. this not only includes sourcing quotes from police officials, but also invoking police work as a potentially more acceptable set of practices. this is most evident in the opening quote about a parking group, which goes on to warn readers that [f]olk have got to be careful with what they put on facebook, people sometimes don’t know all the facts. people should report inconsiderate and dangerous parking – if the police don’t know they can’t do anything about it. european journal of communication ( ) here the statement that ‘folk have got to be careful’ is vaguely worded, reflecting the confluence between participation and spectatorship. even those who may view themselves as the audience may actively contribute to harm, and should exercise restraint. in light of this uncertainty, police work is presented as a more legible and acceptable alternative. this also remains applicable to those who favour these prac- tices. in the context of the same case, the initiator is quoted as claiming that their mediated initiatives ‘have resulted in around police warnings every year, as well as several prosecutions’. effectiveness is thus linked to the police as an institution, as opposed to framing it as an alternative or autonomous form of self-governance. positioning mediated denunciations and vigilantism in relation to police work also downplays any parallels to the kinds of pronunciations made by the press itself. discussion digitally mediated vigilantism appears to disrupt conventional justice seeking, due to a lack of normative guidelines, as well as running foul of legal protocols. such practices enter public discourse through press coverage, and are thus rendered meaningful. through its framing, the uk press emerges as a detached yet occa- sionally opinionated reporter of online denunciations, typically without addressing its own contributions to this weaponised visibility. by conveying ambivalent sen- timent through quotes from other social actors, the press expresses mediated vig- ilance and denunciation as a complex, multi-actor and context-specific set of practices that are contested. yet this coverage also expresses its own perspective through editorials that belie the press’ largely unacknowledged position as a denouncer. digital vigilantism is attributed to ‘internet mobs’. though the press will occasionally refer to specific commentators, they are addressed as a dehuman- ised mass that is technologically infused, legion in number and replete with wrath. within this (counter-)denunciatory content, the distinction between harassment and commentary seems to be maintained when looking at how the broader public is presented. yet both seemingly overlapping practices are presented as consequences of posting, and, more generally, of the existence of digital media platforms and device. the main difference seems to be when referencing opinions and other forms of content that serve a purpose for the press (cf. chadwick, ). one may question the distinction between thousands of people debating on facebook, and in the comments section of a newspaper’s website. press coverage may mobilise the same audience, framing initial participants as attention seekers while directing potentially unwanted visibility in their direction. the press con- demns online forums, while reproducing some of their worst features by reporting on such incidents, knowing that this will direct more attention to and engagement with them, as well as publishing vitriolic comments by their (digital) readership. returning to the one of the opening examples denouncing and directing attention to public intoxication, the article labels the now-defunct website as ‘sick’ in its headline. yet the same newspaper includes articles about other members of the public who were publicly intoxicated at work, or on the road, featuring their full trottier names. while such transgressions are more severe, the decision to publicise in one case and not the other remains open to question. besides asking which transgres- sions (and transgressors) should be made public, another critical question is which social actors should be entrusted with this task. such negotiations remain ongoing, shaped by technological possibilities as well as other factors, such as legal protec- tions and social conventions. one can speculate that user-led denunciations signal an increased democratisation of surveillance. yet individuals may add to social harms associated with surveillance such as categorical discrimination and a chilling effect on free speech, without challenging institutionalised means of watching over and intervening in the lives of a population. these practices may also serve to recon- figure a kind of court of public opinion, where digital media users assess and denounce those who find themselves under prominent scrutiny. some of this denunciation is distilled and reproduced in the press, while the broader process is framed as at best ambivalent and at worst as an internet mob. in context of penal populism, debates and discourses around digital vigilantism (e.g. state or police not doing enough to maintain social order) may enable political actors to impose harsher protocols and standards with regards to criminal offenders and marginalised communities, and also further the boundaries of actionable offences (e.g. what constitutes anti-social behav- iour, and which categories of individuals are most likely to face scrutiny). this study maintains a limited perspective in geographic terms, and also in not centring the experiences of those who are directly involved in such practices. we can speculate that those targeted by such denunciations experience harms in the immediate and prolonged aftermath, which may remain under-represented in both the press and scholarship. subsequent research should consider press coverage beyond the united kingdom, and also consider the experiences and perceptions of those who participate in online denunciations. finally, scholarly accounts of mediated denunciation are not entirely distinct from journalistic ones. a critical consideration of press tactics should also involve a return to reflecting on how we make these practices meaningful, notably in questioning the purpose a word like ‘vigilantism’ serves as a conceptual lens. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article: this work was supported by the netherlands organisation for scientific reserach (nwo) [project number - - ]. orcid id daniel trottier https://orcid.org/ - - - x notes european journal of communication ( ) https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - x . while both local and national press gave coverage of cases, it was primarily tabloids that were active at the national level. one exception is broadsheet coverage in response to a case denouncing sexual harassment in a professional setting. . invoking terms like vigilante and vigilante action/attacks likely serves a more normative goal of discrediting participants (in terms of how a word like vigilante is received by tabloid readership). while this may differ from the intended scholarly use of such terms, such unintended outcomes warrant further attention. . the article in question goes on to describe a bartender who denounced a patron who allegedly groped her. references amicelle 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anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | staging american nights notre top des films anglophones de david roche et vincent souladié Édition électronique url : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi : . /miranda. issn : - Éditeur université toulouse - jean jaurès référence électronique david roche et vincent souladié, « notre top des films anglophones de », miranda [en ligne], | , mis en ligne le mars , consulté le février . url : http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi : https://doi.org/ . /miranda. ce document a été généré automatiquement le février . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / notre top des films anglophones de david roche et vincent souladié aura surtout été l’année du cinéma non anglophone, avec quelques très grands films dont portrait de la jeune fille en feu (france), quatrième long métrage de céline sciamma qui mêle merveilleusement féminisme, poésie et réflexivité, douleur et gloire/ dolor y gloria (espagne) le nouveau métafilm de pedro almodóvar, et surtout le triomphe de parasite (corée du sud, bong joon ho) à cannes et – plus surprenant et sans doute politique – aux oscars, avec ce premier oscar du meilleur film attribué à un film étranger. néanmoins le cinéma notamment américain a également connu une bonne année. les franchises avengers et star wars se sont conclues sur une note tout à fait honorable, avec avengers : end game (usa, les frères russo) et surtout star wars ix : the rise of skywalker (usa, j. j. abrams) dont la révélation finale concernant rey évite la faute idéologique commise dans games of thrones (hbo, - ) à travers le thème de la filiation (la parenté de jon snow et de daenerys targaryen). de l’autre côté du spectre, le cinéma indépendant aura eu sa découverte de l’année avec the last black man in san francisco (usa), film dystopique sur le phénomène de la gentrification, écrit et réalisé avec un formalisme assumé par le duo joe talbot et jimmie falls qui tient aussi le premier rôle. retours solides pour : greta gerwig dont la nouvelle adaptation de little women/ les quatre filles du docteur marsh (usa) fait ressortir la noirceur de l’œuvre de louisa may alcott ; james gray dont le plastiquement somptueux ad astra (chine/usa) fait parfois oublier un scénario prévisible, parfois absurde et fadasse après ces récentes réussites que sont interstellar (usa/uk/canada, christophe nolan, ) et surtout arrival/premier contact (usa/canada, denis villeneuve, ) ; ryan johnson qui offre un whodunit efficace et divertissant avec knives out/ À couteaux tirés (usa) ; ou encore james mangold dont le biopic sportif (et oscar-bait raté) ford v. ferrari/ le mans (usa/france) permet de passer un bon moment en compagnie du toujours sympathique matt damon et du hargneux christian bale ; sam mendes qui, avec (usa/uk/india/spain/canada), dont la somptueuse scène nocturne des ruines de guerre sublime un film agréable mais somme toute assez convenu, nous démontre, à l’inverse d’un steven spielberg avec saving private ryan/ il faut sauver le soldat ryan (usa, notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ) ou alejandro g. iñárritu avec birdman (usa, ), que la prouesse technique (le plan-séquence) peut facilement prendre le dessus sur le récit et la dramaturgie ; les frères safdie, avec leur sixième long métrage uncut gems (usa), font en quelque sorte la démonstration inverse, la technologie de mise au point automatisée light ranger permettant une grande liberté de mouvement à l’acteur adam sandler qui galvanise une narration centrée sur un anti-héros dont la chute inexorable rappelle aussi bien fargo (usa/uk, les frères coen, ) que la trilogie pusher de nicolas winding refn (danemark, - ) ; et enfin taika waititi qui revient à la figure de l’enfant, qui était au cœur de boy (nouvelle-zélande, ) et de l’excellent hunt for the wilderpeople (nouvelle-zélande, ), avec cette adaptation (nouvelle-zélande/république czec/ usa) du roman satirique de christine leunens. plus notables, les seconds films de jordan peele, de robert eggers et d’ari aster ont confirmé avec brio le renouveau du cinéma d’horreur américain : qu’il s’agisse de la satire politique proposée dans us (usa/ chine/japon) qui déplace l’accent sur la question raciale à la question sociale ; du surréalisme atmosphérique et hyper-formaliste de the lighthouse (canada/usa) avec ses influences à la littérature américaine du xixe (herman melville, edgar poe) et au cinéma muet européen des années (jean epstein, f. w. murnau) ; ou de l’allégorie du deuil offerte midsommar (usa/suède), variation sur le thème du wicker man (uk, robin hardy, ) qui relève le défi de l’horreur en plein jour. leurs pairs ont aussi proposé des films solides : woody allen, avec l’agréable a rainy day in new york (usa), qui permet à timothy chalomet de camper gastby, personnage allenien naïf qui doit plus à j. d. sallinger qu’à fitzgerald, et une charmante elle fanning qui – de manière plus suspecte à l’ère #metoo – semble en partie dédouaner les prédateurs sexuels incarnés par jude law, diego luna et liv schrieber ; le tandem ken loach-paul laverty, qui clôt son œuvre avec sorry we missed you (uk/france/belgique), dont le pessimisme n’augure rien de bon pour la grande-bretagne post-brexit ; martin scorsese avec la production netflix, the irishman (usa), qui, au-delà du rajeunissement numérique dont on a tant parlé, permet à robert deniro, à al pacino et surtout un joe pesci apaisé de jouer dans un autre registre que dans les films de gangsters qui ont fait leur gloire. moins convaincants : the mountain : une odyssée américaine (usa, rick alverson) et the souvenir (uk/usa, joanna hogg), dans lesquels des castings de choc (tye sheridan et jeff goldblum dans le premier, honor swinton byrne et tom burke dans le second) tentent en vain de lutter contre un formalisme glacial pour faire passer une émotion. a hidden life (usa/uk/allemagne, terrence malick) il était annoncé depuis longtemps que terrence malick revenait enfin avec a hidden life à la forme narrative de ses débuts, comme si son virage esthétique vers un cinéma de plus en plus dysnarratif depuis tree of life ( ) ne pouvait représenter qu’une parenthèse appelée à se refermer. comme cela est toujours le cas avec malick, le film déjoue en partie ces attentes et ne saurait se prévaloir d’une facture dramatique classique. après une trilogie contemporaine autobiographique (to the wonder [ ], knight of cups [ ], song to song [ ]), malick revient surtout au film d’époque délocalisé puisque a hidden life relate l’histoire vraie de franz jägerstätter (august diehl, dans un rôle diamétralement opposé à celui qu’il tenait en dans inglourious basterds), paysan autrichien emprisonné, persécuté, et finalement exécuté pour avoir catégoriquement refusé de porter l’uniforme et de servir l’allemagne d’hitler, quitte à ne pas signer le serment d’allégeance qui aurait pu in fine lui sauver la vie. il est aisé de notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ #tocfrom n https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ #tocfrom n https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ #tocfrom n https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ #tocfrom n https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ comprendre ce qui a poussé malick à s’intéresser à la vie de cet objecteur de conscience béatifié par benoit xvi en , lui qui assume de plus en plus ouvertement dans ses films son héritage catholique et les questionnements de la foi (il a achevé fin une vie de jésus christ tournée en jordanie, the last planet). on retrouve également dans le film certains thèmes chers au cinéaste : l’exil et la quête du paradis perdu, la pureté désintéressée de l’amour contre l’oppression du système, l’immuabilité de la nature contre le fracas absurde et passager des hommes. au fond, ce ne sont pas forcément ces questions personnelles ni ces thématiques qui rendent fascinant le cinéma de malick mais la manière dont il réadapte son langage formel. l’auteur tire grand profit des expérimentations formalistes élaborées dans ses quatre derniers films en les mettant ici au service d’une histoire et, surtout, en leur donnant une portée politique. mixer les régimes d’images (les plans filmés avec un appareil photo numérique montés bout à bout avec des plans tournés en caméra hd dans to the wonder, par exemple) lui permet ici de faire cohabiter deux mondes hétérogènes, irréels l’un à l’autre : le sacre de hitler (dans des plans extraits du triomphe de la volonté de leni riefensthal, ) et la nature aveugle occupée par les paysans. les plans d’intérieur cadrés en grand angle déformant matérialisent, avec un sens du grotesque kubrickien que l’on ne connaissait pas à malick, l’aliénation du pouvoir dictatorial (les bottes géantes de bruno ganz, le hitler de la chute [allemagne/autriche/italie, oliver hirschbiegel, ]). il a été reproché à malick l’usage de l’allemand non sous-titré pour faire vociférer les habitants tentés par les promesses du troisième reich, ce qui serait le signe de sa part d’une représentation caricaturale et manichéenne de l’histoire, adaptée à un public américain. c’est faire là un étrange procès à ce spécialiste d’heidegger, traducteur de son œuvre philosophique aux États-unis. la barrière instaurée par ce procédé n’est pas idiomatique, en réalité, mais existentielle. du point de vue de l´éthique rigoriste de jägerstätter, certaines idées et certains discours doivent seulement rester à distance morale, dans une zone noire indéchiffrable. joker (usa/canada, todd phillips) joker fut le film américain le plus remarqué de l’année, et celui dont le succès fut le plus controversé, de son triomphe au festival de venise aux nombreux commentaires sur l’ambiguïté de son discours politique. pour les uns, il s’agit du pari réussi d’un superhero movie qui, tout en reprenant le parcours génétique, prend le risque de se détourner radicalement de nombreux codes du genre pour s’aventurer sur le terrain du naturalisme social. pour les autres, il s’agit du succès de circonstance d’une œuvre faussement provocatrice surfant sur l’air du temps ; ces réserves sont comparables à celles qu’avait suscité fight club (usa/allemagne, david fincher, ) en son temps : film produit par le système et prônant l’effondrement de celui-ci. c’est bien sûr cette ambiguïté qui rend joker pertinent, et correspond d’ailleurs au parcours dramatique de son personnage éponyme, porté aux nues contre son gré comme une figure révolutionnaire pour avoir voulu attirer l’attention des médias (on y aura vu des échos de occupy wall street aux us ou des gillets jaunes en france). puisque le joker encourage désormais les performances actor’s studio, le rôle ne pouvait qu’être taillé sur-mesure pour joachin phoenix, dont l’énergie inquiétante mais fragile lui permet de se démarquer subtilement de l’interprétation nihiliste d’heath ledger dans the dark knight (usa/uk, christopher nolan, ) autant que du grand guignol de jack nicholson dans batman (usa, tim burton, ). si le film de philips fait de thomas notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | wayne un entrepreneur mégalomane convaincu qu’il a l’étoffe d’un politique, il pourrait être un prolongement en mode mineur des opus de nolan, dont il ne se détourne pas complètement. comme nolan l’envisageait au départ de sa trilogie, philips cherche à retrouver une ambiance urbaine des années ’s- ’s qui passe par des références ouvertes à death wish (usa, michael winner, ), à taxi driver (usa, martin scorsese, ) ou à the king of comedy (usa, martin scorsese, ), renforcé bien sûr par la présence de robert deniro qui cède sa place à son digne héritier joaquim phoenix pour reprendre un rôle équivalent à celui de jerry lewis dans le film de . de fait, et même si le film se retient comparé à ses modèles, la violence et la noirceur nihiliste surprennent. sur un plan esthétique, la richesse sonore et chromatique de joker n’est pas pour autant déphasée par rapport à son temps. cette expérience d’une odyssée psychologique et sensible dans un décor urbain âpre et fiévreux est à rapprocher dans une certaine mesure des récents films des frères safdie (good time [ ], uncut gems [ ]), mais aussi de you were never really here/a beautiful day (uk/france/usa, lynne ramsay, ), dans lequel phoenix apparaissait déjà, sous des traits et une silhouette bien différents. son statut de satire allégorique rend joker plus accessible que ces œuvres-là, mais il n’en reste pas moins le chef de file de cette noirceur montante du cinéma américain contemporain, de plus en plus palpable. luce (usa, julius onah) il est des films qui marquent avant tout par la qualité de leur scénario et de leur interprétation. c’est le cas cette année de marriage story. c’est aussi le cas de ce premier long métrage, collaboration entre le réalisateur afro-américain julius onah et le scénariste j.c. lee qui adapte ici sa propre pièce produite à new york en . aux côtés de tim roth, d’octavia spencer et de naomi watts – tous excellents ! – dans des rôles secondaires (les parents et l’enseignante), le jeune kelvin harrison jr. crève l’écran dans le rôle éponyme d’un enfant congolais adopté par une famille américaine (blanche de classe moyenne-supérieure, l’image même des « white liberals »), devenu la figure de l’excellence (scolaire, sportive, sociale) dans son lycée. le maître mot du film est l’« ambiguïté », ambiguïté qui laisse planer l’ombre d’un doute tout au long du film. il n’y a pas de bons ou de méchants dans ce mélodrame aux allures de thriller psychologique : il y a des points de vue qui entrent en concurrence, qui se contredisent et parfois même qui sont tous deux « vrais » ou « faux » en même temps. est ainsi posée la relation complexe entre la subjectivité humaine et une conception intersectionnelle de l’identité, démontrant que la portée de celle-ci ne doit pas se limiter à une conception juridique, voire même politique au sens large. cette ambiguïté est habilement exprimée à travers les ressorts habituels du thriller (ombres portées, montage elliptique), mais c’est avant tout sur le visage et dans la voix de harrison jr que tout se joue : l’angélique luce affiche confiance, intelligence, maîtrise mais est régulièrement parcourue par des ondes émotionnelles traduisant une incertitude et une vulnérabilité authentique ou feinte (là est la question). la révélation tarde et quand elle arrive, elle ne fait que renforcer le sentiment d’incertitude. la réussite de luce tient avant tout à l’intelligence avec laquelle elle fait de la question de l’identité un enjeu sensible et donc éminemment esthétique. notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ?lang=fr marriage story (uk/usa, noah baumbach) alors que woody allen revenait cette année à une forme de légèreté screwball avec le très enlevé a rainy day in new york, c’est l’un de ses héritiers directs, qui réitère le genre des drames de chambre familiaux new-yorkais doux-amers, comme il s’y était d’ailleurs essayé dès son tout premier film les berkman se séparent/the squid and the whale (usa, ), qui était déjà la chronique du divorce d’un couple bourgeois. la rupture est d’ailleurs sous-tendue par un autre duel, celui-ci plus culturel, entre new york et los angeles, le théâtre et l’industrie cinématographique et télévisuelle. noah baumbach trouve chez allen des thèmes qu’il traite toutefois avec une authenticité plus terre à terre. le ton de marriage story pourrait aussi rappeler de prime abord la simplicité mélodramatique de kramer vs. kramer (robert benton, ) mais le propos s’avère en fin de compte plus ambitieux et subtil. le film met tout d’abord à l’honneur deux des meilleurs comédiens de leur génération, capable d’alterner les blockbusters et les films d’auteurs indépendants sans décevoir et sans brouiller leur image auprès du public. si l’on savait depuis le début de leur carrière que scarlett johansson et adam driver étaient capables de jouer les âmes fragiles avec autant de naturel, il y a bien longtemps – depuis paterson (usa, jim jarmusch, ) pour driver et under the skin (uk/usa/suisse, jonathan glazer, ) pour johansson – qu’ils n’avaient pas été servis par des rôles aussi bien écrits, et par une mise en scène pensée pour donner du temps et de l’amplitude à leur jeu. l’inflexion de la voix, le détail d’un regard ou d’un geste, l’interaction des corps nourrissent le sentiment du vécu de cette expérience amoureuse et maritale en partie autobiographique. via l’importance de l’écrit et de la parole, les racines littéraires et théâtrales de la méthode employée par baumbach sont mises en abyme dans le film, lequel se veut l’auscultation détaillée d’une rupture et de sa mise en fiction. le sujet sous-jacent pourrait alors être celui-ci, par ailleurs délivré par le titre même du film : toute rupture naissant de la collision de deux points de vue adverses donne forcément lieu à un récit fictionnel. c’est alors que marriage story épate là où on ne l’attendait pas : dans le portrait des avocats tout aussi cyniques qu’humanistes des deux époux opposés (laura dern, ray liotta, alan alda), orateurs et narrateurs apocryphes de la déliquescence du mariage, exagérant ou dénaturant les événements vécus dans l’intérêt de leurs clients, ou de leur propre ego. baumbach affirme que de la rencontre à la rupture, l’équilibre d’une relation entre deux êtres repose sur une négociation fictionnelle avec les faits, sur une histoire sur laquelle les deux s’accordent. marriage story raconte l’histoire de cette fiction tacite. once upon a time … in hollywood (usa/uk/chine, quentin tarantino) sans doute son meilleur film depuis inglourious basterds (allemagne/usa, ) et l’une des plus grandes réussites de , le neuvième long métrage du scénariste-réalisateur américain est à la fois un film-somme qui, situé dans le los angeles de , poursuit la démarche uchronique des trois précédents films tout en revisitant les lieux de ses trois premiers films. les clins d’œil aux films précédents (surtout à inglourious basterds) et aux influences habituelles (leone, corbucci et le western italien) se multiplient et se voient même intégrés aux récits, rick dalton relançant sa carrière grâce au « deuxième plus grand réalisateur de westerns spaghettis » ! un air de déjà vu donc, renforcé par la notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ présence de leonardo dicaprio et de brad pitt, de robert richardson à la photographie et d’une bande-son impeccable. et pourtant l’inattendu émerge à travers un ton à la fois tendre et mélancolique que l’on avait entrevu principalement dans jackie brown (usa, ). après une introduction énergique et hautement parodique (à l’image du début de carrière de rick dalton), la narration relâche le rythme – et c’est là que l’influence de rio bravo (usa, howard hawks, ) se fait sentir – pour nous laisser le temps de naviguer les trajectoires et de nous imprégner de la présence de ses personnages (rick dalton, cliff booth et sharon tate) et de la cité des anges. on retrouve la critique de la masculinité blanche au cœur de reservoir dogs, incarnée dans des personnages machos, xénophobes et étroits d’esprit, tout en encourageant le pathos pour la chute de rick (mention spéciale pour la scène dans laquelle une jeune actrice lui fait prendre conscience que son destin ressemble en tout point à celui du héros westernien dont il lit le récit) et de la sympathie pour la fidélité sans faille de cliff (à l’image de son chien brandy). la fin du film est poignante non seulement parce qu’on est heureux que sharon tate soit sauvée (à ce stade c’était attendu, on se demandait juste comment), mais aussi et surtout parce que cliff est bel et bien un « bon ami » malgré le narcissisme de rick et la barrière socioprofessionnelle qui les sépare et que les longs trajets en voiture de booth ne cessent de souligner. tarantino en profite aussi pour à la fois célébrer le polanski qui a réalisé rosemary’s baby (usa, ) et le comparer implicitement et défavorablement à cliff dont le comportement quand il refuse les avances d’une mineure (pussycat, force vitale au même titre que tate) tend plutôt à démentir les rumeurs mais dont la situation en bas de la hiérarchie de l’industrie cinématographique ne lui a jamais permis de se remettre. quant à la reconstitution fétichiste du los angeles de , démarche qui peut paraître à première vue paradoxale pour un réalisateur qui dit s’inspirer plus du cinéma que de la vie, elle nous (dé) montre splendidement combien est ténue la frontière entre la ville cinématographique et la ville réelle dont le film rend fidèlement compte de la dimension socioethnique (la présence latino) de sa topographie. le tragique tient avant tout de ce que le film est structuré autour de la chronique de la mort annoncée de sharon tate, figure iconique que le film va d’abord transformer en force symbolique de la vie (les scènes de danse) mais que la brillance de margot robbie finit par humaniser à travers une série de gestes quotidiens (un réveil, la prise en stop d’une autostoppeuse) et surtout par une virée au cinéma pour se contempler sur l’écran. cette scène qui célèbre les plaisirs du cinéma et de sa création fait de tate la double de tarantino, qui s’est lui aussi délecté à assister de multiples fois à des projections de reservoir dogs. si rick incarne l’incertitude que peut ressentir tout artiste et cliff un impossible idéal de sérénité (malgré son vécu), c’est tate qui est le cœur du film et le cœur de tarantino. once upon a time… in hollywood n’est pas une ode au classicisme hollywoodien – il est d’ailleurs étonnant que personne n’ait relevé que l’agent qui relance la carrière de rick est interprété par al pacino, l’une des stars du new hollywood. contrairement à ce qu’on a pu lire, c’est une ode au cinéma et à la ville. notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | index thèmes : film, tv, video keywords : american cinema, british cinema, canadian cinema, european cinema, new zealand cinema, independent cinema, blockbuster, art cinema, une vie cachée, joker, luce, marriage story, once upon a time… in hollywood mots-clés : cinéma américain, cinéma britannique, cinéma européen, cinéma néo-zélandais, cinéma indépendant, blockbuster, cinéma d’art, une vie cachée, joker, luce, marriage story, once upon a time… in hollywood auteurs david roche professeur d’études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles université paul valéry montpellier david.roche@univ-montp .fr vincent souladiÉ maître de conférences en études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles université toulouse jean jaurès vincent.souladie@univ-tlse .fr notre top des films anglophones de miranda, | 	notre top des films anglophones de nvs- - - -h-esser-review neo-victorian studies : ( ) pp. - doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. the perks and pitfalls of parody: review of claire nally’s steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian helena esser (birkbeck, university of london, england, uk) claire nally, steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian london: bloomsbury, isbn: - , £ (hb) ***** claire nally’s steampunk: gender, sub-culture, and the neo-victorian is the first full-length study to consider steampunk through a lens of neo- victorian critique. a neo-victorian perspective on steampunk has of course been well established in and through this journal since rebecca onion’s article in its inaugural issue, a special issue of neo-victorian studies dedicated to the subject and guest edited by rachel bowser and brian croxall, and several subsequent articles (see, e.g., montz , ferguson , danahay a and b, pho ). three anthologies have further interrogated a wide range of aspects in steampunk’s imaginative fiction and subculture, often focused on its creative re-use of technology and subcultural politics, but also including colonial frontiers, urbanism, gender and femininity, race and disability, consumerism, and identity (see taddeo and miller , brummett , bowser and croxall ). james carrott and brian johnson’s non-fiction vintage tomorrows ( ) and concomitant documentary ( , samuel goldwyn films) have explored and documented steampunk subculture in the us, and brandy schillace’s clockwork futures ( ) illustrates the history of the technology integral to the steampunk imagination. meanwhile roger whitson’s steampunk and nineteenth-century digital humanities ( ) is dedicated to steampunk’s material culture in the context of digital humanities. in its effort to examine a movement that spans across media https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd (fiction, music, visual art and sculpture, diy practise, cosplay, etc.) and continents, steampunk research is as diverse as the subculture itself, so that a full-length study such as nally’s is a welcome contribution. in her own words, nally’s study represents “a concerted attempt to engage with the issue of gender representation in the steampunk subculture” (p. ), contributing to ongoing debates within neo-victorian studies, where gender has continuously and prominently encoded neo-victorianism’s engagement with and re-signification of the traumas and legacies of the victorian age, and issues of social justice. nally’s work relies on and intersects productively with such neo-victorian concerns, while also delving into the rich and unexplored depths of steampunk textual and visual practise, where the neo-victorian approach to the past is infused with anachronistic play and retro-speculation. one of the strengths of this study is certainly nally’s focus on cross-media material, ranging from the publication steampunk magazine ( - ) across music, visual art and photography, and neo-burlesque performance, to graphic novels and prose fiction, particularly the genre of romance. in so doing, nally shines a light on material that has not yet been discussed in this way, but which represents the wide spectrum of steampunk’s manifestations. she contextualises these different media convincingly by illustrating how steampunk is stratified between counterculture and commercialisation. moreover, by frequently drawing on gothic subculture as a parallel, nally highlights the previously under-researched connections between gothic and steampunk, opening a promising avenue for future critical enquiry. from the beginning, nally situates her analysis within the well- established framework of neo-victorianism’s relationship with margaret thatcher’s notorious ‘victorian values’, but by considering the legacy of neoliberal ideologies in the age of brexit at various points in the monograph, nally also contributes innovative and necessary new impulses towards a discussion of neo-victorianism in the present cultural moment, querying to what extent and in which way steampunk may perform resistance to such conservative nostalgia. while nally takes into account that steampunk is a global phenomenon rooted in fiction emerging out of s california, her perspective is focused on the united kingdom and its cultural context. this certainly strengthens the focus and resonance of her analysis, but it also made me wonder to what degree an anglocentric neo- victorian lens might impose artificial limitations on our understanding of a https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. review of steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd global phenomenon such as steampunk. nally’s examples are chosen well for her reading in a british context, but does that mean we need separate studies about the significant amount of steampunk that is produced in other parts of the world? drawing on an appropriate variety of interdisciplinary approaches, nally creates a flexible theoretical and methodological framework designed effectively to account for steampunk’s unruly diversity, while also accommodating her focus on neo-victorian readings of gender. another strength of nally’s study is that her discussion of gender extends in equal measure to masculinity and femininity, as well as, in the last chapter, queer identities. neo-historical metafiction has largely understood itself as being able to address a perceived systemic historical inequality where gender is concerned, and neo-victorian criticism, like gender studies at large, tends to gravitate towards feminist analysis and queer identities, because that is where inequality is focused. even though traditional masculinity is also increasingly discussed, it is notable and illuminating that nally discusses masculinity and femininity in tandem. her first chapter considers steampunk non-fiction, zine culture, and activism in steampunk magazine, an integral mouthpiece for the subculture’s political aims, which has frequently been cited as a source in steampunk scholarship, but rarely been analysed as a publication in itself. she examines the publication’s role in creating an “imagined community” (p. ), which aligns itself with the underdogs and activists of the victorian age as a means of countercultural resistance “to mainstream values” (p. ). nally examines steampunk magazine in light of zine culture and counterculture activism, as well as outlining how feminist, intersectional activist miriam roček draws on the historical emma goldman to voice feminist concerns of both the past and present in dialogue with one another, compellingly illustrating the historical context that informs such steampunk creations. so too in her discussion of the steampunk band the men who will not be blamed for nothing, which focuses on how their celebration of marginalised voices and deviant victorian and steampunk women may criticise gender stereotypes. nally here alludes to ongoing debates in neo- victorian studies about sensationalism and voyeurism, and also calls up the recent #metoo movement to provide a nuanced argument. she concludes her chapter with a close reading of the men who will not be blamed for nothing’s songs about the victorian murderess mary ann cotton and baby https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd farmer amelia dyer, also convicted of infanticide, against the backdrop of their respective historical contexts, illustrating how the band “examine a horrific, dystopian past and project these experiences as a warning to the present” (p. ). in this chapter, nally outlines how steampunk “can be inflected with a subversive agenda” and “seek[s] to articulate a political attitude” by reflecting on “the history of marginalization and disenfranchisement” (p. ), aspects of which continue into the present. chapter two focuses on how victorian jingoistic masculinity is parodied in the illustrations of doctor geof and nick simpson, and how it reflects “upon the intersection of gender, history, representation, and steampunk” (p. ). nally examines the role of humour, irony, and absurdity in creating steampunk parodies of victorian gender roles, aware that such irony must remain readable to a contemporary audience. doctor geof’s art succinctly exemplifies this trend, especially in its parodic transposition of historical military propaganda and jingoism to the victorian ritual of taking tea. nally’s close reading against the historical backdrop of ideals of military masculinities between new imperialism and the first world war provides a productive analysis of elements that are integral to the steampunk mode but not always easy to analyse, namely irony and parody, while also examining the legacy of victorian gender ideals in the present, especially in the context of brexit, which doctor geof lampoons with his ‘tea referendum’. here, the visual language of propaganda is redirected towards tea drinking, and while tea is itself also symbolic of colonial practise, its association with elaborate ceremony and manners help render the illustration’s boisterous tone absurd. nally also suggests that doctor geof’s art, though produced from a male perspective, successfully (rather than maliciously) caricatures the nineteenth-century ‘weaker sex’ by “magnifying and ridiculing myths of femininity” (p. ). she then examines nick simpson’s photography of an imagined steampunk alter ego against the “heroic masculinity” (p. ) of the crimean war, especially the charge of the light brigade and the way it configured nobility, courage, and failure. lastly, the second chapter interrogates steampunk afterlives of the inventor and explorer and gendered notions about science. outlining how victorian masculinities are prodded and parodied “through bathos, incongruous humour, carnivalesque excess and irony”, nally claims that steampunk representations of gender may reflect “upon the ways in which our contemporary moment can rethink these https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. review of steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd stereotypes” (p. ). in spite of her detailed and convincing reading, however, i also wonder how and where exactly this jovial self-parody offers impulses to imagine alternatives to current hyper or toxic masculinities dominating the public realm. the material discussed here seems largely content with identifying jingoistic stereotypes and offering them up as absurdities, and while that is certainly how steampunk humour largely works, additional impulses would be needed in order to really rethink these gender ideas. that such endeavours may be fraught with ambiguity and the risk of implication or even involuntary complicity in the very discourses one seeks to dismantle is illustrated in the following chapter. here, nally turns towards the performer emilie autumn and the complex ways in which the latter’s neo-burlesque performance attempts to challenge stereotypes about gender, sexuality, and mental illness through a neo-victorian steampunk aesthetic in potentially problematic ways considering the “sexualized, sensational, or exhibitionist manner” in which she does so (p. ). autumn has long been regarded as a gothic performer who has been embraced by the steampunk community, and so nally is right to claim that she “is also a useful figure to reflect upon the ways in which steampunk has intersected with other subcultures and movements, such as goth and neo-victorianism, neo-cabaret and burlesque” (p. ). nally gives an overview of how autumn’s work draws on and intersects with gothic texts and victorian ideas of madness and gender and reflects on how second-wave feminist critics have linked madness and gendered oppression. she also considers the archetype of the (mad) scientist in victorian and steampunk fiction and as an agent of patriarchal control in the asylum, allied to “confinement, surveillance, and pathologization” (p. ). through a productive analysis of autumn’s staged rebellion against these discourses, nally shows how the performer’s usage of spectacle and the aesthetics of the freak show also implicate her in re-iterating the same harmful stereotypes: there “is a danger here of slipping into some fairly common tropes of femininity, infantilization and madness without any real sense of irony” (p. ). such a reading is in line with and expands on eckart voigt’s article on autumn (see voigts ), for example by outlining the ambiguity and risks involved in autumn’s use of a wheelchair to visualise mental illness, a choice with disablist connotations. according to nally, though informed by personal experience, rebellion, and sympathy, the use autumn’s performance makes of “voyeurism in relation to the abject, https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd monstrous visions of femininity onstage” (p. ) undermines its anti- establishment project, by becoming complicit in the repetition and perpetuation of victorian discourses linking femininity, deviance, and madness. chapter four is concerned with the neo-victorian graphic novel as yet another form of steampunk output, specifically brian talbot’s grandville ( - ) and alan moore and kevin o’neill’s the league of extraordinary gentlemen ( -present). nally uses linda hutcheon’s notion of postmodern intertextuality and ironic nostalgia as a theoretical framework through which to examine how steampunk mobilises a self-ware, meta-textual, neo-victorian collage in order to create new meanings. she illustrates how grandville draws on a fin-de-siècle aesthetic to create a steampunk paris, while also using anthropomorphism (the main characters in the graphic novels are all humanised animals) in order to complicate “simple nostalgic reflection” (p. ). most importantly, the graphic novel also draws on victorian and edwardian xenophobic rhetoric such as the ‘yellow peril’ in order to satirise and critique post- / rhetoric, islamophobia, and the war on terror. again, nally skilfully connects the historical background through steampunk to contemporary contexts, and in so doing shows how steampunk’s counter-factual remix and defamiliarisation may re-use the neo-victorian mode to speak to the present. she contextualises the graphic novel’s hero lebrock as a detective figure in the tradition of sherlock holmes, “a rational and authoritative individual” (p. ), and emphasises his physical strength and ready use of violence, which seem modern additions to the male hero. however, nally might have better substantiated her claim that lebrock’s stereotypical masculinity is “undercut by talbot’s characterisation”, namely the fact that he is represented as a badger, which configures him as tenacious and loyal, though simultaneously rendered vulnerable and “disenfranchised by his working-class heritage” (p. ). the fact that lebrock is also emotionally distant and that other characters in the story seem to parody the machismo of “lad culture” (p. ) rather conjure up a type of masculinity painfully common in contemporary popular media and hence may only be semi- ironic. nally then reflects on gender and technology as a preamble for discussing femininity, the new woman, and mina harker in the league of extraordinary gentlemen. she cites harker’s leadership, education, and https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. review of steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd independence as markers of the new woman, as well as reading her aggressive sexual behaviour as evidence for harker’s renegotiation of gender relations, especially with an elderly and emasculated version of rider haggard’s imperial masculinist hero, allan quatermain. similarly, nally interprets harker’s struggles with patriarchal structures as “represent[ing] the ways in which women are silenced or otherwise devalued” (p. ), noting how the graphically narrated psychological rape of the character is designed to “address the toxic masculinity which we might more obviously associate with twenty-first century discourses around rape culture” (p. ). while i agree with nally that the “value of steampunk narrative […] is that women’s agency is written back into the history, albeit fantastically and retrospectively” (p. ), harker strikes me as a highly ambivalent and potentially flawed example of female empowerment. for one, harker’s aggressive ‘seduction’ of quatermain, which nally outlines here – “she then proceeds to undress in front of the bewildered older man […] whilst he feebly protests […] and in a graphic representation of their sexual encounter, mina climbs on top of the aged quatermain” (pp. - ) – suggests that consent is beneath the strong female character, which is problematic. moreover, the fact that harker, whose assertiveness and independence threaten masculine identities (as nally identifies) is continually under threat from that same toxic masculinity, render her portrayal highly ambiguous, especially because patriarchal revenge or punishment for her transgression is then narrated in a detailed, graphic, and “highly sexualized” (p. ) manner. not only does such a portrayal use trauma to undermine her perceived defiance of patriarchy, but the voyeuristic narration also makes readers complicit in much the same way as emilie autumn’s performance does. it is not entirely clear how nally judges these ambiguities. while she convincingly argues that ironic nostalgia creates the “capacity to interrogate representations of gender, technology, and race”, “collapses the notion of progress (from a period of inequality and injustice to our enlightened contemporary moment)” and “holds an uncomfortable mirror up to some of our own racial and sexual prejudices” (p. ), the examples presented in this chapter warrant more nuanced discussion. this is also true for the last chapter, in which nally turns towards steampunk romance fiction in order to show how that genre can lapse back into conservative and heteronormative portrayals of gender “despite the https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd visibility and ostensibly positive message of the fiction under discussion” (p. ). the genre of romance is certainly not known for its radical challenge to gender stereotypes, and nally’s reading of kate mcalister’s steamed ( ) illustrates how “the fantasy space of the romance novel”, while offering women a “sexual outlet”, may also produce nothing much more than “a comfortable nostalgia” (p. ). she strengthens this argument by using post-feminist theory, “which seeks to articulate choice and lifestyle as part of an emancipating agenda, whilst at the same time paradoxically presenting some very conservative visions of what it is to be a woman” (p. ). given that nally claims that the romance heroine’s “radical potential is often foreclosed by the recourse to heteronormativity and ultimately conventions of femininity” (p. ), it would have been helpful had she defined her notion of “conservative”. is femininity as such considered conservative, and are love and marriage included in nally’s idea of lifestyle choices? since feminist and post-feminist media and theory have become highly complex in recent decades, these positions were not immediately clear to me. my own experience with fourth-wave feminism might also explain my surprise at nally’s reading of gail carriger’s parasol protectorate series ( - ). nally certainly identifies flaws in this frivolous, wodehousian supernatural series, such as the male hero being linked to animalistic violence (lord maccon is a werewolf), or the half-italian heroine alexia tarabotti being presented as a “racialized other” (p. ). however, nally’s reading is geared towards showing that alexia’s perceived empowerment remains ultimately illusory, because she marries and conforms to a traditional role of “domesticity and femininity”, doing “very little to challenge the status quo” (p. ). such a reading does not account for the fact that, throughout the series, alexia is also an agent of the crown, who travels independently across europe, at one time as an outcast and ‘fallen woman’, or that she is shown saving london from a destructive mechanical octopus only shortly before giving birth to the couple’s child. while alexia, like many real victorian women, must often articulate her position in relation to traditional gender norms (cf. montz ), she also repeatedly and readily defies them where they do not suit her purpose, for example by fainting comically to evade unwanted questions or using her fortified parasol to defend herself. in so doing, alexia also parodies gender conventions, at least to the same extent as does doctor geof’s art. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. review of steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd moreover, nally’s claim that carriger constructs a heteronormative status quo not only makes demands on the series, which none of the other materials discussed in this study would be able to meet, but it also fails to take into account that alexia is coded as bisexual. this means that while her marriage to lord maccon may appear to be heteronormative, it cannot be because the heroine is not exclusively heterosexual. nally does not comment on the fact that lord maccon, with his animalistic and gruff features, is also presented as a loyal and loving husband who considers his wife to be his equal. this might simply have been beyond the scope of the study, considering that nally foregrounds queer identities in the remainder of this chapter. she productively analyses the ‘deviant’ gender identities of the cross-dressing lesbian madame lefoux and the gay, effeminate vampire lord akeldama in the context of fin-de- siècle culture, citing havelock ellis, radclyffe hall and oscar wilde’s dandyism to provide context for how these steampunk queer identities are encoded in the steampunk text. however, in concluding that this serves to render queer identities “one-dimensional” (p. ) and legible against a conventional, heteronormative status quo, nally ironically overlooks the many other, less visibly coded queer identities in carriger’s series, such as lefoux’ lover angelique, a feminine lesbian, or professor lyall, the unassuming professor-type who passes as straight for a long time, but is later revealed to be gay. together with biffy and the other gay dandy drones, allessandro tarabotti, the bisexual adventurer, and alexia herself, these characters provide a range of complex queer identities, which decidedly undermine a heteronormative status quo in different ways. by representing a spectrum of queer identities less legible within a victorian gender discourse about ‘invert’ lesbians and effeminate dandies, carriger’s fiction, i would argue, challenges rather than reiterates them. this may further be illustrated by taking into account carriger’s adjacent publications, set in the same steampunk universe: in the series surrounding alexia’s daughter (the custard protocol series, - ), we find in primrose and madame sekhmet two lesbian women who are coded as traditionally feminine, and in anitra a trans-woman who passes as feminine. carriger further challenges the heteronormative conventions of the romance genre by publishing two tie-in novellas that focus, respectively, on lefoux’ lesbian romance (romancing the inventor, ), and lyall and biffy’s gay romance (romancing the werewolf, ). https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd in this chapter, nally provides a valuable and critical reflection on the romance genre and its post-feminist pitfalls, as well as skilfully outlining the victorian background against which queer steampunk identities are drawn. however, while mcalister’s novel affirms her reading, carriger’s works demand further study, perhaps particularly with regard to ironic nostalgia and parody, whose mechanisms nally has so productively illustrated in previous chapters. her conclusion that “steampunk fictions can be interpreted as both conservative and revolutionary in these contexts, subjecting the sexualized subject to visibility, but also stereotype and ultimately critical surveillance” (p. ) is merited, but a discussion of gender and especially queer identities in carriger’s fiction must also account for its diversity of representation, especially considering that so much of other steampunk media stay silent on queerness. nally’s study is an important and valuable contribution to the field of steampunk studies, as it expands and reflects on opportunities and dangers integral to the steampunk mode, while also providing a nuanced analysis of material which complements neo-victorian gender studies in new and productive ways. it effectively contextualises steampunk against its victorian intertexts and situates it in the overlapping contexts of neo- victorianism, the current political and cultural moment, and gender criticism. what nally’s study also illustrates is that steampunk gender, caught up in neo-victorian and post-feminist contexts, is fraught with complications and contradictions, mostly perhaps where femininity and the feminist project are at stake. steampunk, with its aspect of counter-factual retro-speculation and remix, has the advantage of being able to reimagine gender in historically inaccurate ways and may also poke fun at stereotypes through irony and parody, but like neo-victorianism and popular culture at large, it also seems to struggle to formulate alternatives without recourse to those same stereotypes. especially regarding masculinity, there seems to be a lack of vocabulary with which to articulate critique beyond parody, whereas portrayals of women must stand up to three generations of feminist and post-feminist critique. for this reason, nally’s study, with its broad and nuanced overview of a variety of materials and subcultural practise, is an important contribution to the discussion of gender in neo-victorian and steampunk scholarship: what are our stakes in the neo-historical and retro- speculative re-evaluation of victorian gender, and how do our current https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. review of steampunk: gender, sub-culture and the neo-victorian _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd understandings of femininity, queerness, and perhaps especially masculinity inform or limit such endeavours? bibliography bowser, rachel a., and brian croxall (guest eds.). . special issue: steampunk, science, and (neo)victorian technologies. neo-victorian studies : . –––. . like clockwork: steampunk pasts, presents, and futures. minneapolis, minnesota: university of minnesota press. brummett, barry. . clockwork rhetoric: the language and style of steampunk. jackson, mississippi: university of mississippi press. carrott, james, and brian johnson. . vintage tomorrows: a historian and a futurist journey through steampunk into the future of technology. sebastopol, california: o’reilly. danahay, martin. a. ‘steampunk as a postindustrial aesthetic: “all that is solid melts in air”’, neo-victorian studies : , - . –––. b. ‘steampunk and the performance of gender and sexuality’, neo- victorian studies : , special issue: performing the neo-victorian, - . ferguson, christine. . ‘surface tensions: steampunk, subculture, and the ideology of style’, neo-victorian studies : , special issue: spectacles and things: visual and material culture and/in neo-victorianism, - . macdonald, bryd (dir.). . vintage tomorrows. perf. william gibson, cory doctorow, gail carriger, cherie priest. samuel goldwyn films. [dvd] montz, amy. . ‘“in which parasols prove useful”: neo-victorian rewriting of victorian materiality’, neo-victorian studies : , - . onion, rebecca. . ‘reclaiming the machine: an introductory look at steampunk in everyday practice’, neo-victorian studies : (autumn), - . pho, diana. . ‘analog incarnations: steampunk performance across time’. neo-victorian studies : , special issue: neo-victorian asia, - . schillace, brandi. . clockwork futures: the science of steampunk and the reinvention of the modern world. new york: pegasus books. taddeo, julie anne, and cynthia j. miller (eds.). . steaming into a victorian future: a steampunk anthology. plymouth: scarecrow press. voigts, eckart. . ‘‘victoriana’s secret’: emilie autumn’s burlesque performance of subcultural neo-victorianism’, neo-victorian studies : , special issue: neo-victorianism and feminism: new approaches, - . https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. helena esser _____________________________________________________________ neo-victorian studies : ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. cc by-nc-nd whitson, roger. . steampunk and nineteenth-century digital humanities: literary retrofuturisms, media archaeologies, alternate histories. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. confirmatory factor analysis and validity of the sexual harassment scale in football refereeing international journal of environmental research and public health article confirmatory factor analysis and validity of the sexual harassment scale in football refereeing josefa sánchez ,* , sara serrat , estefanía castillo and alberto nuviala ���������� ������� citation: sánchez, j.; serrat, s.; castillo, e.; nuviala, a. confirmatory factor analysis and validity of the sexual harassment scale in football refereeing. int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https:// doi.org/ . /ijerph academic editor: andreas holtermann received: november accepted: january published: february publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. copyright: © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). department of integrated didactics, area of body expression, school of sport education, psychology and sciences, university of huelva, el carmen campus, avenida de las fuerzas armadas s/n, huelva, spain; sara.serrat@alu.uhu.es (s.s.); estefania.castillo@dempc.uhu.es (e.c.) department of sport informatics, area of physical and sport education, school of sport sciences, pablo de olavide university, ctra. de utrera, km , seville, spain; anuvnuv@upo.es * correspondence: josefa.sanchez@ddi.uhu.es; tel.: + - abstract: inequalities between men and women in the workplace are reflected in professional sports, specifically football refereeing. this phenomenon sometimes becomes sexual harassment since it is a stereotypically considered male profession in which women are a minority. to measure that behavior, it is necessary to count on valid and reliable tools. therefore, the goal of this study was to determine the factorial structure and the discriminant and convergent validity of the ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’, version of the department of defence (seq-dod). eighty-nine male football referees and ninety-four female football referees, with a mean age of . ± . years, participated in this studio conducted questionnaire in andalusia, spain. a confirmatory factor analysis was performed using the robust maximum-likelihood estimation method. the goodness of fit was assessed, and the factorial invariance was calculated to determine the stability of the model. subsequently, the validity was confirmed. the results corroborated the validity and reliability of the questionnaire adapted to the population studied. therefore, it can be used as a research instrument. keywords: sexual harassment; mobbing; football referee; gender inequality; sport . introduction the metoo movement has contributed to raising awareness about the sexual harass- ment to which women are subjected. this harassment can occur in different environments, such as work, transportation, or public spaces, at home, at educational environments, or sports, among others [ – ]. thousands of women have broken their silence and have shed light on sexual ha- rassment in the workplace and public spaces [ ]. nonetheless, most incidents of sexual harassment seem to go unreported because of fear of retaliation [ ], becoming an important social issue that prevents achieving gender equality in certain professions that have been considered to be masculine [ ]. sexual harassment is both an aggression against women and a form of gender discrim- ination [ ]. sexual harassment is defined as “any behavior, verbal or physical, of sexual nature that has the purpose or has the effect of undermining the dignity of a person, espe- cially when an intimidating, degrading, or offensive environment is created” [ ] (p. ). sexual harassment can be divided into three dimensions that feature differences in their concepts, although they are related to each other [ ]. these dimensions are sexual coercion; unwanted sexual attention, and gender-based harassment. sexual coercion is sexual cooperation in exchange for certain considerations, making itself visible through bribes, threats, and sexual blackmail. unwanted sexual attention refers to verbal and non-verbal unwanted, offensive behaviors, without being reciprocal, such as invitations to dates despite saying no, inappropriate touching, or non-consensual sex. gender-based int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of harassment refers to verbal and non-verbal behaviors with the purpose of insulting, harass- ing, and degrading through disrespect, sexist comments, distinctive treatment, comments about the body, debate about their sexual life, gestures, and inappropriate exhibitions [ ]. sexual harassment victims suffer a violation of their dignity. they lose the right to enjoy their jobs and may have negative consequences on their physical and mental health. in addition, their performance and productivity may decrease [ – ]. different forms of sexual harassment occur in all sports and at all levels [ ], and although prevalence rates have not been systematically estimated, it appears to be higher on the elite level of sports [ ]. traditionally, the figure of the bully has been the coach, but today it is also considered that there is sexual abuse between equals and that it is independent of their sexual orientation [ ]. in the world of sports, there have been numerous studies on violence in soccer [ – ]. although few studies address sexual violence, they are not always focused on the female population [ , ]. these studies often focus on the female population as victims of domestic violence after soccer games, but not as professional athletes [ , ]. in relation to previous studies on sexual harassment, research has been carried out on sports in general [ , ] or on university sports [ ]. on the other hand, studies on individual sports, such as athletics [ – ], in sports teams, such as american football [ ], or soccer [ ]. these studies show, among other findings, that this type of behavior on athletes can cause serious consequences on the physical and mental health of the victims [ , , ]. in relation to soccer, studies on refereeing reveal the stress to which the referees are exposed in their professional work, and on occasions, the abuse they suffer from players, coaches, and spectators [ – ]. although some studies have been carried out in relation to the refereeing figure in soccer, research lacks in this regard [ ]. refereeing work is one of the least valued professions in the soccer world [ – ], and it is a highly masculinized context [ , ], with the number of women being considerably lower than men [ , ]. on the other hand, studies show that female referees suffer greater pressure during matches and less recognition of their work, thus hindering their professional development and suffering double discrimination for being a referee and for being a woman [ , , ]. to study sexual harassment in sports, qualitative instruments, such as interviews or life history, have been used [ , , , , , ]. timpka et al. [ ], designed a protocol for the prevention of sexual abuse in sports. after reviewing the literature, the seq-dod questionnaire was considered more accessible and easy to translate and, therefore, to apply to this study. this questionnaire has been widely used. it has also been subjected to different reviews and critics that conclude that it is an adequate instrument due to the scarcity of quantitative measures that exist to this topic of sexual harassment [ ]. another of the main reasons to use this questionnaire is the similarity between the sports and the military fields. one of the characteristics of these work environments is the presence of women and men in a context historically understood for men [ ]. the military and sports worlds also coincide in the minimum presence of women and the traditional social thought that both are reserved for male practice only [ , , ]. this questionnaire has been widely used in different countries and populations, especially those related to the military field, but it has also been applied in other popula- tions [ , ]. in the absence of a sexual harassment investigation in the football refereeing world, the purpose of the present study was to adapt the ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’ version of the department of defense (seq-dod) [ ]. the goals were to determine the factorial structure and the discriminant and convergent validity of the seq-dod. the most relevant contribution of this paper is to adapt an instrument to collect useful information in the sports context, specifically in football refereeing. it may be used in future studies, adapting it to other sports or other figures, such as female and male players, or technical team, among other future lines of research. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . materials and methods . . participants one hundred and eighty-three football referees from different categories partici- pated in the present study, of which . % were women. the mean age was . ± . years, and the average experience in refereeing was . ± . years. . . instrument the seq-dod (the ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’ version of the department of defense) [ ] was the instrument used in the present study. it is a measurement tool used to determine offensive sexual experiences. this questionnaire was reviewed and adapted to the football refereeing environment. the seq-dod, in its original version, consisted of four factors, namely: sexist hostility, sexual hostility, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. all the questions shared a common root: “in the last months, have you observed or been a victim of some type of behavior described below, perpetrated by others in your work as a football referee?” the body of each element described behaviors that the interviewee might have experienced. the reliability of the instrument, after fieldwork, measured with cronbach’s alpha, was . . responses were given on a likert-type scale, ranging from (never) to (very often). various sociodemographic questions were added to the questionnaire, such as sex, age, experience in football refereeing, and refereeing category. . . procedure first, the organization responsible for the football refereeing that participated in the study was informed about it. participating referees were asked for permission to request their informed consent. the study was conducted after approval. the design took into account the principles established in the declaration of helsinki [ ]. in the same way, we took into consideration the current spanish legal regulations that normalize the protection of personal data [ ]. the fieldwork was carried out by means of a self-administered questionnaire with the presence of an interviewer, which lasted about ten minutes. . . statistical analysis first, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis. the method used was the robust maximum-likelihood estimation. to determine the goodness of fit, we reviewed the indicators, namely: the chi-square value divided by the degrees of freedom (χ /gl), values below . were considered acceptable; root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), the model would show an acceptable adjustment if the value were < . ; and comparative fit index (cfi), values above . are considered acceptable [ , ]. in addition, in order to follow byrne’s indications [ ], we added the akaike information criterion and the expected cross-validation index. subsequently, the factorial invariance was calculated to determine the stability of the model in different populations. convergent validity tests were performed by calculating correlations between factors and composite reliability. finally, we determined the discriminant validity using three different procedures: calculation of correlations between factors and comparison with the square root of the average variance extracted (ave); estimation of alternative models; and construction of confidence intervals for factors correlation with % confidence interval. the statistical analyses were performed using the statistical packages spss (statistical package for the social sciences, version . (spss, ibm, armonk, ny, usa)) and amos v (analysis of moment structure (amos, ibm, armonk, ny, usa), version . ) int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . results to confirm whether or not the scale met the expected factorial structure, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis (figure ). the adequacy of the model under test (model ), which consisted of four factors and twenty-four items, was carried out through a joint as- sessment of a group of indices. table contains the information provided by the adjustment indices, and it can be concluded that it was a correct model. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x for peer review of a joint assessment of a group of indices. table contains the information provided by the adjustment indices, and it can be concluded that it was a correct model. figure . structural model of ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’, department of defence (seq- dod). table . statistics adjustment for the ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’, department of defence (seq-dod) scale model; comparison between models using model as correct. goodness-of-fit indices and model comparisons of the tested models model cmin df p cmin/df cfi rmsea ecvi aic model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . comparisons of conditions using measurement invariance procedures model dif. df dif. cmin p assuming that model is correct . . . . assuming that model is correct . . note. cmin: minimum discrepancy; df: degrees of freedom; cfi: comparative fit index; rmsea: root mean square error of approximation; ecvi: expected cross-validation index; aic: akaike information criterion; model had no restrictions; sexist hostility sexual hostility sexual attention sexual coercion e i k h o p s t u . . . . . . . . . . . a c d b f l m g j n v p w x r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . figure . structural model of ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’, department of defence (seq-dod). the factorial invariance of the model was contrasted by comparing two groups of football referees, which were selected at random among the population object of the present study. we considered the differences in χ between the models without restrictions (model ), model (had restrictions relating to the weight measurement), and model (had weight measurement and covariance restricted), observing differences between models vs. and vs. (table ) the cfi value of the models indicated that all had very similar values, with a difference between them equal to − . . similarly, the akaike information criterion and the expected cross-validation index indicated that the differences in the adjustments were minimal; therefore, the different models exhibited very similar values. these results suggest the factorial invariance of the model. the convergent validity was confirmed by the calculation of the correlations between the factors of the seq-dod. the results indicated positive and significant correlations between the factors of the scale. similarly, the composite reliability values obtained for each int. j. environ. res. public health , , of dimension suggested the existence of this type of validity.to determine the discriminant validity, the square root of the ave was compared with the correlation between both constructs. table shows this correlation and, in the diagonal, the square root of the ave, which was superior to the correlation between the different constructs of the questionnaire. considering these results, it can be affirmed that there was discriminant validity. table . statistics adjustment for the ‘sexual experiences questionnaire’, department of defence (seq-dod) scale model; comparison between models using model as correct. goodness-of-fit indices and model comparisons of the tested models model cmin df p cmin/dfcfi rmsea ecvi aic model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . model . < . . . . . . comparisons of conditions using measurement invariance procedures model dif. df dif. cmin p assuming that model is correct . . . . assuming that model is correct . . note. cmin: minimum discrepancy; df: degrees of freedom; cfi: comparative fit index; rmsea: root mean square error of approximation; ecvi: expected cross-validation index; aic: akaike information criterion; model had no restrictions; model had restrictions relating to the weight measurement; model had weight measurement and covariance restricted; dif. cmin: difference between model and the rest of the models; dif. df: difference between model and the rest of the models; p: significance level between models. table . means, correlations between factors, and square roots of average variance extracted (in the diagonal); cronbach’s alpha; composite reliability. total mean sexist hostility sexual hostility unwanted sexual attention sexual coercion α cr sexist hostility . ± . ( . ) . ** . ** . ** . . sexual hostility . ± . ( . ) . ** . ** . . unwanted sexual attention . ± . ( . ) . ** . . sexual coercion . ± . ( . ) . . note. ** p < . ; cr: composite reliability. as a second discriminant validity test, alternative models were estimated in such a way that a restriction in all of them, i.e., the correlation between each pair of dimensions, should be equal to . in addition, the chi-square test was performed with each one to compare the models to assess whether or not they were significantly different. table shows how the difference between the chi-square test values was always significant. this way, the dimensions of the scale were significantly different from each other, thus confirming the discriminant validity. as a third way to confirm this type of validity, we calculated the possible correlations between the factors. this procedure allowed the construction of the confidence interval relating to the correlations between the dimensions. table shows that the discriminant validity of the scale could be confirmed, since none of the confidence intervals of these correlations contained value at % confidence. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . test of χ differences; confidence intervals of correlations between dimensions. χ differences (gl) p confidence interval sexist hostility/sexual hostility . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) sexist hostility/unwanted sexual attention . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) sexist hostility/sexual coercion . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) sexual hostility/unwanted sexual attention . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) sexual hostility/ sexual coercion . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) unwanted sexual attention/sexual coercion . ( ) − . ( ) = . ( ) < . ( . – . ) . discussion the goals of the present study were to determine the factorial structure and the discriminant and convergent validity of the seq-dod [ ] in spanish football referees. the results confirmed the validity and reliability of the adaptation of the questionnaire to the population under study. the resulting latent variables were the same as those in the original questionnaire. the purpose of our study was to determine the fit of the original model to the data obtained from a sample of spanish football referees. to that end, we performed a confir- matory factor analysis. the parameters were estimated using the maximum likelihood method [ ]. to assess the adequacy of the model under test, we performed a joint as- sessment of a group of indices. some of the most used adjustment indices were selected considering values above . acceptable in the case of the cfi. in the case of rmsea, the model would exhibit an acceptable fit if the value was < . [ ], and values ≤ . would indicate a good fit [ ]. regarding the values of the quotient between χ and gl, in a model considered perfect, the value would be . , and ratios below . would be considered a very good fit of the model, whereas values below . would be considered acceptable [ – ]. finally, due to the convenience of comparing the fit of the model, we added two specially developed indices, namely: the akaike information criterion, i.e., a comparative index between models, having to choose the model that presents a lower value [ ] (values closer to zero indicate a better fit); and the expected cross-validation index, which measures the discrepancy between the covariance matrix involved in the analyzed sample and the expected covariance matrix of another sample of the same size. when models are being compared, a lower expected cross-validation index value indicates the model with the best fit [ ]. the results of the different fit indices of the original model can be considered accept- able. therefore, the model can be considered correct for the population of football referees assessed in the present study. furthermore, the reliability of the resulting instrument measured with cronbach’s alpha was . , which indicated good internal consistency. subsequently, we assessed the invariance of the factorial structure through multi- group analysis [ ]. to that end, the group was divided into two subgroups at random. the aim was to confirm that there were no significant differences between a model without invariance and different models with invariance in some parameters. we found significant differences in chi-square values between the unrestricted model (model ) and the rest of the models. however, given that the chi-square coefficient is sensitive to sample size, we also used the criterion proposed by cheung and rensvold [ ] with respect to ∆cfi. according to these authors, ∆cfi values lower than or equal to − . indicate that the null hypothesis of invariance cannot be rejected. the ∆cfi values found in the present study, int. j. environ. res. public health , , of in the comparison of the unrestricted model with the rest of the models, suggest that the factorial structure of the scale was invariant. the convergent validity was determined by the correlations between the seq-dod factors using pearson’s correlation coefficient. the correlations between them were positive, being high in some cases, which can give an idea of the similarity of the constructs. the results of the correlations demonstrated this type of validity since the results were within the criteria proposed by devon et al. [ ] for this type of validity. the second test of convergent validity of the instrument was determined by composite reliability. acceptable values are > . [ , ]. both tests indicated the existence of this type of validity. the discriminant validity of the scale was expressed by the contrast between the different factors that composed it. this type of validity occurs if the concepts that comprise it are really different and, at the same time, related to each other [ ]. to confirm this validity, these concepts were assessed in various ways. the first consisted of comparing the square root of the ave with the correlation between the constructs of the scale [ ]. the square root of the ave should be higher than the correlation between the constructs so that there is discriminant validity between them. considering the results of the correlations and the ave values, it can be affirmed that there was discriminant validity. this type of validity can also be confirmed in two other ways. the first has been proposed by burnkrant and page [ ]. it attempts to estimate alternative models in such a way that a restriction is included in all of them, i.e., the correlation between each pair of dimensions should be equal to . in the other, each model should be subject to a chi-square test to compare them and assess whether they are significantly different. our results have proven that the difference between the chi-squared values was always significant. therefore, the dimensions of the seq-dod were different from each other, thus confirming the discriminant validity. the third way consists of calculating the possible correlations between the factors and constructing the confidence intervals of the correlations between all the dimensions. the results of the present study also indicated the occurrence of this type of validity since none of the confidence intervals of these correlations contained the value at % confidence [ ]. . conclusions in conclusion, the seq-dod has proven to be valid and reliable. however, it is still in an early stage. the limitations related to the number of football referees assessed in the fieldwork and the lack of bibliography on the subject makes it necessary to conduct further studies in-depth and improve, if possible, this instrument. author contributions: conceptualization, s.s.; methodology, j.s.; validation, s.s.; formal analysis, a.n.; investigation, e.c.; resources, j.s.; data curation, a.n.; writing—original draft preparation, s.s.; writing—review and editing, e.c.; visualization, e.c.; supervision, a.n.; project administration, j.s. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. institutional review board statement: the study was conducted according to the guidelines of the declaration of helsinki, and approved by the ethics committee of junta de andalucía (protocol code -n- and date of approval / / ). informed consent statement: informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. data availability statement: data is contained within the article; there is no supplementary material. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of references . corredoira, l. the right of one’s own image in the recent cases of sexual harassment in film industry: applying the european theory of concentric circles to celebrities (in particular, women). j. inf. policy , , – . 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[crossref] http://doi.org/ . /s sem _ http://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . / http://doi.org/ . /bf http://doi.org/ . / http://doi.org/ . / - . . . 	introduction 	materials and methods 	participants 	instrument 	procedure 	statistical analysis 	results 	discussion 	conclusions 	references social constructionism now more than ever: following the hermeneutic money trail in a post-truth world social constructionism now more than ever: following the hermeneutic money trail in a post-truth world michael adorjan published online: april # springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature in the summer of , at the annual meetings of the society for the study of social problems, i had the great privilege of organizing two very special critical dialogue sessions centered on both the origins of social constructionism, as well as future directions. the year marked the th anniversary of the publication of spector and kitsuse’s ( ) landmark constructing social problems (herein csp). this special issue of the american sociologist presents some of the key papers presented at these sessions, which included many well-seasoned experts who have contributed to constructionism since the publication of csp, including malcolm spector himself, as well as several relatively junior scholars who are at the vanguard of new directions and advances – both empirical and theoretical – of constructionism going forward. since the conference took place in montreal, a particularly apt leonard cohen quote came to my mind (who grew up in montreal and remains closely affiliated with it), which i decided to recite while opening the first session, which i chaired. the lines come from cohen’s song the future, off the album of the same name: things are gonna slide / slide in all directions won’t be nothing / nothing you can measure anymore the blizzard / the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it’s overturned the order of the soul the lyrics can be interpreted in a number of ways, but seems to aptly project today’s general ‘post-truth’ climate (where ‘nothing can be measured anymore’), replete with ‘alternative facts’ and algorithmically-driven news feeds on social media. as part of the contemporary societal malaise, particularly concentrated in the united states following the election of donald trump, the passage may also link to attacks on journalism, academia and academic knowledge. on a wider global scale there is appears to be a the american sociologist ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * michael adorjan madorjan@ucalgary.ca department of sociology, university of calgary, university dr. nw, calgary, alberta, canada http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:madorjan@ucalgary.ca surge in authoritarian state power, extreme forms of nationalism and xenophobia, associated also with radicalism, polarization and animosity (diamond et al. ; giroux ; hobolt ). given this zeitgeist, sociology and the knowledge it produces is particularly fragile, especially if the knowledge produced through socio- logical research is easily dismissed as ideologically driven propaganda emanating from ‘the far left’, or irrelevant ‘relativist’ musings projected from the ivory tower. it makes eminent sense, then, for sociologists, and scientists across all disciplines, to proceed with caution and conduct carefully crafted examinations that help to produce reliable, valid and reproducible knowledge which responds to cohen’s ‘blizzard’ on crucial issues and social problems such as global warming, immigration, and widening gaps in structured inequalities, among others. many of us inspired by sociology come to embrace the insights that accrue from the development of a sociological imagination (mills ), giving us both the knowledge and tools to take action. social activism seems braided to the very essence of sociology, and concomitantly, to the various inspiring forms of activism arising from the #metoo and #timesup awareness networks, among others (cf. glaser and strauss ). in this moment, then, given the pressures sociology is facing, we must expect calls for emboldening its theoretical and episte- mological armament; to ready itself for combat against the social forces that set themselves against the sociological, given that to ‘commit sociology’ is, in this politically charged moment, seen as ideological folly and one more permutation of false knowledge (kay and beland ; singh ). searching for the rational, the objective, and the valid in such a climate seems not only prudent but essential. this is certainly the charge of ‘professional sociology’ as defined by burawoy ( ). years before this moment, csp stridently declared itself in opposition to norma- tive, professional sociology, with the striking remark on the st page: bthere is not and never has been a sociology of social problems^ (spector and kitsuse : ). spector and kitsuse challenged the normative (specifically structural functionalist) frameworks that social problems up to then were studied in sociology. but what of the legacy of csp today? what do some of constructionism’s most luminary figures have to say about its impact? the contributors to this special issue explicate the various contribu- tions of the perspective, and some of the challenges it has faced over the decades, including the critiques which have emerged within constructionist circles, as well as those from without. i proceed by highlighting these contributions, before turning to the broader question of what all this means given the general assault on sociological knowledge today noted above. reflections and reminders this special issue begins with malcolm spector’s own reflections on the years since the publication of csp. spector offers a candid glance at the mentoring role john kitsuse played to spector, and how they came to work together to develop the framework of social constructionism. spector highlights kitsuse’s intellectual style and work within the ‘societal reaction’ approaches popular during the s and s (e.g., the work of howard becker and edwin lemert) including a rejection of a bbalanced approach^, opting instead for an approach which did bnot compromise^ and btry to make everyone happy .̂ spector notes his admiration for woolgar and the american sociologist ( ) : – pawluch’s influential article ontological gerrymandering (woolgar and pawluch ), which raised epistemological questions about whether it is possible to avoid introduc- ing objective assumptions into the analysis. spector argues that woolgar and pawluch were making a point that bwas essentially philosophical,^ but adds bwe are not philosophers.^ spector reveals he is less concerned about whether the junior (i.e., untenured) constructionist scholars of today employ a ‘strict’ or ‘contextual’ stance (see rafter ; troyer ), so long as they do not center their analyses on the bcauses of the conditions.^ spector ends his article with some prescient advice for junior scholars taking up empirical constructionist research. claimsmaking discourses are fundamentally moral discourses, and constitute bsocial problems as moral action^. this is a central insight ushered forth in joseph schneider’s contribution to this special issue. his aim is to retrace some of spector and kitsuse’s foundational arguments in order to ‘double down’ on the importance of an approach which takes seriously the notion that bsocial problems are what people think they are^. schneider highlights the symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological influences on social constructionism, especially from steven woolgar, who drew (partly from his collaborations with bruno latour), an appreciation for the sociological significance of relativism. social constructionists’ ‘core’ bnon-negotiable claim,^ schneider pinpoints: bno claims-making, no social problems. full stop.^ (as an aside, tony christensen’s article in this special issue picks up on this very point). due to constructionism’s focus on moral discourses, schneider argues a bselective agnosticism^ is required, whereby bthe sociologist cannot use their own personal morality or ideology to identify condi- tions as problems.^ social constructionists are certainly not amoral and agnostic to social problems in their everyday lives (see dorothy pawluch’s article in this special issue), but while conducting their research they should be, he argues, agnostic to the claims themselves. schneider is aware of the challenges this poses in the present political climate of – especially – the united states. this approach may well be perceived as undercutting sociologists as experts on social conditions and how to best ameliorate them. indeed, it bbrings the social scientist under analytical scrutiny .̂ yet this approach is singular and prescient insofar as it centers on, schneider lucidly articulates, ba very particular ontological indifference with respect not to what exists but rather to what their theory warrants as relevant data; which is to say, definitional activities.^ this does not bweaken^ sociological knowledge, but rather bthe point is to acknowledge the put-together and relative nature of all claims such that the very practices of that making are themselves available for scrutiny.^ drawing from latour, and insightfully animating his advocacy of selectively agnostic constructionist research, schneider observes bthe more constructed, the more real.^ another contemporary of kitsuse, peter ibarra, contributes an article geared to providing advice to constructionist scholars on how to hone their craft. ibarra was kitsuse’s former student and later collaborator, contributing to the debates revolv- ing around ontological gerrymandering and ‘strict’ versus ‘contextual’ constructionism (e.g., ibarra and kitsuse ). ibarra underscores kitsuse’s advocacy of fieldwork-based research, the importance of tracing bhow claims travel across institutionalized spaces, thereby connecting texts to their auspices,^ and the significance of theorizing the social processes associated with claimsmaking, rather than the social conditions under examination. he remarks on the need for continual reflexivity during the course of research and, perhaps the american sociologist ( ) : – most unpredictably, why constructionist analysts should bcultivate a sense of the absurd.^ the paper proceeds to explicate each of these points in turn. scholars who are ‘cutting their teeth’ with a constructionist project, such as graduate students or even seasoned sociologists taking up a constructionist study for the first time, will find useful ibarra recalling what it was like to discuss constructionism with kitsuse, including the sort of ‘general scope’ questions kitsuse would be known to ask his students. these are questions readers are encouraged to ask themselves to help develop stronger empirical and theoretical directions of analysis. perhaps ironically, given some – such as spector, this issue – who critique ibarra and kitsuse’s later work as advocating a focus too centered on solely the discursive (see ibarra and kitsuse , ), ibarra highlights kitsuse’s encouragement for the collection of multiple sources of content (a bvariegated… social problems process^ (ibarra and kitsuse )), especially ethnographic research, in order to better situate the context of claimsmaking under examination (see also ibarra and adorjan for further discussion of kitsuse’s sense of the importance of social context for constructionist analyses). ibarra also highlights the argument that constructionism, while often focused on ‘successful’ claims, also has the potential to examine social processes of failure (or contesta- tion), an argument which also resonates with tony christensen’s article in this issue. dorothy pawluch’s contribution centers on a reminder of the strengths of spector and kitsuse’s vision of a sociology of social problems, not conditions. she recognizes both the professional and personal challenges with positioning oneself as a construc- tionist scholar today, especially given academic reproaches in traditionally receptive associations such as the society for the study of social problems. she also refers to challenges based on pressures to engage in social activism and ‘public sociology’. the stress placed upon sociology to ‘batten down the positivist hatches’ comes from all directions (arguments i revisit myself below), and it is no wonder that sociological research has widely become synonymous with research on inequality. pawluch refers to harris ( ), who observes that sociology’s bpreoccupation with inequality has permeated virtually all subfields of the discipline.^ she places these challenges in relation to a wider backdrop of controversies regarding the university’s role in wider society, both in terms of public engagement and outreach (again, ‘public sociology’) and engagement in ‘social justice’. significantly, she highlights how many publics do, in fact, embrace constructionist insights despite knowledge produced ‘on the sidelines’ in relation to truth claims; she also draws attention to how calls for freedom of expression on university campuses and calls for universities to teach how to think not just what to think are, perhaps, in line with constructionism’s call for agnostic analyses pinpointing social processes through which both words and actions are embroiled. pawluch’s article proceeds by making a call for constructionists to reaffirm their commitments to a constructionist research agenda that is emboldened against the bcurrent zeitgeist in sociology departments and on university campuses,^ but also does not place in the rear view mirror the important epistemological debates which took place in the s and s. reviewing these debates in detail, she suggests not a single ‘holy’ way forward, but simply argues constructionist scholars should be aware of the analytical choices they make and their implications. the original sorts of ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions that spector and kitsuse espoused the american sociologist ( ) : – are far from exhausted, she argues. we are only beginning to realize the breadth of our questions. joel best’s article takes stock of the ‘internal’ debates within constructionist circles since the publication of csp, but also acknowledges some of the more recent critiques external to the paradigm. he begins by acknowledging the influence csp had in the late s, but argues that, given developments in the four decades since the book’s publication, placing too much emphasis on the origin of csp bwould come at a cost^. csp, he reminds us, illuminated a need at the time for the case study method, which produced a series of important empirical ‘natural histories’ of social problems. never- theless, constructionism risks devolving into internally-centric epistemological essays, he argues, unless it can push beyond case studies and develop theory related to the social processes that can be examined comparatively across individual cases (best ). best also refers to what inspired his term ‘strict constructionism’ and under- scores his long-standing advocacy of the ‘contextual’ approach to constructionism (e.g., best ), based on his position that bit [is] impossible to conduct research that would meet the standards of a strong, strict constructionist reading.^ his paper draws from an interesting and applicable bumblebee analogy, arguing that despite these unresolvable epistemological dilemmas, constructionists have pursued fruitful empiri- cal research; one with an international scope. even though these studies continue to, unavoidably, produce ‘ontological gerrymandering’, best centers on an insight that sociological analysis devoid of context (implying strict constructionism) ceases to remain sociological, if sociology’s domain of expertise is the explication of social context and its relevance to social life. best’s paper is also unique among the contrib- utors here, as he then turns to criticisms ‘from the outside’ (external to constructionism), that continue to challenge the utility of social constructionism. he highlights the recent critiques by dello buono ( , ), previous president of the society for the study of social problems, who argues from a conflict-theory lens that constructionism fails to acknowledge the objective facticity of capitalism and the need to synthesize this to reinvigorate constructionism and make it politically relevant for activism. i return to dello buono’s arguments below. best writes bone can imagine a set of analogous calls for moving beyond social constructionism from analysts favoring other ideologies—say, conservatism, feminism, or fundamentalism.^ his argument is, rather than synthesizing or incorporating the assumptions (e.g., regarding power) of such approaches, constructionist scholars should focus on strengthening constructionism itself. he encourages constructionists to ask themselves ‘so what’ questions pertaining to new empirical studies, which he argues need to go beyond merely another social construction of ‘x’. best’s own work has examined the processes that occur when claimsmaking spreads around the world, contributing knowledge to the global scope of claimsmaking activities and the social processes animating them (best b). amir marvasti’s contribution encourages constructionists to bhave a better appreci- ation of the diversity of constructionist thought and its research practices,^ through an overview of the various ways bwords^ and bnumbers^ are employed in constructionist a recent special issue of qualitative sociological review ( , xi( )) also includes new empirical studies and theoretical directions (including constructionist examinations outside the anglo global north, cyberspace and ‘big data’), indicating the continued vibrancy of new scholarship. the american sociologist ( ) : – research. rather than asking constructionists to position themselves as either ‘strict’ or ‘contextual’ constructionists, he argues that the analytical framework is contingent upon the questions being asked. he begins by problematizing the assumption that constructionist research is necessarily qualitative, and highlighting the varying reasons constructionists may be drawn to qualitative methods. the careful tracking of subjec- tive interpretations and the explication of ‘lived experiences’ remains arguably central, primarily through interviews, discourse analysis or ethnography. these approaches center on the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ of claims-making activities and processes. words, his paper shows, can be used as constructive of social conditions, including people, morality and emotion (loseke ), and words can also be breflexively connected with concrete conditions^ (gubrium and holstein ). marvasti then turns to the use of numbers in constructionist research. ‘strict constructionists’, for instance, usually opt not to challenge bthe accuracy of numbers but understanding how they are constructed and used, particularly in institutional setting^. some constructionists employ numbers to establish causal relations – here asking ‘why’ questions, seeking to go beyond ‘how’ and ‘what’. others seek to use numbers to bestablish fallacies^ and unwarranted societal responses to social problems. for some, marvasti writes, causal analysis and inferential statistics are not inherently antithetical to the project of constructionism. namely, it would be worth knowing not just how but why (i.e., as a result of what social conditions) x changed into y. while marvasti recognizes that ‘mixed methods’ approaches are often criticized for combining antithetical epistemological assumptions and even questions, his paper effectively advocates for eclecticism in constructionist scholarship going forward. the paper projects a broader argument: constructionists should be free to ask the questions they wish, and make methodological choices in line with these questions, rather than preconceived judgements applied to qualitative or quantitative, nor ‘strict’ or ‘contextual’ approaches. jared del rosso’s article also contributes ideas towards advancing constructionist analysis, which can be seen as another approach to extending beyond case study methodology. del rosso, drawing from bruno latour, advocates going beyond claimsmaking to bsocial problems chains^. this he defines as bsites of social problems activities connected by objectified forms of social problems, such as social problem categories inscribed in texts or constructions of the reality of a problem^ (my empha- sis). from the stability and mobility afforded by these objectified sites, constructionists, del rosso argues, should trace how they connect to other social problems sites (i.e., social problems chains), examining the resources these other sites do or do not provide. del rosso’s account aims to help develop social problems theory to account for, in essence, the various permutations of power involved in social problems processes. his goal is to bexpand our sense of how and of what problems are made.^ he underscores a particular problem sometimes identified in constructionism: that constructionists are unable to distinguish between very different sorts of claims, especially if one is unilaterally agnostic to the claims under scrutiny. surely constructionists would ac- knowledge the differences between claims to satanic cults versus hiv/aids in the s, he asks rhetorically. one solution to bbetter distinguish among problems^, del the american sociologist ( ) : – rosso argues, is to bdiversify our analytic vocabulary, so we may better account for the myriad of things that are part and parcel of social problems activities.^ he advocates pushing beyond the ‘merely’ discursive to include ethnographic observation of social problems claimsmaking and ‘chains’ (see also ibarra and adorjan , and christensen, this issue). included in this is the physical materiality relevant to claims makers, which produces the contexts they draw from when articulating concerns about social problems (del rosso uses the example of u.s. torture (see also rosso , )). he writes: bsocial problems theorists must be the most nimble of construction- ists, recognizing the panoply of instruments and materials that claims-makers employ.^ significantly, he acknowledges that this more eclectic incorporation of material condi- tions relevant to claimsmakers is still not amenable to assessments of validity by analysts (i.e., which claims and chains are more ‘correct’, factually or morally, than others). he argues that such questions remain bbeyond the horizon of the construction- ist study. rather, by revealing the different activities, instruments, and materials making up those chains, our studies may better enable others to assess differences among claims^ (my emphasis). del rosso concludes by explicating some methodological challenges implementing such a constructionist project. optimistically, sara crawley lucidly articulates in her contribution to this special issue, while social construction has become politically irrelevant, it has much potential to address power, especially by paying much greater attention to material conditions (here her arguments resonate with both del rosso and christensen, this issue). bthe value of constructionist perspectives is in seeing social relations as variable and socially organized,^ she argues, brather than as transhistorical, natural conditions,^; and notes that bexploring social relations exposes relations of power.^ crawley argues that constructionism suffers from bepistemological encampment^, involving ba tenden- cy to view only one’s own epistemological leanings as valid,^ and resulting in a neglect of the wider ‘so what’ question regarding the knowledge produced by constructionist research. rather, she advocates for bepistemic gain^ involving bwhat sociologists might learn if we use epistemologies as provisional tools for seeing the social world.^ indeed, resonating well with christensen’s article in this issue, crawley argues bempirical research not carefully grounded in theory and epistemology will be driven by unacknowledged and unexamined assumptions.^ part of the problem is (arguably willful) ignorance of material conditions, especially in ‘strict’ forms of constructionism that do not attend to material context outside of member’s claimsmaking. what analytical purity sacrifices, she underscores, is practical relevance to non-academic audiences, especially social activists; and especially in today’s politically charged zeitgeist. moreover, she argues, constructionism cannot avoid reference to material conditions even if it desires to do so (suggesting the critique of ‘ontological gerrymandering’ (woolgar and pawluch )). it is btoo great a price^ to bunsanction^ consideration of bpower, equity, and human suffering,^ crawley argues, resonating also with christensen’s call this issue for a more central consideration of inequalities. one way forward may be to combine multiple bepistemological strategies^ in one project. by this she does not refer to multi-method research, but a bmulti- epistemology^ approach. the goal here is bnot truth-seeking but to see what we can learn from viewing a problem via various analytical strategies.^ crawley is not alone in this issue in raising challenging and provocative questions. she does, however, remind us that current debates, including discussions as the sssp conference, only rehash the american sociologist ( ) : – – arguably unproductively so – an older set of debates on revitalizing social constructionism from the early s (holstein and miller ). crawley’s proposals are geared to (re)ignite a more inclusive constructionist imagination that avoids further siloing of sociological approaches to the study of social problems. in his article, tony christensen takes up the call for a more inclusive approach by including consideration of the voices of marginalized claims-makers; what miller ( ) dubs ‘claims from the underside’. this may at first seem counter-intuitive, as constructionists are usually drawn to those claimsmakers, christensen argues, with the power to broadcast their views (who he dubs ‘top dog’ claimsmakers), and have them taken up by institutions and organizations who champion for their cause. he writes bthe social problems game, like all other social processes, is a rigged game that reflects the inequalities found in the broader social context in which it is played.^ he thus wonders why bconstructionists have paid little attention to unpacking how the game is rigged and the consequences of that rigging for how social problems claims are articulated.^ the answer lies, christensen argues, in latent assumptions found in constructionist examinations of social problems which, if rendered more manifest, would reveal serious omissions in how claimsmaking is analyzed. relatedly, fundamental questions become problematized such as what is a claim, and how do we recognize a claim? turning constructionist concepts inward, he suggests that constructionists too often rest on their own ‘formula stories’ about what claimsmaking looks like, centering on bthose who likely benefit from various forms of privilege and power.^ a major argument here is that bthere is a strangely generalized assumption that recognition by official organi- zations will be desired by claimsmakers, that those organizations themselves are viewed as legitimate and respectable by audiences and that claimsmakers measure success in terms of institutional response.^ indeed, christensen argues, claimsmakers in a position of distrust against key institutions (the police is one example given) are not likely to pursue ‘policy making’ with them as a key stage of the ‘natural history’ model often highlighted in constructionist scholarship. further, assumptions regarding the democratic contexts within which claims are produced undercuts the visibility of social problems bblack markets^. several intriguing questions may be asked here, including bhow does a state with influence or a monopoly over the media change the social problems game? how do we conceptualize violence and intimidation as a form of claimsmaking or counter- claimsmaking? how do non-state claimsmakers go about making and propagating claims in an environment where speaking out publicly carries a risk of punishment?^ while christensen’s arguments naturally suggest enlarging the scope of constructionist research beyond western, liberal democracies, an important aspect of his arguments highlights the importance of also addressing unacknowledged limitations and expanding the analytical scope of scholarship in the anglo-global north. a widened epistemological scope is well suited to christensen’s goals. here he calls on construc- tionists to move beyond ‘words’ alone, especially for those without discursive access to ‘appropriate’ claimsmaking channels. claimsmaking can take a number of different forms, including visual imagery (perhaps online ‘memes’ as symbols of social protest). social constructionists, as with scholars in general, are academics working in a discursive medium, through which the draw to discourse is obviated. this, however risks a confirmation bias linked to constructionists’ inductively-geared approaches. yet there may be fruitful avenues of research involving the extra-discursive, christensen the american sociologist ( ) : – argues, especially for those marginalized from the resources to engage the (formal) discursive social problems process. at root, his paper pushes considerations of power to the forefront of constructionist analyses of social problems, challenging others to produce constructionist research that is arguably more relevant in today’s post-truth era. jun ayukawa and manabu akagawa contribute articles that raise questions of how the social problems process may or may not be different than the north american model developed by spector and kitsuse. both ayukawa and akagawa contribute articles centered on social problems processes in japan. given john kitsuse’s own japanese heritage, it is not surprising that a strong constructionist influence remains there (e.g., akagawa ; ayukawa ; nakagawa ). ayukawa’s chapter, in particular, focuses on claimsmaking regarding the death penalty in japan. japan retains the death penalty, yet is beholden to international conventions on human rights that set both warrants or grounds for social problems (best ). ayukawa makes compari- sons with the united states, arguing that despite both nations upholding the death penalty (and in opposition to international trends of abolishment or at least not applying it), it is too simplistic to examine the claimsmaking processes in japan in the same way as the united states. he argues that balthough the japanese government refers to international treaties and covenants in regard to many issues, it is less enthusiastic about promoting international covenants on human rights.^ despite this, reformers such as civil rights groups and the japanese federation of bar associations draw from international conventions (e.g., from the united nations) which provide legitimacy based on the warrants or grounds they discursively provide. ayukawa observes that beven though both of japan and [the united states] ratified the international covenants on civil and political rights, such references to international consensus are much more common in social problems rhetoric japan, than in the u.s..^ claimsmakers in support of abolishment, however, face challenges based on the context of governance in japan. obstacles include a human rights bureau which is under the influence of the ministry of justice (the latter which does not favor abolishment); and the influence of victims of crime, who, drawing from emotions discourses (loseke and kusenbach ), are having a discernable impact on public opinion, influencing a wave of support for capital punishment. here japanese politicians appear to be under the same populist pressures as in european and north american nations. ayukawa writes ba politician who advocates the abolition of the death penalty cannot expect to win votes; in fact, politicians do not speak about the issue during election time.^ clearly there are some similarities, as well as differences, when considering the national context of social problems claimsmaking in japan. ayukawa posits bthe lawyers and other people who strive for the abolition of the death penalty invoke and emphasize universal values. on the other hand, the opinion leaders and the people who support the death penalty believe in the traditional, domestic values of japan, and refuse to be compromised by european cultural values.^ while glob- alization influences how claims spread internationally (best b), ayukawa concludes that constructionist studies need to be attuned to bfit local conditions.^ borrowing concepts from outside constructionism, i argue that constructionism here can be advanced by paying closer attention to the ‘glocalization’ of claimsmaking (bauman ), and how global discourses and trends come into friction with local exigencies and awareness contexts (glaser and strauss ; tsing ). the american sociologist ( ) : – manabu akagawa contributes a natural history, drawing from foucaultian discourse analysis, of the putative low birth rate problem in japan. the paper effectively highlights the intersections of global trends in gender equality as well as localized issues and interpretations, thus making it another good exemplar of how constructionism informed by varying national contexts outside of the anglo-global north can help produce important comparative knowledge. akagawa highlights de- bates and policy responses aimed at ameliorating japan’s low birth rate, showing how some were embraced while others rejected. he wishes to examine the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ of this debate but also ask ‘why’ questions, such as bwhy the policies which were adopted tend to favor two-income families?^ his natural history covers seven key events between to in order to explain why policies favoring social welfare for working couples were favored over others. interestingly, what began in a ‘top down’ manner, with the welfare ministry announcing in june a low japanese birth rate of . (which became known as the b . shock^), the natural history reveals responses and discord generated from multiple claimsmakers, including gov- ernment officials, academics, national newspaper journalists, but also bloggers and everyday citizens. government officials making arguments that declining birth rates are caused by women’s higher education became, for instance, bseverely criticized^ by others, including female journalists. akagawa suggests that international discourses of human rights and gender equality affect how such claims are responded to. similar to ayukawa’s highlighting of how international discourses come to factor on localized debates, akagawa centers on contention over statistical data that show, for particular claimsmakers, that ‘advanced’ countries such as sweden, france and the united states demonstrate a link between higher female labor participation and total fertility rates. others, however, critiqued these statistical trends in a particular ‘stat war’ over how to interpret the numbers (best a, ). in comparison to ayukawa’s emphasis on the role public opinion has influencing populist responses to the death penalty, akagawa’s paper shows how popular opinion regarding the economic origins of japan’s low birth were bignored^ by bbureaucrats and business managers^. proposed polices such as having an increase to the available child allowance were also rejected given local exigencies such as the bgreat east japanese earthquake^, which directed financial efforts towards recovery. also, while the role of the internet does not factor heavily in akagawa’s natural history, he highlights the ripple effects of one ‘viral’ blog post: bbmy child wasn’t accepted for nursery school. die, japan!!!^ this post was circulated by traditional news media and initially rejected by prime minister shinzo abe (arguing the anonymous post could not be verified) but quickly seemed to backtrack and respond that the government is pushing for reducing child-care wait list times. akagawa’s incorporation of foucault permits some interesting observations about not just how these debates are framed, but what is ‘unsaid’ and ‘unsayable’ given the frames invoked. for instance, he argues bfew claims discuss the merit of low birth rates, such as the possibilities they might solve the traffic congestion problem in urban cities, amelioration of resources, and environmental problems, allowing people to live in larger and less expensive houses.^ moreover, the focus of solutions on gender-equality and work-life balance offsets consideration of the impact of younger people postponing marriage. akagawa makes a strong case for asking ‘why’ questions, which help move bbeyond case studies^ as some have argued is necessary moving forward (best ; see also dorothy pawluch’s article this issue). the american sociologist ( ) : – this issue is a clarion call for studies instilling a constructionist imagination regarding social problems. the articles in this special issue of the american sociologist do not present easy paths forward. indeed, there are challenges still to face and choices still to make (holstein and miller ). what is clear is that a critical mass of constructionist scholars remains highly engaged and inspired to produce significant and vital knowledge, informed by novel questions and directions. the politics of being apolitical the bold dismissal of structural functionalist and other normative perspectives on social problems, geared to distinguish constructionism from other sociological approaches in the late s, may be received as more divisive today than ever before. constructionism, some may argue, is willfully and flagrantly guilty of indifference to the social problems it examines; charged with being apolitical at a time when sides need to be drawn, more than ever. one of the more erudite recent critiques from outside constructionist circles, as mentioned above, is from r.a. dello buono, who charges constructionism with being boverly subjective^ (dello buono : ), and advo- cates its bre-link with the material and structural elements of st century capitalist crises^ (ibid.). it is worth examining dello buono’s arguments in further detail, as they are particularly well presented and can be taken as representative of, as joel best comments this issue, the critiques that come from those (conflict or critical) scholars grappling with how to respond to the structural inequalities shaped by hyper-capitalism and neoliberalism, and exacerbated by the geopolitics of today’s authoritarian global climate. the agnostic or ‘apolitical’ approach to constructionism – whether ‘strict’ or ‘contextual’ – is rejected by dello buono as it offers merely bephemeral and politically- bracketed analyses^ which leads to bpolitical irrelevance^ (ibid.). he argues this approach requires displacement in favor of an binsurgent attitude^ which would produce ba more powerful synthesis of social problems inquiry^ (dello buono : , ). in his more recent presidential address to the sssp, dello buono ( ) raised similar arguments, underscoring the incompatibility of social constructionism to bsocial activism^ (dello buono : , see also agger ), and advocating for greater linkages between bscholar activists^ and bpopular movements^. indeed, here dello buono is centrally interested in the implications of a critically-infused constructionism informing bsocial movements activists^ (ibid., p. – ). dello buono continues: bsocial constructionism tends to freeze the historical moment of the larger political economy in a way that takes our eye off the big moving ball^ (ibid., p. ). before i offer my rejoinder, i should declare at the outset that i admire the call for increased activism and agree that we are in a particularly precarious time when sociology as a whole is being systematically attacked and the knowledge it produces dismissed. personally, i have always found inspirational antonio gramsci’s famous invective against the indifferent. he wrote in : bi hate the indifferent. i believe that living means taking sides. those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. that is why i hate the indifferent^ (see tiso ). and yet my response here is that social constructionism offers invaluable knowledge regarding social processes related to the american sociologist ( ) : – social problems that are needed today, perhaps more than ever before. these social processes involve, in many respects, examinations of power, yet pay careful attention to the nuanced and often unpredictable forms power takes. we may say power is as power does, and constructionism’s conscious apolitical lens is its greatest strength, not its intractable weakness. this is especially apt when examining attributions of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. while it is tempting to ask questions such as why some people believe in the ‘wrong facts’ (cf. glassner ), rather than gearing analysis to ‘debunking’ such claims, constructionism offers the potential to unpack how such claims making operates in particular contexts and adheres closely to member’s per- spectives (gubrium and holstein ; pollner ). dello buono (ibid., p. ) accuses constructionism simultaneously of its btendency towards reification in a way that neglects human agency, leading to the oversimplifi- cation of collective action,^ while elsewhere critiquing the notion that bthe construc- tionist process was free to be delightfully filled with unrestrained human agency as a response to the establishment^ (ibid., p. ). yet constructionist studies place human agency as an empirical question for analysis in relation to the contexts that are meaningful for the members themselves. in addition, the various sorts of claimsmaking activities and bchains^ (see del rosso, this issue) constructionists consider do include social activism and social movements, but as spector notes in his article this issue, blooking back, some of our key concepts may seem dated. our central concept, claims- making activities, and the image that the claimant is a member of, or spokesperson for, a social movement organization, now seems slightly archaic or out of date.^ construc- tionists now attend to the influence and impact of social media and the mediation of online spaces for claimsmaking (adorjan and yau ; maratea , ), and also claimsmaking processes that are not successful (the bnonproblem^), or claimsmaking that occurs despite a lack of agency (miller , kitsuse , ball and lilly ; see also christensen, this issue). these approaches are particularly well geared to examine attributions of non-agency (adorjan et al. ); for instance, in cases where ‘alternative facts’ are contested – we need to know much more about how these processes operate. i argue that we can do this best when we set aside assumptions of normative social structure and explore how social structure is both experienced and acted upon. as highlighted above, best’s argument is also to strengthen constructionism by extending its empirical and theoretical scope, especially away from case studies that do not build upon each other. ibarra also offers some remarks towards the question of social activism. in his article this issue, he discusses the original impetus inspiring many students of sociology who are binterested in righting certain wrongs,^ but reinforces kitsuse’s view that constructionist analysts should avoid bsubstituting [their] own definitions, claims, and assumptions for those of the members^. significantly, ibarra is sympathetic to the call for ‘righting wrongs’ and social activism (see footnote iii in his article). he argues it bis certainly not to say that the other kinds of questions— about warrant and objectivity—are unimportant, but only that they are beyond the purview of constructionism as kitsuse understood it.^ of course, allegiance to spector and kitsuse is one of the issues under contention in this special issue. some call on a greater focus on material conditions that mediate experience and produce certain forms the american sociologist ( ) : – of claimsmaking (see crawley and del rosso, this issue). some call for greater emphasis on multimethod approaches (marvasti) while others advocate for ‘multi- epistemic’ projects (crawley) that aim to synthesize knowledge from ‘traditional’ constructionist studies with approaches that foreground the role of power in structuring claimsmakers’ positions in society. my view is that critical approaches have much to benefit from the insights social constructionism provides, offering situated knowledge to better contextualize analytical focuses on wider social systems (e.g., hypercapitalism, neoliberalism). likewise, constructionism may benefit from considering how critical approaches help problematize questions of how we identify claimsmaking activities and consider those positioned subaltern to power and privilege. this requires thinking through both the material conditions that mediate social problems claimsmaking and the very form claimsmaking takes. it may be that subaltern positioning is mediated by wider norma- tive social structures, but knowledge is still needed regarding how this is experienced and responded to. we still have many fascinating ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions to pursue (see especially pawluch’s article this issue). i argue that constructionism’s selective agnosticism (using schneider’s term) helps produce important knowledge regarding how people understand and respond to social problems; knowledge not ‘better’ or ‘more true’ but simply different than that produced by critical approaches given different epistemological lenses. this is not to suggest that constructionist studies have nothing to learn from these approaches in expanding their empirical focus and theo- retical toolkit. it is, however, also important to consider that sociological relevancy is not solely a product of political relevancy. that said, while single studies that aim to synthesize ostensibly disparate epistemological and theoretical approaches will likely encounter difficulties, it is worth pursuing whether constructionist alliances with other approaches in sociology can help engender in a reflexive way knowledge that is more likely to be relevant for broader publics. many constructionists who are agnostic to the social problems in their analyses are nevertheless likely to be politically left-wing in their personal values, including their inclinations towards activism (see pawluch’s article this issue). there is important work to be done, sides to choose, actions to take, all of which can be informed by constructionist analyses, but which may not be analytically rele- vant for constructionist studies themselves. the challenges most crudely characterized as ‘subjectivism’ versus ‘objectivism’ are not unique to constructionism; indeed, they are longstanding in sociology. even in their classic work on the social construction of reality, berger and luckmann ( ) divided their discussion between society as objective reality and subjective reality. while both sections were written lucidly and with resplendent insight, it is hard to conceive how an empirical research program would proceed by synthesizing both aspects. as sociolo- gists we examine the same world but our theoretical lenses focus on different aspects of it. the challenge lies in findings value in our inquiries based on the choices we make going forward. acknowledgements a special thank you to dorothy pawluch and lawrence nichols for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and, as ever, their enthusiastic support! the american sociologist ( ) : – references adorjan, m., & yau, h. l. 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( ). ontological gerrymandering: the anatomy of social problems explana- tions. social problems, , – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. the american sociologist ( ) : – https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/ / / /stephen_harpers_dangerous_refusal_to_commit_sociology.html https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/ / / /stephen_harpers_dangerous_refusal_to_commit_sociology.html https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/ / / /the_ideological_roots_of_stephen_harpers_vendetta_against_sociology.html https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/ / / /the_ideological_roots_of_stephen_harpers_vendetta_against_sociology.html https://overland.org.au/ / /i-hate-theindifferent/ 	social constructionism now more than ever: following the hermeneutic money trail in a post-truth world 	reflections and reminders 	the politics of being apolitical 	references microsoft word - making power visible - - .docx making power visible: ‘slow activism’ to address staff sexual misconduct in higher education tiffany page, anna bull & emma chapman abstract this article examines activism to address staff-to-student sexual misconduct in higher education in the uk from our perspective as founders and members of the research and lobby organisation the group. we argue that in order to tackle staff sexual misconduct in higher education, the problem has first to be made visible. we theorise this as ‘slow activism’ and outline the activities that we and others have been engaged in towards this end: conducting research; using complaints processes within institutions; naming the experiences of staff sexual misconduct and/or institutions and perpetrators; and carrying out discipline-led and sector-level initiatives. key words sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, gender-based violence, sexual violence, higher education, gender equality, feminist activism, slow activism introduction the group was established in as the first uk-based research and lobby organisation focused on addressing staff-student sexual misconduct . the group was borne from the activism of a group of phd students at goldsmiths, university of london who reported incidents of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and sexualised behaviour from academic staff within their department. over many years, students and staff had reported or attempted to report this sexual misconduct to the head of department and senior management. despite these actions, the staff members carrying out sexual misconduct behaviours remained in the institution, and the misconduct did not abate. within this climate, a small number of staff and students spent four years – from - - making formal complaints and lobbying the university to address this issue. when several members of this student group organised, in late , the first national conference in over twenty years that explicitly we use the uk terminology here, referring to academic as well as professional employees of universities as ‘staff’. in the us, academic staff are termed ‘faculty’. addressed staff sexual misconduct, “sexual harassment in higher education.” the budget that goldsmiths provided for the conference was £ , a figure taken from an institutional budget allocated for equality and diversity. the university stated that it was not promising any further money on this issue, and if they did provide funding, it would have to come from that existing budget. we named our organisation after the amount that was budgeted as a reminder of the low value placed upon the experiences of students within universities, and a reminder that small investments of time or money will be inadequate to address institutionalised, entrenched cultures of sexual misconduct. it took all of these efforts, along with the high profile resignation of one of those staff, professor sara ahmed, for this issue to become institutionally visible. in goldsmiths finally acknowledged publicly that there were “cases” of “sexual harassment, and sexually abusive, or other forms of sexually inappropriate behaviour,” within the institution, which involved their staff behaving “in ways which are at odds not only with our policies and regulations but with our prevailing ethos” (goldsmiths, a). this article takes this starting point to examine the activism that we have undertaken to address staff- to-student sexual misconduct in uk higher education, focusing on the problem of initiating and sustaining social and institutional change when the problem remains largely invisible and when those experiencing these forms of violence fear speaking out. we argue that making visible the problem of gender-based and sexual violence in higher education is a crucial element of our activism, and we outline ways in which this has been done. this article therefore contributes to a body of literature on campus sexual violence (cobb & godden-rasul, ; germain, ; national union of students, , ; phipps, ; phipps & young, a; phipps & young b; universities uk, ; valls, puigvert, melgar, & garcia-yeste, ) by focusing specifically on activism to address sexual misconduct perpetrated by staff employed by higher education institutions. we focus primarily on the current situation in the uk, and particularly on england, where the distinctive ecology of higher the conference was organised by anna, bull, tiffany page and leila whitley. page and whitley were part of the phd student group. the sexual harassment in higher education conference website can be found at: http://shhegoldsmiths.wordpress.com. education as well as the wider legal and political context shapes our work. in order to describe our activism, we draw on existing research and public documentation on this topic, including public reports, legal cases, and media reporting, but primarily we draw on our experience as activists working on this topic. for two of us, this involves first-hand knowledge of the lengthy, difficult process of making complaints of staff sexual misconduct to institutions in which we were enrolled as students. we also utilise knowledge gained from conducting research in this area (as described below) and from carrying out casework on behalf of students who have contacted us while in the process of making, and attempting to make, complaints to their institutions. finally, this article draws on our experience of working to bring about change within individual institutions and across the higher education sector as a whole. in documenting our experience, we follow in a long line of feminist researcher-activists whose “path to activist research opens when we enter the field as participants personally affected by the issue that is the focus of our work” (naples, , ). as naples goes on to describe, many feminist activists do not “begin the work with a research agenda in mind, but rather redefined their engagement as activist research projects during the process” ( , ). we began as activists, some of whom were also researchers in related fields, and have been obliged to become researchers in this field in order to carry out our activism once we recognised the lack of up-to-date uk-based research on experiences and impacts of staff sexual misconduct. the tensions between these two roles are part of what we explore below. the article proceeds as follows. first, we briefly introduce the term ‘sexual misconduct’. second, we discuss the absence of research evidence in relation to staff sexual misconduct in the uk as one of the factors that has contributed to making this issue invisible. we go on to discuss further mechanisms through which staff sexual misconduct is silenced within higher education, and the difficulties this creates in doing activism around it. finally, we introduce the types of ‘slow’ activism that we and others have been carrying out on this issue. we propose that both institutionalised forms of activism and professional lobbying (maier, ), as well as direct action and community-based strategies for social change (baker & bevacqua, ) are needed in order to gain momentum on this issue to create change and to counter-balance the reluctance and at times acute unwillingness of higher education institutions to address and prevent these forms of violence. what is staff sexual misconduct? we use the term ‘sexual misconduct’ to describe a range of behaviours including sexual harassment, assault, grooming, sexual coercion, invitations, and promised resources in return for sexual access towards students (for a discussion of grooming see brackenridge & fasting, ; bull and rye, ). we view staff sexual misconduct to be forms of sexual violence and gender-based violence. sexual misconduct by staff towards students affects students of all gender identities and sexualities, with women students and lgbtq students having specific vulnerability (national union of students, ; cantor et al., ). by ‘staff’ we refer to all employees within higher education institutions including short-term or outsourced contractors , which may also include students who are employed as staff during their studies. we use the term misconduct to signal that this is a matter of professional behaviour in the workplace, and to ensure that the focus remains on the responsibility of the staff member, and their employer, for maintaining professional conduct in their dealings with students. this is in line with recent moves to consider sexual harassment as part of research misconduct (marín-spiotta, ; chapman, ). a further reason for using the term ‘sexual misconduct’ rather than ‘sexual harassment’ is in order to avoid the limited definition that describes harassment as ‘unwanted’ behaviour. the equalities act defines sexual harassment as involving the “unwanted conduct” of another person, in relation to relevant protected characteristics, conduct of a sexual nature, or related to gender reassignment or sex. the term sexual harassment therefore requires the person to which the sexualised acts and behaviours are being directed to make a judgement on what is appropriate, rather than this being a matter of professional conduct. we argue that in the context of the unequal power relationships that national society for the protection of cruelty to children (nspcc) website definition of grooming. retrieved from: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/grooming/ sexual misconduct is also a problem between staff at different levels of the academic hierarchy and much of our work is also relevant to this issue. legislation.gov.uk. equalities act . retrieved from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /section/ exist between staff and students, notions of wanted behaviour and consensual relations must be examined critically. fiona vera-grey’s argument about women’s experiences of being intruded upon by men in public spaces is illuminating in this context: the assumptions underlying the use of the terms ‘unwanted’ or ‘unwelcome’ are that intrusive practices that are not experienced in this way are unproblematic or at least do not ‘count’. it moves focus away from the practices of men, who in practicing intrusion are unaware of whether particular practices are wanted by individual women. their motivations are left unexamined, as is the possibility of negative impact for the women who may experience such intrusions as wanted or desired (vera-gray , ). similarly, for students, sexual attention may be wanted and desired from academic staff, and they may only later (after a break-up; after they have lost access to teaching or other resources; or after they realise that the power imbalance has negatively affected their ability to consent) realise that it has been damaging for them personally or academically. moving away from using the category ‘unwanted’ in a definition of sexual misconduct therefore opens up a theorisation of power-based sexualised behaviour that does not have to be recognised by the student at the time as harmful. the invisibility of staff sexual misconduct in research despite the relatively high incidence of staff sexual misconduct (cantor et al., ; ahrc, ), it is only recently that it has been formulated as a policy problem at national level in the uk. while other authors have documented the ways in which shame, self-blame, and social norms of femininity contribute to silencing sexual violence (campbell, adams, wasco, ahrens, & sefl, ; kelly, ), here we focus on mechanisms specific to staff sexual misconduct in higher education. these mechanisms work together with discourses of shame and self-blame to entrench the invisibility of this problem. for these reasons and others, survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment rarely report their experiences to the police or to their institutions (nus ; ahrc ; ministry of justice ; nus/the group ). as sara ahmed succinctly argues, “silence about violence is violence” ( , ). one of the ways in which staff sexual misconduct is rendered invisible in the uk has been, until recently, through the paucity of research into this issue. while in the s and s there was a wave of research and activism in the us and uk (bagilhole & woodward, ; carter & jeffs, ; dziech & weiner, ; eyre, ; stanko, ), since then, with a few exceptions (beebee & saul, ; lee ; page & whitley, ; ahmed ), there appears to have been a long hiatus in research in the uk. one of these exceptions is the work of sara ahmed, who has written extensively on sexual harassment in higher education during her employment at goldsmiths on her feminist killjoy blog and in her subsequent book ( ). however, other than ahmed’s work, recent research on sexual harassment and sexual violence in higher education has focused predominately on student-to-student gender-based and sexual violence, including the need to tackle so-called “lad cultures” or the performance of particular masculinities in uk higher education (for example, jackson and sundaram ; phipps, ringrose and jackson ; jackson & sundaram, ; national union of students, , ; phipps & young, a; phipps & young, b). this work has both involved and followed activism from students and staff, and, among others, the national union of students (nus), a voluntary membership organisation comprised of student unions in higher and further education in the uk. in response to this ongoing lobbying and campaigning across the sector, universities uk (uuk), a membership and advocacy organisation comprising vice-chancellors and principals of universities in the uk, released a report in with recommendations for how universities should effectively address harassment, violence and hate crime directed at women (universities uk, ). however, the remit of the uuk report was confined to student-student harassment, with the misconduct of staff employed or contracted to universities deemed to be outside of its scope. more broadly the recent edited collection by anitha and lewis ( ) calls out uk see sara ahmed’s https://feministkilljoys.com/ blog for many articles on the complexities of sexual harassment in higher education. higher education’s failure to recognise and act on gender-based violence, and its authors provide guidelines for research, practice and institutional policy change. this lack of recent research has hampered our activism specifically on staff sexual misconduct as there is little up-to-date data from which to build a compelling case to persuade the higher education sector to act on this issue. there is tension in the fact that although universities specialise in carrying out research, we have not been putting our collective expertise to bear on this issue in our own sector. while many academics seem aware of sexual harassers among our peers and may have developed strategies for negotiating this problem, this knowledge has not translated into formal research nor has it (with a few exceptions) informed institutional practices and policies. this may be due in part to both the absence of institutional policy which makes clear expected behaviours and professional boundaries (see bull and rye ), and the difficulties of carrying out critical research in such a sensitive area within one’s own profession, and within one’s own institution. for example, there may be career risks and also a range of personal risks associated in speaking out about this problem within a department or university, especially when on precarious contracts or in junior positions (stanko, ; whitley and page ; see below). in the absence of a substantive body of academic research, until recently much of what is currently known about this issue within the uk higher education sector has been through journalistic investigations rather than academic research (see for example, weale & batty, ; batty, weale, & bannock, ). as a result, two of the authors have turned to research as a form of activism, with two recent studies by the group addressing this lacuna. the first was carried out in partnership with the nus women’s campaign and produced a public report, “power in the academy: staff sexual misconduct in uk higher education” (national union of students, ). based on non-representative national survey of student members of the nus, out of all respondents, % had experienced at least one instance of sexualised behaviour from staff, while a further % were aware of instances of sexualised behaviours happening to someone they know. fewer than one in ten of these respondents had reported this to their institutions. out of those who had reported or tried to report, just over a fifth thought their institution had responded adequately. this study also asked about professional boundaries between staff and students and included focus groups exploring this question. % of respondents were uncomfortable with staff having sexual or romantic relationships with students, and focus groups revealed varying experiences of the professional relationship with staff across students with different identities. a second study conducted by the group “silencing students: institutional responses to staff sexual misconduct in uk higher education” (bull and rye ) comprised analysis of existing institutional policies in this area, and qualitative interviews with sixteen students and early career researchers who had experienced staff sexual misconduct and attempted to report this to their institution or the police. the study found that institutional responses to staff sexual misconduct tended to involve ‘making it up as they go along’ ( , ), i.e. when interviewees attempted to report this experience, there was no clear process to follow which led to inadequate, improvised responses. this led to severe impacts for many interviewees, as well as a lack of justice; only one staff member lost his job as a result of the investigation, despite the fact that most appeared to be serial perpetrators. the policy analysis found a wide range of institutional responses in university policies, from prohibiting staff-student relationships, to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policies that included variations on the phrase: “the university does not wish to prevent liaisons between staff and students and it relies upon the integrity of both parties to ensure that abuses of power do not occur” ( , ). this research has been crucial in beginning to give visibility to institutional inaction and student experiences of staff sexual misconduct in higher education. the silencing of experiences of staff sexual misconduct within institutions one of the key means by which staff sexual misconduct is concealed and students’ experiences silenced within uk higher education institutions is through confidentiality processes. these can protect the perpetrator and allow them to move with impunity to a new institution (whitley and page , - ). such confidentiality processes also mean that students are not made aware how their complaints are dealt with. even after a complaint has been investigated, current disciplinary processes do not require the complainant to be informed of the outcome of an investigation (bull and rye, , - ). this denies the victim-survivor any recognition that her or his complaint was justified and raises questions around how the institution is ensuring the safety of other students who are being taught by the staff member. furthermore, little attention is given to the impact upon colleagues within the same department, school or institution, who must continue to work alongside that staff member. a recent legal challenge has called into question these confidentiality processes around investigations, following an employment tribunal claim by a previous student/employee of university college london and emma chapman, third author of this paper. at chapman’s request, ucl entered into a legal settlement waiving the confidentiality previously placed on the vast majority of emails and documents relating to a case of sexual misconduct in which she was a complainant, to better enable chapman to try to protect herself from retaliation and reveal the outcome of the investigation as well as the sanctions that were in place against the staff member. in addition, chapman’s claim that ucl’s handling of the case was discriminatory and constituted harassment it its own right was upheld. this legal challenge, carried out by discrimination law firm mcallister olivarius, suggests that there is no legal reason to keep universities from disclosing the outcome of disciplinary investigations. this case therefore has the potential to bring about greater accountability for universities and perpetrators through a new culture of openness around investigations of sexual misconduct. a further way in which higher education institutions in the uk have been complicit in silencing those who report sexual misconduct is through non-disclosure agreements (ndas). the guardian has reported on universities requiring students to sign ndas in order to receive compensation after experiencing staff sexual misconduct (weale & batty, ); goldsmiths is reported to have paid out £ , to students between / - / (batty, weale, et al., ). ndas are signed by the for more see de peyer, r. ( , july ). university college london tried to gag me over two-year 'harassment' fight, scientist claims. the evening standard. retrieved from https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/university-college-london- tried-to-gag-me-over-twoyear-harassment-fight-scientist-claims-a .html complainants, the staff member accused of the inappropriate behaviour, and the university. the agreements are legally binding and prevent the signing parties from speaking about the terms of any settlement that may have occurred. the university is also prevented from disclosing the sexual misconduct of the former employer. such agreements inhibit public knowledge and media reporting of such incidents, and rather than protecting employees or students or fulfilling legal data protection requirements, ndas appear to be used to protect an institution’s reputation. however, recently university college london has announced it is ending its use of ndas in sexual harassment cases (gibbons ), and the group’s end ndas campaign provides resources for activists to pressure their institutions to do the same . knowledge of sexual misconduct as a public concern in the uk is also suppressed through legal means. this occurs through the threat of libel proceedings against individuals or media outlets who publicly name perpetrators. drawing attention to sexual misconduct and the failings of institutions therefore places students and staff at risk of legal action. an illustrative example is that of professor carole mundell (bode vs mundell, ; weale ) who was sued for libel for drawing attention to a letter of recommendation provided for a member of staff which failed to mention an investigation of sexual misconduct. while the libel suit against professor mundell by the letter writer was unsuccessful, with the judge ruling that the complainant had not suffered reputational damage, it nevertheless highlights the risks (personal, career-related and financial) that people take by speaking out, and the very real dangers involved in researching and doing activism in this area, as also highlighted by elizabeth stanko in her account of similar experiences in the us ( ). the mechanisms by which higher education institutions may fail to pay attention to students’ testimony and experiences were further highlighted in an inquiry led by professor nicole westmarland into the university of sussex. lee salter, a senior lecturer at the university, was convicted of domestic violence offences against a student, allison smith, but at the time of his see further details at https:// group.com/end-ndas-campaign/ [accessed september ] conviction no disciplinary proceedings had been taken against him by the university. westmarland was engaged by the university of sussex to carry out an independent review of the case, which found that the university failed “to follow and/or operationalise its own policies and procedures” (westmarland, , ). the university also carried out an “inadequate risk assessment,” basing this “solely on what the senior lecturer chose to tell the university with no external verification” ( , - ). westmarland’s report is a rare public record of the ways that, in our experience, higher education institutions often manage reports of staff sexual misconduct, whereby the institution is protected at the expense of the safety of its members, including those most vulnerable to abuse or exploitation. the pattern that this case shows – taking the staff member’s word at face value; failing to prioritise student safety; failing to communicate with the student; and failing to follow its own policies and procedures – helps to explain why survivors of staff sexual misconduct tend to have little faith in their institution’s procedures (see also bull and rye ). given these barriers, as well as the paucity of academic research, as noted above, there are significant challenges to doing activism and research in this area. in this next section we introduce our concept of ‘slow activism’ as our approach to reconciling the difficulties of being researchers and activists within the very institutions that we are investigating, and we explore three different levels on which we are carrying out this activism. ‘slow activism’ within the higher education system we suggest that this culture of silence surrounding staff-to-student sexual misconduct has, until now, played a critical role in preventing sustained campaigning for social change in this area. in this section we outline three levels on which our activism, and that of others, is currently working to overcome this culture of silencing. these activities operate within different temporalities. some involve lobbying for rapid change while others require the development of solutions and changes to culture and practices over time. to this end we label our approach as ‘slow activism’, a term we utilise to get at the varying levels of speed required (and the ensuing frustration at the slow pace at which change occurs) when attempting to work at different levels of the sector to enact change (see also robins ). for example, it describes the need to engage in grassroots activism within institutions on localised campaigns by students and student unions who have intimate knowledge of their own campus environment. it also describes engagement with senior management of institutions and national sector bodies, where producing briefing documents, scheduling meetings, and enacting policy, procedural and cultural change can take months but more often takes years. our approach as a group has been to balance, often somewhat precariously, the need for fast visibility with the slowing down of the ensuing rush to propose solutions and ‘fix the problem’. nowhere in the world are there adequate solutions to address this issue, and while there is immediate need, this demand for change has to be tempered with understandings of institutional speed as well as the fixity of institutional processes: once a solution is put in place, regardless of its appropriateness and capacity to address the problem, it becomes very difficult to modify or change it. for example, institutions that have implemented particular campaigns and solutions (often accompanied by high profile launches) to address sexual violence on campus may then refuse to engage with critique of their programme or to invest further. the presence of an ‘institutional solution’ can, in this way, have the impact of closing down discussion. by contrast, we are aiming for sector guidelines and policy that are informed by research and by the survivor experience, and this takes time. solutions will also need to change over time, and this might mean, for example, that policy needs to be updated on a yearly basis, or that complaints procedures should be regularly audited to identify blockages to reporting. in contrast to such an approach, it is often the case that institutions act only when forced, for example through media attention or legal challenges, or when incentivised by funding and leadership from sector organisations. in the uk, institutional change in this area tends to occur not through regulation but through sector-wide membership organisations such as universities uk. for example, institutions were incentivised to adopt recommendations from the universities uk ‘changing the culture’ taskforce via a £ . million investment in student safeguarding from the higher education funding council for england (office for students, ). at the point of receiving funding, the institution often wants to speed things up, and can rush to enact solutions without understanding the institutional and departmental cultures into which these solutions will be implemented; for example, we are routinely emailed by hr staff asking for documentation that they can implement. this lack of attention to existing cultures of inequality within institutions is telling from those tasked to safeguard students and staff. the need for institutional action to be visible, while the details of sexual misconduct and how it occurs remain largely invisible, should be of concern. by contrast, it has been student unions and self-organised feminist groups that have been at the forefront of local and national activism in the uk to make gender-based and sexual violence in higher education visible, with campaigns, discussions and talks (for feminist actions in uk and us activism to resist sexism and lad culture, see lewis, marine and kenney ). in the following sections we address some of the methods, and their associated temporalities, that activists, including ourselves, have used to increase visibility of staff sexual misconduct. first, the use of new and existing institutional mechanisms to report and complain on an individual level; second, the direct action work of survivors speaking of their experiences on their own terms; and third, discipline-level exposure of the specific cultures and environments that enable sexual misconduct as well as national, sector-wide level work of using research to reform higher education culture and policies. using complaints processes within institutions going through the complaints process at an institution constitutes a form of activism against staff sexual misconduct. rather than being seen as the standard response to experiencing staff sexual misconduct, few students ever report sexual misconduct (national union of students ), and when they do, the accounts reported in bull and rye ( ) of students who attempted to report to their an organisation tackling the resistance of universities to examine and address their institutional culture is changing university cultures. see https://chucl.com university show that this formalised route can take a huge toll on those pursuing it, requiring extraordinary courage and persistence over a period of months or years. in addition, the enacting and completion of complaints procedures can occur at varying speeds across different institutions. for example, there may be informal steps that students are obliged to take (which may be invisible in policies) before they are able to make a formal complaint, such as the student attempting to informally resolve the issue with the staff member. students and staff who pursue staff sexual misconduct cases through their institutional processes are, then, often pioneers who are working towards change within their institutions. indeed, activist sentiments were expressed by most of the interviewees for bull and rye’s study, who indicated that they were pursuing this route in order to protect other women and improve conditions in their discipline (bull and rye, , ). however, there can be consequences for those who carry it out this form of activism (chen and gorski ; lloro-bidart and semenko ; whitley and page ). it is fear-inducing, it is exhausting, and it is potentially damaging to a complainant’s chance of pursuing a career within that institution or sector. it involves holding, supporting and caring for others (as often survivors will find other survivors in order to support each other during institutional processes), and it requires endurance. members of the group have needed to take breaks or to stop doing this work due to such impacts of pursuing complaints. several members of the original group of phd student complainants/activists at goldsmiths remain anonymous. this activism, and the exhaustion of naming personal experiences of abuse – a declaration that is often required in speaking out about sexual and gender-based violence – as well as the feelings of betrayal when institutions fail to act, can have severe and long-lasting personal costs and impacts on mental health (smith and freyd, ). therefore, it is critical that the labour (both physical and emotional – see hoschschild, ) of students as activists is foregrounded in a discussion on the work being done to make the violence of staff sexual misconduct visible within the higher education sector, and more widely discussed in public. as with many forms of activism, it has primarily been conducted by those in positions of precarity, either as students, as junior level staff, or as workers on short-term contracts. despite these costs, this work of complaint can sometimes extend into activism to change the processes within an institution when these are shown not to work. those who must navigate and use faulty procedures develop intricate knowledge of how these particular systems work or fail to work. for example, following a failed or ineffective complaints and investigation process, an institutional response might be salvaged by drawing on the lived experience of survivor-complainants in order to reform these policies and practices . however, survivors may not be in a position to – and should not be expected to - provide solutions to the very institution that has caused their trauma. naming experiences, perpetrators and institutions as a form of activism many complainant-survivors who lack adequate institutional pathways to address staff sexual misconduct have instead turned to other forms of activism in order to prevent harmful behaviour from continuing and to seek justice. one of these forms of activism involves individuals giving voice to experiences of gender-based and sexual violence through naming what has taken place, where it took place, and its impact in theirs and others’ lives. it has also been referred to as “call out culture” (ahmad , vemuri ) and has been a crucial part of the resurgence of #metoo as a social media movement. however, the original intention of the metoo. movement created by tarana burke in involved me too as a signifier of shared pain and understanding between survivors, rather than the naming of perpetrators. more recently #metoo has involved naming industries, institutions and perpetrators in order to make sexual violence visible. in addition, using #metoo has given survivors a forum to share stories and to call institutions and sectors to account. time magazine recently featured the “silence breakers” of sexual harassment and sexual violence in the us as its ‘person of the year’, describing the women as “the voices that launched a movement” (zacharek, dockerman & sweetlands edwards, ). while naming can appear to be a rapid response to sexual misconduct, it often occurs only years after violence has taken place, and after months and years of institutional failures to listen, investigate, and enact justice. as the article describes, there is so much see for example ucl’s preventing sexual misconduct strategy group https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human- resources/preventing-sexual-misconduct-strategy-group see the me.too movement website: https://metoomvmt.org/ that happens before a person gets to the point of speaking out: “those who are often most vulnerable in society—immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and lgbtq people—described many types of dread. if they raised their voices, would they be fired? would their communities turn against them? would they be killed?” ( ). further to this, when individuals or groups decide to name, even at substantial cost or risk to themselves and their safety, institutions can warn against these acts of naming, for example, as described in bull and rye ( , ), potential complainants may be blocked or dissuaded from going forward with a complaint. as ahmed aptly describes, “a wall can come up to prevent students from making complaints in the first place” ( , ). these warnings use the language of protection, where the language is couched in terms to limit damage to individual, but are designed to conceal the institution. complainants are told that others (including perpetrators) will be ‘hurt’ or harmed by their speaking out (whitley and page , ). naming can therefore be seen as a form of ‘slow activism’ in relation to the time it takes to get to the point where a survivor might feel able to name. in the context of staff sexual misconduct, naming can include how institutions responded or why the individual felt unable to previously report or speak of the violence; it does not necessarily involve naming the individual/s responsible. one example of ‘naming activism’ took place when lee salter was named by the independent newspaper. this naming was possible as a result of criminal charge of assault brought by former student allison smith being upheld against him. this naming was not only of salter but of the university of sussex, who continued to employ him despite his conviction for assault (pells, ). the actions by smith led to professor nicole westmarland’s independent review into sussex’s response to domestic violence and the subsequent public report, which led to significant changes in policies at sussex. another example of ‘naming activism’ occurred when sara ahmed, after “watching histories be reproduced despite all our efforts,” resigned from her position at goldsmiths, which led to the actions of the institution being exposed in nationwide press coverage (ahmed a). as ahmed expresses in for details of the policies implemented at the university of sussex see: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/ her blog, “to resign is a tipping point, a gesture that becomes necessary because of what the previous actions did not accomplish. there are now many more people who know something more about what has been happening” (ahmed a). connected to ahmed’s resignation was another form of naming that took place at goldsmiths, university of london in . an account of the sexual misconduct of a former academic staff member was written into copies of the books in the university library that he had authored. this account challenged the silence of the institution by making what had been dealt with privately into a written, public record: the academic tools originally created to publish knowledge about what he knows were (mis or re)used as a means to publish what students know. photographs of the writing that appeared in the books were uploaded to an anonymous blog written by a group of students. the blog asked questions as to what had taken place within the institution, expressed concern as to the resignation of ahmed, and called for goldsmiths to engage in a public discussion and acknowledgement of the sexual violence that had occurred on campus. this archive of material was used by other activists to instigate a public discussion on the facebook event page for a course at another institution taught by the former goldsmiths academic. this course was subsequently cancelled without explanation from the institution. even when institutional action occurs, institutions can still fail to name sexual misconduct. while alison phipps ( , ) is right to argue that naming perpetrators and institutions risks individualising the problem by suggesting that it is simply ‘bad apples’ rather than a sector-wide culture that is to blame, we suggest that until students and staff are safe in their institutions we need to use all the tools at our disposal. we should be working towards the solutions phipps describes, such as ‘speaking in’ to the institution ( , ) in order to bring about deeper and more long-lasting change. but in the meantime, we argue that it is important to retain the right to name experiences, to name what happened to us, and to name who did this – the individuals, institutions and structures responsible. often this naming occurs when institutions are insistent in their refusal to listen; it is seldom the first option survivors reach for. this can be thought of as a form of direct action, or a route https://wewanttruthgoldsmiths.wordpress.com/ for activists who have exhausted all legal and civil-society means at their disposal and feel a sense of urgency at the need for change. as a result they take personal risks or use their own bodies to obstruct injustices or to protect others (graeber, ). for doherty et al., direct action “is intended to directly change perceived political, social or environmental injustices” (doherty, plows, & wall, , p. ; our italics). in the face of repeated institutional failure to provide students with a safe space to study, we argue that direct action is an essential part of the toolkit of feminist activism. naming is a high- risk strategy that directly confronts injustice, and it lets other survivors know they are not alone. we recognise that naming is high risk, and is neither appropriate for all cases of staff sexual misconduct, nor the best method in all instances. in the examples of naming used above, the cases involved serious and sustained sexual misconduct, and all other institutional means were attempted first, making them akin to a whistleblowing action, the latter being a legally recognised action . irrespective of the reason for naming, it comes with the risk of prosecution for libel as well as a considerable risk to personal mental health through the vulnerability of such exposure that often involves the survivor naming themselves and describing their experience. however, where this is the only means to make accountable the institutions that we work and study within, forms of direct action that include naming can be a productive strategy. discipline-led and sector-level activism in some fields, activism to address staff sexual misconduct has moved from being institutionally- based to being discipline-led, in recognition that different academic fields have their own cultures that enable misconduct but also as a solution to the issue of perpetrators moving institutions and avoiding justice. the discipline of astronomy was one of the first academic fields to see national coverage of sharing stories of sexism and sexual harassment within science, and the ensuing community reaction led to the #astrosh hash-tag on twitter and an online community of astronomy allies who support and help survivors, “committed to making astronomy a safer, more equal place” . strategies were https://www.gov.uk/whistleblowing http://www.astronomyallies.com/astronomy_allies/welcome.html quickly formulated and shared via social media under #astrosh. for example, it is now standard for academics supporting this movement to refuse to attend academic conferences where there is no enforceable code of conduct relating in some part to bullying or sexual harassment. in the space of under two years most of the major astronomy collaborations, which cross tens or hundreds of institutions, have written codes of conduct explicitly dealing with sexual misconduct. however, most current higher education sector protocols are silent on this issue. for example, currently none of the principles of the established uk diversity and inclusion framework athena swan directly acknowledge the need to address sexual misconduct within higher education institutions (the discussion of bullying and harassment does not include any mention of sexual violence). without recognition that sexual misconduct and sexual violence are major barriers to gender equality, institutions are not required, and therefore may not be motivated, to tackle this issue. despite this, staff sexual misconduct is now being embedded within some sector frameworks. the juno award is the uk institute of physics’ own gender equality accreditation and is well respected within uk physics departments. it originally consisted of five principles that addressed issues such as career progression and selection processes but, like athena swan, did not address sexual misconduct. in a new sixth principle was launched which requires all physics departments applying or renewing an award to directly address misconduct . this was a result of specific campaigning by one member of the group, emma chapman, and is an achievement we hope to replicate in other gender equality frameworks. this campaigning required a very different mode of practice to the ‘naming activism’ described above, working more as a mode of lobbying than direct action. we were able to draw on established language and frameworks for gender equality to argue that sexual violence should be an integral part of these. working slowly with institutions for an example see: https://lsst-uk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/home/pages/ /code+of+conduct). athena swan website, retrieved from https://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/about-athena-swan/ institute of physics project juno six principles, retrieved from http://www.iop.org/policy/diversity/initiatives/juno/principles/page_ .html as discussed earlier, different forms of activism can operate within and across different temporalities. some actions involve lobbying institutions and sectors for change (both immediate and long term), some involve naming experiences that might appear to occur quickly but are the result of many years’ accumulated experience, and others require the development of methods through which to change ingrained and normalised cultures over time. making power visible involves understanding where power is held within the structures of higher education and naming it as such. in order to do this work, as an organisation we have primarily chosen to focus on the national level. we made this decision because as individuals we became frustrated at trying to enact change within the institutions where we were studying. we also recognised that those working within their own institutions – as students, student union officers, and staff – needed support and that often their voices and actions were silenced and ignored because there was little national visibility on issue of staff misconduct. this meant that even when evidence was presented about staff misconduct, those bringing this forward were dismissed because it was not seen as an issue that warranted an institutional response. its lack of national visibility can contribute to its invisibility at a local level. we strategised that until there was sector recognition and national guidelines that could be used to press for and enact institutional and structural change, local efforts would be inconsistent across institutions. to this end, as an organisation we have needed to engage in a delicate balancing act between activism, lobbying, and research. we need to have the research to provide the evidence of what we already know but also to extend our knowledge beyond our experience and understand wider patterns and the experiences of different students. we also need to create and support campaigns enacted at local and national levels; to critique the institutions that we work within, while supporting and encouraging change including from the most resistant institutional members; and to lobby sector bodies and politicians to develop guidelines and set the standards for the sector. there is tension in moving too quickly or too slowly, outside of the speed at which institutions operate. change is needed in the sector, but this field is still developing and we feel the anxiety of becoming part of the solution. there is an urgent demand for students and staff to be protected, but we are also concerned that solutions might be implemented that do not address the complexity of power relations and the impact of the range of sexual harassment and misconduct behaviours as forms discrimination and inequality that limit and deny access to education and career progression. at our heart, in the context of this remit, we remain activists who research. our activism informs the research process and directs our attention to how we might make public the private and vulnerable experiences of sexual and gender-based violence in ways that remain survivor-centred. we have taken this approach because of the urgency to do something. it continues to be a tension in our work. to do activism takes time away from writing and research. while activist activities – sector meetings, providing responses to those seeking advice or support, giving public talks and conference presentations, and offering media commentary – allows a national conversation to move more rapidly, this work comes at the expense of the formalised research activities that are recognised within higher education. therefore, we continue to tussle with temporal movements between quick responses and slow research; lags in time between institutional responses, and allowing survivors to take their time; activism that points out the problem, and rapid institutional solutions that do not understand the problem. conclusions in this article we have argued that activism around staff sexual misconduct should aim to make this issue visible. we have outlined some of the ways in which it is made invisible: a lack of research on the prevalence and impacts of staff sexual misconduct on students; the difficulties students and staff face in reporting these abuses of power; and requirements for confidentiality around the ways in which individual cases are investigated within institutions. we have described three ways in which forms of what we have referred to as slow activism are currently occurring in the sector, through our own work and that of others: participating in institutional complaints processes; survivors naming their own experiences; and discipline-led and sector-wide activism that is demonstrating ways forward for the sector as a whole. furthermore, we acknowledge that using institutional complaints processes and naming experiences, perpetrators and institutions, are short-term solutions that are not preventative, are often unsustainable and do not necessarily lead to positive change. this is in part because of the ways in which institutional structures and processes both silence and exhaust individuals who speak out, take action, and make complaints. as with other sectors, individuals calling attention to abuses of power in higher education often remain or are increasingly vulnerable to those power relations, as either students or staff in precarious positions of employment. addressing these issues requires activism both within and outside of institutions, across multiple levels of engagement: lobbying members of parliament and sector bodies; preparing formal responses to national consultations; reviewing university policies and procedures and conducting training within universities; speaking at events both within and outside of academia; and advising students on direct action and strategic approaches to invoke change locally within their own institution. overall, however, the forms of activism and research that we use to address the issue of staff sexual misconduct need to match the solutions that are required. we follow bacchi ( ) in suggesting that rather than individualised approaches, what is required are organisation-wide approaches that focus on culture and ongoing dialogue about the kinds of institutions we want to learn and work within. these conversations are difficult, but needed. secrecy around cases of staff sexual misconduct, both when allegations of sexual misconduct have been proven and when staff resign prior to disciplinary procedures, can contribute to reinforcing the silencing of students and staff who have not been able to come forward. while the institution ‘acts’, there may be violence connected to the action. but lack of openness on this issue sends another clear message: that the use of power by staff must be kept quiet. institutions should not underestimate how these silences and refusals to talk about behaviours and cultures that are part of a department, faculty, college, school or university can have an impact on those studying and working within them. however, cultural change takes time, and therefore in conjunction with developing long-term, sustainable cultural change within an institution, other forms of activism including naming, departmental and sector-led activism, and feminist direct action are also needed to bring urgent and sustained attention to this issue. overall, the responses to staff sexual misconduct that we are suggesting have a complex relationship to current neoliberal reforms taking place in higher education in the uk. competition between institutions is leading to a heightened focus on institutional reputation and branding (phipps & young, a) and this can be a positive development for combating staff sexual misconduct as it gives an incentive for institutions to take action (towl, ). indeed, kitemarks or credentialization that certify institutions as to their safety and competence are starting to appear, such as protect-ed, a certification scheme run by the university of salford which provides universities with safety credentials across four areas including harassment and sexual assault (‘protected code of practice’, n.d.). however, such neoliberal approaches also carry great risks, as institutions are incentivised to protect high-achieving staff members (imperial college london, ) and in comparison, students and early career researchers are expendable. the idea of an institutional ‘duty of care’ becomes a convenient fiction. the intersection of sexual violence activism in higher education in relation to neoliberal reforms and controls therefore requires further discussion. while there are powerful mechanisms that are encouraging competition between institutions as well as between individuals within them, there are many organisations and individuals who reject this agenda and who are working for positive change within their institutions; higher education is currently a contested space but also continues to be a productive space for activist-led change. we believe that it is possible to bring about sector-wide change to reduce the prevalence and impact of staff sexual misconduct in higher education. this belief is an essential tool for activists; but it is also grounded in the knowledge that we have an opportunity based on the current historical moment, where both sexual harassment more widely, as well as staff-student sexual misconduct, are now on the public agenda. we – along with many others - hope to seize this moment to bring about lasting sector-wide change. author bios tiffany page is a lecturer in the department of sociology at the university of cambridge, and a co- founder of the group. tiffany's research is interdisciplinary and explores the areas of vulnerability, gender inequalities and institutional violence. anna bull is a senior lecturer in sociology at the university of portsmouth, and a co-founder of the group. her research interests include class and gender inequalities, classical music and music education, and sexual harassment and sexual violence in education institutions. emma chapman is a royal astronomical society fellow based at imperial college london. emma has worked with individual institutions and the institute of physics to ensure the problem of bullying and harassment within stem is taken seriously, for example through the gender equality accreditation juno. references ahmad, a. 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( ). the silence breakers. time magazine. available: http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | rethinking laughter in contemporary anglophone theatre conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” université de bretagne occidentale, brest, france, september - - conference organized by elizabeth mullen and nicole cloarec sophie chadelle and mikaël toulza electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi: . /miranda. issn: - publisher université toulouse - jean jaurès printed version date of publication: october electronic reference sophie chadelle and mikaël toulza, “conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen””, miranda [online], | , online since october , connection on february . url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi: https://doi.org/ . /miranda. this text was automatically generated on february . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” université de bretagne occidentale, brest, france, september - - conference organized by elizabeth mullen and nicole cloarec sophie chadelle and mikaël toulza sercia (socie ́té d’etudes et de recherche sur le cine ́ma anglophone), a society founded in to gather researchers in the field of english-speaking cinema, held its th conference in september at universite ́ de bretagne occidentale in brest, france. remarkably organized by elizabeth mullen, associate professor at universite ́ de bretagne occidentale, the conference, which lasted for three days from september th to th, included panels with - speakers working on cinema and television and reflected sercia’s vast research interests; the works of art studied ranked from mainstream to avant-garde, through silent, classical or contemporary, and came from the united states, the united kingdom, australia, and multiple other geographical locations. this conference was punctuated by two impressive keynotes given by timothy corrigan (university of pennsylvania) and janet staiger (university of texas at austin). this year, the conference revolved around the theme “trouble on screen / trouble(s) à l’écran,” and more generally on the capacity of cinema and television to be, on the one hand, a source of entertainment, comfort and escape from our troublesome daily lives and, on the other, a source of destabilization and trouble, leading us to question our representation of normality. whether this trouble is narrative, visual and/or aural, or situated on the level of production or reception, it deals with the ability of cinema and television to encapsulate the complexities of human societies. one of the questions addressed by this year’s discussions was that of the notion of trouble on screen as a means to depict a complex reality or to depart from realism. at stake was the question of the reliability of filmic representations. films could be seen as a way to document the complex realities of the world, the depths of human psychology and the authenticity of human nature. on the contrary, the screen could also become a place of estrangement from everyday realism, film and television being media that cast a conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | http://www.sercia.net/ https://sercia .wixsite.com/troubleonscreen?lang=en https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/timothy-corrigan/ https://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/janet-staiger/ distorted and disturbing reflection of the world. the conference was devised to investigate to what extent the notion of trouble on screen could question and deconstruct moral lines of conduct, cinematographic and televisual norms, and codes of production and reception and, paradoxically, become a source of creation of new aesthetic norms, thereby inviting viewers to discover the invisible patterns and the subtle power plays at stake in the entertainment industry. the participants were invited to analyze the aesthetics of destabilization through unclear or blurred images, obscurity or unsettling soundtrack, and dwell upon surprising and troubling forms of pleasure and excitement. focusing on trouble on screen led speakers to address broader perspectives such as the question of audience reception, as well as phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspectives, and thus to reflect upon the evolution of film and television studies and their reception. david roche (president of sercia, université paul valéry montpellier ) opened the first panel with a discussion of lynne ramsay’s four feature films, all of which center on troubled characters. he proposed an in-depth study of the way formal devices are used to express these characters’ subjectivities. to proceed, he particularly focused on narrative disruptions, point of view and texture. ramsay’s films allow a reconciliation of objective and expressive realism, both traditions aiming at capturing human experiences, even though these two traditions were initially opposed by david bordwell. martin berny (université paris-est) then analyzed the master (anderson, ). he showed how the movie troubles the status of images. through its editing and narrative structure, the master becomes the emanation of joaquin phoenix’s character’s psychological process. céline murillo (université paris ) focused on the movie unmade beds (poe, ), more precisely on spatial and generic troubles. set between paris and new york city, murillo argued that poe’s movie troubles the separation between reality and fantasy. finally, hadrien fontenaud (université paul valéry montpellier) talked about the passionate friends (lean, ) and madeleine (lean, ), which both follow in brief encounter’s (lean, ) footsteps. far from only being variations of the theme of thwarted desire, passionate friends and madeleine are based on a more complex melodramatic scheme. in these movies, lean implemented specific narrative strategies, which are at the core of both an ambiguous poetics and the troubled and troubling subjectivities shown on screen. in panel , participants were invited to study the theme of trouble in the representations of detectives and gangsters. sophie le hiress (université de bretagne occidentale) analyzed the detectives’ diagnosed mental troubles in three series: perception (tnt, - ), hannibal (nbc, - ), and sherlock (bbc, - ). far from being simple elements, the symptoms associated with these detectives’ disabilities have narrative and formal consequences, as they trouble the series’ aesthetics and the spectators’ reception of the series. xavier daverat (université de bordeaux) studied the femme fatale’s first onscreen appearance in various films noirs, from i wake up screaming (humberstone, ) to the postman always rings twice (garnett, ) and the big sleep (hawks, ). these “micro-ectasies,” a term he used to describe these moments, show the immediate seduction of the male protagonist. they present these women as feminine figures who are ready to be consumed, and trouble the narrative, which pauses in moments of contemplation. argyrios keleris (université paris ) then delved into the gangster genre, the specificity of which lies between standardization and differentiation. because this genre was one of transgressions, it was particularly targeted and troubled by the hays code in . this conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | resulted in the emergence of new genres: the hardboiled detective film, the gangster- as-cop film, the cain-and-abel film, the syndicate film, the city-exposé film, and film noir. in the end, though, the crime film is imbued with ideological ambivalence, and its trouble lies in its depiction of the american dream. finally, dominique sipière (université paris nanterre) studied the factual, spectatorial and genre troubles in the people v. o.j. simpson: american crime story (fx, ) and o.j: made in america (espn films, ). twenty years after simpson’s trial, both series presupposed his guilt even though he was acquitted. they both revolve around what sipière called “le long calvaire de la crédibilité” which, in turn, induces narrative and genre troubles. timothy corrigan’s keynote explored the troubling relation between film and the real to the real through the analysis of two autobiographical documentaries: the missing picture (phan, ), a cambodian-french documentary film on the khmer rouge, and stories we tell (polley, ), a documentary film exploring sarah polley’s family’s secrets. since , films have attempted to shape reality as a philosophical concept, an aesthetic strategy and a personal vision. all of these dimensions offer different versions of the real. corrigan focused on the resistance of the real to be represented in the autobiographical documentaries under study. in the digital era, when documentaries, fake news and tv reality shows depict the real as self-evident, the two documentaries at stake attempt to de-create and re-create the real by focusing on its complexity, resistance and multiplicity. the real provides unstable evidence that should be considered as something that is simultaneously there and not there. corrigan emphasized that films are a way to represent reality as a certain variation of the real, which should be always redefined, debated and considered as unrepresentable, as is the case in both films under study. in the missing picture, the theme of the missing image and the use of clay characters become strategies to tackle the erasure of the genocide, the violence of cambodian massacres and the difficulty to represent a lost reality. the recreation of the real reveals the emptiness of the truth. hence, corrigan believes the representation of a lost reality can also be accomplished by gesturing towards it, and the real can only be represented as “cinematic stoppage.” the missing picture is both a deconstruction of the biographical adaptation and of cinema itself. stories we tell is a mix of personal footage, interviews and reenactments. it reflexively engages and undermines both narratives used to interrogate memory, and the objectivity of any perspective. thus, it tackles the concept of recreating a real that has values, an ethical real. these kinds of reenactments situate the real as a phantom, the most important task of documentaries today being an educational and political one. panel opened with marie-pierre burquier (université paris diderot), who focused on the role played by found-footage in the queer rereading of hollywood’s classical imagery. she analyzed how existing images can be reused, reassembled and reinterpreted in order to bring to light their hidden meaning. burquier based her presentation on the analysis of three films, remembrance (tartaglia, ), rock hudson’s home movies (rappaport, ) and meeting two queens (barriga, ). she underlined the importance of the troubled aesthetics of reassembling in the queer reinterpretation of hollywood mythical figures such as bette davis, greta garbo and marlene dietrich, thus subverting the usual and traditional identification process. she further explained how images from classical hollywood films were merged with images from home footage movies, thus blurring the line between fiction and reality, and troubling the original, ideological framework of these images. this subversion ultimately leads to a reinvention and a rewriting of hollywood’s history. georges-claude guilbert conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | (université le havre normandie) analyzed steve antin’s musical burlesque and its troubled aesthetics. he explained the reasons for the perceived failure of the film, which all have to do with the movie’s handling of taste. he underlined the fact that many elements of the musical belonged to kitsch aesthetics and alluded to gay icons and culture, making it all the more puzzling for people who do not possess these references. iconic figures of gay culture, including cher, madonna or even kristen bell, as well as diegetic and nondiegetic songs and musical performances, contribute to the creation of a troubling aesthetics inherent to the musical genre, the burlesque. finally, jeremy cornec (université bretagne occidentale) studied the representation of physical and identity trouble in the portrayal of the belters in the series the expanse (syfy, -). he analyzed how the construction of a collective identity relied on the palimpsest and revealed a form of unbalanced ethnic representation and oppression. in panel , the troubles initiated by white masculinity in cinema and the troubles in the representation of that form of masculinity were investigated. christelle ringuet (université paris ) analyzed whiteness in lemon (bravo, ). when the film was first released, bravo, an african-american woman director, encountered problems in credibility because she was only screening whiteness. she was badly criticized for that movie, which portrays a troubling form of white masculinity, the deranged white male differing from the more traditional white hero. next, delphine letort, (université du mans) tackled the representation of the ku klux klan in the burning cross (colmes, ). her analysis focused on the portrayal of the klan as a criminal organization which manipulates its members and makes the protagonist believe his economic plight was caused by immigrant labor. unlike its notorious predecessor birth of a nation (griffith, ), the burning cross troubles stereotypical images of minorities through its portrayal of social progress in these groups. finally, lucas barrières (université paul valéry montpellier ) examined the generic and formal troubles employed by refn to evoke ryan gosling’s character’s masculinity troubles in drive ( ) and compared the depiction of forms of manhood to refn’s next film only god forgives ( ). the intertextuality between both films has led refn to redefine an aesthetic of the notion of trouble in the representation of masculinity. in panel , nicolas lahaye (université de versailles saint quentin) worked on the impact of the z-movie the room (wiseau, ) and how its aesthetics, production and reception troubled the filmmaking industry and led to the creation of a myth about its maker, tommy wiseau. the reception of the film also induced a reassessment of the definition of what a cult movie is, thus demonstrating how this film followed the lead of cult films, such as the rocky horror picture show (sharman, ), and created a polymorphous entity. raphaëlle costa de beauregard (université toulouse jean-jaurès) then tackled the subject of cinema and intoxication in three films, one a.m. (chaplin, ), wings (wellman and d’abbadie d’arrast, ) and major dundee (peckinpah, ). she showed how these three films dealt with the conflict between order and disorder brought on screen, the dramatization of disorder and how the screen can represent the body as a site of trouble in the protagonist’s mind. she suggested that these films represent a blurring of our apprehension of the real, which becomes a vehicle for an illusionary escape from our frustrating everyday lives. finally, oliver kenny (université lille ) addressed the impact of britishness on the censorship of sexually explicit films in the uk. he first tackled the difference between erotica and porn and how this difference played an important role in the reception of films such as the principles of lust (woolcock, ) and songs (winterbottom, ) and their conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | relationships to censorship politics. he then underlined the fact that the concept of foreignness could play an important role in the distinction between what could be considered as quality erotic films and porn. foreign films such as le mépris (godard, ), la dolce vita (fellini, ), les valseuses (blier, ) or emmanuelle (jaeckin, ), were praised for their quality and benefitted from a certain flexibility from the censors because of their foreign dimension. the question of the lower number of viewers for a foreign film could also be seen as a form of explanation for this flexibility. in panel , pablo gómez muñoz (universidad de zaragoza) and marimar azcona (universidad de zaragoza) offered two complementary discussions of the movie downsizing (payne, ) from a cosmopolitan perspective. before analyzing space in the movie, gómez muñoz explained the centrality of low-cost staging. matt damon’s character’s family has decided to downsize both because of their financial problems and the effects of consumerism on the environment. leisureland, the downsized metropolis, brings consumption dreams closer to people with a lesser environmental impact, yet it also reproduces inequalities. for instance, the film singles out the latino neighborhood, which is separated from leisureland by a wall, while a bus enters a tunnel into leisureland, thus shedding light on the importance of the notions of border and spatial fixes in this study. azcona then drew on the ambivalence of leisureland’s advertised cosmopolitanism, marketed on the basis of capitalism and consumerism. her approach shed light on how the movie’s politics do not offer any real cosmopolitan transformation of the world whatsoever. the second keynote speaker, janet staiger, focused on the link between representation on screen and the practices of film reception. she analyzed the role played by criticism that read kubrick’s : a space odyssey ( ) as a psychedelic film. at a time when violent hate crimes and massacres continue to shake american society to its core, the link between trouble on screen and trouble in the audience is more than ever under scrutiny. can an audience be under the direct influence of representations of violence on screen? staiger expressed her disbelief that representations could lead to pure mimicry. this study of the reception of is revealing of the complexities and sophistication of the link between trouble on screen and trouble in the audience. staiger underlined the importance of pre-existing knowledge as well as social context, which are possible factors that may influence what audience retains from representations. early critics of the film may have influenced, the perception that the film was the “ultimate trip”. however, in the late s, many youths would have watched any film stoned without needing prior encouragement. moreover, the role played by the film’s aesthetics must be taken into account. the soundtrack, the slow pace, the silence and the minimalist dialogues would have reinforced the comparison of the film to a trip, hence the importance of aesthetics in the reception, not so much in the sense that aesthetics create effects, but that audiences might make use of them in a particular way. the early reviews and the psychedelic terminology they used may have played an important role in the reading of the film, although the importance of the influence of reviews can be relative. people advertised as rated s, for stoned audiences, and the film went on to become a cult film and a smashing success. several lessons are to be drawn from this story. became a cult film much in the same way as the rocky horror picture show (sharman, ) did, with an underground audience who would return to watch the same movie and create trouble in the audience. finally, staiger concluded that, beyond social context, aesthetics also mattered since part of conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | what produced the psychedelic audience was probably the non-standard, non-classical aesthetics, which was more aligned with european art cinema. panel revolved around racial issues in the u.s.a. first, mikaël toulza (université toulouse jean jaurès) unraveled the intersectional politics of voodoo in angel heart (parker, ) in relation to the movie’s troubling racial and generic hybridity. the private eye’s white male gaze, through which the narrative unfolds, perceives voodoo as a diabolical and abject religion. this results in an association between voodoo and satanism which troubles the film’s aesthetics. toulza’s study of the black voodoo priestess’s experience—from angel observing and fetishizing her during the voodoo ceremony to him raping and murdering her—stressed the movie’s destabilization of this untrustworthy white male gaze. ultimately, angel heart’s voodoo troubles racial and generic boundaries, even though it is still used as a sensationalistic means of entertaining the audience. claire dutriaux (université paris sorbonne) examined the term “professional southerners,” which has been used by film scholars and historians to refer to several agents in hollywood who acted as mediators between hollywood and the south in the production code era. dutriaux contended that their presence was necessary to avoid making movies that would be troubling or troublesome to the south’s audiences. during and after wwii, hollywood was negotiating what it perceived as the pressures of the civil rights movement. these professional southerners played an important role to help filmmakers navigate between advocating for the south and its identity on the one hand, and condemning this region’s violent past on the other. yann roblou (université polytechnique hauts de france) closed the panel with an analysis of the horror movie us (peele, ) which is, at least structurally, a classical tragedy. the movie’s reliance on the motif of the double is paralleled by the narrative’s symmetry and repetition and the camera’s confrontation of the characters’ stare to the mirror. us is heavily intertextual and manages to merge the fantastic with horror. in panel , chris horn (university of leicester) questioned friedkin’s goals with films from the s such as rampage ( ) and cruising ( ) and whether or not they should be considered as a form of provocation towards reaganite cinema. according to horn, the reactions to both films said more about the context and the morality of the time than about the films themselves. both films, which dealt with controversial themes—homosexuality in cruising and the death penalty in rampage—played on the cathartic effects films can have when dealing with troublesome material. gary edgerton (butler university) gave a talk on the series mad men (amc, - ) and analyzed its politics in a new era of accountability. he underlined the fact that the show tackled a form of violence through its depictions of sex and engagement with politics. according to him, mad men could be considered to reflect both the zeitgeist of the time but also of today. the critical nostalgia that the show displays not only tackles the gendered and political power plays of the s and s, but could also be said to foreshadow current movements like #metoo, especially if we consider weiner’s own personal life (he was accused of sexual harassment by one the female writers of the show). anaïs le fevre-berthelot (université rennes ) focused on two shows, ally mcbeal (fox, - ) and crazy ex-girlfriend (bloom, the cw, -), in order to analyze the link between the portrayal of female characters and the representation of mental illness on screen and its evolution. the depiction of mental illness on screen is linked to troubling concepts such as representation, norms and identity. for le fevre- berthelot, however, this theme has been underrepresented for a long time in the media. characters suffering from mental illness were very often secondary characters. conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | the post-network era led to a change, and series such as ally mcbeal and crazy ex- girlfriend stand out for several reasons. their depiction of mental illness is not limited to secondary characters. furthermore, her analysis of gender bias in such representations demonstrated to what extent the representation of trouble through the portrayal of female characters suffering from mental illness can lead to question unrealistic expectations of liberal feminism. panel started with sébastien lefait’s (université paris ) exploration of intermedial troubles in the series the handmaid’s tale (hulu, - ) and house of cards (netflix, - ) as examples. in both series, intermediality relies on blurred areas between media forms, troubling the reception notably in terms of the political and social implications which drew a lot of attention from the audience. lefait’s talk emphasized the growing importance of popular series in displaying their political content, thus gradually affecting us politics. julie assouly (université d’artois) then tackled the representations of working-class pennsylvanians in the deer hunter (cimino, ) and out of the furnace (cooper, ). set in “photogenically depressed” industrial landscapes, with a mill serving as multi-faceted signifier of the rust belt, assouly argued that both films explore the troubles associated with working-class wasp masculinity. in one of the final panels ( ) julia echeverria (universidad de zaragoza) put into perspective orange is the new black (netflix, - ) and the spanish women-in- prison series vis a vis ( - , antena & fox spain). jenji kohan, orange’s showrunner, says the series is a trojan horse to tell story about black and latina woman, which also applies to its spanish counterpart. and indeed, both series create visibility for the experiences of multiple forms of femininity. the difference between them lies, according to echeverria, in the fact that orange is set in a highly segregated place while vis a vis’s prison acts, ironically enough, as liberating space. anne sweet (université sorbonne nouvelle-paris ) examined the trouble with female power by analyzing the representation of witchcraft, sexuality and magic in the series the chilling adventures of sabrina (netflix, -). she explored the link between female power and agency on screen and the depiction of witches on television and its evolution from the s until now. sophie chadelle (université toulouse jean jaurès) closed the last panel with a study of the use of slang by female characters in sex and the city (hbo, - ) and grey’s anatomy (abc, - ) and its impact on the representation of female empowerment. she then analyzed the translation of both series and demonstrated how the french dubbing and subtitling altered the work on slang and vulgarity thus undermining the feminist discourse of both series and the female characterization process. the th sercia conference offered a wealth of case studies, theoretical and methodological proposals, and was an opportunity to explore the diverse understandings of the notion of trouble on screen. the multifaceted dimension of the notion of trouble on screen was brilliantly tackled throughout this conference, which also testified to the wide variety of approaches in film and television studies. the creative dimension of the concept of trouble on screen was central. whether it is conveyed through the aesthetics of films or series, the narrative and characterization strategies or the soundtrack, among others, trouble on screen can often lead to the destabilization and explosion of traditional frameworks and the renewal of our beliefs and expectations. cinematic and television works could thus be seen as profoundly conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | human experiences, as organic and living elements, which grow, die and are reborn in a perpetual, creative and artistic movement that troubles us, forcing us to feel and think at the same time, while stepping out of our comfort zone in order to make sense of our very troubling world. index keywords: trouble, cinema, seriality, serial, series, tv, media, internet, film, television, aesthetic, form, hollywood, fiction, documentary, production, narrative, narration, transmediality, intermediality, intertextuality, performance, spectatorship, reality, realities mots-clés: trouble, cinéma, sérialité, feuilleton, séries, télévision, media, internet, film, esthétique, forme, hollywood, fiction, documentaire, production, narration, récit, transmédialité, intermédialité, performance, audience, réalité subjects: tv, film, video authors sophie chadelle doctorante université toulouse jean jaurès sophie.chadelle@univ-tlse .fr mikaËl toulza doctorant université toulouse jean jaurès mikael.toulza@univ-tlse .fr conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” miranda, | mailto:sophie.chadelle@univ-tlse .fr mailto:mikael.toulza@univ-tlse .fr 	conference report: th sercia conference: “trouble on screen” 	 ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... p r o f e s s i o n s p o t l i g h t : i n t e r v i e w s , r e f l e c t i o n s , a n d a d v i c e f r o m w o m e n i n l e g i s l a t i v e s t u d i e s an interdisciplinary and international perspective: an interview with liza mÜgge sanne van oosten, university of amsterdam liza mügge, university of amsterdam doi: . /s sanne van oosten (svo): how has your career developed since the end of your phd? liza mügge (lm): my background is atypical because i am trained as an anthropologist and received a phd in migration and ethnic studies. the red thread in my work is that i always studied pol- itics but from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. just before i completed my phd dissertation, i received a job offer at the university of leiden to become an assistant professor in cultural anthropology. during the three years at that department, i learned two important lessons. the first lesson was the essence of being well informed about the informal and formal rules in the insti- tution and department. i was the only young woman in the department with a child. i asked the head of my department whether i could work full time but with flexible work hours. he replied: “you have a child and you have to take good care of it. it is best if you work part-time, that is what my daughters do.” later, i realized that some of my male colleagues who also had children did have full-time employment but worked from home some days of the week. as i had to get my publications out fresh out of my phd, i also worked full time but received a part-time salary. if i had known this before, i would have never accepted this. i think we see a similar pattern with the gender pay gap. knowing how much you earn compared to your male colleagues is an important piece of information that you may use to address inequality. the second lesson i learned was the importance of mentors. i took part in a training for newly hired female assistant professors facilitated by a well-known social psychologist, professor naomi ellemers. she encouraged us to proactively ask for advice and sup- port from more advanced academics. it was an eye-opener to me that there are many people (often women) who are willing to offer support, even if they don’t know you. i believe advice seeking to gain different perspectives on a problem remains crucial at all career levels. svo: to what extent did your transfer from anthropology to polit- ical science entail a shift in working culture and/or environment? lm: anthropology has a very different way of doing research. many anthropologists do fieldwork for longer periods of time; they usually write books; they write more single-authored articles. they are not publication machines. this is very different from political science. in political science, quantity matters and books don’t count as much. anthropologists are generally closer to their research than political scientists. what i like about the anthropological way of doing research is that you really delve into a topic. i still do that. when i start a new research topic, i try to get as much information as possible from novels, art exhibitions, podcasts, and movies. closeness to research participants is also clearly reflected in anthropological methods. my work is influenced by ethnographic tools that i integrate in mixed-method research designs. svo: has the field changed since you finished your phd? how? lm: when i was about to finish my phd thesis, a male professor at a conference gave me the following advice to build a competi- tive cv. investment in international research collaborations was key. but, he emphasized, i should select my research partners carefully: “make sure you get along well. you know how i select my collaborators? i should be able to talk to them about soccer and bitches.” this “well-meant advice” is telling for the male domination and privilege at the time. and it is damaging too. it made me doubt whether i would ever be able to be involved in an international research project as a young woman with no interest in soccer. today, among others, thanks to #metoo, there is much more attention to sexism in academia, which hopefully prevents such comments. and, if not, there are more places to find support. i only started working on political representation in legislative studies in when i received a grant to study the political rep- resentation of citizens with a migration background. so, i cannot say much about how the field of legislative studies has changed. i overall do see more women in political science, but we are far from equal. women are especially underrepresented among the ranks of full professor. yet, in research on politics and gender, women are overrep- resented. they are doing exceptionally well across the subfields of political science, including legislative studies. the challenge we face is that work on gender is not always considered political science. in europe, we founded the european journal for politics and gender to address this (ahrens et al. ). at the same time, politics and gender scholars gain increasing visibility in general- ist political science journals. that said, there is still a gender gap in the top journals and in citation patterns. there is still a lot of work to be done. svo: have you also experienced sexual harassment while working in academia? lm: during my phd project, i experienced quite a bit of sexual harassment from high-profile politicians that i interviewed. i started writing about these experiences much later because many of my female students asked questions about harassment in the field (mügge ; a; b). at the time, there was not really space to talk about it. it was not a topic of discussion as it is now in society and in academic circles. i am glad that has changed. svo: what about within academia? what were your experiences trying to become part of a field dominated by male scholars? was it easy? difficult? why? lm: i came into legislative studies through the field of politics and gender. the politics and gender field is a very constructive crowd of people, very critical, brilliant women often with a good sense of humor. coming from the—at that time—male-dominated subfield of migration studies, it was a joy to work with this community. generally, gender equality now has gained momentum. this year, the european consortium for political research (ecpr) accepted a plan to enhance gender equality (ecpr ). they aim for equal composition in all of its suborganizations, layers of the organization, among prize laureates and journal editors, and so on. only % of the full professors in europe in the social sciences are women, so we still have a very long way to go. ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... svo: in your view, what are the disadvantages women face for being part of a field that is predominantly male? lm: the professor and lawyer joan williams and her daughter rachel dempsey wrote an amazing book about this: what works for women at work (williams and dempsey ). they inter- viewed successful working women and signaled four main patterns that affect women at work. the first pattern is called “prove it again.” this refers to the way women often have to prove themselves, time and again. “the tight rope” refers to the delicate, often impossible, bal- ance women need to find between being feminine (and not being taken seriously) and masculine (and not being likable). the third pattern is called “the maternal wall,” which refers to the negative competence and commitment assumptions on becom- ing a mother. even women without children are influenced by the maternal wall: they are expected to be available more than they should because of not having children. the fourth pat- tern is a combination of all of the above: “tug of war” refers to the way gender bias against women creates conflicts among women. for instance, an older woman applies harsher standards to a younger woman because that is what it takes to succeed as a woman. i think these four patterns are very important because we see them everywhere, definitely also in academia. svo: what can we do about it? lm: we need male allies. research shows that quality of work increases in more diverse organizations, so this is in everyone’s interest. we need to invest in structures and institutions to try to change the culture. we need men on board to make that change (mügge, evans and engeli ). additionally, academia should become more diverse in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity. in the united states, apsa has a strong community of african american scholars; they are very visible. this is a challenge that european political science should take on (mügge et al. ). n r e f e r e n c e s ahrens, petra, karen celis, sarah childs, isabelle engeli, elizabeth evans, and liza mügge. . “editorial: politics and gender: rocking political science and creating new horizons.” european journal of politics and gender ( ): – . available at http://doi.org/ . / x . european consortium for political research (ecpr). . “gender equality plan, targets and actions, – publications.” available at https://ecpr.eu/ filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf. mügge, liza. . “de persoonlijke politiek van meindert fennema.” over de kracht van anekdotes en netwerken. in democratie en wetenschap, essays voor meindert fen- nema, ed. marcel maussen and floris vermeulen, – . amsterdam: university of amsterdam, amsterdam institute for social science research. available at https:// pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf. mügge, liza. a. “in the mud puddle: the research diary as a method.” in migration and integration research: filling in penninx’s heuristic model, ed. anja van heelsum and blanca garcés-mascareñas, – . amsterdam: amsterdam university press. available at http://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/ / . . mügge, liza. b. “sexually harassed by gatekeepers: reflections on fieldwork in surinam and turkey.” international journal of social research methodology ( ): – . available at http://doi.org/ . / . . . mügge, liza, elizabeth evans, and isabelle engeli. . “introduction: gender in european political science education–taking stock and future directions.” european political science ( ): – . available at doi: . /eps. . . mügge, liza, celeste montoya, akwugo emejulu, and s. laurel weldon. . “intersectionality and the politics of knowledge production.” european journal of politics and gender ( / ): – . available at doi: . / x . williams, joan, and rachel dempsey. . what works for women at work: four patterns working women need to know. first edition. new york: new york university press. one woman’s career path—with advice for young women scholars patricia a. hurley, texas a&m university doi: . /s some context for this article is necessary. i started my career being extremely naïve about gender discrimination in the world at large. my family never gave me any indication that i should have limited expectations for what i might accomplish because i am a woman. parental expectations for me were high—and higher than they were for my brothers, at least from my perspec- tive. after graduation from high school in (a date necessary for further context), i attended newcomb college of tulane uni- versity and graduated in . newcomb was a women’s college at that time and all of my classes (with only a few exceptions) in my first two years were populated only by female students. gender bias in the classroom did not exist. my cohort in graduate school at rice university included only five people, of whom i was the only woman. there were no women on the faculty in the political science department at that time, but it was a small department and i did not give it much thought. although i was a quiet student, it was not because i felt intim- idated by men in my seminars. (i confess to being intimidated by students in the class ahead of me, who all seemed to know so much more than the members of the entering class.) once i was far enough along in the program to have a dissertation committee (all male), i received support and encouragement for my work. does this mean that the department was free of sexism? no. cer- tainly there were people (students and some faculty) who would tell an off-color joke, make the occasional comment that would be interpreted today as creating a hostile environment, or even occasionally say something outrageous directly to me. none of it was any worse than i had heard growing up with three brothers— this was simply the way the world was in those days, so i never took particular offense. if my fellow students were willing to tell that off-color joke in my presence, it simply was a sign that i was “one of the guys.” if a meeting with my committee reduced me to tears (it did once), it was not because they were harder on me than they were on the male students—it was because i was the one who cried. there were times i thought i would fail in those days, but it never occurred to me that i would fail because i was a woman. after taking my first job in the summer of (a non- tenure-track position at the university of houston), i began to recognize the professional difficulties that women faced because of their gender. there were tenure-track women on the faculty who seemed to be judged harshly because they were women. there were women on the faculty who found the environment intimidating because of the behavior of men. there were the conversations all about sports that seemed to leave women out. i received little, if any, mentoring from senior faculty, even while male colleagues also in non-tenure-track positions did receive such support. (i continued to receive mentoring from several dissertation committee members, who were in close geographic proximity.) add to that the male students who approached their female professors inappropriately. yes, there was gender bias in the academic world and i was just realizing it. the atmosphere was far more supportive when i moved to a tenure-track position at texas a&m in , where i was encouraged, given resources, and chosen for administrative leadership posi- tions, including two terms as department head and appointment http://doi.org/ . / x https://ecpr.eu/filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf https://ecpr.eu/filestore/customcontent/membership/genderequalityplan_ .pdf https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/ / _boek_essays_voor_meindert_fennema.pdf http://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/ / . http://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /eps. . https://doi.org/ . / x https://doi.org/ . / x cem_ _s _abstact .. p variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tom- ography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians l. salehi, md, mph, p. phalpher, md, d. levay, msc, c. meaney, msc, m. ossip, md, r. valani, mba, md, mmed, m. mercuri, msc, phd, william osler health system, brampton, on introduction: current data on utilization of ct imaging point to a trend of increasing overutilization of ct angiography for the diagno- sis of pulmonary embolism (ctpa) over time. multiple educational and institution-wide interventions addressing this overutilization have been proposed, implemented and evaluated, with mixed results in terms of long-term impact on physician ordering behaviour. the objective of this study is to examine the inter-physician variability in ordering rates and diagnostic yield of ctpa, under a working hypothesis that a small number of physicians are responsible for a dis- proportionately high number of ctpa ordered in the ed. methods: data was collected on all ctpa studies ordered by ed physicians at two very high volume community hospitals and an affiliated urgent care centre during the -year period between january , and december , . analysis was limited to those ed physicians who had a total of greater than ed visits over the course of the -year period. for each physician, two calculations were made: ) ct pe ordering rate (total number of ctpa ordered divided by the total number of ed visits), and ) ctpa diagnostic yield (total number of ctpa positive for pe divided by the total number ctpa ordered). additional analysis was carried out in order to iden- tify the highest orderers of ctpa and their diagnostic yield. results: a total of , ctpawere ordered by physicians for , total ed visits. preliminary results show a great deal of variation in order- ing rates, ranging from . to . ctpa per ed visit (median = . , iqr = . ). similarly, there was high variation in ct pe yield, ranging from % to % (median = . %, iqr = . %). those phy- sicians in the top quartile for ordering rate had a lower mean diagnos- tic yield, when compared to the lower quartiles ( . % when compared to . %, . % and . % for the physicians in the third, second, and first quartile respectively). conclusion: the findings of this study indicate a wide degree of variability in ctpa ordering patterns and diagnostic yield among physicians working within the same clin- ical environment. there is some suggestion that those physicians who order disproportionately higher numbers of ctpas have lower diag- nostic yields. however, the more interesting lessons from this initial study center on the challenges in creating an audit-and-feedback pro- gram targeting ctpa ‘overutilizers’. keywords: computed tomography, health services utilization, pul- monary embolism p geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information sys- tem analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. galway, bsc, mph, phd, a. drumm, ba, t. leach, np, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, univer- sity of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: emergency departments are a common point of access for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (sgbv), but very little is known about where survivors live and the character- istics of the neighbourhoods. the objective of this study was to use hospital-based data to characterize sexual and domestic assault cases and identify geographic distribution across the ottawa-gatineau area. methods: data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year.data for this study were extracted from the sexual assault and partner abuse care program (sapacp) case registry (jan -dec , ) at the ottawa hospital. spatial analyses were conducted using -digit postal codes converted to canadian census tracts to identify potential geographic areas where sgbv cases are clustered. hot-spots were defined as census tracts with seven or more assaults within a single calendar year. results: in , there were patients seen at the sapacp, had valid postal codes from ottawa-gatineau and were included in the analyses. over % of patients were female and ( . %) were below years of age. eight hot-spots were identified including in the downtown entertainment district, lower income areas, high income neighbourhood, and suburb more than km from downtown. conclusion: this study is of the first to use hospital- based data to examine the geographic distribution of sgbv cases, with key findings including the identification of high-income neigh- bourhoods and suburbs as sgbv hot-spots. alongside efforts like the #metoo movement, this evidence challenges stereotypes of assault survivors and highlights the breadth and widespread nature of sgbv. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual assault p outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon o. scheirer, md, a. leach, md, s. netherton, md, phd, p. mondal, phd, t. hillier, ma, p. davis, md, msc, university of saskatchewan, saskatoon, sk introduction: one in nine ( . %) people in saskatchewan identifies as first nations. in canada, first nations people experience a higher burden of cardiovascular disease when compared to the general popu- lation, but it is unknown whether they have different outcomes in out of hospital cardiac arrest (ohca). methods: we reviewed pre- hospital and inpatient records of patients sustaining an ohca between january st, and december st, . the population consisted of patients aged years or older with ohca of presumed cardiac origin occurring in the catchment area of saskatoon’s ems service. variables of interest included, age, gender, first nations sta- tus (as identified by treaty number), ems response times, bystander cpr, and shockable rhythm. outcomes of interest included return of spontaneous circulation (rosc), survival to hospital admission, and survival to hospital discharge. results: in all, patients sus- tained ohca, of which were identified as first nations. first nations patients with ohca tended to be significantly younger (mean age years vs. years, p < . ) and had shorter ems response times (median times . minutes vs. . minutes, p = . ). there were no differences between first nations and non-first nations patients in terms of incidence of shockable rhythms ( % vs. %, p = . ), rosc ( % vs. %, p = . ), survival to admis- sion ( % vs %, p = . ), and survival to hospital discharge ( % vs. %, p = . ). conclusion: in saskatoon, first nations patients cjem • jcmu ; suppl s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms sustaining ohca appear to have similar survival rates when com- pared with non-first nations patients, suggesting similar baseline care. interestingly, first nations patients sustaining ohca were sig- nificantly younger than their non-first nations counterparts. this may reflect a higher burden of cardiovascular disease, suggesting a need improved prevention strategies. keywords: emergency medical services, first nations, out of hospital cardiac arrest p impact of young age on outcomes of emergency department procedural sedation m. schlegelmilch, md, mph, m. roback, md, m. bhatt, md, msc, university of ottawa, children’s hospital of eastern ontario, ottawa, on introduction: procedural sedation in the emergency department (ed) for children undergoing painful procedures is common practice, however little is known about sedation in very young children. we examined the effect of young age on sedation outcomes. methods: this is a secondary analysis of an observational cohort study of chil- dren - years undergoing procedural sedation in six pediatric eds across canada. we compared presedation state, indication for sed- ation, medications, sedation efficacy and four main post-sedation out- comes (serious adverse events (sae), significant interventions, oxygen desaturation and vomiting) between patients who ≤ years with those > years. pre-sedation state, medications, indication for sedation and time intervals were summarized using frequency and percentage and compared with chi test. logistic regression was used to examine asso- ciations between age group and outcomes. results: patients were included; ( %) were > years and ( %) were ≤ years. children ≤ years were sedated most commonly for laceration repair (n = ; . %), orthopedic reduction ( ; . %) and abscess incision and drainage ( ; . %). children > years were sedated most commonly for orthopedic reductions ( ; . %). ketamine was the most common medication in both groups, but was used most frequently in children ≤ years ( . % vs . %; p < . ). there was no difference in the incidence of sae, significant interventions or oxygen desaturation between age groups, however children ≤ years were less likely to vomit (table ). young children had decreased odds of a successful sedation (or . ; % ci: . to . ). on average, patients ≤ years were sedated for minutes less ( . vs . p < . ) and discharged minutes sooner ( . vs . p < . ). table ≤ years (n = ) > years (n = ) or ( %ci)* p-value n(%) n(%) serious adverse event ( . ) ( . ) . ( . - . ) . significant intervention ( . ) ( . ) . ( . - . ) . oxygen desaturation ( . ) ( . ) . ( . - . ) . vomiting ( . ) ( . ) . . - . ) < . *reference category: ≤ years. conclusion: children ≤ years most commonly received ed sedation for laceration repair using ketamine. young age was not associated with a significant difference in saes, significant intervention or desaturation but was associated with decreased odds of vomiting and of successful sedation. keywords: pain, pediatric, sedation p procedural skills training in emergency medicine physicians within the edmonton zone: a needs assessment r. schonnop, bsc, md, b. stauffer, bsc, md, mhse, a. gauri, msph, d. ha, bsc, md, university of alberta, edmonton, ab introduction: procedural skills are a key component of an emergency physician’s practice. the edmonton zone is a health region that com- prises eleven tertiary, urban community and rural community emer- gency departments (eds) that represents over three hundred emergency physicians. we report the initial stakeholder and site lead- ership needs assessment used to inform the development of a compre- hensive continuing professional development (cpd) procedural skills curriculum for the edmonton zone. methods: a list of procedural skills was distributed to the two edmonton zone clinical department heads of emergency medicine (em). this list was based on a previ- ous canadian study that utilized procedures from the objectives of training in em. based on perceived needs, twenty-five procedures were chosen by consensus from zone leadership and study authors as the initial focus for a skills curriculum. this list was sent via survey to the physician site leads of all eds in the zone. each site lead was asked to indicate the fifteen procedure curriculum they felt would most benefit their respective physician groups. responses were col- lated to look at all departments as a group and stratified by the type of ed (tertiary, urban and rural community). results: every site chief of edmonton zone eds completed the survey ( % response rate). cricothyrotomy and pediatric intubation were the two procedures prioritized by every site. one procedure (ultrasound guided central lines) was prioritized by / sites while three proce- dures (ultrasound guided central lines, adult intubation and chest tube insertion) were specified by / sites as needs. two procedures (peri- cardiocentesis and thoracotomy) were named as priorities only by ter- tiary centers. conversely, three procedures (extensor tendon repair, anterior and posterior nasal packing) were highlighted by all rural sites, but not consistently by any urban sites. conclusion: over the next few years, competency-based cpd will emerge for physicians in practice. our preliminary needs assessment showed that while a common zone-wide curriculum will be possible, targeted curricula tailored to the unique needs of the various types of eds will also be necessary. this has implications for the resources and teaching requirements needed to deliver effective and recurring cpd courses to an entire health region. a targeted needs assessment to all edmon- ton zone physicians will be the next step to verify and further elabor- ate on these preliminary results. keywords: continuing professional development, curriculum, simulation p older adults in the emergency department: a retrospective cross-sectional study of the geriatric population in edmonton emergency departments k. morch, bsc, md, r. schonnop, bsc, md, a. gauri, msph, d. ha, bsc, md, university of alberta, edmonton, ab introduction: the geriatric patient population accounts for an ever increasing proportion of emergency department (ed) visits. geriatric centered eds are an emerging area of interest and research. though there have been past studies looking at older patient presentations at individual hospitals, there is limited data describing geriatric presen- tations within an entire canadian geographic health region. this study characterizes the population of older adults utilizing the eds in the edmonton zone, a health region that comprises a total of eleven tertiary (t), urban community (uc) and rural community (rc) hos- pitals. methods: this retrospective cross-sectional study targeted all patients ≥ years presenting to the edmonton zone eds between april , to march , . data was extracted from the cjem • jcmus ; suppl résumés scientifique https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	variability in utilization and diagnostic yield of computed tomography (ct) scans for pulmonary embolism among emergency physicians 	geographies of sexual assault: using geographic information system analysis to identify neighbourhoods affected by violence 	outcomes of out of hospital cardiac arrest in first nations vs. non-first nations patients in saskatoon 	impact of young age on outcomes of emergency department procedural sedation 	procedural skills training in emergency medicine physicians within the edmonton zone: a needs assessment 	older adults in the emergency department: a retrospective cross-sectional study of the geriatric population in edmonton emergency departments links between psychological disengagement from school and different forms of self-esteem in the crucial period of early and mid-adolescence vol.:( ) social psychology of education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -w links between psychological disengagement from school and different forms of self‑esteem in the crucial period of early and mid‑adolescence delphine martinot, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] received: november / accepted: september / published online: october © the author(s) abstract the purpose of this study was to test the links between psychological disengagement from academics and self-esteem during two different periods of adolescence. previ- ous research provided mixed findings on the links between both psychological dis- engagement mechanisms (i.e., discounting and devaluing) and self-esteem. to clar- ify this relationship, global self-esteem as well as self-esteem in school attainment and social domains were assessed among early-adolescents (aged to ) and mid-adolescents (aged to ). according to the psychological disengage- ment model, it was predicted that experience of personal deprivation due to per- ceived relative academic underachievement would be associated with discounting of academic grades. in turn, a link between discounting and devaluing from school was expected. both psychological disengagement mechanisms were predicted to harm global self-esteem and self-esteem in the school attainment domains. however, dis- counting and devaluing were expected to increase self-esteem in the social domains among mid- rather than early-adolescents. path analyses support in part prediction. both psychological disengagement mechanisms played a different role on global and domain-specific self-esteem. among early-adolescents, discounting reduced global self-esteem and self-esteem in school attainment domains. findings pointed to the self-protective role of discounting on self-esteem in social domains among mid-adolescents as well as the non-protective function of devaluing on global self- esteem, school attainment and social domains of self-esteem. this study contrib- utes by clarifying the links between psychological disengagement from academics and self-esteem at two distinct periods in adolescence and the specific domains of self-esteem. keywords psychological disengagement from school · global self-esteem · domain-specific self-esteem · personal relative deprivation · early-and mid- adolescence http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -w&domain=pdf d. martinot et al. introduction . school disengagement and adolescence youth disengagement from academics is a matter for concern. when they dis- engage from school, youth cease their involvement in school activities, respond in maladaptive ways to the obligation of attending school (skinner et  al. ; wang et  al. ), as well as experience a decrease in grade point average and educational aspirations (wang et  al. ). disengagement from school creates a vicious cycle; youth will more likely associate with delinquent peers, devalue academics, and feel alienated from their teachers, which in turn increases their disengagement from school (morrison et  al. ). academic disengagement may also ultimately lead to school dropout (archambault et  al. ). however, there are periods in the life of youths when they are more at risk to experience school disengagement. researchers have identified the secondary school years as an especially risky period for school disengagement (wang and fredricks ). indeed, the transition to a secondary school is marked with important changes for youth, namely, exposure to a larger and more heterogeneous student popula- tion, fewer opportunities for interaction with teachers, and wavering social sup- port from teachers, peers, and parents (e.g., eccles et al. ; eccles and roeser ; wang and holcombe ). these changes to the school environment are at odds with the developmental needs of adolescents (eccles and midgley ). moreover, according to stage-environment fit theory (e.g., eccles and midg- ley ; eccles et  al. ; eccles and roeser ), students disengage first psychologically and then physically from school as they mature into and through adolescence. thus, school disengagement might initially be expressed by a psy- chological state (eccles and roeser ). therefore, the secondary school years appear as especially relevant to examine the school disengagement in its first expression, i.e., its psychological expression. in this aim, we draw upon a theo- retical framework from social psychology (crocker and major ; major and schmader ; major et  al. ; osborne ; schmader et  al. ; steele ; tougas et  al. , ) to explore the psychological underpinnings of psychological disengagement from academics. in this theoretical framework, researchers make a distinction between two psychological disengagement mecha- nisms, that is, discounting and devaluing (e.g., major et al. , see for a review tougas and beaton ). in the academic domain, discounting involves the con- viction that negative academic feedback and poor academic grades are biased and do not reflect one’s true abilities (e.g., “the grades i obtain are below my real skills”). devaluing is a mechanism whereby a student will minimize the impor- tance of academic achievement and feel that this domain is no longer relevant for the self (e.g., “succeeding in school is not important for my future life”). links between psychological disengagement from school and… both psychological disengagement mechanisms correspond to a mental retreat from academic achievement so that it is no longer considered a primary source of self-esteem (e.g., crocker et al. ; major and schmader ; major et al. ). therefore, the examination of psychological underpinnings of academic disengagement involves the exploration of its links with self-esteem, especially at the critical period of adolescence associated with a lowered self-esteem (orth and robins ; robins et  al. ). this is the contribution of the present study designed to test the links between each mechanism of psychological disengage- ment from school and crucial dimensions of self-esteem on two separate sam- ples of participants corresponding to two different periods of adolescence in sec- ondary school years: early-adolescence ( –   years old) and mid-adolescence ( –   years old). this analysis will help leverage any strategy designed to cur- tail school disengagement and improve school engagement at a critical period of the academic journey. . personal relative deprivation as predictor of psychological disengagement on the basis of the psychological disengagement model (pdm; e.g., beaton et al. ; rinfret et  al. ; tougas et  al. ), psychological disengagement from school emerges from the experience of personal relative deprivation. at the personal level, it is defined as a feeling of dissatisfaction experienced following negative com- parisons of one’s disadvantaged situation with that of more fortunate others (crosby ). according to this definition, personal relative deprivation includes a cogni- tive and affective component (runciman ). the cognitive component refers to personal comparisons with others. the affective component includes dissatisfaction due to perceived differences between the self and others. in the academic setting, classmates represent comparison targets, whereby a student may feel dissatisfaction due to recognizing that one is chronically underperforming at school in comparison with a classmate (or several classmates). if, as originally suggested by crocker and major (crocker et  al. ; major et  al. ), psychological disengagement is a strategy used in response to individual threats such as low grades, students should report psychological disengagement from school when they are dissatisfied with their underperformance relative to their classmates. thus, feelings of personal rela- tive deprivation could predict discounting and devaluing. according to the pdm (e.g., beaton et  al. ; lagacé and tougas ; laplante et  al. , ; rinfret et  al. ; tougas et  al. ), individu- als embark gradually on the psychological disengagement road, starting from the mechanism that has less significance for one’s life (discounting) to the one that has much more (devaluing). discounting is considered as temporary and less radical strategy than devaluing (e.g., lesko and corpus ; major and schmader ; tougas et  al. ). whereas devaluing, deemed as the royal road of psychologi- cal disengagement (croizet and martinot ), implies a withdrawal from the aca- demic domain, discounting allows individuals to temporarily protect themselves d. martinot et al. from negative evaluations received in school. furthermore, individuals generally report greater discounting than devaluing (e.g., régner and loose ; schmader et  al. ; tougas et  al. ), which suggests that it is more difficult to devalue a domain than to discredit poor evaluations, especially when the domain (such as school) is highly valued in society (e.g., laplante et al. ). the first aim of the present study is to determine the relationship between the experience of personal relative deprivation, i.e., dissatisfaction due to unfavorable academic comparisons with other classmates, and psychological disengagement from school. according to the pdm, the more students will feel personally deprived in academic achievement compared to their classmates, the more they will discount their grades. students who repeatedly discount their academic underperformance (poor grades), come to the conclusion that their abilities and potential will never be recognized at school, and thus, are more likely to devalue academics. all in all, personal deprivation in academic achievement is positively associated with dis- counting of grades, which in turn is linked to the propensity to devalue academic achievement. . psychological disengagement and domain‑specific self‑esteem the second aim of the present study is to determine whether secondary school students draw benefit in self-esteem from psychological disengagement in an aca- demic context. psychological disengagement was originally conceived as a strategy meant to protect the self-esteem of stigmatized group members by the detachment of global self-esteem from the domain in which their group is stigmatized so that their self-esteem is no longer affected by negative stereotypes or poor feedback (e.g., major et al. ; major and schmader ; schmader et al. ). although anyone can draw upon psychological disengagement to protect themselves from negative outcomes, it has proven particularly prevalent among stigmatized groups like ethnic minority students, due to greater exposure to group-level threats such as negative stereotypes. however, research has failed to provide clear support of the link between psychological disengagement and self-esteem. some findings indi- cate non-significant or even negative relations between psychological disengage- ment and self-esteem (beaton et al. ; major and schmader , ; tougas et  al. ). results of a meta-analysis (laplante et  al. ) found that both psy- chological disengagement mechanisms are associated with low global self-esteem. in the academic domain, the results are also mixed. among secondary school stu- dents, loose et al. ( ) showed that discounting of grades was positively related to global self-esteem and academic self-esteem while devaluing from school was unrelated to global self-esteem and academic self-esteem. among college students, lesko and corpus ( ) did not find any significant correlations between self- esteem and discounting of academic tests or domain identification (considered in this study as a reversed measure of devaluing). thus, when the measure of devalu- ing refers to domains that are highly regarded in society, such as school or academic links between psychological disengagement from school and… tests, devaluing does not protect self-esteem. yet, it is more difficult to determine whether discounting protects self-esteem in academics given that the measures address different features (discounting academic tests in lesko and corpus’ study, discounting grades in loose et  al.’s study). in addition to this difficulty to deter- mine the link between discounting and self-esteem in the academic context, with the exception of the study conducted by loose et al. ( ) that included academic self-esteem as well as global self-esteem, previous studies focused exclusively on global self-esteem, that is, the individual’s positive or negative attitude toward the self in general. however, several authors have stressed the importance of studying specific self-esteem, especially with adolescents who make important distinctions when describing and evaluating their abilities in various domains (harter a; marsh and shavelson ; young and mroczek ). therefore, in order to better understand the self-protecting properties of both mechanisms of psychological dis- engagement on self-esteem, we propose to examine both global and domain-specific self-esteem. . global and domain‑specific self‑esteem at two different periods in adolescence global self-esteem is not the sum of domain specific self-evaluations. rather, global self-esteem refers to the extent to which individuals evaluate themselves favorably as a person in general (rosenberg ). therefore, an analysis of the relationship between psychological disengagement and self-esteem is incomplete without also considering domain-specific facets of self-esteem, especially in adolescence (harter ; marsh et  al. ; marsh and shavelson ; rosenberg et  al. ; soest et  al. ; young and mroczek ). in adolescence, the self becomes increas- ingly differentiated with a proliferation of selves that vary as a function of social roles, such as a student, a close friend, or a member of a group of peers. this more nuanced understanding of self-esteem has led harter ( ) to develop a self-esteem measure for adolescents (sppa, self-perception profile for adolescents). this measure includes nine different domains of self-esteem, such as academic compe- tence, social acceptance (peers’ approval), behavioral conduct (proper or normative conduct), and close friendship. harter ( ) proposes that not all domain-specific sources of self-esteem will be evaluated in the same manner. for instance, youth may report high self-esteem due to the approval of the peer group (high social acceptance self-esteem), while also experiencing low self-esteem due to the critical views held by teachers or parents (low behavioral conduct self-esteem). within the school context, the key school-defined goal is academic attain- ment, but adolescents also need to maintain and establish interpersonal relation- ships, develop social identities and a sense of belonging (sweeting et al. ). in adolescence, high achievers are not necessarily one and the same as respected or high-standing students. among dimensions giving importance to adolescents within the school community, sweeting et  al. ( ) distinguished between a d. martinot et al. dimension representing popularity and a dimension of academic achievement and conforming to behavioral standards. this distinction is consistent with the  harter et  al. ( ) findings revealing two distinct clusters of domain-spe- cific self-esteem: a cluster comprising the social domains (peer’s approval self- esteem and close friendship self-esteem) and a cluster comprising more norma- tive domains (academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem). thus, “highest standing” represents a different dimension from “highest grades” sug- gesting that adolescents’ self-esteem within the school setting is likely to be sup- ported by at least two types of domain: the social or peer-approval domains and the school attainment domains. moreover, some authors have already suggested that at least devaluing academics may sometimes refer, especially during ado- lescence, to a peer-group norm (davis ; loose et  al. ; ogbu ). therefore, both mechanisms of psychological disengagement as a potential peer- group norm among students with academic difficulties, could result in personal benefit to these students by protecting the social domains of self-esteem (social acceptance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem). however, we propose a different pattern of results between early-adolescents and mid-adolescents. because early adolescence coincides with the transition to secondary school, early-adolescents have trouble to develop friendship and experience less access to social support from peers (berndt ; cantin and boivin ; degirmen- cioglu et  al. ; hardy et  al. ; poulin and chan ). in contrast, har- ter ( b) showed that in mid-adolescence, the support of close friends and approval of peers functions as a secure psychological base from which one could reemerge to protect self-esteem. thus, compared to early-adolescents, mid-ado- lescents are more likely to benefit from the self-protective resources in the peer- approval domain. in contrast, psychological disengagement is expected to harm self-esteem that refers to academic domains for both early- and mid-adolescents. indeed, from an early age the standards for success are explicit, feedback about performance is frequent and routine, and considerable educational attention focuses on teaching proper conduct (cole et  al. ). therefore, discounting grades and devaluing school lead adolescents to adopt non-normative values within the academic con- text. both mechanisms could lead students to feel rejected by the educational institution. for both early- and mid-adolescents, the more they psychologi- cally would disengage from school (discounting and devaluing), the more they would report decreased self-esteem in the school attainment domains (academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem). in sum, both early- and mid- adolescents would suffer from discounting of grades and devaluing from school in the domain-specific self-esteem of school attainment, but mid-adolescents would compensate by turning to the peer-approval domains of self-esteem such as social acceptance and close relationships. finally, what about the consequences of psychological disengagement on global self-esteem? since schooling is highly valued in our society, leaving such links between psychological disengagement from school and… a domain is very costly for a youth (e.g., rinfret et al. ). as a consequence, secondary school students who devalue school will report decreased global self- esteem. concerning the impact of discounting of grades on global self-esteem, the hypothesis remains more open. indeed, loose et al. ( ) observed in sec- ondary school students a positive relationship between discounting and global self-esteem. however, according to the pdm (e.g., beaton et  al. ; tougas et al. ), although discounting can be a temporary form of psychological dis- engagement, repeatedly discounting of poor grades may lead to decreased global self-esteem as students conclude that their abilities and potential will never be recognized at school. thus, discounting the relevance of grades is likely to decrease the global self-esteem of secondary school students. . hypotheses we propose to examine psychological disengagement and a comprehensive view of self-esteem among two separate samples of early- and mid-adolescents. this study will test the links between personal deprivation due to unfavorable comparisons between the self and other classmates in academic achievement, both mechanisms of psycho- logical disengagement, and domain-specific self-esteem, as well as global self-esteem (see fig.  ). thus, the following hypotheses are tested for early- and mid-adolescent secondary school students: - - - - - - personal relative deprivation global self-esteem academic self- esteem behavioral conduct self-esteem social acceptance self-esteem close friendship self-esteem discounting devaluing e e e e e mid-adolescents both early- and mid-adolescents fig. the postulated model of the relationship between personal relative deprivation, psychological disengagement and self-esteem d. martinot et al. ( ) for both early- and mid-adolescents, personal deprivation due to unfavorable comparisons between the self and other classmates in academic achievement will be associated with discounting grades. in turn, greater discounting will covary with an increase of academic achievement devaluing. ( ) for both early- and mid-adolescents, discounting and devaluing academic achievement will be associated with decreased global self-esteem and self- esteem in the school attainment domains (academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem). ( ) among mid-adolescents, rather than early-adolescents, discounting and devalu- ing academic achievement will be associated with increased self-esteem in the social domains (social acceptance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem). method . participants adolescents in this study attended a priority education high school. in france, pri- ority education schools are located in economically depressed neighborhoods and benefit from compensatory education funds. all students in a priority education school come from low or very low socio-economic backgrounds. not only do low socio-economic status (ses) students often underperform compared with their high- ses peers (bradley and corwyn ; goudeau et  al. ; sirin ), but they also face negative stereotypes of intellectual inferiority (croizet and claire ; désert et al. ; spencer and castano ), which increases the risk of psycho- logical disengagement (e.g., major et al. ; schmader et al. ). a total of french adolescents participated in this project. they were between to   years of age (m = . , sd = . ) while youth did not indicate their age. among these participants, were male and were female. some individuals (n = ) did not report their gender. we do not have any data on the participants’ race or ethnicity as french legislation strictly limits the collection of such information. approval from the ethical committee “cpp sud-est vi” (# /ce ) was obtained to conduct the research. informed consent to participate in this study was also obtained by students, parents, school authorities and teachers. the study was presented as a “survey to better know secondary school students”, and the participants were assured that the data would remain confidential. links between psychological disengagement from school and… . measures each participant received a booklet, read the instructions and completed the ques- tionnaire. this questionnaire contained measures selected to tap into the theoretical concepts. where appropriate, items followed by an asterisk indicate that scores were reverse coded to better reflect the construct. . . personal relative deprivation both components of personal relative deprivation were rated. the cognitive compo- nent refers to personal comparisons with others, whereby participants were asked to rate their school performance relative to their classmates’ performance with a ther- mometer scale that ranged from not at all good at school to very good at school. for the affective component, dissatisfaction due to a perceived disadvantageous per- sonal situation next to other classmates was measured by asking participants to rate how they felt about this social comparison on a thermometer ranging from not at all content to very content. responses to both items were reversed and com- bined to form a composite score (r = . , p < . ). high scores represent greater the alpha coefficient was found to be low for the discounting and devaluing variables among adoles- cents as well as for the social self-esteem and conduct self-esteem among mid-adolescents (see table  ). researchers have argued that cronbach’s alpha is a biased estimate of the reliability of a measure when the tau-equivalency assumption is violated (cho ; green and yang ; trizano-hermosilla and alvarado ). therefore, separate confirmatory factor analyses were conducted with eqs version . for the discounting and devaluing measures among early- and mid-adolescents to test for the tau-equiv- alent assumption. furthermore, separate confirmatory factor analyses were conducted for the social self-esteem and the conduct self-esteem measures among mid-adolescents. the tau-equivalency assump- tion was tested by evaluating a unidimensional measurement model whereby all factor loadings are con- strained as equal. when the cronbach’s alpha is found to be a biased estimate, sijtsma ( ) proposes the guttman’s lower bound statistic as an acceptable indicator of internal consistency findings revealed that the constrained model produced unsatisfactory fit to the data for the discounting measure among early-adolescents χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. -. ] and mid-adolescents χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. –. ]. however, the constrained model was satisfactory for the devaluing measure among early-adolescent χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. –. ] and mid-adolescents, χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. –. ]. according to these results, the tau-equivalency assumption is not respected for the discounting measure and the alpha coefficient is not an appropriate estimate of reliability. therefore for the discounting variable, the guttman ʎ parameter was calculated and revealed the following results among early- and mid-adolescents for the discounting measure, . and . respectively. a constrained confirmatory factor analysis was conducted separately for the social self-esteem and the conducted self-esteem measures among mid-adolescent participants. findings reveal that the constrained model was satisfactory for the social self-esteem measure χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. -. ] and suggest that the tau-equivalency assumption is respected. however, the constrained model did not fit the data for the measure of conduct self-esteem χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , cfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [. –. ]. in this case, the guttman ʎ parameter was calculated for the conduct self-esteem measure and was found to be . . d. martinot et al. personal relative deprivation due to a poorly rated academic performance next to their classmates. . . psychological disengagement both psychological disengagement mechanisms, that is, discounting and devaluing were rated with measures taken from a previous study conducted among french sec- ondary school students (loose et  al. ). for discounting of grades, participants were asked to react to the following three items: “the grades i obtain at school pro- vide a valid evaluation of my achievement level*”, “the grades i obtain correctly reflect my academic abilities*”, and “the grades i obtain are below my real skills”. academic devaluing was measured with the following three items: “succeeding in school is important for my future life*”; “being good at school is an important part of who i am*”; and “academic success is very valuable to me*”. for both measures, responses were recorded on a thermometer scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. a composite score was computed by adding the scores and com- puting the average. high scores represent greater discounting and devaluing in the academic context. . . self‑esteem from perception profile for adolescents (sppa) in order to test the postulated model, participants were presented with six subscales of the validated french version (terriot et al. ) of the measure of self-perception pro- file for adolescents (sppa, harter ). the six subscales included: academic self- esteem, behavioral conduct self-esteem, social acceptance self-esteem, close friendship self-esteem, and global self-esteem. each subscale contained items. to complete the sppa, participants first selected a statement from sentence pairs to indicate whether they were like or not like others who were good at a particular activity (e.g., “some teenagers like the kind of person they are but other teenagers often wish they were someone else”, "some teenagers have classmates who like them the way they are but other teenagers have classmates who wish they were different". next, participants marked whether the chosen statement was “really true for me” or “sort of true for me.” each items was scored on a -point scale and summed with high scores reflecting higher self-esteem. . analyses path analysis was performed using eqs . for windows statistical software (bentler ) with raw data and a robust maximum likelihood estimation method. model fit- ness was evaluated against the chi-square statistic and four goodness-of-fit statistics. the satorra-bentler chi–square statistic (s-bχ ) is a corrected normal theory method that evaluates the discrepancy between the hypothesized model covariances and the sample covariances by correcting for nonnormal distributions (satorra and bentler ). a large value of the s-bχ relative to its degree of freedom indicates a “badness links between psychological disengagement from school and… of fit” between the postulated model and the data. the goodness of fit statistics includes the robust root mean square of approximation (rmsea; browne and cudeck ), along with its confidence interval (ci), the standardized root mean-square residual (srmr, bentler ), the robust bentler comparative fit index (cfi; bentler ), and the non-normed fit index (nnfi; bentler and bonett ). values greater than . for the cfi and the nnfi indicate a good fit between the predicted model and the data (hu and bentler ). rmsea and srmr values less than . indicate a good fit between the predicted model and the data whereas a value greater than . reflects a poor fit (kline ). values below . are acceptable (mcdonald and ho ). the eqs statistical package provides a multivariate lagrange multiplier test that refers to the improvement in fit when specific parameters are freed. however, to avoid capitalizing on chance with a data-driven procedure (maccallum et al. ), modifi- cations are based on conceptual grounds. results . preliminary analyses a total of students had not completed the measures that tapped into the theoretical concepts. therefore, the analyses were conducted with secondary school stu- dents. a oneway anova was performed to validate differences among age groups on the basic concepts contained in the psychological disengagement model (tou- gas et  al. ), that is, personal relative deprivation, discounting, devaluing and global self-worth. oneway anovas showed significant differences for personal relative deprivation, f( , ) = . , p = . , partial η = . , discounting, f( , ) = . , p = . , partial η = . and devaluing, f( , ) = . , p = . , partial η = . . no significant differences were uncovered for global self-esteem. the tukey hsd test (see table  ) uncovered distinctions between early-adolescent ( to   years of age) and mid-adolescent participants ( to   years of age). therefore, separate path analyses were conducted with early-adolescent (n = ) and mid-adolescent (n = ) participants. analyses were conducted to test for differences due to age (early-, mid-adolescence) and gender (female, male) on all variables contained in the model. results of the x manova only revealed dif- ferences due to age f( , ) = . , p = . , partial η = . , supporting the table means (standard deviations) and results of the tukey hsd test note prd personal relative deprivation, means sharing a common subscript are not statistically different at p ≤ . variables  years (n = )  years (n = )  years (n = )  years (n = )  years (n = ) prd . a ( . ) . a ( . ) . ab ( . ) . ab ( . ) . b ( . ) devaluing . a ( . ) . ac ( . ) . bc ( . ) . b ( . ) . b ( . ) discounting . a ( . ) . ac ( . ) . abc ( . ) . b ( . ) . bc ( . ) d. martinot et al. decision to conduct separate analyses among early- and mid-adolescent partici- pants. descriptive analyses, correlations and the reliability of measures are found in table  . table correlations and descriptive statistics among early-( to  years) and mid-adolescent ( to  years) participants note. prd personal relative deprivation, *p < . , **p < . variables early-adolescents (n = ) . prd – . ** . ** − . ** − . ** − . ** − . * − . . discounting – . ** − . ** − . ** − . − . ** . . devaluing – − . ** − . ** − . − . * − . . global se – . ** . ** . ** . ** . academic se – . ** . ** . * . social acceptance se – . . ** . behavioral conduct se – . . close friendship se – m . . . . . . . . sd . . . . . . . . skewness . . . − . − . − . − . − . kurtosis . . . − . − . . − . . minimum . . . . . . . . maximum . . . . . . . . alpha n/a . . . . . . . mid- adolescents (n = ) . prd – . ** . ** − . ** − . ** − . − . ** . . discounting – . ** − . − . . − . . * . devaluing – − . ** − . * − . * − . ** . . global se – . ** . ** . ** . * . academic se – . * . ** . . social acceptance se – . . ** . behavioral conduct se – . . close friendship se – m . . . . . . . . sd . . . . . . . . skewness . . . − . . − . − . − . kurtosis − . − . . . − . . − . − . minimum . . . . . . . . maximum . . . . . . . . alpha n/a . . . . . . . links between psychological disengagement from school and… . path analysis among early‑adolescents a path analysis tested the pdm among early-adolescent participants. findings revealed a poor fit (see table  ). the results of the lagrange multiplier test pro- posed the following two modifications: a path between personal relative depriva- tion and academic self-esteem and a path between personal relative deprivation and devaluing. in this instance, participants who felt relative deprivation due to table fit statistics for the psychological disengagement model among early-( to  years old) and mid-adolescent ( to  years old) participants note prd personal relative deprivation, s-b χ satorra-bentler chi-square, nnfi non-normed fit index, cfi comparative fit index, rmsea root mean square error of approximation (confidence interval), srmr standardized root mean square residual a robust statistics are reported models s-b χ (df) cfia nnfia srmr rmseaa ( % ci) early-adolescents (n = ) proposed model . ( ), p = . . . . (. –. ) prd → academic se . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) prd → devaluing . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) final model . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) mid-adolescents (n = ) proposed model . ( ), p = . . − . . . (. –. ) prd → academic se . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) prd → devaluing . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) final model . ( ), p = . . . . . (. –. ) . . . . -. -. -. . -. . . . . . personal relative deprivation discounting devaluing academic self- esteem global self- esteem behavioral conduct self- esteem . fig. standardized robust maximum likelihood solution of the psychological disengagement model among early-adolescents (n = ). the residual variances reflect the amount of unexplained variance. for each observed variable, r = ( —error variance) d. martinot et al. chronic disadvantageous comparisons between the self and classmates in terms of academic performance, reported less academic self-esteem and were more likely to devalue success in academics. both modifications significantly improved model fit (see table  ) and indicated that personal relative deprivation plays an important role in the academic experience. paths between the disengagement mechanisms (dis- counting, devaluing) and close friendship self-esteem as well as social acceptance self-esteem did not reach significance. in addition, results did not support the links between devaluing and the measures of self-esteem. these non-significant param- eters were removed from the model. the final model resulted in a satisfactory fit to the data (see table  ). all parameters were statistically significant (p < . ), although a marginally significant path (p = . ) was obtained between discounting and devaluing (see fig.  ). support was found for all indirect effects of the model, with the exception of the indirect relationship between feeling of relative deprivation and devaluing (see table  ). an alternative model was tested whereby the direction of each parameter was inversed. specifically, academic self-esteem, global self-esteem and behavioral con- duct self-esteem were correlated, and predicted discounting. academic self-esteem further predicted personal relative deprivation. in this alternative model, a direct link was added whereby devaluing explained discounting. finally, both discounting and devaluing predicted personal relative deprivation. this alternative model suggests poor fit, s-b χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , rcfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [ . - . ]. furthermore, the links between devaluing and discounting, global self-esteem and discounting as well as behavioral conduct table indirect effects for models of pre-adolescent and mid-adolescent participants note prd personal relative deprivation, unst. unstandardized coef- ficient, se standard error, st. standardized coefficient a robust solution * p < . indirect paths unst. sea st. preadolescents (n = ) prd → devaluing . . . prd → global se − . * . − . prd → academic se − . * . − . prd → behavioral conduct se − . * . − . adolescents (n = ) prd → devaluing . * . . prd → global se − . * . − . prd → behavioral conduct se − . * . − . prd → social aceeptance se − . . − . prd → close friendship se . . . discounting → global se − . * . − . discounting → behavioral conduct se − . * . − . discounting → social aceeptance se − . * . − . links between psychological disengagement from school and… self-esteem and discounting did not reach significance (p < . ). as a result, the alternative model was not retained. all in all, the final model supports in part the predictions for early-adolescent participants. personal relative deprivation was positively associated with both psy- chological disengagement mechanisms as well as negatively linked with academic self-esteem. discounting and devaluing played different roles. in this final model, the more participants discounted the validity of academic grades, the less they reported global self-esteem, academic self-esteem, and behavioral conduct self- esteem. in addition, significant covariation was detected between the error terms of all self-esteem measures. . path analysis among mid‑adolescents the postulated model was submitted to a path analysis with the sample of mid- adolescent participants. the path analysis did not yield an acceptable fit to the data (see table  ). based on the results of the lagrange multiplier test, personal relative deprivation was associated with academic self-esteem and devaluing. both modifi- cations were added to the model and significantly improved the fit to the data (see table  ). as with the sample of early-adolescents, personal relative deprivation played an important role among mid-adolescent youth in terms of their academic . . . . . . . -. -. -. . . . personal relative deprivation discounting devaluing close friendship self- esteem social acceptance self- esteem global self- esteem . . -. . . . behavioral conduct self- esteem . academic self- esteem . . fig. standardized robust maximum likelihood solution of the psychological disengagement model among mid-adolescents (n = ). the residual variances reflect the amount of unexplained variance. for each observed variable, r = (  − error variance) d. martinot et al. experience. specific parameters between the psychological disengagement mech- anisms and measures of self-esteem did not reach significance and were dropped from the model. the final model revealed an acceptable fit (see table  ) and uncov- ered the unique relationship between the psychological disengagement mechanisms and specific self-esteem dimensions (see fig.  ). all parameters reached signifi- cance (p < . ), although the path between discounting and social acceptance self- esteem remained marginal (p = . , one-tailed). as table  reveals, indirect paths were reliable, with the exception of the indirect links between personal relative dep- rivation and close friendship self-esteem as well as social acceptance self-esteem. the direction of all parameters was reversed to test an alternative model. in this alternative model, close friendship self-esteem and social acceptance self-esteem predicted discounting. in addition, social acceptance self-esteem, global self- esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem explained devaluing. academic self- esteem accounted for personal relative deprivation. devaluing predicted discount- ing. finally, in this alternative model, both devaluing and discounting explained personal relative deprivation. correlations between the self-esteem dimensions were included. this alternative model suggests acceptable fit, s-b χ ( ) = . , p = . , nnfi = . , rcfi = . , srmr = . , rmsea = . , ci [ . - . ]. however, only three reliable parameters were detected. personal rela- tive deprivation was explained by discounting, b = . , se b = . , p = . , and academic self-esteem, b = − . , se b = . , p = . . in addition, devalu- ing predicted discounting, b = . , se b = . , p = . . all other parameters did not reach significance. therefore, since most parameters were not reliable, the final model (see fig.  ) was preferred. the final model supports in part the predictions (see fig.  ). personal relative deprivation was positively associated with discounting and devaluing while nega- tively linked with academic self-esteem. in turn, and as expected, discounting the validity of grades was associated with higher social acceptance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem among mid-adolescent participants. devaluing, how- ever, dampened social acceptance self-esteem, behavioral conduct self-esteem and global self-esteem. significant correlations among error terms were obtained among measures of self-esteem. discussion in the present study, we tested the pdm with secondary school students, during two different periods of adolescence, early- and mid-adolescence. the first step con- sisted in testing the links between experience of personal relative deprivation due to unfavorable social comparisons with other classmates in academic achievement and both mechanisms of psychological disengagement. as expected and according to the pdm, both in early- and mid-adolescence, the more students felt personally deprived in academic achievement compared to their classmates, the more they dis- counted their grades; discounting in turn predicted devaluing academic achieve- ment, most notably among mid-adolescents. nevertheless, the findings also showed links between psychological disengagement from school and… another pathway leading to devaluing school achievement. indeed, for all partici- pants, the experience of personal relative deprivation in academic achievement was also directly associated with devaluing from academic achievement. this direct link between feeling personally deprived in academic achievement and devaluing may be due to unique features of the present population compared to typical populations in previous studies on psychological disengagement model (i.e., adult workers, beaton et al. ; lagacé et al. ; tougas et al. ). indeed, the present participants were students from disadvantaged neighborhoods and a priority education school. consistent with our finding, régner and loose ( ) also found with a population of disadvantaged secondary-school students attending a priority education school that grades directly and negatively predicted devaluing. thus, among students from disadvantaged groups, either grades or discontent due to a disparaging comparison with other classmates, predict devaluing from school achievement. the direct link between academic difficulties and devaluing is also consistent with findings obtained with ethnic minorities (arroyo and zigler ; fordham and ogbu ; régner and loose ). due to their perceived injustice, those who come from low socio- economic backgrounds, live in a segregated environment, and attend at-risk schools are more likely to report disinterest in academics (fordham and ogbu ; régner and loose ). the second step to testing the pdm with secondary school students consisted of examining at two different periods in adolescence, i.e., early and mid-adolescence, whether greater discounting grades and devaluing academic achievement were related to decreased global self-esteem and self-esteem related to academic attain- ment domains (academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem). this sec- ond step also offered the opportunity to test whether both psychological disengage- ment mechanisms were positively associated with self-esteem in the social domains (social acceptance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem) among mid-, rather than early-adolescents. as expected, the links between both psychological disen- gagement mechanisms and self-esteem depended on the period of adolescence. in early-adolescence, discounting correlated negatively with global self-esteem and self-esteem in the school attainment domains (academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem). additionally, discounting played the expected mediating and negative role in the link between experience of personal relative deprivation on one hand and both global self-esteem and the school attainment domains of self-esteem on the other hand. however, devaluing from academic achievement did not predict self-esteem in early-adolescence. moreover, psychological disengagement mecha- nisms were not associated with peer-approval domains of self-esteem (social accept- ance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem). a different pattern of findings emerged among mid-adolescents. in mid-adolescence, devaluing from academic achievement plays a negative and mediating role in the link between experience of personal relative deprivation on one hand and global self-esteem, behavioral con- duct self-esteem and social acceptance self-esteem on the other hand. yet, and inter- estingly, discounting played a positive and mediating role in the link between expe- rience of personal relative deprivation on one hand and close friendship self-esteem and social acceptance self-esteem. d. martinot et al. thus, discounting and devaluing have different implications for self-esteem for early- and mid-adolescents. among mid-adolescent participants, devaluing harms self-esteem (i.e., global self-esteem, behavioral conduct self-esteem and social acceptance self-esteem), whereas discounting is a mechanism that protects self-esteem in peer approval domains (i.e., close friendship self-esteem and social acceptance self-esteem). among early-adolescent participants, discounting, rather than devaluing, harms global self-esteem and self-esteem in academic attainment domains (i.e., academic self-esteem and behavioral conduct self-esteem), whereas devaluing is not related to self-esteem. thus, psychological disengagement is nega- tively associated with global self-esteem through discounting in early adolescence and devaluing in mid-adolescence. thus, psychological disengagement in academics is likely to explain a part of the lowered global self-esteem observed in literature during the period of adolescence (orth and robins ; robins et al. ). therefore, why do students psychological disengage in an academic context when it does not always serve to protect self-esteem? in mid- rather than early-adoles- cence, it seems to be to protect their self-esteem related to peer-approval domains (social acceptance self-esteem and close friendship self-esteem). indeed, mid-ado- lescents who discount their academic grades find self-esteem in their relationships with peers. because only mid-adolescents seem to find protective resources in peers’ approval, at least two explanations are conceivable. first, as suggested earlier, the period of early-adolescence with the transition to secondary school and its numer- ous changes in relationships is a period that may make it more difficult to receive social support from peers. second, such a result may refer to a peer-group norm (e.g., davis ; ogbu ) which would become gradually salient during sec- ondary school years. thus, in mid-adolescence, opposing values of school through discounting of grades could be perceived as valued by peers and give mid-adoles- cents social recognition. consistent with sweeting et  al.’s ( ) results, mid-ado- lescents with academic difficulties seek popularity. however, this benefit incurred by discounting among mid-adolescents is met with significant costs. indeed, discount- ing predicts devaluing; in turn, in mid-adolescence, devaluing is associated with decreased self-esteem (global self-esteem, social acceptance self-esteem and behav- ioral conduct self-esteem). thus, giving up on an important domain of society such as school leads to a loss of personal worth in the school attainment domains as well as a loss of social acceptance from peers. the paradoxical finding on disengage- ment and social acceptance self-esteem is particularly interesting because it shows that mid-adolescents seem to perceive discounting of grades as acceptable or even rewarding with peers, whereas they seem to perceive devaluing school as leading to reject from peers. the present results also showed that experience of personal relative depriva- tion in academic achievement was directly and negatively linked to academic self- esteem, both in early- and mid-adolescents. such a result supports the argument that an increase in practices of normative grading by teachers in secondary schools (eccles and midgley ) makes the standards for success explicit, frequent and routine (cole et  al. ), leading some students who perceive themselves as poor achievers to doubt their worth in the academic domain. links between psychological disengagement from school and… limitations the present results must be interpreted with caution due to certain limitations. first, our research was correlational. in addition, we could not control for initial levels of academic grades and global self-esteem. these limitations prevent any firm conclu- sion about causality. however, this does not undermine the validity of our findings for the predictive relations in our hypothesized model, which were built on the basis of strong theoretical considerations and previous research on the pdm (e.g., beaton et  al. ; laplante et  al. ; rinfret et  al. ; tougas et  al. ). future studies using a longitudinal design and controlling for initial levels of all dependent variables could be helpful to address the causality issue. they could test whether the different harms incurred by devaluing and discounting among mid- and early- adolescent participants may be explained by the extent of the experience of poor academic reputation for mid-adolescents in academic failure. if as predicted in the pdm (e.g., beaton et  al. ; tougas et  al. ), early- and mid-adolescents embark gradually on the psychological disengagement road, starting from the mechanism that has less significance in one’s life (discounting), leading to one that is more impactful (devaluing), they can also directly opt for devaluing from academics. indeed, feeling personally deprived due to unfavorable comparisons with other classmates in academic achievement predicts devaluing both in early- and mid-adolescents. however, the present study does not allow one to determine whether this direct link between experience of relative deprivation and devaluing is specific to two periods of adolescence (early- and mid-adolescence) or to our sample of disadvantaged students from a priority education school. it may be that secondary school french students from disadvantaged neighborhoods have developed school rejection in response to their feelings that they are neglected or rejected by the french school system. thus, another limitation concerns the general- izability of our findings to other groups of adolescents. future research is needed to test whether these results generalize to older adolescents who attend schools in more affluent neighborhoods. conclusions and future directions the present findings offer some clues that help to disentangle the mixed findings concerning the positive or negative link between psychological disengagement and self-esteem. we showed that it is necessary ) to distinguish between both psy- chological disengagement mechanisms according to the age of the adolescent; ) to take into account domain-specific self-esteem. discounting played a mediating role between experience of personal relative deprivation in academic achievement and self-esteem both in early- and mid-adolescence. however, discounting reduced global self-esteem and self-esteem related to the school attainment domains among early adolescents, whereas it protected both peer-acceptance and close friendship self-esteem among mid-adolescents. devaluing only appeared as a predictor of decreased global self-esteem, behavioral conduct self-esteem and social acceptance d. martinot et al. self-esteem in mid-adolescence. these findings show that secondary school students do not benefit from depreciating academics because this domain is highly valued in our societies (crocker and major ; laplante et  al. ; major and schmader ). thus, the relationships obtained in the present study between devaluing and self-esteem refute the self-protective properties of this process. moreover, contrary to what some authors suggest (davis ; loose et al. ; ogbu ), because devaluing school leads to lowered social acceptance self-esteem, such a psychologi- cal mechanism does not seem to be a peer-group norm, at least at early- and mid- adolescence. instead, devaluing school is likely to lock students into a vicious cir- cle because peer rejection increases the risk for misconduct, and lower participation and interest in school (french and conrad ), which correspond to behavioral disengagement from school. once this behavioral disengagement has been reached, other very negative consequences are likely to occur as involvement in delinquency, health-risky behaviors, and aggression (carter et  al. ; fredricks et  al. ; harachi et  al. ; hill and werner ; jimerson et  al. ; simons-morton ; sinclair et al. ). however, in early-adolescents, the negative impact on self-esteem (both global and in the school attainment domains) was only linked to the temporary process of psychological disengagement, i.e., discounting (lesko and corpus ; major and schmader ; tougas et al. ). therefore, early-adolescence or the first years in secondary school may be key-years to plan a course of action to prevent psy- chological disengagement in academics, which can be considered as an initial stage before actually behavioral disengagement and dropping out of school. for instance, in an intervention that transformed schools into safe relational spaces, school profes- sionals practiced behaviors that boosted the resilience of students, such as perse- verance (sanders and munford ). such an intervention is likely to encourage early-adolescents to seek social support from school professionals and thus contrib- ute to their self-esteem in social domains during this period of transition to sec- ondary school. by advocating for a safe relational space, this intervention may also keep mid-adolescents from turning to social support from their peers by discounting their grades. moreover, sanders and munford ( ) also showed that this interven- tion provided the supports and resources that increased the vulnerable youths’ sense of belonging to the school, in spite of feelings of being different from others. as research has shown, school belonging allows early-adolescents from disadvantaged groups to expect greater academic success and competency (hernández et al. ). further research is needed to test the impact of strategies designed to develop social support in an academic context among vulnerable young adolescents on the psycho- logical disengagement process. acknowlegements funding was provided by agence nationale de la recherche (grant no. anr- -ce - - ). compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest we declare no conflict of interest. links between psychological disengagement from school and… open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative com- mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. references archambault, i., janosz, m., fallu, j. b., & pagani, l. s. 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( ). predicting intraindividual self-concept trajectories during adoles- cence. journal of adolescence, , – . https ://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. delphine martinot is professor of social psychology at the laboratoire de psychologie sociale et cog- nitive from the université clermont auvergne. she is particularly interested in the effects of academic comparison contexts on school disengagement and self-esteem. she also studies gender inequalities in the school context. ann beaton is a professor at the school of psychology, from the université de moncton, new brunswick canada. dr. beaton holds a phd in experimental psychology and has been a canada research chair in intergroup relations. her research focuses on how members of low- and high-status groups relate to one another in an academic and work setting. francine tougas has pursued her academic career at the school of psychology at the university of ottawa, and is now an associated professor at the École nationale d’administration publique. she has devoted her research to the antecedents and consequences of relative deprivation on the basis of sex, and age, as well as to the concept of psychological disengagement. sandrine redersdorff is lecturer of social psychology at the laboratoire de psychologie sociale et cog- nitive from the université clermont auvergne. her research interests include the better way to denounce sex-based discrimination and the “potential adverse effects” of using # (i.e. #metoo or # squealonyour- pig) as a way to claim sex discrimination. natalie rinfret   received a ph.d. in social psychology from ottawa university. she is full professor at the École nationale d’administration publique and is chairholder of la capitale chair in leadership in the public sector. her research interests include attitude toward women as managers, downsizing and employ- ees’ mental health, managers’ turnover, leadership style and organizational climate. https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . / - . . . https://doi.org/ . /fpsyg. . https://doi.org/ . /pspp https://doi.org/ . /pspp https://doi.org/ . /j.learninstruc. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.learninstruc. . . https://doi.org/ . /cdev. https://doi.org/ . / - /a https://doi.org/ . / - /a https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - d. martinot et al. affiliations delphine martinot  · ann beaton  · francine tougas  · sandrine redersdorff  · natalie rinfret * delphine martinot delphine.martinot@uca.fr université clermont auvergne, cnrs, lapsco,  clermont-ferrand, france school of psychology, université de moncton, moncton, new brunswick, canada École nationale d’administration publique, quebec, qc, canada chaire la capitale en leadership dans le secteur publique, École nationale d’administration publique, quebec, qc, canada http://orcid.org/ - - - 	links between psychological disengagement from school and different forms of self-esteem in the crucial period of early and mid-adolescence 	abstract 	 introduction 	 . school disengagement and adolescence 	 . personal relative deprivation as predictor of psychological disengagement 	 . psychological disengagement and domain-specific self-esteem 	 . global and domain-specific self-esteem at two different periods in adolescence 	 . hypotheses 	 method 	 . participants 	 . measures 	 . . personal relative deprivation 	 . . psychological disengagement 	 . . self-esteem from perception profile for adolescents (sppa) 	 . analyses 	 results 	 . preliminary analyses 	 . path analysis among early-adolescents 	 . path analysis among mid-adolescents 	 discussion 	 limitations 	 conclusions and future directions 	acknowlegements 	references feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ response – revisiting unspeakable subjects: a retrospective on (and in…) good company… niki lacey* i am hugely grateful to gina, arlie and all the contributors for their generosity in revisiting unspeakable subjects; and for prompting me to do so. my work has spun off in different directions over the last years: and the april event, as well as this symposium, have made me reflect on why i moved at a tangent from feminist theory – even though the challenges which it identifies and seeks to tackle, along with its underlying analysis and inspiration, have remained at the core of my work. in this brief set of remarks in dialogue with the contributors – and with myself – i will revisit a few of those challenges, particularly in light of the #metoo context within which arlie and gina have deftly framed this retrospective. in case the idea of being in dialogue with myself sounds a tad egotistical (!!), let me start off by taking up gina’s insightful thoughts on split, plural and speaking subjects. one of the key components of any scholarship, it seems to me, is critical reflexivity; and in thinking about this contribution, i have been reflecting inter alia on my own split subjectivity. one amusing jumping off point for this was finding that half the contributors had referred to me as nicola – the name i publish in; and half as niki – the name which my friends and colleagues use. the reasons are obvious; but the history is not unrelated to the way power works in the academy to shape us into professionalised personae which we then have to manage, and sometimes to renegotiate, in relation to our, if i can put it this way, extra-academic selves. when i started publishing articles in my mid s, i had already developed a fully-fledged allergy to third person constructions such as ‘it is submitted that’, and a commitment to writing in the first person. but, looking back, i suspect that i didn’t feel quite permitted to speak in my own voice; and that the full name helped me to manage that split between a professional self and an extra- academic self. it is a trivial but perhaps telling example of a more general tension which arises within counter-cultural and counter-normative life and work of any kind. i bumped up against it in relation to unspeakable subjects in another amusing yet troubling form: on reading my analysis of the contrasting writing styles of french feminist writers and english-speaking academics like herself, an old friend (and well-known feminist legal theorist) wrote me a hilarious email asking me if i was accusing her of ‘writing like a bloke’! more seriously (not that i am implying that risking offence to an old friend was a trivial matter…), i think that the idea of split subjectivity also helps to illuminate the difficulty which i have often had – i suspect i am not alone – in bringing my feminist sensibilities, perspectives and insights to bear on my not-explicitly-feminist work. this is something which sharon very deftly pointed out in a review of my last book on criminal responsibility, which covered terrain over which i had written about the distinctive criminal legal construction of women’s subjectivity in a previous book, yet which did insufficient work to fully draw together the threads of the two volumes. i mention this not only to underline the continuing, underlying dynamics which work against critical and counter-normative scholarship, even among those of * school professor of law, gender and social policy, department of law, london school of economics and political science, uk. email n.m.lacey@lse.ac.uk sharon cowan, ‘in search of connections: reading between the lines of nicola lacey’s in search of criminal responsibility’ ( ) ( ) critical analysis of law . mailto:n.m.lacey@lse.ac.uk lacey response – revisiting unspeakable subjects __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ us who want to engage in it; but also to underline something which is insufficiently recognised, yet which is a logical corollary of the first point. this is that critical work, precisely because it insists in looking below the surface, and working against the grain, is tough, difficult, intellectually demanding. so, it is wonderful to see those links being made in all the contributions – as in the contributors’ broader scholarship. marked not just the publication of this book, but also my arrival at lse (a happy coincidence, since the roots of the book lay in good part in the inspiration and support provided by meetings of the women law teachers’ group, which used to meet at lse in the s, thanks to jennifer (jenny) temkin). the last twenty years have therefore given me a special opportunity to think, inspired by lse’s motto, about ‘the causes of things’. this working context has fostered a strong interest in the conditions under which particular social arrangements and vectors of power arise and become embedded – a necessary precursor to understanding the conditions under which they can be resisted, mitigated or changed. this direction in my own work came just as much feminist work was moving in a highly theoretical direction, which probably explains why i didn’t explicitly work again on feminist legal theory once emily’s and my contribution to a collective text on jurisprudence was complete. i am someone with a taste for theory; but i remain strongly committed to holding the projects of socio-legal analysis, critique, utopia and reformism together within an integrated praxis of normative reconstruction. so it is wonderful to see that idea used so productively in all the contributions, and to see the development more generally of projects which bring those resources together - the various feminist judgments projects being an excellent example. reading the contributions, i am struck by how many of the themes which preoccupied me years ago remain on the intellectual and political agenda. while this is reassuring at one level (!), as several of the contributors note, it is also somewhat depressing. why has progress been so slow, and why are we still having to make the argument for situated autonomy or integrity, for a critical appraisal of the gendered ‘privatisation’ of harms to women, or for the gendered nature of legal constructions of concepts such as responsibility, autonomy and, as emily points out, harm itself? why is it such hard work to reveal the erasure of power and of the gendered structural conditions which shape the interpretation, construction and operation of legal concepts? powerful and complex social dynamics are of course at work here. but it is fascinating to see how, amid the continuities of concern, some important changes have materialised in terms of the ways in which ‘fake gender-neutralised’ (!) legal concepts and structural erasures are operating as the socio-political world has evolved over the last years. (as irene points out, this evolution has been in a very different direction to the one for which i hoped; though i should say that i now think that i had an over-rosy view of some aspects of communitarian thinking in the paper on the welfare state which formed part of unspeakable subjects). these changes are illustrated, albeit in different ways, by every contribution, and i am simply going to take up one example: that of responsibility. the idea of individual responsibility as founded in capacity, and as inherently autonomy-respecting, has, as arlie points out, been key to the legitimation of criminal law. yet it is increasingly clear that associated discourses of individual choice (including those about consent in contexts such as sexual offences or medical law) are deployed not merely in a context of the erasure of power and gendered impact, as insa, irene, chiara and emily all show, but also to blur the boundaries between notions of responsibility founded in capacity and those based on character or role. emily jackson and nicola lacey, ‘feminist legal theories’ in james penner, david schiff and richard nobles, et al., introduction to jurisprudence and legal theory: commentary and materials (oup, ). feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ hence, for example, if the subject uses her ‘responsible choice’ in the wrong way, the discourse of responsibility-attribution shifts into a strongly evaluative, character-based mode, with the subject constructed as an ‘undeserving’ claimant, a ‘bad’ or ‘irresponsible mother’, a ‘deserving accused’. within the persisting discursive mechanism which positions women as, as arlie nicely puts it, ‘atypical subjects’, therefore, there remains a powerful tendency to construct us/them as not merely (or not) infantilised or incapable but even (or rather) as abject, bad or dangerous where they step beyond what remain heavily gender-differentiated, value- laden and strongly policed norms of conduct. the re-emergence of powerful discursive constructions of responsibility founded in bad character, either as founded in evaluation of character traits or in the diagnosis of a dispositional or situational association with risk, is in my view one of the most important shifts in recent criminal law; and both insa’s and irene’s papers make it clear something parallel is at work in the welfare context. it applies, of course, to men as well as women; but the conception of what counts as bad, dangerous or risky character remains highly gendered. many challenges, therefore, remain to be confronted; and new ones are emerging all the time. let me mention just one – and one which is closely related to emerging paradigms of character- based responsibility-attribution. as gina and arlie note in their introduction, the #metoo movement has, over the last year, served to shed light on forms of sexual abuse which have long been on the feminist agenda for critique, reform and reconstruction, yet which have proved exceptionally difficult to place on the broader political landscape. this is a significant advance. but as a criminal lawyer, i confess to having found myself at various points worrying that a populist strand in the expression of understandable revulsion at some of the revelations may be fostering a potentially more generalised diminution in the respect for procedural safeguards which are of huge importance in reducing the potentially oppressive nature of criminalising power. demonising and stigmatisation are retrograde forces in criminal justice – as even the slightest acquaintance with the degradation of the american criminal justice system in particular over the last years makes obvious. the challenge here, it seems to me, remains the one of normative reconstruction: not to abandon the important values embedded in ideas such as rights, responsibility, fairness and autonomy; but to reconstruct them, and the safeguards with which they are associated, in ways which speak to the insights of feminist politics. in this context, i celebrate chiara’s suggestion that a third wave feminism is reclaiming concepts such as autonomy. in conclusion, let me return to gina’s conception of plural subjectivity. in this context – and encouraged by sharon’s kind words about the semi-autobiographical quality of the introduction to unspeakable subjects – i want to respond to the quite overwhelmingly generous comments of many of the contributors about my personal impact on them. i will do so simply by acknowledging something which will be obvious any reader of feminists@law. the opportunity to build relationships and to debate feminist ideas with friends, colleagues and students has been one of the great joys and privileges of my career; and my own life and work have been fundamentally shaped by the work of many other people, including the contributors to this symposium. writing – and, in several cases, working – with emily, and with elizabeth (liz) frazer, zelia gallo, hanna pickard, celia wells, lucia zedner; teaching a seminar on feminist issues in law with mary stokes in oxford in the s (we were apparently known as cagney and lacey: a reference for the mature reader…!); teaching feminist legal theory with susanne baer at the humboldt university in berlin in the mid- s and with ratna kapur at nyu in ; working with carol smart, beverley brown, elizabeth (liz) kingdom, alison young on social and legal studies; and in addition to all of them, reading kimberlé crenshaw, lacey response – revisiting unspeakable subjects __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ seyla benabib, nancy fraser, moira gatens, ngaire naffine, jennifer nedelsky, anne phillips, patricia williams, iris marion young, …… i could of course go on. how, then, could i possibly unpick where all the strands of thought which make up unspeakable subjects came from? contrary to the implication of the individualised protocols of contemporary research assessment (let us pass in dignified silence over their increasingly, and ludicrously, hyperbolic grading benchmarks…), any book or article is a tapestry; indeed is part of a broader tapestry, the product of plural subjectivity, and a product which will never be complete. so let me close by expressing my profound gratitude to both the contributors and the many other scholars whose ideas, inspiration, friendship and support are woven into the texture of unspeakable subjects. sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access sexual harassment and assault among university students in norway: a cross- sectional prevalence study børge sivertsen,   , , morten birkeland nielsen, , ida e h madsen, marit knapstad, , kari jussie lønning, , mari hysing to cite: sivertsen b, nielsen mb, madsen ieh, et al. sexual harassment and assault among university students in norway: a cross-sectional prevalence study. bmj open ; :e . doi: . / bmjopen- - ► prepublication history for this paper is available online. to view these files, please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bmjopen- - ). received october revised may accepted may for numbered affiliations see end of article. correspondence to professor børge sivertsen; borge. sivertsen@ fhi. no research © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re-use permitted under cc by-nc. no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. abstract objective the aim of the current study was to provide estimates of both overall and specific forms of sexual harassment among male and female college and university students. design and setting data stem from a recent national student health survey from for higher education in norway (the shot study (students’ health and wellbeing study)). participants full-time students ( . % women) aged – years participated, yielding a response rate of %. main outcome measure sexual harassment was defined according to norwegian legal regulations, and was assessed by self-report on seven items covering verbal, non-verbal and physical sexual harassment. we also collected data on the timeframe and frequency of the sexual harassment, in addition to the formal position of the perpetrator of the harassment. results lifetime sexual harassment was reported by . % (women . %, men . %), while . % (women . %, men . %) reported having been sexually harassed within the past year. the most common forms of lifetime (ever having experienced) sexual harassments were ‘sexual expressions, suggestions or comments about your body’ and ‘unwanted touching, hugging or kissing’ (both . %), while rape and rape attempt were reported by . % and . %, respectively. exposure to all forms of past-year sexual harassments was significantly more common among women and the youngest age cohorts. fellow students committed the past-year sexual harassment in %– % of the instances, while a university staff member was reported to have committed the harassment in . %– . % of cases. conclusion given the potential consequences suffered by those exposed to sexual harassment and assault, both the institutions and student welfare organisations should intensify their efforts to put the theme on the agenda and provide both legal and health services to victims of sexual harassment. the low response rate means that care should be taken in interpreting and generalising the findings to the whole student population. introduction the #metoo movement has highlighted the challenge and impact of sexual harass- ment in most institutions and organisations, including academia. sexual harassment is formally defined as unwanted sex-related behaviours that are appraised by the recip- ient as offensive and that exceed one’s coping resources or threaten one’s well-being. this includes unwelcome verbal and non-verbal sexual behaviours, as well as undesired phys- ical behaviours that the target finds difficult to cope with or to handle. when defined widely, as we do in the current paper, sexual harassment also includes sexual assault, rape attempt and rape. a range of negative consequences related to sexual harassment have been documented, with sexual harass- ment increasing the risk of both mental and somatic health problems. sexually harassed students have also been shown to perform worse academically, as well as being more likely to engage in risky behaviours such as increased drug use, problematic drinking behaviours, sexual risk taking and sexual dysfunction. in a recent systematic review of the litera- ture, fedina et al synthesised the prevalence estimates of sexual harassment in college samples based on studies originating from the usa, published from to . the authors concluded that while the prev- alence rates varied greatly, mainly due to strengths and limitations of this study ► the shot study (students’ health and wellbeing study) is a national student health survey for higher education in norway and included full-time students aged – . ► sexual harassment was defined according to norwegian legal regulations, covering detailed data on verbal, non-verbal and physical sexual harass- ment, in addition to information on the timeframe and frequency of the sexual harassment and the formal position of the perpetrator of the harassment. ► limitations of the study include the relatively low response rate in shot ( %). o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ http://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjopen- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access measurement and definitional differences, unwanted sexual contact was the most prevalent form of harass- ment, followed by rape or rape attempt. for example, for unwanted sexual contact (excluding rape or rape attempt), the majority of studies reported estimates of over % in college women, although the rates ranged widely from . % to %. for male college students, the findings regarding unwanted sexual contact also varied considerably, from . % to %. in terms of rape, the prevalence findings for women ranged from . % to . %, while rates for attempted rape in women ranged from . % to . %. the majority of the included studies focused predominantly on white, female under- graduate students. also, the authors specifically called for studies specifying the timeframe in which the various sexual harassment occurred in order to better distin- guish recent experiences happening in college from life- time and childhood experiences. moreover, the authors concluded that future studies should provide examples of unwanted sexual experiences when defining sexual harassment in order to better differentiate specific forms of sexual harassment. recently, high prevalence rates of sexual harassment and violence have also been reported from european universities, and a large study of + women from european union states showed that one in five women had experienced sexual violence (although not limited to campuses). previous norwegian studies of sexual harassment are virtually non-existent, with two notable exceptions. nielsen et al found that %– % of the norwegian employees reported having been exposed to sexual harassment, assessed with a single item, during the last months, and a small study of elite female athletes found that nearly half of them had experienced some form of lifetime sexual harassment or abuse, assessed by an -item scale. based on these considerations, the aims of the current study were ( ) to estimate the prevalence rates of both overall and specific forms of sexual harassment by providing brief examples, and also to differentiate between recent and lifetime experiences; ( ) to explore possible age and gender differences across these measures; and ( ) to examine who (fellow student, university staff or others) committed the sexual harassment acts. data stem from a large national survey from in which all full- time students under the age of taking higher educa- tion in norway were invited to participate. methods study design and setting the shot study (students’ health and wellbeing study) is a national student survey for higher education in norway initiated by the three largest welfare organi- sations (sammen (bergen and surrounding area), sit (trondheim and surrounding area) and sio (oslo and akershus)). the shot was collected electronically through a web-based platform. details of the study have been published elsewhere, but in short the shot was conducted between february and april , and invited all full-time norwegian students pursuing higher education (both in norway and abroad). participants all full-time norwegian students aged between and taking higher education (both in norway and abroad) received both an email and sms (short message service) text invitation to take part in the study. for the shot study, students fulfilled the inclusion criteria, of whom students completed the online question- naires, yielding a response rate of . %. instruments demographic information (shot ) all participants indicated their sex and age, and partici- pants were also asked about their household status (coded as ‘living alone’ vs ‘living with others’) as well as their rela- tionship status (coded as ‘single’ vs ‘married’/‘partner’ or ‘girl-/boyfriend’). finally, participants were categorised as an immigrant if either the student or his/her parents were born outside norway. sexual harassment in the current study sexual harassment was assessed using a seven-item self-report instrument covering three forms of sexual harassment, also corresponding to the legal definition of sexual harassment in norway : ( ) verbal harassment (sexual expressions and suggestions, comments about body, appearance or private life); ( ) non-verbal harassment ( a: close eye or body movements; b: viewing sexual images (including digital); c: indecent exposure); and ( ) physical harassment ( a: unwanted touching, hugging or kissing; b: rape attempt; c: rape). first, the students were given the following, common definition of sexual harassment: ‘unwanted sex-related behaviours that are appraised by the recipient as offensive or bothersome’. for each of the seven forms of harassment, the respon- dents indicated who conducted the harassment (fellow student, employed at the educational institution or others), when the harassment was experienced (‘past month’, ‘past year’, ‘more than a year ago, but after entering college/university, and ‘before entering college/ university’) and how many times he/she had experienced sexual harassment. in the current study, we define a ‘recent’ event as an episode having occurred within the past months (the first two response options). box details the exact wording used in the questionnaire. statistics ibm spss v. for mac was used for all analyses. negative binomial regression analyses were used to examine gender differences in the prevalence of sexual harassment forms across age groups. negative binomial regressions (producing incidence rate ratios (irr)) were used rather than the more commonly used logistic regres- sions (producing or), as ors tend to overstate an effect size compared with irrs for high frequency outcomes (in o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access this case relevant for some forms of sexual harassment). missing values were handled using listwise deletion. patient and public involvement the planning and design of the study were initiated and governed by the student welfare organisations, which included deciding the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and selecting potential research questions and instru- ments. students were not involved in the actual collec- tion of data, although recruitment was conducted in close collaboration with all the student welfare organ- isations in norway. the results will be disseminated to the study participants via outlets of the student welfare organisations and educational institutions, with news- letters highlighting the main findings being made avail- able to all students. popular summaries of results and interpretations with interest for a wider audience will be disseminated in appropriate outlets (eg, the web pages of educational institutions and the norwegian institute of public health (niph)). results descriptive characteristics and representativeness compared with all invited students ( . % women (n= ) and . % men (n= )), the current sample included a larger proportion of women ( . %) than men ( . %). the mean age was . (sd= . ), and the age distribution of participating students ( – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ) and – years ( %, n= )) was almost identical to that of all invited students ( – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ), – years ( %, n= ) and – years ( %, n= )). in terms of accommodation status, . % reported living alone, while . % reported being single. eight per cent of the sample were immigrants, defined as either the student or his/her parents being born outside norway. prevalence of sexual harassment lifetime sexual harassment was reported by . % of the students, and . % reported having been sexually harassed within the past year. women reported substan- tially more sexual harassment than men (lifetime: . % vs . %, irr= . , % ci . to . ). a similar gender effect was also observed for past-year sexual harassment ( . % vs . %, irr= . , % ci . to . ; see table for details). the most common forms of lifetime sexual harassment were sexual expressions and suggestions, comments about your body, appearance or private life, and unwanted touching, hugging or kissing, which both were reported by . % of the students. intrusive eye or body movements were also common ( . %), whereas viewing/sending sexual images ( . %) and indecent exposure ( . %) were less frequently reported. rape and rape attempt were reported by . % and . %, respec- tively. as detailed in table , large gender differences were observed across all variables. figure depicts students’ detailed responses when he/ she were last sexually harassed, showing that, for example, . % and . % of women and men, respectively, had been verbally harassed since entering college/university. at a similar level, . % and . % of women and men, respectively, reported unwanted touching, hugging or kissing since they started on the college/university studies (see figure for more details). as outlined in box and further detailed in figure , all forms of sexual harassment experienced during the past year were significantly more common in the youngest age cohort. for example, while . % of those aged – years reported any form of sexual harass- ment during the last months, the corresponding proportion among those in the older cohort was . % ( – years), . % ( – years), . % ( – years) and . % ( – years). similar age effects were observed across most forms of past-year sexual harass- ment, with a few exceptions (eg, indecent exposure). number of occurrences of sexual harassment as detailed in figure , the majority of those students reporting lifetime sexual harassment reported multiple occurrences across all forms of harassment, except rape, for which the majority of both women ( . %) and men ( . %) reporting rape had experienced this once. box sexual harassment questionnaire used in the shot  study (students’ health and wellbeing study). sexual harassment is defined as unwanted sexual awareness that is offensive and troublesome. please indicate if you have been exposed to any of the following forms of sexual harassment? verbal harassment. □ sexual expressions and suggestions, comments about your body, ap- pearance or private life. non-verbal harassment. □ intrusive eye or body movements. □ viewing/sending sexual images (including digital). □ indecent exposure. physical harassment. □ unwanted touching, hugging or kissing. □ rape attempt. □ rape. repeat for each harassment form: who were you sexually harassed by? (one or more ticks.) □ fellow student. □ staff at the educational institution. □ other. when were you last sexually harassed? □ past month. □ past year. □ more than a year ago, but after entering college/university. □ before entering college/university. how many times have you experienced being sexually harassed? o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access ta b le r a te s a n d f o rm s o f se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t in m a le a n d f e m a le s tu d e n ts s tr a ti fie d b y a g e g ro u p – y e a rs ( n = ) – y e a rs ( n = ) – y e a rs ( n = ) a ll a g e g ro u p s ( n = ) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) w o m e n (   ) a n y se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) v e rb a l: se xu a l e xp re ss io n s, su g g e st io n s a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in tr u si ve e ye o r b o d y m o ve m e n ts . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: vi e w in g / se n d in g s e xu a l im a g e s . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in d e c e n t e xp o su re . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: u n w a n te d to u c h in g , ki ss in g a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e a tt e m p t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) m e n ( n = ) a n y se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) v e rb a l: se xu a l e xp re ss io n s, su g g e st io n s a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in tr u si ve e ye o r b o d y m o ve m e n ts . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: vi e w in g / se n d in g s e xu a l im a g e s . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in d e c e n t e xp o su re . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: u n w a n te d to u c h in g , ki ss in g a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e a tt e m p t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . n a . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . n a . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) in c id e n c e r a te r a ti o † , ir r ( % c i)* c o n ti n u e d o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access – y e a rs ( n = ) – y e a rs ( n = ) – y e a rs ( n = ) a ll a g e g ro u p s ( n = ) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) l if e ti m e ( % c i) p a s t ye a r ( % c i) a n y se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) v e rb a l: se xu a l e xp re ss io n s, su g g e st io n s a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in tr u si ve e ye o r b o d y m o ve m e n ts . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: vi e w in g / se n d in g s e xu a l im a g e s . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in d e c e n t e xp o su re . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n a . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: u n w a n te d to u c h in g , ki ss in g a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e a tt e m p t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n a . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n a . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) a ll st u d e n ts a n y se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) v e rb a l: se xu a l e xp re ss io n s, su g g e st io n s a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in tr u si ve e ye o r b o d y m o ve m e n ts . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: vi e w in g / se n d in g s e xu a l im a g e s . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) n o n -v e rb a l: in d e c e n t e xp o su re . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: u n w a n te d to u c h in g , ki ss in g a n d so o n . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e a tt e m p t . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) p h ys ic a l: ra p e . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) . ( . t o . ) *a ll p v a lu e s in t h e t a b le  a re < . . † a n i r r  > m e a n s th a t w o m e n a re m o re li ke ly t o r e p o rt t h a t se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t fo rm , w h ile a n i r r < in d ic a te s th a t m e n a re m o re li ke ly t o r e p o rt t h a t  se xu a l h a ra ss m e n t fo rm . n a , n o t a va ila b le . ta b le c o n ti n u e d o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access figure detailed timeframe of sexual harassment forms stratified by sex. error bars represent % ci. figure proportion of students across age groups reporting sexual harassment in the past year. error bars represent % ci. figure number of lifetime occurrences among students having reported harassment stratified by gender. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access among those reporting sexual verbal harassment, a larger proportion of women ( . %) than men ( . %) reported repeated verbal harassment (defined as more than times). this gender difference was also present for intrusive eye or body movements, but not for the other harassment forms (see figure for details). person reported as perpetrators of the sexual harassment the large majority of past-year sexual harassment acts (across all forms: %– %) were conducted by someone outside of the university (neither a fellow student nor university staff member). overall, fellow students committed the harassment in %– % of the cases, whereas a university staff member was reported to have conducted the harassment in . %– . % of the instances. as displayed in figure , among those students having reported each harassment form within the past year, a larger proportion of men compared with women reported being sexually harassed by a fellow student. a correspondingly larger propor- tion of women reported being sexually harassed by someone outside of the university, compared with men. there was also a trend that a larger proportion of men reported being harassed by a university staff member across most harassment forms (p< . ), except for physical harassment. discussion statement of principal findings this large national survey from , inviting all full-time norwegian university and college students aged – , suggests that sexual harassment among norwegian college and university students is prevalent. almost one in four students ( . %) reported lifetime sexual harassment of some form, while one in six students ( . %) reported being sexually harassed during the past year. women reported more lifetime and recent exposure to sexual harassment across all subtypes included in the survey, but also a substantial proportion of men reported expo- sure to sexual harassment. younger students reported significantly more sexual harassment the past year than older students, and the majority of those being harassed reported multiple occurrences across all forms of harass- ment (except rape). the majority of recent harassment acts were committed by someone outside of the university setting, while a fellow student and university staff member committed the harassment in %– % and . %– . %, respectively, of the instances. strengths and weaknesses in relation to other studies, discussing important differences in results being one of the first studies of this magnitude on the prev- alence of sexual harassment conducted after the #metoo movement, the current study provides new evidence that sexual harassment indeed is a substantial problem also in college and university settings. the current estimates of sexual harassment are comparable with the review by fedina et al, who synthesised research in the field from the last years, concluding that although prevalence rates vary, they all indicate that a substantial number of college and university students experience sexual harass- ment. in line with that review, as well as estimates from european universities, we also found that unwanted sexual contact and verbal sexual harassment were the most prevalent forms, both being reported by approx- imately % of the students ( %– % of women and %– % of men). in terms of lifetime rape and rape attempt, this was reported by . % and . %, respectively, whereas the past year prevalences were around . %. and while the results showed that most of the rape and rape attempts occurred before entering college/university, the majority of those students reporting the other five sexual figure frequency of students, staff and others as perpetrators among male and female students who reported exposure to harassment in the past year. sums may exceed % as categories are not mutually exclusive. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access harassment forms had experienced this after they started their college/university studies. the increased focus and attention following #metoo may have impacted some of the respondents’ willingness to describe taboo experi- ences, including sexual harassment. as such, it is difficult to outline possible trends or compare with prevalence rates from previous studies in academic settings. similarly, differences in the used operationalisations and sampling procedures make it difficult to directly compare our find- ings with earlier studies. some of the discrepancies may also be attributed to cultural characteristics. young women were especially at high risk, a finding that is also in accordance with previous studies specif- ically addressing this group. male victims of sexual harassment have been less studied, and although sexual harassment against women is a much more prevalent issue the present results are in accordance with previous studies that report less, but still a substantial rate of sexual harassment among male students. the reasons for not reporting sexual harassment or abuse may be the same for women and men (eg, intimidation, shame, fear of not being believed), but there may also be other reasons for previous under-reports of male victims of sexual harassment, such as cultural attitudes about manli- ness, masculinity and so on. it should also be noted that previous research has shown that women and men differ in the perceptions of sexual harassment, as men has a higher threshold for labelling an experience as sexu- ally harassing. regarding the observed age difference, this might partly be explained by recall bias, differences in perceptions of sexual harassment between older and younger students, and/or a healthy survivor effect where the (severely) harassed drop out of university in a young age. how much these mechanisms affect the prevalence is difficult to quantify, although differences in recall bias are likely to affect the past year prevalence to a lesser degree than lifetime. a small percentage of the reported sexual harassments were from university staff members. even so the current study shows that there are still many students who expe- rience some form of sexual harassment from a person in power or in a trusted position. this is especially worrisome and may need to be specifically addressed in preventive programmes. the increase in digital communication has been paral- leled by an increased focus on sexual harassment through sending or viewing offensive pictures (eg, people sending ‘nude/dick pics’). very few studies have investigated this form of sexual harassment, and the present results document that, although it is among the less frequent types of sexual harassment, it is still reported by . % of the students. the rate was relatively higher ‘the past month’ and ‘the past year’, which may indicate that it is a growing problem. however, trend studies over time are needed to further shed light on this. compared with findings from work-life populations, where most studies include only harassment conducted in the workplace, the present findings are not dissimilar to those reported recently from a danish union survey. this survey found that, when asked about specific situ- ations of unwanted sexual attention, . % of women and . % of men had experienced some sort of unwanted sexual attention in the workplace during the past months. however, most larger scale studies have included only crude overall single-item assessments of exposure to sexual harassment, which yield much lower prevalence estimates. in the union survey, only . % of women and . % of men reported being exposed to sexual harassment during the past months when using such a single-item measure. applying the sexual expe- riences questionnaire, a questionnaire which includes items regarding specific types of harassment similar to those included in the present study, fitzgerald et al reported prevalences of more than % for women and % for men from a us military sample in . however, there is a need for more nationally representative studies using questionnaires assessing specific types of sexually harassing situations to further elucidate the magnitude of this problem within the workforce. meaning of the study: possible explanations and implications for clinicians and policymakers the study has some important clinical implications, as there is substantial evidence showing that victims of sexual assault are more likely to suffer from short-term and long-term health problems. our finding showing that the youngest female students are particularly at risk of being sexually harassed is disturbing. the higher risk of harassment among female students is especially problem- atic as previous research has shown that women display stronger reactions to sexual harassment than men. so although many universities and student welfare organisa- tions run awareness campaigns that focus on preventing sexual harassment on campuses, the results of the present study suggest more should be done. colleges and univer- sities have a unique opportunity to reach many young adults. future studies should include information on the situations where the harassment occurs to better tailor interventions. there is still limited empirical evidence for the effectiveness of universal prevention programmes, although there are interventions with promising results. our finding that the youngest students were more at risk than older students suggests that the inter- ventions should target new students specifically. the high prevalence of sexual harassment also has implications for victim services, which include providing both appropriate treatment and legal services. while prevalence rates and forms of sexual harassment may differ from campus to campus, prevention, intervention and victim service strat- egies require a detailed overview of the specific needs for each campus population. research from work-life settings has shown that while training of employees in the forms of antiharassment courses is important, additional measures are needed. to minimise harassment, organisations and institutions should nurture a common culture that rejects harassment o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access and where all students and employees are equally entitled to a work environment without harassment. supporting the effectiveness of an ‘anti-harassment’ culture, research findings show that a strong climate for conflict manage- ment in organisations is associated with lower prevalence of harassment, while also protecting against the effects of harassment when it occurs. strengths and weaknesses of the study the most important limitation of the present study is the relatively modest response rate of %, with little informa- tion about the characteristics of non-participants beyond age and gender distribution. selective participation could bias the prevalences observed to the extent the selection was correlated with reports of sexual harassment. on one hand, it has been shown that non-participants of health surveys in general have poorer health than participants, and as those exposed to sexual harassment have more mental and somatic health problems the current results may represent an underestimation of the true prevalence in the target population. on the other hand, people are in general more prone to participate in a survey if the topic is relevant to them personally, and as the informa- tion material of the shot study focused much on ‘how the students really are and feel’, one may speculate if this would lead to a higher participation rate of individ- uals who felt that the topic was of particular relevance to them. as response rates are particularly important in preva- lence studies, care should be taken when generalising the current findings to the whole student population. rather, it may be more appropriate to emphasise the relative differences between men and women, as well as different age cohorts found in the current study, as these estimates are less prone to selection bias. related to this is the % female composition of the sample, which may represent a bias for the overall estimates, as women are far more likely to report harassments compared with men. also, this problem was mitigated by examining findings sepa- rately for women and men. it is possible that the use of a web-based survey approach contributed to the modest response rate, as electronic platforms typically yield lower overall participation rates when compared with traditional postal mail approaches, such as paper-based surveys or face-to-face interviews. another limitation is that we did not use a validated instrument when assessing sexual harassment, which would have been preferable and make comparisons across studies easier. rather, we designed a new assessment battery, carefully following the content of the norwegian legal regulations, which also corresponds well with the formal scientific definition of sexual harassment. the main rationale for making a new instrument was due to recent recommendations in the review by fedina et al, where the authors specifically called for studies specifying the timeframe in which the sexual harassment occurred and to provide brief exam- ples of unwanted sexual experiences when defining sexual harassment. a final limitation is that we do not know the extent of missing data, as the questionnaire was designed to only indicate the presence of each harassment form, and not the absence. as such, although we consider it most likely that a missing answer is an indication of not having experienced that particular sexual harassment, missing answer may also mean that ( ) the participant may not want to answer that particular item, ( ) the participant does not remember it, or ( ) the data may be missing at random, for example, not related to sexual harassment. the most important study strengths include the very large and heterogeneous sample, as nearly all previous studies in this field focused on white, female, young undergraduate students. also, notwithstanding being newly developed, the included sexual harassment instru- ment allowed us to explore more detailed information than previously assessed. author affiliations department of health promotion, norwegian institute of public health, bergen, norway department of research and innovation, helse fonna hf, haugesund, norway department of mental health, norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway national institute of occupational health, oslo, norway department of psychosocial science, university of bergen, bergen, norway national research centre for the working environment, copenhagen, denmark department of clinical psychology, university of bergen, bergen, norway vestre viken hf, drammen, norway student welfare organisation of oslo and akershus, oslo, norway acknowledgements we wish to thank all participating students, as well as the three largest student organisations in norway (sio, sammen and sit), who initiated and designed the shot studies. contributors bs and mh drafted the manuscript and conducted the statistical analyses. bs and kjl were responsible for conception and design of the study, and kjl obtained funding. mn, iehm, mk and kjl gave critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content. all authors have approved the manuscript being submitted. funding shot has received funding from the norwegian ministry of education and research ( ) and the norwegian ministry of health and care services ( ). competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication obtained. ethics approval the shot study was approved by the regional committee for medical and health research ethics in western norway (no / ), and electronic informed consent was obtained after complete description of the study to the participants. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. data sharing statement the shot data set is administrated by the niph. approval from a norwegian regional committee for medical and health research ethics (https:// helseforskning. etikkom. no) is a prerequirement. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . /. references . fitzgerald lf, swan s. but was it really sexual harassment?: legal, behavioral, and psychological definitions of the workplace victimization of women. in: o'donohue w, ed. sexual harassment: o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://helseforskning.etikkom.no http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ sivertsen b, et al. bmj open ; :e . doi: . /bmjopen- - open access theory, research, and treatment. needham heights, ma, us: allyn & bacon, : – . . kaura sa, lohman bj. dating violence victimization, relationship satisfaction, mental health problems, 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programs. washington, dc: department of justice: department of justice, . . salazar lf, vivolo-kantor a, hardin j, et al. a web-based sexual violence bystander intervention for male college students: randomized controlled trial. j med internet res ; :e . . senn cy, eliasziw m, barata pc, et al. efficacy of a sexual assault resistance program for university women. n engl j med ; : – . . einarsen s, skogstad a, rørvik e, et al. climate for conflict management, exposure to workplace bullying and work engagement: a moderated mediation analysis. the international journal of human resource management ; : – . . knudsen ak, hotopf m, skogen jc, et al. the health status of nonparticipants in a population-based health study: the hordaland health study. am j epidemiol ; : – . . edwards pj, roberts i, clarke mj, et al. methods to increase response to postal and electronic questionnaires. cochrane database syst rev ; :mr . . dykema j, stevenson j, klein l, et al. effects of e-mailed versus mailed invitations and incentives on response rates, data quality, and costs in a web survey of university faculty. soc sci comput rev ; : – . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jo p e n .b m j.co m / b m j o p e n : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jo p e n - - o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.addbeh. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.addbeh. . . https:// www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles /nij/ .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - x( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /cri. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jach. . . - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s mp _ http://dx.doi.org/ . /occmed/kqs http://dx.doi.org/ . /occmed/kqs http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmir. http://dx.doi.org/ . /nejmsa http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /aje/kwq http://dx.doi.org/ . / .mr .pub http://dx.doi.org/ . / .mr .pub http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://bmjopen.bmj.com/ 	sexual harassment and assault among university students in norway: a cross-sectional prevalence study 	abstract 	introduction 	methods 	study design and setting 	participants 	instruments 	demographic information (shot ) 	sexual harassment 	statistics 	patient and public involvement 	results 	descriptive characteristics and representativeness 	prevalence of sexual harassment 	number of occurrences of sexual harassment 	person reported as perpetrators of the sexual harassment 	discussion 	statement of principal findings 	strengths and weaknesses in relation to other studies, discussing important differences in results 	meaning of the study: possible explanations and implications for clinicians and policymakers 	strengths and weaknesses of the study 	references partha kar: to tackle racism, the nhs needs policies with teeth the bottom line partha kar: to tackle racism, the nhs needs policies with teeth partha kar consultant in diabetes and endocrinology i had to read through the email a few times to digest what a consultant had written to me. “conflating covid with institutional racism amongst your friends and colleagues is utterly shameful,” it said. “nobody knows the genetics of covid, but you see fit to suggest that its predilection for bame [black and minority ethnic people] is down to racism. your views nauseate me—there is no room for them in today’s nhs.” the email was in response to my column in may for the bmj, in which i discussed whether racism was a factor in the increased mortality rate from covid- among people from ethnic minority backgrounds. subsequently, further investigations and a report from public health england have established that racism and discrimination may have contributed to the increased risk of death from covid- among ethnic minority groups. yet, for the consultant who sent me that email, it was hurtful to even suggest that there may be racism in the nhs. the incident made me reflect on a wider problem—and an analogy with sexism. when the metoo movement began, many men responded indignantly: “we can’t all be tarred with this brush,” “i have many women friends,” or “i’m a very liberal man.” they missed the point that the movement wasn’t about them. it was about being quiet, listening to the examples raised, and reflecting that there may be many colleagues whose views you have not picked up on, not acted on, or ignored. it was about being vocal against the issue when observed. about being allies for women facing sexism and trying to bring an end to such a culture. racism in the nhs is not much different. you indeed may not be racist, but to then suggest that no one else is, and to be indignant at the notion of the nhs having a race bias, may simply reflect your ignorance or the bubble you inhabit, where people don’t make any judgments based on colour. however, it’s this sort of ignorance from well meaning individuals, more than the views of outright racists, that propagates the problem. such views mean that, when people see something that jars, they remain silent or try to explain it away with some “scientific” reasoning: cue the debate about vitamin d and that being the sole reason for greater mortality in the bame population, rather than acknowledging the existence of discrimination and racism. if you can’t even accept that there could be a problem—that there could be racism and discrimination in the amazing nhs—why would you want to try to solve it? at an individual level, it’s time to be antiracist, to speak up, and to be allies. at a policy level, it’s time for the nhs to start affirmative action. it needs to introduce something like the rooney rule, a us national football league policy that requires teams to interview ethnic minority candidates for head coaching jobs and other senior roles. so far in the nhs, all attempts at cajoling or nudging have achieved little beyond tokenism. data in the workforce race equality standard showed that white applicants were still “ . times more likely to be appointed from shortlisting compared to bme applicants.” how many more reports or data do we need before we realise that simply “shining light on the data” makes no difference without targets and penalties to improve things? we do know that the nhs responds to targets and associated penalties: look at the four hour target or waiting times for cancer treatment. another big step would be to ditch terms such as b(a)me, which turn discrimination into a simplistic discussion about white and non-white communities. the issues influencing differences in attainment and socioeconomic deprivation are fundamentally different for someone who is black than for someone who is indian, just as they’re different for someone from bangladesh than for someone from china. there is no better or more opportune moment to shift the dial from conversations and cajoling to clearer data collection, open access to data based on area and authority, and a commitment to a concept similar to the rooney rule. the “seacole statute” has a ring to it, and it would be a way to pay homage to a titan and pioneer in the world of fighting for equality in healthcare. it’s certainly worth thinking about. competing interests: www.bmj.com/about-bmj/freelance-contributors. provenance and peer review: commissioned; not externally peer reviewed. kar p.parthakar:covid- andethnicity-whyareallourangelswhite?bmj ; :m . doi: . /bmj.m pmid: public health england. beyond the data: understanding the impact of covid- on bame groups. jun . https://assets.publishing.ser- vice.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_da- ta/file/ /covid_stakeholder_engagement_synthesis_beyond_the_da- ta.pdf. nhs. nhs workforce race equality standard. feb . https://www.eng- land.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/equality-standard/workforce-race- equality-standard- -report/. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m views and reviews portsmouth hospitals nhs trust drparthakar@gmail.com follow partha on twitter: @parthaskar cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: june o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/freelance-contributors https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /covid_stakeholder_engagement_synthesis_beyond_the_data.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /covid_stakeholder_engagement_synthesis_beyond_the_data.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /covid_stakeholder_engagement_synthesis_beyond_the_data.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /covid_stakeholder_engagement_synthesis_beyond_the_data.pdf https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/equality-standard/workforce-race-equality-standard- -report/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/equality-standard/workforce-race-equality-standard- -report/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/equality-standard/workforce-race-equality-standard- -report/ https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:drparthakar@gmail.com https://twitter.com/parthaskar http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ study protocol for prise: a longitudinal study of sexual harassment during the transition from childhood to adolescence study protocol open access study protocol for prise: a longitudinal study of sexual harassment during the transition from childhood to adolescence therése skoog* , kristina holmqvist gattario and carolina lunde abstract background: sexual harassment is a widespread problem with serious consequences for individuals and societies. it is likely that sexual harassment among peers has its main onset during the transition from late childhood to early adolescence, when young people enter puberty. however, there is a lack of systematic research on sexual harassment during this developmental period. thus, there is very little information about the prevalence of sexual harassment during this important transition, its consequences, and how to effectively intervene against and prevent the problem. the primary objective of the described project, entitled peer relations in school from an ecological perspective (prise), is to examine sexual harassment and its developmental correlates during the transition from late childhood to early adolescence. methods: the prise study has a longitudinal design over years, in which a cohort of children (n = ) and their main teachers (n = ) fill out questionnaires in grades , , and . the questionnaires assess aspects of peer sexual harassment and potential correlates including biological (e.g., pubertal development), psychosocial (e.g., self- assertiveness, self-image, peer relations), and contextual (e.g., classroom climate, norms) factors. in addition, we will examine school readiness and policies in relation to sexual harassment and collect register data to assess the number of reports of sexual harassment from the participating schools. discussion: the prise study will enable the researchers to answer fundamental, unresolved questions about the development of sexual harassment and thus advance the very limited understanding of sexual harassment during the transition from childhood to adolescence - a central period for physical, sexual, and social development. due to the sensitive nature of the main research concepts, and the age of the participants, the ethical aspects of the research need particular attention. ultimately, the hope is that the prise study will help researchers, policy makers, and practitioners develop, and implement, knowledge that may help in combating a major, current societal challenge and adverse aspect of young people’s developmental ecologies. keywords: sexual harassment, peer victimization, school, longitudinal, late childhood, adolescence, developmental transition background sexual harassment can be defined broadly as “improper behavior that has a sexual dimension” [ ] or “unwanted sexual attention” [ ]. it includes a range of verbal, phys- ical, and visual direct or indirect behaviors that the re- cipient perceives as unwelcome and/or unwanted. some examples are uninvited sexual comments, grabbing, touching, and requests for sexual favors. as opposed to legal definitions of sexual harassment, psychological defi- nitions emphasize the victim’s subjective experience when determining whether an act should be regarded as sexual harassment or not [ ]. testimonies from the #metoo movement, and evi- dence from a small, tentative body of mainly cross- sectional research, converge to reveal that sexual har- assment becomes part of young people’s lives early in their development. it is well-established that the problem is highly prevalent in early adolescence [ – ]; however, research on sexual harassment in late © the author(s). open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * correspondence: therese.skoog@psy.gu.se department of psychology, university of gothenburg, gothenburg, sweden skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:therese.skoog@psy.gu.se childhood (ages – years), is still in its infancy. this is unfortunate considering that late childhood is a period that is central for general physical, sexual, and social development, and, importantly, the transi- tion from childhood to early adolescence has been pointed out as the time in life when children are typ- ically confronted with and start engaging in peer sex- ual harassment for the first time. trigg and wittenstrom [ ], for example, reported that % of high school and college aged students recalled being sexually harassed in the first through fifth grades. moreover, in one study, more than % of students in middle school in the us (mean age . years) re- ported having been the target of some form of sexual harassment the previous school year, with verbal har- assment (e.g., name calling) being the most common form of sexual harassment [ ]. despite the evidence suggesting a high prevalence of sexual harassment at early ages, and the fact that knowledge of the devel- opmental processes underlying sexual harassment among young people is needed for effective preven- tion, the current literature lacks comprehensive, de- velopmentally and ecologically informed longitudinal studies covering the transition from late childhood to early adolescence. this is surprising not least given that the pubertal process, which occurs during this period for most girls and boys [ ], has been identi- fied as a main trigger for the onset of sexual harass- ment [ , , ]. more studies that follow young people over the course of the transition from late childhood to early adolescence are needed, preferably starting before puberty and its associated marked rise in sexual harassment. what is known about the development of sexual harassment at young ages? the existing literature on sexual harassment among young people (primarily adolescents) has provided some important insights into the phenomenon and its consequences. firstly, studies from different countries in europe, north america, asia, and australia con- sistently find high prevalences of sexual harassment victimization among adolescents. in many studies [ , – ], half or more than half of the adolescents re- port being the targets of sexual harassment. these findings clearly indicate that sexual harassment is a significant and universal problem among young people around the globe. secondly, adolescent research has identified a number of individual characteristics that are linked to an in- creased risk of sexual harassment victimization and per- petration. concerning gender, sexual harassment has been described traditionally as harm that men or boys expose women or girls to [ , ]. accordingly, most adolescent research has demonstrated that girls are more often the targets of, and boys more often the perpetra- tors of, sexual harassment [ , , – ]. in sharp con- trast, however, other findings have revealed that boys are more exposed to direct sexual harassment than girls [ , , ]. research that examines specific forms of sexual harassment in relation to gender [ ] has found that for some forms, girls are more exposed (e.g., being touched, grabbed or pinched in a sexual way) and for others, boys are more exposed (e.g., homophobic name calling). an- other set of studies have found that sexual harassment occurs both within and between both sexes and in both directions [ , , ]. other individual characteristics that have been related to sexual harassment in adoles- cence include pubertal timing [ , ], gender-role con- tentedness [ ], and sexual behavior [ , , ]. thirdly, in addition to individual characteristics, a body of literature has identified environmental charac- teristics that are related to sexual harassment. in addition to e-contexts [ ], educational settings have been identified as a major arena for sexual harassment among young people [ , ]. some of the existing stud- ies have found that certain aspects of the school context, including teacher maltreatment [ ] and feeling discon- nected from school [ ], are linked to a higher preva- lence of sexual harassment. aspects of the peer context, including bullying and peer relationship problems [ ], having peers with problematic behavior [ ], participa- tion in mixed-gender peer groups [ ], and romantic rela- tionship status [ ] have also been linked to sexual harassment. this is also true for aspects of the parent- adolescent relationship [ ]. finally, studies have identified an array of negative consequences of sexual harassment. interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, research has found that early ado- lescents seem to view verbal harassment as the most up- setting forms of sexual harassment victimization [ ]. some of the harms of sexual harassment among young people include lower self-esteem, poor physical and mental health, and trauma symptoms [ ], shame, poor body image [ ], depressive symptoms [ , ], sub- stance use [ ], adjustment problems [ ], and academic problems [ ]. only a few protective factors against these consequences have been identified, including higher self-esteem and higher perceived support from others [ ]. considering that the negative effects have been found in different domains of functioning, sexual harassment appears to have a pervasive, negative influ- ence on young people’s development. taken together, the existing findings point towards the importance of early interventions, as early as before or around the ad- vent of puberty, to combat the problem of sexual harass- ment among young people. for these interventions to be effective, understanding how sexual harassment develops skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of at young ages is a fundamental first step. this step is yet to be taken. what is unknown about the development of sexual harassment in young ages? although important knowledge has been gained from the growing literature on sexual harassment among young people, there are fundamental, unresolved ques- tions that remain to be answered. more research that can answer these questions is urgently needed, given the high prevalence and the adverse consequences associated with sexual harassment. one central limitation in the lit- erature is that most existing studies focus on adoles- cence; few focus on late childhood. therefore, little is known about sexual harassment and its development in late childhood and the transition to early adolescence. furthermore, the vast majority of studies are cross- sectional; few are longitudinal. the lack of prospective, longitudinal studies hinders insight into the develop- mental processes that underlay peer sexual harassment, its correlates, and consequences over time. given that puberty is an assumed trigger of sexual harassment [ , , ], research that aims to fully understand the devel- opmental processes related to sexual harassment and its developmental consequences should commence at or even before puberty (i.e., in late childhood). such studies are important not only to find out the prevalence of sex- ual harassment at different ages, but also because devel- opmental processes could be different at different ages. for instance, it is possible that the consequences of sex- ual harassment at early ages (i.e., late childhood) could be different, and perhaps even worse, compared to later ages (e.g., late adolescence), given that younger children may be less skilled in coping with situations of sexual harassment. to date, whereas there is a body of research on sexual harassment over the course of early to late adolescence [ ], studies that prospectively follow a sub- stantial group of children from late childhood through the transition to early adolescence (i.e., ages – ) are missing from the literature. another limitation in the literature is that few studies have taken an ecological approach to the study of sexual harassment among young people. the focus in previous studies has primarily been on the individual level. simi- larly, studies have primarily relied on data from single informants (i.e., typically victims of sexual harassment). research needs to pay attention to the ecological con- text, on multiple levels, in which sexual harassment takes place, develops, and affects young people. one of the most central developmental arenas for young people is school, but at the same time, school has also been identified as a major arena for sexual harassment among young people [ ]. worryingly, studies further indicate that many schools fail to adequately acknowledge and combat sexual harassment in school [ , ]. this is troublesome given that sexual harassment may interfere with children’s possibilities “to receive an equal educa- tional opportunity” [ ], which is also mirrored in find- ings identifying negative consequences such as absenteeism and lowered grades following sexual harass- ment [ ]. in line with a developmental-ecological per- spective [ ], and in order to address the problem of sexual harassment efficiently, school-based studies that gather information from different informants are war- ranted. this would help to further knowledge about how, for example, attitudes and norms at the school and classroom levels affect the prevalence of sexual harass- ment. it would also enable an increased understanding for the barriers that may discourage young people’s dis- closure of sexual harassment. theoretical framework of the prise study against this background, this study protocol describes a new longitudinal, ecologically informed research pro- gram in sweden, aiming to address sexual harassment among peers through the transition from late childhood to early adolescence: the peer relations in school from an ecological perspective (prise) study. the current project has been designed to address and overcome the shortcomings in the current literature concerned with sexual harassment in early development. several models of sexual harassment have previously been explored in the literature. the prise study is framed within developmental-contextual theoretical per- spectives on sexual harassment [ ]. a key assumption in the current project is that individuals’ experiences of sexual harassment are embedded in their environmental context. thus, a key theoretical framework for this pro- ject is the developmental-ecological perspective [ ]. in line with this, the occurrence of sexual harassment in school can be seen as a result of the interaction between the individual and his or her (school) context. this no- tion is in line with a small body of literature that sug- gests that factors which protect against homophobic bullying include a positive school climate [ ]. in the de- scribed project, we examine the interaction between three layers or levels of the individual and his or her context: the individual level, the classroom level, and the school level. at each level, there may be risk factors, protective factors, and potential consequences related to the occurrence of sexual harassment. the individual level includes individuals’ own experiences of being har- assed, harassing others, or witnessing harassment. it also includes biological (e.g., gender, pubertal development) and psychological (e.g., self-esteem, body esteem, resili- ence, satisfaction with class and school, reactions if sexu- ally harassed) factors within the individual. the classroom level includes the occurrence of sexual skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of harassment in the class. it also includes teachers’ thoughts about sexual harassment (e.g., the seriousness of it), their efficacy in handling situations of sexual har- assment in the classroom, and how peers react to sexual harassment in the class. the school level involves the oc- currence of sexual harassment in the school, interven- tions conducted in the school, and school readiness to handle sexual harassment. considering sexual harass- ment as a result of the interaction between these levels, individuals’ development can be influenced not only by their own experiences of being harassed or harassing others, but also by situations of sexual harassment in their peer group (and how they are handled by their teacher) and at their school. research has shown that teachers have more knowledge about bullying than they do about sexual harassment [ ], which may lead to teachers not seeing situations of sexual harassment, nor understanding their vital role in counteracting them. the prise study is further guided by the developmen- tal theory of embodiment (dte) [ ]. this theory is helpful in outlining the possible processes involved in the relationship between being sexually harassed and the negative outcomes examined in this project (e.g., depres- sive symptoms and disordered eating). the dte derives from social constructivist and feminist frameworks and explains how individuals’ – primarily girls’ and women’s – experiences of their bodies, i.e., embodiment, are shaped as they engage with the world. according to the theory, social experiences shape individuals’ embodiment via three core pathways: ) the physical domain, ) the mental domain of social discourses and expectations, and ) the social power and relational connections do- main. we suggest that sexual harassment may com- promise individuals’ experiences of their bodies within all three domains. the physical domain concerns indi- viduals’ experiences of ownership and agency in relation to their bodies. experiences undermining body owner- ship and agency, such as having one’s body unwillingly scrutinized, commented on, or touched, by others, can inhibit experiences of embodiment. the mental domain of social discourses and expectations involves individ- uals’ experiences of stereotypes and expectations. being exposed to disseminated stereotypes, for example stereo- typical, restraining expectations regarding how girls and boys should behave, also undermines embodiment. the third domain of social power and relational connections includes experiences of empowering or disempowering relationships. prejudicial treatment, harassment, and liv- ing in communities with gender inequality are among the experiences undermining embodiment within this domain. we suggest that sexual harassment may undermine in- dividuals’ experiences of their bodies within all three do- mains (the physical, mental, and social power and relational connections domain), and that this may lead to lower body esteem and lower psychological well- being. to our knowledge, the only longitudinal study examining sexual harassment among girls in late child- hood (mean age . years) found that exposure to sex- ual harassment predicted a higher risk of developing disordered eating four years later [ ]. other studies have further established that low body esteem is a gate- way to disordered eating as well as depression in adoles- cent girls [ ]. therefore, in line with the dte, low body esteem is suggested to mediate the relationship be- tween sexual harassment and its negative outcomes such as depressive symptoms and disordered eating. in relation to the issue of gender, it should be noted that since past studies have shown that both girls and boys are sexually harassed by both girls and boys [ ], we do not define sexual harassment as male sexual ag- gression against women. however, some studies lend support to the notion that sexual harassment may be more damaging for girls than for boys [ ]. nonetheless, this conclusion may be premature, as outcomes typically have been biased towards internalizing symptoms, which are more commonly reported by girls. in fact, some show that the link between sexual harassment and ad- justment is stronger for boys than for girls [ ]. thus, it is possible that boys who are exposed to sexual harass- ment suffer equally damaging effects – but these effects may not have been captured by studies to date. the current project will examine a broader range of possible negative outcomes of sexual harassment, including ex- ternalizing symptoms which are typically more prevalent among boys. research objectives in summary, fundamental and urgent questions remain concerning the development of peer sexual harassment during the transition from childhood to adolescence [ ]. the current literature lacks comprehensive, devel- opmentally and ecologically informed longitudinal stud- ies covering the transition from late childhood to early adolescence. the lack of studies of the years in which sexual harassment emerges is concerning given that it prevents a full understanding of its prevalence, conse- quences, and risk and protective factors. this under- standing also needs to consider the different roles involved in sexual harassment (e.g., victims, perpetrators, and peers who witness it), and to be informed by eco- logical perspectives. against the backdrop of the identi- fied gaps in knowledge in the literature, the primary objective of the prise study is to examine the preva- lence of sexual harassment over the course of the transi- tion from late childhood to early adolescence and its developmental correlates among boys and girls. the study is developmentally informed and has a skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of developmental-contextual approach, meaning that bio- logical, psychological, social, and contextual factors will be examined in relation to sexual harassment over the course of three years (grades – , ages – years). the project is guided by four research questions: . what is the prevalence of peer sexual harassment (victimization, perpetration, and witnessing) during the transition from childhood to early adolescence (ages – years)? . what are the predictors of peer sexual harassment victimization, perpetration, and witnessing during the transition from childhood to early adolescence (ages – years)? . what are the developmental consequences of peer sexual harassment for different subgroups of children during the transition from childhood to early adoles- cence (ages – years)? . what biological, psychological, social, and context- ual risk and protective factors moderate the potential link between sexual harassment and its developmental consequences during the transition from childhood to early adolescence (ages – years)? methods/design research design this research project, designed to examine sexual har- assment among peers during the transition from late childhood to early adolescence in sweden, has a three- year longitudinal design. data will be collected annually in grades (t ) to (t ) from one cohort of students, teachers, and schools via questionnaires. the question- naires will cover aspects of sexual harassment experi- ences among peers as well as biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors that there are theoretical and/ or empirical reasons to think might be related to sexual harassment. the study will run from to . participants the research project will be conducted in sweden. it may appear paradoxical that sweden has a high level of gender equality [ ] and at the same time a high preva- lence of sexual harassment [ ]. therefore, sweden pro- vides an interesting and important context for the study of the development of sexual harassment in early devel- opment and its correlates [ ]. the study will include male and female stu- dents in approximately classes. about – swedish public and private middle schools (mellansta- dieskolor) will be recruited for the data collection. most prior studies of sexual harassment have relied on data from single informants (i.e., typically victims of sexual harassment). the current project takes a developmental-ecological approach by collecting data from different informants at different ecological levels. for each of the participating classes, one main teacher will be included in the study and answer questions about the class and the school culture (n = ). in addition, existing documentation will be col- lected from each school (n = – ). the sample size, n = , is based on conventional calculations [ ], aiming for % power, . alpha, the ability to detect small effect sizes, and using more than ten predictors (miles & shevlin, ). the size further accounts for some attrition ( %) that might occur over the study period. measures table provides an overview and brief description of the instruments that will be used in the study. the in- struments have been chosen based on the theoretical framework [ , , ] and prior empirical studies [ , , , ]. accordingly, data will be collected at the individ- ual level (e.g., from student self-reports), classroom level (e.g., from teacher reports), and school level (e.g., from school data). measuring sexual harassment among young people is sensitive. it is important that all instruments are developmentally- and age-appropriate. during the spring of , we have developed a measure of sex- ual harassment to be used among children (ages – years). the measure consists of six items about physical, verbal, and visual sexual harassment at age – years; and an additional set of five items to measure physical, verbal, and visual sexual harassment at age years. we ask about sexual harassment only among peers and at school. other measures of sexual harassment used among older age groups [ , , , , , ] have been used as inspiration when de- signing our measure. we have also consulted a group of experts (clinical psychologists, researchers, and school personnel) on child and adolescent develop- ment in general, and sexual harassment among young people in particular, in the development of our meas- ure of sexual harassment. both the student and the teacher questionnaires have been pilot-tested with children of the same age as the target group and – grade teachers, respectively. procedure participant recruitment will be done in municipalities in the western part of sweden, in and around the gothenburg region. we will recruit classes in public and private (charter) schools in urban and non-urban areas by contacting school principals and school health service staff. schools that teach grade to grade (swedish th grade children are aged around ) will be approached. skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of table overview of the study instruments measure/instrument description/construct timing (t) of administration student self-reports demographic information questions are asked about age, gender, living situation (housing and family structure), country of birth (own and parents’), language spoken at home, and socioeconomic status t , t , t a pubertal developmental scale [ ] items measuring pubertal status, pubertal timing. item measuring perceived pubertal timing. items measuring height and weight. t perceived pubertal timing at t , t , t the child and adolescent social support scale [ ] items measuring emotional support from teachers, parents, classmates, and friends . t , t , t body esteem scale for adolescents and adults [ ] items measuring appearance-based body esteem t , t , t strengths and difficulties questionnaire [ ] items from the subscales measuring emotional and conduct problems t , t , t victim scale [ ] items measuring general peer victimization (physical, verbal, social) t , t , t school satisfaction (adapted, [ ]) items, e.g., “do you enjoy school?” t , t , t classroom satisfaction (adapted, [ ]) items, for example, "we help each other" t , t , t sexual harassment victimization + items: verbal, visual, and physical sexual harassment victimization items at t and t and items at t location items: location at school where the harassment took place t , t , t offender + items: gender and age of perpetrator(−s) t , t , t witnesses items: witnesses to the harassment t , t , t disclosure items: who was/were told about the harassment t , t , t own reactions [ ] items: behavioral and emotional reactions to the harassment, adapted t , t , t sexual harassment perpetration + items: verbal, visual, and physical sexual harassment perpetration items at t and t and items at t sexual harassment witnessing + items: verbal, visual, and physical sexual harassment witnessing items at t and t and items at t sexual harassment at school and in the class items: sexual harassment is seen as a problem at school and in the class t ,t ,t self-esteem [ ] item: self-esteem t , t , t children's self-efficacy scale [ ] items about self-assertiveness, eg. “stand up for myself when i feel i am being treated unfairly” t , t , t children's hope scale [ ] items about agency and pathways, eg. “even when others want to quit, i know that i can find ways to solve the problem” t , t , t teacher reports demographic information gender, age, educational background, teaching experience, role at the school t , t , t knowledge/awareness about sexual harassment in the class + items t , t , t class norms about sexual harassment items: different reactions that students might have to witnessing sexual harassment among peers t , t , t teacher’s perceptions of the seriousness of sexual harassment and bullying items: how serious a threat to students’ well-being the teacher considers sexual harassment and bullying to be, respectively t , t , t teacher’s intentions to intervene [ ] items: teachers’ intentions to intervene in sexual harassment between students, adapted t , t , t teacher’s efficacy for intervening [ ] items; teachers’ efficacy in intervening in sexual harassment between students, adapted t , t , t skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of data will be collected via questionnaires completed by participating children and teachers, and via public data registers and contacts with the school principal (e.g., school policies). students will fill out pen-and- paper questionnaires during regular school hours. classrooms will be set up in a way to ensure that students will be able to fill out their questionnaire privately. at or around the same time, the class’s main teacher will respond to the teacher question- naire. we will send a questionnaire to the school principal via e-mail to obtain the school-level data. the data will be collected by the research team. the research team includes three senior developmental psychologists and one phd student, who is a trained clinical child psychologist. master’s students will also be part of the research team and participate in the data collection. ethical considerations the prise study has been approved by the swedish ethical review authority (reference number – ). written informed consent will be obtained from the legal guardians of the participating children and from the participating teachers. oral informed consent will be obtained from the children. children will be orally informed about the research in a way that they can understand. school health staff will be informed about the study in advance so that they can take any action necessary. children will be informed, orally and in the questionnaire, that they can get in touch with their local school health nurse or school counsellor if they feel the wish or need to do so. par- ticipants may withdraw from the study at any time without risking any negative consequences. all data will be handled confidentially. all participating school classes will be offered an incentive corresponding to eur per year. analysis to answer research question , we will mainly use descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency and measures of variability. we will report on the percentage of students that report experiences of sexual harassment victimization, perpetration, and witnessing by gender for each time point. we will also report on teacher reports of sexual harassment among their students. research questions , and will be answered using mainly multivariate regression analysis including structural equation modelling and growth analyses. analyses will be both exploratory and confirmatory. subgroup and multilevel analyses will be performed. we will control for the effects of other forms of peer harassment/victimization in the analyses in order to specify the unique effect of peer harassment that is sexual in nature. to answer the question of what the predictors of peer sexual harass- ment victimization, perpetration, and witnessing are during the transition from late childhood to adoles- cence (research question ), we will examine predic- tors at the school level (e.g., diversity and equal table overview of the study instruments (continued) measure/instrument description/construct timing (t) of administration school personnel barriers to bystander action [ ] items: teachers’ perceived barriers to intervening in sexual harassment between students, adapted t , t , t perceptions of school readiness [ ] items: teachers’ perceptions of school readiness to work effectively against sexual harassment among students, adapted t , t , t teacher’s conceptualization of sexual harassment open-ended question t , t , t teacher’s ideas about why sexual harassment among students occurs open-ended question t , t , t teacher’s ideas for the prevention of sexual harassment among students open-ended question t , t , t school data average parental education level in specific schools item on parents’ mean educational level on a -point scale: = primary, = secondary, postsecondary t , t , t school’s grade point average item: the grade point average for the school t , t , t reports of sexual harassment filed reports of sexual harassment at the school t , t , t measures against sexual harassment at the class and school levels active measures taken against sexual harassment at the school t , t , t content of the school’s diversity and equal treatment policies analysis of any content of the school’s diversity and equal treatment policies that relates to sexual harassment t , t , t at = grade ; t = grade , t = grade skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of treatment policies), teacher/classroom level (e.g., teacher’s perceptions of the seriousness of sexual har- assment and bullying), and individual level (e.g., pu- bertal development). similarly, to answer research question (what are the developmental consequences of peer sexual harassment for different subgroups of children during the course of middle school?) we will examine outcomes at the school level (e.g., reports of sexual harassment), teacher/classroom level (e.g., norms/beliefs about students’ reactions to sexual har- assment in the classroom), and individual level (e.g., self-esteem, externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms). we will examine the moderating effects of gender and age. moreover, we will study the inter- relationships among sexual harassment victimization, perpetration, and witnessing over time as part of an- swering research questions and . concerning research question (what biological, psychological, social, and contextual risk and protective factors moderate the potential link between sexual harass- ment and its developmental consequences?), we will study the role of gender, pubertal development, own reactions to sexual harassment, child resilience, and teacher/school responses to sexual harassment as moderators of the links identified in the analyses con- ducted to answer research question . furthermore, the data collected from schools (e.g., reports of inci- dents related to sexual harassment) will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively (content analysis). discussion the described longitudinal research project, prise, which is based on a developmental-contextual frame- work [ ], will enable the researchers to answer fun- damental, unresolved questions about the early stages of sexual harassment among young people. the prise study will advance the literature by studying individ- uals during a key developmental transition (i.e., from childhood to adolescence) in their contexts and by using multiple reporters of and perspectives on sexual harassment at school. specifically, the study will move beyond current knowledge by examining the nature of the problem of sexual harassment when it is assumed to typically begin. this, in turn, will help in identify- ing the young people most at risk of negative out- comes. at the same time, it will also provide knowledge about protective factors. in summary, the prise study will advance the very limited understand- ing of sexual harassment during an age period that is central in a person’s physical, sexual, and social development. the prise study raises ethical questions that need to be addressed and handled carefully and sensitively. ethical considerations are key given that the main participants are vulnerable (by being children) and that the instruments concern sensitive topics (e.g., peer victimization and perpetration). although we have developed the questions about sexual harassment giving special consideration to the participants’ ages, there is still a risk that some of the children will feel provoked or uncomfortable in answering them. this may be particularly true for children who have been exposed to sexual harassment. some researchers also describe what is referred to as the “question-behavior- effect” [ ]; that behaviors that are asked about, espe- cially risk behaviors, will increase as a result of asking about them. taking these issues into consideration, we will collaborate with the school health staff at each school to ensure that they are available for stu- dents in need of support. we will also follow sug- gested guidelines when designing the questionnaire to counteract the question-behavior-effect. on the other hand, it should be taken into account that in order to counteract sexual harassment and its negative conse- quences during the transition from late childhood to early adolescence, we are in urgent need of empirical knowledge concerning this matter. we also believe that many children will appreciate participating in the project through being able to share their experiences and having their voices heard. given the project’s so- cietal benefits and that we will take action to avoid that any children getting hurt, we believe that the potential benefits of this project surpass its potential risks. implications for policymaking and practice with the advent of the #metoo-movement, it became clear that sexual harassment is a widespread, world- wide concern, that needs to be addressed on all levels of society. while children have the right to education, it also remains without doubt that sexual harassment interferes with this right [ ]. consequently, schools should have a strong impetus to create a safe envir- onment for their students, free from sexual harass- ment. to be able to do so, more knowledge about the phenomenon, especially at the age when it typic- ally begins, is urgently needed. knowledge about when, where, why sexual harassment occurs and who are its victims can help delineate potential ways to act against it early in its development. the prise study will move beyond current knowledge by exam- ining the problem of sexual harassment in the transi- tion between late childhood and early adolescence, enabling a better understanding of its onset. it will use a longitudinal design, to identify both risk and protective factors for sexual harassment and its conse- quences. in addition, the project will examine sexual harassment from the perspectives of victims, skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of offenders, and witnesses, as well as on multiple con- textual levels (individual, classroom, and school), to enable a more ecological understanding of the phenomenon. ultimately, the hope is that the project will help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to de- velop, implement, and test interventions that can effect- ively combat a major, current societal challenge and adverse aspect of young people’s developmental ecologies. abbreviations dte: developmental theory of embodiment; eur: euro; prise: peer relations in school from an ecological perspective acknowledgements we would like to thank andrea karlsson valik, licensed psychologist and phd student, for help with preparing the data collection. authors’ contributions ts, khg, and cl planned and designed this study in a collaborative effort. ts received the funding as the main applicant. khg and cl were co-applicants. cl was responsible for the ethical review authority approval. ts drafted the first version of the manuscript. khg and cl helped draft the manuscript. all authors have reviewed and approved the final version of this manuscript. authors’ information ts, khg, and cl are senior lecturers and associate professors at the department of psychology, university of gothenburg, sweden. funding the research project has been funded by the swedish research council for health, working life, and welfare (reference number – ). the funding body has no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript. availability of data and materials the dataset generated and analyzed during the current study is not publicly available due to its longitudinal nature and the sensitivity of the questions, but is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. ethics approval and consent to participate ethical approval for this study was provided by the swedish ethical review authority (reference number – ). active informed consent to participate is solicited from the children and their legal guardians. in consideration of their age, children will consent orally directly to one of the researchers. the consent will be documented by the researchers. legal guardians will be asked to consent in written, either via regular mail or electronically. for some parents, reading (swedish) might pose a problem. if a written consent form has not been received, legal guardians will be given the opportunity to provide informed consent via telephone. the consent will be documented by the researchers. teachers provide written, active informed consent. the consent procedure has been approved by the ethics committee. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. received: september accepted: october references . o’donohue w, downs k, yeater ea. sexual harassment: a review of the literature. aggress violent beh. ; ( ): – . . mcmaster l, connolly j, pepler dj, craig wm. peer to peer sexual harassment among early adolescents. dev psychopathol. ; : – . . miller em. peer sexual harassment in middle school: classroom and individual factors. doct diss: columbia 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validation of a single-item measure and the rosenberg self- esteem scale. personal soc psychol bull. ; : – . . bandura a. multidimensional scales of perceived academic efficacy. stanford, ca: stanford university. . . snyder cr, hoza b, pelham we et al. the development and validation of the children’s hope scale. j ped psychol. ; : – . . edwards km, sessarego sn, stanley lr, mitchell kj, eckstein rp, rodenhizer kae, et al. development and psychometrics of instruments to assess school personnel's bystander action in situations of teen relationship abuse and sexual assault. j interpers violence. ; . . fitzsimons gj, moore sg. should we ask our children about sex, drugs, and rock & roll? potentially harmful effects of asking questions about risky behavior. j consumer psych. ; : – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. skoog et al. bmc psychology ( ) : page of 	abstract 	background 	methods 	discussion 	background 	what is known about the development of sexual harassment at young ages? 	what is unknown about the development of sexual harassment in young ages? 	theoretical framework of the prise study 	research objectives 	methods/design 	research design 	participants 	measures 	procedure 	ethical considerations 	analysis 	discussion 	implications for policymaking and practice 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	authors’ information 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	references 	publisher’s note russian linguistic bulletin ( ) doi: https://doi.org/ . /rulb. . . . ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕ КУЛЬТУРНО-СПЕЦИФИЧЕСКИХ ЭЛЕМЕНТОВ В АМЕРИКАНСКИХ ПРЕДВЫБОРНЫХ ДЕБАТАХ Научная статья Павлина С.Ю. *, Ляличкина А.И. , Нижегородский государственный лингвистический университет им. Н.А. Добролюбова, Нижний Новгород, Россия * Корреспондирующий автор (pavlina.svetlana[at]mail.ru) Аннотация В статье рассматривается лингвистическая составляющая американских предвыборных теледебатов. Выделяются языковые единицы, имеющие культурную коннотацию, отражающие социокультурный контекст. Актуальность обусловлена недостаточной изученностью лингвокультурного аспекта электорального дискурса. Обращение к языковым фактам, отражающим современные социальные и культурные доминанты американского общества, предопределяет новизну исследования. Было выявлено, что культурно окрашенные номинации выборки включают реалии и фразеологизмы. Реалии, в свою очередь, подразделяются на политические, социальные и культурно- нормативные. Фразеологизмы выборки отражают культурные коды американского социума. Они подвергаются трансформациям, что позволяет вписать данные образные номинации в актуальный политический контекст. Ключевые слова: предвыборные дебаты, культурно-специфичные компоненты, реалии, идиомы. using culture-specific elements in american presidential debates research article pavlina s.yu. *, lyalichkina a.i. , nizhny novgorod state linguistic university named after n.a. dobrolyubov, nizhny novgorod, russia * corresponding author (pavlina.svetlana[at]mail.ru) abstract the article explores the linguistic component of american presidential debates. the linguistic units that are embedded in the social and cultural contexts and have cultural connotations are singled out. the culture-specific linguistic units remain an important but under-researched area of pre-electoral discourse analysis. the research revealed that such units of the text encompass realia and idioms. the former incorporates political and social realia as well as those connected with cultural norms and practices. idioms used in the presidential debates reflect american culture codes. they are transformed by politicians to fit specific political contexts. keywords: presidential debates, culture-specific components, realia, idioms. introdaction pre-electoral discourse being a part of political discourse has become a focal point of researches in the field of political science, social philosophy, media linguistics and political linguistics. the electoral component of political communication has acquired great prominence recently, as modern electoral campaigns prove to be a never-ending process [ , p. ]. the pre- electoral situation is characterized by a high level of political confrontation which reaches the greatest point of its intensity during televised presidential debates [ , p. ]. in american political realm televised debates encompass primaries when contenders strive to secure party nomination as well as the debates between the republican and democratic candidates that take place before the election day. in presidential debates have become even more important for those running for the presidency, as rallies were limited due to the pandemic and the main means for politicians to reach and persuade their voters was televised debates participation. the linguistic aspect of presidential debates has been analyzed from different perspectives. researchers investigate the strategies used by politicians to impact their electoral base [ ], [ ], [ ]. they also consider the stance and linguistic means employed by presidential hopefuls to manipulate the audience [ ]. however, rhetorical properties of televised debates remain an understudied field of pre-electoral discourse. one of the aspects that require further investigation is the way the speeches of politicians reflect the socio-cultural context. this takes shape of a culture-specific component of pre-electoral discourse. they are viewed as linguistic units that bear some social and cultural references that can be described as cultural connotation. the aim of this research is to establish and analyze the elements of debate speeches that are specifically american since they mirror some values, elements of the social and political landscape typical of the us culture. the sample includes transcripts of the democratic televised debates in las vegas and south carolina as well as trump vs biden debates. the research is set in sociolinguistics framework and employs critical discourse analysis. classification of culture-specific components of the presidential debates the linguistic units of the sample fall into two main categories: realia and idioms. by realia we understand the items that represent some aspects of a particular political and social contexts which are closely associated with a specific culture. idioms can also be culture-specific as they contain culture codes that linguists describe as their cultural connotation [ ]. the realia singled out in debate texts pertain to the political realm, social sphere as well as cultural norms and practices. political realia include nominations well established in the english language as well as some new words and phrases that became a part of mainstream vocabulary due to the emergence of new phenomena. the former type can be exemplified by the nominations bumper sticker and hanging chads: russian linguistic bulletin ( ) senator klobuchar: what i think we should do is make things more affordable […] do something for the people of america, instead of a bunch of broken promises that sound good on bumper stickers [ ]. bumper stickers are a type of political advertisement extensively used in the us during electoral campaigns alongside posters and pins. in the context of debates they serve as representations of slogans that are never implemented. joe biden: except we had a thing called an election with hanging chads in florida and it was not reauthorized [ ]. by hanging chads they understand the fragments of card ballots, which were not punched the whole way leaving a piece dangling. such votes were not counted by the machine, thus because of this technical error people’s votes were not valid. as for the new political realia mentioned by presidential hopefuls, they include such names as white supremacists, antifa and me too: d. trump: but i’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not [a] right- wing problem …. this is a left-wing problem [ ]. the words antifa and metoo denote new movements that promote liberal values, while white supremacy is a new label that masks the old issue of racial segregation. it is a euphemism employed to substitute for the terms that have become socially unacceptable. social realia used by the candidates denote some elements of american educational landscape: bernie sanders: we are going to triple funding for low-income title i schools, because kids’ education should not depend upon the zip code in which they live [ ]. the democratic contender speaks about schools where the majority of children are from low-income families, so they are entitled to government subsidies, and zip code in this context stands for underprivileged neighborhoods. another term belonging to social realia is redlining: m. bloomberg: redlining was not the problem of the mortgage market… [ ]. though the notion of redlining is usually associated with banks discriminating against people of color, bloomberg underlines its financial basis which is not connected with ethnicity. the discussion of issues of illegal immigration brought about the usage of the slang word coyote in the final presidential debate: d. trump: these children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they used to use them to get into our country [ ]. the slang noun coyoteis used to denote someone who smuggles immigrants into the us across the mexican border. the metaphorical meaning of this word is based on the association with an animal who prays on the weak unable to defend themselves. the animal meaning of this word originates from the language spoken by the indigenous people of central america, and it is widely used metaphorically by mexican-american community. cultural norms and practices are referred to in the following critical remark of senator klobuchar that expresses her opinion of president trump’s relationships with the north korean leader: he literary thinks he can go over and bring a hot dish to the dictator next door and he thinks everything is going to be fine [ ]. to describe trump’s close ties with north korea senator klobuchar uses metaphorical mapping. it refers to the practice of helping neighbours, as americans tend to greet new arrivals to the neighborhood by bringing them some hot dishes. apart from realia culture-specific linguistic units embedded in presidential debates rhetoric include typically american idioms that are endowed with cultural connotation. being asked about the sources that might help to fund the proposed free universal health care, bernie sunders gave the elusive answer: “i can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime”. it is a transformation of the idiom nickel and dime that means “something not important because it does not involve much money”. another transformed american idiom was used by joe biden in reference to his opponent tom stayer who also participated in the south carolina democratic debate: where i come from it is called tommy come lately [ ]. the original idiom johnny-come-lately underwent transformation that involved the substitution of the proper name johnny for tommy to fit the specific political context. that was biden’s way to say that his rival was late to join the conversation and missed his turn to speak. conclusion the analysis of presidential debates rhetoric shows that culture specific units employed by american politicians in pre- electoral discourse encompass realia and idioms. the former incorporate political and social realia as well as the units denoting some cultural norms and practices. as for idioms, they originate in american culture and are normally transformed to fit the political context of debates. 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[in russian] . south carolina democratic debates [electronic resource]. – url: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-carolina- democratic-debate-full-transcript-text/ (accessed: . . ) . donald trump & joe biden st presidential debate transcript [electronic resource]. – url: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-joe-biden- st-presidential-debate-transcript- (accessed: . . ) . trump vs. biden: quotes from the final presidential debate [electronic resource]. – url: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-debate-quotes-factbox/trump-vs-biden-quotes-from-the-final-presidential-debate- iduskbn (accessed: . . ) cem_ _s _abstract .. mp what to do with #metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence a. sobiesiak, bhsc, k. muldoon, mph, phd, l. shipeolu, ba, m. heimerl, ba, msw, k. sampsel, md, university of ottawa, ottawa, on introduction: the #metoo social media movement gained inter- national status in october as millions disclosed experiences of sexual and intimate partner violence. people who experience violence from a former/current intimate partner may not present for care for many reasons, among them not knowing where to go for care, or not realizing they were experiencing abuse since the behavior was por- trayed as ‘normal’. empirical research identified increased police reporting, internet searches, and new workplace regulations on sexual assault/harassment after #metoo. less is known about how #metoo has influenced hospital-based care, particularly among ipv cases. we aimed to investigate if the #metoo social movement influenced pat- terns of ipv cases presenting for emergency care. methods: this study took place at the sexual assault and partner abuse care pro- gram (sapacp), within the emergency department of the ottawa hospital. patients seen from november st, through to septem- ber th, was considered pre-#metoo and those seen novem- ber st, to september th, was considered post-#metoo. all patients seen in october were excluded. analyses compare the proportion and characteristics of ipv cases seen pre- and post-# metoo. log-binomial regression models were used to calculate rela- tive risk and % ci. results: cases were seen by the sapacp during the total study period, of which ( %) were ipv cases. ipv cases were seen pre-#metoo and ipv post-#metoo. the clinical presentation for ipv cases was similar between both per- iods where approximately % of ipv cases presented for sexual assault, % presented for physical assault. an increase in frequency and proportion of ipv cases was observed post-#metoo. post-# metoo there were additional cases of ipv, corresponding to almost a % increase in risk compared to the pre-#metoo period. (rr: . , % ci: . - . ) post-#metoo, there were more pre- senting cases of ipv among male/trans cases ( vs ) and youth cases ( vs ). conclusion: #metoo is a powerful social move- ment that corresponded with a significant increase in ipv cases pre- senting for emergency care. while the assault characteristics among ipv cases remained similar, an important contribution of this research is the increase in youth, male/transgender patients who presented for care post-#metoo. continued investigations into pre- post-#metoo trends is needed to understand more about the changing clinical population and to inform resource and service allocation. keywords: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, trauma mp clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage follow- ing minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study e. mercier, md, msc, t. o’brien, mbbs, b. mitra, phd, mbbs, n. le sage, md, phd, p. tardif, msc, m. emond, md, msc, m. d’astous, md, phd, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: the primary objective of this study was to determine the incidence of clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemor- rhage (t-ich) following minor head trauma in older adults. second- ary objective was to investigate the impact of anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapies on t-ich incidence. methods: this retrospective cohort study extracted data from electronic patient records. the cohort consisted of patients presenting after a fall and/ or head injury and presented to one of five ed between st march and st july . inclusion criteria were age ≥ years old and a minor head trauma defined as an impact to the head without ful- filling criteria for traumatic brain injury. results: from the , electronic medical records evaluated, cases were included. the mean age was . (sd . ) years. one hundred and eighty-nine ( ) patients ( . %) were on an anticoagulant (n = ), antiplatelet (n = ) or both (n = ). twentypatients( . %)developedaclinically significant t-ich. anticoagulation and/or antiplatelets therapies were not associated with an increased risk of clinically significant t-ich in this cohort (odds ratio (or) . , % ci . - . ). conclusion: in this cohort of older adults presenting to the ed following minor head trauma, the incidence of clinically significant t-ich was . %. keywords: head injury, intracranial haemorrhage, traumatic brain injury mp factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review g. genois, i. vlahovic, l. moore, phd, b. beck, md, msc, p. blanchard, md, phd, m. Émond, md, msc, b. mitra, md, phd, mbbs, p. cameron, md, mbbs, a. nadeau, phd, É. mercier, md, msc, hôpital de l’enfant-jésus, québec, qc introduction: trauma care is highly complex and prone to medical errors. accordingly, several studies have identified adverse events and conditions leading to potentially preventable or preventable deaths. depending on the availability of specialized trauma care and the trauma system organization, between and % of trauma-related deaths worldwide could be preventable if optimal care was promptly delivered. this narrative review aims to identify the main determinants and areas for improvements associated with potentially preventable trauma mortality. methods: a literature review was performed using medline, embase and cochrane central register of controlled trials from to a maximum of months before submission for publication. experimental or observational studies that have assessed determinants and areas for improvements that are associated with trauma death preventability were considered for inclusion. two researchers independently selected eligible studies and extracted the relevant data. the main areas for improvements were classified using the joint commission on accreditation of healthcare organizations patient event taxonomy. no statistical ana- lyses were performed given the data heterogeneity. results: from the individual titles obtained by the search strategy, a total of studies were included. each study included between and trauma patients who had sustained mostly blunt trauma, frequently following a fall or a motor vehicle accident. preventability assessment was performed for to patients using either a single expert assessment (n = , , %) or an expert panel review (n = , . %). the definition of preventability and the taxonomy used varied greatly between the studies. the rate of potentially preventable or prevent- able death ranged from . % to . %. the most frequently reported areas for improvement were treatment delay, diagnosis accuracy to avoid missed or incorrect diagnosis and adverse events associated with the initial procedures performed. the risk of bias of the included studies was high for studies because of the retrospective design and the panel review preventability assessment. conclusion: deaths occurring after a trauma remain often preventable. included studies cjem • jcmu ; s s scientific abstracts https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms have used unstandardized definitions of a preventable death and vari- ous methodologies to perform the preventability assessment. the proportion of preventable or potentially preventable death reported in each study ranged from . % to . %. delayed treatment, missed or incorrect initial diagnosis and adverse events following a procedure were commonly associated with preventable trauma deaths and could be targeted to develop quality improvement and monitoring projects. keywords: errors, preventable trauma death, systematic review mp head computerized tomography overuse in adults with mild traumatic brain injury in a single quebec emergency department s. thibault, v. gélinas, msc, s. turcotte, msc, a. pépin, r. renald, n. le sage, md, phd, p. plante, phd, h. witteman, phd, f. légaré, md, phd, l. sauvé, phd, m. gagnon, phd, p. archambault, md, msc, universite laval, lévis, qc introduction: choosing wisely canada has reported rates of unnecessary head computed tomography (ct) scans for low-risk mild traumatic brain injury (mtbi) patients in ontario and alberta ranging from % to %. local data for quebec is currently not available. we sought to estimate the overuse of ct scans among adults with mtbi in the emergency department (ed) of a single level ii trauma center in quebec. methods: we performed a retro- spective chart review of adults who visited the ed of hôtel-dieu de lévis from / / to / / . using an administrative data- base (med-gps, montreal), we randomly sampled ed patients aged over that had an initial glasgow coma scale score of to and had suffered from a mtbi in the last hours. we excluded patients with an unclear history of trauma, a bleeding disorder/anticoagula- tion, a history of seizure, any acute focal neurological deficit, a return visit for reassessment of the same injury, unstable vital signs, or a preg- nancy. data was extracted by two reviewers who analyzed separate charts. they used the canadian ct head rule (cchr) to determine relevance of ct scans. overuse was determined if a patient without any high or medium risk cchr criteria underwent a scan. a third reviewer verified a % random sample of the data extraction for each primary reviewer and inter-rater reliability was assessed using the kappa statistic. results: from the eligible mtbi patients, we randomly selected patient charts to review, of which met all inclusion and exclusion criteria ( % were men and the mean age was years old (sd = )). among included patients, were determined as low risk. the overuse proportion was % ( / ), % ci [ - ]. two ct scans were assessed as abnormal, but none revealed life-threatening injuries and only one was consid- ered clinically significant with a subdural hematoma of mm. inter- rater reliability was substantial to perfect (kappa = . and . ) for each primary reviewer. conclusion: we identified head ct scan overuse in this ed. this will support local quality improvement initia- tives to reduce unnecessary head ct scans for adults with mtbi. keywords: computed tomography scan, emergency department, mild traumatic brain injury mp does reduced cough capacity in minor thoracic trauma leads to more atelectasis development? m. emond, md, msc, s. hegg, phd, e. thériault, md, laval, quebec, qc introduction: minor thoracic trauma (mti) accounts for approximately % of all injuries treated in the emergency department (ed). many of which are minor and will be handle on an outpatient basis. mti and rib fractures especially cause non- negligible pain. the pain experienced by patients can lead to reduce pulmonary function, decrease mucous clearance and decrease cough capacity leading in infectious problems and atelectasis. to our knowl- edge, there is no study of atelectasis development caused by reduced cough capacity in the setting of mti. objective: evaluate if a variation in cough capacity leads to atelectasis development. evaluate if there was a difference in cough capacity perception between the nurse, the physician and the patient himself. methods: a prospective obser- vational cohort study ( - ) in ed recruited patients with a chief complaint of mti, ≥ years old, discharged home from the ed. exclusion criteria: ) a confirmed hemothorax, pneumothorax, fail chest, lung contusion or any other important thoracic or abdom- inal internal injury at the initial visit or unable to attend follow-up vis- its. patients were assessed at - and - days. for each patient, age, sex, mechanism of injury, dyspnea, copd/asthma and smoking status were collected. chest x-ray was done at each visit; pulmonary compli- cations were assessed by a blind radiologist. cough capacity was assessed on a scale of to by a nurse, physician and patient himself at , - and - days. pain was scored on a scale of to . chi -squared and odds ratio (ic: %. p ≤ . ) were assessed to determine if the cough capacity variation leads to atelectasis development. a pearson correlation test was assessed the correlation in cough capacity among participants. results: patients were recruited. initial visit: % had atelectasis, days: % and . % at days. patients were retained for analysis after exclusion of missing data. the median initial pain score was - for all patient categories. at days, the odds ratio of atelectasis development were (score ( - ) . ( . - . ); score ( - ) . ( . - . ); p<= . ). the pearson correlation of cough capacity assessment, in patients without atelectasis were ( . nurse vs. patient; . physician vs. patient; . nurse vs. physician p<= . ). as for the cough capacity perception correlation in patients with atelectasis were ( . nurse vs. patient; . physician vs. patient; . nurse vs. physician; p<= . ). conclusion: there is no statistic- ally significant difference in atelectasis development depending on cough capacity and there is poor correlation regarding the perception of cough capacity except for the nurse. it would be interesting to develop a patient reported outcome measure questionnaire which tar- gets minor thoracic trauma as it is a common emergency department complaint and it could help us improve medical management and patient quality of life keywords: atelectasis, cough capacity, minor thoracic trauma mp vaping, tobacco and cannabis among patients presenting to the emergency department: a cross-sectional study k. zhou, bmsc, d. junqueira, msc, phd, pharmd, s. couperthwaite, bsc, j. meyer, bsc, b. rowe, md, msc, university of alberta, edmonton, ab introduction: inhaled toxins from tobacco smoking, cannabis leaf smoking as well as vaping/e-cigarette products use are known causes of cardio-respiratory injury. while tobacco smoking has decreased among canadian adults, there are now several other forms of legal inhalant products. while legal, the evidence of benefit and safety of vaping is limited. of concern, cases of e-cigarette or vaping products use associated lung injury (evali) have been accumulating in the u.s. and now in canada. despite this, very little is known about the inhalation exposure of emergency department (ed) patients; this cjem • jcmus ; s résumés scientifique https://doi.org/ . /cem. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cem. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	what to do with &num;metoo: pre and post presenting patterns of intimate partner violence 	clinically significant traumatic intracranial haemorrhage following minor head trauma in older adults: a retrospective cohort study 	factors associated with preventable trauma death: a narrative review 	head computerized tomography overuse in adults with mild traumatic brain injury in a single quebec emergency department 	does reduced cough capacity in minor thoracic trauma leads to more atelectasis development? 	vaping, tobacco and cannabis among patients presenting to the emergency department: a cross-sectional study misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /ipj.ipj_ _ corpus id: misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment @article{srivastava misogynyfa, title={misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment}, author={k. srivastava and s. chaudhury and p. bhat and samiksha sahu}, journal={industrial psychiatry journal}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	k. srivastava, s. chaudhury, + author samiksha sahu 	published 	sociology, medicine 	industrial psychiatry journal feminism is a gamut of socio political movements and ideologies that share a common goal to delineate, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes.[ ] feminist movements over decades have campaigned for rights of women, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay, to own property, to receive education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage, and to have maternity leave. feminists have also… expand view on wolters kluwer ncbi.nlm.nih.gov save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationsbackground citations view all topics from this paper 	physiological sexual disorders 	movement 	maternity brand of multivitamin 	contract agreement 	crime act citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency unibo @ ami: a multi-class approach to misogyny and aggressiveness identification on twitter posts using alberto 	arianna muti, a. barrón-cedeño 	computer science 	evalita 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, cites background save alert research feed safe at work: options for british columbia to support survivors of domestic violence in the workplace 	l. gonçalves 	political science 	 	pdf save alert research feed references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency radical feminism and feminist radicalism 	ellen willis 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed encyclopedia of feminist theories 	lorraine code 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed the dictionary of feminist theory 	m. humm 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed postfeminism(s) and the arrival of the fourth wave 	nicola rivers 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed the law code of manu 	manu, patrick olivelle 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed feminist thought: a more comprehensive introduction 	r. tong 	sociology 	 	 , save alert research feed globalization and feminist activism 	m. hawkesworth 	political science 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed from head shops to whole foods: the rise and fall of activist entrepreneurs 	blake slonecker 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed misogyny: the world's oldest prejudice 	s. knaak 	sociology 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed everything you wanted to know about fourth wave feminism – but were afraid to ask prospect; august, 	available from: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ magazine/everything-wanted-know-fourth-wave-feminism. [last accessed 	 ... ... related papers 	abstract 	topics 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue s xjra .. watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised jeff kingston keywords: asahi, censorship, comfort women, fukushima, japan, #metoo, press freedom, sexual harassment, shinzo abe, watchdog journalism prime minister shinzo abe ’s troubles in owe much to japan’s resilient liberalmedia. between and , the media was mostly on its back foot, losing cred- ibility over its initial coverage about the fukushima nuclear accident and withstanding heavy-handed efforts by abe’s government to pressure and intimidate the media into self-censorship (kingston a). since early , however, the liberal asahi news- paper led the way in exposing two cronyism scandals involving private-school projects linked to abe. it also exposed a series of cases revolving around information disclosure practices that revealed a culture of deception aimed at avoiding government account- ability. these included a cover-up at the defense ministry regarding a peace keeping operation (pko) in south sudan that violated legal constraints imposed by the diet, and revelations about doctored data used to support abe’s proposed labor reforms. in these and other cases, the government’s lack of transparency and mishandling of documents drew sharp public criticism. the press played its role of informing the public about these apparent transgressions while highlighting the arrogance of power that has undermined public trust in abe; percent do not believe his self-exonerating explanations about the cronyism scandals (bloomberg ). nonetheless, in september he won reelection to a third term as liberal democratic party (ldp) president and is set to become japan’s longest serving prime minister. popular support, however, is tepid, as monthly polls since by japan’s national broadcasting organization (nhk) indicate that about percent of the public supports him due to a lack of alternatives rather than his virtues as a leader (about percent) or the appeal of his policies (about percent). despite mixed reviews in the press, he has won a series of elections, and in politics that is what counts (kingston b). taming of the press being a journalist in japan is not dangerous like in many other countries where there is a risk of beatings, imprisonment, and murder. but there are other ways to curtail press jeff kingston (kingston@tuj.temple.edu) is director of asian studies and professor of history at temple university japan. the journal of asian studies vol. , no. (november) : – . © the association for asian studies, inc., doi: . /s x at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:kingston@tuj.temple.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core freedom and cow journalists, especially when editors and publishers are often reluctant to stand up to the government. this subservience leads to self-censorship and at times excessive caution. abe has promoted various media-muzzling initiatives, such as the state special secrets law that enables bureaucrats to bury documents for up to sixty years with minimal oversight while introducing penalties of up to ten years’ imprisonment for journalists accessing such documents and their government sources. in , he appointed a crony with no media background to head nhk, who began his tenure by downplaying the comfort women system and embracing “pyongyang rules,” declaring that the nation’s most influential broadcaster could not say “left” if the government said “right.” that same year, the pro-abe media orchestrated a campaign to discredit the asahi newspaper with the government’s encouragement (fackler ). the power of the media to make or break governments is precisely why the abe gov- ernment is keen to tame it by going after the government’s critics. for example, in an off-the-record meeting with journalists in february , chief cabinet secretary yoshi- hide suga reportedly criticized an unnamed television program for bias, a warning that everyone understood was directed at tv asahi. that same month shigeaki koga, a popular television pundit, claimed he was being fired from tv asahi’s popular news program due to his criticism of abe. in , nhk news anchor kensuke okoshi was also ousted due apparently to a clash with an abe crony, while in hiroko kuniya’s nhk show close-up gendai was terminated, part of a larger purge of abe’s critics as media organizations bowed to government pressure (mulgan ; nakano ). martin fackler, a former new york times tokyo bureau chief, says, “close-up gendai was refreshing because it was one of the few efforts by nhk or any major media to do anything remotely approaching investigative, public-interest journalism, and in a prominent time slot.” he adds, “major media companies appear in full retreat under political and social pressure in the abe era. kuniya is just the latest high-profile journalist to be muzzled by media companies that appear to have grown incredibly risk-adverse, seeking to play it safe by just repeating what they are told in the press clubs, and shunning any topic or story that might draw criticism.” access journalism david kaye, the un special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, issued a report on press freedom in japan in june that blasted self-censorship, weak legal protections, access journalism, and media intimidation (kaye ). his conclusions are consistent with previous assessments (freeman ; hall ; mccargo ). kaye also slammed the kisha club (press club) system that embeds journalists at the ministries and agencies they are assigned to cover, enabling them to develop close ties and gain privileged access to official sources. the collaborative and sometimes collusive relationship implicit in this system hampers investigative journalism aimed at uncovering what authorities do not want the public to know. hence journalists pull their punches and reinforce official narratives, interview, january . jeff kingston at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core relying on “access journalism” and accepting the cooptation that entails. in this manner, the media suborns itself and becomes beholden to the officials and institutions they are supposed to cover without “fear or favor.” a senior writer for the asahi shimbun asserts that the role of the kisha clubs is exag- gerated: “kisha club is the place of official announcement and official agenda setting. it is not the place where you can find the most important information.” he adds that “the news reporting which revealed the big scandals of the political power show well that in japan, the press can do its job, though it is often said that japanese press is well controlled by the government.” a kyodo news reporter disagrees, arguing that “the japanese government is now trying to provide benefits only to major media supporting prime minister shinzo abe’s adminis- tration by using the so-called kisha-club system, which excludes minor or internet media. that is really bad for freedom of press in japan because information is sometimes manip- ulated by the government, preventing us from playing a role in monitoring the power.” spotlight journalism the film spotlight won oscars for best picture and best original screenplay at the academy awards. it is a film about the boston globe’s investigative journalism unit that in won a pulitzer for uncovering a sex abuse scandal involving scores of pedophile priests in the boston diocese and a cover-up that reached into the higher echelons of the catholic church. it also became apparent that the boston globe was complicit in the church’s cover-up. japan could use a few spotlights, but the establishment has the dimmer switch firmly in hand. columbia university’s gerald curtis, an expert on japanese politics, says, “the big difference is that the us media stands up to power, as the spotlight movie documents, and the japanese media all too often kowtows to it. it is the pressure from people in senior management and middle-aged reporters who want to be considered for promotion … who engage in censoring themselves and those who work for them…. the salaryman mentality keeps everyone in line.” he adds, “there are many talented and courageous journalists in japan, but the media’s craven abdication of its responsibility to defend them and to protect freedom of speech is what needs to be put in the spotlight.” a japanese investigative journalist laments that the public is overly tolerant of a coopted media, and the timidity and toadying involved. publishers are wary of an unfavorable legal environment and a massive spike in finan- cial penalties imposed on media companies in defamation lawsuits over the past twenty years (repeta and sawa ). this discourages the media from publishing stories that might provoke a lawsuit, thereby embracing self-censorship as a risk management strat- egy. these days, newspapers are primarily businesses where accountants, lawyers, and moguls rule the roost, taking some of the bite out of the watchdogs. alas, it is a system that encourages journalists to keep their heads down, conveying little of what they interview, may . interview, may . interview, april . interview, april . watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core know that might antagonize the powerful. and they have good reason to doubt that their employers will cover their backs in the event they do so. the abe government relies on media organizations and right-wing groups to assail its opponents. in , an orchestrated campaign by neo-nationalist groups denouncing the liberal asahi newspaper for its coverage of the comfort women story and hounding reporters with death threats enjoyed public support from abe (fackler ; yamaguchi ). the media countercharge was led by the yomiuri and sankei newspapers, staunch conservative supporters of abe’s agenda. the relatively liberal asahi has long been a pow- erful critic of the ldp and abe’s revisionist history and plans to revise the constitution. for example, in the asahi reported on abe’s interference with an nhk documen- tary program about an international tribunal regarding comfort women and violence against women in war held in tokyo at the end of (nakano ). but embarrassing powerful politicians and antagonizing conservatives eager to rehabilitate japan’s wartime actions comes at a cost. in august , the asahi issued a mea culpa for its coverage of the comfort women story of sexual slavery, apologizing for a handful of stories published in the s and s that relied on the discredited testimony of a world war ii veteran. asahi reporters confided to me they were angered by their management’s weak response and disap- pointed that the newspaper capitulated rather than offering a robust rebuttal. the yomiuri and sankei pounced on this admission of wrongdoing even though they too had also published articles relying on the same erroneous testimony (see yamaguchi ). they used this issue to discredit the asahi and to promote the revisionist narrative that minimizes, mitigates, and denies the comfort women problem. the asahi has also been a bastion of opposition to abe’s agenda of constitutional revi- sion and patriotic education and won the japanese equivalent of the pulitzer prize for its post- investigative reporting on the fukushima nuclear disaster. this was the asahi’s prometheus team that dug into the fukushima disaster story and managed to uncover inconvenient truths much like the boston globe’s spotlight. this made it a target of the “nuclear village,” or proponents of nuclear power in industry, politics, government, unions, media, and academia (fackler ). the abe government favors bringing japan’s idled nuclear reactors back online, and the asahi’s withering coverage exposing a culture of complacency, regulatory capture, and cost-cutting measures that compro- mised public safety impeded that agenda. the tables turned, however, when the asahi investigative team became embroiled in scandal over a story it wrote on may , , that suggested the workers at the fukushima daiichi plant had disobeyed the plant man- ager’s orders and fled to the fukushima daini plant kilometers away. this was a scoop based on testimony withheld from the public that was given by plant manager masao yoshida. the implication was that the exodus was akin to a mutiny and the workers had decamped because they feared for their lives, punching holes in the prevailing heroic narrative of the fukushima fifty of dedicated plant workers selflessly doing what- ever was required to contain the nuclear disaster. as fackler ( ) argues, the nuclear village found this narrative useful and reassur- ing to a panicked public, while the asahi exodus story raised awkward questions about plant safety in an emergency. suspiciously, just as the asahi was reeling from the orches- trated comfort women attacks, the yomiuri and sankei were leaked copies of yoshida’s testimony kept at the prime minister’s office (fackler ). they attacked the asahi jeff kingston at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core over its interpretation of the worker exodus, asserting that they had not disobeyed orders and that the movement of workers was orderly. in fact, yoshida says his instructions were probably garbled and misinterpreted; he never actually told workers to leave the fukush- ima daiichi site, but also did not tell them not to leave, so the asahi overstated the sit- uation in a somewhat sensationalist way. given the hammering over its reporting on sex slavery, and sharp declines in circulation, asahi management was in damage control mode. as a result, it retracted the exodus story and punished key reporters on the pro- metheus “spotlight” team while derailing the fukushima investigation. the liberal media did not come to the asahi’s defense and showed no solidarity despite the obviously orchestrated nature of the attacks. it is worth bearing in mind that this investigative team was established in part to regain the public’s trust, lost in the immediate aftermath of the march nuclear reactor meltdowns when the media was complicit in the cover-up, downplaying the severity of japan’s chernobyl for two long months. asahi’s revenge the asahi has been at the forefront of holding the government accountable since early , recovering from the orchestrated campaign by pro-abe media to discredit it. two cronyism scandals have dogged the abe cabinet since early . the first involved a sweetheart land deal in which a school operator, moritomo gakuen, secured public land near osaka at an percent discount. the owner, yasunori kagoike, had connections to abe’s wife and pledged to name the school after mr. abe because it shared the prime minister’s commitment to promoting patriotic values. the second scandal involved a close friend of abe, kotaro kake, who was granted special permission to open a veterinary school, the first granted in half a century. memos by local officials detail their meetings with emissaries from the prime minister’s office and their lobbying efforts that suggested the kake vet school project had abe’s backing. it is alleged that in both these school scandals, officials acted with the knowledge that their actions would be appreciated. the media made much of the concept of sontaku, in these cases officials acting without explicit orders in order to curry favor with abe. since abe has moved to centralize high-ranking bureaucratic promotions in the kantei (the prime minister’s office), it is apparent that, “bureaucrats are increasingly concerned about not challenging the kantei … and that public servants now prioritise saving their necks, being promoted and brown-nosing the people in power for that purpose” (mulgan ). concerted press efforts to uncover the truth about both the school scandals have undermined trust in and support for abe as he and others involved have been caught out repeatedly in contradictions and implausible denials and assertions. various docu- ments and memos have been produced and reported that verify allegations that the abe administration used its influence in both cases to secure a favorable outcome (nikkei asian review ). at one point, his poll ratings went into a nosedive, dropping to only percent in a mainichi poll, down from percent earlier in the year (kingston ; mainichi ). in response, abe called snap elections to gain a public mandate, a gamble that paid off as a fractured and unprepared opposition imploded while missile launches from north korea rallied support. it seemed like his troubles were behind him, but starting in early watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core january the media resumed a steady drumbeat on the various scandals. the uncov- ering of doctored data in support of abe’s labor reform law bill and revelations about a tampered document submitted to the diet related to the moritomo case intensified media coverage and reignited public anger. the ministry of finance (mof) had submit- ted an altered document to the diet in to support the contention that abe was not involved in the land sale, but then the media revealed that someone had erased the names of abe, his wife, and other ldp heavyweights that had been scrawled on the documents with brief notes. subsequently, in may the mof came clean and released all of the “lost” moritomo records and memos that tie abe’s wife to the scheme and contradict diet testimony exonerating him. these various scandals suggest that the media is doing its job and informing the public about what the powers that be do not want them to know. david mcneill, a journalist for the economist and the irish times, comments, “on moritomo and kake, the liberal media, frustrated by five years of abe government, have been more aggressive in pursuing what to outsiders look like clear cut cases of cronyism.” alas, “what has been depressing is the way the coverage falls along traditional right-left lines, with the asahi/mainichi and tokyo shimbun taking a more confrontational approach vs the sankei/nikkei/yomiuri soft-peddling.” taking a cue from president donald trump, “since the scandals broke, the prime minister, his deputy and other senior members of the ldp have singled out the asahi by name and said the media is at war with the government.” he adds, “i’m surprised by the lack of media outrage that yasunori kagoike (the central figure in the moritomo scandal) has been in osaka detention house since july . even during the worst periods of detention without trial and ziplock courts in northern ireland, defendants got out into the sunshine once in a while—at least until they were proved guilty.” kagoike and his wife were finally granted bail after spending ten months in detention. a senior writer for the asahi shimbun maintains that the scandal coverage shows that “the freedom of press in japan is not dying. at least not dead yet. i know that there are newspapers, tv news programs, net-news, journalists, and commentators that are very conformist to the government line. because of that, there are more and more people who are disappointed with the media.” yasuomi sawa, the only japanese journalist i interviewed who agreed to be identi- fied, is a senior writer, investigative and in-depth reporting, for kyodo news. he agrees that “the kake and moritomo coverage by the asahi shimbun and other media shows that press freedom here is still working. most notably, it is a dramatic victory for the asahi shimbun that it successfully bit back.” and yet, press freedom remains com- promised by rampant sexism. #metoo lost in translation while the outing of harvey weinstein spurred the #metoo movement in the united states, ricocheting through hollywood and far beyond, in japan it has so far been driven interview, may . interview, may . interview, may . jeff kingston at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core by abuses in the media industry with limited consequences across society. japan’s #metoo movement has been slow to develop despite widespread perceptions that sexual harassment is endemic. in a deeply patriarchal society where male gatekeepers have extensive influence over careers and media coverage, the disincentives for women to come forward are enormous. moreover, the prospects for significant change appear limited, discouraging women from risking their careers, privacy, and reputations. shiori ito became the face of japan’s #metoo movement in when she pub- lished black box, a book about her being raped by a fellow journalist and biographer of abe. they met to discuss her career prospects and options, but she says it ended with him spiking her drink and dragging her semi-conscious body into his hotel, a scene captured on the hotel’s video footage, where he raped her (mcneill ). the taxi driver also backed up her version of events. she endured a traumatic runaround with the police, who advised her to forget the incident. instead she pressed on, enduring a humiliating reenactment with a dummy as police snapped photos to gather evidence. ito filed a criminal complaint in april , less than a month after the alleged inci- dent. then, as mcneill ( ) reports, “two months after the assault, an arrest warrant was issued for quasi-rape (where consent is impossible) against noriyuki yamaguchi, then the bureau chief of tokyo broadcasting system (tbs)’s washington bureau. on june , , investigators waited to serve the warrant to yamaguchi at narita airport. instead, shiori says, one of the investigators called her and said he had been ordered to let yama- guchi go.” shiori was offered a “settlement” from yamaguchi, although he continues to deny the allegations. the mainstream media initially gave little coverage to the story, but the weekly tab- loids smelled a conspiracy in the sidelining of the investigation and arrest, noting that yamaguchi was close to abe and shared his right-wing revisionist views downplaying and denying the comfort women system of institutionalized mass rape. ito’s ordeal trig- gered a debate about how victims are treated poorly in japan, attracting extensive media attention. however, she was also subject to vicious online harassment. in april , a young female journalist, inspired by ito, ignited a political storm that forced the resignation of the top bureaucrat at the mof. it is no secret that media orga- nizations trade on the good looks of young female reporters to elicit information from top officials. those assigned to such reporting duties are under pressure to get information and how they do so is up to them. junichi fukuda, the mof vice-minister who resigned due to the scandal, apparently had a notorious reputation for sexually harassing young reporters. knowing this, the reporter’s female supervisor at tv asahi did not encourage her to play the game of going out for dinner and drinks with sources. but after a year, tv asahi apparently felt that other media organizations were getting an advantage and she was encouraged to get inside information from fukuda. while cultivating ties to fukuda, the reporter was subject to sexual harassment but alleges her supervisor was not supportive. to prove her point, the next time she went out for drinks with fukuda the reporter surreptitiously taped their conversation. he suggested tying her up and having an affair, and also asked if he could touch her breasts. apparently her supervisor scolded her and declined to air a report about fukuda’s proclivities. the reporter wanted the story to get out, so she provided the information and tape to a weekly tabloid mag- azine where salacious scandals are first broken. while the mainstream media is happy to cover a scandal once exposed, it often refrains from leading the charge at the outset. watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core fukuda brazenly denied the revelations even after being confronted with the tape. taro aso, the minister of finance, had his back, demanding that the reporter come forward while also denying that what was reported constituted criminal sexual harass- ment. the men’s club circled the wagons. the victim was subject to online harassment and was accused of unethical conduct. tv asahi held a press conference where its rep- resentatives condemned fukuda’s actions, and the mof’s mishandling of her case, while also rebuking their own reporter for sharing information with another news outlet. leo lewis, a veteran journalist at the financial times, condemns tv asahi “for not protecting its own. having put her in this vulnerable position it ought to have had her back. she needed to have the editor’s support and didn’t get that. the rest of the media also showed little solidarity over this.” in his view, “the sexism issue is a sideshow to the greater nastiness of tv asahi hanging its employee out to dry.” the same week that the diet passed a nonbinding resolution promoting women’s participation in politics, on may , , the abe cabinet released a statement that crim- inal sexual harassment does not exist because japan has no such law. this statement was issued to counter criticism of finance minister aso, who attracted harsh media coverage for his repeated remarks denying that fukuda was guilty of criminal sexual harassment. the effort to defend aso along these lines cast doubt on the cabinet’s sense of responsi- bility for the affair, portraying the absence of such a law as some kind of vindication rather than a priority to be rectified. aurelia george mulgan, a japan specialist at the university of new south wales in australia, comments: “a structural cause in this case is the press club system. tv asahi was frightened about being denied access to the mof. the japanese establishment has a bad habit of freezing you out if you don’t play according to their rules.” sophia university’s koichi nakano explains that asahi tv’s handling of the fukuda affair high- lights the fact that “collusion between the press club reporters of the mainstream media and the government is real. fukuda knew full well that he could get away with it because no news organization would dare report on his horrid conduct. the matter was only exposed in the less respectable weekly magazine, and only after the mof was under attack from all corners (and scapegoated even by the ldp political masters, who are now eager to put the blame on the mof bureaucrats for everything).” in his view, “the news industry is deeply and disgustingly sexist and misogynistic. the silence was imposed not just by fukuda and the mof but also by the male cadres within asahi tv. #metoo accusations of the powerful continue to be very risky in the japanese media because the male-dominated companies are unlikely to offer the victims support and cover they need.” the handling of the fukuda scandal manifests a patriarchal system designed to serve and protect the powers that be, with the mof and tv asahi being elite institutions that enjoy reciprocal benefits. jeopardizing this relationship over a sexual harassment story is unlikely given what is at stake. there is patriarchal denial about the abnormal working conditions faced by these so-called kunoichi (female ninjas) who are expected to put up with lewd behavior by powerful men. it is, as one media informant said, “part of interview, may . interview, may . interview, may . jeff kingston at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core the game. they are not exactly dangled as bait, but there is an assumption that they are more likely to be remembered and singled out for special attention by officials.” prob- lematically, little of the information gained by such means ever sees the light of day, so women are being put in harm’s way for no reason other than cultivating and maintaining good institutional relationships. oddly, there are parallels between the spotlight case of an institutionalized cover-up of sexual abuse by catholic priests in boston and the behavior of bureaucrats in japan. like notorious pedophile priests, fukuda’s behavior was well known. in both cases, there is considerable media complicity in the cover-ups that is due to longstanding, close institutional ties and fear of crossing such an influential institution. the potential for unpleasant consequences of exposing the dirty laundry outweighed the media’s duty to promote accountability by exposing abuses of power. finally, the boston globe overcame that fear, but it remains to be seen if the japanese media has reached a similar tipping point. probably not. the weekly magazines that broke this story are not allowed into the press clubs and make their name and profits by trading in titillating stories. they merely exposed what was widely known about fukuda but not reported by a meek mainstream media. this division of labor remains resilient. as kana inagaki and leo lewis wrote in the financial times, “the culture of silence and resignation is fueled by a sense of duty and fear of losing sources, giving rise to gen- erations of female reporters who have tolerated various kinds of sexual abuse from kisses, breast touching, to knee rubs in taxis” (inagaki and lewis ). lewis does not think that the #metoo movement gained much momentum. the fukuda scandal created a moment of national reflection and outrage, but the mainstream media tended to treat this as a josei mondai (women’s problem) and thus not a priority, rather than a national disgrace. abe grandstands on “womenomics” and speaks frequently of empow- ering women, but in this case, he could not find his voice to speak out for the vulnerable or condemn those who trade on their power to inflict indignities on women. indeed, the reporter was subject to a smear campaign and abe never rebuked aso for suggesting that fukuda was framed in a honeytrap. sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the media are deeply embedded, systemic, and widely tolerated. the nikkei newspaper conducted a poll in may about sexual harassment covering , working women. more than percent of victim- ized women had put up with sexual harassment without reporting it to superiors or col- leagues. sagami university professor toko shirakawa argues that this means “that many victims cannot even consult their employers out of fear that their jobs could be negatively affected” (shirakawa ). as business consultant nobuko kobayashi ( ) explains, “reporting often presents a high hurdle as a victim often does not want to be seen as a ‘complainer’ or is afraid of retaliation.” in an internet survey focusing on the media industry conducted by kyodo news, of the women and men who responded, reported experiencing sexual harassment and percent said it happened on multiple occasions (kyodo ). only percent reported that they consulted with others, mostly because they did not want to be seen interview, may . interview, may . watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core as troublesome and had low expectations about whether the matter would be properly addressed. of those harassed, said the cases involved people they were meeting for their work, by bosses and by senior colleagues. “no more sexual harassment in media” presented a groundbreaking report in may documenting cases of female reporters who were subjected to sexual harass- ment (mccurry ). this report, put together following fukuda’s resignation, details harassment by government officials, police, and local politicians who routinely ask female journalists for sexual favors in exchange for information and sometimes assault them. when the women reported the incidents to their employers, they say they were ignored or “treated inappropriately.” lewis cautions that news cycles have a way of shifting attention rather abruptly as events unfold and new improprieties emerge. problematically, to the extent that sexual harassment in the media industry is the story, the press must cooperate in its own skewering. given that there has been such longstanding tolerance of sexism in the industry, it is hard to expect a sustained focus on media complicity in institutionalized degradation (adelstein ). does this sexual harassment of reporters influence freedom of the press? the wide- spread tolerance of this endemic abuse is suggestive of the subordinate relationship between the media and representatives of the state. this submission is in itself a sign of capitulation that undermines freedom of the press. to the extent that officials can treat female journalists so contemptuously with impunity, the media acquiesces to such indigni- ties and thus conspires in its own subordination. if officials know they can get away with such behavior without editors standing up for their reporters, other abuses also look nego- tiable. where does the line get drawn? this murkiness is a hotbed for collusion and toler- ates a cocoon of impunity that the fourth estate should be unraveling. freedom from intimidation and harassment are essential to press freedom, and this is undermined by a media landscape that remains hostile to female journalists’ dignity and professionalism. concluding remarks the investigative reporting on a series of scandals engulfing the abe administration since suggests that the press is fulfilling its watchdog role. from to , abe’s minions went after his critics in the media, helped oust a few prominent newscasters and pundits while sending warnings to the media about the cost of crossing him. under abe, there has been backsliding on transparency and information disclosure, but the media has exposed how ministries have mishandled, doctored, “lost,” and otherwise tampered with records and data to support abe and derail investigations into wrongdoing. thus, the media has been doing its job despite team abe’s concerted efforts to rein it in. lewis thinks that the journalistic ethos in the united states about the press playing a central role in democracy and showing solidarity over any attempts to impinge on press freedom is not as widespread in japan. japanese journalists, in his view, “are hungry for good stories and bring to light even trivial cases of corruption,” but do not share their us interview, may . jeff kingston at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core colleagues’ ideological zeal about press freedom. in japan, he argues, journalists take the long view, nurture relationships, and expect a certain degree of give and take while working under the assumption of cyclical patterns in the press freedom landscape. the media has been complicit in covering up abuses by powerful men who sexually harass female reporters, an affront to their professionalism and a threat to press freedom. such craven practices ensure that the media punches below its weight and raise questions about what else gets swept under the national tatami mat. there are concerns that the current #metoo moral panic may go the way of previous outbursts of outrage over bullying (ijime), joshi kosei (compensated dating involving secondary school girls), and violent train- ing techniques in sports (taibatsu). after the initial explosion of indignation over abuses that most people knew about, but chose to ignore, media attention fades and moves on to the next moral panic and another round of handwringing and cosmetic reforms. perhaps but if one takes the long view, the media does help mainstream new norms and expectations and pressures for legal reforms. for example, the media played a signifi- cant role in drawing attention to domestic violence in the s, transforming it from a family problem to a matter for state intervention. the media also advocated for reforms that subsequently facilitated an expansion of civil society after the kobe quake and helped to make information disclosure and transparency the sine qua non of good gover- nance (kingston ). such changes happened rather rapidly against the odds, so it may be too soon to discount the potential consequences of #metoo. the editor in charge of the asahi’s “prometheus” unit on the fukushima nuclear debacle posted a sign to motivate his reporters: “no more pooches.” some journalists were offended by the implications, while others found the admonition inspiring. revela- tions about abe’s scandals indicate that the media can be a powerful watchdog when it chooses to do so, but institutionalized timidity ensures that the lapdog image lingers. the reliance on access journalism and excessive deference, along with journalists’ self- perception as players in the business of government, constrains press freedom. finally, media groups and editors have been remiss in not standing up for their reporters. kaye ( ) noted that the dozens of japanese journalists he interviewed did not want to be quoted by name, not because they feared government retribution, but 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http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ / / /abe-getting-schooled-by-moritomo-scandal/ https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/lost-documents-mark-new-twist-in-abe-scandal https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ / / /commentary/japan-commentary/stop-sexual-harassment/% .wwzpkc-b b https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core 	watchdog journalism in japan rebounds but still compromised 	taming of the press 	access journalism 	spotlight journalism 	asahi s revenge 	#metoo lost in translation 	concluding remarks 	list of references the invisible culture of discrimination bapio mathew_invisible_discriminationv vol ( ) sushruta journal of health policy & opinions the invisible culture of discrimination call it ‘institutional racism or unconscious bias, it has devastating impact on the victims satheesh mathew mbbs md frcpch consultant neonatologist, barts nhs trust, london vice president, british association of physicians of indian origin satheesh.mathew@gmail.com key words institutional racism, discrimination, race relations, bame cite as: mathew s. the invisible culture of discrimination. call it institutional racism of unconscious bias, it has devastating impact on the victims. sushruta (nov) - epub . . doi: . / . . a recent itv news item featured radhakrishna shanbag, a senior surgeon with over years of service in the nhs, being asked, ‘please can i have a white doctor for my operation?’, by one his patient’s . any form of racism is both painful and upsetting, however to a dedicated professional it throws a much greater challenge. to remain professional, composed and objective in the face of adversity, is ingrained in medical training. one is also expected to provide the very best of care ‘free from all bias’ at all times to all comers. as in this case, professionals have no choice but to swallow the insults and provide alternatives to get the best possible outcome, suppressing the impact on self-worth and devastating emotional trauma. the surgeon, while experiencing blatant exhibition of ‘racism’, seemed more to me in a predicament as he explained in a media interview, with and uncertainty about how the organisation would support him. it is indeed worrying, if a highly trained professional, after two decades of service appears to have limited confidence in the nhs, when it comes to dealing with overt form of racism. however, after the this item was aired there has been a small twitter storm of opinions in support of the surgeon, clearly condemning this behaviour and prophesying that nhs has a zero tolerance policy to any form of abuse towards staff. there have also been #metoo stories of other professionals facing similar abuse in their own workplace. there is a another hidden side to discrimination that is perceived but often not understood or able to be clearly demonstrated. yet feared equally with far more impact on the career and personal lives of doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff. often this is manifest in the form of poor supervision, level of mentorship/ support and opportunities for progressing careers. the nhs workforce relations equality standard report in highlighted the continued nature of the under- representation of black &amp; minority ethnic (bame) staff in higher positions in the nhs. mailto:satheesh.mathew@gmail.com https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /can-i-have-a-white-doctor-for-the-operation-racist-abuse-against-nhs-staff-almost-triples-itv-news-finds/ bapio mathew_invisible_discriminationv vol ( ) sushruta journal of health policy & opinions this is compounded by the trend in the nhs of the deterioration in the working conditions often leading to recognised unsafe scenarios for care delivery. often this is related to lack of adequate resources. while i endorse these concerns, the real challenge lies in the systemic failures in ensuring that monitoring and accountability structures are robustly implemented across the nhs. over the years, british association of physicians of indian origin, has been inundated with inquiries and requests for advice and support from international medical graduates (img) at all grades and seniority. the most common among these, were the for the fear of discrimination and seeking appropriate mentorship. many imgs were concerned that the available organisational support structures were lacking in empathy and cultural competency. there was a perception of not being dealt with in fairness or openness expected universally. more came to light when bapio, supported by many other organisations successfully petitioned the high court against the attempt of the government to introduce unfair and retrograde immigration rules. the changes in the “highly skilled migrant programme” (“hsmp”) would have impacted on the careers of over , professions, many of whom would have been sent out without qualification or a career under this proposed rule. professional trade union structures failed to provide appropriate support. bapio decided to establish a not-for profit professional support organisation in as the medical defence shield (mds). a project for doctors and run by doctors that is focussed on fairness and justice for all doctors in difficulty. bapio, remains committed to ‘patient care and safety’. we support leadership and professional excellence for all doctors including imgs and doctors from black and the other minority ethnic backgrounds to strive to maintain high healthcare professional standards. and we are proud that these imgs have been making significant contribution to sustain and develop the nhs. there was a strong demand for bapio to make its presence felt across the country. over the years, we have developed a network of regional offices. the recent case of ‘bawa-garba’ has reopened a pandora’s box of a number of systemic failures that the nhs has not been able to address. the nhs and the regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure that working conditions are safe for both patients and the staff that care for them. we have welcomed the nhs long-term plan and its commitment to supporting nhs workforce race equality standards. there is often a historical lack of trust in the processes of openness and fairness within traditional institutions. the nhs is not immune to this and hence the impact of this perceived institutional unfairness needs to be acknowledged by senior leadership and a clear message given to remove the culture that condones the discrimination; institutional, direct and indirect or covert of unconscious bias. we hope that the interim nhs people plan (within the nhs long-term plan) would invest in the wellbeing and support to the whole workforce and in doing so remove barriers to progress for all staff irrespective of their race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity including protected characteristics. to propagate a culture shift in the nhs governance structure that bapio mathew_invisible_discriminationv vol ( ) sushruta journal of health policy & opinions is both robust and sensitive to the needs of its employees; to enable them to deliver high quality care in a safe and just environment. . https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /can-i-have-a-white-doctor-for-the-operation racist-abuse-against-nhs-staff-almost-triples-itv-news-finds/ . https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /wres- -report- v .pdf . david oliver: should nhs doctors work in unsafe conditions? bmj ; :k . https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /interim-nhs- people-plan_june .pdf https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /can-i-have-a-white-doctor-for-the-operation% racist-abuse-against-nhs-staff-almost-triples-itv-news-finds/ https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /can-i-have-a-white-doctor-for-the-operation% racist-abuse-against-nhs-staff-almost-triples-itv-news-finds/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /wres- -report-v .pdf https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /wres- -report-v .pdf https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /interim-nhs-people-plan_june .pdf https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /interim-nhs-people-plan_june .pdf 	the invisible culture of discrimination statements of mentorship history, teaching, and public awareness statements of mentorship daniel a. colón-ramos , , https://doi.org/ . /eneuro. - . department of neuroscience, program in cellular neuroscience, neurodegeneration and repair, yale university school of medicine, new haven, ct , department of cell biology, yale university school of medicine, ct , and instituto de neurobiología, recinto de ciencias médicas, universidad de puerto rico, san juan - , pr key words: landis award; mentor; mentoring the landis award for outstanding mentorship was cre- ated in by the national institute of neurological disorders and stroke (ninds) to recognize that “mentor- ship and training are critical to the development of excep- tional future scientists” and to honor the legacy of former ninds director story landis, phd, in mentoring genera- tions of neuroscientists. i was honored to be nominated by my mentees and then selected by the committee as part of the inaugural group that received the award. while profoundly touched by the recognition, i am the first to admit that in mentoring, my aspirations exceed my ca- pacities or training (and anybody who has worked in my lab will be the second to admit that). my mentorship skills are a work in progress. yet unlike scientific ideas, which are also “works in progress” that benefit from the critiques of our peers, mentoring approaches seldom benefit from the com- ments and wisdom of our colleagues and mentees. for example, i must have written, in the years i have been faculty member, dozens of research statements and plans, progress reports, and grants that have all benefited from the collective wisdom of my colleagues and men- tees. my science is better for it. yet, when it comes to one of the most important activities i do, the training of men- tees, it was in preparing for the landis award that i wrote my very first statement of mentorship. to be sure, one could argue that writing a statement of mentorship is not necessary or even important to being a good mentor. that the tasks necessary for being a good mentor are self-evident. some might even argue that the best way to be a good mentor is to focus solely on the scientific ideas, not so much on the individual mentee. yet i would argue that the few times i have gotten feedback on my mentoring, i have benefited tremendously from it, and so have my mentees and the science we do together (fig. ). when it comes to learning, be it in mentoring or regarding new scientific ideas or techniques, i worry about the “blind spots,” that which i do not know that i do not know. the remedy for that, when it comes to scientific ideas, has been open, effective, and critical discussions with my peers. could our mentoring, similar to our scien- tific ideas, benefit from the collective wisdom and expe- rience from our colleagues and mentees? in that spirit, below i share my lab’s statement of men- torship submitted to the landis award, not as a finished set of ideas, but as a living statement of our lab’s aspira- tions and to initiate a dialogue around mentorship. i also share a number of mentoring resources who dr. michelle jones-london from ninds kindly sent me. statement of mentorship no matter who we are and no matter where we were born, we share a fundamental curiosity about the world received october , ; accepted october , ; first published november , . acknowledgements: i thank past and present mentors for serving as role models and guiding me, through their actions, in this adventure of becoming a scientist and a mentor. i also want to thank my lab members, past and present, who taught me, in honest exchanges, to become a better mentor, scientist, and human being. they also helped polish some of the ideas and interests presented here through discussions at lab retreats, lab meetings, and by proofreading the mentoring statement. i want to thank in particular emily wang, valentina greco, antonio giraldez, marc hammarlund, and david berg for thoughtful comments on the article, and for many years of discussions on these topics. i thank the research center for minority institutions program, the instituto de neurobiología de la universidad de puerto rico, and the marine biological laboratories for providing a yearly meeting and brainstorming plat- form for these ideas. this work is supported by the national institutes of health (nih) grant r ns ), nih pioneer award, the national science foundation grant ios , and the howard hughes medical institute faculty scholars program. correspondence should be addressed to dr. daniel a. colón-ramos, de- partment of neuroscience and cell biology, yale school of medicine, cedar street, shm b d, new haven, ct . e-mail: daniel.colon- ramos@yale.edu. https://doi.org/ . /eneuro. - . copyright © colón-ramos this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed. commentary november/december , ( ) e - . – https://doi.org/ . /eneuro. - . mailto:daniel.colon-ramos@yale.edu mailto:daniel.colon-ramos@yale.edu https://doi.org/ . /eneuro. - . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / around us. that shared human instinct does not mean we are all meant to become scientists, that we all share the same motivations, or that we think similarly about science or the world around us. but it does mean that our shared curiosity is a fundamental aspect of our humanity. this universality is foundational to my philosophy as a mentor in science. i therefore start my mentoring pledge with an aspiration to “do no harm” to my mentee’s innate interest in science. while i recognize the universality of scientific curiosity, i also recognize that individual backgrounds shape our engagement with science. our individual experiences dif- fer based on the intersectionality of our identities, which includes our identity as scientists but also includes our race/ethnicity, gender identity, religion, culture, socioeco- nomic status, etc. these factors influence our interests, motivations, and scientific ideas. it is in the richness of this intersectionality that most of the opportunities and challenges lie for me as a mentor. science works best to produce truly novel insights when influenced by diverse ideas from individuals working together. i intentionally create a space within my labora- tory which harnesses our collective interests to build strong teams joined in a common pursuit of fundamental discoveries in science, while recognizing and celebrating our diverse backgrounds and identities. supporting a di- verse group of mentees creates both interpersonal and group dynamics that reflect issues at play in our scientific communities and, at large, concerns of racial, gender, and socioeconomic equity, for example. this means opening a lab meeting with a discussion of the “#metoo” move- ment in academia; it means postponing afternoon meet- ings after the death of eric garner to talk to a mentee of color about what this death represents for her, as an underrepresented scientist of color working at yale uni- versity; it means traveling with my lab to puerto rico after the archipelago was devastated by hurricane maria to support and learn from our colleagues there (fig. ). in other words, recognizing, respecting, and fostering unique perspectives means challenging normative stan- dards, not only in the scientific paradigms tackled by our research program but also in the paradigms of who and how people are meant to succeed in science. how this philosophy towards mentorship translates at the bench includes active listening to arguments, challenging as- sumptions, and rigorous examination of the foundations of a discovery, all while respecting the dignity of the individual and fostering their growth as a scientist. bal- ancing rigor while fostering growth requires investing the time needed to know and appreciate the individual per- spectives of my mentees. i have established the following mentoring approach to achieve this: . common approaches to scientific excellence by investing in the individual. there are some funda- mental skills i feel all aspiring scientists need to learn (and experienced scientists need to polish) when rig- orously approaching scientific problems. those skills figure . colón-ramos lab in the annual lab retreat in san juan, puerto rico (march, ). in , after hurricane maría, we decided to conduct our annual lab retreat and workshops in san juan, pr. from left to right: ernesto cabezas-bou, mark moyle, leighton duncan, agustin almoril-porras, shavani prashad, sarah hill, sisi yang, titas sengupta, richard ikegami, zhao xuan, and joon lee. not in the picture: mayra blakey, josh hawk, sori jang, ian gonzalez, laura manning, milind singh, noelle koonce, and lin shao. commentary of november/december , ( ) e - . eneuro.org include recognizing assumptions in experimental de- sign, achieving best practices of reproducibility in quantifications and data analyses, and recognizing biases (among other skills). the way i approach men- toring and training is through structured meetings that invest heavily in the individual towards under- standing their drive, their unique perspectives, and how each can build towards the development of these skills. specifically, upon arriving at the lab, each mentee is given a binder which includes infor- mation on the lab’s mission and our mentoring phi- losophy. we establish weekly meetings to discuss experimental design, findings, and interpretations. these meetings are tailored to encourage indepen- dent critical thinking and project ownership, so men- tees are asked to think about their experimental design, results, and interpretations prior to the meet- ing. then, during the meetings, we focus on in-depth discussions in which mentees present their thoughts, identify and challenge assumptions, and conceptual- ize their research questions in broader contexts of overarching significance. once a year, we have a dedicated meeting to discuss motivation and career goals, in which the mentee answers a set of ques- tions in writing which include self-assessment of strengths and areas of improvement as a scientist, evaluation of my performance as a mentor, and their project and personal career goals. these meetings provide an opportunity to understand, not only the strengths of the mentee, but their individual needs and their intersectionality of identity in the context of their motivation and progress. the meetings provide continuous reinforcement of key precepts of the sci- entific process (identifying assumptions, biases and good experimental design) while also creating a men- torship framework in which the mentees progres- sively grow as independent thinkers and in their identity as scientists. . model by example: approaching science with rigor and humility. in science, knowledge is impor- tant but only as a first step to recognize the bound- aries of what we know and, importantly, where they end. it is therefore critical for the training scientist to feel comfortable in recognizing, with humility, their ignorance. i model this by making it clear to my mentees that i do not have all the answers, not in the research projects they are driving, and not in men- toring. like the research projects, i approach men- toring as a team activity in which the mentor-mentee pair jointly learns how to navigate the new terrain. being comfortable with recognizing our ignorance does not mean being complacent in mediocrity. the recognition of ignorance requires rigor and is a first step towards the recognition of opportunities in learning and growth. but in that process, while i am partial and supportive to the mentee, i am impartial and tough towards the work. i also request, and welcome, a similar treatment from the mentee to- wards my own ideas, biases, and assumptions. . creating a network of mentors. mentoring in my lab happens during individual sessions and also in sub- group meetings of teams working in conceptually related projects. the purpose of these meetings is to create a network of mutual mentoring and support. to achieve this, my lab and i have jointly brain- stormed and designed activities that allow us all to grow in our roles. we recognize that being mentors or mentees, like being teachers or students, is rela- tional, these are not fixed roles, and the roles change depending on the context. as scientists in the pursuit of knowledge, we need the mental agility to be both mentors and mentees. to learn this, all my mentees also serve as mentors to new lab members, regard- less of hierarchy in training. experience is important for being a good mentor but is not sufficient; being a good mentor also requires skills in listening and teaching. to train in mentorship, the lab and i jointly created a mentoring document in which we articulate the responsibilities of both mentors and mentees. we also have sessions to discuss how we can all be better teachers and students to each other. in that way, we move beyond the normative hierarchical structures in scientific training and instead create a web of mutual accountability and support in which responsibility and leadership is encouraged. finally, the relationship of shared accountability between lab members is reinforced through an annual two-day lab retreat in which we discuss in depth and in an infor- mal but stimulating setting the future of the lab (fig. ). in these meetings, we discuss the progression of projects, overarching conceptual questions of the field and what our lab can do to address them. the purpose of the lab retreat is to create a space away from the demands of everyday bench work to facili- tate this introspection, evaluation, and discussion. discussions in the retreat have also included career path navigation, science and society conversations on bioethics and policy, and discussions on scientific reproducibility and transparency based on the landis et al. ( ) report. in summary, my mentoring philosophy is based on recognizing, respecting, and investing in the individual, celebrating diversity of thought, and fostering collabora- tive efforts that allow us to jointly bring our unique expe- riences to bear in addressing the cell biology of the synapse and behavior. i work to create a lab environment which honors scientific rigor and respects the dignity of individuals to create a learning and discovery space where we are all comfortable identifying and recognizing our unique strengths and opportunities for growth. this mentoring document was jointly prepared in col- laboration with lab members who read and edited the document. mentoring resources: nrmn, cienciapr.org, or mentor training https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc / mentoring articles on sfn neuronline commentary of november/december , ( ) e - . eneuro.org https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc / http://neuronline.sfn.org/career-specific-topics/ professional-development how to get the mentoring you want: a guide for graduate students at a diverse university http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/ mentoring.pdf making the right moves and training scientists to make the right moves http://www.hhmi.org/programs/resources-early-career- scientist-development individual development plan (idp), a web-based career- planning tool created to help graduate students and post- docs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals http://myidp.sciencecareers.org/ national research mentoring network https://nrmnet.net/ mentoring compacts: example compacts for download are available at https://ictr.wisc.edu/mentoring/mentoring-compacts contracts-examples/ reference landis sc, amara sg, asadullah k, austin cp, blumenstein r, bradley ew, crystal rg, darnell rb, ferrante rj, fillit h, finkel- stein r, fisher m, gendelman he, golub rm, goudreau jl, gross ra, gubitz ak, hesterlee se, howells dw, huguenard j, et al. ( ). a call for transparent reporting to optimize the predictive value of preclinical research. nature. : – . medline commentary of november/december , ( ) e - . eneuro.org http://neuronline.sfn.org/career-specific-topics/professional-development http://neuronline.sfn.org/career-specific-topics/professional-development http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/mentoring.pdf http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/mentoring.pdf http://www.hhmi.org/programs/resources-early-career-scientist-development http://www.hhmi.org/programs/resources-early-career-scientist-development http://myidp.sciencecareers.org/ https://nrmnet.net/ https://ictr.wisc.edu/mentoring/mentoring-compactscontracts-examples/ https://ictr.wisc.edu/mentoring/mentoring-compactscontracts-examples/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ 	statements of mentorship 	statement of mentorship 	reference early career the early career section offers information and suggestions for graduate students, job seekers, early career academics of all types, and those who mentor them. angela gibney serves as the editor of this section. next month’s theme will be jobs in business, industry, and government. notices of the american mathematical society volume , number and bullying in the workplace. recently, the new york times published two articles titled “the #metoomoment: how to be a good bystander” and “sexual harassment training doesn’t work. but some things do.” both articles examine how being an active bystander can promote a healthy work environment. while the articles are focused on the preven- tion of sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, i will explain how the ideas of the articles combined with some of my own ideas can help to promote a healthier work environment more generally. try to remove the person from the situation [nyt article ] according to the new york times article “how to be a (good) bystander,” if you see a colleague being harassed by another colleague or one colleague using their power over another colleague, you should try to remove the person being harassed or bullied from the situation by asking to talk with him/her or by asking if he/she would like to grab a coffee with you. i think this could be broadly applicable in the workplace. perhaps you witness an exchange between two depart- ment members, and you notice that the exchange makes you feel uncomfortable—maybe the exchange doesn’t rise to the level of bullying or harassment, but you wonder if one of the involved parties needs an “out” from the situa- tion. you could provide an opening for the person by asking him/her a question or by asking to talk to him/her about something. for instance, you might say, “i’m giving an exam tomorrow in my calculus class. would you mind taking a look at the exam and providing me with your feedback?” whether or not you actually have a question about your exam, the extra feedback is likely helpful, your request shows that you value the other person’s insights, and you have discreetly provided the person with a possible “out” from a situation where he/she may feel uncomfortable. follow up with the person and see how he/she is doing [nyt article ] coupled with removing the harassed or bullied person from the situation, if you observe an uncomfortable situa- tion between colleagues where one person has been placed in a difficult situation, it can be helpful to follow up with the person who was placed in the difficult situation to see how he/she is doing. if you were able to remove him/her from the situation, you may be able to follow up with him/ her immediately. whether you were able to remove the g ra du at e s tudents post docs n ew fa cu lty g o v ern m ent laborator ies indu st ry m en to rs - dealing with challenging issues promoting a healthy work environment sarah crown rundell as the sexual misconduct allegations continue to surface in our society, many colleges and universities across the coun- try offer training programs to prevent sexual harassment sarah crown rundell is a professor of mathematics at denison university. her email address is rundells@denison.edu. for permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission @ams.org. doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /noti early career march notices of the american mathematical society can hear your talk.” or, if you notice a colleague has posted a new paper on the arxiv, you might say, “i was looking on the arxiv and noticed that you posted a new paper recently. congratulations! it’s impressive how much research you are able to get done while spending so much time with students.” if you are familiar with the research area, you might add a comment about the impact of the new result. in my department, if someone notices an article about someone in our department on the denison university website or another recent professional achievement, he/ she sometimes sends out an email to the department highlighting the achievement. making positive comments to others “lifts them up,” and as you make an effort to be a positive member of your department, people in your department may start affirming one another as well. this potentially could create a strong positive atmosphere in your department where others feel not only respected but also appreciated. in meetings, both within your department and across campus, encouraging an atmosphere of respect might also include not interrupting others and not attempting to multitask. going beyond just encouraging an atmosphere of respect, you can help to create an atmosphere where people feel appreciated by pointing out where you do agree with others, potentially even complimenting them if you are able to do so, before adding your comments to the discussion. for instance, if someone says, “we should avoid giving low grades to our majors because it might discourage them from going to grad school,” you could respond with something like, “your point that we don’t want to do anything that would discourage our students from going on in math is important. but maybe we could brainstorm about other ways to encourage students to go on in math apart from grades.” spotlight contributions from people who are being marginalized [nyt article ] perhaps you are in a situation where someone in your workplace is being marginalized. for example, say you are in a meeting where someone has raised an important point that wasn’t acknowledged, and then someone else raises the same point and it is acknowledged. you might speak up in the moment and say something like, “i believe ellie made a similar point a moment ago. ellie, could you tell us more about your idea?” this allows for the people at the meeting to realize, in a non-confrontational way, that they may have marginalized someone, and perhaps this will help them to not repeat the same behavior in the future. use respectful communication if there is a situation in which you are upset and feel frustrated or angry, express your discontent to the relevant parties in terms of your personal feelings: “i felt ____, when you ____.” or, if a coworker raises an idea that you disagree with, it’s best to challenge the idea that was raised—not person from the situation or not, it’s helpful to follow up with the person at a later time to see how they’re doing, as people process situations at different speeds. following up lets the person know you care and provides an opening for them to talk about how they are feeling in light of the situation. all of this being said, especially if the affected person is a senior member of your department and you are a junior faculty member, you may feel uncomfortable following up with him/her, and so if you don’t feel com- fortable following up, that is okay as well. talk to the coworker(s) who instigated the difficult situation [nyt article ] it’s also important at some point to follow up with the coworker(s) who instigated the situation. depending on the nature of the situation, you may need to wait until the coworkers and/or you have calmed down, so that the conversation can occur within an atmosphere of respect. if your campus has a mediation program and depending on the issues involved in the situation, you might find it help- ful to enlist their help to mediate the conversation. again, if you are a junior faculty member of your department, and the colleague who instigated the situation is a senior member of the department, you may feel uncomfortable approaching the instigator. depending on the nature of the incident and whether you feel comfortable talking to the chair of your department, you might consider talking with him/her. your chair might then be able to follow up with the instigator of the incident as well as the person who was placed into the difficult situation. encourage an atmosphere of respect [nyt article ] in relationships with coworkers, make an effort to com- pliment and point out the successes of others within your department and work environment and try to be open to hearing others’ ideas and learning from others. this can be done in a formal or informal way. perhaps at the begin- ning of department meetings or while gathering near the coffee and copy machines, you might congratulate another member on a recent achievement. i believe it’s also helpful to adopt an attitude that everyone in your department has something to offer. at my institution, at one point, we took time during a department meeting for each member to share something that he/she had tried in his/her course to both exchange ideas and provide a space for affirming each other. less formally, you might say to a colleague, “my calculus ii class seems really well prepared; whatever you did in calculus i last semester really worked.” you can also affirm your colleagues’ research and pro- fessional activities. for instance, if you notice a colleague on the program for an upcoming meeting you might say something like, “i saw that you are on the program for the next maa sectional meeting. you always give great talks! i’m going to try to bring some of my students so that they early career notices of the american mathematical society volume , number take some time if you are feeling particularly strong feelings in light of a workplace incident, it might be helpful to take some time to process your feelings and “cool off” before proceeding. often when emotions are running strong, it can be more difficult to have a respectful conversation with someone. if you find that a conversation is becoming particularly heated, you might suggest a brief bathroom/water break to provide a space for people to calm down for a moment. one final suggestion is to take time to take care of yourself on a regular basis, perhaps by exercising, getting a healthy amount of sleep, meditating, eating well—what- ever helps you to feel grounded. if you feel balanced and grounded, then it’s easier to be a positive force in your de- partment rather than getting “swept away” by the busyness and daily stresses of work. references c. cain, the #metoo moment: how to be a (good) bystander, the new york times, december , . https://www .nytimes.com/ / / /us/the-metoo-moment-how -to-be-a-good-bystander.html c. cain, sexual harassment training doesn't work. but some things do, the new york times, december , . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/sexual -harassment-workplace-prevention-effective.html credits author photo is courtesy of the author. self-doubt and imposter syndrome brian lehmann failure is part of life as a mathematician. mathematical research is genuinely hard—progress is accompanied by false starts, dead ends, and months of effort. teaching can feel unrewarding, and its impact can be hard to assess. tak- ing into account the uncertainties of the academic career the person. both approaches tend to avoid putting the other person on the defensive and instead foster an atmo- sphere for productive conversation. i believe that it is also important that if you feel significant discontent that you find a way to attempt to resolve the issue. allowing feelings of discontent to continue without resolution can lead to resentment over time, which undermines the atmosphere in your department. this being said, depending on the cir- cumstances and involved parties, it may not be possible to have an open conversation about the issue, and if this is the case, i believe it’s important to acknowledge and manage your feelings of discontent, perhaps by talking to a trusted friend or colleague and taking time for yourself (the next two points in this article). i believe that it is also important to avoid labels. for instance, rather than calling someone racist, homophobic, etc., you might say, “i’m worried that saying that would make students from underrepresented groups feel uncom- fortable. perhaps you could rephrase what you just said as….” i believe that it’s best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt in acknowledging that the members of your department likely chose their position because of a love of mathematics and a desire to share that love with others. however, life circumstances change, and so there may be periods of time when department members are able to be more engaged and invested in their work than at other points in time. depending on your relationships with your colleagues and what you know of what is going on in their personal lives, you might foster an atmosphere of support by reaching out to them. for instance, if a department member loses a loved one, your department might send flowers or offer to bring that person a home-cooked meal, or perhaps if a colleague has a baby, you could offer to bring over a meal or pick up groceries. i think it’s import- ant to realize that there isn’t a time limit on grief, whether that grief is tangible to others (e.g., death of a parent or spouse) or less tangible to others (e.g., stillbirth, infertil- ity, divorce—loss of hopes and dreams), and balancing a career with a young family is challenging. it’s important to be compassionate with colleagues, acknowledging that there may be times when others are able to go “above and beyond” and other times when they are “doing the best that they can at the moment.” talk to a trusted friend or colleague if an incident has occurred with your coworkers that leaves you feeling frustrated or unsure of how to proceed, you might find it helpful to talk about the situation with a trusted friend or colleague. often talking about the situa- tion provides you with a space to be able to unwind and a space to be able to brainstorm next steps. if the incident involves harassment or bullying though, you may be re- quired to report it to your institution. sarah crown rundell brian lehmann is a professor of mathematics at boston college. his email address is lehmannb@bc.edu. doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /noti https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/the-metoo-moment-how-to-be-a-good-bystander.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/the-metoo-moment-how-to-be-a-good-bystander.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/the-metoo-moment-how-to-be-a-good-bystander.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/sexual-harassment-workplace-prevention-effective.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/sexual-harassment-workplace-prevention-effective.html structural determinants of gender inequality: why they matter for adolescent girls’ sexual and reproductive health the bmj | bmj ; :l | doi: . /bmj.l a n a ly s i s structural determinants of gender inequality: why they matter for adolescent girls’ sexual and reproductive health more comprehensive understanding of gender inequality is required, particularly the broader structural drivers that underpin the political economy of gender power relations, say asha george and colleagues i n sub-saharan africa, four out five new hiv infections among - year olds are in girls according to unaids estimates. surveys during - showed that more than half of rural women aged – in sub-saharan africa had been pregnant before their th birthday, and as recently as , % of young women in sub-saharan africa and % in south asia were married while still children. these examples highlight how gender power relations profoundly affect adolescent girls with lifelong consequences. research on gender inequality in global health has focused on factors operating at the individual level (age of marriage, literacy, etc), household level (decision making, household composition ), or community level (social norms, access to services ). although gender inequality is experienced by and between individuals, it is also a result of power relations that structure how societies are organised, laws are set, economies function, and ideologies are shaped. we review some of these structural determinants of gender inequality, unpacking what they are and why they matter, with a focus on the sexual and reproductive health of adolescent girls. puberty is a formative period of rapid physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and sexual development, when differences in gender roles and gender inequalities become ingrained. these influence adolescent mortality and risk factors everywhere but particularly in low income countries (tables and ). gender norms that encourage men to be strong and take risks partly explain the health harming risk behaviours of boys. gender inequalities are also particularly harmful to the sexual and reproductive health of adolescent girls and reverberate with lifelong effects. adolescent girls are vulner able to acquiring and being harmed by sexually transmitted infections because of both biological and social factors. adolescent girls tend to receive less education and information about sexuality and reproduction and have poorer access to health services than boys. they are also at higher risk of unsafe sex, often in situations where they have less control over sexual and reproductive decision making. moreover, the risk of unsafe sex is compounded by the high risks of intimate partner violence and sexual violence faced by adolescent girls. adolescent girls are also specifically targeted by harmful practices such as child marriage and, in some regions, female genital mutilation. they are less likely to complete secondary school or have secure employment as they transition into adulthood, face a higher burden of household work, and have less decision making autonomy, including restricted mobility compared with their male peers. if the sustainable development goals are to be realised without leaving behind those most in need, tackling the gendered dynamics that shape adolescent health, and especially the sexual and reproductive rights of adolescent girls, is critical. why structural determinants are important structural determinants are the socioeco- nomic and political processes that structure hierarchical power relations, stratifying societies based on class, occupational sta- tus, level of education, gender, etc. they shape the environments that facilitate or impede people’s ability to protect them- selves from illness, and if sick, their access to quality healthcare. they mould the social contexts that affect people’s experience of being sick, their health outcomes, and the socioeconomic consequences of being ill.   altering these power relations that shape social environments and contexts inequitably is possible but requires a con- scious focus on social justice. when implemented over time policies that tackle structural determinants can achieve long term population effects and reach wider coverage than those focused on household or community level action. action on these structural factors is therefore necessary to maximise key messages •  reaching those most left behind by health interventions requires struc- tural policy initiatives across multiple forms of marginalisation •  women and girls are particularly dis- criminated against in economic and political arenas •  marginalised girls and women are not left out of health and development, but the terms of their inclusion are marginalising •  progress on structural determinants is nuanced and not necessarily linear, given unintended consequences and conservative gender backlash •  policy change to address gender power relations in one area can be sidelined by lack of reform in other areas table  | leading causes of adolescent deaths in low income countries by sex and age group, (who global health estimates) rank - year olds - year olds male female male female road injury malaria road injury maternal conditions hiv/aids hiv/aids interpersonal violence road injury malaria diarrhoeal diseases hiv/aids diarrhoeal diseases diarrhoeal diseases road injury diarrhoeal diseases hiv/aids meningitis lower respiratory infections tuberculosis meningitis o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.l o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ l e av i n g n o o n e b e h i n d doi: . /bmj.l | bmj ; :l | the bmj and sustain the effect of clinical and behavioural interventions. how structural determinants influence health outcomes and inequities building on earlier efforts, we present a conceptual model that acknowledges a broad range of structural factors that inter- connect to produce health inequity, such as economic systems, conflict and peace, migration, and other demographic transi- tions (fig ). we cannot cover everything in the model within this article so focus on four main structural determinants that underpin gender power relations. these factors deter- mine who has what (material and other assets), who does what (division of labour between market and reproductive labour), who decides (political participation and laws), and who is valued for what (social norms, ideologies). they shape the insti- tutions—including families, communities, and markets—that replicate gender inequal- ity, which in turn influences health expo- sures, vulnerabilities, access to services, and outcomes. for each factor we describe how structural determinants underpin gen- der power relations and shape adolescent girls sexual and reproductive health. who is valued and for what? unsafe sex, determined by gendered norms and other structural factors, is the leading risk factor for adolescent death (table ). gender norms govern what is valued and considered acceptable for men and women. in most societies, norms tend to value and privilege what is male over what is female, legitimising patriarchy and camouflaging its unfairness. research with young adolescents ( - year olds) across six cities around the world (baltimore (us), ghent (belgium), nairobi (kenya), ile ife (nigeria), asyūt. (egypt), and shanghai (china)) shows that puberty brings different expectations for boys and girls. girls’ worlds are restricted (in appearance, dress, mobility, access to information) and boys’ worlds expand. in many societies, adolescent girls are expected to be virgins, represent family or clan honour, be submissive in their sexual and intimate relationships, and not have knowledge or information about sexuality or reproduction. gender norms often stigmatise girls who seek contraceptives, become pregnant, or are sexually abused. hence, gender norms are increasingly recognised as an important influence in shaping health, particularly adolescent sexual and reproductive health. fo r a d o l e s c e n t g i r l s , c h a n ge s i n gender norms are influenced by positive role models in families, schools, and communities as well as access to media and information. broader societal change related to economic, environmental, and demographic changes in society (eg, urbanisation, migration, conflicts, technology, economic opportunities) also have profound effects. for example, the decline in child marriage rates in south asia was driven largely by growing economic and educational opportunities for girls. similarly, across countries, increasing female employment was independently associated with positive trends in gender norms and stereotypes, separate from regional trends, growth in gross domestic product (gdp), and the structure of production underlying gdp (agricultural, industrial, etc). in addition, differences by region, gdp growth, and gdp production structures also affected gender norms. although it may be tempting to assume that gender norms progress towards promoting equality over time, this may not always be the case. in times of economic crisis and in regions where countries have changed economic systems, norms have become more inequitable in favour of men, as signalled by increasing agreement with the statement that men have more right to a job than women in the world values surveys. context is also crucial. for example, girls’ education is more strongly associated with reduced risk of partner violence in countries where partner violence is widespread than in those where it is not. who has what? given that malnutrition is among the top five risk factors for adolescent death (table  ), we examine food security as a key asset linked to other structural deter- minants of adolescent wellbeing. food security is deeply gendered. women are more likely than men to be affected by severe food insecurity in asia, africa, and latin america, with the widest gap in latin america. in situations of severe food inse- curity, gender bias against girls often occurs in food allocation within households. poor food security is linked to worse h e a l t h b e h av i o u r s a n d o u t c o m e s , particularly for adolescent girls. studies from several settings (eg, brazil, united states, and sub-saharan africa) highlight l i n k s b e t we e n f o o d i n s e c u r i t y a n d sexually transmitted infections, including reduced use of condoms, increased likelihood of engaging in transactional sex, and decreased likelihood of adhering to antiretroviral therapy for hiv.   a d o l e s c e n t s e x p e r i e n c i n g c h r o n i c f o o d i n s e c u r i t y a n d u n d e r n u t r i t i o n are at increased risk of poor mental health, which in turn influences risky s exu a l b e h av i o u r. p re g n a n c i e s i n undernourished adolescents pose higher risk of obstetric complications and poor newborn outcomes. m a n y p o l i t i c a l , e c o n o m i c , a n d environmental factor s contribute to the gendered effects of food insecurity. discrimination in land, property, and inheritance laws, access to low cost credit, and cuts in government agricultural s u b s i d i e s d i s p ro p o r t i o n a te ly a f f e c t women across low and middle income countries. volatility of food prices also disproportionately affects women, who are often responsible for management of food within households. additionally, marginalised women seeking to find or produce affordable quality food may further increase their workloads or even compromise their own food consumption to save food for other family members. who does what? the global labour force participation rate (a measure of the working age population in or looking for employment) is in long term decline, with the gap between men and women remaining stubbornly large. in table  | leading risk factors associated with adolescent deaths in low income countries by sex and age group, * rank - year olds - year olds male female male female unsafe sex unsafe sex unsafe sex unsafe sex unsafe water unsafe water occupational risk unsafe water air pollution air pollution unsafe water child and maternal malnutrition child and maternal malnutrition child and maternal malnutrition alcohol use intimate partner violence impaired kidney function impaired kidney function impaired kidney function air pollution *data from global burden of disease studies (www.healthdata.org/gbd) o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.l o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.healthdata.org/gbd http://www.bmj.com/ l e av i n g n o o n e b e h i n d the bmj | bmj ; :l | doi: . /bmj.l , the rate for women was . %, . percentage points below that for men. yet women’s economic participation is associ- ated with lower fertility rates, better birth spacing, and delayed marriage. adolescence is when most people t r a n s i t i o n f r o m e d u c a t i o n t o wo r k and begin participating in the labour force. although this is often to alleviate h o u s e h o l d p o ve r t y a n d t o s u p p o r t families under duress, such participation can also afford them the possibilities of greater mobility, networks, information, and financial independence and agency. however, even when parity in primary and secondary education is reached, it does not translate into equal participation in the labour force. for example, the proportion of people not in education, employment, or training in - across low and middle income countries was almost twice as high for female youth ( %) as for male youth ( %). several barriers prevent the economic participation of adolescent girls and young women. gender norms that support early marriage and pregnancy for young women perceive women as primarily responsible for household and care work; this often restricts their mobility and prevents them from completing their education and entering the labour force. discriminatory policies and pr actices that exclude pregnant adolescent girls from schooling further compound their disadvantage. their entry into the work force is also hampered by a lack of information and access to social networks to help with job searches and career opportunities; limited opportunities for training, including a lack of child care; and preference of employers in some sectors to hire only young men. the net effect of female labour force participation depends on the social and economic context, and this is particularly true for adolescent girls and young women. women may enjoy greater personal autonomy if they work in jobs eg, social norms eg, labour force participation eg, food security eg, political participation progression or regression in gender power relations women's empowerment or marginalisation broader contextual drivers g e n d e r e q u al it y o r in e q u al it y s tr u ct u ra l d ri ve rs o f g e n d e r p o w e r re la ti o n s in st it u ti o n s an d s it e s in d iv id u al a n d in te rp e rs o n al a d o le sc e n t g ir ls ’ s e xu al an d r e p ro d u ct iv e h e al th economic systems conflict/ peace demographic change migration who is valued for what? who has what? who does what? organised religion public and private services marketsstatecommunitiesfamilies civil society and social movements limited access to and control over resources vulnerablity: individual reslience, agency, and autonomy exposure to risk factors - eg, intimate partner violence, child marriage, unsafe sex lack of information or knowledge, use of health services limited access to quality services consequences of poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes who decides? sexually transmitted infections, hiv, and consequences unintended pregnancies and consequences fig  | conceptual framework for structural elements of gender power relations that drive gender inequality - o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.l o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ l e av i n g n o o n e b e h i n d doi: . /bmj.l | bmj ; :l | the bmj outside family farms and enterprises. however, for some women, this may be at the cost of working in exploitative, dangerous, or stigmatised activities or in precarious employment without social protection or maternity benefits and at high risk of sexual harassment. furthermore, increasing women’s participation in low level employment may perpetuate negative gender norms. there are also unintended consequences that are context specific. partner violence is less prevalent in countries with a high proportion of women in the formal work force. however, earning money increases a woman’s risk of partner violence in countries where few women are paid for their work. in other contexts, higher levels of female participation in the workforce can erode traditional masculine norms that previously ensured that men must provide for women and their children, leaving women to fend for their children and themselves. who decides? political participation is the most explicit manifestation of the distribution of power, where change is relatively recent and woefully insufficient. women are a small minority in formal elected and appointed leadership positions across the world, with only a handful of countries beginning to reach parity. while the right to vote and to be part of formal government processes through parliaments and cabinets is a critical aspect of gender equality and women’s empowerment, the aspect of female political participation that is often neglected is the role of feminist movements in bringing progressive change in public health agendas. a study of countries over years has shown that the presence of autonomous women’s movements has been more important than women in parliaments or leadership for passing progressive laws tackling violence against women. social movements have also had a critical role in ensuring access to hiv treatment and in advocating for sexual and reproductive rights. the participation of adolescent girls and young women in policy processes, social movements, and planning of programmes related to their health is hampered by power dynamics related to both age and sex as well as other elements of their social position such as ethnicity or class. their participation in sexual and reproductive health programmes is varied, ranging from limited engagement in peer education programmes to decision making and leadership in policy and programme development, through youth led activist organisations and networks (eg, advocates for youth or youth coalition for sexual and reproductive health). i n u n d e r s t a n d i n g c o n t e m p o r a r y adolescent social movements, the role of social media in reshaping political p a r t i c i p a t i o n o f y o u n g p e o p l e i n demanding sexual and reproductive health rights may be particularly influential. even though gender disparities in access to social media disadvantage females, social media has created new opportunities for young feminists to organise and mobilise through blogs, sharing of stories, and twitter campaigns (eg, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #timesup). it is also critical to understand how the engagement of young women in feminist movements has changed what issues are of most relevance to them in relation to sexual and reproductive health. younger feminist organising is more intersectional and more fluid in its understanding of gender justice and non- normative sexualities than older women’s movements. at the same time, women’s movements in several countries are facing backlash even though there is greater access to information and awareness about sexuality and reproduction. what next? we have made the case for unpacking structural forms of gender power rela- tions using the example of the sexual and reproductive health of adolescent girls. research and policy must continue to tackle gender inequalities in health expe- rienced by individuals, families, and com- munities, but a broader understanding of structural forms of gender inequality is needed to sustain change over time. food security offers a good example. in addi- tion to recognising gender biases related to food distribution within households, reducing food insecurity calls for a wide range of upstream policy changes that affect gender inequalities. these include food trade, use of land resources, agri- culture investment, land ownership and access, and education. gender power relations affect both males and females, but structural forms of gender inequality starkly concentrate disadvantage against girls and women. although substantial gains have been made across various health and education gender indicators, gender parity in political and economic participation remain distant goal that may take more than years to reach. changes in gender ideology, which is a foundation for gender inequality, remain actively contested. much of the language of “leaving no one behind,” calling for attention to marginalised groups that may be excluded from progress towards the sdgs, presumes that equality is a matter of addressing the lack of inclusion. yet attention to structural forms of gender inequality shows that the terms of inclusion are critical. adolescent girls and young women already participate in a system that is highly inequitable, contributing to their continued marginalisation. girls and women need social change that ensures more secure and dignified livelihoods, not more inclusion into systems of discrimination. greater inclusion of women in electoral systems, political parties, and social movements that are ideologically opposed to gender equality will not eliminate gender inequalities. finally, the four forms of structural gender inequality are interconnected. for example, gender norms are driven by material access to and control over r e s o u r c e s , a s we l l a s t o e c o n o m i c participation. and, conversely, adolescent girls’ and women’s economic participation is hampered by gender norms related to early marriage and child bearing and raising roles. this means that changing one aspect of gender inequality can have unintentional effects on other forms of gender inequality. these effects are unpredictable, sometimes amplifying progress, sometimes cancelling each other out, and sometimes regressing. these elements of transforming gender power relations require further consideration of complexity in research and policy, with its corresponding emphasis on contextual strategic analysis aided by conceptual frameworks, consultative sectoral engagement, and more considerate time frames to track both intended and unintended trajectories of social change. contributors and sources: asg and aa led the conceptualisation of the paper. asg, aa, cmal, and sr jointly developed the outline and wrote various sections of the paper. asg led the drafting and finalisation of the paper. all authors read the final version and approved it. competing interests: we have read and understood bmj policy on declaration of interests and have no relevant interests to declare. the work was supported by the bill and melinda gates foundation through a grant to the countdown to for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health. ag is supported by health systems extra mural unit funded by the south african medical research council and the south african research chair’s initiative of the department of science and technology and national research foundation of south africa (grant no. ). aa is supported by the special programme of research development and research training in human o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.l o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ l e av i n g n o o n e b e h i n d the bmj | bmj ; :l | doi: . /bmj.l reproduction in the department of reproductive health and research at who. the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official views or policies of the authors’ organisations or funders. provenance and peer review: commissioned; externally peer reviewed. this article is part of a series proposed by countdown to for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health and the partnership for maternal, newborn and child health (pmnch) hosted by the world health organization and commissioned by the bmj, which peer reviewed, edited, and made the decisions to publish these articles. open access fees are funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation and pmnch. asha s george, south african research chair in health systems, complexity, and social change avni amin, violence against women technical officer claudia marques de abreu lopes, research fellow t k sundari ravindran, principal visiting fellow , school of public health, university of the western cape, bellville, south africa department of reproductive health research world health organization, geneva, switzerland united nations university-international institute for global health, kuala lumpur, malaysia school of public health, university of witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa correspondence to: a s george asgeorge@uwc.ac.za this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the creative commons attribution (cc by . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /.   unaids. world aids day fact sheet . . https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet   unaids. women and hiv: a spotlight on adolescent girls and young women . https://www.unaids. org/sites/default/files/media_asset/ _women- and-hiv_en.pdf   unicef. child marriage. . https://data.unicef.org/ topic/child-protection/child-marriage/   richards e, theobald s, george a, et al. going beyond the surface: gendered intra-household bargaining as a social determinant of child health and nutrition in low and middle income countries. soc sci med  ; : - . doi: . /j. socscimed. . .   shannon k, leiter k, phaladze n, et al. gender inequity norms are associated with increased male- perpetrated rape and sexual risks for hiv infection 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new interdisciplinary futures georgina born challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #metoo and black lives matter. against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the th ismir conference, asks how mir can refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity. it is written by an outsider, yet one who, as a music anthropologist, is intensely concerned with mir and its influence. the focus is on elaborating auto-critiques that have emerged within the mir community: social, cultural, epistemological and ethical matters to do with the diversity of the profession, of the music with which mir engages, and of the kinds of knowledge produced. one theme is interdisciplinarity: how mir would gain from closer dialogues with contemporary musicology, music anthropology and sociology. the article also considers how the ‘refresh’ might address mir’s pursuit of research oriented to technological innovation, often linked to the drive for economic growth; concerns about sustainable economies, it argues, suggest the need for other values to guide future science and engineering. in this light, the article asks what computational music genre recognition or recommendation would look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise imaginative self- or group development, pursuing not a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity, or took human musical flourishing as their goals. the article closes by suggesting that the time is ripe in mir for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen. keywords: mir; diversity; ontology; interdisciplinarity; music sociology; music anthropology . introduction . mir and diversity: critiques from within diversity was a theme of the th ismir annual conference held in ; the conference ‘tagline’ was ‘across the bridge’, which was taken to reflect the ‘diversity of scientific disciplines, seniority levels, professional affiliations, and cultural backgrounds’ characterising mir as a field. yet when the conference chairs invited me to give a conference keynote, they asked me to speak to insufficient diversity in two senses: they wanted insights into how to create ‘a more diverse ismir in terms of discipline’, and they also noted that ‘[w]e are trying hard to overcome the current bias [towards] western male engineers’. this article is a revision of the keynote address that resulted from their invitation. together, these observations suggest that the mir community embraces diversity as a positive value, with some believing that it already embodies this value, while others consider it to be a goal towards which ismir should be moving, while acknowledging that it currently has a deficit. diversity is one of those values perhaps too often carelessly invoked. it can also be controversial, particularly if the language of ‘diversity’ is employed in ways that occlude older concerns – notably matters of inequality, injustice or bias. in the words of influential writers, the elevation of diversity in recent public and policy debates can mean ‘that other kinds of vocabularies are no longer used,… including terms such as “equal opportunities”, “social justice”, “anti-racism” and “multiculturalism”’, terms with complex histories linked to the histories of political movements such as feminism and anti-racism. for ‘when the terms disappear from policy talk, a concern is that such histories might also disappear’ (ahmed and swan : ). this warning is especially salient in the current moment, when the world is reeling from the events that impelled movements like #metoo and black lives matter, as well as their sometimes violent consequences. because, of course, it is not so much the events – although they matter in themselves – but their chronic, repeated nature and structural foundations that are the terrain on which efforts towards diversity must be built. academic and scientific fields are just as likely to host these structural foundations as other areas of intellectual, cultural and social life. they, too, are likely to be sites in which those inequalities, injustices or biases made more palatable by the term ‘diversity’ may become apparent and may require to be addressed. and if we think music born, g. ( ). diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval, ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /tismir. faculty of music, university of oxford, oxford, uk gemb @cam.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /tismir. mailto:gemb @cam.ac.uk born: diversifying mir is immune to such issues, then the recent furore that has arisen within the academic music theory community over accusations that it embodies and upholds a ‘white racial frame’ should give pause for thought. evidence of gender imbalances in mir is provided by hu et al. ( ), who also describe the organisational response: the creation at the ismir conference of ‘women in mir’ or wimir sessions ‘in order to identify current issues and challenges female mir researchers face, and to brainstorm ideas for providing more support to female mir researchers’ (hu et al., : ). a complementary perspective comes from a wide-ranging, reflexive discussion of ‘ethical dimensions of mir’ by holzapfel, sturm and coeckelbergh ( ), which identifies bias in several senses. among them are demographic biases stemming from the fact that the mir community, ‘as many engineering research communities’, is characterised by researchers who ‘are typically weird (white, educated, industrialized, rich, operating within democracies) (henrich et al., ), from a limited set of geographical origins, and a majority is male’ (holzapfel et al., : ). also significant for these authors are ‘technical biases’ apparent in how ‘[d]atasets are biased towards eurogenetic forms of music, and consequently mir tasks are biased towards challenges that are meaningful in these idioms’ (ibid.). the consequence is that ‘[m]usic that is under- represented in mir datasets, or that does not fit mir tasks and evaluation measures, is unlikely to be interpreted in a semantically correct way by methods that emerge from the biased mir community’ (ibid.). holzapfel, sturm and coeckelbergh link these obser- vations to a further point: they trace the ‘mir value chain’, suggesting that mir researchers do not have clear through-lines of influence to the several ensuing stages their research feeds into: software development, product design, publishing and thence to the end-user. ‘mir research, as most engineering research, is often not immediately involved in the following steps through the value chain. this leads to a barrier between mir research and the higher levels of constraints on system design’ (ibid.). certainly, this describes a dilemma; yet while their analysis is valuable, arguably it does not go far enough. they present this problem as an ethical one stemming from a delinked value chain that results in a ‘remoteness from users’ (ibid.). but that understates the effects of this fragmentary value chain, which is that mir, by delivering a music-‘information infrastructure’ (kornberger et al., ), acts as a perhaps unwitting participant in reproducing and favouring the normative, restricted repertoire of commercial popular music and associated types of musical expression proffered to consumers by the global digital music industries. indeed, the authors detail one such outcome: ‘an example can be conceived of in relation to rhythm, where most mir tools focus on common time signatures, which finds its continuation in tools within digital audio workstations’ (ibid.). i return later to the risks of a collusive relationship between mir and the digital music industries. my task, then, is to offer suggestions about how to diversify ismir and, by implication, mir as a field. i take this as an ambitious challenge: to try to help the mir community understand the scope, scale and depth of the undertakings entailed by responding to calls for greater diversity in the structural sense. for these challenges may not be obvious and, importantly, they are not singular but several. i frame the concerns i want to raise not by a narrow understanding of diversity but a broad one, asking: how can mir refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity? what can diversity mean for a field like mir? . messages from vermeer at this point, i return to the ismir conference, which took place in the city of delft, home of one of the world’s greatest painters, johannes vermeer. i want to draw three initial messages, or prompts to thought, from reflections on vermeer, whose works are striking for their capacity to convey dutch domestic life in the th century. among their many virtues and innovations is to dwell sympathetically on women’s interiority, their everyday activities and their creativity – for example, when conversing with one another, when writing a letter (figure ), or when seated to perform at the virginal (figure ) – through a compelling visual humanism focused on facial expressivity and embodied experience. this prompts a first message for the mir community: women as bearers of diverse modes of subjectivity, and subjectivity as coloured by embodied experience, which in human societies is mediated by such social differences figure : ‘mistress and maid’, by johannes vermeer (pub- lic domain), c. – , the frick collection, nyc, usa. (source https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_hold- ing_letter.jpg). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg born: diversifying mir as gender, class, race and ethnicity – so that subjectivities, experience and embodied experience are not everywhere the same. a second fascinating message for the mir community, and for the era of big data, stems from the fact that a mere thirty-four works are attributed to vermeer: it is that cultural value does not equate with scale, size or ubiquity. a third message arises from the ways in which vermeer experimented with rare pigments, with the portrayal of light, and with perspective, for he is believed to have employed optical aids like the camera obscura to achieve his most spectacular effects. what we witness in vermeer, then, is early science in the service of art – which prompts a question for ismir: which masters or mistresses does the science and engineering of mir serve? . addressing mir from the outside before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge that i write as an outsider to mir – i am not a scientist but a qualitative social scientist – and it is perhaps foolhardy to advise colleagues whose methodologies i would be hard pressed to understand. nonetheless, i am emboldened because in recent years i have been in dialogue with some colleagues in mir. on the other hand, as someone who has worked for decades on the anthropology and sociology of music, media and digital cultures, i have had to confront and analyse matters of gender, class, race and ethnicity in my research, issues that arose vividly in my ethnographic studies of computer music (born, ) and the bbc (born, a), as well as in a european research council (erc)-funded interdisciplinary research program that i led involving ethnographic studies tracing the impact of digitization and digital media on musical practices worldwide (born and devine, ; born, ). these experiences caused me to develop a theoretical account of how social relations of gender, class, race and ethnicity enter into – or mediate – the musical and media fields and institutions that my team and i researched (born, ). it is on this basis that i developed the framework set out below. to take one element of the erc project: in a mixed qualitative and quantitative study, kyle devine and i showed that of the young people entering higher education in the uk to study music technology degree courses over a five year period, per cent were male, and that they came from a lower social class background and had only slightly higher representation of black, asian and minority ethnicity (bame) students than the average demographic profile for all british undergraduate students (born and devine, ). this is a restricted gauge of humanity entering music technology, and it appears to correlate with the gender equality challenges for ismir, as shown also by statistics on gender representation at ismir that the chairs ran for the conference. in what follows i will certainly address questions of diversity in this demographic sense. however, i will do more. . four interrelated dimensions of diversity i want to draw out four interrelated dimensions of diversity with which i suggest ismir should engage. each has a certain autonomy and matters in itself. but they are also interrelated and together present a formidable lattice of challenges. ) the first is the one just referred to: who gets to be a member of ismir, which is to say, what is the demographic makeup of mir as a profession? could it be more diverse? and how do the field’s feeder educational and employment structures result in these ‘typically weird’, male (gendered) and white (raced) demographics? but while matters of educational and employment equality and equity are critical goals in themselves, diversity raises much more than this. ) the second dimension of diversity is to do with whose music and which music, among the vast ocean of sounds in the world, gets to be the focus of mir’s influential scientific practices. as shown above, it is an accepted strand of criticism within the mir community that the techniques and parameters employed in mir tend to derive from, and reflect, commercially dominant areas of global popular music. yet those techniques and parameters come to be applied in powerful technologies as though they were universal, with inevitable what might be called ‘de-pluralizing’ effects. why is this the case? could mir be more responsive to musical diversity – which is likely to equate with social and cultural diversity? and linking back to the first dimension: might a more diverse population of mir practitioners favour awareness of and sensitivity to a wider spectrum of the world’s musics? figure : ‘lady seated at a virginal’, by johannes vermeer (public domain), c. – , the national gallery, london, uk. (source https://upload.wikimedia.org/wiki- pedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_ vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg born: diversifying mir ) the third aspect of diversity is directly implicated in the previous point: it concerns the foundational epistemological and ontological premises that currently undergird mir as a field. in the face of greater musical diversity, can such premises be sustained or will they necessarily be pluralised – and therefore fundamentally challenged? how can mir equip itself with epistemologies and ontologies of music responsive to a greater diversity of musical cultures? might that demand new interdisciplinary partnerships, bringing areas of humanistic and social scientific music scholarship into dialogue with mir in ways that are currently undeveloped? ) the fourth and final dimension of diversity, an overarching question, also follows on. this returns to my earlier question, riffing on vermeer: which masters or mistresses does mir serve – the profit-seeking imperatives of commercial music tech corporations and online music services, entangled as they are in the recorded music industries? and which mistresses should mir serve in order to diversify its goals, partners and worldly effects? in sum: could mir cultivate a more plural set of orientations and institutional partners so as to include non-commercial, publicly-oriented initiatives aimed at enhancing human musical flourishing, and – given escalating anxieties about impending climate catastrophe – the need to create sustainable music economies? as one of the escala- ting preoccupations of our time, should this issue be foregrounded within the mir community? the remainder of the article elaborates on these four facets of diversity, drawing out connections between them. . the social diversity of mir as a profession and its consequences regarding the first dimension of diversity, important insights come from research in science and technology studies (sts) that probes how certain kinds of social relations come to be immanent in technological design. as the sts scholar madeleine akrich has argued, design is a key stage in which engineers ‘script’ envisaged uses into their technologies, in this way ‘configuring’ potential user identities and preferring certain patterns of use (akrich, ). to exemplify: the workings of gender, in particular, have been probed by nelly oudshoorn and her colleagues, who undertook empirical research on the design of information and communications technologies (icts). through comparative case studies of the design cultures of two online ‘digital cities’ developed in the netherlands, oudshoorn et al. found that in both cases the designers worked with an ‘i-methodology’ (oudshoorn et al., ). although the designers aimed to create technologies with all-embracing appeal and usability – to configure the user as ‘everybody’ and ‘anybody’ – a key slippage was evident in a guiding assumption that the designers themselves, and their own subjective and corporeal experiences of the technologies, represented a universal user. since ict designers are predominantly male, their ‘i-methodology’ hindered their ability to imagine the potential and actual diversity of the eventual population of users. the technologies resulting from these processes, emerging from gendered conditions and assumptions, embodied and entrenched existing norms – prominent among them gender norms. in their words, ‘the dominance of the i-methodology…resulted in a gender script: the user who came to be incorpo- rated into the design of [the ict] matched the pref- erences and attitudes of male rather than female users. as almost all designers were male and tech- nologically highly competent, they made [the ict] into a masculine technology.’ (oudshoorn et al., , p. ) to design technologies and interfaces that respond to real social diversity, then, oudshoorn et al. argue that i-methodology, along with its universalising projections, must be reflexively acknowledged and consciously changed. in this way they offer a powerful cautionary tale relevant to all those fields feeding into the design of new technologies, including mir. in suggesting that social relations and imaginaries are scripted into technological design, i am not making an essentialist point that gender identities always determine design; nor do i imply that actual users are entirely constrained to follow the scripts inscribed in the technologies. as akrich argues, the uses made of any technology cannot be read off design assumptions; user-configurations are not wholly determinant of actual uses. rather, i am suggesting that wider social relations of gender, race, class and so on, on the one hand, and practices of technological design, on the other, exist in relations of mutual constitution. in other words, they mediate one another and result in the conception and design of certain kinds of technologies. that is why who gets to engineer matters. now, there is clearly a danger that such ideas can become too crude; nonetheless, the point is that all kinds of experience – including gendered experiences, but not limited to this – will affect design paradigms. so this is not just a matter of equal opportunities for those currently marginalized, whose talents may be unrecognised by the engineering profession, although that is important in itself. it is equally about the likely benefits of enriching, by diversifying, the social ecology of research groups, and thus the collective imagination and design practices of which they are capable – so that everyone gains, potentially including end-users. the underlying point is that scientific and engineering fields like those of mir, which are all too easy to envision as spaces isolated from wider social forces, are in fact consequential sites in which these social forces are played out, and therefore ripe for a politics of diversity. a first reflexive challenge for mir as a field, then, is to recognize mir as a site in which existing cultural categories, as they relate to social inequalities, injustices and biases, are being reproduced or amplified, and that it could be otherwise. whoever is doing the science and engineering, i-methodology and its normative drive needs to be born: diversifying mir altered, and consciousness of the diversity of users and user needs – and also of musics and musical communities – should take its place, resulting optimally in more diverse knowledge and technologies. as to the problem of attracting and educating a next, larger generation of women engineers and engineers from bame communities, this remains a key challenge for the stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines at large, and one without easy solutions. the recursive weight of history is great, as judy wajcman, a leading feminist scholar in sts, comments regarding the gendering of stem: ‘in contemporary western society, the hegemonic form of masculinity is still strongly associated with technical prowess and power.… notwithstanding the recurring rhetoric about women’s opportuni- ties in the new knowledge economy, men continue to dominate technical work. … these sexual divi- sions in the labour market are proving intransigent and mean that women are largely excluded from the processes of technical design that shape the world we live in.’ (wajcman, : ) for wajcman, long-standing ideologies of masculinity are a core force behind the scarcity of women in stem and the gendering of the cultures of stem, suggesting that masculinity itself might benefit from being reflexively scrutinized. is this an exercise for ismir and its feeder fields? can it be avoided? finally, here, it is salutary to invoke the philosopher peter-paul verbeek’s work on the politics and ethics of technological design, notably his paper ‘materializing morality: design ethics and technological mediation’ (verbeek, ). verbeek has long argued that sts should enter into direct dialogue with engineers and engineering discourses, thereby helping to foster among engineers a self-critical and self-reflexive paradigm such that ‘the ethics of engineering design… take more seriously the moral charge of technological products and rethink the moral responsibility of designers accordingly’ ( ). his eloquent point is one that might inform reflections within mir about the moral seriousness of matters of diversity. . mir and musical diversity: whose music, which music? the second dimension of diversity is the question of whose music and which music become the focus of mir’s scientific practices and their influential applications, for example in recommendation systems. it is well accepted that, as emilia gómez and her colleagues put it, ‘since the beginning of [mir],… most of its models and technologies have been developed [on the basis of] mainstream popular music in the so-called “western” tradition’ (gómez et al., : ). they continue, however, that the last few years have seen ‘an increasing interest in applying available techniques to the study of traditional, folk or ethnic music’ (ibid.). this is certainly laudable, and it is clear that computational ethnomusicology has been developing as a key test-bed for opening up and diversifying the musical sounds and cultures with which mir engages. recently, for example, xavier serra and his team have put rigorously to the test the limits of the kinds of musical sounds, knowledge and representations dealt with by mir in the erc-funded compmusic project ( – ). as they describe it: ‘we work on computational approaches to describe music recordings by emphasizing the use of domain knowledge of particular music traditions … focusing on five music cultures’ from the maghreb, china, turkey, north and south india (serra, : ; serra, ). ‘a target application for this work’, they continue, ‘is a system with which to browse through audio music collections of the chosen cultures; being able to discover specific characteristics of the music and relationships between different musical concepts’ (ibid.). while they assume that ‘there are universal musical concepts, like melody and rhythm’, they stress ‘that many important aspects of a particular music recording can be better understood by considering cultural specificities’ ( : ). they focus on non-western ‘art music traditions, [and] thus on types of music that have been formalised and for which theoretical frameworks have been proposed for their understanding’ ( ). the team consulted expert musicians and musicologists in each tradition to select recordings for the corpora being put together, and their efforts seem exemplary in these terms. addressing similar challenges, olmo cornelis and collaborators aimed to test the presumed universality of existing analytical approaches to pulse and tempo by examining how existing ‘automated tempo estimation approaches perform in the context of central-african music’ (cornelis et al., : ). advocating a ‘multidisciplinary approach’, they employed a range of musicological and ethnomusicological scholarship to hone the study, from fred lerdahl and ray jackendoff to kofi agawu and justin london. while they acknowledge that ‘a major difficulty is… the dominance of western musical concepts in content-based analysis tools’ ( ), it is surprising that this team was nonetheless content to check whether existing beat trackers can or cannot be used reliably for central african music – rather than taking the cue from that music’s difference with regard to pulse and tempo and, in that light, asking: which tools might be needed to address it, and how radically does mir’s existing conceptual and computational toolset demand to be revised in order to tackle the salient aesthetic features of this non- western music? there is, in other words, surely a risk of teleology in beginning with existing tools derived from the analysis of western pop and seeing if they ‘work’ for some fragmentary, decontextualised trait extracted from the total socio-musical existence of central african music. indeed, this teleology is registered in their preliminary comment that ‘the research in this paper relies on existing computational tools, and does not aim to introduce novel approaches in beat tracking and tempo estimation’ ( ). born: diversifying mir although an auto-critique of the elevation of western pop music as a universal model for all music is beginning to develop within mir, then, it seems that the profound challenges posed by ‘other’ musics have not yet been sufficiently registered and worked through (born and hesmondhalgh, ). one kind of challenge stems from all those acoustic, electronic and computer art, popular and folk musics in which melody, harmony, tempo and rhythm do not capture key aesthetic features, which are likely to include qualities such as timbre, ‘gesture’, microtonality, melisma, spatialisation (smalley, , ), and the rhythmic subtleties identified by steven feld and charles keil as ‘groove’ or ‘participatory discrepancies’ (keil, ; keil and feld, ). the problem is that decades after the musicological debate began over these less readily quantized and notated, multidimensional aesthetic qualities, musicology still has great difficulty analysing them. perhaps the musicologist anne danielsen’s work – which combines quantitative and qualitative research on microrhythm in groove-based popular musics (danielsen, , ) – casts light and might be adapted into computational analytical tools of great subtlety. but this seems to be the scale of the problem. it is also notable that, in reaching across disciplines, there is a risk of going backwards into the future: the work of the ethnomusicologist alan lomax (lomax , ), for example, is cited approvingly in some computational ethnomusicology; but his reductive quantitative approach to the analysis and classification of non-western musics has long been controversial and criticised within his own field (feld, ). the points made so far about the challenges posed by non- western and other musics have been limited to their subtle intra-musical features. when it comes to broader cultural understandings of these musics, the problems for mir are of another order, and can include the very assumption that such musics can or should be represented and made available globally through recordings, and digital corpora, at all. the nature of these problems can be conveyed by a case study from my erc research program carried out in north india by aditi deo (deo, ). deo wanted to investigate the digital recording and archiving of north indian folk musics, particularly music from low caste communities, part of a current wave of archiving initiatives in the region stimulated by ideas of cultural heritage and facilitated by the ease of digital recording. in rajasthan one focus of her work was a cultural collective called lokayan run by high caste young male activists. lokayan was in partnership with a bangalore-based organization called the kabir project led by middle class artists and intellectuals, funded mainly by national and international charities and development agencies. together, lokayan and the kabir project were digitally recording a number of elderly, illiterate, low caste hereditary women folk singers renowned for their repertoire of songs devoted to kabir, a th century hindu mystic poet and saint popular among low caste communities. through a secular pluralist reinterpretation of kabir, the kabir project sought to use ordinary people’s devotion to kabir’s poetry and related folk music to attract local people to a politics of secular nationalism. however, among the low caste adherents, the saint and related cultural and musical traditions have a different significance, for they are associated with resistance to caste-based discrimination and, thus, with opposition to the pervasive inequalities of caste and class to which these groups are subject. hence, the very use that the kabir project was making of kabir and related folk traditions entailed a wilful erasure of the affective and political meanings of the saint and the music for local low caste communities. one of the most renowed singers in the local community was the blind, elderly woman folk singer gavara-devi gosayi. in this film clip, shot by deo in , gosayi was performing live at an annual festival called the kabir yatra. the sheer pleasure and joy of the audience, drawn largely from surrounding rural communities, is palpable as gosayi and her musicians perform live. the second clip, in contrast, shows gosayi singing, accompanied by her own harmonium playing as well as two young male percussionists, inside a local recording studio where she was being recorded by lokayan activists. gosayi is visibly uncomfortable; she had never experienced recording before these recording sessions, and she preferred to play live performances out of doors for her usual audience – local followers of kabir. what comes across is how social inequalities of gender, caste and age permeate the recording session, shaping the sociality of the studio and its musical results. as deo notes in her analysis of the sessions, the young men overrode the singer on focal aesthetic matters: ‘critical aspects of the energy of this genre came from its improvisatory form, interactions between vocalist and instrumentalists, and the open-air contexts of its customary performance. the cramped studio, and gavara-devi’s unfamiliarity with studio techniques, skewed the recording process…. the recording studio emerged… as a space of negotiation over musical sounds and technical practices between those with unequal social status and power’ (deo, : ). in lokayan recording sessions, then, social relations of gender, caste and age influenced both the recording process and the ensuing musical sounds. gosayi’s music was made for live performance, not recording, and she was not in a position to understand the implications of recording in the sense either of the sounds being abstracted, frozen, commodified, and lifted into global circulation online, or of any potential monetary reward. in general, ideas of individual authorship, ownership and copyright are quite alien to these musicians. it was when we took this research to an anthropology conference in delhi that we became aware of the intensity of the issues that it raises. for a clamorous debate occurred about all digital archiving projects focused on indian folk musics, coming as these musics do from low caste and ‘tribal’ groups. the accusation made by critics of these practices was deeper than musical accuracy, https://musdig.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-archiving-oral-vernacular-musics-northern-india https://musdig.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-archiving-oral-vernacular-musics-northern-india born: diversifying mir cultural sensitivity or even turning this music into a commodity. it was, rather, that the very disembedding of this music from its live, local communities of practice by recording perpetrated a form of ontological violence, an ontological violence fuelled by the social, cultural and economic distance between local musicians – whose music is profoundly embedded in communal socialities and religious cosmologies – and development-aid-funded activists, and a violence that those who value and respect gosayi, her music and her community must call out. so the challenge posed to mir by non-western musics is not just to get the rhythmic or timbral analysis right, or to take the cues about musical difference from such musics and not impose inappropriate musical values, qualities and systems on them. it is also to recognize that all musics – and most spectacularly those non-western musics that have as yet resisted incorporation into the global archives of digitized recorded music – have an ontology, that those ontologies are plural and often deeply social as well as religious or cosmological (bohlman, ; born, ; sykes, ), and that they may be antithetical to, or profoundly different from, the universalised music ontologies assumed by mir and companion disciplines. this poses ethical and political tests akin to those posed by discourses of sustainability – but here, tests of musical and cultural sustainability. . musical diversity and mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions the third aspect of diversity follows on: it concerns certain epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning mir as a field, which turn on the way that ontology is understood. if mir intends to embrace a wider diversity of musical cultures, can such assumptions be maintained? how could mir equip itself with tools suited to analysing and modelling a greater diversity of musics? these questions arise from the very different approaches to analysing ontologies of music that characterise mir, on the one hand, and contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology, on the other. in computer and information sciences, ‘an ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. the representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members)’ (gruber, : ). similarly, for music informatician darrel conklin, applying this approach to a corpus of basque folk songs, ‘an ontology is an encoding of concepts and their relations in a domain of knowledge’ (conklin, : ). in these disciplines, ontology is therefore conceived in terms of modelling concepts, knowledge and representation. in marked contrast, in contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology, such an approach would be identified with the analysis and modelling of an epistemology of music – that is, conceptual knowledge about a certain music. for in these disciplines, ontologies of music are considered to exceed knowledge and representation. if, in philosophy, ontology is ‘the study of what there is’ (hofweber ), or ‘the study of being or existence’ (gruber ibid.), then contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology adhere more closely to this approach when analysing ontologies of music: they are interested in analysing ‘what music is’ in any particular musical culture in terms that include but exceed knowledge and representation by taking into account the embodied, social and material aspects of any musical culture (bohlman, ; born, b, ). currently, mir takes a range of digital data as an appro- ximation of the contours of a musical culture. in this sense mir itself embodies a theory of ‘what music is’, or what might be called an analytical ontology (born, : ): one that assumes that music can universally be represented by datasets of digital sound recordings, perhaps with added digitised scores or other kinds of metadata, various kinds of knowledge and representation, perhaps with human annotations, and that such representations capture the most salient aesthetic and ontological features of all musics. but we have just seen through deo’s rajasthan case study that this is not the case. for the music of gavara-devi gosayi and her community is immanently bound to live performance, to the socialities engendered in such performance situations, and to the cosmologies and poetry associated with a th century poet-saint as they are infused with a politics of resistance to caste oppression. all of these qualities – this rich embodied, social and material assemblage – together constitute the actors’ ontology of music, and many of them are shed once the sounds are captured by recording, digitised and put into circulation on the internet. so what gets lost in mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions? to presume mir’s theory of music is to foreclose on many living musics, and to prioritise ontologically those sounds that, through recording, have been disembedded from originating bodies, socialities and locales – a process that r. murray schafer named ‘schizophonia’: how recording splits sounds from its originating sources (schafer, ). turning this around, the question arises for the mir community: if more musical diversity is sought, and if respecting the musical ontologies of the source communities is ethically responsible and aesthetically desirable, then what kind of knowledge practices might support mir to analyse and model these kinds of musical cultures ‘as a whole’ (serra, : ), or at least more adequately and less reductively? would it not make sense to consider whether there are ways to bring the cultural, social and material dimensions immanent in diverse ontologies of music into mir’s analytical frame? this means going far beyond thinking of ‘a musical culture as a stylistically coherent musical repertory’ that can only be accessed via ‘available digital traces’ (op cit. ). to tackle this challenge would mean prizing open those base epistemological and ontological premises of mir through close dialogue with those music scholars and disciplines whose specialism is the analysis of music’s cultural, social and material as well as sonic dimensions: that is, music anthropologists and sociologists. implicit in this move would be another challenge: to break with ‘mentalist’ born: diversifying mir conceptions of music, an abstraction that is perhaps so axiomatic in computation, given its long-standing links to cognitive and information-theoretical ontologies, that it has become second nature in mir. what, then, if we began again, refreshing mir by building a new kind of relationship between the field and music anthropology and sociology? and by taking the terms of the ontology at issue from each musical culture, rather than by squeezing it into the existing template of what can most readily and efficiently be formalised, computationally represented and modelled? doing this entails recalibrating how interdisciplinarity proceeds in this field. instead of taking computer and information sciences to be keystone disciplines around which other disciplines revolve and to which they are subordinate, another approach would entail enabling the distinct disciplines to dialogue without hierarchy, and to ask music informaticians to consider alternative epistemological and ontological grounds, perhaps by inventing novel hybrids of qual-quant modelling in ways as yet unimagined and unforged. such a reshaped interdisciplinary practice is actually envisaged in a uk economic and social research council-funded research project on interdisciplinarity that i co-directed, which examined empirically different kinds of interdisciplinary practice in several major interdisciplinary fields and adduced three basic forms (barry and born, a, b). the first, which we call the ‘additive’ or ‘synthesis’ mode of interdisciplinarity (and which is close to what is often called multidisciplinarity), involves bringing different disciplines to the table and allowing each to contribute as they are, without any of them being changed. the second, the ‘subordination’ or ‘service’ mode of interdisciplinarity, is akin to the situation now in mir: a core discipline or disciplines, the computer and information sciences, supervise inputs from other, subordinate disciplines, so that a ‘dash’ of the social or cultural may be added to the framework without this disturbing the premises of the master disciplines. this subordination mode is a common way in which the physical and natural sciences bring in aspects of the qualitative humanities and social sciences; and this is what mir is doing when it adds a touch of ethnomusicology to its research, but without this threatening to alter or disturb its core epistemological and ontological premises. in effect, nothing much need change. in contrast, the third mode, the ‘agonistic’ mode of interdisciplinarity, is the most promising because in this mode there is no hierarchy, and the potential is that all contributing disciplines might change through mutual transformations and the genesis of entirely unforeseen, novel methodologies and theories. this third, agonistic mode of interdisciplinarity therefore takes the form neither of a synthesis nor a hierarchy. rather, it is driven by an agonistic relationship to existing forms of knowledge – that is, by a common sense of the problematic limits of established disciplines. what we are highlighting is how agonistic interdisciplinarity stems from a collective desire to contest or transcend the prevailing epistemological and ontological assumptions of given or established disciplines through innovative knowledge practices that aspire to render the new hybrid interdiscipline irreducible to the simple addition of its antecedent disciplines – in this case, mir plus music anthropology/sociology. the leading information theorist geoffrey bowker portrays something akin to this mode of interdisciplinarity as key to the ‘new knowledge infrastructures’ demanded in the present. as he puts it, ‘the epistemic cultures of the academy all have their own historical “ways of knowing”… [but today], the objects of study… require the triangulation of multiple methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, and call upon… investigators to integrate multiple epistemic viewpoints’ (bowker, : ). indeed, in finding inventive ways to overcome or finesse the qual-quant divide, an agonistic interdisciplinarity between computational musicology and music anthropology and sociology could prototype new methodologies that are urgently required by the digital humanities in general. two further points follow. such a new interdisciplinarity is not limited to music anthropology and sociology. if they can bring social, cultural and material dimensions of music to mir, then psychoacoustics can bring auditory perception – and more generally, the natural sciences of music can bring greater acuity in analysing features relevant to cognition (aucouturier and bigand, ) – and music analysis can throw light on higher dimensions of musical structure. and the benefits potentially flow both ways: these disciplines will in turn be nourished by what mir brings to the interdisciplinary exchange. to take two examples: mir can ‘bring unprecedented signal- processing sophistication to cognitive neuroscience and psychology’ (ibid.: ); while the tarsos platform developed by joren six, olmo cornelis and marc leman offers tools for enhancing the analysis of pitch organization beyond prevalent concepts in western music theory – ‘octave equivalence, stability of tones, equal tempered scale and so on’ (six et al., : ). tools like tarsos respond to the extraordinary diversity of pitch distribution in non-western classical and folk musics and some areas of th century art music; and research of this kind conveys vividly how much music theory has to gain, in terms of diversifying its conceptual range and resources, from dialogues with mir. . diversifying the real-world masters/mistresses that mir serves i come finally to the fourth dimension of diversity: the question of which masters or mistresses mir serves. mir is an international field based mainly in academia, but it has strong links to industry and the burgeoning start-up ecology of music ai. my sense is that its culture is ambiguous, oriented both by the ethos of academia and by responsiveness to the commercial goals of the digital music economy. it is as though, fortuitously, mir serves both; and this seems to go along with certain commercial precepts being transferred almost born: diversifying mir unconsciously into the field. in an area of application like music recommendation, the focus is on a series of goals – attracting and retaining consumers, increasing user engagement, boosting revenues – that find their way into scientific analysis and matters of design. so just as a theory of music is manifest in mir, where music is conceptualized, after western pop, as everywhere taking the form of a ‘track’ or ‘song’, a theory of the human subject is built into recommendation – a human subject who is existentially overwhelmed by the scale of the global digital music archive, whose evolving taste is structured by a preference for ‘similarity’, who is individualized, and who seeks to maximize her/his listening events (born et al., ). built into machine learning applications, these models are likely performatively to shape, rather than merely reflect, listener practices (prey, ): another potential reduction of human cultural diversity. against this background i want to ask: which mistresses should mir serve in order to diversify its goals, partners and worldly effects? if mir’s pursuit of scientific research oriented to technological innovation often comes to be tied, directly or indirectly, to the drive for economic growth, then the escalating criticisms of the faang corporations along multiple vectors (among them transparency, accountability, privacy and security), and parallel concerns about sustainable (music) economies (devine, ), remind us of the urgent need for other goals and values to guide future science and engineering. we might ask: what would computational genre recognition and recommendation look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise musical self- or group- development, linked to goals of human flourishing (nussbaum, ; hesmondhalgh, )? or if they aimed to foster not a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity? or if they were built to enhance the potential cultural and social as well as musical riches and benefits of music discovery? or if, rather than honing normative models of genre, computational genre systems could be tuned so as to respond to and give insight into different individual and collective perspectives on genre? such questions would imply rendering the interface both legible or transparent and modifiable; it might mean enabling the user to call up and browse among the genre systems – that is, the musical universes – of, say, angélique kidjo, kim gordon or diamanda galás, of indonesian noise music scenes or canadian first nation country musicians. being less normative may be less commercially viable, but it might well enhance and enliven our music-computational tools, experiences and futures, while empowering users and responding to, and stimulating, the sociable nature of our musical lives. . conclusions diversity has many potential meanings. it is often understood in terms of the social makeup of a profession or discipline – whether mir or music anthropology. and this certainly matters. but one of the ways it matters is by fostering a population of practitioners harbouring a more variegated cache of cultural and musical experiences to inform practice – in mir, ways of computationally analysing and modelling music. this article has set out four key interrelated components of diversity relevant to mir, each of which has an autonomy, while together they add up to a series of potential interlocking changes. for progress to occur, it should be clear by now, the new forms of interdisciplinarity envisaged should have ambitions not only of epistemological and ontological kinds but of ethical and social kinds. to be clear: this is not a call to reinvent an already discredited wheel – one example is the repeated return to data-rich but impoverished conceptions of the social in the lineage linking adolphe quetelet, the early th century inventor of empirical social research and of the idea of ‘social physics’ (donnelly, ; adolf and stehr, ), through gabriel tarde, the early th century sociologist who held that ‘society is imitation’ fuelled by collective flows of affect (tarde, ), to the ‘social physics’ espoused by mit’s alex pentland (pentland, ). today’s exponents of this lineage risk repeating conceptual and methodological errors while neglecting the abundant resources of contemporary social theory. it is essential, then, to avoid resuscitating outdated paradigms, and a good way to do this is to create an ‘agonistic’ interdisciplinarity integrating current thinking in relevant disciplines: to put mir into interdisciplinary dialogue with today’s ethnomusicology, music anthropology and sociology. the time is ripe for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously untried, and the new hybrid knowledge forms suggested in this article demand cumulative and coordinated efforts. the recent concept of ‘responsible innovation’, the title of a journal founded in , offers a stimulus; it foregrounds the benefits of reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness in emerging technological design, suggesting that these are favoured by ‘an open organisational culture, emphasising innovation, creativity, interdisciplinarity, experimentation and risk taking; … [and] commitment to public engagement and to taking account of the public interest’ (stilgoe et al., : ). this suggests the importance of creating new institutional ecologies, collective efforts within which such values can be cultivated, for example when transforming mir through the four facets of diversity. and this in turn prompts a call for action: an invitation to mir colleagues to join myself and others from relevant disciplines in forming a think tank or similar initiative to develop and take forward these ideas. think tanks in this vein have recently arisen to address ethical issues surrounding the development and application of ai. music informatics, given its prominent position in the ongoing evolution of the data and computational sciences as they affect culture, surely deserves its own initiative of this kind. notes see the statement about the conference posted on july : https://transactions.ismir.net. email to the author from the conference chairs, may . https://transactions.ismir.net born: diversifying mir i wrote this article (in late august ) as the protests erupted in kenosha, wisconsin, over the shooting of jacob blake by a police officer, one of a series of acts of police violence in the usa that inflamed the black lives matter movement. the paper that set this controversy in motion was written by dr. philip a. ewell, originally a plenary talk at the society for music theory meeting: https://mtosmt. org/issues/mto. . . /mto. . . .ewell.html. for a journalistic account of what ensued, see: https:// w w w. i n s i d e h i g h e r e d . c o m / n e w s / / / / m u s i c - t h e o r y - j o u r n a l - c r i t i c i z e d - s y m p o s i u m - supposed-white-supremacist-theorist. on the history of responses to lomax’s cantometrics, see savage ( ). the acronym faang stands for facebook, apple, amazon, netflix and google. on quetelet, tarde and their relationship in relation to the history of criminology, see beirne ( ). on ‘social physics’ in quetelet and pentland, and the connections between them, see adolf and stehr ( ). see the data and society institute (https://datasociety. net), ai now institute (https://ainowinstitute.org), and a institute (https:// ainstitute.cecs.anu.edu.au). acknowledgements i am grateful for dialogues with bob l. t. sturm, fernando diaz and others from the ‘ai, recommendation, and the curation of culture’ workshop in paris, october , notably jeremy morris and ashton anderson. i am also grateful to emilia gómez for conversations, information and for inviting me, with cynthia liem, to give a keynote at the th ismir conference. my thanks, finally, to andrew barry and kyle devine, with whom many of these thoughts were incubated. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references adolf, m., & stehr, n. 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( ). diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval, ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . / tismir. submitted: march accepted: september published: october copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. open access https://doi.org/ . /j.respol. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.respol. . . https://doi.org/ . / - https://doi.org/ . / - https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /cje/ben https://doi.org/ . /tismir. https://doi.org/ . /tismir. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	 . introduction 	 . mir and diversity: critiques from within 	 . messages from vermeer 	 . addressing mir from the outside 	 . four interrelated dimensions of diversity 	 . the social diversity of mir as a profession and its consequences 	 . mir and musical diversity: whose music, which music? 	 . musical diversity and mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions 	 . diversifying the real-world masters/mistresses that mir serves 	 . conclusions 	notes 	acknowledgements 	competing interests 	references 	figure 	figure ecocentric education: introduction to a special collection of essays education sciences editorial ecocentric education: introduction to a special collection of essays helen kopnina international business, the hague university of applied sciences, johanna westerdijkplein , en den haag, the netherlands; h.kopnina@hhs.nl received: august ; accepted: august ; published: august ���������� ������� . the origins of ecocentric education: from critical theory to ecopedagogy this special issue “ecocentric education” contains articles focused on ecological values in environmental education (ee) and education for sustainable development (esd). ecocentric education is based on a critical theory, originating from erich fromm [ ], herbert marcuse [ ], and paulo freire [ ], and on ecological pedagogy (ecopedagogy), developed by richard kahn [ ]. these critical theorists served as catalysts in the transformation of education towards the recognition of the “domination” of capitalist, corporate, and/or political power in shaping societies, challenging the broadly shared assumptions and practices [ ]. fromm [ ] and his peers believed that education makes learners internalize alienation from humanity and nature, a process which is inherent in the industrial capitalist society. this process increases uncritical adherence to dominant values such as consumerism, downplaying the negative side effects of technocratically defined “progress”. these theorists of critical education derived their critique from neo-marxist or ecological socialism perspectives, exposing both social inequalities and ecological damage created by a capitalist system of industrial production. ecosocialism has been especially critical of naive narratives about finitude, scarcity, and conservationism, as david molina-motos [ ] notes in this collection of essays. however, the marxist critique (ecosocialism) of capitalism has its shortcomings, as socialist or communist systems are implied to be a solution. this position fails to take into account the fact that contemporary industrial production systems, however ideologically organized, are still predicated on the exploitation of natural resources and on economic growth [ ]. ecosocialism criticized social and economic inequality without challenging the very mechanism of how this wealth is created, that is, through the appropriation of natural resources [ ]. at an international political level, the realization of the negative side effects of industrial and economic development was discussed in at the united nations conference on the human environment and in the limits to growth report [ ]. the report outlined the need to address population growth, to limit the growth economy and industrial production in order to preserve natural resources for future generations. in , responding to the conferences’ and report’s outcomes, these aspirations were translated into educational guidelines. participants in the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco) workshop proposed a global framework for environmental education, referred to as the belgrade charter, which stated: “the goal of environmental education is to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations, and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones” [ ]. this goal of environmental education, combined with the insights of fromm, marcuse, and freire, inspired ecopedagogy, that supports an “earth democracy” and promotes the rights of all living organisms [ ]. having in part evolved from critical pedagogy, ecopedagogy is less ideologically educ. sci. , , ; doi: . /educsci www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /educsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education educ. sci. , , of leftist or marxist and more environment-centered [ ]. what is significant in ecopedagogy is not its leftist origins, but a call for a radically different method of addressing the excesses of industrial development and anthropocentrism. remaining socially critical, ecopedagogy supports deep ecology and ecocentrism in teaching theory and learning practice [ ]. inspiring this education, ideas addressing the human-centered (anthropocentric) treatment of the environment have been developed by, among others, arne naess [ ]. the ecology or ecosysytem-centered (ecocentric) alternatives to industrial development underlined, pragmatically, the restraint to growth, and, ethically, the importance of recognizing the intrinsic value, rather than instrumental, value of the environment, as haydn washington [ ], one of the contributors to this collection of essays has underlined. as kazuhito nakamura, akio fujiwara, hill hiroki kobayashi, and kaoro saito [ ] suggest in this special issue, ecocentric education does not “restrict human well-being to economic aspects”; rather, it makes “conventional sustainability education richer and profound” by “positioning human beings as part of nature”. another contributor to this collection, reingard spannring [ ], relates ecocentric education to ecological citizenship education, which “seeks to liberate human and nonhuman beings from predetermined behavioral results and functions, and opens the time and space for the subjectification of human and nonhuman citizens within the complex dynamics of a multi-species community” (p. ). thus, ecocentric education also includes individual care for animals, as helena pedersen [ ], in this collection, reflects. pedersen relates ecocentric education to the practice for critical animal pedagogies, offering a critical theory-based form of resistance against the conventionally framed “animal question” in education and beyond. . contributions to this special issue: discussing anthropocentrism and industrialism contributors to this collection of essays reflect on this new type of environmental education, using case studies originating from sweden, spain, scotland, austria, australia, and japan. their articles addressed the following questions: what are the prevalence and characteristics of ecocentric education? does education positively influence environmental knowledge and attitudes at schools and help develop competencies and skills necessary for a transition to a sustainable society in higher education? what are the most effective forms of education taking environmental sustainability as an ultimate goal? how can context-specific studies of education contribute to the scholarship of social change that contributes to environmental sustainability? ecocentric education discussed in this collection aids in understanding how complex variables such as national and institutional context, ideology, and ethics (e.g., ecocentric orientation) and pedagogical skills (e.g., didactic qualities) can ensure a sustainable future. research focuses on nationally contextualized studies on the nexus between education, environment, and sustainable future. contributors achieve this by examining how a wide range of educational programs have influenced students’ worldview and raised particular moral concerns in relation to the environment and our common future. indeed, as opposed to the dominant forms of environmental education and education for sustainable development (esd), ecocentric education reveals the lessons of environmentalism and engages with the underlying power structures of society [ , ]. as washington [ ] has emphasized, sustainability and sustainable development are different concepts, and conventional esd tends to be highly anthropocentric. assuming that conventional environmental education and, particularly esd are largely focused on social and economic issues [ , ], ecopedagogy and ecocentric education provide a counterweight with a focus on the “planet”. the “planet” in this case is not seen as harmoniously balanced with “people” and “profit” but as foundational for any social and economic activity to take place [ ]. in contrast to conventional education, ecocentric education and critical pedagogy are based on “method and process for liberation”, fighting for the oppressed and adopting a “critical methodology, and promote education as a non-violent form of radical social change” [ ]. presently, ecocentric education includes various aspects of ecopedogogy, ecological citizenship education [ ], conservation [ ] and rewilding [ ], education for deep ecology [ , ], post-humanist educ. sci. , , of education [ , ], inclusive (multispecies) pluralism [ , ], animal welfare education [ ], and critical animal pedagogy [ ]. this education focuses on the unity of animal rights and welfare [ , ] on the one hand, and environmental ethics and sustainability on the other hand [ – ]. as alexia barrable [ ] writes in this collection of essays, one of the central aims of ecocentric education is “the promotion of nature connectedness, benefiting both the next generation of learners, as well as our planet”. spannring [ ] presents a fundamental critique of (animal) consumption as a way of being in and relating to the world. in particular, her chapter addresses how objectification and commodification of nonhumans is opposed to a duty of care within a multi-species community and how they mask speciesism (discrimination against other species). at the moment of writing, for example, millions of animals are used for medical experimentation for the development of the covid- vaccine, in the assumed-to-be morally superior cause of advancing human health. simultaneously, the root causes of zoonotic pandemics, i.e., high human population density, consumption of meat, and wildlife trade are subordinated to concerns about the economy and calls for a return to normal [ ]. in education, as pedersen [ ] notes, this translates into normalizing animal experimentation, as animals are routinely incorporated in the science curriculum, with students taught to “utilize, dominate, or control other species as dissection specimens for hands-on training of certain skills in science classrooms”. both spannring [ ] and pedersen [ ] argue that the hierarchical status of humans above animals is not challenged but supported by the notion of the humane use of nonhuman animals, pertinent to welfare education, traditional forms of environmental education, and esd. the aim of critical animal pedagogies, according to pedersen [ ], is to disentangle animals from the demands we make on them. the status quo needs to be challenged by education, as aptly argued by pedersen, who calls for a cessation of our narcissistic preoccupation with “animals for us”. exploring such trajectories in esd and beyond provides “immanent critique and a foundation and condition for political and environmental engagement in human–animal relations” [ ]. it implies the opening of education to “multiple unthought possibilities of unlearning and re-learning our being in the world as standing with, staying away, and stepping aside” [ ]. critical pluralism, in pedersen’s analysis, is different from conventional pluralism prevalent in the environmental education field, sometimes referred to as democratic, which is based on a single dominant species’ decision-making [ ]. this decision-making is also dependent on the public’s perceptions. as nakamura and co-authors suggest, the public’s understanding of environmental challenges often lacks complex time scales, as global issues such as climate change “need to be understood within time spans of some hundred years or more” [ ]. public understanding of the word “speciesism” seems lacking at the time when wokeness (awareness of social injustice) is especially prominent. during #metoo (anti-sexism) and #blacklivesmatter (anti-racism) campaigns, discrimination against various human groups is rightly condemned, while abuse of farm animals or extermination of wild animals and their habitats are not recognized as morally abhorrent. . ways forward in ecocentric education testing the efficacy of ecocentric education in promoting the ability of learners to address environmental challenges will take years of continuous research and practice, requiring longitudinal cross-national studies to test temporary effects on both affective and pragmatic aspects of learners’ ability to solve sustainability challenges. as barrable [ ], these longitudinal studies should focus on measuring the effect of teaching on the “relationship with nature, compassion towards non-human nature, and pro-environmental beliefs and actions” (p. ). based on naess [ ] idea of nature connectedness, barrable stresses that this connection remains central to the ecocentric framework and that disciplines such as environmental psychology are helpful to outline ways that promote this in practice. one of the ways to establish connectedness to nature is through wonder. as washington [ ] notes, while ecocentric education and education for wonder already exist in different forms, there are so many disciplines which should be more deeply integrated into the curriculum. he cites “science education (the kinship of life); geography (sense of place); drama (role-playing games, becoming local species or doing educ. sci. , , of a “mock trial” about protecting local nature); english (the poetry and prose of wonder—such as those of the american nature writers thoreau, muir, leopold, carson, etc.); and art (expressing nature through artworks)” [ ]. in the context of developing a country’s education or indigenous learning, the role of traditional non-hierarchical connectedness to nature, not just through knowledge but through lived and affectionate experience, cannot be understated. local knowledge systems based on animistic traditions have developed over centuries and involve diverse, versatile content [ ]. both naess [ ] and kahn [ ] have noted that ecocentrism is anchored in these traditionally sustainable worldviews, which can instruct education for the future. follow-up studies of ecocentric education, need to involve interdisciplinary fields, such as sustainability, environmental and citizenship education. tackling environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and natural resource scarcity needs an engagement with practical as well as ethical aspects of various integrated disciplines. ecocentric education needs to be offered and tested universally, both in developed and in developing countries, ranging from elementary schools to vocational education to postgraduate college levels. in the future, the fields related to ecocentric education will hopefully integrate both ethical and pragmatic implications of the acceptance of intrinsic value of individual beings and nature as an entity. ways of tackling root causes of unsustainability, including the somewhat uncomfortable issues of population growth and the global expansion of material demands and consumerist lifestyles, will hopefully be developed. such education will embrace learning about solutions to environmental crises, including issues as diverse as family planning services to address population growth and the understanding of degrowth, steady-state economy and circular production models [ ]. restricting economies towards degrowth and re-orienting politics towards including ecorepresentatives would be a significant part of the solution. learning to live and flourish, sharing this planet with billions of other living beings, and guaranteeing brighter prospects for future generations will require expert input not just from scientists but also from socially and morally engaged public and decision-makers. to conclude, this leaves us—academics, educators, and learners—with both a formidable challenge and, in the words of washington [ ], a positive and exciting solution to the environmental crisis. this solution involves “changing our education system, which is arguably a pre-condition for reaching an ecologically sustainable society” (p. ). heeding the lessons of belgrade charter, we need to “teach about ecological reality, ecosystem functions, ecological ethics, and a sense of wonder toward nature” [ ]. here, again, longitudinal research addressing the effects of such learning, will be needed. it is worth the wait, since such education, as demonstrated by the contributors to this special collection, targets the future generations and, indeed, the future of our planet. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declare no conflict of interest. references . fromm, e. the art of loving: an inquiry into the nature of love; harper & row: new york, ny, usa, . . marcuse, h. a critique of pure tolerance. in repressive tolerance; wolff, r.p., moore, b., marcuse, h., eds.; beacon press: boston, ma, usa, . . freire, p. pedagogy of the oppressed; herder & herder: new york, ny, usa, . . kahn, r. the educative potential of ecological militancy in an age of big oil: towards a marcusean ecopedagogy. policy futures educ. , , – . 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raising films, ). what has been less attended to is the way in which these negotiations make cultural workers feel, and more specifically, the gendered dimensions of these inequalities. this article addresses this gap by offering a detailed analysis of the testimonials of mothers published on the website. i argue that women’s testimonials contribute to challenging the silencing around issues of care in the sector. while at times women reinforce new labouring subjectivities that privilege self- regulation, they simultaneously critique the punishing nature of neoliberal working cultures, commonly reflecting on the industries’ demand to suppress the challenges of care. these critiques are rarely framed as resistance to explicit gender inequalities. however, i argue that the testimonials’ presentation – published collectively and alongside one another on the site – allow for recurring experiential patterns to emerge that makes it difficult to see these accounts as an individual woman’s problem and, importantly, highlights the specific gendered dimensions of the emotional violence of neoliberal labouring practices. key words film and television industries; gender inequalities; care; neoliberalism; production cultures; parenting https://doi.org/ . / mum’s the word: public testimonials and gendered experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the film and television industries introduction this article explores parents’ published accounts of their (gendered) experiences of reconciling caring responsibilities with work in the film and television industries, paying particular attention to mothers. caring responsibilities are often identified as a key factor in the persistence of gendered inequalities in the film and television industries due to the inherent incompatibilities of childcare with the sectors’ intense working cultures (creative scotland, ; raising films, ; wing-fai et al, ). while this article argues that caring responsibilities are not essentially gendered, women remain disproportionately affected (creative scotland, ). despite this recognition, feminist media scholars have noted that the challenges of care – and wider gender inequalities – are rendered unspeakable in industries that are characterised by high levels of competition and precarity, and in a wider postfeminist and neoliberal culture (gill, ; wing-fai et al, ). as leung wing-fai et al assert, the costs of the unspeakable nature of care ‘are borne heavily – often without support – by women, who often feel they must not talk about these issues’ ( : ). this silencing is exacerbated by the new labouring subjectivities demanded by the film and television industries which promote resilience, independence and self-regulation, in turn, displacing structural critique onto the individual worker (gill, ). in the current climate, this silencing is increasingly being challenged. in relation to care specifically, recent industry reports and initiatives have sought to highlight the precise barriers that parents and carers who work in the industries face (creative scotland, ; raising films, ). notably, this research has tended to focus on the practical challenges of care, employing quantitative methodologies to explore the numbers and percentages of people who view caring responsibilities as impacting negatively on their career. while these macro approaches are important in terms of identifying the scale of the issue, what has been less explored is the (gendered) experiential and lived consequences of these practical challenges for parents and carers. this article addresses this gap, by providing a detailed micro analysis of the testimonials of parents who work in the film and television industries that have been produced for and published on the website of uk activist organisation, raising films. raising films was established in to explore the challenges of reconciling work in the film and television industries with caring responsibilitiesi. as part of their activism, raising films solicit, invite and publish testimonials from film and television practitioners on their past and present experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the sector on their websiteii. as these testimonials are overwhelmingly written by women, i focus predominantly on mothers’ accounts. the public testimonials – written in practitioners’ own words – contribute to the wider challenging of silencing around issues of care in the film and television industries. further, they enable a crucial insight into the emotional and gendered dimensions of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the sector, offering an alternative to the dominant focus on practical challenges of care in more recent reports. individuals’ subjective experiences of working in the wider cultural industries, and the links of these experiences to their well- being, have begun to be documented (see mcrobbie, ; ross, ; hesmondhalgh and baker, ; lee, ). more recently, significant academic research has emerged that explores the specificities of women’s experiences of working in the film industry, including the ahrc funded calling the shots project at the university of southampton (cobb and williams, et al, – ). this article explores a specific dimension of women’s experiences, namely the gendered impact of caring responsibilities on the way in which women who work in the film and television industries feel. a widespread discourse in relation to exploring women’s subjective experiences of working in the sector relates to assumptions around secondary socialisation and the role model question (‘you can’t be what you can’t see’). this discourse is underpinned by a view that greater visibility of women working in the industries will lead to more women seeing this career path as viable. however, less attention has been paid to the specific ways in which women who work, or have worked, in the industries are prepared to talk about their lived experiences in public. i am not interested here in verifying the ‘truth’ behind individuals’ testimonials – while i have no reason to doubt that contributors are offering honest accounts, i am aware that the public nature of these testimonials may impact on what is/is not said. rather this article is concerned with identifying common, and potentially gendered, themes in women’s discussions of their experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the sector, paying particular attention to their articulation of feelings. literature review traditionally, the creative industries have been viewed as providing creative workers with high levels of fulfilment and self-realisation. however, recent scholarship complicates previously celebratory accounts of the rewards of creative labour, by highlighting the punishing and intense nature of work in these fields (banks, ; ross, ; hesmondhalgh and baker, ; gill, ; mcrobbie, ). while recognising that many creative workers find immense pleasure from their work, this scholarship focuses on more negative aspects of creative labour, such as long hours, erratic work patterns, low (sometimes no) pay, financial insecurity and an eradication of work/life boundaries. the film and television industries, like many wider cultural industries, are increasingly dominated by freelance workers and small independent companies, with the majority of workers on precarious, project-based, short term contracts with few benefits and little workplace protection. rosalind gill asserts that, ‘inequalities are neither accidental nor incidental but are produced by the labouring conditions themselves’ ( : ). in recent years, several scholars have explored the relationship between neoliberal work cultures and the stark inequalities that characterise the cultural industries (oakley and o’brien, ; o’brien, ; gill, ; wing-fai et al, ). in relation to gender inequalities specifically, directors uk’ ( ) ‘cut out of the picture’ report found that only . % of working uk film directors over the past decade were women and that uk films were over six times more likely to be directed by a man, statistics that show little improvement. these inequalities are not related to a lack of interest by women in working in the media industries, with graduates from film and media studies courses closely balanced in terms of gender ( : ). and, yet, on entering the industry, gender inequalities flourish and women’s career progression stalls. the situation is getting worse. in the past years, there has been a fall in the number of films with female directors supported by uk based funding bodies – in , . % of films supported by funders were directed by a woman, while in this had dropped to % ( : ). these findings echo those of the celluloid ceiling report in the us, which found that in women comprised just % of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working in the top grossing films, a % increase from but broadly comparable with the findings for (lauzen, : ). the industry is also heavily segregated by sex, with women disproportionately found in ‘feminine’ areas, such as make- up and hair styling and costume design (directors uk, : ). while women fare better in television, they remain under-represented in senior roles, and again segregation by sex is found in the genres of television programmes directed by women (skillset, ). there is little academic research that focuses exclusively on the impact of caring responsibilities on these gendered disparities (see dent, ; wing-fai et al, and wreyford, for notable exceptions), however, issues of care are raised repeatedly in wider scholarship on gender inequalities in the industries. natalie wreyford ( ) observes in her analysis of the recruitment practices of screenwriters that the growing shift towards informality in these industries further disadvantages those with caring responsibilities who are not able to do the necessary amount of networking needed to access job opportunities. additionally, the increasing move towards freelance contracts intersects powerfully with women’s opportunities to remain working in the industry, offering no maternity pay or parental rights. women are seen to fare better in permanent employment (morgan and nelligan, ). despite the lack of creative labour scholarship specifically on the issue of care, in , several industry reports and initiatives emerged that explored the impact of caring responsibilities on gendered inequalities in the film and television industries in more depth (directors uk, ; creative scotland, ; raising films, ). while a consideration of care is not central to the directors uk report on gendered inequalities amongst uk film directors, it draws attention to the ‘un-family-friendly’ nature of the ‘permanent short termism’ of the industry’s working cultures ( : ). creative scotland’s ( ) ‘screen equalities, diversity and inclusion’ report, based on a survey of over practitioners working in the scottish screen sector and looking at various barriers to access, includes a section on gender and parental responsibilities. it found that % of women viewed gender as a barrier to access the industries and, moreover, that women were % more likely than men to cite caring responsibilities as a specific barrier, despite more men identifying as parents across the survey as a whole ( : - ). in the open questions, respondents cited systematic barriers to balancing career progression with parental responsibility, including limited parental leave and rights; the need to work long, irregular (sometimes unpaid) hours; the expectation to travel; costs and availability of childcare. raising films’ ( ) ‘making it possible’ report is the most focused report to date on the impact of caring responsibilities on work in the uk film and television industries. this report, based on a survey of parents and carers working in film and television, found that % of respondents were female and % were male, suggesting, unsurprisingly, that caring responsibilities are a particularly salient issue for women ( : ). an earlier skillset report found that women in the film and television industries were leaving the industry due to difficulties reconciling caring responsibilities with careers in the sector (skillset, : ). despite this gendered exodus and recent industry initiatives to explore the issue in more depth, several feminist scholars have argued that there is a silencing around the challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work, connected to the new labouring subjectivities demanded by these industries (gill, ; jones and pringle, ; wing-fai et al, ). anne o’brien argues that the self-regulation demanded by media workers means that there is a tendency for them to see subordination at work as ‘an intrinsic feature of their creative labor’ ( : ). this is not to deny these workers agency in terms of their understanding of the power of capital, but rather to argue that ‘the disciplining power of reputation and the social dimension of working relationships at an individual level far outweigh any capacity of individual workers to address their own precarity, as well as any gender bias they endure’ (o’brien, : ). further, the shift towards informal recruitment practices and hiring workers as contractors rather than employees has resulted in a lack of avenues through which to speak out against these inequalities and little to no protection against gender discrimination (morgan and nelligan, : ). scholars have explored the affective implications of neoliberal working cultures, arguing that the individualism and self-reliance demanded by these industries produce feelings of personal failure and self-blame, rather than structural critique (mcrobbie, ). gill ( ) argues that this silencing is exacerbated by a postfeminist context in which feminist battles against sexism have supposedly been won and are no longer relevant. in her interviews with women cultural workers, she detected a lack the critical vocabulary to speak out against gender inequalities, rendering them ‘unspeakable’ ( : ). deborah jones and judith k. pringle ( ) similarly found a lack of critical language for and willingness to talk about feminism or gender inequalities in their interviews with below-the-line workers in the new zealand film industry, while in her interviews with key decision makers in the irish film board, susan liddy ( ) observed that gender discrimination and inequalities were evaded or denied. at time of writing, in the wake of allegations against harvey weinstein and the rise of movements such as #metoo and #timesup, gender inequalities in the film and television industries are increasingly becoming ‘speakable’. however, even in this era of a heightened visibility of feminism, gill convincingly maintains that postfeminism continues to exert a ‘powerful regulatory force’ on women in contemporary life ( : ). she draws on arlie russell hochschild’s ( ) influential notion of ‘distinctive feeling rules’ to examine the way in which postfeminist culture attempts to ‘shape what and how women are enabled to feel and how their emotional states should be presented’, outlawing certain emotions – anger, complaint, insecurity – while privileging others in a way that diminishes resistance to structural gendered inequalities ( : ). in the following section, i explore women’s public testimonials of the challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work in the film and television industries in more depth. in doing so, i move beyond the quantitative and practical focus of recent reports, instead exploring both the emotional dimensions of how gendered inequalities related to caring responsibilities are experienced, but also how these emotions and feelings are articulated subjectively by women working in the sector. raising films’ testimonials there are currently testimonials written by film and television practitioners and published on the raising films website, spanning an almost three-year period and varying in length between – words. the first is written on th may and the most recent is dated th march . the authors encompass a range of roles across the film and television industries, including screenwriters, directors, producers, actors, editors, cinematographers, focus pullers and directors of photography. the majority are freelance (although this is not always explicitly stated) and based in the uk, although some are us based and others have worked transnationally. of the testimonials, have caring responsibilities for children. (the remaining five testimonials include three written by childfree practitioners on their experiences of being children of creative parents, and two written from the perspective of family-friendly production companies. i do not explore these here). of the parents’ testimonials, there are six by fathers, three that are framed as mother/father collaborations and a further testimonial written as a collaboration between two mothers that work together. as the overwhelming majority of testimonials are written by mothers – in total – i focus predominantly on womens’ accounts here, although i briefly touch upon some gendered differences that emerge in comparison with the fathers’ accounts. significantly, the architecture of the site, with the testimonials presented alongside one another, encourages the user to see the testimonials collectively rather than in isolation. throughout the writing of this article, the presentation of the testimonials on the site has undergone significant changes. at time of writing, the testimonials are accessed via a tab labelled ‘stories’ on the website’s front page. they are presented in a patchwork formation alongside other examples of engagement with parents and carers who work in the film and tv industries, including interviews and case studies. each testimonial is clearly marked through a header, and typically accompanied by a name, date and an image of the author – usually at work and/or with their child or wider family. the user can then click on a specific testimonial to read in full. there are no specific guidelines on tone or content when authors are writing testimonials, with an acknowledgement that all accounts are valid as long as they are honest. however, some potential questions to address are offered, including the way in which caring responsibilities have shaped or changed creative practices over time and thoughts on how to make the industry a more sustainable place to work for parents and carers. the implicit address is to other practitioners, with the aim of establishing a supportive community and offering advice. contributors are given the option of having a short bio included, as well as requesting that their submissions are anonymised (notably, these requests are very rare). the testimonials are copy edited for clarity, and contributors have final approval and the opportunity to request small amendments after publication. however, as raising films view their site as a platform rather than a publication, this editing is extremely minimal.iii given the pervasive culture of silencing around the challenges of care in the industry, it is striking that almost all of the authors identify themselves by name and the majority illustrate their accounts with photos. these testimonials are published on a public website and are easily searchable, however, as i am using quotes selectively and framing them in ways the women may not have intended, i have not included names here. there are only two anonymous testimonials, which are particularly candid in their critique of the industry. my analysis involved categorising the testimonials in terms of date; sex of author; occupation; work status (freelance, self-employed, permanent); parenting status (mother/father/child; co- parent/single; primary caregiver or not); race and the country in which they were currently working. not all of these details were readily available, but because the majority of these public testimonials are attached the named people with a public presence online, i was able to check some additional details through a quick online search. this enabled me to build a picture of the dominant patterns in who were creating these testimonies, which were predominantly uk-based, white mothers. for this research, i have focused on gender and parental status, but further intersectional research needs to be undertaken to explore the significance of other identities. it is interesting to consider categories that were more difficult to identify. for example, all six of the fathers’ testimonials explicitly referred to a partner and noted which was the primary caregiver, whereas relationship and caregiver status was much harder to identify in the mothers’ testimonials. only four women explicitly identified as single mothers, but half of the women’s testimonials made no mention of a partner at all, suggesting women are more likely to view childcare as their personal responsibility. writing for a public, activist site, the women often directly state their intention to challenge the industries’ silencing around care by sharing their own experiences. over a quarter of the testimonials mention this silencing explicitly through discussions of their previous fears of disclosing pregnancy or care arrangements in case they ceased to get work. while feminist scholars have argued that this silencing potentially produces a climate in which these challenges are internalised, in contrast the women’s testimonials frequently voice their frustrations with the industries’ intensive working cultures and the barriers these cultures create for parents. and yet, the testimonials are highly ambivalent. these frustrations co-exist with public declarations of love for creative work and a reinforcement of certain labouring subjectivities. complaint is frequently privileged over explicit calls for structural change. further, the loose remit of the testimonials – to offer advice and support to other parents and carers in the industry – creates a context in which women offset their industry critiques with humour and warmth to enhance their relatability (kanai, ). it is also notable that the gendered nature of the inequalities faced by women is rarely explicitly discussed. however, i argue that the collective presentation of the testimonials – published next to one another – foregrounds the structural nature of these gendered inequalities even if the individual content does not. in turn, the inclusion of a small number of testimonials from fathers allows for certain gendered differences to begin to emerge in terms of the emotional implications of negotiating caring responsibilities with creative work. women are much more likely to discuss the impact of reconciling childcare with creative work on their self-identity than men, suggesting that the emotional violence of neoliberal working cultures is highly gendered. negotiating ‘passionate work’ and childcare it is both motherhood and a love of working in the film and television industries that binds the community together and this dual mother/creative worker identity is a key source of ambivalence throughout. one of the most immediate findings is the way in which the women articulate a deep love of their jobs many in the opening couple of sentences. a screenwriter begins her testimonial by stating, ‘i have wanted to be a writer (capital w, always) my entire life’. similarly, an assistant director who left the sector after having children, starts by saying, ‘having a career in the media was the only job i ever wanted to do’. declarations of love for their jobs resonates with angela mcrobbie’s identification of cultural work as ‘passionate work’, often described by workers as corresponding with childhood dreams ( : ). related to this passion is a frequent mention of ‘luck’, indicating that many individuals see themselves as privileged to be able to work in the creative sector. creative labour scholarship has revealed that a deep love for cultural work is not unique to female workers. however, notably none of the fathers mention this love, suggesting a specific tension exists between motherhood and work in the testimonials. despite public declarations of love for creative work, the advent of caring responsibilities acts as a catalyst for critical reflection on the unsustainability of the industries’ labouring practices. several women reflect back on a time (pre-childcare) when they tolerated the challenges of work, but with the benefit of hindsight and a palpable frustration with the incompatibilities of the industries’ working cultures with family life. one woman notes that: having spent the last years working hard and gaining experience in an industry that i have always found to be very rewarding, i am now increasingly frustrated that the same industry is so unsupportive of parents. similarly, another comments that: i find it so frustrating that there isn’t a balance to have this career and be a mum. what if i were to call one morning and say i couldn’t come in as one of my boys wasn’t well? i can’t imagine being employed again and word would soon get out that i was unreliable and uncommitted. while having children may have prompted women to speak out, many women describe recognising the incompatibility between the industries’ working conditions and caring responsibilities even before having children. recollections of anxiety and fear are prominent across the women’s testimonials, particularly in relation to what would happen to their careers if they got pregnant, highlighting the difficulty of getting back into industries that are so dependent on maintaining informal networks. a cinematographer notes that, ‘people were positive about my pregnancy but there was a vague undercurrent of uncertainty – was i in danger of indefinitely dropping off the face of the planet and kissing goodbye to any meaningful career?’ the questioning nature here speaks to a culture in which the challenges of care are frequently internalised, and in which few mothers at senior levels are visible. the way in which fear is commonly articulated by the women - and notably not by any of the men - also suggests that childcare is perceived, from the outset, as their responsibility. it is striking that the one testimonial written by a female, childfree actor shares more in common with mothers’ testimonials in articulating similar fears of ‘parenthood as loom[ing] as a frightening, destabilising prospect’, than with the testimonials of fathers who are not primary caregivers. similar fears are identified by gill ( ) in her anonymised interviews with women cultural workers, yet in contrast to gill’s notion of ‘unspeakability’, it is striking that across the testimonials, women recall these anxieties publicly. challenging the denial of care and self-care one of the most common themes recurring across the women’s testimonials is denial, with women openly critiquing the way in which the sector’s ‘always on’ cultures previously required them to suppress many aspects of care. this challenging of denial manifests in many different ways, including recollections of denial of pregnancies and postnatal needs, public denial of having children and denial of self-care. women recall being ‘in denial’ about their pregnancies, for example, working right through them often with a highly detrimental impact to their well-being. one woman’s testimonial offers an apt example: i was terrified, literally terrified about how motherhood would affect my productivity. how sad is that? i have wanted to be a mum since forever but i knew that i would have to get all my ducks lined up first so that i would have the machinery in place to get back to being me once baby was out. pregnancy wasn’t just a chance to stop and enjoy the experience, to enjoy my body, it was a chance to write a play, to finalise treatments for the sitcom, that bbc drama. in a similar vein, another recounts how a fear of diminishing future work prospects prompted her to physically hide her pregnancy: when i was pregnant i felt that i had to keep my bump hidden for as long as possible. somehow i thought that having a baby would mean i would no longer be considered for any jobs. i often wonder if there is a bias against hiring a woman if she is a mum. is there an unconscious warning bell on the part of the decision maker? in one of my first meetings back, a producer (a woman) looked at my cv and suggested the last couple of years showed a ‘reluctance to work’. i was stunned. is this really how maternity leave is perceived? childbirth is included in recollections of denial. a producer speaks of being in labour and ‘still emailing suppliers, sorting things out. my brain had this surprising capacity to just ignore what was really going on’. she relates this experience to a pragmatic understanding of the impossibility of stopping production on a personal creative venture with no budget, again pointing to the punishing labouring practices of the industry where low (sometimes no) pay makes it impossible to schedule breaks in advance. women also recount suppressing their postnatal needs. a writer describes a ‘low point’ of ‘hiding in a tv exec’s office, breast- pumping during a break in a story meeting’. another recalls asking her aunt to sit with her - week-old baby outside in the car while she delivered a pitch, to avoid the executives finding out how recently she’d had a baby. the language here – ‘hiding’ and fearing being ‘f[ound] out’ – again foregrounds the way in which the challenges of care are continually displaced onto individual women. the women reveal that the industries’ expectation of denial extends to mentions of family life too. discussing a colleague enquiring after her pregnancy, one woman reveals: though he is genuinely interested and patiently waits for my response, i suddenly realise how guarded i feel about discussing the incredible new human being in my life. why? it should be natural to volunteer this information, so why don’t i feel free to gush? my daughter appears to have fallen in with the unmentionables: pregnancy, children and childcare, motherhood, a healthy romantic relationship…in fact any passion or commitment that could be perceived as preceding your passion and commitment to the job at hand. the sector’s ‘always on’ culture is similarly identified by a screenwriter as fuelling denial. she argues, ‘there are never any concessions that you might have family commitments when you get notes on a friday afternoon for a monday morning delivery’. she sadly concludes that the industry expects workers to ‘deny [their] children and [their] life. be a robot’. with the advent of digital technology, the boundaries between the private home and the public workplace are eroding even further. one woman recalls that, ‘with my son i would panic and rush to the other end of the house if he cried while i was on the phone. i felt like one squeal from him would end my career’. another woman recounts how: work crept into my baby’s bath and bedtime routine. singing frère jacques while negotiating a budget change is very tricky. on one job, my mornings began with a stream of impatient e-mails on my phone from a client in new york. not ideal when you’re changing that morning nappy. while some feminist scholars have pointed to the way in which this slippage may usefully allow women flexible working patterns, it also means that the need to deny care does not just apply to a physical place of work, but becomes much more diffuse. a particularly lengthy testimonial reflects on this demand to display no emotion at work in the film and television industries: for the most part women are told if they want to be working in the film industry they must be really strong and not lose their tempers or cry at work. they need to do everything they can to prove wrong the cliched idea that women are too emotional and cannot separate their feelings from their day jobs. this requirement of the industries to deny aspects of care recalls hochschild’s work on the way in which the management of emotion by institutional work cultures is inherently gendered: women are consistently more likely to suppress or deny their emotions than men ( / : ). the very fact that women are deemed to be more emotional than men is often used as a way to invalidate their emotions (hochschild, / : ). ultimately, she argues that the cost of this management of feeling is that it ‘affects the degree to which we listen to feeling and sometimes our very capacity to feel’ ( / : ). speaking with the benefit of hindsight, the women’s testimonials reflect on the highly negative implications of not listening to their feelings for their own self-care. one woman recalls her refusal to accept help after going back to work when her daughter was two weeks old for fear of people thinking that she ‘was diverting attention or draining resources from the film’. as she describes, this resulted in her hiding her exhaustion and pain. similarly, another recalls returning to work when her baby was very young: i was living the dream. i had it all…except for my sanity. because my baby didn’t sleep and after a while i was shattered beyond comprehension and it was slowly dawning on me that my life actually had changed somewhat, in fact rather profoundly, and that this hard-core juggling act was utterly unsustainable and sooner or later, if i didn’t stop for a moment, i’d drop the ball somewhere – or i’d drop the baby. the expectation of the industries to suppress all aspects of care is further articulated by many women as creating a profound identity crisis, due to their intimate connection between self and work. this identity split is best illustrated by the distinction that several of the women make between their working lives pre-children and their working lives after, and their frustration at the way in which the industry’s working cultures make it highly difficult to reconcile the two. as one recalls: so much of this is about me trying to juggle, feeling guilty, losing myself, unsure if i wanted to be a good mum or have a successful career, and nearly always feeling i was failing at both…my career had provided both my sense of identity and my self-worth and now i had neither. [on having children] i had absolutely no idea who i was any more. the only thing i was sure of was that i was a failure. this rupture in identity is sometimes then articulated as leading to a decrease in self- confidence and self-worth. as a screenwriter notes, ‘when i became a mother, i still had the purpose, arguably a more important one as the life-support system for another person. however, i struggled hugely with my new identity and my dwindling sense of self-worth and confidence’. self-doubt is a common theme across the testimonials and operates in a vicious circle in relation to identity crises. as the women recognise, after having children they have less dedicated time and headspace to write, which fuels their lack of self-confidence, resulting in them working less, which feeds their loss of identity further. many stress that they need to work – to do the job they love – to survive on a psychological level. mums make better workers while the women’s testimonials commonly critique the industries’ demands to deny all aspects of care, at the same time, denial of self-care is also advocated as a solution by some of the women to reconciling creative work with caring responsibilities. a recurring piece of advice offered by women is to use time as effectively as possible in order to fit in more work. a producer director recalls that she used her pregnancy ‘as a natural deadline to get a short film shot’. in a bullet pointed list of other pieces of advice for balancing creative work with childcare, she further describes using all available downtime as efficiently as possible – working while her children were napping; taking a notepad to the park to jot down ideas while her children played and letting her ‘imagination wander while dozing, [m]using on a creative problem at the same time, using a different part of the brain (i hoped so anyway!)’ similarly, another admits, ‘granted, i have denied myself many naps i could definitely have done with, but for me, her sleep time is mummy’s writing time.’ notably, these solutions, while realistic and accessible, do not disrupt the ‘always on’ culture of the industries that many women also critique in their testimonials, leaving the onus for change firmly on individual women. indeed, many women are keen in the testimonials to dispel the dominant assumption that having children diminishes women’s passion for creative work– a myth that is often used to explain away women’s underrepresentation in the industries. several of the women stress that caring responsibilities are not incompatible with the new labouring subjectivities demanded by neoliberal working cultures, instead reinforcing these subjectivities by highlighting the ways in which having children has made them better workers. this is exemplified by the testimonial below, which highlights the symbiotic relationship between parenthood and creative work: in this creative, grafting, collaborative industry we learn stamina, we learn will- power, we learn which battles are worth fighting, how to negotiate when you have nothing, and we learn how to really, actively listen. these tools are gold for parenthood – and parenthood reinforces them so you come back to work stronger. further, the public nature of the posts may also play a role in dictating how women frame motherhood and creative work. one woman’s testimonial is explicitly addressed to industry: to producers, broadcasters, funding bodies, agencies and clients – raising a child makes you an amazing multi-tasker, a high-end communicator, an incredible project manager, a fabulous collaborator and a unique storyteller, able to access deep emotions. sounds like a director you might want to hire. many others articulate newly developed traits that fit neatly with constructions of the neoliberal model worker, such as flexibility, adaptability, heightened efficiency, increased stamina and enhanced negotiation skills. one argues that ‘adaptability is certainly one of the skills you have to hone [after having children] – indispensable in creating a documentary film’. other women comment on becoming better at saying no and being assertive and efficient after having children. as one woman notes, ‘my new ‘tiger mom’ attitude works wonders. if i want something, i’m sure as hell gonna go for it now.’ there are softer workplace benefits attributed to having children too, such as an ability to connect with colleagues and film subjects in a more intimate manner. this reinforcement of new labouring subjectivities by cultural workers is in keeping with many of the findings of creative labour scholarship, which argues that these subjectivities – marked by vigilance, self-regulation and autonomy – operate to displace structural inequalities onto the individual (gill, ; lee, ). there is an overlap here with wider scholarship on neoliberal parenting cultures. in her study of parenting discourses under new labour, val gillies found that mothers bear the brunt of initiatives designed to promote ‘good parenting’, where individual (women’s) responsibility is stressed as the solution to addressing broader social problems of disadvantage ( : ). despite the heightened visibility of a popular feminism (banet-weiser and portwood-stacer, ) in more recent years, gill argues that this individualisation remains, with an emphasis on self-confidence increasingly privileged over calls for structural change ( : ). ‘sorry this is all very ‘woe-is-me’’ ultimately, the testimonials are highly ambivalent and highlight the emotional messiness of women speaking publicly about the challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work. on the one hand, they reveal critical awareness of the punishing nature of the industries’ working cultures and the implications of these cultures for women’s emotional well-beings. notably, feelings deemed ‘outlawed’ by postfeminist culture, such as complaint and insecurity, are commonly and publicly expressed. arguably, in the particular context of sharing experiences on an activist website, there is less of a need to adhere to hegemonic feeling rules. in this space, women often challenge the requirement of the industry to suppress certain emotions around care and the emotional labour of care itself. and yet, on the other hand, while feeling rules are rejected, they can still be seen to play a role in how the women negotiate their articulations of the challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work. for example, while a few testimonials advocate changes to the industries’ working cultures or wider social structures around care, calling for shorter working hours, more job shares and an increase in state funded childcare, it is much more common for women to frame their experiences as complaint rather than as explicit calls for structural change. further, rarely do the testimonials express anger, suggesting that other emotions – frustration in particular – are easier to voice. humour and warmth are also common in the tone of testimonials, as a way in which women establish a sense of community with other anonymous women (kanai, : ). women often joke about the daily trials of caring for young children - recounting stories of explosive nappies; awkward breastfeeding moments; endless pureeing of obscure vegetables – in a way that arguably creates a sense of relatable community with other women. the below testimonial offers an apt example: it is am or thereabouts. i am typing this article one-handed, whilst feeding my month old baby girl melody some pureed parsnips that i cooked myself earlier this morning (not organic, but give me some credit, i did check them for mud). i am wearing sweatpants that i slept in and my hair is not so much an updo as an updon’t. i need a wee. desperately. this testimonial’s light tone resonates with akane kanai’s analysis of the ‘affective negotiations’ of young women using tumblr, in which she finds that women typically use humour to render their frustrations- in this context, with post feminist regulation – palatable by turning them into ‘funny, bite sized moments’ ( : ). notably, though, humour in the testimonials doesn’t resolve the central tension at their heart. through deeper analysis, what becomes apparent is the unresolvable – and highly gendered – emotional violence inflicted by neoliberal working cultures, cultures that demand women deny all aspects of care/self-care with highly detrimental implications for their mental and physical well-beings. this unresolvable tension is hinted at in the final sentences of some of the testimonials, which strive and struggle to be upbeat. for example, one testimonial ends by saying: ‘i’m not sure what path my documentary career will take next, but i know that i want to keep making films, and be actively involved in caring for my son. i hope i’ll be able to find a satisfactory way of doing both…’ another ends hers by asking, ‘it can only get easier, right? here’s hoping’. it is also significant that while frustration is directed at the industries’ working cultures, rarely are these cultures connected explicitly to gender inequalities. only two of the women’s testimonials explicitly mention feminism. an actor and screenwriter notes that ‘feminism…has not slowed the ‘motherhood’ hamster wheel’, arguing that men need to father more and women less. a screenwriter talks of ‘an embarrassingly late feminist awakening’, placing her experiences of workplace gender inequalities in the context of other high profile news stories about the eradication of women’s reproductive rights and women being sacked for refusing to wear heels at work. three other testimonials explicitly mention sexism and misogyny, two in the context of being asked inappropriate questions about family situations in interviews and another in relation to misogynistic representations of women and girls on screen. only a handful of other testimonials explicitly note that women are expected to bear the brunt of caring responsibilities in contrast to men. for example, a single mother comments on gendered social expectations around childcare, arguing that, ‘if a man says “i’m going off for six weeks to do a project in the states,” no-one would question his ability as a father; if a woman said it, her relationship with her children would be questioned.’ ‘would i think in these terms if i was a bloke?’ however, while gendered inequalities may not be explicitly addressed in the content of the majority of the accounts, the presentation of the testimonials – displayed collectively and alongside those of men on the raising films site– allows for gendered dimensions to begin to emerge. there are only six testimonials written exclusively by fathers – two identify as primary caregivers, one other talks about having an ‘equal partnership’ with his wife as both work full-time and the remaining three refer to their wives as the primary caregivers. this small number in itself suggests, unsurprisingly, that care is a more salient issue for women. due to the limited testimonials from men, it is difficult to make any definitive comparisons between how men and women articulate their lived experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with creative work. my next research project will explore these gendered differences further, by interviewing both fathers and mothers who work in the film and television industries about their experiences. however, it is possible to start to identify some gendered distinctions. none of the men feel the need to mention their love of their work or comment on how fatherhood has made them better workers, suggesting less of a tension between fatherhood and creative labour even for the primary caregivers. all also explicitly mention their partners in their testimonials, often thanking them for their support, suggesting that they don’t see care as their singular responsibility. there are distinctions between primary caregivers and non- primary caregivers. notably, the three fathers who are not primary caregivers all speak of working on location in the roles of director, producer and production manager, suggesting that childcare is a particularly salient issue for parents in these specific roles. all three talk of the all-consuming nature of the ‘always on’ working cultures of the industries, framing this less in terms of their own identity (as the women’s testimonials tend to do) and more in terms of the well-being of their family relationships. unsurprisingly, the primary caregivers highlight the practical challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work, such as the inflexibility of nursery provision and the difficulty scheduling regular childcare with an erratic income. the testimonial of one father, who works in film production, is particularly interesting for calling attention to the gendered dimensions of inequalities around care in the film and television industries. he notes that, despite having an egalitarian relationship with his wife who also works full-time, ‘as a man and as someone working in film production, there is an outward perception that the responsibility for care of our daughter should fall on her mother’. he recounts having a stressful negotiation over being able to attend his partner’s antenatal scan and only being permitted to take one day off for the birth of his daughter. the way in which raising films solicit and publish testimonials from both men and women could be seen to divert attention from the specific gendered dimensions of inequalities around childcare. and yet, if gender inequalities are often unspeakable in the industries (as found in interviews with creative workers conducted by feminist media scholars), then perhaps placing men’s and women’s accounts alongside one another actually creates a more conducive space for women to speak freely about the challenges they have encountered, divorced from a specifically gendered framework and framed more neutrally as the challenges of parenting. the inclusion of testimonials from fathers – albeit in small numbers with only written by primary caregivers – also plays a minor role in challenging the essentialist notion that women should be responsible for childcare. at the same time, this inclusion begins to point to ways in which the emotional violence of neoliberal working cultures may be particularly gendered, as illustrated by the different experiences of women and men, where women are much more likely to articulate this violence on a personal level, bound up with their self-identity. concluding thoughts at the heart of this article is a call for the importance of thinking about the gendered dimensions of well-being in relation to contemporary working cultures in the film and television industries and beyond. without a radical overhaul of the working conditions in the film and tv industries – and creative industries more widely – it is difficult to see how we can make strides towards a more inclusive and egalitarian sector. recent creative labour scholarship has interrogated the important role that trade unions may play in addressing these issues (hesmondhalgh and baker, ; mcrobbie, ). however, the intensely individualistic working conditions of the contemporary film and television industries, where individuals are required and expected to bear the brunt of any risk and where workplaces are no longer fixed entities, mitigate against collective action in the workplace (mcrobbie, : ). these cultures encourage an internalisation of the challenges of work, and ‘self-blame where social structures are increasingly illegible or opaque serves the interests of the new capitalism well, ensuring the absence of social critique’ (mcrobbie, : ). mcrobbie continues that these contemporary working cultures can operate to reinforce traditional gender values, whereby women are forced to return to rigid gender roles by being excluded from the workplace due to caring responsibilities ( : ). what is striking about the testimonials is the way in which, rather than internalising challenges, women frequently identify and complain about the incompatibility of the sector’s working conditions with childcare as well as voicing their insecurities about the future of their creative careers. however, while a small number of women directly call for changes to the sector’s working cultures – such as shorter hours or greater understanding of caring responsibilities – the majority frame their experiences more as complaint than as explicit calls for structural change. further, very few of the women’s testimonials explicitly mention feminism or gender inequalities. this finding resonates with wider feminist creative labour scholarship, which notes the tendency for individual creative workers to evade discussions of gender inequalities (gill, ; liddy, ; jones and pringle, ). in turn, the women’s testimonials reveal a deep attachment to care, foregrounding the way in which childcare is seen as their responsibility. few testimonials explicitly challenge the way in which care is essentialised. ultimately, the ambivalence found within the testimonials points to the emotional messiness of women speaking publicly about the challenges of reconciling caring responsibilities with creative work. however, while individual testimonials rarely explicitly evoke feminism in their content, their collective presentation on the raising films site allows for a structural picture to emerge of emotional labour that lessens the pressure on individual women. in this way, we can read the testimonials in part as a kind of consciousness-raising, akin to that of second-wave feminist practices of the s, in which the personal is rendered political. there is power in giving voice to these experiences which typically remain hidden and silenced, making it harder to ignore the problem or to argue that gender inequalities are not an issue in these fields. as one woman notes in her testimonial, by not talking about these issues, there is a danger that ‘we fuel the problems, the inflexibility’. similarly, by only focusing on the practical aspects of care, rather than the lived experiences and emotional dimensions of care, we are only able to devise partial solutions. the testimonials play only one small part of vital activism into addressing (gendered) inequalities around care in the film and television workforce. and yet, despite their relatively small number, they can be seen to play a role in the process of challenging individualisation and moving towards a recognition of the structural nature of gender inequalities around care. by placing individual testimonials in a collective space – testimonials that have unique inflections but in which recurring concerns and anxieties appear again and again – it becomes difficult to see the challenges of care as a personal, woman’s problem. while surveys and official industry initiatives have shown the scale of the problem in more recent years, identifying many of the practical challenges that parents and carers face, the testimonials offer a different perspective, underscoring the emotional implications of neoliberal working cultures on mothers in particular. gender inequalities may remain largely unspeakable in this context, but they also become increasingly difficult to ignore. references banet-weiser, s. and portwood-stacer, l. 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( ) the managed heart: commercialisation of human feeling. berkeley and los angeles, california: university of california press, edition. jones, d. and pringle, j.k. ( ) unmanageable inequalities: sexism in the film industry. the sociological review (s ): – . https://www.southampton.ac.uk/cswf/index.page http://www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/ / /screenequalitiessurveymay .pdf http://www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/ / /screenequalitiessurveymay .pdf https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/uploads% f -erk ak v lnpl- dacf f e c b e bf% fcut+out+of+the+picture+-+report.pdf https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/uploads% f -erk ak v lnpl- dacf f e c b e bf% fcut+out+of+the+picture+-+report.pdf https://d dqxe uxvcr.cloudfront.net/uploads% f -erk ak v lnpl- dacf f e c b e bf% fcut+out+of+the+picture+-+report.pdf kanai, a. ( ) on not taking the self seriously: resiliance, relatability and humour in young women’s tumblr blogs. european journal of cultural studies online first, – . doi: . / lauzen, m. ( ) the celluloid ceiling: behind-the-scenes employment of women on the top , , and films of . available at: https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/ / / _celluloid_ceiling_report.pdf(date of access: . . ) lee, d. ( ) the ethics of insecurity: risk, individualization and value in british independent television production. television and new media ( ): – . lee, d. ( ) independent television production in the uk. london: palgrave macmillan.liddy, s. ( ) “open to all and everybody?” the irish film board: accounting for the scarcity of women screenwriters. feminist media studies ( ): – . mcrobbie, a. ( ) clubs to companies: notes on the decline of political culture in the speeded up creative worlds. cultural studies ( ): – . mcrobbie, a. ( ) be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. cambridge, uk: polity press. morgan, g. and nelligan, p. ( ) labile labour – gender, flexibility and creative work. the sociological review (s ): – . oakley, k. and o’brien, d. ( ) learning to labour unequally: understanding the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and inequality. social identities ( ): – . o’brien, a. ( ) producing television and reproducing gender. television and new media. ( ): – . raising films ( ) making it possible: voices of parents and carers in the uk film and tv industry. available at: https://www.raisingfilms.com/wp- content/uploads/ / /making-it-possible-full-report-results.pdf (date of access: . . ) raising films ( – ) testimonials. available at: https://www.raisingfilms.com/stories/(last date of access: . . ) ross, a. ( ) nice work if you can get it: life and labor in precarious times. new york: nyu press. skillset. ( ) women in the creative media industries. available at: http://www.ewawomen.com/uploads/files/surveyskillset.pdf (date of access: . . ) wing-fai, l., gill, r. and randle, k. ( ) getting in, getting on, getting out? women as career scramblers in the uk film and television industries. the sociological review (s ): – . wreyford, n. ( ) gender inequality in screenwriting work. cham: palgrave macmillan. https://www.raisingfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /making-it-possible-full-report-results.pdf https://www.raisingfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /making-it-possible-full-report-results.pdf http://www.ewawomen.com/uploads/files/surveyskillset.pdf wreyford, n. ( ) birds of a feather: informal recruitment practices and gendered outcomes for screenwriting work in the uk film industry. the sociological review (s ): – . i more information on raising films can be found here: https://www.raisingfilms.com/ ii i am familiar with their activism having worked with them before, however i have not been involved in any way with the production or publication of the testimonials, which are publicly available. iii personal email correspondence with sophie mayer, independent scholar and one of raising films’ founders. date: . . . market orientation and innovators’ success: an exploration of the influence of customer and competitor orientation received june , /accepted august , j. technol. manag innov. , volume , issue market orientation and innovators’ success: an exploration of the influence of customer and competitor orientation michael lewrick , maktoba omar , robert l. williams, jr. abstract the concepts of market orientation and innovation and their interrelationship with business success have been explored from a number of perspectives. however, research in this area has not explored the differences between start-up and mature companies. the research study acquired data from over two hundred chief operating officers (ceo’s) and managing directors from both start-up and mature companies. the results illustrate the differences in both types of company and reveals new insights with regard to market orientation and its constituent elements and its relationship with both incremental and radical innovations. key research results are that strong competitor orientation, a key ingredient of market orientation, has positive relationship to incremental innovation for start-up companies but it is contra productive for mature companies. in mature organizations a strong customer orientation is associated with radical innovation. keywords: innovation; market orientation; customer orientation; competitor orientation. journal of technology management & innovation munich university of applied sciences, department of business administration, am stadtpark ; munich, germany email: mlewrick@aol.com edinburgh napier university, the business school, school of marketing, tourism and languages, craiglockhart campus, edinburgh, eh dj email: m.omar@napier.ac.uk assistant professor of marketing, saint mary’s college, department of business and economics, notre dame, in - email: rlwjr@saintmarys.edu issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios introduction this study investigates the effects of different parameters of market orientation on radical and incremental innovation in both start-up and mature companies. this contrasts to other research in this area as distinguishing between start-up and mature companies yields new insights about the transformation process in the growth of innovative companies. market orientation is generally recognized as part of the business strategy of companies and it is considered as an important strategic orientation in literature (hunt and lambe ; gatignon and xuereb ). the concept of market orientation as a business strategy includes the collection of market relevant information. the information is distributed within the organisation with the aim to align products and services to customer needs. the foundation of this is based on the “marketing concept” (drucker ; levitt ). however, market orientation goes beyond the concept and it is associated with the implementation of this approach (wren ). to be market orientated implies that the firm embraces a strategy to obtain and use information about the environment and to disseminate this information throughout the firm. as mentioned before, the foundation of the marketing discipline is the “marketing concept” and the origin of this concept is in the focus by the firm on the customer and their needs (drucker ; levitt ). in the context of this study innovation is measured by three categories: counts of incremental, radical and overall innovation. incremental innovations are the improvements/expansions of existing products, services, processes, technical or administrative conditions. incremental innovation does not cause a significant departure from status-quo. in contrast, radical innovations in products, services, processes, etc. are breakthroughs that fundamentally change a product or service or process. overall innovativeness is the total of all innovations put into practice, radical and incremental in all typologies. these categories have been clearly identified as measures of innovatory activity by a number of authors (tidd, bessant and pavitt : gatignon et al. ; garcia and calantone : utterback ). market orientation can be defined as the organizational culture that most effectively and efficiently creates the necessary behaviors for the creation of superior value for customers and, thus, superior performance for the business (narver and slater ). the term market orientation has been used in many directions and often the terms customer focused, market driven, and customer centric have become terms associated with market orientation (deshpande ). within this study market orientation is considered to consist of four pillars (a) customer centric, (b) customer intelligence, (c) competitor orientation, and (d) market dynamism. a more comprehensive definition of each dimension of market orientation is outlined below. in the following section a short literature review is given and teases out the definition of the components of market orientation. afterwards the key questions of the research instrument and research design with two key hypotheses to test in this study are outlined. the link between market orientation and innovation is demonstrated and from this the variation between start-up and mature companies is discussed. recommendations as to how performance of a firm can be enhanced are then made. market orientation, innovation and success the positive influence of market orientation to business success has been addressed in several studies (greenley ; hooley et al. ; langerak ; kahn ; cano et al. ; zhuo et al. ; gainer and padanyi ; kara et al. ; hult et al. ). lewrick ( ) categorised companies in different performance levels with regard to innovation and business success. the scholar highlights that “a typical low performing company lacks in customer orientation. in many cases the strategy emphasis on a strong product development process without considering the customer needs (lewrick, : )“ the relationship between market orientation and innovations has been also addressed by studies from kohli and jaworski ; rueckert ; slater and narver ; kwaku ; gatignon and xuereb; . kohli and jaworksi suggest that “market orientation entails: ( ) one or more departments engaging in activities geared toward developing an understanding of customers’ current and future needs and the factors affecting them; ( ) sharing of this understanding across departments; and ( ) the various departments engaging in activities designed to meet select customers needs” ( p. ). j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios the cross-functional share of information and knowledge might trigger invention and streamline the innovation process leading to market success. however, the negative influence of market orientation, especially on radical innovations, has been detected (bennett and cooper ; lawton and parasuraman ). lawton and parasuraman ( ) revealed in a study that the adoption of the marketing concept did not affect the success of new product ideas in the market or the innovativeness of new product offerings. other scholars concluded that a strong customer orientation has an negative impact on market success of new products and services (christensen and bower ; leonard-barton and doyle ), while others claim that customer orientation leads to more innovations (von hippel ). market and business opportunities might arise from extensive research and will reach the market push effect, or the market has the need for something different or new – the pull effect. both approaches (push and pull) might be essential to be innovative and tidd et al. comment that: “sometimes the “push” will dominate, sometimes the “pull”, but successful innovations require interaction between the two” ( , p. ). some studies investigate the market orientation and innovation of new ventures or small firms and their success (audretsch ; cohen and klepper ; verbees and meulenberg, ; hyvonen and tuominen ). bigliardi et al ( ) for example, revealed in study of smes that innovative companies investigate the marketplace, put more emphasis to product enrichment and operate with better systems and technology than less innovative companies. however, little attention has been given to the differences between start-up and mature companies and the change in their behavior over time, i.e. their transition. customer centricity & customer intelligence the customer has become recognized as a dominant influence on company strategy and can be defined as a co- creator of value. the extent of the company’s interaction with customers can be quantified and qualified by the amount of data collected, analysis of customer needs and information relevant to realize innovations. however, the customers as co-developer for new products and services differ in start-up and mature companies (lewrick ). kohli and jaworski ( ) recognized the importance of customer focus, but in their definition market intelligence is at the centre of market orientation. in this conjunction, market intelligence includes ascertaining current and future customer needs, dissemination of the intelligence across departments, and organisation-wide responsiveness to customer needs. they introduce market intelligence instead of customer focus since in their view market intelligence is much broader than customer focus. however, within this study customer centric includes the integration of customer needs and strategies as well as the processes of an organisation. customer intelligence is the knowledge about the customer which might be collected e.g. by focus groups, surveys and observation. previous research suggests that understanding customers increases the value of innovation created in the product and service development process. von hippel ( ) pointed out that some customers of products might be ahead of the trend and can drive the development of new products. lukas and ferrell ( ) also found that customer orientation increases the introduction of new- to-the world products and reduces the launching of “me- too products”. hence, it can be hypothesized that market needs drive innovations. competitor orientation organizations that are focused on their competitors are less likely to come up with radical innovations. a strong competitor orientation causes “me-too” products and incremental innovations (lukas and ferrell ). however, over the last decade more open approaches towards innovation management became popular. for example, giannopoulou et al. ( ) point out that “alliances between firms, distributed co-creation practices and collaborations with customers become more and more important ( : )” according to narver and slater ( ) competitor orientation, as an element of market orientation, means that “a seller understands the short-term strengths and weaknesses and long-term capabilities and strategies of both the key current and potential competitors” ( , p - ). previous studies highlight the short term thinking of new ventures and argued the need for more long-term thinking and strategic competitive positioning (robinson and pearce ; tarek and bain ). j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios market dynamism competition is seen as a key influencing factor for innovativeness (utterback ; kimberly and evanisko ). start-up and mature companies operating in environments characterized by dynamic competition are forced to create innovative products and services and innovations are correlated to risky actions to create superior performance (barney ). more recent research explored a positive relationship between market orientation and innovation integrated in the amount of innovations implemented (han, kim and srivastava ; hurley & hult ; lukas and ferrell ). it seems that entrepreneurs and managers must scan the market more carefully in a highly competitive environment. however, market orientation by itself does not help to create value from market dynamism: it needs both management and knowledge creation capabilities (lewrick ). essential drivers might be management experience, management tenure, inter-organizational networks as well as the capability of organizational learning. within this study market dynamism is defined as the change of technology, customer needs, and the actions of competitors. it is assumed that dynamic markets are unpredictable with regard to the competitive conditions. hypotheses two major hypotheses are outlined with respect to the correlations between the variables in the model. the first hypothesis addresses the correlation between customer orientation and radical innovations. as mentioned in the introduction, customer orientation is key for both start-up and mature companies and is a major element of market orientation. hence, we can state the first hypothesis to be tested as: h : customer orientation is positively correlated to radical innovations in contrast to h the second hypothesis stresses the correlation between competitor orientation and innovativeness. referring to the introduction and reviewed literature a strong competitor orientation might lead to me- too products or only improvements in current products or services. however, the concept of competitor orientation includes also the evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. therefore, competitor information embraces the process of collecting and analyzing competitor information. thus the second hypothesis is stated as: h : competitor orientation is related positively to incremental innovations. data collection over ceos and managing directors of innovative and technology driven companies in the high- technology cluster around munich responded to an online questionnaire about their market orientation to innovation as part of a larger survey to understand factors influencing innovation and success. three parts of the questionnaire were intended to survey the customer orientation, competitor orientation and the market and competitor environment with key statements. the respondents rated the extent of use on a seven point scale from , no extent, to , a great extent. the questions were derived from various literature (narver and stanley ; kwaku, ; kwaku et al. ; jaworski and kohli ) to apply verified and tested questions. in addition, one part of the questionnaire had been designed to explore incremental and radical innovation performance in relation to sales increases and customer satisfaction. organizational information on sector, core competences, years in business, number of employees, sales, and sales increases were also collected in the questionnaire. statements on customer orientation were related to collection, analysis and monitoring of customer orientation as well as link to operational and strategic business planning. these were: • we regularly meet customers to learn about their current potential needs for new products. • we constantly monitor and reinforce our understanding of the current and future needs of customers. • we have a thorough knowledge about emerging customers and their needs. • information about current and future customers is integrated in our plans and strategies. • we regularly use research techniques such as focus groups, surveys, and observation to gather customer information. • we have developed effective relationships with customers and suppliers to fully understand new technological development that affect customer’s needs. • we systematically process and analyze customer information to fully understand their implication for our business. j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios to explore the degree of competitor orientation four key questions were developed to learn more about data collection, knowledge and information sharing and implications of competitor orientation. these were: • we regularly collect and integrate information about the products and strategies of our competitors. • we systematically collect and analyze information about potential competitor activities. • managers in this company regularly share information about current and future competitors within the company. • our knowledge of current and potential competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is very thorough. the third section aimed at identifying factors triggered by the market and competitive environment that influence the companies’ strategy and actions. these were: • the actions of local and foreign competitors change quite rapidly in your major markets. • technology changes in your industry were rapid and unpredictable. • the market competitive conditions were highly unpredictable. • customers’ product preferences change quite rapidly. • changes in customers’ need were quite unpredictable. in addition, key statements were developed to identify the impact of incremental and radical innovation on sales, and to explore the customer satisfaction with incremental and radical innovations produced. these were: • % of total sales from incremental products/services introduced by your company in a typical year. • % of total sales from radical products/services introduced by your company in a typical year. • customer satisfaction with incremental innovations. • customer satisfaction with radical innovations. finally, the innovation performance was measured employing a measure of the amount of radical and incremental innovations realized in a typical year in all areas, that is, product, process, service, administrative, and technical aspects of the business. analysis of data before the data set was examined verification and data cleaning was applied to form a reliable set of cases. this reduced the number of usable responses to . companies were then clustered into start-ups and mature companies ( start-up and mature companies). start-up companies were defined as new ventures which had been in business for less than years. mature companies were taken to be those which had been successful in the market for more than years. the link between the different characteristics of market orientation and innovativeness was established by examining correlation matrices. factor analysis was applied as a data reduction technique, to create new variables to determine the effect on the innovation measures of variations in the market domains. results the correlation between the market orientation variables and the number and type of innovation score, representing the number and type of innovations, is laid out in table . there are a number of significant correlations between specific customer orientation variables and the incremental, radical and total innovation score. in particular, all the customer orientation variables but one have a strong correlation with radical innovation. some dimensions of competitor orientation were significantly positively correlated with the number of incremental innovations in areas, such as, competitor orientation strategy and competitor orientation information. in contrast, there appeared to be little evidence of a correlation between competitor orientation and radical innovation. the correlations between the market and competitive environment variables and innovativeness were also mainly significantly positively correlated. j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios correlations / n= incremental innovation score radical innovation score total innovation score customer orientation potential needs . . (**) . (*) customer orientation monitoring . . (**) . (**) customer orientation knowledge . (**) . (**) . (**) customer orientation strategy . . (**) . (**) customer orientation research techniques . (**) . (**) . (**) customer orientation relationships . (**) . (**) . (**) customer orientation information . (*) . (*) . (**) competitor orientation strategy . (*) . . competitor orientation potential . - . . competitor orientation information . . . competitor orientation knowledge . (**) . . (*) market & competitive environment : changes action . . (**) . (**) market & competitive environmt: changes technology . (**) . (*) . (**) market & competitive environment: conditions . . . (*) market & competitive environment: customer preferences . . (**) . (*) market & competitive e environment: changes customer needs . . . ** correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). * correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). table : correlations: market variables and innovativeness it should be noted that the correlations in table are relatively low. however, it is possible to suggest some implications arising from these results. the strong correlations between customer orientation and radical innovation indicates that a highly customer centric approach is necessary to create radical innovations. this gives some support to von hippel ( ) who highlights the fact that “some per cent of all commercial innovations fail, yet we stick to the traditional ways of r&d”. he emphasized that many innovations are triggered from outside a company. customers of products often are ahead of the trend and are able to develop radical product and service innovations. kim and mauborgne ( : ) descried a strong competitor orientation occurring when “the value curve converges with its competitors […] this signals slow growth”. they argue that value innovation occurs when an organization aims at creating new and uncontested market space, which they term a blue ocean strategy, and avoids direct competition with their competitors, which they term a red ocean strategy. similarly, williams et al. ( ) presented a vfbop model to utilize a value innovation blue ocean strategy in ‘base of the pyramid’ emerging markets to create market demand where a lack of competitors exists. the correlations between competitor orientation strategy and competitor orientation knowledge with incremental innovation support the argument that competitor orientation leads to a “red ocean” strategy. within the market and competitive environment, both the correlation between changes action and customer preferences indicate a strong relationship to radical innovation. factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to create factor scores from the sixteen questions. four factors were formed which have been labeled customer centric, competitor orientation, market dynamism and customer intelligence (see table ). both customer centric and j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios customer intelligence were proxies for customer orientation. these variables accounted for . %, . %, . % and . % respectively, (see the rotated component matrix displayed in table ). the kaiser-meyer-olkin rotated component matrix(a) component customer orientation knowledge . customer orientation strategy . customer orientation relationships . customer orientation potential needs . customer orientation monitoring . competitor orientation potential . competitor orientation strategy . competitor orientation information . competitor orientation knowledge . market & competitive environment changes technology . market & competitive environment changes customer needs . market & competitive environment conditions . market & competitive environment customer preferences . . market & competitive environment changes action . . . customer orientation research techniques . customer orientation information . . extraction method: principal component analysis. rotation method: varimax with kaiser normalization. a rotation converged in iterations. measure of sampling adequacy was . and bartlett’s test of sphericity was statistically significant (p < . ) indicating that the application of factor analysis was successful. table : rotated component matrix (component – customer centric, component – competitor orientation, component – market dynamism, component – customer intelligence) the differences between innovativeness of start-up and mature companies and their respective factor scores are shown in table . j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios i nc re m en ta l i nn ov at io n r ad ic al in no va tio n t ot al in no va tio n c us to m er c en tr ic c om pe tit or o ri en ta tio n m ar ke t d yn am is m c us to m er in te lli ge nc e start-up mean . . . . . . - . std. dev. . . . . . . . mature mean . . . - . - . - . . std. dev. . . . . . . . total mean . . . . . . . std. dev. . . . table : startup and mature companies compared from table it is clear that start-up companies have more radical innovations but fewer incremental innovations than mature companies (these differences are significant at the % level). total innovative activity is fairly similar. start-up companies appear more customer centric and customer orientated and seem more concerned about market dynamism than mature companies. however, the reverse is the case for customer intelligence. it was felt that the originally low correlations with competitor orientation may be explained by reference to the age of the company. comparing the correlations of the four components identified in the factor analysis with innovation by company stage shows that this may indeed be the case. this is demonstrated in table which shows the results of the factor components correlated with innovativeness for both start-up and mature companies. start-up /n= incremental innovation score radical innovation score total innovation score customer centric . (**) . . (**) competitor orientation . (**) . (**) . (**) market dynamism . . . customer intelligence . (**) . (*) . (**) mature/ n= customer centric . (*) . (**) . (**) competitor orientation - . - . (**) - . (*) market dynamism . (**) . (**) . (**) customer intelligence . . (**) . (*) ** correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). * correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). table : correlations: categories start-up and mature companies j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios being customer centric was positively correlated with incremental innovation for both start-up and mature companies but it was only positively correlated with radical innovation for mature companies. this gives some partial support to hypothesis h within the group of start-up companies a strong correlation between competitor orientation and both incremental and radical innovations was observed. this suggests that companies in an early stage tend to focus on benchmarking and analyzing competitors, which leads them to innovate. in contrast, for mature companies there is a negative correlation to competitor orientation. a competitor orientation for mature companies appears to be counter productive when it comes to innovations and is significantly so for radical innovations. this supports the h hypothesis. another area of difference was the impact of the market dynamism. for start-up companies the overall dynamic of the market had no relevance, but for mature companies this dynamism was strongly related to both incremental and radical innovations. it suggests that a dynamic environment forces mature companies to put more emphasis on creating innovative products and services. there is also a clear contrast to be observed between start-up and mature companies in the area of customer intelligence. for start- ups, customer intelligence had an impact on the amount of radical and incremental innovations realized, however, for mature companies this influenced only radical innovations. to determine the degree to which the constructed variables of customer centric, market dynamism, customer intelligence and competitor orientation make to fostering innovative activity, ordinary least square regression models were constructed for all companies; both start- up and mature companies. the natural logarithm of total, incremental and radical innovation was taken as the distributions of these were skewed toward zero and taking natural logarithms successfully transformed these dependent variables to more normal distributions. these models are displayed in table . all the models were statistically significant and showed that the factors do explain a reasonable amount of the variation in innovative activity variable all companies (n = ) start-up companies (n = ) mature companies (n = ) l og o f t ot al in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al in cr em en ta l in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al ra di ca l in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al in cr em en ta l in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al ra di ca l in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al in cr em en ta l in no va tio ns l og o f t ot al ra di ca l in no va tio ns constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) customer centric . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) market dynamism . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) customer intelligence . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) competitor orientation . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) adjusted r . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % ** correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed) * correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). table : coefficients of regression models with standard errors in parenthesis j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios the adjusted r of incremental innovations for mature companies is low compared to that of the start-up companies. this suggests that start-up companies may indeed be focusing on market orientation and incremental innovation while mature companies focus more on radical innovations. at the total level the components of customer centric, market dynamism and customer intelligence are positively correlated to innovation. in terms of incremental innovation only the component market dynamism correlates significantly at the % level. for start-up companies, only customer orientation has a positive correlation across all innovations, while customer centric correlates significantly for incremental innovations. with mature companies, customer centric and market dynamism correlate significantly for all innovations. customer intelligence correlates significantly with radical innovation while competitor orientation is not significant for incremental innovation but has a significant negative effect for radical innovation. in table the correlation of customer satisfaction with radical and incremental innovations is confirmed. this suggests that innovations have a positive impact on customer satisfaction and retention. in addition, where there is radical innovation, there is a positive correlation with customer satisfaction for both radical and incremental innovations. it may be that customers recognize the radical innovations of a company and this influences their propensity to buy other products by the same company which only provide incremental improvements to existing offerings. as a result, the enhancement to reputation gained from the company offering innovative breakthrough products also improves the sales volume of the less innovative products. correlations / all companies / n= incremental innovation score radical innovation score total innovation score innovation performance (incremental) % sales . (**) . . innovation performance (radical) % sales . (**) . (**) . (**) innovation performance (incremental) customer satisfaction . (**) . . (**) innovation performance (radical) customer satisfaction . (**) . (**) . (**) ** correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). * correlation is significant at the . level ( -tailed). table : correlations of innovation performance conclusion exploring both start-up and mature companies, this research focused on market orientation and its impact on producing either incremental or radical innovations. the paper contributes to knowledge in a number of areas. the study identifies a generally positive relationship between a number facets of customer orientation and across innovation types. in particular, all elements of customer orientation apart from one have a strong relationship with radical innovation. however, the component customer centric derived from the factor analysis only demonstrated a strong relationship with radical innovation in mature companies. as a result, the hypothesis (h ) that customer orientation is related positively to radicial innovations can be accepted for mature companies but has to be rejected for start-up companies. the research results suggest that for mature companies a strong competitor orientation leads to imitation and does not foster more fundamental invention and innovation. for start-up companies the competitor orientation appears to help identify competitive opportunities that facilitate the launching of new products or services. as a result the j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . (http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios hypothesis (h ) competitor orientation is related positively to incremental innovations can be accepted for start-up companies and must be rejected for mature companies. the results of this study reveal that there are differences between start-up and mature companies in respect to market orientation and innovation. a number of recommendations and observations flow from these results. start-up companies should observe and analyze competitor’s activities in the process of bringing ideas to market. this might be already included in the development of the initial business plan and it should help to bring incremental innovations to market success. in contrast, to stay innovative and to continuously generate the new ideas that bring market success an orientation towards competitors might not be the ideal strategic focus for mature companies. knowing the strategy of competitors might enhance the market intelligence of a mature organization but it does not lead to innovation success, and appears to mitigate against the development of radical innovations. as stated earlier in this paper kim and mauborgne ( : ) argue that value innovation occurs when an organization avoids direct competition with their competitors but aims instead at creating new and uncontested market space, which they term a blue ocean strategy. it is probable that more mature companies are operating in more mature markets. it could be argued therefore that it is unlikely that mature companies will find this uncontested market space through a competitor orientation but only through radical innovations based on a customer orientation. start up companies operating in less mature markets may well find uncontested space in the market through an analysis of competitor activity in what may be a less competitive landscape. having identified some significant differences between start-up and mature companies with respect to market orientation and its affect on innovation we suggest that further research is required to explore the transformation process of growing companies. observing the actual changes and influencing factors might help to foster a deeper understanding of the different perceptions around market orientation and its relationship to successful innovation. about the authors dr michael lewrick is a graduate of from napier university edinburgh and holds a mba from bristol business school. he studied - in new york, munich and nice – business administration with an emphasis on it and organization. his research interests centres on the management issues related to the development and commercialisation of technological and business model innovation. specific areas of focus include developing capabilities for innovativeness and business success. a number of publications have been produced in this area. currently dr lewrick holds a senior strategy manager position at swisscom, zurich. his expertise centres in the development of go-to- market concepts, m&a transactions, growth strategies, investment steering and the management of innovations. dr. maktoba omar is a reader of international marketing strategy at edinburgh napier university, scotland, member of the research committee, and a visiting lecturer/ researcher at harbin university, tsinghua university (china), and munich university of applied sciences (germany). she has published in a number of national and international peer reviewed academic journals as well as presented at conferences and workshops. current research interests focus on globalisation, international strategy and marketing policy. m.omar@napier.ac.uk prof. robert l. williams, jr., is an assistant professor of marketing at saint mary’s college, notre dame, indiana, usa. he has published in peer-reviewed journals such as journal of product & brand management (emerald literati award for excellence international) and journal of brand management as well as presented at numerous conferences and workshops. after years as a practitioner in fortune / companies, his current academic research interests focus on competitive advantage, branding, innovation, higher education, and market entry strategies. rlwjr@saintmarys.edu j. technol. manag. innov. , volume , issue issn: - . 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(http://www.jotmi.org) journal of technology management & innovation © universidad alberto hurtado, facultad de economía y negocios 	introduction 	hypotheses 	analysis of data 	results 	references journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) brookfield, s. & associates ( ). teaching race. how to help unmask and challenge racism. jossey-bass. jürgen rudolph head of research & senior lecturer, kaplan higher education, singapore; editor-in-chief, journal of applied learning & teaching doi: https://doi.org/ . /jalt. . . . content available at : journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) journal of applied learn ing & te ac hi n g jalt http://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/index issn : - x if you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust, your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust. your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow, for you let this human race fall down so god- awful low! (bob dylan, the death of emmett till, ) one evening in august , -year-old emmett till, while visiting his uncle in a mississippi village, went to a grocery store to buy candy. emmett is said – and even this is disputed – to have whistled admiringly at the sight of the attractive white storekeeper, carolyn bryant. this was a violation of the unwritten racial code that still prevailed in the southern states at the time. a few days later, roy bryant and his half-brother j.w. milam kidnapped and tortured the black teenager, shot a bullet in his head, weighted his body with metal and barbed wire, and threw him into a river, seriously injured and still alive (pitzke, ). despite the overwhelming evidence against bryant and milam, the all-white male jury acquitted the accused. bryant and milam admitted killing emmett till in an interview shortly thereafter, but remained unmolested as they were protected against double jeopardy. figure : part of display with racist quote from murderer of emmett till - national civil rights museum, downtown memphis, tennessee, usa. photo taken by adam jones on may, , cc by . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ file:display_with_racist_quote_from_murderer_of_emmett_ till_-_national_civil_rights_museum_-_downtown_ memphis_-_tennessee_-_usa.jpg the photos of emmett till’s disfigured body and the scandalous acquittal became a symbol of resistance and an icon of the u.s. civil rights movement (pitzke, ). figure : mississippi freedom trail marker in money, mississippi, explaining how emmett till’s visit to bryant’s grocery led to his murder. photo taken by eames heard on may, . cc by . , https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/file:bryant% s_grocery_mississippi_freedom_trail_ marker.jpg fast forward years later after emmett till’s gruesome, racially-motivated murder. the killing of a black man, george floyd, by a white policeman in broad daylight in minneapolis, invoked memories of america’s long history of racial injustice. “i’m still crying for emmett till”, read one note decorated with hearts, beside a sketch of the -year- old lynched in (the economist, a). george floyd, in some ways, is perhaps the st century emmett till. in the u.s., racial injustice began with the original sin of slavery, but even after its hard-fought abolition, it has endured due to white supremacist beliefs and racial journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) discrimination. george floyd’s death has provoked protests around the world, strengthening the global black lives matter movements and providing them with widespread multiracial, multi-generation support. global outrage was caused by floyd’s killing having been filmed in excruciating detail. also, police brutality against minorities is rife in many countries around the world. the economist magazine ( b) drew a parallel between the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements: “just as women on every continent found common cause in the #metoo movement, despite the range of their experiences, so protesters around the world have united around the cry that black lives matter”. thanks to the recent black lives matter protests and their creating awareness about the systemic racism and racial discrimination in the u.s. and elsewhere, the importance of brookfield and co-authors’ book under review should be glaringly obvious. although teaching race was published before the murder of george floyd, there is an extremely helpful discussion of violence in the book (george floyd is of course but one of the many unarmed black people killed by the police in the u.s.). citing galtung (in ), the structural violence of racism manifests itself as “unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances”, while the cultural violence of racism refers to cultural aspects (assigning individual characteristics such as ‘inferior’, ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’, or ‘inherently violent’) “that can be used to justify or legitimate direct or structural violence”. structural and cultural violence are then “used to justify direct violence, as housing is destroyed in gentrification, calls for justice are repressed as riots, and unarmed people of color are disproportionately killed by police” ( ). another indication of systemic racism is the mass incarceration of black people. the collective trauma of black people is invisible to other communities for whom it is not a daily reality. “physically and emotionally, people of color find themselves drained, more marginalized, and less hopeful about the future” ( ). violence in communities of colour is a symptom, and not the cause, of poverty. teaching race is led by stephen brookfield and co-authored by “associates” of the lead author and editor. it first and foremost aims to be a guidebook to teach about the emotionally-charged and contentious issues of race and racism. teaching race provides numerous activities, exercises, resources, techniques and strategies to examine racism in the classroom, and some of them may also be helpful to teachers involved in adult and higher education in different contexts. the target audience is “anyone interested in antiracist practice” (xvii). stephen brookfield is a world-famous educational thought leader who hardly requires an introduction, also not to the faithful readers of this journal. jalt’s previous issue saw a review of the second edition of brookfield’s classic becoming a critically reflected teacher (rudolph, ), and he also granted us an interview in which he disclosed that his forthcoming th book will be on creating an anti-racist white identity (brookfield et al., ). while we are wishing brookfield all the best for his impending milestone, a review of his th book, teaching race, is in order. “in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. it identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time. structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist” ( ). in higher education (he), “racism is glaringly evident in admission policies, disciplinary guidelines, curricula, hiring practices, attrition rates for faculty and students of color, and the composition of boards of trustees” ( - ). apart from racism, related key terms in the book are white supremacy, racist microaggressions, and repressive tolerance. white supremacy does not refer so much to obvious examples such as the ku klux klan (kkk), aryan nations and other extreme white nationalist terrorist groups, but rather “the idea that whites, because of their superior intellect and reasoning power, should be in control of decision-making for society as a whole” ( ). the book’s authors perceive white supremacy as the all-pervasive “philosophical foundation of racism” ( ). another useful key term highlighted by the authors is microaggressions. they are at the level of everyday behaviour that enacts the ideology of white supremacy and keeps racist systems in place. microaggressions are defined as “daily verbal, behavioural, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual- orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (sue, cited in ). teaching race is “a work of passion intended to address one of the greatest scars on america’s soul” (xv). brookfield writes that “this is not a book of analysis (though there certainly is analysis in here) but a book of action” (xv). such practicality as well as modesty is typical for the self-deprecating brookfield, but the latter is quite unnecessary. while the techniques and activities described in the book are undoubtedly very useful (brookfield and co-authors are highly reflective experts on a plethora of participatory teaching and learning methods), i appreciated the analytical aspects of the book at least as much as the practical, actionable aspects. every chapter comes with helpful references and there is a -page bibliography at the end with more than items as well as an eight-page index (in addition, the authors’ biodata are included over eight pages at the beginning of the book). brookfield’s introductory chapter damningly states that we “live in a time of rampant racism fuelled and legitimized by racist political leaders” ( ). racism is hugely damaging, as it excludes “large groups of people from full participation in political, social and economic life” ( ). racism is discussed largely as a structural rather than an individual problem. racism is a system of beliefs and practices journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) brookfield also warns to watch out for repressive tolerance, a brilliant term originally coined by herbert marcuse. repressive tolerance refers to institutions managing threats to their authority and legitimacy by only appearing “to be changing while keeping things as they are” and making “small, symbolic changes to institutional functioning” and presenting them “as substantial and important” ( - ). at the end of brookfield’s magisterial introduction to the book, he states that the rawness of teaching about race will mean that teachers may constantly feel out of their depth. hence, approaches to address racism and white supremacy by the book’s authors can be classified into the three umbrella categories of scaffolding, modelling and community building. in chapter , george yancy, a black philosopher and leading public intellectual on race, describes “whiteness” as a site of power, privilege and hegemony. yancy models vulnerability for white students by describing his own sexism, thus hoping to change their understanding of racism so they can begin to see themselves as racist. labelling white students as racists does not imply that they are horrible people. this is quite an important point that is made on various occasions throughout the book. for instance, klein in chapter emphasises that the point of such a critical pedagogy is “not to assign blame or wallow in guilt, but to critically assess normative assumptions and to free ourselves from racist social constructions so we can pursue education as the practice of freedom” ( ) – referring to paolo freire and bell hooks (whose name is intentionally in small letters). buffy smith also states helpfully that “white guilt is not the desired educational outcome” ( ). however, yancy’s rather persuasive argument is that white people benefit from white systemic racism and thus contribute to the maintenance of that system. a white person in the u.s. cannot be exempt from the “relational dimensions of white privilege and power”, as they are “in socially, politically, and economically oppressive relations” ( ). however, with reference to the iconic bell hooks, he classrooms continue to be locations of possibility in which we can be radically open and “transgress and oppose all manifestations of oppressive structures” ( ). in chapter , susan hadley (a professor and director of music therapy at slippery rock university, pennsylvania) discusses teaching whiteness in predominantly white classrooms. one of hadley’s educational techniques is to provide the example of ‘handedness’ (with the world being wired for right- handed people) before moving on to a critical discussion of white privilege. the whole book provides references to excellent documentary film resources, and hadley is the first of several authors in teaching race that refers to lee mun wah’s ( ) important and difficult-to-watch documentary the color of fear – a film in which eight men of different racialised backgrounds talk about the state of race relations in north america. lucia pawlowski is an assistant professor at the university of st. thomas, minnesota, and the author of chapter that is about the creation of brave space classrooms through writing assignments and social media to help students explore racial identities. pawlowski regards the creation of safe spaces as a learning and teaching environment (in which learners ‘agree to disagree’, ‘avoid personal attacks’, and ‘respect each other’) as a platitude and replaces it with brave space, where controversy is invited and embraced. like other authors in teaching race, pawlowski justifies her approach by referring to bell hooks who, in teaching to transgress ( ) referred to classrooms as enactments of bourgeois democracy. the “idea of classrooms as calm, reasonable, even-tempered analytical havens means that white students are never confronted with the raw anger and hostility expressed by students who have spent their lives being insulted and dismissed by racism” ( ). in chapter , mike klein (an assistant professor at the department of justice and peace studies at the university of st. thomas, minnesota) writes about “teaching intersectionality through ‘i am from…’” intersectionality refers to the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, gender and age as they apply to a given individual (or group), thus creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. identities are complex and plural, and the ‘i am from…’ exercise assists students in identifying their own constructed identities. importantly, klein argues against “black and white (pun intended)” categories that prevail in popular culture, as race is socially constructed and complicated by categories such as “ethnicity, nationality and hybridity” ( ). reference is made to freire’s key concept of conscientização that requires “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and then taking action against oppressive elements of a society” ( ). chapter is authored by pamela barnett, at present the dean of the school of arts and sciences at la salle university in philadelphia. her chapter discusses various approaches how to build trust and negotiate conflict: the teacher as ‘the good doctor’, naming exercises, hopes-and-fears feedback, and structured questioning. to me, the most memorable part of barnett’s contribution was her narration of the story of white supremacist derek black (the irony of his surname is difficult to escape), and black’s transformation is also picked up in other pieces of teaching race. in , black disavowed white nationalism, after he studied arabic to better understand the islamic culture of the early middle ages. two chapters later, cavalieri and co-authors state: “stories such as that of derek black… illuminate how relationships and the knowledge from our professions can be powerful tools in reforming even the most avowed white supremacists” ( ). lisa merriweather (an associate professor of adult education at the university of north carolina at charlotte), talmadge guy (a retired professor of adult education), and elaine manglitz (most recently, a vice president for student affairs at clayton state university) in chapter discuss how to create the conditions for racial dialogue. this involves teachers carefully researching their students and ideally leads to the realisation of the illusion of ‘colour blindness’ as well as unrecognised racial bias and unacknowledged white privilege. chapter is another multi-authored piece by consuelo cavalieri, bryana french and salina renninger, who are journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) all associate professors of professional psychology at the university of st. thomas. their collaborative work takes students deep into uncovering systemic racism. systemic racism is also found in universities where white teachers are usually in charge and assess students. although students are not completely disempowered (they can be disruptive in various ways or provide negative teaching evaluations), the teachers’ power is undeniable. cavalieri and co-authors state that when “good relationships guide our teaching, good relationships become an important outcome” ( ). buffy smith is a sociology professor at the university of st. thomas whose chapter is entitled “forming classroom communities to help students embrace discomfort”. smith shares her practice of building ohana communities before inviting her students to consider privilege and white supremacy. ohana is a native hawaiian word which means ‘no one gets left behind’, an approach that smith uses with humour, patience, mercy and grace. students are reminded “that it was healthy for family members to talk about difficult topics” ( ), with care and empathy being essential building blocks in creating a strong learning community. comfortingly, smith proclaims that “we are all works in progress” ( ). smith – like brookfield, yancy and others in this volume – convincingly argues against the “myth of meritocracy”, i.e. the “illusion that people have earned their privileges by their own intellect and hard work ethic”. white students’ realisation that their privileges are based on their skin colour more than on merit leads to an awakening of their racial consciousness, with them becoming socially responsible leaders a much-preferred outcome to mere ‘white guilt’. in chapter , brookfield reviews six specific discussion protocols that can be adapted to the analysis of racial issues. he makes the excellent point that it would be a “simplistic mistake” to assume “who uses discussion is dedicated to social justice and anyone who lectures is an authoritarian demagogue”, also referring to paterson’s notion of counterfeit discussion ( ). brookfield discusses six discussion techniques (that are described also in his earlier work: brookfield & preskill, ) and applies them to the topic of antiracist discussions: todaysmeet, circle of voices, chalk talk, circular response, bohmian dialogue, and appreciative pause. in the th chapter, wendy yanow (an adult educator with adult learning unleashed) teaches against a colour-blind perspective and builds on critical race theory (crt) to explore community writing projects, documentary analysis, and the juxtaposition of story and counter-story. a ‘colour-blind’ ideology leads to the inability to see white privilege. coates is cited ( ): “if i have to jump six feet to get the same thing you have to jump two feet for – that’s how racism works”. white privilege is oftentimes unintended racism, and the impact of the ‘colour-blind’ ideology is negative both for the receiver and the perpetrator. crt sounds like a most meaningful approach as, methodologically, it understands how white supremacy operates by learning from people whose everyday lived experiences are centred on dealing with racism. the crt tenet is “that racism is pervasive and endemic in the united states, and that one of the ways that situation is secured is through the widespread acceptance of color-blind ideology” ( ). in chapter , dianne ramdeholl (an associate professor at suny empire state college in new york city) and jaye jones (the executive director for literacy studies at lehman college – cuny) unearth students’ positionalities through learning histories, questioning, decoding media, and integrating current events into the curriculum. they evaluate the “rise of trump and his cadre of billionaire populists” as “the most visible expression of an institutional contempt for black and brown people” ( ). in chapter , mary hess (a professor of educational leadership at luther seminary) uses “digital storytelling to unearth racism and galvanize action”. her chapter contains an important quote about the data – information – knowledge – wisdom (dikw) pyramid, a key knowledge management concept, that reads: “it is as if the ladder of inference that once stretched upward from data to information to knowledge to wisdom has been truncated, with people rarely climbing as far as knowledge, let alone all the way up to wisdom” ( ). hess’s piece is not short of other quotable quotes, for instance: “the insidious stock narratives of neoliberal capitalism – that persons are individuals, not relational beings; that truth is best arrived at through competition; that value accrues only to what you do, not to who you are; that if you are not successful it is due to your own worthlessness, or to someone else’s cheating… – these stock narratives effectively rule out of order a systemic analysis of the social construction of race” ( ). chapter is entitled “examining mistakes to advance antiracist teaching”, and authored by bobbi smith, a teacher and education consultant in british columbia (canada). smith describes how her world exploded when she asked participants in a workshop to conduct an antiracist power analysis of her own teaching, before eventually achieving a positive outcome. brookfield’s final chapter builds on smith’s previous chapter as well as samuel beckett’s notion of failing well to review some common misperceptions that block white teachers’ efforts to do antiracist work. brookfield discusses the following eight avoidable mistakes: ‘i can control what happens’, ‘i need to stay calm’, ‘i must fix racism and transform my students’, ‘i’ve finally escaped racism’, ‘i understand your pain’, ‘please confess your racism’, ‘i mustn’t dominate, so i’ll stay silent’, and ‘i’m your ally’. teaching race is a major contribution to the analysis of race and racism as well as to the practice of teaching about racism. even if you never had the inclination or opportunity to teach about race, i would nonetheless highly and unreservedly recommend this book. it is a powerful tool in triggering off self-examination and critical reflection of our own potential racism and our attitudes towards race and racialised others. i would also like to disclose that i read this book, especially initially, with some resistance and little joy. nobody likes to be called names, least of all a ‘racist’. eventually, i realised journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) the power of the idea that if at all a ‘racist’, it may not be at an individual, but at a systemic level. while i continue to think of myself as an anti-racist cosmopolitan, the book is highly persuasive on its key points, including (but not limited to) the ideas of white privilege, the fallacy of ‘colour blindness’ and the omnipresence of repressive tolerance. i wholeheartedly embrace the idea of cosmopolitanism that incidentally, is also discussed in this volume: one “can become, indeed should aspire to be, a citizen of the world, able to embrace local ties and commitments, but also to extend well beyond them, engaging a wider human community, even across divides of seemingly irreconcilable differences” (avila & pandya, cited in ). i personally also prefer the concept of intersectionality to the sole focus on race and applaud the application of the decolonial concept of the pluriverse (a sense of multiple coexisting differences) to teaching and learning (mcleod et al., ). my own sociological studies – as well as the book at hand – advise me that “race is a social construct (not a biological reality) and that our concept of white racial identity is socially constructed just as other racial identities are (e.g. asian and black)” ( ). however, it would be wrong to see racism as some sort of phantom that can be eradicated by simply deconstructing it. racism, of course, causes real physical and mental consequences for the people affected by it. there is no other book in recent memory that triggered off as many memories as teaching race. without wanting to take too much time from the reader in this overly long book review: it made me recall an early childhood scene on a staircase in the bavarian village where i grew up and where i, a three-year-old boy, was frightened of the black family that i encountered for the first time in my life; white and black gi’s befriending female high school students from my gymnasium; my being the only white person in various ‘heartland’ neighbourhoods in singapore (white people normally stay in condominiums, not in housing and development board flats); my teaching of the colgate / darkie toothpaste case (the packaging originally showed a white man pretending to be a black man!) in an international management module; amongst many other recollections. with stephen brookfield’s critical pedagogy inviting critical interrogation, he would be probably displeased by an entirely laudatory review. i do have one critical issue with the book and that is its america-centrism. the book is largely written by u.s.-americans about their experiences in the u.s., and bobbi smith’s canadian contribution (in chapter ) is the only exception. this raises the question of applicability of the book’s methods and findings beyond north america. from my own experience (having lived in singapore for more than half of my life), it is, for instance, doubtful whether the brave space advocated by pawlowski would work well in too many asian cultures. it could be perceived as culturally insensitive, and the safe space concept may be preferred. pawlowski may not even see the need for such a brave space in asian countries, as white people do not get to racially discriminate against black people much there anyway? while i continue to ponder about the point just made, a much larger issue is the concept of racism. racism was the central pillar of nazi ideology during their nefarious reign from – that caused the holocaust and the death of many millions of innocent people. the main victims of the nazis were jews, roma and slavs (and not black people), who were all to be exterminated and replaced by the german ‘master race’. i wonder whether critical race theory (crt) and other ideas from the book can be applied to other countries – including those where black people may be less affected. is non-white racism a possibility? is racism dependent on the amount of melanin of victim and perpetrator? can racism be purely understood in terms of skin colour? within orientalism, the so-called ‘orientals’ (whose skin colour could be as fair as that of whites) were pejoratively characterised as “backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded” in order to be subjected and colonised by white supremacist, ethnocentric imperialists (said, , p. ). is such orientalism not also racist? if this excellent book had any limitation, it would be the editorial decision to not discuss race and racism outside north america. brookfield, as a leading expert on critical reflection, did perhaps not want to give us all the answers and make us think critically about issues that go beyond the gamut of this outstanding and highly commendable work. perhaps a sequel, entitled teaching race in a global context could be considered? references brookfield, s. d. ( ). becoming a critically reflective teacher. jossey-bass. brookfield, s. d. & preskill, s. ( ). the discussion book. great ways to get people talking. jossey-bass. brookfield, s. d., rudolph, j. & yeo, e. ( ). the power of critical thinking in learning and teaching. an interview with professor stephen d. brookfield. journal of applied learning & teaching, ( ), - . hooks, b. ( ). teaching to transgress. education as the practice of freedom. routledge. lee, m. w. (dir.) ( ). the color of fear ( -minute documentary). stir fry productions. mcleod, k., moore, r., robinson, d., ozkul, d., ciftci, s. & vincent, k. using the pluriverse concept to critique eurocentrism in education. journal of applied learning & teaching, (si ). advance online publication. pitzke, m. ( , july ). lynchmord on emmett till. letzte chance auf gerechtigkeit. der spiegel, https://www.spiegel. de/geschichte/emmett-till-gelyncht-mit- -jahren-us- mordfall-wird-neu-aufgerollt-a- .html# rudolph, j. ( ). book review: brookfield, s. d. ( ). becoming a critically reflected teacher ( nd ed.). san francisco, ca: jossey bass. journal of applied learning & teaching, ( ), - . said, e. w. ( ). orientalism. penguin modern classics. journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) the economist. ( a, june ). america’s protest turn jubilant. https://www.economist.com/united- states/ / / /americas-protests-turn-jubilant the economist. ( b, june ). the killing of george floyd has sparked global soul searching. https://www.economist. com/international/ / / /the-killing-of-george-floyd- has-sparked-global-soul-searching copyright: © jürgen rudolph. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). the use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. no use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. transcontextual narratives of inclusion: mediating feminist and anti-feminist rhetoric religions essay transcontextual narratives of inclusion: mediating feminist and anti-feminist rhetoric verna marina ehret mercyhurst university, e. th st., erie, pa , usa; vehret@mercyhurst.edu received: march ; accepted: may ; published: may ���������� ������� abstract: in seeking a path to mediating feminist and anti-feminist narratives, one must begin with a framework of the method of narrative analysis being used. using the works of such thinkers as paul ricoeur and richard kearney, i argue that human self-understanding and therefore sense of identity is narrative dependent. while this idea has its critics, in the framework of the central question of this essay narrative theory is a particularly productive tool. the story that i tell that gives me identity is not only a story about the surface. it is embedded in my being. i do not simply have a story, i am a story and create my world through that story. narrative is a part of the ontological structure of being human and the ontic experience of being in the world. one narrates one’s life not in the sense of a movie voiceover, but rather as a reflective and reflexive understanding of oneself. kearney’s work in anatheism is particularly useful for this discussion. while kearney’s interest is in the dialectical move from theism to atheism to a synthesis that is an atheist-informed theism, one can see the same trajectory at work in feminism and anti-feminism. if one begins with patriarchy and moves to feminism, the next step becomes anti-feminism informed by feminism. however, there is still room for an additional dialectical move, to regain a feminism that invites in its detractors and reshapes the collective narratives that impact how we interact with each other in community. keywords: transcontextual narrative; performative narrative; reconciliation “it would have been easier if he had just actually spit in my face and asked me to get him coffee.” this was the beginning of a conversation with a colleague recently after a misogynistic microaggression. the point being made was that while anyone who was paying attention would be able to see the sexism at work in an exchange with a male colleague, she also knew that the burden of proof fell to her. there were a thousand ways one could rationalize away the experience as not having been one of sexism in the work place. to explain to this perpetrator, who has a history of subtle sexism in the work place, that what he did was sexist, marginalizing, and demeaning of her value, was not going to be easy. he had been called out for this kind of behavior at least twice before but nothing had changed. he was a self-proclaimed feminist. therefore, he could not be sexist, went the narrative. had he been more overt, more aggressive in his sexism, the task of calling it out would have been much easier in that she could prove it. although it would not have been any easier to change the behavior or the narrative behind it. however, that is not what happened. the two colleagues live in different and often conflicting narrative structures, and the challenge that faced her was how to bridge the gap between these two very disparate narratives in a way that did not destroy the possibility of a good working relationship with someone who in many other ways she respected. it is the myriad of experiences of these conflicting narratives that happen daily that is the impetus for this essay. when i first started working on this project, i thought, “well i am not a feminist scholar, but i am a woman who thinks and a feminist person. is that sufficient?” then i started reading in current feminist theory and realized that was not sufficient. there are deep traditions that make up the narratives of feminism that shape me whether or not i am aware of them. background in feminist theory provides not only data but also the language to be able to address the tension between these narratives. the religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of claim i intend to make in this essay is that transcontextual narratives are narratives that create new frames of meaning in the space between conflicting narratives. they overlap them, drawing people into the in-between space of meaning and understanding. these narratives become performative of reconciliation because they create the world anew. performative narratives enact reality, and so a transcontextual performative narrative of reconciliation is a way of being in the world through our narrative identities where they begin to overlap with those who are quite different from us. it is important to note that there is no single voice of feminism or anti-feminism. feminism embraces the tremendous diversity of women’s experiences and anti-feminism can be both intentional and unconscious. however, through the course of this essay i intend to show a method that can be applied in a wide variety of circumstances to build communities of inclusion. part of the challenge of a project such as this is language itself. the formal language of a field of study can create a jargon that both gives voice to inchoate ideas and can get in the way of understanding. this essay presents an apparent binary relationship between “feminist” and “anti-feminist.” however, this project proposes an alternative to binary ways of thinking. the alternative creates community. there are limitations to framing the conversation in binary terms. it seems to arbitrarily imply only two types of voices in this discussion and can lead to further marginalization of the voices not included. however, this binary is not intended to be an ontological taxonomy. rather, it is providing a more phenomenological heuristic to provide categories that encompass a broad swath of voices in the issues of feminism. lived reality shows this kind of bifurcation of “feminist vs. anti-feminist” rising to the forefront of the discussion. while the categories should not be taken as absolutes, i am arguing that if this method works in one instance it can be translated into others. what i am providing is a theoretical framework for building performatives narratives that break through the rigid bifurcation of reality that every day seems to get stronger. one can also argue that the way feminist narratives are constructed is a part of what anti-feminism rejects because the vocabulary loses something important in translation from one narrative to the other. if anti-feminist narratives take as a basic assumption that feminist narratives are anti-male, then the feminist narratives are perceived as a threat to the male identity, which contributes to the creation of anti-feminist narratives. modifying some of the work of richard kearney on anatheism, there are stages of development that will allow one to move through the anti-feminist counter narratives to a more enlightened and inclusive feminism (kearney ). it is my claim that the beginning of a performative narrative of reconciliation between feminist and anti-feminist narratives requires reinforcing and claiming the identity of feminist as something positive rather than something to be feared. the concerns about reclaiming feminism, or as kearney might put it an anti-feminism, were brought to the forefront of public discussion with the #metoo movement, its supporters, and its detractors. a lightening rod for the clash of feminist and anti-feminist narratives was aziz ansari, an actor whose feminist credentials seemed fairly credible for a male hollywood actor. however, then a story came out about him seeming to misread cues where his position of power created imbalance in a dating situation. while some use this story as an example of the systemic embeddedness of gender imbalance, others see it as the creation of a “sex panic” where a man innocently misunderstood some cues and is now being persecuted (hamblin ). others have used al franken, former senator from minnesota, as another example of accusations of gender power imbalance and “rape culture” gone too far and destroying good men. this #metoo movement has brought the conversations of feminist and antifeminist rhetoric vividly into the public sphere even for those without social media. while various questions can be raised about the impact of social media in turning narratives into performative creations of alternative realities, for the purposes of this article social media is one among many media embedding these narratives in people’s consciousness, forcing them to take a side, to choose a narrative that they claim as a part of their being. in doing so they risk losing parts of themselves in the relationships lost because friends or family chose the other side (wood ). religions , , of at the level of the academy, these discussions turn to the value of a person’s work against the things a person has done. can we, for example, still use the valuable insights of john howard yoder who argued for the value of feminist voices in theology while at the same time being guilty of violence against women that led to a disciplinary process against him (guth )? is his work more important than his own acts against women? while some have argued that continuing to use his work re-victimizes the women by his fame remaining intact, others have argued that the value of his work is separate from the person (guth ). the further complicating factor of all of these discussions is the power dynamic at work in each of these situations, including the story that opened this essay. the trajectory of this essay will be focused on the ways feminist narratives can be reframed to be transcontextual in that they reach beyond the specific experience of individuals without denying that individuality. however, the individuality of the stories remains important. a transcontextual narrative is different from a meta-narrative, and the goal in creating them is to build shared space, but not a dominating new narrative. these transcontextual narratives are meant to also be performative of reconciliation. in creating a shared space that invites the experiences of difference into a bridge of community the performative narrative creates reconciliation. however, again, this essay focuses on the way feminist narratives can initiate that performative narrative of reconciliation. so, one could justifiably ask if this very activity simply reinforces the power dynamic that has created the narratives of estrangement in the first place? does placing the burden of reconciliation on feminist narratives simply reinforce the notion that women must apologize for being women? these are legitimate concerns. however, my response to these concerns is that if we are going to move beyond a binary mode of thinking, feminist vs. anti-feminist, reconciliation that arises through the creation of shared space through new narrative frames is necessary and must arise from the narratives already seeking inclusion rather than dominion. the rhetoric of anti-feminism is based in a power dynamic that sees equality as a loss, a point i will explain later in this essay. there is no motivation, then, from that point of view to seek inclusion and reconciliation because it is the language of inclusion that anti-feminism is currently rejecting. while an unfortunate reality, and one that can in some sense reinforce gender dynamics, it is still the reality we face that the first move must begin somewhere, and feminist thinkers and actors have a greater motivation to do so. in the opening example of this essay, the power dynamic is clear. however, experience has shown that there is no recognition of a problematic behavior on the man’s side in that example. in addition, made aware of it, he is both surprised to be seen in that way and offended for having been called out on a blatant act of sexism because he is a self-described feminist. while this essay cannot address all of the anti-feminist rhetoric of self-proclaimed feminists, it does acknowledge that the very existence of this category indicates why blatant anti-feminists are often less likely to initiate this reconciliatory conversation. moreover, in taking on the responsibility of reshaping the narrative, feminists seeking reconciliation and community take control of the trans-contextual bridge. in that act, the anti-feminist is being invited into a feminist narrative, an act which can shift the power dynamic and more successfully be performative of reconciliation in a way that community is built than if the person leading the discussion does not have reconciliation and inclusion as a motivation. in choosing sides in these debates one must create a narrative that allows one to justify one’s perspective on the world and to encourage others to incorporate that perspective into their own stories. narrative is performative. it creates reality. in addition, we have a multitude of examples where it is performative of estrangement. however, can it also be performative of reconciliation? that is the central question with which our society must wrestle because the answer to that question holds in it concerns about justice, human rights, human dignity, and human flourishing. who is allowed to flourish in our society through the narratives that shape our cultural frames and identity? religions , , of . transcontextual narratives and performative narratives of reconciliation in seeking a path to mediating feminist and anti-feminist narratives, one must begin with a framework of the method of narrative analysis being used. using the works of such thinkers as paul ricoeur and richard kearney, i argue that human self-understanding and therefore sense of identity is narrative dependent. while this idea has its critics, in the framework of the central question of this essay narrative theory is a particularly productive tool. the story that i tell that gives me identity is not only a story about the surface. it is embedded in my being. i do not simply have a story, i am a story and create my world through that story (lange ). narrative is a part of the ontological structure of being human and the ontic experience of being in the world. one narrates one’s life not in the sense of a movie voiceover, but rather as a reflective and reflexive understanding of oneself (downey ). kearney’s work in anatheism is particularly useful for this discussion. while kearney’s interest is in the dialectical move from theism to atheism to a synthesis that is an atheist-informed theism, one can see the same trajectory at work in feminism and anti-feminism. if one begins with patriarchy and moves to feminism, the next step becomes anti-feminism informed by feminism. however, there is still room for an additional dialectical move, to regain a feminism that takes into account masculinity and anti-feminist narratives. kearney identifies five moments in this dialectical process, separated for analysis, but in practice often happening simultaneously: imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality (kearney ). these five will be explored in the penultimate section of this essay. challenges to the claim that human beings are a narrative include the claim that a human life is not a simple plot line. postmodern theorists have broken down narrative into two types. meta-narrative is the idea that a single narrative can encapsulate all of human truth, seen most clearly in religious claims to a single perspective of religious truth that explains the whole of human experience. in the contemporary world the meta-narrative is generally the domain of hypertheism (klemm and william ). hypertheism seeks the kind of universal theory of truth where those who agree are included in salvation and those who disagree are excluded from the community and salvation. in theological feminist theory, the concern with meta-narrative is kyriarchy, the oppressive application of a single way of understanding the message of, for example, christian truth that marginalizes and even dismisses women’s experiences and voices. meta-narrative as kyriarchy is rejected as an untenable way of interpreting narrative because it creates narrative identities of insider and outsider, primary and secondary citizens or members of a community. the recognition of the multiplicity of narratives and truths led postmodern theorists to the idea of the little or contextual narrative (gehlin ). the claim is that truth is not one and as individuals our stories themselves are not singular. each person is a kind of hybridity, a blend of narratives unfolding simultaneously in a kaleidoscope of stories that flow together and separate, creating a blended image that changes with each angle one takes. the challenge of the contextual narrative is infinite fracturing of the individual and the community. if each person has multiple perspectives, how does the person blend them into a unified person, to be a hybrid and complex self? the contextual narrative shows us that we do and do not know ourselves because we are and are not a unified self. it is because of the multiplicity of our narratives that one can see oneself as a whole and consistent person while holding conflicting interpretations of the world, for example, that women are equal to men and at the same time marginalize the accomplishments of the women one works with. the challenge faced by an attempt to mediate between feminist and anti-feminist narratives is not only the conflict between the groups who hold them, but also the internal conflict where both the feminist narrative can be anti-feminist and the anti-feminist narrative can claim the equality of women is already achieved and assumed and feminists are making a case for a problem that no longer exists. this is where the transcontextual narrative enters. the idea of the transcontextual narrative is that it takes the language of competing narratives and seeks shared ground within them, creating an interpretive frame that invites all into this new frame (ehret ). taping into the pre-existing meanings of the symbols of these narratives, putting these symbols into a new frame draws new religions , , of meanings and opens shared space. in the process, the transcontextual narrative can become a part of the matrix of each individual’s narratives that shape their identity. of course, such a notion is highly idealistic, but the ideal is also possible within real human experience, as will be seen in some of the mediating options explored in this essay. it is the proposal of this essay that transcontextual narratives move from the ideal to the real when they are performative of reconciliation. the addition of the performative element is the claim that the ontological nature of narrative in individual identity is also in communal identity (yang ). some narratives as they unfold in the public domain create the reality they express. in the most disturbing form of performative narratives one can look at the performative narratives of estrangement. when one’s narrative creates a feeling of exclusion in another and spreads to others whose own narrative participates in that narrative, a performative narrative unfolds. the recent growth in hate crimes traced back to narratives of racial, religious, or gender exclusion is an example of this type of performative narrative (southern poverty law center ). however, if a narrative can break apart, it can also bring together. a performative narrative of reconciliation is one that creates the conditions for an unfolding reality of reconciliation between individuals and groups that have resisted each other. communities coming together to support each other after a tragedy see reconciliation of differences through the shared experience. the goal of this essay is to try to create the conditions for performative narratives of reconciliation without requiring a tragedy first. . examples of feminist narratives the creation of a transcontextual narrative requires first understanding the original narratives at work. it is, however, important to recognize that even in the case of the category of feminist narratives that it is intentionally a plural (hamid ). there is not a single voice of feminism. however, it is possible to discern patterns from the multiplicity of narratives and the conversations that happen between feminist thinkers. below is a series of feminist writers constructing various versions of feminist narratives, and in reading these one finds certain recurring themes: gender justice, oppression, patriarchy, kyriarchy, hegemonic masculinity, liberation, agency, diversity of experiences, and the challenges of theological narratives to simultaneously include and exclude. gender justice is, not surprisingly, a central theme in feminist narratives. religious meta-narratives have been used throughout human history to marginalize the voices of women. certain readings of hebrew bible or new testament, for example, become a part of cultural memory—the accepted truths of a community about the reality that god has created. however, the texts themselves do not always fit well with cultural memory, and feminist biblical scholars have unpacked that tension between text and cultural narrative. feminist narratives based on scriptural study have argued that the dominion of men described in genesis , for example, is often used to justify the authority of men over women. however, that narrative comes from a misreading of the text. the created nature of human beings as described in genesis is one of equality. the dominion of men is based in the fallen nature of humanity, humanity that has already been estranged from god. male superiority is not, then, the created order, but the result of sin (jovic ). gender justice, it is argued, is the proper nature of things and the marginalization of women comes from a misunderstanding of biology, theology, and psychology. a second theme of feminist narratives within a theological domain is kyriarchy, which encompasses the themes of patriarchy and oppression and overlaps the theme of gender justice. kyriarchy is the particular form of patriarchy that uses religious tradition and message as a way to show women that their secondary status relative to men was ordained by god. they are not oppressed, they are just fulfilling the roles god has given them. this particular form of patriarchy that marginalizes women’s voices and roles has a very long history in western religions and christianity in particular (with which i am most familiar). kyriarchy highlights the role of oppressive religious narratives and the ways they are used to justify violence against women not only in spiritual but also in physical ways. this kyriarchy, as described by schüssler fiorenza, requires a kind of liberation narrative for women, to be set free from the confines of tradition (nienhuis ). the response, religions , , of nienhuis argues, is “the hermeneutic of creative imagination must be employed in concert with all others because kyriarchal ideologies can ‘colonize the imagination’. if we reimagine what might have happened if the jesuits had employed schüssler fiorenza’s hermeneutics, we begin to construct a resistance strategy” (nienhuis ). liberation and resistance are therefore connected themes of feminist narratives in response to kyriarchy. embedded in kyriarchy and patriarchy, according to feminist narratives, is hegemonic masculinity, which is “defined as valorized male attributes like rationality and aggression associated with hyper-masculinized institutions and cultures, such as those associated with the military” (poloni-staudinger and ortbals ). this theme of feminist narratives is also a theme of masculine narratives (see “wrath of achilles” below). in feminist narratives hegemonic masculinity is often seen in the public understanding of women, for example how women leaders are portrayed in the media as opposed to how male leaders are portrayed. studies of media portrayals of women show that women’s agency is minimized by hegemonic framing. “framing refers to how elites or the media construct and present reality. frames present ‘little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters’ [ ]. they articulate how reality is defined and interpreted by various actors and institutions [ ]” (poloni-staudinger and ortbals ). the power of media is performative narrative. the ubiquity of hegemonic masculinity presented in the media allows that to become the frame by which public female figures are evaluated and the examples they are allowed to be for girls and other women. these hegemonic masculine narratives create the reality to which feminist narratives must respond in order to create the gender justice with which this section began. however, despite these recurring themes, there is also tremendous diversity in what might be considered feminist. in contemporary feminist narratives, that very diversity of perspectives has itself become a common theme in order to engage women’s experiences across social, political, economic, and geographical lines more fully. this diversity of perspectives responding to hegemonic masculinity and kyriarchy engages the narratives in ever more extreme versions of these themes as they become greater justifications for violence against women. in these discussions, the greater depths of feminist narratives can be explored. the narratives of feminism unfold not simply in the individual voices of feminist thinkers, but also in their engagement with each other. for those of us who are regularly in classrooms, we find again and again both female and male students who deny that sexism is a problem and see “feminist” as an insult and a dangerous idea. combating the rejection of feminism in the name of an imagined completion of the feminist project leaves new generations vulnerable to the old traps of patriarchy, to excuse behavior that marginalizes women as “no big deal.” the engagement with feminist thought across time thus becomes an important element of the narrative itself (rigoglioso ). many of the articles read for this project were by prominent feminist thinkers engaging each other’s work across time. among these essays we find powerful arguments for the importance of identifying oneself within the feminist tradition and honoring the figures who have come before. as carol christ notes, of judith plaskow, “ . . . feminist theology is foremost the process of women becoming selves in religious communities” (christ ). the narratives of religion that create belonging and community, when read through a feminist lens, are performative. they create the conditions for women to realize their full being and to imagine change in the world. nancy pineda-madrid looks to the power of the mirabal sisters in the history of feminism, assassinated for their work in fighting for justice for women in the dominican republic, as models to be claimed and celebrated (pineda-madrid ). this discussion builds on elisabeth schüssler fiorenza who was honoring in her writing the work of catharina halkes and the importance of recognizing and celebrating the tradition of feminism, for it too, is a tradition. in addition, that notion of tradition, of being connected to the past and pointing into the future, is essential for the strength of feminist narratives if there is to be reconciliation. as will be seen in a moment, one of the critiques of feminism is that it rejects tradition. however, it is itself tradition. schüssler fiorenza says, “in a context of capitalist globalization and fundamentalist heterosexist hierarchalism, i continue to argue that in the face of progressive social injustice feminist the*logy must be articulated in one way or another as a critical the*logy of liberation or emancipation, that is, as a radical democratic discourse religions , , of of conscientization, self-respect, and transformation” (schüssler fiorenza ). she goes on to argue that, “patriarchal or better kyriarchal power structures rob wo/men of their intellectual traditions. consequently, the next feminist generations cannot learn from the thought of their predecessors, but are constantly forced to reinvent the intellectual wheel” (schüssler fiorenza ). as she points toward the past and tradition, schüssler fiorenza also looks to the future unfolding of feminist narratives. while the past relied on images of motherhood to counter the fatherhood of god, notions of motherhood also marginalize and exclude women, creating a second-class status for women without children for whatever reason that might be. the language of religious narratives cannot, therefore, simply be converted from masculine to feminine terms, but the frames of the language must also be engaged (powell ). if the goal is justice and flourishing and the image of god is used as a model for the power of women, an image that also marginalizes women who do not fit that mold itself becomes problematic (schüssler fiorenza ). in the process of unfolding feminist narratives, one moves from that which they argue against—patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity—to that which they argue for—liberation, agency, and the gender justice with which this section began. exploring the work of letty russel, one finds the proposal that education is the path toward liberation. “education is seen as a process of liberation in community that includes conscientization as ‘learning to perceive the social, economic, political contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality’. using freire’s ideas, russel reflected on how people throughout the world have struggled to ‘become partners who share together in the journey of freedom’ with the hope of ‘sharing their future’” (brady ). the feminist narratives from theology risk accepting a singular narrative that can over-simplify questions of feminism, limiting them to a single religious tradition and moreover a single interpretation of a single religious tradition. to narrate within a religious tradition, as many of these feminist thinkers do, and beyond it is a challenge that each of these feminist and anti-feminist narratives face to varying degrees (brady ). religion can be empowering and disempowering, so in addition to liberation, the theme of agency recurs in feminist narratives. the interpretive path one takes through religious traditions can provide opportunities, by the very act of reconfiguration, of claiming agency in the creation of larger community narratives that incorporate feminist concerns (avishai ). feminist narratives take a variety of forms. many have the commonality of addressing the marginalization and even oppression of women. however, a current critique of western feminism is its racial and cultural bias. so, in understanding feminist narratives it is important to keep in mind the wide array of voices at work. ana patricia rodriguez, for example, writes about the, “fiction of solidarity” in feminist narratives that become forms of intellectual colonialism. her analysis of intersectionality and hybridity in feminist narratives points to the ways in which women live in between worlds and cross borders. in doing so both physically and culturally, they bring a wide array of experiences to these narratives. rodriguez provides an analysis of these ideas as presented in films and novels that explore identity construction of women living across borders and seeking connection and affinity across the borders. these works are also critical of the imperialism of the united states that ignores the suffering of women in central and south america (rodriguez ). one thing that recurs as a theme is the crime of being brown, the assumption by ins agents (currently ice) that those who crossed the southern border of the united states are criminals. that assumption provides an additional complication to the experience of being female in relation to the patriarchy not faced by a us-born woman of english descent. rodríguez’s analysis shows the complexity of attempts at solidarity across gender, national, and racial boarders. solidarity narratives are fragile, broken by the smallest differences and therefore difficult to sustain. as much as we may want people to all start from the same level, the reality of our world is imbalance of power in social, political, and economic domains. this desire for solidarity and symmetry amid the reality of asymmetry is a part of the path of agency and liberation. however, in the midst of these descriptions of patterns and diversity within feminist narratives, one thing that can get lost is politically, religiously, or socially conservative feminist voices. so, to add religions , , of to the feminist narratives, it is important to take a moment to recognize those as well. while feminist narratives in religious domains are often associated with progressive religious voices, one also finds feminism in evangelical christianity (peacore ). while identifying with experiential feminist narratives and the need for christian narratives to incorporate these feminist voices more explicitly, evangelicals also critique feminist narratives that move away from traditional theological ideas such as atonement. in looking at evangelical feminism there is a fear that more progressive feminist narratives lose the grounding of tradition and the power of the traditional narratives to transcend human experience. there is in these narratives an emphasis of the belonging and transformational power of tradition, but one that can be challenged productively by putting them into conversation with experiential feminist narratives (peacore ). through this diversity of voices, one finds not only recurring themes across feminist narratives but also places where the fluidity of these narratives begins to provide tools for a transcontextual narrative. these narratives may be based in traditions, but they are not unquestioning narratives. perhaps one of the most striking themes of many feminist narratives is the willingness to constantly re-examine assumptions about the nature of reality and to revise the narratives to not only reflect that reality but also create that reality as the promotion of justice and human flourishing. . examples of masculine narratives and anti-feminist narratives the dialectical engagement of narratives of identity mean that the pre-existing narratives of oppression do not disappear. they are a part of the frames from which people understand the world and are specifically called out by feminist narratives. however, the process of challenging those long held narratives that have defined societies for millennia lead to a dialectical backlash, the anti-feminist and masculinity narrative. as feminism challenges long held narratives and reinterprets them, there is a loss of identity and the risk of the loss of being as a result. so, the backlash leads to a set of narratives that look back to earlier narratives of masculinity through the lens of feminism, but feminism as interpreted by those who feel threatened by it. masculinity narratives are not necessarily anti-feminist, although they can be. however, one of the challenges of the creation of a transcontextual narrative is the ability to construct narratives that empower and de-marginalize women while not marginalizing not only men but also the notion of masculinity. in the west, at least, the notion that women are unfinished men and therefore inferior in physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities is deeply embedded in cultural memory (myers ). cultural memory refers to the way certain ideas become a part of the common understanding of reality. these ideas become embedded in the narratives of communities through continual repetition so that they become a part of the truths of a society and the frames from which meaning is drawn. take, for example, the stories of genesis – in the hebrew bible referenced earlier. while the text itself is quite complex with distinct creation narratives and complex relations of humanity to god, within cultural memory in the west the story becomes singular. it is the story of creation where human beings are somehow simultaneously created in the image of god and out of dust, or at least the man is. the woman is created out of a rib bone of the man. ask any group of students in an introductory religious studies class in the united states and someone will tell you women have one fewer ribs than men, and humanity is punished for the sin of the woman as she tempts the man to eat the apple god told them not to eat. woman as weak of will but powerful temptress becomes a trope in masculinity narratives that are embedded in cultural memory. what the biblical text says is not as important as what has been passed from generation to generation and in the process becomes truth. of course, for many students it is and is not truth. many have assumed the truth of the stories while also not really taking the biology of it too seriously. however, the core elements, the fall of humanity from a state of perfection because the woman tempted the man to eat an apple (or pomegranate as one student in each class will inevitably say), remain a part of the frame that gives meaning within a predominantly christian leaning u.s. environment. this frame carries so much power that advertisers have long used it to sell precisely the sexuality and temptress quality of women if they will just use the right products (colette ). religions , , of i must also take a moment to indicate a limitation of this study. in the exploration of masculinity and anti-feminist narratives it was often the case that these were not found directly from those holding those narratives but rather by proxy in their responses to feminists or in the reported studies about them. never the less, there is value to exploring these narratives as they appear all over comments sections of social media and at family gatherings in the continued discussion of #metoo and related feminist work. in “‘wronged white men’: the performativity of hate in feminist narratives about anti-feminism in sweden,” mia eriksson challenges the universalizing tendency to point to bad white men as the counterpoint to feminism that is a universal good. she critiques the notion that feminism can be divorced from racial discussions while still placing racial markers on the problematic figures, “white men.” in the process she uncovers important aspects of an anti-feminist narrative, focusing specifically on sweden. she references a letter to politiken where danish anthropologist dennis normark “claims that swedish feminism has indeed got out of hand. he sees a country where the power balance has shifted and where swedish men are being oppressed by swedish women; a country where ‘masculine’ traits . . . are giving way to ‘feminine’ traits . . . ” (eriksson ). she describes how “wronged white men” started as a facebook group but has developed into a way to delegitimize white male complaints about feminism. in the evaluation of these ideas, eriksson’s concern is with narrative and how a feminist narrative along these lines is performative, creating the reality of hostility toward women it describes and means to overcome. narrative indicates not only perspective, but repeated enough the narrative creates a world. eriksson argues that how feminist arguments are constructed matters. if the argument over-generalizes and thus marginalizes and excludes, it creates the conditions for the anti-feminist narratives that then perpetuate the cycle of feminist-anti-feminist conflict. it may even reinforce the very societal structures that caused the gender injustice in the first place and against which feminists fight (eriksson ). attempts at a kind of feminist meta-narrative such as the one eriksson is critiquing do not acknowledge the contextual narratives, for example women who are anti-feminist and men who are feminist. a false dichotomy is created that enhances antagonism rather than improving the environment to allow all people to thrive. however, eriksson’s critique is not only of attempts at a feminist meta-narrative. she also identifies the great challenge of feminist narratives, the denial by one who acts in clearly anti-feminist ways is in fact acting that way. there is a kind of glossing over that, according to eriksson, does violence to the efficacy of the narratives. these claims are found within the feminist meta-narrative and create, according to eriksson, a picture of sweden that becomes a narrative people inhabit. citing Žižek, eriksson critiques the project of feminist meta-narrative by claiming, “the normality of this order makes any discussion of it redundant; it does not need to reflect upon the violence in its language because this is the normal language, the way ‘we’ speak about things like hatred, patriarchy, misogyny, sex, gender, and equality. bodies, relationships, affects, and realities that do not fit this language are, in other words, violently excluded from this feminism and from the reality that it writes” (eriksson ). what eriksson’s analysis provides for the current discussion is not only some insight into masculine and even anti-feminist narratives, but also insight into the limitations of feminist narratives and the ways in which they, if not carefully constructed, can create frames of exclusion rather than inclusion. the argument against an analysis such as eriksson’s is that the oppression of women does demonstrably happen in the whole of the intersectionality of feminine experience and that there is no obligation to treat the oppressors with kid gloves. however, eriksson’s critique is more nuanced. she sees the oversimplification of “white men” vs. “all of feminism without distinction” as a performative narrative that creates the hostility it seeks to overcome. she says, “if read and written as a figuration, ‘wronged white men’ confronts feminism with its own assumptions about power, its own blindness towards objective violence, and its own participation in the making of the world (whether this is a world it likes or not). feminism should, in other words, not be written as a reaction to the worldly forces directed at it, such as patriarchy, but as one part of a worldly configuration” (eriksson ). eriksson’s article therefore both begins the discussion of masculinity and anti-feminist narratives and draws us religions , , of into the next section on the mediating transcontextual narrative. however, before turning there, a little more familiarity with the masculinity and anti-feminist narratives is needed. nancy j. chodorow, in “from the glory of hera to the wrath of achilles: narratives of second –wave masculinity and beyond,” identifies the parallel movements of masculinity narratives alongside feminist narratives. the “glory of hera” narratives arose out of second-wave psychoanalytic feminism to see the image of an overbearing mother influence that in masculinity narratives becomes distinctively anti-feminist. in proposing the “wrath of achilles” as an alternative narrative, chodorow is identifying the tension within masculinity narratives of the alpha male who humiliates or the beta male who is humiliated. in this narrative frame, the secondary role for men puts them in the same category as women and leads to a similar oppression of these men, who have more feminine characteristics, to the oppression of women. one sees not only the competition of masculinity narratives and what it is to “be a man,” but also the beginning of intersection between certain types of feminist narratives and certain types of masculinity narratives. recognizing this conflict and diversity in masculinity narratives is then an important part of the construction of a transcontextual narrative. she states, “the wrath of achilles, a clinical complex from the time of the trojan war to now, also has crucial cultural and political consequences. vamik volkan ( ) describes how a th-century serb defeat in kosovo echoes in recent serbian justifications for invasion and genocide. kissinger, when asked why he supported the iraq war, is reported to have said that in the conflict with radical islam, they want to humiliate us. ‘and we need to humiliate them’ (reported in woodward , p. )” (chodorow ). in other words, the notion of masculinity breaks down into men who humiliate and men who are humiliated, and you want to be the one who humiliates or you are no better than being a woman. this notion is not only pre-feminist, it is revised in a post-feminist world in anti-feminist narratives. it is deeply embedded in the cultural memory of the west. examples of it are seen on the large scale in the rhetoric of war and on the small scale in the ways that boys are told not to cry, or run, or throw like a girl. to be girl-like is not only to be inferior and therefore subject to humiliation. to say, “you’re such a girl” is to insult a man (segal ). within this narrative analysis, to lack the will to dominate and humiliate is to embody feminine qualities too much, and therefore to be not a “real man.” the “wrath of achilles” form of masculine narratives are, arguably, at the heart of the need for feminist narratives, not only for the sake of women, but also for the sake of men. a contemporary variation on this narrative is one in which men are facing the results of the feminist narrative, that women belong in the work place and men should be partners in the home rather than leaving the work of the home to the wife. for some men this condition becomes the source of an anti-feminist narrative. in “the man trap”, emily bobrow describes the challenges the modern man faces in having responsibilities at home with the children and housework while still trying to get ahead at work. this contemporary narrative is a kind of variation on the “wrath of achilles” narrative in that men who embrace the role of full partner with their wives can find themselves marginalized, becoming the humiliated man who does not have the same opportunities for advancement and raises as men who do not have such responsibilities. the interesting thing about this type of anti-feminist narrative is that it describes women as being able to “have it all” by working and having children, albeit facing fewer opportunities for advancement and raises at work, but for men it means fewer opportunities for advancement and raises at work. in other words, for women it is their job to do those things and they do not need the rewards of career advancement to be considered successful. however, for men in this narrative, to experience the world the way women experience it is a trap that limits their success and overall satisfaction (bobrow ). one final masculine narrative, albeit given through a feminist lens, is the “white male lie.” this narrative encompasses the concerns found embedded in the others. oluo describes this lie as the promise that white males could be anything they wanted to be. it is a lie because the realities of the world mean that there are a wide variety of inequalities that make the realization of this narrative impossible. never the less, it is a persistent narrative that the problem of feminism is that it takes something away from men that they were owed. many feminist arguments defend themselves against religions , , of non-feminist arguments by saying feminism is not about diminishing the rights of men but rather building up the rights of women. however, the “white male lie” is an example of the loss of a right. it may be an unjust right and a problematic assumption, but what oluo explains is that the assumption is embedded in cultural memory, that white men have a right to be and do whatever they want. so, the loss of the assumed right to dominion over others is in reality the loss of a right. it may be a perceived right rather than actual human right, and it may be at the heart of injustice, marginalization, and inequality. however, it is still perceived as a right and even an absolute right, and therefore something is lost. this systematic and embedded narrative comes out in a variety of aggressive ways against feminist arguments on social media and blogs (oluo ). the result of these narratives is that yet another dialectical move is required if contemporary societies are going to move beyond the aggressive tension between feminist and anti-feminist narratives and the continued marginalization of violence against women. how is it possible, given the opposing perspectives of these narratives, to mediate them into a constructive space where new meanings and realities are created not in spite of, but through the older narratives? . moving toward the mediating frame the previous sections challenge our ability to respond to oppression and injustice in anti-feminist narratives. so where does one go from here faced with the complexities of these narratives, their internal inconsistencies and their external aggressions toward each other? there are a variety of feminist writers wrestling with this question. in some sense the overt acts of oppression and sexual violence are easier to address because they are obvious to anyone who claims a feminist narrative. the feminist narratives that are held alongside oppressive or marginalizing behavior are harder to address because of the deep denial that such acts have happened. in addition, the overt acts have their own unique problems of reconciliation because of the anger of the victims and supporters of those victims. addressing the overt acts of violence and oppression can perhaps provide us with tools for the subtler acts that are more easily dismissed. diana cates is one scholar wrestling with the most difficult forms of overt oppression, rape and torture. in her essay, “experiential narratives of rape and torture,” cates raises the difficult theological question of forgiveness. the report from amnesty international, the recovery of historical memory project (remhi), provides accounts of experiences of rape and torture in guatemala since the s. these narratives are difficult to read not only because of their graphic nature but also because of the ability of the reader to put themselves in the place of the victim. this is the power of narrative, to draw one into the frame of the narrative and see the world through the point of view and meaning giving frames the narrative provides. as cates describes, the response of the reader to these narratives is anger, rage, hatred. these seem to be natural and even appropriate responses. however, as cates notes, these are not constructive responses. to wish pain and suffering, even death on the perpetrators of horrific crimes simply perpetuates the estrangement. forgiveness, as cates explains, is not easy, and yet it is necessary to move forward to a more inclusive human flourishing. in describing the report, cates says, [the report] represents victim testimonies alongside perpetrator and collaborator testimonies (including, as we have seen, the testimonies of perpetrators who express no shame for what they have done), and comments on all of them with a consistent moral voice—without permitting the dismissal or dehumanization of a single narrator. the effect of this approach is to permit certain emotions, such as hatred for men who rape women, to come to a reader’s conscious awareness. the effect is to acknowledge that these emotions are present and powerful, and to let them play an initial role in denunciation. however, the effect is also to provide, repeatedly and consistently, some perspective on these emotions partly through shifts into calmer descriptive or analytical forms of writing (cates ). religions , , of as a virtue ethicist, cates’ concern in our response to these narratives is to promote human flourishing through the cultivation of character. she says, “to invoke the language of virtue ethics, one could say that the report signals the danger of ‘too much anger’, namely, anger that is experienced in too violent and vindictive a mode, unhinged from the goal of justice” (cates ). if a recurring theme of feminist narratives is a concern with gender justice, then that justice cannot come through alternative acts of injustice or even language that promotes the idea of injustice. anger at these acts is intense and the narrative that makes sense of the anger and incorporates it into the identity of the angry individual quickly becomes performative, if not by that individual then by proxies as the narrative shapes reality in its externalization. it creates a new nomos that brings a sense of order out of the anomy of rape and torture. cultivation of virtues can restrain the performative narratives of estrangement and open up the possibilities of performative narratives of reconciliation. cates’s work can be supported by the tools of positive psychology. positive psychology arose out of a concern that psychology research focused exclusively on problematic behaviors. however, if problematic behaviors and attitudes can be modified, positive behaviors and attitudes can also be amplified, increasing a sense of happiness and well-being. rather than a focus on that which divides us and that which we despise about each other, positive psychology demonstrates that we can be as concerned with what goes right in life as in what goes wrong. seeking common ground and shared space is a place to highlight what goes right and encourages human flourishing. “positive emotions are more than little extras in life, but are as important for our survival and well-being as the negative emotions that tell us to fight or flee” (scheib ). tapping into these positive emotions can assist in the creation of transcontextual narratives that invite those who are estranged into reconciliation. one could point to ways that virtue ethics and positive psychology can become problematic for creating performative transcontextual narratives of reconciliation. there is a risk in virtue ethics with the emphasis on the cultivation of character to become victim blaming or to reinforce power-dynamics that say women must seek reconciliation for the violence done to them. positive psychology can be seen as placing such an emphasis on positive thinking that it marginalizes genuine suffering. however, the examples used here are very specific applications of both virtue ethics and positive psychology. while almost any theoretical framework for evaluating and shaping human behavior could potentially be used to either include or marginalize people, the examples provided here have specific elements that are moving toward transcontextual narratives that are performative of reconciliation. in particular, the work on virtue theory by cates has been carefully crafted to be reconciliatory, but not conciliatory. the claim she is making is that the attitude and character with which we enter a conversation can make or break its ability to be performative of reconciliation. neither cates nor i are arguing that anger is an inappropriate reaction, but rather that anger cannot be the only response. what cates shows in her work is the power of healing made possible by reshaping the narrative by approaching it differently. recognizing the humanity of another shapes the narrative to be one of recognition of humanity. it becomes an invitation to tell a new collective story by not dehumanizing the other who has dehumanized or at a minimum marginalized me and my experience. virtue ethics supported by current claims of positive psychology regarding the efficacy of seeking the positive in things provides the background of a transcontextual narrative. while positive psychology can certainly be used against people as a way to tell them they just need to change their focus in order to live better, that is not how positive psychology is employed here. in this case, positive psychology is used to provide rhetorical tools for the creation of transcontextual narratives of reconciliation. emphasizing benefits and shared concerns can build bridges. positive psychology and virtue ethics as described here can be used in the construction of transcontextual narratives by allowing one to see into the narrative of another and extract what is useful in order to build relationships. not only is a person shaped by their story, their being also shapes the story. if one’s character leads one to begin with the humanizing of the other, then so does the narrative one puts out into the world. that narrative then becomes an invitation to the other rather than a warning or a condemnation. religions , , of lisa sowle cahill further develops the tools for the creation of transcontextual narratives that are performative of reconciliation by providing a three-fold hermeneutic for reading tradition: appreciation, suspicion, and praxis (cahill ). respect for tradition allows feminist narratives to address the language of masculine and anti-feminist narratives. speaking within the language that is already familiar allows people to feel invited into the frames of meaning by things they recognize and see the respect with which those notions are treated. at the same time, once in this shared space a hermeneutic of suspicion can be employed where negotiation of the unfolding of living and therefore dynamic narratives can happen. finally, praxis allows the narratives to become performative. in the ritual, ethical, and other shared activities of a community the narratives that give meaning the action become embodied and create new realities. biblical scholars are already beginning this process in work such as that done by alicia d. myers. in “jesus and (re)defining masculinity in the gospel of john” she shows appreciation for the tradition and the text itself while applying hermeneutics of suspicion to the cultural memory that jesus is quintessentially and simply masculine. she claims, “the growing field of gender studies, and especially masculinity studies, has highlighted the consistent presentation of ‘masculinity’ as the control of self and others, although the proper articulation of control was debated in a variety of ways . . . in contrast, ‘femininity’ is characterized by weakness that prevented self-control. femininity means permeability, an openness to absorb all influences, especially vice, if not restrained by her masculine superiors” (myers ). in her study of the gospel of john, myers found that the typical masculinity of jesus was not as clearly defined as cultural memory would indicate. there is a gender ambiguity in jesus (myers ). this is not a transcontextual narrative in itself because this kind of challenge to cultural memory as it relates to scripture can be deeply disturbing and enhance masculinity and anti-feminist narratives. intermediate steps are required between the description of the tradition and the challenging of the tradition. so, the transcontextual narrative requires a modification of sowle cahill’s framework. for this modification, i return to richard kearney. the five moments of anatheism he describes—imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality—can be used to fill in the gap created between appreciation and suspicion. a transcontextual narrative must begin with an appreciation of the traditions of both feminist and masculinity and anti-feminist narratives. the language must be recognizable in order for the frames to give rise to meaning. however, in pulling together different frames that may use the same language, which we have seen in the feminist and anti-feminist narratives, new meanings can be constructed. it requires creative and imaginative reconfiguration of the elements of the narrative that recognize the value of the previous narrative frames while also recognizing their limitations. it requires humor in the ability to speak thoughtfully with rather than at those with whom one disagrees. returning to cates, humor may be a virtue here, a cultivation of our character to not give in to anger in order to see ourselves and others more clearly. it requires commitment to stay in the conversation even when it is difficult while not becoming reactive. group narrative construction requires dialogue. it requires discernment in the ability to see past the surface of the language being used to the being of the other in the conversation and how the narrative expresses and shapes the being of the other. to see from another person’s point of view shows a respect and care for the other that invites them into the conversation. in that invitation into a new frame hospitality is performed. in addition, in performing hospitality it may become possible for the new narrative to become performative, to reshape a collective reality beyond feminist and anti-feminist narratives and yet not beyond. it is a reframing of feminist narratives after the new anti-feminist and masculinity narratives, not in spite of them, but together with their critiques of feminism. creating the hospitable space opens the doors for a shared hermeneutics of suspicion, not of each other, but of oneself. praxis becomes the performance of the narrative, the recreation of collective being through the reconfiguration of narrative. religions , , of . conclusions the creation of the transcontextual narrative that is performative of reconciliation is possible in part because narratives are not static. human life is constantly unfolding in an ever-changing environment to which one must adapt in order to survive. the narratives that give being and identity to individuals and communities must also adapt. narratives that cannot change become irrelevant and die. they are replaced by others that speak to the needs of the people at the time. this process of reconfiguration, (caufield ) as ricoeur described it, can be traced through the centuries. part of the resistance to feminist narratives is in the ways they challenge what are taken to be “traditional” roles of men and women seen as ordained by god. men who feel their stories threatened feel their roles and their identity, and therefore their very being, to be threatened. who are they if the narratives are not true? however, the question we should be asking is not about the truth or falsehood of the narratives, but rather their ability to allow people to function together and to flourish as human beings. recognition first of the diversity of narratives in masculinity, anti-feminism, and feminism can allow people to take the risk of stepping into a shared space of reconfiguration. the narrative must be inviting, but the step into the space is a choice based on one’s own desire or not for the flourishing of all people. while such work of creating these spaces is experimental, the place to begin is with individual conversations and slowly building networks of narratives. performative narratives of reconciliation are much slower than performative narratives of exclusion, in part because they are building new 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/fbi-hate-crimes-reach- -year-high- -jumped-trump-rolled-toward-presidency- https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/ / / /fbi-hate-crimes-reach- -year-high- -jumped-trump-rolled-toward-presidency- https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/fucking-in-the-hell-that-is-aziz-ansaris-modern-romance-cbc d edf https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/fucking-in-the-hell-that-is-aziz-ansaris-modern-romance-cbc d edf http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	transcontextual narratives and performative narratives of reconciliation 	examples of feminist narratives 	examples of masculine narratives and anti-feminist narratives 	moving toward the mediating frame 	conclusions 	references competing at the top level with crohn’s disease treasure a. br j sports med march vol no competing at the top level with crohn’s disease alyx treasure early potential and realisation of olympic dreams by the time i was , i had already spent years going in/out of hospital. having been told at the age of that i would make the olympics, i was very focused on my sporting goals. i had no prior family history of crohn’s. it took years for me to get a diagnosis and this severely affected my athletic development by preventing me from training/competing. i lost my oppor- tunity to go to college in the usa, which had been a long- term ambition, and it would have been easy to give up on the sport. fortunately, i didn’t give up. i achieved my ultimate goal to qualify for the cana- dian olympic team in the high jump. i jumped . metres in the qualifying round, which put me in the olympic final and helped me to realise my lifelong dream aged years. health versus sporting goals when you’re told at years old that you will make the olympics you become driven, i would remove anything in my path to achieve my target. i was told several times that i had to quit athletics due to my condition, and one doctor advised me to ‘pick health or sport’. i didn’t do well with being told what i could or could not do, and over the years, i have argued with my medical team. however, i needed to be challenged and it is great when you can have open and honest discussions with clinicians. i have valued most those clini- cians who can advocate on my behalf with the rest of the medical team and help to explain what i am going through. ‘my crohn’s, my symptoms’ my symptoms are not gastrointestinally driven, and instead, i develop pain and discomfort, which limits my ability to perform. it isn’t about what i eat. it has been difficult to find a balance during my career and i am still fighting it. i am not sure that i have it remotely figured out. we are told by the dieticians and the nutritionists that look after us that we need to eat ‘hard to digest foods that support athletics’ (such as complex carbohydrates, vegetables and high- fibre foods). unfortunately, these don’t work well for me and i have found that i have to use meal replacements to ensure i have enough energy for training. luckily, i can tolerate protein, which supports my recovery. i have trained in a semi- fasted state, but hitting peak levels for sustained periods is tough when we are doing a – hours training session. optimising the care of my condition i find it hard talking with those both inside and outside the sporting environment about diet. it is difficult to find people with an insight into the disease who can empathise. i have learnt that there is no one- time fix and no gastroenterologist, nutritionist or doctor who can help me. the biggest factor on which i focus on is my preparation. i dedicate months to the maintenance of consistent behaviours, which add up to success. these include optimising my eating, sleep, medication, physio and training. consistency is hard with crohn’s and i have to fight bad periods to train my body as best as i can, to perform when the time is right. athletics in the #metoo era i had to tell people that i wasn’t faking it with my symptoms, and as a young female athlete, i learnt to be assertive. athletics is cutthroat. i made it, but i was hardened through the process. i was told that i had to be ‘tougher’ to deal with my symptoms and i coped with this, but some athletes may not have responded so well. luckily, i had people telling me posi- tive things about my performance, which helped to balance me out and i was able to respond to those who challenged me. i think the key is supporting athletes to become self- aware about what works for them, and then taking an individualised approach to help them recognise what drives them and how to maximise their medical management alongside their performance. becoming an advocate for others i struggled being diagnosed at years old, and i imagine that it would be worse being diagnosed aged or years as you are going through a lot of changes at the same time. i wanted to become an advocate for others with crohn’s disease. i had nobody to look up to and learn from, and having a role model who demonstrates that you can reach the top level in the sport with crohn’s is important. i became a spokes- person for crohn’s canada, and i am pleased to be able to share my experiences to help others (figure ). we are in a better place now that crohn’s and other gastric concerns are being researched, and there are medica- tions and treatment plans available. future hopes and goals i achieved my initial life goal aged years. it took years for me to re- focus, but i want to break the canadian high jump record ( . m at the time of writing) and qualify for tokyo . i will then be years old and i will consider retirement as i cannot continue to put the same pressure on my body. i am studying business and sustainable fashion so that i have a career beyond athletics, and i am looking forward to living a ‘normal’ life. three pieces of advice for a clinician working with an athlete with crohn’s disease: . communication—i have a great team at athletics canada who offer a holistic overview, but i think we need more in- tegrated communication within teams to stop different professions working in silo’s. having the physiotherapists work closer with support staff, such as dieticians, would really support the athletes to reach their peak condition. . holistic understanding of symptoms— the complexity of symptoms that arise from crohn’s and their ability to arise outside of gi- specific complaints means we need to take a whole- body approach. alteration in eating habits and energy output, increased fatigue or chronic pain, all need to be re- viewed for how these symptoms inter- act with gi concerns. the complexity of symptoms and how they are inter- prince george, british columbia, canada correspondence to alyx treasure, prince george, bc, canada; alyx_ treasure@ hotmail. com patient voices figure alyx treasure pictured left with bjsm associate editor paul blazey. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b jsm .b m j.co m / b r j s p o rts m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /b jsp o rts- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.basem.co.uk/ http://bjsm.bmj.com/ http://bjsm.bmj.com/ treasure a. br j sports med march vol no patient voices related should have a greater focus in terms of the relationship between pa- tient and clinician. . individualised approach—crohn’s is a difficult disease to manage as it manifests differently in each patient. worse than that, it seems to mutate and change over time so you feel that you can never fully understand it. this makes it incredibly difficult to have productive conversations with clini- cians on what is happening and why. this is why a long- term individualised program that is monitored closely by the medical team (and more impor- tantly by the patient) is essential. you are your own best advocate and if you can’t get a grasp on how your body re- sponds, it is near impossible to make positive impacts on your management of the disease. alyx is an ambassador for crohn’s and colitis canada who can be found at the following web address—http:// crohn- sandcolitis. ca/ or via social media @ getgutsycanada. contributors this work was written up by paul blazey—associate editor with bjsm following an in- person interview conducted with the athlete in focus, at. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication obtained. provenance and peer review commissioned; internally peer reviewed. © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. ► additional material is published online only. to view, please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bjsports- - ). to cite treasure a. br j sports med ; : – . accepted june published online first  july  br j sports med ; : – . doi: . /bjsports- - o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b jsm .b m j.co m / b r j s p o rts m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /b jsp o rts- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://crohnsandcolitis.ca/ http://crohnsandcolitis.ca/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjsports- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjsports- - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bjsports- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bjsm.bmj.com/ 	competing at the top level with crohn’s disease 	early potential and realisation of olympic dreams 	health versus sporting goals 	‘my crohn’s, my symptoms’ 	optimising the care of my condition 	athletics in the #metoo era 	becoming an advocate for others 	future hopes and goals wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ the sklare address: how gender and family still matter for contemporary jewry vol.:( ) contemporary jewry ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y the sklare address: how gender and family still matter for contemporary jewry harriet hartman published online: july © springer nature b.v. abstract family has resurfaced in many ways as its contemporary face has changed, often challenging the transmission of jewry in traditional ways. gender fluidity and equal- ity had nearly camouflaged the contribution of gender to the transmission of jewry for a majority of the american jewish population, at least. but revelations of per- sisting and underlying gendered patterns beyond the family have alerted us to its particular dynamic, which itself has multiple implications for family as well as insti- tutional life. in this address, we will discuss the changes that are occurring and their implications, as well as research implications, drawing on previous research and approaches that the sklare awardee has taken and is taking. keywords family · gender · jewish identity · open systems model · ecological model of environment · jewish exceptionalism it is humbling to stand before you as the marshall sklare award honoree. it comes during a year that the first such honoree to receive the award in passed away. sidney goldstein’s contributions to jewish demography are legend, and formed the background to many of my approaches to the study of contemporary jews, and we will honor him later tonight at a memorial session at  pm. and i stand on the shoulders of other honorees, whose work has been fundamental to my own develop- ment. to name but a few: calvin goldscheider, the honoree, was my disserta- tion advisor at the hebrew university of jerusalem, who guided me through my first foray into the sociology of contemporary jews, the comparative study of women’s roles as they changed upon immigration to israel from middle eastern countries and anglo-saxon and western european countries. samuel heilman, the hono- ree, preceded me as editor of contemporary jewry, and served both as role model dedicated to the memory of my husband, moshe hartman, z’l. * harriet hartman hartman@rowan.edu professor and chair, rowan university, glassboro, nj  , usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -y&domain=pdf h. hartman and mentor for the role i still play. the works of riv-ellen prell, the honoree, and of sylvia barack fishman, the honoree, contributed—and contribute— immensely to my understanding of gender, family and intermarriage among ameri- can jews. insights from the demography and analysis of sergio della pergola, the honoree, charles liebman, the honoree, his work with stephen cohen, the honoree, and the work of bruce phillips, the honoree, developed my thinking not only about american jews but the global picture of jews, and in par- ticular, comparisons to israeli jews. judit liwerant, the honoree, has brought the language of professor shmuel eisenstadt to jewish studies—i worked with prof. eisenstadt while i was a graduate student at hebrew u and he later became my postdoc mentor. judit has inspired me to incorporate transnationalism and a more nuanced global comparison into my own frameworks of analysis, which you’ll hear more about today. leonard saxe, the honoree, has provided a role model in terms of leadership both of the cohen center at brandeis university and as the cur- rent president of the association for the social scientific study of jewry (assj). to stand on the shoulders of these giants is most humbling. i also want to thank my sister sharon and her husband raulf polichar, who not only provided my home away from home in ann arbor, where i first met my husband-to-be moshe, but are also my home away from home here in san diego, the physical representatives of my family. and my closest and longest friend ruth isaacs, who traveled from the snowy corridors of boston, and robbie turner, whom i’ve known since elementary school, who have also come to share with me today. but more than anything, i would not be standing before you today were it not for the mentorship and collaboration that i shared with my husband, moshe hartman, who passed away this summer shortly after we had returned to israel. he was a driv- ing force from my first days at graduate school in ann arbor, michigan, where he was a fellow student, through the very earliest stages of my career, enticing me to live in israel and confront the differences of gender roles in israel and the united states on both a personal and a professional level. he introduced me to the frame- works of demographic analysis, to the worthiness of mining survey data for metic- ulous and in-depth insights, to the necessity of marrying theoretical framing with methodological expertise, and the possibilities of stretching one’s own capacities for work and achievement. more than half of my published work was in collaboration with moshe, starting from my use of his survey on israeli women and family for my dissertation (hartman ), our year-long collaborative and belabored translation of my dissertation from english to hebrew, to later analyses of women’s roles in israel, to our in-depth analyses of the national jewish population surveys of (m. hartman and h. hartman a) and – (h. hartman and m. hartman ) and the new york population survey of (h. hartman and m. hartman b). we combined our dedication to living a jewish life and raising our four chil- dren jewishly, with the critical analytical topics of jewish identity, how “doing jew- ish” and its widely varying expressions of jewish identity distinguished american jews from the broader educated population in the united states in terms of family and gender differences, particularly with respect to education, labor force participa- tion, and occupational achievements. i cannot help but thank and acknowledge him the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… for being an integral part of the work and orientation that has brought me to this day and your recognition. interestingly, when moshe and i started working on our first book using the njps, one of my colleagues heard of our focus and asked, skeptically, “gender? does gender matter anymore?” after my personal experience navigating gender roles between israel and the us, i was sure it did—at least in israel. but trying to be politically correct, i politely answered something like, “we’ll find out.” and indeed, we found out: our research showed that gender mattered in family responsibilities, in the effect family roles had on labor force participation, occupation and income, and that jewish women trailed jewish men in all of their secular achievements despite being among the highest achieving among american women. that colleague would be surprised today at how much gender matters, though not necessarily in the ways that might have been expected in the s. to be sure, some of the gap in secular achievements is narrowing, though not gone, and that gender gap varies across the jewish part of the globe. but the #metoo movement (and the #gamani movement in israel) have revived the focus on gender in ways that had been dormant in the public conscience (with rare exceptions) for many years, though not for the women (and sometimes men) who have been affected. as many of you know, it touched assj as well, and as it involved colleagues i know pretty well and whose work i use often, it touched me personally. the public consciousness found expression in a tumult of virtual and published exchanges, reaching beyond personal stories to challenges regarding the power dynamics of the jewish academy, volunteer and philanthropic organizations, and probing the very epistemology which guides how we produce and reproduce knowledge in our respective disciplines, as well as how we conduct research and analysis and recommend practical policies for implementation. the very terms with which we communicate about our research have been called into question: what is gender—a binary construct or fluid, straight and/or gay, an essential part of nature or completely socially constructed—and echoes some of the challenges facing the study of contemporary jewry: who is a “jew”? whose social construction is the dominant concept of jewishness or jewish engagement? is jewish studies ethnic studies or religious studies or minority studies or all of the above? is there a “jew- ish” family and what is that and whose criteria should we use to answer that ques- tion? and the two sets of challenges, how to construct gender and jewishness, come together in questions like: is the concept or focus on “jewish continuity” sexist? if jewish continuity entails women’s fertility and socially constructed motherhood, is it patriarchal? in response to the public dialogue which surfaced more than a year ago, as editor of contemporary jewry i organized a special forum to reflect on the social scientific study of jewry, a time and space for reflection as our colleagues’ work was called into question, but it is clear those reflections have a wider reach than any one particular field of study. this special forum, by the way, is being pub- lished in the joint issues of contemporary jewry  ( – ) as i stand here, if it hasn’t already seen print—all of the articles are online in springer first if the pub- lished issue hasn’t reached you yet—and will most certainly give you much to think about and hopefully propel you to work with others to create appropriate h. hartman policies and strategies of response. in this special forum, many of the virtual exchange and especially published pieces are referenced, and you will see how deep and far-reaching into the epistemology and the methodology of our field the exchange took us (see also final reflections: epilogue ; fishman and shain ; thompson ; waxman ). we also discuss many of the initiatives that are taking place, are under construction, or have yet to be fashioned. and i’d like to give credit to assj for its progress on adopting ethics principles guid- ing the organization and to the association for jewish studies (ajs) for creating a task force on sexual misconduct which established a website (https ://www. assoc iatio nforj ewish studi es.org/about -ajs/resol ution s-polic ies/the-ajs-commi ttee- on-sexua l-misco nduct ) that launched in the fall of , developed training for committee members, as well as sexual misconduct procedures which are now fully operational and a model for all other professional organizations. as you will see from the theoretical framework i present a little later, these organizational developments are important for current and future occurrences. i’m going to introduce that theoretical framework with reference to understand- ing the jewish family, but i hope you will keep it in mind to analyze many parts of our study of contemporary jewry. (see the appendix for an application of the theoretical framework i present in this paper, to the gendered power dynamics of interaction that often result in sexual transgressions.) in the following, i will briefly review some of the work moshe and i did together, particularly as it informs our understandings of jewish family and gen- der roles. i’ll then introduce a theoretical model that i think can move the under- standing of jewish families forward. one of the themes that recurs in my work, and especially in my work together with moshe, is what is distinctive about the patterns of gender, family, educa- tion and labor force that occur among american jews and what is “jewish” about these patterns, if anything. we approached this in three ways: first, we sought relationships between secular education and occupational attainment and multiple dimensions of jewish identity (h. hartman and m. hartman ). a major con- clusion from our work with the national jewish population surveys was that gen- dered family roles, reinforced by multidimensional expressions of jewish engage- ment, mitigated jewish women’s work in the labor force but enhanced men’s labor force achievements, resulting in gender differences between american jew- ish men and women in secular achievement. despite beginning their family life later and having fewer children than other american women, most of whom were not as educated as their nonjewish counterparts, a majority of american jewish women cut down their employment hours when their children were young and as a result earned less than american jewish men, and this pattern was stronger among respondents with stronger jewish engagement and identification. we con- cluded that the distinctive centrality of the family in jewish life was evident in the priorities of both men (who used their employment to support the family) and women (many of whom curtailed their careers to perform their domestic roles) (h. hartman and m. hartman ; m. hartman and h. hartman a, b). while it is true that the gender gap between american jewish men and women in https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/about-ajs/resolutions-policies/the-ajs-committee-on-sexual-misconduct https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/about-ajs/resolutions-policies/the-ajs-committee-on-sexual-misconduct https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/about-ajs/resolutions-policies/the-ajs-committee-on-sexual-misconduct the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… education and in the labor force continues to narrow, according to both pew data and community studies data, it has not disappeared entirely. there is of course variation among american jews, and one of the ways in which they vary is by denomination, with the most familistic among american jews being the orthodox, and those with fewer familistic traits more likely to be unaffiliated and/or intermarried, as other studies have made abundantly clear. we see this in whether and when they marry, whether or not they have any children, the number of children that they have, and whether their children are raised as jews (h. hart- man and m. hartman , chs. , ; see also sheskin and hartman ). how- ever, it should be noted that the proportion who are raising their children as jews among intermarried in the younger millennial generation has risen to nearly two- thirds, according to saxe and colleagues’ analysis of the pew survey, nearly three times the proportion in , which means that this dynamic is still evolving. among adult millenial children of intermarriage, many more have had some jewish education and had bar mitzvahs, than adult children of intermarriage had in the past (saxe ). a second way we investigated the distinctiveness of american jewish family, education and work patterns was by comparing the jewish population to the broader american population, where possible controlling for race and educational attain- ment. again, there were indications of distinctive jewish familism, with a higher proportion of american jews raising their children in two-parent married families, with fewer single parents or cohabiting couples raising children than in the broader american population, and lower divorce rates (h. hartman and m. hartman , ch. ). but american jewish men and women are waiting longer to get married and have children than in the past. so overall, the number of children per family is lower than in  the broader american population, even controlling for education. accord- ing to the pew research center, nearly every other mainstream religious group in the population has more children per family than american jews. completed fertil- ity rates for women with undergraduate college degrees are . for american jews compared to . for the broader american population, and for women with grad- uate or professional degrees, american jews’ fertility rate continues to be smaller than that for the broader american population (h. hartman ). in any case, overall, jews show distinction from the broader american population in how their families are central, affecting career and labor force choices, and the predominance and stability of their two-parent families. newer developments indi- cate the willingness to use fertility treatments when natural fertility is challenged, and it is disproportionately challenged among american jewish women; and the dis- proportionate inclusion of jews among single parents by choice (blumenthal ; lieber ), both related to the importance of having children among many ameri- can jews. a third way moshe and i explored the distinctiveness of american jews was to compare american jews to israeli jews, to see what they had in common in terms of family and secular achievement and whether these commonalities could be explained by some shared kernel of “jewishness” (m. hartman and h. hartman a, b, ch. ). i followed this up  years later in a presentation among the fellows at the institute of contemporary jewry at hebrew u, comparing the pew survey of h. hartman israeli jews conducted in to the pew survey of american jews conducted in (hartman ). in fact, comparing israeli and american jews, israelis are more familistic—that is, they marry earlier ( % of american jews aged and younger live alone—which means they aren’t married; compared to less than % of israeli jews), are more likely to have children and less likely to be child-less or child-free (only a quarter of american jews have children under living with them, compared to nearly half of israeli jews; only . % of israeli jewish women have no biological children compared to . % of american jewish women aged – ), and they have more children (in fact, israel’s fertility rate is the highest of the top most developed countries in the world, dellapergola )—and this is true even when comparing israeli and american jews in similar denominations and with similar educational levels. some of these differences seem to be related to the broader population among whom american jews live as opposed to israeli jews who are the majority of the population in israel. but the value differences between american and israeli jews are also related, as is the more well-developed infrastructure of policies and services supporting having children in israel as compared to the united states, as we’ll dis- cuss more later. in terms of the distinctiveness of jews, the israeli pattern seems to reinforce the interpretation that jews are more familistic than the broader american population, which we mentioned above. the israeli-us comparison raised many issues, which i decided to expand in my newest project, an edited book showcasing a global comparison of jewish families (h. hartman, in progress). i’d like to present the framework i am proposing for com- paring diverse jewish families to you today. comparative framework part of my inspiration for adapting this framework is the recent qualitative longitu- dinal study of canadian jewish families, in which alex pomson and randal schnoor suggest that we need to apply a family systems’ perspective to correctly understand the centrality of the family in jewish lives and the construction of jewish identity through the lens of families (pomson and schnoor ). i would like to build on their suggestion and apply an open systems model to the study of jewish fami- lies. this “is an analytical model that can be applied to any instance of the process of social organization, from families” to education to nations, “within which any number of different substantive theories of social organization can be constructed” (olsen , ; see also ballantine, hammack and stuber ). let me walk you through its five components, and then elaborate in terms of the jewish family (fig.  ). in the center box we have the central concern for the analyst, in this case the microsystem of the jewish family—what actually transpires within families, how they vary one from the other, what is “jewish” about them, but also what other important identities and concerns constitute this central unit. within every fam- ily there is a structure with a certain composition of roles, genders, age differences and hierarchy, whether it is explicit or implicit. how the family makes decisions, the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… communicates with one another, its “emotion work,” how flexible and cohesive it is, are all part of the processes that occur within the family. families provide opportu- nities for developmental activities and growth for each of their members. all family members are directly affected by this microsystem, even if the effect is not the same for each of the members. these features are dynamic and may change over time just because of the life course of each of the members—that is, their aging, and their entrance and exit from various life stages (such as graduation or retirement), as pomson’s and schnoor’s longitudinal research so clearly demonstrates. what has become clear from recent research on jewish families is the tremen- dous diversity within their microsystems. sylvia barack fishman’s edited volume, love, marriage, and jewish families: paradoxes of a social revolution ( ), brings us cutting-edge research on many of the variations in contemporary jewish family microsystems, from the younger american generation postponing marriage until their careers are settled, to religious jews negotiating dual careers and religious obligations, to same-sex couples raising children, to single mothers by choice, to haredi (ultra-orthodox)  jews negotiating a very different environment outside of their communities. of course, variation in microsystems is not only a modern phenomenon. jonathan boyarin, in his jewish families ( ), also explores variations in jewish family forms and ideologies. from stories of biblical patriarchs and matriarchs and their children, through the gospel’s holy family of jesus, mary, and joseph, and to mod- ern jewish families in fiction, film, and everyday life, boyarin shows that the family has been considered key to transmitting jewish identity, but he shows how widely fig. an open systems model of family h. hartman jewish families have varied through time and place. current discussions about the jewish family’s supposed traditional character and its alleged contemporary cri- sis tend to assume that the dynamics of jewish family life have remained constant from the days of abraham and sarah to those of tevye and golde in fiddler on the roof and on to philip roth’s portnoy’s complaint. but boyarin shows us the oppo- site, through vast expanses of history and culture as well as the social pressures and strategies that have helped shape jewish families, including strictly orthodox com- munities and same-sex parents, suggesting productive ways to think about possible futures for jewish family forms. microsystems are also affected by life-course transitions (geffen ). common transitions for jewish families are birth (celebrated by the brit milah or circumcision for boys, and sometimes baby-naming for girls), bar/bat mitzvah for -year-old boys and - or -year-old girls (depending on the denomination), weddings and their preparations, and death. this microsystem is influenced by several forces external to it. to begin, unless they are a child born into the microsystem, family members come into the family system with what we sometimes call “baggage.” this provides input from some- where external to the microsystem of the family. each member brings with them positive baggage in the form of social capital—who they know on the outside, how they’ve learned to communicate with other people; human capital—what they know how to do, the languages they’ve learned, the skills they have; and cultural capital— values and norms that situate them in a particular broader society or group. some- times people bring relationships into the family from their family of origin, which becomes the extended family of this family microsystem. or they may have been married before, and have children born in a previous marriage or relationship. they may have a relationship with their ex-partner. some of this capital may be what we refer to as jewish capital—knowing the rituals and the holidays, knowing hebrew or yiddish, having previous exposure to ways of “doing jewish,” knowing other jew- ish people and being able to call upon them to share in the family’s celebrations or times of need—or it can be non-jewish capital, whether it be secular or from another religion the person has been engaged with (see phillips and fishman ). input may also be ongoing, especially as families outsource some of their needs to external services (hochschild ). so families may employ domestic workers and nannies on a regular basis; grandparents and other extended family members may visit on a regular basis; sometimes a family member is ill or disabled and needs nurses or doctors to visit on a regular basis, or a caregiver who is not a member of the family; school children may need tutoring on a regular basis; and most family members have friends or peers who visit the family or at least the household on a regular basis. each time they visit the family they bring some input from the outside society which penetrates the family microsystem. the input is part of the family’s environment, which is a source of change within the family, as we have seen. this environment is made up of the immediate or primary environment, and the secondary environment which is somewhat farther removed. i have added structure to the category of environment in the open systems model, which i think will enable comparisons to be more productive (fig.  ). this structure comes from urie bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which has the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… been developed for understanding child development and socialization (bronfen- brenner , ; bronfenbrenner and morris ; parke and burel ; berns ). the mesosystem bronfenbrenner divides the “environment,” the surroundings of any particular microsystem, into four parts: the immediate environment consists of organizations or groups with which the family interacts, or what bronfenbrenner calls the meso- system—other microsystems that the family interacts with, such as the children’s schools, a synagogue if the family is involved with it, close friends and relatives; the mesosystem is comprised of links between two of a person’s microsystems. if we’re centering our focus on the family microsystem, this would be the links between the family and our friends, the family and our workplace, the family and school, the family and synagogue, the family and neighborhood. we know from pomson and schnoor’s earlier work, back to school: jewish day school in the lives of adult jews ( ), that there is an interesting linkage between the family and children’s jewish day school, for example; not only did the family have an effect on the day school (e.g., by the particular child they sent there, the child’s background, the par- ent’s interest in the program, and the support of school activities and homework), but the children’s day school had an effect on the family, strengthening jewish identity and practice through the school community and its activities and emphases. but we also know from their more recent work (pomson and schnoor ), as i mentioned earlier, that how long-lasting that mesosystem effect is on the family varies from family to family, often interacting with the input the parent entered the marriage chronosystem: changes over time exosystem: influence of external events in which family has no control ( / ; gulf war; immigra�on policies macrosystem: government, economy, religious system, poli�cal system, science/technology, media, culture, norms,values microsystem: the family interac�ons of family with school, friends, neighborhood, synagogue mesosystem: fig. bronfenbrenner’s ecological model applied to family h. hartman with (their memories from childhood, their orientations to religious practice devel- oped prior to the current marriage) as well as processes that transpired in the family unit itself (divorce, for example). the mesosystem is thus influenced by the chrono- system, or history, of the family and its various components, which we will discuss in more detail below. the secondary environment is more removed and might be more amorphous, such as the technological environment, or religious environment, or political envi- ronment, which most surely impact family microsystems today. the most radical example might be when a family moves. if it relocates to a house down the block, it may cause some temporary ripples but may not occasion major change. but immi- gration to another country will necessitate many more adaptations, which may affect the role system in the family, opportunities for growth and accumulation of cultural, social or human capital—or the opposite. if that immigration draws on prior cultural and social capital of a family member who lived in the new country prior to the mar- riage, it will change dynamics in the family because of the new strengths that family member offers to the rest of the family. hence, this model also allows us to study some of the effects of transnationalism—an identity that spans two or more coun- tries—on families. fishman’s volume ( ) is not just descriptive of the inner workings of jewish families. a great variety of research is presented on topics related to family which intersect jewishness, including religiosity, nationality, gender and sexual identities, and life course perspectives. in some of these research examples, it is the meeting of more than one microsystem that affects family life (i.e., mesosystems). in other cases, the intersectionality is between the family microsystem and various aspects in the macrosystem, another element in bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. this intersectionality is a major feature of fishman’s book, which teaches us how famil- ial jewishness cannot be understood without its national and cultural context (here illustrated by the united states and israel), its religious context (ranging from secu- larity to haredi or ultra-orthodox to mixed marriages), its temporal context (con- temporariness in its struggles with historical religious and legal practices adopted long ago). the way that fishman has juxtaposed the chapters helps us understand that child-rearing among gay and lesbian couples encounters different challenges than among heterosexual couples—and yet so many of the same ones; that there is an added dimension to combining work and family when religiously observant families are considered; and that being haredi when so much of the outside society is ultra-secular can both empower haredi women in a shift toward egalitarianism, while maintaining a “soft patriarchy” that must balance gender blurring with temp- tation toward secularity. environmental influences may vary according to jewish denomination. for exam- ple, haredi families (both in israel and in the us) often interact closely with the rab- binic leaders in their community, which revolves around the yeshiva where the hus- bands spent years before and after their marriage. they receive spiritual and religious guidance, social support and even material support through this mesosystem relation- ship (boyarin ; friedman ). the haredi social structure of the “family com- munity” came about as traditional orthodox rabbinic leaders adopted new, quasi- family roles within the parameters of a new voluntary community, one that by its very the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… definition would be separated from the secular world and actively isolate itself from the secular and modern sociocultural environment (friedman : ). “this fam- ily-community revolved around the rabbinical academy, or yeshiva, where young men spent years before and after their marriage. the yeshiva became both the locus of social and religious authority and also to a considerable degree the locus of material suste- nance” ( ). this close linkage between families and the rabbi-led yeshiva became a mesosystem providing not only social capital but also material sustenance for the fam- ily, a pattern which continues among contemporary haredi families both in the us and in israel. in another example, this time from the israeli context, intermarriage between dif- ferent jewish denominations is not common: % of haredi jews marry other haredi jews in israel; % of “dati”  (religious) jews marry other “dati” jews; % of the “masorti” (traditional) marry other “masorti”; and % of the “hiloni” (secular) marry other “hiloni” (cooperman and sahgal , ). this reinforces a jewish society segregated by denomination, related at least in part to segregated patterns of residence between different kinds of jews in israel; segregated schools in terms of haredi, dati, and the less observant and secular; segregated youth movements; and segregated par- ticipation in community activities between denominations. in other words, mesosystem factors mitigate opportunities to meet and feel comfortable with jews of other denomi- nations than one’s own. while the jewish community often forges linkages with all sorts of families and becomes an important source of support, social and cultural capital, sometimes these linkages are weak and actually marginalize non-traditional jews whose inclusion would stretch traditional boundaries. for example, disabled members often face a lack of opportunities for inclusion in jewish communal activities, and sometimes meet up with a lack of sensitivity which further alienates them (see, for example, respectabilityusa https ://www.respe ctabi lity.org/). sometimes virtual jewish organizations provide vir- tual community when the local community does not. b’chol lashon (https ://globa ljews .org/), for example, is an organization that was founded in the year as a response to the study of racial & ethnic diversity of the american jewish community that found that % of america’s million jews are african american, latino-hispanic, asian, mixed race, sephardic and mizrahi (https ://globa ljews .org/about /histo ry/)—in other words, non-ashkenazi. the organization reaches out to non-ashkenazi american jews through blogs, events, speakers, and they provide training to help other organiza- tions become more inclusive. their summer camp is the only multicultural overnight camp that teaches about global jewish diversity and incorporates multiculturalism in its training for leadership in the jewish community. some who have been marginalized from mainstream jewish activities or prayer form their own synagogues or organiza- tions, and while this is an important source of support for individuals and families, it often does not integrate them into the broader jewish community (see scheckner , for example). https://www.respectability.org/ https://globaljews.org/ https://globaljews.org/ https://globaljews.org/about/history/ h. hartman the macrosystem the second part of the environment is the macrosystem, which is comprised of institutional structures in the wider environment, such as the demography of the country, the government and political system (e.g., democracy, communism), the economy (capitalism and socialism, for example, and their respective values), religious systems (judaism and its place in the wider society; state religions vs. plural religions); science/technology and its attendant values, expectations and opportunities; the media, an expression of culture and its norms and values; and the geographical setting and its characteristics (berns ). when moshe and i first tried to make sense of the israeli-american compari- son in a chapter in our book, we found it surprisingly difficult. the wider societal infrastructure and support and some of the values were so different that it was difficult to make sense of the comparisons. we were not the first or the last to observe this, of course. in two worlds of judaism: the israeli and american experiences, liebman and cohen had explored this comparison in . they wrote that not only do israeli and american jews share “the myth of common descent, common destiny and a strong mutual responsibility…they share a set of symbols that are reflected in liturgy and ritual…[and they] are linked by their enemies…and by ties of family…” (liebman and cohen : – ) these transnational ties suggest interaction and influence on one another. but liebman and cohen went on to contrast the american jewish values with those of israeli jews, and more recently such scholars as daniel gordis in we stand divided (gordis ) and sylvia barack fishman in her report to the american jewish committee on israel-diaspora relations (fishman ) reinforce the contrasts between the two cultures. whereas american jews value individualism, israeli jews value family and national loyalty and collectivism; whereas american jews value universalism, israeli jews value particularism; whereas american jews root for the underdog and vulnerable minorities, israeli jews are more concerned with their own national insecurity and vulnerability; american jews value judaism for its justice and morality, israeli jews relate to judaism as a nation and in survival mode. numerous other differences stem from the fact that israelis are the majority in their society, responsible for creating social institutions, many of which reflect jewish values in their institutionalization. many of the significant factors differ- entiating american and israeli jewish families are institutional parts of the mac- rosystem: the role of the military, the infrastructure in the economy which allows women’s part-time work, and the national insurance system which provides sup- port for each child under living at home, to name but a few of the institutional differences (m. hartman and h. hartman a, b, ch. ). in our comparison of the influences on jewish families and secular achievement and their interrelationships, it was difficult to determine which of these many factors (jewishly related or not) would account for similarities and differences between the two groups of jews or even subgroups within them. this framework at least helps us to organize the differences and give a valence to each of them. the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… in my collaborations with ira sheskin, we explored several macrosystem vari- ations between jewish communities within the us to explain differences that we found. we used the data set that ira developed by aggregating all of the commu- nity studies he personally had administered since the early s, first into a decade data file and then into a century data file. currently there are commu- nity studies in the data file yielding interviews with more than , american jews and representing , american jewish households. ira and i looked at many macrosystem characteristics of different jewish communities across the us in an effort to find influences on the jewish identity and engagement of the individuals living in those communities, what we initially labeled “a sociology of jewish place” (hartman and sheskin , ). we found that many of the macrosystem varia- tions were not related to jewish identity patterns in the community. clearly, the size of the jewish community was not a clear recipe for strong jewish identity, nor was the density of the jewish population or the mobilization of a strong jewish federa- tion campaign. strong jewish identity could be found in stable jewish communities and not-so-stable jewish communities (hartman and sheskin , ). but jewish identity and engagement are affected by the collective denomina- tional profile of all jews living in their community (another macrosystem variable). “orthodox jews, for example, behave differently in a community with a significant orthodox population than in a community with few orthodox, but many reform jews” (sheskin and hartman , ). in contrast, a high percentage of “just jewish” or nonaffiliated in the community lowers the level of private ritual practice, as well as ethnic identity, for individuals in almost all of the denominational groups. a high percentage of reform in the community raises the level of jewish engagement in ethnic (as opposed to religiously based) types of activities—among all groups affili- ated with a denomination, suggesting that the activities in which the reform invest impact all denominations in the local community. we also concluded that “interpersonal ties between denominations …may be related to generational and family differences” (ibid., ). “ties to one’s childhood denomination may also result in persistent ties to (significant) others in that denomi- nation, … influencing individual jewish identity, especially if living in an area with strong representation of that childhood denomination” (ibid., ) (in other words, enabling these mesosystem effects to have an influence). these interpersonal ties between denominational groups likely also contribute to the discomfort of identi- fying with a particular denomination, and therefore inconsistency in terms of the different norms and behaviors associated with religious and ethnic identities… “[i] nterpersonal contacts between denominations, whether through family, friends, or through community activities, also promote the understanding of denominations other than one’s own, and bridge their differences” (ibid., ). significant denomi- national switching among american jews may also result in intermarriage between different denominations of american jews (h. hartman and m. hartman ; m. hartman and h. hartman ). actual rates of interfaith intermarriage vary greatly between jewish communities in the us—from % in south palm beach, florida to % in east bay, california and portland, maine—as ira and i have shown using the decade community studies data (sheskin and hartman ). the reasons for that variation seem to h. hartman be related to several macrosystem influences on the families in the communities, most strongly to the denominational composition of the jewish community, in par- ticular what proportion are orthodox and what proportion are unaffiliated; the age composition of the jewish population, in particular the proportion of adults who are over and under , and the proportion of adults who are over ; and whether the community is in the western portion of the us. importantly, there is an interaction between whether the husband or the wife is the jewish partner in the interfaith marriage and whether the intermarried couple raises their children as jews, with jewish mothers being more likely to be raising their children as jews than intermarried jewish fathers. one explanation for this is that the broader jewish community may be  more likely to accept jewish women’s children as jewish and therefore welcome them into their community (in other words, it is a mesosystem influence, reflecting an interaction between the jewish composition of the couple and the jewish community’s acceptance of them and their children as jews.) the increase in interfaith couples raising their children as jewish that i mentioned earlier (saxe ) may also be related to the non-jewish partner’s greater acceptance of the jewish way of life, reflecting the broader community’s positive acceptance of jews as part of the contemporary mainstream, a macrosys- tem influence. the exosystem a third part of the environment is the exosystem. the exosystem includes external events or policies over which the family has no control or direct involvement but which may nevertheless affect them. for example, / , except for the families liv- ing in the immediate area, affected families all over the us—heightening anxieties, instituting accountable practices when children left the home; the election of trump (except for those families directly involved in campaigning) is largely an external event, and it can cause strain between family members, so much so that a recent new yorker cartoon (april , ) shows a marriage ceremony in which the mar- riage vows include agreeing to hate the same people (see https ://pixel s.com/featu red/ vows-carol ita-johns on.html). the shelling from the gaza strip that dotted the south- west of israel (and beyond) in developed beyond the family’s reach, yet fami- lies in israel had  seconds or sometimes only  seconds to scramble for shelter when the siren alerts sounded, often resulting in trauma to family members, which impacts families for years after the event. years of the conflict between the gaza strip and the israeli towns just over the border of gaza have left families on both sides traumatized (o’loughlin ; ocha ; i news ). on another note, the presence of the #metoo movement in the us, or the #gam- ani movement in israel, parts of the exosystem for most people, may well alter the power dynamics between men and women within the family, and eventually lower tensions that penetrate into the family from unequal power positions in workplaces (berman, rosenblatt and stahl ; elliman ). (see the appendix for an appli- cation of the theoretical framework to gendered interpersonal interactions.) https://pixels.com/featured/vows-carolita-johnson.html https://pixels.com/featured/vows-carolita-johnson.html the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… another example of the exosystem is immigration policies, which are fashioned by governments well beyond interaction with most families, but they can tear fami- lies apart, bring them together unexpectedly, change the trajectories for the near- or long-term future, all of which have great impact on families (langhout et al. ). these have affected jewish families the world over. in finland, for example, accord- ing to research by mercédesz czimbalmos which will be published in my upcoming comparative volume on jewish families, swedish immigration policies allowed jews to immigrate to finland (then a part of sweden) only if they converted to christian- ity (czimbalmos ). when finland became a part of the russian empire in the s, they were able to stay in finland as jews, but could only become finnish citizens when finland became independent in . the chronosystem the fourth part of the ecological system is sometimes considered part of the mac- rosystem, but really is a separate facet. the chronosystem consists of change over time, which often becomes a part of the collective memory, also affecting families. in keepers of memory: the holocaust and transgenerational identity ( ), jenny rich finds several patterns among grandchildren of holocaust survivors, with their grandparents’ experience of the holocaust either empowering or traumatizing them, influencing their choices of careers, their commitment to judaism, the importance they place on having children, and more. israeli families often live with their memories or collective memories of the war establishing the state of israel, the massacre of jews living in gush etzion which provides a justification for living there after the war, the assassination of rabin, which expressed the destroyed unity of the israeli jewish population. ameri- can jews live with commitments forged from the mass immigration of jews from eastern europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement of the s, the first jewish vice-presidential candidate, the antisemitism of the pitts- burgh synagogue shooting—these are part of the chronosystem, which constitute part of the collective american jewish memory, with more or less influence on indi- vidual families. the different specifics of collective memories in different settings of jews—from eastern to western europe, from india, from china, from africa, from latin america—help to explain some of the variation from setting to setting in the sensitivities and customs of jewish families the world over. in her introduction to recovered roots: collective memory and the making of israeli national tradition ( ), yael zerubavel describes the collective memory characterizing her experience of israel, how entrenched her family was in it, and how it resulted in a cultural gap between american and israeli jews when she came to live in the us. she describes her parents’ adolescence in reference to wwii activities and israel’s war of independence of , and her own childhood in terms of the suez campaign and her rites of passage into adulthood with respect to the six-day war and the war of attrition that followed it. as she analyzed the role of particular events in israeli history contributing to the collective conscience of contemporary h. hartman israelis, she recognizes “the role of commemoration in establishing invisible ties between the communities of the living and the dead” (xiv). yet she also is sensi- tized to the role of silencing some stories and elaborating on others as societies reconstruct their collective memories. thus the “chronosystem” is not necessarily an “objective” link to history, but one reconstructed for the purposes of emphasiz- ing certain values and attributes of the past for the present context. families are part of that context, and partake of this reconstructed collective memory for their own purposes. boyarin ( ) also points out that “comparisons between ‘today’ and ‘the way things used to be,’ including discussion of how jewish family life has changed, often allude to the way things were ‘in the shtetl,’ almost as though the ancestors of all ashkenazi-descended jews had come from the very same place”; yet, “at no time did all [italics added] east european jews live in such shtetlekh, and the living con- ditions and folkways of different shtetlekh in different countries have varied consid- erably” ( ). nonetheless, these shtetls are part of the collective memory of ashke- nazi american jews and provide a common symbol for comparison to contemporary families. feedback the open systems model also accounts for feedback from the family’s outputs (grown children, for example) back into the original family and forward into new families that the children form (as adults). who among us has not had feedback from their grown children (or been a grown child giving feedback to our family(ies) of origin), often in the form of criticism, occasionally in the form of praise. while parents can’t change the past, they do on occasion change their current behavior in order to help open up relations that have become stuck in an unproductive pattern or to help a child get over some hurt they carry around, whether it was a result of inten- tional or unintentional behavior or verbiage on the part of the parent. children can’t change the past either, but sometimes they “get over” whatever has been an obstacle to closeness with their parent, sometimes with the aid of external help such as a therapist, and sometimes in time to “make up” with their parent as the parent ages but before they die. without recognizing the role of such feedback on families, we miss many of the dynamics that affect the family and its system. value of this model so, here is the model with all five components put together as applied to the (jew- ish) family—the microsystem of the family in the center, with its inputs, its outputs, surrounding environment, and feedback mechanisms. in my opinion, this model can help us to organize and make sense of variations between the wide diversity of jew- ish families and to distill the distinctiveness that jewish families share (if they do) (fig.  ). the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… it is first and foremost an analytical model, which allows us to map out the various influences on what happens within the microsystem of the family; to iso- late what is truly internal to the family, and what is a result of interaction with the external environment. i think this is important both for designing and interpreting research on the jewish family, and for policy-related applications as well. mapping out what we know—and don’t know—about families we wish to compare can guide us in determining the research we need to know. for exam- ple, dellapergola’s research on fertility among israeli jews—which at . is the highest among the most highly developed countries in the world—reveals that many israeli jews would consider having another child if they had more space in their apartment (dellapergola ). do you think that is the same for ameri- can jews? if you could subsidize increased dwelling size for american jews, could you grow the number of children per american jewish family? i know that this makes for a lively conversation starter (i’ve tried it)—but i don’t know the answer, and i don’t think any of us do, because we’d need research among ameri- can jews that addresses this question, and to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have it. or perhaps we realize that macrosystem variables, such as the conceptualiza- tion of gender roles and subsequent expectations for gendered behavior and atti- tudes, differ greatly for jews in india and in canada. we can better understand the gendered challenges of adaptation for indian jews who have migrated to canada by focusing on the different gender schemas common in each society, and tailor fig. open systems model of jewish family h. hartman appropriate support mechanisms for the immigrants, as a result. (you’ll read kelly train’s research [train ] about that in my upcoming volume of com- parative jewish families.) with respect to microsystems despite fishman’s ( ) contributions to understanding new contemporary jew- ish families, there are a number of different family microsystems which have not been adequately researched. for example, what of aging jewish families? fami- lies meeting chronic illness and mortality? the effect of adverse environments on family functioning, such as high unemployment, disability, or terrorism? (see hartman for a more complete list.) what of transnational families—families who themselves move from country to country (as my own did), or families who have a transnational member and extended family? what of the comparisons of american jewish and israeli jewish families of a particular sort, with european or scandinavian jewish families? latin american, australian or south african families? how do the microsystems of jewish families vary according to the type of religiosity they practice or relatively new jewish family forms, which have now come to include single parenting, same-sex marriage, and the inclusion of jews and non-jews in the same family (boyarin )? with respect to mesosystems we have some research on how jewish peers influence the outcomes in terms of individuals (e.g., sinclair and milner ) and even have the beginnings of some mesosystem effects on jewish families, such as pomson and schnoor’s earlier study ( ) of canadian jews, or the studies of birthright parents inspired to visit israel by their teenagers who went on birthright (aronson ). but we have little infor- mation on how much jewish capital matters in occupations, or whether certain occupations present pressures that challenge the jewishness of families (we know they used to in the past—korman ; mael ), or whether certain high school activities undermine the jewishness of teenagers’ families (though some of the nar- ratives in pomson and schnoor’s recent book [ ] are suggestive that they do). we also don’t have cross-cultural research on mesosystem influences, which might be extremely important. the synergy between school and family in the israeli jewish scene, for example, may be very different from that between most us and canadian jewish families and their children’s jewish (or non-jewish) day schools. and what of the mesosystem influences of the extended family of non-jewish spouses or non- jewish places of worship for interfaith intermarriages? samira mehta’s chrismuk- kah ( ) broadened the perspective of intermarriage with jews to understanding better the non-jewish perspectives, but we need more of this. the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… macrosystems analysis of macrosystem similarities and differences will also allow us to focus in on whether similarities between jewish families in different contexts stem from external contexts in which jewish families live or from internal composition and structure stem- ming from jewish capital. perhaps we will find cross-cutting axes globally among all orthodox families, or all secular jewish families, rather than between orthodox and secular in a particular country or setting. should we be interested in promoting more jewish solidarity, we will need to analyze this and make recommendations for promot- ing bonds between diverse jewish families. for example, one of the positive takeaways from the pittsburgh shooting in squirrel hill was to showcase an example of a pluralist jewish community which was able to transcend ideological and organizational barri- ers to cooperate on multiple levels, not only in the time of crisis, but during the time of stability and “normalcy” (whelan ). how did they do this? what resources are needed? exosystems suppose we find that exosystem variables vary widely between israeli and diaspora communities with lower fertility, such as the national insurance subsidies that jew- ish families in israel receive for every child under . could this be modified so that jews in diaspora communities receive similar subsidies? would this be helpful? (from the israeli research, we would doubt it, as neither men nor women seem to associate increased family subsidies with the motivation to have another child [dellapergola ]). research—at least through focus groups, or a survey with hypothetical scenar- ios—would give us a clue of potential impact in various diaspora settings. note that this sklare address was prepared for delivery prior to the coronavirus outbreak, clearly an exosystem influence that has had immense effects on microsystems, mesosystems and macrosystems alike, and is bound to alter the chronosystems of all experiencing it. look for a special issue of contemporary jewry later in the year for an analysis of multiple and varied impacts on contemporary jews the world over. chronosystems in terms of chronosystems, think about this: i’m the fifth woman to receive the sklare award in the last  years—but only the seventh woman to receive the award in the full   years it’s been given. i construct that as progress! and i’m happy to have been a beneficiary of it. and just imagine where we can go from here…. h. hartman conclusion in conclusion, i think this framework has great value for determining what research data would be most valuable to collect and analyze, at what level and with what methods. and ultimately, applying these models to a comparative analysis of jewish (or other) families, be it historical comparison, comparison within a country or a subpopulation, or comparison between countries, will be fruitful in a number of ways. most simply, it will help us organize the similarities and differences, and to locate those similarities and differences at the microsystem and mesosystem lev- els, or at the broader macrosystem, exosystem and chronosystem levels. i hope, for example, that it will help to make sense of the israeli-american comparison moshe and i had such challenges with. we have a great diversity of families within our jewish communities, both within the united states and globally. we can expand and deepen our conceptual- ization of jewishness and its distinctiveness to encompass worldwide jewry, with greater understanding and detail, by applying this comprehensive framework and using it to organize the information that is available, as well as information that still needs to be researched. jews do “jewishness” the world over, and we can sys- tematically understand what that jewishness means, and what features of jewish families are distinctive in particular (or all) contexts. i hope that this theoretical modeling will provide a handle to better understand the changes taking place among jewish families across the globe and across the united states, and help us to make better use of existing research and plan future research for more effective and efficient policy and, ultimately, enable more open and honest assessment and respect for difference as well as commonalities throughout the contemporary jewish world. appendix we can apply this open systems ecological model to the problematic of gendered interpersonal interactions, which have surfaced in public awareness in the past several years (fig.  ). applying this model, which incorporates multi-levels of the environment, shows us: first, the complexity of the interactions. no interpersonal interaction exists in a vacuum. the context within which it occurs is relevant, the input each partner brings to the interaction is relevant, the outcomes vary, and what is done with the outcomes varies depending on the type of feedback that is generated and where it is directed. second, the model allows us to isolate what might be under the control of the participants in the interaction (and what isn’t). it allows us to empower partic- ipants by alerting them to contextual information that might affect the process and outcomes of the interaction. this also helps in the aftermath of a damaging the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… interaction, by lifting the burden from the victim and helping the individual deconstruct the meeting more objectively, with a healthier personal outcome. we can (attempt to) manipulate the inputs by changing mainstream social- ization, including exposing unhealthy gender schema, in every venue of socialization. the model alerts us to possible impacts or outputs from the interaction, which can run the gamut of positive to negative. in other words, the same type of interac- tion may have multiple consequences, and how these are framed by each of the par- ticipants is something that affects the interaction as it happens. importantly, the model delineates elements of the environment that are impor- tant influences on the interaction, many of which are manipulable. mesosystem influences are extremely important to understand in terms of the ramifications of unethical sexual encounters and represent important inputs to empower victims and to fashion consequences for perpetrators. they also provide important handles for fashioning effective policies, or for adapting existing and successful policies and programs. the model shows us the effect of empowering the role of the bystander, for example, and the role of the workplace, and the role of professional associations to prevent, to monitor and to react appropriately to improper encounters. we can make sure the laws are in place and that they are communicated to the vulnerable and the powerful alike. and hopefully, we will be able to tell different stories about “whistle-blowers” as the times change. by mapping where successful policies fit into this model, we can more easily adapt to new settings (or understand why an imported policy doesn’t work). fig. open systems model of gendered interpersonal interactions h. hartman and we can determine the impact of “jewish” at every stage of the model (to what extent jewish gendered interactions are uniquely jewish and/or share many commonalities with the broader society in which they occur). in terms of inputs, what are the impacts of jewish religion—of varying con- ceptions of gender and gendered interactions, the impacts of typical jewish social/cultural/secular human capital and non-jewish social/cultural/human capi- tal that are commonly part of american jews’ upbringing? in the microsystem, what are the prominent jewish settings, processes, pur- poses that might be manipulated and monitored for healthier outcomes? in terms of outputs, what are the most common kinds of outcomes from jew- ish settings? how do they compare to non-jewish or non-denominational settings outside of religion? in terms of jewish environments, how can they empower and improve interac- tions? most of the focus so far has been on this level of change, perhaps appro- priately, and this fits in with efforts in the broader american settings as well. however, the model sensitizes us to other areas related to gendered interactions which can be addressed, such as improving the socialization which becomes the input for interpersonal interaction, in varied settings such as family, school, and community workshops and events. finally, we can strengthen feedback channels to improve interpersonal interac- tions in the future. in conclusion, american jewry—as well as jewry in every community within the us, and jewry in every country outside of the us—operates within an envi- ronmental context. this model gives us some tools to better understand that envi- ronmental context and allow us to compare and contrast, so as better to share policies and practices where feasible or learn to adapt them appropriately. like families (and other social phenomena), gendered interactions are complex and influenced by many variables external to the interaction. this model allows us to contextualize these interactions in ways that facilitate addressing patterns of behaviors and attitudes that are unhealthy and unethical at several levels, includ- ing the input each participant brings to the interaction, the immediate environ- ments which can alter interactions as they occur, the secondary environments which can adopt policies and practices for prevention and correction, the exosys- tems which can stabilize consequences and support systems and change the col- lective consciousness for how these interactions occur. family and gender come together in terms of how children are socialized into gender schema, and the models that they see through their primary child-raisers. but the family also provides an important mesosystem impact when it interacts with other microsystems, and it can also monitor feedback that is input into recur- ring situations. i hope that this theoretical modeling will provide a handle to better understand the changes taking place among jewish families across the globe and across the united states, and a handle to deal with more proactive policymaking and pro- grams to improve the quality of interpersonal interactions and empower potential victims. the sklare address: how gender and family still matter… 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(octo- ber ). https ://www.polit ico.com/magaz ine/story / / / /pitts burgh -synag ogue-shoot ing-squir rel-hill-neigh borho od- . accessed december . zerubavel, yael. . recovered roots: collective memory and the making of israeli national tradition. chicago: university of chicago press. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. harriet hartman is the marshall sklare awardee, an honor given annually by assj, the association for the social scientific study of jewry. hartman is professor of sociology and chair of the department of sociology and anthropology at rowan university, glassboro, nj, and editor-in-chief of contemporary jewry. she received her ba in public service from ucla, ma in sociology from the university of michigan, and phd in sociology from hebrew university of jerusalem. she has published widely in the fields of gender and family and jewish identity, including gender and american jews: patterns of work, education and family in contemporary life ( , brandeis university press) with moshe hartman, z”l; and “the jewish family,” american jewish year book (springer). she is currently doing research on the covid- impact on higher education, with a special focus on first-generation college students, and on diverse engineering students. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ / / /pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-squirrel-hill-neighborhood- https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ / / /pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-squirrel-hill-neighborhood- 	the sklare address: how gender and family still matter for contemporary jewry 	abstract 	comparative framework 	the mesosystem 	the macrosystem 	the exosystem 	the chronosystem 	feedback 	value of this model 	with respect to microsystems 	with respect to mesosystems 	macrosystems 	exosystems 	chronosystems 	conclusion 	references new perspectives on citizen journalism creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). https://doi.org/ . / global media and china , vol. ( ) – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/gch new perspectives on citizen journalism xin zeng chinese academy of social sciences, china savyasaachi jain cardiff university, uk an nguyen bournemouth university, uk stuart allan cardiff university, uk abstract in the aftermath of the south asian tsunami of december , the term ‘citizen journalism’ swiftly gained currency with global news organisations finding themselves in the difficult position of being largely dependent on ‘amateur’ photographs, video footage and eyewitness accounts to tell the story of what was transpiring on the ground in the most severely affected areas. despite its ambiguities, the term was widely perceived to capture the countervailing ethos of the ordinary person’s capacity to contribute to professional news coverage, thereby providing commentators with a useful label to characterise an ostensibly new genre of user-generated content. keywords asia, citizen journalism, new perspective, special issue, user-generated in the aftermath of the south asian tsunami of december , the term ‘citizen journalism’ swiftly gained currency with global news organisations finding themselves in the difficult position corresponding author: xin zeng, - , no. , communication university of china, beijing , china. email: zxbarbara @hotmail.com gch . / global media and chinazeng et al. research-article introduction https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gch mailto:zxbarbara @hotmail.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - global media and china ( ) of being largely dependent on ‘amateur’ photographs, video footage and eyewitness accounts to tell the story of what was transpiring on the ground in the most severely affected areas. despite its ambiguities, the term was widely perceived to capture the countervailing ethos of the ordinary person’s capacity to contribute to professional news coverage, thereby providing commentators with a useful label to characterise an ostensibly new genre of user-generated content. researchers interested in the emergence of citizen journalism in china frequently highlight one of its earliest formative instances, namely the spontaneous reportage of local people in the immedi- ate aftermath of the may earthquake in wenchuan, which claimed approximately , lives. several studies have shown how ordinary citizens on the scene began recording what had happened, providing precipitously ‘raw,’, often deeply moving, firsthand documentation of the devastation for both chinese and international news audiences (jiao, ; li & rao, ; nip, ; white & fu, ). in a period of openness contrasting with more typically restrictive gov- ernmental oversight – praised as ‘the dawning of a chinese glasnost’ by some western commenta- tors (hooker, ) – several self-identified citizen journalists were able to investigate and critique officials’ handling of the disaster, as well as inadequate building standards. such reporting, how- ever, did not completely evade outright censorship, with certain postings deleted from online bul- letin boards and blogs. further counter-tactics were also employed, as nip ( ) points out, such as government infiltration of citizen-generated content – that is, paying for people to post in sup- port of the local authorities’ assertions as a strategy to subvert opposition and manage this new, alternative form of civic engagement intent on improving transparency (nip, , p. ). at the same time, the integrity of professional journalism was similarly subjected to concerted criticism, most notably for factual errors, the insensitive treatment of survivors, and for hindering rescue and relief efforts. reese and dai ( ) describe how china central television (cctv) correspondent na xu was widely referred to as a ‘runaway’ when ‘she admitted live on camera that she was not at the front line of a destroyed middle school at dujingyan but in a hotel in chengdu, a hundred miles away from the quake zone’ (reese & dai, , p. ). it is a telling feature of our digital times that instances of citizen reportage have become com- monplace from one national context to the next in the years since, particularly where breaking news in a moment of crisis is concerned. increasingly, it is the case that the person first on the scene – most likely with their smartphone at hand – will be an ordinary citizen, thanks in no small part to the growing ubiquity of cheaper, easier to handle digital devices, as well as the ease with which ensuing text and imagery can be uploaded and shared across social networking sites. not surpris- ingly, a corresponding shift in public perceptions of crisis coverage has taken place, where the spontaneous contributions of individuals who happen to be present have become so routinely incorporated into professional newswork as to be almost expected. for varied reasons and motiva- tions, so-called ‘accidental journalists’ – be they victims, bystanders, first-responders, officials, law enforcement, combatants, activists or the like – feel compelled to bear witness, actively engag- ing in diverse forms of visual, audio or written documentation to capture and relay what they see, hear or feel unfold before them. for news organisations gathering such material, not least where it is being shared across social media platforms, there remains the demanding work of independent verification and fact-checking to ensure due accuracy and credibility. quick, impromptu assess- ments, typically made under intense deadline pressure, can be fraught with complications. recognising and making good citizen journalism’s potential advantages for enriching reportorial opportunities necessarily entail remaining alert to any risks or possible dangers at the same time. precisely what counts as chinese citizen journalism – and which qualifies to be included in its definition (and, equally important, excluded from its purview) – has recurrently proven zeng et al. challenging to ascertain, with different evaluative criteria being brought to bear by everyone with a personal investment in sustaining their own preferred position. this observation holds true where scholars are concerned as well, of course, as we shall see on the pages of this special global media and china (gmc) issue devoted to ‘new perspectives on citizen journalism’. before we turn to the individual articles, let us briefly consider the emergence of citizen journalism in other asian con- texts as a way to contextualise the ensuing discussion. citizen journalism in asian contexts it is hardly surprising that within asia, a vast continent with a wide range of governmental systems, there is a myriad of inflections of citizen journalism. little can be taken for granted where contrast- ing conceptions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘journalism’ resonate, sometimes in unexpected ways, within countries where political pluralism is often limited under authoritarian rule. let us start with india, the continent’s second largest country and, as the cliché says, the world’s biggest democracy. india diverges from others in many respects, not least its lively and chaotic system of governance. its media landscape matches its polity in energy and tone – more than television channels broadcast news and current affairs and , daily newspapers address audi- ences in about four dozen languages (registrar of newspapers for india [rni], ). unlike what has been seen in many countries, especially in the west, the indian media are expanding at double- digit growth rates on the back of growing literacy and buying power. on the other hand, citizen journalism in its various avatars has struggled to establish a high profile, despite several significant citizen journalism initiatives over the last decade and a half. this is of course a function of the dominance exercised by mainstream media, but, more significantly, the fact that widespread access to high speed internet is a relatively recent phenomenon. official figures from the telecom regula- tor show that million indians had access to broadband in november , but less than two years earlier, in december , this figure was only million (telecom regulatory authority of india [trai], ). the rapid rise in numbers has been fuelled by g mobile connections and some of the cheapest data rates in the world. more than % of indians currently access broadband on their mobile phones, with only a small fraction having access to fixed line broadband. like other populations worldwide, indians are keen participants on a variety of social media platforms, and this online engagement holds promise for citizen journalism as well. one of the first notable attempts to give voice to the voiceless was video volunteers, a network set up in to produce and distribute short videos focusing on the daily lives and problems of underprivileged groups who are ignored by mainstream media. india unheard, its news service that aims to feed mainstream news channels, now has correspondents who have produced more than , video reports (video volunteers, ). merinews, which translates as mynews, the first website dedicated to citizen journalism, was set up in (allan, sonwalkar, & carter, ), and saw the launch of wave ( ), women aloud videographing for empowerment, an initiative similar to video volunteers. wave is now dormant, but cgnet swara ( ), a mobile phone-based audio news service in central india catering to tribal communities that fall largely outside the footprint of mainstream media, has flourished since . all of these have won multiple awards and recognition, but, more importantly, they have demonstrated substantive impacts on redressing grievances, access to services, helping citizens overcome bureaucratic hur- dles, fighting corruption, enforcing basic rights, and obtaining justice. at the same time, almost every mainstream media outlet across print and television has made attempts to incorporate citizen voices in its output. unfortunately, these efforts often tend to be treated as stepchildren within the global media and china ( ) media; they are usually segregated from the output of professional journalists, are often packaged crudely, and vary widely in quality and impact. on the whole, citizen journalism in india has probably had the most impact when it comes to everyday civic engagements in witnessing and ‘sousveillance’, that is, citizen documentation of the powerful from below (in contrast with the powerful’s surveillance of citizens from above). citizen reportage, not least short mobile phone videos in times of disaster and in the case of egregious violations of rights, has in numerous instances gained prominence and created a positive impact on the mainstream news agenda. prominent examples stretch back to eyewitness accounts and images during the mumbai attacks in november on twitter and include cases such as politicians misbehaving in public, passengers being roughed up by airline staff, civilians being used as human shields by armed forces, and lynchings performed by vigilante groups. widespread outrage on specific issues, such as official corruption or violence against women, is often voiced on social media and contributes to public campaigns for reform. at the same time, however, other viral com- munication can spread rumours generating widespread panic, in some cases leading to the forced temporary migration of large populations; hence, the difficulty of making generalisations, particu- larly when assessing the relative vibrancy of the public sphere. indian citizen journalists typically display a strong public service orientation and lean most towards objectives such as ‘highlighting human rights violations’ and ‘solving livelihood- and civic-related issues’ (paul, ). a few lucky cases catch the attention of mainstream media, but, for the most part, as cgnet swara and video volunteers have amply documented, citizen journal- ism efforts depend heavily on their own activism in following up cases with the authorities to cre- ate lasting impact. professional journalists almost always ascribe low credibility to citizen journalists and think of them as ‘agenda-driven activists who actually damage journalism’ (chadha & steiner, ). in india, a meaningful partnership between citizen journalism and mainstream media has yet to emerge, although there are encouraging signs a gradual transformation is under- way. evidence of news organisations scaling up resources to facilitate a greater incorporation of citizen inputs, not least because such material is perceived to be popular with audiences and rela- tively inexpensive, suggests there is a growing recognition of citizen journalism’s potential to recast news reporting. a similar missing link can be found in southeast asia, although it is more for a different reason: the absence of the democratic life that india enjoys. although being home to the boxing day tsunami, the watershed event that helped bring citizen journalism to the attention of the global media (allan, ), southeast asia is not a place where one would expect citizen journalism to have an easy ride. by traditional western standards, such as reporters without frontiers’ world press freedom index, the political elites of this region are among the world’s least willing to offer ample space for citizens to voice their independent concerns, let alone to have their own news platforms. often in the name of political stability, ethnic unification, and religious harmony, they continue to resort to all classic measures – direct verbal/written threats, legal harassments, assaults on the economic survival of independent press, formal and informal control over media ownership, technological intervention (e.g. abolishing radio frequencies, erecting firewalls), and coercive forces – to stifle independent voices (solomon et al., ). in that context, it is no surprise that the incorporation of citizen-generated content into southeast asian mainstream news output is not as vigorous as elsewhere. that is not to deny that citizen journalism initiatives have enjoyed some degree of success in southeast asia. in fact, the region is a good case to see the resilience of citizen journalism in zeng et al. difficult political spaces. in indonesia, a long and still strong tradition of citizen journalism on radio has been enriched by blogs and social networks to add diversity to a media system owned mainly by a small, powerful elite. in malaysia, where the media are under either political parties or government-friendly corporations, a long-perceived lack of journalistic pluralism has been a key factor in stimulating a steady growth of citizen reportage in the past decade or so. with half of the population being under years of age, the increasing affordability of smart phones and other technologies leads malaysians from all walks of life to use social media to bear witness, share information, or debate issues. in the process, citizen journalists bring alternative perspectives to the traditionally centralised mainstream media system with their firsthand audio, video and written accounts, grassroots analyses of socio-political protests, environmental concerns, human rights abuses, political corruption and so on. in , malaysiakini, one of the country’s few independent online news ventures, took the lead in training hundreds of citizen journalists to produce thousands of news videos and articles for its website. citizen journalism malaysia, a recent spin-off from this training initiative, claims in its self-introduction that it has ‘paved the way for a journalistic revolu- tion in malyasia’, with many of its citizen reporters having ‘shaken political parties, highlighted community struggles, covered religious and ethnicity issues and other such stories which would not normally make it to mainstream media’. similarly, in vietnam, the ruling communist party’s tight grip on the media has been challenged by the autonomous growth and popularity of global social platforms over recent years – namely yahoo! in the s (nguyen, ), then facebook and youtube since (grey, ). as of january , according to we are social, million vietnamese ( % of the population) were active social media users, spending hours minutes per day on such plaforms. the sheer vol- ume of social news and information, shared across emergent spaces of interactive dialogue and debate, exposes ordinary people’s personal struggles. further, examples abound where political secrets have come to light, controversial legislative actions were called into question, or street protests organised and co-ordinated to articulate dissent (such as nationalistic movements against china in sea border issues, for example). this has led the communist party to reassess its initial tolerance of citizen journalism in the s, with some officials authorising fear-driven attempts to eliminate daring bloggers and to ban or block social media over the last decade. in the main, how- ever, the government now formally recognises social media as part of the general media landscape, although it stops short of calling them a news and information system in its own right. citizen journalism, it should be noted, is not always seen in a negative light by the political elite in this region. rather, it can be a positive and effective agent of change, so long as demands for reform are respectful of the same boundaries set for the mainstream news media. in practice, how- ever, it frequently proves difficult to agree where such boundary lines should be drawn, with the result being numerous legislative efforts intended to make it riskier for anyone who wants to be a citizen reporter committed to political advocacy. in vietnam, the cyber security law, which came into effect in january , is now used as a legal framework to threaten and silence critics as well as to tame global media companies such as facebook and google. it remains to be seen whether such laws will be successful in these respects, but with china’s increasing influence in the region and reduced reliance on western financial and technical assistance (solomon et al., ), many regimes in southeast asia are now looking to china to find ways to handle the opportunities and challenges from social media, especially those that bear implications for their political survival. like china, for example, the malaysian and vietnamese governments have introduced so-called ‘public opinion agents’ on a considerable scale, their purpose being to effectively police social web global media and china ( ) platforms by countering those narratives deemed unfavourable to the state’s interests. on that note, it is time to return to an examination of chinese perspectives on citizen journalism and its relation- ship to wider political cultures. inside china in turning to consider the chinese context, it should be noted from the outset that the country upholds two contrasting governmental structures – the authoritarian system in the mainland and the democratic one in hong kong – which necessarily give shape and direction to citizen-led forms of newsmaking. even in mainland china, it is possible to show how, when and why certain citizen journalism initiatives have flourished despite the constraints engendered under a tightly controlled public sphere. an early remarkable example of chinese citizen journalism took place in , when the mainstream press directed public attention to onsite images and posts appearing on the blog of a local resident in chongqing concerning a so-called ‘nail house’ – a household actively diso- beying an official order to move out of a state-owned property to make way for a development project. the resident, a young blogger who was later described as ‘the first citizen journalist in china’, took a trip to the nail house and reported on how the occupants, a working-class couple, were desperately fighting developers from the construction site. his blog posts soon gathered half a million readers, many of whom held protests to save the couple’s house and eventually compelled the mainstream media to cover the plight of the couple much more sympathetically. since then, citizen journalism – in all of its variations – can be shown to have adopted a range of different strategies to open up deliberative spaces across online platforms. its advocates have advanced alternative types of reporting, striving to illuminate calls for social justice for the disadvantaged, the need for environmental reforms to combat global warming, the monitoring of governmental responses to crises and disasters (as seen in the wenchuan earthquake above, the zhejiang high-speed train collision in or the tianjin port storage house explosions in ) or to expose the long-hidden hypocrisy and misdeeds of the establishment (including the recent outpouring of chinese #metoo scandals that involve many powerful men). significantly, china has managed to stay relatively clear of the sweeping political impact of western social media platforms, such as facebook, twitter and youtube. this is because it not only bans these networks but also fosters the rise to dominance of home-made social media plat- forms, such as wechat and sina weibo. such networks gradually replaced early, grassroots spaces for citizen journalism, such as bulletin boards and blogs, thereby containing its growing promi- nence in close alignment with state interests to a considerable extent. where citizen journalism proves to be influential, officials can easily intensify state surveillance of the social web, keeping a vigilant eye on any challenge to the government line they deem to be excessive. various laws and administrative regulations have been devised to allow for online citizen news to be filtered, as well as to deny citizen reporters the legal recognition and protection mainstream journalists otherwise enjoy (yong, ). that does not mean the state can be in total control, of course. while china-made social media are easily subjected to government orders and censorship requirements, their sheer size and com- munication speed can go beyond the ability of any censor to keep up. as guo ( : ) observes from the case of weibo, the country’s most popular micro-blogging platform (with million users in the fourth quarter of ), ‘information spreads more rapidly on weibo than previous zeng et al. communication tools because of the large number of users on weibo and the relative ease of repost- ing messages’. there have been instances in which weibo demonstrates the potential to promote counter-hegemonic voices calling for regime changes (sullivan, ). in most cases, however, it seems chinese citizen journalism is still within the ‘tolerance threshold’ of the regime. consistent with such a view, however, is the recognition that self-censorship is not restricted to professional journalists, being a condition which their citizen counterparts must tacitly uphold as well. such self-censorship often means sparing people who are very high in the power structure from criti- cism, or avoiding issues deemed to be too politically sensitive or controversial. reports of power abuses and wrongdoings are likely to surface at local and provincial levels, rather than with regard to central government. to a substantial extent, then, chinese citizen journalism has gathered momentum, gained influ- ence, and contributed to the outcome of public affairs in and through its impact on mainstream news agendas. today, it has become common for the news media to tap into the power of citizen journalism, both as a rich resource of information and as an alternative avenue for field reporting (xin, ). tong’s ( ) in-depth study of chinese journalists suggests they are redefining their own professional identity as a result, both as a way to distinguish and defend themselves from citi- zen journalists and to adapt to the changes that the omnipresent eyes and ears of the public have brought to news production routines and standards. at the same time as embracing its benefits, however, professional journalists remain wary. in common with their counterparts in india and southeast asia, as noted above, they are protective of journalism as an exclusive domain, one where the norms and values of professionalism are consonant with quality, credibility and legiti- macy. one chinese journalist informed tong ( , p. ) that citizen-generated content is often ‘fragmented and incomplete’, not necessarily because people deliberately lie but rather they are ‘just biased’ in relation to their personal priorities. in fact, most journalists participating in the study defended themselves as professionals on the basis that they work in a paid job for a main- stream media organisation, whose identity is associated with ‘investigating, writing and publish- ing’ news (p. ). this special issue taken together, the selection of articles presented in this special issue, ‘new perspectives on citizen journalism,’, offers a diverse array of perceptive insights into the evolution of pertinent reportorial forms, practices and epistemologies in china over recent years. each article affords a distinct vantage point from which to explore research questions formulated to delve beneath sur- face appearances in order to reveal the lived experiences of individuals situated across the citizen- professional journalistic continuum. we first turn our attention to perceptions regarding the relative credibility of citizen journalism in china. jing zeng, jean burgess and axel bruns’ article starts with a study inspired by the afore- mentioned tianjin blasts, when the credibility of the authorities was challenged by information from citizens’ posts. their investigation showed that citizen journalism was credited with provid- ing better, more credible information, especially when the voice of authorities is in doubt. in fact, weibo’s central control of its community verification system, which provides users with the ability to flag but no power to arbitrate false information, was found to be a factor limiting users’ potential for collaboratively identifying and exposing such information. global media and china ( ) following this, yan wu and matthew wall’s study explores how users of wechat, china’s most popular social media platform, interact with news and political discourse within a multi-layered but monitored space. gathering data from focus groups with uk-based users of the app, they examined how their patterns of news consumption and sharing contribute to patterns of reception, interpretation and dissemination that can lend momentum to the voicing of citizen concerns and support for specific causes. wu and wall focus attention on the blurriness of boundaries between news and the agenda-promoting effects of the meta-voicing that is linked to users’ online activities and conversations. next, the special issue features four studies examining the various aspects of the relationship between citizen journalism and the mainstream media and the broader political system of china. yu xiang’s contribution to this issue focuses upon short user-generated videos hosted on three online platforms, xinhua, kwai and pear video. using frame analysis, it finds that user videos tend to be largely entertainment-oriented and apolitical in nature. like luo and harrison’s analysis, this study finds that social media content does not exert an agenda-setting influence on governmental media platforms and indicates that citizen journalism in the form of short videos does not play a significant role in directly shaping news or political agendas. a somewhat different picture emerges from yumeng luo and teresa harrison’s next study on how citizen journalism impacts agendas not only in sections of the traditional media, but also in the policymaking process in china. they undertake a comprehensive quantitative analysis of issues raised in commercial social media, a government-sponsored social media platform, a commer- cially-oriented newspaper, a government-sponsored newspaper and the agenda reflected in policy proposals submitted at the national people’s congress in . their analysis shows that opinions expressed in online social media influence the agenda of commercially-run newspapers and, to some extent, the policy agenda, but not the content of government-run newspapers. moving the relationships between citizen and mainstream journalism from mainland china to the more democratic space of hong kong, the last two articles demonstrate a clear difference: such relationships are still yet to be negotiated for professional rather than political reasons. florin serban offers an account of the strategies of hong kong’s professional journalists in accepting and dismissing citizen journalism. given the special status of hong kong, especially when the condi- tions of press freedom have deteriorated, journalists are facing the challenges of the rise of public participation in journalism. professional habitats are built when professional journalism wishes to differentiate itself from citizen journalism; however, the struggles at the newsroom level to either accommodate or to reject the amateurs are also shaped by public participation. meanwhile, the journalistic response prompted by public participation can also explain the struggles of profes- sional journalists in addition to the struggle to define their role vis-a-vis amateur journalists. in the final study, karoline nerdalen darbo and terje skjerdal explore an aspect that is common to many mediascapes – contests over the legitimacy of citizen journalism. they study the relative role perceptions of conventional journalists and citizen journalists in the semi-autonomous region by interviewing a sample of those who cover politics in both groups. their focus on how profes- sional boundaries are defined also provides indications of how these boundaries are shifting. while traditional journalists are sceptical of the professional values and standards of citizen journalists in hong kong, the latter contest this and instead claim legitimacy by subscribing to many of the same values, albeit within a different organisational context. to close, then, it is the expressed hope of this special issue’s editors and authors that its readers will be inspired to pursue research into citizen journalism. the articles presented here endeavour zeng et al. to build on the small but burgeoning scholarly literature focusing on chinese dimensions to these issues, extending it in new directions with fresh perspectives. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. notes . see http://cj.my/about-cjmy/ (last accessed on january , ) . see https://www.slideshare.net/hoangdungquy/we-are-social-vietnam- -vietnam-digital-landscape- -report?qid=f a -d a- c-a c -caaf eab af &v=&b=&from_search= (last accessed on february , ) . https://www.dragonsocial.net/blog/social-media-in-china/ references allan, s. ( ). citizen witnessing. cambridge, uk: polity press. allan, s., sonwalkar, p., & carter, c. ( ). bearing witness: citizen journalism and human rights issues. globalisation, societies and education, , - . cgnet swara. ( ). about cgnet swara. retrieved from http://cgnetswara.org/about.html chadha, k., & steiner, l. ( ). the potential and limitations of citizen journalism initiatives. journalism studies, , - . gray, m. l. ( ). control and dissent in vietnam’s online world. retrieved from https://secdev-foundation. org/wp-content/uploads/ / /vietnam.controlanddissent.feb .pdf guo, l. ( ). citizen journalism in the age of weibo: the shifang environmental protest. in e. thorsen & s. allan (eds.), citizen journalism: global perspectives (vol. , pp. - ). new york, ny: peter lang. hooker, j. ( , july ). voice seeking answers for parents about a school collapse is silenced. the new york times, p. a . jiao, w. ( , june ). citizen journalism comes to the fore. china daily. retrieved from http://www. chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/ - / /content_ .htm li, j., & rao, h. r. ( ). twitter as a rapid response news service: an exploration in the context of the china earthquake. the electronic journal of information systems in developing countries, ( ), - . nguyen, a. ( ). globalisation, citizen journalism and the nation-state: a vietnamese perspective. in s. allan & e. thorsen (eds.), citizen journalism: global perspectives (pp. - ). new york, ny: peter lang. nip, j. y. m. ( ). citizen journalism in china: the case of the wenchuan earthquake. in s. allan & e. thorsen (eds.), citizen journalism: global perspectives (pp. - ). new york, ny: peter lang. paul, s. ( ). between participation and autonomy. journalism practice, , - . reese, s. d., & dai, j. 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( ). impact. retrieved from https://www.videovolunteers.org/category/videos/impact- indiaunheard/ wave. ( ). women aloud videographing for empowerment! retrieved from http://womenaloud.blogs- pot.com/ white, j. d., & fu, k.-w. ( ). who do you trust? comparing people-centered communications in dis- aster situations in the united states and china. journal of comparative policy analysis: research and practice, , - . xin, x. ( ). the impact on citizen journalism on chinese media and society. journalism practice, , - . yong, h. ( , july ). the significance and specialties of citizen journalism in china. economic spectator. retrieved from https://www.douban.com/group/topic/ /?type=like author biographies stuart allan is professor and head of the school of journalism, media and culture (jomec) here at cardiff university. he has published widely in journalism, media and cultural studies. his most recent books includes: citizen witnessing: revisioning journalism in times of crisis (polity press, ), the routledge companion to news and journalism (routledge, ; revised edition), photojournalism and citizen journalism: co-operation, collaboration and connectivity (routledge, ) and the co-edited the future of journalism: risks, threats and opportunities (routledge, ). an nguyen is associate professor of journalism and associate director of the centre for the study of journalism, culture and community. he has published four books and about papers/chapters and industry reports, in areas such as digital news consumption/citizenship, citizen journalism, news and global develop- ments. his work has appeared in, among others, journalism, journalism studies, journalism practice, digital journalism, international journal of media and culture politics, information research, journal of sociology, and first monday. savyasaachi jain is a senior lecturer in jomec, specialising in journalism and documentary. his specific areas of interest encompass international journalism, global media systems, and the influences that shape journalistic practices and standards. these research interests align closely with his practitioner experience of the media’s coverage of politics, elections, terrorism, conflict, migration, the environment and health in coun- tries across asia, the middle east and africa. xin zeng is an associate professor in the institute of journalism and communication studies, chinese academy of social sciences. her research interests includes young people and new media, media literacy studies, citizen journalism. her recent work includes journalism education in china: the reality and chal- lenges in the digital era; young people’s engagement in online discussions: a subcultural perspective; etc. https://www.videovolunteers.org/category/videos/impact-indiaunheard/ https://www.videovolunteers.org/category/videos/impact-indiaunheard/ http://womenaloud.blogspot.com/ http://womenaloud.blogspot.com/ by amy maxmen f or the past few years, graduate students applying for a prestigious summer course at the marine biological lab­ orator y (mbl) in the harbourside town of woods hole, massachusetts, have been quietly warned about the course’s co­director — richard schneider. in , an investigation at his institution, the university of california, san francisco (ucsf), found that he had violated its sexual harassment policy. although media reports in had pub­ lished some details of schneider’s case, the situation was discussed only in hushed tones among researchers involved with the mbl embryology course. that changed in mid­january, when a young developmental biologist, carolyn dundes, tweeted: “was super stoked to apply to an mbl course this summer but an ally informed me that the course co­director violated ucsf policy on sexual harassment.” two days later, schneider resigned. on  january, he was replaced as co­director. this comes as a relief for some scientists and alumni affiliated with the course who have been uncomfortable ever since schneider’s violation was made public in — a few months before the first summer course that he co­directed. (because directorships last for five years, it was expected he would finish in .) in the past few years, scientists who have participated in the programme have quietly grappled with what to do. some worried that schneider might repeat the offence; others felt guilty by association; and some simply wished it had been addressed head on. dundes found it troubling enough to abandon plans to apply. “it’s horrible — every summer, the students find out,” says one instructor, who asked for anonymity to protect against retribution. the marine biological laboratory in woods hole, massachusetts. the incident raises important questions about how institutions handle accusations of harassment that occurred at different universities — particularly in the #metoo era. biologist exits prestigious post years after violating sexual-harassment policy s h u t t e r s t o c k nature | vol | march | the world this week news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. several other scientists who have taught or taken the course spoke to nature on condition of anonymity for the same reason that they didn’t speak up earlier: the mbl embryology course is taught by high­ranking biologists who wield significant influence in their fields. early­career researchers say that speaking up could cost them collaborations, grants or jobs. the head of the mbl, developmental biologist nipam patel, declined to comment on whether he had received complaints about schneider from students or visiting scientists in previous years. however, he says the mbl has policies barring harassment of all types at the institute. the public discussion about schneider and his sudden departure reflect a growing con­ cern about sexual harassment in academia. and they raise important questions about how institutions handle accusations of harassment that occurred at different universities. many, including the mbl, lack policies about vetting candidates for previous misconduct, which can be especially difficult given that attitudes and discussion about the subject have changed in the past . years. “academic institutions are struggling with how to deal with allegations that pre­ dated the #metoo movement,” says debra katz, a civil­rights lawyer specializing in sexual­assault and harassment cases at the firm katz, marshall & banks in washington dc. the hashtag #metoo went viral in october . and now, at the mbl and elsewhere, katz says, “students are responding to the cul­ tural shift, and saying, ‘no, we don’t want to be in close proximity with someone who has harassed other students in academia.’” the investigation the mbl discussion concerns a covert sexual relationship between schneider and a graduate student, which began weeks after she joined his lab in , at the age of . the details of their sexual relationship are described in a report by a committee that investigated a complaint the student filed to ucsf in . ucsf provided a redacted version of the report to nature. the student, who requested anonymity to protect her from stigmatization, told nature that the physical relationship started when schneider invited her to a party at ucsf. they drank alcohol, then went to a strip club, where the student says their first sexual encounter happened — and this is substantiated in the investigation report. “at the time, i felt like he valued me scientifically,” she recalls. “i felt like this is what a fun scientist would do.” for the next two and a half years, schneider and the student had a sexual relationship that they kept private. the student says she experi­ enced mounting anxiety over the relationship. “i didn’t realize how dependent i was on his approval — what conferences i could go to, what projects i could work on, my references,” she says. “he was my thesis adviser, i couldn’t graduate without his approval.” in , she asked for formal mediation because she could no longer work in schneider’s presence. she says that schneider told her that if others found out about their relationship, it would ruin both of their rep­ utations. looking back on their relationship, she says, “i don’t think it could be called con­ sensual with that kind of power imbalance.” the investigation, which interviewed witnesses, found that “although the rela­ tionship may have begun as consensual, the evidence supports a finding that the com­ plainant, at some point, felt coerced to con­ tinue the relationship and reasonably believed that she had no choice but to continue the relationship lest it damage her career”. schneider did not reply to multiple requests for comment. but in the investigation report from ucsf, schneider “maintains that their relationship was welcome and consensual from beginning to end”. the report concludes that schneider’s “actions and behavior are in violation of the uc policy on sexual harassment”. two years later, in february , ucsf chancellor sam hawgood informed schneider through a letter that he would be disciplined with a demotion from professor to associate professor. the next year, schneider won a ‘mentor of the year’ award from ucsf. (the university says he was selected for the prize by students.) he continues to supervise researchers in his ucsf lab. meanwhile, the student left academia after earning her phd. “i went into a deep depres­ sion,” she says to nature. “i had panic attacks and crippling nightmares for years.” intense environment schneider’s career continued to advance. in december , the mbl announced that he would co­direct its embryology summer course. during these programmes, around trainees, mainly in their early twenties, live alongside the course directors for six weeks in woods hole. patel says that schneider’s vio­ lation wasn’t known when he was appointed. but several people affiliated with the course said they discovered the violation soon after­ wards. that’s because in early , in response to public­records requests, the university of california gave media outlets more than redacted records on harassment cases across its campuses from to . the mercury news, a paper based in the san francisco bay area, reported on schneider’s case. in march, two databases on sexual harassment in aca­ demia posted his violation online. by , many graduate students and post­ doctoral researchers in the course were aware of schneider’s past because their colleagues had sent them links to the databases and media articles. “i was frankly very frustrated because the embryology course is known to be amaz­ ing, so i went but was on guard,” says a grad­ uate student who took the course last year, and who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution. the student adds, “sometimes i would imagine the person who almost left grad school because of [schneider’s] actions, and wonder what that person would think.” at least one trainee wasn’t bothered. “rich [schneider] paid his debt to society, and there are a lot of male scientists who have never been caught,” the researcher says on condition of anonymity. on july , the last day of that year’s course, schneider brought up his violation during an ethics lesson, and apologized if it had made the students uncomfortable, according to a few students present. “i don’t think anyone commented,” one of them recalls. but the situation changed quickly after dundes’s tweet on january. within hours, more than , people had seen the tweet, and had clicked on a link that dundes had posted to an account of schneider’s violation in ucsf’s student newspaper, synapse. mark peifer, a cell biologist at the university of north carolina, chapel hill, replied with a link to an entry on schneider in one of the databases of sexual misconduct. “this is really disturbing ­­ @mblscience ­­what do you say about this,” he wrote. patel says the mbl has been developing a plan for how to vet investigators who violated codes of misconduct elsewhere. “frankly, most institutions are not going to tell us this infor­ mation,” patel says, “so that is our challenge.” but it’s not all that hard, counters julie libarkin, a geologist at michigan state uni­ versity in east lansing, who created one of the online databases of substantiated sexual­harassment claims in . schnei­ der’s case and more than , others are in it. libarkin acknowledges that her database is incomplete because it includes only records that have been made public — not those that were handled confidentially by institutions. “a good step would be to require all job candidates to affirm that there has never been a formal or informal finding of misconduct against them,” she says. “in order to have a sustainable academic system, we need to put people before everything else,” she adds. “these are deep and troubling conversations to have, but they are so important.” amy maxmen, a senior reporter at nature, attended the mbl course in . “institutions are struggling with how to deal with allegations that pre-dated the #metoo movement.” | nature | vol | march news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. an adaptive and evidence-based approach to building and retaining gender diversity within a university forestry education program: acase study of swift journal of forestry, , – doi: . /jofore/fvz practice of forestry - education & communication received september , ; accepted december , advance access publication february , copyright © society of american foresters practice of forestry - education & communication an adaptive and evidence-based approach to building and retaining gender diversity within a university forestry education program: a case study of swift mindy s. crandall, kara k.l. costanza, jenna m. zukswert, laura s. kenefic, and jessica e. leahy mindy s.  crandall (mindy.crandall@oregonstate.edu), assistant professor, department of forest engineering, resources, and management, oregon state university, corvallis, or. (kara.costanza@usda.gov), us forest service, missoula, mt. jenna m.  zukswert (jmzukswe@syr.edu), phd student, division of environmental science, suny college of environmental science and forestry, syracuse, ny. laura s. kenefic (laura.kenefic@usda.gov), research forester and team leader, northern research station, us forest service and faculty associate, school of forest resources, university of maine, orono, me. jessica e. leahy (jessica.leahy@maine.edu), professor, school of forest resources, university of maine, orono, me. abstract retaining women in forestry and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields is a challenge. university education represents a critical point along the forestry pipeline in which women might leave the profession. concerned with the low number of women graduating with bachelor’s degrees in forestry from the university of maine’s school of forest resources, a group of faculty and students formed supporting women in forestry today (swift) in . an organ- ization guided by literature on improving gender diversity in the workplace, swift has taken an adaptive and evidence-based approach while hosting events throughout each academic year. surveys indicate that swift has been effective at helping participants increase awareness of gender-related issues, gain strategies, and develop connections. although challenges still exist for women in forestry, this case study suggests that swift is an effective model that could be used elsewhere to support the retention of women in the forestry profession. keywords: gender, retention, women, diversity, higher education the profession of forestry has long been dominated by men (fao ). employers now often seek to diver- sify their workforce, recognizing that more diverse or- ganizations have more innovation and better financial returns (hewlett et al. ). however, the success or failure of educational institutions at recruiting and re- taining gender diversity has a direct influence on the di- versity of applicants (arismendi and penaluna ). in addition, increasing demographic diversity without increasing inclusivity limits the positive impacts of improved representation (sherbin and rashid ). educational institutions and employers within for- estry must therefore also increase the extent to which women feel welcome and included. undergraduate and graduate programs have been identified as junctions along the educational pipe- line where “leaks,” or stages when women leave sci- entific fields, occur (pell , buckles ). many http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - x mailto:mindy.crandall@oregonstate.edu?subject= mailto:kara.costanza@usda.gov?subject= mailto:jmzukswe@syr.edu?subject= mailto:laura.kenefic@usda.gov?subject= mailto:jessica.leahy@maine.edu?subject= journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx us forestry bachelor’s degree programs struggle to matriculate and graduate women (sharik ), and women remain underrepresented within the student body and among faculty and professional staff (bal ). although increasing representation is one part of the solution (friedman ), it may not be suffi- cient to merely increase the gender diversity of faculty if the goal is to retain women students (blickenstaff ). the forestry pipeline “leaks” because of an un- welcoming climate, the perception that forestry is a “male” profession, lack of feeling a sense of belonging, and lack of perceived career opportunities (hubbard , mcgown ). research and practices from other fields dominated by men can provide insight into ways to reduce discrim- ination and improve inclusivity in forestry. identifying and interpreting incidents of bias is both a necessary step toward improving the climate and a barrier to confronting discrimination at an organizational level (ashburn-nardo et al. ). both observers and tar- gets may struggle to detect discrimination that is less overt. education about the forms of discrimination, the frequency at which it occurs, and whom it affects can help (ashburn-nardo et  al. ). education about “second-generation gender bias”—bias that creates a context in which women fail to reach their full poten- tial—is a primary suggestion for organizations looking to support women’s access to leadership positions (ibarra et al. ). in fact, accurately recognizing and interpreting bias leads women to feel more empowered by providing avenues for action (ibarra et al. ). in a study of persistence of women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) fields, conscious building of peer networks was a key strategy used to reduce isolation (ko et al. ). ko et al. ( ) concluded that encouraging students, faculty, and employees to participate in mentoring net- works could better support women of color. other research has found that social support from organized programs led to a greater sense of belonging and can be a key indicator of engagement in academic settings (rosenthal et  al. ). brainard and carlin ( ) found that the presence of a departmental women’s group was enough to encourage students to stay in en- gineering, another field dominated by men. there is increasing evidence of the role that both men and women need to play in creating more wel- coming climates and combating discrimination. one key to motivating men to support these initiatives is helping them recognize that gender bias exists (prime and moss-rascusin ). in a study of the nsf- funded program advocates and allies, men engaged in gender-equity work recognized that it encompassed actions from small (e.g., challenging biased com- ments) to large (e.g., revamping institutional pro- cesses) (anderson ). case study context the university of maine’s school of forest resources (sfr) is similar to many university forestry programs in the underrepresentation of women, particularly stu- dents in the baccalaureate forestry major (figure  ). although enrollment of women has increased in sfr since , in several of those years, no ( ) or only one ( , ) woman graduated with a bachelor’s degree in forestry. furthermore, although women ac- counted for percent of the graduate students in sfr in – , most did not have forestry undergraduate degrees, indicating a potential lack of awareness to enter the profession at an earlier stage. in terms of faculty within the society of american foresters’ ac- credited forestry program, sfr had only one tenure- track woman faculty member between and , and none from to  . in recognition of this context, six women in sfr met in the fall of to discuss concerns of recent management and policy implications many employers, from private companies to the federal government, value a diverse and representative work- force, and would like to have the largest possible pool of skilled labor from which to select. yet engaging women to study forestry and ensuring that they complete school eager to join the workforce remains a problem. groups that foster support and validation for women’s experiences in the education portion of the training-to-workforce pipeline have the potential to help recruit and retain women while also boosting their participation in the for- estry profession. this case study surveyed participants in supporting women in forestry today (swift) in and . using these surveys and gender literature to adapt swift’s development showed that the combin- ation of educational readings and discussions, panel sessions, social events, and hands-on-training were prom- ising as an effective way to engage women in the forestry profession and increase the likelihood of program completion and workforce participation. furthermore, participants report benefits from the networking oppor- tunities and shared experiences provided by groups like swift. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx attrition from undergraduate enrollment and diffi- culties in retaining women from education to em- ployment in forestry. inspired by literature and by a working group within the us forest service, northern research station (kenefic et al. ), we posited that developing a group specifically addressing the experi- ences of women could improve the climate for women in sfr through increased perceptions of belonging and engagement with the field of forestry, ultimately leading to improved retention. this hypothesis motivated the creation of an education, support, and networking group for women in sfr called supporting women in forestry today (swift) (figure  ). the goal of swift is to support and encourage women in sfr in their forestry education and careers by helping women rec- ognize and overcome existing barriers and fostering a more inclusive community. we do this through four approaches: education about gender discrimination, development of strategies for success in a field dom- inated by men, improved networking for women, and education for and about the role of men as allies. in this case study, we describe our experiences creating, adapting, and sustaining swift over the   years following the group’s creation. in this paper, we: ( ) provide a rich, detailed description of the case study, including the adaptive management of swift; ( ) share relevant findings and themes that evaluate the effectiveness of the four approaches in meeting the goal of swift; and ( ) share results identifying unanticipated benefits of swift as well as future areas of concern for women in forestry. our findings offer suggestions for those wishing to use a similar model at other institutions or workplaces to improve the climate and support retention of women at all levels, ultimately improving diversity within the field of forestry. methods adaptive management through participant observation and surveys as foresters, the concept of adaptive management (holling ) has proven useful in guiding our efforts related to swift. we were all members of the volun- teer swift planning team and used our experiences following methods of participant observation to guide adaptations (musante ). we also used formal evaluation feedback from participants to monitor the success of swift and guide adaptations over time. initial swift meetings were scheduled for the spring semester of and advertised to everyone in sfr identifying as a woman (inclusive of all mar- ginalized genders), from enrolled undergraduate and graduate students to faculty and staff, including ad- ministrative professionals and research scientists. this pool was later expanded to include students enrolled in the forest ecosystems concentration of the ecology and environmental science undergraduate and graduate programs. figure . enrollment and graduates in the undergraduate forestry major at the university of maine, school of forest resources, for academic years (ay) – through – . total forestry majors is the dashed gray line; women forestry majors is the dark green line with square markers; forestry baccalaureate degrees conferred to women is the light green line with triangle markers. data provided by the university of maine, office of institutional research and assessment. figure . current logo for swift, supporting women in forestry today, designed by planning team member maren granstrom. used with permission. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx the swift planning team (hereafter, team) used an anonymous survey to help assess whether the ap- proaches used by swift were effective and guide adap- tive management. the survey collected information on participants’ perceptions of swift and skills gained through participation, as well as challenges faced by women in forestry. paper copies were distributed at a swift meeting, and a link to an online version was emailed to all women invited to swift events, regard- less of participation, at the end of the first semester (spring )  and   years later (spring ). as the survey was not designed to be a representative sample, but instead to evaluate and monitor swift, it is pos- sible that some respondents completed the survey in both years. in addition, the survey was sent to only those who identified as women; the effectiveness of swift from men’s perspectives is not analyzed here. open-ended questions and closed questions that had either yes/no or predefined multiple-choice options were asked in the survey. likert scale questions were on a -point scale from definitely no ( ) to definitely yes ( ). basic summary statistics were used to assess participant responses. open-ended responses for and were coded together, assigned broad themes, and assessed for commonalities. results in the   years since the initial meeting, both obser- vations and survey results have formed the basis of several lessons learned that reinforced or led to modi- fications in the operation of swift (figure  ). these lessons, along with the results described here, inform our understanding of the role groups like swift can play in recruitment and retention of women, and form guidelines for others who may wish to build off this effort. using participant observation to guide adaptation of swift the team has operated on a consensus basis since its inception. as swift is not a membership-driven or- ganization, but open to all who care to participate in any given event, it was critical that the team work col- lectively to develop events and respond to feedback. figure . lessons learned from  years of swift development. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx however, the composition of the team has adapted over time. initial members were those willing and able to participate, and the team was comprised solely of faculty and graduate students. following suggestions by undergraduate participants, the team is now capped at six members: two faculty/staff, two graduate stu- dents, and two undergraduate students. although there are no formal roles or designated leadership positions, one undergraduate student serves as communications coordinator as both a professional development oppor- tunity and an avenue to increase student involvement. the inclusion of men in some swift meetings was another intentional adaptation. at first, the team felt strongly that it was important for women to be able to talk freely about their experiences; literature has shown that having a safe space for to share and com- pare experiences can increase feelings of support and validation among women and encourage them to talk openly (e.g., ibarra et  al. ). initial feedback con- firmed the value of women-only sessions. however, literature has also shown that whereas men may be less likely to recognize sexism, their confrontation of it can be effective at changing the culture (drury and kaiser ). in addition, many within sfr ex- pressed a desire for men to have the same opportun- ities for learning about gender bias and issues; several survey respondents commented on the need to educate our peers, and several men expressed a desire to learn more about gender bias and being an effective ally. to balance these perspectives, swift began hosting one meeting a semester open to people of all gender identities, denoted as a “swift + allies” event. this balance of offerings provides a safe space to explore sensitive issues and an avenue to improve awareness across the sfr community. another adaptation was the development of ground rules to guide meetings, set expectations, and frame conversations. the current ground rules and motiv- ation behind each (table  ) are read aloud at the be- ginning of each meeting. although this is potentially repetitive, doing so accommodates the shifting partici- pation of the group (any given meeting could poten- tially include new participants); it also helps reinforce the shared responsibility of respectful communication. the first swift meeting was an open group discus- sion. with participants, the group was too large to generate thoughtful discussion and include everyone’s perspective—one of the desired outcomes. since that meeting, the default format has been adapted so that members of the team introduce the topic and provide questions or scenarios for discussion before asking participants to break into small groups. participants reconvene as a large group to report back following small group discussions. this format is intended to facilitate greater participation in discussion among table . swift meeting ground rules developed to guide participants and set an appropriate framework at each meeting, along with the motivation for each rule ground rule motivation assume positive intent on the part of fellow participants. some topics may induce strong feelings and/or responses among participants; assuming good intent helps minimize offense. seek to understand, then be understood. be an active listener; work to ensure you understand what another is saying before formulating your response. let as many people as possible contribute. the goal is to encourage participation from as many people as possible; remind participants not to dominate. don’t be afraid of silence. recognize that some people may need a larger pause in conversation to want to jump in. respond with honest, open questions instead of advice or corrections. encourage people to resist giving advice and “correcting” others’ perceptions or reactions, to foster inclusivity and acceptance. respect others’ experiences. recognize that experiences are varied, and all deserve respect. they may not be the same as one’s own. speak from personal experience and try to avoid stereotyping. avoid generalizing whenever possible. speaking from experience can help and provides concrete examples. stories are complex and evolving. everyone chooses how much to share; we may not know the full story. the experience may not be over. limit judgement of others. maintain people’s confidentiality. to maintain a safe space, refrain from discussing other people’s personal experiences outside the swift setting. do share strategies and ideas for success, and your own story when you want. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx individuals, some of whom might be intimidated by speaking in front of a large group. the yearly schedule of events has generally mirrored the approaches identified to achieve swift’s goal: edu- cation for women about concepts of gender bias; devel- opment of strategies for success; improved networking; and education and opportunities for allies. since , swift has hosted three to four meetings or events each semester. an example list of events and a brief summary from the – academic year is shown in table  . generally, one event each semester is primarily social and provides an opportunity for new and returning sfr women to connect with each other. a second event is de- signed to provide an opportunity for participants to hone skills and share what brought them to forestry in the first place: being in the woods. these outdoor events have included an all-woman field tour (involving women for- esters from the local area) of us forest service research on the penobscot experimental forest, a birding hike led by a woman on the sfr faculty, and the ever-popular chainsaw practice session on the university forest, where women of all skill levels can practice chainsaw use in a safe and supportive environment (figure  ). as noted previously, a third event is designated a swift + allies event, open to all; this and the remaining swift event(s) are typically more educational, featuring popular press articles or scientific findings related to gender discrim- ination. these have included topics such as the con- fidence gap (kay and shipman ), “leaning in” (sandberg ), impostor syndrome (clance and imes ), self-advocacy, strategies for negotiating (bowles and babcock ), identifying bias and discrimination (stangor et al. ), and panel discussions with profes- sionals or guest speakers. these events typically incorp- orate either small group discussions or role-playing of strategies for responding to difficult situations. table . examples of swift activities from the – academic year, including a brief description of each event. numbers below participants refer to which of the approaches used by swift the event contributed to: ( ) education of women about terms and concepts in gender discrimination; ( ) development of strategies for success in a male-dominated field; ( ) improving networking for women; and ( ) education, discussion, and opportunities for and about men as allies. meeting participants and approach description september: chili social women only ( ) informal social gathering (“meet and greet”) at the start of the school year. november: chainsaw practice women only ( , ) overview of chainsaw safety and operating basics, followed by opportunities for women to practice using the saw as much or as little as they would like. november: how to be an ally (swift + allies) all genders ( , , , ) one-hour workshop that included presentations about allyship and gender-related issues (e.g., implicit bias) along with small- and large-group discussions. the group produced a list of ways they could be an ally to others in sfr, which was posted on the swift website (forest.umaine.edu/swift). february: leaning in to the job market women only ( , , ) one-hour, moderated, large-group discussion in which participants discussed their experiences on a variety of job-related topics, from applying to jobs to interactions with colleagues. march: speaking up: why we do it when we do and why sometimes we don’t women only ( , , ) panel of undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty who shared experiences of both successful and unsuccessful times when they spoke up about discrimination, and times when they chose not to speak up. large-group discussion followed. april: the good, the bad, and the ugly: experiences as a woman in forestry (swift + allies) all genders ( , , ) seminar presentation by professor nicole rogers (university of maine fort kent) on her ten-year career in forestry. followed by lunch with women undergraduates and informal happy hour with women graduate students. may: guided bird hike women only ( , ) bird identification skills hike in a local conservation area led by dr. amber roth, followed by brunch. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx one of the challenges the team has encountered is balancing the need to present foundational con- tent about gender bias each year while not repeating presentations already seen by long-term participants. the solution has been to vary the format of meetings covering introductory topics, e.g., presentations versus small group discussions. another challenge has been ensuring that those delivering the content have the background and skills to do so. defining gender bias and how it is experienced can be a sensitive topic; it is vital that educational sessions be presented in a way that is accurate. to that end, team members vet sources of information and upcoming presentations, and, when needed, seek presenters or materials from fields of study or organizations that specialize in these topics. using the survey to evaluate the success of swift programming and logistics survey response rates were percent in ( of in the target population) and percent in ( of ). as our primary goal was to monitor swift, no follow-up requests were made after the initial survey in- vitation, which likely led to a response rate more on par with mail survey response rates. in , percent of respondents were undergraduates, percent were master’s students, percent were doctoral students, percent were faculty, percent were staff (including research scientists), and percent did not indicate their position. in , percent of respondents were undergraduates, percent were master’s students, percent were doctoral students, percent were faculty, percent were staff, and percent did not indicate their position. in terms of meetings, survey responses confirmed the benefit of the adaptations guided by par- ticipant observation. for instance, a majority of survey respondents found the ground rules useful and helpful, whereas small group discussions were rated as the most effective meeting format, with percent of respond- ents indicating they were extremely or very effective in and percent in . analysis of both open and closed responses led to the following findings about the impacts of the approaches used. finding : gender bias education and strategy development can help women overcome barriers the first theme identified through the surveys was an increase in awareness on topics of gender bias. the survey asked participants to rank their agreement with several statements following the prompt “since attending swift meetings, have you  .  .  .  ”. a  ma- jority of respondents showed strong agreement with statements that they had become more aware of bias ( . and . in and , respectively) and related swift topics to their own experiences in ways they previously had not ( . and . , respectively; figure  ). overall, almost all respondents ( percent in and percent in ) reported learning at least one new thing through participation in swift figure . scenes from swift events. left: faculty and students birding in a local nature preserve in may . right: graduate student maren granstrom helps undergraduate student and saf student chapter chair michaela kuhn start her chainsaw at the chainsaw practice in november . journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx meetings. over three-quarters of respondents ( per- cent in , percent in ) indicated that they gained new skills (figure  ). open-ended responses articulated both general and specific skills that parti- cipants acquired through swift. many appreciated the unique environment of a women-only chainsaw practice session: “  .  .  .  chainsaw training (last year) was my favorite experience with swift. it was great to learn how to handle a chainsaw without the level of self-consciousness i  would have felt with a male- dominated group.” survey respondents reported that since participating in swift, they had spoken up more in class/meetings ( . and . in and , respectively) and ac- tively supported other women more ( . in and . in ; figure  ). a majority ( percent in and percent in )  indicated they gained new strategies (figure  ). several open-ended responses included specific references to speaking up in uncom- fortable situations, such as: “by drawing attention to bias and building confidence in speaking up, i spoke up about an uncomfortable situation at the gym. without the awareness and strategies gained at swift (and a supportive peer group who helped me craft my mes- sage), i  would not have done that pre-swift.” shifts in personal behaviors were also reported; as one re- spondent in indicated, “now that i’m aware of ‘imposter syndrome’, i  call myself out on it all the time.” recognizing experiences and generating strat- egies have been powerful tools that improved feelings of belonging and allowed individuals to respond more effectively to discrimination. labeling experiences and understanding the role that bias can play in interactions also helped women become more resilient and confident, and participate more fully in the field of forestry. respondents indi- cated that since attending meetings, most had gained confidence ( . and . in and , respect- ively), and many applied for something that they pre- viously would not have because they felt they were not fully qualified ( . and . in and , re- spectively; figure  ). as one respondent in said, figure . mean responses to “since attending swift meetings, have you  .  .  .  ” using a -point likert scale ranging from “definitely no” ( ) to “definitely yes” ( ). results from in light green and in dark green. figure . percentage of survey respondents who reported having gained connections, strategies, or skills by participating in swift activities. participants gained several of these (light green), a few of these (dark green), or none of these (black). responses are shown above responses. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx “i have learned that the experiences that i  have as a female in a male-dominated space are real. also, that those experiences are shared among other female stu- dents, faculty, staff. as a result, i’ve gained confidence in sharing those experiences with others, especially my peer group. i realize, more so now, that when i speak up, i don’t just speak for myself.” as a respondent said, “in the past, i sometimes wondered if negative ex- periences i  had as a woman in forestry were due to something i  was doing wrong. when encountering gender bias, i would feel uncertain and not respond ef- fectively. those experiences made me feel isolated and alone. now i  am able to recognize those experiences for what they are, and i know that they are happening because i am a woman and not because of something that is my fault.” another respondent articulated it this way: “being able to label bias and discrimination has helped me to understand my experiences and not let them undermine my confidence in my own abilities to succeed in forestry.” finding : networking through swift helped build community and improve climate as a means to improve networking and social sup- port for women in forestry, swift was successful; almost all survey respondents stated that they devel- oped connections with other women in the sfr com- munity due to their participation in swift (figure  ). these connections included shared experiences and mentorship opportunities, validation, and a feeling of safety to express and discuss issues. since the creation of swift, there has been a noticeable increase in con- versation between students, faculty, and staff, and a majority of comments in both surveys mentioned in- creased feelings of connectedness and belonging. the potential for feeling isolated was highlighted by sev- eral respondents: “on some days when i go to school, i’m the only female student in each sfr classroom i enter throughout my entire day. swift trainings and meetings provide a comfortable environment for all the women in forestry (faculty and students) to talk about similar experiences, and to connect with one an- other” ( ); “it was really nice to have a ‘safe place’ to communicate with other women in forestry across the professional/educational spectrum. it made me feel welcome and appreciated” ( ); “i’ve expanded my network in the department among women. i  don’t get to interact with many women in the department outside of swift, and swift has built a community of support” ( ). meetings that sought to connect swift participants with other forestry professionals were also highly regarded, with percent ( ) and percent ( ) of respondents rating them either very or extremely effective. using the survey to identify the challenges that remain and unexpected benefits of swift survey respondents in and were asked to list the top three challenges facing women in forestry. in both survey years, the top two challenges men- tioned can be grouped into ( ) bias, microaggressions, and discrimination and ( ) isolation, lack of support, and networking struggles. although unequal pay and inequality were the third most common challenges identified in , in it was the challenges and barriers to addressing discrimination that ranked third. in both and , only percent and percent of respondents, respectively, said they had interrupted bias (e.g., challenged discriminatory com- ments) as a result of participating in swift (figure  , percentages not shown), although both survey results and informal feedback suggested that a higher pro- portion experienced bias. as one respondent in wrote, “[a problem in forestry is] a lack of options to deal with discrimination. you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t when it comes to co-worker ratings of competency, getting credit for your work, etc.” in , another wrote: “the old guard is still there. many student peers are up to speed on profes- sional expectations but the male professors haven’t caught up with society yet. [while it is unclear] how to overcome male issues of feeling like ‘they can’t say any- thing’ around women [or] being overly worried about being accused of harassment, it’s really not that hard to be a decent person.” other issues mentioned by multiple respondents across both survey years included the need to address the confidence gap between men and women; safety, and the perception of men that women have physical limitations in the field (mentioned especially in ); a lack of diversity and representation in forestry; “straight up” (outright) sexual harassment; young women unaware that forestry can be a career; and the need for retention of women in forestry. an unexpected outcome of swift was the im- proved perception of the culture and reputation of sfr; one respondent in pointed out that swift was “reinforcing an image that we, as a department, are doing more than talking about enacting change. it shows organization, longevity, and a positive trajectory for shattering glass ceilings.” in , one respondent answered “do we need swift?” with “  .  .  .  there journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx are indirect benefits. having an initiative focused on women in forestry shows people in the forestry pro- gram, in other programs on campus, and outside the university that supporting women is important here. in addition, highlighting a commitment to diversity in the forestry program creates an atmosphere in which students and faculty/staff feel empowered to discuss issues of bias and discrimination. bringing these things out into the open allows us to address and resolve them, to everyone’s benefit.” looking beyond the university setting, one re- spondent noted that “swift can help prepare both men and women for the challenges that they’ll face in the workforce related to equity and professionalism.” students today see the need and relevance for efforts like swift not just for themselves, but for the field of forestry as a whole: “i believe equality in the workplace is very relevant and conducive to an effective working environment, especially in those industries where there is a dominant demographic.” discussion and conclusion the goal of swift is to support and encourage women in sfr in their forestry education and careers by using approaches designed to help women be aware of and overcome existing barriers (i.e., education about gender discrimination, development of strategies for success in a male-dominated field) and to foster a more inclusive community (i.e., improve networking for women, pro- vide education for allies). ultimately, our aspiration is to increase and retain women in forestry from educa- tion to employment. increasing demographic diversity in forestry benefits us all, on an individual and col- lective level. forestry needs creativity more than ever as we balance competing objectives and social prefer- ences related to land management. creating a more in- clusive environment can help avoid what one survey respondent described as “women turning away from what they love professionally to do what feels safer and more inclusive.” other research on groups like swift that are aimed at supporting and increasing women in forestry have documented both successes and continued challenges (brandth et al. , kenefic et al. ). the forestry profession has made important advances in recruiting and retaining women (kern et  al. ), and our re- sults showed that respondents reported feeling more aware, connected, and equipped to recognize and re- spond to bias and discrimination than before swift. although it is too soon to quantitatively assess swift’s impact on student matriculation and graduation rates, this case study provides additional evidence that small- scale groups like swift can instigate larger-scale posi- tive changes for women in forestry. future work many challenges remain for women in forestry. our results are in line with studies that emphasize both perceived and actual professional and social penalties of women who speak up (stangor et  al. , rehg et al. , hunt ). despite increased awareness and even the emergence between the survey periods of the #metoo movement (zacharek et  al. ), it re- mains difficult for women in forestry to interrupt bias. harassment, bias, discrimination, and safety are issues for everyone in forestry, and one group of women at one institution cannot solve all of these issues alone (mansfield et al. ). the organizational framework outlined here, based on adaptive management and evidence-based design, can be adapted and incorporated in many settings that have the goal of improving both the current ex- periences and the retention of women in forestry. organizations that have explicit goals for diversity, inclusivity, and the advancement of people from trad- itionally underrepresented groups, such as those articu- lated by the society of american foresters (cubbage and menashes ) and the us forest service (usda forest service ), make ideal candidates for imple- mentation of such programs. although swift began as an informal, grass-roots effort, we see an opportunity for administrations and leaders to endorse and sup- port similar top-down efforts. departments or colleges within universities, individual leaders within forest resource companies and organizations, and profes- sional societies can all help by facilitating the creation of similar groups when feasible. in fact, the organ- ization of a network—something that only a central clearing house like the society of american foresters diversity working group or the national association of university forest resource programs could create— would be essential in sharing ideas, information, and best practices among groups to enable us to continue to adapt and create an environment where the num- bers and role of women in forestry can grow. acknowledgments the authors would like to gratefully acknowledge those who have served on the swift planning team since its incep- tion, and who helped to build swift into what it is today. journal of forestry, , vol. xx, no. xx in addition to the authors, they include: karin bothwell, catherine chan, maddie eberly, marie-cecile gruselle, maren granstrom, savannah haines, maggie mansfield, emily roth, and erin schlager. partial support for this paper was provided by the us forest service, northern research station and the maine agricultural and forest experiment station. we also thank the university of maine, school of forest resources for providing financial support for swift, and maren granstrom and brooke penaluna, along with two anonymous reviewers, for providing helpful comments on this manuscript. we recognize the contributions of additional volunteers who have assisted with organizing or leading swift events, including leah beck, nicole bernsen, keith kanoti, charlie koch, and amber roth from the university of maine and bethany muñoz delgado from the us forest service. the name swift was inspired by a similar group for 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https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/strategic-plan[ ]- _ _ _revised.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/strategic-plan[ ]- _ _ _revised.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/strategic-plan[ ]- _ _ _revised.pdf architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism lange, t and pérez-moreno, lc. . architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism. architectural histories, ( ): , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ah. editorial architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism torsten lange* and lucía c. pérez-moreno† over the course of the last decade, women from all over the world and from different social and cultural backgrounds continued to strive for equal rights in the face of discrimination, sexism, and misogyny. uti- lizing new tools and strategies for communication, this ‘fourth wave’ of feminist thinking and activism is characterized by its commitment to a ‘diversity of purpose’ that recognises intersectionality as a key issue of our time and questions established sex/gender systems and gender as a binary category. this spe- cial collection explores the impact of current feminist discourse on architectural historiography. it offers critical debate on the legacy of second and third wave feminism, and asks for the ongoing relevance of the concerns and methodologies. it also highlights the potential of new strategies for documenting and researching the work of women architects, investigating the possibilities of digital tools and networked knowledge. moreover, the collection considers histories of feminist architectural writing in relation to non-canonical geographies and takes a broader view to include lgbtiq+ perspectives on the built envi- ronment. it offers diverse explorations of these key issues and presents necessary reflections to widen feminist enquiries in architectural discourse. introduction feminism is back. indeed, we might argue that it was never gone, but that during the s, its centre of debate — at least in the global north — merely shifted from the street to the academy, giving the impression of a relative silence. over the last decade or so, we have witnessed a return to a more vocal, politically motivated and activist feminist movement that seeks to reconnect to a past that predates the term ‘postfeminism’. utilizing new tools and strategies for communication, women from all over the world and from different social and cultural backgrounds continue to strive for equal rights in the face of continu- ing discrimination, sexism, and misogyny. from internet forums and social media platforms they have moved back out into public space — into streets, squares, town halls, museums, and auditoria. since the early s, several authors have begun to question whether this reinvig- oration of feminism and its associated phenomena con- stitute a new, ‘fourth wave’ (baumgardner ; munro ; chamberlain ; rivers ; shiva and kharazmi ). while the movement’s reliance on digital technol- ogy for discussion and activism is a common denomina- tor that runs through all those accounts — with #metoo, ‘hermana. yo sí te creo’, and everyday sexism perhaps its most visible expression — other defining aspects include the commitment to a ‘diversity of purpose’, which recog- nises intersectionality as a key issue, and the questioning of established sex/gender systems, heterosexism, and binary gender norms. these developments have not bypassed the architec- tural discipline and profession, which still grapple with persistent mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and harassment, as well as poor working conditions and career prospects for women, black, indigenous, and people of colour (bipoc), lgbtiq+, and disabled people across the sector. this has led to an explosion of initiatives, many of them led by young practitioners, either still in or just out of education. as in the wider feminist movement, many of these groups organise and exchange knowledge online. in addition to demanding structural transformations in practice and formal education in order to become more equitable and inclusive, calls to reform architectural peda- gogy have become a key concern, resulting in numerous activist forms of teaching, collective reading groups, and openly shared syllabi and literature lists. yet, with few exceptions (e.g. rendell ), explicit discussion of, and critical reflection about, fourth wave feminism in aca- demic debate both within and beyond architecture has largely remained absent, which may have to do with the contested nature of the concept of historical waves itself. this is especially true in the architectural humanities, the history of architecture in particular. at the same time, there is a steadily growing body of scholarship that seeks to revisit and historicise feminist — along with other forms of — activism post- (robbins ; harris and froud ; radical pedagogies ). it is against this back- drop, and with the knowledge that past feminist waves have stimulated particular themes and forms of scholarly enquiry in architecture (rendell ), that this special * faculty of architecture, technical university of munich, de † school of engineering and architecture, zaragoza university, es corresponding author: torsten lange (torsten.lange@tum.de) https://doi.org/ . /ah. https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo mailto:torsten.lange@tum.de lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminismart.  , page  of collection asks how the current fourth wave of feminism might inform architectural historiography in the present. background to this collection: the legacy of second and third wave feminism feminist architectural historiography emerged in parallel with the second wave of feminism in the s and s. at that time, simone de beauvoir’s le deuxième sexe ( ) had a huge impact, laying the foundations of the sex- gender dualism around which feminist thinking evolved. in the following decades, a complex understanding of gen- der as culturally constructed and performed was produced in several fields, such as social science and humanities, which settled the concept of gender as a ‘useful category for historical analysis’ (scott ; butler ). thus, the entry of gender as an analytical category for architectural history was crucial and presented a number of complexi- ties and resulted in a wide range of positions. one important project that the first generation of femi- nist architects and historians of architecture pursued was to include the contribution of women within or along- side the canonical histories of architecture (men writing about male architects’ great buildings). this so-called ‘herstory’ approach sought to uncover and document the lives and work of a first generation of female archi- tects who received formal training in the discipline. often referred to as ‘pioneers’, these mostly privileged women were able to challenge the gender norms and expecta- tions of their respective societal contexts and earn a degree. the first wave of ‘herstory’ mainly emerged out of english-speaking countries; that is, the united states (cole ; torre ; wright ) and the united kingdom (walker , ). over the course of the following dec- ades, scholars from canada (adams and tancred ) and australia (willis and browyn ) followed a similar path, critically assessing, however, the work of their pre- decessors. a common criticism was the victimisation that had underpinned those first studies (adams and tancred : ). the recovery of the biographies of ‘pioneer women’ often also entailed an analysis of the mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion these women suffered, rendering them as problematic and as a minority (willis : ). those conditions provided explanations for the small number of women architects and their limited contributions to the discipline. the search for female ‘pio- neers’ also achieved success in uncovering the biographies and practice of the first generation of women architects during the early modernist period — a line of research that prevails until today. in this case, it is mainly the female companions or relatives of leading figures of the modern- ist movement (espegel , ) who have been the subject of numerous studies. examples include, among others, the monographs on lilly reich (mcquaid ), charlotte perriand (vedrenne ; barsac ) and sibyl moholy-nagy (heynen ). these are crucial stud- ies, but, at the same time, they also exemplify how the patriarchal hetero-normative system works, since women are presented as victims of the society, as julie willis, annmarie adams, and peta tancred denounced, and as dependents of male (genius) modern architects. the second important approach that scholars of the first generation pursued was to develop feminist critiques of the built environment. thus, the recovery of histori- cal evidence about women was accompanied by a ‘con- comitant deconstruction of the discourses and practices of canonical art history itself’ (pollock : ). in this sense, a reconsideration of the contribution of women without formal architectural education to the production of the built environment became a line of research under- taken to dismantle the dominant association of architec- ture and the built environment with masculinity. among the milestone publications in this group is the grand domestic revolution (hayden ), which, in presenting the proposals and speculative designs of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century material feminists, showcased how women sought to exert influence over the design of their environment long before the graduation of the first female architect. this line of research found resonances in the scathing criticism of modern planning developed in the death and life of great american cities (jacobs ). as such, architectural historians, practitioners, and urban planners began to debate the segregation and inequali- ties that the modern functionalist legacy had generated in many western cities (hayden ). this subsequently paved the way for a large quantity of critical analyses of the sexist dimension of urban planning and design that exposed how the latter (literally) cemented gender roles and aided their reproduction — in other words, how the man-made environment served the patriarchal system (moser ; fainstein and servon ; sánchez de madariaga and roberts ). at the same time as these two main lines of research were developed, other critiques within feminist theory and activism began to emerge. the category ‘woman’ was questioned (radical-lesbians ; wittig ) and the concepts of difference (lorde, ) and intersectional- ity (crenshaw, ) appeared as key categories for gen- der studies. likewise, feminist political texts, such us the sexual contract (pateman ) and the disorder of women (pateman ), highlighted the burden that the separation between public and private sphere imposed on women, and how this hindered their emancipation. a growing body of work began to address, in addition to gender, other axes of oppression such as class, age, ethnic- ity, and sexuality that destabilized the sex/gender dual- ism and fixed gender categories (rubin ). thus, the notions of universal womanhood and collective identity that defined second wave feminism were increasingly questioned over the course of the s under the influ- ence of postcolonial, poststructuralist/deconstructivist, and postmodern theory. consequently, feminism’s third wave was defined by the destabilisation of concepts like body/embodiment, sexuality, and heteronormativity. the traditional thinking that placed women in the pri- vate sphere and men in the public sphere gave rise to diverse reflections in architectural history in which the dualism of private/public (domestic/urban) persisted as the dominant historiographical approach in relevant works. linked to jane jacobs’ and dolores hayden’s ideas, some feminists focused their attention on questions of lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism art.  , page  of social justice and the structural discrimination and stig- matization experienced by many residents of deprived neighbourhoods. they denounced the diverse and intersecting vectors of discrimination that architects and urban planners, as designers of public space, have inflicted upon women and racialised communities (weisman ; anthony ). other texts interrogated the multiple relationships among politics, taste, and housing design (sparke ), and between private space and architecture, proposing critical rereadings of the fin- de-siècle concept of domesticity as well as new explora- tions of the gendered contradictions caused by modern housing as the ‘proper’ place for women (friedman ; martin and sparke ; heynen and baydar ; sugg ryan ). at the same time, drawing from the insights of third wave feminism and queer theory’s critique of binary and heteronormative definitions of gender (fausto-sterling ), other discourses shifted the focus of feminist architectural history to explore relations between sexuality and space (colomina ). around the mid- s, in the wake of the hiv/aids epidemic and the resulting politicization of lesbian and gay archi- tects, the concept of ‘queer space’ emerged across a range of interdisciplinary works that were often produced at the intersection of art and architecture (reed ; sanders ; urbach ; betsky ; robbins ). overview over the contributions to this collection this special collection explores the impact of current feminist activism and discourse on architectural histori- ography. it also offers a critical assessment of the legacy of second and third wave feminisms, and asks for the ongoing relevance of their concerns and methodologies. with its five contributions, this collection cannot, and does not, claim to offer an overview over how feminism’s fourth wave manifests in the writing of architectural his- tory in the present. much like other scholars before us, we struggle ‘to document the contemporary of activism as it unfolds’, to capture a complex and diverse movement in its state of flux and ongoing evolution (chamberlain : ). and yet, as editors of this collection, we do feel the need to respond to this present moment, embracing rather than denying its uncertain, unfinished, and open- ended character. this being said, each article reflects key concerns within fourth wave feminism. taken together, they provide an imprint, however imperfect, of current feminist debates on architectural historical scholarship. lori brown and karen burns’ article ‘telling transna- tional histories of women in architecture, – ’ offers a meta-reflection on the process of researching, writing and editing their forthcoming bloomsbury global encyclopaedia of women in architecture. on the basis of this extensive work — truly global in scope and inter- sectional in its approach, assembling well above , entries — the authors raise critical questions regarding geography, gender and feminist histories, the geopolitics of representation, and architectural knowledge produc- tion, as well as ‘the recent biographic turn’ in architec- ture. brown and burns not only emphasise how scholarly work on the encyclopaedia was driven by a politics that challenges especially white feminists from the global north to acquire ‘transnational literacy’ (spivak : ); they also stress the potential of such global endeav- ours to ‘question the periodisation, geography, and ana- lytic terms used to frame histories of women’s struggles in the discipline of architecture’ by illuminating ‘divergences, differences, and contests between women, feminism, and women’s rights.’ their article highlights an important par- adox which projects like the encyclopaedia both seek to address and counteract: while the careers of women archi- tects in the postwar era were defined by transnational mobility, reflecting the profession’s increasing globalisa- tion more broadly, there remains significant unevenness in terms of the visibility of women from the global south and the former socialist world in architectural histories. if, in the s, historians like judith allen spoke of gen- eral ‘silences’ in the evidence — archival records, in par- ticular — that scholarship urgently needed to address, it seems as though the proliferation of archives of women architects in the northern hemisphere, and easier access to these collections through digital means, is not matched elsewhere (allen ; hunter ). brown and burns’ work participates in current efforts to work from differ- ence and establish new assemblages that connect the local and the global by employing collective, distributed, and networked modes of knowledge production. as men- tioned above, the emergence of fourth wave feminism is frequently connected to the digital age, its tools of com- munication and online platforms for social organising, and the authors stress how these tools have facilitated the collaborative production process by which work is distrib- uted among area editors who are well connected to local authors. the dominance of particularly north american and british accounts within feminist scholarship in architec- ture, which brown and burns criticise, is also taken up by rixt hoekstra in her contribution ‘second-wave feminism in dutch universities: revisiting the work of feminist scholars and its consequences for dutch architectural history’. where the former suggest complementing, or counteracting, the dominance of biographies of (estab- lished/canonised) western women architects with numer- ous biographical accounts that are grounded in their respective local, national, and wider global contexts, hoekstra focuses on excavating one particular micro- historical episode, charting the emergence of feminist studies in architecture in the netherlands through the lives and work of six key protagonists. she reveals local specifi- cities regarding the different trajectories of second wave feminism as it entered europe and the dutch-speaking countries, shedding light, for example, on its delayed impact. hoekstra situates the interdisciplinary research, writing, and exhibition work developed by art historians wies van moorsel (b. ), ellen van kessel (b. ), marga kuperus (b. ), and heidi de mare (b. ), the cultural anthropologist irene cieraad (b. ), as well as the architect anna vos (b. ) at the intersection of grassroots activism and academia in the gradual process of the institutionalisation of women’s and gender studies. through a close study of published sources and archive lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminismart.  , page  of documents, hoekstra shows that these scholars developed two strands of investigation that remain relevant to this day: gendered analyses of privacy and domesticity and the ‘herstory’ mode of writing women into the canon of archi- tectural history. oral histories provide additional accounts that embody history. hoekstra’s article thus speaks to the notion of feminist timekeeping and ‘affective temporal- ity’, as developed by prudence chamberlain ( , ) in her recent framing of fourth wave feminism. drawing on both sara ahmed and ann cvetkovich, chamberlain argues that ‘the present of feminism is irrevocably tied to the past that constitutes it, the future that sustains it, and this sense of hopefulness for its own demise’ ( : ). yet, she continues, the ties that connect past and present cannot be grasped through causality, but rather through the ‘affective charge of investment’, so that ‘feminism cre- ates a haptic temporality, with past, present and future all touching upon one another’ (chamberlain : ). in the meetings and conversations among people who embody different ‘generations’ of feminists, this affective and haptic temporality becomes palpable. kirsty volz’s contribution, ‘reconsidering “minor” archives: the case of australian architect nell mccredie’, assumes the relevance of analysing the work of early women architects. however, her work reflects on the need for creating new frameworks to analyse the work of those women, even more when their professional careers were developed in non-canonical (or ‘major’) geographies. the case of nell mccredie is an example of the difficulties in assessing the work of a female architect, one who worked in australia in the s and the s and who designed houses in a suburban area of the peripheral city of brisbane. mccredie’s work can be scarcely defined within tradi- tional frameworks. volz gets back to gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s ( ) understanding of the ‘minor’, and, as such, she is committed to deconstruct dualist modern narratives that present a selection of buildings — designed by male privileged architects and described as ‘major’ or ‘great’ buildings — as ‘significant’ for architecture’s history, in opposition to all the rest of architectural works that are considered ‘insignificant’ in canonical narratives. in doing so, she discusses the approaches to ‘minor architectures’ previously offered by architecture theorists and histori- ans such as joan ockman ( ; ), jennifer bloomer ( ), hugh crawford ( ), karen burns ( ), and jill stoner ( ), where the ‘minor’ is not presented as opposed to the ‘major’ but as intertwined with it. volz’s text addresses the historiographical potential of shifting the discussion from a dichotomous relationship (major/minor dualism) to one of interdependence (major and minor). thus, the ‘minor’ becomes a significant category for femi- nist architectural history that, following stoner’s ideas, also enclosed a critique to the neoliberal system of which the architecture profession is currently a part. menna agha’s contribution to this collection, titled ‘emotional capital and the other ontologies of the architect’, tells the story of nubian displacement villages in egypt and their environments through the lens of oral testimonies about three nubian women who are members of the author’s family, and who partook in the process of rebuilding their settlement villages between the s and s. in her account of placemaking, written from within the nubian society where there is societal appre- ciation of emotional contributions, agha thus challenges common western understandings of architecture by pos- iting emotional labour as a foundational framework for spatial production. she engages with recent feminist schol- arship that has reconceptualised pierre bourdieu’s notion of capital to include ‘emotional capital’. on the basis of ancestral narratives obtained through encounters with her kin, she examines those actors in placemaking who are invisible to develop an expanded understanding of the figure of the architect. this leads her to an ‘other’ ontology of placemaking and placemakers — one that expands the possibilities of attribution, involvement, and performance in contemporary practice, and recognises the emotional labourer as an architect. speaking not only to ecofeminist concerns which permeate fourth wave feminism through its story of resource exploitation and displacement, this article importantly also engages with what ahmed has called ‘feminist ethics of otherness’ ( : ). both in her fieldwork and its presentation in the article, agha practices the kind of ‘specific engagement’ that avoids speaking for an-other, but instead proceeds through the translation of speech between individuals who recognise their differential positioning in the world (ahmed : , – ). agha’s ethnographically informed architec- tural history of (re-)building communities within matripo- tent societies in mid- to late th-century southern egypt therefore not only allows us to question gendered, taken for granted, notions of the architect as intellectual worker. it also presents us with a model for feminist scholarship — and activism — that builds on the notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, first proposed by gayatri spivak in the mid- s, and since developed by ahmed and other inter- sectional and queer feminist thinkers of the fourth wave (marinucci ; ahmed ; spivak ). the inclusion in this collection of the last essay, ‘queering california modernism: architectural figurations and media exposure of gay domesticity in the roosevelt era’, by josé parra-martínez, maría-elia gutiérrez-mozo, and ana-covadonga gilsanz-díaz, is rooted precisely in such an expanded understanding of strategic essentialism, as developed in mimi marinucci’s feminism is queer ( : ). some readers may question why an issue on femi- nism and architectural historiography should contain an article that investigates three california modernist houses designed and built for wealthy, white, gay male patrons by two male architects at the end of the s. marinucci reminds us that there is an ‘implicit connection between queer theory and feminist theory’ — and to some degree also practice — only made more explicit through the term queer feminism ( : ). at the heart of this connec- tion is a solidarity that is ‘born of a deep understanding that the oppression of women and the suppression of les- bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender existence are deeply intertwined’. if, as marinucci notes, queer feminism’s potential is to ‘direct increased attention toward sexual- ity in the context of feminist theory’, while, at the same time, giving ‘increased attention to gender in the context lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism art.  , page  of of queer theory’ ( : ), this becomes most palpable in the article’s critical analysis of the particular type of domesticity developed in the three modernist ‘bachelor’ houses along the intersection of sex/gender: on the one hand, the design of privacy to shield their clients’ intimate, sexual lives, coupled, on the other, with the houses’ great publicity and their owners’ public performance of mascu- linity as a screen to uphold the appearance of a normative heterosexuality during a period of intense homophobia. the article not only mobilises, and expands, historical and theoretical approaches championed by third wave femi- nist scholars such as eve sedgwick’s reading of the closet ( ), beatriz colomina’s work on privacy and public- ity ( ), and alice t. friedman’s analyses of patronage ( ), but also brings these into productive conversation with the work of contemporary queer feminist scholars such as ahmed ( ) and katarina bonnevier ( ). as editors of this collection, we recognise queer feminism as absolutely integral to this current fourth wave moment — just as critical debates concerning race, social class (including recognition of the increasingly global division of labour), and disability occupy a central place since the principle of intersectionality became key to feminist the- ory and practice today. many of these concerns are also reflected in the review article that accompanies this special collection. andrea merrett reviews doris cole’s pioneering book from tipi to skyscraper: a history of women in architecture ( ) and points out that it can be seen as a form of activism. although cole’s book was not polemical at the time, as a social history of women’s engagement with the built envi- ronment it challenged the canonical monographs that present the male architect as ‘genius’ — a male hero-figure considered the sole creator of his oeuvre. a leap to the present brings us to ines toscano’s review. she analyses three feminist websites as places of current activism: the spanish-speaking blog un día, una arquitecta [one day, one female architect] (moisset ), the media con- tributions of the portuguese-speaking group arquitetas (in)visíveis [invisible female architects] (cascelli ), and the academic website pioneer women of american architecture (mcleod and rosner ). she discusses how the power of digitalization can break frontiers and glo- balize feminist activism. the third contribution explores recent research on queer feminism. olivier vallerand reviews elizabeth otto’s book haunted bauhaus: occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics ( ), an engaging approach to this fundament pioneer school of art and architecture where spirituality, politics, gender, and sexuality are brought together in a completely new light to explore the political and social experiments and relationships obscured by traditional major narratives that centred they attention on the design and art output of the school. in summary, the collection highlights the potential of new strategies for documenting and researching the work of women architects, investigating the possibilities of digi- tal tools and networked knowledge. moreover, the collec- tion considers histories of feminist architectural writing in relation to non-canonical geographies and takes a broader view to include lgbtiq+ perspectives on the built envi- ronment. it offers diverse explorations of these key issues and presents necessary reflections to widen feminist enquiries within architectural discourse. further discussion: present and future directions feminism is back — still more remains to be said and done. in this last section of the editorial we thus want to sketch out a series of current and open routes of investiga- tion that stretch from the place of feminism and gender in pedagogy and the academy to the ongoing project of building archives; the development of an expanded con- cept of practice; a further activation of the ‘margins’; criti- cal attention to, as well as the de-centring of, historical constructions of subjectivity and the body entwined with normative conceptions of architecture, giving space to other forms of embodiment and the more than human; and the urgent need for speculative and performative his- tories that seek to intervene in the present and future. beginning with the place where debate appears to be most lively at the moment: in and outside of classrooms and studio spaces at architecture schools around the world, collectives of young female architects — often sup- ported by their male peers — are not only asking ques- tions about the silences, gaps, omissions, and blind spots in curricula, but also demanding a critical assessment and reorientation of architectural education, and by exten- sion, architectural practice, towards more socially and environmentally sustainable, equitable, and inclusive futures. it is they who embody this current fourth wave, first and foremost, and who are at the forefront of driving change. as for the first of the two points above, sources such as the encyclopedia introduced by burns and brown in this collection, but also surveys like the recently pub- lished breaking ground (hall ), whose visual quality will appeal to wider audiences not least in practice, are important correctives here. as the architectural history survey continues to be the principal mode of instruc- tion at the degree level — and which, for those who move into practice, presents the only point of contact with the past — the question remains how the extensive body of feminist scholarship can find its way into these intro- ductory level courses, which are frequently pressed to convey knowledge of a vast number of buildings across ever-expanding geographies in an extremely short time. here not only the question of the textbook, and with it the canon and women’s inclusion into both, comes up, but also how well-established, canonical examples can be critically reread, interrogating what is typically left out of the picture in established historiographies of ‘landmark’ buildings (textbook women ). beyond the academy, and mirroring the foundational role of technology in this current fourth wave, blogs, social media, and digital platforms that link collectives and indi- viduals are a second key forum for debate. their role in relation to existing historiography and the ongoing pro- duction of architectural history needs to be understood as both generative, in the sense that many projects are now ‘born digital’ (hall ), as well as offering oppor- tunities for a wider dissemination of knowledge beyond lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminismart.  , page  of conventional media such as books, journals, and exhibi- tions. many of the questions addressed by these networks, from the lack of representation of black, indigenous, and people of colour [bipoc] (blackfemarc ) to conditions of work and deep-rooted sexist bias in architectural cul- ture, both inform and resonate with ongoing scholarly inquiry. for specific locally grounded projects such as ‘w@arch.pt’ (pedrosa ) in portugal and ‘muwo’ in spain (pérez-moreno ) that are often funded through grants in response to the un’s sustainable development goals, sdg ‘gender equality’ in particular, these net- works not only provide channels through which scholars can speak and collaborate with each other but also act as global amplifiers, transmitting the knowledge produced in these contexts to the traditional centres of discourse. it needs to be stressed here again, that, as in other areas of architectural historical scholarship, research in these different places follows its own rhythms. while the con- tinued dominance and heightened visibility afforded to english-language scholarly output creates the impression — perhaps illusion — of a homogenous field marching in a similar direction, research in areas like southern europe tends to follow well-established lines of enquiry around female pioneers, for instance. biography continues to play a central role in many of these projects and their highly networked and distributed mode of scholarship. yet, beyond merely increasing the visibility of women, bipoc, and lgbtiq+ architects, this new scholarship continues to challenge historiographical conventions around (single) authorship and disciplinary practice, championing alternative narratives that place their actors into expanded networks of influence, and that emphasise collective forms of work outside of the model of private practice (bihlmaier, frey, and perotti ). this includes situated enquiries of the drastically differ- ent political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts that have created distinctive conditions for, and experiences of, practice for women in geographies such as russia, eastern europe, and the wider socialist world (pepchinski and simon ), or the iberian peninsula under salazar’s and franco’s regimes (pérez-moreno and pedrosa ). these enquiries challenge universal models of the ‘woman architect’ along with the universal notion of modernity. in addition to that, informed by the ongoing study of the profession in the th century (darling and walker ; pepchinski et al. ; stead ), scholars such as isabelle doucet and meike schalk are investigating how corporate and bureaucratic practices in the post-war era have often provided alternative avenues of work for the steadily growing number of women graduates in architec- ture. seen together with the disheartening results of recent quantitative and qualitative social studies of women in the industry by the architects’ council of europe ( ), the architects’ journal in the uk (mark ; tether ), or the australian parlour project ( ), this work holds up a mirror to the profession, highlighting how, especially within private practice, inequality, discrimination, and precariousness persist, leading to the exclusion of women and others (brown et al. ; tauke, smith and davis ). however, while certainly shocking and deeply embarrass- ing in today’s context, stories of exclusion and marginality (siddiqi and lee ) can also become productive sites for historical scholarship themselves — for example, by following the paths of figures who have either been cast out of mainstream practice or who deliberately chose to practice on the fringes or even outside of the profession. new work in women’s history and gender studies, par- ticularly that of black and queer scholars such as saidiya hartmann’s wayward lives, beautiful experiments ( ) or jack halberstam’s work on failure ( ), may inspire scholarship on resistant, oppositional, and activist prac- tices (hochhäusl ). included here is, of course, the entire — and still largely dormant — project of revisiting and historicising radical feminist practices since the s in countries like the us, the uk, and beyond (merrett ; boys and dwyer ). all of the above-mentioned approaches engage in the important work of expanding the archive of a feminist architectural historiography. the work of dissecting normative constructs that are deeply entwined with architecture, which, in some ways, may be traced back to the critical reading groups of feminists in the s and s, the interrogation of the power-knowledge nexus, and its becoming material in architecture — or ‘knowing-making’ as aimi hamraie ( ) calls it — forms another incredibly rich and pro- ductive area of current interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of gender and queer studies, critical race theory, and disability studies. this entails the his- torical study of the production of modern subjectivities and bodies through architecture in dialogue with both the natural sciences (biology and medicine, in particular) and cultural representations — asking how the construc- tions of gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. have been spa- tially and materially constituted (davis ; park ; hamraie ; preciado ; preciado ). revisiting these historical constructs in their profoundly intertwined relationship with architecture and the built environment, particularly from the perspective of contemporary non- normative, non-binary, trans and other identities and forms of embodiment, also encourages us to un-think and un-build these discriminatory, exclusionary, and lit- erally disabling structures in the effort to build more inclusive and liveable futures for human and more-than- human relations (halberstam ; crawford ). this last point, perhaps more than any other, stresses that the work of feminist architectural history in the fourth wave, or whatever we may want to call this current moment, also has to be speculative — directed at a future that ultimately anticipates feminism’s own redundancy (rendell ; rendell ). for it is this ‘futurity’, to borrow from the queer scholar josé esteban muñoz ( ), the hope for equality and justice for all, that connects feminism across all its waves. authors’ note in this editorial we have stressed the collective and net- worked character of fourth wave feminism. as editors of this special collection, we thus want to acknowledge, and express our gratitude to, the extensive network of peo- ple we were in conversation with over the past two years. we would like to thank claire jamieson, who has been involved in the early stages of this collection’s develop- lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism art.  , page  of ment; petra brouwer, who has overseen its production as architectural histories’ editor-in-chief; wouter van acker for his work on the reviews; and lenore hietkamp, for her excellent copyediting work. in addition to the authors, we are grateful to the peer reviewers whose feedback and advice on the contributions included here has been invaluable. beyond this narrower circle of people, there are numerous groups and individuals to whom we as editors feel indebted: among others, the parity group at eth zurich, especially charlotte malterre-barthes and gabrielle schaad; colleagues from the working group equality, diversity and inclusion of the bauhow alli- ance, including isabelle doucet, peg rawes, meike schalk and amy thomas; members of the eahn special interest group women and gender in architecture and design; members of the equality chair at zaragoza university; as well as feminist philosophers elvira burgos and victoria pérez royo, whose classes have been absolutely vital to this outcome. our thanks go to all of them. this research has 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/mitpress/ . . https://doi.org/ . /mitpress/ . . https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://arch.ethz.ch/parity-diversity/parity-talks/pt .html https://arch.ethz.ch/parity-diversity/parity-talks/pt .html https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.jstor.org/stable/ lange and pérez-moreno: architectural historiography and fourth wave feminismart.  , page  of how to cite this article: lange, t and pérez-moreno, lc. . architectural historiography and fourth wave feminism. architectural histories, ( ):  , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ah. published: december copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access architectural histories is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. https://doi.org/ . /ah. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	introduction 	background to this collection: the legacy of second and third wave feminism 	overview over the contributions to this collection 	further discussion: present and future directions 	authors' note 	competing interests 	references miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | rethinking laughter in contemporary anglophone theatre interview with maria giese, april , cristelle maury and david roche electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi: . /miranda. issn: - publisher université toulouse - jean jaurès printed version date of publication: october electronic reference cristelle maury and david roche, “interview with maria giese, april , ”, miranda [online], | , online since october , connection on february . url: http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi: https://doi.org/ . /miranda. this text was automatically generated on february . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / interview with maria giese, april , cristelle maury and david roche we interviewed maria giese on tuesday, april via the video conference system renater at université toulouse jean jaurès and nyc. additional questions were provided by our colleague hélène charlery. maria giese is an american journalist, screenwriter and director. she holds a master’s degree from ucla’s graduate school of theatre, film and television. she wrote and directed the feature films when saturday comes ( ), starring sean bean and pete postlethwaite, and hunger ( ). in , after four years of activism in the directors guild of america, giese became the person who instigated the biggest industry-wide federal investigation for women directors in hollywood history. in the new york times, manohla dargis referred to her work as “a veritable crusade.” she has an upcoming book, troublemaker, which describes her work getting the aclu and eeoc to investigate this issue—the ramifications of which are resonating globally. cm: to begin with, could you tell us how it all started for you. you said in a ted talk, “the battle for women’s voice in entertainment media,” that you were given $ million funding to direct when saturday comes. can you tell us more about that? mg: sure. my love of cinema started at a very young age. i grew up in puerto rico, which is a visually magical place, and i had a very lively dream world. my mother is a landscape photographer and my father is an oceanographer—they both encouraged me to write and draw, to be a storyteller. we didn’t have a tv or even a telephone in those early years, but when i first saw a film, i felt like that was very close to dreaming, and i grew fascinated with the idea of putting dreams on film. then when i was years old, my family moved back to cape cod. in provincetown there was a wonderful art house movie theater, “the movies”, which played european and international cinema rather than american films. from my early teens i was exposed to german film, french avant-garde, italian neo-realism. i was inspired by so many filmmakers: herzog, antonioni, kurosawa, de sica, fellini and bunuel. and then when i was about fourteen, i saw the film swept away by lina wertmüller. i interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=fn_al_tt_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=fn_al_tt_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_ don’t think i had really imagined myself as a film director. i wanted to make films, i wanted to be able to do what i saw these extraordinary auteur directors doing, but i don’t think it really hit home that i could do it until i saw swept away. i never changed my course after that. that was all i wanted to do. i think swept away struck me also because it centered on politics and gender. looking back, i was very interested in sociopolitical films from early on, and the influence they could have on culture. that would grow in me more and more as time went on and eventually come to define my life wok. there wasn’t really a lot of access at that time to study film, especially when you’re a kid on cape cod. screenplays were not getting published frequently in the late s, but i was able to get hold of three collections of bergman, antonioni, and lina wertmüller screenplays. so i read those over and over again, and then at age i was accepted to simon’s rock of bard college, which is an early college. they didn’t have a film program, but i ran the film society and became a projectionist. in this way i was able to research and watch a lot of movies. i poured through the thick rental catalogues of mm films offered by distribution companies and really learned about the whole history of cinema, who was who and what stories they told. studying at wellesley college and ucla then i went to wellesley college, one of the first women’s colleges in the united states. oddly, wellesley didn’t have a filmmaking program either. i often wonder why women’s colleges didn’t have an emphasis on entertainment media storytelling when it was quickly becoming the most effective method of getting women’s voices into our cultural narrative, and was so incredibly influential. in any case, i continued working as a projectionist, studying film, and writing my own screenplays. after getting my ba in , i finally got the opportunity to apply to film school. i was accepted into ucla’s five-year graduate film program. i literally felt like i had won the lottery, being able to do what i had dreamed of for so long. it was and my class was about / men and women thanks to title ix, part of the civil rights act of . title ix was written into law by richard nixon in and provides for equal opportunity for women in education and sports. i felt so at home for five years in this program―some of the happiest days of my life. i made several shorts and won quite a few awards. my third short, “a dry heat” won the top award at film school, a “spotlight award” and was a finalist for the student academy awards that helped me get an agent by . i worked consistently as a teacher’s assistant, and i also started writing professionally. so, as i was excelling as a student, i also was doing script-doctoring and observing on prime time episodic tv shows, like la law and crime and punishment. how when saturday comes came about while all this was going on, the screenplay, when saturday comes, began to evolve. it was the story of my ex-husband’s life growing up in sheffield, england, dreaming of becoming a professional football player. he had actually made it to trials on huddersfield united, but that was as far as he’d gotten. he was always telling me interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nv_sr_ ?ref_=nv_sr_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nv_sr_ ?ref_=nv_sr_ colorful stories of his childhood growing up in a tough working-class neighborhood in sheffield, england. these stories were like a capsule in time, and so different from my sort of elite new england upbringing. there was a lot of drinking and fighting and poverty, and school beatings and working in factories. i think i really saw his childhood stories through the lens of my love of british kitchen sink films, and i thought it would make a great movie. at about this time i got hired to rewrite a screenplay based on a novel called the north star for nils gaup, the indigenous norwegian director who had directed the hit film, pathfinder. the first draft had been written by the iconic italian screenwriter, sergio donati (who had written the spaghetti westerns for clint eastwood), and his son lorenzo, but the script was not strong and had not been able to get financed. christophe lambert was starring in the film and he hired me to rewrite it. i went back to the henry wilson allen novel for a page one re-write and grew fascinated with the subject matter. it was about the gold rush in nome, alaska with people streaming in competing for gold strikes. there was a tremendous discrimination against immigrants coming in to compete. so-called “americans” (who were of course all immigrants anyway) tried to get laws passed to keep them out and prevent them from competing for strikes. christophe played a native american who gets caught in the middle of this dramatic action film centered around a chase. it was so much fun to work on this project and my rewrite got us$ million from th century fox, as well as the attachments of stars, james caan and catherine mccormack. the film was quickly greenlit to start shooting and i was brought out to oslo to work with the director on the script. right at the same time christophe lambert read when saturday comes and wanted to produce it. he put me together with producer meir teper, and an executive from new regency named david matalon who in turn introduced me to two women producers, sharon harel and jane barclay, who were making some of the best films in england at that time—their company was called capitol films. i met with them and even though i had never directed a feature film, they quickly saw the potential and gave us the green light. it sounds easy, but the truth is before i met with capitol we had been turned down by about production companies in the us. many of them had asked me: “would you be willing to give us the script and we’ll bring on a male director?” my agent had advised me, “just say no, tell them if you want a different director, get a different script.” and that (laughs) seemed to work really well in terms of people dropping the project and not wanting to do it. so you can imagine i was pretty relieved and excited when capitol said yes to me as the director. they financed a $ million budget, and we went very fast-track into production. one of the reasons we got greenlit was because we got sean bean attached to star. his mom lived in sheffield not too far from where my ex-husband’s family lived, and girlfriend of his brother’s lived next door to sean bean’s mom. she dropped the script off for sean. when he saw it was about sheffield united, he was like “fuckin’ hell, united!” (laughs). he called (producer) jimmy daly and said: “y’ must be pullin’ me plonker! let’s do it!” he was really excited to do a screenplay about his beloved football team, sheffield united, and he brought on academy award-nominee pete postlethwaite who he’d been starring with on the successful british tv movie, sharpe’s rifles ( ). then, christophe lambert brought on emily lloyd and the rest interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_ is history. we started crewing up with some of the best cast and crew out of england and scotland at the time. dr: good! we’ll talk about the movie again later on, but there are two things that you touched on that are actually questions we had for you later. so one was basically had you spent time in great britain before making that movie, given that your ex-husband was british? we were obviously very much intrigued by an american director making her first movie such a british movie. and then the second thing you touched on but that we also wanted to ask you later we can talk about now maybe, is you said you were very interested in documentary and films that had a socio-political intent and so forth, do you have any feelings or thoughts on documentary versus fiction? do you see them as complementary? what are your feelings in terms of the socio-political impact they can have? mg: (laughs) i have thoughts on everything. when you grow up somewhere you don’t necessarily see the extraordinariness of it. coming from the outside provides objectivity and discovery. i was fascinated with the ancient tribal nature of football culture in northern england. and i was struck by how difficult it was to move between the classes. so, even though we were very much trying to make a sports success story in the spirit of rocky, we were also exploring the culture of poverty, failure, and alcoholism. i also had a brother who died of alcoholism in a motorcycle accident in when i was , so i brought the heartbreak of that experience into the film. there were a lot of things that were deeply personal to me about that film. documentary and the fiction film to answer the second part of the question: i think if as filmmakers we care about making a socio-political difference in the world, then the way our fiction narratives blend with documentary truth can be fluid. when we tell stories, our life experiences and understanding of the world are deeply integral to them. i was very inspired by the films of gillo pontecorvo, burn for example. he claimed he made films only when he absolutely had to because the world needed to know something. he mixed a lot of fact and fiction. but there’s often quite a lot of intertwining of documentary and fiction in the films i love—i’m thinking now for example of blows—truffaut was telling his own deeply personal story of childhood, lacing fiction and fact. perhaps that’s why i never really responded that well to hollywood films—as primarily made-up stories, they often had this singular objective of entertaining people. while from my experience, non-american films— those of satyajit ray, or kurosawa, just as examples—functioned on a deeper, richer basis that seemed more meaningful to me. they opened up new universes of culture and politics and human experience that made them transformative rather than simply entertaining. for me, there’s something fundamentally magical about the nature of cinema. i remember when i used to be a projectionist, and i would be all alone setting up the films on the projectors. there was that big white screen, and then people would come into the theater and sit down, and i’d bring the lights down—and all of a sudden this surprising new universe appeared on the screen that was completely immersive for an hour and a half or two hours. to me there’s just magic in that. it’s like closing your eyes and going to sleep, and suddenly you are conjuring up images from a place in your unconscious that may have a priori knowledge—you may be connected to a collective unconscious from ancient or primeval times that are beyond our ability to interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | explain. so i just have an incredible love for that effort filmmakers make to put something meaningful on the screen. to share a dream experience. to share something profound that is perhaps beyond human reckoning. it’s not easy coming back to la cm: let’s go back to your career and the next film you made. was it more difficult for you to get funding for hunger? and what about its release and distribution? seems like it was difficult. it was made in and released in . can you tell us about it? mg: hunger came out of a very difficult place. after when saturday comes i returned to los angeles and i was now single because after the shoot my ex-husband stayed behind with sean bean’s wife, melanie hill. i had also graduated from ucla film school so i didn’t have the protective mechanisms of an institution behind me. i was represented by a top agent at william morris agency, but because when saturday comes did not get us distribution, it was as if i had never directed it. and i had done a very female thing of deferring my directing pay on the film pari- pasu with all my multi-millionaire producers when i had no financial support system in place or income. so suddenly i was all alone in a rental apartment in la, and i slipped very quickly into poverty. i realized things were going very wrong, but i didn’t know what to do about it. i was coming up for directing jobs, and having great meetings, but in the end i was always passed over for a guy—and that meant no paychecks came in. i was doing all this free development work for people, taking lousy screenplays and doctoring them, thinking i was attached as director, and then lo and behold, some guy would direct it. it was almost comical. i was constantly busy in development, coming up with all sorts of interesting ideas, with numerous pots on the fire, yet nothing paid off. ultimately, i was having to cobble together an existence to be able to eat and pay rent. still, i was always optimistic—sort of like voltaire’s candide. i felt like i was walking through this utterly terrible landscape of horror that was hollywood. i had all the best intent in the world, like some kind of cheerful, well- meaning fool with bullets coming at me from every direction. in the meantime, i was watching my male classmates and peers who i don’t think were any more talented than me, and maybe even less hard-working than me, and they were making movie after movie, becoming the great masterful auteur directors of our time. i mean, i knew these guys and some of them were pretty mediocre, yet they were becoming acclaimed as the cinematic geniuses of our time. the making of hunger my mother sent me a copy of knut hamsum’s hunger. i guess she thought it was her way of helping me navigate the difficult course my life had become. and it really did resonate with me. this existentialist masterpiece novel is about a writer wandering around christiania (norway) around trying to get work and literally starving to death. i was not literally starving to death, but spiritually i felt like i was. i remember i was in barnes & noble bookstore one day going up an escalator and all of a sudden it just hit me suddenly that i should take this book and contemporize it for the screen. i interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_knf_t https://www.imdb.com/title/tt /?ref_=nm_knf_t should set it in los angeles and make it a starving screenwriter wandering around los angeles looking for a job. it was the perfect way for me to get back to work, while also exploring the experience i was going through. so i spent the next few months writing the screenplay. i got it out to a few producers and agents, but nobody wanted to do it. everybody thought it was too depressing. so i gave it to an actor friend of mine named joseph culp and he said, “look, let’s just do this.” it was right at the time that all those brilliant dogma films were coming out, making us all very optimistic about doing digital no-budget movies and changing cinematic history (laughs). so i said, “why not, let’s do it.” we had no money, no equipment, nothing. we just decided we were going to do it for absolutely zero budget. a friend of mine lent me a sony trv camera, which is just like a bad ’s home-video camera, it’s not even broadcast quality. and i went ahead and committed my life to shooting this film starting in . we shot the movie in days. and then things got really messy because i was working in the digital realm, and it was very cumbersome. my previous films had all been shot on mm or mm and cut on steenbecks or upright moviolas. now we needed all these expensive, very heavy gigabyte drives. i remember driving all over the (san fernando) valley picking up five here, ten there—from people’s garages. we had to practically fill a room with these goddamn gigabyte drives that were also failing us and slowing things down. my friend sam citron edited the film in this tiny little room we’d begged from a super high-end commercial production company called cucolorus in venice, ca. it was right across the street from dudley moore and warren beatty’s famous restaurant, market street. the industry was exploding, and with movie stars walking around in front of our office, and big productions getting made all around us, yet we were so far removed from it on some level. we were tucked away for months in this little closet where we were eventually forgotten. at a certain point i remember feeling like bartleby the scrivener. eventually after many months the execs at cucolorus noticed we were still there and told us to evacuate, but we didn’t. we just kept staying until the movie was finally done. hunger at the nordkapp film festival anyway, by i had completed the film, and it got really great reviews in several festivals. it was called “pick of the pack” and “shot on video wonder” and “the champion”—you’ve seen those reviews. i began to harbor new hopes (laughs), but it didn’t go any further than that. and all the major festivals ignored it. but finally it got noticed in norway. the director, knut erik jensen was making a documentary about knut hamsum for norwegian tv and read about me and my film during online research. he brought a film crew all the way out to la for a week and filmed me. it was a terrific boost to my self-esteem as a director, and he really loved the film. he was also head of the nordkapp film festival in honningsvag way, way up in the north of norway—almost in the arctic circle, and he selected my film to open the festival. so, in this way, hunger had its splendid world premiere in norway in . it got a passionate and protracted standing ovation which truly made all the years of effort interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | worth it. and knut hansum’s own grandson told me that he thought it was better than the version that won best actor award at cannes film festival. so, that nordkapp experience gave me a lot of renewed confidence and hope. and i think in a certain sense it was kind of what set me off in my activism for women directors, too. because i really decided at that point that i probably could have been a good filmmaker and that there was really a lot of sexism at play that had held me back in many ways. then i started looking around and noticing that my female peers and classmates were nowhere to be seen either. i realized it wasn’t just me, but all women that were losing out on opportunity. so i think the hidden success of hunger triggered a certain rage inside of me that set me on this explosive last years of activism for women directors. i just want to terrorize hollywood on behalf of all women. i wanted to blow it up in a thousand ways—and in the end i did. i suppose that has been actually my greatest success. dr: we’d like to talk some more about the movies before going back to activism. we wanted to ask you a question about the adaptation of the novel, which you explained, but we did have a question. you adapted it to la, changed the art form, but you did keep the male character instead of a female character. listening to you now, i was wondering if it was to maintain some distance with your situation which was clearly not positive, so did the decision not to change the gender, did it have something to do with that or was it just because you had the opportunity of working with this actor that you knew well? why did you not change the gender basically? female or male characters mg: male or female, the character in my hunger is me. i could have cast a man or a woman to play the role—it wasn’t important. i didn’t see that character as sexualized. it’s a story about something else. but this brings up a very important point that can be seen from several perspectives: on the one hand, how we see ourselves in relationship to the female or male heroes in films is determined in large part not by sex, but by the treatment of that character. most of the time, we identify with the hero (or anti-hero) because, whether male or female, the stories are designed that way, so the audience can step into those shoes and have the experience of transference. whatever our gender, we each have the capability of identifying with a character regardless of sex. and it’s fun to step into the shoes of, say, clint eastwood or idris elba, or bradley cooper and see an adventure through their eyes. it’s fun to step into greta garbo’s or gal gadot’s or jennifer lawrence’s shoes, too. you don’t have to share their sex to do that. on the other hand, of course, because nearly % of films over the past years—and literally % in the years between and — have been directed by men, most of our film stories are about men, and that has shaped humanity and how we see ourselves. and it makes us, even as female filmmakers sort of default to male characters. that’s something that’s most certainly changed for me in the past decade since i have woken up— almost all the films i’m trying to develop right now have female leads and are rooted in one way or another in female empowerment. not that i wouldn’t make a film all about men, it’s just my eyes have been opened to the need for balance and my interest has shifted. interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | i was not a strong feminist in the s or s—so many of us women who were children during the women’s lib movement of the ’s were complacent, or worse, were part of the backlash. we had to experience the downslope of opportunity in a deeply personal way to wake up. i was among those women—but i sure did wake up with a fury. i was so angry with myself and my generation for allowing the backslide, i was ready for martyrdom to catch us back up and restore the movement—restore progress for ourselves and the next generation. i think where women directors are concerned i came to the very forefront of it. it became a crusade for me i was willing to sacrifice everything for—but i’m jumping ahead. career challenges and sex discrimination in my early years of struggle as a filmmaker, i never said i’m not experiencing success because i’m a woman, i told myself it was because i was not good enough. i think that’s what most of us women were telling ourselves because we had no community and nothing to reflect off except for our male peers who, while facing enormous challenges in this incredibly competitive profession, had it significantly easier. we women were all sitting in our living rooms or wherever trying to compete in a world that didn’t want us, that didn’t care what we thought or said. and there was no community, no internet, no social media for us to change any of that. later, it was my ability to harness that as an activist, that made it possible for me to create enormous change. male directors connected in all these different ways: in the directors guild, on sets, and socially. hollywood was a world designed by men and controlled by men for men to succeed, and female director success was just an illusion. casting male leads when i directed hunger, i wasn’t thinking of the gender identity of that character, i was thinking about what it feels like as an artist to be utterly shut out of the world of success. i identified with the hero (or anti-hero) in the novel, hunger. knut hamsun had captured that universal experience of being prevented from pursuing greatness, of having to battle mediocrity when you know greatness is possible. i think about when percival gets to meet the fisher king. he could become a great knight himself, but he’s missing something fundamental—he was not privy to the secrets of that special class. when he had the opportunity for inclusion into that superior realm, he didn’t know what questions to ask. the mysteries were beyond him and he thought it was impolite to intrude—so he wasn’t accepted in to the glorious life. i think that’s sometimes how i feel as a woman living in this patriarchal world. and it makes me want to foment revolution to turn the whole thing upside-down. igniting the feminist flame there’s an element of frustration being female in this patriarchy after all these thousands of years. because we are female, we feel we can never really come in fully, not really. and being shut out from ever being an “auteur director” in the th or st interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | century is part of that sad continuum of being part of what amounts to a second class. our world’s storytelling, our cultural narrative, the voice of civilization, is simple not open to us. . . that’s ultimately what i became obsessed with changing. that’s what ignited the fire inside of me to disrupt and explode hollywood. the secret answer to the future of women rested in this one thing: we had to find a way to demand our equal participation in our storytelling. because if we could do that, we could share in our cultural narrative, share in the economics of it, and in doing so become equal participants in the power structure of our civilization. after all these thousands of years, it could possibly come down to just one law to make all this happen. and of course that would become my mission. to make title vii—equal employment opportunity law in us entertainment media become the fulcrum for an immense social transformation. dr: you kind of broached this topic already when you were explaining why you made when saturday comes, but we were wondering if there were any scenes you feel stand out that maybe a straight male director would not have done but that you chose to do or that came to you. mg: i’m not sure. the question of the female gaze comes up all the time these days, and especially that i’m on a lot of panels and speaking in the public forum. is there such a thing as a “female gaze”? it’s a fascinating and complex question. i do deeply believe in the significance of the discussion, but i question our ability to define such a term universally when women have been so marginalized in our storytelling and employments as filmmakers. this applies not just to cinema in the past years, but to all storytelling arts since the dawn of literature. a term “female gaze” suggests also validating the term, “male gaze”— and then should we have all sorts of other “gazes”? men have not been constricted by storytelling boxes into which they are supposed to fit, so why should women? it shouldn’t be a mandate that women have to tell female stories. men tell all sorts of stories across a vast spectrum of genres— a universal “male gaze” is not possible to define, in my view. women’s voices and visions have been absented from our cultural narrative, and it is critically important to now include them fully— past, present and future, but we must be open to each voice on an individual basis and allow for full freedom of expression. stamping female storytelling or filmmaking with definitions or standards or expectations is unfair, constraining, and demeaning to us as a sex, and i oppose it. what i favor is strict adherence to equal employment opportunity laws in all our entertainment media industries, globally. and great unity and solidarity among all people who value the democratization of our storytelling in fully realizing that goal. then, when we are on the road to equality, and especially when we have fully established it, let meritocracy (regardless of sex) determine success. and let our freely expressed voices and visions determine any possible sex-based definitions of “gaze.” children’s cinema interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | cm: do you have any projects? mg: i’m always working on lots of projects. i have a beautiful children’s script that i have wanted to direct. it’s set in friesland in the netherlands, and it’s about a group of schoolchildren who go on a quest to find a wheel and so restore grace to their bereft little fishing community. and it’s got a ten-year-old girl as its lead, and i’d love to make that film. i have a stockpile of other projects i’d like to make, and now that my profile is rising due to my work for gender equality in entertainment media, i’m getting quite a lot of submissions—scripts for me to direct. some of them are very exciting projects. my interest in children’s cinema has grown since i had children quite late in life (i was and when i had my son and daughter who are now teenagers). thanks to them, i became an enormous fan of hayao miyazaki. i would say hayao miyazaki (studio ghibli) is among the greatest feminist filmmakers of all time. his films nurtured my own feminism and have totally transformed, largely thanks to john lasseter, children’s animated cinema in the united states. miyazaki’s incredible love and celebration of women and girls and sisters, girlfriends, grandmothers and aunties has been truly transformative to the world. so i credit him a lot— women directors in hollywood in the s dr: we wanted to ask you about the fact that, in the academy awards, for instance this year, some very brilliant women directors were forgotten, and there were lots of articles about it, but for instance debra granik who directed leave no trace, lynne ramsay you were never really here, one of the most beautiful movies i’ve seen in the past three years, chloé zhao the rider, another one of the most beautiful movies i’ve seen in the last couple of years, and none of them were nominated. a couple of years back ava duvernay for selma was not nominated either, which was kind of surprising. this is interesting because, as you said, it points to the fact that there’s a systemic problem. and i’ve read studies that basically show that in independent cinema, in terms of gender, it’s pretty close to / or / or something, but in hollywood, apart from kathryn bigelow, there aren’t really any women directors who’ve been given the opportunity to have a career? mg: yes. i don’t think there is an example of % women directors working anywhere in the world except perhaps sweden, where the brilliant anna serner of the swedish film institute was able to mandate / gender hiring. but let’s talk about hollywood. when i started going at this in , about % of episodic tv shows were directed by women, and about % studio features were directed by women. and in commercials which is the most lucrative category of directing, women are almost completely absent—about %. it’s all about the money. women are allowed in if you don’t pay them, so for example about % of feature documentaries are directed by women in the us. today in things are changing—but only because of legal action, because of the aclu and federal investigations. hollywood needs the fear of lawsuits to hand jobs to women because stories are power. if % of entertainment media content that is distributed around the world comes out of hollywood—that’s a lot of influence. back in , i started parsing out that %-- who were the women directors that made up that % of studio feature film directors? and i started to see that almost % of that % were either movie stars, pop stars or the relatives of movie moguls. angelina jolie, barbara streisand, madonna, drew barrymore, jodie foster, even sofia interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | coppola and kathryn bigelow (daughters or wives of movie moguls, a billionaire). each one of them was either rich or powerful enough to command executives, if not outright finance their own film by themselves. so, if you take them out, almost % of studio features are directed by just ordinary women, where does that leave girls, just anybody, and women of color, and little girls of color who might dream of doing this? statistically, they don’t have a chance. we should not be lying to our daughters, telling them they can become whatever they want. it’s a lie. if we want to tell our daughters they can achieve their dreams, we’d damn well better change the world first so it’s true. it was this sort of thinking that gave me the impetus to battle for women directors in my union, to take it to the aclu and the eeoc. after battling my union, the directors guild of america, i went to the eeoc and aclu. in the aclu launched this massive media campaign putting women directors on the map, successfully got the eeoc to investigate in —that investigation has now been going on for years and six months—and thanks to that we are seeing a little bit of an upswing in terms of female director hires, particularly in television. in i think women directed . % of studio features and i’m told that by % to % of studio films will have been directed by women. episodic tv shows directed by women will have jumped from % in to perhaps % in —that’s a % increase in six years. that’s the power of legal action. okay, so to get back to your question: these beautiful films made last year by women directors were totally ignored in the academy. well, the fact of the matter is that it’s a tiny hierarchy of power, of elite white liberal men in hollywood, who occupy the high seats of power in all of the organizations in hollywood. you take a guy like steven spielberg, just as an example: he is not just a famous director who’s made all these massively successful films, but he’s also very powerful in every sector of the industry: unions, studios, networks, talent agencies, the director’s guild of america, the producers guild of america, the writers guild of america, the academy of motion pictures. he also owns a studio—dreamworks—and he’s a giant force at caa. and he has powerful ties to washington dc and the news media. these guys are running the whole show, controlling america’s communications machinery, influencing geopolitics. they know how powerful they are, and they think they are making the world a better place. they think they have the right ethos to spread around the world—but guess what—they don’t value women or female voices. they shut women out. they are fraught with bias. before when the aclu and eeoc pressure came, spielberg hired just one female director (mimi leder) on the many, many feature films he produced. turns out that is employment discrimination based on sex—it’s not just wrong on a moral basis, it’s also against the law. check out his imdb producer credits since , he’s hiring lots of women now (laughs). we women get hit from every direction in a power structure like this. we make a movie, and we get a lower budget, shorter production schedules, worse distribution, low p&a (print and advertising). and it’s the same group of guys that are coming up and getting all the awards. i mean think about it. i’m a member of the directors guild of america, and so every year i get this big long list of hundreds and hundreds of films to pick from, and most of the names you don’t recognize or you haven’t even interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | seen the films. who has the time to see hundreds and hundreds of films every year? so people just gravitate to and select the names they know. and % of critics are men, they’re inherently biased against female made films, giving men better reviews and better coverage. so it’s going to require revolution. we need to stop thinking about hollywood as being a bunch of privately owned businesses in which the owners of the means of production have a right to bypass the law and do things their own way. we need to see hollywood for what it is: the communication center for one of the most powerful nations in the world, the propaganda machine for the united states of america. and it is largely creating our cultural narrative for our entire world, which is helping to guide the trajectory of civilization. you don’t think that this little tiny group of superpower guys in hollywood know this? it’s like in the battle between the koch brothers on one side and the one- worlders on the other; where is civilization going to go? it’s largely going to be based on what stories we tell and what ethos people are convinced of. hollywood leaders want to hang on to that incredible power of influence and of money. i know i’ve made significant waves, but what power have we women got in the face of all of this? i was talking to this guy who had been a very big lobbyist in washington dc, and he told me, “those eeoc positions, they’re all bought and paid for.” so we managed to get this federal investigation going for women directors, and they got the eeoc to take on this investigation. but hollywood pays hundreds of millions of dollars every year into the coffers of lobbyist groups in washington dc to represent their interests in hollywood. it is a very difficult battle to fight. in the end, we can win by playing a strategic game in which we convince the world that this is not just a feminist issue, this is a civil rights issue—and it resonates nationally and globally. also, this is not a partisan issue, it’s not a liberal or conservative issue. if women are shut out of contributing to our cultural narrative, our storytelling by being shut out of hollywood as directors, so are conservatives. beyond #metoo in right after the weinstein scandal hit the news, i wrote a guest post for the hollywood reporter, and i really knew immediately that this shift over to #metoo from equal employment opportunity law was going to be problematic for the work i was doing. so i counted up all the films that harvey weinstein had executive produced and produced, and i found that he had only hired . % women to direct the films he had executive produced or produced— . %, less than . then i thought, so where does that put the great hollywood icons that we all love and who have not sexually harassed and assaulted women—executive producers and producers like steven spielberg or george clooney and matt damon. i counted up all the films that steven spielberg had produced and executive produced up to when the aclu started in on this campaign, and as i mentioned before, he had hired only % women to direct the films that he executive produced. and george clooney interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | %. and matt damon %. they were actually worse violators of employment discrimination than weinstein was. i started thinking, oh yes, hollywood is happy burning harvey weinstein on this medieval sacrificial pyre to absolve all hollywood of its collective sins against women, but really the real pain, where the real injury happens, is in not giving us the jobs. sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace are just some of many symptoms resulting from employment discrimination. they are the result of power-imbalances founded in employment and pay inequality. it’s all about money. and truly, given a choice, i would take sexual harassment any day over unemployment. filmmaking, film history and (feminist) film theory cm: our last question. getting back to the narrative content of your films. we noted that obviously you make a lot of references to the history of cinema (saturday night and sunday morning, kitchen sink realism, charlie chaplin’s little tramp…), but would you say that film theory has also influenced the narrative, aesthetic, and political content of your films? mg: i don’t think a lot about film theory when i’m writing or directing, but ideas about how film functions, and images from films throughout film history are a part of me, so they are also part of my story-telling. this is i think why it’s so important that % of our stories be told by women because we don’t know what is going to come out of that. we don’t know what visuals and what subtexts might come to be included in the great body of our global cinema that other people will take from. i have borrowed and made homages to many different things that i have seen from cinema in all of my years of life watching and studying film, but those come largely from a male body of work and a male perspective on the world. can you explain a little bit more your question in terms of film theory? cm: sure! you went to film school in ucla where obviously you gained a lot of background knowledge on film history and film theory. do you feel you’ve been using it in your films? it’s the case with a lot of film directors nowadays who self-consciously quote film theory and feminist film theory. for example, it is the case with some horror movies which integrate feminist scholarship into their narrative material, or with todd haynes who responds to feminist film scholars like pam cook and laura mulvey in mildred pierce. i was wondering if you had thought about doing this when you worked on when saturday comes. mg: i try to avoid pretension in general in my work, so i try not to be overly conscious about theory. i know the influences really come from the films that have informed the stories i’m trying to tell. so as you say, for example, on when saturday comes i was very influenced by this sporting life, the loneliness of the long distance runner, and saturday night and sunday morning. cm: so making references to film history and films rather than referring to film theory per se. what about hunger, the reference to the little tramp is conscious, isn’t it? mg: of course, i was using the character in hamsun’s hunger to illustrate my own plight in hollywood while referencing iconic figures from cinematic history, charlie chaplin on the one hand, and lawrence of arabia on the other. each of them, like myself, is walking a tight-rope in life between sheer, hilarious mediocrity and potentially godlike greatness. the contradiction between what life is like, and what life could be like is so irreconcilable that in the end, what else can we do but laugh? we are just a step from oblivion and that’s all the time we get. show’s over. so we do interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | what we can. we try to tell stories to say, “i was here.” we try to shape the world to be a better place for the next gang coming in. anyway, that is what directors do: we have a vision, and in attempting to realize that vision we find a thousand problems we need to solve along the way. on my journey i found that women are not fully allowed to direct films, so i had to solve that problem for all of us along the way. and ultimately, that’s the message of my film hunger— at first charlie pontus gets defeated by hollywood, he has to hitch a ride on a big rig truck out of la—he’s exiled. but in the end he writes the book. and it’s a masterpiece, right? he triumphs over this industry that is like an existential vortex. that’s his redemption. well, i do think that hunger is my favorite piece of work i’ve ever made . . . and yet no one has seen it. cm: well, we have! index mots-clés: maria giese, réalisatrices, féminisme, militantisme, hollywood, discrimination, jimmy, hunger keywords: maria giese, women directors, feminism, activism, hollywood, discrimination, when saturday comes, hunger subjects: film, tv, video authors cristelle maury maîtresse de conférence université toulouse jean jaurès cristellemaury@gmail.com david roche professeur université paul valéry montpellier mudrockca@gmail.com interview with maria giese, april , miranda, | mailto:cristellemaury@gmail.com mailto:mudrockca@gmail.com 	interview with maria giese, april , science magazine post date • october s c i e n c e sciencemag.org w e have heard from readers with concerns about the publication of the letter “harass- ment charges: injustice done?” (a. moya et al., august, p. ). at science, we take harassment issues very seriously. we are working to develop policies that adhere to our editorial principle of airing a wide range of perspectives and that also prevent causing further harm to the targets of harassment. publication of a letter does not represent an endorsement by the editorial staff at science. past practice has been based on the understanding that reader-submitted letters are intended to reflect conversations taking place in the scientific community. the pub- lished letter in question did that by raising concerns about the transparency of the investiga- tory process. this point touched on the challenges institutions face when de-termining how the processes and outcomes of harassment investigations should be shared, decisions that must weigh the bene-fits of transparency against important priva-cy concerns. however, the letter also dis-cussed the personal conduct and scientific accomplishments of the individual found guilty of harassment. in the future, we will not publish letters in which authors argue that an individual accused or found guilty of harassment is likely innocent because others have inter-acted with that per- son without incident; this argument is logically flawed. in addi-tion, although some informa- tion about a per-son’s scientific achievements is at times nec-essary to establish context, we will not pub-lish letters in which authors argue that pro-fessional achievements have any bearing at all on the likelihood that the individual en-gaged in harassment. such arguments not only lack relevance to harassment behavior but also may result in further harm to the targets of harassment and exacerbate the al-ready daunting process that targets face in coming forward publicly. we are striving to increase our under-standing of all facets of the issue of harass-ment and to review and modify our editorial processes accordingly. jeremy m. berg editor-in-chief editor’s note: harassment policy . /science.aav post date october o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ august • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o : ia n p a r k e r harassment charges: enough himpathy we are well into the #metoo era, yet journal- ists and editors are still fixated on the harasser’s fall from grace rather than the detrimental effect of sexual harassment on the victims and our society as a whole. the news story “prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding” (m. wadman, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) reinforces a familiar toxic narrative: the accomplishments of the harasser hold more value to science than women’s right to a safe workplace. this is now so commonplace that it has been dubbed “himpathy” ( ). in the news story, wadman tells us all about the “eminent” professor, from his scientific accomplishments to his personal hobbies. he did “pioneering” and “ground- breaking” work, he donated money to the university, and he was president of aaas (the publisher of science). however, we do not hear about the pioneering work of the women he harassed at university of califor- nia, irvine (uci). from a graduate student to a tenured professor to an assistant dean, the news story reduced the women who demanded an end to his misconduct to complainers. we are told that ayala was just being “european” and his actions were mis- understood; instead, the narrative should focus on the many women and careers that suffered from ayala’s actions. wadman then chose to end the article by quoting an ayala supporter who diminished the investigation. edited by jennifer sills letters the same himpathy sentiments return in the follow-up news in depth story “report details harassment by famed biologist” (m. wadman, july, p. ). words matter, and science should wield its words and influence carefully. it is time to recognize that harassers have taken a substantial toll on the advancement of science. it is time to acknowledge that sexual harassment in all its nefarious forms puts an unquantifiable burden on the victims (many of whom are our colleagues). it’s time to believe women. jane zelikova, kelly ramirez,* jewel lipps, on behalf of women scientists leadership women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: k.ramirez@nioo.knaw.nl reference . k. manne, down girl (oxford univ. press, ). . /science.aau harassment charges: journalists’ role as a woman in science, i find the report- ing of allegations against francisco ayala (“#metoo complaints fell noted geneticist,” m. wadman, news in brief, july, p. ) deeply troubling. the title implicates the “complaints” or “complainers” as respon- sible for the resignation, as opposed to the actions of the accused or the impartial sexual harassment investigation. the term “complaint” gives the impression that the alleged victims have minor grievances as opposed to serious reports of scientific misconduct. not only is this title biased against whistleblowers, it is also factu- ally incorrect, as the first allegations of harassment were allegedly made years before the resignation. i assert that the investigation, not the allegations, caused the accused to resign. jessica duffy department of biology, midwestern state university, wichita falls, tx , usa. email: jlduffy @my.mwsu.edu . /science.aau harassment charges: injustice done? we are deeply concerned by the way in which our friend and colleague professor francisco ayala has been forced to resign from the university of california, irvine (uci), after being accused of sexual harass- ment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation). the charges that have been raised against him have had appall- ing consequences. those of us who are well acquainted with professor ayala know that he is an honorable person, who throughout his career has treated his friends, co-workers, and students in a respectful, egalitar- ian way. his lifelong commitment to teaching, research, and outreach on bio- logical evolution has won him worldwide recognition. he has been a generous bene- factor to the university of california and throughout his fruitful career has opened new fields of biological research, pro- moted mutual respect and independence uci decided to remove francisco ayala’s name from the science library after he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ between evolutionary studies and religious perspectives, played a key role in several major scientific organizations, and helped many spanish-speaking female scholars and hispanic students, in particular, both in the united states and throughout the world. from the available information, it appears that the inquiry conducted by uci lacked genuine due process, fair- ness, and full transparency. we urge uci to acknowledge the possibility that its sanctions against professor ayala were enacted in haste and to reopen the case and investigate the matter more thor- oughly. we understand the wish of both the institution and professor ayala not to unduly prolong this whole unhappy episode. it is equally important, however, that justice be done and be seen to be done. if carried out properly, uci could help devise a more successful model for how institutions should deal with such situations in the future. devising an improved procedure for these cases would earn everyone’s gratitude. andrés moya and additional authors* institute of integrative systems biology, university of valència, valència, spain, and foundation for the promotion of health and biomedical research of valència region (fisabio), valència, spain. email: andres.moya@uv.es *the full list of authors is available online. s u p p l e m e n ta ry m at e r i a l s full list of authors www.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . /suppl/dc . /science.aau harassment charges: metoo but due process the resignation of eminent biologist francisco j. ayala amid charges of sexual harassment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) has left ayala’s home campus deeply divided. the controversy highlights problems in the way universities currently address charges of sexual harass- ment. because the university of california, irvine (uci), failed to post easily acces- sible guidelines on how the ayala case was handled, especially how and by whom final decisions were made, many uci faculty are concerned that the university overreached, imposing a punishment not commensurate with the specific charges of wrongdoing. a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment should include clearly stated procedures to protect due process and ensure propor- tional responses to wrongdoing. i will not engage in the ugly nastiness of “he said, she said” as we debate the veracity of accusations described in sala- cious detail (“report details harassment by famed biologist,” m. wadman, news in depth, july, p. ). these are human tragedies evolving in front of us. victims strive to regain lost self-esteem, along with justice. the accused wrestle with shock, forced to confront their own cluelessness at shifting mores, and everyone realizes how vulnerable we all are, including adminis- trators struggling to figure out how best to fairly confront sexual harassment and gender equality. we are all at risk when goodwill and communications break down. to fairly and equitably strike a balance between complacency and overreaction, i recommend three procedures to help achieve the notoriously difficult goal of changing attitudes toward gender. first, we must do more to foster a university climate that takes seriously and protects potential targets, be they male or female. part of that is recognizing that even subtle forms of verbal behavior—i.e., jokes or comments about appearance—make some women and minorities uncomfortable. yet resulting deferential treatment can contribute to a climate in which women or minorities are treated differently. even- tually, this subtle, differential treatment can foster continuing inequality. second, we must insist that legally correct poli- cies and procedures are followed when charges of sexual harassment are made. these procedures need to be transpar- ent and the same for all faculty. policies should be written in prose that even nonlawyers can understand and posted in obvious places, with regularly sched- uled discussion forums designed to help educate all members of the university community. third, the punishment must fit the crime. if tasteless, off-color jokes and the kind of ambiguous “unwanted touching” of which ayala was accused warrant his public humiliation, what do we do with more serious charges of sexual harassment? and why is hana ayala pun- ished for her husband’s acts by having her name removed from gifts to uci? the #metoo movement has done a great service in opening up an area too long taboo. but the failure to follow clearly es- tablished, fairly administered, and trans- parent procedures can too easily produce witch hunts that cast doubts on legitimate charges of sexual harassment. this will set back the move toward gender equality, in the academy and in society at large. kristen renwick monroe department of political science, university of california, irvine, irvine, ca , usa. email: krmonroe@uci.edu . /science.aau insights | l e t t e r s sciencemag.org s c i e n c e step up your job search with science careers • access thousands of job postings • sign up for job alerts • explore career development tools and resources search sciencecareers.org published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ harassment charges: metoo but due process kristen renwick monroe doi: . /science.aau ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ spatial and psychophysical domination of women in dystopia: swastika night, woman on the edge of time and the handmaid’s tale humanities article spatial and psychophysical domination of women in dystopia: swastika night, woman on the edge of time and the handmaid’s tale elisabetta di minico histopia research group, autonomous university of madrid, ciudad universitaria de cantoblanco, madrid, spain; redbetts@hotmail.com received: january ; accepted: february ; published: february ���������� ������� abstract: analyzing burdekin’s swastika night piercy’s woman on the edge of time and atwood’s the handmaid’s tale the article aims to examine the relations between space, gender-based violence, and patriarchy in women’s writing. hitlerdom in swastika night, the mental hospital and the future dystopian new york in woman on the edge of time, and gilead in the handmaid’s tale are spatial and social nightmares. the authorities that rule these dystopias imprison women in restricted spaces first, limit their vocabulary and daily actions, deprive them of their beauty, freedom and consciousness, and impose maternity or sexuality upon them. my analysis will connect the limitation of space with the psychophysical domination the objectification and the disempowerment of the female gender. hoping also to shed light on the dynamics and the reasons for contemporary real gender-based violence and depreciation, the study will be focused on: . the ways space contributes to the creation, the stability and the dominion of dystopian powers; . the representation and the construction of female figures, roles and identities; . the techniques of control, manipulation and oppression used by patriarchal powers against women; . the impact of sex, sexuality and motherhood on women’s bodies; and . the possible feminist alternatives or solutions proposed by the novels. keywords: dystopia; space; patriarchy; gender-based violence; sexuality meaning “bad place” in ancient greek, dystopia is a genre that describes desperate worlds, dominated by the hyperbolic evolution of history and contemporaneity’s worst nightmares, including nuclear and ecological disasters, dictatorships, racial or gender-based violence, corruption, overpopulation, hyper-urbanization, and excess of consumerism and publicity. often considered as “the shadow of utopia” (kumar , p. ), dystopia generally opposes utopia and its “good (or inexistent) places”: it promotes anti-utopian visions resulting from the degeneration of utopian attempts to change a community or a whole world. while utopian works foster “a quest for the ideal society” (booker a, p. ) by exploring socio-political alternatives able to positively impact reality, dystopia shows “the potential abuses that might result from the institution of supposedly utopian alternatives” (booker a, p. ). according to kumar ( ), “utopia and anti-utopia are antithetical yet interdependent. [ . . . ] the anti-utopia is formed by utopia, and feeds parasitically on it. [ . . . ] anti-utopia draws its material from utopia and reassembles it in a manner that denies the affirmation of utopia. it is the mirror-image of utopia—but a distorted image, seen in a cracked mirror.”. (p. ) but dystopia is not just a “negative response” to utopia (kumar , p. ), it “also constitutes a critique of existing social conditions or political systems” (booker a, p. ), providing a representation of contemporary societies and their power relations. baccolini and moylan ( ) underline the powerful social critique of dystopia and its invitation to resist against different forms of discriminating powers: “the dystopian imagination has served as a prophetic vehicle, the canary humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of in a cage, for writers with an ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible socio-political tendencies” (pp. – ). analyzing the socio-political plots of dystopia, we can recognize some common structures and strategies: “the official, hegemonic order of most dystopias [ . . . ] rests, as antonio gramsci put it, on both coercion and consent” (baccolini and moylan , p. ), “building” a public and private body of society through mechanisms that go from fear, violence and pain to propaganda, to a sense of belonging and adulterated needs worshipping pleasure, esthetic, materialism, and comfort. generally, dystopian authority strictly organizes spaces and exploits linguistic and psychophysical subjection to repress or manipulate individuals, to fit them into their social, ethical and political standards, excluding, blaming and repressing the non-aligned and the outcasts. thus, people become “lands” to be invaded and defeated. by limiting spaces, power shows its grandeur, supervises its citizens and identifies the nonaligned, converting places and settings into (both real and symbolic) extensions of authority. by limiting language, power spreads only the necessary concepts and messages, and eventually eradicates unwanted ideas. by limiting bodies, power shapes perfect citizens, docile and obedient, and displays “otherness” as a threatening aspect of societal practices, justifying the marginalization or elimination of sexual, ideological, or racial “others”. when dealing with women, the control of space, abuse, and the impoverishment of language also contribute to the patriarchal objectification and disempowerment of the female gender. in fictional dystopian contexts (as well as in realities that show dystopian tendencies), “women can suffer two times: first, because of political/authoritarian power, secondly through a male/sexist oppression” (di minico , p. ). in which ways do space, sexuality, and violence support dystopia and influence women? where do women stand in the telling of “bad places”? how are women’s stories written in patriarchal systems? this article will try to answer these questions by analyzing three iconic works: katharine burdekin’s swastika night (first published in ), marge piercy’s woman on the edge of time (first published in ), and margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale (first published in ). written in the th century by three successful female authors, these novels are not only extremely significant and analytical for their time, but also current and incisive towards contemporary society because of their trenchant analysis of gender issues. . plots of war against female bodies at first glance, swastika night, woman on the edge of time, and the handmaid’s tale show a disparity in terms of style, historical context and geo-location. while english author katharine burdekin wrote swastika night in , analyzing pre-world war ii europe and the nazi threat, marge piercy and margaret atwood are two living authors who insert their works in a more contemporary north-american context (piercy is american, atwood is canadian), making their dystopias the results of anti-democratic involutions. moreover, from a stylistic point of view, swastika night and the handmaid’s tale are two dreadful dystopias, while woman on the edge of time is a critical utopia that uses dystopia to underline the possible future consequences of a society moved by patriarchy and injustice. despite these relevant differences, the novels have been chosen because they perfectly describe realities where women are psychophysically violated, isolated and commodified by men, deeply connecting the themes of gender, power, and space. reflecting on sexuality, maternity, rape, and gender roles, the plots clearly focus on gendered violence, extreme commodification/annihilation of the female body, and male domination fantasies. burdekin published swastika night under the male pseudonymous murray constantine and the story itself is narrated by a man. the “maternity” of the novel was revealed only during the s. swastika night is one of “the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late s” (croft , p. ), predominantly because burdekin related dictatorship with misogyny, powerfully attacking the patriarchal ideologies that could work as substrate for wider repressive government tendencies. deeply understanding nazi politics and their future outcomes of racial, religious and humanities , , of sexual oppression, swastika night, years before the second world war, is also one of the first novels to chronically imagine a world where an undefeated nazism rules, as in dick’s the man in the high castle (dick [ ] ) or harris’s fatherland (harris [ ] ). in burdekin’s novel, nazism has won a global conflict, hitler is worshipped as a god, jews have been erased from earth, christians are considered “worms”, and animalized women are used only for procreation. the whole idea of family has been shattered in favor of a male and manly community, where love is predominantly experienced as a homosexual feeling. knights rule this hierarchical society. one of them, old childless friedrich von hess, reveals to hermann and alfred that hitler is not a deity, but a simple man, and that women were once intelligent, educated, beautiful and loved by men. von hess entrusts the future to the protagonists, urging them to organize a resistance group and to support the development of new independent models of femininity, thus saving a society destined to extinction. mothers are, in fact, gradually ceasing to give birth to daughters, in a sort of natural selection of gender. woman on the edge of time is a powerful novel written by american writer and social activist marge piercy. it blends realistic drama, utopia, and dystopia, placing itself among the critical utopias. the critical utopias arose during the s and the s, in a time when the search for the “good place” supported the political struggles and youth protests in the name of human, civil and reproductive rights, inclusiveness, emancipation, socio-economic justice, and socio-cultural liberation. shaped by “ecological, feminist and new left thought” (baccolini and moylan , p. ), this utopian revival forged “visions of better but open future”, developing “a critique of dominant ideology” and tracing “new vectors of opposition” (baccolini and moylan , p. ). piercy’s novel tells about connie ramos, a hispanic woman living in a degraded area of new york. a victim of abuse and prejudices throughout her life, she is diagnosed with violent paranoid schizophrenia and unjustly locked into an asylum, where doctors try to surgically control her impulses through brain implants. in this dissociative place, empathetic connie communicates with luciente, an androgynous figure from the future. luciente shows her mattapoisett, a utopian place where the major socio-political problems of the s (patriarchy, racism, pollution, unrestrained consumerism, and homophobia, among others) have been resolved. here, a harmony between genders and classes, as well as between humanity and the environment, is established. regrettably, utopia is not the only alternative for earth: there is also a dystopian version, where women are the “property” of men, nature is contaminated, and the population is controlled, drugged and repressed by multinational corporations. the future is not yet decided and, to support the creation of mattapoisett, connie poisons the medical staff who embody oppressive power. she will almost surely end up indicted, but at least she is sure she is fighting for a better future. the reawakening of utopian themes ended in the s: “in the face of economic restructuring, right-wing politics, and a cultural milieu informed by an intensifying fundamentalism and commodification” (baccolini and moylan , p. ), there was a new rise of darkest nightmares, also fostered by the development of cyberpunk, the republication of swastika night, and the publication of the handmaid’s tale. attacking “western phallocentrism” (freibert , p. ) with ferocity and lucidity, the handmaid’s tale tells about the republic of gilead, a regime moved by christian fundamentalism and ruled by commanders. to oppose a loss of values, caused by religious tolerance, gender equality, sexual freedom, abortion, and similar “aberrations”, the new state annihilates knowledge, dissent, female and lgbtq emancipation, and other “sins”, dragging the nation into a dystopia exalting manhood and blind faith. disenfranchised, women are pushed back into domesticity. since the world is suffering from a high rate of sterility, fertile women, called handmaids, are chosen as surrogate mothers for wealthy families, as in the biblical antecedent in which rachel asks her husband jacob to impregnate her servant bilhah, who gives birth on her behalf. dressed in red, “the color of blood which defines” them (atwood , p. ), handmaids are breeding slaves who are regularly raped, forced to bear children and then leave them to the commanders’ families. the other female groups include wives, marthas (servants), jezebels (prostitutes), aunts (the handmaids’ brutal teachers), humanities , , of econowives (wives-servants-mothers for the lower-class men), and unwomen (female dissidents who are exiled to the colonies—contaminated reclusion areas). the main character is an independent and cultured woman, a wife and a mother. captured and re-educated to be a handmaid, she belongs to commander fred waterford and his wife serena joy, becoming offred. analyzing swastika night, battaglia ( ) affirms that the central theme of the novel is “the relations between male and female principles, between a male system of values and a female one” (p. ). she adds: “burdekin clearly shows [ . . . ] how sadism—the pillar hitlerdom is founded on—is originated by feelings of inferiority and fear” (p. ). said analysis is also true for the other two analyzed novels, and it reflects “real life” dystopias. according to feminist theories, starting from the beginning of time, “the androcentric character of patriarchy inherently [has confined] women to the fringes of society” (gilarek , p. ). the roots of this “ideology of male supremacy” are to be found in the archetypal tendency of endorsing female submission and biological control in order to support masculine myths of superiority. women’s empowerment and freedom undermine this cult and the conservative need for patriarchal control and traditional values, stimulating, in repressive environments, male sadism and hostility toward the female gender. “fear generates violence and desire of destruction, because destruction is the most reassuring form of possession” (battaglia , p. ). it is interesting to notice that there is a “self-evident” connection “between political power and the male gender role” (patai , p. ) in society, especially in fascist, conservative and/or patriarchal realities. the more the gender roles are fixed, and the authority reactionary, the more the community experiments with gender-based violence (reid-cunningham , p. ). the results could be catastrophic, as shown by the shocking worlds of dystopia: “male egos and female bodies; male persons and female animals: these are the extremes of which an ideology of male supremacy is capable” (patai , p. ). “we were the people who were not in the papers. we lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. we lived in the gaps between the stories” (atwood , p. ), offred says, referring to the initial underestimation of the first political signs that would lead to the dictatorship. but this quote also perfectly explains the subordinate position of feminine spaces, words, bodies and expectations in repressive and patriarchal society, where women are objects and not the subjects of both their narratives and their lives. . dystopian spaces/female nightmares space has not only geographic value, but also a socio-political, economic, cultural, textual, and metaphorical significance that psychophysically influences the citizens who live in it. there is a strong connection between power and spaces. according to lefebvre, space is not neutral and objective. it is a social product reflecting social relations, politics and ideology of power. “space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic. [ . . . ] space has been fashioned and molded from historical and natural elements, but in a political way. space is political and ideological. it is a product literally populated with ideologies”. (lefebvre [ ] , pp. – ) according to castells ( ), “space is not a ‘reflection of society’, it is society” (p. ): spatial forms “express and perform the interest of the dominant class” (p. ), leaving outside “peripheralized and oppressed” subjects, such as “exploited workers, tyrannized people, dominated women” (soja , p. ), debased racial/ethnical minorities, and demeaned lgbtq communities. thus, urbanism is not just a simple frame constructed on geographical factors, it is also the result of governmental choices showing the possibilities of social inclusion, mobility and freedom for certain communities. in realities (not necessarily conservative and repressive) where equity, justice and rights are not guaranteed for all sections of the population, the isolation of marginalized groups is increased through a spatial organization that supports discrimination. to quote just a few examples, limitation humanities , , of of movement, ghettoization, decaying infrastructures, insufficiency of or inaccessibility to resources, transports, and services (schools, museum, etc.) affect disempowered people’s participation in social, political and cultural life, thus reducing their chances of recovery and improvement. if, on the one hand, space can support social exclusion, it can, on the other hand, be exploited to maximize both the population’s involvement and fear. this is particularly evident in—but not limited to—authoritarian and totalitarian organization of space. paraphrasing what mosse (mosse [ ] ) affirmed about nazi-fascism, dominant powers can use architecture and mise-en-scène to show the authority’s strength, to diminish people’s individual and collective identity, to favor political control, and to dramatize the relationship between power and submitted subjects. the urban planning of public and private areas and infrastructure (squares, streets, houses, churches, prisons, schools, parks, slums, etc.) serves the political apparatus’ needs, transforming gathering places, buildings, and monuments into “pedagogical-political” weapons (tobia , p. ). the menace of constant surveillance through architecture, military, spies and technology supports the creation of a restrained, exploitable and almost-transparent society. in addition, the repetition of flags, emblems, stereotyped images, and messages imbeds a liturgical symbolism in the collective consciousness, while public ceremonies—not only those that are strictly political, but also folkloristic events—evolve into cultural rites (mosse [ ] , p. ), supporting the affirmation of the mythos, transmitting cognitive contents and generating emotional responses in the observers. rites determine popular attitudes, ideas and sensations, and sacralize the bonds between crowds and leaders. from a feminist perspective, space is also revealed to be “tied up with, both directly and indirectly, particular social constructions of gender relations” (massey [ ] , p. ). both in democratic and dictatorial realities, in fact, urban space can disclose gendered limitations. reflecting on “the spaces of modernism”, massey (massey [ ] ) underlines the tendency to divide public places and private ones, fostering a separation of spheres that support “confinement” of women in the house (p. ). the socio-political exclusion that women can suffer in daily life is reflected in the male organization of urban space. “the restriction that women face on their mobility [ . . . ] allows masculinism to reveal itself an unnatural constraint on women’s lives” (rose , p. ). from a patriarchal point of view, in fact, there are some public spaces where “virtuous” women are not allowed or where they shouldn’t go, just as there are dangerous public places where women could be more exposed to criminal/male violence. dystopian fiction has deeply interiorized this link between space and power, showing realities in which dystopian delusions are socio-politically and geographically constructed. to exaggerate the differences between men and women, feminist dystopias often insist on the creation of cities explicitly designed for men, with women coercively relegated to domestic areas or ghettos. in said realities, women’s bodies can be almost literally crushed by toxic masculinity and male spaces, until they become physically and intellectually invisible. hitlerdom, connie’s present and future new york, and gilead impeccably materialize a political use of place and architecture, a use that also influences the representation and the construction of female figures, roles and identities. the analyzed novels are spatial and social nightmares dominated by male powers. the pain, fear, and rejection that women feel during their lives are profoundly emphasized by the places in which they are confined and from where they cannot escape. as “symbolic extensions of the theme and characterization” of the plot (giannetti , p. ), spaces contribute to the creation of dystopia, visually and psychophysically imprisoning characters within their borders, and influencing the construction of society. women’s limitation of movement directly reflects their lack of, or the restriction of their choices, actions, vocabulary, consciousness and appearance, while spaces appear “masculinized”: “through the masculinization of the body politic”, public space also becomes “a masculine area” (rose , p. ). swastika night’s women are segregated in a gender-based apartheid. they live in small wooden houses in degraded and closed areas, far from the male spaces. the women’s quarters are supposed to be almost self-contained, to limit contact between the two sexes. women are generally not allowed humanities , , of to leave this ghetto except for the women’s worship, when they are “herded like cattle into the church” (burdekin [ ] , p. ). this “holy” swastika-shaped building is not a refuge, but another architectural and symbolic place where women are humiliated and brainwashed. during the mass, women (who cannot sit down) spend the time crying, sobbing, and listening to knight’s misogynist speeches. he lectures “them on humility, blind obedience and submission to men, reminding them of the lord hitler’s supreme condescension in allowing them still to bear men’s sons” (burdekin [ ] , p. ), who, after months, are taken in custody by their fathers. in woman on the edge of time, we discover three different realities: connie’s contemporary world, a future utopia and a future dystopia. both the utopia and dystopia have their roots in the protagonist’s present society. connie lives in spanish harlem, a poor neighborhood where mistreatment, gender-based violence, prostitution, and drugs are common and almost “contagious”. during her hospitalization, connie is isolated from the external world and has limited interactions with the internal community and an oppressive relation with the medical staff. the descriptions of the asylum are horrific, and insist on the place’s darkness, filthiness, and desperation, symbolically materializing the injustices suffered by connie through a suffocating frame. when in seclusion, for example, she is stuck in a hall with no doors and no windows, a desolate spot with no way out, reflecting the protagonist’s life. filled with “names, dates, words scratched somehow into the wall with blood, fingernails, pencil stubs, shit” (piercy , p. ), this empty room is a constant memory of the abuses perpetuated in it, and a gate to hell for alienated and disadvantaged people, betrayed by fate, families, and institutions. recalling the confinement of the asylum, people don’t have freedom of movement nor any other rights in the dystopian new york, a dreadful evolution of contemporaneity. this megacity is a land of oppression and injustice that vertically separates classes and physically and symbolically represents architectural stratification as an exemplification of tyrannical power, evoking the film metropolis by fritz lang. the “richies” live up in the sky in luxurious space platforms, while the poor are doomed to barely survive on a devastated and polluted earth. connie meets an inhabitant, gildina, in a windowless apartment in a guarded complex. talking with her, the protagonist discovers that nature doesn’t exist anymore, air is deadly contaminated, and food is made “from coal and algae and wood by-products” (piercy , p. ). low-class people die around the age of forty, while the élite can live up to two hundred years thanks to surgery and organs ripped from the indigent. to handle solitude, lack of affection, sadness, insomnia, and other similar indispositions, new yorkers take a lot of drugs, as in huxley’s brave new world (huxley [ ] ). this society is not controlled by a charismatic leader, as the big brother in orwell’s (orwell [ ] ), it is dominated by “multis”, multinational corporations that have replaced nations and which own citizens. contrariwise, mattapoisett is a feminist and anti-racist ecotopia where discrimination, violence, and pollution find no place. when connie visits mattapoisett for the first time, she doesn’t expect a rural village. future is not a sci-fi reality: there are no skyscrapers, flying cars or space ships. in this utopia there are not even cities: mattapoisett is a green paradise, a bucolic village with people, many happy and funny animals, idyllic landscapes with gardens, forests, rivers, and few buildings. there is a close and harmonic correlation between nature and people, and citizens appear to be very respectful and caring, towards each other and all living creatures. but still, mattapoisettians perfectly use technology to protect their environment (they have advanced recycling systems, rainwater tanks, and solar energy) and to enhance humanity, destroying gender inequality, biological determinism, racism, and poverty. further opposing dystopia, in mattapoisett everyone has plenty of physical and personal space, to “meditate, think, compose songs, sleep, study” (piercy , p. ). woman on the edge of time suggests that capitalist authority and patriarchal discourse can marginalize and oppress both the environment and otherness (women, gays, the poor, immigrants, etc.) because “the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human” (bookchin , p. ). mattapoisett reflects bookchin’s theory: the “village” is the answer to western society’s “obsession with hierarchy and the mechanism of power politics and power humanities , , of economics” (frazier nash , p. ). like bockchin, piercy mediates between environmentalism and technology and suggests that the solution for the human/natural crisis is a radical change in the organization of society through social ecology, urban decentralization, measures of self-sufficiency, and face-to-face democracy (bookchin ). we need to dismantle the “chronic domination” of profit and injustice by reconnecting people and nature and valorizing people’s alterity as source of strength and wealth. as in the preceding novels, in the handmaid’s tale, dystopian spaces are also controlled and asphyxiating. after the rise of gilead, citizens have lost their freedom, and their social ties have been completely destroyed. they are trapped in a motionless but almost unknown space; except for leaders, soldiers, and subjects who live close to border areas, people are not even informed about the national frontiers, nor about gilead’s wars. the commanders’ hierarchical system imposes division between authority and citizens, and then between men and women. gilead’s daily actions are limited for both sexes and there are no places for socialization and dialogue. worship buildings, schools, universities, libraries, fashion stores, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, and museums have been closed. overall, the female gender is the most affected by this domination: women’s natural space is once again the household, while their possibilities of self-determination and movement are completely nullified by overbearing gender roles, the cult of masculinity and demographic emergency. in gilead, private and gathering places become places of death, revenge and propaganda. salvagings and particicutions, for example, are public executions in open spaces (e.g., parks, stadiums, squares, etc.), where the population is called to actively participate in the killings, turning regular citizens into perpetrators. on the wall that surrounds offred’s city, executed traitors are hanged, between barbed wire and searchlights. with their heads cover by bags, these bodies are like “scarecrows” and people walking by are supposed to look, fear and despise them. like swastika night, the handmaid’s tale is set in the future, but it is not a sci-fi nightmare: its “bad place” shows medieval and obscurantist patterns. the extremely simplified gilead life is built on distorted utopian visions where everyone has a position to hold, a purpose to fulfill, a place to be in. its dystopia is generated by a fascist utopia of a closed, traditional and static society where socio-political harmony basically means human deprivation of freedom and awareness. as anticipated, the passage from utopia to dystopia is a historical cliché and, as griffin (griffin ) concludes, in investigating the rise of nazi-fascisms, gilead too shifts from “being a utopian anti-systemic movement to a hegemonic, autocratic regime which, in order to realize its utopia, [is] forced to create an even more draconian institutional apparatus of social engineering and propaganda” (p. ). both swastika night and the handmaid’s tale describe regimes with a strong ceremonial observance. their rituals deeply reflect the historical process of “sacralization of politics” that “transforms the ideology into a dogmatic doctrine, and the party into a church” (gentile [ ] , pp. xxiii–iv). power in hitlerdom and gilead assimilates religion and creates a complex system of beliefs, symbols and customs, originating, just as nazism, “new political forms, new myths and cults”, adapting “old traditions” to “new purpose” (mosse [ ] , p. ) and putting spaces at the service of control. in the contemporary and future dystopias of woman on the edge of time, the sacralization of politics is not a central theme, but a strong link between architecture, politics and authority is still present and places are transformed into cages, both in connie’s present and in gildina’s future. despite the differences, the final aim of these “bad places” is to erase dissident dimensions, creating a “one-dimensional” reality and determining “not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations” (marcuse [ ] , pp. xlv–vi). marcuse links one-dimensionality with mass culture and the consumerist era, but his reflections also apply to repressive and patriarchal dystopian systems, where authority aims to annihilate critical thoughts, dialectic, nonconformity and liberty, equating disobedience to sins. humanities , , of . feminine bodies as linguistic, sexual and maternal dystopian lands to conquer external spaces are not the only “lands” dystopia needs to conquer in order to impose its imperium and prevent rebellions. bodies and minds become “battlefields” for campaigns in which the use of prejudices and stereotypes such as: legitimated practices; the disempowerment of (racial, social, economic, sexual, etc.) otherness; the collapse of interpersonal relationships; and the isolation and/or brutal repression of “discordant” groups are functional tactics. according to rose ( ), who also referred to haraway, “bodies are ‘maps of power and identity’; or, rather, maps of the relation between power and identity” (p. ). the bodies that symbolize “otherness”, such as women’s bodies, are “sites of repression and possession” (wolff , p. ): they are inferior but still exploitable and “colonizable”, because superior systems can dispose of them at will. in swastika night, woman on the edge of time and the handmaid’s tale, violence is predominantly directed towards women, related to the sexual sphere and supported by gender roles and biological determinism. in hitlerdom, heterosexuality is separated from pleasure and affection, and women are debased and abused, becoming “pure reproductive conduits with no hope of a future” (lothian , p. ). in connie’s united states, women, especially poor and marginalized ones, are chained to stereotypes of motherhood and inferiority, while, in gildina’s future, many women are concubines and maternity is generally not included in their relationships’ contracts. in atwood’s gilead, women’s only purposes are to give birth and to take care of children. in swastika night, the female body profoundly disgusts men: “hairless, with naked shaven scalps, the wretched ill-balance of their feminine forms outlined by their tight bifurcated clothes—that horrible meek bowed way they had of walking and standing, head low, stomach out, buttocks bulging behind—no grace, no beauty, no uprightness, all those were male qualities”. (burdekin [ ] , p. ) nevertheless, while “despicable” groups as jews have been exterminated, women are still needed for procreation: even when annihilated, they cannot escape from biological predestination. their individualities are crushed, their values and abilities are denied, and their own bodies are torn apart, becoming the slavish properties of men, but motherhood is imperative, and it is the only reason they survive. in the story, women are neither protagonists nor antagonists. they are invisible, and don’t occupy any physical or narrative relevant space. burdekin gives them no voice and no action. women remain in the background, defeated and humiliated, reduced to “a collection of wombs and breasts and livers and lights” (burdekin [ ] , p. ). the annihilation is complete because they are not even able to understand their potential values and to conceive change or disobedience. “they were no more conscious of boredom or imprisonment or humiliation than cows in a field. they were too stupid to be really conscious of anything distressing except physical pain, loss of children, shame of bearing girls, and the queer mass grief which always overtook them in church” (burdekin [ ] , p. ). these literary choices underline and mimic the rhetoric nazis used to justify their racial policies: in order to allow repression or assassination of selected human beings, those have to be properly dehumanized. so, the “righteous” and desentimentalized part of the population will perceive them as something “other”, unnatural, inherently enemy, as an inferior and “separate body” from the rest of society, as arendt (arendt [ ] ) suggested about the jewish community in the germany before and during hitler’s command (p. ). thus, while hitlerdom’s women are presented as soulless animals that cannot feel pain or sorrow, men and masculinity are celebrated and sacralized. theirs is the kingdom of heaven, the power and the space on earth. this tendency is emphasized by the führer ’s “miraculous birth”, who, according to the swastika religion, was born without a mother: strangely resembling the birth of athena from zeus’s head in ancient greek mythology, hitler exploded from the head of god the thunderer. as christianity reveals a rejection of sexuality through the idea of the “immaculate conception” of christ, hitlerdom humanities , , of shows a complete rejection of femininity: “motherhood and biological reproduction become sites of abjection” (lothian , p. ), necessary only because society doesn’t have a technological sci-fi alternative. the only possible female rebellion is extinction, of women and consequently of men. the imperative to bear-boys-and-not-girls ultimately becomes an attack against the power, which will eventually disappear precisely because of its misogynist male supremacy. the most paradoxical detail of swastika night is that the only salvation for women comes from men because female gender is shaped by male necessity, wishes and authority. “women will always be exactly what men want them to be. they have no will, no character and no souls; they are only a reflection of men” (burdekin [ ] , p. ), von hess affirms. the only hope for a decaying world is to educate women, making them re-acquire awareness of their identity and possibilities, but, according to the knight, to raise strong daughters, it will be necessary to impose male models on them, at least for a while. who knows when or whether “being women” will be enough. in woman on the edge of time, connie and many of the other characters try to find their place in a world that does not valorize or support them, ending up as “broken” subjects, disengaged from society and in need of fixing, although their “damage” is inflicted by social imbalance and rejection. through connie’s devastating, isolating and debasing experience, piercy critiques the treatment of mental illness in the s, as well as the medicalization of social problems. at the same time, the author uses the protagonist’s pain as a metaphorical representation of discrimination and marginalization, against women, minorities, and underprivileged individuals. piercy’s outcasts are rejected and abused not only because of their gender, but also for being non-white, poor, uneducated, queer, or helpless. the “good” space is mostly a “white, bourgeois, heterosexual masculine public space” (rose , p. ), and it minimizes the “other”: “transparent space, as an expression of social-scientific masculinity’s desire for total vision and knowledge, denies the possibility of different spaces being known by other subjects” (rose , p. ). as a mexican middle-aged woman with a history of abuse coming from an impoverished reality, connie is an invisible and unexpected heroine, and represents “otherness” from sexual, racial, and economic points of view. the novel’s powerful figures, both men and (white) women, are abusive, merciless or indifferent to the pain felt by the outcasts. they decide and impose their thoughts and rules on “inferior” citizens. embodying a judgmental and discriminatory authority, doctors, social workers and other institutional figures refuse to hear and help connie, even ending up psychophysically harming the protagonist. connie is sterilized against her will because “residents wanted practice” (piercy , p. ). her daughter is taken away from her after an episode of maltreatment and adopted (by devious methods) by a rich white family. the men in connie’s life are violent, oppressive, belittling, or dead. her father was a sadistic beater, while her brother luis is greedy and dominant, and agrees with her hospitalization. connie’s college professor, everett silvester, who enjoyed having spanish-speaking secretaries (offensively nicknamed “chiquitas”), used his position to sleep with her, establishing a relationship that was a sort of “genteel slavery” (piercy , p. ). eddie (the father of her daughter angelina) raped and often beat her, also causing her a miscarriage. the list of “positive” men is restricted to two deceased partners. martín was her first affectionate husband, he made her feel protected, worthy and loved, but he died after being stabbed. the pickpocket, claud, also cared about her, but he died in prison, after being a subject for a medical hepatitis vaccine trial he officially volunteered for. many of the other characters depicted in the novel show a similar desolate fate as connie’s. dolly (connie’s niece) is a drug-addicted prostitute beaten up by her pimp/lover geraldo, who is also responsible for connie’s reclusion. mariana (connie’s mother) had an unnecessary hysterectomy after a difficult pregnancy and was emotionally rejected by her husband, who considered her “no longer a woman. an empty shell” (piercy , p. ). in the asylum, connie meets sensitive and intelligent patients, tormented for their nonconformity, as alice, skip, and sybil. rebellious, happy and fierce alice undergoes surgery that eradicates her identity and personality, transforming her into “a toy, a puppet, humanities , , of a laboratory monkey” (piercy , p. ). rejected by his family, who try to “cure” his homosexuality, skip is a young gay man with suicidal tendencies who eventually kills himself. considering herself a witch, sybil is an extravagant and combative woman who supports women’s independence teaching them “how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands” (piercy , p. ). sybil rejects sex because she interprets intercourses as an invasion: she recognizes a sort of geometric and conceptual vulnerability of women in relationships, refusing to be “a dumb hole people push things in or rub against” (piercy , p. ). these characters are categorized as “monsters” and they are forced to consider themselves as such, to diminish their identity and to humiliatingly confront themselves with impossible standards of success and integration. they are victims of outrageous injustice and prejudices: otherness, indigence, desperation, oddity, misconduct, socio-political activism and their sexual preferences become psychiatric illnesses and crimes, emphasized by the environment they come from, which is seen as an additional aggravating factor. in connie’s world, women often experience sexuality as a power relation and a source of oppression. it seems that they cannot freely enjoy and use their sexuality, depending on male desires and paying a price for intercourse, as when connie is abandoned by her boyfriend chuck, rejected by her family and forced to leave university after an unwanted pregnancy that ends in an abortion without anesthetic. this is even more evident in the future new york. gildina embodies a hypersexualized dystopia. she is a doll-woman who lives in a misogynist reality where sexual slavery imposed through temporary contracts has replaced marriage, and where women’s identity is destroyed in order to be re-constructed and chained to denigrating values of beauty and behavior. female bodies are modified in extreme ways to satisfy male fantasies, materializing fetishism and erotic perversions. with large breasts, very thin waists, and small feet, gildina is a “cartoon of femininity [...] cosmetically fixed for sex use” (piercy , pp. – ), so physically imbalanced that she can barely walk (or escape). since she has no personal identity, gildina doesn’t recognize the trivialization and the alteration of her body as forms of violence. the commodification is completely accepted and there are probably no alternative and independent models of women. moreover, reconfirming piercy’s will to attack both patriarchal oppression and socio-racial persecution of otherness, one of gildina’s characteristics is her lightened skin, a racist principle imposed on the epidermis, implying that this future interpretation of beauty “means pallor” (davis , p. ). sexual workers are hired just for pleasure. maternity is reserved for another group, the “moms”, described by gildina as women who are “so fat”, “cored to make babies all the time” (piercy , p. ). this dichotomy, that anticipates the separation between handmaids and jezebels in the handmaid’s tale and wives and concubines in louise o’neill’s only ever yours (o’neill ), echoes a heavy double standard that generally imposes a separation between motherhood and uncensored and free female sexuality, between nurturing traditions and sins, between virginal ideas of caretaking and carnal desires. after all, “the sexual woman is not a breeder. breeders need not orgasm” (davis , p. ). desired, imposed or denied, maternity is a fundamental value in society: being a (good) mother is the most important and praised feminine characteristic, the aspect that most defines women’s role and identity, and also a judgment parameter for society. “women not only define themselves in a context of human relationship but also judge themselves in terms of their ability to care” (gilligan [ ] , p. ). for connie, maternity is both a source of joy and satisfaction and a “site of oppression” (burwell , p. ). connie is a mother, but she is a bad and barren mother, estranged from her child and deprived of her uterus. she has lost the only pride she ever had, and this inability further tears her life down. in connie’s reality and in gildina’s future, the female identity is shaped (and sometimes condemned) by sexuality, motherhood, economic condition and race. conversely, in luciente’s world, these “elements” have no negative impact on women. in mattapoisett there is no poverty, race or binary division of roles and genders, similarly to what happens in ursula le guin’s the left hand of darkness (le guin [ ] ), where gethen’s inhabitants are intersexual. since pregnancies are humanities , , of completely artificial and the reproductive system is subjected to genetic engineering, mattapoisett’s council decides “to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population” (piercy , pp. – ). sexuality, love and maternity are always liberating and empowering experiences, “not driven by possession” (levitas and sargisson , p. ). women and men’s characteristics have been leveled in favor of androgynous figures, and children are “comothered” by three parents, not necessary female. men can also be mothers, and they can even breastfeed. the mechanization of births completely frees women from “old hierarchy”. they renounced “the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. the original production: the power to give birth. cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. and males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. so we all became mothers”. (piercy , p. ) gilead’s people are miserable, traumatized and not-only-biologically barren. the regime “wishes to impose a sterile stasis on nature, both internal and external” (coupe [ ] , p. ). it forces both the male and female population to completely re-write their cultural traits, collective behaviors, intimate dispositions and expectations, replacing past aspirations to happiness, fulfillment and other personal hopes with obedience, submission and faith. by reminding citizens that “gilead has no bounds, it is within” them (atwood , p. ), this intrusive control desentimentalizes interpersonal relations and destroys human “spontaneity”, as in nazi lager (arendt [ ] , p. ). “echoing freud’s suggestion that religion is one of the principal forces that act to repress erotic energies in human society” (booker b, pp. – ), the regime depicts sexuality as a sinful act, especially when it has non-procreative intentions or if it is “against nature”. but gilead’s emphasis on sexual repression and spiritual salvation expresses “a question of political power” (booker b, p. ) more than religious concerns. this is confirmed by the existence of brothels, places where all male fantasies, even the most perverted and blasphemous ones, can be fulfilled. as in , dystopian regimes discipline sex and affectivity in order to establish a deep-rooted supremacy on the population, catalyzing citizens’ repressed energy in service of the state. since personality is often “defined in terms of sexuality” (bourke , p. ), regulating sexuality or sexually abusing bodies is a way to control social structures and, consequently, female gender identity and roles. offred often reflects on her body: it no longer belongs to her, it doesn’t respond to her will anymore. her body is a simple incubator and women are just “two legged wombs” (atwood , p. ) used to save the world from extinction. handmaids are commodities bearing a product that will be possessed by their masters, recalling connie’s belief that angelina has been “stolen” from her by richer people who have “bought” her child as an object. gilead’s maternity has been capitalized and is a medium of oppression that directly opposes the ideas that are usually associated with the term, as happens, for example, in p. d. james’s the children of men (p. d. james [ ] ), another emotional novel with a barren society that inspired a homonymous and touching film directed by alfonso cuarón in . here, dystopia cannot deprive motherhood of its positive essence and significance, and the maternal body remains “a vessel of hope for the future” (sparling , p. ). this interpretation finds no place in gilead, where capitalist and patriarchal power doesn’t just control and repress sexuality, it imposes sexuality and legalizes a form of gender-based violence that can be defined as mass rape. the finality of this crime is not to “destabilize or even break a particular ethnic, national, or religious group or to ‘ethnically cleanse’ a whole society” (dusauchoit , p. ) as dramatically happened, for example, during the yugoslav war ( – ) or the rwandan genocide ( ), but the reasons for violence against women in gilead are similar to those of the long history of mass rape in warfare. rape evolves into an instrument of war that “erases the victim’s cultural identity and treats her as nothing more than a kind of biological box” (allen , p. ). the male communication behind these abuses sees women as property of men, “sacred vessels” (atwood , p. ) for political purposes, without rights nor freedom of choice. in a vision in which women can personify nations, minorities, beliefs, and doctrines, “occupying” female bodies through sexual violence means to assault and humiliate an enemy’s state, group, ideology, or liberty. humanities , , of the handmaids have to face the trauma of rape every month. they have to normalize their life and to accept violence, disempowerment and depreciation as regular systems. they have to “celebrate” sexual assaults and forced pregnancies as miracles. they are treated like cattle, as in hitlerdom, and aunts can use electric shock prods to punish them and make them more obedient. their bodies are responsible and condemned, not only for their sexuality, but also for the involuntary desire of sexuality that they inspire in men, even in cases of violence and rape. swastika night, woman on the edge of time and the handmaid’s tale remind us that women’s worth is directly dependent on their sexual morality, while male impulses are condoned as ungovernable. this patriarchal tendency “drives home the point that women’s sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men’s sexual behavior” (valenti , p. ), merging victim blaming and the “purity myth”. to eradicate women’s resistance, dystopia wages against feminine bodies a war in which “the penis is explicitly coded as a weapon” (bourke , p. ). authority exploits abuse (not only rape, but also psychological violence, devaluation, etc.) to impose oppressive gender roles, to subjugate women and to exalt male dominion, annihilating identities that are considered corrupted, and depriving women of their image, individuality, femininity, self-perception, and spaces. women’s bodies in the analyzed novels, and often in real life, are externally and internally modeled and used by masculine power, to be practical, obedient and serve an economic use. as de beauvoir (de beauvoir [ ] ) affirms: “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman. no biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine”. (p. ) patriarchal societies—in fiction and in history—have been obsessed with sexuality and purity. the “virgin-whore complex” has profoundly influenced the affirmation of female gender, and still does. despite cultural, religious and political differences depending on time and place, ideal women have often been depicted as pure, passive and nurturing figures (virgin), while independent and sexually liberated models of femininity have usually been interpreted as negative and dirty (whore). manhood, instead, has always been linked to active and dominant attributes, roles and behaviors, to the idea that men are in charge of society, while women’s identity is strictly connected with domesticity, maternity, and submission. women are objectified and diminished for the “male gaze” (mulvey [ ] ) and for male authority. even when female bodies are covered, mortified or not visually eroticized, plots are obsessed with female shapes and sexuality, reinforcing patriarchal ideology and supporting conservative fantasies of domination. . the end of dystopia(s) silenced, abused, controlled, and manipulated, the women in swastika night, woman on the edge of time, and the handmaid’s tale show where patriarchal dystopias hit the hardest and remind us what we should defend: our spaces, our choices regarding our bodies, and our expression. these novels tell with lucidity, passion and pain how female social exclusion is also linked to limitation of space and mobility and how the female body can become a political vessel and an object to promote/impose a patriarchal, conservative and repressive authority. the story of the nameless hitlerdom women, of offred, of connie and gildina remind us of how dangerous some political discourses can be and how easily democracy can collapse or reveal its “dystopian” traits. in a piece about the handmaid’s tale, atwood (atwood ) wrote for the guardian: “i made a rule for myself: i would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time. [...] i did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior”. like atwood, also burdekin and piercy’s exposed traumas are not just fictional. restriction of female humanities , , of spaces, psychophysical abuse, cult of masculinity, victim blaming, depreciation of female identities and roles are just some of the dystopian “precedents” that the three authors recognize in western society and that still nowadays support dangerous stereotypes. they find their roots in history and contemporaneity, reviving the worst actions of past dictatorships and dramatizing the objectification, the hyper-sexualization and the debasement of women also present in western democracies. dystopia is a current literary and cinematographic phenomenon in expansion. especially after the us election, which saw businessman donald trump become the th president, publishers and bookshops have seen a record sales increase in dystopian works. between november and january , sold + . % (de freytas-tamura ), while, in the first half of , sales of the handmaid’s tale increased + % (reilly ), also thanks to the critically acclaimed hulu series based on the novel, which premiered in april . since then, the handmaids have become a metaliterary trend topic, and many journalists, critics and scholars have evidenced the allegorical connection between gilead’s reality and the contemporary political context of several nations. after decades of blind faith in cultural, socio-political and economic progress, in which many advances have been made in terms of civil and human rights, we are experiencing one of the cyclical crises of democracy, just as huntington ( ) predicted. in recent years, in many countries, from the united states of america to brazil, from italy to uk, from argentina to germany, conservative, patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and illiberal discourses and actions are gaining new and alarming support, and it is not unusual to hear worrying political declarations undermining gender equality and female reproductive and civil rights. consequently, violence against women is also debased, despite being a plague that affects % of women worldwide, according to estimates by the world health organization in (world health organization website ). women’s spaces and freedom are seriously questioned. in response to these real “dystopian” tendencies, new feminist movements are emerging worldwide, such as the ni una menos movement (born in argentina in , in response to an increase of gender-based violence and feminicide in the country) and the #metoo movement (born in the united states of america in , after the emergence of sexual-abuse allegations against film producer harvey weinstein). one interesting detail of this new feminist wave is that, mainly since the summer of , after the first season of the handmaid’s tale series, thousands of women’s rights activists across the united states and abroad have started to organize cosplay-protests “against gender discrimination and the infringement of reproductive and civil rights” (hauser ), especially regarding conservative modifications to abortion and rape laws. demonstrations with women wearing the iconic handmaid’s “uniforms” have been reported and are exponentially increasing in the usa, canada, uk, italy, argentina, and may more nations. the handmaid’s tale is sponsoring a political use of dystopian fiction that has become extremely significant for its social relevance and recalls what has already happened with other works, such as moore and lloyd’s s graphic novel v for vendetta (moore and lloyd [ ] ) and the homonymous movie based on it and directed by mcteigue. just like v, the handmaids have gained a political significance, mobilizing women and men in real-life spaces. even if only provocatively, dystopia can help us to spot the symptoms of a sick society. if we want to avoid shaping our future days to be dark misogynist nightmares, we 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[crossref] tobia, bruno. . l’altare della patria. bologna: il mulino. valenti, jessica. . the purity myth. berkeley: seal press. wolff, janet. . feminine sentences. essays on women and culture. berkeley: university of california press. world health organization website. . violence against women, november . available online: https: //www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women (accessed on may ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / - http://dx.doi.org/ . /gsp. . http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/the-handmaids-tale-tvs-most-chilling-trump-era-series-w http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/the-handmaids-tale-tvs-most-chilling-trump-era-series-w http://dx.doi.org/ . /fronjwomestud. . . https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	plots of war against female bodies 	dystopian spaces/female nightmares 	feminine bodies as linguistic, sexual and maternal dystopian lands to conquer 	the end of dystopia(s) 	references fighting for “justice”, engaging the other: shi’a muslim activism on the british university campus religions article fighting for “justice”, engaging the other: shi’a muslim activism on the british university campus emanuelle degli esposti ,* and alison scott-baumann ,* faculty of asian and middle eastern studies, university of cambridge, cambridge cb da, uk department of religions and philosophies, soas, university of london, london wc h xg, uk * correspondence: ed @cam.ac.uk (e.d.e.); as @soas.ac.uk (a.s.-b.) received: january ; accepted: march ; published: march ���������� ������� abstract: while shi’a muslims remain in the minority in europe, including within universities, the past decade has witnessed the growing profile of shi’ism on university campuses, especially in britain. in particular, there has been an emphasis on campaigns that prioritise notions of justice, equality, and human rights. drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst twelver shi’a students in britain between – , this paper examines the forms of shi’a activism currently being articulated on university campuses, especially those that explicitly seek to engage non-muslims and spread awareness about shi’a islam. on the one hand, such practices constitute a form of self-representation for shi’a students who would otherwise feel marginalised within the university space; while on the other, they promote a particular version of shi’a islam that both frames it within the european context and that also contributes to the sectarianisation of the contemporary shi’a subject. while the forms and resonance of shi’a student activism arguably only have meaning within the context of contemporary europe, we argue that the discursive contours underpinning such activism ultimately transcend such national and cultural boundaries and contribute to a reinterpretation and reimagining of shi’a sectarian identity for the modern age. keywords: shi’ism; islam; identity; sectarianism; activism; britain; university . introduction despite often being presented as the quintessential monolithic “other” to western judeo-christian religious and cultural hegemony, islam is as rife with internal nuances, divisions, and heterogeneity as any other sociocultural system of meaning. these differences naturally carry over when relating to muslim populations in non-muslim countries, including those in europe and the west. as in the wider islamic world, shi’a muslims in europe represent a numerical minority, making up approximately – percent of the muslim population (pew research centre ). for this reason, adherents of twelver shi’ism and other minority branches of islam have often been overlooked in studies of muslims in europe more broadly; their experiences either glossed over or simply relegated to a caveat or footnote in more mainstream studies on sunni muslims (bowen ; cesari ; grewal ; hopkins and gale ; meer ; modood , ; modood and ahmad ; roy ). however, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in these marginalised communities, with a particular emphasis on twelver shi’ism and the place of shi’a muslims within europe and the west twelver shi’is make up an estimated percent of shi’a muslims globally and are so called because of their belief in the twelve imams: the spiritual and political successors to the prophet mohammed. twelvers believe that the imam mahdi, the twelfth imam, has gone into occultation and will return on the day of judgement. due to their demographic and doctrinal dominance among shi’is, for the purposes of this paper, all references to “shi’ism” should be understood as pertaining to twelver shi’ism, rather than to other minority branches of the sect. religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of (degli esposti b, a; flaskerud ; scharbrodt ; scharbrodt et al. ; scharbrodt and shanneik ; schmidt ; shanneik ; spellman-poots ; van den bos ). while much of this emerging literature focuses on shi’a rituals and practices, migrant spaces, and issues of gender and religious observance, there has been little focus on the ways in which shi’a minorities actively engage with the wider societies in which they live. elshayyal ( , p. ) highlights both the dearth of and the need for such work, which we present here. in contemporary europe—where a legacy of multiculturalism, islamophobia, immigration, and securitisation have led to a problematisation of muslim identity—how do shi’a muslims seek to negotiate and communicate their religious identity vis-à-vis the majority non-muslim population? such questions are especially pertinent given the growing profile of shi’a islam internationally, partly as a result of sectarian conflicts abroad and the recent rise of sunni-shi’a sectarianism on european soil (wyatt ). this paper examines the forms of twelver shi’a activism currently being articulated on british university campuses, especially those that explicitly seek to engage non-muslims and spread awareness about shi’a islam. the british case study is significant as britain represents a key focal point for muslim integration in europe (modood ), and shi’a muslims in britain are a vocal and well-represented minority (bowen ). drawing on more than five years of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted between – , our research focuses on shi’a islamic societies on british university campuses (known as ahlulbayt societies, or absocs for short) as a way to excavate the kinds of social, religious, and political activism currently being orchestrated by shi’a students in britain. the focus on twelver shi’is is significant since twelvers represent the largest shi’a population both in the uk and globally. moreover, focusing on twelvers is also a strategic choice, as it sidesteps some of the more complex arguments regarding whether or not other minority groups (most notably ismailis, alawis, and zaidis) can be regarded as adherents to shi’a islam or if they represent distinct sects of their own. for the purposes of this paper, therefore, any references to shi’a islam should be understood as referring to twelver shi’ism. while the research and findings of this paper focus on the british case, we have preliminary evidence to suggest that the experiences of shi’is in britain are being replicated elsewhere in europe; britain thus represents a microcosm of the ways in which shi’a identity is currently being (re-)articulated and (re-)interpreted in the context of contemporary europe. . results one of our key research findings is that despite the religious foundations of shi’a student organisations in britain, much of the publicly-geared activism currently being undertaken by shi’a students does not have an explicitly religious component, but rather is reflective of contemporary discourses of secularism and liberal humanitarianism. this is especially the case in examples of campaigns that explicitly target non-muslims on campus. furthermore, those campaigns that do contain a religious component often do so in ways that either implicitly or explicitly seek to contrast shi’a islam with (certain forms of) sunni islam. in the contemporary british context, such discursive positioning can be understood both as an attempt to articulate a coherent vision of shi’a identity, as well as an attempt to distance a secularised, humanist vision of shi’a islam from the negative connotations of sunni extremism in britain. a notable exception is oliver scharbrodt’s examination of shi’is in ireland (scharbrodt ). the bulk of the empirical material used in this paper comes from a series of semi-structured interviews and complementary fieldwork that was conducted by e.d.e in – as part of a soas-funded project on “the shi’a voice on campus”. this research was instigated to complement a wider ahrc-funded project on “islam on campus” led by a.s.b. further supplementary material for the paper also comes from e.d.e’s doctoral research, comprising over semi-structured and more than informal interviews, as well as three years of fieldwork and participant observation among twelver shi’a communities in london from – . the potential emergence and crystallisation of what could be called a “european shi’ism” is something that requires further investigation, and forms the core of e.d.e’s current postdoctoral research. religions , , of in this sense, such examples of shi’a activism, in which a universalist shi’a identity is articulated in contrast to negative stereotypes of radical or extremist sunni islam, can be understood as productive of a sectarianised shi’a subject. while eschewing primordialist or essentialist understanding of sectarianism as a natural product of underlying ethno-religious “sects”, we are equally concerned to distance ourselves from any kind of normative characterisation of sectarianism as a necessarily “bad” thing. rather, the term “sectarianism” as applied throughout this paper should be understood as a fundamentally descriptive category; one that highlights processes of identity formation and mobilisation in which certain kinds of in- and out-group identity boundaries are prioritised over others. in this way, identity discourses that work to construct the category of “shi’a” as conceptually and empirically distinct from the category of “sunni” (and vice-versa) are necessarily sectarian, no matter what their normative or emotive content. such a characterisation of sectarianism has theoretical and analytical implications for the study of religious and ethnic minorities, and, crucially, it is our contention that positive affirmations of in-group identities (e.g., “i am shi’a”) can unconsciously work to foster antagonisms for those who fall outside the parameters of such boundaries (i.e., “sunnis”, “non-muslims”, etc.). in this sense, sectarianism should be understood as an unconscious and socially-produced discursive by-product of shi’a-specific identity construction, and not as a conscious move towards antagonism or violence between shi’is and sunnis (though it may potentially lead to such conflict). discourse, identity, and psychoanalysis: constructing the shi’a subject for the purposes of this paper, we avoid problematic notions of “identity” as a fixed or coherent ontological property pertaining to individuals and/or groups, and draw instead on the literature of critical discourse analysis to excavate the discursive boundaries of the identity-category “shi’a”. fundamental to this project is an understanding of discourse that extends beyond a purely linguistic category and sees it as the ensemble of social utterances, performances, and practices that constitute the social world and that, moreover, is reflective of particular networks of power and hegemony (howarth and torfing ; laclau and mouffe ; torfing ). in this sense, discourse is what constitutes the meanings attributed to particular linguistic signifiers (such as the identity category “shi’a”). within such a framework, identities emerge not as ontological things-in-the-world, but as discursively-produced signifiers whose contours reflect the ways in which power works to naturalise and to render intelligible social categories of belonging and otherness (laclau and mouffe ; Žižek ). for this reason, we maintain a theoretical and conceptual distinction between the shi’a subject as a discursively-produced identity category and individual shi’is themselves. it is within this theoretical paradigm that we seek to understand examples of shi’a student activism on campus as contributing to the discursive production of the shi’a subject, where this subject is understood as simultaneously both embedded in contemporary discourses of liberal humanitarianism and also productive of a certain sectarianised logic of shi’a identity and belonging. shi’ism, as a minority branch of islam, is at once a religious sect, a sociological positioning, and a political orientation (degli esposti b). the ideological split between shi’a and sunni muslims originally occurred over a succession dispute following the death of the prophet muhammad in ad, with shi’is believing that muhammad appointed his cousin and son-in-law, ali ibn talib, as his rightful successor (the term “shi’a” comes from the arabic shi’at ali meaning “the followers of ali”). this initial dispute eventually culminated in an uprising orchestrated by the prophet’s grandson (and ali’s son) hussain in ad following the death of the sunni caliph mu’awiya i that resulted in the massacre of hussain and his family at the battle of karbala. later in this paper, we document how the for a critical discussion of the literature on identity, and especially issues of performative identity and identity change, see degli esposti ( b). this distinction between the individual and the subject is developed further in e.d.e’s phd thesis. religions , , of traumatic memory of karbala, and its transformation in the late twentieth century “from an origin myth . . . into a mobilising narrative of political struggle and self-sacrifice” (khalili , p. ), has come to undergird contemporary forms of shi’a student activism within british universities. the karbala paradigm, we argue, shapes and informs shi’a activism on campus in ways that seek to place shi’a identity (i.e., articulations of the shi’a subject) within a universalistic framework informed by contemporary articulations of liberal humanitarian norms and minority rights. it is important to stress that the shi’a subject under scrutiny here is first and foremost a discursive subject—one whose construction is representative of a particular socio-political juncture within the context of the british university campus—and should not be confused with the individual practicing shi’is who alternately identity (or dis-identify) with this subject. the paper will begin with a brief overview of the british context and the place and resonance of (shi’a) islam in britain, before moving on to an empirically-grounded analysis of the contemporary forms of shi’a activism taking place on british university campuses. the focus on shi’a activism on campus should be seen as a microcosm of the ways in which shi’is in britain are negotiating their position within wider british society. it also has wider implications for the integration of muslims and other minority religions within europe and the west more broadly. . (shi’a) islam in britain: multiculturalism, islamophobia, and the securitisation of identity the experiences of shi’a muslims students should be understood against the backdrop of the wider british socio-political context, especially when it comes to the way in which muslims have responded to (often negative) public attitudes towards islam. in particular, the british government’s attempts to police the muslim population through a securitised agenda, coupled with the ethnonormative logic of british multiculturalism (aly ), has arguably led to the emergence of a religiously-inflected muslim political agency in britain. recent studies of muslim political identity in the british context have productively drawn out the parallels between muslim civic and political rights movements and the political claims made by gender and race activists (modood ), and emphasised the role of liberal ideas of equality, human rights, and multiculturalism in shaping muslim political consciousness (meer ). in particular, studies have highlighted the trend towards the racialisation of islam as a primary marker of identity, in which the term “muslim” has come to function “effectively as an ethno-religious category in the west” (bloul , p. ). since the attacks on the world trade centre in new york on september and the london bombings on july , the british government has engaged in a number of counter-terrorism initiatives and policies to combat the perceived threat of home-grown islamist radicalism. one of the most significant of these policies is the prevent strategy, which forms part of the government’s contest counter-terrorism initiative. created by the labour government under tony blair in , prevent’s remit was widened in under conservative prime minister david cameron to cover all forms of extremism (carlile ; home office ); however, there remains a widespread perception that the policy disproportionately targets muslims (awan ; birt ; heath-kelly ; hm government ; richards ; scott-baumann ; thomas ). as thomas highlights, prevent’s focus on islam has thus effectively resulted in “enforcing the otherness of muslim communities” (thomas , pp. – ). in this way, policies such as prevent have not only led to the problematisation of muslim identity in the uk by labelling muslims as a “suspect community” (awan ; pantazis and pemberton ), but they have effectively worked to construct a cohesive the term “ethnonormativity”, a reformulation of the notion of heteronormativity taken from the literature on gender studies and critical feminism (most notably the work of judith butler), is used here to refer to “a deeply embedded set of beliefs about essential sameness and difference that naturalise the notion of ‘ethnicity’ and provide it with the status of a proper (ontological) object” (aly , p. ). indeed, on march the uk’s court of appeal ruled that paragraph of the prevent duty guidance (which urges extreme caution on universities hosting external speakers in case of terrorism) should be deemed unlawful to the extent that it “is not sufficiently balanced and accurate to . . . assist [the decision maker] to a proper conclusion” (islam c ). religions , , of sense of “muslim identity” in britain that glosses over the heterogeneity inherent within islam itself and british muslims in particular. the practicing british muslim is thus caught in a bind between attempting to promote a positive muslim identity at the same time as seeking to distance themselves from the pejorative conceptions of islam that permeate wider society. this is especially pertinent for self-identifying muslims who represent minority branches of the religion (such as twelver shi’is), rather than the dominant sunni/salafi/wahhabi version portrayed in the tabloid press. for practicing shi’is in britain, there are a number of reasons why individuals might not feel part of a wider community of “british islam” (and not merely due to the pathologisation of islam in public discourse). firstly, the vast majority of muslims in britain tend to be sunni and come from south asian backgrounds (mostly from india or pakistan) (abbas ; hopkins and gale ; karner and aldridge ; meer and modood ; scott-baumann b; spellman-poots ). demographically speaking, there are qualitative differences between the majority working-class, south asian, sunni muslims in britain and the mostly middle-class, predominantly arab, iranian, or east-african indian, shi’a muslims (notwithstanding the political and ideological divisions between different schools of sunni and shi’a islam). moreover, against the background of what one interviewee called “anti-muslim propaganda”, many shi’is feel both misrepresented and misunderstood by conceptions of “islam” propagated by the british media and wider society. as zainab, an iraqi shi’a woman who came to britain as a child, put it: “the shi’a are all silent. you always hear about ‘muslims’, but they’re inevitably [south] asian and sunni; you never hear about shi’is . . . we don’t have a voice. we need to show people that it’s not us that do all these crazy things.” this desire for shi’is to distance themselves from the wider (sunni) muslim community was something e.d.e repeatedly came across during her research—there was an enduring sense that “we’re not that kind of muslim”. in particular, a number of research participants highlighted the rise of islamist terrorism post- / and the prevalence of wahhabi and salafi brands of islam within britain as a way to stress their alleged difference from “those kinds of muslims”. while the growing influence of extremist interpretations of sunni islam within britain have certainly contributed to an enduring sense of shi’a difference (scharbrodt ), there is also an important respect in which geopolitical conflicts in the middle east and wider islamic world have also fostered intra-communal sunni-shi’a antagonism within the british context. in particular, the iran-iraq war of the s, the gulf war, the us-led invasion of iraq, and the recent conflicts in iraq, syria, and yemen, have all nurtured different ideas of what it means to be “sunni” and “shi’a” muslim in the contemporary world (aly ). more recently, the rise of islamic state in iraq and syria (isis), including a number of high-profile attacks against shi’a muslims in the middle east, as well as terrorist attacks on european soil, have further politicised what it means to be a practicing shi’a muslim in the contemporary context. as scharbrodt emphasises: “in the age of isis, a particular responsibility falls on shi’is living as a minority in the west to represent a different image of islam and to ensure that shi’a muslims and their distinct sectarian identity are visible in the public and demarcated from violent expressions of sunni islam” (scharbrodt , p. ). current events—both on and off campus—thus provide the backdrop against which young shi’a muslim students in britain are developing their adult identity. it has become somewhat trite to comment on the sense of moral crisis currently characterising britain’s student scene between a commitment to free speech, on the one hand, and a sensitivity to the potential for the university environment to foster certain forms of politically or socially extremist views, on the other (brown and saeed ; hopkins and gale ; scott-baumann ; thornton ). in particular, there has been increased scrutiny of the activities of muslim students at british universities, with both politicians and this is a broad brush-stroke depiction of the demographics of sunnis and shi’is in britain, but is representative of the narratives and forms of identities articulated by our research participants. e.d.e phd interview, february . informal conversation with n.m, august . religions , , of the media accusing universities of being “complacent” regarding the alleged prevalence of islamist radicalisation on campus (gardham ). while there is currently no reliable evidence that a student has ever been radicalised on campus to commit acts of violence (scott-baumann ), the belief that university campuses are “hotbeds of extremism” (gardham ) plays into populist perceptions of the threatening muslim other, and is thus encouraged by politicians and adopted by the media and the general public (heath-kelly ; scott-baumann ). while the prevent strategy is, in theory, intended to address all forms of radicalism and extremism across the political spectrum, a significant number of commentators have criticised the programme for focusing too narrowly on muslims (awan ; birt ; heath-kelly ; qurashi ). indeed, the findings from the – ahrc representing islam on campus project show that muslim students are engaging in forms of self-censorship in an attempt to avoid attracting unwanted critical attention. this suggests that islam is viewed as a pathology: the representing islam team collected evidence of decisions by muslim students not to invite particular speakers, or hold events on topics relating to middle east politics, as well as examples of muslim male staff deciding not to grow a beard and reported self-consciousness in muslim women regarding wearing the hijab or other visible signs of religious commitment. furthermore, the process of pathologising islam also affects the intellectual pursuit of muslim/british identity through the curriculum (scott-baumann a). such an approach has an impact upon non-muslims as well, as noted in a recent report on free speech on campus by the joint committee on human rights ( ); in particular, there are concerns that the emphasis on countering radicalism and violent extremism is resulting in an impoverishment of the university academic environment (perfect ; scott-baumann and perfect ). practicing shi’a students at british university thus find themselves in the difficult position of wanting to increase the visibility of islam—and shi’a islam in particular—while being acutely aware of the social and political pitfalls of doing so. nevertheless, shi’a students are finding innovative ways to mobilise within the university environment. as detailed above, on the one hand, there is a tendency for shi’is to attempt to distance themselves from “negative” perceptions of islam (especially those related to sunni islamism), while emphasising the elements of their religion that are perceived to be more relatable to a non-muslim audience. in particular, shi’a students have drawn on liberal humanitarian discourses of freedom, equality, justice, and minority rights, to present a version of shi’a islam that is arguably well-suited to the liberal, secular environment of the university campus. in framing shi’ism as a “fight for justice”, shi’a students have thus contributed to the discursive construction of shi’a islam as a force for social good within the context of a secularised public sphere, at the same time as this discourse strives to distance shi’ism from certain forms of (sunni) islam that are negatively viewed within the british social context. . shi’ism on campus: from representation to activism there are no accurate figures regarding the number of shi’a students at british universities, although anecdotal evidence garnered during this research project implies that there are small numbers of shi’is (between – individuals) at most british universities surveyed. such figures suggest that shi’i students represent a significant minority among muslims on campus. until the early s, shi’a students at british universities had no official form of representation on campus beyond that which was provided by the university islamic society (isoc). against the backdrop of rising islamophobia and in the period between april and march , for example, there was a percent rise in the number of referrals to the prevent programme regarding issues of far-right activity (bbc ). nevertheless, there remains a widespread perception that prevent disproportionately targets the muslim population. these figures come from estimates provided by our research participants at the following universities: aston, birmingham, bradford, brunel, cambridge, cardiff, dundee, imperial college london, hertfordshire, king’s college london, leeds, london school of hygiene and tropical medicine (lshtm), oxford, portsmouth, soas, sheffield, university college london (ucl), and westminster. it should be noted, however, that these figures represent the number of shi’i students known to our participants, and therefore the real figure is likely to be higher. religions , , of public scrutiny post- / , coupled with growing anti-shi’a sentiment amongst british sunnis in the wake of the iraq war, it is easy to see how practicing shi’a students may have felt outnumbered or “silenced” within the sunni-dominated isocs. these convening factors led to the splintering of the islamic presence on some campuses, with the establishment of alternative islamic societies intended to cater for those who no longer felt at home within the wider isoc body. the first of these alternative organisations were established in at ucl and soas, and by the name ahlulbayt society (a reference to the family of the prophet muhammad, absoc for short) had become widespread. at the time of writing, there are currently active absocs across the uk, at universities as diverse as birmingham, bradford, cardiff, dundee, glasgow, and southampton. the emergence of absocs in the early s thus took place within the context of both domestic and international political developments, especially with regards to increasing sunni-shi’a sectarianism in the middle east and the growing influence of salafist and wahhabist-inspired islamism. although doctrinal differences between sunni and shi’a islam are not always apparent, and the two sects share many similarities when it comes to the practice of islam, shi’a muslims observe a number of different rituals than their sunni co-religionists. for example, shi’is pray with their hands by their sides, instead of clasped in front of them, and often use a small clay tablet (called a turba) during their prayers. shi’is also traditionally hold specific prayers on a thursday evening (known as dua kamel) and friday morning (dua nudba), as well as the rituals associated with the islamic month of muharram—all of which differ from sunnism. there are also certain forms of dress that are more closely associated with shi’ism than with schools of sunni thought, such as the wearing of black during muharram (to mourn the death of imam hussain and his compatriots at the battle of karbala), the sporting of tattoos, and particular styles of the hijab. as a result of these variations, shi’a muslims can be visually and performatively distinguished from sunnis, especially during prayer or at specific times of the year; differences that can serve as potential sources of friction in the university context. as alia , a -year-old british-born iraqi commented, reflecting on her experiences studying at cambridge and imperial universities: unless you’re all going as a big group of shi’a to pray . . . you’ll always be the one person in the room praying with a turba. (alia, cambridge, ) similarly, hussain, a -year old british-born man of iraqi background who completed both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at imperial college london, made the following comment regarding the potentially contested nature of prayer spaces on campus, which are mostly dominated by isoc members: i think there has been a very turbulent time between the two sects, isoc being mainly sunni. and, you know, [the university] would only offer one prayer room for the both of us, and the different styles of prayer were maybe not accepted by both groups. and . . . there would be friction when we went to pray . . . it was dominated by sunni muslims . . . so, you go down and the whole room is sort of territorialised in this group prayer, and you’re trying to sneak in the side and do your own thing. (hussain, imperial, ) this sense of not fitting into the sunni-dominated portrayal of islam on campus is echoed by zainab, a -year-old british-lebanese student currently studying at soas. reflecting on the this is mostly limited to followers of lebanese-iraqi cleric ayatollah mohammed hussein fadhlallah. for example, some orthodox shi’is wear their hijab in such a way as to also cover the lower part of their chin; a style that is particularly associated with those who follow khomeini or support the iranian theological establishment. all names are pseudonyms. a turba (pl. turab) is a small piece of baked earth or clay (those made of the earth of karbala being the most sacred) used by shi’a muslims during prayer. the turba represents something clean and natural, and can be substituted in most shi’a schools by a piece of paper or other natural material. religions , , of relationship between isocs and absocs at different universities, she made the following comment comparing the small number of absoc members on campus to shi’ism’s minority status globally: because we’re the minority because we’ve been marginalised . . . so, we always had that conversation; so now we have to break out of that, say: “no, we are muslims” . . . we are the minority, even here. like in the uk, even in university, isoc is always bigger. (zainab, soas, ) indeed, all the shi’a students interviewed expressed some sense of being marginalised or sidelined by the sunni majority at university, whether that be in terms of the kinds of events on offer, the lack of availability of shi’a-specific resources, the general ignorance regarding shi’ism exhibited by other muslim groups, or (as above) the simple reality of being the only person in the room praying differently. the emergence of absocs thus allowed shi’is to congregate with like-minded individuals without having to feel the need to justify their differences to other muslims. while absocs thus began as a way for shi’a muslims to come together within a shared space of mutual understanding; over time, the organisations have evolved to do more than simply cater to the spiritual and social needs of shi’a muslims on campus and have arguably come to actively contribute to the meaning and resonance of what it means to be “shi’a” in contemporary britain. in this sense, absocs have become integral to the production of shi’ism as a minority identity category in the british context. although such diversity, on the one hand, represents a positive affirmation of shi’a religious and community identity within the university setting, the often fraught relations between absocs and isocs within the same university campus points, on the other, towards a tendency to prioritise a sense of “shi’aness” over and above notions of “muslimness” that might be shared with sunni co-religionists (and vice-versa). for example, throughout the academic year – , the absoc of one london university engaged in a self-proclaimed “boycott” of the university isoc in order to protest the perceived “sectarianism” of the latter. in a whatsapp conversation amongst absoc members in september , three shi’a undergraduates participated in the following exchange in relation to the boycott: ali: so, with all this that’s happening with isoc [sic] and their committee are we welcome in isoc or will [we] be treated like nd class citizens? jasim: if you join absoc you are not allowed to join isoc qaisar: nd [class citizens]?? ud be lucky [sic] ali: loool [sic] here’s me thinking people were more tolerant at [university] in the above exchange, humour is used as a way to mitigate the seriousness of the topic—the implicit accusation that the university isoc is sectarian or anti-shi’a. interestingly, although accounts of why the split between the isoc and absoc arose during this period varied considerably, the most frequently recurring discursive trope was of shi’a victimhood and minority representation. for example, take the exchange between two shi’a students (both part of the university absoc committee) during the inaugural absoc meeting for the beginning of the academic year: ali: why do we have two islamic societies at [university]? hassan: because one’s right and one’s wrong. while humour is again used here to soften the message (the comment by hassan was accompanied by laughs from the other members), the promotion of two different islamic societies, divided by due to the sensitive nature of this material, the name of the university in question has been omitted. absoc whatsapp conversation, september . source: e.d.e fieldnotes. e.d.e fieldnotes, september . ibid. religions , , of sectarian affiliation, is suggestive of a crystallising sense of “shi’aness” as a specific identity category. the implicit assumption here, of course, being that it is the (shi’a) absoc that is “right”, and the (sunni) isoc that is “wrong”—thus invoking a sense of shi’a-specific identity predicated on an orientation towards religious difference. as hussain commented, within imperial absoc “the focus was certainly more on religion as a kind of primary means of expression”, where shi’a religious identity came to take precedence over ethnic or cultural forms of belonging. moreover, as in zainab’s comment above, this prioritisation of shi’a identity is, more often than not, founded on a sense of shi’a marginalisation by the sunni majority. university absocs thus function both as a place for shi’a muslims to come together with other co-religionists without fear of judgement or persecution and as a crucible for the production and reinforcement of a shi’a-specific minority religious identity. this identity is, in turn, institutionalised and encoded by absocs’ organisational status within the wider student body. in , the muslim student council (msc) was founded as an umbrella body to oversee the activities and organisational structure of absocs. as ali, a former chair of the organisation, explained, the msc is “essentially a supporting organisation for any society that reflects its aims, but in reality, this is mostly absocs.” as well as coordinating nationwide campaigns and outreach across all absocs, the msc holds regular training camps for incoming absoc presidents, along with an annual convention open to all absoc members, both past and present. according to ali, the msc was founded on three key principles: development (personal, spiritual, and professional); integration (both within university and within wider society); and engagement (spreading awareness about shi’a islam). it is this last principle that has transformed university absocs from inward-looking organisations catering to the needs of shi’a students, to faith-based platforms for social activism, under the direction of the msc. the motto, “your mission is your campus”, encapsulates this spirit of this impulse to spread the message and visibility of shi’a islam within the university setting. as zahra, an economics student at hertfordshire commented, reflecting on her experience within the absoc: i think we play a major role in universities to represent who we are as muslims . . . and if we don’t talk about it, and don’t have a conversation, then (a) people will never know about what shi’as are, and (b) people will follow the wrong idea of what we’re about through ignorance. (zahra, hertfordshire, ) in this sense, then, absocs not only serve a religious and social function for shi’a students within the university, they also stand in as the representatives of shi’a islam on campus. while many of the students interviewed spoke of the need to “educate” the wider muslim student body about shi’ism, especially those (mostly sunni) muslims who harbour negative or ill-informed ideas about shi’ism, there was also a general consensus about the necessity of providing information about shi’a islam to non-muslims. as zahra went on: we need to be more outverted [sic], not inverted, we need to talk to more people . . . a lot of people come and ask me, a lot of non-muslims ask me loads of questions. i get really excited when people ask me, because it’s nice. it means people want to know what i am, so that way we’re reducing the stigma of all the negative things you hear about islam, and at the same time we’re introducing what shi’as are. it’s important we have a conversation about that. (zahra, hertfordshire, ) along with running a regular timetable of faith and social events aimed primarily at members, absocs also encourage shi’is to engage with the wider student body through outreach and activism. the organisations thus serve as a platform through which shi’a students can find the means and mechanisms to express themselves, both as muslims and as members of wider british society. for example, during a soas absoc meeting in october , mohammed, a young iraqi shi’i, proposed that members of the society should “bring a personal item that is linked to your shi’a identity to be worn . . . at the ugm [university general meeting]” (e.d.e fieldnotes, october ). here, religions , , of mohammed not only demonstrates an awareness that certain material items serve to mark individuals out as having a “shi’a identity”, he also encourages others to visibly and publicly display this identity as a form of self-determination and minority representation within the university campus. similarly, zahra spoke of how she makes an effort to explain shi’ism to any non-muslim who asks her about her faith: people who are non-muslim just see me as a muslim . . . they don’t ask me what sect you are, you know, what do you believe in, are you different from that person. so, i have to sit down and i tell them a story. i always tell them a story every time: “oh, i’m from this sect, and i do this.” (zahra, hertfordshire, ) while these examples show individual absoc members taking the time and energy to explain their faith to others, the societies also organise a number of campaigns that are specifically targeted at promoting shi’ism within both the university campus and wider society. it is to these campaigns that we now turn. engaging the other: towards an ethical shi’a activism due to shi’a islam’s minority status both within university campuses and within wider british society, young shi’a students expressed the need to spread awareness about shi’a islam, and about the issues facing marginalised shi’a groups around the world. in many cases, such efforts to engage and educate the wider british public take inspiration from the karbala paradigm and the martyrdom of imam hussain, on the one hand, and global westernised discourses of human rights and ethical humanitarianism, on the other. in this sense, contemporary forms of shi’a activism, both on- and off-campus, mimic other emergent forms of international activism, where marginalised groups make use of the language of global humanitarian activism to stake claims for representation and recognition (gallagher et al. ; hogan ; samuels ; stychin ). for example, the annual ‘ashura awareness week (aaw) campaign run by university absocs and coordinated by the msc seeks to engage both muslim and non-muslims students in a conversation regarding the place and resonance of shi’a islam, and especially to raise awareness about the figure of imam hussain and the historical persecution of shi’a muslims. the campaign involves a number of coordinated events and outreach by absocs across universities, including manning an aaw stall in prominent places on campus, distributing written material, and engaging passers-by in discussions about ‘ashura, imam hussain, and shi’ism more generally. marketing and publicity for the campaign similarly focuses on the figure of hussain, and often discursively links his martyrdom to wider global issues of injustice. for example, the aaw facebook page run by leeds university absoc, states that: on ashura, the tenth day of the islamic month of muharram, imam hussain ibn ali made the ultimate sacrifice for social justice in the face of corruption and tyranny. similarly, one of the posters produced for aaw by the ahulubayt islamic mission (aim), the youth branch of the iranian-run islamic centre of england, and in collaboration with london absocs including imperial college, ucl, queen mary, and city universities, declares that the campaign is “aimed primarily at non-muslims [sic]” in order to promote “truth, justice, and freedom” (e.d.e fieldnotes). other forms of activism, both on- and off-campus, replicate this discursive logic. for example, the msc coordinate an annual nationwide campaign against food poverty called hungry for justice, in which absocs collect donations from the student body to distribute to local food banks. in addition, there are a number of one-off or small-scale events organised by individual absocs, often in collaboration with other student societies, that seek to raise awareness about contemporary source: facebook. accessed december . religions , , of issues both in britain and internationally. examples of such campaigns include fundraising events for humanitarian aid to conflict-torn countries such as yemen and syria; post-natural disaster zones such as haiti, the philippines, and nepal; and awareness campaigns regarding issues of black and minority rights, femicide, and racism. the suturing of shi’ism’s karbala paradigm with global discourses of liberal humanitarianism is, we argue, typical of contemporary forms of shi’a activism in the west; and reflects a particular form of discursive subject-formation in which shi’a identity is equated with ethical self-betterment. while the globalisation of liberal norms through the spread of international humanitarianism and the human rights regime (hopgood ) has certainly contributed to contemporary articulations of shi’a identity, it is our contention that in the context of muslim minority communities in britain this sense of shi’a particularism is also heavily imbued with the political and social realities of the modern secular state. as mahmood ( , p. ) argues: “secularism . . . is not simply the organising structure for what are regularly taken to be a priori elements of social organisation—public, private, political, religious—but a discursive operation of power that generates these very spheres, establishes their boundaries, and suffuses them with content, such that they come to acquire a natural quality for those living within its terms.” in the british context, the encounter between secular discursive power and shi’a politico-religious ethics has arguably resulted in the emergence of a particular kind of ethical shi’a subject predicated on the discursive logic of secular humanitarianism. here, ethics does not refer to any sense of the normative “good”, but rather should be understood as an ensemble of behaviours geared towards self-betterment and self-fashioning (eastwood ; fassin ; faubion ; foucault ). in this sense, ethics is ultimately a practice of subject formation; one that “simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the political choices and the moral economies of contemporary societies” (fassin , p. ). for individual practicing shi’is, the ethical imperative to “be (a good) shi’a” thus increasingly blurs into and becomes interchangeable with the ethical imperative to “be (a) good (shi’a)”—i.e., from one productive of the shi’a politico-religious subject to an ethical self-transformation undergirded by a preoccupation with secular liberal humanitarianism. this is especially visible in the increasing transformation of the karbala paradigm and the memory of imam hussain from a shi’a-specific politico-religious myth to a model for ethical behaviour and self-improvement applicable to all humanity (regardless of their religious affiliation). for example, during the arba’een march in london, several volunteers (including large numbers of absoc members, who coordinated volunteering sign-up campaigns on london university campuses) walked up and down park lane handing out roses to members of the public which were accompanied by a tag bearing the following message: hussain’s epic legacy inspires millions hussain inspires me to . . . give back. be caring to all of humanity. care for people around me. stay strong in what i stand for. help those less fortunate than me. resist oppression in all forms. what will your legacy be? while britain does not technically operate as a secular state, our use of the term “secularism” here should be understood as a reference to widespread assumptions regarding the place and status of religion within british public life in which issues of faith and practice (especially of non-christian religions) are relegated to the private sphere. message produced by the who is hussain? campaign and handed out during the london arba’een march. source: e.d.e’s fieldnotes. religions , , of again, the message here combines elements of shi’a religious piety with an ethical imperative founded on a logic of secular humanitarianism. in particular, the final rhetorical question (“what will your legacy be?”) encourages the reader to engage in similar practices of ethical improvement by continuing the “legacy” of imam hussain’s philosophy and behaviour. it is exactly these kinds of discourses that undergird many contemporary forms of shi’a student activism, both within the campus environment and among wider british society. one such example is the imam hussain blood donation campaign (ihbdc), a charitable project run by the uk-based islamic unity society (ius), a shi’a-run charity affiliated to the muslim council of britain and backed by the nhs. the ihbdc also has a presence on university campuses, with absocs often distributing marketing material about the campaign at freshers’ fairs and other university events. according to the ius website, the imam hussain blood donation campaign is “the first campaign within the uk which aims to increase the number of regular blood donors from muslim communities.” the website goes on to say: at the same time, the campaign seeks to increase awareness about hussain, grandson of prophet muhammed (peace be upon them), and the tragedies he faced in karbala when martyred for standing up against oppression and tyranny, and for justice and equality. millions of people worldwide [sic] are inspired by hussain’s great character and give blood as a way to help others in need and live up to these high values. through the blood donation campaign, ius’s self-professed aim is to increase awareness about shi’a islam and the beliefs of shi’a muslims. here, the emphasis is very much on the inspiration of hussain’s story and the value that his legacy can imbue to others through the ethical imperative to give blood. such positive articulations of “shi’aness” thus form part of the discursive landscape within which a specifically shi’a identity category can emerge. in this sense, the increasing visibility of shi’a muslims as shi’a first and foremost is part of a wider discursive and social architecture that undergirds the construction of the shi’a subject. this subject, invested in the logic of ethical humanitarianism and oriented towards positive articulations of shi’a activism and emancipation, nevertheless unconsciously (re)produces sectarianism in the way it works to prioritise shi’a experiences and unproblematically constructs “shi’aness” as a transnational, trans-ethnic, and ahistorical politico-religious identity category. mehdi, a student at birkbeck, perfectly captures the ethical imperatives undergirding such forms of shi’a subject-formation: they say: “oh, there’s only a few shi’is, there’s more sunnis, we must be right.” no, there might be a few shi’is, but we stand for what we believe—we don’t believe in quantity, we believe in quality . . . if you have , people in front of you and you’ve got people on your side, and you can hear the drums of war, and you know you’re going to get killed. and after everyone gets killed . . . and you still say: “no, you’re wrong.” nobody does that in their right mind; that means there must be something there. (mehdi, birkbeck, ) here, mehdi constructs a coherent historical narrative that inscribes the karbala paradigm onto the contemporary context; he also draws on the historical memory of karbala to highlight shi’a moral authority in the face of aggression. the language used here is particularly interesting, with the constant repetition of “right” and “wrong” working to discursively construct a shi’a-specific ethics of victimhood and struggle against oppression. in this way, the language of justice, equality, and human rights is used to undergird articulations of a shi’a-specific identity that is then communicated to the wider british public through activism and engagement. source: https://ius.org.uk/giveblood, accessed january . ibid. https://ius.org.uk/giveblood religions , , of while this sense of shi’a victimhood and exceptionalism is hardly new, and may even be considered to be integral to the faith itself (barzegar ; cole ; dabashi ; nasr ), the incorporation of pre-existing and contemporary shi’a grievances into a humanitarian framework based on the discourse of “human rights”, is arguably a thoroughly modern phenomenon, and can only have arisen within the international political and humanitarian system that has been developed over the last fifty years. significantly, it is our contention that the encounter with western liberal discourses of “human rights”, “justice”, “equality”, and “minority representation” (both as a result of the british public sphere and of the increasing globalisation of such discourses in the contemporary moment) has worked to construct a shi’a subject whose contours are determined by a certain preoccupation with ethical norms. in other words, the shi’a subject implicated in such examples of shi’a humanitarian activism is necessarily an ethical subject as a result of its emergence within what didier fassin calls the contemporary “banalisation of moral discourse and moral sentiments” (fassin , p. ). moreover, within the discursive construction of this shi’a subject, terms such as “human rights”, “justice”, and “equality” have thus come to function as what khalili ( ) call “empty signifiers”: linguistic constructs that are ultimately lacking in any core meaning but whose ambivalence functions as a suturing point for the production of social and political meaning. the advent of the ethical shi’a subject is thus inextricably intertwined with contemporary articulations of humanitarian principles, and as a result can be understood as a thoroughly modern subject, rather than as the ultimate expression of an underlying and primordial sectarian “essence. . conclusions this paper has charted the emergence and evolution of shi’a islamic societies on british university campuses from spaces of minority representation to platforms for public engagement and activism. in particular, we have emphasised the ways in which such forms of activism are undergirded by a discursive suturing of shi’a theology and ethical subject formation with global liberal humanitarian discourses of justice, equality, and minority rights. on the one hand, such attempts by shi’a students to engage the wider non-muslim student body should be understood as contributing to positive articulation of shi’a religious identity within the contemporary context, and especially against the backdrop of widespread public antagonism towards islam. in this sense, the discursive framing of shi’ism through the secularised, humanist language of equality, justice, and human rights, can be seen as a strategic choice by young shi’is who wish to promote a version of shi’ism that resonates with the secular liberal values of wider society, and particularly with the ethics of activism characterised by contemporary grassroots movements such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, and the occupy protests. the shi’a subject constructed by such narratives is one that is embedded in the political and social climate in which it is articulated, while simultaneously harbouring a deep attachment to a shi’a-specific ethics of self-betterment through the karbala paradigm and the figure of imam hussain. young shi’i students are thus actively engaged in re-negotiating and re-imagining their religious commitments and identity for the turbulent politics of the twenty-first century. on the other hand, this re-imagining of the shi’a subject for the contemporary age is also potentially complicit in the sectarianisation of shi’a politico-religious identity as a result of the prioritisation of shi’a-specific identity categories over and above a wider sense of muslim-ness that may be shared with co-religionists. in particular, the antagonistic political and social climate in britain—whereby islam and muslims have been pathologised and securitised as presenting an existential threat to the wider british public—as well as the growing international profile of salafist and wahhabist islamist groups such as isis, has arguably fostered articulations of the shi’a subject that either explicitly or implicitly seek to distance shi’ism from such negative perceptions of (sunni) islam. this move towards a sense of shi’a particularism and exceptionalism—often predicated on a historical sense of victimhood dating back to the battle of karbala—has also been compounded by the very real experiences of marginalisation, misunderstanding, and even active discrimination encountered by shi’a students at the hands of sunni muslims (not to mention the persecution of shi’is in the islamic religions , , of world by islamist and terrorist groups). for this reason, while the promotion of a distinctive shi’a identity as qualitatively different from broader perceptions of (sunni) islam can be understood partly as a strategic choice within the context in which it is articulated, there is an important sense in which it also actively contributes to the sectarianisation of shi’a identity through the act of discursively bracketing off shi’ism as an identity category in its own right. again, it is worth stressing that our use of the term sectarianism functions here as a purely descriptive category and does not imply any kind of normative judgement about the content and resonance of the identity in question. while our research and findings in this paper have focused on the british case, we would like to highlight the fact that the british context serves as a microcosm for the kinds of political, social, and religious discourses currently operating on shi’a communities across europe. ultimately, the experience of shi’a students should not be understood as being limited to the british university context, but is reflective of the ways in which shi’a minorities are engaging with non-muslim populations both in europe and elsewhere in the west. for this reason, we propose that the discursive contours underpinning the forms of student activism documented in this paper ultimately transcend such national and cultural boundaries and contribute to an ongoing reinterpretation and reimagining of shi’a sectarian identity for the modern age. author contributions: conceptualization, e.d.e. and a.s.-b.; data curation, e.d.e.; formal analysis, e.d.e.; funding acquisition, a.s.-b.; investigation, e.d.e.; methodology, e.d.e. and a.s.-b.; project administration, a.s.-b.; supervision, a.s.-b.; writing—original draft, e.d.e. and a.s.-b.; writing—review & editing, e.d.e. and a.s.-b. funding: the authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: this research is supported by the ahrc [re/presenting islam on campus: gender, radicalisation and interreligious understanding in british higher education’ ( – ), ah/m x/ ] for which scott-baumann is pi. degli esposti also received financial support for this research in the form of a phd scholarship from soas, university of london, and a fieldwork grant from the british institute for the study of iraq (bisi). conflicts of interest: the 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Žižek, slavoj. . the ticklish subject: the absent centre of political ontology. brooklyn: verso. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	results 	(shi’a) islam in britain: multiculturalism, islamophobia, and the securitisation of identity 	shi’ism on campus: from representation to activism 	conclusions 	references the political encounter with louis althusser: full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rrmx rethinking marxism a journal of economics, culture & society issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx the political encounter with louis althusser: introduction banu bargu & robyn marasco to cite this article: banu bargu & robyn marasco ( ) the political encounter with louis althusser:, rethinking marxism, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: aug . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rrmx https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rrmx &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rrmx &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule the political encounter with louis althusser: introduction banu bargu and robyn marasco this special issue presents a collection of essays on the work of louis althusser. these essays commemorate althusser’s centennial and the publication of for marx and reading capital more than fifty years ago. both texts have changed how we read marx and how we make sense of the development of marx’s ideas. and both texts have contributed to the theoretical account of capitalist social for- mations and the politics of class struggle. true, much has changed about capital- ism and its social relations in these past five decades. however, we believe that althusser’s thought remains as relevant as ever. as the inequality between the wealthiest few and the rest reaches unprecedent- ed proportions around the globe, as american cities organize in uprising against police violence and the streets of paris erupt in protest against new taxes on workers, as the state apparatuses more aggressively reproduce populist national- isms and assume a more authoritarian structure, understanding the complex pol- itics of the masses and advancing class struggle have lost nothing of their urgency. with the concept and practice of science being altered by big data, looming plan- etary disaster continuously being dismissed as one narrative among many, and the emergence of a public discourse that thrives on post-truths, many of our conven- tional concepts and categories require rigorous rethinking and revitalization. these developments cast new light on althusser’s investments in the scientificity of marxism, his revisions to a lacanian idea of the real, and his uncompromising antihumanism. as marx’s writings once again move into the mainstream of polit- ical debate and discourse, the positions that althusser stakes out in reading marx and reinvigorating marxism demand serious consideration. and while the alt-right is galvanized by the specter of “cultural marxism,” a term that could also be applied to althusser’s thought and his celebrated concept of ideology, and while “demo- cratic socialism” comes back into political vogue, the moment seems ripe for a re- assessment of his works. our aim in assembling this dossier is to put focus back on this prodigious marxist philosopher. for us, what remains so compelling about althusser’s philos- ophy is the specific relationship it establishes to politics. we wanted to develop the political insights in althusser’s work, especially in light of the contemporary rethinking marxism, vol. , no. , – , https://doi.org/ . / . . © association for economic and social analysis http://www.tandfonline.com conjuncture, and reconsider the relevance of his thought for our times. we were also interested to assess some of his important contributions to political theory by scrutinizing his encounter with different thinkers and how he enlists them for his own political and philosophical purposes. the contributing authors to this special issue take different approaches to althusser and offer different ways of reading him, but each of them foregrounds political questions. taken together, these essays suggest the primacy of politics in the encounter with althusser. our intention in these pages is not to rehash old debates or rehearse the familiar controversies that surround althusser’s life and work. instead, we see the time that has lapsed since althusser’s untimely withdrawal from public life as offering the possibility of reading althusser afresh. this is not to say that all of his polemics remain relevant or that his denunciations of other left tendencies are definitive. in fact, certain features of his work remain significantly bound to an intellectual and political context that has long vanished. and yet, there are elements in his thought, ideas, and arguments that have gained further acuity, despite limitations and contradictions within his oeuvre. this is why we hope to present his thought in a new light and in response to new problems. some of essays in this issue deal with how althusser inherits or engages other traditions and thinkers—machiavelli, rousseau, hegel, gramsci, lenin, freud, and lacan, for example. others put althusser’s thought in conversation with thinkers that he most certainly read and in turn influenced, though this influ- ence was not always openly acknowledged—foucault, most prominently. our essays seek to articulate althusserian concepts—the void, the police, interpellation, the state, the conjuncture—with new precision. through these interventions, we hope to contribute to a larger conversation about marxist philosophy and politics, perhaps in the collective spirit of althusser and his core interlocutors, but with voices from beyond the inner circle of initiates. we hope to do this by clarifying the elements of a marxist politics, identifying innovative strands for a materialist philosophy, forwarding class struggle, while also recognizing and attempting to address althusser’s limitations on such fundamental issues as race and racialization. these essays pay tribute to althusser’s tremendous intellectual legacy without speaking to the much more difficult questions raised by his personal life, his strug- gle with mental illness, the death-by-strangulation of his long-time partner and wife, hélène rytmann-légotien, the complexities of his being declared unfit to stand trial, and his subsequent psychiatric internment and withdrawal from public view, which defined the last decade of his life. we are acutely aware of how his personal life has impacted the reception of his ideas and how this tragedy has been used to discredit not only althusser himself, but also the entire tradition of marxism of which he was a part. we have found it impossible to hold the personal and the philosophical completely apart, especially to the extent that althusser’s own psychobiography invites readers to think of them to- gether. at the same time, we have also found the fusion of the personal and the bargu and marasco philosophical, in which one is the explanation for and condemnation of the other, unsatisfying and untenable. we began editorial work on the present collection before #metoo brought this issue to the headlines, impacting every cultural insti- tution and theoretical inheritance, including our own. without presuming to speak for all the contributors to this issue, we as editors have felt the heavy burden of how to deal with althusser the person while we continue to read and teach his works and draw inspiration from his thought. every encounter with althusser is a political encounter. this is not just because of his life or his times or even his marxism but because we believe, with althusser, that materialist philosophy is a political weapon. every theoretical practice has a philosophy, or a concept of truth, and every philosophy has a politics, or a concept of power. mapping the relationship between them might be seen as the singular work of political theory. this is, in effect, the ambitious goal we have set for ourselves in reading althusser today. political encounter with althusser << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left /calgrayprofile () /calrgbprofile (adobe rgb \ \ ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /off /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /srgb /dothumbnails true /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel /emitdscwarnings false /endpage - /imagememory /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct 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/monoimagedict << /k - >> /allowpsxobjects true /checkcompliance [ /none ] /pdfx acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier () /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname () /pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice religions article from the mosque to the town square: some reflections on islam, youth, social movements, and citizenship salvatore madonia ,* and ana i. planet contreras ,* taller de estudios internacionales mediterráneos, universidad autónoma de madrid, ciudad universitaria de cantoblanco, madrid, spain departamento de estudios árabes e islámicos, universidad autónoma de madrid, ciudad universitaria de cantoblanco, madrid, spain * correspondence: toto.mad@hotmail.it (s.m.); ana.planet@uam.es (a.i.p.c.) received: january ; accepted: march ; published: march ���������� ������� abstract: an observation of the dynamics of the citizen participation of young people defined as muslims who frequent madrid’s mosques and squares raises the possibility that these young spanish muslims are developing their own civic/political participation as citizens and natives. this indicates a particular religious/cultural identification disassociated from the predefined religious view that characterizes them as actors in a process born out of their aspirations as citizens. for the most part, children of immigrants share an everyday experience in which they are defined by their religion, while also expressing their desire to break away from labels and distance themselves from the identification of islam as experienced in immigrant communities, institutionalized islam in mosques, associations and cultural centres, and the islam of convert activism. the journey from the mosque to the town square is one taken time and again by these young people—followed during a multisited ethnography involving six years of research—that clears the way for a religiosity that is closely tied to the everyday experiences of young people continuously hearing about other situations (e.g., the war in syria, the protests during the so-called arab spring, the may movement). in the process of differentiation and confrontation with islamic people in the spanish context, new association-building and new activism have emerged, with some connections to european youth associations and a growing commitment to global causes like the fight against islamophobia and against international terrorism (the ‘je suis charlie’ movement) and feminist causes (#metoo). keywords: islam; youth; social movements; spain; france . a few thoughts on spanish islam in a context characterized by long centuries of islamic history, speaking about islam in spain in the twenty-first century means speaking about a sociological reality that is fundamentally tied to spain’s transformation into a country of immigration in the s. although spanish islam continues to be defined by the media and by more than a few scholars as ‘immigrant islam’, islam in modern spain has other characteristic elements that must be considered to better understand the current situation in terms of institutionalization and representation before the administration. this also helps to explain the dynamics found among the young spanish muslims examined in this study. a quick presentation of the demographic characteristics of spanish muslims reveals that their presence in the country is not, in fact, particularly recent. in the last decade of the franco dictatorship (the s), several hundred citizens from middle eastern countries that had established good political and diplomatic relations with spain settled in the country. as muslims, they were a religious minority, without any specific religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of legal status, protected by the existing weak legislation regarding religious freedom. most were students in spanish universities and many stayed in spain, some even participating in the creation of the first muslim associations, which they continue to lead to this day. spanish muslims as a group must also take into consideration the distinct population living in the north african cities of melilla and ceuta, who have played an important role in the process of institutionalizing islam in the country. spain is also home to a community of spaniards who have converted to islam. although journalistic accounts have calculated around converts, other analysts estimate a lower number, around . the most visible groups live in the provinces of cordoba, granada, and seville in andalusia in addition to barcelona and valencia, and have very active religious associations that draw attention to their presence (lópez garcía and contreras ). these ‘neo-muslims’ are particularly visible in projects that underscore the importance of so-called muslim spain and the cultural wealth of spanish islam. like the earlier groups, they have also played a very important role in the process of negotiating and recognizing islam as a religion with notorio arraigo (the legal status of being well known and ‘deeply-rooted’ in spain) and in later negotiations with the spanish state regarding the cooperation agreements between the state and the islamic commission of spain (cie). the cooperation agreements, a small church–state concordat without any economic commitment on the part of the state, enumerate the religious rights specifically recognized for muslims living in spain, both as individuals and as a group (contreras mazarío ). the cooperation agreements were signed in —a highly symbolic year as the fifth centenary of the so-called discovery of america, the conquest of granada, and the beginning of modern spain under the reign of the catholic monarchs (who had to be commemorated using other words)—after earlier conversations with representatives of the different muslim communities and associations and the constitution of the islamic commission of spain (cie) as the sole counterpart with the state. the cie, whose history has been presented in other studies, has shown itself over time to be a body with little cohesion, the lack of which has been a source of inefficiency if not paralysis, and it is little appreciated by muslims in the country, generally speaking. finally, all of these groups, which are characterized by strongly heterogeneous origins and social backgrounds, have been joined by citizens from muslim majority populations, part of a wave of late twentieth-century economic migrants who have acquired spanish nationality. this wave was notable for its high number of moroccans, who constitute the largest group of spanish muslims in the country today. the spaces of islam created by this heterogeneous community correspond to two fundamental types. the first comprises the large associations and cultural centres and mosques that have become increasingly visible in spain’s larger cities. in the case of madrid, whose squares and streets form the setting for the islam of the young people presented in this article, the initiative of muslims in the s and s led to the construction of two separate mosques: the m mosque (so-called because of its location on a hill above the m motorway that rings the city), a powerful centre of ideological influence financed and controlled by saudi arabia; and the abu-bakr mosque (known as the strait mosque because of its location next to the estrecho metro station) led by a group of see ‘chronology of modern spanish islam up to the signing of the cooperation agreement with the spanish state in ’ in (planet contreras ). largely born in the cities, these muslims were not granted the status of citizen until after , in the wake of the civil clashes that responded to the first spanish law on foreigners enacted in , months before spain acceded to the european economic community and part of the required legal adaptation. the law left this group without any legal status and a documentary regularization process was required (guia ). this question is particularly complex in spain because it is not possible to request any public documentation containing data on the religious affiliation of citizens. the figures used here are estimates based on migration and origin statistics provided by the national institute of statistics. a large—and self-interested—effort at gathering statistics is made every year by the observatorio andalusí. founded in , the observatory is an independent, nonprofit organization associated with one of the largest federations of muslim communities, the union of islamic communities in spain, and defines itself as an ‘institution for observing and monitoring the situation of muslim citizens and islamophobia in spain’ http://observatorio.hispanomuslim.es/. http://observatorio.hispanomuslim.es/ religions , , of spaniards of syrian origin. both sites serve as examples of spaces of traditional religious-community (re-)production, where modes and manners of living as muslims in a minority society are transmitted that respect pre-established religious precepts according to the theological model of the reference country. along with these large mosques are a few dozen mosques and oratories whose characteristics are similar to those found in other countries in europe. these are self-managed, small and located on little streets in the centre of municipalities or displaced to industrial zones on the outskirts where they are able to offer more services in better facilities. in many of these spaces, practices associated with so-called ‘ethnic churches’—services attended by worshippers from the same country—take place. these institutions have played an interesting role in the migration processes of their members, as their attendance facilitates a socialization pattern based on common faith and their status as migrants, distinguishing their integration into spanish society. the ethnic nature of space is not, however, exclusively associated with moroccan migrants. a similar dynamic characterizes the movements of the brotherhoods and tariqas migrating from sub-saharan africa, with their strong ethnic-cultural undertones. also divided into dozens of neighbourhood centres and mosques, their relationship with the majority society is scant, with both positive and negative experiences in their few direct encounters with the authorities, who often delegate or simply ignore the processes of collective representativeness in which the others participate. one particular space of islam is found on the internet. thanks to the charisma and constant presence of some of the best-known exponents on social networks, alliances and connections have sprung up in the virtual sphere that are very sensitive to the evolution of a ‘homegrown’ islam and clearly critical of the more traditional views put forth by earlier groups. these associations contain committed activists who usually take up issues that concern them personally and are recognized as native spaniards, denouncing racism, islamophobia and intolerance in spanish society, but also criticizing the backward-looking positions taken by institutionalized islamic groups with regard to questions including lgtb rights, the patriarchy and the position of women in worship. this scenario is not, however, limited to spaces of worship and online activism. as the title of this piece indicates, there is space for islam and muslims outside the mosques. recent years have witnessed the consolidation of a new sociopolitical subject, headlined by youth-led association-building projects that call for a different form of islam in terms of both identity and religion. in dialogue with other viewpoints, young spanish muslims are beginning to search for their own associative spaces where they can progressively become independent from existing spaces. moreover, their practices seem to reveal a specific will to transform themselves from ‘consumers’ of an islam proposed by others to ‘producers’ of an islam characterized by being young, muslim, spanish, and european (madonia ). what follows is a look at both how this step has been taken and the protagonists themselves. . from ‘ -m’ to ‘je suis charlie’: a decade of evolution the terrorist attack of march represents one of the most shocking and traumatic moments in the collective memory of recent spanish history. at that time, in the face of the brutality of the attack, the islamic community went out on to the streets and presented itself to the media as a compact community, united in grief and sharing the shock of an incomprehensible massacre with the rest of the citizenry. in the words of an interviewee who lived through the experience: a complete census of associations and mosques can be found on the observatory of religious pluralism website maintained by the public groups, pluralism and coexistence and the spanish federation of municipalities and provinces: http://www.observatorioreligion.es/directorio-lugares-de-culto/. see (cerrolaza ). the attacks took place in the early morning of march on several madrid commuter trains, both in the atocha train station in the centre of the city and in the small el pozo station in a suburban working-class neighbourhood. in spain the attacks are often referred to simply as ‘ -m’. http://www.observatorioreligion.es/directorio-lugares-de-culto/ religions , , of when i . . . ,i was young, it’d been years . . . well, no, more, at the time of the -m attack. [ . . . ] a group of older young people, i mean, i was one of the little ones at the time, they were -something, decided to get together and buy wreaths and go to atocha to show our respect in the name of young muslims, you know? [ . . . ] atocha was crammed with people and all the girls went in with their veils on and the boys, they were all muslims. and the people were . . . everyone was silent, all the people, the whole station. [ . . . ] then they went in and put the flowers down. they prayed and when they bent down, the whole station applauded [laughter]. it was an almost magical sight [i. , -year-old male, syrian origin]. however, in the days following the attack, after it awoke from the nightmare, the islamic community found itself enveloped in a climate of suspicion and fear that became more widespread as the investigations advanced. this climate also affected the daily lives of young muslims, who began to be identified as a threat to the point, as razi asserts, that the way they were perceived by spanish society changed: obviously, they didn’t look at us the way they did before [i. , -year-old male, syrian origin]. as a result of this situation, the islamic institutions whose work largely centred on the transfer of religious-cultural knowledge began to pay more attention to young people. they did this not only by supporting the activities of the existing youth associations, but also by facilitating new initiatives backed by the most representative mosques in the country. these new concerns led the leaders of cultural and religious centres to implement specific activities for young people such as classes on ‘manners’, which became sites of debate on the correct religious interpretation of relationships between young muslims and their non-muslim social environment; meetings with experts on the qur’an and religious figures from various arab-islamic majority countries; and encounters where young people could discuss their proposals with older members of the mosque (téllez ; téllez ; téllez and madonia ). over time, the combination of this institutional umbrella and the lack of freedom when it came to developing more participatory activities led young people who no longer identified with the institution’s discourse, views, and activities to gradually distance themselves from it. when asked about this, the young people criticized the progressive stagnation of an institutional position that, by not allowing the participation of young people as actors, had progressively lost the ability to address their daily needs and problems, as the following comment highlights: a: i was going to several . . . , to several meetings. well, yes, to several meetings of young muslims, activities held in the mosque and more, but the same . . . , the same conclusion. we didn’t modernize the dialogue, we didn’t modernize the message and it’s always the same. so, it’s as if . . . as if the mosque was, let’s say, a centre to instil these values or to instil in us how to treat the rest of society right. we form part of this society, so, why not instil in the others how to treat us right? do you understand? it’s like we marginalized ourselves and they are pushing, pushing, “you have to do this”, “you have to do that”, “you have to whatever”, but they don’t really sit down with us and ask us, “what problems have you had?” and whatever, you know what i mean? “ok, ugh, this is the topic, this is what we’re going to talk about”, why don’t we vote? [ . . . ] [i. -year-old female, moroccan origin]. these young people are not denying what they identify as the mosque’s traditional role of cultural transmission but, in a more complex way, they are asking to be allowed to initiate some activities aimed at participating in spanish society, in which they feel they play an active part. instead of the positive image of the muslim who is well integrated into society, they call for a pro-positive image of muslims participating in a society where they have a role to play: for example, from the times that i’ve gone and such, i think that if we put more effort into, maybe, i don’t know, we could participate in things like . . . i don’t know, social events, religions , , of you know? like cultural events, and i think there are a lot . . . what happens is that we often shut ourselves up inside the mosque, you know? and we try . . . it’s very nice, and i agree, you know? it’s really basic and fundamental being, or working with things from islam and learning more and going to their talks, that’s really good, but take it outside, too. that’s my opinion, i see it like that, because outside, with non-muslims, we have to make ourselves seen, you know? [i. . : -year-old female, moroccan origin and i. . : -year-old female, ecuadorian origin (convert)]. as will be explored in further depth below, both the attrition in terms of representation and the experience of citizen participation out on the streets would lead to the autonomy of some associations formed in the mosques and the emergence of new groups in no way subject to institutional control. ten years after the fateful morning of march, a collaborative organization between different youth associations had emerged and made itself visible in, for example, the use of public space as a way of distancing themselves from terrorism. on january , shortly after the terrorist attack in the editorial office of the charlie hebdo magazine in paris, the islamic culture foundation called for a silent march in madrid under the slogan, ‘against terrorism and radicalism’. according to several media outlets, more than representations from islamic cultural centres, secular civic associations, and several spanish youth associations attended the demonstration, united in their determination to break the link between islam, terrorism, and radicalization. this street demonstration revealed a clearly distinct dynamic from what was happening in france, where the islamic community chose to become less visible in the public space after the attack. as some scholars have noted, this reaction correlates with the gulf that seems to exist between the representatives of institutionalized islam and muslims on the street (mauger ). in the spanish case, then, a determination to occupy the street in a compact, united way became apparent. however, a more detailed observation of the participants reveals that the ambitions of the actors involved in islamic youth association-building were engaged in a different undertaking. as in france, these young people were breaking ties with traditional representatives and associations. in the french context, several authors agree that the terrorist attack aggravated a ‘generational crisis’ in the representation model for the islamic community (geisser et al. ). the institutionalized position that blindly adhered to the national rhetoric of republican values and accepted that its sole role was to condemn the attacks was juxtaposed by the more critical and complex position supported by young people. these groups, which identify as muslim and french (brouard and tiberj ), insisted on using the collective mourning as a time of necessary reflection about both the cultural and political causes behind terrorism and also the processes of exclusion and dispossession faced by the muslim population in the country (geisser et al. ). as in other european contexts, imams, mosque leaders, and administrators of islamic cultural centres in spain incorporated rhetoric similar to that of the french in their discourses. in addition to condemnation and distancing, in spain, emphasis was also placed on rejecting any falsely religious view that supported or permitted terrorism. as a result, the position of the islamic community adopted by the institutional representatives during the act at atocha was the religious delegitimization of terrorists and the negation of any islamic basis for terrorism. ‘we’, the muslims, were represented by religious leaders at the forefront of a heterogeneous community raising a unanimous voice against the terrorists’ views of a murderous islam. the islamic culture foundation (funci) is a spanish nonprofit, apolitical, and nondenominational scientific organization established in with the aim of tearing down the walls of misunderstanding between the western world and the arab and islamic world. funci specializes in the culture of al-andalus, as an important part of this common heritage, a model of intercultural respect and a suitable tool for promoting understanding. funci maintains a twofold approach to both facilitate an intercultural coexistence where differences become an additional value for enabling greater social cohesion, and to promote sustainable actions in mediterranean countries through the med-o-med network. see https://funci.org/. https://funci.org religions , , of parallel to these raised voices were more timid representatives and members from other initiatives, from spaces of civic engagement and advocacy, from the small neighbourhood mosques. beyond condemning terrorism, these voices also demanded that society pay more attention to the dissemination of islamophobia, which had found a breeding ground in the social climate of growing fear and widespread suspicion towards islam. sociopolitical demands began to take shape that renewed the need for a more committed, fluid institutional dialogue that was not limited to a commemorative event, but would begin the task of recognizing and legitimizing the daily needs of islamic communities in the country. in short, social and religious actors appeared in the public space who proposed different views and positions in response to a global cause. in addition to street actions, after the paris attack, different representatives and members of the new islamic youth associations engaged in an animated debate on the social networks. at that time, critiques of the institutional position were accompanied by appeals against islamophobia as well as positions supporting and rejecting the je suis charlie movement, demonstrating a different capacity to engage and participate in the collective mourning. they did not abandon the street, however, and several associations like the spanish association of muslim girls (achime), the complutense university of madrid muslim student association, and the fuenlabrada association of young muslims, decided to demonstrate their unity on the street, thus solidifying a presence in the compact, collective public space as another sociocultural player with ties to the other demands being made, but one that insisted—in opposition to institutionalized voices—on being homegrown, spanish, and victims of the same violence and terror, like other spaniards and europeans. what, then, were the key factors in this process of independence, what experiences may have influenced this development and according to what sociocultural dynamics are the new forms of associative participation evolving? the following sections explain the events that occurred during this decade of activism and citizenship. . thoughts about islam, youth, and social movements: from the arab spring to the ‘ -m’ movement in december , events in sidi bouzid, tunisia, ignited a series of citizen demonstrations and uprisings throughout the arab world that came to be known as the ‘arab spring’. alongside the professors, activists, spaniards, and foreigners of all ages from madrid who went out onto the streets to demonstrate in front of the embassies of tunisia, egypt, syria and other countries whose citizens were rising up were young people participating in the actions both as individuals and as members of associations. in this context of euphoria and the assertion of rights, during which the people of madrid were also calling for the regime to fall, initial contacts were established that solidified during the various demonstrations held in front of the embassies. as trust spontaneously grew among the demonstrators, the number of young muslims attending the rallies increased as well. contacts made on the ground were strengthened on facebook, where links were formed between clusters of muslim boys and girls and various human rights and ‘no a la guerra’ anti-war association activists. this is an association made up of young people from the mosque in fuenlabrada, a municipality near madrid with a markedly urban character. it is now represented by the fuenlabrada al-umma youth association (ajuf). the may movement (often referred to spain as ‘ -m’) was a popular movement that took to the streets and squares of the largest cities in spain, especially the emblematic puerta del sol square in the centre of madrid in spring . this occupation constituted one of the first ‘occupy’ movements and was the setting for the indignados anti-austerity movement. for a comprehensive assessment of this movement, see the issue coordinated by cameron ( ). this slogan was used in all the protests heard on the streets of spain in in an infrequent exercise to reject the conservative government that was supporting the new american military action in iraq as part of its global war on terrorism strategy. this section of the article discusses some of the results of the fieldwork done by salvatore madonia between and in the community of madrid under the auspices of the research project el mundo arabe-islámico en movimiento: migraciones, reformas y elecciones y su impacto en españa (cs - -c - ) financed by the ministry of science, innovation and universities, directed by ana i. planet contreras. this was a multisited participant observation that began with sociopolitical activism for the syrian cause and then developed into participation in various processes, such as the creation of an association of young muslims conceived by some young members of a facebook group that is a prosperous university association with religions , , of later in , and shortly after the beginning of the revolts in syria, a permanent sit-in began in front of the syrian embassy in madrid. just m from the front door of one of madrid’s main museums, the prado, and on one of the city’s most heavily trafficked streets, this civil action was accompanied by protests every sunday. the sit-in was organized around a tent used to hold the provisions for the demonstrators, a table to collect signatures calling for the expulsion of the syrian ambassador and several posters. week after week, the direct presence and participation of young people from syrian families grew, despite the fact that their presence at the embassy could pose problems for their families and friends living in syria. this dangerous situation fostered solidarity between young people from different places—moroccans, palestinians, egyptians, tunisians—and non-muslim spaniards. the presence of the young people, especially females, conquered the fears of their parents and the syrian community living in madrid. the sit-ins became organized dates (with music, dancing, and even live conferences from syria with participants in the revolts), bringing together more than people each sunday for three years in the heart of the city. moreover, as with any other action involving demands, the use of social networks, particularly facebook, was fundamental, without replacing the physical meetings where the internal organization of the protest and new initiatives were debated. this is what arturo guerrero has defined in his description of a spanish-speaking islamic virtual sphere as an agora; a virtual space that facilitates direct communication between internet users also fosters off-line connections between them (guerrero ). throughout the demonstrations, a set of group rituals took shape that strengthened and advanced the group’s internal relationships. the everyday needs that appeared on a regular basis—from preparing the space in front of the embassy to putting up posters and flags, writing manifestos, taking care of the sound equipment and, finally, taking everything down at the end of each demonstration —led to meetings on demonstration days in the form of a group breakfast in a cafeteria next to the embassy and lunch in a turkish restaurant after each session. lunchtimes became well-attended gatherings, moments for group reflection on what had happened during the demonstration and for further debate on the next steps to take. in the on-line sphere, the organization of a facebook group led to the creation of sub-commissions that met in closed access groups to handle various needs. during one of these ritualized moments, it was collectively decided to use the virtual network of the existing facebook groups to create a humanitarian aid association. the operating procedures of the social networks, characterized by direct and participative access to virtual debate (madonia ), led to the creation of the aid association for the syrian people (aaps). the group thus created its first open facebook page where it could freely post all types of a physical headquarters today. the fieldwork also involved participation in courses on arabic and on islamic manners and culture in one of the large mosques in madrid as well as in some of the centre’s religious celebrations, rituals, and practices. finally, the social network created during this time, particularly on facebook, was monitored thanks to the growing contacts with muslims and islamic institutions and associations in the spanish-speaking virtual sphere with islamic content. over the course of the ethnography, numerous interviews were done with young spanish muslim men ( ) and women ( ) between and years old, with different sociodemographic features regarding level of studies, social class, parents’ country of origin (syria, morocco, palestine, egypt) and age. all were sunnis although with different degrees of declared religious practice. the citations that appear in the text distinguish the speaker by gender, the country of origin of one or two of the parents, and age. for example, before the ambassador was expelled, photos were seen being taken from the embassy windows and the facebook pages of the future aid association for the syrian people were attacked on several occasions. these acts were publicly reported both in the media and to the police. although the permanent sit-in continued, to avoid being evicted, they reached an agreement with the police to dismantle the tent, leaving just a flag and a symbolic chair during the rest of the week. the aaps continues to be active as a humanitarian association. its facebook page reads: ‘the aid association for the syrian people was founded in summer , inspired by the demonstrations against the syrian dictatorship taking place since march. the first association of syrians in spain formed in response to the need for moral and material support for those protesting inside syria for a better future. although the organization has clearly taken a side, defending and supporting the revolutionary movement in syria created in mid-march , from the beginning the association has been apolitical and does not side with any faction, ethnicity, religion or other distinction beyond the division that separates those who struggle for freedom from those who continue to support the dictatorship. made up primarily of syrians and spanish-syrians, the group also has members and sympathizers from several countries, including italy, morocco, religions , , of information and propaganda and suggest activities. the main characteristic of this space was that it facilitated more open, democratic collective participation where all the members could propose ideas, make suggestions and vote to approve or reject a proposal with equal influence. one result of the growing organizational capacity and larger number of participants was the organization of the first large demonstration, held in madrid in may . the spring of was a time of exceptional activism and political action in the streets of spain. in may , the may movement permanently occupied puerta del sol, the main central square in madrid. previous experiences and contacts with activists in madrid made it possible for the members of the association to assist the syrian people to develop relationships and participate in the wave of collective protest. some of the members participating in the -m indignados demonstrations began to forge ties with the general organization on the square. this was not an easy task, as in very little time, a number of commissions and clusters had formed off puerta de sol, each one focused on very specific and different demands (martín rojo and frutos ). every proposal issued by a commission had to be first presented to the general proposal commission and, if it did not violate the overall values of the movement, could then be presented to the public and finally voted on by majority consensus in the group meetings periodically held on the square. in the case of the young muslims and their non-muslim peers, it was decided to distribute informative brochures and gather signatures to request the expulsion of the syrian ambassador from madrid. these early initiatives received significant support from the people walking around the square, which encouraged the young people to incorporate slogans and posters from the indignados movement into the pro-syrian demonstrations. later, several demonstrations related to the may movement dovetailed, and they joined in solidarity with the sunday demonstrations in front of the syrian embassy, located a short walk from puerta del sol. in the end, the decision was made to set up a tent in the puerta del sol camp as a place to spend the night, raise awareness, and propagandize for the syrian cause. this made it possible to create stronger ties with the movement in general and also with young people with various stances regarding what was occurring in other arab countries. as a result, it became possible to organize larger acts that connected puerta del sol with the global protests of the early arab spring youth movements as well as with older protest movements. from the minutes of silence held in the square for syria to the live connections with al-tahrir square in cairo and the moments of solidarity with the amazigh protests in north africa, the sahrawi protests in morocco and the palestine protests in gaza, the local situation in the square became connected to the various global protests that characterized that moment in space and time, visibilizing many languages rarely heard in the public space of madrid, such as greek and arabic (martín rojo ). . new islamic youth association-building as a key player in the future evolution of a homegrown islam it was not only the syrian cause that motivated the participation of the young people, however. in the same way and during the same time as the events described above, some young people who self-defined as muslims began to use social networks to form facebook groups where they could germany, iran and, of course, spain. this is due to the humanitarian nature of the association, which has always been faithful to its raison d’être: to dedicate itself exclusively to activities that help the syrian people reach their legitimate aspirations. these activities, which began with demonstrations, localized tent cities and sit-ins, slowly expanded to include bike rides, talks, exhibitions, meetings with social agents and politicians, and charity events. the group’s most important development was the establishment of the st humanitarian aid campaign, during which a shift took place from requesting aid from institutions to organizing shipments of humanitarian material ourselves (clothing, medicine and medical material)’. available online https://www.facebook.com/asociacionaaps/ (accessed on december ). examples of internal clashes and external pressures affecting the association are described below. often events or situations that took place during offline demonstrations were widely and eagerly debated online on the social networks. what happened on the streets and squares of madrid during the may movement and the subsequent activism and mobilization in other municipalities inside and outside the country can be seen as part of the broader global occupy the street movement. https://www.facebook.com/asociacionaaps/ religions , , of debate and launch activities. in , the embryo of the complutense university of madrid muslim student association took shape on the internet and soon moved into the university space with the broad objective of talking about islam and the arab world in general, especially with regard to what concerned them as young people: q: have you participated in any associations for young muslims? a: um . . . , virtual ones. [laughter]. q: tell me a little bit about it. a: well . . . really . . . yes, for example, a little while ago one was created on facebook. well, in fact, we’re trying to create a real one now at the complutense university that’s just got going. it’s being led by a girl who converted to islam who’s doing her masters in arab studies or something like that, or eastern studies, and she had the idea. she’s from complutense and we’re working on it now [ . . . ] q: what association is it? a: it’s ‘muslim students from spain’ and it’s on facebook. the progressive search for independence from more traditional institutional control was justified by a different way of conceiving of collective dynamics and practices. in their rejection of a stricter community model, the young people established their need to experience and think about their religious identification in light of their day-to-day experiences and in their immediate sociocultural environment. from the beginning, their primary need appeared to be getting to know and collectively supporting each other as a group of young people with the same necessities and identifying themselves in the same living situation: q: what is your goal? what are you doing? a: we support each other in our studies and get to know each other, um . . . also arabic. there are people . . . there are, well, since a lot of people, a lot of muslims were born here in spain and don’t speak arabic and whatnot, we put up videos, links and things where you can learn arabic and so forth. q: do you also address issues related to islam? a: yes, we talk about islam . . . then in the group chat, sometimes we even talk about whether we should speak spanish or arabic in the chat room and it’s true that we speak more spanish. q: what other topics do you discuss? a: everything related to the arab world. for example, the last thing i posted, which is the alternative to facebook, but muslim, which is iquabook [laughter] and whatever, films about . . . the typical film about terrorism and that sort of thing, clichés about muslims, trying to break the moulds out there [i. , -year-old female, moroccan origin]. the main objectives of this association reveal the need for these young people whose parents came from abroad to find ways to deal with their daily problems, beginning by challenging the clichés and stereotypes that directly affected them as a minority group in a majority non-islamic society: q: what goals do you have beyond getting to know each other? a: support, too, because a muslim . . . in other words . . . usually a muslim has a difficult life and the support might . . . and the same thing, it’s breaking the moulds that . . . the clichés specifically, the philology faculty at the complutense university of madrid, where several of the young men and women who created this new association have been enrolled. religions , , of out there. we’re trying to have debates, conferences, talks in the association and in principle, it’s that. q: what are the stereotypes? a: what the press and, well, muslims who say they’re muslims, and i think that they aren’t or at least they don’t show it. the clichés? well, terrorism, machismo, um . . . being inferior, i think, being poor. also muslims are seen as poor, um . . . ignorant, too, when really it was a great civilization and . . . i think that muslims represent everything bad [laughter]. unfortunately, that’s the case [i. -year-old female, moroccan origin]. the lack of any vertical control or pre-imposed activities fostered constant collaboration between the different members who were invited into a horizontal participation in all the decision-making processes related to the evolution of the association from the beginning. the result was a space for collective association and socialization that produced dynamics of direct confrontation and interaction inside and outside the group. the characteristics of the operation of social networks encouraged multiple debates and proposals for activities, and the group’s facebook page became not only an arena for discussing plans for future activities, but also for the association’s very goals, halfway between a charitable and a sociocultural association: lara: i wanted to say that i would like us to take the initiative in our association to do something, even if it’s just a gesture, for the muslims killed in myanmar. what do you all think? [young female muslim]. najem: suggestions accepted! [young female muslim]. fahima: i personally support any type of assistance to anyone. and, as far as operation kilo goes, we can do it among the members of our association and then send it or deliver it to whoever needs it [female convert]. [ . . . ] lara: that seems like a good idea, but (my personal opinion), as a student association, we should do more activities like talks, conferences, workshops, excursions . . . about topics that interest us. for example “myanmar”, talking about what happened, because almost nobody knows anything. i mean, providing information in talks and the like and from there we could give information so whoever wants to help can get in touch with another association . . . [ . . . ] but not collecting food, i don’t know if i’m making sense . . . in other words our objectives are more educational, right? [young female muslim]. hsina: i’m also in favour of doing talks and conferences about topics related to islam and what’s happening in arab-muslim countries today [young female muslim]. off campus, beginning in august —but with female university students acting as leaders—a group of muslim girls from informal groups with younger members decided to form a women’s association for female muslims. in this association, which is headquartered in madrid but organizes activities across the country, the participants plan and coordinate quite innovative projects, always insisting on their autonomy and originality. they stress the idiosyncrasy of being young, muslim, and spanish females, highlighting the novelty of the confluence of these particular traits with regard to their contextual needs. for these young muslim females, islam is a way of life, and they are united in the decisions they reach by consensus and want to improve their living conditions. in their statutes, the association asserts that its main objectives include fostering a ‘spanish-muslim’ identity, religious discussion in the complutense university of madrid young muslim students facebook group [last visited / / ]. first post / / , last post / / . it has received views and comments. available in the two histories of the facebook group and webpage. religions , , of dialogue and, in general, improving relations in their society, helping each other face the problems of daily life and prejudice towards their religion. here, too, the virtual sphere has become important in terms of providing greater freedom with regard to decision-making and participation. in addition to a facebook page, this association also has a website, which works somewhat like a blog, making it easy for members to learn about and follow the different activities. at the collective level, these two examples of new youth association-building demonstrate the autonomous, homegrown orientation of some young people who seem to have left behind the pre-established models for how to be and appear muslim in spanish society (if, indeed, they ever followed them), in order to begin to construct their own religiosity as a component that enriches their spanish society. the possibility of being able to organize and direct their activities more freely and independently allows them to construct their own arguments related to their needs and logic in their sociocultural environment, since they can decide and directly and proactively have a say in conferences, meetings, and activities designed by and for them. over time, these young people have started to create their own ways of being in society as a group. their activities are connected to their daily experiences and, for example, they have begun to invite non-muslim experts to their conferences to discuss topics of interest to them as young people. these activities not only allow internal debate between the youths, but also more broadly facilitate meetings and confrontations between activists or experts who would otherwise be reluctant to engage in direct confrontation. in several cases, after the encounters promoted by the associations, the topics debated prompted considerable response on social networks or, on the contrary, topical issues motivated the young people to organize spectator events or to participate directly. for example, after tunisian activist amina tyler was punished, a broader debate was launched about possible convergences and divergences between the femen feminist movement and islamic feminism or, more recently, after the #metoo movement took off, young activists participated in the publication and dissemination of a hashtag linked to islamophobic attacks on muslim women wearing the headscarf. these same young people have participated in and taken ownership of civil-social causes, opening up other areas of citizen participation such as the pink march to raise funds for breast cancer and the promotion of charity drives to collect food and clothing for the neediest. in this second phase of youth association-building, the forms and content of the promoted activities display the development of a contextualized, daily religious viewpoint. the young people combine different activities in a single event to make it more attractive, mixing recreation with religion, or reinventing religious celebrations as mountain excursions, for example, where community reflection and prayer mix with ski sessions and shopping, breaking the ramadan fast in various parks around the city or celebrating the eid holidays in a public swimming pool, ‘eating up the sunshine’, in the words of the poster that announced this initiative. greater decision-making and cooperative freedom, a rejection of institutional control, the need to participate in immediate circles and the creation of synergies with other sociocultural movements are, then, the elements that characterize the identitarian-collective identification of these young people as muslims and spaniards. in this process of differentiation, the religious element that characterizes them as muslims continues to be central, since these youths are not renouncing their religiosity, but they also demand active and direct citizen participation from the identity perspective of being and seeing themselves as muslims. beyond the possible differences between the associations, all share the fact that they participate in a process of collective identification; they are all muslims acting in a sociocultural context in which their image as muslim is under construction. moreover, they want to participate actively in this construction. these young people usually share activities, participate in meetings, and collaborate available online: https://www.facebook.com/achimeoficial/?fref=ts (accessed on august ). available online: http://www.asociacionachime.com/ (accessed on august ). https://www.facebook.com/achimeoficial/?fref=ts http://www.asociacionachime.com/ religions , , of with several associations at the same time in a process of collective mobilization that breaks with old patterns and proposes new forms of religiously interpreted interaction. in this way, a contextual identity-related religious interpretation materializes that reopens the discussion about european islam and europeanized islam, proposing instead a homegrown islam. indeed, in the case of these young people, their religiosity—although still far from the ambitions and pretensions of experts and critics—remains intensely rooted in their daily lives. author contributions: s.m. and a.i.p.c. developed the theoretical formalism, conceived and designed the analysis and wrote the article. s.m. collected the data on section . funding: this research was founded by the projects ‘participación política, islam y trasnacionalidad en el mundo árabo-islámico y en contexto migratorio’ (cso - -c - -p) and ‘crisis y dinámicas locales y transnacionales en el mediterráneo occidental: cambios sociopolíticos, movilizaciones y diáspora’ (cso - -c - -p) financed as an r&d&i by the ministry of finance and competitiveness of spain. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references brouard, sylvain, and vincente tiberj. . français comme les autres? enquête sur les citoyens d’origine maghrébine, africaine et turque. paris: presses de sciences po. cameron, bryan. . special issue “spain in crisis: -m and the culture of indignation”. journal of spanish cultural studies : – . [crossref] cerrolaza, erika. . nuevas formas de religiosidad y reelaboraciones identitarias en migración: el caso de la comunidad murid en españa. revista de estudios internacionales mediterráneos . available online: https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ (accessed on december ). contreras mazarío, josé maría. . muslims in spain: the legal framework and status. in observing islam in spain: contemporary politics and social dynamics. edited by ana i. planet contreras. leiden: brill, pp. – . isbn - - - - . geisser, vincent, omero marongiu-perria, and kahina samaïl. . musulmans de france: le grande Épreuve. ivry-sur-seine: les Éditions de l’atelier/editions ouvrières. guerrero, arturo. . descodificando el islam. el islam en internet en españa. valencia: tirant humanidades. diáspora. isbn - - - - . guia, aitana. . the muslim struggle for civil rights in spain: promoting democracy through migrant engagement, – . sussex: sussex academic press. isbn - - - - . lópez garcía, bernabé, and ana i. planet contreras. . islam in spain. in islam, europe’s second religion: the new social, cultural and political landscape. edited by shireen hunter. westport: praeger, pp. – . isbn - - - . madonia, salvatore. . islam transnacional y nuevos espacios de libertad religiosa: las redes sociales en la construcción de una identidad hispano-musulmana. revista de estudios internacionales mediterráneos (reim) : – . available online: https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ (accessed on december ). madonia, salvatore. . musulmanes, jóvenes y ciudadanos: un estudio etnográfico en la comunidad de madrid. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic), ediciones politeya: estudios de políticas y sociedad. martín rojo, luisa. . taking over the square: the role of linguistic practices in contesting urban spaces. journal of language and politics : – . [crossref] martín rojo, luisa, and carmelo díaz de frutos. . en #sol, revolución: paisajes lingüísticos para tomar las plazas. journal of spanish cultural studies : – . [crossref] mauger, gérard. . sur les attentats de et janvier . savoir/agir, no. . planet contreras, ana i., ed. . observing islam in spain: contemporary politics and social dynamics. leiden: brill, pp. – . téllez, virtudes. . la juventud musulmana de madrid responde: lugar y participación social de las asociaciones socioculturales formadas o revitalizadas después de los atentados del -m. revista de estudios internacionales mediterráneos : – . available online: https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/ view/ (accessed on december ). http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jlp. . . mar http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ religions , , of téllez, virtudes. . la sospecha y el cuestionamiento de los vínculos transnacionales y globales en la identificación civil de musulmanes españoles jóvenes en madrid. revista de estudios internacionales mediterráneos : – . available online: https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ / (accessed on december ). téllez, virtudes, and salvatore madonia. . making visible “invisibilized” spanish muslim youth. in observing islam in spain: contemporary politics and social dynamics. edited by ana i. planet contreras. leiden: brill, pp. – . © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://revistas.uam.es/index.php/reim/article/view/ / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	a few thoughts on spanish islam 	from ‘ -m’ to ‘je suis charlie’: a decade of evolution 	thoughts about islam, youth, and social movements: from the arab spring to the ‘ -m’ movement ]the may movement (often referred to spain as ‘ -m’) was a popular movement that took to the streets and squares of the largest cities in spain, especially the emblematic puerta del sol square in the centre of madrid in spring . this occupation constituted one of the first ‘occupy’ movements and was the setting for the indignados anti-austerity movement. for a comprehensive assessment of this movement, see the issue coordinated by b -religions- (b -religions- ). 	new islamic youth association-building as a key player in the future evolution of a homegrown islam 	references reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism: an interview with todd gitlin and michael schudson symposium “value and values in the organizational production of news” https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / sociologica. v. n. ( ) issn - https://sociologica.unibo.it/ reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism: an interview with todd gitlin and michael schudson jiang chang* todd gitlin† michael schudson‡ submitted: september , – accepted: september , – published: september , abstract reflecting on more than four decades in dual scholarly careers that cut across the bound- aries between communication, the sociology of culture, and journalism studies, professor todd gitlin and professor michael schudson discuss the growth, evolution, and strengths and weaknesses of the media studies field with professor jiang chang. the three reflect on the origins of the research, the gap between the field of journalism studies and the field of sociology, the role played by journalism in the growing conflict between china and the united states, the relationship between media and political protest, and whether there ought be any cause for optimism regarding the state of democracy in the twenty-first cen- tury. keywords: american sociological association; china; culture; fox news; journalism studies; sociology. * shenzhen university (china);  criver@protonmail.ch;https://orcid.org/ - - - † the columbia university graduate school of journalism, and chair of the ph.d program in communica- tions (united states) ‡ the columbia university graduate school of journalism (united states) copyright © jiang chang, todd gitlin, michael schudson the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / art. # p. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://sociologica.unibo.it/ https://orcid.org/ - - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) jiang chang: thank you both. okay. i’m really honored to do this. the first question is, can you describe your own intellectual history in graduate school? you were involved enrolled in the prestigious sociology department, but you ended up writing dissertation on journalism and media. so was this common at the time? why was there such a flowering of media studies within sociology in the s? michael schudson: so that’s really two questions i guess: how did i get to this topic and why was sociology in general moving toward this topic. the answer of how i got to the topic is somewhat accidentally! i wasn’t strictly interested in media, i was interested in professions. and the dissertation that i wrote compared the emergence of notions of professionalism and objectivity in journalism and in law. and later, after that was finished, and i was considering turning the dissertation into a book, i sent it around to a few people, all of whom said the journalism part is really interesting. the law part really isn’t. so, it became a book about the rise of objectivity in journalism. there was still little general interest in the media at the time, within sociology. i remember telling people that it was my “watergate dissertation” — that law and journalism were the two professional fields (or professionalizing fields in the case of journalism) that were constantly in the news at the time i was coming to a dissertation topic. so those were the ones i worked on. it took a while, in some ways not until my second book — on advertising, that i said, “oh, i study media.” and as you know, although the institutionalization of journalism studies as such came many years after that, there was a turn more broadly to studies of media, popular culture in the news media, particularly because of the political moment — the anti-war move- ment, the various rights movements evolving at the time, all very much present among younger sociologists and graduate students. and everyone i knew was a critic of the news media. todd [gitlin]’s work was very important in pushing people further in that direction, the whole world is watching comes out , i think soon after discovering the news. so does dan schiller’s book, on objectivity in the news. gaye tuchman’s “news as a strategic ritual” ap- peared prominently in american journal of sociology in . i think she was a real pioneer. i’d also heard that [herbert] gans was also working on the news media but that he’d been working on this for many years off and on, finally publishing deciding what’s news in , i believe. but i think this was all a response to public events and a new, critical take on journalism, and the fact that a great many standard practices of journalism seemed to be inadequate to the mo- ment. todd gitlin: i’m not sure what the right answer is. let me explain about my own gradu- ate school trajectory. it was unusual. i did a master’s degree at the university of michigan in political science in to . when i was deeply involved in student radical activity. i was involved with the organization students for a democratic society and very much involved in organizing for civil rights, against south african apartheid and american corporate connec- tions, and then against the vietnam war. for the next nine years i worked as a political organizer or community organizer, and a journalist, and that was the core of my life. i wrote quite a lot of poetry too, and a book about communityorganizinginchicago, butprimarilyipublishedjournalisminwhatwethencalled the “underground press,” which was not literally underground but was alternative, a more im- passioned form of journalism than the traditional kind. when i decided to go back to the university i wasn’t originally planning to write about me- dia. i decided to go to berkeley, i was living in san francisco. i was looking for a program that would be unconfining, that would be relatively open to my various interests, which were not only sociological but cultural and literary. i also had grand — and i would now say grandiose https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) — theoretical ambitions when in the late s i started to become influenced by the idea that we had entered into a post scarcity society. and i was interested in the concept of scarcity. so when i decided to go back to get a ph.d. at berkeley, my initial thought was that i would try to write an intellectual history of the idea of scarcity. now, i had not intended to go on with media studies. after taking a year of courses and passing my qualifying exams, for which i submitted quite a lot of previously published work, one of my professors, bob blauner, told me that he liked an article i had written in early about the mutual influences of the media and the student movement. he thought that was a promising topic. i had written this piece for a new left nonacademic journal, leviathan, while out of school. i had read very little of the sociological literature on media; or on movements, for that matter. but i had a lot of experience and i had observations which were, i would say, both intuitive and earned through reflection on experience. the article, “ notes on television and the movement,” was quite speculative. but it had in it some of the ideas about the interaction between media and the new rough that i later developed. a couple of years later i revised it (“sixteen notes”) for publication in the literary journal tri-quarterly. so bob blauner said to me, “i thought that was a very interesting piece. why don’t you develop it?” and that was actually the first time i thought about doing so. a professor’s sug- gestion can be mighty powerful! in fact, if i had been stubborn and kept to my plan of writing the intellectual history of the idea of scarcity, i would still be working on that, i’m sure. in any event, i had been interested in media for years, in a way that combined curiosity and lack of discipline. in graduate school at berkeley, i spent a whole year catching up on the disciplinary field, and was rather astonished and appalled, frankly, at how thin it was. that led me, in , to write my critique of the dominant paradigm (which was published in theory and society in ). i wrote it because i wanted to digest and react to my underwhelming experience of reading the field. then i startedto encounter other sociologistsof more or less mygeneration who were working on media in a fresh way. one was michael schudson, the other was gaye tuchman. they were the prime ones, along with the slightly older harvey molotch, then at the university of california, santa barbara, who had written an important article after the big oil spill in , first in a popular journal and eventuallyin an academicjournal. “accidents, scandals and routines,” he and his co-author called it — a very detailed attempt to reconstruct the process by which events become news. now, at that time, i was largely unaware that there was a field called communications. there was a ph.d program in communications at stanford, but for me their behaviorist em- piricismwouldhavebeentoonarrow. iwasinasociologydepartmentbecauseiaspiredtoward a sociological imagination. my advisors were quite sympathetic to my pursuit of a sociological understanding of media. in fact, my thesis advisor, bill kornhauser, many years earlier, as a graduate student at the university of chicago, had participated in some pioneering research in about television’s representation of a parade to honor general macarthur after pres- ident truman fired him as commander in korea. gladys and kurt lang positioned graduate students around the parade in real time and then compared what they observed with the me- dia coverage. bill kornhauser was one of the observers, and moreover, he was interested in the concept of mass society. so he was very encouraging. my committee in general, i think, appre- ciated that the field of sociology, of media or as we then said, mass communication, was quite thin. i knew herb gans’ work, which i appreciated, but there wasn’t much else. i still don’t understand quite why the three of us, michael, gaye and myself, stumbled into the field more https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) or less at the same time. jc: but how did the study of media institutionalize? because it has been a quite mature discipline worldwide. why do so many sociologists who studied the media finally decide to leave sociology? ms: in my case, just to be autobiographical again, the faculty at harvard sociology who most influenced me were the least sociological in terms of professional connection. my dis- sertation advisor was daniel bell, who was given a ph.d at columbia in sociology for already published work in journalism in several different magazines. he was basically a magazine jour- nalistwithaninsatiablethirstforsocialandpoliticalknowledge. hecametocolumbiatoteach undergraduates and he wrote an early book about the undergraduate curriculum at columbia, which is quite an interesting book on general education that contains seeds of several of his later, more famous works. but he never studied in a graduate school. the other great influence on me was david ries- man, whose only advanced degree was in law. he learned what sociology he learned by teaching undergraduatesattheuniversityofchicago. hetaughtinthesamecoursethatdanielbellalso taught in — and at the same time. there’s a great story riesman told me about teaching under- grads there in a room next to daniel bell’s classroom. he could hear the clamor and excitement of students’ voices in bell’s class through the wall. it was intimidating when his own students were practically silent! when i knew him, of course, he was world-famous and didn’t need to be intimidated by anyone. but i was not socialized in graduate school into learning about the american sociological association. i’m not sure bell or riesman ever went to an asa meet- ing. if they did, they did so as outsiders. they would never have been on committees. they probably never voted in asa elections. they were sociologists in intellectual orientation, but not in professional orientation or training. now at some point, i don’t remember the dates, but i started attending asa meetings. i organized a small, informal group of sociologists there who were interested in culture, popular culture,andsoon,andwestartedmeeting,withoutanagenda,excepttolearnwhatoneanother were doing. maybe this lasted for three years or so? had i known more about the asa, i would have said, “hey, we should be a section! we should organize ourselves formally within the asa.” but this never occurred to me because i didn’t know what a section was, you know, no one had ever taught me that. or mentioned it to me so far as i know. and so the sociology of culture section at asa got founded maybe five years after that. and people who knew more about institutions than i did put it together and did all the work to make it happen. so people drifted elsewhere looking for jobs in a tight job market — and communication was a growing field. and it was, i think it’s fair to say, it was an intellectually limited field and one that borrowed almost everything from social psychology and sociology. a little bit from political science, a little bit from elsewhere, but it was an importer of ideas and intellectual tra- ditions, and at that point a lot of people, some of us who sort of accidentally started studying the media, benefited from that. my initial job in university of chicago was in sociology. there was no communication department there. but my next job, at the university of california, san diego, also in sociology, came with the understanding that i would teach in the undergradu- ate communication program that was an interdisciplinary program that only later became a department. tg: i had a sociological imagination before i went back to graduate school. i carried soci- ology with me in my head, or at least aspired to do so. i did not care what was the departmental setting for my thinking. but when i think back on it, in the s, if one wanted to write about https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) media, one might write straight history, or undertake some empirical research on media effects in political science. for a deeper look, sociology was the place to be. in my view this was partly because sociology was not as confined as it later became — not as quantified. berkeley, i’m happy to say, was the least quantified of the major american departments. what happened in sociology was a boom in the study of culture. the culture section of the american sociological association rather quickly grew large. it was so large, in fact, that it was in a way ungainly. for better or worse, it became difficult to demarcate the media as such — media institutions, media flows, the relation between media and ideology, between media and other institutions. perhaps the sociological study of media later dwindled in part because it was subsumed within the larger currents of the sociology of culture. jc:mynextquestionisaboutthedifferencesbetweenthestudyofjournalismandthestudy of media. how is the study of journalism different than the study of the media? are we too focused on journalism and not enough on larger media systems or is the opposite true? tg: i am inclined to believe that the study of the media generally is the over-arching frame- work and that the study of journalism is largely nested within it. i felt this more and more acutely over the years. when i was first writing about media in the s, in my dissertation, i was operating on the premise that the way in which media operate on people is primarily through ideology, through framing, through conceptual impact, and i wrote on that premise. for many years thereafter, some intuition about the shortcomings of that approach nagged at me. i came to think my initial approach to media was too intellectualized. i did a second study in – , on television entertainment. occasionally i had odd thoughts about what i called the ontology of television — what kind of phenomenon is this, the presence of televi- sion, the attention to it? what is the nature of its presence in our social life? i scribbled notes and put them in an ontology file. in the end i used almost none of it in my book, inside prime time, which came out in . i had the intuition that if we look at the interaction that takes place between people and media — and here i was thinking particularly about television — the interaction was far more enmeshed in emotional life than purely cognitive life. and that in fact, cognition floated on the surface of emotion. so this long period of rethinking culminated in the book that i wrote in , , and published in , called media unlimited. there i tried to reconstruct the history of media, including the history of journalism as a subset within the context of the history and sociology of emotion. now, some journalists who resent seeing journalism enclosed within the area of media stud- ies. i remember one review of media unlimited by a journalist who liked the book very much but said, “i don’t understand what all this is about the media,” because that’s not how he thought of his profession. but i think in a way it’s a seed of professional arrogance to think that the way people at large approach journalism is essentially different from the way in which they approach any other kind of media content. i had a trace of this intuition in my dissertation, the whole world is watching — that the ways in which journalism gets our attention is not essentially different from the way which it approaches us as entertainment or mood or whatever you want to call it. in other words, a headline or a news photo or even the structure of an article, the forms of emphasis and so on, use a repertory of appeals and approaches which is not essentially different from what a movie maker does or a musician does. there are differences, of course. journalism is a special style of media. but i did feel more and more strongly, and continue to feel very strongly, that journalism is an art of human sensa- tion and attention-getting. that it is, in aristotle’s terms, a form of rhetoric. and that among https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) its rhetorical devices and commitments is to a certain conception of truth. journalism should not operate the same way cartoonists do. i don’t want the walt disney company producing the news. but the human interaction is not so different. ms: right. well, again, i’ll start autobiographically. in around , probably about or or so, i began work on what later became the sociology of news in a ww norton series thatjeffalexanderedited. andwhathehadaskedmetodowaseither, ican’trememberexactly now, a sociology of culture book, or a sociology of popular culture book. and i said that that’s beyond my capacity. it’s just too vast a topic. i wouldn’t know where to begin. how about a sociology of news? and he said okay. that was what i thought i could handle and what i would enjoy doing and that was my entry (published ) in the series. there is such a thing as a sociology of news. and at that time, we still didn’t have jour- nals like journalism or journalism studies. we would have many others later, but those were just getting off the ground or hadn’t started yet. so there gets to be an institutionalization of this study of journalism. (what year did the “journalism studies” section of the international communication association begin? i suspect a few years after that.) journalism quarterly (later journalism and mass communication quarterly) existed but it drew contributors and readers largely from j-school faculty with very little interaction with or interest in sociology or history or political science or the more adventuresome developments in communication stud- ies. when i wrote the sociology of news, you know, i was still teaching at the ucsd depart- ment of communication. which had at that point , , faculty. it was deeply interdisci- plinary. all of the early hires had to be appointed in some other department, because commu- nication couldn’t make appointments. so michael cole was in psychology, carol padden was in linguistics. dan hallin was in political science. i was in sociology, chandra mukerji was in sociology, and so forth, with a % appointment in the program on communication. and i think for all of us it was communication that quickly became our real home because it was so much fun. so interesting. and the interdisciplinarity of it was absolutely crucial. people there just loved it and didn’t want to be confined to the discipline they had done in graduate school. so journalism studies now has its own journals. it has its own section of the ica. it has its own book series though different university presses. it has some affiliations with outside fields. it’s notably mixed up with political science through a jointly sponsored journal, political communication. i think political science especially has been a strong influence on it over the years. but sometimes i do feel that my younger and intellectually talented colleagues settle too comfortably into “journalism studies” as the world that defines them. people are too content to focus only on journalism as if it were the whole universe. journalism’s a very important insti- tution. but so are political parties. party systems matter. and so on and so forth. the economy matters. and if you are thinking and writing only about journalism, you’re going to miss stuff. and i think media-centrism is an endless danger in journalism studies. looking at the culture of cultural studies, or the study of culture, more widely would help but so, you know, so would knowing a little about political power. there’s a lot besides the news that makes a difference. i once told graduate students that the concept most sorely absent in communication studies is the concept of “institutions.” institutions matter, both in and around the media. jc: i totally, with you on that journalism scholars sometimes are too satisfied with the field. you know, in china, we even give phd degrees on just journalism to people and there are a lot of scholars have been advocating for, like a pure journalism studies field for many years. so, maybe these are very different contexts, but still, i think the symptoms are alike everywhere. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) my next question is about this special issue, which takes a look at web metrics. there’s an argument that web metrics contribute to the potential rationalization of journalistic work, a la max weber. but the politics of the last three years seem anything but rational. so is rationaliza- tion still a viable thesis in journalism or elsewhere? or are we in a different era? one that goes beyond this rationalization framework? tg: there are still elements of journalistic practice that conform to weber’s model of ra- tionalization — which doesn’t mean that the products are rational. it means that there are impersonal procedures which are brought into play by the practitioners. they are instrumen- tally rational. there are usually unwritten rules of the form: if x happens, you should do y. if you talk to one witness about an event you should talk to another witness. those are rational procedures. those still apply. however, the entire ecology of journalism has been transformed by the proliferation of the means of media. now, i argued in media unlimited that such transformations are not entirely unprecedented and that if we look at the history of consumption in the west, and the role of media in helping to constitute experience, we see a continuity of development in which new forms develop, new technologies develop, and then take their place among the other technologies. at different times, different ones come to the fore and others retreat into the background. but the spirit or the sensibility of media is governed by a hunger for speed — speed of transmission and speed of apprehension — and by a search for what i call disposable emotions. the astounding multiplication of media that was taking place in the late s was both new and not new. i mean the magnitude of it was new, the ability to publish, the ability to start a platform with no capital, et cetera, but within a framework of technology diffusion in general. let’s lookattheearlyhistoryofradio. radiowasfirstdevelopedintheusasbothamilitary communicationdeviceandthenasacommercialdevice. butduringthatperiodbetweenworld war one and , radio was basically an amateur pursuit, decentralized, a sort of hobby, using shortwave. and it was completely chaotic, which is why the us government stepped in, with the federal radio act in , to rationalize it so that broadcasters did not interfere with each other’s frequencies. so even in the case of radio you have this diffusion of initiative. you have this decentralization of the use of media. and then there was a largely successful attempt by institutions, in that case the state, and of course also commercial enterprises, to rationalize the allocations through licensing. so when you look into that history, what happened in the late s is not quite so surprising. you have a dynamic of expansion and also a dynamic of control and concentration. ms: i’m struggling with this question. and i did not go back to my weber see how much he saw rationalization as a description of what was happening, or as normative, something that was good. and maybe we still have that question. is rationalization a good thing or not? i mean for him it was clearly part of modernization, part of the, as he said at least in the english translation, the “disenchantment of the world,” rationality and schemes and systems of ratio- nality and reasoning on the basis of data like people keeping credit and debit account books in businesses as they had not done before the th century. i don’t know. weber wrote at length about religion, he was very interested in religion, and whether he saw the displacement of religion as a good thing i don’t know. a weber scholar would probably be able to answer that, but leaving aside what weber thought, we can see web metrics and such as a good example of rationalization. let’s leave less to chance and guesswork. let’s know how many people are out there reading how much and for how long and we can measure our impact. you know, we do it too in academia with journal “impact factors.” maybe https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) we should eliminate and forbid the reporting of journal impact factors and just make our own judgments about whether this journal or that one publishes good work or not. we have not ultimately rationalized how we, at least here in the united states, deal with hiring and promotion of faculty. it’s peer review. and there’s some wonderful research on how peer review is conducted and what kind of factors influence it and i have just spent three years on a committee at columbia that is advisory to the university provost on all tenure decisions across the university. and there’s no question there: the numbers matter. and for a scientist, dollars matter: how many and how big the grants are that you’ve received (ideally from the federal government from nih or nimh or nsf. all of that does count, but it is not all that counts. in the end, i would say from my experience, people still ask and want answers to the question of, did this person’s work make a difference in this person’s field or subfield? i mean my first book is my most cited work. it’s not my best work, but it’s the most cited one. it would also be very interesting to know whether cited work is cited accurately. from what i have seen, maybe or % of those who cite my claims in discovering the news misunderstand what i claimed! so what? well, when it comes to what matters in tenure decisions, that’s not what matters or what should matter. what matters is whether the work is intellectually sound work or not, of a quality deserving of a permanent position at this or that college or university. the numbers help but they don’t answer the question. js: well, i like to respond a little bit to your comment about your first book. you know, as your official chinese translator of that book, i did my very best to at least make the translation clear and accurate. but i don’t know how people are going to cite it. but i still think it is a very good contribution. and maybe even if when people are setting it in the wrong way, they still get inspired and enlightened by the book. so maybe it’s not that bad thing. that is just my opinion. ms: you’re right. i hope you’re right. jc: well, it seems that many of the most passionate critics of the institutional press have in the past decade become its defenders, at least in its ideal form. so why do you think this might be? tg: my goodness. that’s a good question. i would say because the political and cultural landscape has changed so dramatically. when i and people like me criticized the mainstream journalism in the s, we were in a sense presupposing the model of rational discourse. we believed that media should be judged by immanent critique. that is, we had in our minds a model of journalism as an approach to transparency in relation to the truth. we then criticized existing journalism against that standard. we pointed out that, contrary to naïve ideas of ob- jectivity, there were frames. judgements were being made through institutions that had their preferences and priorities, not necessarily self-consciously. we had, in a funny way, an ideal not so different from habermas’s idea of the ideal speech situation. that is we believed in not only the goodness but the practicality of a model of ratio- nal critical discourse, as habermas called it. so then we held the new york times or cbs or any other institution to account against that standard. but we were naïve about how durable that standard was. at just the moment when we were criticizing the performance of the me- dia, the basis for that standard was eroding. nobody imagined the internet. now if we go forward to the s, it’s clear both in the politics in the us and many other countries, and also throughout the cultural apparatus, that the standard has dissolved. now we’re contending with the world of competing propaganda. let me go back for a sec- ond. the model of journalism whose development michael wrote about in his book governed a certain period of american journalism. in fact, it ran more or less from the progressive era https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) through the evolution of television up through the s. that triumphalist model exalted journalism at its most heroic. journalism as the institution that exposes the king, that stands as an independent force to hold power accountable. there was a golden age, institutionally so, so that at the time when i was writing in the s about how cbs covered the s, the three network news broadcasts accounted for more than three quarters of the viewing public. so when walter cronkite, the renowned anchorman on cbs, closed his broadcast by say- ing, “that’s the way it is,” he was articulating a norm which had a great deal of credibility. of course some people disagree: there was a right-wing critique of him. but the norm was rein- forced by the great successes of american journalism in those years. number one, reporting on civil rights activity. number two, critical reporting on the vietnam war, which was slow to develop but then did develop very aggressively. third, coverage of the crimes of the nixon administration. those were the years when young people flocked into journalism schools because now a journalist was a hero, as in “all the president’s men.” that world is gone. because it’s gone, thoseofuswhowerecriticalofthemainstreamforitsdistortionsandomissions, cametorealize thedegreetowhichweactuallydependedonanassumptionofcommongrounding, acommon standpoint that more or less rational people could share and on the basis of which we could make judgements and come to act, as walter lippmann famously wrote in public opinion. i would just add to what you said before about the golden age of journalism. as you know, the myth of american journalism is that it was always a truth-seeking operation, that it was an enlightenment product, that it was proof of our conviction that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. but in fact, that’s not how american journalism began. ameri- can journalism was scandalous, wild, often deliberately misleading in order to both accomplish political missions and also to increase readership. in fact, the golden age is not typical of the history of journalism in america. it’s the exception. and we’ve now gone back to the period of the s and s and s and s when the news was polemical, partisan, rather hysterical, frequently misleading or straight-out deceitful. in this longer view of the history of american journalism, the golden age of journalism is a parenthetical period. it’s not the norm. we have now returned to what was originally the norm, which was wild. ms: yeah, i like that question. i think that the premise of the question is right. and i remember noticing that in the british case, when much of the most interesting academic work on the news media was highly critical, it came from scholars on the political left (and that’s still the case). but at a certain point as british politics moved to the right in the thatcher years, some of those scholars started to think, maybe the bbc isn’t as bad as we said! and maybe its “even-handedness” is not selling out, maybe it’s actually upholding some kind of unintentional modesty that accepts fairness as a professional ideal and turns out to be useful to society. journalism has moved strongly (especially since the late s in the united states) to a more interpretive style. and i think the extent to which it has done that has not been recognized by american journalists. and i think insufficiently recognized in journalism studies as well. we still worry about what i would like to call an “old fashioned notion of objectivity problem.” my own contribution to this was with a former graduate student, katherine fink, on the rise of what we called contextual journalism and the extensive move towards providing the audi- ence more contextual information. and there are half a dozen other published papers by other people with comparable results, showing that “hey, guess what? the criticism of standard ob- jectivity from the s and s, took hold! somebody listened! they listened less to the academics then than to other journalists who were making similar criticisms. but the criticisms took hold; if you’re just saying,”he said she said,” and not making your own judgments about https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) what actually happened, you’re not doing the public a favor. you have the new journalists who are experts in science, sometimes in medicine or public health, or politics in particular. they may have phds or m.d.’s but, more often, they don’t. they’re just smart and savvy writers with a close acquaintance with the people who do help produce new expert knowledge. and these journalists are in a position to say, “some things are plausible, some things are wrong.” and today journalists need to say that, obviously in the us with a president who can’t stop lying, when the leader of the world’s most powerful nation has an unending thirst for winning attention and for just winning, and not a passing thought for making a distinction between what’s true or what is likely to be true and what’s sheer fantasy or self-serving wishes. well, “he said, she said” doesn’t do the job. i think more journalists should take courses, or at least listen to a lecture or two on the recent history of journalism. in the us they like to say, “oh, well, journalism all goes back to the first amendment and the founders believed in the press as watchdogs on government.” well, not really. thomas jefferson — who stands as a statue outside columbia journalism school — thought prosecuting newspapers for libel was a fine idea: only the states, not the federal government, should do it. you don’t hear that very often. jefferson had very different notions about what the press was about, and the press they were talking about has changed dramatically over time, especially in the last fifty years. and we don’t recognize that. jc: okay, thank you for this. i wanted to get a bit more contemporary now. particularly i want to talk about several very big protests that have been shaking both journalism and the word, the #metoo movement or the more recently black lives matter. and it seems that jour- nalism is increasingly taking aside in these political disputes. do you agree that this is happen- ing? ms: yes, i’d agree for the most part. granted my reading is limited, particularly since the pandemic. the newspaper i read most carefully, the new york times, has long been criticized for being too liberal. at one point, (july , ) daniel okrent, the first “public editor” at the paper (whose task was to fearlessly assess criticism of and complaints about the paper and publish his conclusions) asked in a headline, “is the new york times a liberal newspaper?” and answered in the column’s first sentence: “of course it is.” this was an informal look, not a quantitative study, and he emphasized that the paper was liberal on social issues, notably on same-sex marriage. that was a very interesting column for a new york times insider to write, pointing to a one-sidedness to the kinds of issues and topics that get taken up in in the paper. it doesn’t mean you don’t quote people accurately, it doesn’t mean you don’t occasionally have a profile of an interesting anti-abortion activist, but in the preponderance of the news, the liberal bias was obvious years ago. so in that sense, i think, yeah. it might be more even-handed in someothermainstreamnewsmedia, likelythebroadcasttelevisionnetworks, butpubliceditors there would probably still find a liberal tilt. jc: but the fact that mainstream journalism is more and more taking a position, do you think it is good or bad for democracy? tg: is mainstream journalism increasingly taking sides? yes, with a caveat. the major news organizations are socially liberal, not economically liberal. so for quite a while, in part because of the social classes from which the media elites emerge, they were (eventually, at least) sympathetic to feminism, they were sympathetic to equal rights activities, to gay rights, to the disabled, to minorities of different kinds. liberal on social questions — not on economic ques- tions. on the subject of economic inequality, the public is actually to the left of the media. but on matters that directly connect to the social experience of the news organizations, they are liberal. so it’s not astonishing that the #metoo movement would find a welcome within https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) mainstream media. and if we look at coverage of the black lives matter demonstrations, i see a direct continuity from coverage of the civil rights movement and violations of civil rights in the late s to the coverage of the murder of george floyd in the present. now we have videos, so we get more intimate and more decentralized images, but the effect ofthebroadcastof, let’ssay,therodneykingbeatingin andthenthetrayvonmartinand michael brown killings, and so many others, all the way up to george floyd and jacob blake. the coverage of those events conforms to the premise that journalism is obliged to show abuses of power. and so the coverage of the birmingham demonstrations in , which were elec- trifying, where we saw police dogs used against demonstrators, we saw high velocity fire hoses being used as weapons, that coverage which was very important to expanding the civil rights movement and sympathy for what african americans were going through — the same spirit is at work now. the difference is that now there are many more points of entry to large audiences, so that a george floyd video becomes immense even though (or maybe partly because) it was recorded by amateurs. the scale of these uprisings is of such magnitude that i have to say, even against the back- ground of what i’ve described, i’m astonished at how widespread the coverage has been and how receptive in spirit, if not always in detail, it’s been to the demands and the activities of black lives matter. so that very quickly we saw it became the big story. now, of course, there are many reasons why that story spread. i don’t have a hypodermic model of why that hap- pens. but very quickly it became clear that this was to be a big story. anguish, horror, and rage erupted from just beneath the surface. perhaps the movement of was also swept along by all the thwarted energy — pent up by the pandemic and quarantine — finding an affirma- tive outlet. journalism’s attention to black lives matter was immense and surprising. but the outlines were not brand new. jc: but the fact that mainstream journalism is more and more taking a position, do you think it is good or bad for democracy? tg: i think that the commitment of mainstream journalism to truth — primarily the truth that is discomforting, uncomfortable, disturbing — that commitment is absolutely essential. sometimes mainstream journalism goes rather too far in its alignment with the vocabulary or the spirit of the protests, whether it’s the #metoo movement or black lives matter or others. but in general i think that it’s a step forward to demolish the fantasies about objectivity which were always overrated, always overambitious. all the more so because of the rise of the right- wing propaganda, committed to lying and distortion and falsehood, that took hold of a seg- ment of our population. then mainstream journalism, obsessed with a need for “balance” and “nonpartisanship,” learn how stupid — how distorting — it is to say: “well, some people say the moon is a rock miles from earth and some people say it’s made of green cheese.” some have learned, some haven’t — not enough. when the green cheese caucus is so large, it’s essential to try to arrive at the truth. now that doesn’t mean you abandon the ideal of fairness. it doesn’t mean that you write falsehoods. it doesn’t mean that you neglect contrary views. no, it’s important to resist the appeals of propaganda. but still and all, when even the aspiration to truth is being trampled thousands of times every day, i think it is a matter of enlightenment conviction to recommit bringing the truth to light. ms: when i was teaching undergraduates at uc-san diego, and these are very good stu- dents, they were top of their high school classes in california, they did not understand there was a difference between an editorial and a straight news story and a news analysis. for them, it was basically, it’s either in the newspaper or it’s not in the newspaper. but from inside jour- https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) nalism, there’s a big difference. and newspapers were, you know, advocates of policies and persons and parties for several hundred years. but the rise of a notion of objectivity more or less amounted to “let’s separate what we advocate as a news organization in relation to our pol- itics and our citizenship, and what we describe as going on in the world and keeping people up to date with what’s going on in the world.” that was the first change. and then at some point accelerating quickly in the s there was, as i said earlier, an increase in overt interpretation, or contextualizing of the news. half or more of each front page these days is interpretation — interpretation is sort of taken for granted as part of the job of journalism. how otherwise could an ordinary reader understand this complicated and quickly moving world of ours? within some kind of limits that i can’t define, that’s good for democracy. i think that the move toward interpretation has been good for creating news that goes deeper and communi- cates more fully than the flat (and frankly boring) news i read in the s and early s. jc: should that be without limits? ms: you know, i think that that’s a question that journalists themselves know is on their agenda. if i were in a decision making role in a news organization, i think i’d have to figure it out. day by day and moment by moment and situation by situation. i don’t have a general ruling. i do think it’s a question for journalists to figure out — without government intervention. thereareotherissuesaboutthepublicationofhatespeechandthepublicationofsheerliesthat the big online platforms have to deal with every day and i think it would be a public service for them to share publicly how they go about this, how they define the principles by which they make their judgments. i haven’t thought through the whole question here where european countries are quite different from us in terms of forbidding hate speech. i mean, at present, it doesn’t look like european policies been any more successful than the us government’s more “hands off” policy in preventing resurgence of not just hate speech but hate parties. jc: okay. all right. okay. that’s pretty much about mainstream journalism in the us. and my next question is of special interest of mine. it’s about so many readers of this journal are very interested in the tensions between china and the united states and how it has been increasingly playing out in the realm of speech. tg: correct. jc: we see that journalists are being expelled and technology companies subject to increas- ing pressures from the state and so on. so do you think we are headed to another cold war, which is a very hot topic here in china at this moment? tg: i think it all depends on the decisions of the leadership of the two countries. i think it could go toward a bitter, more polarized cold war. probably not military conflict, though perhaps skirmishes at the edges. but i think the situation is also manageable if leadership is wise on both sides. obviously our current political leadership is the opposite of wise. it is both belligerent and stupid, a toxic combination. relations will be complicated and difficult but neither the united states nor china is going to go away. jc:: no. tg: they’re both immense and powerful within different spheres. and they are also, as we all know now, or should know, deeply interdependent. jc: yeah, that’s true. tg:: what is an american corporation? what is a chinese corporation, etc.? my com- puter came here from china. and i don’t know where skype came from. i don’t know who invented skype. in any event, i think the most likely scenario is one of managed conflict and managed cooperation simultaneously. and wise leadership can contain the antagonisms. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) jc: so what role should journalism play in managing this new superpower of confronta- tion? tg: well, i think journalists should do what they should be doing in any case. they should be trying to hold power accountable, they should be trying to explain realities. journalism in the us anyway, in the west in general and perhaps in china too, is too often imprisoned in events rather than social and institutional developments. so the very existence of supply chains, so crucial to understanding what’s happened in china-us relations over the recent decades, needs to be described and explained. and not just once. again and again and again because there are illusions. first of all, that china is “stealing our jobs.” there’s some truth there, but it’s exaggerated. there is the illusion that the us must bow down to dictatorship. there is the illusion that the us is golden and china is wicked. all this stuff has to be stopped and the picture needs to be filled out as it evolves. sometimes chi- nese leaders and people will be angry at why the americans are so interested in the uighurs and sometimes americans will be angry because they think chinese propaganda is undermining our democratic system. trump, accused on the basis of much evidence of collaborating with putin, now conjures a fantasy of millions of fraudulent ballots being deposited by the chinese government in amer- ican mailboxes. this is insane. so all such crazy claims need to be cleared away. but there’ll continue to be us-china frictions. there are different ideas about journalism, about hong kong, about other matters. that’s okay. we’ll see what evolves. but i do think journalism can inflame things. we saw that in the early cold war and in the s very dramatically in both the us and the soviet union. but it needn’t go that way. it needn’t fan the flames of just raw, stupid hatred — and shouldn’t. ms: well, look, theoptimist inmeisstrong. lookatthenewsthismonth. thefirstwoman of color to be on a major party ticket in the history of the country is a sign of progress. i mean, it’s more a sign of progress if biden and harris get elected and that’s yet to be seen. but i think a second four years of a person as ill equipped to lead a constitutional democracy as mr. trump could be really disastrous for this country and for the world and certainly for us-china rela- tions. so far as i know trump still thinks that covid- is a chinese invention. there was the eisenhower cabinet officer who said what’s good for general motors is good for the coun- try. trump seems to think what’s good for mar-a-lago is good for the country. if he actually thinks about what’s good for the country at all. trump will pull out all the stops to be reelected. i think this would be dreadful for us- china relations. and that would be very bad for the world. would there be a new kind of cold war? i think right now it’s mostly an economic cold war which is not the same thing as a cold war. trump’s views about the coronavirus notwithstanding. i don’t think fighting the chinese is as much on his mind as appeasing russia seems to be. you know, every time that a journalist is expelled from china, the western news media are horrified. but at the same time. any time physically attacking a reporter is encouraged by the president of the united states, every journalist in the country is also horrified. so when the police enter a newsroom in hong kong, it’s on the front page of the new york times. even if it’s pure, old fashioned, here’s what happened reporting. you have to make a judgment about where in the paper that belongs. and they made a judgment and it was the front page. that’s a valuejudgment. youcan’tescapevaluejudgmentsinjournalism. andthat’swhattheacademic analysis of ideology and ideal of objectivity (including my own) has never fully come to terms with. and now it’s in our faces. and somehow we have to come to terms with that. jc:somylastquestionwouldbewhatcanbothsociologyandthestudyofnewscontribute https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) to the situation? tg: well, sociology is always, i think, called upon to try to clarify the dynamics of societies, to clarify what’s at stake in history, which entails trying to see events within a context of pro- cesses and institutional power. parenthetically i think sociology would be far more successful and influential in america if it were less jargon-ridden and more concerned with accumulating a popular public, which is not technically proficient but which deserves to have a deeper view than simply the hysteria of the moment. so i think sociology would be all the more effective if it reached out to a larger public. and to some extent we’re seeing this. i mean one of the fascinating things in the black lives matter period is how some social scientists have gotten an important extensive hearing for their explanations of, and debates on, the history of racism in america. the idea of insti- tutional racism, which used to be highly controversial (as counterposed to “prejudice,” which was strictly a matter of individual consciousness), is far more acceptable today. you now hear politicians speaking of it. twenty years ago, it would have been a taboo, left-wing phrase. soci- ologists can take some credit for altering the discourse for the good. jc: and what could the study of news, the journalism studies, could contribute? tg: it’s always important to see how the institutions actually work as opposed to how they say they work and i’m sure this is true in china as it’s true in the united states. so if we understand that news doesn’t come from nowhere but that it’s a product of social decisions, that institutions are at work, that human beings are producing the news, and that the news is not growing on trees, that’s enlightening. the details are enlightening. at the same time, journalism has a serious struggle today because it is itself an embattled institution. it’s embattled mostly by commercial pressures, in particular the collapse of the newspaper industry. so, in addition to trying to make mainstream journalism more thorough and smart, journalists also need to create new platforms for reaching people and attempting to explain why we’re in this crisis and what might be done about it. ms: i think what journalism does — various forms of journalism, from the most profes- sionalized objective journalism to advocacy journalism and all the things in between- they are all trying to make sense of information in an incredibly interdependent globalized world. i keep teaching and keep going back and reading walter lippman’s public opinion, which has been pretty heavily attacked in recent years. i mean, he’s dead, but so it doesn’t matter to him, but various scholars have attacked him for being an elitist, for wanting experts to rule; he never wanted experts to rule. he did say that none of us in a world that has become so complicated can take in and assimilate all the information that bombard us. he was writing long before twitter. and he felt overwhelmed, overwhelmed by how much information there was. and he noticed members of congress couldn’t absorb it all, let alone the rest of us for whom politics is not a full-time job. and — i think he was wrong about this — but he also said there was a world of small, self-contained communities where people had enough knowledge of everybody else in town, and everything else going on in town, that they could make well informed judgments about what to do. but he assumed that the problem was not the people were stupid. the problem was that the world had become overwhelmingly complex. and that, you know, we have lives to lead, we have jobs to do, we have children to take care of, we have elderly to take care of, we have lots to do. and we can’t be spending the entire day reading the new york times, or better still other news outlets, or these days easily other news outlets that that’s just not within human capacity. and that’s the problem. that’s why we have to rely on experts who devote their lives to trying to get a fair handle on some specific small micro domains so that somebody https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) knowshowtodoacolonoscopyandsomebodyelseknowshowtoteachfreshmencomposition and on and on. and that’s why we need journalists, to translate for us to help translate for us. journalists can’t do it all and they won’t do all of it. but they do take a remarkable lunge at this unbearably large task and that’s why journalism matters so much. we’d like it to be as good as possible. and the world is not about to get less complicated, as we can see. jc: ok, thank you both. i think that’s pretty much all the questions that i want to ask. i would like to thank you for all these very inspiring and enlightening comments you just give, especiallyforme, ajournalismresearcherinanauthoritariancountry, strivingtostayoptimistic. so i want to really, you know, show my appreciation for your time and your energy. jiang chang: shenzhen university (china) https://orcid.org/ - - -  criver@protonmail.ch;  https://szu.academia.edu/jiangchang jiang chang, ph.d., is distinguished professor of media and communication studies at shenzhen uni- versity, china. he’s currently working on the politicsof digital countercultures in contemporary china, and the theorization of digital journalism. he has published three books and over eighty research papers in chinese, english and french, and won several awards for his academic achievements, including out- standing young scholar of the china communication academy awards and the swiss government excellence scholarship. he could be reached via e-mail: criver@protonmail.ch. todd gitlin: the columbia university graduate school of journalism, and chair of the ph.d pro- gram in communications (united states)  http://toddgitlin.net todd gitlin has written eighteen books, including history from the last century (the sixties: years of hope, days of rage) and contemporary (occupy nation: the roots, the spirit, and the promise of occupy wall street), sociology (the whole world is watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left); communications theory (media unlimited); and four novels, including sacrifice, which won the harold ribalow award for fiction on jewish themes, and the opposition, to be published in by guernica editions. he is a frequent contributor to the new york times, the washington post, usa today, and other periodicals. michael schudson: the columbia university graduate school of journalism (united states)  https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/michael-s-schudson michael schudson received a b.a. from swarthmore college and m.a. and ph.d. in sociology from harvard. he taught at the university of chicago from to and at the university of california, san diego from to . from on, he split his teaching between ucsd and the columbia university graduate school of journalism, becoming a full-time member of the columbia faculty in . he is the author of eight books and co-editor of four others concerning the history and sociology of the american news media, advertising, popular culture, watergate and cultural memory. he is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences, palo alto, a macarthur foundation “genius” fellow, and has received honorary degrees from the university of groningen (netherlands) and hong kong baptist university. his most recent books are journalism: why it matters (polity, ), the rise of the right to know: politics and the culture of transparency - (harvard, ) and (with c.w. anderson and leonard downie, jr.), the news media: what everyone needs to know (oxford, ). https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://szu.academia.edu/jiangchang http://toddgitlin.net https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/michael-s-schudson https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / religions article confucian democracy and a pluralistic li-ki metaphysics hyo-dong lee the theological school, drew university, madison ave., madison, nj , usa; hlee @drew.edu received: october ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: this essay explores the possible constructive role of a confucian metaphysics in the pluralistic confucian-democratic context of south korea. in his recent landmark study, sungmoon kim has argued that south korean democracy is sustained by a public culture of civility that is grounded in confucian habits and mores and yet is pluralistic in ethos. i appreciatively interrogate kim’s thesis in order to advance a claim that a comprehensive confucian doctrine such as confucian metaphysics can contribute significantly to the flourishing of confucian democratic public culture, provided that it affirm a pluralistic ontology. i contend that the tradition of korean neo-confucian li-ki metaphysics, particularly one found in the works of nongmun im seong-ju, offers rich resources for a pluralistic ontology despite its history of ethical monism. by putting nongmun’s thought in conversation with some of the contemporary critiques of the schmittian (mis-)appropriation of the notion of popular sovereignty, i outline a pluralized version of the rousseauian general will—a kind of critically affectionate solidarity of diverse groups of people—that is confucian in character. my claim is that such a critically affectionate solidarity finds its grounds in and draws its nourishment from a pluralistic confucian ontology. keywords: korean neo-confucianism; li-ki metaphysics; confucian democracy; popular sovereignty; pluralism; public culture . introduction given the spate of political drama that has unfolded in south korea in the last few years, it is probably safe to assume that the nation has become a flourishing democracy, not only in a formal, procedural sense of the term but also in a substantive manner, encompassing the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of south korean society. the candlelight revolution—the months-long nonviolent street protests of millions of citizens against then-president park geun-hye’s corruption and abuse of power—led to the first impeachment and removal from office of a sitting president in the spring of . the new election that immediately followed ushered in a more progressive government that has implemented various liberalizing policies aimed at strengthening civil rights protections, freedom of the press, and labor rights, among others. at the same time, it has waged a campaign to root out the corrupt and authoritarian elements in the government that had undermined and subverted the rule of law. the candlelight revolution has also revitalized the civic sphere, with civic organizations and trade unions freshly empowered to counter the entrenched alliance among politicians, high-ranking government officials, and the giant family-controlled business conglomerates (chaebeols). the voices representing the human rights of oppressed and marginalized people—foremost among them feminist and lgbtqi—are increasingly asserting themselves in the public square and the media landscape, most prominently igniting a #metoo movement directed against prominent politicians, business leaders, intellectuals and more. this kind of momentous historical development, of course, does not spring out of nowhere. a prominent feature of south korean society is that it is, to this day, deeply confucian. up until , religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of korea was ruled for five centuries by one of the most confucian dynasties of all times. long before the end of joseon dynasty in the early twentieth century, confucian habits and mores, centered around the ritual of ancestor veneration and the familial ethical code of filiality, had filtered down from top to bottom, infiltrating all levels of society and all aspects of daily life (deuchler ). it is true that the great social upheavals of the twentieth century—the experience of the nearly half-century-long japanese colonial rule, the division of korean peninsula into two koreas and the devastating korean war, the rapid process of modernization that has profoundly transformed post-war south korea into an industrial, urban society—have interrupted and destroyed so much that was tradition. nonetheless, the confucian habits and mores have persisted, having been profoundly entrenched in the psyche of the people and in the ways they relate to one another on a daily basis. many studies have been conducted in the last decade or so on what role, if any, confucianism has played in the successful democratization of south korea and the establishment of constitutionalism in the nation. it is however beyond the scope of this essay to investigate the possible historical causal relations between the korean confucian tradition and the democratic transformation of south korea. in this essay i will take the reality of vibrant pluralistic democracy in south korea as a context within which i examine a much-debated political-philosophical problem concerning the relationship between confucianism and democracy, namely the question of the possibility of a confucian democracy. more specifically, i will explore possible contributions that confucianism as a comprehensive doctrine could make for the flourishing of a pluralistic democracy. for that purpose, i will center my discussion on the tradition of so-called neo-confucian “moral metaphysics” (tu , p. ) and ask what role it may play in developing a robust theory of confucian democracy. . confucian democracy and “religious” confucianism in his recent landmark study, confucian democracy in east asia, sungmoon kim envisions a democracy with characteristics indigenous to east asia. the kind of democracy he envisions is one sustained and animated by a public culture grounded in confucian habits and mores, befitting the social context of south korea where confucianism governed almost every aspect of life just a century ago and still does in a much more attenuated, yet deeply lingering sense. the confucian habits and mores that kim proposes are qualitatively different from those of a traditional confucian society, which was a “ritual-constituted gemeinschaft that aims at an organic whole” (kim , p. ). rather, they are core components of a more loosely circumscribed confucian public culture shared by the citizens of a democratic civil society who subscribe to different comprehensive moral doctrines (p. ). in articulating those habits and mores, kim highlights the familial moral sentiments traditionally at the heart of the confucian ethical and ritualistic tradition, namely filial affection (親 qı̄n) in the parent–child relation, the most primordial of all relations in confucian thought (p. ). in the dominant, mencian strain of confucian tradition, filial affection is thought to reflect in the most primordial sense the heart of empathy (惻隱之心 cèyı̌nzhı̄xı̄n), which is endowed by heaven in all of us and which grows into the virtue of humanity or benevolence (仁 ren) in and through ethical and ritual practices within the context of the so-called five relations (五倫 wulun). hence, the parent–child relation serves as the model for the rest of the five relations, and in so doing makes the familial the paradigm for the public and the political ( – ). according to kim, in the mencian perspective people’s moral-political self-cultivation starts out from their practice of filial affection in the familial context, whose characteristic ethico-ritual form is filiality (孝悌 xiaoti), and their extension (推 tui) of it beyond the familial context (p. ). this is how see, among others, (shin ; kim ). for an excellent survey of the debate, see (angle ). i borrow the phrase “comprehensive doctrine” from (kim , p. ). the phrase “moral metaphysics” was coined by mou zhongsan to highlight the neo-confucian attempts to provide a metaphysical basis of human existence as moral agents. religions , , of people come to cultivate various manifestations of the virtue of humanity, such as trustworthiness (信 xin), social harmony (和 he), respect of the elderly (敬老 jinglao), and respectful deference (辭讓 cirang), among others (p. ). the mencian political tradition confers the mandate of heaven to rule upon the virtuous and sage ruler because the sage ruler is the one who has acquired these virtues of humanity in a consummate fashion. he has nurtured the heaven-endowed humanity (ren) in him to perfection and has thereby become the genuine human being who is able to extend the familial moral-sentiment in him analogically to encompass even strangers as if they were quasi-family members. as the supreme embodiment of the filial affection, the king, as the son of heaven and the father to all his subjects, rules by extending that affection in the form of benevolence (ren) toward people and love (愛 ai) toward all living things ( – ). in so doing, the monarch, as consummate exemplar-teacher, is able to nurture the moral cultivation of his subjects, not least by implementing public policies designed to provide favorable material conditions for their moral development. here lies the essence of confucian virtue politics (德治 dezhi) realized through a benevolent government (仁政 renzheng) ( – ). in the contemporary east asian context, kim argues, it is however important to realize that “the capacity to envisage strangers as if they were (quasi-)family members does not necessarily have to rely on the foundational metaphysical account of human nature and particular moral virtues affiliated with it” (p. ). in other words, the familial moral sentiments can be decoupled from the mencian metaphysical account of filial affection as rooted in the heaven-endowed virtue of humanity. the public virtues, mores, and habits which the familial moral sentiments nurture can be unmoored from the cosmological-metaphysical understanding of the familial as the political best exemplified in the idea of the mandate of heaven to rule given to the virtuous ruler. kim’s reasons for this move lie in the fact such cosmological-metaphysical accounts are comprehensive moral doctrines. central to a pluralist democracy today is the sound moral-political judgments of its citizens, not the kind of full-blown moral ideal of sagehood and the concomitant programs of moral cultivation found in the classical confucian cosmological-metaphysical accounts of the familial as political, especially when the latter’s exaltation of moral equality—that anyone can become a sage—is intertwined with an unquestioning acceptance of political inequality (p. ). going further, kim distinguishes confucian public culture, which he advocates, from confucian culture in an ethically monistic sense, a case of which is cheng-zhu neo-confucianism that had exercised a socio-political and cultural monopoly in korea for centuries. korean cheng-zhu neo-confucianism allowed no room for ethical pluralism by instituting a patriarchal social hierarchy undergirded by clan law (宗法 zongbeop zongfa) and family rituals (家禮 garye jiali) (p. ). as “religious confucianism”—and a monistic/patriarchal one to boot—such a confucian culture should not constitute the core of confucian public culture, although citizens may hold it as their private value system (that is, as “private confucianism”) (p. ). in summary, comprehensive moral doctrines are something of an overkill when it comes to the task of constituting a democratic public culture, and are to be sidelined when their ethical monism collides with the value pluralism at the heart of a pluralistic democracy. today, kim observes, the confucian virtues, both familial and political because they are based on the capacity to regard strangers as if they were quasi-family members, are “widely cherished as public virtues and socially available through the continued ritual practices” in traditionally confucian societies in east asia (p. ). what renders east asian societies confucian today is not their citizens’ adherence to comprehensive confucian moral doctrines but the distinctively confucian character of their public mores and habits in the sense mentioned above, which is predicated on “the social kim notes that the will of the people—their contentment or discontent—was always understood to express vicariously the mandate of heaven, leading to the demand that the ruler translate his moral accountability to heaven into his political responsibility for the well-being of the people (p. ). this is the meaning of the time-honored confucian political thesis of “people-centrism” (民本 minběn) (p. ). the confucian literati, the ruling class, “saw themselves not merely as king’s servants but heaven servants, public servants (公僕 gongpu)”, sharing with the ruler moral accountability to heaven (p. ). religions , , of semiotics of confucian rituals” still widely practiced (p. ). how, then, do these public mores and habits give rise to the public culture of a thriving pluralistic democracy? because it is rooted in, and nurtured and sustained by various ethical and ritual expressions of filial affection, kim claims that such a confucian public culture is characterized by civility. at the same time, this public culture consists in a kind of public reason animated by “critical affection” (p. ) or “critical familial affection” (p. ), which prevents civility from degenerating into docility. a family is often filled with psychological tension and moral disagreements because of the “affective resentment” present in one’s love of one’s family members, enabling the family members to love the virtues of one another while hating the injustices (p. ). this is why familial moral sentiments consist in critical affection, which, when extended to the public, forms the core of confucian public reason, empowering the citizens of a pluralistic democratic society to regard one another as members of a quasi-family even when vehemently and passionately disagreeing with one another (p. ). critical affection forms the heart of the ethos indispensable to a well-functioning confucian pluralistic democracy. relating this notion of confucian public culture of civility to the specific context of south korea, kim suggests that a concrete example of the familial moral sentiments in the south korean context is found in jeong, the sense of closeness and mutual affection which koreans feel as they reason with one another, as if they were all members of one big family. since jeong enables koreans to regard the korean nation as one extended family, it nurtures in them a sense of ethical responsibility toward one another, which kim calls “uri (we)-responsibility”, which allows them to maintain a bond of “critical affection” even when disagreeing with one another across deep differences as strangers to one another. this, as “a uniquely korean-confucian mode of general will” (p. ), is the key to a public culture of civility in the south korean context—the kind of public reason and culture that has sustained and continues to sustain the drive toward a pluralist democracy in south korea. kim’s thesis is a provocative one with profound implications for assessing the role that the deeply embedded confucian heritage in east asia has to play in the growth and maturing of democratic institutions and cultures across the east asian nations. his key argument—that in order to accommodate the value pluralism of a democratic public culture, the confucian public virtues nurtured by the familial moral sentiments must be decoupled from the confucian moral cosmology and metaphysics in which those virtues have traditionally been embedded—represents a significant breakthrough in so assessing the role of confucian heritage in today’s east asia. this is especially the case in the context of the current debates around the notion of confucian democracy, since kim’s thesis is an important corrective, in my view, to the similar attempts made by the contemporary advocates of confucian meritocracy and “perfectionism”, such as daniel bell, tongdong bai, jiang qing, and joseph chan, to divorce the ideal of moral-political meritocracy from the cosmology and metaphysics underlying traditional confucian virtue politics (bell ; bai ; qing ; chan ). the principal difference between kim and the confucian meritocrats/perfectionists lies in the fact that, due to their retention of confucian conceptions of (objectively) good life, the latter end up providing inadequate explanations of how they can avoid ethical monism when their non-comprehensive doctrines of political meritocracy/perfectionism are all about publicly promoting moral-political cultivation of citizens guided precisely by those substantive conceptions of good life. given the limited scope of this essay, however, i will not discuss further the disagreements between the said advocates of confucian meritocracy and the confucian democrats like kim. this is precisely why kim calls confucian public reason a bridging capital that “bonds citizens horizontally across their deep differences” rather than a bonding capital that “cements the existing social fabric of moral community” (p. ). of the confucian meritocrats/perfectionists, joseph chan comes closest to addressing seriously the issue of value pluralism in modern constitutional democracy, while jiang qing explicitly foregrounds his desire to rehabilitate the traditional confucian ideal of virtue politics to the extent of appealing to the transcendent, sacred legitimacy of “heaven”. among the ranks of confucian democrats are deweyan communitarians like roger ames, david hall, and sor-hoon tan. see (ames and hall ; tan ). religions , , of i would like, rather, to raise a question that kim does not explicitly pursue in his work: what would then be the role of confucianism as a comprehensive moral doctrine or ethical system in a confucian public culture? kim names such a confucianism “religious confucianism” or “private confucianism” and relegates it to the status of a private value system held by individual citizens or associations, with little if any role to play in constituting the core of confucian public culture. however, if, as kim argues, confucian public values and practices such as “filial and fraternal love and responsibility, respect of elders, moral criticism and rectification of government, and social harmony” (p. ) have made a critical contribution to the democratization of south korea and still underpin its confucian public culture, then one is driven to ask: what gave birth to those values and practices, and nurtured them through the centuries? the answer is pretty straightforward: it is confucianism as a comprehensive moral doctrine, and, more specifically, in the case of korea, ethically monistic and socially patriarchal cheng-zhu neo-confucianism. it is therefore apropos to ask if confucian public culture could sustain itself as confucian without the gestating womb and the nourishing breastmilk of confucianism as a comprehensive ethical system. while it may be necessary to distinguish clearly confucian public culture from “religious” or “private” confucianism” and not to allow the latter to be legally established at the core of the former, it does seem beneficial for the health of a pluralistic confucian democracy to consider the public—that is, political—role of confucianism as a comprehensive doctrine or worldview. in the context of the united states, we find analogues of “religious” confucianism having a public, political role to play. given its history, one could persuasively argue that the public mores and habits of the citizens of the united states are still christian in an attenuated sense of the term, despite the “wall of separation” between church and state erected by the first amendment to the constitution. precisely due to the loosely christian character of the public culture of the united states, christianity as a comprehensive doctrine and ethical system wields in this land a considerable influence on public discourse. its influence, however, is a double-edged sword. the enduring political power of right-wing, fundamentalist—and even theocratic—christian evangelicalism, as prominently displayed in the election of president donald trump, is an exemplary case unveiling the danger posed by a comprehensive doctrine when a significant part of the public culture traces its roots to and is still very much nurtured and animated by that doctrine. at the same time, martin luther king jr. and progressive black churches are a shining testament to the salutary effects that a form of christianity as a comprehensive doctrine can have on the maturing of a pluralistic democratic civil society. in assessing the public role of confucianism as a comprehensive doctrine, then, the key point at issue is what kind. a comprehensive doctrine seems by definition to boast a totalizing horizon that engulfs all differences. nevertheless, encompassing does not necessarily or always mean nullifying. there may be a comprehensive doctrine or ethical system that offers a space for myriad differences to blossom within its horizon without subsuming them all under a single authoritative orthodoxy. such a doctrine or system would nurture the kind of public culture that “relaxes what counts as an assault upon the sacred”, as william connolly has suggested (connolly , p. ). within the context of south korea, a good candidate for such a “pluralistically” comprehensive moral doctrine would have to be found within the orbits of cheng-zhu neo-confucianism, given the dominant—almost exclusive—role it has played in shaping the confucian character of the nation’s public culture. . neo-confucian moral metaphysics: monism or pluralism? it is beyond doubt that cheng-zhu neo-confucianism tended to be ethically monistic, historically speaking, as sungmoon kim has argued. there may be various reasons for its being so, but my suspicion is that its ethically monistic tendency may have something to do at least partly with its intellectual heritage, namely, neo-confucian moral metaphysics, especially its focus on the ordering, for a trenchant analysis of the political power and influence of the right-wing conservative evangelical christianity in the united states, see (connolly ). religions , , of unifying, and harmonizing power of pattern (理li). according to neo-confucian metaphysics, everything consists in a union of pattern (理 li) and psychophysical energy (氣 qi). psychophysical energy is the vital energy of the universe that constitutes everything—visible and invisible, with form and without form, living and non-living, material and ideal, and body and mind. pattern, on the other hand, refers to the metaphysical structure of reality that is logically, ontologically, and normatively prior to psychophysical energy, yet is always found “embodied” in the latter and dependent on it for creative dynamism. pattern and psychophysical energy are intertwined in the following manner. pattern in its state of sheer—structuring—potentiality is one, simple, indeterminate, and abstract. when “activated” by psychophysical energy, however, this one heavenly pattern (天理 tianli) issues forth into myriad concrete patterns that structure the “ten thousand things” (萬物 wanwu) of the world. this is the crucial point made by zhu xi, the “systematizer” of cheng-zhu neo confucianism, when he says, famously, “pattern unites, [whereas] psychophysical energy differentiates (理同氣異 litong qiyi)” (zhu b, vol. , p. ) in relation to another well-known statement by one of his predecessors, cheng yi, “pattern is one, but its manifestations are many (理一而分殊 liyi er fenshu)” (cheng a, vol. , p. ). this ontological account of one and many raises a critical question: if difference and multiplicity are introduced into pattern only insofar as pattern is activated by psychophysical energy, then does that not signal an unarticulated premise that pattern is originarily and ultimately one, and only derivatively and penultimately many? insofar as pattern is the metaphysical ultimate with logical, ontological, and normative priority over psychophysical energy, an undercurrent of ontological asymmetry between one and many is unmistakable. one can detect this undercurrent in the celebrated and much-discussed saying of cheng yi on pattern: “empty and tranquil, and without any sign, and yet all figures are luxuriantly present [沖漠無朕, 萬象森然已具 chongmo wuzhen, wanxiang senran yiju] . . . it is like a tree one hundred feet high. from the root to the branches and leaves, there is one thread running through all . . . actually there is only one track.” (cheng b, vol. , p. ). in illustrating the relationship between pattern as the simple, indeterminate and quiescent one (“empty and tranquil, and without any sign”) and the myriad configurations of individual patterns found in it (“all figures are luxuriantly present”), cheng yi employs a historically influential arboretic metaphor in which the branches and leaves all derive from and depend on the single root system and trunk. this ontologically asymmetrical rendition of the relationship between one and many is accompanied in cheng-zhu neo-confucian metaphysics by a propensity to devalue psychophysical energy not merely as the source of difference but also of evil. the unavoidable excesses and deficiencies in psychophysical energy’s differentiating movements, it claims, inevitably give rise to individual configurations of psychophysical energy that are opaque, impure, turbid, indolent, and therefore less open and communicative. zhu xi locates the source of evil, which is understood as selfishness, in these non-resonating and uncommunicative configurations of psychophysical energy. when human beings are born with these kinds of psychophysical configuration, they more often than not obstruct the full realization of the virtue of humanity as empathy in them, namely, the essence of “psychophysical energy” is a slight modification of daniel k. gardner’s translation of qi into “psychophysical stuff” (gardner , p. n. ). a more precise translation would be “psycho-bio-physical energy”. i follow a. c. graham’s translation of li as “pattern” (graham , p. ). in its interpretation by zhu xi, the duality of pattern and psychophysical energy comes to resemble the western distinction between the metaphysical and the physical, as can be seen from the following well-known remark: “pattern is the way above physical form (形而上之道) and the root from which all things are born. psychophysical energy, by contrast, is the vessel with physical form (形而下之器) and the instrument by which all things are produced” (zhu c, vol. , p. ). the sentence also appears quoted in zhuzi yulei: “if we discuss it from the perspective of the single origin of the myriad thing-events, pattern unites, while psychophysical energy differentiates” (zhu , vol. , p. ). see also “what makes them similar is their pattern; what makes them different is their psychophysical energy” (zhu , vol. , p. ). i am using wing-tsit chan’s translation of this saying with one modification, substituting “all figures” for “all things” (chan , p. ). this is in contrast to the famed “rhizomatic” metaphor employed by deleuze and guattari to underscore the ontological ultimacy of multiplicity (deleuze and guattari ). religions , , of the heaven-endowed human nature that is their individual pattern (li) (ching , pp. – ). it is a common neo-confucian observation that the vast majority of people are born with such non-resonating, uncommunicative and therefore involuted configurations of psychophysical energy ( – ). when this observation is coupled with the assignment of ontological penultimacy to the multiplicity of individual patterns, all derived from concrete determinations of the one indeterminate and abstract heavenly pattern by the morally ambiguous differentiating dynamic of psychophysical energy, the offspring is the neo-confucian de facto—if not de jure—devaluation of the moral agency of the vast majority of people. this anti-egalitarian tendency shows itself in the cheng-zhu neo-confucian opposition of “heavenly pattern” (天理 tianli), which is “public” (公 gong), to “human desire” (人欲 renyu), which is “private” (私 si), and its social patriarchalism in which the ruling class of cultured male gentry, who are versed in the classics and thus trained in the way of the sages to exercise public leadership, stand as “superior persons” (君子 junzi) over women, the working mass of commoners, and foreign “barbarians” as “inferior persons” (小人 xiaoren) (zhu a, vol. , p. ). the ruling elites impose their own parochial patterns—their ritual ways (dao)—upon the ruled subjects with the claim of representing heavenly pattern allegedly discovered by the ancient sages and preserved in the classics. the way of the ruling elites enjoys unrivaled hegemony over any other ways of the oppressed multitude and does not suffer a competitor, since it stands for the “objectively settled” and “unchanging” universal pattern of the revered founding figures of human culture in whose name the elites rule and from whose legacy they derive the legitimacy of their rule as the guardians of the sagely learning (angle , pp. – ). in this sense, the ethical monism and social patriarchalism of cheng-zhu neo-confucianism prove to be the two sides of the same coin. hence, cheng-zhu neo-confucian metaphysics in its traditional form is a poor candidate to serve as an inspiration for a pluralistically comprehensive moral doctrine that could sustain and nurture the confucian public culture of a pluralistic democracy. nevertheless, there are strains of neo-confucian thought, both in and outside the hegemonic cheng-zhu school, that reject the ontologically asymmetrical rendition of the one-many relation, i.e., ones that do not devalue the spontaneous movements of psychophysical energy in order unduly to valorize the unifying and harmonizing power of pattern. let me hint at two possible sources, both from korean neo-confucianism, for envisioning a pluralistically comprehensive moral doctrine. hwadam seo gyeong-deok (花潭徐敬德 – ), for one, famously argued that at the ultimate ground of the world lies the one psychophysical energy (一氣 ilgi), also called “the great void” (太虛 taeheo), not pattern. the great void is in a state of utter clarity, stillness, oneness, purity, and emptiness (湛一 虛 damil cheongheo) (seo , pp. , ) yet its spontaneously differentiating and structuring movements give rise to the myriad things of the world (p. ). a similar yet more sophisticated understanding of psychophysical energy as the creative ground of the cosmos is put forward by nongmun im seong-ju (鹿門任聖周 – ). the core thesis of nongmun’s neo-confucian metaphysics, that “pattern and psychophysical energy are equally actual zhu xi states, “human nature is always good, yet there are some who are good from the time of their births, and there are those who are evil from the time of their births. this is due to the differences in their physical endowment . . . the goal of learning is to transform the physical endowment, although such transformation is very difficult” (zhu , vol. , p. ). dai zhen, a qing dynasty neo-confucian, criticized the song and ming neo-confucians for claiming the authority of the heavenly pattern to justify their own parochial interests and desires: “of those who regard pattern as something obtained from heaven and endowed in the heart-mind, there is none who does not replace it with their personal opinions” (dai , vol. , p. ). for the cheng-zhu neo-confucians, heavenly pattern—which angle translates as “universal coherence” (angle , p. )—is objectively settled (定 ding) and unchanging (常 chang), having been discovered by the early sages who had deep insights into the human nature. following zhang zai, hwadam calls the one psychophysical energy also “the great void” (太虛 taeheo/taixu). (seo , p. ). hwadam understands 一氣 (ilgi) as the ultimate creative ground of the cosmos, in contrast to the dominant usage of the term within the confucian and daoist traditions. religions , , of [理氣同實 ligi dongsil],” claims that principle and psychophysical energy completely correspond to each other in all respects, in all their modes of being and operation (son , p. ; hong , p. ). metaphysical li and physical ki (qi) are, in other words, two distinct yet intertwined, mutually irreducible, and co-extensive aspects of the ultimate reality, i.e., what he calls “one transparently all-encompassing and overflowingly large thing-event [一箇虛圓盛大底物事 ilgae heowon seongdae jeo mulsa]” which is no other than the dynamic substance-in-process of all that is and becomes (im e, . a/p. ). the two are different characterizations of the same ultimate reality, psychophysical energy being its characterization from the perspective of the world simply being the way it is, while pattern is the characterization of the ultimate reality from the perspective of the reason why the world is or must be the way it is (im d, . b/p. ). the two characterizations together give expression to the ultimate reality’s visible and spontaneous movement of creative harmonization that constitutes the world on the one hand and its invisible function of rationally grounding and normatively governing the same world on the other. the ontological and cosmic creativity manifest in the universe, i.e., the ubiquitous phenomenon of the so-called “life-giving intention” (生意 saeng-ui/sheng yi) frequently extolled by the neo-confucians, is a joint manifestation of pattern and psychophysical energy. nongmun’s thesis of the co-extensive and equal actuality of pattern and psychophysical energy implies that the ultimate reality is both the principle of unity and harmony on the one hand, and the principle of differentiation and delimitation on the other. in other words, he introduces difference and multiplicity directly into the heart of the “one transparently all-encompassing and overflowingly large thing-event” that is both pattern and psychophysical energy. his innovative rendition of the concept of “the original substance of psychophysical energy” (氣之本體 ki ji bonche) (im e, . b/p. ), which is all-pervasively present in the very process of its concrete delimitation into myriad individual configurations of psychophysical energy, underpins his key claim that “psychophysical energy is one, but its manifestations are many (氣一分殊 gi-il bunsu)” (im e, . a/p. ). by thus making psychophysical energy both the principle of unity and differentiation, he not only overturns the cheng-zhu neo-confucian devaluation of psychophysical energy but also locates in it the source of the creativity and fecundity observed in the cosmos. in line with his ontologically symmetrical rendition of both the li-ki relation and the one-many relation, nongmun veers away from the cheng-zhu neo-confucian distinction between the heaven-endowed original nature of things (本然之性 benran zhi xing), which is traditionally regarded as pattern in abstraction from psychophysical energy, and the so-called physical nature (氣質之性 qizhi zhi xing), i.e., the individually unique natures of concretely existing things determined and delimited by their specific psychophysical endowments. he rejects the distinction between the two on the ground that the individually unique natures retain their original impulse toward unity and harmony—the telltale sign of the efficacious presence of the original nature—in the form of their shared life-giving intention (im c, . a/p. ; cf. choe , pp. – ). in the case of humans whose individually unique natures are determined primarily by the respective psychophysical constitution of their heart-minds (心 sim), his disavowal of the distinction between the original nature and the physical nature leads him simply to label human nature the original nature (im d, . a–b/p. ). in fact, he insists on the original goodness of the concrete human heart-minds to such an extent that he draws up the following corollary to his main thesis: “the heart-mind and the nature are equally actual nongmun’s thought amounts to a parallel and “dipolar” construction of the pattern-psychophysical energy relation. for citations from im seong-ju’s nongmunjip, i give the book number and the page number in the traditional format, and then (after a slash) the page number in the modern pagination, as its “modern” edition is in fact a facsimile of the traditional format. nongmun states, “its being so refers to psychophysical energy, while its reason for being so corresponds to pattern [其然者 氣也; 所以然者理也]”. the notion of “life-giving intention” was championed by cheng hao and zhu xi. nongmun himself acknowledges the influence of cheng hao and zhu xi on his notion of “life-giving intention” (im e, . b– a/pp. – ). nongmun regards the phenomenon of “life-giving intention” as a principal evidence for the creatively harmonizing power of psychophysical energy (im e, . a/p. , . b/p. , . a/p. ). religions , , of (心性同實 simseong dongsil)” (im a, . a/p. ; im b, . b/p. ). the end-product of his renovation of cheng-zhu neo-confucian metaphysics is a robust defense of the inherent moral subjectivity and agency of all human beings—the mencian heritage—whose political implications are still much to be drawn out and explored. . toward a pluralistically comprehensive doctrine of confucian democracy nongmun was, of course, neither a pluralist nor an advocate of democracy. he remained within the orbit of ethically monistic and socially patriarchal korean cheng-zhu confucianism and did not develop the possible, ethically and politically liberating, implications of his thought. nonetheless, if differences and multiplicity are at the heart of ultimate reality as he suggested, then this may provide us with an occasion to reconsider the moral and political significance of a confucian metaphysics for a pluralistic democracy. in a confucian metaphysics inspired by nongmun, the plurality and differences that characterize our embodied existence could no longer be viewed as secondary and derivative qualities co-emergent with our individual birth from our supposedly singular, unitary origin and ground of being. this implies that, for such a pluralistically comprehensive confucian doctrine, the existence within a pluralistic democracy of different values and groups of people, named along various markers of identity and difference (gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, etc.), would reflect the nature of reality as such. pluralism, including political pluralism, would be an intrinsic feature of the landscape within its allegedly totalizing horizon. furthermore, by giving the nod to the idea of popular sovereignty as capable of underpinning the constitution of a body politic made up precisely of diverse groups of people beholden to different value systems, such a confucian metaphysics would reject the much-debated conception of popular sovereignty as unitary. for much of the history of the modern nation-states, popular sovereignty was understood and exercised on the model of absolute monarchy, by opposing the unity of the sovereign to the multiplicity of the multitude. hobbes, one of the early theorists of the modern sovereign state, famously described the hypothetical social contract through which human beings, desperate to overcome the state of nature fraught with a “war of every man against every man” (hobbes , p. ), voluntarily surrendered their individual sovereignty, i.e., their natural right to govern and to defend themselves, to a single sovereign power—either a monarch or an assembly—in order to constitute a commonwealth that promised protection and security ( – ). although the sovereign was, for rousseau, the law-giving “general will” of the people forming one nation instead of the will of the monarch, its sovereignty was, nevertheless, indivisible (rousseau , pp. – ). furthermore, for popular, democratic sovereignty to work, the multitude, who were no more than a rabble, must be molded into a people with a unitary will, which required the state with legitimate political authority to subject the chaotic bodies of the multitude. this unitary view of popular sovereignty finds one of its most sinister contemporary renditions in carl schmitt, who defines the essence of the political as consisting in a friend-enemy distinction, publically conceived, and the existential struggle of the people to survive against external and internal nongmun’s main theses, “pattern and psychophysical energy are equally actual [理氣同實 i gi dong sil]” and “the heart-mind and the nature completely correspond [to each other] [心性一致 sim seong il chi] were originally coined by his teacher, yi gan, to refer primarily to the human heart-mind in its un-activated state in which the original substance of psychophysical energy fully resonates with the original human nature’s mandate of empathy and harmony. nongmun applied this insight to what might be called ultimate reality, expanding the notion of i gi dong sil to cover the ground and depth of the entire cosmos (choe , p. ). in affirming the notion of popular sovereignty, the pluralistically comprehensive confucian metaphysics which i am suggesting in this essay sides with confucian democrats like sor-hoon tan and sungmoon kim over against the advocates of confucian meritocracy, such as joseph chan and jiang qing. for the following discussion of popular sovereignty, i am indebted to clayton crocket (crocket , pp. – ). rousseau describes how the “multitude” (p. ) becomes united in one sovereign body politic though social contract, and claims that when the sovereign democratic state is dissolved, democracy, the rule of the citizens, degenerates into ochlocracy, the rule of the (chaotic) multitude (p. ). religions , , of threats (schmitt , pp. – ). the political entity, i.e., the state, decides on the friend-enemy distinction, separating out the “public enemies” from the body politic internally and defending itself from other states externally (pp. – ). the state’s sovereignty lies precisely in its power to create the friend-enemy grouping and, in so doing, to produce itself as a political community beyond mere societal or associational groupings (p. ). the citizens of a democratic state, the demos, exercise popular sovereignty insofar as they purge themselves of hostile, alien elements within and stand united in opposition to enemies without. a pluralistic confucian metaphysics would not be able to accommodate the unitary conception of popular sovereignty, let alone schimtt’s extreme version of it. it would refuse to conceive the people’s autonomous capacity to rule themselves as predicated on a production of “them”—i.e., the politically externalized remainder that giorgio agamben memorably calls homo sacer (agamben ). in face of the political storm and the media war stirred up in south korea recently by the arrival of yemeni refugees in the southernmost island of jeju, it would repudiate any notion of a homogeneous and unitary demos that can come into being only by erecting border walls, both visible and invisible, beyond which immigrants, refugees, and undesirable minorities are to be cast out. in response to the heated confrontations between lgbtqi-pride marchers and violent counter-demonstrators in the city of incheon, it would support the notion of popular sovereignty as the freedom of self-governance enjoyed by a body of people bound together even across deep differences by critically affectionate solidarity, which sungmoon kim insightfully captures with his notion of confucian public reason based on critical affection (jeong) and uri-responsibility. the confucian character of such a pluralistic metaphysics lies precisely in this—that it underwrites the idea of a body politic, which is capable of peaceably holding together diverse groups of people beholden to different value systems, on the basis of the humane heart of empathy claimed to be in all of us, whose many names are ren, jeong, critical familial affection, critically affectionate solidarity, and so on. the democratic character of such a confucian metaphysics comes to the fore when it rejects the elitism of traditional confucian virtue politics, viz., when it declines to prioritize the objectively settled and unchanging universal pattern of benevolent sociopolitical organization, allegedly discovered by the ancient sages and entrusted to the care of the enlightened junzi, as the most unsullied articulation—patterning (li)—of the humane heart of empathy. precisely how, then, does such a pluralistically comprehensive confucian doctrine appeal to the humane heart of empathy in order to provide support to the idea of a confucian democratic polity? here, the all-encompassing metaphysical horizon of the pluralistic confucian doctrine serves to anchor, ontologically, the pivotal moral-political notion of critically affectionate solidarity. its affirmation of the ontological ultimacy of both one and many, both unity and diversity, in a universe as lush and bountiful as ours would enable us to surmise, if not to know for certain, that the differences at the heart of reality are held together peaceably by something analogous to the humane heart of mutual empathy, so that myriad patterns (li) and harmonies—a cosmos—could be born. in other words, despite the chaotic percolation of différance that all-pervasively characterizes the ontological depth of our being (to borrow derrida’s celebrated term for the unending non-teleological processes of elemental mutual differentiation at the core of any seemingly stable essential unity), what prevents reality from collapsing into a state of perpetual conflict and barren chaos is no other than something like mutual affection that brings together the differences to ground—that is, to “pattern”—a meaningful and valuable cosmos. it is precisely in this sense that the two prominent examples of mutual empathy and affection, namely the cardinal confucian virtue of ren and the korean jeong, are manifestations in the human sphere of the cosmic and metacosmic “life-giving intention,” i.e., the boundlessly generous creativity at the root of things. notwithstanding the daoist rejoinder, that “heaven and earth are not humane (天地不 religions , , of 仁 tiandi buren)” the pluralistic confucian metaphysics would insist on the affective—empathetic and therefore humane—constitution of the world’s suoyiran (所以然), i.e., the reason for there being a world. such a confucian doctrine of the affective grounding of a pluralistic cosmos would enable us to claim that the peaceable co-flourishing of different values and diverse groups of people in a world as vital and fecund as ours—all its discord and conflicts notwithstanding—reflects the deepest undercurrent of reality pulsing with mutual empathy and affection. the pluralistic confucian metaphysics of the kind i have suggested would allow us to venture a thesis, that our freedom to live and thrive, each of us in our own distinct way, will not inevitably jeopardize the bonds of critical affection that sustains a pluralistic confucian democracy, and that, even without the learned elites’ paradigmatic ethico-political patterning (li) of our mutual empathy, we can in our freedom traverse our differences to forge patterns (li) of peaceable co-flourishing. such a confucian metaphysics would offer a “religious” basis for the trust we put in the strength and resilience of confucian public culture to hold our fractious democratic commonwealth together. it would even be able to provide a metacosmic rationale for believing in the power of confucian public culture to bridge our disparate and contentious ways with what kwok pui-lan and joerg rieger call “deep solidarity”—the solidarity of those who have compassion for one another on account of their shared suffering, i.e., their common experience of oppression, exploitation, and marginalization, even with all their differences in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, and so on (rieger and kwok , p. ). confucianism as a comprehensive doctrine, when so reimagined, could even be said to be indispensable for the well-being of a pluralistic democratic commonwealth in east asia, given the power to tug at the body and mind, which the confucian discourses still wield widely in east asian nations, especially in south korea, despite more than a century of intellectual marginalization and neglect. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references agamben, giorgio. . homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford: stanford university press. ames, roger t., and david l. hall. . the democracy of the dead: dewey, confucius, and the hope for democracy in china. chicago: 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author(s) abstract germaine greer’s polemic ‘on rape’ has proved controversial and has served to further divide feminist opinion on the way to move forward from #metoo in consent reform. greer’s work, along with other second wave feminists, has been rejected by third wave feminist scholarship for simultaneously minimising the harm caused to victims of sexual violence and claiming that rape is not ‘catastrophic’, with naomi wolf being greer’s most vocal and powerful opponent. yet, i claim that in maintain- ing this position in opposition to greer we are missing the real transformative power of greer’s revival of second-wave arguments in relation to reforming our laws on consent post #metoo. the consent framework and the definition of consent under the sexual offences act has been readily criticised for its vague definition of ‘freedom’ and ‘capacity’ in that such a definition misses the subtler, yet powerful, ways in which victims are coerced and abused—those which are most insidious, since they are embedded within the fabric of our society, and within the ‘tissue’ of heterosex. greer’s position that rape is ‘bad sex’ may well hold some truth— since bad sex for women has long been accepted as part of life albeit reduced to sufferance and duty. inevitably, this leads us to the conclusion that there are many more instances of rape than we thought, and many more women suffering, than we thought. this article examines this position and argues for urgent research on wom- en’s sexuality, and radical intervention in the law and academia, in the quest for con- sent law reform. keywords consent reform · feminism · women’s sexuality · sexual offences · greer * victoria brooks v.brooks@westminster.ac.uk school of law, university of westminster, - little titchfield street, london, uk http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf v. brooks introduction in reading greer’s arguments in her recent polemic essay, on rape, we find a timely revival of second-wave feminist scholarship. given we are collectively looking for research strategies post #metoo in order to work towards a law that fits the sexuality of women, we need fresh and radical theoretical perspectives. i claim that if we are to find the potential for reform, among the controversy, we need to ask the following question: how do we translate greer’s second-wave revival into concrete research strategies aimed at consent reform? at the core of sexual offences, is the law of consent. in england and wales, the sexual offences act (which succeeded the sexual offences act ), outlines three key offences under ss - , those being rape (s ), sexual assault by penetration (s ) and sexual assault (s ). as part of each of these offences, consent is an integral element. as part of the actus reus (criminal act) and mens rea (criminal mind), a lack of consent and a lack of belief in consent must be respectively proven. the act defines consent under s. as ‘a person consents if he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice’, and this will be applicable to all three offences. an offence is commit- ted under ss - where the individual elements of the offence are proven, and where there is an absence of consent, and where the defendant lacks reasonable belief in consent. for example, for s rape to be made out, the following must be proven: intentional penetration by a penis of the anus, vagina or mouth of the victim, with- out consent and without reasonable belief that the victim was consenting. accord- ingly, the offence of rape under s of the act can only be committed by a man with penis. penetration with anything else, falls under either s or s of the act. greer refers in her book to the offence of rape, to which she limits her critique. greer explicitly takes care to explain that her book is limited to consideration of an offence of non-consensual penetration of the vagina by the penis (greer : ). i argue that greer’s arguments have broader application than s. , as with other second wave feminism, to the entire conceptual integrity of consent. this is sig- nificant since consent is integral to all offences under the sexual offences act , meaning that her arguments, taken to relate specifically to consent, have broad application to nonconsensual sex, no matter what offence might techni- cally be committed. indeed, greer has pointed to the problematic aspects of con- sent more broadly, and the need for research on the ‘fit’ of consent for women’s sexuality, and their continuing struggle for equality before the law. as we can see, consent sits, rightly, at the heart of sexual offences. this is, however, where the complexity begins, and where greer’s arguments illuminate both the veracity and prevalence of sexual offences, and point to the conditions that gave rise to sexual offences act . supra. aaccompanying the s. definition of consent are the presumptions which i am not considering in detail here. see ss - of the act. see also cps legal guidance in relation to prosecutions under the act: https ://www.cps.gov.uk/legal -guida nce/rape-and-sexua l-offen ces-chapt er- -conse nt. there are significant problems in relation to consent and the s. sexual assault by penetration offence (and the use of the evidential and conclusive presumptions, which has been used in relation to transpho- bic judgments concerning so-called ‘gender fraud’ (sharpe ). https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter- -consent greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent #metoo (greer : ). greer’s recent publication and audacious revival of second-wave feminism which has restored a second-wave slant to popular debates has met with staunch and vociferous third-wave opposition. this opposition has come most notably from #metoo survivor and third-wave feminist thinker, naomi wolf. her disappointment in greer’s work was clear, in that greer did not deliver the philosophical work that she believed to be required of a great femi- nist thinker in these times (wolf ). her criticism was that she minimized the suffering and trauma of rape victims, and the lifelong effects of violent sexual assault. wolf takes issue with greer’s controversial claim that rape is not a ‘rare and catastrophic event’, but one that takes place everyday (greer : ) and that greer’s work fails to deliver in terms of robust research. yet this claim made by greer echoes a claim made over  years ago by mackinnon, that the problem with the law is that it sees nonconsensual sex as normal, and rape as deviant, which means the reality is that women do not perceive everyday ‘bad’ noncon- sensual sex as rape: …in all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of “sex”; they were not coerced enough. maybe they were force-fucked for years and put up with it, maybe they tried to get it over with, maybe they were coerced with something other than battery, something like economics, maybe even something like love. (mackinnon : ) the divisions between second and third wave feminists have never been so pro- nounced in relation to greer, yet much of this seems to stem from the fact that she is felt to be saying something entirely new. second-wave feminists like mackinnon have been saying this for a long time, and have been asking the law to respond to the daily injustices done to women in the name of fucking; a call which the law has thus far failed to answer satisfactorily. greer’s intervention, even if it is a revival, is needed. consent, greer and the second wave revival the position that is traditionally associated with second-wave feminism, that the act of sex is that which signifies the subordination of women—translating the tradition- ally submissive role of women in male pleasure, into the widespread ways in which male dominance is continually reinforced within society (anderson ). sex, from the second-wave perspective, is also that which symbolizes the male need to possess and own that which he ‘fucks’—the deeper he goes, the more intimate his knowl- edge and the more pervasive and resolute his ownership: ‘being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. he owns you; he fucks you’ (pringle in smits and bruce : ). it is thus that the assertion of second-wave feminist scholarship that we cannot have a feminist account of justice, without understanding the ‘fuck’ (pringle in smits and bruce : ). yet for second-wave feminists, this is the real challenge: to hear women, to allow them to speak outside of a language made by men; such language being a mechanism for asserting the hierarchy that causes the suffering of women (dworkin : ). given that this is what #metoo has asked us to do, it is surely obvious v. brooks that the law must respond by making it easier for women to communicate their expe- riences. indeed, as mackinnon has said, if we are to believe these women, or those who have claimed that they are victims of sexual assault, then sexuality itself, the fucking, the act, and its endless array of variations, ‘can no longer be regarded as unimplicated’ (mackinnon b: ). the focus must be astute, robust, unflinch- ing and unafraid to talk about the different ways in which women’s subordination through sex is maintained. this is a task, as mackinnon reminds us, that is beset by traps, those which might cause us to settle for the ‘best inequality’, rather than true equality, that we can find (mackinnon b: ). this, i argue, is where the law is currently at—it is an imperfect framework that is less unequal than it has been, or could be. however, the law can strive toward a far less banal destination, to work towards equality through knowledge about women’s pleasure and suffering, rather than accepting sexuality as it is, as an instrument of women’s subordination. this would involve treating consent as connected to sexuality, and treating that entwine- ment as inextricable and as an instrument of male dominance. this would constitute for law reform, as mackinnon would argue, a feminist method (mackinnon a: ). to treat sex as disconnected from our consent frameworks is to treat sex as though it were disconnected from sexuality, and otherwise to treat sexuality as if it were not pervasive to everyday life, or rather in mackinnon’s cutting words, that it ‘came from the stork’ (mackinnon a: ). this crucial step, is toward undoing these sexual inequalities, and this is where the strength of greer’s critique resides, in engaging us all, and provoking law to engage in a real way, in the perennial search for feminist justice. by now we have realized, that this must include creating the legal conditions for sexual assault survivors to speak as themselves, in their own voice (pringle in smits and bruce : ). it could also be argued that greer adds little to that which the formidable body of second-wave feminism has already argued, but what she does do is remind us of what this vast body of controversial and critical feminism has been telling us, and directs a particular demand of the law itself to reflect on its role (if any) in sexual offences. mackinnon has pointed to the possibility that law must remember its role in fetishizing its own transgression (ensuring dominance retains its essential need for achievement, and does not feel like ‘taking candy from a baby’), or rather, pre- venting the powerless gaining true power (mackinnon a: ). it seems that the distance between the second and third wave rests upon a disagreement as to the ‘reach’ of sexuality and the admission or denial of harm in terms of women’s sexual liberation. for wolf, liberation is shattering the polarization of women’s desire as resting at either pole of ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’, moving towards wholesale reclamation of desire (wolf ). the problem is that this move toward liberation takes for granted the ease with which the claim that sexuality is ‘ideologically bounded’ can be escaped (mackinnon a: ). for mackinnon, good sex, or rather, libera- tion, rests on a ‘value judgment’ that if women have more sex, natural sex, healthy sex, they will be more free to be the ‘sexual aggressors’ and thus again women’s position of subordination is asserted (mackinnon a: ). therefore, we find see also in relation to jurisprudence in particular (mackinnon ). greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent that ‘good sex’ is constructed as that which will remove the proliferation of offend- ing by reducing the need for men to offend. the usefulness of greer’s essay is that it restores the reality through her ‘bad sex’ of second-wave arguments of the co-option of sexuality through hierarchies, and reminds us of the commensurate uncomfort- able claim that rape is not pursued by a few radically bad, perhaps psychopathic men (mackinnon a: ). to illustrate the complex reality of greer’s controversial ‘bad sex’, i write below a fictitious scenario from which to begin understanding a small part of women’s sex- ual experience. as we have seen, the crucial task of a feminist methodology for law reform, is that we identify the ways in which the act of sex translates into subtle, yet real, everyday oppression. the consequence is that this oppression ‘folds’ back into sex, making it into an act, in greer’s words to be endured, while affirming a male position of dominance, making it impossible to find mackinnon’s ‘true’ sexual equality and confounding the claim that the feminist method in law reform, is cru- cial. in identifying these moments, we find that law must discern the utility of its intervention, and the consequences of its denial of the subtle pervasiveness of sexual offences. the scenario is based on two individuals who in which there is a familiar dynamic of power (held by benjamin) and subordination (of celine): celine and benjamin are sitting together at dinner, and both are having a nice time, talking and laughing. benjamin is married. celine is benjamin’s long term lover, but not his wife. benjamin is a powerful and attractive man to celine, and celine is also a powerful and attractive woman. celine and benja- min have an ‘edgy’ relationship some of the time though, and celine lives with a constant fear that benjamin will leave her and stop seeing her if she does not please him in subtle ways in terms of voicing or not voicing her displeasure, as well as submitting to his sexual desires, and this stops celine from being entirely ‘herself’, or talking about things that worry her, or being entirely open and confident with him. most of the time though, when they see each other, they have a wonderful time, but there are patches of subtle, yet curi- ously weighty instances where celine feels depleted and like ‘nothing’ in his presence. later during the dinner, celine accidentally knocks over a bowl of gravy while she is gesticulating wildly as part of a conversation they are hav- ing. some of the gravy falls on to benjamin’s shirt and lap. celine is horrified, and apologizes immediately, urgently looking around for napkins to wipe up the spillage. benjamin does not shout at celine, but goes instantly cold. benja- min gets up and finds some napkins, goes to the bathroom, and sits back down. he speaks normally to celine, but in a way that is without affection. there are longer silences than normal. this carries on for over an hour and celine feels embarrassed. she apologises again, and assures benjamin that she didn’t mean to, that she would hate to hurt him in any way. benjamin remains cold. celine feels herself shrink inside, feeling humiliated and embarrassed, lonely and as if she wants to go home. she remembers this feeling from other times with powerful men, and it hurts her. she feels worthless and clumsy, terrified that benjamin will see that she lacks grace and intelligence, and will leave her. she puts on a brave face, despite the tears rising with increasing force behind her v. brooks eyes. she puts on a smile and remembers how empowering it is to be a whore for benjamin. they continue to talk, benjamin’s anger gradually passes, but he does not apologise nor understand how his reaction might have hurt her and made her feel insecure. she has sex with benjamin later that evening, she is feeling cold inside, unaroused, and she feels a pain in her chest. she didn’t have an orgasm, and she felt this persistent pain in her heart. she cries as he falls asleep. she cries quietly to herself in the morning too and tries to raise the situation with benjamin – he dismisses it as nothing. yet another time, when a man has been cruel to her – in a very small way, arguably, but it means eve- rything. most would agree that it would be difficult to argue that there was an offence committed by benjamin against celine, under the law of consent as it stands. there is also an important question as to whether indeed there should be—is this not just everyday harmless ups and downs and arguments to be expected in intimate rela- tionships? there is no violence in the conventional physical sense, no clear pattern of coercive behavior, and no voiced refusal or resistance to sex. in terms of appar- ent injury, there is the ‘harm’ suffered by benjamin in terms of the gravy spillage. there is no commission of a sexual offence under the law, and indeed, if there was an accusation, there would likely be discomfort as to the truth of that accusation. it would be difficult for celine to explain to someone who had not been in this position as to why she suffered and why what was done to her was so harmful, and does ben- jamin have a right to be angry? there is though, for sure, suffering, a lack of pleas- ure and very clearly, a consequence that celine feels belittled and small, useless and alienated, and exhausted—this is clearly greer’s bad sex, or otherwise mackinnon’s normalized nonconsensual sex. this is the most insidious form and most reminis- cent of the oppression against which the second-wave argued, since the law would separate the sex itself from its context, and would tell us, resolutely, that the sex was consensual albeit the circumstances and dynamic within the relationship between celine and benjamin was regrettable. bad sex, as we shall see from greer’s arguments, often takes the form of coer- cion. this kind of coercion is not necessarily overt, and what might be considered as mere ‘acquiescence’, can be just as harmful and violent an experience as explicit coercion (conroy et al. ). in short, simple everyday acquiescence and ‘bad sex’, covers a multitude of sufferings that amount to something far greater, and point to a far more extensive problem. heterosex suffers from a paucity of scrutiny into the subtle yet extensive ways in which women are coerced under the veil of the decep- tively less harmful appearance of ‘acquiescence’, male sanctioned ‘liberation’ or what i shall argue, greer’s ‘bad sex’: coercive control is now an offence in english criminal law and defined as: ‘a purposeful pattern of behaviour which takes place over time in order for one individual to exert power, control or coercion over another.’ see the home office ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relation- ship’ ( ) retrieved from: https ://asset s.publi shing .servi ce.gov.uk/gover nment /uploa ds/syste m/uploa ds/ attac hment _data/file/ /contr ollin g_or_coerc ive_behav iour_-_statu tory_guida nce.pdf (accessed october ). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /controlling_or_coercive_behaviour_-_statutory_guidance.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /controlling_or_coercive_behaviour_-_statutory_guidance.pdf greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent ‘future studies of sexual acquiescence need to more critically evaluate the normative heterosexist framework of human sexuality that is typically used to understand the complexities of sexual consent, and recognize that… acquies- cence and coercion may be intimately linked constructs.’ (conroy et al. : ) we see here the empirical confirmation that indeed fucking is a social and politi- cal institution, that we are reluctant to question, for fear of either busting, or seeming to bust, the myth that fucking is the benchmark of women’s liberation and becoming the feminist enemy of sex itself (pringle in smits and bruce : ). it is much easier to remain included, to accede, and to ‘acquiesce’. this is the particular kind of coercion, acquiescence, or otherwise unequal sexual encounter that symbolizes with depressing clarity the second-wave’s disappointing fuck—the one that does not deliver on its grace-giving, self-knowing, liberating promise, but represents wom- an’s true ‘sexual life’ in our male dominated social order. it is not a rape scene, but it is a scene where celine feels no option but to continue her subordination, and the law is perfectly happy for this to be the case. one must be careful of falling into a sex-negative and depressing trap here—one that the second-wave is often criticized of doing, along with not incorporating the experiences of women of colour and those experiences of lgbtq women (henry in orr et  al. ). but if the law, and indeed academic discourse do not attempt to move beyond the construction that is sexuality, how on earth can we expect to understand any woman’s sexuality? following from that, how can we hope to work towards consent reform if those of us who are charged with making and criticizing the law, are afraid to talk about the reality of ‘bad sex’? dworkin was optimistic that subordination was not natural and inevitable, and through crazy acts of resistance, we can overcome through a ‘rising of objects’ this oppressive sexual order (pringle in smits and bruce : ). for this rising to happen, we need acceptance that there are problems with the current laws, and that our understanding of heterosex fucking is one-sided. if we are to work towards true equality in the non-contingent second-wave sense, we need a brave and radical move to place women’s pleasure (and suffering) at its center, and make real efforts to empirically, theoretically and practically understand what women need from the law, since that is what guarantees and builds women’s personhood within our social and legal order. greer reminds us that the disturbing nature of celine’s experience is that it will be unimaginably common, meaning that rape can be seen as part of the ‘tissue of everyday life’ and is omnipresent as a risk within the very materiality of sex (greer : ). the question we ought to ask ourselves is how many times have i been celine? how many ‘celines’ do i know? what are celine’s desires, and what do they mean for the law? what is celine’s suffering? in the coming sections, i exam- ine some of the criticisms and obstacles to consent reform. i then move on to exam- ine the links between these positions and greer’s arguments, and how greer’s theo- retical arguments hold the potential for significant practical impact in the quest for law reform. finally, i argue for the necessity to take these forward into a meaningful effort for consent law reform, and how we might begin to go about this huge and urgent task. v. brooks feminism and consent the juggernaut that is #metoo has surely now asserted its status as a fully-fledged ‘movement’ reaching past hollywood, past only the workplace, reaching into pro- voke questioning on the very fabric of gender and power relations (jaffe ). we are now in a position where our responsibility, and not only the responsibility of feminism, is to survivors of sexual violence and toward a change in sexuality and norms, and to understand more about the ways in which women suffered and con- tinue to suffer. in doing so, our responsibility is to finally look towards changing the laws and systems that have been failing these people, time and time again (jaffe : – ). one of the problems, not just peculiar to law, is that discussion of sex is divisive, and particularly so in relation to feminism. we saw controversy surrounding greer’s essentialist and highly problematic comments regarding trans women, but the responses to greer’s work on consent are in a different register. in relation to consent, helen reece argued that as soon as we start talking in a real way about sex, or we dare to question a liberal position on the matter; we are shut down (reece ). with greer’s ‘on rape’, and naomi wolf’s subsequent withering cri- tique, we are about to see a repetition of the same with her telling us that greer’s on rape is so wrong, in so many ways (wolf ). it is quite a task therefore for us to put aside our differences, and look toward the very building blocks of the concept of consent which forms the architecture of the law’s attitude to women’s sexuality and sexual agency. women’s legal personhood, or otherwise that which the requirements of consent are built to protect, has been found to lack the complexities which reflect the real and lived dynamic of consent, a reality that has been reflected empirically and which the law has been asked to respond to (du toit in hunter and cowen : ). patri- archy has brought about a system that is in itself built on nonconsensual gender- power relations since men and women do not inhabit the equal and shared political culture imagined by the law, meaning it does not acknowledge and accommodate women’s experiences (mcguinness ). in fact, the consent framework has been found to be so entrenched within a system that is structurally unequal for women (a system where at best a ‘less unequal’ situation can be attained), that one cannot help but think there is a case for doing away with it altogether, albeit hunter argues that this is a ‘practical impossibility’. instead we should look at doing away with the consent/non-consent binary and change entirely the vocabulary of sexual offences and utilize judgments in relation to behavior as ‘occasions of oppression’/’occasions of respect’. thus, efforts at law reform would be directed towards maximizing the latter and minimizing the former (hunter in hunter and cowen : ). this would allow us to remain conscious of bias and inequality, whereby liberal notions of women’s sexuality (those whores and virgins) can creep into judgments. see reports of the argument to ban germaine greer from speaking due to transphobic views: lewis ( ). retrieved from https ://www.newst atesm an.com/polit ics/femin ism/ / /what-row-over-banni ng-germa ine-greer -reall y-about (accessed on november ). https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/ / /what-row-over-banning-germaine-greer-really-about https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/ / /what-row-over-banning-germaine-greer-really-about greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent craig argues that we must not judge encounters on their perceived morality, thereby circumscribing law’s limits on women’s sexual liberty (craig : ). this is a problem that is inevitable in an adversarial system, as mcglynn argues. the law, and those who make the law and are part of it, and indeed popular opinion, are preoccupied with punishment (mcglynn ). focus tends to be on increas- ing convictions in sexual offences cases, rather than listening to the needs of diverse voices and what survivors of sexual assault actually need and want from the legal process (mcglynn : – ). this would certainly hold true in relation to greer’s practical critique of the law as far too focused on punishment and recrimina- tion and would go some way towards extending the legal lens inward, towards the complexities of cases (greer : ). for others, the replacement, or at the very least, the decentering of consent is necessary since ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ are liberal ideals, and ones which have underpinned, and are products of, the legal system which has perpetuated structural inequality towards women: consent, as a framework has a ‘darker side’ (drako- poulou in hunter and cowen ). such terms as ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ do not account for complex dynamics of oppression and exploitation and go towards set- ting a bar that is far too low for sexual encounters for women. surely there ought to be something better to aim for than ‘agreement by choice’, such as the ‘affirma- tive consent’ mechanisms that operate in some bdsm and kink encounters (tripodi ). novak cautions however that the law must avoid succumbing to its propen- sity to normalize unhealthy versions of these relationships, since they are founded on a dynamic of domination and subordination (novak ). while such relation- ships offer a vocalized and explicit culture of consent, which is to be admired, we must be careful to consider the context in which the appearance of even enthusiastic agreement is given, and not indulge the myth of a straight mutually pleasurable fifty shades scenario. it seems that there is unification in feminist scholarship that the consent frame- work needs reform, but the question is now about practically how we undertake this endeavor. defining and understanding the parameters of ‘good sex’, and sex that is bad sex, or worse, sex that is abusive to women, now rests at the heart of the divi- sions between feminist thinkers, and between genders. tripodi has argued that we need to start looking towards sex that is not conventionally considered ‘normal’, in order to understand the problems with ‘vanilla’ heterosex. normal sex can rightly be considered now a hotbed for toxic sexual relations, far more so than, for exam- ple, than bdsm sex, which has a culture of ‘active consent’ (tripodi ). tripodi argues that there is a real opportunity in empirically examining such scenarios. talk- ing about and researching such encounters (those which have somewhat spectacu- larly found themselves on the wrong side of the law in the (albeit extreme) case of r the problem with focusing on punishment and pandering to a perceived public need to increase con- viction rates and indeed sentences, has recently been subject to withering and effective critique; and points to the general poor state of insight into the effects of punishment and the criminal justice system’s real and practical impact generally, and specifically in relation to sexual offences. see anonymous ( ) and langford ( ). v. brooks v brown provides us with a rare opportunity to understand how power operates in a sexual culture of explicitly required active consent (tripodi , ). such a sce- nario allows us to penetrate beyond populist obscuring narratives of women’s sexu- ality such as fifty shades of grey, and to understand the possibilities for both pro- ductive (pleasure-giving) and toxic (abusive) communications in heterosex (tripodi , – ). recent pioneering empirical work has found serious potential in reaching a more embodied and sex-positive ethic of consent that accommodates the ‘grey areas’, through the examination of bdsm/kink sexual cultures (fanghanel ). such work allows the overcoming of popular narratives such as fifty shades, which have morphed into myths, furthering the law’s misunderstanding of sex, where a violent master/slave relationship has manifested in the popular (and there- fore jury) imaginary as the myth of heterosexual harmless ‘kink’ rather than abuse (gurnham ). it is clear then, that however the critical framing is imagined, whether it be sec- ond or third wave feminist, a space must be made within it to incorporate the experi- ences of women (oskala ). i claim that there is a simple, obvious, yet strangely problematic addition to this—we must focus, as tripodi suggests in relation to bdsm, on particularly the sexual experiences of women. this means talking about sex, which for the law, is going to be an awkward and sticky task, but wholly neces- sary. greer’s recent intervention is a timely reminder that the fuck is both the root and manifestation of the oppression and subordination of women (pringle in smits and bruce ). this intervention also reminds us that the legal system consoli- dates this through its consent frameworks, and reminds us that a search for equality requires radical (feminist) methodological intervention. this might involve a com- plete change of the consent framework and its connected legal vocabulary. if the law is concerned with justice, the search must involve proper conversations about fucking: ‘understanding ‘the fuck’ is a central task of a feminist account of justice’ (pringle in smits and bruce : ). the law we have is a ‘fucking law’, which reinforces the fuck as that which allows men to possess and to know, while at the same time being too squeamish to ask the questions, or listen to the answers, on what turns women on, and what turns them off (brooks ). scientific and empirical work ought to be at the centre of our learning on the sexuality of women, that which does away with centuries of assumptions within sex research, of men who talk about what women want. there is work being done in the field of sexology, such as that of martin, which uses real research to completely revolutionize the way that we understand women’s sexual tastes, and which extends, for example, to upending the perceived preference women have for monogamy and intimacy (martin ). we cannot learn enough now about women’s pleasure, no matter how much it shakes the foundations of our laws and how nervous it makes the men who hold power—we must know about women’s desire in all of its forms, from see mackinnons’s critique of kinsey and his followers, who saw that women’s resistance was a restriction on men’s sexuality and favoured liberation in the form of ‘the more sex the better’ (mackin- non a; ). [ ] ac . greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent all kinds of women. we must learn from women of colour, queer women, straight women—we must learn as many stories as we can, now the stage has been cleared for us, and it is the task of law to listen and respond. we must ask the question of women that mackinnon asked, and the law must at last listen: ‘what do you really want? do you feel that you have the conditions under which you can ask yourself that question? if you feel you are going to be raped when you say no, how do you know that you really want sex when you say yes? do you feel responsible for men’s sexual feelings about you? what about their responsibility for yours, including your lack of them.’(mackinnon : ) these questions, again written by mackinnon over   years ago, are the ones that the law has still not asked, of any women, let alone all women. it is worth not- ing at this point, that that the ‘person’ who is the subject of s. of the act, remains explicitly masculine in the letter of the legislation. to work towards creating a space for genuine equality in consent law, researchers must take on the task of answering the questions that mackinnon asked. greer’s power is in her reminder of this task and in the following section i outline some of the connections between her work and our current law on sexual offences, and how these openings signal where we need to know more about women’s sexual experiences. greer on rape and the problems with consent first, it is useful to note that greer is deeply critical of the ability of the law to have a meaningful role in addressing the prevalence of rape, which echoes much of the feminist critique discussed above. she finds that the law is part of what divides us as adversaries, and more harmfully, provides excuses to the perpetrators of rape. as we have seen, the mens rea element of offences under the sexual offences act provide that it must be proven that the defendant lacked reasonable belief in the victim’s consent. greer argues that this, in effect, allows the defendant an excuse (greer : ). it is helpful at this point to look at the consultation leading to the sexual offences act . comments preceding the act had pointed to the problems with mens rea, in that offenders inevitably possess an innate ambivalence towards consent, meaning that their state of narcissistic sexuality might already cause them to assume that a ‘no’ means ‘yes’, on the basis of presuming so-called ‘playful’ resistance, or some kind of rape fantasy (temkin : ). of course the assessment of whether this element is satisfied is a question for the jury, but where the very issue of consent in sex, and the complex yet absolute internal reality of consent is not made visible, how can we expect a jury to have confidence in rul- ing that consent was impossible, while also finding that the defendant’s belief was not reasonable? take celine’s incident: does benjamin even know or care whether there is something wrong with the sex they are having? despite clear external s. of the sexual offences act . v. brooks evidence that celine is unlikely to be consenting giving the unresolved anger of their encounter, benjamin does not follow the implications of this evidence, nor investi- gate the matter with celine. yet, can we be sure that a jury would find that benjamin had belief in consent and if so, should that belief override the clarity of celine’s non-consent? in defining the mens rea as it is under the act, we allow the defend- ant an opportunity to decide whether there were ‘objective’ signs of consent (greer : ). that is not to say that non-consent is not obvious—of course it is, but that nature of non-consent is internal, pervasive, personal, silenced and the language to express it is not present within legal vocabulary. therefore, non-consent is shrouded within toxic heterosex narratives which obscure the reality of non-consent through mechanisms and myths ranging from fifty shades, to marriage and duty (greer : – ). these myths presume willingness, often ever-present willingness, where there is clear evidence to the contrary, or when both parties are aware that the pres- ence of willingness will ebb and flow. celine was not consenting, but what language would she use to express this? here we find a clear pointer by greer on the back of the second-wave, that the law has not yet incorporated ways for women to express consent and non-consent. as dworkin originally claimed, women exist in the eyes of the law to uphold the status of men, as objects for their use, and thereby deprived of a true and vocalized legal subjectivity, to which the objective standard of law, is deaf: ‘…we speak only their language and have none, or none that we remember, of our own; and we do not dare, it seems, invent one, even in signs and gestures. our bodies speak their language. our minds think in it. the men are inside us through and through. we hear something, a dim whisper, barely audible, somewhere at the back of the brain; there is some other word, and we think, some of us, sometimes, that once it belonged to us.’ (dworkin : – ) in allowing the defendant to decide whether there is consent, we continue to assert male control, and his power and right to maintain the fear and threat of rape (greer : ). greer suggests that the genesis of this is from the reality and mate- riality of sex, the fuck, and the impossibility of the male realization that someone could not feel pleasure from that which he gains so much (greer : – ). the impossibility of this points to the fragility of mens rea in such defences to sexual offences. its fragility comes from the reality that it is prone to appropriation by the inevitable narcissism of toxic male pleasure—that which is blind to the pleasure, or the needs, of the woman. of course, the man with the penis does not lack belief in consent—this is impossible, for who could resist! this point also connects to greer’s controversial reminder that we should not attribute such power to the penis, that it is not a weapon, which invites us to stop fetishising it through law as the only append- age capable of committing the most serious offence under s of the act. here we are reminded of the problem of the notion of a ‘hierarchy of offences’ by greer’s reassertion of mackinnon’s claim that penetration by the penis ‘is not all there is to what was intrusive or expropriative of a woman’s sexual wholeness’ (mackinnon : ). thus we find, that through consultation with women, we must understand the true trauma of offences such as those under s. that rest at the bottom of the hierarchy, and which may, in some instances be of similar intensity to that suffered greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent in the course of offences at the top. it is the hierarchy and law’s own preoccupation with the penis, that silences the true suffering of women and retains focus on what men define as sexuality, rather than what women define as their own sexual being (mackinnon : ). the further problem is that there is no scope within the current legal framework to imagine a ‘lack of consent’. greer rightly asks the question: what is an objective sign of lack of consent? (greer : ) in searching for an alternative to the prob- lematic narrative of punishment that mcglynn identifies above, greer examines the potential of restorative justice as an alternative (greer : ). in england and wales, such an initiative, where a survivor of a sexual offence can initiate a process where they meet or communicate with the offender and ‘take back control’, is possi- ble where the survivor wishes to do so. under the current conditions, where rape is within the tissue of everyday sex, greer considers restorative justice will not work. this is because the defendant is unlikely to see that he has responsibility for hurting the victim (since he sees no harm) and he frankly does not care if the victim and the community understand and forgive him, so this will have no lasting impact on either party (greer : – ). in fact, greer sees no point whatsoever in pursuing any punitive measures—whether they are increased sentencing tariffs (she recommends a decrease) (greer : ), or the more draconian surgical and chemical castra- tion alternatives used in other jurisdictions (greer : ). mackinnon argued that men in prison for rape find it to be the ‘dumbest thing’ that ever happened, since they have done very little that is different from many other men—the only difference is that they were not caught (mackinnon : ). punishment, in short, is not addressing the gaps in knowledge that ought to be filled with accounts of the sexual experiences of women, and taken forward into necessary consent reform. greer’s solution is that we stop glorifying the penis, and its potentially destructive power, and instead start doing and talking sex pleasurably—in short, to decrease rape, we must start having good sex, and stop this cycle of bitterness and recrimination (greer : ). in terms of further practical steps however, greer is silent in terms of how we might begin to rethink legal frameworks in order to remove the phallus at its centre. the most jarring part of greer’s work is where she tells us that ‘women fantasize about being raped’ (greer : ). this is a difficult part of the book to read, and resolutely rejected by the #metoo movement and much of feminist thought. greer softens this suggestion by reminding us that her statement is not entirely true, since research has found rape fantasies to be those in which the woman remains some- how in control. i argue that it is important to not dismiss sexual fantasy, while also retaining the view that these will not be the fantasies of every woman. also, given that fantasies are fantasies, by virtue of their lack of physical performance they can remain safe, and can be a healthy form of sexual play. i expect that the number of women that fantasize about violent rape and abuse, meaning for it to be realized and those who fantasize about celine’s situation will be minimal. the point here is that see restorative justice council, ‘restorative justice and sexual harm’ retrieved from https ://resto rativ ejust ice.org.uk/resto rativ e-justi ce-and-sexua l-harm (accessed on october ). https://restorativejustice.org.uk/restorative-justice-and-sexual-harm https://restorativejustice.org.uk/restorative-justice-and-sexual-harm v. brooks we do not know, and this is symptomatic of our lack of knowledge about the sexual appetite of women, and the lack of talk about what women desire (greer : ). her critique here is clearly reminding us that our desire to shut down discussion of things we find uncomfortable, must not override our desire to understand the condi- tions that gave rise to #metoo. perhaps the most important aspect of greer’s work is her reverence of men and sex. greer is misunderstood, i argue, as being someone who is a man hater, and someone who hates women who love sex. this seems a bizarre position to take since her entire thesis asks us to have better sex, and to be moved in this through our love of men (greer : – ). this is particularly so, since it was mackinnon who said, directed towards men (thought it could so easily be directed towards the law, too): ‘i think you need to remember that we love you. and that often as a result it is often unclear to us why you are so urgent. it is unclear to us why you are so pressured into seeking sexual access to us. we want you not to denigrate us if we refuse. we want you to support us and to listen to us, and to back off a little.’(mackinnon : ) a particularly useful phrase that greer uses is where she says that ‘rape is a hate crime, not a sex crime’ (greer : ). this is maybe where we can identify some useful point where the law might intervene. rape is committed by men that find it impossible to know what consent is, due to their own narcissism and inability to be kind to their partners, and to give them pleasure (greer : ). toxicity is something that the law should punish and remedy, rather than seek out to punish the victim for not achieving the impossible task of communicating her lack of consent. for sure, rape is a crime against sex, against pleasure, and against orgasm, but it is first and foremost the ugliest of hate crimes against a woman’s body—whether non- consensual and/or violent. here we find the possibility of connecting to hunter’s suggestion that we change our vocabulary around consent, where we look at oppres- sion/respect. however, again, it is a reminder given by greer that to do this, we need to focus on sex, to find out what women’s sexuality needs from the law, and what the law needs to know from sex. as both greer and wolf argue in different ways, we need much more research about women’s sexual identity, about male sexuality, and what we want and need from sex, without judging each other on moral suppositions borne of assumptions borne of squeamishness. if we take the example of celine, it is likely that there will be women that identify with this. it is like the situations that greer mentions, where unwanted sex within a relationship becomes an instrument of alienation and withdrawal, that gradually whittles away the intimacy between partners, causing heartbreaking loneliness and pleasure-less sex, followed by the inevitable blaming that she was the one who destroyed their mutual love (greer : – ). a lack of consideration, a lack of kindness, a lack of willingness to explore mutual sexuality together, a lack of care and listening—a blindness and deafness to the sexuality of women, narcissism and entitlement, and then blame on the one he hurts for the pain he caused. this is a situation that is familiar, all too familiar, yet we know so little about it, and the law knows so little about it. we know about the psychology and greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent behavior of violent rapists (as indeed we should) but we know less about these eve- ryday toxic men who far outnumber them and who’s offending is incalculable. as greer tells us, ‘we can only understand [rape’s] prevalence and our inability to deal with it if we position it correctly in the psychopathology of daily life’(greer : ). in short, we need to know far more about the pleasures and traumas of heterosex. i argue that to understand this, we need to focus on what greer is saying about consent. it is clear that she considers the multitude of instances of rape that happen under the guise of bad sex would not be caught by the law. given the definition of consent, it is easy to see how the law is blind to these instances, for it all depends on the conception of ‘freedom’ that we apply. part of the freedom we have is about hav- ing sex with who we want, when we want, with the pleasure that we desire and this, it is submitted, is something the law knows nothing about when it comes to women’s sexuality. if we are to take greer at her word, then the law is useless and has never stopped sanctioning rape. the reforms leading to the act are an illusion, and abandoning of the marital rape exception (r v r ) was an illusion—all we have is a more sophisticated mechanism for sanctioning sex without consent, and a traumatic and humiliating process for victims of the most violent of rape offences. in the final pages of greer’s work, we find her lament on the demise of honest sex-talk (greer : – ). in fact, it is not a lament only about the lack of talk, but also a lack of apparent ability for women to be honest about what they want— the demise of the erotic in favor of the sexual, particularly in relation to the imagery to which we are daily exposed. greer advocates slower sex, creative sex, the sex that we want, that is not bad sex, that is not the sex that celine has, nor the myriad other women who are, or have been in this position. conclusion: strategies towards reform having considered greer’s recent work, it is apparent that the author is not simply writing to shock us, nor in an attempt to write the philosophical treatise that wolf criticizes her for not producing. greer’s work is an attempt to remind us, at a cru- cial point, of the significance of feminist thought in focusing in on the acts, or the facts, that the law on sexual offences attempts to judge when it is invoked. greer is reminding us that two things are needed: ( ) we need to take a close look at the very materiality of women’s subordination and suffering. in doing so, we need to seek out, beyond masculine understandings of pleasure, the secret moments of dworkin’s radical rebellion, and ( ) to do so, we as researchers, law-influencers and makers, we must take forward mackinnon’s feminist method. these two abstract points mean that we must focus on women, for a change—that is, the sexuality of women. the question for us as researchers then is how, empirically, methodologically, and practi- cally, do we reach women, in order to bring this evidence to the law and undertake the complex and yet sadly still necessary task, of reasserting our demands? focusing r v r [ ] ukhl . see smith and skinner ( ) and ellison ( ). v. brooks on the act of sex, or the fuck, as dworkin would say, as an object of scrutiny in the current academic and legal context is a challenge. to achieve the task that was set by the second-wave, we need nothing less than radical intervention: we need ‘joan of arcs’, to subvert deeply entrenched inequality. i claim that there are two key areas that we need to collectively target to reach a position whereby we can firstly ask the right questions, and crucially, to gain the answers in terms of research, and finally to create the conditions whereby law is able to listen. although law has taken both a critical and interdisciplinary turn, as a discipline it remains conventional relative to, say, politics, philosophy and sociology, particularly methodologically. yet the advantage of law is that, by its very nature, it can incor- porate a multitude of disciplines, ranging from geography (holder and harrison ) to drugs and childhood (flacks ) and to psychology and psychoanaly- sis (aristodemou ). feminist legal studies has also asserted itself as a formida- ble critique of the inequalities within the legal system (fineman ). yet when it comes to method, and in translating this disciplinary variety and experiment toward jurisprudence, a conservatism and reticence by formal consultation mechanisms and law reform to take account of and listen to radical scholarship. this may be because law’s critical and arguably radical turn, has been recent. the old pale male and stale philosophical guard of ronald dworkin, raz, kelsen, hobbes, bentham and kant retain their expected presence in any jurisprudence syllabus, with femi- nist jurisprudence being, at best, an add-on. even in philosophy and theory, it is the case that the authority of mostly male philosophy retains its grip, meaning that even our philosophical voice in relation to the law, is that of men. this indicates again the importance of greer’s intervention, which reminds us of the strength, power and importance of the second-wave feminist voice, and that woman philosophers have been making these arguments for a while, with little in the way of meaningful response from jurisprudence. even though we have seen a critical turn in the law, even with radical theory we see evidence of the legacy of ancient philosophy, with queer theory being criticized for invisibilising the experiences of women (beres- ford ). further, philosophy can have the effect of teaching us false lessons about our desires. we must be cautious of imbuing philosophy which has been written over the centuries by men, with authority to judge women’s sexuality and desire (brooks ). law in discipline, practice and reform process must open, or oth- erwise be forced to open, to the feminist method, which mackinnon argued for in the first place, and of which greer reminds us. when the law commission are con- sidering and taking forward a paper that is feminist, critical and includes empirical evidence of women’s views and experiences of sexuality, we might consider the task to be at least underway. see for example in terms of the wide ranging theoretical disciplinary openness of law (philippopou- los-mihalopoulos in sellers and kirste ) and in relation to law, criminology, theoretical experimen- tation and second wave feminism in particular (dymock ). for the expansion of diverse methods in socio-legal work, see mcconville and chui ( ) and in relation to sexuality work (creutzfeldt et  al. ). however, the allying of radical methods and critical legal scholarship in sexuality has proven problematic from and institutional and ethical perspective, see brooks ( ). greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent methodologically speaking, there is also a problem to bringing forward radi- cal sex research and women’s sexual experiences to the law. radical methods have indeed started to creep into the study of law, in relation to for example, environ- mental law, human rights, criminal law and law and identity, but less so in relation to sexuality, where cultural anxiety in response to such methods within academia remains (irvine ). if we are going to expect the law to listen to our concerns about consent, and to work towards meaningful reform, then it is obvious that we need an academic space that allows the necessary work. in terms of allowing such work, the institutional priorities of academia need to give the same weight and insti- tutional support and respect to radical sexuality work, as it does to conventional sci- entific and ‘authoritative’ quantitative work that typically yields research income. research ethics processes within academic institutions are also instrumentalised to silence what might be deemed as ‘risky’ sexuality work that might yield uncom- fortable findings (brooks ; hedgecoe ). this institutional reticence to hear about sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality, resonates across both law and aca- demia. this indicates the practical reality of dworkin’s pessimistic optimism, that although subordination and inequality are not inevitable, we require radical and confrontational intervention to fuck with a system that is structurally inclined to silence women’s sexuality. greer’s work is an attempt to do just that, and to provide a momentum for feminist thinkers and researchers, radical socio-legal scholars and theorists, to finally provoke law into responding to our overdue understanding of women’s sexuality, with meaningful consent law reform. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest author a declares that he/she has no conflict of interest. human and animal rights this article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . interna- tional license (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, 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( ). on rape by germaine greer: so wrong in so many ways. retrieved from https ://www. theti mes.co.uk/artic le/revie w-on-rape-by-germa ine-greer -so-wrong -in-so-many-ways-b j wh v. accessed on october , . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-on-rape-by-germaine-greer-so-wrong-in-so-many-ways-b j wh v https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-on-rape-by-germaine-greer-so-wrong-in-so-many-ways-b j wh v 	greer’s ‘bad sex’ and the future of consent 	abstract 	introduction 	consent, greer and the second wave revival 	feminism and consent 	greer on rape and the problems with consent 	conclusion: strategies towards reform 	references edinburgh research explorer crime and justice research citation for published version: sparks, r , 'crime and justice research: the current landscape and future possibilities', criminology and criminal justice. https://doi.org/ . / digital object identifier (doi): . / link: link to publication record in edinburgh research explorer document version: peer reviewed version published in: criminology and criminal justice publisher rights statement: the final version of this paper has been published in criminology & criminal justice, vol/issue, month/year by sage publications ltd, all rights reserved. © richard sparks, . it is available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/crime-and-justice-research( a c -f - -bab - cfed cf e).html crime and justice research: the current landscape and future possibilities richard sparks university of edinburgh introduction – the ‘brief’ and its context early in i was invited by the economic and social research council (esrc) to prepare a concise ( page) paper – a ‘think piece’ – on the scope for future research council investments in research on crime and justicei. this was one of thirteen such invitations. these were issued to scholars working in fields that for various reasons (in some cases perhaps their comparative newness, in others their interdisciplinary character, among other possible reasons) seemed to have attracted comparatively little investment in recent years. the papers were to be prepared on a common template in three main parts. these were: i) an overview of the current landscape, including some indication of its current scope, the identification of major ‘gaps’ and some observations on needs regarding data and capacity building; ii) key opportunities and future directions, including topics such as interdisciplinarity, internationalization, impact and collaboration; iii) recommendations on where esrc might best focus its future funding in order to make a distinctive contribution to developing research in the area. the authors had roughly three months in which to prepare these pieces, during which time they were encouraged to consult as widely as possible with people in the field, both researchers and users or commissioners of research, and with one another. a crucial part of the context of this mission (for i chose, rashly, to accept it) was the transition then taking place from the seven existing research councils, understood as distinct albeit collaborating organizations, to the creation of uk research and innovation (ukri)ii as an over-arching body. although these papers were written primarily for the purpose of advising esrc council and staff on their strategy, there was also an intention that they should be widely discussed and at least their executive summaries published. i interpreted the injunction to consult to mean trying to open the invitation to comment or contribute as widely as possible. i asked the british society of criminology (bsc) to publicize this to its members, and i sent out emails to about one hundred people in the uk and around the world. these included everyone i could identify as head of a criminology department or centre, with a request to pass the message on to colleagues. i received about forty responses from a range of individuals and groups (for all of which i remain very grateful). at the time of writing i do not know what use esrc have determined to make of any suggestion of mine. the project, however, has had a bit of an afterlife, of which this exchange of views in criminology and criminal justice (ccj) is a significant extension. in april we held a day of discussion in edinburgh under the auspices of bsc and ccj at which i presented the outline of my position, with responses from a number of people and a lively debate from the floor. it was evident both from the responses i received to my initial request for input, and from the discussions in april that there is a keen appetite for a serious, structured and from inclusive conversation about the future of research on crime and justice. we also know that there are widely divergent views on these matters. this has always been a plural and contentious area, often characterized (as ian loader and i have pointed out in other contextsiii) by its capacity to generate heat. part of my responsibility, as i interpreted it, was to convey some of that diversity in what i wrote for esrc as a source of strength and vitality, even if i was also required to offer some definite propositions. i acknowledge full responsibility for the propositions, therefore, whilst also affirming that i made a serious and grateful effort to reflect the range of views that people took so much time and trouble to formulate and send to me. all i am able to present here, then, is a condensed version of my argument. i have removed some of the more technical aspects, concerning data sharing or impact pathways for example, in order to focus on some ‘big picture’ questions about the shape of the field now and, so far as we can glimpse it, in the next couple of decades. i cannot speak for decisions that esrc may ultimately take, and that in my view is in any case no longer the main topic. i have therefore removed explicit recommendations to esrc from what follows. the issue is rather how we, as producers and users of research, organize our thinking on actual and emergent problems of crime and control, and in which ways we consider it important to respond to them. : an overview of the current landscape what is the current scope of research in this area? the scope of research in the fields of crime and justice is in principle extremely large. it has always been the case that it is difficult – and on some views impossible in principle – to draw boundaries around the questions of crime and justice so as to say that only some topics, concepts, approaches or methods are relevant. we should not begin by regarding this expansiveness as a problem, or only as a problem. what it means is that crime and justice intersect with many other societal questions and developments. they cannot be successfully ‘thought’ in isolation but go alongside other key institutions, processes and approaches. this is key to their contemporary significance, and central to the contributions that crime and justice researchers can make to interdisciplinary approaches to current and emergent challenges. here, in order to try to gain some perspective on this question of ‘scope’, i organize this research area into six broad themes, in roughly ascending order of scale. these are in no sense evaluative judgements (all the themes noted here are vital and intensely topical ones), but they may disclose different opportunities for investment, and different potential impacts amongst readers and users of research. i) crime-as-conduct. although explaining or otherwise understanding the actions of people identified as having contravened criminal law (or of other people in interaction with them – victims of crime, for example) is the most traditional goal of ‘criminological’ iv inquiry it is by no means the sole or even dominant raison d’être of the field today. nevertheless, some of the best work internationally on crime, social exclusion and urban fortunes (characterized by strong observational research practice and grounding in place) has been done in the uk, sometimes with esrc supportv. the gradually gathering awareness of the centrality of gender in social relations generally, and in questions of crime and justice in particular, has informed much of the most imaginative and compelling recent work. work has addressed the violences of men against women and children in domestic contexts (coercive control, intimate partner violence) and in public spacevi (including both antique and seemingly more fully contemporary phenomena such as online threats and abuse). ii) pathways and trajectories. longitudinal studies of pathways and transitions, often of a cohort drawn from a single city (edinburgh, peterborough)vii, are designed to illuminate questions such as the differing outcomes in terms of crime and victimization amongst people growing up in different areas or subject to other influences or disadvantages. the resources required to sustain such studies over time, and to enable them to interact with other large-scale, life-course studies, are clearly considerable. amongst the most significant recent extensions of criminal careers research – and one in which uk-based researchers have been in the vanguard - has been the refocusing on questions of desistance from crime (or to follow farrall, of how people ‘start to stop’)viii. such work often requires qualitative longitudinal designs, complementary to the larger quantitative studies noted above. iii) controls and regulations. another principal focus of research in crime and justice concerns criminal justice institutions and decision-making (domestically, comparatively and – increasingly – internationally). uk-based researchers have been at the forefront of new work posing questions concerning the scale, priorities, and effectiveness of actually-existing institutions of crime controlix. increasingly this concerns not just the activities of public police forces or probation or prison services and other familiar state agencies but also a host of other regulatory actors in and beyond criminal justice, including those in private and voluntary or ‘third’ sectors. what was once a radical, disruptive perception, that controls and regulations are not necessarily or intrinsically benign, or without harmful consequences of their own, is increasingly widely acknowledged. the questions therefore come to concern a much wider and more demanding array of debates and opportunities, of which regulation through criminalization is just one, bringing in train its own special capacities for harm or help. iv) new technologies and affordances. there is an obvious yet expansive and extremely complex dialectic between the opportunities for harm and exploitation made available by new technologies (the many forms of cyber-crime and computer-enabled crime, and the other varieties of harm made feasible by new media – social media bullying, grooming, trolling and stalking, for example) and the regulatory and surveillance capacities of new technologies. the relations between crime and justice and technological development are thus of central and constantly growing significance. they include bioethical questions, questions of data privacy and intellectual property, changes in justice process and the nature of adjudication itself, the infrastructural dimensions of situational crime prevention, and many other topics that reach across traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. v) globality and trans-national flows. crime and justice research is no longer defined and limited by entirely ‘domestic’ preoccupations. rather it increasingly concerns questions such as people trafficking and ‘modern’ slavery, drugs and other criminal networks, money laundering, illegal antiquities and other high-value commodities and a host of other illicit ‘flows’, both mundane and exoticx. a major focus in recent uk-based and other european work has been the phenomenon of ‘crimmigration’xi, and the consequent concern with borders, detention and deportation as responses on the part of the wealthy countries of the north to the disruptive aspects of new mobilitiesxii. there are major challenges and opportunities here to re-think the problem-spaces of crime and justice research beyond the primacy of single-jurisdictional specificities, and beyond an unreflexively northern projection of the world. vi) alternative conceptions. exciting new directions have started to emerge that invite us to re-evaluate traditional conception of ‘the criminal question’ in light of a wider range of disciplinary resources. whilst the notion of ‘decriminalizing criminology’xiii is not in itself entirely novel, the tasks of rethinking harms and risks (to environment, security, health and human development) and the appropriateness of political and policy responses to these have gained focus and energy. for example, current work in law enforcement and public healthxiv, new regulatory frameworks, peace-processes (including their domestic applications and analogies)xv, the security implications of architecture and urban design (as well as of computer ‘architectures’ and other socio- technical developments), amongst others, all disclose exciting practical opportunities at the same time as opening dialogues between disciplines. : what are some important gaps in the current research profile in this area? the expansive scope of crime and justice, together with their dynamically changing character and their inherent connections to major questions of policy and practice mean that ‘gaps’ are similarly numerous, varied and emergent. as one senior commissioner and user of research put it to me, “the gaps are everywhere”: i) dimensions of violence: actions, reasons, contexts. violence menaces, perplexes and troubles us. its protean character demands interdisciplinary attention. it presents both explanatory and practical problems at all levels – the interpersonal, the collective, the ‘mass’, the political. earlier generations of research largely kept such ‘scalar’ problems separate by erecting disciplinary fences, whereas now the opportunity arises to explore those problems differently. whereas in the past studies of violence often stood accused of having individuated the problem, contemporary work specifically addresses group-supported and collective action, including at large scale (for example the actions of armies and other parties in and after armed conflictxvi). some of the great mobilizations of our time - #metoo, black lives matter, the demonstrations after parkland, the currently gathering agitation around gun crime in london and elsewhere – are themselves responses to violence. interest on the part of research users and practitioners in and beyond government, in media and amongst wider publics is both diverse and massive. the gendered basis of violence still demands much further inquiry, not least in light of current legislative activity and international agreements. there is major scope for international comparative and collaborative activity, spanning the global north and south. there is also a need for further research on questions of hate and extremism, domestically and internationally. this is one of many areas in which work with perpetrators is difficult to accomplish yet entirely necessary. empirical evidence is key to the development and implementation of more effective responses. ii) crime, punishment and after: despite the excellence of some recent work on pathways into and out of crime (such as the recent turn in research and policy towards questions of desistancexvii) and on aspects of social control and regulation there are also some striking gaps. as noted below, promising lines of inquiry arising from cohort studies – including more convincing evidence than previously on the frequently counter-productive effects of early contact with the criminal justice systemxviii - risk not being built-upon in the absence of new longitudinal work. research on prisons is now a significant strengthxix, and suggests what can be accomplished with some investment and a highly focused and committed research community. elsewhere, however, systematic studies of criminal process and decision- making are more scattered and this leaves very considerable areas of policy and practice (courts, judgements and sentencing, parole decision-making, systems of surveillance and supervision, re-entry after punishment, and indeed law-making itself) severely under-served by research. in some of these areas – such as sentencing and its social consequences, including with respect to questions of equity in respect of race, class and gender, for example – there is surprisingly little current empirical research and few noteworthy concentrations of expertise. yet it is also clear that new technologies and innovations (in estimations of risk and the emergence of so-called ‘algorithmic justice, for example, or new surveillance and monitoring technologies) are occurring continually, with major implications for conceptions of justice and the practices of the relevant professions. similarly questions of race and increasingly also of citizenship and nationality loom large. this goes to on one hand to familiar yet intransigent questions concerning policing (for example in controversies about stop-and-search practices and police use of armed force), prosecution and punishment in relation to racialized disparities, and on the other to new configurations about the treatment of foreign nationals at every stage of criminal process. iii) crime and technology: the social and human dimensions of technology extend far beyond the theme of ‘cybercrime’ as such, and many of these are at early stages of explorationxx. in respect of crime and justice this clearly includes a host of aspects of technology-facilitated risks (grooming, radicalization, hate-discourse among others), but it also relates to technological developments in respect of investigation, adjudication, surveillance and supervision – in short every stage of criminal process. iv) representations, discourses, politics: an area of major contemporary concern and one with obvious interdisciplinary resonance (with cultural studies, social history, film and media, applied linguistics and other interests), is the representations and discourses in terms of which questions of crime and justice are circulated and socially shared. there are new and promising lines of inquiry – the turn to visual criminology, for example – that offer opportunities to more fully explore these connectionsxxi. yet in general terms there is a paucity of new work of empirical depth and theoretical ambition. this is despite the pressing nature of some current controversies (from phone hacking, to ‘fake news’, to the ubiquity of images of crime and law enforcement in popular culture, and their implications of these for questions of knowledge, trust, security, public participation and other aspects of contemporary life.) v) global challenges, global harms: whilst some aspects of globalization have received attention others remain to be explored. crime and justice research has much to offer current debates about security, perhaps not least in respect of commitments to empirical precision and to grounding and to situating these discussions in respect of real places and everyday social practice. there are major challenges for empirical research on smuggling, piracy and other international crimes, and on illicit flows in finance and services, amongst many other problems. the level of mutual knowledge between the majority of crime and justice researchers and those working in international law, international relations, development studies and related fields, or indeed of the work of key international agencies and institutions, is very low. : key opportunities and future directions what are the opportunities for interdisciplinary research in this area? to say that crime and justice are interdisciplinary questions is both to state the obvious, and to understate the challenges and opportunities that they present to us. it has never been possible for a single discipline – criminology, for example – to claim exclusive ownership over crime and justice, even to the same degree that economics ‘owns’ economics relations or geography exercises jurisdiction over questions of space and territory. to the contrary these problems are shared (excitingly, if not always entirely peaceably) between law, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, politics, geography, demography, ethics, literary studies and history, to name only some of the more traditionally prominent. latterly, these have been joined by a new constellation of discourses – public health, organization and management studies, computing and informatics, bioethics and genomics, international political economy, behavioural economics and many othersxxii). there is thus massive scope for interdisciplinary collaboration, but within which the contributions of the social sciences require to be defined and affirmed. there are also, thanks to developments such as the creation of sentencing councils in both england and wales and latterly scotlandxxiii, a wider and more diverse set of potential research users than has traditionally been the case. there is a host of current problems that can only be explored fully in interdisciplinary modes, but we cannot at present always be confident that interdisciplinary working will take place successfully. for example, amongst social scientists knowledge of ‘cyber-crime’ remains the domain of a limited number of specialists, and this is some distance from enhancing wider understanding of the spectrum of relationships between new technologies and questions of crime and justice. yet such questions are central to every aspect of contemporary security, from the most commonplace retail purchase to the stability of entire institutions, economies and political orders. this therefore invites greater integration between crime and justice research and social studies of technology and its uses more broadly considered. in other words both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ problems pose important challenges. it seems arbitrary to pick out only a few of these. however, in the interests of space i will nominate just three: i) crime, justice and public health: we know that gradients identified by health researchers in terms of unequal exposure to risks of disease, incapacity and mortality have counterparts in the lives of perpetrators and victims of crime. this has major implications for mapping, documenting and explaining these distributions, their consequences and their persistence. but it also draws problems of crime and justice into diverse policy spaces, presenting challenges that involve those working in the domains of children and families, education, health, housing, and de-centring the predominance of policing and criminal justice as responses. thus the emphasis above (and extended in conclusion) on the multiple dimensions of violence is by definition plural in disciplinary terms, but necessarily regards health as crucial. ii) empirical legal research remains, on the whole, at small scale more than a decade after the nuffield foundation’s important reportxxiv. similarly, the specifically legal dimensions of many crime and justice problems receive limited attention from social scientists. this inhibits the development of certain forms of work in crime and justice, perhaps especially with regard to legislation, law reform, adjudication and sentencing. iii) the relations between conventional conceptions of crime and justice and the production of environmental harms on a planetary scale (such as climate change, the reduction of biodiversity by, for example, logging and deforestation, the pollution of the atmosphere, waterways and oceans) present unprecedented challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation, and of course for intervention. these and other consequences of human action for life on earth are literally un- thinkable from within the horizon of single disciplines, and they certainly pose questions about security that reach far beyond, though they doubtless include, traditional debates about criminalization, enforcement, sanctions and so onxxv. in these respects the absence of ‘disciplinary’ purity or unity amongst scholars working on crime and justice is an undoubted, if paradoxical, strength. it enjoins interdisciplinary co- working on these matters and it emphasises their connection with other problems and other fields. what are the opportunities for international research perspectives in this area? the scope for comparative and trans-national research in this field is also enormous. it is true that historically the connection between conceptions of crime and justice and the sovereign powers of individual nation-states has tended to lead to a degree of particularity and sometimes insularity. many factors combine to invite us to move beyond that state of affairs. many of the most urgent and difficult problems of our times are inherently trans-national in character, whether that be the illicit movement of money, people, and commodities or the flow of images and information. both security threats and enforcement efforts increasingly exist in trans-national, cross-jurisdictional networks and spaces. whist international collaborative enterprises in the fields of crime and justice research are not new (and indeed reach back far further than many are aware) they have also increased in scope and intensity lately. recent years have seen the emergence of confident, critical and active research communities in asia and latin america. these developments both invite new collaborative and comparative initiatives and challenge researchers in the global north to decolonize their received conceptions of their disciplines. the impetus provided by the emergence of an explicitly self-described southern criminology has latterly given additional focus to these reversals of flow, from ‘core’ to ‘periphery’. thus, for example, we see new work on environmental hazards emerging from countries directly impacted by deforestation, mineral extraction, population displacement or rising sea levelsxxvi. similar trends seem apparent in relation to studies of the (often intensely conflicted) place of crime and justice in transitions to democracy; of memory and denial in respect of atrocity crimes, disappearances and other legacies of dictatorship; state crime, corruption and police brutality; constitutional change, the development of human rights cultures and the reform of state institutionsxxvii. three propositions for investment in crime and justice research violence: the opportunities for new conceptual development and new interdisciplinary discovery are large. methodologically, violence can be explored in a host of ways from the minutely observed (biographical, ethnographic) to the collective and political levels. it demands exploration in disaggregated ways, most obviously in respect of gender; but it also speaks to a wide range of trans-national and comparative questions and to issues of human development, global public health and so on. violence raises a host of policy enigmas, inviting contrastive evaluations as between ‘traditional’ criminal justice-focused responses and approaches grounded in public health, peace-making, and a range of regulatory alternatives. scope for collaboration is thus very considerable. also very large therefore are the impact potentials, not just among the ‘usual suspects’ in police services and other state agencies but a wide variety of ngos and civil society groups. the diversity of possible topics and approaches under this theme tends to encourage a network or programme model that invites multidisciplinary contributions from a wide range of potential participants. punishment, conviction and beyond?: the post-conviction phases of criminal justice have received little attention, relative to their significance. yet there is much promising and some outstanding work taking place in and beyond the uk on themes of incarceration, supervision, desistance, restorative processes, re- entry (and more broadly on work, citizenship and the social consequences of intervention). there is very little serious, current, well-funded empirical work on sentencing, and almost none on major current controversies such as the parole system. the scope for interaction with philosophy, history and law is great. scope for international comparison is very large here, including for north-south collaboration. the politics of punishment are prominent (and intimately related to understandings of such contemporary phenomena as populism, on one hand, and of global diffusion of human rights consciousness, on the other). any such initiative should specifically seek new conceptual development (including ‘purely’ theoretical pieces) and invite explorations of alternative conceptions of regulation that depart from, challenge and critique established responses. this theme thus incorporates questions of technology, data, comparison, representation, governance and trust. it thus seems ripe for active collaboration across council boundaries, most obviously between esrc and ahrc in the first instance and may lend itself to consideration for centre funding. global challenges, global harms: crime and justice have historically been so identified with nation-states and their sovereignty that current realities of their relation to world-systemic problems of governance, regulation and co-operation under international agreements still seem to take us by surprise. transnational organized crime is an aspect of this; as are crimes within the global financial system. such an initiative would therefore expressly be concerned with relationships between questions of crime and justice (and conceptions of harm) and other current arenas of ‘security’ discourse. specific dimension might include, questions of mobility and borders (migration detention, deportation etc); liabilities for and responses to environmental harms (marine environments, deforestation, trafficking in endangered species etc); international criminal law properly so-called (including crimes of war and crimes against humanity). many disciplinary dimensions are engaged here, but they include (more explicitly than previously) the relations between empirical social science research on these questions and problems of international law, and by extension of political coordination, the roles of international agencies and ngos and so on. : final thoughts researchers want to see investments that produce new knowledge, generate debate, develop early career colleagues and help make change in the world. interestingly, research users tend to define the unique contributions of larger-scale publicly funded research in strikingly similar terms. opportunities for researchers to migrate between disciplines appear important, as do specific efforts to encourage the formation of multi-disciplinary collaborative teams. cyber- crime, broadly considered, and environmental harms are two areas in which crime and justice researchers might play fruitful roles within such extended groupings. above all, i want to argue for the internationalization of perspectives on questions of crime and justice and towards fully grasping the contribution of social science perspectives on new dimensions of technology (especially including risks to the natural environment). this favours comparison and collaboration generally, and especially co-working with colleagues in the global south. nonetheless, certain deep and intractable problems remain at the core of the enterprise: violence; justice and punishment; harm, security and risk in the international sphere. endnotes i esrc is the uk’s principal public research funding body. see further: https://esrc.ukri.org/ ii https://www.ukri.org/ iii amongst others, i. loader and r. sparks ( ) public criminology?, london: routledge iv this term is used here sparingly and advisedly. it simply denotes work concerned to understand dynamics of rule-infracting and rule-enforcing action, especially across the boundary of the criminal law. it offers no privilege to work that self-nominates as criminology, nor conversely does it exclude any other disciplinary starting point. v see in this context the body of work by robert macdonald and colleagues on youth, the 'underclass' and social exclusion on teesside: http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/l /read. see also, for example: hall, steve, winlow, simon and ancrum, craig ( ) criminal identities and consumer culture : crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism. willan publishing vi for example: marianne hester’s project on justice, inequality and gender-based violence: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f ; a number of projects by sylvia walby and colleagues: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fk % f . the prospectus of course is currently widening to include the range of online/social media forms of threat – see for example the project by claire hardaker and others on twitter rape threats: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f vii see p-o wikstrom, peterborough adolescent and young adult development study (pads+): http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f ; viii esrc has supported a number of desistance studies, notably in scotland where this line of inquiry has been strong. they include mcneill et al.’s imaginative knowledge exchange project: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fi % f ; and beth weaver’s ‘co-producing desistance from crime’: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f ix thus we have seen some support of work in prison studies (notably around the cambridge prisons research centre (e.g. http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f ); a modest amount of new work on policing, including one ambitious recent project by stott and others (http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f ). most other areas of criminal justice decision-making have not recently figured in very prominent ways. see, however, crawford on ‘markets in policing’: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f . x support for work on trafficking and modern slavery appears to be embryonic, but see the recent project by rose broad: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f . there has also been some recent support for new work on illegal financial flows, for example by nicholas lord: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f and michael levi: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f . xi this term generally refers to the blurring of boundaries between migration law and criminal law, and hence the imposition of criminal sanctions or other impositions on people for infractions committed n the course of attempting to migrate. xii the body of work known as border criminology is associated in this country with the work of mary bosworth and her collaborators, of the oxford university centre for criminology, among others. xiii shearing, c. ( ) ‘decriminalizing criminology’, canadian journal of criminology, ( ): - xiv see for example the various conferences organized under the auspices of the centre for law enforcement and public health (https://leph toronto.com/conference), the innovations introduced by bodies such as the anu-based regnet (http://regnet.anu.edu.au/about-us); and a wide variety of scholarly networks and ngos interested in transitional justice, justice alternatives, peace-making (for example: https://www.ulster.ac.uk/research/institutes/transitional-justice-institute). xvwork by john braithwaite and colleagues at australian national university is somewhat exemplary in this regard http://regnet.anu.edu.au/research/research-projects/details/ /peacebuilding-compared-project. see similarly the activities of christine bell and her collaborators through edinburgh university’s global justice academy: http://www.globaljusticeacademy.ed.ac.uk/ xvi for example esrc has supported the network on gender violence across war and peace, (christine chinkin, pi): http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f . xvii some of the best of this work has received esrc support, but it is a bare handful of studies. the post- conviction phases of criminal justice have received shockingly little research council support in recent years – a search on the word ‘parole’ for example produces nothing whatsoever. nor has there been any systematic https://esrc.ukri.org/ https://www.ukri.org/ http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/l /read http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/ / http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/ / http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fk % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fi % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f https://leph toronto.com/conference http://regnet.anu.edu.au/about-us https://www.ulster.ac.uk/research/institutes/transitional-justice-institute http://regnet.anu.edu.au/research/research-projects/details/ /peacebuilding-compared-project http://www.globaljusticeacademy.ed.ac.uk/ http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f collation of such work in the uk since the body of research reports commissioned by the last royal commission on criminal justice in the early s. xviii for example mcara, l and mcvie, s. ( ) ‘youth crime and justice: key messages from the edinburgh study’, criminology and criminal justice, , : - xix for example ben crewe’s excellent work on very long-term imprisonment: http://gtr.ukri.org/person/ ecd - f f- - b - a abc ; yvonne jewkes and dominique moran’s recent work on prison architecture: http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa xx the recent collaborative initiative involving esrc, the netherlands organisation for scientific research (fwo) and nordforsk under the aegis of the nordic societal security programme is a salient example of what new, imaginative, international projects may look like: https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in- cyber-security xxi michelle brown and eamonn carrabine (eds) ( ) the routledge international handbook of visual criminology, london: routledge. xxii see further i. loader and r. sparks ( ) ‘situating criminology’, oxford handbook of criminology, th edition, oxford: oup; m. bosworth and c. hoyle (eds) ( ) what is criminology?, oxford: oup xxiii the sentencing council for england and wales has existed in its current form since . it is an expert body consisting principally of senior members of the judiciary, with some academic representation. the council issues and monitors ‘definitive guidelines’ on specific offences. in preparing these it conducts both analytic (legal, doctrinal) and social research (principally on public opinion and attitudes to sentencing). the scottish sentencing council was established in . it too has research and knowledge exchange functions and its statutory aims include that of ‘promoting greater awareness and understanding of sentencing’. xxiv genn h., partington m. and wheeler s., ( ) law in the real world: improving our understanding of how law works, nuffield foundation http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report. pdf xxv see here the essays recently brought together in c. shearing and c. holley (eds) ( ) criminology and the anthropocene, london: routledge xxvi consider here for example the contributions in k. carrington et al (eds) ( ) palgrave handbook of criminology and the global south by white, brisman and goyes. xxvii whilst latterly a growing proportion of such work is produced in universities, sometimes with adequate support from funding bodies (perhaps especially in brazil, and in chile), much of it has been accomplished by ngos. for example in argentina organizations such as the centro de estudios legales y sociales (cels) have played and continue to play critical roles: https://www.cels.org.ar/web/ http://gtr.ukri.org/person/ ecd - f f- - b - a abc http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in-cyber-security https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in-cyber-security http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report.pdf http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report.pdf https://www.cels.org.ar/web/ the promise of feminist philosophy hypatia vol. , no. (summer ) © by hypatia, inc. the promise of feminist philosophy bonnie mann, erin mckenna, camisha russell, and roc�io zambrana sara ahmed begins living a feminist life with a reflection on the word “feminism,” and she claims to have written the book “as a way of holding onto the promise of that word” (ahmed , ). ahmed is explicit in noting that by “feminism” she means intersectional feminism, and for her, the promise of the word “feminism” is far-reaching. it is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. it brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. it brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships, in the struggle for more bearable worlds. it brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. feminism: how we pick each other up. so much history in a word, so much it too has picked up. ( ) her description speaks to the ways so many of us have been picked up by feminism, the exhilaration we have felt reading feminist works, engaging in feminist conversa- tions and feminist activism. in this passage she connects the promise of feminism with the specific histories of women who have refused the things that diminish us. so there is a past, or there are many pasts, that are born of an aspiration to more bearable futures. we inherit the aspirational promise of feminism and through it we sometimes lift one another up. when the four of us made the decision to apply to become the new co-editors of hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, it was the power of that promise that com- pelled us. as daunted as we were by the weight of the controversy that had engulfed the journal and its various constituencies, as much as we disagreed with one another in our specific responses to that controversy—across our own philosophical, demo- graphic, and political differences—we all shared the sense that hypatia was worth fighting for. we shared the hope that hypatia could realize its better nature, renew its long-standing aspiration to be a source of the writing that gives words to experi- ence, articulates the meanings of injustice, and gives us strength to go on. we were gripped by a sense of the importance of such work in a context in which feminist gains remain fragile and antifeminist commitments are a cornerstone of burgeoning authoritarian political trends globally. if hypatia is to realize its better nature, however, we must be willing to acknowl- edge that the word “feminism” has a complex and self-contradictory history. “so much history in a word, so much it too has picked up” (ahmed , ). the trou- bled “we” of feminism, “that hopeful signifier of a feminist collectivity” ( ), collects and intensifies tensions around the word “feminism.” racism, colonial control, rein- forcement of modes of material inequality, political exclusion, and social sanction sometimes travel under the banner of “feminism,” are sometimes entangled with femi- nist thinking and practice, and sometimes appropriate feminist demands for their own ends. while the word “feminism” is associated with hope and renewal in some contexts, at some times, for many of us, it also carries historical associations of betrayal, dismissal, privileged indifference, and willful ignorance in relation to crossed relations of power. “where there is hope, there is difficulty,” ahmed writes, “feminist histories are histories of the difficulty of that we, a history of those who have had to fight to be part of a feminist collective, or even had to fight against a feminist collec- tive in order to take up a feminist cause” ( ). hypatia is as much a part of this vexed history as any feminist endeavor. the jour- nal’s hard-won standing in the world of academic publishing (having fought for and achieved a status that previous generations of feminist thinkers could not have imag- ined for a feminist publication) has necessarily come at the cost of its entanglement in the professional practices, managerial and administrative norms, and discursive conventions that are part of the machinery that tends to maintain historical patterns of exclusion and suppression. hypatia has become an avenue for many junior scholars to achieve the professional legitimation required to succeed in academic life, it has published groundbreaking work that has literally changed the status of feminist thought in professional philosophy, and at the same time it also finds itself in the position of being experienced by many scholars who find their marginalization in the discipline to be tenacious and unremitting as an institutionalized site of the reproduc- tion of that exclusion. living up to hypatia’s promise requires navigating these com- plex and contradictory realities, it means listening to the grievances of those the journal has failed to welcome and failed to hear, it requires a renewed invitation to the journal’s intended community to criticize, reflect, and hold hypatia to account. but the “total concrete situation” (beauvoir ) in which we take on the edi- torship of hypatia is more complex still. we begin this work at a historical moment in which any conflict among feminists will be seized on by antifeminists as a way of furthering their cause. most immediately, antifeminist elements in the discipline of philosophy and academia more broadly are anxious to publicize the shortcomings of institutionalized feminist endeavors as evidence for the illegitimacy of feminism tout court. we have to recognize that feminist achievements are fragile; they have to be protected or they will be undone. it is important, however, not to react to this reality impulsively and defensively through efforts to shut down dissent. creating practices of and promoting values consistent with engaging dissent, and changing as a result of dissent, have to be at the core of our work in order to strengthen and protect editorial statement feminist gains. camisha has suggested that there are three important elements to this commitment: “( ) the need for close attention to social context in order to avoid uncritically reifying assumptions that support current social and political inequalities, ( ) the challenging of any stance’s claim to political neutrality and the acknowledge- ment of one’s own partiality and founding assumptions, and ( ) a willingness to engage in and to remain engaged in continual criticism and self-reflection” (russell , ). this is even more important given the broader political context. feminist demands are achieving a public urgency, international scope and broad visibility through the #metoo, #timesup, and #niunamenos social-media campaigns, mas- sive women’s marches, including protests “from buenos aires and sao paulo to mex- ico city and santiago” against femicide (hatch ), and (at least in the us) the unprecedented numbers of women running for public office. women’s strikes and pro- tests around the world led cinzia arruza to announce, at the end of , the arrival of a “third feminist wave” in the form of a “new class movement.” “while the second feminist wave, in the sixties and seventies, had a core of advanced capitalist wes- tern countries as its centers of propulsion,” she writes, “the current feminist wave was born from the ‘periphery’—from argentina and poland—and it rapidly spread to a global level, assuming a mass dimension in a series of countries most affected by the crisis and by austerity and debt containment policies (italy, spain, brazil, chile. . .)” (arruza ). antiracist activists and those supporting immigrants and refugees are achieving an unprecedented public visibility internationally. simultaneously, right- wing nationalist movements in many parts of the world are making antifeminist com- mitments an explicit and central part of their public platforms. as the washington post reported in january of , the authoritarian, nationalist government of poland has moved to strip women of their reproductive rights, raided feminist organizations and taken away their funding; the president of the philippines built his brash public image in part by telling rape jokes; the turkish president has issued repeated appeals to women’s maternal destiny as a core cultural value; russia’s putin appointed antifeminist women to public positions in order to put right-wing, repressive politics into practice; and the us president, dubbed “misogynist in chief” by women’s rights activists, was elected in part on the popular appeal of his frequent sexist attacks on women and his public promise to overturn women’s reproductive rights (tharoor ). the explicit sexism of these movements is enmeshed with their even more explicit racism and brutal anti-immigrant and antirefugee policies. where authoritarian political movements are on the rise, we also find a disdain for thinking, for reasoned deliberation, and along with these, disdain for the moral worth of the vulnerable. hannah arendt’s description of an era when facts and events are “infinitely fragile” (arendt , ) in the face of “organized lying” that involves lies “so big they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual tex- ture—the making of another reality” ( ) could not be better suited to our own times. for arendt, the counterweight to organized lying is an “enlarged mentality” that is achieved only through putting oneself into the shoes of the other, of many others, and thinking from the perspective that engaging many perspectives enables hypatia ( ). times like these intensify the urgency of picking each other up through com- mitted feminist thinking and practice. hypatia’s specific history in this regard is complex. the journal’s editors have often addressed questions of disciplinary pluralism, demographic exclusion and marginaliza- tion, and the journal’s own role in setting the agenda for feminist agitation or com- pliance within the academy. from – , for example, the journal’s annual reports reflect a substantial, ongoing discussion about making hypatia “robustly and proactively inclusive,” which included the formation of a “diversity advisory group” (convened by linda alcoff, including kristie dotson, kathryn gines, mariana ortega, uma narayan, and ofelia schutte) to make recommendations to the editors and co-editors. their efforts included making financial commitments to support scholars’ work that engages “the diversity within feminism, the diverse experiences and situations of women, and the diverse forms that gender takes across the globe” through essay prizes, travel support, and other forms of funding. one vehicle for engaging dissent at certain points in hypatia’s history was the inclusion of a “comment/reply” section. in this section, debates over the meaning of pluralism occurred, and the question of whether or not hypatia was locked into a nonconfrontational approach in relation to the larger discipline was debated (lind- gren , . ; urban-walker , . ). the costs of academic legitimacy were the- matized, questions about the potential limits of academic interventions, the politics and strictures of seeing hypatia primarily as a way for junior scholars to obtain tenure, and the potentially compromising task of securing recognition in the context of the academy were described and analyzed (holmes , . ; frances , . ; triglio , . ). special issues have served many purposes, but one purpose has been to provide a forum for engaging difference and dissent. hypatia has taken on the issue of philosophical pluralism or its absence, for example, in its own pages. charlene had- dock seigfried challenged the pragmatist tradition to stop neglecting feminism and feminists to stop neglecting pragmatism in a hypatia article (seigfried , . ) and followed up with a special issue on feminist pragmatism (seigfried , . ), with another special issue entitled women in the american philosophical tradition – appearing years later (rogers and dykeman , . ). analytic feminist phi- losophy as a distinctive tradition was the topic of two special issues (cudd and klenk , . ; superperson and brennan , . ). the special issue structure has sometimes allowed hypatia to create space for scholars who are subjected to the most persistent forms of marginalization in the discipline, and for intersectional feminist work, even as hypatia as a whole has been justly criticized for the underrepresenta- tion of such work. in , a double-volume special issue thematized multicultural and postcolonial feminist challenges to philosophy and the need for feminists to engage internationally (narayan and harding , . , . ) and was followed by two additional special issues speaking to these themes (scholtz , . ; herr and park , . ). special issues were published on women of color feminism (dotson , . ), feminism and disability (kittay, silvers, and wendell , . ; , . ; hall , . ), indigenous women (talamantez, guerro, and waters , . ), heterosexism (callahan, mann, and ruddick , . ), and transgender editorial statement studies (bettcher and garry , . ). more recently, the development of hypatia clusters (a set of three or more articles on a single theme in an open issue) offers another avenue that might be employed to highlight work that is marginalized in the larger discipline (see, for example, the latina feminist philosophy cluster in issue . , ). although this history reflects admirable efforts to create space for scholarship pro- duced at the margins of feminist philosophy and the discipline more broadly, it is not necessarily the case that creating space for these voices amounts to a willingness to be changed by them, nor that such efforts seamlessly achieve the hoped-for results. roc�ıo’s understanding of the “normative ambivalence” of action provides a crucial caution here. to act is to attempt to express an intention publically [sic]. but this means that the determinacy of an action is not fully up to the agent. it is a matter of its externality—its “publicity,” for instance. . .. the determinacy of deeds, moral worth, even intentions can only be established in light of the temporal extension and intersubjective character of action, hence in light of misfires, competing interpretations, unforeseen consequences, incongruent normative expectations, and so on, that exceed the intentions of the agent. . .. along these lines, spaces of resistance, as well as philoso- phy as a critical practice, are always subject to normative instability, co- option, to coextensive positive and negative meanings and effects. . . .this means that any material or discursive gain against systems of oppression is fragile, “precarious,” in need of being maintained, even radically trans- formed in light of new material and historical conditions. (zambrana ) we understand hypatia to be one of those precarious spaces of resistance, where intentions and outcomes do not perfectly mirror each other. we see hypatia as aspir- ing to a critical practice that must be vigilantly maintained even as it remains open to radical transformation, as new historical and material conditions present them- selves. the new editorial team of hypatia is the most diverse in its history, philosophi- cally, demographically, and in terms of our professional age/status in the discipline (with one assistant, one associate, and two full professors). each of us has felt her own versions of gratitude for and critical distance from hypatia over the years. com- ing together as a team is an ongoing process of recognizing our differences related to our historically burdened relationships to feminism and the discipline of philosophy as a whole, acknowledging our disagreements, and building trust with one another across those divides. the larger team includes our managing editor, sarah lachance- adams, joan woolfrey, the co-editor of hypatia reviews online who graciously agreed to continue until we are able to find a replacement, our two graduate student employees, eli portella (editorial assistant) and kaja rathe (hypatia reviews online managing editor). the one thing we all have in common is our connection with the university of oregon, since all of us have been part of uo’s graduate program in hypatia philosophy either as faculty or as students. all of us have undertaken our work for hypatia while the nonprofit board and the interim task force are still working to put new governance structures in place, and while hypatia is in the midst of reflecting on the question of feminist publication ethics in an expansive way, without yet having a full set of principles or guidelines in place. it is clear that there must be an ongoing conversation about publication ethics that extends from questions of policy to questions of unwitting complicity in histori- cal patterns of marginalization and exclusion. though the editorial team does not actually determine or control hypatia’s policies—those are to be reworked by a broader constituency—we will be responsible for implementing them. this imple- mentation must go beyond a set of policies to include habituating sensitivity to how citational practices, processes of review, and recognized discursive conventions are implicated in structures of power. this broader view will prevent the reduction of the conversation to a liberal affirmation of the right to “free speech,” since it recognizes the ways in which access to the means of speech is as much a product of reified rela- tions of power as it is an achievement of our liberatory strivings. taking historically sedimented vulnerabilities into account will require more care than our traditional, only apparently neutral practices of gatekeeping require. citing alain locke’s asser- tion that “in this value domain mutual respect and reciprocity, based on nonaggres- sion and nondisparagement can alone be regarded as justifiable” (locke , ), erin writes, “this means remaining open ourselves, but not to the point of allowing aggressive attacks, unwarranted disparagement, and attempts at erasure” (mckenna , ). at the same time, feminist work requires the recognition that there are no pure places to which we can retreat. as bonnie puts it: there is no “free space” immunized from patterns of injustice. our cultural moment is characterized by the blatant affirmation of racism, sexism and other modes of injustice on the one hand, and on the other hand by a reactive fantasy of innocence or purity that sets itself up as the counter- point to aggressive misogyny and racism. the two sides mirror one another at least in this: the one side demands the purification of a “home- space” from different others, while the other demands the creation of a “home-space” purified of not only those who embrace and affirm such injustices, but also all those who might act unjustly. the problem with this fantasy of purification is that it is doomed to fail—all of us are liable to enact injustice because the structures of injustice are crossed, complex, and also structure the material relations in which we are bound. the fan- tasy of purity allows no room for mistakes, thus no room for growth, and no room for change. the pure room becomes the empty room, eventually. (personal correspondence ) the co-editors of hypatia are very clear that we are fallible in the pragmatist sense of that term, that hypatia as a project must keep its own fallibility in sight rather than suppress or deny it. the key to pragmatic fallibility is contestation and change. we editorial statement call on the entire hypatia community to hold us to account, to name failures when they occur, and strive with us for positive transformation. references ahmed, sara. . living a feminist life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. arendt, hannah. . between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. nd ed. new york: viking. arruza, cinzia. . from women’s strikes to a new class movement: the third feminist wave. https://www.viewpointmag.com/ / / /from-womens-strikes-to-a-new-cla ssmovement-the-third-feminist-wave/. beauvoir, simone de. . the second sex. new york: vintage books. hatch, jenavieve. . powerful images of women protesting against femicide in latin america. huffington post, october . https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ -powe rful-images-of-women-protesting-against-femicide-in-latin-america_us_ cd e b b d c e. locke, alain leroy. . pluralism and ideological peace in the philosophy of alain locke: harlem renaissance and beyond, ed. leonard harris. philadelphia: temple university press. mckenna, erin. . the need for reciprocity and respect in philosophy. the pluralist ( ): – . russell, camisha a. . the assisted reproduction of race. bloomington: indiana univer- sity press. tharoor, ishaan. . how anti-feminism is shaping world politics. washington post, jan- uary . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ / / /how-anti- feminism-is-shaping-world-politics/?utm_term=. a ceee a . zambrana, roc�ıo. . hegelian interviews: roc�ıo zambrana. hegelpd. http://www.hege lpd.it/hegel/print/?articolo= . hypatia https://www.viewpointmag.com/ / / /from-womens-strikes-to-a-new-classmovement-the-third-feminist-wave/ https://www.viewpointmag.com/ / / /from-womens-strikes-to-a-new-classmovement-the-third-feminist-wave/ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ -powerful-images-of-women-protesting-against-femicide-in-latin-america_us_ cd e b b d c e https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ -powerful-images-of-women-protesting-against-femicide-in-latin-america_us_ cd e b b d c e https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ -powerful-images-of-women-protesting-against-femicide-in-latin-america_us_ cd e b b d c e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ / / /how-anti-feminism-is-shaping-world-politics/?utm_term=. a ceee a https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ / / /how-anti-feminism-is-shaping-world-politics/?utm_term=. a ceee a http://www.hegelpd.it/hegel/print/?articolo= http://www.hegelpd.it/hegel/print/?articolo= s jra .. dance as radical archaeology marie-louise crawley dancing in the archaeological museum t his article examines from an artist-researcher perspective the durational solo dance work likely terpsichore? (fragments), which i created for and performed at the ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, oxford (uk) in april . this work emerged as a key part of a wider practice-as-research project probing shifting experiences of tempo- rality when choreography “performs” as museum exhibit. the project asked how we might con- sider the live female dancer in the archaeological museum as a counter-archive or, to use performance theorist rebecca schneider’s reworking of philosopher michel foucault’s term, as a site of “counter-memory” (schneider , ). how might dance’s presence in the museum allow an alternative visibility, a hypervisibility, for those ancient female bodies previously rendered invisible—or, only partially visible—by history? furthermore, how might the presence of the live female dancer in the museum allow certain buried female histories to surface and be “re-collected,” becoming—through performance—part of the museum’s collection (at least, temporarily)? by unpacking these questions here, i aim to make a claim for dance in the archaeological museum itself as a potentially subversive act of what i term “radical archaeology,” both in terms of how it plays on notions of disremembering and remembering histories, and how it seeks to disrupt received notions of how we view and understand ancient history and culture. dance in the art museum in the uk and continental europe is once again in the choreographic zeitgeist, with major events such as french choreographer boris charmatz’s musée de la danse (dancing museum), and belgian choreographer anne teresa de keersmaeker’s work/travail/ arbeid—both at tate modern, london (uk), in and respectively—as select examples among many and with dance scholarship reflecting this. however, although the practice of dance in the art museum seems to be enjoying exponential growth, as does the scholarship on it, dancing in the museum of ancient history and archaeology seems a rare phenomenon, at least in the uk. there are historical antecedents for it: we might think of the pioneers of modern dance in the early twentieth century, such as isadora duncan (c. – ), working in the british museum, for example. but why dance in the archaeological museum today? such was my marie-louise crawley, phd (ad @coventry.ac.uk), is a choreographer, dancer, and researcher. her research interests include dance and museums, and areas of intersection between classics and dance studies, such as ancient dance and the performance of epic. educated at the university of oxford and then vocationally trained at the ecole marceau in paris, she began her professional per- formance career with ariane mnouchkine’s théâtre du soleil. since she has worked as an independent choreographer and dance artist. she completed her phd ( ) at c-dare (centre for dance research), coventry university, where she is assistant professor in dance and cultural engagement. drj / • august copyright © dance studies association doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:ad @coventry.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core question as i embarked upon the creation and performance of likely terpsichore? (fragments) at the ashmolean museum. likely terpsichore? (fragments) this durational work, performed over two weeks in april throughout the opening hours of the museum ( : a.m.– : p.m.), was composed of four dance fragments. i performed each of the four solos—subtitled galatea, myrrha, philomela, and medusa—in the signature glass windows and bridges that connect the ashmolean’s galleries. the performances, viewed behind glass, thereby offered a visual echo of the glass vitrines enclosing ancient artefacts throughout the museum. the dance was juxtaposed against the museum’s other representations of female histories—in the surrounding marble sculptures, fixed in pigment on frescoes and ancient vases, and more strik- ingly and shockingly still, in the physical remains of the exhibited romano-egyptian female mum- mified bodies. i must pause here to remember the sensations of shock and anger that i felt on an initial site visit to the ashmolean, when i first encountered the female romano-egyptian mummies on display in the museum’s ancient egypt and nubia galleries. some of these female “remains” even have mummy portraits, painstakingly restored prior to the ashmolean’s redisplay and the five-million-pounds’ egypt project that brought them out from storage in . the oldest of these portraits, on linen, is of a young woman dating from – ce: she was excavated by flinders petrie ( – ) at the roman cemeteries of hawara in fayum, south west of cairo, in . however, although this woman’s body—and a representation of her face—is undeniably mate- rially present in the ashmolean, i was struck by how her story, and a sense of who she was, is absent. on seeing her body and the bodies of other “unknown” women on display, i began to ask who these women really were. similarly, on that same first site visit, as i walked through the museum’s gallery , the randolph greek and roman sculpture gallery, my eyes were drawn toward a marble sculp- ture of a seated woman. this statue was missing both its head and arms. the label next to her informed me that she is a roman artifact ( – ce) and, despite missing the identifiable lyre, is considered to be “likely terpsichore, the muse of the dance.” i was struck by the term “likely” and how the fragmented statue’s very identity is defined by what is missing. significantly, it was the curt descriptive label next to this sculpture that gave the final durational dance-work its title. photo . marie-louise crawley in mask in likely terpsichore? (fragments), ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, uk, . photograph: brandon kahn. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core half exhibit, half dance installation, the four solos were performed in silence (or in the relative, ambient silence of the museum). galatea, myrrha, philomela, and medusa are all female charac- ters from roman author ovid’s ( bce– ce) metamorphoses, a text written contemporane- ously to the development of the roman dance-theater pantomime form, tragoedia saltata (danced tragedy). all four solos take their root in the foundational principles of this ancient form to somehow explore how, in the moment of performance itself, we might reconfigure a (performance) history into something new. the four fragments feature classical heroines whose voices and bodies have been appropriated throughout history (even by ovid), and aim to reclaim a space in history (and a body in the present) for them. the solos were performed on a loop; as such, they could be viewed in any order, and, significantly, even partially viewed as fragments. housed in their glass “display cases,” they could also be viewed and reviewed from different perspectives; from above, from below, close-up, or at a distance, the visitor chanc- ing upon the work could choose to spend as much or as little time with each work as they wished in the same way as they might view another artifact in the museum’s collection. in viewing the dance in the museum setting, my aim was that the viewer-spectator somehow “completed” the alternative glimpse of an alternative female bodily history offered by the dancer’s performance. this was further reinforced by the way in which viewers could experience the work in a fragmen- tary fashion: walking around the museum, they might only see one of the four solos, or they might glimpse short fragments of each, seen from above, below, face-to-face, close-up, or from a distance—the live dancer seen against marble friezes and sculptures, caught in passing. each viewer might then reassemble the performance’s fragments in a different order, putting the pieces back together in a way unique to them, re-collecting the female stories my dance was putting on display through my body in both senses of the word. we often think of the museum as a temple to memory, as the resting place of history, and as the space in which we come to reflect upon that history, to recollect. yet the very etymological defini- tion of “museum” is a shrine to the muses; in my own dance practice in the ashmolean, the museum is very specifically the shrine to both clio, the muse of history, and also to terpsichore, the muse of the dance (as well as of their seven sisters). when i think of clio and terpsichore at play in the archaeological museum, i cannot help but see before me traces of dance scholar susan foster’s vivid description in choreographing history ( ) of the duet between these two muses, dressed in their combat outfits and sneakers, as they enter some sort of choreo- graphic tussle. in foster’s imagination, their sweaty, fleshy duet is a dialogue playing out the ten- sions, frictions, and collisions between the rhetorical body and the dancing body. for foster, terpsichore senses “the need to rationalize choreography as persuasive discourse” and clio realizes “the need to bring movement and fleshiness into historiography” ( ). these muses know their differences, yet they also have an idea of their common strength: the positive force of a coalition emerging from their collision, a coalition to resist and disembody the “tyrant” ( ). as i dance in the archaeological museum, i, too, feel that i am playing out this collision and coalition between clio and terpsichore. in a practice that somehow attempts to offer an alternative visibility for those who have been partially buried by history, and of whom only fragments are remaining, the coalition of clio and terpsichore together presents a resistance against the looming tyrant of a patrilineal, institutionalized history. these two sister muses are at work resisting the status quo that the museum, as a house of authority, of institutionalized power, might represent. however, for me, the picture that foster paints is itself fragmentary and incomplete. i wish to add a third character, an older (perhaps wiser) figure waiting in the wings, watching and witnessing: memory. for, lest we forget, the mother of the muses—and of clio and terpsichore—was mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. it is memory who births history, it is memory who births the dance, and it is she who will eventually call them to account. if we think about the ancient greek idea of the archive—the ἀρχεῖον—as the home of the tyrant who has the power, we might say that the archaeological museum houses the very monuments of history and of collective memory that define who holds the power and who does not. this idea drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core necessarily relies on a definition of a museum as the very embodiment of historical, cultural her- itage. in looking at a museum like the ashmolean, it is important to keep in mind the high stakes of its history and politics as the uk’s oldest museum, and the fact that museums such as the ashmolean emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as storehouses of collective cul- tural memory. as such, we might think of the museum as a permanent and static fixture embody- ing cultural memory (what diana taylor ( ) would indeed classify as an archive). yet, due to the institutional developments brought about by the movement of the “new museology,” museums have gradually become—and are becoming—much more fluid, transient spaces where the histor- icized past meets the present moment. it is within this framework that performance has entered the museum. in fact, as museology scholar helen rees leahy suggests, it is “the inherent transience and fluidity of performance that confronts the apparent solidity and stasis of the museum” ( , ). it is performance, which takes place in the present moment, in all its brokenness and incompleteness, but also in its movement, that challenges the static, frozen quality of the institution. for me, rees leahy’s suggestion chimes with foster’s description of the battling, moving muses. terpsichore challenges clio to enter the fray, which then becomes a dance; and, as foster suggests, it is this constant movement, this dance, which then resists, challenges, and disrupts the authorial stasis of the museum as archive, the house of collective memory. writing on museum and heritage theater, performance and theater scholar paul johnson points to performance in the museum as a potential alternative means of writing history: if in the new museology, . . . meaning is socially determined and assigned, then surely history must be written in a similar way, and indeed the museum or heritage site is one of the locations where an embodied form of that writing takes place, and so performance itself can be one of the ways of writing. ( , ) whereas johnson is here talking about museum theater, he makes a valid point for what dance per- formance might also be doing in the archaeological museum. as the writing of the dance, chore- ography in the museum offers an alternative means of how we might write history. yet it also offers an alternative means of how we might read history, too, and how we might view it. i would like to focus now on exactly how dance performance does this, in relation to the ideas of the monumental (the solid, static objects of collective memory, as defined by those holding the power) and the fragmentary. indeed, whereas the museum might purport to exhibit the monumental, these monuments are dis- located in time and space: they, too, are often incomplete and fragmented. we need only think of the parthenon marbles housed in the british museum, and the gaps remaining on the parthenon, where they originally were; the marbles are half here and half there, suspended across geographical space as well as across historical time. it is this dislocation and fragmentation that can lend such poignancy to seeing ancient objects on display. furthermore, as performance studies scholar jennifer parker-starbuck writes, the very nature of their fragmentation has now become an almost performative feature of museum exhibition and display: a shift toward how collections and objects perform histories, and what the perfor- mative curatorial strategies of cultural narratives might signal about these histories, has begun to shape museums very differently. i was, for example, surprisingly moved when i visited the then newly opened acropolis museum in athens. walking through the great hall around the replica of the acropolis, studying the spaces where the missing parthenon marbles belonged as i looked upward at the actual parthenon on the hill was a surprisingly poignant moment—the missing objects were specifically curated to be as belonging within the gaps in the recon- struction. (parker-starbuck , ) drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core it is the gaps between the fragments that seem to speak to us across time and space. in , at the opening symposium of the kings college london research project “modern classicisms,” which explores the enduring legacy of greek and roman visual culture in contempo- rary art, artist marc quinn made a strong case for the classical fragmentary: if all classical culture had been perfectly kept, we wouldn’t be interested . . . if it’s fragmented, it has time in it. ( ) quinn’s proposition is a striking one for my own dance explorations. it is the fragmentary that con- tains time; taking this further, we might say that it is from the fragmentary that time might escape. it is through the gaps between fragments that the past may escape to the present; it is through the fragmentary that the past can speak to the present and, conversely, the present reply to the past. it is through the fragmentary that clio dances with terpsichore and, with mnemosyne as witness to their dancing, they are able to resist the historical status quo. it is essential to point out here that i am claiming a positive sense for the fragmentary, particularly in terms of the feminist critical framework underpinning my practice-as-research in the museum. this idea of the fragmentary, of completing the picture, of putting the pieces back together again, as i asked of my spectators, also speaks to dance scholar gabriele brandstetter’s work on the fragmen- tary nature of performance in the museum as offering an alternative to traditional historiography. brandstetter ( ) points to how that which she terms the “museum in transition” can serve as a cultural model for restructuring traditional categories of narrative. following on from jean-françois lyotard’s la condition postmoderne ( ), brandstetter posits the “historeme” or the anecdotal or unpublished as a contrast to the grand récit (lyotard’s “meta-narrative”) and uses dance in the museum, citing redoings of postmodern dance history in the museum (such as those in french choreographer boris charmatz’s musée de la danse), to state how performance can challenge critical historiography. brandstetter suggests that, although traditional historiography tells history with a beginning, middle, and end, it is performance in the museum that can offer an opportunity for the anecdotal to be revealed, and this precisely because of performance’s fragmentary nature. in fact, one of the strongest arguments for including performance within the repertoire of interpreta- tive strategies a museum has at its disposal is that “it provides museums with a resource that helps them fill some of the inevitable gaps in their collections and the narratives that they tell” (jackson , ). it is in this recovery of distant, hidden, fragmented, and marginalized voices through performance that an attempt can be made to re-present that which is absent. dance as radical archaeology thinking about connections between writing, reading, viewing, and dancing history, leads me to highlight the relationship between choreography and archaeology that is central to my practice. i am indebted here to an argument first made by archaeological scholars michael shanks and christopher tilley in their seminal text, re-constructing archaeology ([ ] ), and, in partic- ular, their reading of the archaeologist as some sort of time traveler navigating between the past (that which is being “re-constructed”) and the present (the point at which that reconstruction is happening in the here and now). shanks and tilley’s reading of the archaeologist’s relationship with time rests on an understanding of the contrast between history and memory. history, a word containing both a subjective and objective genitive (ricœur ), is to be regarded both as what has happened and the apprehension of that happening. as such, it does not take place pri- marily as a past event, that which is gone, for “there is no abstract concept of ‘event’ which exists separately from the practice of apprehending and comprehending the past” (shanks and tilley [ ] , ). as shanks and tilley point out, there is no verb corresponding to the noun “his- tory,” and the absence of such a verb as “to history” is something that they wish their study to drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core address. there is a related verb—“to remember”; and memory “presumes the active practice of remembering, incorporating past into present; it is a suspension of the subject-object distinction” ( ). furthermore, memory is linked to storytelling, a mnemonic act addressing an audience. here the archaeologist becomes a “story-teller” (again shanks and tilley’s term), and the act of remem- bering the past becomes a performance. furthermore, it is a performance that does not attempt to construct a coherent continuity, to tell the whole story. such an attempt would be fruitless, as the past is never fixed, it is forever being reinterpreted, and the hermeneutic reinterpreting is endless: the archaeologist may textually cement one piece of the past together but almost before the cement has dried it begins to crack and rot . . . archaeology should be con- ceived as the process of the production of a textual heterogeneity which denies final- ity and closure; it is a suggestion that archaeologists live a new discursive, practical relation with the past. this relation is one of ceaseless experiment, dislocation, refusal and subversion of the notion that the past can ever be “fixed” or “tied down” by archaeologists in the present. it involves an emphasis on the polyvalent qualities of the past always inscribed in the here and now. (shanks and tilley [ ] , ) shanks and tilley’s groundbreaking argument has undeniably paved the way for how i consider the choreographer and dancer in the museum to be very similar to the archaeologist. the dancer in the museum is navigating past and present; she is “doing” history, remembering, storytelling; choreog- raphy, like archaeology, continually inscribes “the polyvalent qualities of the past” (shanks and tilley [ ] , ) in its presentness. the relationship between archaeology and performance has emerged as influential on performance theory and practice (pearson and shanks ) and questions concerning connections between the two disciplines have been addressed at length by giannachi, kaye, and shanks ( ). building on these studies exploring the “negotiations of tenses of place and time” ( ) that both archaeology and performance entail, and while not wishing to do a disservice to archaeologists, i would like to suggest that, in such negotiations, dance in the museum perhaps has the power to go even further than archaeology. dance in the museum is, in a sense, something i have begun to coin as “radical archaeology.” whereas archaeologists aim to survey, excavate, and produce texts, and there is rarely recourse to an empathetic (or bodily) understanding of the past, my museum dance practice aims to communicate the emotions and sen- sations of women from the past to its viewers in the present to encourage in them an empathetic, visceral connection to the past. this radical archaeology, which takes place in the bodies of both the dancer and the viewer, is a grounding principle behind my dance practice in the museum. although i am writing from the choreographer-dancer’s perspective, and an outline of the “audience’s” reception of the work is limited here, it seems clear that the physicality of the dance and the con- nection that it is able to make on a visceral, emotional bodily level is significant in terms of how it might enable a re-viewing of the museum collection, and also a rethinking of what that collection represents. the idea of dance as radical archaeology chimes with work currently being proposed in the fields of phenomenology and sensory studies in archaeology, and there is indeed some overlap in the field of sensory classical archaeology (e.g., betts ). however, sensory classical roman archaeology has to date tended to focus on the sonic and the haptic, rather than the kinesthetic. likely terpsichore? (fragments) affirms dance practice as a vital and necessary base for inquiry into ancient history, culture, and performance. it reflexively speaks back to classical archaeology itself as a sen- sory, embodied practice and how that practice might meet the museum. its subversion of the muse- um’s institutional narrativizing points to the nature of dance as an act of radical archaeology, asserting dance not merely as an art object or educational project to enliven or animate the museum collection, but as an integral element of that collection, and therefore of our understanding of the histories represented within it. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core fragments and monuments the archaeological museum is often a repository of fragments of monuments, which are themselves repositories of fragmentary cultural memory. classicist helen lovatt posits that an exploration of the monumental brings together two sides of the gaze, “the powerful and disempowered, subject and object, same and other, male and female, to explore the end result of epic: the traces that are left behind” ( , ; my emphasis). to illustrate her point, lovatt uses an episode drawn from ovid’s metamorphoses—that of perseus, he who slays the snake-haired gorgon medusa, whose female gaze petrifies anything that dares look it in the eye. this same episode lies at the root of “medusa,” one the four dance fragments of likely terpsichore? that i created for the ashmolean. furthermore, in her inquiry into how the epic gaze interacts with epic acts of pres- ervation and remembrance (acts that, i would argue, are within the domain of the archaeological museum), lovatt evokes the indeterminate, elusive gaps in the epic monument ( , ). in response to lovatt, i suggest that live dance in the museum as simultaneously fragmentary and monumental can offer such elusiveness, at least for the fleeting moment of performance. as lovatt reminds us, medusa symbolizes the monstrous-feminine, a figure who has been appro- priated by both psychoanalysis and feminism (e.g., sarton ; cixous ; rimell ), a “pin-up for female objectification . . . the petrifying image of a mask-like female face . . . a synec- doche for women in epic: monster, uncanny, associated with the divine, powerful, at the same time as she is raped, objectified, an object conquered and exchanged by men to give them power” (lovatt , – ). significantly, classics scholar mary beard ( ) points to the decapitated head of medusa as a defining image of the radical separation—real, cultural, and imag- inary—between women and power in western history: “one of the most potent ancient symbols of male mastery over the destructive dangers that the very possibility of female power represented” ( ). furthermore, the head of medusa, the gorgon’s head, the object held aloft by the victorious perseus, was itself popularly represented in antiquity on an object known as a gorgoneion, an apo- tropaic amulet. on this object, medusa’s face becomes a monument, a visible sign that stimulates an act of remembrance. author geoff dyer describes such historical monuments as “permanent, built to last, [that have] none of the vulnerability of the human body” (dyer , ). i wonder how the live, female body in the museum, surrounded by fragmentary monuments, might itself defy dyer’s definition and become monumental through the fragmented dance and through its photo . marie-louise crawley in mask in likely terpsichore? (fragments), ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, uk, . photograph: brandon kahn. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core very vulnerability? might the medusa’s head one day dance its way through the museum alongside her body? “medusa” in constructing the choreography of “medusa,” i sought to explore the idea of the ashamed and frightened young woman behind the monstrous apotropaic “monument” (i.e., the head of medusa as apotropaic object). i strove to subvert medusa’s role in history as the one whose hair is made of snakes and whose monstrous gaze turns to stone anyone she looks at. rather than dance medusa as the one who petrifies, i aimed to dance medusa’s own petrification, her own metamorphosis, which has made her take on the mask of the monster. i returned to ovid’s metamorphoses ( . - ), in which it is perseus who gets to tell her story; again, the man speaks for the woman, as he brandishes her impotent head around for all to see. it is ovid who tells us that medusa was only transformed into a monster because it was a punishment: her crime—having been raped by poseidon. in “medusa,” the motif of the snakes—a continuous, circular movement of the hands, recalling the helissein (a coiling, twisting movement) of roman pantomime dancers, emanates from within my pelvis and torso, a manifestation of her fear and shame. the snakelike movement of the hands, wrists, and fingers becomes an increasingly inescapable binding motion, which gradually overtakes the whole body. the coiling motion develops from the arms and torso into the hips and legs, pulling me into deliberately repetitive and accumulative sequences of ronds de jambes and turns, which trace circular figure eight patterns on the floor. enclosed within the glass confines of the vitrine-like balcony, the circular phrase accelerates, medusa’s transformation an unstoppable force hurtling through my body and the space surrounding me. this frenetic phrase was punctuated by moments of what i came to term stillness- that-was-not-quite-stillness —hands crowning the head, snakelike above the mask. in this moment of moving stillness, i wanted to subvert the idea of stillness as petrification and medusa’s petrifying gaze. after a long moment’s stillness-that-was-not-quite-stillness, in which my breath danced heavily as my heart rate slowed, the snaking hands motif would begin again and the accumulative phrase repeat to the other side of my glass enclosure. again, the repetition of the movement served to stress the repetition of this particular story through time and history, the impossibility of escape from it. rape and blame doomed to repeat throughout the centuries: photo . marie-louise crawley in likely terpsichore? (fragments), ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, uk, . photograph: brandon kahn. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the woman punished, deemed monstrous. as the dance came to a final “stillness,” facing the ashmolean’s colossal front doors, my playing of the apotropaic gaze was broken by my removing the mask from my face. my hands stretched the mask out in offering to the visitors surrounding me on all sides—below me, above me, opposite me—as if to say, “you have only seen the mask that history has given her, but she is a woman. this, too, is medusa.” i revolved slowly, my arms stretched out to offer the mask to every viewer whose gaze i was able catch. in those final moments, i aimed to return the gaze, but also to hold it, acknowledging a moment of witness. we are all medusas. we are all witnesses to this story. as choreographer-dancer, i see “medusa” as an example of dance in the museum as the moment when the apotropaic monument is broken and shatters to pieces, that moment which philosopher paul ricœur speaks of as the “rupture of memory” ( , ). it is a moment of resistance, a dance of resistance; it is dance as radical archaeology. notes . a video documentation of likely terpsichore? (fragments) is available online: http://podcasts. ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work. this was recorded in the ashmolean on april , . this was a day the museum was closed to the general public and so, although the video acts as a “memory” of the dance practice as it was performed in the museum, it is important to note that it is not a memory of an actual public performance. . in this article, i use the term “practice-as-research,” in its uk context. the variations in terminology in the wider field, namely “practice-as-research,” “performance as research,” “practice-led research,” along with other variations in wide use (e.g., “practice-based research,” “practice-led research,” “performance-as-research”) demonstrate the extensive range of definitions that this methodology has acquired to date. for an up-to-date discussion and unpacking of these terms in relation to performance-as-research as a methodology, i point the reader to arlander, barton, and dreyer-lude ( ). however, this project adopts a fairly simple definition: practice-as-research here means employing the creative processes of choreographing and perform- ing as research methods. . selected examples of dance in the art museum in the uk and continental europe over the last five years alone show the current scale of such activity and include: boris charmatz’s musée de la danse at tate modern, uk, in ; anne teresa de keersmaeker’s work/travail/arbeid at tate modern, uk, in ; pablo bronstein’s historical dances in an antique setting at tate britain, uk, in ; manuel pelmus and alexandra pirici’s public collection at tate modern, uk, in , and the pan-european “dancing museums” project, which initially ran from june –march involving arte sella, italy; museum boijmans van beuningen, netherlands; the civic museum in bassano del grappa, italy; gemäldegalerie der akademie der bildenden künste, austria; le louvre, france; mac/val, france; and the national gallery, uk, which, at the time of writing this article, is now in its second iteration ( – ). . for example, guy ( ); wookey ( ); as well as the “dance in the museum,” a special issue of dance research journal ( ); the “theatre and the museum: cultures of display,” a spe- cial issue of the theatre journal ( ); and “performance, choreography and the gallery,” a special issue of performance paradigm ( ). . in the united states, however, new york’s metropolitan museum of art recently appointed a choreographer in residence, andrea miller/gallim dance who, as the – metlivearts artist in residence, premiered a new site-specific work, stone skipping, at the reconstructed temple of dendur in the museum’s sackler wing in october . the temple of dendur has previously been a site for dance, and significantly the martha graham company performed “frescoes” at its opening in . what draws me to miller’s work is her appreciation of this par- ticular museum as a site of history: “i’m focused on bringing embodiment into a space that is defined by materials, objects and artifacts. these are all masterpieces of our art and of our history; but nevertheless the living body isn’t present as a representative of our history . . . i feel like we’re drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core [gallim dance] representing this deep part of our culture—art—and searching for meaning” (miller interviewed in cates ; n.p., emphasis added). . elias ashmole founded the ashmolean museum of art and archaeology in oxford, uk, in . importantly, it is part of the university of oxford itself, and since its foundation, the triple combination of collection, teaching and research has remained the institution’s distinguishing feature. . since the s, the museum world has undergone significant and radical changes. political and economic pressures have meant that museum professionals have shifted their attention away from their collections and toward a more viewer-centered ethos. attempting to end the traditional elitism of the museum and to ensure greater accessibility to these public spaces, the profession has been marked by a self-reflexivity that has become known as a “new museology.” . their current location remains a bone of contention, as arguments for and against their repatriation to athens continue, cf. jenkins ( ). . marc quinn speaking at “modern classicisms: classical art and contemporary artists in dialogue,” november , , at kings college london, uk. the related research project’s website can be found at www.modernclassicisms.com. . this feminist approach specifically serves my research question about the moving body as potential counter-archival “object” in the museum, and whether its presence might allow a new visibility for those female bodies previously rendered invisible by history. it also uses the dancing body as museum exhibit to subvert the idea of the female body as archival object historically sub- jected to the “gaze,” to use laura mulvey’s ( ) term, of the male collector. as helen thomas ( ; ) points out, despite its limitations, mulvey’s theory was, and i would argue, continues to remain useful to feminist analysis because it offers itself as a model for “understanding the asso- ciation and objectification of women through their bodies and their lack of cultural power within the discourses of patriarchy” (thomas , ). it seems particularly useful when we think about a performance practice in the history or archaeology museum—that “seat” of cultural and patrilineal power—where a female dancer’s body is deliberately put on display for all eyes to see, and where the curatorial practice of display is subverted by replacing an inanimate object with a live, dancing body that shifts through time and space. . see michel foucault’s theory ([ ] ) of a general history. . brandstetter, “the museum in transition: how do performing artists affect historiography?” (keynote address, iftr , stockholm university, sweden, june , ). . over the course of two performance days (april – , ), a very small-scale study was undertaken under the auspices of the archive of performances of greek and roman drama (apgrd), university of oxford, and the ashmolean to gather some data as to how visitors reacted to the dance in the museum. visitors expressed how the dance offered another way of experiencing ancient history and culture, and of viewing the collection, with the dance “inviting attention on weight, materiality and texture, bringing history ‘to life’”; “connecting past and present”; “bring [ing] it alive, taking us (the viewer) back to classical times, experiencing performance to some extent as they did in the past . . . engag[ing] the emotions powerfully”; and as “an alive and active experience” (visitor feedback). . i am grateful to the sensory studies in antiquity network (www.sensorystudiesinantiquity. com), to which i belong, for opening my own senses to the promotion of study of senses in the ancient world among archaeologists and ancient historians. . significantly, in the context of the post #metoo era, in the uk, medusa has seemingly become a popular symbol for both male and female choreographers alike, with jasmin vardimon’s medusa examining the gendered historical significance of the myth premiering in the uk in autumn , and sidi larbi cherkaoui’s medusa for the royal ballet staged at london’s royal opera house in may . . beard brings the image up-to-date, with an exploration of how this same image is still used today to separate women from political power. she cites examples such as newspaper headlines dubbing the uk prime minister theresa may “the medusa of maidenhead,” and the even nastier merchandise on offer to supporters of donald trump during the us election campaign of , drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.modernclassicisms.com https://www.sensorystudiesinantiquity.com https://www.sensorystudiesinantiquity.com https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core such as mugs and t-shirts offering an image of trump-perseus brandishing the dripping head of clinton-medusa. as beard concludes, “if ever you were doubtful about the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded or unsure of the continued strength of clas- sical ways of formulating it—well, i give you trump and clinton, perseus and medusa, and rest my case” ( , ). . interestingly, this is also explored in sidi larbi cherkaoui’s medusa ( ) for the royal ballet which stages her rape by poseidon: in a striking moment of stillness, medusa is suspended in midair, held aloft on poseidon’s back. at first, cherkaoui reads medusa’s ensuing monstrosity as her empowerment: choreographically, he places her at the center of a mass of faceless male soldiers, whom one by one she manipulates and casts asunder, until she stands triumphantly en pointe, her fixed gaze staring out at us, her body poised still with only her arms moving, snaking, and coiling. however, less convincingly, cherkoaui also reads perseus’s eventual beheading of medusa as her liberation: this for me means the ballet in effect resists a potentially feminist, post #metoo era read- ing, with the male “delivering” the female from her punishment through death. . slaney ( ) indicates the movement and dance vocabulary offered to us by ancient authors such as lucian (“on the dance”) and galen (“de sanitate tuenda”), although she is quick to point out that the “glossary” she compiles is derived from nonspecialist spectators, and we have no firm knowledge of how pantomime dancers referred to their steps. . see video documentation of likely terpsichore? (fragments): http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work ( : onwards). . see crawley ( ). . see the video documentation of likely terpsichore? (fragments): http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work ( : ). works cited arlander, annette, bruce barton, melanie dreyer-lude, and ben spatz, eds. . performance as research: knowledge, methods, impact. london: routledge. beard, mary. . women and power: a manifesto. london: profile/lrb. betts, eleanor, ed. . senses of the empire: multisensory approaches to roman culture. abingdon, uk: routledge. brandstetter, gabriele. . “the museum in transition: how do performing artists affect historiography?” unpublished keynote address at iftr , stockholm university, sweden, june , . brannigan, erin, hannah mathews, and caroline wake, eds. . “performance, choreography and the gallery.” special issue, performance paradigm . bronstein, pablo. . historical dances in an antique setting. tate britain, london, april – october . cates, meryl. . “artist in residence andrea miller on stone skipping at the temple of dendur.” accessed march , . https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea- miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview. charmatz, boris. . if tate modern was musée de la danse? tate modern, bankside, london, may – . cherkaoui, sidi larbi. . medusa. royal ballet, royal opera house, london, may – . cixous, hélène. . le rire de la méduse. paris: galilée. crawley, marie-louise. . likely terpsichore? (fragments), ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, oxford, april – . accessed march , . http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely- terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work. de keersmaeker, anne teresa. . work/travail/arbeid. rosas, tate modern, bankside, london, july – . dyer, geoff. . the missing of the somme. london: penguin. foster, susan leigh. . choreographing history. bloomington: indiana university press. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ /andrea-miller-stone-skipping-artist-residence-interview http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core foucault, michel. 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( ) . re-constructing archaeology: theory and practice. london: routledge. slaney, helen. . “motion sensors: perceiving movement in roman pantomime.” in senses of the empire: multisensory approaches to roman culture, edited by eleanor betts, – . london: routledge. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core taylor, diana. . the archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the americas. durham, nc: duke university press. thomas, helen. . “do you want to join the dance? postmodernism/post-structuralism, the body, and dance.” in moving words: re-writing dance, edited by gay morris, – . london: routledge. thomas, helen. . the body, dance and cultural theory. london: palgrave macmillan. vardimon, jasmin. . medusa (dance performance). jasmin vardimon company, gulbenkian, canterbury, september . wookey, sara. . who cares? dance in the gallery and museum. london: siobhan davies dance. drj / • august https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	dance as radical archaeology 	dancing in the archaeological museum 	likely terpsichore? (fragments) 	dance as radical archaeology 	fragments and monuments 	“medusa” 	notes 	works cited kent academic repository full text document (pdf) copyright & reuse content in the kent academic repository is made available for research purposes. unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg creative commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. versions of research the version in the kent academic repository may differ from the final published version. users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. users should always cite the published version of record. enquiries for any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.uk if you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the kar admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html citation for published version thompson, s. and hayes, l. and newman, d. and pateman, c. ( ) the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole pateman. feminist legal studies, ( ). pp. - . issn - . doi https://doi.org/ . /s - - - link to record in kar https://kar.kent.ac.uk/ / document version publisher pdf fem leg stud ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole pateman sharon thompson  · lydia hayes  · daniel newman  · carole pateman , published online: march © the author(s) abstract this reflection is based on a conversation with professor carole pate- man on th december as we prepared for a conference at cardiff university to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of her seminal work, the sexual contract ( ). as socio-legal scholars, the sexual contract has been formative in, and transforma- tive of, our understandings of law and gender. we explore professor pateman’s aca- demic journey and consider how she came to write a ground-breaking book that has made major impacts on socio-legal and feminist legal studies. the paper is struc- tured around the main themes arising in conversation with pateman, with each sec- tion centred on her own account taken from our conversation in late . keywords feminism · biography · patriarchies · sexual contract · social contract · settler contract introducing the sexual contract without doubt, the sexual contract has a special place in feminist thought. pub- lished thirty years ago, the work has inspired a broad range of ground-breaking scholarship and is a classic text in political theory and jurisprudence. it is his- torically important in making visible the patriarchal dimensions of the original contract—the sexual contract. “looking back, i’m not actually quite sure when i thought of…the term, ‘the sexual contract’”, says pateman. indeed, the genesis * sharon thompson thompsons @cardiff.ac.uk cardiff university, cardiff, uk university of california, los angeles, usa school of european studies, cardiff university, cardiff, uk http://orcid.org/ - - - x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf s. thompson et al. of the book lay in her prior consideration of industrial democracy and worker co- operatives in participation and democratic theory ( ) and in her exploration of the philosophy of locke, hobbes and rousseau in the problem of political obligation ( ). work undertaken for these first two monographs affirmed for pateman that the social contract was only part of a powerful and deeply-rooted cultural story about what binds society. it was by reading, writing about, and teaching feminist scholarship in the s that pateman later “realised there was this other dimension of contract” (see brennan and pateman ). for pateman, feminism “offered a different way of looking at all of this” and hence the sex- ual contract emerged as being “partly about the classic texts…and partly my re- reading of them once i’d got this feminist perspective which made it all look so different”. the sexual contract located patriarchy, and gave it a history, within the origi- nal contract. “one thing that runs right through the book”, she says, “is the fact that contract, in my argument is central, as in practice it is the way in which an important form of subordination occurs.” by identifying the sexual contract as being part of the original contract, conventional assumptions about contract are subverted completely. the orthodox interpretation of contract, as the basis of freedom, is dealt a critical blow as pateman meticulously argues across each chapter that freedom is predicated on subordination. thus her “big message”, was that “men governed women” while political theory promulgated a myth that all citizens of the social contract are equal. it was this powerful myth, embedded in notions of contract, that obscured the fact of women’s subordination. pateman explains: by the time i was writing the book…women were, more or less anyway, equal citizens. but in fact…you couldn’t ever forget that you were women. we’re not these individuals in exactly the same way that men are. for example, although…many more wives were working or in paid employment…they were not seen in exactly the same way as male workers. hence, the sexual contract is focused on social structures, exploring “marriage as an institution. or, employment as an institution”. this explanation may be help- ful for those who mistakenly assume that the book is simply about legal contracts between individuals. it is pateman’s alternative way of thinking about contract that constructs a damning critique of existing social structures and institutions: of course, there are contracts between individual men and women. that’s how you become husband and wife or employer and employee, or employer and worker or whatever terms you want to use. but that’s not so much the point. in fact, i would say you can’t understand what’s going on when there’s a contract between the two people if you don’t also understand something about the insti- tution, because you’ve got to know what ‘marriage’ means, it’s part of one of the major structures of the society. in the book i wasn’t talking about individu- als in large part. i was talking about husbands and wives which is an entirely different thing…they’re social categories or political categories. john stuart mill points out that you can have husbands who ill-treat their wives and you can have husbands who behave absolutely wonderfully. but the point is that the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole… the institution of marriage gives each husband the capacity, if he so wishes, to ill-treat his wife. for pateman, securing a link to praxis in her writing was key. her ambition was for the book to show in practical terms how the sexual contract affects actual life and human behaviour. she achieved this by homing in on contractual formulations of marriage, employment, prostitution and surrogacy. this device made the book widely accessible because her ideas were practically tethered to assumptions about family, work, heterosexual sex and childbirth which were, and remain, central to cul- tural constructions of womanhood and impact on all women even though they do not in practice form part of every woman’s life at an individual level. one thing i had always been keen on right from the very beginning in my first book, was that i…got some empirical evidence in there as well as the the- ory. and i’ve always been rather keen…that you don’t just have this abstract argument…i think this is why i didn’t become a philosopher (laughs). that was why i started looking at these various contracts. the marriage contract is particularly important, as is the employment contract, i think it is in a way almost as important as the marriage contract. and then the newer ideas of the prostitution contract and the surrogacy contract. it is no surprise that the sexual contract has had a major influence in socio-legal scholarship. socio-legal feminists, likely schooled in the orthodox understandings of freedom of contract and jurisprudence, have experienced a law school education too often premised on old-fashioned (and inadequate) notions of the liberal individual. encountering pateman’s argument that, through contract, employment, marriage, prostitution and surrogacy are in fact characterised by subordination, provides them with a transformative legal understanding of contract and gender. although her two earlier books have been hugely successful in their own right (remaining in print and on the syllabus of many politics modules in universities around the world) it is the sexual contract that has captured a truly interdisciplinary audience (on ). yet, pateman still seems quite surprised by this, “somehow, i appear to have had a more eager reception in law schools than political science departments”, she says, “that has been interesting”. indeed, it wasn’t until pateman began to work on her manuscript for the sexual contract that she recognised an expansion in her disciplinary repertoire to include an exploration of legal concepts, “i quite enjoyed it, so there’s more of it in the ‘settler contract’, the chapter i wrote later in contract and domination, ( ) with charles mills”. before the sexual contract the sexual contract has been described as a ‘seminal work’ (vincent ) which has marked an ‘historically important juncture in the development of contemporary feminist thought’ (yeatman ). it is not difficult to see why. the sexual contract was, and continues to be, a bold and radical work which s. thompson et al. re-writes the idea of original contract, re-formulates notions of the social contract and illustrates the transformative power of feminist thought in defiance of nar- rowly-argued categories of ‘belonging’ within feminism’s internal silos. to date, there is little written about the lives of women in academia, and this is especially apparent in the fields of law and jurisprudence since women’s legal history has not, until very recently, been considered important enough for academic study (auchmuty ). in the context of discussing the sexual contract, it is more than a little ironic to note that male privilege filters our social awareness of the information which is, or is not, relevant to understanding personal contributions to public life. in the hope of protecting each generation of women from the isola- tion of being cut off from their own history, biography and context is essential to understand how women have negotiated their ‘portfolios’ between the public and private spheres (auchmuty ). understanding more about pateman’s background and her unorthodox journey into academia provides a richer understanding of what pateman describes as her “take-no-prisoners” approach to written argument and it illuminates why her per- spective on the orthodox is so distinctively critical. i’ve never really thought about audiences. i’ve just been interested in writ- ing the stuff…it sounds a bit odd, perhaps…i think because i came at this from such a different background and such a different route than most peo- ple, i wasn’t entirely socialised into the way of academia. pateman’s background was far from privileged. born into a working-class fam- ily in a village in sussex during the second world war, she recalls, “my mother always liked to say, ‘and the midwife had to stay all night!’ because of german bombers flying overhead”. having passed the +exam, pateman was accepted at lewes county grammar school for girls, although she will “never know how my parents found the money for my uniform, but anyway somehow they did, and i used to go in on the bus every day”. although academically talented, there was no encouragement of her to stay on to do a levels, which she puts down to a combination of both her social- class and gender since often middle-class boys went to private school and middle- class girls could use the opportunities of grammar school to move from further to higher education: i left school when i was sixteen. i took the o-level exams. i got…i think eight. and thinking back it occurred to me some years ago that none of these teachers at the school said, ‘oh! you should stay on.’ no. so i just left…i think the middle-class girls all stayed on. pateman married when she was quite young and moved away from her parents to live in witney, near oxford. she worked as a clerical worker and in the civil service at the land registry and took evening classes in english literature. pate- man’s home was not far from ruskin college, an education institute set up at the turn of the twentieth century as a ‘college of the people’ to provide univer- sity-standard education (wilkes and sheppard ). its correspondence courses the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole… offered a path breaking route into higher education for adults from the uk and overseas who could not financially afford to give up paid work. although women were not excluded, the majority of its correspondence students were men said to be “engaged in laborious occupations, men to whom even the cost of the mid- night oil was a serious  drawback” (editorial ). ruskin college also offered residential courses, which originally had been men-only affairs but were opened to include women from . funded by the trade unions, ruskin college rep- resented a unique and revolutionary development in working-class education. yet despite its acceptance of women as students, the institution had been designed for the advancement of working-class men and the creation of this space for workers’ learning did not overturn social perceptions that participation in university educa- tion was a male preserve. pateman had heard of ruskin college, “but i thought it was for men!”. purely by chance, pateman attended a party in oxford at which she met a woman who opened her eyes. “i started chatting to this woman, you know, ‘what you are you doing?’…she was at ruskin! i didn’t know there were any women there and i was extremely surprised.” pateman had enjoyed doing evening classes, her tutor agreed to write her a let- ter of reference and with that, she applied to ruskin college. there was no grand plan, she was motivated by an interest in learning and was accepted for study. paying for college however was another matter and she faced an interview by three “quite elderly county council people” who would decide whether to pro- vide her with financial support. “i remember i went for the interview and they kept asking me what i would do afterwards. i didn’t really know how to answer, because i hadn’t even thought about that. i was just excited about the idea of doing this!” perhaps her apparent lack of ambition was the reason why she was merely offered enough money to pay her bus fares until the principal of ruskin intervened on her behalf and secured a bursary to cover her fees. “so that was how i came to go to ruskin”, pateman recalls there were barely any women there, mostly men, and the game there was who was most work- ing-class. well, i couldn’t possibly win that because i was a woman, so i didn’t count (laughs)…the archetypal ruskin student was still a miner who went down the pit when he was fourteen. although, i had a great time there. ruskin college awarded its own internal diplomas and students also sat the oxford university postgraduate diploma in political science and economics. pateman describes it as “rather strange” that, in a college with “nobody with any educational qualifications to speak of”, students could sit the postgraduate diploma. pateman was keen to continue her studies in politics and economics, she sat entry exams for universities, including oxford, “partly because it was nearby, but partly because it was oxford! i mean, you know (laughs) everybody’s heard of it, even if they’re completely untutored they’ve heard of oxford. so there it was…this chance set in front of me to write these exams…and we were living just down the road!”. not expecting anything to come of her application, pateman was surprised to be accepted to study philosophy, politics and economics (ppe) at lady margaret hall. on hearing the news, “my mother had really no idea of what i was doing, but she s. thompson et al. was terribly pleased and proud…but it was an incredible culture shock for me…i had no idea lmh was quite an upper-class place”. pateman completed her undergraduate degree in two years (as the diploma sub- stituted for the first year), “studying with all these diplomat’s daughters”. it was at ruskin that pateman says she “found” political theory and “just loved it!”. she was inspired by the writing of john plamenatz in man and society and it was the history of political thought, the awareness that learned people had discussed and debated these ideas for centuries, that captured pateman’s imagination. but for pateman at that time, the very thought of undertaking a doctorate was “beyond my grasp”. embarking on a postgraduate bachelor of letters programme (b.litt.) appeared a more attractive option for a student now weary of examinations. her supervisor, brian barry, was a source of inspiration and encouragement. recognising the high calibre of pateman’s studies in the ‘classics’ of political theory, brian suggested she not only switch from the b.litt. to a doctorate programme but also told her to send her manuscript to cambridge university press. pateman explains: so i started writing what became this book on the thinkers. and then i got a bit stuck. what did i do next? brian suggested i have a look at the work of g. d. h. cole and for me, somehow, i don’t know, it just came together…i sent the manuscript to cambridge and one day this letter came through the let- terbox and it said, ‘we’re going to publish this as a book’ (laughs). so that’s how that happened…i didn’t understand then that with a degree from oxford i could have done all sorts of things! i just kind of went with it. so that’s how i became an author. her viva came after the publication of participation and democratic theory ( ) and pateman remembers hearing an ‘incredible noise’ and learning that it was cowley factory workers with chains marching up the high street outside pro- testing the industrial relations act as she sat inside defending her thesis: “it was really quite amusing that during the viva they were clanking up the high street and we were in there talking about industrial democracy”. while pateman’s expertise in political theory was developed at oxford, it was her later immersion in feminist texts that led to her re-reading, and effective re-writing in the sexual contract of the classic texts on social contract. when she was at rus- kin, pateman recalls that “the women’s movement had hardly got started”. it was the publication of feminist texts in the early seventies that brought her to feminism: when all these feminist books came out—not the academic ones, the original ones—that was a eureka moment! i mean, heavens! people writing about this! and so i just devoured them…because you know…look what they’re writing about! i agreed with every word of it. interestingly, these books didn’t immediately influence pateman’s work: “i was hugely excited about those books but at that point it didn’t seem to have much con- nection to what i was doing. i mean it took me ages to work that out, actually”. it was through pateman’s teaching at the university of sydney of a bespoke undergrad- uate module on ‘the political economy of women’ that she realised the connection the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole… between the feminist literature she had read and her own academic writing. indeed, sydney was where she published her first feminist piece in and “by that time, i had kind of started to see how it…interrelated with the work i had been doing”. she speaks about the connection between the women’s movement and her academic work with genuine enthusiasm: there were lots of things going on in the streets…by the early seventies…i thought this was the best thing that had ever happened. i had been reading hobbes and locke and rousseau and so on for a few years, but suddenly it was like reading different books! there’s all this stuff which either was never set for students to read or was just kind of, you know, skimmed over. and this suddenly leapt out at me—look, look! they had all been talking about mar- riage and men and women…it’s very hard to describe now, the impact all those early books had because there had been nothing and we had never been taught about women writing things earlier and the kinds of things they wrote. and even…john stuart mill! we didn’t read the subjection of women ( ). that wasn’t in the curriculum. you read on liberty ( ). or considerations on representative government ( ). for readers of the sexual contract, these “eureka moments” are patent in pate- man’s writing over and over again. her feminist transformation of classic political theory and philosophy lifted a veil on what had not been taught in law schools or in political theory classrooms before—that it was through the exclusionary medium of contract, that institutions and structures of society we often take for granted, in fact serve to reinforce gendered power imbalance and subordinate women. response to the sexual contract the sexual contract has made a fundamental contribution to the development of feminist theory, received world-wide acclaim, and has inspired generations of schol- ars across multiple disciplines. “it’s just been wonderful, the number of people who have come up and said…what an influence it had on them”, pateman says. further- more, the significance of the book is underpinned by its relevance to a diverse range of cultures around the world, which is something she is very pleased about: the book was written very specifically about anglo-american countries and the common law tradition…but i’ve discovered people all over the place in very different cultures have still found it very useful…that’s been…most pleas- ing that it has got this much wider audience than i would have ever expected. it has been enormously gratifying for pateman to observe that the term ‘the sex- ual contract’ has taken on a life of its own beyond the book, “people refer to it as a ‘thing’, and i never know whether they’ve actually read the book or not (laughs), but it is terrific!”. however, pateman found that when the book first appeared in print, some of her reviewers deeply misunderstood it, possibly because they “focused on various chapters” in isolation when the sexual contract is “meant to be read from s. thompson et al. the first page to the last”. this might be why “a lot of them really said nothing about the employment contract”, for example, but instead “focused on the marriage con- tract”. some reviewers also misunderstood the idea of the sexual contract, in that they read it as coming before the social contract, “which actually is not what i said at all!”. pateman notes, “i said they’re both part of the original contract. one doesn’t really come before the other because the original contract is just a story anyway”. in the late s, when the the sexual contract was published, essentialism was a major issue in feminism circles. previously, pateman has shared her concern that “essentialism hunters” had overlooked the arguments she actually made in their fer- vour to identify perceived essentialism (on ). yet the deep historical rooting of pateman’s work gives her a long-view perspective on the significance of feminism for political theory and, an awareness in particular that critiques of essentialism have a very long history (for example, in the work of mary wollstonecraft in the eight- eenth century). while essentialism can be a problem, pateman’s work highlights sexual difference as a political difference between men and women, located in the thought of the classic contract theorists. she affirms: i regarded feminism as offering a different way to look at all that. and i couldn’t see the point of having divisions between labels of liberal feminism and socialist feminism, etc., etc., etc. you know, there was feminism! and that is what i used. of course, it didn’t stop people, after the book was pub- lished, from trying to stuff it into one of these categories. usually, (puts on a posh voice) ‘oh she’s a radical feminist.’ as a political scientist, it was the opportunity to bring feminism to “such, basic, important questions” about citizenship, democracy, participation and authority that gave pateman a belief in feminism as a political and intellectual movement that would really change the whole thing!…but that hasn’t happened…while feminist ideas have changed some things, it hasn’t been a big enough change. cer- tainly, there are many more women in political science…but everyone can be in their own little area of work without necessarily taking a great deal of notice about what other people are doing. the sexual contract today it is interesting to consider pateman’s own response to reading the sexual con- tract once again in preparation for her opening address to the upcoming confer- ence at cardiff university and this interview. she quietly reflects, “on the whole i quite like it, actually (laughs)”. considerable legal and economic changes have produced and reflected changes in patriarchy but women’s subordination to men is a recurrent theme, as pateman muses: the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole… i haven’t changed my mind about any of the major things in the book. and i still think the sexual contract has application now, although you have to take into account that society is not quite the same as it used to be. the sexual contract continues to be widely regarded as one of the most impor- tant challenges to assumptions made in political theory and it has become a clas- sic second-wave feminist text (mills , ). the significance of its ongoing relevance should not be underestimated: there have been big changes over the last thirty years and patriarchy is obviously not exactly the same as it was. social mores have changed quite a bit. in particular there has been a lot of migration. people move around a lot and many of the old industries that i talk about in the book have gone. i mean mining has gone more or less completely. printing is all computer- ised. so, the old working-class industries that supported the breadwinners that are in the book, they’re not available any more. jobs today seem to be awfully low-waged in this country. experience tells her that discussions of men’s power over women fall in and out of intellectual fashion. for example, pateman notes that the recent #metoo campaign on social media in has powerfully brought the issue of sexual har- assment back into public view and encouraged women to share their experiences of rape, sexual violation and unwanted sexual attention. this has drawn attention to the common place of harassment in women’s lives and asserted women’s right to speak for themselves and self-define the actions which harm them. however, an apparent focus on celebrity women has foreshadowed the day-to-day sexual harassment encountered by women unable to speak out for fear of losing their jobs and homes or jeopardising their intimate relationships. in this disparity of voice lies proof that the un-silencing of women in contemporary society is only partial. pateman’s enduring view of the underlying institutional contract and the domination/subordination dichotomy prompts her to question, “despite #metoo, how many men still think in exactly the same way? how many men have been influenced by the harvey weinstein scandal?” the sexual contract is anything but dated, as is also clear in pateman’s analysis of demands for a basic income (pateman ); a timely issue directly connected to her discussion of the employment contract thirty years ago. pateman brings the gen- dered dimension of policy questions over basic income into sharp focus: basic income intersects with feminism because one thing that historically women have always lacked is an income. and particularly as wives…the ‘breadwinner’ was always the husband and if he was generous the wife could live reasonably well. but if not, not so. therefore, a basic income would mean that really for the first time all women would have an income. but the cru- cial thing then is the level at which it is set. it becomes interesting when it’s enough that you can live on…not necessarily well, but you can live on it, so you can take part in things, and you don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from…i think, if you had it at that sort of level…it would at least s. thompson et al. allow people to not do some of the worst jobs and to get out of relationships where they’re being beaten up. and then also, i thought if it was at a living level…people might start talking about other things. you know, how it is that women have not had an income like this before. by abandoning a stance of gender-neutrality, pateman’s approach makes vis- ible the liberating possibilities of basic income for women, such as escaping abu- sive relationships or being able to reject low-waged, poor quality jobs. the rel- evance of the sexual contract is also manifest in its contribution to other fields, such as critical race theory. pateman is clearly passionate about this, particularly charles mills’ work the racial contract ( ). “oh i loved it!”, she says, “it’s very, very interesting stuff”. this culminated in pateman and mills’ co-authored work contract and domination ( ). in this book, pateman applied her vital perspectives on contract to theorise one of her other major contributions—‘the settler contract’. the settler contract exposes the deception of terra nullius or ‘virgin territory’ and undermines the arguments historically used to legitimise the states created in north america and australia. the domination/subordination reinforced by the settler contract meant that the existence of the original inhab- itants of these lands could only exist if expressly recognised by the new state ( , ). the formulation of this argument goes back to the late s ( , ), as pateman had “been collecting…material on terra nullius for a very long time”. this research, building on the theoretical framework developed in the sex- ual contract, makes a ground-breaking contribution to critical race theory and socio-legal studies on indigenous land rights. and so it is not surprising that pate- man says “i regard the settler contract as my last significant piece”. through her oeuvre, pateman has been able to explore the original contract through three interrelated dimensions: the social, sexual and racial contract. when considering whether the institutional inequalities embedded in the sexual contract will be eroded in future, pateman is not overly sanguine. in an interview with nirmal puwar ( ) pateman anticipated an “interesting period over the next ten years if numbers of women in positions of political leadership go on increas- ing…we have plenty of examples of women who have been leaders of govern- ment that have not pushed an agenda that helps women”. fifteen years on, she now reflects on this statement about women in power: there have not been very many female leaders who could be seen as having been influenced by the feminist movement. very few of them, as far as i know, have actually done anything very specific for women…sometimes they have improved welfare policies…which obviously would have helped women. in pateman’s view, “there…hasn’t been a big enough cultural revolution yet” and while “a lot of feminist ideas…are now in popular circulation they exist in a very… watered-down form” and hence a lack of meaningful change has been achieved by women who do gain positions of power. arguably the most persuasive explanation proffered by pateman is that there are women pursuing policies that help women, but, she asks, “how likely is it that a woman of that sort would come to be in a position where she could be a leader of a country?” she goes on to say that there the sexual contract years on: a conversation with carole… have “undoubtedly…been male politicians who have had policies that have helped women, but i don’t think many of them have put it that way”. when assessing why women do not gain power through helping women, perhaps our best explanation is provided by the sexual contract. this institutional contract, that she sets out so powerfully in her book, continues to underpin society today. and so, it is fit- ting that when asked what message she wants readers to get from the book now, pateman responds: i would hope that it might give them some insight…into the way that societies are structured. even the best societies are still structured so that somehow men monopolise all the top positions, they get all the power. conclusions pateman’s recollections about how the sexual contract came into being underline the fallacy of any attempt to regard equal opportunity and formal equality as a solu- tion for the intellectual advancement of women’s thought. how many more women with pateman’s scholarly capabilities and intellectual capacity did not discover new possibilities because they did not bump into a woman at a party who went to rus- kin college? while oxford university was institutionally open, in a formal sense at least, it was the geographic proximity of its buildings and it physical presence in a town pateman knew well that made it socially accessible to her. pateman returned to education as an adult in a setting shaped by and for working- class men and later advanced her studies in a setting shaped by and for upper-class men. it is an inescapable conclusion that the boldness of her ideas in the sexual contract reflect her ability to understand gender from a working-class perspective and that this ability was sharpened by her educational circumstances and personal biography. the book offers a confident, assertive and clear account from a woman who remarks, “i wasn’t at all confident (laughs)…it took me a very long time to develop any confidence about anything in life” but also recognises that by the time of writing the sexual contract she had learned “how to do it, how to put things together…i’m a woman who likes to make an argument, i’m not messing about, you know, i make an argument”. pateman’s critical eye, her powerful written voice and her desire to challenge grand theories has been informed by her understanding of feminism as a call to keep focused on the big picture, speaking truth to power. women’s education and scholarship are fundamentally significant as activities in the public sphere. feminist writing and teaching is, in and of itself, a form of public sphere activism, producing and affecting social change by challenging fundamen- tal tenets of assumed ‘knowing’ about the world. pateman’s account suggests the sexual contract is, in part, a product of her teaching about feminism and her own learning as an academic educator. it is a book inspired and informed by social expe- rience located in the chasm between her sophisticated knowledge of political theory and the reality of what she knew of women’s lives. for academic feminists, questions of ‘how to be’ feminist and ‘how to do’ femi- nism necessarily recur in fresh contexts for each generation. undoubtedly, feminism s. thompson et al. needs its writers and thinkers; those whose activism like pateman’s, is communi- cative, explanatory and endures as it is carried through the medium of education. hence feminism needs its teachers too. when the orthodox understandings are so evidently wrong, it is patently inadequate for students to come to feminist explo- rations of contract as a supplementary addition to the orthodox. young women, particularly working-class women, should not have to wait until post-graduate edu- cation or beyond to be introduced to scholarship which invites them to understand their historic exclusion and contemporary awareness of not quite fitting in. acknowledgements the sexual contract: years on, is a conference supported by feminist legal studies and funded by the cardiff centre for socio-legal studies. it takes place between – th may . details and updates can be found at https ://sites .cardi ff.ac.uk/event s/view/the-sexua l-contr act- - years -on/. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . inter- national license (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribu- tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references auchmuty, rosemary. . recovering lost lives: researching women in legal history. journal of law and society : – . brennan, teresa, and carole pateman. . mere auxiliaries to the commonwealth: women and the origins of liberalism. political studies : – . editorial. . ruskin collegian, ed. h alsop. ruskin college. mills, charles. . the racial contract. ithaca and london: cornell university press. mills, charles. . the domination contract. in contract and domination, ed. carole pateman and charles mills, – . cambridge: polity press. mill, john s. . on liberty. boston: ticknor and fields. mill, john s. . considerations on representative government. new york: harper and bros. mill, john s. . the subjection of women. london: longmans, green, reader, and dyer. on, steve. . interview with carole pateman. contemporary political theory : – . pateman, carole. . participation and democratic theory. cambridge: cambridge university press. pateman, carole. . the problem of political obligation. cambridge: polity press. pateman, carole. . the sexual contract. cambridge: polity press. pateman, carole. . democratizing citizenship: some advantages of a basic income. politics and society : – . pateman, carole. . the settler contract. in contract and domination, ed. carole pateman and charles mills, – . cambridge: polity press. pateman, carole, and mills, charles. . contract and domination. cambridge: polity press. puwar, nirmal, and carole pateman. . “the sexual contract”, women in politics, globalization and citizenship. feminist review : – . vincent, andrew. . the nature of political theory. oxford: oxford university press. wilkes, chris, and sheppard, alan. . the college and the fellowship during world war i, ruskin college fellowship of ex-students. https ://www.ruski n.ac.uk/perch /resou rces/the-ruski n-colle ge- fello wship -and-the-first -world -war.pdf. accessed feb . yeatman, anna. . review articles: carole pateman, the sexual contract (polity ). thesis eleven : – . https://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/events/view/the-sexual-contract- -years-on/ https://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/events/view/the-sexual-contract- -years-on/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://www.ruskin.ac.uk/perch/resources/the-ruskin-college-fellowship-and-the-first-world-war.pdf https://www.ruskin.ac.uk/perch/resources/the-ruskin-college-fellowship-and-the-first-world-war.pdf editorial comment editorial comment jen parker-starbuck theatre journal, volume , number , march , pp. ix-x (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ theatre journal ( ) ix–x © by johns hopkins university press editorial comment the four essays that make up this issue seem, at the outset, quite different, spanning from scenic conceptions of the “not-performing” infant to an account of the lesser-known saint pelagia in the fifth century; from south african attempts to address transitional justice through performance to the emergence of ideas about “ham” acting in the nineteenth century. indeed, general issues tend to be a bit of a collage. but in reading them all together, there is also a sense of framing that runs across these distinct essays. framing is perhaps an obvious association; after all, theatre acts as a frame, holding a “mirror up to nature” as shakespeare so famously put it. here, framing also becomes a mode of analyzing the past through the present; it becomes a boxing in or around human life; and it becomes a mode of seeing and understanding intermedial exchange. the issue begins with a literal framing: the newly invented incubator as framing tiny, premature infants. in bryoni trezise’s essay “future visions: a pre-performative history of infant theatricality” we encounter infants in “unexpected frames,” first in exhibitions of incubator technology in the early twentieth century, and then on the stage of socìetas raffaello sanzio’s tragedia endogonidia, br.# brussels. through these different instances, trezise traces the emergence of what she describes as an “aesthetic modality that involves the pre-performative infant being staged as a device for ‘long watching.’” by looking at two distinct framings of infants, trezise argues that the infant figure, the “not-performing child,” establishes a “temporal echo” with which to examine these scenes. within technological frames (in the socìetas raffaello sanzio piece the baby is onstage with a robot), the not-performing infant, she argues, becomes “intertwined with narratives of progress and is, both narratively and ontologically, responsible for a future.” the evocative idea of the temporal echo can be found in all of the essays in this general issue; authors explicitly and implicitly analyze questions and framings of the past that allow for provocative comparisons today. in his essay “’better to burn’: the prima mimarum and political friction in fourth- century antioch,” scott venters begins with the story of saint pelagia the “harlot,” a provocative tale of antioch’s first actress, a “prima mimarum,” but also called a “meretrix,” the term for harlot. venters introduces readers to pelagia’s life as she transitions from actress to religious convert who donated her wealth to the poor, and then, disguised as a eunuch named pelagius, traveled as a monk. venters argues that it is her “mobility, ambiguity, and autonomy” that resist narrative closure around her descriptors, and that despite the texts’ erasure of her “performative transgressions” (by substituting meretrix for mima), it cannot ignore them gesturally (through pelagia’s disguised cross-dressing). although grounded in fourth- and fifth-century antioch, the essay also reaches forward, to arjun appadurai’s ideas about commodity to show the exchange value placed upon women during this period. it is difficult not to reflect on the #metoo movement and current wave exposing histories of sexual harassment when the essay reminds us how the mima was treated: “her political identity had been martyred, torn asunder, and disseminated . . . women were only cognizable through sexual associations with men: widow, virgin, harlot, (martyr).” temporal echoes that ring louder and louder. x / jen parker-starbuck gibson alessandro cima’s “exporting south africa’s truth and reconciliation com- mission: global arts corps’ truth in translation” analyzes the function and the use of theatre as a mode of facilitating dialogue and aiding in conflict resolution through his examination of the musical truth in translation, and the documentary it inspired, a snake gives birth to a snake. the production dramatizes the stories of eight language interpreters within south africa’s truth and reconciliation commission, which is then framed by the film, which follows the production as it tours through other conflict zones such as rwanda, the balkans, and northern ireland. the result is a layered ex- amination of how the processes of developing a theatrical piece can, as cima argues, perform “reconciliation as an ongoing and strenuous embodied practice.” the essay focuses on the questions of transitional justice and how these ideas might be translated to other conflicts. it concludes with the difficulties faced by the truth in translation cast workshops with survivors in other countries as it toured. cima explores how the reframing of one culture’s trauma to another’s may produce different outcomes due to “questions of translation, interpretation, and context.” the final essay of the issue, eleanor massie’s “ham acting: a circum-atlantic ge- nealogy,” expands sianne ngai’s aesthetic categories to include “ham”: “awkward, over-theatrical, and embarrassing.” massie historicizes and examines this aesthetic category as one linked to the precarity of a more stable or professional acting style, but also links its emergence to the precarity of black performers and to a reframing of blackness in the theatre industries of the united states and britain. although often understood in relation to the amateur or “bad” actor, massie argues that the “attention- grabbing laboriousness” of the white actors in her examples masks the presence of the black actors whose labor is not acknowledged. the essay then frames three specific examples: from film (a hollywood musical, the story of vernon and irene castle), vaudeville (a musical called the ham tree), and an dialect poem (“the first banjo”) in which white actors/writers use “ham” in ways that capitalize on, and problematically reframe, the labor of black artists. although addressing wildly different topics, these essays, each in their own way, exemplify the potential and strength of theatre research to respond and remain resistant to increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded politics and policies affecting much of our readership. theatre’s potential to frame immediate political crises (as in the affective production of the jungle i recently saw at the young vic in london, which dramatized the hope, potential, and politics within and surrounding the refugee camp in calais before it was demolished) and to tell stories about gender and racialized struggles and about nations themselves is mirrored back in these pages. drawn together, these essays intersect in their framings to speak back, to act back, and to provide a space for potential change. i would like to note that as of this issue i have taken over as editor from the in- comparable joanne tompkins, who completed her editorship as of the december issue. i want to thank her within these pages for her friendship and support over these past two years. when taking on this role, i could not have imagined how fortuitous it was to be paired with such an excellent role model in editing—i have learned much from her skill and from the thoughtful care she gives to the work. i also did not real- ize the intensity and constant communication needed for the journal to run smoothly, and feel fortunate that joanne made this aspect so pleasurable. as i step into these large shoes, i am grateful to welcome my new coeditor, e.j. westlake, to the team. i am already excited by e.j.’s ideas and looking forward to the shape the journal will take as we forge ahead. —jen parker-starbuck biron - birkbeck institutional research online lup, d. and beauregard, t. alexandra and adamson, m. ( ) the many faces of gender inequality at work. [editorial/introduction] downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / usage guidelines: please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk please cite as: lup, d., beauregard, t. a., & adamson, m. ( ). the many faces of gender inequality at work. work, employment & society, ( ), - . the many faces of gender inequality at work in january this year, the day to day editorial work for work, employment and society (wes) moved from the university of leicester to the middlesex university team, for the period - . we are an interdisciplinary team, with members from four departments within middlesex university. in addition to dedication to the core sociological approaches of the journal, the team members have been selected to reflect the increased interdisciplinary character of the journal. members bring a wide range of research interests and perspectives, with particular emphasis on the growing research areas of labour process, new forms of work, precarious work, globalisation, diversity, mobility, labour migration, and psychosocial studies. to capitalise on our diverse research expertise, we have decided that, whenever possible, we will create thematic issues of wes and preface them with short editorials. in doing this, we hope to better focus the attention of academic and practitioner communities with an interest in a specific theme, to foster dialogue, and to signal potential areas for further research. introducing the thematic issue the collection of articles included in this first thematic issue addresses gender inequalities, a theme that has featured intensively in the public sphere in these past months, including high profile revelations about gender pay discrimination such as those at the bbc and others in the uk, the #metoo and #timesup campaigns, and ongoing debates about gender inequalities in the global labour market. our assembling of this particular issue also coincides with uk employers’ compulsory reporting, for the first time, on the gender pay gap and the solutions they envision for closing this gap, including plans around increasing the number of women in the upper echelons of organisations. in our view, all the articles in this issue have a link to this pressing problem, in that they highlight how solutions to gender gaps depend on factors that reside not only within the organisation, but also at family and societal levels. moreover, these factors are constantly reshaped by changing economic contexts and national policies. the articles we present in this issue cover not only a variety of factors and contexts, but also document the sources and outcomes of gender inequalities across six countries from four continents, including a cross- country analysis. together, they provide a snapshot of the rich empirical evidence available to researchers interested in further developing our theoretical understanding of gender inequalities. the articles in this issue three articles in this issue investigate how macro-level social and economic forces shape the gender structure of labour markets. in ‘good, bad and very bad jobs for women?’ tracy warren and clare lyonette analyse changes in the quality of women’s part-time jobs in britain in the post-recession period. what makes their analysis of part-time jobs particularly relevant for gender inequalities is the fact that britain has a high percent of part-time jobs and that women have traditionally dominated this labour segment. using data from the uk skills and employment survey series, warren and lyonette’s analysis zooms into distinct aspects of job quality related to pay, skills and training, promotions, job autonomy, security and intensity. they also differentiate jobs by position in the standard occupational classification. while at an aggregate level it appears the pre-recessionary narrowing of the gap in quality between part-time and full-time jobs has been maintained, the analysis by occupational position paints a more complex picture. on the one hand, there has been an increase in the number and some positive change in the quality of part-time jobs for women employed in higher-level occupations. however, the women in this category were also the most likely to feel that their jobs were at risk and to work overtime. on the other hand, women in low-level jobs have seen a worsening in job quality on almost all dimensions, and this drop in quality is observed for both part-time and full-time jobs. these findings raise questions about the way in which economic conditions shape gender inequalities in labour markets. in ‘dynamics of gender earnings inequality in reform-era urban china’, guangye he and xiaogang wu also investigate the link between economic context and gender inequality. their innovative aim is to parse out the effects of ‘economic growth’, measured as gdp per capita, from ‘marketization’, captured by percent employment in the private sector, using a large size dataset from the mini-census conducted by the national bureau of statistics. their analysis demonstrates that economic growth reduces the gender gap in earnings, while marketization exacerbates this gap. these findings suggest that the socialist state’s push for introducing more market mechanisms in the planned economy seems to have a negative impact on women’s wages. more generally, he and wu’s results call attention to both marketization and economic growth as distinctive factors that shape resource allocation and social stratification in modern societies. juliane stahl and pia sophia schober investigate the impact of parental leave and childcare policies on mothers’ work-care patterns in germany, comparing mothers with different educational levels. they also compare the uptake in formal childcare in east and west germany, which historically had different norms for women’s employment and formal childcare: in east germany early maternal employment was the norm, while in west germany mothers were more likely to interrupt their careers to care for young children at home. their study ‘convergence or divergence? educational discrepancies in work-care arrangements of mothers with young children in germany’ focuses on the period between and and uses data from the german socio-economic panel study and a supplementary data set on households from families in germany. stahl and schober show that the impact of parental leave and childcare policies on mothers’ work-care arrangements depends on mothers’ education. specifically, both employment and day-care uptake increase strongly among families with more educated mothers, with the gap between the higher- and lower-educated categories widening between - . this pattern is present in both east and west germany. in unveiling this pattern, stahl and schober’s study draws attention to how government policies and social class interact in shaping gender-related work opportunities. the warning sounded by their study is that while parental leave and childcare policies work to the advantage of some women, for others – the least educated – these same policies increase the risk of economic insecurity and further social exclusion. a further group of three articles emphasises the role of organisations in shaping patterns of gender inequality by looking at how particular gender equality policies are put in place at the organisational level. in ‘the good, the not so good and the ugly: gender equality, equal pay and austerity in english local government’, hazel conley and margaret page focus on the impact of austerity on the implementation of the gender equality duty (ged) and the single status agreement (ssa) in english local authorities between and . introduced in (and later transferred with some modifications in the equality act ), ged placed a statutory duty on public authorities “to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment and to promote equality of opportunity between men and women” in all their functions. in turn, the single status agreement of , a national collective agreement between local government and unions meant to develop a common pay scale for all jobs based on the premise of equal pay for equal value, was supposed to be in place by but was severely delayed. conley and page show how, under the threat of budget cuts, instead of ged and ssa jointly informing measures to address the gender pay gap and the structural and institutional contexts that contribute to this gap, they became split targets of two distinct teams: equality and human resources, respectively. in their interviews with representatives from local authorities, conley and page find that the hr teams handled the equal pay issues, but did not actively use insights generated under ged to address a wider array of factors that contributed to gender inequality. the article’s findings draw attention to the importance of organisational resources as a moderator of the impact of national gender equality initiatives. in a similar setting, that of local authorities, but in finland, paula sanberg, maria tornroos and roosa kohvakka investigate the role of collective agreements in institutionalising the undervaluation of work performed by women. unlike the uk, where the ssa has, by and large, contributed to the harmonization of wage determination practices, finland’s local government employees are covered by several collective agreements, with multiple methods of wage determination. in ‘the institutionalized undervaluation of women’s work’, the authors show that, within the same organisation and controlling for human capital endowment, employees covered by collective agreements that represent jobs typically performed by women receive lower wages than employees covered by agreements that represent male-dominated jobs. moreover, even controlling for collective agreement, women’s compensation is still lower than men’s. in the third article to draw attention to organisations as critical sites in which gender inequalities are reproduced or attenuated, sylvia fuller and lynn prince cooke investigate variations in fatherhood wage premiums across canadian firms. ‘do formalization and performance pay matter?’ inquire the authors. using linked employer-employee data from the canadian workplace and employee survey, fuller and cooke show that in organisations with more formalized structures of decisions around wages and promotions, such as human resources departments and collective bargaining agreements, the fatherhood wage premium is lower than in organisations without such structures. this evidence suggests that formalization might reduce opportunities for gender biases and group-based privileges to impact employees’ compensation. the final set of articles in this issue highlights the ways in which the employment status and working arrangements of employees’ partners contribute to patterns of gender inequality in responsibility for unpaid domestic work and in earnings from paid work. in ‘flexible men and successful women: the effects of flexible working hours on german couples’ wages’, laura langner examines the use of flexible work hours among german employees and the outcomes of flexibility for wage growth. contrary to the popular belief that women are the typical category of employees to require flexible working, she finds that flexible work hours are not more likely to be taken up by women or by parents, but instead by men. both men and women benefit in terms of increased wages from adopting flexible work hours, and domestic partners of flexible workers also experience an increase in earnings. the link to gender inequality emerges with the finding that among those using flexible hours, the wage growth effect occurs later for women than for men. the implication here is that women working flexible hours need to prove their continued commitment to the employer before increased productivity is financially rewarded. their male counterparts, however, do not. the article by robyn mayes and paul koshy, ‘transnational labour migration and the place of reproductive labour: trailing wives and community support in boddington’, examines the experiences of women from asia, europe, and south america who migrated to rural western australia to accompany partners who have taken up work in a local gold mine. the authors’ interviews with both migrants and non-migrant community members show how the organisation of work in the gold production industry contributes to creating a gendered experience of migration. mines rely on male workers who are mobile and employed for the short rather than long term at relatively remote work sites where -hour production is the norm. this generates migration patterns in which accompanying wives have few opportunities to continue their own careers or to undertake any paid employment. in turn, ‘trailing wives’ feel compelled to perform a disproportionately large share of the household’s domestic labour and emotion work while their spouses work long hours. the authors clearly demonstrate how industry practices reinforce these unequal divisions of paid and unpaid labour within migrants’ households, the local community, and the workers’ camp. finally, in ‘unemployment and the division of housework in europe’ , by tanja van der lippe, judith treas and lukas norbutas, we again see discrepancies in the proportion of household labour shouldered by women compared to men. analyses of data from european countries demonstrate that both women and men spend more time on housework when they are unemployed, but women do so to a much greater extent. this “gendered reaction to joblessness” identified by the authors extends to partners’ unemployment as well. while men’s participation in unpaid household work is not linked to their partners’ employment status, women with unemployed partners engage in more unpaid domestic labour than women whose partners are in work. the effects of unemployment on the allocation of household work thus precipitate even higher levels of gender inequality for heterosexual domestic partners than is usually the case. future work developing the theoretical understanding of the mechanisms that generate gender inequalities proposed in the articles requires further research. below, we draw attention to a number of avenues for further investigation that the articles in this issue suggest as worth pursuing. we hope that these suggestions will be of interest not only to researchers, but also to practitioners and policy makers. all the articles in this collection refer, directly or indirectly, to policies meant to address gender inequalities. most of the papers show how, under certain conditions, the impact of these policies is either lacking or creating further inequalities. while the insight that the successful impact of policies depends on how they are translated and enacted by various actors is not new, it appears to us that more focused research effort is needed to shed light on this aspect. specifically, future research could look more systematically at how the impact of policies meant to address gender inequalities is moderated by organisational characteristics and resources. are organisations with resource constraints less likely to pay attention to the careful implementation of gender equality measures, in the way suggested by conley and page? does the gender composition of an organisation or of its uppermost echelon matter for the speed with which gender equality measures are adopted and on how they are enacted in practice? are measures meant to address gender inequality more likely to be introduced in certain industries? similarly, family norms might moderate the way in which parental leave, childcare allowances, or other measures intended to address gender inequalities in the labour market affect women’s wages and career progression. for instance, we may need to pay more attention to cross-partner effects and how the work experiences of household members interact to produce or reproduce gender equality or inequality; employees do not work or live in a vacuum, and workplace and household factors intersect. relevant questions for future research could focus on cases that challenge traditional gender roles. how do ‘trailing husbands’ contribute to domestic work and emotional labour in the family’s host country post-migration, and how do these household contributions influence their female partners’ work activity and experiences? do men who work flexible hours participate in domestic work to a greater extent than those on traditional schedules, and does this help to account for the increase in their partners’ wages? third, as suggested by warren/lyonette and stahl/ schober’s studies, women’s socio- demographic characteristics, including occupational class and education levels, also shape work experiences and outcomes. while the call to study inequalities at the intersection between gender and other socio-demographic characteristics is not new, our emphasis here is on understanding how women’s socio-demographic characteristics affect the way in which they are able to seize the opportunities offered by policies geared toward reducing gender inequalities in the labour market. for instance, since september the childcare offer under the free early education entitlement in the uk has increased from to hours. it appears to us that investigating how different categories of mothers are able to access and use this childcare provision would be a question well suited to work and employment scholars interested in gender inequality. finally, the international breadth of the articles in this issue suggests the need to develop a finer-grained theoretical understanding of how gender inequalities are constructed and operate across a variety of national and cultural contexts. such theoretical developments would allow us to explain why certain policies to reduce gender inequalities succeed in a particular national context, but not in others; they could also guide practitioners in devising more efficient equality strategies. we also make a call for expanding research on work- related gender inequalities to under-researched countries from the global south. we hope that this thematic issue may yield insights that will contribute to innovative research with practical impact. on behalf of the editorial team: daniela lup t. alexandra beauregard maria adamson citizen-scholars: social media and the changing nature of scholarship publications article citizen-scholars: social media and the changing nature of scholarship amy l. chapman * and christine greenhow department of counseling, educational psychology, and special education michigan state university, east lansing, mi , usa; greenhow@msu.edu * correspondence: chapm @msu.edu; tel.: + - - - received: december ; accepted: january ; published: february ���������� ������� abstract: research is rarely created for private use; researchers publish their work so that others can read and use it, to advance the collective understanding of a field and impact people’s lives. yet traditional approaches to scholarship, which emphasize publication in subscription-based rather than open access journals, inhibit not only the dissemination of research but also its usefulness, particularly outside of academia. across all fields, scholars, educators, and members of the public benefit from scholarship which is easily accessible. open science and public, social scholarship can break down these barriers to accessibility and utility. in this age which calls for a more informed citizenry, the use of social media to share and promote discussion of research could change not only the nature of scholarly communication but also the nature of scholarship and scholars’ roles. in this conceptual article, we argue that practicing public, social scholarship and increasing the use of social media to promote scholarship are the civic responsibility of citizen-scholars, so that research becomes more widely accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere. keywords: social media; scholarship; citizen; civic engagement; research; open science; public scholarship . introduction in the age of social media, the nature of scholarship has begun to shift toward greater openness and transparency and the utilization of various multimedia formats [ – ]. historically, the traditional model of scholarship has been structured around communities of scholars, grouped into institutions, whose research is disseminated through academic journals, available via institutional or individual paid subscriptions. this approach has limited public access to research. recent calls for open science, or the idea of openly sharing scientific knowledge as early as possible in the discovery process can be seen as an invitation to promote wider consumption of research through publication in accessible formats or open access journals [ , ]. it can also be seen as a move toward re-envisioning the role of scholars, especially in terms of how scholars contribute to public discourse and the role that technologies like social media might play in facilitating this contribution. advancing the knowledge base and participating in public discourse through scholarship are two ways in which scholars contribute to civic life. social media may assist scholars in these practices, enabling them to share work; interact with a broad audience; and become citizen-scholars, generating research with a commitment to the improvement of society. in this conceptual article, we argue that performing open, public, and social scholarship using social media is the civic responsibility of today’s citizen-scholars, so that research becomes more accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere. next, we present a short overview of the traditional model of scholarship, followed by brief descriptions of three converging trends in scholarly practices: open science, public scholarship, and social scholarship, which foreground our discussion of the responsibilities and practices of citizen-scholars in the age of social media. publications , , ; doi: . /publications www.mdpi.com/journal/publications http://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /publications http://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications publications , , of . traditional model of scholarship in the traditional model of scholarship, scholars from different disciplines convene in a common physical place (e.g., university or college) and conduct research, which is disseminated through the classes they teach on campus and through publications. ideally, scholarship is grounded in openness; being transparent about one’s research allows others to see that it is legitimate, and to corroborate or dispute it through subsequent research. however, criteria for funding and publication have not typically encouraged open science; they do not promote the sharing of materials, software, codes, or data sets between researchers, nor do they promote the publication of findings without statistically significant results [ ]. in addition, research findings that are published are often inaccessible to many, given the high costs of academic journals. although the concept of the university is a relatively modern construct, the idea that there was a place where scholars gathered to teach and students gathered to learn is considerably older. though there have been different understandings and purposes of universities over time—from religious institutions which prepared students for religious life, to government-run centers of learning where graduates became members of polite society, to practical institutions intended to prepare students to enter agricultural or mechanical professions—research conducted and classes taught at universities have long been shaped by constraints [ ]. whether their purpose was religious, secular, or practical, universities were the centers of knowledge that was given out to particular people for a particular purpose. the constraints of this university model, with its control of scholarship production and knowledge flows, benefitted some students, such as those who wanted to train in a specific vocational field or to pursue religious life. however, not all people who seek to pursue additional education are able to attend a university; cost, location, or the amount of time needed to pursue a degree, among other factors, are prohibitive for many prospective students. with traditional forms of scholarship, students are limited in their higher education choices by the campus-based model. the ways in which research has historically been disseminated (e.g., through teaching) advantages students who have the desire and means to attend a university while disadvantaging others. in addition to limits imposed by institutional contexts, funders and publishing outlets also constrain meaningful, comprehensive scholarship dissemination and in turn, public discourse. research, particularly in the sciences, is built upon openness and transparency [ ]. research is conducted, ideally, in such a way that others can follow the work that was done and the conclusions that have been drawn. however, this openness is neglected, sometimes to the point of being disincentivized, when it comes to the dissemination of research. sources of funding and publication outlets seek to support and publish new research with significant findings, even though research which corroborates prior research or research with null findings can be as valuable in making sense of the world [ ]. this contributes to the development of scholars who do not have a complete view of research in their field, as publications skew towards statistically significant results, and data, materials, methods, or codes are not shared. . open science in light of these limitations above, the traditional, campus-based model of scholarship no longer remains the only viable model. from university-organized electronic communications, such as online or hybrid courses, to informal and independent learning made possible and accessible through online resources, the internet has shaped when, where, and with whom learning and teaching occur [ ]. in addition to making it possible for students who are interested in higher education to have options beyond coming to campus to learn, the internet has created a space for open science. open science is a model of scholarship in which all aspects of the research process are open and transparent. as masuzzo and martens argue: publications , , of the overall goal of open science is to accelerate scientific progress and discoveries and to turn these discoveries into benefits for all. an essential part of this process is therefore to guarantee that all sorts of scientific outputs are publicly available, easily accessible, and discoverable for others to use, re-use, and build upon. [ ] (p. ) thus, in enacting open science, scholars make their methods, codes, and materials, as well as their research results, available to the public at no cost. with open science, the expectations and requirements of publication shift from only publishing new, statistically significant research to publishing rigorously conducted research that can include studies which corroborate prior research or have null findings. furthermore, the call for open science includes more than a call for sharing research tools, data sets, and findings. some open access journals, in addition to providing free access to the research that they publish, also work to support open science in other ways. for example, the university of huddersfield press has sought to actively engage the scholarly community via social media to support researcher interactions and disseminate research publications beyond academia [ ]. the press uses facebook and twitter to connect authors to each other, to share information about its processes, and to increase the reach, or potential audience, of its publications [ ]. additionally, huddersfield press seeks to develop the next generation of scholars, offering funds to provide early career scholars with time for writing and editing and inviting them to writing retreats offered by the publishing house [ ]. this investment in future scholars is intended to illuminate the process of accessible academic publishing, provide them with skills to build their body of work, and increase the amount of open access research [ ]. in addition to utilizing open access publishing outlets, some in the research community have called for the elimination of publishing research results in academic journals entirely [ ]. instead of publishing results at the end of the research process, hartgerink and van zelst argue that each step of research should be communicated separately as it is completed, allowing each step to be evaluated and refined before moving on to the next step. elements of the research process, they argue, should be made public through networked modules with open access, which would allow not only for the connection of the pieces of a particular study but also for connection of those elements to other, related studies [ ]. this method of communicating research processes and outputs would also allow for the inclusion of methods, codes, and materials, for which traditional academic journal formats typically do not have space [ ]. the open science model of scholarship has several potential challenges and benefits over the traditional model [ ]. challenges to enacting open science, especially involving social media, include the risk of ideas being stolen, the difficulties of getting credit for work published primarily on social media, disagreement about standards and incentives for conducting open science, and the time and effort needed to learn how to use social media tools to create open access networked models or to initiate and sustain social media accounts for open science purposes [ ]. on the other hand, those in favor of open science argue that it breaks down barriers: between scholars who are researching similar questions, between scholars from different disciplines, and between scholars and learners. if open science practices were normative (e.g., open publishing or networked modules that include data sets, protocols, and findings shared with other researchers), scholars who are researching the same topics or asking similar questions could become knowledgeable of others’ work and build on it. in this way, open science could foster a more accurate and comprehensive knowledge base in a discipline, including knowledge of successful and failed interventions. additionally, complex societal problems typically require interdisciplinary research teams. open science could spark more boundary-crossing and productive collaborations at the intersection of disciplines, where increased access to data sets make data-sharing and multi-method analyses from diverse perspectives possible. open science can also increase the ability of learners to access research, especially for those not affiliated with a university, or who cannot or do not want to pay for journal access. members of the public seeking current research on a particular topic face fewer barriers through open science. finally, open science benefits scholars, as papers published in open journals are more likely to be cited and mentioned in publications , , of the media [ ]. together, these affordances of open science contribute to a multiplicity of paths for the acceleration, dissemination, and usefulness of “discoveries into benefits for all” [ ]. . public scholarship while calls for open science are relatively recent in academia, the idea that scholarship should be public is not new. john dewey, in the early s, argued that scholars should interact with the public in order to identify, shed light on, and help solve societal problems [ ]. moreover, dewey thought that science could be most helpful in alleviating social problems and contributing to progress through robust public inquiry [ ]. for dewey, public inquiry was the way in which scholarship was useful to all, and not limited to particular fields where new research might trickle down to people who might use it [ ]. a more contemporary definition of public scholarship expands upon dewey’s associations between the process and products of research, education, and their potential impacts on democratic values and civic action. imagining america, a higher education consortium in the united states dedicated to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design, defines public scholarship as “scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area . . . [that] contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value” [ ] (p. , emphasis added). public scholarship includes the diverse ways in which scholars and their community partners communicate knowledge. in public scholarship, the purpose of both the research and the ways in which it is circulated is to contribute to education and civic life [ ]. this goal can be achieved through a variety of research or creative activity which enhances teaching and learning, promotes an informed citizenry and various methods of civic education, increases awareness of civic responsibility and encourages civic engagement, and investigates and creates solutions to societal problems [ ]. with this definition, public scholarship is seen not only through the lens of open science; but is understood to contribute to the public good. there are a variety of ways in which scholars can engage in public scholarship that attend to these goals. for instance, scholars engaged in public scholarship can seek to circulate their research not only through publications but through conferences and public lectures, reports and meetings for community partners, and editorials. additional avenues for public scholarship include contributions to websites and blogs, exhibitions of creative work, engagement with the media, and utilization of social media and online applications to connect with a broader audience. public scholarship also includes collaboration, which can occur during the research or creative process through to the many ways in which the results of the collaboration are communicated to the public. any of these means of research dissemination have the potential to increase the public’s engagement with scholarly work, and in turn, enhance education and civic life. next, we present a third model for scholarship, social scholarship, which exists at the intersection of public scholarship, open science, and social media. it envisions the role social media might play in enacting open, public scholarship as well as the benefits and challenges of embracing this approach to scholarship today. . social scholarship: a model for open, public scholarship through social media building on the central ideas of open science and public scholarship, social scholarship is a recent model for scholarly practices that re-envisions boyer’s ( ) seminal, four-dimensional model for scholarly activities (i.e., scholarship of discovery, teaching, integration, and application) in light of social media advancements [ ]. social scholarship seeks to take advantage of social media affordances (i.e., user-generated content and promotion of users and their interrelationships) and values (i.e., knowledge as accessible, co-constructed, decentralized, and connective) to evolve the ways scholarship is performed in academia. cohen ( , paragraph , as cited in [ ]) defines social scholarship as “the practice [ . . . ] in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing process . . . [and is characterized by] openness, conversation, collaboration, access, sharing and transparent revision.” publications , , of social scholars use social media to publish and interact with scholarly output and to join an online community devoted to their topic [ ] (cohen, , april , paragraph ). “openness” has typically referred to open data-sharing, open source code, open peer review, or freeing the academic literature from paywalls [ ], but with social scholarship, its meaning has broadened to include alternate forms of peer review, public engagement in science, and the recognition of various forms of output as legitimate products of research effort [ ]. social scholarship integrates the use of these social media tools throughout the research and publication process in ways that promote wider access, openness, transparency, and collaboration. for instance, social scholarship advocates informal, social review of articles as a complement to traditional and open science peer review models [ ]. in open science peer review, journals publish reviewer reports either as a component of the pre-publication review process or post-publication, where, after editorial review, submitted articles are published online and peer review occurs openly (i.e., reviews with names of reviewers are published by the journal alongside the article and authors are invited to publish revisions in response) [ ]. by adding an informal social review process, scholarly work is made openly accessible on social media platform(s) to a broad audience of specialists and non-specialists and undergoes an explicit or implicit review. in explicit review the audience on social media is invited to scrutinize and post or comment on the scholarly work using the social media platform. for example, in the case of the #arseniclife debate on twitter, tweets indicated skeptical and non-skeptical views of a scientific article that claimed bacteria could replace phosphorus for arsenic in its genetic material [ ]. to back up their claims, twitter users involved in the #arseniclife conversation, tweeted links to critiques and studies refuting the original study’s central claim, which were published on blogs before publication in traditional academic outlets. ultimately, the arsenic life hypothesis was dismissed with the open access publication of a study refuting it by one academic blogger. in implicit review, the audience engages with the scholarly work as indicated by metadata (e.g., favoriting, liking, retweeting, sharing, tagging, bookmarking, page views, download numbers, etc.) which can sustain public interest in the research and reveal the extent of connections the work has generated. advantages to incorporating informal, social review as part of social scholarship practice are that it may help identify inaccuracies; resurface overlooked research, practice, and policy implications; sustain debates on controversial findings; raise research visibility by engaging journalists; and engage the broader public in cutting edge science [ , , ]. furthermore, studies have shown that such informal review can produce higher-quality research with better verified claims [ ]. on the other hand, challenges with informal review are that non-specialists, journalists, and social media influencers, or those with outsize followings, can shape conversation in misleading or unwarranted ways, all within public view, and contribute to the spread of misinformation. for a more complete discussion of the practices that make up social scholarship and their benefits and challenges, see [ , ]. in addition to the above example of using twitter to promote wider access, openness, transparency, and collaboration through social scholarship, other social media such as facebook and the academic social network sites (research gate and academia.edu) also have the potential to influence open, social scholarly practices. facebook, for example, has been noted for its ability to enhance scholars’ engagement with an open, collaborative research process, and not merely with research outcomes or published research; drawing on their social capital, or the people and information resources available to them in their online social network of facebook friends, scholars share various types of information, ask for resources, and question a wide and diverse audience about what problems are worth investigating in the first place [ ]. as on twitter, academics on facebook can engage in formal and informal social review; sustain attention to topics or controversial research; disseminate work quickly to a wide audience; and gain recognition, feedback, and support from peers worldwide [ , ]. on the other hand, critics of the use of facebook to advance new forms of scholarship point out that facebook’s designed features “constrain their users, fostering ‘conviviality and liking’ over debate and discussion” (p. ) because facebook seeks to control users’ attention and behaviors, giving people more of what they like in accord with the targeted advertising on which the platform depends [ ]. publications , , of unlike facebook and twitter, social media like researchgate and academia.edu, both for-profit companies founded in , were designed to facilitate academic and research practices and have features that can promote open dissemination practices and knowledge-sharing within academic communities [ ]. for instance, researchgate supports knowledge-sharing and research dissemination by allowing academics to upload research products, “follow” other academics, and get notified when academics of interest upload new scholarly products. similar to the aforementioned examples of explicit and implicit social review on other social media platforms, academics on researchgate can comment on research publications, and ask and reply to questions with the questions feature. users can signal their engagement with others’ projects and publications, contributing to implicit social review, by viewing, downloading, bookmarking, recommending, following, or sharing the work. these activities are counted and totaled by the platform so that users can see how much interaction the scholarship is generating. although, in contrast to researchgate, academia.edu is more popular for scholarship in the arts and humanities than in the social sciences, it has similar features for knowledge-sharing, open research dissemination, and social review [ ]. like researchgate, users of academia.edu can upload research artifacts, including a wide range of outputs such as peer-reviewed publications, working drafts, book chapters, conference papers, and teaching material. on “sessions” pages, users can comment on papers or leave line-by-line annotations. through the “views” feature and through the analytics dashboard on each scholar ’s profile page, users can see indicators of engagement their work has generated. however, drawbacks to using these social media platforms for new forms of scholarship have been noted in the literature. one criticism is that site features, such as the analytics dashboard on academica.edu, reinforce a form of “navel-gazing”, incentivizing scholars to constantly self-monitor and self-promote rather than focus their attention on knowledge advancement and dissemination for the collective good [ ]. concerns over the quality and credibility of work openly shared on these sites [ , ], as on facebook and twitter [ , ], have also been noted. perhaps most importantly, the integration of these social tools into scholars’ lives is largely uncharted and unexplored territory which may have far-reaching, potentially negative consequences we have yet to understand. a recent review of the literature on researchgate and academia.edu as tools for scholarly communication, for instance, found only two studies that actually investigated scholarly practices when using these academic social network sites [ ]; one study examined whether authors comply with publishers’ copyright agreements when uploading their articles to researchgate [ ], and the other examined question-and-answers and small group discussions on researchgate [ ]. on the other hand, scholars have theorized several advantages to using these academic social network sites for open, social scholarly practices: they help users to keep up with research trends, build communities, and engage in conversation; they improve open sharing of scholarly outputs at various stages; they stimulate alternate formal and informal forms of peer review; and they develop and enhance academic reputation and identity [ ]. thus, social scholarship exists at the intersection of open science, public scholarship, and social media. although research documenting such new forms of scholarship-in-practice is nascent, social scholarship principles emphasize widening the open review process to encompass informal social review, encouraging scholarship dissemination beyond academic journals platforms as legitimate outlets for research, and changing the dynamics of traditional knowledge production from scholar to consumer toward collaborative knowledge production built on public engagement with research via social media. . citizen-scholars whether working from the traditional model of scholarship or the open, public, and social scholarship approaches emerging today, academics, especially those at land-grant universities, have always had the important responsibility of generating and circulating discoveries that advance the publications , , of knowledge base, improve education, and contribute to the public good. indeed, one of the many purposes of education has long been to produce informed citizens who participate in civic life [ ]. broadly speaking, civic refers to all aspects of life that are related to the communities in which one lives, ranging from one’s neighborhood and municipality through to state and national issues and government [ ]. civic responsibility, in turn, refers to the idea that all members of a community bear responsibility for its social and societal problems and are willing to be informed about, and take action regarding, these issues [ ]. citizen-scholars, then, have a civic responsibility to work toward the generation of accessible, shareable, usable scholarship that informs the public and helps address pressing societal problems. citizen-scholars also have a responsibility to stay up-to-date on their field of study and to engage civically in issues that pertain to their expertise. although civic engagement has typically referred to conventional ways in which people fulfill their civic duty (e.g., voting) [ ], this definition is changing in light of citizens’ adoption of social media for civic and political purposes and new models of citizenship today. for instance, bennett theorized two citizenship styles in use today: dutiful citizenship and actualizing citizenship [ ]. these two models differ in their approaches to civic engagement, sources of information, expressions of civic opinions, and types of civic actions [ ]. dutiful citizenship is the traditional model of citizenship, where civic engagement is an obligation and duty; information comes from legacy news sources such as newspapers and television news, civic expression is done through writing letters to newspapers and through voting, and civic action is related to traditional political party or governmental structure [ , ]. in contrast, actualizing citizenship is a more contemporary model. citizens who hold this style of citizenship see civic engagement as personal; what is “known” is a blend of information and action that has been co-created and co-curated over online social networks. civic expression occurs over a wide variety of platforms, and civic action includes more fluid membership in online groups, social media movements (e.g., #blacklivesmatter, #metoo), protests, marches, and consumer boycotts [ , ]. in this context, citizen-scholars are poised at the intersection of scholarship trends, social media advancements, and contemporary forms of civic engagement to participate in the public co-curation and co-creation of knowledge, educational innovation and evidence-based solutions to complex problems. particularly in this time of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” it is critically important for citizen-scholars to contribute to the knowledge and public discourse being shared via social media. . conclusions in this conceptual article, we have explored the benefits and challenges of practicing contemporary approaches to scholarship in service to making research more widely accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere. today’s citizen-scholars, perhaps now more than any time in history, have an obligation and an opportunity to utilize powerful, ubiquitous social media platforms to engage the public in science and collective, civic action. the need for informed and educated citizens has not diminished in the age of social media. in the era of “fake news,” the distribution and discussion of accurate and timely research is critical, and citizen-scholars, through open, public, and social scholarship, can play a significant role in promoting an informed citizenry. author contributions: both authors contributed substantially to this work. both authors contributed to the article’s conceptualization, writing—original draft preparation, and writing—review and editing. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . greenhow, c.; 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	traditional model of scholarship 	open science 	public scholarship 	social scholarship: a model for open, public scholarship through social media 	citizen-scholars 	conclusions 	references nmt- - - -werner.fm Årgang , nr. - , s. – norsk medietidsskrift vitenskapelig publikasjon copyright © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cre license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /). doi: https://doi.org/ . /issn. - - - - issn online: - the smirnoff equaliser – en feministisk medieintervention för strömmad musik? the smirnoff equalizer – a feminist media intervention for music streaming ann werner docent, sodertörns högskola ann.werner@sh.se sammendrag i den här artikeln analyseras marknadsföringen av the smirnoff equaliser utifrån syftet att undersöka vilken sorts feministisk medieintervention (gill, ) verktyget presenteras som och hur verktyget placeras in i musiklyssnan- dets algoritmiska kultur (morris, ; striphas, ). the equaliser mäter könsbalansen i spotifys användares musiklyssnande och föreslår kvinnliga artister för dem att lyssna på i spellistor. den lanserades som ett samarbete mellan de två företagen, smirnoff och spotify, inför den internationella kvinnodagen och avser att göra musi- klyssnandet mer jämställt. i artikeln diskuteras frågorna; vilken sorts feministisk strategi presenteras i marknads- föringen? vilka pekas ut som ansvariga för att förändra? och: vad osynliggörs i marknadsföringen? marknadsföringen av verktyget undersöks utifrån dessa frågor genom diskursanalytiskt inspirerade läsningar med bakgrund i mediete- ori om algoritmer och postfeministisk kultur. nyckelord the smirnoff equaliser, postfeminism, kvinnliga artister, algoritmisk kultur, spotify, populärmusik abstract this article analyses the marketing of the smirnoff equalizer with the aim to investigate what kind of feminist media intervention (gill, ) the tool is presented to be, and what place the marketing carves out for it in algorithmic cul- ture (morris, ; striphas, ). the equalizer measures the balance between women and men artists in a spotify account, and proceeds to suggest women artists to the user through playlists. it was launched as a collaboration between the two companies – smirnoff and spotify – ahead of international women’s day , and aims to make music more equal. in this article the questions: what kind of feminist strategy is presented in the marketing? who is assigned responsibility for change? and what is hidden by the marketing? are explored through readings inspired by discourse analysis using media theory about algorithmic and postfeminist culture. keywords the smirnoff equalizer, spotify, women artists, algorithmic culture, popular music, postfeminism ative commons cc-by-nc . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / ann werner inledning att kvinnoidentifierade artister är i minoritet i musikbranschen är ett välkänt faktum. en forskningsrapport om könsrepresentation i låtar på billboardlistan – (smith et. al., , s. ) visar att artister identifierade som kvinnor utgör , % av artisterna och , % av de som producerar musiken. en annan forskningsrapport om jämställdhet i stor- britanniens musikbransch (bain, , s. ) visar att bland artister med skivkontrakt i stor- britannien är de kvinnoidentifierade , %. usa och storbritannien står för en stor del av den populärmusik som har global spridning, och även om dessa undersökningar inte kan antas representera hela världen är de indikatorer på hur könsrepresentationen ser ut. samtidigt som den ojämna könsrepresentationen i musikbranschen är välkänd finns äldre och nyare initiativ för att motverka den: dessa är ofta inriktade på att öka antalet kvinnoi- dentifierade artister, låtskrivare, producenter och dj:s i branschen. branschinitiativ och medlemsorganisationer som bandcamp, she is the music, keychange och popkollo, för att bara nämna några, har arbetat med utbildningar, nätverkande, stöd till artister och påver- kan av nyckelpersoner för att öka representationen av kvinnoidentifierade artister i musik- branschen. arbete för att uppmuntra en högre andel kvinnoidentifierade artister att delta i musik- branschen har pågått länge, att algoritmer har betydelse för vilken musik som visas på topp- listor samt presenteras för enskilda lyssnare är ett nyare konsumtionsfenomen (hesmond- halgh & meier, ; maasø & hagen, ). resultatet av algoritmiskt musiklyssnande tycks inte vara större balans mellan kvinno- och mansidentifierade artister. var av de globalt mest strömmade artisterna på spotify kvinnoidentifierade ( icke-binär artist och könsblandade grupper fanns också med på listan). ted striphas ( ) har argumen- terat för att algoritmiska mjukvaruprocesser är en aktiv medskapare av en ojämlik kultur- konsumtion, där algoritmerna som rekommenderar innehåll på netflix eller google för- stärker och omvandlar sociala grupper utifrån till exempel klass, genus och etnicitet/ras när de förmedlar och organiserar kulturellt innehåll. med andra ord är tjänsterna som erbjuder strömmad musik inte neutrala kanaler, utan medskapare av vilken musik som bli populär och medskapare av hur konsumentgrupper föreställs. i samband med den internationella kvinnodagen , som också var våren efter #metoo, lanserade smirnoff och spotify ett verktyg de enligt utsago utvecklat tillsammans med syftet att få lyssnare att upptäcka fler kvinnoidentifierade artister: the smirnoff equa- liser. i videon som marknadsför verktyget från mars säger spotifys talesperson tim ganss att de mest strömmade låtarna på spotify under alla framfördes av män. denna dominans av mansidentifierade artister framställs i videon som anledningen till att initiativet för jämställdhet i strömmad musik tagits. the equaliser är placerad inom ramen för keychange och initiativet smirnoff equalising music. i det samarbetar smirnoff med kvinnoidentifierade dj:s och arrangerar musikevent för att öka antalet kvinnoidentifierade . artister som varken identifierar sig som män eller kvinnor är än färre. de diskuteras inte närmare i den här arti- keln. det beror på att materialet som undersöks, marknadsföringen av the smirnoff equaliser, beskriver kön som binärt. därmed osynliggörs artister som inte identifierar sig enligt den uppdelningen och könsbinäritet naturali- seras. för att göra läsaren uppmärksam på att kön inte är binärt, detta är en diskursiv konstruktion och förhär- skande uppfattning, används i artikeln begreppen kvinnoidentifierade och mansidentifierade artister. när författaren refererar till andra forskare eller materialets benämningar används ibland annan terminologi. . i artikeln kommer verktyget att kallas för the equaliser genomgående eftersom författaren anser det överflödigt att göra reklam för företaget varje gång verktyget nämns. en översättning skulle kunna vara jämställaren, eller jämlikaren. men orden är inte vedertagna på svenska på samma sätt som equaliser är på engelska. equaliser kan anspela på både jämlikhet och jämställdhet, samt på jämställdhetsintegrering (gender mainstreaming) och är ett mångbottnat begrepp. norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - aktörer inom musikbranschen, exempelvis på musikfestivaler. the equaliser analyserar lyssnandet på ett konto utifrån artisternas (av spotify tillskrivna) kön och meddelar köns- balansen i lyssnandet i procent. sedan ger det ett värdeomdöme och föreslår spellistor där användaren kan reglera andelen kvinnoidentifierade artister. the equaliser är ett av flera initiativ för jämställdhet och jämlikhet inom strömmad musik. tidal lanserade satsningar för att synliggöra genus och sexualitet under pridemånaden i usa både och . dessa inkluderade videor med artister som definierar sig själva utanför cis- och heteronor- men, bland andra; caly bevier, serpentwithfeet och carlos vara. de talar om hur identitet, genus och/eller sexualitet påverkar deras musikskapande i korta filmer. en redigerad spel- lista för pride skapades av tidal vid samma tidpunkt som artistvideorna delades på twitter. apple music lanserade den mars , dagen före den internationella kvinno- dagen, videon global feminism tillsammans med artisten annie lennox och företaget the circle. i videon talar annie lennox om genusbaserade orättvisor i världen och denna kampanj fick en egen spellista med kvinnoidentifierade artister i apple music (#global- feminism). Även om tidal och apple musics initiativ inte analyseras här är det intressant att notera att de, som smirnoff och spotify, arbetar för jämställdhet och jämlikhet genom att bygga spellistor och visa marknadsföringsvideor. de valda strategierna påminner med andra ord om varandra och analysen av the equalisers marknadsföring kan ha bäring även för andra jämlikhetsinitiativ inom strömmad musik. i den här artikeln analyseras marknadsföringen av the equaliser i två videor från och samt två exempel på diskussioner av marknadsföringen och verktyget av musi- kentusiaster som exempel på medierad feminism. syftet är att undersöka vilken sorts femi- nistisk medieintervention (gill, ) the equaliser presenteras som och hur verktyget pla- ceras in i musiklyssnandets algoritmiska kultur (morris, ; striphas, ). i artikeln ställs frågorna; vilken sorts feministisk strategi presenteras i marknadsföringen? vilka pekas ut som ansvariga för att förändra? och: vad osynliggörs i marknadsföringen? analysen bör förstås som kvalitativ i bemärkelsen att den identifierar trender, tendenser och möjliga tolkningar. bakgrunden till analysen är forskning om populärmusik och genus, samt de medieteoretiska diskussionerna om algoritmisk kultur, postfeminism och kommo- difierad feminism. efter detta inledande avsnitt är artikeln disponerad på följande sätt: forskningsbakgrund och teori följs av ett stycke där material och metod presenteras, däref- ter är analysen uppdelad utifrån tre teman och sist diskuteras slutsatserna. populärmusik och genus inom forskning om kvinnor i musikbranschen och om genus och populärmusik har hur den ojämna könsrepresentationen i branschen kommer till uttryck undersökts. detta har ofta gjorts kvalitativt inom olika sorters musikverksamheter i studier som syftat att förstå hur utövare och publik konstrueras i termer av genus, hur innehållet i musiken är genusko- dat eller hur miljöerna, kulturerna eller genrerna har inbyggda förståelser av genus och makt. exempelvis har frågan om hur genus konstrueras i klubbkulturer studerats i inter- vjuer och etnografi med kvinnoidentifierade dj:s (gadir, ; attias, gavanas & rietveld ). hur genus och makt påverkar praktikerna i kvinnoidentifierade producenters arbete är ett annat aktuellt område, då musikproduktion är dominerat av mansidentifierade per- soner (wolfe, ). betydelsen av genus för musikbranschens struktur och funktion har . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h rynir_q c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h rynir_q c ann werner vidare diskuterats (leonard, ) och musikaliska uttryck hos framgångsrika kvinnoiden- tifierade artister har analyserats (burns, ; whiteley, ). tidigare forskning om genus, populärmusik och musikbranschen har även undersökt betydelsen av medier för musik ur ett genusperspektiv. exempelvis har medierade fankul- turers genusmönster inom hårdrock beforskats (hill, ), användningen av medieteknik i musikutbildning (armstrong, ) har studerats ur genusperspektiv, samt liveframträ- dandens påverkan på rapporteringen om kvinnoidentifierade artister i traditionella medier och sociala medier har jämförts (danielsen, kjus & kraugerud, ). i fallet spotify har de algoritmiska rekommendationernas genusmönster undersökts kvantitativt (eriksson & johansson, ) och kvalitativt (werner, ). kritiska perspektiv på mjukvara inom ramen för forskning om algoritmisk kultur ryms kritiska perspektiv på hur mjukvara samverkar med maktordningar i skapandet av kulturellt värde och sociala grupper. algorit- mer är en ändlig uppsättning instruktioner som i mjukvara på hemsidor och i applikationer används för att inkorporera användares beteenden i de förslag som visas i gränssnittet. algoritmer är multipla, de kan vara utformade och fungera på många olika sätt (bucher, , s. ). inom det som kallas algoritmisk kultur syftar algoritmer till att matcha använ- daren med produkter och sökresultat som intresserar hen, och få användaren att titta på fil- men, eller köper produkten (hallinan & striphas, ). att skapa algoritmer som matchar användaren med kulturellt innehåll som den vill ha involverar klassifikation av både kultur och sociala grupper, eftersom smaken hos grupper analyseras (hallinan & striphas, , s. ). klassificering av värde, praktiker och artefakter hos människor i sociala grupper (striphas , s. ) är vad algoritmer förmedlar när de förmedlar kultur på strömnings- tjänster. på så sätt är de medskapare både av kulturellt värde och de sociala grupper som konsumerar det. ett tydligt exempel på hur algoritmer är medskapare av sociala grupper ges av noble ( ) i hennes forskning om googles sökmotor. när data organiseras av googles sök- motor presenteras sökmotorn som ett verktyg för människor att använda, en neutral tek- nisk lösning för att hitta på internet. egentligen styrs den av ett rad val och kommersiell logik inom vilken kategorierna genus och ras samverkar (noble, ). noble ( ; ) har i sina studier konstaterat att googles sökmotor hypersexualiserar svarta kvinnor och flickor, och osynliggör dem som människor. hon menar att googles algoritm simultant rasifierar och sexualiserar minoriteter i usa. den algoritmiska kulturens ojämlikhet kon- strueras som om detta är vad användaren vill ha, och därmed har inte producenterna av algoritmiskt organiserad kultur något ansvar för den. i den här artikeln undersöks ett exem- pel på när företag marknadsför «jämlika» algoritmer, och använder mjukvara för att arbeta för att motverka exempelvis sexualisering och rasifiering. det är med andra ord en inter- vention i den sorts algoritmer som noble ( ) studerat som undersöks här. en interven- tion som visar att algoritmer kan fungera på olika sätt och presentera olika sorter världar (bucher, ). huruvida the equaliser kan uppnå de mål som sätts upp av företagen bakom den eller inte kommer diskuteras i analysen. medierade feminismer medieforskare har analyserat hur feministiska idéer på - och -talet har blivit allt mer närvarande i vardaglig mediekultur och kallat detta fenomen för ett postfeministiskt tillst- norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - ånd (tasker & negra, ; mcrobbie, ; gill, ). i detta tillstånd har vissa feminis- tiska frågor, idéer och metoder blivit en del av populärkulturens språk. postfeminism är en samling utsagor inom populärkulturen som använder feministiskt idégods och beskriver feminismen som förlagd till dåtiden (tasker & negra, , s. – ). postfeministiska idéer som analyserades av forskare under -talet kom ofta till uttryck som figurer, till exempel i representationer av kapabla kvinnor med karriär och agens. karaktärerna bridget jones och ally mcbeal kan förstås som postfeministiska figurer från den tiden. men postfeministisk diskurs kan även vara närvarande i feministisk medieaktivism, eller i nyhetsrapportering om feministiska frågor (gill, ). postfeminism beskrivs av forskare som kännetecknad av idéer om att feminismen har vunnit de avgörande segrarna, samt av fokus på individuella framgångar för vita västerländska cis-kvinnor från medelklassen (mcrobbie, ). mcrobbie ( ) har kallat postfeminism for ett upplösande (undoing) av feminism och en icke-feminism eftersom den inte tar ställning emot sexism eller strukturella orättvisor base- rade på föreställningar om genus. frågor om globala orättvisor eller kollektiv organisering är inte i fokus i postfeministisk mediekultur. hur genusrelaterad makt interagerar med andra maktordningar utifrån till exempel rasism, klasskillnader, transfobi eller koloniala strukturer osynliggörs i den postfeministiska mediekulturen. nyliberal feminism har tagit större plats i medier på senare år (rottenberg, ), och ordet feminism har återvänt med en positiv konnotation, vilket inte var fallet i postfeminis- tisk kultur på -talet. enligt gill är den nyliberala feminismen i medierna en del av det postfeministiska tillståndet där feminism adresseras på ett tydligare sätt än i den postfemi- nistiska mediekulturen på - och -talen (gill, ). i den nyliberala feminismen disku- teras genusrelaterad strukturell makt öppet, av personer som sheryl sandberg i hennes bok «lean in» (rottenberg, ). men de lösningar på orättvisor som presenteras i nyliberal feminism är individuella; kvinnor behöver arbeta hårdare för att övervinna genusrelaterad ojämlikhet och hitta balans i livet. nyliberal feminism i medierna ifrågasätter heller inte den kapitalistiska logiken bakom en strävan efter ett (ekonomiskt och personligt) fram- gångsrikt liv. skillnader mellan kvinnor diskuteras inte – det vill säga sandbergs problem med att bli befordrad eller skaffa barnvakt framställs som universella feministiska problem. på så sätt osynliggörs den nyliberala feminismens medskyldighet i ett system av kapitalis- tiskt och rasistiskt förtryck av andra kvinnor. medierade postfeminismer är enligt gill ( ) multipla i samtiden och hon definierar fyra sorters postfeminismer som närvarande i medier (gill , s. – ). den första är rapportering om feministiska frågor, när medier tar upp feministiska frågor som lönegapet till diskussion men ofta förminskar problemens strukturella art i hur de rapporterar om frå- gan. den andra är feministisk aktivism i medier, när kampanjer som #metoo eller #bring- backourgirls har fått genomslag. den tredje är nyliberal feminism i medierna, där indivi- duella kvinnor uttalar sig feministiskt och/eller presenterar individuella lösningar på jämställdhetsproblem inom vad som ibland är en självhjälpsdiskurs. den fjärde och sista är modefeminism, där feminism blir ett mode och en stil som förlorar sitt innehåll exempelvis genom att skrivas på en t-shirt eller användas som marknadsföring av en bok – helt utan definition. fortfarande, menar gill ( ), förespråkas inte primärt global solidaritet eller kollektiv kamp, utan postfeminismerna är ofta individualistiska och pro-kapitalistiska i sina föreslagna lösningar på genusrelaterade orättvisor, med undantag för en del feministisk medieaktivism. en kritik som har riktats mot medieforskningen om postfeminism är att perspektivet har en oförmåga att förstå deltagarnas (det vill säga de eventuella feministerna bakom den postfeministiska kulturen, och de som använder och uppskattar den) upplevel- ser och förståelser av feminism samt vad postfeminism kan uppnå. ann werner inom forskning om reklam har en diskussion med fokus på hur marknadsföring av pro- dukter kan använda sig av vissa sorters feministiska budskap förts. detta kallas av goldman ( , s. ) för varufeminism, eller kommodifierad feminism. centralt för denna sorts marknadsföring med feministiska argument är att feminismen avpolitiseras och görs till ett konsumtionsval, till exempel genom att en reklam betonar den representerade kvinnans rätt att välja, självständighet, frihet, likvärdighet, eller sexuella agens. dessa egenskaper framställs på ett positivt sätt i varufeminismen, det vill säga den arbetande, konsumerande och väljande kvinnan talas om och talas till. i varufeminismen kan även modeller som inte uppfyller gällande skönhetsideal introduceras med argument som «skönhet är till för alla», det kan även förekomma ombytta roller där en kvinnoidentifierad person får fylla traditio- nellt maskulina positioner och/eller objektifiera andra personer (gill ). den avgörande skillnaden mellan en generell postfeministisk mediediskurs och varufeminism är att i varu- feminism är det uttalade målet att sälja produkter. eftersom materialet i den här artikeln är marknadsföring av ett verktyg skapat av två företag med produkter att sälja är goldmans ( ) definition av varufeminismen relevant. det är dock rimligt att också se marknads- föringen som analyseras här som en del av en större postfeministisk diskurs samt som ett uttryck för feministiskt jämställdhetsarbete. jag kommer att återkomma till dessa tre möj- ligheter i analysen och diskussionen. material och metod the equaliser återfinns i ett specifikt sammanhang: en algoritmisk rekommendationskul- tur. att algoritmisk presentation av kultur att strömma kan innehålla obalans utifrån kön, och att denna obalans kan och bör justeras är, som diskuterades i inledningen, en idé som även tidal och apple music fått. lanserade smirnoff och spotify the equaliser som är ett verktyg med en egen webbplats (https://smirnoff.withspotify.com/). verktygets algo- ritm analyserar tidigare beteenden på ett spotify-konto utifrån (av spotify tillskrivet) kön på de artister som lyssnats på och berättar hur många män och kvinnor kontot lyssnat på i procent. hur artisterna kategoriseras utifrån kön och hur blandade grupper behandlas av verktyget är inte tydliggjort, det är också oklart vilken tidsperiod av lyssning som verktyget mäter. det är däremot rimligt att tro att the equaliser använder sig av de tillskrivna kön som finns i artisternas biografier på spotify och eventuellt utesluter artister som inte har ett tillskrivet kön (som grupper eller icke-binära artister). den här slutsatsen är baserad på att tydligt könade soloartister dominerade de spellistor som the equaliser föreslog författaren. efter genomförd analys presenterar tjänsten könsbalansen i lyssningen i procent tillsam- mans med ett värdeomdöme. till exempel «du lyssnar på fler kvinnor än genomsnittet». sedan presenteras möjligheten att «equalise» ditt lyssnande genom att välja en genererad spellista där andelen kvinnoidentifierade artister kan justeras till valfri procentsats. the equaliser lanserades med en marknadsföringsvideo med namnet «smirnoff & spo- tify launch smirnoff equalizer» den mars . videon bygger på intervjuer med två per- soner; tim ganss, talesperson för spotify, och honey dijon, dj och producent av elektro- nisk dansmusik samt ambassadör för verktyget. ytterligare en marknadsföringsvideo kal- lad «does equality extend to playlists» släpptes mars , det vill säga inför internationella kvinnodagen året efter den första videon kom. i den andra marknadsföringsvideon redovi- . i april togs webbplatsen bort. när artikeln skrevs i mars existerade den. funktionen var dock inte så bra och jag felanmälde den i mars till spotify. i maj när artikeln reviderades var webbplatsen borta. om detta är tillfälligt eller om the equaliser har gått i graven är okänt. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j__e lwx t ( - - ) https://smirnoff.withspotify.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j__e lwx t norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - sas både framgångar för the equaliser och behovet att av fortsätta arbeta för kvinnoidenti- fierade artisters inkludering i branschen. inga personer framträder med namn i videon från och avsändaren är otydlig. dessa två videor analyseras här som marknadsförings- material, och kallas i analysen för marknadsföringsvideorna, det vill säga de ses som cen- trala texter för att förstå vad smirnoff och spotify förmedlar om the equaliser för att nå sina kunder och vilka diskurser utsagorna i videorna använder sig av. för att bredda diskus- sionen och komplicera analysen inkluderas även videon «spotify tries gender equality, fails miserably» av fantano, en musikbloggare med en miljon följare på youtube, samt bloggin- lägget «what smirnoff equaliser means for music» av tom jarvis på audioordeal, en hem- sida som presenteras som riktad till musikproducenter, dj:s och tekniknördar. deras dis- kussioner av the equaliser problematiserar hur verktyget fungerar i relation till hur det marknadsförts och vad som är möjligt att uppnå med det. detta material används för att komplettera analysen av marknadsföringen och behandlas som ett sekundärmaterial i arti- keln. fantano och tom jarvis har valts på grund av deras höga synlighet i sökningar efter the equaliser på youtube och google. de kan inte anses representativa för hur verktyget mottogs, men som engagerade användare har de identifierat intressanta problem med verktyget i relation till hur smirnoff och spotify beskriver verktyget. problemen de tar upp har också observerats av andra debattörer och upplevts i författarens egen användning av the equaliser. analysmetoden som används är en diskursanalytiskt inspirerad läsning av materialet, det vill säga marknadsföringen ses som att den konstruerar mening. snarare än att repre- sentera en bakomliggande verklighet eller intention så är de ord och bilder som används i marknadsföringsvideorna handlingar som skapar föreställningar (potter & wetherell , s. ). i linje med syftet fokuserar analysen på tre områden. det första är hur aktörerna i marknadsföringen och den roll de tillåts inneha i den feministiska interventionen konstru- eras. genom detta tema undersöks vem som är den agerande feministen och vad den gör. i det andra området undersöks hur positivt och negativt värde tilldelas könsrepresentation, artister och musik. genom detta tema undersöks vilken sorts feminism som presenteras och med vilka argument den saluförs. slutligen diskuteras de tystnader som finns i marknadsföringen, det vill säga vad som inte alls tas upp trots att det är relevant. inom detta tema diskuteras hur the equaliser är en del av den algoritmiska rekommendationskulturen utan att detta tydliggörs i marknadsföringen. analysens tre teman utgår ifrån hur michel foucault ( ) beskriver diskursens ordning, som kommer till uttryck genom aktörer eller subjekt, värderingar och tystnader. i marknadsföringsmaterialet ses uttalanden, val av tale- spersoner och frågeområden som sätt att organisera mening. de två användarnas diskussi- oner om the equaliser analyseras inte på samma sätt utan används för att ställa frågor till marknadsföringsmaterialet och diskutera marknadsföringens meningskonstruktioner kri- tiskt. marknadsföringens aktörer «music is better when everyone’s involved» säger honey dijon i slutet av den första marknadsföringsvideon för the equaliser från . uttalandet är signifikant för det över- gripande budskapet eftersom det blir slutklämmen i marknadsföringsvideon, det ges också eftertryck i hur det sägs. det är dock inte «alla» som intar platsen av centrala aktörer i . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxqzt nc vq ( - - ) . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsiv jfygv ( - - ) . https://audioordeal.co.uk/what-smirnoff-equaliser-means-for-music/ ( - - ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxqzt nc vq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsiv jfygv https://audioordeal.co.uk/what-smirnoff-equaliser-means-for-music/ ann werner marknadsföringsvideon – det vill säga konstruerade subjekt som framställs som mer eller mindre aktiva i hur de språkligt beskrivs. spotify representeras av tim ganss från «music intelligence» som får tala i mer än halva videon ackompanjerad av bilder på en program- merare (ser ut som en kvinna) i arbete och kvinnoidentifierade artister som inte namnges när han talar om dem. i den senare delen av videon under mindre än halva tiden talar honey dijon som är ambassadör för the equaliser och presenteras som dj och producent ackompanjerad av bilder på när hon spelar live i klubbmiljö och går i storstadsmiljö. honey dijon sitter i en studioliknande miljö när hon pratar och tim ganss står i vad som kan vara ett öppet kontorslandskap. de enda personer som får tala i videon är tim ganss och honey dijon. smirnoff nämns av tim ganss i början när han säger: «we partnered with smirnoff», vilket inte tydliggör företagens roller. tim ganss presenterar spotify som initiativtagaren eftersom «we» har initiativet i meningsbyggnaden. honey dijon börjar med att säga att det är bra när företag som spotify och smirnoff vill förändra branschen, hon nämner därmed även hon spotify först. aktörernas inbördes relation presenteras därmed som att spotify har en position av aktivt handlande, det är spotify som ska hjälpa kvinnoidentifierade artis- ter att bli mer strömmade genom verktyget the equaliser, som de skapat med smirnoff av den här anledningen. det är spotify som kommer till tals först, och mest. honey dijon framställs som en aktör som tycker att detta är en god idé och stödjer spotify utan att själv aktivt bidra. i videon finns därmed två dominerande aktörer: spotify och de kvinnoidenti- fierade artisterna. med andra ord framställs spotify som den aktör som handlar – och de kvinnoidentifierade artisterna som de som är objekten för handlingen och/eller är glada att få hjälp. användare, de personer som lyssnar och ska använda verktyget för att göra musi- ken mer jämställd diskuteras inte explicit i videon, deras handling blir dock nödvändig för att the equaliser ska ha någon effekt, och när tim ganss förklarar hur the equaliser fun- gerar så refererar han i förbifarten till användare som inte könas eller tillskrivs andra grup- pegenskaper. för att återvända till honey dijons ordval «everyone» så antyder detta ord en mångfald som inte bara inkluderar en balans mellan kvinno- och mansidentifierade artister utan «alla». honey dijon är själv en svart transkvinna, vilket tillsammans med ordvalet i slutet av den första marknadsföringsvideon kan förstås som att jämställdheten vidgas. en vidgad jämställdhet kan inkludera fler än två binära könstillhörigheter, och fler maktordningar än genus, som etnicitet/ras, sexualitet, klass och nationalitet. detta är dock inte det övergri- pande budskapet i videon som i sitt meningsskapande fokuserar kvinnoidentifierade artis- ter som en grupp. det sker dock en glidning i benämningen av de som ska inkluderas under den första videon från . tim ganss börjar med att tala om «female artists» när han beskriver att syftet med verktyget är att verka för jämställdhet, men när han sedan går vidare till att berätta om varför (de mest strömmade låtarna framfördes alla av «male artists») så diskuterar han det gångna året som ett fantastiskt år för kvinnor inom musik (women in music). här sker alltså en glidning från kvinnliga artister till kvinnor inom musik. kort därefter när han beskriver hur verktyget fungerar säger han «men and women artists» vilket är svåröversatt till svenska, men män och kvinnor som är artister kan vara en motsvarighet. de sista benämningarna som tim ganss använder är helt enkelt män och kvinnor när han talar om hur användaren kan anpassa de föreslagna spellistorna genom att justera antalet män och kvinnor på dem. när honey dijon tar över i videon förändras tilltalet eftersom hon talar om bristen på inkludering av kvinnor inom musikbranschen. detta sätt att formulera sig antyder att bran- schen har ett ansvar medan tim ganss snarare verkar placera ansvaret på användaren som lyssnar. hon använder dock samma ord som tim ganss avslutar med: «kvinnor». sedan norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - säger hon att genus inte ska begränsa någon från att bli artist för att sedan avsluta med att tala om «alla», musik är bättre när alla är med. hur de som ska inkluderas beskrivs varierar alltså under videon; kvinnliga artister, kvinnor inom musik, kvinnor som är artister, kvinnor, de som är begränsade av genus, och alla. klustret av benämningar domineras dock av ordet kvinnor snarare än alla eller genus – som endast används en gång vardera. dessa personer, kvinnor, beskrivs både av tim ganss som fantastiska artister och av honey dijon som personer som inte inkluderas i musikbranschen. med andra ord är inkludering av kvinnor, som är fantastiska, vad marknadsföringsvideon konstruerar som målet för the equaliser. både tim ganss och honey dijon talar om kvinnoidentifierade artisters underrepresen- tation, och deras kamp för att delta i musikbranschen utan att nämna tidigare initiativ, forskning eller aktivism. på så sätt osynliggör de på ett klassiskt postfeministiskt manér (mcrobbie ) att varken ojämlikhet eller det feministiska arbetet för att förändra musik- branschen är nytt. i den andra marknadsföringsvideon från har de personifierade representanterna för spotify och kvinnoidentifierade artister försvunnit och en röst som låter som en kvinnoröst presenterar historien om the equaliser, ackompanjerad av bilder från #metoo-demonstrationer, klubbar och spelningar med kvinnoidentifierade artister och visuell presentation av resultat the equaliser (enligt videon) lett till. till exempel står det i en text att en % ökning av strömning av artister som är kvinnor (women artists) uppmätts. det framgår inte från när till när. i den andra marknadsföringsvideon används genomgående benämningen «women artists» och «equal» vilket får videon att framstå som mer genomtänkt men också som opersonlig eftersom den låter som en uppläsning av ett pressmeddelande. ett mål för smirnoff equalising music, att dubblera antalet «women artists» som är huvudnamn på musikfestivaler, tas upp och jämställdhet beskrivs som en fråga om att bli upptäckt, exponerad och ha möjligheter, för kvinnor som är artister. för dessa artister har chansen att bli upptäckt, exponerad och få möjligheter enligt videon ökat efter lanseringen av the equaliser. i videon framställs det som att verktyget fått stor sprid- ning på sociala medier bland användare som delat med sig av sina kvinnoidentifierade favoritartister. det sägs även att goda resultat har uppnåtts eftersom kvinnor som är artister nu utgör en större del av spotifys strömmade musik (nu %). könsbinäriteten från den första marknadsföringsvideon kvarstår, den är till och med ännu tydligare eftersom det inte finns glidningar i hur de som ska integreras i musikbranschen benämns. det är fortfarande smirnoff och spotify som framställs som de som ska «rädda» de oupptäckta kvinnorna som är artister, men smirnoffs aktörskap har stärkts. smirnoff har en tydligare roll i den andra marknadsföringsvideon från eftersom målet med smirnoff equalising music lyfts fram och the equaliser placeras in som en av flera delar i det initiativet, event inom initiativet visas också i bild. smirnoff är ett kommer- siellt företag som säljer alkohol och spotify, som fortfarande är en stark aktör i den andra videon, är ett kommersiellt företag som säljer prenumerationer på strömmad musik till enskilda individer och reklamplats (med information om de enskilda individerna) till andra kommersiella aktörer. att framställa dessa två företag som «agents of change» kan därför förstås som marknadsföringsstrategi där social rättvisa utifrån kön, och feministiska idéer används för att sälja produkter i linje med varufeminism (goldman, ). det är en marknadsföring som förutsätter att målgruppen – de som smirnoff och spotify vill sälja sina produkter till – sammankopplar jämställdhet och förändring med positiva värden. det går att förstå som att företagen vill nå en publik som identifierar sig med de kvinnoidentifi- erade artister som är underrepresenterade i musik. möjligen finns det bland unga kvinnoi- dentifierade en stor grupp nya konsumenter av musik och alkohol som företagen vill nå. ann werner det går också att förstå strategin som att de vill profilera sig som «goda» och appellera till alla som sammankopplar feminism med godhet och coolhet, och ser jämlikhet som rele- vant i samtiden (gill , rottenberg ). fantanos beskriver de spellistor the equaliser skapar åt användare som bestående av redan kända kvinnoidentifierade artister, till och med artister och låtar som varit så popu- lära att en lyssnare omöjligt kan ha missat dem. fantano ifrågasätter därmed det narrativ som återfinns i marknadsföringsvideorna – att the equaliser räddar kvinnoidentifierade artister från deras undanskymda plats så att de upptäcks och får nya möjligheter. fantano diskuterar även den bristande synligheten i the equaliser för artister som i sin musik och sina artistskap satt feministiska frågor i centrum och frågar sig var grimes och princess nokia är när the equaliser skapar spellistor. sammanfattningsvis så presenterar smirnoff och spotify sig som progressiva förän- dringsagenter som hjälper kvinnoidentifierade artister. de kvinnoidentifierade artisterna blir föremål för förändring men inte de som driver den. samtidigt placeras ansvaret för att förändra strömmandets könsrepresentation på användaren som framställs som genusne- utral. tillskrivet värde en jämn fördelning av kvinnoidentifierade och mansidentifierade artister i strömmad musik framställs i båda marknadsföringsvideorna som något positivt, som målet med interventionen. jämställdhet är med andra ord en fråga om jämn fördelning av tillskrivet kön i antal strömmade låtar eller artister. dock säger marknadsföringen av the equaliser lite om innehållet i den musik som strömmas eller om kvinnoidentifierade artisters villkor i musikbranschen. till exempel nämns inte sexism i musik eller musikkultur, eller hur kvinnoidentifierade artister behandlas. bilder från #metoo-demonstrationer visas kort i början av den andra marknadsföringsvideon men detta är så nära marknadsföringen kom- mer att antyda att någonting mer än antalet strömmade kvinnoidentifierade artister har betydelse för jämställhet. i den andra marknadsföringsvideon från lyfts exempel på förbättringar och dessa är också numeriska. i materialet som kommer från smirnoff och spotify placeras med andra ord fokus på numerisk balans, vilket tillskrivs ett positivt värde. squires ( , s. ) diskuterar jämställdhetsintegrering som en politisk strategi för att främja jämställdhet och som enligt henne kan delas in i tre typer av förändringsarbete. hon kallar de tre för inte- grerande, agendasättande och transformativa. den första strategin innebär att försöka inte- grera fler kvinnor i den aktuella verksamheten genom policyförändring och tekniska verktyg implementerade av experter. den andra strategin handlar om att sätta vissa femi- nistiska frågor på agendan i samarbete med de aktuella gruppernas organisationer. medan den tredje innebär att vända blicken mot de till synes neutrala aktionerna och frågorna exempelvis i en organisation och undersöka deras påverkan på allas lika villkor i organisa- tionen, inte bara med fokus på «kvinnor» utan genom flera maktordningar. den första stra- tegin, integrerande, har fördelen att målet är tydligt (öka antalet kvinnor) samt att argu- mentationen är positiv – det vill säga att jämställdhet inte framstår som hotfull utan ska göra verksamheten bättre för alla. squires ( , s. ) menar dock att den här sortens jämställdhetsintegrering kan bli en retorisk fälla. om jämställdhet är positivt och sägs bidra till bättre kvalitet osynliggörs maktskillnader som ligger bakom ojämställdhet, bättre kvali- tet riskerar att bli målet. och om bättre kvalitet inte uppfylls av jämställdhetsåtgärder kan förändringsarbetet gå i stå. norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - musikalisk kvalitet tillskrivs, som jag redan antytt, positivt värde i de två marknads- föringsvideorna; kvalitet presenteras som ett viktigt motiv för att inkludera kvinnoidentifi- erade artister. kvalitet framförs som argument för the equaliser av honey dijon när hon säger att musiken blir bättre om alla är med. men tim ganss tar upp kvalitet redan i början av marknadsföringsvideon från . han säger: «this really doesn’t properly represent the fantastic work done by female artists» när han presenterar att mansidentifierade artister dominerar bland de mest strömmade låtarna . uttalandet antyder att det finns kvinn- oidentifierade artister som är fantastiska, det vill säga gör musik av hög kvalitet, men som inte strömmas på spotify och att the equaliser avser hjälpa lyssnaren att hitta dem. dessa kvinnoidentifierade artister är också eventuellt okända, bilderna som visas i marknads- föringsvideorna är inte på stora allmänt kända popstjärnor. därmed går det att förstå meningsskapandet som att lyssnaren ännu inte hittat de artister som videon talar om. beto- ningen av de kvinnoidentifierade artisternas kvalitet i videon stärker dock inte nödvändig- tvis bilden av dem som bra. detta eftersom kvalitet framhålls samtidigt som tim ganss ver- kar förvånad över underrepresentationen av kvinnoidentifierade artister , «ett fantas- tiskt år för kvinnor inom musik». han ser förvånad och upprörd ut när han pratar om det och det framstår som att underrepresentation av högkvalitativa kvinnoidentifierade artister var okänd (för honom) innan slutet av . det går att tolka det som att marknadsföringen presenterar att kvinnoidentifierade artister som håller hög kvalitet är en nyhet och att det tidigare inte funnits bra kvinnoidentifierade artister. att kvinnoidentifierade artister kan vara riktigt bra upprepas i båda marknadsföringsvideorna, vilket innebär att det inte är en diskursiv självklarhet att dessa artister håller hög kvalitet. relationen mellan aktörerna kvinnoidentifierade artister och värdet hög kvalitet framstår som svag eftersom den behöver stärkas upprepade gånger. sammanfattningsvis används numerisk representation som ett mål, och musikalisk kva- litet som en anledning för att arbeta för jämställdhet i marknadsföringen. men att använda kvalitet som argument kan bli en retorisk fälla om den höga kvaliteten på musik sedan inte av lyssnaren upplevs som uppfylld varje gång av the equaliser eller de kvinnoidentifierade artisterna. uteslutningar och tystnader att fördelningen mellan kvinnoidentifierade, mansidentifierade och artister som varken definierar sig som män eller kvinnor i musikbranschen är ojämn, och att de mansidentifie- rade står för en stor majoritet av produktionen är känt. att verksamheter för att motverka denna obalans, och diskussioner om den, funnits länge är också känt. flera oberoende undersökningar pekar på att kvinnoidentifierade deltagare i branschen sällan är över %. detta är dock något som lämnas utanför marknadsföringsmaterialet. att nå en fördelning på / i lyssnande är ändå möjligt, men inte så enkelt eller självklart som det framställs i marknadsföringsvideorna givet fördelningen i musikbranschen. könsbinäriteten i verkty- gets funktion synliggör den underrepresenterade gruppen (kvinnoidentifierade artister) eftersom det är dessa som föreslås på spellistor och diskuteras i marknadsföringen. samti- digt osynliggör den artister som inte låter sig kategoriseras binärt, då könsbinäritet är själv- klart i hur ojämställdhet beskrivs. fokus på de kvinnoidentifierade artisterna osynliggör även de mansidentifierade artisterna och deras roll i arbete för förändring. det framställs inte i marknadsföringsvideorna hur the equaliser förhåller sig till inne- hållet i spotifys katalog och till artisternas genre och popularitet när spellistor skapas. att spotifys algoritmiska rekommendationer föreslår en hög andel mansidentifierade artister ann werner har visats i forskning (eriksson & johansson, ). i marknadsföringen diskuteras inte hur spotifys vanliga algoritmer har en roll i vilka artister och låtar som strömmas. i marknads- föringen av the equaliser framstår det istället som att lyssnarna helt själva valt att strömma musik framförd av mansidentifierade artister utan inblandning från spotify. hur spo- tify organiserar musiken algoritmiskt för att matcha musik med lyssnare (hallinan & strip- has, ) osynliggörs. men spotify använder sig precis som andra tjänster för strömmad kultur av algoritmer som lyfter fram visst innehåll, döljer annat och föreslår artister för sina lyssnare baserat på idéer om deras smak och grupptillhörighet. the equaliser framställs däremot i marknadsföringen som en algoritmisk konstruktion för att göra musiklyssnandet mer jämställt. detta görs genom att den presenteras som ett verktyg som utvecklats, men också genom att det visas en programmerare när utvecklingen tas upp av tim ganss i den första marknadsföringsvideon. spotifys övriga presentation av musik på strömnings- tjänsten naturaliseras. som fler forskare påpekat (eriksson et al, ) finns det en risk för rundgång i de rekommendationssystem som algoritmiskt musiklyssnande bygger på, samma låtar dyker upp igen. de artister och låtar som är mycket populära rekommenderas därför ofta och kan på så sätt bli än mer populära. denna medietekniska påverkan på popularitet skulle kunna utmanas av verktyg som the equaliser, där lyssnaren kan justera spellistor efter andra kate- goriseringar. men verktyget har inte integrerats i strömningstjänsten utan placerats utanför den, på en hemsida som enkom innehåller the equaliser. att the equaliser inte är en del av spotify, utan en separat tjänst är vagt beskrivet i marknadsföringen. Å ena sidan sägs det aldrig att verktyget ska integreras i spotify, å andra sidan sägs det heller inte att den ligger på en separat hemsida. det är inte alls självklart att spotifys användare ens känner till att verktyget finns, och marknadsöringsvideorna har jämförelsevis få visningar på youtube. i marknadsföringsvideorna lyfts the equaliser fram som om den skulle rikta sig till alla spotifys användare då den presenteras som en åtgärd för att förändra mansdominansen hos de mest strömmade låtarna. för att ändra på vad som är allra mest populärt är det rimligt att anta att många av användarna måste förändra sin lyssning. det framstår i videorna som att smirnoff och spotify ser jämställdhet som centralt för sina verksamheter. hur många som verkligen använt the equaliser rapporteras däremot inte, vilket kan innebära att det rör sig om ganska få av de konton som använder spotify. tom jarvis skriver att många som använt verktyget påpekar att de förslag på kvinnoiden- tifierade artister de fått på spellistor inte passar med deras övriga musiksmak. de artister som föreslås på spellistorna är, som fantano också sagt, oftast redan kända popartister. med andra ord framstår verktyget som trubbigt i jämförelse med andra algoritmer som rekom- menderar musik på spotify där genrepreferens och tidigare lyssning brukar avspeglas i rekommendationerna. hur verktyget fungerar och prioriterar är oklart. men fantano ironi- serar över hur ofta the equaliser inte fungerar alls trots att det i marknadsföringen fram- ställs som att smirnoff och spotify satsar på jämställdhet. om verktyget integrerats i spotifys algoritmer som genererar personliga spellistor, och i rekommendationsalgoritmen, torde genomslaget kunna vara ganska stort. men ett sådant tillvägagångssätt presenteras inte som strategin i marknadsföringen som analyseras här. istället ska verktyget hjälpa användaren att valfritt och individuellt förändra sin lyssning och upptäcka kvinnoidentifierade artister. . detta kan också förstås som en konsekvens av att smirnoff, eller en annan aktör, har upphovsrätten till the equ- aliser – inte spotify. men vad som än är anledningen till att verktyget inte är en del av spotify är konsekvensen densamma. . den maj hade den första marknadsföringsvideon visningar och den andra visningar. detta kan jämföras med de miljoner aktiva användare spotify sade sig ha i mars . norsk medietidsskrift | Årgang | nr. - sammanfattningsvis osynliggör marknadsföringen the equalisers sammanhang och den algoritmiska arkitekturen på strömningstjänsten spotify. det framstår i marknads- föringen som att de data som the equaliser använder för att skapa rekommendationer av kvinnoidentifierade artister är neutrala samt som att jämställdhetsarbete inom musik är någonting nytt. diskussion i materialet som analyseras i den här artikeln nämns inte feminism. syftet som lyfts i marknadsföringen av the equaliser – att göra musiken mer jämställd (equal between male and female artists) – är dock tydligt feministisk och hakar i frågor som «kvinnor tjänar min- dre», «kvinnor kommer inte vidare i karriären» och så vidare. enligt gill ( , s. ) har sådana feministiska frågor fått ökad plats i medierna det senaste decenniet men de indivi- dualiseras ofta, eller trivialiseras. gill ( ) frågar sig vilken sorts synlighet som feminis- tiska frågor får när diskussioner om twerking ramas in som feministiska. i marknadsföring av the equaliser trivialiseras dock inte kvinnoidentifierade artisters synlighet och fram- gång, den framställs snarare som en allvarlig fråga. däremot är placeringen av the equali- ser (utanför spotify) och det marginella intresset för verktyget, samt att det inte tycks ha fungerat i enlighet med vad som utlovas en trivialisering av kärnfrågan. verktyget har en mycket marginell plats i spotifys algoritmiska arkitektur på grund av detta. synligheten för feministiska frågor i medier kan också ramas in som en livsstil, feminism blir ett coolt val för en trendig person men tömt på innehåll (gill , s. ). om vi vänder blicken mot smirnoffs marknadsföringsstrategi, i vilken the equaliser bara är en liten del av smirnoff equalising music, har den likheter med sådan modefeminism. smirnoff lyfter fram den feministiska frågan om kvinnoidentifierades plats i musikbranschen som cool och ungd- omlig, och saluför den med fester och klubbar samt har dj:s som talespersoner (till exempel honey dijon och the black madonna). lösningen på ojämställdhet i musikströmmande presenteras som avhängig av att indivi- duella lyssnare förändrar sina lyssningsmönster genom spellistor efter att ha upptäckt verktyget. det innebär att smirnoff och spotify väljer en individualistisk lösning på ett strukturellt problem. formerna som valts för the equaliser, marknadsföringsvideor, artist- samarbetet med honey dijon och en algoritm som analyserar könsbalans och skapar spel- listor, är medlen för att uppnå målet. den här analysen har fokuserat på budskapen i marknadsföringen, men det är värt att notera att the equalisers effekter också blir till genom medier och mjukvara som formar verktyget. samtidigt som användaren individualiseras så präglas marknadsföringen av ambitionen att hjälpa och lyfta kvinnoidentifierade artister generellt, de individualiseras alltså inte utan framställs som en grupp. de uppfattningar som kommuniceras om kvinnoidentifierade artister är binära – det vill säga antingen är en artist en kvinna eller en man. förutom att uppdelningen i två kön framställs som entydig och självklar så adresseras inte andra mak- tordningar som etnicitet/ras, sexualitet, klass eller nationalitet. beskrivningen av hur förändring ska uppnås är teknokratisk (squires, , s. ), det vill säga förändring i könsbalans nås genom ett tekniskt verktyg – och det verkar förutsättas att användarna kom- mer att följa rekommendationerna i detta verktyg. förutom att the equaliser här analyserats som ett försök till en feministisk medieinter- vention kan det också förstås som jämställdhetsintegrering, det vill säga en policy för ökad jämställdhet mellan könen. marknadsföringen använder kvalitet för att motivera att det är viktigt att inkludera de kvinnoidentifierade artisterna – rättvisa eller ojämlikhet framställs ann werner inte som anledningar. att kvinnoidentifierade artister gör bra musik är alltså anledningen till att the equaliser ska användas – för att lyssnaren ska hitta bra musik. att använda kva- litet som argument för genomförande av jämställdhetspolicy är enligt squires ( ) van- ligt i en integrerande jämställdhetsstrategi. the equaliser kan vara ett resultat av en upprik- tig önskan att lyfta fram kvinnoidentifierade artister och stärka jämställdheten i musik- branschen men i marknadsföringen framstår strategin som en retorisk fälla och en trivialisering av feministiska frågor inom algoritmisk kulturkonsumtion. referenser armstrong, v. 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( ). women in the studio: creativity, control and gender in popular music production. abingdon, oxon: routledge. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-recording-studio.pdf http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-recording-studio.pdf https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /sp/jxi https://doi.org/ . / . . 	norsk medietidsskrift 	doi: https://doi.org/ . /issn. - - - - 	the smirnoff equaliser – en feministisk medieintervention för strömmad musik? 	inledning 	att kvinnoidentifierade artister är i minoritet i musikbranschen är ett välkänt faktum. en forskningsrapport om könsrepresentation i låtar på billboardlistan – (smith et. al., , s. ) visar att artister identifierade som kvin... 	populärmusik och genus 	inom forskning om kvinnor i musikbranschen och om genus och populärmusik har hur den ojämna könsrepresentationen i branschen kommer till uttryck undersökts. detta har ofta gjorts kvalitativt inom olika sorters musikverksamheter i studier som syft... 	kritiska perspektiv på mjukvara 	inom ramen för forskning om algoritmisk kultur ryms kritiska perspektiv på hur mjukvara samverkar med maktordningar i skapandet av kulturellt värde och sociala grupper. algoritmer är en ändlig uppsättning instruktioner som i mjukvara på hemsid... 	medierade feminismer 	medieforskare har analyserat hur feministiska idéer på - och -talet har blivit allt mer närvarande i vardaglig mediekultur och kallat detta fenomen för ett postfeministiskt tillstånd (tasker & negra, ; mcrobbie, ; gill, ). i dett... 	material och metod 	the equaliser återfinns i ett specifikt sammanhang: en algoritmisk rekommendationskultur. att algoritmisk presentation av kultur att strömma kan innehålla obalans utifrån kön, och att denna obalans kan och bör justeras är, som diskuterades i i... 	marknadsföringens aktörer 	«music is better when everyone’s involved» säger honey dijon i slutet av den första marknadsföringsvideon för the equaliser från . uttalandet är signifikant för det övergripande budskapet eftersom det blir slutklämmen i marknadsföri... 	tillskrivet värde 	en jämn fördelning av kvinnoidentifierade och mansidentifierade artister i strömmad musik framställs i båda marknadsföringsvideorna som något positivt, som målet med interventionen. jämställdhet är med andra ord en fråga om jämn fördeln... 	uteslutningar och tystnader 	att fördelningen mellan kvinnoidentifierade, mansidentifierade och artister som varken definierar sig som män eller kvinnor i musikbranschen är ojämn, och att de mansidentifierade står för en stor majoritet av produktionen är känt. att verksa... 	diskussion 	i materialet som analyseras i den här artikeln nämns inte feminism. syftet som lyfts i marknadsföringen av the equaliser – att göra musiken mer jämställd (equal between male and female artists) – är dock tydligt feministisk och hakar i fr... 	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(adobe) (common) ( . ) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) ( . ) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) ( . ) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice pdf hosted at the radboud repository of the radboud university nijmegen the following full text is a publisher's version. for additional information about this publication click this link. https://hdl.handle.net/ / please be advised that this information was generated on - - and may be subject to change. https://hdl.handle.net/ / research article open access gender awareness among medical students in a swiss university ilire rrustemi , *, isabella locatelli , joëlle schwarz , toine lagro-janssen , aude fauvel and carole clair , abstract background: gender is an important social determinant, that influences healthcare. the lack of awareness on how gender influences health might lead to gender bias and can contribute to substandard patient care. our objectives were to assess gender sensitivity and the presence of gender stereotypes among swiss medical students. methods: a validated scale (n-gams – nijmegen gender awareness in medicine scale), with subscores assessing gender sensitivity (gs) and gender stereotypes toward patients (grip) and doctors (grid) (ranging from to ), was translated into french and was distributed to all medical students registered at the university of lausanne, switzerland in april–may . reliability of the three subscales was assessed calculating the alpha cronbach coefficient. mean subscales were calculated for male and female students and compared using two sample t-tests. a linear model was built with each subscale as a dependent variable and students’ sex and age as covariables. results: in total, students answered the n-gams questionnaire, their mean age was years old, . % of them were women. gs and grid sub-scores were not significantly different between female and male students (gs . for women, . for men, p = . , grid . for women, . for men, p = . ). a statistically significant difference was found in the grip subscale, with a mean score of . for women and . for men (p < . ), which suggests a more gender stereotyped opinion toward patients among male students. a trend was observed with age, gender sensibility increased (p < . ) and stereotypes decreased (grip p = . , grid p = . ) with students getting older. conclusion: medical students’ gender sensitivity seems to improve throughout the medical curriculum, and women students have less stereotypes towards patients than men do. the implementation of a gender-sensitive teaching in the medical curriculum could improve students’ knowledge, limit gender bias and improve patients’ care. keywords: gender, medical education, gender bias, gender stereotypes background gender is considered as a social determinant of health, at the same level as ethnicity and education. social in- equalities between men and women influence health at different levels from structural to individual health behaviors [ ]. a strong call has been made in the last de- cades to systematically integrate sex and gender dimen- sions and to raise gender awareness in medical education, medical research and epidemiology [ , ]. gender awareness is the “ability to view society from the perspective of gender roles and how this has affected women’s needs in comparison to the needs of men” [ ]. thus, gender awareness aims toward better health for men and women. lack of gender awareness leads to gen- der bias and can contribute to unfair patient care [ , ]. there are two types of gender bias in medicine: gender © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: ilire.rrustemi@gmail.com faculty of biology and medicine, university of lausanne, lausanne, switzerland center for primary care and public health (unisanté), lausanne, rue du bugnon , ch- lausanne, switzerland full list of author information is available at the end of the article rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:ilire.rrustemi@gmail.com stereotype, which is defined as the clinically unjustified difference of treatment between female and male pa- tients; and gender blindness, which is defined by the in- ability to recognize differences when they are clinically pertinent [ , ]. gender stereotypes influence physician’s differential diagnosis and decisions of management. a common example of stereotypes is found in cardiovascu- lar disease, where coronary heart disease is often under- diagnosed in women due to a different, biased management [ , ]. gender stereotypes are acquired in society through socialization of both men and women and are rooted in gendered roles, identities and repre- sentations. gender blindness results from fundamental and clinical research that has been historically (and often still is) conducted predominantly on male participants, results being then extrapolated to women [ ]. the common example is again in the treatments of cardio- vascular diseases [ ]. gender stereotypes can be prevented through a gender-sensitive medical education [ ]. in the european context, implementation of a gender perspective in med- ical education started mainly in in the netherlands, with a successful research-project lead by prof. lagro- janssen, applying the concept of gender mainstreaming. in years, gender and sex issues were implemented into the existing curriculum at all levels and specific lectures about gender awareness were launched in the medical school of radboud university [ ]. integrating gender related lectures and implementing gender perspective in the specialties teaching showed results on preventing gender disparities in healthcare [ ]. in switzerland, despite the principle of equality be- tween women and men being enshrined in the federal constitution since , gender inequality is observed in many domains such as economic activity, salaries, share of domestic work, political representation [ ]. for ex- ample, % of women manage all the domestic activities (ofs, ) in a heterosexual couple. in the professional domain, women have more part time jobs than men ( % had part time jobs in ) [ ], and are paid less (in , women are paid . % less than men in the private sector) [ ]. these divisions contribute to differ- ent health-related exposures and lifestyle behaviors, as well as to social stereotypes that are reflected also in the medical field and among medical staff. in switzerland, women entered the medical profession for the first time in [ ], and today while the ma- jority of medical students are women, they are still under represented in leading medical positions [ ]. these gendered organizations of leadership might reinforce gender stereotypes in the clinical setting. in the university of lausanne (unil), gender studies were integrated in in the faculty of social and political sciences. from , the unil acknowledged the importance of gender in health, along with the federal office of public health in switzerland, which created a “gender health” service in [ ]. the first lecture on gender and medicine was held to medical students in [ ]. a platform of interdisciplinary gender stud- ies (plage – plateforme en etudes genre) was created in , aiming to gather all projects of the university around the question of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation [ ]. currently, unil students follow a -h introduction to gendered medicine during their first year of studies, an optional h seminar, and -h lectures on gender and health during the th and th year. to promote an inte- grated structured teaching of the gender dimension in medicine, the faculty of biology and medicine at unil is currently implementing a gendered medicine project. this project aims at integrating a gender dimension in all disciplines of pre-graduate medical education and apply gender regulated terms in research, such as includ- ing female participants or/and addressing the differences of sex and gender in the outcome of interest [ ]. this study was conducted in the frame of this project, with the goal to assess gender awareness in medical students using a validated scale developed in the netherlands, the nijmegen gender awareness in medicine scale (n- gams). the aim of this study was twofold: . to meas- ure gender awareness among students at the university of lausanne and to assess the evolution of gender aware- ness throughout medical education; and . to validate the n-gams scale in a french speaking setting. methods study design and gender awareness measure we performed an observational cross-sectional study among medical students at the medical school of the university of lausanne in switzerland. to measure stu- dent’s gender sensitivity we used the n-gams scale, which has been developed in and validated by the dutch team of radboud university nijmegen medical centre [ ]. this scale is based on two attitudinal aspects of gender-awareness: gender sensitivity (gs) and gender role ideology which is assessed towards patients (grip) or doctors (grid). the three subscales contain state- ments that students have to assess using a likert point scale (ranging from “not agree at all” to “totally agree”). some statements have reverse meaning, there- fore an adjustment of reverse scoring statements was done. the gs group has statements, which explore the student’s general opinion of considering gender and sex in healthcare, for example with statements such as the following “physicians’ knowledge of gender differ- ences in illness and health increases quality of care”. the grip score has statements which specifically relate to stereotypes about male or female patients and their rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of communication regarding health problems, with state- ments such as: “women expect too much emotional support from physicians”. the grid score has state- ments, which explore student’s stereotypes towards doc- tors and their practice, for example: “male physicians are more efficient than female physicians”. a higher score in the gs statements means a higher gender sens- ibility. on the grip and grid scales high score implies more gender-stereotyping opinions. it is to our know- ledge the only validated scale that measures gender awareness in medical students. it has been developed and validated in the netherlands and used in two other studies in sweden [ ] and in taïwan [ ]. a professional interpreter translated the n-gams scale from dutch to french. the french questionnaire was then tested by three medical students and two members of the study team (ir and cc) and adapted according to their comments. translation of the english questionnaire was also done by the study team into french and then back translated into english. results were then compared with the translation done by the professional interpreter and disagreements discussed and resolved. we offered the possibility for students to add comments at the end of the survey, to obtain a qualitative opinion about the questionnaire. additional file shows the statements of the n-gams question- naire translated in french. an english version of the n- gams questionnaire can be found in andersson et al. (with minor modification) [ ], and the initial version in english in verdonk et al. [ ] (https://bmcmededuc.bio- medcentral.com/articles/ . / - - - /ta- bles/ ). study population the survey instrument - a questionnaire containing the n-gams scale as well as basic demographic data – was sent to all medical students of unil during the academic year of – , using an anonymous online survey (surveygizmo® software). in total registered stu- dents were invited to participate, with a majority of women ( . % female students). about % of registered students were first year medical students and the num- ber decreases and stabilizes after the nd year of medical school. table shows the proportion of students in each academic year and the proportion of female students registered for each year. the recruitment of participants was conducted through e-mails. announcements in vari- ous facebook students’ groups were also posted. the survey was initially open for a month. as we noticed a lack of male participants, we encouraged their participa- tion through a second targeted e-mails. statistical analysis exploratory factor analysis was used in order to define n-gams subscales. at first impression, it appeared that factors were enough, one for gender sensitivity and a second for gender stereotypes (grip and grid). follow- ing previous work (verdonk, ; andersson, ), we “forced” factors. in order to have three separate fac- tors, scores with loading smaller than a cut-off of . and cross-loading scores (scores with loadings > . on more than one factor) were dropped leading to define three relevant dimensions. reliability of the three sub- scales above was assessed calculating the alpha cron- bach coefficient. mean subscales were calculated for male and female students and compared using two sam- ple t-tests. a linear model was built with each subscale as a dependent variable and students’ sex and age as covariables. quadratic effect of age and interaction be- tween age and sex were tested. results in total, students answered the survey ( % of regis- tered students), with students who completed the questionnaire, resulting in a final response rate of . %. the proportion of participants varied between . % ( st academic year) to . % ( th academic year). among included students, were women ( . %), men ( . %) and one participant was categorized as “other” and excluded from analyses. there were more table number of participants stratified by gender and years of education, with total number of students registered in autumn in the university of lausanne in parentheses year of study number of male participants (male students in total) number of female participants (female students in total) total number of participants (total number of students) participation rate (%) percentage of female students in total (%) ( ) ( ) a( ) . % % ( ) ( ) ( ) . % . % ( ) ( ) ( ) . % . % ( ) ( ) ( ) . % . % ( ) ( ) ( ) . % . % ( ) ( ) ( ) . % % total ( ) ( ) ( ) . % . % a category “other” not included rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/ . / - - - /tables/ https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/ . / - - - /tables/ https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/ . / - - - /tables/ female participants in every year, except for the th aca- demic year, where . % of respondents were men. age of students ranged from to years old, with a mean of years old. age corresponds to year of study but was preferred because of the low number of samples for each year. table shows the participation rate of stu- dents for each academic year. with an exploratory factor analysis conducted on completed questionnaire ( responses were excluded that had one or several missing values on n-gams scores), we obtained relevant subscales, gs, grip and grid, globally explaining % of data variability. the first subscale represented gender sensitivity (gs; the higher the score value, the higher the sensibility to gen- der issues) and was defined by the mean of out of the original statements. eight of them were reversed since they presented a negative loading in the factor analysis. the second subscale represented stereotypes towards patients (grip: the higher the score value the stronger the stereotypes) and was defined by the mean of out of the original statements. the third subscale repre- sented stereotypes towards doctors, (grid: the higher the score value the stronger the stereotypes) and was de- fined by the mean of out of the original statements. reliability scores of the n-gams subscales measured by cronbach’s alpha were α = . for the gs subscale, α = . for the grip subscale and . for the grid sub- scale. therefore n-gams could be validated with relevant subscales (see additional file ). the students scored a gs subscore of . (sd . ), a grip subscore of . (sd . ) and a grid subscore of . (sd . ). as shown in table , gs and grid subscores were not significantly different between female and male students (gs . for women, . for men, p = . , grid . for women, . for men, p = . ). a significant difference was found with the grip sub- scale, with a mean score of . for women and . for men (p < . ), which suggests a more stereotyped opinion toward patients among male students. a trend was observed with age (table and fig. ): gender sen- sitivity showed a significant quadratic trend with age, with an initial increase followed by a stabilization (both linear and quadratic effect p < . ); stereotypes to- wards patients and doctors decreased linearly with students getting older (grip p = . , grid p = . ). adjusting for age, students’ sex was still associated with grip subscale, female students having less tendency to have stereotyped beliefs (table ; coefficient . , p-value < . ). we collected qualitative comments at the end of the n-gams questionnaire. most participants com- plained about the formulation of the statements, which were too stereotypical and suggesting negative stereo- types towards women. some of them suggested adding also negative stereotyped statements about men to bal- ance the questionnaire, which addressed negative roles for women only. discussion using the n-gams instrument, we obtained a general overview of gender awareness of medical students from lausanne’s medical school and identified some patterns. students had overall medium to high gender sensitivity and medium to low gender stereotypes. women had sig- nificantly less stereotypes toward patients than men. gender sensitivity and gender stereotypes toward doc- tors were not significantly different between male and female students. we observed both a positive improve- ment of gender sensitivity and a decrease in gender ste- reotypes toward patients and doctors over the years, suggesting an improvement of gender awareness when students move forward in their medical curriculum. the finding that female students had less stereotypes towards patients may be partially explained by the fact that women in general are more aware of stereotypes to- ward patients because it speaks about their own position and their right to a better health care. the high grip score, showing stereotypes toward patients, among rd and th year male students can be associated with the absence of gender-focused lectures during the first clin- ical master's years. the improvement of gender aware- ness during the master’s years might also be explained by the start of the clinical years in the rd year, when students are confronted with patients and clinical situa- tions putting their knowledge into practice. during this process, most of the diseases are described with scores and guidelines based on clinical research and prevalence, which contain often a gender or sex aspect. students start to sort out diseases influenced by gender and sex patterns and develop stereotypes. this could be pre- vented by an implemented gender dimension in all lec- tures including specialties, where the role and influence of gender is addressed. an improvement of general gen- der awareness could be also achieved by implementing gender focused courses also at a clinical level, for nurs- ing staff, senior clinicians or attended specialists, who are usually responsible for medical students in the first years of clinical learning. table mean subscores stratified by sex total women men p of the difference gs score . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . grip score . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) < . grid score . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . response varies from = not agree at all to = totally agree gs gender sensitivity, grip gender role ideology towards patients, grid gender role ideology towards doctors sd in parentheses rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of we compared our results with other countries based on the studies published in the netherlands and in sweden in [ ]. results suggest a better gender sensitivity of swiss students as shown by higher mean gs score (gs score . for women and . for men), when compared to swedish students (gs score . for women and . for men) and to dutch students (gs score . for both sexes). swiss male students had more stereotypes towards patients than swedish male students (grip . in swiss compared to . in swedish stu- dents) but had less stereotypes towards doctors than dutch male students (grid . in swiss compared to . in dutch students). another aspect is the influence of sociocultural norms, including gender norms that dif- fer across countries. the social status of women is stron- ger in sweden, where gender equality is ensured in more dimensions than in switzerland. for example, according to swedish statistics, % of employed women have part-time jobs and the gender gap in salaries was % in [ ]. the gender gap in netherlands was % in the same year [ ]. sweden is ranked first in the eu to have the most equitable sharing of households activities [ ]. the comparison is also observed in the inter- national world economic forum global gender gap index (http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-re- port- /rankings/), where sweden ranks th, nether- land th and switzerland th. we suggest that these differences of women’s social status can explain the dif- ferences in gender awareness across countries. in addition, the time lag between studies (the andersson study was performed in – and our study in ) may explain the discrepancies in gender awareness table linear model with students’ sex and age student’s sex (men vs women) age age gs score . ( . ) . (< . ) − . (< . ) grip score . (< . ) − . ( . ) – grid score . ( . ) − . ( . ) – response varies from = not agree at all to = totally agree gs gender sensitivity, grip gender role ideology towards patients, grid gender role ideology towards doctors p in parentheses fig. predicted mean subscales according to the linear model, with student’s age and sex rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report- /rankings/ http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report- /rankings/ between students. over time the public opinion about gender awareness in general has evolved. with the #metoo era and the feminist wave increasing in social media, considering the timeline is important [ ]. the social environment, including in the work, scientific and medical sectors, is changing and gender inequalities has become a prominent topic including in the media. those factors might explain a higher gender sensitivity in the participants in our study. comparison were not possible with the study from taiwan, because the n-gams scores had been modified. the differences between educational systems play an important role in the results. in lausanne, in the first year the students are approached by a gender focused lecture of one hour and an optional seminar which depicts the culture of the faculty about the importance of gender. in sweden and the netherlands at the time of study, the im- plementation of gender aspect in the medical curricula was already in place [ ]. the educational background in the universities influenced the differences in scores. comparing our study with the swedish and the dutch studies has its limitation due to the difference in the educational level of the participants. the data was col- lected from first year medical students in the andersson study, whereas in our study all six academical years could participate. in – the participation rate was % for netherlands and % for sweden [ ]. their sample sizes were greater than in our study, which limits comparisons. limitations our study has some limitations that have to be acknowl- edged. first, the n-gams questionnaire has some pit- falls. the instrument is based on formulated negative stereotypes to which participants are asked to react and the formulation of such stereotypes is context and time- bond. hence, a linear translation of these formulations may not always be adequate. in addition, the use of negative stereotypes may have induced a social desirabil- ity response bias. finally, a back-translation of the ques- tionnaire from dutch to french was not formally made. however, we did translate the english questionnaire into french and then back into english, confronting this version with the one ot the professional interpreter. we thus aimed to limit the risk of misinterpretation. the participation rate was low ( . %) and % of the students answered but did not complete the question- naire and were excluded from analyses. we thus cannot exclude a selection bias. indeed, male students were un- derrepresented and had to be encouraged by a second reminder to answer the survey which showed success as the sample sex ratio matched the real population ratio. first year medical students were overrepresented and, even if the participation rate was proportional to the total number students, they might have influenced the overall results, because they did not have gender courses at the time of the survey. due to our small sample, we were not able to stratify results by medical year to look at the influence of existing gender medicine courses in the reduction of gender bias. it is possible that students sensitized or interested by the gender dimension in health answered the survey in a larger proportion and were thus over-represented. if this holds true, it means that we might expect a lower gender awareness com- pared to what we have measured. the n-gams instru- ment is to our knowledge the only validated questionnaire that exists to measure gender awareness. it has been criticized [ ] and might not be sensitive enough to fully reflect gender awareness; it has allowed obtaining a general overview of swiss students’ gender awareness, but did not allow a more precise understand- ing of which kind of stereotypes were in play. strengths we used a validated tool (n-gams) to specifically as- sess gender awareness among medical students. this study permitted the validation of n-gams in french and validated its utilization in switzerland, which will allow its application in other french-speaking countries. by adding a comments section in the questionnaire, we gave the students the opportunity to assess the state- ments of n-gams and give qualitative insights on the questionnaire and express their opinion. finally, our study is the first, to our knowledge, to have assessed gender awareness among swiss medical students and will serve as a baseline for further comparison with other countries or within the same setting, to assess the im- pact of a better inclusion of the gender dimension in medical education. conclusion through their participation in this study, medical stu- dents at the university of lausanne showed a certain interest in the topic of gender in medicine but appear to have stereotypes and suboptimal gender sensitivity as shown by our results. the evolution of gender awareness throughout the academic years shows promising results but implementing coordinated and continuous teaching of the gender dimension throughout the whole medical curriculum is necessary to prevent stereotypes and bias affecting future doctors, and ultimately future patients. in addition, despite some weaknesses, the n-gams in- strument could be adapted to different countries and languages. an early sensitization on gender bias and their influence on health among medical students in swiss universities could contribute to improve the qual- ity of medical care and ensure equity in healthcare. rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of supplementary information supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . additional file . nijmegen gender awareness in medicine scale (n-gams). additional file . results of factor analysis with three factors. first three graphs represent plots of pairs of factors (grip,gs); (grid,gs), and (grid,grip). all scores have large (> . ) loading on one (and only one) factor. the last graph gives methods for choosing the number of factor retained. on methods give factors (ones dropped cross-loading scores, otherwise all methods give only two factors.). abbreviations n-gams: nijmegen gender awareness medical scale; unil: university of lausanne; gs: gender sensitivity; grip: gender role ideology towards patients; grid: gender role ideology towards doctors; plage: plateforme en études genre; ofs: office fédéral de la statistique acknowledgements we would like to thank the team of unisanté for its contribution and all the students who participated in the study. previous presentation this study has been presented as a poster at the rd annual meeting of the swiss society of general internal medicine (basel, switzerland, june ) and as an oral presentation at the m-day (lausanne, december , first prize for the oral presentation). authors’ contribution all authors have made contributions to the study and the manuscript. cc made the concept and design of the study. ir managed the data acquisition and statistical analysis with il. cc and il made the supervision of the study. ir and cc performed the analysis and interpretation of data, as well as the drafting of manuscript. il, js, tlj and af were involved in the critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content. all authors have read and approved the manuscript. funding carole clair is partly supported by a “medicine and gender” grant from the faculty of biology and medicine, lausanne, switzerland and a grant from the swiss national science foundation (pz p _ ambizione grant). these are government and university grants and the funders did not influence the design, analysis or content of the work. availability of data and materials our data are not on a data repository. the datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. only coded data may be shared. ethics approval and consent to participate the study did not collect medical data. the local ethics committee (cer-vd) confirmed that the study was waived from ethic approval. consent for publication (not applicable) competing interests none declared. author details faculty of biology and medicine, university of lausanne, lausanne, switzerland. center for primary care and public health (unisanté), lausanne, rue du bugnon , ch- lausanne, switzerland. dept. of primary and community care, radboud university medical center, geert grooteplein , ez nijmegen, netherlands. institute of humanities in medicine, lausanne university hospital (chuv), lausanne, avenue de provence , lausanne, switzerland. received: november accepted: april references . doyal l. sex, gender, and health: the need for a new approach. bmj (clinical research ed). ; 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( ): . . chung yc, lin cy, huang cn, yang jh. perceptions on gender awareness and considerations in career choices of medical students in a medical school in taiwan. kaohsiung j med sci. ; ( ): – . . statistics sweden. women and men in sweden . . available from: https://www.scb.se/contentassets/ eaae b da aad cca/ le _ b _br_x br eng.pdf. accessed apr . rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc / https://eige.europa.eu/taxonomy/term/ https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/actualites/quoi-deneuf.assetdetail. .html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/actualites/quoi-deneuf.assetdetail. .html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiques/catalogues-banques-donnees/communiques-presse.assetdetail. .html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiques/catalogues-banques-donnees/communiques-presse.assetdetail. .html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiques/catalogues-banques-donnees/communiques-presse.assetdetail. .html https://www.unil.ch/fbm/home/menuinst/la-releve-academique/egalite-femmes-hommes/plan-daction-de-la-fbm.html https://www.unil.ch/fbm/home/menuinst/la-releve-academique/egalite-femmes-hommes/plan-daction-de-la-fbm.html https://www.unil.ch/ecoledemedecine/fr/home/menuguid/enseignante/medecine-et-genre.html https://www.unil.ch/ecoledemedecine/fr/home/menuguid/enseignante/medecine-et-genre.html https://www.scb.se/contentassets/ eaae b da aad cca/le _ b _br_x br eng.pdf https://www.scb.se/contentassets/ eaae b da aad cca/le _ b _br_x br eng.pdf . european institute of gender equality. gender equality index : netherlands, vol. ; . p. – . available from: https://eige.europa.eu/ rdc/eige-publications/gender-equality-index- -denmark. accessed apr . . neil ao, sojo v, fileborn b, scovelle aj, milner a. the # metoo movement: an opportunity in public health? the lancet. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. rrustemi et al. bmc medical education ( ) : page of https://eige.europa.eu/rdc/eige-publications/gender-equality-index- -denmark https://eige.europa.eu/rdc/eige-publications/gender-equality-index- -denmark https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusion 	background 	methods 	study design and gender awareness measure 	study population 	statistical analysis 	results 	discussion 	limitations 	strengths 	conclusion 	supplementary information 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	previous presentation 	authors’ contribution 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note female faculty: why so few and why care? female faculty: why so few and why care? downloaded from: https://research.chalmers.se, - - : utc citation for the original published paper (version of record): kamerlin, s., wittung stafshede, p. ( ) female faculty: why so few and why care? chemistry - a european journal, ( ): - http://dx.doi.org/ . /chem. n.b. when citing this work, cite the original published paper. research.chalmers.se offers the possibility of retrieving research publications produced at chalmers university of technology. it covers all kind of research output: articles, dissertations, conference papers, reports etc. since . research.chalmers.se is administrated and maintained by chalmers library (article starts on next page) & women in stem female faculty : why so few and why care ? shina caroline lynn kamerlin*[a] and pernilla wittung-stafshede*[b] abstract : despite slow ongoing progress in increasing the representation of women in academia, women remain signif- icantly under-represented at senior levels, in particular in the natural sciences and engineering. not infrequently, this is downplayed by bringing forth arguments such as inherent biological differences between genders, that current policies are adequate to address the issue, or by deflecting this as being “not my problem” among other examples. in this piece we present scientific evidence that counters these claims, as well as a best-practice example, genie, from chalmers university of technology, where one of the authors is currently employed. we also highlight particular challeng- es caused by the current covid- pandemic. finally, we conclude by proposing some possible solutions to the situa- tion and emphasize that we need to all do our part, to ensure that the next generation of academics experience a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable working environment. as chemistry professors, we grew up, academically, in a world full of men, and as students and early career researchers, we were so used to this situation we did not seek to question it as being anything but the norm. as we grow academically older, however, we began to ‘see’ more and realize the underlying reasons for why the gender balance is so skewed. historically, academia was a career path for men, and even today, the number of female faculty is low and gender biases flourish. this is true, also in sweden where we both work now, a coun- try frequently and rightly praised for gender equality. even though sweden is a very progressive country in terms of child- care options, parental leave, etc. , women make up only % of grade a staff (equivalent to full professor, eu- %, fig- ure a) in natural sciences.[ ] the challenges to reach a grade a position can also be measured in the “glass ceiling index” (gci), which compares the proportions of women in academia at grades a, b and c positions (with grade c defined as either postdoctoral scholar or assistant professor depending on country, grade b being an intermediary faculty position, and grade a being equivalent to a full professorship), with the proportion of women in grade a positions, in a given year. as described in ref. [ ] , the gci can range from to infinity : a gci score of < indicates that women are more represented at the grade a level than in academia generally (defined as grade c or higher), and a gci score of > indicates that women are less represented in grade a positions than in aca- demia generally, that is, that there is a glass ceiling effect making it more difficult for women to reach a position of top seniority than to enter academia generally, and the larger the gci score, the stronger this glass ceiling effect. here, again, de- spite ranking first in the eu on the gender equality index[ ] sweden, nevertheless, scored . on the gci in (fig- ure b, slightly improved from . in ), compared to an eu- average of . .[ ] but why are there so few women fac- ulty, and why should we care about it ? we are now in senior faculty positions where we can and do dare to speak up ; and we must do so both in order to help younger female colleagues, as well as to create a better future for all young people. in addition, an inclusive workplace cli- mate that takes into account all aspects of diversity leads to great productivity and collegiality,[ ] with a diversity of perspec- tives and viewpoints represented, and therefore benefits us all. most female scientists have personal stories of things that have happened to them, and while anecdotal evidence is im- portant, it is also significant to emphasize that there now exists a wealth of scientific data on gender inequality in aca- demia. below, we will highlight the most common responses (truly, resistance) one may get when bringing up gender in dis- cussions and counteract each of them with scientific evidence. we will then present an example of a promising gender equali- ty initiative in academia (currently taking place at one of the authors’ universities), concerns that arise due to the current co- ronavirus crisis, and conclude with our views of possible solu- tions. [a] prof. dr. s. c. l. kamerlin department of chemistry – bmc, uppsala university bmc box , s- uppsala, (sweden) e-mail : lynn.kamerlin@kemi.uu.se [b] prof. dr. p. wittung-stafshede department of biology and biological engineering, chalmers university of technology, s- gothenburg, (sweden) e-mail : pernilla.wittung@chalmers.se the orcid identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under : https ://doi.org/ . /chem. . chem. eur. j. , , – t wiley-vch verlag gmbh & co. kgaa, weinheim chemistry—a european journal science voices doi.org/ . /chem. http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /chem. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % fchem. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - common resistance to gender equality there is no problem despite denial by many, there is a problem. analyses of univer- sities in most countries reveal that the fraction of female facul- ty, and specifically, female professors, is low. in sweden, , % of all professors across all disciplines were female[ ] ( % in natural sciences ;[ ] note that the swedish numbers are very similar to the eu- average[ ] , for example in , the pro- portion of female professors (all disciplines) in sweden was % compared to an eu- average of %).[ ] it is important to note that this is not due to few women pursuing tertiary and quaternary education. for decades, the relative gender proportion between undergraduate[ ] and graduate[ ] students, across all disciplines, has been around fifty–fifty. despite this, the relative proportion of men keeps increasing as one moves up the academic career ladder, and we often depict this as the ‘leaky pipeline’ or the ‘glass ceiling’. in addition, it is important to note that there is a gender pay gap against women in all countries[ ] (men earn more on average) and women do more household work than men on average.[ ] recent studies also suggest that women do more so-called ‘academic household’ work, that is, things helpful to the community but not count- ing as merits when competing for elite grants and highly com- petitive senior leadership positions.[ ] during the last decade or so, the percentage female professors in swedish academia has increased by about % per year.[ ] but we cannot simply wait until percent is reached, as studies show that progres- sion towards gender equality stops when approximately – % of females at the top in a profession is reached.[ ] it is all about biology some people claim that women are not as good as men in cer- tain scientific topics, and women do not have the skills, or do not want, to become leaders. thus, there is nothing one can do about the situation—but this is totally wrong. if one looks at traits such as ambition, analytical ability, intelligence, physio- logical well-being, personality, cognitive performance and problem solving, there are no differences between men and women.[ ] if anything, girls perform better in school than boys.[ ] instead, the explanation includes historical norms, cul- ture, and unconscious bias.[ ] we all have built-in norms that are hard to change, and even hard to detect as they are so natural. for example, the harvard implicit association test shows that most people associated science with men.[ ] there are policies in place so today we are fair we think we follow appropriate rules and we are fair, but we are not. for example, the wording used in recommendation letters differs dramatically between letters written for men and for women.[ ] teaching evaluations (such as those found on the rate my professor website, https ://www.ratemyprofessor- s.com) show lower ratings for female teachers compared to men, for the same performance, as well as gender bias in gen- eral.[ ] several studies show it is harder for women to publish, women are less likely to be in senior authorship positions, and papers authored by women get less citations than papers by male authors.[ ] success rates for grant proposals from women are lower than for men.[ ] a striking study is the john/jennifer test, where it was clearly shown how unconscious bias is at play.[ ] despite distributing identical cvs for hypothetical ap- plicants for a laboratory manager position to participants (with only the gender of the candidate changed), when the appli- cant name was “male”, he got better evaluations and was of- fered a higher salary than “female” candidates. it is important to note here that both men and women in academia show un- conscious bias against women. each difference between men and women may be small in isolation, but when these small differences are accumulated, this leads to a “mountain of feathers” effect that contributes to excluding women from full participation in academia, independently of their objective merits as an academic. it is not my problem many people say they are in favor of gender equality, but they do not want to get involved in equality and diversity issues di- rectly, as they believe such issues do not affect them. but, by being quiet, one supports the current system (a phenomenon sometimes called complicit masculinity). homophily means men supporting men ; in academia, there are many ‘old boys’ networks’ that set unwritten rules. women, on the other hand, being in the minority, may become hostile to each other lynn kamerlin obtained her phd at the uni- versity of birmingham, followed by postdoc- toral training with stefan boresch and arieh warshel, before joining the faculty of uppsala university in , where she is currently a professor of structural biology. she is also a wallenberg scholar, fellow of the royal soci- ety of chemistry, and former chair of the young academy of europe. her research fo- cuses on computational physical organic chemistry, protein evolution and enzyme design. in addition, she has been engaged in science policy, with a particular focus on women in stem, widening european partici- pation in research, as well as open science. pernilla wittung-stafshede obtained a phd at chalmers in , followed by a postdoc at california institute of technology. in , she started as an assistant professor in chemistry at tulane university, new orleans, where she received tenure in . in she moved to rice university, houston and, in , she re- turned to sweden and became a professor at ume, university, followed by, in , a move to chalmers. her research centres around pro- tein biophysics, with focus on copper trans- port and amyloid formation. she is a wallen- berg scholar, member of the royal swedish academy of the sciences, and the nobel com- mittee for chemistry. she heads the genie initiative at chalmers. chem. eur. j. , , – www.chemeurj.org t wiley-vch verlag gmbh & co. kgaa, weinheim chemistry—a european journal science voices doi.org/ . /chem. https://www.ratemyprofessors.com https://www.ratemyprofessors.com http://www.chemeurj.org simply to survive, rather than building on similar network strat- egies and supporting each other. in addition, evaluation of women’s performance becomes subjective rather than objec- tive when gendered (masculine) definitions of excellence are used.[ ] in this context, it is important to point out that several studies in recent years have shown mixed groups, or diversity, to result in more successful research and publications with higher impact.[ ] since the goal of universities is to be success- ful, promoting gender equality becomes everybody’s problem and a real strategy to increase university quality and reputa- tion. there is too much already (gender fatigue) there are some people who are now arguing that gender equality has gone too far, and today men are discriminated against instead.[ ] this is not true, as if this were the case, the percentages mentioned in the beginning of the text should have been different. although gender equality has been a topic of discussion, research and policy planning for decades, there have been few concrete actions that have truly trans- formed society. female scientists and students are still the tar- gets of stereotyped comments and microaggressions on an ev- eryday basis. even if each individual comment may in itself be unharmful, they build up and affect women’s confidence. stud- ies show that women underestimate their self-confidence (and figure . (a) proportion (%) of women among grade a staff in natural sciences (full professor equivalent). (b) glass ceiling index. the majority of this data is from , although there are exceptions to the reference year in both panels, and data is not available for all countries. here, “eu” denotes the eu- aver- age. based on raw data presented in ref. [ ] . for methodological details and exceptions, as well as country codes, see ref. [ ] . chem. eur. j. , , – www.chemeurj.org t wiley-vch verlag gmbh & co. kgaa, weinheim chemistry—a european journal science voices doi.org/ . /chem. http://www.chemeurj.org attribute success to others) whereas men overestimate their self-confidence (and happily attribute others’ success to them- selves), see for example, ref. [ ] . this is important as confi- dence is easier to spot than competence, which in turn has been shown to give men benefits.[ b, ] the confidence gap will lead to differences in how men and women decide on ap- plying for example, for promotion and grants, with men often pushing through with less merits. current initiatives and perspectives for the future what is genie ? one promising initiative to target gender inequality in academ- ia that started in january at chalmers university of tech- nology (gothenburg, sweden) is called “genie” (gender initia- tive for excellence) (https ://www.chalmers.se/genie). genie is a university-wide effort to increase excellence at the university through gender equality efforts. genie aims to increase the representation of female faculty and promote gender equal systems and processes as well as to create an inclusive work environment and campus culture. initiatives such as this are important at all institutions irrespective of discipline, but par- ticularly important at institutions such as chalmers, as the rep- resentation of women at technical universities has been histori- cally low.[ ] for example, at chalmers, women comprise % of all professors ( , based on employment data). what gives genie higher potential for success than many other ini- tiatives are at least three features. first, it is a bottom-up initia- tive, led by members of the faculty, with two professors driving this initiative (which is in contrast to many other such initia- tives which are instead led by administrators). this is important because it means that the genie leaders will understand other faculty and they will more easily get respect in the organiza- tion. second, genie has lots of money, in fact the funding to genie (e million) is the largest ever given to a gender initia- tive in academia.[ ] third, the genie initiative has a long life- span, years, so the hope is that changes introduced through this initiative can become permanent. the key mission of genie is to stimulate and help each department to take owner- ship of and responsibility for gender-equality work. genie will provide the tools, feedback and money to facilitate this. each department is different, thus tailored work is needed to ad- dress the individual needs of the different departments. genie will also finance hires of female faculty, support female scien- tists in the system, measure gender-divided data (such as flow of money, sick leave, hires, faculty positions ; all as a function of time), look over policies and in general try to increase awareness. the concept builds on making the university staff wanting to change, not forcing them. after one year, based on feedback from department heads and faculty at chalmers, it is clear that genie has built trust in the system and increased the awareness of diversity and equity issues. consequences of the covid- pandemic ? there is a risk that gender equality and diversity work may be forgotten at universities due to the multiple pressures caused by the ongoing covid- pandemic. historically, crises affect gender equality negatively.[ ] today, universities around the world have shut down campuses, undergraduate teaching is done online and zoom has become the new tool for faculty meetings. most faculty work from home, often surrounded by family. it has already been reported that in the last few months, women are submitting dramatically fewer manuscripts for publication than men.[ ] to the best of our knowledge, there is no research yet on how online meetings affect gen- dered power structures. in the long term, we worry that a vir- tual academic life will hamper research creativity, for both men and women, as interactions with peers often underlie new ideas and inspiration. however, if the proportion of female pro- fessors continues to increase at a rate of only % a year[ ] (swedish numbers), the pandemic will be long under control before we reach gender equality in academia. thus, we should not let the current crisis result in a setback in gender equality work. possible solutions ? there is no magic bullet to solve gender inequity in academia, but rather, this is an issue one must work to tackle on many levels in many ways, and each and every one of us, irrespective of seniority, play a role in creating a more equitable and inclu- sive working environment for women and other minority groups. to truly change academic culture, most scientists must get onboard and realize such a change is good for all. both formal and informal leaders in the departments must engage in gender issues and become aware of the current situation. gender equality must be put on top of universities’ strategic agendas, there must be strong leadership caring for the topic at every level, and awareness/education of all university staff must be increased. before bias in academic evaluations are re- moved, women need to be prioritized. scientific excellence (meritocracy) must be guiding all work, although quality must be valued higher than quantity of merits. it is important to note that a lot of university efforts were put into dealing with sexual harassment after #metoo. but sexual harassment is only the tip of the iceberg ; we also need to address all smaller issues found in the big chunk of ice under the waterline. those issues are much more common and make up the aca- demic culture we have today. we can all help : by speaking up when things are wrong, pushing on our leaders to make deci- sions that favor equity, collecting data and statistics on gender in different academic contexts, raising our voices to increase awareness, and supporting the women (and other minorities) around us irrespective of their career stages. in fact, we all have a responsibility to get engaged—all of us together form the academic culture. chem. eur. j. , , – www.chemeurj.org t wiley-vch verlag gmbh & co. kgaa, weinheim chemistry—a european journal science voices doi.org/ . /chem. https://www.chalmers.se/genie http://www.chemeurj.org disclaimer science voices are opinion articles written by scientists around the world and the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of wiley-vch. conflict of interest the authors declare no conflict of interest. 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[ ] a) c. flaherty, no room of one’s own, inside higher ed. , ; b) n. amano-patiÇo, e. faraglia, c. giannitsarou, z. hasna, who is doing new research in the time of covid- ? not the female economists, vox cepr policy portal, ; c) p. vincent-lamarre, c. r. sugimoto, v. lari- vihre, the decline of women’s research production during the coronavi- rus pandemic, nature index, ; d) g. viglione in are women publish- ing less during the pandemic ? here’s what the data say, nature, . manuscript received : may , version of record online : june , chem. eur. j. , , – www.chemeurj.org t wiley-vch verlag gmbh & co. kgaa, weinheim chemistry—a european journal science voices doi.org/ . /chem. http://www.chemeurj.org author’s copy: this is a so-called personal version (author's manuscript as accepted for publishing after the review process but prior to final layout and copyediting) of the article. ‘you, them, us, we, too? … online-offline, individual-collective, forgotten- remembered, harassment-violence’ jeff hearn european journal of women’s studies, vol. ( ), , pp. - . issn: - eissn: - http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw you, them, us, we, too? … online-offline, individual-collective, forgotten- remembered, harassment-violence jeff hearn #metoo was originally a campaign launched in by tarana burke, a us black woman, against lack of services for black women victims/survivors of abuse, especially sexual assault, in underprivileged communities. it offered support to others, framed as ‘empowerment through empathy’, when statutory and other support did not exist. burke told ebony magazine: “it wasn’t built to be a viral campaign or a hashtag that is here today and forgotten tomorrow … it was a catchphrase to be used from survivor to survivor to let folks know that they were not alone and that a movement for radical healing was happening and possible.” in october , following increasing allegations, the us actor, activist, producer and singer, alyssa milano, initiated a new viral #metoo campaign. she aimed to develop support for women who had experienced abuse: to show solidarity with those who come forward and those who, for a variety of reasons, do not feel able to come forward, and so show the extent of such abuse. here, i have been asked to comment on: “bearing in mind your own work, do you think that #metoo is ‘useful’: in terms of triggering systemic change? in terms of its impact? in terms of bringing women together across borders?” in many ways, it is easy to answer these questions: yes, yes, and yes. indeed, personal testimonies are an established method in feminist and other consciousness-raising movements. but to say a little more, i comment here on what appears distinctive, and in some ways new, about #metoo. these distinctive appearances are important in considering the questions posed. cyberpolitics, online-offline first, #metoo is an example of contemporary virtual politics or cyberpolitics of sexuality and violence, made and facilitated through internet and other socio-technological relations and affordances. it builds on many interactive projects, such as the uk ‘everyday sexism’ operative since (bates, ) or the swedish #prataomdet [#talkaboutit], following sexual allegations against julian assange, and leading onto vivid discussion of policy and practice on sexual consent (strid, ). a significant aspect of such virtual politics is that they seem to have both a (younger) generational profile as well as working across generations. the very technology that may be used to harass, bully and violate, to undermine gender/sexual citizenship, can be used to enhance that citizenship (hearn, ). this is not to isolate the online and the offline; the initial campaigns have spawned a whole range of other campaigns, and also policy initiatives, and strong examples of immediate jeff hearn is professor of sociology, university of huddersfield, uk; senior professor, gender studies, Örebro university, sweden; professor emeritus, hanken school of economics, finland; and professor extraordinarius, university of south africa. his latest book is revenge pornography; gender, sexualities and motivations, with matthew hall, routledge. collective awareness and action. to use some immediate examples: two universities where i work – Örebro university, sweden, and hanken school of economics, finland – have just in the last few days produced new, if very different, policy statements from the top down: the first using the frame of ‘power language’, the latter highlighting zero tolerance. there is now a significant amount of research and informed (online) commentary on whether and how tweeting and online campaigns more generally bring social change. such interventions appear to have been influential, at least at the margins, in high profile electoral campaigns, and also in some single issue campaigns, such as around specific law reform and consumer actions. virtual politics can be a means to rapid, transnational spreading of ideas, information and interventions. with #metoo, this has been amply illustrated. in finland, the movement caught on rather slowly, with initial responses in schools and defence forces, but now in late november is taking off; in neighboring sweden, where it grew fast, with , women signing by late november (https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/darfor-blev-metoo-uppropen-sa-starka-i- sverige/), there is talk of a ‘social revolution’. twitter reports that more than . million women and men have used the hashtag in countries. celebrities and workplaces second, #metoo seems, initially at least, to have been driven by reactions and responses to high profile individual cases of what has been often characterized as sexual harassment, confirmed or alleged, by specific individual men in the public eye. in particular, it appears to have been prompted by revelations about and against men celebrities, made sometimes by women celebrities, sometimes by less well-known women. thus, the hashtag can partly be seen as an offshoot of media and popular interest in celebrity culture, even whilst the initial focus on revelations of sexual harassment and assault from the ‘entertainment’ industry has broadened to other male-dominated sectors, notably politics and professions. perhaps significantly, at times the #metoo campaign has become almost synonymous with harvey weinstein. maybe this intensification followed on from his hypocrisy after his previous public support for progressive causes. the campaign took off fast and with much wider impact than there was following the cases of, for example, bill cosby or jimmy savile (so vile), with the first being a black us comedy actor, the second a white british disc jockey and television ‘personality’, and also dead. the viral #metoo campaign could be seen as part of an accumulation of reaction against celebrity cases. seen in the uk context, it seems in some ways a follow-up to major allegations against a plethora of “show business” (a term now with new meanings) sexual abuse cases of children, young people and women by leading british men made public over recent years. seen in the us context it might partly a delayed, cumulative reaction to and anger against trump’s boasting of “grabbing pussy”. many of the initial reports in #metoo were derived from male-dominated industries, with the focus on male actors, directors, producers, parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists, academics, and the like, even technologists. more privileged gendered class, status, high visibility and occupational sectors figured strongly. studies of women entering male-dominated sectors have long reported more harassment, perhaps part of the policing of occupational boundaries by men, whilst women in more stereotypical female jobs have sometimes under-reported, perhaps because of different gendered-sexual expectations in such jobs (e.g. gutek and morasch, ). https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/darfor-blev-metoo-uppropen-sa-starka-i-sverige/ https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/darfor-blev-metoo-uppropen-sa-starka-i-sverige/ more directly, gender-sexual power, sexualities and sexual abuse have often gone together (hearn and parkin, / ). in the case of (uk) parliament: “young staff members who surround british lawmakers have no independent personnel body to appeal to if they have complaints. instead, they are told to inform party whips, in- house disciplinarians who were widely believed to stockpile compromising information for their own purposes. newspapers, for their part, have often sat on reports of abuse rather than risk libel claims.” (barry, ) having, said that, the #metoo campaign is now spreading more widely to non-white collar and working class sectors, such as the construction industry. another key aspect to workplace contexts concerns protection given to certain high status, high performing employees, even if the benefit to an employer of retaining a very productive but “toxic” employee, such as a sexual harasser, may be far outweighed by the cost of keeping them (housman and minor, ). indeed, such employees tend to drive out other employees. however, with new technologies, the ‘superstar economy’, whereby the successful can leverage much more, may mean “the rest of the economy is becoming more like hollywood, where a small group of stars have long reaped a huge portion of the rewards. that means more bosses and boards may soon face decisions about whether to stand up to harassers or to overlook their behavior.” (scheiber, ). change in harassment and abuse in organizations and workplaces depends on fundamental change in hierarchical, gendered, aged, classed, ethnicized and racialized workplaces. individuals and collectivities third, there are a number of individualisms in play in the expansion of the campaign, against celebrities, in allegations, responses, reactions, experiences, in the listing of individual incidents. by and large, it is individuals, rather than groups, collectives or organizations, who initially at least have tweeted or have been or are active in some other way online, whether in their own reported abuse or supporting those abused. this is exemplified in the “me” of “metoo”. the highlighting of the “me” can be interpreted in many different ways, ranging from embodied claiming and the claiming of bodily integrity through to the personal as political onto resonances with neoliberal individualism. it may be seen as paralleling the current “i am” campaign against modern slavery (https://www.iamcampaign.com/) or going further back to the “i am a man” campaigns of the black men sanitary workers in memphis, (https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/i-am-a-man). however, at the same time, the “too” of “metoo” suggests there are (many) others before, and probably afterwards to be allied with. so, in this way, it links (the) one and the other(s), perhaps even structure and agency. the “too” of “metoo” may also link the mostly unknown, perhaps anonymous, individual harassed or assaulted woman with the celebrities or proto-celebrities. in keeping with reality shows and the rest, this may be a democratization, a solidarization, of (unwanted) fame. so, while the “me” or the “i” is asserted, it is also, partially, anonymized in numbers, in solidarity, a form of determined, optimistic democratization. memory, forgetting and surprise https://www.iamcampaign.com/ https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/i-am-a-man fourth, the campaign has been associated, especially from beyond the movement, with some loss of memory and some element of surprise ‘these things’ still happen, in the film industry, theatre, media industry, the law, even universities – as if surely there is policy to deal this kind of thing? ! the recent discussions and disclosures on sexual harassment in the film industry and other arenas seem to have surprised some people, even with claims there is little research on this. people should not be so surprised. there is a whole genre, or genres, of books on the ‘casting couch’, some fictional some factional, some factual (halperin, ; jaher, ; zimmer, ; see: https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=casting% couch&item_type=topic). more generally, sexual harassment is far from new; it is just that it was not always called that. there are many examples chronicled from the nineteenth century (mackinnon, ; lambertz, ; bratton, ; husu et al., ). mary bulzarik ( : ) has reported that the victims of sexual harassment in the nineteenth century were in all occupational areas: … railway cashiers, union organizers, garment workers, whitegoods workers, home workers, doctors, dressmakers, shopgirls, laundry workers, models, office workers, cotton mill workers, cannery workers … broom factory workers, assistant foremen [sic], stenographers and typists, soap factory workers, hop-pickers, shoe shine girls, barmaids, legal secretaries, actresses, sales demonstrators, art students, and would-be workers at employment interviews. more to the contemporary point, research and policy development have become well, if unevenly, developed, since its naming in the s. for example, years ago in , the finnish ministry of health and social affairs published a survey and bibliography detailing publications and no less than ten bibliographies on sexual harassment (högbacka et al., ). the same year, wendy parkin and i published “sex” at “work” (hearn and parkin, / ), and liz stanley and sue wise published georgie porgie: sexual harassment in everyday life, in which they argued against the “percentage of women who have experienced sexual harassment” approach to sexual harassment, as all women have experienced it. a few years ago saw the ‘discovery’ in finland that sexual harassment actually occurs in the national parliament (niemi, ). even though there had just earlier been major harassment scandals, for example, concerning the former parliamentary speaker, matti ahde (puustinen, ), this seemed to take much of the mainstream media by surprise. what is it that keeps it being rediscovered? why is it surprising? do people have bad memories? is it a generational quirk that the older do not tell the younger about it? or is it that the younger assume that the problem has been resolved until they then experience it, and then maybe think it a ‘one-off’, an individual problem? so, coming back to the original questions, how can loss of (individual and collective) memory be overcome? the desire of actual and potential harassers, mainly if not only men, and their allies and passive bystanders, to obscure and cover up may be inspired by simple power, shame or taken-for-grantedness. this may be accompanied, uncomfortably, by the pressure, and sometimes constrained decision, not to disclose harassment by the harassed, mainly women. is this too risky or just not worth mentioning? or is the mentioning and complaint followed by further blockage? is the aftermath, even the cover-up, more traumatic than the event? the targeting of women victim/survivors, and sometimes men, may occur twice over, in the event https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=casting% couch&item_type=topic and in the cover-up. long-term political vigilance and institutional transformation are necessary; otherwise, there will be more, repeated ‘surprise’ rediscoveries, and online campaigns, in five or ten years’ time, followed by gender business as usual. sexual, harassment, sexual violence, violence fifth, more critically, the campaign has often been framed, especially from the outside and in public media, in terms of sexual harassment, and much less in terms of the wider questions of sexual violence, sexual assault, rape and gender/sexual domination, abuse, exploitation and oppression, . having said that, the latter are recognized in some commentaries. for example, the facebook group #allavi [#allofus], started by the swedish parliamentarian maria robsham, has some , members, with women posting their experiences under the explicit naming of sexual violence [sexualiserat våld], i.e. not sexual harassment (https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/han-har-inga-skivor-men-sager-att-han-vill-se-mina-fina- brost/), in keeping with the continuum of sexual violence (kelly, ). however, many commentaries remain limited to sexual harassment. #metoo brings women together across various kinds of borders, national, class, ethnic; women come to know of other women elsewhere with similar experiences to themselves. what is less clear-cut is how and whether such online movements necessarily change persistent gendered social structures. to cite a parallel: there can be online campaigns against poverty that are successful in particular moments, but inequality continues to grow globally and also intra- societally, if not so inter-societally. whether #metoo leads to lasting collective action and solidarity and fundamental change in gender/sexual power relations is a question only be answered in due course. it is possible that #metoo-type campaigns raise women’s voices, consciousness and solidarity, in the short term, leading, or not, onto policy change, but that these are not enforced by what has been called feminist implementation (callerstig, ), so that structural, unequal gender power relations of gendered violence do not change so much. it is unlikely sexual violence will decrease significantly if societies and institutions remain fundamentally and structurally gender unequal. this perspective concerns how wider social change in one societal domain, namely violence, intersects with another domain, polity, as its context, as well as with economy and civil society (walby, ). seen thus, there would be hope for structural change since social revolutions may occur in multiple domains simultaneously, if unevenly, with potential to disrupt the hegemony of the gender regime increasing with changes in each domain. this also directs attention to the complex form and structure of (gendered) violence regimes, including anti-violence structures, as well as possible paradoxes between relatively high levels of gender equality on some measures remaining accompanied by relatively high levels of reported sexual violence. it is such societal issues that we are researching in a new swedish research council project led by sofia strid (‘regimes of violence: theorising and explaining variations in the production of violence in welfare state regimes, project - ). men … an absence presence sixth and finally, while #metoo has successfully expanded, as well as bringing criticisms for the onus being on women, and the shortcomings of one size fitting all (http://blogs.khaleejtimes.com/ / / /why-i-didnt-join-the-hashtag-me-too-bandwagon/), it https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/han-har-inga-skivor-men-sager-att-han-vill-se-mina-fina-brost/ https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/han-har-inga-skivor-men-sager-att-han-vill-se-mina-fina-brost/ http://blogs.khaleejtimes.com/ / / /why-i-didnt-join-the-hashtag-me-too-bandwagon/ still comes down, in short, to changing men, the main perpetrators (see global secretariat team, menengage, on #ipledge; ruiz-navarro, ). men need to stop, change, and not get away with it. i started writing this when i was traveling to frankfurt; i began glancing through the lufhansa airline magazine, and to my slight surprise there was an interview of star of stage, screen and now scandal, dustin hoffman. he said: “when i started out, a sex scandal would have meant the end of any career. today, if a sex video somehow gets into the public domain, you become a star. that’s extraordinary!” (heldman, : ) how very non-prescient of the star! if nothing else, this shows how quickly gender/sexual/violence politics can shift and change – a lesson also learnt from the proto- mainstreaming of white supremacist sympathies by # . #metoo may usher a different gender revolution. acknowledgements i am grateful to liisa husu and sofia strid for information and comments on earlier drafts. references barry, ellen ( ) 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( ) ‘the eye of the beholder: an interdisciplinary examination of law and social research on sexual harassment’, new mexico law review, (winter): - . bulzarik, mary ( ) ‘sexual harassment at the workplace: historical notes’, radical america, ( ): - . callerstig, anne-charlott ( ) making equality work: conflict, ambiguities and change actors in the implementation of equality policies in public sector organisations. doctoral thesis. linköping: linköping university electronic press. global secretariat team, menengage ( ) metoo - hear, believe and act: time to be responsible, boys and men! http://menengage.org/news/hear-believe-and-act/ gutek, barbara and morasch, bruce ( ) ‘sex ratios, sex-role spillover, and sexual harassment of women at work’, journal of social issues, ( ): - . halperin, ian ( ) hollywood undercover: revealing the sordid secrets of tinseltown. edinburgh: mainstream. hearn, jeff ( ) ‘the implications of information and communication technologies for sexualities and sexualised violences: contradictions of sexual citizenships’, political geography, ( ): - . https://staffmail.hud.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=xsfyhdw s ube hr qgf kmcxfws begkkstklofa tr jx rsrvca..&url=https% a% f% fwww.nytimes.com% f % f % f % fworld% feurope% fuk-parliament-misconduct.html http://menengage.org/news/hear-believe-and-act/ hearn, jeff and parkin, wendy ( / ) ‘sex’ at ‘work’: the power and paradox of organization sexuality. hemel hempstead: prentice hall/harvester wheatsheaf; new york; st. martin’s. hearn, jeff, strid, sofia, husu, liisa and verloo, mieke ( ) ’interrogating violence against women and state violence policy: gendered intersectionalities and the quality of policy in the netherlands, sweden, and the uk’, current sociology, ( ): - . heldman, patrick ( ) “erfolg ist manchmal ein unfall” ["success is sometimes an accident"], lufthansa magazin, / : - . husu, liisa, katainen, elina, peltonen, eeva, purra, pia, raevaara, eeva and tiukka, liisa et al. (eds.) lukukirja suomen naisille. helsinki: gaudeamus. högbacka, riitta, kandolin, irja, haavio-mannila, elina and kauppinen-toropainen, kaisa ( ) sexual harassment. helsinki: ministry of social affairs and health. equality publications. series e: abstracts / . jaher, diana beth ( ) ‘painting with faces’: the casting director in american theatre, cinema, and television. doctoral thesis, champaign, ill: university of illinois at urbana. kelly, liz ( ) surviving sexual violence. london: wiley. lambertz, jan ( ) ‘sexual harassment in the nineteenth century english cotton industry’, history workshop, (spring): - . mackinnon, catharine ( ) the sexual harassment of working women. new haven: yale university press. niemi, hertta ( ) managing in the “golden cage” an ethnographic study of work, management and gender in parliamentary administration. doctoral thesis. helsinki: hanken school of economics. puustinen, liina ( ) ‘tapaus ahde “mediatuomioistuimessa”’, journalismikritiikin vuosikirja, ( ): - . ruiz-navarro, catalina ( ) machos en rehabilitación’, el espectator october. https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/machos-en-rehabilitacion-columna- ; also ‘the ugly truths of men are not said out loud: that is the pact of patriarchy’, october , http://www.kractivist.org/the-ugly-truths-of-men-are-not-said-out-loud-that-is-the-pact-of- patriarchy-metoo/ http://www.antikvaari.fi/haku.asp?stype=full&tekija=% husu,% liisa% katainen,% elina% peltonen,% eeva% purra,% pia% raevaara,% eeva% tiukka,% liisa% % % (toim)&submit=hae http://www.antikvaari.fi/haku.asp?stype=full&tekija=% husu,% liisa% katainen,% elina% peltonen,% eeva% purra,% pia% raevaara,% eeva% tiukka,% liisa% % % (toim)&submit=hae http://www.antikvaari.fi/haku.asp?stype=full&tekija=% husu,% liisa% katainen,% elina% peltonen,% eeva% purra,% pia% raevaara,% eeva% tiukka,% liisa% % % (toim)&submit=hae https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/machos-en-rehabilitacion-columna- http://www.kractivist.org/the-ugly-truths-of-men-are-not-said-out-loud-that-is-the-pact-of-patriarchy-metoo/ http://www.kractivist.org/the-ugly-truths-of-men-are-not-said-out-loud-that-is-the-pact-of-patriarchy-metoo/ scheiber, noam ( ) ‘in a superstar economy, a bull market in superstar harassers’, new york times, october. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/superstars-sexual- harassment.html stanley, liz and wise, sue ( ) georgie porgie: sexual harassment in everyday life. london: pandora. strid, sofia ( ) “#talkaboutit: talking about consent and coercion”, sylvia walby et al. stopping rape. bristol: policy press. walby, sylvia ( ) globalization and inequalities: complexity and contested modernities. london: sage. zimmer, ben ( ) ‘‘casting couch’: the origins of a pernicious hollywood cliché’, the atlantic, october. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /casting-couch- the-origins-of-a-pernicious-hollywood-cliche/ / https://staffmail.hud.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=gafgmqgqa wncqgnefh dwj x-bvutdojz-m sn vr jx rsrvca..&url=https% a% f% fwww.nytimes.com% f % f % f % fbusiness% fsuperstars-sexual-harassment.html https://staffmail.hud.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=gafgmqgqa wncqgnefh dwj x-bvutdojz-m sn vr jx rsrvca..&url=https% a% f% fwww.nytimes.com% f % f % f % fbusiness% fsuperstars-sexual-harassment.html https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /casting-couch-the-origins-of-a-pernicious-hollywood-cliche/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / /casting-couch-the-origins-of-a-pernicious-hollywood-cliche/ / critical incident scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved scenario-based training for sexual harassment prevention david desplaces tommy and victoria baker school of business, the citadel john ogilvie barney school of business, university of hartford author note david desplaces, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship john ogilvie, professor of management correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to david desplaces, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, tommy and victoria baker school of business, the citadel, mountrie street, charleston, sc . email: ddesplac@citadel.edu scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved abstract although laws have been enacted both to prevent sexual harassment (sh) and to prosecute those who engage in it, the issue remains a matter of concern in the workplace. a variety of training programs have been developed to address sh, but their effectiveness has been called into question. using a scenario-based activity, we directly assessed the impact of various training approaches on undergraduate and graduate students’ perceptions of sh. a comparison of pre- and post-measures indicated that the scenario and associated activities yielded post-session shifts in awareness of sh. differences were found between undergraduate men and women and between undergraduates and graduates, with no gender differences observed among the latter. keywords: case study, human resource management, legal, management, scenario, sexual harrassment scenario-based training for sexual harassment prevention in a study conducted in , % of firms surveyed had an explicit policy statement on sexual harassment (sh), and % offered training intended to prevent and combat it (blackman, ; tyner & clinton, ). some states, among them connecticut and california, mandate sh training for supervisors, and many companies and universities conduct regular programs designed to address the problem. nevertheless, it is estimated that some - % of women and - % of men in the united states experience sh (aggarwal & gupta, ; quick & mcfadyen, ). even in a study of human resource professionals, % self-reported gender discrimination, and % unwanted sexual attention (tyner & clinton, ). particularly troubling is the indication in research conducted by cheung and colleagues ( ) that cynical attitudes toward sexual harassment might effect the outcome of training. which in our eyes should raise awareness on the part of organizations that have not fully committed to establishing and maintaining an environment and culture free of sh. the revelations brought about by the #metoo movement have further fueled this cynicism by making clear that sh remains a significant issue in all types of organizations. while many cases continue to go unreported— meaning that the official eeoc numbers represent an underestimate of the true extent of the problem—the effort put into awareness training does offer some hope that it is possible to build a society that is not plagued by sh. the present study begins with a review of the sh literature, with attention to the types of sexual harassment, their emotional and economic impact, and, especially, the effectiveness of sh awareness training. we next describe our attempts to measure the effectiveness of this training using a scenario activity. the study concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings and avenues for further research. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved defining sexual harassment the us supreme court recognized in what constitutes a hostile work environment and the responsibility that an employer bears in sexual harassment claims. more specifically, the case stated: to prove a hostile environment claim based on sexual harassment under current law, harassing conduct must be unwelcome, “because of…sex,” (us court case: u.s.c.a. § e- (a)( ) (west ); oncale v. sundowner offshore servs., inc., u.s. , – ( ).) and “sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.”(us court case: meritor, u.s. at .) the environment must be both subjectively offensive to the victim and also objectively offensive to a reasonable person. (us court case: id. at – .) the employer is responsible for the hostile work environment if it knew or should have known about the harassment and failed to take proper action. (us court cases: c.f.r. § . (d) ( ) and meritor savings bank, fsb v. vinson, us , ) to appreciate the prevalence and deleterious effects of sh in the workplace fully, it is important first to define the relevant terms clearly. in the literature on the topic, two broad dimensions of sh must be distinguished, a legal one and a psychological one (o’leary-kelly, bowes-sperry, bates, & lean, ; willness, steel, & lee, ). the u.s. equal employment opportunity commission ( ) defines sh legally in the following terms: unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment. this legal definition comprises several components, which might lead to different types of sexual harassment. there is, to begin with, the fairly clear and objective definition involving a quid pro quo in which an individual might feel pressured to grant sexual favors in exchange for remaining employed or receiving a promotion. less direct and explicit is the creation of a hostile work environment that impairs an employee’s ability to perform, for instance, through the telling of sexually-oriented stories or jokes (including based on one’s sex), the display of sexually charged images, or comments on workers’ physical appearance. those who engage in such behavior may be unaware that they are making it difficult for others to perform their jobs and to advance. an observer of the harassment of a fellow worker may also contribute to a hostile environment, as can be seen in the case study presented below. although we want to acknowledge that much still needs to be done to clarify or define the types of sh, we have chosen to focus on its traditional sense that is harassment that is sexual in nature that is unwelcome. most researchers also acknowledge a behavioral or psychological aspect of sh that transcends this relatively narrow legal framework, defining it as, for example, “unwanted sex- related behavior at work that is appraised by the recipient as offensive, exceeding her resources, scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved or threatening her well-being” (fitzgerald, swan, & magley, , p. ). this definition is broader than the legal one, touching on gender discrimination, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion (fitzgerald, drasgow, hulin, gelfand, & magley, ; willness et al., ). psychological harassment can resemble bullying when it takes the form of gender discrimination, in that it involves intimidation and hostility, but it need not meet the legal, reasonable person standard to have an impact. indeed, such behavior may not even be overtly sexual to be perceived as hostile and demeaning. some scholars have connected harassment specifically with misogynistic attitudes. thus taylor ( ) and fitzgerald et al. ( ) have argued that harassment is more a manifestation of hostility toward women than of any desire for sexual gratification. this latter distinction deserves to be developed and included in sh harassment-training programs. impact of sexual harassment the consequences of sh for those who have subject to it are substantial, as the #metoo movement has revealed. a meta-analysis has identified negative psychological outcomes for individuals as well as negative impacts on organizations associated with sh (willness et al., ). victims of sh have reported anxiety, depression, emotional distress, interpersonal friction, career setbacks, family problems, and sexual dysfunction (barak, ; mclaughlin, uggen, & blackstone, ; willness, et al., ). organizational outcomes for workers may include such withdrawal behaviors as absenteeism and turnover, decreased job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and decreased productivity (taylor, ; willness et al., ). the breadth of the organizational impact is in part because the adverse outcomes extend beyond the victims to include coworkers and other observers of sh (o’leary-kelly et al., ). moreover, clients and customers may be implicated in the negative impacts of sh (gettman & gelfand, ). beyond such impacts felt by individuals and organizations, sh is associated with high financial costs, in particular relating to litigation and settlement payments. indirect adverse financial impacts have also been documented; specifically willness et al. ( ), using utility analyses, reported losses in productivity owing to sh, with the costs to organizations estimated at some $ , per individual affected. from the perspective advanced in the present study, training constitutes the most effective means for preventing sh. it is also cost-effective, in the long run requiring only a fraction of the investment of time and monetary resources that are currently being spent on a per person basis dealing with sh in the ways just described. the effectiveness of sexual harassment training in the united states, efforts to combat sh through training have become widespread, with as many as nine in ten employers offering it across all industries (bainbridge, perry, & kulik, ). the cost of this training to u.s. employers has been estimated at more than billion dollars annually (goldberg, ), and, not surprisingly, the usefulness of this enormous outlay has been called into question. nevertheless, multi-level engagement of this sort has emerged as the key recommendation for efforts to combat sh, including the use of interactive scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved and experiential methods (becton, gilstrap, & forsyth, ). given the prevalence of sh and its harmfulness in the workplace, as was seen above, as well as the expense of the training, the effectiveness of the various methods, including interactive (scenario-based) ones, is naturally a major concern. in fact, the research teams of salas, wildman, and piccolo ( ) and buchanan, settles, hall, and o’connor ( ) have both found simulation-based learning to be superior to other training strategies in terms of imparting knowledge about sh and creating empathy towards its victims. such evidence immediately raises the question of the types of scenarios or simulations that would best serve as the basis for the training. again, however, there has been little work comparing the effectiveness of various types of scenarios in sh training. furthermore, ebner and efron ( ) have argued that: the potential danger of workshop deterioration increases when the simulation game centers on a situation about which many or all of the participants may have powerful preconceptions, such as an issue that is important to participants in their real lives or one that has been widely covered by the media for an extended period of time. (p. ) these researchers went on to identify sexual harassment complaints specifically as one cause of such deterioration. thus quid pro quo scenarios could elicit strong emotions that would hinder rather than promote learning, especially for participants who have experienced this type of sh. such scenarios would also easy for participants to recognize and, therefore would not occasion much debate. scenarios built around more subtle and less obvious settings, by contrast, might prove to be a more effective tool for discussion and learning about sh. scenarios have been used in several settings for training purposes, including to teach auditors to determine when assets have been misallocated (strand, welch, holmes, & judd, ), contextual factors in conflict management (callanan & perri, ), and organizational justice issues in performance reviews (tatum & eberlin, ). furthermore, scenarios about handling difficult situations have shown to enhance the reading scores of students in grades to (juzwik, nystrand, kelly, & sherry, ). such findings suggest that a carefully crafted scenario involving sh issues could prove effective in raising awareness of the problem in the workplace. we accordingly formulated hypothesis as follows: h : training scenarios and associated discussions can improve awareness of sh. gender differences in perceptions of sh a further significant issue regarding sh is whether women and men perceive it differently. since women are more frequently the objects of harassing behaviors, any such differences should be taken into account during training. informative in this respect, are several meta-analyses that have aggregated results from multiple studies. to begin with, blumenthal ( ) found that women, in general, perceive wider range behavior to constitute harassment than men do; he did not, however, identify any moderating factors relating to specific situations. in another meta-analysis, rotondo, nguyen, & sackett ( ) found that perceptions diverged more greatly between men and women as situations became more ambiguous, for instance, scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved concerning dating pressure and derogatory attitudes. another study, however, using scenarios involving a male and female employee within the same organization, did not find any differences in perceptions of harassment attributable to gender (dougherty, turban, olson, dwyer, & lapreze, ). the literature is thus inconsistent on this point, but we found more convincing evidence that women are more likely to perceive that a given act constitutes sh than men. we accordingly formulated hypothesis as follows: h : women tend to be more sensitive to sh in the context of a given scenario than men. the effectiveness of training intended to change attitudes initial approaches to addressing the problem of sh involved the presentation of relevant information, for instance, in the context of seminars (barak, ; paludi & barrickman, ). in one informative study, christian and gumbus ( ) used the society for human resource management guidelines to help students learn about a potential case of sh. published arbitration cases may also be an effective means of teaching about the subject (lucero, ), as concrete conclusions can be drawn from arbitration decisions. again, however, there has been relatively little research assessing the efficacy of these approaches. nevertheless, a general consensus has emerged in the academic community that more active modes of engagement yield better learning outcomes. in one of the few informative studies that have appeared, beauvais ( ) used videotaped samples or scenarios to provoke discussion and then followed up with role-playing, methods that eventually deepened participants’ understanding and catalyzed shifts in their attitudes about harassment. barak ( ) likewise combined videotaped scenarios with role-playing to improve understanding and to teach skills for coping with sh, in this case, using a female-only sample (but not pre- and post- measures). in still another study, dunlop and lee ( ), showed one group of subjects videos of sh vignettes and provided another with educational literature on the subject; unlike beauvais and barak, however, these latter researchers found that the literature intervention yielded a greater change in perceptions than the video intervention. this result may be attributable to the greater effort required to read than to watch a videotape; similarly, cognitive dissonance research has shown that low financial incentives can yield greater changes in attitude than larger ones (festinger & carlsmith, ). more research is necessary to resolve the issue. these approaches all assume that, once participants become aware of what constitutes sh, its legal consequences, and institutional policies for preventing it, they will “do the right thing.” this assumption may, however, be dependent on the composition of the sample. thus sipe, johnson, and fisher ( ) found that undergraduates did not feel threatened by sh in the workplace, while dougherty et al. ( ) found that graduates tended to view harassing behaviors more negatively than undergraduates. this apparent gap between more experienced (in this case, the graduates) and less experienced (the undergraduates) individuals in the workplace deserve further investigation, and we, therefore, formulated hypothesis as follows: h : graduate students tend to be more aware of sh than undergraduates. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved methodology respondents we used this scenario in an undergraduate and a graduate class (total of sections) taught at a university in the northeastern united states that covered the topics of management, organizational behaviors, human resources, and leadership. our convenience sample of students consisted of undergraduates, and graduate students (working professionals studying part-time) allowed us to compare less experienced students (undergraduates) with more experienced working professionals (graduate students). furthermore, it allowed us to group individuals with training and more experience with the topic (graduate students were working professionals versus traditional undergraduates studying full time with limited to no work experience). in terms of gender, % of the participants were male, and % female. scenario a brief (one-page) scenario was presented to the participants following desplaces and ogilvie ( ). in this scenario, questions were raised regarding the actions of a manager toward a customer regarding the creation of a hostile environment for the employees. the issues were not straightforward, requiring a relatively deep understanding of sh and the articulation of justification for actions to be taken by management. this scenario was deemed particularly well- suited for the present study in light of the evidence, alluded to above, that the behavior of customers toward employees can have a considerable impact (gettman & gelfand, ), the problem is especially acute in the entertainment industry (williamson, ). instrument a brief quantitative survey was administered to the participants before and after a class discussion. this survey used a five-point scale ranging from , indicating strong disagreement, to , indicating strong agreement. the items included in the survey instrument had been developed specifically for this scenario by the authors and designed to assess perceptions of key sh topics as reported in the literature (e.g., flirting and legal interpretations of sh) as well as to measure the possible impact of the scenario (i.e., change in perceptions of having witnessed sh). the same instrument was used to assess the impact of the scenario on the participants’ understanding of sexual harassment. analysis we analyzed the survey results comparing the various groups (undergraduate, graduate) using spss software (tables - ). as seen in table , there were no significant differences between undergraduate and graduate participants in terms of having witnessed sh, and both groups revised their assessments of the severity of the sh in the scenario downward after completing the exercise and participating in the debriefing discussion. these data indicate that participants may have considered certain behaviors or actions to be sh that were not so classified during the discussion of the scenario, a finding that stresses the importance of training. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved table difference in status in terms of training and witnessing sexual harassment time time yes no yes no under. grad. under. grad. under. grad. under. grad. have you had any form of sexual harassment training? . %* . %* . %* . %* have you witnessed behaviors or actions that you define as sexual harassment? % . % % . % . % . % . % . % *chi-square shows probable difference between groups the findings further indicate that individuals’ interpretations of sh situations could become more nuanced as a result of discussion and facilitation. further analysis using a paired t- test comparison of pre- and post-tests (table ) showed that the scenario and its discussion had a significant impact on the perception that sexual attention at work is never appropriate (mean = . before the discussion and . afterward). although the responses still fell between disagreeing and disagreeing strongly, there was a marginal change in the perception that the manager’s action was appropriate in the particular context of the scenario (specifically, the mean of . increased to . ). a marginal change was also noticed in participants’ recognition of the need for management to take further action. further analysis comparing pre- and post-test results among undergraduates and graduates demonstrated that the former were most significantly affected regarding the perception that sexual attention at work is never appropriate (mean= . for the pre-test and . for the post-test) and that management needed to take further action (increase in the mean from . to . ). these results support hypothesis , indicating that the scenario and associated discussion had a positive impact on the participants’ perceptions. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved table comparison of pre- and post-test general underg. grad. time time time time time time questionnaire a v e ra g e a v e ra g e a v e ra g e a v e ra g e a v e ra g e a v e ra g e . the actions or behaviors of the manager are appropriate in this context. . . ** . . . . . flirting with customers is different from the same type of attention directed at employees . . . . . . * . most people are offended by sexual comments or jokes in the workplace. . . . . . . . most sexual harassment is consciously or unconsciously encouraged by the “target.” . . . . . . . the actions or behaviors of the manager are illegal. . . . . . . . sexual attention at work is never appropriate. . . * . . * . . . management should take some remedial action toward the manager . . ** . . * . . . this situation constitutes sexual harassment. . . . . . . significance: *less than . level, **less then . level table confirms the discrepancy in this regard between men and women, with . % of the former and . % of the latter reporting having witnessed such behaviors. nevertheless, the men who participated in the study appear to have responded to the exercise and discussion by narrowing their definitions of sexual harassment, showing a significant drop from . % to % between the pre- and post-test discussions. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved table gender differences relating to training and witnessing sexual harassment time time yes no yes no male female male female male female male female have you had any form of sexual harassment training? . % . % . % . % have you witnessed behaviors or actions that you define as sexual harassment? . %* . %* . %* . %* , %* . %* . %* . %* *chi-square shows probable difference between groups some adult female students argued during the discussions that a woman should be able to dress somewhat provocatively without attracting this type of attention. other participants argued that salespeople often use flirtation to sell products and services. such perceptions were confirmed by our survey (table ), in which men were found to be moderately (p < . ) more likely to distinguish flirting with customers from the same type of attention directed at employees. our results also indicate that men were more likely to view sh as consciously or unconsciously encouraged by the “target” ( . compared with . ). women, moreover, differed significantly from the men in both pre- and post-exercise surveys regarding whether sexual attention at work is appropriate. therefore, hypothesis was supported. the responses of the graduate student participants to these questions, on the other hand, did not change from the pre- to the post-test, as shown in table . thus an examination of pre- exercise responses showed a significant difference (p < . ) on three of the questions ( , , and ) on an independent simple t-test comparing the responses of the two groups. graduate participants were more likely to disagree with the notion that most sexual harassment is consciously or unconsciously encouraged by the “target” (mean = . ) than undergraduate participants (mean = . ). this question was the only source of differences in the post-exercise responses (mean for graduates = . ; for undergraduates, . ). the graduate participants appeared to be more sensitive to the appropriateness of sexual attention (mean of . compared with . for the undergraduates) and the need for management to take action in the case described in the scenario (mean of . compared with . for the undergraduates). furthermore, the graduate students were marginally (p < . ) more likely to perceive the action of the manager to be illegal after participation in the discussion than undergraduates (mean of . compared with . ). thus a drastic change occurred from the pre-test, on which they were less likely to perceive the behaviors to be illegal (mean of . compared with . ). the fact that % of undergraduate participants, compared with % of the graduates, had received no sexual harassment training further lend support to hypothesis that graduates or professionals are more aware. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved table comparison of reactions across gender time time questionnaire a v e ra g e m e n w o m e n a v e ra g e m e n w o m e n . the actions or behaviors of the manager are appropriate in this context. . . . . . . . flirting with customers is different from the same type of attention directed at employees. . . ** . ** . . . . most people are offended by sexual comments or jokes in the workplace. . . . . . . . most sexual harassment is consciously or unconsciously encouraged by the “target.” . . * . * . . . . the actions or behaviors of the manager are illegal. . . . . . . . sexual attention at work is never appropriate. . . * . * . . * . * . management should take some remedial action towards the manager. . . . . . . . this situation constitutes sexual harassment. . . . . . . significance: *less then . level, **less than . level comparing genders scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved table comparison of responses of undergraduates and graduates time time questionnaire a v e ra g e u n d e rg ra d u a te g ra d u a te a v e ra g e u n d e rg ra d u a te g ra d u a te . the actions or behaviors of the manager are appropriate in this context. . . . . . . . flirting with customers is different than the same type of attention directed at employees. . . . . . . . most people are offended by sexual comments or jokes in the workplace. . . . . . . . most sexual harassment is consciously or unconsciously encouraged by the “target.” . . * . * . . * . * . the actions or behaviors of the manager are illegal. . . . . . ** . ** . sexual attention at work is never appropriate . . * . * . . . . management should take some remedial actions toward the manager. . . * . * . . . . this situation constitutes sexual harassment. . . . . . . *p< . , **p< . comparing graduates and undergraduates. in our scenario, however, the more likely victims of harassment were the two employees (one male and one female) who observed the incident, though students rarely identified them as such during the group discussions. as noted earlier, gettman and gelfand ( ) have argued that bystanders can be impacted by viewing the harassing behaviors of managers. the comments of the manager in the scenario thus had the potential to create a sexually charged and potentially hostile environment for the two employees. such a workplace could be considered offensive by the customer, who was the object of the sexual reference as well. current definitions of sh in state and federal statutes pertain only to the workplace, so any interaction between the manager and the customer, although inappropriate, would not constitute sh. this limitation does not mean that customers could not take subsequent legal action in the form of lawsuits. certain interpretations of the law have also stressed patterns of behavior. because the incident in the scenario was isolated and the customer did not object, it is unlikely that the behavior would meet a legal definition of harassment. we note that the phenomenon of sudden-onset sh (woodford & woodford, ) does not seem relevant here, for it involves severe incidents, unlike the situation described in the scenario. however, it is important to note that patterns of behavior are not necessary to warrant sh claims and that the law does recognize an isolated incident based on the severity. scenario-based training for sh prevention copyright © institute of behavioral and applied management. all rights reserved conclusions several studies have suggested that the situation in which an incident of harassment occurs impacts reactions by those involved (stockdale, vaux, & cashin, ; o’connor, gutek, stockdale, geer, & melancon, ). attention to the more subtle circumstances of a manager acting inappropriately toward a customer, as in the scenario used in the present study, thus holds promise in terms of changing attitudes and behavior. our analysis showed the scenario to be effective in giving the participants in our study a better understanding of sh. we did not, however, through this study attempt to influence actual behavior. future research efforts in professional settings, across industries, and/or types of professionals with different educational backgrounds might further shed light on how attitudes and behaviors can be altered or improved. although the findings presented here reinforce the significance of training and experience when it comes to recognizing, preventing, and dealing with sh, it is important to the point that it is not enough for organizations to provide training for their members. what is needed are systems in place for reporting and handling such matters. more importantly, employees (and managers for that matter) need to be informed regarding how to protect themselves, as the members of an organization share responsibility for bringing about change in the culture of the workplace—and indeed for seeing that all are treated with respect. organizations need not forbid social interactions among co-workers or employees, for a great deal of business is conducted over dinner or drinks. what is important is that all workers and managers remain professional, which of course, means that they never try to force themselves on others, whatever the genders of the individuals involved. it is also a fact of life that some romances begin in the workplace; proximity breeds attraction, and many workers spend nearly half of their waking hours on the job with their fellow workers. organizations have a clear responsibility to their employees and customers regarding sh. they cannot allow even a single documented incident to pass without reaffirming their values. prompt action is required; simply having a policy on sexual harassment is insufficient defense for an organization in a court of law. again, companies need to offer training for employees (johnson, ). the actions of managers should be documented, and those who have fallen short in fulfilling their responsibilities relating to sh should be counseled and encouraged to attend diversity and/or sensitivity training. by documenting incidents of sh, offending parties can be made aware of the inappropriateness of their behavior and notified that further incidents might constitute grounds for dismissal. diversity 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( ). sudden-onset harassment: negligence or strict aguas y ríos: activismo, descolonización y naturaleza en cecilia vicuña y ana tijoux barros, maría josé. . aguas y ríos: activismo, descolonización y naturaleza en cecilia vicuña y ana tijoux. latin american research review ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /larr. literature and cultural studies aguas y ríos: activismo, descolonización y naturaleza en cecilia vicuña y ana tijoux maría josé barros universidad adolfo ibáñez, cl mjbarro @uc.cl en este artículo se analizan dos producciones recientes de cecilia vicuña y ana tijoux: la instalación quipu mapocho ( ) y la canción “río abajo” ( ), respectivamente. a partir de estos trabajos, se examinan los cruces entre arte y activismo y cómo ambas artistas elaboran retóricas de la resistencia que vuelven porosos los límites entre el arte y lo político e instalan posiciones críticas frente a la racionalidad moderna-colonial-patriarcal-capitalista que aún rige a las sociedades latinoamericanas. desde esta perspectiva, se propone que vicuña y tijoux promueven la descolonización de la naturaleza a partir de la descolonización de los saberes, articulando un discurso ecológico en que los ríos y mares son defendidos desde una “cultura del agua” de raíz indígena, pero sin caer en visiones puristas o arcaizantes. two recent productions of vicuña and tijoux are analyzed in this article: the quipu mapocho installation ( ) and the song “río abajo” ( ), respectively. the junctions of art and activism are examined through these works, particularly how both artists create rhetorics of resistance that render porous the boundaries between art and politics and also introduce critical positions against the modern-colonial-patriarchal-capitalist rationality that still governs latin american societies. from this standpoint, i propose that vicuña and tijoux promote the decolonization of nature based on the decolonization of knowledge, articulating an ecological discourse in which rivers and seas are defended from the perspective of an indigenous “water culture” but without lapsing into purist or archaic visions. grandes ríos hay en mi territorio. algunos son madres y padres los otros. ellos dos conversan a lo antiguo. el dueño del agua nos habla mientras todo se azula a su alrededor. —adriana paredes pinda, Üi activismo artístico en vicuña y tijoux la globalización —además de la liberalización de los mercados— ha promovido la mundialización de resistencias y luchas que van desde la denuncia de abusos sexuales y la funa de los acosadores por medio del hashtag #metoo hasta el cuestionamiento de los tratados de libre comercio como el tpp (acuerdo transpacífico de cooperación económica). en chile, por ejemplo, durante el primer semestre del las estudiantes se tomaron las universidades, escuelas y calles para liderar un movimiento feminista que instaló en la esfera pública un debate urgente sobre las nuevas articulaciones del patriarcado y la precarización de las vidas de las mujeres. en este contexto de empoderamientos, activismos y nuevas solidaridades, la escena este artículo se enmarca en el proyecto postdoctoral fondecyt “artistas y activistas del siglo xxi: retóricas de la resistencia y genealogías descolonizadoras en cecilia vicuña, ana tijoux y camila huenchumil” ( – ), del cual soy la investigadora responsable. una versión preliminar de este trabajo fue presentada en el xlii congreso del instituto internacional de literatura iberoamericana (iili) realizado entre el y de junio de en bogotá. https://doi.org/ . /larr. mailto:mjbarro @uc.cl barros: aguas y ríos artístico-cultural chilena no ha estado ajena a la voluntad de transformación social que moviliza a una parte importante de la ciudadanía. lo anterior se puede observar en las producciones recientes de cecilia vicuña (santiago, –) y ana tijoux (lille, francia, –), mujeres que entran y salen de la esfera artística para dialogar estrechamente con problemáticas políticas y culturales que atañen a la sociedad en su conjunto y donde las nuevas tecnologías ocupan un papel fundamental en la difusión de estos discursos que nos invitan a pensar en otros mundos posibles. aunque generacionalmente vicuña y tijoux se encuentran distanciadas —vicuña se inicia como poeta y artista visual en los con la tribu no, mientras que tijoux comienza su carrera musical en los con la banda de rap makiza— ambas convergen en la articulación de su práctica artística con el activismo. desde este posicionamiento fronterizo, ambas asumen como propias las problemáticas en torno al agua y la naturaleza que hoy movilizan a distintos colectivos y organizaciones sociales, articulando un discurso ecológico que promueve la descolonización de la naturaleza a partir de la descolonización de los saberes. como podremos observar más adelante, vicuña y tijoux se apropian creativamente de los conocimientos, creencias y formas de vida indígenas en sus producciones, dando cuenta de un locus de enunciación abigarradamente mestizo o ch’ixi, como diría silvia rivera cusicanqui ( , – ), que se manifiesta tanto a nivel discursivo como material. ello permite entender también el hecho de que ambas artistas hayan reivindicado en distintas oportunidades su filiación indígena, gesto de re-etnificación identitaria que pone de manifiesto una concepción fluida y abierta de las subjetividades. ¿pero cómo entender el activismo en el espacio del arte y en un contexto donde las líneas de fuga parecen ser rápidamente recicladas por la lógica de mercado? ¿cómo dialoga el activismo artístico de mujeres como tijoux y vicuña con las figuras del intelectual o el artista comprometido del siglo xx? ¿cómo se entretejen los vínculos entre el artista, la comunidad y las plataformas de difusión como el museo, el escenario, la calle o internet? ¿cómo comenzar a elaborar una genealogía de los artistas-activistas chilenos? para intentar responder estas preguntas recurriremos a la instalación quipu mapocho ( ) de vicuña y la canción “río abajo” de tijoux incluida en su disco vengo ( ), estableciendo previamente algunas directrices crítico- teóricas sobre las nociones de activismo, naturaleza y descolonización en las que se sostiene este trabajo. en primer lugar, me parece importante aclarar que el activismo artístico se distancia del llamado arte comprometido que movilizó a una parte importante del campo intelectual y artístico latinoamericano del siglo xx. las relaciones entre el arte, lo político y la realidad social no se articulan en estas producciones más recientes desde los metarrelatos como el marxismo, las militancias partidarias ni la figura del intelectual paternalista que habla en nombre del pueblo (para el caso de chile basta pensar en pablo neruda, la nueva canción chilena o la brigada ramona parra, entre otros múltiples ejemplos), sino que desde las luchas micropolíticas levantadas por distintos movimientos sociales, comunidades y minorías que comienzan a visibilizarse y empoderarse a partir de la década de los en contextos geopolíticos también diversos. en este sentido, los artistas-activistas como vicuña y tijoux no pueden ser pensados al margen de las múltiples voces y colectivos que alcanzan su mayor explosión y diversificación en la era contemporánea y que posicionan sus demandas tanto en el espacio público de la calle como en las redes virtuales. es con estas luchas que los artistas-activistas actuales se identifican y solidarizan, buscando generar una relación más cercana con su público y sobre la base de propuestas estéticas que tienden a establecer cruces entre distintos géneros artísticos y soportes. en el caso de las artistas que aquí nos convocan, el diálogo con las demandas de los movimientos sociales vinculados al ecologismo, el feminismo y los pueblos indígenas nutren de manera fundamental sus producciones y discursos públicos. por cierto, al hacer esta aclaración no puedo dejar de mencionar a nina felshin ( ) y su emblemático ensayo “¿pero esto es arte? el espíritu del arte como activismo”, donde la curadora norteamericana estudia el arte activista de mediados de los en el marco de los movimientos por los derechos civiles, el feminismo, la revolución estudiantil y las protestas antibelicistas en estados unidos. en este clima marcado por el cuestionamiento a la autoridad y la emergencia de nuevas contraculturas, felshin define el activismo artístico como prácticas culturales que problematizan las fronteras entre el mundo del arte y el activismo político. estas darían origen a estéticas democratizadoras como el arte conceptual, centradas en el proceso de creación más que en el producto, la participación del público, la circulación del arte más allá de los para el caso de vicuña, ya en sabor a mí la poeta anuncia tempranamente su devenir indígena al decir “pero yo me voy a volver india” ( , ). años después confirma públicamente esta idea luego de convivir con comunidades indígenas del altiplano y realizarse una muestra de adn que reveló sus orígenes diaguitas (ver el texto “the diaguita opera singer” incluido en su libro de performances spit temple). con respecto a tijoux, en distintas canciones ella hace referencia a su filiación indígena desde una retórica del orgullo por su cuerpo moreno y en contra de la ideología del racismo (escuchar “la rosa de los vientos” de aerolíneas makiza y “vengo” de su disco homónimo). barros: aguas y ríos espacios institucionales y la apropiación de los medios de comunicación y la publicidad (felshin , ). de ahí la importancia que tendrá la performance en el arte conceptual, el arte feminista y el arte activista contemporáneo, práctica que fue valorada positivamente por los conceptualistas por su capacidad de involucrar al público y poner en entredicho las nociones de objeto de arte y su sistema de distribución en el mercado artístico (felshin , ). al respecto, los trabajos de vicuña a fines de los y comienzos de los fueron pioneros. sus objetos de arte precario dan cuenta, tal como ha señalado magda sepúlveda a propósito de sabor a mí ( ), de su “rechazo al carácter mercantil en que había caído la obra en su deseo de consagrarse” (sepúlveda , ), lectura que por cierto resulta congruente con sus performances e instalaciones en las que continúa utilizando materiales orgánicos y emplazando en espacios abiertos que impiden la permanencia física de sus trabajos. en el caso de tijoux, el hecho de subir al escenario como cantante constituye un acto performático en sí mismo, toda vez que su cuerpo y voz funcionan como soportes y materiales de su música, además de permitir un contacto directo con el público. por otro lado, desde la teoría política, chantal mouffe ( ) plantea que las prácticas artísticas que cumplen un papel crítico se caracterizan por fomentar el disenso e impugnar el consenso de las democracias actuales, logrando intervenir, ampliar y reconfigurar —desde el arte— el espacio público entendido como un campo de batalla o lucha “agonista”. a estas manifestaciones mouffe las llama, indistintamente, arte crítico o activismo artístico. tomando en consideración estas ideas, podríamos decir que las producciones recientes de vicuña y tijoux establecen cruces entre distintas disciplinas, circuitos culturales y recursos mediáticos, elaborando retóricas de la resistencia que no solo vuelven porosos los límites entre el arte y lo político, sino que también instalan posiciones críticas y disidentes frente a la racionalidad moderna/colonial/patriarcal/ capitalista que aún rige a las sociedades latinoamericanas. ambas artistas ingresan a la esfera pública al volver visibles y audibles las subjetividades históricamente excluidas, negadas y silenciadas, perturbando — para decirlo en términos de jacques rancière— el “reparto de lo sensible”, es decir, la constitución simbólica de lo social que define a quienes se separa y excluye (los sin-parte) y a quienes se les hace participar (tener- parte) del mundo y la comunidad (rancière , ). lo anterior nos permite vincular a vicuña y tijoux con quien fuera, a mi parecer, una figura fundamental del activismo-artístico desarrollado por mujeres en chile: violeta parra ( – ). como cantante, recopiladora de folclor, arpillerista, pintora y poeta, parra elaboró un nuevo lenguaje al recrear y enlazar distintas expresiones artísticas, oficios, saberes, generaciones, tradiciones y medios, asumiendo al mismo tiempo una posición activa con respecto a las luchas sociales y políticas de su época, muchas de ellas todavía vigentes. además, parra buscó estrechar las distancias entre el artista y su público al configurar espacios inclusivos y alternativos a la cultura oficial como lo fue su carpa de la reina, yendo un paso más allá de los escritores y artistas que también intervinieron en la esfera pública, pero desde la posición paternalista del intelectual. “elegiría quedarme con la gente” (garcía , ), dijo parra en una entrevista cuando le otra perspectiva iluminadora sobre los cruces entre performance y activismo ha sido desarrollada por d. soyini madison ( ) en acts of activism: human rights as radical performance. en este trabajo, la académica analiza cómo los activistas locales de ghana han hecho de la performance una táctica de resistencia y subversión radical, puesta al servicio de los derechos humanos y la justicia social en el marco de las luchas cotidianas contra las políticas neoliberales en África. uno de los actos de activismo expuestos por madison en su libro se relaciona con el derecho humano al agua. inspirada en su trabajo de campo en el continente africano y la lucha de distintos activistas locales en contra de la privatización de este recurso hídrico, en marzo del dirigió la performance water rites en la universidad de carolina del norte con el propósito de que sus alumnos pudieran tomar consciencia de su relación con el agua (madison , ). en contra de las formas consensuales de democracia que hoy rigen a las sociedades occidentales, en su libro en torno a lo político ( ) mouffe aboga por la construcción de una democracia “agonista” en la que se reconozca abiertamente la dimensión antagónica constitutiva de “lo político”. lejos de los discursos pospolíticos que celebran la supuesta desaparición de las luchas entre nosotros/ellos, la perspectiva “agonista” busca dar vida a un espacio público abierto al disenso, la discusión y el conflicto, donde los distintos proyectos hegemónicos se reconocen unos a otros como legítimos oponentes y cuentan con canales legítimos de expresión. en palabras de la académica belga: “una sociedad democrática requiere de un debate sobre alternativas posibles, y debe proponer formas políticas de identificación colectiva en torno a posturas democráticas claramente diferenciables. el consenso es, sin duda, necesario, pero debe estar acompañado por el disenso” (mouffe , – ). desde la crítica literaria, rubí carreño ( , ) también aborda la noción de disidencia para referirse al repertorio musical y literario tanto chileno como latinoamericano “que cotidianamente enfrenta y resiste creativamente a los poderes fácticos que lo consideran mano de obra, residuo o, desde el plano de la representación, “el otro”. en este contexto, la académica acuña el concepto de “biopoética” para pensar aquellas manifestaciones artísticas y culturales donde los sujetos reivindican el cuerpo, el placer y la libertad como una respuesta política y estética frente a la violencia del biopoder ( ). para ambas artistas violeta parra es un referente importante en sus obras. valgan como ejemplos la pintura “violeta parra” de vicuña incluida en sabor a mí ( ) y la participación de tijoux en el musical ciudadano la carta ( ) de gopal y visnu ibarra, adaptación teatral de la canción homónima de parra. claudia cabello ( , ) propone que los intelectuales latinoamericanos de izquierda como gabriela mistral debaten durante las décadas del y su forma de relacionarse con el pueblo y sus problemas, adoptando una “práctica intelectual [que] barros: aguas y ríos preguntaron con qué forma de expresión se quedaría si tuviera que escoger solo una. las artistas-activistas que analizo en este artículo han comprendido, al igual que violeta parra ( , ), cómo desafiar, cuestionar y transformar las jerarquías y fronteras de los espacios artísticos y sociales “pa’ dar el grito de alarma”. en el caso de vicuña y tijoux, este “grito de alarma” se relaciona directamente con los desastres ambientales que nos conciernen tanto a escala global como local. ¿pero cómo se articula el discurso ecológico de ambas artistas? ¿cómo se distancian de los eslóganes verdes a ratos ingenuos? ¿cómo es concebida la naturaleza y el agua en sus producciones recientes? si gracias a la ecología política hemos entendido que la naturaleza es siempre una construcción social y material mediada por relaciones de poder (bustos, prieto y barton ), sostengo que ambas artistas polemizan con las prácticas y los imaginarios de mercantilización de la naturaleza promovidos por lo que vandana shiva —junto con otras ecofeministas como maria mies o mary mellor— ha llamado el patriarcado capitalista. en su texto las guerras del agua, shiva ( , ) explica que la crisis del agua que el mundo vive actualmente se debe a un choque entre dos “formas distintas de entender y sentir el agua”. por un lado, desde el paradigma ecológico, el agua es concebida como un “don gratuito” otorgado por la naturaleza y como un bien comunal. ello implica que el acceso al agua se considera un derecho humano y que los recursos hídricos son propiedad de las comunidades que gestionan su reparto equitativamente, y no de quienes buscan explotar y privatizar este recurso para venderlo (shiva , ). por el contrario, desde el paradigma del mercado, se considera que “el agua es una mercancía, y su propiedad y comercio un derecho fundamental de las empresas” ( ). desde este posicionamiento, se sostiene que el problema de la escasez hídrica se podría solucionar si el agua fuera distribuida con total libertad en los mercados y que su conservación se podría garantizar subiendo su precio comercial ( ), ideas que a mi parecer dan cuenta de una ingenuidad ciega frente a las consecuencias tanto sociales como ecológicas propiciadas por la misma lógica de mercado y que afectan principalmente a los más pobres. por cierto, latinoamérica no ha estado al margen de “las guerras del agua” y la creciente amenaza de su explotación privada con todas las consecuencias que ello implica. en este contexto, y como bien ha estudiado la académica mexicana aimé tapia gonzález ( ), la acción de las mujeres indígenas del continente ha sido fundamental en la lucha por la defensa de los recursos hídricos y el derecho humano al agua, oponiéndose a su distribución desigual entre la población, la construcción de centrales hidroeléctricas y la contaminación de ríos y mares. a partir de casos concretos como la lucha del ejército zapatista de mujeres en defensa del agua (movilización de indígenas mazahuas que tuvo lugar en méxico entre los años y ), tapia ( , , ) demuestra que “el acceso al agua tiene género, etnia y clase social”, por lo que no resulta extraño que sean precisamente las mujeres las “que participen activamente en los movimientos socioambientales”. al respecto, no podemos dejar de recordar para el caso de chile la lucha de nicolasa y berta quintremán, líderes y activistas pehuenchues, que a mediados de los se opusieron férreamente a la construcción de la represa ralco de la empresa endesa en el sector cordillerano de alto bío- bío. aunque finalmente el proyecto fue construido y las comunidades desplazadas de su territorio ancestral, la resistencia de las hermanas quintremán ha marcado un hito en el marco de las movilizaciones mapuches de las últimas décadas. vemos, entonces, cómo las mujeres indígenas del sur, movilizadas por la defensa de sus territorios, han logrado instalar en la esfera pública una alternativa tanto ética como epistémica frente a la lógica extractivista del capitalismo global, promoviendo a su vez una concepción “biocéntrica” (tapia , ) del mundo. esto significa que el ser humano, lejos de ser considerado el centro del universo, es pensado como uno más entre los otros seres —animales, plantas, montañas, ríos— que habitan el planeta. ¿y cómo se sitúan las producciones de vicuña y tijoux en el marco de estas disputas por los recursos hídricos y la defensa del agua impulsada por los movimientos sociales? como ya hemos anunciado previamente, ambas artistas promueven en sus trabajos la descolonización de la naturaleza —y en particular del agua— a está atravesada por actitudes paternalistas, el imperativo de mediar y entregar ‘cultura’ (canónica) y una visión muchas veces estereotipada del pueblo”. en el caso de parra, también existe una identificación con los sectores populares, pero no desde una posición paternalista. tanto a nivel discursivo como performático se propuso estrechar las distancias con su público, gesto que la acerca más al rol de la activista que de la intelectual. en su libro biopiratería: el saqueo de la naturaleza y del conocimiento, la intelectual y activista india propone que las dicotomías patriarcales actividad/pasividad, cultura/naturaleza, masculino/femenino continúan operando como instrumentos del capitalismo transnacional en la colonización de los bosques, ríos, animales, semillas y mujeres, situación de violencia llevada al extremo con las nuevas biotecnologías, la ingeniera genética y las patentes sobre organismos vivos. en otras palabras, el patriarcado capitalista se caracteriza por concebir la tierra como una materia muerta, manipulable e inanimada, representación desde la cual se legitima la explotación de sus recursos sin importar las consecuencias sociales y ecológicas (shiva , – ), así como la biopiratería o el robo de distintas formas de vida y conocimientos ancestrales por parte de compañías transnacionales farmacéuticas y agrícolas ( – ). barros: aguas y ríos partir de la descolonización de los saberes. este gesto nos permite entender sus producciones en diálogo con lo que el grupo latinoamericano modernidad/colonialidad ha denominado el “giro decolonial”. en palabras de walter mignolo ( , – ): “el giro decolonial es la apertura y la libertad del pensamiento y de formas de vidas-otras (economías-otras, teorías políticas-otras); la limpieza de la colonialidad del ser y del saber; el desprendimiento de la retórica de la modernidad y de su imaginario imperial articulado en la retórica de la democracia”. ahora bien, la descolonización epistémica busca dar paso, según explica aníbal quijano ( , – ), a una comunicación intercultural que se niega a la imposición de una cosmovisión particular como racionalidad universal, tal como lo hizo europa occidental. en este sentido, lo que promueve el pensamiento decolonial es el intercambio y la pluralidad epistémica, idea que bien podríamos comprender y complementar con el concepto de “ecología de saberes” propuesto por boaventura de sousa santos en una epistemología del sur. en otras palabras, lo que se busca es evitar caer en nuevos purismos o esencialismos que reproduzcan los dispositivos coloniales de subordinación, así como la neutralización de las luchas políticas levantadas históricamente por mujeres, indígenas, negros, migrantes, campesinos y pobres. considerando las puntualizaciones anteriores, me propongo analizar a continuación cómo en las obras quipu mapocho de vicuña y “río abajo” de tijoux se realiza una defensa de los ríos y mares desde una “cultura del agua” (shiva , ) de raíz indígena. en diálogo con lo que héctor alimonda ( , ) ha llamado el “giro natural-colonial”, estas producciones visibilizan críticamente las destrucciones sociales y ambientales que desde la conquista hasta hoy afectan a latinoamérica, pero que han sido negadas de manera sistemática por las narrativas celebratorias de la modernidad y sus procesos de desarrollo. además, me interesa indagar cómo en estas poéticas activistas, descolonizadoras y ecológicas se elabora un lenguaje —simbólico, enunciativo y/o representacional— desde el cual se establecen cruces e intercambios que vuelven a estrechar los límites entre el arte y lo político, el artista y la comunidad, la obra y la realidad social. quipu mapocho de vicuña: desde el río sacrificial a la “muerte del mar” en el marco de la exposición movimientos de tierra realizada en el año en el museo nacional de bellas artes de santiago, cecilia vicuña presentó su instalación quipu mapocho. al igual que en otras oportunidades, una sala del museo fue intervenida con largos vellones rojos y amarillos extendidos en el suelo (ver figura ). estos recreaban el correr de las aguas y también la estructura de un quipu, sistema de escritura con cuerdas anudadas utilizado por los incas y otros pueblos andinos, del cual vicuña se ha apropiado en sus producciones recientes convirtiéndolo en un núcleo tanto conceptual como material de sus trabajos. además, en la instalación se incluía un video, que registraba las performances realizadas por la artista en distintos puntos del río mapocho y un catálogo con textos, dibujos y fotografías en torno a esta obra y las de los demás participantes. como bien señala la crítica julieta gamboa ( , ), los trabajos artísticos de vicuña se caracterizan por generar “una experiencia poética totalizadora” que integra lo verbal con lo visual, lo performático y lo sonoro, elaborando de esta forma un texto-tejido que trasciende los límites genéricos y perceptivos. lejos de los imaginarios sobre el mapocho como el río de caca que atraviesa la ciudad de santiago, en quipu mapocho vicuña ( , ) lo resignifica como un torrente generador de vida al establecer un diálogo con su propia biografía como “niña mapochina”, los saberes andinos y la historia del niño incaico encontrado en en el cerro el plomo. recordemos que este niño fue enterrado vivo en tiempos del tawantinsuyu en el marco de la ceremonia llamada capacocha. en los textos del catálogo de la instalación, la artista hace memoria de la condición sacrificial del niño del plomo y reescribe su historia al señalar que su tumba, situada en el nacimiento del río mapocho, había sido un lugar de adoración de las aguas: “el niño / da su vida / para que siempre / fluya el agua. // su muerte es el agua. // vive y llora / en las nacientes. // el niño ofrenda / el niño altar. // vive y muere / con una hebra roja / en la mano” (vicuña , – ). acorde con este relato, vicuña se propuso volver a trazar el ciclo del río mapocho desde su origen en la cordillera hasta su desembocadura en el mar, recuperando la hebra roja portada por el niño como signo en palabras del sociólogo portugués: “[el pensamiento postabismal] es una ecología porque está basado en el reconocimiento de la pluralidad de conocimientos heterogéneos (uno de ellos es la ciencia moderna) y en las interconexiones continuas y dinámicas entre ellos sin comprometer su autonomía. la ecología de saberes se fundamenta en la idea de que el conocimiento es interconocimiento” (santos , ). el video de las performances asociadas a quipu mapocho se encuentra disponible en el siguiente enlace de la exposición: http:// www.movimientosdetierra.org/portfolio-item/cecilia-vicuna/. en el boletín informativo del museo nacional de historia natural ( ), titulado el niño del cerro el plomo, se señala que el niño fue ofrendado para “interceder directamente con el dios sol, para que velara por el bienestar del inca y del tawantinsuyu, lo cual suponía que el individuo se iba al otro mundo donde permanecía vivo”. http://www.movimientosdetierra.org/portfolio-item/cecilia-vicuna/ http://www.movimientosdetierra.org/portfolio-item/cecilia-vicuna/ barros: aguas y ríos del agua-sangre que sostiene y nutre la vida. como si de una romería se tratara, se dirigió a distintos lugares del curso fluvial para realizar una serie de performances e instalaciones en las que dispuso grandes vellones rojos sobre el agua y lugares aledaños al río. estas acciones se realizaron en los siguientes lugares: la laguna piedra numerada ubicada en el cerro el plomo; la ribera del río mapocho frente al cerro manquehue; el museo nacional de bellas artes; y la desembocadura donde confluyen los ríos mapocho y maipo en el humedal de llolleo, aledaño al puerto de san antonio (ver figura ). a su vez, estas intervenciones son representadas en los escritos del catálogo como los nudos de un gran quipu y ceque imaginario desplegado sobre el territorio, donde los lugares sagrados o huacas se entretejen con las fuentes de agua de la cordillera y las estrellas por medio de líneas virtuales (vicuña , ). la presencia de los hilos rojos en la obra de vicuña se remonta a sus primeros trabajos. estoy pensando en su pintura Ángel de la menstruación ( ), autorretrato en que se observa su cuerpo desnudo, alado, en movimiento y envuelto con un hilo rojo, mientras de su vagina sale un chorro de sangre. al poner en escena la sangre menstrual, fluido censurado por distintas culturas patriarcales y valorado negativamente como suciedad o prohibición, vicuña celebra este líquido corporal como signo de una sexualidad activa y su unión con el ritmo de la naturaleza. desde entonces el hilo rojo es reelaborado y resignificado por la artista en distintas obras que reúnen poesía, performance, video y/o instalación, historia que ha sido recientemente recuperada en su libro read thread: the story of the red thread ( ). en la cosmovisión incaica el ceque es el sistema de organización radial del espacio, que por medio de líneas virtuales indica la ubicación de los lugares sagrados o huacas y las fuentes de agua para las acequias, entre otras múltiples funciones relacionadas con figura : instalación quipu mapocho en el museo nacional de bellas artes. crédito de la foto: maría josé barros. barros: aguas y ríos de acuerdo con lo anterior, podríamos decir que quipu mapocho funciona como un poema-acción total que, al igual que otros trabajos de vicuña, se elabora desde el concepto ritual de la ofrenda, gesto que se remonta a los objetos de arte precario incluidos tempranamente en sabor a mí (sepúlveda , ) y que la artista continúa reproduciendo en sus trabajos intermediales más recientes como la instalación- performance quipu menstrual ( ), el documental kon kon ( ) o la performance-video kuntur ko en el mapocho ( ), entre otros. ¿pero cómo es entendido el concepto de ofrenda en el contexto de la poética vicuñiana? en su texto “andina gabriela” sobre la poesía de gabriela mistral, vicuña ( , ) lo vincula con el principio de reciprocidad andino y, en particular, con el rito del sacrificio: “ofrendar es devolver, responder es volver a ofrecer. los dioses han creado a la tierra en un acto de sacrificio y amor, y esperan que ese amor sea devuelto en una ofrenda, en un sacrificio”. desde esta óptica, quipu mapocho funciona como un acto de donación y memoria por el sacrificio del niño, del cual la artista se hace partícipe con la convicción de que esta ofrenda ayudará a renovar las fuerzas del mar, el humedal y los pescadores artesanales, entrelazando de esta manera su trabajo artístico con elementos rituales, ecológicos y sociales: “llevar el hilo rojo a la mar la astronomía, el calendario y los ayllu. estas líneas se ramificaban desde el templo del sol ubicado en el cuzco en dirección hacia el tawantinsuyu y sus alrededores (zuidema ; sherbondy ). en un trabajo anterior, titulado ceque fragments/fragmentos de un ceque, vicuña se refiere a este complejo sistema espacial, ritual y social en los siguientes términos: “el ceque correspondía a los días del año, los ciclos del mercado, la circulación de las aguas, el cambio de las esposas, el ritmo social y administrativo” ( ), recurriendo además a distintos especialistas del mundo andino como zuidema o paternosto para complementar su escrito e instalación. figura : dibujo incluido en el catálogo de la exposición movimientos de tierra, en el que vicuña indica los lugares o “nudos” donde se realizaron las performances e instalaciones de quipu mapocho. crédito: cecilia vicuña. barros: aguas y ríos completa el sueño del niño / dándole vida al humedal y al movimiento de los pescadores / asfixiados por el puerto de containers de san antonio” (vicuña , ). ahora bien, llama la atención el hecho de que en los trabajos donde vicuña recupera la historia del niño del plomo, el sacrificio —lejos de ser pensado como un acto de violencia ejercido sobre un niño de ocho años— parece ser idealizado o romantizado. en sus obras se da cuenta de la función religiosa que cumplían estos ritos, pero de alguna manera se oblitera la intención de dominación política que también tenían: “para el inca los sacrificios a todas huacas del imperio eran de suma importancia para no enfurecer a ninguna de ellas. pero la intención más profunda de esto era controlar los cultos locales y en parte instrumentalizarlos para el estado incaico” (schroedl ). en este contexto, los niños podían ser reclutados para el sacrificio con el propósito de ofrendar al sol y celebrar las nuevas conquistas, como parte del tributo exigido a los grupos sometidos o como una estrategia utilizada por las autoridades para ascender en la escala jerárquica poniendo a disposición del inca a su hijo o hija (schroedl ). en obras como quipu mapocho y quipu menstrual la muerte del niño es pensada como una ofrenda por el agua que debemos agradecer y recordar en un acto de reciprocidad; sin embargo, esta representación excluye cualquier referencia a la lógica de la muerte que también movilizó a los altos estamentos de la sociedad inca. en este sentido, los trabajos de vicuña se distancian de textos como “alturas de macchu picchu” de neruda, donde la voz supera la visión idílica del mundo indígena con la que se inaugura canto general para denunciar la explotación de los trabajadores incaicos. por otro lado, y en relación con la apropiación que realiza vicuña del mundo indígena, también resulta interesante analizar cómo en quipu mapocho y su obra en general opera una “versión sonora del cosmos” (barrios , ) acorde con las culturas ancestrales y que amplía nuestro régimen sensorial más allá de la mirada. en el caso del video que registra las performances realizadas en el nacimiento y la desembocadura del río, los cantos de vicuña y el etnomusicólogo josé pérez de arce se entremezclan con los sonidos de la naturaleza transitando desde lo ritual al lamento. en la primera parte del video, donde se observa y escucha el correr de las aguas en las cumbres del cerro el plomo, las voces celebran la vida imitando los sonidos de aves e insectos y acompañados por instrumentos ancestrales como el trompe. sin embargo, este canto ritual cambia drásticamente al inicio de la segunda parte del video cuando se muestran las imágenes del humedal de llolleo y el puerto de san antonio. los vellones rojos —signos del poder fertilizante del agua- sangre— se pierden al sumergirse en el mar mientras se escuchan los llantos y gemidos emitidos por la artista. el canto se convierte en un lamento que padece la “muerte del mar”. y es que en vicuña la descolonización epistémica también implica descolonizar nuestros sentidos, es decir, aprender a oír los sonidos de cada lugar. rescato esta idea de su texto “respuesta a pascua lama” escrito en el marco de quipu menstrual, obra dedicada a la recién electa presidenta bachelet y realizada para pedir por la protección de los glaciares amenazados por la aprobación definitiva del proyecto minero pascua lama de la empresa barrick gold: “un lugar es un sonido, y una forma de oírlo. (…) re-aparece (el niño del cerro el plomo) cuando chile está a punto de escoger entre oír o no oír la música de una conexión con la tierra y el glaciar, el tono específico de un lugar” (vicuña ). desde esta perspectiva, la artista se posiciona como un sujeto con dones especiales capaz de escuchar los mensajes de la tierra y transmitirlos a la comunidad. en este sentido, resulta iluminadora la lectura de yenny ariz castillo ( , ) sobre el poemario la wik’uña ( ), donde plantea que la voz poética asume una identidad chamánica capaz de integrarse a la naturaleza e interpretarla, a lo cual agrego que esta capacidad comunicativa especial está mediada también por la capacidad de oír y cantar. de ahí la importancia que tiene el canto y la voz en el trabajo de vicuña (pienso en sus performances, el disco kuntur ko o la musicalidad de sus poemas), siendo importante señalar que en el artista visual bernardo oyarzún también ha retomado algunos aspectos de la historia del niño del plomo en su trabajo mitomanías ( ). en esta obra, la estatua de pedro de valdivia de la plaza de armas de santiago es reemplazada por la imagen de la figura del camélido de oro encontrada en la tumba del niño, gesto que deconstruye la historia y fundación colonial de nuestra capital para relevar su filiación y sustrato indígena. ahora bien, a diferencia de vicuña, en esta obra no se hace alude al sacrificio del niño de forma explícita, más bien se recupera parte de su imaginería visual y ritual para hacer visible la mentira colonial que ha borroneado nuestras raíces incaicas. en su capítulo dedicado a la voz ritual, pérez de arce ( , ) explica –a partir de unos cantos citados por guamán poma de ayala– la función de este instrumento humano en las culturas indígenas: “pájaros, animales, ríos y cuentos, además de sonar como nosotros los escuchamos, resonaban en los cantos de los espíritus que los animaban y protegían, y esos cantos eran imitados por el hombre. así, el canto es una llave para manejar las potencias de la naturaleza y su uso requiere conocimiento y precaución”. la muerte del mar ( ) es un video de vicuña sobre las consecuencias de la pesca de arrastre en la costa del litoral central y la lucha de los pescadores artesanales por la defensa del mar, cuya genealogía la artista reconstruye a partir de los changos y en diálogo con el baile de los chinos. a su vez, este video es un homenaje a mistral y su poema “muerte del mar” publicado en lagar ( ). barros: aguas y ríos quipu mapocho la música vehiculiza un llamado de alerta y conciencia sobre el daño ocasionado a las aguas, el mar y los humedales, lo que también se puede apreciar en el trabajo musical de tijoux. de la mano con lo anterior, en esta obra se cuestiona también la lógica extractivista de la pesca industrial que ha despojado a los pescadores artesanales de su fuente de trabajo, problemática abordada previamente en el documental kon kon y que pone de relieve las consecuencias ambientales y sociales de un modelo económico voraz. el poema-ofrenda quipu mapocho, definido por la artista como “una rima de actos y sonidos en la tierra” (vicuña , ), se convierte en una invitación a establecer una armonía entre nuestras acciones y el ritmo del cosmos, polemizando de esta forma con las nuevas colonizaciones de la biodiversidad —como la actual ley de pesca— que finalmente afectan a los más pobres. esto explica, también, el hecho de que la artista dedique su trabajo “al fin de la privatización del agua en chile” (vicuña , ), siendo importante recodar que el modelo de gestión de aguas que nos rige actualmente se impuso durante la dictadura y que a nivel internacional es considerado como un ejemplo extremo de “neoliberalización” de los recursos hídricos (prieto , ). vemos, entonces, cómo desde una propuesta artística experimental, intermedial y afín a su estética de lo precario, vicuña articula una “cultura del agua” en la que se recrean y resitúan los sistemas de conocimientos y ritos del mundo andino, con el propósito de defender el agua como un bien comunitario y el cuidado de una naturaleza concebida como totalidad sagrada, sonora e interrelacionada. “río abajo” de ana tijoux: rap andino en contra de la privatización del agua luego de ser la vocalista de makiza, exitosa banda de rap chilena cuyas canciones “en paro” y “la rosa de los vientos” marcaron a toda una generación de jóvenes a fines de los , ana tijoux inicia en el su carrera como solista que ya reúne cuatro discos. considerada como una de las raperas más importantes de la escena musical latinoamericana, sus canciones se hacen escuchar en festivales, tocatas alternativas y encuentros de barrio, pero también en las plataformas del mercado global como la serie breaking bad y los premios grammy, donde ha competido con figuras emblemáticas del pop y el reguetón como illya kuryaki and the valderramas, calle , don omar y daddy yankee, entre otros. como artista y activista, tijoux ha logrado posicionar su proyecto musical en un mundo preferentemente masculino como el hip-hop y apropiarse de los circuitos de la industria y las redes sociales para difundir un discurso abiertamente crítico y de denuncia que nos retrotrae a los orígenes de este estilo musical afroamericano. tal como explican maría emilia tijoux, marisol facuse y miguel urrutia ( , ), el hip-hop surge a fines de los años en nueva york “como expresión de un arte popular y como movimiento contestatario en sectores marginados de la ciudad”. sin lugar a duda, ana tijoux mantiene el espíritu contestatario de sus antecesores negros para reelaborarlo de acuerdo con las demandas y luchas de su nicho contextual, al igual como lo hicieron en su momento grupos de los como tiro de gracia o el rap mapuche actual de artistas-activistas como wenu mapu, wechekeche Ñi trawün o luanko. vengo, el último disco de tijoux lanzado en el año , se distancia de sus producciones anteriores por la fusión del rap con sonoridades latinoamericanas, especialmente andinas, y la incorporación de instrumentos como la quena, el charango, el quenacho, la gaita colombiana, el cajón peruano y el cuatro. las letras de sus canciones mantienen el tono contestatario de siempre, pero abordan nuevas temáticas como el patriarcado, la guerra, la segregación urbana, el modelo económico y la maternidad, dando cuenta del compromiso de tijoux con las causas que movilizan a las sociedades actuales. “rendirse jamás como primer manifiesto”, parece ser la consigna que sintetiza este espíritu. la presencia de las epistemologías indígenas y la vocación ecológica en la obra de vicuña también ha sido analizada por críticas como candice amich ( ), vera coleman ( ) y yenny ariz ( ), esta última citada previamente en el cuerpo del artículo. de manera muy resumida, en su estudio sobre el documental kon kon amich ( , ) lee el rescate de las culturas indígenas del aconcagua por parte de vicuña como “an alternative that looks to precapitalist cultures to imagine a postcapitalist futures”. coleman ( , ), por su parte, indaga a propósito de los poemarios visuales instan e i tu cómo la materialidad y visión relacional del universo es explorada por la autora chilena a partir de los cruces entre la física cuántica y las cosmovisiones indígenas. kaos ( ), ( ), la bala ( ) y vengo ( ). la canción “ ” de su disco homónimo fue incluida en la exitosa serie breaking bad. con respecto a los premios grammy, tijoux ha sido nominada varias veces. el disco vuelvo, por ejemplo, fue nominado en la categoría “mejor álbum de rock latino, urbano o alternativo” en el año . en relación con el movimiento de hip-hop mapuche desde una perspectiva musical y en diálogo con el activismo presente en la región de la araucanía, destaco la investigación de jacob rekedal y su artículo “el hip-hop mapuche en las fronteras de la expresión y el activismo”. este fragmento ha sido extraído de la canción “delta”. esta cita de tijoux y todas las que vienen a continuación corresponden a su disco vengo. por eso no tienen número de página. barros: aguas y ríos en este contexto, destaca el posicionamiento feminista y ecológico del disco anunciado desde la portada, donde se observa la transformación del cuerpo de la cantante en un árbol, mientras sus pies y mano derecha tocan la tierra y sus brazos exhiben tatuajes con diseños de textiles indígenas. todo lo anterior situado en el marco de una estética que recuerda la religiosidad popular latinoamericana y que caracteriza el diseño del disco (ver figura ). a esta imagen inicial habría que agregar otras incluidas en el disco, donde se observa una mano sosteniendo una planta iluminada con amplios rayos amarillos, o aquellas donde se reproduce la imagen de una mujer de la revolución mexicana con su fusil, una mujer encapuchada amantando a su hijo o una machi, con su atuendo tradicional (ver figuras , y ). vemos, entonces, cómo en las representaciones visuales incluidas en vengo —todas diseñadas por pablo de la fuente, más conocido como gráfica diablo rojo— se articulan imágenes de mujeres donde los saberes ancestrales, el contacto con la tierra y el cuidado de los hijos se aúna con la acción política, gesto que desarma los límites patriarcales quien aparece en esta imagen es adela velarde, enfermera oriunda de la ciudad de juárez, reconocida por su participación como soldadera en la revolución mexicana. la machi es una autoridad religiosa y política del pueblo mapuche que puede ser asumida por hombres y mujeres. como curandera posee amplios conocimientos sobre plantas medicinales y facultades chamánicas vinculadas a la música ritual, las visiones y los sueños. las ceremonias precedidas por la machi son el machitún (para sanar a los enfermos) y el nguillatún (para pedir por las buenas cosechas), instancias rituales en que el canto, el cultrún y las ramas de canelo son fundamentales. en las últimas décadas, estas autoridades ancestrales han sido duramente perseguidas por la justicia chilena, para lo cual basta recordar los casos de los machi celestino córdova y francisca linconao, ambos acusados y encarcelados en el marco de la ley antiterrorista por el caso del matrimonio luchsinger-mackay. diseñador teatral y musical. ha realizado los diseños de discos y afiches de importantes grupos de la nueva escena musical chilena como ana tijoux, juana fe, banda conmoción y movimiento original, entre otros. figura : carátula del disco vengo. crédito: gráfika diablo rojo. barros: aguas y ríos público/privado-cultura/naturaleza-activo/pasivo y que reivindica la capacidad de agenciamiento femenino desde un posicionamiento vital que busca entrelazar y unir más que excluir o separar. considerando lo anterior, ¿cómo es abordado el problema del agua por tijoux y cómo se elabora su discurso ecológico? en la canción “río abajo”, la primera parte destaca por la representación del agua como un ser o un espíritu dotado de vida, cuyo mensaje se articula a partir de una serie de enunciados precedidos por el verbo “soy”, que van delineando una simbología del agua afín a las creencias indígenas en torno al carácter divino y animado de las distintas manifestaciones terrestres (reyes , ). de esta manera, el agua es metaforizada como una fuerza femenina y fertilizante que irriga la tierra (“soy la madre que cultiva los frutos y su siembra”), pero también como una fuerza poderosa que fluye y corre de manera constante. por ejemplo, en el verso “soy la pluma de la flecha andina con su danza”, las palabras “pluma”, “flecha andina” y “danza” conforman una intrincada red isotópica en torno al movimiento, lo ritual y la dualidad tierra/cielo, recreando así el principio de complementariedad andino y el valor sagrado del agua. de acuerdo con lo anterior, la letra de esta primera parte acentúa especialmente la condición multiforme del agua (el agua es la asociación entre mujeres y naturaleza reivindicada por ciertos movimientos sociales, artistas y académicas no ha estado exenta de críticas por parte de algunos sectores feministas que leen este vínculo como una esencialización de lo femenino que reconfirmaría los binarismos patriarcales de género. como bien explica mary mellor ( , ) en feminismo y ecología, las feministas que históricamente han luchado por la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres —desde mary wollstonecraft hasta simone de beauvoir y en adelante— han tendido a rechazar la inscripción de las mujeres como naturaleza/biología; sin embargo, en las últimas décadas, el ecofeminismo ha revalorizado positivamente este vínculo como una respuesta de resistencia frente al patriarcado capitalista y la crisis ecológica actual. en contra de los dualismos y la visión separatista de la sociedad occidental, las ecofeministas sostienen que la asociación entre mujeres y mundo natural no debe ser eliminada, sino que reformulada a la luz de una nueva concepción de nuestra corporalidad, la naturaleza y la relación de los seres humanos con ella (mellor , – ). retomo la noción de isotopía de francois rastier ( , ), la cual define como “la iteración de una unidad lingüística cualquiera” que, leída de manera vertical y prestando atención a sus distintas variantes, da cuenta de la existencia de un eje vertebrador que organiza el texto poético y lo dota de sentido. en el caso del fragmento citado, las palabras “pluma”, “flecha andina” y “danza” remiten al menos a tres isotopías, las que podemos identificar en torno a los núcleos semánticos del movimiento, lo ritual y la dualidad cielo/tierra o arriba/abajo. figura : adelita, mujer de la revolución mexicana. crédito: gráfika diablo rojo. barros: aguas y ríos “fuente cristalina”, “lluvia”, “aguacero”, “nieve”, “bruma”, “cascada”), pero también su capacidad creativa para transformar la realidad en conjunto con otros elementos (“soy el rocío que salpica fulminante los rayos de sol un arcoíris penetrante”) y generar vida (“soy esa fuerza que se precipita en el centro del capullo donde nace la semilla”). la canción, entonces, comienza con un relato mítico-poético en el que se hace hablar al figura : mujer con capucha amamantando a su hijo. crédito: gráfika diablo rojo. figura : machi con su atuendo tradicional. crédito: gráfika diablo rojo. barros: aguas y ríos agua y que más adelante será repetido, pero con una modificación: la voz lo presenta como un canto-susurro aprendido de la abuela (“lo cantaba así la abuela grillo susurrándote dulce en el oído” ). todo lo anterior nos remite a una concepción de naturaleza sagrada, nutricia y creativa coherente con los saberes ancestrales, característica que se deja entrever no solo en la letra de “río abajo” y las distintas referencias al mundo andino, sino también a nivel musical (estoy pensando en la sonoridad altiplánica de las partes instrumentales de esta canción, pero también en la composición “interludio agua” que le precede, donde los sonidos de los instrumentos de viento se combinan con los sonidos del correr del agua). de esta manera, tijoux recrea y reivindica una cultura del agua de raíz indígena, contraponiéndola en la segunda parte de la canción con la cultura del agua promovida por el libre mercado: “tú no me puedes poner nombre / no me puedes apresar / mi amor es demasiado enorme / no me sujetan tus cadenas / no quepo en tus embalses / […] yo fluyo río abajo sin que puedas dominarme / no me encierran tus botellas / yo regalo agua desde la cordillera / no hay minera que pueda sustraerme”. el agua —espíritu indócil, libre y amoroso— se resiste a su privatización y a ser convertida en un bien de consumo, tal como se advierte en los distintos términos que remiten al control ejercido sobre el fluir de las aguas (“nombrar”, “apresar”, “sujetar”, “encerrar”). desde esta perspectiva, tijoux polemiza con el accionar de las empresas mineras y las centrales hidroeléctricas situadas en distintos territorios del país, que amenazan con despojar a los pueblos indígenas de un bien comunitario donado por la pachamama o Ñuke mapu. frente a esta alteración del principio de reciprocidad entre seres humanos y naturaleza, la canción “río abajo” finaliza con un discurso de aires utópicos que visualiza el paso del agua desde la “estrella altiplánica […] hacia el mar”. se completa de esta manera el ciclo del agua violentado por un “ecocapitalismo voraz” (cajigas-rotundo , ), siendo importante recalcar que el discurso ecológico de tijoux se articula, al menos, desde dos posicionamientos. por un lado, aquel que reivindica los conocimientos indígenas negados por la racionalidad moderna (“descolonicemos lo que nos enseñaron”, dice un verso de la canción “vengo”, dando cuenta de una clara intención por desaprender los resabios de un colonialismo todavía vigente). por otro, aquel que cuestiona abiertamente al capitalismo como una tecnología del poder que acrecienta las diferencias de clase y el control sobre las vidas (me refiero a la canción “todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire” también incluida en el disco vengo). a modo de cierre: desaprender las pedagogías coloniales a partir de los trabajos de vicuña y tijoux, hemos entendido el activismo artístico como una práctica cultural de acción, crítica y fronteriza, que construye su propio lenguaje y recurre a distintas plataformas de difusión para vehiculizar discursos e imaginarios de transformación social que sintonizan con las preocupaciones de una comunidad situada en un contexto geopolítico específico e intervenir en las disputas y luchas de la esfera pública. en quipu mapocho y “río abajo”, ambas artistas-activistas se hacen cargo de los problemas en torno al agua y la naturaleza que actualmente movilizan a los movimientos ecologistas, feministas y antiglobalización, pero también a los pueblos indígenas afectados por los proyectos extractivistas emplazados en sus territorios. desde el arte, la calle y las plataformas digitales, el activismo continúa vigente como una respuesta de la sociedad civil frente a las tramas del poder político y económico, siendo importante mencionar que —según los datos proporcionados por the guardian en colaboración con global witness— cincuenta y cuatro activistas ambientalistas del mundo han sido asesinados durante el en lo que lleva del año (ulmanu, evans y brown ). desde esta perspectiva, vicuña y tijoux elaboran retóricas de la resistencia que no solo vuelven porosos los límites entre el arte y lo político, sino que además nos invitan a desaprender nuestras pedagogías coloniales. sus discursos a favor de la descolonización de la naturaleza se realizan desde un posicionamiento de descolonización epistémico y corporal: ambas valoran, recrean y resitúan los saberes indígenas como una alternativa sostenible frente a las crisis ecológicas actuales, pero también como una respuesta política que pone en entredicho la mercantilización de la naturaleza y el racismo epistémico. de esta manera polemizan con el patriarcado capitalista y su lógica predatoria al disputar la idea de una naturaleza inerte que puede ser explotada con meros fines económicos, reivindicando —en oposición a esta mirada— la idea de una la letra hace un guiño intertextual a abuela grillo ( ), cortometraje animado del director denis chapon, en el que se recupera la leyenda indígena sobre direjná —la abuela-grillo de los ayoreos y dueña del agua— para abordar la llamada guerra del agua que tuvo lugar en cochabamba, bolivia, en el año . la influencia de la música andina está de moda en el pop alternativo nacional (tengo en mente a cantantes como gepe o pedro piedra). ahora bien, la diferencia de ellos con tijoux radica en que la incorporación de estas sonoridades indígenas no es solo un arreglo musical, sino que también resulta coherente con el discurso de descolonización propuesto en vuelvo. al momento de redactar este artículo, la última actualización de la cifra de activistas asesinados correspondía al de julio de . barros: aguas y ríos naturaleza viva, sagrada y activa y coincidiendo en la movilización de un imaginario andino en su defensa del agua como bien comunitario. por último, me interesa resaltar que los trabajos de vicuña y tijoux no caen, a mi parecer, en discursos esencialistas o esencializantes sobre los conocimientos indígenas de los cuales se apropian. lejos de las concepciones puristas sobre las identidades culturales, en sus producciones se yuxtaponen, tensionan y complementan distintos saberes, disciplinas artísticas y soportes que alteran cualquier noción fija de cultura. ya sea desde el arte conceptual o el hip-hop, ambas artistas elaboran —desde un locus abigarradamente mestizo— poéticas activistas, descolonizadoras y ecológicas, que nos invitan a desnaturalizar nuestra manera de imaginar e interactuar con la naturaleza y a poner en valor los conocimientos y las formas de vida de los pueblos indígenas del continente. información sobre la autora maría josé barros es doctora en literatura de la pontificia universidad católica de chile y académica de la facultad de artes liberales de la universidad adolfo ibáñez, donde desarrolla una investigación fondecyt sobre los cruces entre activismo, artistas mujeres y descolonización en la escena chilena actual. como especialista en poesía chilena y mapuche contemporánea ha publicado varios artículos al respecto. además, ha trabajado en el archivo manuel rojas uc y es editora junto con pía gutiérrez del libro manuel rojas: una oscura y radiante vida. nuevas lecturas y aproximaciones críticas (en prensa). referencias alimonda, héctor. . “la colonialidad de la naturaleza: una aproximación a la ecología política latinoamericana”. en la naturaleza colonizada: ecología política y minería en américa latina, coordinado por héctor alimonda. buenos aires: clacso. amich, candice. . “from precarity to planetarity: cecilia vicuña’s kon kon”. global south ( ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /globalsouth. . . ariz castillo, yenny karen. . “la red espiritual de ollaytantambo en la wik’uña, de cecilia vicuña: agua, piedra y luz”. revista de humanidades ( ): – . doi: 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/the-defenders-recording-the-deaths-of-environmental-defenders-around-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /feb/ /the-defenders-recording-the-deaths-of-environmental-defenders-around-the-world http://www.ceciliavicuna.org/esp_poema.htm http://www.ceciliavicuna.org/esp_poema.htm https://vimeo.com/ barros: aguas y ríos how to cite this article: barros, maría josé. . aguas y ríos: activismo, descolonización y naturaleza en cecilia vicuña y ana tijoux. latin american research review ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /larr. submitted: august accepted: june published: september copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /. open access latin american research review is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the latin american studies association. https://doi.org/ . /larr. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	activismo artístico en vicuña y tijoux 	quipu mapocho de vicuña: desde el río sacrificial a la “muerte del mar” 	“río abajo” de ana tijoux: rap andino en contra de la privatización del agua 	a modo de cierre: desaprender las pedagogías coloniales 	información sobre la autora 	referencias 	figura 	figura 	figura 	figura 	figura 	figura eliminating gender-based bias in academic medicine: more than naming the “elephant in the room” eliminating gender-based bias in academic medicine: more than naming the belephant in the room^ anna u. morgan, md, msc, mshp , , krisda h. chaiyachati, md, mph, mshp , , , gary e. weissman, md, mshp , , , and joshua m. liao, md, msc , , division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, harbor-ucla medical center, torrance, ca, usa; leonard davis institute of health economics, university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa, usa; division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, perelman school of medicine, university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa, usa; cpl. michael j. crescenz veterans affairs medical center, philadelphia, pa, usa; division of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine, department of medicine, hospital of the university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa, usa; palliative and advanced illness research center, perelman school of medicine, university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa, usa; division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, university of washington, seattle, wa, usa; uw medicine center for scholarship in patient care quality and safety, university of washington, seattle, wa, usa. gender-based discrimination and bias are wide- spread in professional settings, including academic medicine. overt manifestations such as sexual ha- rassment have long been identified but attention is only more recently turning towards subtler forms of bias, including inequity in promotion and compensa- tion. barriers to progress vary across institutions and include lack of awareness, inadequate training, poor informational transparency, and challenging power dynamics. we propose five solutions that the academic medical community can adopt to not only name, but also address, gender-based bias as the proverbial elephant in the room: definitively identify the systemic nature of the problem, prompt those with influence and power to advance a culture of equity, broadly incorporate evidence-based explicit anti-sexist training, increase transparency of infor- mation related to professional development and com- pensation, and use robust research methods to study the drivers and potential solutions of gender inequity within academic medicine. while implementing these proposals is no small task, doing so is an important step in helping the academic medical community become more just. key words: workforce; medical culture; professionalism; physician behavior. j gen intern med ( ): – doi: . /s - - - © society of general internal medicine beyond being victims of harassment and overt discrimina- tion, women in academic medicine can also experience subtler manifestations of gender-based bias (e.g., disparity in profes- sional promotion and/or salary). for example, since , the number of women and men enrolling in us medical schools has been equivalent. yet as of , women made up only % of associate professors, % of full professors, % of department chairs in internal medicine, and % of deans at us medical schools. nearly two thirds of female clinician- investigators endorse personally experiencing gender bias in professional advancement, and female physicians at us pub- lic medical schools earn nearly $ , less per year than their male counterparts. numerous initiatives have arisen to counteract these trends and support the needs of female physicians. for example, the society for general internal medicine has implemented the women and medicine taskforce, the american association of medical colleges coordinates the group on women in medicine and science, and institutions have initiated local programs for female physicians. unfortunately, despite growing recognition of gender-based bias as a proverbial belephant in the room,^ progress towards equality has been slow. barriers vary across institutions and include lack of awareness, inadequate anti-bias training, poor informational transparency related to promotion and compen- sation, and challenging power dynamics. in view of these challenges alongside persistent gender-based bias against women, we believe there is an opportunity for the academic medical community to organize behind more unified solutions to such disparities. received june , revised november , accepted march , published online march , community, as well as the robust and powerful #metoo movement, it should not surprise us that half of women report gender-based harassment in the american workplace overall. women in academic medicine are no exception. approximate- ly % of female faculty report having experienced sexual harassment and – % report gender-based discrimination, while % of physician mothers report experiencing gender- based discrimination. m anifestations of gender-based bias against women, in-cluding sexual harassment, discrimination, and inequi- table treatment, are common in professional settings. given recent headlines from the film industry and political http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf potential solutions efforts to directly counteract gender-based bias, in both its im- plicit forms as well as its overt manifestations, are critical for achieving gender equality in academic medicine. building on a framework for addressing gender inequity within academic med- icine and drawing from our experiences as junior members of the academic medical community, we propose solutions focused on addressing unconscious gender bias with the hope that they can help achieve gender equity in our community. first, we can only begin to address problems of inequity by definitively naming the elephant in the room: the systemic nature of gender-based bias. while insufficient in and of itself for affecting change, this kind of clarity represents the first step in creating space for women and men of all training levels to recognize and call out both overt and subtle manifestations of inequity as they occur, by publicly identifying it in the mo- ment, anonymously reporting, or discussing it with involved parties after the event. second, those in positions of power within academic medicine—many of whom are men—can unequivocally support efforts that attempt to counteract manifestations of gender-based inequity. we all have roles to play in local transformation within our institutions. however, individ- uals who have historically wielded power through formal leadership positions and interpersonal dynamics must in many cases play a central role in addressing gender ineq- uity. these efforts could include involvement in institu- tional policy changes (e.g., required gender parity on committees, targeted proportion of women as grand rounds speakers), role modeling in daily interactions with colleagues, and other forms of support (e.g., sponsoring promotion or advancement of female junior faculty). be- cause it can be as or more powerful than strategy in dictating behavior, the culture cultivated by those in po- sitions of power will likely influence how comfortable individuals feel speaking up about and addressing gender-based bias. third, we should actively counteract bias by incorporating explicit evidence-based anti-sexist training for individuals at all levels within academic medicine, from medical students through senior faculty. importantly, such trainings would not only focus on removing pre-existing biases, but also impart the skills necessary to oppose social and cultural norms that perpetuate inequity. while not yet widely implemented, pro- grams tested in a variety of academic settings have begun producing improvements in implicit bias, individual behavior, and departmental climate. , to have sustainable and wide- spread impact, high-quality training should be rigorously test- ed across different institutions and incorporated into processes like maintenance of certification and tenure review. fourth, institutions and departments could better address man- ifestations of inequity through increased transparency and track- ing of information about hiring and academic advancement by gender. specifically, institutions could develop forums (e.g., working groups comprised of diverse stakeholders, btown hall^ style meetings) to discuss how to make the academic work environment more receptive for women. such work could also take advantage of existing inter-professional education, which provides an opportunity to address bias in contexts that extend beyond individual departments or schools. finally, because we can only change what we measure, researchers should utilize established conceptual frame- works and methods to study both the internal drivers and external manifestations of gender-based bias within our profession. despite robust research infrastructure for study- ing discrimination and disparity for patients, academic medicine is only beginning to apply such rigor to gender- based bias within its own halls. to this end, approaches based on critical gender theory that have been used suc- cessfully in other professional settings could be prominent- ly featured in future research. practitioner inquiry methods, for example, afford researchers the opportunity to study existing power structures and to understand their own role within those structures. dedicated funding mechanisms are necessary to support self-reflective and actionable re- search to combat gender inequity. we recognize that implementing these solutions is no small task and must be coordinated with efforts aimed at reducing inequity among colleagues from other historically marginal- ized groups, including those in sexual or racial/ethnic minority groups and disabled communities, among others. the pro- posed solutions represent starting points for not only naming, but also actively addressing, gender-based bias in order to help the academic medical community become more just. conclusion like those in other professional fields, women in academic medicine can experience inequity arising from gender-based bias. despite mounting empiric and anecdotal evidence about the systemic nature of this bias and its external manifestations, more unified strategies and responses are needed. several solutions—including active sponsorship by those in positions of power, explicit anti-sexist training, increased transparency about hiring and professional advancement, and rigorous re- search investigation—can help the academic medical commu- nity not only name, but also actively address, gender-based bias. acknowledgements: the authors would like to thank dr. katrina a. armstrong and dr. judy a. shea for their review of earlier versions of this manuscript for which they were not financially compensated. corresponding author: anna u. morgan, md, msc, mshp; division of general internal medicine, department of medicine harbor-ucla medical center, torrance, ca, usa (e-mail: amorgan@dhs.lacounty. gov). compliance with ethical standards: conflict of interest: the authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest. morgan et al.: gender-based bias in academic medicinejgim references . report of co-chairs chai r. feldblum & victoria a. lipnic. report of the co-chairs of the eeoc select task force on the study of harassment in the workplace.; . https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_force/harass- ment/upload/report.pdf. accessed feb . . carr pl, ash as, friedman rh, et al. faculty perceptions of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in academic medicine. ann intern med. ; ( ): . https://doi.org/ . / - - - - - . . adesoye t, mangurian c, choo ek, girgis c, sabry-elnaggar h, linos e. perceived discrimination experienced by physician mothers and desired workplace changes. jama intern med. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . . . lautenberger dm, dandar vm, raexer cl, sloane ra. the state of women in academic medicine: the pipeline and pathway to leadership – . vol . . https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/the state of women in academic medicine – final.pdf. accessed feb . . jagsi r, griffith ka, jones r, perumalswami cr, ubel p, stewart a. sexual harassment and discrimination experiences of academic medical faculty. jama. ; ( ): . https://doi.org/ . /jama. . . . jena ab, olenski ar, blumenthal dm. sex differences in physician salary in us public medical schools. jama intern med. ; ( ): . https://doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . . . women and medicine task force. soc gen intern med. . http:// www.sgim.org/communities/task-forces/women-and-medicine. accessed feb . . group on women in medicine and science (gwims) - member center - aamc. am assoc med coll. . https://www.aamc.org/members/ gwims/. accessed feb . . focus on health &amp; leadership for women. trust univ pennsylvania. . https://www.med.upenn.edu/focus/. accessed feb . . westring a, mcdonald jm, carr p, grisso ja. an integrated framework for gender equity in academic medicine. acad med. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /acm. . . girod s, fassiotto m, grewal d, et al. reducing implicit gender leadership bias in academic medicine with an educational intervention. acad med. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /acm. . . carnes m, bartels cm, kaatz a, kolehmainen c. why is john more likely to become department chair than jennifer? trans am clin climatol assoc. ; : – . . ipe teaching fellowsprogram | center for health sciences interprofes- sional education, research and practice. https://collaborate.uw.edu/ / /ipe-teaching-fellows-program/. accessed feb . . cochran-smith m, lytle s, eds. inquiry as stance: practitioner research for the next generation. new york: teacher’s college press; . morgan et al.: gender-based bias in academic medicine jgim http://dx.doi.org/https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_force/harassment/upload/report.pdf http://dx.doi.org/https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_force/harassment/upload/report.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . http://dx.doi.org/https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/the http://dx.doi.org/ . /jama. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jama. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . http://dx.doi.org/http://www.sgim.org/communities/task-forces/women-and-medicine http://dx.doi.org/http://www.sgim.org/communities/task-forces/women-and-medicine http://dx.doi.org/https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims http://dx.doi.org/https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims http://dx.doi.org/https://www.med.upenn.edu/focus http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. http://dx.doi.org/https://collaborate.uw.edu/ / /ipe-teaching-fellows-program http://dx.doi.org/https://collaborate.uw.edu/ / /ipe-teaching-fellows-program 	eliminating gender-based bias in academic medicine: more than naming the &ldquo;elephant in the room&rdquor; 	abstract 	potential solutions 	conclusion 	references microsoft word - ryland - learning digital citizenship in publics of practice - reviewed copy .docx learning digital citizenship in publics of practice: how adults learn to use activist hashtags on twitter by megan ryland b.a., the university of british columbia, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (educational studies) the university of british columbia (vancouver) august © megan ryland, ii the following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: learning digital citizenship in publics of practice: how adults learn to use activist hashtags on twitter submitted by megan ryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in educational studies examining committee: deirdre kelly, educational studies supervisor catherine corrigall-brown, sociology supervisory committee member theresa rogers, language and literacy education supervisory committee member michelle stack, educational studies additional examiner iii abstract today, vital aspects of private life and public discourse are happening online, and media and digital literacy skills (mdl) are necessary to engage in this sphere. this qualitative study examines how adults can learn the mdl skills necessary to advocate for social change on twitter using activist hashtags, like #blacklivesmatter and #metoo, and engage as democratic digital citizens. to do this, nine twitter users with varying levels of activity provided their twitter archives and took part in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. these data were evaluated using content analysis to explore how participants learned to use activist hashtags on twitter. using the lens of critical pedagogy and a theory of learning through experience (dewey, ) as the foundation, participants’ learning journeys were coded, analyzed, and compared to concepts from the literature. these concepts include public pedagogy (giroux, ), which applies to sites of learning beyond formal education, and communities of practice, which addresses how communities teach their members (lave & wenger, ). in addition, the concepts of publics and counterpublics are employed to make sense of how hashtags function (bruns & burgess, ; fraser, ; warner, ). finally, the concept of digital citizenship is applied to the practices under examination to demonstrate how mdl alone fails to capture the critical, political aspects of activist hashtags. study participants learned to use hashtags to advocate for social change on twitter by combining multiple strategies, based on individual goals, opportunities, and obstacles. in total, participants described strategies, which could be grouped into the four main approaches of applying prior knowledge, exploration, modeling and examples, and directly accessing expertise. the three most common strategies were learning through exposure over time (i.e., experience), iv observation and copying, and trial and error. activist hashtags are able to function not just as sites of public pedagogy or communities of practice, but as “publics of practice” where participants used the public discursive space to learn and practice relevant digital citizenship skills. although this study is focused on a narrow set of behaviours and participants, it provides insight into how people might be learning to use new digital tools. v lay summary this qualitative study examines how adults can learn the media and digital literacy skills necessary to advocate for social change on twitter using activist hashtags, like #blacklivesmatter and #metoo. researching how this practice is learned can help us understand how adults are learning to use digital tools to be heard and take part in public life online more broadly. in interviews, participants described learning strategies, which could be grouped into the four main approaches of applying prior knowledge, exploration, using models and examples, and directly accessing expertise. the three most common learning strategies were exposure over time (i.e., experience), observation and copying, and trial and error. participants learned the necessary skills and attitudes by combining multiple strategies according to their goals, opportunities, and obstacles. the study concludes that activist hashtags on twitter can offer public space to learn and practice competencies necessary to be an engaged, democratic citizen online. vi preface this thesis is an original, unpublished work by the author, megan ryland. ethics review and approval for this study was provided by the university of british columbia behavioural research ethics board, which issued ethics certificate number h - to cover the research conducted with participants. vii table of contents abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii lay summary ........................................................................................................................... v preface ...................................................................................................................................... vi table of contents .................................................................................................................... vii list of tables............................................................................................................................ xi list of figures ......................................................................................................................... xii acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ xiii chapter : new media, new skills, new questions ................................................................ . study foundations, context, and rationale ................................................................. . research questions and considerations ..................................................................... chapter : building the framework ...................................................................................... . theoretical framework ............................................................................................. . . theory of knowledge: critical realism ............................................................. . . theories of learning: critical pedagogy and experience ................................... . . critical pedagogy .............................................................................................. . . john dewey: situated learning experiences ...................................................... . conceptual framework ............................................................................................. . . media and digital literacy ................................................................................ . . exploring digital citizenship ............................................................................ . . public pedagogy ................................................................................................ . . community of practice & legitimate peripheral participation ........................... viii . . publics and counterpublics ................................................................................ . . hashtags & activism ......................................................................................... . . conceptualizing next steps ............................................................................... . situating the researcher ............................................................................................ chapter : charting the course of study .............................................................................. . research design rationale ........................................................................................ . ethical considerations and concerns ......................................................................... . data collection ......................................................................................................... . . selecting a sample ............................................................................................ . . . recruitment strategies: challenges and procedures ....................................... . . participant data overview ................................................................................. . . archival review: digging into twitter histories ............................................... . . conducting interviews: soliciting narratives and understanding context .......... . data analysis strategies ............................................................................................ . . coding archives ................................................................................................ . . coding interviews ............................................................................................. . considering the design in hindsight ......................................................................... chapter : tracking learning journeys ............................................................................... . participant twitter use: motivations and purposes .................................................... . . connecting ........................................................................................................ . . contributing ...................................................................................................... . . influencing ........................................................................................................ . . learning ............................................................................................................ ix . . personal goals ................................................................................................... . why #tweet? exploring hashtag motives ................................................................ . . why #activism? ................................................................................................ . an overview of hashtag behaviour ........................................................................ . learning journeys ................................................................................................... . . soft skills are hard ......................................................................................... . . evaluating mastery .......................................................................................... . learning strategies .................................................................................................. . . applying prior knowledge .............................................................................. . . directly accessing expertise ........................................................................... . . modeling & examples ..................................................................................... . . exploration ...................................................................................................... . hashtag activism: applying what they have learned ........................................... . learning journeys with no destination ................................................................... chapter : mapping the learning landscape .................................................................... . media and digital literacy or digital citizenship skills? ........................................ . revisiting theories of learning: public pedagogy and communities of practice ..... . limitations of memory, technology, and capacity ................................................. . implications for research, informal learning, digital citizenship, and education... . open questions: authenticity, adaptability, inequality, anonymity, and more ....... . in closing: reviewing the learning tool kit .......................................................... references ............................................................................................................................. appendices ............................................................................................................................ x appendix a recruitment materials ..................................................................................... a. recruiting advertisement .................................................................................... a. blog text ............................................................................................................. appendix b interview guide .............................................................................................. xi list of tables table . twitter use, ordered by total tweet count ..................................................................... table . demographic information, ordered by identifying as an activist .................................. table . educational background, ordered by participant reports of relevant education ............. table . twitter uses, grouped according to five major themes ................................................. table . code book for twitter archives ................................................................................. table . overall distribution of tweets across various features of the platform for the total data collected ................................................................................................................................. table . the mean distribution of tweets across various features of the platform for a single archive .................................................................................................................................... table . specific strategies and overall approaches to learning ............................................... table . hobb’s ( ) essential competencies of digital and media literacy........................... table . choi’s ( ) elements of digital citizenship ........................................................... xii list of figures figure . diagram mapping how various kinds of hashtags are related to one another ............. figure . recruitment image to be posted to twitter and facebook ......................................... xiii acknowledgements in the years that it has taken to complete this thesis, i have relied on many people for support in different ways. i would like to first thank my supervisor, dr. deirdre kelly, who has been thoughtful and supportive from our very first conversation before i had even been accepted into the master’s program. her contributions to this work have been substantial, introducing me to key approaches and concepts that made this work possible, and i have learned a great deal under her guidance. furthermore, her belief in my project and my skills has buoyed me through this process. second, my committee members, dr. catherine corrigall-brown and dr. theresa rogers, have offered critical questions that improved this work. i would also like to acknowledge the professors and classmates i worked with in the ubc educational studies master’s program, as many had a role in how i approached and completed this work. i am also grateful for the financial support provided by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada’s joseph armand bombardier canada graduate scholarship. beyond the university, mentors, and peers, this thesis could not have been completed without the support of my family and friends. my parents, dianne and alan ryland, have been unwavering in their support and i cannot properly express my gratitude for their efforts, past and present, to help me pursue my education. so many of my friends have acted as counsellors and cheerleaders during this process and i am deeply grateful to each and every one, but especially jess borthwick, greyson peck, and rebekah parker. finally, i want to extend my enduring gratitude to the study participants who so generously shared their experiences and their twitter archives to help me better understand their learning journeys. it was a true joy to speak to each person and hear how they used social media xiv to support positive change in the world. i feel so fortunate to have been able to do this work and learn from each person. i am also incredibly grateful to the people who passed on my call for participants and supported recruitment, as i would be lost without their kindness. this thesis is the result of the efforts of many people, who brought their experience and knowledge to the project, each in their own way. thank you. chapter : new media, new skills, new questions today, vital aspects of private life and public discourse are happening online, and new skills are necessary to engage in this sphere. media and digital literacy (mdl) is a vital skill set in a society where people are constantly surrounded by, participating in, and creating media online. mdl has also received renewed interest in the last year as concerns regarding “fake news” and possible manipulative social media campaigns have garnered increasing attention, forcing the public to grapple with the evolving political consequences of living in a media- saturated environment (padgett, ; rosenwald, ). the issue of mdl is also vital when considering how inequality in society becomes wrapped up in who has the tools to access technology and digital literacy, with real social and economic impacts for those who face barriers to becoming digital citizens (dimaggio & hargittai, ; mossberger, tolbert & mcneal, ; norris, ; van dijk, ). scholars and educators are no longer asking whether media and digital literacy are necessary; the key question now is how best to develop media literacy and support digital citizenship (citron & norton, ; kellner & share, ; mihailidis & thevenin, ). many scholars are researching mdl and attempting to provide educators with the tools to incorporate it into the classroom (hobbs, ; hoechsmann & dewaard, ; hoechsmann & poyntz, ; kellner & share, ). however, my interest lies in how people outside of formal education can acquire these new and necessary mdl skills. specifically, i am looking at the internet as a site of learning. online, informal learning can occur as citizens navigate the new media available, expanding learning opportunities beyond the classroom. kellner and kim ( ) see these opportunities and argue that, “the internet provides individuals today with a whole new pedagogical setting: decentralized and interactive communication, a participatory model of pedagogy, and an expanded flow of information, thus comprising a new field for the conjuncture of education and democracy” (p. ). peter trifonas ( ) writes that digital culture has “transformed cultural perceptions of learning,” as digital media offers new educational environments (p. ). stack and kelly ( ) argue that “the media are a central, if not primary, pedagogue” and recognize that the media is a formative institution, similar to the education system; digital media are an extension of this impact (p. ). it is critical to examine the pedagogical role that digital media plays in supporting media and digital literacy (hoechsmann & poyntz, ). to focus this study on a set of behaviours that could be measured and investigated, i have chosen a specific practice that could be used as an example for how adults might learn mdl skills informally online. this study explores how adults learn the mdl competencies necessary to use activist hashtags on twitter. twitter is a social media platform that allows users to broadcast short messages (“tweets”) and interact online. a hashtag is a type of keyword used to identify a topic online and provoke a shared conversation. i use the term activist hashtags (e.g., #metoo) to refer to hashtags that make justice claims or demand social change. to examine the learning processes necessary for people to begin using activist hashtags, i have conducted an exploratory, qualitative study of nine twitter users. participants each provided access to archives containing their twitter history and took part in a semi-structured, in-depth interview. data collected using these two methods were examined through content analysis to identify patterns within and across cases. by incorporating both twitter archives and interviews, the research was able to include patterns of use over time and thick descriptions of processes. participants were also able to offer their own perspective and provide context for their archives, which helped to inform some of the interpretation necessary in my analysis. i approached this study using the lens of critical pedagogy and a theory of learning that focuses on experience. as a result, i understand learning as situated, contextual, and political. in the discussion of my findings, i draw on the concepts of public pedagogy (giroux, ), which is the notion that situations outside formal schooling hold pedagogical value, and communities of practice, which addresses how communities teach and incorporate new members (lave & wenger, ). to support my work with these concepts, i also apply the concepts of publics and counterpublics, as theorized by nancy fraser ( ) and michael warner ( ). finally, i apply the concept of digital citizenship to the practices under examination to discern how we might best conceive of these skills. in completing this study, i seek to draw on and contribute to the literature on learning, critical media and digital education, and social media. . study foundations, context, and rationale before proceeding any further, it is helpful to situate the study in the wider world and the literature. in the process, i offer further rationale for the study and provide the background necessary to understand how twitter functions, as this is useful to make sense of the data and analysis to follow. when considering the pedagogical value of the media, it is increasingly common to treat movies, television, and video games as learning spaces (boler, schmidt, & renzi, ; sandlin, schultz & burdick, ; steinkuehler, squire & barab, ; trifonas, ), but i intend to focus on social media as an informal arena where users might learn mdl competencies. i chose to focus on twitter for this study because i share reid’s ( ) belief in social media websites as “important sites of public pedagogy, places where we go to learn, and places where we learn indirectly as we come to understand ourselves in relation to others and our culture through social media interactions” (p. ). twitter has specific features, benefits, and challenges as a site of learning and a site of research, making it worth delving into its background. twitter (www.twitter.com) is a social media platform for microblogging (i.e., short broadcast messages), and participation consists of reading, posting, commenting on, “liking,” and sharing user-generated tweets. twitter had million active users as of february (tsukayama, ). according to the ryerson social media lab, % of canadians use twitter, with % of those users active daily, % weekly, and % active less often (gruzd, jacobson, mai, & dubois, ). based on surveys by the pew research center ( ), % of american adults use twitter, and of those number % report using it daily, % weekly, and % less frequently. in both countries, twitter use is roughly the same across genders, but the main age cohort using the platform is -to -year-old (gruzd, jacobson, mai, & dubois, ; pew research centre, ). anyone with an internet connection and an email address can create a free account to join the online platform and choose their own username (e.g., @username). users might choose to be anonymous, use their own offline identity, or even pretend to be someone else, although popular users such as celebrities can be “verified” by twitter and receive a special blue checkmark on their profile to indicate an authentic identity. once someone has a profile, they can keep their tweets private or, more commonly, broadcast their tweets to other users who might choose to subscribe to (“follow”) their content. a user will also choose to follow others, whose content will automatically be added to their list of updates (“twitter feed”) to read when they log on. twitter originally limited each tweet to characters but, in the fall of , increased this limit to characters. a tweet might contain text, hyperlinks, photos, videos (including live streaming video), gifs, polls, and location information. twitter does not require mutual recognition for interaction, so strangers can follow or tweet to strangers. whenever a username is included in a tweet, the user is notified of a “mention,” which can be used to direct a user’s attention to the tweet (e.g., “hey, i bet @username would love this!”) while a direct reply to another user will begin with their username (e.g., “@username i don’t agree with that.”). when users tweet back and forth in a conversation, they create chains of replies and, given that it is a public forum, other users might jump in and comment as well, creating multiple offshoots in a conversation. should a user want a private conversation with someone, they can send a direct message (“dm”) to another user that others cannot view. users can choose who is able to dm them, however, and sometimes dms are only accepted between mutual followers. users can create “threads” by replying to their own tweets, creating a daisy chain of linked tweets that other users can follow like conversations as well, and this can essentially help a user exceed the character limit for tweets. hashtags (e.g., #keyword) can be added to words or phrases to make tweets easily searchable and hashtags automatically create a hyperlink that other users can click to see other tweets that include that hashtag. hashtags typically compose the bulk of the “trending topics” that appear beside the twitter feed, which are topics that twitter observes to be popular within a given area; to be “trending” means that content has been very popularly viewed. users are also able to re-broadcast (“retweet,” or “rt”) the content of other twitter users and share it with their own followers, either with additional comments (a “quote tweet”) or directly without any comment. tweets can be retweeted or liked by other users and the twitter algorithm recognizes this engagement as well and will present these tweets higher in the feed or even use them to create twitter “moments”— that is, highlights from the twitter community that other users will view. users must learn the function of all these features of the platform, and more, for full engagement and to maximize its potential for communication. twitter is a popular medium for information gathering about and discussion of news, politics, journalism, crisis updates, television shows, cultural and sporting events, conferences, and memes (bruns & stieglitz, ). within this space, networks or communities can be formed through a shared participation in conversation, either actively through tweeting, or more passively through observing tweets of others. information travels quickly through the platform due to the brief word count and ease of sharing, but researchers remain concerned that twitter users may not be receiving multiple perspectives because information may not bridge barriers between personal networks (gleason, ). because users choose whom they follow, they can become integrated into communities, or isolated from others, but as they exist through network connections, they are nearly always overlapping, and some content will break through. for example, a comment or joke intended for a small audience may become widely circulated (“go viral”) through retweets, hashtags, becoming a twitter moment, or being cross-posted in another web platform, and this can occasionally bring disproportionate attention (and, at times, harassment) to users who have very few followers. given the nature of the technology, social media literature is constantly attempting to catch up to the current platforms and social conventions for usage. for example, java and colleagues ( ) published their work, “why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities” only a year after the platform launched, so their article does not include significant features of twitter, and their four categories of action on the platform (daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news) are no longer comprehensive. historically, social media or social network literature has focused on “impression management, performance, networks and network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy issues,” but there is increasing interest in using it as an educational support and learning platform (boyd & ellison, , p. ). as twitter has achieved some comparative longevity, researchers using the platform can begin to build on one another, but research has historically been dominated by “topic-, context-, and event-related case studies” that cannot yet create an overall picture of how twitter is used in (bruns & stieglitz, , p. ). danah boyd is a prominent social media scholar who has conducted research on several web . platforms, including twitter. for example, boyd and ellison ( ) present a comprehensive overview of social network sites at the time, while boyd and golder ( ) provide an in-depth analysis of retweeting practices. boyd and ellison ( ) argue that “what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks,” and this highlights the opportunity for social media to have deep research potential (p. ). discourse and social connections are more recordable, collectable, and searchable than ever before, and this can be exploited for both prosocial and nefarious (confessore, ) purposes. researchers are now drawing connections between education and social network research. for example, in “tweeting for learning: a critical analysis of research on microblogging in education published in - ,” gao, luo and zhang ( ) present the research that was conducted to evaluate how twitter can be incorporated into classroom teaching. they found that twitter's microblogging “promotes a collaborative virtual learning environment” across several educational settings, even though such participation was often “informal” or “playful” (p. ). this finding lends credibility to the idea that twitter use could have pedagogical value. for his part, benjamin gleason ( ) argues that the sharing and construction of knowledge on twitter could be considered an “informal learning process,” because it is unplanned, spontaneous, collaborative, participatory, interest-driven, and exists outside of the classroom paradigm (p. ). by facilitating interaction and exchange of information, twitter might be considered an “information neighbourhood” that is worth considering as a learning environment (gleason, , p. ). however, it is also valuable to note that dunlap and lowenthal ( ) found that the quality of twitter experiences depends on “who you are connected with; how frequently you participate; and how conscientious you are about contributing to the value of the community” (p. ). lewis, pea, and rosen ( ) provide additional cautions, because although “educational research indicates[s] that people learning within social contexts and that collaboration and development of joint narrative presents powerful dynamics for learning,” they point out that a vibrant learning community typically requires the development of “shared goals and experiences” (p. ). it is, therefore, critical to keep in mind the importance of participation and connections among users to the experience of learning. it is also important to avoid generalizations about platform purposes and experiences, given that a user’s individual set of circumstances—who they follow, what they tweet, how frequently they use it, their goals, et cetera—will shape their outcomes substantially. within twitter, i focus on the specific feature of hashtags. hashtags can be used for many purposes. within my work, an “activist hashtag” is one that can be interpreted as making a claim about social justice, drawing on iris marion young’s ( ) understanding of justice and the political. ⁠ although some may argue that hashtags are not effective activist tactics (gladwell, ), i have chosen “activist” to describe the category of hashtag i intend to study because (a) activists are using these hashtags to make claims, (b) the politics of activism encompass more than the formal politics of governments, expanding my scope, and (c) in making claims, these hashtags are active, performative, and/or prescriptive, rather than passive or descriptive (arguably similar to “activist courts”). i am not, for example, expressly interested in hashtags like #ndp or #cdnpoli that merely reference the political. rather, i am interested in hashtags that are engaged in making political claims regarding (in)justice, including hashtags such as #nodapl, #blacklivesmatter, and #metoo. rachel kuo ( ) has also used similar terminology to describe this practice as it specifically applies to racial justice, referring to them as “racial justice activist hashtags.” activist hashtags allow other users to more easily find, share, promote, collect, add to, and interact with tweets related to a politicized topic or debate. kuo ( ) also points to the potential of these hashtags to act as “collective action framing tools” (p. ). that is, activist hashtags might be used to communicate “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization” by providing a set of interpretations for a specific societal problem (benford & snow, , p. ). although it is beyond the scope of this study to analyze the phenomenon or effect of activist hashtags, i do according to young ( ), “the concept of justice is coextensive with the political…politics in this sense concerns all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decision-making. when people say a rule or cultural meaning is wrong and should be changed, they are usually making a claim about social justice” (p. ). for young, injustice takes the form of oppression and domination, in various forms (ibid.). attempt to understand how study participants understand the practice, so this is included in the analysis in chapter four. in addition, because activist hashtags can be used to engage in political discourse, interact with other community members, and advocate for change, i also evaluated the skills to use them for their potential as digital citizenship skills in chapter five. activist hashtags are becoming a common practice online, and mainstream media seem to report on new trending activist hashtags on a near weekly basis. scholarship that features activist hashtags tends to focus on the phenomenon of activist hashtags themselves, including the scope of circulation, patterns of use, and reasons for its occurrence, often using network analysis and discourse analysis (an & weber, ; bastos, raimundo, & travitzki, ; bonilla & rosa, ; hogan, ; kuo, ; olson, ; thrift, ). however, i have not encountered scholarly work specifically analyzing how participants learn to take part, which i argue is a critical question. there are few structured opportunities for someone to learn how to use and create effective activist hashtags. it is certainly not within standard school curriculum, where explicitly teaching young people how to participate in protest is a rare element on any syllabus (van den berg, ). conventional educational institutions also often face challenges incorporating new technologies and media practices into their programs and can do little to educate those who have graduated. unlike marketing or professional uses for twitter, one cannot rely on workplace seminars or certificate programs to cover activist tactics. activist strategies might be shared through activist communities, but when an activist hashtag becomes highly popular, it moves outside of these potential communities of practice—how then do outsider participants learn to join in on this new media practice? i attempt to address this question in this study. many scholars have taken up the challenge of exploring how digital media has transformed opportunities for civic engagement or activism more generally, with a specific focus on its potential for young people (bennett, ; jenkins et al., ; kellner & share, ; mcgillivray, mcpherson, jones, & mccandlish, ; mihailidis & thevenin, ; ratto & boler, ; rogers, ; shumow, ). there is consensus that these tools have the potential to be powerful and that critical media and digital education are key to ensuring that the next generation can take advantage of these opportunities. i argue, however, that there has not been sufficient research on how adults might learn these critical mdl skills, especially considering that most of life is spent outside of the traditional classroom. if these are important tools for civic engagement and activism, as the literature suggests, it is crucial to mark the trajectory of the adult learning curve, too. this study also responds to scholars who are calling for more study of informal learning and its unique role in adult education (choudry, ; foley, ; livingstone, ). in learning in social action, foley ( ) writes, “for me, the most interesting and significant learning occurs informally and incidentally, in people’s everyday lives,” but this learning often receives little scholarly attention (p. ). after investigating the subject, livingstone ( ) writes, most adults probably engage in multiple forms of learning on an ongoing basis, with varying emphases and tendencies. only the state-sanctioned forms of schooling and further education are very fully identified or widely documented. other adult learning activities have tended to be ignored or devalued by dominant authorities and researchers, either because they are more difficult to measure and certify or because they are grounded in experiential knowledge, which is more relevant to subordinate social groups… it is clear that both adults’ informal education/training and their self-directed informal learning have been relatively little explored to date and warrant much fuller attention from those interested in comprehending the nature and extent of adult learning. (p. ) nearly ten years later, choudry ( ) notes that, “although there is a considerable body of scholarly literature on adult education and learning, relatively few attempts have been made to understand how people produce knowledge and learn (especially through informal learning) through involvement in social action” (p. ). this study’s design responds to that gap and has also heeded livingstone’s ( ) recommendation for “more inclusive approaches to informal learning that attempt to identify tacit knowledge through such means as direct observation in situation or in-depth interviewing” to research “taken-for-granted learning processes” (p. ) by incorporating both archival data reflecting user practices and in-depth interview data. although this work does not engage directly in social movement learning, as i have narrowed the scope of this study to focus on media and digital literacy skills, the perspectives of scholars like griff foley ( , ), eurig scandrett ( ), and aziz choudry ( ) do support this work. foley’s ( ) work on the informal, adult learning by those engaged in struggle is similar in intent, although our emphasis differs, and scandrett’s work ( ) highlights the importance of incidental learning in social movements. choudry’s ( ) learning activism offers a look at the wider context of the learning that occurs in social movement participation. these scholars recognize the role for informal, tacit learning to build knowledge, skills, and attitudes in movements. they also acknowledge the dearth of relevant research. choudry ( ) agrees with john holst ( ) that adult education has been reluctant to acknowledge that social movements can be both educational and political, consistently downplaying the role of informal learning. when considering emancipatory adult education, it makes sense to look to activism for lessons, and in activism, “often learning by doing leaves the deepest footprints” (choudry, , p. ). the nature of this study is deeply interdisciplinary, and a complete picture of all relevant scholarship would not be possible or practical to include. however, further context will be provided by the theoretical and conceptual framework in chapter two, which details the theories and ideas at work in this study. this introduction is simply intended to provide the background necessary to understand the remainder of the thesis and establish the stakes of the inquiry. this study draws on social media and media and digital literacy scholarship, as well as educational theories and research, to answer questions of interest to social movement learning and hashtag activists themselves. . research questions and considerations my primary research question is: how do adults learn the mdl competencies necessary to use activist hashtags on twitter? additional related questions of interest flow from this primary question, and this study has been designed to provide opportunities to examine the following subset of questions: • what media and digital literacy competencies are necessary to use activist hashtags on twitter? • could the set of skills under examination be better described as digital citizenship practices? • what motivates learning to use activist hashtags on twitter? • how do users conceptualize the practice of using activist hashtags? • what mechanisms allow or enable learning to use activist hashtags on twitter? given my understanding of the literature and the activity itself, i initially anticipated that learning to use activist hashtags on twitter would most often be a process of learning by doing. i anticipated finding that users can learn by encountering activist hashtags, observing their use in the twitter environment, engaging in a process of trial and consequences, and learning from experience. to be successful, twitter users would have to learn to access, analyze, evaluate, create, reflect on, and take action with activist hashtags on the social media platform—that is, develop mdl skills for that environment. users would also bring experience from other environments to bear on their hashtag trials, but they would have to adjust their strategies and develop media and digital skills for the specific twitter environment. broadly, participant experiences did align with these expectations, but participants employed more learning strategies than anticipated by combining a variety of different approaches to learning. i return to these questions in the final chapter, where i explore how my data and analysis speak to my conceptual framework and the literature. i also address the potential advantages of viewing these skills as digital citizenship, rather than simply mdl, and how activist hashtags might function not just as either sites of public pedagogy or communities of practice, but also as “publics of practice.” although this study is focused on a narrow set of behaviours, and a yet narrower set of participants, i believe it can provide some insight into how people might be learning to use these new digital tools for public discourse and advocacy. chapter : building the framework in this chapter, i describe the key theories and concepts necessary to establish the basis for this research. i begin by presenting the theoretical assumptions built into my approach for this research, including my theory of knowledge and learning. this is followed by mapping the conceptual framework i am using to make sense of this work. finally, i also provide a description of how i see my own positionality and my role in the research process. together, this chapter will detail the structural foundations of the study. . theoretical framework a theoretical framework is, in effect, a set of lenses that are used to view and understand data. by explicitly stating what theories have shaped this study, i hope to clarify my approach to the production of knowledge and be transparent about the assumptions built into my interpretation of the data. by situating my work and its claims, i hope to make it more robust under scrutiny. . . theory of knowledge: critical realism i approached this study through the lens of critical realism, which holds that reality is both concrete and constructed. according to critical realism, “material practices are given an ontological status that is independent of, but in relation with, discursive practices” (sims- schouten, riley, & willig, , p. ). sousa ( ) puts this another way: “the world is complexly brought about by interlocking causes,” both material and discursive (p. ). instead of accepting the world as empirically verifiable, as posited by positivism, or entirely constructed, as in social constructionism, critical realism offers a third way that i find especially useful when conducting social science research. in addition, critical realism is typically concerned with investigating “mechanisms”—generative processes—rather than simply “events” and this matches well with the focus of my study examining a learning process (danermark et al., ). arising first from the work of roy bhaskar in the s, critical realism was a response to the critiques of positivist and constructionist approaches (alvesson & sköldberg, ; sousa ). critical realism incorporates aspects of both social constructionist and positivist traditions to create a theory of reality and science that attends to power, social construction, relativity, and subjectivity without rejecting the notion of a material reality (alvesson & sköldberg, ). sims-schouten, riley, and willig ( ) clarify this point: “acknowledging that our knowledge of ‘reality’ will always be limited is not the same as saying that there is no such thing as ‘reality’” (p. ). in this view, the purpose of “scientific work is instead to investigate and identify relationships and non-relationships, respectively, between what we experience, what actually happens, and the underlying mechanisms that produce events in the world” (danermark et al., , p. ). critical realism separates questions of “that which exists” from “the knowledge we have about it (what we believe)” (alvesson & sköldberg, , p. ). this distinction supports a humble philosophical position that does not mistake human understanding for material reality and encourages a critical approach to producing knowledge. critical realism more accurately captures my approach than positivism or social constructionism because it values both the observable and unobservable (such as power) to help explain phenomena and patterns (alvesson & sköldberg, ; sousa ). something is considered “real,” whether socially defined or not, “if it affects behaviour and makes a difference,” and so this includes both material goods and discourse (alvesson & sköldberg, , p. ). although i acknowledge the social construction of reality and the effective contingency of truth, my knowledge claims are formed on the basis that some realities can be considered more likely than others (mccall, ; lopez & potter, ; fletcher, ). critical realism approaches science with “epistemological caution” based on the recognition that humans create knowledge through a social process and humans are fallible, but it remains possible to discern between theories, and there is a substance to the world independent of human understanding (lopez & potter, , p. ; alvesson & sköldberg, ). critical realism sees knowledge as contextual and dependent on perspective, but its practitioners seek to present “truer and truer (truth is not absolute) accounts of reality” (lopez & potter, , p. ). this is a key distinction. although my knowledge claims must be limited by my situated construction of meaning and the specifics of context, it is my responsibility as a researcher under the critical realist framework to present a reasonable argument and convincing evidence for my conclusions, which form the basis for a claim that the reality that i describe is more likely than others. . . theories of learning: critical pedagogy and experience given the nature of this study, evaluating the learning process, it is important to establish how i understand learning to take place. my theoretical framework focuses on how learning occurs and what learning does, and it is shaped by two key perspectives. first, it is influenced by critical pedagogy and considers learning to be ideally emancipatory but always power-laden. second, it is informed by john dewey’s approach to learning as an outcome of experience, particularly in light of how he understands the role of the environment in the learning process. these theories are compatible because they both frame learning as a relational, situated process that has political implications. . . critical pedagogy in the critical pedagogy reader, peter mclaren ( ) admits that the practice of critical pedagogy is “as diverse as its many adherents,” but there are common themes to the approach (p. ). both the critical posture and the diversity of the field appeal to me, as it offers a flexible lens to approach this work. mclaren ( ) states that critical pedagogy theory tends to share the key understanding that, the individual, a social actor, both creates and is created by the social universe of which he/she is a part. neither the individual nor society is given priority in analysis; the two are inextricably interwoven, so that reference to one must by implication mean reference to the other. (p. ) this assumption is vital to my approach, particularly when practically applied to behaviour within a social media network. on a social media platform, users input content and receive content that has been curated according to their desires, other users, and algorithms; each experience is then a result of both internal and external forces that are “inextricably interwoven” as a user simultaneously influences and is influenced by the social media platform. more broadly, the relational and social construction of knowledge is a key assumption in my project. in working with critical pedagogy, my theoretical framework can acknowledge the politics of the learning process. douglas kellner and gooyong kim ( ) state that a “major goal of critical pedagogy is to facilitate simultaneously individual development and social transformation for a more egalitarian and just society” (p. ) learning should be emancipatory within this framework. this theoretical orientation appeals to me, particularly for this project, because it informs my choice to focus on learning to use activist hashtags. i am interested in media and digital literacy (mdl) as it can be practiced for critical, emancipatory ends. learning to use activist hashtags appears to be a practical case where it is immediately clear that knowledge has a “social function” (mclaren, , p. ). it is a deeply relational set of skills where power is being invoked, wielded, and resisted. power must be at play when people are able to take up new political tools. although there are many examples of developing a mdl competency available for study, i am choosing to focus on a skill set that has been politicized by its practitioners. my investigation of this topic presumes that mdl competencies are not neutrally acquired or practiced, making critical pedagogy a useful approach to take. kellner and kim ( ) also note that key critical pedagogy scholars paulo freire and john dewey both held that education has the potential to “be a democratizing force and promote cultural revolution and social transformation” (p. ). in pedagogy of the oppressed, freire ( / ) argues that individual and social transformation through education are linked; learning for liberation has impacts on both a personal and political level. as i am focusing on the case of learning to use activist hashtags, individual learning and social change are also linked within my study. learning for democratic purposes is a thread woven throughout this work, including my use of citizenship and publics as key concepts within this work. finally, it is worth noting that digital technologies have been viewed by critical pedagogy scholars as a potential opportunity to learn outside of dominant institutions, participate in public discourse, and pursue empowerment (kellner & kim, ). however, “potential” is a key distinction, and it is important to remain critical of the narratives of digital empowerment as well. powerful technologies can cut both ways—supporting democratic engagement, or eroding trust in democratic processes, for example. furthermore, significant digital inequality remains locally and globally, as many people do not have access to technology or sufficient digital literacy to participate due to social, geographic, or economic factors (van dijk, ; dimaggio & hargittai, ; mossberger, tolbert & mcneal, ; norris, ). again, attending to power is key to understanding the opportunities of digital technologies—and the power to access and learn about digital technologies is substantial. digital space is not equally accessible to all, and its affordances are concentrated with those people already most likely to hold power. while this study will be an addition to the growing critical pedagogy literature that considers the power of digital media as a learning space, i am also sensitive to the problem of falling into technological determinism, utopic thinking, or universalizing experiences. . . john dewey: situated learning experiences the scholarly work of john dewey is frequently considered a part of critical pedagogy literature, but as that literature is particularly wide-ranging, i think it is valuable to be clear that i am drawing on a specific aspect of a specific theorist in my work. my choice of study has already been deeply shaped by my understanding of learning as situated in an environment and shaped by experiences. as john dewey also pays significant theoretical attention to these ideas, his work provides an approach to learning that can be used as a potential starting point to understanding how media and digital literacy skills are acquired through experience. i believe it is important to be explicit regarding how i understand learning to occur. according to dewey, learning arises from the engagement of the “self” in the “world,” and this relationship is key to dewey’s influence on my work. in democracy and education, john dewey ( / ) writes, “all learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and place,” describing learning as inherently context-based and situated, giving pride of place to the environment in his framework for education (p. ). as theorized by dewey ( ), the environment is the “particular medium in which an individual exists” and which leads him [sic] to see and feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of others. thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behaviour, a certain disposition of action. (pp. - ) dewey ( ) further specifies that the “social environment,” in particular, is shaped by people living in association, who present the “objects” of affection and dislike, esteem and aversion, through group behaviour that establishes normative standards that new members of society may observe and emulate (p. ). each group or community, from a gang to a guild, can be considered its own social environment. in examining learning on a social media platform, environment is a key element to consider. as dewey has theorized, i understand the environment as generative of experience and learning as situated in a context. experience, and thus learning, arises from the environment. for dewey ( ), experience is activity (“trying”) followed by consequences, which results in learning (p. ). as bente elkajaer ( ) describes in contemporary theories of learning, experience is the “transaction” that occurs between individuals and their environment (p. ). dewey ( ) writes, to “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with their world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connection of things. (p. ) this idea of learning by trial and consequences (experience) is central to my understanding of how learning occurs. so too is his notion of relational learning. we understand things, ideas and experiences in relation to one another, rather than in isolation (dewey, , p. ). experiences are necessarily connected and inform one another. as my study focuses on learning by doing, or as dewey might put it, learning by “trying,” rather than a traditional learning environment, dewey’s work helps articulate how that process occurs. according to dewey, learning is a deeply situated process dependent on context and experience. situated learning is a valuable lens for understanding the learning process of participants in this study because i am studying learning that occurs in the course of life and is applied to genuine problems, rather than an instructional scenario. the theory of situated learning assumes that “learning cannot be isolated from the activity, the culture, and the context in which it takes place” (schugurensky, , p. ). by taking this approach, i am able to incorporate the full richness of participants’ contexts and experiences in my understanding of their learning process. in reviewing the literature, it is important to note that david kolb has also proposed a well-known approach to experiential learning. kolb ( ) defines learning as, “the process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” (p. ). in this view, experience may lead to knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. however, i do not find it as compelling as dewey’s theory of experience. first, as elkjaer ( ) observes, kolb’s learning cycle indicates a sequence of events. kolb’s theory suggests that learning occurs in a cycle of concrete experience, followed by reflective observation, followed by abstract conceptualization, followed by active experimentation, returning again to concrete experience, and so forth (kolb, ). each aspect requires a skill set that must be used together, so that learners “need four different kinds of abilities,” which kolb then associates with his theory of learning styles (kolb, , p. ). for dewey, experience cannot be meaningfully broken down into separate processes. action and thinking are integrated. according to dewey, thinking “is the intentional endeavour to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous” (dewey, , p. ). although separating these capacities may be useful when theorizing, i do not think that these individuated capacities reflect the practice of learning where each facet is intertwined. i favour a theory that embraces a continuous integration of thinking and action, as dewey theorizes learning through experience. second, experience results in more than abstract conceptualization or, put more simply, knowledge. dewey acknowledges that many types of meaning can be drawn from experience; his definition of experience includes knowledge, emotion, aesthetics, and ethics (elkajaer, ). it is important to me that my work recognize that the body and emotion are not separate from the learning process, just as they are never separate from experience. although learning requires thought, it cannot be a simply cognitive or behavioural process. in addition, in an applied setting where the learner is tacitly acquiring skills and using them, abstract conceptualization may not be a useful part of the learning process. if participants do not “reach” abstract conceptualization, i am disinclined to consider the learning “incomplete,” if the learner has built a skill set that does serve their purposes. finally, dewey is part of the tradition of pragmatism, and i think this is a valuable orientation to hold when approaching informal learning specifically. ⁠ as one learns through experience rather than instruction, knowledge must logically be contingent on present experience and adjust according to new experiences. the value of actions is dependent on consequences, as one finds in pragmatism (elkajaer, , p. ). there are simply few resources outside of practical experience on which to draw. this is particularly true within my study, as a quickly- changing technology platform has little pre-established tradition for success; users likely have to although it is often unwise to put stock in colloquial use of philosophical terms, a layperson would certainly call most informal learning “pragmatic.” skills that you develop without structured curriculum in the course of your life are often practiced out of need and use value. pay attention to their practical experience to drive their behaviour—to be successful, they do what works. as elkjaer ( ) puts it, “the view of experience as encompassing the relation between subject and worlds, inquiry as experimental and instrumental and knowledge as fallible means that pragmatism can be called a learning theory for the future,” and i tend to agree (p. ). . conceptual framework karlsson and ackroyd ( ) write that, “the issue for cr-guided researchers is always: what concepts are required to understand the data available and to bring into focus the processes or mechanisms that are really at work?” (p. ). within critical realism, conceptualization is an important part of analysis, because “concepts provide an abstract language enabling us to speak about qualitative properties, structures, and mechanisms” that are the focus of a study (danermark et al., , p. ). they also function as theories, as they attempt to describe a reality. in the following section, i explain the concepts that provide the language for my approach to this study. my conceptual framework is an interdisciplinary structure out of necessity, and, therefore, rather than presenting a comprehensive review of each field involved, i am including examples of each concept that provide support for my approach, contextualize my research, and allow me to draw a clear map of connections between various concepts. using this conceptual framework, i investigate the potential for activist hashtags to create an online public or counterpublic that could be a space for public pedagogy regarding media and digital literacy, and perhaps even democratic digital citizenship. . . media and digital literacy media and digital literacy (mdl) combines two terms which will be treated as inseparable concepts, at least in the contexts where it will be applied in this study. the first term, media literacy, is defined as the skills to “access media on a basic level, to analyze it in a critical way based on certain key concepts, to evaluate it based on that analysis and, finally, to produce media oneself,” according to the leading media education non-profit mediasmarts, which conducts research and provides curriculum resources about media and digital literacy in canada (mediasmarts, n.d.a, para. ). the “key concepts” of media literacy are considered to be, “that media is constructed; that audiences negotiate meaning; that media have commercial, social and political implications; and that each medium has a unique aesthetic form that affects how content is presented” (mediasmarts, n.d.a, para. ). these core principles are broadly shared with media literacy scholars (buckingham, ; kellner & share, ). the second term, digital literacy, is seen to “encompass the personal, technological, and intellectual skills that are needed to live in a digital world” (mediasmarts, n.d.a, para. ). although mediasmarts distinguishes between media literacy and digital literacy, they acknowledge that the two skill sets are "closely related" and the key concepts outlined for media literacy are “equally applicable” to traditional and online media sources (mediasmarts, n.d.b, para. ). in fact, their website helpfully points out the “intersection” of digital and media literacy; it is that intersection my work intends to occupy by using media and digital literacy (mdl) as an umbrella term to encompass both skill areas. essentially, given that the digital world is a subset of the media landscape, digital literacy requires media literacy, but it is also difficult to imagine calling someone media literate if they could not navigate digital media, given the impact of digital technology on all aspects of media creation and consumption. in the current north america context, i do not believe a meaningful engagement with media literacy excludes the digital sphere. for example, media literacy has generally considered viewing, creating, understanding, and analyzing film to be part of its domain; given that digital technologies have transformed how films are created, distributed, and consumed, ignoring digital literacy makes a meaningful difference in how the medium could be understood. media literacy and digital literacy literatures have not always been intermingled, but i intend to draw on literature that considers media literacy to have evolved into this broader concept of media and digital literacy. other terms have been proposed to describe the new skill set necessary for the contemporary media-saturated context. for example, the term “ st century skills” has received some significant attention, but as jenkins and colleagues ( ) point out, it tends to de- emphasize textual literacy in its rush to move forward and fails to understand the importance of a digital social skill set rather than just vocational or individual skills. in “confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the st century,” jenkins, purushotma, clinton, weigel, and robison ( ) argue for “new media literacies” as a broadly encompassing term for the “set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape,” but i find their list of competencies included in this set of literacies to be so inclusive as to be ungainly to use within my research (p. ). i intend to use a definition of media and digital literacy that i am able to articulate clearly, so that i might be able to find measures for identifying it. mdl are competencies that are defined in a variety of ways, but generally emphasize the necessity of (a) technical and procedural skills, (b) analytical and evaluative approaches, and (c) attitudinal and social capacities (hoechsmann & poyntz, ; kellner & share, ). although traditional literacy focuses on reading and writing, literacy expands within mdl to cover a wider set of skills: not just consuming, understanding and creating texts, but also analyzing, critiquing and contextualizing all forms of media and communication (national association for media literacy education, ). it is valuable to note that mdl is most usefully conceptualized as a spectrum of capacities. given the wide variety of skills under the umbrella of mdl, it is possible to continue developing mdl skills over a life time. however, educators and legislators are increasingly interested in supporting a minimum level of competence to ensure that basic engagement with media and digital technology is possible for all citizens, who need these tools to navigate an ever-more crowded media landscape (kellner & share, ). renee hobbs, a media education scholar, has provided the definition of media literacy that is used by the american national association for media literacy education (national association for media literacy education, ). hobbs considers mdl to include “the full range of cognitive, emotional and social competencies that includes the use of texts, tools and technologies; the skills of critical thinking and analysis; the practice of message composition and creativity; the ability to engage in reflection and ethical thinking; as well as active participation through teamwork and collaboration” (hobbs, , p. ). hobbs ( ) breaks down the competencies of mdl into five essential, interlocking competencies: the capacity to access, analyze and evaluate, create, reflect, and take action using all forms of communication. i will use hobbs’ framework as the assessment criteria for determining what kind of media and digital literacy skills are required to use activist hashtags. although competing definitions are available, i find hobbs incorporates many of the features common to other definitions while being both focused, specifying clear competencies, and broad enough to include the wide range of capacities required to develop mdl in the contemporary environment. . . exploring digital citizenship i will also be exploring the emergent concept of digital citizenship as a lens to interpret activist participation and community formation online. by exploring the potential for informal learning about politicized issues and justice claims through the process of online participation, i seek insight into how people can learn to engage, understand and use media as digital citizens. digital citizenship is being theorized in many different ways (choi, ; couldry et al., ; jones & mitchell, ; mossberger, tolbert, & mcneal, ; ohler, ; ribble, ). for example, mossberger, tolbert and mcneal ( ) describe digital citizenship as “the ability to participate in society online,” and a digital citizen is defined as “those who use the internet regularly and effectively—that is, on a daily basis” (p. ). in a guide for educators, mike ribble ( ) argues that “digital citizenship can be described as the norms of appropriate, responsible behaviour with regard to technology use” (p. ). jason ohler ( ) similarly proposes that digital citizenship education is closely tied to character education, emphasizing good conduct, ethics, and community alongside digital literacy. in a survey of canadian education policy across the country, hoechsmann and dewaard ( ) suggest that in general there is a trend to “focus on keeping canadian students safe and responsible in their interaction online, as well as providing guidance to help them maintain healthy relationships and to develop civic responsibility,” but a look at the provincial policies shows that they diverge in significant ways (p. ). other scholars place different emphasis and implement digital citizenship in new ways, including a focus on preventing cyberbullying and developing civic culture online (couldry et al., ; citron & norton, ; jones & mitchell, ). it is also important to highlight what the digital citizenship literature might be missing. i agree with akwugo emejulu and callum mcgregor’s ( ) claim that digital citizenship has largely been de-politicized in the literature, and this critical feature of this term must be re- introduced in how it is used. emejulu and mcgregor ( ) call for what they term “radical digital citizenship” that refers to a “praxis” where individuals or collectives might “critically analyze the social, political, economic and environmental consequences of technologies in everyday life” and “collectively deliberate and take action to build alternative and emancipatory technologies and technological practices” (p. ). although i do not directly adopt their definition of digital citizenship, this study does take up a critical, political digital citizenship. iris marion young’s writes that politics “includes all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decision making,” and i consider politics to be similarly expansive, including the work of activists, politicians, and citizens simply taking part in their community ( , p. ). where there is power at play, there is politics, and this is an important feature of digital citizenship. furthermore, i will specifically be focused on democratic digital citizenship practices, although the additional modifier is often not specified in the digital citizenship literature. in specifying “democratic” practices, i draw on dewey’s ( / ) theory that, “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (p. ). in addition, this study will also make use of the concept of publics, which elaborates on the role of the public sphere in a democracy (habermas, ; fraser, ). drawing inspiration from both iris marion young ( ) and chantal mouffe ( ), i am interested in digital citizenship practices as framed by young’s deliberative democratic theory and influenced by mouffe’s “agonistic public sphere⁠.” for the purposes of in on the political, mouffe ( ) writes, “the task for democratic theorists and politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted” (p. ). in this study, i approach twitter as a series of publics and counterpublics that might aspire to resemble the public sphere described by mouffe, in the sense that twitter has the potential to provide public space for counterpublics to contest hegemonic publics. an agonistic approach to politics that values ongoing struggle is an intuitive and visceral fit to me, having engaged in political dialogue this study, i see these approaches as compatible because, as kelly ( ) has argued, fraser has similarly drawn on both deliberative and agonist traditions to theorize contestation within publics and counterpublics. within this approach, contestation and dialogue are critical to seeking justice for all in a democracy, but consensus is provisional and struggle is the status quo. to evaluate digital citizenship within this study, i turn to moonsun choi’s ( ) concept analysis of the term, as i have found choi’s description of digital citizenship best suited to my own understanding and purposes. choi ( ) found that four major categories compose digital citizenship: ethics, media and information literacy, political participation/engagement, and critical resistance. choi ( ) argues, “digital citizenship needs to be understood as a multidimensional and complex concept in connection with an interrelated but non-linear relationship with offline (place-based) civic lives” (p. ) and “being a good digital citizen is not just participating in pre-existing communities but also creating new and different types of communities and/or sometimes transforming the community, society, and world when social injustice happens online and offline” (p. ). moonsun choi’s ( ) work drawing out the elements of digital citizenship and close attention to the implications of digital engagement on citizenship is a compelling starting point for examine the practices in this study. i return to choi’s elements of digital citizenship in chapter five as i consider how to define the skills of participants. the lack of consensus about use of the term “digital citizenship” within policy, practice, and theory suggests that the concept is still open to exploration and innovation. i hope to contribute to the growing literature by considering how hashtag activism in an online public online. the experience of it much more often resembles struggle than rational consensus. might be a digital citizenship practice and examining how adults are able to learn this new set of digital citizenship capacities online. . . public pedagogy in evaluating the impact of the environment on the participants in the study, i will be drawing on the concept of “public pedagogy.” public pedagogy refers to the way media, popular culture, and daily interactions can act as informal education (giroux, ). this concept is imagined in several ways in the literature, but a common understanding is that schools are not the only site of education, and other environments can have educative effects through their structures (sandlin, schultz, & burdick, ). public pedagogy might be used to describe “learning in institutions such as museums, zoos, and libraries; in informal educational sites such as popular culture, media, commercial spaces, and the internet; and through figures and sites of activism, including public intellectuals and grassroots social movements” (sandlin, o’malley, & burdick, , p. ). use of the concept has grown in both cultural studies and adult education, but giroux's work has had a formative impact on the notion of public pedagogy (sandlin, schultz, & burdick, ). giroux's ( , , ) approach to public pedagogy can be closely associated with critical pedagogy theory, as his analysis of the concept is deeply infused with power relations and the emancipatory potential for education. it is increasingly common to consider various kinds of digital media a potential form of public pedagogy, which supports using the concept in this study to help understand how learning might occur through twitter use (andersson & olson, ; dennis, ; sandlin, o’malley, & burdick, ; sandlin, schultz, & burdick, ; trifonas, ). for example, in sandlin, schultz, and burdick’s handbook of public pedagogy ( ), video games (hayes & gee, ; trifonas, ), blogs (bernstein, ), and social media (freishtat, ; reid, ) are all among the sites evaluated as public pedagogy. twitter, in particular, does not appear to have been made a common object of close study as a site of public pedagogy, especially compared to facebook, but it a strong candidate. this study contributes to this growing area in the literature. my understanding of public pedagogy also draws on dewey’s approach to the environment’s role in learning, as discussed above. my research is seeking to understand how an environment that has not been curated by an educator might still become a learning environment. with these ideas in mind, questions of public pedagogy meet questions of how an online environment could teach social justice activism. recalling my interest in the potential for online spaces to generate a digital citizenship, the assumptions of my research project become clearer. i am invested in the possibility of a public pedagogy that might inform critical digital citizens. however, glen savage ( ) provides a word of warning regarding the concept of public pedagogy, based on the educational research literature. he reminds theorists to be explicit in naming what “public” a pedagogy might reach, differentiating this process from socialization, and recognizing both the regulatory and resistance potential in these pedagogies (savage, ). often, these steps are not taken, and the term becomes less meaningful, savage argues. therefore, in drawing conclusions, i must be clear who is participating in any theoretical “public pedagogy” and ensure that my argument is applied to a particular public. furthermore, although there is sometimes an assumption that mdl competencies can be created passively or intuited through simple exposure, jenkins and colleagues ( ) point out that there are potential barriers to this process that are commonly overlooked. first, the “participation gap” is created by unequal access to technology, experiences, and skills (jenkins et al., , p. ). second, the “transparency problem” occurs when digital processes are concealed from consumers (ibid.). the final barrier is what they call the “ethics challenge,” or the “breakdown of the traditional forms of professional training and socialization” that would prepare a young person to act and create in a digital community with integrity (ibid.). this is a valuable critique levelled at those who believe young people can adapt to new media without support, and one i kept in mind as i approached my research on the potential for a mdl learning process through the use of social media. it is important to consider the limitations to “learning by doing” compared to engaging with intentional or formal education. even if public pedagogy online can support the development of mdl competencies and offer another way to access mdl education, it is not a sufficient solution to the problem of how to ensure consistent and comprehensive access to mdl education to all people. . . community of practice & legitimate peripheral participation in addition to public pedagogy, i will also be making use of two connected concepts: “community of practice” and “legitimate peripheral participation,” as articulated by jean lave and etienne wenger ( ) in situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. these terms focus on learning through participation in social activity and evolution towards community membership, which has the potential to be a useful way to view my participants’ learning process. according to lave and wenger ( ), a community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice… the social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning. (p. ) however, lave and wenger ( ) clarify that the use of “community” in the phrase does not “imply necessarily co-presence, a well-defined identifiable group, or socially visible boundaries. it does imply participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means for their lives and for their communities” (p. ). a community of practice will have shared practices, mutual participation, common goals, and construct a collective culture and history (wenger, ). communities of practice created online have been termed by some “electronic networks of practice,” and typically feature a looser, more fluid membership, as participants are frequently distant and/or strangers (hildreth & kimble, ). “legitimate peripheral participation” is how lave and wenger have labeled the process of a new learner beginning to participate in a community of practice and increasing their mastery over time through participation in the “sociocultural practices of a community” (lave & wenger, , p. ). for lave and wenger, legitimate peripheral participation is central to the process of learning through practice and is a part of their evolving approach to the concept of apprenticeship. they write, “legitimate peripheral participation moves in a centripetal direction, motivated by its location in a field of mature practice. it is motivated by the growing use value of participation, and by newcomers’ desires to become full practitioners” (lave & wenger, , p. ). it should be noted that lave and wenger were not suggesting that there is a “centre” to a community of practice into which the newcomer might move from the periphery, but the newcomer could be said to be moving from partial participation to full participation in the community. as such, they theorize learning as not just acquiring skills, but also the construction of an identity as someone who is a part of a community. i apply these concepts more instrumentally to describe the learning processes of participants, as they are compatible with my theory of learning as a situated, social practice, as explained in the prior section. lave and wenger “locate learning… in the increased access of learners to participating in roles in expert performances,” and this is a helpful approach for a study that focuses on learning that is measured through its application (p. ). in addition, a number of scholars have applied the concept of the community of practice to learning online and networked twitter behaviours (gilbert, ; gunawardena et al., ; johnson, ; lewis & rush, ; wesely, ; xu, chiu, chen, & mukherjee, ) and, given that i am evaluating learning on the platform, i want to ensure that i can put this work in relation with this literature as well. . . publics and counterpublics twitter is widely considered a part of the public sphere, but conceptualizing twitter as creating the conditions for multiple, competing publics supports a richer understanding of that platform. the concept of “publics” deconstructs the traditional, singular “public sphere” in favour of viewing civic engagement and discourse as taking place in multiple spaces, including the concept of “counterpublics” as publics that resist dominant discourses (fraser, ; warner, ). given the expansive public space provided for discourse by the internet, it is difficult to imagine this arena as the single, shared, coherent public sphere that scholars might have traditionally imagined. nancy fraser ( ) presents an appealing alternative in “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,” where she argues that there are “a variety of ways of accessing public life and a multiplicity of public arenas,” and the bourgeois public sphere traditionally described by habermas is just one of many competing publics (p. ). within this framework, a dominant (bourgeois) public is placed alongside many other publics, and the sum total of public space is composed of many separate and overlapping publics. furthermore, for fraser, “counterpublics contest the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech” ( , p. ). scholars have been imagining how contemporary digital media has shifted opportunities to create and access publics, and i hope to contribute to this literature by considering what skills are necessary to access these digital publics and counterpublics on twitter (papacharissi, ; rambukkana, ; rogers, ). there is a growing support for treating hashtags as publics of various kinds (bruns & burgess, ; jackson & banaszczyk, ; kuo, ; papacharissi, ; rambukkana, ). in publics and counterpublics, warner ( ) helpfully defines a public as a “space of discourse organized by discourse,” which exists “by virtue of being addressed”; i believe that a twitter hashtag can function in this way (pp. - ). creating a hashtag (e.g., #blacklivesmatter) can make discursive space for a conversation and its attendant community of participants. furthermore, warner writes that, “when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise—over the conditions that bring them together as a public,” and a hashtag public negotiates the contested meaning of the discursive space through the use of the hashtag itself (warner, , p. ). even provisional consensus requires struggle and may not occur at all (kelly, ). it is further important to note that in warner's public, participating strangers “become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity,” and this process can be seen to occur when users participate in a hashtag and bridge the gaps from digital stranger to digital neighbour in the process (pp. - ). becoming an emergent social entity, however, is not to be equated with becoming a for an example of how activist hashtag counterpublics engage in a struggle for coherent meanings and inclusive consensus, see jackson & banaszczyk ( ) for their analysis of racial justice activist hashtags. community. on this point, bruns and burgess ( ) write: the extent to which any one group of participants in a hashtag may be described as a community in any real sense is a point of legitimate dispute. the term “community,” in our present context, would imply that hashtag participants share specific interests, are aware of, and are deliberately engaging with one another, which may not always be the case; indeed, at their simplest, hashtags are merely a search-based mechanism for collating all tweets sharing a specific textual attribute, without any implication that individual messages are responding to one another (this is most evident in the case of emotive hashtags such as #headdesk). on the other hand, there is ample evidence that in other cases, hashtags are used to bundle together tweets on a unified, common topic, and that the senders of these messages are directly engaging with one another, and/or with a shared text outside of twitter itself. (p. ) a hashtag public and a hashtag community are not synonymous. furthermore, bruns and burgess are right to avoid assuming that all hashtags share the same qualities and that they all act in the same way to create discourse or relationships between participants. hashtags are flexible linguistic tools, and research participants make use of them in many different ways to a variety of ends. although not all hashtags are effectively publics, i believe my analysis benefits from thoughtfully applying the concept of publics and counterpublics to hashtags. armed with this framework, the many swirling factions and subcultures of the internet begin to resemble a network of publics and counterpublics, rather than a chaotic monolith. . . hashtags & activism hashtags are worthy of consideration as concepts because they provide specific opportunities to understand communication on the platform and offer unique functionality that has been adopted by other social networks, as well as popular vocabulary. hashtags were first generated by users rather than twitter’s creators, emerging from the necessity to find information management strategies in the noisy environment of twitter (rambukkana, ). in , user chris messina publicly proposed using hashtags to signal a “channel,” based on the tradition of user-generated tags and irc (internet relay chat) channels, so that tweets could be meaningfully grouped for easier “contextualization, content filtering, and exploratory serendipity” (rambukkana, , p. ). according to zappavigna ( ), hashtags function as “social metadata,” appending additional meaning to the content to “assist in retrieving and understanding that content when it is stored or published” (p. ). hashtags also invoke an “imagined audience” and assume an awaiting conversation, because the original purpose of a hashtag is to add a tweet to a greater collection and increase the chances of sharing through establishing a way to locate a tweet (zappavigna, , p. ). that being said, zappavigna points out that a hashtag may not be self-explanatory to those who fall outside of the community it is addressing. hashtags communicate to a particular public, rather than all people. bruns and stieglitz ( ) write that hashtags might be created on an “ad hoc” basis, responding in the moment to a new development, might be “reoccurring,” repeatedly referring to the same event or phenomenon, or hashtags can be “promoted praetor hoc” (i.e., before an occurrence), often by organizations who are trying to establish how users reference an upcoming event (p. ). today, the question of what a hashtag does is made challenging by the flexibility of the practice. zappavigna ( ) writes that hashtags can be used to communicate, (a) the topic of the post, (b) association with an existing community practice, and/or (c) additional emotional commentary. bruns, moon, paul, and münch ( ) argue that the hashtags can be used for creating an “ad hoc public,” “a community of practice engaging in shared, possibly concurrent activities,” creating and spreading a (funny or serious) meme, or creating emotional emphasis, and they further acknowledge that a full investigation of other possibilities has yet to be completed. in their quantitative study of communication patterns, bruns and stieglitz ( ) identify two key, common behaviour patterns related to hashtag use. first, “gatewatching” occurs when users include a hashtag to facilitate identifying, sharing, and disseminating “situationally relevant information” with other users in the moment, especially during breaking news events (p. ). second, “audiencing” occurs when users include a hashtag to support a shared experience of an event and collect live commentary on the platform, exemplified in the popular practice of “live-tweeting” events as they occur (p. ). tsur and rappoport ( ) point out that hashtags will often provide valuable context, which was particularly important when there were only characters allowed and a user is liable to encounter a tweet in isolation from the larger conversation of which it is a part, literally or figuratively. according to bruns and burgess ( ), the ability of a hashtag to communicate with a “community of interest” on an ad hoc basis is a unique strength of this “communicative practice,” as it has the potential to bridge gaps between users who do not follow one another and create conversations that can span wider networks through forming a public (pp. , ). i hope to add to the growing literature examining the possibilities within these publics. a particular hashtag practice of interest in this study is what has been referred to as “hashtag activism,” which is activism mobilized on social media and marked by the shared use of a hashtagged word or phrase, like #metoo (clark, ; cumberbatch & trujillo-pagán, ; stache, ; vats, ; yang, ). this form of activism is particularly vulnerable to being labeled as “slacktivism,” which is a derisive term for passive and/or performative gestures that do not effect social change but allow people to look and/or feel like they are engaging in activism (cabrera, matias, & montoya, ; christensen, ). however, christensen ( ) argues that online activism does not appear to substitute for alternative offline actions, and may actually reinforce other activism, and so concerns that tweeting is diluting the power of movements are likely uncalled for and may actually be missing the point. in general, twitter has been established as a potential tool for activism, as it is closely associated with prominent contemporary movements, such as occupy wall street, black lives matter, the indignados, as well as moments of significant social upheaval such as the arab spring, where substantial news and discussion occurred on twitter (murthy, ). for activists, twitter might function as an opportunity to be heard, spread a message, coordinate and mobilize around actions, hold power accountable (particularly through sharing recorded video), and show solidarity (murthy, ). many scholars have begun evaluating twitter hashtags for their potential to contribute to social justice activism (berridge & portwood-stacer, ; bonilla & rosa, ; booten, ; clark, ; cumberbatch & trujillo-pagán, ; eagle, ; gleason, ; olson, ; stache, ; vats, ; yang, ). however, this work is typically focused on the impact, meaning, or media representations of the activism taking place on twitter, assisted by specific hashtags, rather than how participants in such activism were able to take part at all. it is important to note that evaluating the effectiveness of twitter or hashtag activism is not within the scope of this study. determining the overall effectiveness of any given activist tactic is typically challenging, given the many possible metrics for measuring success, differing circumstances in which the tactic might be applied, and multiple co-mingling strategies, making attribution challenging. in addition, in many cases hashtag activism is arguably too recent to have accomplished its intended goals, if it were even expected to be able to do so. for example, participants cited the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as an effective hashtag, but it has not ended state-sanctioned violence against black people, so what do the participants mean by effective? this will be explored in chapter four. my stake in addressing hashtag activism with research participants, however, is in understanding how they view the practice, rather than determining the objective effect of hashtag activism as an activist or political tactic. in a sense, i am interested in the origin story, rather than the phenomenon, of how twitter users learned to use the twitter platform to advocate with hashtags. to do this, i will be focused specifically on the hashtags that are making a claim for justice and advocating directly within the text of the hashtag, such as #yesallwomen, #blacklivesmatter, or #nodapl, which i call “activist hashtags.” according to young ( ), injustice takes the form of oppression and domination, in various forms, and “when people say a rule or cultural meaning is wrong and should be changed, they are usually making a claim about justice” and so activist hashtags might take on a broad range of issues, from wide-scale social issues to problems of misrepresentation in a particular news story to gentrification of a community (p. ). although activism on twitter takes many forms and may not use hashtags at all, this study focuses on a particular strategy as an example of the wider possibilities. . . conceptualizing next steps by outlining these concepts, i hope to provide a clear picture of where this study sits in the greater web of ideas. media and digital literacy, digital citizenship, public pedagogy, communities of practice, publics (and counterpublics), and hashtag activism are used to analyze and understand participant experiences learning to use activist hashtags on twitter. because my topic cuts across subject areas, i believe that the interdisciplinary nature of my research allows me to learn from researchers in different fields and combine concepts across disciplines for greater understanding overall. it is worth reminding readers that for critical realists, concepts are also theories about the world they are attempting to describe (danermark et al., ). as a result, concepts can be taken up pragmatically as they are useful to describe data, demi-regularities, mechanisms, or other features, and re-imagined according to new theories of the world. in chapter five, i will return to the concepts presented here to theorize how they relate to my findings. . situating the researcher finally, given my understanding of learning as situated, influenced by context and formed by experience, it is important to situate myself within this research. this study, like all research, is a learning process. my learning will be informed not just by the literature i review and the research methods i choose, but also by my own perspective and lived experiences. inevitably, my point of view is a lens that i use to see any data and, in order to transparently describe all of the methods i have used to interpret information and reach conclusions, i must also provide a description of my positionality. i was born in , and so the world wide web has always existed during my life time. although i reject the premise of the “digital native” (prensky, ; see bennett, maton, & kervin, ) that might assume i have a “natural” ability regarding digital technology simply due to my age, i do approach my research from the position of someone who is comfortable living, learning, and working online, and this does influence my perspective. the most basic influence is the desire to initiate and complete this research at all, particularly as this study assumes that one might learn transferable skills within an informal digital environment. my belief that informal learning could be a key tool for generating knowledge of rapidly changing digital tools and techniques is based on my own experience of navigating digital space. in addition, my experience developing critical consciousness of media has been influenced by access to online resources. given my own history, i hoped to get insight into how common my own experiences might be. research inevitably becomes a personal project, but the impetus for this research is immediately personal, arising from a curiosity about the processes that i engage with on a daily basis and the desire to compare my own experiences with those of others. of course, it is important to acknowledge that reliable, continuous internet access and the skills to use it remain privileges. my position as a white, educated, settler canadian who has grown up with the means and skills to access the internet throughout my life, generally through a computer in my home, puts me in an advantageous position relative to many people. in essence, i am on the privileged side of the “digital divide,” a concept popularly used to describe the unequal access to the internet, technology, and digital skills (van dijk, ). such access throughout my life has given me the opportunity and inclination to take on digital research. further motivation for this project has been provided by participating in both activist and twitter communities since . i have been a part of feminist activist communities online and in vancouver, bc for almost a decade, and for much of this time i have been investing my time in educating youth regarding social justice issues. activist hashtags were first brought to my attention through feminist hashtags that i encountered as i used my personal twitter account. although i use twitter for a variety of purposes, my main focus has been to continue to gather information that is relevant to me as a feminist and citizen. until i began this study, however, my twitter use was infrequent, sometimes stopping for months at a time. this experience in activism and on twitter has provided some sense of being an “insider” when speaking with some participants, but i have been very interested to learn more about how other people use twitter quite differently from myself and i have enjoyed seeing new sides of activism on twitter that i had never heard about. as i consider knowledge to be relational and socially constructed, i am aware that my own relationship to my research is incorporated into any findings, regardless of any intention to present only the “facts.” transparency about my positionality is intended to locate my situated knowledge (haraway, ) for readers and allow for greater accountability. as my perspective will shape the focus and outcomes of my research, i believe my best strategy for accounting for this influence is to be clear about its presence. while i cannot pretend to begin with a blank slate, i can attempt to transparently establish my positionality, so that others might trust my findings based on their own analysis of my methods, understanding the assumptions i make, investments i hold, and the limitations of my lens. chapter : charting the course of study having established my philosophical approach within my theoretical framework, i proceed to describing the concrete facets of research design and the procedures that i followed in collecting and analyzing data. within this section, i detail my research design and then walk through my procedures to provide a clear map of my journey through recruiting participants, collecting data, and completing analysis. in the process, i also detail the data collected and provide a picture of the participants who took part in the study. this chapter should give the necessary background to understand the sections to follow where i present and discuss my findings. it may be useful to first return to my research questions. my main research question asks how adults learn the media and digital literacy competencies to use activist hashtags on twitter. however, several questions arise in trying to make sense of the first: • what media and digital literacy competencies are necessary to use activist hashtags on twitter? • could the set of skills under examination be better described as digital citizenship practices? • what motivates learning to use activist hashtags on twitter? • how do users conceptualize the practice of using activist hashtags? • what mechanisms allow or enable learning to use activist hashtags on twitter? to answer my research questions, i completed content analysis of twitter archive data and transcripts of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine participants. below, i describe the approach and procedures completed to ensure that the two methods of data collection, archives and interviews, were complementary. . research design rationale critical realism does not prescribe a specific kind of research design and, in fact, often embraces the necessity for using multiple methods, allowing for a “both-and” approach that rejects methodological “purity” while still considering compatibility, which danermark, ekström, jakobsen, and karlsson ( ) call “critical methodological pluralism” (p. ). in light of this view, this research is designed as a qualitative, exploratory study that incorporates two complementary methods under the umbrella of content analysis. content analysis, broadly defined, is a set of research techniques intended to develop systematic, credible inferences from texts (drisko & maschi, ). this is typically done through the process of coding—that is, attributing a segment of text (unit of analysis) with a specific value or meaning (code) (flick, ). content analysis necessitates a transparent account of how these inferences are made, as interpretations of text are not self-evident or universal by nature (drisko & maschi, ). tools such as code books or analytical frameworks are commonly used to consistently establish and provide rationale (flick, ). there are many different, related strategies for coding, and i outline my particular strategy as i describe my procedures below. using content analysis, “conclusions can be drawn about the communicator, the message or text, the situation surrounding its creation—including the sociocultural background of the communication—and/or the effect of the message,” making it a versatile approach (white & marsh, , p. ). content analysis can also traditionally be applied to a it may also be worth noting that case studies are frequently embraced by critical realist scholars, placing my exploratory study within the tradition of analyzing social mechanisms through close examination of a narrow data set (edwards, o’mahoney, & vincent, ). although frequently considered only a method, content analysis can be considered a research methodology itself (pfeil & zaphiris, ; small, ; white & marsh, ). wide variety of texts. because it is well-suited even for data that were not generated for research purposes, content analysis is a useful approach for understanding all of the different kinds of data in this study (drisko & maschi, ). content analysis is quite compatible with the process of critical realist research as described by fletcher ( ) and danermark, ekström, jakobsen and karlsson ( ). they write that critical realist research begins with empirical description where demi-regularities, trends or patterns within a data set, are identified and then a researcher must consider what casual mechanisms might generate the demi-regularities (danermark et al., ; fletcher, ). next, a researcher would go through a “process of abduction—also known as theoretical redescription” where the researcher will analyze the data through the lens of concepts (fletcher, , p. ). braun and clarke ( ) describe coding in generally similar terms, without the terminology of critical realism. in their process, data is first summarized descriptively, and empirical features of the data are captured, following by analysis of these initial codes for themes at a more abstract level that have explanatory power (braun & clarke, ). critical realism research frequently includes interviewing and qualitative coding, but the literature does not present a strict method for coding. later in the chapter, i discuss in greater detail how i approached this task. overall, i have chosen content analysis for its flexibility, its capacity for addressing large data sets, and its application in similar studies. this preference for pragmatic methods and flexibility is typical of critical realist research (edwards, o’mahoney, & vincent, ). as this study is exploratory, i wanted to employ methods that offered me as much room to maneuver as possible. content analysis provides the flexibility necessary to approach analysis from several angles, as both quantitative and qualitative strategies might be employed (drisko & maschi, ). although my study is essentially qualitative in nature, because i am interested in describing a situated learning process, the amount of twitter archive data also lends itself to some quantitative description. i am interested in patterns (or, demi-regularities), and i consider repetition and shared language to be important, so elements of descriptive statistics are useful to understand the wide trends in the archival data. however, the logic of my approach and strategy of analysis remains consistently qualitative overall. coding and thematic analysis of the data as text add greater depth than any numerical summary i compose, and i did not complete a statistical analysis, as one might in a quantitative study. whether counting or coding, my work will be characterized by qualitative aims to “turn the world into a series of representations” as part of “attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (denzin & lincoln, , p. ). content analysis is also useful for its ability to manage large amounts of data, particularly by reducing data into manageable pieces via a system of coding (schreier, ). together, study participants have produced , tweets over a period of a decade. a procedure that focuses on reducing archive data is key. twitter also arguably lends itself to this type of analysis, as many of its own internal data organization strategies can be re-purposed within content analysis, such as the hashtags, retweets, and mentions that show up in the content of a tweet. i was able to code structurally to identify specific twitter behaviours quite easily. interview data required a different procedural strategy that focused on analyzing themes, but content analysis proved to be it is worth distinguishing the capacity for content analysis to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative techniques into one method from truly mixed methods research that encompasses separate, distinct qualitative and quantitative studies under a greater research umbrella (drisko & maschi, ). i will not be conducting a mixed methods study, but i will draw on a variety of techniques available to me under the banner of content analysis. a useful approach for summarizing, analyzing, and understanding both data sets. the systematic approach of content analysis and its acknowledgement of the iterative nature of data analysis review also appealed to me, because it incorporates revision within the strategy of inquiry itself. content analysis has frequently been used as a methodology in internet-mediated research that focuses on text generated online, from blogs to message boards (de wever, schellens, valcke, & van keer, ; garrison, anderson, & archer, ; gay, pena-shaff, & martin, ; hara, bonk, & angeli, ; hine, ; pena-shaff & nicholls, ; stacey, ). in the early s, scholars like robin mason ( ) and france henri ( ) called for an increase in qualitative content analysis, in particular, for analyzing computer-mediated communication in online learning environments. henri’s ( ) work has been important in providing a preliminary framework for content analysis of these digital learning spaces, and other scholars like hara, bonk, angeli ( ) and pena-shaff, martin, and gay ( ) have continued developing content analysis as a tool for this work. since that time, there has been a consistent trend in using content analysis for evaluating learning, although a preference for quantitative features appears to have continued into the s (gerbic & stacey, ). however, while these studies offer a strong rationale for using content analysis in my own study, their coding frameworks are poorly suited to twitter as a learning environment and the evaluation of informal learning. the processes and frameworks for using content analysis to examine conversational environments like message boards or distance education platforms cannot be directly applied to twitter archives because this data is quite different. rather than following threads of conversations, twitter archives capture only one person’s activity, and tweets are often not sequential in any meaningful way. furthermore, these prior studies typically occurred in digital spaces where students were purposefully engaged in learning, making indicators of learning much more directly visible. therefore, there is limited use in applying the approaches of studies that focus their attention on online learning in these spaces, except to understand the advantages of content analysis as a methodology for analyzing computer- mediated communication in general. regarding twitter and content analysis specifically, other scholars have fortunately provided models that are better suited to the kind of data i am reviewing, which can provide some guidance for my research (bruns & burgess, ; bruns & stieglitz, ; bruns & stieglitz, ; gao, lui, & zhang, ; rinaldo, tapp, & laverie, ). for example, tamara small ( ) offers a useful framework in, “what the hashtag: a content analysis of canadian politics on twitter,” as she examines the impact of #cdnpoli on the dissemination of information through a content analysis of tweets that included the hashtag during . her clear description of her method provides a helpful starting point, but her focus differs quite significantly from this study of learning processes rather than analyzing a digital artefact (the hashtag itself), and so significant departures from her work were necessary. this is essentially the challenge of interdisciplinary work that educational researchers often encounter, requiring that we learn from several fields of research to create our frameworks. there are a growing number of examples of similar research regarding how twitter hashtag activity impacts social movements, protest, and political action around the world (berridge & portwood-stacer, ; bonilla & rosa, ; booten, ; clark, ; cumberbatch & trujillo-pagán, ; eagle, ; gleason, ; olson, ; rambukkana, ; stache, ; vats, ; yang, ). benjamin gleason ( ) provides a strong model for using a hashtag to explore informal learning, as he evaluated the capacity to learn about a social movement through twitter. using a case study that incorporated a mixed-methods approach, including descriptive statistics and content analysis, gleason found that twitter provided “multiple opportunities for participation in the occupy movement…which may help learners becoming more informed, engaged citizens” (p. ). furthermore, he specifically identified competencies that were required to engage in such a manner, including navigating twitter hashtags, information management, and a “learning mindset” (gleason, , p. ). gleason’s examination of the learning process, however, was conducted from a first-person point of view, analyzing his own learning through content analysis, while my study seeks to understand the learning of others. my study shares many of gleason’s methods and questions but includes a set of interviews to provide additional perspective beyond what content analysis of twitter archives can offer. it should be noted that interviews are less frequently used in the literature i have reviewed, although they do appear (see stephansen & couldry, ). there is a growing interest in using interviews to support text-based content analysis to get a more detailed picture of online behaviours (bruns & stieglitz, ; pfeil & zaphiris, ). researchers working in understanding student learning online have specifically recommended that content analysis of posts be paired with retrospective interviews to allow for greater insight into learning (hara, bonk, & angeli, ). interviews pose a greater challenge to obtain than publicly available in contrast, bonilla and rosa ( ) offer an ethnographic approach to hashtag activism research by treating twitter as a field site as they analyze the #ferguson phenomenon as a "political temporality" (p. ). they highlight the semiotic significance of hashtags beyond existing as a "filing system," arguing that hashtags create a "particular interpretative frame" that "locates texts within a specific conversation" by more directly indicating the meaning of a tweet (bonilla & rosa, , p. ). their close reading of the #ferguson hashtag provides strong background in how hashtags might create and politicize a public. although an ethnography is out of the scope of my project, their approach is broadly informative for projects looking at hashtag activism. twitter messages, which may explain some of this discrepancy. i believe that it is important, however, to allow twitter users an opportunity to elaborate on their experiences of using hashtags. although a survey might be more convenient for a sample that is distant and diverse, my questions about twitter competencies practiced through engagement with activist hashtags required fulsome answers, particularly if participants had not thoughtfully considered their involvement prior to being contacted. in addition, capturing experiential data on informal learning often requires “an initial orienting process” for study participants by researchers because of the tacit and casual acquisition of knowledge; without such guidance, “most people do not register much of the informal learning they do until they have a chance to reflect on it” (livingstone, , p. ). after having completed the interviews, i can attest to the benefits of interviewing over surveys for informal learning, as i observed how participants would come to realize how much they had learned as we spoke. interviews also allowed for more flexible responses, greater exploration of issues, and made room for unexpected answers in a way that survey questions do not. achieving long, deeply considered answers to questions on a survey is possible, but i believe unlikely in the circumstances of my study. for many participants, the interview process was the first time that they critically considered their own behaviour on twitter. without a responsive dialogue and probing questions, reflections would likely have been much more surface-level. critical realists use interviews to understand both the interpretations and social context of interview participants, so that they might understand their experience and how it is structurally situated (smith & elger, ). the interview is also the juncture where researcher theory and interviewee expertise meet (smith & elger, ). critical realism approaches the interview as an interactive dialogue where knowledge and meaning are mutually constructed by both interviewer and interviewee throughout the process, which is a view shared by constructionists (smith & elger, ). however, critical realists recognize that “accounts need to be subjected to critical scrutiny not only in their own terms but also in relation to other sources, including observation, documents, and other interviews,” and my research design follows this logic during both data collection and analysis (smith & elger, , p. ). for example, i used twitter archive data as a type of stimulus text during the interviews to create a more concrete context for their accounts. by connecting interviewee descriptions of practices with their demonstrated practices on twitter, the interview data we co-construct was influenced by interviewee perspective, interviewer theories, and documented evidence. through the combination of these factors, i hoped to “generate situated accountings” of how interviewees learned to use activist hashtags (roulston, , p. ). finally, my research design is significantly informed by the unique challenges of researching informal learning, particularly tacit knowledge that is often acquired in the process of everyday practices. livingstone ( ) notes that direct observation and in-depth interviewing can both be useful to get in touch with “previously taken-for-granted learning processes” and case studies are common within informal learning scholarship (p. ). by incorporating both observation (via archives) and interviewing, i hope to be able to begin to fill in the picture of how the learning process occurred for my participants. . ethical considerations and concerns ethical considerations must be a part of every research process. although i seek to be aware of and address the potential negative impacts of my work, i also consider ethics to be an ongoing responsibility. for example, while i received ethical approval from the university of british columbia behavioural research ethics board to complete this study according to proposed procedures, i remained vigilant for ethical challenges and nuances that might arise during and even after the study. content analysis itself presents some challenges, as its focus on a systematic reduction of data to concepts is necessarily fraught. coding requires interpretation, and i recognize that the way that i make meaning of data will not be universally-held, despite my best efforts to provide rationale. i hope to avoid a narrow view of the data by collecting archive data and conducting interviews, which can provide insight into the archive data and serve as a partial check to my own interpretation. i also purposefully put the two data sets in conversation during analysis. by recognizing that coding and identifying themes is an iterative process, and incorporating points of reflection into the research design, i hope to mitigate some of this limitation. however, it is inescapable that my interpretation will shape the conclusions i reach. therefore, i think that it is important to recognize that this study will only present a partial vision of this learning phenomenon and that participant voice will be significantly muffled by my own analysis. regarding interview ethics, i have done my best to enter interviews without assumptions about participant experiences and be aware that these conversations sometimes inspire strong emotions or reactions from the participants. while this study “only” focuses on experiences of learning about a specific social media practice, it is not necessarily a light topic, and twitter experiences can be fraught, particularly for people who use the platform for activism. i anticipated that my participants may have had negative encounters on this platform, particularly if they had achieved the notoriety that often accompanies a trending activist hashtag. in addition, the activist hashtags themselves can arise from difficult circumstances, such as the #metoo hashtag, and i took this seriously as i asked participants about their hashtag use and motivations. my questions were particularly open when requesting information about these topics, and i let the participant determine the depth of disclosures. because i was addressing potentially challenging topics, i was prepared to be patient, take breaks when necessary, and i had resources ready if they needed more support, although no participants required them. i did ensure that i communicated that i understood the gravity of disclosures when they were made and limited my questions to what was necessary for the research, which did not require exploration of their personal history beyond twitter use. i was able to develop a rapport with participants through email correspondence and conversation prior to questioning, which allowed for more sensitive handling of topics. through these interactions, i could establish a more comfortable dynamic where mutual humanity was recognized, rather than engaging just from the role of “researcher.” the nature of the research involving social media data makes additional vigilance important because there are fewer models for how to proceed. qualitative research, in particular, is still finding its legs, although it is quickly expanding (poynter, ). digital or virtual methods continue to be a site of research innovation (hine ; poynter, ; rogers, ). as technology is shifting quickly, norms and understandings remain under construction, so questions of identifying public versus private speech, how potential subjects should be approached, and how to best maintain relationships with research participants are all still being answered (golder, ahmed, norman, & booth, ). while this means that i must be vigilant to ethical issues and clearly document the reasoning behind practices that are not yet tradition, the possibilities for digital research are also exciting (markham & buchanan, ). i hope my study contributes to the literature to help shape how this kind of work is approached. in general, practicing confidentiality was important to be able to assure participants that they could reflect on their experiences openly. by removing identifying information from interviews and tweets, i am attempting to reassure participants that sharing their learning experiences will not result in being exposed to (additional) potential scrutiny or harassment. to achieve confidentiality, i avoid quoting directly from twitter data if the sentence(s) could be entered into a google search and identify a participant. while this kind of deanonymization might seem outlandish, there have been documented cases where people have gone to the trouble of identifying anonymized research participants by tracing social media content (golder, ahmed, norman, & booth, ). as a result, i have generally analyzed and presented twitter data in the aggregate for patterns, rather than a close reading of specific tweets. according to golder, ahmed, norman, and booth ( ), this strategy aligns with how study participants would prefer their social media be treated. in their survey of social media research ethics, golder and associates found that respondents were generally comfortable with aggregate social media data being used in research but found that opinions differed greatly on using quotes from publicly available social media. as in all studies, it was important to explain and address any potential risks with participating in the study and gain participants’ informed consent. given the degree of literacy engaging in english-speaking twitter requires, i felt comfortable relying on conventional consent forms and ongoing conversation to get informed consent. in forms and during interviews, i did ensure that i was clear with participants about the intention, scope, and data collection involved in the research. i wanted participants to understand their role and contribution to the study before speaking with me. i also offered to provide transcripts to participants to review prior to their use in the study. several participants took me up on this offer, but of those who reviewed their transcripts, only one provided minor clarifications. no participants withdrew their consent during the process. researchers have not reached a consensus regarding consent for use of publicly available social media data, but there is an increased public interest in ensuring active informed consent, even if terms of service or other methods might officially allow for data collection (golder, ahmed, norman, & booth, ). i chose to seek explicit informed consent for both interview and twitter archive data. for some participants the notion that a researcher would be searching through their twitter history may be unremarkable, as the data is publicly accessible anyway, and several were quite aware of their tweets being used by others already. however, my scrutiny may also have felt very invasive, as a twitter archive potentially covers a substantial amount of information about the participant. as the publicness of social media is continuously being re- negotiated, i am interested in preserving the greatest portion of privacy i can for participants. to this end, i requested that participants provide their twitter archive by exporting it from the platform themselves and sending it to me. although qualitative software packages like nvivo do offer features that allow me to collect data directly from the web, i was not comfortable “data scraping” (extracting data from websites) when i had an alternative procedure available that would provide participants with more control over their data and more awareness of its collection. if a user had wanted, they could have edited the data that they submitted to me, as these files can be manipulated. thus, my procedure made it clear what information would be under my consideration, because i would not be collecting their data in an ongoing way, as i might have been able to do with data scraping. in addition, the twitter api (application processing interface) provides much less control over what data is collected and often limits how far into the past a researcher might review. in this way, the user and the researcher had more control over data collection when it was controlled by the user rather than software (bruns & stieglitz, ). while much similar research has used automated data scraping to collect social media data (bruns, moon, paul, & münch, ; gleason, ), i have preferred to avoid this strategy when possible to have the highest possible ethical standard. . data collection this study is composed of two sets of complementary data, twitter archives and interviews, collected from nine participants. these two methods of data collection were chosen to seek some degree of “methodological triangulation,” where multiple forms of data are used together to support understanding a single shared aspect, like one might use cross streets to find an intersection (roulston, , p. ). using both archives and interviews also gave me the opportunity to see a longitudinal view of a participant’s twitter use, and potentially understand a bigger picture of the strategies at play. relying on interviewees to remember fleeting interactions or long-ago social media updates seemed unrealistic, but to analyze the data without the context provided by the rich descriptions available in interviewing would leave me to only guess at intentions, meanings, and goals of participants. in the following sections i explain the process and rationale for participant recruitment and selection, summarize the data collected, and then describe the data collection and analysis procedures. bruns and stieglitz ( ) helpfully note that twitter data collection is always limited by what the twitter platform collects and makes available. while i was able to collect certain information more reliably by asking participants to download their complete archive, twitter’s records are not without fault and features like emojis in tweets often created errors when exported. no data collection strategy is perfect. . . selecting a sample choosing the selection criteria for my participants presented challenges. the study scope is rather expansive, and to narrow it required putting aside interesting questions. for example, because i am dealing with knowledge acquisition regarding technology, one might anticipate that age is an influential factor in how technology is taken up. i would be deeply interested in investigating the practices of youth, but this group ought to be examined as its own particular case, and twitter is not the most meaningful platform for young people at this time (anderson & jiang, ). therefore, i limited my study participants to those over the age of nineteen. another important criterion for inclusion was that participants must communicate in english on twitter. this is a significant limitation to my study, but i did not feel prepared to take on the expense of translation for substantial data sets and, perhaps more to the point, i do not possess the cultural knowledge that would be necessary to make sense of political conversations relevant to many non-english speaking groups. even within english, i was often faced with the limits of my cultural knowledge and had to research meanings. given the scope of my master’s thesis, i thought that it was reasonable to limit my participants to english speakers, although i acknowledge the loss that this presents. the processes that i describe may be quite different for people who speak other languages, given related cultural affordances. interestingly, two study participants who speak english as an additional language post exclusively in english on twitter; the forces behind that decision were unfortunately out of the scope of this study, but i would encourage other researchers to explore language use on the platform and how that impacts twitter experiences. to capture the necessary data about the media and digital literacy (mdl) learning required to use activist hashtags, participants did have to have some twitter archive history. initially, i imagined that a minimum of ten tweets would be necessary to gain a sense of how users interacted with the platform. however, after struggling to find participants who had low activity on twitter, i did accept a participant, @mary, who had only five tweets in her history. as a result, i leaned more on her interview to understand her twitter use and her understanding of activist hashtags. however, the smaller archives did prove to be easier to analyze than those that spanned tens of thousands of tweets, which was a challenge i did not fully understand until i was faced with it. i also required that participants had used an activist hashtag, as this was the practice under examination, but i did make a further exception for @mary. i did so on the basis that her short twitter history did include tweets that were participating in advocacy, which was a behaviour i considered aligned with activist hashtags, and i was also interested in speaking to someone who might be able to provide the experience of having chosen not to participate in a hashtag. however, upon interviewing this participant, @mary revealed that she had participated in an activist hashtag on facebook, #metoo, and so she was not so much of an exception to this criterion as i had anticipated. to create potential points of comparison and capture different experiences on the platform, i focused on recruiting participants who used twitter differently. i aimed to recruit three participants who tweeted at least once a day, three participants who tweeted at least once a week, and then three participants who tweeted once a month or less. to measure this, i divided their total numbers of tweets by the number of months they had been active on twitter to get a rate of activity. i also asked participants to self-report their twitter use, as tweets are not always reflective of time spent using twitter. to ensure that i had participants who fell within these categories, i pre-screened participants via their public twitter profiles, considering especially their activity in , and used a preliminary survey. i also recruited the originator of an activist hashtag to hear specifically about that experience as well. within this cross-section of twitter behaviour, i hoped to be able to draw comparisons between behaviours on the platform within my sample. the selection criteria also implicitly include “those people who are interested in participating in my study” and “those people who are accessible to me.” among these candidates, i aimed to recruit people who could describe different potential trajectories for learning to use activist hashtags. as a small, qualitative study, my goal was not to draw a sample statistically representative of the very broad community who uses activist hashtags (emmel, ). instead, i focused on selecting diverse participants who had the relevant experience and inclination to help explore the potential learning strategies available. . . . recruitment strategies: challenges and procedures during the process of the study, i attempted two different recruitment strategies for participants. initially, i proposed to recruit ten people by choosing an activist hashtag, such as #weneeddiversebooks, and contacting twitter users who had participated in that hashtag and met the selection criteria. in this way, i could be assured that candidates would have participated in the relevant practice under investigation and that the procedure allowed for randomized selection of twitter users and limited bias in the selection process. under this plan, i would set an interval and contact every fourth user who participated in the hashtag and met my selection while this strategy would offer a randomized selection from the pool of hashtag participants, it is worth emphasizing that this sample of users would unlikely be reflective of a randomly chosen sample of twitter users in general. users who are activated to practice activism on twitter are a subset of overall users; people advocating for any particular issue are an even smaller subset. criteria until i reached a total of ten research participants. this purposive sampling was intended to include random twitter users who have diverse but relevant twitter experiences. users who were contacted for recruitment were approached through twitter direct messages or (when possible) through contact information available in their user profiles. potential participants were given information about the study and fourteen days to respond to my inquiry before i would seek out a new candidate and assume they were uninterested in participating. as a small honorarium and a minor incentive to participate, study participants were all offered a $ gift certificate. the amount was low enough to avoid the risk of coercion for the vast majority of twitter users but provided a little motivation to reply to my initial contact. as part of the process, i needed to choose an activist hashtag. to do this, i used the following criteria: • the originator of the hashtag was interested in participating in my study, as i hoped to include a hashtag creator in my sample. • the hashtag referred to an issue that did not target a narrow identity group. this criterion was meant to avoid a sample that was pre-determined to disproportionately include people from a particular identity group. for example, the twitter users for the activist hashtag #shoutyourabortion were predominantly women. to maximize the chances of a as i was approaching random twitter users and reviewing their profiles prior to contact, i also reserved the right to forego contacting a user to whom i did not feel safe providing my contact information. this judgement was based on my own familiarity with the phenomenon of “bots,” programmed accounts, and “trolls,” abusive users who often use anonymous accounts created to prank, harass and/or threaten other twitter users. as i did not want to become targeted by these kinds of users, i did not approach potential research participants who i believed participate in twitter in this way. although it would be of interest to learn how trolls might learn to use activist hashtags, i believe that would be a separate project and i did not wish to put my own safety or well-being at risk. diverse sample, i chose a hashtag that was not similarly focused. • at least one hundred twitter users participated in the hashtag over time. i did not need the hashtag to be widely popular (“trending”), but i needed sufficient users to be able to recruit ten research participants for my study. i was able to successfully contact the creator of a popular activist hashtag and recruit her into the study, which was very fortunate. however, when i proceeded to try to contact twitter users who had participated in this hashtag, this stage of the process proved much more difficult. while the activist hashtag was extremely popular and well-recognized, providing many possible candidates for participation, my messages to users received nearly no responses. as months passed, key obstacles to this recruitment process became clear. first, random online recruitment presents a practical challenge, as users are generally not motivated to respond to random inquiries, even with a small monetary incentive. without shared interest, community, or network, recruitment messages are likely to be interpreted as like spam. in fact, my strategy of sending direct messages to twitter users who were not mutual followers was considered rather bold or even inappropriate by some, much like approaching someone in the street might be. i did not realize this at the beginning of the study, as i had not yet spent considerable time on twitter, although i had been a user since . this realization made me understand how my recruitment messages might be coming across, and why i was not receiving responses. furthermore, the ease of recruiting a hashtag creator is not representative of how easy it would be to recruit a random twitter user. the hashtag creator had been interested in speaking with me on the topic of the study because she was invested in the work that she was doing. therefore, it was intuitive for her to consider a study of her behaviour to be relevant to her interests and worthy of her time. when i did recruit other participants, it would usually be because they were also likely to be interested in the outcome of the study, at least nominally. if i approached candidates who did not value the study for their own reasons, the recruitment pitch was not very compelling, even with a monetary incentive. finally, this study is interested in participants who also use twitter infrequently. however, in a random sampling of twitter users of #activist (for example), frequent twitter users are highly represented, due to their activity, and infrequent twitter users are rarely encountered. without directly pursuing this type of twitter user, it is difficult to recruit an infrequent twitter user. furthermore, infrequent users of twitter are likely not to even encounter the recruitment message, as they must sign on to the platform to receive it, and they rarely do so. it was important to pursue twitter users with different usage patterns and relationships to the platform, as it is reasonable to consider this a factor in their learning process and skill development, which is the focus of the study. therefore, the study could not simply sample high frequency users on twitter, but these are the users to be mostly encountered in a random sample. although the messages did receive some interest and one interview had been conducted with the hashtag creator, it was necessary to pursue alternative recruitment strategies in order to achieve the necessary data to continue pursuing this project in a timely manner. to address these obstacles, the new recruitment process was adjusted to also include publicly requesting participants via two additional strategies: digital outreach and third-party recruitment. in digital outreach, i used social media posts and social media advertisements, including a recruitment video (see appendix a for materials). the university of british columbia behavioural research ethics board has itself drawn up guidelines for recruitment using social networking sites in response to increasing research recruitment happening over social media, providing a strong precedent for this strategy. by posting and advertising on twitter and facebook, the message was able to reach potential participants who were active in these spheres and therefore likely to be familiar with activist hashtags. for example, the #metoo hashtag was being used on facebook as well as twitter during the time of this recruitment, demonstrating that facebook could also be a good place to recruit. in addition, i could reach people outside of my immediate social circle and keep the pool of participants open to those who might not share my particular position. to support public understanding of the study and give context for the video and advertisements, a facebook page, twitter account, and a ubc blog were created where potential participants could get more information or be re-directed. text of these pages was limited and consistent across various platforms. however, posting on social media would again encounter the difficulty that infrequent users would be unlikely to be exposed to the participation request or recruitment advertisement. therefore, i also made use of third-party recruitment as an approach for contacting potential participants. i provided a third-party recruitment letter to acquaintances who might serve as gatekeepers for additional social networks and would be willing to pass on a message to others. through word-of-mouth, i was more likely to locate potential participants who could not be reached online due to the nature of their twitter use and who might be interested in participating. because of the new recruitment strategies, potential participants had to be vetted to determine if they fit the selection criteria, as i could no longer assume that they had participated in a relevant hashtag, and no recruitment letter could realistically be comprehensive in listing qualifying hashtags. therefore, i also created a preliminary survey that would be provided to potential participants to ensure that they met the selection criteria. upon receiving the preliminary survey, i could review their twitter feed to ensure that they did use activist hashtags, if necessary. all potential participants who received information about the study through a third-party recruiter or advertisement were directed to contact me if interested in participating. when potential participants got in touch, they were provided additional information about the study, including a consent form and the preliminary survey, and they were given fourteen days to confirm interest in participating and return the survey. at that time, they were asked to sign the consent form and return it via email within seven days. as this is a small exploratory study, a comprehensive or representative sample is unlikely using any recruitment method. therefore, the final recruitment strategy focused on simply reaching those who would be interested in taking part and prioritized including those people who represent a variety of twitter experiences. participants were predominantly recruited through third-party recruitment. while a randomized sample would arguably be the most defensible, and online recruitment has opened up possibilities to reach more potential participants, i found that nothing was more effective than a trusted contact identifying candidates who might be interested in participating. i believe that online recruitment was especially challenging because i was not pursuing participants who might be invested in the work or targeting members of a specific community; these features would have offered avenues for incentivizing participation or establishing initial rapport. i encourage others to explore the potential impact of a more appealing incentive or using online recruitment within communities that might identify with the goals of the study. . . participant data overview following the second recruitment strategy, a total of nine participants joined the study. in all, , tweets were included in the nine archives, with the smallest archive containing only five tweets and the largest containing , tweets at the time of submission. i spoke to each participant for an average of one hour for an interview over video conference software, like skype, google hangouts or facetime. given the amount of data generated from these participants, nine people were deemed sufficient for this exploratory study and additional candidates that could be reached seemed unlikely to provide substantial new information. for an overview of the data collected and the participant demographics, please see the following table (twitter use information), table (demographic information), and table (educational background). in analysis, i frequently used groupings according to activity level (high, moderate, or low), overall total number of tweets (top, middle, or bottom of the group), whether participants reported to have relevant education, and who identified as an activist. these features are also included in the tables for clarity during analysis. it should be noted that i did not specifically pursue participants who identified as activists, as the practice of activist hashtags is not specific to activists as a group, but all of my participants did report to participate in activism. for the purposes of analysis, i divided the total group into people who identified as activists and those who only tentatively identified as corrigall-brown ( ) writes in patterns of protest that activism is practiced “in a multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of continuity” and a typical activist has an “episodic and intermittent trajectory of engagement” with activism (p. ). this description tracks well with the overall behaviour of most participants, who would have periods of high and low activist engagement. although self-identified activists tended to be more consistent in their activism, even their level of engagement rose and fell, relatively speaking, as they moved between campaigns or issues. activists, usually providing caveats before relenting that their participation in activism technically qualified them, but this identity was not important or useful for them in general. those who identified as activists were also the most active and most prolific users in my sample. the participants who were tentative about identifying as activist had the lowest activity rates and typically had lower total tweets as well. participants were given the opportunity to choose their own pseudonym, although not all people chose to do so, and i did not insist. when participants did not choose a pseudonym, i provided a simple handle in the form of “user” and then attributed a letter in the order of recruitment. regarding names, it is worth noting that i generally recruited people who are identified by their real name on their twitter account, and this is not representative for how everyone uses twitter. many people on twitter are anonymous and do not tweet to people with their own identity. it makes sense that anonymous twitter users are less likely to want to be interviewed by a real person, even if they are promised confidentiality. however, as a result, this study focuses on hearing from people whose offline and online identities are roughly synonymous and their online activities align with their “real lives,” so their experiences of the platform reflect this use. this aspect is particularly important when doing activist work that includes disclosures or putting oneself “on the line,” because using one’s authentic identity is a more vulnerable choice than anonymous disclosures. consider the consequence of sharing a traumatic experience anonymously online compared with sharing the same story when one’s identity is clear, as many did in the #metoo hashtag. only two of my nine participants took any lengths to conceal their identity on the platform through their usernames and all participants interacted with offline peers using their twitter account. participant total tweets period of activity (months) reported twitter usage activity level rate of tweets per month follows (users) followed by (users) @nina , daily high activity , , , @userd , weekly high activity , , @lorelei , weekly high activity @usera , daily moderate activity , , @bob , weekly moderate activity @userc , weekly low activity @userb weekly low activity @nastywoman daily moderate activity @mary yearly low activity table . twitter use, ordered by total tweet count participant age gender race/ethnicity english is additional language additional disclosed minority status identifies as activist @lorelei woman white no yes @nastywoman woman white no immigrant yes @nina woman black no yes @usera woman east asian no yes @userd man south asian no yes @bob man east asian yes immigrant tentatively @mary woman white no tentatively @userb man south asian yes immigrant tentatively @userc man white no immigrant tentatively table . demographic information, ordered by identifying as an activist participant reported relevant education post-secondary education (degree) additional formal education disclosed industry bachelor law master phd @bob yes yes yes yes technology @mary yes yes yes workplace seminar on social media law enforcement @nina yes yes yes media/arts, law @usera yes yes coding boot camp, marketing certificate technology @userb yes yes yes e- commerce diploma marketing, education @userd yes yes yes community workshop on social media law @lorelei no in progress media/arts @nastywoman no yes yes in progress academia @userc no yes yes yes academia table . educational background, ordered by participant reports of relevant education overall, i was able to recruit participants who used twitter in a variety of ways to various degrees and i grouped them in several ways for analysis. demographically, my participants had a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and their ages ranged from to , with an emphasis on people in their late twenties. participants were all english-speakers and hailed from north america as i was speaking to them, but two spoke additional languages and were born in asia. all participants had graduated high school and, generally, participants had received a high degree of formal education. however, when i asked participants about how they learned to use twitter, very few attributed their knowledge to any kind of formal learning. the descriptor of “relevant education” is the result of reports by participants of how they applied prior knowledge to their use of the platform, rather than an external judgment based on their educational background; a third of the participants did not say that prior education was applied in their twitter use. the amount of education acquired by participants in general, however, suggests that my sample generally included those with the sufficient class and economic privilege required for these accomplishments. i did not collect a significant amount of detailed personal background information from participants, so in many cases i cannot definitively attribute specific traits or advantages to each person. it is somewhat difficult to estimate how the sample relates to the general population of twitter. it is not currently possible to directly collect demographic data of twitter users from the platform alone, given that users report little information in their profiles, and so this information is typically collected through surveys of the general population. canadian surveys by the ryerson social media lab and american surveys by the pew research center both found that twitter participation was essentially the same across genders and - to -years-old were the most likely age group to have twitter accounts (gruzd, jacobson, mai, & dubois, ; pew research centre, ). this gender and age break down has been reflected in the demographics of this study as well. although the sample includes a high proportion of highly educated twitter users, this is not necessarily a poor representation of twitter users. canadian data suggests those who are highly educated are more likely twitter users. among those with bachelor’s degree, % used twitter; among those with a master’s degree, % used twitter; and among those with a professional degree, % used twitter (gruzd, jacobson, mai, & dubois, ). in comparison, % of those surveyed with high school education were using twitter (gruzd, jacobson, mai, & dubois, ). pew research center ( ) found that of high school graduates, only % used twitter, while % of college graduates used twitter. although the ryerson social media lab did not report on racial groups, pew research centre ( ) reports roughly similar participation rates among white, black, and hispanic survey respondents. such data paints an incomplete picture of the participation rates of various racial and ethnic groups, but it does suggest that the platform may be used at similar rates across groups. selecting a representative sample is not a feasible goal of this study, in part because i am focused on a subset of twitter users who participate in activism on twitter and i do not know the demographic composition of that group; it may or may not differ from the twitter population at large. i include the available demographic information to demonstrate that my sample, while small, did include a meaningfully diverse group that likely encountered different social and cultural groups on twitter. as a social network, a user experience on twitter is affected by social factors, making demographics at least latently relevant to how they learn to use the platform. . . archival review: digging into twitter histories after recruitment, i requested that participants provide their twitter archives for my review prior to the interview. all twitter users can export their twitter archive directly from the platform and receive a folder that includes several formats, including a dataset file that i could use for my purposes. i used this bounded set of data in my analysis, rather than gathering ongoing data throughout the process. i began with the initial review of twitter archive data prior to interviewing the study participants for two reasons. first, i wanted to prepare for each interview by reviewing their twitter activity, as this familiarity could benefit me during the interviews. second, i wanted to be able to draw on specific examples from their twitter archives during the interviews. i had originally intended to code the archives prior to the interview but found that the logistics of this were not feasible, given that some participants had so much data to go through, and i felt that it was important not to wait more than a month between joining the study and sitting for an interview. i feared that participants would lose interest in that time, and i would have to put aside the data i had already analyzed, wasting significant time and effort. therefore, i shifted my tactics. when i received an archive, i would go through and clean the data set in excel and prepare it to be imported into nvivo. this included creating specific columns in the data set associated with each feature of a tweet, marking whether a hashtag was present in each tweet, and simplifying some of the information in the data so that it was easier to understand. initially, archives provided the following information about each tweet: time and date it was sent, an internal identification number, whether the tweet was a reply, whether the tweet mentioned another user, the tweet content itself, whether the tweet was a retweet and, if so, the user who was being retweeted and the time of posting, the posting method of a tweet, and the extended url of any link included in the tweet. for example, i got rid of the column for the internal identification numbers and turned entries into binary values for easier sorting when possible. once i had imported the archives into nvivo, i ran frequency queries to find out the more frequent hashtags each participant used so that i could direct my questions towards these examples. i also coded structurally for the different features of hashtags, such as including user mentions, replies, retweets, hashtags, links, and threads. this allowed me to get an overview of what kind of features each participant relied upon and when they began to use them, particularly hashtags. i then extracted all tweets that contained hashtags and made note of the first use of each unique hashtag in a separate excel document. these increased my familiarity with the data, provided an overview of participants’ hashtag use, and provided an opportunity to do research on unfamiliar hashtags prior to a conversation with participants. i could also then bring questions to the participant for clarification during the interview. having a record of hashtag use over time also familiarized me with the first few hashtags a participant used, which gave me a sense of what first motivated hashtag use. i chose to do this archive review—identifying frequently used hashtags, noting what features were used over time, and cataloguing introduction of new hashtags—in order to efficiently get a sense of overall twitter use prior to the interview. after the interview, i returned to the archive data, prepared to have a more nuanced understanding of their twitter behaviour. by incorporating a purposeful procedure for analysis, i hoped to allow the archive to affect the interviews and allow the interviews to meaningfully shape how i understood the archive data. furthermore, i would code the archives prior to the interview transcripts, allowing for a continuing mutual influence between the two data sets as i moved back and forth between them. this procedure was intended to ensure that the two methods of data collection would complement and support one another, rather than simply occur in parallel, and iteratively improve how i understood the sum total of the data. . . conducting interviews: soliciting narratives and understanding context having reviewed the archives, i arranged to interview each participant. i conducted nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews (kvale, ) using a set of questions as a guide (see appendix b), but i allowed myself to also be responsive to participants. as learning strategies and twitter experiences were wide-ranging, this flexibility allowed me to incorporate differences between interviews more smoothly and engage more humanely with participants, rather than sticking to a script. i also wanted to allow the participant to drive the interview to areas that i did not anticipate. therefore, i was prepared to reword, re-order, or abandon questions. although i had prepared an “outline of topics to be covered, with suggested questions,” i preferred to stay open and allow for the participant to move the interview towards topics relevant to their experience, even as i tried to keep my research questions in mind (kvale, , p. ). my demeanour during interviews was open and relational. i approach the in-depth interview through the lens of the “respondent as teacher,” as described by lara foley ( , p. ), but with a small change in emphasis. i did my best to establish the dynamic of peer-teacher and peer-learner, where we are each working from our knowledge and experience to co-create shared knowledge, rather than a traditional teacher-student dynamic. i see the interviewee as “an active participant and source of knowledge” with valuable experience to share as a peer in online activism (foley, , p. ). to make this interview a shared endeavour, i was transparent with my participants regarding my research interest and questions. in addition, i offered a small amount of self-disclosure about relevant experience with the platform because social media remains a relatively new area and so finding a shared vocabulary for practices was very helpful. not everyone shares a universal language for their own tactics, so we needed to create shared references to compare notes. therefore, knowledge produced in these interviews was knowledge that was shared in collaboration between the researcher and the respondent. because the study is focused on how they learned and all answers were given equal regard, i did not feel the need to “sneak up” on the answers to my questions or fear biasing the answers if participants were aware of the purpose of the study. in fact, two participants noted that curiosity about the subject of the study itself was part of their interest in taking part. when speaking with participants, i also carefully considered my status as a potential insider and outsider. to consider myself an insider, i am acknowledging a shared practice (using activist hashtags), but i could not assume additional similarities. furthermore, although i may share their experiences of using activist hashtags on twitter, participants belonged to identity and political groups where i am an outsider. others approached activism, citizenship, community- building, politics, and technology with experiences and identities that i do not share. in these cases, it was particularly important to remind myself to consider the implicit assumptions driving my questions and be prepared to follow the participants’ lead as they described their experiences. the semi-structured format is intended to allow for this process. whether the participant viewed me as an insider or outsider (or both) was a determination only they could make, so i was careful to approach the interviewee open to new ideas, receptive to all responses, and responsive to the person i was encountering. i was able to successfully use various video conference software, such as skype, facetime or google hangouts, to meet with my research participants. although i appreciate the advantages of an in-person interview, video conference software allowed me to move beyond the boundaries of a single location. a remote interview is not ideal to capture the physicality of the interviewee and did present challenges for building rapport, but overall it was more advantageous than a drawback, given my focus. technical difficulties only interrupted two interviews very briefly, and both participants were sufficiently comfortable with the technology that these short delays did not seem disruptive for them. the convenience of video conferences over in-person meetings may have helped to recruit participants. after the several email conversations required to arrange a video conference, participants and i typically had established some sense of one another. in the case of the participants who were connected to this study through a third-party recruiter, i also benefited from having been introduced already by someone whom they trusted. this is another benefit of this recruitment method that i had not necessarily anticipated. i also began each conversation with small talk and asked them if they had any questions for me, prior to beginning to refer to my interview guide, which included scripted material regarding consent and confidentiality. most participants wanted to be reminded of the purpose of the study, and i found that summarizing the questions of interest in the study increased their motivation to provide information, although some cautioned me that they were not certain they would be helpful. i reassured those participants and expressed my gratitude to all participants that they would take the time to provide their experience and insights for the study. in general, participants were open about their experiences and did their best to answer my questions, but sometimes did not recall the information that i was seeking. all participants had at least one moment or more where they were unable to remember something. the use of their own archive as a stimulus text was often key to bringing back memories, providing context for pieces of recollections, or drawing their attention to a segment of their history that could be discussed more specifically. i also did my best to communicate my understanding when participants did not remember something, as i was eager to avoid flustering, frustrating, or pressuring the participants. i knew from the start that a significant limitation to using interviews would be that many people are not reflective about their twitter use and that the sheer volume of tweets makes it impossible to remember much about a single one, especially if a user has been active for years. i tried to present myself as flexible, easy-going, and positive in hopes of receiving a similar attitude and keeping the line of communication open. furthermore, although i felt very fortunate that my participants appeared genuinely interested in helping me, i also wanted to avoid applying any pressure that might incentivize participants to make up responses when they did not remember. i much preferred a response of, “i don’t remember” to falsifying memories to give a more pleasing answer. however, there is no way to verify that my strategy was entirely effective for avoiding fabrication, and overall, i acknowledge that memory is imperfect regardless. although i have coupled interview data with the archives to help support narratives that arise from either source, i know that my data is not a verbatim transcription of reality as it occurred. however, again, some realities can be considered more likely than others (mccall, ; lopez & potter, ; fletcher, ). following the interviews, i proceeded to transcribe each conversation. the transcription process allowed me to increase my familiarity with this data and write several memos as i progressed and noticed patterns in responses. it was actually very helpful to immerse myself in the data by transcribing all the interviews in a short span of time. in this way, when i turned to coding the archives, i had been sensitized to concepts that were important to participants in their stories of learning to use twitter. these concepts helped to influence how i built the code book and what information might be relevant to the participants themselves. . data analysis strategies i completed qualitative content analysis of both archive and interview data sets, although my approach was adjusted according to the data source. for example, when looking at the twitter archive data, the material lends itself to summation through tables that demonstrate patterns of behaviour, while interview data is already focused around key questions, and it is more easily divided into themes. for the archives, i also needed to use a few different strategies to be able to reduce the data sufficiently to bring patterns into focus. with so much information, it was quite difficult to determine where to concentrate, and creating a code book was critical to the process. the interviews were primarily understood through a coding strategy similar to thematic analysis to make sense of each participant’s learning journey. in general, my study has used the coding strategies described by uwe flick ( ), who cites margrit schreier ( ) for his approach to qualitative content analysis, and virginia braun and victoria clarke ( ) for thematic analysis. i also found it helpful to draw on marilyn domas white and emily marsh ( ) and graham gibbs ( ) for additional detail or strategies. my analysis has also been influenced by amber fletcher’s ( ) description of how critical realists move from identifying demi-regularities (patterns) in the research through initial coding and then go through the process of “theoretical re-description, in which empirical data are re-described using theoretical concepts” to move from describing to conceptualizing (p. ). as mentioned above, analysis occurred in this study through an on-going conversation between the archival and interview data. i began with an archival review, conducted the interviews, coded the archives, and then coded the interviews. by purposefully building in a procedure for analysis, i intended to build a structure than ensured that i would move between each data set and allow one to influence my understanding of the other. each participant provided both an archive and an interview, and while these are different formats, i believe they can be best used as mutually reinforcing sets of information on each participant, rather than isolated incidents. my process was also to evaluate on an individual level and then look for broader patterns across cases. once data had been analyzed for each participant, i was able to look for points of contrast or similarities between participants, using the themes i have identified to provide structure and focus. although the data lend themselves to many kinds of analysis, i used my research questions to narrow the scope of my analysis. . . coding archives the scale of the data was initially intimidating as i turned to the task of coding the twitter archives of participants. over , tweets were collected as part of participant archives. although i focused on hashtags, i used tweets as the unit of analysis because hashtags often work together and provide context to the surrounding text. extracting hashtags out of the tweet context would frequently decrease clarity and meaning. qualitative software was necessary to even begin the practical process of coding, and i chose nvivo because it boasted the ncapture feature that extracted social media data from the web and imported it into the software. although i did not use this feature, i anticipated that ncapture meant that the software was prepared to deal with twitter data. unfortunately, the technical challenges of this amount of data did not become clear until i had already started the process of analysis. nvivo is not yet optimized for the size of data sets that i wanted to use. significant time was spent waiting for the software to process queries or respond to commands. however, overall, i believe that coding by hand would have made many of my analysis strategies impossibly time consuming, so the software remains the best option. i can only assume that it will continue to be improved in future versions to handle more data. to maintain consistency over the significant time it would take to go through all nine archives, it was a practical necessity to systematically establish a code book at the start of the process. my initial code book was built from my familiarity with twitter features, my initial review of the archives, the interviews with participants, and terms in the literature. throughout the coding process, the code book was then refined and provided a consistent anchor that could keep a record of how each code was defined. although i did have to begin with some codes generated from information thus far, i coded inductively, and so codes were added as i had greater exposure to the data. when revisions were made, i could make note of them and return to prior archives as necessary. my first step was to code structurally for the use of specific twitter features, which was the one coding step completed prior to conducting interviews. these features included: • user mentions: these tweets include a mention of another user, indicated by @username. these tweets might be replies as well (see next point). • replies: these tweets begin with @username and are directed more narrowly at a specific user. replies are treated differently by the platform itself, as they are excluded from follower twitter feeds. • retweets: these are tweets made by others that a user has chosen to share with their followers, and they might include additional commentary. • hashtags: these tweets contain a hashtag (#). • hyperlinked: these tweets contain a hyperlink, which can be used to add multimedia to the tweet or direct readers to a website external to twitter. • plain text tweets: these tweets do not use any of the other features. by coding for the behaviours enabled by the platform, i could track when certain features were used by participants and notice patterns. this strategy is roughly compatible with bruns and stieglitz’s ( ) proposed quantitative strategies for analyzing communicative patterns on twitter, although adapted for the purposes of this study. by coding for these features of the archive, it also allowed me to focus my attention when composing a narrative of their twitter use, as i could see when hashtag use began in the overall timeline and then read that section of the archive more closely. i also coded for specific hashtag behaviours. i identified which hashtags the user had participated in, originated, and retweeted. because a hashtag is created whenever a # precedes a word, it is very easy to “originate” a hashtag, but i included a specific kind of hashtag creation in this category. when considering whether a user has originated a hashtag, i did not include hashtags that were incidentally original, such as elaborate one-off comments. i was looking to capture hashtags that participants might describe as having actively created and repeatedly used. in this case, originating a hashtag implies a level of consciousness and strategy, if not at the moment of creation, then in subsequent use. the next step in coding the archives was coding specifically the hashtags, now that they could be isolated from the rest of the archive. my initial review of the archives and relevant literature were both helpful in shaping my original coding framework for this step, which also grew as i became more familiar with the data as i coded. without being able to group the hashtags around specific concepts, it would be nearly impossible to identify any patterns of behaviour. michele zappavigna ( ) provided a useful starting point for this process because she describes hashtags as social metadata with specific functions. for zappavigna ( ), hashtags are user-generated descriptive annotation that enable additional functionality for a tweet, such as increased searchability or insight into content. her approach to hashtags emphasizes “meaning in context” that focuses on hashtags as a social practice that is both in service of data management and emotive or social purposes (zappavigna , p. ). i took a similar approach as i evaluated the hashtags for their function in context. drawing on some of the functions zappavigna ( ) describes, such as “topic-marking” and “metacommentary,” i broke the hashtags functions into the following categories: metacommentary (mt), topic-marking (tm), and metadata (md). these categories are be explored in the following chapter. i then proceeded to break down these categories into more specific functions, in the case of metacommentary, and more specific topics, in the case of topic- marking tweets. at this point in the analysis, i chose to strategically narrow the codes that i would apply, as not all hashtags were equally under scrutiny in the study. therefore, i allowed a wide berth for “miscellaneous topics” that did not appear to deepen my understanding of activist hashtags, learning, or related practices. my aim in coding was not to comprehensively describe all twitter behaviours, and so i put aside hashtags that were not dominant themes in the data set and did not appear connected to the practices of interest in the study. the code book evolved throughout the coding process using inductive coding. i allowed for coding a tweet as more than one thing because one tweet could include multiple hashtags and often words can multi-task, serving as both a comment and marking a topic, for example. due to the significant number of tweets under examination, i avoided expanding my codes unless i felt it would provide additional depth of understanding. this meant that i had to return to re-code previous archives when it became clear that behaviours that appeared singular were actually a relevant pattern. for example, hashtags coded as both mc-humorous and tm were re-coded as meme when i noticed that this overlap described a common twitter behaviour. the definitions of each code were refined throughout the process so that i could ensure consistent coding. interview data also helped inform how i could code specific hashtags, as the description of the purpose behind a hashtag was often informative. for most of the participants, i was able to code by reading through archives sequentially. however, @usera, @userd, and @nina had large enough archives to make this process unreasonably difficult. @usera had tweets with hashtags, @userd had tweets with hashtags, and @nina had , tweets with hashtags. to address this practical challenge, i used nvivo to identify all hashtags and their usage frequency, determine the code for each unique hashtag, and then apply this code to all incidents of that hashtag. many hashtags only appeared once, but procedurally this was a much faster strategy. for @nina’s substantially larger corpus, additional measures were taken to reduce the data under evaluation. @nina’s over , tweets are much larger than the next largest archive (@userd at approximately , ), and this presented a unique challenge in analysis. although @nina had much more data to review, it was unlikely to be proportionally informative if i were to examine each tweet and each hashtag. patterns of behaviour would be evident from a much smaller sample of her tweets. although @nina has qualities and successful hashtags that make her archive more interesting for answering some questions, her tweets are not all equally informative. in fact, much of her hashtag use was repetitious; only , hashtags were unique, although hashtags appeared in , tweets. among the group of unique hashtags, many were used only once or twice. having reviewed the archive, i attribute this effect to a couple of factors. first, the function of topic-marking means that new hashtags are easily introduced into a dataset covering many topics, such as this one; for every potential topic, there is a potential hashtag. second, metacommentary hashtags are often a phrase that is not intended to be reproduced at all, becoming a single-use hashtag, and this practice can even form the basis for humor, so it is a relatively common purpose for hashtags. therefore, it is not surprising that of the roughly , unique hashtags present in the data, % have been used only once, and another % have only been used twice. the benefit of coding these tweets is likely to diminish compared to the time it takes to code them, as uncoded hashtags are still identified (already coded structurally) and can be presumed to fall in the category of singular or very infrequently used hashtag that is not likely to be representative of a larger trend in the data. given that the point of coding the archives was to cluster data for identifying patterns, a single data point is unlikely to disrupt a greater pattern, if a sufficient sample are coded. with this rationale, i separated the hashtags that had been used once or twice from the rest of the hashtags to be coded and randomized these hashtags in excel. then, i identified a smaller sample of hashtags to code. for hashtags that have been used twice, / of the total were included ( / , ) and / of the hashtags that have been used only once ( / , ) were included. these figures were chosen due to the consistency of the hashtags themselves — having viewed the entire data set, the tweeting behaviour appears consistent— and because the resulting figures ( , hashtags used once or twice) represent a sizeable portion of the unique hashtags included overall ( , ). therefore, of the , tweets where hashtags were present in @nina’s archive, i coded structurally for all the tweets, but coded the content of the tweets for all but , hashtags, which are generally representing hashtags that were used only once. in all, , hashtags used were coded, representing approximately % of the archive’s hashtags. . . coding interviews when reviewing the interview data, my focus was on the qualitative features of the participants’ learning narratives. my intention was to create descriptions of the learning process and identify themes (braun & clarke, ; flick, ). the transcripts allowed for more open coding because data management was not so vital to the process. therefore, while a similar process was followed in spirit, the interviews could lean towards thematic analysis, where i moved from coding and into generating larger themes. in the interviews, i could do more than identify patterns or kinds of behaviour and instead look at shared meanings and conceptualize common experiences. to do this, i read each transcript for both latent and semantic meanings and generated initial codes inductively (braun & clarke, ). unlike the archive data, i was able to code more openly, expanding my code book as i went through, and then doubling back and reviewing prior transcripts if new codes were generated. each transcript received at least three full “passes,” but sections that were more conceptually loaded received more attention. given the affordances of using software like nvivo, i also moved through the data strategically to support my overall process of analysis. for example, as i coded, i also marked out larger sections of transcripts that shared a coherent narrative regarding their learning so that i might return to these sections as i tried to understand the learning journey of each participant. after initial coding, i began to look for themes. i approached themes as patterns within the data that could be articulated as broader concepts, as compared to codes that are more simply recurring aspects in the data (braun & clarke, ). my themes are composed of codes that reflect facets of that larger concept. as mentioned, while i was transcribing and familiarizing myself with the data, i was also creating memos, and these were helpful as i turned to the task of identifying themes, as well. themes that were not relevant to the research questions were put aside as i moved forward with analysis, but this narrowing of focus happened when themes were reviewed and defined, rather than attempting to determine initially what was relevant. this judgement came as i looked to understand what should be reported from this dataset and how these themes fit together to address the research questions. as with the archives, i went through the process first individually and then collectively. by first investigating the learning journey of each participant, i was then able to identify larger patterns overall and paint a picture of the entire dataset. i explore these themes in the following chapter. . considering the design in hindsight content analysis provided a flexible structure for addressing two sets of complementary data from nine participants. although there were significant challenges associated with collecting and analyzing both archive and interview data, and alternative or simpler research designs might have been advisable for greater efficiency, the methods described above have provided a more comprehensive picture than a more streamlined process might offer. without either archives or interviews, i could not have benefited from having access to both a document of participant behaviour and participants’ direct testimony regarding their behaviour’s meaning. for example, it would have been difficult to puzzle out acronym hashtags from context alone or guess the purpose of hashtags created as inside jokes. the responsiveness of the semi-structured interview was valuable for the opportunity to explore specific experiences. in fact, given another opportunity and significantly more time, i would use the interviews even more strategically by presenting participants with full re-creations of cases from their own archives, rather than just examples of hashtags, to put the interview and archive data in even more direct conversation. i look forward to more researchers responding to the call for incorporating more interviews into studies of social media communication, as my work would look substantially different without both methods. chapter : tracking learning journeys in this chapter, i draw on both the archival and interview data to understand a series of interlocking features of participant twitter experiences. first, i explore the set of motivations and meanings that shape twitter use for my participants, particularly when using activist hashtags. second, i present an overview of the range and patterns of behaviour i observed in hopes of identifying what skills might be necessary to use activist hashtags on twitter. finally, i describe the learning process and strategies participants used. as i describe the data, i move fluidly between referencing the archives and the interviews. . participant twitter use: motivations and purposes my analysis begins with reviewing the uses for twitter according to my participants to provide context for the use of activist hashtags. participants frequently reported that they did not understand the purpose of twitter prior to joining the platform. @userc admitted, “i didn’t have much of an idea of what i would use it for. it’s just, people were on twitter and i found certain uses,” demonstrating a key trait in participants: willingness to try something new without a clear reward. @lorelei, @nina, and @mary all even admitted to beginning with a negative impression of twitter. for example, @nina said, i just heard that there was another social media platform out there and i just… i don’t want to know what kim kardashian has for breakfast and i don’t want to talk to celebrities or whatever, and i just didn’t understand the potential strengths and efficacies of the platform until i actually got on. all participants did eventually come to value twitter and understand its purpose as they learned to use the platform. in general, the most important purposes for twitter use were shared by all participants; this included gathering information, sharing information, spreading their beliefs or values, connecting to others, and participating in dialogue. overall, i coded for separate purposes for twitter that were shared by at least two participants (see table ). however, when participants spoke about the uses, purposes, and motivations for using twitter during interviews, five significant themes were consistent across all participants: connecting, contributing, influencing, learning, and pursing personal goals. themes twitter uses number of participants connecting connecting to peers (general) participating in dialogue access to community/communities connecting to peers from offline feeling heard building relationships & networking comradery & solidarity contributing sharing information amplifying others entertaining others provide valuable outcomes to others influencing spreading messages & beliefs consciousness-raising control over the narrative regarding a topic mobilizing others for action activist campaigns gaining the attention of powerful people learning gathering information exposure to new perspectives listening to others personal goals receiving attention self-expression communicating their values establishing authority & credibility (reputation) receiving affirmation table . twitter uses, grouped according to five major themes . . connecting it is not surprising to see that connecting is a key motivation behind using twitter, as this is a social media platform after all. a significant part of the promise of this type of media is connection. facets of this theme include feeling heard, building relationships, networking, community, solidarity, and dialogue, as well as simply connecting to offline and online peers. most participants also spoke to failures of connection, such as harassment, trolling, alienation from communities, negative feedback, and not feeling heard; these experiences demotivated them to use the platform. to give one example, @lorelei focused the majority her activity on connecting with peers and spoke directly to this purpose for twitter, saying, “if i was just on twitter to only say things, i don’t know, into the abyss? that’s not really the point. i wanted to keep in touch with these people and talk to them.” all participants, regardless of their activity level or other factors, spoke to the importance of connecting during their interview to some degree. . . contributing contributing is also an inherent feature of twitter, as the platform runs on user-generated content, and participants consistently spoke about wanting to contribute to others. sharing of information was a key purpose for using twitter for every participant in the study. however, participants also named more nuanced contributions: amplifying the voices of others (particularly the more marginalized), providing tangible or intangible outcomes to followers, and even providing entertainment to others. high activity users were much more likely to see twitter as an opportunity to contribute, and those participants who identified as activists were also much more likely to see contributing as a key purpose for twitter as well. for example, @nina, an activist and high activity user, strategizes to help other twitter users and feels a significant responsibility to provide value to her followers now that she has a platform: i would say that i am more proactive in that i use twitter to educate, enlighten and sometimes to even entertain, whereas before, i think i was doing more of receiving the information, as opposed to trying to help disseminate it. . . influencing influencing is the next major theme of twitter use, and it is particularly relevant when considering twitter’s use for activism. facets of this theme include consciousness-raising efforts, spreading beliefs or values, attempting to mobilize others for action, getting the attention of the powerful, and controlling the narrative. the majority of participants who identify as activists use twitter in all of these ways, while tentative activists reported only some of these uses for the platform. overall, however, all participants were familiar with the capacity for twitter to be used to push an agenda and influence others. as an activist on twitter, @usera was especially clear in her strategizing around this: i’ve found that twitter right now for me has been a great way to get my story and activism heard by being a channel to journalists and journalists channeling that to a broader audience…you can [also] use twitter to start creating your own narrative, creating your own story, [and] encouraging other people to do the same and once it’s kind of reached that intrigue and mass, you’ll see a shift in public opinion, at least starting online and then it’ll continue to spread outward. . . learning twitter was also a tool for learning. all participants said that they used twitter for information gathering, and this was a critical feature, particularly for low activity users. access to dialogue was also informative for several participants, beyond its utility as a way to connect. @userd was enthusiastic about this aspect of the platform, saying, what was really cool about twitter when it came out was that, for some reason, experts in areas that i was really interested in, especially like oil and gas development, policy, indigenous issues, were on twitter and because it wasn’t that popular, you could engage with these experts on issues to learn, to influence them, et cetera. for @userb, [twitter] was more of a learning platform for me than being a contributor, because, yes, once in a while i put some comments on someone’s tweets and if i want to learn something more, i would ask them, “are there any more resources you can provide me?” [but] for me it has been just a learning platform. critically, nearly all participants expressed appreciation for the way that twitter exposed them to new and diverse thought. for example, @bob said, i think i mainly use twitter because it has an interesting community. so, unlike other social networks, i think i’m much more likely to find people who are different from me, whose opinions or views on life are different from mine. so, i don’t use facebook, but when i used to use it, it was mainly people i knew in real life, and that was a much narrower set of viewpoints to be exposed to. similarly, @lorelei said, “i just liked being exposed to a really wide variety of thoughts and opinions that i wouldn’t usually get, because i’m hearing voices from so many people across north america, mostly, and a few people across the world.” a desire for learning and/or exposure to new information was explicitly expressed by nearly all participants. . . personal goals finally, participants used twitter to pursue personal goals for their own satisfaction. these included self-expression, communicating their values to others, establishing their authority or credibility, building reputation, receiving affirmation, or getting the attention of others. interestingly, low activity users did not describe self-expression as a use for twitter, although they certainly did use it for this at times, and neither did they appear to use the platform for reputation nor credibility purposes. activist participants were much more likely than tentative activists to describe using twitter to accomplish personal goals, not just activist ones. overall, learning strategies, education, and background do not appear to be meaningful factors in what uses the participants described having for twitter, but differences across activity rates and activist identity were clear. first, it is interesting to note that the low activity group all identified as tentative activists only, while those in the high activity group were self-identified activists. participants who had a higher activity rate and total number of tweets articulated many more reasons to use the platform compared to low activity users, who primarily used twitter for information exchange. while low activity users might take actions that technically count as activism upon their reflection, they did not explicitly use it for activism, unlike other participants in the study. although it is not surprising that the majority of self-identified activists spoke about explicitly using twitter for activism, it is interesting to note that activists also used twitter for the widest variety of reasons, not just their causes. this association between more activity and more uses could be explained by reasoning that more activity helps discover more uses for twitter, or that having more uses for twitter motivates higher activity rates, or that they are mutually reinforcing. . why #tweet? exploring hashtag motives because hashtags can serve several functions and they are a key feature of twitter use overall, their purposes dovetail with all the common uses for twitter: connecting, contributing, influencing, learning, and pursing personal goals. the use of activist hashtags can also be mapped onto the categories. for example, one participant spoke about using a hashtag that was created by a striking union at his university in an attempt to show solidarity (connecting) and support the strike (contributing) by taking up virtual space and advocating for the importance of teaching assistants (influencing). this participant likely also discovered relevant news by following the hashtag, expanding its use to include the theme of learning as well, and, as a teaching assistant himself, the strike also contributed to personal goals of achieving fairer wages. with this in mind, activist hashtags appear to be a strategy for pursuing the ends that participants already have for their twitter. it is a practice aligned with general purposes and motivations for using twitter, not a true outlier behaviour, although participants do not use activist hashtags often. the attributes of hashtags, however, do entail a unique set of functions within the platform itself. participants were generally aware of the uses for hashtags that the literature describes. first, hashtags collect information for users, allowing others to both mark tweets as part of an ongoing conversation and for users to seek out information in a centralized place. @userd told me a story of following a hashtag that a local professor had created for his class in order to learn about a topic of interest; without being a student in the class, he was able to follow along and learn regardless. hashtags to categorize a conversation (coded as topic-marking) are by far the most common use and almost always the first way that participants used hashtags, @lorelei representing the only exception. participants would go on to diversify their hashtag use, as described in the next section, but topic-marking remained important. relatedly, hashtags can also be used to reach people beyond twitter followers, because those following the hashtag will see the tweet. this function is key for how hashtags can be used to influence other users as well, because hashtags can draw new attention to a tweet this way. for example, many of @userb’s initial hashtags were focused on raising awareness about organ donation and helping a friend in need, so he included several hashtags in each tweet in hopes that this would widen his audience. @userd once used hashtags in similar ways to reach new users as well, but now that twitter has a search function, he does not find himself clicking on hashtags and felt that this was changing how hashtags could be used. he said, i honestly think hashtags are dead now, from my perspective. i don’t know if you heard that from your other speakers, or participants, but back then [when i started], it was like ensuring that it got in front of people. hashtags, people searched hashtags. now, i’m not sure if that’s the case. however, most other participants did report using hashtags to follow content, and so this function of the hashtag remains alive for users who do not have the following @userd has amassed. for @userb, hashtags still feature as a key strategy for growing his followers: hashtags are very important for reaching out to people… like, if i’m in [city], if i’m saying something without any hashtag, my reach is limited to the followers that i have. but using a hashtag, that increases my reach by x amount of users… like, for instance, i was using one hashtag called #badparenting, so everyone who is following parenting tips would start following us, because we are tweeting things related to parenting. so, yeah, it’s an important way to connect to people with the subject that is being discussed. hashtags can also be used to intentionally create recurring conversations within a consistent group that outsiders can join by following the hashtag. these groups are often referred to as “chats” on twitter, as in “#bcedchat,” but i coded these hashtags as community in the archives to be more descriptive of their function. often these groups will use hashtags for an additional function where they establish a call-and-response format and use the hashtag to link the many answers to the initial question, which i coded as response. @userb described benefiting from this practice as he learned to follow hashtags: there are these one-hour kind of tweet sessions where, for example, they use a hashtag and everyone searches those hashtags and they join the tweet—it’s like a virtual meeting, and then the organizer of the event, he puts up a question. everyone who is a part of these conversations, they give their own opinions, their own experiences. so yeah, those tweet meetings are a really interesting way of getting involved and learning a lot about the issues that you are following. several participants were also familiar with using hashtags for live tweeting, where a user includes a specific hashtag in a series of tweets that serve as ongoing commentary for a specific event. others can essentially follow along with the event by following the hashtag. while @lorelei used this practice to live tweet a movie she was watching and then even mocked the practice by live tweeting ironically, @usera specifically used this practice for activism. @usera explained how she did this: i do a lot of live tweeting especially for important situations or events where other people can’t physically be there and i’m the only person. so, when there is a significant event going on and they want to see what is happening, i live tweet pretty much line-by-line, play-by-play, what’s going on. so, i get a lot of people who—like journalists, or even general people who i don’t know, who follow me to read that. and i try to make it also fun too to keep people interested, and it becomes a good archive for people to reference back, or feel like they were a part of it. hashtags used in live tweeting often reference the location or the topic under discussion, which are coded as topic-marking or more specifically location in the archives. hashtags could also be used as additional commentary, or what i refer to below as metacommentary as i was coding the archives. this use of hashtags was not a part of the original intended purposes of a hashtag, but users have broadly taken it on as a natural use for hashtags. on average, participants had introduced metacommentary hashtags to their archives by the time they had used unique hashtags. as hashtags are formed whenever # precedes text with no spaces, the form is highly flexible, and users can make anything a hashtag. this makes a lot of room for humour, much of it ironic and playing with the hashtag form itself. @lorelei’s spoke about primarily using hashtags ironically and, in fact, her first hashtag ever was an ironic comment on hashtags themselves, which is an outlier compared to the other participants in the study. hashtags can even function as memes where a user will make a humorous comment that becomes a topic itself as it circulates among other users, who add on additional examples. these might be hashtags like #fivewordstoruinadate or #addawordruinabook. although @nina did not explicitly name this behaviour as a key use for hashtag, her large archive contains quite a few examples of hashtags coded as memes and these humorous tweets can be linked to her stated intention to “entertain” others using twitter. given how often meme hashtags trend on twitter, this is a common use for hashtag, even if it is rare in the sample data. the use of humour with hashtags is even incorporated into activist hashtags, like #oscarssowhite, where jokes are used to bring attention to an issue. . . why #activism? the purpose of an activist hashtag is to advocate for social change and make a justice claim, but this can be done in a variety of ways. primarily, activist hashtags were described as consciousness-raising strategies that increased awareness of a specific demand or issue. @mary felt clear that hashtags could be a tool for activism, as nowadays it’s a really good way to get information out and to get people behind a cause… and so it kind of gives you an idea of the grandeur or the scope of certain things that, previous to social media, you maybe never could have known before, or so readily, i guess. @userc also suggested a useful analogy, saying, “it’s sending a message or filling up the public space with a message… it’s almost like a yard sign for like a political candidate or something.” his description of the role of an activist hashtag captures a specific use for activist hashtags as a tool to publicly campaign for a social change and taking up public space with the message. aside from the broad purposes already listed, activist hashtags can be part of specific activist strategies. drawing on examples from the interviews and archives, some of the uses might be pointing to a particular injustice to raise awareness, like #blacklivesmatter; attempting to support a cause and raise money, like #bellletstalk that encourages speaking about mental illness and bell contributes funds to the cause for each hashtag instance; building solidarity like #weareuoft or #standwithpp; creating shared sustained conversations and linking events to greater issues, one of the many functions of #idlenomore; presenting a slogan or demand like #nodapl; mobilizing users for actions, like #boycottrush or #occupywallstreet; soliciting testimonials to specific social justice issues, like #metoo; reducing stigma, like #whyistayed; and even publicly grieving loss, like #justice trayvon, #neverforget, and many others. all participants agreed that hashtags advocating for social justice were potentially a form of activism, depending on their content, and might be considered political actions, again depending on their content. given the timing of the interviews, #blacklivesmatter and #metoo were both frequently offered as examples of activist, political hashtags. the main motivations behind caveats for activist hashtags were regarding the degree of their importance and potential for real effect. for example, @bob said, activist hashtags “attempt to change the conversation around these topics, and i think that can have an impact, though it might be a small impact.” more critical of the practice, @lorelei said, i do think they are activist tactics, because you’re creating and sustaining a conversation about these really important things, but at the same time, i don’t know, i wonder if that’s the best form for them? because lots of people are interested and engaged when online, but then they’re not going to do anything in real life to try to change the things that they’re talking about. @lorelei echoed the main concern behind @nastywoman’s hesitance to call activist hashtags “activism” per se. during the interview, @nastywoman argued that, hashtagging something is not effective collective action. being an anonymous voice on twitter isn’t going to change legislation. it may potentially influence—the number of people that engage in it may potentially influence attitudes, but it won’t actually change anything for the lives of people who are affected by these hashtags… if you’re not writing to your senator about feminist issues, you’re not really doing anything. you’re just engaging in a very popular social media trend. so, why it is that i don’t think that that is sufficient is that i think that—i mean, it’s fine, it’s not hurting anybody—but i would rather spend my energies on more active activism and not passive activism. in essence, @nastywoman is concerned that activist hashtags are examples of “slacktivism,” which is a common concern mentioned in the conceptual framework as well. according to the rest of the participants, however, activist hashtags are not as ineffective or low stakes as @nastywoman might think. both @nina and @userd testified that activist hashtags that they helped start resulted in tangible outcomes for themselves and others, including the cancellation of a politicized event, crystalizing a new narrative regarding an issue with long- term impact, raising money for a cause, and even just uplifting their followers. as a specific example of activist hashtag impact, @userc said, something like the #metoo movement, that’s one of the things where its space, its kind of “yard sign” space, just has an effect where the more you see it, and then you see it from friends and family—so like, as a male who’s somewhat aware but doesn’t realize, that has a different sort of effect where it’s just like, “this is showing up a lot, among a lot of different people who i know.” so, that’s a different sort of information i guess? it has an interesting effect. you know, it kinda drives home how prevalent issues of sexual harassment are. @usera also spoke about using the activist hashtag that she created to keep a specific community informed about critical issues of interest to that group, highlighting the important function of information transfer. multiple participants described using activist hashtags for information, both gathering it and sharing it, and the importance of this function is arguably undervalued when evaluating the work of hashtags merely through tangible actions. communication throughout a movement is a useful function for activist hashtags, especially if actions will be required as a result, as was often the case for @usera’s activist hashtags. even @lorelei and @nastywoman themselves acknowledged making use of activist hashtags for informational or awareness purposes. as is the case for most activist tactics, taking part in activist hashtags can also have its risks. @lorelei pointed out that the amount of reach and attention an activist hashtag can potentially attain can actually dissuade some people from participating in it, citing herself as an example. she said, “sometimes i wouldn’t use ones that were more related to me, because i didn’t want to get twenty trolls responding to my tweet because i put it in a more public way, so they could find what i’m saying.” using hashtags to publicize a demand for justice opens users to this kind of backlash on twitter, especially if the hashtag begins to trend, so they do require strong dedication to the cause. this is particularly the case when an activist hashtag requires personal disclosures. overall, activist hashtags were seen by participants as a legitimate activist tool with the potential to have a positive effect. whether that impact appeared small or large depended on the example and often on the practices of the participant. @nina, @userd, and @usera were the most prolific hashtag users and self-identified activists, and they all felt that activist hashtags were a real tool in activism, although they noted that it was one of many kinds of activist strategies. participants generally acknowledged a preference for combining online and offline activism, and no one anticipated that hashtags might solve significant issues on their own. this shared belief in the power of activist hashtags is unsurprising, given that all participants did use them at least once. even those participants who expressed skepticism about hashtags as a tactic would use an activist hashtag as a part of an activist campaign, even @userd who said hashtags might be “dead” now. for example, @nastywoman said that she would use a hashtag if i were just getting started and it was an individual attempt to raise consciousness or at least get people to think about the issue that might not be salient. i think it’s a good way to get people on board a new idea, not necessarily to effect change on behalf of that idea. does that make any sense? where it’s a good way to mobilize the troops, but it’s not really going to get too much done if there are already troops on board. here, @nastywoman summarizes the common use of activist hashtags to raise consciousness, share information, spread beliefs and values, and influence others that recurred throughout my interviews. from her own description, it appears that even for those critical of the practice, hashtags have their place in activism. . an overview of hashtag behaviour in this section, i focus on how participants used hashtags, rather than why, by further exploring the archive data. when coding the archives, i evaluated hashtags based on their function. in general, i used three broad categories: metacommentary (mc), topic-marking (tm), and metadata. although inspired by zappavigna’s ( ) linguistic analysis of the social function of hashtags, i have generated definitions of each concept that matched how i saw the hashtags implemented in the data i compiled. again, mc hashtags are intended to act as additional speech that addresses the tweet itself. this type of hashtag is both communication in its own right and expands on the meaning of the tweet’s text (hence, meta). these tweets typically provide additional content that might be humorous, advocacy, emotive, or others. often, a tweet will be complete without the hashtag’s commentary, and the hashtag’s meaning can typically stand without the tweet text, but they inform one another. this type of hashtag includes examples like, #fail, #yuck, #toldyouso, and #bam! it also includes more complete statements like #renewdocmcstuffins. although mc hashtags often provide emotional information and physical descriptions or gestures like #smh (shaking my head), i have not specifically coded for this subset of behaviour. i have only created subsets of mc hashtags that were highlighted in interviews or were relevant to activist hashtags. as a result, i chose to code specifically for humorous (e.g., #firstworldproblems) and advocacy (e.g., #savealife) hashtags, with additional subsets within advocacy for activist (e.g., #blacklivesmatter) and marketing (e.g., #exploreedmonton) hashtags to differentiate between different goals (see figure ). as mentioned, tm hashtags are used to indicate the topic of the tweet and often take the form of a single noun or short phrase, such as #foodies or #cdnpoli. these hashtags might be effectively used for sorting, categorizing, or collecting tweets according to the topic of the tweet. these hashtags are often incorporated in the tweet text itself and when this is the case, the extraction of a hashtag would substantially impede the meaning of the tweet. in contrast, mc hashtags can typically be removed without irreparably damaging the tweet meaning. i also coded for several specific topic areas as they appeared significant, relevant to tweeting for social change, or informative of key twitter behaviours. metadata was the final broad category that i identified and it describes a very narrow set of hashtags that are also providing factual or technical information about the tweet itself, rather mc hashtags can be used to advocate for many things, as this function of a comment is highly flexible. those mc hashtags that are advocating for something other than social change were labeled as marketing, although they might not be specifically selling something. in general, these hashtags were uncommon, but they were worth separating from activist hashtags for their different function. than commentary that elaborates on the tweet text. this might include hashtags like #thread, which indicates the kind of tweet it is, or hashtags generated by a specific application to indicate what product was used to create a tweet. these were the extreme minority of hashtags used and are unrelated to my research question, so they generally do not feature in my analysis, but they were meaningfully different from the others and worth defining. figure . diagram mapping how various kinds of hashtags are related to one another codes description example archives where code appears percent of total data coded metacommentary (mc) hashtag provides additional commentary or insight into the tweet content. although this hashtag comments upon the tweet, it typically makes sense aside from the tweet as well. #fail . % codes description example archives where code appears percent of total data coded mc-humorous hashtag are intended to be humorous, broadly defined, and are often sarcastic or ironic. this is challenging to code, but participants identified humour as an important feature of twitter behaviour. therefore, best-guess evaluations based on context are used. #firstworld problems . % mc-advocacy hashtags that advocate or market something in particular, typically in the form of a statement. #savealife . % mc-advocacy- activist hashtags that advocate for social change and make a justice-related claim. #metoo . % mc-advocacy- marketing hashtags that are advocating for something in general, excluding social change. #explore edmonton . % meta data hashtags that are used to indicate structural or technical features of the tweet. #thread #rt . % topic marking hashtags that are used to indicate the topic of the tweet, making it easier to categorize, gather, or search tweets. #tech . % tm-location hashtags that establish the location of the user. place-based hashtags frequently refer to cities but might also include countries and conferences. #yvr #chinatown . % tm-meme hashtags that make a humorous comment and are repeated by different users on twitter so that inclusion of the hashtag marks an entry into a shared topic of conversation. #ruinadate infive words . % tm-event hashtags associated with current events, excluding recurring topics. often significant events in the news, like disasters or violence, are associated with a hashtag for a shared conversation regarding the new issue. #pulse #trayvon martin . % codes description example archives where code appears percent of total data coded tm-community hashtags that have been purposefully implemented by users to speak to a group of people about a specific topic. these hashtags are often formalized with a set of rules that are stated somewhere accessible online, including relevant topics and periods of activity. a twitter user or organization often manages the activity on this hashtag through specific posts. #wjchat . % tm-response hashtags that indicate that the tweet is part of a call-and-response strategy for holding a public conversation on the platform. a question will be asked and user responses will also include the hashtag, connecting the two parts of the conversation. these hashtags might be established by twitter communities, organizations, or individuals. these hashtags are intended to help users follow a shared conversation that is typically temporary. #askacop . % tm-education hashtags on the topic of education, schools, and learning. #phdlife #ubc . % tm-politics hashtags that cover political topics, using an expansive definition of the political (discussed above). #cdnpoli #racism #aclu . % tm-politics- formal politics hashtags that cover formal political events, activities, or structures. these might include formal government processes, politicians, or related topics. #cdnpoli #voting #trudeau . % tm-politics- ideology hashtags that refer to belief systems, sets of values, or ideologies. #feminism #racism . % tm-politics- advocacy hashtags that refer to informal politics, advocacy events, social change organizations, activist figures, or related topics. #nelson mandela #aclu . % codes description example archives where code appears percent of total data coded tm-politics- advocacy- fundraising hashtags that refer directly to appeals for funds for an organization, cause, or person. #gofund me . % tm-popular culture hashtags that cover topics in mainstream media and popular culture, including celebrities, sports, brands, arts, or cultural events. #baseball #beyonce . % tm-popular culture- trademarks hashtags that are brands, trademarks, media properties, and corporate entities. as companies often encourage this kind of hashtag presence, it is a particularly relevant type of code for learning to use hashtags. #nba #twitter . % tm- miscellaneous hashtags that do not fall into other topic areas but are functioning to mark the topic of the tweet. #network- ing #inspiration . % table . code book for twitter archives the most common way to use a hashtag is for topic-marking, and this aligns with the conventional function of hashtags. hashtags were originally created for data management in a noisy communication environment, and participants in my study used them for this purpose. a majority of hashtags were coded as tm. within this category, politics was the most frequently used topic area overall, composing % of the total. politics here encompasses identity politics, formal politics of government, references to ideologies, and the informal politics of advocacy work. within this breakdown, formal politics was a sizable proportion at . % of the data and advocacy was coded for another . % of the data. i include the percentages to give a sense of the significance of each behaviour and the kind of use my participants had for twitter, overall. additional codes of interest are location, pop culture, and miscellaneous. location is a key function to note, as these are hashtags that are used to place the tweet as related to a specific location, most often a conference or a city. the unifying feature of these hashtags is that they are about putting a pin in the map and they represent . % of coded hashtags. popular culture hashtags are used to refer to topics in mainstream culture and media broadly, while a subset with this code, trademarks, refers to particular branded properties. popular culture is a worthy use to note because it composes . % of the total data and because using popular culture hashtags were a common way to start using hashtags among participants. it is also actively encouraged by the media, which is why i coded specifically for trademarks as well. for example, during our interview, @nina said that she might have first heard of hashtags from television shows that she was watching, suggesting that this hashtag behaviour might be a “gateway” to hashtag use. finally, miscellaneous topics compose less than % of the coded hashtags, which suggests that i have not missed a key area in my analysis. another . % of hashtags are coded as mc, signifying a small but important kind of hashtag use. for the purposes of this study, the most important kind of mc hashtags is the activist hashtag. an interesting feature of the activist hashtag is that it works as both an mc and tm hashtag. an activist hashtag is text with self-contained meaning, like mc hashtags, but it also marks a topic of conversation, like tm hashtags. #blacklivesmatter is a prime example where it functions as both text, an argument that stands on its own merits, and topic, either an idea or the associated movement. while an activist hashtag is initially only an mc hashtag making a claim, if an activist hashtag receives attention, it circulates like a tm hashtag to invoke a topic or stand in for a set of ideas. activist hashtags compose a very small proportion of overall twitter use in the sample, making up less than % of total hashtags in the overall dataset. within the archives and interview data set, there were also examples of using a hashtag against its original intention to make a justice claim (and sometimes a joke at the same time). in a couple of cases, the original hashtag had even been an activist hashtag already, but it was being activated in a different way. i coded all of these instances as activist hashtags. the necessity to have enough context to recognize them made these activist hashtags more challenging to identify. however, this is clearly an important practice to note, as @bob, @lorelei, @nastywoman, @usera, and @userd all mentioned it during interviews, even if these hashtags made up a tiny fraction of the dataset. although humour was identified during interviews as an important practice on twitter, humorous hashtags were not a significant proportion of any one archive. @lorelei, who identified herself as a part of “funny twitter,” used humorous hashtags significantly more than the average . % and still these types of hashtags composed only . % of her archive. the next greatest proportion of humorous hashtags was @nastywoman, but only . % of her hashtags were coded as humorous. however, @nastywoman was also explicit in her interview about purposefully using humour when she was on twitter. here, the archives and the interviews speak to each other quite clearly. many participants noted their interest in the humour of others but most did not describe their posts as funny. it is also worth noting that using hashtags for humour is associated with greater overall use of mc hashtags, as @lorelei and @nastywoman also have the highest percentage of mc hashtags, . % and . % respectively, compared to the average of . %. given that my participants were selected because they were using twitter for activism, at least occasionally, i would not imagine that all twitter users have similar behaviour patterns to the users in my study. given my sample, it is unsurprising that politics feature heavily in their archives. for most of my participants, their mission in using twitter is not to share funny memes, although they may do so occasionally, or follow the latest championship games, although again this activity is occasionally seen. within my sample, the most consistent use for hashtags was to signal participation in a political or cultural discussion. hashtags allowed participants to be incorporated into these ongoing, wider conversations on twitter. . learning journeys the key research question of this study asks how people learn the media and digital literacy competencies necessary to use activist hashtags. activist hashtags represent a tiny portion of their overall twitter activity, however, so i focused on how participants learned to use twitter in general. to participate fully in twitter, participants needed to be able to use the different features of the platform. among them is the capacity to post tweets, include user mentions, reply to tweets, use hashtags, retweet others, and link to external content, including pictures and video. within the data gathered, all these behaviours are quite common (see table and table ). tweets typically include one or more of these features, with less than % of tweets in the total dataset consisting only of plain text. participants with the lowest overall activity tended to have the highest proportion of tweets that include links, suggesting that to be a common activity for even a casual user. participants with the highest activity and highest total number of tweets also had the highest proportion of user mentions and replies, making the most active also the most interactive users. this makes sense, as holding conversations on twitter easily balloons tweet totals because each response is a new tweet, and recurring conversations likely draw users back to the platform more reliably because they have built relationships. the top tweeters, @nina, @lorelei, and @userd, all spoke directly to the importance they placed on the relationships they have been able to build on twitter. total data instances percentage of total plain tweets , . % user mentions , . % in reply , . % hashtags present , . % retweets , . % contain url , . % total all tweets , . % table . overall distribution of tweets across various features of the platform for the total data collected mean percentage of archives percentage of archive plain tweets . % user mentions . % in reply . % hashtags present . % retweets . % contain url . % table . the mean distribution of tweets across various features of the platform for a single archive on average, participants would begin with plain text tweets and move quickly into using user mentions and replies, then begin including hyperlinked content, followed by retweeting others, and finally hashtagging. overall, the most common trajectory appears to be joining the platform, beginning to interact with other users, sharing external content of interest, amplifying other user content, and then broadcasting messages to a larger audience and incorporating twitter conventions. i would simplify this pathway to: post —> interact —> share —> amplify —> broadcast. because retweeting involves sharing posts that a user did not create, i have seen researchers exclude these posts from their analysis, but retweeting is an important, common behaviour on the platform. retweeting combines interacting with others and sharing content in the process of amplifying someone else’s post. several participants spoke about using retweets as a strategy for information sharing, making this a key feature to begin using because information exchange is one of the most common uses for twitter among my participants. furthermore, participants retweeted posts particularly on topics where they did not feel qualified to speak themselves, and these participants were aware of how the speaker mattered—a topic i explore more below. participants generally had learned to use all the features of twitter within their first tweets. however, it is worth noting that these tweets were frequently spread across several years and the use of new features appeared to be related to each user’s needs, rather than a desire to master the platform. in a self-directed learning journey, this makes sense. users would encounter different aspects of twitter as necessary over time. while some participants seemed to take to tweeting quickly and used the platform consistently, like @nina, @userd, and @lorelei, most people’s twitter use fluctuated according to their personal needs or interests with an overall upward trend. @usera, @userb, @bob and @nastywoman have all had years since first starting to use twitter when they posted fewer than ten tweets. @lorelei had left twitter entirely when i spoke to her, @usera took long breaks from twitter, and @nastywoman’s archive reflects only her tweets since returning to twitter in after at least years away. only @userc’s archive features a slow and steady increase in posts over time. participants who identified as activists appeared to move through mastering the different aspects of the platform more quickly than the others. although the small sample disallows generalized conclusions, i think it is plausible that this is because the activists had more specific goals for their twitter use related to their activism, motivating them to explore the platform more quickly. by the time participants were using activist hashtags, they had used, on average, unique hashtags and had tweeted times over days or over years. given that the basic features of the platform were typically demonstrated within the first tweets, i argue that activist hashtags are a more advanced use of twitter. being able to use the platform to advocate for social change requires familiarity with the platform and how using such a hashtag might work, both technically and practically. a participant must be able to use a hashtag, which is a relatively easy skill, but must also understand the utility of the practice. given that learning the social features of the platform was described as more challenging than the technical features, it makes sense that they generally appeared later in the archives. . . soft skills are hard participants reported that learning the technical aspects of which buttons to press was straightforward and used similar logic to other social media platforms, easing the transition to twitter. the exception to this was the practice of threading, which @bob, @usera, @userc, and @userd all mentioned in their interviews as a challenge. threading is a technique introduced by twitter users and involves replying to your own tweet in order to create a series of connected tweets that people can read in chronological order. often people will number their threaded tweets so that readers can keep track of the order and see the end of a thread. twitter has recently made the process a true feature of the platform and helped automate it, but, prior to this change, threading was largely a social practice that just re-organized how you used the existing technical features. there was twitter discussion of whether threading was appropriate behaviour, which @userd mentioned in his interview, but it has generally become an accepted @bob and @usera both have backgrounds in technology and did note that twitter’s changes to their user interface often do not address common user issues or required recalibrating their twitter use to adapt to the new version of the platform. however, most participants did not comment on this aspect. twitter practice. participants who brought up threading consistently reported that it was the hardest feature to master as both a thread creator and reader. learning the soft skills of twitter appears to be more challenging than concrete technical skills. generally, mentally processing the amount of information available on twitter, as well as the speed of its delivery, and understanding the social norms on twitter were most frequently described as the points of friction. as a result, i will take a moment to dwell on relevant participant comments. regarding the speed and volume of information, @userb helpfully summed up the experience of first using twitter, saying, sometimes you get lost in so many messages that you cannot actually read them all. or, then they have links on their own, so once you click one link and you are reading an article—meanwhile, in the background, twitter has already done five hundred tweets, which you can never follow, and you can never keep track of what’s going on. the overwhelming speed of information delivery was mentioned even by those who have grown quite comfortable on the platform. for example, @usera initially found twitter confusing: “i remember i really didn’t get the format, and i think at first [that’s] how most people feel when they see twitter. it feels like streams of thought from all these different people that don’t read sequentially.” participants employed different strategies in response to this challenge; for example, @userb has used hashtags to focus his information intake, @userc has chosen to follow users who do not post as frequently, and @usera avoids reading her main twitter feed at all in favour of reviewing specific hashtags or accounts. discovering twitter norms was also a key learning curve that multiple participants highlighted to me. norms are generally important in public spaces and can be communicated in many ways. however, online, there can be fewer established conventions or cues and participants reported often being unaware of lines until they were crossed. @bob addressed how he learned what is socially appropriate, saying, usually it’s by noticing what other people are doing and i think it differs a lot by community. so, for example, in the japanese-speaking twitter community, there is a significantly higher amount of explicit sort of social etiquette marking, like people will say things like, “i’m sorry i’m replying from outside of your followers,” and then say something. so, i think with those communities, when i see those messages, i can understand, “oh, that’s the etiquette.” i think in the case of english-speaking twitter, it’s much more difficult, partly because there is less uniformity in those rules. so, it’s basically, i learn the rules i guess by people explicitly tweeting about what they believe should be the rules, or people replying saying, “that was rude” or whatever. knowing when to speak on twitter appears to be a nuanced understanding for participants. i was surprised to hear the majority of participants demonstrate awareness of how their voice was contextualized in public space online. all participants could understand and describe their sense of audience and being in public, which i had generally expected for adults posting on a public platform, but most participants were doing more than curating tweets according to a need for privacy or reputation maintenance. participants spoke about the knowledge that they took up space online when they spoke and that this impacts who is heard and ways that messages are able to circulate, like when @lorelei commented that a lot of her activism on twitter was “more retweeting other people because… i find people who encapsulate everything i want to say, and i don’t want to just detract from what they’re saying.” since achieving notoriety, @nina has intentionally strategized to amplify marginalized voices, and she explained to me that, it was very obvious to me that people were following me because of my platform, and they felt that i had something to say, and so then it became incumbent on me to make sure that i was using my platform in the best way that i could, which means amplifying voices that may otherwise go unheard, or who just aren’t heard as loudly, and then also having conversations that i think would be of benefit to not just my community, because i have a core group of people and then i’ve got the other , people. an awareness of who is speaking is particularly important for how participants used activist hashtags, as several participants explicitly mentioned that this type of hashtag would commonly appear in their retweets, rather than their original posts, because of their sensitivity around the effects of voice and space. for example, @userd said that he would choose to retweet an activist hashtag because, “what do i need to say that this person hasn’t effectively conveyed, or this person is part of this movement and, like, i’d rather amplify their voice than say something—like, what do i know about #blacklivesmatter, you know? that kind of thing.” @lorelei spoke to this point even more clearly, saying, i don’t feel like i use [activist hashtags] that often, because even though i follow those hashtags to see what other people are saying and i wanted to know what they’re saying about it, a lot of the time i wouldn’t say something because i felt like maybe it wasn’t my voice that needed to be heard at that time. like, i’m not going to provide anything more useful to this conversation. i just want to be a respectful listener. although participants did not name this awareness as something they learned and so did not pinpoint its origin, it was a knowledge that seemed to be shared by most participants, to greater or lesser degrees, and highly useful when navigating twitter. there were also other unwritten rules that participants pointed to explicitly, like when it is appropriate to direct message another user, how much emotion to display, appropriate degrees of kindness or “snark,” how frequently you should post updates, linking various accounts, choosing display pictures, or the best ratio of users followed versus following. although participants named different aspects, everyone seemed to understand that being good at twitter involved more than simply being able to tweet. . . evaluating mastery when trying to understand learning, it is useful to consider what competence means. when speaking to participants, i asked them if they felt that they were “good at” twitter and what that would entail. very few spoke about mastery of technical aspects or specific platform metrics, although these were mentioned. after analyzing the interview transcripts, i identified two key themes that helped unite disparate criteria that participants presented: competence was (a) achieving a positive effect and (b) receiving affirmation. participants commonly spoke about successful twitter users providing value to others or making a difference, both of which fall into the broader category of having a positive effect. the value provided might be tangible, such as new information or resources, but might also simply be the value of entertainment. users that were considered funny were included in the category of providing value to followers, based on the priorities of participants. although the majority of participants did not themselves try to cultivate a following based on their sense of humour, they could see it as a strategy for gaining influence and attention that they valued. consciousness- raising and influence over others were also considered as having a positive effect on their followers (given that they felt that their causes or influence were positive) and the ability to do this was also valued. participants also measured competence on twitter through the resulting affirmation they received. affirmation might take several possible forms, such as a high follower count, frequent user engagement, increasing their recognition and credibility in their community, or direct feedback from others. @usera spoke about receiving compliments from community members about her twitter presence, as well as having journalists seek her out for comments. @userb considers his slowly increasing follower count to be evidence of his increasing abilities on twitter and carefully monitors engagement with his tweets on his professional account. @userd has raised his status within his community as a result of tweeting, received offers to write op-eds, and has even gotten jobs through twitter. all these things indicated to them that they were performing well on the platform. the only skill that was highlighted by participants that was not captured in these major themes was the criterion of “good copy.” as @usera said, to write effective tweets with hashtags and being able to integrate it, there’s an element of good copywriting… a lot of people just ramble on on twitter, but some of the most effective tweets, either they have a really poignant point that they’re making that other people haven’t made yet that is different or interesting or unique, or it’s just well-written copy. given the platform is largely text based, it is not surprising to hear that good writing supports successful twitter use. turning our attention to activist hashtags specifically, participants had a clear consensus on the qualities of a good activist hashtag, even if they had never created one themselves. @userd said that, “it’s gotta be short and catchy and convey meaning,” which is very close to @usera’s requirements: “short, memorable, and captures the essence of what you’re advocating for.” similarly, @nastywoman, @userb and @bob all emphasized brevity and clarity. @nina expanded on the logic of these criteria: “i think that’s sort of the beauty of a good hashtag, that you don’t need an essay about what it means. you know, people can sort of gravitate to it and understand it right away.” in general, participants appeared to know how to create an activist hashtag, at least in theory, even if none could truly explain directly how they came to know it. . learning strategies having addressed the questions of why people might learn, what people might learn, and when people might learn it, i now turn to how they have learned. to do this, i reviewed how participants described learning to use twitter. during analysis, i coded for each strategy i could identify and noticed that many were shared across participants. in the end, i identified separate learning strategies across all the participants and the average number of strategies mentioned in a single interview was seven. the most frequently used strategies were learning through exposure over time and copying what they observed, and these were often described together. the next most common strategies were trial and error, followed by applying prior although inserting images, video, and gifs requires its own set of literacies, no participant spoke about the importance of these twitter features. as such, i have not chosen to focus on this set of knowledges. knowledge and being directly taught. the twitter learning curve appears to commonly require more than one tool to reach the present level of competence for each participant. although formal education or direct teaching made up only a small slice of the reported strategies, relevant education does appear related to participant learning strategies. participants who reported no relevant education had the lowest number of strategies that they had used to learn twitter, between two to five, while the average among the remaining participants was nine strategies. those without relevant education were unlikely to speak about applying prior knowledge, unsurprisingly, but they were also unlikely to report having role models, consulting peers, learning indirectly from community members, or using feedback from data or other users to guide their tweets. it is possible that relevant education also provided the tools or relationships needed to seek out additional relevant learning strategies. whatever the cause, the difference is notable. reviewing other comparison points for the group, there were not significant differences in the number of strategies used, except that the top tweeters used slightly fewer different strategies, suggesting that learning in more ways does not necessarily correlate to greater participation, advanced learning, or developing expertise. having several learning strategies appears helpful, but having the most learning strategies did not seem necessary to be highly proficient at twitter. to get a better understanding of overall patterns, i grouped the eighteen strategies or sources of learning into broader approaches to the learning process (see table below). these larger themes were: applying prior knowledge, directly accessing expertise, modeling & examples, and exploration. on average, participants drew on three or more of these larger approaches, so even when grouping similar strategies together, it is clear that participants were employing many different tactics to learn. based on my participants, informal learning appears to entail a buffet-style approach to learning strategies. . . applying prior knowledge participants commonly attributed their learning (at least in part) to applying prior knowledge to this new platform. the knowledge in question might be available as a result of something inherent to who they are or, more predictably, based on prior study or training. participants who identified as tech savvy applied instincts honed on other technologies, and some of this technical knowledge was further attributed to age or generation. @bob, @mary, @nastywoman, @usera, and @nina all felt that they had an aptitude for social media based on these kinds of “inherent” traits. for example, @usera said, “i’m a digital native and i also work in tech, so it’s easier for me to adopt technologies because i create them, too.” although participants more often cited their youth as an enabling condition for learning twitter, @nina felt that her life experience was helpful as she learned the platform: i think it would be different if i was someone half my age and just sort of getting started, but again, with my marketing background and being older and just being able to see how things work, i wanna say it came pretty organically to me. as mentioned, @nina, @usera, and @userb had training in marketing, which they described as relevant. @bob and @usera both had also been trained in the technology industry and applied their relevant knowledge to twitter. in essence, learners using this strategy felt that they had some sort of foundation on which to build. however, it is worth mentioning that participants usually did not consider prior knowledge to be enough to master twitter, and other learning strategies were necessary. @bob spoke to this point: having a computer science background, i think, makes it more likely that i’m familiar with how certain uis and how certain aspects of websites work, more than a completely random user. i think that’s just maybe a matter of familiarity with using lots of different kinds of web platforms. on the social side, i think a lot of the social aspects of twitter are not directly driven by the technological choices, except maybe the things like the character limit and things like that, and so i think a computer science background doesn’t help, for example, become a twitter user that is more likely to follow those social etiquettes. . . directly accessing expertise some participants did actively seek out or benefit from intentional learning scenarios. this would include a variety of strategies, including getting someone to teach them, consulting with peers, finding resources like blogs or websites with advice, or other ways of seeking information. @mary and @userd each chose to participate in workshops that highlighted twitter as a useful platform for their goals (law enforcement and community building, respectively), although they were not given practical instruction on how to use twitter there. @bob spoke about consulting with peers who helped run the same twitter profile, and @userb would occasionally ask for assistance from other people in his field with more experience. @userb was the only participant who reported using online resources like websites and blogs to help learn about the platform. no participant felt that they had been given a thorough lesson in twitter, although @mary did describe a brief tutorial from a friend that came closest: she mostly just said, you know, this is what it’s good for and she pointed—like, once i got it on my phone, she was like, “here’s where you push to do a tweet and here’s—” and user interfaces. i’m like, “so i @ or i # the tweet?” and she was like, “no, if you @, then it goes to the person, but if you #, then it just lumps it together with other people’s things that have that same hashtag” and i was like, “oh, okay” and i might be totally bastardizing what is true, but that’s my understanding of it anyway, and so she was like, “then you can search for hashtags if you want to know—like, if there’s a big incident and it gets a hashtag… then you can search for that and you can find all the people’s tweets that are related to that.” and i was like, “oh, okay.” so, she kind of told me about it and explained it. no other participant reported a similar interaction with a friend introducing them to twitter, even if friends had been encouraging them to join the platform. participants often described intentional learning moments as happening piece by piece and just in time. for example, @usera described the experience of learning to do activist work online, saying that, “you get these little tips from different people and everybody learns a little bit here, a little bit there, and you just share this information to build each other’s capacity up.” for example, when she was trying to report back her experience to her twitter community of followers, another user stepped in to teach her how to thread her tweets. however, there was no reliable teacher; @usera could not recall who had helped her, but she knew she would occasionally get these tips from people “sympathetic to a cause.” @userd also described a moment where a more experienced peer dropped a tip on how to structure tweets in their twitter conversation to make them more easily shared with followers. these “teachable moments” seemed to come and go quite quickly and stood out as rare occasions of intentional skill acquisition. . . modeling & examples the most commonly reported approach to learning was relying on publicly available models or examples. this included learning from witnessing others being taught (or scolded), observing role models or community leaders, media offering examples, or simply copying other users they followed. nearly all the participants reported observing and copying as a learning strategy, making it one of the top overall tactics, and this makes sense given that this strategy is essentially equally accessible to all of the participants. @bob, @userb and @userd each also named specific individuals who acted as role models, by demonstrating practices of interest, and/or community leaders, who took steps to support others by publicly sharing resources. these model users were unaware of their role in teaching these specific people about the platform, as they were all strangers to the participants, but they served as learning resources nonetheless. in another variation on a role model, @userd mentioned that some users offered negative examples that he could learn from to avoid unflattering behaviours as well. this kind of negative feedback is related to what i have termed “indirect teaching,” or moments where participants observed other people publicly explaining how one ought to behave on twitter or how a feature works, sometimes in the process of publicly scolding a particular user. as a prime example, i return to @bob’s explanation of learning social norms: “i learn the rules i guess by people explicitly tweeting about what they believe should be the rules, or people replying saying, ‘that was rude,’ or whatever.” when asked, he said that he did not recall ever receiving corrections or negative feedback directly, but it is clear that his position within the public space gave him sufficient information to learn second-hand. . . exploration the final major approach to learning was through exploration. this theme captures various ways of learning through experience: trial and error, feedback from both data and other users, and then simple exposure helping to build understanding over time. exposure over time was tied with observing and copying for the most frequently cited tactic, with trial and error close behind. these exploratory learning strategies were sometimes offered rather dismissively, called “clicking around” (userd) and “plinking” or “stumbling” (@mary), but nearly all participants relied on exploration as an important piece of their learning journey. @usera described her learning process as, “once you kind of trip over yourself a few times, then it becomes second nature” and her acceptance of bumps in the road is helpful when learning by trial and error. @bob, @usera, and @userb, were all able to reflect on tweets that they regretted posting in hindsight, showing that they were learning from experience and errors in particular. choosing who to follow was another aspect where several participants attested to using trial and error. both @userb and @userc spoke about choosing to follow certain users and unfollowing them after being dissatisfied by their tweets, and both considered this a natural part of getting comfortable on twitter. twitter provides feedback in the form of user engagement and analytics, which multiple users found educational. @usera was one of the few who paid attention to the metrics on the platform, saying, for me, instead of a role model, i look at data more, so i do check up on what are my top tweets, what are people clicking on certain things, or links, and try out—purposely try out different things, and then from there you start to figure out what’s more effective, what’s less effective. @usera attributes the instinct to do this to having a job in marketing, where a/b testing on communications is normal; she said, i do the same for activism work. some people are like, “how are you able to make so effective statements?” or “how are you able to make such effective tweets?” it’s because, like, you look at the data and see what’s working, what’s not, and you continue to do what’s working. so, data’s been a big part of what i do. @userb also has a marketing background, and he is diligent about how he notes user engagement, follower count, and other metrics for the account he helps run. learning through exploration appears to be facilitated by a very helpful trait i noticed in many of the participants: a willingness to try something new. in the process of describing how she learned to retweet, @mary offered a great example of this mindset: “i just push buttons until something happens. that’s kind of my—that’s how i deal with technology: i just do things until it either works or i totally break it. and so, most of the time, eventually, it works.” according to @nina, she started using twitter motivated simply by a willingness to explore a new social media platform, “you know, wanting to know what it was about, how it was different from facebook…just to try it out and see what it did, what it didn’t do.” it is unlikely that @nina, who was both a mother and lawyer at the time, had nothing better to do than learn a new social media platform, and yet she was willing and interested in doing so simply to satisfy curiosity, as she tells it now. participants demonstrated a consistent openness to and even active interest in new experiences. this appears to be a supportive trait for learning on twitter. theme & facets description participants using this strategy applying prior knowledge apply prior knowledge & education to use twitter, participant relied on the application of prior knowledge and education. subsections of this strategy included applying prior marketing knowledge and applying prior technology knowledge. identity - generation participant attributed their knowledge of twitter to the generation that they are a part of, or the benefits of being their age. identity - tech savvy participant attributed their knowledge of twitter to being the sort of person who understands technology more generally or participates in a lot of technology. osmosis & intuition learning involved relying on inherent intuition, instincts, or attributing knowledge to a naturalized absorption of information that feels second-nature and has no clear origin. directly accessing expertise direct teaching or mentorship learning involved someone explicitly and directly teaching something. this is different from consulting peers because in consultation, a user would be seeking out assistance and often already created an idea of what they wanted to post or had a problem to solve. when someone is directly teaching, it is about transfer of new knowledge or skills. a key example that recurred in the data was participants learning to thread, where participants were informed of something they did not know by someone who could offer than information. consulting peers learning involved consulting peers and receiving feedback when solicited. these peers could provide guidance to one another and share practices. attending workshops learning involved attending a relevant workshop that helped increase understanding of twitter. accessing relevant resources learning involved seeking out and referring to resources that could provide information about twitter and its use. these might include industry magazines, blogs, or websites where advice about how to use twitter is shared. exploration exposure & over time (experience) learning involved exposure to the platform over time. being in the environment of twitter was informative. participants could see what kind of information and behaviour was being shared over time and acclimate to the environment. this is a much more passive and long-term process compared to observing and copying, which is more active and narrow behaviour. theme & facets description participants using this strategy trial and error learning involved trying something and learning from the consequences. exploring learning involved exploring the platform. this is a combination of exposure and trials through curiosity. this is a discovery process. metrics feedback learning involved reviewing the data analytics that twitter provided and considering this feedback when making future posts. for example, if many people clicked on a link, this feedback suggested that this post was successful. therefore, posts with similar features would be encouraged. engagement feedback learning involved considering what kind of posts received engagement from other twitter users and considering this feedback when making future posts. for example, if many people replied to a post, their feedback would determine if the post was successful. modeling & examples observing & copying learning involved purposely observing others and copying demonstrated behaviour. this is different from merely exposure because it is the active reviewing of examples and reproducing similar material as a result. community leadership learning involved leadership from a community member whom the user knew, online or offline, where behaviour was modeled and twitter use was encouraged by a specific individual. participants did not call this mentorship, as it was not a relationship to that individual, and they may not even see this person as a role model, but that community member was able to provide a public resource to on-lookers. indirect teaching learning involved seeing someone else get directly taught or simply told about something, because it’s a public space, and learning by proxy. in some cases, participants learned from someone else’s scolding and avoided being scolded by not making a similar mistake. role model participants learned from a role model on twitter, who was unaware that this particular user was learning from them. media instruction & marketing learning involved media sources instructing participants on how features could be used, including marketing or promotions. this could include brands sharing hashtags and instructing audience members to use them on twitter, thereby implying what the hashtag was for and when to use it. table . specific strategies and overall approaches to learning each participant spoke to several different learning strategies and approaches, but it is important to note that just because a participant did not specifically articulate a strategy during our interview does not mean that they did not use said strategy. interview questions were designed to create room for participants to share their stories rather than confirm or deny their use of certain learning techniques. however, i can say that at least this many strategies were described by participants, and they may have practiced even more. . hashtag activism: applying what they have learned many participants did not recall specifically when they began to learn about hashtags, especially as hashtags have begun to infiltrate even offline conversation. it stands to reason that they learned in similar ways to how they learned how to use twitter in general. however, some specific strategies were named. @nina suspected that she had first encountered hashtags through television shows that encouraged viewers to use specific hashtags to tweet about shows. one of @mary’s early hashtags was also the result of stadium announcers encouraging her to use a hashtag to tweet during a sports game. this falls under media instruction & marketing. however, @mary was originally instructed about hashtags from her friend, who was telling her the twitter basics, which falls under direct teaching and mentorship. @userd also mentioned that he got some direct instruction about why hashtags were useful at a community meeting, although he already had a sense of what hashtags were. @userb used websites and blogs (accessing relevant resources) to realize the importance of hashtags while he was learning about digital marketing as part of his self-directed professional development. overall, it makes sense that participants could more easily recall education through these external resources than the creeping awareness of hashtags as a phenomenon that is difficult to pin down. none of these sources, however, provided instruction for how to use or create activist hashtags. even activist networks had not reached out to my participants to help induct them into the practice of creating activist hashtags in any explicit way they recalled, and certainly no other organization has taken it upon themselves to ensure that this practice continues to spread. although @userd did describe a community workshop where a local provided information on how twitter might be used to build community, he said that the workshop simply “solidified” his thoughts about hashtags rather than provided new information he could not glean from “clicking around” already for a year. the main role of movements in this learning is likely during this “clicking around” in a media environment where activists are demonstrating how to use the platform for social change. even without formal guidance, my participants were able to take on the practice of using activist hashtags because they understood the mechanics of hashtags generally and were motivated to use the specific hashtag for its own particular merits. these merits were generally evaluated based on a participant’s individual ideology, biography, resources, and social network, which aligns with the conventional factors for initial social movement participation (corrigall-brown, ). @nina and @usera have originated activist hashtags that have received significant circulation. their descriptions of this process focused on their motivation for the creation, rather than any challenges or learning process duration creation. they were prepared to create a hashtag because they had already gathered all the necessary skills, and any strategies mentioned echo those broadly applied when learning twitter. as i mention above, the first time participants used an activist hashtag occurred later on in the archives than other skills, and activist hashtag creation occurred even later. by this time, participants were able to navigate twitter and use it for their purposes without significant effort. both participants also identify as activists, and it makes sense that they would express their activism online. @nina has been by far the most popularly successful with her activist hashtags and had created four at the time of the interview. she described her hashtags as arising “organically” as she was expressing herself or identifying a need, and then others were able to support her original message. the hashtags were not coordinated with other people or organizations; in fact, her most popular activist hashtag was initially unintentional and then she harnessed its resonance to advocate for change. in that case, creating an activist hashtag was a function of capitalizing on accidental zeitgeist and researching relevant information through external resources once it had taken off, having chosen to embrace the momentum the hashtag was receiving. since gaining a significant platform, @nina has been more intentional about creating activist hashtags and provided more framing in the original tweet to ensure that the purpose of the hashtag was clear. she attributed her decision to do that to practical necessity (“so you don’t have to explain fifty billion times what the heck the hashtag is about”), as well as an undergraduate education in marketing and years of law that taught her the basics of branding. this would be an example of combining the lessons of prior knowledge, experience, and feedback from other users. learning from engagement feedback was also a part of her process for creating a more recent activist hashtag that was responding to low morale within her community, as she assessed the enthusiasm for the hashtag prior to fully encouraging its spread. an initial post tested the waters, and then she was able to launch it in coordination with certain relevant dates; based on further feedback afterwards, her testing had been correct and her community was responsive to her message. it is worth pointing out that @nina has a relationship and shared community with her followers, describing them as her “tribe,” and so she can use this connection for reliable feedback, while other participants have not developed this kind of network and may not have access to learning this way. @usera has created three different activist hashtags, with varying degrees of success. her strategies for developing the hashtags have varied, although each one was an intentional attempt to create an activist hashtag. her first was based on a slogan she had created for a website and simply adapted as a hashtag. she found that this was often too long, and this caused the hashtag to be modified by others when they used it. her next two activist hashtags did not receive widespread use, which she attributed in one case to a lack of time to cultivate messaging around it and, in the other case, she found that an alternative hashtag had already taken hold within the community. this highlights two challenges when creating activist hashtags: the speed of information and the competitive attention market. in creating these hashtags, @usera was applying prior knowledge and drawing on experience on twitter, and as a result of creating them, she began to learn from engagement feedback as well as trial and error. she said she fully expects to continue to create hashtags, although she is taking a break after spending much of the last year on various social media activism campaigns. @userd reported that he might have originated a hashtag as part of trying to pressure a local politician. he was taking part in a campaign with a specific political goal and was acting as part of a team, which might be the source of his uncertainty about the origin of the hashtag. although he did not elaborate on his creation process, @userd had significant twitter and activism campaign experience at this point and was working with an experienced team, so i would expect that this process was some combination of applying prior knowledge and consulting with peers. the activist hashtag summed up their goal in a phrase, and so it is likely to have felt intuitive to simply add a hashtag to their demand and circulate it on twitter, where they were already active for political work. @userd reported that this campaign used several offline and online tactics, not just an activist hashtag, but they were able to fundraise and receive attention from both the local media and the opposition leader in the provincial government as a result, so he felt the campaign was generally successful. as i spoke to him, he was in the process of brainstorming an original hashtag as part of advocating for a political goal in his region. as part of an online strategy to build public support for change on a specific niche issue, he planned to use a succinct phrase that captured his demand. he was hopeful it might help his cause. based on the experiences of @nina, @usera, and @userd, once someone has created an activist hashtag, there seems to be a high likelihood that they will create another. this makes sense. once the tactic has been attempted, it is relatively easy to try again. it does not cost anything to try. each participant planned to use hashtags again in the future and found the strategy rewarding, even if they did not reach their original goals. . learning journeys with no destination a final thought on learning journeys on twitter: there is no clear endpoint to informal learning, but there are rest stops. nearly all the participants felt that they had more to learn on the platform to be considered experts, but it was rare to hear any kind of interest in learning more. @bob, @nastywoman, @mary, @usera, @userc, and @userd all acknowledged that they could be better at twitter if they were to put in more time and effort. several participants explicitly expressed unwillingness to further develop their skills in an intentional way. although some participants, like @usera, said they do look at metrics and analytics provided by twitter to purposefully improve, others like @bob acknowledged their potential utility and yet knowingly put the tools aside. @nastywoman attributed her passive approach to learning twitter to the fact that she is “not trying to be good at twitter.” this is an interesting aspect of the learning behaviour on twitter, where it is self-directed. participants need a motivation to increase their skills, and although several of these participants have goals for their twitter use, like spreading beliefs or mobilizing people, they are not necessarily sufficiently motivated to learn advanced skills. this means that people will stop seeking improvement when they feel that they will not be sufficiently rewarded for their efforts towards excellence. is it worth taking the time and effort to be better at twitter? at least for @bob, @nastywoman, and @userc, the answer was explicitly “no,” at least for now. in fact, the only participant who reported continuing to be engaged in his own learning is @userb, whose job requires that he run a twitter account. in his case, it makes sense that he be motivated to continue to get better and better at twitter. for everyone else, even @mary, who is new to the platform and only five tweets into her learning journey, competence is sufficient, and mastery is not motivating in and of itself. chapter : mapping the learning landscape having explored the archives and interviews with participants, this chapter reflects on how my analysis speaks to concepts from the literature and then considers the implications of the study. first, i compare the competencies and practices i encountered with the principles of media and digital literacy (mdl) and digital citizenship to show how the latter might be a useful concept to describe the skill set in question. i then return to the concepts of public pedagogy and communities of practice to show how they might apply to the experience of participants. i close by making note of arising questions, study limitations, and final reflections. . media and digital literacy or digital citizenship skills? media and digital literacy is a big tent, as explored in chapter two. mdl generally refers to a set of competencies that encompass practical technical skills, conventional literacy, critical analysis, as well as a set of attitudes and social skills (hoechsmann & poyntz, ; kellner & share, ; hobbs, ). in fact, mdl only truly makes sense as a coherent skill set when you contemplate the magnitude of navigating the modern media and digital landscape, which necessitates such an inclusive tool kit. to focus my analysis, i concentrated on mapping participant skills to the five essential mdl competencies according to hobbs, a well-established media literacy scholar (see table ). essential competencies of digital and media literacy access “finding and using media and technology tools skillfully and sharing appropriate and relevant information with others.” analyze and evaluate “comprehending messages and using critical thinking to analyze message quality, veracity, credibility, and point of view, while considering potential effects or consequences of messages.” create “composing or generating content using creativity and confidence in self-expression, with awareness of purpose, audience, and composition techniques.” reflect “applying social responsibility and ethical principles to one’s own identity and lived experience, communication behavior and conduct.” act “working individually and collaboratively to share knowledge and solve problems in the family, the workplace and the community, and participating as a member of a community at local, regional, national and international levels.” as defined in renee hobbs ( ) white paper “digital and media literacy: a plan of action,” p. . table . hobb’s ( ) essential competencies of digital and media literacy reviewing these facets of mdl, it is clear that my participants required all of these capacities to engage with activist hashtags on twitter. participants all had to access the necessary technology and information to share the hashtags with their followers. to do this well, they had to be able to evaluate each activist hashtag and understand the claim that it was making. when i asked participants about examples of activist hashtags from their archives, they spoke to their rationale and understanding of each one. participants were aware of the consequences of participating in a hashtag, either through retweeting it or making an original contribution. hashtag creators had an even bigger vision behind their tweets, but all participants honed their tweets according to their purposes and audience. participants saw activist hashtags as a way to take action to positively affect their community and contribute in some small way to making change. participants even spoke to the ethics of whose voice was heard and how to take part in an activist hashtag responsibly. a full gamut of mdl competencies was displayed by participants in the process of describing their approach to hashtag activism. given the breadth of meaning already packed into mdl, it may feel almost gratuitous to ask for a yet-broader concept to help name the skills my participants demonstrated. to say that they were practicing media and digital literacy skills is certainly accurate. i argue that digital citizenship, however, is a superior way to describe the skill set necessary to use activist hashtags. moonsun choi’s ( ) elements of digital citizenship include media and information literacy, but expand to also explicitly cover ethics, political participation, community engagement, and critical resistance (see table ). elements of digital citizenship ethics practicing safe, responsible, and ethical use of technology; being aware of digital issues and impact of technology; exercising and respecting digital rights, including privacy, expression, and others; and practicing digital responsibility and appropriate behaviour. media and information literacy capable of accessing technology; technical skills and digital literacy; and media literacy skills to understand, evaluate, create, acquire, and use information. participation/engagement practicing political engagement, including formal and informal politics; participating in the digital economy; cultural engagement online; and personalized engagement through empowered individual use of these tools. critical resistance critiquing existing power structures and participating in political activism. adapted from moonsun choi ( ), “a concept analysis of digital citizenship for democratic citizenship education in the internet age,” pp. - . table . choi’s ( ) elements of digital citizenship although the two concepts share a lot of features, critical resistance is a key difference between mdl and digital citizenship. critical resistance is also essentially a summary of the purpose of an activist hashtag. by making a justice claim, activist hashtags are necessarily presenting a critique of society by identifying injustice and speaking up to demand change. in a deliberative democracy, this is a key citizenship practice. by including critical resistance as a skill, there is also an acknowledgment of the role of power, politicizing the skill set, which is necessary when looking at the skills needed to engage with hashtag activism. without this factor, much is lost. digital citizenship also has greater, explicit emphasis on political and cultural engagement, which is important when considering the skills and attitudes that participants demonstrated. participants see twitter as a space for connecting, contributing, influencing, learning, and pursuing goals; at least three of these five goals are explicitly about how to engage with others. competence on twitter was consistently described not simply as understanding the practical features of the platform but being able to positively connect and contribute to others. participants were learning a set of skills that could only be practiced within a social network; they are citizenship skills that deal with how people engage with one another in a shared society. as i discuss in the last chapter, participants also showed a vital awareness of the ethics of speaking online, as well as the potential and the responsibility that accompanies speaking in public space. all participants recognized that twitter could be used to spread messages and beliefs, and they took this potential seriously. importantly, six of nine participants spoke about how their speech affected the public space, including its potential to either amplify or muffle the voices of marginalized people. this ethical awareness is a key facet of a digital citizenship that arguably supports deliberative democracy, where citizens must engage in public deliberation to find a way forward. in a time when we are supposedly trapped in filter bubbles and increasingly polarized, my participants expressed desire for exposure to new ideas, dialogue, amplifying others, and exchanging information—a constellation of activities that arguably prepare a citizen to take part in deliberative democracy (van den berg, ). certainly, participants needed to develop a broad spectrum of mdl skills to be able to participate in and create activist hashtags, but they also needed the capacities and attitudes of choi’s ( ) digital citizenship. by labeling the skills of the participants digital citizenship rather than mdl, i am can attend to the elements of power, politics, and ethics implicated in learning to use activist hashtags on twitter. these participants are not just literate users, they are engaged digital citizens. . revisiting theories of learning: public pedagogy and communities of practice as i review the strategies that participants used to learn, i must also determine if the concepts and theories in my framework can be applied to the mechanisms i have identified. given that i have named different learning strategies, it is not surprising that i am considering multiple concepts to address the kinds of patterns i have seen in the experiences of participants. i am not trying, however, to prove or disprove the role of public pedagogy or communities of practice. instead, i am evaluating the potential for either concept to enable or support learning the relevant behaviours under examination. first, i return to my understanding of learning as situated and contextual. the broad learning strategies of applying prior knowledge, using models and examples, exploration, and accessing expertise are compatible with a view of learning as critically informed by one’s environment. these are strategies that rely on, respectively, prior knowledge foundations specific to each participant, observing their environment for models and cues, interacting with their environment to develop increasingly sophisticated understandings of a platform, and accessing the relationships and resources available to each participant. although i have focused on the shared themes across participants, each learning journey was unique to each participant, combining similar processes in different ways. for each participant, their learning happened in a specific network of users that comprised their environment, and resources were offered within particular communities. given the importance of the learning context to the process, i see twitter as a learning environment and consider it a site of public pedagogy. most participants were able to use the resources provided by the twitter environment itself to develop the necessary skills and knowledges to use activist hashtags. the most common broad approaches to learning— exploration and using models or examples— both rely on absorbing information from twitter’s media environment and applying what they learned. of the nine participants, only two chose to participate in a traditional educational environment (workshops) to learn about twitter, and only one chose to access relevant educational resources, showing that these strategies were not necessary to develop twitter skills. in addition, neither the workshops nor resources applied directly to learning to use activist hashtags, although they contributed to overall twitter knowledge. only five of nine participants reported even brief moments of explicit instruction, and even that was informal. generally, participants used twitter as a source of learning about twitter, and activist hashtags as a source of learning about activist hashtags. activist hashtags are well-suited to being learned through public pedagogy. participants described a good activist hashtag as clearly and concisely delivering the essence of its message, suggesting that the purpose and use of a good activist hashtag ought to be self-evident when a participant viewed it in context. in a sense, the artefact explains itself, recalling @nina’s comment that, “i think that’s sort of the beauty of a good hashtag, that you don’t need an essay about what it means. you know, people can sort of gravitate to it and understand it right away.” additional context cues allow potential users to observe and copy a format if they would like to join the phenomenon. many popular hashtags offer a fill-in-the-blank format that is easily mimicked by onlookers who might want to take part, such as #yesallwoman, #whyistayed, or #oscarssowhite. by creating phrases that allow for easy mimicry and opportunities to join in, the tweet and essentially the hashtag itself can provide information about how to use it. potential participants can learn from a single example and are likely to use the hashtag correctly, or at least knowingly. it is arguably this function that allows for those who are not insiders to join in, because much of the statement is simplified into a slogan that can be adopted. participants did not describe any challenges to understanding a hashtag’s meaning or a learning curve prior to participating. the ease of participation smooths the friction between those interested in taking part and those who actually partake, making it an easy threshold to cross. here it is important to recall that hashtags, particularly activist hashtags, are increasingly being conceptualized by scholars as publics and counterpublics (bruns & burgess, ; bruns, moon, paul, & münch, ; jackson & banaszczyk, ; kuo, ; rambukkana, ). through activist hashtags, discursive space is created online for the exchange of ideas, information, and dialogue. i argue that these activist hashtag publics and counterpublics are also liminal spaces of learning that can, through the mechanism of public pedagogy, “teach” onlookers how to participate in this public discourse. participants are not born knowing how to participate in publics and counterpublics on twitter; to enter into a public or counterpublic, it is reasonable to consider that perhaps the activist nature might be impeded by the low cost of participating. however, powerful hashtags like #iftheygunnedmedown, #rapedneverreported, #whyistayed, and the recent #metoo movement asked participants to actively engage with the hashtag with their own personal stories, and some of these stories are high stakes. #metoo and #blacklivesmatter were identified as powerful examples by participants, several of whom spoke at length about #metoo. ease of participation does not appear to dampen the effect of these hashtags, as the proliferation of users seems to be key to their effect. participants had to go through a learning process. while participants might not consciously feel the learning curve as they take part in activist hashtag publics/counterpublics, having already built many of the foundations necessary, it still required learning. furthermore, each hashtag is loaded with information about how to legitimately take part in the public exchange, as evidenced by the ability for participants to understand when they were contributing according to or contrary to the goals of the hashtag, as previously discussed. this study has been conducted with the understanding that hashtags can act as publics and counterpublics, but i have also been sensitive to the potential for activist hashtags to facilitate community as well. because context and connection appear critical to the learning processes and intentions of participants, community could also be a key mechanism for learning, based on lave and wenger’s ( ) idea of communities of practice. however, the question of community on twitter, a “social network,” is nuanced, and i asked my participants about it directly to hear about their experience. just because participants were interacting on a network and even building relationships did not mean that they reported feeling like they were part of a specific and meaningful community on twitter. community was reported to exist in pockets, typically that were topically divided. @bob, @usera @userd spoke about how they interacted with several different topic- or location-based communities, moving among them fluidly depending on what they were interested in or sharing. @usera was able to describe how she interacted with each group differently, because she understood each community as a different audience with a different set of needs or goals. access to a community, however, did not equate to belonging. access to twitter is not even necessarily access to community. @bob put it well when he said, “sometimes i think i feel like i’m a part of those [communities], but i don’t think there’s necessarily a broader twitter community that is the same for everyone.” i notice in this statement how tentative @bob was to include himself in those communities. @userc was even more tentative about considering himself part of a community, allowing that he might be “only very partially,” but he felt clear that he was developing some strong interpersonal relationships. @userd spoke about the feeling of community having “ebbs and flows” and noted that “i don’t know if i would call it community, but definitely, like, relationships… like, you develop these relationships, networks perhaps.” likewise, @lorelei was initially ambivalent on the question of whether she felt like she was a part of a community, but she did value the ongoing relationships that she was forming within “weird twitter,” as she called it. newer participants like @mary and @nastywoman, however, did not report feeling connected to a particular community on twitter. @nastywoman felt like she had the potential to access communities in the future based on others connecting with her more recently, but currently she felt more alienated from the communities than accepted. while participants were building bonds and connecting to other users, most were hesitant to say they belonged to a community. in contrast, @nina and @userb offered important examples of feeling very connected to a community on twitter. @nina described her followers as her “tribe” and her “community” where they hold conversations on various issues, saying that she speaks to them “as if i had , people in my family room and we were just chatting on a particular subject.” @nina is a unique case in some ways, as her twitter use is substantially different from the other participants, simply due to the number of followers and influence she has been able to attain, but her comments about community are still important. she not only felt connected to her followers, but she also felt responsible for using her platform to support and benefit her community of followers. she understood her position as a community leader and treated it with significant weight and thought. on the other hand, @userb was a community member who felt he benefited from the community leaders whom he could follow on twitter. he was involved in communities on twitter relevant to his field, and he said, “what i like about that community is that they learn from each other,” cherishing the exchange of skills, tips, and accomplishments with fellow professionals. he argued that twitter has allowed professionals in his field to share their work with less fear of competition and in a more collegial spirit. although @userb’s experience of using twitter primarily as a work site and a resource for professional development was unique within the sample, it does represent how some twitter users take advantage of the platform. his strong sense of community is a testament to the fact that he is not alone in using twitter this way. that said, the rest of the participants did not report a similar experience of learning within a community. in general, although participants acknowledged that they shared the broader space of twitter with other users, community required more than mere co-presence on the platform. because each user curates their twitter feed and an algorithm further interferes with ordering tweets, essentially no two people are experiencing twitter in the same way; there is no way to be on the same literal or metaphorical page. as a result, there is no common public square of twitter where everyone can meet. although there are inevitably tight links that form based on shared followers and mutual following, most users seem to remain nodes in a network that never quite touch. this resonates with thomas’ ( ) description of why students never “came together” during in fact, hashtags are in some ways an attempt to create a shared public space where users can gather content together for a shared experience. live tweeting explicitly works this way. therefore, hashtags have the potential to be a community building tactic, and the archive data offered examples of users implementing it in just this way. by creating a community hashtag, users can join an ever-widening circle of participants engaging in a shared conversation. however, the accessibility of participation facilitated by a keyword does introduce a further limitation: people are connecting to a hashtag, rather than each other, because this community does not require mutual recognition to take part. in essence, hashtags may become another node in a network of connections. scholars of publics and counterpublics may be able to shed light on some of the limitations of hashtags in community formation. warner ( ) writes that within publics, strangers “become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity” but this is not the same as community (pp. - ). bruns and burgess ( ) struggled with whether hashtags could be described as communities as well and argue that community requires “that hashtag participants share specific interests, are aware of, and are deliberately engaging with one another, which may not always be the case” (p. ). some hashtags, like those coded as community and response do appear to encourage participants to engage with other community members and see themselves as belonging to a group of participants. however, given the purpose of activist hashtags specifically, participants are most likely engaging with the ideas in the discussions in virtual learning environments: “students interact not with another student, but with another student’s writing. further, this writing is removed in space and time from the parties involved in the discussion… therefore, it would be more appropriate to conceptualise students’ messages as data stored for potential access by other students, rather than contributions to an ongoing dialogue” (p. , emphasis in original). hashtag, rather than other participants. while there are certainly exceptions, developing community on twitter is not as easy as participating in a hashtag. i argue that a hashtag, and twitter more generally, often resembles a library. this argument is quite aligned with seeing twitter as a series of overlapping publics and counterpublics, as it imagines twitter as a place for the exchange of ideas. for many of my participants, signing on to twitter is much more like going to the library, a place where you might gather information or resources, than going to a social club or meeting, where you might develop tighter bonds to peers. although a library is a shared public space, not everyone will engage with others there in a meaningful social way on a regular basis, and social opportunities are often specifically arranged events. the feeling of community was narrower, more selective, and less common among participants, often requiring prompting to consider during the interviews, while the search for information on twitter was essentially a universal use of the platform. although participants did communicate a desire for or experience of connecting with others using the platform, this was often framed as interpersonal relationship building rather than community building. as a result, the question of whether participants were learning through communities of practice may be best answered with, “sometimes.” according to lave and wenger ( ), a community of practice needs more than mere “co-presence,” instead requiring “participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means for their lives and for their communities” (p. ). a community of practice will share not just practices, but goals, history, and culture. in transient space like twitter, these requirements set a high bar. although people using the same activist hashtag might share the same practice and goals, they may not even recognize the other people taking part in the hashtag. as mentioned above, participants in a hashtag public may be simply participating in discourse, rather than a community. still, a community of practice is not without merit for select participants who were able to connect to a community or communities, like @nina, @userb, and @usera. @bob and @userd’s reports of sometimes feeling like a part of a community can also be considered a nascent opportunity for a community of practice to support learning on twitter. given the predominance of using modeling and examples as a learning strategy, and particularly community leadership, it suggests that some of the processes enabled by communities of practice are in place for some of the participants. @userb was by far the most explicit in his attribution of learning to his community, and the fact that he is engaging with other professionals in his network makes this unsurprising. the concept of communities of practice originally arose from the idea of apprenticeship, and it was used to explain how novices became advanced practitioners (lave & wenger, ). no other participants, however, purposely immersed themselves in a network of people with more expertise than themselves with the hope of increasing their mastery or network. in a sample of nine, it is difficult to say which experiences are more representative of the larger twitter population, but @userb is an important data point. the work of this exploratory study is to discover what is possible, and i am inclined to argue that it is possible to use community of practice to enable learning on twitter, and i encourage other researchers to explore this phenomenon to a greater depth. when looking at activist hashtags specifically, however, communities of practice seem less applicable. even activist hashtags that focus on demonstrating solidarity or shared experience, which can serve to create a sense of closeness, arguably enable mutual recognition rather than a reciprocal closeness, because it is unclear who exactly is viewing an activist hashtag. typical boundaries of community actually dissolve when an activist hashtag becomes widespread, opening users to potential scrutiny or harassment from others. more broadly, participants generally did not report feeling like they were a part of an activist community online, even if they participated in activism and followed activist issues using twitter. to imagine that most of the participants are members of a community of practice regarding activism is potentially an overstatement of the kind of intentionality they have regarding their activism. although four participants did use the platform explicitly to pursue their activism, only @usera and @nastywoman described activism or consciousness-raising as their main goal when using twitter. in general, even for some of the participants who identified as activists, activism appears incidental to participating on the platform and exchanging other kinds of information. activist hashtags are just one type of public or counterpublic in which they can participate on twitter. a more useful concept than communities of practice is the connected idea of “legitimate peripheral participation,” which lave and wenger ( ) use to describe the position of a novice beginning to participate in a community of practice. on this topic, lave and wenger ( ) write, the individual learner is not gaining a discrete body of abstract knowledge which (s)he will then transport and reapply in later contexts. instead, (s)he acquires the skill to perform by actually engaging in the process, under the attenuated conditions of legitimate peripheral participation. this central concept denotes the particular mode of engagement of a learner who participates in the actual practice of an expert, but only to a limited degree and with limited responsibility for the ultimate product as a whole. there is no necessary implication that a learner acquires mental representations that remain fixed thereafter, nor that the “lesson” taught consists itself in a set of abstract representations. (p. , emphasis in the original) legitimate peripheral participation seems to be a helpful description of the kind of observation and application of learning that is possible online. one can be legitimately participating in a twitter hashtag merely through reading their feed, but without necessarily creating a hashtag themselves. furthermore, when learners do tweet with an activist hashtag, they participate in “the actual practice of an expert,” because their tweet is treated the same as other users—there is no twitter learner’s permit (lave & wenger, , p. ). legitimate peripheral participation also recalls the two most commonly reported learning strategies: (a) exposure over time and (b) observing and copying. therefore, i find the explanatory power of this concept appealing. while communities of practice may not be a concept that applies to many of my participants, nearly all of them described a learning process that was similar to legitimate peripheral participation at times. perhaps the disjuncture between the two concepts is the presumption of community-belonging and intention to improve in communities of practice, which are often not the case. given that an activist hashtag is typically better described as a public or counterpublic than a community, i argue for calling them a “public of practice.” the advantage of this term would be to label the kind of learning necessary to participate in these hashtag publics. it would be marking them as a space of discourse that allows for a type of learning and legitimate peripheral participation that is ongoing but centered around a public rather than a community. although it might be sufficient to call activist hashtags a site of public pedagogy and leave it at that, calling them publics of practice highlights the fact that this learning has an element of application to its pedagogy. not only are activist hashtags learning environments and publics, but they are also a place of practice. learning is often occurring at the same time as application, and this is not incidental to its occurrence. participants reported exploration, and frequently trial and error, as key to their learning process. in calling a hashtag a public of practice, we capture the fullest possible picture of the learning that occurs. . limitations of memory, technology, and capacity in this study, i aim to demonstrate an “emancipatory interest in knowledge” rather than present a “formulaic solution,” following the tradition of critical theory as described by alvesson and sköldberg ( ). i can only describe how it might be possible to learn and present the world as it can be, rather than provide an encyclopedic description of what is. even aside from philosophical stances and the limits of my own positionality, this project cannot realistically present a definitive answer to the question of how all people will learn the mdl skills to use activist hashtags on twitter, given its limited scope and its practical constraints as a master’s thesis. nine participants are simply insufficient to discover all there is to say on this topic and do not reflect all users. for example, it is possible that activists in other movements or communities have developed specific strategies around teaching activist hashtags that i simply did not encounter. an exploratory study is always open-ended, a signal to others that there is more yet to learn, and i hope that others will take up this question in the future as well. throughout this study, i have also mentioned the limitation of memory and the challenges of capturing informal learning that occurs through lived experience. livingstone ( ) cautions researchers that, “retrospective views of the amount of time spent in incidentally initiated informal learning processes are likely to remain very approximate underestimates” but also argues that “approximations of the significance of important phenomena should be preferred to either continuing to ignore them or to imposing false precision in measurement efforts” (p. ). i have chosen to pursue this study with this limitation continuously in mind, rather than attempting to acknowledge it and put it aside, because it is a part of the nature of the work. foley ( ) recognizes the importance of studying informal learning in action despite the challenges incumbent in a study of this kind, writing: we learn as we act, and our learning is both tacit and explicit. this is indeed a complex tapestry, difficult to unpick. but just to know that it is complex and needs to be unpicked is important for those of us concerned with understanding and facilitating critical and emancipatory learning. we can then let go of formulas that promise quick results, and get on with the difficult and rewarding work of trying to understand what people are actually learning in the places where they work and live. and, of course, considering the implications of that learning for our educational interventions. (p. ) this quote gets to the heart of this project. learning is always difficult to measure, as any educator will tell you, but the difficulties presented by studying learning through experience are not outweighed by the importance of doing so. throughout this study, i have tried to make it clear that the reports of participants may not be the sum total of either their own experiences or of the phenomenon but analyzed what i could from their reports. the questions of my study remain important, even if they are difficult to answer, and my conclusions are transparent in the scope of their claims. given my interest in twitter as a site of public pedagogy, another significant limitation to the study is that i was not able to capture the twitter feed of participants, which represents significant evidence of how participants experience the platform. in general, this study focused on capturing what the participants created on twitter by analyzing their tweets, rather than attempting to directly collect evidence of what they saw on the platform. not only was i at a loss for how i might collect such data, but if i had, it would have been challenging to determine how to analyze this information. it is nearly impossible to retroactively determine what tweets any single user might be exposed to on the platform, especially as twitter’s algorithm has made the process for composing a user’s twitter feed increasingly opaque. while historically twitter displayed tweets in chronological order, since twitter has chosen to order tweets according to internal algorithmic estimations of what it calls a “top tweet” (typically tweets that receive a lot of engagement, such as likes, replies, and retweets) and surfacing tweets that “you might have missed” while logged off (oremus, ). this shift has a qualitative and substantial impact on the user experience and what they see on the platform, and it also makes it difficult to guess what tweets a user might be viewing at any given time. therefore, while the theory of learning in this study focuses on the impact of the environment or site of learning, it is impossible for me to actually recreate and analyze the site of learning. to address this issue, i have chosen to interview participants and hear about their experiences of the platform, but reflections on the use of a platform over years are sketches rather than mirrors of their experience. participants frequently admitted to not recalling answers. in addition, i collected the information on the experience of the platform that it was possible to capture, user activity on twitter, but even this strategy is not seamless. participants like @nastywoman and @usera noted that they had deleted tweets from their twitter archive, even substantial amounts, in an effort to curate their archives for onlookers. @bob, @mary, and @userb also said that they had additional twitter accounts as well, which i did not have access to because the accounts were associated with organizations, and it was not possible to get permission. even if i had received permission, their tweets would have been intermingled in the archives with collaborators. therefore, even their archives offer an incomplete picture of their experience. again, interviews had to stand in for this lack of data but cannot completely compensate. due to the difficulty of capturing the site of learning, a useful research strategy would be an autoethnography of a new user of twitter, and i certainly would have considered this method if i felt that i were sufficiently unfamiliar with the platform. i encourage other researchers to follow gleason’s ( ) example and consider documenting their own experiences of new digital learning environments to capture learning in process. given that learning is situated and contextual, many accounts of this learning process would be necessary before a bigger picture might be envisioned. . implications for research, informal learning, digital citizenship, and education despite challenges and questions that remain unanswered, this research offers insights that are relevant to the current moment. first, and perhaps most obviously, research on digital environments is necessary to understand the opportunities and challenges of new technologies. with technological innovations shaping both our everyday present and our future, it is valuable to consider how we can keep up with the necessary media and digital literacy skills to use them for good. in addition, this work is relevant to questions of how lifelong digital learning might occur more generally. understanding that online informal learning might require a buffet of learning strategies is useful when anticipating how this learning could be supported or enabled. i am proud to join the chorus of voices asking questions about the educative potential of online spaces. in particular, research into how people learn to use new digital media to create positive social change and support democratic digital citizenship is important. kellner and kim, speaking about their own work on youtube response videos, offer an argument relevant to the rationale for this study: when they have an occasion and competence to raise their authentic voices based on their own lived experiences of social oppression, marginalized people are likely to augment their counter-hegemonic struggle by consolidating solidarity with other critical social constituencies. equipped with crucial sociopolitical consciousness and competency to make use of the internet, individuals can realize what giroux ( ) calls the “reconstruction of democratic public life.” (p. ) media and digital literacy skills or, as i have argued, digital citizenship skills are critical in contemporary society to the project of consciousness-raising and social change. in understanding how these skills are learned, even without aid of formal structures, we are given greater insight into how citizens today can participate and shape public life. although new media technologies are not inevitably tools for positive social change, it is this fact that makes their use for activism even more worthy of attention. in a world where my participants could be using twitter simply to exchange funny pictures or comment on celebrity news, it is worth examining how and why they (also) use twitter for activism. to do this necessary digital research, scholars must develop standards of consent, effective research designs, and best practices. i hope that this study can be of service to future scholars who are taking on digital research. although technology changes constantly, making applying lessons directly more difficult, the rationale of my design choices—as well as the recruitment challenges i faced—will hopefully help inform others looking to conduct similar research. i especially encourage other researchers to combine research methods and do more than collect publicly available data, even if this creates challenges. there is no shortage of things to measure on the internet, but digital qualitative research still has much to explore and offers a different view of life online. i also hope that this research supports norms that favour collecting data using procedures that prioritize informed consent and transparency. big data offers substantial opportunities for digital research, but it is vital that data collection is done in ways that treat participants as people with dignity, not just accounts with data. there are many ways to explore digital qualitative research while keeping this in mind, and i look forward to seeing how other scholars pursue it. this study also adds to the voices arguing for the importance of informal learning, and especially incidental learning, as a key educational process (choudry, ; foley, ; foley ; livingstone, ; scandrett, ). choudry ( ) writes, “people struggle, learn, educate, and theorize wherever they find themselves. the form this takes may change, but the importance of space and places for collective action, learning, reflection, and intergenerational sharing is crucial to building, sustaining, and broadening resistance” (p. ). now that people, and especially activists, are finding themselves on twitter, it is becoming just such a place as he describes. it is critical that we attempt to understand how learning occurs outside of formal structures; if we do not, we will miss much of the learning that occurs. this study also has implications for formal education regarding mdl and digital citizenship, which is increasingly common in curricula (hoechsmann & dewaard, ). although the conceptions of mdl and digital citizenship are quite broad when applied, digital literacy as technical proficiency has been gaining momentum. with campaigns like the hour of code (code.org) and organizations like canada learning coding (canadalearningcode.ca), there is increasing appetite for teaching youth to code, and governments are responding to the industry demand, like british columbia’s commitment to integrate coding into the curriculum (silcoff, ). if technical skills like coding, however, come to symbolize the totality of digital literacy and are not combined with the softer skills in mdl and digital citizenship, students are left substantially unprepared to use digital tools. not only did participants report that these soft skills were the most challenging to acquire, but these skills were also vital to the ways that they were using twitter to connect, contribute, influence, learn, and pursue personal goals. for example, humour was identified as an important part of twitter use, but this feature is likely to be undervalued by educators describing successful twitter use. being funny is not a technical skill, but it is a highly useful, well-regarded skill on twitter. applied more broadly, in a world full of social platforms, social skills are just as important to learn to be successful in the internet age. educators need to anticipate this reality as they plan their digital literacy lessons. . open questions: authenticity, adaptability, inequality, anonymity, and more many questions remain open for exploration and, given the nature of the technology, they become more numerous every day. for example, anyone watching north american political news cannot help but hear about the influence of twitter bots, which are accounts that are automated for certain responses, or otherwise fake accounts that might be run for various purposes such as impersonating real people, trolling, or artificially inflating the twitter metrics. not only are these practices of concern for the platform, mainstream media, the public, politicians, and others who are trying to use the platform as a public sphere, but skepticism of twitter users and authentic engagement could potentially poison the entire well. activists and their allies struggle to maintain legitimacy already, but if hashtag activism is suspected to be astroturf instead of a grassroots sentiment, this struggle will only increase. on an individual level, how can a twitter user join a hashtag in an informed way and avoid empowering bots or malicious users? this is especially difficult when credible reporting on a hashtag can hardly keep up with the social movement of the hashtag itself, due to the nature of the internet. increasingly sophisticated skills may be necessary in the future to be able to separate wheat from chaff and signal genuine sentiment. the ability to discern authenticity online is a critical mdl skill that deserves greater attention. informal mdl learning requires more research specifically to answer questions connected to the digital divide. for example, within my sample, i did not speak to anyone who struggled to access the technology and basic digital literacy necessary to join twitter, but their experiences with the platform are likely to differ from the learning journeys i have described. i also encourage researchers to investigate what makes some adults learn mdl and digital citizenship skills, while others ignore, avoid, or even resist gaining this skill set. my participants had a set of motivations for their twitter use that helped drive their learning, and they were generally interested in or open to new things, but, without a comparison group of non-learners, i can only speculate that these are important dispositions for this kind of learning. lifelong informal digital learning will be an increasingly important area of study to understand how people can adapt to technological change and avoid being “left behind.” important questions also remain regarding how trolling and online harassment impacts the experience of twitter learners and their capacity to attain digital citizenship. while my participants were aware of the potential to be harassed, and @nina briefly spoke to how she handled trolls, it was outside of the scope of this study to deeply explore that experience. it would be worth looking at both how being trolled is a learning curve of its own, often requiring a very specific set of skills to maintain emotional, mental, and even physical health. kelly and arnold ( ) have explored the issue of cyberbullying, and i second their concern that online harassment might lead to the silencing of marginalized groups if members withdraw from digital public space to avoid abuse (kelly & arnold, ). in the framework of deliberative democracy, the silencing of any group is a substantial limitation to citizenship and access to justice, making this a key point for future inquiry. i would also be interested in how anonymity impacts the learning process on twitter. this study generally included participants who posted under their own identity, which arguably enforces certain parameters of behaviour. it might even be valuable to explore how users learn to troll others on twitter, which is certainly not a skill all users possess. anonymous users and trolls may have unique goals, practices, and communities on twitter that are worth investigating for how they inform the skills they acquire and how. i would also encourage other researchers to draw on this work and apply it to specific publics and counterpublics on twitter. critical race digital studies is likely to have a key role to play in understanding how hashtag activism is learned, and potentially even taught, within particular communities and counterpublics on twitter (see jackson & banaszczyk, ; kuo, ). catherine r. squires’ ( ) work considering subaltern counterpublics may hold considerable potential for this work, considering how jackson and banaszczyk ( ) have already applied it to activist hashtags. it is also important to consider what it means that twitter has become home to publics, counterpublics, communities, protests, and amplified voices of many who are usually ignored by mainstream media. for example, what does it mean that “black twitter” is considered a key demographic on this format in north america, when black- owned mainstream media is still a rarity? many of the examples of powerful hashtags that i have seen and that have come up in interviews were created by people of colour, especially black women. researchers who have insight into these communities have much to contribute to how we can understand how activist hashtags are created, taken up (or not), and become a source of learning for others. regarding activist hashtags as a concept, i would be interested in investigating the extent to which these hashtags might be an example of “problem-posing” education. drawing on paulo freire’s ( ) pedagogy of the oppressed and applying critical pedagogy more directly to the question of what the activist hashtag accomplishes for social movement learning could be rewarding. kellner and kim’s ( ) analysis of response videos on youtube might act as a model for how this might be done. while activist hashtags are less explicit in demanding a response sometimes, they are stating that there is a problem, making a justice claim, and then creating a community of common cause that coalesce around the topic; effectively, they are consciousness-raising, as my participants have described it. this study did not have the scope to tackle broader questions of how activist hashtags function, and there is much work still left to be done. . in closing: reviewing the learning tool kit based on the content analysis of the twitter archives and interview transcripts of nine adult study participants, informal learning online involves a buffet of strategies that can be combined according to individual goals, opportunities, and obstacles. participants applied prior knowledge, explored, referred to models and examples, and accessed expertise to learn how to use twitter to advocate for social change with activist hashtags. few participants relied on directly accessing hashtag expertise, although this was helpful when received. the most common learning strategies reported overall were learning through exposure over time (i.e., experience) and through observation and copying, although trial and error was a significant strategy as well. nearly all the participants attributed a part of their learning to a process of experience where they took in events and incorporated their results into their frameworks of understanding. in essence, learning was part and parcel of making sense of their experience. observation and copying, essentially mimicking other users, also makes some intuitive sense on a platform built around “following” others. these findings approximately align with anticipated strategies, although i did not expect participants to each describe so many different strategies in addition to these. in total, participants described strategies, which i grouped into the four main approaches. specific cohorts within the sample had some differences in experience. participants who had high tweet activity, and who also identified as activists, reported more uses for twitter. high activity participants and those who reported relevant education also reported a wider array of learning strategies. whether participants saw themselves as activists or not, using activist hashtags aligned with their interest in using twitter to connect, contribute, influence, learn, and achieve personal goals. by the time study participants were using activist hashtags, they had typically mastered all the basic features of the platform and were familiar with hashtags already, so they were able to apply what they knew to take part in the activist hashtag at hand. among those participants who had created an activist hashtag, experiences varied in their outcomes, but all reported that they would use the tactic again in the future. hashtag use was motivated by the particulars of each activist hashtag, and, in general, participants felt that hashtags advocating for social change had the potential to be an activist tactic and useful political tool. like all tools, however, it depended on how they were used. according to participants, an effective activist hashtag is clear, concise, and captures the essence of its message. considering the breadth of learning strategies that i identified in the study, my findings align well with choudry’s ( ) argument that there is a “dynamic interrelation” between formal, informal, and other kinds of education (p. ). i agree that learning occurs through a series of overlapping processes, and that these processes have a dynamic relationship, as evidenced by the fact that participants who reported relevant education also reported using more (and arguably unrelated) learning strategies. learning happens in many forms and, formal or informal, lessons learned one way are integrated into insights gained in another to create a coherent overall skill set to apply. it all becomes experience that helps you understand and act in the world. finally, it must be said: new research regarding new media will inevitably become old research about old media. twitter was born over a decade ago, but it is difficult to guess if twitter be around in a decade from now. several participants pointed out that twitter is not as popular or successful as they think it should be, and they worry about twitter’s future. although currently receiving renewed attention thanks to events connected to the american elections and tweets by president donald trump, twitter has struggled to become a profitable company and retain users (tsukayama, ). my participants, and many others, feel that twitter is a powerful and effective platform for their purposes, but even several of them have left the platform in the past. the experiences of participants are relevant beyond the life span of a particular social media platform, however. even if activist hashtags were no longer in circulation, it is likely that we would still need to keep making space for publics of practice that support democratic digital citizenship. the internet and networked communication are not going away, and hopefully neither is 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( ). searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags. social semiotics, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / . . appendices appendix a recruitment materials a. recruiting advertisement figure . recruitment image to be posted to twitter and facebook a. blog text (http://blogs.ubc.ca/hashtagstudy/) home page: recruiting participants do you use twitter? have you used it in the past? do you ever use hashtags to talk about issues that are important to you? the study “learning to use activist hashtags on twitter” is recruiting participants. we are researching how people learned to use hashtags on twitter to talk about issues they care about. these are hashtags that ask for change or point to problems, like #endpoverty, #blacklivesmatter, or #weneeddiversebooks. have you ever used hashtags like this? if so, please consider getting in touch at [email address] to join the study. your experience is can give important insight into how people start using these hashtags. study participants will be interviewed and give us permission to use their tweets in the study. information will be confidential and all answers are voluntary. participation will not take longer than an hour, and as thanks for your participation, you will receive a $ gift certificate to amazon. to join the study, contact [email address] or click on “about the study” to learn about this research and participation. this study has been approved by the university of british columbia behavioural research ethics board and supervised by dr. deirdre kelly. about page: about the study: learning to use activist hashtags on twitter purpose of the study: the goal of this study is to look at how adults (ages +) learn to use hashtags on the social media website twitter to talk about injustice. hashtags are a type of keyword used on social media to label or comment on a topic, but the focus of the study will be on specifically “activist hashtags” that might be seen as a call for action or related to injustice, like #weneeddiversebooks or #endpoverty. although they are being called “activist hashtags,” they are used by many different kinds of people for many different reasons. activist hashtags are becoming common online, but there are few structured opportunities for someone to be taught to use these tools. this study is interested in asking the question: how do we learn the knowledge and skills to use and create activist hashtags? in addition, how do we understand these new digital tools? principal investigator: dr. deirdre kelly, professor educational studies university of british columbia tel: [phone number] email: [email address] co-investigator: megan ryland, graduate student educational studies university of british columbia email: [email address] participant recruitment participants are currently being recruited for this study. people are invited to participate in the study who have used activist hashtags and would like to share their experiences. twitter beginners, amateurs, and experts all have important experience to share for this study. if you are interested in taking part, please contact [email address]. description of participation: there are two parts to participation in this study: sharing your twitter archive and completing an interview. in total, participation time should not exceed hour. first, you will be asked to download your twitter archive (your tweet history) and provide a copy to the co-investigator, megan ryland. clear instructions for how to do this will be provided. twitter archive data will be analyzed to understand how you learned to use activist hashtags over time. second, you will be interviewed one-on-one for approximately forty-five minutes via video conference software like skype or google hangouts. the interview will focus on the process of learning to use twitter and activist hashtags, including questions about the hashtags that you have used on twitter. however, please note, you will not have to defend or justify your use of particular hashtags. with your permission, the audio of the interviews will be recorded for transcription and analysis by the researcher. you will have the opportunity to review your contributions to the study prior to its completion to ensure that you feel you have been represented accurately in transcripts. confidentiality: we will ask you to choose a pseudonym (fake name) to be used in the study, rather than your real name or twitter username, to protect your privacy. participants will not be identified by their real name or username in the interview transcripts, twitter archive data, or the completed study. any references to names of people, organizations, or locations will be deleted or changed to protect the confidentiality of research participants. your social media archive will not be directly quoted in full within the final study if it can be used to identify specific twitter users; such data will be included in aggregate. all documents or recordings, including consent forms, will only be stored as electronic files, which will be kept on a password-protected and encrypted hard drive. the study outcomes will include a graduate thesis and a brief summary report, which will be shared with participants. potential benefits and risks: you will receive a $ amazon gift certificate for taking part in the study and you will have a chance to reflect on their experiences using activist hashtags. reflection might encourage greater insight into your social media or activist practices. for people invested in social media activism, the final study might provide information about how others learn about social media activism, suggesting resources for their own use. you will experience no known risks from taking part in the study. during interviews, you are free not to answer any question and/or to stop participation as you see fit. although the interview does not contain questions specifically targeting sensitive topics or intended to draw out difficult experiences, the researcher can refer you to a counselor or other community resources as necessary. study contact information: if you have any questions about this study, feel free to contact professor deirdre kelly at [phone number] or [email address]. if you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the research participant complaint line in the ubc office of research ethics at - - or, if long distance, e-mail rsil@ors.ubc.ca or call toll free at - - - . consent: taking part in this study is entirely up to the participant. you have the right to refuse to participate at any time. if you do decide to take part, you may later choose to leave the study if you no longer wish to participate for any reason. appendix b interview guide participants and i shared a brief conversation prior to launching into the interview portion, allowing us to become comfortable as people before the more structured interaction of the interview. interview introduction thank you for agreeing to be part of my study about how people learned to use activist hashtags. i appreciate the chance to hear about your experiences so that we can better understand how this happens. is it alright if i record our session? it will let me focus on listening now, rather than taking notes. [wait for response] i’ll be sending you the transcript after the interview to make sure that i’ve understood what you’ve said, so you’ll have a chance to doubt check before i get too ahead of myself. just as a reminder, your name will be kept confidential and i will be anonymizing any details you provide that might identify you to others, so please feel free to speak freely. do you have any questions about that? [wait for response] after i finish the research, i’ll circulate a summary of the findings, and of course make my thesis available for anyone interested, in case we can learn from other people’s strategies for learning about activist hashtags, and social media activism in general. before we start, do you have any questions about me, the study, or this interview? [wait for response] finally, given what i have just told you, do you consent to participate in this study? [wait for response] hashtag encounters - how do activists encounter hashtags? • how did you hear about twitter? • what made you join twitter? • what sort of things do you use twitter for? • were that any challenges or things that were more difficult to learn than others? o if so, could you describe them? • did you have any teachers or mentors for twitter? o if so, could you describe them? • what would it mean to be “good at” twitter? o do you feel like you are “good at” twitter? • do you remember your first encounter with hashtags? • can you tell me the story of how you started to use hashtags? • can you remember the first time you saw or learned about activist hashtags? these would be hashtags that are related to an issue of justice, oppression, domination or power in society, like #blacklivesmatter or #notokay. hashtag participation - how do users understand the practice of using activist hashtags? • are there activist or politicized hashtags that you remember using? o do you remember how you encountered them? o do you remember why you used them? • how do you use activist/politicized hashtags? • how have you learned to use activist hashtags? • do you feel like you really understand how to use activist hashtags or are you still learning? • can you tell me why you used a particular activist/politicized hashtag? [draw example from archive] • who are you hoping will see your activist hashtag? • who are you speaking to when you use an activist hashtag? hashtag creation - what is the thought-process behind creating an activist hashtag? • have you ever created a politicized or activist hashtag? o can share a story of an example? o what inspired you to create a hashtag? o why did you choose to create that hashtag in particular? o who did you think would see it? o who did you think might use it, if anyone? o who else used your hashtag? o did you do it again? was it different the other times you tried? hashtag impact - how do users understand the impact of using activist hashtags? • what do you think makes for a good activist hashtag? • what about a bad one? • what are you hoping the hashtag will do? • what does it mean to you, to engage in this way? • have you ever done something because of a hashtag you saw? • do you feel like you’re “in public” when you use hashtags? • do you feel like you are part of a community when you participate in a hashtag? o if yes, can you describe the community? activism and civic engagement - what is the role of the hashtag in activism and/or political action? • would you consider yourself an activist? o if yes, what kind of activism are you involved with? • could you describe what the term “activist” means to you? • what makes an action “political” to you? • can you please explain why you would or would not consider activist hashtags a political strategy? closing • do you have anything that you would like to add or mention? • do you have any questions for me? • do you have any questions about the study? n.b. the questions here represent a guide. although not all questions could be addressed in each interview, my goals were to address each category of question and ensure as much question consistency among interviews as possible. tilburg university metapolitical new right influencers maly, ico published in: social sciences doi: . /socsci publication date: document version peer reviewed version link to publication citation for published version (apa): maly, i. ( ). metapolitical new right influencers: the case of brittany pettibone. social sciences, ( ). https://doi.org/ . /socsci general rights copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • you may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • you may freely distribute the url identifying the publication in the public portal ? take down policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /socsci https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/c ddef f- - b- ba -cac e https://doi.org/ . /socsci soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci article metapolitical new right influencers: the case of brittany pettibone ico maly culture studies departement, tilburg university, ab tilburg, the netherlands; i.e.l.maly@tilburguniversity.edu received: may ; accepted: july ; published: july abstract: far-right movements, activists, and political parties are on the rise worldwide. several scholars connect this rise of the far-right at least partially to the affordances of digital media and to a new digital metapolitical battle. a lot has been written about the far-right’s adoption of trolling, harassment, and meme-culture in their metapolitical strategy, but researchers have focused less on how far-right vloggers are using the practices of influencer culture for metapolitical goals. this paper tries to fill this gap and bring new theoretical insights based on a digital ethnographic case study. by analyzing political youtuber and #pizzagate propagator brittany pettibone, this paper contributes to our understanding of radicalization processes in relation to the use of digital media. keywords: brittany pettibone; new right; metapolitics; influencer; metapolitical influencer . introduction far-right movements, activists and political parties are on the rise worldwide. organic and even blood and soil nationalism, radical new right regionalism, anti-feminism, homophobia, racism, and anti-migration rhetoric are moving from the margins to the mainstream (nagle ; maly a; tufekci ; russel ; fielitz and thurston ). several scholars connect this rise of the far- right at least partially to the affordances of digital media and to a new digital (meta)-political battle (nagle ; lewis ; maly a, a, a). mainstream digital media like youtube, facebook, twitter, and instagram are used by radical right and far-right actors in connection to niched websites, boards, crowd funding platforms, click farms, bot-networks, and alt-tech to engage in a metapolitical battle: a cultural or ideological war for hegemony. the appropriation of digital culture and digital technologies has changed the metapolitics of the far-right. not only the intellectual, but also the activist, the politician and the prosumer are now imagined as part of the new right metapolitical battle. much has been written about the far right’s adoption of meme-culture (nagle ; bogerts and fielitz ; maly a), larping (the ironic and metapolitical use live action role playing in order to do or say things that are too outrageous for normies) (tuters ), harassment (conversi ), and trolling (hodge and hallgrimsdottir ) in their metapolitical strategy, but researchers have focused less on how far-right vloggers are using the practices of influencer culture for metapolitical goals (lewis being an exception). this paper tries to fill this gap and brings new theoretical insights based on a digital ethnographic case study. influencer strategies are next to harassment, fear, exclusion, denial, and negation (maly a; conversi ), key in understanding contemporary far-right mobilization. by analyzing political youtuber and #pizzagate propagator brittany pettibone as a case, this paper after her marriage with martin sellner—a key figure within the pan-european identitarian movement generation identity—pettibone has adopted his last name and is now known as brittany sellner. throughout the paper, from a coherence perspective, i have opted to use the name brittany pettibone instead of brittany sellner. soc. sci. , , of contributes to our understanding of radicalization processes in relation to digital media. this research starts by understanding the role of culture and the niched nature of contemporary radicalization processes (maly a). people do not radicalize in relation to abstract phenomena, but in relation to (a network of) very specific individuals, websites, channels, and discourses. the trump campaign under steve bannon succeeded in connecting several of these niches together (the so-called alt-right, incels, #maga-activists, channers, anti-feminists, pizzagaters, …) in one movement (nagle ; maly a). brittany pettibone is one of those figures around which a transnational niche came into being. she played a key role in bringing to prominence the #pizzagate conspiracy theory and has since built a large following and a prominent status among far-right activists around the world. she is working on a transnational scale and has a truly global following. pettibone uses the action and meaning making possibilities of different mainstream digital media like twitter, instagram, and youtube and adopts the practices of influencers to further a metapolitical agenda. with more than , followers on instagram, . followers on twitter and . subscribers on youtube ( june ), pettibone has created a niched media empire for herself. and this in less than four years’ time. in the first two sections of this paper i will explain my theoretical framework and key notions like metapolitics, after which i will further zoom in on the adoption of “influencer culture” for metapolitical goals. in the third section, i will explain my methodology, digital ethnography, after which i will introduce the case study. . metapolitics in a post-digital world in the st century, the concept of metapolitics has been taken up by new right and identitarian movements in the us and europe (nagle ; hawley ; maly a; zienkowski ). several key figures of the alt-right in the us and the identitarian movements in europe argue that metapolitics is at the heart of the new right cultural construction of a future society. the new right idea of metapolitics goes back to groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne (grece), the “school of thought” led by alain de benoist, better known as la nouvelle droite, in the th century (bar-on ). central to the metapolitics of la nouvelle droite was the gramscian idea that culture and ideas need to be produced first to realize political change in the long- term. or, more concretely, in order to build a post-liberal, post-democratic society in the future, intellectuals should start to produce and circulate ideas. key figures in the global new right network explicitly refer to the project of la nouvelle droite and the theoreticians alain de benoist and especially guillaume faye as guides in understanding metapolitics. martin sellner—now the husband of brittany pettibone and head of the identitarian movement—dedicated a series of five videos on the metapolitical dictionary of guillaume faye. greg johnson, editor in chief of the far-right american publishing house counter-currents not only looked at la nouvelle droite as an example for building a north american new right, he highlights the importance of the concept of metapolitics for the north american new right. daniel friberg, ceo and co-founder of the influential new right publishing house arktos, not only publishes the works of alain de benoist, guillaume faye (including his metapolitical dictionary) and generation identity, he himself stresses the importance of new right metapolitics. in his handbook for the true opposition, friberg stresses that ‘any political struggle must be preceded, legitimized, and supported by a metapolitical struggle .’ this metapolitical battle is about “strategy” and ideology. ‘the deepest work of the friberg, d. . the real right returns. a handbook for the true opposition. london: arktos; friberg, d. . ‘metapolitics from the right’, altright.com. https://altright.com/ / / /metapolitics-from-the-right/; spencer, richard. . ‘what it means to be alt-right. a meta-political manifesto’, altright.com, ( b), https://altright.com/ / / /what-it-means-to-be-alt-right/ and kirkpatrick, james. . ‘an american defense worker suggests four ways americans can fight back against the rule of judge.’ vdare, ( ), https://vdare.com/letters/an-american-defense-worker-suggests-four-ways-americans-can-fight-back- against-the-rule-of-judges friberg, d. . ‘metapolitics from the right’, altright.com. https://altright.com/ / / /metapolitics- from-the-right/ soc. sci. , , of metapolitician of the right’, says leonard, is, ‘necessarily anti-democratic: he seeks to produce a society in which metapolitics, save in its conservative aspect, no longer exists.’ at its core, every new right metapolitical project is about the production and hegemonization of an ideology that rejects liberal democracy, the left and the (radical) enlightenment tradition in general. digitalization has fundamentally reshaped and re-organized the (meta)-political field and the media field in general. whereas the far-right has always used digital media to propagate their ideologies (winter ), the metapolitization of the far-right (griffin , p. ) in the hybrid media system (chadwick ) has changed the form, content and strategies that are being used today. in his seminal work, chadwick argues that we now see a ‘chaotic transition period’ in which “old media” and “newer media logics” interact with and are interdependent among each other. the result of this interaction and interdependence in the reflexively connected social fields of media and politics is what he labels as the ‘hybrid media system’ (chadwick , p. xi). within that system, different actors—be it politicians, influencers, journalists, activists, or alternative media—try to ‘create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings.’ (chadwick , p. xi). digital media enable metapolitical actors to potentially have an impact in the whole hybrid media system. in the last few years, we have seen that the alt-right and chan trolls have been successfully trolling mainstream media in order to amplify their message (phillips ). identitarian movements remediatize small but spectacular offline interventions by uploading videos on social media in the hope that mainstream media would report on them (maly a). in a similar vein, the far-right has carefully and strategically mobilized the media ideology surrounding google by adopting search engine optimization to make sure their sites rank high on certain search terms and exploit the potential of data voids (arnstad ; golebiewski and boyd ; maly c;). this new media landscape affects the agenda setting process. while mainstream media is still important in this hybrid system, they have become weaker in determining what is important and what is not and in constructing a consensus. in this interdependent and asymmetrical hybrid media system, salience is transferred among political actors, media platforms and public groups and is thus hybridized. such hybrid forms of salience, argue maniou and bantimaroudis ( , p. ) ‘should be approached as indices of mediated significance derived from interdependent and asymmetrical distributions of media power, divided between mainstream media outlets as well as grassroots digital platforms including various in-between hybrid media formations.’ this hybrid salience does not deny the agenda setting role of legacy media, but it does highlight the different metapolitical options that the hybrid media system has given rise to. being able to steer the information flows and making mainstream media work for their cause is a bonus for far-right activists, but not necessary anymore. alt-right activists have set up a whole ecology of their own platforms for metapolitical goals: they not only have their own websites and blogs, but also upload podcasts and vlogs on mainstream platforms like youtube and use social media to find an audience. . metapolitical influencers in general, we see that the metapolitical strategy of the new right is focused on a deep integration in the digital mainstream. new right activists try to use the digital mainstream platforms as leverage to reach new audiences. even though many new right activists openly criticize the “left-wing” bias of zuckerberg and dorsey, in practice we see that they try to conform to the (literal reading) of the community standards of these social media. as a result of this interaction between activists and platforms we see new (metapolitical) practices (maly a, c, b) and new norms and cultures (hou ) emerging. one of these cultural practices is what is known as “influencer,” “micro-celebrity,” or “social media celebrity” culture (lewis ). marwick, together with boyd and senft, argues that micro-celebrity should be understood as ‘a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, use strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regard their audience as fans’ (marwick and boyd ; senft ; marwick ). this “edited self,” as garcía-rapp and roca-cuberes ( ) call it, is at the same time a product of the internal norms of each community (shaping its discourses, styles, looks, and ideologies) and soc. sci. , , of the technical affordances and the media-ideologies connected to the platform (visible in its community standards and norms), and the intrinsic features of online content. influencer culture is thus a socio-technical assemblage: the voice and performance of the social media influencer is not entirely “free,” but a product of socio-technologic interaction between the vlogger, the platform(s), his or her followers, and the larger niche in which the influencer acts. micro-celebrity culture finds its material base in the technological programming of the digital infrastructures. influencers are an integral part of the so-called attention-economy or what venturini calls the ‘economy of virality’ (venturini , p. ). they capture the attention of the users and activate them (garcía-rapp and roca-cuberes ). audience labour (fisher ), or more specifically, the interaction between people, interfaces, and algorithms, is the fundament of the contemporary digital economy. this audience labour and attention is measured, quantified, and standardized in the form of “reach,” “views,” “interactions,” “likes,” and “shares.” together with tracking cookies and third-party data, they enable platforms to collect and reconfigure all that data into predictive modelling in order to create a more personalized experience for users, and of course to monetize them (zuboff ). in order to be fully integrated in this economy of virality and thus generate uptake (maly c), metapolitical influencers need to be media literate. they need to develop specific strategies to make use of the affordances and algorithms of the different media (and their specific media logics) to build an audience and/or community (varis and hou , p. ). digital affordances are thus socio- technical affordances: they refer to the action-taking possibilities and meaning-making opportunities that the technical capabilities of a platform enable. these interfaces steer the behaviour of users, but don’t determine it. media ideologies—the ideas that people form about the workings of a media platform and its algorithms—will shape the behaviour and practices of the users (gershon ). concretely, as the functioning of the algorithms of the different platforms is not known by anybody outside of the company that builds them, the acquiring of media literacy is based on an ‘algorithmic imaginary’ (bucher ). this imaginary is constructed on the basis of practical experience and the careful monitoring of metrics: the number of likes, shares, followers, viewers, and comments. these “vanity metrics,” as rogers ( ) calls them, not only give birth to the culture of influencers and social media celebrities, they also bring into life networks of influence. the more people follow an influencer, the more chances that their content will be liked, shared, and distributed in the network. these networks of influence (jacobson et al. )—within an attention economy—not only have economic value (in terms of data production and usefulness for marketing campaigns), they also have metapolitical value: they contribute to the spread of metapolitical ideas. . scope of study measuring influence is usually done using quantitative measurements—and in this sense reduplicates the assumption inherent in the vanity metrics and the attention economy in general. even though there are other models to quantitatively study “influence” and impact (rogers ), a digital ethnographic approach focusing on the production and uptake of metapolitical discourse can contribute to a more detailed and empirical understanding of how the contemporary digital ecology contributes to the radicalization of certain individuals of groups. i will use the case method in this paper. in an ethnographic approach, a case method is understood as ‘a methodology in which one uses case analyses to demonstrate theory’ (blommaert and dong ). a case study is thus not just about describing a case, an event, an incident. the case is used to make one or more theoretical claims. it is ‘a case of something.’ in this paper, i will focus on how brittany pettibone uses digital media to wage a metapolitical battle. pettibone is only one of many new right and radical right influencers—one can also think of her husband, martin sellner, but also people like stefan molyneux, sargon of akkad, millenial woes, the golden one, lauren southern, see for instance, d. boyd, it’s complicated. the social lives of networked teens, and r.v.k, vatrapu, towards a theory of socio-technical interactions ( ). lecture notes in computer science, doi: . / - - - - _ soc. sci. , , of richard spencer, joseph paul watson, infowars, and many more. together, they form a whole network of right-wing actors (see lewis ; maly a). the outcome of an ethnographic case study—and thus of the theoretization of the data—is theory. the insights of this paper are thus not limited to this individual case, but can in relation to the findings in other cases, be generalized (see for instance also maly a). a digital ethnographic approach (varis ) also helps us to move beyond any technological determinism which is so popular today in explaining the role of technology in radicalization. in many accounts on online radicalization, one seems to blame “the recommendation algorithms.” the algorithms are seen as the main or maybe even the only actor that is responsible for the promotion of racism (noble ) or constructing a “rabbit hole” and promoting “radicalization” (roose ). digital media scholar tufekci, for instance, called the youtube algorithm a great radicalizer and youtube ‘given its billion or so users’ (…) ‘one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the st century’ (tufekci ). such claims give readers the impression that those recommendation algorithms work independently and overrule human agency. new research shows that youtube’s recommendation mechanism does not promote inflammatory or radicalized content (ledwich and zaitsev ). both claims do rely on a technological determinism, as they seem to understand the algorithms as completely independent actors. by adopting an ethnographic interactionist approach, the focus is not on the algorithms and the platforms alone, but on what people do with interfaces and algorithms. it brings human (and non-human) agency in the picture when trying to understand radicalization processes in relation to digital media. this digital ethnographic case study is part of a long-term digital ethnographic and discourse analytic project studying far-right political parties and movements and how they use digital media (maly , , a, b, c, d, a, b, c, a, b, c). it is mainly based on data collection through long-term observation between and of pettibone’s youtube, twitter, and instagram accounts and her book ‘what makes us girls’ . this is accompanied by live ethnography (chadwick ; maly a), the use of the digital archive of twitter, youtube, and instagram and digital tools like social blade, twittertrails, and the wayback machine. my analysis not only focuses on the content britany pettibone produces, but also on the interaction between her metapolitical influencer practices, digital technologies, and digital culture in order to generate uptake. . the rise of brittany pettibone as already mentioned above, brittany pettibone started her social media life as an aspiring author in search for a publisher. even though she registered a twitter account in , the first tweet that can be found on her account dates from . up until october , most of her tweets were “unpolitical.” more even, most of them have one or two likes at best. her tweets struggled to find an audience. and then, mid-october , seemingly out of nowhere, a series of explicitly political tweets emerged. the first one, referring to kanye west’s support for trump, was still understated. the second tweet linked to an article of culture war veteran pat buchanan. in the article, buchanan supports trump’s performance in the october debate against hillary clinton (see figure ). pettibone, b. . what makes us girls: and why it’s all worth it. adelaide: reason books. soc. sci. , , of figure . first explicit political tweet from brittany pettibone—october . this tweet indexes pettibone’s integration in an already existing political niche with a large online presence. the use of msm to speak about the mainstream media and the framing of mainstream media, hollywood and the “political class” as “the elite” that fights “the outsider” donald trump shows a deep intertextuality with the paleoconservative and alt-right niche in the us (maly a). furthermore, the fact that she knows or encounters the blog of buchanan is another index of the political context in which she produces her voice. from the early start of her political influencer career, she is clearly knowledgeable of far-right culture in the us and reproduces existing frames, words, and known figureheads in the far-right scene in the country. for instance, she also tweeted a link to the controversial right-wing project veritas youtube video on ‘democrats rigging the election.’ the veritas project is known to be linked to the entourage of trump . the first tweet that really took off saw pettibone targeting what she understood as the ‘normalization of paedophilia’ (see figure ). thirty-two people liked this tweet and retweeted it. the next tweets were all explicitly political, dealing with topics such as “trump,” “assange,” “crooked hillary and the wrongdoings of the clintons,” “anti-globalism,” the rigged “msm,” and pro-trump stances in the context of the elections. topics that again all put her firmly within the pro-trump network and the campaign topics steered by steve bannon. project veritas action. . rigging the election—video ii: mass voter fraud. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdc pvcvfks&feature=youtu.be mazzetti, mark and goldman adam. . erik prince recruits ex spies to help infiltrate liberal groups. the new york times. soc. sci. , , of figure . first tweet generating some uptake. pettibone was clearly looking and trying to generate uptake for her tweets. one of her tactics was, at first without much success, to reach out to key figures within the alternative influence network (lewis ). in the weeks after this post (figure ), pettibone starts reacting to posts of already established far-right influencers, white nationalist trolls, far-right journalists and conspiracy thinkers like stefan molyneux, the ricky vaughn, jack posobiec, and joseph paul watson. another tactic was using more and more hashtags. hashtag tactics (bonnin ) or carefully mobilizing hashtags on twitter is crucial to prolong the visibility of a post and tap into new audiences. hashtags also ‘simultaneously function semiotically by marking the intended significance of an utterance’ (rosa and bonilla ). this double function of the hashtag helps generate uptake within a very specific niche. the importance of hashtag tactics (and an existing follower base) becomes clear when we see that the uptake of the repost of the same article (figure ) and status on the normalization of pedophilia on november . this repost happens when she already has secured her place within the new right network, and uses the #pizzagate hashtag. the repost now generated , k shares, likes and over comments. soc. sci. , , of figure . first “podesta” tweet form pettibone. the real breakthrough moment of pettibone on twitter occurred when she started to engage with the podesta emails. in october and november , wikileaks released , emails allegedly from podesta, an american political consultant with close relations with the clintons and the democratic party. pettibone very quickly surfed on the hype surrounding the podesta email leak and mobilized several hashtags that proved to be crucial in generating uptake. her first podesta tweet (see figure ) used the hashtag #podestaemails and managed to get over one thousand retweets and likes. in that post, pettibone links to a thread from the infamous pro-trump-reddit /r/the_donald as “proof” that the democratic party organized pedophilia rings. the whole thread is based on one email from performance artist marina abramovic to john podesta in which she says that she is ‘looking forward to the spirit cooking dinner at my place’ (wikileaks ). in those tweets, abromovic’s arty “dinner party” concepts called spirit cooking were de-contextualized. they were now read literally as an invitation for “occult/magic gatherings” where children were molested and murdered. art—fiction—was turned into “reality.” this re-entextualization has had profound and powerful effects, as it was the start of a new conspiracy theory—pizzagate—that would have a massive following in the next weeks and months. this wikileak was also the start of massive algorithmic work from right-wing actors (and the russian internet research agency) who used those emails to discredit the clinton-campaign. the height of that campaign was reached on november . pettibone’s use of the hashtag #podestaemails on that day shows her digital literacy. the hashtag not only followed the tweet format that wikileaks set up, it tapped into a discourse that was trending at that moment (see figure ). pettibone used this by then already familiar hashtag-format to tap into the hype of the day and lead thousands of people to the r/the_donald page on reddit. soc. sci. , , of figure . google trends—podesta email searches wordwide. the success of this post seemingly convinced pettibone to make the podesta emails, pedophilia, and the democratic party into reoccurring topics. three days later, on november, the hashtag #pizzagate appeared for the first time . pettibone posted no more than eighteen tweets that day all digging up information from the wikileaks leak on the “ring.” the next day, on the us election day of , she posted a tweet with the pizzagate hashtag , claiming to be one of the first to use the hashtag . in less than one month, pettibone developed a feel for hashtags and tapped into very successful ones like #dncleak , #spiritcooking, #clintoncult, and #savethechildren. the success of these hashtags was not only a matter of organic uptake. twitter found that % of the activity related to the #podestaemail hashtag came from bots (o’sullivan ). the #spiritcooking hashtag was supported by the russian internet agency (diresta et al. ) and the #pizzagate hashtag was also pushed by extensive bot-activity, primarily focused on internationalizing the affaire (guenon des mesnards and zaman ). this made pizzagate into a global phenomenon getting global traction. pettibone’s hashtag tactics helped turn brittany pettibone, the aspiring teenage writer, into an influential political tweep playing a major role in spreading the #pizzagate conspiracy theory (metaxas and finn ). since her first pizzagate-tweet, all her pro-trump tweets in that period gathered several thousand interactions. pettibone played a central role, next to other key figures like mike cernovich, jack posobiac, infowars, microchips, and many other far-right tweeps, in the negative messaging campaign against hillary clinton, the clinton foundation, fbi director comey, soros, cnn, and the dnc. her attack on comey for instance, in november , gathered more than , likes and shares. her activity clearly fits in the larger campaign that surrounded trump’s run for president in . by december , pettibone managed to gather , followers on twitter (see figure ). #pizzagate and trump’s campaign made pettibone into a niched micro-celebrity on twitter and created her fame as a “pizzagate-expert” within alt-right circles in the us and identitarian circles on a global level. for instance, she was interviewed as a pizzagate expert on “this alt right life” with fisher, m., woodrow j., and hermann, p. . pizzagate: from rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in d.c. the washington post. that tweet, and most others using that hashtag have been deleted by pettibone or twitter. fisher, m., woodrow j., and hermann, p. . pizzagate: from rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in d.c. the washington post. soc. sci. , , of matt forney , on right on radio , on the haggman report, on the altright.com website, and many others. pizzagate became so big that legacy media started to report on it , contributing to the amplification of the story and its actors. the army of rightwing activists, the different youtube channels, together with chan trolls and bots, were able to steer the information flow, not only in their own niche, but in the hybrid media system on a global scale. pizzagate is a textbook example of hybrid salience (maniou and bantimaroudis ). the conspiracy theory scored on all three dimensions of media salience—attention, prominence, and valence (kiousis ), but only in the so- called alternative influence network (lewis ). even though pizzagate was not taken up by mainstream media as truth, the mass media attention still contributed to the uptake and circulation of the conspiracy theory, its media salience for certain groups, and thus its political impact. figure . total twitter followers brittany pettibone—social blade. . constructing brittany pettibone, the new right political youtuber in the same timeframe, brittany pettibone and her sister also set up a youtube channel. this youtube account was from the start deeply political. the first video the sisters published—‘why we’re voting for donald trump’—was an instant success realizing more than . views in less than one month. the video generated likes and only dislikes, indexes that they realized uptake by a very specific pro-trump audience. by the end of november , the pettibone sisters managed to acquire almost subscribers. as announced in the caption of their first video, a series of political videos followed and they all mobilized far-right discourse directly targeting an already existing affective “alt-right” and identitarian public. the video titles ‘msm: weapon of mass deception’ ‘political correctness will enslave you’ , ‘why hating donald trump probably means you really hate hillary clinton,’ and ‘the rise of anti-whiteness’ are emblematic for the integration of the pettibone sisters in this far-right niche. maybe more important: the videos and their metadata show that pettibone has a thorough understanding not only of the accepted norms and discourses within that niche, but also of the affordances and norms of youtube as a platform. key tactics she mobilized were: ( ) using her existing audience on twitter as leverage (see figure ), ( ) doing collaborations with more famous youtubers, ( ) producing content made for uptake in the niche, and last but not forney, m. . this alt-right life, episode : inside #pizzagate with brittany pettibone. this altright life. https://anchor.fm/matt-forney/episodes/this-alt-right-life--episode- -inside-pizzagate-with- brittany-pettibone-e s vj right on radio. . # —inside #pizzagate with brittany pettibone. listennotes. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/right-on-radio/ -inside-pizzagate-with- u xidblzgq/ see for instance fisher, m., woodrow j., and hermann, p. . pizzagate: from rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in d.c. the washington post. pettibone, b. . msm: weapon of mass deception. youtube. https://web.archive.org/web/ /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm kfcarzmy pettibone, b. . political correctness will enslave you. youtube. https://web.archive.org/web/ /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= cgyrjh fuq pettibone, b. . why hating donald trump probably means you really hate hillary clinton. youtube. https://web.archive.org/web/ /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= qxddlt i&feature=y outu.be pettibone, b. d. the rise of anti-whiteness. youtube. https://web.archive.org/web/ /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daui gwqzbq soc. sci. , , of least ( ) focus on search engine and recommendation optimization. the combination of these four instruments made her account boom in a very short period of time. figure . using twitter as leverage for her youtube channel. in february , her youtube account only had followers—a sharp contrast with her twitter base at the time. nevertheless, visitors are enough to unlock new tools from youtube to monetize and connect with your audience. as we can see in figure , she actively used her twitter account to direct tweeps to her youtube channel. throughout that month and in the course of the next months, her audience would very rapidly grow as she started a youtube “podcast” (sic.) with tara mccarthy under the banner “virtue of the west.” these vlogs were introduced in the metadata of the first video as “a podcast” (sic.) ‘dedicated to helping you reconnect with the traditional values that once made western civilization great, including but not limited to the glorification of the nuclear family, motherhood, masculinity, femininity, etiquette, traditional gender roles and love of one’s own culture, race and country’ . pettibone and her new co-host tara mccarthy tried to create a female niche for themselves within the larger new right network. they shaped that niche by inviting all kinds of conservative, alt- right, pro-trump and anti-feministic youtube vloggers with an already established following. lauren southern, millenial woes, black pigeon speaks, ‘blonde in the belly of the beast’, trump supporter and deploraball organizer mike cernovich and anti-politically correct vloggers josephine and james o’keefe were all guests. the videos were clearly produced for uptake in the alternative influence network of far-right youtubers (lewis ). the first episodes were also syndicated on the then just started far-right platform altright.com . the content, the topics, the guests, the discourses and the look and feel of these first vlogs matched the norms of that niche at the time. the fake news of the msm, anti- pettibone, t.s. sn. virtue of the west. http://tspettibone.com/virtue-of-the-west/ see the vlogs on alright.com: https://altright.com/ / / /virtue-of-the-west-podcast-tommy-robinson/ https://altright.com/ / / /virtue-of-the-west-black-pigeon-speaks/ https://altright.com/ / / /virtue-of-the-west-ricky-vaughn-and-the-internet-war/ soc. sci. , , of immigration, anti-feminism, the idea of anti-whiteness and political correctness were all classic and hotly debated tropes within that niche at the time (maly a; lewis ). more even, the keywords used in the titles of the videos also index the search engine strategy. youtube is more and more used to search for news and information in general (smith et al. ). metadata and especially the smart use of keywords is crucial to be found. metadata provided in the title, tags, category, and the description of the video is also used ‘for platform-specific recommendation systems’ (golebiewski and boyd ). these recommendations are more and more important in driving traffic to one’s channel. pettibone’s channel has adopted both strategies in the hope of finding an audience. all videos came with extensive explanation in the meta-data, not only on the particular video, but also on the concept of the “podcast.” the titles of the first collaboration videos she made with mccarthy all followed the format of ‘a chat with …’ and the name of the guest. this almost guarantees that their video will pop up when users search for these already famous far-right youtubers, and maybe more important: chances are high that the youtube algorithms will recommend them to people already watching those figures. whereas using names of fringe rightwing vloggers guarantees uptake within this specific niche, using highly popular keywords like trump, clinton, islam, or soros broadens the potential reach of the vlog. surfing the wave of viral or hyped content by producing content dedicated to the hype of the moment is a classic influencer tactic (hou , p. ), and pettibone manages that game. figure . total youtube subscribers brittany pettibone. the tactic of doing collaborations (youtube creator academy ) and interviews with already established alt-right vloggers, together with her content, her twitter base and her carefully constructed meta-data resulted in a rapidly expanding audience for her channel. after the four february episodes that pettibone made with mccarthy, her channel had four times more subscribers. and one month later she again doubled her subscribers to over , (see figure ). in a very short timeframe, she would not only attract audiences from different corners of the world, she would herself also start operating on a more global scale. pettibone, together with the canadian far- right youtuber and activist lauren southern, started travelling to europe and published vlogs on their travels and especially on the identitarian movements and their actions in europe. . from activist tweep to metapolitical influencer in less than one year after her first political tweet, pettibone had acquired large visibility—a key value within the attention economy (garcía-rapp and roca-cuberes )—within the global far- right niche. the name brittany pettibone had become a brand with a substantial audience of alt-right and identitarian activists. in the next months and years, she would capitalize on this position. since may , pettibone started to craft her channel around her own personality. the banner ‘virtue of the west’ was replaced by a professionally crafted intro positioning her name and her own logo. since april , we also see that pettibone more regularly starts to use her instagram account, giving her followers more insight in “the back office” of her political activism and seemingly giving unfiltered access to her private life. this influencer practice is commonly understood as “networked intimacy.” the concept was initially introduced to try to understand how people use digital media to make friends or to display intimacy in the context of social media (miguel ). in relation to soc. sci. , , of influencers, it has gotten a slightly different meaning. networked intimacy has become an instrument to bind audiences to the influencer and create a perception of authenticity. whereas in pictures on pettibone’s instagram mostly showed typical family pictures, we see a clear break in . from her invite to trump’s inauguration, over selfies with lauren southern to her performance at the free speech rally in berkeley in april : instagram was now regularly used to give her fans a look behind the scenes of her activist life. with the exception of some old #tbt pictures—showing her travelling with friends, celebrating her dog’s birthday and pictures with her family—most pictures were now carefully staged and stylized to contribute to her brand as an “important activist.” the intimacy of these “old family” #tbt photos were re-entextualized in a political context and blended with more glamorous pictures reminiscent of fashion shoots with behind the scenes pictures and stories on her political activism. influencers, hou ( ) argues, try to create an aura of authenticity through the (interactive) representation of the intimate and private self. a practice hou calls staged authenticity. a good example of how pettibone uses staged authenticity for metapolitical goals is her wedding. in the weeks and months before her wedding with martin sellner (see figure )—a key figure within the pan-european identitarian movement generation identity—followers on her instagram could see her getting her wedding ring sized, kissing martin sellner on a carriage under the caption ‘du bist die liebe meines lebens,’ and pictures of both giving their wedding vows in a church on the austrian countryside. figure . marriage picture of martin sellner and brittany pettibone. soc. sci. , , of all these pictures and captions provide her followers with deeply intimate information. like all—non-political—influencers, pettibone mobilizes this aura of authenticity strategically to create a bond with her audience (gaden and dumitrica ), giving them the feeling that they really know pettibone. the difference with non-political influencers is that networked intimacy and strategic authenticity are now being mobilized in support for metapolitical goals. this metapolitical dimension becomes clear when we see how her instagram account works in synchrony with her youtube channel. on her youtube channel, we see the same wedding picture reappearing when pettibone posts a vlog with the title “ reasons marriage is a risk (and why we still took it)” (see figure ). figure . youtube video on marriage. the same romantic wedding picture of the couple in traditional clothing is now edited and being used as a thumbnail on youtube (figure ). the title of the video is seemingly unpolitical. the seo of this video is made or at least has the potential for uptake in a very different niche by a potential very different audience (people who are interested in marriage and maybe have doubts). the video shows the couple on the last day of their honeymoon. first on a boat in italy where they make the joke that now that salvini is out of office, someone has to make sure the waters are safe of illegal immigrants. later, they film from one of the italian beaches. sitting on a beach bed, they address their viewers, with a beer and a café latte in hand, and again with a small joke that the beaches are safe. when they start discussing marriage and why they did it, they are seemingly just rationally talking about all potential problems in marriage. they discuss three questions ( ) is it responsible for right- wing activists to marry and have children considering their precarious financial situation, ( ) is it responsible to set children in this world as right-wing activists, and ( ) a more general one, should you really bind oneself to one person for the rest of your life. pettibone, (sellner), b. . reasons marriage is a risk (and why we still took it). youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzbg n- po&t= s soc. sci. , , of throughout the discussion we see two main frames. the first one is a traditional understanding of marriage and gender roles. in an ideal marriage, the man is the one that goes out working and provides food on the table. the wife is supposed to dedicate her life in service of the children and the family. these traditional gender roles are constantly flagged throughout the video and pettibone explicitly states that she would leave the political life ‘and obviously prioritize motherhood once i have children’ . it is also flagged by the fact that pettibone decided to adopt sellner as her last name since their marriage. the second frame explicitly and implicitly constructs a world dominated by “the left.” all questions related to the family and marriage start form the idea they live as far-right activists in a “left-wing” dominated world. this meta-frame is highlighted in “the left,” “the globalists,” and “soros-funded organizations” in particular who they claim are trying to de-platform them, prosecute them and cancel their “bank accounts.” this dominance of “the left” is also highlighted in the fact that marriage, in today’s western societies, is not sacred anymore, that people divorce and that even poly-amorous relationships are promoted. all of this is framed as a consequence of the consumption culture that the left, and especially liberals, have promoted. the personal, the networked intimacy and the staged authenticity, are deeply political. it is through displaying their personal story—the staged back office of their activist life—that they normalize their political goals, or better, metapoliticize them. this is all the more obvious when martin sellner explicitly states that having children is a political act in itself, because not having children ‘is exactly what they—our enemies—want’ , ‘it is a kind of revolutionary act,’ it is a kind of ‘in your face against the modern world, all the globalists’ who don’t want you to marry. within the new right and broader, the anti-enlightenment tradition and radical nationalism, ‘the family’ is seen as the corner-stone of the nation, of the community. it is the family that ties the ethno-cultural community with the blood and soil ideology. the prominent trope in in the right discourse about the so-called degenerate of society, is not only the result of migration and diversity, but also of the destruction of the family by individualism and globalism. as alain de benoist and charles champetier state in their new right manifesto, it is on the local level of ‘the family, the neighborhood, the village, the city, the professions’ (…) that one can create a standard of living worthy of human beings, not a fragmented life’ . the family, in new right discourse, is of course highly politicized. not all families matter. the family is here understood as a building block of the homogeneous society and rests on traditional values and traditional gender roles . the family—in new right discourse- is the antipode of the individual in an enlightenment discourse. here we see that key ingredients of blood and soil nationalist discourse are still organizing contemporary new right metapolitics: the family is the blood-and soil building block of the homogenous (white) community. the display of intimacy is directly connected to the new right political agenda. the inside view in their honeymoon gives the viewers the feeling of being part of their lives and constructs a figure of dedication. even on their honeymoon they think about their followers and their political goals. they sacrifice themselves for their cause. the content is also used, just like all other social media content that they produce, to raise money. most videos they produce not only come with calls to share and to subscribe, but also to donate. in some of her videos, pettibone even explicitly asks and argues why it is important to donate . the wedding video is no exception (see figure ). the issue pettibone, (sellner), b. . reasons marriage is a risk (and why we still took it). youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzbg n- po&t= s pettibone, (sellner), b. . reasons marriage is a risk (and why we still took it). youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzbg n- po&t= s, min. : - : min) pettibone, (sellner), b. a. reasons marriage is a risk (and why we still took it). youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzbg n- po&t= s, min. : - : min de benoist, a. & champetier, c. . manifesto of the french new right in the year . https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ /a f a acd b d d ae .pdf see for instance: faye, g. archeofuturism. london: arktos and faye, guillaume. . why we fight. manifesto of the european resistance. london: arktos. pettibone (sellner), b. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, last minutes. soc. sci. , , of of de-platforming/demonetizing is raised and the video description links to several platforms (paypal and stripe in this case) to support their activism and buy her new book. note also that each video she posts comes (see also figure ) with links to all her other channels on mainstream and less mainstream digital channels. in this way, she tries to build an audience on these platforms in the hope to not only have more reach, but also prepare for potential de-platforming. figure . hypermediacy and activism. . family and relation advice as metapolitics since her marriage, the purely political content has become less prominent. since her marriage vlog, she posted videos on a wide range of topics: ‘abortion as a moral good,’ ‘the war on men,’ ‘what makes women great,’ ‘why young people are unhappy,’ ‘man won‘t date “woke” women’, ‘should women propose marriage to men?,’ or ‘twitter mob attacks mom for posting cute family photo.’ eleven of these posts deal with relationships and gender-related topics. the family, marriage, love, happiness, dating, abortion, and (white) women and (white) men in general are now key topics on her channel. even though all these videos seemingly deal with relational topics, they are all deeply (meta)political. no matter what the topic really is, they all promote a narrative on the so-called dominance of the “woke” and “lunatic left.” a world where feminists and anti-racists are willingly destroying the traditional family, marriage, and the traditional gender roles of (white) men and women. she describes a world in decay. that decay is visible in the attack on the traditional gender roles, the destruction of the community and especially the war on men. ‘while feminism may claim to have interest in realizing equality,’ pettibone broadcasts, ‘it has shown itself to be far more interested in usurping the traditional male role and that is a war of sort that has been started. boys and men are not only shamed and belittled for their masculine qualities, their masculinity is deemed toxic, a danger to society even. meanwhile the feminization of boys and men is upheld, praised and defended. gone are the days were men valued and respected for their desire to protect and to lead and their societal contributions . ‘not even father-days is safe any longer from the destructive hands of our brave new woke culture’ . this “left”-wing discourse is pettibone, (sellner), b. b. what makes women great? youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmj plgkau, min: : pettibone, (sellner), b. b. what makes women great? youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmj plgkau, min: : soc. sci. , , of presented as the norm in society and thus as all powerful, their discourse is carried by ‘the most powerful institutions: the media, education and entertainment .’ in contrast, brittany sellner portrays herself as the voice of reason or common sense, taking a seemingly middle ground position . when she for instance attacks the #metoo movement, she doesn’t do it full frontal, but in a smart, hedged way: ‘i do not claim that society has no need for a movement like the #metoo—movement’, say pettibone, ‘but if these movements truly do want to accomplish something, they need to be concerned with evidence, fair trails and shining light on all forms of violence, including the violence that affects men’ . such attacks come with identity effects. she constructs herself as the opposite of the caricature she makes of the #metoo movement. contrary to them, she positions herself as fair, balanced, and only producing evidence-based discourse. this position is reinforced by showing tweets, newspaper, and website articles to “prove” her discourse. she also includes links to her sources in the bio of the video. this way of working reminds us of how successful far-right youtubers like joseph paul watson (maly b) or lauren southern operate. they also carefully construct an aura of “evidence-based” discourse to construct their very own idiosyncratic political narrative on the basis of assembling facts, fiction, lies, and news taken out of context and re- entextualized in a very different narrative. this type of media literacy—the careful production of political junk news instead of outright fake news (venturini )—enables them to comply to the community standards of youtube and thus stay integrated in the digital mainstream and to let their metapolitical discourse circulate. important to realize is that pettibone’s metapolitical discourse is not new at all, but has roots in a two-century old tradition of the anti-enlightenment. just like in the anti-enlightenment tradition, in fascist and new right discourse (sternhell ; griffin ), “the liberals” and “the left”—in short, the enlightenment, universalism, and individualism—are seen as destroying traditions, the family, and the separation of the sexes. this metapolitical work was always done in order to build a new society where traditional values are again put central. ‘we have allowed our society to regress to such a disoriented state, that trying to recover it, would likely take decades and a concerted effort by many many courageous people . in the conservative revolutionary tradition (sternhell ; mohler ; herf ), decline is never just accepted: new right metapolitical actors see themselves as the vanguard, the elites who are actively constructing the future . and just like all conservative revolutionaries, pettibone argues that this way forward is found in ‘finding, a strong, stable and tighten real life community’ built on clear gender roles that celebrate the ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ of men and women. brittany pettibone’s seemingly non-political content is deeply (meta)-political. it is produced as part of the larger new right metapolitical battle. this political goal cleverly takes the form of self-help content on relations, identity, love, and family. the niche that pettibone is carving out for herself is very similar to the one that people like mike cernovish and the academic jordan peterson are tapping into. their success is to a large extent built on a very specific niche of young men and women in search for answers, comfort, and self-worth. this niche of “angry white men,” as kimmel ( ) calls it, has, over the last decades become a substantial electorate and thus a very powerful and profitable niche. pettibone targets this niche and taps or construct a new one: women and girls who are also struggling in this world. this is the setup of pettibone’s book. ‘what makes us girls’ is pettibone (sellner), b. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, min: : see for instance: pettibone (sellner), brittany. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, min. : and pettibone, (sellner), b. b. what makes women great? youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmj plgkau pettibone (sellner), b. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, min. : - : pettibone (sellner), b. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, min: : faye, g. . why we fight. manifesto of the european resistance. london: arktos. pettibone (sellner), b. c. the war on men. youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjmuiiqxfg, min: : soc. sci. , , of wrapped in a meta-story of trying to help young girls finding their destiny by sharing her personal story . at the same time, it is a metapolitical book. these metapolitical goals are seldom recognized, and the book is sold at major outlets like amazon and wordery as a health and lifestyle book. such a categorization is of course very powerful from a metapolitical point of view: it normalizes the metapolitical goals. this is not about politics, but about health. the publication of that book in turn allowed her to appear on many different youtube channels but now as an author dedicated to making young girls happy. . conclusions: metapolitics . and the digital ecology pettibone’s rise to micro-celebrity stardom within the global new right was not only the result of her pro-trump content in full election time, but also an effect of (her use and understanding of) the affordances of digital media. her media literacy and the interaction of humans and non-humans in particular, enabled her to become a new right influencer. her hashtag tactics especially allowed her to reach an ever expanding audience. the prominence of pettibone was at first closely connected to her political activity on twitter and her twitter audience was deeply integrated into a local niche of right-wing supporters for trump, but this globalized quickly. she became a key figure within the global new right network (maly a, c). this network is a translocal and polycentric network of intellectuals, activists, movements, and vloggers dedicated to new right metapolitics (nagle ; maly a, b, ). they all reproduce key elements of the so-called anti-enlightenment tradition (sternhell ; maly e) in its post-wwii new right and identitarian manifestation: organicism, celebration of inequality, anti-materialism, anti-feminism, organic homogeneous groups, and anti-leftness (maly c). their success is at least partially due to their knowledge and use of mainstream digital platforms. the programmed connectivity (van dijck ) and the system of personalization, datafication, and vanity metrics helps new right influencers to construct a niche, so-called “echo-chambers,” that create fertile ground for a metapolitical battle. the voice of the metapolitical influencer is produced in a very specific socio-technical context. if they integrate themselves successfully in the socio-technical culture of the platform, they become full members of the attention economy and the platform will contribute to the uptake of their metapolitical battle. metapolitical influencers are not just “using” these digital media to have impact and reach. their integration in the ecology of mainstream digital media contributes to the monetization of the audience labour they activate. this partially explains why known far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists like joseph paul watson, but also pettibone and southern can stay active for so long on youtube and twitter. the “micro-celebritization” of metapolitics is a phenomenon that is directly linked to the neoliberal capitalist ideology underpinning the current digital ecology. their integration and understanding of this ecology explains their impact at least partially. it is the technical construction of digital media and their personalization strategies in relation to influencer practices that shape echo chambers, or as ledwich and zaitsev ( ) call it: radical bubbles. these radical bubbles are not just algorithmic products. they are socio-technical assemblages and thus depend on the algorithms and the media literacy of influencers. whereas alain de benoist and charles champetier understood “metapolitics” in relation to elite right-wing intellectuals, we see that this traditional conception of metapolitics has been stretched today. in our post-digital times , we see that intellectuals, activists, politicians, and prosumers all imagine themselves as meta-political actors. the “democratization” of content production facilitated by digital media has clear effects on the metapolitical production—or “input-side.” thompson ( , p. ) already stressed that the new forms of action and interaction enabled by digital media— "mediated online interaction” as he calls it—have a fundamental impact on the political field. the pettibone, b. . what makes us girls: and why it’s all worth it. adelaide: reason books. pp. – de benoist, alain & champetier, charles. . manifesto of the french new right in the year . https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ /a f a acd b d d ae .pdf cramer introduces the concept of post-digital to highlight that the digital revolution has occurred and is now a ‘normal’ part of societies around the world. soc. sci. , , of same is true for the metapolitical field. more concretely, digitalization disrupts ‘the settled roles’ of the institutional gatekeepers: “the power of the established media organizations to shape the agenda is disrupted by the emergences of a plethora of new players who are able to use communication media to interact with others while bypassing the established channels of mediated quasi interaction” (thompson , p. ). as a result, “information,” leaks, scandals, and junk news (venturini ) are abundantly present in the current digital ecology. these changing power relationships in the media field disrupt common understandings of media salience and shape all kinds of metapolitical opportunities. digital media not only enables new actors to become part of the metapolitical battle. they also affect “the input.” digital messages are not just distributed but also shaped and altered by digital media (van dijck , p. ), they (re)shape and re-organize the communicative structure of the “input”-discourse (maly b). as a result, metapolitics has escaped the formats of the paper, the journal, or congresses, and is now also distributed in the form of memes, podcasts, blogs, and vlogs. understanding search engine optimalization and gaming the system is now an essential ingredient of any metapolitical battle. if activists succeed in integrating themselves in the media culture of a certain platform and follow the norms, they can successfully use that platform for their metapolitical goals. not only the input, but also the uptake has changed profoundly in the digital ecology. active uptake of ideas is of crucial importance for any metapolitical project in post-digital times (maly c). uptake refers to ( ) the fact that within the digital ecology users are not only consumers but also (re)producers of discourse, so-called prosumers (miller ) and ( ) that algorithms and the interfaces of digital media play an important role in the dissemination and reproduction of ideas (see maly a, c). uptake through human and non-human actors (from bots to the algorithms organizing the communication on a platform) has become a crucial part of any political and metapolitical battle. metapolitical messaging in the digital age is thus not a linear process between sender (the intellectual) and receiver (the people), but involves a multitude of human and non-human actors that are all potential senders and receivers. this “uptake” is as crucial as the input. new right metapolitics . (maly b) is thus defined by the affordances (in a socio-technical understanding) and interfaces of digital media. the contemporary metapolitical strategies of new right actors are not only visible in the classic metapolitical structures influenced by la nouvelle droite—think things like spencer’s national policy institute, congresses, books, papers, and essays— they are also embedded in digital culture: in vlogs, memes, and offline practices influenced by digital culture and in political activism in general. the far-right has not only technologically integrated itself, it has also culturally integrated their metapolitical battle in the digital mainstream. weddings and relation advice on youtube can now become powerful pathways to far-right radicalization. the rise of far-right ideas, movements, and parties seems to indicate that this new digital metapolitical battle has impact. it is thus important to understand and direct research towards these new digital metapolitical strategies in relation to the circulation of information flows in the digital ecology. ideological, discourse-analytical, and radicalization research not only needs to focus on the content, but also on the different actors and the systems of communication if one wants to understand how the digital metapolitical battle occurs in post-digital times. funding: this research received no external funding.page: conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflicts of interest. references arnstad, henrik. . ikea fascism: metapedia and the internationalization of swedish generic fascism. fascism : – . doi: . / - bar-on, tamir. . rethinking the french new right. alternatives to modernity. london and new york: routledge. blommaert, jan, and dong jie. . ethnographic fieldwork. a beginner’s guide. bristol: multilingual matters. boagaerts, l., and fielitz, m. . do you want meme war? 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through photos and public responses international journal of environmental research and public health article #antivaccination on instagram: a computational analysis of hashtag activism through photos and public responses yunhwan kim , donghwi song and yeon ju lee ,* division of media communication, hankuk university of foreign studies, seoul , korea; yunhwankim @hufs.ac.kr business school, hankuk university of foreign studies, seoul , korea; @hufs.ac.kr division of applied mathematical sciences, korea university, seoul , korea * correspondence: leeyeonju @korea.ac.kr; tel.: + - - - received: september ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: a dramatic increase has been registered in the number of social media posts in photo form as well as in hashtag activism. hashtags, which manifest thoughts and feelings clearly and concisely, originated on twitter, where the length of a post is limited; their use, however, has expanded into other social media services, including instagram. hashtags, which make it easy to find and express support for posts of interest, have been widely used for online activism, although they have been criticized for fostering confirmation bias. moreover, hashtag activism in photo form has been relatively understudied. this research analyzed instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags as an example of hashtag activism through photos. in addition, we examined how the photo features were related to public response, which was manifested via engagement and comment sentiment. the results suggest that the photos which were categorized into “text” took the largest share. it was also found that the major way of claiming was to imprint key messages that persuade people not to vaccinate with remarks from professionals on photos and provide a source of supporting information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention. various photo features showed associations with engagement and comment sentiment, but the directions of correlation were usually the opposite: these results suggest that engagement and comment sentiment are separate domains that reveal different public responses. keywords: antivaccination; instagram; hashtag activism; microsoft azure cognitive services; engagement; comment sentiment . introduction social media has been playing an increasingly influential role in expressing one’s opinion online, and the means of expression utilizing the functions of social media are various, with hashtags being one of the most popular ones. a hashtag is a brief keyword prefixed by the symbol # (hash) included in social media posts in order for them to be easily searched for among the huge volume of posts on the platform [ ]. the hashtag is known to have been first introduced by twitter, although it is now widely used on other social media services. it serves not only as a guide for finding and following posts of interest but also as a marker that shows one’s stance on an issue explicitly and succinctly [ ]. these characteristics make the hashtag a useful tool for activists who need an efficient way to widely disseminate their belief and interactively communicate with the public. hashtag activism is a realization of this potential—it is an attempt to use the hashtag functions in social media to incite social change [ ]. individual users or activists devise tags that manifest their belief on an issue concisely and attach them to their social media posts; similarly, users or activists who int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of support or approve of their belief use the same tag to show their endorsement. like other memes on social media [ ], some of these tags are shared by the general public and spread throughout the social media space, and some of them, including #metoo or #blacklivesmatter, have gone viral beyond online spaces, becoming symbols of social movements. the hashtag has been acknowledged as one of the major forms of online activism [ ]. however, hashtag activism has also been criticized. it has been argued that the effectiveness of hashtag activism is questionable [ ], and that activism by short hashtags may obscure the rich context of a movement [ ]. yet, one of the biggest criticisms is that it can foster confirmation bias [ ]. hashtags make it easy to find posts of interest, but this function may worsen the tendency of networking only with likeminded users or paying attention only to posts with similar viewpoints. this can result in polarization [ , ], which may harm society at large. the antivaccination movement can be considered an example of this phenomenon. activists upload posts with hashtags displaying antivaccine intentions on social media, and these are used by other social media users who share their belief. such activism via hashtags can foster confirmation bias, and concern has been increasing about its possible harm to the society—for example, the breakdown of herd immunity. in this regard, the interest in the antivaccination movement on social media has been considerable, and many studies have analyzed the social media data of the movement [ – ]. it must be noted that most of the previous studies about hashtag activism in general and antivaccination on social media in particular have analyzed text data. while text is still the major form of online data, it is also true that the share of visual data such as photographs has been rapidly increasing, and photo-centric social media services (e.g., instagram) have attracted many users, significantly growing their impact. yet, hashtag activism via photos on social media has been relatively understudied. furthermore, while the literature has paid much attention to the role of social media photos in public health [ ], the vast majority of previous studies about photo content have used the content analysis method with human coders, whereas computational analysis has been employed in a limited number of studies [ , ]. meanwhile, the relationship between features of the photos and the engagement of the public has been understudied. public engagement, which is usually measured by the number of likes and comments on social media [ ], can show what kind of photos would induce public endorsement through photos of hashtag activism; however, little research has been conducted on it, especially in the literature on the antivaccination movement. in this regard, the present study aims to explore how the antivaccination movement is represented on instagram. in addition, it aims to investigate the relationship between the features of antivaccination instagram photos and public engagement. with these aims, instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags were downloaded, and photo features at various levels were extracted. moreover, the current study measured the public engagement with the photos as well as the sentiment of the comments on the photos; finally, it analyzed how photo features are associated with them, and whether these features can predict them. the following research questions are proposed: rq . what are the key characteristics of the content of instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags? rq . what are the relationships between the features of instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags and the engagement of the public with the photos? rq . what are the relationships between the features of instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags and the sentiments of comments on the photos? this study is structured as follows. first, it reviews previous studies about social media photos and public health, hashtag activism, and the antivaccination movement on social media. next, it describes how the data were gathered and which features were extracted and used for the analysis of the instagram photos. furthermore, it presents the key characteristics of the content of instagram photos, the associations of photo features with public responses, and the predictability of photo features regarding engagement and comment sentiment. finally, it discusses the implications of the results. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . related works . . social media photos and public health many previous studies have paid attention to social media photos of topics pertaining to public health. first, photos about diseases were analyzed. yi-frazier et al. [ ] asked adolescents with type diabetes to post diabetes-related photos for three weeks on instagram. they analyzed the uploaded photos and found that their major categories were diabetes care, humor, and food. seltzer et al. [ ] analyzed the instagram photos with the #zika tag and found that they were primarily related to the prevention and transmission of the disease. fung et al. [ ] also analyzed the content of zika-related photos and found that its prevention, its effects on pregnancy, and the deaths associated with it were major categories. instagram posts with the #melanomasucks tag were analyzed by cho et al. [ ], with the most frequent content being controlling melanoma and the effects of having melanoma. nobles et al. [ ] examined the demographic profile of faces in instagram posts with the #hiv tag and compared it with the profile of those at most risk of a new hiv diagnosis. their results suggest that the faces on instagram photos were older, more female, more white, less black, and less hispanic than those of new hiv diagnoses. photos about cigarettes have also been analyzed in previous research. chu et al. [ ] categorized instagram photos about the electronic cigarette and found that advertisement was the most common type of content, followed by product and activity. the results of lee et al. [ ] also revealed that the most popular category of instagram posts of electronic cigarettes was marketing. laestadius et al. [ ] examined what kind of user mainly posted about electronic cigarettes on instagram; it was found that over half of the posts were uploaded by corporate users. allem et al. [ ] analyzed the content of instagram photos of cigars and found that about one fourth of the photos were about marijuana. next, previous studies have analyzed social media photos related to the human body. for example, they examined photos uploaded on instagram by body-positive accounts [ ] and health influencers [ ] and investigated what kind of body images these accounts convey. self-injury is another topic that previous studies on instagram photos have focused on, showing that pictures with a high degree of injury generated more comments [ ], though the majority did not contain any advisory warning [ ]. previous studies also analyzed social media photos about alcohol [ ], junk food [ ], pregnancy [ ], and surgery [ ]. it must be noted that, however, most of those studies used the content analysis method with human coders, whereas advanced computational analysis methods were used in a limited number of studies. to name a few, kim and kim [ ] analyzed the photos on the cdc (centers for disease control and prevention) instagram account using various features at the content and pixel levels which were extracted by computational methods. moreover, nobles et al. [ ] analyzed the faces in instagram photos with the #hiv hashtag with automated methods and compared the demographics of the faces with the ones at risk of diagnosis. the current study is in line with the abovementioned research, adopting computational methods to analyze photos about antivaccination. . . hashtag activism since hashtags have been widely used in a variety of movements, many previous studies have examined hashtag activism using diverse methods. a group of studies have used “hashtag ethnography” [ ]—an ethnographic description of how hashtags have been used in social movements. they have investigated movements mainly concerned with race [ , ] and gender [ – ], as well as movements by students [ ] and teachers [ ]. another group of studies analyzed the content of hashtagged social media posts. papacharissi and oliveira [ ] examined the form of news exhibited under the hashtag #egypt on twitter. giglietto and lee [ ] analyzed tweets containing the #jenesuispascharlie hashtag and revealed the various discursive strategies that the users of the hashtag employed. brown et al. [ ] conducted a content analysis of tweets with the hashtag #sayhername, focusing on the black women who are victims of police violence. xiong et al. [ ] analyzed tweets with the #metoo hashtag and identified its int. j. environ. res. public health , , of themes, which included the antecedents of the main event and suggested actions for women’s rights. ince et al. [ ] analyzed the content of #blacklivesmatter tweets and categorized them into five groups, including solidarity or approval of the movement. ray et al. [ ] also examined #blacklivesmatter tweets and showed the evolution of both anti- and pro-police narratives on twitter. this coexistence of counter- and counter-counter-narratives is also visible in the work of drüeke and zobl [ ], who analyzed tweets with #aufschrei, which means “cry out”; the hashtag was originally used to encourage critical voices against sexual assault, but a persistent number of anti-feminist and sexist messages also employed the hashtag. a network analysis method has also been used in the literature about hashtag activism. concerning the #wirecall hashtag, which was used in activism around the wisconsin recall election, xu et al. [ ] built and analyzed the follower-following network on twitter. their results showed that users with a higher level of connectivity were more involved in the information flow. jackson and welles [ ] analyzed the network of retweets and mentions with the #ferguson hashtag on twitter and found that the network was a broadcast network, where a small number of influential users transmit messages to the vast majority of users unilaterally. yan et al. [ ] also analyzed the network of retweets and mentions on twitter to reach similar results, revealing that the #concernedstudent hashtag network has evolved to be highly concentrated. wang et al. [ ] paid attention to the hashtag co-occurrence network; their analysis of tweets with #occupywallstreet revealed that the role of hashtags in information virality may vary with the context of the tweets. further, concerning the #occupywallstreet hashtag, tremayne [ ] generated a bimodal network whose nodes are one of the two kinds—user account or hashtag—and identified a small number of key nodes that are important for the spread of the movement. while hashtag activism has been examined in previous research, studies that have paid attention to hashtag activism through photos are still rare. the work by stefanone et al. [ ] is one of the exceptions; they analyzed the photos with the #guncontrol hashtag on twitter and showed that photos with an attribute frame, fear and humor appeals, and positive valence were retweeted more. moreover, ichau et al. [ ] analyzed the content of instagram photos with the #jews hashtag, finding that the photos can be categorized into five groups, including people and private lives, culture and history, and cultural production. the present research is in line with these studies and investigates hashtag activism through photos using computational methods. . . social media data analysis on antivaccination movement social media has a major impact on the way that people interact and exchange information, and this is also the case in the antivaccination debate [ ]. since information on the internet may influence people’s behavior regarding vaccination, it is important that facts are shared; yet, the social media platforms that enable individual users to find and share information easily can have two side effects on vaccination decision: they can lead people to get vaccinated [ ], but antivaccination movements also can be strengthened [ , ]. thus, it is relevant to observe the vaccination debate on social media and to examine how antivaccination movements proceed [ ]. in this regard, previous studies have analyzed the social media posts about the antivaccination movement. keelan et al. [ ] analyzed the human papilloma virus (hpv) vaccination debate on myspace blogs and found the difference in the points that positive and negative blogs made; positive blogs focused on the effectiveness of the vaccine, whereas negative blogs focused on its risks. salathe and khandelwal [ ] conducted a sentiment analysis of tweets about h n vaccination and found that users who posted about vaccination generally formed communities, and that most communities were dominated by either positive or negative sentiments. radzikowski et al. [ ] presented the twitter narrative regarding vaccination after the measles outbreak; the major themes included the political aspects of the vaccination, anti-antivaccination activism, and more health-oriented issues. broniatowski et al. [ ] examined how twitter bots promote online vaccination debate and found that bots and “content polluters” tweeted more about vaccination than average users. jang et al. [ ] compared the vaccine-related content in twitter, reddit, and online news in the us, canada, and the uk, and showed that both twitter and reddit discussed the vaccine–autism link more than online news. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of a network analysis method has been used to observe antivaccination movements on social media. yuan et al. [ ] analyzed the retweet network related to the mmr vaccine; they discovered that users with pro- and antivaccine views retweet much more from their own opinion communities. himelboim et al. [ ] also found subgroups regarding the hpv vaccine conversation on twitter, noting that interactions and information flows mainly occurred inside each subgroup. johnson et al. [ ] revealed the difference in the network clusters; antivaccination clusters were smaller in size but highly entangled with undecided clusters, whereas pro-vaccination clusters were more peripheral. francia et al. [ ] showed that opinion groups regarding vaccination could be characterized according to their political perspectives. smith and graham [ ] examined the discourses present within anti-vaccination facebook pages using social network analysis and found that the present-day discourses were located at the center of discourses. while antivaccination movements on social media have been investigated in previous studies, limited research has focused on social media photos about antivaccination. guidry et al. [ ] analyzed vaccine-related photos on pinterest and showed that most photos were concerned with antivaccination. kearney et al. [ ] conducted a sentiment analysis of the instagram photos about the hpv vaccine and showed that the proportion of pro-vaccine posts was higher than that of the antivaccine posts, but the pro-vaccine posts were liked less than the antivaccine posts. chen and dredze [ ] analyzed vaccination photos on twitter, showing that the sentiment of a photo could be one of the predictive factors of whether the photo would be retweeted. following these studies, the present research analyzes antivaccination photos on instagram, employing features both at the content and pixel levels for analysis and investigating their associations with and the predictability of public responses to the photos. . method . . data collection we crawled the instagram posts with antivaccination hashtags; instagram-scraper (https://github. com/rarcega/instagram-scraper) was used for this purpose. data were gathered from to june . in order to obtain a pool of hashtags about antivaccination, we examined the tags from the best-hashtag.com website (http://best-hashtags.com/hashtag/antivaccine/). after removing hashtags which are unsuitable or too general from the pool, we manually inserted each hashtag in the instagram search bar and inspected the number of posts with the hashtag. then, we selected hashtags with a sufficient number of posts for data gathering. as a result, the following hashtags were used for searching: #antivaccination, #antivaccine, #antivax, #antivaxmemes, #antivaxxer, #informedchoice, #informedconsent, #vaccineinjuryawareness, and #vaxxed. after removing duplicates, , photos in total were used for analysis, and , comments and , , likes accompanying the photos were also collected and analyzed. . . photo features . . . content category for a given photo, its content was categorized into one of the predetermined classes; computer vision api in microsoft azure cognitive services (https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive- services/computer-vision/) [ ] was used for this purpose. each photo was uploaded to the server and the pretrained artificial intelligence service categorized its content into one of following classes: abstract, animal, building, dark, drink, food, indoor, others, outdoor, people, plant, object, sky, text, or transportation. . . . face features from a given photo, we extracted features regarding human faces using face api in microsoft azure cognitive services (https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/face/). the pretrained artificial intelligence service detected human faces from each photo, and features including age, gender, https://github.com/rarcega/instagram-scraper https://github.com/rarcega/instagram-scraper http://best-hashtags.com/hashtag/antivaccine/ https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/computer-vision/ https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/computer-vision/ https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/face/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of and size were measured. additionally, the emotions expressed on each face on the photos were determined; the sum of all emotion scores was . the face features used for the analysis were as follows: ( ) the number of faces was measured by counting how many faces were on a given photo, ( ) closeup was the ratio of the size of the biggest face to the size of the photo, and ( ) face ratio was the ratio of the sum of the sizes of all faces to the size of the photo. then, ( ) age was the average age of all appearing faces, and ( ) female was the count of female faces in a given photo. the emotion scores of each emotion classes, ( ) anger, ( ) contempt, ( ) disgust, ( ) fear, ( ) happiness, ( ) neutral, ( ) sadness, and ( ) surprise, were averaged across all the detected faces in a given photo. . . . optical character recognition features the english words appearing in a given photo were detected using the optical character recognition (ocr) function of computer vision api in microsoft azure cognitive services. the number of words feature was measured as the number of english words detected in a given photo. . . . pixel features the pixel information was processed to extract low-level features using the python programming language and opencv library [ ]. the numbers contained in each pixel of a digital photo represent colors—rgb (red, green, blue), hsv (hue, saturation, value), or others according to the color space model—and various features of a photo can be extracted using these numbers. first, the means and variances were calculated for the red, green, and blue in each photo’s pixels; thus, the resulting features were ( ) red mean, ( ) red variance, ( ) green mean, ( ) green variance, ( ) blue mean, and ( ) blue variance. in the same way, the means and variances were calculated for the saturation and value (i.e., brightness) in each photo pixels; the resulting features were ( ) saturation mean, ( ) saturation variance, ( ) value mean, and ( ) value variance. since hue, unlike saturation and value, is a nominal feature, its total range ( to in opencv) was divided into intervals ( , , , , , ), each of which correspond to each key color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet [ ]. the share of pixels whose hue falls into each color interval was calculated; the resulting features were ( ) red share, ( ) orange share, ( ) yellow share, ( ) green share, ( ) blue share, and ( ) violet share. further, the share of red, orange, and yellow was calculated to be ( ) the share of warm colors, and the share of green, blue, and violet was calculated to be ( ) the share of cold colors. in addition, the number of peaks in a hue histogram [ , ] (( ) hue peaks) was also employed for analysis; we generated the hue histogram, smoothed it with kernel density estimation, and counted how many local maximums were in the smoothed hue histogram [ ]. finally, the affection features from the pad (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) model were calculated using the formula (pleasure = . × value + . × saturation; arousal = − . × value + . × saturation; dominance = − . × value + . × saturation) from previous research [ ]; the features were ( ) pleasure, ( ) arousal, and ( ) dominance. . . . visual features the current study examined the features that represent the attractiveness of a given photo [ ]. first, ( ) brightness measured how bright a given photo was using the average of luminance (y values in the yuv color space) in the pixels of the photo. next, ( ) colorfulness measured how colorful a given photo was using the relative amounts of red, green, and blue values in the pixels and their means and standard deviations [ ]. ( ) naturalness measured the degree of correspondence between a given image and the human perception of reality [ ]; we counted the proportion of pixels whose saturation and luminance were located in a certain range [ ]. ( ) contrast and ( ) rgb contrast were also measured; the former was calculated by the ratio of the standard deviation of the luminance in pixels to the number of pixels [ ], and the latter was calculated by extending the former into rgb color space with three dimensions. ( ) sharpness, which represents the clarity and how detailed a given photo is, was calculated by getting the laplacian of each pixel’s luminance and normalized it with the average luminance of neighboring pixels [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of concerning color, two additional metrics were also employed for analysis. ( ) color diversity, which represents the degree of diversity in the colors of a given photo, was measured by fractal dimension using the box-counting method [ ], as has been done in previous studies [ , ]. ( ) color harmony, which represents the degree of harmony among the dominant colors in a given photo, was measured by the geometric characteristics that were generated by the dominant color on the color wheel [ ]. for this, we generated a hue histogram, smoothed it with kernel density estimation, and identified the highest and the second highest peaks that represent the top two dominant colors. we located the top two colors on the color wheel and measured the internal angle between the two colors as the color harmony [ ]. . . . engagement the first measure of public response is engagement, which shows the connection between a social media message and the action of the public [ ]. as in previous research [ ], we measured engagement as the number of likes and comments, which represent online behaviors responsive to a message. . . . comment sentiment another measure of public response is the sentiment expressed in the comment on a given post. sentiment analysis was conducted using text analytics api in microsoft azure cognitive services (https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/). for each comment, it returned a score between , which represents being most negative, and , which represents being most positive. the sentiment scores across all comments on each photo were averaged and employed for analysis. . results . . the content of antivaccination instagram photos the frequency of the antivaccination instagram photos by content category is presented in figure . this shows that “text” photos make up the largest part ( . %), as more than half of the photos had words on them. and, besides “others” category, “people” photos follow ( . %). int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of photo is, was calculated by getting the laplacian of each pixel’s luminance and normalized it with the average luminance of neighboring pixels [ ]. concerning color, two additional metrics were also employed for analysis. ( ) color diversity, which represents the degree of diversity in the colors of a given photo, was measured by fractal dimension using the box-counting method [ ], as has been done in previous studies [ , ]. ( ) color harmony, which represents the degree of harmony among the dominant colors in a given photo, was measured by the geometric characteristics that were generated by the dominant color on the color wheel [ ]. for this, we generated a hue histogram, smoothed it with kernel density estimation, and identified the highest and the second highest peaks that represent the top two dominant colors. we located the top two colors on the color wheel and measured the internal angle between the two colors as the color harmony [ ]. . . . engagement the first measure of public response is engagement, which shows the connection between a social media message and the action of the public [ ]. as in previous research [ ], we measured engagement as the number of likes and comments, which represent online behaviors responsive to a message. . . . comment sentiment another measure of public response is the sentiment expressed in the comment on a given post. sentiment analysis was conducted using text analytics api in microsoft azure cognitive services (https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/). for each comment, it returned a score between , which represents being most negative, and , which represents being most positive. the sentiment scores across all comments on each photo were averaged and employed for analysis. . results . . the content of antivaccination instagram photos the frequency of the antivaccination instagram photos by content category is presented in figure . this shows that “text” photos make up the largest part ( . %), as more than half of the photos had words on them. and, besides “others” category, “people” photos follow ( . %). figure . frequency of antivaccination instagram photos by content category. figure . frequency of antivaccination instagram photos by content category. considering that “text” photos make up the largest share, the messages delivered by the words on photos (rather than the post text) were examined. the total number of photos from which ocr detected any word was , , and a total of , , detected words were analyzed. since the ocr detects words one by one without contextual information, the detected words were transformed into https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of lowercase without further preprocessing. punctuation marks and stop words (&; -; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; a; about; after; am; an; and; are; as; at; b; be; because; been; but; by; c; can; do; e; et; for; from; had; has; have; he; her; his; how; i; if; in; into; is; it; it’s; i’m; just; may; me; more; my; of; on; only; or; our; s; she; should; so; than; that; the; their; them; there; they; this; to; up; us; v; was; we; were; what; when; which; who; why; will; with; would; you; your; —; •) were removed. here, a custom list of stop words was used, because the results seemed to contain much noise, which may be due to the errors in ocr. the frequency of the remaining words is presented in figure . the figure shows that many words relate to children: “child”, “children”, “kid”, “kids”, and “baby”. it also demonstrates that “autism” was ranked high in the frequency ranking. detected words such as “doctor” and “dr” stand for the professionals that might be remarked on concerning the antivaccination movement. words that prohibit actions—“not”, “no”, “never”, and “don’t”—were also observed, and the key issues highlighted were “measles”, “polio”, “flu”, and others.int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . top frequent words detected by ocr (optical character recognition) from the antivaccination instagram photos. we also analyzed the text accompanying to the photos for the purpose of comparison. each post texts were tokenized into words, transformed into lowercase, lemmatized, and had punctuation marks and english stop words (listed at https://gist.github.com/sebleier/ ) removed. the frequency of the remaining words is presented in figure , suggesting that words (including hashtags) that significantly reveal the antivaccine intention, such as “antivax”, “antivaxxer”, “antivaxmemes”, “informedchoice”, and “informedconsent”, appeared in the post texts. it also shows that the words for uniform resource locations (urls), such as “http”, “com”, and “www”, appeared frequently, as well as those related to children, such as “birth”, “baby”, and “child”. taking the results from the analysis of ocr and post texts into consideration together, persuading people not to vaccinate through words imprinted on photos including remarks from professionals and providing the source of supporting information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention seems to be the major means of delivering messages in antivaccination movements on instagram. figure . top frequent words detected by ocr (optical character recognition) from the antivaccination instagram photos. we also analyzed the text accompanying to the photos for the purpose of comparison. each post texts were tokenized into words, transformed into lowercase, lemmatized, and had punctuation marks int. j. environ. res. public health , , of and english stop words (listed at https://gist.github.com/sebleier/ ) removed. the frequency of the remaining words is presented in figure , suggesting that words (including hashtags) that significantly reveal the antivaccine intention, such as “antivax”, “antivaxxer”, “antivaxmemes”, “informedchoice”, and “informedconsent”, appeared in the post texts. it also shows that the words for uniform resource locations (urls), such as “http”, “com”, and “www”, appeared frequently, as well as those related to children, such as “birth”, “baby”, and “child”. taking the results from the analysis of ocr and post texts into consideration together, persuading people not to vaccinate through words imprinted on photos including remarks from professionals and providing the source of supporting information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention seems to be the major means of delivering messages in antivaccination movements on instagram.int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . top frequent words in the text accompanying antivaccination instagram photos. in addition, the content tags network was generated and analyzed. first, for each photo, the tags corresponding to the content of the photo were acquired using computer vision api from microsoft azure cognitive services. next, only tags whose confidence score was greater than or equal to . , which stands for a high degree of correspondence with the photo content, remained. networks were generated by connecting pairs of tags using a set of criteria defining co-occurrence—for example, if tag a and tag b were suggested by computer vision api with a confidence score of over . , two tags became the nodes of the network and an undirected, weighted link was placed between the two nodes (see figure ). finally, the network was analyzed. a centrality analysis was conducted to determine the central words using four centrality measures: weighted degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. figure . top frequent words in the text accompanying antivaccination instagram photos. in addition, the content tags network was generated and analyzed. first, for each photo, the tags corresponding to the content of the photo were acquired using computer vision api from microsoft azure cognitive services. next, only tags whose confidence score was greater than or equal to . , which stands for a high degree of correspondence with the photo content, remained. networks were https://gist.github.com/sebleier/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of generated by connecting pairs of tags using a set of criteria defining co-occurrence—for example, if tag a and tag b were suggested by computer vision api with a confidence score of over . , two tags became the nodes of the network and an undirected, weighted link was placed between the two nodes (see figure ). finally, the network was analyzed. a centrality analysis was conducted to determine the central words using four centrality measures: weighted degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . content tag network of the antivaccination instagram photos. node size represents the weighted degree, and nodes with the same color belong to the same subgroup, determined by community detection using the louvain algorithm. to make it easier to see, only nodes with the top % of weighted degree (occupying . % of the total weighted degree) were displayed. the result in table suggests that the content of the photos was primarily textual. the words that represent the subject in the photos were mostly “person”, “man”, “woman”, “baby”, and “toddler”, whereas the words that represent the action and the location in the photos were mainly “indoor”, “outdoor”, “wall”, “ground”, “grass”, “clothing”, “smile”, and “sitting”. in addition, community detection was conducted using the louvain algorithm [ ] to detect the main themes of the content tag network. the result is presented in table . it suggests that the major themes in the content tag network were text and joy, personal and indoor life, and medical issues. table . top central words of the content tag network by weighted degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. ranking weighted degree betweenness closeness eigenvector text text text text person person person person human face indoor indoor indoor screenshot outdoor outdoor outdoor clothing food clothing clothing indoor clothing wall human face smile screenshot food wall cartoon wall screenshot man outdoor animal human face screenshot man floor ground woman poster ground sky ground woman table man smile toddler sky floor sky baby fashion accessory woman tree book grass grass grass wall human face tree floor drawing tree table book design cartoon smile sitting abstract man book cartoon tree woman cartoon toddler textperson human face screenshot clothing indoor smile cartoon outdoor man poster woman toddler baby book wall drawing design abstracttree grass posing sky newspaper sketch food handwriting animal child bottle ground standing sign floor fashion accessory suit glasses sitting table carnivore illustration vehicle boy land vehicle child art dog soft drink car art water group hat girl cup building graphic little drink face people painting footwear fast food furniture mammal bed computer road typography holding tie plate cat wearing fruit wheel selfie dress fedora baked goods young beach coffee flower active shirt eyes cowboy hat map jeans sunglasses t-shirt snack dessert toy shirt monitor ceiling black and white sleeve billboard music couch laptop chair cake bird sports equipment letter snow sun hat kiss tableware television window plant vase vegetable funny dance birthday cake goggles anime wedding dress cloud jacket weapon swimming trousers smiling green presentation sofa laying sport sports uniform bride mountain auto part bicycle helmet swimwear juice whiteboard screen soccer ball black field shorts bicycle wheel ship menu orange red concert nature lake comic pink top electronics street fashion bathroom lipstick cellphone football brassiere cocktail hand lemon room athletic game phone scene different coffee cup sink sweatshirt playground human beard coffee table shelf watch grave medical equipment way cemetery transport tin can undergarment bus mug necktie beer necklace christmas tree medical cosmetics health care figure . content tag network of the antivaccination instagram photos. node size represents the weighted degree, and nodes with the same color belong to the same subgroup, determined by community detection using the louvain algorithm. to make it easier to see, only nodes with the top % of weighted degree (occupying . % of the total weighted degree) were displayed. the result in table suggests that the content of the photos was primarily textual. the words that represent the subject in the photos were mostly “person”, “man”, “woman”, “baby”, and “toddler”, whereas the words that represent the action and the location in the photos were mainly “indoor”, “outdoor”, “wall”, “ground”, “grass”, “clothing”, “smile”, and “sitting”. in addition, community detection was conducted using the louvain algorithm [ ] to detect the main themes of the content tag network. the result is presented in table . it suggests that the major themes in the content tag network were text and joy, personal and indoor life, and medical issues. . . photo features and engagement of antivaccination instagram photos first, the mean engagement by content category was investigated. in figure , it is shown that instagram photos that were categorized into “transportation” and “outdoor” induced the most public engagement, and that photos in the “text” category were also relatively high in terms of mean engagement. the degrees of engagement differed by content category (f = . , p < . ). next, the association between photo features and engagement was examined, and the results are presented in table . from the table, we can observe that most face features were not associated with engagement; yet, the exceptions were age and neutral, as photos that contained faces of older people and those without particular emotion induced more engagement. moreover, the positive correlation between the number of words and engagement suggests that photos with more imprinted words generate higher engagement. concerning pixel-level features, the means of red, green, and blue were significantly associated with engagement. we can also observe from the table that photos with splendid color drew less engagement; saturation mean, all color shares (except violet share), and colorfulness were negatively associated with engagement. in contrast, brighter photos induced more engagement, as value mean and brightness were positively correlated with engagement. the affections from the int. j. environ. res. public health , , of pad model showed significant associations; pleasure was positively correlated with engagement, whereas arousal and dominance were negatively associated with it. table . top central words of the content tag network by weighted degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. ranking weighted degree betweenness closeness eigenvector text text text text person person person person human face indoor indoor indoor screenshot outdoor outdoor outdoor clothing food clothing clothing indoor clothing wall human face smile screenshot food wall cartoon wall screenshot man outdoor animal human face screenshot man floor ground woman poster ground sky ground woman table man smile toddler sky floor sky baby fashion accessory woman tree book grass grass grass wall human face tree floor drawing tree table book design cartoon smile sitting abstract man book cartoon tree woman cartoon toddler grass camera sitting table posing fruit water food sky plant toddler baby newspaper water baby building sketch cup animal fashion accessory food design building poster handwriting book fashion accessory girl animal sport poster holding child plate holding child bottle fast food design water table . part of words in subgroups of the content tag network. to make it easier to see, only nodes with the top % of weighted degree (occupying . % of the total weighted degree) were included. theme words text and joy text, screenshot, cartoon, poster, book, drawing, design, abstract, newspaper, sketch, food, handwriting, animal, bottle, sign, table, carnivore, illustration, child art, dog, soft drink, art, cup, graphic, drink, painting, fast food, mammal, typography, plate, cat, fruit, baked goods, coffee, map, snack, dessert, toy, monitor, billboard, music, cake, bird, letter, tableware, television, vegetable, funny, birthday cake, anime, weapon, green, juice, whiteboard, screen, black, menu, orange, concert, comic, pink, electronics, cocktail, lemon, coffee cup, shelf, tin can, mug, beer, christmas tree personal and indoor life person, human face, clothing, indoor, smile, outdoor, man, woman, toddler, baby, wall, tree, grass, posing, sky, child, ground, standing, floor, fashion accessory, suit, glasses, sitting, vehicle, boy, land vehicle, car, water, group, hat, girl, building, little, face, people, footwear, furniture, bed, computer, road, holding, tie, wearing, wheel, selfie, dress, fedora, young, beach, flower, active shirt, eyes, cowboy hat, jeans, sunglasses, t-shirt, shirt, ceiling, black and white, sleeve, couch, laptop, chair, sports equipment, snow, sun hat, kiss, window, plant, vase, dance, goggles, wedding dress, cloud, jacket, swimming, trousers, smiling, presentation, sofa, laying, sport, sports uniform, bride, mountain, auto part, bicycle, helmet, swimwear, soccer, ball, field, shorts, bicycle wheel, ship, red, nature, lake, top, street, fashion, bathroom, lipstick, cellphone, football, brassiere, hand, room, athletic game, phone, scene, different, sink, sweatshirt, playground, human beard, coffee table, watch, grave, way, cemetery, transport, undergarment, bus, necktie, necklace, cosmetics medical medical equipment, medical, health care int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . mean engagement by content category. next, the association between photo features and engagement was examined, and the results are presented in table . from the table, we can observe that most face features were not associated with engagement; yet, the exceptions were age and neutral, as photos that contained faces of older people and those without particular emotion induced more engagement. moreover, the positive correlation between the number of words and engagement suggests that photos with more imprinted words generate higher engagement. concerning pixel-level features, the means of red, green, and blue were significantly associated with engagement. we can also observe from the table that photos with splendid color drew less engagement; saturation mean, all color shares (except violet share), and colorfulness were negatively associated with engagement. in contrast, brighter photos induced more engagement, as value mean and brightness were positively correlated with engagement. the affections from the pad model showed significant associations; pleasure was positively correlated with engagement, whereas arousal and dominance were negatively associated with it. table . correlations of photo features with engagement. kind feature like comment engagement face features number of faces . . . closeup − . . * − . face ratio − . . * − . age . * − . . * female − . . * . anger − . − . − . contempt . . . disgust . . * . fear . − . . happiness − . . * − . sadness − . . * − . surprise . . . neutral . * . * . * ocr feature number of words . * . * . * pixel features red mean . * . * . * red var − . − . * − . green mean . * . * . * green var . − . * . figure . mean engagement by content category. table . correlations of photo features with engagement. kind feature like comment engagement face features number of faces . . . closeup − . . * − . face ratio − . . * − . age . * − . . * female − . . * . anger − . − . − . contempt . . . disgust . . * . fear . − . . happiness − . . * − . sadness − . . * − . surprise . . . neutral . * . * . * ocr feature number of words . * . * . * pixel features red mean . * . * . * red var − . − . * − . green mean . * . * . * green var . − . * . blue mean . * . * . * blue var . * − . * . * saturation mean − . * − . * − . * saturation var − . * − . * − . * value mean . * . * . * value var − . − . * − . red share − . * − . − . * orange share − . * − . * − . * yellow share − . * − . * − . * green share − . * − . * − . * blue share − . * − . * − . * violet share - - - share of warm colors − . * − . * − . * share of cold colors − . * − . * − . * hue peaks − . − . * − . pleasure . * . * . * arousal − . * − . * − . * dominance − . * − . * − . * int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . cont. kind feature like comment engagement visual features brightness . * . * . * colorfulness − . * − . * − . * naturalness . − . * . contrast . − . . rgb contrast . − . * . sharpness − . . * − . color diversity . * − . * . * color harmony . * − . . * * p < . . finally, predictive models were built and analyzed to investigate how accurately photo features predict engagement. support vector regression models were trained with -fold cross validation, and their root mean square errors (rmses) are presented in table . considering the means and standard deviations of likes (m = . , sd = . ), comments (m = . , sd = . ), and engagement (m = . , sd = . ), we can conclude that the rmses are relatively small and that photo features have an acceptable level of predictability in terms of engagement. table . root mean square error of the -fold cross validation of support vector regression to engagement. feature like comment engagement face features . . . ocr feature . . . pixel features . . . visual features . . . all features . . . . . photo features and comment sentiment of antivaccination instagram photos first, the mean comment sentiments by content category were investigated. in figure , it is shown that the photos categorized into “food” and “plant” received the most positive comments from the public. furthermore, we can observe from the figure that the comments on the photos in all categories were positive (above . ), although it must be noted that the photos in the “text” category, which were largest in number and ranked high in mean engagement, registered the least positive comment sentiment. the comment sentiments differed by content category (f = . , p < . ).int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . mean comment sentiment by content category. next, we examined the association between photo features and comment sentiment, and the results are displayed in table , which shows that most face features were significantly associated with comment sentiment rather than engagement. the number of faces, age, and female showed positive correlations with the comment sentiment. moreover, it is observed that happiness was positively associated with it, whereas most negative and neutral emotions—disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and neutral—were negatively associated with comment sentiment. the negative correlation between the number of words and comment sentiment suggests that photos with more words on them have comments with more negative sentiment; this result is also opposed to the one obtained in the analysis of photo features and engagement. concerning pixel-level features, the means and variances of red, green, and blue were significantly associated with comment sentiment. in the case of means, the associations were negative, which was the opposite in engagement. from the table, we can also observe that photos with splendid color induced more positive comments from the public, as the saturation mean, all color shares (except the blue share and violet share), and colorfulness were positively associated with comment sentiment. in contrast, brighter photos drew more negative comments, as the value mean and brightness were negatively correlated with the comment sentiment. the affections from the pad model showed significant associations; pleasure was negatively associated with comment sentiment, and arousal and dominance were positively associated with it. this was also opposite in engagement. the positive correlation of hue peaks suggests that photos that feel mussier had more positive comments, and the visual features showed significant associations with comment sentiment—naturalness and sharpness were positively associated with comment sentiment, and contrast and rgb contrast were negatively associated with it. figure . mean comment sentiment by content category. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of next, we examined the association between photo features and comment sentiment, and the results are displayed in table , which shows that most face features were significantly associated with comment sentiment rather than engagement. the number of faces, age, and female showed positive correlations with the comment sentiment. moreover, it is observed that happiness was positively associated with it, whereas most negative and neutral emotions—disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and neutral—were negatively associated with comment sentiment. the negative correlation between the number of words and comment sentiment suggests that photos with more words on them have comments with more negative sentiment; this result is also opposed to the one obtained in the analysis of photo features and engagement. concerning pixel-level features, the means and variances of red, green, and blue were significantly associated with comment sentiment. in the case of means, the associations were negative, which was the opposite in engagement. from the table, we can also observe that photos with splendid color induced more positive comments from the public, as the saturation mean, all color shares (except the blue share and violet share), and colorfulness were positively associated with comment sentiment. in contrast, brighter photos drew more negative comments, as the value mean and brightness were negatively correlated with the comment sentiment. the affections from the pad model showed significant associations; pleasure was negatively associated with comment sentiment, and arousal and dominance were positively associated with it. this was also opposite in engagement. the positive correlation of hue peaks suggests that photos that feel mussier had more positive comments, and the visual features showed significant associations with comment sentiment—naturalness and sharpness were positively associated with comment sentiment, and contrast and rgb contrast were negatively associated with it. table . correlations of photo feature and comment sentiment. kind feature sentiment face features number of faces . * closeup . face ratio . age . * female . * anger . contempt − . disgust − . * fear − . * happiness . * sadness − . * surprise − . * neutral − . * ocr feature number of words − . * pixel features red mean − . * red var − . * green mean − . * green var − . * blue mean − . * blue var − . * saturation mean . * saturation var . value mean − . * value var − . * red share . * orange share . * yellow share . * green share . * blue share − . violet share - share of warm colors . * share of cold colors . * hue peaks . * pleasure − . * arousal . * dominance . * int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . cont. kind feature sentiment visual features brightness − . * colorfulness . * naturalness . * contrast − . * rgb contrast − . * sharpness . * color diversity . * color harmony − . * * p < . . finally, predictive models were built and analyzed to investigate how accurately the photo features predict comment sentiment. support vector regression models were trained with -fold cross validation and their rmses are presented in table . considering the means and standard deviations of the comment sentiment (m = . , sd = . ), we can conclude that the rmses are relatively large and that the predictability of photo features on comment sentiment is unsatisfactory. table . root mean square error of the -fold cross validation of support vector regression to comment sentiment. feature comment sentiment face features . ocr feature . pixel features . visual features . all features . . discussion the share of social media posts in photo form has been increasing dramatically, and this is also the case in hashtag activism. hashtags, which manifest thoughts and feelings clearly and concisely, originated on twitter, where the length of a message is limited, but their use has been expanded to other social media services, including instagram. hashtags, which make it easy to find and express support for posts of interest, have been widely used for online activism, but hashtag activism in photo form has been relatively understudied. this study analyzed instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags as an example of hashtag activism through photos. in addition, we examined how the photo features were related to public response, which was manifested via engagement and comment sentiment. the major findings and discussions about them are as follows. first, the photos that were categorized into “text” took the largest share (more than half) among instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags. this indicates that, while antivaccination posts were uploaded on the photo-centric platform, the photos manifested their idea mainly through the text imprinted on them. one may argue that this is not the best way to exploit the potential of the photographic medium, and that using a photo-centric platform then becomes meaningless. yet, this can be an efficient way of using the characteristics of visual data, because texts imprinted on photos usually draw attention more easily due to their large size and variety in color and font. next, the primary means of delivering messages in antivaccination instagram posts was found to be imprinting key messages persuading people not to vaccinate through words imprinted on the photos, including remarks from professionals, and providing the source of more information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention. the results revealed that the photos contained words that refer to professionals and that prohibit actions, as well as showing words linked to urls. combining the above results, citing remarks from professionals on the photo-imprinted text can be an effective strategy of persuasion, because it can make the content look more convincing. putting the key messages in the text imprinted on photos and the source of detailed information in the post text separately can also be effective, making it easier to reach the source via hyperlinks in the post text. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of concerning public responses, engagement and comment sentiment appeared to be separate domains, revealing different responses. the photos in the “text” category ranked relatively high in mean engagement but induced the least positive comments among all categories of photos. the more words imprinted on photos, the higher the level of engagement the photos induced, but the less positive comments they had. photo features which had an insignificant correlation with engagement showed significant associations with comment sentiment (for example, a part of face features), and the directions of correlation tended to be the opposite in the case of photo features that had a significant correlation with both engagement and comment sentiment (for example, a part of pixel and visual features). moreover, the predictability of photo features was different in terms of engagement and comment sentiment: the former was predictable by photo features with acceptable accuracy, while the latter was not. these results suggest that messages can be designed differently depending on whether they aim to obtain more likes and comments or to induce more positive responses from the public. finally, some of the low-level features (pixel and visual features) showed significant correlations with public responses. the features whose high values made the colors of photos splendid were negatively associated with engagement, but those whose high values make photos look bright were positively correlated with engagement. the opposite must be noted regarding comment sentiment, as discussed in the above; the features whose high values would make the colors of photos splendid were positively associated with comment sentiment, but those whose high values made photos look bright were negatively correlated with comment sentiment. these results suggest that photos with particular low-level characteristics can appeal more to the public, and that activists ought to have this in mind when aiming to use photos as their medium. concerning antivaccination movements, it needs to be noted that it can be considered as disinformation based on conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and rumors. it is not only an example of confirmation bias in social media but also disorienting public opinion or generating noise. thus, it should be warned equally against the side-effects of social media that enable connections among only like-minded people and social activities based on anti-social norms. the combination of these two threats would cause serious harm to individuals’ health as well as to society at large. in this regard, future studies will have to explore the motivation, context, and personal experiences concerning why social media users are engaged in these confirmation biases in general and the antivaccination movement in particular. additionally, we can investigate in future studies how the word difference (e.g., scientific vs. emotional words [ , ]) in social media posts would influence the response from the public. the major implication of this study is that it investigated how photos are used for hashtag activism. despite their rapidly growing share in social media data and the increasing role they have been playing in online communication, visual materials have drawn relatively little attention from researchers of online activism. this study tackled the issue of using instagram photos for hashtag activism and contributes to the body of literature by extending the research domain. furthermore, it examined the content of antivaccination instagram photos and revealed the characteristics of their way of delivering messages. in addition, this study showed that public responses to antivaccination instagram photos can be manifested in two domains—engagement and comment sentiment—which can be different to each other. it can also be meaningful with regard to the photo features that were used for the analysis; low-level (pixel-level features) features as well as high-level (content-level) features can be a useful route through which implicit information can be conveyed, and analyzing them can produce other kinds of results than those generated by content analysis. a major limitation of this study is that it dealt with only one instance of hashtag activism. the approach used in this study is expected to be extended to analyze other hashtag activisms of various kinds—particularly those through photos—by comparing them with one another. . conclusions the aim of the present research was to analyze instagram photos with antivaccination hashtags as an example of hashtag activism through photos and examine how the photo features were related int. j. environ. res. public health , , of to the public response, which was manifested via engagement and comment sentiment. this study identified that the photos categorized as “text” took the largest share. it was also found that the major way of delivering messages was to imprint the key messages that persuade people not to vaccinate with remarks from professionals on the photos and provide a source of complementary information in the post text with hashtags of antivaccine intention. various photo features showed associations with engagement and comment sentiment, but the directions of correlation were usually the opposite: these results suggest that engagement and comment sentiment were separate domains that revealed the different public responses. author contributions: conceptualization, y.k.; methodology, y.k.; software, d.s.; writing—original draft preparation, y.k.; writing—review and editing, y.k.; visualization, d.s.; supervision, y.j.l.; funding acquisition, y.j.l. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this work 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.vaccine. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmir. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ipm. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.cviu. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /srep http://dx.doi.org/ . /josa. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmir. http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.chb. . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	related works 	social media photos and public health 	hashtag activism 	social media data analysis on antivaccination movement 	method 	data collection 	photo features 	content category 	face features 	optical character recognition features 	pixel features 	visual features 	engagement 	comment sentiment 	results 	the content of antivaccination instagram photos 	photo features and engagement of antivaccination instagram photos 	photo features and comment sentiment of antivaccination instagram photos 	discussion 	conclusions 	references science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ editor's note jeremy berg doi: . /science.aat ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ representing rape trauma in film: moving beyond the event arts article representing rape trauma in film: moving beyond the event amanda spallacci department of english and film studies, university of alberta, edmonton, ab t g r , canada; spallacc@ualberta.ca received: september ; accepted: january ; published: january ���������� ������� abstract: trauma theorists foreground the unrepresentability of trauma; however, with modern innovations in visual representation, such as the photograph and cinema, depictions of trauma have begun to circulate across different mediums for a variety of audiences. these images tend to problematically present the traumatic event rather than the effects of trauma, such as traumatic memory. specifically, some contemporary hollywood popular films and television series that include rape as their subject matter often include a rape scene that can evoke affects such as disgust or empathy, and while these affects can last the duration of the film, they fail to shift popular discourses about rape because affect is more productive when it focuses on effects instead of events. as trauma studies has shifted to memory studies in the humanities, and rape has become more prominent in popular culture through the circulation of personal testimony on social media and memoir, depictions of rape in cinema have slowly started to change from presentations of rape scenes to representations of rape trauma that highlight different affects, such as shame. using monster ( ), girl with the dragon tattoo ( ), room ( ), and the television series, reasons why ( ) and sharp objects ( ) as case studies, this paper argues that, for an audiovisual depiction of rape to shift popular discourses about rape, it would have to function rhetorically to widen the cultural understanding of rape trauma beyond the event, and demonstrate that rape trauma should be understood as part of the personal, unconscious, cultural, and visual mediation of traumatic memory. keywords: trauma; memory; affect; rape; hollywood cinema . introduction current theories of trauma stress the impossibility of its representation (meek , p. ) and, as a result, a significant number of contemporary hollywood popular films and television programs present the traumatic event as opposed to representing trauma itself. this tendency is particularly true of narratives involving rape scenes: rape tends to be represented in film and television through a rape scene that marks the event as trauma rather than traumatic memory. the affects generated from the construction of these scenes produce a short-term effect, as “they make the movie viewing powerful rather than merely an intellectual exercise” (plantinga , p. ); yet, in the right context and in the long-term, affects “may burn themselves into memories of audiences and may become templates for thinking and behavior” (p. ). similarly, smith ( ) claims that, in phenomenological and affective terms, “no matter how far our beliefs and values are initially shaped by social structures . . . we are capable of expanding and adopting our existing conceptual frameworks through new experience including our experience of fictional representation” (p. ). rather than adopt the trauma studies approach that insists on the impossibility of representing trauma—and, as a result opting to focus on the traumatic event—some recent cinematic depictions of rape represent the trauma resulting from the sexual violence through the concept of cultural memory, which “can best be understood at the junction where the individual and social come together” (hirsch and smith , p. ). the cinematic arts , , ; doi: . /arts www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /arts http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts arts , , of choice not to include a rape scene, and instead, to highlight the trauma resulting from the rape, also mirrors the movement in which theories about trauma have begun to shift in academic settings from trauma studies to memory studies alongside discourses about rape that have become increasingly more prominent in popular culture with social media activism such as the #metoo movement. as far back as , sarah projansky argued that “rape narratives [in film] help organize, understand, and even arguably produce the social world; they help structure social understandings of complex phenomena such as gender, race, class and nation” (p. ), even though “film is the least discussed aspect of media culture in relation to rape within scholarly literature” (p. ). horeck ( ) analyzes “the link between violence and representation, and fantasy and related reality” (p. ) as opposed to looking at these entities as distinct or in opposition because representations of rape are foundational to “the terms of the social—and the sexual—contract” (p. ). research on rape-revenge films also varies: as read ( ) claims, these films are indicative of “a historically rather than generically diverse cycle of films” (p. ), while heller-nicholas ( ), through an analysis of rape-revenge films, demonstrates that these films are neither “historically [nor] generically specific” (p. ). finally, henry ( ) situates rape -revenge films as a “cultural key that can help to reveal and interrogate the meanings of rape and the political, ethical and affective responses to it” (p. ). regardless of these differences, fiction films that depict a rape scene seem to present a “feminist paradox between a desire to end rape and a need to represent (and therefore perpetuate discursive) rape in order to challenge it” (projansky , p. ). on the topic of representation, meek ( ) questions “how modern cultural forms, especially those of modern visual media have helped to create conditions in which trauma has assumed such signification” (p. ). visual media and discourses about trauma have a symbiotic relationship with each other because “a ‘memory’ which is represented by media and institutions must be actualized by individuals, by members of a community of remembrance . . . on shared notions of the past. without such actualizations, monuments, rituals, and books are nothing but dead material, failing to have any impact in societies” (erll , p. ). as television programs have the advantages or disadvantages of sustaining a longer narrative—and in some cases, commentary—while comprising a different viewing experience than film since they are mostly watched at home and usually broken up into episodes, both television and film are visual mediums that employ the same stylistic approaches. this essay therefore argues that event-based representations of rape—meaning that they focus on the rape rather than trauma—such as is the case in room ( ); reasons why ( ); monster ( ) and girl with the dragon tattoo ( ), keep affects contained within the movie or television viewing experience, whereas a television program like sharp objects ( ), in representing traumatic memory, can produce a multitude of affects, widen cultural understandings of rape beyond the event, and “shed light on the chronically trauma-producing social structures so as to forge the will to change them” (kaplan and wang , p. ). . trauma and the image: from photography to film trauma and the image have a long and symbiotic relationship: as meek ( ) suggests, “to the extent that trauma theory seeks to establish some privileged or exceptional link between testimony, witnessing and traumatic event, it participates in forms of political identification that are often already constituted through media representations” (p. ). building on walter benjamin’s theorization of the photograph, meek refers to the modern revolution as an era of “rapid social change, technological innovation and the mass availability of information” in which, he argues, with the invention of the photograph and the circulation of images in the public sphere, the photograph “performed important mnemonic functions” (p. ). as an early form of visual mass media, sontag ( ) claims that “photographs [became] a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the for the remainder of the paper, girl with the dragon tattoo will be referred to as gwtdt. arts , , of merely safe prefer to ignore” (p. ). the photograph offered a medium that could not only depict but also authenticate events, and as these images began to circulate publicly, they structured the ways in which the public understood trauma. furthermore, the photograph’s ability to capture an event, then to reproduce and circulate its image, became a means to understanding the effects of trauma on the mind: clinical researchers elizabeth brett and robert ostroff, as well as bessel van der kolk, and literary scholars such as cathy caruth, conceptualized the “traumatic image, conceived as an ‘iconic’ memory that haunts the victim in the form of flashbacks, dreams, and other intrusive repetitions”, and this notion of the traumatic image “has come to dominate american discussions of trauma” (leys , p. ). the photograph presented an authentic link to the traumatic event and participated in discourses about truth that are still prevalent in trauma studies. for leys ( ), contemporary discussions of trauma are polarized between mimetic and anti-mimetic models of trauma—two distinctions, leys argues, that can never be resolved without “falling into contradiction” ( ). nonetheless, by avoiding any mimetic presentations of trauma, such as hypnosis, theorists, such as cathy caruth, propose an anti-mimetic model of trauma, arguing that an external event traumatizes a sovereign autonomous subject, establishing “a strict dichotomy between the autonomous subject and the external trauma” (p. ). for caruth ( ), memories of a traumatic event do not include a subjective or cultural mediation at the conscious or unconscious level; instead, the flashbacks or nightmares that a survivor experiences after the event are “traces” of the event (p. ), or as radstone ( ) calls them “traceless traces” (p. ). caruth’s theory is important—especially for cases such as rape that take place without a witness or any material evidence—because it tries to authenticate the survivor’s testimony by proposing a causal link between symptoms and the event, whereby the symptoms are understood as evidence of the traumatic event. whether by means of visually depicting a traumatic event, or authenticating a survivor’s testimony, both the photograph and trauma theory seek to illuminate trauma that was once below the level of cultural awareness. similar to the photograph, some contemporary popular hollywood film and television programs offer visual depictions of rape through the constructed scene, which expose a criminal act that is frequently silenced and suppressed in contemporary culture. according to plantinga ( ), “films are ideological because they are rhetorical constructs persuasive in their effects on the audience” (p. ), and most often the persuasive force of cinema is the affect achieved through certain stylistic techniques that “will influence the spectator’s understanding and experience of the film text” (p. ). some films and television series that include a rape scene may foreground the protagonist’s emotional responses during the rape through close-up shots of the protagonist’s face, which may invite empathy from the audience. alternatively, the rape scene might emphasize the physical occurrence of the assault, usually through close-up shots of the protagonist’s body parts while clearly depicting the rapist, which can elicit feelings of disgust from the audience. the film techniques used to construct a rape scene certainly affect viewers strongly; however, this presentation of the rape scene and its subsequent affects also influence the ways in which people conceptualize sexual violence and how they respond to survivors because “affects make ideas and images salient and memorable, they play a role in individual and cultural memory” (p. ). the prevalence of rape scenes in mainstream hollywood cinema over representations of rape trauma creates the standard that the burden of proof falls onto the survivor, a standard that does not exist in most real rape cases because, more often than not, the only form of evidence of a rape is the survivor’s testimony. . rape scenes as representations of survivors’ trauma chiefly, two techniques, each producing different affects, are observed in the rape scenes from the films and television program discussed in this section: close-up shots of the protagonist’s face which may evoke an empathetic reading from the audience, or close-up shots of the protagonist’s body parts along with a close-up of the rapist’s face, which can elicit disgust from the audience. one of these techniques is employed in room, in which jack, a five-year old born by a woman known as ma—who was kidnapped and imprisoned at the age of seventeen by old nick—hides in a closet while ma is arts , , of raped by old nick. the narrative is presented from jack’s point-of-view, so rather than depict the rape on-screen, the scene consists of a series of extreme close-ups of jack’s face—which appears fearful and confused—as well as diegetic offscreen sounds of a bed squeaking and a man groaning, indicating that old nick is raping ma offscreen. the close-ups could evoke empathy with jack, who is visibly terrified for his mother, and may also invite the audience to share jack’s concern for his mother. for its part, reasons why is a television series told through a dual narrative by a teenager named hannah, who committed suicide and left a box of tapes explaining the thirteen reasons why she took her own life, and another teenager named clay, to whom she left the box. the show oscillates between the past, in which the audience watches the events unfold that hannah outlines in her voice-over tape recordings, as well as in the present, as clay negotiates the information he receives from hannah’s tapes. in “tape side b”, hannah is left alone in a hot tub with bryce, who bends hannah forward, holds her down, and rapes her. this graphic rape scene operates in a circuit of close-up shots of hannah’s face, her hand, and bryce, coupled with faint non-diegetic music and diegetic on-screen dialogue in which hannah urges bryce to stop, while bryce tells hannah that she ought to relax, and, finally, the diegetic offscreen sound of hannah’s voice on the tape recording saying, “[t]he way i see it, there are two different kinds of death. if you’re lucky you live a long life and one day your body stops working and it’s over, but if you aren’t lucky you die a little bit over and over.” as the diegetic offscreen sound is complete, hannah stops struggling, as depicted by close-ups of hannah’s listless hand and face while the rape comes to an end. these two rape scenes are different in the sense that one occurs offscreen while the other is graphic and onscreen; however, the close-up shots of the protagonists’ faces foreground the character’s emotions, encouraging empathy from the audience in both cases. once the film has constructed the protagonist as worthy and generated sympathy for the character, plantinga ( ) argues that a scene is incorporated into the narrative to encourage an empathetic response in the viewer, and that the viewer may “catch some of the emotion the character is thought to be feeling” or from the audience in the theatre (p. ). initially, empathy might seem viable, since it implies that spectators can put themselves in the position of the character in this situation, helping them to see that rape is morally condemnable; however, empathy runs the risk of “depoliticizing and universalizing violence” (dean , p. ). thus, rape scenes that invite an empathic reading through a series of close-up shots of the protagonist’s face have the potential to collapse differences and render invisible the precarious existence and increased vulnerability that certain people from various subject positions experience in regard to rape. additionally, some audiences “tend to make moral judgements on nonmoral grounds, and moral approval of a character might be something like an emotion or an intuition rather than a conscious or deliberate evaluation” (plantinga , p. ). for ahmed ( ), emotions become attached to people, objects, ideas, and events, saturating them with emotional meaning, suggesting that emotions are socially constructed (p. ). mainstream media positions white, middle class women as “worthy female victims” (stillman , p. ). as a result of these visual and discursive media formations, audiences may feel more inclined to feel empathy once they view “worthy” victims who are raped on-screen. furthermore, empathy can be a self-interested feeling because it tends to be accompanied by pleasurable feelings such as pride, in which the spectator views themselves as someone who abhors injustice (plantinga , p. ). in other words, the representation of a “worthy” victim in close-up shots during a rape scene may invite viewers to feel not only empathy, but also a sense of moral superiority, both of which do not necessarily spark any political engagement after viewing the film or change popular discourses about rape. some stylistic film techniques create distance between the protagonist and audience (plantinga , p. ), and unlike the close-up of the face that foregrounds the protagonist’s emotional response throughout the rape scene, such as in room and reasons why, distanciation techniques, such as numerous close-ups of aileen’s bound wrists and hands in monster, for example, as well as continuous close-ups of lisbeth’s leg, arm, back, and buttocks in gwtdt, foreground the physical arts , , of violence of rape. the depictions of violence in question are achieved at the expense of completely dehumanizing aileen and libseth, and rather than challenge the beliefs held by most men who abuse women—men who fail to see women as human, but as body parts (russell , p. )—these representations perpetuate these oppressive discourses about women. in this respect, young ( ) coins the term “criminological aesthetics” to explain that “crime images are structured according to a binary logic of representation making one visible and the other invisible” (p. ), and subjectivities associated with criminality and crime “are made and remade according to the images ascribed to them” (p. ). while these images may be fictional, therefore, fictional criminal stories “play an important role in fashioning our real world beliefs and responses” (plantinga , p. ). within the limited number of shots that depict aileen or lisbeth’s faces throughout their respective rape scenes, aileen’s face is covered with blood and is usually turned to the side, pressed against the car seat, and lisbeth’s face is always completely covered by her hair, while the rapists’ faces are illuminated and in close-up or medium close-up. the dehumanization of these women is even more troubling given their subject position because the images simply emphasize the hierarchal social systems and binaries that do not challenge but perpetuate assumptions that subjugate these women. aileen is homeless, a sex worker, and about to meet selby for their first date when she is violently raped by a man using a crow bar in a scene that represents the fact that sex workers receive more violent abuse during rape, and they are more often “raped with objects” (russell , p. ). lisbeth is a ward of the state without control or access to her finances, works as an investigative hacker, and identifies as bisexual; she is tased, tied up, and anally raped by nils bjurman, her state sanctioned guardian. caputi ( ) argues that within popular culture, a “good girl bad girl dichotomy” exists that forms assumptions about women’s cleanliness and dirtiness, and that “bad women, most non-white women, as well as white trash, prostituted women, lesbians-are denounced as already dirty contaminated, criminal, sexual and animalistic” (p. ). according to plantinga ( ), “the rhetorical force of narrative depends in part on what it teaches us about characters and kinds of characters about how to respond to various situations and value the world and its contents” (p. ). the cultural labels and assumptions about certain groups of women make them increasingly more vulnerable to gendered violence, and rather than problematize these beliefs, the film techniques used throughout the rape scene depict these beliefs in a visual form: by fragmenting the body, aileen and lisbeth are dehumanized while experiencing extreme violence due to their subject position in society. rape revenge films, such as monster and gwtdt, fall within the justice genre, which includes themes of justice, injustice, revenge, and retribution, and these themes are governed by moral criteria that many people share (carroll , pp. – ). while empathy can be evoked by film techniques such as the close-up of the protagonist’s face, it also involves “a benevolent disposition toward [the protagonist]” (p. ). aileen and lisbeth are not depicted as “pro-family, courteous, [or] mostly pro-social”, which are traits that plantinga ( ) argues that a character must possess in order to be “worthy of our pro-attitude”, and subsequently the viewers’ sympathy (p. ); yet, audiences could find themselves on aileen and lisbeth’s side as they attempt to seek revenge on the rapist. according to young ( ), in the context of the rape revenge genre, “in order for the women’s acts of lethal revenge to make “legal” and cinematic sense, the subsequent series of homicides must be at least symbolically against a proceeding cataclysmically serious event of rape” (p. ), and often, in order to “manipulate a spectator’s stance towards characters and a narrative event”, plantinga ( ) rightly argues that, unlike empathy, disgust is a “direct affect” and is often used in “vengeance narratives . . . to make dispatch of the criminal act that functions to ritually purify society of the unwanted contaminate” (pp. – ). for example, according to philippa gates, lisbeth’s rape “offers more shots of bjurman’s face in anticipation and pleasure during the rape”, setting up the narrative for lisbeth to be “justified in—and, more importantly, celebrated for—her acts of violence against the men who hate women” (gates , p. ). monster and gwtdt include a graphic rape scene, which may evoke disgust in certain viewers; yet, even if some viewers may feel something like an allegiance to aileen and lisbeth, plantinga notes that, because viewers are goal-oriented, they may simply want the arts , , of protagonist to complete a task based on the generic expectations of the narrative rather than on a moral approval of the character. thus, while empathy is generated through the close-up of the protagonist’s face, disgust is often independent of the protagonist and influenced by narrative; however, both empathy and disgust tend to avoid the complex social systems to which rape belongs, as well as the effects of trauma beyond the event. regardless of whether the rape scene is meant to fulfill a generic narrative expectation of the justice genre, such as in monster and gwtdt, or if it functions as one of the thirteen traumatic events that led up to hannah’s suicide in reasons why, all three present a graphic rape scene that places the viewer in a voyeuristic position: in monster, with the exception of two point-of-view shots of aileen looking at her bound hands, the rape is documented through the passenger car window; in gwtdt, the majority of shots are from the video camera, which is propped on a chair at the back of the guardians room, and the rest of the shots are from the side of the bed; and in reasons why, every shot is taken from the side of the hot tub. young ( ) states that “both cinema and the law require and demand corroboration, and both achieve it by linking violence and vision at the expense of the injured woman” (p. ); therefore, this voyeurism implicates the viewer as a bystander who bears witness to the graphic rape but cannot intervene, and so these films do not function rhetorically to challenge assumptions or misconceptions about women. while graphic depictions of trauma can vicariously traumatize certain viewers (kaplan and wang , p. ), often, the “public fascination with torn and open bodies” (seltzer , p. ) and frequent visual exposure to violent images may cause emotional and intellectual disengagement (meek , p. ). additionally, russell ( ) claims that because of the prevalence of heterosexual pornography—which she categorizes as material created for heterosexual males—that “combines sex . . . with the abuse or degradation of females” (p. ), certain men need to associate violence with pleasure by pairing violent scenes with arousing or gratifying stimuli such as female nudity (p. ), and, as a result, films that depict women being raped, tortured and killed are increasingly popular in america (p. ). in particular, the point-of-view shots from the camera in lisbeth’s backpack capture long shots of her entire naked body, and during her struggle, her buttocks are raised in the air in some instances, and the shots from the side of the bed consist of medium close-up shots of the side of her breast. overtly sexualizing and highlighting the victim or survivor’s nudity in a rape scene may titillate certain viewers, and thus, constructing a graphic rape scene in a culture that fetishizes traumatic events—specifically acts of violence against women—perpetuates the discourses that allow these acts to persist. survivors hesitate to disclose sexual violence because rape testimony is framed by legal testimony, which is predicated on coherence, linear narrative structure, comprehensive language, and evidence (andrews ; hesford ; jensen ), as well as by rape myths that include blaming tactics and misinformation about rape that our society believes are facts. truth of the event is central to testimonies about sexual violence, precisely because “the search for absolute truth is still dominant in legal contexts” (leydesdorff and adler , p. ), and rather than acknowledge that the aforementioned effects of trauma and rape culture are responsible for the survivors’ inability to form a legal testimony (alcoff and gray , p. ), defense lawyers often use the effects of trauma as evidence to discredit survivor’s testimony. most rapes occur without a witness, and instead, society bears witness to a testimony; however, cinematic depictions of rape tend to focus on the event—as evidenced by the foregrounding of the rape scene—and as the narrative unfolds, the viewer occupies a voyeuristic role in knowing that the rape happened: the viewer knows that the rape occurred not because they believe the survivor’s testimony, but because they bore witness to the event, adhering to the imperative of truth of the traumatic event and its relationship to the iconic veracity of the image. if films are ideological, as plantinga ( , p. ) argues, the rape scene does not challenge popular and oppressive discourses about rape; rather, it is complicit with them. for a film about rape to be ideological, it would have to function rhetorically to widen the cultural understanding of rape trauma beyond the event and demonstrate that rape trauma is “an episode in a longer chain of structural mutations in modern systems that have accumulated a record of violence, suffering and misery” (kaplan and wang , arts , , of p. ). this “longer chain of structural mutations” is perhaps represented in more complex ways in television’s “longer chain” in terms of episodic narrative structure, and while some programs, such as reasons why, do not capitalize on this formal advantage, it nonetheless allows for a more nuanced critical commentary than film can sometimes provide. if they are to inform or change cultural discourses regarding rape, film and television need to evolve away from an event-centered narrative of rape and towards a representation of traumatic memory that might expose the “modern systems that have accumulated a record of violence, suffering and misery.” . sharp objects and traumatic memory unlike reasons why ( ), sharp objects ( ) takes advantage of its episodic narrative structure to offer a more nuanced commentary on trauma. the program is a murder mystery mini-series about a journalist, camille preaker, who returns to her hometown of wind gap to report on the disappearance and murder of two young girls. she discovers that her own experiences while growing up in wind gap were not unlike those of the two young women, revealing that personal trauma cannot be dissociated from cultural memory in wind gap. the narrative within sharp objects oscillates between the present and the past through flashbacks that are rarely assigned meaning, and interactions between characters in the present—which at times mirror the events from the past in different contexts—demonstrate the multi-directionality of the story and its ability to not only represent traumatic memory, but also to “make critical use of it to shed light on the chronically trauma-producing social structures so as to forge the will to change them” (kaplan and wang , p. ). the series refuses narrative closure, both in the conclusion as well as the flashbacks. first, many unanswered questions remain by the end of the series, an unusual narrative choice for a murder mystery series because a characteristic of the genre is that the narrative tends to reveal who committed the murder and how they conducted the act. instead, sharp objects reveals this information near the end of the credits that follow the final episode, an intriguing choice considering that often people stop watching as soon as the credits appear on the screen. second, flashbacks appear frequently within the narrative and are often short, fragmented, and are not assigned any direct meaning; throughout the series, they are either triggered by specific objects or settings and signaled by a cut in the present followed by a match-on action shot to a scene from the past, or by dialogue, in which during the conversation in the present, camille is depicted in close-up followed by a cut to a scene from the past. according to hirsch and smith ( ), for survivors, acts of traumatic memory “require agents and specific contexts . . . they can be involuntary, repetitious, obsessive” (p. ), and certain cinematic depictions, according to kaplan ( ), “mimic the structure of trauma in the way the images intrude increasingly into the narrative without being given meaning and refuse us a sort of closure” ( ). camille’s alcoholism and the scars from words that she carved on her flesh are revealed throughout the series. flashbacks portraying camille from various ages throughout her life begin to appear in the narrative at a higher frequency, seemingly building to a revelation of the traumatic event—the event that caused camille’s alcohol addiction, the scars on her body, and the intrusive flashbacks—because trauma, as it has been presented in photographs and other visual media as well as conceptualized in theories about trauma and discourses in news media, always involves a presentation of the event or a link to the “truth” of the event. trauma has assumed this signification because “what is understood as history and as memory is produced by historically specific and contestable systems of knowledge and power that produce them” (radstone and hodgkin , p. ); yet, ball ( ) suggests that perhaps memory, rather than trauma, is one way to talk about the “affective aftermath of oppression without recourse to idealist notions of coherent identity and ‘authentic’ experience” because memories can “stand in for experiences” (p. ). instead of a grand revelation of the traumatic event, in sharp objects, the flashbacks that precede the non-witnessed event are just as significant as the event itself because they demonstrate trauma and traumatic memory as part of a larger chain of oppressive forces. arts , , of a particularly pertinent scene from sharp objects is from the third episode of the series, called “ripe”, in which camille and richard, a detective sent to wind gap to investigate the murders, walk through a forest in which the two young girls who were murdered used to play; camille, having grown up in wind gap and spent a lot of time in the same forest, debriefs richard on the cultural environment that breeds wind gap’s social landscape. she refers to previous cases of murdered women from wind gap, revealing that some of the cases were never thoroughly investigated because of the cultural labels assigned to these women who “didn’t conform to the rules of engagement in wind gap”, and were often referred to as “lesbians or sluts”. this moment and a later scene in which camille’s mother chastises her for being “so willful” and “never sweet” because she cut her hair short as a child, demonstrate that discourses about femininity and image have followed her throughout her life. the flashbacks in which camille is young with short hair represent her naivety as a child with regard to these discourses about femininity and image; however, between her childhood and teenage years, camille learned the dangers of cultural labels about women: in flashbacks of her adolescence, camille has become a cheerleader and has grown her hair long, seemingly in an attempt to adhere to culturally circulated images of femininity as well as to warrant the love of her mother following the death of her younger sister, marion. shortly thereafter, camille and richard enter a section of the forest referred to as the “end zone”, which, according to camille, is where “the football team would have their way with that week’s lucky cheerleader”. richard asks if the police were ever notified, and after camille replies that “of course not”, richard states that, “some people would call that rape . . . taking advantage of someone too young to make an informed decision . . . sounds criminal. literally”. according to pribram ( ), if gender is discursively and culturally constructed, then “it becomes possible to intervene and influence predominant perceptions of women”, (p. ) and dialogue in television and film, “enables its narratives to represent many gendered issues productively in their deserved complexity” (p. ). by identifying as rape an event that, according to camille, most people in wind gap would consider to be consensual, richard, an outsider in wind gap, exposes the pervasiveness of the town’s cultural discourses. furthermore, as a detective, richard’s occupation is to uncover the truth, and because he calls this event rape without material evidence, but rather from an account of the events from camille, he ascribes value and truth to testimony. this dialogue about informed consent and rape gives meaning to a previous flashback in which camille, as a child, walks through the forest into a shed that has slices of dead animals hanging from the ceiling and laid out on a table, as well as graphic pornographic images hanging on the walls. the flashback cuts to a scene in the present of camille masturbating in a motel room, then cuts back to a flashback of a young camille masturbating in her childhood bedroom, presumably to the images in the shed. revisiting this sequence in the context of camille and richard’s discussion about informed consent and rape illuminates the fact that depictions of violent sexuality, such as those in the pornographic images from the shed, saturate various mediums in popular culture, mediating female sexuality and informing sexual practices, so much so that sexual violence against women becomes status quo. with regard to the murder that they are currently investigating, camille and richard agree that the fact that the murderer removed the victim’s teeth is “equivalent to rape” because “it’s about power”, and as the conversation ends, richard begins walking towards the shed—the shed that has already appeared in numerous flashbacks—and camille has yet another flashback of herself as a teenager in her cheerleading uniform kneeling on the ground, moving insects around with a stick, as a group of teenage boys are crowded around behind her out of focus. this flashback serves as an acknowledgement that camille was indeed one of the cheerleaders who was raped by the football team. as camille follows richard into the shed, he unintentionally notes that the shed is a “creepy place for two young girls to hang out”, and camille becomes visibly uncomfortable and exits the shed. evidently, the shed, with its disturbing contents, is a source of trauma and shame for camille. evoking gilles deleuze, probyn ( ) argues that “shame is produced out of the clashing of mind and arts , , of body, resulting in new acts of subjectivity consubstantial with the words in which they are expressed” (p. ). according to probyn, sexuality is an “area ripe for shame” (p. x), and, coincidently, one of camille’s scars is of the word “ripe”, and the episode in which this scene unfolds is also titled “ripe”. the surface of camille’s skin, with the exception of her face and hands, is carved with negative cultural labels, and these “nasty labels” also appear on various objects throughout the series, serving as titles for each episode while also demonstrating that shame is both personal and cultural. camille’s scars not only expose her practices of self-harm, but also her way of working through trauma, and the scars, similar to the flashbacks, evidence the fact that traumatic memory is never exclusively personal: traumatic memory is conscious, unconscious, and cultural, and is a product of events and effects, of memory and culture, of visual media and trauma itself, which is never exclusively personal, but also social, cultural, and political. kaplan and wang ( ) argue that “trauma intensifies the urgency of re-symbolization and reveals the bankruptcy of the prior symbolization . . . and may provide opportunities to tap into the driving force that enables new symbolic expression” (p. ). personal testimony and political activism about rape have begun to saturate popular culture across a variety of mediums, and these discourses expose issues such as the suspicion and disbelief with which rape testimony is often met in juridical settings and the public sphere. relatedly, depictions of rape in contemporary hollywood cinema have slowly shifted from the presentation of a graphic rape scene that, based on its construction, can generate affects such as disgust or sympathy, towards a representation of traumatic memory that accounts for the “inter-intra-subjective processes through which meanings are conferred, negotiated and mediated” (radstone , p. ). more scholarship, however, needs to be generated on films that depict rape. for the case of the rape-revenge genre, for instance, the vengeance sequence following the rape could be rationalized as a simple mimetic depiction of trauma because following the rape, the protagonist becomes the perpetrator; often she puts on his clothing after the event, such as in monster ( ) and kill bill vol , before inflicting violence on others, and this representation is arguably just as reductive as anti-mimetic presentations of trauma. additionally, documentary films about rape tend to avoid rape scenes and cinematic representations of memory, and instead foreground a rape survivor who delivers her testimony in extreme close-up, a technique which might produce empathy, sympathy, or more nuanced affects. nonetheless, the fact that representations of rape have begun to change in mainstream hollywood cinema is an encouraging prospect because “trauma produces new subjects” (kaplan , p. ), and rather than relegate rape survivors to a mystified silence, new representations of trauma support shared suffering and witnessing. through new representation of rape trauma, survivors can identify with their own memories onscreen and watch these memories reach wide audiences. hopefully, the rhetorical nature of nuanced representations of rape in cinema can change the oppressive discourses about rape in popular culture. funding: this research received no external 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https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rfms feminist media studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms introduction: gender, migration, and the media mara mattoscio & megan c. macdonald to cite this article: mara mattoscio & megan c. macdonald ( ) introduction: gender, migration, and the media, feminist media studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: nov . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rfms https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rfms &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rfms &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - commentary and criticism introduction: gender, migration, and the media mara mattoscioa and megan c. macdonald b,c agabriele d'annunzio university, pescara; bkoç, university, istanbul; ceurias fellow - , iméra, université aix-marseille across the sensationalist media coverage of recent migratory movements, generally labelled as the “refugee crisis,” crucial issues of gender, including health-care disparities, differential access to asylum and/or citizenship, and national policies on integration, have received ambiguous treatment. cases of sexual violence suffered by migrants or visible gender identifications have mostly been framed in stereotypical ways, reinvigor- ating essentialist oppositions between the west, seen as “progressive and endangered,” and the rest of the world, deemed “backward and threatening.” tales of trafficked women have, for instance, ended up constructing almost all forms of female mobility, with the notable exception of domestic work, as “high risk” and morally unadvisable (felicity schaeffer-grabiel ; enrica rigo ). more nuanced understandings of the gendered complexities of migration, border surveillance, and media systems have been often overlooked (radha sarma hegde ). this “commentary and criticism” section is in conversation with kaitlynn mendes and kumarini silva’s “women, migration, and the media” contribution to feminist media studies, where we read that “as women’s bodies move across borders, discussion about the representation of female experiences in the migration process still remains somewhat mute” ( ). in the years that have followed mendes and silva’s focus on women migrants and the media, western media discourses have accumulated reports of “dra- matic peaks” in mass migration across the mediterranean, the result of the so-called arab spring, the outbreak of the syrian war, climate change, and the desire for better economic conditions, to name but a few reasons. unstable and contradictory construc- tions of “deserving” and “undeserving” refugees have been repeatedly produced in this mediatic flow. in the summer of , empathic coverage of entire syrian families fleeing their country trumped the representation of (always apparently single) african migrants who were moving for similar reasons, in a “hierarchy of deservingness [that] reflects arrangements of race . . . interpenetrated by us and european political-economic interests” (heide castañeda and seth m. holmes , ). yet, a media backlash emerged against refugees in europe later that year, after the unrelated paris terrorist attacks and reports of mass sexual assault in cologne during the city’s new year’s eve celebrations. syrians, suddenly identified as predominantly single and male, were then increasingly framed by the media as “bogus refugees,” who looked suspiciously different from the stereotypical (non-white) third world poor that “could never be confused for an image of europe” (radhika gajjala and jill walker rettberg , ). this was followed by questionable interventions such as kamel daoud’s ( ) new york times feminist media studies , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf op-ed, in which “sexual misery” in the arab world was diagnosed as the cause of sexual violence associated with refugees, drawing a line from sexual harassment in tahrir square to cologne, “bursting onto the scene in europe.” however, at the time of writing, while the supposed “refugee crisis” has turned into a “crisis of responsibility itself” (lilie chouliaraki and tijana stolic , ), european states are fighting one another over redistribution quotas and right-wing movements are gaining momentum in fomenting anti-immigrant sentiments, a situation in which african migrants have been again put centre stage in the hierarchy of “threat” and “excess.” following hegde’s suggestion that scholarly attention shift from an idea of media as artifactuality to one of media as mediation, this “commentary and criticism” section attempts to address the “complex constitutive connection between media forms and practices, mediated environments, and the politics of migration” (radha sarma hegde , ). in order to account for the complex nature of such mediated migration, we look beyond mendes and silva’s ( ) exclusive focus on women migrants and call attention to the mediatic and mediated gendering of migration itself. in particular, we look at specific types of “gendered visibility” and at the “absences and invisibilities [that are] produced and sustained through mediated reiterations that cross borders and communities” (hegde , ). anna carastathis and myrto tsilimpounidi’s contribution begins with a provocative claim: “all migration politics are reproductive politics.” this opening salvo leads to a discussion about heteronormative expectations projected onto migrants by national states and border officials, as well as by pro-immigration campaigns themselves. examining the latter’s “refugees welcome” placard, which travelled from the us– mexico border in the s to the shores of contemporary southern europe, the authors show how even progressive activists tend to represent migrants as invariably hetero- sexual families with well-defined gender roles, in order to try to stimulate public identification with them in the west. the authors’ critique of such a “methodological heteronormativity” seems crucial at a time when gender and sexuality are mobilized most often to exclude or instrumentalize people on the move. the stereotypical image of migrants as inherently male and sexually threatening because of a supposed “archaic” background (often a reference to islam) is the starting point of giuliana sorce’s commentary on the german right-wing media campaign “ dezibel.” tracing the campaign’s promotional videos and online presence, sorce points out how the white male founder and his supporters successfully managed not only to instrumentalize western feminist discourse through an insistent focus on the “endan- gered daughters of europe,” but even proceeded to appropriate the channels and strategies of the recent #metoo and time’s up movements that protest sexual harass- ment worldwide. here we witness the intersection of the figure of the “rapefugee” and the phenomenon of “femonationalism,” whereby the campaign encourages white european women to act in solidarity with one another to combat an “imported” sexual danger. the complete erasure of female migrants from the scene thus seems directly connected to the usurpation of german and european women’s voices, as the latter are spoken for and about but never listened to by the # db anti-immigration campaign. the final two commentaries work in tandem, excavating media coverage, gender, and agency transnationally, and from different geographical locations, through a discussion of the same migratory tragedy: the death of nigerian women in a commentary and criticism shipwreck off the coast of libya in . krista lynes examines three images that were widely circulated in european and us media coverage of the event, and shows how the stereotypical casting of female nigerian migrants as hapless victims of sexual trafficking was mirrored in the women’s post-mortem reification as their corpses were repeatedly photographed wrapped in bags, suspended over lines of hearses, or piled up on cargo ships. the media’s manner of “giving shape” to the migrants is via necropolitical repetition, “steeped in thickly gendered, racialized and classed imagin- aries.” lynes unpacks the term “trafficking,” making connections between the twenty- first-century deaths in the mediterranean, transnational trade, and christina sharpe’s work on “the mathematics of black life” and the transatlantic slave trade. the ambiguous attitude of arrival nations and official rescue operations further emerges through lynes’ analysis of the gendered naming of rescue ships and their often overlooked implications. while lynes’ approach to the mediterranean cemetery is from a euro-american media perspective, faith oloruntoba, abigail odozi ogwezzy-ndisika, babatunde adeshina faustino, and kelechi okechukwu amakoh’s contribution approaches media coverage of the event from a nigerian media perspective, through an analysis of articles published in two high-circulation national newspapers with a strong online presence. the authors’ findings show that the western media trope of nigerian women as always forcibly trafficked as potential sex workers is reiterated by nigerian news outlets, in accordance with the interested national governments’ cooperation in discouraging (especially female) migration. in this context, pregnancy is directly associated in the media dis- course with a condition of failure, hopelessness, and shame, while both the nigerian and european governments are cast as heroic saviours. the shifting of the responsibility for death in migration from structural international policies to individual (a)morality is thus highlighted by the authors as one consequence of the sinister ways in which gendered migration is mediated. similarly to what happens in euro-american border policies, in which borders “do not function as linear boundaries [but] hierarchize people’s movement according to gender- constructed roles” (rigo , ), transnational media discourses about migration produce and reiterate specific configurations of gender for people on the move and sedentary populations alike. these foster hyper-visibilities, erasures, and (mis)alignments in accordance with national governments’ interests and international political dis- courses. with this issue of “commentary and criticism,” we propose that it is only by taking the media’s gendering power into account that the complex entanglements of gender politics and migration policies can be fully understood. note . there are, of course, exceptions to fear-mongering and irresponsible media representations. to take but one recent example, see warscapes’ mediterranean collection (bhakti shringarpure et al. ). sarah jilani ( ) argues in the conversation that women’s testimonies coming out of the syrian war are increasingly found in books and memoirs rather than in traditional media coverage. feminist media studies disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. references castañeda, heide, and seth m. holmes. . “representing the ‘european refugee crisis’ in germany and beyond: deservingness and difference, life and death.” american ethnologist ( ): – . doi: . /amet. . chouliaraki, lilie, and tijana stolic. . “rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual topology of european news.” media, culture and society ( ): – . doi: . / . daoud, kamel. . “the sexual misery of the arab world.” new york times, february . accessed september , . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/the-sexual-misery- of-the-arab-world.html. gajjala, radhika, and jill walker rettberg. . “terrorists or cowards: negative portrayals of male syrian refugees in social media.” feminist media studies ( ): – . doi: . / . . . hegde, radha sarma, ed. . circuits of visibility: gender and transnational media cultures. new york: new york university press. hegde, radha sarma. . mediating migration. cambridge: polity press. jilani, sarah. . “how women are collaborating to tell stories that break through the noise on syria.” the conversation. accessed september , . http://theconversation.com/how-women- are-collaborating-to-tell-stories-that-break-through-the-noise-on-syria- . mendes, kaitlynn, and kumarini silva, eds. . “commentary and criticism: women, migration, and the media.” feminist media studies ( ): – . rigo, enrica. . “re-gendering the border: chronicles of women’s resistance and unexpected alliances from the mediterranean border.” acme: an international journal for critical geographies, dec. accessed august , . https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/ . schaeffer-grabiel, felicity. . “transnational media wars over sex-trafficking: abolishing the ‘new slave trade’ or the new nativism?” in circuits of visibility: gender and transnational media cultures, edited by radha sarma hegde, – . new york: new york university press. shringarpure, bhakti, michael bronner, veruska cantelli, michael busch, jessica rohan, melissa smyth, jason huettner, gareth davies, and noam scheindlin, eds. . mediterranean. brooklyn: upset press. methodological heteronormativity and the “refugee crisis” anna carastathisa and myrto tsilimpounidib apanteion university; bslovak academy of sciences all migration politics is reproductive politics. the nation-state project of controlling migra- tion secures the racialised demographics of the nation, understood as a reproducible fact of the social and human body, determining who is differentially included, who is excluded, and who is exalted. citizenship, illegality, and asylum are often affirmed or rejected as inheritable transitive properties that adhere to a person by virtue of heteronormative (or, more rarely, homonormative) configurations of kinship. as eithne luibhéid ( , ) has argued, sexual normativity is crucial to nation-state projects of “biological and social reproduction of the citizenry, but also for the cultivation of particular kinds of social, economic, and affective commentary and criticism https://doi.org/ . /amet. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/the-sexual-misery-of-the-arab-world.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/the-sexual-misery-of-the-arab-world.html https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://theconversation.com/how-women-are-collaborating-to-tell-stories-that-break-through-the-noise-on-syria- http://theconversation.com/how-women-are-collaborating-to-tell-stories-that-break-through-the-noise-on-syria- https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/ behavioral sciences article title ix mandated reporting: the views of university employees and students amie r. newins ,* , emily bernstein , roselyn peterson , jonathan c. waldron and susan w. white department of psychology, university of central florida, orlando, fl , usa; emily.bernstein@knights.ucf.edu (e.b.); rpeterson@knights.ucf.edu (r.p.) department of psychology, virginia tech, blacksburg, va , usa; jwaldron @vt.edu department of psychology university of alabama, tuscaloosa, al , usa; swwhite @ua.edu * correspondence: amie.newins@ucf.edu; tel.: + - - - received: october ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: per title ix of the higher education amendments of , many university employees are mandated reporters of sexual assault. university employees (n = ) and students (n = ) completed an online survey assessing knowledge and opinions of this reporting requirement. university employees and students generally reported being quite knowledgeable of reporting requirements. most university employees indicated they would report an incident disclosed by a student, but students were fairly ambivalent about whether they would disclose to faculty members. nearly one in five students ( . %) indicated that title ix reporting requirements decreased their disclosure likelihood. these findings suggest that mandated reporting policies, as well as how they are presented to students and faculty, should be examined in order to increase compliance and facilitate disclosure. keywords: title ix; sexual assault; disclosure; reporting . introduction sexual assault (i.e., sexual contact that occurs without consent from both parties) is a prevalent issue on university campuses. more than one in five ( to %) college women and more than one in twenty ( to . %) college men report experiencing attempted or completed sexual assault since beginning college [ , ]. survivors of sexual assault or rape are at an increased risk of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and suicidality [ ]. the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, coupled with the profound negative consequences resulting from such assaults warrants legislative and policy intervention. the current study aims to examine university employee’s and student’s perceptions of one aspect of such a policy: mandated reporting under title ix. title ix of the higher education amendments of (title ix) specifies that any educational institution receiving federal funding must prevent sex-based discrimination and respond to acts of sexual discrimination when they do occur [ ]. in april , the office of civil rights released a dear colleague letter, which provided specific guidance on schools’ duties to ensure that sexual assault and harassment are properly addressed in educational settings [ ]. in particular, this letter explained that universities are obligated to take action in response to sexual violence if any university employees who are not confidential employees (e.g., student health providers, victim services advocates) know of the incident [ ]. specifically, university employees are required to report incidents of sexual violence involving students to the title ix coordinator. it should be noted that prior to the april dear colleague letter, title ix requirements were primarily interpreted through case law [ ]. behav. sci. , , ; doi: . /bs www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://dx.doi.org/ . /bs http://www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci http://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= behav. sci. , , of the clery act of requires that universities publish crime statistics. as a result, certain campus authorities are required to track and report anonymous data about crimes on college campuses, but reporting of personally identifying information is not required. in , the campus sexual violence elimination (save) act, an amendment to the clery act of , was enacted; this law requires universities to report statistics regarding sexual, domestic, and dating violence and to provide training programs to students and employees about these types of violence [ ]. the required training programs must include information about title ix reporting requirements as well as title ix resources. the campus save act also laid out standards for the university’s disciplinary response. furthermore, some states have elected to go beyond the requirements of title ix; specifically, some states have implemented laws that require colleges and universities to report sexual assault cases to law enforcement agencies [ ]. if other states follow suit, the potential reach of mandatory reporting will expand (i.e., from university employees disclosing to title ix officials to include further reporting by the title ix officials to law enforcement), underscoring the importance of understanding knowledge and opinions of reporting requirements. furthermore, sexual assault is also prevalent among college students internationally [ ]; therefore, information about how mandatory reporting laws are perceived could be relevant to other countries considering how to address disclosures of sexual assault and sexual harassment on college and university campuses. for example, bill in canada has many similar requirements to title ix and the clery act [ ], so the findings of this study may help to inform laws in other countries. to date, limited research has examined whether university employees (many of whom are mandated reporters under title ix) and students understand title ix reporting requirements and whether they agree with these requirements. this line of research is important, as university employees’ perceptions may affect compliance with title ix, and students’ perceptions likely influence the likelihood that students will disclose to university employees. one previous study examined opinions of victim advocates on college campuses in a state where all campus employees must be mandated reporters, but noted a need for research on the opinions of faculty and other staff [ ]. furthermore, few studies have examined how student characteristics may affect the likelihood of disclosure to a university employee who is required to report incidents under title ix. there are several variables that may affect students’ opinions of mandatory reporting. first, rape myth acceptance (rma; i.e., agreement with inaccurate beliefs about rape) is one factor that may influence students’ title ix beliefs and their willingness to disclose a sexual assault to university employees. common rape myths include beliefs that women want to be raped, that men cannot control aggressive sexual impulses, and that many women make false claims about being raped [ ]. as a result, individuals high in rma may be less likely to see a need for mandatory reporting or fear that mandatory reporting could increase the risk of women making false claims about sexual assault experiences. research in non-collegiate samples has found that individuals high in rma are less likely to disclose sexual assault experiences to the police [ , ]. rape myths also tend to involve stereotypes about rape (e.g., that rape is only perpetrated by strangers) [ ]; as a result, higher levels of rma may also affect opinions about mandatory reporting of sexual assault and sexual harassment due to decreased perceived need to address college sexual assaults, which often do not fit stereotypes (e.g., the majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by known others) [ ]. furthermore, feminist theory dictates that rma allows sexual assault to continue to occur in american culture [ ]; therefore, feminist beliefs may be another variable that affects students’ disclosure likelihood, as individuals high in feminist beliefs may be more likely to reject rape myths. in fact, a recent study found that universities with a female president reported % more rapes to the department of education and had higher levels of estimated compliance with reporting than universities with a male president [ ]. in addition, prior research has shown that men who have perpetrated sexual assault report higher levels of hostility toward women and more acceptance of using verbal pressure in sexual encounters compared to men who have not perpetrated sexual assault [ ]. individuals who engage in aggressive behav. sci. , , of behaviors may be more accepting of sexual aggression, which could affect acceptance of mandatory reporting requirements. therefore, it is possible that aggression would also relate to title ix perceptions among students. finally, previous research has shown that sexual assault history influences likelihood of disclosure [ ]. individuals with a history of sexual assault have had to work through decisions about to whom they disclose. furthermore, they likely experienced a range of social reactions to their disclosures [ – ], which likely color their opinions on how disclosure information should be handled. to the authors’ knowledge, only one previous study has examined knowledge and opinions of title ix reporting among university employees and students [ ]. however, the data collection for that study occurred in (i.e., prior to implementation of the campus save act). newins and white ( ) found that both university employees and students generally reported high levels of knowledge and agreement with title ix reporting requirements. when provided with a vignette describing a student’s disclosure of sexual assault perpetrated by another student, most employees ( . %) indicated they would likely report the incident to the title ix coordinator. a substantial proportion of students indicated they would tell a faculty member if they knew of a sexual assault perpetrated by another student ( . %) and if they experienced a sexual assault ( . %). among students, rma was negatively associated with agreement with knowledge and opinion questions about title ix reporting requirements. while feminist beliefs were not related to those ratings, they were positively associated with the estimated likelihood of disclosing one’s own sexual assault to a university employee. finally, compared to students who did not report a history of sexual assault, students who were survivors of sexual assault were more likely to believe that reporting sexual assault perpetrated by a student should be required, less likely to believe that reporting of sexual harassment perpetrated by a student should be required, more likely to indicate they would disclose sexual assault involving third parties, more likely to be unsure whether they would report their own sexual assault, and more likely to say that title ix reporting requirements decreased the likelihood that they would tell a university employee about their own sexual assault. the current paper sought to extend these findings by examining whether there are differences in knowledge and opinions of title ix reporting requirements following implementation of the campus save act. additionally, this study sought to replicate and extend the findings regarding predictors of title ix opinions among students by adding aggression. research on employee and student knowledge and opinions of mandated reporting of sexual assault is needed to inform policy. in particular, the assumptions that underlie mandated reporting have limited empirical support [ ]; therefore, further research on perceptions of mandated reporting is needed to inform the future of these policies. we expected that the current study would provide additional evidence that university employees and students know about reporting requirements. the following hypotheses were proposed. hypothesis : given that the campus save act requires additional education about sexual assault on college campuses, university employees and students in the current study were expected to be more aware of reporting requirements and be more likely to agree with mandated reporting compared to employees and students who completed a similar study prior to implementation of the campus save act. hypothesis : due to the power differential between faculty and students, we expected more agreement with mandated reporting when sexual harassment and sexual assault is perpetrated by a faculty member. we also expected more agreement with mandated reporting for cases of sexual assault compared to sexual harassment, as sexual assault is typically perceived as a more severe form of victimization. hypothesis : given the literature cited above, among students, rma and aggression were expected to be negatively associated with agreement with mandated reporting, and feminist beliefs were expected to be positively associated with agreement with mandated reporting. behav. sci. , , of hypothesis : based on previous research, among students, we hypothesized that survivors of sexual assault would be less likely to indicate they would disclose sexual assault compared to students without a history of sexual assault. . materials and methods . . participants and procedures the study was approved by the university institutional review board. university employees were recruited through recruitment emails sent to academic department heads and via listservs. students were recruited through the psychology department research management website. it should be noted that all undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes are eligible to participate in the research management system, and many non-psychology majors enroll in psychology courses for general education requirements, for courses required by other majors, and to fulfill elective requirements. data collection occurred during the spring semester. during the data collection period, all university employees had mandatory title ix training, which could be completed either in person or online. this training informed employees that all employees (with few exceptions, e.g., counseling center staff) were mandated reporters. as such, all employees should have been familiar, prior to data collection, with the title ix reporting mandate. university employees were not compensated for participating; students received extra credit in psychology courses. participants implied consent to participate by entering the survey after being provided with information about risks and benefits. as part of the consent document, participants were informed that data collection was anonymous. all data were collected via anonymous online surveys hosted on surveymonkey®. participants were university employees and college students at a large public university who completed the online survey. university employees had a mean age of . (sd = . ; range: to ), completed their highest degree an average of . years (sd = . ) prior to completing the survey, and had been working in a university setting for an average of . years (sd = . ). the majority of the sample identified their gender as female ( . %) and race as white ( . %); four university employees ( . %) identified their ethnicity as hispanic or latino(a). university employees held a range of positions ( . % professors of various ranks (assistant, associate, and full), . % administrators, . % graduate teaching assistants, and . % other positions (e.g., adjunct professors, instructors)). students had a mean age of . (sd = . ; range: to ). most student participants identified as female ( . %) and white ( . %). participants were primarily in their first year ( . %), followed by second year ( . %), third year ( . %), fourth year ( . %), and fifth year or beyond ( . %). two- hundred-eighty students ( . %) indicated experiencing at least one sexual assault (attempted or completed) since the age of . . . measures both university employees and students completed the title ix knowledge and opinions questionnaire; only students completed the remaining measures due to a desire to keep the university employee survey as brief as possible to increase completion. title ix knowledge and opinions questionnaire. university employees and students were asked about knowledge and opinions of university employees’ reporting responsibilities related to four student disclosure scenarios: ( ) sexual harassment by a student, ( ) sexual harassment by a faculty/staff member, ( ) rape by a student, and ( ) rape by a faculty/staff member. this questionnaire was identical to the one used by newins and white [ ]. employees were asked about their reporting requirements if a student were to disclose each scenario, and students were asked about reporting requirements if they were to disclose that they had experienced each scenario. participants were asked to rate agreement with three statements using a seven-point likert scale ( = strongly disagree to behav. sci. , , of = strongly agree): ( ) university employees are required to report the incident to university officials (i.e., knowledge of reporting requirement); ( ) university employees should be required to report the incident to university officials, even if the student states they do not want the incident reported after disclosing it (i.e., opinion of non-consented reporting); and ( ) university employees should be required to facilitate reporting if the student wishes to report it to university officials (i.e., opinion of consented reporting). a brief description of title ix mandated reporting was then provided. then, university employees were asked to indicate how likely they would be to report a student disclosure of sexual assault to the title ix coordinator. students were asked to rate how likely they would be to ( ) tell a faculty member if they had been sexually assaulted by another student, and ( ) tell a faculty member if they knew an acquaintance had perpetrated a sexual assault against another student. the rating scale ranged from (definitely would not) to (definitely would). students were then asked to rate the degree to which the likelihood of disclosing their own sexual assault to a university employee was affected by knowing the university employee reporting requirements on a scale from (much less likely to tell) to (much more likely to tell). feminist perspectives scale (fps) [ ]: the fps consists of items assessing “liberal,” “radical,” “social,” “cultural,” and “women of color” feminism. participants were asked to rate how much they agreed with the statements from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). scores are summed, with higher total scores indicating stronger feminist perspectives. previous research demonstrated good internal consistency (α = . ) and good convergent and divergent validity in a college sample [ ]. for the current study, cronbach’s alpha was . . illinois rape myth acceptance scale (irmas) [ ]: on the irmas, students were asked to rate how much they agreed with each of the rape myths on a (not at all agree) to (very much agree) scale. scores are summed, with higher total scores indicating higher myth acceptance. previous research demonstrated good internal consistency (α = . ) and construct validity [ ]. for the current study, cronbach’s alpha was . . sexual experiences survey—short form victimization (ses-sfv) [ ]: on the ses-sfv, women reported on seven types of unwanted sexual experiences (i.e., sexual touching/contact, oral sex, vaginal sex, anal sex, attempted oral sex, attempted vaginal sex, and attempted anal sex), and men were asked about five types of unwanted sexual experiences (excluding questions related to vaginal sex). participants were asked to indicate whether or not they had experienced each incident as a result of five different coercion strategies during two non-overlapping periods: ( ) during the months prior to completing the survey, and ( ) during the period between their th birthday and months prior to completing the survey. test–retest reliability, convergent validity, and concurrent validity of data from the ses-sfv have been demonstrated [ ]. for the current study, participants were classified as either having experienced sexual victimization since the age of (i.e., endorsed any item on the ses-sfv) or not (i.e., denied all items on the ses-sfv). aggression questionnaire (aq) [ ]: the aq consists of items that measure aggressive tendencies. participants were asked to rate how characteristic each item is of them from (extremely uncharacteristic of me) to (extremely characteristic of me). the aq consists of four subscales: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. subscale scores are created by summing the items for each subscale. previous research has demonstrated that the internal consistency of the four subscales and total score ranged from . to . [ ]. for the current study, cronbach’s alphas ranged from . to . . behav. sci. , , of impulsive/premeditated aggression scale (ipas) [ ]: the ipas is a -item measure of impulsive and premeditated aggression. participants are asked to rate their agreement with each statement based on the last months from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). subscale scores (i.e., impulsive aggression and premeditated aggression) are computed, and higher scores indicate higher aggression. in a college sample, the ipas demonstrated high internal consistency (impulsive aggression α = . ; premeditated aggression α = . ) [ ]. for the current study, cronbach’s alphas were . for impulsive aggression and . for premeditated aggression. . . data analyses all data were entered into statistical package for social sciences (spss) version (ibm corp. released . ibm spss statistics for windows, version . . armonk, ny: ibm corp.) for analysis. independent samples mann–whitney u-tests were used to compare responses from the current study with those from a study that used the same title ix knowledge and opinions questionnaire and was conducted prior to implementation of the campus save act at the same university [ ]. related-samples wilcoxon signed rank tests were used to examine whether knowledge and opinions of reporting requirements differed by perpetrator category (student vs faculty), type of sexual victimization (sexual harassment vs rape), and student consent for reporting (non-consented vs consented). spearman’s rho correlations were used to examine the relationship between student responses on the title ix knowledge and opinions questionnaire and measures of feminist beliefs, rma, and aggression. in order to examine whether survivors of sexual assault differed in their knowledge and opinions regarding title ix mandated reporting as well as their estimated likelihood of disclosure, responses to these items were trichotomized, and multinomial logistic regressions were run to examine sexual assault history as a predictor of responses to these items (participant gender was entered as a covariate to control for gender differences). . results . . university employees . . . descriptive information means, standard deviations, and medians for responses to each of the twelve knowledge and opinion items are presented in table . university employees generally reported high levels of knowledge of reporting requirements in instances of sexual harassment by another student, sexual harassment by a faculty member, rape by another student, and rape by a faculty member. university employees were generally in agreement with both non-consented and consented reporting in instances of sexual harassment by another student, sexual harassment by a faculty member, rape by another student, and rape by a faculty member. additionally, most university employees ( . %) indicated that they would report a student disclosure of sexual assault by another student to the title ix coordinator (m = . , sd = . , median = . ). behav. sci. , , of table . descriptive statistics for title ix knowledge and opinion questions. university employees n = students n = scenario statement m sd median m sd median student was sexually harassed by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . . . . . . opinion of non-consented reporting . . . . . . opinion of consented reporting . . . . . . student was sexually harassed by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . . . . . . opinion of non-consented reporting . . . . . . opinion of consented reporting . . . . . . student was raped by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . . . . . . opinion of non-consented reporting . . . . . . opinion of consented reporting . . . . . . student was raped by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . . . . . . opinion of non-consented reporting . . . . . . opinion of consented reporting . . . . . . note: ratings for all questions ranged from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). knowledge of reporting requirement = i am (faculty/staff members are) required to report the incident to university officials; opinion of non-consented reporting = i (faculty/staff members) should be required to report the incident to university officials, even if the student does (i do) not want the incident reported; opinion of consented reporting = i (faculty/staff members) should be required to help the student report the incident to university officials, if the student wants (i want) to do so. behav. sci. , , of . . . comparisons with previous research hypothesis was partially supported. university employees reported stronger agreement with the statement assessing knowledge of reporting requirements in instances of sexual harassment by a faculty member in the current study compared to the previous study (newins & white, [ ]; prior study: m = . , sd = . , median = . ; z = . , p = . , η = . ). there were no significant differences between the two studies on ratings for the other eleven items assessing knowledge and opinions of mandated title ix reporting (zs = − . to . , ps > . ; see newins & white, [ ], for descriptive statistics from the prior study). university employees were also more likely to indicate that they would report a student disclosure of sexual assault in the current study (prior study: m = . , sd = . , median = . ; z = . , p = . , η = . ). . . . comparisons by perpetrator category, type of sexual victimization, and student consent for reporting hypothesis was mostly supported. university employees indicated greater knowledge of the requirement to report and higher agreement with required reporting regardless of student wishes when the hypothetical incident was perpetrated by faculty members compared to those perpetrated by students (zs = . to . , ps < . , rs = . to . ). they indicated more agreement with being required to assist students with reporting sexual harassment perpetrated by faculty members compared to incidents perpetrated by students (z = . , p < . , r = . ), but there was no difference by perpetrator type in agreement with being required to assist students with reporting incidents of rape (z = . , p = . , r = . ). university employees indicated greater knowledge of mandated reporting and stronger agreement with required reporting regardless of student wishes when the hypothetical incident involved rape, compared to sexual harassment (zs = . to . , ps < . , rs = . to . ). they indicated more agreement with being expected to assist with reporting incidents of rape (compared to incidents of sexual harassment) when the hypothetical perpetrator was a student (z = . , p < . , r = . ), but there was no difference in responses to this item by incident type when the perpetrator was a faculty member (z = . , p = . , r = . ). university employees indicated greater agreement with non-consented reporting (vs consented reporting) for incidents of rape when a faculty member was the perpetrator (z = − . , p = . , r = . ). opinions of consented and non-consented reporting did not differ for the other three situations (zs = − . to . , ps > . ). . . students . . . descriptive information descriptive statistics for the twelve title ix knowledge and opinion questions are presented in table . similar to university employees, students generally reported high levels of knowledge of, and agreement with, mandated reporting of sexual violence involving student survivors. students varied in their indicated likelihood of disclosing their own hypothetical sexual assault to faculty members ( . % indicated they would not disclose, . % were unsure, and . % indicated they would disclose; m = . , sd = . , median = . ) and a hypothetical sexual assault involving other students ( . % indicated they would not disclose, . % were unsure, and . % indicated they would disclose; m = . , sd = . , median = . ). similarly, students varied in how mandated reporting requirements influenced their disclosure likelihood ( . % indicated they were less likely to disclose, . % indicated it was unchanged, and . % indicated they were more likely to disclose; m = . , sd = . , median = . ). behav. sci. , , of . . . comparisons with previous research hypothesis was partially supported; however, some results were contrary to hypothesis . students indicated stronger agreement with the statement assessing their opinion of faculty members being required to assist students with reporting incidents of sexual harassment perpetrated by another student in the current study compared to the previous study (newins & white, [ ]; prior study: m = . , sd = . , median = . ; z = . , p = . , η = . ). however, students indicated less agreement with mandated reporting of sexual harassment perpetrated by faculty members and rape perpetrated by both students and faculty members (prior study: m = . , sd = . , median = . , m = . , sd = . , median = . , m = . , sd = . , median = . , respectively; zs = − . to − . , ps < . , η s = . to . ). there were no significant differences between the two studies on ratings for the other eight items assessing knowledge and opinions of mandated title ix reporting or on the items assessing estimated disclosure likelihood (zs = − . to . , ps > . ; see [ ] for descriptive statistics from prior study). . . . comparisons by perpetrator category, type of sexual victimization, and student consent for reporting hypothesis was supported. student ratings for all three items were higher for incidents of sexual harassment and rape when the hypothetical perpetrator was a faculty member rather than a student (zs = . to . , ps < . , rs = . to . ). students indicated more agreement with both opinion statements (i.e., mandated reporting and consented reporting) for incidents of rape compared to sexual harassment (zs = . to . , ps < . , rs = . to . ). students were more likely to indicate awareness of mandated reporting for rape (vs sexual harassment) when the perpetrator was a student (z = . , p < . , r = . ), but responses about awareness of mandated reporting did not differ significantly between rape and sexual harassment when the perpetrator was a faculty member (z = . , p = . , r = . ). students indicated greater agreement with consented reporting (vs non-consented reporting) in all four situations (zs = . to . , ps < . , rs = . to . ). . . . relationships between title ix reporting questions and participant characteristics correlations are presented in table . hypothesis was mostly supported. feminist beliefs were positively correlated with knowledge of mandated reporting for three of the scenarios and with beliefs that faculty members should be required to assist students with reporting when the student wants to report in two scenarios. rma was negatively associated with almost all of the title ix knowledge and opinion questions, and it was negatively associated with likelihood of disclosing a third-party sexual assault to faculty members. while there was some variability, scores from the various aggression scales, particularly physical aggression and hostility, were generally negatively associated with ratings on the title ix knowledge and opinion questions; however, correlations were small. behav. sci. , , of table . correlations of title ix questions and reporting likelihood questions with fps and irmas scores (student sample; n = ). question fps irmas aq-pa aq-va aq-anger aq-hostility ipas-impulsive ipas-premed. i disclosed being sexually harassed by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . − . * − . ** − . * − . * − . * − . . opinion of non-consented reporting . − . − . ** − . * − . − . * − . − . opinion of consented reporting . * − . *** − . ** − . − . − . * − . − . i disclosed being sexually harassed by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . * − . *** − . *** − . * − . − . * − . * − . opinion of non-consented reporting . − . ** − . ** − . − . − . * − . − . * opinion of consented reporting . − . *** − . *** − . − . ** − . ** − . * − . i disclosed being raped by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . * − . * − . ** − . * − . *** − . ** − . . opinion of non-consented reporting − . − . − . ** − . * − . − . * − . * − . * opinion of consented reporting . − . *** − . ** − . − . * − . * − . − . i disclosed being raped by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . * − . ** − . ** − . − . ** − . − . . opinion of non-consented reporting − . − . * − . * − . − . * − . * − . * − . opinion of consented reporting . * − . *** − . ** . − . − . − . * − . if you were sexually assaulted by another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? . − . − . . − . − . *** − . * − . ** if you knew that an acquaintance of yours had sexually assaulted another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? . − . ** − . . − . − . − . * − . ** is the likelihood of you telling a trusted faculty member if you were sexually assaulted affect by title ix reporting requirements? . . − . − . * − . * − . ** . − . * note: fps = feminist perspectives scale; irmas = illinois rape myth acceptance scale; aq = aggression questionnaire; pa = physical aggression; va = verbal aggression; ipas = impulsive-premeditated aggression scales; premed. = premeditated; knowledge of reporting requirement = faculty/staff members are required to report the incident to university officials; opinion of non-consented reporting = faculty/staff should be required to report the incident to university officials, even if i do not want the incident reported; opinion of consented reporting = faculty/staff should be required to help me report the incident to university officials, if i want to do so. * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . behav. sci. , , of . . . differences in ratings on title ix reporting questions by history of sexual assault. hypothesis was supported. frequencies for participant response categories are presented in table ; results of the multinomial logistic regressions are presented in table . sexual assault was not associated with responses to any of the title ix knowledge or opinion questions. however, sexual assault survivors were more than twice as likely as students without a history of sexual assault to indicate they would not disclose (vs would disclose) their own sexual assault to a faculty member; the odds of being unsure (vs would disclose) did not differ based on sexual assault history. additionally, compared to students who did not report a history of sexual assault, survivors of sexual assault were more than two times more likely to indicate that knowledge of mandated reporting decreased their likelihood of disclosure (vs increased); the odds of no change (vs increased likelihood of disclosure) did not differ based on sexual assault history. finally, individuals who experienced sexual assault were nearly one and a half times more likely to be unsure (vs would disclose) if they would disclose a sexual assault involving third parties; odds of indicating they would not disclose (vs would disclose) did not differ. table . student responses by sexual assault history (n = ). question no history of sexual assault n = history of sexual assault n = n % n % i disclosed being sexually harassed by another student knowledge of reporting requirement disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of non-consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . i disclosed being sexually harassed by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of non-consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . behav. sci. , , of table . cont. question no history of sexual assault n = history of sexual assault n = n % n % i disclosed being raped by another student knowledge of reporting requirement disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of non-consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . i disclosed being raped by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of non-consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . opinion of consented reporting disagree (ratings of to ) . . neutral (rating of ) . . agree (ratings to ) . . if you were sexually assaulted by another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? would not disclose (ratings of or ) . . unsure (rating of ) . . would disclose (ratings of or ) . . if you knew that an acquaintance of yours had sexually assaulted another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? would not disclose (ratings of or ) . . unsure (rating of ) . . would disclose (ratings of or ) . . is the likelihood of you telling a trusted faculty member if you were sexually assaulted affect by title ix reporting requirements? decreased likelihood (ratings of or ) . . unchanged (rating ) . . increase likelihood (ratings of or ) . . note: knowledge of reporting requirement = faculty/staff members are required to report the incident to university officials; opinion of non-consented reporting = faculty/staff should be required to report the incident to university officials, even if i do not want the incident reported; opinion of consented reporting = faculty/staff should be required to help me report the incident to university officials, if i want to do so. behav. sci. , , of table . results of multinomial logistic regressions examining the effect of sexual assault history on responses to title ix questions (student sample; n = ). question and response nagelkerke psuedo-r b se wald χ ( ) p or % ci for or i disclosed being sexually harassed by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . disagree (ratings of to ) . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of non-consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - i disclosed being sexually harassed by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of non-consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - i disclosed being raped by another student knowledge of reporting requirement . disagree (ratings of to ) . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of non-consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - behav. sci. , , of table . cont. question and response nagelkerke psuedo-r b se wald χ ( ) p or % ci for or i disclosed being raped by a faculty member knowledge of reporting requirement . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of non-consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - opinion of consented reporting . disagree (ratings of to ) − . . . . . . to . neutral (rating of ) − . . . . . . to . agree (ratings to ) ref - - - - - if you were sexually assaulted by another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? . would not disclose (ratings of or ) . . . < . . . to . unsure (rating of ) . . . . . . to . would disclose (ratings of or ) ref - - - - - if you knew that an acquaintance of yours had sexually assaulted another student, how likely would you be to tell a faculty member about the incident? . would not disclose (ratings of or ) . . . . . . to . unsure (rating of ) . . . . . . to . would disclose (ratings of or ) ref - - - - - is the likelihood of you telling a trusted faculty member if you were sexually assaulted affect by title ix reporting requirements? . decreased likelihood (ratings of or ) . . . . . . to . unchanged (rating ) . . . . . . to . increase likelihood (ratings of or ) ref - - - - - note: sex was included as a covariate. se = standard error; or = odds ratio; ci = confidence interval. behav. sci. , , of . discussion results indicated that university employees and students are aware of mandated reporting of sexual violence and generally agree with mandated reporting in theory. the vast majority ( . %) of sampled university employees indicated they would report a student disclosure of sexual assault (after being informed of mandated reporting requirements); however, . % of university employees were unsure if they would report and . % indicated they would not report. a substantial proportion of students indicated ambivalence about whether they would disclose a sexual assault (both if they were the survivor and if it involved student third parties) to a faculty member with over one-third being unsure if they would report in both scenarios and nearly one-fifth indicating they would not disclose their own sexual assault. while just over half of students ( . %) indicated that mandated reporting requirements did not affect the likelihood that they would disclose to a faculty member if they experienced a sexual assault, a substantial minority ( . %) indicated these requirements decreased their disclosure likelihood. the results of the current study reveal that some university employees are hesitant to report despite knowledge of the requirement, a meaningful proportion of students say that mandated reporting decreases their disclosure likelihood, and students who have experienced a sexual assault are less likely to indicate they would disclose their sexual assault to a mandated reporter and more likely to indicate that mandated reporting disclosure decreases their disclosure likelihood. taken together, this information suggests that more research on this topic is needed in order to inform future policies related to sexual assault reporting. in particular, research is needed to determine whether mandated reporting of sexual assault at the university level is associated with benefits to survivors and the broader university community. furthermore, research is needed to determine if policies should be modified (see holland et al., , for discussion of alternative policy options) [ ]. when the results of the current study were compared with a prior study on the topic [ ], there were a few important differences in university employees’ and students’ opinions regarding title ix. it should be noted that although the two studies were conducted at the same university, the prior study was conducted prior to required compliance with the campus save act. at the time of the prior study, title ix training was optional for university employees; however, it was mandatory at the time of the current study. it is encouraging that university employees in the current study were more likely to indicate they would report to the title ix coordinator if a student disclosed sexual assault to them, but the effect size was very small. students in the current sample had lower levels of agreement with mandated reporting in three of the four hypothetical scenarios (i.e., sexual harassment by a faculty member and rape by a student or faculty member). while the effect sizes were small, these results suggest that caution should be taken with policies requiring mandated reporting on college campuses. if agreement with mandated reporting is declining, student disclosures could decrease. therefore, further examination of the effects of mandated reporting on disclosure and compliance with investigations is warranted. . . correlates of title ix opinions among students rma was negatively associated with responses on most of the title ix questions. this finding is not surprising, since rma involves trivializing the experience of rape, excusing the perpetrator, and blaming the survivor [ , ]. furthermore, it is consistent with research that has revealed that acceptance of certain rape myths is associated with unacknowledged rape among college women; specifically, women who experienced a rape but did not label it as such (i.e., were unacknowledged) endorsed higher levels of rma for myths involving rape stereotypes and myths that men do not intend to rape [ ]. given that rma affects how survivors label their experiences, it is not surprising that it also affects whether college students believe sexual assault and sexual harassment warrant mandated reporting. in contrast to the previous study, feminist beliefs were not related to items assessing disclosure likelihood, but they were positively associated with some of the title ix knowledge and opinion questions, particularly the knowledge question. given that title ix prohibits discrimination behav. sci. , , of on the basis of sex and gender [ ], it is not surprising that individuals who endorse higher levels of feminist beliefs would be more aware of what this act requires. aggression was generally negatively associated with knowledge and opinions of mandated reporting, with the most consistent findings being for physical aggression and hostility. prior research has shown that hostility and acceptance of aggression in sexual encounters are positively associated with the likelihood of sexual assault perpetration among men [ ], so it is unsurprising that aggression would be negatively associated with opinions of mandated reporting for sexual violence. it is possible that individuals who engage in more frequent aggressive behaviors are more likely to either have perpetrated or know someone who has perpetrated a sexual assault, which could influence beliefs about how disclosures of sexual assault should be handled. survivors of sexual assault were more likely to indicate they would not disclose to a faculty member if they were sexually assaulted and were more likely to be unsure if they would disclose knowledge of a sexual assault involving third party students. in addition, survivors of sexual assault were more likely to indicate that mandated reporting requirements decreased their disclosure likelihood. these findings are generally consistent with results of the previous study [ ]. additionally, in another study, college women who experienced an adolescent sexual assault were less likely to disclose a later sexual assault than their peers who did not experience a prior sexual assault [ ]. these findings underscore the importance of working to ensure that survivors have a positive disclosure experience in order to increase the likelihood of later disclosure. . . practical implications a recent review of the assumptions underlying mandated reporting found relatively limited evidence to support these assumptions [ ]. specifically, they identified both supporting and contradictory evidence that mandated reporting increases knowledge of the prevalence of sexual assault and that mandatory reporting benefits survivors, employees, and institutions. furthermore, several publications underscore concerns that mandated reporting on college campuses may result in unintended negative consequences including loss of control of disclosure [ ], possible decreases in disclosures [ ], secondary victimization [ ], and possible victim-blaming during the adjudication process [ ]. furthermore, mandated reporting raises ethical issues for psychologists and others in academic settings [ , ]. the current findings suggest that although the majority of students and university employees are aware of mandated reporting under title ix, there is variability in agreement with these mandates. it is possible that addressing rape myths and fostering feminist beliefs may increase agreement with these mandates. however, given that individuals who endorsed a history of sexual assault were less likely to say they would disclose to a faculty member, it is important that title ix officials talk with survivors to identify ways of improving the title ix investigation process and to identify ways to increase disclosure. . . limitations first, data were collected at a single university, thereby limiting ability to generalize to other schools; however, this limitation did allow for a cleaner comparison to the prior study, which was conducted at the same institution [ ]. additionally, the use of predominately white convenience samples limits the generalizability of the results. furthermore, for comparisons pre- and post-implementation of the campus save act, it would have been ideal to have followed a single sample longitudinally. in addition, an a priori power analysis was not conducted to determine the necessary sample size. however, post-hoc power analyses revealed that the obtained sample sizes provided power of greater than . to detect a medium effect in the multinomial logistic regressions and power of at least . to detect medium effect sizes in all other analyses. an additional limitation is the fact that correlates of title ix knowledge and opinions could not be examined for university employees, as additional measures were not included in their version of the survey. finally, data on prior familiarity with the title ix requirements and completion of trainings related to mandated behav. sci. , , of reporting was not collected; however, given that training was required when these data were collected, we assume most, if not all, participants had received formal training. . . future directions given the recent increase in attention to sexual assault both in the news media and on social media (e.g., the #metoo movement), more recent research examining disclosure are needed. furthermore, because this attention may influence disclosures that may involve mandated reporting, future research will be needed to determine whether perceptions of mandated reporting are affected. furthermore, these findings should be replicated in more diverse samples to ensure generalizability to a wider range of college students. finally, international research on the acceptability of mandated reported is needed, particularly in countries considering implementing mandated reporting laws. . conclusions the spirit and intention of the title ix reporting requirements are broadly considered a step toward the goal of decreasing incidents of sexual aggression and harassment on college campuses. these results suggest, however, that general campus-wide training initiatives, which include education on the title ix requirements, do not necessarily increase the likelihood of complying with mandated reporting. a sizeable minority of students even indicate that knowledge that university employees are mandated reporters decreases their likelihood of disclosing an incident. also, consistent with prior research, within-person variables, such as rma, hostility, and sexual assault history, predict disclosure likelihood. collectively, these results indicate that awareness-building and training initiatives may have more sustained and positive impact when some of the reasons for non-disclosure are considered and addressed directly. author contributions: conceptualization, a.n. and s.w.; methodology, a.n. and s.w.; validation, a.n., j.w., and s.w.; formal analysis, a.n..; investigation, a.n., j.w., and s.w.; data curation, a.n. and j.w.; writing—original draft preparation, a.n., e.b., r.p., j.w., and s.w.; writing—review and editing, a.n., e.b., r.p., j.w., and s.w.; visualization, a.n.; supervision, s.w.; project administration, j.w. and s.w. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . conley, a.h.; overstreet, c.m.; hawn, s.e.; kendler, k.s.; dick, d.m.; amstadter, a.b. prevalence and predictors of sexual assault among a college sample. j. am. coll. health , , – . 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	participants and procedures 	measures 	data analyses 	results 	university employees 	descriptive information 	comparisons with previous research 	comparisons by perpetrator category, type of sexual victimization, and student consent for reporting 	students 	descriptive information 	comparisons with previous research 	comparisons by perpetrator category, type of sexual victimization, and student consent for reporting 	relationships between title ix reporting questions and participant characteristics 	differences in ratings on title ix reporting questions by history of sexual assault. 	discussion 	correlates of title ix opinions among students 	practical implications 	limitations 	future directions 	conclusions 	references gill_the-shifting-terrain rosalind gill and shani orgad the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo article (accepted version) (refereed) original citation: gill, rosalind and orgad, shani ( ) the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo. sexualities, ( ). pp. - . issn - doi: https://doi.org/ . / © sage publications this version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/ available in lse research online: january lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. this document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo rosalind gill and shani orgad it is an honour to be part of the th anniversary celebrations for sexualities and to have the opportunity to express appreciation for the space the journal has opened up. it has become a key site for interesting, critical and challenging work; indeed, it is hard to imagine what sexuality studies, queer theory, examinations of sex in the media and popular culture, and studies of intimate life would look like without the journal. we would like to express our gratitude to the editors over the last two decades – and to staff and assistants – for all their work in developing this vibrant and crucial space. in this short article we will aim to do three things. first, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes we have seen in the scholarly field of gender, sexuality, and intimacy over this period, and on new emerging directions. second, we want to discuss the move away from discussions of ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in a variety of ways in which sex and power intersect. thirdly, we will discuss metoo as an example of this shifted form of engagement, and raise some questions about its possibilities and limitations. gender, media, sexuality and intimacy as media scholars who work around questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy this has been an exciting time. one of the changes we have observed is the increasing interest in the way that sexual identities and practices are constructed in media, with the take-off of terms such as mediated sex (mcnair, ) mediated sexual citizenship (brady et al , ), intimate publics (berlant, ), media sex (attwood, ) and mediated intimacy (andreasson et al, ; barker et al, ), indicating a growing understanding of the ways in which media are implicated in intimate life. social media in particular have become a major focus of interest with work on feminist and queer digital activisms opening up new questions about social movements, practices of critique and ‘call out’ and new affective ties and solidarities (rentschler & thrift, ; ryan & keller, ; keller et al, ). there has been also a growing body of work examining the role of self-representations in the construction of sexualities and sexual identities and the affordances of social media for curating a digital self (e.g. connell ; dobson , ; fink and miller, ; kanai, ; o’neill ), situated within the broader interest in self-representation (thumim, ), and wider shifts in which the clear-cut distinction between (media) producers and consumers or audiences is breaking down. our own work (barker, gill and harvey, ; elias & gill, ; gill and orgad, , ) also looks at the importance of smartphone apps (e.g. for health, appearance or sex) in intimate life as a relatively underexplored area that contributes to discussions about the quantified self (lupton, ; ajana, ), datafied self and new forms of surveillance (see gill, in press for longer discussion). another profoundly important set of shifts has been the opening up of questions about intersectional, postcolonial and decolonial critique within the field, generating a rich, critical vocabulary for scholars. the multiplication of terms for thinking about gender is having a major effect on the field- moving scholars beyond a taken-for-granted cisgender binary, and in the process introducing radically new ways of thinking about both gendered and sexual experience. trans studies in particular has a significant new visibility, with new journals (e.g. international journal of transgenderism, transgender studies quarterly) research and introductory texts (e.g. haefele-thomas, ). beyond this, it is hopeful to see the flourishing of intersectional research agendas that foreground not simply gender and sexuality but also race, disability, age and body size as well. alongside critical race scholarship, disability studies and fat studies are having a very important effect on the field (mcruer, ; rothblum& solovay, ). the significance of place and cultural context is also increasingly important. the dominance of anglo-american theorising, especially in queer studies, has given way to far greater geographical diversity- with large numbers of studies from latin america and east asia in particular. such research does not simply ‘add in’ new countries or cultures, but, more critically, offers ex-centric or decolonial perspectives that displace the hegemony of white, urban western theorising (comaroff & comaroff, ; willems, ; giraldo, ). early work on ‘transformations of intimacy’ has also been taken up in multiple directions that explore the many and varied ways we live our intimate lives. alongside ongoing interest in the experiences and practices of intimacy in heterosexual households and how they serve to sustain power relations (orgad, ; van hooff ), the agenda has significantly expanded to examine questions around intimacy in queer family forms. polyamory and non- monogamy, increasing numbers of single person households and the ‘gayby boom’ are all topics of research (ryan-flood, ; lahad, ). much attention has also been paid to how digital media are changing our ways of meeting intimate partners (e.g. hobbs et. al) and sustaining intimate relationships (e.g. wilson chivers and yochim, ), with considerable work on internet and mobile dating, including the ways this may be striated by power e.g. trolling and harassment of heterosexual women on tinder (albury et. al., ; thompson, ). theorising of the wider cultural formation via the critical terms postfeminism and neoliberalism (e.g. evans & riley, ; gill, ; mcrobbie ) has also generated increasing interest. it is becoming more common to see neoliberalism understood not simply as a political and economic rationality, but as one that is profoundly connected to intimate life and subjectivity. notions of intimate governance and affective governance are key here, as well as the body of work - our own included – that looks critically at the way that sex is frequently framed in terms of entrepreneurship (harvey & gill, ). barker et al’s ( ) research on smartphone apps for tracking, measuring and monitoring is a good example: showing how such apps exhort us to quantify and evaluate our sex lives, inculcating a tracking mentality. such apps are part of a much wider regime based around framing sex in terms of imperatives (frith, ; tyler, ). more hopefully, it is also exciting to see increasing resistance to such framings including ‘anti’ self-help books like ‘rewriting the rules’ (barker, ) and ‘enjoy sex (how, when and if you want to)’ (barker & hancock, ) as well as critical blogs such as crunk collective ( ; ). it is good to see also new dialogues developing – for example between postfeminism and queer studies (mccann, ; mcnicholas smith & tyler, ). one of the main ways the impact of activism has been felt within academic debates about sexuality has been in relation to the contested term of ‘sexualization’ and it is to this we turn next. sexualization: from moral panic to political engagement at one point in the early part of this century, concerns about ‘sexualization’ were ubiquitous. anxieties and concerns about ‘sexualization’ came to prominence in reports from think tanks (e.g. rush & la nauze, ; apa’s task force on the sexualization of girls, ; fawcett society, ), government reports (e.g. papadopoulos, ; buckingham, ; bailey, ) activist campaigns (for example to change the licensing laws for lapdancing clubs), as well as a variety of well-publicised popular books (eg paul, ; durham, ). news reporting in the period was preoccupied with questions of ‘porno chic’, the ‘premature sexualisation of children’ as well as wider concerns with the impact of what many agreed was a distinctly more ‘sexualized’ culture. academic debate – including in the pages of this journal – also focussed on ‘sexualization’, with divergent positions, including those that welcomed the multiplication of discourses and images of sex as a positive or democratizing shift (mcnair, ; mckee et al, ); those who approached the question from a ‘public morals’ or ‘responsible right wing’ (see duchinsky, ) perspective; and a range of very different feminist positions- ranging from radical feminist perspectives (e.g. jeffreys, ; dines, ) to ‘third wave’ ‘sex positive’ positions (johnson ; church-gibson, ). the topic of sexualisation has always been contested and fights about sexuality have long divided feminism – whether that be about pornography, genital cutting or sex work. these debates have been painful for many, and silencing for many more. too often they have taken place along deep enduring lines of stratification – between feminists of north and south, secular or religious, heterosexual or queer. they have also been marked by battle lines that seemed to have been established years earlier during feminism’s ‘sex wars’. much work has tried hard to avoid being pulled into the polarizations of the ‘sexualization of culture’ debate. feona attwood’s work has been crucially important in resisting this (false) binary, and in complicating or unpacking what ‘sexualization’ means. back in she argued that the term denotes many things which are often collapsed together: 'a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; [and the] fondness the scandals, controversies and panics around sex' (p. ). this reading helped to open space for a range of more nuanced engagements with ‘sexualized’ culture including seeing it as a neoliberal capitalist phenomenon linked to consumerism and discourses of celebrity, choice, and empowerment (gill, ; coleman, ; ringrose and renold, ; wood ). this latter tradition of work has been critical of the exclusionary nature of many concerns about ‘sexualization’, and in particular its imagined figure of a vulnerable, white, middle- class, north american, assumed-to-be-heterosexual -year-old girl who is the privileged subject of panics about sexualisation (gill, ). some (egan, ; gill, ) have interrogated the classed, racialized and heterosexualized nature of the framing of sexualisation concerns. a second critique highlighted by gill focuses on the way sexualization concerns frame the issue in moral rather than political terms – focusing on how much flesh is shown, how explicit it is, without making distinctions between the kinds of material being discussed. as activist rowan ellis i has shown, sex education material for lgbtq young people on youtube is almost always categorised as ‘restricted’ – therefore not easily accessible to view – almost as if not being heterosexual makes one automatically ‘too sexualized’. the issue has also been divisive for many women who work in the sex industry, as well as for trans people and others who live outside a rigid gender binary. a third area of critique has challenged the individualistic focus of many proposed interventions to challenge ‘sexualisation’ with their emphasis upon media literacy – as if the best we can hope for is to train young women to deconstruct or see through ‘harmful’ images or practices, not actually change them. not only does this seem timid, inward-looking and part of a long-standing tradition that seeks to ‘change the woman rather than change the world’, but also research shows that it simply doesn’t work (gill, ). overall – and again with many others, including as part of the germinal esrc seminar series ‘pornified? complicating the sexualisation of culture’ - we have sought to fashion a position that is ‘sex positive but anti-sexism’, whilst also attending to the differences in the way that bodies may be ‘sexualized’. many of us have chosen to use the term ‘sexualized’ in scare quotes to distance from its assumed meanings. we have also sought to interrogate the fear and shame that sometimes animates discussions of ‘sexualization’ (ringrose et al, ), arguing that this feeds into the difficulty for girls and young women to explore their own desires (fine, ). above all, we have emphasised the need to challenge sexism (and racism, classism, disablism, heterosexism, etc) rather than ‘sexualisation’ per se. this means having a political rather than a moral sensibility about sex. it is to be concerned with power, consent and justice rather than exposure of flesh. from this perspective recent feminist activism such as the #metoo movement represents an exciting development- and it is to this that we turn in our final section. #metoo: a new day on the horizon? the exponential visibility of metoo in the contemporary moment illustrates in interesting ways the shifted engagement we describe, from a concern with ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in how sex and power intersect, and the implications of this shift. the movement’s emergence on social media and its subsequent remarkable visibility are situated within many of the various shifts we described above: in particular, the intensifying incorporation of media and especially social media into intimate lives, the explosion of self-representation in the articulation of sexual identities, as well as the popularity of feminism and the important work of preceding feminist and social movements and mobilisations such as slutwalk, black lives matter, the women’s room and everyday sexism. the metoo hashtag has been circulating in countries, and, significantly, beyond the global north, from south korea, to japan, indonesia, ii to palestine iii (see https://metoorising.withgoogle.com/). the movement’s global uptake is arguably due, at least in part, to its broad and inclusive appeal, and its ability to cross lines of stratification. while the #metoo campaign was sparked by the exposure of the experiences of white heterosexual women in the us, it has quickly expanded, with more and more stories of queer women and men, women of colour and women and men in other countries coming into the limelight. also, although the #metoo discussion has focused largely on secular women’s experience, it triggered critical discussion of silenced sexist and sexual violence also in religious institutions. iv at the same time that #metoo has been criticized by many for centring the experiences of white western women, some important non-white figures have spearheaded the movement and contributed to its significant visibility. these include, for example, oprah winfrey whose inspirational golden globes speech in january about a ‘a new day on the horizon’ attracted huge attention, mexican hollywood actress salma hayek, and african-american civil rights activist tarana burke, who founded the original metoo movement in , and endorsed the hashtag movement. indeed, many see #metoo as a hopeful platform for building feminist solidarity across lines of class, race, and sexuality. metoo seems to also represent a challenge to the highly individualised nature of many current discussions and proposals to tackle gender inequality and sexism by ‘fixing’ women’s psyches –a critique we develop in our account of the rise of the confidence culture (gill and orgad, ) and made by other feminist scholars in relation to postfeminism (gill, ) popular feminism (banet-weiser, a) and/or neoliberal feminism (rottenberg, ). as sarah banet-weiser ( b) notes, “one of the most hopeful manifestations of #metoo has been the focus on the sheer numbers of women coming forward, forcing people to deal with the collectivity of it all.” the campaign has provided important spaces for a wider range of women to participate in public debate on sexual harassment, sexism and rape culture (mendes, ringrose and keller, ). these are, of course, still early days, however, there is already encouraging evidence of organizational, legal, policy and cultural changes triggered by #metoo. most notably, many powerful men are being held accountable for abuse and harassment. another visible development has been time’s up, a programme launched by women in hollywood that will raise funds for working-class women facing workplace sexual abuse to file lawsuits. the #metoo movement has also generated discussion around “zero tolerance” harassment policies, and many organizations (e.g. microsoft, new york city council) have already changed their sexual harassment policies in its wake. v more broadly, #metoo is fundamentally concerned with the intersection of sex and power and has framed its concerns in terms of justice. this concern has vividly crystallized in harvey weinstein's indictments in june , and in particular the highly circulated image of him in handcuffs. consent is a focal point of the #metoo-inspired debate, surfaced by stories such as that initially reported in january on babe.net, by an anonymous - year-old woman writing about being coerced by comedian aziz ansari into a sexual encounter. at the same time, and despite the optimism that has surrounded the movement – which, as feminists, we partly share – the trajectory it has taken thus far suggests some profound limitations. notwithstanding the shift from moral panic to political engagement, it seems that many of the fundamental problems identified in relation to the sexualisation debate persist in the context of #metoo, and are manifest in old as well as new and troubling ways. firstly, despite the excitement about metoo’s wide appeal and cross-class, cross-ethnicity and cross-race character, its politics and aesthetics are exclusionary in various problematic ways, echoing similar critiques about previous feminist movements such as slutwalk (see black women’s blueprint, ; mendes ). writing in feministing on her experience as an lgbtq person and survivor of multiple forms of sexual violence perpetrated within her own community, jess fourneir criticized metoo’s ‘footnoting’ of queer experiences, that is, their relegation to the margins of a conversation about pervasive sexual violence that definitely concerns us. vi the rapper cardi b spoke powerfully about metoo’s favouring of a particular femininity that is 'respectable' (skeggs, ) and 'believable', leaving out women like herself (woman of colour, previously a stripper, hip hop artist) who ‘do not matter’. the overwhelming exclusion of disabled women from the metoo movement has been another important criticism (flores, ; wafula strike, ). clare hemmings ( ) argues that #metoo promotes an understanding of sexual gendered violence as primarily experienced through a binary between men and women, thus undermining broader coalitions of those facing harassment in the face of masculinist dominance, including cis-women, trans* men and women and gender non-conforming subjects and queer subjects of colour. highlighting the question of who is able to speak out, dubravka zarkov and kathy davis ( ) note that powerful and privileged women are at the centre of metoo. many others do not have access or could not take the risk of speaking out as the ‘sanctions would be too great’. in this context, zarkov and davis note the contrast between contemporary metoo stories and the fate of nafissatou diallo, the new york maid who stood out against dominique strauss-kahn in . secondly, it is not only sexual identities and subjectivities that have been excluded, marginalised and occluded by #metoo. the primary context within which metoo emerged and with which its cause has been associated is almost exclusively sexual violence. furthermore, within this focus, the #metoo-inspired discussion has foregrounded one particular domain, namely the workplace. following the harvey weinstein exposé and the pouring of stories of (mainly celebrity) women in the media and cultural industries, metoo has come to be preoccupied with sexual violence in paid work contexts. even within these contexts, it has focused predominantly on women in certain roles and certain workplaces; women in sectors such as health and social work, wholesale and retail, administration, accommodation and food services, manufacturing and hospitality– in which female employment is concentrated–have been conspicuously absent from the majority of the discussion. domestic violence has been notably missing from the discussions. domestic violence organizations and activists are trying to capitalize on the visibility of #metoo to advocate their causes vii – an effort that demonstrates their exclusion from (or at least marginalisation within) the movement. the critique of metoo's narrow focus on gendered sexual violence connects to a third limitation. it concerns the question of whether the movement’s popularity and visibility are indeed due to its call for justice, or due to the salacious content of the stories it has brought to light. to put it somewhat crudely, is it sexism or sex that ‘sell’? how should we understand the role of a mainstream media that suddenly seems to believe (some) women, after decades of trivialising and undermining us? does this represent a genuine shift? is a backlash coming? what is more, as research has shown, the proliferation and repetition of sexual violence stories, especially on social media, may make the distribution of online vitriol easy, persistent and vicious, creating a toxic and less safe, not safer, space for women’s expressions of their voices (jane, ; mendes, ringrose and keller, ). finally, for all the celebration of #metoo’s challenge to sexual violence and harassment, so far it seems that a significant part of the debate remains framed in terms ‘bad apples’ and ‘monsters’ who did horrible things, not about the monstrous capitalist, patriarchal and sexist system that has produced, sustained and rewarded these ‘bad apples’ over decades. in this context, it is striking to note that the discussion about the sexist and violent abuse of female actresses by some hollywood senior men’s – dominated and exemplified by the case of harvey weinstein– has been mostly divorced from critical discussion of the huge role played by films (the commodity produced and distributed by this capitalist industry) in naturalizing and normalizing violence against women. thus, as shelley cobb & tanya horeck ( : ) warn, although the current moment “feels like a watershed moment, it is important to proceed with caution and determination… so far, the emphasis on charitable legal funds, changing the face of those in power (e.g. more women ceos etc.), and better corporate policies remains contained by a postfeminist sensibility that ‘is not disruptive’ and is ‘capitalism, neoliberalism and patriarchy friendly’ (gill , )”. while welcoming #metoo for its more politicised engagement with matters of sexual politics, then, we remain ambivalent – hopeful, yet also troubled - by the type of discourses, themes, sexual identities and experiences that it foregrounds, and crucially, by those it renders invisible and unintelligible. we embrace davis and zarkov’s ( ) productive insistence on thinking about #metoo, and more broadly about the intersection of sex and power in the contemporary moment, in terms of dilemmas and ambiguities. #metoo seems to represent a decisive shift away from moral panics about ‘sexualization’, to more politicized understandings that foreground power relations. nevertheless, an entirely ‘new day’ of gendered and sexual relations still seems some way off. references ajana, b. 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( ). ambiguities and dilemmas around# metoo:# forhow long and# whereto?. european journal of women’s studies - notes i https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /mar/ /lgbt-community-anger-over-youtube-restrictions- which-make-their-videos-invisible ii http://www.globeasia.com/columnists/metoo-paternalistic-indonesia/ iii https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/palestinian-metoo-yasmeen-mjalli-not-your- habibti-woman-west-bank-palestine-israel-a .html iv see for example, http://time.com/ /me-too-church-too-sexual-abuse/ v in april , the new york city council passed the stop sexual harassment in new york city act, which would require employers with or more employees to conduct mandatory annual anti-sexual harassment training for all employeeshttps://www.withersworldwide.com/en-gb/new-york-announces-changes-to- harassment-laws-following-metoo-movement vi http://feministing.com/ / / /metoo-dont-make-trans-and-queer-survivors-a-footnote/ see also: https://medium.com/@lauramdorwart/the-hidden-metoo-epidemic-sexual-assault-against-bisexual-women- fe c a vii https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /health/metoo-domestic-violence-screening-tool/index.html author bios rosalind gill is professor of social and cultural analysis at city, university of london and a professorial fellow at the university of newcastle, nsw. she is author of several books including mediated intimacy (with meg-john barker and laura harvey) and is currently writing about ‘the confidence cult(ure)’ with shani orgad, in a book due for publication by duke university press in . shani orgad is associate professor in the department of media and communications at the london school of economics and political science (lse). she writes and teaches on media, cultural representation, gender and globalisation. her forthcoming book is entitled heading home: motherhood, work and the failed promise of equality (columbia university press, ). i degrees of authenticity at work: refuting the either/or paradigm a dissertation submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree executive doctorate of business administration by james a. smith, jr. temple university, fox school of business may, examining committee members: deanna geddes, professor, human resources management lynne andersson, associate professor, human resources management matt wray, associate professor, sociology daniel isaacs, assistant professor, legal studies ii abstract some would argue that authenticity is a characteristic that is encouraged by managers and leaders in the workplace. but what does it mean to be “authentic” at work today? does it mean bringing your “whole self” to work every day? and do people want to do that? should they? and are there limits to their authentic expression? to better understand the concept of authenticity in the workplace, two studies (one qualitative – semi-structured interviews and one quantitative – an online survey) were conducted with managers and non-managers from diverse industries (e.g., financial services, pharmaceutical, residential/corporate moving, energy, utilities, and telecommunications/mass media). preliminary analysis revealed diverse definitions of workplace authenticity, shedding light on a complex, conceptual landscape. in addition, results indicated a limited range in which employees feel they can express authenticity (demarcated by self and other-imposed “thresholds”), suggesting both individual and organizational factors contribute to one’s ability and willingness to express oneself authentically at work. the goal of this research is to examine existing beliefs regarding authentic expression at work and provide insights to assist future “authenticity at work” research. specifically, this research seeks to: ( ) define a meaning for authenticity at work today; ( ) determine what hinders and what helps authentic expression; ( ) determine the range for authentic expression at work; ( ) explore why authenticity is viewed as an either/or experience, rather than as more or less; and examine how authentic expression affects certain workplace outcomes (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job performance). i conclude this research with a post hoc event analysis/deconstruction to illustrate what can happen when a person’s authentic expression crosses an impropriety threshold. keywords authenticity, support, expression, management, culture, threshold, privilege iii dedication dedicated to my parents, james a. smith, sr. (r.i.p dad) and rebecca n. smith, who first gave me my wings to soar and to gina m. smith, my wife who offered unfaltering support to her husband throughout this process. iv table of contents abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii dedication ............................................................................................................................... iii list of tables………………………………………………………………………………...v list of figures………………………………………………………………………………vi chapter . introduction ...................................................................................................................... . essay one ............................................................................................................................... literature review................................................................................................................ methods and data collection............................................................................................ findings............................................................................................................................. discussion ......................................................................................................................... limitations ........................................................................................................................ conclusion and propositions............................................................................................. . essay ................................................................................................................................... introduction ....................................................................................................................... literature review and hypotheses ................................................................................... methodology and data collection .................................................................................... results ............................................................................................................................... general discussion ........................................................................................................... limitations and future research ...................................................................................... a post hoc analysis ......................................................................................................... final thoughts .................................................................................................................. conclusion ........................................................................................................................ references ............................................................................................................................. appendix a. authenticity survey ................................................................................................. v list of tables . description of study participants’ organizations……………………… . description of study participants……………………………………… . data analysis theme, descriptive behaviors and representative quotes from study (theme: authenticity states and traits)………………... . data analysis theme, descriptive behaviors and representative quotes from study (theme: communication)………………………………. . data analysis theme, descriptive behaviors and representatives quotes from study (theme: organizational culture)……………………….. . what helps and what hinders authentic expression and behavior…....... (study ) . correlations and descriptive statistics (study )……………………... . t-test # and t-test # (study )……………………………………... . regressions for variables (study )…………………………………… . survey responses question (study )………………………………. . survey responses question (study )………………………………. vi list of figures . dual threshold model of authenticity in organizations.……………... . the person-centered conception of authenticity.……………………… chapter introduction great value appears to be associated with employee authenticity at work. there are leaders who express that authenticity is both wanted and welcomed at work, using phrases like, “be yourself because everyone else is taken”; “we want your truth”; and “be the best possible you, you can be”. in some organizations employees are encouraged to bring their full selves to the office, to engage in direct and unreserved conversations, and to share personal stories as a way of gaining their colleagues’ trust and improving team synergy (rosh & offermann, ). the rise in open work spaces and high performance work teams over recent years has only heightened the demand for immediate trust, collaboration and vulnerability—and managers are supposed to set the example (rosh & offermann, ). scholarship examining the impact of authenticity in the workplace has found, for instance, that with greater employee feelings of authenticity come greater job satisfaction, engagement, and self-reported performance (boute, ). however, in , a deloitte study found that more than half of employees in today’s workforce cover up some part of their identity at work to try to fit in, with underrepresented groups (e.g., lgbtq individuals, blacks, women of color, women, and hispanics) feeling the most pressure to “cover” aspects of who they are (read, ). considering that authenticity is positively discussed and championed in today’s workplace, how can this be? historical and current research on the concept of authenticity suggests that it is complex, complicated and compelling. philosophical meanings of authenticity have been historically articulated in terms of individual virtue and ethical choice, while psychological meanings of authenticity have been articulated in terms of individual traits/states (adorno, ; baumaster, ; danzinger, ; furtak, ; ; goldman & kernis, : ; heidegger, , ; hoy et al., ; kernis, a; kierkegaard, ; noviceviv, harvey, buckley, brown & evans, ; pianalato, ; ryan & deci, ; sartre, ). authenticity—who a person is, how he/she perceives him/herself, and how he/she operates on those perceptions—is an important construct in humanistic psychology as well (barnett & deutsch, ; boyraz, watts & felix, ; harter, ; maslow, ), and has been linked to self-esteem and well-being (barnett & deutsch, ; menard & brunet, ; wood, linley, maltby, balious & joseph, ) as well as lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress (barnett & deutsch, ; gregoire, baron, menard & lachance, ; satici & kayis, ; wood et al., ). nonetheless, several scholars dispute that people can even be authentic. existentialists reject the implication that authenticity relates to an “inner” or “true” self (lawler & ashman, ). according to this view, people are situated in their world, without a separate and ‘private’ or ‘true’ self—what existentialists refer to as “being-in-the-world” (lawler & ashman, , p. ). polt ( ) points out that we can never go beyond the world that we occupy (lawler & ashman, )—instead, we exist in a context variable over time, and can never be abstracted from this (lawler & ashman, , p. ). we must always interact with people, events, etc., and cannot be dispassionate spectators of our own particular context (lawler & ashman, , p. ). even if we decided and determined not to live this way, we are compelled to do so (lawler & ashman, ). lawler and ashman ( , p. - ), drawing on sartre’s work, provide the following perspective on authenticity: if asked what is meant by the adjective ‘authentic’, it is likely that most respondents would provide synonyms such as original; genuine; sincere; or truthful. thus, when we consider something to be authentic we interpret that to mean that we are dealing with the genuine article and that can be important if set within the context of historical investigation. however, we might question whether it is meaningful to talk of something being ‘authentic’ when that thing is still in the process of becoming. in other words, can we talk of a living human as being ‘authentic’ when that person has the capacity to change and to redefine her/his self constantly? is it possible to talk of an abstract concept that is subject to constant redefinition as being authentic? sartre believed that those who write about authentic leadership think that it is worthwhile to explain the construct of authenticity in both contexts. however, much of the historical and contemporary research on authenticity suggests that peoples’ behavior is distinguishable as either authentic or inauthentic. according to kernis and goldman ( ), authentic behavior is distinguished from inauthentic behavior by the conscious, motivated intentions that underlie it. authentic behavior is guided by an honest assessment of one’s self-aspects by way of the awareness and unbiased processing of its components (kernis & goldman, ). in essence, authentic behavior is intentional and “choiceful” behavior, oriented toward a “solution” derived from consciously considering our self-relevant “problems” (e.g., potentially competing self- motives, beliefs, etc.) (kernis & goldman, ). in contrast, inauthentic behavior involves being unaware of, ignoring, oversimplifying, and/or distorting or negatively projecting outcomes (kernis & goldman, ). given the disparate and sometimes contradictory conceptualizations of authenticity among scholars in various disciplines, authenticity at work was explored in two separate essays and accompanying studies. study is intended to: ( ) address the ambiguity regarding what it means to be authentic at work; ( ) determine if there is an “authenticity threshold” marking the range in which an employee can express themselves authentically at work; and ( ) determine what helps or hinders authentic expression and behavior. relatedly, study helps to provide an understanding of why some people thought it was critical to be authentic at work and others did not and assess the fears associated with authentic expression, setting the stage to explore the degree to which individual and organizational factors contribute to one's ability and willingness to express authentically at work. study expands on results of study , including the notion that employee expressed authenticity is not an either/or (authentic or inauthentic) concept. thus, study focuses on better understanding the range of expressed authenticity (i.e., more or less authenticity not either/or) at work as well as a deeper exploration of the factors (individual and organizational) that enhance or impede the expression of authenticity. also, study examines how one’s authentic expression relates to outcomes such as an employee’s job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance? study is a qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews with corporate professionals from various industries. study is a quantitative study (with corporate professionals from various industries) using an online survey. chapter essay one literature review historical perspectives on authenticity the construct of authenticity can be traced back to ancient greek philosophy as reflected by the greek aphorism “know thyself”, inscribed in the temple of apollo at delphi (gardner, cogliser, davis, & dickens, ; parke & wormell, ). the etymology of the word authentic comes from the greek word authento, which means “to have full power” (gardner et al., ; trilling, ), referring to where an individual is “the master of his or her domain” (gardner et al., ; kernis & goldman, ). another early reference to authentic functioning is socrates’ focus on self-inquiry, following his argument that an “unexamined life is not worth living” (gardner, et al., ). following socrates, aristotle posited a view of ethics that focused on one’s pursuit of the “higher good” achieved through self-realization by aligning the activity of the soul with virtue to produce a complete life (gardner, et al., ; hutchinson, ). aristotle also discussed how individual pursuit of the higher good involved different virtues (e.g., continence, pleasure, friendship, and theoretical wisdom) (kernis & goldman, , p. ). as such, the described relationship between the pursuit of the good (i.e., those factors that lead to the highest good) and the highest good (i.e., supreme happiness and well-being) seems to underscore a sense of unity or integration among people’s pursuits, a perspective that contemporary self-theorists suggest reflects either self-organization (e.g., donahue, robins, roberts, & john, ; kernis & goldman, , p. ; showers & ziegler-hill, ), integrated self-regulation (e.g., deci & ryan, ; kernis & goldman, ), or self-concordance (kernis & goldman, ; sheldon & elliot, ). in other words, aristotle’s notion of authenticity promotes a connection between people’s self-knowledge and behavioral self-regulation (kernis & goldman, ). in his view, knowledge of the highest good significantly affects individuals because it allows them to organize their lives well—“like an archer with a target to aim at” (irwin, ; kernis & goldman, , p. ). thus, aristotelian authentic functioning can be obtained by sustained activity in concert with a deeply informed sense of purpose (kernis & goldman, , p. ). american philosopher and psychologist, william james, was one of the first to write about authenticity in a contemporary sense. james ([ ] ) describes the many aspects of the self, including the “me,” which consists of the physical, social, and spiritual aspects of the self (vannini & franzese, ). the social component of the me is directly relevant to authenticity and concerns the human need for recognition, as well as the idea that we present ourselves differently to different audiences (vannini & franzese, ). concurrent with the psychological attention to authenticity, sociologist erving goffman zeroed in on the way in which the actor (i.e., the individual) creates a face (i.e., a persona) and performs his or her role to an audience which works to create a façade that is both believable and evokes the approval of others (vannini & franzese, ). goffman’s theoretical contributions to authenticity research were significant (vannini & franzese, ). sociological research on authenticity largely addresses authenticity as self-reflective and emotional (vannini & franzese, ). such an approach addresses both the individual’s subjective sense of what the true self is, as well as the individual’s subjective emotional experience of being true or untrue to that self (vannini & franzese, ). when moving from varying views authenticity, we see that philosophical meanings of authenticity are historically articulated in terms of individual virtues and ethical choices, while psychological meanings of authenticity are historically articulated in terms of individual traits/states (adorno, ; baumaster, ; danzinger, ; furtak, ; p. ; goldman & kernis, : ; heidegger, , ; hoy et al., ; kernis, a; kierkegaard, ; noviceviv, harvey, buckley, brown & evans, ; pianalato, ; ryan & deci, ; sartre, ). authenticity – who people are, how they perceive themselves, and how they operate on those perceptions – is an important construct in humanistic psychology (barnett & deutsch, ; boyraz, watts & felix, ; harter, ; maslow, ). authenticity is linked to our self-esteem and well-being (barnett & deutsch, ; menard & brunet, ; wood, linley, maltby, balious & joseph, ) as well as lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress (barnett & deutsch, ; gregoire, baron, menard & lachance, ; satici & kayis, ; wood et al., ). german philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist karl marx also provided unique views on authenticity. marx’s economic and philosophic manuscripts of (seen as the original exposition of marxist humanism) and his notion of alienation were much more self-motivated or self-centric than sartre’s notion of authentic expression (jakapovich, ). for marx, human nature must be understood as a dynamic concept created through social relations and their alterations (jakopovich, ). according to marx, we transform our relation to the world and transcend our alienation from it— creating our own distinctly human-natural relations—by acting, that is, through our material- needs mindset (knudsen, rickly & vidon, ). critical theorist walter benjamin continued the discussion by connecting these ideas into theories of authenticity, arguing that authenticity is a premodern ideal that evolved out of the theory of originality after the rise of mechanical reproduction and capitalism (knudsen et al., ). marx argued that under capitalism, there cannot be authenticity – except among “owners” who experience full rewards with authenticity (knudsen et al., ). marx’ theory of authenticity did not stop with originality but, also, considered the mechanisms that establish it, namely aura, ritual and tradition (knudsen et al., ; rickly- boyd, ). benjamin believed that it wasn’t mechanical reproduction that leads to inauthenticity, but separation from the rituals and traditions of production and meaning (i.e., aura) that result in alienation (knudsen et al., ). he argued that while we are alienated from our true selves in all societies, we are only alienated from what we produce, from society generally, and from our others through capitalism, in both its modern and post-modern forms (knudsen et al., ). recent perspectives on authenticity the word “authentic” is traditionally applied to any work of art that is an original, not a copy (ibarra, ). when used to describe leadership, of course, it has other meanings—and they can be problematic (ibarra, ). for example, the notion of adhering to one’s “true self” flies in the face of much research on how people evolve with experience, discovering facets of themselves they would never have unearthed through introspection and examination alone (ibarra, ). further, being utterly transparent—disclosing every single thought and feeling— is unrealistic and risky in our quest to be authentic (ibarra, ). most people associate authenticity with being true to oneself — or “walking the talk” (su & wilkins, ). one issue with that association is that it focuses on how you feel about yourself (su & wilkins, ). the idea of simply “acting on one’s values” or “being true to oneself” is at best just the beginning for thinking about what authenticity means (freeman & auster, ). authenticity is increasingly considered a relational behavior, not a self-centered one (su & wilkins, ), meaning that you must not only be comfortable with yourself, but also comfortably connect with others in order to be truly authentic (su & wilkins, ). in this way, authenticity involves both owning one’s personal experiences (i.e., thoughts, emotions, needs, and wants) and acting in accordance with those experiences (gino, kouchaki, & galinsky, ). a commitment to one’s identity and values (erickson, ) is important for effective self-regulation (gino et al., ); when this commitment is violated, people feel less authentic (gino et al., ). being authentic also reflects an ongoing process of conversation that not only starts with perceived values but also involves one’s past, relationships and experiences with others, and goals for the future (freeman & auster, ). authenticity entails acting on these values personally and professionally and thus also becomes a necessary starting point for ethics (freeman & auster, ). after all, if there is no motivation to justify one’s actions either to oneself or to others, then—as sartre has suggested—morality simply does not come into play (freeman & auster, ). in considering these more current perspectives on authenticity raised by su & wilkins ( ) and freeman & auster ( ), one may raise the question of whether considering one’s perceived values, history, relationships with others, and aspirations is a common employee practice at work. does it ensure individual workplace satisfaction or effectiveness? further, even though organizations ask for authenticity, do they truly want employees to bring their full selves to work and to communicate with complete transparency? there are several factors that contribute to how much of oneself a person brings to work with him/herself. on the one hand, we live in a tell-all society where people are so apt to share https://hbr.org/cs/ / /what_being_an_authentic_leader_really_means.html their personal and professional experiences and achievements. social media is largely responsible for people wanting to get a closer look into who someone really is or who they want you to believe they are. however, despite this st century landscape, there are those who believe they cannot be truly authentic at work. sometimes, it is employees’ personal preferences to simply not “open up” themselves to their boss or to fellow organizational members. this could also be precipitated in part by fear, a lack of trust, cultural norms and employees’ belief that the cost of truly being themselves outweighs the benefits. in truth, honestly sharing one’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences within the work environment can be a double-edged sword. despite its potential benefits, self-disclosure can create more distance than closeness. it can backfire if it’s hastily conceived, poorly timed, or inconsistent with cultural or organizational norms—damaging your reputation and your relationships, fostering distrust, and hindering teamwork (rosh & offerman, ). so, is the call for authenticity at work merely “lip service” by corporations? are leaders willing or even ready to model the message of “being yourself” and create an environment where the benefits of being authentic are greater than the costs? as a recent harvard business review article declared, “authenticity has emerged as the gold standard for leadership” (george, ) with significant research pursued today focusing on authentic leadership. nevertheless, the empirical research that exists on authentic leadership does not tell the entire “authenticity at work story” nor provide sufficient answers to these questions. much of the focus is on workplace outcomes and the role that the leader plays in providing support for those outcomes; information pertaining to degrees of authenticity and authenticity at your own risk is limited. thus, authenticity and its potential benefits at work remain ambiguous. gaps exist in the literature that requires more exploration, including the perceived benefits and challenges employees face in being authentic. researchers, coming to divergent results, have weighed in on the topic of authenticity for years. however, few empirical studies investigate the deep-lying challenges of authenticity at work (metin, taris, peters, van beek & van den bosch, ; sheldon, ). one important reason for this dearth of relevant empirical research is that at present most measures of authenticity assess it generally and as a stable, personal trait, rather than examining its manifestation within a specific context (e.g., at work) and as a social state (metin et al., ). this indicates a significant opportunity to advance the research in this area and provide insight into how organizations and individuals can benefit from allowing space (without fear of reprisal) for significant authenticity at work. in addition, there are few studies that explore over-arching reasons why people believe that they cannot be authentic at work. the qualitative study reported here facilitates development of a more robust and inclusive model of workplace authenticity with propositions to better explain this phenomenon. the goals of this research are to: ( ) address the ambiguity regarding what it means to be authentic at work; ( ) determine if there is an “authenticity threshold” marking the range in which an employee can express authenticity at work; and ( ) determine what helps or hinders authentic expression and behavior. methods and data collection parents, teachers, and friends tell their children and others about the importance of “being yourself” (mengers, ). the message imparted is that “being yourself” will lead to better outcomes than attempting to be someone or something else (mengers, ). however, does research supports this notion (as it relates to the workplace)? moreover, what happens when “being yourself” causes retribution, scorn or distance from others? previous studies and essays don’t tell the complete story. although descriptions of authentic functioning are found among a variety of works and disciplines across the arts and sciences (kernis & goldman, ), these descriptions are often vague, relegated to peripheral segments of larger works, and lack continuity in their lineage or origin (kernis & goldman, ). at times, descriptions of authenticity seem to be at the “limits of language,” loosely described in such diverse topics as ethics, values, well-being, consciousness, subjectivity, self- processes, and social or relational contexts, or characterized in terms of its opposite, (i.e., inauthenticity), with references to inauthentic living, false-self behaviors, or self-deception (kernis & goldman, , p. ). the qualitative study reported here probed deeper into this complex subject. qualitative methods are especially useful in studies exploring questions about how experience is given meaning (bateman & barry, ). following the method described in grant, dutton, and rosso ( ), inductive research was conducted through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with managers and non-managers. these interviews attempted to understand organizational members’ views on authenticity and why or why not they chose to fully express themselves at work. the desired outcome of this paper is an elucidation of the most critical elements of authenticity, determining whether striving for this at work is truly valued (by members and organizations alike), and exploring potential barriers and supports can be used to build a testable model of authenticity at work. the following research questions were posed: . what does it mean to be authentic at work? . do leaders and employees perceive that being authentic at work is important? . what helps and hinders employees from being authentic at work? . specifically, what fears limit employee authenticity at work? . are there thresholds delineating valued authentic expression and behavior at work? organizational context the companies. this research was conducted in four organizations and four different industries: financial services, pharmaceutical, residential/corporate moving and storage, and energy. the organizations were located in charlotte (north carolina), horsham, (pennsylvania), coppell (texas) and charleston (south carolina). company a is a fortune financial services organization that is the leading provider of financial services in the academic, research, medical, cultural and governmental fields. it has , employees. company b is a major pharmaceutical firm that has been around for over years. it has over , employees in countries. company c is a residential and corporate moving and storage company that was established in ; it has customers around the world and over employees. company d is an energy company established in . it has over half a million electric customers in counties throughout south carolina and employs nearly , full- and part-time employees. table . description of study participants’ organizations company industries location years of operation number of employees a financial charlotte, nc/philadelphia, pa years , b pharmaceutical horsham, pa > years > , c residential moving frisco, tx years < d energy charleston, sc years < , the participants (i.e., the employees). all eleven participants interviewed were full-time employees who worked in either a management (seven) or non-management (four) capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fortune_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/financial_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/financial_services from a demographic perspective, seven were women and four men who collectively averaged . years of professional work experience. six were white, four african-american, and one was hispanic. table . description of study participants employees management non-management black white latino black white latino men women timeframe. this study was conducted during march and april . interviews lasted between – minutes. six of the interviews were in person and five were conducted over the phone. research methodology this study is guided by the interpretivist view that reality is relative; thus, it is important to understand that motives, meanings, reasons, and other subjective experiences are time and context bound (hudson & ozanne, ; obrien & lineham, ). the goal is to connect the reader to the world of the participants in order to facilitate an understanding of their subjective men leadership black leadership white leadership latino non-leadership black non-leadership white non-leadership latino women leadership black leadership white leadership latino non-leadership black non-leadership white non-leadership latino experience and illuminate the structures and processes that shape their authentic expression and behavior at work and in their relations with others. therefore, any representational form should have enough ‘interpretative sufficiency’ (christians et al., , p. ) (i.e., possess depth, detail, nuance, and coherence) to assist the reader in forming critical consciousness (denzin, ; obrien & lineham, ). the methodological goal is to provide an interpretative portrayal of authenticity at work as perceived and experienced by organizational members as told to and interpreted by a researcher with experience in the corporate environment. i applied a variation of glaser and strauss’s grounded theory approach ( ; see also cooper & kurland, ; creswell, ; eisenhardt, ; and strauss & corbin, ). grounded theory is ‘inductively derived from the study of the phenomenon it represents’ by using qualitative research methods in which ‘data collection, analysis, and theory stand in reciprocal relationship with each other’ (cooper & kurland, ; strauss & corbin, , p. ). that is, researchers want to allow a deeper understanding of the construct to materialize from the data analysis (cooper & kurland, ). in taking this qualitative approach, it was important to choose samples that could ‘contribute to the evolving theory’ (cooper & kurland, ; creswell, , p. ). for example i focused on organizations with ( ) a history of open and honest communication and integrity; ( ) operations for plus years; and ( ) at least employees. interviewing employees from good-sized, established organizations was important for eliciting participant feedback and determining if managers’ and non-managers’ authenticity played a role in their job satisfaction and work effectiveness. in addition, in these companies, the ceo’s vision (for authentic and honest communication) could get lost because of the number of layers between the executives and the employees. therefore, the same set of questions was used for both managers and non-managers. data collection and analysis study participants responded to four types of questions: demographic (section ),professional development support (i.e., training and coaching/mentoring support - skill; confidence building; personal power support - will) (section ), authenticity at work (how manifested/communicated at work) (section ), and factors (i.e., fears) that prevent authenticity at work (section ). the primary task of the first part of the interview was to build trust and rapport, understand the participants’ current job responsibilities, and how long they have worked fulltime in the workforce. subsequent questions focused on their professional development and their views on authenticity at work (from both an individual and organizational perspective). questions were mostly open-ended and are included below: demographics  how long have you been working full-time in the workforce?  what do you currently do for your organization?  how long in current position? professional (confidence, personal power - will) (professional support – skill)  how has your organization supported your professional growth from a skill or task perspective? from a confidence building and personal power or will perspective?  is there someone at work you would consider a mentor?  how does this individual contribute to your success?  did the individual provide a tailwind or a headwind (explain)? authenticity at work  have you ever heard someone say, “i’m one way at home and i’m another way at work?” explain what that statement means to you.  on a scale of – (with one being the lowest level) how much of yourself do you bring to work? why do you feel that way?  how would you define authenticity at work?  how transparent are you during communications (i.e., what you truly think or how you truly feel about something) with others, including management? explain.  what, if anything, concerns you regarding communicating with colleagues at work?  how important is authenticity in the workplace?  do you fear repercussion when sharing your truth or when providing feedback (if it’s constructive or not in line with what others have said or believe)? fear as preventing authenticity  what are your (if any) workplace fears?  are any of these tied to wanting to be more authentic? explain.  what are other workplace factors (in addition to authenticity) that contribute to workplace effectiveness? data analysis included review of audio recordings of all interviews, using temi transcription software to transcribe the data then interpreting the responses. as the sole interpreter of the data, i wanted to carefully determine and report what i thought was important—what new knowledge i could bring to the world. i first reread every interview transcript while simultaneously listening to the actual interviews. i also kept clarifying notes about my initial impressions. these notes focused primarily on the following: the participants’ tone when discussing authenticity; their perspectives on the topic; their understanding of the topic; and their experiences relative to their authentic expression. i then slowly reread each transcript coding key words, sentences, phrases or experiences (what i termed their “moments that mattered”). many of the initial codes reflected how the participants defined and felt about authenticity; their emotions when discussing their authentic expression; how they viewed their corporate culture; how they communicated with others; and the way their authentic expression at home compared to their authentic expression at work. some key words and phrases that i noted early on included support, culture, institutionally-driven, transparency, reputation, chameleon, leadership, mindset, drink the kool- aid, values, retaliation, feedback, communicate/communication, advocate/advocacy, navigate, trust, fear, honest, and positive. the next phase of the analysis involved determining what codes were most important and creating themes (i.e., theme coding). i wanted to identify initial (provisional) concepts in the data. many of these early codes pertained to interviewee comments relating to what helps and what hinders authentic expression along with the reasons behind it. my initial themes included the following: emotion; communication; follow-through; disposition; truth; image; values; effort; culture; and management. i reconciled these themes to eliminate redundancies. most redundancies pertained to communication, the business environment and the relationship/support one has with his/her manager and peers. i transferred the themes to index cards and sorted them into piles based on what i perceived was most critical to helping/hindering employees’ authentic expression at work. the next part of my analysis involved noting what factors the participants found to be an advantage, disadvantage or challenge for authenticity (or authentic expression and behavior) at work. i looked for frequency (of words and sentiment) and drew conclusions. i then categorized the words into the themes. after the initial coding, i went back to review my themes and codes to reduce/combine similar themes and codes. some of the most repeated codes were the following: be true to myself; values; how i’m going to be perceived; feedback; truth; management asks for it but they can’t handle it; watch what you say; and culture. i kept comparing data with data, data with the themed categories and themed category with themed category (bateman & barry, ; charmaz, , p. ). i developed a new theme, “authenticity states and traits”, and combined it with the previous themes of communication, image, emotion, effort, disposition, follow- through and truth. i developed another new theme, “organizational culture”, and combined it with previous themes labeled management and culture. i believed that these combinations best represented the essence of each theme and associated coding. moreover i perceived these three themes, based on my interviews and the analysis of the data, to be the most critical to address the notions of more or less authentic expression. during the coding process i also searched for: ( ) compelling stories; ( ) whether authenticity was needed for individual job satisfaction and effectiveness; ( ) how authenticity impacted an employee’s level of job commitment; ( ) definitions and degrees of authenticity; ( ) anything new that would emerge from the data; and ( ) future research opportunities. the entire transcribing and coding process uncovered both common and uncommon thoughts, beliefs, and challenges to workplace authenticity. finally, i compared how the manager and non-manager answers varied. i also checked to see if there were different responses based on diversity, specifically race, ethnicity, gender, and age. the data reflected the findings discussed in the next section. findings the data analysis findings indicated that both managers and non-managers perceive authenticity as important, to some degree, to employees’ workplace satisfaction, effectiveness, and well-being. more specifically, analysis uncovered the following trends pertaining to authenticity at work: ( ) there is no single way to define authenticity at work today; ( ) individual and organizational factors contribute greatly to ones’ authentic expression and behavior at work; ( ) fear of perceived reprisal plays a large role in authentic expression and behavior at work; and ( ) one’s achievement at work is possible without fully authentic expression. defining authenticity during the interviews, both managers and non-managers offered similar though distinct views on what authenticity is in the workplace. the definitions that were most similar were based on the notion of being true to oneself and/or staying true to ones’ values. tables – describe the three identified themes, along with descriptive behaviors and representative quotes. theme one: authenticity states and traits theme one informs research question one (what does it mean to be authentic at work?). participants’ comments centered on desired authentic states and traits. state authenticity is the sense that one is currently in alignment with one’s true or real self (sedikides, slabu, lenton & thomaes, ). a trait-consistency hypothesis claims that authenticity is generated when individuals act in a way consistent with their personality or individual-level traits, whereas inauthenticity is generated when individuals act in a way inconsistent with their traits, and that having to change one’s behavior to accommodate situations takes a toll (fleeson & wilt, ). participants discussed the significance of authentic communication and behavior, staying true to oneself and the merits for doing such; however, they also discussed some of the risks in doing so. their comments reinforced the notion that there is a range for authentic expression and behavior at work, and that people do not want to be seen as inappropriate (see figure ). specifically, this includes behavior and expression that is opinionated, self-centered, egregious, disrespectful, and mean-spirited. in addition to generally relating to authenticity, their comments also addressed the research question: do leaders and employees perceive that being authentic at work is important? participants highlighted the importance of the individuals’ values being in line with organizational values. finally, comments regarding race, state and trait authenticity were shared. several black participants commented on consistently holding back a part of their natural, authentic expression because of their race. table . authenticity states and traits: theme, descriptive behaviors and representative quotes emerging from the data analysis theme description of behavior representative quotes authenticity states and traits  what you see is what you get; sincerity; straight-talk.  real, not a façade, not phony.  being true to yourself.  not willing to do anything that wouldn’t go with your personal values, which hopefully are aligned with the company’s values.  washes clean.  it feels true.  up front.  not hiding anything.  congruent with your values.  not being filled with guile.  going the extra mile.  caring enough to take time out of your busy work schedule to make sure that you’re taking care of something that has been haunting people – that’s been lingering and frustrating for them.  consistent.  if you say you’re going to do “i don’t like phoniness and i don’t like fake because i want people to be real with me. whether it hurts, but do it in love. i want to know the truth so i can correct whatever is wrong. if it’s an issue i want to be able to try to work on that issue. if you’re not being transparent, then you’re not telling me the truth – then i will continue to make that same error or mistake.” (aa female non-manager) “everybody should be able be authentic and honest at work. now if you espouse or you know, have specific beliefs, i want you to keep that to yourself. i don’t want you to be inauthentic, but i want you to be respectful that other people may not feel the same way.” (aa female non-manager) “not being more me did not net me any benefit. so whether i was me, or i wasn’t me, i felt like there were external factors outside of me that had decided for whatever reasons there was not going to be any advocacy. so i might as well be me and lose being me than lose being what i think they want any way. and it feels better being successful being me than to find success being a perception. i feel like i’m something, keep your word.  making sure that you are not withholding or scared to do something that needs to be done for the sake of your reputation.  being, behaving as much of yourself that you’re willing to give without being someone else.  not a comfort-zone zombie. more successful in my role now because i came into it kind of with that agreement with myself….i feel like i can be myself because of course, the culture kind of leans that way.” (aa female non-manager) “if you push the wrong button, you’re going to see the true me because i’m just me. i don’t know to be anything else but me.” (african american female non-manager) “if they don’t want it or if they can’t handle it don’t ask me for the truth. if you want the truth that’s what you’re going to get. i’m not going to sit and tell you something you just want to hear and you’re asking me for the truth. you either want the truth or you don’t want me to talk.” (aa female non-manager) “i’m not going to sugarcoat it. if you have a question, i’m going to give you the straight answer.” (hispanic female non-manager) “i’m forever thinking, as a young black woman, how much is this going to be perceived from an unbiased place? i’m trying to do better about not letting that stop me anyway and being authentically myself.” (aa female non-manager) “to me it’s still important because i mean it depends on your mindset. if that’s all you’re focusing on just climbing the ladder, then faking it ‘till you make it works for you. but for someone that has a moral compass and looking beyond just trying to climb a corporate ladder, then you’re going to be authentic because you know you’re trying to please a higher power. you’re not trying to please me. you’re trying to please a higher power.” (aa female non-manager) “as long as i know my ‘why’ i feel comfortable.” (aa female manager) “people are not going to feel good about coming to work if they can’t be themselves.” (aa female manager) “i don’t think i can get to a because i don’t think i can love people to that magnitude at work. i care about people but that love is not the same as i have for my husband or my family. my responsibility and my commitment to my family are different from work. work can come and go. it’s not at the same, deeper level.” (aa female non-manager) “be honest or go work for yourself because you’ll be miserable and you can’t give hours plus a week to a place that you’re absolutely miserable…that’s why people die early.” (aa female non-manager) “black people can’t be activists at work; it’s not what they want; my ‘sociability’ may detract from my performance.” (aa male manager) theme two: communication. this theme evolved from the participants’ comments pertaining to the “how” or “how much” they believed they were “allowed” to authentically communicate at work to be effective (given the situation), maintain productive relationships with management and non-management members, be true to themselves, and avoid reprisal or reprimand. most of their comments suggested that, at work, they thought before they spoke rather than the other way around. they knew what authentic communication was, but were very intentional and purposeful when determining what to say and how to say it, given the receiver and location where the communication took place. authentic communication is typified by a kind of natural, non-hyper- reflective speech (i.e., between friends, family etc.). their reasons for not fully communicating authentically at times were purely subjective; in other words, there wasn’t a specific of evidence- based reason to support their belief, instead reflecting what could be considered a “gut feeling”. when not providing full disclosure, they didn’t believe they were being inauthentic; they merely thought that at times (given the situation, the setting or the person they were speaking to) less was more (i.e., less authenticity was perceived to be the most advantageous path to take in certain circumstances). additionally, participants’ descriptions of authentic communication behaviors were helpful in painting the picture for what they believed best practices look like. nevertheless, they expressed inconsistency in following through with those best practices. the phrase “using a communication filter” came up multiple times. some even shared stories of when they wished they hadn’t communicated as authentically as they did. to them, for the most part, they believe people may ask for the truth, but may not want it. table . communication theme, descriptive behaviors and representative quotes emerging from the data analysis theme description of behavior representative quotes communication  listening and being engaged.  what you say to someone’s face is what you say behind their back.  you always know where you stand.  there’s no ambiguity.  saying what you believe, not saying it because you think people want to hear it.  saying it because you believe it. not fake.  showing emotion intelligently. “i can see how you can be one way at home and one way at work. some of my conversations at home namely, religion, politics and sex don’t translate well at work. those are the sort of topics we shouldn’t really discuss. i’m going to have a more private conversation with my spouse than with my coworker as a leader. some of my cultural beliefs that i share at home might offend someone at work, particularly in my role here. we have a circle of trust at home. there’s going to be differences between your demeanor and how you portray yourself with work than you’ll see at home.” (white male manager) “i bring it all in both places. it’s about what filter i’m putting on it. if i see something that i don’t like, i’m the type of person where i’m going to speak on it – in both places. but it’s how i give that feedback. so to my family it’s going to be straight no chaser. when i’m at work you’re going to get that same feedback but i’m going to package it so that it’s not offensive but you will get the feedback and you will understand my message and you will know what you need to improve upon or not do again in my presence.” (aa female manager) “with regard to authentic communication with bigger groups i’m less authentic, one on one or small groups i’m very authentic. so i may present something to the team one way then get a couple people in a smaller setting and present it in a different way. because in a bigger group i’m more worried about how people are going to take things, how it’s going to be translated but in the smaller group i can explain it better. i can frame it better. i’m a or in the big group and a or in the small group.” (white male manager) theme three: organizational culture the organizational culture of a firm determines what is valued (e.g., time, results, accountability and reliability) and what’s unacceptable affecting such disparate workplace behaviors as how feedback is given, who gives it, and how people communicate in general. in this way, organizational culture is the heartbeat of any organization (gochhayat, giri & suar, ). the axioms guiding a firm’s organizational culture do not have to be in writing, but if you look around you can see, sense, and hear that they exist, and participants recognized the extent to which the rules facilitate authentic expression and behavior. participants’ comments and perceptions addressed all five research questions in some capacity and profoundly reflected upon the organization’s culture. nearly everyone agreed that organizations ask for authenticity, but only want it to a certain extent. moreover, the participants accepted this, and also accepted the notion that there is a limit to authentic expression and behavior (for most people). interviewees discussed the varied impact that organizational culture has had on their career—first, and second, in adhering to its mores, which were taxing at times. they also mentioned the merits, depending on the culture, of inauthenticity or saying the right things to the right people. their comments and perceptions of the significance of organizational culture on authentic expression highlight the complexities of this construct. table . theme organizational culture, descriptive behaviors and representative quotes emerging from the data analysis theme description of behavior representative quotes organizational culture  understanding and behaving in- line with the organization’s norms and social mores. “they do want it. they ask for it but they have trouble accepting it. i’ve watched other people unsuccessfully try to be truly authentic and then all of a sudden they’re seen as negative against the culture. you can get away with more if you’re more careful with your words. when you give people polish you have to make sure the polish is in the right color bottle.” (white male manager) “authenticity in the workplace is a little important. i don’t know if i’d say a lot. i mean everybody’s got to drink their dose of kool-aid and the people that fight it don’t do as well. and if they just didn’t say anything about it and went along with it then it would probably favor them more instead of pushing against it every single time. you don’t have to agree with it but also you don’t have to voice your opinion that you don’t agree with it every time too. if you just stopped and kept your thoughts to yourself every once in a while…there are certain things that are just not meant to say out loud – especially at work.” (white female non-manager) “inauthenticity is rewarded. in terms of, if you can put on your best front, you say the right things, you meet the right people it is absolutely rewarded. (aa female non- manager) “my previous company’s culture was very, very, very, set in. if you wanted to be authentic it would break you into submission. if you were comfortable being inauthentic, because you think that’s the way all of corporate america is, you feel right at home and you navigate that culture much more easily because you say the right things and you laugh at the right jokes and you go along to get along. within months you’ll get promoted.” (aa female non-manager) “organizations don’t want authenticity. they say they do but they don’t really. in companies with strong cultures the second something goes against the culture it tends to get shut down pretty quickly. then all of a sudden you don’t fit in with the culture. they’re so emotionally tied to it they don’t want to admit that things are not as they think they are.” (white male manager) based on the interview participants’ views, understanding the value that authenticity has at work is difficult to pinpoint. depending on the context and the players involved, authenticity in expression is sometimes appreciated and other times not. some employees limit their authentic expression while others suggest that it is the only way they know how to be. they suggested that the organization’s “authentic expression limit” does not consistently apply to everyone, as it seems to be lower for those that share the least in common with the organization’s unwritten norm for success. ultimately, from the data analysis, the following conclusions emerged: ( ) one’s authentic expression does not have to be significant or constant in order for him/her to be effective in his/her role; ( ) people often believe that their “at home” persona and level of authentic expression will not be welcomed nor appreciated at work; ( ) authenticity means different things to different people; ( ) authentic expression is a choice; ( ) race is taken into consideration for some in determining how authentic they’re going to be; and ( ) inappropriate or egregious authentic expression is not welcomed in the workplace. factors that help/hinder authentic expression research question three asked, “what helps and hinders employees from being authentic at work?” interview participants discussed the factors that they believe help/hinder their authentic expression (see table below). they commented that the organization’s culture could both help and hinder employees’ authentic expression based on if their personal values were in alignment with those of the organization. interviewees discussed the significance of having support from both their manager and their peers to help with their authentic expression. some indicated that the perceived risks for being authentic outweighed the perceived consequences. notably, they cited fear of reprisal, judgement, and not being accepted as their major fears of authentic expression and behavior. in addition, some said that they would rather leave their home persona at home, choosing not to fully disclose that side of themselves in the workplace. table . what helps and what hinders authentic expression and behavior. helps hinders organizational culture relationship with manager/peer support individual mindset/choice organizational culture relationship with manager diversity (e.g., race, gender, age) individual mindset/choice lack of management/peer support each participant answered yes to the question, “have you ever heard someone say, ‘i’m one way at work and one way at home?’” however, they differed in whether they believed that sentiment to be true for themselves. there was nearly an unanimous sentiment that, in spite of what today’s leaders ask for regarding authenticity, one still has to be careful. when asked, “do organizations want and value authenticity?” one participant said: organizations ask for authenticity and they appreciate it – if it’s in line with their ideas and their goals; sometimes the truth hurts and they don’t want it and you have to, as an individual, be discerning in determining how much you can give; too much can be too much. it is not % necessary for you to be that . you have to navigate. (white male manager) another participant provided a totally different perspective when asked the same question: who i am at work is who i am at home. i can’t switch it up. i am % me every day, all day. i wear my heart on my sleeve. i don’t honestly know how someone is able to switch up. if you have to switch it up, i feel like you lose who you are, you lose yourself. (hispanic female non-manager) it bears emphasizing that these examples represent a clear divide in the degree to which participants perceived that they could be authentic and how much they believed it is truly valued. when asked the question, “on a scale of one to (with one being the lowest), how authentic are you at work?” the average respondent score was . . three of the responded (the highest rating) and one senior leader responded . . these two examples indicate that: ( ) there are opposing beliefs pertaining to whether organizations want and value authenticity at work; ( ) employees can be promoted at work without operating with a high level of authenticity; and ( ) when some people arrive at work, they leave something (i.e., a part of themselves) at the office door. one of the participants, an african-american male manager, talked about a time when he was asked, by a white female colleague (in front of others) if he felt the government’s slow response to the victims of hurricane katrina was racially motivated? he told me that he was not sharing his authentic truth (which i presumed was yes) in that moment, believing it would be career suicide. instead, he replied that he could understand why some people may feel that way. another participant, when asked to discuss a time when she wasn’t authentic at work had this to say: i remember when i didn’t feel like i could be authentic at work it became very stressful. it became a drag. it bled into my home-life….feeling like i had to put on a front, feeling like i didn’t have an advocate so i couldn’t be honest at work. i ended up venting those frustrations at home or not saying anything at all and that turned into fatigue. for me it resulted in lethargy and disengagement at home. (african american female non-manager) judging by this sentiment alone, one can see the potentially far-reaching impact that not being authentic can have on an individual. it can take a toll on an individual at work and at home. research has found that being true to one’s self empowers individuals in the workplace, facilitating feelings of control and mastery that lead to greater job satisfaction and happiness (boute, ). this is a crucial because a sense of empowerment is essential to job satisfaction and engagement (boute, ). ultimately, emotional intelligence is connected with authentic expression (miao, humphrey & qian, ). fears that limit authenticity research question four specifically asked about fears related to authentic expression and behavior. the participants discussed a few major fears, namely fear of reprisal, judgement, and acceptance. kernis and goldman ( ) suggest that behaving authentically sometimes takes courage because one’s true inclinations may conflict with those of one’s peers or authority figures who have strong evaluative or controlling tendencies (deci & ryan, ). this is where fear enters the discussion. as a powerful, evolutionary-based emotion, fear encourages avoidance behavior, a narrowed perceptual and cognitive focus on perceived threats, and pessimistic judgements about risks and future outcomes (frijda, ; izard, ; kish- gephart, detert, trevino & edmundson, ; lerner & tiedens, ; maner & gerend, ). given these manifestations, fear may influence a wide array of organizational phenomena, including decisions to reveal “invisible diversity” (kish-gephart et al., ; ragins, singh & cornwell, ), reward and punishment distribution (appelbaum, bregman & moroz, ; kish-gephart et al., ), team member/leader interaction, communication, and improvement activity (kish-gephart et al., ; nembhard & edmondson, ). fears mentioned by the interview participants are associated with a narrowed perceptual and cognitive focus on perceived threats and pessimistic judgments about risks and future outcomes. for some fear was tied to economic insecurity. other fears, according to the respondents, help establish a threshold for authentic expression. when asked the question, “do you believe there is a threshold (see figure ) determining how much a person can bring of him/herself to work?” several participants made statements similar to those set forth below: even though you can show your true colors and be authentic you still have to watch how you approach people. (aa female non-manager) i also think there’s two places of onus on that – the environment that manager creates to have that (authentic communication) and the person who’s creating those thoughts and how they do it. i think we sometimes forget to, and how to, communicate with somebody especially in frustrating times. (white female manager) discussion this study sought to determine what it means to be authentic at work and, in doing so, go beyond survey data and practitioner opinion. what was sought was an understanding of why some people thought it was critical to be authentic at work and others did not. further, it was important to determine whether authenticity was a key contributor to individual effectiveness and behavior. the first two research questions asked what it meant to be authentic at work and do leaders and employees perceive that being authentic at work is important. on the surface, one would think that the typical answers to both of these questions would be: ( ) to be true to oneself; to bring your full self to any situation; and to be real, not phony; and ( ) absolutely, being authentic at work is important. study ’s findings, however, suggest that there are varied opinions on both. while most of the study participants (both managers and non-managers) agreed that authenticity at work involves to some degree, being real, transparent, true to oneself and acting and communicating in accord with one’s values, some shared that it also involves factors like showing emotion intelligently, not being filled with guile, keeping your word and not staying in your comfort-zone. when discussing the importance of authenticity in the workplace, many struggled with simply answering the question. they would provide an answer then continue with a thought that contradicted their previous sentiment. some of their responses did not align with their overall thoughts about its value. to a person, every participant agreed that one did not have to be authentic in the workplace to be effective and that there was a limit (or threshold) for how authentic a person could or should be. based on this notion, one’s production seems to be more significant than one’s authentic expression. of the eleven interviewed, only three said that they were a “ ” at work (i.e., the highest rating on my authenticity at work scale). however, they all agreed that you have to be one way at work and one way at home. they expressed that they felt freer to be their true selves at home than at work, such that they were freer to discuss their opinion on workplace dynamics and to communicate and provide feedback without editing their thoughts or carefully choosing their words. further, all respondents agreed that there are both self-imposed and organizational- imposed limits to an individuals’ authentic expression. despite acknowledging that both favorable and unfavorable results from authenticity are possible, less is known about the circumstances that enable either to occur. because of these varying perspectives, a model for self – and other – imposed assessment processes could help determine authentic expression boundaries an individual has to navigate at work. these expression boundaries create a sense of “more or less authentic” rather than the either/or authentic/inauthentic paradigm. to help illustrate those authentic expression boundaries (at work) in study , the dual threshold model (dtm) of anger (geddes & callister, ) is utilized and expanded for authentic expression. in its original form, this model includes an emotion expression threshold, which is crossed when individuals communicate rather than suppress a felt emotion (e.g., anger), and an impropriety threshold, which is crossed if one’s expressed feelings violate organizational emotion display norms (geddes & callister, ). in this particular analysis, authenticity replaces emotion/anger as the model’s “internal” phenomenon that may or may not be expressed. figure . dual threshold model of authenticity in organizations. from interview comments, it appears that participants believe being authentic at work can be achieved but that it is associated with some risk. one has to be tuned into the organizations’ or departments’ culture and environment and thoroughly understand their manager’s leadership style. ultimately, it seems that a manager’s leadership style determines how employees’ navigate authenticity thresholds in their organization. some managers are results-oriented but lack emotional and social intelligence. some were promoted into leadership roles for being successful individual contributors but never enhanced their people development skills. even still, some avoid conflict at all costs and aren’t good communicators, while others can be direct and autocratic. the impact of organizational or departmental culture and environment has on employees’ authentic expression is explained by wood et al. ( ). his critical paper built on the person- centered model of rogers ( ) but adopted a tripartite structure of authenticity (metin et al., ) including self-alienation, authentic living, and social or external influences (see figure ). this third dimension, external influences, pertains to the influence the environment has on an individuals’ behavior (metin et al., ). humans are fundamentally social beings and they are affected by the influence of their social environment; hence, the interaction of environment and an individual’s deep–lying cognitions is an essential determinant of authenticity (metin et al., ; schmid, ). both models reinforce the role these factors play. figure . the person-centered conception of authenticity study participants discussed the significance of the relationship with their manager as playing a role in their authentic expression. they suggested that it determines how ( ) they hear the manager’s feedback (if he/she provides it), and ( ) if they share their own truth (and if the manager shares his/her truth with him/her). from the participants’ perspective, authenticity is needed on both sides for a successful relationship. in bill george’s book, authentic leadership: rediscovering the secrets to creating lasting value, he challenged a new generation to lead authentically (george, sims, mclean & mayer, , p. ). authentic leaders are mission- and people-focused, and their values drive their decisions and behaviors. they know who they are and have the self-discipline to get results; however, at the same time, they establish long-term meaningful relationships (george, et al., , p. ). these initial findings reported here are, for the most part, consistent with the authenticity dimensions developed by kernis and goldman ( ). these dimensions help with understanding what authenticity can mean at work and in life. the dimensions are: ( ) awareness or self-understanding, ( ) unbiased processing or openness to objectively recognizing their ontological realities (e.g., evaluating their desirable and undesirable self-aspects), ( ) behavior or actions, and ( ) relational orientation or orientation towards interpersonal relationships (kernis & goldman, ). each of these components focuses on an aspect of authenticity that, while related to each of the others, is distinct (kernis & goldman, ). moreover, these dimensions relate closely with potential factors that drive authentic expression through expression and impropriety thresholds as noted in the dual threshold model (i.e., the factors that influence whether one suppressed or expressed authentically and factors that influence whether one’s expression is found “inappropriate”). awareness. the awareness dimension refers to possessing and being motivated to increase knowledge of and trust in one’s motives, feelings, desires, and self-relevant cognitions (kernis & goldman, ). authenticity relates to a multifaceted and integrated self that is anchored in strong self-beliefs, self-confidence, self-acceptance, and agency rather than self- doubt, confusion, and conflict (kernis & goldman, ). unbiased processing. this dimension involves objectivity with respect to our positive and negative self-aspects, emotions, and other internal experiences, information, and private knowledge (kernis & goldman, ). in addition, it involves not denying, distorting, or exaggerating based on evaluative information (kernis & goldman, ). in short, unbiased processing reflects the relative absence of interpretive distortions (e.g., defensiveness and self- aggrandizement) in the processing of self-relevant information (kernis & goldman, ). the major benefit of unbiased processing is that it contributes to an accurate sense of self (kernis & goldman, ). behavior. this dimension of authenticity involves behaving in accord with one’s values, preferences, and needs as opposed to acting “falsely” merely to please others or to attain rewards or avoid punishments (kernis & goldman, ). this component reflects the behavioral output of the awareness and unbiased processing components (kernis & goldman, ). there are instances (e.g., when one’s authentic expression crosses the impropriety threshold of the dtm) that exist in which the unadulterated expression of one’s true-self may result in severe social sanctions (kernis & goldman, ). in such instances, at the very least, authenticity will reflect heightened sensitivity to the fit (or lack thereof) between one’s true-self and the dictates of the environment, and a heightened awareness of the potential implications of one’s behavioral choices (kernis & goldman, ). in contrast, blind obedience to environmental forces typically reflects the absence of authenticity (cf., deci & ryan, ; kernis & goldman, ). relational orientation. the final dimension of kernis and goldman’s ( ) authenticity model is relational in nature, and bears resemblance to jourard’s ( , p. ) proposition that “authentic being means being one’s self, honestly, in one’s relations with his fellows” (kernis & goldman, ). relational authenticity involves valuing and striving for openness, sincerity, and truthfulness in one’s close relationships (kernis & goldman, ). in essence, relational authenticity means being genuine rather than fake in one’s relationships with close others (kernis & goldman, ). it is characterized by honesty in one’s actions and motives as they pertain to one’s intimates, and to accuracy in beliefs about oneself and one’s intimates (kernis & goldman, ). moreover, it involves endorsing the importance of close others seeing the “real” you and relating to them in ways that facilitate their being able to do so (kernis & goldman, ). as mentioned earlier, kernis and goldman’s four authenticity dimensions relate closely to factors that can potentially affect authentic expression crossing the expression and impropriety thresholds of the dual threshold model (of authenticity). the dual threshold model of workplace anger is unique in that it distinguishes multiple forms of workplace anger, including suppressed, expressed and deviant anger. it also offers a theoretical framework that identifies conditions likely to increase the probability of negative outcomes along with those that may generate a higher probability of positive outcomes from anger expression (geddes & callister, ). when replacing anger with authenticity in the proposed dual threshold model of workplace authenticity, similar findings are anticipated. further, it is believed that kernis and goldman’s authenticity dimensions will play a significant role in crossing (or not) expression and impropriety thresholds in the work environment when expressing authentically. limitations notably, this study did not provide conclusive evidence on the relationship between workplace effectiveness and well-being to authenticity. moreover, no inter-rater reliability was established, as i was the sole coder of the interview content. the study only included respondents and they were from different industries. a larger sample-size from each industry could provide additional findings. the participants’ answers, pertaining to the factors that limit authentic expression, could have been explored at a deeper level. participants could have been asked to explain more about their beliefs regarding the limitations created by race and gender. in addition, they could have been pushed more on why these types of “authenticity at your own risk” cultures are allowed to exist. conclusion and propositions study looked to facilitate development of a more robust and inclusive model and propositions to explain how authenticity “works” in today’s workforce. the bulk of the previous research in this area looked primarily at authentic leadership and the role it plays in the workforce. this research, a continuation of the authenticity discussion, provided more of a balanced perspective (i.e., focusing more on employee’s authenticity and the role their manager’s authenticity plays in their daily experiences). in addition, it provided a more current definition and an initial framework for understanding authenticity in the workplace that can be utilized to spawn further research on this area of organizational behavior. not addressing these factors could be seriously problematic for today’s and tomorrow’s increasingly diverse workplace. in summary, based on the current findings, the following six propositions need further exploration: proposition . both self- and organizationally-imposed factors can help or hinder authentic expression and behavior. proposition . expression and impropriety thresholds will reduce or expand “space” for authentic expression in the workplace. proposition . “fully” authentic expression is not necessary to experience greater job satisfaction and effectiveness at work. proposition . suppressed authenticity can reduce positive outcomes for employees, while expressed authenticity - that doesn’t violate cultural norms - can increase favorable outcomes for both employees and their organizations. proposition . individual factors/traits may promote greater authentic expression at work. proposition . authentic expression is better conceptualized as more or less rather than either/or. chapter essay introduction issues of authenticity are ubiquitous. from lance armstrong to martha stewart to bill o’reilly and most recently jussie smollett, matters of authenticity and authentic expression continue to constitute a pervasive part of our culture, institutions, workforce, and individual selves (erickson, ). in study , the goal was to facilitate development of a more robust and inclusive model with propositions to explain how authenticity “works” in today’s workplace. in addition, i looked to build theory and determine what helps and what hinders authentic expression and to consider the notion of “thresholds” defining the space where an employee can express authentically without sanctions, and still find success at work. moreover, i sought individual and organizational fear factors that contribute to one's ability and willingness to express authenticity at work. study found that both managers and non-managers perceive authenticity to be important to workplace satisfaction, effectiveness and well-being, though to different degrees. more specifically, analysis uncovered the following trends pertaining to authenticity at work: ( ) there are myriad, individualized definitions for authenticity at work; ( ) individual and organizational factors contribute greatly to one’s authentic expression and behavior; ( ) fear of perceived reprisal plays a significant role in authentic expression and behavior; and ( ) employees can still be productive without being fully authentic. this final observation was a key factor motivating research for essay (and study) that addressed the primary questions: what range of authentic expression allows individuals to be productive at work? should the concept of authenticity be viewed in terms of degrees (i.e., more or less) rather than as either/or (authentic or inauthentic)? as such, study consists of analysis of data gathered from an online survey and a post hoc event analysis/deconstruction discussing the incident involving larger-than-life, motivational speaker and self-help guru tony robbins interacting with one of his audience members, nanine mccool. although researchers have studied authenticity for hundreds of years, it remains an extremely complex phenomenon. on the surface, authenticity appears to be a positive state or trait. organizations consistently highlight the benefits of authentic expression for both the organization and for the individual. below the surface, however, there are mixed views on how much authentic expression is valued, needed, or even permitted in the workplace. recent work in business ethics research calls attention to the promise inherent in the concept of authenticity (e.g., individual fulfillment) for complicating as well as enriching the ways we think about core issues at the intersection of management ethics and practice, like moral character, ethical choices, leadership, and corporate social responsibility (driver, ; jackson, ; ladkin, ; liedtka, ). organizations that foster or support authenticity may enhance both the business and the people side of an institution simultaneously (driver, ; jackson, ; ladkin, ; liedtka, ). is authentic expression truly needed, possible, or even wanted in today’s workplace? in business, the rise in corporate manipulation and guile has resulted in increased interest in authenticity (liedtka, ). over the past decade, management journals, featuring articles on authenticity, have more than doubled (lehman, o’connor, kovacs & newman, ). for example, in , the academy of management annals published a -page article on authenticity. given its ubiquity in popular culture as well as academic research, an increased understanding of this concept is of critical importance (lehman et al., ). in study , i conducted a quantitative survey that examined authenticity at work as it relates to communication and behavior. interviewee feedback (from essay ) and a more extensive review of the literature lead to developing hypotheses about authentic expression at work in relation to management, peer and organizational support, the big five traits of extraversion and openness, and demographic sensitivities (e.g., awareness of gender, race/ethnicity and management status as it relates to being authentic) and emotional intelligence. also, authentic expression was also considered in relationship with job productivity, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. to extend the discussion of the importance of recognizing “limitations” place on authentic expression in society, i also provide a post hoc event analysis/deconstruction of a incident involving tony robbins where his authentic expression was called into question and sanctioned. in other words, his “authentic” behavior crossed the impropriety threshold of acceptable norms for those in his social realm. the result of this research is used to further elucidate the importance and impact of authenticity at work and society and to examine to what degree, and in some cases, what topics, one can fully express themselves authentically. literature review and hypotheses several goals for study included determining what workplace outcomes (e.g., job productivity, job satisfaction and organizational commitment) can be linked to authenticity and what additional factors contribute to authentic expression. study findings also indicated that there may be differing effects relative to authentic expression based on individual differences, including diversity, and job level of the individual within the organization, so attention was paid to these variables. authenticity, extraversion, openness and emotional intelligence historical ideas and perspectives within philosophy that contribute to the development of psychological authenticity suggest that the portrayal of authenticity involves a variety of themes (kernis & goldman ). most notably, authentic functioning is characterized in terms of peoples’: ( ) self‐understanding, ( ) openness to objectively recognizing their ontological realities (e.g., evaluating their desirable and undesirable self‐aspects), ( ) actions, and ( ) orientation towards interpersonal relationships (kernis & goldman, ). authentic expression is a choice and employees are consistently considering the impact of their communications. fleeson and wilt ( ) performed three studies where they compared two hypotheses - trait consistency, that individuals feel most authentic when acting in a way consistent with their traits; and state-content significance, that some ways of acting feel more authentic because of their content and consequences, regardless of the actor’s corresponding traits (fleeson & wilt, ). authenticity was consistently associated with acting highly extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and intellectual, regardless of the actor’s traits (fleeson & wilt, ). the central question in the study was whether frequent changes in behavior, specifically big five trait–relevant behavior, are associated with changes in authenticity, and if so, how (fleeson & wilt, )? big five traits are used because those factors are commonly accepted to be major dimensions of personality (fleet & wilson, ; mccrae & costa, ). for essay , i choose two of the big five traits—extraversion and openness—as i believed these two subscales would be most associated with authentic expression at work. they both involve proactive and interactive forms of communication and they create greater possibilities for relationship building – which can be for workplace effectiveness and happiness. extraversion pertains to the desire to be around people more so than being by yourself and openness pertains to being open to new ideas and new experiences. humanistic theories (maslow, ; rogers, ) argue that behaviors that produce growth increase authenticity (fleet & wilson, ). the state-content significance hypothesis assumes that the more of the content that has consequences for authenticity, the more authenticity (fleeson & wilt, ). emotional intelligence is considerably valued by both managers and non-managers in today’s workplace. emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions (salovey & mayer, ). in addition, among various individual difference variables, emotional intelligence is the variable that has been known to noticeably influence authentic leadership (ilies et al., ; miao, humphrey & qian, ). ilies and colleagues ( ) argued that authentic leaders should be self-aware and aware of their areas of strength and their areas of weaknesses and understand their emotions, all of which are affected by emotional intelligence (miao et al., ). emotional intelligence is found to impact leader emergence, leader performance and effective leadership styles (e.g., authentic leadership) (miao et al., ; walter et al., ). for example, emotionally intelligent individuals can use their emotional intelligence to decipher the emotional requirements of a situation, empathize with others, and modulate their emotional displays to meet others’ expectations, all of which are related to authentic leadership; moreover, emotionally savvy leaders are more likely to have higher perceived authenticity in the eyes of their followers because they can use their emotional intelligence to apply effective emotional labor strategies to gain favorable impression from their followers (gardner et al., ; miao et al., ). therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : expressed authenticity is positively related to the individual traits of a) extraversion, b) openness, and c) emotional intelligence. authenticity, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance studies provide empirical evidence of a positive link between authenticity and work engagement (cable et al., ; emmerich & rigotti, ; van den bosch &taris, , . according to the conceptualization of kernis and goldman ( ), authentic behavior is characterized by increased self-awareness and unbiased processing (emmerich & rigotti, ). thus, employees who are more authentic possess more detailed, complex, and accurate knowledge of their abilities and inner states with regard to their work and performance (emmerich & rigotti, ). this equips them to handle the myriad complexities, internal politics, ongoing change, micro-inequities, and various leadership styles that are found in today’s workplace. as a result their authentic expression, job satisfaction and job performance is positively impacted which will undoubtedly enhance their organizational commitment. research linking authenticity to performance is scarce, but the evidence suggests a positive association between performance and authentic self-expression (kuntz & abbott, ; metin et al., ). moreover, when employees are authentic in the workplace, they are spending less time thinking about self-control or fake behaviors (e.g., surface acting), following display rules (grandey, ), or monitoring their expression (knoll & van dick, ), which in turn leads to increased work ability (emmerich & rigotti, ). sheldon and elliot ( ) state that individuals put more effort into self-concordant goals (i.e., work goals and personal goals), which should further foster employees’ work ability (emmerich & rigotti, ). since people spend a substantial amount of their lives at work, it seems reasonable to assume that having a job that fits one’s personality and true self and has a supportive environment and culture would be advantageous for both the employee and the organization (menard & brunet, ; metin et al., ; van beek et al., ). this coincides with van den bosch and taris’s ( ) finding that authenticity and job satisfaction are positively related (metin et al., ). one can reason that authentic expression that does not violate organizational cultural norms or values will be associated with high satisfaction and positive performance (metin et al., ; wood et al., ). organizational commitment refers to employees’ feeling of obligation to stay with an organization (rukh, shahrukh & iqbal, ). it’s a psychological bond between the employee and the organization (rukh et al., ). if the employees’ authentic expression is welcomed, encouraged and supported and if its rewarded by leadership they will undoubtedly feel a closer connection with the organization therefore leading to enhanced commitment. finally, to examine the concept of authenticity at work, plasticity labs partnered with wilfred laurier university social psychologist dr. anne wilson to survey workers. using both qualitative and quantitative methods research findings suggest that % of the workers who claimed they behaved and communicated authentically believed that it strongly factored in to enhanced performance and productivity at work and lessened their desire to censor their thoughts, expression and behavior (boute, ). therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h a: expressed authenticity is positively related to a) job satisfaction, b) commitment, and c) job performance. authenticity’s relationship to satisfaction and commitment in comparison to job performance satisfaction in one’s work is an effective reaction that incorporates experiences from the whole work environment, rather than merely assigned tasks (gutierrez et al., ; pope ). previously, researchers have concluded that job satisfaction was solely the result of achievement or production levels (loi, chan, & lam, ; pope, ). subsequent studies show that such a relationship is not necessarily accurate since it is possible for employees to be high producers but be unhappy in their work, or for them to be satisfied with their job, but low producers (kafetsios, nezlek, & vassilakou, ; pope, ). as defined earlier, authenticity is the degree to which an individual’s values, beliefs, and characteristics (i.e., their true self) fit his/her environment (metin et al., ). organizational commitment, an employee’s positive attitude toward the organization, refers to the employee’s personal psychological intimacy toward the organization that he or she is employed (yon, kim, ko & park, ). in other words, it refers to the employee’s relative strength of organizational identification and interest (yon et al., ). job satisfaction and organizational commitment are perceptual or psychological conditions of employees on various organizations, but they differ in terms of attitude (yon et al., ). while organizational commitment is a comprehensive concept reflecting the emotions of employees toward the organization, job satisfaction is more of an effective response towards the job or particular aspects of the job (yon et al., ). further, job satisfaction indicates a relatively short-term need-satisfactory reaction and organizational commitment represents an expectation of fulfilling relatively stable, long-term and developmental desires (yon et al., ). yoon and suh ( ) demonstrated that the greater employees’ satisfaction, the higher their willingness to show extra effort, because they tend to be more committed to delivering high service quality (kim & brymer, ). additionally, research has shown that greater authentic expression can lead to increased job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance. however, study respondents suggested that a person can still be productive at work without full authentic expression. one’s job satisfaction and organizational commitment could be impacted greatly if he/she had to, or choose to, suppress his/her authentic expression. therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h b: expressed authenticity’s relationship to job performance is weaker than with job satisfaction and organizational commitment. authentic expression and demographic sensitivities in organizations, individuals may assume that who they are outside of work is somehow not relevant or important at work and that it’s acceptable to be one way at work and one way at home (ferdman & deane, ). when we choose to bring more of our self to work, we are more likely to critically participate in life. with more active participation, we learn to consider others’ expectations and interpretations of us as well as to reject these expectations and interpretations when they do not resonate with our own experiences (ferdman & deane, ; heidegger, ; shamir & eilam, ). bringing one’s whole self to work involves being honest about your combination of strengths and areas for improvement, while recognizing that you are constantly developing, evolving and learning (ferdman & deane, ) and that you adjust your communication displays contextually. according to sylvia ann hewlett, author of executive presence: the missing link between merit and success, the struggle between conformity and authenticity in the workplace is a major stressor for employees (steckl, ). in addition to performing well, employees want to fit in. moreover, some simply want to survive and do what they think is necessary to assist with the process of work. for many workers of color, code-switching, or altering the way one speaks and acts depending on context, becomes the norm to make coworkers and superiors more comfortable (leiva, ). succeeding in the workplace requires mastery of it (leiva, ). in addition, hewlett’s research shows that women and people of color face more challenges than their counterparts in navigating this balance (steckl, ). in fact, one of her studies found that over percent of professionals of color felt the need to compromise their true selves to conform to company standards (steckl, ). therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : demographic sensitivities at work will reduce one's authentic expression in an organization. perceived organizational support and authentic expression according to research, the emotions that people feel and display are the result of social conventions, norms, socialization processes, and structural positions (vannini & franzese, ). even though authenticity is considered to be a genuine expression of the true self, it is certainly not exempt from the same social forces shaping every other experience (vannini & franzese, ). an area of social life in which emotions are especially controlled, and genuine expression is filtered, is that of paid work (vannini & franzese, ). people who make up the marginalized groups of a particular social context are more often faced with dilemmas that requires them to choose between acting in accordance with their self-values or in accordance with the expectations of powerful others (erickson, ). the need to “act professional” (or fit in) in work settings can contradict being “real” as employees are often expected to follow role expectations (i.e., go along to get along) and demands from supervisors, clients and colleagues that are not necessarily consistent with their feelings, values or ideas (emmerich & rigotti, ). researchers have also found that the more employees perceive their leaders to be authentic, the higher their level of satisfaction is with those leaders, which affects their organizational commitment and willingness “to walk the extra mile” (i.e., exhibit organization citizenship behaviors “ocb”) (clapp-smith et al., ; moriano et al., ; ribeiro, duarte & filipe, ). the relevant literature has shown that authentic leadership creates a positive, transparent and fair environment that influences employees’ attitude and willingness to engage in ocb (ribeiro et al., ). thus, social exchange theory (blau, ) can be used to explain why individuals who perceive authentic leadership develop a feeling of obligation to reciprocate by improving their performance (ribeiro et al., ). avolio et al. ( ) argue that, if leaders express feelings of confidence, positive emotions, and optimism, followers respond with greater commitment and satisfaction with their work, as well as attributing greater value to their company (ribeiro et al., ). this leads to less turnover, ancillary effort, and consequently, greater commitment and job satisfaction. therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : perceived organizational support of authentic expression will increase one's authentic expression at work. authenticity support, demographic sensitivities, job satisfaction, organizational support, and job commitment even without intending to do so, organizations often quash, suppress and minimize employees’ expectations (green, finkel, fitzsimons & gino, ). promotion opportunities, job advancement, special projects, professional development and building relationships with certain leaders can be impacted. the structures, norms and cultures of many modern organizations make it particularly difficult for employees to embrace the allowable organizational norms related to authentic self-expression (i.e., rules, written or unwritten, can restrict and limit full or greater authentic expression) (green et al., ). to the degree that employees bring expectations of authentic self-expression to work, the prospective costs associated with disconfirmation, and the benefits associated with confirmation, compel a deeper examination of the ways in which organizations disconfirm or confirm these approach-oriented expectations (green et al., ). maslow, in describing the need for what he called self-actualization, refers to the human “desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming” (maslow, , p. in green et al., ). fulfillment of this need to become one’s unique self and to be valued as such takes different forms for different individuals (green et al., ). authentic self-expression is the fulfillment of an individual’s sense of who he/she is in words, action, and the relational value others place on the authentically-expressed self (green et al., ). authentic self-expression at work has been associated with personal power, vulnerability, creativity, enthusiasm and innovation. in group settings, authentic self-expression can improve performance, activating the often-dormant benefits associated with diversity (green et al., ; polzer, milton, & swarm, ). in search of differentiation and competitive advantage, an organization encourages its employees to perform and communicate in ways consistent with the organization’s values and works to cultivate shared cultural norms and values that pressure individuals to align their thinking and behavior with the leader’s vision (green et al., ; o’reilly & chatman, ; pratt, ; schein, ). given that organizations are conceptualized as instruments aimed at achieving a specific goal that employees may not intrinsically value (barnard, ), organizations attempt to influence employees to internalize their goals (green et al., ; kelman, ; o’reilly & chatman, ; o’reilly & chatman, ). these various organizational practices together serve to impress an organizational identity and behavioral code on individuals while suppressing their unique identities (green et al., ; nicholson, ; sherif, ). in the process, employees will inevitably experience a sense of inauthenticity, an experience antithetical to authentic self-expression (cable, gino, & staats, ; green et al., ). there is a clear psychological cost to the enforced suppression of individuality and authentic self-expression within the workplace (green et al., ). some argue that people who suppress their authentic selves in deference to organizational strictures feel alienated from the self (grandey, ; roberts, ), can be exhausted by the cognitive effort associated with suppressing the self (hewlin, , ), and can even experience a sense of immorality and impurity resulting from a sense that they are being untruthful with their self (gino, kouchaki, & galinsky, ; green et al., ). more generally, these relatively common organizational practices—strong socialization processes, a strong focus on process adherence, and demands for uniformity and conformity—hamper employees’ ability to authentically self-express in organizational settings (cable et al., ; green et al., ). strong cultures, socialization processes, and inspirational, purpose-focused leadership all help employees embrace, and feel embraced by, a collective social identity (green et al., ). organizational practices like those described above establish an organizational code (formalized processes, uniformity norms, and socialization practices) that signals that an individual’s value reflects minimized deviance from that organizational code (green et al., ). research has shown the impact that adopting positive forms of leadership (e.g. arnold et al., , cummings et al., , kuoppala et al., , nielsen et al., b, skakon et al., , van dierendonck et al., ) has in working toward improving the well-being of workers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib (nelson, boudrias, brunet, morin, de civita, savoie, & alderson, ). in addition to the impact that managers can have on employees, work climate is also posited to influence well- being (brunet & savoie, ; nelson et al., ). some authors have also postulated that authentic leadership may positively influence work climate (caza et al., ; gardner et al., ; mrayyan, ; nelson et al., ). therefore, authentic leadership and leadership in general play a significant role in shaping well-being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance. therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : authenticity support at work has a greater impact at work than demographic sensitivities on job satisfaction, organizational support and job commitment. methodology and data collection participants one hundred and thirty-three american and australian corporate professionals (managers and non-managers) contributed data for this study. these volunteers worked in the following industries: consulting and professional services; utilities; telecommunications (mass media); insurance and financial services; beauty care products and accessories; commercial moving and installation services; individual and family services; community-based mentoring; pharmaceutical; and commercial and industrial general contracting. there were respondents with a % response rate. procedure a representative from each organization was contacted and asked to select a diverse group of employees ( in total – a combination of managers and non-managers) to participate in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s #bib the study. each representative contacted potential participants online using work email addresses provided by their organizations. in the email, a brief explanation of the study’s aim (i.e., workplace communication and behavior) was provided, followed by a hyperlink that led directly to the starting screen of an online qualtrics survey. the introductory screen explained the survey’s purpose and emphasized that participation was voluntary and confidential. in addition, participants were informed that completing the survey would take approximately – minutes. the eight-section, -item survey was entitled “workplace communication and behavior.” the first seven sections of the survey were to be answered using a likert scale (six used a response scale from – strongly disagree to strongly agree; one (job performance) used – far short expectations to far exceeds expectations). the final three questions were open-ended for narrative responses. measures authentic expression the -item authenticity degrees scale (wood, linley, maltby, baliousis, & joseph, ) measures dispositional authenticity, individual communication and behavior. four items were selected from each of the three dimensions (self-alienation, authentic living, and accepting external influence). these twelve items allowed for a shorter survey and were slightly adjusted to reflect authenticity at work. four items loaded on the “authentic living” factor measured “authentic expression” at work. these four items included: “at work, i think it is better to be yourself, than to be popular.” “at work, i always stand by what i believe in.” “i am true to myself in most situations.” “at work, i live in accordance with my values.” cronbach’s alpha for this four-item scale was . . authenticity support the authenticity support subscale of my pilot authenticity degrees scale was used to measure the impact of organization culture, manager and peer support on authentic expression. to test the validity and reliability of the authenticity support scale, i conducted an online survey monkey pilot study with past and current clients and colleagues. i developed the items for the authenticity support scale based on the main organizationally-relevant factors derived from my first study (i.e., management support, peer support and the organization/corporate culture) that influence one’s expression (versus suppression) of authenticity and whether that expression is supported or seen as inappropriate (i.e., crosses the expression and/or impropriety thresholds). fourteen of the eighteen items were used to measure the participants’ perception of the support they receive to be authentic. sample items include: “our company’s employee policies influence how authentic i am at work.”, “my manager plays a significant role in how authentic i am at work.”, “my co-workers support my authentic expression at work.”, and “my co-workers and i discuss being authentic at work.” cronbach’s alpha for this fourteen-item scale was . . the remaining four items were used to measure demographic sensitivities (that play a role in authentic expression support). sample questions include: “my gender impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work.”, “my age impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work.”, and “my ethnicity impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work.” cronbach’s alpha for this four-item scale was . . extraversion extraversion was measured by using the extraversion subscale of the big five personality test (digman, ). sample questions include: “is talkative.”, “is full of energy.”, “generates a lot of enthusiasm.”, and “is original, comes up with new ideas.” cronbach’s alpha for this eight-item scale was . . openness openness was measured by using the openness subscale of the big five personality test (digman, ). sample questions include: “is curious about many different things.”, “has an active imagination.”, “is inventive.”, and “likes to reflect, play with ideas.” cronbach’s alpha for this eight-item scale was . . emotional intelligence the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (teique) (petrides, ) was used to measure emotional intelligence. the full measure is found in appendix (scale ). sample items included: “expressing my emotions with words is not a problem for me.”, “i can deal effectively with people.”, “i’m usually able to find ways to control my emotions when i want to.”, and “on the whole, i’m pleased with my life.” cronbach’s alpha for this -item scale was . . job commitment job commitment was measured using the six-item affective commitment scale (meyer, allen & smith, ). sample items included: “i would be happy to spend the rest of my career with this organization.”, “i do not feel a strong sense of ‘belonging’ to this organization.”, and “this organization has a great deal of personal meaning to me.” cronbach’s alpha for this six- item scale was . . job satisfaction job satisfaction was measured using the eight-item job satisfaction scale (schleider, smith, casper, watt, & greguras, ). sample items include: “the competence of your supervisor in making decisions.”, “i feel that i am happier in my work than most other people.”, and “most days i am enthusiastic about my work. i find real enjoyment in my work.” cronbach’s alpha for this eight-item scale was . . job performance the two-item performance scale (kiefer & barclay, ) was used to measure job performance. these items included: “how would you rate your performance over the last six months?” and “how would your employer rate your performance over the last six months?” since this was only a two-item measure, a third item was added, which was: “how would you rate your performance in relation to your peers over the last six months?” reponses ranged from = “far short of expectations” to = “far exceeds expectations”, with = meets expectations. cronbach’s alpha for this three-item scale was . . qualitative responses three open-ended questions were asked in the survey, consistent with interview questions asked in earlier, in-depth interviews. the questions included: “how important do you think authenticity is at work?”, “do you think a person has to be authentic in order for him/her to be productive at work? explain.”, and “what helps and what hinders your authentic expression at work.” these were hand coded for post hoc analysis and discussion. results table shows the means, standard deviations, scale reliabilities (cronbach’s alpha), and correlations for study variables. four independent variables (i.e., authentic support, extraversion, openness, and emotional intelligence) correlated positively with authentic expression. demographic sensitivities was negatively correlated with authentic expression. all dependent variables (i.e., work outcomes) job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance) correlated positively with authentic expression. h : expressed authenticity is positively related to the individual traits of (a) extraversion, (b) openness, and (c) emotional intelligence. correlations show significant positive correlations for each trait. based on these results, hypothesis was supported. h a: expressed authenticity is positively related to (a) job satisfaction, (b) commitment, and (c) job performance. correlation analysis indicates a significant, positive relationships with these variables. based on these results, hypothesis a is supported. h b: expressed authenticity's relationship to job performance and organizational commitment is weaker than with job satisfaction. correlations show this hypothesis is partially supported. while all were positively correlated, job satisfaction was more highly correlated with expressed authenticity than job performance. h : demographic sensitivities at work will reduce one's authentic expression in an organization. correlation analysis shows a significant, negative relationship between these two variables. subsequent t-tests were performed with groups split above and below the mean. t- tests showed that people with lower demographic sensitives (below the mean) were not significantly different in their authentic expression at work than those with higher sensitivities (above the mean). both statistics helped clarify this relationship. based on the non-significant t- test (shown in table ), this hypothesis is partially supported based on the significant, negative correlation. h : perceived organizational support of authentic expression will increase one's authentic expression at work. analysis show significantly high correlations between these two variables. a second t-test compared groups separated above and below the mean. people with lower perceived authenticity support (below the mean) were significantly different from those with higher perceived authenticity support regarding their authentic expression. that is, with increased organizational support, people were more likely to express authentically. based on the t-test (shown in table ), this hypothesis was supported. h : authenticity support at work has a greater impact at work than demographic sensitivities on job satisfaction, organizational support and job commitment. correlations indicate authenticity support is more highly correlated with the dependent variables than demographic sensitivities. based on these results, this hypothesis is supported. regressions also were performed by entering the independent and demographic variables into the equation to predict each dependent variable. results showed that authenticity support found in the organization was the best predictor for all of these dependent variables (see table ). analysis of survey open-ended questions the three open-ended questions at the end of the survey were: ( ) how important do you think authenticity is at work? ( ) do you think a person has to be authentic in order for him/her to be productive at work? explain. ( ) what helps and what hinders authentic expression at work? surveys can limit the depth of responses, so i wanted to provide a vehicle for respondents to share additional perspectives regarding their views on authenticity at work. of the survey respondents, provided answers to the questions. over half of the respondents ( ) answered “very” to the first question. other answers to the question included “vital”, “nice but not necessary”, “somewhat”, “not”, “critical/extremely” and “quite”. for question two, respondents answered “yes” while answered “no”, not a significant difference. the other answers included “not necessarily”, “to a degree”, and “yes and no”. three participant’s comments reflect the difference in thought: yes. it benefits the individual if they can be true to themselves as well as those around the person so they can know who they’re truly working with. any place there is truth there is freedom. authenticity breeds trust even if the person who is truly revealing himself is not exactly the kind of person you prefer to be around. at least they’ve shown you who they truly are. you can trust that. no. based on the type of work you do it is highly possible to complete tasks without being your true self. being a minority that deals with stereotypes on a daily basis conditions you to monitor your behavior and communication style to ensure you are able to meet your career objectives in good standing. for example, being extremely happy or extremely angry is fine, expressing these emotions however, does involve a degree of calculation because of the cultural assumptions that others may make no and yes. i believe that a person can put on a facade to get through work…but i believe if they recognize that they are unique and that uniqueness about themselves will allow them to propel themselves to heights they couldn’t have imagined. with regard to question three, a number of themes emerged. these themes were similar to those found in essay that evolved from the semi-structured interviews conducted. a list of the comments can be found in tables and . the themes for what helps and what hinders authentic expression were: helps hinders management support lack of management support culture/environment culture/environment recognition gossip individual attitude/mindset/choice lack of peer support peer support fear (being judged, reprisal, not understood) independence/freedom to do one’s job choice; individual values different from company’s the three questions were developed to see if the sentiment reflected in the likert scale survey responses would be similar to these open-ended options. i also wanted to see if there would be outlier data. nevertheless, authenticity support, in the form of organizational culture, management and/or peer support, emerged again as the pivotal contributor to one’s authentic expression at work. lack of support had the reverse effect. while authenticity is certainly a desired behavior, more than half of the respondents answered “very” to question one. over one third answered that authenticity was not necessary for an individual to be productive. their accompanying comments reinforced this sentiment. this is an indication that people have learned to work, and be productive, without full authentic expression. workers may believe that the perceived risks of expressing authentically outweigh the perceived rewards. hence, there is an opportunity to widen the space for authentic expression. general discussion the purpose of the current study was to continue to explore the merits of authenticity at work. authenticity over the years has mostly been described as either/or experience rather than as a more or less concept. my research showed that the range of authentic expression is better explained using degrees rather than binaries. in addition, i wanted to explore self- and organizationally-imposed factors that helped and hindered authentic expression and behavior at work as well as determine which constraint had greater impact. finally, i wanted to see how authentic expression impacts work outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance. results indicate that authentic expression is important at work; however, full authentic expression, which is a false concept, is not needed for a person to be productive. in addition, the findings show that authenticity support within the organization (i.e., management and peer support) is integral for greater authentic expression at work. the data also provided insight into the degrees of authentic expression at work, causing one to draw conclusions regarding the relative space for “safe” expression (that space, as indicated on the dual threshold model, is between the suppression and impropriety thresholds). organizations can enlarge this space by moving the expression threshold more than the impropriety threshold because they can’t let people express without some consequence for making “inappropriate” comments authentically. my findings expand on existing theory regarding authenticity at work (van den bosch & taris, ; metin, taris peeters, van beek, & van den bosch, ; plasticity labs & dr. anne wilson, ; deloitte, ). the findings reinforce ryan et al.’s, ( ) work with self- determination theory (sdt). sdt argues that individuals are authentic when their actions are congruent with their core self, meaning when they are autonomous and self-determining (metin et al., ). the likelihood of greater, positive work outcomes occur when employees are more self-determining. this research also reinforces wood et al.’s study with the tripartite structure of authenticity. their research revealed that higher levels of authenticity (as measured in terms of three subscales of authentic living, self-alienation and accepting external forces) were associated with positive affect, self-esteem, autonomy, happiness, environmental mastery, personal growth, self-acceptance, and gratitude (van den bosch & taris, ). this can lead to enhanced job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance. my findings reinforce goffman’s ( ) theory of felt identity. according to goffman, felt identity is an individual’s subjective sense of his or her own situation and the continuity and character that an individual comes to have because of his or her various social experiences (erickson, ). this felt identity helps employees navigate the workplace landscape and determine their perceived range for authentic expression. the respondents’ feedback in both study and study regarding their authentic expression and their belief about authenticity in general is explained in the above theories. moreover, their feedback calls to mind anais nin’s words, “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” my findings also fit in with kernis & goldman’s ( b) subjective authenticity theory. a person is high in subjective authenticity when agreeing that he or she is “really being me” or “acting like my true self” (fleeson & wilt, ). on the other hand, a person is low in subjective authenticity when judging that he or she is “putting on an act” or does not “feel like my true self” (fleeson & wilt, ). this range of subjective authenticity (feeling and behaving) parallels the range of authentic expression discussed in some detail in the dual threshold model (geddes & callister, ). nevertheless, my findings open up avenues for future research regarding the “nice but not needed” notion of authentic expression, the role privilege plays in authentic expression, the power of authenticity support, the risk of going against the grain and speaking truth to power. perhaps the three most interesting findings of the research can be summarized as follows. first, the results supported the hypothesis (in study ) that discussed the profound impact authentic support has on authentic expression and that authentic expression had positive correlations with the job characteristics (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance). if a person believes that he/she has manager and peer support, he/she is more likely to challenge the status quo, test expression boundaries and reveal more of him/her true self. with this added “freedom to be me”, they are likely to be more satisfied, committed, and productive at work. second, the results showed that demographic sensitivities at work will reduce one's authentic expression in an organization. these sensitivities included race/ethnicity, gender, management status and negative perceptions of previous experiences. with regard to the semi- structured interview responses and survey open-ended question responses, none of the white respondents, in either study, discussed ever having to change or alter who they were personally to be productive or to fit in. however, they did state that they changed aspects of their behavior or the way they communicated. in contrast, non-white respondents reported that they had to alter both who they are (i.e., personal aspects), how they conduct themselves, and how they communicate at work. third, my findings reinforced the idea that speaking truth to power is still a risky endeavor for some. in essence, speaking truth to power risks offending those in power. on the one hand, speaking truth to power can position a person to be seen as a change agent for expressing his/her firm values. on the other hand, the same person can be seen as an individual with an agenda. this phenomenon was reinforced in both my semi-structured interviews and in my post hoc event analysis/deconstruction. takeaways and conclusions, from this research, for practitioners and organizational leaders include the followings: ( ) although many in the workplace believe that authenticity is important they also believe that the current work environment is becoming more difficult for others, especially leaders, to accept it; ( ) there are a number of fears associated with authentic expression and many employees believe that despite its potential benefits, authentic expression or limited authentic expression can be explained by economic security and insecurity; ( ) authenticity is a moral category that’s used to police behavior; people are accountable for a constantly moving standard; ( ) authenticity is socially constructed which makes it difficult to define; in the world it means different things to different people; and ( ) there is a small engine of inequality associated with authenticity (i.e., some would argue that people with power and privilege have more space (i.e., room) for authentic expression. the findings addressed all research questions and paved the way for new questions that are discussed in the limitations and future research chapter below. finally, the findings created a picture that informs what employees really think about the value of authenticity at work. they believe that organizations can benefit from it. at the same time, however, they (i.e., employees) can still be productive and profitable with limited authentic expression. being able to refer back to an “inner, true self” helps individuals to manage themselves and their lives through varying works demands and challenges (di fabio and kenny, ), especially in the context of the increasing flexibilities and insecurities of the modern work life inside and outside organizations (emmerich & rigotti, ; savickas, ). limitations and future research there were several limitations in study . while efforts were made to compensate for limitations, there were some that must be acknowledged. first, although the sample size was adequate for a quantitative study (more would be even better), the lack of racial and ethnic diversity limited perspectives on authentic expression. research has shown that people of color experience the workplace differently from non-people of color (steckl, ). the semi- structured interviews support this notion as well. this lack of diversity in the sample makes it difficult to generalize the results. it would be amusing to see if the rich information gathered in both studies would hold true across a larger, wider range and even number of white and non- white employees. second, the voluminous number ( ) of survey questions in study might have taken away from the respondents’ momentum when completing the survey as well as the limitation of a one-time cross-sectional data collection. although it took only – minutes to complete the survey, the sheer number of questions could have decreased fully active participation. out of the respondents, answered every question. in attempting to determine what assisted with promoting more authentic expression at work and during the survey’s development, it would have been better to select fewer variables. additionally, the questions did not specifically address respondents’ opinions relative to the amount of space one has for authentic expression or their belief regarding the either/or, more or less authenticity argument. obtaining both their quantitative and narrative perspectives would have added another level of depth to the data. future research should examine different facets of authenticity and how they relate to outcomes like job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance. first, from an independent variable standpoint, research could explore the role privilege has on authentic expression. that would initially require a study of privilege overall and what types of privilege (e.g., race, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.) are most prevalent in the workplace. second, research could investigate the impact of technology on authentic expression at work. technology is disrupting nearly every industry. thus, at work, technological devices (e.g., smartphones, ipads, laptops) could play a significant role in employees breaching issues of confidentiality and overall daily operation communications. third, future research could investigate the sanctions associated with crossing the impropriety threshold of authentic expression and if those sanctions are levied consistently regardless of one’s role or position in an organization. fourth, future research could explore the benefits of expanding the space for authentic expression at work. considering most organizations have rules on what’s considered acceptable and allowable decorum, a variety of elements must come together to show how organizations will benefit from expanded authentic expression. for instance, would businesses that allow free expression reduce risks associated with employees keeping their mistakes to themselves? to target the space of appropriate authentic expression future research studies could use the following questions when conducting interviews: when do you feel most safe to communicate authentically at work?; what could organizations do to help widen the space for authentic expression at work?; what have you done in the past to increase your authentic expression?; when (i.e., what situations) have you felt that it was in your best interests to keep your truth to yourself? finally, future research could explore the impact of “pretending” behavior on one’s health, well-being and self-esteem. does wearing a professional mask, on a daily basis, take a toll on employees? and what are the costs for the employee and for the business? this work includes, but is not limited to, impression management (goffman, ), interactive service work (bowens & cummings, , pp. - ) and emotional labor (ashforth & humphrey, ; grandey, : , see also gross, ; hochschild, : morris & feldman, ). there are myriad opportunities for future research concerning the impacts of limits on authentic expression (and perhaps enhanced suppression) at work. a post hoc analysis a case of authentic expression gone too far: tony robbins many still believe that authentic expression at work can feel like a double-edged sword (bassett, ). while expressing your honest opinion and your true personality can be perceived as better than faking it or going along to get along, in some cases, it has the power to damage your reputation (bassett, ). building on study , i examined the extent to which full authentic expression at work can influence how one is perceived and where the line for that full expression is drawn by organizational observers. as mentioned earlier, authenticity involves the ability to regulate one’s behavior in a way that is consistent with internally-held values and goals (harvey, martinko, & gardner, ; stajkovic & luthans, ). what happens, however, if the regulation of those values and goals is magnified to the point where one’s expression and behavior becomes intolerable to others? entrepreneur, best-selling author, philanthropist and self-proclaimed number one life and business strategist, tony robbins had such an experience (bailey, / / ). in this section, i offer a post hoc case analysis/deconstruction to illustrate the particulars involved in his march , #metoo movement, impropriety threshold crossing incident at his unleash the power within (upw) event. i will discuss the players, identify significant takeaways, and examine what this experience sheds light on. my motivation was to illustrate how this incident helps to clarify what it means to cross the impropriety threshold of workplace authenticity and to draw insights into how authenticity can impact ones’ code of professionalism at work. what’s equally significant regarding this incident, especially considering the emphasis placed in studies and on authenticity as a spectrum, is determining when robbins’ expression and behavior was most authentic. was it during the -minute exchange with nanine mccool (i.e., the upw audience member who challenged and questioned robbins’ representation and understanding of the #metoo movement)? or was it in his online apology that followed shortly after recordings of the incident went viral. this analysis will provide evidence for how changing, salient protocols ultimately reduce or expand the ‘space’ given to authentic expression at work. method procedure i facilitated an event deconstruction using archival data in the form of articles, podcasts, videos, websites, reports, and other online resources relating to the experience; i also interviewed nanine mccool. i did an electronic database search in lexis-nexis using key words related to the incident collect journal articles, online newspaper and magazine articles, and media interviews. in addition to reference materials collected through the electronic database search, i acquired public documents by searching the internet sites suggested by google. data collection: google my initial data collection included reviewing tony robbins’ website (www.tonyrobbins.com) and doing a google search on nanine mccool and on antoinette http://www.tonyrobbins.com/ collins (aka, butterscotch), whose video recording of the incident started the avalanche of media and societal reaction. the mccool google search alone uncovered pages of articles, videos, blogs and podcasts discussing topics such as: ( ) the actual incident; ( ) mccool’s past and disbarment, her post-event interviews and response to robbins’ apology; ( ) robbins’ apology, backlash and “mansplaining”; and ( ) body language analysis. the videos that assisted most in this research were: ( ) mccool (march , ); ( ) butterscotchmusic (may, ); ( ) abc news (april , ); ( ) abc news, nightline (april , ); ( ) today, (april , ); ( ) nbc news (april , ); ( ) kcra news (august , ); ( ) facebook/butterscotch (march , ); ( ) the good men project (april , ) and ( ) nowthis news (april , ). podcasts that contributed to the research were: ( ) catherine graceo (april , ); ( ) global transformatrix (april, , ); and ( ) karen sterling (april , ). using temple university’s online library, i started searching data bases. of the databases to select from, only access world news, lexis-nexis academic (nexis uni) and the wall street journal full text ( – present) had information discussing the event. i put the following terms in the search engines: tony robbins nanine mccool, tony robbins nanine mccool since the incident and tony robbins nanine mccool #metoo. the publications that contributed the most to the research were: ( ) the charlotte observer (bailey, / / ); ( ) the fairfield mirror (dirienzo, / / ); ( ) the san jose mercury news (ross, / / ); ( ) the republican american ( / / ); and ( ) the daily world (krauss, / / ). file:///c:/users/james/downloads/catherine file:///c:/users/james/downloads/global event participants tony robbins entrepreneur anthony j. robbins (born anthony j. mahavorick), better known as tony robbins, is arguably the nation’s number one motivational speaker (although he does not like being referred to as such). he’s wealthy, charismatic, tall ( ’ ”), handsome, and has an enormous following. on his website (www.tonyrobbins.com), he calls himself, “a recognized authority on the psychology of leadership, negotiations and organizational turnaround” and “the nation’s number one life and business strategist”. he has worked with presidents, olympic athletes, corporate executives, entertainers, professional athletes and teams, and celebrities. tony robbins, who never attended college, chose the self-help/motivational speaking industry at the age of after attending a seminar facilitated by author, entrepreneur and motivational speaker, jim rohn. robbins has been a mainstay in the industry for more than years. known initially for his infomercials and seminars, robbins evolved into a best-selling author, philanthropist and life coach. according to the top celebrity wealth sites, his net worth is believed to be approximately $ million and is listed in the nd position on forbes’ wealth power rankings (wallace, ). having presented to, and worked with, hundreds of thousands of clients nationally and internationally, he has over companies operating in more than countries (wallace, ). those companies include asteroid mining, credit cards, hospitality, nutritional supplements, private equity, sports teams, -d printed prosthetics and wealth management (inc. magazine, ). an aggressive and brash speaker who welcomes and confronts issues during his live events, robbins has built an empire on the central message that anyone can learn to be confident. the caption on the homepage of his website reads, “close the gap between where you are today – and where you want to be.” nanine mccool according to many, joyce nanine nyman mccool has spent a lifetime “speaking truth to power.” her march , , encounter with tony robbins at his unleash the power within event was not her first confrontation with a powerful figure. the ’ ”, -year-old former u.s. coast guard and lawyer (who was disbarred for using social media, namely twitter, to encourage readers to reach out to two judges who she believed had been unwilling to consider all of the evidence in two child custody cases) hails from new orleans, louisiana. as a lawyer, she practiced family law and had long been an advocate and activist for human rights. mccool, no stranger to taking on issues, is herself a sexual abuse survivor (at the age of three) and home abuse survivor. she has been a supporter of the #metoo movement since its inception. mccool says she attended the upw event on a whim because she thought well of tony robbins and his mission. prior to paying the $ , registration fee, she said that she did research on his background, teachings, and beliefs, and discussed it with her husband. she admitted that participating in motivational workshops was not something that she typically did, but she was feeling out of sorts since her disbarment and was looking for inspiration. she saw an advertisement about the event and decided to attend. butterscotch antoinette clinton (butterscotch) is an internationally-known singer, songwriter, musician, beatboxer and lgbtq and #metoo activist. she plays the piano, saxophone, flute, guitar, and bass guitar. the -year-old entertainer and recently-turned speaker, hails from the sacramento-davis, california area. having gained national exposure from her appearance on the second season of america’s got talent in , butterscotch has continued her career both as a musician and an activist. her video recording of the -minute confrontation between robbins and mccool started the media explosion and coverage of the incident. the event robbins’ unleash the power within event is a three-and-a-half-day motivational and empowerment experience. according to robbins’ marketing materials the session is designed to enable attendees to break down the fears and psychological limitations which are holding them back from achieving massive success with their life. upw events are held both nationally and internationally. the event in question occurred on march , , in san jose, california. over , people were in attendance. the incident using her smartphone, butterscotch began video-recording the incident just after robbins finished making supportive comments about his good friend steve wynn. wynn is a casino magnate who had recently stepped down from his post as ceo and chairman of wynn resorts amid multiple accusations of decades of sexual misconduct and abuse. robbins then moved into a discussion about the #metoo movement. apparently, he had made #metoo comments earlier and returned to the topic to continue his thoughts. robbins began by saying that women were using the #metoo movement to hold onto their victimhood to gain significance. he continued by saying that they were attacking men and accusing them of abusive behavior that really was not abuse at all in order to attempt to make themselves relevant. after sitting in her chair squirming, because of what she felt were a series of untruths and misrepresentations, mccool stood up and yelled, “you don’t get it…you got it wrong.” robbins didn’t immediately hear her but within seconds one of his team members handed her a microphone and he made his way toward her. during the next eleven and a half minutes, of which he spoke for nearly ten, robbins used profanity, audience engagement techniques, his voice, his platform, his physicality, and his larger-than-life positional power to convince mccool that her #metoo movement beliefs were misguided. as he challenged her #metoo sentiment, robbins consistently made his argument to both mccool and the , plus people that were in attendance. he encouraged the audience members to raise their hand or say, “yes,” if they were following him or agreed with his point. when mccool made her first statement, asserting that robbins mischaracterized the #metoo movement, he interrupted, challenging her response. he spoke for seconds without pause, mentioning jesus, quoting scripture and dropping the “f” bomb in subsequent sentences. when he did pause, letting mccool respond, he listened as the crowd cheered and applauded her thoughts. this moved robbins to take her from the relative “safety” of her audience seat and bring her into the aisle alongside him. next, he did a “push exercise” with her, demonstrating what he felt the #metoo movement was doing to men. he asked her to extend her arm and make a fist. his fist met hers and he commenced with pushing her down the aisle. his lesson was that when you push people, you don’t get results; you get pushback and angry people, so everyone loses. robbins, who is ’ ”, appeared to outweigh mccool, who is ’ ”, by at least pounds. the demonstration (i.e., the push) lasted approximately seconds. he finished with one last push (or thrust) of his own for emphasis. robbins continued by telling a story about a high-ranking friend of his who works in hollywood. indicating that he hears stories like the one he was about to tell all of the time, without hesitation, he continued his argument. he said that his friend interviewed three people for a job – a woman and two men. the woman was more qualified, but she was extremely attractive. fearing that hiring her was too much of a risk, he hired someone else. seeing mccool shaking her head disapprovingly and hearing her utter that that was an excuse, robbins continued to make his case, uninterrupted, for another minute and a half. mccool then chimed in reminding him that he was a very influential man and that his mischaracterization of the #metoo movement was a disservice. her words were again met with more cheers and applause and another robbins interruption, where he continued to assert his point for another seconds. when someone from the audience called out that he needed to apologize, robbins’ offered the following response: i’m not going to be inauthentic and say i’m sorry about something that i’m not sorry about. i’m not sorry...this is what so many people are doing. they’re saying they’re sorry when they’re not just to comply. i’m not here to comply…but what i wouldn’t do is be inauthentic. it would be inauthentic for me to go, ‘oh no it’s fine, everybody should comply...’ robbins finished their disagreement with three non-stop minutes of commentary regarding how to gain significance in life. mccool didn’t get the opportunity to speak again. he asked the audience to give her a hand, he then kissed her hand and continued with the session. one of robbins’ closing thoughts was peculiar. he talked about why he brought up the #metoo movement in the first place. this caused me to wonder: did he script, plan, and prep to opine on the #metoo movement? how much did mccool’s interruption alter his plans and his authentic expression? shortly after the march th upw event (march th to be exact), butterscotch posted the video on her facebook wall. after , plus views and several hundred comments, robbins’ legal team instructed her to take the video down. she kept it up for two additional days even after being threatened with legal action. on march th , mccool posted the video on youtube and a couple of days later, the video was picked up by nowthis news. they posted a one minute and thirty-eight second clip of the video on their social media platform and the video went viral. the backlash was immediate. #metoo founder tarana burke (who was initially contacted by robbins’ team, before she saw the video, to provide context/damage control) called out robbins. the video trended on twitter. multiple celebrities shared their shock and dismay. on april th , after the video had gone viral ( days after the actual event), tony robbins issued the following apology on his facebook wall: at a recent unleash the power (upw) event in san jose, my comments failed to reflect the respect i have for everything tarana burke and the #metoo movement has achieved. i apologize for suggesting anything other than my profound admiration for the #metoo movement. let me clearly say, i agree with the goals of the #metoo movement and its founding message of ‘empowerment through empathy,’ which makes it a beautiful force for good. for years i’ve encouraged people to grow into the men and women they dream to be. i watch in awe as more and more women all over the world find their voice and stand up and speak out. all of our growth begins with learning. my own started with a childhood marked by abuse. i am humbled that others have looked to the path i have taken in the decades since as lessons in their own journey. but sometimes, the teacher has to become the student and it is clear that i still have much to learn. i teach that ‘life happens for you, not to you’ and what i’ve realized is that while i’ve dedicated my life to working with victims of abuse all over the world, i need to get connected to the brave women of #metoo. i am committed to being part of the solution. i am committed to helping to educate others so that we all stay true to the ideals of the #metoo movement. i will never stop examining my own words and actions to make sure i am staying true to those ideals. that begins with this brief statement but will not end until our goals are reached. tony robbins it has been nearly a year since the incident. robbins has not publicly discussed or addressed the matter since. mccool, who stayed for the entire four-day session and who was later reimbursed the entire $ , registration fee, appeared on a number of radio, television and podcast interviews after the event discussing what occurred. she posted several videos on her youtube channel to continue the conversation. she and butterscotch remain advocates for the #metoo movement and other causes. discussion this case analysis provides an example to help illustrate what can happen when someone’s authentic expression crosses the impropriety threshold in a culture whose threshold has been set by the observers, i.e., audience members at the march , , tony robbins’ upw event (geddes & callister, ). as a result of his authenticity crossing this threshold (and his lack of understanding of the challenges that women face in business), robbins had sanctions levied against him during and immediately following the event. first, he lost a portion of the crowd after his fiery, one-sided debate with mccool, and second, he subsequently received a groundswell of media, social media, #metoo and celebrity backlash. this example also provides a better understanding of the “limited” range of expressed authenticity. to clarify and to better explain the range of expressed authenticity, i used the dual threshold model (geddes & callister, ) in study . in its original form, this model includes an emotion expression threshold, which is crossed when individuals communicate rather than suppress a felt emotion (e.g., anger), and an impropriety threshold, which is crossed if one’s expressed feelings violate organizational emotion display norms (geddes & callister, ). in the current research study, authenticity replaced emotion/anger as the model’s “internal” phenomenon that may or may not be expressed. crossing this threshold is a function of both actor behavior and observer perceptions; thus, there is a type of actor-observer interaction inherent in the model (geddes & callister, ). the thresholds and their placement in relation to each other represent authenticity display rules and norms operating formally or informally within the organizational context (geddes & callister, ). although no formal rules were established by the audience members at the upw event, societal mores and attitudes pertaining to: ( ) gender communication norms; ( ) opinions regarding how abused women should deal with their abusers; and ( ) empathy that should be showed toward abuse victims, were clearly salient. robbins appeared to have planned to make disparaging remarks about the #metoo movement as part of his presentation, having alluded to it at the end of his dispute with mccool. perhaps her challenge, which he didn’t anticipate, contributed to his aggressive, physical, and misplaced authentic expression. robbins’ behavior falls in line with what the dual threshold model calls deviant behavior. according to the model, deviant anger (and in this case, deviant authenticity) crosses an impropriety threshold reflecting the norms and mores of the cultural and/or organizational climate. in other words, the behavior “deviates” from salient norms of propriety within a particular context and/or community. thus, deviant anger behaviors may involve actions as seemingly benign as raising one’s voice, giving someone the silent treatment, or sending an all- caps email as well as those more universally viewed as unacceptable (geddes & callister, ). moreover, an individual whose expressions are considered improper (or deviant) in context is more likely to be labeled as volatile, out of control, aggressive, or unprofessional, thus damaging his or her reputation and perhaps his or her ability to function effectively at work, (geddes & callister, ). once the impropriety threshold is crossed, attention and effort may be directed toward controlling and reprimanding the angry individual and away from issues that may have produced the employee’s negative emotion (geddes & callister, ). it may prove difficult to determine the extent of sanctions against robbins’ via lost revenues, reduced product sales, fewer talk show invitations, etc. however, the majority of those reporting and commenting on the incident offered informal sanctions, many expecting or hoping for some sort of more formal admonition in the offing. nevertheless, the initial social media and mainstream media backlash he received for dismissing the #metoo movement as women trying to gain significance appears to have waned. does this mean that celebrities, influencers, wealthy individuals and people of privilege are given more space for crossing a threshold? or that people lose interest and memory with time? kernis & goldman ( ) believe that authenticity is not a single unitary process. they posit that it can be broken into four separate components—awareness, unbiased processing, behavior and relational orientation. the behavior component involves behaving in accord with one’s values, preferences, and needs as opposed to acting “falsely” merely to please others or to attain awards or avoid punishments (kernis & goldman, ). they acknowledge that situations exist where behaving in accord with and staying true to one’s values may result in severe social sanctions. this appears to be the case with robbins (although the informal sanctions he received are not known). additionally, they presume that authenticity will reflect the heightened sensitivity to the fit (or lack thereof) between one’s true self and the dictates of the environment, and a heightened awareness of the potential implications of one’s behavioral choices (kernis & goldman, ). robbins, seemingly, underestimated the impact of his authentic expression and behavior or thought that he could convince the audience to agree with his perspective. his apology illustrates that authenticity is not easily attained nor is an either/or experience; instead, it is often more or less. ericson ( ) posits that authenticity can be conceptualized as a continuum along which individuals can vary between the extremes of being fully authentic and completely inauthentic. nevertheless, as it relates to language, scholars and people in general tend to treat authenticity as a binary generalization--an entity is either authentic or inauthentic (lehman, o’connor, kovacs & newman, ). authenticity generalizations are rarely expressed with any language qualifiers. scholars and people in general, very seldom refer to people as “kind of authentic,” producers as “sort of phony,” or objects as “somewhat counterfeit” (lehman et al., ; qian, ). yet people seem to be sensitive to degrees of authenticity even if what’s said is not expressed with those exact words (lehman et al., ). it seems that authenticity is, therefore, “not an all or nothing, black or white, distinction but rather a matter of degree” (cooper et al., : ; lehman et al., ). social life is made of compromises, deals, and negotiations (strauss ) and authenticity—as wholesome as it may seem—cannot be exempt from the need to strike a balance between the “true to oneself thing to do” and the “necessary thing to do” (vannini & franzese, ). this incident sheds light on several critical workplace factors discussed below. going against the grain. while at work, do we all have to think alike? if a person doesn’t go along with the dominant thought of the day, will he/she be ostracized? does it depend on the topic in question? certain issues (e.g., race, religion and politics) are obviously still sensitive matters to discuss in the workplace. what this situation does illustrate is that if a person goes against the grain on a controversial topic, he/she runs the risk of crossing an impropriety threshold and experiencing at least informal sanctioning. ones’ power, status and level of influence may not shield him/her from sanctions or reprisal since impropriety is judged by observers not the actor him or herself. organizational leaders, and society in general, espouse that they want your truth, but does your truth require alignment with their truth? mccool in subsequent interviews said she applauded robbins for sharing his truth about the #metoo movement although she disagreed with his perspective and his misogynistic and aggressive approach. is the workplace prepared for (or will it allow) people to take an unpopular stand relative to something they perceive is impacting their workplace experience or society? organizations that open space for people (i.e., support colleagues) to be more authentic will likely increase the benefits for individuals and companies alike with higher levels of job satisfaction, commitment and productivity. information travels quickly. the oft-quoted, unofficial workplace statute, “what’s said here stays here” or “what happens in vegas stays in vegas” may have run its course. due to technology, and the “tell all and show all” society we live and work in, people rush to share information, incidents and experiences online. now anything one says or does, within seconds, can be shared throughout the world. this alone could impact authentic expression going forward – in the workplace, in board rooms, in locker rooms, in classrooms, at self-help seminars and the like. should educators, speakers, executives, physicians, coaches, meeting leaders, etc., be concerned with their authentic expression being recorded (video or audio) during classes, sessions, meetings and presentations? if robbins had known his debate was being video- recorded, and would later go viral, he might have altered how he approached his #metoo movement diatribe or he may have avoided the subject altogether. the use of poetic license may have run its course as well if people self-censor what they say. code of professionalism. regardless of one’s position at work, he/she has to adhere to behavioral guidelines and conduct norms. certainly, there are situations where greater authentic expression could provide additional clarity; however, no one can be fully authentic and expect not to have backlash or punishment. people would benefit from being more emotionally intelligent. there are times that call for people to be more assertive regarding who they are and what they feel, but they should understand that they when they choose that course it’s at their own risk. this reinforces the “authenticity is more or less” conversation. do people, at work, differentiate enough between who they are, what they believe or what they feel or value and how that is expressed? this could be what robbins was struggling with. he may have felt freer to express himself because of his status and unbeknownst to him, his white male privilege. he’s a mega personality with an enormous following. he’s wealthy, charismatic, and engaging. he’s tall. he’s a white. he’s a man. some might say that, as a result, society has opened more space for his authentic expression without repercussion. however, within the culture created by the upw audience, there were people who disagreed with his sentiment and challenged that aspect of his authenticity, and also disagreed with how he facilitated the debate. the image of the physically-imposing man interrupting, pushing, using profanity and speaking loudly to a woman, on the topic of women who have been abused, undoubtedly factored into their point of view. his behavior went against the code of professionalism as judged by his audience. since how we feel is so tied to who we are, our lack of experience in other peoples’ lives makes us more vulnerable to biases that are preventing others from being themselves or who they want to be in our presence at work or any place else— except in this instance, mccool didn’t back down. the dual threshold model proposes that there is potential value in establishing or altering emotion (authenticity) policies and standards that expand the space between the expression and impropriety thresholds (geddes & callister, ). the threshold is going to move culturally and move with time. we’ve seen the evolution of allowable/acceptable behaviors (e.g., drinking onsite at workplace events). nevertheless, these are still sensitive times and what you say about others, not only can affect them in a negative way, but can also damage you. and one single interaction can last a very long time. truth to power. speaking truth to power is holding people in power accountable for what they say. on one hand, speaking truth to power can position a person to be seen as a change agent. on the other hand, the same person can be seen as an individual with an agenda. mccool had a history of speaking truth to power and she has experienced both sides of the pendulum. she was disbarred for her authentic “social media” expression about two judges’ handling of a child custody case, but was lauded for being courageous as she unwaveringly stood her ground with robbins. what does this mean for the workplace? every organization, its culture, its leadership and its core values are different. keen knowledge of each can help in determining the degree of ones’ authentic expression with leadership. this may impede how quickly the space for authentic expression in the workplace expands but it can at the very least, kick-start previously non- discussed topics and perspectives. liedtka ( ) argued that increased attention to authenticity and its themes (i.e., the differentiated sense of self located within a larger social context; each individual’s “once occurredness,”; the importance of voice, active participation, and emotions; and the tension between the novel and the familiar) brings a different lens through which to explore business strategy making, offering new methods to consider and examine key strategy concepts that challenge traditional approaches. privilege. as a fundamental concept, privilege relates to, and involves, unearned benefits given to powerful social and reference groups within systems of oppression (case, iuzzinni, & hopkins, ; kendall, : mcintosh, ). social forces at the societal and institutional levels bequeath privilege to individuals and groups categorized as belonging to a particular social identity (typically recognized as being part of the dominant or majority group), e.g., white, male, heterosexual, upper/middle class) (case, iuzzini & hopkins, ). does privilege play a role in who’s allowed to communicate more authentically at work? does privilege provide a greater sense of confidence for some to project more authentically than others at work? as i watched the video of robbins constantly interrupting mccool then pushing her up the aisle to illustrate a point, i couldn’t help but wonder why he was permitted to continue his aggressive, profanity-laden behavior during their debate. for me and those present, he crossed way over the impropriety threshold with his assertions and with his physical approach. at one point he said that the #metoo victims needed to stop being so sensitive. he said that he was not knocking the #metoo movement; he was knocking victimhood. he also offered that we’re seeing people (i.e., #metoo victims) attempting to make themselves significant by making someone else wrong and getting certainty. what message was he sending to anyone observing about a woman’s place in society? according to mccool, that message was, “women, if you fight back, it’s just going to get worse…so shut up and take it.” what message was he sending to women (and people in general) regarding taking a risk to challenge a successful, white male icon’s perspective during his show? the audience even clapped after their debate was over. mccool, during our interview, offered the following regarding privilege, authenticity and her experience with robbins: …well he (robbins) is used to being worshipped and i do think that issue of privilege was very, very telling here and that it was very much involved…he’s a good looking, wealthy white guy. i see it all of the time. privilege can be so insidious…that the idea that you’re wrong doesn’t occur to you. but i think for someone like tony robbins or a lot of men, and white men in particular, and white women too, i think there are tiers…i think there is this underlying presumption that if you get in a disagreement with someone who is not in your group and depending on where you are in the hierarchy that’s how you decide if you’re right or wrong. and i think it’s almost invisible and i think in that moment when tony robbins pulled me over…he just thought he was going to come out smelling like roses like he always does. he was going to pull me out there and do his thing and everybody was going to love it and that i somehow was going to be different than what he expected… you know, what i turned out to be…and he was angry. somehow i triggered him perhaps to the same degree he triggered me…he was angry and he wanted that confrontation at some level. everything he said sort of demonstrated how out of touch…but i think as far as authenticity goes, in that moment, he was being authentic. he was triggered. he was in a place where he felt pretty safe. and he felt like this was his domain. and here i was this person daring to challenge him. he didn’t think about it. he spoke from his true authentic self. i think it’s really hard for a lot of white people to understand about privilege is that space that we have – that to us is normal, it’s ‘here’s my space and don’t mess with it – here’s my rules’. and when we’re in a situation when perhaps we’re not the dominant group or if we’re outnumbered by whomever the group is (african americans or gay people if we’re not gay, whatever) then we feel like we’re being attacked because we’re losing something that belongs to us or that we’re entitled to it. why was robbins permitted to continue without more people coming to her defense? why did mccool stay for the entire four-day session? she later admitted that she wasn’t proud of the way she acquiesced to his power. she felt that she got small during their debate. did anyone else leave? (it appears some did.) was it celebrity privilege? was it gender privilege? was it racial privilege? or was it any of the other privileges (e.g., class, sexual orientation, education, physical ability, age, national origin) that are commonly discussed that allowed him to express authentically beyond what others found acceptable? researchers from the university, california, berkeley (california) and the rotman school of management, university of toronto (ontario) ( ) performed seven studies that revealed that upper-class people behave more unethically than lower-class people. greed tends to be the motivating factor (piff, stancato, cote, mendoza- denton, & keltner, ). more research is needed to explore the role privilege plays in authentic expression at work. final thoughts was robbins’ apology truly authentic? why did he wait days to apologize? was it a full apology? why did his people contact tarana burke after the incident to provide context? why did he issue an online, written apology rather than making it in-person? most importantly, for whom was the apology intended? it didn’t seem to be specifically directed toward mccool. finally, critical to our purposes, when was his expression more authentic, during the incident or in the apology? this incident sheds light on the power (or lack of power) of apologies once the apologizer recants for sharing what was once his/her authentic expression. in his book mea culpa: a sociology of apology and reconciliation, nicolas tavuchis discusses the significance and process of apologies. tavuchis posits that the process of an apology as a dyadic interaction between offender and offended, where remorse and forgiveness are at the core (retzinger, ). apologies aren’t easy and involve risks, self-exposure and accountability (retzinger, ). one compelling element of tavuchis’s views on apologies is that he believes that apologies are not a single action of attrition but rather ongoing steps between persons to repair relationships (retzinger, ). research on conflict management offers that an apology is a compelling tool, used by violators, to clear up a wrong-doing, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the victim (fehr, geland, & nag, ; fisher & exline, ; shumann, ). apologies help victims: ( ) feel validated; ( ) improve their opinions of their wrongdoers; ( ) reduce their frustration, animosity and resentment toward their wrongdoers; ( ) increase their compunction and alacrity to forgive their wrongdoer (barkat, ; eaton, ; ohbuchi, kameda, & agarie, ; shumann, ). however, although apologies are powerful reparation tools, wrongdoers sometimes don’t apologize, don’t apologize in a timely manner, or don’t apologize appropriately (shumann, ). robbins’ apology, in some regard, falls into all three categories. and, recalling tavuchis’s view on apologizing (i.e., it’s not a single action), robbins misses the mark again because he hasn’t said anything since the incident. tavuchis says that a true apology involves both saying and feeling sorry. moreover, robbins never apologized directly to mccool—not for his views on the #metoo movement, but for what appeared to be the bullying techniques he used to get her to come to his side. the ironic aspect of this entire incident was that they were debating women asking for help in dealing with abusers, primarily men, and he was being abusive. it was a delayed apology, and it contradicted what he said about apologizing during the incident. apologies regarding authentic or inauthentic expression may be the most difficult to embrace and accept. authenticity points toward different expression, practices, attitudes, choices, perspective and the resulting behaviors (liedtka, ). will organizations begin to add authenticity expression guidelines to its corporate policies? will organizations support more space and more support for authentic expression as noted by the dual threshold model for authenticity? will leaders truly begin to embrace authenticity, address inherent biases that they may have and create cultures where employees feel free to express more of who they are and, respectfully, more of what they think to avoid crossing an impropriety threshold. taylor ( ) points out that organizations should not be the enemy of authenticity – they should be its host (liedtka, ). boyle ( ) asks an extremely provocative question: what kind of world do we create when we accept that each of us—nearly all of whom spend the majority of our waking lives working within the confines of one kind of institution or the other—can be fully authentic only at our leisure (liedtka, )? conclusion in this paper, my aim was to extend the contributions of the numerous researchers who have studied authenticity in the past by focusing on its impact in the work setting; most specifically, uncovering a more current definition and exploring the degrees of authenticity and the range of authentic expression. in order to do this, i conducted both qualitative and quantitative studies. i concluded with an ad hoc case analysis/deconstruction illustrating what can happen if someone crosses an authentic expression impropriety threshold (i.e., violated expression norms) within their organizational environment. authenticity is supposed to be about being who we naturally are (or strive to be), not who we believe we have to be in order to be productive and safe at work. although organizations ask for authenticity and truth, research gives evidence to the notion that there is a limit to what type of authentic expression is wanted and encouraged. as illustrated in the robbins’ case, sometimes full authentic expression can cross impropriety thresholds established by the workplace culture. the culture dictates the organization’s values, beliefs, communication methods, practices, decision making, time focus, strategy, goals and more. these, in turn, influence authentic expression and behaviors. what does this mean for the st century workplace? does it mean the workplace is going to continue to be a place where people perceive that “going along to get along” is safer than “i’ve got to be me”? are diversity dimensions like race and gender going to continue to impact an individual’s concerns about authentic expression? are there still going to be organizations that create and sustain cultures and environments where people fear repercussion or reprisal for authentic expression? or is the st century workplace, with its numerous changes, going to be a place where individuals feel safe to express authentically, given the situation? these are questions to answer moving forward. this research is merely another step in a compelling and complicated authenticity journey. authentic expression at work will continue to be examined and explored – much work remains to be done. researchers will continue to analyze, at a deeper level, the factors that help and hinder authentic expression and what creates larger or smaller space to express authentically at work. some believe that full authentic expression at work will never be possible in cultures that impose control over daily practices—and that give you a vote but not a voice. nonetheless, what is known today is that authentic expression has both costs and benefits to individuals at work. tables table : descriptive statistics and correlations table : t-tests and t-test # : demographic sensitivities f sig. t df authentic expression equal variances assumed . . - . t-test # : authenticity support f sig. t df authentic expression equal variances assumed . . . table : regressions for dependent variables job satisfaction organizational commitment job performance independent variables β β β gender - . . . white-non-white - . . - . manager - non-manager . . - demographic sensitivities - . - . . authentic expression . - . . extraversion . - . . openness . - . . emotional intelligence . - . . ** authenticity support . ** . ** . * r squared . . . f . ** . ** . ** *p < . ; **p <. table . survey responses question one how important do you think authenticity is at work?  although i think it is important, i think in the current work environment in general, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for others to accept authenticity at work.  very important. it is important to never lose sight of your values and morals just because of a job. your work environment should promote these same values you have.  very important, though not essential.  not too important. i don't think it hinders success much at all, though i think it would influence happiness/enjoyment if you never had to worry about "acting" in front of others.  if you don’t demonstrate and receive authentic experiences in the workplace - how can trust exist? authenticity is essential!  depending upon the situation it is usually very important. however, the politics sometimes leads you to be not so authentic.  i'd say you have to be at least an on a scale otherwise you're just taking orders and not being creative. you can't be two different people; sending mixed messages to co- workers will cause a breakdown in relationships.  there are limits. professionalism requires a certain level of decorum, and sometimes you simply have to buck up because work is paid for a reason -- people are not going to do it for free.  very important but not often supported by upper level management to be authentic.  very. part of diversity is diversity in thought as well as background.  not important, fake it ‘til you make it.  authenticity is critical to the productivity and job satisfaction of any individual in the workplace. if employees feel they can't be themselves at work, they are going to spend a lot of time and energy "covering". that is time and energy that could have otherwise been spent on their actual work.  extremely important. it benefits the individual if they can be true to self as well as those around the person so they can know who they're truly working with. anyplace there is truth there is freedom.  people should be themselves unless it impacts how they perform. for example, a person who is very quick to react will need to temper that quickness if they are in a role that requires them to be a good listener and gather all of the facts before weighing in on a situation and/or presenting a solution.  very. it is critical that employees feel they can bring their authentic self to work. that requires a culture that encourages and is accepting of everyone and the experiences, background, knowledge, etc. that they bring to the job. it creates a wall if as a company we do not support authenticity.  i do. it can be very difficult for someone who has to constantly worry about what others are going to think or trying to hide something in fear of what others may or may not think. table . survey responses question two do you think a person has to be authentic in order for him/her to be productive at work? explain.  no. i think you can probably be more productive if you are authentic, but people have been going to work for years and years without totally being themselves and they have managed to survive and even thrive.  not necessarily. i believe depending on the job/role and the degree of contact with other people necessitates the level of authenticity required. that said i believe being authentic and genuine will most often get people further and allow for more success, unless their authentic self is a jerk.  if a person isn't authentic, their work isn't authentic, and by that it isn't being fulfilled to its best potential. being authentic will affect a person's emotions, mental stability, and demeanor and when those aspects are negative it has a corresponding impact on that person's output.  no authenticity is linked to social interaction. productivity is linked to production – so if the person needs to wear his/her mask to get the work done so be it.  yes - the buck stops here. it starts with each individual contributing to the whole. if you stand out as a "me me" person then the breakdown will start. work has to be integrated with a person's true self for him/her to give his/her all. at the same time, it's not utopia and people are paid to work; some compromises may be required.  absolutely. progress cannot be made or measured in the workplace without it.  yes, if you're faking who you are you can't be creative or problem solve effectively - or at least what you do come up with won't be as good.  no, the work will still get done but turnover may be higher and satisfaction lower.  matrix and hierarchy and the political games that one must play to get their ideas supported can hinder one’s ability to remain authentic.  no, all that matters is the leader's perception of you, and if you have to influence others, how they feel about you.  a person has to be part of the right club. i am actually leaving my current job after years due to the poor management and lack of respect by management. the company i work for says that they value inclusion and want to create a structure where everyone is heard. they will never get there with the current management in place. i have seen the company change from god old boy’s club mentality to the new age of female bullies in management. i actually think the age of the "female bully" culture is worse. at least in the good old days they appreciated you if you were good at getting things done. the female bullies are untrusting and feel threatened by others so they are always looking for ways to undermine you unless you are part of the cool kids under club!  yes, because nobody wants to work for a bull shitter. be real. be yourself. people really respect and appreciate if you are yourself.  yes. i think being authentic makes you more productive. people trust you more so they work harder. people aren't trying to figure out your motives so you are more efficient. conversations can be faster and decisions made quicker when people give their honest opinion. you come to better decisions when everyone participates and shares their perspective.  i believe that the more authentic a person is at work, the more productive he/she will ultimately be. putting on a facade requires effort, expends time and generally promotes a bad taste in one's mouth. these types of "negativities" can certainly counteract an individual's productivity in a day's/month's/year's work.  no, i think some people are comfortable being inauthentic, in fact, some people are naturally inauthentic, and it may be difficult for those people to be their authentic self at work. personally, i can't function if i can't be myself.  yes. authenticity promotes engagement. being yourself without fear of judgment or retribution allows for creativity and doing things differently. references abc news. 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https://moneyinc.com/tony-robbins-net-worth/ zarkov, d. & davis, k, ( ). ambiguities and dilemmas around #metoo: #for how long and where to? european journal of women’s studies, ( ), - . appendix authenticity survey section : demographics please complete the following information about yourself: organization:__________________________________________________________ gender:______________________________________________________________ race:________________________________________________________________ ethnicity:____________________________________________________________ number of years with your company:_______________________________________ number of direct reports (i.e., people you manage; if you do not supervise anyone, put ):_______ section : authenticity scale please respond to each item below using the following response option range: – strongly disagree to - strongly agree. strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree or disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree at work, i think it is better to be yourself, than to be popular. i don’t know how i feel inside. at work, i am strongly influenced by the opinions of others. i usually do what other people tell me to do. at work, i always feel i need to do what others expect me to do. at work, other people influence me greatly. i feel as if i don’t know myself very well. at work, i always stand by what i believe in. i am true to myself in most situations. at work, i feel out of touch with the ‘real’ me. at work, i live in accordance with my values and beliefs. at work, i feel alienated from myself. section : authenticity support please respond to each item below using the following response option range: – strongly agree to - strongly disagree. mark your answer. strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree or disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree our company’s employee policies influence how authentic i am at work. my manager plays a significant role in how authentic i am at work. my gender impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work. my age impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work. my ethnicity impacts the support i receive to be authentic at work. past experiences in this company make me comfortable being authentic at work. believing i can be authentic at work helps my productivity. at work, i feel free to express my true feelings with my manager. at work, i feel free to express my true feelings with my co- workers. my manager knows the real me. my co-workers support my authentic expression at work. my manager wants us to be authentic at work. my co-workers know the real me. our company expects us to be authentic when we interact at work. my co-workers and i discuss being authentic at work. some people have more freedom than others at work to express their authentic self. my manager and i have very candid conversations about work. my coworkers help create a supportive environment for me at work. section : big subscale here are a number of characteristics that may or may not apply to you. for example, do you agree that you are someone who likes to spend time with others? please mark the box that corresponds with each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with that statement. strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree or disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree i see myself as someone who… strongly disagree mostly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree mostly agree strongly agree is talkative is reserved is full of energy generates a lot of enthusiasm tends to be quiet has an assertive personality is sometimes shy, inhibited is outgoing, sociable is original, comes up with new ideas is curious about many different things is ingenious, a deep thinker has an active imagination is inventive values artistic, aesthetic expression prefers work that is routine likes to reflect, play with ideas has artistic interests is sophisticated in art, music or literature section . emotional intelligence subscale (teique-sf) instructions: please answer each statement below by putting a circle around the number that best reflects your degree of agreement or disagreement with that statement. do not think too long about the exact meaning of the statements. work quickly and try to answer as accurately as possible. there are no right or wrong answers. there are seven possible responses to each statement ranging from ‘completely disagree’ (number ) to ‘completely agree’ (number ). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . completely completely disagree agree . expressing my emotions with words is not a problem for me. . i often find it difficult to see things from another person’s viewpoint. . on the whole, i’m a highly motivated person. . i usually find it difficult to regulate my emotions. . i generally don’t find life enjoyable. . i can deal effectively with people. . i tend to change my mind frequently. . many times, i can’t figure out what emotion i'm feeling. . i feel that i have a number of good qualities. . i often find it difficult to stand up for my rights. . i’m usually able to influence the way other people feel. . on the whole, i have a gloomy perspective on most things. . those close to me often complain that i don’t treat them right. . i often find it difficult to adjust my life according to the circumstances. . on the whole, i’m able to deal with stress. . i often find it difficult to show my affection to those close to me. . i’m normally able to “get into someone’s shoes” and experience their emotions. . i normally find it difficult to keep myself motivated. . i’m usually able to find ways to control my emotions when i want to. . on the whole, i’m pleased with my life. . i would describe myself as a good negotiator. . i tend to get involved in things i later wish i could get out of. . i often pause and think about my feelings. . i believe i’m full of personal strengths. . i tend to “back down” even if i know i’m right. . i don’t seem to have any power at all over other people’s feelings. . i generally believe that things will work out fine in my life. . i find it difficult to bond well even with those close to me. . generally, i’m able to adapt to new environments. . others admire me for being relaxed. section : general questions and comments please provide your thoughts to the following questions: . how important do you think authenticity is at work? ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ . do you think a person has to be authentic in order for him/her to be productive at work? explain. ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ . what helps and what hinders your authentic expression at work? ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ additional comments: ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ a systematic review of qualitative studies of adults’ experiences of being assessed for psychological therapies health expectations. ; – .	 		 	 | 	 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hex received:	 	april	   | revised:	 	september	   | accepted:	 	october	 doi:	 . /hex. r e v i e w a r t i c l e a systematic review of qualitative studies of adults’ experiences of being assessed for psychological therapies angela sweeney phd  | sarah clement phd  | kate gribble bsc  |  elizabeth jackson pgdip  | sarah carr phd  | jocelyn catty dphil  | steve gillard phd this	is	an	open	access	article	under	the	terms	of	the	creative	commons	attribution	license,	which	permits	use,	distribution	and	reproduction	in	any	medium,	 provided	the	original	work	is	properly	cited. ©	 	the	authors.	health expectations	published	by	john	wiley	&	sons	ltd population	health	research	institute,	st	 georges,	university	of	london,	london,	uk freelance	researcher,	london,	uk child,	community	and	educational	 psychology,	exeter	university,	exeter,	uk sgul	library,	st	georges,	university	of	 london,	london,	uk school	of	social	policy,	university	of	 birmingham,	birmingham,	uk department	of	education	and	 training,	tavistock	and	portman	nhs	 foundation	trust,	london,	uk correspondence angela	sweeney,	population	health	 research	institute,	st	georges,	university	of	 london,	london,	uk. email:	asweeney@sgul.ac.uk funding information research	trainees	coordinating	centre,	 grant/award	number:	pdf- - - ;	 national	institute	for	health	research abstract objective:	to	synthesize	the	qualitative	literature	on	adults’	experiences	of	psycho- logical	therapy	assessments.	the	review	was	led	by	people	with	experience	of	under- going	assessments,	with	high	levels	of	client	involvement	throughout. search strategy:	a	comprehensive	search	of	electronic	databases	was	undertaken,	 with	additional	search	strategies	employed	to	locate	further	literature. inclusion criteria:	studies	were	included	that	qualitatively	explored	the	experiences	 of	people	 aged	 +	who	had	been	assessed	 for	psychological	 therapy	 services.	 assessments	could	be	structured	or	unstructured.	qualitative	was	defined	as	any	 analysed	account	of	people’s	experiences,	including	qualitative	survey	data. data extraction and synthesis:	literature	quality	was	appraised	using	the	critical	 appraisal	skills	program	checklist,	modified	to	include	client	involvement	and	inter- sectionalities.	following	data	extraction,	thematic	synthesis	was	used	to	synthesize	 findings	across	studies. results:	of	 	 	titles	were	screened,	with	 	studies	 relevant	 to	 the	review.	 themes	and	sub	themes	were	identified	at	three	stages	of	the	assessment	process:	 the	journey	to	the	assessment,	at	the	assessment,	and	after	the	assessment.	findings	 highlighted	the	emotional	impact	of	assessments,	collaboration,	intersectionalities,	 rights,	 pathologization,	 socioeconomic	 restrictions,	 and	 information	 and	 support	 needs.	implications	and	limitations	were	indicated. discussion and conclusions:	findings	were	situated	within	the	trauma-	informed	(tia)	 literature.	 trauma-	informed	 assessment	 principles,	 including	 collaborative	 assess- ments,	may	be	fruitful	means	of	improving	people’s	experiences.	whilst	the	benefits	of	 collaboration	appear	self-	evident,	explicitly	collaborative	approaches	were	not	 the	 norm,	nor	were	studies	conducted	 independently.	further	service	user	research	 is	 needed.	a	greater	understanding	of	the	experience	of	minority	groups	is	also	needed. k e y w o r d s cbt,	client	experience,	client	involvement,	counselling,	iapt,	psychological	therapy	 assessments,	psychotherapy,	qualitative	research,	service	user	experience,	service	user	 involvement,	systematic	review,	thematic	synthesis www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hex http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:asweeney@sgul.ac.uk   |     sweeney et al.   |   i n t r o d u c t i o n in	england,	large	numbers	of	adults	access	psychological	therapies,	with	 the	use	of	such	therapies	having	risen	steadily	since	 . 	nearly	one	 million	people	are	assessed	annually	in	england	through	the	national	 health	 service	 (nhs)	 improving	 access	 to	 psychological	 therapies	 (iapt)	programme	alone 	(iapt	is	an	english	nhs	therapy	programme	 delivered	through	local	services	and	free	at	the	point	of	delivery).	this	 figure	is	set	to	rise	to	 . 	million	by	 . 	this	indicates	that	huge	num- bers	of	people	in	england	are	assessed	for	psychological	therapies	every	 year,	with	an	upward	trajectory.	note	that	we	are	using	the	term	“psy- chological	therapies”	to	refer	to	various	talk-	based	therapies	including	 counselling,	psychotherapies,	cognitive	behavioural	therapy. prior	to	delivering	a	psychological	therapy,	an	assessment	is	un- dertaken	during	which	assessors	establish	service	suitability	and	eligi- bility,	considering	whether	and	how	psychological	therapy	might	help.	 approaches	vary	from	unstructured	history	gathering	or	storytelling	 methods 	to	structured	assessments	of	symptoms, 	or	some	combina- tion	of	both.	assessments	can	take	place	many	months	before	therapy	 begins	or	seamlessly	lead	into	therapy.	whilst	people	within	iapt	typ- ically	receive	a	single	brief	telephone	assessment,	beyond	iapt,	as- sessments	can	be	one-	off	information	gathering	exercises	or	multiple	 sessions	which	aim	to	have	therapeutic	impact. the	ways	in	which	practitioners	conduct	assessments	are	influ- enced	by	factors	such	as	service	cultures;	bureaucratic	requirements;	 personal	skills	and	qualities;	early	training;	theoretical	orientation;	 practical	experience;	client	 factors;	 therapeutic	alliance;	and	how	 these	meld	within	 specific	 assessments. , 	thus,	whilst	 there	are	 broad	approaches	to	assessment,	individual	encounters	are	inevita- bly	intuitive,	idiosyncratic	and	vary	from	assessor	to	assessor	and	 encounter	to	encounter. there	is	some	evidence	that	psychological	therapies	can	cause	 long-	term	harm 	and	that	people	who	identify	as	lgbt	and/or	as	 black	and	minority	ethnic	are	more	likely	to	report	harms. 	hardy	 and	colleagues	found	that	a	clear	assessment,	amongst	other	fac- tors,	 fostered	 engagement	 and	 helped	 mitigate	 against	 potential	 long-	term	harms. there	is	a	growing	international	literature	on	trauma-	informed	 approaches	(tias).	such	approaches	understand	the	role	of	violence	 and	trauma	in	the	lives	of	many	who	seek	psychological	support;	en- sure	that	systems	and	practitioners	are	sensitized	to	this	and	do	not	 (re)traumatize;	and	are	strengths	based,	understanding	that	people	 are	attempting	to	survive. 	trauma-	informed	assessments	aim	to	 be	informed	by	cultural,	religious,	gender,	language,	socioeconomic,	 age	and	disability	awareness;	focus	on	therapeutic	alliance	and	col- laboration;	and	have	clear	and	transparent	processes. 	assessors	 ensure	questions	are	necessary,	make	sensitive	and	carefully	timed	 and	paced	trauma	enquiries,	do	not	ask	for	trauma	details,	support	 grounding	and	focus	on	immediate	safety. - 	this	tia	literature	will	 be	used	to	inform	an	understanding	of	people’s	experiences	of	psy- chological	assessments. despite	 an	 established	 culture	 of	 service	 user	 involvement	 in	 mental	 health,	 psychological	 therapies	 lack	 almost	 any	 client	 involvement.	developing	an	involvement	culture	could	enable	ser- vices	to	enhance	ethical	practice,	minimize	harms	and	reduce	drop- outs. 	 however,	 trivedi	 argues	 that	 psychological	 therapies	 are	 often	resistant	to	client	involvement,	for	instance,	arguing	that	feed- back	is	“transference,”	that	people	have	an	“axe	to	grind,”	are	too	vul- nerable	to	be	involved	or	are	unable	to	comment	dispassionately. we	will	consider	client	involvement	levels	in	our	review	papers. the	purpose	of	this	review	was	to	synthesize	qualitative	research	ex- ploring	adults’	experiences	of	undergoing	psychological	therapy	assess- ments	to	develop	a	rich	and	comprehensive	understanding	that	increases	 best	practice	knowledge.	the	review	is	being	conducted	as	part	of	a	wider	 study	investigating	assessment	processes	for	talking	therapies	(aptt).   |   m e t h o d s this	study	had	four	main	phases:	(a)	formulation	of	the	protocol;	(b)	 systematic	searching	and	selection	of	literature;	(c)	data	extraction	 and	quality	assessment;	and	(d)	data	synthesis. .  | formulating the protocol a	service	user	advisory	group	(suag)	established	the	review	priori- ties	including	focus,	literature	types	and	key	terms.	a	draft	protocol	 was	discussed	and	revised	in	a	suag	subgroup.	the	suag,	a	clinician	 advisory	group	and	a	research	librarian,	reviewed	the	protocol,	lead- ing	to	revisions.	search	terms	were	further	revised	following	piloting. . .  | inclusion and exclusion criteria studies	that	met	the	following	criteria	were	included: • population:	adults	aged	 +	who	have	been	assessed	for	a	psycho- logical	therapy	service	for	their	mental	health. • phenomena:	 explores	 an	 aspect	 of	 people’s	 experiences	 of	 being	 assessed	 using	 structured	 or	 unstructured	 approaches.	 assessment	was	defined	as	a	process. • study type:	any	analysed	account	of	people’s	experiences,	 including	 qualitative	components	of	broader	studies	and	qualitative	survey	data. exclusion	criteria	were	(a)	people	aged	 	or	under;	(b)	studies	where	 it	was	not	possible	to	disaggregate	clients’	and	other’s	views;	(c)	social	 or	cognitive	assessments;	(d)	conference	proceedings/abstracts;	and	(e)	 publications	not	in	english.	there	were	no	restrictions	by	date	or	setting. .  | systematic searching and selection of literature . .  | search strategy four	electronic	databases	were	searched	in	january	 ,	updated	 on	august	 :	cinahl	(cumulative	index	to	nursing	and	allied	 health	literature),	embase,	psycinfo	and	medline.	search	terms	      |   sweeney et al. were	applied	using	free	text	and	subject	headings	(see	table	s 	for	 final	search	strategy	and	table	s 	for	an	example). in	 consultation	 with	 advisory	 groups,	 additional	 literature	 searching	 included	 (a)	 worldcat	 dissertation	 and	 theses,	 and	 opengrey,	 searched	 in	february	 ,	updated	 in	august	 ;	 (b)	a	call	for	literature	was	placed	in	a	national	service	user/survivor	 organization	newsletter;	 (c)	 forward	and	backward	citation	 track- ing	of	included	papers	and	some	relevant	excluded	papers;	(d)	four	 journal	indexes	were	searched:	psychological	assessment;	journal	 of	counseling	psychology;	international	journal	of	mental	health;	 and	psychology	and	psychotherapy:	theory,	research	and	practice;	 (e)	where	possible,	lead	authors	of	included	papers	were	asked	for	 relevant	literature;	and	(f)	requests	to	advisory	groups	and	key	ex- perts.	this	enabled	us	to	identify	literature	beyond	peer-	reviewed	 journals. . .  | screening and selection of studies two	 authors	 screened	 retrieved	 records	 from	 the	 	 peer-	 reviewed	database	searches	for	potential	inclusion	kg	and	sc.	each	 author	screened	 %	of	 records	 (n	=	 	records	per	screener),	 with	 %	 (n	=	 )	 of	 records	 double	 screened.	a	kappa	 calcula- tion	on	the	results	of	double	screening	found	that	the	strength	of	 agreement	between	screeners	was	poor	(unweighted	κ =	 . ;	 %	 ci	=	 -	 . ).	a	third	screener	as	reviewed	the	records	that	each	 screener	had	identified	as	potentially	relevant.	sc	then	rescreened	 all	references	as	there	was	strong	agreement	between	as	and	sc	had	 extensive	experience	in	systematic	reviews.	the	full	texts	of	identi- fied	studies	were	assessed	for	eligibility	by	two	people	as/sc.	in	 the	 	update	search,	sc	screened	titles/abstracts	and	as	and	sc	 assessed	studies	for	eligibility	based	on	the	full	texts.	discrepancies	 were	discussed	and	resolved	with	an	arbiter	sg. for	the	grey	literature,	one	author	screened	the	retrieved	titles	 sc,	located	and	read	full	copies	of	texts	and	arrived	at	a	list	of	po- tential	titles.	a	second	author	then	reviewed	the	full	texts	for	their	 possible	inclusion	as.	there	were	no	discrepancies. .  | data extraction and quality appraisal . .  | data extraction data	extraction	was	discussed	in	a	suag	sub	group	and	piloted.	a	 standard	data	extraction	form,	used	by	as,	extracted	basic	 infor- mation	such	as	country,	methods,	participant	socio-	demographics	 and	assessment	form	(see	table	s ).	first	authors	were	contacted	 (where	possible)	for	clarifications	and	to	describe	client	involvement.	 extraction	of	study	findings	is	described	under	data	synthesis. . .  | quality appraisal we	piloted	three	quality	appraisal	approaches , 	 including	a	be- spoke	approach	used	 in	eppi-	centre	 reviews	 (these	build	on	 the	 quality	assessment	frameworks	of	previous	eppi	reviews). - 	like	 malpass	and	colleagues,	we	concluded	that	 the	casp	 included	a	 range	of	issues	whilst	remaining	manageable. 	to	ensure	the	review	 was	client	focused,	we	modified	the	casp	to	include	intersectionali- ties	and	client	involvement	(see	table	s ). feder	et	al 	piloted	four	approaches	to	scoring	the	casp	and	 found	a	simple	unweighted	score	was	most	effective,	and	so	we	also	 adopted	this	approach.	our	aim	was	not	to	exclude	papers	based	on	 quality	as	there	is	a	lack	of	consensus	over	quality	appraisal	meth- ods,	and	poor	or	limited	reporting	does	not	necessarily	equate	to	 unreliable	findings. 	instead,	we	aimed	to	gain	some	understanding	 of	the	strength	of	the	evidence	base	and	have	reported	the	overall	 quality	of	the	body	of	literature,	rather	than	individual	scores. .  | data synthesis literature	was	analysed	using	thematic	synthesis. 	first,	literature	 was	read	and	extensive	notes	were	taken,	with	the	whole	text	con- sidered	data.	from	this,	a	draft	coding	frame	was	created,	discussed	 by	the	suag	and	applied	using	microsoft	excel.	the	coding	frame	 contained	 descriptive	 and	 analytical	 themes,	 subtheme,	 linkages	 across	the	data	and	indicative	quotes	and	was	refined	and	expanded	 as	 coding	continued.	findings	were	discussed	 in	a	 reflexive	data	 workshop	with	suag	members.   |   r e s u lt s .  | description of included studies searching	identified	 	 	references,	with	 	studies	relevant	to	 the	review—see	figure	 ,	prisma	diagram,	for	the	flow	of	papers	 through	the	review.	there	were	two	phd	theses,	six	reports	and	five	 peer-	reviewed	papers. nine	 studies	 were	 from	 the	 uk,	 with	 one	 each	 from	 the	 netherlands,	united	states,	canada	and	israel	(table	 ).	five	studies	 explored	 iapt	(described	 in	the	 introduction);	 this	 involves	a	tele- phone	assessment	followed	by	allocation	to	therapy	(if	eligible),	typi- cally	a	short	course	of	cbt.	all	but	one	study	was	published	in	or	after	 	with	six	studies	published	in	 -	 .	one	study	used	a	sur- vey	alone	and	five	studies	used	semi-	structured	interviewing	alone.	 the	remainder	used	interviews	along	with	one	other	method	(survey,	 focus	group,	audio-	recording	or	written	account	of	the	assessment).	 ethnicity	was	not	reported	in	four	studies,	and	the	majority	of	par- ticipants	were	white	in	all	but	two	remaining	studies.	overall,	more	 women	were	included	than	men.	sexual	orientation	was	described	in	 two	studies,	with	around	half	of	people	identifying	as	heterosexual	in	 one	study	and	around	three	quarters	in	the	second. .  | quality of included studies quality	appraisal	scores	ranged	from	 	to	 	(maximum	 )	with	a	 mean	of	 .	reports	tended	to	score	higher	than	peer-	reviewed	pa- pers,	perhaps	related	to	journal	word	space	restrictions. 	studies	 were	 strong	 on	 the	 appropriateness	 of	 design	 (eg,	 recruitment),	   |     sweeney et al. basic	 reporting	 (eg,	 aims)	 and	 value.	around	half	 the	 studies	 in- volved	service	users/clients	 in	the	research	process	( / )	and/or	 considered	issues	relating	to	intersectionalities	( / ).	few	studies	 fully	reported	ethical	 issues	( / )	or	critically	examined	research	 relationships	( / );	all	that	had	were	led	by	or	had	high	levels	of	 client	involvement.	notably,	three	studies	were	conducted	by	clini- cal	researchers	employed	at	the	sites	being	explored	and	one	by	a	 researcher	employed	by	the	service	under	study. .  | findings the	results	are	clustered	around	three	elements	of	the	assessment	 process:	the	journey	to	the	assessment,	at	the	assessment	and	after	 the	assessment,	with	a	number	of	themes	and	sub	themes	 identi- fied	at	each	point—table	 	provides	an	overview.	quotes	directly	 from	research	participants	are	differentiated	in	the	text	from	author	 quotes	by	the	use	of	italics.	table	s 	gives	a	fuller	overview	of	the	 findings	through	further	exemplar	quotations. the	suag	drew	strong	parallels	between	the	preliminary	results,	 their	personal	experiences	and	the	findings	of	broader	survivor-	led	 studies. 	there	were	occasional	points	of	divergence,	most	notably	 around	experiences	of	post-	assessment	feedback.	during	the	data	 workshop,	the	group	again	felt	that	the	findings	reflected	their	expe- riences,	identifying	areas	of	importance	and	implications	which	have	 informed	the	discussion.   |   t h e j o u r n e y t o t h e a s s e s s m e n t .  | distress and desperation the drugs and psychiatrist were not working – i was des- perate (morris) people’s	 reasons	 for	 seeking	assessments	were	predominantly	 captured	 in	 four	papers, - 	often	conveying	a	sense	of	despera- tion	and	crisis.	morris	summarized	people’s	reasons	as	a	triangula- tion	between	(a)	current	life	events	(such	as	divorce);	(b)	past	events	 and	behaviours	(eg,	childhood	sexual	abuse/self-	harm);	and	(c)	cur- rent	feelings	and	behaviours	(eg,	anger/eating	problems). 	women	 often	tolerated	enormous	amounts	of	distress	before	seeking	help. despite	this,	some,	men	and	women,	questioned	the	legitimacy	of	 their	right	to	support	or	attention , , 	and	felt	grateful	to	receive	 a	service. , figure   prisma	diagram	showing	 flow	of	studies	through	the	review records found through peer reviewed electronic database searching records clearly lacked relevance full text articles assessed for eligibility articles excluded: : not mental health : not talking therapy assessment : not qualitative : ineligible study type : not service users : could not be retrieved studies met inclusion criteria records identified through non-peer review electronic database searches records screened (after duplicates removed) additional articles double screened and judged to meet the inclusion criteria: : contact with experts/advisory groups : forward/backward citation tracking : contact with included authors : call for literature studies included in qualitative synthesis: : peer reviewed : theses : reports      |   sweeney et al. .  | seeking a new approach i was tired of being locked up (mcdonagh) many	people	had	tried	different	approaches	to	easing	their	dis- tress,	including	traditional	psychological	and	talking	therapies,	men- tal	health	services,	alternative	therapies	and	self-	help.	people	using	 specialist	services	(for	women	or	people	diagnosed	with	personality	 disorder)	often	reported	negative	contacts	with	psychiatry	which	 motivated	them	to	seek	a	new	approach. - , 	for	some	using	spe- cialist	personality	disorder	services,	the	service	was	considered	a	 “last	resort”	as	all	prior	attempts	to	engage	with	mental	health	ser- vices	had	been	unsuccessful. .  | gatekeeping [it is] discouraging when it takes courage to ask for help and you are forced to ask again and again (hamilton) whilst	approaching	a	therapy	service	often	took	courage, , , hann	found	that	people	with	poor	assessment	experiences	had	often	 struggled	with	convoluted	referrals. 	gps	were	important	gatekeep- ers	and	could	be	a	barrier	to	referral	if	they	lacked	knowledge	about	 local	services. , - 	for	some	in	contact	with	mental	health	services	 or	with	negative	experiences	of	psychiatry,	self-	referral	was	an	import- ant	way	of	bypassing	medical	establishments. .  | a difficult wait when patients are most in need and have the least support (hamilton) anticipating	the	assessment	was	often	highly	emotional:	people	 described	feeling	nervous;	daunted;	scared;	relieved;	desperate;	fright- ened	of	rejection;	concerned	about	the	legitimacy	of	their	claim	to	sup- port;	hopeless,	“it’s	this	or	nothing”;	hopeful	of	being	“cured”;	and	eager	 to	begin. , , , there	was	a	sense	that	therapy	is	“a	restricted	commodity”, particularly	in	the	context	of	uk	funding	cuts. 	consequently,	 people	 appreciated	 short	 waits	 between	 referral	 and	 assess- ment. , , , 	for	others,	 having	 their	hopes	 raised	and	 then	 waiting	for	an	assessment—sometimes	extensively—at	a	time	of	 intense	distress	were	very	difficult , - 	and	caused	some	to	 drop	out	of	the	process.	there	was	a	need	for	basic	contacts	(for	 instance,	a	 letter	confirming	a	waiting	 list	place)	and	support,	 although	 not	 everyone	 wanted	 interim	 support. , , - the length	of	the	wait	was	easier	to	bear	if	people	had	been	experi- encing	difficulties	for	a	long	time,	or	were	waiting	for	a	therapist	 of	their	choice	(eg,	a	black	female	therapist).   |   at t h e a s s e s s m e n t .  | i wanted to know that i could share an aspect of myself (mcdonagh) fundamental	to	assessments	is	that	the	client	shares	something	of	themselves	 with	the	assessor,	often	relating	to	difficult	and	painful	experiences.	this	re- quires	support,	a	sense	of	trust	and	safety,	and,	at	times,	a	shared	identity,	and	 can	cause	additional	trauma	or	spark	the	beginnings	of	catharsis. . .  | traumatic, cathartic you start talking….it’s amazing how much emotion is just bubbling under the surface (morris) undergoing	an	assessment	was	often	an	emotional	experience.	whilst	 this	could	be	cathartic	and	validating,	sparking	new	insights, , , 	it	could	 also	be	painful	and	traumatic,	raising	difficult	and	painful	issues	without	 sufficient	support. 	a	significant	determining	factor	appeared	to	be	the	 degree	of	collaboration:	explicitly	collaborative	assessments	conducted	 across	 multiple	 sessions	 were	 often	 experienced	 as	 empowering, , whilst	assessments	with	multiple	sessions	that	were	done to	a	person	were	 more	often	experienced	as	traumatic ;	this	was	in	the	context	of	the	latter	 often	being	a	“last	resort”. 		positive	assessments	could	inspire	hope	and	 be	a	catalyst	for	change, , , 	providing	a	foundation	and	direction	for	 therapy. 	good	outcomes	were	sometimes	traceable	to	assessments. . .  | opening up, closing down you’ve got to watch what you say. you definitely don’t want to show extreme signs of anger or suicidal thoughts. (danna) danna	described	participants’,	 “ambivalence	…	between	 feeling	 compelled	 to	 share	difficult	 aspects	of	 themselves	…	but	 simulta- neously	heeding	the	natural	tendency	to	protect	oneself	due	to	the	 implicit	vulnerability	that	opening	oneself	up	to	others	entails”. a participant	who	had	previously	been	hospitalized	following	an	assess- ment	was	“definitely	guarded”. 	similarly,	morris	found	that	whilst	 some	women	opened	up,	for	others	it	was	important	to	establish	a	 therapeutic	relationship	first;	she	describes	one	woman	disclosing	ex- periences	of	childhood	sexual	abuse	in	the	assessment	but	waiting	a	 year	to	disclose	bulimia	because	this	was	experienced	as	so	shameful. . .  | validation, pathologization l did not want my lesbianism looked on as pathology. did not want to be blamed for violence done to me (mcdonagh)   |     sweeney et al. table   overview	of	studies	included	in	the	synthesis lead author year country article type service assessment (purpose, assessor and procedures) study aims data collection and analysis participants (assesses only): numbers, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and age client involvement in the research processa barber uk independent	 report sutton	uplift:	an	iapt,	well-	being,	 primary	care	management	and	 secondary	mental	health	care	 assessment	service to	establish	service	eligibility.	the	assessment	could	have	been	in	 any	one	of	the	four	sutton	uplift	services.	procedures	and	 assessors	not	described to	explore	how	sutton	uplift	is	perceived	by	 people	who	have	been	offered	or	used	the	 service	with	a	particular	focus	on	access,	and	 the	support	offered	or	received	and	its	impact survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 co-	produced	 thematic-	based	 analysis 	people	surveyed,	 	people	 interviewed.	survey:	most	female	 (n	=	 ),	white	british	(n	=	 )	and	 aged	 -	 	(n	=	 )	or	 -	 	(n	=	 )	 (range	 +).	sexual	orientation	not	 stated research	led	by	service	users/ clients bryant uk independent	 report statutory	and	non-	statutory	 psychological	therapies	in	leeds to	establish	service	eligibility.	procedures	and	assessors	not	described to	explore	service	users	views	about	accessing	 psychological	therapy	services	in	leeds,	uk,	 with	a	particular	focus	on	pathways,	 information,	choice,	and	understanding	and	 expectations	of	therapy semi-	structured	 interviews.	 framework	 approach 	participants.	roughly	half	female,	 majority	white	british,	majority	 -	 	 (n	=	 )	and	 -	 	(n	=	 )	(range	 +).	 sexual	orientation	not	stated research	team	included	a	service	 user/client	researcher	and	 service	user/client	consultants cape uk peer reviewed routine	clinical	assessment	letters	 including	one	psychology	 outpatient	department purpose	of	assessment	unclear.	 	people	assessed	by	a	psychologist,	 	by	a	psychiatrist	(data	relating	to	psychologists	included	in	 synthesis).	procedures	not	described. to	explore	people’s	immediate	reactions	to	the	 routine	clinical	assessment	letters	sent	by	 their	psychiatrists	and	psychologists	to	their	 gp/other	referring	professionals semi-	structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis 	participants.	half	female,	majority	 white	except	 	african	caribbean	and	 	mixed	heritage.	age	ranged	from	 	 to	 	(median	 ).	sexual	orientation	 not	stated none	apparent crawford uk independent	 report specialist	services	for	people	 diagnosed	with	personality	 disorder	(data	relating	to	two	 therapy	services	included	in	 synthesis) to	establish	service	eligibility.	one	service	used	multiple	meetings	 and	forms;	a	second	service	used	two	meetings	and	a	computer	 assessment.	assessors	not	described the	qualitative	component	aimed	to	explore	 individuals’	experiences	with	a	particular	 focus	on	identifying	factors	that	influence	 perceptions	of	service	quality	and	outcomes,	 and	decisions	to	engage	with	or	withdraw	 from	services. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 framework	 analysis 	service	user	participants	plus	 	 ex-	service	users.	 %	female;	 %	 white	british,	 %	white	other	and	 %	bme.	age	and	sexual	orientation	 not	stated. qualitative	study	was	led	and	 conducted	by	service	user/ client	researchers danna united	states phd	thesis university	counselling	centre purpose	not	clear.	collaborative	psychological	assessments	 (or	therapeutic	assessment)	including	computer	testing	and	 feedback	conducted	by	trainee	psychologists. to	understand	client	and	therapist	experiences	 of	collaborative	assessment	with	in	order	to	 improve	practice. semi-	structured	 interviews	 (including	 videoed extracts	of	the	 assessment).	 written	 description	of	 assessment	 experiences.	 grounded theory. 	participants.	 	male,	all	white,	age	 ranged	from	 	to	 	(median	and	 mean	 ). none	apparent de	saeger the netherlands peer reviewed clinic	for	people	diagnosed	with	 personality	disorder purpose	unclear.	collaborative	therapeutic	assessment:	four	 sessions	including	psychological	testing	(eg,	rorschach)	followed	 by	written	and	face-	to-	face	feedback.	assessors	not	described. to	elucidate	and	explain	largely	favourable	 process	outcome	results	in	an	rct,	to	 generate	hypotheses	about	the	effective	 ingredients	of	therapeutic	assessments	from	 service	users’	perspectives	and	to	tighten	the	 conceptual	understanding	of	therapeutic	 assessment. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 modified	 consensual	 qualitative	 research 	participants.	 	female,	mean	age	 . 	(sd	=	 ).	ethnicity	and	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. none	apparent fornells-	 ambrojo uk peer reviewed routine	outcome	measures	 (roms)	in	iapt-	smi	(severe	 mental	illness)	demonstration	 site purpose	and	assessors	unclear.	use	of	roms	at	baseline only included	in	data	synthesis. to	explore	service	user	perceptions	of	routine	 outcome	measurement	(rom)	focusing	 particularly	on	satisfaction	and	experience. survey.	thematic	 analysis 	participants.	half	female,	 %	 from	bme	communities,	mean	age	 	 (sd	=	 . ,	range	 -	 ).	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. none	apparent hamilton uk independent	 report iapt to	establish	service	eligibility.	assessors	and	procedures	unclear. to	evaluate	london	iapt	services	with	a	 particular	focus	on	understanding	service	user	 satisfaction. survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 thematic	 analysis? 	people	surveyed,	 	focus	group	 participants,	 	interview	 participants.	survey	and	interviews:	 around	three	quarters	female,	 %	 white	british,	age	range	 -	 	(survey	 mean	age	=	 ;	interviews	mean	 age	=	 ).	sexual	orientation	not	 stated. high	levels	of	service	user/client	 involvement (continues)      |   sweeney et al. table   overview	of	studies	included	in	the	synthesis lead author year country article type service assessment (purpose, assessor and procedures) study aims data collection and analysis participants (assesses only): numbers, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and age client involvement in the research processa barber uk independent	 report sutton	uplift:	an	iapt,	well-	being,	 primary	care	management	and	 secondary	mental	health	care	 assessment	service to	establish	service	eligibility.	the	assessment	could	have	been	in	 any	one	of	the	four	sutton	uplift	services.	procedures	and	 assessors	not	described to	explore	how	sutton	uplift	is	perceived	by	 people	who	have	been	offered	or	used	the	 service	with	a	particular	focus	on	access,	and	 the	support	offered	or	received	and	its	impact survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 co-	produced	 thematic-	based	 analysis 	people	surveyed,	 	people	 interviewed.	survey:	most	female	 (n	=	 ),	white	british	(n	=	 )	and	 aged	 -	 	(n	=	 )	or	 -	 	(n	=	 )	 (range	 +).	sexual	orientation	not	 stated research	led	by	service	users/ clients bryant uk independent	 report statutory	and	non-	statutory	 psychological	therapies	in	leeds to	establish	service	eligibility.	procedures	and	assessors	not	described to	explore	service	users	views	about	accessing	 psychological	therapy	services	in	leeds,	uk,	 with	a	particular	focus	on	pathways,	 information,	choice,	and	understanding	and	 expectations	of	therapy semi-	structured	 interviews.	 framework	 approach 	participants.	roughly	half	female,	 majority	white	british,	majority	 -	 	 (n	=	 )	and	 -	 	(n	=	 )	(range	 +).	 sexual	orientation	not	stated research	team	included	a	service	 user/client	researcher	and	 service	user/client	consultants cape uk peer reviewed routine	clinical	assessment	letters	 including	one	psychology	 outpatient	department purpose	of	assessment	unclear.	 	people	assessed	by	a	psychologist,	 	by	a	psychiatrist	(data	relating	to	psychologists	included	in	 synthesis).	procedures	not	described. to	explore	people’s	immediate	reactions	to	the	 routine	clinical	assessment	letters	sent	by	 their	psychiatrists	and	psychologists	to	their	 gp/other	referring	professionals semi-	structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis 	participants.	half	female,	majority	 white	except	 	african	caribbean	and	 	mixed	heritage.	age	ranged	from	 	 to	 	(median	 ).	sexual	orientation	 not	stated none	apparent crawford uk independent	 report specialist	services	for	people	 diagnosed	with	personality	 disorder	(data	relating	to	two	 therapy	services	included	in	 synthesis) to	establish	service	eligibility.	one	service	used	multiple	meetings	 and	forms;	a	second	service	used	two	meetings	and	a	computer	 assessment.	assessors	not	described the	qualitative	component	aimed	to	explore	 individuals’	experiences	with	a	particular	 focus	on	identifying	factors	that	influence	 perceptions	of	service	quality	and	outcomes,	 and	decisions	to	engage	with	or	withdraw	 from	services. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 framework	 analysis 	service	user	participants	plus	 	 ex-	service	users.	 %	female;	 %	 white	british,	 %	white	other	and	 %	bme.	age	and	sexual	orientation	 not	stated. qualitative	study	was	led	and	 conducted	by	service	user/ client	researchers danna united	states phd	thesis university	counselling	centre purpose	not	clear.	collaborative	psychological	assessments	 (or	therapeutic	assessment)	including	computer	testing	and	 feedback	conducted	by	trainee	psychologists. to	understand	client	and	therapist	experiences	 of	collaborative	assessment	with	in	order	to	 improve	practice. semi-	structured	 interviews	 (including	 videoed extracts	of	the	 assessment).	 written	 description	of	 assessment	 experiences.	 grounded theory. 	participants.	 	male,	all	white,	age	 ranged	from	 	to	 	(median	and	 mean	 ). none	apparent de	saeger the netherlands peer reviewed clinic	for	people	diagnosed	with	 personality	disorder purpose	unclear.	collaborative	therapeutic	assessment:	four	 sessions	including	psychological	testing	(eg,	rorschach)	followed	 by	written	and	face-	to-	face	feedback.	assessors	not	described. to	elucidate	and	explain	largely	favourable	 process	outcome	results	in	an	rct,	to	 generate	hypotheses	about	the	effective	 ingredients	of	therapeutic	assessments	from	 service	users’	perspectives	and	to	tighten	the	 conceptual	understanding	of	therapeutic	 assessment. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 modified	 consensual	 qualitative	 research 	participants.	 	female,	mean	age	 . 	(sd	=	 ).	ethnicity	and	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. none	apparent fornells-	 ambrojo uk peer reviewed routine	outcome	measures	 (roms)	in	iapt-	smi	(severe	 mental	illness)	demonstration	 site purpose	and	assessors	unclear.	use	of	roms	at	baseline only included	in	data	synthesis. to	explore	service	user	perceptions	of	routine	 outcome	measurement	(rom)	focusing	 particularly	on	satisfaction	and	experience. survey.	thematic	 analysis 	participants.	half	female,	 %	 from	bme	communities,	mean	age	 	 (sd	=	 . ,	range	 -	 ).	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. none	apparent hamilton uk independent	 report iapt to	establish	service	eligibility.	assessors	and	procedures	unclear. to	evaluate	london	iapt	services	with	a	 particular	focus	on	understanding	service	user	 satisfaction. survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 focus	groups.	 thematic	 analysis? 	people	surveyed,	 	focus	group	 participants,	 	interview	 participants.	survey	and	interviews:	 around	three	quarters	female,	 %	 white	british,	age	range	 -	 	(survey	 mean	age	=	 ;	interviews	mean	 age	=	 ).	sexual	orientation	not	 stated. high	levels	of	service	user/client	 involvement (continues)   |     sweeney et al. feeling	believed	and	heard	had	a	validating	 impact, , , 	whilst	 feeling	unheard	was	at	times	experienced	as	a	betrayal. 	for	some	using	 women’s	and	“personality	disorder”	services,	feeling	validated	or	pathol- ogized	was	entwined	with	previous	experiences	of	psychiatry. - , mcdonagh	found	that	most	“traditional	[non-	feminist]	therapists	 denied	the	women’s	histories	of	sexual	abuse,	failed	to	ask	about	 sexual	abuse	…	failed	to	incorporate	such	information	into	assess- ments	when	it	was	provided…	[and]	tended	to	pathologise	the	ef- fects	of	 the	 sexual	 abuse”. 	consequently,	 some	women	sought	 women’s/feminist	therapy	that	would	“see	beyond	psychiatric	diag- noses	to	the	person	and	their	life	experiences	underneath”. 	when	 women	felt	that	therapy	services	were	becoming	medical,	they	could	 lose	trust;	for	instance,	one	woman	who	was	asked	for	her	psychia- trist’s	details	felt	pathologized	and	disengaged	shortly	after	starting	 therapy. 	similarly,	bryant	found	that	some	people	selected	a	ser- vice	because	it	could	respond	to	a	particular	issue	(eg,	sexual	abuse,	 addiction)	or	because	female	counsellors	were	available	(preferred	 by	a	minority	of	both	women	and	men). in	their	analysis,	lavie-	ajayi	found	that	the	client’s	(sima’s)	com- plex	ecological	accounts	of	her	difficulties	were	ignored	in	favour	of	 the	therapist’s	(rivka’s)	individualist	interpretation. 	sima	“tried	to	 balance	the	expectation	to	be	a	‘good	client’	and	not	challenge	the	 medical	internal	discourse	while	retaining	her	right	not	to	accept	 the	treatment	recommendations”.	post-	assessment	she	asserted: instead of insisting and … get locked on psychiatric med- ication, one could think beyond that … if she had helped me to solve the problem at my workplace, she would have cured me. . .  | social identity understanding my background in order to understand me (morris) lead author year country article type service assessment (purpose, assessor and procedures) study aims data collection and analysis participants (assesses only): numbers, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and age client involvement in the research processa hann uk independent	 report iapt varies	by	service,	not	always	clear. to	understand	the	views	of	people	who	 completed,	did	not	engage	with	or	discontin- ued	therapy	with	a	particular	focus	on	 effectiveness,	satisfaction	and	 recommendations. survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis 	people	surveyed	( 	iapt	service	 users,	 	non-		service	users).	 	 people	interviewed.	survey:	three	 quarters	white	and	female,	mean	age	 	(range	 -	 ).	interviews:	 two-	thirds	female,	three	quarters	 white,	mean	age	 	(range	 -	 ).	 sexual	orientation	not	stated. research	team	included	three	 service	user/client	researchers	 and	two	mainstream	 researchers lavie-	ajayi israel peer reviewed psychotherapy	in	a	community	 mental	health	centre to	establish	service	eligibility.	interview	by	a	therapist/ senior	clinical	psychologist to	explore,	through	discourse	analysis,	the	 tension	between	hegemonic	and	critical	 discourses	in	the	clinical	interaction	within	a	 single	assessment	encounter	between	a	 therapist	and	service	user. audiotaped	 intake.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 critical	 discourse	 analysis one	female	participant,	mizrahi	(jew	 of	north	african/asian	origin),	aged	 .	sexual	orientation	not	stated. none	apparent mcdonagh canada phd	thesis traditional	(including	psychiatric,	 psychoanalysis)	and	feminist	 therapy not	clear,	varies	by	service.	data	synthesis	includes	 data	relating	to	psychological	therapy	(including	psychoanalysis, 	psychotherapy	etc.) to	explore	women’s	subjective	experiences	of	 therapy	for	survivors	of	childhood	sexual	 abuse	(csa). survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis? 	women	survivors	of	csa	surveyed,	 	women	csa	survivors	 interviewed.	survey:	half	 heterosexual,	 %	white,	median	age	 	(range	=	 -	 ).	interviews:	half	 heterosexual,	majority	white,	median	 age	 	(range	 -	 ). researcher	identifies	as	having	 personal	experience	of	the	 topic marshall uk peer reviewed iapt to	establish	service	eligibility.	assessors	and	procedures	unclear. to	explore	people’s	reasons	for	not	attending	 therapy. semi-	structured	 interviews. thematic	 analysis	using	 data	mapping	 sheets 	participants,	 	female.	age	range	 -	 .	ethnicity	and	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. minimal morris uk report individual	or	group	psychoanalytic	 psychotherapy	at	a	women’s	 therapy	centre to	assess	service	eligibility	and	whether	group	or	individual	 therapy	more	appropriate	through	an	interview.	assessors	 are	therapists	in	the	centre to	highlight	women’s	needs,	assess	whether	 psychoanalytical	psychotherapy	helped	them	 to	progress	in	their	lives	and	identify	possible	 gaps	in	service	provision	with	a	view	to	 improving	future	women’s	experiences. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 framework	 analysis 	women	interviewed.	 	white	 british,	 	heterosexual,	majority	 aged	 -	 	(n	=	 )	(range	=	 -	 ). research	led	by	a	service	user/ client	researcher aclarified	through	email	communication	with	study	authors	where	possible.	 table    (continued)      |   sweeney et al. through	their	analysis,	lavie-	ajayi	concluded	that	gender,	ethnicity	 and	class	had	affected	the	assessment	encounter	between	sima	and	 rivka. 	morris	also	found	that	social	identity	shaped	assessments:	being	 assessed	by	someone	with	a	shared	cultural	background	and/or	language	 meant	women	could	be	understood	in	their	own	words	and	contexts. . .  | staff impact i felt that someone understood and cared (fornells-ambrojo) morris	found	that	therapists	were	typically	described	in	two	ways,	 “those	who	appeared	friendly,	welcoming	and	encouraging	and	those	 who	were	perceived	as	…	cold,	neutral	or	very	quiet”. people who found	the	assessment	difficult	typically	had	a	neutral	or	quiet	therapist.	 where	this	occurred,	the	person	sometimes	went	on	to	dislike	their	 therapist	or	group,	often	disengaging	after	a	few	sessions.	conversely,	 experiencing	kindness	could	be	“heart-	warming”, 	creating	a	sense	of	 hope, 	with	the	manner	of	giving	feedback	either	opening	or	closing	 opportunities	for	self-	reflection. 	staff	could	also	be	experienced	as	 patronizing,	or	failing	to	respond	to	people	as	individual’s,	preventing	 engagement. 	mcdonagh	 found	that	women	who	sought	 feminist	 therapy	were	more	likely	to	interview	their	prospective	therapists,	ef- fectively	assessing	their	assessor. receptionists	also	impacted	on	people’s	experiences,	hamilton	 concluding, reception staff are vital to creating a positive atmosphere in the service. we had reports of friendly, helpful and effi- cient staff, but we also heard about staff who were snappy and unfriendly. people talked about the courage involved in coming to the iapt service. what might seem like a small gesture on the part of individual staff members may have a huge impact on whether patients feel relaxed in attending the service. ( ) lead author year country article type service assessment (purpose, assessor and procedures) study aims data collection and analysis participants (assesses only): numbers, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and age client involvement in the research processa hann uk independent	 report iapt varies	by	service,	not	always	clear. to	understand	the	views	of	people	who	 completed,	did	not	engage	with	or	discontin- ued	therapy	with	a	particular	focus	on	 effectiveness,	satisfaction	and	 recommendations. survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis 	people	surveyed	( 	iapt	service	 users,	 	non-		service	users).	 	 people	interviewed.	survey:	three	 quarters	white	and	female,	mean	age	 	(range	 -	 ).	interviews:	 two-	thirds	female,	three	quarters	 white,	mean	age	 	(range	 -	 ).	 sexual	orientation	not	stated. research	team	included	three	 service	user/client	researchers	 and	two	mainstream	 researchers lavie-	ajayi israel peer reviewed psychotherapy	in	a	community	 mental	health	centre to	establish	service	eligibility.	interview	by	a	therapist/ senior	clinical	psychologist to	explore,	through	discourse	analysis,	the	 tension	between	hegemonic	and	critical	 discourses	in	the	clinical	interaction	within	a	 single	assessment	encounter	between	a	 therapist	and	service	user. audiotaped	 intake.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 critical	 discourse	 analysis one	female	participant,	mizrahi	(jew	 of	north	african/asian	origin),	aged	 .	sexual	orientation	not	stated. none	apparent mcdonagh canada phd	thesis traditional	(including	psychiatric,	 psychoanalysis)	and	feminist	 therapy not	clear,	varies	by	service.	data	synthesis	includes	 data	relating	to	psychological	therapy	(including	psychoanalysis, 	psychotherapy	etc.) to	explore	women’s	subjective	experiences	of	 therapy	for	survivors	of	childhood	sexual	 abuse	(csa). survey.	 semi-	 structured	 interviews.	 thematic	 analysis? 	women	survivors	of	csa	surveyed,	 	women	csa	survivors	 interviewed.	survey:	half	 heterosexual,	 %	white,	median	age	 	(range	=	 -	 ).	interviews:	half	 heterosexual,	majority	white,	median	 age	 	(range	 -	 ). researcher	identifies	as	having	 personal	experience	of	the	 topic marshall uk peer reviewed iapt to	establish	service	eligibility.	assessors	and	procedures	unclear. to	explore	people’s	reasons	for	not	attending	 therapy. semi-	structured	 interviews. thematic	 analysis	using	 data	mapping	 sheets 	participants,	 	female.	age	range	 -	 .	ethnicity	and	sexual	 orientation	not	stated. minimal morris uk report individual	or	group	psychoanalytic	 psychotherapy	at	a	women’s	 therapy	centre to	assess	service	eligibility	and	whether	group	or	individual	 therapy	more	appropriate	through	an	interview.	assessors	 are	therapists	in	the	centre to	highlight	women’s	needs,	assess	whether	 psychoanalytical	psychotherapy	helped	them	 to	progress	in	their	lives	and	identify	possible	 gaps	in	service	provision	with	a	view	to	 improving	future	women’s	experiences. semi-	structured	 interviews.	 framework	 analysis 	women	interviewed.	 	white	 british,	 	heterosexual,	majority	 aged	 -	 	(n	=	 )	(range	=	 -	 ). research	led	by	a	service	user/ client	researcher aclarified	through	email	communication	with	study	authors	where	possible.	 table    (continued)   |     sweeney et al. table   overview	of	people’s	experiences	of	being	assessed	for	psychological	therapies phase of the assessment process theme, illustrative quote and summary of content sub theme, illustrative quote and summary of content journey	to	the	 assessment distress and desperation “the	drugs	and	psychiatrist	were	not	working	–	i	was	 desperate”	(morris) d	esperation	and	crisis	underpinning	help-	seeking;	 legitimacy	of	claim	to	support;	gratitude -	 seeking a new approach “i	was	tired	of	being	locked	up”	(mcdonagh) t	rying	to	ease	one’s	distress;	failure	of	other	 approaches;	assessment	as	a	last	resort -	 gatekeeping “[	it	is]	discouraging	when	it	takes	courage	to	ask	for	 help	and	you	are	forced	to	ask	again	and	again”	 (hamilton) c	ourage	to	seek	therapy;	barriers	to	referral;	 importance	of	self-	referral -	 a difficult wait “	when	patients	are	most	in	need	and	have	the	least	 support”	(hamilton) a	nticipating	the	assessment;	therapy	as	a	restricted	 commodity;	waiting;	information	and	support	needs -	 at	the	 assessment “i	wanted	to	know	that	i	could	share	an	aspect	of	 myself”	(mcdonagh) feeling	safe	to	share	parts	of	yourself;	beginnings traumatic, cathartic “	you	start	talking….it’s	amazing	how	much	emotion	is	just	 bubbling	under	the	surface”	(morris) d	istress	and	catharsis;	the	importance	of	collaboration;	a	 catalyst	for	change opening up, closing down “	you’ve	got	to	watch	what	you	say.	you	definitely	don’t	want	to	 show	extreme	signs	of	anger	or	suicidal	thoughts”	(danna) o	pening	up	and	holding	back;	the	importance	of	therapeutic	 relationships validation, pathologization “l		did	not	want	my	lesbianism	looked	on	as	pathology.	did	not	 want	to	be	blamed	for	violence	done	to	me”	(mcdonagh) feeling	believed;	being	pathologized;	the	role	of	specialist	 services social identity “	understanding	my	background	in	order	to	understand	me”	 (morris) t	he	impact	of	social	identity;	sharing	language,	sharing	 backgrounds staff impact “i	felt	that	someone	understood	and	cared”	(fornells-	ambrojo) assessor	qualities;	assessing	the	assessor;	receptionists assessment techniques “i	t	is	difficult	and	pointless	to	quantify	how	i	am	feeling”	 (fornells-	ambrojo) positive,	negative	and	ambivalent	experiences	of	techniques “i	didn’t	know	what	rights	i	had”	(mcdonagh) rights,	information	and	agency information giving and gathering “i	didn’t	know	what	would	happen	at	all”	(marshall) i	nformation	giving	and	gathering;	exercising	agency,	informa- tion	needs;	information	exchange authority and agency “	the	interviewer	kept	insisting	that	i	answer	the	questions	 even	though	i	clearly	said	i	felt	uncomfortable”	(hann) assessor	as	powerful	agent;	collaborative	assessments (continues)      |   sweeney et al. . .  | assessment techniques it is difficult and pointless to quantify how i am feeling (fornells-ambrojo) techniques—ranging	 from	 rorshach	 to	 symptom	 measures— were	often	experienced	positively,	helping	people	express	 them- selves	(particularly	where	spoken	communication	was	difficult);	gain	 clarity	around	feelings;	positively	reframe	issues;	and	open	space	 for	thinking	and	reflection. , , 	where	people	were	ambivalent	 or	disliked	techniques,	it	was	typically	because	they	were	lengthy,	 challenging,	upsetting,	inflexible	or	difficult	to	engage	with. - , , some	were	sceptical	about	computer	judgements	and	preferred	to	 talk,	“i	mean,	it’s	like,	i	could	have	told	you	that”. 	whilst	partici- pants	in	de	seager	were	positive	about	testing,	one	of	the	only	neg- ative	comments	across	the	study	was	a	person	wondering	“why	all	 these	tests”. .  | i didn’t know what rights i had (mcdonagh) there	is	an	inherent,	typically	unacknowledged	power	imbalance	be- tween	clients	and	assessors.	whilst	there	are	individual	differences	in	 the	extent	to	which	people	wish	to	exercise	agency	and	choice,	people	 nonetheless	have	basic	rights	and	information	needs	that	are	not	always	 met. . .  | authority and agency the interviewer kept insisting that i answer the questions even though i clearly said i felt uncomfortable (hann) assessors	were	often	experienced	as	the	people	with	“authority”	 who	“know	best”. 	whilst	this	could	be	positive,	resulting	in	direc- tion	from	an	expert	about	whether	and	which	therapy	to	try, , 	for	 others	it	compromised	agency.	for	instance,	sima	(lavie-	ajayi)	had	 to	navigate	a	difficult	path	through	her	assessment	without	overtly	 challenging	rivka’s	discourse. 	conversely,	explicitly	collaborative	 assessments	were	typically	valued,	engendering	a	sense	of	equality	 or	involvement	which	enhanced	agency. , . .  | information giving and gathering i didn’t know what would happen at all (marshall) the	provision	of	 information	 can	be	one-	way,	 or	 “more	 akin	 to	 a	dialogue	than	to	unilateral	 information	gathering”. 	the	extent	to	 which	clients	exercised	agency	varied:	whilst	some	were	happy	to	be	 guided	by	the	therapist, , 	others	asked	questions, , 	or	wanted	to	 but	 felt	unable. 	 information	needs	 included:	alternative	 local	 ther- apy	services;	practicalities;	and	details	of	 the	 therapeutic	process. phase of the assessment process theme, illustrative quote and summary of content sub theme, illustrative quote and summary of content after	the	 assessment another difficult wait “the	coming	weeks	could	not	come	fast	enough”	 (danna) ready	for	therapy;	the	pain	of	waiting -	 receiving feedback “i		don’t	want	to	be	an	ignorant	patient”	(cape) prerequisite	for	therapeutic	alliance;	mixed	 experiences	of	written	feedback -	 making choices “you	get	what	you	are	given”	(bryant) l	ack	of	informed	choice	over	therapy	or	therapist;	 trusting	the	assessor;	choice	and	socioeconomics assessor-therapist continuity “i’	m	not	a	particularly	open	person.	so	for	me	to	do	 what	i	did	in	the	first	interview,	and	to	have	to	do	 that	all	over	again….	i	thought	that	i	had	started	 therapy”	(morris) l	ack	of	advance	warning;	familiarization	and	consist- ency;	continuity	and	socioeconomics not going on to therapy “i		just	needed	an	answer	as	to	what	to	do…	i	just	felt	 absolutely	worthless.”	(bryant) the	pain	of	rejection;	dropping	out table    (continued)   |     sweeney et al. lacking	information	created	uncertainty 	and	could	reinforce	a	sense	 of	secrecy	surrounding	therapy 	and	feel	damaging. 	in	particular,	not	 being	informed	about	the	“rules	of	therapy”	at	the	assessment	(such	as	 the	use	of	silences)	could	cause	people	to	subsequently	disengage. further,	 it	could	mean	that	boundary	breaches	were	not	recognized,	 compromising	rights: i wish i had known more because my first therapist over- stepped my boundaries and i didn’t know what rights i had. ( ) conversely,	sharing	good,	clear	information	was	valued, , , re- sulting	in	people	feeling	better	prepared	and	able	to	exercise	choice.   |   a f t e r t h e a s s e s s m e n t .  | another difficult wait? the coming weeks could not come fast enough (danna) whilst	some	people	left	the	assessment	hopeful	and	“willing	to	go	 through	the	fire”, 	often	with	the	understanding	that	therapy	would	 be	a	difficult	process,	others	felt	“opened	up”	and	had	a	potentially	dif- ficult	wait	for	therapy. .  | receiving feedback i don’t want to be an ignorant patient (cape) some	studies	described	the	 impact	of	 receiving	 face-	to-	face	or	 written	feedback	about	the	assessment	and	 its	outcomes.	face-	to-	 face	feedback	created	opportunities	to	challenge	misinterpretations	 and	for	many	was	a	prerequisite	for	a	trusting	relationship. , 	whilst	 written	feedback	could	mean	people	felt	listened	to,	understood	and	 validated, , 	or	made	their	problems	feel	contained	and	manageable,	 for	others	it	was	intensely	distressing. .  | making choices you get what you are given (bryant) there	were	few	opportunities	to	discuss	therapy	options and little	choice	about	which	therapy	or	therapist	people	received	post-	 assessment. , , , 	 some	 accepted	 this,	 trusting	 their	 referrer	 or	 assessor,	or	feeling	grateful	to	receive	any	service,	whilst	others	felt	 disappointed	and	unable	to	make	informed	choices. , , barber re- ported	that	one	person	felt	that	being	assigned	to	the	wrong	service	 post-	assessment	was	a	“waste	of	money,	time,	resources	…	putting	 people	to	the	right	service	is	fundamental”. 	people	with	means	were	 able	to	exercise	choice,	selecting	their	therapist	privately. .  | assessor - therapist continuity i’m not a particularly open person. so for me to do what i did in the first interview, and to have to do that all over again…. i thought that i had started therapy (morris) many	were	unaware	that	their	assessor	would	not	be	their	thera- pist,	and	this	could	be	upsetting.	people	who	had	the	same	assessor	 and	therapist	valued	the	familiarization	and	consistency. , 	this	issue	 was	avoided	where	people	had	the	means	to	purchase	therapy. .  | not going on to therapy i just needed an answer as to what to do… i just felt abso- lutely worthless. (bryant) bryant	explored	the	experiences	of	four	people	who	were	“willing	 to	go	through	the	fire”	but	were	not	offered	therapy. 	all	had	long-	 term	mental	health	service	contact	histories.	none	understood	why	 they	were	declined	therapy	and	none	appeared	to	have	received	infor- mation	about	alternative	services.	people	consequently	felt	powerless;	 angry;	frustrated;	rejected;	bewildered;	disappointed;	hopeless;	and	 worthless. marshall	 explored	 the	 experiences	 of	 	 people	 who	 disen- gaged	from	iapt,	finding	that	lengthy	waits	without	support,	rigid	 assessments,	a	lack	of	information	about	therapy,	patronizing	com- munication	styles	and	a	lack	of	individualized	approaches	were	all	 contributory	factors. whilst	many	who	had	taken	the	decision	to	have	an	assessment	 had	therefore	decided	to	accept	therapy	once	offered, 	others	de- cided	not	to	proceed	with	therapy.	reasons	for	declining	included	 because	 people	 had	 needed	 help	 urgently;	 were	 no	 longer	 well	 enough	to	engage	in	therapy;	or	had	found	alternative	support. ,   |   d i s c u s s i o n this	review	synthesizes	qualitative	research	on	people’s	experiences	 of	being	assessed	for	psychological	therapies;	the	findings	can	use- fully	inform	best	practice	around	assessments	and	can	also	be	un- derstood	through	trauma-	informed	(tia)	principles. in	 fully	 understanding	 people’s	 experiences,	 a	 process-	based	 conceptualization	was	adopted,	rather	than	seeing	assessments	as	 one-	off	encounters.	this	process	arguably	begins	when	people	are	 finding	the	courage	to	seek	an	assessment	and	ends	when	people	 are	waiting—typically	without	support—for	therapy	to	begin,	or	at- tempting	to	recover	from	a	rejection.	this	mirrors	the	conceptualiza- tion	adopted	in	the	tia	literature	and	proposed	elsewhere , and enables	a	greater	understanding	of	the	ways	in	which	assessments	 impact	people’s	experiences.      |   sweeney et al. the	extent	of	collaboration,	along	with	therapeutic	alliance, can	 determine	 whether	 clients	 have	 positive	 assessment	 experi- ences	that	are	empowering,	facilitate	change	and	promote	agency	 and	hope,	or	negative	experiences	that	incite	distress,	powerless- ness	and	hopelessness.	collaboration	is	also	a	fundamental	principle	 of	tias,	meaning	that	the	inherent	power	imbalance	between	staff	 and	clients	is	understood,	with	relationships	based	on	mutuality,	re- spect,	trust,	connection	and	hope. 	trauma-	informed	assessments	 are	shared,	collaborative	processes	which	seek	to	discuss	and	clarify	 connections,	 sequences,	 coping	adaptations	and	strengths. 	 it	 is	 possible	that	such	assessments	could	reduce	dropout	and	improve	 experience	 through	creating	a	high-	quality	 initial	encounter,	with	 further	research	warranted.	whilst	the	need	for	collaboration	may	 seem	self-	evident,	explicitly	collaborative	assessments	were	not	the	 norm.	moreover,	across	psychiatric	services,	service	users	typically	 feel	that	they	are	done	to,	rather	than	with. whilst	collaborative	assessments	may	be	an	 important	exam- ple	of	good	practice,	the	collaborative	assessment	studies	we	re- viewed	were	conducted	by	clinicians	employed	in	those	services. consequently,	 independent	 service	user	 research	 is	needed	as	 it	 is	uniquely	positioned	to	understand	client	experience. 	there	is	 also	 a	 danger	 that	 therapist-	led	 research	 could	 interpret	 client’s	 experiences	through	a	therapeutic,	rather	than	research	lens;	this	 could,	for	instance,	result	in	experiences	being	dismissed	as	trans- ference,	or	for	what	they	reveal	about	a	person’s	psyche,	rather	than	 what	they	reveal	about	a	service. 	referring	to	client	involvement,	 trivedi	writes, getting service users to identify for themselves the rea- sons why they might have dropped out and then working with them to address the issues could help make services more ‘user- friendly’ with a subsequent fall in dropout rates. ( ) seeking,	waiting	for,	undergoing	and	moving	on	from	an	assess- ment	can	be	intensely	distressing,	and	the	desperation	underpin- ning	help-	seeking,	as	well	 as	 the	potentially	negative	 impacts	of	 assessments,	should	not	be	underestimated.	within	this,	the	tension	 between	“opening	up,”	often	to	persuade	an	assessor	that	you	de- serve	therapy,	and	being	“guarded,”	for	instance	to	protect	oneself	 from	overwhelm,	can	be	understood	as	rational	struggles.	 in	 line	 with	tias,	assessors	must	carefully	manage	disclosures	and	attend	 to	emotional	safety. 	waiting	for	an	assessment,	or	for	therapy	to	 begin,	was	particularly	difficult	for	people	in	intense	distress	and	 could	cause	people	to	disengage.	services	should	consider	the	pos- sibilities	for	rapid	assessment	and	interim	support,	as	well	as	sup- port	where	therapy	is	not	offered	(potentially	as	simple	as	onward	 referrals). our	review	also	points	to	the	vital	role	of	women’s	therapy	ser- vices,	particularly	for	women	who	have	experienced	gender-	based	 violence	and/or	who	self-	identify	as	 lesbian.	in	a	climate	of	fund- ing	uncertainty,	particularly	in	the	uk,	this	finding	is	notable. 	we	 also	found	that	where	people	had	experienced	coercive	psychiatry,	 assessments	that	felt	medicalizing	prevented	engagement.	as	a	min- imum,	assessors	should	explain	why	they	are	requesting	 informa- tion,	consistent	with	tias. 	beyond	this,	whilst	there	clearly	needs	 to	be	a	fit	between	the	frameworks	of	understanding	held	by	the	 client,	the	assessor	and	the	subsequent	therapist,	in	practice	this	fit	 is	often	restricted	to	those	with	socioeconomic	means,	with	uk	nhs	 clients	sometimes	feeling	“you	get	what	you’re	given.” our	review	also	highlighted	the	link	between	information	and	 rights,	with	people	having	clear	information	needs	at	each	point	of	 the	assessment	process.	yet	there	was	a	sense	that	traditional	psy- chotherapies	in	particular	can	be	secretive,	with	unspoken	“rules”. disclosing	these	rules	within	the	assessment	process	enables	 in- formed	choice,	can	prevent	disengagement,	and	empowers	people	 to	understand	rule	breaches,	particularly	pertinent	in	the	light	of	 the	#metoo	movement	(a	social	media	campaign	raising	awareness	 about	the	prevalence	of	sexual	violence	and	harassment ).	ideally,	 people	undergoing	assessment	would	be	informed	of	an	indepen- dent	 person	 or	 organization	 that	 they	 could	 contact	 to	 discuss	 concerns. whilst	there	is	an	inherent	difficulty	in	building	therapeutic	 alliance	within	one-	off	encounters,	we	nonetheless	 found	 that	 people	 were	 less	 likely	 to	 disengage	 if	 their	 assessor	 demon- strated	warmth,	kindness	and	collaboration.	receptionists	also	 impacted	on	people’s	experiences.	within	tias,	it	is	understood	 that	 all	 staff,	 including	 clinical,	 domestic	 and	 administrative,	 shape	people’s	experiences	and	consequently	all	staff	receive	tia	 training. .  | study limitations and further research methodological	limitations	include	that	some	review	work,	including	 the	thematic	synthesis,	was	conducted	by	one	reviewer.	however,	 the	review	had	high	levels	of	service	user	involvement	throughout	 which	can	enhance	quality. 	the	emerging	synthesis	was	discussed	 with	the	suag	using	reflexive	techniques	to	understand	the	inter- play	between	our	experiences	and	data	interpretations.	as	thematic	 synthesis	is	inherently	subjective, 	others	may	have	arrived	at	dif- ferent	analytical	accounts. quality	appraisal	 found	that	 intersectionalities,	ethics	and	re- search	relationships	were	explored	infrequently.	consequently,	we	 are	unable	to	report	the	experiences	of	people	from	minority	com- munities.	future	research	should	employ	a	critical	understanding	of	 research	relationships,	including	the	experiences	of	diverse	popula- tions.	given	the	unique	importance	of	women’s	services,	future	re- search	should	also	consider	experiences	within	services	accessed	by	 social	identity	(eg,	for	people	who	identify	as	lgbtq)	or	experience	 (eg,	sexual	violence	survivors). the	majority	of	studies	 ( / )	had	not	been	peer	 reviewed.	 this	may	be	because	collaborative	and	service	user-	led	research	 has	 not	 historically	 entered	 mainstream	 journals,	 only	 recently	 gaining	 recognition	 as	 a	 valid	 form	 of	 enquiry. 	 interestingly,	 non-	peer-	reviewed	literature	typically	scored	higher	in	the	quality	 assessment.   |     sweeney et al. the	majority	of	papers	were	from	the	uk	which	has	the	nhs	and	 iapt	programme.	this	has	shaped	our	findings,	for	instance	around	 socioeconomic	access	 to	 services.	future	 reviews	 should	 include	 literature	beyond	english	language,	search	a	broader	range	of	data- bases	and	conduct	wider	literature	calls. descriptions	of	the	assessment	process	are	variable,	with	the	 majority	of	studies	not	reporting	the	specialty	or	approach	of	the	 assessor/service,	 the	 assessment	 form,	 its	 duration,	 and	 trauma	 enquiries	and	disclosures.	this	makes	it	difficult	to	connect	client	 experience	to	therapy	modalities	and	the	technical	question	of	how	 assessments	 are	 conducted,	 limiting	 the	 inferences	 that	 can	 be	 drawn	and	highlighting	a	need	for	further	research. finally,	we	did	not	explore	assessors’	experiences.	further	re- search	investigating	assessments	as	a	dyadic	interplay	between	two	 actors	would	enable	a	fuller	account	of	assessment	processes.   |   c o n c l u s i o n s this	review	aimed	to	understand	adults’	experiences	of	undergo- ing	psychological	assessment.	the	findings	were	understood	within	 tias,	 including	 those	 relating	 to	 the	emotional	 impact	of	assess- ments,	information	and	support	needs,	rights,	pathologization,	soci- oeconomic	restrictions,	intersectionalities	and	collaboration.	whilst	 the	need	for	collaboration	may	appear	self-	evident,	explicitly	col- laborative	assessments	were	not	the	norm	and	independent	service	 user	research	is	needed.	given	the	focus	of	this	review,	our	gaps	in	 understanding	and	the	quality	of	papers,	future	research	directions	 have	been	suggested,	emphasizing	the	importance	of	understand- ing	the	assessment	from	dyadic	and	multiple	perspectives,	including	 that	of	minority	groups. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s angela	 sweeney	 is	 funded	 by	 a	 national	 institute	 for	 health	 research	 post-	doctoral	 fellowship.	 this	 paper	 presents	 inde- pendent	research	partially	funded	by	the	national	 institute	for	 health	research	 (nihr).	the	views	expressed	are	those	of	the	 authors	and	not	necessarily	those	of	the	nhs,	the	nihr	or	the	 department	of	health.	the	authors	would	 like	 to	 thank	judith	 scammel	(sgul	librarian)	for	her	support	and	expertise	in	con- ducting	 the	 review	 and	 dr	 sarah	 white	 for	 her	 assistance	 in	 the	kappa	calculation.	dr	sweeney	would	also	like	to	thank	the	 advisory	groups	for	their	contribution	to	the	aptt	research	pro- gramme	(understanding	and	improving	assessment	processes	for	 talking	therapies)	which	this	paper	is	a	part	of:	vanessa	anenden,	 katie	bogart,	dr	sarah	carr	 (co-	author),	dr	 jocelyn	catty	 (co-	 author),	 professor	 david	 clark,	 dr	 sarah	 clement	 (co-	author),	 alison	faulkner,	 sarah	gibson,	mary	 ion,	dr	 jayasree	kalathil,	 steve	keeble,	dr	angela	kennedy,	dr	gemma	kothari	and	lana	 samuels.	special	thanks	go	to	sarah	clement,	lana	samuels	and	 alison	faulkner	for	their	pertinent	and	insightful	feedback	 in	a	 data	workshop. c o n f l i c t o f i n t e r e s t the	authors	declare	that	they	have	no	conflicts	of	interest. a u t h o r c o n t r i b u t i o n s as,	scl,	sca,	jc,	sg	involved	in	protocol	development.	ej,	scl,	kg,	 as	involved	in	data	searching	and	screening.	as	involved	in	data	ex- 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: – . https://doi.org/ . /hex. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/counseling-keys/ /if-your-therapist-harasses-you-metoo https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/counseling-keys/ /if-your-therapist-harasses-you-metoo https://www.nsun.org.uk/on-power-and-privacy https://www.nsun.org.uk/on-power-and-privacy https://doi.org/ . /hex. societies article france’s #nuit debout social movement: young people rising up and moral emotions sarah pickard ,* and judith bessant ,* institut du monde anglophone, université sorbonne nouvelle—paris , paris, france school of global, urban and social studies, rmit university, melbourne, vic , australia * correspondence: sarah.pickard@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr (s.p.); judith.bessant@rmit.edu.au (j.b.) received: august ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: set against a backdrop of austerity and neoliberal policies affecting many young people adversely, the nuit debout protest movement in france began in march when people gathered in public spaces to oppose the socialist government’s plan to introduce neoliberal labour legislation. like other post- movements, nuit debout was leaderless, non-hierarchical, and relied on social media for political communication and to mobilise participants. the nuit debout was also a movement inspired by powerful moral-political emotions such as righteous anger and hope. in this article, the authors address two questions. first, what features of nuit debout distinguished it from earlier social movements in france? second, what role did moral emotions play in mobilising people to act as they did? drawing on interviews with young protestors and their own testimonies, we argue that nuit debout was a distinctive form of protest for france. one distinguishing feature was the way young people—the “precarious generation”—were motivated by a strong sense of situated injustice, much of which related to what they saw as the unfairness of austerity policies, being deprived of a decent future and the feeling they had been betrayed by governments. keywords: young people; social movements; protest; political participation; austerity; moral-political emotions; precarity; labour laws; nuit debout; france . introduction “we are not going home tonight!” (“on ne rentre pas chez nous!”). that is how the nuit debout protest movement started in france. student unions and trade unions had organised a demonstration for march to oppose a bill recently proposed by the socialist government led by prime minister manuel valls on employment law reform. the legislation commonly referred to as the el khomri law (la loi el khomri) after myriam el khomri, the minister for labour would particularly affect young people within the labour market. it triggered a series of demonstrations around the country leading to the big day of action on march . the parisian procession took one of the customary routes, by starting at place d’italie—with student and trade union leaders at the head carrying traditional banners—and ending at place de la nation. in this article, we have translated all french terms and quotes into english. all terms and quotes in french are in italics as are the names of french organisations. on february , myriam khomri presented to the state council (conseil d’État) the new “bill to create new freedoms and new protections for companies and workers” (projet de loi visant à instituer de nouvelles libertés et de nouvelles protections pour les entreprises et les actifs). it was a socialist government led by prime minister manuel valls, françois hollande (the socialist president) and the laws were introduced by myriam el khomri the socialist minister for labour, jobs, professional training and social dialogue (ministre du travail, de l’emploi, de la formation professionnelle et du dialogue social). at the head of the march were union leaders: william martinet, president of the biggest student union (union nationale des etudiants de france—unef ) and trade union leaders bernadette groison (fédération syndicale unitaire—fsu), jean-claude mailly (force ouvrière—fo) and philippe martinez (confédération générale du travail—cgt). societies , , ; doi: . /soc www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /soc http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= societies , , of some demonstrators, however, continued marching down the boulevard voltaire towards place de la république, a square in the heart of the city with enormous symbolic significance. centre stage of this large public space stands léopold morice’s famous statue of marianne, the french national symbol who embodies the victory of the french revolution over the abuses of the power of the elite: the monarchy. both the monument and the square itself represent the fundamental post- french republican values of freedom, equality and fraternity, along with the revolutionary spirit. it was a spirit channelled by a group of protestors stating they wanted to “overthrow the el khomri law and the world it represents”. it had already been decided before the march that more was needed to express their discontent, something that would “frighten” the government. from these sentiments came the powerful declaration: “we are not going home tonight!” in this way, the place de la république was occupied, as participants stayed up through the night, taking part in debates and taking to social media about nuit debout, which can be translated into english as “rise up at night”, “stand up at night”, or “up all night”. it was action that soon spread to other towns across france [ ] and other countries, signifying the advent of a new social movement in which young people were central actors. nuit debout sits within a wider youth-led movement triggered by austerity and experiences of precarity often expressed and communicated through social media [ ]. nuit debout can also be understood as part of global protest action precipitated by the global financial crisis in which young people played a key role. this is evident in the similarity of the issues contested and the protest methods used. yet as a social movement, nuit debout has been considerably less studied than its predecessors, especially in the non-french-speaking world. in this article, we describe and explain the nuit debout movement, focussing on the crucial role played by young participants and their moral-political emotions. we first provide a brief contextual account of the political situation in france that provoked the nuit debout movement. we then document the key characteristics of the protest and the fundamental roles played by young people. the focus then shifts to the novelty of the nuit debout movement in a nation renowned for political protest. attention is given to the role of moral emotions that were an important feature of the movement. in doing this, we address the following questions: . what key features of nuit debout distinguished it from earlier social movements in france? . what was the role of moral-political emotions in the mobilising and shaping the nuit debout movement? we argue that nuit debout was an innovative and distinctive form of protest for france, in which moral-political emotions played a critical role. . methodology in this article, we seek to highlight the voices of the young participants of nuit debout. to do so, we draw on interviews with young participants and their own testimonies. these come from a variety of printed and online first and secondary source material. many quotes come from books produced by collectives of young participants shortly after the end of nuit debout, for example, ref. [ ] # mars. some of the quotes from young participants come from extracts of interviews made during nuit debout by the independent media company mediapart that are available online. we also use insider accounts taken from interviews with young participants published in english and french “nuit debout” has been translated into english in different ways, including “rise up at night”, and “up all night”. in the french, the significance is not to accept the proposed law lying down, but to stand up or rise up against it and protest all night long. the name had to be found quickly and initial suggestions, such as “nuit rouge” (“red night”) were rejected in favour of one that had fewer connotations with traditional political parties and political factions. there was a general consensus that “nuit debout” should exist outside of traditional political groupings.the term “debout” features in the first lines of the revolutionary song by eugène pottier ( ) “l’internationale”: “debout! l’âme du prolétaire. travailleurs, groupons-nous enfin. debout! les damnés de la terre! debout! les forçats de la faim! . . . ” in the english version, debout! is translated as “stand up!”. societies , , of newspapers. background information and insider accounts are cited from interviews with participants carried out by the authors in july . material produced in numerous social media posts that were made during the movement by young participants is also used. many of the texts (manifestoes, testimonies and articles, etc.) produced during nuit debout are published in nuit debout: les textes [ ]. other references are made to a special issue on the nuit debout in the french academic journal les temps modernes [ ] (for further information see footnotes and reference list). finally, one of the authors of this article was an independent observer of the nuit debout in paris. for the economic data we mostly use official french statistics from the institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (insee) and the institut national de la jeunesse et de l’éducation populaire (injep). . the background to nuit debout: neoliberal labour law when françois hollande became president of the french republic on may , in his victory speech, he announced young people and justice would be his priority and that he should be judged at the end of his term in office on what he had done for french youth [ ]. as a president from the socialist party, his pledge gave hope to a generation of young people many of whom were experiencing difficult social-economic conditions characterised by precarity after the global financial crisis and five years of the right-wing presidency of nicolas sarkozy from to [ ]. however, from onwards, the situation for most young people in france worsened [ ]. youth unemployment was more than % for under- -year-olds [ ], housing was generally unaffordable, youth poverty was increasing [ , ] and, as a result, many young people felt their future was dim [ ]. in short, despite the presidential election promises, the young generation in france could realistically expect living standards and opportunities to be worse than their parents [ ]. many young people were experiencing a declining standard of living with downward social mobility: in french “déclassement” [ – ]. it was a situation that could be explained in part by the fact that young people also experienced lower levels of public spending than did their elders when they were young [ , ], as part of the socialist government’s austerity measures. moreover, at the time, france was undergoing an official national “state of emergency” announced by president of the republic françois hollande soon after the terrorist attacks of november . that decree granted special power to the government within a national security frame, authorising the executive to use repressive policies and rely on actions not permitted in normal circumstances. these included restrictions on public gatherings and increases in police powers. on february , during a public meeting at the parisian labour exchange (“bourse du travail”), there was a premier screening of a low budget documentary film “merci patron!” (“thanks boss!”) [ ]. it was directed by françois ruffin, founder and editor in chief of an independent and alternative quarterly newspaper popular with left-wing activists: fakir [ ]. the film is critical of the ultra-wealthy, the use of foreign labour and the outsourcing of french jobs; it depicts a couple sacked by their billionaire boss bernard arnault and their bid to seek reparations. according to fakir, the film was part of the struggle against “the oligarchy” and the purpose of the public meeting was to bring together activists for them to air their various grievances against the french government. it was also decided at that public meeting to try and “scare” the french political leaders [ ] by going on a traditional protest street march, but then not to go home afterwards. the date set for this was march because demonstrations organised by youth organisations and trade unions were already planned for then to protest against the el khomri labour law. as a result, it was announced in fakir that a “red night” (“nuit rouge”) would take place on march , when a central public square would be occupied, when the film merci patron! would be screened and most importantly, when people would get together and talk. those interested were asked to publicise the event by distributing a downloadable flyer [ ] that could be handed out notably on march when there would be other demonstrations against the draft labour legislation. in further preparation, a multitude of social media accounts were set up using different names, for example, “on vaut mieux que ça”, societies , , of (“we are worth more than this”) and “convergences des luttes” (“a meeting of struggles”). added to these were teasers about the future event posted on a new youtube channel with the slogan “we are not going home!” (“on ne rentre pas chez nous!”) with links to the twitter hashtags #nuitrouge, #nuitdebout and #rêvegénérale. naming the event “nuit rouge” (“red night”) quickly lost popularity because the colour red was seen to denote traditional left-wing political organisations. in this way, “nuit rouge” became “nuit debout” (“rise up at a night” or “stand up at night”) in a bid to communicate the idea of inclusiveness, that people from different backgrounds with a variety of claims would come together to challenge the labour law and other issues of concern. the labour legislation that student and trade unions (especially unef and cgt) and the nuit debout movement were responding to was part of a neoliberal policy agenda. it was legislation first put forward on february by the socialist government of prime minister manuel valls (under a french socialist president françois hollande). according to the government, the bill was drawn up to ‘modernise’ labour legislation and decrease unemployment: its provisional name was “act to overhaul labour law and increase collective bargaining” (refondre le droit du travail et donner plus de poids à la négociation collective). it was also legislation designed to circumvent long-standing collective bargaining processes and to reduce protective regulatory requirements meaning companies would be able to dismiss staff more easily and enact other changes that weakened the capacity of trade unions to represent workers. it was legislation justified by the government as a “need” to “modernise” the labour market and bring it into the twenty-first century, to enhance competitiveness, which it was argued would strengthen the economy. according to the government, this would create greater workplace “flexibility”. in these ways, it was similar to neoliberal legislation introduced decades earlier in countries such as australia, the united kingdom, and the united states. however, for many young people, the fact that such legislation was introduced by a socialist government and president hollande who had made promises to make them a priority and alleviate the adversities they were experiencing enhanced their sense of injustice. (the effect of this disillusionment was later to be expressed as a withdrawal of support on the part of many young people for the socialist party in the presidential elections). for many decades, france had been somewhat resistant to what became an almost unified system of anglo-american neoliberalism. for example, france’s tax revenue remained historically high, one of the highest in the world, it had negligible university fees, and a substantial number of people employed by the state (public sector workers). it seems that marked something of a watershed, when france’s political elite decided to pursue a neoliberal policy and push through the el khomri law. although the legislation took the name of myriam el khomri, the minster for labour, key figures behind the reform were manuel valls the prime minister and emmanuel macron the minister for the economy and industry (who would go on to leave the socialist party, form en marche and become french president in ). significantly, the labour reform was also central to the government’s wider austerity plans. despite the nuit debout protest actions that had been occurring for nearly six weeks in place de la république and elsewhere around the country, and despite opposition to the law by colleagues within the ruling socialist party, on may , prime minister manuel valls announced the government “rêve générale” (“national dream”) is a slogan that is often used in french demonstrations. it is a play on words with “grève nationale” (“national strike”). leaders of the cgt trade union are public and media figures. the leader of the cgt at the time of nuit debout was philippe martinez. for a longer explanation in english of the contents of the labour legislation see [ ] (birch, ). emmanuel macron was minister for the economy, industry and digital affairs (ministre de l’economie, de l’industrie et du numérique) from august to august when he resigned. he founded a new political party en marche in april and a year later he was elected president of the french republic in may . societies , , of would force the passage of the bill. this was done by using exceptional constitutional provisions that saw the bill pass through the lower house, the national assembly (“assemblée nationale”) without a vote, using article . of the french constitution of the fifth republic. the bill thus went straight to the upper house, the senate (“sénat”) where article . was invoked again and the bill was passed by the lower house on july without a vote. it was then approved by the constitutional council (“conseil constitutionnel”) on august . in this way, the new labour legislation became law on august , five months after it was originally presented to parliament. the fact the government resorted to using exceptional constitutional provisions to avoid normal voting practice is indicative of both what was at stake and of its determination to force the new labour law through parliament [ ]. in short, the labour legislation introduced into the french parliament by a socialist government was a classic representation of the neoliberal worldview. it was such governmental action that motivated people to engage collectively to form and sustain the nuit debout protest over several weeks, until the legislation was passed. . nuit debout: a different kind of social movement for france france has a long and rich history of social movements involving street protests and occupations of public sites that played and continue to play a fundamental role in popular political action. the dramatic events of may that involved strikes and demonstrations, as well as the occupation of universities and factories is an important part of the social, cultural, and political history of france. the student-led “mai ‘ ” holds a special somewhat nostalgic place in the hearts and minds of many french people. it has been argued by some that “mai ‘ ” marked the end of traditional collective actions and ushered in new social movements within postmodern politics [ ]. in the early twenty-first century, two youth-led protest movements in france focussed on issues pertaining specifically to young people. in , there were protests against a new first job contract for young people (contrat première embauche—cpe), called the “mouvement anti-cpe”. this was followed in , by substantial protests against extensive higher education reforms, called the “mouvement anti-lru”. in this way, both actions were protests against reforms that effected the lives of many young people directly and they involved traditional demonstrations and occupations of universities for weeks, recalling methods used in “mai ’ ”. importantly, the protests obtained certain concessions from the government. almost half a century after “mai ’ ”, the nuit debout movement emerged from traditional left-wing initiators, organisers and participants of protests in france. however, a decision was made the use by french socialist prime minister manuel valls of this constitutional device is an example of what david dyzenhaus ( ) [ ] calls a “legal black hole,” which enabled the government, to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of the el khomri law, and possible parliamentary defeat.article . of the french constitution of the th republic reads as follows: “le premier ministre, après délibération du conseil des ministres, engage devant l’assemblée nationale la responsabilité du gouvernement sur son programme ou éventuellement sur une déclaration de politique générale. l’assemblée nationale met en cause la responsabilité du gouvernement par le vote d’une motion de censure. une telle motion n’est recevable que si elle est signée par un dixième au moins des membres de l’assemblée nationale. le vote ne peut avoir lieu que quarante-huit heures après son dépôt. seuls sont recensés les votes favorables à la motion de censure qui ne peut être adoptée qu’à la majorité des membres composant l’assemblée. sauf dans le cas prévu à l’alinéa ci-dessous, un député ne peut être signataire de plus de trois motions de censure au cours d’une même session ordinaire et de plus d’une au cours d’une même session extraordinaire. le premier ministre peut, après délibération du conseil des ministres, engager la responsabilité du gouvernement devant l’assemblée nationale sur le vote d’un projet de loi de finances ou de financement de la sécurité sociale. dans ce cas, ce projet est considéré comme adopté, sauf si une motion de censure, déposée dans les vingt-quatre heures qui suivent, est votée dans les conditions prévues à l’alinéa précédent. le premier ministre peut, en outre, recourir à cette procédure pour un autre projet ou une proposition de loi par session. le premier ministre a la faculté de demander au sénat l’approbation d’une déclaration de politique générale.” loi n◦ - du août , loi relative au travail, à la modernisation du dialogue social et à la sécurisation des parcours professionnels [ ]. societies , , of during the public meeting held at the parisian labour exchange in february to do things differently, in order to really “scare” the socialist government. the aim was to act in an alternative way: “we are not demanding anything, we are building new ways of doing politics. politicians have transformed politics into something reserved for professionals and experts, like neurology, econometrics, anthropology” [ ] (pp. – ). in what follows, we identify certain characteristics of nuit debout that distinguish it from earlier french protests. it is a distinction that owes much to desire of young participants to do politics differently, in response to what they saw as the failures of the ruling socialist government and its predecessors. the first feature of nuit debout that distinguished it from earlier french social action was its leaderless and horizontal character with a modus operandi centred on participatory democracy and a “meeting of struggles”. nuit debout was born from a popular will to oppose the labour law and austerity policies. participants also wanted to do politics differently. second, it was primarily young people who provided much of the energy and impetus. they occupied public spaces in paris and other french towns, they used new technologies to oppose neoliberal and austerity policies, to recruit, to communicate with supporters and to mobilise support off and online. (a) a leaderless horizontal social movement and participative democracy several key features of nuit debout distinguished it from earlier french social movements. first, it was a deliberately leaderless social movement with no official head, director, or president. this was almost unprecedented in france’s history of social movements. although the activist and editor of fakir, françois ruffin was the initial momentum behind nuit debout with his film merci patron!” (“thanks boss!”) and through the exercise of his media power, after the movement started, he stepped back. nuit debout also had no official spokespeople who claimed to speak for all, nor were there any official representatives. in order to uphold the democratic principles of equity and to avoid one or a few leaders becoming the primary focus of the movement, nuit debout was intentionally leaderless, something that made it quite different to earlier french popular political action. it was more of a non-hierarchical and horizontal movement [ ] (gérard and simonpoli, , p. ) with “participants” (“nuitdeboutistes”) fully engaged in a direct democratic practice. the idea was that “nuit debout belonged to everyone”; it was public property such as the public spaces that were occupied. it was an approach intended to ensure primary attention was given to the issues of concern in the “meeting of struggles” (“convergence des luttes”), by avoiding the distractions of a leadership struggle or faction fighting that tend to affect traditional political organisations (see below). instead of a leader and spokespeople, there were several “action committees” or “task forces” (“commissions”), such as the “communication committee” (“commission de communication”) and the “democracy in the square committee” (“commission démocratie sur la place—dslp”) who deliberated collectively. participants in these committees changed on a rolling basis in a conscious effort to share tasks and not have prominent permanent leaders. in a further bid to enlarge democratic participatory practice, several “sub-task forces” or “sub-action committees” (“sous-commissions”) and inter-task forces (“inter-commissions”) were established. moreover, members of the “action committees” declined to make mainstream media appearances in an official capacity or as spokespeople [ ], for example, they did not go on television to be interviewed, or take part in media debates. a rare broadcast was a filmed of a group discussion involving nuit debout participants with a journalist ref. [ ] # mars, , pp. – : “nous ne revendiquons rien, nous construisons de nouvelles manières de faire la politique. les policien.ne.s l’ont transformée en une discipline réservée aux professionnel.le.s et aux expert.e.s comme la neurologie, l’économétrie ou l’anthropologie.” for a full list of all the nuit debout commissions, see the nuit debout website. available online: https://nuitdebout.fr/paris/ commissions/dslp [ ]. the way the different commissions worked and other aspects of how nuit debout functioned can be observed in the documentary film by marina otero called l’assemblée [ ]. https://nuitdebout.fr/paris/commissions/dslp https://nuitdebout.fr/paris/commissions/dslp societies , , of from mediapart [ , ] (mediapart, a, b), an independent (alternative) advert-free media organisation. notably, mediapart carries out investigative journalism that has revealed high level french political corruption and it is behind frenchleaks [ ]. these deliberate endeavours to create a different structure and have a different relationship with the mainstream media made nuit debout stand out from earlier social movements in france. leaderless horizontal movements have been uncommon in france as most have been the product of well-ordered and well-practised traditional “leftist” organisations: trade unions, student unions and political parties that are behind most protest actions. these long-established organisations dating back well before “mai ‘ ” have strong figureheads who call and direct protest actions and who are familiar faces in french mainstream media. it is an organisational practice that has seen many leaders caught-up in their own career advancement and struggles for various capitals. nuit debout hoped to avoid this and wanted the media to pay attention to the movement itself and the issues at stake: “we are over-taking the traditional activist milieu and we are obliging the media to talk about us” [ ] (# mars, , p. ). participants in nuit debout tried to avoid reproducing what they saw as features of traditional politics such as the way members of social movements were co-opted and came to be part of the political elite. this aversion to “older style politics” explains why the customary banners, flags and emblems that identify particular political institutions, such as student unions, trade unions and political parties were barely evident. this reaction against “traditional” politics was grounded in feelings of betrayal, in part given it was a socialist government that initiated the labour law reform. this sense that nuit debout stood independent and not linked to any political organisation or union and was re-affirmed during the movement [ ], something that appealed to many young people who had not previously been activists: “i think it is important that we can speak with each other today and that we are not in a movement that is individualistic, but rather in a community spirited movement. that is how we can take things forward, by being strong together and standing together” [ ] (lisa, young student, nuit debout participant, mediapart, april ). the absence of formal leaders and official representatives in nuit debout can also be understood as a way those involved in the movement could avoid sanctioning the development of a powerful and domineering political elite found in the conventional political culture. such culture was embodied by manuel valls the french prime minister when he introduced a major neoliberal “reform’ such as the el khomri labour law. for many participants in nuit debout, this symbolised a positive move away from what they thought had become a corrupt and stultifying political system: “i like all the changes nuit debout could bring about. in our minds, the movement makes things possible that have seemed impossible for years” [ ]. this rejection of traditional politics in favour of more participatory democratic practice was summed up in a declaration featured in an edition of the nuit debout online daily gazette [ ]: “nous dépassons les cercles militants traditionnels et obligeons les édias à parler de nous.” fewer than eight per cent of the french workforce are unionised (compared to nearly % in britain and almost % in the european union) a significant decrease since the when around per cent of employees were members of a trade union [ – ] (the economist, ; andolfatto and labbé, ; pignoni, ). the right to strike was introduced into the french constitution in , which means workers can stop working to make professional and social claims. “je pense que c’est important aujourd’hui de parler à chacun pour que l’on ne soit pas dans un mouvement individualiste, mais vraiment dans un mouvement communautaire. c’est comme ça que l’on fait avancer les choses c’est en étant soudé et en étant solidaire.” “j’aime aussi voilà tout le changement que cela pourrait apporter. j’ai l’impression que dans les consciences, ça rend possible toutes les choses qui ont l’air impossible depuis de nombreuses années.” societies , , of “politics is not just the business of professional politicians, it is everyone’s business” [ ]. the horizontal organisation of nuit debout can also be understood as an attempt to create a more egalitarian political movement consistent with republican values expressed in france that references the french revolution and the french national motto: “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. this horizontal model epitomised a french republican tradition centred on solidarity, egalitarianism, and direct democracy, where everybody’s voice counted and was respected. thus, nuit debout exemplified how large numbers of predominantly—but not exclusively—young people took politics into their own hands by occupying public spaces, by demanding social justice and a more genuine public dialogue. a central aim was to encourage more inclusive public debate and decision-making. another feature of the nuit debout movement was the nature of its claims and aims. while the draft labour law legislation was the initial catalyst for the nuit debout, as the movement progressed, young participants were engaged actively by online posting testimonies about their poor working conditions and other grievances via “on vaut mieux que ça” (we are worth more that this) (see below). very quickly nuit debout became “a meeting” or “a union of struggles” (“une convergence des luttes”), in which a plurality of complaints, claims and hopes were expressed. like all social movements in france, the daily ritual of a general assembly (assemblée générale) was an important feature ( p.m.– p.m.) of nuit debout. the use of silent hand signs (“silent jazz hands” or “democracy-saving hand gestures”) were also employed, which saw participants communicating by waggling their hands in the air to agree and crossing arms to disagree, etc. using traditional sign language. while this silent gesturing helped avoid disturbing or interrupting speakers, it also strengthened the role of political emotions by adding to a sense of solidarity and feelings of belonging among participants. such communication practices employed during nuit debout were a legacy of earlier french youth-led protests such as those in and (see above) and were also inspired by the indignados protest movements, as felicetti and della porta argue: “in developing its repertoire, nuit debout drew consistently from the repertoires of action, organizational models and frames brought from previous similar movements [ ] (p. ). participants occupying place de république took turns in speaking for a fixed short period on subjects of their choice that typically moved well beyond the labour law: “this movement is not the usual thing about politics and politicians; we can meet other people and it is really beautiful. it shows us that there is still hope, [ . . . ] that we can change things. [ . . . ] the labour law was the straw that broke the camel’s back. [ . . . ] but what brought me here is about much much more than just labour legislation” [ ]. the issues debated in nuit debout assemblies included the universal basic income, equitable housing policies, education, corporate tax evasion, debt forgiveness, housing inequality, immigration, refugees, transport, the environment, feminism, registering invalid votes in elections, and reforming the constitution, among many others. these debates highlighted a sense of popular disenchantment with the power elite and a disconnect between the government and the people, which was especially strong among many young people. at the same time, nuit debout debates reflected an optimism and hope that “ordinary people” create “a better world”, one that was less individualistic and more valuing of common goods. as juliette a young student commented: “in the beginning, when all the marches started, i was a bit sceptical because i thought once again people were demonstrating to defend their own interests and protect their own “la politique n’est pas une affaire de professionnels, c’est l’affaire de tous.” the different commissions and the “democracy saving hand gestures” (“les gestes qui sauvent la démocratie”) used during nuit debout are available online: https://wiki.nuitdebout.fr/wiki/ressources/les_gestes_nuit_debout [ ]. “ce mouvement qui sort un peu de la logique strictement politique / politiciens qui permet de se rencontrer du monde [ . . . ] cette logique-là est très belle. j’ai encore de l’espoir [ . . . ] que l’on puisse encore changer des choses. [ . . . ] la loi du travail ça a été la goutte qui a fait déborder la vase [ . . . ] ce qui me fait venir ici ça va largement au-delà de la loi du travail.” https://wiki.nuitdebout.fr/wiki/ressources/les_gestes_nuit_debout societies , , of rights. [ . . . ] but i saw that a new kind of movement was being created [ . . . ] things were created that were less negative and more positive. [ . . . ] i said to myself, ‘fab’ because in this movement there are no trade unions, no political parties. [ . . . ] nobody is at the top” [ ]. in these ways we saw in nuit debout a more democratic organisational structure combined with an interest in doing politics differently, something that was especially apparent among young participants, a point we consider further in the next section. (b) a youth-led movement reinventing political participation it is a popular view within french mainstream media and in certain sections of academia that young people are politically disengaged, de-politicised and politically apathetic because they tend to have lower electoral turnout rates than older citizens [ ]. yet for anne muxel (a french specialist on young people and political participation), many young people in france are political, but in ways that are less traditional and ways that are more “expressive” and more “emotional” [ ] (p. ). contrary to the idea young people were politically disengaged, young participants in nuit debout were critical of what they saw as exclusionary practices and hierarchical decision-making, which discouraged their engagement and locked them out of participation in electoral politics. they wanted greater involvement and not simply just to be the object of policy or government directives. nuit debout provided opportunities for young people to circumvent conventional electoral politics [ ]. as mentioned, interest in doing so owed much to a sense of disillusionment with the traditional political elite and what many saw as the failure of successive governments to act responsibly and to be genuinely inclusive of young people. in this way, nuit debout provides a convincing example of how many young people are assuming the responsibility of positive freedom themselves and inventing new forms of political action or political participation [ ]. in nuit debout, we saw young people enacting “do-it-ourselves politics” (dio politics) [ ] outside traditional political organisations (political parties and unions). importantly, young participants commented that they were fed up with what they saw as the staid and self-interested traditional french political culture and associated expectations. as one young participant explained: “for the ‘experts in the media’, nuit debout had to lead to something concrete, to bring an answer to what was going to happen in the next election, to create a structure. [ . . . ] in our world, anything that does not create something is considered a failure. we [at nuit debout] refuse this kind of logic that we have been locked into up until now. nuit debout is building a network, a common culture. trust is its engine and momentum. it is sustainable and renewable” [ ] (pp. – ). the desire to reinvent politics and develop alternative political participation processes along with a new model of society, citizenship and a constitution was a central dynamic at work in this collective of youthful hopes and dreams [ ]. with all this in mind, we challenge representations of young people as disinterested in politics or as only being interested in politics when it affects them directly. nuit debout revealed a popular dissatisfaction with conventional politics and was testimony to a strong interest in developing new forms of non-institutional and institutional politics. it is something also apparent in other countries, for example, in the united kingdom, where momentum played a role making the corbyn-led labour party popular among young people and the formation of certain electoral politics [ ]. the same observations can be made about spain with podemos (“we can”) and in “a l’origine, moi, quand les manifestations ont commencé, j’ai été un peu sceptique parce que j’avais l’impression qu’encore une fois c’étaient des gens qui venaient manifester pour leurs intérêts, pour défendre leurs droits personnels. [ . . . ] mais, j’ai vu un nouveau mouvement se créer [ . . . ] des choses qui se sont créées qui ne sont plus négatives mais positives [ . . . ] je me disais ‘chouette’ parce que dans ce mouvement, il n’y a pas de syndicats, il n’y a pas de partis politiques. [ . . . ] personne chapote le mouvement.” ref. [ ] # mars, , pp. – : “pour les éditocrates, nuit debout se devait d’aboutir à quelque chose de concret, d’apporter une réponse aux prochaines échéances électorales, de créer une structure.” societies , , of the united states with bernie sanders, a socialist democrat candidate, in the run up to presidential electoral campaign. with this in mind, we argue that nuit debout is part of a larger political change process being shaped primarily by growing numbers of young people motivated by feelings of injury and grievance as well as outrage in the face of policies that frustrated them from pursuing a promised future. young people in france were not alone in feeling outraged and wanting to protest. the nuit debout movement followed and was inspired by earlier anti-austerity protest and democratic deficit protest around the world [ ]. mobilised by the similar issues that particularly affected young people and using similar tactics, we saw a communication or sharing and transfer of various practices across the globe. participants felt part of the global wave of protests and “nuit debout shared [ . . . ] important features with previous anti-austerity mobilizations”. young people played central and formative role in the way nuit debout was represented to online world. for france, such online action initially against the el khomri labour law and then with the mobilisation of nuit debout was unprecedented [ ]. the communicative power of the internet was evident from the outset. the labour reform bill was first reported in the mainstream media on february , and within two days, an online e-petition calling for the withdrawal of the labour law was launched on www.change.org [ ]. as part of an activist and trade union movement the e-petition “loi travail: non, merci!” (‘labour law: no thanks!” was created on february by caroline de haas (born ), former leader of the french national union of students (unef ) ( – ). the e-petition generated immediate and widespread interest, producing an unprecedented million signatures in just over a fortnight [ ]. this unparalleled popular response to the e-petition indicates the degree to which many opposed the law reform. this extraordinary success of the online e-petition led the prime minister, manual valls, to delay the initial presentation of the bill to the cabinet, i.e., the council of ministers (“conseil des ministres”) from march to march [ ]. at the same time, a website [ ] https://loitravail.lol (‘labour law lol”) was created by a collective of unionists and activists that documented the main aspects of the planned el khomri law with links to the e-petition for people to sign online. in the same week, the online e-petition was launched, a collective of young youtubers also formed “on vaut mieux que ça” (“we are worth more than this”) and posted their first video on a new youtube channel [ ]. the channel was accompanied by a new website [ ], a facebook page [ ] a twitter account [ ] and other social media platforms. the primary purpose of all this action was to communicate “warnings” about the labour bill; it was to collect online testimonies documenting how young people were taken advantage of in the labour market and to provide insight into the precarious nature of their employment. the youtubers collective first posted a video clip that encouraged peers to post on twitter using the hashtag #onvautmieux and to submit “witness statements” on the dedicated website [ ]. many were also published in an online book format [ ]. initiated by “a collective of creative citizens” with the aim of “freeing speech on societal problems, such as work,” the participants emphasised they were not spokespeople for an organisation or movement, but rather “triggers for words” (“déclencheurs de paroles”), enabling and facilitating the assemblage of authentic and legitimate prose. twitter hashtags such as #convergencedesluttes and social media sites for convergences des luttes played a vital role in political communication. indeed, during nuit debout they were critical for informing, mobilising and sharing information and ideas: for example, we saw the direct communication and transmission of practices from iceland in , to cairo, egypt to spain [ – ] (castañeda, , ; eklundh, ; portos and masuallo, ; van de velde, ), to greece [ ] (kioupkiolis and pechtelidis, ) to the united states [ , ] and the united kingdom [ , ], chile and quebec [ – ], then hong kong [ ] and turkey [ ]. young people in france were part of a “precarious generation”, experiencing what the french call “déclassement” and their discontent [ , , ]. significantly, the twitter #onvautmieux launched on february was a precursor to #metoo (october ), whereby people denounce behaviour via tweets. the french version of #metoo was also launched in october : #balancetonporc (“squeal on the pig”). www.change.org https://loitravail.lol societies , , of “let’s post videos online like those who used to stick posters on the walls of our towns. let’s use the internet to share this burst of freedom with the whole world and let’s be inspired by their methods. let’s make the most of the democratisation of encryptment to share without being spied on and let’s surprise them” [ ] (p. ). another novel use of media initiated by nuit debout saw rémy buisine use his smartphone to set up live video broadcasts of the daily general assemblies at place de la république via the app periscope [ ]. this enabled thousands of people to watch the periscope broadcasts—with an estimated , people viewing the assemblies during the first week [ ]. according to the -year-old, the audience for his nuit debout periscope broadcasts was “quite young, from teenagers to young people around twenty-years-olds” [ ]. at the same time, the nuit debout website was linked to numerous social media platforms such as bambuser, instagram, tumblr, snapchat, scoop.it, and reddit. nuit debout was different to earlier social movements in france that conformed to a hierarchical organisational model. this was evident, for example, in the way nuit debout was organised horizontally and the ways participants very deliberately did not rely on official leaders. it was also distinctive in the ways the movement occupied town squares and public spaces for weeks and in the ways it made extensive use of digital technologies to reach out to the french people more generally and to inform public opinion, a feature reflecting the capacity of young people to engage with new media [ ]. many of these young participants were also deeply affected by political and moral emotions. . nuit debout and political-moral emotions political or moral emotions play a critical role in politics generally and in protest action in particular. yet as philippe braud argues, they are often overlooked [ ]. political emotions are worth paying attention to because they are a source of politically significant moral energy. moral or political emotions such as patriotism, righteous anger, collective pride, resentment or hope work to create a sense of solidarity or connection derived from the building and sharing of commitments to “things that matter”. emotions are interwoven with moral values, and sometimes arise from a sense of anger or injustice about perceived infractions of moral rules [ ] (see also [ ]). as randall collins [ ], observes, emotional energy is also what charges feeling of enthusiasm and the confidence needed to take initiative and engage politically. james jasper [ ] highlights the pleasure, pride and sense of hope we experience when we express ourselves and our moral position when participating in collective actions such as protests. for mary holmes, anger “is the essential political emotion because it is a response to perceived injustice” [ ]. simon thompson agrees: “the experience of anger is evidence of perceived injustice, and thus it gives people the impetus to engage in collective action in order to overcome this injustice” [ ] (see also [ ]), [ ]. for della porta “hot cognition” like a sense of injustice may well be extremely important for mobilisation, but it also needs an attribution of responsibility to concrete targets, successfully bridging the abstract and the concrete” [ ] (see also [ – ]). moral or political emotions such as anger and outrage are often what characterise protest action. it can, for example, be that felt sense of injustice provoked by governments promoting austerity policies after , played a key role in mobilising collective action. moral emotions are also important in the construction of solidarities involving people working collectively to achieve what they see as important social or collective goods. such emotions contribute to a powerful a sense of identity, belonging and camaraderie that is typical of much collective action. participants in this study report how they enjoyed the experience of bonding with people through “postons des vidéos en ligne comme celles et ceux qui nous ont précédé.e.s collaient des pamphlets sur les murs de leurs villes. utilisons le web pour partager les élans de liberté du monde entier et inspirons-nous de leurs méthodes. profitons de la démocratisation du cryptage pour échanger sans être surveillé.e.s et provoquer l’effet de surprise”. societies , , of shared rituals and songs, identifying heroes and villains, and by developing a consensus about who are their friends and enemies. in these ways, protests reinforce a sense of shared “gratification and solidarity-building” [ ]. the pleasure of creating and sharing perspectives, beliefs and building solidarity is vital for mobilizing and sustaining protest action [ ]. political-moral emotions can also become a central to one’s individual and group identity and help create through what durkheim called “collective effervescence” that made “collective consciousness” possible [ , ]. we now turn to the issue of moral or political and ethical emotions to argue that paying attention to how they shape social movements is critical for understanding how and why nuit debout came about. doing this involves moving away from the normative practices of conventional political science understood as a liberal normative account of the political, which relies on rational-action explanations. in referring to a liberal project, we refer to narratives that are part of a liberal tradition [ , ], which emphasise ideas that people are rational, utility calculating, freedom seeking autonomous agents and political is an aggregate of those individual dispositions. from these accounts of human action came powerful narratives about representative democracy that rely on the assumption that the political or politics is technical action. this conventional liberal frame has informed mainstream political science and sociology. we argue against the idea central to this mainstream tradition that for human action to be political, it needs to be motivated by “individual” rational intention. instead, we argue that paying attention to the role of political emotions helps appreciate what moved many young people to participate in nuit debout. we are also critical of claims made by its proponents that political science is a neutral science, which describes or reports on what is there in “politics” [ , ]. we also argue that such claims are not defensible. as highlighted in hannah arendt’s account [ ] of human action, most political action is not so much a form instrumental rational action (“techne”), but a form of praxis. as such, it involves a combination of ethical-political-emotional “principles” or “virtues”. moreover, critics of conventional political scientists such as mark petracca [ ] and daniel kahneman [ ] demonstrate how political and economic decisions are rarely “rational”. political decisions including those made in formal political institutions frequently rely on various factors that include wilful blindness, jealousy, selfishness, altruism, prejudice, or powerful moral-political emotions such as patriotism (love of country, kin and kind), outrage or injustice. these “non-rational” factors play a critical role in creating and sustaining political momentum in our time. given all this, we argue there is value in paying attention to the role of moral emotions in the shaping political action. to understand what is happening in social movements such as nuit debout, the work of philosophers such as martha nussbaum and her account of political and moral emotions is also helpful [ , ]. for nussbaum, emotions are not simply “impulses that have no connection with our thoughts, imaginings and appraisals” [ ]. they are “intelligent” emotional responses based on judgement that guide our ethical views about what is “good or bad”. as nussbaum argues, emotions are responses to our intelligent reasoning and judgements, and as such are connected to our ethico-political judgement [ ]. in this way, emotions can be understood to be part of human intelligence and reasoning, as opposed to being an “irrational” side effect getting in the way of “real” politics [ ]. with this in mind, we now turn to young people’s political expressions of resistance, their sense of indignation, and hope that reflect complex (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) feelings and positions. in what follows, we consider what counts as politics. we do this by drawing on the most studies of public opinion and legislative processes, for example, assume rational choice theory, while overlooking the contradictions that set liberalism and democracy against each other much of the time. it the kind of contradiction exemplified, in the way the valls government pushed through its labour legislation without putting the laws to a vote and by using the constitution to justify their use of constitutional-legal rules to preserve the republic (which is actually the use of sovereign power to declare an exception to the normal rules of law). societies , , of participants’ own interpretative capacities about what moved them to participate and how they interpret their actions. we ask how did they describe what was happening? did they see what they did as political, and importantly why they did act as they did? and how did they interpret the actions of others? such insider accounts are critical if we recognise that human action is not political unless those involved and those observing interpreted the actions as such. as many young people participating in nuit debout understood, they were moved to action by political or moral emotions such as righteous anger and disenchantment, disappointment, and disillusionment with the french “political class” and political elites. as we show here, a deep sense of betrayal, and anger at having to bear the brunt of austerity policies fuelled the protestors who turned up day and night to express their disappointment when facing what they considered to be broken promises made by governments over the years and the “political establishment” more generally. alongside the outrage was hopeful optimism and pride. when righteous anger combined with hope it often generated a sense of urgency about the imperative for change and to find new ways of doing democracy and politics. this highlights simon critchley’s insight that politics can be understood as powerful moral responses to “situational injustice” [ ]. it is also similar to what motivated participants in social movements, such as spain’s los indignados and the occupy movement [ , ] (pp. – ). many of the young people participating in nuit debout were students (who were also working part-time or full-time to help pay for their studies) were also experiencing the fallout from the great recession ( ) which cut french gdp by . %. by may , unemployment had risen in general to . % and was even higher for young workers, while % of young people under were deemed to be in poverty [ ], circumstances that continued into [ – ]. given their precarious status young people are directly affected by the labour reforms of the el khomri law. they are already losing ground and the reforms would further weaken their working conditions and capacity to live a decent life. young people involved in nuit debout describe their experiences of politics and identities variously as citizens with a strong sense of disillusionment and disaffection, who had in effect become outsiders in their own polity. many reported feeling betrayed, disillusioned, angry, despondent and annoyed, if not enraged. many nuit debout participants were fed up and felt denigrated. as -year-old matthiew explained: “the labour law was the final straw”. according to matthiew: “this government [ . . . has failed] to deal with the real problems such as unemployment, climate change and a society heading for disaster” [ ]. twenty-six-year-old jocelyn reiterated this sense of betrayal, and disillusionment and loss of faith due to the broken promises [ ] (pp. – ): “people are really sick and tired, and that feeling has been building for years. everything hollande once promised . . . but gave up on really gets me down” [ ]. similarly, -year old mariam also felt “deep betrayal”. as she explained: “this government is doing the opposite of what we elected it to do” [ ]. according to a nuit debout press release: “nuit debout is the result of several dynamics: a general but diffuse anger and the development of different specific struggles” [ ]. in addition, as marco, a -year-old student explained, it was “a sense of disillusionment and indignation” that moved him to action [ ]. while righteous anger dominated, a sense of hope and empowerment were also present. they are manifest, for example, in the idea that young people themselves had the capacity to take action outside the stultified conventional political domain. as marco explained: “the event itself, [ . . . ] [had the] ability to mark a generation. we could do things, we could go outside, we could organise things ourselves. above all, [we saw] the politicisation of many young people who had never previously been linked with politics”. [ ] “the el khomri bill on working conditions mobilised so many people because by pushing injustices further and further the dam broke on how much we could take” (press release march , reproduced in [ ] farbiaz, , p. ). interview carried out by authors with young nuit debout participant marco in july . societies , , of he continued explaining how nuit debout produced a sense of generational solidarity, or what he described as “generational interpellation or questioning”, based on a recognition that many young people “were experiencing the same common problems” [ ]. according to patrick farbiaz, a former parliamentary assistant to the green party (but not a young person himself), reported a strong sense of fear existed among younger participants: “nuit debout is not a fortuitous ‘clap of thunder’. in the short term, it is the wake-up call for young people who were thought to be terrified and paralysed by the jihadist terrorist attacks in january and november . young people have risen up against the emergency state and the decision to enact the revocation of nationality [withdrawal of french nationality from french nationals returning to france after taking part in isis activities abroad], symbols of governance through fear. young people protested against the el khomri law showing their willingness to fight against a society where precarity affects young people as well as their elders. [ . . . ] ‘were not scared’ is the founding expression of the movement” [ ]. some young participants were also moved by a sense of hope, by the belief they could in some ways remedy the “broken system” and bring about social change through collective action. as -year-old cécile commented about the assembly of which she was part: “i don’t agree with the state society is in today. to me, politics feels broken. this movement appeals in terms of citizen action. i come here after class and i intend to keep coming back. i hope it lasts” [ ]. remaining faithful to a commitment to a collective identity several nuit debout participants published testimonies signed as a collective. it is a valuable edition that offers insider accounts of their own experiences and why they became involved [ ]. as one contributor to this collective explained, they were tired of being thwarted and denied opportunities for a good life: “we are fed up with this world that has had its humanity amputated. these daily injustices, these repeated frustrations. [ . . . ] this life is eating us up from the inside. anger is rumbling in our guts/stomach. if we let it, it will take us over and prevent us from going forward/advancing. let’s embrace it, use it to rise us up. standing we will be unstoppable” [ ]. another reported, a feeling of “disgust” with the way “political elites” were conducting themselves and how that had to that point engendered a sense of powerlessness: “it all started with a feeling, like a dull thud of powerlessness that one hears every morning walking by the men and women that the system spits into the gutter. the humming of servitude that echoes the bleakness of the tv news that vomits out its absurd stream of devastating news. this sensation of weariness and disgust that we all feel. usually we just keep quiet. too often we say nothing. this was the starting point, the point where everything fused together” [ ]. “nuit debout n’est pas un coup de tonnerre fortuit. a court terme, c’est le réveil d’une jeunesse qu’on croyait tétanisée par les attentats jihadistes de janvier et de novembre . une jeunesse qui s’est soulevée contre l’état d’urgence et la déchéance de nationalité, symboles d’une gouvernance par la peur, et qui s’est mobilisée contre la loi el khomri en affirmant son désir de lutter contre une société où la précarité frappe les jeunes comme leurs aînés.” “nous ne voulons plus de ce monde amputé de son humanité. ces injustices quotidiennes, ces frustrations répétées, ces horaires de travail illimités, ces enfants qui survivent dans la rue, ces mort.e.s par milliers qu’on réduit à des chiffres épuisent notre capacité à ressentir. cette vie nous ravage de l’intérieur. la colère gronde dans nos tripes. si nous ne l’acceptons pas, elle prendra toute la place, nous empêchera d’avancer. embrassons-la, utilisons-la pour nous relever. debout, nous serons inarrêtables.” “tout part d’un sentiment, du bruit sourd de l’impuissance que l’on entend chaque matin en passant devant ces femmes et ces hommes que le système recrache dans le caniveau. ce bourdonnement servile qui fait écho à la morosité du journal télévisé vomissant son flot absurde de nouvelles accablantes. cette sensation qui gave nos esprits de lassitude, de dégoût, nous l’éprouvons tout.e.s. nous nous taisons, souvent. trop souvent. ici se situe le point de départ, le point de fusion”. societies , , of as nussbaum argues, disgust is a negative moral-political emotion often found in political debates, (for example, in debates on race, ethnicity and same sex marriage). as she explains, disgust is often associated with anger and can “involve strong aversion tendencies” directed towards by whom one is disgusted. in the case above, it is the power elite who the narrator is repulsed by and who she “seeks separation from” [ ] (pp. – ). nuit debout marks such a separation, a “starting point” from which participants could break away and try to begin something clean and new and fresh, something that is not “contaminated” by what many participants saw as the incestuousness and ineptitude of the traditional political community. it is a disgust at the failure of politician to do their job, to take seriously their responsibility to ensure all citizens have their most basic rights to shelter and food secured: “when we are alarmed about women, men and children who are locked outside, outdoors and without a roof over their heads that everyone has a right to, they [politicians] reply that the housing crisis will pass, whilst nurturing real estate speculation” [ ] (pp. – ). here we see a distaste about the debasement of politics as it became “publicity”. it was a development experienced as destructive of optimism and hope: “the transformation of politics into mere communication anesthetises our hopes” [ ] (pp. – ). again, we see the core idea of disgust evident in the use of metaphors such as “gnawing”, “rotting”, “worms”, all reminders of our own mortality and animal status. as nussbaum observes, the primary object of this powerful political emotion—disgust—are bodily secretions, decay, that are “oozy, slimy, smelly”. as moral-political emotions and metaphors they work very effectively to communicate the idea that the “corrupt”, unhealthy and noxious polity is like diseased bodily fluids which as such can “contaminate” all that is valued, that can destroy hope for the future, and thus must be avoided [ ] (p. ): “since the setting up of the ‘state of emergency’ [enforced after the serious acts of terrorism in ] our democracy has been rotting like a fruit gnawed at by worms. [ . . . ] we are living in a climate of fear whose extremes weaken us and affect what is dearest to us—our dignity” [ ] (p. ). to grasp how the participants in nuitdebout understood the political, we drew on the participant’s own interpretations of what had moved them to engage in various kinds of expressive political actions. we considered how they described events, the dynamics at play, and how they interpreted the actions of others including governments and political elites. what we discovered was that many participants identified the role of moral-political emotions to say why they had engaged in the kinds of political solidarity that nuit debout had made possible. as participants made clear, they experienced a deep sense of betrayal, after years of “broken promises by governments” and “the political establishment” more generally. they said they were angry at having to bear the brunt of austerity policies and the prospect of law reforms that would further reduce their capacity to enjoy secure decent work. some talked about their disenchantment, disappointment, and disillusionment with the french “political class”. these moral emotions were what moved the protestors to turn up every day and night, to debate online and to listen and even to speak and in public spaces. “quand nous nous alarmons que des femmes, des hommes et des enfants soient enfermé.e.s dehors, hors des murs et du toit auquel chacun.e. a droit, ils.elles nous répondent que la crise du logement est passagère, tout en entretenant la spéculation immobilière.” “la transformation de la politique en communication pure anesthésie nos espoirs.” “depuis l’instauration de l’état d’urgence, nous voyons notre démocratie pourrir comme un fruit rongé par les vers.” societies , , of this reminds us that speaking and acting politically are powerfully embodied practices and experiences. this insight can go missing when political science accounts of the political accounts are framed in terms of “individual” rational action or as the effect of structural “factors” that are woven into causal predictive-explanatory narratives. identifying the role of political emotions highlights the diverse and complex ways politics is practiced, how it is value laden, and always marked by deeply felt ethical and moral sentiment. in terms prefigured by arendt’s [ ] (pp. – ) account of human action as praxis, we see better how social movements along with more formal political institutions and practices characterised by unplannability, contingency, and human vulnerability even fragility because of the way what she calls “principles” which include important moral-political emotions impel us to act. this suggests that political action is often informed by ideas, feelings and actions that do not look all that rational or predictable. . conclusions this article outlined how the nuit debout movement started in march and how it began in opposition to neoliberal industrial legislation favouring business, which removed various protections from workers that would have a particularly adverse effect on many young people. nuit debout started in paris with a small group of around fifty participants who set up temporary camps each day which were removed every night by the police under the direction of the socialist paris mayor anne hidalgo. this meant every night the community spirit was broken as the make-shift stalls and shelters had to be taken down and rebuilt every morning. while for some this adverse action by the state may have enhanced a sense of solidarity, it was also wearing and disheartening. this experienced alongside other repressive responses from the state, no doubt having to set-up and dismantle equipment each day, played a part in the decline of nuit debout, as well as the passing of the labour law. as we argued, political or moral emotions like righteous anger, a sense of injustice and betrayal, solidarity or camaraderie, and love of one’s country help in understanding what moved so many people to become part of nuit debout. as participants themselves said, political or moral emotions rooted variously in hope, and even in feelings of love as well as feeling betrayal or anger helped them develop a sense of solidarity and a commitment to a more participatory political practice directed at overturning what many considered to be unfair and discriminatory industrial “reforms”. while nuit debout was initiated by a leftist coalition, it soon grew to encompass a more diverse movement, heavily comprised of young people. within a short time, nuit debout spread to many towns such as bordeaux, lille, montpellier, nantes, rennes, strasbourg and toulouse, and grew to include thousands of participants across france. at the same time, nuit debout’s initial political agenda expanded from opposition to the new labour legislation to include a range of issues from the austerity policies, to housing affordability and social inequality forming a “union” or “meeting of struggles” (convergence des luttes). young people also provided the momentum for much of the online and offline recruitment and mobilisation methods used in nuit debout much of which was new to france [ ] (p. ). nuitdebout was part of a larger process of global discontent evident in the occupation of public squares such as the occupy movement that began in the united states, the indignados and -m similar anti-austerity movement in spain and greece. yanis varoufakis (the former greek minister of finance and founder of diem ) participated in nuit debout and spoke at place de la république pointing to the commonalities between nuit debout and the syntagma square movement in athens, in [ ]. a declaration made during nuit debout also confirmed this view: “nous avons assisté à un mouvement exceptionnel, inattendu, dans une conjoncture où l’émergence d’une action politique semblait tellement improbable, un mouvement remarquable par sa durée, par la diversité de ses formes et par ses innovations.” during nuit debout a “revolutionary” or “republican” calendar was used that harks back to the new calendar established after the french revolution. in this way, nuit debout started on march , the next day was march and the day after march, etc. societies , , of “this movement was not born and will not die in paris. from the arab spring to the -m movement, from tahir square to gezi park, republic square in paris and the numerous other occupied public places this evening in france is the illustration of the same angers, the same hopes and the same conviction: the need for a new society where democracy, dignity and freedom are not empty declarations” [ ] (pp. – ). young participants in nuit debout were inspired by “anti-austerity” movements and expressions of solidarity that had taken place elsewhere recognising themselves as part of an on-going global phenomenon: “around us, uprisings are thriving. everywhere, people are rising up one after another: the arab spring in tunisia and egypt, -m in spain, occupy wall street in the united states, the umbrella revolution in hong kong . . . movements and public squares are feeding our imagination” [ ] (p. ). as the testimonies of young participants in nuit debout reveal, they were reflexively aware political activists who acted out an interest in doing politics differently, and who took the principles of democratic inclusion seriously. they were interested in standing up to “the political elite” with whom they had become disillusioned, in part due to austerity policies. their actions were not those of a selfish “generation” preoccupied with a “sense of self-entitlement”. author contributions: the two authors wrote, edited and reviewed the article. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references and notes . ngo, p.; truong, c. nuit(s) debout; collection coups de gueule et engagement; atlande: neuilly-sur-seine, france, . . felicetti, a.; della porta, 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[crossref] . satter, r. paris’ occupy-style protesters carry warning for french left. ap news. april . available online: https://apnews.com/ebe cf a bfaa bc/paris-occupy-style-protesters-carry- warning-french-left (accessed on september ). . marco. nuit debout participant. interview with authors. july . . nussbaum, m. anger and forgiveness: resentment, generosity, justice; oxford university press: oxford, uk, . . varoufakis, y. place de la république during nuit debout. youtube. april . available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload= &v=fp mb gy (accessed on september ). © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /annurev-soc- - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http://dx.doi.org/ . /soc . http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://www.insee.fr/fr/ppp/comm_presse/comm/communique_presse_ .pdf http://www.insee.fr/fr/ppp/comm_presse/comm/communique_presse_ .pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /nuit-debout-protesters-occupy-french-cities-in-a-revolutionary-call-for-change https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /nuit-debout-protesters-occupy-french-cities-in-a-revolutionary-call-for-change http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . https://apnews.com/ebe cf a bfaa bc/paris-occupy-style-protesters-carry-warning-french-left https://apnews.com/ebe cf a bfaa bc/paris-occupy-style-protesters-carry-warning-french-left https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload= &v=fp mb gy http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	methodology 	the background to nuit debout: neoliberal labour law 	nuit debout: a different kind of social movement for france 	nuit debout and political-moral emotions 	conclusions 	references op-parl .. money, sex and broken promises: politicians’ bad behaviour reduces trust richard rose ,* and bernhard wessels centre for the study of public policy, university of strathclyde & wissenschaftszentrum, berlin, germany; democracy & democratization, wissenschaftszentrum berlin, berlin, germany * correspondence: prof_r_rose@yahoo.co.uk this article develops and tests empirically a theory of the effect on political trust of forms of behaviour that violate social, political and legal norms about how pol- iticians ought to behave. these include taking money for favours, over-indulging in private life and making misleading promises to win votes. the evidence comes from a specially designed survey in britain, france and spain, countries where popular distrust of politicians appears greater than illegal political behaviour. bad behaviours, especially abandoning election promises once in office, have a much stronger effect on distrust of political parties that do differences in partisanship. comparing national regressions shows that the impact of bad behaviours is very similar in britain, france and spain. keywords: distrust, mandate, misleading voters, mps’, behaviour, over-indulgence, taking money . introduction for citizens to decide whether politicians are to be trusted or distrusted requires applying standards to evaluate their behaviour. standards are social constructs; bad behaviour can refer to breaking legal, social or political standards (cf. tänzler et al. ). if the behaviour of politicians is consistent with laws and social norms, this should encourage popular trust. but if popular representatives break these standards, this should encourage popular distrust (cf. mishler and rose ; rose ). the positivist approach of contemporary social science research favours defin- ing standards by reference to reliable and verifiable measures. laws are particu- larly suitable for this purpose, since they are readily available formal statements of standards. in addition to those applicable to all citizens, officeholders are sub- ject to laws specific to their office, such as anti-bribery measures prohibiting the # the author(s) . published by oxford university press on behalf of the hansard society. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. parliamentary affairs ( ) , – doi: . /pa/gsy downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july abuse of public office for private gain. if politicians act within the law, this may be deemed to make them trustworthy. politicians whose behaviour is subject to public controversy favour this approach because they can defend what they do by emphasizing that their actions are legal. however, this standard reflects what jennings ( ) has described as ‘moral minimalism’, because it excludes ways in which politicians can break public standards without breaking any law (cf. jennings et al. ). social norms are culturally constructed by combining informal standards held in the mind and legal standards formally inscribed in statute books. norms estab- lish social psychological expectations about how people ought to behave. in their relations with fellow politicians, officeholders are expected to comply with infor- mal ‘rules of the game’ if they are to be trusted by colleagues (fuchs ). the norms that ordinary citizens apply to their political representatives can com- bine standards used in their personal relations and specifically political standards. violating informal norms can be described as bad behaviour, while violating for- mal standards is an illegal act (rose and peiffer , chapter ). insofar as poli- ticians comply with social norms about how they ought to behave, this should encourage political trust. insofar as they behave badly, it should encourage distrust. trust, a word with meanings varying with context (levi and stoker ), is important for political institutions to implement collective decisions (easton ). if there is a widespread belief that in unforeseen situations politicians will act as beneficially as possible, politicians can expect widespread popular accep- tance of their decisions (newton ; dowding , p. f). trust is particu- larly important in theories of representative democracy. citizens give direction to government by casting their vote for the candidate or party that they trust will be most likely to act in accord with their interests and values (cf. miller and stokes ). theories of principal–agent relationships assume that voters, as political principals, can trust the representatives they elect to act in accord with the man- date that voters give them. however, a variety of realist theories and empirical studies question whether politicians can be trusted to act honestly and to repre- sent voters’ views (cf. wlezien ; gailmard ; allen et al. ). this article is innovative in developing a theory of how different types of bad behaviour affect political trust and testing it with a specially designed survey questionnaire. it differentiates legal, social and political types of bad behaviour the term corruption was historically used to refer to violating standards of all kinds; this meaning survives in reference to a computer file being corrupt. because the term corruption has been loaded with many different meanings (see heidenheimer and johnston, ; rose ; philp ; heywood ; ardigo and hough ; ), in this article the term bad behaviour is used to refer to the violation of informal social norms about actions of politicians. parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: : deleted text: - deleted text: paper deleted text: deleted text: and different types of punishment for each. to guard against contextual effects confounding generalization, the data come from national sample surveys in britain, france and spain, three countries where corruption in the legal sense of bribery is not widespread but where there is evidence of limited trust in demo- cratic representatives (dogan ; norris ). in all three countries, statistical analysis shows that it is politicians’ violating their electoral mandate that gives the biggest boost to distrust, moreover, this effect remains strong after controlling for differences in respondents’ partisanship and socio-economic status. . a theory of bad behaviour and distrust the theoretical importance of trust invites the question: what causes individuals to trust representative institutions central to democratic politics? many theoreti- cal explanations have been advanced (zmerli and van der meer ). they range from social psychological predispositions to trust face-to-face relations and perceptions of the political and economic performance of political institutions to democratic institutions promoting trust (warren ). theories tend to focus on political trust; distrust and scepticism are treated as residual categories (mishler and rose ). because of our focus on the effect, if any, of breaking standards, our model focuses on their effect on distrust (figure ). breaking three different types of standards—laws, moral social norms or a political mandate—can increase distrust. in addition, the more severe the punishment deemed appropriate for breaking a standard, the greater the increase standards broken laws social norms political mandate distrusts representatives appropriate punishment severe minor none controls partisanship socio-economic status figure . how bad behaviour influences political distrust . a google scholar search on february found , references to political trust, more than twice the , for political distrust. bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: in distrust. the model also controls for the potential effect of an individual’s par- tisanship and socio-economic characteristics. our first hypothesis calls attention to three different types of standards that, if broken, can increase distrust. by including social and political as well as legal standards, it allows for a broader range of influences than an exclusive focus on legal violations, such as taking a bribe. it also leaves open to empirical investiga- tion whether the effect of each standard is independent of the others, whether they form a single underlying attitude, or whether some standards have a signifi- cant effect on trust while others do not (cf. seyd ). h : the more people see politicians as breaking legal, social or political standards, the more likely they are to distrust representative institutions. laws set out clear and enforceable rules for assessing whether a politician’s behav- iour breaks a legal standard, and a law court can make a judicial determination about whether or not a politician’s behaviour has broken a law. lawyers are not the only social scientists relying on laws as the major criterion for discriminating between good and bad behaviour. many social science definitions of corruption instance violations of laws against bribery as a prime example. the theory and practice of public administration focus attention on the adoption of laws and bu- reaucratic regulations that will promote behaviour by officeholders that complies with laws and regulations (see e.g. rose-ackerman and soreide ). deciding what statutes define as legal and illegal is a responsibility of politicians. where anti-corruption laws affect their own interests, such as financing the cost of polit- ical campaigning, politicians can include loopholes that effectively allow them to accept money in ways that are legal but may be inconsistent with social norms. national practices vary in the extent to which politicians are subject to special jurisdictions, as has been the case in britain when parliament acts as the judge of the behaviour of errant mps (hine and peele ) or have immunity from pros- ecution while in office (wigley ). social norms set standards of behaviour that are appropriate and those that are not. instead of being set out in black-and-white legal statutes, they are in the minds of individuals, comprising cultural values and beliefs relevant to social and political roles (cf. welch ). in a democratic political culture, for example, norms emphasize that citizens ought to vote when an election is held and that elected politicians ought to represent the views of their voters. the behaviour of individuals in parliament and government reflects not only formal rules but also informal norms (march and olsen ; north ). by definition, a democratic political system requires politicians to act in keep- ing with their role as popularly elected representatives. insofar as these standards are widely shared in the population, they reflect non-partisan rather than partisan values, for example, not making ethnic or racist slurs about fellow citizens. when parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: deleted text: <italic>.</italic> deciding policies, politicians are expected to respect the mandate that they receive from their voters (cf. thomson et al. ). politicians are also subject to norms about personal behaviour that is inappropriate because it brings their public of- fice into disrepute, such as appearing drunk on television or using unflattering obscenities to describe other politicians, voters or countries (cf. allen and birch ). informal social and political norms cannot be enforced in a court of law but they can be judged in the court of public opinion. print, television and social me- dia can hound politicians by publicizing activities that are deemed to violate in- formal norms, and public opinion polls can act as a quasi-jury rendering a popular verdict about whether the accused has engaged in bad behaviour. if poli- ticians are ashamed by the exposure of behaviour they thought would be kept pri- vate, they can resign office voluntarily. if they are hesitant to do so party leaders can offer an embarrassing colleague a choice between resigning or being sacked (jacquet ). legal and normative standards of behaviour can be in conflict, since opin- ions of citizens about how politicians ought to behave are subjective popular judgments, while decisions about what is illegal are made in the courts. for ex- ample, participants in the #metoo movement have publicized politicians be- having in ways that they judge as violating contemporary standards of gender relations. even though few politicians have faced court charges for such activi- ties, many who are the object of #metoo complaints have accepted that their behaviour is shameful and apologised or left office. a similar disjunction be- tween legal and informal popular standards was demonstrated when the parlia- mentary expenses claimed by almost british mps were leaked. the media headlined as scandalous expense claims, such as that for cleaning the moat around one’s stately home. only a handful of mps were convicted of making an illegal claim, but most mps repaid some expenses that met parliamentary standards but that they did not want to defend in public, and some decided not to stand for re-election (cf. kavanagh and cowley , p. ff, ff; vanheerde-hudson ). the punishment appropriate for breaking standards varies in accord with the legal maxim that it should fit the crime. the more serious the violation of a stan- dard is, the more severe the punishment should be. moderate punishments can be assigned to activities that are considered inappropriate for a public office- holder but not damaging to public policy. some activities may be tolerated and not result in any punishment. for a politician to be photographed drunk in pub- lic does no harm to anyone but himself or herself, while a politician who accepts money for fixing a contract for a constituent who builds an unsafe bridge at a grossly inflated cost violates both legal and social standards. bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july h : the more people see the violation of standards as serious, the more likely they are to distrust representative institutions. the punishment of chris huhne, a british cabinet minister, illustrates gradations of seriousness. when his car was caught by a speed camera, his wife pleaded guilty to a speeding offence, an experience common to many britons and not requiring an apology. when months later huhne was indicted for perverting the course of justice by pressuring his wife to lie to the court to avoid losing his motoring li- cence, he was so shamed that he immediately resigned as a cabinet minister. after pleading guilty to the charge, he also resigned his seat in parliament and was given an eight-month prison sentence. since bad behaviour by politicians may not be the only stimulus to political distrust, our model controls for the effect of partisanship, which is often a signifi- cant source of disagreement in the application of standards. a politician accused of breaking standards may counter-charge by saying the attack is motivated by partisan opponents. this response was employed by president bill clinton after being impeached by the republican-controlled house of representatives and is being used daily by president donald trump to defend himself in the court of public opinion. partisan loyalty can influence citizens to ignore bad behaviour by other members of their party in accord with the maxim ‘my party, right or wrong’. our model also controls for socioeconomic status, since sociological theories hypothesize that differences in status influence attitudes towards corruption (cf. heath et al. ). a british study has found that higher-status people are more likely to be tolerant of the behaviour of politicians and have more trust in political institutions (allen and birch , p. ). inglehart ( ) has devel- oped theories about younger and older citizens differing in the social norms that they apply in judging behaviour (cf. schoon and cheng ). gender differences in representation may lead women to be less trusting because fewer women hold elected office. . public perceptions of bad behaviour since democratic politicians are meant to represent citizens, a national sample survey is an appropriate means for obtaining evidence about how the public per- ceives the behaviour of their representatives. to complement the concentration on breaking formal anti-bribery laws found in transparency international’s global corruption barometer (www.transparency.org/), we designed a question- naire to measure the extent to which people see politicians engaging in bad be- haviour and how serious they think these activities are. parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: deleted text: <italic>.</italic> deleted text: - deleted text: : deleted text: . http://www.transparency.org/ to avoid basing conclusions on a single national case, the politicians behaving badly (pbb) survey was conducted in three west european democracies, britain, france and spain. they were chosen because, by the conventional measure of ille- gal corruption, the payment of bribes is low in all three countries. a eurobarometer survey ( ) found that only % of french respondents, % of spaniards and . % of british respondents reported that they had paid a bribe to a public official in the past year. in the global corruption perceptions’ index produced by transparency international, all three countries are rated in the top quarter, but they also differ from each other. the cpi rating of britain is , france and spain . the french-based survey organisation, efficience , con- ducted telephone interviews with a random stratified sample of britons be- tween and january ; with french between and december ; and with spaniards between and december . while each country has a distinctive history and political culture relevant to corruption and scandals (cf. della porta and yves ), in the years leading up to the survey in all three countries there was substantial media publicity about politicians breaking standards. the british media competed in headlining stories of pbb in their private lives, offering to use their office in exchange for the pay- ment of large fees, and misleading voters by making policy u-turns (vanheerde- hudson ; hine and peele ). in france, le canard echainé has regularly published exposes of bad behaviour by leading politicians. the financial affairs of former president nicolas sarkozy and economics minister and later imf head christine lagarde were subject to scrutiny and the sexual affairs of president francois hollande were well publicized. in spain a substantial number of cases have been publicized about the illegal payment of money to major politicians in established parties (orriols and cordero ). at the time of the survey prime minister mariano rajoy was campaigning for re-election amidst allegations of in- volvement of corruption and the former economics minister was on trial for cor- ruption and subsequently convicted. to assess trust in representative institutions, a single question was asked: to what extent do you trust political parties? replies were coded on an -point scale ranging from , no trust, to , complete trust. the focus on parties rather than individual politicians provides a common reference point across electoral systems that differ in whether people vote for a party list, an individual candidate or have a combination of choices. it also avoids the risk of contamination because of the popularity or unpopularity of a locally elected mp or national party leader at the time of fieldwork. national respondents differed only in the degree to which they withhold trust from parties that represent them. the mean british re- spondent gave the least negative rating, . . in france the mean score was . and in spain . . bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: , deleted text: , deleted text: - deleted text: , deleted text: - deleted text: , deleted text: - deleted text: politicians behaving badly . breaking standards only a very small percentage of people are likely to have first-hand experience of a politician behaving badly, while almost everyone is exposed to media stories about politicians that can be used to evaluate them. therefore, the pbb question- naire asked people about their perceptions of politicians’ behaviour. while this is not evidence of how politicians actually behave, it is sufficient to influence the subjective judgments that people make about whether politicians are to be trusted (cf. figure ). the pbb question about politicians taking money—how many members of parliament take money from people who want political favours?—was intentionally ambiguous. it leaves open whether the money was an illegal bribe or was given as a material reward to an mp who had legally done a political favour. the former interpretation is implied when the british media videos a sting in which an mp offers to take money to help a fictitious business interest (see e.g. insight ). when this is publicized, an mp usually claims that the payment was justifiable re- muneration for representing an interest and no legal charge is made against the mp (insight ) only one-third think that most or all mps take money for do- ing favours; the median respondent thinks that less than half do so, and those say- ing hardly any do so outnumber the proportion saying all mps take money for favours (table ). notwithstanding differences in how mps are elected in britain, france and spain, there is little difference between countries in the extent to which mps are seen as taking money for favours. in all societies there is a distinction between behaviour that may be accepted in private life, but which, if it becomes public, may be judged as a violation of so- cial norms about how politicians ought to behave (cf. sarmiento-mirwaldt et al. ). while the media are quick to headline-specific examples of a politician’s private life as scandalous, to find out if such stories are generalized to politicians as a class the pbb survey asked: how many politicians in their private life over- indulge in drink, sex or drugs? in all three countries, two-thirds or more thought that only some or hardly any politicians over-indulged in their private behaviour, and cross-national differences in perceptions were limited (table ). a basic assumption of representative democracy is that citizens can compare the different policies that politicians offer and vote for the one that comes closest to their view, confident that, if elected, their choice can be trusted to deliver the mandate that their voters give (schumpeter ). to determine whether voters trust politicians to do what they promise, the pbb survey asked: how many politi- cians promise to do one thing if elected and then do the opposite after being elected? the question made no allowance for politicians pleading extenuating circumstan- ces when they execute a u-turn and abandon an election promise. insofar as vot- ers see politicians as unscrupulously seeking their vote, they are less likely to be parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: . deleted text: above deleted text: headline trusted. of the three standards asked about, the one most often seen as violated is the political standard that politicians should not make misleading election prom- ises. among britons, almost three-quarters see most elected representatives as po- litical hypocrites; the proportion rises to more than five-sixths in france and seven-eighths in spain (table ). all in all, the public tends to see the behaviour of politicians in shades of grey rather than in black-and-white terms. less than % think all politicians break all three standards of behaviour and less than % think hardly any do so. although respondents were making an evaluation in their national context, their judgments tended to differ more between types of activities than between countries. in britain there is a difference of up to percentage points between the percep- tion of most mps misleading voters and most over-indulging in their private lives, in france, the contrast between misleading voters and taking money or over-indulgence rises to %. spaniards likewise discriminate in their perception of bad behaviour: there is a percentage point difference between those seeing politicians misleading voters and those seeing them over-indulging in their private lives. table perception of violations of standards how many politicians. . . britain france spain % % % take money: receive money from people who want political favours all most (total) ( ) ( ) ( ) some hardly any over-indulge privately: in drink, sex or drugs all most (total) ( ) ( ) ( ) some hardly any mislead voters: promise to do one thing if elected and then do the opposite after being elected all most (total) ( ) ( ) ( ) some hardly any source: pbb survey. telephone interviews by efficience . britain, , – january ; france, , – december ; spain, , – december . funded by wissenschaftszentrum berlin democracy & democratization programme and centre for the study of public policy bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent . seriousness of bad behaviour the ppb survey included a nuanced measure of the seriousness of corruption. immediately after asking about the frequency with which a standard was broken, people were asked what should happen to a politician who violates a particular standard. up to five alternatives were offered. they ranged from the most severe in terms of its consequences—going to jail or leaving their office—to nothing need be done. intermediate categories included paying a paying a fine or publicly apologising. since these punishments are not mutually exclusive, respondents could and often did endorse multiple punishments. there is overwhelming agreement that breaking each type of standard is seri- ous; on average < % say nothing should be done. even though making a public apology is considered necessary, it is not deemed sufficient to deal with the viola- tion of informal standards about how politicians ought to behave (table ). there is little difference between britons, french or spaniards in the seriousness with which people treat taking money for favours. five-sixths think that politi- cians who take money for favours should lose their post and more than half think they should also go to jail. a majority likewise think that politicians who over- indulge in their private lives should forfeit their public office, but few think such behaviour deserves a jail sentence. the cross-national assessment of the minority who over-indulge shows significant differences. in spain, % think those who do so privately should lose their public office, in france % take this view, and in britain % endorse severe punishment. pbb respondents talk tough when asked: if someone you voted for did this (that is, broke a promise), what would you do at the next election? more than two-thirds of spaniards and about three-fifths of britons and french say they would vote for someone else. only one in nine say they would vote the same. however, replies to this hypothetical question do not appear to be matched by the proportion of table seriousness of bad behaviour q. what should be done with a politician who breaks a standard? britain france spain % % % should lose job, votes type of behaviour takes money over-indulges privately misleads voters source: pbb survey parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: . deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: less than deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent voters actually switching parties when a general election is held. one reason is that bad behaviour and corruption in the legal sense are not the only issues influencing voters. when asked about the three most important problems facing government, only % of britons and % of french mention it. in spain, where high-level corruption was very much in the news during fieldwork, it was named by %. moreover, partisan ties and information-awareness, plus economic influences, can discount the effect of bad behaviour and corruption on voting (kla�snja ; greene and york , p. ff). . testing the effects on political trust even though our three european countries appear similar in attitudes towards pbb, it does not follow that the determinants of political trust are the same in each country. to assess whether this is the case, we conducted separate regression analyses in each country. if the same indicator is significant in all three national contexts, this is especially robust evidence of support or rejection of a hypothesis and, if results are the same in two of the three countries, this shows substantial support. to provide a clear focus on substantive relationships, we also report the results of a regression analysis that pools the three national surveys (table ). given sample sizes of one thousand, we use . or lower as our standard for sta- tistical significance in the three national analyses and . in the larger pooled database. since the impact of significant variables on trust can vary substantially, we cal- culate predicted probabilities for the effect on trust of an independent variable changing from its lowest to its highest value. coefficients with a minus sign show that the variable reduces trust, but the size of their impact varies. thus, a coefficient of � . for the effect of politicians lying to get votes reduces spanish trust in political parties by more than three and one-half points on the -point trust scale, while a coefficient of � . for the effect of over-indulging reduces trust by just under one point. altogether, empirical analysis provides strong support for our model of the ef- fect of corruption on individual trust in the political parties that represent them. in all three national analyses, the ols regression accounts for a high level of vari- ance: % in britain, % in france and % in spain in the pooled three-nation analysis. moreover, notwithstanding many historical differences between the countries, there is consistency in the national evaluation of influences. the three while a theoretical case can be made that corruption and trust have reciprocal effects on each other, to test this with a structural equation model requires variables that can serve as control instruments and these do not occur in the ppb survey (cf. wroe et al. m, p. ff). for details of variables and how they have been coded, see supplementary table s . bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: . deleted text: politicians behaving badly deleted text: deleted text: - deleted text: - deleted text: percent deleted text: deleted text: deleted text: https://academic.oup.com/pa/article-lookup/doi/ . /pa/gsy #supplementary-data types of standards are significant in all three countries. so too is partisanship. in contrast, the seriousness of punishment for violating standards is of limited sig- nificance in all three countries, and so too is the effect of educational status. there is extremely strong support for our first hypothesis (table ). if people perceive politicians as breaking any of the three informal standards, they are sig- nificantly more likely to distrust political parties. moreover, the effect is found in all three countries. the standard that generates the most distrust is central to the theory of representative government: elected representatives should keep the promises that they made to voters when seeking votes. after controlling for all other influences, the pooled data analysis estimates that trust in politicians will fall by . points among people who see politicians saying one thing to win votes and doing the opposite once in office. the effect is biggest in spain; dishonesty in making political promises lowers trust by . points. the effect of politicians being seen as taking money for favours is second in impact. in the pooled data analysis it lowers trust in political parties by an esti- mated . points. while this is substantial, the effect is two-fifths less than that table effect of breaking standards on trust in parties ols regression coefficient independent variables britain france spain all types of corruption mislead voters � . b � . b � . b � . b takes money � . b � . b � . b � . b over-indulgence � . � . b � . b � . b seriousness of violation strict punishment � . a . � . � . a corruption important problem � . � . � . � . b partisanship supports governing party . b . b . b . b supports opposition party . b . b . b . b demographics gender female . � . b . . high socio-economic status . . � . . low socio-economic status . . a � . . constant . . . . number of cases adjusted r . b . b . b . b note: all independent variables have been recoded to a range of – . regression coefficients show the maxi- mum effect on the -point scale for trust of an independent variable moving from its lowest to its highest value. a level of significance (p < . ). b level of significance (p < . ). parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: by of politicians breaking promises; moreover, the impact varies substantially be- tween countries. it is twice as high in britain as in france. if citizens think most of their politicians over-indulge in their private lives, this has a significant effect on trust too; however, this effect is less than breaking other standards. after con- trolling for taking votes and taking money, in all three countries it lowers trust by under one point (table ). contrary to hypothesis , measures of the seriousness of bad behaviour have no consistent effect on political trust. endorsement of the strictest punishment— send violators to jail or eject them from office—has no significant effect in the pooled data set or in france and spain. while significant in britain, the size of the effect is much less than that for misleading voters or taking money (table ). moreover, in all three national surveys, people who see corruption as an impor- tant problem do not differ significantly from their fellow citizens in their level of political trust. the significant effect in the pooled data set is small and may simply be a by-product of having three times as many interviews when calculation signif- icance (table ). the contrasting findings for the first and second hypotheses shows that it is not the seriousness of what is done but whether a politician behaves badly that depresses trust. . partisan effect the importance of controlling for party loyalties is robustly confirmed. at the time of the survey, the governing party in britain was the conservatives, in france the socialists held the presidency, and in spain the popular party was in office. notwithstanding major differences between these parties, in all three coun- tries those who voted for the governing party are substantially more likely to trust parties (table ). the effect holds after controlling for the negative impact on trust of believing that politicians who hold office renege on the promises they make when campaigning to win office. while the halo effect of supporting gov- ernments of different ideologies has a positive impact on trust, boosting it by as much as . points in the pooled database, it does not offset the negative impact of politicians breaking their promises to voters. moreover, in spain, where the governing party has been mired in all kinds of allegations of bad behaviour, the boost to trust among its supporters is less than one-third of the depressing effect on trust of politicians misleading their voters. in all three countries those who do not vote for the governing party consider- ably outnumber government supporters. they include supporters of established opposition parties that have been in government and hope to return; new parties that have never been in government; and those without any party preference. established parties have the most grounds for being distrusted, since they have previously been in government; they include the labour party in britain, the bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: f deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: . deleted text: socialist party in spain and the republicans in france. after controlling for all other effects, in all three countries supporters of the governing party, whether socialist or conservative, tend to be significantly more trustful and supporters of the established opposition parties significantly less trustful. insofar as holding of- fice encourages trust, this implies that the alternation of established parties be- tween government and opposition will lead partisans to alternate between sometimes trusting and sometimes distrusting a government that in theory is democratically representative. in other words, the impact of partisanship is not ideologically based; it reflects the temporary electoral success of competing parties. in preliminary regressions, we tested whether those who do not support estab- lished parties rotating between government and opposition tend to be more dis- trustful of parties. this is consistent with non-established parties such as ukip in britain, the national front in france and podemos in spain being described as protest parties. in fact, it makes no difference in trust, even in spain, where pro- test parties were strongest at the time of the pbb survey. one possible explanation is that in spain the overall level of trust in parties was very low. in britain by the time of the survey at the beginning of the conservative government was seeking to regain supporters by implementing ukip’s flagship policy of having a referendum on the uk withdrawing from the european union. supporters of protest parties were not significantly more distrustful than the national average and the same was true for non-voters. in other words, those who have stopped voting for the established parties of government are not so much angry as apa- thetic about the claims of governors to be trustworthy. notwithstanding the emphasis in sociological theories on the pervasive effect of socio-economic status on popular attitudes, empirical tests of the effect are in- conclusive (cf. heath et al. ; zmerli and van der meer ). none of the three demographic indicators–high status, low status and being a woman—has a significant effect on trust in the pooled analysis. the consistent failure of socio- economic status to show a significant effect indicates that people who are more informed about politics are just as likely to distrust political parties as citizens with a secondary school education. the same is true for those with the low socio- economic status, except in france, where the effect is marginally significant but the impact is slight (table ). gender has no significant influence in the pooled analysis, britain or spain. french women are inclined to be less positively trusting but the size of the effect is small. in a preliminary regression analysis, we tested the effect of age which the pbb survey divided into four groups. in all three countries the youngest group, age – , did not differ significantly in their trust from the oldest, over ; the same was true of the intermediate age groups. this implies that distrust in parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: &ndash; deleted text: to government is an all-age phenomenon independent of specific events in early so- cialization or of any inter-generational changes in standards of private morality. . implications for representation our evidence shows that to confine the effect of corruption on trust to actions breaking laws is to misread the minds of voters. breaking informal standards is a major cause of distrust too. the most important informal influence on trust is politicians saying one thing to get elected and doing the opposite once in office. this implies that attempts to improve trust in politicians by adopting formal laws will be inadequate, since major informal influences on distrust are within the law. although our theory is in principle applicable to all political systems, the evi- dence comes from only three european countries. notwithstanding differences between the histories, institutions and party systems of britain, france and spain it is striking that separate regression analyses come to the same conclusion. the violation of informal standards about how politicians ought to behave substan- tially depresses trust in democratically elected politicians. whatever the standard broken, the minimum punishment tends to be loss of office. moreover, people who think a less serious punishment is acceptable are just as likely to distrust par- ties as those who consistently favour severe punishments. a single survey cannot show whether perceptions of bad behaviour have been increasing. surveys over the past several decades show that distrust in political parties and politicians is long-standing (klingemann and fuchs ; norris ; van der meer and hakhverdian ). whiteley et al. ( ) argue that short-term changes in trust are simply fluctuations around a long-term equilib- rium of limited trust. this suggests that many citizens have long-established pre- dispositions to trust or distrust their representatives, views that are, at most, only temporarily altered by events or the behaviour of a particular party leader (cf. allen et al. ). because standards of bad behaviour are informal, they are easily contestable. in the absence of substantial evidence of wrongdoing, a politician accused of act- ing badly can reject allegations. in the face of evidence, a politician can claim that there is no wrongdoing as long as there is no violation of a formal legal standard. when allegations and evidence of bad behaviour imply that laws have been violated, as in the investigation of russian meddling in the us election, the response can be, as in the case of the administration of donald trump, a counter-charge against critics of corrupt or bad behaviour. counter-charges create a race to the bottom among parties ‘normalizing’ their behaviour by making their opponents appear to be acting as they do. insofar as counter- charges are convincing, this is likely to fuel popular distrust in all politicians. bad behaviour and trust downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: . deleted text: `` deleted text: '' partisanship qualifies the extent to which individuals distrust political parties (cf. anderson et al. ). among those supporting the government of the day, % see all or most politicians as reneging on their promises, and this is the case for % favouring establish opposition parties, % if without a party affiliation and % of supporters of protest parties that have never been in government. while the effect of being in government makes supporters more trusting, the fact remains that a substantial majority in citizens, whatever their partisan status, see politicians as misleading voters. distrustful citizens do not accept the classic schumpeter ( ) model of democratic elections as offering a choice between alternative parties of govern- ment. instead of seeing degrees of corruption that allow for a choice of one party as a lesser evil (cordero and blais ), they see both alternatives as forming an untrustworthy cartel (cf. katz and mair ). confronted with a choice of par- ties that cannot be trusted to keep their pre-election promises, citizens can decide not to vote. however, while election results show fluctuations in turnout, there has been no consistent downward trend in turnout in west european countries. however, there has concurrently been a big rise in votes for unestablished parties that have never been in government (mudde ; wagner and meyer ). in france, outsider candidates from the right and left took almost half the vote in the initial round of the presidential ballot. in spain, the two established par- ties of government together won just under half the vote in . in britain, an outsider party, ukip, has been so successful in getting the conservative party to adopt its major policies that it lost its own electoral support. although the bad behaviour of politicians has destabilized party systems, it has not led to a loss of trust in democracy as an ideal (cf. ferrin and kriesi ; kumlin and esaiasson ). distrustful citizens are not voicing an attack upon their democratic political system. they are expressing dissatisfaction with the ex- tent to which politicians fall short of formal and informal standards of demo- cratic behaviour that they would like political elites to change (vasilopoulou ). in doing so, citizens are endorsing winston churchill’s ( ) defence of democracy as ‘the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried’. funding the work of the first-named author was supported by an economic and social research council grant number es/i x/ about the global experience of cor- ruption. the pbb survey was funded by the wissenschaftszentrum berlin and the centre for the study of public policy, university of strathclyde. earlier versions were presented to the parliamentary standards committee of the uk parliament parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent deleted text: percent and to the ecpr general conference, prague, september . three anonymous reviewers made helpful comments. references allen, n. and birch, s. 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( ) handbook on political trust, cheltenham, edward elgar. parliamentary affairs downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-abstract/doi/ . /pa/gsy / by university of strathclyde user on july 	gsy -fn 	gsy -fn 	gsy -tf 	gsy -tf 	gsy -fn 	gsy -fn 	gsy -tf 	gsy -tf 	gsy -tf desecrating celebrity full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcel celebrity studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel desecrating celebrity romana andò & sean redmond to cite this article: romana andò & sean redmond ( ) desecrating celebrity, celebrity studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: mar . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcel https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcel &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcel &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule desecrating celebrity romana andòa and sean redmondb adepartment of history, anthropology, religions, art history and performing arts, sapienza university of rome, rome, italy; bschool of communication and creative arts, deakin university, geelong, australia defile me when we decided on the theme of desecrating celebrity for the fourth celebrity studies international conference at sapienza university in rome, , none of the most powerful examples of contemporary desecration had yet occurred. we were still to see the allega- tions of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse laid by over women against hollywood film producer, harvey weinstein. this, in turn, gave rise to the #metoo movement and the flood of male stars and celebrities who were accused of using their positions of power for their own ends, including kevin spacey. we were still to see: bill cosby’s final metamor- phosis from the beloved, cuddly patriarch of the cosby show, into an inveterate predator; the tax evasion scandal that engulfed cristiano ronaldo, and the subsequent rape allegations levelled against him; the ferocious divorce between cult and mainstream idol johnny deep and amber heard, including allegations of spousal abuse; the demise of brangelina’s marriage and the battle over alimony and who would be custodians over their children; and the airing of the hbo documentary leaving neverland which accuses michael jackson of paedophilia. there are numerous other examples, a veritable polluted sea of falls from grace and the perversion of star and celebrity images: it was if desecration was now the dominant, the central determinant of celebrity culture. of course, many of the examples listed here are tied to sexual power and the ideologies that shape them. even if such determination can be questioned – stars and celebrities continue to provide cohering social myths to bind with – the issues of degradation, desecration and decelebrification are an integral part of the complex phenomenon of celebrity. unsurprisingly the switch between steps related to consecration and degradation in celebrity life is a constant: the rise and fall narrative, a central component of star and fan identification streams, and media marketing. for some stars, such as fatty arbuckle and paul reubens , the desecrating moment marked the end of their career and the long- lasting revocation from the dominant culture’s collective memory. that said, even when a star or celebrity falls from grace their decline becomes a media story in itself, and for some fans the trade and traffic in their perverse memorabilia produces new modes of affective engagement (schickel ). nonetheless, the flows of consecration and desecration are marked by media fields and technologies and the conceptualisation of ‘near’ and far’, whether it be the big screen, and the slow time of print and analogue technologies, or the liquid quick time of the digital age. the question of proximity and intimacy is often argued to increase with such contact sean redmond s.redmond@deakin.edu.au celebrity studies , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - formations as reality tv, or the social media, opening up new ‘authentic’ frames with which to bind with figures of fame. but it is also enabling new discourses of trolling to take root and branch. for example, in elizabeth podniek’s analysis of the perezhilton.com website, they find trolling to be: ‘graphic, aural, oral, auto/biographical, collaborative, and collective, it is a postmodern celebration of and desecration of the life and times of fame today’ ( , p. ). the shift from a predominantly top-down, broadcast-driven media logic to one invol- ving a dynamic content circulation paradigm, has challenged the way that celebrity culture is symbolically and materially produced, circulated and consumed. in these new circulation processes the celebrities ‘digital life’ is, in fact, produced from the contamina- tion between top-down and bottom-up forces, and official and unofficial media streams. this friction results in the increasing visibility of celebrities as they move between media ‘layers’ and as ‘control’ over what and how they represent shift between producers and consumers, mediators and fans. consecration and desecration flow from such newly open or porous digital formations, as the examples above suggest. the #metoomovement enabled female stars and celebrities to use twitter to circumnavigate official discourses, bringing to light their own desecration as they rightfully desecrated those figures who had abused them. one might argue that this increases the ‘intensity’ with which stars and celebrities are engaged with and in the way stars and celebrities ‘speak’ to culture (jerslev ). this increasingly active and participatory role of the audience, then, also resonates in the celebrity-building process, as well as in the parallel and complementary degradation process. in comparison to the ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ described by thompson ( ), in the case of electronic media, in the new digital media system, the affective participation of audiences in production, distribution and consumption of the celebrities becomes conclusive. moreover, these processes succeed at an absolutely unpredictable speed compared to the traditional mass media system. for example, american actress alyssa milano began using the phrase ‘me too’ on twitter in . milano encouraged victims of sexual harassment to tweet about it and ‘give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem’. within year, the #metoo hashtag had been used over million times (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /how-social-media-users-have- discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/ft_ - - _metooanniversary_ hashtag-used- m_times/) in this radically transformed scenario, digital media seem to do be able to two different things: it can give rise to instantaneous celebrities, consecrated without formal ordination; and, due to the possible shortening of the chronological interval between celebrification and desecration, it can quicken the processes of degradation. but not only this, this temporal instantaneity can quickly turn a fallen star or celebrity into a holy figure again, since the means of real-time reconsecrations are easily afforded. there is an amnesia that leaks into the flows of celebrity culture. in fact, within the new media ecosystem, the fallen celebrity may potentially reach an even higher level of elevation in the public sphere. we may consider in this sense the media storytelling of asia argento, the italian actress who was among the first actresses to speak out about powerful producer harvey weinstein’s sexual assaults. within a few months, she was the victim of a terrifying online ritual of degradation managed by italian newspapers, politicians and audiences because of her role of victim and heroine; then she was celebrated for her renewed visibility and success r. andÒ and s. redmond https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/ft_ - - _metooanniversary_hashtag-used- m_times/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/ft_ - - _metooanniversary_hashtag-used- m_times/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/ft_ - - _metooanniversary_hashtag-used- m_times/ on tv (she was hired by x-factor); finally, when she was accused of sexual assault by jimmy bennet, she was condemned and again celebrated by the media as both oppressor and penitent victim. here the perceived truthfulness and authenticity of the celebrity confessional is seen to produce this constant flow of celebrity consecration and desecration. celebrities can use the digital media as a set of stages to emotionalise themselves and to puncture the fakery of so-called parasocial interaction. similarly, fans and consumers can mine these perfor- mances, stage their own performances, opening up celebrity culture to congregations which defile and sanctify the famous. this re-staging of where, how and when celebrity culture is produced, may have two consequences. first, the process of cultural and collective, psychic and individual ‘filtering’ processes may be severely lessened and undermined. in the ‘wild west’ of the digital media and the social media in particular, there is the space for producers and consumers/ fans to totally rewrite the rules of desecration, and more generally, the moral rules of interaction. this may lead to a downward spiral of decline: where contemporary online degradation ‘ceremonies’ result in a ferocious backlash, which in turn produce a viler set of engagements and so on, each spiral more contaminated than the last. when these stages create the hate speech that target race, gender and sexuality, real injury is imparted (lumsden and morgan ). second, the democracy it affords and the issues that it can deal with, open up the world to new forms of creative agency and political activism, of which the #metoo movement is a powerful example. here desecration is in the service of emancipatory politics. there is, of course, the folds and flows of pleasure: the unruly nature of desecra- tion which allows those who play in that space a sense that there is life beyond the neoliberal marketplace. an unholy special edition standing between consecration and desecration, this special issue is dedicated to the examination of the ongoing transformation of the social role and significance of celeb- rities in an age where the divide between good and evil has collapsed. as we demonstrate in this introduction, the thematic issue of desecration, and more generally of celebrity consecration, is far from being exhaustively investigated. this special issue, then, does not and cannot offer a definitive overview of the area but rather seeks to open doorways and to raise important questions about the morality and immorality of fame. nonetheless, the articles selected have been drawn from the very best work presented at the conference. they take us from the holy chapels of religion to the ‘nasty’ politics of the age of trump; from the starry screens of hollywood cinema to the wasted vestiges of television personalities; and from the moralising speech of the social media to the sacrilege of david bowie. celebrity culture will never be this defiled again. feminism, religiosity and celebrity culture represent an ideal fil rouge in the opening essays by misha kavka and lucy bolton, both keynote speakers at the conference. in taking down the sacred: fuck-me vs. fuck-you celebrity, misha tracks and traces the power geometries found in celebrity culture’s own appetite for profanities. making a powerful distinction between fuck-me and fuck-you celebrity, with the former being seen to abide by standards of feminine beauty, and the latter as openly addressing the unequal forces of celebrity studies sex and power, the article sees a shift between the two. drawing on post-weinstein era examples, such as caitlyn jenner, tess holliday and rose mcgowan, the article suggests that the celebrity system, which has heavily favoured the fuck-me trope, is now beginning to enunciate an active ‘fuck you’ political sensibility. in lucy’s article, beautiful penitent whore: the desecrated celebrity of mary magdalene, she explores the way that mary magdalene as both celebrity and film star embodied the classic dichotomy of virgin and whore found in western judeo-christian culture. writing from an interdisciplinary perspective, and drawing upon theology, church and art history, feminist film and media studies, celebrity and popular culture, lucy examines a number of seminal ‘religious’ films to ‘unravel’ the saintly and unsaintly representations found of mary. in so-doing, the article shows us the benefit of interdisciplinary analysis, and the forms through which gendered religious representations flourish. in michael williams’s essay, a venus in marble and bakelite: ava gardner and one touch of venus, ‘divinisation’ is explored through the promotion and reception of one touch of venus ( ), which drew up and extended ava gardner’s then rising star profile. michael discusses how universal-international’s marketing campaign drew upon patriarchal notions of female beauty where initiatives such as the bakelite figurine of gardner distributed to exhibitors, and beauty contest tie-ins where fans could measure themselves up against star and sculpture alike, reproduced a form of gendered and desecrating commodification that ultimately served repressive ends. in white trash celebrity in the age of eugenics: desecrating clara bow, gaylyn studlar also explores the gendered dimension of film star desecration but closely ties it to white trash sensibilities. gaylyn suggests that bow’s symbolic and commodity value was synonymous with the erotic provocations of the stereotyped flapper, but her celebrity transgressed hollywood’s conventional discourses of white idealisation, instead infecting it with lower-class licentiousness. the article goes on to powerfully conclude that such representations lay the ideological groundwork for the class sham- ing that is directed at ‘chav’ female celebrities associated with british reality television today. the perverse nature of the sex scandal is taken up in caroline bainbridge’s analysis of jimmy savile and his status as a somehow ‘untouchable’ celebrity. in who will fix it for us? toxic celebrity and the therapeutic dynamics of media culture, caroline explores the media processes and practices that helped both shape and respond to the desecration of savile’s celebrity, persuasively arguing that there is a therapeutic quality to the production and consumption of such scandalous events. the article goes on to argue that re-mediations of celebrity scandals provide important outlets for unconscious emotional experience, in turn creating an important psychological space for resisting dominant narratives that contrive to shape celebrity as somehow ‘untouchable’. sex and power are also the keywords in two recent cases of decelebrification – bill cosby and kevin spacey – discussed by mette mortensen and nete nørgaard kristensen in their article, de-celebrification: beyond the scandalous. mette and nete propose a new term, de-celebrification, to designate a state in which celebrities lose their legitimacy and no longer possess the formal and symbolic power formerly attached to their celebrity status. drawing upon empirical data to investigate the way audiences respond and contribute to fallen celebrities, the article shows how the agency can work in the contemporary digital age. r. andÒ and s. redmond sreya mitra takes up the challenge of exploring the complex role that the social media has in desecrating the female star or celebrity through such acts as chastisement, ridicule and trolling. in trolled, body-shamed and slut-shamed: the desecration of the contemporary bollywood female star on social media, sreya examines the way bollywood female stars are often body-shamed and trolled on social media platforms such as twitter. drawing upon priyanka chopra as a case study, the article explores the way they attempted to navigate their role as a transmedia and transnational celebrity, against the public humiliation they faced online for not embodying traditional indian ‘feminine’ qualities. in his essay, desecration and the politics of ‘image pollution’: ambedkar statues and the ‘sculptural encounter in india’, pramod nayar returns to the theme of sculptural desecra- tion explored in michael williams’ article. pramod examines the desecration of public statues of b.r. ambedkar ( – ), who drafted the constitution of india, suggesting that desecration speaks to complex ideas and tensions around nationhood and the national imaginary, and the binary caste and class system that he worked against. to desecrate or profane the ambedkar statue is to question the pure/impure distinction that the figure represents. the desecration of politics and public values is the focus of the article by anita biressi who critically donald trump’s political persona. in president trump: celebrity-in-chief and the desecration of political authority, anita suggests that donald trump’s perverse power lies in his self-ordained role as a celebrity-in-chief who desecrates politics, political authority and the political scene. this political sacrilege has consequences for political authority and the discourses that operate within the political arena since it lowers and stains the issues that politics explores. now moving to the journal’s forum section, music celebrities are the very protagonists who are seen and heard to desecrate the arenas of fame. in ian dixon’s essay, your face is a mess: desecrating david bowie’s face-as-commodity in ‘diamond dogs’, the protagonist is the face of david bowie, that is – like for many celebrities – the access point for fans to the star personality. in the diamond dogs album, bowie plays with his face presenting himself as a half-man, half-dog freak, a cocaine addict and performer who is sexually promiscuous and non-heteronormative. as ian suggests, bowie’s fascination with facial desecration may result in the annihilation of his own celebrity, while it challenges the role of iconic faces of singers as new saints, martyrs and religious figures. the face, then, is considered by fans as an important tool to use in order to reach the real meaning of a celebrity and at the same time as a strategy managed by celebrities themselves to play with audiences in their symbolic appropriation. within a celebrity landscape so drastically changed by social media, this kind of interaction among fans and celebrities needs to be further explored: in the essay from awkward teen girl to aryan goddess meme: taylor swift and the hijacking of star texts, annelot prins reflects on the appropriations of taylor swift’s persona as a symbol of white supremacism. according to the author, this might be interpreted both as one-sided fan practices from an undesired audience and as a potential hook, promised to her fans by her music. the appropriation of swift, as analysed by annelot, shows that the impact of social media on star texts can hardly be underestimated, and a polysemic star text that declines to explicitly claim political position may even provide opportunities for hijacking by audiences. celebrity studies the complex and contradictory relationship among fans and celebrities is also inves- tigated in the article, jaak joala – ‘kremlin nightingale’ or estonian celebrity? in an attempt to explain the dynamic of estonian singer estrada joala’s fame, heli reiman reflects on the schizophrenic balance between the star’s diverse self-presentations and the multiple audiences expectations and needs within different political and historical contexts. joala’s nationalist role in estonian popular music history has been recently recognised and re-established through numerous commemorative acts produced for the narrative- building project of the estonian cultural past. however, it was not always so: as a matter of fact, joala’s artistic image as a romantic, charismatic, talented, western-like singer, addressed the expectations of soviet audiences, which was simultaneously rejected by estonian audiences not surprisingly because of a lack of nationalism. as these cases study make evident, the celebrity is clearly a matter of narratives. the role of media and social media storytelling is relevant also in the case of the celebrity trainwreck. in her article, trainwreck femininity and whitney: monstrous feminine redux, susan hopkins reflects on how the celebrity trainwreck invites fans into a modern ‘passion play’ of the sacred and profane, through patriarchal narratives that negate the agency of the female star. as hopkins reports, whitney houston and amy winehouse have been dehumanised and punished by mainstream and new media, represented as female pop stars known more for their drug use, troubled relationships, erratic or self-harming behaviour and emotional instability, than for being powerful and creative models of subversion. conclusion in desecrating celebrity – in ‘shitting on its shibboleths’ as sean put it when opening the conference – we have sought to do two things. first, to undermine, question and resist dominant and perceived ways of understanding celebrity culture. second, to shine an unholy light on the way that desecration and consecration operate in the dark days of the contemporary political age. as we finish writing this introduction, the news reminds us that the ugly, gendered signifiers of desecration is everywhere – it is in the reported endorsement by president bolsonaro of brazil, of a post on facebook insulting the french first lady, brigitte macron; and it is in melania trump’s smouldering exchange with canada’s prime minister, justin trudeau (august ). the former works off ageist and sexist stereotypes and the latter softens and romanticises the fakery that each represent. but, finally, the news or rather the ‘new’ news, or the informational flow which circulates in dynamic streams on the social media, also show us that resistant desecration is every- where, shaped by a political agency and criticality that seeks to tear down the normative walls. as prince andrew continues to maintain his innocence with respect to his relation- ship with jeffrey epstein, prostitution and under-aged sex, the media trolls rise up, challenging his official narrative, offering a counter to this ascribed celebrity caught in a clear abuse of power. it our job to defaecate on and to desecrate celebrity culture. notes . it should be noted that reubens has continued to work, to take on film and television roles. however, these ‘cameo’ roles largely support the argument that he is carnivalesque figure – a hauntology of a star. similarly, pee-wee’s big holiday (lee ) seems to trade in this past-ness. r. andÒ and s. redmond . the term metoo was coined by activist tarana burke as a way to connect survivors on a grass- roots level. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors romana andò, ph.d. is researcher at sapienza university of rome since where she currently is head of the international master of science in fashion studies. she has taught classes on audience research, fashion and consumer experience and transmedia content production for undergradu- ate and graduate students. she combines empirical and theoretical research, within the frame of cultural studies and qualitative methodologies for field work. she is also the coordinator of the social tv observatory (together with alberto marinelli). she authored many articles on audience practices, fandom, tv consumption and fashion. among the others: andò r., marinelli a., , television(s) come cambia l’esperienza televisiva tra tecnologie convergenti e pratiche social (how tv experience is changing thanks to convergent technologies and social practices), guerini, milano; andò, r., marinelli a., , youtube content creators, egea milano. sean redmond is professor of screen and design at deakin university. he is the co-editor of celebrity studies and the author of celebrity ( ), and co-author of the fandom of david bowie: everyone says hi ( ). he has research interests in stardom and celebrity, science fiction, the video essay, and eye tracking the moving image. references jerslev, a., . media times| in the time of the microcelebrity: celebrification and the youtuber zoella. international journal of communication, , . lumsden, k. and morgan, h.m., . ‘fraping’, ‘sexting’,’trolling’ and ‘rinsing’: social networking, feminist thought and the construction of young women as victims or villains. in: proceedings of forthcoming feminisms: gender activism, politics and theory (bsa gender study group conference) ( ), pp. - leeds, uk. podnieks, e., . celebrity bio blogs: hagiography, pathography, and perez hilton. a/b: auto/ biography studies, , . schickel, r., . intimate strangers: the culture of celebrity. new york: doubleday. thompson, j.b., . the media and modernity: a social theory of the media. stanford: stanford university press. celebrity studies 	defile me 	an unholy special edition 	conclusion 	notes 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	references writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color review writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color crystal parikh university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp., isbn: - contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x; published online march crystal parikh’s writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. as a literary critic with explicitly political concerns, a thinker interested in counter-hegemonic ideas but one who doesn’t abandon the quest for ethical life, parikh issues a challenge to contemporary political theorists interested in thinking through radical critique and racial justice during our reactionary times. human rights discourse, as has well been documented and thoroughly discussed, is nothing short of complex. on the one hand, since the end of the second world war, it has been a crucial tool for the most vulnerable people to mobilize against the horrors authoritarianism, domination, exclusion, and violence. on the other hand, it has historically been coopted for dangerous ends – just think of invocations of humanitarian intervention, us’s wars for spreading democracy and peace abroad, and all the efforts associated with neoliberal privatization and financial austerity. critics thus insist that human rights are ineffective at best, or nothing more than instruments of hegemony at worst. they are seen as powerful words on paper that only matter to the extent they are truly secured, but are usually proclaimed by states to mask their own geopolitical interests in the pursuit of free market capitalism and political order – rather than democracy. the upshot here is that human rights have very little to do with making life more livable for the poor, women, people of color, and the disabled. parikh’s work insists that such pessimism, while historically justified and intellectually understandable, relies on a narrow notion of human rights. in her view, we haven’t fully appreciated the political potential in the meaning of both humanity and rights precisely because we haven’t fully engaged the terrain in which these two terms have been most fruitfully explored, namely what she calls � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals the ‘minor literatures’ of writers of color, such as toni morrison, ernest gaines, maxine hong kingston, jessica hagedorn, chang-rae lee, and susan choi, among others. parikh’s ambition is not to romanticize such minor literatures as inherently radical or emancipatory – or even claim that the ideas embedded within them could be easily applied to politics. instead, the intention is to show a counter-vision of human rights that emphasizes shared human precariousness, unveiling the fantasy of invulnerability, and endorsing the construction of personal and familial relationships not governed by pernicious ideals of what is socially respectable. indeed, if human rights discourse relies on a notion of universality but smuggles in a provincialized account of what is properly human (white, american, male, heterosexual, invulnerable), parikh aims to provincialize such dominant narratives. the aim is to shed light on the ethical viability of that, which is more attentive to difference and pluralism and more capable of addressing suffering and degradation in ways responsive to the citizens for whom human rights are said to matter the most. on the one hand, she writes that ‘human rights provide deeply meaningful methods of political and moral imagining, especially for subjects whose recognition by the state is tenuous, if not altogether foreclosed’ (p. ). on the other hand, she emphasizes ‘bodily and social vulnerability’ and stresses the way ‘minor literatures give voice to the complex desires of these subjects’ and how they ‘mediate the subject’s experiences of vulnerability and agency’ (p. ). political theorists who read writing human rights will see the work as enacting three main projects: the post-colonial attempt to provincialize american and western universalism (dipesh chakrabarty, gayatri spivak), the post-structural critique of power (michel foucault, jacques derrida), and developing a sense of global responsibility based in shared precariousness (stephen white, judith butler). for these reasons, at a moment when the term ‘identity politics’ is used by critics to denigrate movements on the left that call for justice for marginalized identities, parikh’s work offers a corrective. following recent work by critical race theorists, queer theorists, and feminists, an implicit argument of the book is that all politics is, in some sense, based in specific identity standpoints that it often obscures. put differently, identity, then, is an inescapable source of political claim making, whether or not it is seen as such. one of the things that makes writing human rights an important work and will surely interest political theorists is parikh’s ability to successfully and effortlessly move between different methodological approaches – literary criticism, us intellectual history, critical race theory, legal theory – without sacrificing intellectual rigor or political purpose. part of why parikh’s readings are so theoretically generative is that they provide a method to see literature (narrative, review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s plot, dialogue) as harboring both critical and normative insights, but also that they express a theoretical imagination that is not bound by traditional argumentative conventions (like didactic claiming or deductive logical reasoning) or simple resolutions. the texts she explores, many of which have been examined by critics before, are given a fresh take. for instance, in the introduction, she reads toni morrison’s classic novel, beloved ( ) (based on the nineteenth century historical figure of margaret garner), as a work that exposes how ‘humanness’ is a construction. in the novel, an enslaved person, sethe, who has no rights is nonetheless considered criminal when she kills her child, beloved – who also will have no rights – in order to save her from slavery. sethe sees herself as human, even as her sense of self is haunted by the past and the dangers in the world as a black woman in the post-reconstruction era. this vulnerability doesn’t preclude her from persisting and reconstructing new family networks, as well as attempting to love and be loved. these themes are continued throughout the book. the first chapter considers how the work of gaines and kingston complicates the idea of afro-asian solidarity in a way that radicalized the impulse towards global antiracism. through a reading of novels by hagedorn and lee, the second chapter examines how human rights have a life of their own, escaping ideas of humanity found within liberalism. the third chapter, centered on susan choi’s the foreign student, considers how minor literature evokes an idea of vulnerability in ways that expand the right to security and escape narrow ideas of community. the final three chapters zoom in on novels by julia alvarez, jhumpa lahiri, and ana castillo and aimee phan to tackle the rights to revolution, to health, and to family in ways that make us rethink ideas about what it means to flourish, and make autonomous choices about the good life. despite its overwhelming strengths and clear interest for contemporary political theorists, writing human rights is not primarily a work of traditional political theory. although parikh fluidly invokes arendt, foucault, levinas, and fanon among others throughout, her concern is less with placing minor literature into conversation with american political thought or the western tradition and more with the boundaries of literary criticism and american studies. for all of the crucial and provocative questions the book generates, it still leaves some unresolved: what would a national or international politics, or even social movements like black lives matter, #metoo, or dakota access pipeline protests, based in the minor literature of human rights, look like? is there a tension between questions of institutional politics (geopolitical interests, grassroots struggle, state activity, and ngo work that tries to advance human rights) and the radical normative project of ethico-political thinking? answering these questions is, of course, not central to the review � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s book’s success, but they could be taken up in future work that tries to grapple seriously with rethinking key political institutions and discourses that affect people’s everyday lives. nonetheless, parikh’s work serves as an important model of an engaged and probing mode of writing for our contemporary moment when democratic faith and norms are being thrown into question. thinking human rights is perhaps more important now than ever before, given the global the rise of authoritarianism, white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, the assault on women’s reproductive rights, ongoing war, occupation, torture, and ethnic cleansing. as writing human rights reminds us, however, accepting the spirit behind human rights – justice, equality, self-determination, dignity – does not require succumbing to its dominant formulations. alex zamalin university of detroit mercy, detroit, mi , usa zamalial@udmercy.edu review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s 	writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color 	crystal parikh university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp., isbn: - blending integrated knowledge translation with global health governance: an approach for advancing action on a wicked problem review open access blending integrated knowledge translation with global health governance: an approach for advancing action on a wicked problem katrina marie plamondon , * and julia pemberton abstract background: the persistence of health inequities is a wicked problem for which there is strong evidence of causal roots in the maldistribution of power, resources and money within and between countries. though the evidence is clear, the solutions are far from straightforward. integrated knowledge translation (ikt) ought to be well suited for designing evidence-informed solutions, yet current frameworks are limited in their capacity to navigate complexity. global health governance (ghg) also ought to be well suited to advance action, but a lack of accountability, inclusion and integration of evidence gives rise to politically driven action. recognising a persistent struggle for meaningful action, we invite contemplation about how blending ikt with ghg could leverage the strengths of both processes to advance health equity. discussion: action on root causes of health inequities implicates disruption of structures and systems that shape how society is organised. this infinitely complex work demands sophisticated examination of drivers and disrupters of inequities and a vast imagination for who (and what) should be engaged. yet, underlying tendencies toward reductionism seem to drive superficial responses. where ikt models lack consideration of issues of power and provide little direction for how to support cohesive efforts toward a common goal, recent calls from the field of ghg may provide insight into these issues. additionally, though ghg is criticised for its lack of attention to using evidence, ikt offers approaches and strategies for collaborative processes of generating and refining knowledge. contemplating the inclusion of governance in ikt requires re-examining roles, responsibilities, power and voice in processes of connecting knowledge with action. we argue for expanding ikt models to include ghg as a means of considering the complexity of issues and opening new possibilities for evidence-informed action on wicked problems. conclusion: integrated learning between these two fields, adopting principles of ghg alongside the strategies of ikt, is a promising opportunity to strengthen leadership for health equity action. keywords: integrated knowledge translation, global health governance, health equity, health inequities, knowledge-to-action, wicked problems, complexity * correspondence: katrina.plamondon@ubc.ca university of british columbia, university way, kelowna, bc, canada interior health, doyle avenue, kelowna, bc, canada full list of author information is available at the end of the article © the author(s). open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:katrina.plamondon@ubc.ca http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / background problems described as ‘wicked’ earn the label from their in- herent resistance to resolve; they are convoluted, reactive problems entangled in competing social interests and values [ , ]. the persistence of health inequities [ , ] is a wicked problem [ ] shaped by systems of power [ – ] and the social and structural determinants of health [ – ]. robust evidence provides clear insights into their socio-political, economic and historic causes [ ], and offers actionable policy solutions [ – ], making the persistence of health inequities a knowledge-to-action problem. however, efforts to advance evidence-informed action unfold in the same systems of social and political power that disproportionately advantage the already privi- leged and are generative of health inequities’ wicked na- ture. additionally, despite recognition of their wickedness, attempts to respond often reduce health inequities into component parts, examining ‘symptoms’ rather than causes [ – ] in ways that ‘fit’ with dominant political ideologies [ – ]. these factors fuel the wickedness and tenacity of health inequities. the purpose of this review article is to explore the complementarities of two promising approaches of ap- plied research and practice that might support meaning- ful processes for advancing evidence-informed health equity action. it began with informal conversation about our experiences as doctoral students doing research for health equity, where we found ourselves grappling with contradictions and tensions within our field. though we witnessed a broad commitment to ‘good’ equity intentions, we simultaneously observed processes and leadership that contradicted the evidence on causes and applauded super- ficial responses to health inequities. critically examining how to move beyond good intentions for health equity became central to both of us in our doctoral research, with katrina focusing on integrated knowledge translation (ikt) and julia on global health governance (ghg). as our dialogue became more purposeful and structured, we discovered that the challenges we encountered in our respective fields were met by strengths in the other. adopting an intentionally optimistic lens, we explored how these fields might complement each other and, through deeper attentiveness to issues of political power, could collectively contribute to more productive health equity action. we understand both ikt and ghg to be primarily con- cerned with processes. ikt brings together people who do and use research as equal contributors to processes of col- laboratively identifying and responding to knowledge-to-ac- tion challenges [ – ]. ideally, ghg brings cross-sector actors together to deliberate and guide mechanisms for resolving complex global issues through intentional collab- oration [ , ]. both are promising, yet the strengths of each mirror weaknesses in the other. poor governance suffers from accountability and administrative failures, and a lack of strategy for integrating evidence-informed, con- textual and tacit knowledges [ – ]. emerging from health systems settings with clearly defined and con- tained contexts (e.g. clinical practice sites), ikt suffers a lack of attention to power dynamics and complexity in decision-making [ ], making it difficult to apply to ‘wicked’ knowledge-to-action problems. further, despite much inter- est in both ikt and ghg within the field of health equity, their respective bodies of literature are disconnected. in this article, we draw on freire and shor’s metaphor of a ‘dialogic table’ [ ], inviting contemplation of how blending ikt approaches with ghg principles could support meaningful health equity action. below, we lay a foundation for deeper, critically reflective consider- ation of the complementarities of ikt and ghg. we are inspired by the potential of critical pedagogy as an epistemological guide for ‘how’ we (society, scientists, practitioners, decision-makers, etc.) might collectively inspire transformative possibilities. in their reflective con- versation about learning, freire and shor described a ‘dia- logic table’ as an enabler of transformative co-learning. they suggested an “object to be known is put on the table between subjects…[who] meet around it and through it for mutual inquiry” ([ ], p. ). the “object to be known” in this dialogue is evidence-informed health equity action. the ‘subjects of knowing’, each with their own insights, knowledges (e.g. tacit, institutional, professional knowl- edges), evidences and epistemologies, are people situated within the fields of ikt and ghg. we set this dialogic table by discussing the wickedness of health inequities, the strengths and limitations of ikt and ghg, and how to leverage their mutually beneficial characteristics. unpacking the wickedness of health inequities health inequities are systematic differences in health rooted in socioeconomic and political injustices [ ]. the who commission on social determinants of health de- scribed health inequities as avoidable, arising from “…the conditions of daily life in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age” shaped by social, political and economic forces, and requiring response from the “whole of govern- ment” [ ]. evidence shows that the greater the gap be- tween a population’s richest and poorest, the greater the differences in health between them [ , , ]. unequal and unfair systems of power between and within nation states are widely recognised as driving forces in the cre- ation of structures that disproportionately advantage some lives at the cost of others [ , , ]. though the evidence about causal roots is clear, and a robust suite of tested pol- icy recommendations widely available [ – ], the imple- mentation of policy solutions is far from straightforward. calls for social policy reform to improve health have been documented for more than years [ , ], revealing plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of deep resistance to resolve. indeed, the causes of health inequities are tenacious because they are rooted socio-pol- itical systems and structures designed to reinforce the sta- tus quo of power distribution, locally and globally. connecting knowledge to action on root causes of health inequities implicates a reconstruction of the sys- tems and structures that shape how society is organised. this infinitely complex work demands sophisticated examination of drivers and disrupters of inequities and a vast imagination for who (and what) should be engaged. this work is challenging for many reasons, not the least of which is a fundamental clash between health inequities’ inherent complexity and the dominant lens through which the world is observed and responded to in the field of health and science generally. this lens involves linear, reductionist and hierarchical assumptions (table ) stemming from seventeenth-century mechanistic suppositions about reality [ ]. a repercussion of these assumptions is a persistent western habit of understanding “the world as a collection of separable and thus independent units and assumes linear cause-and-effect relationships between these units, and that these relationships are reversible” ([ ], p. ). when these as- sumptions are at play, our collective capacity to recognise the depth and tenacity of root causes remains elusive. lending to a particularly narrowed and superficial lens through which the social determinants of health [ ] and health inequities are framed [ , ], mechanistic assump- tions effectively mask complex mechanisms that entrench inequities. rather than focusing on the intersecting nature of the social determination of health [ ], efforts to advance health equity under these assumptions place inordinate at- tention on behavioural interventions and insufficient atten- tion on structural causes [ , ]. for example, even when there is agreement about causes, public health efforts tend to focus on interventions that place responsibility for health on individual behaviours [ , ]. despite the recognised value of upstream and structural interventions, research shows a predominantly downstream focus in policy and public health efforts [ , – ]. behavioural interventions for healthy eating, for example, distract attention away from complex issues of affordability and accessibility, whereas a more structural intervention might involve advocacy to ad- vance socially protective policy for living wages. further, the role of power in establishing systematic ad- vantage and disadvantage, recognised as a pivotal driver of health inequities [ ], is only occasionally acknowledged and infrequently used to guide study goals and objectives [ ]. decades of dominant neoliberal ideology [ ] have contributed to policy environments incompatible with the kinds of social protection known to mitigate health inequi- ties [ , , ]. compounding these incompatibilities is a preoccupation with individualism and bio-behaviourism in health sciences that conflicts with the best available evi- dence and often distracts attention from where it might be most productive [ , , , ]. whether inadvertent or strategic, the absence of power analysis in efforts to ad- vance health equity action can undermine possibilities of uprooting the tenacious systems of power that lead to inequities. the fields of ghg and ikt span practice, policy and re- search outside the confines of a particular topic. both fields bring something important to the table in response to health inequities. further, because of their relational nature, they both offer platforms for the kind of dialogue necessary to challenge reductionism and mitigate power imbalances. greater integration across disciplines interested in health equity is recognised as necessary evidence-informed action for health equity [ , ]. if there is indeed desire and cap- acity to begin unravelling equity-harming structures, power and policy environments, then there is an urgent need to understand how to mobilise knowledge into action – both in terms of increasing the application of existing knowledge and informing emerging research. unpacking these influ- ences could provide a useful means of deconstructing underlying assumptions that lend themselves to consistent failures to advance health equity. table mechanistic assumptions and their application to social determinants of healtha assumption description how the assumption circumvents complexity of health inequities reductionism assumes the whole system can be understood by identifying, describing and analysing all of its constituent parts breaks social determinants of health into separate, distinct factors (rather than a set of complex intersecting factors) draws attention to symptoms or expressions of root causes that are more immediately visible (e.g. considering ‘race’ a determinant of health instead of ‘racism’) linearity assumes that ( ) output changes proportionally with input, and ( ) the effect of combined inputs can be understood and predicted by dissecting the input–output relationships of individual components, or a direct summative and predictive cumulation of constituent parts simplifies interconnectedness justifies use of proxy indicators that reflect symptoms rather than causes of health inequities (e.g. monitoring maternal and child mortality rates as indicators of equity) hierarchy assumes central power and control, which diffuses systematically from proximal to more distal parts places responsibility for acting on health within individuals or groups, rather than society legitimises a focus on health damaging behaviours rather than health damaging conditions, systems or structures aadapted from jayasinghe, [ ] plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of what does ikt bring to the table? efforts to respond to health inequities include explicit calls for connecting research to action [ , ]. these calls align with the growing recognition of the import- ance of knowledge translation (kt) [ – ]. ikt offers strategies for bringing diverse perspectives together to understand and respond to problems through processes of knowledge generation and refinement [ – ]. inherently relational [ ], ikt is non-linear and challenges trad- itional notions of the dispassionate, objective ‘expert re- searcher’ [ ] whose work, once released into the world through scholarly publication, carries de facto impact. it involves participatory, inclusive processes where people who ‘use’ research work alongside people who ‘do’ re- search [ ]. recognising a ‘social contract’ between society and science, ikt brings stakeholders into a social process of problem solving through research [ ] emphasising knowledge co-production in partnership [ ]. by virtue of this collaborative approach to knowledge production, re- finement and use, an ikt approach necessitates dialogue and trust building [ – ]. these characteristics are well suited to overcoming mechanistic assumptions by foster- ing ‘change from within’; however, the application of ikt to wicked problems is constrained by underlying assump- tions that limit the scope and scale of contexts for which it was originally envisioned. frameworks for ikt consistently describe it as a way of collaboratively leveraging the research processes as a means for generating context-sensitive, complexity-embracing, real-life solutions grounded in evidence. among evolving models for ikt are encouraging innovations, such as the use of critical realism and arts in kt [ ], systems thinking [ ], and even reflexive frameworks for equity-focused kt [ ]. common among these models is a recognition that “both communities [of knowledge users and producers] hold distinct norms and values but they also bring valuable knowledge to the problem; and the work of knowledge gener- ation is done collaboratively” ([ ], p. ). a distinguishing feature of ikt is, however, that “knowledge users usually have the authority to invoke change in the practice or policy setting” [ ]. this presumes that knowledge users are indi- vidual ‘stakeholders’ who represent particular portfolios within a health system or community setting. when the context and knowledge-to-action problem implicates social organisation and structure, however, the idea of including everyone, or even of finding just one set of stakeholders who may have authority to invoke change over some aspect of policy or practice relevant to health equity can be para- lysing. the need for engaging people who can be part of decision-making mechanisms that lead to action opens a question of governance. although ikt models demonstrate promise for micro- (e.g. clinical practice unit) and meso- (e.g. health sys- tems) contexts [ ], their utility is limited when applied to the multiple, complex actors that contribute to shap- ing political, social and cultural environments that either drive, do nothing or disrupt wicked problems like health inequities. this is, in part, due to the difficulty of navi- gating meaningful engagement within the vastness of potential actors to include. rather than focusing stake- holder analysis [ ] in a defined setting, the range of po- tential actors implicated in wicked problems extends to networks of knowledge producers and knowledge users, many of which are not single entities, but conglomerates that also produce multiple competing interests and values. identifying the ‘right’ actors to engage could become in and of itself a wicked problem, resistant to resolve and surely beyond the scope of any individual study or programme of research. further, these models lack direc- tion for how to achieve cohesiveness toward a common goal. additionally, despite a need for evidence-informed policy and practice for health [ , ], there are few exam- ples of using ikt approaches to respond to wicked prob- lems. these features that constrain the application of ikt in the face of wicked problems could be redressed through adoption of the principles of ghg, particularly its mecha- nisms of legitimacy and collaboration between multi-sector transnational actors, with an emphasis on civil society. what does ghg bring to the table? as a reaction to the intensifying wickedness of health prob- lems that defy state borders, governance processes consist of stakeholders working through formal international insti- tutions both within and across borders. heavily influenced by major globalisation events such as hiv/aids and sars, current mechanisms and processes for ghg stem from the disciplines of political science, health economics and health policy [ , ]. in the absence of a singular global government, ghg platforms convene a plurality of major actors to define shared values, establish standards and regulatory frameworks, set priorities, mobilise and align resources, and promote research. ghg often requires individual governments to forgo aspects of their individual sovereignty in order to collaborate and participate with international agencies such as who [ ]. for example, the who international health regulations establishes stan- dards for how individual countries respond to international health risks [ ]. these regulations refer to the need for the director-general of who to consider scientific evi- dence, but do not provide recommendations for how this evidence could inform decision-making. ultimately, ghg is a polycentric system that provides a mechanism for collective decision-making for improved health through the interplay of different institutional forms and actors at different levels in pursuit of common goals [ , , ]. the imperfect decision-making pro- cesses of ghg are, however, embedded in historical and socio-political contexts of colonialism and heavily plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of influenced by power relationships, values, norms, organ- isational structures and resources. ghg is political; it can serve to reinforce or challenge existing institutional exclu- sion and power inequalities and has direct impacts on health system equity whereby the decisions made through ghg processes shape who accesses benefits and whose voices are heard [ ]. continued processes of globalisation and increasing influence of private sector actors in global health bring new layers of political power to the govern- ance scene [ ], while innovations in technology, data, communications and networks open possibilities for reim- agining the mechanisms and processes relied upon post world war ii [ ]. the time is ripe for reimagining how ghg might better support collective responses to global problems. at the turn of the twenty-first century, health sectors worldwide were acutely aware of their limited capacity to deal with emerging challenges in isolation. global vulnerability to pandemics, climate change and political instability all contribute to a growing recognition of a need for multi-sectorial action and broad public and pri- vate partnerships at national and international levels [ ]. further, civil society and political leaders are chal- lenging notions of an isolated, technocratic health sector and call for more unified attention to issues of equity and human rights [ ]. society writ large voiced a desire to be part of the political sphere that shapes their life circumstances, opportunities and experiences of health and healthcare. in response to a confluence of heightened awareness of the globalised nature of health issues and growing demand for collective responses, complex net- works of international agencies and philanthropic founda- tions collaborated to set global targets for progress toward a more equitable word through the millennium develop- ment goals and the more recent sustainable development goals [ , ]. these and other examples of governance for health equity (e.g. the who commission on social determinants of health) are key demonstrations of the kinds of platforms and mechanisms ghg offers. import- antly, these mechanisms also demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism contributes to health equity failures. global health crises exemplify how health equity is tied up to socio-political and economic contexts, including the histories of colonisation. the – ebola epidemic is an important example of the consequences of govern- ance failures. as outbreaks emerged, the world witnessed vulnerabilities and fragmentation in public service sectors that became determinants of who lived and who died – revealing intense inequities between and within countries [ – ]. leaders in health systems and governments alike recognised the need for strong global institutions, mecha- nisms and funding for development of global public goods that contribute to resolving global health threats. in the case of the ebola crisis, ghg leadership (e.g. who) failed to respond in a timely manner, which lead to other key ac- tors stepping up to fill the leadership gap. the response was openly criticised as “too little too late” to halt an epi- demic reflective of the “pathology of society and the global and political architecture” [ ]. like many contemporary ghg challenges, this crisis unfolded through the legacy of colonialism [ ] that holds the roots of inequities in place. by revealing the differential value placed on human life globally, these failures illuminated the tenacious nature of health inequities and the lack of political will to uproot their causes. while ghg provides a platform for responding to wicked problems through global collaboration, cooperation and leadership among a diverse set of actors, ghg deliver- ables still lack strategies to ensure evidence- [ ] and equity-informed [ ] policy, practice and decision-making. the lancet–university of oslo commission on glo- bal governance for health also pushed for evidence- and equity-informed ghg, recommending mandatory health equity impact assessments for all global institutions and strengthened sanctions against non-state actors for rights violations [ ]. surprisingly, there are few examples of looking to ikt to support processes for the same [ ]. shared governance and public dialogue about our social and economic architecture is needed [ ], where public moral norms can be re-constructed and internalised (e.g. recreating constructs of health equity as a public good). ikt approaches and strategies could support this kind of dialogue in engaged, inclusive ways that support connect- ing this kind of evidence and other knowledges with ac- tion. in table , we offer an overview of recognized steps in the knowledge-to-action cycle [ ] alongside comple- mentary ghg processes and mechanisms. this blended ikt–ghg approach, done alongside a critical examination of power, presents a promising pathway toward health equity action. additional ‘objects’ of consideration on this dialogic table in addition to our interest in leveraging the relational-dia- logic nature of ghg and ikt to counter reductionism and mitigate power imbalances, we propose placing a few add- itional objects on this dialogic table, namely accountability, leadership and inclusion. it is beyond the scope of this dis- cussion to resolve the intricacies of any of these issues, but we hope that they serve as sparks for continued dia- logue and reflection. in ghg, the lack of accountability of major global health organisations (i.e. who), and its rela- tionship to systems of power, has been a significant chal- lenge [ ]. unclear accountabilities, particularly for leadership, can play a role in legitimising investments in research, ikt, or policy in ways that overlook evidence about causal roots or reinforce inequitable power dy- namics. without frank acknowledgement of the legacies plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of of colonisation, and particularly at a time when neo- liberal reason and monetisation of socio-political pro- cesses undermine democratic governance [ , ], it is insufficient to assume health equity is the responsibility of governments, government agencies or civil society, nor of international institutions, such as who or united nations, whose political leverage falls under the shadow of powerful financial bodies such as the world trade organization, international monetary fund, world bank and, more recently, influential and well-endowed philan- thropic foundations such as the bill & melinda gates foundation [ , ]. neither can the roles, responsibilities table blending processes and mechanisms for a blended integrated knowledge translation (ikt) – global health governance (ghg) approach moments in the ikt cycle complementary ghg processes and mechanisms examining power in an ikt–ghg approach identify problem and identify, review, select knowledge ↓ adapt knowledge to local context ↓ governance bodies that work together to identify problems and knowledge consideration of the composition of non-traditional actors, such as civil society and private sector, in governance bodies guidance for meaningful engagement between actors, particularly in shared governance models promising example: gavi mitigates known global power imbalances through the composition of their board, which includes neutral individuals who speak to public interests, government representatives each from donor and recipient countries, expert in research and technology, industry representative each from the global south and global north, civil society representative, and representative each from who, unicef, world bank and bill & melinda gates foundation taking steps to balance power between global north and global south promoting transparency and accountability in decision-making about the composition of governance bodies attentiveness to how particular ways of framing health and governance influences how a ‘problem’ is being understood attentiveness to how historical conditions and power dynamics privilege particular assumptions assess barriers to knowledge use ↓ select, tailor, implement interventions ↓ guidance on how to resolve discrepant norms and values between engaged actors guidance on how to ensure legitimacy of leadership guidance on how political will and power influence this process platforms for coordinating global-level responses to wicked problems promising example: the lancet commission on ghg offered specific recommendations for governance mechanisms and processes, with detailed calls to make the examination of issues of power an explicit responsibility of ghg. they called for attention to democratic deficit, institutional and structural inflexibility, strengthened accountability, identification and involvement of missing institutions and voices, and to create a policy space for health. their report offers specific guidance on how to do so. among the commission’s recommendations were specific mechanisms, including a proposed un multi-stakeholder platform on global governance for health attentiveness to how historical conditions and power dynamics give rise to inequities in inclusion and voice exploration of how processes of historical exclusion (e.g. due to race, class, gender, indigeneity, etc.) can be mitigated monitor knowledge use ↓ evaluate outcomes ↓ sustain knowledge use generation and maintenance of mechanisms provide infrastructure for monitoring and evaluation norms and expectations for transparency in decision-making promising example: two advisory bodies, the technical review panel and a technical evaluation reference group, provide independent audit and monitoring of programmes funded by the gfatm. their reports highlight lessons learned from funding requests and reviews, including perspectives of applicants, technical partners, the secretariat and the board. they consist of external experts in hiv, tb and malaria as well as experts in human rights, gender, health systems and sustainable financing. their reports are made publicly available through the gfatm website attentiveness to who decides what knowledge count as legitimate attentiveness to who decides what outcomes count as legitimate consideration of who owns knowledge, with efforts to promote publicly owned and accessible data attentiveness to equitable distribution of resources and benefits plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of and accountabilities of ‘researchers’ and ‘research users’ in ikt be simply assumed because they agree to work together. these are critical considerations in moving toward evidence-informed, equitable governance for health equity action. systems for enabling accountability and transparency must be agreed to, which raises questions of meaningful participation and responsibility [ ]. despite intense im- balances in power and interests, the challenge for ghg and ikt strategists alike will be to engage a plurality of actors in ways that enable collective agreement on a com- mon goal. accountability extends to issues of inclusion and exclusion and how power is distributed. though in- clusion is widely recognised as important for ghg and kt, how to achieve it is elusive. global events exemplify ways in which civil society is pushing back on systems of exclusion, voicing a desire to transform what are, in es- sence, governance processes. responses to global health issues evolve in politicised systems that exclude the voices of those most burdened by health inequities [ ]. the idle-no-more [ ], occupy [ ], black lives matter [ ] and the more recent #metoo movements share a common outcry for justice and equity in society, pointing to the in- equities generated by power and policy structures that sys- tematically privilege the wealthy and white. collectively, these movements reflect a growing public demand for pol- itics of inclusion where government and non-government actors are held accountable for the consequences of their action (or inaction). they are demonstrative of how intri- cately tied up health inequities are in complex, competing systems of power within which there is a need for critical analysis and mitigation. further, the likelihood of understanding complexity be- comes much greater by directly fostering balanced repre- sentation that includes a pluralism of voices. on a larger scale, this is reflected in the evolution of the major ghg players in the world. historically, who and the world bank have been primarily responsible for ghg, but given the significant frustration with each of these institutions’ poor ghg, two new organisations have risen, namely the global fund for aids, tb, and malaria (gfatm) and global alliance for vaccines and immunization (gavi); what separates these two institutions from their counter parts are their commitment to ghg. these commitments include a wider, more inclusive, board of governors (civil society, the private sector, and philanthropic organisations), as well as providing clear and transpar- ent (i.e. publicly available) decision-making regarding funding decisions and priority-setting processes. both organisations rely on external review for their ac- countability for decision-making processes like fund- ing decisions. we believe that theory and practice in both ikt and ghg would benefit from these new exam- ples of creating organisations that work toward governance models based on inclusion, voice, transpar- ency and accountability. without clear leadership and a commitment to accountability through transparency by all global health actors, the current response to health inequi- ties will be ad hoc and exclusive of these civil society voices, as well as highly fragmented with little to no for- mal mandate between the players. importantly, the re- sponse would be at risk of remaining distracted by the tendency to focus on symptoms rather than causes. as the field of ikt evolves, so too do opportunities for theory and practice refinement. governance processes could enhance current ikt frameworks to open consider- ations of how to weave evidence into decision-making while acknowledging conflicting norms and values within the political sphere under which it operates. using shared health governance theory to drive this examination can contribute to more transparent and equity-centred ap- proaches to understanding how these norms and values shape health problems [ ]. expanding ikt models to in- clude governance would require re-examining legitimacy, transparency, power and inclusion in the process of con- necting knowledge with action. this broader conceptual- isation extends the application of ikt into a complex public sphere, across domains and outside the control or context of any one institution or set of actors. we are much more likely to approach understanding complexity through systems of inclusion that directly engage multiple socio-political arenas. systems of inclusion can be expli- citly addressed by adopting principles of ghg alongside the strategies of ikt. exploring a blended ikt–ghg approach could extend insights from the success of ikt in clinical and health sys- tems settings [ , ] to wicked problems. this approach could illuminate new ways of thinking about how we might influence the trajectory of wicked problems to fair, equit- able governance informed by high quality, rigorous and relevant research. in the example we offer here, of moving toward health equity, ikt implicates an all-of-society ap- proach because the root causes involve all of society. ikt models already acknowledge the process of connecting knowledge with action as inherently social, but this is often used as a way to describe the processes involved in well-defined settings. wicked problems are not confined to singular contexts. although attending to social processes are important, they need to be considered in the broader sphere of how society is organised. this means thinking about and connecting the best available knowledge about a wicked problem to evidence-informed action as a ‘public good’, wherein the process is integrated as part of the social fabric around which communities are organised. we be- lieve broadening the application of approaches to ikt across multiple layers of complex social interactions can support evidence-informed influence and, again, ghg can support the achievement of coherency in doing so. plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of conclusion in this article, we set a dialogic table to explore how blending principles of ghg with ikt strategies could le- verage the strengths of both, enhancing the possibility for effective and evidence-informed answers to wicked problems. we situated this table in a global political economy that unfairly distributes power, resources and money. by focusing on explicit examination of power and overcoming mechanistic assumptions that draw at- tention away from the root causes of health inequities, there is tremendous potential to be leveraged in a com- bined ikt and ghg approach. such an approach would require leadership from academic, policy and civil society arenas wherein existing ghg platforms explicitly embrace a commitment to connecting knowledge (evidence about causes) with action. we encourage those pursuing an ikt–ghg approach to engage in bold and inclusive dia- logue about how socio-political histories (e.g. colonisation) are at play in the ways they frame or respond to health in- equities. in contemplating governance-focused ikt, actors involved in advancing health equity can take promising steps toward inclusion of a broad spectrum of actors and a pathway for stimulating the collective agency needed to affect change on this wicked problem. abbreviations ghg: global health governance; ikt: integrated knowledge translation; kt: knowledge translation acknowledgements we wish to acknowledge the mentorship, encouragement and scholarly guidance we receive from our supervisory committees as doctoral candidates. for kp, at the university of british columbia, this includes dr joan bottorff, dr susana caxaj, dr ian graham, and dr michael burgess. for jp, at mcmaster university, this includes dr lisa schwartz, dr susan jack, dr claudia emmerson, and dr brian cameron. funding this paper was commissioned by the integrated knowledge translation network (iktrn). the iktrn brings together knowledge users and researchers to advance the science and practice of ikt and train the next generation of ikt researchers. honorariums were provided for completed papers. the iktrn is funded by a canadian institutes of health research foundation grant (fdn# ). further, the article emerged from the doctoral dissertation work of both authors. kp’s doctoral studies are funded through a banting and best canada research scholar award from the canadian institutes of health research. jp’s doctoral studies are funded through banting and best canada research scholar and the douglas kinsella award in bioethics from the canadian institutes of health research. availability of data and materials not applicable. authors’ contributions kp provided coordination and leadership for the preparation of the manuscript. the content for this debate article was generated through a series of conversations to which kp and jp contributed equally. both authors brought a strong grounding research and science related to health equity. kp provided more content related to integrated knowledge translation, jp provided more content related to governance. both authors read and approved the final manuscript. authors’ information kp is a regional practice leader for research & knowledge translation at interior health. in her role, she supports ikt through teaching, mentoring, consulting, and leading ikt and equity-centred research. ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. author details university of british columbia, university way, kelowna, bc, canada. mcmaster university, main street west, hamilton, on, canada. interior health, doyle avenue, kelowna, bc, canada. received: november accepted: february references . rittel hwj, webber mm. dilemmas in a general theory of planning. policy sci. ; : – . . waddock s. the wicked problems of global sustainability need wicked (good) leaders and wicked (good) collaboraative solutions. j manag glob sustain. ; : – . . labonte r, schrecker t. the state of global health in a radically unequal world: patterns and prospects. in: benatar sr, brock g, editors. global health and global health ethics. cambridge: cambridge university press; . p. – . . donkin a, goldblatt p, allen j, nathanson v, marmot m. global action on 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https://doi.org/ . / http://www.ccghr.ca/resources/principles-global-health-research/ http://www.ccghr.ca/resources/principles-global-health-research/ https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /si.v i . https://doi.org/ . /si.v i . https://doi.org/ . /tsq. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - 	abstract 	background 	discussion 	conclusion 	background 	unpacking the wickedness of health inequities 	what does ikt bring to the table? 	what does ghg bring to the table? 	additional ‘objects’ of consideration on this dialogic table 	conclusion 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	authors’ contributions 	authors’ information 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	publisher’s note 	author details 	references communicating gender-equality progress, reduces social identity threats for women considering a research career $ € £ ¥ social sciences article communicating gender-equality progress, reduces social identity threats for women considering a research career una tellhed * id and anna jansson department of psychology, lund university, lund, sweden; psy.anna.jansson@gmail.com * correspondence: una.tellhed@psy.lu.se; tel.: + - - - received: december ; accepted: january ; published: january abstract: since the majority of top-level researchers are men, how does this vertical gender-segregation affect students’ perceptions of a research career? in the current study, an experimental manipulation either reminded students of academia’s current dominance of men or of its improving gender-balance. the results showed that women primed with the dominance of men anticipated much higher social identity threats (e.g., fear of discrimination) in a future research career as compared to a control group. in contrast, women primed with the improving gender-balance anticipated much lower threat. further, the dominance of men prime increased men’s interest in the phd program, as compared to controls. women’s interest was unaffected by the prime, but their lower interest as compared to men’s across conditions was mediated by their lower research self-efficacy (i.e., competence beliefs). the results imply that communicating gender-equality progress may allow women to consider a career in research without the barrier of social identity threat. keywords: gender segregation; social identity threat; career interest; self-efficacy; academia . introduction every year on december, the nobel prize is awarded to the world’s most excellent researchers. watching the ceremony is a reminder of the vertical gender segregation in academia, defined as an uneven hierarchical gender distribution, since % of the nobel laureates thus far have been men (nobel media ab ). even in countries where women dominate higher education, top-level researchers are predominately men (european commission ; shen ; sugimoto et al. ; universitetskanslerämbetet (universitetskanslerämbetet ukÄ)). how does being reminded of the vertical gender segregation in academia affect students’ perceptions of a potential future research career? in this study, we experimentally test how framing its gender balance as currently dominated by men, versus becoming more gender-equal, affects students’ anticipated social identity threats and career control, as well as their level of self-efficacy and interest in a future research career. it is important to understand how the vertical gender-segregation in academia affects students’ perceptions of an academic career in order to identify ways to lift barriers that may keep women from reaching their full career potential in research. the data for the current study is collected in sweden, the country that awards the nobel prize. although known as one of the most gender equal countries in the world (world economic forum ), % of the full professors in sweden are men (universitetskanslerämbetet ukÄ). . . social identity threats and identity safety according to social identity theory (tajfel and turner ), people desire to view their social identities, like their gender, positively. therefore, if an environmental cue suggests that an individual’s social identity is negatively valued in a domain, it can cause social identity soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of threat, including stereotype threat, where vigilance is raised and performance may suffer (see (inzlicht and schmader ; major and o’brien ; spencer et al. ), for reviews). social identity threat includes the fear of becoming negatively stereotyped and discriminated in a domain (cheryan and plaut ; murphy et al. ; petriglieri ; steele et al. ) and may diminish a person’s sense of control (chithambo et al. ; fischer and bolton holz ). previous research has shown that contexts dominated by men can trigger social identity threat in women (inzlicht and ben-zeev ; major and o’brien ; murphy et al. ; sekaquaptewa et al. ; steele et al. ). in the current study, we expand this research by testing the hypothesis that reminding students that most top-level researchers are men increases women’s anticipated social identity threat and reduces their sense of control over an imagined future research career. previous research has shown that social identity threat can be lifted by creating an identity safe environment, where individuals in numerical minority, or in a stigmatized group, are assured they are welcome, supported and valued (e.g., davies et al. ; holmes et al. ; petriglieri ). in this study we test the novel hypothesis that simply reminding students that academia is becoming more vertically gender-balanced, can function as an identity safety prime. we hypothesize that it reduces the level of social identity threat that women may otherwise anticipate in a future research career. if this simple technique is empirically supported, it may have practical value in helping individuals pursue their occupational goals without the barrier that social identity threat may create. . . interest and self-efficacy social identity threat tends to be unrelated to interests in a domain (e.g., cheryan and plaut ). however, repeated exposure to social identity threat can push people to withdraw from a career path, despite interest in it (thoman et al. ; woodcock et al. ). in a study of gender minorities in higher education, steele et al. ( ) found that women in majors dominated by men experienced higher levels of social identity threats than other students and were more likely to think about changing their major as compared to others. relatedly, gibney et al. ( ) found that when employees perceive that their organization obstructs their goal fulfilment, they tend to disidentify with the organization. although not related to social identity threats, it is well-established that men and women tend to have different career interests and choose different types of careers (e.g., cejka and eagly ; su et al. ; tellhed et al. , ). these gender differences have multiple antecedents and are shaped in a lengthy socialization process (eccles ). however, in the current study, we aim to test if simply varying the way academia’s gender-skewness is presented, which may affect students’ interest in a future research career. we have only found one previous study with a similar design. in that study, heilman ( ) found that women’s interest in an occupation increased and men’s interest decreased when it was described as soon becoming horizontally gender-balanced (i.e., with equal numbers of men and women, disregarding hierarchical gender differences). we expand this previous study by priming vertical gender segregation and by the focus on academia. since people tend to be more interested in careers that are dominated by their gender ingroup than their gender outgroup, we hypothesize that being reminded that most successful researchers are men increases men’s and decreases women’s interest in the phd program as compared to a control group. it is less clear how an improving gender-balance prime relates to gender differences in career interest. although heilman ( ) found that it decreases men’s interest, more recent research in sweden and in the us has shown that gender-balanced career paths tend to be perceived as highly attractive by both men and women (diekman et al. ; tellhed et al. ). in the current study, we therefore exploratory test the effect of the improving gender-balance prime on men’s and women’s interest in the phd program. further, previous research has found that women’s lower interest in occupations that are horizontally dominated by men, which tends to be statistically mediated by women’s lower self-efficacy, defined as doubts that one has the right competence to succeed in a domain (e.g., bandura ; betz and hackett ; hackett ; lent et al. ; tellhed et al. , ). we will replicate this research by testing if a gender difference in interest in the phd program is soc. sci. , , of statistically mediated by a gender difference in the belief that one has what it takes to succeed in research. lastly, even if women have lower research self-efficacy than men, we predict that swedish students will reject a stereotype that men have a greater aptitude for research than women. meta-analyses tend to find only small psychological gender differences (hyde ). also, sweden is a country with a strong gender equality ideology (sou ; wahl ), and statements that one sex is better than the other is generally frowned upon. however, previous research has shown that it is sufficient to simply be aware that a negative stereotype exists, for stereotyped group members to subsequently suffer from stereotype threat, which may disrupt their individual performance assessments (steele ; tellhed and adolfsson ). . . summary of the design and hypotheses to summarize, we will experimentally manipulate information to swedish university students regarding the vertical gender-segregation in academia, and compare the outcomes of two manipulations with a control group. in the experimental conditions, the students will either be reminded of the current vertical dominance of men in academia or be reminded that the vertical gender-balance in academia is improving. the main hypotheses are hypothesis . ( a) women who are reminded of the current vertical gender segregation in academia anticipate stronger social identity threats in a future research career as compared to a control group and as compared to ( b) women who are reminded of the improving gender-balance in academia. hypothesis . ( a) men who are reminded of the current vertical gender segregation in academia have higher interest in the phd program, while ( b) women exposed to this prime have lower interest in the phd program as compared to controls. hypothesis . a gender difference in interest in the phd program is mediated by a gender-difference in research self-efficacy. . method . . participants one hundred and ninety social science students at a large university in sweden volunteered to participate in the study. recruitment occurred in class, where a male research assistant asked for volunteers. coding of the hypothesis inquiry measure (see below) indicated that four participants guessed the main hypotheses of the experiment and were therefore excluded from further analyses, which left men and women. the mean age was . (sd = . ). . . materials all materials are here translated from swedish to english, by the researchers. the experimental manipulation consisted of written facts regarding the vertical gender-segregation in the swedish academia. for ethical considerations, only well-known facts were chosen. the two experimental groups read that the purpose of the study is to learn more about men’s and women’s interest in a future academic career. the participants in the current vertical gender-segregation condition further read that academia is currently strongly gender-skewed. this initial information was followed by four points of facts illustrating the vertical dominance of men. the facts read, “over % of all full professors in sweden are men, although women make up the majority of university students,” “the majority of swedish government funding is still awarded to soc. sci. , , of researchers who are men,” “today, men are still more likely than women to become full professors,” and “ % of the nobel prize laureates have been men.” the participants in the improving gender-balance condition read that academia is becoming more vertically gender-balanced, followed by four points of facts illustrating this. the facts read, “the gender-balance is currently equal amongst phd students,” “the number of university lecturers and full professors who are women is increasing,” “equal numbers of men and women currently earn a phd in sweden,” and “many of the top-level researchers at this university are currently women.” the control group simply read that “this study’s purpose is to learn more about students’ interest in a future academic career,” and did not read any facts about the gender-skewness in academia. the level of anticipated of social identity threat was measured by two items, similar to the one’s used by steele et al. ( ). they read, “how likely do you think it is that you will be judged by negative gender stereotypes, if you choose to work as a researcher in the future?” and “how likely do you think it is that you will be discriminated (treated unfairly) because of your gender if you choose to work as a researcher in the future?.” the responses were indicated on a scale ranging from “not at all” ( ) to “very” ( ). α was . . anticipated career control was measured by the item “a successful research career is largely dependent on factors outside of the researcher’s control.” the scale ranged from “not correct at all” ( ) to “precisely correct” ( ). the participants’ interest in a future research career was measured by the item “how interested are you in applying to the phd program?” responses ranged from “not at all interested” ( ) to “very interested” ( ). the measure of research self-efficacy was based on betz and hackett’s ( ) career self-efficacy measure, with the adaptation to a likert scale (maurer and pierce ). the participants were asked to indicate their level of certainty that they have what it takes to “complete the phd program (and earn a phd)” and to “work as a researcher” on a scale ranging from “not certain at all” ( ) to “completely certain” ( ). α was . . the research stereotype accuracy measure read “do you believe that either men or women are better suited to work as researchers”? responses were indicated on a scale ranging from – , where indicated the response “women are better suited,” indicated “there is no gender difference,” and indicated “men are better suited.” to check the effectiveness of the experimental manipulation, the participants were asked to indicate if they primarily think of men or women, when they hear the word “researcher.” responses were given on a scale ranging from “primarily women” ( ) to “primarily men” ( ). last in the survey, the participants were asked to describe what they believed the hypotheses of the study were. . . procedure the survey was distributed by a male research assistant to the participants in their lecture hall during a break between lectures. before handing out the survey, he explained that the purpose was to investigate students’ interest in an academic career. to comply with the ethical guidelines for research on humans, he also informed the students that participation is voluntary, that the data is treated anonymously, and that they may withdraw from participation at any time without consequences. they were asked to fill out the questionnaire individually and not look at each other’s answers. the experimental manipulation text was printed on page of the questionnaire, and the three versions of the survey had been randomized prior to the data collection so that the participants were randomly assigned to either one of the two experimental conditions or the control group. the measures that explicitly mentioned gender where placed last in the questionnaire as to not prime the control group with the category gender. when the participants had completed the survey, everyone was fully debriefed regarding the experimental manipulation and the study’s hypotheses and all questions were soc. sci. , , of answered. no one communicated any discomfort regarding the study’s manipulation or other aspects of the study. . results for the descriptive statistics of means and standard deviations, see table . assumption testing and outlier screening was conducted on all variables, with no serious violations detected. table . descriptive statistics for all variables separated by participant gender and the experimental conditions. men male-dominance prime women male-dominance prime men control group women control group men gender-equality prime women gender-equality prime m sd m sd m sd m sd m sd m sd social identity threat . . . . . . . . . . . . career control . . . . . . . . . . . . interest . . . . . . . . . . . . self-efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . gender stereotype . . . . . . . . . . . . manipulation check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . manipulation check a two-way between groups anova found a small significant main effect of the experimental manipulation on the manipulation check, f( , ) = . , p = . , ηp = . . post-hoc comparisons using the tukey hsd test indicated that the participants in the current vertical gender-segregation condition associated researchers significantly stronger with men as compared to the improving gender-balance group, p = . . no other effects were significant. . . social identity threat (hypothesis ) a two-way between-groups anova showed a large main effect of participant gender, f( , ) = . , p < . , ηp = . , a small main effect of the experimental manipulation, f( , ) = . , p < . , ηp = . , and a small interaction effect, f( , ) = . , p < . , ηp = . , on social identity threat. one-way anovas, separate for the genders, showed that only the women were affected by the experimental manipulation, and the effect size was large, f( , ) = . , p < . , η = . . post-hoc comparisons, using the tukey hsd test, indicated that the women in the current vertical gender segregation condition anticipated significantly greater social identity threat in a future research career, both as compared to the control group, p = . , and to the improving gender-balance condition, p < . , where the anticipated threat was the lowest. this supported hypothesis a and b. replicating previous research (e.g., chithambo et al. ) a regression analysis further showed that social identity threat predicted perceived career control, b = . , β = . , p < . , f( , ) = . , p < . . a two-way between groups anova showed a small effect of the experimental manipulation on perceived career control, f( , ) = . , p < . , ηp = . , no main effect of participant gender, f < , and a small interaction effect, f( , ) = . , p = . , ηp = . . follow up analysis showed that only the women’s beliefs were affected by the experimental manipulation, and the effect size was large, f( , ) = . , p < . , η = . . the women who were primed with the current vertical gender segregation attributed academic success more strongly to factors outside individual control as compared with the women in the control group, p < . and the women in the improving gender-balance condition, p < . . . . interest (hypothesis ) a two-way between-groups anova showed a main effect of participant gender, f( , ) = . , p = . , ηp = . , a main effect of the experimental condition, f( , ) = . , p = . , ηp = . , and a marginally statistically significant interaction effect, f( , ) = . , p = . , ηp = . , on soc. sci. , , of interest in the phd program. one-way anovas showed that men’s interest was dependent on the experimental manipulation, f( , ) = . , p < . , η = . , and the effect size was moderate. post-hoc comparisons, using the tukey hsd test indicated that the men who were reminded of the current vertical gender segregation in academia were significantly more interested in the phd program as compared to the men in the control group, p < . , which supported hypothesis a. men’s interest was also marginally significantly higher in the improving gender balance condition as compared to controls, p = . . however, the women’s interest in post graduate school was unaffected by the experimental manipulation, f < , which contrasted hypotheses b. . . mediation test (hypothesis ) we next conducted a mediation analysis to test if the gender difference in interest was mediated by a gender difference in research self-efficacy. a series of multiple regressions first showed that participant gender predicted interest, b = − . , β = − . , p = . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p = . , and self-efficacy, b = − . , β = − . , p < . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . , and that self-efficacy predicted interest, b = . , β = . , p < . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . . when interest was regressed on both participant gender and self-efficacy, self-efficacy was a significant predictor of interest, b = . , β = . , p < . , but participant gender was not, b = − . , β = − . , p = . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . . significance testing of the mediation effect (using the modification of sobel ( ) test by baron and kenny ( )), showed that self-efficacy significantly mediated the gender difference in interest in the phd program, z = − . , p < . , which supported hypothesis . see figure . soc. sci. , , x for peer review of program as compared to the men in the control group, p < . , which supported hypothesis a. men’s interest was also marginally significantly higher in the improving gender balance condition as compared to controls, p = . . however, the women’s interest in post graduate school was unaffected by the experimental manipulation, f < , which contrasted hypotheses b. . . mediation test (hypothesis ) we next conducted a mediation analysis to test if the gender difference in interest was mediated by a gender difference in research self-efficacy. a series of multiple regressions first showed that participant gender predicted interest, b = − . , β = − . , p = . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p = . , and self-efficacy, b = − . , β = − . , p < . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . , and that self-efficacy predicted interest, b = . , β = . , p < . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . . when interest was regressed on both participant gender and self-efficacy, self-efficacy was a significant predictor of interest, b = . , β = . , p < . , but participant gender was not, b = − . , β = − . , p = . , r = . , f( , ) = . , p < . . significance testing of the mediation effect (using the modification of sobel’s ( ) test by baron and kenny ( )), showed that self-efficacy significantly mediated the gender difference in interest in the phd program, z = − . , p < . , which supported hypothesis . see figure . figure . self-efficacy significantly mediated the overall gender difference in interest in the phd program, * p < . , ** p < . . lastly, exploratory anovas showed no effect of the experimental manipulation on research self-efficacy nor an interaction effect (manipulation x gender), f:s < . there were no significant main effect or interaction effect on the research stereotype accuracy measure, f:s < . a one sample t-test showed that the overall mean for this last measure, m = . , sd = . , did not significantly differ from the scale’s midpoint ( ), which was indicative of “no gender difference,” t < . thus, the participants did not appear to believe in a gender difference in research ability. . discussion . . social identity threat and career control the results of this study expand previous research by demonstrating that reminding students of the well-known fact that most top-level researchers are men has a large effect on women’s social identity threats. as compared to a control group, the women primed with the current vertical gender- segregation in academia were much more worried about becoming negatively stereotyped and participant gender β = − . ** interest phd program β =− . ns self-efficacy β = − . ** β = . ** interest phd program participant gender figure . self-efficacy significantly mediated the overall gender difference in interest in the phd program, * p < . , ** p < . . lastly, exploratory anovas showed no effect of the experimental manipulation on research self-efficacy nor an interaction effect (manipulation x gender), f:s < . there were no significant main effect or interaction effect on the research stereotype accuracy measure, f:s < . a one sample t-test showed that the overall mean for this last measure, m = . , sd = . , did not significantly differ from the scale’s midpoint ( ), which was indicative of “no gender difference,” t < . thus, the participants did not appear to believe in a gender difference in research ability. soc. sci. , , of . discussion . . social identity threat and career control the results of this study expand previous research by demonstrating that reminding students of the well-known fact that most top-level researchers are men has a large effect on women’s social identity threats. as compared to a control group, the women primed with the current vertical gender-segregation in academia were much more worried about becoming negatively stereotyped and discriminated by gender if they would pursue a career in research. like others have found, the level of social identity threat was related to reductions in expectations of career control (chithambo et al. ; fischer and bolton holz ), and the women primed with the dominance of men were much more likely to believe that a researcher’s career success is out of his/her control as compared to a control group. the men anticipated much lower threats than the women, and their level of threat and perceived career control were unaffected by the experimental priming. it is worrying that academia’s vertical gender segregation appears to threaten women contemplating a career in research. few students, especially those interested in pursuing a research career, are likely to miss the fact that men dominate top-level research. social identity threat is a stressor that no students should have to endure, and much previous research has demonstrated its many negative effects on for example performance expectations, motivation, and health (see (inzlicht and schmader ; pascoe and smart richman ; schmitt et al. ; spencer et al. ); and reviews). it is therefore promising that our results demonstrate that women’s anticipated social identity threat was largely reduced and their sense of career control largely increased when they were informed that the gender-balance in academia is improving. it thus appears that simply informing students that increasing number of women now become top-level researchers may largely lower women’s fear of becoming negatively stereotyped and discriminated in a research career. this novel finding shows the power in communicating gender-equality progress and could have important implications for those invested in reducing the vertical gender segregation in academia. importantly, while teachers and academic leaders may want to clearly communicate any gender-equality progress to their students, they should also pay attention to the actual developments regarding gender-equality. recently, the eu reported that gender-equality development is halting in some respects and even declining in some european countries (european institute for gender equality (european institute for gender equality eige)). also, many swedish women have recently reported about widespread sexual harassment and sexism in academia in connection to the hashtag #metoo (#akademiupproret academic uproar). we cannot assume that the vertical gender segregation and its associated threats for women in academia will dissipate, without further reforms. . . interest and self-efficacy the results further expanded previous research by demonstrating that priming men with facts about the vertical gender segregation in academia, substantially increased their interest in applying to the phd program, as compared to a control group. this was expected, since men and women tend to be more interested in career-paths which are dominated by their gender ingroup (e.g., su et al. ), although the direct effect of an experimental gender-balance prime has rarely been empirically tested (but see (heilman )). also, being reminded of the improving gender-balance in academia marginally increased men’s level of interest as compared to controls. interestingly, the direction of this effect was opposite to heilman’s result ( ), who in contrast found that such a prime lowered men’s career interest. this may perhaps indicate a change in young men’s attitude toward working in gender-balanced careers since . this conclusion corresponds with recent research, which indicates that gender-balanced career paths are typically perceived as highly attractive to both men and women (diekman et al. ; tellhed et al. ). soc. sci. , , of contrary to our hypothesis, reminding women of the vertical dominance of men in academia did not lower their interest in the phd program as compared to controls. instead, their interest was slightly lower than men’s across conditions and was statistically mediated by women’s slightly lower self-efficacy or confidence that they have what it takes to succeed in research, which was also unaffected by the experimental prime. this mediation result replicated much previous research, which has shown that gender differences in self-efficacy explain women’s lower interest in careers that are dominated by men (e.g., hackett ; tellhed et al. ). the result implies that to improve women’s interest in a research career, women’s research self-efficacy needs to be strengthened. in sweden women generally perform better academically than men and earn the majority of academic degrees (universitetskanslerämbetet ukÄ), which suggests that many women have an excellent aptitude for research. future research may want to test if combining an improving gender-balance prime with individual aptitude feedback may work to reduce both women’s social identity threat and increase their self-efficacy. the group average on the research stereotype accuracy measure indicated a strong agreement among the participants that there is no gender difference in research aptitude. but, as stereotype threat research has shown, a belief in stereotype accuracy is not necessary for numerical minorities to be negatively affected by negative ingroup stereotypes (inzlicht and schmader ; spencer et al. ). therefore, it is important to also combat negative stereotypes concerning women’s competence. . limitations the research assistant who collected the data was male, which may have strengthened the impact of the vertical gender segregation prime for the participants. a suggestion for future replications is to vary the gender of the experimenter in order to explore if this affects the strength of the prime. previous studies suggest that it may (marx and goff ; stout et al. ). another limitation is the use of convenience sampling and that all participants were social science students, a field that is horizontally dominated by women (although vertically dominated by men). future studies may want to test if the effect of the vertical gender-segregation prime is even stronger in stem-fields, which are horizontally dominated by men. it could also be relevant to measure the participants’ current experience of gender-related social identity threat. people who have previously experienced social identity threat tend to have increased vigilance for future threat and may therefore be more strongly affected by vertical gender segregation cues (major and o’brien ). one may also want to replicate the current study in countries that are rated lower on gender equality as compared to sweden ((european institute for gender equality eige); world economic forum), since the increasing gender-balance prime may have a different effect in countries where progress toward gender equality has been slower. however, the vertical gender segregation in sweden’s labor market is strong, even in international comparisons (european commission , ; sugimoto et al. ). it could also be relevant to replicate the design using indirect measures that are less sensitive to social desirability concerns (see lane et al. ). for instance, it is possible that the participants’ would associate research aptitude more with men than with women on an implicit measure though explicitly rejecting such gender stereotypes. we also encourage measuring explicit associations of researchers with men versus with women separately, as opposed to the combined approach in this study, to aid interpretations. finally, future research may also want to include an organizational identification measure, since it tends to be reduced by perceived organizational obstructions (gibney et al. ). perhaps women who are reminded of the vertical gender segregation in academia identify less with their university, while a gender-equality prime increases identification. soc. sci. , , of . conclusions to conclude, the results from this study suggest that the current vertical gender-segregation in academia has different effects for men and women respectively. for students who are men, this insight may raise their interest in pursuing a research career, while it makes students who are women fear discrimination and a loss of control should they pursue an academic career. this gloomy outlook for women is, however, brightened by the result that simply informing students that the gender balance is improving in academia reduces the threat women perceive and strengthen their sense of career control. further, since women’s lower interest in the phd program as compared to men’s was mediated by women’s lower research self-efficacy, it implies a need to strengthen women’s competence beliefs and make them see their full potential. by reminding talented women of the improving gender balance in academia, and assuring them that they have what it takes to do research, hopefully, more women will fantasize about their future great scientific discoveries rather than imagining a hostile academia when they hear about the nobel prize laureates. author contributions: una tellhed (u.t.) conceived and designed the experiment; we thank puria farhang for collecting the data; una tellhed and anna jansson (a.j.) analyzed the data; u.t. and a.j. wrote the paper. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references #akademiupproret (academic uproar). . visste inte om jag skulle dö—sen våldtog han mig [didn’t know if i would die—then he raped me]. svenska dagbladet. november . available online: https: //www.svd.se/visste-inte-om-jag-skulle-do--sen-valdtog-han-mig (accessed on december ). bandura, albert. . self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. psychological review : – . 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journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . www.palgrave-journals.com/dam peter simeon swisher vfi nity ilana holmes excite media group llc union square west, th fl new york, ny , usa tel: + ext , e-mail: iholmes@excitepr. com , www.excitepr.com introduction to mam . just within the past few years, user-driven technology models — exemplifi ed by the social phenomena known as “ web . ” — have created a fundamental shift in multimedia asset management (mam) and how end users interact with it. mam is being forced to evolve from closed client / server (c / s) enterprise models to increasingly open, metadata-centric and web- native architectures. this new model connects media, metadata, end users and production tools via the web in completely networked and user- driven ways. this is the “ managed web ” , or “ mam . ” . systems that exemplify web . , such as wikipedia, flickr, amazon, ebay and youtube are among the largest digital fi le management solutions in use today; in terms of users and assets under management it is hard to imagine larger digital asset management (dam) communities. for example, as of august flickr.com — a web . -based photo sharing and metadata tagging community — supported over , , digital images and over , , end users. amazon has over , , customer accounts worldwide. web . systems achieve these amazing usage levels within very small timeframes. for example, flickr, as of december , had , , digital images and , , registered users. within the mam . ecosystem, context is king. data such as how production tools and assets are used is logged and dynamically impacts the entire system. feedback from consumers is immediate. tracking and using context within mam . drives further learning and self- management for the entire ecosystem. the system becomes richer and more useful the more it is used. mam . removes boundaries between the community, media and metadata. legacy mam solutions created clear boundaries between content creators and content consumers. the managed web: a look at the impact of web . on media asset management for the enterprise peter simeon swisher is the product manager at vfinity, an innovative content management software company based in nyc. vfinity has developed and implemented the only web-native asset management system on the market today. as product manager, swisher helps guide development, sales and marketing for vfinity ’ s products and services. for more than a decade, he has helped lead the release of digital asset management, relationship management and other web-based technologies for companies such as quark, inc., aris global and interactive data corporation. he has lectured and written on strategies and uses of commercial software for the print media, fi nancial, pharmaceutical and broadcasting industries. swisher has a bachelor of arts degree from the university at albany, ny. keywords: web . , multimedia asset management (mam) , mam . , digital asset management (dam) , digital media , broadcast dam abstract this paper examines the fundamental shift occurring within multimedia asset management and digital asset management solutions, a shift that has been ignited by web . and its core principles; community-driven adaptive technologies that converge media, metadata, users, and tools — all via the web. this paper explores how the social networks and technology, which are driving the web . phenomena, are expanding user adoption at alarming rates, drastically increasing re-use of licensed and unlicensed assets, as well as emphasizing a need for greater and more scalable governance of intellectual property and business rules for managing user generated content. journal of digital asset management ( ) , – . doi: . /palgrave.dam. impact of web . on media asset management © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . vol. , – journal of digital asset management content creators were within company walls; content consumers were at the receiving end of distribution packages. mam . ecosystems blur these lines in such a way that consumers are also producers, and producers are directly connected to consumers via the same ecosystem. at the same time, these user contributions means that proper re-use and management of protected materials is more important than ever before. this paper will explore the principles of mam . and how it is fundamentally changing what users expect from mam. finally, it will investigate strategies for protecting licensed assets in a completely open and networked web . -ready mam, mam . . why is this dam system necessary? legacy dam and mam solutions offer signifi cant value to the companies that choose to adopt them. within existing networks, they improve all aspects of fi le management: including making ingesting, indexing, storage, retrieval, and re-use more effi cient. rights management and copy-protection also work extremely well inside of these closed environments. the explosion in the amount of digital media and the need to manage this media across any device or platform is, however, a great challenge even for the most well-established dam companies. the emergence of the socially networked web in , the fi rst commercial internet service provider opened for business. by , the number of internet hosts (a computer system with a registered internet protocol address) grew to , , . still, in , the internet was available in only per cent of us households. by that number had grown by per cent. in , the number of hosts had risen to , , . as of july , that number was , , . as impressive, was the prevalence of the internet in the workplace. by , over . per cent of full-time employees had internet access at work. the increased home and workplace usage of personal computers and the internet is causing a corresponding explosion in digital fi les and all-digital workfl ows. digital media has evolved to multimedia. single-purpose fi les are now rich source fi les. via mam . , multimedia source fi les may undergo multiple renditions to serve completely different distribution needs. the evolution of multimedia and the web and exponentially increasing user communities provides great promise and challenges for mam. a new breed of solution is needed to meet these challenges. blending the best of existing requirements and tools with emerging social networks fostered by web . is the winning strategy. from web . to … for most of its existence, the web has functioned as a medium for publishing static information to passive audiences. the fl ow was simple: enterprises and institutions would publish information, and end users would consume it. this is also true for dam solutions. users created static collections of digital assets and administrators provided a view into those catalogs via a web front end to the mam. still, the presentation of information was static; it only changed when the institution decided it was time to publish new assets. as the availability of the web in the offi ce increased, dam end users began requesting web interfaces to these solutions. within the technical limitations of the time, vendors responded by offering functionally limited web front ends to c / s systems. many enterprise-scale dam is still structured this way today. the most useful aspects of the dam remain on the client or server level, while the web front end is used as a static presentation tool. … to web . , the socially networked web what has emerged within the past two to three years is a truly dynamic, user-driven and completely networked web. this “ socially networked web ” provides for live collaborations between the publisher and the audience. it is a web which improves the more it is used and the more open it is. it is a system which offers applications that are designed completely for the web; services such as google documents and spreadsheets bring the power of microsoft word and excel completely onto a web platform. web . solutions not only manage more assets than swisher journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . any other dam system, they do so in largely self-managed ways. to take advantage of this wonderful technological evolution, legacy dam must adopt web . principles, or be replaced with managed web solutions. web . , more than just a buzzword while web . — like mam before it — is in one sense fl ashy new technical jargon, what web . represents is extremely important. web . is the convergence via the web of an ecosystem of communities of users, business, tools and digital media, in such a way that the whole system becomes more useful and less diffi cult to manage the more it is used. it is a set of completely networked web applications and databases that are designed to adapt to the needs of its users, based upon how they actually use it, not on how vendors or employers want them to use it. web . can be considered to be almost completely user-driven. this is in stark contrast to most mam systems that become more diffi cult to manage the larger the asset and especially the user base grows. web . patterns and principles of the managed web the core principles of mam . and the core patterns of web . , as defi ned by o ’ reilly media, are listed below. more information and specifi c examples are provided throughout this paper. while there may be some overlap and confusion about the terms, this paper will address them as well ( figure ). metadata and media with workgroup and enterprise dam, usage data such as how, when and where an asset was used is typically only available within annual usage reports. it is rarely used to affect any dynamic changes in system function, or to inform the choices of the user community. this is not the case with mam . . whether data is implicitly extracted, or explicitly entered, any action within the enterprise mam community — any fi le added, commentary, or metadata entered — is a contribution to the collective intelligence of the entire system. a great example of using transactional data to benefi t the community is amazon.com. data is the next ‘ intel inside ’ : using unique, hard- to-recreate data sources to become the ‘ intel inside ’ for this era in which data has become as important as function. every transaction in amazon adds to the global data pool, effectively altering the entire system. a look at the profi le page for the book “ freakonomics ” provides immediate access to the pooled transactional data about this product and the community that has purchased it. for example, we see that per cent of the community who purchased “ freakonomics ” also purchased “ the tipping point ” by malcolm gladwell. another per cent bought “ the world is flat ” by thomas l friedman. another per cent paid for “ blink: the power of thinking without thinking ” . members of the amazon community can immediately become part of numerous sub- communities based on what they purchase. media & metadata tools connecting tools & media social software rich user experiences harnessing collective intelligence data is the next “intel inside” innovation in assembly rich user experiences software above the level of a single device perpetual beta leveraging the long tail lightweight models and cost-effective scalability mam. . © gistics source:vfi nity w e b . c o r e p a t t e r n c o r e p r i n c i p l e s o f m a m . figure : matrix of web . patterns and core principles of mam . impact of web . on media asset management © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . vol. , – journal of digital asset management they can more easily delve deeper into the topics that interest them, and will be informed by a community of like-minded users, via “ social software ” . instead of locking this community- generated data away until quarterly reporting time, amazon made it intrinsic to the ecosystem. given that amazon has over , , members, this was no small task. the same richness is benefi cial to mam . . how, when, where, why and to what effect corporate assets — such as logos, adobe indesign layouts or final cut pro projects — are used, is unique valuable data. mam . should be able to leverage this information to help make better decisions based on the user community. connect digital content with digital tools via the web legacy dam and organizational structures create many types of silos. one example of this is legacy dam, mam and rights management solutions cannot communicate with each other. tool silos are created by incompatible devices and formats, or by devices that simply cannot work on the platforms and communication protocols that a global organization requires. organizational silos evolve as well; editors are blocked from your producers, producers are blocked from contractors and so forth. rights management systems are blocked from payment systems. desktop asset management is blocked from another department ’ s workgroup asset management system; the workgroup system is blocked from the enterprise system, which in turn is blocked from a large percentage of your corporation. and as is often the case with dam, your customers are blocked from you. software above the level of a single device : create software that spans internet-connected devices and builds on the growing pervasiveness of online experience. mam . eliminates these silos by either replacing them or bridging them. producers collaborate with contractors and customers via completely web-based tools, media and metadata. editors and managers have immediate access to assets regardless of when they connect or what tool or operating system or location they are connecting from. assets and metadata from one system or workfl ow fl ow seamlessly into other systems and workfl ows. legacy devices and databases are not eliminated, they are leveraged. open standards and web-based solutions help make this possible with mam . . social software social software is web-native technology that is available to entire communities and improves the more it is used. like any legacy dam, powerful and fl exible metadata controls are required. in mam . however, users may have open access to metadata. the more metadata they add, and the more valuable their metadata, the more useful the system becomes. harnessing this “ collective intelligence ” is a fundamental tenet of web . . harnessing collective intelligence : create an architecture of participation that uses network effects and algorithms to produce software that gets better the more people use it. systems that use collective intelligence principles will make it very easy for users to contribute data, whether it is done implicitly or explicitly. the user ’ s own interests will drive adoption. also, data from the usage of integrated production tools should add to the collective intelligence. how a final cut pro user works, what fi les they use, how they use them, when, and where is all valuable data. tag clouds are a popular example of what can be done with collective intelligence after it ’ s been harnessed ( figure ). tag clouds are a way to browse to assets via metadata assigned to that asset by the community. it is not unlike browsing via a keyword index or structured taxonomy. with mam . however, the browsing experience changes every time the system is used. the more a metadata value is used, the more prominent it will be in the tag cloud. tag clouds can be implemented in any number of ways, and are not limited to the example given below. closed solutions cannot harness collective intelligence collective intelligence cannot be harnessed if people do not participate or if the software cannot leverage their participation. systems that offer closed or proprietary metadata schemas and swisher journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . principles, will struggle to adopt collective intelligence in any meaningful way. likewise, if the software requires signifi cant training and customization, then the benefi ts of collective intelligence will not be realizable. the smart kid is not always right unleashing collective intelligence presents signifi cant issues for mam . solution. it provides access to an unparalleled array of data. the quality of the media and metadata will directly impact the quality of the ecosystem within which it exists. the managed web must offer solutions to fi ltering and controlling this less valuable data. in some cases, the community will be trusted to self-manage. rating systems, notifi cation and violation controls, and voting mechanisms are some ways that mam . offers self- management. group level moderation is also possible; moderators keep the community on track, and remove abusive members as necessary. whether self-managed, or moderated, or auto- managed by rights management solutions, mam . solution supports whatever model is most effective. if the tail is long enough, then grab it another foundational aspect of web . , “ leveraging the long tail ” refers to exploiting to new uses and distribution points for all your content — even older, less popular content. amazon.com for example, has made more money selling this type of content than they have from selling top hits. leveraging the long tail : capture niche markets profi tably through low-cost economics and broad reach enabled by the internet. depending on your viewpoint, one potential example of long tail content is “ pocket full of kryptonite ” from the spin doctors. this was once an extremely popular album. it was, however, played so often for a time-period in the early s, that the public became oversaturated by it. the band also failed to produce new material. as a result, the album fell from favor. one would struggle to fi nd a brick and mortar store that carries it today. does this mean the album can never be sold again? no. in the digital world, it does not matter how much shelf space a product takes up, because there is no shelf. amazon makes this album figure : tag cloud from flickr.com impact of web . on media asset management © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . vol. , – journal of digital asset management available to users in a myriad number of ways. fans can search for it explicitly, or they can fi nd it indirectly; for example while viewing one of the band ’ s major infl uencers. brick and mortar business cannot do this because of limited and expensive shelf space. with sites like amazon, passionate spin doctors fans can easily fi nd a like-minded community where they can download their music and videos and add to corporate profi ts, all without taking up any shelf space. mam . supports the long tail. it leverages all assets, regardless of popularity or media type. it does this implicitly by collecting usage data and by using algorithms that mine these data for relevant patterns. it presents new displays and navigation paths to end users, paths that dynamically and continuously evolve as the data changes. rich user experiences historically, the web interface for enterprise mam and content management systems was provided as an afterthought. some companies built feature-limited web interfaces to the mam. other web interfaces were feature-rich, but extremely clunky. some offered portal-style views into pre-arranged collections of assets and metadata. finally, some simply publish a folder of assets to a web template. most of these systems require a heavy amount of asset management on thick clients. under that model, the web simply becomes another static presentation tool. rich user experiences : going beyond traditional web-page metaphors to deliver rich user experiences combining the best of desktop and online software. with mam . , the web interface provides a rich and rewarding user experience. static presentation-only interfaces will not work. even though the interface is completely web-based, it must have everything the user needs from their client solution. in effect, it should also eliminate their need for a client-side or a “ mam-only ” plug-in. in order to do this, mam . uses the latest web technologies, such as ajax and flash. more importantly however, mam . systems are designed for the web, from the very beginning. rich user experience via -click launch™ and web-based nonlinear editing web-based editing of documents, spreadsheets and video projects, asset annotation, streaming proxy videos, panning, zooming, and comparing images side-by-side, -click launch from the web into production tools are all great examples of the rich user experience that a mam . can provide. -click launch, a process created by vfinity ’ s founder shen tong, lets users take full advantage of their existing desktop tools, by providing a direct linkage between media, production tools, and the mam all via the web. effectively, -click launch is a way to open assets or projects directly into the appropriate production tool. it is not a client side plug-in; it is a completely web-based tool. -click launch is used to open video projects or photoshop documents directly into nonlinear editors such as final cut pro or image editors such as adobe photoshop. web-based nonlinear editing (web-nle) is another example of a rich user experience. web-nle is not something that popular video presentation systems such as youtube are capable of supporting. while handling some aspects of metadata tagging and ranking via the web is already available, the time is approaching when it will be possible to handle many video production tasks completely via the web. ingesting video from any source fi le or device, logging, clip, editing, re-mixing, transcoding and publishing video assets all via the web are functional areas that mam . covers. keep it simple, stupid despite all the possibilities, it is important that web . interfaces not be too complex. complexity leads to low user adoption rates. low user adoption rates lead to wasted money. if a system is too complex to use, then there is a great chance it will not be used. unfortunately, many early c / s solutions left us with a legacy, if not an expectation, that interfaces must have more features than are possibly needed. divergent client requests resulted in numerous features that rarely got used by the broad base of end users. this “ bloat ” is an obstacle to user adoption. the managed web experience is calculated simplicity. it offers only what the user needs, swisher journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . where and when then they need it. it adapts as user needs change. it should not force the user to change how they operate. it reduces, if not eliminates, the need for training. it dramatically increases user adoption of the solution. ideally, it would even make the system fun to use. the new era of the managed web demands new development strategies all of this may sound fantastic, and it is, however, the real question is: how would it be possible to build a mam . system and what will it cost? the great news is that a convergence of web-friendly production tools, advances in web technology, availability and bandwidth, place us at the beginning of a new era in digital content usage. for mam . , this means integrating only the most useful functionality of legacy solutions, but in a completely web-based and networked way. how to do this is a question for which the web . principles “ perpetual beta ” and “ lightweight models ” provide answers. continuous releases to meet ever- evolving needs: the perpetual beta perpetual beta : move away from old models of software development and adoption in favor of online, continuously updated, software as a service (saas) models. the traditional software release and adoption cycle more or less consists of the following phases: requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, integration and maintenance. the timeline for most vendors is to devote a month or two to analysis. more time is devoted to design. implementation takes four to fi ve months. quality assurance needs to be trained and testing will then begin with the fi rst alpha, and so on. the end result is that the initial release cycle may take upwards of – months if everything goes right. if anything goes wrong along the way, such as a serious mismatch between the business requirement and technology delivery, then the process will need to be restarted. traditional software development is a lengthy and costly process, and not well suited for mam . . developers of mam . follow agile approaches. they release products early and often to meet dynamic business requirements. this is a dramatic change from legacy mam which has many benefi ts. the entire idea-to- customer cycle is much shorter. when the proper framework is in place, features are rolled out to customers in one to three month cycles. as a result, customer feedback may be received one month from the original idea, versus the six to twelve months in the old development model. immediate feedback, based on actual usage, drives new functionality. this helps customers to understand how the system really impacts business processes. this is one of the major areas where a lack of understanding causes many enterprise implementations to fail. service-based and zero-footprint software enterprise mam is expensive. in mam . , expenses are reduced by implementing either zero-footprint software or software that is capable of being provided as a service. below is a quick look at a cost comparison between dam . and mam . solutions ( figure ) . meet ever-evolving needs via lightweight models lightweight models and cost-effective scalability : use lightweight business- and software-development models to build products and business quickly and cost-effectively. favoring simplicity is the best approach to meeting the needs of your end users. with mam . the focus is on solving well- understood and real business requirements, not on perceived needs or rushing to build “ me- too ” software. adhering to web . principles will mean developing the minimum functionality, and designing the system to integrate with other business and open source systems to enable further collaboration. mam . provides opportunities to realize value from the existing managed web platform impact of web . on media asset management © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . vol. , – journal of digital asset management in many ways. functions such as search and retrieval are modularized and exposed as services. for example, this is used to expose assets to business-to-business portals. in mam . , the work is performed quickly, not over the course of multi-year projects. innovation in assembly : building platforms to foster innovation in assembly, where remixing of data and services creates new opportunities and markets. vfinity receives numerous requests that we fi nd are best managed following an “ innovation in assembly ” strategy. some educational customers wish to integrate our mam with open source image display and comparison systems. we are able to do so easily. others wish to re-mix, re- assemble and display existing assets in completely different ways. for example, they wish to assemble a source text-based asset in different ways to different audiences, including or excluding content, and changing styles as needed. all this and much more is possible with mam . or managed web. what social software means to mam: rights management while web . principles are a clear benefi t to enterprise mam, one needs look no further than youtube to see how the vast array of community contributed content causes headaches for content owners and distributors. with truly open enterprise mam, users have unfettered access to production tools, and content sources. if they so choose, community members may rip video directly from digital video sources — the rights to which they do not own — mash these together, add unlicensed music, and post to youtube instantaneously. does this sound like a headache for google? well, it is. as entertaining as the audience fi nds the material to be, signifi cant rights violations are occurring with many submissions. the responsibility will be on the mam . system to help manage all the myriad rights to all this content. while this seems like an impossible task, there are a number of strategies to make it manageable. managed web systems will need to integrate with web-friendly rights management solutions to start. the solutions can assist the mam in scanning contributed content for any associated content rights. if violations are found, the assets can be moved to a special queue for further action. if rights are available, but need to be purchased, the mam can integrate with payment solutions as necessary. at the same time, the managed web can enlist its user communities to police themselves. for example, the community can fl ag assets for potential violations. these assets can automatically be moved to a special administrator ’ s queue as needed. the same mechanisms that harness collective intelligence can be used as one part of the solution for managing digital rights. the managed web satisfi es the needs of both the rights holders and the content consumers. while it is probably enterprise class dam user base: creative users and consumer users distributed globally dam software - internal deployment outsourced dam services solution startup year -month deployment year -month deployment applications and software subtotal $ , $ , labor and consulting subtotal $ , $ , hardware and network infrastructure subtotal $ , $ total startup costs $ , , $ , operations year -year total year -year total applications and software subtotal $ , $ , $ , $ , labor and consulting subtotal $ , $ , , $ , $ , hardware and network infrastructure subtotal $ , $ , $ $ total operations costs $ , $ , , $ , $ , , total startup and -year operational costs $ , , $ , , enterprisedam. . © gistics figure : comparing costs of internally deployed dam versus the on-demand dam swisher journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . impossible to keep all objectionable material off the managed web at all times, it is a relatively simple task to combine the best of self- management and systems-management to ensure that risks and violations are mitigated. examples of what mam . provides: production from anywhere, any device, any tool what all of this provides is a signifi cant increase in mam richness and user involvement. the following case studies show a few real examples of what can be made possible with mam . . news team of one case study mam . will result in more effective and effi cient production for news operations. in today ’ s worldwide news organizations content is typically gathered by a reporter and cameraperson. the material is either edited locally then fed to the broadcast center, or rough cuts can be fed in for fi nal editing. frequently, archival footage and / or graphics are inserted at the broadcast center before air. at that point the raw material will be sent to a central archive or stored in a bureau or production facility. the material often gets lost in the system because it is mis-logged or misplaced. finding and acquiring the material involves valuable manpower. now fast forward to the mam . news operation. a “ news team of one ” covers a story and returns to the satellite truck or bureau with their camera and raw material. they begin editing their own story on a laptop and through a web browser they are able to access their tools and search their news department ’ s servers for additional information, video or graphics. the fi nal piece is then sent to producers in the broadcast center and inserted in the program lineup. the raw material, including related research, is stored for future use as a fi le on a company server with uniform metadata and the reporter ’ s comments. virtual national focus group case study television networks spend billions of dollars each season on programs that they hope will attract a large number viewers that will result in substantial advertising revenue. with so much at stake, these companies invest a lot in research to help make smart programming decisions. this includes screening pilots for focus groups in las vegas and capturing their comments in a very manual cost-prohibitive process. the mam . research department will be able to virtually gather a focus group from anywhere in the nation and give them access to pilots right from their homes. a group of , can view a pilot and provide comments directly into web-based metadata fi elds. in turn, this input is directly available to programming executives. the information can also be analyzed by demographic and location. it will help producers, marketers and programmers to better understand the audience. and the information is stored with the program and easily accessible in mam . at any future time. while bandwidth and security might be an issue today, soon technology will solve these issues. content repurposing for publishers with declining subscription bases and advertising revenue, and the proliferation of freely available content on the web, media publishers are being forced to fi nd new ways to generate revenue without increasing their workforce. one way to do this is to repurpose and resell old content. for any publisher without a managed web strategy this would be challenging. these publishers are forced to manually recreate new content from old, which comes at great expense. web . publishers fi nd new value from existing content by repurposing what they already have. for example, they are converting text assets into new products, based on the needs of the intended audience. the same source content can be used to create multiple stylized products, each serving a unique need. the mam performs all the processing, including or excluding content as needed, and wrapping it up into the desired publishing template for fi nal presentation. global story creation case study a good way to hold onto and / or grow an audience is to keep producing original and compelling content. the typical content creation process goes something like this: writer creates story; writer submits story; copy editor edits story; designer creates imagery; designer submits imagery; desktop editor creates page; copy editor proofs page; desktop editor makes fi nal edits and impact of web . on media asset management © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . vol. , – journal of digital asset management changes; story is prepared for transmission; story is transmitted to printer; fi nal product is archived. at every stage of the process, time is wasted searching for fi les, writing instructions, and distributing both to the next actor in the process. each user may be working on disconnected devices and incompatible platforms. in the nonmanaged web space, most of the value is realized only in the fi nal stage when the fi nal product is archived. mam . publishers introduce effi ciencies and value at every stage of the content creation process. the writer can create and submit the story from anywhere in the world. in fact, the writer can submit content directly into the mam. the graphic designer can reside locally or remotely, and ingest their materials from any device. the copy editor can likewise make their edits from anywhere, work directly on the source material, and send change instructions immediately to the writer. the desktop editor is notifi ed of the available project, searches the mam for relevant materials, and saves signifi cant time by re-using existing templates. the editor then launches their project from the managed web directly into desktop production tools. all work is routed and proofed via the mam . . final versions are transmitted to the printing service, and the project is archived. summary web . embodies a new era for the management and use of digital media. it has drastically increased the relevance of the online experience to producers and consumers. it has created a need to properly manage media across all devices and platforms. these events have created limitless opportunities to create new revenue streams from all assets, including seemingly less popular assets. it has also ignited a cataclysmic shift in traditional asset management strategies. in response, mam . offers new solutions for how content creators and consumers can collaborate, and how the system can evolve independently as the needs of the user community change. vfinity calls this reaction to web . , the “ managed web ” or “ mam . ” . under mam . , open, collaborative models connect media, metadata, end users and production tools via the web in fully networked and user-driven ways. digital assets and projects are opened directly. any contribution to mam . system is potentially a valuable data point for other members of the community. the managed web harnesses this data, using it to improve the system for other users. mam . responds to the openness of web . by offering strategies that satisfy the needs of rights holders and content consumers. it enables greater collaboration between entire communities of users; content producers and consumers will be able to learn from each other on a scale previously unimagined. mam . responds to the diverse needs of a global community by adopting agile development processes and offering only the most essential functionality in completely web-native tools. mam . is the next generation of mam, empowering a global end user community with unlimited fully web-based access to: media and metadata production tools that combining best of web-based and desktop tools intrinsically connected production tools and media social software that becomes more useful the more it is used rich user experiences that span all devices and platforms these fi ve elements provide a better way to enhance your productivity via the web. it is next evolution of the web; it is the managed web (mam . ); and it is here today. references and notes robert, a. th august, ; flickr fans to yahoo: flick off!; wired news; wired.com . yahoo, inc pr department . vfi nity’s founder shen tong coined the term “ context is king ” , during a presentation entitled “ media context from taxonomy, community tagging, and workfl ow integration ” , at the henry stewart dam & mom symposium in los angeles, ca. it means that a piece of content becomes increasingly valuable as we capture how it is used and what users think of it, or the context . http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ . ibid . ibid . us census bureau . ( ) statistical abstract of the united states; internet access and . http://www. census.gov/prod/ pubs/ statab/infocomm. pdf . • • • • • swisher journal of digital asset management vol. , – © palgrave macmillan ltd – $ . http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour .html . musser, j. with o ’ reilly, t. and the o ’ reilly radar team ( ). web . principles and best practices ; o ’ reilly radar; sebastopol, ca, pp. – . see ref above . ibid . ibid . see ref above . ibid . ibid . von hellens , l . , nielsen , s . and beekhuyzen , j . ( ) qualitative case studies on implementation of enterprise wide systems . idea group inc (igi), melbourne , p. . michael , m . and joel , w . ( ) business case for on-demand delivery of digital asset management . gistics incorporated; oakland, ca, p. ; data summarized from enterprise class dam table . see ref above . ibid . 	the managed web: a look at the impact of web . on media asset management for the enterprise 	introduction to mam . 	why is this dam system necessary? 	the emergence of the socially networked web 	web . , more than just a buzzword 	web . patterns and principles of the managed web 	metadata and media 	connect digital content with digital tools via the web 	social software 	closed solutions cannot harness collective intelligence 	the smart kid is not always right 	if the tail is long enough, then grab it 	rich user experiences 	rich user experience via -click launch and web-based nonlinear editing 	keep it simple, stupid 	the new era of the managed web demands new development strategies 	continuous releases to meet ever-evolving needs: the perpetual beta 	service-based and zero-footprint software 	meet ever-evolving needs via lightweight models 	what social software means to mam: rights management 	examples of what mam . provides: production from anywhere, any device, any tool 	news team of one case study 	virtual national focus group case study 	content repurposing for publishers 	global story creation case study 	summary 	references envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements vachhani, s. j. ( ). envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements. journal of business ethics, , - . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - publisher's pdf, also known as version of record license (if available): cc by link to published version (if available): . /s - - - link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the final published version of the article (version of record). it first appeared online via springer nature at https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/daf e c - ae - e a- c - c f c https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/daf e c - ae - e a- c - c f c vol.:( ) journal of business ethics https://doi.org/ . /s - - - o r i g i n a l pa p e r envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements sheena j. vachhani received: july / accepted: december © the author(s) abstract using two contemporary cases of the global #metoo movement and uk-based collective sisters uncut, this paper argues that a more in-depth and critical concern with gendered difference is necessary for understanding radical democratic ethics, one that advances and develops current understandings of business ethics. it draws on practices of social activism and dissent through the context of irigaray’s later writing on democratic politics and ziarek’s analysis of dissensus and democracy that proceeds from an emphasis on alterity as the capacity to transform nonappropriative self-other relations. therefore, the aims of the paper are: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of a culture of difference and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a practical democratic ethics and politics of organizations; (ii) to explore two key cases of contemporary feminist social movements that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples of how feminist politics develops through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal differences; and (iii) to extend insights from irigaray and ziarek to examine ways in which a practical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. keywords alterity · democracy · difference · feminism · feminist ethics · irigaray · radical politics · gender · ziarek introduction whilst the field of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (csr) have made strides in considering gen- der, grosser and moon ( ) note there is rarely explicit reference or substantive exploration of feminist theory to understand gendered differences and issues in business eth- ics. as borgerson ( , p.  ) attests, “feminist ethics has been consistently overlooked, misunderstood, and improp- erly applied within business ethics and corporate social responsibility”. feminist ethics offers rich theoretical and conceptual resources for understanding and representing diverse interests, effectively critiquing corporate business ethics, corporate sovereignty and offering alternative forms of ethics for organizations (burton and dunn ; liedtka ; rhodes ) by exploring the intersections between relationships, responsibility and experience (borgerson ). in particular, these perspectives offer insight into the politics of difference, namely how gendered differences are constructed and how they enable and constrain the dynamics of corporate power and privilege in organizations (karam and jamali ). to translate this further into organizational terms, femi- nist ethics and politics offer ways of disturbing organiza- tions, pushing beyond constructed categories assigned to us, such as gender, race and class, and engaging in a politics of disturbance of organizational order “through critique, resistance and opposition to the self-interested sovereignty of business and to the pretense of corporate immutability in the name of capitalism” (rhodes , p.  ). importantly, this provides a practical ethics for understanding dynam- ics of oppression and discrimination that go beyond nar- rowly defined and reductive notions of gender in mainstream business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature, such as the focus on instrumental approaches to women’s empowerment, gender equality and corporate leadership (grosser and moon ; grosser and mccarthy ). this paper thus contributes to debates around democracy and business ethics by showing how dissent, in the form of activist, grassroots organizations, collectives and networks, * sheena j. vachhani s.vachhani@bristol.ac.uk department of management, school of economics, finance and management, university of bristol, howard house, queens avenue, bristol bs   sd, uk https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf s. j. vachhani representing different individuals and groups are able to effectively resist and how feminist movements rethink gen- der, race and class differences and the challenges this entails. “this ethics finds practical purchase in forms of dissent that redirect power away from centres of organized wealth and capital, returning it to its democratically rightful place with the people, with society” (rhodes , p.  ). a practi- cal, democratic business ethics on this basis is where the actions and practices of social justice groups hold institu- tions and corporations to account and challenge and disrupt corporate sovereignty (rhodes ). the theoretical critique developed here draws on the feminist philosophy of luce irigaray and ewa plonowska ziarek whose work on dissensus and radical democracy offers important theoretical perspectives for a practical and gendered, democratic organizational politics. irigaray sees “the contemporary ethical project as a recall to dif- ference, rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference” (fermon , p.  ). irigaray contends that overlooking the symbolic organization of power (fermon ) reifies the subordinated position of the feminine and if democracy is to be real, considera- tion needs to be given to the status of women in democratic thinking rather than recourse to a universalised, masculine subject of democracy. ziarek ( , p.  ) develops and extends irigaray’s concern for a radical female imaginary and operationalises the idea that, although women have won the formal rights of citi- zenship in western democracies, the liberal discourse of rights has not yet been transformed to express a culture of sexual difference. without a culture of dif- ference constructed within the larger horizon of eco- nomic equality, women, irigaray argues, are caught in a double bind between ‘the minimum of social rights they can obtain…and the psychological or physical price they have to pay for that minimum’. in this sense, irigaray and ziarek both enable the devel- opment of a practical democratic ethics whereby “women under these conditions require imaginative ways to recon- figure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would expe- rience it as a positivity worth emulating” (fermon , p.  ). in light of the challenges many women face to be heard and the effects economic cuts have on the most vul- nerable, women’s democratic participation, modes of dis- sent and the complexities surrounding women’s differences continue to be an important and necessary conversation for advancing ethical debates. therefore, the contributions of the paper are: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of the politics of differ- ence and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a democratic business ethics and politics of organizations; (ii) to explore two key cases of contempo- rary women’s social activism that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples for how feminist politics develop through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal dif- ferences and a commitment to holding organizations and institutions to account built on a nonappropriative relation to the other (pullen and rhodes ; ziarek ), namely the recent global #metoo movement (see tyler ; vach- hani and pullen ) and sisters uncut collective, a uk- based direct action collective; and (iii) to extend insights from irigaray and ziarek to examine ways in which a radical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. the paper is structured as follows: firstly, the politics of difference are explored and the implications this has for thinking about dissensus, resistance and activism. this is done in the context of business ethics and csr and outlines the importance of considering sexual difference. following this, irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference (irigaray a) and ziarek’s ethics of dissensus are developed as a way of rethinking the possibilities of democratic engagement with sexual difference at its heart. ziarek challenges and builds on irigaray’s work to suggest that a more radicalized view is needed if sexual difference still has a political future and ethical relevance for feminism. two important examples of grassroots, social activist groups are then discussed that illustrate feminist activism based on recognition and embod- ied ethics of difference. the paper ends by offering a series of observations for developing a democratic culture of dif- ference and what this brings to democratic business ethics (rhodes ) that furthers our understanding of ethics, dis- sensus and radical democracy. the politics of difference—conceptualising gender differences and sexual difference in the context of dissent, ethics and democracy feminist, poststructuralist approaches in particular high- light ways in which categories of the feminine and femi- nine subjectivity and difference become subordinated and constructed in relation to masculine subjectivity (irigaray a). this subordination of the feminine raises crucial ethical questions that foreground discussions of democratic ethics and feminist politics, namely: what political future(s), if any, does sexual difference have? (cheah and grosz , p.  ). what is contended here is that the politics of differ- ence, especially sexual difference, has not been sufficiently attended to in the ethics literature and that feminist ethics, envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… through irigaray and ziarek, enriches a reflexive rethinking of dissent and democratic action in organizations. how difference is constructed in business ethics and csr literature is intimately related to positions of power and needs to be understood in relation to the political and social contexts in which organizations function (grosser ; grosser and moon ; karam and jamali ; keenan et al. ). for example, gender equality and wom- en’s empowerment have become popularised as corporate ethical discourses and as part of mainstream csr agendas, mobilised in terms of competitive advantage and legiti- mised by the business case, namely economic arguments for improving profitability of organizations (grosser and moon ; grosser ). this agenda has been limiting and conceives of gender difference in narrow, reductive terms and the rise of corporate power and corporate discourses of gender equity provides challenges to feminist movements working to resist these reductive discourses (grosser and mccarthy ). critiques of corporate business ethics and managerial discourses suggest that differences between individuals and groups are constructed and brought into being in order to be appropriated (zanoni et al. ). tyler ( , p.  ) notes these reificatory processes render lived multiplicity, differ- ence and intersectional complexity knowable and therefore manageable categories and characteristics ready to be co- opted as organizational resources. thus, difference can be defined as “those points of disidentification and dissimi- larity that come to be experienced or perceived as socially, politically and ethically significant” (tyler , p.  ) that manifest through context-specific processes (zanoni et al. ) and which reflect, sustain or transform relations of power. within and evolving from these debates has been a con- cern with sexual difference (fotaki et al. ; oseen ; pullen and vachhani ; vachhani ) that questions the philosophical, political, practical and social basis on which gender differences are demarcated and constructed within the context of phallocratic and patriarchal culture, namely the prevalence of a singular, hegemonic masculine subject as opposed to a welcoming otherness or alterity (fermon ). the latter is premised on an inter-corporeal understanding of alterity as situated within embodied rela- tions of mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ; dale and latham ). in grosz’s terms, “sexual difference entails the existence of a sexual ethics, an ethics of the ongoing negotiations between beings whose differences, whose alterities, are left intact but with whom some kind of exchange is nonetheless possible” (grosz , p.  ). thus, what becomes important are the lived, social dimensions of sexual difference, not as biological differences between bodies but as the ontological status of the sexed body. irigaray and an ethics of sexual difference irigaray’s work has been explored in management and organization studies to consider the conceptual potential of a feminist psychoanalytic approach to gendered and sexual differences across a variety of contexts such as leadership, academia and writing practices (fotaki ; fotaki et al. ; pullen and vachhani ; vachhani ). fotaki ( , ) shows how sameness and difference become reinforced in academia by masculine discourses that centre around the presence or absence of the phallus that suggests the existence of a singular, hegemonic masculine subject that is unable to recognise a feminine subject. oseen ( ) and pullen and vachhani ( ) challenge corporate women’s leadership discourses in order to enable the creation of “a space for women other than as imitation men or excavated women” (oseen , p.  ). in comparison, vachhani ( ) discusses sexual dif- ference by addressing ethical and political dilemmas of the subordination of the feminine in organizations. recent discussions turn to irigaray to write differently using femi- nine writing or feminist écriture, that does not suppress and conceal possibilities for understanding difference as a rec- ognition of the feminine (fotaki et al. ; höpfl ; vachhani ). this approach insists on the transformative and activist potential of feminine writing one that offers a practical politics for changing organizations. despite these advances, less attention has been paid to irigaray’s later work that focuses attention on civil rights, responsibilities and democracies. je, tu, nous (iriga- ray. b), thinking the difference (irigaray ), and democracy begins between two (irigaray b), in par- ticular, draw on the development and practical implications of a theory of sexual difference for feminist politics, sexed rights and democratic culture (ziarek ). debates sur- rounding the politics of difference have arguably paid more attention to differences between groups which have resulted in the problematic homogenisation of identity and culture of any group to which particular or special rights might be ascribed (deutscher ; see ashcraft ; grosser ; tyler ). as hekman ( , p.  ) discusses, a culture of difference involves the idea that differences involve power and, “if we challenge those differences by asserting their opposites, the challenge is necessarily parasitic on the dif- ference itself, not an escape from it.” drawing on michele le doeuff, deutscher ( , p.  ) explains that “respect for cultural and sexual difference is regularly selective, oppor- tunist, and cynical”. thus, for irigaray amongst others, sameness and difference need to be reconceived in order to pursue an ethical recognition of political, social and demo- cratic difference to enable social change. irigaray’s work is important in this regard as she argues for a culture of differ- ence for ‘a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied s. j. vachhani with sameness, but whose otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representation” (whitford , pp.  – ; irigaray a; martin ) and endorse “politi- cal equality while maintaining concerns about its terms” (deutscher , p.  ). it is important to note critiques of irigaray’s work which have primarily centred around being read as essentialist, elitist and inaccessible (whitford ; deutscher ). despite these critiques, many have read irigaray’s meto- nymic and poetic writing as figurative rather than literal such that charges of biological essentialism are seen more as a strategic, rhetorical gesture to instal the embodied feminine subject into the text rather than a reflection of biological femininity or womanhood (fuss ; whitford ; vach- hani ). taking what fuss calls ‘the risk of essentialism’, that one could argue is largely tactical, irigaray attempts to inscribe difference and conjure up an ‘other woman’. butler ( , p.  ) notes that “irigaray’s task is to reconcile nei- ther the form/matter distinction nor the distinctions between bodies and souls or matter and meaning. rather, her effort is to show that those binary oppositions are formulated through the exclusion of a field of disruptive possibilities… those binaries, even in their reconciled mode, are part of a phallogocentric economy that produces the ‘feminine’ as its constitutive outside”. thought of in this way, an ethics of sexual difference cre- ates new conditions for the articulation of difference (gatens ) in the context of business ethics rather than invoking a monolithic, binary notion of gendered differences between men and women that reasserts or re-inscribes essentialist presumptions or reproduces gendered stereotypes. this calls for emphasis on the fluidity of sexual difference alongside race, class and other differences where such a construction requires an openness to alterity in the context of democracy (weiss ; ziarek ). fermon ( , p.  ) writes that “irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial ‘circuits’ alone, we overlook the symbolic organi- zation of power—women risk losing ‘everything without even being acknowledged’”. instead an interval of recogni- tion, which concerns how alterity is not about subsuming the other, can expand the political and include the concerns and activities of different groups of women (fermon ), through democratic organizational practices and settings such as social movements. recognition in this sense is the “embodied, practical and cooperative character of the self- other relation” (harding et al. , p.  , also cited in tyler p. ) generated through embodied practice. in democracy begins between two, irigaray’s ( b) concern is how to operationalise this approach to sexual difference and situate it within social [and organizational] practice. she initiated a working collaboration with the commission for equal opportunities in emilia-romagna, italy to challenge civic rights, citizenship and otherness. this enables rethinking dissent and resistance as demo- cratic engagement and action in the following way: how women’s movements centre around challenging different forms of political life and their related power relations and values, are about modifying women’s status within democ- racy. however, “when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order. the latter ges- ture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women.” (irigaray b, p.  ; irigaray a). this approach aims to challenge the context and framework of difference to reconceptualise its bounds and rethink a model of subjectivity (irigaray b). it also provides important insight into the way in which difference can be tactically, reflexively mobilised in a rethinking of radical democracy in the context of organizational ethics. ziarek develops this point in irigaray’s work to argue for an ethics of dissensus to which i now turn. ziarek and an ethics of dissensus if culture, under patriarchy, is concerned with the existence of one subject, the logic of the one and the feminine as its shadow of the other, then a radicalized feminine symbolic or female imaginary must, in part, suspend this state. sexual difference is then not the positive recovery of truth but “an articulation of the disjunctive temporality characteristic of the emergence of the new modes of life” (ziarek , p.  ), new imaginary and symbolic identifications that offer the opportunity for change, which can be seen in the cases discussed below. therefore, what is at stake is an eth- ics and politics of recognition, proceeding from an embod- ied, tactical mobilisation of difference. irigaray brings this to the fore by claiming a space for a radical female imaginary (ziarek ; dale ) which is developed and extended by ziarek ( ). ziarek’s ( , p.  ) development of an ethics of dissen- sus refers to the “irreducible dimension of antagonism and power in discourse, embodiment, and democratic politics” where “an ethics of dissensus does not transcend politi- cal and subjective antagonisms…but rather articulates the difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression” (ziarek , p.  ). ethics can be read as the dilemma between freedom, responsibility and obligation and, for ziarek, an ethics that concerns an “ethos of becoming” and “ethos of alterity” which lead not only to a nonappropriative relation to the other, as levinas argues (see rhodes ), but considers how obligation based on respect for such an alterity and accountability for the other “can motivate resistance and envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… the invention of…new modes of life” (ziarek , p.  ). thus, freedom can be redefined as relational and understood through the ethical and political significance of sexuality and embodiment “as an engagement in transformative praxis motivated by the obligation for the other” (ziarek , p.  ) that moves us beyond the binary relation of freedom and responsibility. ziarek’s work is of importance here for business ethics literature because it seeks to understand ethics as a contested terrain in a way that does not occlude the role of sexual and racial differences. to summarise, rather than seeking ethical resolution or resolving antagonistic relations of power, eth- ics concern embodied relations of dissent that can motivate resistance and an attention to alterity that results in a non- appropriative, nonviolent relation to the other. this results in seeing ethics as a contested terrain, one that contests the disembodied notion and universalising tendencies of democratic citizenship and addresses the tensions “between ethical responsibility for the other and democratic strug- gles against domination, injustice, and inequality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other” (ziarek , p.  ). an ethics of dissensus is thus about how we account for the plurality and conflicts of irreduc- ible differences such as class, race and gender which form a more suitable basis for understanding radical democracy and the antagonisms and dissent that it depends on. bell hooks ( , cited in ziarek , p.  ) notes that critiquing the universal democratic citizen is not the rejection of common bonds or commonality “but that we want to find the basis of commonality in something other than a notion of shared experience or common oppression”. to distinguish ziarek and irigaray further, ziarek cri- tiques irigaray’s inability to address the antagonistic dif- ference among women to draw on a broader, more radical- ized notion of sexual difference, one that is more dynamic and open to transformation. such a theory enables thinking about sexual difference in futural terms and “as a condition of becoming” (ziarek , p.  ; pullen et al. ). using irigaray’s conceptualisation of the negative, ziarek refers to the work of “disappropriation,” where “the assump- tion of sexual difference reveals the limits of the symbolic positions rather than an identification with a positive identity” (ziarek , p.  ). the labour of the negative entails how we are never the whole of the subject: “i is never simply mine in that it belongs to a gender…i am objectively limited by this belonging. the reluctance to recognize the importance of sexual difference seems to me to derive from this negative in the self and for the self it entails.” (irigaray , p.  ). in this sense, irigaray engages in a politics of impossible differ- ence (deutscher ) where the negative is “the condition of the actualization of the negative in the subject—what she calls ‘taking the negative upon oneself’” and “reveals the internal division and self-limitation of the sexed subject” (ziarek , p.  ). this marks sexual difference not as a universalised particularity but where “the assumption of sexual difference reveals the limits of the symbolic positions rather than an iden- tification with a positive identity” (ziarek , p.  ). this recognition of the negative means challenging stereotypes of gender, race and class and ‘norms’ that become naturalised and homogenised in pursuit of a universal democratic subject. so, it is not simply the recognition of the rights of women to construct their own political identities, as advocated by iri- garay, but a broader and more fundamental contestation of the abstract and universalizing subject of liberal citizenship. this echoes nancy fraser’s notion of political justice, which combines the politics of redistribution, such as economic redis- tribution, with the cultural claims of difference (ziarek ). negative or impossible sexual difference must become radi- calized and foregrounded such that “’the impossible’—contra- dictions, conflicts, incompletion—in the formation of all iden- tities, the labor of the negative in sexual difference prevents the reification of the existing gender and racial stereotypes into political or ‘natural’ norms, thus opening the possibility of their refiguration” (ziarek , pp.  – ). this radical- ized view focuses not on the transformation of existing gender identities which would reproduce heterosexual, middle-class subjectivities as political norms but emphasises the impossible as the limit of all political positions (ziarek ). thus, the ways in which proliferating differences become reified into disembodied political subjects is of crucial ethical concern if we are to advance a democratic business ethics (rhodes ) based on restoring democratic action and dissent to individuals and groups that challenge the corporate status quo. having explored a number of theoretical claims around difference, notably sexual difference through irigaray and ziarek, the next section explains the methodology and two cases, the global #metoo movement and uk-based direct action collective sisters uncut, to suggest that a democratic feminist ethics built on the nonappropriative relation to the other emerges out of contemporary feminist, social activist movements and from this we can learn lessons for under- standing a radicalized sexual difference. feminist activism furthers our understanding and potential for radical demo- cratic organizational practices. this is premised on an inter- corporeal understanding of alterity situated within embod- ied relations of mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ; dale ) and centralises the ethical and political significance of gendered readings of democracy. methodological engagement this paper draws on empirical sources from two illustrative cases of feminist, social movements, using online sources such as websites, news stories, online interviews with key s. j. vachhani individuals and commentaries to explore unique and contem- porary examples of social activism from grassroots move- ments. such a “methodology of dissent” exemplifies aspects of radical democracy and an ethics of dissent explored in the theoretical discussion above in complementary and contrasting ways. this methodological approach has also been termed a “netnography” (kozinets ), which uses social science methods to explore the lived experiences of individuals and the ways in which online communities and networks create “networked sociality”. combining elements of ethnography and social media research, the aim of net- nography is to understand how “individuals joined into net- works partake in a complex world that not only reflects and reveals their lived experiences but is also, itself, a unique social phenomenon” (kozinets , p.  ). it focuses atten- tion on new social forms advanced by online, virtual spaces of social interaction and what they make possible (kozinets , p.  ), combining archival and online communications. online access to social interaction “demonstrates an evolving ecosystem of social and individual data and cap- tured and emergent communications” and “netnography is positioned somewhere between the vast searchlights of big data analysis and the close readings of discourse analysis’ (kozinets , p.  ). this approach demonstrates the con- tested and shifting notions of community and collectives that underpin social movements and the potential for empower- ing and self-reflexive research designs in feminist research (lather ; harding ). i draw on elements of this approach to surface contentions, contradictions and tensions in feminist politics by analysing empirical sources from the online presence of feminist social movements. this provides a sense of their practices and how they enable rethinking dissent and protest, analysed through an awareness of sexual difference and in light of tensions in the shift from protest to engagement with the state and other institutions that many feminist social movements face (walby ). the analysis below offers narrative fragments and inter- pretations, not with the intention to present either illus- trative case as an homogenous collective of voices but to use accounts, narrations and stories of their development into collectives as important sites of democratic action and engagement, contexts that are often neglected in discussions in business ethics and csr. this involves recognition of dif- ferent spaces of dissent and resistance and the fluid bounda- ries between spaces of activism—visible protests, online communication and virtual communities. such an approach also necessitates exploring supportive and contradictory accounts; collaboration and contestation that shapes feminist social activism (see just and muhr , for a methodologi- cal discussion of studying the women’s march). the cases were chosen for being prominent feminist and intersectional movements: #metoo as an example of a global phenomenon facilitated by its media presence and use of social media to organize (see ozkazanc-pan ); and sisters uncut for its focus on resistance against austerity at a national level in the uk, using local consensus-driven practices of demo- cratic engagement. the analysis below combines accounts of online and physical sociality in response to resisting sexual and gendered violence. it explores embodied relations in the form of visible events, imagery and iconography and the organizational dynamics and processes of ethical delibera- tion and democratic action. the #metoo movement and sisters uncut— dissent in action at global and national levels to develop the first case, the recent #metoo movement has advanced a global platform for feminist politics (ozkazanc- pan ). #metoo gained momentum in as an inter- national movement against assault and harassment and its global presence has made it an important example of femi- nist activism and politics. devised as a grassroots campaign by tarana burke in , the movement has been mobi- lised into consciousness raising and social activism aimed to empower women through empathy (see https ://metoo mvmt.org/). as a pro-feminist movement, along with the women’s marches (see tyler ), it is a salient example of globalised feminist politics, with a remit for inclusion and celebration of difference. whilst it can be said that these contemporary movements form part of a longer history of feminist activism (vachhani and pullen ) they also rep- resent new and possibly unique moments in the development of feminist politics. munro ( ) and walby ( ) suggest that we may be in a fourth wave or “circuit” of feminism one that is mobilised by social media and the development of online, networked sociality. the platform #metoo has gained, certainly in the global north, included the presence of a number of social activ- ists at the oscars cefremony and association with a number of high profile women actors and flim directors (see seales ). this demonstrated the movement’s presence in an elite context and world stage. #metoo founder tarana burke along with other feminist activists were named time’s person(s) of the year for their consciousness raising efforts (vachhani and pullen ). the significant profile of the movement has catalysed debates on the backlash, effects and future of #metoo (bennett ). this elicited a number of claims around a shift away from the emphasis on celebrity culture and the media industry, such as the case of harvey weinstein, towards shaping and critiquing cultural and soci- etal narratives that shape behaviour in more varied organi- zational contexts. this entails moving away from focusing on individuals towards more nuanced, meaningful discus- sions of democratic organizational processes and collective https://metoomvmt.org/ https://metoomvmt.org/ envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… women’s agency (ozkazanc-pan ) that enables speaking out against harassment and oppression. the purpose of the movement, espoused by burke, has been to promote empathy and solidarity at an individual and collective level and to mobilise social change (see https :// metoo mvmt.org/). central to this claim is that the momen- tum gained by #metoo could change policies and law and promote the development of democratic practices, whether it be re-evaluating sexual harassment policies, destigmatis- ing issues around sexual misconduct in organizations, or addressing policy-based changes around reporting and dis- closure of harassment charges within workplaces. #metoo has raised a series of issues around women’s agency, dif- ference and how one kind of justice can overshadow other injustices. how #metoo relates to racial justice campaigns such as black lives matter and #sayhername for exam- ple, is yet to be extensively studied as a way of working across intersectional concerns in activist movements. rot- tenberg ( , n.p.) explains, for alicia garza, another cofounder of black lives matter, “the importance of ‘me too’ lies in the ‘power of empathy, this power of connec- tion, is really about empowering people to be survivors, to be resilient, and also to make really visible that sexual vio- lence is not about people’s individual actions, that this is a systemic problem’”. however, the public status of #metoo has raised criti- cisms around the groups of women neglected by such cel- ebrated movements. for example, it has been accused of neglecting disenfranchised groups such as incarcerated women. rottenberg ( ) offers another critical perspec- tive, asking “can #metoo go beyond white neoliberal femi- nism?” given its inception in as a grassroots movement aimed to serve sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities, its resurgence and contemporary shape has been charged with a surprising lack of focus on women from low socio-economic groups. vachhani and pullen ( , p.  ) note, “it might even be that neoliberal feminism has thrived on shaming women to stay silent, fixing themselves rather than working collectively to address institutional and structural sexism and harassment in organizations”. social movements can only offer the possibilities of social change and transformation if they include women of all backgrounds and whilst such movements might create awareness they may not produce the appropriate tools for dialogue and reflection (munar ; vachhani and pullen ). whilst #metoo has built social awareness and change, there are a number of challenges it raises around the politics of empathy (pedwell ), that is who is offered empathy and what effects this has, alongside how to transfer discus- sion from consciousness raising to the institutional envi- ronment (munar ). rottenberg ( , n.p.) notes how #metoo has shifted “debates about workplace norms” and “created new and surprising alliances”. for example, the transnational reach of #metoo prompted a group of women lawyers to offer support to survivors in india, pakistan and bangladesh (hemery and singh ). one lawyer set up #metoo meetups and explained how it offers sisterhood to women and a forum to listen (hemery and singh ). however, the focus on individualism, especially the hero- ism of the individual’s resilience may prevent mobilising people politically and collectively. this risks neglecting socio-economic and cultural structures and disarticulating the systemic nature of gendered and sexual violence (rot- tenberg ). the recent focus on celebrity culture also means its historic roots to focus on low income and women vulnerable to violence have been overwritten. “from the outset, the movement had a very specific therapeutic and political vision that helps explain its affective pull, as well as why women feel empowered when speaking about their painful and often traumatic experiences. as burke puts it: ‘me too’ is about ‘using the power of empathy to stomp out shame.’” (rottenberg , n.p.). the primary tension is how to empower and embolden women to create ethical and responsible dialogue as collec- tives and communities that challenge the language of shame whilst recognising the systemic violence and intersecting systemic oppressions that underpin these acts (ibid ). for example, as flynn ( ) notes, some indigenous cul- tures may not want to speak out for fear of inciting racism or further stereotyping men of their community. the complex dynamics of collective community over individual rights and the transnational dynamics of a complex, global feminist movement illustrate how democratic ethics is a contested terrain; one that engages in an ethics of dissensus as plurality and irreducible differences of class, race and gender (ziarek ). this necessary contestation and deliberation calls for addressing the antagonistic differences between women and sexual difference as a “condition of becoming” (ziarek , p.  ). see https ://black lives matte r.com/. social movements such as #sayhername aim to build a substan- tial social media presence that link race-based justice movements. #sayhername was aimed at resisting police brutality against black women (see http://www.aapf.org/sayhe rname /) and to highlight the mistreatment of black women in the criminal justice system in the united states. art and poetry play a significant role in this movement. a particularly poignant example can be found on the #sayhername website, entitled: ain’t i a woman?": the poetics of #sayhername ( week of action), found at: http://www.aapf.org/sayhe rname -video s- . included in which is the powerful line “i cannot tell if i’ve been frightened to death or frozen alive”. patrisse cullors, a founder of black lives matter, and tarana burke have engaged in conversation about the role of class, gender and race-based activism and the issues they face as activists - see https ://www.youtu be.com/watch ?v=_omi j gknnw . https://metoomvmt.org/ https://metoomvmt.org/ https://blacklivesmatter.com/ http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/ http://www.aapf.org/sayhername-videos- http://www.aapf.org/sayhername-videos- https://www.youtube.com/watch% fv% d_omi jgknnw s. j. vachhani the second case, sisters uncut, is a direct action group against domestic violence that fights against different forms of oppression in the united kingdom. sisters uncut pro- vides a contrast to the #metoo movement which has been criticised for its focus on privileged groups of women. their powerful feministo states that “austerity is a political choice” (http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/femin isto/). formed in by a group of intersectional feminists concerned with trans- forming society their feministo states, as intersectional feminists we understand that a per- son’s individual experience of violence is affected by interconnecting and mutually reinforcing systems of oppression….the systems of power and privilege in our society enable and protect the actions of perpe- trators. this creates a cycle of violence, which can only be broken through transforming society. to those in power, our message is this: your cuts are violent, your cuts are dangerous, and you think that you can get away with them because you have targeted people who you perceive as powerless. we are those people. we are sisters uncut. we will not be silenced. sisters uncut use direct action as a way of revealing struc- tural problems, alternatives and solutions to tackling social issues that take many forms. by occupying spaces, hanging banners to draw attention to social issues, blocking bridges and calling out sexual harassment, “whatever form it takes, its purpose is to be disruptive”. this forms a powerful way of effecting change through dissent and the embodied relations it entails where “even if you don’t see the exact result you want immediately, over time it can contribute to changing the conversation.” (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/) in contrast to #metoo, sisters uncut have engaged in a variety of resistance-based direct action protests aimed at challenging the status of women, such as: hijacking advertis- ing on the london underground to protest cuts to domestic violence services; occupying spaces (such as the visitors centre at holloway women’s prison); flash mobbing south- wark council offices; blocking waterloo bridge to protest cuts to refuge shelters and the disproportionate effects they have on black, disabled and migrant women ; and putting on community festivals. their activities aim to shine light on issues affecting marginalised and vulnerable groups of women. they challenged the prison industrial complex by raising attention to the vulnerability of women at the yarls wood detention centre and reclaimed the visitors centre of holloway prison in (holloway prison was closed in july ) in protest of the erasure of the women who suffered there. the multiple axes of oppression addressed by sisters uncut, and campaigns such as #sayhername, briefly explored above, suggest a radical democracy aimed at embracing the embodied vulnerabilities of difference. sisters uncut arguably offers a more localised and inter- sectional approach than #metoo. their focus on collective, direct action is a way of changing how politics is done, sometimes being labelled as modern suffragettes (o’hagan ). groups have been formed across the country since high profile protests such as lying down on the red carpet at the premiere of the film suffragette (kwai ) and dying trafalgar square fountains blood red (deardon ) alongside key, local achievements such as getting women’s aid reinstated in doncaster (spratt ). this combina- tion of intervening in public spaces and consciousness rais- ing shows how contrasting avenues of democratic action forces people to confront issues and how politics considers women’s issues (spratt , n.p.) aimed at creating greater insight and further action against the austerity cuts, state violence and the effects on different vulnerable groups of women. their aim is to create safe social spaces through values such as community accountability using an accountability toolbox with principles of transformative justice as a way of healing if a sister is harmed (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/safer space s/). they organize not around the sharing of particular feminist values but on the desire to campaign for better domestic violence services that recognise particu- lar experiences and needs for women (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/). the groups expressly state no hierarchy or leaders, use dialogue and consensus decision-making aimed to give members an equal say and meet to provide inclusive and supportive survivor-centred spaces for women, nonbinary, agender and gender variant people. whilst there are criticisms of consensus building in relation to the co- optation of marginalised groups, consensus decision-making in this context is used as a practical tool for understanding embodied, ethical relations between individuals in pursuit of social change. this is opposed to consensus building in the context of liberal democracies that aims to elide or silence differences. the ultimate aim of such an ethos is to foster dissensus at the heart of a culture of difference. the approach aims to cultivate and sustain creative and dynamic ways of fostering for a list of news articles on action taken by sisters uncut in pro- test of austerity cuts, see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/press /. see http://www.gal-dem.com/servi ces-not-sente nces-siste rs-uncut -occup y-hollo way-women s-priso n/ for further details on the activi- ties of sisters uncut and the importance of remembering holloway women’s prison. for further details, see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/. see also uk uncut for a related anti-austerity grassroots movement using direct action and civil disobedience: https ://www.ukunc ut.org. uk/about /. http://www.sistersuncut.org/feministo/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/saferspaces/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/saferspaces/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/press/ http://www.gal-dem.com/services-not-sentences-sisters-uncut-occupy-holloway-womens-prison/ http://www.gal-dem.com/services-not-sentences-sisters-uncut-occupy-holloway-womens-prison/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ https://www.ukuncut.org.uk/about/ https://www.ukuncut.org.uk/about/ envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… discussion, committed to finding solutions that are actively supported (see www.seeds forch ange.org.uk/short conse nsus), in a spirit of creating respectful dialogue between equals using techniques such as active listening, summaris- ing and synthesis to achieve democratic decisions. a “fish- bowl spokescouncil” can be used, especially for large scale decision-making, an approach aimed to spread power for decision-making across small groups rather than concentrat- ing power in the hands of individuals. one member states, “there’s a lot of discussion and it isn’t easy. consensus is a lot harder than voting, straight up democracy or whatever. but, at the end of the day, people are happier in the long run” (spratt , n.p.). one frustration noted by members is how sisters are por- trayed and the co-optation of femininity—“those of us who do the media side of things are really aware of our image and how it has come across—that we are young and female—the media loves to fetishise young women—even when we do our big marches we’ll have a really diverse group of peo- ple—in terms of ages and races—but the pictures that end up being taken and appear in mainstream media are of young, slim, white able-bodied women—that doesn’t reflect all that we are” (spratt , n.p.; see also, charles and wadia ). spratt surmises that this fetishization may stem from how anonymity is par for the course when engaging in direct action and how it is important that no sister gets more credit than another. one member states, “we see a lot of hierar- chies in activism and in politics…it just perpetuates the kind of structure that we are trying to fight against. we are creat- ing the world we want to see through the way we operate” (spratt , n.p.). this approach to democratic action, such as consensus-based approaches to decision-making, are used to challenge individuals vying for power, focusing on the structural problem rather than the individual—“it’s not a challenge to the existing ego problems of politics if we rep- licate the very system that perpetuates it. we stay clear of the structures of traditional politics” and “it shows that it’s the same tactics that need to be used everywhere—direct action.” (spratt , n.p.). spratt shows how inter-gen- erational feminism plays a part with a strong presence of younger feminists passionate about domestic violence cuts and how they have also attracted those who would not have normally considered protest before joining. the focus on direct action and physical presence are core to sisters uncut in contrast with online activism prevalent in contemporary feminism: “but that’s nothing in comparison to being in that room, being in that safe space, taking to the streets, using your body and just being there” (spratt , n.p.). ziarek ( , p.  – ) notes that attention to the contradictions, conflict and incompleteness of identities thus opens up possibilities to reconfigure norms of gender, class and race and challenge the presumption of a universal demo- cratic subject. sisters uncut shows how an intercorporeal understanding of alterity is enabled through embodied rela- tions of dissent, mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ). these two cases demonstrate contrasting yet connected feminist social movements and their related power rela- tions. however, whilst the advancement of women’s rights help to modify women’s status within democracy, they are also at risk of becoming institutionalised or absorbed into existing structures, thus leaving those structures intact and concealing further exploitation of women (irigaray b; walby ). #metoo, as a movement beyond a hashtag, and sisters uncut engage in different forms of democratic ethics that challenge the context and framework for under- standing difference, and more fully appreciate the complexi- ties of women’s differences within the structures they are a part (irigaray b). sisters uncut, in particular, provides insight into ways in which difference can be tactically and reflexively mobilised (tyler ) through collective acts as a rethinking of radical democracy, by using shock, pro- tests and accountability-driven practices. global and local initiatives such as these cases may offer new modes of life, through imaginary and symbolic identifications, as ziarek imagines. this manifests from an ethics of dissensus that recognises irreducible dimensions of power and political and subjective antagonisms (ziarek ). #metoo and sisters uncut demonstrate a commitment to engage in an “ethos of alterity” which transforms practices of dissent informed by an “obligation for the other” (ziarek , p.  ; robinson ). these two cases are connected in their engagement with embodied relations of dissent but offer contrasting contexts and methods by which democratic engagement is achieved to challenge institutional and structural social change. the paper now develops these arguments by examining their relevance for rethinking democratic organizational prac- tices, especially for a democratic business ethics understood through sexual difference. read through the earlier theo- retical discussion of irigaray and ziarek, as fermon ( , p.  ) notes, the strategic challenge of sexual difference is a basis for democratic rights, that “will allow women space and time to generate an economy open to women’s interac- tions with each other, to reach beyond sex-neutral citizen- ship to an open future”. in contrasting and connected ways, see www.seedsforchange.org.uk for an elaboration of techniques used for consensus decision-making in collectives and non-hierar- chical activist groups. in a “fishbowl spokescouncil” groups sit in an outer circle around spokes of a wheel. groups are clustered behind the spokes and spokespeople (or spokes) from each group can feed back to the spokescouncil to reduce repetition of information. on the basis of the discussion, the spokescouncil can build a series of pro- posals which are discussed back in individual groups to check for agreement or change. http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/shortconsensus http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/shortconsensus s. j. vachhani the cases above speak to a democratic feminist politics built on nonappropriation of the other as a way of building and cultivating a culture of difference, but one that is always at risk of the appropriation of women’s identities. towards a democratic culture of difference—feminist politics and contemporary ethics of dissensus these cases highlight ways in which democratic dissent involves a tactical reassertion of difference, reasserting feminine difference in its multitude. this tactical reasser- tion politicises sexual difference and develops capacities for solidarity and democratic engagement not based on shared experiences of oppression that collapses or elides other forms of lived difference but on shared goals (vachhani and pullen ). when difference is managed, the problem- atic insistence on identity must lead to “taking stock of the constitutive exclusions that reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials, exclusions that each articulation was forced to make in order to proceed” (butler , p.  ). this returns us to two key questions that have wider relevance for feminist organization studies and feminist ethics: how do feminist politics expand the terrain on which democratic organizational practices, and democratic business ethics, are understood; and how does the strategic challenge of sexual difference enable us to foster and cultivate a more expan- sive and radicalized notion of difference in organizations that responds to an intercorporeal and embodied ethics? the remainder of the paper offers a number of observations that move these discussions forward to enable a richer theoriza- tion of gendered difference in democratic business ethics. feminist politics of difference offer ways of disturbing organizations, as intimated earlier, pushing beyond con- structed categories assigned to us and engaging in a politics of disturbance of organizational order through critique and resistance to the sovereignty of business. accordingly, cor- porate masculinity “is not so much a rejection of the femi- nine, but more a co-optation of it for the purpose of mas- culine public glory” where the feminine “is not absent, but rather is rendered as being at the service of the masculine” (rhodes and pullen , p.  ). the embodied ethics and politics of activism seen in fem- inist movements, such as #metoo and sisters uncut, have a dialogic and often problematic relation to formal organiza- tions such as corporations and the state. approaches that seek to explore the “embodied, practical and cooperative character of the self-other relation” (harding et al. , p.  , cited in tyler , p.  ) and recognition of never fully knowing the other (ahmed ) require more atten- tion in business ethics, especially the complex relationship between feminist ethics, direct action and the possibilities of a democratic ethics of organization. this challenges the idea that “the corporation has extended the market, if not the civil freedoms on which it was predicated” (fermon , p.  ). sexual difference offers a contestation of corporate masculinity and sovereignty and attention to embodied dif- ferences that are constitutive and generative of other differ- ences that need to be addressed (gherardi ). a democratic culture of difference enables fruitfully rethinking democratic business ethics by reconfiguring feminine difference where collective action disturbs corpo- rate sovereignty in business ethics. irigaray’s elaboration of sexual difference, as developed earlier, establishes rec- ognition and respect for difference as “prior to productive and generative relations” between genders (fermon , p.  ). these politics defy easy categorization and offer no immediate solutions (fermon ) but dissensus, thought through this lens, is not negative but “a productive means through which democracy can be pursued.” (rhodes , p.  ). “feminism still needs a theory of sexual difference, but a theory that is more dynamic, more democratic and more ethical—a theory capable of foregrounding not only the futurity of democracy and the antagonistic differences among women but also the ethical respect for alterity in all its forms” (ziarek , p.  ). this prompts us to acknowledge the ethical and political dimensions of dif- ference in its multitude as central to a democratic business ethics. for radical democracy in feminist social movements, “the public sphere is understood as a contested space where agonistic differences should come into productive conflict without recourse to any hope of ideal consensus”. (rhodes , p.  ). these social movements challenge individ- ual sovereignty and direct public attention to inequality but beyond this offer the possibility of a collective, democratic ethics of openness and appreciation of self-other relations. they offer hope in bleak times and show the vibrancy of feminist activism and the political spaces and strategies used to frame, structure and enact social change (grosser and mccarthy ). difference is never accomplished or completed but involves reasserting feminine difference and highlights the importance of alterity, involving “obligation for the other and the agency of the subject, between responsibility and the struggles against sexist, racist and class oppression, and finally, between the desire for justice and embodiment, affect, and sexuality.” (ziarek , p.  ). embodied ethical relations (thanem and wallenberg ) are central to this endeavour and reconceptualises ethical obligation without collapsing into unconditional responsibility or “an indiffer- ent struggle of heterogenous forces without ethical stakes” (ziarek , p.  ). a democratic culture of difference, understood through sexual difference, thus offers a conceptual framework envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… through which to re-imagine the constitutive exclusions faced by marginalized or vulnerable groups where “our desire to install a new kind of social system does not pre- clude us from living in the one that exists” (irigaray a, b, cited in fermon , p.  ). beyond this, an ethics of dissensus enables the confrontation of power and politi- cal differences without “the utopian vision of justice tran- scending antagonisms of race, class, sexuality, and gender” (ziarek , p.  ). valuing dissensus as a source of ethics, one that can account for “vulnerability to difference without assuming that such difference can be known”, is central to the development of a practical and democratic business eth- ics (rhodes , p.  ). concluding thoughts discourses around women’s empowerment and corporate ethical discourses of equity, such as the business case for gender equality, have arguably come to be seen as part of the corporate business ethics and csr architecture of organi- zations. however, critiques of these approaches highlight their selective recognition of difference and studies clearly demonstrate how difference is adopted in problematic ways in formal organizations (grosser and moon ; karam and jamali ). feminist social activism and protest offer a new way of understanding gendered differences in busi- ness ethics, where complex events and the tensions and chal- lenges that arise remind us “what is possible when feminists assemble the combined forces of our bodies, practices, and ethics” (tyler , p.  ). the two cases discussed present opportunities to under- stand the complex dynamics of dissent and radical democ- racy based on intercorporeal and embodied differences that offer “a better place to locate business ethics…in practical modes of dissent and disturbance to corporate sovereignty arising within civil society.” (rhodes , p.  ). this could be termed a democratic ethics of difference that takes into account gendered differences and reconceptualises ethi- cal obligation as a challenge to corporate business ethics. differences can be tactically and reflexively mobilised in rethinking radical forms of democracy, as explored earlier. this tactical reassertion demands questioning the basis on which the feminine is constructed in organizations, it necessitates and leads to an ethical questioning from which arise an ethics of becoming and ethos of alterity, in ziarek’s terms. it requires an understanding of negation and the impossible: “what divides, as a negativity, is also that which can bring us close: ‘i defend the impossible’ [irigaray ] ” (fermon , p.  ). we can hope that new possibilities emerge from this endeavour. activist politics at the heart of feminism have much to teach us about how difference is constructed, man- aged or even negated in formal and informal organizations and this advances thinking about the importance of and ten- sions within democratic business ethics. tyler ( , p.  ) recognises that “what is needed, politically and ethically, is a destabilization of the regulatory ideals that shape” differ- ence in organizations. feminist politics and activism through movements, protests and collective acts promise embodied, ethical and political practices that challenge normative regimes that categorise difference (see ashcraft ). the latter is an “an exploitation of our basic relationality, fore- closing rather than supporting genuine recognition (tyler , p.  ) and impeding nonappropriative self-other rela- tions. the new ways of organizing seen in contemporary feminist movements challenge systems of oppression and the constitutive exclusions faced by different women with the promise of hope and vulnerability of the embodied and generous ethical relation. many of us know, when we name a problem, we often become the problem (ahmed ). this means instaling ourselves as problems. the power of dissent and antagonism at the heart of these movements suggest perhaps, beyond irigaray, a literal labouring against the negative where the disavowal of women’s existence and the negation of the feminine can be recovered as a source of invention and possibilities through the power of dissent, critique and protest. acknowledgements this article has benefitted from the close atten- tion and insightful critique of the reviewers and special issue editors. particular thanks go to alison pullen and melissa tyler for their close attention to the theoretical ideas and for their continued support and wise counsel. i dedicate this article to a new addition to my family who i hope will inherit the fire to fight injustice and live in better times. funding this article received no funding. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest sheena j. vachhani declares that he/she has no conflict of interest. research involving human participants and/or animals this article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals per- formed by any of the authors. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attri- bution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / s. j. vachhani references ahmed, s. 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( ). volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. bloomington, in: indiana university press. zanoni, p., janssens, m., benschop, y., & nkomo, s. ( ). unpack- ing diversity, grasping inequality: rethinking difference through critical perspectives. organization, ( ), – . ziarek, e. p. ( ). towards a radical female imaginary—temporality and embodiment in irigaray’s ethics. diacritics, ( ), – . ziarek, e. p. ( ). an ethics of dissensus—postmodernity, feminism and the politics of radical democracy. california: stanford uni- versity press. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. http://cbswire.dk/can-i-kiss-you/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /oct/ /sisters-uncut-suffragette-film-premiere-women https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /oct/ /sisters-uncut-suffragette-film-premiere-women http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/metoo-white-neoliberal-feminism- .html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/metoo-white-neoliberal-feminism- .html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/metoo-white-neoliberal-feminism- .html https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/sisters-uncut/ https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/sisters-uncut/ https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / 	envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements 	abstract 	introduction 	the politics of difference—conceptualising gender differences and sexual difference in the context of dissent, ethics and democracy 	irigaray and an ethics of sexual difference 	ziarek and an ethics of dissensus 	methodological engagement 	the #metoo movement and sisters uncut—dissent in action at global and national levels 	towards a democratic culture of difference—feminist politics and contemporary ethics of dissensus 	concluding thoughts 	acknowledgements 	references Эмоции создают новые физическое, информационное, и виртуальное пространства emotions create new physical, informational, and virtual spaces Георгий Почепцов https://rezonans.kz/emotions-sozdayut-virtualnoeprostranstva/ Информационное и виртуальные пространства по сути воспитывают подчиненного человека. По этой причине для государств столь опасны https://rezonans.kz/author/geo/ https://rezonans.kz/wp-content/uploads/ / /pexels-photo- .jpeg тексты о героях, которые идут наперекор судьбе и правилам. Они хороши во время войны, но не столь приятны во время мира. Дж. Даймонд осуждающе смотрит в сторону неолитической революции, которую все хвалят, поскольку она создала типаж именно послушного человека, который пришел в результате развития сложных иерархических структур, на которых покоятся современные общества. Здесь непослушание строго карается. Даймонд говорит, что все не так просто. Есть и множество отрицательных факторов этого перехода. Рост болезней, дискриминация полов. Даже средний рост людей уменьшился при переходе к аграрной цивилизации. Худший тип растительного питания привел к уменьшению продолжительности жизни: он уменьшился от лет до . Количество свободного времени, по его мнению, осталось тем же. Кто выиграл от этого нового типы жизни? Только элита. Его конечное мнение таково: “Археологи, изучающие развитие фермерства, реконструировали критический этап, на котором мы сделали самую ужасную ошибку в человеческой истории. Делая выбор между ограничением населения или увеличение производства еды, мы избрали последнее, завершившееся голодом, войнами и тиранией” [ ]. Однако человечество не победило, голод все равно сопровождает его. И это при том, что сельхозкультуры занимают - % обитаемых земель, потребляет % воды, давая - % выбросов за счет парниковых газов [ ]. Треть произведенных продуктов пропадает. Голод на сегодня стал политической проблемой. Послушание, возникшее десять тысяч лет назад, годилось для того общества, принеся ему стабильность, в которой оно нуждалось. Но ситуация становится совсем другой, когда возникает потребность в инновациях, как это происходит сегодня. Взгляд в прошлое перестал быть интересным, его сменил взгляд в будущее. Как развивать мозги человечества в новом направлении? Какой инструментарий при этом можно использовать? В этом плане оказывается интересной фантастика, которая “разрешает” хотя бы временно получать новую модель мира. Но даже эта временная виртуальность трансформирует мозги по-настоящему. Люди других религий, культур, языков также несут другой взгляд на мир. Именно по этой причине экономику всегда интересуют иммигранты. Тем более, они несут с собой заряд активности, который может уже быть утерянным у местного населения. Китай сознательно усиливает эту сторону фантастической литературы, собираясь таким образом помочь инновационной экономике. И это начинается с детского возраста, они говорят о детях так: “Их воображение будущего может повлиять на их реальность” [ ]. Известный фантаст Н. Гейман передает мнение Китая, приведшее в результате к созданию мощного потока фантастической литературы: “Вы знаете многие годы, что делаем прекрасные вещи. Мы делаем ваши айподы. Мы делаем телефоны. Мы делаем их лучше, чем кто-либо другой, но нам не приходили в головы эти идеи. Поэтому мы отправились в тур по Америке разговаривать с людьми из microsoft, google, apple, где задавали им много вопросов о них, просто о людях, работающих там. И мы обнаружили, что все они читали научную фантастику, поэтому мы и подумали, что, наверное, это хорошо” [ ]. И это послужило стимулом запуска китайской фантастики. Кроме того, развитие фантастики ведет к росту других вариантов виртуальной продукции: фильмы и игры, интернет драмы, телесериалы [ ]. Мозги населения погружаются в другой мир, что в результате может помочь создать своих гениев с “другими мозгами”. Существует явная корреляции мира виртуального и физического. Один влияет на другой. Трансформация одного порождает ответ в другом. Можно привести прямые примеры: – Из-за коронавируса во Франции и в Италии выросли продажи “Чумы” Камю: ​“​По данным итальянской газеты, за месяц «Чума» с -го места в рейтинге продаж поднялась на третье место. Во Франции, как пишет francetvinfo со ссылкой на данные сайта edistat, рост продаж не так высок, но за последнюю неделю января были проданы экземпляров «Чумы», а за последнюю неделю февраля — ″ [ ], – концепция альтернативных фактов команды Д. Трампа привела к росту продаж “ ” Оруэлла [ – ], пошли вверх продажи Хаксли и Брэдбери [ – ], вероятно, потому, что люди хотят осмысления того мира, в который внезапно попали. Кстати, и книга Арендт о тоталитаризме попала на третье почетное место по продажам. Если эволюция может двигаться без эмоций, то все революции это высокоэмоциональные технологии. ​Происходит в ряде случае искусственная эксплуатация человеческих эмоций, начиная с известных волнений года (Париж, Прага). В той модели, которая была взята на вооружение, обязательным элементом стали человеческие жертвы. ​В пражской весне правительство пало, когда появилась жертва – убитый студент. Но как потом оказалось, убитого в реальности не было. Но он был в медиа и в головах людей. И виртуальность победила реальность. Виртуальность трансформирует реальность, реальность также влияет на виртуальность. Студия Дисней, например, поменяла сюжетную линию в фильме “Мулан”, чтобы соответствовать движению против сексуального насилия #metoo. Продюсер фильма говорит: “Я думаю, что в эпоху движения #metoo образ командира, который является объектом сексуального влечения [со стороны своей подчиненной], будет смотреться крайне дискомфортно, и мы подумали, что это неуместно […] Мы разделили образ Ли Шанга на два персонажа: один из них – это командир Тунг, который выполняет роль ее опекуна и наставника; второй – это Чэнь Хунхуэй, который служит в подразделении с Мулан” ([ ], см. также отчет о деятельности этого движения за г. [ ]). Фантастика оказалась важной во всех сферах. Крупный бизнес заказывает фантастам написать их видение будущего. У американцев создано Командование будущего, призванное ускорить перевод армии на новое вооружение и мышление. Чтобы побеждать по-новому, надо и мыслить по-новому. И сделать это надо скорее возможного противника, в числе которых числятся Россия и Китай. Сегодня можно жить и в мире вчерашнем, и в мире будущем. Это что касается отдельного человека. Но государство не может себе такого позволить. Оно не может заниматься будущим не системно, а случайно. Это же касается и крупного бизнеса, и военных, поскольку успешность их будущего задается работой в сегодняшнем настоящем. Они должны быть готовы к будущему, а не пассивно ждать его прихода. Тот, кто сам не формирует будущего, живет в чужом будущем, что не всегда комфортно. Советский Союз выстроил сильное виртуальное пространство, но отстал в достижениях в пространстве физическом, если не считать обороны. И он проиграл межстрановую гонку именно из-за этого отставания, поскольку мозги его граждан, в первую очередь эмоционально, оказались развернутыми на Запад. Эмоции легко побеждают любую рациональность. Несоответствие уровней виртуального и физического стало причиной развала СССР. В. Кондратьев посмотрел современными глазами на фильм “Кубанские казаки” и пришел к такому выводу: “Лучший и самый богатый в районе на цветущей Кубани колхоз только что провел электричество, что у председателя другого колхоза вызывает удивление и скрытую зависть. Вдумайтесь: год, в середине ХХ века, спустя почти лет с начала реализации ленинского плана ГОЭЛРО – электрификации всей страны! И тогда, если внимательно вглядеться в картину, становится очень даже понятно, почему на ярмарке, которую в так много показывают в фильме, нет ни одного электроприбора и вообще ничего, что было бы связано с электричеством, даже лампочек. Более того, там нет ни мяса, ни рыбы, ни молочных и прочих скоропортящихся продуктов. Просто потому, что их негде хранить в кубанскую жару – холодильников-то тоже ведь не было!” [ ]. Сильная виртуальность позволяла удерживать население в ожидании более счастливого будущего. Такой испокон веков была и модель религии, обещавшей, что в загробном мире плохие будут наказаны, а хорошие вознаграждены. Но это был индустриальный век, где главные решения несла промышленность. Она забирала все ресурсы на оборону, объясняя это необходимостью борьбы с врагами. Сегодняшняя смена правил игры усугубила отставание. Постиндустриальное пространство дало откат и в сфере виртуальной, так как постсоветские страны не в состоянии производить кино на равных с Западом. Зритель массово ушел к западному кино, не говоря о сериалах. На этой дороге к новой виртуальности мы потеряли чтение. Дети хуже сходятся с чтением, поскольку главным развлечением сегодня стало то, что они видят на экране. Вербальная цивилизация сломалась под натиском цивилизации визуальной. Творцы вербальности отступили на задний план. Профессор Ф. Дэвис, возглавляющий Центр исследований чтения, литературы и общества Ливерпульского университета, однако говорит, что чтение классики “освобождает эмоции и воображение”, позволяя людям чувствовать себя “более живыми”, ведя к потенциальному излечиванию от симптомов болезней [ ]. Книги по самопомощи не работают так, поскольку они не включают мозги эмоционально. Ф. Дэвис говорит: “Если вы просто ищете информацию, вы движетесь быстро, это очень легко и делается автоматически. Это возбуждает, это влияет эмоционально”. Этот центр проводит отдельные исследования типа чтение при деменции, чтение в тюрьме, чтение при депрессии (см. Некоторые примеры [ – ]). И все это идет под общей темой – чтение и ментальное здоровье. Такова сила эмоционального воздействия (об эмоции и производстве см. [ ]). Опора на эмоции проявилась в мультиках, сделанных разработчиками американских вооружений. Это ответ на мультики Путина с новыми разработками [ ]. В американской демонстрации гибнут новейшие российские танки и бронетранспортеры, а также зенитно-ракетный комплекс большой дальности С- . Война на экране приближает будущую войну года (см. также [ ]). Виртуальности уже воюют за будущее. С другой стороны, происходит уничтожение старых виртуальностей. Когда они были активными и владели мозгами людей, потом они ушли, оставшись только в науке и образовании. Но сегодня они вытесняются и оттуда. Шоком прозвучал информация, что Оксфордский университет при обучении классической филологии убирает из программы Гомера и Виргилия [ ]. Это результат реформирования в сторону того, чтобы сделать образование более доступным. Вспомним при этом, что дореволюционная гимназия в России давала гимназистам эти тексты. ​То есть гимназия до года давала больше, чем оксфордский университет через сто лет после. Прошлая виртуальность оказывается в этом случае мертвой для современности. Трансформация прошлого рода может быть и иной. Д. Антонов, специалист по демонологии средних веков, констатирует уход конкретных фигур демонического поля, но зато сохранение оперирования демоническими моделями в наше время: “традиция демонизировать оппонентов никуда не исчезла. В современной масскультуре, в том числе той, которую транслируют российские СМИ, все эти демонические модели работают, как и прежде — активно, алогично, агрессивно, эмоционально и вполне эффективно. Разница только в том, что христианская демонология сегодня малоактуальна и заменяется на другую — политическую, мистическую, конспирологическую, в зависимости от среды и аудитории” [ ]. Мир виртуальных врагов никуда не уходит, так как власти не выгодно его терять. В период политических “обострений” возникает клеймение “врагов народа” или “врагов государства”. Это в свою очередь дает право власти применять против тех, кто так обозначен, любые меры. Эмоции также заполонили сферу потребления, вводя управление нами через обладание предметами. Сегодня человек покупает не кроссовки, а самоощущение. А. Реквиц говорит, рисуя модель всеобъемлющего входа эмоций в современную жизнь: “сфера потребления вся пронизана стремлением к позитивному, привлекательному, аутентичному переживанию. Аутентичность и привлекательность — это главные ценности всей этой позитивной эмоциональности. И экономика — транспортный канал. Затем — дигитализация. Репрезентация эмоций — того, что происходит внутри и вообще-то не может быть показано. И все же эмоции, причем позитивные эмоции, демонстрируются. Пример тому — Инстаграм, и тут всегда главное — привлекательность и аутентичность. Субъект позднего модерна теперь занят не только самореализацией, но и тем, чтобы продемонстрировать вовне свою подлинную и привлекательную жизнь. Все должны ее увидеть” [ ]. Мир строится параллельно в физическом, информационном и виртуальном пространствах. Где-то они совпадают, а где-то одно из пространств, в первую очередь – фантастическое, уходит вперед. Там заранее проигрывается то, к чему мы можем быть еще не готовы. Но это в первую очередь пространство, влияющее на наши эмоции, поэтому сила его воздействия достаточно велика. ● diamond j. the worst mistake in the history of the human race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the -history-of-the-human-race ● doshi v. the small dutch town that wants to shape the future of your food https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /how-a-small-dutch-town -is-shaping-the-future-of-your-food-wageningen-netherlands ● lu yifan a.o. china focus: sci-fi entrusted to fuel imagination of chinese children http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/ - / /c_ .htm ● shenoy g. telling the china story: the rise and rise of chinese science fiction https://factordaily.com/china-science-fiction/ ● blair d. the business of fantasy https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/ / /ws a ef a e dcc c.html ● Из-за коронавируса во Франции и в Италии выросли продажи “Чумы” Камю http://www.rfi.fr/ru/%d %b %d %b %d % %d %be%d %bf%d %b / -coronavirus-peste-camus ● england c. george orwell’s sells out on amazon as trump adviser kellyanne conway refers to ‘alternative facts’ https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/george-or well- -alternative-facts-donald-trump-adviser-kellyanne-conway-ama zon-sellout-bestseller-a .html ● freytas-tamura de k. george orwell’s ‘ ’ is suddenly a best-seller https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/ -george-orwell-donald-tr ump.html ● tuttle b. sales of dystopian novels have been spiking on amazon since the election https://money.com/trump- -dystopian-novel-sales-brave-new-world/ ● gilbert s. ​ ​ isn’t the only book enjoying a revival https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ / / -george- orwell-alternative-facts-trump-kellyanne-conway/ / ● Из римейка “Мулан” убрали возлюбленного главной героини. Он не подходил под требования #metoo https://www.bbc.com/russian/news- ● impact report https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/ / / - - _metoo_ impactreport_view_ .pdf ● Антиреальность сталинизма: лет назад вышел фильм “Кубанские казаки” https://newizv.ru/news/society/ - - /antirealnost-stalinizma- -let- nazad-vyshel-film-kubanskie-kazaki ● reading classic novels instead of self-help books can boost brain power and improve your quality of life, new research suggests https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /reading-classic-novels -instead-self-help-books-boost-brain-power-research-suggests.html ● what literature can do https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/iphs/researchgroups/crilswh atliteraturecando.pdf ● new study finds reading can help with chronic pain https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ - /uol-nsf .php ● meet the keynotes: professor philip davis http://igel .no/keynotes/meet-the-keynotes-professor-philip-davis/ ● reading between the lines: the benefits of reading for pleasure http://manuscritdepot.com/documentspdf/galaxy-quick-reads-report-fi nal% .pdf ● Проценко Н. Кто управляет нашими сердцами? https://gorky.media/reviews/kto-upravlyaet-nashimi-serdtsami/ ● Обратка от Пентагона: чем ответила Америка на российские военные мультики https://newizv.ru/news/tech/ - - /obratka-ot-pentagona-chem-otve tila-amerika-na-rossiyskie-voennye-multiki ● peck m. watch this american helicopter (virtually) destroy russia’s t- armata tank https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/watch-american-helicopter-virtually- destroy-russia%e % % s-t- -armata-tank- ● pearce t. ‘fatal mistake’: oxford classics department considers removing homer and virgil from syllabus https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fatal-mistake-oxford-classics -department-considers-removing-homer-and-virgil-from-syllabus ● Демоны русской Смуты. Интервью с историком Дмитрием Антоновым https://gorky.media/context/demony-russkoj-smuty/ ● Реквиц А. «Одна из особенностей “Я” позднего модерна — крайнее обострение чувствительности». Интервью https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/ -andreas-rekvits-ob-emokratii crossing borders | vol. ( ) | student reflections on youth and risk © the author | cc by-nc | doi: . /j.cb. | p a g e how does hegemonic society perpetuate lgbtq+ discrimination through the institutions and ideologies of law, education, and religion? isha leibel department of sociology, macewan university abstract research has shown that the institutions and ideologies behind hegemonic society’s laws, educational system, and religions, have been integral to the discrimination of lgbtq+ youth. to better understand the specific aspects of each institution, and how they directly affect lgbtq+ youth, this paper critically examines these institutions using both the traditional heteronormative lens, as well as the more recent lgbtq+ friendly lens. issues such as the role of homophobic political leaders, and the laws they pass, are considered. as the majority of youth spend their formative years in an educational setting, the role of teachers, peers, and parents are all considered when discussions of ‘coming out’ or sexual education is brought to light. furthermore, in an attempt to understand the coexistence of lgbtq+ youth and religious education, comparisons between different school settings are taken into consideration. following the review, different avenues are suggested to further study this topic in order to create a more inclusive, safe, and accepting society for all sexualities and gender identities. introduction this project critically examines the ways in which institutions, such as the law, education, and religion, perpetuate discriminatory practices and ideologies in our society. although societal recognition of the necessity of supports for lgbtq+ youth has been on the rise over the past few decades, societal opinions on lgbtq+ rights are not holistically acknowledged worldwide and are, in some locations, actively discouraged. unfortunately, due to these differing societal opinions regarding the rights of lgbtq+ youth, this minority group can be considered to be an at-risk youth group. for instance, a study done showed that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (lbg) youth have an increased risk of negative health outcomes and various health-related risk behaviours (coker, austin, & schuster, , p. ). although the results from this study do not directly encompass every individual within the lgbtq+ community, it can be assumed that the negative health effects that lgb youth face can be extended to represent the experiences of transgender, two-spirited, or any other lgbtq+ youth member. many identities of the lgbtq+ community are only just beginning to surface in mainstream society, and therefore it is important to keep in mind that many lgbtq+ individuals are not represented in research and have yet to have their stories and statistics empirically recognized. these results are representative of the lack of research done on the lgbtq+ community, rather than a lack of negative health outcomes that lgbtq+ individuals face. hegemonic society does not naturally include or make space for lgbtq+ individuals, and instead revolves around heteronormativity by encouraging ideals such as the nuclear family. as a result, lgbtq+ individuals become segregated from society, regardless of whether societal views are supportive of lgbtq+ rights or not; being a member of the lgbtq+ community is not ‘the norm’ in hegemonic society. therefore, in order to ensure a truly safe and accepting society for lgbtq+ youth a greater emphasis must be placed on supporting this at-risk group. when inclusive practices are not actively being encouraged and lgbtq+ youth are not provided with appropriate supports, the necessity of these resources becomes blatantly clear. without inclusive practices in place their struggles are not remedied and they continue to experience lives of segregation and exclusion, having nowhere to access specialized help. on the other hand, when these programs are initiated and prioritized, studies have shown that these supports can be, quite literally, lifesaving. these programs can provide lgbtq+ youth with stronger, more developed internal or interpersonal resources that can aid in their continual development (lytle, silenzio, homan, schneider, & caine, , p. ). despite these https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / crossing borders leibel | p a g e significantly pivotal results, a multitude of locations around the world continue to lack in providing these safe spaces. this lack of resources creates massive gaps in our societal systems that the lgbtq+ community fall through when living in a location where their personal rights are not respected or acknowledged. matters are further complicated when intersectional discrimination is considered, as it is not widely recognized that segregation and discrimination can exist between both the lgbtq+ community and society, as well as between the at-risk individual and the lgbtq+ community itself. this research aims to uncover the ways in which societal institutions are key sites of the perpetuation of heteronormative, discriminatory practices and policies that lead to the lack of support for lgbtq+ youth. a better understanding of these institutional processes may lead to the specific alterations that need to be made to our society in order to provide lgbtq+ youth with the necessary spaces and support they deserve. theoretical considerations the lgbtq+ youth of today are not accepted and supported within society without active efforts of inclusion being made. to thoroughly examine the ways in which lgbtq+ youth are segregated from society, a feminist theoretical lens can be applied. as outlined by gedro and mizzi, the aim of a feminist theoretical lens is to observe gender inequalities that are created as a result of the social construction of gender, beginning with the societal assignment of sex at birth ( , p. ). by adopting this theoretical perspective, we can begin to accurately investigate, and then begin to question, the heteronormative practices that are enforced continuously throughout society today. although the feminist theoretical perspective is an appropriate theory to apply to the examination of lgbtq+ individuals’ experiences in society, it is important to recognize the specific ways in which the feminist theoretical lens has evolved over the years, and how we apply this theory in the st century. unfortunately, as mentioned by nourie and harris, throughout the first and second wave of feminism, not all women who faced discrimination from patriarchal society were recognized sufficiently ( , p. - ). it was unfairly assumed by the white female leaders of the first and second feminist movements that all women, regardless of race, ability, class or any other differentiating feature, faced the same degree of discrimination. therefore, as first and second wave feminist approaches fail to consider the experiences of women of colour, low income women, and trans women, it is imperative to consider the perspectives of third and fourth wave feminists as well. third and fourth wave feminist approaches aim to be more inclusive and diverse in their advocacy. the goals of the third and fourth waves are to consider the experiences of women who face intersectional challenges such as sexism, homophobia, ableism, racism, etc. by taking a third or fourth wave feminist approach, the definition of what it means to be ‘a woman’ begins to broaden and consequently address the unique experiences of the diverse lgbtq+ community. it is for this reason that the more recent third and fourth waves have a more inclusive and holistic understanding of how our society lacks in supports and services available for lgbtq+ youth. in the current fourth wave of feminism, the discourse of social media is recognized as a major platform for the many movements within the current wave, such as the #metoo movement. by recognizing the role social media plays in feminism, a media platform in which individuals of all ages can interact with, the fourth wave feminist approach is even more inclusive and diverse than the waves that precede it. therefore, although it is important to recognize the massive strides made within each wave, it is also important to acknowledge the people who have gone unnoticed and unheard in order to best acknowledge how each wave contributes to the advocacy for lgbtq+ youth rights (k. holland, personal communication in gend , fall, ). by adopting an intersectional approach and applying it in conjunction with a feminist theoretical lens, it can be ensured that a multitude of discriminatory experiences faced by women and sexual minorities in our society will be recognized and addressed. intersectionality is a concept, coined by kimberlé crenshaw in , that recognizes the unique experiences of individuals who face multiple oppressions, such as sexism and racism, simultaneously, and how these factors cannot be considered separately, but instead need to be recognized as discriminatory factors that interact with one another. crenshaw’s intersectional lens is paramount to this critical analysis as it broadens the scope to encompass all individuals that experience gender inequality, including those in the lgbtq+ community. thus, those who face intersectional societal discrimination, such a lesbian who uses a wheelchair potentially being subjected to homophobia and ableism, can rest assured knowing that their whole entity will be accounted for when exploring their experience of gender inequality in society. therefore, to clarify, if it is suggested in this paper that a feminist theoretical perspective is applied it can be assumed that intersectionality is a key factor in the application of this theoretical lens (crenshaw, ). in addition to the feminist theoretical perspective, to more holistically explore the experiences of the lgbtq+ community, queer theory should also be applied. in similar fashion to feminist theory, queer theorists aim to examine the ways in which gender and sexualities are considered within a society that heavily encouraged heteronormativity (smith, crossing borders leibel | p a g e , p. ). this theory takes the concept of intersectionality and broadens the scope even further to focus on the diverse list of individuals that face oppression and discrimination due to their sexual minority status, such as those within the lgbtq+ community. although society has become much more inclusive since the first wave of feminism, lgbtq+ youth continue to be a largely oppressed community in our society. queer theory provides a solid foundation for this paper by questioning the hegemonic norms that are reinforced in our current society, which hopefully leads to understanding how lgbtq+ youth are coping in a society that promotes heterosexuality above all (smith, , p. ). having established that the lgbtq+ community is a clearly segregated and discriminated group within society today, it is important to analyze why that has come to be. the overarching answer to this question is that unless initiatives to support lgbtq+ youth are actively established, the hegemonic society in which we exist does not innately provide these supports or opportunities. so why is the hegemonic society we live in so naturally exclusionary towards lgbtq+ youth? through the dissection of the certain institutions and ideologies that make-up our hegemonic society, i believe it is possible to find the root of this intrinsically heteronormative culture we abide by and reproduce in our daily lives. lgbtq+ youth and the law the law is one of the most influential institutions in society. typically, within a democratic society, the law that a society abides by is representative of the ideologies and values held by the majority of society. the law comes to be one of the largest forces to perpetuate heteronormativity, as in many societies heteronormativity is a widely-shared ideology in society. heteronormative laws, which derive from patriarchal law, have come to define many societies. as a result, lgbtq+ individuals struggle to find existing support and encounter anti-discriminatory laws worldwide. unfortunately, there is an extensive number of heteronormative laws around the world that exemplify how societies have used the law to suppress lgbtq+ youth. in the united states for instance, the degree to which lgbt-inclusive, non-discrimination laws are introduced varies from state to state (taylor, lewis, jacobsmeier, & disarro, ). for example, some states have limited insurance protections for the lgbtq+ community, whereas other states offer far more comprehensive bans on discrimination. in addition to this, many protection policies are not inclusive of the entire lgbtq+ community, so in some states transgender individuals and gender-variant people remain unprotected. lastly, it is important to recognize that a state’s adoption of sexual orientation protection policies does not necessarily suggest they also implement gender-identity protection. unfortunately, this conflation of gay and transgender identities has led to certain lgbtq+ identities being overlooked and unprotected. furthermore, as many lgbtq+ youth are not of legal voting age, not only are they drastically affected by these discriminatory laws, but they also have no legal mechanism to change any laws put in place. in order to examine the true inclusivity of these government laws, taylor, lewis, jacobsmeier, and disarro ( ) suggest we must emphasize the importance of paying attention to who is actually being protected, rather than just when a law is implemented. unfortunately, although a state may seem to suggest their laws are lgbtq+ friendly, this is not always true, especially among those who are at the mercy of others to fight for their human rights. despite our relatively liberal reputation in canada, we too have laws and political figures in power that are working against the lgbtq+ community. for instance, alberta’s recently elected ucp premier, jason kenney, has been quoted on multiple occasions stating his disapproval of bill , which was implemented by the previous ndp government (bellefontaine, ). bill introduced more protective rules for gay-straight-alliances in schools including, but not limited to, the prohibition of school officials notifying gsa member’s parents about their child’s participation in the alliance group. with this bill, lgbtq+ youth who are participating in gsas can talk openly with other like-minded and supportive peers, without fear of being ‘outed’ to their families (alberta school council, ). as noted by many concerned allies and the previous ndp government, by allowing schools to inform parents of their children’s participation in a gsa there is potential risk of familial ostracism and even abuse towards the child if their family does not approve of their decision to be in a gsa. although it has been noted by jason kenney that his intent of informing parents about their children’s participation in gsas is to provide alberta with the strongest legal protection for gsas in canada, his stance does not consider the significantly probable retaliation children could face from parental disapproval. regardless of intent, the decision to ‘come out’ must be that of the child. kris wells, a representative of the institute for sexual minority studies, further emphasizes this by recognizing that although it is preferred to have the parents involved in a lgbtq+ youth’s life in order to increase support systems for the child, many families are not accepting of the lgbtq+ community, and therefore the decision to disclose a child’s participation in a gsa must be through their own initiative (bennett, ). this is supported by research that has shown the effects of being ‘outed’ as an lgbtq+ youth can result in potentially severe repercussions for the youth themselves. a study done by the national gay and lesbian task force policy crossing borders leibel | p a g e institute and the national coalition for the homeless found that on average, half of homosexual teenagers received a negative reaction from their parents and just over a quarter were kicked out of their homes after ‘coming out’ to their parents (human rights campaign, n.d.). a tragic anecdote of the repercussions lgbtq+ youth face from being ‘outed’ is the sterling v. borough of minersville case where wayman sterling ended up killing himself after a police officer threatened to ‘out’ him as a homosexual to his family and community (kretz, , p. ). unfortunately, this is just one of many lgbtq+ individuals who have ended their lives in fear of facing actual or threated societal backlash based on their sexuality. these anecdotes provide cause for the critical examination of hegemonic institutions as they reaffirm that without laws to protect lgbtq+ youth, their safety is at risk. as lgbtq+ youth, under the age of eighteen, have no legal ability to vote against laws and regulations that suppress their community, it is up to the voting population to keep their safety not only in mind, but a top priority when casting their votes (bennett, ). lgbtq+ youth and education the second social institution worthy of scrutinizing is the education system. as youth typically spend most of their childhood and adolescence within this social institution, it is necessary to explore the effects schools have on the experience of young lgbtq+ individuals. does this institution also contribute to the creation and maintenance of exclusionary practices towards lgbtq+ youth? if so, what specific features, practices, norms, and ideals does the education system hold that perpetuate discrimination against lgbtq+ youth and how has this contributed to the lack of support and programming for lgbtq+ youth? although it is important to reiterate that gsas, if used safely, respectfully, and confidentially, can be a great source of support for lgbtq+ youth in school, the damages that result from providing these supports using a heterosexist lens can be incredibly harmful. in similar fashion, airton ( ) suggests that if anti-homophobic education is applied within the confines of commonly held gender-normative structures, the damage can be just as detrimental as an education that makes no attempt to provide anti-homophobic education at all (p. ). much like the ideological framework of the law, because our hegemonic society assumes that heterosexuality is the norm, there is no space for true anti-homophobic practices to exist. therefore, as suggested by airton, the first consideration that needs to be made in order to genuinely and effectively support lgbtq+ youth is to loosen the gender- normative structures already in place. without initially dismantling heteronormative practices, lgbtq+ youth will continue to be segregated from society and face the repercussions that come alongside that. one of the most discriminative practices within the education system is the heteronormative approach to sexual education. just as hegemonic society revolves around heteronormativity, sexual education programs tend to adhere to gender binaries and heteronormative perspectives as well. lgbtq+ inclusive sexual education is not embraced by all and therefore, in turn, lgbtq+ youth are suffering from health inequalities (mustanski, birkett, greene, hatzenbuehler, & newcomb, ). it is proposed by mustanksi and colleagues that although “tackling these issues in schools is complex, and it will be impossible to ensure that mistakes are never made, complexity does not justify inaction” ( , p. ). by intentionally ignoring lgbtq+ sexual education topics, this at-risk group faces a lack of support, knowledge, and acceptance at a point in their lives when they are only just learning about who they are. if lgbtq+ youth are to be sufficiently supported, as any human should be, the current curriculum needs to be more inclusive and welcome the idea of engaging in topics that don’t fit our socially constructed binaries. furthermore, it has been empirically determined that school children will not face negative consequences with the implementation of inclusive sexual education, and the overwhelmingly positive impact this education will have on lgbtq+ youth will be insurmountable (gegenfurtner & gebhardt, ). if educational institutions begin to recognize the changes that need to be made, lgbtq+ youth will be more supported, their experiences will become normalized, and they will be headed towards existing in a world that is safer and more supportive of diversity in all forms (mustanski et al., , p. ). the debate on whether or not lgbtq+ sexual education should be included in the sexual education curriculum has no place in a society that hopes to achieve safety, support, and acceptance for all; the necessity for inclusive, comprehensive, and lgbtq+ friendly sexual education is a given. lgbtq+ youth and religious education the final, and possibly the most exclusionary, institution that perpetuates hegemonic society’s exclusion of lgbtq+ youth is the combination of religious and educational institutions. there has been a multitude of anecdotal accounts and empirical research reported over the years regarding the contentious relationship between religion and the lgbtq+ community. in a study that looked at religious dominations and their stance towards homosexuality, it was found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who live in countries that supported homosexuality had fewer alcohol-abuse symptoms in comparison to those living in countries that are less accepting of homosexuality (kenny & judd, ). more recent studies have once again confirmed this relation between alcohol- consumption and acceptance of one’s sexual identity. in a crossing borders leibel | p a g e comparative analysis of sexual minorities who attend religious-affiliated schools and their nonreligious-school- attending counterparts, there was a significant difference in alcohol use. the study found that sexual minority youth who attended religious-affiliated schools had higher levels of alcohol use than their counterparts who attended non- religious schools. furthermore, sexual minority youth who attended religious-affiliated schools were less likely to be ‘out’ to their peers and teachers than those who attended non- religious schools (stewart, heck, & cochran, ). although there are a multitude of factors that could affect one’s alcohol-use and one’s decision to ‘come out’, due to the historically tumultuous relationship between religion and the lgbtq+ community it would be naïve to ignore this relationship. as lgbtq+ youth are only recently receiving more attention in research, the interconnectedness between religion and lgbtq+ youth has yet to be fully examined and understood. unfortunately, what research has found so far indicates that the relationship continues to be difficult and lgbtq+ youth are still struggling to coexist in both communities simultaneously. contributing to the ongoing lack of support for the lgbtq+ community in religious educational institutions, and the perpetuation of the tumultuous relationship that exists between religion and the lgbtq+ community, are the overtly discriminatory religious groups that are making their voices heard in some religious schools today. an example of this are christian right political organizations that advocate against lgbtq+ rights found within some religious school settings. not only have these groups been known to provide detailed instructions on how to publicly object to ‘controversial’ sexual topics such as same-sex marriage or lgbtq+ individuals and their relationships in school settings, but some groups go as far as suggesting that lgbtq+ individuals should be removed from being considered a protected group (for parents, ; weddle & new, ). although these groups’ websites state that their mission is to provide students with the ability to exercise their religious freedoms in educational institutions, it becomes clear that there are additional motives that encourage discrimination against lgbtq+ individuals, which they justify through their perceived religious right to oppose actions or beliefs that are seen as impious (for parents, ). regardless of religion, when the subjugation of one group is included in another religion’s moral code, it is necessary to re-evaluate these codes of conduct in order to provide our youth with the inclusive educational atmosphere they all have a right to. discussion and conclusion the insufficient supports for, and discriminatory practices against, lgbtq+ youth are a deeply seeded, multi- dimensional, societally constructed phenomena. the immense task to ensure lgbtq+ youth are safe, supported, and accepted in society is difficult to take on. that being said, the seemingly insurmountable goal of achieving worldwide lgbtq+ rights is attainable. if heteronormativity is simply a socially constructed concept that we have normalized over the years, achieving a more equitable society amongst the sexes is in-reach. therefore, i will not discuss lgbtq+ supports in matters of if they will be implemented, but rather, when they are implemented. when lgbtq+ supports increase in number and normality, how can we ensure that the three social institutions discussed, law, education, and religion, will not continue to perpetuate the heteronormative ideals hegemonic society has maintained for so long? three sets of forces may be considered when advocating for a shift in hegemonic society in order to provide adequate support for lgbtq+ youth. first, macro level forces in society materialize as the norms, ideologies, values, and figureheads of society that are indicative of the type of society one is living in. through the literature review conducted in this study, it has been determined that in order to provide effective lgbtq+ youth supports, these macro level societal features must shift drastically. an example of this would be changing those norms that make passive jokes or suggestions of homophobia, racism, sexism, and ableism acceptable. whilst these social norms continue to exist, discrimination against lgbtq+ youth will consequently exist as well. this suggestion for change is not meant to disregard the immense challenge of redefining societal norms, but rather to recognize the profoundly detrimental impact these unrecognized norms have on a society hoping to become more inclusive. the second set of forces that must be considered in the fight for lgbtq+ youth advocacy are at the meso level. it is at this level where the necessary institutional changes are addressed. one paramount change that needs to occur within the institution of education is the implementation of comprehensive and inclusive sexual education that provides for the basic human rights of all individuals, regardless of sexuality or gender identity. if nothing else, a proper education, gender-identity-appropriate bathrooms, and personal privacy need to be unconditional rights rather than topics of debate. once again, these changes may seem improbable in the current society we live in, but in order to help lgbtq+ youth they are all necessary steps that need to be taken. the final set of forces worthy of consideration in the fight for equal rights for lgbtq+ youth are at the micro level. the many pieces of anecdotal evidence provided throughout this paper reflect the micro level. from the unimaginably high crossing borders leibel | p a g e rates of harm faced by lgbtq+ youth, to the lack of supports, and even some directly discriminatory policies in place, each unique experience within this community is worthy of considering. it is these anecdotal pieces of evidence that provide the answers to the heart of this study. when lgbtq+ youth supports are put into place in society, how can they be introduced and maintained with the assurance that they will accurately, specifically, and efficiently support this group of youth at risk? an example of a micro level consequence of increased acceptance of the lgbtq+ community in society would be the improved health of lgbtq+ youth. the specific quality of life of the diverse group of individuals within the lgbtq+ community need to be considered, otherwise we run the risk of improper, inefficient, and unsuccessful implementation of supports and services that will not provide positive change for lgbtq+ youth at risk. the main aspects of the law, education, and religion that perpetuate discrimination against lgbtq+ youth are the heteronormative ideologies that support their foundation. therefore, because the hegemonic society that exists today does not provide space for lgbtq+ youth, regardless of how flexible the lgbtq+ community is, they will never seamlessly be accepted in society. how i would suggest moving forward would be to implement the necessary safeguards to ensure the safety of lgbtq+ youth. in agreement with kretz ( ), one avenue that should be explored is a complete re-evaluation of the existing doctrine surrounding minors’ rights over their sexual orientation (p. ). one’s age should not confine them to an incomplete sexual education or a lack of confidentiality surrounding their sexual orientation. with the current laws in place, lgbtq+ youth are approaching adulthood unprepared, unsupported, and without the necessary foundations to succeed in life; this is a vital issue that can no longer be dismissed. lgbtq+ youth face the intersectional accumulation of oppression not only based on their sexuality or gender identity, but also their age. for this reason, special consideration needs to be taken to ensure the rights of this at- risk youth group. simply put, through the dissection of the many ways that law, education, and religion perpetuate an unsafe society for lgbtq+ youth, the necessity for improvement of policies, implementation of inclusive atmospheres, and increase in specified supports is abundantly vital. references airton, l. ( ). from sexuality (gender) to gender (sexuality): the aims of anti-homophobia education. sex education ( ), - . doi: . / alberta school councils (n.d.) bill fact sheet & frequently asked questions (faqs). retrieved from www.albertaschoolcouncils.ca/public/download/documents/ bellefontaine, m. ( , march ). ucp leader jason kenney defends allowing parental notification if child joins gsa. retrieved from www.msn.com/en-gb/news/parliamenthill/ucp-leader-jason- kenney-defends-allowing-parental-notification-if-child-joins-gsa/ar- bbvghbt?li=aa o bennett, d. ( , july ). united conservatives oppose alberta bill on changes to gay-straight alliances. retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/united- conservatives- oppose-alberta-bill-on-changes-to-gay-straight- alliances/article / coker, t. r., austin, s. b., & schuster m. a. ( ). the health and health care of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. annual review of public health, ( ), - . doi: . /annurev.publhealth. . crenshaw, k. ( ). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, ( ), - . doi: . / ettinghoff, e. ( ). outed at school: student privacy rights and preventing unwanted disclosures of sexual orientation. loyola of los angeles law review ( ), - . retrieved from www.albertaschoolcouncils.ca/public/download/documents/ for parents. ( ). day of dialogue. retrieved from http://www.dayofdialogue.com/parent- info/ gedro, j., & mizzi, r. c. ( ). feminist theory and queer theory: implications for hrd research and practice. advances in developing human resources, ( ), - . doi: . / human rights campaign (n.d.) growing up lgbtq in american: key findings. retrieved from www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/growing-up-lgbt-in- america_report.pdf. kenny, d. a., & judd, c. m. ( ). consequences of violating the independence assumption in analysis of variance. psychological bulletin, ( ), - . doi: . // - . . . kretz, a. j. ( ). the right to sexual orientation privacy: strengthening protections for minors who are “outed” in schools. journal of law and education, ( ), - . lytle, m. c., silenzio, v. m. b., homan, c. m., schneider, p., & caine, e. d. ( ). helping young people stay afloat: a qualitative study of community resources and supports for lgbtq adolescents in the united states and canada. journal of homosexuality, ( ), p. - . doi: . / . . mustanski, b., birkett, m., greene, g. j., hatzenbuehler, m. l., & newcomb, m. e. ( ). envisioning an america without sexual orientation inequities in adolescent health. american journal of public health, ( ), - . doi: . /ajph. . nourie, a. e., & harris, v. w. ( ). an intersectional feminist perspective on lgbtq youth in foster care: implications for service providers. world journal of education, ( ), - . doi: . /wje.v n p smith, r. r. ( ). queer theory, gay movements, and political communication. journal of homosexuality, ( - ), - . doi: . /j v n _ stewart, b. t., heck, n. c., & cochran, b. n. ( ). a comparison of sexual minority youth who attend religiously crossing borders leibel | p a g e affiliated schools and their nonreligious-school-attending counterparts. journal of lgbt youth, ( ), - . doi: . / . . taylor, j.k., daniel, c.l., jacobsmeier, m. l., & disarro, b. ( ). content and complexity in policy reinvention and diffusion: gay and transgender-inclusive laws against discrimination. state politics & policy quarterly, ( ), - . weddle, d. b., & new, k. e. ( ). what did jesus do? answering religious conservatives who oppose bullying prevention legislation. new england journal on criminal and civil confinement, , - . ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs this is the accepted manuscript anderson, s., horgan, s., jamieson, f., jardine, f. & rogers, a. ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs, criminology and criminal justice. copyright © the authors. doi: . / information for users of the institutional repository users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user’s personal reference. for permission to reuse an article, please follow our process for requesting permission ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs sarah anderson shane horgan fiona jamieson cara jardine ashley rogers https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/process-for-requesting-permission https://doi.org/ . / ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs sarah anderson (university of the west of scotland, uk) shane horgan (edinburgh napier university, uk) fiona jamieson (university of edinburgh, uk) cara jardine (university of strathclyde, uk) ashley rogers (abertay university, uk) we were delighted to be asked to respond to richard spark’s paper. we are encouraged by the themes and issues highlighted, and feel passionately about many of the areas of future research identified in the piece. indeed, many of the areas of scholarship (such as research with the global south, practices and experiences of crime and punishment, violence in all its forms, crime and technology, socio-legal research, and political discourses around crime) are areas with which we - as a collective group of early career researchers (ecrs) - are currently engaged, often in collaboration with other ecrs within and outwith the uk. we commend both prof. sparks and the esrc for this important and timely reflection on the direction and possible futures of criminology. we also highly commend the editors of ccj who have sought a contribution from a group of academics who are at risk of being marginalised within the discipline generally, and from these conversations, specifically. as a collective, we feel the piece raises a number of questions and contingencies related to occupational conditions and culture in uk higher education. in this brief response, we wish to consider and highlight how certain features of our field may limit the extent to which this exciting criminological future is realised. for brevity, our response will focus on these structural issues. however, we also recognise that the precarity experienced by many ecrs also has a high human cost including, but not limited to: exploitative working conditions; financial insecurity; being unable to make future plans; and rising mental and physical ill health (jones and oakley, ; gill, , ; ucu, ; thwaites and pressland, ). as sparks’ notes, inter- and multidisciplinary work is essential if we are to engage fully and critically with the societal issues of our time (e.g. the climate crisis, technology- related risks). arguably, this possible future has already begun to manifest, but this is not without its pitfalls. firstly, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work involves developing a methodological and philosophical lingua franca with disciplines often far from our own (e.g. climatology, computer science). while desirable, it should be recognised that these developments take time and, in the context of a ‘fast-paced’ and ‘ref ready’ research environment, there is little appetite for risky investment. this research context constrains the possible designs and methods available to us (e.g. long-term ethnographic fieldwork), restricts the development of fully critical accounts, and risks a criminology that itself contributes to systems of oppression and subjugation. secondly, silo-bridging conversations may or may not lead to outputs that satisfy both funders and university promotion-track demands, as well as moral and ethical commitments. the extent to which this work is tenable, therefore, both in terms of securing funding or continuing work, for those who risk non-renewal or promotion to permanency, is unclear. the commitment required for such work extends far beyond the generosity or passion of those precariously employed, if employed at all. even for those on permanent contracts, it far exceeds already unrealistic workload models. in light of these tensions, it is perhaps unsurprising that phd students are often at the forefront of multidisciplinary research. the phd can afford the space to nurture relationships, read, and think; allowing researchers the time required to navigate complex methodological and conceptual barriers and move the discipline forward. however, the extent to which this will remain the case is questionable, and we should exercise caution regarding where and with whom the responsibility to push disciplinary boundaries lies. while there had been some welcome discussion within funding bodies of increasing the number of years of funding available, it appears this will not be the case. while the time to complete becomes shorter, the list of achievements phd students are expected to demonstrate grows; to publish in prestigious journals, have real world impact, acquire sufficient teaching experience, and do so while navigating an increasingly competitive and precarious job-market. thus, focusing on phd candidates, or those equally precarious, to drive forward the establishment of multidisciplinary connections is misguided and unjust. we can also observe a shift towards larger scale, inter-disciplinary research projects which has implications for the types of employment that ecrs move into. often, these projects adopt a model of working more familiar to stem disciplines; a principal investigator (the grant holder) leads the project and is supported by one or more postdoctoral researchers. this has coincided with a decreasing number of permanent academic posts, creating a situation whereby many ecrs will become ‘serial’ post- docs; employed on a succession of fixed-term, temporary, and precarious contracts across different projects. this results in numerous difficulties for ecrs, not limited to: a lack of recognition of the additional time inter-disciplinary research requires (e.g. to learn new skills, methodologies and literatures); difficulties maintaining professional autonomy and an independent identity; and barriers to developmental opportunities (jones and oakley, ). with regard to progression, post-docs can face a disconnect between their careers and traditional measures of “success”, such as producing sole-authored papers. moving between subjects can leave these ecrs without a disciplinary ‘home’, and with what appears to be a disjointed narrative to their work history, they may struggle to market themselves in a competitive job market. for inter-disciplinary work to be sustainable, these issues of progression and transitions must be resolved. for funders, this model of working has significant implications for the resulting number and quality of research outputs. ‘serial post-docs’, for example, often move into new posts with unfinished outputs from previous projects and have limited time to engage in knowledge exchange activities (jones and oakley, ). it is not always guaranteed that they will continue to be included in any future writing projects and outputs from the original research team. academia often lacks awareness, kindness and fairness in this respect. this raises serious questions about whether this model of working hampers both academic scholarship and publication, and meaningful engagement with wider audiences. indeed, a recent survey of nearly , casualised staff found that % felt that this was not a cost-effective way to fund research, while % felt that more secure employment would support more genuinely innovative scholarship (ucu, ). funders may also see limited returns when ecrs move from their phd to teaching- heavy posts. the prevalence of teaching only contracts, which may or may not be permanent, has grown rapidly and over a third of academics involved in teaching are now on a contract of this type (ucu, ). these roles often have limited (or no) paid time to do research or to publish from their (often research council funded) phd research. even where ecrs are successful in securing a lecturer post, staff in combined teaching and research posts spend more than double the time on teaching than on research (reportedly accounting for only % of their time), with increased demands around administration, pastoral care, marking and internal quality assurance (ucu, ). furthermore, the disparity in the realities of such posts in russell group and post- universities must be acknowledged. in the latter, teaching loads may be higher and there are greater difficulties securing research funding in criminology, and yet ecrs within many of these institutions are subject to similar expectations (from their own institution and for future career progression) regarding ref and income generation. embracing spark’s call to reflect on how criminology might develop, we can imagine one future where the above structural issues remain unaddressed, entrenching and intensifying precarity within the academy. an almost inevitable effect of this will be the limiting of diversity within criminology, as those with the least resources and capital face the highest barriers to an academic career. this is concerning as women and non-white academics are already marginalised in parts of the discipline which attract the most power and prestige, as institutional practices reproduce within the academy the racial and gender discrimination prevalent in neo-liberal societies (chesney-lind and chagnon, ). this has clear implications for the nature of knowledge production, but also for future students. in a climate of black lives matter and #metoo, students demand and deserve to be taught about matters of race, gender and inequality from diverse faculties. yet, we suggest that an alternative future is possible. we persist with hope and desire to be part of the future of criminology, but importantly, we strive for change within and outwith the discipline to ensure that our work in academia is sustainable. while we exist here in a collective response to more dominant voices, we ask that ecrs be included more formally and centrally in funding bodies and their visions. only then can research objectives and expectations be considered fairly alongside the lived realities of a career in academia more generally, and in criminology, more specifically. revising the visions of funders and institutions in light of the structural difficulties experienced by ecrs offers an opportunity to challenge practices which are to the detriment of all. as rosalind gill powerfully argues, precarity is inextricably linked to other damaging and disabling features of the neo-liberal university, such as the intensification of work, a demand to be ‘always available’, and the stress, exhaustion and overwork that this entails (gill, ). we hope, then, to forge intergenerational solidarities that will allow us to tackle this culture, and in turn avoid reproducing within the discipline the power and intersectional inequalities that frame so much critical work in criminology. acknowledgements we are very grateful for comments provided by dr. ellie bates on an earlier draft of this response. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. references chesney-lind m & chagnon n ( ) criminology, gender, and race: a case study of privilege in the academy. feminist criminology ( ): – . gill r ( ) breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. in flood r and gill r (eds) secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections. london: routledge routledge, pp. – . gill r ( ) academics, cultural workers and critical labour studies. journal of cultural economy ( ): - . jones s and oakley c ( ) the precarious postdoc. durham: working knowledge/hearing the voice. available at: http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp- content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf (accessed on august ) thwaites r and pressland a ( ) introduction: being an early career feminist academic in a changing academy. in thwaites r and pressland a (eds) being an early career feminist academic. london: palgrave macmillan, pp. - . ucu ( ) workload is an education issue: ucu workload survey report . available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu- http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu-workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf (accessed on august ) ucu ( ) counting the costs of casualisation in higher education: key findings of a survey conducted by the university and college union. available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher- education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf (accessed on august ) https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu-workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} 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of the profession. medical librarians must develop a new professional orientation: one that focuses on cultural awareness or cultural consciousness that goes beyond ourselves and our collections to that which focuses on the users of our libraries. we must develop a commitment to addressing the issues of societal, relevant health information. using examples from medical education, this lecture makes the case for social justice librarianship. this lecture also presents a pathway for social justice medical librarianship, identifies fundamental roles and activities in these areas, and offers strategies for individual librarians, the medical library association, and library schools for developing social justice education and outcomes. the lecture advocates for an understanding of and connection to social justice responsibilities for the medical library profession and ends with a call to go beyond understanding to action. the lecture emphasizes the lack of diversity in our profession and the importance of diversity and inclusion for achieving social justice. the lecture presents specific examples from some medical libraries to extend the social justice mindset and to direct outreach, collections, archives, and special collection services to expose previously hidden voices. if medical librarians are to remain relevant in the future, we must act to address the lack of diversity in our profession and use our information resources, spaces, and expertise to solve the relevant societal issues of today. introduction i am truly honored to have been selected as the janet doe lecturer. like the many doe lecturers before me, being selected brings a host of mixed emotions, varying from amazement, joy, pleasure, and ultimately panic from the weight of the responsibility. the janet doe lecture is an extensive examination of a topic related to health sciences librarianship. the topic is open ended, as long as the subject is under the very broad theme of philosophy or history. like most of the doe lecturers before me, i too am not a philosopher nor a historian. my career as a medical librarian has been a journey both literally and figuratively. i have worked on both coasts and in the middle of the country, deliberately relocating to accept more advanced leadership positions. i have outreach experience in three regional medical library network offices: the pacific northwest, the greater midwest region, and the new england * the janet doe lecture on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship, presented at mla ’ , the th annual meeting medical library association, inc.; atlanta, ga; may – , . julia sollenberger, ahip, fmla, the janet doe lecturer, gave the introduction. region (in these last two, i led those programs). a defining moment in my career was the opportunity i had to work outside the united states, specifically in liberia. i started my library career as a library technician in a state medical society library and continued working in different support staff positions while attending library school part-time with the support of the medical library association (mla) scholarship. my first professional job out of library school was as a reference/user education librarian, followed by administrative positions as a public services department head, an assistant director, then an associate director, and finally, a library director. the libraries in which i worked were in both private and public academic health sciences centers with a variety of health professional schools and affiliated hospitals. because of this breadth of experience, the kinds of projects i have worked on, and the diversity of the communities in which i have worked, the r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org topic for this lecture came naturally to me. i did not, like many previous doe lecturers, experience a long and agonizing road for a search for my topic. for me, it was quite the opposite. in fact, the topic chose me and seemed a natural fit. i fleetingly thought about and quickly dismissed discussing the work i have done and continue to do in promoting research data management as a fundamental new role for medical librarians or my project in public health information access and outreach, specifically my approach to providing real- time access to the literature for the public health workforce who have no affiliation with academic medical libraries. but i must confess my choice of topic comes from contemporary concerns about what is going on in our society today and is influenced by movements such as #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #enough, #resistance, #neveragain, and #marchforourlives, and the proliferation of accepted terms such as “fake news” or “alternative facts.” when i started exploring social justice as my topic, i had some initial doubts as to whether or not i should go forward. i acknowledge that some librarians might feel uncomfortable with the topic and what is to follow. however, given what has gone on to threaten our country’s democratic values and principles, i am more convinced than ever that i had to discuss “social justice and the medical librarian.” i think most of us would agree that democracy in any country depends on an informed electorate with equal access to quality information, knowledge, and education. therefore, by definition, the library profession is an integral part of democracy. specifically, what we medical librarians do—making evidence-based health information available to those who need it in order to help patients, families, and caregivers make better patient-care decisions— connects us to democratic principles and ideals of equal access to information and health care. as louis brandeis, a former supreme court associate justice and “militant crusader for social justice,” asked and answered, “what are american ideals? they are the development of the individual for his own good and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good though democracy and social justice” [ ]. in the united states, we have the means for such democratic ideals, but we have not lived up to the potential [ ]. american democracy is in danger because of an increasingly ill-informed public who are easily manipulated with sound bites and twitter rants that lead to the infringement on the rights of the poor, the disenfranchised, the underserved, immigrants, people of color, women, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (lgbtq) community. with the continuing closures of hospital libraries and relentless budget cuts experienced by many academic medical libraries since , coupled with the proliferation of many alternative options for accessing information, the need for medical librarians is being questioned, and our sheer numbers, ranks, and status are diminishing. if medical librarians are to survive as a distinct profession, then we must consider who we are as individuals, embrace our place as medical professionals in a democratic society, stand up for human rights and social justice, and assert our social responsibility. few doe lecturers have touched upon the roles of medical librarians in a democratic society. henry lemkau jr., fmla, in his doe lecture, said, “our lives are informed and given purpose by the influences that surround us,” and he discussed our profession “in the context of the social and cultural worlds in which we function” [ ]. i suggest that this discussion has never been more important than it is today, given the times in which we live (mass deportations, children separated from their families at the border, no sustained solution for the dreamers, and a government shutdown over the border wall). i would add to the discussion the context of the users, not just the professions, whom we serve. the importance of human values in medical librarianship was first highlighted by martha jane zachert in her doe lecture [ ]. previous to her, doe lecturers defined the values of medical librarianship in terms of collection-building, self- image, organization and retrieval methods, and technological savvy. david bishop’s definition of diversity, for example, only focused on specialization in the field of librarianship and did not touch on diversity with respect to populations [ ]. but it was zachert who wrote of developing new values for the medical library profession “related to man’s cognitive life and social, as well as to social and cultural institutions and the process of social change.” she identified professionalism as one of our most “enduring values...perhaps the keynote of our value system” [ ]. in my view, professionalism goes beyond the tasks we do or what we call s o c i a l j u s t i c e a n d t h e m e d i c a l l i b r a r i a n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) july journal of the medical library association ourselves, but rather embodies who we are and what we stand for [ ]. for the most part, doe lecturers have shied away from discussing politics and its effect on their topics or the medical library profession. estelle brodman was an exception with a somewhat lengthy discussion of the effect of hitler’s nazis, the vietnam war, racism, and the perils of the “pursuit of power” over the “pursuit of excellence” [ ]. the doe lecture by rachael k. anderson, ahip, fmla, was the first to explore the factors that have influenced who has been able to enter our profession, with a particular focus on racial and gender discrimination [ ]. gerald oppenheimer, in , was most adamant about our profession looking outward and “concentrating on values…which are directed outward to the society in which we live and work” [ ]. he went on to describe the debate in mla between those who felt we should leave human rights to others and those who felt the association should take a more active role in democratic ideals. you may think given the title of my talk that it is also a political talk. promoting equality and democratic ideals is not partisan. rather, it is a talk about values and what barack obama named democracy with a small “d” [ ]. it is a talk about social justice in our everyday work. it is a talk about how we can be relevant to the people we serve by providing information that improves everyone’s health, not just the privileged few. it is a talk about professionalism, and how we can incorporate and promote social justice into our profession, how we can become agents of societal change, and how we practice as medical librarians in the context of the times in which we live. defining social justice —of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane. martin luther king [ ] what do i mean then by social justice in the context of health care and medicine? while social justice and diversity are linked, social justice goes beyond representation. a term hard to define, social justice in medicine is: the open acknowledgement of the dignity and autonomy of and delivery of high-quality medical care, to all members of society, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, language, geography, origin, or socioeconomic background. [ ] it is the idea that health care employees work toward eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care [ ]. the institute of medicine report, unequal treatment, first detailed a systematic examination of racial and ethnic disparities in health care. it clearly indicated that us racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to receive even routine medical procedures and more likely to experience a lower quality of health services, and called out the social responsibility of physicians toward their patients [ ]. social justice is not just an admirable idea. social justice is a responsibility of the health care team to provide health services for every person, no matter where they live, what they do, or what lifestyles they lead. the case for social justice medical librarianship comes from our roots in the health professions and medical education. i hope this talk challenges our preconceived notions of the role librarians should play in social justice and suggests some specific actions. there is a growing recognition amongst the health professions and medical educators that there is disparity in the health care delivered to ethnic, racial, gender, and other minority populations [ ]. these disparities lead to patient dissatisfaction, noncompliance with treatment, and poorer health outcomes. diseases such as tuberculosis and hiv are social diseases. there is recognition that the impact of societal and economic factors on the individual needs to be considered just as much as the bacteria of the disease itself [ ]. there needs to be a broader awareness of the barriers to accessing health services among underrepresented groups. there also needs to be a comprehensive strategy in addressing them [ ]. the liaison committee on medical education (lcme) standard . is one concrete step [ ]. all medical schools in the united states and canada must address the issues of social justice, cultural competency, diversity, and inclusion along with the need for medical students “to recognize and appropriately address gender and cultural biases in health care delivery” as part of the medical school accreditation process. specifically, medical students must demonstrate an understanding of how culturally diverse perspectives of health and illness affect a person’s response to symptoms, disease, and r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org treatment. the lcme standards also require students to understand how gender and cultural biases affect health care delivery [ ]. medical education is not alone: these themes are reflected in transforming the education of future nurses, public health workers, and other members of the health care team. if medical librarians are to maintain our status as members of the health professional team, then we, too, must take up the call. i would even go so far to say that future survival as a profession depends on it. rudolf virchow, who is considered the father of social medicine, wrote in , “medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale” [ ]. despite this, just like medical librarianship, the medical profession has been slow to respond to society’s issues. the medical professions’ late response to the hiv/aids pandemic and its effect on the lgbtq community is only one example. yet as evidenced by the lcme accreditation standards and the increased number of journal articles in academic medicine over the last decade, there seems to be a greater awareness among medical educators that teaching social justice to medical trainees and medical school faculty needs to be essential to educating future health professionals. social justice and medical school curriculum there are examples of medical schools incorporating social justice into their curricular offerings: • through problem-based learning methods, medical students and faculty at the university of hawaii have developed the social justice curriculum project, consisting of self-directed learning, action, and self-reflection [ ]. • the university of california davis health system offers faculty development training on how to conduct interracial dialogue on race, racism, oppression, and privilege [ ]. • in memory of freddie gray, faculty at northeastern ohio university have designed a curriculum to help trainees and faculty understand unequal access to health care and how physicians can work toward eliminating the injustices contributing to inappropriate care [ ]. • the human rights and social justice scholars program at the icahn school of medicine at mount sinai is a preclinical training program in social medicine that incorporates service learning experiences with lectures, mentorship, research projects, policy and advocacy projects, and a seminar series [ , ]. • the harvard medical school hosts the “equity and social justice” series of lectures and dialogues focusing on history and context, culture and environment, health disparities, and leadership and skills development. other medical schools are going beyond the lcme guidelines and are beginning to also provide advocacy training to address social determinants of health. the leads curriculum at the university of colorado school of medicine, the scholarly concentration in advocacy and activism at the brown university warren alpert medical school, and the health justice scholar track at georgetown university school of medicine are early examples that focus on empowering medical students to design and execute advocacy projects for social change. i am fully aware of the criticisms of social justice and social justice education. some may think it too politically liberal, or too politically correct, or too leftist or activist. some may feel that they cannot express their conservative views in these settings. the goal of social justice is not to have us conform to one way of thinking but rather to give everyone the opportunity to be engaged, thoughtful community members who think critically about issues affecting the community. this is the tradition of a liberal education without having politically liberal connotations. it is where students, educators, and librarians recognize the complexity of the world and our interconnectedness. it is an opportunity for us all to reflect and think critically about these issues, develop tolerance for ambiguity, appreciate diversity, and respect the different views of others [ ]. the case for social justice and the medical librarian like medicine, medical librarianship is not only an information science, but a human science. it is the search, retrieval, evaluation, and application of information to meet human needs to help health professionals, students, and patients make informed decisions about their health. currently, much of what we do in medical libraries still focuses on developing vast libraries of print or online collections, enhancing informatics technology-based s o c i a l j u s t i c e a n d t h e m e d i c a l l i b r a r i a n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) july journal of the medical library association skills, and developing evidence-based best practices for delivering reference, education, or other services. while performing activities such as developing data science plans, digitizing special collections, and conducting systematic reviews are important, they need to be done in a social justice context. through a social justice lens, we would need to introduce more humanistic approaches to our work: refocusing our attention from serving ourselves and what is more efficient or effective for us to do in our libraries and shifting our focus outward. we need to focus on learning what our users want from us, learning how individual users experience the library, and tailoring our services and approach to their individual needs and experience. social justice librarianship involves developing a personal and professional approach in which the practice of medical librarianship puts the user’s interests and needs front and center. like medicine, we have been slow to recognize what our social responsibility to those we serve is and that there is no one size fits all to the services we provide. this lecture critically discusses this concept of social justice and proposes that medical librarians must go beyond the traditional approaches to thinking about their work and must develop a deeper understanding of and connection with the social responsibilities of the health professions and people we serve. medical librarians must develop a new professional orientation—one that fosters a critical awareness or critical consciousness of going beyond the self to others and a commitment to addressing the issues of societal relevant health information. this new professional orientation or identity places information science in a social and cultural context. it is coupled with a recognition of societal injustices with respect to access to health care and health information and a search for appropriate action. i will suggest a framework for medical librarianship social justice, identify the fundamental roles and activities in these areas, and suggest strategies for individual librarians as well as mla, the association of academic health sciences libraries (aahsl), and schools of library and information sciences (lis) for developing education and outcomes. it is my hope that, through this lecture, you will gain an understanding of and connection to the social responsibilities of medical librarianship, develop an individual approach to reflective professional practice, and be inspired to action. the social justice education debate while there is more agreement today that health professionals need to be trained in cultural competence, multiculturalism, and social justice, there is a debate regarding the curriculum and the accompanying teaching methods. in academic medicine, proponents of critical consciousness theory view it as a way to help refocus the current methods of health professional education. medical education focuses on developing procedurally competent physicians. adding social justice to health education brings physician training back to its original mission of developing socially conscious health providers who focus on the patient-doctor relationship and to “inform an appropriate crucial pedagogy for fostering compassionate, humanistic, socially conscious health professionals who act as agents of change” [ ]. the early efforts in social justice medical education curricula stress developing competencies in multiculturalism. these efforts use the categorical approach where attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of specific cultures and groups are defined, outlined, taught, and memorized. while acquiring multicultural competence implies learning about multiple and diverse cultures, it is limiting. it often leads to oversimplifying and stereotyping certain groups. this is an unintended outcome. this realization has led to new teaching methodologies that focus on developing a set of skills to assess individually what factors might affect a patient’s care or developing critical consciousness [ ]. medical educator delese wear cautions that it is not enough to be culturally competent and, in fact, multicultural competency–based education can become “a medical education paradigm in which the notion of ‘novelty’ replaces that of ‘equality’ in approaches to treating patients” [ ]. kumagai argues that a competency-based approach to social justice education is not appropriate, as linear modes of learning may help the student accumulate knowledge but not necessarily understanding. he argues for new ways of thinking about how students learn or know. teaching social justice to support professionalism calls for new content and new teaching methods [ ]. r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org the concept of the medical professional who practices actively in the world involves a paradigm shift away from passive learning of new knowledge and skills to more active learning. it requires developing a new professional identity with a reflective orientation to the understanding of self, professional self, others, and the world. it has its roots in “critical conscious theory,” a term proposed by brazilian activist and theorist paulo freire in his work, pedagogy of the oppressed. critical consciousness goes beyond critical thinking. it is the “ability to intervene in reality in order to change it.” the link from education to democracy is implicit in freire’s work. learners act as subjects in the creation of democracy in education through telling and listening to experiences. consciousness is a sense of one’s personal and collective identity, an in- depth understanding of the world, and a penchant for action against oppression [ ]. friere saw the act of dialogue as an act of proclaimed equality: dialogue, curiosity, creativity, and critical consciousness actively seek to intervene and change society. he observed the educational system in brazil, which focused on spoon-feeding or banking and depositing knowledge to the masses, as oppressive. he advocated for more active learning and questioning as a way of freeing the individual. he felt that learners needed to connect to their own personal, cognitive, and emotional experience; to engage with others through dialogue; and to emancipate themselves and others through praxis (applying theory to action). this capacity to connect with one’s position in society and engage in dialogue about inequities depends upon critical consciousness—a reflective reading of the world. from consciousness, learners could act as agents of change. social justice education is actively learning by doing. friere’s theory of critical consciousness has been applied to educational change in various disciplines, most recently, medical education: a friere critical teacher is a problem-poser who asks thought provoking questions and encourages students to ask their own questions…students experience education as something they do, not as something done to them…educators…are challenged to de-privilege their own power and authority and become informed, experienced and knowledgeable facilitators of student learning rather than depositors of information into the mental vaults of learners. [ ] students are both teachers and learners and vice versa. kumagai expands on friere’s work as applied to teaching social justice in a medical context. he calls on the teachings of german philosopher jürgen habermas and his framework for knowing and communicating. teaching social justice requires another type of learning, by which individuals (and, indeed, groups and societies as a whole) formulate new ways of understanding reality, of interacting with others, and of perceiving their own identities. habermas identifies three primary ways in which we generate knowledge. the first is “work” or instrumental action—knowledge based upon empirical investigation and governed by technical rules. scientific research is an example of this domain. in librarianship, this may equate to technical work in maintaining systems and collections. the second is “practical knowledge.” this domain identifies human social interaction or “communicative action.” it is defined by “building consensus or standards” in order to determine appropriate action. legal and social sciences belong to the “practical.” in medical librarianship, “practical” is the way we help develop clinical practice. the last is “emancipatory,” or “self- knowledge” or “self-reflection.” this involves: interest in the way one’s history and biography has expressed itself in how one sees oneself, one’s roles and social expectations…insights gained through critical self- awareness are emancipatory. knowledge is gained by self- emancipation through reflection leading to a transformed consciousness or changed perspective. [ , ] for medical librarians, this can include approaching the reference interview from the user’s perspective and having a greater awareness of our own biases prior to providing canned searches or information packets. the medical librarian needs to have empathy for the individual asking the reference question and treat every question as an individual need. habermas’s framework of knowing is important to consider as we think about a social justice framework for medical librarianship. although medical training, appropriately so, must focus on developing technical skills and consensus-driven understanding of best clinical practice, not all education to prepare health professionals to work in society arises from these ways of knowing. implicit in the efforts to introduce more humanistic care into medicine and to address s o c i a l j u s t i c e a n d t h e m e d i c a l l i b r a r i a n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) july journal of the medical library association topics as social justice and human values into professional training is a requirement that a new way of knowing does not involve just knowing facts and figures. it involves the personal and professional orientation toward self and others—a way of being in the world—in which the practice of medicine has the patient’s interests at the forefront. this way of being cannot be taught through traditional lecture or classroom settings but must be acquired through reflection, dialogue, and experience [ ]. this type of education engages learners and teachers in the exploration of self and others through the use of narratives, reflective writings, comics, art, theater, and film. the emphasis is to engage in reflective interaction with a play, film, or essay; with a patient; and with each other in opportunities to grapple with moments of uncertainty and discomfort, and to go ultimately beyond discussion to action in the world. medical libraries, schools of lis, and our medical library associations need to emulate the efforts from our health professional colleagues when it comes to social justice education. we need to introduce more of these ways of learning and concepts into our formal and informal curriculum for medical librarians. diversity in librarianship let me now turn to diversity in our profession. though not the same as social justice, diversity is important for achieving it. while the library community considers diversity to be a core value, the library sector has fallen short, despite ongoing initiatives that focus on the recruiting minority librarians. what do we mean when we say diversity, and why does diversity matter? diversity matters because we want our libraries to be reflective of the diverse communities in which we work and the users we serve. a recent mckinsey analysis of global public companies found that those companies with greater ethnic diversity are % more likely to outperform their peers: “diversity matters because it is an opportunity to be innovative, to leverage gifts and talents of all our people” [ ]. for at least the last two decades, many academic libraries have established diversity committees, residency programs, and fellowship opportunities for minorities in order to increase representation in the workforce. in recent years, some academic librarians have worked toward understanding this issue and have spoken out about the shortcomings of efforts to diversify the profession and advocate for social justice [ ]. professional associations have grappled with the issue of diversity and initiated efforts to increase the representative numbers of library employees of color in librarianship. library organizations have implemented programs toward effecting change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the profession. in , the american library association (ala) began the spectrum scholarship program meant to address ethnic under- representation in the library community. more recently, the association of research libraries began providing a number of diversity initiatives surrounding recruitment and career development of underrepresented ethnic groups, including the “initiative to recruit a diverse workforce” and the “leadership and early career development program,” among others. the association of college and research libraries has in recent years formed a diversity alliance. mla has had a scholarship for minority students and recently formed the diversity and inclusion task force; aahsl has acted similarly. despite these efforts, librarianship remains a primarily white female profession. the ithaca s+r report, funded by the andrew mellon foundation, called the “inclusion, diversity, and equity survey,” is the most recent attempt to measure representational diversity in libraries and documents the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the profession. it found that over % of employees at academic research libraries were white. and as positions become increasingly senior, they also become increasingly white [ ]. the report also found that library leaders or administrators are % white and non-hispanic. it also noted that many non-white staff members work in roles such as technical services, processing, and so on, which are being phased out of libraries as they move from print to electronic collections. one of the study’s coauthors roger schonfeld wonders whether “there is in fact a risk that libraries will become not more diverse in the future but potentially less diverse in the future if action isn’t taken” [ ]. the report gives credence to minority staff who have faced barriers to advancement. these issues become even more pronounced as the national population has grown markedly more diverse. the us population ( figures) is % r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org white, with a projection for that white people will make up only % of the population [ ]. using the ala diversity counts data and comparing it to the us census data for and us census projections for , it is clear that we are far from reflecting our country’s diversity. however, diversity has a much broader definition than race and ethnic representation and encompasses combatting discrimination based on age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, religious background, language, or disability. the ala diversity counts data go beyond highlighting the disparity for race and ethnicity. we lack other forms of diversity in libraries as well, though demographic data for areas other than race and ethnicity are less well defined or tracked. the diversity counts authors highlight the low employment of librarians with disabilities, given the increase between and of people self-identifying as having or more disabilities. while % of – year olds self-identified as having a disability on the us census, the percentage of credentialed librarians was % [ ]. the recent association of american medical colleges (aamc) report called “learners and disabilities” is similarly discouraging. only . % of , medical students self-identified as having disabilities and needing accommodations [ ]. the report highlights the barriers that medical students with disabilities experience in their training. going back to librarians, the diversity counts report states, “credentialed librarians are predominately women, ages – , and white. they are not limited by disability and work full-time” [ , ]. this lack of diversity in libraries in regard to race, ethnicity, disability, and other factors distance the very communities we seek to serve. and it suggests a proportionally less diverse library workforce on the horizon [ ]. we need to ask ourselves why diversity does not happen despite libraries making diversity a priority. why are these efforts not making any meaningful difference? why are we bringing people from underrepresented groups into our libraries at the same rate they are leaving the profession [ ]? what are the barriers to diversifying employees? when asked this question in the ithaka survey, library directors recognize there is a problem but identify the problem as something they cannot control. they blame external factors, such as lack of a talent pool or geographical location, rather than internal factors such as unconscious bias in the interview process. [ ]. in addition, they identify their libraries as more inclusive than the library community as a whole, whether or not that is the case [ ]. yet, we know that in comparing the percentage of racial and ethnic subgroups in the us population, the distribution in library assistant positions is more or less proportional, whereas the distribution in professional librarian positions is not, the latter skewing heavily to an overrepresentation of white people. diversity counts confirms this discrepancy [ ]. one strategy may be to look internally for higher education and promotional opportunities for library assistants in our own libraries. perhaps looking in our libraries and not outside the environment is where the problem really lies. when i was at the university of illinois at chicago, for example, the university librarian, sharon hogan, sponsored a program for underrepresented minority library assistants to attend the master’s of library and information science (mlis) program at the university of illinois urbana-champaign. selected employees went to school on weekends (tuition free), the library provided transportation, and upon graduation, students/employees were guaranteed a paid professional position in the library system. it should be easier today to implement programs like this, especially since there are so many online lis degree programs available. eligible employees could be given educational leave to complete coursework, allowed to use work computers, and receive tuition benefits. common library hiring processes and practices also contribute to the lack of diversity. we need to examine the criteria for job descriptions, recruitment processes, and hiring practices to open up the pipeline for underrepresented groups to enter the profession and provide opportunities for advancement. while we discuss and say we encourage the recruitment of library workers from diverse backgrounds, our application requirements are not designed to celebrate the experiences of diverse applicants. we need to reframe application requirements, materials, and interview questions in ways that make sense for a variety of applicants’ experiences [ ]. s o c i a l j u s t i c e a n d t h e m e d i c a l l i b r a r i a n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) july journal of the medical library association social justice in medical librarianship in earlier portions of this talk, i discussed how medical educators and health professional students have incorporated social justice, through critical consciousness, into their work and studies. i have also discussed how our profession has been challenged in achieving success in diversity despite our efforts. though social justice has not been the focal point for the medical library profession, there are examples in which individual medical librarians have been active in what i would call social justice outreach. one such example is the response of some of our members to the appearance of hiv/aids in the early s, a disease that was social and stigmatized the populations it affected. while only a handful of articles about this new disease appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the early s and the disease was never recognized until after the ronald reagan presidency, new and different sources of information were developing to fill the void. gay and community-based organizations primarily in new york and san francisco, where effects of the disease were most felt, were collecting and distributing information about treatment and prevention; often with the help of medical librarians working with these organizations. the first mla presentation on this topic, “the aids information crisis: confluence of the roles of information creator, seeker, and provider,” by david ginn, which was delivered at the annual meeting in portland, oregon, chronicled the information phenomenon in the gay and community-based organizations and called for the aids information gap to be addressed by our profession [ ]. at the same time, m. kent mayfield, mla headquarters continuing education program leader, enlisted ginn and richard stevens, aids director of the health council of south florida, to develop an aids information course outlining the new and expanding types of information that existed in the community setting. in the meantime, gerald j. perry, ahip, fmla, and jeffrey t. huber were publishing important books on aids information resources and terminology. perry later went on to form the lgbt health sciences librarians special interest group (sig) in mla. in , the national library of medicine (nlm) developed a special funding mechanism for hiv/aids community-based information access, in which some of us have partnered over the last twenty plus years, bringing information retrieval, skills development, computer acquisition, and internet access to this affected community. there are numerous other projects funded by nlm in which medical librarians partnered with community-based organizations to enhance the health information literacy of underserved populations. as they are too numerous to name them all, i will highlight a few i am most familiar with. projects included partnerships with mental health patients and providers. e-mental health programs, coordinated through the countway library with partners at the massachusetts department of mental health and the dartmouth college and harvard university medical schools, were designed to enhance the health information literacy of seriously ill mental health patients and their families, focusing on co-occurring disease. persons with serious mental illness have high mortality rates, tend be smokers, experience obesity, and present with multiple physical health concerns. this project focused on information related to physical as well as mental health resources. another project i worked on while in worcester addressed the opioid crisis. we worked with the city’s first alternative high school for addicted teens. medical librarians worked with students, their parents, and their teachers to create a resource room with internet, computer, and pamphlet materials and sponsored speakers who focused on options for recovery, addiction counseling, and the decriminalization of addiction. when nlm broadened its attention to serving consumers in addition to health professionals, its funding for health information outreach to minorities, underserved, and vulnerable populations through the national network of libraries of medicine (nnlm) has been and continues to be a critical vehicle for social justice librarianship. medical librarians partnered with public libraries to provide consumer health collections and access to medlineplus, computers, and internet connections as well as training for public librarians. in , for example, medical librarians from the yale university harvey cushing/john hay whitney medical library partnered with the new haven free public library to develop a consumer health information center with collection and information services for the city’s public library users who are traditionally from minority and economically disadvantaged groups. then library director regina kenny r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org marone received a recognition award from the city for her leadership in this project. another example is the spiral project from tufts university hirsch health sciences library. spiral stands for “selected patient information resources in asian languages.” partnering with the chinatown community in boston, tufts university health sciences librarians and community health center providers developed a free online website with patient health information resources in languages such as chinese, vietnamese, cambodian, korean, thai, and japanese. medical librarians working in international librarianship in conjunction with health care providers to expand medical education curricular and accompanying library resources in countries such as liberia speak to our profession’s commitment to improving health through equal access to information in a global society. the societal impacts of diseases such as ebola on a country like liberia are major, threatening the peace process, causing psychological distress, and resulting in numerous losses of life for the citizenry and health care providers, causing a breakdown of the health care and educational systems. cultural considerations such as burial practices and wide distrust of traditional healers as well as a lack of basic infrastructure (regular electricity, limited internet access) hindered efforts in the beginning to control the disease. in a country like liberia, which was recovering from decades of civil war and whose people experienced years where educational institutions could not operate, basic library services such as print textbooks, a manual check-out system, and copy cataloging served the medical school faculty and students well. the ebola outbreak resulted in the closing of the medical school, but post-outbreak that basic library was continuing to function when the medical school reopened, and luckily, all the staff we worked with survived the crises, though some of the students had died. the countway library of medicine, harvard medical school, is extending the social justice mindset beyond direct outreach services to incorporating a public history perspective to its medical archives and special collections. the project uses a pubic history perspective to apply history to real-world problems. the project, “equal access: stories of diversity and inclusion at harvard medical school,” focuses on collecting resources that fill in the gaps in the history of medical education. the project includes oral histories and papers from students and faculty who are underrepresented in medicine, including the first women and african american students and faculty. the intention is to use these collections to create a “dialogical” with collaboration and input from the community whose collections are being archived and personal stories recorded in order to more fully interpret and understand the issues surrounding barriers to accessing medical education and why this history is important. the success of these and similar projects depends not on just going into the community and making resources available. all these outreach projects involve getting to know the community and its cultures, developing an equal partnership with the community, showing respect for cultural norms and practices, and then tailoring services to these. medical librarians’ obligation in providing consumer health information services to the public is a relatively recent phenomenon. mla’s recognition of the consumer and patient health information section, the subsequent consumer health information specialization, and most recent announcement of nominations for the newly endowed mla consumer health librarian of the year award have cemented what was once regarded as a controversial new role into accepted practice. call to action —a man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. a man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. a man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. martin luther king [ ] if medical librarians are to remain relevant in the future, i believe we must deal with the lack of diversity in our profession, actively create our future using humanistic approaches, and use our information resources, spaces, and expertise to solve relevant issues of today. these include addressing the social and racial injustices in health care. we can use our library spaces to encourage critical consciousness conversations about the hard issues such as racism, sexism, gun violence, health disparities, climate change, and other societal issues affecting the health of the nation. our libraries can be the community centers where these conversations, open dialogue, and civil debate should be encouraged and can occur. in s o c i a l j u s t i c e a n d t h e m e d i c a l l i b r a r i a n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) july journal of the medical library association addition, we can provide the quality information and data to help participants in these conversations critically evaluate and sift out the fake news from the real news. it is our responsibility to provide access to accurate, trusted information as well as the tools and skills to critically evaluate that information in ways that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. in addition, we need to collect, preserve, and make available information by, for, and about marginalized communities and fill in the gaps in the history of medical education. in , british librarian douglas john foskett wrote the creed of a librarian: no politics, no religion, no morals, in which he argued “the librarian ought virtually vanish as an individual person, except in so far as his personality sheds light on the working of the library” [ ]. i disagree with foskett. in my opinion, the notion of library neutrality is a myth. our buying decisions, resources, budgets, and even locations are not neutral. we contribute to certain kinds of inequalities through our acquisitions decisions, our cataloging practices, our classification schemes, our controlled vocabularies, our use of commercial search engines, and even where we are located in our hospitals or academic campuses. we regularly practice self-censorship in book selection by primarily buying from corporate vendors. neutrality is “a code word for the existing system. it has nothing to do with anything but agreeing to what is and will always be…neutrality is just following the crowd” [ ]. a neutral stance does not care about human rights violations. neutrality does not account for social and economic inequalities. the notion that the medical library is a social institution that serves as a community center for its users is not neutral. medical librarians cannot be neutral and be trusted advocates for their communities, especially the underserved. i believe that medical librarians can be forces for social good. this is crucial to our future and to the health of our local communities and a sustainable global community. what can medical librarians do? we need to move beyond awareness to action. we must address the whiteness of our profession and develop real strategies for doing so [ ]. we must acknowledge that our libraries have never been and are not neutral. we must bring our libraries closer to the communities we serve. we need to confront the societal responsibilities of lis and develop curricula that emphasize preparing future librarians for leadership roles in activism, community service and engagement, rights, and justice. we need to shift our focus to the people and communities we serve and de-emphasize collections. medical librarians in partnership with medical educators can and should provide students with opportunities, resources, and spaces that encourage open dialogue on social issues, broaden their horizons, encourage empathy for patients, and use these experiences to make a difference. medical librarians should embrace a humanistic approach to professional practice, one that embraces the whole person, not just the physician scientist, and supports curricular efforts that expand the humanities in medicine. we need to offer services, programs, and resources that reflect the diversity of the communities we serve and provide outreach to and advocacy for and with underserved communities in our local communities. we need to support open access publishing and advocate for policies that increase access to information for all [ ]. medical librarians, our professional associations, and lis schools can take specific actions to promote social justice. we can offer open dialogues and discussions on social justice topics at our library conferences. we can develop hiring practices that recognize a variety of experiences, application formats, and interview styles to encourage diverse applicants to apply. we can commit to opening the pipeline into medical librarianship through innovative pathways for library assistants to attain the mlis. we can make concerted efforts to hire staff from diverse backgrounds that reflect us census data. we must develop a welcoming and inclusive environment for all employees and library users in our workplaces. we must welcome all comers into our library conferences. we must develop an approach to professional practice that considers user needs and experiences first and offer library services, resources, and programs that reflect the needs of our users, especially those who may be marginalized. we can adopt a public history perspective to building special collections and archives, filling in the gaps. we can adopt and enforce practices and policies that show respect for all library users, even when these may be inconvenient for us. we must implement outreach and advocacy programs in equal partnership with underserved populations, respecting cultural norms, in order to increase access to health information throughout the world. in the lis schools or r u s s o m a r t i n doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) july jmla.mlanet.org programs, we need to add courses into the curriculum that focus on diversity and social justice topics; and we need to increase the number of lis faculty from diverse backgrounds. conclusion —injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. martin luther king [ ] librarian of congress archibald macleish said, “librarians must become active not passive agents of the democratic process” [ ]. social justice and social responsibility are core values of the medical profession. medical librarians have been an untapped resource for this important work. diversity, inclusion, and social justice are the defining issues for the present and future of the medical library profession. positive outcomes from this work will be cementing the relevance of the medical librarian as a member of the health care team. medical librarians who practice their profession through a social justice lens have the potential to have a meaningful impact on transforming the health of the public, especially the marginalized. medical librarians are no strangers to change and evolving roles. we have learned new technologies and adapted them into our library workflows. we have moved from a focus on print to electronic resources. we have added online searching, expert searching, systematic reviews, and in-person and online teaching to our portfolios. we work outside the library as informationists and are embedded into research or clinical teams. we have learned how to write data management plans and teach researchers and graduate students how to use electronic lab notebooks. social justice medical librarianship is one more change in the evolution of our profession. we can do this. we must do this. the future of our profession depends on it. references . brandeis ld. social welfare history project: true americanism—address of louis d. brandeis ( ) [internet]. virginia commonwealth university [cited mar ]. <http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/uncategorized/true- americanism-address-louis-d-brandeis- />. . gorman m. our enduring values: librarianship in the st century. chicago, il: american library association; . . lemkau hl jr. constants, context, and change: the pursuit of purpose. j med libr assoc. jan; ( ): – . doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . . . zachert mj. books and other endangered species: an inquiry into the values of medical librarianship. bull med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . . bishop d. on the uses of diversity. bull med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . . brodman e. the pursuit of excellence. bull med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . . anderson rk. reinventing the medical librarian. bull med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . . oppenheimer gj. domus or 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(available from: <https://www.lrs.org/documents/workforce/racial_and _ethnic.pdf>. [cited apr ].) . hathcock a. white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis. libr lead pipe [internet]. oct [cited mar ]. <http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ /lis- diversity/>. . ginn ds. the aids information crisis: confluence of the roles of information creator, seeker, and provider. bull med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . . emery d. did martin luther king say ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent’? [internet]. snopes media group [ jan ; cited mar ]. <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mlk-our-lives- begin-to-end/>. . foskett dj. the creed of a librarian—no politics, no religion, no morals. london, uk: library association; . . horton m, freire p, bell b, gaventa j, peters jm, eds. we make the road by walking: conversations on education and social change. philadelphia, pa: temple university press; . . king ml jr. letter from birmingham jail. liberation. ; ( ): – . . macleish a. the librarian and the democratic process. ala bulletin. jun: . author’s affiliation elaine russo martin, fmla, elaine_martin@hms.harvard.edu, director of library services, countway library, harvard medical school, boston, ma received march ; accepted march articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license. this journal is published by the university library system of the university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. issn - (online) 	elaine russo martin, fmla 	see end of article for author’s affiliation. 	this lecture discusses social justice and the role that medical librarians can play in a democratic society. social justice needs to be central to the mission of medical librarianship and a core value of the profession. medical librarians must develop a new professional orientation: one that focuses on cultural awareness or cultural consciousness that goes beyond ourselves and our collections to that which focuses on the users of our libraries. we must develop a commitment to addressing the issues of societal, relevant health information. using examples from medical education, this lecture makes the case for social justice librarianship. this lecture also presents a pathway for social justice medical librarianship, identifies fundamental roles and activities in these areas, and offers strategies for individual librarians, the medical library association, and library schools for developing social justice education and outcomes. the lecture advocates for an understanding of and connection to social justice responsibilities for the medical library profession and ends with a call to go beyond understanding to action. 	the lecture emphasizes the lack of diversity in our profession and the importance of diversity and inclusion for achieving social justice. the lecture presents specific examples from some medical libraries to extend the social justice mindset and to direct outreach, collections, archives, and special collection services to expose previously hidden voices. if medical librarians are to remain relevant in the future, we must act to address the lack of diversity in our profession and use our information resources, spaces, and expertise to solve the relevant societal issues of today. 	introduction 	defining social justice 	social justice and medical school curriculum 	the case for social justice and the medical librarian 	the social justice education debate 	diversity in librarianship 	social justice in medical librarianship 	call to action 	conclusion 	references 	author’s affiliation 	elaine russo martin, fmla, elaine_martin@hms.harvard.edu, director of library services, countway library, harvard medical school, boston, ma 	received march ; accepted march jcss ( ) v. . the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace negar shiva zohreh nosrat kharazmi* (received july ; accepted july ) abstract recent years have witnessed a surge in research on the impact of the cyberspace on social movements. the feminist movement has built a vocal platform online which attempts to underscore sexual violence against women. scholars have begun to suspect that the internet has ushered in a new wave, the fourth wave of feminism. the fourth wave’s main feature is its reliance on social media. the accessibility, reach of a widespread audience, low costs and user-friendly environment have encouraged women to use social media to speak out against various forms of sexual violence directed against women. it is also assumed that going forward; the movement will also tackle issues such as the gender pay gap, neoliberal policies, maternity leave, and cultural sexism. moreover, the internet-based movement is striving to bring to the fore the topic of intersectionality, that is, the intersection of oppressive institutions, and the attempt to rectify the failings of past waves by representing those oppressed by multiple institutions such as sexism, classism, and racism. this commentary provides an overview of the emerging academic literature on the fourth wave of feminism and critically reflects the lack of social realism in its existing form of knowledge production. keywords: feminism, fourth wave of feminism, internet, social media, social movements, social realism. negar shiva: department of american studies, faculty of world studies, university of tehran, tehran, iran zohreh nosrat kharazmi: (corresponding author) department of american studies, faculty of world studies, university of tehran, tehran, iran- email: zkharazmi@ut.ac.ir commentary this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (cc by nc), which permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. journal of cyberspace studies volume no. july pp. - w e b p a g e : h t t p s : / / j c s s . u t . a c . i r . e m a i l : j c s s @ u t . a c . i r print issn: - . e-issn: - . doi: . /jcss. . negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. the fourth wave of feminism: an introduction the dynamics of social movements changed forever in the year , when the word wide web became available to the public. one of the outcomes of the transformation of social movements by the internet was the revamp of the feminist movement which some argue has brought an end to the era dubbed as ‘post-feminism’. while postfeminists rendered the feminist movement irrelevant due to the fulfillment of some its objectives, the fourth wavers utilized the internet and social media platforms to draw attention to what they believe is rampant sexism still experienced by women from all walks of life. the interconnectedness granted by the cyberspace helped women share their stories online, enabling them to be heard or read instantly by the online community, who immediately saw a pattern of sexual misconduct and violence all around the world, inflicting emotional and physical pain on both men and women. this realization led to the establishment of various online campaigns to raise awareness and collect money for causes related to the issue. the arrival of the fourth wave was anticipated as early as . e. ann kaplan ( ) points, the fourth wave will be distinguished by bringing second and third wave feminists together to confront a new and devastating reality that involves us all, if not equally, then at least at once. this new reality ideally cuts across racial, ethnic and national divides (p. ). activist and writer jennifer baumgardner ( ) traces the formation of the fourth wave back to approximately the year . while some refuse to accept the existence of a fourth wave, others are trying to elaborate on its features. shelby knox considers the online activism of the fourth wave as a distinguishing feature, saying “blogs are our consciousness-raising groups”. according to knox, the fourth wave has equalized feminism as the virtual world allows the majority to participate in the movement without having to pay for education on matters related to women (baumgardner, ). most scholars who have written on the subject of fourth-wave feminism have refused to define it, waiting for the wave to form and conclude before ascribing labels. the term “first wave” was applied to suffragists decades later in the s and s when journalist martha lear was writing an article about the feminist movement of the time for the new york times sunday magazine (baumgardner, ). the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. prudence chamberlain ( ) also sees the recent developments in technology a key factor in catalyzing the fourth wave of feminism. she says the fact that the term fourth-wave feminism has not been defined by scholars, but is being used by journalists and activists speak to the movement’s penetration of “multiple disciplinary manifestations of feminism” (p. ). british journalist kira cochrane wrote a book titled meet all the rebel women in to outline the fourth wave of feminism and its manifestations in the uk. according to her, “everywhere you looked in the summer of , the fourth wave of feminism was rising in the uk, and women were opening their eyes to misogyny and sexism, and shouting back against it” (p. ). cochrane’s book gives examples of how women were opening their eyes to misogyny and violence in several countries around the globe, including ireland, the united states, russia, germany, australia, egypt, etc. while jonathan dean and kristin aune ( ) say they cannot picture the movement until after the event, in her book the feminist fourth wave: affective temporality, chamberlain ( ) says the refusal of academics to define the fourth wave is due to their reluctance to “hinder any natural growth or development” (p. ). those who believe the mere addition of the internet to the mix is not adequate to claim the formation of another wave of feminism have questioned the existence of the fourth wave of feminism (munro, ). debbie stoller, bust co-founder and editor-in-chief, believes that for a wave to exist, they must espouse new ideas, and she does not see that in younger feminists, she therefore dismisses the arrival of the fourth wave, saying that the new generation is merely using new technologies to discuss old ideas (baumgardner, ). catherine redfern and kristin aune ( ) acknowledge the resurgence in feminist activity, but continue to see the movement as part of the third wave. chamberlain’s ( ) counterargument is that policies are formed as a result of continuity, and despite the various waves, feminism’s central objective has always been the creation of a society where men and women are treated equally. chamberlain ( ), therefore, rejects baumgardner’s idea that the fourth wave simply exists because it wants to, and stoller’s denial of its existence due to its repetitive themes, but instead argues that the fourth wave of feminism is “the acknowledgment of an affectively intense period of feminist activism” (p. ). negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. while chamberlain does not define the movement, she looks at the internet as the wave’s facilitator of communication to examine its impact on the formation of collective feelings. nicola rivers ( ) marks a heightened interest in feminism manifested in public consciousness, popular culture, and newspaper columns. according to rivers ( ), much like the third wave before it, fourth-wave feminism is fractured and complex, frequently reinforcing the advancement of the individual and centering the seductive notions of ‘choice,’ ‘empowerment,’ and ‘agency.’ these ideals are present even in feminist activism that seemingly undermines or challenges the idea of women—or perhaps more accurately some women— as able to make their own choices outside the constraints of an overtly patriarchal society (p. ). to prove her point, rivers drops the names beyoncé, taylor swift, and miley cyrus, who have in recent years chosen to call themselves feminists, which promotes the achievements of successful women. however, the type of success advocated by the said celebrities is the one also promoted by capitalism, success in the music industry depending on women presenting a sexualized image of themselves to the public. therefore, rivers cautions those who want to announce that the fourth wave of feminism has arrived, or to announce the end of post-feminism, to consider all facts. she nevertheless affirms the arrival of the fourth wave, saying, “the voices arguing for an openly pro-feminist identity and a ‘revival’ of feminist politics have begun to be heard, culminating in a swell of activity that could be conceptualized as the arrival of the fourth wave” (p. ). nickie charles and khursheed wadia ( ) have marked a sharp resurgence in feminist activism in recent years in the uk. although they categorize the movement as the third wave, they have found the internet a central part of the ongoing feminist movement. solange simões and marlise matos ( ) believe the fourth-wave feminism in brazil is in large part influenced by a broader global movement, which in the south american country has translated into work towards three distinctive agendas, the move to increase political representation, rights to abortion and mitigating the widespread violence against women. according to parry, johnson and wagler ( ), the use of technologies such as the social media has allowed individuals to share the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. their experiences within a global discourse and to a larger audience; as a result finding similarities that can initiate global movements. hence, in recent years, we have seen a rise in the number of collective movements based on social, economic, and political agendas (e.g., sexual violence, equal pay, and reproductive rights) – a distinctly second wave organizing tactic. the result, then, is a new wave that is ushering in innovative conversations and actions around feminism that are a worthy consideration for leisure scholars (parry et al., ). harriet kimble wrye ( ) believes the fourth wave addresses questions asked before, but to a new extent; questions concerning the limits of materialism, a shift from “me” to “we” and all that is on the planet and on how feminism can be of service to ecology and the world. ruth phillips and viviene cree ( ) are passed the question of if there is a fourth-wave feminism, and have in their work explored the consequences of the resurgence of interest in feminism on teaching social work. the internet-driven wave has drawn international attention to topics of intersectionality, and the normalization of sex by the media. pauline maclaran ( ) believes that market and consumer research can benefit from the application of fourth wave feminist perspective in order to solve the problem of women’s economic exclusion and mark the ways in which the fashion and music industries and overall the contemporary culture is portraying a distorted image of women. parry et al. ( ) identifies four major tenets for the emerging fourth wave of feminism, “( ) blurred boundaries across waves; ( ) technological mobilization; ( ) interconnectedness through globalization; and ( ) a rapid, multivocal response to sexual violence.” in general, there seems to be a consensus among those who have acknowledged the fourth wave, that the movement is online (andersen, ; parry et al., ; roberts, ; salime, ), with its primary goal being combating sexual violence (andersen, ; baer, ; munro, ; parry et al., ; roberts, ). the movement also focuses on intersectionality as one of its main objectives (andersen, ; cochrane, ; munro, ), attempts to call attention to pregnancy leave and the gender pay gap (benn, ; cochrane ), and neoliberal economic policies (baer, ; cochrane, ; salime, ). negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. internet and the fourth wave of feminism in an interview with american feminist writer and journalist jessica valenti, deborah solomon ( ) casually mentions to valenti that maybe they are onto the fourth wave now, in return valenti replies that maybe the fourth wave is online. social networking services, grassroots movements, and feminist discussions have marked a fourth wave of feminism, which has found meaning via digital spaces (guillard, ). in her article, ‘feminism: a fourth wave?’ ealasaid munro’s primary claim for the fourth wave is that it has been enabled by the internet, particularly social media, facilitating a call-out culture. women are using technology to empower themselves by establishing networks that can facilitate organization (sutton & pollock, ). based on the experience of bates and her everyday sexism project, cochrane ( ) writes, the immediacy of the internet lends itself to the sharing of everyday sexism, as bates has found – the incidents women might otherwise of necessity brush off, but which form an essential part of a larger conversation when shared, the evidence that what we face isn’t individual, but collective, that there are power structures in place which might be tackled politically (p. ). with the new generation enabled by the speed of communication in the social media, the majority of protests against the status quo have been online (benn, ). the internet has fostered a ‘call-out’ culture that allows sexual predators to be ‘called out’ and exposed (munro, ). one of the manifestations of this surge in activism is witnessed in hashtag feminism. the concept has created a space for victims of inequality to gather and share their experiences (dixon, ). kitsy dixon ( ) in her article indicates, “it is without question that we are facing the new wave of feminism, via hash tagging” (p. ). young women have chosen social media as a platform for feminist activism due to its low cost, easy use, flexibility, accessibility and its wider reach of the audience (schuster, ). in , certain scholars were pondering the effectiveness of online tools (see: cochrane, ; munro, ). julia schuster ( ), while acknowledging the yawning generational gap between the older and younger feminists in new zealand, was expecting an improvement in issues related to social media use by the younger feminists. she hopes the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. passage of time will gradually result in a rise in digital literacy and take care of the problems related to the use of social media. besides the solidarity that online hashtag movements such as #metoo or #beenrapedneverreported have created, the ubiquity of sexual violence against women makes the public see the issue not as something personal, but rather as something structural (mendes et al., ). liz lane ( ) sees hashtags as a method for women to subvert patriarchal structures in a space where the body is not immediately seen and one’s voice can be heard. lane ( ) continues, “hashtags contribute to a larger ethos of the language at play, building new conversations around central rhetorical tactics with which users across the globe can identify” (p. ). social media platforms such as twitter remain a fundamental part of the fourth wave’s distinct identity by enabling speedy commentary (zimmerman, ). tegan zimmerman ( ) also sees technology as the distinctive feature of fourth-wave feminism, and names social media platform twitter as the enabler of the movement, especially its main objective, that is, intersectionality. moreover, zimmerman refuses to distinguish between online and offline activism and encourages scholars to defer from a binary approach when researching online and offline social protests. she further elaborates, twitter is the most important platform for fourth wave feminist activism chiefly because of its deployment of intersectionality. identifying privilege, difference, representation, and racism from an intersectional approach is a necessary prerequisite for fourth wavers, demonstrated time after time with hashtags like #solidarityisforwhitewomen, which resonated, angered, and divided many feminists (zimmerman, : ). baer ( ) also sees twitter as a vital part of feminist protests since it can collect the experiences of women from various localities, and reveal the pervasive structural inequalities faced by women especially when it comes to violence. twitter is not the only manifestation of digital activism. keller ( ) studied girl bloggers to find out how girls are using blogging as a way to engage in public life despite being excluded from formal politics and citizenship rights, and challenges the mainstream assumption that girls are shallow customers of the internet. negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. mendes et al. ( ) explored the emotional toll and the unpaid labor of online campaigns in their article on digital feminism, finding that % of their respondents have experienced trolling, online abuse or hostility after sharing their experiences online. the participants, however still viewed twitter as a safer and easier space for engaging in feminist activities. henrike knappe and sabine lang ( ) conducted a comparative study of women’s movements networking in different organizations in the uk and germany to highlight the transition of social movements from offline to online and distinguish its differences in feminist organizations in two european countries. the fourth wave of feminism has triggered numerous online campaigns, as well as campaigns that have gone further from online and turned into marches in the offline world. feminist activists contend that campaigns such as the everyday sexism project, no more page and the daughters of eve have set the fourth wave’s path and have manifested the wave’s objectives (roberts, ). the absolute agreement of scholars on the fact that the fourth wave of feminism is online, stems from the manifestations of this feature in multiple vocal and global campaigns. the following campaigns were either purely online or were organized online: the international slutwalk: in january , a canadian policeman speaking to students at york university on community safety tips said, “i’ve been told i’m not supposed to say this, however women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized” (johnson, ). the toronto slutwalk was organized in response to the police officer’s comments to challenge rape culture and victim blaming. the protest in canada triggered similar protests all around the world (borah & nandi, ). cofounded by heather jarvis and sonya barnett, the local movement drew the attention of news and social media and in the later months slutwalk protests were held in more than cities and countries including australia, germany, mexico, south korea, brazil, india, and the united states. the objective of the movement is to eradicate a culture that blames victims of sexual assault for what happens to them (hill, ). many have criticized the movement. those who are against slutwalk believe such protests trivializes the issue of rape culture. others however see the slutwalk as a movement that “mobilizes against a specific instance of sexist oppression and its politicized use of clothes challenges the pervasive ideology of sexual violence” (hill, : ). the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. the metoo movement: the hashtag #metoo started trending on twitter on october , when actress alyssa milano, inspired by actors ashley judd and rose mcgowan who had openly discussed their encounters with american film producer harvey wienstein, used it to encourage the public to disclose their experiences of sexual violence. later, it was revealed that african american women’s rights activist tarana burke had coined the hashtag in . the hashtag was used million times in the first hours (mendes et al., ). as reported by soucie, parry, and cousineau ( ), within four months after milano used the hashtag, at least men in positions of power in numerous industries were accused of sexual violence. many were stripped of their positions. women’s march: following the inauguration ceremony of us president donald trump and on his first day in office, around one million protestors marched on washington d.c. to advocate legislation regarding women’s rights, immigration reform, abortion, environment, lgbtq rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, healthcare and worker’s rights (women’s march, , mission section). the march was the largest one-day protest in the us history. similar protests occurred in many cities across the united states and around the world in sydney, berlin, london, paris, nairobi and cape town to show solidarity (smith-park, ). project unbreakable: after a friend told her she was sexually assaulted, new york photography student grace brown founded project unbreakable in to give voice to hundreds of rape victims who have shared their stories on the blog’s tumblr page. survivors can hide their identity if they want, and they hold cards that are either a message of hope, or quote a sentence the attacker said to the victim during the assault (meyjes, ). brown told the guardian newspaper that the people who share their stories on posters are sometimes talking about the incident for the very first time, and talking about trauma can be a way of healing and letting go (adewunmi, ). most of the posters are the words the attacker has said to the victim before, during or after the attack. some examples are: “just suck it up and get over it”, “you’re a guy, you can’t say no to a girl like me”, “stop playing hard to get”, “you’re beautiful”, “i love trans boys”, “you must have really bad karma from a past life”, “if you tell anyone you will be kicked out of the school”, “i know you want it”, “if you tell anyone you will be in just as much trouble as i am” (patel, ). negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. the victims include both men and women from all ages and walks of life who have used project unbreakable to talk about their experiences sometimes for the first time. no more page : the tradition of printing topless women on page in the uk-based sun newspaper began in when sun editor larry lamb published the photos of a topless german model at a time when the owner of the newspaper rupert murdoch was out of the country. years later lamb said he regretted the choice, but at the time, the move resulted in a . million to . million rise in circulation (moyer, ). the campaign no more page was organized to protest uk’s prominent newspaper the sun from printing pictures of topless models on its page . the campaign was founded in when lucy-anne holmes wrote a letter to the then-editor of the sun to reconsider his approach to page . when holmes received no answer, she started a petition. two years later in january and after the campaign had gathered , signatures from teachers to politicians and actors, the sun withdrew its -year-old feature (aston, ). the campaign has inspired similar movements in other countries. in germany, sophia becker and kristina lunz launched a campaign dubbed stop bild sexism to challenge the daily paper bild, which publishes sexualized images of women and asks readers to rate women based on their cleavages (greenslade, ). the facebook rape campaign: in , several feminist activists realized that facebook has a number of groups online that are encouraging violence against women. the groups contained pages of battered women, but they were labeled humorous and according to facebook, not considered hate speech. activists laura bates, soraya chemaly and jacklyn friedman along with the organization women, action and media (wam), first started reporting the pages to facebook only to find out the company does not see the pages constitute hate speech. the women started a facebook rape campaign, which sent over , tweets and , emails within a week. facebook felt threatened when brands started to withdraw their advertisements from the website. the pressure from brands which either withdrew completely or contacted facebook to support the campaign resulted in the company removing some of the offending pages, as well as changing their standards policy and training employees who are in charge of checking reports to better evaluate what constitutes hate speech (chamberlain, ). everyday sexism project: uk feminist laura bates developed the website everyday sexism project in to draw the public’s attention to sexist attitudes women and girls face every single day of their lives the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. (phipps et al., ). the overwhelming number of similar stories shared by women from all around the world pointed to the pervasiveness of violence against women (bowles eagle, ). thousands of women have shared their stories in the website to challenge the normalization of sexism and verbal and physical abuse in streets, schools, universities, at the workplace and home. all-male panels: saara särmä, a researcher in international relations, who witnessed that a lot of the conferences and meetings that she attends have all male panels, created the tumblr page all male panels (locker, ). according to a research conducted by event software company bizzabo, out of the , speakers surveyed in mostly private sector events across countries, % were male (fadel, ). on her tumblr page, särmä posts pictures of all-male panel event all around the globe, and attaches to them a photo of knight rider star david hasselhoff giving thumbs up to the event organizer who managed to gather an all-male panel. to särmä, haselhoff embodies the concept of white masculinity and therefore she finds it funny that haselhoff would congratulate the panel (locker, ). särmä has approached the subject with humor to underscore a lack of trust for female experts in various fields and promote equality. hollaback!: the hollaback campaign was established in . the website and its application “allows users from across the world to map their local experiences with street harassment on a global platform” (parry et al., : ). according to the campaign’s website, the objective of the campaign is to end harassment and introduce the locations of harassments to local authorities via hollaback!’s publicly available map. they are currently active in countries, cities and operate in languages. founder of the campaign julie lalonde says the majority of the street harassments they receive were related to public transportation. when she first approached oc transpo (the urban transit service of ottawa, ontario located in canada), they refused to work with her but after she encouraged the public to speak out about the instances of harassment that occur on the bus, the transit service has set up a mechanism for people to report such instances. since the mechanism was established in until , incidents were reported to oc transpo (mcgenere, ). time’s up: in the wake of the harvey weinstein scandal and the metoo hashtag, hollywood celebrities initiated the time’s up organization and raised more than $ million to fight discrimination. the money has negar shiva and zohreh nosrat kharazmi jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. allowed the organization to establish a time’s up legal fund for women who lack the resources to bring their cases of sexual harassment against employees to the court (linderman, ). regarding the goals of time’s up, the movement’s president lisa borders says the objective is to alter how women are treated at workplaces, to making a systematic change to society and make workplaces a safer and more fair environment for women (desta, ). moreover, time’s up entertainment, an affiliate of time’s up, has recently established an initiative labeled ‘who’s in the room’ which aims to diversify the producers and executives by giving people of color entry-level and assistant positions where they can be mentored by those more experienced in the business (kilkenny, ). one billion rising campaign: largely in response to former house representative todd akin’s use of the term ‘legitimate rape’, eve ensler founded the one billion rising global movement to end rape and sexual violence against women. the name of the campaign, one billion rising, refers to a report published by the united nations and the world health organization that says one in every three women will be sexually and/or physically assaulted at some time during their lives (smith, ). since , every year on february rallies are held by the campaign to raise awareness about violence against women, which takes many forms such as rape, battery, female genital mutilation, incest, and human trafficking. social realism needed: who constructs women’s lives feminists with the fourth wave orientation have been espousing their ideas in recent years via the internet and social media platforms. they are optimistically following to give voice to those who remained historically silenced on the bitter experiences of gender-based violence and discrimination. online campaigns and blogging are the most fashionable tools that have made this speaking out possible. the fourth wave of feminism is still expected to expand its list of oppressions and disadvantages beyond sexual harassment, rape culture, and body shaming. the fourth wave’s main claim is to give agency to victimized women and like its precedents, it stands on an empiricist constructivist point of view. today, there is no doubt that the introduction of harsher punishments for rapists and the perpetrators of any forms of violence, including the physical, psychological or sexual abuse is an essential requirement for the health of our social life. the movement’s extremist approach to the fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. suspects of sexual harassment, though, can effectively alienate many members of the public from the movement and reinforce the idea that emotions run wild in the feminist movement. one of the ways to avoid this consequence is to wait for a judge’s ruling on rape cases before pressuring corporations to strip the accused of their positions of power. one could say that the current behavior of many associated with the fourth wave resembles an angry mob online, destroying anyone’s reputation who is merely accused and not yet proven guilty. the fourth wave of feminism in theory and practice stands on a significant moment. the fact is that no practical prescription, no calling for a deeper reflection on the concept of violence and mobilization to safeguard women’s lives against various forms of violence has been put forward by the fourth wave. the records indicate the movement is much concentrated on accusations, defamation and at best, lawsuits against those whom they claim to deserve punishment. fourth wave advocates have yet to base their approach on social realism, and the consequences of their strategies until now can be witnessed in the public backlash against feminism in recent years. the fourth wave is yet to start a discourse on the extent of women’s control on defining strategies and practical techniques for making their domestic and work environments safe, on what constitutes consent and what constitutes sexual misconduct (the case of stand-up comedian aziz ansari), on the controversial topic of participatory engagement in promiscuous behavior and finally joining professions with conventional focus on the body performance and the female beauty such as the porn industry, along with many other necessary practical provisions. it seems, similar to previous generations, the fourth-wave feminists are grappling with acknowledging the biological differences between men and women and the limitations that come with it. this denial has disarmed women for the past decades and has stopped them from creatively shaping their minds and social acts for a better future. declaration of conflicting interests the authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. references adewunmi, b. 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( ). #intersectionality: the fourth wave feminist twitter community. atlantis: critical studies in gender, culture & social justice, ( ): - . retrieved from http://journals. msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/ . gender equality in the global health workplace: learning from a somaliland–uk paired institutional partnership keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - gender equality in the global health workplace: learning from a somaliland– uk paired institutional partnership roxanne c keynejad, fikru debebe mekonnen, aziza qabile, jibril ibrahim moussa handuleh, mariam abdillahi dahir, mariam mohamed haji rabi, cathy read, edna adan ismail practice to cite: keynejad rc, mekonnen fd, qabile a, et al. gender equality in the global health workplace: learning from a somaliland– uk paired institutional partnership. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . / bmjgh- - handling editor stephanie m topp ► additional material is published online only. to view please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bmjgh- - ). received july revised october accepted october for numbered affiliations see end of article. correspondence to dr roxanne c keynejad; roxanne. . keynejad@ kcl. ac. uk © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re-use permitted under cc by-nc. no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. summary box ► slow progress on gender equality has predominantly occurred in high-income countries. the long-term commitment of health workers and educators on both sides of health institutional partnerships can fa- cilitate constructive, collaborative and interdisciplin- ary exploration of the potentially sensitive subject of gender inequality. ► global health workplace gender inequalities are common in low-income and high-income countries alike. while overt gender prejudice and discrimina- tion may be more prevalent in settings with limited education and awareness, subtler disadvantage per- sists at systemic levels in high-income settings. ► priority actions include wider engagement of aca- demia with gender-focused research, institutional actions to address barriers, national prioritisation of gender inequality and nurturing of grassroots initia- tives, through institutional partnerships and interna- tional networks. ► sustained, high-profile recognition by global insti- tutions, non-government organisations, publishers, national governments, health and education sys- tems is required to harness grassroots momentum demanding gender equality at every level. abstract worldwide recognition of gender inequality and discrimination following the #metoo movement has been slow to reach the field of global health. although international institutions have begun to address gender, the perspectives of front-line global health workers remain largely undocumented, especially in regions not captured by large-scale surveys. long-term collaborative relationships between clinicians and educators participating in paired institutional partnerships can foster cross-cultural dialogue about potentially sensitive subjects. king’s somaliland partnership (ksp) has linked universities and hospitals in somaliland and london, uk, for health education and improvement, since .we collaboratively developed an anonymous, mixed methods, online survey to explore workplace experiences among somaliland and uk-based staff and volunteers. we adapted the workplace prejudice/discrimination inventory to address gender inequality, alongside qualitative questions. somaliland (but not uk) women reported significantly more gender prejudice and discrimination than men (medians= and , z= . , p= . ). while front-line somaliland workers described overt gender discrimination more frequently, uk respondents reported subtler disadvantage at systemic levels. this first survey of its kind in somaliland demonstrates the potential of global health partnerships to meaningfully explore sensitive subjects and identify solutions, involving a range of multidisciplinary stakeholders. we propose priority actions to address pervasive gender inequality and discrimination, including wider engagement of academia with gender-focused research, institutional actions to address barriers, national prioritisation and nurturing of grassroots initiatives, through institutional partnerships and international networks. without sustained, concerted intervention across all levels, gender inequality will continue to hinder progress towards the vision of good health for all, everywhere. introduction from ‘silence breakers’ instigating the #metoo movement to legally mandating gender pay gap reporting, high-income countries have begun to acknowledge the pervasive influence of gender inequality and discrimination. gender is an important social determinant of physical and mental health and mortality, increasingly recog- nised at international levels. the fifth sustain- able development goal aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, end gender discrimination and gender-based violence and ensure women’s leadership at all levels of decision making. gender inequality in global health recently, work in syria and democratic republic of congo addressing sexual violence as a weapon of war received ’s nobel peace prize. however, slow progress towards gender equality in global health largely affects high-income countries. the world o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjgh- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjgh- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjgh- - http://gh.bmj.com/ keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health economic forum’s global gender gap report quantifies economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empower- ment in countries. rwanda, nicaragua and philip- pines are unusual among low-income and middle-in- come countries (lmics), being ranked in the top . the lowest rankings are occupied by countries currently or recently engaged in armed conflict, alongside more affluent nations that limit women’s participation and empowerment. postconflict ‘success stories’ such as rwanda demonstrate how peace-building activities can create political and wider gender equality, although not without some negative consequences. a growing literature supports gender-sensitive approaches to state building in fragile and conflict-affected situations while emphasising barriers that can perpetuate entrenched gender norms. since only countries able to provide data for out of index domains are included in the gender gap report, united nations member states remain unaccounted for. these nations risk falling behind the current wave of global support for gender equality. their undocumented experiences may also offer important insights, relevant to global health practitioners and policy makers. neither somalia nor somaliland (a peaceful, postconflict nation internationally unrecognised since ) was included in . attempts by the who to prioritise gender inequality have been challenged for neglecting its interactions with other personal characteristics such as ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability. intersectional theorists emphasise that the impact of gender on health is deter- mined by ‘multiple axes of power relations’ resulting from interactions between gender and other individual categorisations. somaliland somaliland, a former british protectorate, is a self-de- clared independent state with an estimated . million population. primary and secondary school enrolment is increasing, but in / , one woman attended school for every three men. in , enrolment was %– % men at amoud and hargeisa universities, including medicine, nursing, business and law. however, enrolment at burao university, including veterinary medicine, islamic studies and law, was % women. the majority religion is islam and % of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic. a constellation of factors influencing experiences of gender equality affects somal- iland, but data regarding practising healthcare staff, disaggregated by gender, are not available. paired institutional partnerships for global health long-term global health partnerships between health- care organisations and educational institutions in different clinical and resource contexts facilitate mutual exchange of experience, skills and expertise. their benefits were reflected in millennium development goal and sustainable development goal to ‘revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development’. in an ever-more globalised world, international, multi- disciplinary networks, aided by rapidly evolving online media and communications technology, offer advantages to global health not readily accessible to large institu- tional bodies. in particular, the benefits of ‘bounda- ry-spanning’ practices that foster cross-cultural learning networks and communities of practice that build local and national health institutions in lmics are increas- ingly acknowledged. king’s somaliland partnership (ksp) ksp is one such link between universities and hospitals in somaliland, and king’s health partners, london, uk, which aims to improve healthcare and its outcomes by strengthening people, organisations and systems. ksp has collaborated on clinical education in somaliland since , using a combination of face-to-face and e-learning via the low-bandwidth medicineafrica website, demon- strating knowledge and cultural exchange benefits. building research capacity is evidenced by publications coauthored by female and male clinician-educators in both countries. a ‘strategic partnerships for higher education innovation and reform’ grant has expanded ksp’s work to multidisciplinary professionals. several founding members remain active in ksp to this day, and many volunteers have contributed for over a decade. the long-term commitment of health workers and educators on both sides affords working relationships in which potentially sensitive subjects, such as gender inequality, can be discussed. responding to growing awareness of intersectional gender inequality, our predominantly, but not exclusively, female and somalil- and-based team of ksp volunteers agreed to survey diverse staff in both countries, exploring gender-associ- ated barriers and facilitators in the global health work- place, focusing on solutions and best practice. surveying workplace experiences procedure a working group of interested ksp volunteers and staff collaboratively developed a survey before online dissem- ination. we used mixed-methods to capture quanti- tative and qualitative data on diverse experiences. we adapted the validated -item workplace prejudice/ discrimination inventory (wpdi) to ask about gender using simpler language (online supplementary file ). we developed five contextually relevant additional state- ments, about being listened to, expressing views, being encouraged, leadership and missing opportunities. we used qualitative questions to explore gender-based and intersectional workplace barriers, recommendations and good practice. we collected demographic information using broad categories and encouraged participants to contact rk to raise specific concerns. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjgh- - http://gh.bmj.com/ keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health table median wpdi scores and iqrs by group somaliland (n= ) uk (n= ) total (n= ) median iqr median iqr median iqr female, n= – – – male, n= – . – – total, n= – – – wpdi, workplace prejudice/discrimination inventory. any staff member, volunteer or student aged over years participating in ksp activities was eligible to participate. analysis we used stata se v. to analyse adapted wpdi scores. likert-scale responses scored between (‘strongly disa- gree’) and (‘strongly agree); relevant items were reverse-coded, yielding a maximum score of . we performed non-parametric tests due to small sample size. we compared median item, total wpdi and additional item scores, using wilcoxon rank-sum tests. we analysed qualitative responses using thematic analysis, following a stepwise approach. rck, fdm, jimh, aq, mmhr and mad generated initial codes and searched for themes. rk collated and named themes, which were collaboratively reviewed. we employed reflexivity during this process, recognising our personal, intersectionally influenced biases. for example, as a female uk researcher, rk employed self-reflexivity when reading qualitative responses by participants with diverse experiences. reflexivity was also employed within the analytical team, when collaboratively reviewing codes and themes generated by diverse research colleagues, whose experiences and perspectives influenced their interpre- tations. this approach has been advocated to enhance ‘sense-making’ when cross-cultural teams collaborate on research. demographics thirty-six somaliland ( % women) and uk-based participants ( % women) completed the survey between january and march . median age was – years (somaliland; range: – years) and – years (uk; range: – + years). somaliland participants’ main professional roles were medical ( %), administra- tive ( %), teaching ( %), midwifery ( %), research ( %) and nursing ( %). most uk participants were doctors ( %) or nurses ( %). median experience was – years (somaliland) and – years (uk; range: – + years). wpdi scores online supplementary file displays item responses; table shows descriptive statistics. when considered alone, somaliland women and men differed significantly on total wpdi scores (medians= / , z= . , p= . ), unlike uk participants (medians / . , z=− . , p= . ). somaliland women agreed significantly more strongly than men with eight statements. these were ‘at work, women receive fewer opportunities’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ), ‘where i work, men are treated better than women’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ), ‘at work, people are intolerant of women’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ), ‘managers check women’s work more closely than men’s’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ), ‘making jokes about gender is [not] common where i work’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ) and ‘at work, i am treated poorly because of my gender’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ). two non-wpdi items showing signifi- cant differences were ‘i am not encouraged by my seniors to aim higher in my career’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ) and ‘i miss out on training or teaching oppor- tunities because of my gender’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ). there was no significant difference between somaliland and uk participants’ total wpdi scores (medians= / , z= . , p= . ), nor between aggregated women and men (medians= / , z= . , p= . ). when considered together, somaliland respondents agreed significantly more strongly that ‘where i work, people of different genders [do not] get along well with each other’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ) and ‘i am not encouraged by my seniors to aim higher in my career’ (medians / , z= . , p= . ). women agreed significantly more strongly than men, that ‘at work, i am treated poorly because of my gender’ (medians= / , z= . , p= . ). workplace barriers forty-seven (somaliland) and % (uk) of respondents described gender-related barriers in their field. somali- land participants described men being disproportion- ately encouraged and widespread beliefs that women are weaker, less competent and reliable. one commented: ‘my managers never encouraged me or appreciate. [i am] never being given opportunity of work or education if one come[s] out’. they highlighted difficulties for women in securing employment, scholarships, promo- tions and leadership positions. a top candidate was told she would not be appointed in case she married and became pregnant, and women were posted to inacces- sible regions where they could not go outside unaccom- panied. women were interrupted by men in meetings, o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjgh- - http://gh.bmj.com/ keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health deprioritised against junior males and faced ‘all kinds of humiliation and under encouragement’. one recalled ‘during my study people were telling me i can’t be a doctor and when i became they said at least say am nurse; female can’t be a doctor’. another noted that limited employment prospects influence emigration of women to high-income countries. gender-based violence was a cause for concern: ‘every girl is afraid of being raped if they leave home at night, even evening, this is the greatest problem for women who cannot defend themselves’. uk participants described gender pay gaps, unequal treatment, inflexible conditions, being bullied on-call, unequal representation in leadership and excess work (‘male colleagues giving females additional work, eg, pelvic exams, review[s] of young female patients as they feel uncomfortable’). one reported that us ‘females [are] subtly seen as less able to handle hard work hours, or being seen as selfish for wishing to breast feed’. one said stereotypically feminine women are better received, and another: ‘i consciously try to avoid what i feel are “female” attributes when applying for jobs or promo- tions’. a male participant said ‘i often feel i am treated with more academic respect than my women peers in the workplace’. uk participants also noted disadvantages for men (‘i am expected to stomach more abuse’), difficulty gaining exposure to women’s health and lower clinical pass rates ‘because of the perception that [women’s] approach is “softer”’’. in both countries, participants said patients may be more willing to see women and described women being unable to train in chosen specialties. surgical theatres were highlighted: (somaliland) ‘sometimes they did not give us sterile surgical gowns to participate in the theatre; sometimes they hide sutures while we are in there’. a uk respondent highlighted limited access to toilet facilities during on-call shifts. interventions somaliland respondents proposed a range of inter- ventions. themes included raising community aware- ness about gender equality, especially in remote areas, involving parents, elders, religious leaders, commercial sectors, and policy makers, seeking international atten- tion, policies and legislation, fair recruitment, propor- tional leadership, advocacy, economic empowerment, positive discrimination, widening access, confidence building, peer support, case studies, workshops, seminars and radio and television broadcasts. uk participants recommended better implementa- tion of legislation and policies, quotas, more access and support of flexible working, equal parental leave, mentor- ship, role models, countering stereotypes, pay transpar- ency, recognition of implicit bias and enhanced access to opportunities. academics proposed proactively engaging women in research and returning to it from maternity leave, support with grant applications, mock interviews, publication and alternative routes. some expressed positivity. a somaliland respon- dent said ‘i try to change many problems that i see… i am hopeful that the world will recognize the power of women’. a uk respondent stated ‘healthcare is ahead of many areas of work in terms of equal opportunity, but we need to actively recruit more women into senior leader- ship roles and develop young women’s leadership skills in a way that does not just replicate the current very ‘male’ leadership style’ existing positive practice several somaliland respondents noted improvements in prejudice against women in the workplace and recog- nised government efforts. female senior surgeons and physicians, hospital matrons, managers, academics, entrepreneurs and business leaders were cited as role models. others emphasised rising school enrolment, university graduation and work participation among women, especially in urban areas. one noted that mixed- gender clinical placements improved respect for female students, compared with segregation. another noted more gender discrimination outside the workplace than within it. several respondents noted that national and international organisations employing female staff enable role modelling of gender equality, including equal pay. one respondent referred to islamic scripture advocating women’s rights, and others emphasised the roles of elders and the wider community in recognising women’s contributions. uk respondents recognised employer initiatives, including paid maternity leave, shared parental leave, less than full-time training, female leaders, role model- ling, retention efforts and implicit bias training. one highlighted the benefits of ksp’s flexible, remote elec- tronic technologies, widening access for staff with caring responsibilities. however, one stated ‘gender bias is such a problem in my area that i do not know of any positive examples of which to share’. intersectional barriers fifty per cent of somaliland and % of uk respondents acknowledged barriers arising from other characteris- tics. somaliland participants especially emphasised clan membership, younger age and disability as influencing career progression. one highlighted early marriage, when husbands may prevent women from continuing to work. sexuality was acknowledged to be a taboo subject in somaliland. uk participants emphasised intersec- tional barriers for ethnic minorities: ‘social stereotypes of those with certain age, race, religion, disability and sexu- ality manifest as psychological and practical barriers to opportunities’. somaliland participants recommended addressing intersectional barriers through similar initiatives but emphasised the need to involve cultural, religious and government leaders in addressing clan, disability and age-related discrimination. suggestions included preventing clan being identified during recruitment, o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health national policies protecting characteristics, educa- tion about implicit bias, role modelling by interna- tional organisations and funders and collecting more routine demographic data. uk participants suggested employer actions, including quotas, enforcing policies, encouraging diverse applicants, discussing implicit bias, school-age and early career mentorship. implications benefits of health institutional partnerships our study built on nearly two decades of cross-cultural global health partnership between somaliland and the uk. it demonstrates how culturally sensitive subjects can be constructively explored in the context of long- term health partnership between differently resourced settings. in distinct ways, persistent hierarchies and entrenched power differentials affect the worlds of research, university education and clinical practice in both countries, consistent with low rates of female lead- ership across top international universities. this study overcame these barriers to collaborative research leader- ship and academic authorship, building on ksp’s legacy to unite a diverse team of junior and senior, female and male, somaliland and uk contributors to address this still-taboo subject. academic engagement medical publishing is increasingly prioritising the neglected field of gender inequality and the need to consider gender in global health practice and research. the gambia women in science working group argues that in sub-saharan africa, ‘women and men need to perceive women as intellectually equal’. the current climate of prioritising gender equity in global health inspired our diverse group to spearhead the first study of its kind in a country unable to contribute data to the gender gap report. more vocal prioritisation of such research is required, to meaningfully harness current momentum for global gender equality. the dangers of inertia are clear, with emigration of skilled female staff and withdrawal of female expertise from the workforce highlighted by our study. international commonalities while overt gender prejudice and discrimination were more frequently reported in somaliland, uk respond- ents described subtler disadvantage at systemic levels. while many recommendations for somaliland already exist in the uk, they have not eliminated unequal pay, hostility in surgical theatres, bullying, harassment or intersectional barriers. transparency and discussion are crucial steps, making recent global publicity of pervasive sexual harassment, pay inequality and occupational segregation particularly welcome. wpdi scores among female somaliland respondents were higher than those of male or uk respondents and similar to a recent study among muslim american women, underscoring the severity of workplace discrimination and prejudice in selected low-income and high-income settings. recogni- tion of intersectional barriers and the need for them to be approached with sensitivity in somaliland supports calls for recognition of intersectionality in global health. institutional action our findings support evidence-based action at global, national and institutional levels. this includes concep- tual frameworks for gender in healthcare human resources, research guidance, integrating gender equality into health systems strengthening, applying international human rights and equal opportunities laws to national policies, anticipating health workers’ life cycle needs, restructuring education and work settings to integrate family and work and reflect the value of caregiving by both genders. of note, a health workforce survey in rwanda found that the odds of health workplace violence were reduced by gender equality. national prioritisation the encouragement of the somaliland ministry of health development for this study, in requesting to receive its results, deserves special mention. government bodies can tackle systemic gender inequality in collaboration with health, education and voluntary sector organisa- tions. improvements in workplace attitudes, educational enrolment and female leadership in somaliland demon- strate how much can be done, even in resource-limited contexts. grassroots initiatives despite challenges, respondents were hopeful about somaliland’s future global health workforce. somali- land’s female medical doctor organization was founded in , to exchange knowledge through discussion and seminars, empower female doctors through education and contribute as equals to their community. a key benefit will be building support networks for isolated clinicians outside urban centres, providing support during chal- lenging, isolated posts. institutional support of such unfunded organisations and similar initiatives for nurses and allied health professionals could be developed in collaboration with institutional partnerships, such as ksp, which conduct interdisciplinary capacity building. the work of grassroots initiatives in collaboration with paired institutional partnerships could be further enhanced by international networks such as women in global health, providing support, mentorship and promotion on a world stage. limitations our results were limited by the self-selecting nature of participants: we did not capture views of individuals lacking literacy, english language or internet access. as such, more severe prejudice and discrimination could have been missed by this brief survey. a broader range of responses would be obtained by triangulating these data with somali-language interviews, with diverse staff. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ keynejad rc, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health conclusions this first study of its kind in somaliland demonstrates the potential of global health partnerships to meaning- fully explore sensitive subjects, involving stakeholders across international, governmental, educational, clinical and voluntary sectors. understanding responses along- side those of uk participants using cross-cultural mixed methods indicated relevance outside this region, missed out of key international surveys. we hope that colleagues in diverse global health settings will explore gender in their own context, taking the crucial first step of starting a conversation, from which a theory of change can be built and multifaceted interventions planned. we look forward to reading their findings and sharing the outcomes of our own in years to come. author affiliations health service and population research department, king’s college london institute of psychiatry, psychology & neuroscience, london, uk faculty of public health, edna adan university, hargeisa, somalia department of obstetrics & gynaecology, kaah community hospital, hargeisa, somalia department of psychiatry, amoud college of health sciences, borama, somalia hargeisa office, world health organization, hargeisa, somalia department of internal medicine, hargeisa group hospital, hargeisa, somalia king’s centre for global health and health partnerships, king’s college london, london, uk nursing & midwifery, edna adan hospital, hargeisa, somalia acknowledgements we thank dr sharon markless, dr stephani l hatch, dr billy gazard, dr peter hughes, mr daniel jones, dr gudon adem, dr hodan m osman and professor john rees for their kind and instructive feedback on the survey design. we would also like to thank somaliland’s national research committee and staff of the somaliland ministry of health development for their support of and interest in the results of this research. contributors rck coordinated survey inception and design, applied for king's college london ethics committee approval, coordinated thematic analysis, performed statistical analysis and led writing up. fdm contributed to survey design, applied for somaliland ministry of health and development approval, led survey dissemination, performed thematic analysis and contributed to writing up. aq, jimh, mad and mmhr contributed to survey design, performed survey dissemination, thematic analysis and reviewed the final manuscript. cr provided senior advice on survey and study design, partnership working and ethics procedures and contributed to writing up. eai provided senior advice on survey and study design, senior input to application for somaliland ministry of health and development approval, performed survey dissemination and reviewed the final manuscript. funding ksp receives funding from uk department for international development (education), via british council. disclaimer the funder played no role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, writing-up or publication. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. ethics approval king's college london's research ethics subcommittee (ref: lrs- / - ) and somaliland’s national research committee and ministry of health development director general (ref: mohd/dg: / / ) approved the study. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. data sharing statement all available data have been summarised in this article. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . references . time, . time person of the year : the silence breakers. available from: http:// time. com/ time- person- of- the- year- - silence- breakers/ [accessed jul ]. . office for national statistics, . understanding the gender pay gap in the uk. available from: https://www. ons. gov. uk/ empl oyme ntan dlab ourm arket/ peopleinwork/ earn ings 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	conclusions 	references s .. digital politics michael bernhard and daniel o’neill the special section r apid changes in the fields of micro-electronics and data processing have transformed the world over the last thirty years. the first personal computers appeared in the mid- s and these started to become common in offices in the mid- s, before becoming an everyday necessity soon thereafter. while forms of remote communication between computers in government and in research universities began in the s, the origins of the omnipresent internet of today only emerged in the late s and early s, when commercial internet providers began to offer widespread service to firms and customers. the ramifications of these two sets of changes have been far reaching. for those of us old enough to remember, this latest iteration of the industrial revolution has fundamentally transformed the way we used to do so many things—produce, consume, wage war, and live—on a day-to day-basis. some of the most far-reaching changes have been in politics, where new virtual social networks have transformed the public sphere. this transformation poses a whole new set of problems for the control of information and organizations in closed societies, and creates the means for new and powerful forms of informational distortion and manipulation in open ones. in this issue we present four articles that discuss the impact of this paradigm shift on how we fight, get around, and entertain ourselves. the first two contribu- tions address how transportation in urban areas has been disrupted by the rise of uber. in many places it has challenged the highly regulated and profitable taxi in- dustry, devaluing assets and displacing labor. not only has uber transformed urban transportation markets, creating winners (mostly the entrepreneurs who created, invested, and bet on platform companies) and losers (taxi companies and drivers), its new mode of delivering services has escaped conventional measures of govern- ment regulation and challenged local and municipal governments to find ways of coping with innovation. the lead article, entitled “disrupting regulation, regulating disruption: the politics of uber in the united states,” is coauthored by ruth berins collier, veena dubal, and christopher carter. their focus is not only on the alteration of the settled patterns of urban transportation markets, but on how uber has also effec- tively escaped regulation by local government, state legislatures, and the courts. first, its new means of service provision escape traditional ways of regulating commerce. second, uber has both taken advantage of the privileged position of capital to contest regulation in the bureaucracy and the courts, and it has also selectively mobilized consumers and its own drivers to counter the grievances raised by taxi companies and drivers. similar themes are raised in kathleen thelen’s “regulating uber: the politics of the platform economy in europe and the united states.” she explores uber’s impact in a more comparative perspective using evidence from the united states, ger- many, and sweden. thelen shows how the entry of uber into markets under different systems of regulation trig- gered different flashpoints in each country. these flash- points in turn mobilized different actors, shaped somewhat different conflicts, and led to different regulatory out- comes. the third piece in the special section has an in- ternational relations focus. in “the politics of attributing blame for cyberattacks and the costs of uncertainty,” marcus schulzke notes that the difficulty in determining the origin and motives of cyberattacks makes it hard for actors to formulate appropriate responses. he notes that the problem of cybersecurity and attack attribution is largely an issue taken up by experts and politicians. he argues that it is essential to involve the citizenry in broader public discussions, lest uncertainty about the identity of the perpetrator leads to the blaming of familiar scapegoats and the cultivation of conspiracy theories. in this sense cyberattacks may pose additional costs in terms of main- taining accountability in democratic societies. the last piece in our special section is “it’s the end of the world and they know it: how dystopian fiction shapes political attitudes” by calvert w. jones and celia paris. you may wonder why we placed a piece on the impact of dystopian fiction in a digital politics section. first, there has been a rise in the popularity of dystopian novels, television series, and films. these would include the hunger games, the maze runner, enders game, the matrix, v for vendetta, minority report, divergent, mr. robot, and the walking dead, as well as reinterpretations doi: . /s © american political science association december | vol. /no. from the editors https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core of such classics as fahrenheit , westworld, the man in the high castle, blade runner, and the handmaid’s tale. by its nature, dystopian fiction takes unsettling trends in the present and imagines what it would be like if they were extrapolated into the future. we take the huge popularity of the genre to be an indicator of the anxiety about our future in the present digital age. in many of these cautionary tales, the growing power of technology to allow us to manipulate, monitor, and control others lies at the heart of the nightmare. in addition, the stories studied here are now distributed in new ways with the streaming of online content replacing conventional print and broadcast media. jones and paris argue that political scientists have chosen to ignore the impact that fiction has on the formation of political attitudes. arguing that the best way to approach such questions is by examining different popular genres, they run a series of experiments to gauge the impact of exposure to dystopian fiction on values and attitudes. they come up with an interesting set of findings—first, that exposure makes viewers more likely to justify radical, even violent, action against unjust authority. however, despite this, viewers seem to experi- ence no deterioration in their levels of social capital. the importance of digital politics is also reflected in the increasing number of scholarly monographs published on the topic. in the book review portion of this issue, we highlight a range of such recent work in a special “digital politics” section. articles this issue includes three additional stimulating articles. the first is a new contribution to the journal’s extended engagement with the impact of the carceral state on race and politics in the united states. michael leo owens and hannah walker take a position contrary to the current wisdom that all involuntary contact with the carceral system has negative implications for political participation. based on a sample drawn from metropolitan chicago, in “the civic voluntarism of ‘custodial citizens’: involun- tary criminal justice contact, associational life, and political participation,” they show that while custodial citizens are less likely to vote or to register to vote even after re-enfranchisement, those involved with civil society organizations are far more likely to participate in non- electoral civic activity. in “partners in crime: an empirical evaluation of the cia rendition, detention, and interrogation program” averell schmidt and kathryn sikkink examine the impact of participation in the cia’s rendition program on human-rights protections in partner states. rejecting a narrow functionalist logic on whether rendition pro- grams are successful in thwarting terrorism, schmidt and sikkink find that in authoritarian partner states, general human-rights abuses increased with participation. the evidence leads to the conclusion that anti-terrorist programs need to be assessed in a fashion that takes into account their broader consequences, including the welfare of citizens in partner countries. in “bounded rationality without bounded democ- racy: nudges, democratic citizenship, and pathways for building civic capacity,” mark edward button considers the possible civic consequences of state interventions that seek to influence individual behaviors in ways that produce predictable outcomes it favors. button contends that this recent behavioral turn in public policy risks missing the importance of the personal capacities and institutional conditions necessary for democratic citizenship. however, he argues that empirical evidence drawn from the study of deliberative democracy shows how liberal societies can address the issue of “bounded rationality” while simulta- neously facilitating civic virtues and upholding individual liberty in the context of a pluralistic society. reflections we have three provocative reflections as well in this issue. in the discipline we are keenly aware of issues of gender, and as in many parts of american life the #metoo movement has had an important impact on leading universities such as harvard, and highly visible journals such as the american journal of political science. apsa commissioned a task force to study sexual harass- ment at its annual meeting, and it issued an influential report on this issue in . while the report found that a majority of members had not experienced sexual harassment at the annual meeting, a substantial minority of women ( %) and a smaller minority of men ( %) had experienced some form of negative behavior of this type. we asked virginia sapiro, one of the coauthors of the report, whose long and distinguished career includes a number of important contributions in the area of gender politics, to reflect on the question of harassment. in “sexual harassment: performances of gender, sexuality, and power,” sapiro draws on her background in political behavior and democratic theory to explain sexual harassment’s intractability through a framework that focuses on its embeddedness in subordinating struc- tures. after discussing the problem through the lenses of public opinion, law, public policy, and performative theory, she proposes a normative standard of “anti-sub- ordination” to identify and respond to issues of harassment in a consistent and consequential fashion. the second reflection contributes to our understand- ing of the current wave of democratic backsliding plaguing a number of world regions, none more perhaps than central europe. in “democratic backsliding and academic freedom in hungary,” zsolt enyedi, a professor of political science and the pro-rector for hungarian affairs at central european university (ceu), explores the impact of democratic backsliding on academic freedom perspectives on politics from the editors | digital politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in viktor orbán’s hungary. the text not only provides a first-hand account of what has transpired at ceu, but discusses how the defense of academic freedom is a defense of freedom more generally, and how universities and academics need to step up and play a critical role in fighting for it. the issue of democratic erosion is also considered in the review section, with a wide-ranging symposium on steven levitsky and daniel ziblatt’s recent influential book, how democracies die, which became a new york times best seller. contributions to the symposium come from sheri berman, valerie bunce, william connolly, katherine cramer, christopher sebastian parker, and aníbal pérez-liñán. our last reflection is less contemporary, but no less important. recently, comparative historical work on the origins of democracy has reevaluated the role of religion and its development in that process. in “the ecclesiastical roots of representation and consent,” jørgen møller argues that discussions of the emergence of representative institutions in the medieval period neglect the emergence of representation and consensual rule in the catholic church. such practices later diffused into the secular realm. this insight sheds further light on why representative forms of government first arose and spread throughout the latin west. final thoughts issue ( ) concludes our first calendar year at the helm of the journal. it has been a highly educative experience for us on the state of the discipline and its practitioners. it really feels like a privilege. the volume for is shaping up in interesting ways. issue ( ) will feature kathleen thelen’s presidential address and a special section on qualitative methods. that will be followed in ( ) by our special issue on “trump: causes and consequences” and a special section on “celebrity and politics,” guest-edited by board member samantha majic, will follow in the second half of the year. notes bartlett and gluckman . cunningham . sapiro and campbell , . references bartlett, tom and nell gluckman. . “she left harvard. he got to stay.” the chronicle of higher education, february . available at https://www. chronicle.com/interactives/harvard-harassment, accessed august , . cunningham, rachel. . “msu professor investigated for sexual misconduct, resigns from journal.” the michigan daily, may . available at https://www. michigandaily.com/section/academics/msu-professor- and-um-researcher-accused-sexual-misconduct-resigns- journal, accessed august , . sapiro, virginia and david campbell. . draft report on the apsa survey on sexual harassment at annual meetings. committee on professional ethics, rights, and freedoms. american political science association. available at https://www.apsanet.org/ portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual % harassment% report% final.pdf?ver - - - - , accessed august , . december | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/harvard-harassment https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/harvard-harassment https://www.michigandaily.com/section/academics/msu-professor-and-um-researcher-accused-sexual-misconduct-resigns-journal https://www.michigandaily.com/section/academics/msu-professor-and-um-researcher-accused-sexual-misconduct-resigns-journal https://www.michigandaily.com/section/academics/msu-professor-and-um-researcher-accused-sexual-misconduct-resigns-journal https://www.michigandaily.com/section/academics/msu-professor-and-um-researcher-accused-sexual-misconduct-resigns-journal https://www.apsanet.org/portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual% harassment% report% final.pdf?ver= - - - - https://www.apsanet.org/portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual% harassment% report% final.pdf?ver= - - - - https://www.apsanet.org/portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual% harassment% report% final.pdf?ver= - - - - https://www.apsanet.org/portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual% harassment% report% final.pdf?ver= - - - - https://www.apsanet.org/portals/ /journals/apsa% ethicscommitteesexual% harassment% report% final.pdf?ver= - - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core statement of mission and procedures perspectives on politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science pro- fession and between the profession and the broader schol- arly and reading publics. such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. at the same time, perspectives seeks to promote a complemen- tary form of broad public discussion and synergistic under- standing within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community. perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere, publicizing important scholarly topics, ideas, and innovations, linking scholarly authors and readers, and pro- moting broad refl exive discussion among political scien- tists about the work that we do and why this work matters. perspectives publishes work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: research articles: as a top-tier journal of political sci- ence, perspectives accepts scholarly research article sub- missions and publishes the very best submissions that make it through our double-blind system of peer review and revision. the only thing that differentiates perspectives research articles from other peer-reviewed articles at top journals is that we focus our attention only on work that in some way bridges subfi eld and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scien- tists about matters of consequence. this typically means that the excellent articles we publish have been extensively revised in sustained dialogue with the editor—me—to address not simply questions of scholarship but questions of intellectual breadth and readability. “refl ections” are more refl exive, provocative, or pro- grammatic essays that address important political science questions in interesting ways but are not necessarily as systematic and focused as research articles. these essays often originate as research article submissions, though sometimes they derive from proposals developed in con- sultation with the editor in chief. unlike research 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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core microsoft word - leigh gilmore forum .docx title he said/she said: truth-telling and #metoo author professor leigh gilmore publication forum: university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture & the arts issue number issue date autumn publication date / / editors vicki madden and maria elena torres-quevedo forum claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in any such media current or later developed. the author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. any latter publication shall recognise forum as the original publisher. 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture and the arts issue | autumn 	 forum | issue 	 he said/she said: truth-telling and #metoo professor leigh gilmore wellesley college	 "he said/she said: truth-telling and #metoo" analyses how the conversation about sexual violence changed when millions of women worldwide raised their voices to say “me too.” it historicizes the #metoo movement within feminist activism in communities of colour around sexual assault advocacy and in relation to anita hill's testimony in that clarence thomas sexually harassed her. the #metoo moment offers a clear representation of the scale of sexual violence and presents a vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness through the power of truth-telling. leigh gilmore argues that truth-telling is dynamic and that survivor speech in the form of #metoo has disrupted the routine minimization of women's accounts of harm into the "he said/she said" pattern. in the middle of october , the conversation about sexual violence changed when millions of women worldwide raised their voices to say “me too.” in response to allegations of sexual abuse in hollywood, including serial predatory behaviour by producer harvey weinstein, actor alyssa milano reawakened the power of a simple phrase: “me too.” the #metoo movement did not come out of nowhere. in african american activist tarana burke started the #metoo movement as part of a grassroots organization supporting women and girls of colour who are victims of sexual assault. this simple phrase has previously been shared privately between survivors of sexual assault and their advocates. #metoo acknowledges the power of shared experience and the identification it fosters as the basis for empathy. #metoo, with and without the hashtag, was shared by million facebook users in the first hours after alyssa milano’s october th tweet. for many, this was the first time they had ever spoken out about sexual violence in a public forum. it represented the first time others realized the sheer number of those whose life histories included sexual violence. the #metoo moment represents a vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness. those who speak and those who hear are transformed into a new relation through the power of truth telling. those who were silenced spoke, witnessing their voices amplified by the collective force of millions. those who had not previously been aware became witnesses not only to sexual violence, but also to the ways in which they contribute to systems that enable sexual violence to persist. i have been writing about self-representation and vulnerable subjects for long enough to suspect that the new openness to survivor testimony represented in the #metoo moment might be brief. previous episodes of tolerance to survivor testimony, as with incest survivors in the s, established a pattern of initial curiosity mixed with the possibility of empathy that quickly led to skepticism. too soon, scandal arises along with cries of false accusation and worries about due process, hastening the collapse of further widespread conversation. testimonial moments are always vulnerable to being derailed when new subjects encounter old judgments in the arena of truth-telling. longstanding patterns of doubt and discrediting are easily revived, so i gave it a week, maybe two, before the window forum | issue 	 would slam shut. i hoped that would be long enough to raise new awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual violence in women’s lives, to move the conversation beyond hollywood, to catalyse a widespread discussion about power, gender, work, and race that started and then stalled in in the u.s. when clarence thomas was seated on the supreme court and anita hill’s powerful testimony of how he had sexually harassed her when she worked at the eeoc was silenced. instead, the conversation is continuing. from hollywood to washington to silicon valley, from academia to athletics and the media, powerful men are losing prestige, jobs, and the air of impunity that previously encircled them. women and men in the u.s. are learning to speak in new ways about sexual violence and abuses of power. in any testimonial moment, it is essential to ask: how are the dynamics of truth-telling and gender shifting? men have long been able to invoke the ‘he said/she said’ tactic when accused of sexual abuse or harassment. doing so places the thumb of doubt on every woman’s side of the scale of justice. it worked for clarence thomas against anita hill. he said/she said gives any man an outsized ability to smear any particular woman’s credibility, because women are routinely doubted in a way that is not true of plaintiffs in other kinds of criminal cases. in part that’s because people believe that they simply want to give both sides of an argument equal weight and that such even-handedness is a hallmark of justice. but as salutary as such a belief is, it does not square with the application of justice to victims of sexual harassment in virtually every kind of work place and to victims of sexual assault, especially the most vulnerable: indigenous women, women of colour, young people, and trans people. scales of justice tip toward the empowered, not only in the outcomes produced, but also in the attribution of doubt to victims of sexual violence. woven into the application of justice is a cultural bias that says women are not as reliable as men, that they lie about sexual violence, “cry rape” when they regret sex, or just don’t understand that boys have to be boys sometimes. he said/she said thrives in the presence of unequal power, unequal credibility, and unequal doubt. importantly — and this accounts for some of the staying power of this public conversation — by amplifying the collective power of survivor speech, the “me too” movement dilutes the threat of retaliation against any individual woman. #metoo disrupts he said/she said. the pattern of centring the discussion on a single act of sexual assault or harassment has been replaced by a flow of allegations against numerous perpetrators. the scale has altered. even when one man is the focus, there are many, many other men who have been accused in reliable and verifiably sourced stories in credible journalism. we do not see the pattern of an array of attorneys and other enablers of an accused man facing off against a single woman, as we did with anita hill, where a lone woman is isolated in her accusation and suffers additional abuse in the form of reputational destruction. instead, as more women come forward to offer highly credible accounts against specific men, women’s voices are amplified. the massive number of women sharing #metoo certainly exposed the scale of women’s experiences of sexual abuse, but the generic quality of the hashtag also enabled participation by offering safety in numbers. given the ubiquity of how women are trolled and shamed online, the ability to participate without naming any particular victimizer meant that specific women were not silenced. the powerful act of affiliating as a survivor opened a door for longer, specific accounts to emerge. a few days after alyssa milano’s october #metoo tweet, i was invited onto a call-in radio program to discuss sexual harassment. as women called in with their stories, i was struck by how many of them began, “the first time i was sexually abused …” there was so much forum | issue 	 pain, carried over a lifetime, exacerbated by silencing, that poured into the public square. from youth to maturity, from school to work and home, from entry level to high level management jobs, on swim teams, at church, and just walking home, it is clear that women’s lives are marked by the persistent threat and experience of sexual abuse, as well as retaliation or disbelief if they come forward. the personal stories bear witness to the chronic trauma women carry from the actions of abusers and from the doubt expressed by the people they tell, including the people charged with pursuing justice. the #metoo movement has also made its way into popular culture. for example, the chronic exposure to the pervasive presence of sexual violence in women’s everyday lives was recently highlighted in a saturday night live skit entitled “welcome to hell,” that depicted the façade of femininity as a candy-coloured fantasy scape in which women look permanently girlish with their lip gloss, ponytails, and blank stares, but sing about the ubiquity of sexual violence in the “hell” that men are now shocked to learn about in the #metoo moment. in a sing-song voice, host saoirse ronan ventriloquizes the male complaint about having the truth of sexual violence unmasked — “now house of cards is ruined/and that really sucks” — and introduces in the collective voice of “us” what is ruined for women: “well, here's a list of stuff that's ruined for us” — as the female cast sings this list: “parking/and walking/and uber/and ponytails/bathrobes/and night-time/and drinking/and hotels/and vans.” the litany of what is ruined for women is a list of triggers so interwoven into daily life that literally no place is free from reference to the pervasiveness of risk and inclusive of women’s required and habitual adjustment to it. as this skit suggests, the #metoo movement paved the way for exposing and articulating everyday sexual violence in the lives of women. it is hardly an accident that the persistence of “me too” is rooted within the current political climate in the u.s. we can’t underestimate the impact of the election of president trump, a man who had bragged about sexual assault, and whose stalking of hillary clinton in the “nasty woman” debate shook many. the women’s march and the scale of global, voluntary assembly the day after his inauguration were signs of how angry women are about a culture that allows sexual abuse to continue without holding perpetrators accountable. along with providing a forum to voice women’s anger, the #metoo moment has initiated a new moment of accountability. one wonders if it will reach the white house. abuse interrupts women’s careers, harms our health, and shatters our faith in institutions. as i argue in tainted witness: why we doubt what women say about their lives, having survivor speech ruled permanently under suspicion, permanently at odds with the truth creates a pervasive and persistent culture of doubt. the blunting of he said/she said is a powerful step forward for women. but it is a movement with more to do. many of the people in the spotlight, both abusers and victims, have been white celebrities or public figures. he said/she said must be disrupted for women of colour, too, with histories of feminist advocacy and organising centred in discussions of sexual violence. further, the environments in which male abuse of power flourishes must be exposed as the same environments in which racism and homophobia persist. as the #metoo movement makes clear, truth-telling is dynamic. it often arises within some enabling constraint related to rules of evidence or judgment, or comes into view as a social relation tied forum | issue 	 to an institution, like the law or a work culture with its own norms of behaviour. rather than standing alone and apart, confirmable in its accuracy, observable by all, truth also often takes the form of ethical promise. truth is what we pledge to another and, in this way, creates a bond through its performance. truth-telling entails doing, but it creates the possibilities of undoing, including undoing those who speak truth to power and the grounds of credibility on which they stand. to tell the truth is to profess a fidelity on which one can rely. but as a matter of law, truth-telling requires interpretation of the person giving testimony. when evidence is presented — a weapon, for example, a photograph of a scene, or of bodily injury — it cannot speak in its own voice. but when testimony is evidence, when the witness speaks in their own voice, interpretation is informed by bias about who can tell the truth, who is prone to lie, and about what. the millions of survivors are showing how those denied access to the self- possession of the first person can enter the social field of representation to bear witness to sexual violence. new witnesses emerge as credible in new configurations of power and within shifting forums of judgment. social media has democratized survivor speech and because news and entertainment media are so fully enmeshed, celebrity reporters are now covering sexual violence and raising consciousness about power and coercion. currently, we are all tasked with understanding metoo as a form of witness. i wonder how much truth we will allow ourselves to hear. notes 	https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html https://thewalrus.ca/after-metoo-the-fear-of-failure/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-more-than- -million-facebook-posts-comments-reactions- -hours/ in tainted witness ( ), i argue that anita hill’s testimony in inaugurated a new era of doubting women in public. 																																																													 forum | issue 	 author biography leigh gilmore is the author of tainted witness: why we doubt what women say about their lives (columbia up ); the limits of autobiography: trauma and testimony (cornell up ); autobiographics: a feminist theory of women’s self-representation (cornell up ); and a co- editor of autobiography and postmodernism (u mass p ). her articles on life writing, feminist theory, law, trauma, testimony, and graphic narrative appear in signs, feminist studies, women’s studies quarterly, biography, a/b: auto/biography studies, profession, prose studies, law & literature, and american imago, among others, and in numerous collections. along with elizabeth marshall, she is co-author of girls in crisis: girlhoods and social justice in life narrative and contemporary comics (fordham up forthcoming). she has been professor of english at the ohio state university and dorothy cruikshank backstrand chair of women’s and gender studies at scripps college, and has held visiting appointments at uc berkeley, uc santa cruz, northeastern university, harvard divinity school, and brown university. she is currently distinguished visiting professor of women’s and gender studies at wellesley college. she writes for the online journalism platform the conversation and has appeared as a guest analyst on sexual harassment and the #metoo campaign on the pbs news hour, national public radio, and boston globe, among other outlets. romeo and juliet by the oregon shakespeare festival (review) elizabeth e. tavares shakespeare bulletin, volume , number , spring , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article access provided for user 'pkirwan' at jun : gmt with no institutional affiliation https://doi.org/ . /shb. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /shb. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ performance reviews the through-line of the tragedy of ophelia’s situation: manipulated by her father and his employers; spurned by her lover; said lover eventually murdering said father. duffin demonstrated an astonishing commitment to the role—even in the display of full-frontal nudity in act four. yet this moment treaded a very fine line between bravery and gratuitousness, given that the display of nudity has so often been used as a short-hand embodiment of ophelia’s madness in recent productions. one wonders, in any case, when she will get her own turn at hamlet. ophelia’s nudity was symptomatic of the ways in which the gender politics of this production aligned with recent worrying trends in pro- ductions of hamlet. during the nunnery scene, hamlet pushed ophelia backwards onto a large table, peeling her legs apart as he knelt between them. there has been a tendency in recent hamlets to illustrate ham- let’s behavior towards ophelia through physical and sexual assault, even though there is no textual basis for this, and performing this scene in this manner felt similarly invasive and unnecessary here. the casting of negga, a female ethiopian-irish actor, in the central masculine role of the west- ern canon, was a significant one, and thus to see tropes of masculinist vio- lence reprised uncritically here was especially disappointing. in the wake of the #wakingthefeminists movement that has dominated discussions of irish theater in recent years, not to mention the #metoo era, it is ever more important that theaters recognize and address the impact of these reproductions of sexual violence. despite this, farber’s production at the gate was symptomatic of how recent irish shakespeares have sought to experiment with staging traditions and conventions in both irish theater and shakespeare performance, for which it must be commended. n romeo and juliet presented by the oregon shakespeare festival at the allen elizabethan theatre, ashland, oregon. june –october , . directed by dámaso rodríguez. scenic design by efren delgadillo, jr. costume design by leah piehl. lighting design by tom ontiveros. wig design by cherelle d. guyton. music composed by rodolfo ortega. dramaturgy by tiffany ana lópez. movement and intimacy direction by sarah lozoff. fight direction by u. jonathan toppo. with william thomas hodgson (romeo), emily ota ( ju- liet), sara bruner (mercutio), derek garza (tybalt), robin goodrin nordli (nurse), greg watanabe (capulet), amy newman (lady capulet), richard elmore (montague), monique holt (lady montague/apothecary), michael j. hume (friar laurence), christiana clark (prince escalus), armando mc- shakespeare bulletin clain (paris), julian remulla (benvolio), brent hinkley (peter/friar john), lauren modica (gregory), and others. elizabeth e. tavares, pacific university a set of mobile stranding mirrors whirled and rotated between the acts of dámaso rodríguez’s romeo and juliet, which played in the outdoor venue at the oregon shakespeare festival. moved by the performers, they contributed to the fluidity of the continuous action (overlapping entrances with exits) which operated without pauses or black-outs. painted grey to match the theatre facade on the one side while on the other were antique mirrors with ornate frames, the mirrors helped to delineate public and private spaces: marking the private dovetailed sonnet romeo and juliet shared while the ongoing masque was visible in the spaces between; highlighting tybalt’s misplaced vengeance when he alerted lord capulet to the party crashers; and concretizing the garden wall—the oft-forgot additional obstacle both separating and protecting the eponyms’ first declarations of love. such moments were indicative of the rest of the production, juxtaposing period concepts and period text with minimalist design to inform contemporary concerns. for example, the rich diversity of the ensemble made the tragedy of the play more poignant than in my own previous experience. the world of this production offered a very full vision of community identity, such as ability and cultural diversity, including at least five women of color and two actors who were differently abled. as gregory, lauren modica, a little person, was fully incorporated into complex and fully choreographed fight scenes (true too of her work in the festival’s recently completed henriad, reviewed in sb . and . ). meanwhile, monique holt signed all her lines in american sign language as lady capulet and the apothecary. as in other asl-sensitive performances, this can run the risk of siloing off certain characters. pleasingly, the production thoroughly integrated the asl-speaker by having all of the characters occasionally sign their dialogue whether or not holt was onstage. those occasions were usually moments of frustration, inarticulation, or when a character desired to express the breadth of an emotion. mercutio and the prince were both played by women as women, while other characters were played by women as men. the presence of so many different kinds of body in different kinds of role allowed the play to speak to a wide range of human experience. in all other aspects of concept and design, this production refresh- ingly eschewed the premise that relatability can only be cultivated one- performance reviews dimensionally; which is to say, by seeing characters that look like oneself. the presentation of the ensemble primed the audience for this particular horizon of expectation: the performance opened with the entire cast en- tering the faux-elizabethan outdoor playhouse wearing matched white, floor-length hooded cloaks. they each took a line of the prologue rather than invent a figure for its delivery, and then took seats on makeshift benches ringing the stage. at each speaker’s first entrance (that is, when they first spoke), they cast off their cloak rather than coming from off- stage. it is a technique rodríguez has used before, as in the opening gambit of street carolers communing over a garbage fire to begin artists repertory theatre’s hit production a civil war christmas back in . making explicit that the actors are drawn from a world outside that of the play—contemporary us society—invited audiences to participate in the imaginative construction of the performance experience. in keeping with this overarching aesthetic principle were the hip and coherent choices in material design. leah piehl’s costume design was, frankly, delicious, offering a range of italian renaissance colors, patterns, and fabrics. all body types received detailed attention aimed at reflecting cuts currently tending on major runways. this meant that the shoes— opting for a chic ankle-cut boot rather than the stereotypical calf-height of robin hood and pirate period dramas—were both on-trend and on- period. in so doing, the syncretism of the costuming mirrored a crucial ensemble in romeo and juliet, dir. dámaso rodríguez. oregon shakespeare festival, . photo by jenny graham, courtesy of the oregon shakespeare festival. shakespeare bulletin sea-change marked by the play, reflecting as it does sixteenth-century england’s preoccupations with the merits of humanist individualism in the wake of long-term communally-anchored identity. in contrast to these period-sensitive yet individually flattering costume choices were the lighting elements incorporated into the set design by efren delgadillo, jr. and tom ontiveros. like something out of a dan flavin art installation, the torches and candelabra used to mark space were made of a translucent plastic. two windows parallel to the musicians’ loft were tastefully backlit with coordinating colors to mark in whose home, montague or capulet, the scene was taking place. they provided visual contrast to the sumptuousness of the costumes, asking playgoers to focus on the bodies in performance rather than their accoutrements. for example, the bed in which romeo and juliet exchange lines of carpe diem was not dripping with gauzy lace, but rather its four posts were made of fluorescent tubes of light, giving the scene an intimacy not available under a traditional spotlight. it also provided that moment with a sense of gender-neutrality, as if a bed they both truly shared rather than romeo’s incursion into juliet’s childhood room. i was lucky to see the production in early september: a number of per- formances had been cancelled due to the smoke coming from the nearly sixty fires blazing in northern california and oregon. it was a rare case to see the sensitively lit production under a moonless night, allowing juliet to speak directly to the open air as she plans to cut romeo out in little stars. alongside this environmental literalism was another lighting choice at which i audibly gasped when revealed: a backlit scrim on which was projected a close-up of the moon’s surface was revealed above the balcony for that infamous scene. the exaggerated moon here, with no actual moon to compete with, showcased the same verticality of performance the rose had been newly available to offer at first performances of this particular play. with three levels of activity available and friar laurence ascending on a grassy path by way of a large tomb trap, the scale of the experience of these actors seemed to stretch well outside this western wooden o. the thoughtful coherence of the production’s design was matched by a detailed attention to the script. to my ears, no moments of text, no matter how difficult, were thrown away. for example, at mercutio’s death, romeo genuinely didn’t think his friend had been seriously injured when he said “the hurt cannot be much” ( . . ). this is in stark contrast to a dense performance history of that line being used to comfort mercutio on death’s door rather than to cultivate romeo’s naivety and general sense of shock. likewise, dramaturge tiffany ana lópez opted for the performance reviews quarto version of juliet’s balcony speech, preferring “that which we call by any other word” rather than “name,” commonly used in films, from the quarto ( . . ). this seemed to align with a core question of the production suggested by the pre-show preface, in which playgoers were asked to consider how communication, or lack thereof, plays a role in the lovers’ fate. while certainly this textual choice and the inclusion of asl resonated with that concern, little of the rest of the production was similarly in- vested in developing audiences’ empathy with those society casts as out- siders. there were so many other rich choices that pulled me in different interpretive directions. the oft-cut scene of banter in which mercutio and the boys are looking for romeo, while he chooses to hide from them in order to pursue juliet, posed questions of male camaraderie and ties beyond kinship. once mercutio was slain, romeo wore his friend’s black cape for the rest of play, allowing the prop to accrue new meaning as well as mark the play’s tonal transition into tragedy. while both decisions were thoughtful and fully considered, these emphases were not backed up by anything elsewhere in the production that would support an inter- pretation invested in male bonding. rather than a mark of incoherence, however, this disconnect between design and script reinforced (perhaps unintentionally) the central concern of the production: two communities, both rich and fully realized, refusing to communicate and so utterly failing those who would be their future. n the duchess of malfi presented by the royal shakespeare company at the swan theatre, stratford-upon-avon. march –august , . directed by maria aberg. designed by naomi dawson. lighting design by natasha chivers. music composed by orlando gough and directed by david ridley. sound design by claire windsor. with joan iyiola (the duchess of malfi), alexander cobb (ferdinand), chris new (the cardinal), nicolas tennant (bosola), paul woodson (antonio), greg barnett (delio), amanda hadingue (cariola), aretha ayeh ( julia), will brown (roderigo/executioner), ashley gayle (silvio), richard hurst (grisolan/executioner), jeff alexander (doctor), and others. meghan c. andrews, lycoming college john webster’s the duchess of malfi is not an inherently happy, crowd- pleasing play. yet while maria aberg’s modern-dress production captured _ _ _article .. b american society for mass spectrometry, doi: . /s - - - j. am. soc. mass spectrom. ( ) : y research article mechanistic and kinetic study of singlet o oxidation of methionine by on-line electrospray ionization mass spectrometry fangwei liu, wenchao lu, xunlong yin, jianbo liu department of chemistry and biochemistry, queens college and the graduate center of the city university of new york, queens, ny , usa abstract. we report a reaction apparatus developed to monitor singlet oxygen ( o ) reactions in solution using on-line esi mass spectrometry and spectroscopy mea- surements. o was generated in the gas phase by the reaction of h o with cl , detected by its emission at nm, and bubbled into aqueous solution continuously. o concentrations in solution were linearly related to the emission intensities of airborne o , and their absolute scales were established based on a calibration using , -anthracene dipropionate dianion as an o trapping agent. products from o oxidation were monitored by uv-vis absorption and positive/negative esi mass spectra, and product structures were elucidated using collision-induced dissocia- tion-tandem mass spectrometry. to suppress electrical discharge in negative esi of aqueous solution, methanol was added to electrospray via in-spray solution mixing using theta-glass esi emitters. capitalizing on this apparatus, the reaction of o with methionine was investigated. we have identified methionine oxidation intermediates and products at different ph, and measured reaction rate constants. o oxidation of methionine is mediated by persulfoxide in both acidic and basic solutions. persulfoxide continues to react with another methionine, yielding methionine sulfoxide as end-product albeit with a much lower reaction rate in basic solution. density functional theory was used to explore reaction potential energy surfaces and establish kinetic models, with solvation effects simulated using the polarized continuum model. combined with our previous study of gas-phase methionine ions with o , evolution of methionine oxidation pathways at different ionization states and in different media is described. keywords: on-line esi mass spectrometry, in-spray solution mixing, reaction kinetics, methionine, singlet oxygen, persulfoxide, sulfoxide, photooxidation, dft-pcm calculation received: may /revised: /accepted: july /published online: august introduction methionine (met) is one of the five amino acids (the otherfour are tryptophan, tyrosine, histidine, and cysteine) that are most susceptible to the attack by reactive oxygen species (ros) [ – ]. oxidation of met residues in proteins produces sulfoxides (meto) [ – ]. under extremely strong oxidative conditions, meto can be irreversibly oxidized to sulfone (metoso) [ , ]. it is well accepted that hydrophobic contacts via the met residues contribute to protein stability. moreover, met has the propensity to interact with aromatic residues, and the resulting met sulfur-aromatic motif provides additional stabilization over hydrophobic interactions [ ]. oxi- dation of met to meto decreases hydrophobicity [ ] and disrupts both dispersion and electrostatic interactions present in the sulfur-aromatic motif [ ]. such oxidation-induced post-transla- tional modifications may cause proteins to change conforma- tions and lose functions [ – ], and are related to pathophysio- logical conditions such as cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases [ , ]. on the other hand, surface-exposed met resi- dues act as endogenous antioxidants or bmolecular bodyguards^ under oxidative stress, protecting other residues important to the functions of proteins [ , ]. this is due to the fact that cells are capable of reducing meto back to met, catalyzed by met sulfoxide reductases (msrs) [ – ]. the reversible met oxida- tion is also identified as a trigger for the functions of two protein electronic supplementary material the online version of this article (doi: . /s - - - ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. correspondence to: jianbo liu; e-mail: jianbo.liu@qc.cuny.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - kinases camkii and transcription factor hypt (hocl specific) [ , ]. consequently, the contents of met and meto in cells can be used to indicate the extent of ros generation, and the activities of oxidant scavengers and msrs. oxidation kinetics of met to meto has been investigated in the presence of various ross [ , – ], of which o -mediated kinetics was mostly measured using photooxidation methods [ , ]. in these experiments, o was generated via energy transfer from the triplet excited state of a sensitizer to o (type ii photo- sensitization) [ ]. photooxidation of met [ , – ] depends on various parameters (e.g., ph, o concentration, solvent composi- tion, buffer ions, and combination of light and sensitizers). deter- mination of o -mediated oxidation kinetics was also challenged by the competition between radical- and o -mediated reactions, and the interaction between substrates and excited sensitizers. to avoid the interferences in photooxidation experiments, one approach is to use heterogeneous photosensitization in which sensitizers are isolated from reaction solution and the sensitizer-generated o is delivered through space [ ] or via bubbles [ ]. we have adopted another approach based on a chemical reaction to produce radical-free, bclean^ o . coupled with ion-beam-scattering methods and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (esi ms), we have investigated o -mediated oxidation dynamics of met in the gas phase at different ionization and hydration states (including [met + h]+(h o) - and [met – h] –(h o) - ) [ , ]. study of the o reactions with dehydrated [met + h] +/[met – h]– has allowed us to identify the intrinsic interactions between met and o ; and that of the o reactions with hydrated [met + h]+(h o) - /[met – h] –(h o) - has enabled us to recognize the effects of individual solvent molecules. on the one hand, gas-phase findings provide fundamentals in understanding the oxidation mechanism; on the other hand, they suffice as valu- able references in examining specific and continuum solvent effects, and it will be interesting to see how the gas-phase findings can be extrapolated to solution models. this prompted us to look at o oxidation of met in aqueous solution, aimed at investigating the resemblance and evolution of reaction path- ways and products from the gas phase to aqueous continuum. over recent years, applications of esi ms have spread rapidly in monitoring solution-phase reaction kinetics and probing the course of chemical transformations [ – ]. the fast growth of such applications relies on several exclusive advantages of esi ms: ( ) the esi process is simple, bclean^ and bsoft^, where no harsh conditions are applied to the sample solution being transferred into mass spectrometer. as a result, weakly bound species may be detected in the gas phase; ( ) on- line esi ms is a rapid and sensitive approach that detects multiple products simultaneously at very low concentrations (nanomolar), and provides chances for capturing short-lived intermediates, which might not survive the normal handling for off-line analysis; ( ) each mass spectrum represents a snapshot of an on-going reaction, and kinetics can be measured through continuous analyses of the reaction mixture. however, monitoring o reaction kinetics in solution puts severe demands on an on-line esi ms experiment, which warrants careful consideration in the design of the corresponding apparatus and methodologies. first, the reaction apparatus is continuously pumped in order to replace quenched o in solu- tion with fresh o ; consequently, esi ms has to sample solu- tion from a low-pressure reaction system. secondly, we need to record esi ms of aqueous sample in both positive and negative modes. note that water has a high surface tension that requires high esi spray potentials. the high spray potentials may lead to the presence of conventional corona discharges at the esi emit- ter. for otherwise equivalent conditions, a breakdown due to a corona discharge occurs at significantly lower field strength in the case of the negative polarity than in the case of the positive one, and the esi operation becomes impossible without dis- charge suppression [ , ]. however, the method to be used for discharge suppression should pose inappreciable interference with the aqueous sample. thirdly, the sample transfer time must be minimized so that the reaction progress can be tracked promptly. to meet these specifications, a new on-line esi ms and spectroscopy monitoring system was developed in the pres- ent work. capitalizing on this apparatus, we have measured the reaction kinetics between met and o in different ph solutions. the results were interpreted with the aid of electronic structure calculations. combined with the recently reported gas-phase dynamics of bare/hydrated met ions with o [ , ], a sound understanding has been obtained for met oxidation. experimental and computational details o generation, detection, and reaction o was generated by the reaction of h o + cl + koh → o (~ % Χ Σg – and ~ % a Δg) + kcl + h o [ , , ]. as shown in figure , ml of m koh ( %, alfa aesar, ward hill, ma, usa) was added to ml of wt% aqueous h o (alfa aesar) in a sparger ( ), which was immersed in a chiller held at – °c. the resulting mixture was degassed quickly. then, . sccm of cl (≥ . %, sigma-aldrich, st. louis, mo, usa) was mixed with sccm of he (research grade, t.w. smith, brooklyn, ny, usa) and bubbled through the h o /koh slush. all of the cl reacted with h o . the gaseous products passed through a cold trap ( , kept at – °c) to remove water vapor. only o , o and he remained in the downstream gas. the concentration of o in the gas was determined by measuring o emission (a Δg → Χ Σg –, ν = – ) [ ] at nm in an optical emission cell ( ). emission from the cell was collected using a plano-convex lens, passed through an optical chopper (srs mod- el sr , sunnyvale, ca, usa) and -nm bandwidth interfer- ence filter centered at nm, and focused by another plano- convex lens into a thermoelectrically cooled ingaas detector ( , newport model , irvine, ca, usa) coupled with a lock-in amplifier (srs model sr , sunnyvale, ca, usa). o (mixed with o and he) was then bubbled into the aqueous solution in a reaction vessel ( ). during the experiment, the entire apparatus was continuously pumped with a mechanical pump, and the f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine pressure of the apparatus was maintained at τ (slightly above water vapor pressure at room temperature) through a pressure relay ( , cole-parmer ow, vernon hills, il, usa). the pumping serves several purposes: reducing the residence time of o in the gas phase and therefore minimizing its wall quenching and self-quenching, and removing quenched o and replenishing fresh o to the reaction solution. since a significant amount of water evaporated from at the low operating pressure, extra water was replenished into through an ismatec reglo-cpf rotary piston pump (glattbrugg, switzerland) ( ) at a precisely con- trolled flow rate. to check the reactivity of aqueous substrates towards o / he, control experiments were performed under the same con- ditions as those for o , except that cl was replaced by o (t.w. smith, brooklyn, ny, usa) gas at the same flow rate. on-line sampling for spectroscopy and esi ms our monitoring system includes a uv-vis spectrometer and an esi tandem mass spectrometer. absorption and mass spectra were recorded over the course of reactions. as illustrated in figure , the aqueous reaction solution was circulated by a peristaltic pump ( ) through a quartz flow cell ( , starna cells . -q- /z , -cm path length, atascadero, ca, usa). uv-vis absorption was monitored using an ocean optics usb diode array spectrometer ( , dunedin, fl, usa). spectra were recorded at -s intervals using the ocean optics spectrasuite software. to the best of our knowledge, most on-line esi ms ap- proaches sampled reaction solution at a pressure near atmo- spheric or higher, where the solution was delivered to esi by gravity or positive gas pressure [ – ]. however, our reaction system needs to be maintained at a pressure of τ as rational- ized above. therefore, one feature of our sampling system is to transport sample from low-pressure solution to open-air esi, using a sampling loop ( . ml vol.) coupled to a -position switching valve ( ). the valve was controlled by a labview program. for each measurement, the valve was placed in load position for s to fill the loop with reaction solution through , and then switched to injection position for transferring the solution to electrospray. the time lag between sample load and ms measurement is determined by the dead volume (~ . ml) of the transfer line connecting the sampling loop to esi and the sample transfer rate. note that a typical flow rate for esi is μl/min, which would result in far too long delay for kinetic measurements if this rate is used for sample transfer. in a previous on-line esi ms experiment [ ], we adopted cooks and coworkers’ method [ ] by adding a splitter to the sample transfer line, right before esi. the sample was swept to esi under n gas pressure. this configuration allowed for a high sample transfer rate ( . ml/h), and in the meantime delivered only a small fraction of the flow to esi. we were able to reduce the sample transfer time to less than s [ ]. but this method increased the total sample volume needed (by a factor of ~ ) for each measurement. in the present work, we developed another approach to reduce the lag time. the sampling loop was swept by water plug using a syringe pump ( a) at pro- grammed flow rates. for each sampling, the flow rate of a was first set to ml/h. during this duration, the sample was loaded, inserted into the transfer line, and transferred to the esi emitter. after that, the rate of a decreased to . ml/h until the completion of ms measurement. in the positive ion mode, the esi emitter was assembled by gluing the stainless steel hypodermic tubing ( -gauge, . " o.d. × . " i.d. × . ″ length, small parts inc., logansport, in, usa) to the exit (peek tubing, . " o.d. × . " i.d., idex, oak harbor, wa, usa) of , and the total time for sample load and transfer was minimized to less than s. an issue for negative esi of aqueous solution is electrical discharge. due to the high surface tension of water, its esi onset field strengths are ± . × v/m in positive and negative ion modes, respectively (much higher than those of ± × v/m for methanol) [ ]. unfortunately, for the negative ion mode corona discharge at the stainless steel tip occurred at lower field strength than the esi onset [ ]. as a result, the stainless steel emitter could not be used in negative esi. cassou et al. reported negative nano-esi of water solution by using borosilicate cap- illary with an esi spray potential of – . kv and a -mm distance between the emitter and the counter electrode [ ]. we were not able to achieve stable esi with the same field strength, presumably because of the higher flow rate we used. our approach is to utilize a borosilicate theta-glass capillary ( , figure . schematic depiction of on-line coupling of o gen- eration, detection, and reaction to spectroscopy and esi ms. the configuration of esi is shown for negative ion mode. for positive esi, aqueous solution from sampling loop is directly transferred to an esi needle through peek tubing. ) sparger; ) cold trap; ) optical emission cell; ) ingaas detector; ) reac- tion vessel; ) pressure relay; ) piston pump; ) peristaltic pump; ) quartz flow cell; ) diode array spectrometer; ) - position switching valve; a/b) syringe pump; ) borosilicate theta-glass capillary; a/b) peek tubing; ) peek microtee; and ) platinum wire f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine sutter instrument, novato, ca, usa) as an esi emitter [ – ], and mix aqueous sample solution and methanol (hplc grade, fisher scientific, pittsburgh, pa, usa) at the tip of the emitter so as to lower esi operating potential. aqueous solution and methanol were individually delivered by syringe pumps a and b at a flow rate . and . ml/h, respectively, and directed into the two separated channels within the theta capil- lary through short peek tubing ( a and b, μm i.d. × μm o.d.). the theta capillary was laser-pulled to a tip size of μm i.d. × μm o.d. by a micropipette puller (sutter instrument p- ). a peek microtee ( , . μl dead vol- ume, idex) was inserted to the aqueous sample line, and a platinum wire ( , . " o.d., alfa aesar) was inserted into one stem of to supply the electrical connection (– . kv) for esi. in this in-spray solution mixing, the encounter of aqueous solution and methanol took place at the time when solution reaction was terminated by spray. consequently, interference with aqueous reactions by methanol was minimized, and diffu- sion and turbulence were avoided during fluid mixing. esi ms and collision-induced dissociation-tandem ms measurements a home-built guided-ion-beam tandem mass spectrometer was used for esi ms measurements. the operation, calibration, and data analysis procedures for the mass spectrometer were de- scribed previously [ ]. in brief, the apparatus consists of an ion source, radio frequency (rf) hexapole ion guide, quadrupole mass filter, rf octopole ion guide surrounded by a scattering cell, second quadrupole mass filter, and a pulse-counting de- tector. both quadrupole mass filters use extrel . mm tri-filter rods (extrel cms, pittsburgh, pa, usa) and were operated at . mhz with a detectable m/z range of to . an esi emitter was held at . and – . kv, respectively, for producing positively and negatively charged species from sample solution. charged droplets entered the source chamber of the mass spectrometer through a desolvation capillary (which was heated to °c and held at v for positive ions and – v for negative ones). the distance between the emitter tip and the entrance of the desolvation capillary was cm. liquid droplets underwent desolvation as they passed through the heated capillary, converted to gas-phase ions in the source chamber. a skimmer with an orifice of . mm is located mm from the capillary end, separating the source chamber and the hexapole ion guide. the skimmer was biased at v for positive ions and – v for negative ones. ions were transported into the hexapole at a pressure of mτ, undergo- ing collisional focusing and cooling to k. in conventional esi ms measurements, the first quadrupole mass filter was rendered to an rf-only ion guide, and ions were mass-analyzed by the second quadrupole. in order to identify the structures of product ions, collision- induced dissociation (cid) was performed. the product ions of interest were mass-selected by the first quadrupole, and then injected into the octopole ion guide, which trapped ions in the radial direction. dc bias voltage was applied to the octopole, allowing control of the kinetic energy (elab) of ions in the laboratory frame. elab can be converted to the collision energy (ecol) between ions and collision gas in the center-of-mass frame using ecol = elab × mneutral/(mion + mneutral), where mneutral and mion are the masses of neutral collision gas and ions, respectively [ ]. the octopole runs through the scattering cell filled with xe gas ( . %, spectra gases, stewartsville, nj, usa). the pressure of the cell was controlled using a leak valve and measured by a baratron capacitance manometer (mks model head and signal conditioner, mks instruments, andover, ma, usa). cid was measured at ecol = . , . and . ev with the cell pressure of . mtorr. primary ions and fragment ions were collected by the octopole, and directed to the second quadrupole for mass analysis. electronic structure calculations to aid in reaction mechanism interpretation, density functional theory (dft) electronic structure calculations were performed using gaussian [ ]. all structures were fully optimized at the b lyp/ - +g* level of theory. to take into account the solvation effects for aqueous reactants, transition states (tss), intermediates, and products, we have employed the polarized continuum model (pcm) [ ], which creates solute cavity via a set of overlapping spheres in the dft calculations for all species. the dft-pcm method has been successfully used for probing and reproducing the solution-phase chemistry of o and perox- ides, for example the o oxidation of -thioguanine [ ] and the transformation of -oxoguanine [ ] in water. conformation searching was conducted for all reactants, and their most stable confirmations were used as starting geometries in construction of reaction potential energy surfaces (pess). all of the tss were verified as first-order saddle points, and the vibrational mode with an imaginary frequency corresponds to the associated re- action pathway. all reported reaction energetics include zero- point energies (zpes) and thermal corrections at k, with zpes scaled by a factor of . [ ]. the energy barriers of tss (with respect to reactants) were refined by single-point calcula- tions at b lyp/pcm/aug-cc-pvtz using the b lyp/pcm/ - +g*-optimized reactants and ts geometries. results o concentrations in solution in the experiment, chemically generated o was continuously bubbled into aqueous solution in the reaction vessel. o has a longer lifetime in the interior of bubbles (because of reduced encounters with water) than in bulk solution. after diffusing into the bulk water, o has a lifetime of ~ μs and can travel only ~ nm [ ]. therefore, o reactions occurred both at the gas/ liquid interface of bubbles and in the bulk solution. considering the steady concentration of airborne o (as determined by the o emission intensity, which varied within % over the course of reaction), and the continuous feeding of fresh o into the reaction solution, a quasi-steady-state [ o ] may be assumed for f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine our reaction system as people did for bubbled o in heteroge- neous photosensitization [ ]. in order to validate this assump- tion and determine the average value of [ o ] in solution, two o chemical trappers, , -anthracene dipropionate dianion (adpa, chemodex ltd., st. gallen, switzerland) and uric acid ( %, alfa aesar), were used as calibration compounds. adpa is known to react with o chemically (i.e., without physical quenching), producing endoperoxide via [ + ] cyclo- addition accompanied by bleaching of the absorption band of adpa [ ]. figure a shows absorption changes of adpa along the reaction course. the ph of the adpa solution ( . mm) was maintained at . using borax/naoh buffer. shown in the insert of figure a is the plot of ln(at/a ) versus reaction time, where at and a are the adpa peak absorption (at nm) at different reaction times and time zero, respectively. the observation of a linear relationship between ln(at/a ) and reaction time indicates that consumption of adpa obeys first-order rate law. accordingly, an average [ o ] in solution can be extracted using the reaction rate kr ( . × – m- ⋅s– ) for adpa + o [ ]. during each experiment, emission of airborne o was continuously monitored. figure b presents the correlation between the output of the emission detector and the corre- sponding adpa-calibrated [ o ] in solution. it shows that [ o ] in solution increases linearly with the growth of airborne o emission. the calibration curve crosses the x-axis at ~ mv. this indicates a threshold airborne concentration below which all of the o quenched in bubbling and diffusion before reaching aqueous substrates. in the subsequent experiments, the calibration curve of figure b was used to determine [ o ] in solution. we also used uric acid [ – ] as a chemical trapper to test our reaction setup, and confirmed that o -induced uric acid oxidation follows first-order kinetics (see supplementary figure s in the supporting information). this further supports the pseudo-steady-state assumption for [ o ] in our solution reactions. however, the literature reported kr values for uric acid were based on bleaching of uric acid by photooxidation and did not represent exclusive chemical reactions with o . montaña et al. [ ] reported that both o -dependent and -independent mechanisms were involved in photobleaching of uric acid. kanofsky [ ] and fischer et al. [ ] found that uric acid was able to directly quench sensitizers. rabello et al. [ ] reported consecutive reaction steps for uric acid oxidation depending on sensitizers. for these reasons, the reported kr of uric acid was not used for qualitative determination of [ o ] in our experiment. met oxidation products, mechanism, and kinetics in basic solution we present first the o oxidation results of met in basic solution. the reaction solution (ph = . ) was prepared by adding naoh to . mm met aqueous solution. considering the pk values of met (pka = . and pkb = . ) [ ], deprotonated [met – h]– is the predominant species (i.e., % [met – h]– versus % neutral met) in this solution. major product ions were found at m/z and , corresponding to deprotonated sulfoxide [meto – h]– and its met adduct [meto – h]–-met, respectively. as shown in figure , the intensities of both products increase along the reaction time. note that formation of dehydromethionine [met – h]– was reported in the photooxidation of met at ph – [ ]. but no [met – h]– was observed in our mass spectra. it is possible that the product ions of m/z have contri- bution from doubly charged covalently bound dimer [met – h]–-oo-[met – h]–. we have examined the isotope distribu- tion at m/z , but did not observe obvious contribution from s-containing [met – h]–-oo-[met – h]–. for further verifi- cation, we have carried out cid of the ions m/z with xe. if the ions were from [met – h]–-oo-[met – h]–, singly charged [metoo – h]– would be expected in cid products. however, - . - . . . . . . wavelength (nm) a b so rb a n ce l n ( a t/a ) time (x s) co - -o c o o -o c co - o o emission intensity (mv) [ o ] in s o lu tio n ( x - m ) . . . . . . . (a) (b) figure . (a) uv-vis absorption spectra of adpa over the course of the reaction with o , recorded at ph . the insert shows the plot of ln(at/a ) versus reaction time, where at and a are the absorbance at nm at different times and time zero, respectively; and (b) the linear relationship between the emis- sion intensity of airborne o and the [ o ] in solution deter- mined using adpa trapping f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine no fragment ions were observed in the m/z range higher than at ecol = . – . ev, ruling out this possibility. cid of the product ions m/z with xe produced two fragment ions at m/z and , which confirms that this species is an adduct of a neutral met molecule to [meto – h]–. our initial guess for the structure of [meto – h]–-met was that the met is covalently bonded to [meto – h]– via s(=o)-s (thiosulfinate) or s-o-s linkage [ ]. a grid search was then used to find global minima in their conformation landscapes. each of the torsion angles of met backbones was rotated systematically through ° at ° increments to generate trial staggered confirmations. to our surprise, all of the trial con- formations converged to hydrogen-bonded structures of [meto – h]-⋅⋅⋅met. the most stable conformer lies . kj/mol below the reactants, as shown in scheme . our mass spectra also revealed a trace of ion signals at m/z with no obvious time dependence after its initial rising. we have attributed this species to mainly persulfoxide [metoo – h]–. persulfoxide is a common intermediate in the o oxida- tion of dialkyl sulfide r s. however, persulfoxide readily reacts with a second r s to yield sulfoxide [ ]. the species observed at m/z could be the remaining [metoo – h]–, x x x )s/t n u oc( yti s n et ni n oi m/z t im e (m in) m/z (x ) m/z (x ) m/z product ion [meto - h]- [metoo - h]- [meto - h]- met m/z primary ion [met - h]- (x ) ... reaction time (sec) Σ p ro d u ct s / (r e a ct a n t x [ o ] a ve ) . x . x (a) (b) figure . (a) product mass spectra for met oxidation in ph . solution at different reaction times; and (b) plot of meto � h½ �−½ � met � h½ �−½ � o ½ �ave vs. reaction time t f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine which survived on-line transfer. one complication in the inter- pretation of m/z is that the [met – h]–/ch oh adduct was expected at the same m/z when methanol was added in negative esi. to confirm the presence of [metoo – h]–, we repeated the experiment using ethanol as a supplementary solvent for esi. the peak of m/z was still visible in product mass spectra, verifying formation of [metoo – h]–. in figure a, the contri- bution from [met – h]–/ch oh has been subtracted at m/z . note that an alternative structure for m/z could be sulfone [metoso – h]–. we have excluded this possibility for several reasons. it was reported that formation of sulfone occurs to a much lesser extent in met oxidation [ , ]. based on dft calculations, the reaction enthalpy for formation of [metoso – h]– is – . kj/mol with respect to [met – h]– + o , which is more exothermic than that of [metoo – h]–. [metoso – h]–, if it did form in the reaction, would have been observed in product mass spectra with considerable intensity. however, this is not the case in our measurements. the absence of sulfone could be due to a tight and high transition state ( . kj/mol above the reactants, calculated at b lyp/pcm/ - +g*) for the inter- conversion from [metoo – h]– to [metoso – h]–. to dissect the oxidation mechanism and elucidate the inter- mediacy of [metoo – h]–, we have mapped out the reaction pess using relaxed pes scan at b lyp/ - +g*. solvent ef- fects were simulated using the pcm model. in pes calculations, the following reaction steps were assumed following foote’s sulfide photooxidation mechanism [ ], of which the first step corresponds to formation of a key intermediate persulfoxide, and the with another [met – h]– leading to two sulfoxides. met – h½ �–þ o ⇌ metoo – h½ �– Δhrxn ¼ – : kj=mol ð Þ metoo – h½ �– þ met – h½ �–→ meto – h½ �– Δhrxn ¼ – : kj=mol ð Þ in figure a, the potential energy for the first step is contin- uously monitored while the o moiety is approaching the met sulfur atom. the pes scan continuously varied the distance between s and the bcloser^ oxygen atom of o at a step size of . Å from . Å to . Å until a stable [metoo – h]– structure formed. all coordinates other than r(o-s) were opti- mized at each step. as illustrated in the pes, there are no activation barriers above reactants leading to formation of [metoo – h]–. the reaction initially forms a weakly bound precursor complex with r(o-s) of . Å. this electrostatic interaction-based precursor crosses over a small barrier ts - at r(o-s) of . Å, evolving to a covalently bound product [metoo – h]– ,which locates . kj/mol below the isolated reactants. figure . (a) pes for the reaction of [met - h]– + o → [metoo – h]–, plotted against the distance between the s atom of [met – h]– and the closer o atom of o ; and (b) d pes for the reaction of [metoo – h]– + [met – h]– → [meto – h]–, plotted against the o–o bond length and the distance between the terminal o of [metoo – h]– and the s of [met – h]–. calculations were carried out at b lyp/pcm/ - +g* . . scheme . lowest-lying conformation of hydrogen-bonded [meto – h]-⋅⋅⋅met f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine figure b shows a d pes for the second step reaction along the reaction coordinates r(o-s) and r(o-o). r(o-s) is the distance between the terminal o atom of [metoo – h]– and the s atom of [met – h]–, and r(o-o) is the peroxide bond length of [metoo – h]–. these coordinates were chosen because r(o-s) describes the approach of reactants, while r(o-o) corresponds to the separation into two [meto – h]– products. the pes was fit to nearly points calculated at b lyp/pcm/ - +g*, and we optimized all other coordinates at each point. on this d surface, there is one activation barrier (ts –) located at the bottleneck leading from the reactants to the product well, with r(o-o) ~ . Å, r(o-s) ~ . Å, and an energy of . kj/mol in excess of the reactants. this barrier accounts for the energy required to dissociate peroxy linkage and transfer the terminal o to the s of the approaching [met – h]–. the reaction enthalpy for equation ( ) is calculated to be – . kj/mol. analysis of the pess provides insight into the met oxidation mechanism in basic solution. particularly, it verifies equations ( ) and ( ) as two consecutive elementary steps. both steps are bimolecular reactions, and the second one acts as the rate- limiting step due to the associated high-energy ts –. we therefore conclude that formation of [metoo – h]– is much faster than its subsequent conversion to [meto – h]–. note that [metoo – h]– always presented low abundance in products. as illustrated in the product time profiles of figure , the abundance of [metoo – h]– rose from zero after the initial induction period and then had no obvious change during the major part of the reaction. under these conditions, we made quasi-steady-state approximation (qssa) [ ] for [metoo – h]–, i.e., d metoo − h½ �−½ � dt ¼ k− met − h½ �−½ � o � � −k−− metoo − h½ �−½ � −k− metoo − h½ �−½ � met − h½ �−½ � ¼ ; ð Þ where the rate constants k − and k− − are for the forward and backward reactions of equation ( ), and k − for equation ( ). the reverse direction of equation ( ) represents a fraction of o physical quenching that takes place via decomposition of [metoo – h]–, partially accounting for the reaction inefficien- cy [ ]. [met – h]– does not have an appropriate low-lying excited state to deactivate o by electronic energy transfer, and a charge-transfer quenching mechanism is unlikely due to its large reaction endothermicity [ ]. on the other hand, movement along the pes for [met – h]– + o → [metoo – h]– may bring the persulfoxide into a region near the rapidly rising triplet state pes where intersystem crossing could occur [ ]. a similar physical quenching mechanism was observed in the gas-phase collisions of o with hydrated and dehydrated [met – h]– [ ]. considering equation ( ) is rate-limiting, the steady state concentration of [metoo – h]– implies that a large fraction of [metoo – h]– must decay back to reactants rather than converted to [meto – h]– (i.e., k− −[[metoo −h]−]≫k −[[metoo − h]−][[met − h]−]). we can therefore eliminate k −[[metoo − h]−][[met − h]−] in equation ( ). this leads to a pre-equilibrium for equation ( ) as expressed by equation ( ), where k– is the equilibrium constant. metoo − h½ �−½ � ¼ k − met − h½ �−½ � o ½ � k−− ¼ k− met − h½ �−½ � o � � ð Þ the rate law for formation of [meto – h]– can now be given as d meto − h½ �−½ � dt ¼ k− metoo − h½ �−½ � met − h½ �−½ � ¼ k−k− met − h½ �−½ � o � � ¼ k− met − h½ �−½ � o � � ; ð Þ where k− is the effective rate constant (m– s– ). among the three products ([meto – h]–, [metoo – h]– and [meto – h]– ⋅⋅⋅met), [metoo – h]– is minimal (< . % over a period of min) and can be safely ignored in the total product concentra- tion. [meto – h]-⋅⋅⋅met originates from the secondary reaction of [meto – h]–, and was lumped together with [meto – h]– in calculating the total [meto – h]– concentration. as a result, equation ( ) can be approximated as d meto − h½ �−½ � dt ¼ k− met − h½ �−½ � − meto − h½ �−½ � � � o � � ð Þ and its integrated form as met − h½ �−½ � − meto − h½ �−½ � − met − h½ �−½ � ¼ k− o � � dt ð Þ or meto − h½ �−½ � met − h½ �−½ � o ½ �ave ¼ k− met − h½ �−½ � t ð Þ at the reaction time t, meto − h½ � −½ � met − h½ �−½ � can be measured using the relative abundances of reactant and product intensities in the corresponding mass spectrum. [ o ]ave was averaged over the integration period from to t. as shown in figure b, the plot of meto − h½ �−½ � met − h½ �−½ � o ½ �ave versus t fits into a linear relationship, supporting the proposed mechanistic scheme. the measured value of k− is . × m– ⋅s– . in the above two-step scheme, formation of [meto – h]– can also be viewed as a trimolecular reaction that avoids nearly simultaneous three-body collisions [ ]. assuming k − follows the arrhenius equation with the activation energy e − equal to ts - ( . kj/mol), the overall activation energy ea − for this trimolecular reaction is given by equation ( ) [ ]. since the Δhrxn for the first step is – . kj/mol and the activation f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine energy for the second step is not too high, ea − for this trimolecular reaction becomes negative: e −a ¼ rt dlnk− dt þ rt dlnk − dt ¼ Δhrxn þ e − ¼ − : kj=mol ð Þ met oxidation products, mechanism, and kinetics in acidic solution the oxidation product of met in ph . solution (prepared by adding equimolar hcl to . mm met aqueous solution) was detected at m/z only, and its intensity increased with the reaction time as shown in figure a. this product can be attributed to protonated [meto + h]+ or [met + h]+-oo-[met + h]+. we have performed cid of m/z with xe, and expected that [met + h]+-oo-[met + h]+ would lose a proton in cid. however, no [met + h]+-oo-met was observed in cid, indicating that no [met + h]+-oo-[met + h]+ was formed in the reaction. note that due to the low carboxyl pka of met, the percentile populations of neutral and protonated met in ph . solution are % and %, respectively. as a result, the kinetics at ph . represents the oxidation chemistry of neutral met (in a zwitter- ionic structure), albeit that the reactant and products were protonated in positive esi spray. therefore, the following kinetics discussion focuses on neutral met. similar as its deprotonated counterpart, we may propose two steps for oxi- dation of neutral met. their reaction enthalpies were calculated at the b lyp/pcm/ - +g* level of theory: met þ o ⇌metoo Δhrxn ¼ − : kj=mol ð Þ metoo þ met→ meto Δhrxn ¼ − : kj=mol ð Þ concerning the reaction enthalpies for formation of persulfoxide and sulfoxide, the neutral system has only mod- erate changes compared to [met – h]–. more pronounced effects are observed in their pess and associated activation barriers. unlike the reaction of [met – h]– + o (see figure a), the pes scan for met + o (see figure a) results in a covalently bound persulfoxide metoo barrierlessly, with- out formation of a weakly bound precursor. metoo has the o moiety sandwiched between the ammonium group and the sulfur atom. metoo has a zwitterionic character [ ], so the proton of the ammonium group is shared between the n and the terminal o, rendering metoo an bs-hydroperoxide^ compound. when another met approaches metoo, the latter transfers an o atom to met. as the o–o bond ruptures and the new o–s bond forms, two molecules of meto are produced. the pes for this process is scanned in figure b along the distance between the terminal o of metoo and the s of met from . Å to . Å at a decrement of . Å each step. a transition state ts is located at r(o-s) of . Å and r(o-o) of . Å. at ts , the o–o bond rupture is accompanied by the proton shuttling back to the amino group. ts lies . kj/mol above the reactants (for comparison, ts is . kj/mol lower than the corre- sponding ts – for [metoo – h]– + [met – h]–). the overall activation energy ea for met + o → meto is – . kj/mol according to equation ( ). based on the similarities between the pess for o with deprotonated and neutral met, we conclude that both systems follow similar kinetics, and have applied the pre-equilibrium assumption to equation ( ) and qssa to metoo. as a result, the rate law for formation of meto can be written as d meto½ � dt ¼ k metoo½ � met½ � ¼ k k− k met½ � o � � ¼ kk met½ � o � � ¼ k met½ � o � � ð Þ and its integrated form meto½ � met½ � o ½ �ave ¼ k met½ � t ð Þ where k and k- are the rate constants for the forward and x x x m/z t ime ( min) product ion [met + h]+-o m/z (x ) primary ion [met + h]+ m/z (a) [met + h]+(h o) m/z reaction time (sec) p ro d u ct / ( r e a ct a n t x [ o ] a ve ) x (b) ([met + h]+) (h o) m/z io n i n te n si ty ( co u n ts /s ) figure . (a) product mass spectra for met oxidation in ph . solution at different reaction times; and (b) plot of meto½ � met½ � o ½ �ave vs. reaction time t f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine backward reactions of equation ( ), k is the rate constant for equation ( ), k is the equilibrium constant for equation ( ), k is the effective rate constant for formation of meto from met + o , and [met] is the initial met concentration. note that to facilitate comparisons, all the corresponding rate con- stants, equilibrium constants, and barriers for different ioniza- tion states have been assigned identical names, but with b+/–^ superscripts to indicate ionization states. because of the lower ts barrier and consequently the larger k (compared with ts – and k −, respectively), metoo could react more promptly with another met to yield meto, and itself was therefore missing in product mass spectra. a plot of meto½ � met½ � o ½ �ave versus reaction time shown in figure b is linear, from which the value of k is calculated to be . × m– ⋅s– . remarkably, the k for neural met is a factor of higher than the k− for deprotonated met. [met + h]+ presents similar oxidation behaviors as neutral met to further explore the effects of ionization on the met reaction with o , we have constructed the pess for protonated [met + h]+ + o in solution, as illustrated in figure c and d. the oxidation of [met + h]+ follows the same reaction mechanism and shows nearly identical pes profiles and energetics as those for neutral met, i.e., formation of s-hydroperoxide from en- counter of [met + h]+ and o , followed by transfer of an o atom from [metoo + h]+ to another [met + h]+ via an activation barrier ts + located at . kj/mol above reactants. met þ h½ �þþ o ⇌ metoo þ h½ �þ Δhrxn ¼ − : kj=mol ð Þ metoo þ h½ �þ þ met þ h½ �þ→ meto þ h½ �þ Δhrxn ¼ − : kj=mo ð Þ discussion comparison with photooxidation kinetics matheson et al. [ ] reported the reactive rate constant kr ( . × m– s– ) and the total quenching rate constant kt ( . × figure . (a) pes for the reaction of met + o → metoo, plotted against the distance between the met s atom and the closer o atom of o ; (b) pes for the reaction of metoo + met → meto, plotted against the distance between the terminal o of metoo and the s of met; (c) and (d) are similar to (a) and (b), except that the met, persulfoxide, and sulfoxide are protonated in (c) and (d). calculations were carried out at b lyp/pcm/ - +g* f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine m– s– ) of o with met, where o was generated by direct excitation of o in d o (pd = . ). kt was evaluated by competitive inhibition of the chemical reaction of bilirubin with o , and kr was measured from loss of met using an amino acid analyzer. most of the other kinetic measurements for met with o are based on dye-sensitized photooxidations. kraljic and sharpatyi [ ] reported a kr of . × m– s– in neutral water, according to o consumption in steady state photosen- sitization. lindig and rodgers [ ] examined kt in neat d o using laser flash photolysis. quenching of o lay in the competition for o between adpa and met, and the kt for met was measured to be . × m– s– . in the experiment of miskoski and garcía [ ], o was generated by rose bengel and tryptophan was used as a sacrificial substrate. the solution was photolyzed, and tryptophan consumption was monitored by its fluorescence in the absence and the presence of met. through a stern-volmer analysis of dynamic quenching of fluorescence, a kt of . × m– s– was obtained for met at ph . kr was measured based on o consumption in a solution containing sensitizer and met, and its value equals kt. based on a similar fluorescence quenching approach with diphenylfuran as a fluorescence probe, sysak et al. reported a kr of . × m– s– in water (ph = ) [ ]. in the above works, no kinetic model was given and all of the kr values were reported as a second-order rate constant in the unit of m– s– . if we assumed that formation of metoo is the rate-limiting step for met oxidation, the rate law for forma- tion of meto would follow second-order kinetics as equation ( ). least-square fitting of our kinetics data to equation ( ) gave a k value of . × m– s– , similar as those reported from photooxidations. but our data were poorly fitted to equa- tion ( ), suggesting equation ( ) does not describe kinetics correctly. ln met½ � met½ � − meto½ � ¼ k o � � ave t ð Þ the ph dependence of met photooxidation has also been subjected to scrutiny. earlier work on methylene blue- sensitized photooxidation of met by weil [ ] and spikes and macknight [ ] showed a remarkable increase of o consumption at a high ph range starting from . sysak et al. [ ] reported comprehensive ph dependence of met photoox- idation. according to them, the reaction is initialized by for- mation of a persulfoxide intermediate, followed by secondary reactions that are both ph- and buffer-dependent. at high ph (above ) and catalyzed by buffer ions, oh– may attack the s of persulfoxide, and the reaction gives one molecule of sulfoxide and one molecule of h o . at intermediate ph of – , when met carries a free amino group, the dominant pathway leads to dehydromethionine and h o via internal displacement, where the dehydromethionine was assigned as a five-membered het- erocyclic n-s compound [ ]. dehydromethionine may slowly hydrolyze to met sulfoxide. at ph below , the persulfoxide oxidizes a second met by the sulfide trapping mechanism, resulting in a stoichiometry of met + o → meto. compe- tition among the secondary reactions accounts for the variation in o uptake at different ph (i.e., the met to o ratio is . : above ph and : below ph [ , ]). it is worth mentioning that formation of dehydromethionine in photooxidations was usually determined based on –nh loss (using fluorogenic detection), but the loss of primary –nh reactivity strongly depended on dyes [ ] and buffer ions [ ]. for example, little change was observed in the –nh reactivity when eosin rather than methylene blue was used as a sensitizer [ ]. it was suspected that the excited dye abstracted h atom from met to form dehydromethionine [ , ]. this hypothesis was corroborated by the fact that h o was formed in methy- lene blue radical-mediated photooxidation of met [ ]. this implies that formation of dehydromethionine and h o might not be completely o -specific [ ], and the observed photo- oxidation ph dependence may reflect the oxidation-reduction potential between met and excited dyes [ ]. the uncertainty in photooxidation kinetics also remains as to whether the o uptake is dedicated to o -induced oxidation or partially due to formation and reactions of ⋅o – with substrates. such uncer- tainty was eliminated in our measurements, by bubbling bclean^ o to the met solution, and using a straightforward ms technique to identify products. evolution of met oxidation from the gas phase to solution preceding the present solution work, we reported the reactions of met ions with o in the gas phase. we first investigated the oxidation of protonated and deprotonated met in the absence of water [ , ]. the reaction systems were then augmented by adding explicit number of water ligands [ , ], which ac- counts for microsolvation. the parallel gas- and solution-phase study helps us evaluate evolution of met oxidation dynamics and kinetics from the gas phase, through microsolvation, to the aqueous solution. the gas-phase oxidation processes follow an addition/ elimination mechanism. the first step is addition of the o moiety to the met sulfur, yielding persulfoxide. the reaction outcome is determined by whether the persulfoxide intermediate has accessible product channels or not. in the case of dehydrated [met + h]+ + o , the persulfoxide intermediate evolves to an s- hydroperoxide hn ch(co h)ch ch s(ooh +)ch . the lat- ter eliminates h o , yielding a dehydro compound of meth +. the reaction is extremely efficient at low ecol, approaching the collision limit. in the reaction of dehydrated [met – h]–, the persulfoxide intermediate interconverts to s-hydroperoxides nh ch(co -)ch ch s(ooh)=ch and nh ch(co -) ch ch=s(ooh)ch . contrary to the protonated case, h o elimination of deprotonated s-hydroperoxides encounters in- surmountable barriers. therefore, none of the deprotonated s-hydroperoxides could convert to stable end-products but decayed back to reactants, making [met – h]– nonreactive towards o . f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine the fates of s-hydroperoxide intermediates are changed once [met + h]+ and [met – h]– become hydrated. the disso- ciation of water ligand(s) provides an energy disposal path to release the heat gained from peroxide formation. it enables the capture of the brelaxed^ s-hydroperoxides as stable end-prod- ucts, i.e., hn ch(co h)ch ch s(ooh +)ch for oxidation of [met + h]+(h o) , , and nh ch(co -)ch ch s(ooh)=ch and nh ch(co -) ch ch=s(ooh)ch for [met – h] –(h o) , . for the reac- tions of [met + h]+(h o) , , h o elimination becomes less dominant. interestingly, reaction efficiencies of [met + h]+(h o) and [met + h]+(h o) are and times higher than those of [met – h]–(h o) and [met – h] –(h o) , respectively. the effect of ionization state on gas-phase reaction efficiencies can be traced back to the formation efficiencies of protonated and deprotonated s-hydroperoxides, whose structures are completely different. formation of protonated s- hydroperoxide hn ch(co h)ch ch s(ooh +)ch takes places via intramolecular proton transfer from the [met + h]+ ammonium group to –soo, and there is no activation barrier. on the other hand, deprotonated s-hydroperoxide nh ch(co –)ch ch s(ooh)=ch or nh ch(co -) ch ch=s(ooh)ch is formed by taking an h from the terminal –sch or from the γ-ch ; neither of these two routes is facile. similar to gas-phase reactions, the first step of met oxida- tion in solution is formation of persulfoxide. however, only in acidic solution the initially formed persulfoxide evolves to s- hydroperoxide; in basic solution, the structure of initial persulfoxide remains stable, presumably because of bulk sol- vent stabilization. in aqueous solution, persulfoxide or s- hydroperoxide could be thermalized through solute–solvent interactions. however, a downstream route opens for persulfoxide/s-hydroperoxide through the participation of oth- er met molecules, leading to sulfoxide. different from the gas-phase reactions where the reaction efficiencies mostly depend on the formation efficiencies of s- hydroperoxides, the reaction efficiencies in solution are also related to the second step, which leads to formation of sulfox- ides by o-transfer between initially formed persulfoxide and second met. based on dft-pcm calculations, the barriers for this reaction are . , . , and . kj/mol for protonated, neutral, and deprotonated systems, respectively. conclusions a new on-line reaction setup was developed to couple solution- phase reactions of electronically excited o with an esi mass spectrometer and an absorption spectrometer. this apparatus enables us to measure o oxidation kinetics in aqueous solu- tion. to determine [ o ] in solution on an absolute scale, a method was established to correlate the [ o ] in aqueous solu- tion with airborne o emission intensity. this on-line moni- toring system was utilized to study the reaction kinetics of met with o at different ph. in both acidic and basic solutions, sulfoxide [meto – h]– and [meto + h]+ were confirmed to be major products. we have captured the persulfoxide intermedi- ates in basic solution. the reaction mechanism and ph depen- dence were elucidated with the assistance from dft calcula- tions, using the polarized continuum model to simulate bulk solvation effects. it was found that the reactions in acidic and basic media follow the same mechanism composed of two elementary steps, formation of persulfoxide for deprotonated met or s-hydroperoxide for neutral/protonated met, followed by transfer of an o atom from persulfoxide or s-hydroperoxide to a second met, producing two sulfoxides. the second step is rate-limiting, and formation of sulfoxide follows third-order rate law with respect to [met] [ o ]. a remarkable result concerns the ph dependence of met oxidation. the effective rate constants for formation of met sulfoxide are . × m– ⋅s– at ph . , decreasing to . × m– ⋅s– at ph . . the signif- icantly lower rate constant in basic solution is due to the high activation barrier leading to formation of sulfoxide from deprotonated persulfoxide, and the latter overwhelmingly decayed back to reactants accompanied by physical quenching of o . combined with our findings in the gas-phase o oxidation of hydrated/dehydrated met ions, a panorama can be created for evolution of the met oxidation mechanism from the gas phase, through microsolvation, to aqueous solution. reactions in different media and at different ionization states are all mediated by persulfoxides, which carry high internal energy and thus are very reactive. in the gas phase, the fates of persulfoxides are determined by whether they have exit product channels or not. in the reaction of protonated met, transfer of two h from [met + h]+ to o provides an energetically favored dissociation path. to the contrary, h o elimination is inhibited in deprotonated persulfoxide, and the latter could only decay back to reactants. the fates of persulfoxide intermediates are altered upon microsolvation in the gas phase. dominant hydration effect is the suppression of persulfoxide decomposi- tion. this can be attributed to energy dissipation from excited persulfoxide intermediates via water dissociation, 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spikes, j.d.: sensitized photooxidation of amino acids: effects on the reactivity of their primary amine groups with fluorescamine and o- phthalaldehyde. photochem. photobiol. , – ( ) f. liu et al.: singlet o oxidation of methionine 	 electrospray ionization mass spectrometry 	abstract 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	section 	acknowledgments 	references queering feminist solidarities. #metoo, losha and the digital dalit creative commons attribution . international issn - https://opengenderjournal.de queering feminist solidarities. #metoo, losha and the digital dalit sara morais dos santos bruss (moraisd@uni-potsdam.de) abstract: at the height of international visibility for #metoo, a crowd- sourced list was published on facebook that contained the names of pres- tigious indian academics, accusing them of sexual harassment. the list was controversial not only in that it became a viral phenomenon (and re- sulted in immediate questioning of the legitimacy of internet culture for politics) but also in that these accusations did not contain information on the circumstances of the alleged crimes, so as to protect the victims’ ano- nymity. the list was quickly dubbed “the list of naming and shaming” and was met with its strongest criticism from within the feminist movement itself, as established feminists argued publicly against such methods and against the queer dalit leaker of the document, raya sarkar. this paper examines these conflicts of solidarity as conflicts between transnational and local positionalities and argues for the possibility of digital spaces as environments that invite a queering of identity politics, constructive dis- agreement, and transformative justice, rather than mere conflict and its resolution through a homogenous feminist identity. keywords: postcolonialism, feminism, social media, intersectionality, sexual harassment submitted: january accepted: october published: march cite as: morais dos santos bruss, sara ( ): queering feminist solidar- ities. #metoo, losha and the digital dalit. in: open gender journal ( ). doi: . /ogj. . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ogj. . edited by tanja carstensen and kathrin ganz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://opengenderjournal.de mailto:moraisd% uni-potsdam.de?subject= https://doi.org/ . /ogj. . open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . sara morais dos santos bruss queering feminist solidarities. #metoo, losha and the digital dalit introduction the hashtag #metoo – popularized after revelations surfaced about main- stream-media mogul harvey weinstein’s sexually predatory behaviour – seems to be a defining signifier for contemporary feminisms. since the weinstein af- fair, #metoo has “gone viral” and become a cipher upon which feminist move- ments are hinging their work on sexual and gendered violence. the hashtag has been criticized, reduced, reused, misunderstood, and celebrated again and again in different locations across the globe, connecting discourses that seem geographically distant and locally distinct. media outlets across a wide spectrum have acknowledged, commented on, or dismissed that women* are dispropor- tionally exposed to violence and harassment on the basis of their gender. most surprising, however, seems to be the way victimhood is articulated in a shame- lessly accusatory way when it exists beyond the frame of white, heterosexual, and bourgeois femininity. in fact, the “me too” movement, sans the hashtag, was created for black and lower-class women* by activist tarana burke, who was looking to support and heal those who continue to be the least acknowledged victims of sexual violence (a verso report ). picking up on this lineage, i argue for the strength of the internet to inform intersectional and marginalized communities of feminists through the example of an indian list of alleged sexual harassers in academia. the list, which came to be known as losha (“list of sex- ual harassers in academia”), was crowd-sourced, managed and leaked by raya sarkar, a young queer dalit anti-caste activist, who first posted it on facebook to circulate amongst their peers. the list was quickly dubbed a campaign to “name and shame” (menon ) and was met with its strong criticism from within the i understand that “woman”, as any category, can never exhaust itself and does not describe a specific or essential body or being. for this reason, i frame the category of woman* (with the asterisk) as inclusive and understand it to extend to anyone that self-defines or is read as “woman”. i understand the difficulties of juxtaposing womanhood – however construc- ted – with victimhood, but given that a large majority of women* across locations have, in some way or another, experienced violence, harassment, or misconduct due to their gender and (assumed) sexuality, i understand the category of woman* to be, to a certain extent, framed by violence, although i also want to stress that it is not only women* who experien- ce such gendered forms of violence. i stand also by the category of victimhood, despite attempts to frame the encounter with sexual violence in more empowering terms. marking a person as a victim allows the person to understand the origin of the crime within a perpe- trator. it marks solidarity amongst victims, which has shown itself precisely through these shared vulnerabilities, making individuals feel less alone by providing space for sharing pain. i use the term thus in defiance of “victim-blaming” and anti-feminist stances that have made it an insult. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ https://doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . feminist movement itself, as established feminists expressed worry over such emerging digital methodologies. the list came to be understood as an expres- sion of dalit-adivasi-bahujan (dab) feminism, thus situating itself at the position of india’s most marginalized women*. in addition to such a reading of losha as dalit expression, the list needs to be read as the inhabitation of the “digital queer” (gajjala , pp.), which effectively circumvents claims to authentic singular identities, addressing instead a globalized digital public sphere. the following article will explore the “list-statement controversy” (as this series of events came to be known) from the angle of digital media studies. i will first describe how the list-statement controversy developed to then turn to the positionalities at play in more detail. i argue that there is a public intimacy that emerged among list-supporters due to the intersectional angle and multiplicity of positionalities it could offer articulation to. what imagined positionalities and methodologies inform the losha conflict and how does the digital complicate or assuage these problems? i will argue that the non-upper-caste, non-heterosexual status of the leak- er of the list, raya sarkar, necessitated the digital’s multiplicity to become a point of rupture for indian feminism. i read losha as having its lineages in offline spaces of feminist representation as well as in a transnational digital connectivity that enables kinship networks across difference (paik ). the anxieties about such a ‘viral’ object verbalized by upper-caste (savarna) indian feminists inadvertently reveal and repeat historical anxieties about caste and a non-savarna subaltern national authenticity that queered the politics of identity in the post-colony. further, given that both the accusers and the accused travel within the transnational spaces of academia and the internet, losha’s political relevance must be contextualized beyond the borders of indian territory, in res- onance with a global public. i will in closing argue that the list harnesses a mul- tiplicity common in digital spaces that questions the capacity for identity politics as authentic and homogenous group expressions. at the moment of leaking, i was a visiting scholar at the english and foreign language university in hyderabad (eflu), using the library of the anveshi re- search centre for women’s studies for my research. as a white-passing non-in- dian scholar who had spent most of her academic life in western institutions, my assumptions and knowledges about caste-based discrimination, india-specific stereotypes and violence are predominantly mediated either through academic texts or conversations such as the ones i had at anveshi. my understanding of losha was deepened through an array of interviews undertaken in bangalore in the aftermath of the list. here, i was supporting and organizing budding con- versations about consent and feminist infrastructures at the centre for internet https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . and society (cis), as a response to the centre’s former board member lawrence liang’s being implicated by the list. i was soon discussing losha at cultural insti- tutions such as the alternative law forum; the srishti school of art, design and technology; and elsewhere, and learning from the practitioners dealing with its immediate implications. i am greatly indebted to the people offering insights, in- cluding jasmine george from hidden pockets, darshana mitra from alf, jasmeen patheja from blank noise, and padmini ray murray from srishti, as well as, finally, numerous students, feminists and digital practitioners at anveshi, eflu, and cis. although their perspectives were central to informing my position as a west- ern academic, i do not want to pit these informants against suggestions of “au- thentic” indianness carried forward by the statement. instead, the analysis pre- sented here takes a less-travelled route , as it focuses on the digital aspects of the list and its enabling capacities for queer politics that undermine an understanding of identities as essentially authentic or static. as an early-career feminist research- er of digital infrastructures and computational imaginaries, i acknowledge and relate to the convergence of offline and online lives that the #losha -feminists arguably experience on a daily basis. this suggests that communities inhabiting digital technologies in a similar manner can indeed produce ideological overlaps between them that complicate the traditions of identity politics and allow for sol- idarity across difference – but this by no means makes identities and expressions ahistorical or decontextualized. while the list and its subsequent defenders make clear demands about identity politics and the disavowal of caste in discussions on gender-based violence, the list also problematizes the question of being inside and outside, of activity and passivity, and of an indigenous indian feminism that perpetuates a framework that privileges heterosexual savarna cis-women. losha in the spotlight losha is the first object of discussion in india to visibly signal towards the sup- posedly already global #metoo movement. the list’s publication occurred as a response to an article by christine fair on huffpost, which was taken down “less-travelled” does not mean that i am treading in entirely unexplored territory. radhika gajjala’s research in particular has been incredibly helpful, and at the time of #losha, i was following a group of indian digital feminists around gajjala on facebook and twitter. some of what i learned came from these conversations, and gajjala’s recent book “digital diaspo- ras” ( ) has documented many of the discussions that took place at the time. i am thus especially grateful for this book, as these conversations have become citable references. i use the hashtag here to separate the list as an object from the list as a discourse and the list- and discourse-supporters, whether they themselves contributed or not. “#losha- feminists” then refers to all pro-list feminists, while “losha” refers to the list itself. “#losha”, in turn, refers to the discussions emerging around the object of losha online, where often the hashtag was used to mark an article or statement as referring to the list. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . from the website on october (dasgupta ). in the article, the writer names her harassers under the hashtag #himtoo and gives explicit detail as to how the continuity and systematic repetition of sexual misconduct led her to leave academia. the article marks a shift in focus; fair argues that conversa- tions on sexual violence should not pretend that these instances were crimes without origin but instead focus on the perpetrators (fair ). responding to this impetus, raya sarkar published a list of names on facebook, warning friends and followers of academics with problematic and predatory behaviour, but also asking for further contributions. as a result, the list named around prominent and left-intellectual academics as predators, beginning with one of fair’s main perpetrators, indian academic dipesh chakrabarty. the list, crowd- sourced from students in higher-education institutions across india, was said to first have been conceived of as a “whisper network” (gajjala ) with which to warn students about professors that were potential predators. as such, it would not lay claim to any judicial mechanisms, but merely record instances of violence and harassment for future students. such networks have existed for as long as sexual predators have, but this instance was quickly understood to be replacing judicial mechanisms with vigilantism. shortly after losha had appeared and “gone viral” in the format of a google doc, sarkar took responsibility for crowd-sourcing, managing and leaking the list, giving it a face and a target towards which to direct its criticism. immediate- ly, the feminist publishing collective kafila issued a statement that criticized and dismissed the list as “naming and shaming” and demanded it be taken down in the name of the “larger feminist community” (menon a). the statement questioned the political valence of internet culture and read losha as testimony to an insurmountable gap between india and the west. predominantly, there seemed to have been a worry that losha would dis- mantle the mechanisms of due process and natural justice that feminists had built over the course of decades, as explained in the statement written by nivedita menon ( a), which was signed by other prominent feminists. the statement and its subsequent annex (menon b) suggested there could be flaws in evaluating certain cases as harassment; unfair accusations could be made against innocent people because a lack of both detail and evidence made it impossible for outsiders to evaluate the circumstances. the way losha was set up, it was argued, led to a lumping together of different degrees of harass- ment without nuance, as descriptions and resolutions were left blank – even for people already found guilty through institutional mechanisms. feminists and left-intellectuals saw the danger of enabling right-wing con- servatives in going “on the rampage naming every ‘anti-national’ as a sexual https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . harasser” (menon a). pro-statement feminists further questioned the via- bility of contributors’ anonymity, the lack of context, as well as the format – the list had been put up on facebook through sarkar, who was now acting as a proxy and seemed to have sole editing power, while the google doc could virally circulate. arguments against the list framed the digitality of the object as open- ing the gates for an internet culture that knew only trolling and shaming, was flippant in its judgment, and produced no real way of moving forward politically. the statement’s signees argued to instead return to strengthening due-process mechanisms, which would validate harassment claims and support a fair and just outcome for all involved. the internet universal and indian feminism this conflict makes it necessary to look at sarkar more closely as the proxy of the list, beyond the supposed divide of feminisms along notions of “generations” or “waves”. as suggested initially, younger feminists growing up with the internet as a firm part of their lives may have developed a more intuitive and diverse engagement with online spaces and thus may have acquired a different form of media literacy. however, age cannot be the only avenue of explanation for the chasm between supporters of the list and supporters of the statement. as many voices have since suggested, the divide between list supporters and statement supporters is ideological rather than generational (e.g., ayyar ; roy ). and yet, the arguments provided by the statement and its follow-ups questioned the list’s legitimacy and the methodology behind it, reading it as uninformed and dismissing its activist potential because of its digital format. expressing this technological scepticism, menon called out “finger-tip activists with no histori- cal memory” (menon ), claiming that losha was ineffective “slacktivism”. at the same time, the list was being read as “mob justice” (chachra ) and even compared to a gulag (visvanathan ). further, menon’s statement in- sinuated that the list ahistorically broke with indian feminist tradition for the sake of a neoliberal global subjectivity. however, not only does “calling out” and “taking back” have historical lin- eages within feminist methodologies , menon’s suggestion of rupture misun- derstands the temporalities of the digital, and falls short of the labor behind the interface. any form of expression on digital social-networking sites such as twitter or facebook is often mistakenly read through myths of discontinuity i am thinking of movements such as take back the night, hollaback, and others that origina- ted in the feminist “second wave” of the s and s, and, especially in india, were very suspicious of the institutionalization suggested to be of relevance here (chaudhuri ). https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . (balsamo ). because cyberspace is imagined as a space of radical newness and innovation, the initial assumption that it is breaking with all histories and modalities of the physical world (barlow ) continues to have currency. me- dia technologies are fetishized as constant innovators through monikers such as “new media” (chun ), instead of being seen in their historical lineages in terms of design, purpose, content, and usage. as wendy chun ( ) has claimed, digital archives have been said to turn memory into storage, meaning that knowledge becomes stowed away and detached from its political relevance and historical lineages. the internet is now often read merely in terms of inter- face, where whatever is not immediately present is assumed to be lost in the depth of cyberspace, to no longer be accessible on new media turned old. the same shortsightedness registers with political content in digital spaces. the “global village”, meant to bring online users closer together, has instead glossed over difference, meaning that the interfaced encounter is usually as- sumed to happen with an unmarked universal user (srinivasan ). when spe- cific identity markers are not immediately accessible, online objects are always first assumed to iterate a hegemonic position, meaning that a user in india would usually assume content to come from a user that is savarna and middle class be- fore other options. as contexts constantly collapse online (boyd/marwick ), it becomes increasingly difficult to follow the lineages that digital politics call upon, because the assumption is that what you see is all you get. however, this view regards the interface as the only space on which politics happens, which creates a rigid boundary between offline and online activities and negates the processes of labor and care that enable the digital object to appear in the first place. instead, i read losha as an object that evoked connection only amongst those who populate the digital intimately and could thus decipher it beyond what the interface seemed to suggest. this intimacy is revealed only in a deeper engagement with losha beyond the interface. as lauren berlant has put it: “to intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. but intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a par- ticular way.” (berlant ) as berlant phrases it, the forms of attachment that such communication pro- poses is relational; normative ideologies may very well reconfigure, but also contest such forms of attachment. i read the attachment of the digital, perhaps unusual for the usual habitus of the pro-statement feminists, to have negotiat- ed losha’s methods of circulation and contribution more ‘naturally’ for those https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . who agreed with the methodologies or contributed directly. sarkar later stated that they had vetted every contribution personally, often verifying the individual stories through a comprehensive consultation of the indian penal code (gajjala et al. ). the pro-statement feminists did not consider the complexities be- hind the interface, and thus expressed ignorance over the offline labor and his- torical continuities that made an object such as losha possible in the first place. in part, i see this occlusion facilitated by the notion of the digital object as “viral”, and thus contagious, polluted, alienating, but also passing to, at one point, disappear. following chun, i suggest an understanding of bodies that “inhabit” the digital through their interfaced objects, rather than proclaiming digital objects to travel as infectiously “viral” (chun ). this shifts a reading of the digital as contagious and frivolous toward the acknowledgement of of- fline labor, but also provides an understanding of the embodied situation from which such objects are produced. seeing losha as an object that is “inhabited” through more and more bodies joining a collective rather than something in “virality” allows an understanding that losha did not simply travel – implying that it left nothing behind or that it comes from polluted origins and “infects” people. instead, i argue that it grew to include more and more people in differ- ent ways, either as contributors or via the traditions of consciousness raising, when read as a “whisper network”. those arguing against the list seemed unable to see the internet as a se- rious site for activism, despite earlier acknowledgements of the importance of the digital in the protests after the now-infamous delhi gang rape of . at the time, the mass protests in solidarity with the victim were all organized on- line, via the same social-media channels that sarkar then used and by the same people who then shamed online engagement as nothing but hysterical tipping (dey ; jha/kurian ). in fact, the event has been said to mark a turning point for indian feminism toward the internet and “to a global vocabulary of rights” (kurian , ) that resonates with mainstream media outlets on a transnational scale. menon’s problematic evaluation of social media, seemingly dependent on who uses them, accumulated in her understanding that it should not matter whether or not the leaker was dalit (menon b). i read this statement as grossly negligent of what it means when a queer young dalit lawyer becomes the face of a critical feminist object and subsequent target of an ideological bat- tle initiated by supposed allies. mirroring these claims, radhika gajjala, padmini ray murray, and others have shown how dalit communities in particular con- nect and are enabled to speak online and inhabit the digital (gajjala , ; nayar ; ray murray ) to escape home-grown hierarchies and critique https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . localized universalisms. when we remind ourselves of the gandhian call that ambedkar and the dalits should not argue for separate electorates so as not to divide hindu society (ambedkar ), menon’s statement offers a reading suggested by shailaja paik ( ) that marginalized communities across the world (in her example, dalit and african-american women) struggle similarly with homegrown hierarchies and a feminism that occludes them in comparable manner. contrary to menon’s appeal to what was read as feminist universalism, the losha-advocates devised rules according to a global community of margin- alized people otherwise excluded in the umbrella-terms of movements suppos- edly intended to liberate them (garza ). the digital can hence be a place for those who are otherwise omitted. losha departs from its national context to build “margin-to-margin” solidarity net- works, and even received a statement of support from tarana burke herself (the new indian express ). such differentiation seems necessary, especially for feminism, which has often had to withstand claims that it is an elitist project that has omitted women* of color, queer and trans women*, sex workers, work- ing-class women*, disabled women*, and dalit women*. despite possible flaws, losha must thus be read through an understanding of digital social movements that have lineages in and continuities with offline histories. in such a reading, conflict can be made productive through its poten- tial to disrupt norms, and social-media content can be seen to frame new spaces for the marginalized subject to remain, rather than to appear and disappear, when read as “viral”. the list must be read as an anti-caste and queer feminist object – one that does historicize but has rejected a flaccid struggle under the umbrella of “the larger feminist community” for the sake of a critique of in- dian elites that are seen to perpetuate, rather than disrupt, caste hierarchies (bargi ). instead of reading it as dangerous, frivolous or troubled, the list, in its digitality, offers a new point of departure for addressing and critiquing brah- manical (and other) heteronormative patriarchies on a systemic level and allows subaltern positionalities to become authors of their own narratives and connect in solidarity and care. losha is, therefore, an incident that has enabled a local, subaltern voice to travel across the globe and place itself in the path of #metoo. nothing natural about justice entangled into the question of digitality was the fear that losha was aiming to replace judicial mechanisms of natural justice. natural justice is meant to guarantee that judicial mechanisms function without bias, including an impar- tial ruling after a fair hearing. with sarkar coming forward as an anti-caste ac- https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . tivist, the indian caste-class nexus that gives “some men a sense of entitlement and access to young women’s minds and bodies” (gopal ) became one of the central axes of discussion of the list. as pallavi rao has argued, sexual ha- rassment cannot be seen “in isolation from other forms of systemic violence” (rao ) and omitting the context when a dalit comes forward to land in the eye of a storm is highly problematic. sarkar’s facebook profile positioned them as an anti-caste activist long before losha, and the list cannot but be read in lineage with sarkar’s preceding posts. while this conjecture has been discussed in great detail , i do not want to omit its implications here, given that caste is so important in this context. as many presented due process as the central reason for their opposing losha, i want to shortly address its shortcomings, especially in relation to the aforementioned caste-class nexus that inflects any ability to address gender issues. for many, the internal complaints committee (icc) and gender sensitisa- tion committee against sexual harassment (gscash), the central committees in charge of ensuring that due process is carried out at indian universities, have more potential for redressal than filing a police report. certainly, efforts to in- still mechanisms of due process independently from the state have been central achievements that can only be attributed to the now well-established feminists that supported the kafila statement. these mechanisms are more sensitive to victimhood than a patriarchal state would be; they incorporate and rely on femi- nist knowledge on sexual assault and misconduct, rather than merely on judicial factors or cultural myths. however, to pretend that these mechanisms serve all victims of gender-based violence equally would be naive at best. students experiencing discomfort with the actions of professors rarely file reports, espe- cially when they do not evaluate the behaviour as hard harassment (das ). due-process mechanisms are difficult enough to navigate as a student or young academic, as accusations of false allegations, backlash from perpetrators or “economic and political weekly” has put together a whole number of articles in a special feature on “power and relationships in academia” accessible online (epw engage ). further, in fall , the journal “communication, culture & critique“ included three articles on losha by ayesha vemuri, pallavi rao, and radhika gajjala that i quote throughout this article. this only names a few of the articles that deal with caste explicitly; others are cited throughout this subsection. like elsewhere, sexual assault victims often struggle to be believed and cases often get dismissed on the basis of lacking evidence. against this background, women*’s complaints have regularly been disregarded, especially when directed towards upper-caste men. cor- rupt police officers may refuse to file reports on assault; pretend to file them, only for the reports to then get lost; or file them and have victims see them get thrown out in court (krishnan ). adding to these all-too-familiar scenes, the indian political climate is in- creasingly toxic and turned against marginalized communities, which are searching for in- dian authenticity through neo-conservative to fundamentalist hindu-nationalist homoge- neity and, therefore, paradoxically, joining a global shift towards what is largely considered to be the “political right”. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . their peer groups, and refusal to work with accusers in the future are only some of the repercussions that any person naming their assaulters may face. in addi- tion, these committees mostly do not include representatives from all marginal- ized communities and therefore create a heterosexual and upper-caste matrix that may unwillingly perpetuate biases towards lower-caste, indigenous and non-hindu minorities (ayyar ). taking into consideration a dominant discriminatory stereotype that frames dalits as hypersexual and constantly available, especially to upper castes (paik ), the question is how sensitive such committees are to their own bias- es. the perseverance of caste-discrimination, coupled with the preponderance of upper-caste hindu women* on gender-sensitivity committees, makes the mechanisms of due process and natural justice almost inaccessible to everyone at the lower end of the social hierarchy (gupta/dangwal ). these flaws in processes of natural justice within indian academia were not new revelations, and yet, they made for little lenience on the part of statement supporters. the insistence on due process and only due process thus intensified a wound al- ready felt amongst the younger and socially marginalized students supporting the list. statement supporters seemed oblivious or indifferent to the caste- based inequalities that continue to exist, even perpetuating discrimination, as caste was further invisibilized through the statement. as india’s caste hegemony hardens once more under hindu-nationalist rule, dalit and adivasi communities have found little distinction between the domination of the british raj, the violence of institutions with hindu-national- ist inflections, and the brahmin-centric heteropatriarchy that normalizes both (mondal ; thomas danaraj ). dalit lynchings and gendered violence based on caste or religious discrimination have made it unsafe for these com- munities to protest in public spaces or university institutions. names such as chuni kotal, rohith vemula, j muthukrishnan – an adivasi woman and two dalit men who, after long episodes of institutionalized harassment, committed sui- cide – have become central to university-based dalit struggles. their bodies are evidences of the violence with which non-brahmins are faced even in suppos- edly progressive university institutions. protesters mourning their deaths have also been shut down, often violently. the last decade has hence seen the arrival of a multitude of online presenc- es in which dalits attempt to re-write histories of india from the point of view of their oppression – often under the violent scrutiny of the state and its drift to the right, but also of public universities as governmental institutions and even india’s political left (bargi ; thomas danaraj ). internet formats, often met with suspicion within the upper-caste heteropatriarchy, thus serve as a vi- https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . tal point of knowledge production and critique from a dalit perspective. digital platforms have become one of the central spaces for dalits to connect, organize and historicize (nayar ). the question of the harassed queer further complicated the call to due process at the time. non-heterosexual sexual relations were decriminalized only in , after the losha leak (paletta/anh vu ). theoretically, queer victims of gender-based violence – where the perpetrator was of the same sex as the victim – if they had been acknowledged at all, would, at the time, have run the risk of being criminalized. on the other hand, sarkar’s self-identifica- tion as “queer” also posits them in relation to the globalized queer movement originating within western europe and north america, rather than with the various indigenous queer and non-binary communities in india such as hijras or kothis . as there is an obvious lived difference to these communities, pre- dominantly in terms of class hierarchies, the term queer invariably opens itself up to the accusations of neoliberal appropriation and a reification of west- ern superiority (puar ). however, as gajjala states, queer bodies that are read as female learn to pass and invisibilize their specificities more often than those that are assigned the male sex at birth (gajjala ). for this reason, flocking to the digital happens more intuitively for these groups, as the ano- nymity of interfaces is arguably already familiar (dean ). but the invisibil- ity of sarkar’s queer-femme sexuality made other identifiers hypervisible in the indian discourse: read-as-male dalit rage, read-as-femme asian migrant in the us, read-as-western technology to criticize savarna indianness. instead of reading these critiques of sarkar and losha in isolation, sarkar’s queerness transcends their sexuality and comes to signify their outsideness in the state- ment-discourse. i propose that losha should be read outside of a paradigm that perpetu- ates feminism as monolithic and authentically situated. in this affirmative read- ing, the fluidity of the internet can portray identities as in flux, relational and porous. through losha, i propose a queer reading of the digital as a space that, in opposition to the notions of disembodiment that fuels the cyberspaced imaginary, is material and inhabited (chun ; ray murray ). as a result, losha should be read as an infrastructure that allowed for the digital queer to these communities are perhaps differently queer, as they consist of intersex and trans- gender people, often living in abject poverty or making a living through sex work. they are also predominantly bodies moving from their male-assigned birthgender to a feminine/ female appearance and thus have different experiences with discrimination, stereotypes, and being invisibilised, even by the gay movement (gajjala , ). the term queer, alt- hough sometimes also used to address these communities, comes with class-connotations, but also seems more befitting to describe a femme-appearing law graduate of asian origin living in the united states than the arguably less cosmopolitan indigenous queer communi- ties. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . inhabit public space, to become visible and intelligible – and thus to have the capacity to reveal existing conflicts within the indian feminist movement. transnational digital feminisms and the politics of the local given these complications, the question of naming vs. due process is arguably misplaced. rather, one might ask how valuable due process may have been to dalits at the point of the losha revelations, how willing the committees might be to have a close look at one of their own, and how adequate the repercussions would be, should all of these steps even be taken. paired with a tonality that was understood as patronizing and dismissive, the statement and the discourse around it seemed to sever the ties between disappointed contributors to the list on one side and their former mentors and idols on the other. losha disrupted the notion of a united indian left-intellectual front and revealed to some what others were unable to admit – that even they – intelligent, anti-nationalist and “feminist” men* – felt an entitlement to younger women*’s bodies in a way that caused conflict and muddied consent. the very public occurrences mentioned above ease a reading of losha as a critique of brahminical heteropatriarchy, connecting struggles of sexuality, gender, and class/caste in one object. sarkar, instead of aligning with the histo- ries of (upper-caste) feminism in india, chose to put the guerrilla tactics associ- ated with adivasi and lower-caste communities to the forefront. given that the naxalbari uprising had its th anniversary in , just months before losha appeared, it is not too far-fetched to speculate on sarkar’s sympathy with the communist armed guerrillas, whose political aim was to uplift dab communities by putting guns in their hands. indeed, there have also been references to the revolutionary dalit in other writings that defend losha. drishadwati bargi, in responding to the kafila statement, says: “for instance, the dalit–bahujan man can play with the figure of the ‘an- gry/militant/revolutionary male‘ and gain legitimacy and acceptance in a culture that valorises men with ‘strong personality.’ the same can make the dalit–bahujan woman a greater outcaste, desexualised and perhaps, a little too queer for these spaces. this, in turn has its resonance in build- ing friendships or feminist solidarities across caste.” (bargi ) while, at the time, there was much speculation on the true status of sarkar’s roots, the patronizing sentiments expressed in the statement underline rather than discredit that line of argument, as sarkar and losha are dismissed due to the supposed ahistoricity of the internet and a misrecognition of dalit tactics. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . waging sarkar’s vulnerability against their supposed privilege when situating them in the us again forsakes questions of accountability and care for a fe- tishization of authenticity. thus, insisting on more proof and insight into the occurrences rearticulates the colonial legacies of positivistic knowledges that fetishize truth as an objective fact. however, as complex cases such as that of aziz ansari and avital ronell have shown, it is impossible to objectively assert a situation where sexuality is nego- tiated in line with power hierarchies. here, consent becomes a grey area that is spread out between aspiration, desire, and integrity, where the accuser is often read as the problem. losha underlines the allegorical nature of truth and the judicial mechanisms that perpetuate an understanding of truth as objectively accessible. as sarkar came forward to defend the list, other contributors were enabled to remain in the sheltered anonymity sarkar had provided for them, but they could still take a public stand in solidarity with #losha, without the danger of being retraumatized through victim blaming and intricate questioning. despite its critics, losha added intersectional inflections to indian feminism – in composing what i read as a structural critique rather than in expecting pu- nitive measures against individuals. it is only in this reading – transformative rather than carceral – that losha may release its potential to speak to the hy- brid intersections of discriminatory practice. precisely because of its collectivity, its connection to me too, and the cen- trality of raya sarkar as the queer dalit leaker – their position in the us pro- tecting and enabling them – losha systemically identified faults in indian femi- nism’s caste discourse. because the dalit is either desexualized or hypersexual, bargi ( ), as cited above, suggests reading the dalit position in itself as queer – a position that, according to maría do mar castro varela et al. ( ), always includes a struggle to move from spaces of invisibility to legitimacy and repre- sentation. as mimi mondal ( ) has stated, a dalit with a voice is no longer seen as an authentic dalit. sarkar is thus read as “too dalit” for feminism, and “too queer” for indian sexual politics. while ashley tellis (who was also added to the list) has lamented that the indian queer movement did not stand with dalits, laborers, farmers or sex-workers (tellis ), i argue that speculations about sarkar’s identity posited them as constantly in-between, and effectively, their queerness was read as foreignness, thus echoing precisely the type of affirma- tive national discourse tellis so deeply criticizes. losha as digital testimony does not pretend, therefore, to replace the law, but critiques its gaps and interpretations within feminist movements. instead of lacking nuance, i read losha as a comment on the structural quality of sexual and gendered inequalities, which can also manifest in friendships, mentorships https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . and quotidian forms of personal exchange. sarkar acknowledges the systemic quality of harassment on their facebook page, which exemplifies their reading of sexual and gendered violence not as a singular act but as a cultural fact: “[…] people are within their right to discredit the list and call it false despite mounting public testimonies from survivors but they may not harass any of us to reveal details for their own lascivious entertainment. some folks claimed that it is unfair to clump all alleged harassers togeth- er because some of them may have harassed “less” than the rest. rape culture is when people grade your trauma. there is no such thing as sexual harassment lite™. if an act falls within the scope of sexual harass- ment, then it’s sexual harassment. period.” (sarkar , on facebook) sarkar defies the constant inquiries for further details of occurrences that led to names being put on the list, invoking a critique of judicial procedures that often undermine feminist support by fetishizing proof. instead, sarkar stressed the necessity of acknowledging the right of victims to have their own scale for the trauma they have had to live through, therefore attesting to cultures of violence rather than to individual perpetrators, to notions of healing rather than punitive measures. in a conversation in gajjala’s most recent book, sarkar attests to the intricate details that went into compiling the list (gajjala et al. ). as ayesha vemuri mentions in this conversation, discussions around losha have often omitted the fact that sarkar was trained as a lawyer and, therefore, has expertise on what falls within the scope of sexual harassment and vetted the contributors to losha accordingly, even offering support should any of the contributors want to take legal action (gajjala et al. , ). this again allows for a reading of losha as accompanying and at best transforming the legal sys- tem, not dismantling it. conclusion in this paper, i have argued for an understanding of digital space beyond no- tions of virality and crisis, as a transnational arena that both influences and challenges local positionalities as bounded, authentic, and separable. losha exemplifies how quotidian digital acts can give voice to and form solidarities for those marginalized within local umbrella-term movements for social justice. in terms of the iterative space it creates for those whose trauma is least recog- nized within public discourse on violence, objects such as losha allow margin- alized expression to critique naturalized hegemonies within political groups. as a digital object, the list was open to many different forms of engagement and can be read as a hypertextual manual that invites its contributors and readers to https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . connect to it on a range of identity levels (as discussed above) – arguably, at the same time. losha must be read as a queer object, as it attests to the multiplicity of identities that inform and iterate each body, yet also permeates the boundar- ies of neoliberal individuation in its collective form. the list has since affected more nuanced conversation about sexual vio- lence and patriarchy, which have spilled beyond the left-intellectual academic landscape of losha and paved the way for constant questioning of positionali- ties within workplace institutions and across caste-boundaries. since losha, the question of brahmanical patriarchy has become central in india’s social-media landscape. in light of new hashtags such as #smashbrahmanicalpatriarchy and movements that offer online sex-education, self-help and community consul- tation, centring increasingly on dalit perspectives, i argue that the list has pro- duced affective solidarities that allow for dissent and discussion beyond the law. these new discussions work without framing feminist solidarities and kinship formations as fragile, juvenile or volatile for finding representation in a digital form. looking beyond sensation, losha can give way to a new language of care and intimacy, of connection and allyship, across age, caste, class, and any other category that may seem to divide feminisms into unlikely enemies but actually only addresses lacks within feminisms that should always strive to better their scope – whether or not standards and methodologies are met or revised. no one owns feminism. it is not uncommon for articles written at and after hour zero of leaking to include side notes, edits and mentions of accusations of sexual harassment but also of more intersectional readings of violence. after the sense of crisis had died down, the list effectively opened a space to continue these old and yet-to-be- resolved struggles. however, it has also allowed for #metoo to resurface within indian cyberspace in ambivalent ways. the same methodology of naming and shaming has been implemented within a recent resurgence of the movement. and yet, savarna feminists have not only hailed this round of #metoo, it has com- monly been marked as its very first arrival in the country – losha and sarkar’s efforts simply erased (buzzfeed india/kandukuri ; rasul ). only after fervent critiques have twitter feeds and articles included acknowledgement of sarkar’s labor, without which #metoo would not have happened for india in this way. the internet thus reveals what was already there – the fact that lived real- ities and solidarities transgress and circumvent monodirectional identity cate- gories on multiple levels, but that violence can also and very often does express itself “merely” in forms of unquestioned privilege or quick omissions. this hashtag was initated by dalit activist thenmouzhi soundarrajan, @dalitdiva on twitter, in the aftermath of the list. https://opengenderjournal.de/issue/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ogj. . morais dos santos bruss: queering feminist solidarities open gender journal ( ) | doi: . /ogj. . losha and other lists that have appeared to target a culture in which silence is the trade-off for supposed safety and where sexual violence seems like a crime without origin. especially for victims of intersectional violence, these objects mark a moment not only of community building but of breaking precisely that codex of silence and of demanding not only protection but a response and ac- knowledgement of hurt, beyond a formal or institutional frame that often fails or ignores the most marginalized bodies in their community. finally, losha, me too, and #metoo must, therefore, be read through his- tories that depart from women*-of-color feminist networks of care that were laboring away, unacknowledged, long before these hashtags travelled 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( ) issn - https://sociologica.unibo.it/ from value to values, from field to discipline: understanding journalistic culture in the st century c.w. anderson* submitted: september , – accepted: september , – published: september , abstract the introduction to this symposium, “value and values in the organizational produc- tion of news,” outlines its primary themes. it begins with an elaboration of the argument that the past few years have seen a major shift in the analytical concerns of researchers inter- estedintheproduction, consumption, andinstitutionaltransformationofnews. whereas public conversations about journalism in the first two decades of the internet era were pri- marily oriented toward questions of “value,” a series of political shocks have called into question not only the value but the normative values of news. the introduction then discusses the two major aims of the symposium through an overview of the articles and essays contained herein. the first aim is to apply the theories and tools of sociology to the analysis both of news value and news value(s). the second aim is to reflect on what this analytical framework can tell us about the disciplinary relationship between journalism studies and sociology. keywords: journalism studies; mass media; political protest; sociology; values. * school of media and communication, university of leeds (united kingdom);  c.w.anderson@leeds.ac.uk;https://orcid.org/ - - - copyright © c. w. anderson the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / art. # p. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://sociologica.unibo.it/ https://orcid.org/ - - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) introduction the past few years have seen a major shift in the analytical concerns of researchers interested in the production, consumption, and institutional transformation of news. whereas public conversations about journalism in the first two decades of the internet era were primarily ori- ented toward questions of “value,” a series of political shocks have called into question not only the value but the normative values of news. by value i mean the fact that sources of journal- istic funding are increasingly decoupled from generic digital display advertising; in addition, with the growth of highly sophisticated digital metrics, the literal economic value of individ- ual stories and even shorter blocks of text and multi-media can be quantified in sophisticated new ways. by value(s) in contrast, i refer to the fact that with the worldwide rise of a variety of anti-liberal political currents (brexit, the election of donald trump, the power of an increas- ingly authoritarian china, etc) as well as the simultaneous emergence of protest movements (#blacklivesmatter, #metoo, civil unrest and resistance in hong kong, and so on) journalists are increasingly being called upon to articulate and defend their normative beliefs in ways that go beyond simply the provision of factual, neutral information. given this intellectual and real-world shift from value to values, this symposium of sociolog- ica has twoaims. the first aim is to applythe theoriesand tools of sociologyto the analysis both of news value and news value(s). the second aim is to reflect on what this analytical framework can tell us about the disciplinary relationship between journalism studies and sociology. in the next two sections i discuss both of these aims through an overview of the articles and essays contained in this symposium. from value to values the first and most obvious aim of this symposium is to apply the theories and tools of various branches of sociology to the question both news value and news values. sociologies of work, management, and quantification see the manner through which firms create economic value as central to what they study (see, for example, stark, ; boczkowski, forthcoming). mean- while, cultural sociologyand the sociologyof theprofessions(along withrelateddisciplineslike normative political theory) examine how workplace cultures construct and embrace normative values that give meaning to what they do (lamont, ; boltanski & thevenot, ). the charge set out for the authors of these pieces was to problematize the easy conflation of value and values in newswork, a conflation that not only haunts the profession of journalism, but the academic subfield of journalism studies as well. while it may very well be the case that audi- ence quantification, economic success, and normative values can be achieved simultaneously, this may also not necessarily be the case. the opening invited essay by sarah jackson (university of pennsylvania, annenberg school of communication) clearly marks this shift in focus. for jackson ( ), reflecting on the newsroom controversies and tensions in american newsrooms that have accompanied the rise of #blacklivesmatter, normative news values have always been at least partially subservient to the larger values of society, which means that they are unavoidably and structurally racist even as they simultaneously represent real efforts on behalf of an occupational group to enact values that help democracy function properly. jackson’s goal in this powerful piece is for journalists to be more self-reflective about the manner by which their professional efforts can harm particular people and groups even while they purport to benefit society at large. this concern is echoed at the end of the issue in an interview with candis callison and mary lynn https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) young (university of british columbia), both of whom reflect on how their own experiences in newsrooms helped spur them into phd programs and eventual academic positions, so they could better understand the tensions between their early, purportedly noble journalistic goals and the racialized and classed institutional constraints that stymied their efforts to incorporate social justice elements into their daily newswork. what frameworks might we, as scholars, ourselves use to understand these tensions? can we criticize the way journalists fall short of their normative goals simply by looking at a list of ideal news values and documenting the manner in which these values are shortchanged in practice? in the first of the peer reviewed pieces here, juliette de maeyer deploys a refreshingly orig- inal framework for understanding news values, one based on john dewey’s theories of valua- tion, and one that tackles this question head-on. dewey, in line with his overall philosophi- cal pragmatism, proposes in his theory that we move “value(s) to valuation, considered as an action. this action comprises both prizing (an immediate, felt dimension) and appraisal (an intellectual dimension), it moves along an ends-means continuum, and it is always situated.” (de maeyer, , p. ). de maeyer looks at the journalistic metadiscourse that has accom- panied the deployment of the stock journalistic cliché, “a nose for news,” showing how this nose for news always involves some sort of situated action that bridges the gap between ideal- ism and structural constraint. bringing the two arguments full circle, we most certainly cannot interrogate the racialized elements of news production by simply documenting journalistic fail- ures, but can perhaps interrogate the manner in which the nose for news does or does not also take into consideration the presence of racial and economic injustice in deciding what counts as appropriately newsworthy. it would be interesting to apply de maeyer’s deweyan frame- work to the problems jackson, callison, and young outline in their pieces to see what might new discoveries emerge. at the conclusion of her piece, de maeyer wisely notes that news valuation is not simply emotional and affective but also carries within it an economic calculus as well; “news is a hy- brid good, with both a price-tag and a symbolic/public worth.” (de maeyer, , p. ). in their article that immediately follows, angele christin (stanford university) and caitlin petre (rutgersuniversity)begintoteaseouttheimplicationsofjournalism’simbricationofboththe economic and the symbolic. they do so by turning to vivian zelizer and her concept of “good matches,” wherein social actors engage in complex forms of relational labor in order to smooth over the contradictions between monetary transactions and social relations. in the context of digital journalism, these tensions occur within the realm of audience quantification, and most sharply at the border between “good journalism” and “good audience metrics.” drawing on two ethnographic case studies, the authors conclude that these value/values disputes are organi- zationally managed by newsroom managers who engage in moral boundary-drawing, strategic invocation, domestication, reframing metrics as democratic feedback, and justifying metrics as organizational subsidies. invoking and extending marion foucarde’s insight that most of sociology is often silent about “bad matches,” christin and petre themselves make on the task of looking at those moments when the “smoothing over” process fails through a series of bad matches that they helpfully generalize as overspelling: “when the profit-generating potential of journalists’ activities was plainly spelled out and incentivized through metrics for its own sake” (christin & petre, , p. ). the line between value and values, for christin and petre, thus exists in a state of constant tension rather than at a moment of profound change. the next piece, by lucas graves (univer- sity of wisconsin-madison) and laurens lauer (university duisburg-essen) takes stock of a moment when new values do manage to permeate an institutional field. fact-checking is (along https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) with blogging) one of the few genuinely new phenomena to penetrate the world of journalis- tic work in the past twenty years. it is also work that increasingly possesses an institutional structure. but the values of that institution — as seen through changes observed at the yearly global fact-checking summit — have shifted over time, driven in part by the need to manage internal diversity and consolidate more formal structural mechanisms to coordinate a diverse membership. drawing on extensive ethnographic and observational data, the authors argue that changes in structure can be used as a heuristic through which to understand and even measure changes in professional values. “the case of global fact.” they write “highlights the particular demands of codifying dominant values in a diverse, growing transnational field; it also indicates how event-level structures help to resolve these tensions, and offer a kind of scaf- fold for more permanent field-level governance mechanisms” (graves & lauer, , p. ). elizabeth hansen (harvard university) also looks at the manner in which journalistic val- ues have shifted in the digital age, this time through the lens of “digital disruption,” which, in the world of american public radio, functioned as both a rhetorical device used to encourage change as well as a looming organizational “death sentence.” hansen, drawing on two years of fieldwork conducted between and , argues that the rhetoric of “business model dis- ruption” deployed during that time obscured the fact that the changes that actually occurred within in news organizations lay more at the level of values (beliefs) than they did at the level of value (business model). hansen’s embrace of an idealist lens, focusing on “the ideological clashes — the clashes over values and assessments of what matters,” perhaps primes her to see shifts in belief as at least as important as shifts in socio-material infrastructure. “one of the core disruptive effects of digital media innovations,” she concludes, “is the evolution of actors’ iden- tities to contain more complex role relationships, which are complemented by a reconfigured set of values, and undergirded by a transformed set of practices” (hansen, , p. ). two articles conclude the central section of this symposium, each of them focusing, like hansen, on the tension between “value” and “values” which has been exacerbated by numer- ous socio-political shifts in journalism over past twenty years. ronald jacobs (suny-albany), providesacomprehensive(anddepressing)accountofthenumerous“legitimationcrises”faced by western journalists, most notably changing structures of media ownership, algorithmic dis- ruption, and vitriolic populist attacks on expertise and professionalism (jacobs, ). while these are familiar ailments, the most intriguing aspects of jacob’s paper outline the legitima- tion strategies journalists can (and do) deploy in order to try to confront the manifold crises. these include making greater use of opinion columnists (who can “speak truth” in ways not normally afforded to traditional news reporters) partnering with social media companies to de- velop fairer, more journalistic algorithms, boycotting populist demagogues, and injecting “aes- thetic values” into the public sphere. in contrast, amanda brouwers and tamara witschge (university of groningen) stake out an optimistic position almost diametrically opposed to the pessimism of jacobs. in their paper, these two scholars deploy a unique auto-ethnographic method in order to study, from the inside, how “hope” can function as both a value for both journalism and innovation. most studies of journalism do not discuss hope. and most stud- ies of entrepreneurial journalism, particularly in the last half-decade, have tended toward the cynical or at least the skeptical, looking at the larger background discourses of the california ideology as a structure which exploits entrepreneurs as much as it empowers them. while brouwers and witschge acknowledge the truth of this skepticism, they also want to go beyond it and study the hopeful and idealistic motivations that drive so many individuals seeking to reinvent journalism. in their own words, “we challenge the current scholarship that predomi- nantly views journalism from a sense of lack, or even dread. we consider entrepreneurs as those https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) longing for change in journalism, which means they operate not from a known, fixed under- standing of the field, but much more from a sense of what is”not yet” (bloch, in miyazaki, ) and from the possible” (brouwers & witschge, , p. ). all of these papers in the central, peer-reviewed section track these tensions between the possible and the impossible, and the dialectical swings between journalistic value and journalis- tic values. unlike most recent academic and popular writing on the news business, they do not focus only on the economic side of the crisis in journalism or on the assault on normative val- ues. rather, value and values are inherently intertwined, and trying to understand one without understanding the other — as these pieces so clearly demonstrate — is a fool’s errand. from field to discipline the changes in the study of news and journalism over the past two decades has been remark- able, and those of us entering the discipline in the early s have been able to witness the birth, growth, and healthy adolescence of an entirely new field. twenty years ago there was no “journalism studies” as an academic field, although there were of course many studies “of jour- nalism” housed in different segments of the western university. this began to shift in with the establishment of the journalism studies division at the international communica- tions association and the founding of two field consolidating journals: journalism: theory, practice & criticism (sage), and journalism studies (routledge). more recent years have seen further disciplinization and consolidation, marked by the founding of additional journals like journalism practice ( ) and digital journalism ( ). routledge academic publishing, in particular, continues to produce journalism related research at an astounding rate, featuring hardback imprints ranging from “routledge focus on journalism,” to “routledge research in journalism,” to “journalism studies: theory and practice.” a few leading scholars have even argued that digital journalism studies is itself a field, separate and apart from the study of journalism, a field marked by its own theories, problems, and canons of relevance. the days when the study of news could be found scattered across a wide variety of venerable communi- cations subfields including “sociology,” “mass communication,” “political communication,” “cultural studies,” “media theory,” and the even more generic “media studies” seem like a long time ago. given all this, the second aim this symposium call is to critically reflect upon the relation- ship between sociology and journalism studies in the opening decades of the twenty-first cen- tury, a highly appropriate goal given the presence of these articles in an internationally oriented sociological journal. once tightly linked, the disciplinary bonds between sociology and jour- nalism studies have increasingly attenuated as sociology gains in methodological sophistication and journalism studies grows increasingly disciplinary. what do sociologists still have to say about journalism — if anything? and why should journalists and scholars of the media care about what sociologists have to say? can the tools of social science, outside political science and journalism studies, help pick apart the knot of value and values discussed above? the most direct discussion of this second aim can be found in the interviews that conclude the symposium. callison and young (authors of the recently published reckoning: journal- ism’s limits and possibilities) along with media indigena podcast creator rick harp, do not have much to say about sociology in their conversation, but the three of them together provide a deep and personal set of insights as to why the field of journalism studies came to function the way it did and why that field so often falls short in its analysis of issues related to race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender identity. both callison and young highlight the manner https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) in which their drive to enter the academy was driven by their hope for journalism (similar in some ways to the hope expressed by brouwers and witschge) and the gap between that hope and the reality they faced when they worked as professional reporters. as young puts it, fundamentally though, i was compelled and i believed the idealized mission that journalism told about itself. when i worked as a journalist, i thought i was finding thetruththroughfactgatheringthroughmyinterviews, sources. itwasonlyuntili ended up reporting on crime in houston, texas, for the houston post that i started to have a number of moral dilemmas and crises about: was i representing things accurately? couldi,givenmylevelofexpertise, myeducationalbackground, given the complexity of the structural and sociological landscape that i was covering?” (harp, callison & young, , p. ). this gap between ideal and reality has helped define american and northern european journalism studies as fundamentally a problem oriented discipline. what young and callison help highlight is how some problems, under this framework, can get overlooked in favor of others. both michael schudson and todd gitlin (columbia university), who wrap up this sym- posium in an interview with jiang chang (shenzen university), have walked the line between sociology, journalism, and communication research throughout their entire careers. their per- spective differs from that of callison and young in some obvious (gender, race, generational) and less obvious ways. among the less obvious ways is their memory of another academic world, one that preceded not only the world of journalism studies but the world of a sociolog- ically inclined media studies more generally. interestingly enough, both remember a moment when the study of news could have been housed within the sociology of culture section at the american sociological association (asa), but was not — a development that helped pave the way for today’s hyper-specialized analysis of news. it is futile, of course, to wonder what a jour- nalism studies more influenced by cultural sociology might have looked like, and perhaps the academic world of today is the better one. nevertheless, i tend to agree with schudson, who notes that sometimesidofeelthatmyyoungerandintellectuallytalentedcolleaguessettletoo comfortably into “journalism studies” as the world that defines them. people are too content to focus only on journalism as if it were the whole universe. journal- ism’saveryimportantinstitution. butsoarepoliticalparties. partysystemsmatter. and so on and so forth. the economy matters. and if you are thinking and writ- ing only about journalism, you’re going to miss stuff. and i think media-centrism is an endless danger in journalism studies. looking at the culture of cultural stud- ies, or the study of culture, more widely would help but so, you know, so would knowing a little about political power. there’s a lot besides the news that makes a difference. i once told graduate students that the concept most sorely absent in communication studies is the concept of “institutions.” institutions matter, both in and around the media (chang, gitlin & schudson, , p. ). one of the most pressing questions for journalism studies going forward is the question of how it can occasionally “discount” the importance of its object of analysis in order to remain attentive to the other objects that also matter. it is my opinion that the articles in this sympo- sium provide a helpful guide for how to do just that. of course, intentions are one thing; what matters is results. in that spirit, i hope the readers of this journal find these articles of interest. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) references boczkowski, p. j., zelizer, b., & anderson, c. w. (forthcoming). journalism: a manifesto. london, uk: polity. boltanski, l., & thévenot, l. ( ). on justification: economies of worth. princeton: prince- ton university press. brouwers, a. d., & witschge, t. ( ). hope as a portal to change: reimagining jour- nalism’s value(s). sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / chang, j., gitlin, t., & schudson, m. ( ). reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, andjournalism: aninterviewwithtoddgitlinandmichaelschudson. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / christin, a., & petre, c. ( ). making peace with metrics: relational work in online news production. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / demaeyer, j.( ). “anosefornews”: from(news)valuestovaluation. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / graves,l.,&lauer,l.( ). frommovementtoinstitution: the“globalfact”summitasa field-configuring event. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / hansen, e. ( ). disrupting the news. sociologica, ( ), – https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / harp, r., callison, c., & young, m. l. ( ). value and values in the interstices of jour- nalism and journalism studies: an interview with candis callison and mary lynn young. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / jackson, s. j. ( ). on #blacklivesmatter and journalism. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / jacobs, r. n. ( ). virality, algorithms, and illiberal attacks on the press: legitimation strategies for a new world. sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / lamont, m. ( ). the dignity of working men: morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. miyazaki, h. ( ). the method of hope: anthropology, philosophy, and fijian knowledge. stanford, ca: stanford university press. stark, d. ( ). the sense of dissonance: accounts of worth in economic life. princeton: princeton university press. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / from value to values, from field to discipline sociologica. v. n. ( ) c.w. anderson: school of media and communication, university of leeds (united kingdom) https://orcid.org/ - - -  c.w.anderson@leeds.ac.uk;  https://www.cwanderson.org c. w. anderson is a professor of media and communication at the university of leeds and member of the board of advisors at the towcenter, columbiauniversity graduate school of journalism. he studies journalism, politics, and how the production of public knowledge is being transformed in the digital age. he was the author of apostles of certainty: data journalism and the politics of doubt (ox- forduniversitypress, )andrebuildingthenews(templeuniversitypress, ), andco-author or editor of the sage handbook of digital journalism (with tamara witscghe, david domingo, and alfred hermida, ), remaking the news (with pablo boczkowski, the mit press, ), and the news media: what everyone needs to know (with michael schudson and len downie, oxford university press, ). from to he was an editor and organizer at nyc indy- media, one of the world’s first “citizen journalism” websites. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cwanderson.org https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / 	introduction 	from value to values 	from field to discipline 	references safeguarding children in the developing world—beyond intra-organisational policy and self-regulation $ € £ ¥ social sciences article safeguarding children in the developing world—beyond intra-organisational policy and self-regulation afrooz kaviani johnson ,* and julia sloth-nielsen ,* department of child law, university of leiden, leiden, the netherlands department of public law and jurisprudence, university of the western cape, bellville, western cape , south africa * correspondence: a.kaviani.johnson@law.leidenuniv.nl (a.k.j.); jsloth-nielsen@uwc.ac.za (j.s.-n.) received: april ; accepted: may ; published: june ���������� ������� abstract: safeguarding in the context of development and humanitarian assistance has received heightened international attention since . emerging literature has not yet investigated the extent to which responses are evolving in the best interests of the child, in line with the treaty-based rights of children. this article makes a unique contribution to scholarship by applying a child rights lens to safeguarding efforts in the aid sector with a focus on the least developed countries in africa. the article first reviews the safeguarding landscape—providing a snapshot of self-regulatory and standard setting initiatives by non-government organisations (ngos) and bilateral government donors. next, the article examines the relevant standards in the convention on the rights of the child and the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child and respective committee observations to enrich the safeguarding discussion. finally, the article discusses key dilemmas and remaining challenges for safeguarding children in the developing world. the article suggests that a rights-based approach provides for a more nuanced and contextualised response, avoiding the temptation of ‘tick-box’ exercises driven by reputational management and ‘programming siloes’ imposed by humanitarian and development actors. to support sustained and consistent progress, efforts should go beyond intra-organisational policy and sectoral self-regulation. child rights law monitoring mechanisms can be leveraged to encourage effective government oversight of ngos in contact with children, as part of national frameworks for child protection. donor governments should also consider and increase investment in national and local child protection systems to address risk factors to child abuse and ensure appropriate responses for any child that experiences harm. keywords: safeguarding; child protection; child abuse; risk to children; sustainable development goals; convention on the rights of the child; african charter on the rights and welfare of the child; non-government organisations . introduction the global community has less than a decade to achieve the agenda for sustainable development and sustainable development goals (sdgs). agenda envisages a “world which invests in its children and in which every child grows up free from violence and exploitation” (united nations general assembly , para. ) and expressly includes several targets to end all forms of violence against children. unlike the preceding millennium development goals, agenda is grounded in including to eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls (target . ), to take immediate and effective measures to secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of human rights standards and requires that the goals “be implemented in a manner that is consistent with the rights and obligations of states under international law” (united nations general assembly , para. ). those obligations relating to children’s right to be protected from violence are articulated under several international instruments—most notably the convention on the rights of the child and the optional protocol to the convention on the rights of the child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. the convention has near universal ratification, except for the united states of america (us). most african countries have ratified the optional protocol (united nations human rights office of the high commissioner ). in the regional context, the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child has comparative articles expounding children’s right to be protected from violence. regional policy frameworks include the african union agenda and africa’s agenda for children (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child ). despite the global and regional aspirations, high rates of violence against children persist. there is insufficient investment in tackling root causes and drivers of violence, as well as in those specialised services to support children and families affected by violence. in much of africa, social welfare and child protection services are largely delivered by non-state actors including non-government organisations (ngos), faith-based organisations, and community actors. formal legal systems do not function optimally. in many cases, this enables a culture of impunity for perpetrators (csáky , p. ). not surprisingly, in the least developed countries, cases of child abuse and exploitation perpetrated by those meant to ‘help’ communities are met with heightened public outrage. this outrage ripples across the global north in cases which implicate ‘western’ offenders, international ngos and official development assistance. in early , allegations of the sexual exploitation of women and girls by a senior oxfam staff member following the earthquake in haiti made global headlines (bbc ). the revelations triggered critical introspection within the humanitarian and development sector and a flurry of consequent activity. like the reactions following the west african ‘sex-for-food’ scandal (united nations high commissioner for refugees & save the children uk ), several significant policy commitments on ‘safeguarding’ emerged, largely from the components of the ‘aid chain’ headquartered in the global north. scholarly engagement with the concept of safeguarding is just emerging (sandvik , p. ), and literature has not yet explored the extent to which responses are evolving in the best interests of the child, in line with the treaty-based rights of children. although the oxfam investigations were reportedly unable to substantiate the allegations concerning girls (charity commission for england and wales ), the risks to children arising from development and humanitarian activity are well known to child protection practitioners and documented by csáky ( ), amongst others. this article makes a unique contribution by applying a child rights lens to safeguarding efforts in the aid sector, with a focus on the least developed countries in africa, from a view in the developing world. the article examines child safeguarding within the public international law framework, taking a child rights, legal theory-based approach, and drawing on international human rights standards and norms set out in the convention on the rights of the child and other relevant instruments. the article also draws on the observations of the committee on the rights of the child and the african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child and existing legal academic scholarship relating to children’s rights. the methodology necessarily employed both legal and interdisciplinary research. the sources reviewed and analysed were identified through comprehensive desk research via databases, journal tracking and review of grey literature, including research reports, conference proceedings, and government documents on thematic areas of child abuse and exploitation, child safeguarding, safeguarding, institutional child abuse, child protection and abuse of power in development and and, by , end child labour in all its forms (target . ) and to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children (target . ). soc. sci. , , of humanitarian contexts, with a focus on africa. the article is also informed by the authors’ professional experience in child rights and protection in africa and internationally. the article first reviews the safeguarding landscape—providing a snapshot of self-regulatory and standard setting initiatives by the sector over the last three decades. next, the article examines the relevant standards in the convention on the rights of the child and the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child and respective committee observations to enrich the safeguarding discussion. finally, the article discusses key dilemmas and remaining challenges for safeguarding children in the developing world. the article suggests that a rights-based approach provides for a more nuanced and contextualised response, avoiding the temptation of ‘tick-box’ exercises driven by reputational management and ‘programming siloes’ imposed by humanitarian and development actors. to support sustained and consistent progress, efforts should go beyond intra-organisational policy and sectoral self-regulation. child rights law monitoring mechanisms can be leveraged to encourage effective government oversight of ngos in contact with children, as part of national frameworks for child protection. while safeguarding discourse in certain policy arenas has focused on sexual exploitation and abuse, an especially egregious violation of children’s rights, a rights-based approach should consider the various intersections between humanitarian and development activity and children’s treaty-based rights. this should encompass all risks and harms including those arising in the digital era. intra-organisational efforts are interlinked and dependent on local and national systems. as such, donor governments should consider and increase investment in child protection systems to address risk factors to child abuse and ensure appropriate responses for any child that experiences harm. at the time of writing, countries in africa are beginning to deal with secondary impacts of the covid- pandemic and, more than ever, robust social services are required to protect the most vulnerable children. . the safeguarding landscape—evolving self-regulation and standard setting safeguarding means different things to different people (sandvik , p. ). until relatively recently, the term was almost exclusively used in the united kingdom (uk) as a legal definition applied to vulnerable adults and children (hm government ; uk department for international development , p. ). in the context of aid, the term has evolved to focus on the organisational ‘duty of care’ and responsibility to ‘do no harm’. the term remains poorly understood in the global south (walker-simpson , p. ). while different organisations use different terminologies (sandvik , p. ), the broader issue of ngo accountability to the people they serve can be positioned within a context of at least three decades of evolving ngo self-regulation and standard setting. this section provides a snapshot of these efforts. . . self-regulatory and standard setting initiatives and the west africa ‘sex-for-food’ scandal the demand for humanitarian relief following the end of the cold war saw a proliferation of new organisations that were often “inexperienced and unprofessional” (zarnegar deloffre , p. ). attention was drawn to ngo accountability and the lack of professional standards following a series of “problematic” emergency relief operations, particularly in ethiopia, somalia, and rwanda (zarnegar deloffre , p. ). industry-wide standards emerged for ngos to distinguish themselves from “low-quality” organisations (zarnegar deloffre , p. ). these standards included the sphere humanitarian charter and minimum standards, people in aid code of conduct, and the code of conduct for international red cross and red crescent movement (sandvik , p. ). the humanitarian accountability project was established in , with the aim of piloting an international aid ombudsman (hilhorst et al. , p. ). the issue of child exploitation perpetrated by humanitarian workers first came to global attention in , with the west african ‘sex-for-food’ scandal. a united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) and save the children report implicated personnel from agencies in liberia, sierra leone and guinea in the sexual exploitation of refugee children (united nations high commissioner for refugees & save the children uk ). the revelations precipitated the development of several soc. sci. , , of policies, codes and procedures by the un and civil society. while not the focus of this article, those key un developments deserve mention as they have also guided the policies and standards of ngos. these include the establishment of the inter-agency standing committee on sexual exploitation and abuse and subsequent guidance for protection from and response to sexual exploitation and abuse (inter-agency standing committee n.d.), the un general assembly resolution on the investigation into sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in west africa (united nations general assembly ), and the issuance of a global policy in the form of the secretary-general’s bulletin, special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (united nations secretariat ). importantly the bulletin provides that sexual activity with children (persons under the age of ) is prohibited regardless of the age of majority or age of consent locally, and that mistaken belief in the age of a child is not a defence. the safeguarding policies of many ngos and bilateral donors mirror these standards. around the same time, a coalition of humanitarian and development ngos in the uk came together to establish the keeping children safe coalition. the first version of the child safeguarding standards was launched in . the standards call for organisations to: (i) develop a policy describing commitment to prevent and respond appropriately to harm to children; (ii) place clear responsibilities and expectations on staff and associates and support them to understand and act in line with these; (iii) create a child-safe environment through implementing child safeguarding procedures across the organisation; and (iv) monitor and review safeguarding measures (keeping children safe , p. ). keeping children safe has evolved into an independent ngo, which also provides consultancy services to organisations to improve child safeguarding internationally (keeping children safe n.d.). the protection of beneficiaries (adults and children) from sexual exploitation and abuse was also integrated into the work of the humanitarian accountability project (hap) and its successor core humanitarian standards alliance. the core humanitarian standard on quality and accountability sets out nine commitments that organisations and individuals involved in humanitarian response can use to improve the quality and effectiveness of the assistance they provide. the core humanitarian guidance note draws attention to the issue in five of the nine commitments. commitment (to ensure assistance appropriate to needs) calls for consideration of protection concerns, such as preventing sexual exploitation and violence. commitment (to ensure no negative impacts) recognises the “high value of aid resources and the powerful position of aid workers” and requires identification and timely action upon unintended negative effects including sexual exploitation and abuse by staff. commitment (to provide access to information and participation) explains that people may be vulnerable to exploitation and abuse (including sexual abuse) if they do not know their entitlements, the standards of behavior for humanitarian workers, and how to make a complaint. a child safeguarding policy is expressly recommended under commitment (complaints mechanisms). as part of guidance to monitor organisational responsibilities, commitment (well-managed staff and volunteers) includes a question on whether all staff and contractors are required to sign a code of conduct that covers the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (core humanitarian standard (chs)). on a national level in the global north, ngo umbrella bodies (such as the australian council for international development in australia, bond in the uk, and interaction in the us) championed codes of conduct, and accreditation, risk management and contracting arrangements of some governments were utilised to enforce standards (humanitarian advisory group ). the australian government was the first bilateral donor to implement child protection standards for staff and funded partners under its child protection policy, introduced in (ausaid ). the mandatory child protection standards follow five key principles: zero tolerance of child exploitation and abuse; recognition of the best interests of the child; sharing responsibility for child protection; procedural fairness; and a risk management approach to reduce the risks of child exploitation and abuse with aid activities. hap joined with sphere and people in aid to become part of the joint standards initiative. in december , the core humanitarian standard (chs) was launched in copenhagen. in , hap and people in aid merged to form the chs alliance (hilhorst et al. , p. ). soc. sci. , , of the united states agency for international development (usaid) also introduced child safeguarding standards to cover “all activities intended to prevent and respond to abuse, exploitation, or neglect by usaid personnel, contractors, and recipients or as a result of usaid-supported programming” (usaid ). the standards complement the usaid counter trafficking in persons code of conduct. on an organisational level, policies and standards on child protection/safeguarding, gender equality, and codes of conduct were developed and implemented in many aid organisations to varying degrees. . . new and emerging initiatives—post oxfam, #metoo and #aidtoo in february , the times newspaper published a front-page article headlined ‘top oxfam staff paid haiti survivors for sex’, which alleged that oxfam covered up claims that senior staff working in haiti following the earthquake used prostitutes, some of whom may have been under (bbc ). around the same time, #metoo and then #aidtoo revelations snowballed. these included accounts of rape, assault, and harassment in the workplace that were seen to be badly handled, denied or concealed by ngos (parker b). the parameters of safeguarding in the aid sector thus expanded to include workplace relations and harassment within organisations. the rationale was that both were enabled by power imbalances, especially gender inequality (uk department for international development b, p. ). in march , the uk parliamentary international development committee launched an inquiry on sexual exploitation and abuse in the aid sector (uk parliament ). in its final report, the committee was highly critical of the failure of the international system to tackle these abuses, and accused the sector generally of “complacency, verging on complicity” (house of commons, international development committee , p. ). the report made a number of recommendations, largely directed at the uk department for international development (dfid), including the creation of an international register of aid workers to function “as one barrier to sexual predators seeking to enter the international aid profession”, and the establishment of an independent aid ombudsman “to provide a right to appeal, an avenue through which those who have suffered can seek justice by other means”(house of commons, international development committee , pp. , ). the committee encouraged dfid to use a forthcoming ‘safeguarding summit’ to secure commitments from across the sector to move the measures forward. the safeguarding summit, convened by dfid in october , brought together over delegates including government donors (representing percent of global official development assistance), the un, international financial institutions, uk ngos, and uk private sector supply partners (commitments made by donors to tackle sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment in the international aid sector). the summit faced some controversy and criticism, including the lack of diversity in the speakers and near absence of voices from the global south (donovan ; parker b). at the summit, the uk international development secretary launched several initiatives including a dfid scheme to work with interpol to vet aid workers against criminal records, a misconduct disclosure scheme to allow employers to check for previous misconduct linked to sexual abuse and exploitation, and a humanitarian passport scheme to prove an individual’s identity and vetting status (uk department for international development a). promising commitments were made by all constituencies at the conclusion of the summit. this included pledges by ngos to address organisational culture and improve existing processes for safeguarding (bond ). perhaps most significant were the commitments made by donors the #metoo movement started over a decade ago in the us as a grassroots effort to show support for survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women of colour from low socio-economic backgrounds, and gained near global prominence from when the #metoo hashtag went viral. women in the international aid sector used the hashtag #aidtoo to bring attention to sexual violence within the sector (gillespie et al. ). australia, austria, belgium (ministry of development cooperation), canada, denmark, finland, france (ministry for europe and foreign affairs of france), germany, iceland, ireland, italy, japan (ministry of foreign affairs of japan), luxembourg (ministry of foreign and european affairs), mexico (amexid), the netherlands (ministry for foreign trade soc. sci. , , of designed to bring about four “long-term strategic shifts”, namely: (i) ensuring support for survivors, victims and whistle-blowers, enhancing accountability and transparency, strengthening reporting and tackling impunity; (ii) incentivising cultural change through strong leadership, organisational accountability and better human resource processes; (iii) agreeing minimum standards and ensuring donors and their partners meet them; and (iv) strengthening organisational capacity and capability across the international aid sector, including building the capability of implementing partners to meet the minimum standards (commitments made by donors to tackle sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment in the international aid sector). subsequently, members of the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) adopted the development assistance committee (dac) recommendation on ending sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment in development co-operation and humanitarian assistance in july (oecd development assistance committee ) this is the first international instrument to address sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment across the sector. the preamble of the dac recommendation recognises the inter-agency standing committee’s principles and minimum operating standards on prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse and the core humanitarian standard on quality and accountability as essential international standards. the rights and needs of children come out expressly in the preamble of the dac recommendation, with the recognition “that child survivors require particular attention to ensure their safety, protection, and well-being”. paragraph (d) of the dac recommendation also calls for the strengthening of “existing local services and networks and coordination with gender-based violence and child-protection services”. the dutch ministry of foreign affairs took forward a scoping study to assess whether there is a need for an aid ombudsman and, if so, how it might function and fit with existing governance mechanisms in the sector. the study, published in september , found strong consensus on the need for an ombudsman mechanism in the sector to provide independent recourse for complainants (hilhorst et al. ). while the ombudsman concept has reportedly since been abandoned by the uk government (edwards ), other initiatives have progressed. for example, the misconduct disclosure scheme to check for previous misconduct linked to sexual exploitation, abuse or harassment is operating. as of october , people have reportedly been prevented from being re-hired (uk department for international development , p. ), and organisations are using the scheme (steering committee for humanitarian response, misconduct disclosure scheme). some donors are also working with the core humanitarian standards alliance and humanitarian quality assurance initiative to strengthen verification options for chs quality assurance and to develop models that better reflect the needs of organisations (uk department for international development , p. ). . international and regional child rights frameworks to guide safeguarding there are clear intersections between violence against women and violence against children and strong arguments for improved convergence in programming (guedes et al. ). however, there is also a need for a dedicated discussion on the specific rights and needs of children, which has been somewhat diluted in some policy arenas. while the convention on the rights of the child (crc) is referred to cursorily in the safeguarding discussion as a reference point for guidance and and development cooperation), new zealand (ministry of foreign affairs and trade), norway, spain, sweden, switzerland, united kingdom (including the scottish government), and the united states of america (u.s agency for international development). australia, austria, belgium, canada, czech republic, denmark, finland, france, germany, greece, hungary, iceland, ireland, italy, japan, korea, luxembourg, netherlands, new zealand, norway, poland, portugal, slovak republic, slovenia, spain, sweden, switzerland, united kingdom, united states and the european union. the recommendation encompasses six pillars: (i) policies, professional conduct standards, organisational change and leadership; (ii) survivor/victim-centred response and support mechanisms; (iii) organisational reporting, response systems and procedures; (iv) training, awareness raising and communication; (v) international coordination; and (vi) monitoring, evaluation, shared learning and reporting. soc. sci. , , of minimum standards, mentions are largely aspirational and transitory. this section explores how child rights standards and existing monitoring mechanisms for human rights law could support a more sustainable and consistent effort to ensure children’s protection in the context of humanitarian and development activity. . . relevant treaties and articles for safeguarding children the crc is the primary instrument relating to children’s right to protection from violence. in the regional context, the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child (acrwc) has comparative articles setting out children’s rights to protection. the focus on children’s rights is important in framing the response to the issue and rejects approaches where children are characterised only as “objects in need of assistance rather than as subjects with rights” (tobin and seow , p. ). the child rights approach also recognizes that children are human beings in their own right and not ‘adults in waiting’. the monitoring of state party compliance with obligations under the crc involves external oversight by the committee on the rights of the child (the crc committee). african states are also subject to oversight by the african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child (the african committee) with regards to compliance with the acrwc. state parties are required to report periodically to the committees and committees thereafter issue concluding observations and recommendations. although these observations and recommendations impose no legal obligation, they are often an agenda for action and have had an “intensifying or catalyst effect” to support political and legal processes in countries (sloth-nielsen , pp. – ). while safeguarding discourse in certain policy arenas has focused on sexual exploitation and abuse, an especially egregious violation of children’s rights, a rights-based approach should consider the various intersections between humanitarian and development activity and children’s treaty-based rights. this should encompass all risks and harms. by way of example, the unhcr and save the children report also highlighted other forms of exploitation such as child labour. an adolescent boy in sierra leonne is quoted as saying: “i have no father and no mother and there are jobs that i am being made to do like washing underpants in exchange for food which i do because i have no parents. i wish i had my parents because i do not have any support and i am exposed to so much abuse” (united nations high commissioner for refugees & save the children uk , p. ). issues of safeguarding would fall primarily under the crc theme (or ‘cluster’) related to violence against children. the crc committee (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ) explains that this cluster includes abuse and neglect (article ), measures to prohibit and eliminate all forms of harmful practices, including, but not limited to, female genital mutilation and early and forced marriages (article ), sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (article ), the right not to be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including corporal punishment (articles (a) and ), measures to promote the physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of child victims (article ), and the availability of helplines for children. other forms of exploitation, including child labour, are to be reported under the special protection measures other international instruments include the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish human trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the convention against transnational organised crime, the convention concerning the prohibition and immediate action for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour and the optional protocol to the convention on the rights of the child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. the relationship between the instruments should be understood as complementary (tobin and seow , p. ). the authors are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point. in , the committee on the rights of the child revised the guidelines for periodic reports to reflect the new cluster on violence against children and to update references to general comments (united nations committee on the rights of the child ). article is regarded as “the core provision for discussions and strategies to address and eliminate all forms of violence in the context of the convention more broadly” ((united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. (a))). in contrast to article , article imposts a blanket obligation on states to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation irrespective of whether they are in the care of their parents (tobin and seow , p. ). soc. sci. , , of cluster (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the relevant articles in the acrwc include articles (child labour), (child abuse and torture), (harmful social and cultural practices), (armed conflicts) and (sexual exploitation) in particular. in its general comment no. on state party obligations under the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child (article ) and systems strengthening for child protection, the african committee elaborates on the measures required to improve implementation of the acrwc and in particular calls for states to states “to adopt a holistic approach” to realise children’s right to survival, development and protection provided by article of the acrwc. the african committee explains that this is enabled by adopting a systems-strengthening approach to child protection (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). a systems-strengthening approach would include both formal and informal local contexts around the child (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). . . domestic implementation and the role of the international community the observations of the crc committee are useful to articulate the respective responsibilities of developing vis-à-vis donor countries. the crc committee is cognisant of the different starting points of state parties in implementing the crc and obligations relating to protection of children from violence. the crc committee acknowledges that protecting children from all forms of violence is highly challenging in most countries and that states parties are designing and implementing measures from “very different starting points” with respect to existing legal, institutional and service infrastructures, cultural customs and professional competencies, and levels of resources (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). while recognising different starting points, the crc committee highlights that the right to protection from all forms of violence outlined in article is a civil right and freedom. as such, in applying article of the crc (taking all appropriate legislative, administrative, and other measures for the implementation of the rights), implementation of article is “an immediate and unqualified obligation” of states parties (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). this means that in spite of economic circumstances, states are required to undertake all possible measures towards the realisation of children’s rights, paying special attention to the most disadvantaged and using available resources “to the maximum extent” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the african committee likewise emphasises that “whatever their economic circumstances, states parties are required to undertake all possible positive measures towards the realisation of the rights of the child” and to pay “special attention to the most disadvantaged and marginalised groups” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). on child protection specifically, the african committee notes “state party spending on child protection and systems strengthening is far too low, and lacks visibility in government budgets” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). the crc committee is explicit that “resource constraints cannot provide a justification for a state party’s failure to take any, or enough, of the measures that are required for child protection” taking into consideration state parties’ obligations under articles and (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). while acknowledging fiscal realities in africa, the african committee states that the acrwc standards “were set intentionally” and “do not allow states parties to claim that they do not have any resources for the implementation of social and economic goods for the fulfilment of children’s rights” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). furthermore, the african committee explains it will “scrutinise diligently claims that non-fulfilment of rights is linked to non-availability of resources” and expects that states parties show “rapid forward progress in extending the reach and impact” of measures to realise children’s rights (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , pp. – ). the crc committee urges states “to adopt comprehensive, strategic and time-bound coordinating frameworks for child caregiving and protection” (united nations committee on the rights of the child soc. sci. , , of , para. ). similarly, the african committee calls for “a national policy for children that provides a common, unifying, comprehensive and rights-based framework of action for all role-players”, which is costed, has measurable targets and budget allocations (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). it is within such frameworks that responsibilities of ngos in contact with children can be embedded. in view of “different starting points”, and on the understanding that budgets on national and decentralised levels should be the primary source of funds for child protection, the crc committee has drawn the attention of states parties to the avenues of international cooperation and assistance outlined in articles and of the crc (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the crc committee states that implementation of the crc is “a cooperative exercise for the states of the world” and that the crc “should form the framework for international development assistance related directly or indirectly to children and that programmes of donor states should be rights-based” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , paras. , ). the african committee also encourages state parties to ensure children’s rights are “deliberately reflected and adequately catered for in all donor aid agreements, including with global finance institutions” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). in general comment no. ( ) on the right of the child to freedom from all forms of violence, the crc committee reiterates that child rights-based protection programmes should be one of the main components in assisting sustainable development in countries receiving international assistance (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). this is reflected in part in the dac recommendation, in which signatories have expressly acknowledged the importance of strengthening child protection services. while forming part of recommendations by unhcr and save the children (united nations high commissioner for refugees & save the children uk ) and csáky (csáky ), this important element has not received significant attention in recent safeguarding discussions. . . applicability to non-state actors at the very least, there are ‘indirect’ children’s rights obligations for non-state actors to comply with children’s treaty-based rights. in general comment no. ( ) on general measures of implementation, the crc committee emphasises that the legal obligation of state parties “to respect and ensure the rights of children as stipulated in the convention” includes the “obligation to ensure that non-state service providers operate in accordance with its provisions, thus creating indirect obligations on such actors” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the crc committee further elaborates that child rights responsibilities extend in practice “beyond the state and state-controlled services and institutions to include children, parents and wider families, other adults, and non-state services and organisations” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the crc committee has taken a broad view of ngos constituting, for example, human rights ngos, child- and youth-led organisations and youth groups, parent and family groups, faith groups, academic institutions and professional associations (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). this broad view is particularly relevant in the african context where most services to children are delivered by civil society organisations (csos). these can include ngos, faith-based organisations, volunteer networks, social enterprises, or philanthropic projects connected to for-profit companies (parker a, p. ). organisations that encounter children are not only those that provide social services such as education, health, nutrition, recreation, alternative care, and protection but also other services, including water and sanitation, infrastructure, as well as humanitarian relief. the crc committee has also expressed its agreement with the committee on economic, social and cultural rights in its general comment no. ( ) of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. paragraph of the general comment reiterates that as parties to the covenant, states are “ultimately accountable for compliance with it” but responsibilities for realisation of the right to health fall to all members of society, including health professionals, families, local communities, soc. sci. , , of intergovernmental and ngos, csos, and the private business sector. states parties are therefore called to “provide an environment which facilitates the discharge of these responsibilities” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). . . best interests of the child the best interests’ principle is fundamental and especially relevant for child safeguarding in the aid sector. article ( ) of the crc provides that the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration in “all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies.” importantly, the crc committee elaborates that “public or private social welfare institutions” should not be narrowly construed or limited to strictly social institutions but would apply to “all institutions whose work and decisions impact on children and the realisation of their rights” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the crc committee notes these would be bodies “not only those related to economic, social and cultural rights (e.g., care, health, environment, education, business, leisure and play, etc.), but also institutions dealing with civil rights and freedoms (e.g., birth registration, protection against violence in all settings, etc.)” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). private bodies include “either for-profit or non-profit—which play a role in the provision of services that are critical to children’s enjoyment of their rights, and which act on behalf of or alongside government services as an alternative” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). this extension of this obligation to private social welfare organisations is quite unusual in an international treaty (eekelaar and john , p. ). the crc committee explains that article has implications for all implementation measures taken by governments, individual decisions made by judicial or administrative authorities or public entities through their agents, decisions made by civil society entities and the private sector, including profit and non-profit organisations, which provide services concerning or impacting on children, and guidelines for actions undertaken by persons working with and for children, including parents and caregivers (united nations committee on the rights of the child , pt. ii). the best interests’ principle should therefore be the primary consideration in all actions concerning children undertaken by humanitarian and development organisations. guidance from the african committee reinforces the broad application of the best interests’ principle. in its general comment no. on state party obligations under the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child (article ) and systems strengthening for child protection, the african committee states that article ( ) of the acrwc provides that the best interests of the child shall be the primary consideration and this applies to both private and public institutions (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). the african committee explains it is therefore “the responsibility of the state party to ensure to the maximum extent possible that private actors, including . . . various non-state actors engaged with children’s rights and services, are aware of and apply the best interests of the child in all of their endeavours” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). furthermore, article ( ) of the crc provides: “state parties shall ensure that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.” while some doubt was expressed as to the appropriateness of this provision, the legislative history suggests the rationale was to apply the best interests’ principle to the very specific area of institutional care and service provision (office of the united nations & high commissioner for human rights , pp. – ). the application in alternative care settings is also explicit in the commentary of the african committee (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). there has been little exploration of this article, yet it is highly relevant to safeguarding discourse. in africa, most institutional care is provided by ngos and faith-based organisations, many of which soc. sci. , , of are funded by faith communities or individual donors from the global north, and which often fail to register or comply with relevant government regulations (see for example munthali , p. ). in its general comment no. ( ) on general measures of implementation, the crc committee emphasises that “enabling the private sector to provide services, run institutions and so on does not in any way lessen the state’s obligation to ensure for all children within its jurisdiction the full recognition and realisation of all rights in the convention.” in relation to article ( ), the crc committee explains that rigorous inspection is required to ensure compliance and proposes “a permanent monitoring mechanism or process aimed at ensuring that all state and non-state service providers respect the convention” (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). . . intra-organisational processes and codes of conduct in general comment no. ( ) on the right of the child to freedom from all forms of violence, the crc committee explains that administrative measures under article of the crc “should reflect governmental obligations to establish policies, programmes, monitoring and oversight systems required to protect the child from all forms of violence” ((united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. (b))). these include the development and implementation “through participatory processes which encourage ownership and sustainability” of intra- and inter-agency child protection policies and professional ethics codes, protocols, memoranda of understanding and standards of care for all childcare services and settings, for all levels of government and civil society institutions. settings include daycare centres, schools, hospitals, sport clubs and residential institutions ((united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. (b))). the implementation by government and civil society of rights-based child protection policies and procedures and professional ethics codes and standards of care are also mentioned by the crc committee in relation to ‘prevention measures’ (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). the emphasis on ownership and sustainability is important, otherwise there is a risk that the endeavour becomes a ‘tick-box’ exercise. in other words, if the codes and policies are to impact positively on children’s protection, the process will require more than preparing paperwork that is filed and forgotten. there is a need for meaningful consultation among stakeholders, including children and young people themselves, and consideration of how international and regional standards can be implemented in a local context, in the best interests of the child. the values and behaviours elaborated within codes and policies must be owned and championed by organisational leaders and staff, and safeguarding policies and practice continually monitored, assessed and adapted. pressure to produce a checklist of policies and procedures driven by a compliance imperative is unlikely to lead to change that improves children’s protection. the african committee has echoed the importance of policies and personnel of ngos in its recent general comment no. on state party obligations under the african charter on the rights and welfare of the child (article ) and systems strengthening for child protection. the african committee requires civil society organisations and international organisations working with children to adopt child safeguarding policies. furthermore, the committee suggests persons who have abused children should not be able to work with children, even as volunteers. importantly, especially for the african context where ngo–government relationships in some countries are “characterised by a large amount of distrust, cooptation, and outright repression”(gugerty , p. ), the african committee urges “state parties to review the legislation governing the registration and operation of csos to ensure that it does not provide any impediment to their optimal functioning”(african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child ). while there are different legal frameworks and self-regulatory mechanisms for ngos across the continent (gugerty ), child protection and safeguarding measures are not yet incorporated. both the crc and african committees could raise questions on such standards in its list of issues for state party reports as part of their external oversight role. soc. sci. , , of . key dilemmas and challenges for child safeguarding this final section sets out key areas for further consideration and critical debate by practitioners and policymakers in the effort to safeguard children from harm in the context of humanitarian and development activity. recent developments and commitments are significant and promising. however, to harness the current momentum and ensure initiatives in the global north positively impact children’s safety in the least developed countries, there is arguably scope for a more nuanced and contextualised approach, guided by children’s treaty-based rights and the best interests’ principle. current sectoral efforts appear to largely focus on international ngos with headquarters in the global north and the risk of a ‘western’ offender harming children in the world’s poorest countries. this does not reflect the variety of organisations inhabiting the aid space and in contact with children. the focus on ‘western’ staff is arguably disproportionate given that local staff make up the majority of the workforce in the developing world and both local and ‘foreign’ staff (of all levels) have been implicated in cases of child abuse (csáky , p. ). this reality suggests that high-profile initiatives such as the global criminal records register may have a limited impact on the protection of children in the developing world. firstly, a global criminal records register assumes that the person has already come to the attention of police and justice systems. it is well evidenced that “much abusive behaviour has historically gone unreported” and the majority of “perpetrators detected do not have prior convictions for any form of child maltreatment” (tilbury , p. ). secondly, the register assumes that there are functioning information management systems in the countries in which personnel have resided in order to be able to feed into the global database. this is not the case in most developing countries in africa. by way of example, even in one of the most developed countries on the continent, south africa, implementing a scheme to identify persons unsuitable to work with children has proved largely unsuccessful. south africa’s children’s act (act no. of ) mandates the department of social development to keep and maintain a child protection register (section ), which consists of two parts. part a records all reports of abuse or deliberate neglect of a child and part b lists persons declared unsuitable to work with children. the act requires all organisations to assess and verify the suitability of employees and potential employees who will “work with or have access to children” (section ). as of march , the register has names of persons declared unsuitable to work with children and the department has only received , suitability check enquiries from employers and individuals. with over million people in south africa employed in the formal non-agricultural sector (department of statistics, south africa ), the small number of suitability checks makes it clear that the register is not functioning optimally. among other challenges, the register is constrained in that it does not align with the national register for sexual offenders, resulting in critical omissions in the list of crimes that warrant inclusion on the register, such as attempted rape (kpmg , pp. – ). even high-income countries with functional and routine criminal records checks for determining suitability of working with children are increasingly cognisant of their limitations. in australia, for example, some commentators suggest the scope of screening regimes risk being “too big and too expensive to be sensible” (tilbury , p. ). at worst, an overreliance on such mechanisms can be detrimental to children’s safety. the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in australia—one of the most probing government inquiries to have taken place—found that australia’s working with children checks can provide a “false sense of comfort to parents and communities and may cause organisations to become complacent” due to the mistaken belief that people who have undergone these checks do not pose any risks to children (australia & royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse , p. ). screening is only one in a range of strategies needed to make organisations child safe. rather than a sole focus on trying to identify individuals and prevent them entering organisations, lessons from other jurisdictions emphasise to the need “to modify environments, thereby reducing the likelihood that anyone could engage in abusive behaviour” (higgins et al. , pp. – ). there should also be attention on the structures and opportunities within the sector that enable abuse to occur. lessons soc. sci. , , of may be drawn from the large body of literature about the role of institutions (both government and non-government) with responsibility for children in preventing and responding to child sexual abuse. the uk independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, for example, commissioned a rapid evidence assessment and identified structural and organisational factors shown to facilitate child sexual abuse (radford et al. ). these included privacy and the offender being alone with the child, persons in positions of trust having little supervision or monitoring, lack of safeguarding policies, failure to report or to sanction offenders, a culture where abuse is normalised, hierarchical organisations where it is difficult for junior staff to complain, lack of an adequate complaints system, and a lack of safe space for children who are victimised to tell anyone about the abuse, and to have complaints acted on appropriately (radford et al. , p. ). this highlights the limitations of ‘tick-box’ exercises focused on paperwork and calls for a localised and thorough assessment of how ngos in the developing world interact with children and what risks these interactions present. on a larger scale, this also requires the sector to grapple with the inequitable power relations that characterise their interactions with communities and children. in the humanitarian accountability partnership report of consultations with aid beneficiaries on their perceptions of efforts to prevent and respond to sexual exploitation and abuse, lattu (lattu , p. ) concluded that the single most important reason for the “humanitarian accountability deficit” is the uneven relationship between agencies delivering aid and users of humanitarian assistance which puts the users “at a structural disadvantage in their relationship with humanitarian aid providers.” this inequitable relationship is echoed in the voices of children, captured in empirical evidence on the subject. for example, an adolescent girl in liberia is quoted as saying: “these ngo workers they are clever they use the ration as bait to get you to have sex with them” (united nations high commissioner for refugees & save the children uk , p. ). similarly, the following quote from an adolescent girl in cote d’ivoire, “he’s using the girl but without him she won’t be able to eat”, and an adolescent boy in south sudan, “people don’t report it because they are worried that the agency will stop working here, and we need them” (csáky , p. ). this observation is not new, nor limited to children, but it is one that has arguably not yet been adequately addressed. it calls for transformative change in the sector. there are indications of some organisations starting to contend with these entrenched power dynamics. in addition to inequitable power relations, safeguarding efforts need to pay greater attention to longstanding attitudes and beliefs on child abuse and appropriate responses to it. these social and cultural norms form part of the “very different starting points” in the implementation of children’s rights as highlighted by the crc committee (united nations committee on the rights of the child , para. ). social and cultural norms relating to children and child abuse may be either protective of children or enhance their vulnerability. these norms need to be considered in safeguarding efforts as they are both risk factors and barriers to help seeking. while not representative across the continent or within countries, the following harmful norms have been identified in the literature: gender norms and gender socialisation including about social roles or expectations that differentiate males and females and place children at increased risk of sexual abuse (gwirayi ; plummer and njuguna ); patriarchy including male dominance or perceived superiority that can perpetuate abuse, male violence and traditional notions of masculinity and normalisation of inter-personal violence (gwirayi ; lalor ; petersen et al. ; plummer and njuguna ); a ‘culture of silence’ relating to sexual matters and discouraging speaking up about sexual violence (plummer and njuguna ); and sexual norms including sexual initiation rites or harmful practices including female genital mutilation and child marriage (plummer and njuguna ), and the myth of sexual intercourse with a young child to ‘cure’ sexually transmitted diseases including hiv/aids (lalor ). many of these norms intersect with norms that enable violence against women but there are also distinct norms relating to children including their low status and socialisation for obedience and acquiescence (lalor ; plummer and njuguna ). by way of example, the following quote from a south sudanese girl is illustrative of various attitudes and practices at play that contribute to individual and community responses to abuse: “the father would try to persuade the man to take the girl as a bride and to pay cattle for her. soc. sci. , , of he would not ask the girl whether she wants this. so really the girl gets no advantage from telling anyone about the abuse” (csáky , p. ). norms on masculinity also contribute to low disclosure rates by boys that experience sexual abuse (guedes et al. , p. ). importantly, those beliefs and norms found on the community level also manifest amongst the local staff of aid organisations as well as the staff and volunteers of their implementing partners (sloth-nielsen , p. ). additionally, they will be found amongst duty bearers or service providers that will be called upon to respond when allegations of child abuse emerge and are reported. closely linked to this point, in most of africa’s least developed countries, the institutional dimensions to address child abuse (such as infrastructure in law enforcement, judiciary, health and social welfare) are constrained. victim and witness protections are weak and reporting to formal services may put children and communities at further risk. this raises potential ethical dilemmas for reporting abuse. walker-simpson argues that “the very act of reporting abuse may actually expose the child to additional risk” in contravention to the ‘do no harm’ principle (walker-simpson , p. ). informal community practices are often the prevailing system employed for dealing with child abuse. while these may not always seem to provide adequate protection when “judged through a western lens”, they are “often considered the least stigmatising, most accessible, and most helpful of interventions by communities” (krueger et al. , p. ). this highlights the criticality of meaningful consultation and addressing the attitudes and expectations of local people, otherwise “no matter how strong an ngo’s internal safeguards, if children and their caregivers are unwilling or unable to report abuse, protection procedures will remain ‘fatally flawed’” (walker-simpson , p. ). the push to establish complaints mechanisms for specific projects or organisations can also be problematic, especially in the absence of a functioning system at local or national level. parallel systems risk creating perverse situations, where there is a system in place to refer, investigate, report, and act upon cases of violence only if it is perpetrated by an aid worker. violence against children in the context of aid cannot be detached from child protection generally, just as sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers cannot be detached from gender-based violence generally (stern ). there is a need to “move away from programming silos focussed on perpetrators and their acts”, and instead focus “on victims and their harm” (stern ). there is some parallel to efforts to disrupt child sexual abuse and exploitation in the context of tourism, especially in south east asia, where international advocacy and programmes focused more on the foreign sex offender and less on the underlying and interlinked factors contributing to children’s vulnerability (kaviani johnson ). similarly, research shows that those children vulnerable to abuse by aid workers are “already vulnerable children” including orphans, children with disabilities, children separated from their parents, children from especially poor families, children who are discriminated and marginalised, children displaced from their home communities, migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking children, and children from families who depend on humanitarian assistance (csáky , p. ). the african committee calls for a systems-strengthening approach to child protection and explains that an issues-based approach has, in the past, “resulted in a fragmented child protection response, marked by numerous inefficiencies and pockets of unmet need” (african committee of experts on the rights and welfare of the child , p. ). it follows that investment in child protection systems strengthening is strongly interlinked with the responsibility of delivering aid in a way that does no harm and would sustain efforts to ensure protection of children in the developing world. finally, there are new challenges for children’s rights, which arise from development and humanitarian activity in the digital era. the committee on the rights of the child is currently drafting a general comment on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. one group of rights to be realised in a digital world is the protection of privacy, identity and data processing. this is highly relevant for aid organisations in the developing world. the aid sector uses mobile telecommunications, messaging apps and social media to coordinate their work, communicate with staff and volunteers, and engage with the people they serve ((international committee of the red cross icrc, p. )). many african countries are also seen as a “testing ground” for technologies produced elsewhere and, soc. sci. , , of as a consequence, the personal data of people on the continent, including children, are increasingly stored in hundreds of databases (privacy international ). this is especially relevant with current digital health surveillance in the response to covid- . the way in which data, including children’s data, is collected and is used is changing quickly and the ongoing accumulation of data about children throughout their lifetime can create a variety of unforeseen risks and challenges (viola de azevedo cunha ). some children, for example, refugee children, may be particularly vulnerable to invasions of privacy in the form of data surveillance as well as dangers resulting from data-leaks or misuses (peace research institute oslo ). this is an area for further examination and focus for the sector. . conclusions the increased attention and strong consensus and commitment to address sexual exploitation and abuse in the aid sector is commendable. the suite of standards may coordinate and socialise ngos in advancing child safeguarding and reducing organisational risk, especially for those ngos with headquarters—or funded by donors—in the global north. this is an important endeavor given the fact that, in many of the world’s least developed countries, non-state actors deliver the majority of services to children and thus have an important role to play in contributing towards their protection. furthermore, as discussed, non-state actors have—at the very least—‘indirect’ obligations to comply with children’s treaty-based rights. going forward, it is suggested that the safeguarding discourse applies a child rights-based approach and considers the various intersections between humanitarian and development activity and children’s treaty-based rights. this should encompass all risks and harms, including those emerging in the digital age. furthermore, given the strong links and dependency between intra-organisational efforts and national systems, there is a need to go beyond intra-organisational policies and self-regulation. ngos and governments must be jointly and severally responsible for child safeguarding. in the case of national governments, progressive improvement of child protection standards and oversight of non-state actors working with children is required. to do this, national and international investment is needed for strengthening child protection systems on national and local levels in the developing world. to be sustainable and contribute to meaningful change for children, efforts cannot be driven by the latest scandal, but must be motivated by a genuine commitment to children’s treaty-based rights. with less than ten years to achieve agenda and at a time 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[crossref] zarnegar deloffre, maryam. . global accountability communities: ngo self-regulation in the humanitarian sector. review of international studies : – . [crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% fgc% f &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% fgc% f &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% fgc% f &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% fgc% f &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% f % frev. &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ /treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=crc% fc% f % frev. &lang=en https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/crc/shared% documents/ _global/int_crc_sta_ _e.pdf https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/treaties/crc/shared% documents/ _global/int_crc_sta_ _e.pdf https://undocs.org/a/res/ / https://undocs.org/a/res/ / https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/international-development/ -report-of-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse-save% the% children.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/international-development/ -report-of-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse-save% the% children.pdf https://indicators.ohchr.org/ https://undocs.org/pdf?symbol=en/st/sgb/ / https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ / mbt.pdf https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/child_privacy_challenges_opportunities.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /car. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	the safeguarding landscape—evolving self-regulation and standard setting 	self-regulatory and standard setting initiatives and the west africa ‘sex-for-food’ scandal 	new and emerging initiatives—post oxfam, #metoo and #aidtoo 	international and regional child rights frameworks to guide safeguarding 	relevant treaties and articles for safeguarding children 	domestic implementation and the role of the international community 	applicability to non-state actors 	best interests of the child 	intra-organisational processes and codes of conduct 	key dilemmas and challenges for child safeguarding 	conclusions 	references the romance publishing industry and its reputation vol.:( ) publishing research quarterly ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - the romance publishing industry and its reputation lauren cameron published online: january © the author(s) abstract romance has always had a negative reputation, but is this reputation justified? this study examines the negative stigma surrounding the billion dollar romance publish- ing industry in the usa and uk. the potential causes are discussed, and testimoni- als from contemporary romance readers and writers provide a basis for the case that this judgemental stance should be removed. keywords romance · fiction market · perception of romance · book community · romance authors · readers introduction romance fiction is one of the most popular fiction genres in the united kingdom and the united states, but there is a stigma surrounding it. this stigma shames romance readers and writers, because society sees romance fiction as “trashy”. this creates small communities of romance readers that support each other while often hiding their love of the books. despite its reputation, it is a billion-dollar industry. romance is an intrinsically feminine genre, which creates a problem in misogy- nistic societies that are attempting to police women’s bodies and minds. the strug- gle to implement feminism is not just a problem within the uk and usa, but it is also holding back the romance community from being acknowledged as a legitimate section of fiction readers. the aims of this study are to discover how the negative perception of romance came about, and how it has changed throughout the history of the genre. the cultural influence of misogyny in the uk and usa will be examined * lauren cameron laurencameron@live.ca edinburgh napier university, calder road, edinburgh eh    pf, uk [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf publishing research quarterly ( ) : – in relation to the romance genre to determine whether patriarchal values have any influence on the negative stigma. romance is a genre that is valuable and legitimate, and also not what most people believe it to be. perception of romance has been heavily skewed by a select few nov- els. there are very few academic studies that positively reflect romance. with only negative voices present, it cannot be conclusively said that romance has no value. by presenting the other side of the argument, new information can be added to the academic study of the fiction market. defining romance romance is a subgenre in fiction that must contain two main components: a central love story, and an emotionally satisfying ending. in the us alone, romance is a bil- lion dollar industry. within this genre, there are further subgenres: historical, erot- ica, etc. for the purpose of this study, contemporary romance will be the focus. con- temporary romance must meet the basic qualifications of romance, while also being a reflection of the time period it is written in. typically, contemporary romances include any romance set in the time period it is being written, within  years. all romance novels that were once contemporary but now considered historical provide insight into the state of romance throughout its history. today’s contempo- rary romance is focused on two things: bodily autonomy, and a push towards diver- sity. early romance novels saw heterosexual white women defying social norms, overcoming personal struggles, and finding happiness, a theme that has continued today with much more diversity. terms used to describe romance novels are often problematic and used to keep romance contained in a box. by calling a book an “easy-read”, it implies that the readers of the genre are not intelligent. “porn” implies that readers only read the novels for sexual reasons; to categorize every romance novel as an outlet for sexual frustration diminishes the genre and women. finally, “trash” implies that the nov- els are bad, when the entire point of romance is to examine human relationships. the first novel considered a romance was pamela; or virtue rewarded, by sam- uel richardson. published in , it was the first novel to be written solely from the female point of view, and to feature a love story with a “happily ever after”. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ] [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – writers such as jane austen and charlotte brontë published successful romance novels, but the genre did not take off as a mass market industry until the s, with the founding of harlequin. it was the first company to change with the romance genre; selling romance novels was about convenience for women, which was a business plan that allowed them to become a powerhouse in a multi-billion-dollar industry. today, the romance audience is % female, with % reading print, % ebooks, and % audio books. romance publishers have kept up every step of the way, allowing them to maintain % of the usa book market. modern romance is thought to have begun in , with the publication of the flame and the flower by kathleen e. woodiwiss. this was the first romance novel to contain an explicit sex scene, which then launched a trend in romance that continues to this day. however, it also contained problematic content. this novel had many explicit rape scenes, as did its contemporaries, which was a huge prob- lem from the elevated perspective of the twenty-first century. however, in , women in the uk and the usa could not get a credit card, and marital rape was not considered a crime. idealized and glamourized explicit rape as a plot device has since been eradicated from the genre, but as we can see with the current #metoo movement, our society has not had the same revelation. the heroes in romance reflect the sociopolitical times. for example, with the eco- nomic crash of the early s, romance saw a rise in billionaire heroes. now, with feminism strengthening and the rise of #metoo and the current political cli- mate, the alpha male hero no longer works alongside the strong female heroine. contemporary romance novels reflect the times they are written in, and these novels have drastically changed from the versions released in . the issue romance, as a genre, has been ridiculed by larger society since its advent. despite consistently being a best-selling genre and billion-dollar industry, romance still receives little to no respect. author penny reid states that she has seen her books called “trashy romance”, “fluffy”, “smut”. in a article about upcoming [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – novels, cosmopolitan called a romance novel “too well written to be considered romance”. this insults the writers and readers of the genre. one of the most recent instance of romance shaming that renewed the debate had to do with author and politician stacy abrams. abrams is a bestselling romance novelist. she went on the stephen colbert show to discuss her political career. instead, colbert got out one of her novels, which abrams politely admitted to writ- ing. abrams was clearly uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was going, because colbert’s tone and the tone of the audience were ridiculing. colbert then proceeded to read one of the sex scenes in her novel, to her obvious discom- fort, and then laughed. abrams was being shamed for being a successful author. abrams is so much more than her romance career, and to out something she clearly prefers to keep private insults her and the genre. the debate the debate about whether romance is a worthy genre goes back to its advent. not just romance, but women’s writing as a whole. because romance is a female dominated genre, it is seen as more lowbrow than almost any other genre. despite being a female dominated field, romance receives just as much backlash from women as it does from men. in , george eliot described women’s writing as “frothy, prosy, pious, and pedantic. however, there was another perspective as well, otherwise women’s writing would not have survived. virginia woolf said: “[…] the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; […]. yet it is the masculine values that prevail. […] this is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. this is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing- room”. woolf correctly identified the main problem with romance: it deals with women’s feelings. what academics are saying the differing opinions on romances worthiness as a genre come from those who read it, and those who do not. those within the community make convincing argu- ments for why it is worthy. however, most pieces written on romance in the past years were not written by people who read the genre, and therefore do not offer a full perspective, or a positive one. hannah eisley burnett argues that the shame surrounding romance draws its readers together into a community. eisler-burnett’s thoughts are that romance [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – would sell even more incredibly if it was not so highly ridiculed by society as a whole. by building a community of romance readers, the shame associated with reading it loses power and disappears. sarah wendell argues that it is a genre focused on emotional development and self-actualization, that values women’s emotions and desires. jennifer weiner agrees, and she thinks that these books are so criticized because they are about women. weiner say, “it’s sexist when critics automatically relegate anything con- cerning young women’s lives to the beach-trash dumpster bin-especially when they’re automatically elevating anything about young men’s lives to the exalted spheres of literature”. the fact that readers continue to read the genre despite the shame placed upon them shows that the genre is interesting and worthy. pamela regis argues that romance is the most popular genre, but popularity does not equal acceptance. crit- ics characterize the genre from a few reviewed texts, which are gate-kept by men. nora roberts has written and published over novels, but her books have only been reviewed by the new york times twice, despite consistently being best-sell- ers. a reader’s rejection is based on personal taste, whereas a critic’s opinion is meant to be based on “reasoning and sufficient evidence”, and the majority clearly are not. critical rejection of romance novels began to emerge in the s, alongside first- wave feminism. germaine greer said, “romance nourishes disappointed women, creates unattainable fantasy, and is cause and effect of women’s oppression”. fem- inists in this time did not like how passive women were, but regis argues that this is a deliberate misreading of the genre. just because a woman’s story has a love story, does not mean that the woman is passive; the novels try to reaffirm women’s independence by giving them choice in their own happiness. krentz argues that romance novels are subversive, because they show a woman holding power but not abusing it. krentz, wendall and regis are some of the only academic voices advocat- ing for romance. the other voices are much more negative, such as an article that claims the idealized versions of love that romance presents lead to psychosexual [ ]. [ , ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – problems, perpetuates gender roles and does not demonstrate safe sex practices. jade deveraux argues back that “supposedly women who read [romantic novels] are so stupid that they can’t tell a story from reality. is anyone worried that the men who read spy thrillers are going to go after their neighbours with an automatic weapon?”. deveraux’s point demonstrates that iqbal’s point is about policing women’s minds and bodies. as well, contemporary romance novels have adapted to keep up with reliable contraception and consent. is romance feminist? in her study, linda christian-smith argues that romance novels are anti-feminist because men give meaning to the women. but do the women in the novels not also “complete” the men? the story is meant to be focused on them finding love, not the other aspects of their lives, because that is not the genre. the couples, whether men and women, men and men, or women and women, complement each other, and choose to live their lives together. christian-smith did a study of girls at a lower middle-class school to see the effects of reading romance on teenagers. according to her, girls read romance for four main reasons: to escape, entertainment, because they enjoy it, and to learn about love. christian-smith argues that romance novels are the reason girls are getting in trouble in school, and that these young girls are failing their classes because they read romance. however, the girls were women of colour in a low income area who are not given as many choices in society. perhaps the most concerning idea of chris- tian-smiths’ was that girls only get part-time jobs to be consumers, and put them- selves in situations where they may have a romantic encounter. in direct contrast to christian-smith’s ideas, drew himmelstein says, “reading romantic novels is a useful way for teenagers to learn about relationships and experi- ment with their sexual imaginations in a safe space. at a time when adolescents are developing the neural pathways for sexual pleasure and fantasy that will carry them into their adult lives, stories and characters provide a vivid world that is both “titil- lating and educational”. by allowing teenagers to learn about sex and romantic situations from romance novels, they view is less as a forbidden thing, but a way to connect with another person, and are therefore more likely to have respect for their own bodies and sex itself. romance novels teach girls to be a part of a sexual rela- tionship, not just an accessory. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ] [ , ] [ ]. [ , ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – christian-smith’s ideas would reflect that romance is not feminist. however, she has never been immersed in the genre. no one is saying that romance novels all represent feminist values; author courtney milan argues that romance is not inher- ently a feminist genre, but it is changing to become so. romance explores what it is to be a woman, and draws feminists because there are so many women in the business. these feminists are making sure women are represented and empowered with the books they read. as well, romance is feminist because it welcomes women from all over the world to explore and talk about books that they love. romance and its adaptation and ability to explore new issues and diversity make it unique. romance as a genre has room for critiquing, as all genres do, but it needs to be informed critique based on actual evidence. the romance formula the other main point of contention about romance is that the books follow a “for- mula”. this is true; a romance novel needs an emotionally satisfying ending, and it has to have a love story. typically, the first sex scene will occur % of the way through the story, followed by a fall out between the hero and heroine, and then a reconciliation. however, how the characters get there varies in thousands of dif- ferent ways. krentz argues that crime, which is seen as a more literary genre, also follows a formula: there is a crime, there is someone trying to solve it, there is a con- flict, the false suspect, and then the true criminal. yet crime is not seen negatively, because it is a male dominated genre. this shows that it is the women that are the issue, not the formula. reader experience thanks to sites like amazon and the increasing numbers of self-published authors, us and uk romance novels are accessible all over the world, creating communities. the shame surrounding romance forces readers to rely on others and creates the idea that romance should be a reader’s “dirty little secret”. many readers do keep the [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – books they read a secret if it is romance, because of one too many negative interac- tions or shared experiences that shame them into hiding. three facebook romance book club groups were interviewed, totaling , members, with members choosing to participate. the first group was kennedy ryan books, a book club dedicated to diverse romance, with members at the time of the interview and responses. the second group was krista and becca ritchie’s fizzle force, dedicated to general contemporary and lgbtq+ romance, with members and responses. the final group, mariana zapata’s slow burners, focused on contemporary romance with a “slow burn” (the characters do not become a couple until % through the novel) with members, and responses. finally, participants chose to remain anonymous. all participants were aware of a stigma and negativity or judgement surrounding the romance genre, even if they had not experienced it themselves. their differing reactions to this judgement can be attributed to human character and outlying fac- tors. though not all participants experienced the stigma in the same way, all were aware of a negativity surrounding romance as a genre, but stated that this would not prevent them from reading the books that they enjoyed. all of the participants were female; this was expected, as romance is a female dominated genre, and those men that had the opportunity to participate declined. since romance is targeted mainly towards women, having all female responses does not limit the scope of this study. the female respondents represented various demographics: married, single, white, bame, lgbtq+, teenagers, adults, etc. the majority of participants were highly educated, with at least a college degree. this counters christian-smith’s argument that reading romance is the reason young girls are doing poorly in school. as well, people generally think that romance readers are “undereducated, overweight, undersexed”, but this reader data shows that is not true. of the people who responded, % got overly negative reactions when they say they read romance, % said they got strictly positive reactions, and % stated that they received a mix of the two. of these same responses, % said that they were very open about their love of reading romance, % said they kept it a secret from those in their “real life”, and % did not have applicable responses. since only % of readers received positive reinforcement for reading romance, it is surprising that the majority of romance readers do not hide it, when they are more likely to get a negative reaction. this shows that since eisler-burnett’s publication, there seems to have been a shift in the shame women feel about reading romance. women no longer let the shame control them and are much more open about their love of the genre, despite the risk of being shamed for it. the shame has not gone away, but the control it holds has. readers feel shame attempting to be forced upon them for reading romance, either by those close to them, online and in the media, or complete strangers. despite this, many either seek out communities, keep it a secret, or share their love for the genre. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – the differences in the readers who felt comfortable and those who did not seem to have a personal factor. some readers stated that it was their age that had made them more comfortable with being open about their reading. younger readers tended to keep their interest in romance to themselves for fear of parental backlash. some common themes that appeared throughout reader responses were where the shame they felt came from; there was not one single participant that denied that the shame existed. everyone agreed that society had to do with the shame they felt, even if they had not personally had a negative interaction. most respondents who had had a negative interaction stated that it came from someone they knew, or someone within their community. one reader stated that whenever one of her friends sees a book with a two-star or lower review, he states that it would be a book she would like, because she likes “trash”. several women also echoed that men were the ones to comment negatively on their reading choices; one woman stated that her uncle routinely makes her uncomfortable about reading romance, sexualizing the books. several women raised an interesting point: their husbands are the only ones in their lives threatened by them reading of romance novels. they feel threatened by the male characters in the books; one woman said her reading of romance contrib- uted to her divorce. not all husbands were like this; another woman attributes her love of romance and her husband’s support of it to their -year relationship. how- ever, this echoes wendell’s idea that men feel that romance readers will not be able to tell fiction from reality, and reinforces her idea that women can, in fact, tell the difference. readers who discovered the genre at the recommendation of someone in their lives were typically more open about their love of romance, whereas women who had discovered the genre on their own kept it a secret from those in their “real life”, because they do not have the support needed to combat the shame being forced upon them as a genre. many respondents said that discovering romance was a source of happiness, which reflects the idea that romance is an escape into a world where women do have a voice. author experience six authors completed the interview. jessie edwards was interviewed for her role within the rwa. elizabeth may was contacted because she writes both romance and sci-fi, as well as fantasy. elle kennedy is a self-published author, who also writes lgbtq+ romance. kennedy ryan writes bame and diverse romance. rebekah weatherspoon writes bame and lgbtq+ romance. samantha young and sarah maclean are traditionally published authors. susannah nix is self-published and focuses on romance featuring heroines in stem. tessa dare is a best-seller, and one of the most well-known names in romance. finally, adriana anders is an author who reached out after seeing the reader interview questions, and she is an award- winning romance author. the questions asked centered around the authors’ romance [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – careers, the reactions they get to their profession, and why they write romance. edwards received a list of questions about the rwa and its purpose within the romance community. when asked about common misconceptions they receive, the authors all had very similar responses. % said that the most common misconception they received was that romance was for unintelligent or lonely women. % said that people gener- ally thought their books were “porn”, and % said that people commonly thought that their books were unrealistic. most authors negative interactions came from their books being referred to as “porn”. anders argues that this is false and reduc- tionist, because romance does not have to contain sex scenes. nix’s romances are “closed door” because they do not contain explicit sex scenes. anders argued, “can you imagine if we referred to all thrillers as violence-porn?” this would not hap- pen, because it reduces the genre to one element. as well, she argues that a sci-fi novel written by a man “riddled with explicit, poorly-written sex scenes gets posi- tive attention, when romantic fiction gets an eyeroll”, simply because it is written by a women, which is the root of the problem. most of the authors had mostly positive interactions when they said they write romance, with a few small negative interactions. the negative interactions typically came from twitter “trolls” who had not actually read their books, or from people they knew in real life reducing their careers to “fluff”. the authors felt that these terms reduced the hard work that went into writing and producing their books. rebekah weatherspoon said that she was careful to surround herself with supportive people, which helps to block out the negativity that she might otherwise receive. nix, kennedy and young all stated that they began writing in other genres before moving into romance. even today, young says that her romance is more focused on the psychological aspects of romantic relationships. nix chose to take her scientific knowledge and bring it to romance by exploring women in stem in romantic rela- tionships. kennedy chose to move from thrillers to romance, often combining the two genres, because she loves the happily ever after aspect of romance. kennedy and anders both stated that the romance community was full of some of the most intelligent men and women that they have ever met, so to see it reduced to “fluff” or “porn” is disheartening. all of the authors interviews had the utmost respect for their readers, so the view that they are anything less than intelligent, diverse human beings is an idea that comes from outside of the community; the same place that judges romance novels as lowbrow. they describe the romance community as “unique”, “tight-knit” and “inclusive”, and say that they have never experienced something like it with any other book genre, something that was echoed by the reader responses. the romance community has a formal community, known as the romance writ- ers of america. this group is a collection of romance authors who support each other, and jessie edwards says that “romance authors are the most active, engaged, and unified community”. they use their platform to talk about feminism, diversity and politics, and to stay in touch with their readers, moreso than any other genre. edwards also pointed out that romance is at the forefront of publishing innovation, thanks to the community that surrounds and supports it. from online self-publishing to reader interaction, if publishing adapts a trend, romance did it first. the power of publishing research quarterly ( ) : – the romance community is so strong that it can change the entire publishing commu- nity, and yet it is still underestimated. findings the academics referenced studied romance and its effect on society, but very few study its reputation. much of the literature available about romance is very negative and one sided, with the positive voices featured some of the only ones available. the negative voices are often unsubstantiated and heavily influenced by the soci- etal stigma surrounding romance, rather than actually fact. the positive data is often written by academics within the romance community, which again further reflects the idea of romance readers enjoying the genre while those outside of the commu- nity disparaging it. the results of all of the interviews conclude that there is shame surrounding the romance fiction community. several respondents offered theories of why this could be; one woman attributed it to fifty shades of grey by e. l. james and the nega- tive attention it brought to the romance community. however, most of the readers had been reading romance and feeling the shame surrounding it decades before the publication of fifty shades. the common denominator seems to point to romance being a female dominated genre, meant for women, contributing to feminism, and therefore it is an enemy of the patriarchy. these reader comments echo what aca- demics who support the romance genre have found; romance is seen as less because it values and supports women. romance is a genre about women taking control of their bodies; female readers can see themselves in the characters they read about, and that is empowering. girls are conditioned to search for love from a young age, while men are not, which cre- ates a disconnect in society. by reading romance, girls and women can fulfill the need for love that society has forced upon them, without the disappointment that men in real life often provide when compared to the princes girls are taught to look for. most women agreed that what they are reading is not reality, but they want to read romance anyway, because it brings them happiness. to elevate books targeted towards men over those about women is sexist. the patriarchy places men above women, and so often women’s interests are demeaned in order to keep this social order. is romance demeaned because it is actually not well written, or because it appeals mainly to women? considering some of the classical canon today is romance, signs point to the shame surrounding romance being another way to police women’s bodies and minds. jane austen, charlotte and emily brontë all wrote romance that is worshipped today, and yet our contemporary [ ]. [ , ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – romance authors are demeaned and looked down upon. just because something is written by women, for women, does not mean that it should be relegated to a lesser tier. further proof of the negativity surrounding romance having to do with women and not the actual book content is evident when you compare it to crime fiction. crime is a typically male dominated genre and is heralded as one of the best in fic- tion. however, it follows a formula, it contains adult content, and is a best-selling genre, just as romance is. the only differences between these genres is that one is targeted towards men, whereas the other is targeted towards women. if crime can be lauded as a highbrow fiction genre, how can we classify all romance as lowbrow? there is bad romance just as there is bad crime fiction, but both genres also have stand-out exceptional work. the fourth best-selling fiction author of all time is danielle steel. she is the best- selling fiction author currently alive, having written books. the fact that she is one of the best-selling authors of all time should be enough to elevate the genre, and yet it is still seen as less because she is a woman, and because women are the ones that typically buy her books. in contrast, nicholas sparks is a male author often her- alded for writing romance, despite the fact that he does not. his books are general fiction, because they do not contain an emotionally satisfying ending, one of the two main criteria. despite this, he still gets labelled as a romance author and praised for writing it. he does not like the label romance, because he believes the books he writes has more “depth” than romance, and he does not like the genre. this prob- lem is two-fold: it is a man demeaning romance and objecting to being associated with it, and it is also a man being heralded as a wonderful romance writer, while the woman who is the best-selling fiction author currently alive is still seen as less for writing romance. one reader had a particular stand out response that contributed to the theory that misogyny is the reason romance gets a bad reputation. she was recently in line at a bookstore, and two elderly women in front of her stated that they would never buy a book written by a woman. there is still an idea in society that books written by men are better, and while this idea is still present there is no way for romance to thrive. despite the negative patriarchal influence on romance, the romance community is thriving within itself. this community is mainly online, in places like goodreads or facebook book groups. however, some women stated that they went so far as to make separate facebook and goodreads accounts so that people from their “real life” would not know about their love of romance. others stated that they were lucky enough to have support, which made them feel comfortable enough to share their love of the genre. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – one of the main complaints academics have against romance as a genre is that it is not “feminist”. however, like any genre, it has been growing and changing. to say that today’s romance is completely un-feminist is reductive. almost all contempo- rary romance novels display bodily anatomy and women making their own choices when it comes to sex, something larger society has still not been able to do, despite the advances in feminism. anders described romance as “subversive feminist liter- ature”, because it is “a genre written primarily by women, for women, and about women” who are looking for “personal, emotional and physical fulfilment”. con- temporary romance covers all sorts of feminist topics, from discrimination in the workplace to abortion, so to write is off as “fluff” or “trash” when it has so much to offer and teach on these subjects is harmful to the feminist movement. as well, academics are once again diminishing female intelligence. as has been established, women know how to tell the difference between fiction and reality. along those lines, they are also able to tell what is feminist and what is not. if they do happen to read a romance novel without a strong, feminist main character, they can still be a feminist. feminism is not a static state, but one that is ever changing and growing as society does, just like romance. weatherspoon pointed out in her interview that her writing changes with the political and social climate, because she is learning more every day. romance and feminism have grown together. romance is intrinsically feminist, because it gives a voice to women to write about the female experience. romance novels contain stories of women reaching their dreams with the support of those around them and finding love in addition to that. for some women, finding love and starting a family is their goal, and feminism is supposed to be about giving women a choice; if that choice is to get married, it needs to be respected, otherwise the foundations of feminism fall apart. romance, as a genre, deserves more recognition within the fiction market. librar- ies and bookstores need to have a more prominent display and selection of romance novels for readers to see and to generate interest. many bookstores do not have romance specific sections but will have a crime section on prominent display. by adding a specific romance section, romance is validated. romance is a genre that is mainly online, and this is something that needs to change in order for romance to be seen as a valid. readers also need to combat the personal shame they feel. as the reader inter- views indicate, many readers have already begun to do this by being open about the fact that they read romance. if readers, personally, do not feel shame about reading and enjoying romance, then the negative judgment from outsiders becomes moot. even if it is only being open about it online, it is still a small step in the direction of a genre that is dedicated to women being accepted by society as a whole. if readers do not let themselves be shamed, they cannot be shamed, and the oppressive voices lose their value. words like “fluff” and “trash” need to be taken out of the vernacular surrounding romance. they diminish the intelligence of writers and readers. no explanation or justification is needed for reading romance, because readers should be able to enjoy [ ]. publishing research quarterly ( ) : – a genre they love. romance readers are smart, diverse, often educated women who just want to be able to read without societal commentary on their intelligence. a book does not need to be on a short list for a literary award to be worthwhile, and the idea that only books with that potential should be read is harmful to the readers and authors who truly love the genre. the necessary happy ending is what people love about it, and is a poor excuse for demeaning the genre; no one truly has issue with a book ending happily, it is just one of many reasons that people use to hide less acceptable objections. the main reason that people do not accept romance is because it is a genre targeted at women, showing them having control of their bodies and minds. in the usa, laws are being passed in to control women’s bodies. when that is considered, it is easy to see that the same voices that want to repress women’s voices would also want to eradicate a genre that promotes these very things. reader responses showed that the negative judgment they received came from a few spaces: the men in their lives, conservative and religious friends, the same voices attempting to make laws and set limitations on what women can do. not all members of these communities think this way, but there are some voices outnumbering the others. the misogyny surrounding the genre can be seen in countless places: husbands believing their wives cannot tell the difference between the fiction and reality, sta- cey abrams being mocked for writing romance, romance authors being told their work is “trash”. romance has been fighting to survive against misogyny since its advent, and the common result is that is has thrived. people argue that it is too for- mulaic, but other similar fiction genres receive no backlash, proving that this is not the true problem. it is a genre that promotes women’s voices, and for that reason should be at least given consideration for true equality. romance is not for every- one, just like any other genre. however, no other genre is continuously mocked by those that do not read it. this is not just a fiction market issue; it reflects the larger issues of misogyny in uk and us society, something that needs to be improved in all areas so that women can make their own choices about their bodies, careers, and reading. romance deserves a better reputation. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative com- mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]. 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fhkey% ddc b d-d eb- -bb f-a cc b https://www.rwa.org/online/resources/about_romance_fiction/online/romance_genre/about_romance_genre.aspx% fhkey% ddc b d-d eb- -bb f-a cc b https://www.rwa.org/online/resources/about_romance_fiction/online/romance_genre/about_romance_genre.aspx% fhkey% ddc b d-d eb- -bb f-a cc b https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a /erotic-novels-you-must-read/% futm_source% dtwitter% utm_medium% dsocial-media% src% dsocialflowtw% utm_campaign% dsocialflowtwcos publishing research quarterly ( ) : – s-you-must-read/?utm_sourc e=twitt er&utm_mediu m=socia l-media &src=socia lflow tw&utm_ campa ign=socia lflow twcos . . wendell s. everything i know about love i learned from romance novels. naperville: sourcebooks casablanca; . . wendell s, tan c. beyond heaving bosoms: the smart bitches’ guide to romance novels. new york: touchstone; . . wright, j. women who miscarry could be criminally investigated under georgia’s new abortion law. harper’s baazar. . https ://www.harpe rsbaz aar.com/cultu re/polit ics/a /what-does-georg ias-abort ion-law-mean-women -who-misca rry/. accessed july . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a /erotic-novels-you-must-read/% futm_source% dtwitter% utm_medium% dsocial-media% src% dsocialflowtw% utm_campaign% dsocialflowtwcos https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a /erotic-novels-you-must-read/% futm_source% dtwitter% utm_medium% dsocial-media% src% dsocialflowtw% utm_campaign% dsocialflowtwcos https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a /what-does-georgias-abortion-law-mean-women-who-miscarry/ https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a /what-does-georgias-abortion-law-mean-women-who-miscarry/ 	the romance publishing industry and its reputation 	abstract 	introduction 	defining romance 	the issue 	the debate 	what academics are saying 	is romance feminist? 	the romance formula 	reader experience 	author experience 	findings 	references a novel framework using neutrosophy for integrated speech and text sentiment analysis symmetrys s article a novel framework using neutrosophy for integrated speech and text sentiment analysis kritika mishra , ilanthenral kandasamy , vasantha kandasamy w. b. and florentin smarandache ,* shell india markets, rmz ecoworld campus, marathahalli, bengaluru, karnataka , india; kritika.mishra@shell.com school of computer science and engineering, vit, vellore , india; ilanthenral.k@vit.ac.in (i.k.); vasantha.wb@vit.ac.in (v.k.w.b.) department of mathematics, university of new mexico, gurley avenue, gallup, nm , usa * correspondence: smarand@unm.edu received: september ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: with increasing data on the internet, it is becoming difficult to analyze every bit and make sure it can be used efficiently for all the businesses. one useful technique using natural language processing (nlp) is sentiment analysis. various algorithms can be used to classify textual data based on various scales ranging from just positive-negative, positive-neutral-negative to a wide spectrum of emotions. while a lot of work has been done on text, only a lesser amount of research has been done on audio datasets. an audio file contains more features that can be extracted from its amplitude and frequency than a plain text file. the neutrosophic set is symmetric in nature, and similarly refined neutrosophic set that has the refined indeterminacies i and i in the middle between the extremes truth t and false f. neutrosophy which deals with the concept of indeterminacy is another not so explored topic in nlp. though neutrosophy has been used in sentiment analysis of textual data, it has not been used in speech sentiment analysis. we have proposed a novel framework that performs sentiment analysis on audio files by calculating their single-valued neutrosophic sets (svns) and clustering them into positive-neutral-negative and combines these results with those obtained by performing sentiment analysis on the text files of those audio. keywords: sentiment analysis; speech analysis; neutrosophic sets; indeterminacy; single-valued neutrosophic sets (svns); clustering algorithm; k-means; hierarchical agglomerative clustering . introduction while many algorithms and techniques were developed for sentiment analysis in the previous years, from classification into just positive and negative categories to a wide spectrum of emotions, less attention has been paid to the concept of indeterminacy. early stages of work were inclined towards boolean logic which meant an absolute classification into positive or negative classes, for positive and for negative. fuzzy logic uses the memberships of positive and negative that can vary in the range to . neutrosophy is the study of indeterminacies, meaning that not every given argument can be distinguished as positive or negative, it emphasizes the need for a neutral category. neutrosophy theory was introduced in by smarandache [ ], and it is based on truth membership t, indeterminate membership i and false membership f that satisfies ≤ t + i + f ≤ , and the memberships are independent of each other. in case symmetry , , ; doi: . /sym www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry http://www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /sym http://www.mdpi.com/journal/symmetry symmetry , , of of using neutrosophy in sentiment analysis, these memberships are relabelled as positive membership, neutral membership and negative membership. another interesting topic is the speech sentiment analysis, it involves processing audio. audio files cannot be directly understood by models. machine learning algorithms do not take raw audio files as input hence it is imperative to extract features from the audio files. an audio signal is a three-dimensional signal where the three axes represent amplitude, frequency and time. previous work on detecting the sentiment of audio files is inclined towards emotion detection as the audio datasets are mostly labelled and created in a manner to include various emotions. then using the dataset for training classifiers are built. speech analysis is also largely associated with speech recognition. speech analysis is the process of analyzing and extracting information from the audio files which are more efficient than the text translation itself. features can be extracted from audio using librosa package in python. a total of features per audio file have been retrieved including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (mfcc), mel spectogram, chroma, contrast, and tonnetz. the goal of this project is to establish a relationship between sentiment detected in audio and sentiment detected from the translation of the same audio to text. work done in the domain of speech sentiment analysis is largely focused on labelled datasets because the datasets are created using actors and not collected like it is done for text where we can scrape tweets, blogs or articles. hence the datasets are labelled as various emotions such as the ryerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song (ravdess) dataset which contains angry, happy, sad, calm, fearful, disgusted, and surprised classes of emotions. these datasets have no text translation provided hence no comparison can be established. with unlabelled datasets such as voxceleb / which have been randomly collected from random youtube videos, again the translation problem arises leading to no meaningful comparison scale. we need audio data along with the text data for comparison, so a dataset with audio translation was required. hence librispeech dataset [ ] was chosen, it is a corpus of approximately h of khz read english speech. the k-means clustering algorithm performs clustering of n values in k clusters, where each value belongs to a cluster. since the dataset is unlabelled features extracted from the audio are clustered using the k-means clustering algorithm. then the distance of each point from the centroid of each cluster is calculated. -distance implies the closeness of an audio file to every cluster. this closeness measure is used to generate single value neutrosophic sets (svns) for the audio. since the data is unlabelled, we performed clustering of svns values using the k-means clustering. sentiment analysis of the text has various applications. it is used by businesses for analysing customer feedback of products and brands without having to go through all of them manually. an example of this real-life application could be social media monitoring where scraping and analysing tweets from twitter on a certain topic or about a particular brand or personality and analysing them could very well indicate the general sentiment of the masses. ever since internet technology started booming, data became abundant. while it is simpler to process and derive meaningful results from tabular data, it is the need for the hour to process unstructured data in the form of sentences, paragraphs or text files and pdfs. hence nlp provides excellent sentiment analysis tools for the same. however, sentiment cannot be represented as a black and white picture with just positive and negative arguments alone. to factor in indeterminacy, we have the concept of neutrosophy which means the given argument may either be neutral or with no relation to the extremes. work done previously related to neutrosophy will be explained in detail in the next section. for the sentiment analysis of text part, the translation of the audio is provided as text files along with the dataset which mitigates the possibility of inefficient translation. in this paper, using valence aware dictionary and sentiment reasoner (vader), a lexicon and rule-based tool for sentiment analysis on the text files, svns values for text are generated. then k-means clustering is applied to visualize the three clusters. the first step is the comparison of the two k-means plots indicating the formation of a cluster larger than the rest in audio svns implying the need for a neutral class. then both the svns are combined symmetry , , of by averaging out the two scores respectively for px , ix and nx . again k-means clustering and hierarchical agglomerative clustering is performed on these svns values to get the final clusters for each file. neutrosophic logic uses single valued neutrosophic sets (svns) to implement the concept of indeterminacy in sentiment analysis. for every sentence a, its representative svns is generated. svns looks like 〈pa, ia, na〉 where ‘pa’ is the positive sentiment score, ‘ia’ is the indeterminacy or neutrality score and ‘na’ is the negative sentiment score. neutrosophy was introduced to detect the paradox proposition. in this paper, a new innovative approach is carried out in which we use unlabelled audio dataset and then generate svns for audio to analyse audio files from the neutrosophic logic framework. the higher-level architecture is shown in figure . figure . high level architecture. indeterminacy is a strong concept which has rightly indicated the importance of neutral or indeterminate class in text sentiment analysis. coupling it with speech analysis is just an attempt to prove that not all audio can be segregated into positive and negative. there is a very good amount of neutrality present in the data that needs to be represented. we have used clustering to validate the presence of neutrality. this paper is organized as follows: section is introductory in nature, the literature survey is provided in section . in section , the basic concepts related to speech sentiment analysis, text sentiment analysis and neutrosophy are recalled. the model description of the proposed framework that makes uses of neutrosophy to handle speech and text sentiment analysis is given in section . in section the experimental results in terms of k-clustering and agglomerative clustering are provided. results and discussions about combined svns are carried out in section . the conclusions are provided in the last section. . literature survey emphasizing on the need and application of sentiment analysis in business and how it can play a crucial role in data monitoring on social media. the fuzzy logic model by karen howells and ahmet ertugan [ ] attempts to form a five class classifier—strongly positive, positive, neutral, negative and strongly negative for tweets. it is proposed to add fuzzy logic classifier to the social bots used for data mining. it will result in the analysis of the overall positive, neutral and negative sentiments which will facilitate the companies to develop strategies to improve the customer feedback and improve the reputation of their products and brand. a study on application of sentiment analysis in the tourism industry [ ] shows that most of the sentiment analysis methods perform better for positive class. one of the reasons symmetry , , of for this could be the fact that human language is inclined towards positivity. it is even more difficult to detect neutral sentiment. ribeiro and others have pointed out a similar observation in [ ] that twelve out of twenty-four methods are better in classifying positive sentiment and neutral sentiment is harder to identify. they also concluded from their experiments that vader tool provides consistent results for three-classes (positive, neutral, negative) classification. similarly, hutto and gilbert in [ ] did an excellent job in comparing vader tool eleven sentiment analysis techniques depending on naïve bayes, support vector machine (svm) and maximum entropy algorithms. they concluded that vader is simple to understand and does not function like a black box where the internal structure of process cannot be understood as in complex machine learning and deep learning sentiment analysis techniques. vader also performs in par with these benchmark models and is highly efficient as it only requires a fraction of second for analysis because it uses a lexicon rule-based approach, whereas its counterpart svm can take much more time. vader is also computationally economical as it does not need any special technical specifications such as a gpu for processing. the transparency of the tool attracts a larger audience as its users include professionals from businesses and marketing as well as it allows researchers to experiment more. hutto and gilbert’s analysis is applied in [ ] to rule out the neutral tweets. they built an election prediction model for usa elections. they used vader to remove all the neutral tweets that were scraped to focus on positive and negative sentiments towards donald trump and hilary clinton. fuzzy logic gives the measure of positive and negative sentiment in decimal figures, not as absolute values or like boolean logic. if truth measure is t, then f is falsehood according to the intuitionistic fuzzy set and i is the degree of indeterminacy. neutrosophy was proposed in [ ], it was taken as ≤ t + i + f ≤ . the neutrosophy theory was introduced in by smarandache [ ]. neutrality or indeterminacy was introduced in sentiment analysis to address uncertainties. the importance of neutrosophy in sentiment analysis for the benefit of its prime users such as nlp specialists was pointed out in [ ]. to mathematically apply neutrosophic logic in real world problems, single valued neutrosophic sets (svns) were introduced in [ ]. a svns for sentiment analysis represented by 〈pa, ia, na〉 where ‘pa’ is the positive sentiment score, ‘ia’ is the indeterminacy or neutrality score and ‘na’ is the negative sentiment score. refined neutrosophic sets were introduced in [ ]. furthermore, the concept of double valued neutrosophic sets (dvns) was introduced in [ ]. dvns are an improvisation of svns. the indeterminacy score was split into two: one indicating indeterminacy of positive sentiment or ‘t’ the truth measure and the other one indicating indeterminacy of negative sentiment or ‘f’ the falsehood measure. dvns are more accurate than svns. a minimum spanning tree clustering model was also introduced for double valued neutrosophic sets. multi objective non-linear optimization on four-valued refined neutrosophic set was carried out in [ ]. in [ ] a detailed comparison between fuzzy logic and neutrosophic logic was shown by analyzing the #metoo movement. the tweets relevant to the movement are collected from twitter. after cleaning, the tweets are then input in the vader tool which generates svnss for each tweet. these svns are then visualized using clustering algorithms such as k-means and k-nn. neutrosophic refined sets [ , – ] have been developed and applied in various fields, including in sentiment analysis recently. however no one has till now attempted to do speech sentiment analysis using neutrosophy and combine it with text sentiment analysis. a classifier with svm in multi class mode was developed to classify a six class dataset by extracting linear prediction coefficients, derived cepstrum coefficients and mel frequency cepstral coefficients [ ]. the model shows a considerable improvement and results are . % accurate. after various experiments it was concluded in [ ] that for emotion recognition convolutional neural networks capture rich features of the dataset when a large sized dataset is used. they also have higher accuracy compared to svm. svms have certain limitations even though they can fit data with non-linearities. it was concluded that machine symmetry , , of learning is a better solution for analysing audio. in [ ] a multiple classifier system was developed for speech emotion recognition. a multimodal system was developed in [ ] to analyze audio, text and visual data together. features such as mfcc, spectral centroid, spectral flux, beat sum, and beat histogram are extracted from the audio. for text, concepts were extracted based on various rules. for visual data, facial features were incorporated. all these features were then concatenated into a single vector and classified. a similar approach was presented in [ ] to build multimodal classifier using audio, textual and visual features and comparing it to its bimodal subsets (audio+text, text+visual, audio+visual). the same set of features were extracted from audio using opensmile software whereas for text convolutional neural networks were deployed. these features were then combined using decision level fusion. from these studies it can be very well inferred that using both audio and textual features for classification will yield better or sensitive results. . basic concepts . . neutrosophy neutrosophy is essentially a branch of philosophy. it is based on understanding the scope and dimensions of indeterminacy. neutrosophy forms the basis of various related fields in statistical analysis, probability, set theory, etc. in some cases, indeterminacy may require more information or in others, it may not have any linking towards either positive or negative sentiment. to represent uncertain, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent, and indeterminate information that is present in the real world, the concept of a neutrosophic set from the philosophical point of view has been proposed. single valued neutrosophic sets (svns) is an instance of a neutrosophic set. the concept of a neutrosophic set is as follows: definition . consider x to be a space of points (data-points), with an element in x represented by x. a neutrosophic set a in x is denoted by a truth membership function ta(x), an indeterminacy membership function ia(x), and a falsity membership function fa(x). the functions ta(x), ia(x), and fa(x) are real standard or non-standard subsets of ]− , + [; that is, ta(x) : x ←]− , +[ ia(x) : x ←]− , +[, fa(x) : x ←]− , +[, with the condition − ≤ su pta(x) + su pia(x) + su pfa(x) ≤ +. this definition of a neutrosophic set is difficult to apply in the real world in scientific and engineering fields. therefore, the concept of svns, which is an instance of a neutrosophic set, has been introduced. definition . consider x be a space of points (data-points) with element in x denoted by x. an svns a in x is characterized by truth membership function ta(x), indeterminacy membership function ia(x), and falsity membership function fa(x). for each point x ∈ x, there are ta(x), ia(x), fa(x) ∈ [ , ], and ≤ ta(x) + ia(x) + fa(x) ≤ . therefore, an svns a can be represented by a = {〈x, ta(x), i a(x), fa(x)〉|x ∈ x} the various distance measures and clustering algorithms defined over neutrosophic sets are given in [ , , ]. symmetry , , of . . sentiment analysis of text and vader package sentiment analysis is a very efficient tool in judging the popular sentiment revolving around any particular product, services or brand. sentiment analysis is also known as opinion mining. it is, in all conclusive trails, a process of determining the tone behind a line of text and to get an understanding of the attitude or polarity behind that opinion. sentiment analysis is very helpful in social media understanding, as it enables us to pick up a review of the more extensive general assessment behind specific subjects. most of the existing sentiment analysis tools classify the arguments into positive or negative sentiment based on a set of predefined rules or ‘lexicons’. this enables the tool to calculate the overall leaning polarity of the text and thus makes a decision on the overall tone of the subject. vader is an easy-to-use, highly accurate and consistent tool for sentiment analysis. it is fully open source with the mit license. it has a lexicon rule-based method to detect sentiment score for three classes: positive, neutral, and negative. it provides a compound score that lies in the range [− , ]. this compound score is used to calculate the overall sentiment of the input text. if the compound score ≥ . , then it is tagged as positive. if the compound score is ≤− . then it tagged as negative. the arguments with the compound score between (− . , . ) is tagged as neutral. vader uses amazon’s mechanical turk to acquire their ratings, which is an extremely efficient process. vader has a built in dictionary with a list of positive and negative words. it then calculates the individual score by summing the pre-defined score for the positive and negative words present in the dictionary. vader forms a particularly strong basis for social media texts since the tweets or comments posted on social media are often informal, with grammatical errors and contain a lot of other displays of strong emotion, such as emojis, more than one exclamation point, etc. as an example, the sentence, ‘this is good!!!’ will be rated as being ‘more positive’ than ‘this is good!’ by vader. vader was observed to be very fruitful when managing social media writings, motion picture reviews, and product reviews. this is on the grounds that vader not just tells about the positivity and negativity score yet in addition tells us how positive or negative a text is. vader has a great deal of advantages over conventional strategies for sentiment analysis, including: . it works very well with social media content, yet promptly sums up to different areas. . although it contains a human curated sentiment dictionary for analysis, it does not specifically require any training data. . it can be used with real time data due to its speed and efficiency. the vader package for python analysis presents the negative, positive and indeterminate values for every single tweet. every single tweet is represented as 〈nx , ix , px〉, where x belongs to the dataset. . . speech analysis an important component of this paper is speech analysis which involves processing audio. audio files cannot be directly understood by models. machine learning algorithms do not take raw audio files as input hence it is imperative to extract features from the audio files. an audio signal is a three-dimensional signal where the three axes represent amplitude, frequency and time. extracting features from audio files helps in building classifiers for prediction and recommendation. python provides a package called librosa for the analysis of audio and music. in this work, librosa has been used to extract a total features per audio file. to display an audio file as spectrogram, wave plot or colormap librosa.display is used. figure is a wave plot of an audio file. the loudness (amplitude) of an audio file can be shown in wave plot. symmetry , , of figure . wave plot of an audio file. figure shows the spectrogram of the sample audio. spectrogram is used to map different frequencies at a given point of time to its amplitude. it is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a sound. figure . spectrogram of an audio file. the mfcc features of an audio file is shown in figure . the mfccs of a signal are a small set of features which concisely describe the overall shape of a spectral envelope. sounds generated by a human are filtered by the shape of the vocal tract including the tongue, teeth etc. mfccs represent the shape of the envelope that the vocal tract manifests on the short time power spectrum. figure . mfcc features of an audio file. symmetry , , of the chroma features of the sample audio file is represented in figure . these represent the tonal content of audio files, that is the representation of pitch within the time window spread over the twelve chroma bands. figure . chromagram of an audio file. figure represents the mel spectrogram of the sample audio file. mathematically, mel scale is the result of some non-linear transformation of the frequency scale. the purpose of the mel scale is that the difference in the frequencies as perceived by humans should be different for all ranges. for example, humans can easily identify the difference between hz and hz but not between hz and hz. figure . mel spectrogram of an audio file. the spectral contrast of the sample audio file is represented in figure . spectral contrast extracts the spectral peaks, valleys, and their differences in each sub-band. the spectral contrast features represent the relative spectral characteristics. symmetry , , of figure . spectral contrast of a sample audio file. figure shows the tonnetz features of the sample audio file. the tonnetz is a pitch space defined by the network of relationships between musical pitches in just intonation. it estimates tonal centroids as coordinates in a six-dimensional interval space. figure . tonnetz features of the sample audio file. symmetry , , of . model description . . model architecture the research work follows a semi-hierarchical model where one step is followed by another but it is bifurcated into two wings one for audio and other for text and later on the svns are combined together in the integration module. the overall architecture of the work is provided in figure . the process begins with selecting an appropriate dataset with audio to text translations. for the audio section, convert the audio files into .wav format and extract features for further processing. since the dataset is unlabelled the only suitable choice in the machine learning algorithms are clustering algorithms. for this module, k-means clustering was chosen. then the euclidean distance(x) of each point from the centre of each cluster is calculated and − x is used as the measure of that specific class, svns values were obtained. clustering was performed again to visualise the svns as clusters. figure . the model architecture. for the text module, the text translations were considered and vader tool was used to generate svns. after the generation of svns, it was clustered and visualized. symmetry , , of in the integration module the svns values obtained from speech module and text module was combined together, there by combining both the branches. the final svns are calculated by averaging the audio and text svns which are again clustered and visualized for comparison. . . data processing dataset played a crucial role in this research work. the reason being we wanted to map audio svns to text svns for comparison so a dataset with audio translation was required. hence librispeech dataset [ ] was chosen. librispeech is a corpus of approximately h of khz read english speech. the data is derived from read audiobooks from the librivox project, and has been carefully segmented and aligned. for this purpose the following folders have been used: . dev-clean ( mb with audio) . train-clean ( . gb with , audio) we used the dev clean ( mb) folder to test algorithms in the initial phase and then scaled up to train clean- ( . gb) to get the final results. we did not scale further due to hardware limitations. the reason for selecting the “clean” speech sets was to eliminate the more challenging audio and focus more on speech analysis. since these are audio books, the dataset is structured in the following format. for example, - - .flac is present in the sub directory of directory , it implies that the reader id for this audio file is and the chapter is . there is a separate chapters.txt which is provided along with the dataset that provides the details of the chapter. for example, is the chapter ‘maximilian’ in the book ‘the count of monte cristo’. in the same sub directory a text file is present, - .trans.txt which contains the audio to text translation of the audio files in that directory. the reason for choosing this dataset over others is that it provides audio to text translations of the audio files. the processing of audio file from .flac format to .wav format was carried out. the dataset was available in .flac format. it was necessary to convert these files into .wav format for further processing and extracting features. for this ffmpeg was used in shell script with bash. ffmpeg is a free and open-source project consisting of a vast software suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. . . feature extraction the audio files were then fed into the python feature extraction script which extracted features per audio file. using the librosa package in python following features were extracted . mfcc ( ) . chroma ( ) . mel ( ) . contrast ( ) . tonnetz ( ) the following npy files were generated as result: . x_dev_clean.npy ( × ) . x_train_clean.npy ( , × ) then these files were normalized using sklearn. the screenshot of the normalized audio features is given in figure . symmetry , , of figure . normalized audio features. . . clustering and visualization . . . k-means the k-means algorithms used for clustering svns values for sentiment analysis was proposed in [ ]. it is a simple algorithm which produces the same results irrespective of the order of the dataset. the input is the svns values as dataset and the number of clusters (k) required. the algorithm then picks k svns values from the dataset randomly and assigns them as centroid. then repeatedly the distance between other svns values and centroids are calculated and they are assigned to one cluster. this process continues till the centroid stops changing. elbow method specifies what a good k (number of clusters) would be based on the sum of squared distance (sse) between data points and their assigned clusters’ centroids. . . . hierarchical agglomerative clustering and visualization hierarchical clustering is a machine learning algorithm used to group similar data together based on a similarity measure or the euclidean distance between the data points. it is generally used for unlabelled data. there are two types of hierarchical clustering approaches: divisive and agglomerative. hierarchical divisive clustering refers to top to down approach where all the data is assigned to one cluster and then partitioned further into clusters. in hierarchical agglomerative clustering all the data points are treated as individual clusters and then with every step data points closest to each other are identified and grouped together. this process is continued until all the data points are grouped into one cluster, creating a dendogram. the algorithm for hierarchical agglomerative clustering of svns values is given in algorithm . symmetry , , of algorithm : hierarchical agglomerative clustering. input: n number of svnss {s , . . . sn} output: cluster begin step : create a distance matrix x using euclidean distance function dist(si, sj) for i ← , n do for j ← i + , n do xi ← dist(si, sj) end end step : x ←{x , x , . . . , xn} step : perform clustering while x.size > do (xmin , xmin ) ← minimum_dist(xa, xb)∀xa, xb ∈ x remove xmin and xmin from x add center{xmin , xmin } to x alter distance matrix x accordingly end results in cluster automatically end . . generating svns values . . . speech module since the dataset was unlabelled, k-means algorithm was used for clustering. with k being set to , the clusters were obtained. let the cluster centres be b , b and b . b , b and b were mapped as positive, neutral, and negative clusters, respectively. we randomly selected samples from each cluster and mapped the maximum sentiment of the sample as the sentiment of the cluster. for every data point p, in the dataset distance was calculated to the centres of each cluster. -distance implied the closeness measure to each cluster or class (positive, neutral or negative). svns for audio were created using -distance and stored in a .csv file as 〈pa, ia, na〉. . . . text module the next task is sentiment analysis of text translation using vader. vader is a tool used for sentiment analysis which provides a measure for positive, neutral and negative classes for each input sentence. using vader text translation for each audio was analysed and svns were generated and stored in .csv file as 〈pt , it , nt〉. taking the csv file of text svns as input, k-means cluster with k, taken as , was performed. . . . integration module next, we proceed on to combine the svns, the audio svns values are represented by 〈pa, ia, na〉 and the text svns values are represented by 〈pt , it , nt〉 and the combined svns are represented by 〈pc , ic , nc〉, where the component values are calculated as symmetry , , of pc = (pt + pa) ic = (it + ia) nc = (nt + na) ( ) combined svns values were generated using equations given in equation ( ). the visualization of combined svns is carried out next. using k-means clustering and hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithms, the svns of audio, text and combined modules were visualized into clusters. . experimental results and data visualisation . . speech module the elbow method specifies what a good k, the number of clusters would be based on the sse between data points and their assigned clusters’ centroids. the elbow chart of the audio were created to decide the most favourable number of clusters, they are given in figure a,b for the dev-clean folder and train-clean folder, respectively. (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . elbow chart for dataset. the elbow method generates the optimum number of clusters as three as shown in figure a,b. hence, the dataset is clustered into three clusters – positive, indeterminate and negative. the results for the clustering of the dataset into three is visualised in d and d in figures a,b and a,b. the d visualization of the clusters is given in figure a,b for dev-clean and train-clean respectively. figure a,b are the k-means clustering in d for dev-clean and train-clean respectively. once clusters are formed, we calculate the euclidean distance of each data point from the centre of the cluster. let the cluster centres be b , b and b . for every data point p in the dataset distance was calculated to the centres of each cluster. -distance implied the closeness measure to each cluster or class (positive, neutral or negative). euclidean distance d can be calculated using the formula given equation ( ). d = √ (x − x ) + (y − y ) ( ) the sample svns values generated from the audio features is given in figure a. symmetry , , of (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . k-means clustering in d for audio dataset. (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . k-means clustering in d for audio dataset. (a) audio svns (b) text svns figure . sample svns values. . . text module the audio to text translations are given in the dataset, a sample from the dataset is given figure . symmetry , , of figure . sample audio to translation. now the text file is processed with the vader tool for analysis, which generates svns values in form of 〈nt , it , pt〉. for the sake of notational convenience, we created and populated .csv file in the order of 〈pt , it , nt〉, where pt is positive, it is the indeterminate membership and nt is the negative membership. a sample of the .csv file that contains the svns values is shown in figure b. vader also gives a composite score for every line, depending on which the tool also provides a class label, i.e., positive or neutral or negative. since we were working with unlabelled data, we did not have a method to validate the labels provided by the tool. in the case of the textual content of a novel, this is a narration, so one cannot get high values for positivity or negativity only, neutrals takes the maximum value when svns value is used; which is evident from figure b. the obtained svns values are clustered using k-means algorithm and visualized in figures a,b and a,b. figure a,b are results of the k-means clustering in d on dev-clean and train-clean datasets respectively. (a) dev-clean results (b) train-clean results figure . k-means clustering in d text svns values. similarly the clustering results are represented in d in figure a,b. dev-clean folder contains audio files and train-clean folder contains , audio files. the clustering visualisation clearly shows the presence of clusters indicating the existence of neutrality in the data. symmetry , , of (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . k-means clustering in d of text svns values. . . integration module the final svns are calculated by averaging the audio svns and text svns. the combined svns values are again clustered and visualized for comparison. we visualize the svns values using clustering algorithms such as k-means and hierarchical agglomerative clustering given in algorithm . the k-means clustering results of combined svns of dev-clean and train-clean are given in figure a,b respectively. (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . k-means clustering in d of combined svns values. the dendograms generated while clustering the combined svns values of dev-clean and train-clean are given in figure and figure respectively. the clustering results of using agglomerative clustering on the combined svns values of dev-clean and train-clean datasets are given in figure a,b respectively. symmetry , , of figure . dendogram of combined svns values of dev-clean. figure . dendogram of combined svns values of train-clean. symmetry , , of (a) dev-clean (b) train-clean figure . agglomerative clustering of combined svns values. . result and discussion the visualization of clustering results and the dendogram clearly reveal the presence of neutrality in the data, which is validated by the existence of the third cluster. it is pertinent to note that, in case of sentiment analysis, data cannot be divided into positive and negative alone, the existence of neutrality needs to be acknowledged. after analysing the results of all the clustering algorithms, significant conclusions have been made. the concept of indeterminacy or neutrality has not yet been dealt with in normal or conventional and fuzzy sentiment analysis. svns provides a score for neutral sentiment along with positive and negative sentiments. speech sentiment analysis using neutrosophic sets has not been done to date, whereas it can provide excellent results. the logic behind combining svns is to include both features related to the audio files derived from amplitude and frequency and pairing it with the analysis of text for better results. this is a much more wholesome approach than just picking either of the two. in table , the number of audio classified as cluster (c ), cluster (c ) and cluster (c ) are shown for svns from audio features, text svns and the combined svns for dev-clean librispeech folder which is mb with audio. there is a considerable overlap in the values that are present in the cluster c and c and c , for the three values from speech module, text module and combined module, respectively. table . dev-clean clustering results. svns c c c audio text combined in table , the number of audio classified as cluster (c ), cluster (c ) and cluster (c ) are shown for svns from audio features, text svns and the combined svns for train-clean- librispeech folder which is . gb with audio. since the dataset was unlabelled there was no other choice but to cluster the features, hence the output which was received was clusters without class tags, hence it cannot be identified with these given results which cluster represents positive class, neutral class or negative class. class tags can be obtained from vader composite score, but since our aim was to show the presence of neutrality in the data, we did not do the mapping of the clusters to a particular class using the vader tool provided labels. symmetry , , of table . train-clean- clustering results. svns c c c audio , text , combined , instead, if we used the max of the svns values present in the cluster to map the cluster to a class tag. accordingly we obtained c cluster was positive class, c cluster was neutral and c cluster was the negative class. though it can be inferred from the changing number of data points in the clusters and their ratios to one another that analysis of audio separately and text separately, and then combining the two together with neutrosophic sets is effective to address the indeterminacy and uncertainty of data. . conclusions and further work work on analyzing sentiment of textual data using neutrosophic sets has been sparse and little, only [ , ] made use of svns and refined neutrosophic sets for sentiment analysis. analysis of audio or speech sentiment analysis using neutrosophy has not been carried out, until now. to date, there has been no way to accommodate the neutrosophy in the sentiment analysis of audio. in the first of a kind, we used the audio features to implement the concept of neutrosophy in speech sentiment analysis. we proposed a novel framework that combines audio features, sentiment analysis, and neutrosophy to generate svns values. the initial phase of the work included extracting features from audio, clustering them into three clusters, and generating the svns. this was followed by using the vader tool for text and generating svns. now there were two svns for every audio file; one from the audio files and the other from the text file. these two were combined by averaging out the svns and the newly obtained svns were clustered again for final results. this is an innovative contribution to both sentiment analysis and neutrosophy. for future work, while combining the svns weights can be set according to priority or depending on the reliability of the data. for example, if the audio to text translations are bad then weights can be set in the ratio : for audio svns to text svns where the resulting svns will depend % on the audio svns and % on the text svns. similarly, other similarity measures other than distance measures can be used for generating svns values for audio files. author contributions: conceptualization, v.k.w.b. and i.k.; methodology, software, validation, k.m.; formal analysis, f.s.; investigation, resources, data curation, writing—original draft preparation, v.k.w.b. and i.k.; writing—review and editing, f.s.; visualization, k.m.; supervision, project administration, i.k.; all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. abbreviations the following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: nlp natural language processing svns single-valued neutrosophic sets mfcc mel-frequency cepstral coefficients ravdess ryerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song vader valence aware dictionary and sentiment reasoner svm support vector machine dvns double valued neutrosophic sets sse sum of squared distance symmetry , , of references . smarandache, f. a unifying field in logics: neutrosophic logic. in philosophy; american research press: rehoboth, de, usa, ; pp. – . . panayotov, v.; chen, g.; povey, d.; khudanpur, s. librispeech: an asr corpus based on public domain audio books. in proceedings of the ieee international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (icassp), brisbane, australia, – april ; 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[crossref] http://dx.doi.org/ . /icassp. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /epjds/s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /inventive. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jisys- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.compind. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -x http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.patcog. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.neucom. . . symmetry , , of . poria, s.; cambria, e.; gelbukh, a. deep convolutional neural network textual features and multiple kernel learning for utterance-level multimodal sentiment analysis. in proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing, lisbon, portugal, – september ; pp. – . publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. c© by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	literature survey 	basic concepts 	neutrosophy 	sentiment analysis of text and vader package 	speech analysis 	model description 	model architecture 	data processing 	feature extraction 	clustering and visualization 	k-means 	hierarchical agglomerative clustering and visualization 	generating svns values 	speech module 	text module 	integration module 	experimental results and data visualisation 	speech module 	text module 	integration module 	result and discussion 	conclusions and further work 	references making lemonade: examining female empowerment making lemonade: examining female empowerment through visual music media by rebecca gass a thesis submitted to faculty of social and applied sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in intercultural and international communication royal roads university victoria, british columbia, canada supervisor: dr. jennifer walinga, phd august, rebecca gass, making lemonade: examining female empowerment committee approval the members of rebeca gass’ thesis committee certify that they have read the thesis titled making lemonade: examining female empowerment through visual music media and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements for the degree of master of arts in intercultural and international communication: dr. jennifer walinga [signature on file] dr. ann braithwaite [signature on file] final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon submission of the final copy of the thesis to royal roads university. the thesis supervisor confirms to have read this thesis and recommends that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements: dr. jennifer walinga [signature on file] making lemonade: examining female empowerment creative commons statement this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . canada license. to view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/ . /ca/. some material in this work is not being made available under the terms of this licence: • third-party material that is being used under fair dealing or with permission. • any photographs where individuals are easily identifiable. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /ca/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /ca/ making lemonade: examining female empowerment abstract this research study explores popular culture through visual music media, specifically beyoncé’s visual album titled lemonade. through a social constructionist lens, a phenomenological approach, and by incorporating psychoanalytic film theory, critical theory, feminist theory, and black feminist theory, this study aims to uncover what aspects of visual music media empower youth girls aged - years. through film-elicited interviews and digital focus groups, this study engaged with youth girls from across canada about what makes and does not make them feel empowered while viewing music videos. qualitative thematic analysis was used to produce results which included three sensitizing concepts named cloak of competence, cloak of incompetence and generational language along with five emerging themes, listed as voice, unity, persistence, compassion and relatability thematic results outlined visual, auditory, and metaphorical phenomena that empower and disempower youth girls. empowering aspects to visual music media included visual depictions of voice, unity, auditory depictions of compassion and persistence, and a sense of relatability between the artist, situation, emotion, or setting. keywords: beyoncé, celebrity feminist, empowerment, feminist activism, and popular culture. making lemonade: examining female empowerment acknowledgements i gratefully acknowledge and thank my thesis advisory committee members. my sincere appreciation is expressed to dr. jennifer walinga who continually reminded me of my potential and ability when i feared i lost both. thank-you to dr. ann braithwaite who always made time for coffee and conversations about texts (literally and figuratively), popular culture, and social inequities. many thanks to you both for sharing your expertise and your guidance as i worked through this process. together, your unwavering support and patience were integral to the success of this thesis. to gemma fraser, from royal roads accessibility services, thank you for your diligent support. through our work, i learned how to take care of my health while progressing through challenging projects and life obstacles. to my parents, and siblings, namely my brother michael and sister alyssa. thank you for always believing in me. thank you for staying ‘close’ when we have physically been so far. i know i can never fall, when the two of you are there to keep me upright. and, finally, to my life partner, dawit. thank-you for always bringing me back to my inner truth. you always remind me that i have the answers within myself when i start to go on an adventure looking for them outside of myself. thank you, i love you. making lemonade: examining female empowerment table of contents abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... definitions..................................................................................................................................................... chapter one: focus and framing ............................................................................................................. introduction ............................................................................................................................................... overview of literature ............................................................................................................................ examining empowerment ...................................................................................................................... power and influence in a feminist context ............................................................................................ visual music media: its origins, history of sexual explicitness, and effects on women and girls .... hip hop feminism, #metoo, and intersectionality related to popular culture activism ..................... academic buzz on beyoncé: scratching the surface of black feminism in popular culture ............... chapter two: methods ............................................................................................................................. methodology ........................................................................................................................................... strategy and design ................................................................................................................................ data collection ....................................................................................................................................... data analysis .......................................................................................................................................... coding ................................................................................................................................................. analysis ............................................................................................................................................... chapter three: detangling (results) ...................................................................................................... demographics ......................................................................................................................................... sensitizing concepts ............................................................................................................................... emerging themes ................................................................................................................................... chapter four: unweaving the braid (discussion) ................................................................................. the essence: voice ................................................................................................................................. theme one: unity ................................................................................................................................... theme two: relatability ........................................................................................................................ theme three: compassion ..................................................................................................................... theme four: persistence ......................................................................................................................... interrelated and interlocked: the connected nature of uncovered themes .......................................... chapter five: re-braiding (conclusions) ............................................................................................... ethical considerations and limitations .................................................................................................. further research ..................................................................................................................................... personal reflection ................................................................................................................................. references ................................................................................................................................................... making lemonade: examining female empowerment appendix a: informed consent ................................................................................................... appendix b: particpant informaton sheet ......................................................................... appendix c: sample email to particpant .............................................................................. making lemonade: examining female empowerment definitions beyoncé: a black female identifying artist, known for her lead role in the early s girl band destiny’s child and later for her independent chart-topping hits. black femme: a community of lesbian, transgender and cis black women creating resources for themselves in a world/system that denies them safety and security. booty: a colloquial term to reference ‘buttock.’ generational language: for the purpose of this study, is a concept coined by the researcher to navigate words, phrases, or speech patterns used by the participants to get at the center of the participants’ lived experience. hip hop: a style of popular music from us black and/or hispanic origin. third wave feminism: a branch of feminism that took place from the s to the early s focusing on the many intersecting elements of feminism. fourth wave feminism: a phase of feminism that began around that focuses on the empowerment of women in girls mainly using internet tools and social activism. visual music media: also referred to as ‘music videos’ a medium that combines visual and auditory elements for entertainment purposes. making lemonade: examining female empowerment chapter one: focus and framing introduction beyoncé knowles is a pop culture icon. she is known for her curvy figure and acrobatic voice. a self-proclaimed feminist, she is listed by time among the most influential people in the world in and . forbes also listed her as the most powerful female in entertainment of . on april , , beyoncé launched her sixth album, lemonade. the album was debuted at pm est on saturday night on the cable channel hbo. it was a succession of music videos linked by poetry spoken by somali-british poet warsan shire. the visual album packs in personal stories, experiences, and videos. during its release, beyoncé supporters and skeptics flocked to the blogs to share their opinions on the artist’s newest album, giving their opinions on how it does or does not provide women with the autonomy and self-determination to challenge adversities within their own societies. lemonade is just one example of many pieces of visual media in today’s visual world. rooted in psychoanalytic film theory, critical theory, feminist and black feminist theory, while undertaking a social constructionist approach, my research inquiry will aim to examine what aspects of visual music media are perceived as empowering among youth girls? the study explores the impact visual music media has on young girls across canada, in aims of determining what aspects of visual music media, if any, are perceived to empower young women. the researcher investigates these questions by soliciting participants between - years of age. the purpose of this study is to provide the space for youth girls to share their interpretations and response of visual music media phenomena, including but not limited to reactions to stimuli, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations. while there is a wealth of research with respect to decoding music videos using discourse and content analysis, few studies have making lemonade: examining female empowerment used qualitative methods to decode visual music media. while informal content analyses of music videos have been completed and published to blogs, podcasts, and video blogs, many do not reflect the opinions of young women – which this study aimed to do. overview of literature research in the field of power relationships, feminist media studies, and content analysis of music videos exists in today’s journals, books, and texts. yet few studies have examined the ways in which visual music media empower young women in a qualitative approach, besides studies related to body image. the literature surveyed for the purpose of this study is rooted in power relations, contemporary feminist thought and approach in addition to contemporary popular culture. while “power to” is central to the research theme, it is important to note the “power as social relations” as human relationships are always mediated by power (digeser, ). feminism has its roots in power relations. third wave feminism is considered a turning point that focuses less on the oppressive and exploitative power of marketing and media phenomena and more on their potential for empowerment. the era of third-wave feminism is considered by many academics as an outcry for change in power in modern society and sets the stage for the #metoo movement and age of digital feminist activism. after the debut of mtv, academic researchers began to take interest to the network’s output, examining the content and generating interpretations on gender power dynamics present in the aired videos. studies show findings that sexual content of music videos exists and can enhance viewer enjoyment. however, there are limited studies that elicit emotional responses to empowerment. making lemonade: examining female empowerment examining empowerment in academic discussions on power, the three dimensions of power and the distinction of power as “power over,” “power with,” and “power to,” is seen as the foundation of academic analysis (haugaard, a,b). “power over” refers to the power an individual has over the actions or decision-making process of another individual. for example, parents have a power over relationship with their young children as they indicate bedtimes, mealtimes, wardrobe, etc. rowlands ( ) describes that through gender analysis, “power over” is wielded predominately by men over other men, by men over women, and by dominant social, political, and economic or cultural groups over those who are marginalized. “power with” refers to an agreement in which all people or groups decide to act in ways that benefit the welfare of all. it is the act of pushing aside our individual wishes to the will of the common good because we know we ultimately are served by doing so (haugaard, b). for example, democracy in canada is considered a “power with” relationship. “power to” is also referred to as empowerment. in the context of the conventional definition, empowerment has to do with the power some people have of stimulating activity in others and raising their morale. it involves undoing negative social constructions – building the capacity in those affected to have influence. still we pursue the goal of empowerment, but we do it by focusing on “power with.” we live in a world of “power over” and desire a world of empowerment and we get there by traveling through the land of “power with” (haugaard, a, b). these two concepts are highly relevant and important to this research study as we explore the empowerment factor prevalent in mainstream music videos. dahl ( ), foucault ( , , as cited in haugard, a,b), lukes ( ), and haugaard ( a,b), are some of the forefathers in the research realm of knowledge and making lemonade: examining female empowerment power. lukes’ ( as cited in haugard a) writings established the notion of the three dimensions of power, which include ( ) exerting power behavior in making decisions; ( ) controlling the agenda and the creation of barriers to limit power; and ( ) the powerful transforming the powerless). foucault’s approach rejects the belief in the existence of regulating power, as per haugaard ( a,b). in foucault’s world, there is no source of actions, only an infinite series of practices. he focuses on the decentralization of power, creating the fourth dimension of power, known as “power as a network of social relations.” the idea of power as “social relations” is important to note in this study as we explore the power of media influence and then what is done with that power. digeser ( ) identifies the critical issue behind the fourth dimension of power as “what kind of subject is being produced” (p. ). although we are examining the empowerment component in relation to music videos, the notion of power as a network of social relations and interactions is critical for this research study as iexplore the components of feminist power relations. power and influence in a feminist context various feminist writers (haugaard, a,b; rowlands, ; winch et al., ) have described the way in which people who are systemically denied power and influences in the dominant society internalize the messages they receive about what they are supposed to be like, and how they may come to believe the messages to be true. this internalized oppression (“power over”) is adopted as a survival mechanism – but it becomes so ingrained that it becomes a reality. for example, a woman who is subjected to violent abuse (emotional or physical) when she expresses her own opinions may start to withhold them – eventually coming to not having any opinions of her own (haugaard, a). female youth are often systemically denied power over making lemonade: examining female empowerment what they wear, who they spend time with, what they eat and their physical activity level due to parental power and oftentimes how they should think and act due to internalized oppression from media and pop culture. in relation to this current study, i removed barriers for youth females to express their values, opinions and feelings on media and popular culture, specifically, beyoncé’s album lemonade. the historic powerlessness of women is integral to the process of the empowerment of other women, including youth. the voices of the poor study conducted in countries showed that voicelessness and powerlessness are pervasive among the poor, affecting every aspect of their lives (narayan, ). narayan ( ) goes on to say that an empowering approach to poverty reduction is grounded in the conviction that poor people themselves are invaluable partners for development, since they are the most motivated to move out of poverty. if the same principles are applied, this example showcases that powerless women themselves are invaluable in the process of the empowerment of young women. furthermore, freire ( ) explains that traditional pedagogy is a banking model as it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. however, he argues the need for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. freire ( ) states that [i]n order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. (p. ) he goes on to state that “[o]nly power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (freire, , p. ). these studies show that oppressed groups in society are the best drivers for change. for the purpose of this research, we will be speaking with female youth in order to explore the perceptions of female youth about the power making lemonade: examining female empowerment of visual media. the research will examine how visual media influences perceptions to build capacity of knowledge, self-identity, and self-worth in young women; and how this power is strengthened if it is presented via the voices of the oppressed. visual music media: its origins, history of sexual explicitness, and effects on women and girls the debut of mtv on august , (irons-georges & berman, ) redefined the music industry fusing visual elements and the recording industry together as one. soon after its inception in the early s, activist groups such as the national coalition on media violence began expressing concern over the presence of sexual and violent content in music videos (cummins, ). due to these concerns, scholars spearheaded empirical studies to determine the pervasiveness of the content (cummins, ). these studies showed that sexual content of varying levels of explicitness could easily be found on mtv. sexual explicitness in music videos has been related to stereotypical notions of women as sexual objects and, to a lesser degree, females as subordinate and males as aggressive (wallis, ). these stereotypical notions reinforce gender inequality and the disempowerment of women. the current research aims to identify what components of music videos are perceived to elicit empowerment over disempowerment. cummins ( ) speaks of two prominent studies that examine sexual content in music videos. zillmann and mundorf ( ) examined the effect of sexual content in music videos in relation to viewer enjoyment. they concluded that sexual content had a mixed result, divided almost entirely along gender lines. yet sexual content largely increased participants’ appreciation for the musical dimension of the music video regardless of their gender (cummins, ). hansen and hansen ( ) conducted a similar type of study but crafted more naturalistic in its making lemonade: examining female empowerment approach (used videos which had varying levels of sexual content and did not artificially edit them in any way - which was done in the zillman and mundorf study). findings showed that videos containing the most amount of sexual content were rated significantly more visually appealing than the moderate or low sex videos. although videos with more sexual content were rated more visually pleasing, my research will aim to examine whether sexual content in music videos is empowering to young women. there is a significant amount of literature involving third wave feminism and the empowerment of young women through media. yet few studies examine how visual music media (or music videos) impact young women’s perceptions by involving young women. one study explores teenage girls’ critical response to celebrity feminism by asking how girls understand celebrity feminism, analyzing the tensions that it often raises for girls doing feminism in their everyday lives (jessalyn & ringrose, ). authors interviewed girls who were part of a feminist club at a london high school or who participated in feminist politics as bloggers. results concluded that while many of the teens were pleased that feminism is more visible within popular culture, most were skeptical of the representations of feminism by celebrities in the media, which they claim turns feminism into a ‘fashion’. yet, it is important to note that this study was conducted in partnership with teenagers who have one foot in the ‘feminist pool’. teenagers part of the ‘feminist pool’ might have a higher level of savviness allowing them to interpret celebrity feminism in ways other than through a positive lens. their experience in reading and research allows for opportunity to critically assess celebrity feminism. other studies, such as durham ( ), hamad and taylor ( ), lindsey ( ), and weidhase ( ) examine responses to celebrity postmodern feminism in music videos and beyond, yet with a critical content analysis or a textual analysis approach in lieu of interviewing making lemonade: examining female empowerment members of the intended audience. findings concluded celebrity feminism varies and at times is critiqued on a continuum scale, yet this goes against third wave feminist beliefs, as there is no “one way” to be a feminist (tong, ). critique through a “scale” is problematic as it implies that there are “good” feminists and “bad” feminists reinforcing the idea that there is “one way” to be a feminist. these findings provide context and understanding for the current research as it relates to fourth wave and celebrity feminism. as tong ( ) mentions there is no “one way” to be a feminist, this idea is also transferred to fourth wave feminism which iwill review the following chapter. buote et al. ( ), cummings ( ), emerson ( ), and wallis ( ) explain the depiction of body image, black womanhood, and gender displays in media in their studies. through a content analysis of gender display in music videos, wallis ( ) uncovered that significant gender displays primarily reinforced stereotypical notions of women as sexual objects and to a less degree, females as subordinate and males as aggressive. emerson ( ) found that the depiction of music videos showcases how young black women must negotiate sexuality and womanhood in their everyday lives. buote et al. ( ) conducted eight studies using a variety of content analysis, survey, and experimental methods, to examine differences in sociocultural norms for ideal appearance for women and men in “daily life.” findings state that appearance norms encountered by women in daily life are more rigid, homogenous, and pervasive than those for men. studies also concluded that these norms are more harmful to body image. these norms, in turn develop a sociocultural communication barrier which causes internal conflict and alienation along with a cybernetic communication barrier, due to frequency of adverts. these findings showcase that in daily life, young women are overloaded with body image ideals. from these studies, we can determine that there is an apparent need for qualitative research studies making lemonade: examining female empowerment focusing on the empowerment impact of visual music media on its intended audience groups. while these studies show that young women are bombarded with body image ideals, the voice of the women themselves are not commonly represented in the studies. current research in feminist media studies undertakes more of a critical discourse analysis approach in the form of personal essays, textual or content analysis. this approach is useful when using conceptual analysis to identify common themes by clustering similar texts, words, or types of visual images. however, it does not identify emotional responses from the intended audience. emotional responses help to unveil the lived experience of participants and this exposure of a lived experience provides a foundation of understanding and connecting. hip hop feminism, #metoo, and intersectionality related to popular culture activism feminist thought is constantly changing and evolving. while four waves of feminism exist, this thesis examines components on third wave feminism only to provide context for the current fourth wave of feminism and the #metoo movement. tong ( ) states that similar to the postmodern feminist belief that there is no one way to be feminist, third-wave feminists “are more than willing to accommodate diversity and change and are particularly eager to understand the ways in which gender oppression and other kinds of human oppression co-create and co-maintain each other” (p. ). third-wave feminists are “feminist sponges” (tong, , p. ) who accept that all women are different. third-wave feminism is also interested in preserving women’s voices, and oral history has become a big part of this. woodward and woodward ( ) quote baumgarder and richards’ claim that what has been defined as the third wave of feminism is a “media-savvy, culturally driven generation” ( , p. , as cited in woodward & woodward, , p. ), capturing the knowingness and awareness of young feminists today. yet, fourth wave feminism goes above and beyond the making lemonade: examining female empowerment media savviness and relates specifically to human rights activism leveraging social media and popular culture. maclaran’s ( ) literature review is a composition of key studies contributing to the debates on whether marketing activities exploit or empower women. the findings illustrate the changing nature of feminist attitudes to the role of the market in women’s lives. maclaran ( ) explains that third wave feminism focuses less on the oppressive and exploitative power of marketing and media phenomena and more so on the potential for empowerment. these findings are relevant to my proposed study, as skeptics and critiques of beyoncé’s visual music media indicate that the feminist approach is a fashion statement and not at the core of the artist’s purpose, which is personal branding and marketing, a concept later discussed as commodity feminism. other third wave feminist approaches include noting “hip hop feminism.” hip hop feminism, as cited by durham, cooper, and morris ( ), is “an umbrella term to encompass creative, intellectual work regarding girls and women in hip hop culture and/or part of the hip hop generation” (p. ). arguments relating to hip hop demeaning women and continuing to marginalize black people have been on rotation since its inception and continue to rotate today. tricia rose ( ) tackles these arguments head-on in her book the hip hop wars. the author covers the “ten debates in hip hop,” highlighting five critical arguments against hip hop and following up with five of hip hop’s defending arguments, notably, how hip hop is not solely responsible for sexism and how there are very few conversations regarding the positivism in hip hop, namely philanthropist activities in black communities. rose ( ) covers both critics and defensives with the use of strong examples in a diplomatic way, staying true to the book’s title causing a literary war. one chapter specifically talks about hip hop demeaning women, stating making lemonade: examining female empowerment that the visual representations of black women in hip hop videos “reflect the hallmarks of mainstream masculinity: they regularly use women as props that boost male egos, treat women’s bodies as sexual objects and divide women into groups that are worthy of protection and respect and those that are not” (rose, , p. ). rose goes on to say “thus, hip hop does not break from the fundamental logic of mainstream masculinity so much as to convey it with access, bravado, and extra insult” ( , p. ). the author simply states that hip hop is not the origin of the demise but rather a product of mainstream masculinity which have “consistently celebrated male violence as a necessary means to conflict resolution” (rose, , p. ). many hip hop artists use the term “keeping it real” when faced with critiques of their music that perpetuates negative social conditions. rose ( ) also highlights these arguments and defenses of the phrase in a chapter called “just keeping it real.” this phrase is interpretive and can mean many things, but generally it speaks to the hard truths about black urban street life. rose states “a good deal of hip hop speaks and has always spoken openly and in depth about aspects of black urban poverty,” ( , p. ) and goes on to mention how hip hop provides a ground level view of living under what are “nearly warlike conditions in communities that face [a] myriad of daunting circumstances” ( , p. ). in some of the final pages of the text, rose speaks about “invisible white consumption” of hip hop music highlighting the underplayed role of white people consuming damaging stereotypes of black people, especially when those stereotypes are perceived as ‘authentically’ black ( ) yet, the author also highlights the arguments of many hip hop supporters suggesting that hip hop is a “project of racial unity” (rose, , p. ). the notion of hip hop feminism as a branch of third wave feminism is relevant to this current research study as it denotes cultural underpinnings associated with a certain type of making lemonade: examining female empowerment generation and can be specific to geographic locations. it set the tone and helped pave the way for the current fourth wave of feminism which is centered around empowerment, built upon the notion of intersectionality, and mobilized through internet mediums. one highly publicized example of fourth wave feminism is the #metoo movement. in the fall of , the #metoo hashtag erupted on social media as an anti-rape activist approach after actress alyssa milano turned to social media for a call to action shortly following the highly publicized rape case with former film producer harvey weinstein (fileborn & loney- howes, ). millions of individuals, globally, used the #metoo hashtag on social media within hours of the post. this generated significant and overwhelming response in support of survivors of sexual harassment and violence (fileborn & loney-howes, ). the movement not only sparked conversation and outrage on social media but allowed for a series of questions about voice and worthiness. fileborn and loney-howes ( ) highlight some other questions that were born from this movement, such as “what constitutes sexual violence, whose experiences are included and perceived as worthy of redress, and how activist communities should go about the ‘business’ of generating change” (p. ). many feminist activists have generally argued that acts of sexual violence are indicative of “rape culture,” versus one off individuals who are “sick.” the term “rape culture” has been a controversial one and refers overall to the social, cultural, and political processes that condone violence against women but also blame women if and when violence is perpetrated against them (fileborn & loney-howes, ). a notable qualitative thematic study was conducted with real-life #metoo users unpacking their motives and general experience in participating in the digital feminist movement (mendes & ringrose, ). the researchers used surveys and semi-structured interview making lemonade: examining female empowerment questions to uncover a variety of reasons as to why #metoo users joined the social movement and added their name to the social hashtag. answers varied from having a: sense of anger and outrage at the pervasiveness of rape culture, to a desire to challenge rape myths that deny recognition for many victims, to a desire to build a structural analysis of sexual violence, to generating communities of care. (mendes & ringrose, , para. ) the authors shared their general optimism for the power and potential of digital feminist movements (mendes & ringrose, ). this type of research is beneficial not only to those who face sexual assault but also those with varying intersecting identities that cause them to be placed in the most marginalized groups of society. the fourth wave movement is not limited to feminist activism for white women who face sexual assault but for black and brown women and men with a variety of intersecting identity factors, including but not limited to gender fluidity, non-binary identification, transgender identification, intersex, poverty, addiction, accessibility, and mental health issues. the concept of intersectionality is not a new one. in her breakthrough essay titled demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of anti-discrimination, doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist politics, kimberlé crenshaw introduced the term of intersectionality to highlight the marginalization and oversight of black women in antidiscrimination law, feminist theories, and antiracist theory and politics. later, crenshaw produced a second piece that expanded on her initial framework called mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity, politics, and violence against women of color (carbado et al., ). intersectionality allows us to look at structures of power and how they intersect with marginalized peoples of society. carbado et al. ( ) reference intersectionality as a fluid, ever making lemonade: examining female empowerment changing and a non-contained entity. further to that, dhamoon ( ) argues that intersectionality is not only a theoretical argument but rather a research paradigm in and of itself, stating that it can be broadly applied to social relations, contexts, and movements that transcend the initial discourse of non-white women. dhamoon’s ( ) article suggests five key considerations for taking on and mainstreaming intersectionality, noting language, complexities of difference, choice of focus, models of explanation, and principles of analysis for interaction. the author argues that above all, it is “crucial to frame it as a form of social critique so as to foreground its radical capacity to attend to and disrupt oppressive vehicles of power” (dhamoon, , para. ). in relation to the current study, it is imperative to interpret intersectionality as a form of social critique, especially when considering elements of popular culture, visual media, and power structures. already noted in dhamoon’s ( ) article, the application of intersectionality allows researchers to move beyond ontological foundations created by white, cis gendered males and females. this application is important as a reminder that forms of oppression are not merely additive, as if accessibility, racism, and sexism (to name a few) are separate layers. intersectionality theory argues that black women experience a different type of sexism compared to white women and black women experience a different kind of racism compared to black men (cabardo et al., ). intersectionality as a form of social critique is important as it creates an understanding of how we all carry multiple identities. the importance of these multiple identities— based not only on race, normative gender, class, sexuality, nonnormative gender, physical abilities, and age—vary in different times and contexts, creating either disadvantages or privileges on each of us (dhamoon, ). making lemonade: examining female empowerment academic buzz on beyoncé: scratching the surface of black feminism in popular culture african studies professor omise’eke tinsey describes beyoncé’s album lemonade as “the most widely distributed black feminist [work] of the current moment,” ( , p. ). she goes on to say that lemonade “offers a spectacular entry point into black feminist conversations” ( , p. ). tinsley highlights videos from the visual album, specifically the sorry and boy bye videos as a tribute to ‘black femme’ and mentions a turning point in the formation video for black transgender sisters, by including new orleans bounce hip hop star big freedia. further to that, adrienne trier-bieniek produced an edited collection of essays entitled the beyoncé effect: essays on sexuality, race, and feminism in , prior to the lemonade album, to analyze and critique the star’s collection of art and the progression of her material. this analysis is generally highly supportive of the artist’s work, arguing its scholarly relevance to the work of black feminism. aisha durham ( ) explores beyoncé as a key figure in contemporary feminist media studies, largely for the artist’s unconventional body type and feminist views. the author focuses heavily on beyoncé’s “booty” and how it represents racial and class difference for black women, mentioning that “the lower half of beyoncé is emphasized to mark authentic blackness rooted in the american south” (durham, , p. ). durham ( ) also draws attention to the artist’s strong linkages to black respectability through her music, specifically in destiny’s child’s music video nasty girls ( ). in this video, beyoncé watches women dressed in little clothing dance on television, and later scolds them in her lyrics, linking attire to promiscuity. beyoncé advises these women “to put some clothes on” because men do not want a “hot female that’s been around the block female”in the music video. the author states that “the virtual women are miraculously transformed morally making lemonade: examining female empowerment through fashion—recalling the rhetoric of respectability” (durham, , p. ), going on to explain that body studies in feminist communication research has not theorized the influences of black female bodies with non-black audiences. many years of comparative research suggest black girls having a healthier body image than their white counterparts because of within group appreciation for body differences and the general lack of black females in mainstream media (durham, ). but, with the advent of social media and amplified access to music videos across class and cultures, this is no longer the case as a recent study connecting media exposure to body disturbance suggests black and white women have become more dissatisfied with their lower torso with increased television viewing (durham, ). overall, the author concludes that beyoncé’s ultimate role in popular culture is a role of othering and says that through performance, beyoncé calls attention to intersecting discourses of racialized sexuality and gender, and she highlights the particular constraints that exist for black girls and women who also want to express their sexuality in a society where black bodies are always already marked as deviant. (durham, , p. ) shortly after the release of beyoncé’s lemonade album, black feminist scholar bell hooks posted a blog on her personal page titled moving beyond pain (salzano, ). in there, she states that the lemonade album creates “a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists invisibility,” (hooks, , as cited in salzano, , p. ) and goes on by saying “[i]t challenges us all to look anew, to radically revision how we see the black female body. however, this radical repositioning of black female images does not truly overshadow or change conventional sexist constructions of black female identity” (hooks, , as cited in salzano, , p. ). making lemonade: examining female empowerment jackson ( ) also digs into the bell hooks narrative on beyoncé, specifically looking at commodity feminism and the glamorization of gendered cultural paradox. the author goes on to note that hooks suggests beyoncé’s lemonade album “doesn’t do enough,” (jackson, , para. ) and that the artist has power and agency to transcend cultural barriers and move past representations of black women as a victim. jackson ( ) concludes that hooks’ expectations of beyoncé outstretch the means stating, “expectations of beyoncé outstrip the space the artist is herself attempting to make with this work” (para. ). these examples are to showcase the fluid and ever-changing nature of popular culture and celebrity studies. there are academics who strongly support beyoncé as a feminist and some scholars who condemn her for “terrorism” and reinforcing white beauty standards (salzano, , p. ). additionally, these examples show that the majority of academic literature on beyoncé exists in the form of discourse and content analysis, whether it is with arguments supporting the artist’s approach to black feminist activism, or condemning it, causing it to push the oppressed black female narrative. the current research is set apart as it focuses on what girls have to say about beyoncé and her visual music instead of highly educated academic adults. chapter two: methods methodology this study was situated within the constructionist paradigm (social) to address what aspects of visual media are perceived as empowering among youth girls. the constructionist paradigm was chosen for this research based on its linkage to feminist theory, black feminist theory, and psychoanalytic film theory, along with its roots in investigating the qualitative nature of values, beliefs, and motivations. while critical theory is more often paired with feminist research, this paper does not focus solely on the theoretical elements of feminism but rather it making lemonade: examining female empowerment explores the use of visual media and popular culture through a feminist lens. constructionism reminds us our sex, gender, societies, and the media we consume and then create is socially constructed. constructionist methods are interpretive and there is the ability to facilitate co-creation between investigator and participants (guba & lincoln, ). guba and lincoln ( ) further argue that constructionism “assumes multiple, apprehendable, and sometimes conflicting social realities that are the products of human intellects, but that may change as their constructors become more informed and sophisticated” (p. ). the current study used both qualitative individual interviews in the form of film-elicitation and focus group interviews for data collection which is consistent with this paradigm. both individual interviews and focus group interviews provided interaction-based data that were co-created to reach understandings from the participants’ perspectives, and experiences (platt, ). strategy and design our visual experiences play a key role in identity formation. all visual forms are culturally embedded, and these cultural aspects also play a central role in the creation of identity. using visual analysis methodology, this study aims to critically examine a piece of visual music media through a social constructionist approach while applying, psychoanalytic film theory, black feminist theory, and critical theory. the study engaged research participants to share their perceptions, feelings, and thoughts in response to segments of beyoncé’s visual album lemonade. the purpose of this research was to create a space for young women to share their interpretations in response to media as the published research in this field is mainly content analysis and/or discourse analysis. making lemonade: examining female empowerment the s witnessed the invention of film and cinema, which was later made more accessible to the north american public with the television in the s and s. more recently, the internet, digital imaging, and social media have engaged hundreds of millions of people globally as a means of communication and entertainment (sturken & cartwright, ). for this study, i look at feminist film theory as an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, individual viewers, communities, and societies while considering alienating categories which deny women’s experiences as active spectators enjoying films or reading them critically (allen, ). when we look at psychoanalytic film theory, it is closely associated with academic film criticism that developed in the s and s, is allied with critical theory, and analyzes films from the perspective of psychoanalysis, generally the works of jacques lacan, a french psychoanalysis and psychiatrist (allen, ). the goals of psychoanalytic approaches are interested in emotional states and the role of the unconscious (seale, ). allen ( ) states that psychoanalytic film theory “explores the significance for human understanding of cinema’s augmentation of perception; it emphasizes what and how the cinema allows us to see, and how this effects our self-understanding” (p. ). it should be noted that there are limitations to psychoanalytic film theory as historically, it collides with the phenomenology (the study of lived experience) popular in cultural studies. phenomenology allows researchers to tap into the lived experience of their participants while psychoanalytic film theory looks at how film and media influence the lives of their participants. psychoanalytic film theory asks the question “what pop culture does to people” where phenomenology asks, “what people do with popular culture?” creating an epistemological disconnect between the two methodologies. sturken and cartwright indicate that “perception, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/film_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/critical_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/psychoanalysis making lemonade: examining female empowerment memory, and imagination are key concerns of phenomenological approaches to cultural analysis” ( , p. ). for this study, theoretical elements of psychoanalytic film theory are used along with black feminist theory but are situated in a phenomenological approach. this study will aim to explore the understanding of its participants, examining what and how they interpret meaning along with how it affects their personal self-understanding as it relates to their cultural experiences. see figure . below for a visual representation of the methodological and theoretical approach to this study. figure . methodological and theoretical approach interviews and focus groups will be used to tap into the participants’ lived experiences and meaning making (phenomenology) that will then be interpreted using a social constructionist constructionist paradigm - sex and gender are socially constructed - popular culture is socially constructed - acknowledges conflicting social realities - allows for co-creation between investigator and participants feminist film theory - idea that deny women's experiences as active spectators enjoying films black feminist theory - black female spectatorship - intersectionality is vital when assesing media with or about black women critical theory - reveals and challenges power structures - assess and critique of society and culture pyschoanalytic film theory - looks at the pleasure we derive from images and the relationship between our desires and our visual world making lemonade making lemonade: examining female empowerment epistemological framework that incorporates feminist and psychoanalytic film theory and critical theory. data collection to collect data, i solicited research participants (female students between - years of age) through word-of-mouth, social media, and through contacting youth organizations across canada. the age range chosen is specific to consumers of mainstream r&b music and music videos. homogenous purposive sampling was used for the study, often recommended for phenomenological research. a total of participants joined the study, with unequal fragments joining in the focus group sessions due to participant availability. ethical approval from the royal roads office of research was granted and approved from the research ethics board (reb). the treatment of participants was consistent with the recommendations for the ethical treatment of human participants. participants did not receive compensation for their involvement, but each participant had a chance to win a $ gift card to a place of their choosing. a draw was made after interviews and focus groups were completed. with the album being just over an hour in length, the participants were provided with a tidal (multimedia viewing platform) login and asked to view the following segments: ) : - : ) : - : ) : - : ) : - : after viewing the segments, participants were asked to provide individual responses to structured interview questions through a video submission, no longer than five minutes in length. while structured interview questions were provided, participants were encouraged to include additional thoughts, opinions, and comments. participants were then placed into focus groups making lemonade: examining female empowerment which were arranged at a later date. the focus groups were strategically composed of participants from different geographic locations in canada. the focus group sessions were digitally recorded with audio and video and held over google hangout air platform. the interviewer gathered qualitative data in the form of interpretations and descriptions of thoughts and feelings from the participants. participants watched segments of beyoncé’s visual album lemonade and respond to questions such as: . how does this segment of video make you feel? do you feel empowered by this segment of video? . what components of the video make you feel this way? . do the clothes the artist is wearing in this video make you feel empowered about your clothing choices? . which pieces of the artist's lyrics inspire or empower you the most within this segment of video? answers from participants were recorded on video for ease of transcribing and coding. in order to obtain strong and trustworthy data, i chose to pair film-elicitation with focus group research to gather my data, also known as triangulation. through this process, i was able to test the consistency of findings and mitigate common threats in the individual methods, that could influence results. film-elicitation refers to asking participants to ‘create’ media – in the form of a video composed of their own news stories, advertisements, or personal reflections of an event (hughes, ). film-elicitation, like photo-elicitation, can be a highly productive research tool for the social researcher, yielding insights and understandings that might otherwise be missed or not be discernible by other methods (banks, ). a focus group is a form of group interview centered on a topic or activity and in which the interaction within the group is making lemonade: examining female empowerment used to facilitate the elicitation of participants’ views. i chose focus groups as a data collection method as it is a common method to elicit responses from media occurrences, especially audience studies (seale, ). furthermore, the focus group method is appropriate due to the participant age range ( - ). this method encourages and fosters conversation, which at times may be difficult in a one-on-one interview. bloor and wood ( ) highlight the success of virtual focus groups in past studies. focus groups have been a fashionable research method in the recent past (seale, ), but the popularity of conventional focus groups (as opposed to virtual focus groups) may now be dwindling (bloor & wood, ). these methods of data collection were paired, since focus group participants can be influenced by groupthink (voicing opinions out of sync with their true thoughts). furthermore, critics of focus groups argue that it is not sufficient as a sole method of data collection and should be supported by additional research methods (van den hoonaard, ). van den hoonarrd ( ) states that focus groups are “particularly appropriate when you are interested in learning about how people understand things that occur in their everyday lives or that they have thought about,” (p. ) which this current research aims to do. data analysis prior to data analysis, i created a list of personal biases that could affect the research study. these biases included but are not limited to: (a) being a fan of the artist beyoncé; (b) personally feeling empowered by the artist’s syntax, voice, and costume choices; (c) canadian youth know and are familiar with beyoncé; and (d) females have similar emotional responses to visual media. these were important reminders as i proceeded with coding and thematic analysis. in qualitative research, it is nearly impossible to be fully objective as the biases and standpoints of the research influence the topic being studied along with methodologies and methods chosen making lemonade: examining female empowerment for the study. while my biases are noted here, my personal standpoint also affected the approach of this study being a white, cis gendered female from prince edward island in my late twenties/early thirties. my life experiences and personal views help to shape the methodological approach to this study. coding after data collection was completed, i transcribed elicited videos and focus group sessions in a jeffersonian format. after obtaining transcribed data, i determined my conceptual framework based on critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminist film theory, and black feminist theory. i created a guide sheet that encompassed a list of data driven codes and theory driven codes. data driven codes were listed as: depiction of a societal/social standard; negative mental/emotional reaction to imagery; positive mental emotional reaction to imagery; neutral mental/emotional reaction to imagery; and lack of resonance with imagery. the theory driven codes included power, syntax, colors, decoding, flow, semiotics, objectification, gaze, and race/representation. these codes were chosen specifically based on the theoretical framework for this study and sub-codes were developed to further break down the data. i began coding the individual film-elicited interviews first followed by the focus group data. i used one coding sheet for this purpose. some comments and quotes received two or more codes depending on the nature of the comment. for example, it was common for one quote to have a code for “power” and one code for “decoding.” analysis to validate the thematic coding, i relied on interrater reliability mainly for validation of process, having the procedural elements reviewed by my thesis supervisor. in order to maintain making lemonade: examining female empowerment confidentiality, i used participant ids in lieu of participants names. from there, i put relatable codes into “buckets” to review all data with the same code more closely. through this process, themes began to emerge. van den hoonarrd ( ) quotes esterberg by calling this the “so what” question (p. ). similar concepts, quotations, and words emerged from this process allowing the researcher to identify small themes that eventually turned into larger overarching themes. after i created a list of themes, i reviewed the participants’ quotes and comments in the theme cluster to ensure that they aligned. during this phase, i also referenced field notes taken during the interviews. member checking or “member validation” as in researching society and culture, (seale, ) is the “act of giving your research participants a chance to examine and comment on themes you have derived from the data that they helped contribute, before findings are written up” (p. ). for this study, i provided my sensitizing concepts and emerging themes to two research participants, chosen at random, for cross-verification. seale ( ) mentions that there can be many ways of “seeing” data but this “form of validation may prove useful if the goal of the research is to identify and apply themes that are recognized or used by participants” (p. ). the two participants chosen for member-checking both “heavily” agreed with the sensitizing concept of ‘cloak of competence’ and both participants noted the notion of ‘cloak of incompetence’ as “accurate” with one participant mentioning “i definitely do not feel one hundred percent comfortable arguing on behalf of something i don’t know or haven’t experienced.” one participant best connected with the theme “unity” while the second participant best connected with the themes of “voice” and “relatability.” since this study was conducted about film with film-elective interviews and film recorded focus groups, i had the ability to note facial and body expressions during the making lemonade: examining female empowerment interview(s). assessing, labelling, and pairing facial and body movements with comments was intended to strengthen decisions created about themes. however, due to limitations in time and ability, the assessment of facial and body movements was omitted and is later discussed in the future research section of this paper. making lemonade: examining female empowerment chapter three: detangling (results) demographics all participants resided in canada, with % from eastern canada and . % from each central and western canada. approximately % of participants identified as caucasian and % of participants were age . the age range of participants was - years, with the median age of participants age . additional information about the demographic of participants is listed in table . and figure . . table . demographics of participants participant id age grade province/country ethnicity preferred music style y a ab, canada south asian indie, blues, pop, rap, top on, canada caucasian other pe, canada caucasian pop pe, canada caucasian pop on, canada caucasian punk rock ab, canada caucasian hip hop pe, canada caucasian indie, rap pe, canada caucasian pop, indie, punk rock on, canada caucasian other pe, canada caucasian indie, top , country y a bc, canada caucasian indie, pop, rap, electronic, hip hop a undergraduate student in first year of university. figure . participant age breakdown making lemonade: examining female empowerment sensitizing concepts analysis of the data resulted in three sensitizing concepts and five emerging themes. a sensitizing concept is a tool used by the researcher to help understand their participants’ worldviews (van den hoonaard, ). sensitizing concepts come from the data themselves, rather from preconceived ideas before collecting and analyzing a set of data. sensitizing concepts differ from emerging themes as the concepts are constructs that are derived from the research participants' perspective, using their language or expression (van den hoonaard, ). results from this study uncovered three sensitizing concepts. in addition to the five emerging themes, of voice (super-ordinate), unity, compassion, persistence and relatability, there were three sensitizing concepts identified from the research. table . provides examples of questions asked to participants, followed by their quote or paraphrased quote. . ‘cloak of competence’ (mcluhan et al., ) denotes participants engaging with a question or conversation the way they know how to, versus the way they have been asked to. % % % % age age age age making lemonade: examining female empowerment . ‘cloak of incompetence’ (mcluhan et al., ) with regards to discussion/comments on the oppression of women, black femme/feminism. . ‘generational language’ refers to the speech patterns used by the participant demographic to explain a thought or idea (e.g., low-key, side-chick, etc.) table . identified sensitizing concepts sensitizing concept example of question asked to participants quote or paraphrased response cloak of competence how does this segment make you feel? a . “throughout segment one, it had a lot of metaphors for religion as well as her abusive relationship, and it definitely had a lot of anticipation.” . “when she says, ‘oh, my god,’ in, like, pleasure, whatever [eyebrows tilt in], it was a sign of worship [eyebrows tilt in], as if he was providing her something that was from a higher level or class [corners of mouth turn down].” cloak of incompetence what does this section represent to you and how does it make you feel? b . “the part with the grandmother was ‘cool’, sharing stories of strength is motivating but i felt this section and others talking about black women have ‘nothing to do with me’.” . “i figured it being more... like, you hear people talking about growing up being black or not being privileged, and how that’s torture, and how it’s something that you struggle with. and then you become empowered by it, and it becomes your salvation; it becomes who you are, and it’s just... that’s kind of more how i saw that quote, just probably just because i really making lemonade: examining female empowerment [smiles] am not very educated in what’s going on. but, like [smiles and shakes head], it was more of a culture thing than anything for me.” . “so, i’m white, so i can’t really speak much on culture, but [laughs] – you know, just white culture.” generational language how did this segment of video make you feel, and what parts of it made you feel that way? . “a black woman is, like, one of the most underappreciated women,” that was really cool, how they, like, just these stills, and they did, like, mostly, like, black-and- white photos, or videos of people, which was kind of... what i felt was supposed to... like, low- key, represent, like, the fact that they are in the dark, because they’re kind of stuck in this thing people see them as [eyebrows are raised].” . “i think it’s really important to address the fact that beyoncé [smiles] never slanders the side chick.” note. the specific notes below indicate themes within participants ‘answers that informed the researcher’s attribution of the sensitization concept._. a searching for metaphors/similes instead of considering how the visual made them feel. b avoiding topics due to lack of education or experience on the topic. while the “cloak of incompetence” sensitizing concept is noteworthy in this study, it is important to mention that it did not completely saturate the data. approximately % of codes were related to representation of women and race, some of which directly spoke to the perceived challenges black women face. as one participant expressed: i think she really touches on the segment of the second clip where they are talking about how black women are the most disrespected in america. and i think... i know i said in making lemonade: examining female empowerment the first segment that i liked how she had all of the other girls... well, you didn't really know why. and i think she kind of wraps that into the segment we just watched] that, “they may be disrespected, but they’re all still queens.” and, like, ultimately, i think that’s what she’s trying to get across here. another participant expressed: and so, as you go through the video, there’s more and more culture, and i think that represents her [really] going back to her roots. and then, like, the whole... just, like, most disrespected women... or, yeah, that black women are the most disrespected women, i think... like, she really shows that she’s not going to let that happen to her… the “cloak of competence” was routinely used by way of decoding the viewed media. participants often relied on their ability to search for similes and metaphors in text or film, looking for meaning. overall, there was a reluctance to share feelings and emotions about the visual album and more of an effort to “decode” what the media meant. emerging themes the research findings were five emerging themes that informed a model of the values, beliefs, and behaviors of female youth and how they interpret music media. data analysis identified a core theme pertaining to “voice.” the five emerging themes are discussed further in table . . the central theme of voice refers to the agency and self-determination, specifically of women, in media and in day to day life. the theme of compassion considers that the idea of “letting go,” a visual form of strength, most importantly noting honesty with oneself. the theme of relatability refers to how relatable an artist is to the viewer, which could be linked to attire, speech, race, or class. persistence considers the use of positive speech and audible depictions of strength offered by the artist. the final theme of unity refers to visual depictions of women supporting one another, specifically standing together, side by side. making lemonade: examining female empowerment table . values, beliefs, and behaviors of female youth aspects a explanation examples b voice (central) agency/self-determination and owning your independence. related to understanding one’s identity and ability to communicate that identify with others. not allowing yourself to be “changed” by media, influencers, or peers. uncovering “invisibleness” to be heard. . “i thought that beyoncé created lemonade to show that she is flawed, and that she has flaws. but then i got another message [smiles] out of it, that, ‘we aren't flawed, and we are who we are, and that’s completely okay and perfect.’” . paraphrased: "i am not empowered through anger and that is what this section seems like to me, angry." . “and then, at the end, everything was, like, kind of in color, which was nice [laughs and rolls eyes] because it’s kind of like, to me, showing that they wanted basically [shrugs] everyone to be able to be seen in color and be seen as everyone else is [corners of mouth turn down], instead of being seen as, like, a minority.” . “…where she’s like... she tried to change herself [corners of mouth turn down], i was, like, kind of like, “not empowering at all” [laughs]. like, you don’t change yourself for someone [smiles].” . “i felt disempowered throughout the whole thing [corners of mouth turn down], like, the whole segment [corners of mouth turn down]. she talks about a lot about relying making lemonade: examining female empowerment aspects a explanation examples b on someone else, and that’s kind of the opposite of empowerment to me.” . “i was slightly empowered by her vulnerability… ...because i think we’re kind of told that, like, we can’t be very vulnerable [rolls eyes] now, and she did that.” unity images/lyrics depicting togetherness (specifically women standing with other women). . “a lot of the time, the album had her girls or her family there with her. so, it kind of like showed her that, like, that’s who keeps her going and, like, no matter what’s going on, like, she’s able to keep going.” . “and she’s... in the video, she brings her friends close, so she’s basically saying like, ‘i still have my friends and they’re still here to support me, but... even though you’re not there, you’re out doing other things, i still have these people around me’.” . “i liked that, actually [corners of mouth turn down] for... especially with the other dancers and stuff, it did bring kind of like a community feel to the message, i guess. it was more... like, it wasn't just one girl feeling the need to stand up for herself [corners of mouth turn up], i guess, but it was more of, like, a gendered community feeling.” making lemonade: examining female empowerment aspects a explanation examples b . “so, i think it really just shows how strong women are together as one whole, even if it’s not a specific group of people, but even... like, all together from different backgrounds [shakes head] and stuff like that. i think it really includes women as a whole and how strong we are together.” . “women are stronger together. yes, we’re strong by ourselves, and we have a voice to a point [corners of mouth turn down]. but whenever we’re with other people who share the same values and views, i think we’re able to make our voice more heard.” compassion (forgiveness) the idea of “letting go” while maintaining honesty and integrity. . “[i felt] the most empowered by kind of the end when she started to forgive and stuff and, yeah, that just made me feel empowered because not everyone can do that.” . “i think it’s very easy to [squints eyes] know... if you’re hurt, it’s very easy to just close yourself off and be hurt and be bitter [corners of mouth turn down], as she was in kind of the second part of it. it’s very easy... i mean it’s very common, too; but it’s really hard to kind of heal from that hurt, and it was a great way... it was good seeing the transition between, you know, her being hurt and angry [corners of mouth making lemonade: examining female empowerment aspects a explanation examples b turn up] – understandably so [eyebrows are raised] – to being forgiving and loving again.” . “and i think maybe, like, she was hurt – i'm not sure necessarily [eyebrows are raised] by who; i don’t want to make judgments or anything – but she’s starting to forgive that [corners of mouth turn up], and move on for maybe the better of herself and her family. that is empowering.” . i think the most empowering part of the album was at the end when she showcased her family and friends and, especially, like, all the girls who helped her in the music video – like, all of them. i think that she kind of [sighs] showed that, like, although these, like, things have happened to her in the past, like, she used her friends and her family to get through them. and no mater, like, what she was doing with her music career, like, in her life, like, they were still there to support her. relatability the development of sense of self/identity through clothes, other attire, and speech. . “the part where she is underwater seemed like a possible metaphor for drowning which i could relate to, but it didn't make me feel empowered - more on edge.” . “but she was able to speak to events that happen in women’s lives all around the making lemonade: examining female empowerment aspects a explanation examples b world, and she was able to go back to her roots, which created this connection between her and her audience.” . “she made plenty of references to the pain of growing up and leaving behind her childish ways to enter into a more professional world with a lot more requirements. and, as a teenage girl going into university and starting to go out [eyebrows are raised] on my own, i could definitely relate to that.” . “i thought... [sighs] i felt really sad, actually, at the beginning of it. it was just, like, really emotional, and i could kind of feel her pain. she kind of looked like she was going through something big at the moment, and [i kind of]... the way she organized the whole film. like, she made it so you could see all of what she was feeling.” persistence (major) using positive self-speech as well as positive word choices rooted in compassion instead of anger. the notion of moving forward even under challenging circumstances. . “i know everybody feels empowerment different ways – but seeing people belittle others and treat others [rolls eyes] with what i feel is disrespect, it doesn't empower me.” . “and this is probably the one [where] i felt the most [eyebrows tilt in] empowered to, just because, like, after all the things that like, the song is, like, talking about making lemonade: examining female empowerment aspects a explanation examples b how, like, bad everything is going, she’s still able to just be herself and just power through it.” . “but i think i felt, like, more happy and empowered at the second ones – like i said before – because they had, like, components with the family and, like, love and happiness and more, like, ‘never give up,’ kind of thing.” . “[there is a sense] that ‘you can get through this,’ and showing her steps. so maybe you can take inspiration if you’re having troubles or you’re going through something, you can kind of build off that.” note. column headings have been condensed for formatting. further details are indicated in the specific notes below. a ‘aspects’ represents aspects of visual music media that perceive to empower youth girls. b ‘examples’ provided comprise participants’ quotes (or paraphrased content, where indicated). findings from this study reveal a set of values, beliefs, and behaviours that one sample of canadian youth girls find empowering in music media. the central notion of voice, both for self and others, seeks to pull back the curtain on the invisibility that prevails of marginalized and vulnerable groups. visual representations of women standing together and beside one another, especially in challenging times, speaks to the empowering notion of unity. the notion of compassion came through with specific comments related to forgiveness. participants noted vulnerability and sharing the truth was an element that was named courageous and powerful. relatability speaks to the cultural background, attire, word choices, make-up and tone of voice making lemonade: examining female empowerment presented in music media. findings indicate that when young women able to relate to an artist, they may feel more empowered by their music and/or films. moving forward during challenging times with grace and dignity, using positive self-speech and showing respect for others spoke to the theme of persistence and positivity. the research findings showed that clothing choices and scenes including females in revealing clothing did not seriously impact the level of empowerment but was rather seen as a choice of the artist. figure . depicts the interconnectedness of emerging themes for this study, with “voice” as a central component. figure . interconnectedness of emerging themes this model affirms the connectedness of the emerging themes and places voice at the center as the super-ordinate theme voice was the first of the five themes to emerge and, without it, the remaining themes would not have been uncovered. this study provides a platform for the voice of young women, identifies the lack of voice of women, specifically black women, and interprets the voice of one of the most famous women of the st century, beyoncé. because of voice unity persistance compassion relatability making lemonade: examining female empowerment voice, other themes emerged. comments, thoughts, interpretations, and feelings were un-braided to find themes in unity, persistence, relatability, and compassion through the lived experiences of the participants, but they do not exist solely on their own. the model links these themes using lines creating a fluid circular response to visual media. chapter four: unweaving the braid (discussion) countless studies have drawn conclusions that media is influential (keller & ringrose , turner , and wallis, ). its images and messages teach individuals how to think, act, believe, and perceive their worlds, especially when referring to teenagers. in fact, scholars have argued that mass media is one of the “strongest agents in the socialization process, along with family, friends, and school” (goldman et al., p. ). within the discussion of black popular culture, collins ( ) frames mass media as appropriation and repackaging of black ideas and cultural representations created by black people. drawing on the theoretical framework for this study with respect to psychoanalytic film theory, i referenced researchers on visible culture and specifically how viewers make meaning. images produce meaning, but the meaning of visual music images do not rest fully in the hands of the producers waiting for viewers to uncover them. struken and cartwright ( ) suggest that meanings are “produced through complex social relationship that involves at least two elements besides the image itself and its producer: ( ) how viewers interpret or experience the image and ( ) the context in which the image is seen” (p. ). this is to say that visual music media can be interpreted in ways that differ from intended, dominant, or shared meanings, and that meaning is created when media is consumed. research findings from this study show one central and four main themes to what canadian youth girls (aged - ) find most empowering in visual music media. making lemonade: examining female empowerment the essence: voice central to the other four themes found in this research, voice emerged as the super- ordinate theme.. the idea of uncovering “invisibleness” is central to the concept, method, and analysis of this study. in black women in popular culture, goldman et al., ( ) quote brenda allen and bring to light the notion of black women as “invisible rather than as distinct persons who experience and resist multiple jeopardy or interlocking oppressions based on their race, their gender, and intersections of these and other aspects of their identity” ( , p. ). in this study, all participants identified the lack of voice women, and particularly black women, have in society today. while some participants noted this through a cloak of incompetence (e.g., “i didn’t realize that black women were treated in this way”), the study unanimously revealed the lack of voice among black women in north america and around the globe as a result of intersectionality. each participant referenced this point either during a focus group session or their film-elicited interview. many participants ( . %) stated that they found elements of “changing yourself for someone else” going against your true self and labelled it as disempowering. one participant expressed: i found that there was, like, strong feelings of solitude. like, she separated herself from the world because of what happened; and then, like, trying to change herself over what happened wasn't very empowering. another participant expressed: the beginning of it, where she’s talking about kind of becoming this other woman just [smiles, shrugs and shakes head] ... i don’t know, it made me feel kind of uneasy. like, it’s not what i see female empowerment is about is…she’s talking about changing herself making lemonade: examining female empowerment into something more desirable, i guess but the way it was brought across makes... it just …it wasn't empowering at all to me. furthermore, at some point, all participants noted themselves as most empowered by images and auditory reinforcements of women finding and owning their own voice. it should be noted that voice is not limited only to speaking and the use of one’s physical voice, but is widened to attire, make-up use, physical capabilities (child-bearing and athletic potential), and actions towards others. theme one: unity visual content must be considered in the larger social or cultural contexts in which they are viewed. with respect to this study, all participants were from canada and % identified as caucasian. all participants indicated a strong sense of empowerment after seeing images of women standing with other women, specifically during challenging times. participants noted a sense of community, and one participant responded to these scenes as a “gendered community feeling.” other participants uncovered a sense of “generational unity” when responding to video of grandmothers, mothers, and children gathering together, especially for black women coming together to celebrate successes and continue to work towards equality. all participants responded positively to visual representations of support that appeared in the form other women, including friends, family, and beyond. two examples from this theme are: this was the most empowering part of the album for me because of the images and lyrics about unity and togetherness and not singing about and showing problems. making lemonade: examining female empowerment i liked the inclusion of female dancers and stuff, it did bring kind of like a community feel to the message, i guess. it was more... like, it wasn't just one girl feeling the need to stand up for herself, i guess, but it was more of, like, a gendered community feeling. theme two: relatability studies of visual culture look at the intersectionality of visual, auditory, and tactile media. sturken and cartwright ( ) argue that “when we have an experience with a particular visual medium, we draw on associations with other media and other areas of our lives informed by visual messages” (p. ). findings from this research indicate that a stronger sense of empowerment is invoked when the viewer is able to relate to the situation, experience, emotion or artist (and the preconceived notions they have about the artist) more easily. participants felt most empowered when they viewed an image and could relate it to a personal experience. in , jessica mary elsie cummings from the university of windsor conducted a study on the “effect(s) of visual media on the female body image,” and uncovered four in-depth themes. one of these themes references that “people ascribe meaning to things that act or impact on them” (cummings, , p. ). similarly, in the current study, there was a higher yield of responses when a participant was able to relate to the artist, an emotion, image, or verse from the album. some examples include: it made me feel like before she wasn't as strong; and now that she knows what she knows, she’s stronger and she’s able to... i guess she doesn't have that wall up, and she’s more open and she’s able to understand it, i guess, what’s happening and those kinds of things. she made plenty of references to the pain of growing up and leaving behind her childish ways to enter into a more professional world with a lot more requirements. and, as a making lemonade: examining female empowerment teenage girl going into university and starting to go out on my own, i could definitely relate to that. theme three: compassion brackett ( highlights the “ruler” approach, which is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence, as listed here: recognizing emotions in oneself and others understanding the causes and consequences of emotions labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context regulating emotions with helpful strategies the research and its findings are intended for school-based programs and initiatives that build and support the emotional intelligence of adults and children (brackett, ). yet, his findings are applicable to people around the globe. i intend to specifically look at the expression of emotions following cultural norms and social context. when we look at various cultures and societies, there are many ways to express and interpret emotions. with respect to this study, many participants responded more positively and observed higher instances of empowerment in situations of compassion and forgiveness. less than half of the participants felt high levels of empowerment in scenes that depicted anger and resentment, while most of participants felt empowered through forgiveness and vulnerability. examples from three participants: i think it’s very easy to [you] know... if you’re hurt, it’s very easy to just close yourself off and be hurt and be bitter, as she was in kind of the second part of it…but it’s really hard to kind of heal from that hurt, and it was a great way... it was good seeing the transition between, you know, her being hurt and angry – understandably so – to being forgiving and loving again. i feel like she is being rude, just because someone might hurt you or be rude to you doesn't mean you have to be rude back. i felt discouraged and not empowered. making lemonade: examining female empowerment it can be hard to let go of the power hold someone or something has on you and i think seeing people do that empowers me the most. yet, it should be noted that persons from other cultural, social, or socioeconomic backgrounds may not respond to the same way to the visual media segments. this theme is colloquially termed by the researcher as “letting go,” moving into the final theme informally referred to as “moving forward.” theme four: persistence as this study’s interviews and focus groups progressed, it became evident that the idea of “moving forward,” especially during challenging life events, was highly valued. persistence and the use of positive speech were elements that empowered participants, along with visual representations of “making the best of what you have in a situation.” some examples from three participants: actions are more empowering than words are. so just kind of flipping someone off and telling them you’re done with them, that doesn't really empower me much; it’s just [sort]of stooping to a level that i don’t really want to be at. i know everybody feels empowerment different ways – but seeing people belittle others and treat others with what i feel is disrespect, it doesn't empower me. hearing stories of determination during a difficult situation and turning to strong women make me feel the most empowered. making lemonade: examining female empowerment interrelated and interlocked: the connected nature of uncovered themes popular culture is ever-changing and involving. van den hoonaard ( ) encourages researchers to “think about how your various themes and concepts relate to one another and make connections among them” (p. ). one way she suggests doing this is viewing data considering social processes. while voice emerged as a super-ordinate theme from this research, the interconnectedness of unity, relatability, compassion, and forgiveness as other major themes provide insight to the lived experiences and values of the participants. comments, feelings, and emotions in response to the visual media segments were often intertwined with both empowering and disempowering examples; highlighting similes, metaphors, and other symbols; decoding scenes and clothing choices; and personal experiences. the themes are depicted as interconnected because the lived experiences of the participants and their interactions with media are interconnected. as the interviews and focus groups continued, it become evident that there were multiple ways to feel empowered while consuming segments from beyoncé’s lemonade album, and these means to empowerment were often interrelated with one another. when framed through the lens of popular culture, it is important to view findings as what is true today – versus what is true always. while the participants’ impressions of empowerment in this study are fluid and interconnected, media we consume and the way in which we consume continues to shift with youth being at the epicenter of the turnover, causing potential change in this area of study in the coming years. making lemonade: examining female empowerment chapter five: re-braiding (conclusions) through these discussions with canadian female youth, i have determined that the aspects of visual music media that are perceived as most empowering to them are visual representations of voice (owning your authenticity) and unity (images of solidarity and standing with one another). auditory and visual representations of persistence and compassion, coupled with the ability to relate to the artist or situation, envelope a stronger sense of autonomy of choices among viewers. many studies adopting film theory or psychoanalytic film theory focus on the unintended consequences to the female body image (cummings, ; buote et al., ; maclaran ). in this study, participants did not emphasize body image in their comments and only rarely commented on the attire, or lack thereof, in the consumed media. this research might help inform communication planning and marketing for community level youth-based empowerment projects and initiatives in canada. there are some aspects of this research that may also be helpful in informing communication strategies for female youth engagement in international settings (girls’ education, microfinancing, gender-based violence). overall, this study demonstrates the importance in encouraging and recognizing the individual and collective voice of girls when it comes to the issues and needs of women worldwide. ethical considerations and limitations the primary ethical consideration of this study was the confidentiality of the participants, especially since the majority of them were minors. i committed to concealing the identity of all participants to anyone besides myself and my advisor.. this commitment was also made via an informed consent form signed by each participant, and their parent or guardian if they were under the age of . making lemonade: examining female empowerment at the time of the recruitment and data collection, i was working in the recruitment office of the university of prince edward island (upei). my primary role was to recruit students for graduate and professional programs and assist in the application/assessment process. however, in / i frequently assisted in the recruitment and retention of undergraduate students, often visiting high schools in prince edward island (pei) and nova scotia. to mitigate a perceived conflict of interest, i confirmed with pei-based participants that my role as lead investigator of this research project was independent of my employment at upei and they were in no way connected. there were three unintended limitations to this study worth noting. firstly, time for participant recruitment and participation was a challenge. i had hoped to recruit participants and conduct film-elicited interviews followed by three focus groups, each with six participants. however, recruitment was more challenging than anticipated, especially since it was not limited to one province, rather spread out across canada. coordination and planning for focus groups was demanding and often extremely challenging for the participants considering the up to four- hour time difference and their school and extracurricular activities. therefore, i put a minimum length on the film-elicited interviews and conducted follow-ups with participants while putting emphasis on the quality and depth of the focus groups. secondly, i had intended to use quota sampling, ensuring there were represented voices from female youth of various cultural backgrounds. but, again, due to limitations in time and difficulties in recruitment, the study was adapted for purposive homogenous sample. . finally, there were technical challenges with using google hangout air, resulting in parts of focus group sessions were some words or phrases were inaudible therefore leaving word gaps in some transcripts. this created some challenges in data coding and analysis but was not a making lemonade: examining female empowerment damaging factor for the analysis due to the wealth of data collected by both focus groups and individual film-elicited interviews. further research there are many opportunities for further research in this field. i have selected four recommendations for further study. firstly, the findings in this study are limited to their context. we still do not know if all girls feel the same way as these girls from canada do. it would be interesting to repeat the study in another country or region (united states, south east asia, or east africa) with youth girls from different cultural, ethnic, traditional, and class backgrounds to see if themes remain similar or differ completely based on cultural identity. initially, while coding my qualitative data, i coded the syntax and flow of speech of the participants in order to measure their confidence, sense of certainty, and openness. i also transcribed the interviews to include facial expressions and hand gestures of participants. when it came time to analyze the codes, there was too much to unpack. therefore, i analyzed the codes relating to flow and syntax and, rather doing a thematic analysis of these specific codes, i framed it as the sensitizing concept of “generational language.” further analysis from this data can be completed that assesses speech patterns of youth girls, measuring their certainty while also analyzing their facial expressions to ensure what they are saying with their voice matches to what they are saying with their bodies. next, the data collected from the study included facial and body expression and movement along with comments on ideas, emotions, and feelings from the participants. due to a lack of time and in-depth formal education in body language, these data were not included in the study. therefore, future research could include a partnered analysis of the depicted body making lemonade: examining female empowerment language in combination with participants’ speech to further validate the emerging themes from this study. finally, as previously noted, popular culture is constantly changing and evolving, from what we consume to how we consume it. this study could be repeated after five to ten years to see if time, social movements, or a shift in popular culture change the perspectives of viewers. personal reflection this research project has been an immense personal learning journey for me. i began this research in and completed the written portions and requirements in the summer of . while there were periods of time that i was not working actively on this research project, that does not mean it was not actively working on me. this research allowed me to shift my career path, move to ethiopia to work for a canadian ngo, work hand in hand with unicef and the who on public health campaigns in rural ethiopia, as well as win a request for proposals for cad$ million from the government of canada. i began this research project with high levels of excitement and interest, but these levels tapered off after i began working in international development communications and public health promotion. i began to look at my research inquiry and data as frivolous and lacking in ontological purpose as i worked in areas of access to health and education for women and girls globally. in march of , i returned to canada due to covid- and was able to make time to complete this research. during this time, the second surge of black lives matter took place with the murder of black american george floyd, and a larger social movement to push back against racial inequities and systemic racism in north america and throughout europe. at this time, i began to become passionate about my initial research once again. i drew parallels between making lemonade: examining female empowerment sensitizing concepts, specifically the “cloak of incompetence,” and its link to white silence and how it is manifested and sprinkled through society. i noted voice as a common theme not only in my research project but in the countless blogs, videos, and social media posts supporting the overdue black, indigenous, and people of colour movement. this research came full circle for me at the end, looking not at “what popular culture does to people” but rather “what people do with popular culture.” the opportunity to study and research in this field has put me on a new career and life path and has helped change and shape my worldview for the better. making lemonade: examining female empowerment references allen, r. 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( ). why feminism matters. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. http://doi.org/ . / http://doi.org/ . / making lemonade: examining female empowerment appendix a: informed consent research consent form my name is rebecca gass, and this research project is part of the requirement for a thesis in the master of arts in intercultural and international communication at royal roads university. my credentials with royal roads university can be established by telephoning jennifer walinga, director, school of communication and culture at xxx-xxx-xxxx. the royal roads university research ethics board can be contacted via colleen hoppins at xxx-xxx-xxxx. this document constitutes an agreement to participate in my research project, the objective of which is to conduct a study on the topic female empowerment through music videos, specifically to beyoncé’s visual album entitled “lemonade.” the research will consist of the submission of a personal video and a group interview following semi-structured interview questions that will include information about and references to you. the research will ask you to reflect on personal ideas, feelings, thoughts and views on the subject of female empowerment through music videos. this consent form seeks your consent to be included in the study and relinquishes confidentiality and anonymity as a participant. the method of data collection will take place via google hangout air/youtube live. a “private” option for group video focus group will be chosen, yet there is no guarantee of digital security. in addition to submitting my final report to royal roads university in partial fulfillment for a master of arts in intercultural and international communication, i will be submitting finding to relevant academic journals and conferences. information will be recorded in hand-written format and videotaped and, where appropriate, summarized, in anonymous format, in the body of the final report. specific comments may be attributed to individuals in the study unless otherwise requested to the researcher. a copy of the final report will be published and will be housed at royal roads university, available online through umi/proquest and the theses canada portal and will be publicly accessible. access and distribution will be unrestricted. you are not compelled to participate in this research project. if you do choose to participate, you are free to withdraw at any time without prejudice. similarly, if you choose not to participate in this research project, this information will also be maintained in confidence. an exit interview will be conducted for participants withdrawing from the study at any point to ensure participant confidentiality and safety. digital and written data will be deleted from databases and hard drives and not used in the study. however, participant data may no longer be withdrawn from the study after submission of a personal video and participation in a focus group discussion. it should be noted that while individuals may voluntarily withdraw from the group, your previously recorded comments remain as part of the anonymous data set for the method, as these comments (without making lemonade: examining female empowerment personal identifiers) cannot be separated out of a group recording. participation in this research study will cumulatively take approximately take four ( ) to five ( ) hours of your time. the primary benefits produced are for society and for the advancement of knowledge. please note that the principal investigator is employed at the university of prince edwards island but is enrolled as a graduate student at royal roads university. this research pertains to the requirements for a master of arts from royal roads university and is not affiliated with the university of prince edward island; nor will participants receive incentive from the university of prince edward island to participate in the study. by signing this letter, you give free and informed consent to be included in this project. you may contact the researcher at any time before proceeding at xxx-xxx-xxxx. by signing this letter, you give free and informed consent to participate in this project. name: (please print): __________________________________________________ signed: _____________________________________________________________ date: _______________________________________________________________ parent/guardian (please print): __________________________________________ parent/guardian email address: __________________________________________ parent/guardian phone number: __________________________________________ signed: _____________________________________________________________ date: _______________________________________________________________ please retain a copy of this consent form for your records. making lemonade: examining female empowerment appendix b: particpant informaton sheet making lemonade: examining female empowerment through visual music media participant information sheet name: age: grade: province of resident: city of residence: ethnicity: please mark your preferred type of music: indie pop rock rap top electronic hip hop punk rock techno country blues other making lemonade: examining female empowerment appendix c: sample email to particpant hi _____, thank you for agreeing to participate in my research! below is a list of next steps. we will likely look at scheduling the focus group the last weekend of the month - do you think that might work for you? see the next steps below: . fill out the informed consent form and have your parent/guardian to sign it and send it back to me. . fill out the information sheet attached and send it back to me via email. . download tidal and login with the following credentials: username/password. . watch the following video segments: a) : - : b) : - : c) : - : d) : - : * you are welcome to watch the entire video segment on tidal if you'd like. but you are only required to watch the segments listed above. you are welcome to use the tidal account as your own for the period of this research. feel free to take notes as you watch the video segments on some of the following elements: tone of voice, words, attire/costumes, make up, imagery (personal or background), etc. . record a video of yourself, answering some questions (these questions will be sent tomorrow) and send to me via email or via text message. there are no wrong answers, only your personal experience. your video should be a minimum of minutes long at least, and a maximum of minutes (if you have more to say that goes over minutes, that is alight, it is just a guideline). *you are welcome to take notes while you watch the segments. * and then answer the following questions, in a recorded video and send to me via text or email. this is your video submission - so feel free to be as creative as you'd like :). . what do you think of the r&b artist beyoncé? . how did you feel after watching segments of the visual album? making lemonade: examining female empowerment . how did each segment of video make you feel? did you feel empowered by any segment of video? . what components of the video make you feel this way (tone of voice, lyrics, attire, visual imagery, etc). * please note if at any point if you felt dis-empowered by any of the video content. for context, empowerment has to do with the power some people have of stimulating activity in others and raising their morale. it involves undoing negative social constructions – building the capacity in those affected to have influence. thank you for your participation! if you have any questions at all during the process, you can text, call or email me at xxx-xxx-xxxx. best regards, rebecca uc irvine western journal of emergency medicine: integrating emergency care with population health title #metoo in em: a multicenter survey of academic emergency medicine faculty on their experiences with gender discrimination and sexual harassment permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ f k journal western journal of emergency medicine: integrating emergency care with population health, ( ) issn - x authors lu, dave w. lall, michelle d. mitzman, jennifer et al. publication date doi . /westjem. . . supplemental material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ f k #supplemental license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ f k https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ f k #author https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ f k #supplemental https://creativecommons.org/licenses/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . // . https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ western journal of emergency medicine volume , no. : march original research #metoo in em: a multicenter survey of academic emergency medicine faculty on their experiences with gender discrimination and sexual harassment dave w. lu, md, msci, mbe*† michelle d. lall, md, mhs‡ jennifer mitzman, md§ sheryl heron, md, mph‡ ava pierce, md¶ nicholas d. hartman, md, mph|| danielle m. mccarthy, md, ms# joshua jauregui, md, med† tania d. strout, phd, ms* section editor: whitney johnson, md, ms submission history: submitted july , ; revision received september , ; accepted november , electronically published february , full text available through open access at http://escholarship.org/uc/uciem_westjem doi: . /westjem. . . tufts university school of medicine – maine medical center, department of emergency medicine, portland, maine university of washington school of medicine, department of emergency medicine, seattle, washington emory university school of medicine, department of emergency medicine, atlanta, georgia the ohio state university college of medicine, department of emergency medicine, columbus, ohio university of texas southwestern medical school, department of emergency medicine, dallas, texas wake forest school of medicine, department of emergency medicine, winston-salem, north carolina northwestern university feinberg school of medicine, department of emergency medicine, chicago, illinois * † ‡ § ¶ || # introduction: gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment of female physicians are well documented. the #metoo movement has brought renewed attention to these problems. this study examined academic emergency physicians’ experiences with workplace gender discrimination and sexual harassment. methods: we conducted a cross-sectional survey of a convenience sample of emergency medicine (em) faculty across six programs. survey items included the following: the overt gender discrimination at work (ogdw) scale; the frequency and source of experienced and observed discrimination; and whether subjects had encountered unwanted sexual behaviors by a work superior or colleague in their careers. for the latter question, we asked subjects to characterize the behaviors and whether those experiences had a negative effect on their self-confidence and career advancement. we made group comparisons using t-tests or chi-square analyses, and evaluated relationships between gender and physicians’ experiences using correlation analyses. results: a total of out of ( . %) subjects completed at least a portion of the survey. women reported higher mean ogdw scores than men ( . vs . ; % confidence interval [ci], . – . ). female faculty were also more likely to report having experienced gender-based discriminatory treatment than male faculty ( . % vs . %; % ci, . %- . %), although male and female faculty were equally likely to report having observed gender-based discriminatory treatment of another physician ( . % vs . %; % ci, . %- . %). the three most frequent sources of experienced or observed gender-based discriminatory treatment were patients, consulting or admitting physicians, and nursing staff. the majority of women reported having encountered unwanted sexual behaviors in their careers, with a significantly greater proportion of women reporting them compared to men ( . % vs . %, % ci, . %- . %). the majority of unwanted behaviors were sexist remarks and sexual advances. of those respondents who encountered these unwanted behaviors, . % and . % reported at least somewhat negative effects on their self-confidence and career advancement. conclusion: female em faculty perceived more gender-based discrimination in their workplaces than their male counterparts. the majority of female and approximately a quarter of male em faculty encountered unwanted sexual behaviors in their careers. [west j emerg med. ; ( ) - .] volume , no. : march western journal of emergency medicine lu et al. em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment population health research capsule what do we already know about this issue? female physicians experience disparities in salary, leadership, and career advancement. prior studies have documented gender discrimination and sexual harassment of female physicians. what was the research question? what are the perceptions of and experiences with gender discrimination and sexual harassment among academic emergency medicine faculty? what was the major finding of the study? female faculty reported more gender discrimination than male faculty, and half had encountered sexual harassment in their careers. how does this improve population health? there is cultural momentum to confront gender discrimination and sexual harassment across many industries. ensuring a safe and equitable workplace is vital for the healthcare workforce. introduction women represented . % of united states (us) medical students in - . despite near parity in the number of men and women now entering medicine, female physicians continue to experience disparities in salary, , leadership, , and career advancement. - for example, while % of the overall medical workforce is comprised of women, women hold only % of the healthcare industry’s executive positions. data suggest inequity and harassment are intertwined, and harassment is often fostered in workplace environments that perpetuate these gender disparities. for instance, discrimination and harassment by gender are more prevalent in industries in which women make up a majority of the workforce but hold a minority of the positions of power. many studies have documented gender discrimination and sexual harassment of female medical students and physicians. , - the recently released national academies of science, engineering, and medicine report on sexual harassment of women in medicine revealed similarly troubling results. in that report % of female medical students and % of female physicians described having been sexually harassed on the job. inappropriate encounters were consistently reported, ranging from sexist comments and sexual innuendo to inappropriate touching and solicitation. sexual harassment can be complex to study and measure because it has several varying legal definitions. the american medical association and the united kingdom general medical council define sexual harassment as unwelcome attention or behavior that a person finds offensive and that makes them feel unsafe or uncomfortable. , one of the more comprehensive definitions comes from the us equal employment opportunities commission (eeoc), which states that “unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.” such harassment may include unwelcome verbal, visual, non-verbal, or physical conduct that is of a sexual nature or based on someone’s gender. there is currently little data examining gender discrimination and sexual harassment in academic emergency medicine (em). , , the objective of this study was to explore the perceptions of and experiences with gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment among academic em faculty. we hypothesized that female emergency physicians would have greater perceptions of and more experiences with gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment compared to their male colleagues. methods study design this study was a cross-sectional survey of a convenience sample of em faculty on their perceptions of and experiences with gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. study setting and population all em faculty at six urban, academic training programs were eligible for this study with the exception of the study authors. study sites were departments of em located in the following regions: new england (one); the southeast (two); the south (one); the midwest (one); the west (one). the survey was administered over february and march . study protocol an anonymous electronic survey was emailed to all eligible subjects. the invitation stated that the purpose of the study was to examine subjects’ experiences with gender discrimination and sexual harassment in their medical careers. subjects consented to the voluntary study by completing the survey on an online, secure platform. three reminder emails were sent to non-responders. the study was either approved or deemed exempt from review by each site’s institutional review board. measurements no single, well-validated instrument could be found that satisfactorily measured the multiple aspects of workplace gender discrimination and sexual harassment that were of interest. based on a review of the current literature, we created a -item survey consisting of questions adapted from surveys used in similar work among populations of physicians from western journal of emergency medicine volume , no. : march em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment lu et al. multiple specialties (appendix). the survey was pre-tested by em faculty at five of the six participating institutions to ensure respondent comprehension. these individuals were subsequently excluded from the study. we measured subjects’ perceptions of discrimination using five questions adapted from the overt gender discrimination at work (ogdw) scale, an instrument that assesses the perception of gender biases in the workplace. , the scale asks, “how strongly do you agree with the following statements about your current place of work:” ( ) i have been treated unfairly at work because of my gender; ( ) the people i work with sometimes make sexist statements and/or decisions; ( ) i feel that some of the policies and practices of this organization are sexist; ( ) at work, i sometimes feel that my gender is a limitation; and ( ) at work, i do not get enough recognition because of my gender. responses are based on a - likert scale, with = strongly disagree; = neutral; and = strongly agree. scores range from - , with higher scores indicating higher perceptions of discrimination. evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the ogdw when used with healthcare and other professional workers has been previously described with a cronbach’s alpha of . and a strong, positive correlation between scores on the ogdw and another established measure of everyday gender discrimination experiences at work (r = . ; p< . ; n= ). in addition, a recent study among anesthesiology trainees reported significant gender-based differences in median ogdw scores as well as in scores on the career barriers inventory that reflect sexual harassment, providing further support for the construct validity for the ogdw. using questions adapted from prior work, we also asked subjects to report the frequency with which they have experienced discriminatory treatment based on their gender as well as the frequency with which they have observed discriminatory treatment of another physician based on gender. responses included the following: weekly, monthly, annually, rarely, and never. those respondents who reported weekly, monthly, or annually to either experiencing discriminatory treatment or having observed discriminatory treatment were subsequently asked to identify the source of the gender-based discrimination. potential sources included university, medical school or hospital administration, consulting or admitting physician, em attending physician, resident physician, medical student, nursing staff, clerical staff, emergency medical services personnel, patient, and other. subjects were asked to report the frequency with which they had experienced or had observed discriminatory treatment from each source (weekly, monthly, annually, rarely, and never). developed by bruce and colleagues, these items were designed to categorize the scope, type, and source of gender-based discrimination in medicine. items were piloted with female general surgery residents and then studied in a sample of female healthcare practitioners who practiced or intended to practice in general surgery. responses to these items were consistent with qualitative responses from the same participants analyzed using a grounded theory approach. taken together, these findings provide early evidence supporting the construct validity of the items. lastly, we asked subjects whether in their professional career, they had encountered unwanted sexual comments, attention or advances by a work superior or colleague based on the eeoc definition of sexual harassment. , , for respondents who answered yes, we asked them to indicate “yes” or “no” for each of the following behaviors they may have encountered ordered by level of severity : ( ) sexist remarks / behavior; ( ) unwanted sexual advances; ( ) subtle bribery to engage in sexual behavior; ( ) threats to engage in sexual behavior; ( ) coercive advances; and other (we included text space to allow respondents to specify). we asked respondents who answered yes to having encountered unwanted sexual behaviors to indicate the extent to which those experiences had a negative effect on their self-confidence as a professional and on their career advancement. both of these questions were adapted from prior work , and answered via a - likert scale, with = not at all and = greatly. carr and colleagues previously showed that female medical school faculty who reported sexual harassment experiences using these items were more likely to also report gender-based bias in the academic environment, providing evidence to support the validity of these items. we collected limited demographic information (table ) to prevent easy identification of otherwise anonymous responses and to encourage honest reporting. we did not obtain information linking subjects by study site. data analysis we collected data electronically using qualtrics (qualtrics, provo, ut) survey software and exported into spss for windows v. . (spss, inc., chicago, il) for analysis. continuous variables (eg, age, ogdw scores) were examined for normality using visual inspection of histograms, p-p plots, and pearson’s skewness statistic. we used the t-test for independent samples to compare group means for continuous variables. in addition, we used pearson’s chi-square analysis to compare proportions across categorical variables. in some cases, for example, in categorizing respondents as having experienced or observed gender-based discrimination, response categories were collapsed into dichotomous categories a priori to aid in result interpretation (“never” and “rarely” vs “weekly,” “monthly,” and “annually”). to assess the strength and direction of relationships between variables, we used pearson’s correlation coefficient or spearman’s rho as appropriate for the data. partial correlations were also used to evaluate relationships between variables, while controlling for the effect of a covariate (gender). data are presented as frequencies, proportions, means, and % confidence intervals (ci) around differences between means. all p-values are two-tailed, and we accepted an alpha of less than . as statistically significant. volume , no. : march western journal of emergency medicine lu et al. em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment results a total of out of ( . %) subjects completed at least a portion of the survey. respondents were mostly male (n = , . %) and white (n = , . %) (table ). the mean age reported by participants was . years (range - years) with the majority of respondents (n = , . %) having completed residency training within years. in our sample, cronbach’s alpha for the five items of the ogdw scale was . , suggesting an acceptable level of internal consistency. the mean ogdw score for all respondents was . (standard deviation . , % ci, . – . ), with women reporting significantly higher mean ogdw scores than men ( . vs . , respectively; t = . , df = . , p < . , equal variances not assumed; mean difference . , % ci, . – . ). female em faculty were also significantly more likely to report having experienced workplace discriminatory treatment based on gender than their male counterparts ( . % vs . %, respectively; p < . ) (figure ). having experienced discriminatory treatment based on gender was significantly associated with higher ogdw scores (mean ogdw . vs . , t = - . , df = . , p < . ; equal variances not assumed; mean difference - . , % ci, - . – - . ). although women were more likely than men to report having experienced gender-based discriminatory treatment, male and female em faculty were equally likely to report having observed discriminatory treatment of another physician based on gender ( . % vs . %, respectively; p = . ) (figure ). having observed discriminatory treatment of another physician based on gender was also significantly associated with higher ogdw scores (mean ogdw . vs . , t = - . , df = . , p < . , equal variances not assumed; mean difference - . , % ci, - . – - . ). respondent age and years in practice were not significantly correlated with ogdw scores, experience with or observations of gender-based discriminatory treatment. for those respondents who had experienced or observed gender-based discriminatory treatment, at least annually, the three most frequent sources of the discriminatory treatment were patients, consulting or admitting physicians, and nursing staff (figure ). the majority of women ( . %) reported having encountered unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advanced by a work superior or colleague in their professional career (table ). a significantly greater proportion of women reported encountering these unwanted behaviors as compared to men ( . % vs . %, = . , df = , p = . ). the majority of unwanted behaviors were sexist remarks and unwanted sexual advances (table ). of those respondents who encountered these unwanted behaviors, . % ( / ) and . % ( / ) reported negative effects on their self- confidence and on their career advancement at least somewhat (table ). controlling for gender, those respondents who were older (r = . , p = . ) and had been practicing longer (r = . , p = . ) were also significantly more likely to report having encountered these unwanted behaviors. respondents who reported having experienced these unwanted behaviors had ogdw scores that were significantly higher than those of their counterparts without such experiences ( . vs. . , t = - . , df = . , p < . , equal variances not assumed; mean difference = - . , % ci, - . – - . ). discussion although gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medicine are well documented, , - the extent of these problems within academic em had not been previously examined. in our study, men and women differed significantly in their perceptions of and experiences with workplace gender discrimination and sexual harassment. our data showed that the majority of female em faculty have encountered unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advances in the workplace. this is consistent with prior work among us medical school faculty wherein % of women reported harassment during their careers. a significant number of male em faculty also reported these unwanted sexual behaviors in our study, similar to a recent study among surgery residents. characteristics participants (n= ) n (%) age years) < ( . ) - ( . ) - ( . ) > ( . ) years out of training - ( . ) - ( . ) - ( . ) - ( . ) > ( . ) gender male ( . ) female ( . ) race/ethnicity white ( . ) black/african american ( . ) hispanic/latino ( . ) asian/pacific islander ( . ) american indian/alaska native ( . ) other ( . ) table . characteristics of participants in survey of gender bias and sexual harassment western journal of emergency medicine volume , no. : march em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment lu et al. weekly monthly annually rarely never weekly monthly annually rarely never female male female male p er ce nt ag e of p ar tic ip an ts in e ac h fr eq ue nc y ca te go ry p er ce nt ag e of p ar tic ip an ts in e ac h fr eq ue nc y ca te go ry frequency of experienced gender-based discriminatory treatment frequency of observed gender-based discriminatory treatment figure . percentage of participants who experienced or observed gender-based discriminatory treatment by gender and frequency. it is important to note that these results spanned respondents’ professional careers, which encompass time from medical school and residency or fellowship training to their current practice as em faculty. we did not ask respondents to identify the source of each case of unwanted sexual behavior. we therefore do not know what proportion stemmed from a work superior (eg, department chair or medical director for when respondents were faculty, or medical faculty or senior resident for when respondents were trainees) vs a work colleague (eg, peer faculty or trainee or nursing staff). older respondents and those who have been in practice for a longer period of time were more likely to report having encountered these unwanted sexual behaviors. this is in contrast to a prior study that reported higher rates of sexual harassment among younger physicians. it is unclear in our study whether older respondents have had more time in the medical profession to encounter these behaviors, whether such behaviors were more common in the past, or whether they felt more empowered to report these instances since they may be more established in the field and have less fear of reporting. in recent work among clinician- researchers who had received career development awards from the national institutes of health between - , % of women reported having experienced sexual harassment compared with % of women in the aforementioned study of medical school faculty study in . , while the proportion of women reporting sexual harassment appears to have decreased from to , definitive conclusions cannot be drawn due to differences in study populations and the higher percentages of women enrolled in medical school in the intervening years. similar to other studies, the majority of unwanted sexual behaviors in our study were sexist remarks and unwanted sexual advances. , although these behaviors are detrimental and should not be tolerated, they may be less threatening than volume , no. : march western journal of emergency medicine lu et al. em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment patient consulting or attending physician nursing staff resident university/hospital administration ems personnel em attending physician clerical staff medical student other patient nursing staff resident ems personnel em attending physician clerical staff medical student other consulting or attending physician university/hospital administration s ou rc e of o bs er ve d ge nd er -b as ed di sc rim in at or y tr ea tm en t s ou rc e of e xp er ie nc ed g en de r- ba se d di sc rim in at or y tr ea tm en t figure . sources of experienced or observed gender-based discriminatory treatment by average frequency. frequency categories: = never; = rarely; = annually; = monthly; = weekly. average frequency average frequency the other examples of unwanted sexual behavior included in the study survey. this may explain why a majority of respondents who described having encountered these behaviors reported that they had little to no negative impact on their self-confidence or career advancement. our results are consistent with work among female surgeons wherein a majority similarly reported that they could overcome career barriers stemming from gender discrimination. it is important to note, however, that we do not know the cumulative impact of these less aggressive but more frequent forms of unwanted sexual behavior on individuals over the course of their professional lives. prior research among female physicians suggested that while there were no significant differences in the effects of sexual harassment on professional confidence or career advancement, women who reported experiencing negative gender bias had lower career satisfaction. qualitative studies of female em faculty may be able to shed light on this important issue. a smaller but significant number of respondents reported more alarming instances of unwanted sexual behavior, including coercive advances, bribery to engage in sexual quid pro quos, and threats to engage in sexual behavior. we did not query how respondents dealt with these unwanted behaviors, including whether they had reported them to institutional authorities or confided in mentors, colleagues, or others. studies among surgeons found that only a minority of respondents who experienced workplace gender discrimination or sexual harassment reported it to colleagues or supervisors. , the two most common reasons for non-reporting were believing that the action was harmless and that reporting would be a waste of time. of those who reported such discrimination, a majority western journal of emergency medicine volume , no. : march em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment lu et al. table . number of participants by gender who reported having encountered unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advances. response female n (%) male n (%) total n (%) no ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) yes ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) table . type and impact of unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advances. action type total n (%) sexist remarks/behavior ( . ) unwanted sexual advances ( . ) coercive advances ( . ) subtle bribery to engage in sexual behavior ( . ) threats to engage in sexual behavior ( . ) extent these behaviors had a negative effect on your confidence in yourself as a professional greatly ( . ) moderately ( . ) somewhat ( . ) a little ( . ) none at all ( . ) extent these behaviors negatively affected your career advancement greatly ( . ) moderately ( . ) somewhat ( . ) a little ( . ) none at all ( . ) described a lack of action as the result. a study of internal medicine residents similarly revealed that female residents did not report harassment because they were not confident they would be helped. among em residents specifically, only about % filed a formal complaint regarding abuse or harassment. those em residents who did not file complaints reported a variety of reasons for not doing so, including the following: feeling that the episode was insignificant; feeling that it would not help; fear of reprisal; feeling that reporting would not stop the behavior; feeling that they had no mechanism to file; and describing that they were discouraged to report by others. our data showed ogdw scores were significantly higher for female em faculty than male em faculty. our finding was consistent with prior studies, including one among anesthesiology trainees that demonstrated a significant gender disparity in ogdw scores. in a different study, female medical school faculty were more than . times more likely than male faculty to perceive gender- based discrimination in the academic environment. similar investigations among early-career surgery faculty and senior general surgery residents revealed that female surgeons perceived they were treated differently based on their gender and these differences in treatment were a barrier to their academic career development. as expected, our data revealed that having encountered unwanted sexual behaviors and having more experiences with and observations of gender-based discriminatory treatment correlated with higher ogdw scores. female em faculty were significantly more likely to report experiencing discriminatory treatment based on their gender than their male colleagues in our study. interestingly, male and female em faculty were equally likely to report observing discriminatory treatment of another physician based on gender. so although someone may not have direct experience with gender discrimination, he or she can identify and recognize it when it occurs with another physician. we did not query respondents as to whether they acted or intervened in any way when they saw these instances of discrimination of another physician. nor did we ask respondents who reported having experienced discrimination or harassment whether others intervened on their behalf when there were witnesses. institutional policies and guidance illustrating how witnesses should report and intervene in instances of gender discrimination or sexual harassment may be helpful. em faculty reported that patients were the most common source of both experienced and observed gender-based discriminatory treatment. this may stem from underlying sexist beliefs that exist within our culture and society. prior qualitative work revealed that despite the power physicians hold in the relationship with their patients, it did not preclude female physicians from being the target of unwanted sexual harassment and sexual advances. in these circumstances, female physicians were viewed as women first and physicians second, leaving them susceptible to sexual harassment, particularly by male patients. physicians described sexual harassment from patients most commonly in the form of suggestive looks or gestures and sexual remarks. among em residents, women were more likely to report unwanted sexual advances and discomfort from sexual humor, and that patients or patients’ family members were the most frequent source of abuse or harassment. . to be clear, in our study we only asked respondents about discriminatory behavior, not harassment, from patients. nonetheless, significant overlap exists between the two types of behavior and there is evidence to suggest that progress has been limited. in a recent study of female medical students, all participants reported numerous workplace interactions with male patients involving flirting or sexual innuendo, with many describing that they were “too used to it.” the second and third most common sources of experienced and observed gender-based discriminatory volume , no. : march western journal of emergency medicine lu et al. em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment treatment were consulting or admitting physicians and nursing staff. this is consistent with prior work among surgery residents, where among all hospital staff, nurses were the most common perpetrators of harassment, followed by attending physicians. sexism within the medical profession is well documented, starting from undergraduate medical education, through residency and fellowship training, and continuing through clinical practice as attendings. in a recent study investigating the prevalence of sexual harassment in academic medicine, the presence of a strong institutional hierarchy was associated with sexual harassment in both genders, highlighting the important role of organizational culture. while issues related to gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medicine have long been documented, there is currently significant societal and cultural momentum to confront these pervasive problems. prominent attention to sexual harassment and assault has been raised through the #metoo movement, which aims to shed light on the prevalence of sexually inappropriate behaviors. the #metoo movement subsequently spurred the time’s up organization that coordinates responses and develops solutions to address gender discrimination and harassment. time’s up healthcare was recently established to unify national efforts to bring safety, equity, and dignity to the healthcare workplace. there are many ways gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment can be addressed. for example, leaders in medicine can commit to ending gender-based inequities by changing workplace standards and culture. medical educators can better prepare students, residents, and fellows for dealing with gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment in their present role as trainees and future role as physicians. physicians should also take advantage of their inherent leadership roles in healthcare and advocate for each other as well as other healthcare providers who may not feel empowered to speak up. future research examining and describing successful strategies (eg, staff education, clear anti-harassment policies, reliable reporting mechanisms, strict accountability, changes to academic promotion processes, and faculty recruitment and retention) to address gender inequities and sexual harassment in the healthcare workplace is necessary. limitations our study population was a convenience sample of em faculty at six urban academic sites and our results may not be generalizable to practicing emergency physicians in non-urban and non-academic settings. approximately % of eligible subjects responded to the survey and response bias may have played a role in our results. we were unable to compare characteristics of respondents with those of non-respondents due to the anonymous nature of our survey methodology. therefore, we do not know whether more men or women chose to participate in the study and whether their experiences with gender discrimination or sexual harassment played a role in their study participation. although our questions measuring self-reported experiences and observations of gender discrimination and unwanted sexual behavior were modeled after prior work, have face validity as well as internal consistency reliability (ɑ = . ) in this sample, other aspects of reliability and criterion and construct validity have not been previously established finally, we were unable to corroborate respondents’ self-reported experiences with and observations of gender discrimination or sexual harassment. prior work demonstrated that the majority of medical students developed progressive desensitization to discrimination and learned to systematically tolerate or minimize discrimination or harassment as a part of their future career. thus, we do not know whether respondents’ accounts of experienced or observed gender discrimination and sexual harassment represent over- or under-reporting of what may be considered objective definitions of discrimination or harassment. conclusion female em faculty perceived more gender-based discrimination in their workplace than their male counterparts, with higher perceptions of discrimination associated with greater reports of experience with and observations of discriminatory treatment. although female em faculty were more likely to experience gender discrimination than their male colleagues, both groups were similar in their observations of discriminatory treatment of another physician based on gender. the majority of female and approximately a quarter of male em faculty encountered unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advances by a work superior or colleague during their professional careers. future work to examine the prevalence and characteristics of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in a larger and more diverse sample of emergency physicians is necessary. address for correspondence: dave w. lu, md, msci, mbe, university of washington medical center, box , ne pacific st, seattle, wa - . email: davelu@uw.edu. conflicts of interest: by the westjem article submission agreement, all authors are required to disclose all affiliations, funding sources and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias. no author has professional or financial relationships with any companies that are relevant to this study. there are no conflicts of interest or sources of funding to declare. copyright: © lu et al. this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the creative commons attribution (cc by . ) license. see: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / western journal of emergency medicine volume , no. : march em faculty gender discrimination and sexual harassment lu et al. references . total u.s. medical school enrollment by race/ethnicity and sex, - through - . association of american medical colleges. available at: https://www.aamc.org/system/files/reports/ / factstableb .pdf. accessed june , . . jagsi r, griffith ka, stewart a, et al. gender differences in the salaries of physician researchers. jama. ; ( ): - . . madsen te, linden ja, rounds k, et al. current status of gender and racial/ethnic disparities among academic emergency medicine physicians. acad emerg med. ; ( ): - . . wehner mr, nead kt, linos k, et al. plenty of moustaches but not enough women: cross sectional study of medical leaders. bmj. ; :h . . carr pl, ash as, friedman rh, et al. faculty perceptions of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in academic medicine. ann 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s, berg d, et al. “i’m too used to it”: a longitudinal qualitative study of third year female medical students’ experiences of gendered encounters in medical education. soc sci med. ; ( ): - . . camargo a, liu l, yousem dm. sexual harassment in radiology. j am coll radiol. ; ( ): - . . bruce an, battista a, plankey mw, et al. perceptions of gender- based discrimination during surgical training and practice. med educ online. ; : . . cook dj, liutkus jf, risdon cl, et al. residents’ experiences of abuse, discrimination and sexual harassment during residency training. mcmaster university residency training programs. cmaj. ; ( ): - . . frank e, brogan d, schiffman m. prevalence and correlates of harassment among us women physicians. arch intern med. ; ( ): - . . mcnamara rm, whitley tw, sanders ab, et al. the extent and effects of abuse and harassment of emergency medicine residents. the saem inservice survey task force. acad emerg med. ; ( ): - . . komaromy m, bindman ab, haber rj, et al. sexual harassment in medical training. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . . phillips sp, schneider ms. sexual harassment of female doctors by patients. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . . national academies of sciences e, medicine. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. washington, dc: the national academies press; . . sexual harassment in the practice of medicine. code of medical ethics opinion . available at: https://www.ama-assn.org/ delivering-care/ethics/sexual-harassment-practice-medicine. accessed june , . . dignity at work. general medical council. available at: https://www. gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/dignity-at-work-policy---dc _pdf- .pdf. accessed june , . . guidelines on discrimination because of sex. equal employment opportunity commission. available at: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/ types/sex.cfm. accessed june , . . marco ca, geiderman jm, schears rm, et al. emergency medicine in the #metoo era. acad emerg med. ; ( ): - 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cochran a, hauschild t, elder wb, et al. perceived gender-based barriers to careers in academic surgery. am j surg. ; ( ): - . . schneider m, phillips sp. a qualitative study of sexual harassment of female doctors by patients. soc sci med. ; ( ): - . . time’s up healthcare. available at: https://www.timesuphealthcare. org/mission. accessed june , . https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/women-make-up-only- -of-healthcare-ceos/ / https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/women-make-up-only- -of-healthcare-ceos/ / https://iwpr.org/publications/sexual-harassment-work-cost/ https://iwpr.org/publications/sexual-harassment-work-cost/ https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/dignity-at-work-policy---dc _pdf- .pdf https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/dignity-at-work-policy---dc _pdf- .pdf https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/dignity-at-work-policy---dc _pdf- .pdf https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/ 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making a difference during and after covid- janine o’flynn melbourne school of government, university of melbourne, melbourne, australia abstract this article explores key challenges emanating from covid- and how public man- agement and administration research can contribute to addressing them. to do this i discuss the ‘big questions’ debate and then sketch two big thematic challenges. in articulating these, i point to interconnections across various levels of analysis and argue we need to work across a range of boundaries and get more comfortable with complexity. my key argument being that both during and in the aftermath of a catastrophic global pandemic, it is at the intersections, not in silos, that we are likely to move forward intellectually and practically. keywords covid- ; public management; public administration; research introduction the director-general of the united nations (un), antónio guterres, declared covid- a health crisis like we had never seen in our lifetimes; one that requires us to come together collectively to mount a war on the virus (guterres ). by july , the un declared that covid- was wiping out years of gains that had been made towards the sustainable development goals; that more than half a billion people may move into poverty; and that intimate partner violence was increasing around the world (united nations ; patterson ). at the same time, some . billion workers in the informal economy, many in developing countries, looked likely to lose their livelihoods; poaching and deforestation have soared as people around the world try to make a living; million americans had applied for unemployment benefits; and the eu had agreed to a € bn spending package in an attempt to rescue the european economies (patterson ; gowen ; parliament ). by july , almost million people have been infected with covid- and more than , thousand are dead. the world has been shocked by images of mass graves being dug in many countries to cope with the dead including brazil, iran, bolivia, south africa, and the united states of america (usa). worse may still come (e.g. will ). the full scale and scope of covid- is still unknown. at worst, covid- may be something we need to live with, rather than something we beat and current experience is showing that waves keep coming in nations who thought they had the contact janine o’flynn janine.oflynn@unimelb.edu.au public management review https://doi.org/ . / . . © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - virus under control (e.g. beech and doan ). this is a disruptive moment in history, with more questions than answers, but what is clear is that many complex, interconnected challenges lie ahead. some of these are new, but others are old, like poverty and inequality. here, covid- is acting as a sort of accelerant. facing up to these challenges will be complex, requiring integrated and interconnected responses that draw on diverse expertise, a range of actors and various disciplines. public administration and management scholars can play a major role here, but recent commentary has questioned whether we are up to the task. talbot ( ), for instance, argued that the public administration ecosystem in britain is ‘dead’ and perry ( ) discussed how public administration was ‘vanishing’. nabatchi and carboni ( ) have questioned whether public administration scholars can respond to the grand challenges facing the world: at precisely the moment in which we confront serious political, economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges on a truly grand scale, the field of public administration seems reluctant (and perhaps incapable) of responding in a meaningful way. as covid- morphs into one of the great disasters of our times, public administra- tion and management scholars, can, indeed must, make a difference and show that the field is not incapable, vanishing or dead. as the united nations ( ) has highlighted in its pleas for global collaboration during the pandemic: we cannot teach children remotely without technology, wash hands without water, or fight a pandemic without functioning health systems. we must work together. scholars who want to be part of confronting the big issues that a post-covid project will pose need to move across boundaries, work across disciplines, and move outside our comfort zones. many will be primed for this, coming from different backgrounds and with existing interdisci- plinary collaborations in place. the knowledge that has developed in our fields can inform others; but we also need to be ready to learn, to challenge some of our assumptions and to work in different ways. our best shot to make a difference during and after the crisis is, in my view, at the intersections, not in silos. this is where we are likely to move forward intellectually and practically. in this piece i want to set out some areas where we can focus our attention in a way that can do this. to do that i first look at the ‘big questions’ of the field, and i then go on to sketch out two big thematic challenges. i focus in particular on the role of govern- ment, trust, and the citizenry; and justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage. i conclude the article by setting out several key points from the preceding discussion that focus on the future of our field. a field of big questions: but what are they? what the big questions and challenges will be as we move forward and how we can contribute to them is, of course, a prediction business. i will do a little of that in the next section, but first these need to be situated in a broader context. there have been long and protracted debates about the ‘big questions’ of public management and administration; what they are, but also what they should or might be. this debate has been very usa-centric (mingus and jing ) and in modern times has spun off of behn’s ( ) attempt to articulate the big questions (or types thereof). he articu- lated three: the micromanagement question – how to break the micromanagement cycle; the motivation question – how to encourage people to work towards achieving j. o’flynn public purpose; and the measurement question – measuring achievement. these have been critiqued for being too narrow, instrumental, and focused primarily at the organizational level (kirlin ). behn’s ( ) questions were, in kirlin’s view, too much about ‘doing’ and not enough about ‘consequences and value for the larger society in which public administration is embedded’ (kirlin , ). he argued that big questions needed to focus on ‘how public administration affects society . . . [on] understanding the role of public administration in influencing society historically and understanding its use to shape society in the future,’ not on instrumental issues (kirlin , ). this meant the big questions needed to be more about institutions than organizations and needed to have ‘meaning’. in seeking to bridge these views, callahan ( ) set out an integrative approach bringing together questions about institutions and organizations. more recently, haque ( ) has argued that both behn and kirlin missed the big paradigmatic questions of public administration, the former being too narrow, and the latter focused on mid-range questions. and mingus and jing ( ) have addressed the us-centricity of the debate somewhat by reflecting on behn’s questions and developing seven big questions for chinese public administration. in recent years, the most comprehensive articulation has been by sowa and lu ( ) who point to three questions that have dominated the field in the s: how do we deliver public services; how effective is public management; and, how do we understand public problems? here the big questions where driven by what we were expending our energy on. we are now years on from the initial ‘big debates’ about the ‘big questions’ and we have seen some refinement of them. reflecting on them in a time of the global pandemic, exploding social movements such as black lives matter and #metoo, and rising populism and authoritarianism, makes some of these ‘big questions’ seem not so big at all. rather, many seem conservative and to be missing the big picture. we see in real time that covid- is finding its way into every crack in society hitting the already worse off harder and faster than others and pouring accelerant on deeply divided and fractured communities. in this historic moment we see a range of big gnarly, wicked problems converging and demands for a remaking of institutions and societies. if ever there was a time to focus on what matters, as kirlin ( ) challenged us to do, it is now. to do this we will need to challenge ourselves. what matters is shaped by context and power – where we are in the world and who has the power to define the field. it is uncontroversial, i would think, to say that in our field that power has been narrowly held regardless of how we measure it – geography, race, culture or gender. the product of this has been that ‘the field’ has reflected the interests of few and been blinkered to other perspectives. while such tensions are inherent in any field, they have been coming to the fore in recent times in ours. various aspects of this are explored by alexander and stivers ( ), blessett et al. ( ), and feeny, carson, and dickinson ( ). carboni and nabatchi ( ) recently reflected on how these tensions played out at the minnowbrook conference held in the usa. debate was had on whether the field should be more normative or more instrumental and calls were made for a reckoning to acknowledge the role our field has played in ‘initiating and perpetuating injustices and oppressions’ (p. ). some conference participants . . . expressed alarm and anxiety about issues that were not being addressed: climate change, wealth and income inequality, social justice and human rights, and democratic roll backs, among many others. many of these participants asserted that the field should advocate or take a stand on current issues. they decried the silence of the field’s intellectual leaders and public management review professional associations on these and other important issues, and called for the assertion of our role as stewards of democracy and justice. others argued that these issues are not within the purview of public administration, and are more appropriate for other disciplines such as political science, sociology, and philosophy. they felt that public administration should stay focused on the more conventional issues of management and policy analysis, and that our professional associations and representatives should remain objective and neutral (carboni and nabatchi , ). alongside these important debates, many scholars are deeply concerned about whether our work has impact where it is most needed; in other words, whether we are making a difference. abouassi et al. ( , ) have argued it is not clear if our work informs important decisions and actions, and lamented whether or not: our voice is important in the public discourse surrounding today’s critical public administra- tion and governance issues, such as poverty, policing, racism, xenophobia, and immigration . . . concerns still persist that our academic focus is, at least in part, more of an intellectual and theoretical exercise than an attempt to produce a real change in societal structures and outcomes. at this moment, space is opening up for a fundamental reshaping of the field, or even more radically, a rethinking of what our ‘field’ even is. ‘what matters’ and the ‘big questions’ are being shaped by new generations of scholars. the shifts we are seeing signal that the big questions might be less binary and more integrated, bridging levels of analysis and be much more embracing of complexity and controversy. this is a positive development and, in my view, we must engage with a much broader set of issues and challenges. we should not leave these concerns to others because they are ‘too hard’ or push them to the margins because they are not ‘part of our field’. it is also time for a reckoning of sorts. we must look at the role that our field has played in creating these injustices and harms, many of which are now being amplified by covid- . whilst these may have been at the margins, these themes are both broad and deep and run through the historical contours of our field, ranging from: moral inversion and administrative evil (adams and balfour ); race and police brutality (menifield, shin, and strother ); administrative burdens and abortion access (herd and moynihan ); the oppression of indigenous or first nations peoples (sunga ), to the warehousing and commodification of asylum seekers and prison- ers (o’flynn forthcoming). in these cases (and many more) public servants, public sector organizations, and political actors are central; and power is a critical dynamic we need to grapple with. not only do we need to think about what a disruptive event like covid- will mean to the field, we need to think about what ‘the field’ even is. the big questions are changing, and important issues are being addressed in our field. it is important to recognize that this (r)evolution is being led by our newest generations of scholars. covid- , in my view, will accelerate this transformation and i believe that our field will be all the better for it. from big questions to big thematic challenges in the previous section i examined the ‘big questions’ debate and i highlighted the importance of focusing on what matters. in this section i want to switch from big questions to big thematic challenges, because a focus on challenges draws attention to where we can have a substantial impact. it is also true that these big thematic challenges offer potential to work across disciplines, to do important bridging work (moynihan j. o’flynn ) and to incorporate a fuller range of topics so we can more fully grasp the complex, dynamic nature of various phenomena (o’flynn ). such an approach sits well with the current focus on ‘grand challenges’ (gerton and mitchell ) and the notion of integrative public administration which is more problem-oriented, contextually grounded, and interdisciplinary (carboni and nabatchi , ). in taking stock of the covid- experience to date and reflecting on public administration and manage- ment i identified a series of potential big thematic challenges that cut across levels of analysis and disciplinary boundaries, and also where we can make a difference. here i draw out two themes which offer substantial potential to do work that matters. i also make that point here that scholars in our field have not neglected these; indeed, many have dedicated their lives to these topics. the issue that is these have not necessarily been centrestage. in the coming years we need to redraw these boundaries and rethink what the big questions might be and then anchor them around what matters. it is at these intersections that we are able to move forward intellectually and make the most sub- stantial impact practically. in this piece i will focus my attention on sketching out two big thematic challenges: (i) the role of government, trust and the citizenry; and (ii) justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage. at this moment in time, these two in my view, are the most pressing. the role of government, trust and the citizenry as moynihan has recently argued ‘crises reveal government capacity’ ( , ). they also draw into stark relief the role of government, which has always been a central question in public administration and management studies. for some decades now writers have stressed that we can expect a future filled with fast-moving, continually- morphing, cascading and cross-jurisdictional challenges or disturbances (williams ; fuerth and faber ; oecd ). it is clear that as the covid- pandemic has taken hold that people from every corner of the world expect government to be ‘out front’ battling the virus and providing services and support for citizens (edelman ). the ability of governments to do so, however, has been mixed, despite years of warning that an unpredictable pandemic of this description was inevitable (organization , ). in the worst-case scenario these warnings were ignored (the economist a, june). these mixed results will not be a surprise to those that have been making the case over many years that governments have been faltering. it has been argued that our public administration systems are ill-equipped to confront these big complex chal- lenges (bourgon ). many reasons have been put forward to explain this: every- thing from the disarticulated nature of the state (frederickson ) to the skill mix of the public service workforce (oecd ; chine et al. ). others have focused on the role of so-called ‘deep state’ (osnos ) or the end of expertise (mishra ) as factors impeding government capacity. capacity often rests on a ‘cadre of experts who are thinking about low-visibility problems when few others are’ (kelman ) and success of government can often be hidden (see lipton and steinhauer ). for example, ‘public health is an enterprise with an intrinsic problem: people can’t see sicknesses avoided or deaths averted’ (achenbach et al. ). commentary on the current crisis has revealed in some nations ‘degraded administrative systems and capacities’ and systems where ‘public officials [have] career incentives to avoid risks, downplay long-terms threats and enact administrative burdens’ (deslatte , ). public management review as well as revealing the limits of our capacity, crises also reveal the limitations of political leadership as moynihan ( , ) has argued: [in the united states] covid- brought to the fore many elements of democratic backsliding under trump, while revealing the limits of his philosophy of governing. career officials were sidelined. trump repeated unproven theories about medical solutions while promising a crisis response that he proved unable to deliver. his political appointees had not prepared for pandemics despite warnings, and seemed asleep at the switch when the threat turned into reality. similar outcomes have been a long time in the making across many nations, a point lewis ( ) made in the fifth risk. he laid bare what happens when those in charge don’t understand how government actually works, or don’t care to know. covid- is reminding us that politics matters profoundly to public administration and manage- ment – shaping it in old and new ways. the covid- experience will challenge many who see politics as being in a separate domain to the practice of public administration. it is becoming harder, if it was ever possible anyway, to draw hard boundaries that insulate public administration from politics in the way that many classical scholars suggested (haque ). covid- is showing us that politics matters across many aspects of the crisis. for example, emerging evidence from the study of the political determinants of health shows that the spread of covid- is being fuelled by populism and also stoking it (mckee et al. ). in some of the worst-performing governments during the pandemic – united kingdom (uk), india, usa, brazil and russia, for instance – leaders have ridden populist waves to power which bred con- tempt for institutions, denialism, suspicion of elites and embedded the practice of blaming victims and outsiders. in these places it has been much more difficult to put in place effective governmental responses (mckee et al. ). in the usa, for example, mask-wearing, social distancing and governmental responses have become an extra- ordinary political battleground. in brazil, russia, iran and the usa, politicians have been comfortable ‘contradicting their experts on basic facts about the pandemic, publishing implausible numbers on covid deaths or propagating conspiracy the- ories’ (the economist b, july ). the pandemic has shown us that politics matters: from international cooperation, or the lack thereof, to the influence on individual behaviour, the nature of politics shapes responses and outcomes. this is happening as much through public administration systems, public services, and relationships with citizens, as it is through social media platforms. a challenge for public administration and management scholars will be to expand out what we mean by capacity and the factors that influence it. capacity is also shaped by relations with other parties, in some cases radically so. public administration and management scholars have for many years been exploring these questions. there has been extensive work on the range of costs and benefits of engaging external parties and the types of value these relationships seek to create (alford and o’flynn ; o’flynn a). covid- is showing both the power of these relationships as well as the fragility and burdensome nature of them. as will be discussed later in this section, government is relying heavily on service users and citizens to co-create value; we need to think in more depth about the nature and dynamic of this relationship and what factors impact on it (oecd ). government has also become increasingly reliant on private sector firms to deliver on its objectives and must grapple with the tensions that occur in these attempts at value creation. j. o’flynn experiences during covid- have bought into stark relief the fragility and proble- matic nature of these relationships. in britain, for example, test-and-trace services provided by the private firm serco have been problematic, costly and ineffective (mueller and bradley ). in australia, a major covid- outbreak in the state of victoria has been tracked to a hotel quarantine programme where a combination of poor governmental decision-making, reliance on private security firms, exploitative work practices, poor training and low wages have combined to help fuel the second wave of infections (thorne ). in the same state, an explosion of cases in aged care facilities operated by private firms has shown up intergovernmental conflicts, lax compliance and enforcement of standards leading to out-of-control infections and deaths (handley ). the ongoing tension between the pursuit of public and private value in these relationships has borne out in these examples, demonstrated how relationships have been poorly designed to create shared value, undermining govern- mental capacity to protect its citizens. we have long known that the deep cuts under austerity have undermined public services across the world, but the true extent is now on display for all to see (kim ; thomas ). as mazzucato and quaggiotto ( ) have argued ‘effective govern- ment, as it turns out, cannot be conjured up at will, because it requires investment in state capacity.’ in britain, for instance, austerity has left the health and care systems lacking the resources and resilience needed to confront the scale and scope of the pandemic (thomas ). the state is now over reliant on the private sector to carry out what many see as core public service roles during a pandemic (mueller and bradley ). thomas ( , ) argued that covid- has shown that this was ‘neither productive, nor efficient . . . [with] lost capacity in public health meaning poorer population health, creating unnecessary risk.’ despite notions that public and private actors can work together to create public value (moore ; o’flynn ; alford and o’flynn ), the experience of recent times has questioned whether this promise has been realized. mishra ( ) put it more brutally: over the last decade, successive conservative governments have ruthlessly shredded what was left of the social safety net in the name of budgetary ‘austerity’, hastening britain’s decline into a flailing – if not failed – state that can’t even secure supplies of gowns and masks for its hospital workers. alongside the increase complexity of challenges and questions of capacity has been increasing dismay at a parallel trend: the erosion of trust in government. whilst declining trust calls into question the capacity of governments to act, it is also true that government competence, or a lack of it, undermines trust (oecd ). on the cusp of one of the most complex challenges to confront governments, the oecd reported that in only % of people trusted government (oecd ). however, as governments around the world have acted to respond to covid- , we have seen a rapid uptick in trust. the edelman trust barometer, for example, saw an -point improvement for trust in government from january to may indicating that trust is back; at least for now. since , government had languished in distrust globally, as gridlock in the eu over greek debt and several corruption scandals in developing nations eroded trust. the [may results] shows a striking comeback for government: at percent trust (+ points since january), the public is relying on government to protect them in a manner not seen since public management review world war ii. trust in government is not only up by double digits in six of markets surveyed, it is the only institution trusted by the mass population ( percent). across the world we have seen wildly differential responses to covid- . one area where public administration and management scholars can contribute will be to explore these links between levels of trust and the capacity to act, especially how this relates to whether government can connect with citizens in processes of value co- creation (osborne ). covid- has shown in detail just how reliant the imple- mentation of government action is on a range of parties, including citizens who are being asked, or directed, to modify their behaviour – handwashing, mask-wearing, limiting movement, physically distancing (world health organization ). how we conceptualize, or reconceptualize these dynamics is important, as are notions of value – individual vs. collective, public vs. private; or personal well-being through to societal value (strokosch and osborne ). for example, osborne’s ( ) work encourages us look at notions of value co-creation, which depends on how individuals engage with the ‘offering’ of public sector organizations. recent work by strokosch and osborne ( ) indicates the importance of goal congruence between actors and how this can constrain and enable value creation. others such as alford ( , ), frame these interactions as various types of co-production in pursuit of public value and differentiate between the various client roles that can shape these dynamics. citizens are also bearing the ramifications of wide-spread unemployment as entire industries are shuttered to protect public health. and whilst currently citizens express a desire to save lives over jobs (edelman ), such other-regarding attitudes may be difficult to sustain over time as the world enters a period of economic meltdown. as lockdowns continue around the world, we need to understand these links, but also how some sort of compliance fatigue may undermine even the best strategies that govern- ment develops to combat covid- . in other words, will some sort of ‘goal con- gruence’ hold or fall apart over time (strokosch and osborne )? will citizens continue to respond positively to calls on them, or will they refuse? the virus has: . . . laid bare one of the gnarliest problems facing all governments. convincing people to change their behaviour in the ways needed to prevent new waves of covid- will rely on people worrying about others as well as themselves. in most places the disease has become one that threatens the elderly, the poor and marginalised minorities. but beating back a virus that has spread around the world with such ferocity will be impossible unless most people play by the rules of the new normal (the economist b, july). in the most extreme lockdown cases the state is determining almost every aspect of our lives; how we work, who can enter our homes, and how we exercise. when the state of victoria, australia declared a ‘state of disaster’ in early august it deployed “the country’s most intrusive bureaucracy since its days as a penal colony (cave ) and handed control of the public service to the police and emergency services minister (morton ). the victorian lockdown has included the use of military personnel to enforce movement restrictions within the city of melbourne and between the metro- politan centre and regional areas; permit systems now exist for border crossing, childcare and working on site. as altshuler and hershkovitz ( , ) have argued, such action would have been unimaginable in democratic nations prior to covid- : this fear prompted citizens of all democratic countries to obey orders and voluntarily surren- der some of their basic freedoms, in exchange for maintaining their health. in parallel, the very same fear has led democratic governments to place restrictions on freedom, demonstrating j. o’flynn their immense power and control, in ways which would have been deemed quite inconceivable before the pandemic. whether trust matters for citizen co-production or the co-creation of value and how this links to capacity is important to understand. for example, in new zealand where the government implemented a hard lockdown and sought elimination of covid- there were pre-existing high levels of trust in government (macaulay ). studies have shown that trust has remained high – % of new zealanders trust government to make the right decisions regarding covid- (compared to % across the g ), and there is renewed faith in public institutions (shaw ). in contrast, in the us pre- covid levels of trust in government were at historic lows (pew research center ), in a nation shaped by ‘underlying anti-statist political culture . . . [and a] pathological distrust of government’ (fukuyama ). this has made coordinated governmental approaches extraordinarily challenging, with claims that communities are picking up much of the organizing work (yong ). it has also turned state requests or demands of citizens for behavioural adaptation into a battleground. as covid- continues to challenge governments around the world, citizens turn to them to for solutions. such solutions though are proving hard to find, especially given that the arrival of such a pandemic has been predicted for many years (world health organization , ). so, as much as governments have been shocked, they should not be surprised. what is clear is that citizen behaviour will play a critical role in addressing the pandemic; here issues of co-production (alford ) and/or co- creation of value (osborne ) can help us to understand these dynamics. as can the emerging work on ecosystems of value creation which can cope with multiple actors, conflict, power and processes of value creation and destruction (strokosch and osborne ). how covid- will shape our sense of the role of government moving forward is an area for attention – clearly big government is back in many nations – and the pandemic has shown us how much government does matter. or more specifically, it has shown us how much government capacity matters. how capable governments are in dealing with the virus may well impact on trust with government; perceived failures are likely to burst the current ‘trust bubble’. and citizens who we are relying on to change behaviours and bear substantial burdens in doing so may well suffer fatigue and disillusionment, thus undermining the energy and engagement needed to fight the virus. how these patterns connect or lock together both now and post-covid is an area that matters for public administration and management scholars. here there is plenty of scope to contribute, learn, and build new knowledge with others. justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage the covid- pandemic has acted as an accelerant for many entrenched issues across the world, highlighting injustice, systemic inequality and entrenched disadvantage. global evidence shows that a growing sense of unfairness negatively impacts on trust in institutions; recent data also shows that people believe that those with less are bearing more of a burden of suffering, illness, and sacrifice during the pandemic (edelman ). these perceptions are playing out in real time, with the poorest and most vulnerable bearing the biggest burdens of the covid- crisis. those least able to cope and already in dire circumstances are suffering: ‘without urgent socio-economic public management review responses, global suffering will escalate, jeopardizing lives and livelihoods for years to come’ (patterson ). the un estimates that as many as . billion workers in the informal economy will lose their livelihoods, most in developing countries (patterson ). in the uk, evidence is showing that those with the least are being impacted the most (social metrics commission ). at the same time that covid- is amplify- ing these issues, a mass social movement, black lives matter, has taken hold around the world centring racial injustices and demanding transformational changes to society. together these phenomena form the second big thematic challenge i want to emphasize as an area for public administration and management scholars to make a difference. in my view two areas in particular emerge. the first area is an acknowledgement of the marginalization of these topics in the field itself and a commitment to change. wicked problems related to justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage have been important themes in public administration and management for many years, but it is fair to say that these have not been at the centre of the field. to be clear, many excellent scholars have focused on these issues for a long time, seeking to address them and improve the lives of communities through various means; they have made a profound difference. as a field, however, these issues have not been seen as foundational. recent work, however, is challenging this. blessett et al. ( , emphasis in original) recently argued: ‘as a discipline and practice, we have not adequately anchored social equity to the foundation of public administration.’ they argued that within the public sector there existed numerous inequities, across myriad policy areas, and these ‘result in detrimental harms for subjugated and margin- alized communities’ (p. ). a key principle of their manifesto is for social equity to be positioned as a foundational anchor of public administration. black lives matter, and the broader social movement it has inspired, also brings to light the limited attention that public administration has given to racial issues. again, this is not to argue that excellent work has not been done; it has. rather that these issues have not been seen as central which goes to my earlier points about who has had the power to define the field. a call to action has been made by alexander and stivers ( , ) who argued that public administration has given limited attention to: . . . the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgements of individual administrators . . . scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining long-standing policies and prac- tices with racist implications. the intersection of a global pandemic with a global movement for change which directly challenges the role and operation of government is an area that public administration and management must confront. now is the time for the debate about race in our field – how race matters, the injustices and subjugation that has been built into scholarship and practice, and how we must change this. the second area of focus is on the intersection of issues of justice, inequality and disadvantage at this historic moment. what does it mean for how we think about the practice of public administration and how our research can drive social change. it is clear now that across the world the repercussions of covid- will be catastrophic, plunging millions into unemployment and poverty and destroying livelihoods. some . billion children have already been forced out of physical schooling – million of them in developing countries. it is estimated that million children may never return to school, with young girls primed to be the most impacted (the economist c, j. o’flynn july). it is also true that decades of economic, social and political change have come to a head during the crisis; in other words decades of policies founded on neoliberal- ism, individualism, and a market-based society (sandel ). in the usa and uk, for instance, mishra ( ) argued: anglo-america’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. nevertheless, the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies still comes as a shock to some. the links between poverty, race and covid- are critical to understand. evidence is emerging, for example, of a bi-directional relationship between poverty and covid- . in other words, poverty exacerbates the effects of covid- and is also exacer- bated by it. and despite many commentators arguing that covid- does not discriminate, evidence is showing that clearly it does. in the usa, black and latino americans are contracting and dying from covid- more than white americans (board ). in brazil, black and indigneous brazilians are dying at higher rates, with predications that indigneous tribes will lose a generation of leaders (andreoni, londoño, and casado ; phillips ; ruball and araujo jnr. ). in the uk, those already overrepresented in poverty are being hit the hardest – black and asian groups have been more negatively than white groups; people with a disability are more likely to have negative labour market outcomes (social metrics commission ). predictions for the future are dire with those already in poverty expected to move more deeply into it, and those that were close to the poverty line will cross it. the study also showed that those in poverty reported higher, and increasing levels of loneliness, with around one-third fearing for their future. in the uk, a recent report laid out just how devastating covid- has been to those who already experience disadvantage. public health experts are showing that disadvantaged people are more vulnerable to infection because they are more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation, work in occupa- tions where there aren’t work from home options, are more likely to have unstable work and income, present later for health care services, and often have reduced access to health-care covid- presents a much higher health risk for the already disad- vantaged groups in society (patel et al. ). getting help, however, has been challenging despite the action of many govern- ments to provide stimulus and support. the capacity issue here has been critical, but so is the nature of burdens placed on those in need, and the philosophical and moral underpinnings of public service systems. the welfare system in the usa, for exam- ple, has crumpled under the pressure. by july, million americans had applied for unemployment claims which overwhelmed state-based systems. in oklahoma for instance, hundreds of people camped out overnight to get the ticket needed for an appointment so they could submit their details (gowen ). in that state ‘mega- processing events’ are being held at large sporting arenas. even when people apply the backlogs are massive; social security and welfare systems have been overwhelmed around the world. in washington d.c., the story is similar with people waiting months to have applications processed and falling into poverty and homelessness during the process. the complex intersections between state schemes and federal emergency coronavirus schemes makes the situation worse – applicants for the federal assistance scheme in the usa need to be rejected by their state scheme first before they can access the pandemic programme (swenson ). the experience is public management review highlighting in many nations the underinvestment in systems and outdated pro- cesses, the administrative burdens (herd and moynihan ) in place, how difficult it remains for governments to work together, and also the degrading encounters that many citizens have with the state when they are at their most vulnerable. there are important areas where public administration and management scholars can make a difference. another area of global concern has been in aged care services, a magnet for covid- the world over given the mix of high-risk residents, insecure workforces, and lax regulations in many countries. covid- has torn through this vulnerable sector of the community: ‘runaway coronavirus infections, medical gear shortages and govern- ment inattention are woefully familiar stories in nursing homes around the world’ (stevis-gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). tens of thousands of elderly people have died due to a combination of warnings being ignored, a lack of preparedness, and neglect; in many nations aged care was not even included in preparedness plans. elders have been warehoused away from sight, invisible. in some places it has been argued that elderly people were simply left to die – in belgium, for instance, hospitals refused infected patients and denied them care and it took weeks to determine who was responsible for care as various parts of governments passed the buck (stevis- gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). the situation was so dire that médecins sans frontières dispatched teams of experts into nursing homes to care for residents. similarly, in sweden emergency doctors turned away the elderly and in spain inves- tigations are under way to determine is aged care residents were abandoned and left to die (stevis-gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). in australia, an outbreak in aged care facilities in victoria has highlighted issues of responsibility between levels of government, with complex mixes of public and private providers and regulatory regimes administered by the federal government. a disaster that was entirely predict- able given the many reviews and inquires that have been done into this sector (lucas and cunningham ). this experience also raises questions of whether these com- plex hybridic models may have serious defects that only truly come to light in crisis, thus raising questions of how different governing models interact with vulnerability (o’flynn b, forthcoming). justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage is a big thematic challenge that demands attention from public administration and management scholars. from our most vulnerable citizens, through to how we design public services and welfare systems, matters. public administration and management scholars have wrestled with the boundaries of the field, as was discussed earlier – whether we should be normative or instrumental, and whether big social issues should be left to others or constitute central themes. covid- has shown us that it is time for the multiple, complex, and uncomfortable issues that relate to justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage to become critical to public administration and management. as blessett et al. ( , – ) argued recently: . . . in light of the current state of affairs across the globe, those who constitute the field – both practitioners and scholars – must engage in intentional, active, and ethical efforts to serve and safeguard all people, especially the most vulnerable in our society. no longer can we engage in functional activities that do harm, nor can we passively stand on the sidelines. this is a defining moment that will reveal what we value. j. o’flynn covid- has amplified this call. by design or default, in many countries we are returning to an era of big government. mass unemployment, catastrophic health outcomes, decimated industries, exploding state debt, growing inequality, and extreme poverty are all likely effects of an unprecedented pandemic. public administration and management must play a part in shaping the responses intellectually and practically. we can do this by working with others and also by acknowledging that our field needs to transform. the future of our field what comes post-covid remains to be seen. what we do know is that the experience of a global disruption of this scale and scope raises a series of critical challenges for societies and for us as scholars. i have highlighted two big thematic challenges; areas where i think that public administration and management scholars can make a difference and where there are many interconnections to be made. in doing so i don’t claim to define the field or to push other topics to the side, but rather to spotlight important areas for us to grapple with. in summing up there are several important points to emphasis. public administration and management matters; both as a field and as a craft. as a field we need to confront the big challenges of our times and develop and deploy knowledge that helps to address them. in this way i echo the call from kirlin , ) more than two decades ago: public administration is a central part of the grandest of human endeavors – shaping a better future for ourselves and those yet unborn. the institutions crafted to achieve human aspira- tions require administration, including public agencies; however, the measure of success is not at the instrumental level, but in its enduring value not only to those in a particular nation, state, or city, but worldwide to all who aspire for improved lives . . . we should take our role in society very seriously – the big questions of public administration must address how we make society better or worse for citizens. as a field this means we must also pay heed to the catastrophic effects that covid- looks likely to have on the next generation of scholars and the big ideas that they are developing. for many entering into what is already a tough labour market, the coming years will be worse. for those in precarious positions which are likely to be cut as universities look to tighten their belts and reduce expenditure, this is dire. our field will be all the poorer for it. not just the scholarship that may never be done, but our gifted colleagues who won’t be in classrooms with the next generation of people driven to serve the public. this will be an inter-generational disaster for us all. and we need to try and stop it. covid- has shown us that the craft of public administration and management also matters. the current situation demonstrates clearly the role that government plays and the value creation it can catalyse, often in conjunction with citizens. citizens lean heavily on government, and vice versa, but without trust, redundancy, resilience and capacity the ability to confront these challenges is severely diminished. indeed, these relationships can be as value destroying as they can be value creating (flemig and osborne ). the depletion and long-term deterioration of aspects of public sector systems has left us more vulnerable to complex challenges. this is a dynamic shown clearly in some of the public-private failures that have come centrestage during the crisis. building in redundancy and adaptive capabilities is critical as we move forward. public management review in the uk calls for this are already being made: ‘now, the uk government should take the opportunity to create a system where resilience is considered efficient, where long- term thinking is encouraged, and where resources ae allocated to delivery on it’ (thomas , ). it also means that this moment offers ample opportunity for deep learning and adaptation and for looking at how to rebuild many systems that have been shown to be problematic or which have themselves exacerbated the effects of the pandemic. for example, the heavy reliance on private actors to pursue public value has deep fault lines that must be explored in much more detail. any short-term gain made in such relationships can be quickly overshadowed by big, catastrophic value destruction during crisis. it is likely that the wave of examples illustrating this will continue for some time to come. what is happening under the cover of covid- matters immensely. as the world grapples with the covid- catastrophe, we need to keep an eye on the undercurrents; developments that will be out of the spotlight, but which need our continued attention. for instance, there has been increased violence against women across the world (un women ); harsher border action by the usa (the economist d, july); increased surveillance of citizens in many nations (altshuler and hershkovitz ); and challenges to democracy in countries as diverse as pakistan (afzal ), hong kong (yam ), the usa (goldberg ), bolivia (pagliarini ), india (raza ), and australia (kelly ; murphy ). each of these developments, and many more, happening under the cover of covid has the potential for profound impact on public administration and management but is also demands input and guidance from our field. covid- has been a disruptive force in our field and much attention is turning to understanding the impacts. but we should also be mindful to connect up to pre- covid developments that were already underway. alongside big thematic challenges are shifts in the field that have already started, and which will lock in with these challenges in interesting ways. the emerging work by mergel, ganapati, and whitford ( ), for example, on agile governance provides a new way of thinking about public administration and management and can be an important influence. or the manifesto developed by douglas et al. ( ) on positive public administration which focuses on success and positive contributions in the field rather than just failure. also critical to the field moving forward is the notion of integrative public administration developed by carboni and nabatchi ( , ) which ‘reframes and expands the role of public administration scholar as integrator and connector of research and practice.’ this approach is anchored in: . . . a strategic approach to improving the social contract, governance, and policy implementa- tion that puts scholars at the nexus of scholarship and practice. instead of emphasizing whether the scholarship-practice divide is abysmal or necessary, we call for public administration scholars to understand their unique position to help address complex puzzles related to public values and the administrative state.” (carboni and nabatchi , ) i began this piece with the notion that we have big thematic challenges to address during, and after, covid- . and i stressed that we need to move out of our silos to do this, to work at the intersections to make a difference. as davis ( ) has argued: ‘pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors . . . the covid pandemic will be j. o’flynn remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis.’ if ever there was a time for public administration and management scholars to make that difference, it is now. notes . global data is available from the johns hopkins coronavirus resource centre online at: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html. accessed july . . on brazil see phillips and maisonnave ( ), on iran see borger ( ), on bolivia see abc news ( ), on south africa see besent ( ) and on the united states see samuels and usero ( ). . the seven that i identified were: the role of government, trust and the citizenry; working together; justice, equity and entrenched disadvantage; leadership, workforce and service; the digital and data revolution; performance, innovation and reform; and, covid undercurrents. . this quote from the edelman launch site for the spring report ( may ) online at: https://www. edelman.com/research/trust- -spring-update the full spring report on the edelman trust barometer available online at: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss /files/ - / % edelman% trust% barometer% spring% update.pdf. both accessed july . . for detailed cataloguing of government responses see the blavatnik coronavirus response tracker online at: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus- government-response-tracker acknowledgments disclosure statement the author has no conflicts of interest to report in relation to this article. notes on contributor janine o'flynn is professor of public management at the university of melbourne and her research interests focus in particular on reform and relationships. this covers topics as diverse as 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https://hongkongfp.com/ / / /weaponising-covid- -how-state-suppression-breeds-distrust-and-disinformation-in-hong-kong/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /coronavirus-american-failure/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /coronavirus-american-failure/ / 	abstract 	introduction 	a field of big questions: but what are they? 	from big questions to big thematic challenges 	the role of government, trust and the citizenry 	justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage 	the future of our field 	notes 	acknowledgments 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributor 	orcid 	references untitled journal of clinical sport psychology, , , – https://doi.org/ . /jcsp. - © human kinetics, inc. original research #sporttoo: implications of and best practice for the #metoo movement in sport mitch abrams learned excellence for athletes michelle l. bartlett west texas a&m university the #metoo movement has brought long needed attention to the epidemic of sexual assault and sexual violence. in the world of sports, the need to prevent and address such acts requires individuals with training in clinical, forensic and sport psychology. these professionals must have particular understanding of the dynamics of sexual violence within the athletic and sport culture. this paper serves to highlight context-specific approaches to pertinent identification and treatment issues. an overview of sexual abuse victim and perpetrator identifica- tion will be offered. in addition to the introduction of risk assessment and recommendation of comprehensive prevention programming, treatment needs in the athletic context will be explored. group-level interventions currently being utilized will be reviewed, recommended topic areas to be covered in protocols will be enumerated and suggestions for systemic and cultural change in the sport domain will be offered. keywords: assessment, sexual assault, sport, violence with enhanced media attention to the epidemic of sexual assault and sexual violence in the world of sports, and in particular college sports, an opportunity to address and prevent such acts is presenting for individuals with a unique skill set. the #metoo movement, founded by tarana burke in , may be the most widely seen social media phenomenon demonstrating the importance of a mean- ingful response by those involved in sports. individuals that have training in two vital areas: clinical psychology/counseling and in sport and performance, particu- larly in understanding athletic and sport culture, bring pragmatic expertise to the table. specifically, clinical sport psychologists with forensic training can establish themselves as a critical piece in the call to address and remediate these prominent issues in today’s sport landscape. the problem of sexual violence in sports sits at the nexus of the subspecialties of clinical psychology, sport psychology, and forensic psychology. this paper serves to provide an overview of context-specific approaches to pertinent identification and treatment issues. an overview of sexual abuse victim abrams is with learned excellence for athletes, fords, nj. bartlett is with the dept. of sports & exercise sciences, west texas a&m university, canyon, tx. address author correspondence to mitch abrams at mitchabramspsyd@gmail.com and michelle bartlett at mbartlett@wtamu.edu. unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc https://doi.org/ . /jcsp. - mailto:mitchabramspsyd@gmail.com mailto:mbartlett@wtamu.edu and perpetrator identification will be offered along with a critical examination of prevention programming. risk assessment methodology will be reviewed in the context of factors that contribute to a culture that tolerates sexual assault. group- level interventions currently being utilized will be reviewed, recommended topic areas to be covered in protocols will be enumerated, and suggestions for systemic and cultural change in the sport domain will be offered. sexual assault and abuse identification prior to the larry nassar scandal at michigan state university and u.s. gymnas- tics, there has been concern about sexual abuse and assault in sport. dr. celia brackenridge captured these issues in her seminal tome spoilsports: understand- ing and preventing sexual exploitation in sport, published in . before this, former nhl hockey player sheldon kennedy and another unnamed player came forward and accused their former coach graham james of sexually abusing them for years between and . later, theo fleury, another prolific nhl star came forward with his story that mirrored the abuse kennedy had endured. they collectively reported that james had abused several male hockey players under his supervision for many years. this was long before the jerry sandusky abuse at penn state football, hidden under the guise of camps for underprivileged or troubled youth. perpetrators are not only coaches and sport staff, but athletes, as well. in , jameis winston, then quarterback of the florida state university football team, was accused of sexual assault. no charges were filed, however, in , the university paid $ , to settle a lawsuit brought by the victim alleging a violation of title ix by fsu in handling her complaint. winston was later accused of groping an uber driver and was suspended three games of the season by the nfl. in , former nfl safety darren sharper was convicted of multiple charges of drugging and sexually assaulting several women across many cities. he is currently serving a -year sentence in federal prison and will have to report as a sex offender when he completes his incarceration. in contrast, former stanford university swimmer, brock turner, received a mere -month sentence for a sexual assault conviction on an unconscious woman outside a campus fraternity house (see also abrams, , pp. – ). in all of the cases, there was the opportunity for law enforcement, sports administration, governing bodies, and many other adults to intercede, but for a variety of reasons, they all failed to do so; leaving countless victims in their wake. these represent only a few of the sexual abuse scandals that have existed in the sports world.. sexual grooming itself is defined by craven, brown, and gilchrist ( , p. ) as a “process by which a person prepares a child, significant adults and the environment for the abuse of this child. specific goals include gaining access to the child, gaining the child’s compliance, and maintaining the child’s secrecy to avoid disclosure.” the process of recruitment in sports provides an opportunity for adults to have significant authority and control over the athletes that want to compete for them, and parents often trust that their children are going to be safe, regardless of whether it is accurate for them to do so. coaches who are successful with improving performance and/or helping the athlete advance to higher levels of competition may sometimes be erroneously presumed to be equally jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc concerned with the athletes’ psychological health and development. simulta- neously, there are many coaches that are tremendous role models, and some of which have literally saved the lives of athletes who may have gone down treacherous paths without their guidance. the purpose of these statements is not to demonize sports, but to recognize that sports can create an environment conducive to the recruiting and grooming of victims by a sexual predator. sports leagues have attempted to subvert the potential for sexual predators to access athletes by utilizing criminal background checks. unfortunately, criminal background checks are inadequate if the coach (or doctor, or any other predator in the authoritative milieu) has not previously been caught, arrested and/or convicted. sexual predators may be particularly adept at avoiding apprehension and thus a “clean” background check may give the illusion of safety, setting the stage for precarious situations. it is then of paramount importance to understand that sex offenders are not a homogenous group that all have the same proclivities, grooming patterns, preferences, attitudes, presentations, etc. identifying perpetrators requires understanding the many criminogenic factors that contribute to sexual offending. identifying victims requires understanding of the often complex presentation of trauma-related symptoms. victim identification when screening for sexual abuse trauma-related symptoms, it is important to understand that the groomed, abused athlete may not present symptoms in a typical manner. a victim may present as confident and well-adjusted at some times, and at other times they may present as scared, irritable or angry. in addition, the victim may appear depressed or anxious or traumatized with inconsistent presentations. this is partially due to the abuser intentionally keeping their victim off guard, unbalanced and thus, easier to control. for example, the abuser may shower the victim with praise and gifts while alienating them from watchful parents, then later threaten the athlete with harm if they should tell others about the abuse. this is one of the ways offenders may groom their victims by separating them and ingratiating themselves with the targeted victim, therefore setting the stage for the abuse to occur. furthermore, where one might anticipate seeing “traditional” symptoms of simple post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), such as flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, emotional hyper-reactivity, etc., many people that have endured long-term abuse develop complex ptsd (c-ptsd), which presents differently (roth, newman, pelcovitz, van der kolk, & mandel, ). c-ptsd presents with emotional dysregulation, but symptoms also include shame and guilt, distorted perceptions of self, relationship difficulties, dissociation, and low-level paranoia. simple and/or complex ptsd, eating disorders, depressive disorders, and anxiety disorders all have been associated with trauma. substance abuse is a mechanism sometimes utilized by the victim to self-medicate the trauma-related emotional pain. furthermore, there will be some who develop symptoms that spontaneously remit, and there will be some who never become symptomatic at all. because of a sport culture that encourages obedience and the suppression of emotions (sinden, ), athletes may struggle in ways that don’t mimic traditional clinical features. the clinician must be educated about trauma-informed care and the athlete culture, jcsp vol. , no. , #sporttoo: the #metoo movement in sport unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc to maximize the likelihood of identifying symptoms the athlete may have ambivalence about sharing. in summary, the many different strategies used by the perpetrators leads to many different reactions by victims. it is important that those working with potential victims of sexual assault are aware that compared with presenting traditional trauma symptoms (flashbacks, nightmares, emotional reactivity, etc.) consistently, the athlete victimcan present symptoms of sexual abuse inconsis- tently. for example, the victim may portray confidence one day, and on another may look like a shell of themselves; frightened, fragile, and confused. thus, it is critical to refer the athlete to a clinical sport psychologist who has experience in identifying trauma in sports. if the sport organization does not have such a referral source, one should be sought out immediately. the american psychological association provides a resource to find a local sport psychologist on their website at https://locator.apa.org. again, advocates may be well-intended and can assist with policy changes, but it is difficult to help without having experience working with both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse. . .especially those that have navigated the world of athletics and understand the culture of sport. sexual violence risk assessment if/when an organization identifies a perpetrator suspected of abuse or assault, this individual subsequently needs to be assessed to determine if/what treatment they would benefit from. often the organizational patterns have been to either cover up the actions or dismiss them from the institution. if the latter is chosen, and no assessment is completed, the perpetrator leaves and finds victims elsewhere. further, when the alleged perpetrator is an athlete and not a member of the staff, there are added factors that schools and athletic departments struggle with. resources invested in the athlete will be lost and the hopes of the athlete assisting school athletic success (with accompanying increase in revenue) may leave with them. instead of reducing victims, it increases victims elsewhere, while protecting the “brand” of the university or organization. there are a variety of tools available to assess risk and determine likelihood of future offending. however, these tools have yet to be normed on athlete popula- tions. since sex offending is a comparatively low base-rate crime and there have not been sufficient athletes who have been identified as perpetrators, it is difficult to study athletes-as-perpetrators and develop specialized offender risk assessment tools accordingly. this may be an area of future research, but in the absence of such tools, utilization of current methodology is an appropriate mechanism to assess violence in sport domains. historically, risk assessment utilized three models: unstructured clinical decision making, actuarial decision making, and structured professional judg- ment. unstructured clinical decision making is the oldest and most widely used method that involves no specific guidelines for the evaluator. they “simply” offer their clinical opinion without support of well-considered static and dynamic risk factors and it is supported by their professional qualifications and credentials. this has been criticized in the literature for lacking reliability, validity and account- ability (litwack & schlesinger, ). jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc https://locator.apa.org the actuarial method utilizes algorithmic tools that predict violence by comparing an individual to a norm-based reference group and provide a more precise, probabilistic estimate of future violence. this is more mechanical, but it improves upon the poor reliability and validity of unstructured approaches (grove & meehl, ; litwack, ; quinsey et al., ). however, because of the removal of professional discretion and rigidity of actuarial approaches (douglas & kropp, ; hart, ), the forensic field has evolved further by utilizing the structured professional judgment approach, which has been popu- larized by those focusing on recidivism prevention utilizing the risk needs responsivity (rnr) model (andrews & bonta, ). this process allows for professional discretion in adjusting risk conclusions from the actuarial predictions with consideration of other risk-related information. for example, a meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism (hanson & bussiere, ) noted two broad factors were associated with sexual recidivism: deviant sexual interests and antisocial orientation/lifestyle instability. similarly, malamuth et al. ( ) identified in his confluence model, hostile masculinity and impersonal sexual orientation as supported precursors to increased risk of sexual violence. the structure professional judgment approach has been shown to have good validity (douglas & webster, ) and discriminates well between recidivists and non-recidivists in retrospective research (hanson & morton-bourgon, ). it is recommended that risk assessment of athletes utilizes actuarial instruments when possible and support the obtained data with other information gleaned by psychological testing, clinical interview and collateral information. moreover, the ability to assess an individual’s likelihood of future assault is actually a conglom- eration of very specialized skills that most sport counselors have not been trained with. it is critical for every sport organization to know what medical and/or mental health professionals they have access to and what skillsets those professionals possess, as well as how to gain access to other professionals with required expertise if needed. ideally, this would be a clinical sport psychologist with forensic training. a non-exhaustive list of tools that assess risk of recidivism and then can be synthesized in the context of other empirically supported criminogenic factors follows. these include the historical clinical risk management- , version (hcr- ; douglas, hart, webster, & belfrage, ), the spousal assault risk assessment (sara; kropp, hart, webster, & eaves, ), the static- r (phenix, helmus, & hanson, ), and the psychopathy checklist—screening version (pcl-sv; hart, cox, & hare, ). other personality measures used to assess psychological factors that may also detect an individual’s potential for violence include the personality assessment inventory (pai; morey, ), the minnesota multiphasic personality inventory – nd edition, (mmpi- ; butcher et al, ), the state trait anger expression inventory – nd edition (staxi- ; spielberger, ), and the rorschach inkblot test (weiner, ), primarily utilizing the comprehensive system (exner, ), which has proved to be very useful in forensic assessments. the utilization of rnr models allow for assessment of risk and recommenda- tions for treatment. though sex offender treatment has not been specifically modified for people employed in or participating in athletics, and the specifics of sex offender treatment go beyond the scope of this article, it is prudent to extend already established programs that focus on building strengths that compensate for jcsp vol. , no. , #sporttoo: the #metoo movement in sport unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc criminogenic risk factors, such as the good lives model (ward, ; ward, melser, & yates, ; willis & ward, ), to athlete populations that demonstrate sexual assault risk factors. sexual assault prevention there is little doubt that sexual assault is an epidemic, especially on college campuses. among undergraduate students, . % of females and . % of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacita- tion (cantor et al., ) with an additional % of transgender college students experiencing sexual assault while on campus (new, ). the rate of sexual assaults on campuses has remained relatively unchanged over the past years (fedina, holmes, & backes, ). conley et al. ( ) asserted that sexual assault is the most common form of violence on college campuses, yet only about % are sexual assaults are reported (coray, ). one in nine girls and one in boys under the age of experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult and females ages - are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault (finkelhor, shattuck, turner, & hamby, ). women of the age of - are at the highest risk for sexual assault compared to the general population (robers, kemp, rathbun, morgan, & snyder, ). some researchers have found lifetime incident rates of childhood sexual abuse for females to be in ( %) and in ( %) for males (dube et al., ). though the perpetrators tend to be males and acquaintances that the victim knows, more males are victimized than one might assume (bullock & beckson, ). there have been some researchers who have argued that athletes are more likely to perpetrate sexual violence (e.g. eskenazi, ) than non-athletes. research has found that involvement in contact versus non-contact sports may not contribute to higher levels of aggression against women (marchell, ; smith & stewart, ). recently, navarro and tewksbury ( ) found that athletes and non-athletes were similar in the degree of rape myth acceptance (rma) with athletes reporting stronger agreement than nonathletes did. interestingly, in this same study, the authors found “an unanticipated and inverse relationship between greek organization membership and rma; greeks were not particularly adherent to rape myths,” as it could be that greek organizations desire to combat their stereotype. other studies have found that athletic participation has been identified as an uninfluential factor in rape myth acceptance (humphrey & kahn, ). caron, halteman, and stacy ( ) and smith and stewart ( ) concluded that there was no significant difference between athletes and non-athletes on aggressive sexual behavior. they opined that thecharacteristics of athletes themselves rather than their athletic participation must be considered further in examining the presumed link between athletes and sexual assault. however, there may be factors in sport culture that may contribute to assaultive behaviors if left unchecked. these may include hostile (or toxic) masculinity, especially when paired with a culture of impersonal sex (malamuth et al., ), rape supportive attitudes or rape myth acceptance (attitudes that shift the blame for sexual assault from the perpetrator to the victim (holland & cortina, ; see also abrams, , p. ), sense of entitlement, group dynamics that lead to jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc groupthink (janis, ) and deindividuation, drug/alcohol use, and a lack of consequences. hence, this is why these must be addressed in comprehensive prevention programs. the most prolific models used to prevent sexual assault have centered upon bystander intervention models. this is interesting considering the fact that bystander interventions were the descendent of the bystander effect, or bystander apathy (darley & latane, ), which found that individuals do not offer help to a victim when other people are present. the probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders and there is a diffusion of responsibility. it has been found that if one person stands up, more are likely to do so, but if no one helps, people are left wondering what the right thing to do is (fischer et al., ). other barriers to bystander intervention models include: unconscious racial bias (katz, merrilees, hoxmeier, & motisi, ), rape myth acceptance, bystander efficacy, alcohol use/intoxication, peer perceptions, perceptions of sexual assault severity, and gender of the bystander (labhardt, holdsworth, brown, & howat, ), with males less likely to intervene (leone & parrott, ). jackson katz’ ( ) mentors in violence prevention (mvp program) is a widely disseminated sexual violence prevention model in sports, which utilizes a bystander-based approach. the research does not support that this is an effective program, though it tends to be well-received by the audience (williams & neville, ). also, college-level bystander programs have increased participants’ feel- ings of self-efficacy for and frequency of intervening in situations that could lead to a sexual assault (katz & moore, ), based upon self-report. the ncaa has historically supported bystander-based approaches, as well (ncaa, n.d.). however, when examined more closely, it has been recognized that actively intervening in a peer or stranger’s aggressive behavior is a challenging task even for well-trained adults (casey & ohler, ) and, further, youth identified more barriers than facilitators to bystander behavior. for adolescents, the prospect of intervening is laden with real social and sometimes physical risks (storer, casey, & herrenkohl, ). this has led leone et al. ( ) to conclude, although bystander intervention programs have been identified as a promising prevention strategy for sexual aggression, a recent meta-analysis suggests they have a stronger impact on attitudes and behavioral intentions than on actual bystander behavior (katz & moore, ). the best evidence that bystander interventions are necessary but not sufficient is the fact that while bystander interventions have been the primary modality of prevention for decades, the rate of reported sex crimes on college campuses has continued to surge and bureau of justice statistics noted that campus sexual assaults jumped from about , in to , in (robers et al., ). there are consistently increasing reports of sexual assault complaints through the years despite the ongoing attempts at prevention. however, this increase in reporting may also signify greater access to knowledge on how to report. other approaches include “shotgun approaches,” such as rookie symposia or single-time viewings, which may be moving and momentarily eye-opening, but these approaches don’t change culture by themselves and can often fall out of the athletes’ consciousness shortly after the presentations. findings suggest that longer term interventions than are typically presented may be one important aspect of producing stable change over time (heppner et al., ). additionally, in their jcsp vol. , no. , #sporttoo: the #metoo movement in sport unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc review of college sexual assault prevention programs, vladutiu, martin, and macy ( ) found that effective sexual assault prevention programs are professional- facilitated, targeted at single-gender audiences, and offered at various times throughout students’ tenure at college. they are workshop-based or offered as classroom courses with frequent and long sessions. program content should include gender-role socialization, risk education, rape myths, rape attitudes, rape avoidance, men’s motivation to rape, victim empathy, dating communication, controlled drinking and/or relapse prevention (vladutiu, martin, & macy, ). when pairing the increasing sexual assault reports with the correspondingly large settlements in title ix lawsuits (most settlements are not made public), it becomes obvious that more comprehensive programs for sexual assault prevention are necessary. moreover, because there are factors in the athlete culture that may contribute to sexual assault, programming should be tailored to athlete populations while being mindful that there are heterogenous subcultures inside the sports world. admittedly, it is difficult to know how successful programs are because dependent variables such as decreases on measures with high face validity (such as rape supportive attitudes, male dominance/power, reporting that the subjects feel more equipped to stand up when witnessing a violent event, and victim empathy), do not reliably lead to a change in behavior. nonetheless, it is the opinion of the authors that there is a need for more aggressive models that focus on the accountability of the perpetrator. these are the conditions that led to the develop- ment of the abrams plan for violence prevention, assessment, and treatment (abrams, ). abrams plan for violence prevention, assessment, and treatment at the core of the abrams plan for violence prevention, assessment, and treatment is the risk needs responsibility (rnr) model developed by don andrews and james bonta in the late s, which has proliferated the forensic psychology world for the past twenty years. as mentioned earlier, the philosophy focuses on the fact that offenders have risk factors that contribute to their criminality and each risk factor has a treatment need to which it corresponds. finally, there is appreciation that not all risk factors have the same responsivity to treatment and that should be considered in the context of how treatment is formulated for offenders. abrams ( a, b) has spoken about the need to utilize the rnr model in athlete violence from a prevention, assessment, and treatment point of view. prevention must address the many factors that can contribute to athlete violence, including those often embedded and interwoven in the male athlete culture. bystander intervention is a minor part of the modelbecause the author appreciated, especially in team sport dynamics, a lesser status athlete is less likely to stand up to more influential seniors, especially if they are acting in a way that is overtly or covertly supported by the coaches and administrators above them. with a primary focus on culture change, interventions need to utilize both a top-down and bottom- up approach and include addressing the myth of false reports and victim prototype, the legalities of consent, drug and alcohol education, consequences, and the male athlete culture. jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc addressing the myth of false reports. often athletes believe allegations of false reports are common, so, when providing statistics to athletes about victimization, it is critical to include that false reports of sexual assault occur, according to fbi statistics, at the same rate as any other crime ( - %; lisak, gardinier, nicksa, & cote, ), which is very rare. it is far more likely that a victim will not come forward than make a false report ( %, rennison, ). this may be due to the isolation that accompanies the trauma, which is compounded by people not believing them or shaming them, as if they were willful participants in their victimization. if one adds the retraumatization that occurs in the administration of a sexual assault forensic examination (see also abrams, , p. ) and in cross- examination where rape shield laws have not protected victims, the likelihood of false report is again exceedingly unlikely in comparison to an unreported rape. addressing the myth of the victim prototype. when presenting on incidence rates, it is important to help male athletes understand that sexual assault affects them, as well. this is because given incidence rates, it is nearly impossible that they do not know someone who has been a victim; not to mention the much higher incidence of male victimization than people realize (bullock & beckson, ). understanding in this domain is in its infancy, as it is recognized that hazing in male sports has, at its core, victimization based upon power differentials, and sometimes that victimization is sexual (heil, martin, & kavussanu, ). male athletes may have been a victim of sexual assault during hazing rituals without realizing it. addressing the legalities of consent. the next component addressed in the rnr model is discussion about the legalities of consent. many people do not understand, appreciate or agree with what is necessary to constitute consent (witmer-rich, ). attention must be paid to statutory limitations that delineate how old an individual must be to legally give consent. this is also complicated by differences from state to state on how sex crimes are defined. issues of incapaci- tation, including being unconscious, mentally ill and/or intoxicated (by substances they ingested or those that were slipped into their drinks to incapacitate them) must be addressed. also, when discussing consent, it should be highlighted to audiences that some states have “forcible compulsion” components of their sexual assault statutes, whereby it is a sexual assault when a person complies with sexual activity for fear of being harmed if they do not comply; and that threat can be overt or implied. male athletes may be confused when they hear this, but it is critical for them to understand two things: . laws have shifted because the laws have done such a poor job of assisting victims and leading to prosecution and . regardless of whether one agrees with a law, one should still be educated about what the law is that must be followed. drug and alcohol education. this leads to the next content area: drug and alcohol education. there is little confusion that alcohol can be used as a weapon in an attempt to make women more susceptible to the advances of men. it is the reason why “ladies drink free” specials are seen at clubs and bars. there are some who have challenged that drug and alcohol education is akin to blaming the victim. drinking to the point of incapacitation can be poor judgment. however, poor judgment on the part of the victim does not justify the rape. encouraging individuals to exercise better judgment can also be advantageous. studies have jcsp vol. , no. , #sporttoo: the #metoo movement in sport unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc shown that athletes engage in frequent bouts of binge drinking (brenner & swanik, ; yusko, buckman, white, & pandina, ), pointing to the need for alcohol education. alcohol intoxication is not a defense that will be effective in avoiding culpability in sexual assault cases (go, ). addressing consequences. perhaps the penultimate conversation that could have lasting impact is discussing with young male athletes what prison is like. being able to explain the phenomenology of incarceration, such as a lack of the most basic freedoms, an ever-present threat of violence, extorsion, and guard indifference, can have eye-opening reactions. all in all, being able to share with young men what incarceration is really like, should they wind up there, is a powerful part of prevention programming. addressing male athlete culture. there is also the issue of the male athlete culture in general. the athlete culture, in and of itself, suppresses the willingness of athletes to discuss their emotional struggles and a stigma that seeking psychologi- cal help is a sign of weakness (wahto, swift, & whipple, ). often the misogynistic themes that can be seen in locker room talk objectifies females, idealizes female conquests, legitimizes rape, promotes homophobia and equates femininity with weakness (a poor performing male athlete may be teased for throwing like a girl or having some other feminine characteristic), or any theme of status, toughness, and anti-femininity (leone & parrott, ). this can be compounded by the belief that the coach/staff will fix any transgression an athlete or staff member engages in. however, we should also be mindful that our society (parents, coaches, athletes, etc.), continues to fuel the athletically talented indi- vidual with the idea that they have a different set of rules (coakley, ). this need for a culture shift exists far before the student-athlete understands what college athletics consists of; leaving universities responsible to remediate athlete entitlement. accountability should be demanded overtly at all levels of sport participation, but specific attention must be added to youth sports where the athletes may be more plastic and receptive (bavelier et al., ). when coaches and administrators, especially males, set the tone that abuse of women will absolutely not be tolerated, and levy swift consequences regardless of the talent level of the perpetrator, change may start. to incite change it is also important to pay attention to the attitudes that the male athletes embrace and how group dynamics can lead them to an epidemic of sexual acting out. groupthink (janis, ) can lead to deindividuation where someone who normally has a good set of morals and would not engage in deviant behavior, joins in the group attitude and takes part in collective, systematic misogyny. the presence of a misogynistic peer norm also decreases the likelihood of prosocial bystander intervention in males (leone & parrott, ). a crucial factor related to culture that needs to be highlighted and targeted for intervention is toxic (or hostile) masculinity (malamuth & thornhill, ; malamuth et al., ), which is a prevailing set of attitudes predicated upon male dominance, devaluation of women, misogyny, suppression of emotions and homophobia. it is the backbone of “locker room talk” (see also stripling ( ) for examples) and may lead boys, who often struggle with self-esteem, to question what it means to be a man. malamuth and colleagues posited in the confluence model of sexual aggression ( , ), that it is the combination of hostile jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc masculinity and impersonal sex that creates an explosive mixture that sets the stage for assault. it may be puzzling how, when these factors often converge on college campuses, this has not been a major focus of intervention. . .especially since the model has been around for over twenty years. again, hostile masculinity, may be further exacerbated by the male athlete culture that restricts allowing athletes to experience, process, and utilize their emotions (wahto et al., ). the concepts of respect, honor, integrity and loyalty are often used as hashtags rather than being qualities that are valued and nurtured. ultimately, sports administrators and coaches must demand accountability and high moral character. unfortunately, the teams, coaches and organizations often share culpability either because they knew about the problem and didn’t get the athlete the help they need, or they did not know and they should have. further, for many athletes, especially those coming from single-parent house- holds, coaches can provide the guidance and male role-modeling that they are not getting otherwise. there may be many coaches that are effectively saving these boys’ lives. however, there is compelling evidence in the incidence rates that male athletes are not consistently getting clear messages demanding respect for females and that there will be zero tolerance, regardless of the physical abilities of the athlete, for any deviance from this credo. athlete populations must be sensitive to the toxic masculinity that may be present in the male athlete culture and work to contradict it. severe punishment is necessary as a deterrent, but it is insufficient alone. better prevention and risk assessment is needed to determine the best course of action. because prevention does not require clinical acumen per se, it can be particularly powerful to have former/ current athletes work in presentations to change the culture. culture shift requires team leadership, coaches, and captains to carry the torch of acceptable behavior, with coaches potentially being fired if continually perpet- uating an adverse culture (stripling, ). playing sports, especially at the college and professional level, is a privilege, not a right. and athletics departments and sport organizations can do a better job of holding their coaches, staff, and student- athletes accountable. similarly, treatment of sexual and domestic violence also needs to be handled by professionals with expertise and training in such areas that may not be standard in all relevant graduate education. the importance of using a three-pronged approach: comprehensive prevention, risk assessment, and treat- ment, cannot be underestimated in moving toward reduction of sexual assault incidences and victims, and the world of athletics is no exception. summary violence is not a new phenomenon in american society and, not surprisingly, it is represented in the sport culture, as well. the #metoo movement has brought to the forefront the need to talk about victimization openly and honestly in sport; while also setting the stage for change. in conclusion, there is a great need to identify both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse and violence, with the hopes of delivering services to victims that have been historically under attended to, and to perpe- trators, with the hope of addressing their criminogenic factors. it is prudent then, to progress towards a three-prong approach to target sexual assault in athlete populations focusing upon comprehensive programming, risk jcsp vol. , no. , #sporttoo: the #metoo movement in sport unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc assessment and treatment for perpetrators. comprehensive programming that targets hostile masculinity, teaches the legalities of consent, provides drug and alcohol education, discusses incidence rates and consequences for all parties involved must supplant the proliferated bystander interventions which have not proven to lead to lasting change. culture shifts will require longer, ongoing interventions, rather than single session “shotgun” approaches. moreover, an appreciation that the skills required to change approaches to sexual assault prevention lay at the intersection of clinical, forensic and sport psychology is long overdue. we must bring experts with these backgrounds together to implement programmatic change. this must include consideration of the risk needs responsivity approach utilizing structured professional judgment to identify sport-involved-perpetrators (athletes, coaches and staff) and, when indicated, provide treatment to them to reduce their potential for 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( ). alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, and performance enhancers: a comparison of use by college student athletes and non- athletes. journal of american college health, ( ), – . pubmed id: doi: . /jach. . . - jcsp vol. , no. , abrams and bartlett unauthenticated | downloaded / / : am utc https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /j.avb. . . https://doi.org/ . /vio https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract https://doi.org/ . /jach. . . - everyone must be able to breathe: a plan to support diversity and inclusion in respiratory physiology editorial everyone must be able to breathe: a plan to support diversity and inclusion in respiratory physiology x melissa l. bates , , and karla k. v. haack department of health and human physiology, university of iowa, iowa city, iowa; department of internal medicine, university of iowa, iowa city, iowa; stead family department of pediatrics, holden comprehensive cancer center, university of iowa, iowa city, iowa; and department of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology, kennesaw state university, kennesaw, georgia submitted june ; accepted in final form june introduction from the chair of the american physiological society’s respiration section as a scientist, i (m.l.b.) have spent the past years thinking about how we breathe as a basic physiological pro- cess. now, i feel overwhelming grief when i hear “i can’t breathe” as a refrain from our fellow black americans. the topic that many of us have devoted our lives to studying is a basic human right that has been denied so casually to some, and this saddens and frustrates me. some scientists pride themselves on conducting their research as an apolitical en- deavor. we cannot, and indeed we must not, check our morals at the doors of our laboratories. many members of our society are active in addressing these injustices. i believe we can take additional steps to improve our inclusiveness and address unmet needs in physiology. i invited dr. karla haack, chair of the aps diversity and inclusion committee and member of the neural control and autonomic regulation section of aps, to coauthor this editorial. dr. haack and i collaboratively offer long-term steps that we can take as physiologists, personally as scientists, and, as the aps respiration section, to address health disparities and support our underrepresented colleagues professionally. we offer this plan together as a road map for us all to consider applying. addressing these issues is essential to promote the best sci- ence, address important health disparities, and secure the future of our section within the aps. steps that we can take as physiologists first and foremost, we are physiologists and are well-poised to address scientific questions that impact communities of color. underrepresented minorities, particularly black ameri- cans, have historically had poorer health outcomes, compared with white americans. most recently, we have learned that black adults and children have higher sars-cov- (i.e., covid- ) infection rates and poor outcomes ( , ). black americans also have higher incidences of and worse outcomes from air pollution exposure ( ), hypertension ( ), heart and lung transplantation ( , , ), asthma ( , ), sleep-disor- dered breathing ( , , ), prematurity ( , ), and blood and lung cancer ( , ), among others. contributors to poor out- comes are multifactorial and include socioeconomic status, poor access to treatment, and physiological differences. as physiologists, we can address these important questions in the same way that we have begun to rigorously address sex as a biological variable. we can collaborate with our colleagues who work in these areas. we can advocate for funding for these questions and make it a priority to review grants and manu- scripts in health disparities. we also must guarantee that all physiologists have an opportunity to engage in groundbreaking research. we can take care to cite our minority colleagues appropriately ( ), be vigilant in identifying implicit bias ( ), and remain open to policy initiatives that are aimed at address- ing the insidious racial disparities in grant and manuscript review ( ). steps that we can take personally educate yourself. we do not all see the world through one singular lens. we carry our own life experiences into our interactions with others. this is not a weakness as long as we recognize and embrace our differences. we should also ac- knowledge that this lens is often fallible, and the perceptions that we have of others can be inaccurate, or worse. the nih has more information on sociocultural factors including im- plicit bias, stereotype threat (when someone is in a situation for which there is a negative stereotype for a group/s that they belong), and more [see ( a)]. reflect on these sociocultural phenomena. have you experienced any of these? have you unknowingly inflicted them on someone else? if so, how can you do better next time? continually asking yourself these questions will keep you calibrated. while not a perfect instrument, we can also explore our own implicit biases. we hope that awareness brings motivation to be more inclusive in our words and actions [resources available ( )]. it is time to stop viewing racism as only explicit acts of villainy, and to recognize that we all exist within a system that reinforces racial bias ( ). books like richard rothstein’s the color of law ( ) and dr. ibram x. kendi’s how to be an anti-racist ( ) comprehensively explore how government policies have created our current system of inequality and how to be active in your refusal to perpetuate this inequality, respectively. be an advocate and contribute to local action plans: be willing to ask yourself difficult questions about the environ- ment around you. how many people of color are in your lab? department? college? on your aps committees? are you correspondence: m. l. bates (melissa-bates@uiowa.edu); k. k. v. haack (khaack@kennesaw.edu). am j physiol lung cell mol physiol : l –l , ; first published june , ; doi: . /ajplung. . . - / copyright © the american physiological societyhttp://www.ajplung.org l downloaded from journals.physiology.org/journal/ajplung at carnegie mellon univ ( . . . ) on april , . https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:melissa-bates@uiowa.edu mailto:khaack@kennesaw.edu advocating for these individuals by asking them to be partici- pants in scientific sessions, and not simply contacting them for additional volunteer work? have you communicated your willingness to act as a sponsor? are you advocating for their promotion and tenure? for major aps awards? are you ac- tively seeking new hires that contribute to and prioritize a diverse and inclusive workplace? for some of us, advocating for persons of color may require us to think a bit further than our immediate circle of colleagues. being involved as a spon- sor of a minority travel fellow awardee, and with our under- represented awardees and porter fellows at our section ban- quet, are examples of how we can widen our own networks, as well. underrepresented minority scientists are often burdened by service activities ( , ). listen carefully and also be willing to contribute to the hard work required to develop local action plans at your institution. encourage inclusivity: perhaps you recall the #actualliving- scientist campaign from a few years ago. you are an actual, living scientist. you may be the first scientist someone meets, so make it a positive experience. someone inspired each of us to be a scientist, so pay it forward. make your labs and classrooms inclusive and safe spaces where all trainees feel visible and valued. commit to discussing in lab meetings at least quarterly what you can do as a lab to promote inclusivity. vote: decisions at local, state, and national levels can either reinforce inequalities or attempt to fix them. remember that some americans have had their votes suppressed or otherwise hindered. never take yours for granted. steps that we can take as a section make a representative from the diversity and inclusion committee a full member of our steering committee. more than years ago, we changed our section’s standard operat- ing procedures so that the representative to the trainee advi- sory committee could participate as a voting member of our steering committee. this gave our trainees a voice, allowed them to share their concerns with leaders in the section, and provided a pathway to future leadership. regular input from our trainee members led to truly meaningful initiatives includ- ing the development of the marilyn merker memorial trainees highlights breakfast and endowment fund, and expansion of our trainee-focused research recognition awards program. our section has successfully trailblazed in our support of trainees, and other sections have followed our lead. in this same spirit, we must continue this trend. giving a voice and a seat at the table is not just our responsibility, it is also to the benefit of the section. in collaboration with the chair of the diversity and inclusion committee, we will change our standard operating procedures to make a representative of the diversity and inclusion committee a formal member of the steering com- mittee. as chair of the section, a priority for me (m.l.b.) is to carry this initiative to completion within the next year improve the pipeline to leadership. active participation in aps leadership is a documented career catalyst. the personal connections and networks built through society participation stimulate new collaborations, bring recognition through awards for service and leadership, and contribute to building a national and international reputation that is important for career ad- vancement. the society is also in need of a diverse leadership to contribute an abundant pool of creative ideas that navigate aps to an even more successful future. service at the national level often begins with service at the section level. we must, therefore, encourage the nomination of underrepresented mem- bers at the section level and commit to promoting them to national-level leadership. at the section level, we will involve everyone interested in serving our community. the diversity and inclusion committee is currently working on an initiative to make the application process for section steering committees and aps-wide committees more transparent so that interested applicants know the exact steps they should take to become more involved. become more involved in the martin frank diversity travel awards program and porter fellowship. a recent study pub- lished in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america (pnas) reported that while graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds perform more innovative work, they are less likely to have their work recognized ( ). we have the power to improve the visibility of the work of our underrepresented members. the martin frank diversity travel awards program offers opportunities for underrepresented, early career members to attend and network at the aps’s annual meeting. we must ensure that this program reaches its fullest potential by committing to engage with these outstanding scholars at the annual meeting, and then throughout their careers. as more senior faculty, many of us recognize our roles as mentors. some junior faculty may fail to recognize that they have also achieved a level of success that the next generation of scientists aspires to. any section mem- ber who is a level of training more advanced than the awardee can serve as a sponsor for a martin frank diversity travel fellow. importantly, faculty also serve as sponsors by writing letters of support, nominating trainees for awards, promoting their work, making connections with colleagues, and serving as collaborators and consultants. sponsorship is a critical compo- nent in career advancement. for underrepresented physiolo- gists to have the same access to sponsorship, members of the respiration section must commit to getting to know them, getting to know their science, and committing to their advance- ment. each member of our section should attend the martin frank diversity fellow activities at our annual meeting and convey their willingness to sponsor the careers of these phys- iologists. the annual section banquet is a highlight of our annual meeting. it is a time to reconnect with friends, to recognize the achievements of our members, and celebrate our award win- ners. we will commit to recognizing the achievements of our underrepresented members, and expressing our appreciation for the opportunity to celebrate with them. commit to platforms that promote inclusive participation. the #metoo movement has raised difficult questions about sex/gender inclusion in physiology. the aps has developed a code of conduct as a result. it outlines clear expectations and recourses for all. when we hear colleagues asking whether panels are gender diverse while planning our annual meeting, it warms our souls. in the same way, we must now actively, continuously, and systematically ask whether our panels are inclusive of underrepresented scientists. be bold enough to ask your colleagues about the diversity makeup of the session chairs and speakers before submitting a proposal for consider- ation. the respiration section will ask our joint program l ajp-lung cell mol physiol • doi: . /ajplung. . • www.ajplung.org downloaded from journals.physiology.org/journal/ajplung at carnegie mellon univ ( . . . ) on april , . committee representatives to report on the composition of every panel. we must also take care that our award nominee lists are diverse, including for our most prestigious section awards. by soliciting comroe lecture nominees through the aps awards website, we can encourage a more diverse nom- ination pool. we will solicit participation from all members to represent physiology publicly. this includes serving as an aps media contact and participating in journal-sponsored initia- tives, including podcasts and webinars. we want to make visible the faces of all types of physiologists. the section will also engage with journal editors, program committee chairs, and nominating committee chairs to develop concrete plans for inclusion. conclusions diversity is good for the aps’s scientific mission and it is good for the individual scientists who contribute to that mis- sion. by no means is this plan intended to provide a complete solution to problems that are rooted in centuries of inequality. these conversations have been going on for some time, and yet we have not made adequate progress. it is time to take effective actions and establish policies and cultures that have real im- pacts far into the future. progress is long overdue, and we must quicken our pace in addressing the inequalities that have not spared physiology. we remain committed to hearing every voice of every member and to learning how we can better support our underrepresented members. the aps is our scien- tific home and we remain hopeful that the members of our section are equally committed to making everyone feel safe and welcome here. i (m.l.b.) pledge to implement the com- ponents of this plan within the respiration section and to continue to reinforce these values within our membership. we hope that other sections will also adopt and expand this plan and we remain committed to working together. thank you for considering this plan. acknowledgments we are grateful to our many colleagues who provided feedback on this editorial. in particular, we recognize the contributions of our colleagues of color, who are often overwhelmed with service activities. grants this work was supported in part by american cancer society research scholar grant -rsg- - - -cce and the mezhir award for col- laborative research 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reformation, reformation anniversaries have become big business and the subject of much scholarly debate. this paper considers the question of anniversaries in relation to suppo- sedly marginal religious groups in the era of the reformation. what do they choose to commemorate? how did they fit into our accounts of religious change? and what does memory from the margins tells us? the paper argues that con- sidering memories and anniversaries amongst these communities allows us to reassess our categories of mainstream and marginal in relation to religious change in the early modern world and beyond, and to reconsider some of our narratives about the legacies of religious change. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - open birkbeck college, university of london, london, uk. correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to k.h. (email: katherine.hill@bbk.ac.uk) palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms () :,; mailto:katherine.hill@bbk.ac.uk www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms introduction was ‘luther year’, the -year anniversary of the posting of the ninety-five theses and the start of the reformation. ten years of preparation from the lutheran church and german authorities culminated in celebrations all over the world. from poetry slams to movies, panorama installations to conferences, heritage tours to a wave of publications, luther sparked intense intellectual and academic analysis about the meaning of religious change in early modern europe. (marshall, ; roth, , pp. – ). anniversaries and moments of memory activation invite us to consider what narratives are being shaped about the past and what narratives we as historians and scholars want to tell. remembrance inevitably sparks renewed debates about origins and outcomes, and we can learn much about a movement, nation or community at times of commemorative celebration. the first big -year reformation jubilee, that of luther’s birth, initiated a battle for ownership of his memory in a fractured germany in the dying days of the gdr (hoffmann, ; scott, ). from – , visitors might have experienced the nuanced differ- ences of nationally inflected exhibitions commemorating the anniversary of world war one in, for example, belgium, france, england, and germany. the -year anniversary of women’s right to vote and the suffragettes has struck chords with the contemporary #metoo movement. the luther anniversary was, it seemed to many, a chance to embrace a more ecumenical luther, though there have also been concerns about the way in which commemorations renewed a hero image of the reformer (evangelical church in germany, ; roth, ). but what if we did not focus on luther’s story? the years and will mark the anniversary of a different part of the reformation. these are the dates that the mennonite world conference (mwc) has picked to commemorate the origins of anabaptism. recalls the moment at which conrad grebel baptized george blaurock in zurich ‘to ignite a brand-new anabaptist movement which countered the movements of luther, zwingli and catholicism’. coincides with years since the appearance of the schleitheim articles, a statement of ana- baptism’s separation from the world, and the martyrs’ synod, a meeting which established a principle of mission. (it earned its name because many of its principle participants died soon after). the significance of these dates is clear, but any such immediate connection is sidestepped on the front page of the mwc’s website for the anniversary which focuses on the message of what has been titled ‘renewal ’. renewal was launched in the same year as the -year anniversary of the lutheran refor- mation and is presented as a chance for ecumenical discussion within and beyond the mennonite church, with ten years of events designed to invigorate anabaptist faith globally. these events are not likely to be on most people’s radar and will not spark the same rash of publishing as luther’s . nor are the events uncontroversial amongst mennonites some of whom question whether these anniversaries are an appropriate or rele- vant celebration of mennonite identity (goossen, b). for mennonite communities and mennonite scholars the question of anniversaries has stoked intense debate about the historical nar- ratives that surround these public rituals of commemoration. (roth, , pp. – ; osborne, ). considering the anni- versary celebrations and controversies of the lesser known part of the reformation story, however, is also a chance for reformation scholars to revisit some of our accounts of religious change and its legacies. what if we switched our perspective to those who were supposed to be on the edges of the story? what do the debates within the mennonite community reveal about these memories and anniversaries more broadly? what new questions or old problems might we consider by examining remembrance from the edges of the reformations? memory on the margins makes us reconsider the centre. the mennonite church, which is coordinating the -year anniversary, has its roots in anabaptism. this reforming move- ment of the sixteenth century rejected infant baptism along with many of the conventional structures of society, such as swearing oaths and serving in the military (stayer, ; goertz, ). anabaptism is not well integrated into reformation histories. histories of the radical or ‘left-wing’ of the reformation remain understudied and marginalized from the mainstream historio- graphical scholarship on the reformation, and despite a spate of histories produced in the s and s on early modern ana- baptism, anabaptist studies have not seen the same energy since. new waves of scholarship have started to redress this problem, recognizing the fundamentally problematic label of the ‘radical reformation’ and a group of new researchers are spearheading moves to bring anabaptist histories into the digital age with the open access website, anabaptist historians. scholarship in the last fifteen years has seen a handful of important monographs on anabaptist and mennonite histories (driedger, ; räisänen- schröder, ; monge, ; hill, ; goossen, a). but the scholarly imbalances and the division between mainstream and radical persist, especially for the pre-modern era. not everyone agrees that anabaptist studies are an endangered enclave (dipple, ; p. ). anabaptism does have a rich historiography, and there are mennonite presses and journals, notably the mennonite quarterly review and journal of menno- nite studies, which are energetic and stimulating fora. however, the specialist focus of this publishing can also reiterate the boundaries separating scholarship. research is often produced in confessional contexts, and though confessional history in itself is not inherently problematic, i would agree with academics who stress that there has been a return to confessionalised scholarship in reformation studies. the anniversary sharpened this in many cases, despite its claims to ecumenism, and has reinforced a sense of separatism. even sources may be divided. a special series exists for documents on the anabaptist reform movement (with the tactical name change from the pejorative ‘wiedertäufer’ to ‘täufer’ in the late s). so, while students of the european reformation may have a week on radical anabaptists in the sixteenth century, few courses touch on much beyond this or examine the longer-term traditions that evolved from non- conformist impulses. the distorting nature of this scholarship has broader impli- cations. it matters that anabaptists have been on the edges of historiography since it is partly a symptom and consequence of on one of the biggest, most problematic debates in reformation historiography: confessionalisation (brady, ). reformation scholars have for some time sought ways to write histories which go beyond the confessionalisation thesis which ties long-term narratives of religious change into accounts of state, discipline, and institutions. confessionalization neglects alternatives to the model of institutional faith, faiths often related to national identity and larger historical narratives of the rise of nationalism, and thus it omits a fundamental and long-lasting element of confessional change (lotz-heumann, ). moments of mem- ory and celebration, therefore, are a chance for academics to address these questions. anniversaries bring to the fore big debates about origins and futures, as well as the place of com- munities in the contemporary world, and so often implicate national and international institutions. though there are ques- tions about its success, a major emphasis of the luther commemoration, for example, was to attempt to move away from national and confessionalised narratives and embrace a more ecumenical vision for lutheranism’s future in the modern comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms world (lwf and pcpcu, ). the run of reformation anniversaries can stimulate conversations which re-invigorate scholarship. anabaptists memories there are over million anabaptists in the world, and the mwc -year celebrations for many are a remembrance of those things that characterize the collective memory of their commu- nities—an emphasis on the separation between church and state, a history of persecution and martyrdom, freedom of religion, liberty of conscience, and elective entry into the church. it is also seen as a chance to assess and reinvigorate mennonite identity in the contemporary world (roth, ). clearly memory matters to mennonites (and their close cousins the amish and hutterites). for numerous mennonites, there exists a deep sense of connec- tion to their early modern past, its martyrs and heroes. but whilst the / centenary will be a celebration coordinated by the mwc, the reality is of course that cultures of memory amongst anabaptist descendants go far beyond the official celebration and central structures. the attitudes which form the global backdrop to the planned commemorations are rooted not in national churches and state institutions, but family, communal and personal memories which have preserved the sense of the past and collective remembrance. mennonites, amish and hutterites all migrated great distances from the sixteenth century onwards. this was not always the result of persecution and exile, as a traditional anabaptist narrative might suggest, but anabaptists undeniably traveled far. communities moved from northern and central europe to russia and ukraine, migrated to the americas, or undertook confessional work in india, south east asia, and africa. as people move, memories travel with them. indeed, for mennonites, amish and hutterites, memory was a critical tool for bridging the gap between communities dispersed across wide areas and separated from society in a variety of ways. memory is central to diasporic identity (agnew, ; baronian, et al., , pp. – ). anabaptist memories existed in the records kept by their own churches, family possessions or per- sonal recollections which bound the community together. men- nonites in contemporary manitoba or kansas, for example, have objects, documents and shared narratives which trace cross- generational diasporic histories in europe, russia and beyond. we can only follow these histories and memories if we look beyond conventional institutional and geographical boundaries, since the very core of mennonite, hutterite and amish identity is in the communities of dispersion which stretched across regions. memory in these diasporic communities could not tell the same story as institutional churches. lutheran memories had an inclusive message in which looked to a global lutheran culture but also reasserted the dominance of wittenberg. calvi- nist memories are focused on geneva. anabaptist memories have been of a more disparate nature, though the mwc’s focus on and the swiss origins of the movement has caused con- troversy by centring anabaptist histories on one location deter- mined by a central committee. but why does it matter to think about this type of memory? is it not just one more anniversary, one more strand of the legacy of the reformation era? first, it reveals issues concerning con- temporary mennonite identity in relation to an early modern past and a diasporic identity. debates arose whether the date for a mennonite anniversary should be or , or indeed whether should have been the date for celebration. the result is ten years of renewal announced in , culminating in but with a celebration of in switzerland along the way. deeper unease amongst some members of the community has focused on the way in which any anniversary of this kind reinforces a monogenetic heritage which excludes the global church and diversity, and even alludes to a form of european ethnic purity (goossen, b). the monogenesis versus poly- genesis debate about anabaptist origins is long-standing but seems not to have died (stayer et al., ). an official celebration which gives one line of interpretation and reinforces one nor- mative view of anabaptist and mennonite heritage, rather than recognize all the alternatives and global perspectives, is proble- matic. it is possibly in dialogue with these concerns that africa is a suggested location for the th mennonite world conference assembly (roth, , p. ). some counterpoint views to the and dates also argue that the anabaptist church did not originate in the sixteenth century since it was a continuation and successor to the apostolic church of christ (roth, , pp. – ; goossen, b). this was the line taken by the two most famous anabaptist historical works, the seventeenth-century martyrs mirror and the hutterite great chronicle. such a view, however, can be equally proble- matic and elide the constant and shifting creative power of memory formation and the way in which recollections have been reinvented across the centuries. there are, too, always political questions at stake in commemorations (goossen, b). men- nonites, not the amish or hutterite, are driving the -year anniversary, but it is presented as celebration for all anabaptists. what does it tell us that this celebration matters most for the better integrated and politically active part of the anabaptist legacy, and that this is intertwined with institutional and con- fessional narratives? anniversaries after all always serve some purpose, and also coincides with the -year anniversary of the foundation of the mennonite central committee, so some would argue that this has more to do with institutional and political positioning than organic commemoration (goossen, b). we should remember that the official celebrations are only one part of memory; we have to look beyond to broader memory cultures, to individuals and local communities. memory is the aggregation of these narratives, as much as central cele- brations. the intense debate amongst different anabaptist tra- ditions is a stark reminder of the power and importance of diasporic memory, but also the need to recover alternatives to centralized commemorations. scholarship should consider how memory cultures themselves are created and recreated, why and when, and in what contexts. centenaries and anniversaries of origins, celebrated centrally, are a relatively modern phenomenon. marked the first major mennonite anniversary when the new mennonite world con- ference convened in basel and there do not seem to have been parallel events in or before. earlier celebrations and asso- ciated controversies existed. in various mennonite com- munities celebrated the death of menno simons and a call was issued in by august heinrich neufeld, pastor of the iber- sheim mennonite congregation in rhine-hesse, for ‘every men- nonite congregation in the old world and the new’ to plan for the date. the proposed celebrations sparked considerable con- troversy which revealed the fault lines in nineteenth-century mennonite society (roth, ; urry, ). thus, historians should be sensitive to the way in which memories are chosen, contested, and narrated, how they vary and shift, and how they exist at different levels. for specific communities, individuals, and families, it might be personal or local commemorations which held the most weight, and memory cultures had local inflections. mennonites in chortitza (zaporizhia oblast, ukraine) erected monuments in the late nineteenth century to figures of their past, to johann bartsch and jakob höppner, the men who had nego- tiated the details of the settlement for mennonite migration from prussia at the end of the eighteenth century (urry, ). research needs to understand the way in which memory has been palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - comment palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms constructed at local, regional and familial levels, as well as focusing on global and international commemorations. second, i would argue that by interrogating anabaptist memories as this anniversary approaches, we can uncover novel trajectories for the long-lasting legacies of the reformation throughout the world and in so doing address some of the fun- damental debates of the reformation era. it opens up new per- spectives on both our histories of non-conformist groups in the early modern world, and the implications for how religious change has shaped global culture. the debates over anniversaries have sharpened questions of the interaction between the refor- mation legacies of anabaptism and lutheranism (and other tra- ditions) and brought to the fore the continued global power of these anabaptists networks of memory. such trends undermine the sense of marginality and separateness that has shaped ana- baptist historiography, but also call into question broader reli- gious narratives which still seem to rest on notions of confessionalisation. the nature of the relationship between these different religious communities and the -year celebrations matters, and any student of the reformation needs to understand those labeled both marginal and mainstream. it is only from the margin though that we can rewrite the centre. until we question the narratives of the marginal, we will be forever locked into the modes of persecuted and persecutor. anniversaries do not always help in this reassessment since they have in some ways reasserted confessional narratives and nor- mative divisions. in , as preparations for were getting under way, the lutheran world fellowship offered an official apology to anabaptists for past persecutions. the divided mem- ory cultures sought rapprochement but also in many ways reit- erated division (roth, , – ). such an event reinforces normative mennonite self-definitions of the confession as a per- secuted minority without asking how this cultural narrative evolved, or what happened when communities or individuals chose not to follow this path. looking from the edges, we can see that anabaptists were not always a persecuted minority, they were not marginal to histories, and they did not always search for the peaceful, quiet way (urry, ). and looking from the centre, we have neglected the impor- tance of supposedly marginal groups in our long histories of the reformation. anabaptist descendants are a visible presence across much of america. nearly every north american, it seems, has a mennonite, hutterite or amish story. they have seen the buggies, been to the farms, or visited the churches. yet these communities still seem a curiosity. amish communities in pennsylvania, for example, are a tourist attraction more than a subject of scholarly discussion. amish, hutterites and more conservative mennonites of the old order tradition do not necessarily sit easily in our narratives of historical development and modernity. for those from outside the tradition, they seem an outdated relic of an older time, but their existence problematizes our notions of reforma- tion legacies. it becomes difficult to argue, for example, that the unintended effect of the reformation was secularization (gregory, ). in a series of six essays, gregory proposed that the protestant refor- mation questioned authority in ways which led to a multiplicity of competing claims to truth and this resulted ultimately in the privatization of faith, the power of the state over church, and secularization. but there are problems with this account. if we are to write narratives which escape the pitfalls of a return to con- fessionalisation but also appreciate reformation legacies on their own terms we have to be able to understand the dynamics of the communities of pennsylvanian amish or old order mennonites in belize. and we also have to be able to contain accounts of mennonites who are integrated into modern canada, hutterites who reject televisions and much modern media but embrace the best farming technologies, or amish communities who live separate lives but actively engage in a form of tourism which plays on their traditionalism. such solutions do not represent secular- ization necessarily but alternative models for recreating faith and adapting. for gregory, division has shattered a more universal sense of faith but for mennonites, for example, the broken body of the church can also be a symbol of the quest for faithfulness and of following the right path which diverts from the main- stream (roth, , p. ). splintering may have led to diversity, but it can also provide energy. furthermore, a sense of secular- izing decline can also be seen as a particularly western-centric narrative, and reformation legacies must be able to appreciate the explosion of christianity in the global south. mennonite memory brings into sharper focus other issues about reformation memory and the need to look beyond the official celebrations. focusing on luther in a way which reinforces the norms of the mainstream and the marginal absents a major and important part of the reformation legacies in eur- opean, eurasian and north american history, and beyond into africa, japan, india, and korea. deeply rooted identity and multifaceted memories have shaped anabaptist communities and cultures across the world: from prussia militarism to tsarist expansion, from the american west to the world wars, from south american colonies of mennonites to the power of contemporary protestant churches in the global south, even to questions of how mennonites should respond to trump. understanding the geo- graphical spread of anabaptist groups and the way in which their communities evolved across the diaspora opens up other archives, resources and memory cultures. new archives, new sources and new regions all offer promising concrete areas for research on reformation legacies. first, scholarship can look to understudied or neglected archives and records which provide alternative histories to accounts of confessional change. whilst mennonite archives in north america, for example, are an important resource for scholars of mennonite history and communities themselves, they remain little studied by reformation historians more generally. yet, there is a wealth of material in the church and family fonds which continues to come into these repositories. there are sur- prising finds in archives across europe and beyond, such as the histories of mennonite communities in regional polish archives or the church books of mennonites, quakers and other groups that have made their way into german state archives. a com- prehensive understanding of the complex archival traces would allow a much richer account of the long legacies of the reformation. second, we must think about the diverse way in which memory was enacted and histories recorded. this might be by paying closer attention to the way in archives themselves and their construction shape memory. the contents, materials and orga- nization of archives reflect power relations (stoler, ) and scholars have started to write the social history of archives (ketelaar, ). unpicking these archival histories, such as the reasons why mennonites have come to create their own archives, will in turn shed light on the history of confessional memory and memory making. furthermore, focusing on the transmission and function of memory could lead us to think about the very dif- ferent memory cultures amongst all those included amongst anabaptists. the memory practices of mennonites who have created extensive records differ from the old order amish who eschew formal archiving but rely on family and oral histories. the implications of different practices of recalling pasts and the power relations between different memory cultures is essential to the construction of more dynamic narratives of religious cultures. third, we might think about the way in which memory and confessional legacies were enacted across different media. comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms discussions of reformation anniversaries have tended to focus on written narratives, documents and recorded history. but memory and connections to the past exist in other ways. how did objects function as embodiments of tangible connections with a past? how did the landscape and environment tell stories of connection? mennonites draw on memories of the great chortitza oak which grew in ukraine where mennonites settled in the late eighteenth century but whose acorns have traveled across the atlantic. considering material and environmental sources, as well as written documents will help us understand legacies in diachronic and global perspective or the ways in which communities negotiate their interaction with the contemporary world. finally, scholarship can think about memory, community and identity in areas which have not been part of more conventional narratives of reformation legacies. this means uncovering new trajectories for communities who are not part of the traditional accounts of survival, such as mennonite who migrated down to the black sea from russia and ukraine rather than crossing the atlantic. more broadly, it means focusing on global histories of mennonites and protestantism in general, particularly in the global south, exploring questions of community, race and place in a post-colonial era. these new avenues for research will help reveal religious communities which existed beyond institutional and national structures and the problematic way in which big anniversaries reinforce grand narratives. paying more attention to the local and the individual has the effect conversely of broadening memories across seas and generations. the contentious / cele- bration not only provokes questions about anabaptist history but demands we find more nuanced ways of thinking about memory, the ways it is embedded in language, landscape, and people, and the traces it leaves. conclusions i would like to finish with one example of this power of memory at the level of the individual and the family which also touches on the way in which it expands our global and cross-period histories of religious change. in the mennonite archives in bethel college in north newton, kansas there are boxes which contain family papers donated to the archive for safe-keeping. papers inside have not been categorized into type and are often an eclectic mix of items preserved and curated by the family over generations. opening these folders, i was given a snapshot into the way in which histories, church, and communities are built on individual and family memories but also the importance of placing these in the context of globally connected communities. these collections are not the usual stuff of institutional or national memory. however, precisely because they are personal and have been kept by groups and families on the move, they embody the connected communities of dispersion which are at the core of mennonite identity. one folder has a tiny notebook, meticulously translating and transcribing the daily record kept by their forebears who traveled from russia, russian passports, a handwritten book of early nineteenth century remedies for colic and much spider bites. the jacob f. and marie banman fond contains beautiful eighteenth century fraktur examples, modern hand-written genealogies and family record and copy books. like their owners, these objects had migrated across land and sea, and the juxtaposition of documents which record lives lived across centuries and borders encapsulates the connections, memories and emotions that sustained mennonite communities. these collections of memories go far beyond the -year anniversary and remind us of the power of the local and the glocal (the term coined to express the interplay between the global and the local) in communities bound together by remembrance (freist, , p. ). whether or not mennonites celebrate the -year centenary in or , their debates reveal the global and diachronic power of anabaptist memories, and these memoryscapes offer not only ways of thinking about mennonite identity but broader memory cultures of early modernity and reformation history. memories of the reformations and their global legacies must be understood in cross-confessional contexts. scholarship can use these comparative histories of memories and legacies as a way out of the debates of marginal versus mainstream and con- fessionalisation to consider questions of global protestantisms, long term legacies, and concepts of diaspora and exile. anniver- saries always offer us a chance to rethink histories. in analyzing the various reformation anniversaries, it is not a question of ‘memory wars’—whose anniversary we should be celebrating, whose reformation was better, or which had more positive or long-lasting effects. rather scholars can take the opportunity of these discussions over commemorations to diversify our concepts of the reformation and its legacies. received: january accepted: july notes for information on the variety of celebrations see the official luther website. https://www.luther .de/en/ /reformation-anniversary/. german plans to spend relatively little on centenary events compared to the uk and france were criticized. see https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ / germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary. an example of a more subtle and low-key exhibition was that at the neues museum weimar, ‘krieg der geister: weimar als symbolort deutscher kultur vor und nach ’. http://mennoworld.org/ / / /the-world-together/anabaptisms- th- anniversary-is- -not- /. see also https://themennonite.org/daily-news/how-to- celebrate- -years/. https://mwc-cmm.org/renewal . https://anabaptisthistorians.org/. this is the series quellen zur geschichte der täufer. see for example the joint statement by the lutheran world federation and the vatican. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/ / / / a.html. a booklet was produced to recognize this by the lwf and the pontifical council for promoting christian unity, from conflict to communion: lutheran-catholic common commemoration of the reformation in ( ). the latest triennial census conducted by the mwc counted , , members as of november . this includes various groups such as the mennonites, the amish, and hutterites. this was the first known anabaptist confession written by michael sattler. references agnew v ( ) diaspora, memory and identity: a search for home. university of toronto press, toronto baronian m-a, besser s, jansen y ( ) diaspora and memory: figures of dis- placement in contemporary literature, arts and politics. rodopi, amsterdam and new york brady jr. ta ( ) confessionalizaiton—the career of a concept. in: headley jm, hillerband hj (eds) confessionalization in europe, – : essays in honor and memory of bodo nischan. ashgate, aldershot dipple g ( ) the radical reformation will not be televised. sixt century journal ( ): – driedger md ( ) obedient heretics: mennonite identities in lutheran hamburg and altona in the confessional age. ashgate, aldershot evangelical church in germany (ekd) perspectives : writings on the reformation ( ). evangelische kirche in deutschland, hanover freist d ( ) lost in time and space? glocal memoryscapes in the early modern world. in: kuijpers e, pollmann j, müller j, van der steen j (eds) memory before modernity: practices of memory in early modern europe. brill, leiden, p. – goossen b ( a) chosen nation: mennonites and germany in a global era. princeton university press, princeton goossen b ( b) why years?: a critique of anabaptism’s upcoming anni- versary celebration. mennonite life palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - comment palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms https://www.luther .de/en/ /reformation-anniversary/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary http://mennoworld.org/ / / /the-world-together/anabaptisms- th-anniversary-is- -not- / http://mennoworld.org/ / / /the-world-together/anabaptisms- th-anniversary-is- -not- / https://themennonite.org/daily-news/how-to-celebrate- -years/ https://themennonite.org/daily-news/how-to-celebrate- -years/ https://mwc-cmm.org/renewal https://anabaptisthistorians.org/ https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/ / / / a.html https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/ / / / a.html www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms goertz h-j ( ) the anabaptists, trans. trevor johnson. routledge, london and new york gregory b ( ) the unintended reformation: how a religious revolution secu- larized society. belknap press of harvard university press, cambridge, mass and london hill k ( ) baptism, brotherhood, and belief in reformation germany: ana- baptism and lutheranism, – . oxford university press, oxford hoffmann sp ( ) the gdr, luther and the german question. rev polit ( ): – ketelaar e ( ) prolegomena to a social history of dutch archives. in: blok a, lucassen j, sanders h (eds) a usable collection: essays in honour of jaap kloosterman on collecting social history. amsterdam university press, amsterdam lotz-heumann u ( ) the concept of “confessionalization”: a historiographical paradigm in dispute. mem y civón : – lwf (the lutheran world federation and pcpcu (the pontifical council for promoting christian unity)) ( ) from conflict to communion: lutheran- catholic common commemoration of the reformation in . evangelische verlagsanstalt: leipzig and bonifatius marshall p ( ) : martin luther and the invention of the reformation. oxford university press, oxford monge m ( ) des communauteś mouvantes: les societ́eś des frer̀es chret́iens en rheńanie du nord: juliers, berg, cologne vers – . libraire droz, geneva osborne t ( ) “golden age” or “global age”: commemorating anabaptists past, present and future. mennonite life räisänen-schröder p ( ) ketzer im dorf: visitationsverfahren, täuferbe- kämpfung und lokale handlungsmuster im frühneuzeitlichen württemberg. universitatsverlag konstanz, konstanz roth jd ( ) how to commemorate a division? reflections on the th anniversary of the lutheran reformation and its relevance for the global anabaptist mennonite church today. mennon q rev : – scott t ( ) the luther quincentenary in the gdr. ger hist ( ): – stayer jm ( ) anabaptists and the sword. new edition of edition. wipf and stock, eugene stayer jm, depperman k, packull wo ( ) from monogenesis to polygenesis: the historical discussion of anabaptist origins. mennon q rev : – stoler al ( ) along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial com- mon sense. princeton university press, princeton and oxford urry j ( ) mennonites, politics, and peoplehood: europe-russia-canada, to . university of manitoba press, winnipeg urry j ( ) memory: monuments and the marking of pasts. conrad grebel rev ( ) acknowledgements thanks to proofreaders in the early modern work in progress group and james urry for references and discussions on mennonites. additional information competing interests: the author declares no competing interests. reprints and permission information is available online at http://www.nature.com/ reprints publisher’s note: springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /. © the author(s) comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms http://www.nature.com/reprints http://www.nature.com/reprints http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / www.nature.com/palcomms 	memories from the margins? anniversaries, anabaptists and rethinking reformations 	introduction 	anabaptists memories 	conclusions 	references 	references 	acknowledgements 	competing interests 	acknowledgements issn: - vol. , no. , side – https://doi.org/ . /sjvd. kontakt: inger vagle inger.vagle@oslomet.no publisert . . kjønn på dagsordenen et ikketema i yrkesfaglærerutdanningene? kari h. hansen , grete haaland , ellen møller , inger vagle . norges teknisk naturvitenskapelige universitet – ntnu . oslomet – storbyuniversitetet . etterstad videregående skole abstrakt hensikten med denne artikkelen er å sette kjønn på dagsordenen i yrkesfaglærerutdanningene. som lærerutdannere ønsker vi å belyse hvordan perspektivet på kjønn og mangfold ivaretas i planverket for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene i tre fylker i norge, samt hvordan yrkesfaglærere kan bidra til å skape bedre kjønnsbalanse i yrkesopplæringen. mangel på reell valgfrihet i yrkesopplæring og arbeidsliv er fremdeles en samfunnsutfordring. det er i liten grad lagt til rette for at verken jenter eller gutter kan være minoriteter i yrkesopp- læringen og i arbeidslivet. #metoo har ført til økt åpenhet rundt kjønnsubalanse og har satt denne problematikken på dagsordenen også i det yrkesfaglige utdanningsfeltet. i artikkelen besvares følgende problemstilling: hvordan kan kjønn som minoritet ivaretas i yrkesopplæringen? artikkelens utgangspunkt er en tematisk analyse av resultater fra en dialogkonferanse for fagar- beidere, lærere og rådgivere i videregående opplæring, samt nasjonale føringer og lokale planer som legger føringer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene. datagrunnlaget fra dialogkonferansen er basert på deltagernes egne erfaringer med yrkesopplæringen. de politiske føringene om arbeid for bedre kjønnsbalanse i utdanning og arbeidsliv videreføres i svært liten grad i planer for praktisk- pedagogisk utdanning for yrkesfag (ppuy) og treårig yrkesfaglærerutdanning (yfl). dette kan føre til at yrkesfaglærere utvikler liten bevissthet rundt utfordringer knyttet til dette feltet, samt hvordan de profesjonsfaglig kan håndtere disse. funnene drøftes i forhold til relevant teori og nyere kjønnsforskning på feltet. emneord: fagopplæring, yrkesfaglærerutdanning, kjønnsbalanse, kjønn, likestilling mailto:elin.morud@ntnu.no sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen innledning det er politisk enighet om at kjønnsskjevheten i yrkesfagene er en utfordring. aktuell forskning og nasjonale føringer understreker også at det er vesentlig med helhetlige tiltak for å kunne endre dette i hele utdanningsløpet, fra rekruttering til yrkesfaglige utdanninger, og fram til ferdig fagarbeidere (nou : ; nou : ; jørgensen, ; vagle & møller, ). sett i et minoritets- perspektiv, med hensyn til identitetskonstruksjon, har ikke ungdom reell rett til frie valg av yrker eller frihet til mangfold i arbeidslivet når minoriteten er under prosent (kanter, ; moi, ; winkler & degele, ; orupabo, ; vagle & møller, ). minoritet viser i denne sammen- heng til begge kjønn når de er underrepresentert i et utdanningsprogram eller yrke. norsk arbeidsliv har et stort behov for arbeidskraft, spesielt innen yrkesfag (ssb, ). yrkes- fag betyr her de fagene som krever yrkesfaglig kompetanse på videregående nivå og som dokumen- teres gjennom fag-/svennebrev eller vitnemål etter treårig utdanning i yrkesfaglige utdannings- program. eksempler er rørlegger, elektriker, helsefagarbeider og blomsterdekoratør. i st. meld ( – ) og st. meld ( – ) om likestilling trekker begge meldingene fram gutter og jenters kjønnstypiske utdanningsvalg som en utfordring. det er ti yrkesfaglige programområder. de «fire store»; helse- og oppvekstfag (ho), bygg- og anleggsteknikk (ba), elektrofag (el) og teknikk og industriell produksjon (tip) har alle en kjønnsmajoritet på prosent eller mer. andre fagområder er mindre og mer variable (utdanningsdirektoratet, ). i regjeringens politiske plattform fra står det at de skal stimulere til at flere skal velge utradisjonelle utdanninger og karrierer for å bidra til et mindre kjønnsdelt arbeidsliv, eksempelvis ved å gjøre ordninger som «menn i helse» og «jenter og teknologi» til landsdekkende ordninger (granavold-plattformen, ). forskningsleder liza reisel ved institutt for samfunnsforskning uttalte i aftenposten . november at framtidens arbeidsliv ikke blir mindre kjønnsdelt av seg selv. forskning på feltet tyder på at substansiell endring ikke kommer av seg selv, spesielt ikke i de yrkesgruppene der det vil være stort behov for yrkesfaglig utdannet arbeidskraft i framtidens arbeidsmarked (ssb, ). yrkesfaglige utvalg for bygg-, elektro- og industrifag har i sin rapport til kunnskaps- departementet (kd) utfordret nasjonale myndigheter med krav om å sette inn økte ressurser for å bidra til økt rekruttering av jenter til bygg-, elektro-, industri- og transportfagene (utdanningsdirektoratet, ). det framheves i rapporten at norge har det mest kjønnsdelte arbeidsmarkedet i europa, og at bedriftene innenfor fagfeltene bygg, elektro, industri og transport stadig taper verdifull rekruttering og dermed snevrer inn jenters valgmuligheter. utvalget anbefaler derfor at: ) prosjektet jenter i bil- og elektrofag utvides til å omfatte industri- og transportfagene, ) det innføres et ekstra tilskudd til bedrifter som tegner lærekontrakt med jenter i bygg-, elektro-, industri- og transportfagene og fører dem til fagprøve, ) i rapporten oppfordres kunnskaps- departementet til å utarbeide en nasjonal plan for å øke rekrutteringen av jenter til bygg-, elektro-, industri- og transportfagene (udir, , s. ). ung i dag-utvalget, i regi av barne-, ungdoms- og familiedirektoratet, påpeker i sin rapport kjønnsdelte utdannings- og yrkesvalg, at det har vært lang mer individorientert enn systemorientert forskning innen feltet kjønnsdelt utdannings- og yrkesvalg (reisel, skorge & uvaag, ). sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen nasjonalt lovverk, eksempelvis likestillingsloven ( ) og opplæringsloven ( ) i norge, er tydelig knyttet til kjønnsbalanse og likestilling i samfunnet. i denne studien retter vi oppmerksomheten mot gutters og jenters erfaringer med å være kjønnsminoriteter i yrkesutdanningene, samt hvordan yrkesfaglærerutdanningene ivaretar kjønn som minoritet gjennom planverket. gjennom tematisk analyse belyser studien nasjonale krav for arbeid med bedre kjønnsbalanse i lærerutdanningene. studien undersøker også hvordan innholdet i lokale planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningen (studieplaner/programplaner for ppuy og treårig yrkesfaglærerutdanning) ivaretar de disse føringene. yrkesfaglærere må være i stand til å ivareta og utøve verdier som likeverd, likestilling, medvirkning og medansvar i sin praksis. denne kompetansen skal gjøre yrkesfaglærerne i stand til å praktisere tilpasset opplæringen for alle elever, deriblant kjønn som minoritet, både i klasserom, verksted og i bedriftsopplæringen i yrkesfaglig fordypning. utdanningsinstitusjonene har et spesielt ansvar for å sikre at yrkesfaglærere innehar denne kompetansen. problemstilling: hvordan kan kjønn som minoritet ivaretas i yrkesopplæringen? forskningsspørsmål: . hvordan ivaretas kjønn som minoritet, likestilling og kjønnsbalanse i nasjonalt og lokalt planverk for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene? . hvilke erfaringer har unge fagarbeidere, og deres lærere og rådgivere med læringsmiljøet knyttet til kjønnsminoritet i yrkesopplæringen? yrkesfaglærerutdanningene i denne artikkelen innbefatter den treårige yrkesfaglærerutdanningen (yfl) og praktisk-pedagogisk utdanning for yrkesfag (ppuy). teoretiske perspektiver kjønnsbalanse i utdanning og arbeidsliv har lenge vært og er fremdeles en sentral del av norsk likestillingspolitikk. etter at ordningen med fylkesansvarlige for likestilling opphørte på slutten av -tallet, har fokuset på kjønnsbalanse i stor grad vært rettet mot høgskole- og universitets- utdanninger (guldvik & opsal, ). jenter innen de tekniske fagene i norge i dag utgjør ca. fire – fem prosent, og gutter innen helse- og oppvekstfagene ca. prosent. forskning viser at når en minoritet er under prosent, vil det hele tiden være en selvforsterkende effekt som hindrer andre å søke seg til gruppa på grunn av kjønnsulikhet. det medfører at valg av yrke er ikke reelt fritt. en minoritet på under ti prosent vil i tillegg bli utsatt for en rolle som «token» eller merket og være utsatt for ulike mekanismer i samspillet mellom minoritet og majoritet. slike mekanismer er ikke ulikt berit aas sin beskrivelse av hersketeknikker, som i sin ytterste konsekvens kan være seksuell trakassering, og som bidrar til å skyve kjønnsminoriteter ut av skole- eller arbeidsmiljøet (kanter, ; aas, ; moi ; winkler & degele, ; orupabo, ; vagle & møller, ). et interseksjonelt perspektiv på identitetskonstruksjon kan belyse de usynlige barrierene individet møter i utdanning og yrkesliv. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen valg av yrkesfaglig utdanning i norge skjer allerede når ungdommene er – år. ungdom- mene er da i en alder hvor kjønnsidentitet står sentralt, og valgene de gjør styres i stor grad av følelser, ikke rasjonalitet. ungdommer som velger yrkesfag i videregående gjør sitt yrkesvalg tidligere enn ungdommer som velger studiespesialisering, og deretter velger en yrkesretning (reizel, hegna & imdorf, ). fagenes «kjønnethet», kan medføre at majoriteten søker seg til et fag som bekrefter egen kjønnsidentitet. det fører igjen til at motsatte kjønn, dermed mer eller mindre bevisst, holdes utenfor. yrkesvalg og karriere i vår del av verden har blitt en stadig større del av unges identitetsbygging. forutinntatte holdninger til fagene kan bidra til at ungdommene tar med seg holdninger og adferd inn i utdanningen som bidrar til å opprettholde myter og fordommer (alvesson, ashcraft & thomas, ; nielsen, ; jørgensen, ; vagle & møller, ; præstmand hansen, ; vogt, ). kjønnsdeling i fag- og yrkesopplæringen i norge strekker seg tilbake til de første håndverks- yrkene (mjelde, , ; mjelde & tarrou, ; vagle & møller, ). selv om kvinner i norden nå har oppnådd den høyeste yrkesdeltakelsen i verden, er arbeidslivet fortsatt kjønns- segregert både horisontalt og vertikalt. yrkesfag er blant områdene med størst horisontal kjønnssegregering i norden, til tross for aktivt likestillingsarbeid og såkalt statsfeminisme spesielt i norge og sverige siden -tallet (nou : ). fokuset på akademisk utdanning har, for både gutter og jenter, vært dominerende de siste tiårene. det har vært noen skandinaviske likestillingsprosjekter innen det yrkesfaglige feltet, som spesielt i danmark har gått under beteg- nelsen mandefagstrategien, men det har i liten grad blitt en del av en systematisk likestillings- politikk. totalt har dette ført til at kjønn i det yrkespedagogiske feltet i skandinavia har blitt en blindsone i den generelle likestillingen i samfunnet. diskusjoner knyttet til kjønn er relativt fra- værende i den konkrete pedagogisk- didaktiske organiseringen av opplæring i skole og bedrift (møller & vagle, ). feministisk arbeidslivsforskning har i en skandinavisk gynosentrisk tradisjon fokusert på de kvinnedominerte delene av arbeidslivet, høyere utdanninger og kvinner i ledelse. forskning på kvinner i mannsdominerte utdanninger og faglærte yrker har i hovedsak vært vinklet på individer eller kjønnsulikhet (holter, ; gunnarsson, ; iversen, ; møller & vagle, ). denne forskningen har fokus på erfaringer blant kjønn som minoritet i yrkesutdanningene. det kan se ut som om disse forskningsresultatene i liten grad har bidratt til å skape grunnlag for endringer mot bedre kjønnsbalanse i det yrkesfaglige utdanningsfeltet. minoritetsperspektivet og forståelse for kjønnsrelaterte minoritet – majoritetsrelasjoner (aga, ; kanter, ; møller & vagle, ), har vært en nisjetenkning med røtter i amerikansk minoritetsforståelse med liten forankring i skandinavia. fra et begynnende mangfoldsperspektiv har begrepet interseksjonalitet vokst fram (moore, ). først i den senere tid har den interseksjonalistiske tenkningen inkludert minoritetsspørsmål i den feministiske diskursen i skandinavia, men fortsatt på den gynosentriske banehalvdelen (vagle & møller, ). ved å sette den amerikanske minoritetstenkningen fra det androsentriske arbeidslivet inn i den skandinaviske eller norske arbeidslivsmodellen og parts- samarbeidet, er det mulig å sette i gang prosesser som kan utvikle kompetanse blant yrkesfaglærere slik at de kan bidra til endringer i arbeids- og læringsmiljøet som i større grad ivaretar kjønn som minoritet. ved å flytte fokus fra individuelle valg og erfaringer til minoritetsforståelse og mekanismer i minoritet – majoritetsrelasjoner, vil arbeidet med utfordringer knyttet til kjønn som sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen minoritet i langt større grad flyttes fra individpåvirkning til strukturelle endringer og kompetanse- utvikling for lærere på yrkesfag. regjeringen finansierte i en kartlegging på kuben videregående skole med tittel gutter, kjønn og likestilling, som en del av sin likestillingspolitikk. kartleggingen ble gjort av barne-, ungdoms- og familiedirektoratet (bufdir) og ressurssenter for menn (reform). rapporten viste klart varierende lærerkompetanse på bakgrunn av svar på spørsmål om integrering av kjønn som minoritet, både for gutter og jenter. en av anbefalingene i denne rapporten var formulert slik: «vi finner det riktig å påpeke at lærere og andre må være åpne for å revurdere egne holdninger og forestillinger om kjønn, etnisitet og identitet». videre: «trygghet skapes når læreren har et bevisst og positivt forhold til sin egen kompetanse på kjønnsspesifikke utfordringer, og når læreren benytter denne kompetansen i møte med alle typer elever» (reform, , s. ). dette kan være spesielt utfordrende for yrkesfaglærere. de har en dobbelt kompetanse som både lærere og tidligere yrkesutøvere i sitt yrkesfag. som en del av denne kompetansen er de ofte også «bærere» av en yrkeskultur som kan innebære at de tar med seg en «mannskultur» eller «kvinnekultur» uavhengig av eget kjønn inn i skolen (korp, ). yrkesfaglærerens rolle og funksjon relatert til arbeid med kjønn som minoritet i studien analyserer vi yrkesfaglærens og yrkesutdanningens oppgaver og funksjoner i lys av sam- funnsoppdraget gjeldende for all opplæring. med yrkesutdanningen oppgave menes de forpliktelser som skolen har ideelt gjennom lover, læreplaner og forskrifter. med funksjon menes de virkninger skolen faktisk har på yrkesfageleven gjennom den praksisen som utøves i skolen (imsen, ; møller & vagle, ). med andre ord er det realiteter og ikke bare intensjoner som presenteres. se figur neste side. i vår studie har vi valgt å fokusere på det gunn imsen ( ) omtaler som likhetsskapende funk- sjon i yrkesutdanningen: likeverd, likestilling, medvirkning og medansvar, samt hvordan dette perspektivet ivaretas i nasjonale og lokale planer i yrkesfaglærerutdanningene, og i lærerens praksis i yrkesopplæring i skolen. verdier som likeverd og likestilling, medvirkning og medansvar er et vesentlig grunnlag for skolens oppgaver og funksjoner, og en grunnleggende kompetanse å utvikle i lærerutdanning for yrkesfaglærere for at verdiene skal bli ivaretatt i praktisk lærerarbeid i yrkesutdanningen (møller & vagle, ). de siste tiårene har det vært økt fokus på yrkesfag i offentlige utredninger og vedtak. i politikk for likestilling (nou : ) vises det til et stort behov for arbeid med kjønnsbalanse innen yrkes- fagene, blant annet i prosjektet jenter i bil og elektro og (vagle & møller, ). det samme gjør også stortingsmelding , - , likestilling i praksis. her heter det i tillegg på s. at regjeringen vil: «[…] legge til rette for at flere kan velge utradisjonelle utdanninger […]» og «[…] styrke kunnskapsgrunnlaget om kjønnsforskjeller i gjennomføringsgrad og utdanningsvalg». en vesentlig likestillingsutfordring er den kjønnsdelte utdanningen som fører til det kjønnsdelte arbeidslivet i norge (granavold-plattformen, ). sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen figur . yrkesutdanningens fire likeverdige hovedfunksjoner. (hansen, , modifisert etter imsen, ) vellykkede prosjekter innen feltet blir ofte trukket fram uavhengig av om de er innen utdanning, arbeidsliv eller som arbeidsmarkedstiltak. resultatet av forskningen i disse prosjektene er i liten grad forankret i ovennevnte føringer, eller i kunnskapsbasert teori innen gynosentrisk likeverds- feminisme eller frigjøringsfeminisme. utfordringene på feltet reduseres da til arbeidsmarkeds- politikk som speiler behovet for rekruttering av begge kjønn til alle utdanninger og yrker, uten at dette er forankret og begrunnet i forskningsbasert kunnskap. metode delstudie i innstruk dette forskningsarbeidet inngår i et større nasjonalt forskningsprosjekt kalt innstruk (innhold og struktur i yrkesopplæringen). studien bidrar med forskningsbasert kunnskap om hvordan man kan få til en best mulig samfunnstjenlig og yrkesrelevant opplæring for alle ( – ). forskningsprosjektet utføres i et partnerskap mellom norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige univer- sitet (ntnu) og oslomet – storbyuniversitetet. denne artikkelens utgangspunkt er en tematisk analyse av dokumenter, som omfatter nasjonale føringer (kunnskapsdepartementet , ; nou : , : , : , universitets- og høgskolerådet, a, b, c; ) og lokale strategi- sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen planer og planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene (hvl, a, b; nord universitet, a, b; ntnu, a, b, c, d, e, f; oslomet a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h). vi har også inkludert resultater fra en dialogkonferanse for unge fagarbeidere som representanter for kjønnsminoriteter, samt lærere og rådgivere i videregående opplæring i det kjønnsdelte yrkesfaglige feltet. dialogkonferansen hadde tittelen: kjønnsdelte utdanningsvalg i yrkesfagene – hva kan vi gjøre for å snu trenden til mer likestilte utdannings- og karrierevalg hos unge og voksne – i utdanning og arbeid? dialog- konferansens formål var å belyse utfordringer knyttet til kjønn som minoritet, å dele erfaringer og å legge grunnlag for videre arbeid i yrkesopplæringen for bedre å ivareta kjønn som minoritet. dialogkonferansen var siste forskningsaktivitet i prosjektet innstruk, som ble kombinert med et oppdrag for «yrkesfagenes år». dokumentanalyse hensikten med dokumentanalysen var å finne ut hvordan nasjonale føringer var konkretisert i nasjonale styringsdokumenter og lokale planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene knyttet til arbeid med kjønns-, likestillings- og mangfoldsproblematikk, samt studere sammenhengen mellom de nasjonale føringene og hvordan disse blir ivaretatt i planene. i den innledende fasen av forsknings- arbeidet ble de nasjonale styringsdokumenter om kjønns-, likestillings- og mangfoldsperspektiver analysert. i tillegg ble nasjonale rammeplaner for lærerutdanningene (kunnskapsdepartementet a, b), nasjonale veiledninger for lærerutdanningene (universitets- og høgskolerådet - lærerutdanning, a, b, c), lokale strategiplaner (hvl, b; nord universitet, b; ntnu, f; oslomet, h), samt planer for den treårige yrkesfaglærerutdanningen (ntnu, b, c, d, e, f; oslomet , ) og praktisk-pedagogisk utdanning for yrkesfag (hvl, a; nord universitet, a; ntnu, ; oslomet, ) analysert (grønmo, ; kjeldstadli, ; thagaard, ). vi analyserte lokale planer fra sør og nord trøndelag som ble slått sammen til trøndelag fylke i , akershus som fra inngår i viken fylke og hordaland som fra inngår i vestland fylke, fordi vi i en annen del av innstruk har gjennomført spørreundersøkelser og intervju med yrkesfaglærere i disse fylkene. dokumentanalysen er en systematisk undersøkelse av innholdet i utvalgte sentrale dokumenter som beskriver nasjonale føringer for arbeid med kjønn som minoritet, utdannings-institusjonenes overordnede strategidokumenter, nasjonale rammeplaner og lokale planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene. søkerordene vi brukte var likestilling, likeverd, jente, gutt, kjønn, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold. begrepene er knyttet til overordnede begreper i nasjonale og lokale styringsdokumenter. johannessen, tufte og christoffersen ( ) skiller ikke mellom dokument-analyse og analyse av annen type kvalitative data i tekstform, noe vi heller ikke gjorde. hensikten med dokumentanalysen og analyse av kvalitativ tekst fra dialogkonferansen, var å få fram menings-innholdet med fokus på innholdet i forskningsspørsmålene og problemstillingen. dialogkonferanse det var deltakere på dialogkonferansen for unge fagarbeidere. disse var representanter for kjønnsminoriteter, samt lærere og rådgivere i videregående opplæring i det kjønnsdelte yrkesfaglige feltet. det teoretiske grunnlaget for dialogkonferanser bygger på aksjonsforskning som kjenne- sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen tegnes av at forskerne deltar i prosesser og mulige løsninger sammen med deltakerne. dialogkon- feransen ble organisert etter prinsipper for å bidra til å konstruere virkelighetsbildets kompleksitet gjennom ulike diskurser. i dialoggruppene søkes det å komme fram til en kollektiv «stemme» som dokumenteres på veggavisene (gustavsen, ; levin & klev, ; pålshaugen, ). hensikten med denne dialogkonferansen var å få kvalitativ innsikt i de unge fagarbeidernes erfaringer med å være kjønnsminoritet i opplæringsøyemed, enten som elev eller lærling i skole og bedrift eller offentlig virksomhet, i tradisjonelle manns- og kvinnedominerte yrker. rådgivere og lærere bidro med erfaringer fra sine ulike roller, noe som la grunnlag for drøfting og vurdering av aktuelle framtidige tiltak. to av artikkelforfatterne hadde det faglige ansvaret for konferansen. dagsorden handlet om å belyse og diskutere utfordringer i tilknytning til kjønnstradisjonelle utdanningsvalg i videregående opplæring. tema var, som tittelen på dialogkonferansen: kjønns- delte utdanningsvalg i yrkesfagene – hva kan vi gjøre for å snu trenden til mer likestilte utdannings- og karrierevalg hos unge og voksne – i utdanning og arbeid? dialogkonferansen ble organisert i fire steg. vi startet med innspill fra fagarbeidere om deres opplevelse av støtte og hindringer for å velge og gjennomføre kjønnsutradisjonell fag- eller yrkesopplæring i plenum. dialoggruppene ble der- etter organisert først i ti homogene grupper med fagarbeidere innen helse og oppvekstfag, fag- arbeidere innen tekniske fag også videre. tema var: hva er muligheter/hindringer i vårt fagområde? gruppene utformet ti store ark eller veggaviser med sine dokumenterte refleksjoner. deretter omstrukturerte vi gruppene og lagde ti heterogene dialoggrupper, som representerte ulike utdan- ningsprogram. deltakerne delte sine erfaringer, tiltak og hindringer i arbeidet for å bidra til at elever gjennomfører kjønnsutradisjonell fag- eller yrkesopplæring. dette resulterte i ti nye veggaviser. dialogkonferansen ble avsluttet med presentasjoner og oppsummering i plenum. tekstene fra de veggavisene ble sendt ut til alle deltakerne og utgjør det empiriske materiale. analyse av data i dokumentanalysen var fokus på søkerordene og begrunnelsene for disse satt inn i et samfunns- messig- og likestillingsperspektiv. hovedkategoriene for analysearbeidet er basert på begreper som i dokumentanalysene framkom som sentrale for å belyse problemstillingen, og er gjennomgående for både dokumentanalysene og dialogkonferansen. kategoriene var likestilling, likeverd, kjønn, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold. i tillegg til disse kategoriene valgte vi å søke på begrepene gutt og jente for å fange opp eventuelle beskrivelser av hvordan gutter og jenter kunne ivaretas i henholdsvis mannsdominerte og kvinnedominerte yrker, uten at begrepene i hovedkategoriene var brukt direkte. i analysen av kvalitative utsagn fra veggaviser fra dialogkonferansen gjennomførte vi tematisk analyse med bruk av tre tolkningsnivåer, slik fejes og thornberg ( ) beskriver dem: det første nivået er deskriptivt (beskrivende). det andre er tolkende gjennom identifisering av temaer og mønstre. det tredje tolkningsnivået omfatter tolkning i lys av teori. for å finne mønstre og fortette materialet slik at det ble oversiktlig, håndterlig og presentabelt (postholm, ; kvale & brinkmann, ) fortettet vi teksten. vi søkte etter meningsmønstre og likheter som grunnlag for kategorisering. betydningen av et godt og trygt arbeidsmiljø, framheves som den viktigste faktoren for kjønnsminoriteten, både i skole og bedrift. underkategorier som . relasjoner mellom sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen lærere og elever eller instruktører og lærlinger. . strukturer for å ivareta likestilling og mangfold i skole og bedrift, beskrivelser viktige forhold for arbeids- og læringsmiljøet og for aktuelle tiltak. etikk, validitet og reliabilitet studien er i sin helhet meldt inn til norsk samfunnsvitenskapelig datatjeneste (nsd) og gjennomført i henhold til deres retningslinjer. studien er godkjent med prosjektnummer . vi har fulgt forskningsetiske prinsipper gjennom studien (kvale & brinkmann, ). begrepene validitet og overførbarhet handler om å gjøre rede for og sikre at studien er troverdig og at de funn som presenteres, er til å stole på (malterud, ). forskerteamet har god kjennskap til feltet og utfordringene som belyses i dette forskningsarbeidet gjennom egen undervisningserfaring innen høyere profesjonsutdanning i pedagogikk og yrkesdidaktikk, som lærere ved ppuy og treårig yfl innen elektrofag, teknikk og industriell produksjon og design- og håndverksfag. to av forskerne har erfaring som kjønnsminoritet i sine yrker, noe som kan påvirke forskningens validitet. to av forskerne har erfaring som kjønnsmajoritet i sine yrkesfag. sammensetningen i forskerteamet gir ulike perspektiver på utfordringene som belyses, noe som styrker forskningens etikk, validitet og reliabilitet. når studien er ferdigstilt, blir all rådata makulert. resultater her presenteres resultater fra dokumentanalysene og dialogkonferansen. forhold knyttet til kjønn som minoritet er i liten grad synlig i planene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene innledningsvis presenteres en oversikt over anvendte begreper i de utvalgte dokumentene. deretter oppsummeres resultatene med fokus på sammenhengen mellom nasjonale føringer og lokale planer for lærerutdanningene. se tabell på neste side. kunnskapsdepartementet legger føringer for arbeid med å fremme likestilling og likeverd i for- skrifter og nasjonale retningslinjer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene og praktisk-pedagogisk utdan- ning for yrkesfag (kunnskapsdepartementet, , a, b). ved høgskolen vestlandet finnes likestilling og likeverd i strategidokumentet, men ingen av søkeordene i programplanene for ppuy. nord universitet og ntnu legger føringer for arbeid med å fremme likestilling, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold i sine strategidokumenter. i programplanen for ppuy ved nord universitet nevnes kun likeverd, mens likestilling, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold ikke er videreført fra strategi- dokumentet som gjelder alle utdanningene. ved ntnu er ingen av føringene videreført i program- planene for yfl, mens likeverd og mangfold er nevnt i programplanen for ppuy. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen tabell : tabellen viser hvilke begreper relatert til kjønn, likestilling og kjønnsbalanse, som brukes i nasjonale styringsdokumenter for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene, i utdanningsinstitusjonenes interne og overordnede strategidokumenter og i de lokale planene for praktisk-pedagogisk utdanning for yrkesfag og treårig yrkesfaglærerutdanning. forkortelser i tabellen. kd: kunnskapsdepartementet, yfl: treårig yrkesfaglærerutdanning (bachelor), ppuy: praktisk pedagogisk utdanning for yrkesfag, hvl: høgskolen vestlandet, ntnu: norges teknisk-, naturvitenskapelige universitet, dh: utdanningsprogram for design og håndverk, ho: helse og oppvekst, rm: restaurant- og matfag, el: elektro, ba: bygg- og anleggsteknikk, tip: teknikk og industriell produksjon, ss: service og samferdsel, mk: medier og kommunikasjon/medieproduksjon i strategidokumentet for utdanninger ved oslomet beskrives arbeid for å fremme likeverd og mangfold uten at kjønnsbalanse og likestilling nevnes spesielt. programplanene for yfl har i varierende grad innhold som omhandler søkeordene i denne studien. i planen for yfl-ho og rm er ingen av søkeordene nevnt. i planene for yfl-el, ba, tip, ss, mk nevnes arbeid for likestilling, mens planen for yfl-dh inneholder begrepene likeverd og kjønnsbalanse. program- planen for arbeidsplassbasert yfl inneholder både likestilling, likeverd, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold og har et eget avsnitt under hovedoverskriften kjønns-, likestillings- og mangfolds- perspektivet, i programplanen. i programplanen for ppuy finner vi tekst som omhandler likestilling og likeverd. omfang og konkretisering av innhold knyttet til begrepene i oversikten varierer fra utdanning til utdanning. kunnskapsdepartementet legger føringer for at utdanningene skal ivareta ulike perspektiver knyttet til likestilling, inkludering og mangfold i forskrift om rammeplan for treårig yrkesfaglærerutdanning, uten videre konkretisering (kunnskapsdepartementet, ). kunnskaps- sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen departementet har også følgende informasjon på sin web-side: «alle offentlige virksomheter er ved lov pålagt å jobbe aktivt for likestilling og mangfold som arbeidsgivere og som myndighetsutøvere. virksomheten skal årlig redegjøre for sin innsats for likestilling og mangfold som arbeidsgiver» (komité for kjønnsbalanse og mangfold i forskning, u.å.). i nasjonale retningslinjer for lærerutdanning konkretiseres ovennevnte begreper til å handle om likeverd, solidaritet, fremme av likestilling mellom kjønn, inkludering, rettferdighet, god utdanning for alle. «lærarutdanningane skal fremje likestilling mellom kjønna» (kunnskapsdepartementet, a). kort oppsummert kan vi si at føringene fra kd om fremme av likestilling ivaretas i svært varierende grad i de lokale planene for lærerutdanningene, som ligger til grunn for innhold og arbeidsmåter i de treårige yrkesfaglærerutdanningene og ppuy. kjønnsminoriteter ivaretas ikke i tilstrekkelig grad i yrkesopplæringen resultatet fra analysen av veggavisene fra dialogkonferansen ga innsikt i kjønnsminoritetenes opplevelse av eget læringsmiljø og i omfanget av utfordringene knyttet til kjønn og likestilling i yrkesopplæringen. dialogkonferansen som bestod av ) innledende fortellinger fra kjønns- minoritetene, yrkesfaglærere og partene i arbeidslivet, ) homogene dialoggrupper dokumentert gjennom veggaviser og ) heterogene dialoggrupper dokumentert gjennom veggaviser ) oppsummering og rapport, viste at det fremdeles er behov for tiltak knyttet til utvikling av gode arbeids- og læringsmiljøer for kjønnsminoriteter for å oppnå at de gjennomfører utdanningen og blir værende i yrkene sine som kjønnsminoriteter. dialoggruppene laget veggaviser om forhold de mente hadde hatt betydning for arbeids- og læringsmiljøet i eget utdanningsløp. de første veggavisene, hvor dialoggruppene var homogene, skulle vise muligheter og hindringer i eget fagområde for vellykkede kjønnsutradisjonelle utdanningsløp. de andre veggavisene, hvor fag- gruppene var blandet, skulle vise forslag til sammenfallende og kjønnsspesifikke tiltak deltakerne mente ville fremme et godt arbeids- og læringsmiljø i sine respektive fagområder i skoler og bedrifter. underkategorier, for beskrivelse av viktige forhold for arbeids- og læringsmiljøet og for aktuelle tiltak, som kom frem gjennom analysen var: . relasjoner mellom lærere og elever eller instruktører og lærlinger. . strukturer for å ivareta likestilling og mangfold i skole og bedrift. betydningen av et godt og trygt arbeidsmiljø, framheves som den viktigste faktoren for kjønns- minoriteten, både i skole og bedrift. hva som er et godt arbeidsmiljø er subjektivt og kan ikke konkretiseres på en objektiv måte (imsen, ). begrepet vil derfor ha ulike betydninger fra person til person. om et læringsmiljø er godt eller ikke, avhenger av hvordan den enkelte eleven/lærlingen opplever dette. Å være trygg i et godt miljø kan bety at man ikke er redd eller føler ubehag i opplæringssituasjonen. da kan det være vanskelig å lære noe. det samme kan hevdes om arbeids- miljøet i en offentlig virksomhet eller bedrift. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen gode relasjoner mellom lærere og elever eller instruktører og lærlinger er grunnleggende faktor for å ivareta kjønnsminoriteter deltakerne framhever nødvendigheten av at elevene, lærlingene og fagarbeiderne i veggavisene: «medvirker i utvikling av felles regler ved skolestart eller ved oppstart av arbeidsforholdet, og at de selv definerer hva som er et godt og trygt arbeids- og læringsmiljø». innholdet i et trygt og godt arbeids- og læringsmiljø omhandler for dem «relasjonsbygging, å ta vare på hverandre, være inkluderende», og at det er «alles ansvar at alle trives. «det mangler i dag fokus på jenter som minoritet i mannsdominerte yrker» og det «er fordommer mot menn i kvinnedominerte yrker». derfor må et trygt og godt arbeids- og læringsmiljø med rom for mangfold og ulikheter handle om «ta vare på minoritetene, inkludere og normalisere på en naturlig måte», og der det er nødvendig for å gjøre kjønnsminoriteten selvstendig, «tilby ulike aktiviteter for gutter og jenter». dette kan motarbeide stigmatisering og stereotyper. det handler om å «skape et arbeidsmiljø hvor mangfold feires, både kjønn og andre identitetsfaktorer». fra gruppene med kvinnelige lærlinger og fagarbeidere framkom nødvendigheten av at et trygt læringsmiljø «er fysisk og praktisk tilpasset for å ivareta en garderobekultur fri for seksuell trakas- sering», at «et sunt arbeidsmiljø betyr en annet språkbruk». begrepene læringsmiljø og arbeids- miljø brukes ofte som synonyme begreper, avhengig om opplæringskonteksten er skole eller bedrift. strukturer for å ivareta likestilling og mangfold i skole og bedrift deltakerne på konferansen påpekte et behov for strukturelle tiltak, både lokalt og nasjonalt. lokalt omhandler dette «et sted» som gjør det «enkelt for minoriteter å finne noen å henvende seg til ved behov». nasjonalt handlet det om at «et sertifiseringssystem for å presse frem endringer» i norsk yrkesopplæring er nødvendig, og at det settes av tid og bevilges penger til nødvendige strukturelle endringer. flere av veggavisene framhever nødvendigheten av å samle kjønnsminoriteter i samme klasse. «jenter føler seg ofte mer sårbare som minoritet», men ønsket om samling av mindretalls-kjønn gjelder også guttene, i for eksempel ho- klasser. behov for å etablere nettverk, både i skole og bedrift, synliggjøre disse og «bygge bro mellom nettverkene på tvers av kjønn» framheves i tillegg i flere veggaviser. oppsummering av resultater dialogkonferansen avslører at det er behov for kompetanse knyttet til kjønn som minoritet blant ledere av læringsarbeid i skoler og bedrifter, slik at disse i større grad kan tilrettelegge for kjønnsminoriteter. disse resultatene er kollektive stemmer fra deltakerne. de kan ikke nødvendig- vis generaliseres, men de er eksempler som tydelig viser at det er behov for kompetanseutvikling i et interseksjonelt minoritetsperspektiv for å ivareta kjønnsminoriteter i yrkesutdanning og yrkesliv. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen analysen av nasjonale retningslinjer (kunnskapsdepartentet a, b) og rammeplaner (kunnskapsdepartementet , ) for ppuy og yfl, viser at det finnes nasjonale føringer for arbeid for bedre kjønnsbalanse i arbeidslivet. analysen av programplanene for ppuy og yfl viser samtidig at føringene ikke er videreført i de lokale planene for ppuy og yfl, med unntak av planen for aby ved oslomet. diskusjon i diskusjonen knytter vi funnene opp mot nasjonale føringer og teori. vi ser først på de nasjonale føringene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene og hvordan disse føringene konkretiseres videre i lokale studie- og programplaner. deretter drøfter vi hvilke konsekvenser funnene kan ha for innhold og arbeidsmåter i framtidens planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene. nasjonal oppvåkning denne diskusjonen fokuserer på forholdet mellom nasjonale føringer for arbeid med kjønnsbalanse og likestilling, og yrkesfaglæreres og yrkesfaglærerutdanningenes rolle i dette arbeidet. nasjonale føringer for økt kjønnsbalanse i utdanning og arbeidsliv har som vist innledningsvis, vært mange og tverrpolitisk tydelige fra og uten vesentlige endringer etter regjeringsskiftet i . våre funn fra dialogkonferansen viser at det fremdeles er behov for et systematisk arbeid for å ivareta kjønnsminoriteter i yrkesopplæringen. deltakernes fremhever at det i dag «mangler fokus på jenter som minoritet i mannsdominerte yrker», og det «er fordommer mot menn i kvinne- dominerte yrker». deltakerne ønsker at skole og bedrift i større grad tar vare på minoritetene ved å «skape et arbeidsmiljø hvor mangfold feires, både kjønn og andre identitetsfaktorer». de nasjonale føringene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene uttrykkes ikke eksplisitt i innholdsbeskrivelser for lærerutdanningene, men fremkommer i overordnede mål om økt fokus på handling og kompetanse for å øke mangfold og likestilling på alle nivå i norsk utdanning og arbeidsliv. de lokale planene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene viser derimot at innhold knyttet til kjønnsminoriteter er fraværende i alle planene med ett unntak. skolen er den første utfordringen for elever som kjønnsminoritet i det yrkesfaglige utdanningsløpet, og som resultatene i denne studien viser, omfatter studie- og emneplaner for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene i liten grad relevante temaer for feltet. det er behov for kompetanse relatert til pedagogiske virkemidler for å ivareta opplæring av kjønn som minoritet og for å oppfylle regjeringens egne mål om bedre kjønnsbalanse i utdanning og arbeidsliv. disse behovene uttrykkes ikke nødvendigvis gjennom føringenes innhold. fag- og yrkesopplæringen i norge hviler på et trepartssamarbeid. bedriftene forplikter seg til et samfunnsansvar knyttet til kjønn og likestilling gjennom sin del av opplæringen. yrkesfag- lærerutdanningen synes derimot ikke, gjennom lokalt planverk, å være forpliktet verken av sam- funnsansvaret eller debatten. det kan framstå som en del av den gynosentriske tradisjonen, som aksepterer kjønnsulikhet som premiss, når kjønn og likestilling ikke inngår inn i de lokale planene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen tornerosesøvn i yrkesfaglærerutdanningsinstitusjonene manglende samsvar mellom nasjonale føringer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene og lærerutdannings- institusjonenes lokale planer for ppuy og treårig yfl kom tydelig fram i analysen. det legges nasjonale føringer for lærerutdanningene i rammeplanene og nasjonale retningslinjer for ppuy og yfl, som forplikter dem til å arbeide for å fremme likestilling og mangfold. ved tre av de fire institusjonene i studien er føringene tatt videre inn i institusjonenes strategi- og visjonsdokumenter. i strategiplanen for oslomet brukes begrepene likeverd og mangfold, som kan innbefatte begrepet likestilling uten at det eksplisitt er uttrykt. ser vi videre på oslomets lokale planer for yrkesfag- lærerutdanningene, er føringene for arbeid med likestilling svært ulikt ivaretatt. oslomet har én plan for ppuy og ni planer for yfl. i to av planene for yfl er de nasjonale føringene for å fremme likestilling og likeverd ikke ivaretatt, vurdert gjennom noen av søkeordene, mens arbeidsplassbasert yfl har sterkt fokus på både likestilling, likeverd, kjønnsbalanse og mangfold, som det andre ytterpunktet. ved hvl er føringene tatt videre i en av de to ppuy-planene, mens føringene ikke er tatt videre i noen lokale planer for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene ved ntnu og nord universitet. dette viser at det er tilfeldig hvordan disse føringene konkretiseres videre i yrkesfaglærerutdan- ningene. funnene fra dialogkonferansen kan tyde på at lite gjøres i yrkesopplæringen for å legge til rette for jenter som minoritet i tekniske yrker. både jenter og gutter som minoritetselever framhever behovet for økt kompetanse knyttet til kjønn som minoritet for å bedre læringsmiljøet både i skole og bedrift. studien har ikke empiriske funn knyttet til yrkesfaglærerutdanningenes faktiske praksis for å gi studentene verktøy for å skape bedre kjønnsbalanse i yrkeslivet. studien viser heller ikke hva studentene ved de ulike lærerutdanningene faktisk lærer om tilrettelegging og læringsledelse for yrkesminoriteter. dersom kjønnsproblematikk vektlegges like lite i utdanningene som de lokale planene viser, kan studenter ved alle disse utdanningsinstitusjonene bestå sine lærerstudier uten å ha utviklet nødvendig kompetanse for å håndtere kjønnsrelaterte utfordringer i yrkesopplæringen. dette gjelder selv om enkeltpersoner, på bakgrunn av erfaringer, engasjement og kompetanse, sannsynligvis bidrar i sin undervisning. dette innebærer at utfordringene relatert til kjønn ikke håndteres planmessig og forskningsbasert. det kan se ut som om det har utviklet seg en kjønns- blindhet i yrkesfaglærerutdanningene i norge, på linje med det som beskrives som kjønnsblind karriereveiledning i ungdomstrinnet i flere studier (buland, mathiesen & bungum, , ; nou : ; nou : ; jørgensen, , ; lehn, ; møller & vagle, ). elevers og lærlingers behov er tydelig uttalt på dialogkonferansen ble temaet kjønnstradisjonelle utdanningsvalg i videregående opplæring dis- kutert. utfordringer som står på den samfunnsmessige dagsorden, både i yrkesopplæring i skole og bedrift og i yrkesfaglærerutdanning, kom tydelig til syne, eksempelvis hvordan ivareta de få – eller kanskje den eneste jenta i klassen eller på praksisplassen. betydningen av å ha et nettverk og opp- leve tilhørighet både innenfor og på tvers av kjønnskategorier, beskrives som grunnleggende viktig for å ivareta kjønnsminioriteter. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen det empiriske materialet fra dialogkonferansen var entydig i elevers behov for en god relasjon til lærere generelt og kontaktlærer spesielt. deltakerne på dialogkonferansen framhevet slike relasjoner som den viktigste faktoren for hvorvidt elever mislykkes eller lykkes og mener det ikke avhenger av hvorvidt elevene tilhørte en gutte- eller jenteminoritet, hvor gamle de var eller om de var fra by eller landsbygd. deltakerne på dialogkonferansen mener også at læreren har ansvar for å gripe inn dersom elever plager eller utestenger hverandre. yrkesfaglærere som i liten grad har arbeidet sammen med det motsatte kjønn i sin tidligere yrkeskarriere, har ikke nødvendigvis tilegnet seg kompetanse på dette feltet gjennom erfaring. mange kan da kvie seg for å blande seg inn i forholdet mellom elever, spesielt mellom gutter og jenter. funnene fra dialogkonferansen viser at et trygt og godt arbeids- og læringsmiljø med rom for mangfold og ulikheter, er viktig for at kjønnsminoriteter skal føle seg ivaretatt. kjønnsstereotypiske holdninger blir lett generalisert og kan virke sårende for den som blir utsatt for dette i hverdagen (kanter, ; møller & vagle, ; nielsen, ; jørgensen, ). gjennom analysen ser vi at relasjonsbygging og inkludering er sentralt for kjønnsminioriteters trivsel. lærerens og ledernes rolle er viktig, samtidig som alle må bidra for at alle skal trives. reformrapporten gutter; kjønn og likestilling sammenfaller med våre funn, når den beskriver viktigheten av at alle elever har behov for å bli sett, bli hørt som den de selv er og oppleve et trygt og godt klasse/arbeids- og læringsmiljø (reform, ). intervjuene med elevene rapporten viser til, gir også et klart eksempel på at nasjonal likestillingspolitikk ikke er gjennomført i videregående skole på dette feltet (reisel, skorge & uvaag, ; nou : ). behovet for økt kompetanse blant lærere og skoleledere er tydelig. flere utviklings- og forskningsprosjekter har vist at dersom det gjøres aktive grep for å åpne «lukkede porter», kan kjønnsbalansen endres (nou : ). dette krever bevissthet og systematisk arbeid fra skolenes side. både rådgivere og karriereveiledere er sentrale personer i dette arbeidet, men yrkesfaglærerne og instruktører i bedrift er minst like sentrale som daglige støttepersoner. de er også portåpnere for ungdommer som opplever å bli kjønnsminoritet i det skole- eller arbeidsmiljøet de har valgt. helena korp konkluderer på bakgrunn av svenske styringsdokumenter og egne studier med «att som lärare aktivt eller passivt medverka till att upprätthålla och återskapa exempelvis traditionella könsroller står alltså i direkt strid mot styrdokumenten» ( , s. ). yrkesfaglærerne trenger forskningsbasert kompetanse og rom for refleksjon for å kunne bryte mønstre og bidra til ønsket utvikling og endring. kjønnsdelingen i arbeidslivet er en sosial konstruksjon og ikke naturgitt. gjennom systematisk arbeid og/eller generell samfunnsutvikling har flere fag «skiftet kjønn» i løpet av de siste tiårene (blocksgaard, ; buland & havn, ; møller & vagle, ; liversage, ; christiansen, ; vagle & møller, ). denne studien, med et interseksjonelt perspektiv, viser at arbeid for å skape et trygt arbeids- og læringsmiljø som bygger på likeverd, likestilling, medvirkning og medansvar, vies liten oppmerksomhet i den videregående opplæringen. funnene fra dialogkonferansen viser at yrkesfag- læreres bidrag til bedre kjønnsbalanse i fag- og yrkesopplæringen som en del av deres samfunns- oppdrag, ikke blir tilstrekkelig ivaretatt. praksisen som utøves i skolen bidrar ikke i stor nok grad til profesjonell ivaretakelse av kjønnsminoriteten innen teknologiske fag for jenter eller helse og oppvekstfag for gutter. sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen hva kan gjøres? funnene i denne studien viser at det må gjøres grep for at gutter og jenter skal oppleve at de blir ivaretatt som kjønnsminoriteter i yrkesopplæringen. det første steget kan være at ledelsen ved lærerutdanningsinstitusjonene følger opp nasjonale retningslinjer for føringer om kjønn, likeverd og minoriteter i lærerutdanningene på en tydelig måte i lokale studie- og programplaner. manglende føringer i lokale planer kan føre til liten oppmerksomhet rundt kjønn som minoritet i utdanningen av yrkesfaglærere. det kan også være nødvendig å utvikle presise læringsutbyttebeskrivelser av yrkesdidaktisk kompetanse knyttet til kjønn som minoritet i de lokale planene for yrkesfaglærer- utdanningene. betydningen av et godt og trygt arbeidsmiljø framheves i dialogkonferansen som den viktigste faktoren for kjønnsminoriteten, både i skole og bedrift. yrkesfaglærerens kompetanse relatert til kjønn som minoritet, kan være å ivareta et innhold i undervisningen hvor aktuell forskning og kunnskap om minoriteter og likhetsskapende funksjoner i yrkesutdanningen er en del av yrkesfaglærerens samfunnsoppdrag i norsk skole (imsen, ). det er neppe nok med bare kunnskap om tema, selv om dette kan bidra til en økt bevisstgjøring for framtidens yrkesfaglærere. ifølge rapporten fra ressurssenteret for menn, med tittel gutter, kjønn og likestilling, kan læreren skape trygghet for sine elever gjennom å ha et bevisst og positivt forhold til sin egen kompetanse på kjønnsspesifikke utfordringer og anvende denne i møte med elever (reform, ). det er ikke tilstrekkelig med ett bombepunkt eller to om minoriteter i læringsutbyttebeskrivelsen i lokale planer. i lærerutdanningen kan alt undervisnings- og læringsarbeid, organisert gjennom for eksempel didaktiske øvelser i klasseromsledelse, kommunikasjon eller tilrettelagt opplæring, implisitt ha fokus på minoritet, likestilling, likeverd og medansvar. det kan bidra til å øke yrkesfag- lærerstudentenes bevissthet om og didaktiske kompetanse i tilrettelegging for læring for alle elever, inkludert kjønnsminoriteter, både i klasserom og verksted. utdanningsinstitusjonene oppfordres til å ta tak i temaet og til å sette fokus på sammenheng mel- lom liv og lære ved å utfordre holdninger i det yrkesfaglige feltet. selv god kunnskap på dette feltet gir ikke nødvendigvis grunnlag for god tilrettelegging og læringsledelse for kjønn som minoritet. utvikling av ferdigheter og kompetanse betinger at temaet vektlegges i obligatorisk pedagogisk praksis. som yrkesfaglærerutdannere har vi et selvstendig ansvar for å bidra til en endring av dette gjen- nom å tilrettelegge innhold og arbeidsmåter i utdanningen av framtidens yrkesfaglærere som ivare- tar alle elever, hvor kjønnsminoriteten er inkludert. dette betinger at programplanene legger til rette for det. avsluttende kommentar planene for ppuy og yfl må endres slik at de inkluderer kjønnsbalanse og likestilling i tråd med nasjonale føringer. samtidig må temaet få en sentral plass i yrkesfaglærerutdanningene for at yrkes- faglærerstudenter skal utvikle kompetanse om kjønn som minoritet, samt lære å bygge gode sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen læringsmiljø for alle elever. yrkesfaglærerne kan bidra i diskusjoner for å forbedre og utvikle holdninger knyttet til likeverd, verdsetting av mangfold og gjensidig respekt for hverandre. yrkesopplæringen og yrkesfaglærerutdanningen i norge fremstår tidvis som et felt der det er aksept for kjønnsdeling av fag og yrker – kvinner har kvinneyrker, menn har mannsyrker og portene mellom dem er lukket. forfatterbiografi kari hansen er dosent ved institutt for lærerutdanning ved norges tekniske-naturvitenskapelige universitet – ntnu. hansen underviser ved den treårige yrkesfaglærerutdanningen, leder nasjonale videreutdanningstilbud for yrkesfaglærere, eksterne oppdrag og underviser og veileder på master i yrkesdidaktikk. hun har begrunn som selvstendig næringsdrivende, som yrkesfaglærer i mange år innen design- og håndverk og har svennebrev som dame- og herrefrisør. hennes forskningsinteresse er knyttet til yrkesopplæring med fokus på interesse-/yrkesdifferensiering, tidlig fordypning i vg , samt likestilling, makt og demokrati. grete haaland er prrofessor ved oslomet – storbyuniversitet. haaland har jobbet som selvstendig næringsdrivende og yrkesfaglærer i mange år og har erfaring fra prøvenemnds- og nasjonalt klage- nemndsarbeid. hun er utdannet frisørmester og er i dag leder av kompetansesenteret for yrkesfag ved oslomet. hun har omfattende erfaring fra utdanningspolitisk arbeid, blant annet gjennom medlemskap i opplæringsråd/faglig råd og læreplanarbeid. hennes forskningsinteresse er knyttet til yrkesfag, yrkesopplæring med fokus på myndiggjøring, relevans og yrkesdifferensiering, anerkjen- nelse av realkompetanse, samt likestilling, makt, demokrati og trepartssamarbeid. ellen møller, ph.d/avdelingsleder for teknikk og industriell produksjon ved etterstad videregå- ende skole i oslo. møller er bilmekaniker og tekniker, har hovedfag i yrkespedagogikk og ph.d. fra roskilde universitet i danmark. hun arbeider som yrkespedagog, og som aksjonsforsker har hun særlig kompetanse på det yrkesfaglige feltet i et kjønnsperspektiv. møller har særlig vært engasjert i å rekruttere flere jenter til tekniske yrkesfag og har blant annet skrevet boka en av gutta sammen med inger vagle. møller og vagle var veiledere i prosjektet jenter i bil og elektro ( – ), som de fikk los likestilling for. de siste årene har møller arbeidet som avdelingsleder for teknikk og industriell produksjon ved etterstad videregående skole i oslo. møller er medlem av nasjonalt faglig råd for tip- fagene (teknikk og industriell produksjon) på vegne av skolenes landsforbund. inger vagle er førsteamanuensis ved oslomet – storbyuniversitet. vagle har jobbet som selvsten- dig næringsdrivende, har fagbrev som elektriker og elektroinstallatør og vært elektrolærer ved etterstad videregående skole i oslo. vagle underviser ved den treårige yrkesfaglærerutdanningen ved oslomet. hennes forskningsinteresse er fagopplæring og likestilling. vagle har særlig vært engasjert i å rekruttere flere jenter til tekniske yrkesfag og har blant annet skrevet boka en av gutta sammen med ellen møller. vagle og møller var veiledere i prosjektet jenter i bil og elektro ( - sjvd vol , no. kjønn på dagsordenen ), som de fikk los likestilling for. vagle er medlem av nasjonalt faglig råd for 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( ). tidsskriftet: kjerringråd : (s. - ). https://docs.google.com/document/d/ kgachoowa fhrvcjmd tnrtiwopg isfjf q zday s/% https:/www.ssb.no/utdanning/statistikker/vgogjen/aar/ - - https://docs.google.com/document/d/ kgachoowa fhrvcjmd tnrtiwopg isfjf q zday s/% https:/www.ssb.no/utdanning/statistikker/vgogjen/aar/ - - https://docs.google.com/document/d/ kgachoowa fhrvcjmd tnrtiwopg isfjf q zday s/% https:/www.uhr.no/_f/p /i fbd e - a f- a - e - c cfa d/fellestekst-for-retningslinjene-for-alle-typer-av-larerutdanning.pdf https://docs.google.com/document/d/ kgachoowa fhrvcjmd tnrtiwopg isfjf q zday s/% https:/www.uhr.no/_f/p /i fbd e - a f- a - e - c cfa d/fellestekst-for-retningslinjene-for-alle-typer-av-larerutdanning.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /i c f d-e c- ce - c - c b bbc /nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-praktisk-pedagogisk-utdanning-for-yrkesfag-trinn- - _ferdig.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /i c f d-e c- ce - c - c b bbc /nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-praktisk-pedagogisk-utdanning-for-yrkesfag-trinn- - _ferdig.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /i c f d-e c- ce - c - c b bbc /nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-praktisk-pedagogisk-utdanning-for-yrkesfag-trinn- - _ferdig.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /ie da c-a - d - - e a f ac/nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-trearig-yrkesfaglarerutdanning-godkjent- .pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /ie da c-a - d - - e a f ac/nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-trearig-yrkesfaglarerutdanning-godkjent- .pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /ie da c-a - d - - e a f ac/nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-trearig-yrkesfaglarerutdanning-godkjent- .pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p /ie da c-a - d - - e a f ac/nasjonale-retningslinjer-for-trearig-yrkesfaglarerutdanning-godkjent- .pdf https://www.udir.no/globalassets/filer/fag-og-yrkesopplering/yrkesfaglig-utvalg-for-bygg-industri-og-elektro.pdf https://www.udir.no/globalassets/filer/fag-og-yrkesopplering/yrkesfaglig-utvalg-for-bygg-industri-og-elektro.pdf https://www.udir.no/globalassets/filer/fag-og-yrkesopplering/yrkesfaglig-utvalg-for-bygg-industri-og-elektro.pdf https://www.udir.no/tall-og-forskning/statistikk/statistikk-videregaende-skole/sokertall-videregaende-opplaring-for-skolearet- - / https://www.udir.no/tall-og-forskning/statistikk/statistikk-videregaende-skole/sokertall-videregaende-opplaring-for-skolearet- - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - - - - https://doi.org/ . / 	abstrakt 	innledning 	teoretiske perspektiver 	yrkesfaglærerens rolle og funksjon relatert til arbeid med kjønn som minoritet 	metode 	delstudie i innstruk 	dokumentanalyse 	dialogkonferanse 	analyse av data 	etikk, validitet og reliabilitet 	resultater 	forhold knyttet til kjønn som minoritet er i liten grad synlig i planene for yrkesfaglærerutdanningene 	kjønnsminoriteter ivaretas ikke i tilstrekkelig grad i yrkesopplæringen 	gode relasjoner mellom lærere og elever eller instruktører og lærlinger er grunnleggende faktor for å ivareta kjønnsminoriteter 	strukturer for å ivareta likestilling og mangfold i skole og bedrift 	oppsummering av resultater 	diskusjon 	nasjonal oppvåkning 	tornerosesøvn i yrkesfaglærerutdanningsinstitusjonene 	elevers og lærlingers behov er tydelig uttalt 	hva kan gjøres? 	avsluttende kommentar 	forfatterbiografi 	referanser transnationalizing radio research - new approaches to an old medium r e se arch i n g po d c a st pro duc ti o n – an austr alian po d c a st stu dy about wom e n an d wo r k i n ar e we th e r e ye t? mia lindgren the #metoo movement’s viral spread across social media in october drew unprecedented global attention to the issue of sexism in the workplace. much of the discussions focused on harassment of women, however the debate also highlighted gender equity issues more broadly, shining the light on women’s experiences at work. previously, messages about gender equality in profession- al life have not usually garnered such interest in the media. the podcast are we there yet? (awty), produced in melbourne during and , was a response to the lack of podcast content at the time dedicated to topics about women and work. it was decided that a podcast would be an appropriate format – simple to produce and widely accessible – to discuss gender in the workplace. this chapter explores the audio production as a site and model for practice- research in podcast studies. informed by media scholar robert macdougall’s ( ) work, this case study examines the unprecedented opportunities podcast- ing affords us to reinterpret and reimagine our personal and professional lives. it looks at how a collaborative podcast production involving two gender equality and leadership consultants and a radio studies researcher in melbourne devel- oped into a research venture, providing a practice-informed research model for combining production with rigorous analysis. mapping the whole chain from production to reception engendered a deeper understanding of the podcast’s content and, going forward, offers one possible research model for scholars in the emerging field of podcast studies. the two novice podcast presenters – melbourne-based leadership consul- tants linda betts and barbara dalton – had run face-to-face (‘f f’) leadership programs for women for over ten years. however, they had no broadcast ex- perience. the research team wanted to examine if a podcast dedicated to the topic of women at work could provide listeners with a shared experience similar to that established in f f seminars where current gender and organisational research is discussed alongside participants’ own reflections and lived expe- riences. extensive research exists on the use of podcasts in educational and business settings (drew ; fernandez et al. ; hatfield ; moryl ; popova et al. ; thielst ) and the research team wanted to investigate how podcasting could add to the conversation about gender and work in acces- sible and portable ways. sto ry te lli n g wo m e n an d wo r k an initial review identified a small number of international podcasts focus- sing on gender, such as slate’s long-running (since ) double x gabfest (slate ). a prominent radio program which is also available via podcast is the stalwart uk-based women’s hour, broadcast since and addressing women’s perspectives on health, education, cultural, and political topics (bbc ). us-based podcasts focussing on women are more common, such as us entrepreneur sophia amoruso’s girlboss radio, involving interviews with ‘boundary-pushing women who’ve made their mark’ (amoruso ), and the rocket girls podcast (fine ), aimed at motivating, guiding, and supporting young women to pursue their passions in science and maths. since the #metoo movement in late , a number of additional podcasts focussing on women in the workplace have emerged, such as the harvard business review’s six-part series, women at work, which includes “conversations about the workplace, and women’s place in it” (harvard business review ). there is also us podcast, women’s work, which celebrates stories of “creative women who do interesting work” (oxenreider ). in australia, the abc launched fierce girls in , a podcast about australian women “who dare to do things differ- ently” aimed at children (abc ). the closest match to the are we there yet? podcast is the broad experience, a podcast about women, work, and suc- cess (the broad experience n.d.) produced by us-based public radio reporter ashley milne-tyte. despite its australian origins, it was envisaged that the awty podcast could be attractive to international audiences where personal experiences and storytelling would become a lingua franca that could support and engage trans- national audiences and create a shared sense of community. there is a growing body of work focused on podcasting and storytelling (alexander ; biewen/ dilworth ; dann ; lindgren b, ; mccracken ; mchugh , ; norrington ). podcasting has been described as a ‘pull’ me- dium (berry ; mcclung/johnson ), where listeners seek out content that interests them and therefore become genuinely engaged with the podcast. macdougall argues that podcasts create a strong bond between producers and listeners, one that moves, “beyond the way readers of a novel might report sym- pathy for (or may empathize or identify with) various characters” (macdougall m i a l i n d g r e n : ). this would support the aim of are we there yet? which was to pro- duce a podcast that provided the audience with a sympathetic learning space with traits of a classroom or seminar. the production team also wanted the podcast to be solutions-oriented. presenter barbara dalton said she intended are we there yet? to be “informative (here’s the research) and also pragmatic (this is what you can do)” (dalton ). rese arch approach the team produced and analysed the podcast using a practice-research ap- proach, building on this author’s conceptual work into radio documentary forms (lindgren a) by extending it to the field of podcasting. adams et al. ( : ) describe practice-led research as a “reflexive paradigmatic research structure” led by practice that acknowledges the importance of the researcher’s interaction with the research material. plr is still a novel approach in radio studies, yet one that offers myriad opportunities for rich and multi-layered scholarly analysis of audio content production providing new understandings of podcast genres and production practices. four focus groups (n= ) with fe- male listeners were undertaken with an accompanying thematic analysis of the transcripts. women known to the consultants were invited to listen to the podcast and to then attend a focus group. the main themes identified are dis- cussed briefly later in this chapter. additional self-reflexive feedback was gath- ered from presenters betts and dalton, as reflective practice is a key element of plr (gray/pirie ). the research design allowed for in-depth contribution from the production team and listeners, affording a collaborative and compre- hensive approach to understanding both the production and reception of the podcast. pi lot episo d e – g o o d g i r l sy n d ro m e the pilot episode, good girl syndrome, was funded by monash university in melbourne to explore analytical models for talk-based podcast content. the -minute episode focused on research and societal discourse surrounding belief systems and expectations of women’s behaviour in the workplace. it discussed how women often feel compelled to ‘do the right thing’ and to be agreeable in workplace settings. the research team used a narrative learning approach (hatfield ) to effectively communicate complex issues about gen- der equity and the advancement of women in the workplace. narratives can be powerful tools for making sense of the world as they “draw us into an experi- ence at more than a cognitive level; they engage our spirit, our imagination, r e s e a r c h i n g po d c a s t p r o d u c t i o n – a n a u s t r a l i a n po d c a s t st u d y a b o u t wo m e n our heart, and this engagement is complex and holistic” (clark/rossiter : ). stories of women’s experiences in the workplace were shared with listen- ers as short voxpops, in the interview and by the presenters in their informal dialogue. short audio clips were included to provide additional story examples, such as where marge simpson instructing lisa on how to ignore her own feel- ings in order to fit in, from the us television cartoon the simpsons (groening/ brooks/simon ), created an audio shorthand for the ‘good girl’ culture. this is where women win approval by being helpful and behaving well but at a cost to their agency and leadership potential. the episode included an interview with melbourne-based writer and femi- nist karen pickering who shared her personal experiences of sexism in the workplace when she worked in a bar as a young woman. ms pickering recount- ed how a young male supervisor sent her home to apply makeup because she “looked tired”. while this example took place in an australian pub in the early s, the story remains relevant. only weeks before awty was produced, a uk-based consultancy-firm sent home one of their female staff members be- cause she was not wearing high-heeled shoes at work (bbc news ). ar e we th e r e ye t? … lesso ns le ar n ed the format described above for the podcast pilot episode has clear radiogenic traits (berry ) as a talk-style program incorporating talk, audio clips and music. the awty presenters followed a script with information about relevant gender research and links to useful readings. this dialogue between the pre- senters ranged from informal ‘banter’ to segments providing evidence-based information to accompany the personal stories. the relationship between the novice podcast presenters barbara and linda was noted by the focus group participants. they found that barbara and linda’s conversational dialogue sig- nalled a well-oiled team with expert knowledge of the subject matter and long- standing collaborations, bringing their personal – and authentic – experiences into the conversation. barbara and linda’s lack of broadcast experience was not seen by focus group participants as an impediment. thematic analysis of the transcribed focus groups identified a number of key themes emerging for the listeners of the good girl syndrome pilot episode. these are discussed only briefly below due to the scope of this chapter. when m i a l i n d g r e n asked about the experience of listening to the episode and the use of podcast- ing to discuss gender in the workplace, participants noted four main themes: . reflection (encouragement of reflection on self ) . identification (application of information to personal experience, relatabil- ity, emotional connection) . education (the podcast as pedagogical tool, information tool, mentor) . storytelling (the importance of personal narratives, conversational style, podcast listening as journey) these themes relate directly to traits ascribed to podcast forms, such as its hyper-intimacy (berry ), personal storytelling (lindgren ; mchugh ) and strong listener attachment, a relationship which macdougall ( ) suggests is specific to podcasting where it “[...] may be part of an evolution in parasocial phenomena and a fundamentally new form of mediated interper- sonal communication” ( ). analysis of the focus group data suggests the pilot podcast was successful in engaging the listeners and encouraging reflection. some listeners recognised shared experiences from the podcast stories and ap- plied the information to their own experiences. according to one participant: i found it really enjoyable and it ’s s tuf f that i used to do more with that i don’t have time for. i found it terrif ically interes ting, i found it per sonally challenging, jus t to get back and s tar t thinking more like that. and yeah, i found it to be quite motivating. (par ticipant, focus group , ) another participant commented on the informative nature of awty and how the audio format provided an engaging form of education: i think there’s lot s of ways you can potentially use it, because the s tories engage and i think working again in health, if you look at things like nearly ever y thing’s in print, your clinical prac tice guidelines are in print, ever y thing’s in print, ever yone’s sick of print, it doesn’t en- gage. (par ticipant, focus group , ) the solution-based approach of the podcast motivated one focus group par- ticipant to actively change her behaviour when applying for work: “it made me really think about maybe how i need to be not such a good girl in an interview potentially, so coming across a bit stronger rather than that more passive” (par- ticipant, focus group , ). r e s e a r c h i n g po d c a s t p r o d u c t i o n – a n a u s t r a l i a n po d c a s t st u d y a b o u t wo m e n co n clusi o n the pilot podcast episode good girl syndrome discussed in this chapter begins with the presenters barbara and linda explaining the ambition of the podcast as an aural space where they talk about “[…] how being a woman still impacts on our work, pay, and the opportunities we have”. they continue: many women think what they experience in the workplace is jus t happening to them, but ac tually, it ’s par t and parcel of being a woman at work. by connec ting the dot s and sharing experiences about women in the workplace, we want to give you tools to navigate the ‘oc- cupational hazards of being female’ (are we there yet? ). this introduction becomes a three-point ‘manifesto’ for a podcast about wom- en and work: ) listeners are part of a community of shared experiences; ) those shared experiences are delivered through a narrative approach (by pre- senters and interviewees); and ) informed by current research and personal experiences, the podcast will provide listeners with solutions and suggestions for actions. all of these points were noted by listeners reflecting on awty in the focus groups. although the main themes noted above could be applied to some specialist radio programs, it is unlikely that you would find in main- stream radio programming schedules a series of programs dedicated to gender equality in the workplace. furthermore, participants in the focus groups re- ported a high level of identification and reflection generated by listening to the podcast. this aligns with what scholars suggest is podcasting’s ability to create strong communities and engagement with listeners (cf. berry ; mcclung/ johnson ; macdougall ). although the audience focus groups only dis- cussed the pilot episode, their feedback support the proposition that a podcast like are we there yet? 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political science / , pp. - . slate, “double x gabfest”, (https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/double-x-gab- fest/id ?mt= ), accessed april . snyder, julie ( ): interviewed in “download this show”, december , , abc radio national, (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthiss- how/serial/ ), accessed march , . m i a l i n d g r e n thielst, christina beach ( [ ]): social media in healthcare: connect, commu- nicate, collaborate, chicago: health administration. r e s e a r c h i n g po d c a s t p r o d u c t i o n – a n a u s t r a l i a n po d c a s t st u d y a b o u t wo m e n westminsterresearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch making a difference: toward a feminist democratic theory in the digital age asenbaum, h. this journal article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by cambridge university press in the politics & gender. this version is free to view and download for private research and study only. not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © cambridge university press, the final definitive version in the online edition of the journal article at cambridge journals online is available at: https://dx.doi.org/ . /s x the westminsterresearch online digital archive at the university of westminster aims to make the research output of the university available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the url of westminsterresearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). in case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail repository@westminster.ac.uk https://dx.doi.org/ . /s x http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/ repository@westminster.ac.uk making a difference toward a feminist democratic theory in the digital age hans asenbaum, university of westminster pre-edited version accepted for publication in politics & gender on th november abstract: this essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. it revisits debates of difference democracy of the 's, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. this strategy inevitably entails essentializing tenden- cies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identity. difference demo- crats did not take notice of the parallel emerging discourse on cyberfeminism exploring novel iden- tity configurations on the internet. this essay augments the politics of presence with digital identity reconfigurations. neither difference democrats nor cyberfeminists distinguished between various participatory sites. drawing on conceptions of participatory spaces from development studies and deliberative democracy, this essay generates a typology differentiating between empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens' assemblies, and claimed spaces of social move- ments. the democratic functions these spaces fulfil are best facilitated by three different modes of identity performance: identity continuation, identity negation, and identity exploration. a plurali- zation of participatory sites and modes of identity performance facilitates inclusion while tackling the essentializing tendencies in difference democracy. introduction the profound changes in current societies are, among others, marked by two intertwined trends, the intensification of citizens’ participation in politics and the increasing digitization of everyday life. political apathy today is counteracted by intensified political participation in social movements, citizens initiatives and unconventional forms of engagement such as flash mobs and occupations (della porta and rucht ). simultaneously, governments are developing new participatory for- mats such as citizens’ assemblies, referendums, and participatory budgets (smith ). the digit- ization of everyday life affecting the dynamics of work, love, family, and politics amplifies this trend. social media that accompany our every step through the smart devices in our pockets increase participatory possibilities and extend communicative networks (castells ). the #metoo de- bate, in which a social media hashtag connected a global bottom up campaign challenging patriar- chal structures, provides a recent example. both these trends of increased participation and digitization are situated in a context of power asymmetries along social identity markers of gender, class, race, sexuality, able-bodiedness, etc. such inequalities, perceptible by hard indicators such as income and soft indicators such as respect, result in the exclusion of marginalized groups from and within democratic participation. thus, dem- ocratic theory with its ideal of equality faces the challenge of conceptualizing inclusion in digitized participatory societies marked by structural power asymmetries. contemporary feminist theory has extensive expertise regarding the exclusion of marginalized groups. however, feminism and democracy are two concepts mostly discussed in isolation from each other. while the core ideas of equal rights and social status of the sexes and equal rights and influence of all citizens in political decision-making share a lot of common ground, democratic theory has been reluctant to acknowledge feminist thought. this neglect is regrettable as feminist debates offer crucial insights, particularly when taking the emancipation of the sexes as a starting point and conceptualizing feminism as a broad movement against identity-based discrimination. in the groundbreaking essay “feminism and democracy” the leading democratic theorist carole pate- man ( ) was the first to articulates a vision of democracy that “extends beyond the state to the organization of society… democratic ideals and politics have to be put into practice in the kitchen, the nursery, and the bedroom” ( , ). the great potential of combining feminist and democratic theory was explored for a short period of time in the s by so called “difference democrats” (e.g. mansbridge ; phillips ; young ). their rich discussions promoted inclusion in democracy through a performa- tive politics of presence. mirror or special representation through quotas were advanced to include marginalized groups into the public sphere. difference democrats themselves, however, exten- sively discussed a dilemma inevitably accompanying this strategy. the organic body of the indi- vidual democratic subject became not only the intended site of resistance to domination but also a site of confinement. claiming identity through physical presence entails essentialist tendencies, reinforces stereotypical thinking, and traps the individual in its body, impeding the possibility of identity change. difference democrats’ discussions in the s did not take notice of the parallel emerging discourse about novel identity configurations on the internet. cyberfeminist thought in media, com- munication, and science and technology studies (sts) developed a different understanding of democratic subjectivity (e.g. haraway [ ] ; turkle ). in contrast with the physically embodied subject with its stable identity markers, the reconfigurations of the organic body through technology allowed for novel cyborgian corporealities. while sharing the idea of inclusion through embodied presence with difference democrats, cyberfeminists redefine presence through new modes of digital embodiment, anonymity, and identity play. this essay deepens difference democratic thought by incorporating cyberfeminist insight. it augments the politics of presence with a notion of digital presence to answer the question: how can inclusion be advanced in societies marked by identity-based power asymmetries? both differ- ence democratic and cyberfeminist thought contributes to inclusion in democracy, but their focus on one type of identity performance only limits their scope. moreover, they both neglect to differ- entiate between participatory sites and their respective functions in democracy. in contrast, i pro- pose that the essentializing tendencies in difference democracy can be tackled by expanding the array of identity performances. this can be achieved through a pluralization of participatory sites and their respective democratic functions. social movement activists, for example, fulfil different democratic functions than parliamentary legislators and thus best contribute to inclusion through different identity performances. the solution to the difference democrats’ essentializing dilemma can be found in difference democracy itself. it is its core value of pluralism that leads the way out. to achieve this differentiation, i further develop the debates on difference democracy and cyberfeminism with the concept of participatory spaces generated in feminist development studies (brock, cornwall, and gaventa ) and deliberative democratic theory (dryzek ), distin- guishing empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens’ assemblies, and claimed spaces such as social movement organizations. i propose a typology, which outlines which digital identity performance (identity continuation, identity negation, identity exploration) in which participatory space (empowered, invited, claimed) best contributes to which democratic function (accountability, equality, freedom). this typology might be of use to democracy scholars, activists, and state agents to think more adequately about the variability of identity performances and dem- ocratic functions of different participatory spaces. the main purpose of this article is thus to investigate the positive contributions new means of performing identity through online media can make to participatory democracy. when raising this question, the negative effects of digital communication must not be overlooked, however. exten- sive empirical literature illustrates how online communication is frequently marked by group po- larization, fraud, cyberbullying, and hate speech (e.g. sunstein ). the digital divide and digital inequalities, moreover, exclude large numbers of citizens from participation altogether (campos- castillo ). for a critical feminist inquiry, it is imperative to ask, how these challenges interact with new participatory spaces on the internet. do digital participatory spaces exacerbate or mitigate discrimination, exclusion and deception as widely observed in everyday online communication? to move toward a new feminist democratic theory in the digital age, this essay first revisits difference democracy and the notion of inclusion through physically embodied presence. it then moves on to cyberfeminist thought on digital reconfigurations of democratic subjectivity. drawing on the concept of participatory spaces, the third section develops a typology showing how different modes of identity performance in different participatory spaces fulfil different democratic func- tions. this typology is illustrated by a review of empirical studies on online participation. difference democracy: a feminist challenge to democratic theory rather than a coherent model of democracy, what came to be termed “difference democracy” (dryzek , ) is a diverse feminist discourse in democratic theory promoting inclusion in par- ticipatory processes in the context of structural inequalities. jane mansbridge’s beyond adversary democracy ( ) played a crucial role in setting the agenda. her empirical investigation evi- denced participatory inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class in a new england town hall meeting and in a case of workplace democracy, illustrating how members of marginalized groups spoke less and felt less influential. the agenda set forth by mansbridge critically resonated with conceptions of deliberative de- mocracy emerging at this time. while sharing the goal of inclusion with deliberative democrats, difference democrats charged the original conceptions of deliberation with androcentrism and eu- rocentrism. generated by white, male academics, the universalizing conception of rational knowledge is deeply rooted in western enlightenment thinking. the focus on dispassionate, fact- oriented discussion with the force of the better argument contributing to consensus-finding tends to silence marginalized social groups. this results in internal exclusion – the devaluation of content uttered by those with low identity-related social status (young ). in her seminal essay “against deliberation” lynn sanders argues: “[t]aking deliberation as a signal of democratic practice par- adoxically works undemocratically, discrediting on seemingly democratic grounds the views of those who are less likely to present their arguments in ways that we recognize as characteristically deliberative. in our political culture, these citizens are likely to be those who are already un- derrepresented in formal political institutions and who are systematically materially disadvantaged, namely women; racial minorities, especially blacks; and poorer people” (sanders , ). the problem of internal exclusion has been evidenced in a wide array of empirical work since mansbridge’s ( ) study. the extensive experimental work of christopher karpowitz and tali mendelberg ( ) documented in the silent sex finds that overall women speak less in delibera- tive settings. edana beauvais ( ) finds not only that women and ethnic minorities speak less, but also are audience members more easily swayed by comments made by men. the gender gap in classical forms of political participation such as voting has closed recently in western societies (nancy burns et al. ). upon closer examination, however, inequality persists. a recent study of western countries finds that while women vote and petition at higher rates than men, they are less likely to participate in civil society initiatives and collective action. these patterns point to internal exclusion: women participate less in face-to-face deliberative settings because they feel unwanted or intimidated (coffé and bolzendahl ). this is also mirrored in a dramatic gender gap in political ambition to engage in politics among youth (fox and lawless ). to tackle the problem of internal exclusion, difference democrats promote diversity as a re- source for deliberation. iris marion young, for example, observes the emergence of a heterogene- ous public in contrast to habermas’ universal public sphere. here red and black power, lgbtiq, and women’s movements articulate diversity. “in this vision the good society does not eliminate or transcend group difference. rather, there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups, who mutually respect one another and affirm one another in their differences” (young , ). difference is not perceived as obstacle, but as resource for deliberation enabling mutual growth (young b). in the same vein, nancy fraser ( ) observes the formation of subaltern counterpublics by marginalized social groups as safe spaces to develop counter discourses that challenge hegemonic narratives. beyond diversifying politics through social movements, many difference democrats call for extending the scope of participatory democracy. according to carole gould ( ), the best way of facilitating presence for marginalized groups is by creating self-managed participatory assem- blies in the workplace and education. others focus on inclusion in parliamentary institutions. anne phillips ( ) argues that the notion of diversity has always been a core concept in the liberal, pluralist tradition. however, pluralism was only applied to ideas and not to identities. while liber- alism declares individuals equal in value and rights, it overlooks structural inequalities along iden- tity cleavages. according to phillips, the composition of parliamentary bodies does not only need to reflect a pluralism of ideas but also a pluralism of identities. physically embodied presence as political claim in difference democratic debates, the corporeal identity of marginalized subjects functions as visi- ble claim for inclusion. phillips ( ) argues that the liberal politics of ideas, which only pays attention to content and neglects identities, is now challenged by a politics of presence. giving preference to hanna pitkin’s concept of “standing for” rather than “acting for,” phillips contends that only by claiming presence in public assemblies such as parliaments and activist meetings can marginalized groups draw attention to their particular experiences. similarly, mansbridge argues: “even when the descriptive legislator is silent, his or her mere physical presence reminds the other legislators of the perspectives and interests of the group of which he or she is a descriptive member” ( , ). it is thus the visibility of the physical body that articulates a political claim. according to many difference democrats, political claim-making through embodied presence is valid because different bodies represent different social positionalities. since men and women, heterosexual and lgbtiq, black and white people are forced into different social positions, they also bring different qualities to the public. the presence of women in political decision-making processes is often advocated by pointing to specific womanly qualities stemming from particular socialization. according to this argument, women’s experience of mothering contributes to a caring and nurturing orientation. mansbridge ( , ) argues that empathy, sensitivity, and intuition as female characteristics are constitutive for democratically organized communities, which rely on social connections of trust, love and duty. some difference feminists interpret this as a superior culture of women who excel at persuading, listening, asking questions, moderating, and integrating (mansbridge , - ). and gould draws parallels between female nurturing and the redis- tributive functions of the state: “i also believe that the typical concern for providing for the specific needs of others associated with mothering or parenting… can usefully be imported into the larger democratic community” ( , ). to facilitate access of marginalized groups to political institutions, many difference democrats advocate quotas. while mansbridge ( ; ) and phillips ( ; ) favor descriptive or mirror representation, young ( ; a; ) calls for special representation of groups who suffer from the long-term effects of historic oppression. according to young, the current system of party representation needs to be supplemented by a structure of self-organized associations of marginalized groups wielding veto power in decisions of their direct concern. these measures need to be accompanied by affirmative action in education and employment. the dilemma of difference while difference democrats’ discussions about identity, inequality, and inclusion provide an inval- uable contribution to democratic theory, their argument is also haunted by an inherent conundrum. difference democrats themselves have repeatedly pointed out a paradox: the politics of presence furthers inclusion through visibility of marginalized groups, however, it simultaneously reinforces dominant modes of identity construction (mansbridge , ; , ; ; phillips , ; young , ; ; a, ; b, ). young calls this the dilemma of difference. if black people are supposed to speak for black people by virtue of their corporeal attributes, the identity of the individual is fixed in accordance with the associated group identity, personal pref- erences are undermined, and stereotypes are activated. according to young: “the unifying process required by group representation inappropriately freezes fluid relational identities into a unity, and can recreate oppressive segregation” (young a, ). similarly, mansbridge elaborates: “es- sentialist beliefs reinforce stereotypes, trap the individuals in the group in the images traditionally held of the group, make it hard for those individuals to treat their identities flexibly and performa- tively, de-emphasize lines of division within groups to the advantage of dominant groups within the group, and harden lines of division between groups” (mansbridge , ). social movements promoting the affirmation of group difference might be successful in rein- terpreting their identities in positive terms, but in doing so they also affirm identity confinements. labels such as “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “black,” “asian,” “jew” always demarcate definitions, which limit individual self-expression and identity exploration. these confinements become even more problematic considering intersectionality and uneven power relations in the process of iden- tity construction. the notion “woman,” for example, is mostly created by white, heterosexual, able- bodied women with higher incomes and thus rarely reflect the experience of lbtiq, black, disa- bled, and poor women (fraser , ). young’s criticism of “cultural imperialism” imprisoning members of marginalized groups in their bodies marked as deviant other (young , ) thus partly also applies for positive reinterpretations of these identities. the new prison might benefit from an improved image, but it is a prison nevertheless. cyberfeminism: materializing difference through the digital difference democrats’ discussions in the ’s did not take notice of the parallel emerging dis- course about novel identity configurations on the internet, which promises to shed new light on the dilemma of difference. in the ’s, feminist scholars started exploring new modes of digital communication (e.g. haraway [ ] ; turkle ). these discussions came to be identified with the term “cyberfeminism.” cyberfeminist discourses, on the one hand, promoted diversity through the digital performance of marginalized identities in digital counterpublics – very much in line with the ideals of difference democracy. on the other, they explored the liberating effects of anonymity (author ). what emerges in cyberfeminist thought are conceptions of digital pres- ence, which allow for a re-reading of difference democracy. cyberfeminism as movement extends beyond academia and fuses discussions from three sources: feminist scholarship, digital art projects such as the old boys network (www.obn.org) and subrosa (cyberfeminism.net), and online women’s empowerment projects including peer-sup- port groups (fernandez and wilding ). the equal importance of feminist scholarship and em- powered practice for cyberfeminism as a movement, is also exhibited in the fact that the term “cyberfeminism” was simultaneously coined in by the british cultural theorist sadie plant and the australian art collective vns matrix (volkart , ). the roots of cyberfeminist dis- course go further back than the emergence of the term, however. rise of the cyborg before the term cyberfeminism was coined, scholars such as donna haraway and sherry turkle laid the ground for later work on digital presence. in “a cyborg manifesto,” haraway ([ ] ) starts from the same point of critique as young ( ) and other difference democrats: “gen- der, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism” ( ). like young ( ), haraway points to the construction of binary categories such as male/female, civi- lized/primitive, and mind/body defining one element as inferior to the other. however, unlike young’s difference as resource for deliberation aiming at equalizing the value of both elements, haraway proposes the metaphor of the cyborg as monstrous hybrid breaking out of this dichoto- mous thinking altogether. by reconfiguring human/machine, animal/human, and physical/non- physical, the cyborg does not, however, merge these binaries into a new unity, a dialectical synthe- sis, but rather leaves the riddle unsolved. the irony of the cyborg is constituted by its plurality dissolving unity into contradiction. haraway encourages giving up the struggle for clearly demar- cated identities and indulging in the pleasures of the cyborg – the pleasures of disorientation. bi- nary gender codes are reconfigured into “partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed construc- tions of personal and collective selves” (haraway [ ] , ). haraway’s cyborg dream leaves the figure of the cyborg itself mainly obscure. what cyborgs could be in current societies is made comprehensible in sherry turkle’s second self ( ) – albeit without using the term “cyborg.” in her psychological ethnography of user interaction with com- puters, turkle explores human/machine hybridity: “we search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become” ( ). computers simultaneously appear as objects – as tools used by human subjects – and as thinking subjects, which call upon their users. humans can employ computers as tools to create their own individual worlds. as soon as humans enter these worlds, however, they are affected by them. humans are subjected as “com- puters enter into the development of personality, of identity, and even of sexuality” (ibid., ). the hybridization of human/machine emerges in a move of reciprocal affectivity. on the one hand, users humanize computers as “friends” that “are stupid” at times or need to “rest for a while.” on the other, users reimagine themselves in technological terms as they might not “function well” or conceptualize their forgetfulness as information being “erased from the hard drive” (ibid., ). according to turkle, computers function as mirrors for the individual self. the metaphor of narcissus, which has been misinterpreted in the past, helps to understand this mirror function. nar- cissus did not fall in love with himself out of vanity, but seeing his reflection in the water he per- ceived himself as someone else, thus falling in love with the self as other. computers provide mir- rors to see the self as reconfigured other. it objectifies the self, resulting in a representational object vis-à-vis the self. this objectified other/self does not serve vain self-love, but the anxious search for the self, as reassurance of our own existence, stability, and unity. turkle aptly captures hara- way’s complex notion of the disorientation of the cyborg: “where we once were rational animals, now we are feeling computers, emotional machines. but we have no way to really put these terms together. the hard-to-live-with, self-contradictory notion of the emotional machine captures the fact that what we live now is a new and deeply felt tension” (ibid., ). identity play in a world beyond zeros and ones these theories of the cyborg as a subject formation that disrupts modern identity categories is put into relation with online communication in sadie plant’s book zeros + ones ( ). plant attests the disorder of binary identity codes rooted in western thinking that was also criticized by haraway and young. this identity disruption is amplified by new possibilities of anonymous communication and identity play online. plant illustrates this reconfiguration of gender identities along the compu- tational logic of zeros and ones. while in traditional western thought, the phallic is associated with presence, power, and masculinity, women are associated with the as absence, passivity, powerlessness, a nothing, a gap, a hole. in this metaphor, men are everything and women nothing, an image corroborated by the division of global wealth and political power. the computer disrupts this binary logic, however, and turns the established binary upside down. in original computer punch cards the constitutes the something and the the nothing: “no longer a world of ones and not-ones, or something and nothing, thing and gap, but rather not-holes and holes, not-nothing and nothing, gap and not-gap” (ibid., ). plant’s narrative of the history of computing relocates the focus to the forgotten contributions of women, such as ada lovelace whose work in the s foresaw the potentials of computing beyond mere calculation (also cf. evans ). women mostly, however, executed repetitive work to fulfil plans developed by men. when weaving was automated through punch cards as an early form of computational automation, women moved to the industrial assembly lines and functioned as gearwheels along with industrial machines. today it is women in the global south, mainly in asia, who assemble computers for use in the west. plant describes an intimate relationship between women and machines both abused as tools of men. she invokes the many popular fictional narra- tives of robots, often designed as women and thus connoted with the idea of sexual objectification, who rebel against their human, male creators. plant’s zeros + ones has been highly influential in early cyberfeminist writing. both danet ( ) and sick ( ), for example, explain online avatars as masquerade disrupting traditional gender identities and volkart ( ) describes the cyberfeminist subject as unruly cyborg, revolting against male domination. plant’s book has, however, rightfully been criticized for its techno-deter- minism and its essentialist reproduction of stereotypical gender roles, although reinterpreting them in positive terms (wajcman , ) much like some difference democrats. recent cyberfeminist work turns to the corporeal configurations of the cyborg and investigates digital presence. the collected volume cyberfeminism . (gajjala and oh ), for examples, examines digital space as marked by patriarchal and capitalist inequalities that are contested by feminist presence. in “developing a corporeal cyberfeminism” brophy ( ) attempts to “reha- bilitate” cyberfeminism through the concept of liminality. drawing on elizabeth grosz’s ( ) “in-betweenness” she explains new subject constitutions through the digital as a change in the per- ception of reality both online and offline. in a similar vein, jessie daniels’ “rethinking cyberfem- inism(s)” ( ) draws attention to re-embodiment on the internet. through examples such as web- sites that facilitate peer advise on transsexual body transformation she illustrates how the partici- patory possibilities of online engagement are used in subaltern counterpublics to construct alterna- tive body images. this can be read as an emancipatory move of marginalized groups to take control of the construction of their own body and challenge hegemonic body images. in a circular process, images of the physical body are replicated online and then in turn affect the perception of the body offline and can even entail physical body transformation. thus, while early cyberfeminist writing of haraway, turkle, and plant focuses on ephemeral- ity and identity play, current cyberfeminists situate themselves much closer to difference demo- crats’ politics of presence by focusing on analog/digital identity continuities, thus paying closer attention to the limits of identity play and its stereotyping effects (nakamura ), while still attesting possibilities for transformation. they, moreover, take the notion of the cyborg further by applying it not only to online identities like plant but by grasping the offline reconfigurations of embodiment through a digitally altered perspective on the self. toward a feminist democratic theory in the digital age while there is some agreement about the importance of identity and the inclusion of marginalized groups between difference democrats and cyberfeminists, their conceptions of identity differ quite significantly. table summarizes similarities and differences. table : comparison between difference democracy and cyberfeminism difference democracy cyberfeminism political goal inclusion inclusion space of political interaction analog face-to-face cyberspace, liminal space mode of presence physical presence digital presence identity performance stable mutable both difference democrats and cyberfeminists contest gendered power asymmetries by focus- ing on particular modes of identity performances. cyberfeminist perspectives allow for the conceptualization of a politics of presence online. the difference democratic notion of physical presence can thus be supplemented with a cyberfeminist notion of digital presence. this sheds new light on the dilemma of difference. the essentializing tendencies in difference democratic thought can be countered by opening up possibilities of exploring multiple identity configurations in the liminal spaces between and beyond online and offline. cyberfeminists draw attention to the value of anonymity. this does not merely entail hiding identity, which has rightfully been criticized as contributing to the invisibility and further marginalization of disadvantaged groups (kolko ). rather, anonymity consists as much of identity creation as of identity negation and thus constitutes a specific type of identity performance (author ). as the rest of the paper will demonstrate, promoting diversity is possible through digital corporealities that continue as well as discontinue physically embodied identities. thus, a cyberfeminist notion of digital presence can supplement difference democrats’ politics of presence and contribute to the overarching goal of inclusion. difference democrats developed their accounts of inclusion in relation to three types of polit- ical institutions in society: representative state institutions, citizens’ participatory institutions, and social movements’ organizations. they, however, did not differentiate the mode of identity perfor- mance for these three types, proposing continuous identity performances for all of them instead. in contrast, i argue that different institutions fulfil different democratic functions which are best fa- cilitated by different modes of identity performance. to generate this differentiation, i draw on the concept of participatory spaces emerging in feminist development studies (brock, cornwall, and gaventa ; cornwall ; ; gaventa ; cornwall and coelho ) and deliberative democratic theory (dryzek ). discussions about participatory spaces distinguish empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens’ assemblies, and claimed spaces such as social movement organi- zations. this differentiation enables us to grasp political participation in three different academic fields: first, the study of parliamentary deliberation gives insight into legislative decision-making processes (bächtiger et al. ). second, the study of democratic innovations is rich in empirical findings on participatory designs such as mini-publics, town meetings, participatory budgets, peti- tions, referendums, and consultations (smith ). third, the study of social movements and col- lective action has recently employed democratic theory to understand internal decision making where “forms of power intervene in the communicative arenas that social movements build and inhabit” (della porta and rucht , ; also cf. polletta ). the concept of empowered, invited, and claimed spaces allows for thinking these three types of participatory arrangements together. the crucial differentiation between these spaces is informed by the social positionality of the cre- ators of the respective space and the actors within them. in short, it is determined by the question: who created the space for whom? empowered spaces are created by the state and facilitate the interaction of state actors; invited spaces are created by the state for citizens; and claimed spaces are created by citizens for their own interaction. the metaphor of the space serves to translate the notion of physical relationality into social relationality: “thinking about participation as a spatial practice highlights the relations of power and constructions of citizenship that permeate any site for public engagement” (cornwall , ). furthermore, space as a relational concept makes imagining a discursive power architecture possi- ble. participatory interfaces are to be carefully constructed to challenge asymmetrical power rela- tions inscribed in societies. in line with difference democrats’ pursuit of inclusion, andrea corn- wall ( ) argues: “some participatory approaches explicitly seek to disrupt the order of hierar- chical institutions, creating new and different spaces in which different rules of the game offer otherwise silenced actors a chance to speak and be heard” ( ). at the same time, however, partici- patory design can function as a tool of political elites to coopt participants (font et al. ). the differentiation between types of spaces contributes to finding new answers to the question of inclusion in unequal digitized societies. looking at political engagement on the internet, each type of participatory space with its different actors contributes to a different democratic function through different modes of identity performance as illustrated in table . all of these identity per- formances and their respective democratic functions serve the overarching goal of inclusion. table : typology of identity performances in participatory spaces on the internet empowered spaces invited spaces claimed spaces actors state agents state agents, citizens citizens identity performance identity continuation identity negation identity exploration democratic function accountability equality freedom empowered spaces such as parliaments need to fulfil the democratic function of accountability to create a strong link between citizens and their representatives (dryzek , ). the dialog- ical process of giving and holding to account includes various ideas of various constituencies into the democratic system. accountability is facilitated by identity continuation – the performative enactment of physically embodied identity as advocated by difference democrats. as a communi- cator in empowered spaces, the democratic subject acts as a representative of the social group it is associated with by virtue of the identity markers inscribed in its body and performed through socio- cultural codes of clothing, body language, etc. in regard to online communication, such continuous identity performances are possible through the digital replication of analog identity performances. invited spaces are designed to facilitate inclusive dialogue and are oriented toward the ideal of freedom from domination (smith , ). in contrast with both empowered and claimed space, invited spaces generate short-lived encounters between citizens and between citizens and state agents. they call for short term solutions to problems of internal exclusion (young ). digitally enabled identity negation corresponds to this logic. it reduces stable identity markers to a minimum such as individual pseudonyms, the collective moniker “anonymous” or no identifiers at all. this does not do away with identity, it rather facilitates identity expression. diversity is claimed lin- guistically rather than visually. identity boundaries are, however, destabilized (author ). claimed spaces, finally, flourish on identity exploration to facilitate expressive freedom, as suggested by cyberfeminists. claimed spaces on the internet allow for the visual enactment of identity through avatars, pictures, videos, emoticons and other digital reifications of corporeality. this identity exploration of the individual serves the freedom to rediscover and playfully express the multifaceted self. it thus contributes to inclusion of various aspects of identity into the demo- cratic system. identity exploration corresponds with social movements’ need to communicate with the public. to be heard in a competitive media environment, they need to form colorful and inno- vative collective identities and engage in carnivalesque forms of protest. the typology presented in table is not rigid. while the mode of identity performance and the respective function are indeed closely linked, the type of participatory space in which they might occur needs to be treated more flexibly. accountability through identity continuation, for example, can be important in invited spaces as well just as identity negation and equality might be vital in claimed spaces. the following review of empirical work on the subject, however, will demonstrate that the respective identity performances and its functions mostly occur in the partic- ipatory spaces indicated in table . it shows how these democratic functions come into play and what designers of participatory spaces need to take into account in order to best facilitate them. empowered spaces on the internet: accountability through identity continuation empowered spaces as democratic forums legitimized by the citizenry to make political decisions on their behalf are increasing their online presence (stanyer ). new digital modes of identity construction are used by governmental actors to fulfil their function as representatives of their re- spective constituencies. in practical terms, this means that representatives carefully select and cu- rate images and text including biographies and information on current activities. these visual and textual self-portraits replicate representatives’ analog identities. in a study on us members of con- gress, gulati ( ) explains: “the images and symbols that members of congress include on their web sites are meant, at the very least, to be consistent with the impression of themselves that they are trying make with a constituent during a face-to-face meeting” ( ). this is corroborated by stanyer ( ) in a study on us and uk legislators, who “…will seek to project the same identity (they will not appear as someone else) and emphasize the same qualities” ( ). these continuous identity performances serve the democratic function of accountability con- necting representatives to their constituencies. only through identity continuation can representa- tives be held accountable. thus, one of the prime goals of digital government policies is to increase transparency. not only does this enhance public scrutiny of governmental activities, it also strengthens the bond of constituents with their representatives: “while transparency of parliamen- tary procedures including committee deliberations, parliamentary debates, mp [member of parlia- ment] voting records and mp absenteeism is clearly important for public accountability, transpar- ency of actual mp characteristics (that is, personal and contact information) can likewise enhance the quality of governance by increasing public awareness, legitimacy, and trust in both parliament and individual mps” (joshi and rosenfield , ). setälä and grönlund ( ) go beyond the notion of transparency and claim that legislators’ digitized identity performances facilitate publicity. unlike transparency, which describes the mere possibility of public scrutiny, publicity facilitated by representatives’ websites strengthens interac- tivity. the act of holding representatives accountable is a two-way conversation which also com- prises civic feedback. this input function of accountability allows for the inclusion of public opin- ion in governmental decision-making. while the possibilities for public feedback to legislators’ have been significantly increased through new media, several studies show that most of represent- atives’ websites grossly neglect the opportunity for interactivity (e.g. jackson and lilleker ). representatives’ websites are rather used for one-way communication and identity construc- tion contributing to difference democrats’ ideal of embodied diversity. a recent study finds that % of parliamentary websites worldwide display photos of legislators, % indicate their sex, and % their age (joshi and rosenfield ). these numbers are higher in wealthier nations such as the us where % of the websites of members of congress contain information on education and experience, % on local roots, and % on family relations. representatives’’ official gov- ernmental websites are complemented by their social media presence. the compilation of several identity performances on various web domains has been theorized as “networked self” in the work of feminist media scholars (cohen ; papacharissi ). empirically, % of legislators worldwide were found to use social media (joshi and rosenfield ). legislators’ social media presence also entail a gendered aspect. while only . % of uk mps are women, . % of mps actively engaging on twitter are women (jackson and lilleker ) giving some credibility to the cyberfeminist thesis of women’s empowerment through online engagement. invited spaces on the internet: equality through identity negation invited spaces such as citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgets are increasingly replicated online or make use of hybrid online/offline engagement (smith , - ). whereas in em- powered spaces only state agents interact and the democratic function of accountability links them to the citizenry, invited spaces serve as an interface between citizens and state representatives, be this directly through the digital interaction of citizens with state agents or indirectly through gov- ernmental engagement with the discursive output of these spaces (peixoto and fox ). invited spaces online are carefully designed to afford inclusive processes of citizens’ partici- pation, with the literature focusing on design feature such as facilitation, co-temporality (a-/syn- chronicity), and identifiability (davies and chandler ). the latter feature proves especially significant. unlike their analog counterparts, online spaces provide the opportunity for the temporal negation of physically embodied identity. this potentially counters prejudice and discrimination that are prevalent in face-to-face encounters. it levels the playing field and promotes meritocracy. in , for example, the uk parliament in cooperation with the hansard society organized an online consultation process entitled womenspeak. the online forum invited both mps and vic- tims of domestic violence to discuss their personal experiences under self-selected pseudonyms. the crucial role of avoiding identification is pointed out by margarete morgan, an mp taking part in the process: “the anonymity offered by the technology enabled women to tell their stories, often for the first time, without fear of identification and to receive support and advice without fear of reprisal” (cited in smith , ). coleman ( ) finds that % of participants in womenspeak reported to perceive the online forum as a safe space: “had the participants been invited to attend parliament to tell their stories and express their views, few would have gone. parliament is an intimidating place and most women would not want their names recorded as witnesses” ( ). this case illustrates difference democrats’ counterpublics as enclave deliberation of disadvantaged groups (fraser ). at the same time, it exemplifies a cyberfeminist practice of peer support. at the end of the process, several participants posted enthusiastic comments such as: “it was brilliant; i felt really close to the participants during the consultation as if i were part of a giant support network” (cited in coleman , ). while this example aptly illustrates the inclusive function of identity negation in invited spaces online, it is possible that this is only due to the particularly vulnerable position of participants. other examples, however, show that temporal identity negation can contribute to equality in other contexts as well. an experiment on a political discussion forum to debate the upcoming south korean national election in found that participants who had to reveal their gender, age, and region engaged less frequently than those who stayed anonymous. the authors of the study explain: “physical appearance or social status (perceived) in face-to-face interactions often function as ‘gates’ that control human interaction. anonymity in computer-mediated communication frees in- teraction participants from potentially feeling socially inferior to their counterparts and, thus, fa- cilitates expression for everyone” (rhee and kim , ). this feeling of inferiority can further be explained by the “chilling effect.” the feeling of being observed and judged by others leads to inhibition and stifles free expression. this chilling effect observed on social media where users self-censor due to government surveillance (stoycheff ) also comes to bear in invited spaces on the internet, where participants potentially feel judged by their gender, race or other identity markers. anonymity can thus work against the chilling effect and alleviate peer pressure and concerns about surveillance. a study comparing anonymous and identified online petitioning found that the willingness to sign petitions drops by . % if identifi- cation is required (la raja ). other studies show that when given the choice, large shares of online petition signers opt for anonymity (berg ; schmidt and johnsen ). similarly, par- ticipation numbers dropped drastically in the online participatory budgeting process in the german city of gütersloh when mandatory identification was introduced. while in with the option of anonymity . % of population took part, this number decreased to . % in the consecutive year where identification was required (ruesch and märker ). the effect of diminished participation through enforced identification comes along with sig- nificant gender differences: the study on online petitions found that while men are hardly affected by required identification, engagement of female participants drops significantly. the author rea- sons that women are more heavily affected by peer pressure: “while women now vote at equal rates to men, their participation remains unequal with respect to… other forms of participation. disclosure policies appear to depress this participation even more” (la raja , ). claimed spaces on the internet: freedom through identity exploration claimed spaces on the internet are either created as alternative media or occupy commercial space on corporate social media such as facebook or instagram. they make use of opportunities for digital identity change, which is not a serious endeavor but a playful undertaking. the carni- valesque act of masking constitutes a transformative practice of challenging the stability of identity (bakhtin ). today carnivalesque protest with its roots in european medieval mardi gras, which often entailed the mockery of ruling authorities and the playful inversion of social hierar- chies, meet the possibilities of online identity play described by cyberfeminists. both cyberfeminist practice and carnivalesque protest are aptly illustrated by the new york art collective guerilla girls. their public interventions in the disguise of gorillas dating back to have made use of digital media in recent years. digital identity performances extend the analog possibilities of roleplay through digital images and videos of gorilla performances enacting aggressiveness and masculinity. particularly, the breakaway-group guerilla girls broadband have created a subversive online presence. on their website, users can join by virtually dressing up as gorillas. core members of guerilla girls broadband themselves take on the identities of female artists who have not gained the deserved appreciation in the male dominated art business. a “car- tography of choice” maps abortion clinics and emails can be sent to “bad bosses” anonymously to address sexual harassment, unequal pay or other work-related grievances (stein ). digital identity play has also become an important part of the annual days of activism against gender-based violence. established in , this campaign has recently spread to second life, a virtual online environment for social roleplaying. here feminist activists set up virtual dis- cussion events, meetings, and exhibitions around the topic of gendered violence. participants de- sign female avatars with black eyes, bruises, and bleeding wounds to create awareness (motter ). protest avatars were also used in the euro mayday netparades in and . the annual euro mayday parade draws attention to current precariousness of work, which especially affect women. on the website of the mayday netparade users could create their individual protest avatars as part of a diverse collective. according to a study by mattoni and doerr ( ), women, who are often underrepresented in the imagery of traditional labor day parades, took center stage online as “the parade’s visual icons of protests positively underlined diversity and differences as an asset of the collective struggle” ( ). other examples illustrate the relevance of racial and queer identity performances in claimed spaces on the internet. in , a queer community established itself in the virtual roleplay fantasy game world of warcraft. the fact that the , users of the community created , characters, including the practice of gender swapping, indicates playful identity exploration. due to its global scope, this community also included participants from countries where homosexual practices are banned. apart from political discussions on lgbtiq issues, the community organized virtual pride parades. unlike the above examples were analog political protest was taken online, members of the lgbtiq movement on world of warcraft organized offline meetings after their online en- counter (mckenna, gardner, and myers ). the digital enactment of difference is also evident in what became to be known as habbo raids. in users of the imageboard chan charged mod- erators of habbo hotel – an online roleplay platform mostly used by white, us american teenagers – with discriminating against black avatars. chan users created a coordinated online swarm of black, male avatars in black suits with black sunglasses and big afros, which blocked entrances to facilities in the virtual hotel setting. when other users attempted to enter the virtual pool, the raiders exclaimed: “pool’s closed due to aids!” mocking racial prejudice (author ). identity exploration in claimed spaces on the internet does not require an entire virtual world with fully animated avatars like in the cases cited so far. rather, social media provide tools for the everyday practice of identity play as part of political engagement. gerbaudo ( ) demonstrates how users change their social media profile pictures for flags, logos or portraits of others or they decorate their own pictures with ribbons or color filters. in the so called “arab spring,” for exam- ple, thousands of social media users changed their profile picture for the image of khaled said, a -year-old blogger killed by police in alexandria. the strategy of difference enabled by online identity exploration thus also entails aspects of performing solidarity. at the same time, however, the carnivalesque construction of digital identities is also employed for discrimination and hate speech. in the so called “gamer gate affair” twitter trolls using images of anime girls as profile pictures attacked feminists criticizing misogynist depiction of women in computer games, includ- ing death and rape threats (author ). another example is the online presence of the ku klux klan who uses their website to visually construct a masculinist, heteronormative, and racially “pure” self-image (schmitz ). conclusion this essay set out to find new ways of furthering inclusion in democratic societies marked by iden- tity related power asymmetries. it aims at contributing to the ideal of inclusion promoted by differ- ence democrats while counteracting the essentializing tendencies inherent in their politics of pres- ence. while the essentializing effects of the politics of presence themselves cannot be eliminated, they can be alleviated by a pluralization of alternative modes of identity performances. the multi- plicity of identities which contribute to diversity as core value of democracy calls for the plurali- zation of institutional arrangements, which facilitate such diverse identity expression. the typology presented here to account for such plural identity performances might appear as rigid. while the link between identity performances and their respective democratic function in- deed proofs strong, the link with the respective space appears weaker. examples illustrate that these identity performances with their respective function can work in other types of spaces as well. koop and marland ( ), for example, find that at least to a certain extent identity exploration is possible for representatives as they emphasize different aspects of themselves in different media. and some of my own work explores modes of identity negation in claimed spaces created by the hacktivist collective anonymous (author ). the purpose of this paper is not to regulate identity performances and confine them to partic- ular spaces. rather than closing doors, i aim to open them and allow for new thinking. the goal is to draw attention to the diversity of modes of identity performances that are not mutually exclusive but can and must function alongside each other to fulfil a variety of democratic functions. this essay is a call for diversifying the types of participatory spaces and modes of identity performances as part of a pluralist democratic society. it is thus diversity – the core value of difference democracy – that leads the way out of the dilemma of difference. the essentializing tendencies of difference democracy are best countered by pluralizing participatory spaces and the variety of identity perfor- mances within them. this argument needs, however, to be evaluated against the background of the perils of online communication such as group polarization, discrimination, and digital inequalities. exclusion from online participation along gender, race, class, age, and geographic divides leaves these new possi- bilities of engagement out of reach for many. the factual increase in participatory possibilities, thus also widens gaps in political engagement. it is, however, important to note that these gaps are narrowing and are even overcome in the case of gender in the us, (campos-castillo ). as for all of these challenges, they often pose new threats to democracy. the wide spread of online com- munication is, however, a new emerging reality that needs to be faced. this reality brings both opportunities, which are the subject of this article, and challenges. both are unavoidable and need to be dealt with with the greatest possible awareness, to which this article is a contribution. the important question at this point is whether and to which extent participatory spaces on the internet exhibit negative effects observed in everyday communication. group polarization de- scribed by sunstein ( ) as a process in which communication among like-minded participants leads to more extreme positions has not been reported in any of the cases discussed above. the same applies for lying and fraud. it appears that design features of participatory spaces such as moderation and the awareness of their participants mitigates negative behavior exhibited else- where. this observation, however, does not apply for discrimination. as the examples of the gamergate and the kkk online illustrate, some claimed spaces are created to pursue exclusionary purposes. this appears as trade-off coming along with freedom of expression. in short, anti-dem- ocratic tendencies exhibited in online communication are rather less pronounces in participatory spaces, who through their design and participants’ awareness appear to discourage such behavior. discussions of difference democracy have long quietened down. but marginalized identities still account for modes of exclusion as recent studies show (beauvais ; karpowitz and mendelberg ). this becomes even more evident in the face of new media’s challenges such as cyberbullying and opportunities such as #metoo. let carole pateman’s words be an inspiration: “the lesson to be learned from the past is that a ‘democratic’ theory and practice that is not at the same time feminist merely serves to maintain a fundamental form of domination and so makes a mockery of the ideals and values that democracy is held to embody” (pateman , ). references bächtiger, andré, markus sörndli, marco steenbergen, and jürgen steiner. . “the deliberative dimensions of legislatures.” acta politica ( ): – . bakhtin, mikhail. . 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representation.” in ethnicity and group rights, edited by ian shapiro and will kymlicka, – . new york: new york university press. ———. b. “difference as a resource for democratic communication.” in deliberative democracy: essays on reason and politics, edited by james bohman and william rehg, – . cambridge: mit press. ———. . inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. this criticism has been responded to in various accounts of deliberative democracy with relaxations of consensus requirements and explanations of rationality as intersubjective for example by dryzek ( ). here this criticism merely functions to explain the starting point of debates around difference democracy. while the literature in development studies speaks of closed, invited and claimed spaces, dryzek speaks of empow- ered and public spaces. closed and empowered spaces refer to state institutions. public spaces encompass both claimed and invited spaces. i bring these two terminologies together, because they supplement each other. on the one hand, dryzek’s terminology lacks a differentiation between invited and claimed spaces and collapses them into public spaces. on the other, the terminology of development studies is not consistent. the attributes “claimed” and “invited” describe how participants get access to the respective participatory space. the term “closed” does not describe modes of access but appears to deny access altogether.” the term empowered,” however, explains that participant in state institutions get access via modes of empowerment, either through elections or appointment. while these processes are highly exclusive, they are not entirely closed. the gender funding gap within the entreprenuerial ecosystem in the united states: does a correlation exist among gender, industry, and funding? abigail a. staker an honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the kenan-flagler business school at the university of north carolina at chapel hill chapel hill approved by ___________________________________ (maryann feldman) ii abstract abigail a. staker the gender funding gap within the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the united states: does a correlation exist among gender, industry, and funding? (under the direction of maryann feldman) recent studies highlight females’ positive impact within the business world and entrepreneurial ecosystem. within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, however, females lag behind their male counterparts in funding accumulation. previous research identified three primary causes to this discrepancy: ( ) lack of females in the financial capital industry, ( ) implicit bias, and ( ) female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attitudes. what isn’t addressed, however, is an analysis of the industries pursued by females versus males. my study identifies and attempts to understand underlying causes in gender funding differences based on industry. i use a mixed-method approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis. my findings suggest ( ) industry does not exhibit a significant role in gender funding differences, ( ) implicit bias continues to plague females, and ( ) females are underrepresented across all industry lines. females receive fewer investment dollars than their male counterparts, appearing to directly correlate to the limited number of females entering the entrepreneurial ecosystem. iii acknowledgements i would like to recognize several individuals whose support and guidance throughout the senior honors thesis made this completion possible. dr. maryann feldman – thank you for all your help and advice throughout the senior honors thesis process. i am forever grateful for your willingness to serve as my advisor! dr. patricia harms – thank you for the guidance and help you have provided over the past year. this process would not have been the same without you! david fisher – i cannot thank you enough for your assistance on my data analysis. my thesis would be half of what it is today without your help! dr. melissa geil and dr. wendell gilland – thank you serving as committee members for my honors thesis. your advice and feedback proved invaluable to the completion of my thesis! the kenan scholars program and the kenan institute – thank you for pushing me to purse a senior honors thesis. i am forever grateful for the many opportunities this program has provided me! mom, dad, and mimi – thank you for always being there for me during the ups and downs of this process. the completion of my thesis would not have been possible without you all by my side! iv table of contents abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iii list of tables ........................................................................................................................ vii list of figures ..................................................................................................................... viii introduction .......................................................................................................................... literature review ............................................................................................................... the gender funding gap in the entrepreneurial space ................................................................. lack of female presence in the financial capital industry .................................................... implicit bias in entrepreneurial financing ............................................................................. female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attitudes ...................... conclusion .................................................................................................................................... methodology ....................................................................................................................... hypothesis..................................................................................................................................... quantitative analysis .................................................................................................................... sample selection and criteria ............................................................................................... data collection ...................................................................................................................... data breakdown .................................................................................................................... v data analytics ....................................................................................................................... regression ............................................................................................................................. qualitative analysis ...................................................................................................................... limitations .................................................................................................................................... quantitative collection and analysis: crunchbase database ............................................... qualitative collection and analysis: interview subjects ...................................................... other ...................................................................................................................................... conclusion .................................................................................................................................... research findings .............................................................................................................. quantitative analysis .................................................................................................................... data analysis ......................................................................................................................... regression analysis .............................................................................................................. qualitative analysis ...................................................................................................................... investors................................................................................................................................. founders ................................................................................................................................ investors and founders .......................................................................................................... discussion ............................................................................................................................... discussion of findings .................................................................................................................. vi conclusion .................................................................................................................................... future research ............................................................................................................................ appendices .............................................................................................................................. references ..................................................................................................................................... vii list of tables table . : data collection attributes .......................................................................................... table . : investors / founders questionnaire ............................................................................ viii list of figures figure . : percent of total funding received by year founded and gender ( to ) .. figure . : average funding received by year founded and gender ( to ) ........... figure . : total funding by industry and gender from founding years ( to ) ......... figure . : number of startups founded per industry sector ( to ) ............................ figure . : average funding provided to each gender by industry ( to ) .................. introduction within the workplace and business world, females continue to make advancements both as leaders in established companies and founders of new ventures. as of , females accounted for . % of fortune ceos in the united states, increasing from . % in (connley, ). in , venture capital (vc) investments in all-female founded startups hit a record-setting $ . billion, representing . % of funds invested across the entire united states startup ecosystem (clark, ). while popular press considers these statistics encouraging for females within the business world, are they true triumphs? currently, among fortune companies, more ceos named john exist than all female ceos combined (miller, quealy, & sanger-katz, ). all-male founded startups received % of venture capital financing in (clark, ). these percentages speak volumes to the distinct differences between males and females within the business world. further, the gender inequality remains perplexing as recent studies highlight females’ positive impact within the business world and entrepreneurial ecosystem. research conducted by boston consulting group and masschallenge found females impacted revenue generated by startups more positively than males. the study indicated female-led ventures generated % more revenue over a five-year period compared to their male counterparts. however, while females delivered higher revenues, a gender gap persisted in new-business funding (abouzahr, taplett, krentz, & harthorne, ). venture capital is a form of private equity and a type of financing that investors provide to startup companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term growth potential. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venturecapital.asp) masschallenge strengthens the global innovation ecosystem by accelerating high potential startups across all industries, from anywhere in the world for zero-equity taken. (https://masschallenge.org/) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venturecapital.asp https://masschallenge.org/ so, the question becomes, why do these distinct gender differences exist? at first glance, gender bias appears at play. however, when female entrepreneurs like elizabeth holmes succeed in obtaining significant funding for their business ventures, gender bias appears irrelevant. thus, new questions and ideas regarding the entrepreneurial gender funding gap surface. elizabeth holmes, the founder of theranos, provides the best, although most sensationalized, example to date of a female’s ability to raise investment capital. theranos, a blood-testing startup touting proprietary technology, reached unicorn status with a $ billion valuation. ultimately, the technology and theranos proved worthless. however, before the exposure of theranos’ technology as fraudulent, elizabeth holmes raised $ million from outside funding sources (hartmans & leskin, ). obviously, her gender did not deter investors. her ability to achieve such noteworthy capital accumulation, with an unproven technology, brings into question current research explanations for the funding gap, especially in regard to gender bias. does funding really hinge on the gender of the founder or does funding occur as a function of industry? while research to date examines many reasons for the existence of a gender funding gap, the anomaly witnessed with elizabeth holmes’ unprecedented capital accumulation inspired me to assess the gender funding gap from a different approach. specifically, my research will examine the following question: does a discrepancy between entrepreneur funding and gender exist within different industry sectors or does the discrepancy in funding exist as a function of the type of businesses pursued by females versus males? ****** this research thesis intends to provide additional clarity as to why the gender funding gap persists in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. the literature review examines the formal research done to date on the gender funding gap, including ( ) the lack of female presence in the financial capital industry, ( ) gender bias, and ( ) female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attributes. the research methodology section defines my hypothesis, explains my quantitative and qualitative data collection, and highlights any limitations to my research approach. the research analysis and discussion sections provide research findings and discussions of possible reasons for the gender funding gap based on my results. lastly, the thesis provides a conclusion to my study and suggests additional future research which could improve or build upon this topic. literature review the initial step to my literature review involved reviewing current research to develop the overarching reasons for the entrepreneurial gender funding gap. from this initial analysis, i developed generalized categories focused on the possible causes for the gender funding gap. the primary explanations researched to date fall into three main groups: ( ) lack of female presence in the financial capital industry, ( ) implicit bias in entrepreneurial financing, and ( ) female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attitudes. within each category, i examined research studies which supported these three alternative conclusions. based upon this review, i determined further research needs to be conducted on the direct correlations between gender, industry, and funding amount, specifically with a focus on gender and industry space. the gender funding gap in the entrepreneurial space a growing body of literature exists that examines discrepancies in funding between females and males within the entrepreneurial space. coleman and robb ( ) used data from the kauffman firm survey to establish an inequality in gender funding. their results indicated females start their ventures with significantly lower financial funding than males. males incurred twice as much business debt to establish their ventures as compared to females (p. ). further, coleman and robb ( ) findings suggested females raise significantly lower amounts of incremental debt and equity in the first years of startup businesses. these results held true no matter the type of firm or owner characteristics (p. ). the kauffman firm survey (kfs) is a panel study of , businesses founded in and tracked over their early years of operation, through . the survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity; characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses; the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of these businesses; and the characteristics of their founders. (https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/entrepreneurship/research/kauffman-firm-survey) https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/entrepreneurship/research/kauffman-firm-survey a more recent study by poczter and shapsis ( ) builds on the research of coleman and robb ( ). using data collected during a televised entrepreneurial pitch competition, these researchers analyzed funding obtained by entrepreneurs from angel investors. consistent with findings from coleman and robb ( ), female teams received less capital and provided more of their own equity relative to their male counterparts (p. ). further, the study revealed females received lower valuations, resulting in smaller investments than male-owned ventures. interestingly enough, the study revealed yield rates between males and females did not vary (p. ). while a gender funding gap clearly persists, the primary reason for the funding discrepancy between females and males varies by research. research to date primarily studies the following explanations: ( ) lack of female presence in the financial capital industry, ( ) implicit bias in entrepreneurial financing, and ( ) female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attitudes. lack of female presence in the financial capital industry one explanation for the gender funding gap relates to the underrepresentation of females in the financial capital industry. the authors of the diana project found between and , less than % of total venture capital funding went to female-owned firms (gatewood, brush, carter, greene, & hart, ). they concluded this low level of funding correlated to the relatively small number of females employed in the venture capital industry (p. ). a later study by blum ( ) researched why gender disparities exist among directors and partners at venture capital firms. as of , females comprised approximately % of independent venture a multi-university research program aimed at identifying factors that support and enable high growth in female-led ventures. (gatewood, brush, carter, greene, & hart, ). capitalists (p. ). the bureau of labor statistics highlighted from to , . % of female workers left the financial industry while males increased by . % during the same timeframe. further, the number of females aged to working in finance dropped by . % while males increased by . % (p. ). according to blum ( ), this disparity resulted in part from limited mentoring opportunities, few female role models, lack of executive management experience, and female exclusion from primary niche networks (p. ). such disparity negatively affects entrepreneurism and economic activity for females in their quest for capital in a male- dominated industry (p. ). with male dominance in the venture capital space, females lack the networking relationships to connect them with venture capitalists, thereby limiting their probability of obtaining venture financing. implicit bias in entrepreneurial financing in addition to the lack of female representation in the financial capital industry, gender bias also affects investors’ financing decisions. muntean and Özkazanç-pan ( ) studied the gender gap in entrepreneurship from a lens of a feminist framework. liberal feminism assumes equality for males and females; however, an unspoken bias continues to view males as the norm in the entrepreneurial space (p. ). edelman, róisín, tatiana, and brush ( ) explored the role of gender bias in the financial decision-making process. they examined the disparity in funding between male- and female-owned companies using social identity theory (p. ). the researchers argued in male-dominated angel investment groups, gender stereotypes biased angel investors’ interpretation of signals sent by entrepreneurs. these signals included male dominance the bureau of labor statistics (bls) of the u.s. department of labor is the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. its mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision making. (https://www.bls.gov/bls/infohome.htm) a the study of the interplay between personal and social identities. social identity theory aims to specify and predict the circumstances under which individuals think of themselves as individuals or as group members. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-identity-theory) https://www.bls.gov/bls/infohome.htm https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-identity-theory in business and the perceived difference between entrepreneurship and femininity (p. ). their findings suggested angel investors viewed female-led entrepreneurial ventures as having less legitimacy, even though no differences in actual legitimacy existed across businesses (p. ). the researchers contended within angel groups composed of predominantly males, the expectation of entrepreneurs as masculine engendered biases against females (p. ). this attitude resulted in ventures led by males being more favorably evaluated, thus privileging male entrepreneurs for funding. this study correlates to the results found by fiske, cuddy, glick, and xu ( ), which indicated the united states cultural beliefs system viewed males as being more competent than females in business transactions and personal interactions (p. ). a different study conducted by kanze, huang, conley, and higgins ( ) pairs well with this observation. kanze et al. ( ) proposed the funding gap originates with a gender bias, as evidenced by the questions posed by investors to entrepreneurs during funding rounds. they used data collected from question-and-answer sessions at the techcrunch disrupt new york city in and (p. ). in analyzing the question-and-answer sessions between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the researchers found the gender funding gap not likely to narrow with more females entering into venture capital. both female and male venture capitalists demonstrated the same biases, especially in regard to the type of questions asked to each gender during funding sessions (p. ). the questions posed to females highlighted prevention, techcrunch disrupt is the world’s leading authority in debuting revolutionary startups, introducing game- changing technologies and discussing what’s top of mind for the tech industry’s key innovators. disrupt gathers the best and brightest entrepreneurs, investors, hackers, and tech fans for on-stage interviews, the startup battlefield competition, a -hour hackathon, startup alley, hardware alley, and after parties. (https://www.techstars.com/event/techcrunch-disrupt-new-york-city/) prevention focused questions emphasize maintaining non-losses and not losing capital (e.g. what does customer retention look like? are you operating at breakeven?) (kanze, huang, conley, & higgins, ) https://www.techstars.com/event/techcrunch-disrupt-new-york-city/ whereas the questions asked to males focused on promotion (p. ). a review of these sessions revealed discrepancies in questions asked to different genders, highlighting the effect of bias on financing decisions. promotion focused questions directly correlated with greater funding amounts (p. ). brush, greene, balachandra, and davis ( ) substantiated the findings of kanze et al. ( ) by examining recent developments in capital accumulation within the venture capital space. in an effort to update the initial diana project study, the researchers analyzed funding in the venture capital space by industry, stage of investment, physical location, and performance outcomes (p. ). brush et al. ( ) concluded females made progress in obtaining funding; however, “there is still a significant funding gap in that all-male teams are four times more likely to receive funding from venture capital investors than companies with even one female on the team” (p. ). further, the researchers suggested this result may occur due to gender homophily theory. based on this theory, brush et al. ( ) concluded in the venture capital space, with trust being the central component in financing relationships, the male-dominated venture capital industry prefers investing in relationships with male ceos or all-male teams as compared to female ceos and teams: a direct reflection of gender bias in funding decisions (p. ). female- versus male-owned company characteristics and owner attitudes females also appear to exhibit different owner attitudes and business characteristics than their male counterparts, which in turn affects financing decisions. the majority of research to date focuses on the gender funding gap in the early-stage obtainment of capital. becker-blease promotion focused questions emphasize attaining growth-oriented gains that are facilitated by capital (e.g. how do you intend to acquire customers? what does your revenue forecast look like?) (kanze, huang, conley, & higgins, ) gender homophily theory suggests that people have a tendency to associate with people who are demographically similar as this leads to positive perceptions and trust (brush, greene, balachandra, & davis, ) and sohl ( ) observed females sought angel financing at a rate much lower than their male counterparts, even though the females’ chance in obtaining financing from angel investors equaled males (p. ). the researchers surveyed angel investor portals and found % of proposals originated from female entrepreneurs, the remaining % male. these findings indicated female entrepreneurs lack confidence when seeking external funding (p. ). cole and mehran ( ) analyzed data from the survey of business finances (ssbf) and discerned the same finding as becker-blease and sohl ( ). while the probability of a female and male receiving a loan equated, females applied for significantly lower amounts of debt compared to males (cole and mehran, ). this trend continued into later stage funding. in and , females raised roughly half the amount of incremental financing than their male counterparts (coleman and robb, ). further, gatewood et al. ( ) examined male and female entrepreneurs’ networks and how these networks correlated to financing. consistent with coleman and robb ( ), they determined females received early-stage funding. however, either for lack of aggressively growing their business or because they dropped out of their business early, later rounds of funding for female entrepreneurs consistently underperformed in comparison to males (p. ). the discrepancy in external funding requests directly correlates to the gender funding gap. so, why do females consistently underperform males in requesting debt when results in obtaining financing prove equal? research confirmed females shy away from external sources of financing to avoid giving up control and taking on greater risk (constantinidis, cornet, & asandei, ). after conducting interviews with entrepreneurs, constantinidis et at. ( ) the survey of small business finances (ssbf) collects information on small businesses (fewer than employees) in the united states. owner characteristics, firm size, use of financial services, and the income and balance sheets of the firm are just some examples of the types of information collected. (https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss /nssbftoc.htm) https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss /nssbftoc.htm also concluded females choose to pursue businesses in industries that do not rely heavily on external funding sources to maintain business viability (p. ). further, brush, edelman, manolova, and welter ( ) conducted research on the importance of gender in ecosystems at the institutional, organizational, and individual levels. this study found females tend to align themselves with female only networks, thereby, restricting access to economic and social capital and limiting their credibility as a field player in the entrepreneurial space (p. ). in addition to requesting smaller investment amounts at initial and later stage funding rounds, females also prefer to use different forms of capital accumulation than males. in analyzing the kauffman firm survey , coleman and robb ( ) observed females preferred and relied more heavily on obtaining capital through internal rather than external sources to finance their ventures (p. ). personal debt for female entrepreneurs included personal credit card balances, personal bank loans, business credit card balances in the owner’s name, and family loans. only a small percentage of females used outside equity investors or venture capital financing, . % and . %, respectively (p. ). sullivan and meek ( ) also noted female engagement in financing networking focused on family and friends (p. ). a later study by kanze et al. ( ) observed the continued trend of females using personal financing rather than external sources to fund their ventures. the researchers corelated the attraction to personal rather than external financing with the “lifestyle” and “female friendly” industries pursed by females, driven by a perceived need to balance work and life (p. ). coleman and robb ( ) analyze the growth in female-owned firms in the early s which provided much insight to female attitudes toward business. according to data from the united states census bureau from to , female-owned firms increased by . % compared to the growth rate of . % for united states firms overall. however, during this same timeframe, the revenues, business growth, and payroll of these female-owned firms grew at a lagging pace compared to overall united states firms. revenues, business growth, and payroll grew at %, %, and %, respectively, compared to overall firm growth of %, . %, and % (p. ). these united states census bureau statistics indicated while the number of female- owned firms grew faster than those owned by males, their relative importance in the marketplace did not follow the same trend (p. ). between and , the number of united states female-owned companies continued to trend upward, increasing by %: a rate five times faster than the national average for all businesses (edelman et al., ). however, again, despite the continued growth of female-owned ventures, the researchers found female entrepreneurs continued to face challenges in obtaining financial capital and growing at the same rate as their male counterparts (p. ). a key reason male- and female-owned businesses grow at differing rates and receive different funding amounts links to the different motivations and anticipated rewards of business ownership, a trend which remains constant over the past decade. firm growth and profits motivated males while females sought personal fulfillment, flexibility, and a sense of control (morris, miyasaki, watters, & coombes, ). further, the desire for control and risk aversion led females to keep their businesses small and manageable (p. ). a more recent evaluation performed by sullivan and meek ( ), related to females and entrepreneurship, also concluded the census bureau is the federal government’s largest statistical agency. they are dedicated to providing current facts and figures about america’s people, places, and economy. federal law protects the confidentiality of all the information the census bureau collects. (https://www.census.gov/about/what/census-at-a-glance.html) https://www.census.gov/about/what/census-at-a-glance.html differences in motivation, opportunity recognition, acquisition of resources, and entrepreneurial performance/ business success existed between females and males (p. ). the authors noted females pursue different industry lines compared to males (p. ). swartz and amatucci ( ) also found female confidence to be a cause. the authors concluded females give up greater ownership percentage when negotiating funding than their male counterparts (p. ). further, ladge, eddelston and sugiyama ( ) focused on female entrepreneurs’ imposter fears and its effect on female entrepreneurial identity. the researchers concluded these fears directly correlate to the success and growth of female ventures, resulting in a gender performance gap which directly relates to the gender funding gap (p. ). consistent with ladge et al. ( ), simmons, wiklund, levie, bradley and sunny ( ) further assessed the cultural attributes of entrepreneurship ecosystems by evaluating how public stigma and personal fear of business failure affects the likelihood of reentry into the entrepreneurial space by males and females. the authors found public stigma of business failure deterred females from trying again to a larger degree than males. conversely, males feared personal failure more than females (p. ). differing industry focuses by males and females further explains the gender funding discrepancy. coleman and robb ( ) highlighted female-owned firms tend to concentrate in the service and retail sectors: industries which are highly competitive and lack opportunities for growth and profitability. as of , % of female-owned firms resided in the service sector and . % in the retail industry space (p. ). only a small percentage of female-owned firms existed in rapid growth or high technology lines of business (morris et al., ). further, manolova, brush, edelman, and shaver ( ) researched the different expectations and growth imposter syndrome is the overwhelming feeling that you don’t deserve your success. it convinces you that you’re not as intelligent, creative, or talented as you may seem. it is the suspicion that your achievements are down to luck, good timing or just being in the “right place at the right time.” and it is accompanied by the fear that, one day, you’ll be exposed as a fraud. (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/overcoming-impostor-syndrome.htm) https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/overcoming-impostor-syndrome.htm intentions of united states female and male entrepreneurs. these findings indicated females start more businesses to achieve a work-family balance, which usually relates to slower growth industries (p. ). according to the study, male entrepreneurs’ motivations focused on financial success much more than female objectives in entrepreneurship (p. ). manolova et al. ( ) research correlates with a study by neumeyer, santos, caetano, and kalbfleisch ( ) who investigated the effects of business typology, race, ethnicity, and past business experience on the social capital distribution of female entrepreneurs in entrepreneurial ecosystems (p. ). through studying two social network data from municipal ecosystems in florida, usa (gainesville and jacksonville), the researchers determined network connectivity and the distribution of social capital significantly differ for male and female entrepreneurs (p. ). this difference proved contingent on the business type. male entrepreneurs highlighted higher social capital in aggressive- and managed-growth business networks, while female entrepreneurs exhibited higher social capital scores in lifestyle and survival business networks (p. ). guzman and kacperczyk ( ) examined the gender gap in entrepreneurship funding with a geographical focus of businesses located in california and massachusetts between and . the researchers used administrative business registration records to document six different startup attributes at founding (p. ). guzman and kacperczyk ( ) then used predictive analytics to summarize growth orientation of the different businesses. the results highlighted female-led ventures lagged by sixty-three percentage points behind male-led ventures in obtaining external funding (p. ). however, they attributed the most significant factor to the gender funding discrepancy related to initial startup orientation. the researchers found females start ventures with lower growth potential which does not appeal to investors. specifically, females do not start companies with “differentiated technology” – an innovative technology product not currently available in the marketplace (p. ). this research found females start firms associated with local business activities. however, when female- and male- led ventures focus on high growth, females and males achieved equal exit outcomes through ipos or high-value acquisitions (p. ). conclusion a review of the literature documents a funding gap between male and female entrepreneurs and provides much insight into why such gaps exist. reasons for the funding gap include the lack of female angel investors and venture capitalists, implicit bias, and business characteristics and owner attitudes exhibited by female and male entrepreneurs. while some of the research touched upon the different industries male and female entrepreneurs pursue, a deeper dive with more current data could provide further explanation and narrow the causation of the gender funding discrepancy. based upon this review, i determined further research needs to be conducted on the direct correlations between gender, industry, and funding amount, specifically with a focus on gender and industry space. therefore, my research will focus on the following question: does a discrepancy between entrepreneur funding and gender exist within different industry sectors or does the discrepancy in funding exist as a function of the type of businesses pursued by females versus males? methodology hypothesis in response to my research question and review of studies related to the gender funding gap, i formulated the following hypothesis which i intend to prove or disprove through my research: the gender funding gap more closely aligns with the type of industry and business growth pursued by females versus males with females pursing lower growth business industries. however, the continued lack of female investors (i.e. venture capitalists and angel investors) hinders female entrepreneurs’ abilities to obtain outside funding, consistent with gender bias. ***** in this section of the thesis, i explain the methodology used to address my research question and prove or disprove my hypothesis. i proposed a mixed-method study, including both quantitative and qualitative data collection. the goal of this approach to my research focused on ( ) analyzing and determining the funding provided to startup businesses within certain industries and ( ) determining any correlation between the amount of funding and the gender of the founder within these industries. i conducted my quantitative analysis as follows: i collected a data sample of startups based on specific company characteristics using the financial website crunchbase . from this database sample, i performed data analytics to develop and analyze patterns within the entrepreneurial ecosystem by gender and industry. i also used the sample database to run a crunchbase is the leading platform for professionals to discover innovative companies, connect with the people behind them, and pursue new opportunities. over million professionals—including entrepreneurs, investors, market researchers, and salespeople—trust crunchbase to inform their business decisions. and companies all over the world rely on crunchbase to power their applications, making over a billion calls to crunchbase’s api each year. (https://about.crunchbase.com/about-us/) https://www.crunchbase.com/ https://about.crunchbase.com/about-us/ regression analysis based on pre-determined independent and dependent variables. the regression analysis intended to determine if a correlation exists among gender of founder, industry, and funding amount. my qualitative data collection consisted of one-on-one interviews with individuals in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, including angel investors, venture capitalists, and startup founders based upon an established set of questions. quantitative analysis sample selection and criteria to select the sample of startup companies, i used crunchbase, an online database consisting of information on innovative ventures. while other databases exist, crunchbase proved to be the most user-friendly with the capability to download datasets into excel. further, as an undergraduate kenan-flagler business student, crunchbase was the only accessible financial database for use in my research study. crunchbase data includes information about funding amounts, founding members, year founded, and specific company characteristics, including industry identification and location. crunchbase sources its data in four ways: venture capitalists, machine learning, an in-house data team, and the crunchbase community. any individual can submit information to the crunchbase database; however, a moderator reviews these submissions before being accepted for publication (about crunchbase, n.d.). in order to validate crunchbase as a reliable database, i cross-checked a random sample of the data with pitchbook, a well-known, highly-respected private capital markets database. the datasets selected from crunchbase matched pitchbook, with a few exceptions. overall, the crunchbase data proved reliable. in order to appropriately collect the dataset, i established certain criteria. these criteria related to founding dates and geographic landscape. founding dates: the dataset consisted of companies founded between january , and december , . this time frame provides history and current relevance for data analysis. geographic landscape: the geographic landscape focused on startups headquartered in the united states, exclusively. i selected this landscape in order to better understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the united states. data collection based on the above variables, the full dataset included the information shown in table . for each company: table . : data collection attributes company characteristics funding characteristics founders characteristics organization name number of funding rounds founders’ names company group (industry ) total funding amount number of founders date founded headquarters location i selected these attributes because they most closely aligned with my research focus. crunchbase categorizes businesses based on groups, which equate to industry. within the dataset, forty-one groups/industries exist. data breakdown in reviewing the initial dataset, i eliminated all companies missing information related to founders’ names and total funding amount: two variables necessary to complete data analysis. the next aspect of the dataset breakdown involved identifying the gender of the founders. breaking down the dataset by gender proved crucial to identification and analysis of gender funding trends. to classify gender, i employed a version of guzman and kacperczyk’s ( ) research method. consistent with their research, i used the social security administration (ssa) list of names registered from to . through the use of python, an algorithm correlated each name within the ssa list to the number of times that name was recorded as a specific gender (see appendix a). if a name from the ssa list associated with one gender more than %, the name identified with that gender. for a name falling below % correlation with one gender but above % with the other gender, the name identified as ‘unknown’ gender. after identifying the gender of the names on the ssa list, a new python algorithm correlated the gender identification from the ssa list with the first name of the founders within my dataset (see appendix a). with gender identified, i then classified each company as all-male founded, all-female founded, or mixed gender founded. following this procedure allowed for identification of % of companies within the dataset as all-male, all-female, or mixed gender founded ventures. i eliminated companies for my dataset with no gender identification. funding associated with the excluded group accounted for less than % of total funding for the dataset. the social security administration (ssa) is a u.s. government agency that administers social programs covering disability, retirement, and survivors' benefits. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/ssa.asp) python is a high-level programming language designed to be easy to read and simple to implement. python is considered a scripted language and is often used for creating web applications and dynamic web content. (https://techterms.com/definition/python) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/ssa.asp https://techterms.com/definition/python data analytics with a complete and consistent sample database, i performed quantitative analysis, including a breakdown of data by founding group, industry, number of ventures started by year, and funding amounts, to understand the dynamics occurring within each industry sector. with this analysis, i also compared the founding groups to each other based upon number of all-male, all-female, and mixed gender founded ventures with a focus on capital accumulation across the top industries for each gender group. by focusing my dataset on these characteristics, i analyzed % of total investment funding from to . regression to further understand and thoroughly analyze the relationship between funding, industry, and gender in the entrepreneurial space, i performed a multi-variable regression analysis using my sample dataset. the dependent variable in the regression equaled the total funding received by a startup. gender of founder and industry group comprised the independent variables. the regression model examined the relationship between gender of founder, industry, and funding amount to determine relational patterns that potentially predict entrepreneurial funding decisions. qualitative analysis in addition to the quantitative analysis, i conducted one-on-one semi-structured interviews of investors, including venture capitalists and angel investors, as well as entrepreneurs. to identify research participants, i used chain referral sampling . further, i attended the frontiers of entrepreneurship conference in palm beach, florida. during the chain referral sampling is a non-probability sampling technique that is used by researchers to identify potential subjects in studies where subjects are hard to locate. (https://explorable.com/snowball-sampling) the frontiers of entrepreneurship conference is focused on exploring emerging issues to advance a new era of entrepreneurship: thought leaders from academics, industry and government debate the most challenging current issues in the field of entrepreneurship and set the agenda for future research and policy. (http://www.cvent.com/events/ -frontiers-of-entrepreneurship-conference/event-summary- f a f f ecd b fbea .aspx) https://explorable.com/snowball-sampling http://www.cvent.com/events/ -frontiers-of-entrepreneurship-conference/event-summary- f a f f ecd b fbea .aspx http://www.cvent.com/events/ -frontiers-of-entrepreneurship-conference/event-summary- f a f f ecd b fbea .aspx conference, i connected with leaders throughout the country in the venture capital, angel investing, and entrepreneurial space and conducted interviews. lastly, i interviewed members of an investment team at a local venture capital firm. through these various networking opportunities, i built a solid, well-rounded population of research participants to sample. table . lists the questions that i asked investors and startup founders: table . : investors / founders questionnaire investors founders ( ) what is the gender of the founder for the majority of companies in which you invest? ( ) do you think your gender players a roll in the way investors see you? ( ) what industries would you consider to be the most likely to receive large sums of money? ( ) have you ever felt like your gender has been a disadvantage for you when trying to receive funding for your venture? ( ) do you think gender of founder has ever affected your willingness to invest in a company? ( ) within your industry, do you see a vast majority of either female or male founders? ( ) what role does gender play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how has it changed over the past years? ( ) what is your general perception of male versus female founders? ( ) what are the key attributes you look for in individuals / companies to decide whether or not you will invest and how much to invest? ( ) what role does gender play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how has it changed over the past years? ( ) do you think females and males pursue different industries? if yes, what industries is each gender pursuing more heavily? ( ) do you think females and males pursue different industries? if yes, what industries is each gender pursuing more heavily? these questions were specifically developed based upon the research topic and approved by irb (see appendix b). federal regulations require that research projects involving human subjects be reviewed by an irb. the irb must approve or determine the project to be exempt prior to the start of any research activities. the irb cannot provide approval or determinations for research that has already been concluded. (https://www.bu.edu/researchsupport/compliance/human-subjects/determining-if-irb-approval-is-needed/) https://www.bu.edu/researchsupport/compliance/human-subjects/determining-if-irb-approval-is-needed/ limitations the process of collecting and analyzing data for my question presented limitations to my research as follows: quantitative collection and analysis: crunchbase database through using crunchbase to create my dataset, a number of restrictions existed. as a relatively new database, created in , crunchbase’s dataset for the early years of my research, which starts with , may not be fully inclusive of businesses started during the early time period of my research. in addition, the data available for does not appear to be fully inclusive of all activity occurring in . the numbers demonstrate funding for equating to less than % of total funding within my sample dataset. given current published information, the funding amount in my dataset does not appear reasonable. further, crunchbase provided limitations to my data based on available information for each company. the composition and data of companies on crunchbase evolve from one of four data sources. while considered reliable by academia, these sources may be limited in scope. for example, a number of startup companies located in the geographical regions and industries of my research may not be on crunchbase. additionally, crunchbase does not allow for mass data accumulation. therefore, i performed extensive data collection through hand-pulling the information from crunchbase which approximated over one hundred excel workbooks. these excel workbooks then needed to be merged into one excel worksheet to create a usable database. this combination created an output of approximately , companies. i then analyzed the , companies, realizing limitations associated with the data available in crunchbase. for many companies, founders’ names or total funding amount could not be discerned. therefore, i eliminated these companies from my dataset, reducing the number of companies to , . i also disregarded companies for which gender could not be identified for at least one founder, eliminating an additional , companies. i attempted to individually identify gender for common bisexual names, such as taylor; however, the presentation of the data did not allow for this analysis. through removing these companies, i chose to narrow the scope of my research, resulting in a sample dataset of approximately , companies. this narrowed scope may not allow for complete, unbiased analysis. qualitative collection and analysis: interview subjects with regard to qualitative data collection, limitations exist by the nature of the interview process which cannot ensure unbiased answers. the composition of my interview subjects originated from successful entrepreneurial and investor ventures. therefore, the predisposition of the interviewees focused on high-growth startup ventures rather than lower-growth companies founded by entrepreneurs seeking a work-life balance. by not having respondents that understand this aspect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the overall analysis as to why the gender funding gap exists could be skewed. since crunchbase appears to focus on companies with high- growth potential, the interviews will provide support to the quantitative analysis and findings. other limitations also exist outside of the quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. a further limitation involves the individuals who try to start a company, but never get their businesses off the ground. a pool of companies exists who likely apply for funding, but never receive investments and end their business ventures. since i am unable to obtain company applications for investments, an unaccounted group of individuals may be missing from my analysis, potentially skewing the data centered around the types of businesses pursued by females and males and discrepancies in funding. conclusion the combination of the mixed-method approach provides the necessary information needed to prove or disprove my hypothesis and identify underlying causes in gender funding differences. further, the research methodology helps detect whether other factors, such as implicit bias, affect funding decisions in the entrepreneurial space. research findings in this section, i provide high-level analysis of both my quantitative and qualitative findings in order to test my hypothesis. this analysis explores the gender funding gap within the scope of my observations. quantitative analysis data analysis from my dataset sample, which includes the period january , to december , , i confirmed the continued existence of a gender funding discrepancy. while not inclusive of every investment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem during this period, figure . depicts males outpace females as a percentage of total funding amount received by year founded . this finding is consistent with current published information. however, some interesting trends emerged from my analysis of the sample dataset comprising figure . . the decrease in percentage funding to all-male ventures from % in to % in indicates an increase in percent of total funding invested in all-female and mixed gender founded ventures. while all- female teams’ percent of total funding received only increased % from to , mixed gender ventures equated to % of all invested capital in companies founded in , increasing from % in . these findings indicate a trend towards improvement in the capital accumulation space for mixed gender ventures. mixed gender ventures founded in equate to % of total funding, while all-male founded teams accumulated % of total funding. interestingly, while not significant growth, all-female entrepreneurial ventures founded in received % of total funding, increasing from % in . from to , the trends towards increased capital investment in mixed gender and all-female teams continues, indicating note – funding amounts in my dataset correlate with the year founded, not the year funding is received. an upward trend, not a one-time anomaly. the increase in mixed gender founded ventures as a percentage of capital accumulation highlights the increasing role of females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. figure . : percent of total funding received by year founded and gender ( to ) to further supplement the findings provided by figure . , figure . examines the average funding ( 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑌𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝐹𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑉𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑌𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝐹𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 ) by gender within my sample dataset. consistent with figure . , the graph indicates a decreasing trend for all-male founded ventures starting in , as related to average funding received. however, when examining the average funding, figure . does not highlight a significant gender funding disparity when accounting for the number of ventures founded relative to the amount of funding received. in fact, in and , mixed gender founded ventures outpaced all-male teams by $ million and $ million, given incomplete crunchbase data for , the graph does not reflect this year. % % % % % % % % % % % t o ta l f u n d in g r e c ie v e d ( % ) percent of total funding received by year founded and gender all-female all-male mixed gender respectively. females continue to struggle; however, the disparity does not appear as significant when considering the number of companies founded by all-female teams, which is significantly smaller than all-male teams. for example, in , all-female founded ventures lagged behind their all-male counterparts by only an average of $ million when considering the number of ventures started. while average funding in displays the largest average funding over the sample dataset time period for all-female teams, the discrepancy in average funding between all- female and all-male founded ventures approximated $ million. thus, the results of highlight a closing gap between average funding of all-male and all-female teams. the significant improvement related to mixed gender teams’ average funding further highlights the narrowing of the gender funding gap. figure . : average funding received by year founded and gender ( to ) a v e ra g e f u n d in g ( $ m ) average funding received by year founded and gender all-female all-male mixed gender in addition to the overall analysis completed regarding gender and funding by year founded, i dissected my sample dataset further by examining funding by industry groups and gender. within my sample dataset, forty-one different industry groups existed. consistent with figure . , the dollar amounts invested in all-male ventures far exceeded the capital accumulation for all-female and mixed gender ventures in all forty-one industry groups. however, many of these industries comprised a small percentage of overall funding. therefore, i analyzed the top-ten funded industries for each gender classification. this breakdown ultimately resulted in fifteen industry segments, comprising % of total funding from to . figure . highlights biotechnology startups received the largest funding for each gender. all-male, all- female, and mixed gender founded ventures received $ billion, $ billion, and $ billion, respectively. commerce and shopping also dominated the funding accumulation, placing in the top three for each gender category with all-male, all-female, and mixed gender teams receiving $ billion, $ . billion, and $ . billion, respectively. in evaluating the top three industries by gender, clothing and apparel ranked second in funding for all-female teams, receiving $ . billion in funding. interestingly enough, while all-male teams received $ . billion in investments for clothing and apparel, this industry category ranked nineteenth in overall funding received by males. figure . also indicates the lack of dominance of the clothing and apparel sector in capital accumulation, but yet this sector places second for industry funding in all-female teams. another curious finding relates to technology businesses outside of biotechnology, especially artificial intelligence (ai) and apps. for each gender category, ai and apps ranked in the top five for all-male and all-female founded teams for capital accumulation and top seven for mixed gender teams, indicating a strong presence of females in the technology sector outside of biotechnology. financial services also topped the list for funding in all gender categories. a further breakdown of this category indicates companies focused on financial technology (fintech), banking, and blockchain comprise the majority of this classification. once again, this finding indicates females occupy and receive funding in similar industry categories to all-male teams; however, a significant gender funding gap persists. figure . : total funding by industry and gender from founding years ( to ) to fully understand the discrepancy between male and female entrepreneurs, figure . examines the number of entrants by gender classification within each industry space receiving the highest capital investments. consistent with the findings from figure . , which indicates funding amounts received by all-male teams dominate across industry space, figure . highlights the number of startups founded by all-male teams far exceed the other gender classifications in all sectors. the discrepancies in funding directly correlate to the disparity in the number of startups by gender within industry category. , , , , , f u n d in g a m o u n t (i n $ m ) total funding by industry and gender from founding years to all-female all-male mixed gender figure . : number of startups founded per industry sector ( to ) to further the understanding of the gender funding gap, i analyzed the average funding ( 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑉𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 ) provided to each gender by industry between and . as with average overall funding by year (figure . ), different trends emerge when considering the average funding provided to each gender by industry. consistent with figure . , figure . indicates average funding provided to each gender classification appears significantly different when assessing average funding provided to each industry. the energy sector immediately stands out in this analysis. in reviewing figure . , the overall funding provided to all-male teams in the energy space approximated $ billion, with mixed gender teams receiving approximately $ billion. however, with all-male startup ventures in this industry space and only mixed gender teams, the average investment provided to mixed gender teams surpassed all-male teams by $ million. while not as large, this trend also exists in biotechnology, financial services, administrative services, and education. further, while all-female teams lagged behind their n u m b e r o f s ta rt u p s f o u n d e d number of startups founded per industry sector all-female all-male mixed gender counterparts in average funding, all-female founded ventures exceeded all-male and mixed gender teams in the content and publishing sector. with the exception of energy and administrative services, which reflect average funding between $ - million and demonstrate a large gap for all-female ventures and their counterparts, the average funding provided to all- female teams does not appear as ominous as the discrepancies reflected in figure . . for example, all-female startups in the biotechnology sector receive on average $ . million or %, whereas all-male teams receive $ . million or %. in comparison, when evaluating total actual funding amount by industry (figure . ), all-male startups received % of funding as compared to all-females teams which received %. the smaller discrepancy related to average funding by gender classifications within industry as compared to actual investment dollars seems to indicate a narrower gender funding gap. figure . : average funding provided to each gender by industry ( to ) a v e ra g e f u n d in g ( $ m ) average funding provided to each gender by industry all-female all-male mixed gender regression analysis in order to determine whether or not a predictive relationship exists among industry, gender, and funding amount, i ran a multi-variable regression in which industry and gender acted as independent variables to determine potential investment amounts. due to regression limitations, i selected eleven industries to analyze. these eleven industries comprised % of total capital accumulation in my sample dataset between the years and . in order to analyze the effect of all-female and mixed gender teams by industry on investment amounts, i calculated an intercept which represented an all-male founded team in industries not included within the independent variables. based upon this regression (see appendix c), all-male teams will consistently outperform all-female and mixed gender ventures in capital accumulation. the predicted funding amount for an all-male founded venture exceeds all-female and mixed gender teams by $ . million and $ . million, respectively. at a significance level of . %, the independent variables affecting the predictive funding amount include all-female founded ventures and the following industry sectors: administrative services, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, commerce and shopping, data and analytics, energy, and financial services. due to mixed gender ventures being immaterial at a . % significance level, this value indicates mixed gender teams do not meaningfully differ from their all-male counterparts in predictive investment funding amounts. this finding correlates with average investment funding amounts during the period of to which indicated mixed gendered team received greater amounts of average capital accumulation in certain industries than their all-male venture founded counterparts (figure . ). while mixed gender teams appear to be immaterial in predicting future investment funding, the results differ for females. the regression analysis indicates all-female ventures to be disadvantaged in capital accumulation for startup ventures. the small number of all-female ventures included in my sample dataset limits the ability of the regression analysis to be fully predictive of investment funding patterns. however, given the overall data analysis performed as part of my study, the prediction that females are disadvantaged in the entrepreneurial ecosystem related to funding appears valid. qualitative analysis to collect my qualitative data, i conducted seven interviews with entrepreneurs and investors, including angel investors and venture capitalists. the composition of this sample included six females and one male. three of the females encompassed both the roles of angel investor and entrepreneur. one female represented only the entrepreneurial space. the other two females work within the venture capital industry. the sole male interviewed for my qualitative analysis founded a number of startups and currently pursues angel investing opportunities. while the sample size appears small, the interviewees encompassed a vast geographic area and various industry expertise. in discussions with my advisor, expanding the scope of this sample proved unnecessary due to the consistency of my findings. the summary of findings for each question posed to interviewees as set forth in table . follows: investors what is the gender of the founder for the majority of companies in which you invest? two of the respondents focus on investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs which include females, the lgbtq community, and minority ethnic groups. the remaining respondents confirmed male entrepreneurs receive the majority of funding from their companies. what industries would you consider to be the most likely to receive large sums of money? each respondent agreed the technology industry comprised the majority of investment funds. specifically, more than one respondent highlighted software, primarily related to business to business software as a service, and fintech as an emerging space that will accumulate tremendous investment funding. one respondent did include artificial intelligence and blockchain, as well as healthcare to be likely industries to receive large investments. these findings correlate with the quantitative analysis performed by industry category (figure . ). further, an interviewee highlighted the massive funding needed to create a successful biotechnology company directly correlates to the biotechnology industry’s dominance in investment funding for the period to . do you think gender of founder has ever affected your willingness to invest in a company? two of the females make sole investments in minority entrepreneurs; therefore, this question did not apply. however, one of the female venture capitalists acknowledged the #metoo movement as a deterrent to males investing in female ventures. the interviewee believed the tension created between genders by this movement creates an unfavorable environment for females and males to transact business outside the confines of a business office: an area where much business occurs, such as coffee meetings or dinners. while the #metoo movement correctly highlights needed reforms in the workplace for females, the pressure created by the movement limits the willingness of males to interact with females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for fear of misinterpretation. this sentiment presented itself during my interview with the sole male interviewee who confirmed his comfortableness with females due to his personal circumstances. however, he acknowledged his male counterparts may not possess a similar attitude given existing biases in the workplace. for examples, males prefer to work with males because of familiarity. the #metoo movement was founded in to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly black women and girls, and other young women of color from low wealth communities, find pathways to healing. our vision from the beginning was to address both the dearth in resources for survivors of sexual violence and to build a community of advocates, driven by survivors, who will be at the forefront of creating solutions to interrupt sexual violence in their communities. (https://metoomvmt.org/about/) https://metoomvmt.org/about/ what are the key attributes you look for in individuals / companies to decide whether or not you will invest and how much to invest? all interviewees agreed the key attribute to decide where to invest lie with the potential growth of the company, no matter the gender of the founder. the scalability of the business highlighted the decision-making process of investors as well as the coachability of the founding team. founders do you believe your gender players a roll in the way investors see you? have you ever felt like your gender has been a disadvantage for you when trying to receive funding for your venture? of the four female entrepreneurs interviewed, three believed their gender deterred investors. one female entrepreneur stated, “i had to be twice as good [compared to my male counterpart] to get anywhere.” she further elaborated by stating that if investors did well with male founded companies, they will likely continue to invest in males over females, creating a pattern in the investment cycle. interestingly enough, one of the female founders said she never experienced discrimination because she “was so used to being the only female that she thought it was normal.” as we continued our conversation and discussed the increased awareness of gender bias, she reaffirmed her belief that her gender did not cause discrimination in investor funding decisions. within your industry, do you see a vast majority of either female or male founders? consistent with the interviewee responses as investors, the number of males in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, no matter the industry, far outweighs the number of females starting ventures. specifically, each interviewee created a company within the various technology sectors. however, they believed a disproportionate number of males dominate the space. while they acknowledge the number of females within the various sectors of the technology industry increasing, the discrepancy remains in the number of females starting ventures compared to their male counterparts. what is your general perception of male versus female founders? a general observation made by both investors and entrepreneurs highlights that females when entering an investment pitch appear more prepared than their male counterparts. females tend to request capital accumulation later in the business development model. for example, females request money once they conduct in-depth market research and/or obtain revenue whereas males tend to request investments before the product/service proves viable. investors and founders what role does gender play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how has it changed over the past years? from both an investor and entrepreneur perspective, more than one respondent believes females incur a diminished role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem due to bias. for example, one female investor highlighted when an entrepreneur seeks funding, the potential investors ask more preventative questions to females while their male counterparts receive promotion questions. as my literature review indicated, promotion questions garnish more capital accumulation. thus, females incur bias at the initial stage of investment. one of the female interviewees believes the expectation for female founders far exceeds their male counterparts. a female must “knock it out of the park” in order to obtain funding while the male benchmark during a pitch does not require the same expectation. one of the most interesting perspectives related to this question focused on how things transformed over the past ten years. almost all respondents agreed that not much ‘actually’ changed over the time period, but the attention to the underrepresentation of females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem warranted much greater conversation and understanding. do you think females and males pursue different industries? if yes, what industries is each gender pursuing more heavily? all interviewees believe little differences exist in the industries pursued by females and males. in the respondents’ objective opinion, males just outnumber females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, both as investors and entrepreneurs. however, three respondents, who invest at the seed stage, found females to pursue more social ventures than their male counterparts. these social ventures focus more on community good than high-growth, financial outcomes, resulting in less investment dollars flowing to female founders who start social ventures. overall, the qualitative analysis consistently confirmed the lack of females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem creates some of the gender funding discrepancy. however, the reasons for this gap vary based upon the respondents’ personal experiences. a social entrepreneur is a person who pursues novel applications that have the potential to solve community-based problems. these individuals are willing to take on the risk and effort to create positive changes in society through their initiatives. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-entrepreneur.asp) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-entrepreneur.asp discussion in this section, i intend to analyze my quantitative and qualitative research findings in an attempt to understand factors contributing to the gender funding gap. i further plan to analyze these results in relation to previous studies performed, as outlined in my literature review. discussion of findings from my analysis, the gender funding gap continues to hinder females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. the regression results, without question, clearly establish females as disadvantaged in capital accumulation. certain industries, by nature of capital investment requirements, appear to receive greater sums of investment dollars during the period to . however, no matter the industry or amount of seed money needed to launch/develop a startup, the regression indicates females predictively lag behind their male counterparts in obtaining investment funds. further, the quantitative data analytics of my dataset sample from to supports the regression as capital accumulation between females and males remains vastly different. the investment amounts provided to females, no matter team orientation, significantly lag behind all- male ventures. however, the data does suggest minor improvements in female entrepreneurs’ quest for capital accumulation when considering the average funding received by year founded and gender (see figure . ). the trend indicates average investment funding increasing, especially for mixed gender teams which outpaced all-male founded team in average funding for the years and . this finding suggests females’ acceptance increasing within the entrepreneurial ecosystem whether as an all-female or mixed gender team. expanding the quantitative analysis to include industry sectors reaffirms the basic conclusion that males receive significantly greater investment funding compared to females, no matter the industry. however, as with the overall trend in average funding received by gender, the gap diminishes between males and females when considering average funding provided to each gender team within the different industries (figure . ). this analysis indicates that within certain industry segments, such as energy, biotechnology, administrative services, education, and content and publishing, mixed gender teams and all-female teams acquired higher average capital accumulation than their all-male counterparts. one interesting observation i noted during my quantitative analysis related to the female industries that received the greatest funding, both in overall and on average investment accumulation. clothing and apparel ranked second in industries for overall capital accumulation for all-female ventures. this finding seems to indicate that females may be receiving more investment dollars in areas more aligned with their stereotypical gender roles. further, support for this finding existed when analyzing average funding by industry (figure . ). content and publishing exhibited female dominance as the only industry females received more average funding than their counterparts. again, this industry closely aligns with perceived stereotypical roles for females. these findings suggest the existence of gender bias in funding decisions within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. in comparing the quantitative analysis with my qualitative findings, certain trends align. for example, all respondents agree females trail behind their male counterparts in regard to total investment dollars received. however, one interesting fact that emerged not only in my quantitative, but also my qualitative analysis, relates to the sparseness of females entering the entrepreneurial space. the limited number of female-founded ventures stands out throughout the period of to . as figure . highlights, the number of all-female and mixed gender teams significantly lag behind all-male teams entering the entrepreneurial ecosystem in every industry category. during the interviews, more than one respondent commented on the absence of female entrepreneurs and female investors as a reason for the funding gap. the interviewees consistently agreed that the high-growth industries pursued by females and males did not significantly differ. this finding directly disputes earlier research which found females’ pursuit of a work-life balance as a reason for gender funding discrepancies. the differing investment amounts verify the existence of a gender gap, but the ability to discern the reasons for this discrepancy proves difficult. while one can infer from the quantitative findings that implicit bias affects capital accumulation for startup ventures, the ability to confirm these findings based solely on the numbers proves infeasible. therefore, the qualitative findings create the supplemental data required to fully understand all aspects of the gender funding discrepancy. while not explicitly stated, each interviewee believed gender bias plays a role in capital accumulation for startup ventures. this belief supports the many research studies to date which highlight implicit bias as a reason for the gender funding gap. one respondent discussed the different types of questions asked to females and males; another interviewee highlighted the need for females to be “twice as good” as their male counterparts. one individual deliberated the impact of the #metoo movement on investor/entrepreneur relationships. these interviews confirm an obvious belief of gender bias within the investor world. this belief ultimately affects the interpersonal relationships between females and potential investors which potentially may impact funding decisions for entrepreneurs. when considering industries pursued, number of companies being founded by gender, and implicit bias, one may conclude the gender funding gap inevitable. however, as the aspects of my quantitative findings highlight, minor improvements appear to exist for females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem related to capital accumulation when considering the average funding received by year founded and gender (figure . ). while these gains reflect baby steps rather than systemic change, if the quantitative trends continue, the gender gap could narrow. conclusion my research and subsequent analysis tested the following hypothesis: the gender funding gap more closely aligns with the type of industry and business growth pursued by females versus males with females pursing lower growth business industries. however, the continued lack of female investors (i.e. venture capitalists and angel investors) hinders female entrepreneur’s abilities to obtain outside funding, consistent with gender bias. my findings suggest industry does not exhibit a significant role in the gender funding discrepancy within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, disputing a portion of my hypothesis. however, my study did confirm the lack of female investors and gender bias as potentially impacting females’ ability to receive funding. the most significant results of my study highlight the underrepresentation in the number of female entrepreneurs across all industry lines for startup ventures. this underrepresentation results in females receiving fewer investment dollars than their male counterparts. no matter the industry pursued or the reasons for the lack of female presence in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the fact remains – with significant underrepresentation of female entrepreneurs, the investment funding gap will remain insurmountable. future research while my research identified reasons for the persistent gender funding gap within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, my study highlights areas to consider for future research. as discussed within the limitation section of my research methodology, the quantitative data collection presented a number of shortcomings. by collecting and analyzing a more inclusive database, the trends identified in my study, especially related to an upward trend in average funding received by all-female and mixed gender founded ventures, need further investigation. this aspect of my study provides significant insight worth deeper analysis and understanding. as with the quantitative analysis, a more extensive qualitative analysis, which includes more males and less investors focused on minority groups, may provide additional insight into the root cause of the gender funding disparity. the ability to fully analyze the impact of gender bias on the funding determinations within the entrepreneurial ecosystem could provide invaluable insight to reduce the gender funding gap. yet, another area of study that warrants further investigation relates to determining whether or not the lack of females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem relates to ventures that never progressed in the entrepreneurial lifecycle. a potential means to analyze this area would be an extensive review of patents issued by gender. this type of study could also provide insight into why female entrepreneurs continue to maintain minority status in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. further, because the underrepresentation of females, both as entrepreneurs and investors, appears correlated to the lack of investment funding provided to female entrepreneurs, future research should focus on barriers to entry for females in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. for example, a current study by the wall street journal highlights the existence of an “invisible wall that deters women from roles seen as stepping stones to ceo” (fuhrmans, ). this “invisible wall” may also exist in the entrepreneurial space, leading females to not pursue startups. investigating the reasons for the lack of females receiving college/graduate degrees with a high entry into the entrepreneurial ecosystem, such as computer science and engineering, equates to an area worth further study. to rectify the gender funding discrepancy in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, 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( ). economic census, survey of business owners company statistics series. washington, d.c.: usgpo. retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/ /econ/census/survey-business- owners.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/ /econ/census/survey-business-owners.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/ /econ/census/survey-business-owners.html religious/secular discourses and practices of good sex university of groningen religious/secular discourses and practices of good sex schrijvers, lieke l.; wiering, jelle published in: culture and religion doi: . / . . important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): schrijvers, l. l., & wiering, j. 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bthe centre for research on culture and gender, ghent university, ghent, belgium; ccomparative study of religion, faculty of theology & religious studies, university of groningen, groningen, the netherlands abstract this article focuses on the triangulation of sexuality, religion and secularity in dutch society by analysing two contemporary case studies. we focus on sexual experiences and practices rather than sexual identities to further understand the constructions of what constitutes ‘good’ sex. the empirical research is situated in the netherlands, where the binary of religion and sexual regulation versus secularity and sexual freedom has been dominant in both public and political discourse for a long time. exploring sexual practices and narratives as central to the constitution of both religious and secular selves, we noted these to be fluctuating, inconsistent and subject to discourses. our first case study discusses sexual experiences of non-heterosexual protestant women, whereas the second explores the frequently considered ‘neutral’ notions of secularity in sexual education. applying insights from both religious studies and queer studies, we bring the empirical study of sexuality together with the theoretical debates about the conceptualisation of the secular and the religious in contemporary western europe. this comparative approach to sexuality not only undermines the culturally presumed exclusive opposition of the secular and the religious but it also provides new empirical contributions for understanding the interactions between sexual practices and sexual discourses. keywords sexuality; secularity; religion; gender; the netherlands; discourse introduction sexuality has become one of the pivotal stages where boundaries between religion and secularity are imagined, highlighted and discussed. positioned at the crossroad of the social and the individual, sexuality can be considered as © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact lieke l. schrijvers l.l.schrijvers@uu.nl open access http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:l.l.schrijvers@uu.nl http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering something deeply personal while also subject to strong societal, religious and cultural norms and regulations (foucault ; butler ). in the developing intersectional field of the study of religion and gender, increasing numbers of scholars have pointed to the centrality of sexuality, gender and the body in the construction of a religion/secular binary. these scholars call for a recognition of religious women’s agency and subject formation (avishai ; bracke ; mahmood ); emphasise the centrality of materiality and the body in both religious and secular lives (meyer ; engelke ); or focus on the relation between religion and lgbtq rights (jakobsen and pellegrini ; dudink ). whereas, gender has been thoroughly conceptualised and theorised, it appears rather difficult to study sexuality in a way that moves beyond discursive identity categorisations. often sexuality tends to become a label instead of a practice, something that, as jeffrey weeks brilliantly put it, ‘presupposes the existence of a particular identity which pins you down like a butterfly on the table’ (weeks , ). queer theory has been very valuable and necessary in the deconstruction of this often fixating concept of identity, and hence it has contributed greatly to the de-essentialisation of sexuality. scholars such as josé munoz and jack halberstam inspired many scholars of religion to rethink the relation between discourses, practices and embodiments in the formation of sexual subjectivities in religious contexts (see schippert ). still, we are convinced that more empirical research on sex with a focus on the interplay of discourse and practice is needed. since sex frequently is located precisely at such crossroads of the social and the private (spronk ), we think that this research will contribute to obtaining a more comprehensive under- standing of ‘sex as sex’. here, we agree with rachel spronk, in considering sex as the constantly transforming result of complicated mediations of the social and the embodied individual. in this article, we urge for a focus on bodily, experi- ential and sensory qualities of sex, which moves beyond an identity approach (see also wekker b; valentine ) while also taking into account social influences and normativities. we therefore apply spronk’s notion of ‘good sex’ to refer to the subjective experience of erotic pleasure, and simultaneously to norms about what morally good, proper, derivative or improper sex entails. in what follows we first situate our research in the expanding field of the study of religion, secularism, gender and sexuality. then, we discuss the context of the netherlands as one that provides us with an especially fruitful context to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay of discourses and practices that constitute religious/secular sex. in the second part of the article we continue our exploration by presenting two empirical case studies based on our separate research projects. schrijvers will analyse the experience of sexual pleasure through the narratives of protestant women who have sex with women. wiering explores ‘sexular’ notions recommended by sexual health care organ- isations. together, these case studies explore a variety of sexual practices and discourses that illustrate similar mediations taking place in both case studies. culture and religion sex in the study of religion and the secular in the last decades, a critical perspective towards gender and sexuality has taken ground in the field of religious studies (beattie and king ; hawthorne ; korte ). however, religion continues to be a rather controversial topic of research in many queer or feminist studies. this is partly informed by a consist- ent link of secularism and women’s and lgbtq rights movements in western europe. when feminist scholarship was institutionalised towards the end of the twentieth century in the form of gender studies, the influence of feminist polit- ical activism was deeply felt. here, religion was mainly considered yet another patriarchal institute which limited sexual freedom, an institute which had to be criticised or even left behind on the way to women’s liberation and lgbtq sexual freedom. this bond between sexual and gender critical movements and secularism is also present in the netherlands, where narratives of emancipation are frequently considered to be parallel to processes of unchurching. a simi- lar discourse dominates in countries throughout western europe and north america by which most religions, and particularly islam, are met with suspicion when it concerns women’s emancipation and sexual freedom. since / and the following ‘war on terror’, islam is moreover increasingly violently framed as the ‘other’ of western culture and stereotyped as most rigid concerning sexual freedom (el-tayeb ; jouili ; dudink ). this genealogy of feminism has linked emancipatory politics and academia with a secular agenda up until today. this is not to say that feminist critiques were absent in religious organisa- tions or theological institutes (see loughlin ; llewellyn and trzebiatowska ; van den brandt ) but the role that religious actors have played in feminist history is often ignored in the dominant narrative of feminist and gen- der critical theory. recently, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have started to question this implicit secular/religion binary in gender studies and the study of sexuality, thereby calling for a dialogue between religious studies and gender studies (hawthorne ; korte ; abu-lughod ). one could in fact argue that the stubborn conviction of religion and sexuality as being juxtaposing is increas- ingly considered a taylorian subtraction story of the secular, as more and more studies seem to point to other directions (taylor ). simultaneously, the pop- ular conviction of secularity and sexuality as being indisputable allies has been problematised (butler ; scott ; rasmussen ; cady and fessenden ; bartelink ). inspired by asad’s ( , ) critical assessment of the secular and secularism in the context of myths and pain, many scholars applied a similar critical angle to explore the secular’s involvement with sexuality. probably the best known example of such a critical reflection on secular sexuality comes from feminist historian joan scott. in her ursula hirschmann lecture ( ) scott argued that secularism, much like religion, imposes specific forms and notions of sexuality that are particularly related to the treatment of women (see also scott l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering ; verkaaik and spronk ). scott suggest that rather than a neutral space of equality, secularism should be considered just another framework within which inequalities between men and women continue to exist: many of the women defending their right to wear a headscarf admit that not all covered women freely choose it. but that is no different, they insist, from women who feel pressured by boyfriends or husbands to conform to the dictates of western fashion. (scott , ). scott calls attention to secular normativity related to sexuality, and by doing so questions the often presumed sharp differences between (supposedly oppres- sive) religious and (supposedly egalitarian) secular treatment of women (scott , ). scott’s work encouraged many scholars to explore the normative sexular climate of the west, and we now see a body of literature on ‘the study of sexularism’ coming into being (e.g. verkaaik and spronk ; schuh, burchardt, and wohlrab-sahr ; cady and fessenden ; selby ; amir-moazami ). in this study of the sexular, many scholars focus on the social position and freedom rights of sexual minorities in secular societies. for instance, mepschen, duyvendak, and tonkens ( ) shed light on a hypocritical secularist mobili- sation of homosexual rights in the netherlands. butler ( ) addresses the same problematic utilisation, albeit more broadly in relation to the rights of gay people more generally. van der veer ( ) highlights the role played by the late dutch politician pim fortuyn, who was gay himself and who had made sexual freedom – or rather, islamic restrictions of that freedom – a crucial part of the ideology of his political party. exploring this literature on sexularism, we are intrigued by the question how to further understand the interactions of secular discourses and secular subjec- tivities (wiering ). there have been quite some works on the interaction of secular discourses and religious subjectivities, but we consider this only one part of a multifaceted story. we primarily aimed to explore interactions between var- ious ‘secular’ actors. it is one thing to note that secular power seeks to privatise religion, and that, in doing so the state confines religion to what is frequently perceived to be the domain of women. yet observing how this confinement plays out in everyday life brings forth a different set of questions. it is not as if secular discourses have unmediated access to people’s minds and behaviour, nor is it correct to assume that these discourses literally copy the instructions of the secular state. secularity in society has gained many different interpretations, hence secular people can disagree with each other, or they can disagree with or undermine secular discourses. we decided to zoom in on such interactions. sex as more than an identity we situate ourselves on the intersection of the study of the secular and the anthropology of sexuality. sexuality has always been an important aspect in culture and religion feminist scholarship, answering the now famous call of gayle rubin to start ‘to think about sex’ (rubin , ). from different disciplines a theory of sexuality has developed which aims to deconstruct the notion of identity as fixed, and instead points to the historical sociopolitical factors that constitute sexual subjectivities (muñoz ; boellstorff ; schippert ; schrijvers ). in his review of the anthropology of sexuality, boellstorff ( ) observes how the field of sexuality has shifted from identity politics, which is directed towards increasing visibility and political participation of gays and lesbians, towards the understanding of sexual subjectivity and intersubjective meaning making (boellstorff , ). this opened up the conceptualisation of sexuality as shaped by historical contexts, individual desires and experiences, as well as social discourses. sex is thus something someone does, a practice, act or performance, but can also constitute an important part of subject formation and self-identification. queer theory has radically deconstructed the notion of sexual identity as something fixed (that is, the assumption that one is gay, lesbian, heterosexual) to sexuality as fluid, constructed and performed (muñoz ; schippert ). even though sex and sexuality are terms commonly used, both can refer to a number of practices, desires or characteristics. sex can refer to erotic practices in narrow sense, such as masturbation or intercourse, or broader to practices of courtship and performances. sex can also refer to a category of biologically determined male or female sex, which is then often framed as opposed to gen- der as a social construct. after this constructivist turn in gender studies, judith butler continued the deconstructive project by arguing that bodies, embod- iment and the biological categorisation of ‘sex’ are also shaped by political circumstances and discourses (butler ), as to not essentialise either sex or gender. sexuality can furthermore refer to personal desires, related to the subject the erotic desire is directed to (gay, lesbian, pansexual) or by desired practices (bdsm, asexual). yet, more often sexuality refers to a broader social arena ‘where power relations, symbolic meanings of gender, and hence moral discourses in relation to sexual behaviour, are played out’ (spronk , ). despite all this emphasis on the social influence on sex, we still agree with the critique of gloria wekker who has argued that ‘the mere existence of a sexual identity [still] is usually taken for granted’. wekker asks us to pay more attention to the multiplicity of subjectivity (wekker a, ). our empirically based approach to sex does not exclude the importance of political formations and emancipation, but does argue that starting from these practices complicates the story of identity politics built on a supposed neat divide of secular and reli- gious sex. in this approach, sex becomes a topical area to further understand the intersections and overlappings of discourse and practice and deepens the insight in the multiplicity of lived sexularities. we employ the term ‘good sex’ (spronk ) to investigate the various messy ways in which sexual experi- ences are narrated and constructed. in our approach, ‘good sex’ refers both to l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering subjective experiences of sexual pleasure and interactions, as well as to norms and ethics of what the interlocutors consider to be ‘good’, or ‘proper’ sexual practices and desires. introducing the netherlands in order to understand the intersections of sex, religion and the secular in the netherlands, we need to go back to the s and s when the netherlands experienced its so-called ‘sexual revolution’. this revolution occurred in the context of the so called ‘pillarisation’, which refers to the politico-denomina- tional segregation of the dutch society. this popular metaphor of the pre- netherlands presents the dutch nation as divided into several distanced pil- lars of segmented organisations, all representing distinct social groups such as catholics, protestants and social democrats, which together are suggested to hold up the netherlands (van dam , ). based on his own account, van der veer ( ), raised in the s and s, illustratively tell us: i was raised as a protestant, and we had our own church, political party, sports teams, schools, shops, and welfare organisation, as if we formed an ethnic com- munity. everything in society was organised according to these pillars. the dutch pride themselves on their long tradition of tolerance, but this was part of a broader system of noninterference with other pillars. marriage patterns in the netherlands also followed such divisions. this is well expressed in the dutch proverb, ‘when you have two beliefs on one pillow, the devil will sleep in between.’ (idem). in the s, dutch society started to de-pillarise as a consequence of student revolts, the rise of the so-called post–second world war ‘baby boomer genera- tion’, the sexual revolution (van der veer ) and the expanding welfare state that reduced the need and longing for confessional support structures (schuh, burchardt, and wohlrab-sahr ). along with the gradual collapsing of the pillarisation, a particular notion of modernity made its way into general public opinion, one that excluded the role of the church and strongly encouraged individuality (kennedy ). echoing this latter plea for individuality, a very important first step towards this modernity was to get rid of the supposedly outdated and restricting taboos on sexuality (schnabel , – ). more and more dutch seemed to agree that people should be able to decide on their sexual behaviour actions individually, which suggested that the topic was in urgent need of discussion after years of problematic silence. as a consequence, in the ‘wild sixties’ sex and sexuality became increasingly visible for the public eye. porn magazines, sex shows in amsterdam and the naked appearance of phil bloom on television all shocked the ground, implementing the popular dutch conviction of the s as having successfully liberated the previous restricted dutch sexuality (schnabel ). culture and religion as mentioned above, this alleged sexual revolution went hand in hand with processes of unchurching and depillarisation. between and the number of unaffiliated people for instance increased from to % (becker and vink ). since the church was considered as the flagship of the pillari- sation from which the dutch sought to distance, many expressed a disaffection with the church through an abandonment of traditional moralism (mepschen, duyvendak, and tonkens , ), and engaged in one of the many previ- ously considered unconventional manifestations of sex, such as reading porn magazines. secularity and sexual openness were taken to be welcome avenues to modernity, and this narrative continues to dominate dutch public discourse on sexual freedom. the opening up of civil marriage for same-sex couples, com- monly referred to as gay marriage, as the first country worldwide in is still considered the peak defining moment of dutch sexual freedom and emanci- pation, reaffirming the image of the netherlands as a sexually liberated and secularised country. this binary between, to put it bluntly, religious traditional chastity on the one hand, and secular sexual openness on the other (see also rasmussen ) continues to prominently feature in contemporary dutch culture. besides being deeply implemented in the dutch cultural memory, the dualistic representation has also successfully blurred any variety in any of the parties ascribed to either side of this socially constructed spectrum. christianity is seen as a religion that, per definition, has unyielding difficulties with sex, whereas secularity is sug- gested to always be non-restrictive. in the aftermath of / , this polarisation adjusted as christianity was joined by islam in its position as, now evermore so racialised, secularity’s ‘other’. islam was taken to be threatening the dutch norms and values, and many scholars have argued that this was in fact quite conven- ient for secularist discourse, as it enabled dutch secularist to let their notions of sexuality appear all the more liberal (hekma ; mepschen, duyvendak, and tonkens ; el-tayeb ). white dutch homosexuals are for instance framed as part and parcel of dutch secular culture and as such national identity and pride, a suggestion that did not strike with previous protests regarding the public display of queerness of only a few year earlier (verkaaik ; mepschen, duyvendak, and tonkens ). it is at this particular moment in dutch history, where religion and sexual taboo have been assigned to team-up to represent the completely opposite pole of modern, liberal, free secular sex, that we conducted our anthropological fieldwork. case study – sex and pleasure among non-heterosexual protestant women in the spring of , schrijvers met women between the ages of and who have sex with other women. they referred to themselves as lesbian, bisex- ual or queer, and who where a member of a congregation within the protestant l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering church netherlands (pkn). schrijvers engaged in long in-depth interviews with these women which focused on their personal stories and narratives with regard to religion, gender and sexuality (schrijvers ). initially, schrijvers started off this research with the question of how lesbian religious women deal with the conflict of religion and sexuality. since most research on religion and lgbtq people focuses on cisgender male homosexual people in religious institutes, she wondered if and how experiences of ‘women who have sex with women’ (wekker a, ) differed. talking to the research participants, schrijvers gradually realised that the lived experiences did not at all confirm the idea that religion inherently excludes or represses non-normative sexual identities and practices. in speaking about their sexual practices and desires, religion was not excluded but instead was central to the narrating of sexual experience. as such, the interlocutors created a sexual ethics that draws both on religious sources, as well as secular discourses about sexual freedom circulating in broader dutch society. at the same time, the interlocutors were very aware of the dominant dutch public discourse in which religion and non-normative sexuality are coun- ter posed, and dealt with this in different ways. they certainly thought about the potential influence of their sexual identification on their role and position in their congregation. some expressed a concern for their acceptance as lesbian woman and explicitly asked their church board to take a stance on same-sex marriage. others specifically joined a church that they already knew to be open for lgbtq people. some struggled more than others with their position in their religious community, and one of the women was expelled from the church board because of her coming out. yet these difficulties were only marginal topics in most of the conversations. instead these women continuously emphasised the importance of embodied experiences and personal relations with god. god-given sexual pleasure ‘i can now thank god when i have an orgasm’, dieke, a lesbian woman in her fifties, said. dieke told schrijvers how she experiences god during sex and how she thanks him when she has an orgasm. in describing her sexual experiences and desires, dieke made a clear separation between her sexual experiences in a heterosexual marriage and in her relationship with another woman: not only does she have more orgasms in having sex with women, but she now thanks god for these moments of pleasure. most women had engaged in sexual relations with one or more men before opening up about and/or acting upon their sexual desires for women. for all interlocutors, heterosexual sex was framed in terms of reproduction by their parents, at school and in church before and during their marriages. non-heterosexual sex was at the same time considered deviant and sinful. dieke explained to schrijvers how the sex with her husband was ‘nice as long as we had children. […] i was raised with the idea that you have to please your husband, but it didn’t really do anything for me’. she used to consider culture and religion intercourse desirable as long as it could result in a pregnancy, which was the most important reason to engage in it. it was furthermore her duty as a wife to please her husband, which she did, and the sex mainly consisted of penetration. she enjoyed it for the potential outcomes in the form of pregnancy, but did not experience pleasure in the act itself and did not feel aroused by her husband. for many married years, dieke did not consider her lack of sexual pleasure a problem because she was raised with the idea that this was not the most important aspect of sex, and women’s pleasure was especially unimportant. she gradually discovered that sex could be different, and that her lack of arousal came out of a lack of attraction to her husband, because he was a man. she came to recognise that good sex could be about more than reproduction, and that she did feel aroused by other women. after divorcing from her husband dieke fell in love with mia, which gave her the confidence and the opportunity to explore her own sexual desires. with mia, she engaged in sexual acts of mutual masturbation and oral sex; acts that she experienced to be directed at her and that included pleasure of both partners: ‘this is the kind of intimacy i’d been looking for all that time’ when she stepped out of her heterosexual relation in which her sexuality was defined as passive and opposed to men’s, dieke entered a different space of sexual subjectivity and in some sense became subject of their own desires. most women told schrijvers how they experience sexuality more fully and autonomous since they have sex with other women, and most women describe themselves as lesbian and as exclusively attracted to women. what struck schrijvers in their stories was that having sex with other women did not con- flict with their personal religious beliefs, but was intrinsically connected to their religious experiences. nienke, in her thirties and married to anne, told schrijvers that even though she contemplated how her sexual orientation stood in relation to religion, she never experienced any problems towards god, by which she separates her personal religiosity (‘god’) from church doctrines (religion). astrid, a -year-old lesbian woman, described her relationship as threefold: ‘eva, god and myself are a strong cord that can simply not be broken […] i have such a strong feeling that we are bound together, and as well together with god’. the relation she had with god is for astrid a central element in her romantic rela- tionship with eva, she even considers this a threefold relationship. for astrid, nienke and the others, religion was not something separate, but an essential and central element in their experience and practices of sex. furthermore, sexuality was considered a central and crucial aspect of what it means to be a human being created by god. they creatively claimed religious space to seek desirable and pleasurable sex with other women. and for dieke, whom we started this paragraph with, sexuality became something she can enjoy and in which she can experience god through her body; she can now, now that she has sex with another woman, thank god when she has an orgasm. l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering ‘good’ christian sex by the claiming of space in their personal faith stories, these women carefully shift boundaries of ‘good sex’ by arguing that having sex with women is per- missible rather than sinful, and as such they subtly question some of the sexual morals they were raised with. they thus create more room for sexual freedom, while this space is at the same time limited and regulated. in speaking about their sexual ethics, most participants reiterated forms of homonormativity by emphasising monogamy and questioning promiscuous sexual behaviour. dieke and rené considered sexual pleasure as something that should be desired by both men and women, and with whomever they want, in their case with other women. this type of sexual pleasure is a gift of god, so there is nothing sinful in enjoying good sex. at the same time they were very clear on whose and which sexual practices are permitted or desirable, which practices are ‘good sex’. most women pointed to their similarity to heterosexual couples, which is considered the ideal, or even the only ‘good sex’ in much of christian doctrine (gerber ; cornwall and isherwood ). evelien stated in this regard that she is ‘just very normal’. what it means to be normal meant a similarity to heterosexual couples, which was then in almost all cases defined by monogamy. annelies formulated this as follows: ‘you have to ask the same things of [non-straight] people as of straight people: love and faithfulness have to be central in a relationship’. a dis- tinction was made between sex out of love, and sex out of lust, by which ‘good sex’ should be enjoyed in a one-for-one relationship which is built on notions of trust, fidelity and mutual support, instead of giving into sexual lusts. not the partner one has sex with, but the characteristics of the relationship became the primary site on which to separate ‘good sex’ from ‘bad sex’. in many of the communities these women attended, the sexual boundary between proper and improper christians was built on a distinction between heterosexuals and homosexuals, with the latter considered deviant. this emphasis on similarity and normalcy of their own sexual relations with heterosexual relations constituted a symbolical boundary of ‘good christian sex’. marriage in church is one of the ways to affirm this one-for-one intention, and often considered one of the most important benchmarks of sexual equality and aspirations for homosexual (homonormative) couples. all women referred to this as a potentially important ritual to gain the blessing of both god and the religious community. yet only a few women actually desired to get married themselves for several reasons. civil same-sex marriage has only been possible since in the netherlands, at a time when many interlocutors were already in long-term relationships or had a civil partnership. they did not consider mar- riage to have any added value. the second reason some women did not want to get married was because they had been divorced and associated marriage with their negative heterosexual experiences. in the protestant church of the netherlands (pkn), there is no central policy on same-sex marriage, but the board leaves this up to individual congregations. because of this possibility and culture and religion diversity, the potential of same-sex marriage in a particular church was consid- ered a way to measure the acceptance of lesbians and gays, even though the interlocutors did not always wanted to use this possibility themselves. evelien asked her church board to decide on the matter before agreeing to join the board as church elder, ‘eventually, they decided that the church allows the blessing of different kind of relations. it gave me a feeling of ‘yeah, i’m really welcome here!’ nienke on the other hand, took a more pragmatic approach. she and anne wanted to have a wedding ceremony in church, and simply looked for a church in which this would be possible. in their previous community, same-sex marriage was not permitted, but nienke never felt out of place there and this did not influence her feeling of being accepted by her community. a third theme which came up in the narratives of these women was that monogamy was not only considered preferable, but even considered a particular positive feature of christianity. christianity, especially was valuable because it restrains one to ‘go from one to another’ (evelien), and motivates one to seek for long time and trustworthy partners instead of engaging in promiscuous sexual relations with multiple partners. the women made a clear distinction between non-religious sexualities and christian sexualities, in which the latter provide more support for loving and caring monogamous relationships. secular spaces were often regarded as oversexualised and providing ample opportunities to engage in non-monogamous ‘bad sex’. many of the interlocutors also felt out of place in mainstream secular lgbtq networks because of anti-religious ten- dencies in these spaces. karlijn, for example, said: ‘i feel like i’m misunderstood on two sides. i think the gayworld is as intolerant as the religious world’. this ‘gayworld’ she refers to celebrates her queer sexuality, but her religious beliefs are often met with suspicion or atheist negativity. these women experienced the limits of the notion of sexual freedom in secular gay spaces when it came to religion, something that marked the boundary of acceptance and recognition for them. on the one hand, they did consider secular lgbtq spaces valuable in having the opportunity to meet future lovers and providing information about sexuality that they did not find in their religious upbringing and current communities. on the other hand, secular spaces were often considered to be shaped be loose sexual morals that did not put the same emphasis on loving monogamous relations as the women desired themselves. in that sense, religion provided them with strength and tools to search for ‘good sex’, motivated by love and trust, but nevertheless something to be desired and enjoyed. case study – sexularism in sex educations in the four months of his fieldwork in and , wiering investigated dutch sexual practices and notions recommended by organisations working in the field of sexuality (e.g. health care organisations). he interviewed dutch professionals working for such organisations, usually white, highly educated l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering doctors, sexologists, people working for community health service (chs, ‘ggd’) or people working for different, usually smaller, organisations. he additionally participated in many meetings, seminars and sexual educations for students, parents, migrants or teachers, and he engaged in a long-term training to have eventually become an instructor himself. in doing so, he set out to explore secular sex, that is, those notions and prac- tices of sex that his interlocutors considered secular (see wiering ). in order to investigate how individual interpretations of sex would relate to broader secular discourses, wiering decided to compare findings from interviews with observations from sex educations. out of a variety of sex educations, wiering, for this article, selected sex education through theatre shows, since these included embodied practices and thus provided examples of how all the ideals about sex were put into practice. in these one-hour performances, a play about sex was performed for students. acting sexular the theatre show begins, and the actors on stage begin to introduce the char- acters they are about to play. we, about students, two teachers and myself, learn that bram, a somewhat shy-looking boy, has a girlfriend named linda. they have been in a relationship for a year now, but they do not see each other a lot as they live in different parts of the netherlands. in the coming summer this will fortunately change, because they have selected the same campsite for their holidays. they will both go there with a good friend. bram will be joined by raymond, who, in contrast to bram, appears very confident. he uses cool and funny language, is absolutely witty and he wears sunglasses. linda will bring along kirsten, a girl who is a christian, as linda explains the very first moment kirsten appears on stage. linda and kirsten will also be camping together and they will also share a tent. finally, there is melisandre, a confident, sexy-looking girl (the students in the audience usually particularly agreed on this) who wears short skirts. in the first scene on the camp site, we see bram and raymond having a dis- cussion next to their tent. as one could have expected, they are talking about sex. reason for this is the potential of a first sexual encounter between bram and linda. raymond tells bram that he is stunned that, despite bram and linda’s one-year relationship, they did not have had sex yet. he asks bram: but, i mean you have been in a relationship for a year already! that’s really mean of her [to not have had sex yet]. is she good at giving a blowjob then? you don’t know that either? man. how does she taste? i mean, you did taste her didn’t you? that nice wet mussel! bram responds: ‘no, no, i haven’t. i am just not sure if she wants that, you know. i just don’t know!’ raymond then tells him: ‘pfff, i know what ladies like. trust me, they want it’. culture and religion during the rest of the show it becomes apparent that raymond clearly does not know ‘what the ladies like’. it turns out that raymond has a crush on melisandre and they have a few flirting conversations where it becomes evident that raymond basically has no clue on how to appropriately approach her. meanwhile, it is elaborately put forward that melisandre is a supposedly free-spirited girl. for instance, when the group goes swimming, melisandre goes fully naked, whereas (christian) kirsten sticks to her swimsuit. during a scene in a disco, melisandre shows off sexy dance moves, whereas kirsten is absent as she, encouraged by linda, decided to remain in her tent. melisandre also informs the audience about her various sexual experiences, and that she has had sex with a lot of different boys. moreover, after she and raymond had sex near the end of the show, she is capable of rightly pointing out, on the basis of raymond’s sexual performances, that he probably was a virgin up until then. finally, we also learn that she lives by three rules: ( ) sex should be safe, ( ) she should, at least, know the boy’s name and ( ) the sex should not take place at her own (parental) home. meanwhile, raymond managed to persuade bram to urge his girlfriend into having sex with him (‘be more decisive man, girls dig that’). bram, quite bluntly and awkwardly, physically attempts to have sex with linda several times dur- ing the show, who then tells him that she is not ready for it yet. near the end of the show she finally does agree to have sex, but it is quite obvious that she only does so because she feels pressured. after the sex, she tells the audience that she feels absolutely terrible about what happened. the show ends, and, subsequently, the moderator asks for advice from the students in the audience. once in a while, she asks a student to come on stage to engage in a performed conversation to advise the actors. these post-show discussions were particularly helpful in wiering’s analysis, as they somewhat indicated how the students interpreted the show, and also because they helped wiering to spot the agenda implicitly advocated by the script and the moderator. the moderator’s specific selection of particular parts of the show for the discussion does, of course, not come out of the blue. secular sex as modern sex observing this show, wiering designated two components that were sug- gested crucial for having ‘good sex’. first, the forms of sex recommended in the shows all suggested a particular liberated notion of women, and to a lesser extent, a somewhat disciplined notion of men. it was implicitly suggested that women should be represented and treated differently than in the past, which is why men had to take a step back. men had to take women’s wishes and needs more into consideration and should respect the emancipated status of women. secular sex was presented as incompatible with the supposedly outdated under- standing of women as chaste, a term often used to capture the period before the l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering sexual revolution in the netherlands. for example, each of the audiences that wiering was part of perceived melisandre as a slut, upon which the moderator was very eager to point out the problematic differences between boys and girls in this regard. it was stated that it is problematic to assign melisandre the label of slut because she was just showing a particular form of behaviour, which she had the full right to opt for. wiering observed that, albeit very implicitly, christianity seemed to be paying the price for this supposedly progressive and modern image of sex. kirsten, the christian girl, who wanted to delay sex until after her marriage – a decision that was outstanding given the sexual behaviour of the rest of the group – was not defended in a similar way as melisandre. the moderator did mention that it was her own decision to delay sex, but that choice was not highlighted nor was it defended equally to melisandre’s outstanding decisions. additionally, kirsten was by no means as funny as melisandre, she was criticised by melisandre and linda for being weird (‘you are not going to pray in our tent now, are you?’), she was condemned for being boring (linda and melisandre strongly ridiculed her decision to not go naked during the skinny dipping) and, finally, she simply had little time on stage. this implicit stigmatisation of christianity as outdated was a recurring theme in wiering’s fieldwork, of which the theatre shows, again, were only a small part. among his interlocutors, christians were frequently seen as a ‘different’ group of people. in several conversations wiering had, christians were described as people who just do not want to talk about sexuality, and who, for that reason, were simply a bit outdated. cor, a sexologist, implicitly confirmed this notion of christianity as outdated during an interview: they [christians] are catching up, though. for now, they just need different edu- cation, and that’s not really available at this moment is it? there is attention for refugees and their culture, but the christians are missing the boat. the dutch health system has simply overlooked them. jantien, a woman working for a large health care organisation, told wiering that an acquaintance of her recently had adapted sexual educations to make them applicable to reformed christians, implying that this had been quite a task. also during several sex education classes wiering attended, christianity was implicitly presented as a religion that recommended outdated forms of sexuality. it seems that, to somehow proof the up-to-date-ness of secular sex, an outdated example was needed. secular sex as safe sex a second feature suggested in the shows to be essential for having ‘good sex’, was safety. first, sex had to be safe in the sense that it always should include contraceptives. melisandre, the free-spirited girl was absolutely clear about culture and religion this as was reflected in one of her three ending statements mentioned above. additionally, a condom wrapper was thrown over the wall during the scene in which bram and linda had sex, which took place in a toilet stall. second, and much more cunningly, ‘good sex’ was suggested safe because it demanded a particular disciplining of boys. the post show discussions always elaborated extensively on bram and raymond’s mistakes. bram, the audience and the moderator usually agreed, had simply acted stupidly. this was the con- sequence of his lack of knowledge and his blinding respect for raymond. as for raymond, the audience’s laughter and comments suggested that there were many things for him to improve upon. the audience considered it inappropriate that he explicitly said that fucking was really nice; openly spoke of ‘hot girls’; stated that an ideal woman should have the body shape of a coca-cola bottle; pulled down his pants in public when melisandre asked him to do so; danced in a somewhat awkward way; said that it was weird to not yet have had sex with a girl after already seeing her six times; made obscene gestures; peaked into a toilet, and so on. raymond, in the end, was suggested to be a show-off, and after more questions from the moderator about how we could explain all this problematic behaviour, as someone who was extremely uncertain deep down. like the demand of secular sex to be up-to-date, the requirement of secular sex to be safe resonated well with findings from other parts of wiering’s field- work. again, it seemed religion was paying the price, although this time it was islam. particularly in the interviews he held, islam was frequently considered the complete opposite of dutch-ness, and especially newly-arrived muslims were seen as a huge threat against sexual progressiveness. the main problem, wiering learned, was that the religion was presumed to be violating the common dutch, sexual rights, norms and values. islam was considered a very serious threat, pre-eminently because the supposedly islamic notions of sex were considered potentially dangerous. cor told wiering: let’s take two kissing men. a syrian muslim boy cannot just go and beat them, because [listen] boy, that is just the way things are in the netherlands! that’s our foundation, you cannot cross that, that’s how it is and you have to accept that! and two people drinking wine together does not mean that they are going to have sex together. that’s just how things work in the netherlands. wiering heard many similar stories in his fieldwork, for instance about muslim boys who had not been able to control themselves when they first encountered dutch girls wearing short skirts. ‘they [newly-arrived muslims] are simply walk- ing through our town as we speak!’, els, a colleague of jantien, stated somewhat panicked. els used this statement to support her earlier mentioned argument that there was an urgent need for more sex education among muslim refugees. the fact that this fear always concerned muslim refugees reflects the more general disapproval of islam in wiering’s fieldwork. islam was considered devi- ant, sometimes dangerous, and therefore incompatible and unwanted. l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering good secular sex though wiering’s interlocutors generally considered most of the content of the sex educations described here to be neutral, it is clear that others, for instance some religious practitioners, would not likely appreciate it. it is no coincidence that religious schools in the netherlands mainly opt for other organisations to provide the mandatory sex educations than secular schools. but there is more to be said here. if one would follow the recommendations of the educations, boys would not be boys anymore. on the contrary, we are suggested that boys are in need of disciplining themselves. shown representa- tions of dangerous boys unable to control themselves suggest that boys should reflect critically on their own behaviour, including what they say and how they dance. moreover, given the depiction of boys as being rather unaware, wiering could not help wondering whether this depiction of boys as completely clueless and as having a worse understanding of girls’ boundaries might perhaps be driven by the prevailing image of dangerous muslim boys who are supposed to be completely unaware of the dutch norms and values, and who ‘even’ happen to walk in our towns. additionally, this theatrical performance confirms the association of religion as something that needs to be privatised – in fact, religion is suggested to be in a need for a privatisation that goes even further than a tent – and as something that is boring. given the non-coincidental fact that religion becomes person- ified by a girl with a short, non-interesting time on stage, one cannot neglect the suggestion that a particular secular agency of girls is advocated. one that simultaneously encourages girls to become liberated, and hence to not be dully. religion merely is depicted as a stumbling block, for both girls and boys, in their process of confirming and maintaining supposedly correct and ‘liberated’ forms of behaviour that will eventually lead to ‘good’ secular sex. conclusion we have presented two very different case studies on sex, and we are the first to admit that of course any comparison is rather difficult for a variety of reasons. what we do argue, though, is that our empirical investigations and analyses of the constructions of both religious and secular sex have revealed underlying norms and assumptions, illustrating that even supposedly ‘free’ sexual practices are performatively shaped in accordance to discourses and norms about correct and incorrect sex. this article illustrates how religion can be an essential factor in the self-narration of sexual experiences and desires. sexual pleasure can be a moment in which god is experienced, which makes sexual practices essential in their construction of a religious self. at the same time, religious women’s beliefs strengthen their faith in monogamy and they uphold strong norms about which sex is considered ‘good’. the space in which sex can be experienced fully, directed culture and religion at women’s pleasure instead of procreation, is furthermore managed carefully by opposing christian sex to secular sex. the latter is suspected of consisting of morals too loose for their christian standards and preferring non-monogamous sexual acts which are only based on lust. faith, on the contrary, enables a sexual ethic which simultaneously emphasises pleasure while directing this towards trustworthy and monogamous relationships. in wiering’s case study of secular sex, we have seen how dutch sex education does suggest specific norms of how people are to have sex. we have seen how notions of secular sex are constructed through their opposing to conceptions of religious sex: we are suggested that, in contrast to supposedly outdated and dangerous forms of religion, secular sex is both modern and safe. these empiri- cal findings, we think, accurately illustrate how the religious and the secular are indeed engaged in processes of producing each other in society (asad ). finally, our empirical material urges us to think about sexuality beyond disem- bodied identity categories. such an analysis that begins from the intersections of discourse and sexual practices instead provides us with new insights into the workings of religion and the secular in daily lives of people in the netherlands, and shows how ideas of sexuality are shaped through norms and moral codes, both in ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ contexts. notes . abbreviation of ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer’. we follow the mainstream of contemporary scholarship in this regard. recently, activist voices call for an even further multiplication of the term: lgbtqasp or lgbtqi+. this is a mainly us-based discourse that up until now has not been that present in the netherlands or europe at large. . though allies, lgbtq movements and feminist movements have not always been aligned. in the development of the academic field of gender studies, women’s studies, feminist studies or lgbtq studies, however, these often overlap. acknowledging the complexity of this field of study, and diversity in emphasis depending on national geographic location, we will not further specify gender studies and queer studies. . for example france (scott ), the uk (hawthorne ), belgium (van den brandt ) and the usa (jakobsen and pellegrini ). . see schuh, burchardt, and wohlrab-sahr ( , – ) for an excellent, much more comprehensive account. . phil bloom is a dutch artist, entertainer and actress. she appeared naked on television on july in a vpro (originally an acronym for vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep, or liberal protestant radio broadcasting corporation) show called ‘hoepla’. . the church also contributed strongly to the sexual revolution, though its role is marginalised and not really acknowledged by the dutch (see knibbe & bartelink paper in progress). . most women used terminology of ‘coming-out’ (uit de kast komen in dutch) to refer to the moment they were first open about their sexual desires for other women to friends and/or family. l. l. schrijvers and j. wiering . see wilcox for a thorough analysis of this type of religious individualism among queer women in the united states (wilcox ). . astrid referred here to ecclesiastes : ‘and if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.’ (kjv), in dutch prediker : ‘en indien iemand den een mocht overweldigen, zo zullen de twee tegen hem bestaan; en een drievoudig snoer wordt niet haast gebroken.’ (statenvertaling). . many dutch religious people have two wedding ceremonies (or these can be combined): one civil ceremony at for example city hall, and one religious ceremony in which they receive the blessing from religious authority. only civil ceremonies provide legal basis and it is this official institute of marriage that is legally and nationwide open for same-sex couples. . there is no explicit mention of same-sex marriage in pkn documents. policy refers to non-heterosexual relations as ‘different kinds of relations’ (andersoortige relaties), terminology repeated by evelien. in practice most women referred to this as gay marriage, similar to the discourse about civil marriage. officially, this is ‘opened up for all kinds of couples’, and there is no difference between gay and straight marriage, but gay marriage is a commonly used term. . this only is a partial selection of the show that serves this article’s aims. we do not want to compliment nor criticise particular features of the show: we merely wish to illustrate certain assumptions regarding religion from which the show departs. . the audience was not informed about how she had noted this. . though it is not our aim to evaluate the show, we want to point out that it was quite successful in capturing the students’ attention. . names of the interlocutors in this article are pseudonyms. . there is a lot more to this quote than we can address here, particularly with regard to nationalism, ethnicity and race. for a discussion of what has been referred to as ‘the dutch nativist triangle of sexuality, race and religion’, please see the chapter of balkenhol, mepschen and duyvendak ( ). . we realize that ethnicity is important here too. however, for the article’s purposes, we decided to limit ourselves to religion. yet it should be kept in mind that we regard religion, ethnicity, race and culture to be intersecting concepts empirically. . in the netherlands, schools are, except from some very general guidelines put forward by the government, free to conceptualise sex education according to their own preferences. . please note that the fieldwork was conducted before the #metoo discussion ensued. this is important to mention, as the discussion’s prevalent role in dutch society could otherwise perfectly have explained the described emphasis on the need for disciplining boys. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank the participants of the noster ‘challenge of difference’ semi- nar for their support in producing this article. also, they want to thank anne-marie korte, kim knibbe, brenda bartelink and jonathan barry for their useful insights and support. all errors remain our owns. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. culture and religion funding this work was supported by the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo), [schrijvers: - - ], [wiering: - - ]. orcid lieke l. schrijvers   http://orcid.org/ - - - references abu-lughod, lila. . do muslim women need saving? cambridge, ma: harvard university press. amir-moazami, schirin. . “investigating the secular body: the politics of the male circumcision debate in germany.” reorient ( ): – . doi: . / reorient. . . . asad, talal. . formations of the secular: christianity, islam, modernity. stanford, ca: stanford university press. asad, talal. . “thinking about the secular body, pain, and liberal politics.” cultural anthropology ( ): – . doi: . /j. - . . .x. avishai, orit. . “‘doing religion’ 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university press. verkaaik, oskar, and rachel spronk. . “sexular practice: notes on an ethnography of secularism.” focaal : – . doi: . /fcl. . . weeks, jeffrey. . sexuality. new york: routledge. wekker, gloria. a. “‘what’s identity got to do with it?’: rethinking identity in light of the mati work in suriname.” in feminist anthropology: a reader, edited by ellen lewin, – . malden, ma: blackwell. wekker, gloria. b. the politics of passion: women’s sexual culture in the afro- surinamese diaspora. new york: columbia university press. wiering, jelle. . “there is a sexular body: introducing a material approach to the secular.” secularism and nonreligion ( ): – . doi: . /snr. . wilcox, melissa. . queer women and religious individualism. bloomington, in: indiana university press. https://doi.org/ . / - https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / - . https://doi.org/ . /fcl. . https://doi.org/ . /snr. 	abstract 	introduction 	sex in the study of religion and the secular 	sex as more than an identity 	introducing the netherlands 	case study – sex and pleasure among non-heterosexual protestant women 	god-given sexual pleasure 	‘good’ christian sex 	case study – sexularism in sex educations 	acting sexular 	secular sex as modern sex 	secular sex as safe sex 	good secular sex 	conclusion 	notes 	acknowledgements 	disclosure statement 	funding 	references uc berkeley uc berkeley previously published works title best practices in research mentoring in clinical science. permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ qd r rd journal journal of abnormal psychology, ( ) issn - x authors gruber, june borelli, jessica l prinstein, mitchell j et al. publication date doi . /abn peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ qd r rd https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ qd r rd#author https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ best practices in research mentoring in clinical science june gruber university of colorado boulder jessica l. borelli university of california, irvine mitchell j. prinstein university of north carolina, chapel hill lee anna clark university of notre dame joanne davila stony brook university dylan g. gee yale university daniel n. klein stony brook university robert w. levenson university of california, berkeley jane mendle cornell university bunmi o. olatunji vanderbilt university gail l. rose university of vermont darby saxbe university of southern california lauren m. weinstock brown university the growth of clinical science as a field depends on the work of engaged mentors nurturing future generations of scientists. effective research mentoring has been shown to predict positive outcomes, including greater scholarly productivity, reduced attrition, and increased satisfaction with training and/or employment, which ultimately may enhance the quality of the clinical-science research enterprise. barriers to effective research mentoring, however, pose significant challenges for both mentees and mentors, as well as for labs, training programs, and/or departments. we discuss some key issues as they apply to clinical-science mentoring and note how they are affected across different developmental levels (undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, doctoral, internship, postdoctoral associates, and early career faculty). although we do not proclaim expertise on these issues—and have struggled with them in our own careers—we believe an open discussion around best mentoring practices will enhance our collective effectiveness and help mentees and our field to flourish. editor’s note. laurie chassin served as the action editor for this article.—am x june gruber, department of psychology and neuroscience, uni- versity of colorado boulder; jessica l. borelli, department of psycho- logical science, university of california, irvine; mitchell j. prinstein, department of psychology, university of north carolina, chapel hill; lee anna clark, department of psychology, university of notre dame; joanne davila, department of psychology, stony brook university; dylan g. gee, department of psychology, yale university; daniel n. klein, department of psychology, stony brook university; robert w. levenson, department of psychology, university of california, berke- ley; jane mendle, department of human development, cornell uni- versity; bunmi o. olatunji, department of psychology, vanderbilt university; gail l. rose, department of psychiatry, university of vermont; darby saxbe, department of psychology, university of southern california; lauren m. weinstock, department of psychiatry and human behavior, brown university. some of the ideas appearing in this article were presented at the asso- ciation for psychological science annual convention, clinical science forum (may ). correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to june gruber, department of psychology and neuroscience, university of col- orado boulder, ucb muenzinger d c, boulder, co - . e-mail: june.gruber@colorado.edu t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. journal of abnormal psychology © american psychological association , vol. , no. , – issn: - x http://dx.doi.org/ . /abn https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:june.gruber@colorado.edu http://dx.doi.org/ . /abn general scientific summary effective mentoring is important to fostering important outcomes in clinical science. we discuss key mentoring issues for undergraduate and postbaccalaureate students, graduate students, clinical science internship and postdoctoral fellows, as well as early career faculty. we conclude by outlining a path forward for further discussion and research around best mentoring practices in clinical science. keywords: mentoring, teaching, clinical psychology, students supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/ . /abn .supp in clinical science, as in many academic disciplines, mentorship is a powerful responsibility that can challenge both mentor and mentee. the very concept of the mentor has daunting literary origins. in homer’s odyssey, odysseus’s son, telemachus, is left behind as his father journeys to troy. telemachus is addled and inept until the goddess athena intervenes. athena assumes the body and voice of mentor, an old friend of odysseus, and guides and provides telemachus with a transformative degree of psycho- logical fortitude (lattimore, ; o’donnell, ). the standard set by homer’s mentor— having godlike wisdom, instantiating the mentee’s epic transformation—is formidable. yet, today, few are formally taught mentorship skills, and many mentors feel uncer- tain, apprehensive, and in need of guidance as they negotiate these complex professional relationships, especially in a field that must balance research and clinical-training goals. this article’s goal is to generate discussion about important mentoring issues in clinical science and encourage future work tackling emerging mentoring challenges. we first discuss what we know and do not yet know about effective mentorship across various stages of clinical-science training, from undergraduates to early career scientists. next we offer a discussion of best practices in mentoring based on the premise that effective mentorship pro- motes not only individual success, but also our field’s collective success. we focus on research mentoring, that is, how best to train future scientists conducting and disseminating research about psy- chopathology, its assessment and treatment, recognizing that these skills may be unique to other advisory or supervision experiences. this article is applicable for readers with varying degrees of familiarity with the issues discussed. although it primarily ad- dresses mentoring in the context of psychology departments, the issues raised are likely relevant to psychiatric, medical, and neu- roscience fields. we aim to move beyond the status quo to consider more deeply what will best prepare mentees for the future of clinical science. what do we know about clinical-science research mentoring? there are at least seven reasonably well-established research findings on mentoring; however, to our knowledge, few (if any) are specific to clinical science. . mentoring involves providing mentees with multiple types of support, including advising, sponsoring, promot- ing visibility and exposure, coaching, giving challenging assignments, role modeling, protecting, accepting and confirming, counseling, and befriending. these fall into career and psychosocial support mentoring functions (kram, ). . mentees value certain behaviors in mentors, including role modeling, effective communication, and honest and constructive feedback (rose, ). rose reported three dimensions of individual differences in a priori ratings of the “ideal” mentor: integrity (e.g., value/believe in me, give me proper credit, thoughtful/considerate), guidance (e.g., provide information, set deadlines, problem solve), and relationship (e.g., share experiences, positive atti- tude, have informal interactions). . there are important differences between formal and in- formal mentoring. the classic : mentoring model is informal and associated with a greater range of mentoring functions and higher satisfaction (jackson et al., ; noe, ; ragins & cotton, ). however, there is an uneven availability of informal mentoring, especially for women and members of underrepresented minorities (boyle & boice, ). even when formal mentoring programs exist, many individuals seek out informal men- toring with individuals they perceive as more similar to themselves and with whom they interact more produc- tively (holt, markova, dhaenens, marler, & heilmann, ). . effective mentoring provides benefits for both mentees and mentors. meta-analyses (e.g., allen, eby, poteet, lentz, & lima, ; girves, zepeda, & gwathmey, ) indicate that effective mentoring— defined as men- toring in which both the mentee and mentor achieve their career-related and professional development goals (allen et al., )—is associated with positive objective (e.g., greater compensation and career advancement) and sub- jective (e.g., higher job and career satisfaction, career commitment, and expectations for advancement) out- comes. . both mentees and mentors benefit from multiple-mentor models. a constellation of supportive relationships to support mentees in different domains and across their evolution as scientists has clear benefits (dobrow, chan- dler, murphy, & kram, ; terry & ghosh, ). multiple mentors offer diverse perspectives with differ- ent knowledge and skills, are better mentors that can help buffer the effects of a dysfunctional mentoring relation- t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. clinical science mentoring ship, assuage the “time burden” of individual mentors and provide support across different domains (e.g., per- sonal issues may be best kept out of more professional relationships (de janasz & sullivan, ). the “mentor map” of the national center for faculty development and diversity illustrates the various functions multiple mentors can provide (see part a of the online supple- mental material). in addition to multiple mentors at the same professional level (e.g., multiple faculty mentors), vertical team mentoring across levels may be valuable: senior faculty can mentor junior faculty, who can in turn mentor postdoctoral fellows, who can mentor graduate students, who can mentor undergraduates. peer mentors also offer a helpful supplement to mentoring between individuals at different career or training stages (e.g., cornelius, wood, & lai, ). a multiple mentoring approach can both increase the di- versity of perspectives available and even help them acquire men- toring experience. . some mentee behaviors increase the effectiveness of mentoring. mentee behaviors such as arriving on time, being prepared for meetings, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions can elicit more effective mentoring, perhaps through the mechanism of mentors’ perceptions: mentees perceived by their mentors as foresightful, pro- active, probing, respectful, grateful, reciprocal, and hum- ble get better mentoring (burroughs wellcome fund, howard hughes medical institute, ). . everyone can benefit from mentoring. gender and race are weaker determinants of mentoring benefits than pre- viously thought. recent research suggests that men and women are mentored at about the same rate and receive similar mentoring functions and benefits (decastro, grif- fith, ubel, stewart, & jagsi, ; harden, clark, john- son, & larson, ; leavey, ). furthermore, racial homogeneity is not a strong predictor of mentor- relationship attributes or outcomes (decastro et al., ; eby et al., ; harden et al., ; harrison, price, & bell, ; hernandez, estrada, woodcock, & schultz, ), although same-race mentors may be pre- ferred (brooms & davis, ). what don’t we know about clinical science mentoring? despite the consensus that mentorship is valuable, extant re- search, practice, and policy on mentorship is limited by a lack of conceptual clarity and consistency in defining benchmarks or mutually agreed-upon outcomes to differentiate “successful” from “unsuccessful” mentoring behaviors (baker, pifer, & griffin, ; berk, berg, mortimer, walton-moss, & yeo, ). there also is substantial variability in the paths to high-quality mentor- ship (i.e., equifinality) and mentorship styles are highly individu- alized and may evolve through trial-and-error. moreover, there are mentee differences in desires and expectations for mentors (rose, ). in the following text, we discuss the central mentoring issues relevant to each of four career stages to offer a framework that can be used to guide future research, based on the premise that clinical science mentoring includes a developmental consideration of per- sonal and professional development, emotional support, and skill building (see table ). moreover, mentoring is by definition a transactional process, with mentors continually guiding, yet in- formed by their trainees’ progress, input, and feedback. in short, we believe that great mentors are not those who necessarily pos- sess requisite competence, but are continually learning through a process of reflection, adjustment, growth, and ongoing communi- cation with each mentee. undergraduate and postbaccalaureate research mentoring the role of mentors to undergraduates is unique because, in many cases, these mentors serve as a gateway into our profession. undergraduates’ mentors should be prepared to discuss the current state of psychological science, process, and prospects of graduate school admissions, and the multitude of professions that allow one to use clinical-science training, including various careers in aca- demia as well as administrative, corporate, health care, and edu- cational settings. several resources are available to help new mentors effectively discuss these points or offer to undergraduates for their own reading (e.g., prinstein, choukas-bradley, & guan, ; sayette & norcross, ). as the national acceptance rate into doctoral clinical psychology programs is � %, with many clinical science programs � % (prinstein et al., ), it is critical to help undergraduates develop a realistic appraisal of their admis- sion chances and help them assess their genuine interest in a scientific approach to the study and practice of clinical psychol- ogy. a second role of undergraduates’ mentors is a “surrogate par- ent,” including normalizing undergraduates’ identity confusion; discussing balancing professional and personal responsibilities; teaching appropriate workplace skills (often the first formal con- text for students to learn and practice research skills); and helping undergraduates assess their strengths, weaknesses, workstyles, and interests as they contemplate their coursework, extracurricular activities, and career options. a third task for undergraduates’ mentors is to help them extract meaningful lessons and skills from their research expe- riences. for example, a mentor may help undergraduates un- derstand why a research project is being conducted, how a project can make an important contribution, and eventually the way it may be used to inform the assessment, prevention, or amelioration of psychological symptoms. undergraduates’ mentors should help mentees understand how to evaluate pub- lished research critically, generate novel hypotheses, design innovative studies, and frame their research for a broad array of audiences. many undergraduates will rely on a mentor to guide their search for a postbaccalaureate position or through the process of graduate-school admission (e.g., calhoun & prin- stein, ; prinstein et al., ). students are changing and so must mentoring styles. remark- ably little work has discussed multiple mentoring, which is a common experience for undergraduates who interact with class- room instructors and often multiple professors and graduate students overseeing or serving as formal or informal mentors. t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. gruber et al. http://dx.doi.org/ . /abn .supp yet it remains unknown who may best benefit from multiple mentors and how these mentors can augment, rather than un- dermine one another’s guidance, or what mentor characteristics (e.g., faculty rank; similar vs. contrasting mentoring ideology) are most closely associated with successful team mentoring. today’s cohorts of students are also far more diverse than in past generations, not only with respect to gender and ethnic/ racial backgrounds, but also sexual and gender-minority iden- tity, socioeconomic status, ability, and so forth mentoring with sensitivity to diversity and multicultural humility and is espe- cially important to consider. the institutional context is a powerful influence on undergraduate students’ research and other life experiences during college, setting local norms for inclusivity (or lack thereof), and potentially providing funding and other opportunities for students’ research involvement (e.g., national science foundation-funded research experiences for undergraduates). mentors must be keenly aware of power dy- namics they exert (even if unknowingly) over young trainees and be aware of, and know how to report, violations of profes- sional boundaries among undergraduates and/or between fac- ulty and students. graduate student research mentoring the empirical literature on faculty mentoring of graduate students in psychology is limited, with even fewer studies focusing on clinical psychology or research mentoring (calla- han & watkins, ; lundgren & orsillo, ). nonetheless, consistent with the larger literature, mentoring in psychology graduate programs are associated with greater student achieve- ment and satisfaction (clark, harden, & johnson, ; john- son, ; mangione, borden, nadkarni, evarts, & hyde, ), even up to years later (callahan & watkins, ; mallinckrodt & gelso, ). yet several challenges are inher- ent in graduate-student mentoring, perhaps more so than for other developmental phases due to the all-encompassing nature of clinical-science training. clinical-science graduate students are expected to develop core competencies across many do- mains including research, teaching, clinical work, and even mentoring or supervision. in addition, like their peers in other psychology subareas, clinical-science graduate students must build theoretical and methodological expertise while develop- ing a research program that is complementary to but also distinct from their mentors’. clinical-science research mentors table overview of mentoring task milestones across four levels of mentoring primary mentoring tasks mentoring milestone undergraduates graduate students interns/postdocs early faculty personal development fostering autonomy/personal and career goals are differentiated from family of origin. encouragement of long-term planning/ understanding implications of decisions decades later fostering financial and curricular independence/ selecting specific training experiences. managing self- derived expectations for perfection, and learning time management skills guidance on how to determine career and personal values. wrestling with imposter syndrome/ transition from trainee to faculty help early faculty recognize that most skills required to function successfully as a faculty member are not explicitly taught. encourage mentees to have learning goals, not performance goals professional development teaching about the field of psychology and about clinical science; develop confidence in reviewing existing scientific literature and developing novel hypotheses. learning the tone and style of manuscript writing achieving depth of knowledge about a specific research area(s). promote development towards nearly autonomous manuscript preparation. develop initial grant writing skills. develop a professional network of colleagues interested in related topics promote autonomy in one or more areas of research/clinical competence. facilitate development of grant writing skills including the mechanics and the way to “frame” one’s research. teach supervision skills. help ensure access to datasets and/or collaborators that will allow a fruitful transition through the first few years of faculty encourage experimentation with different approaches to allow rapid development of faculty skills. help faculty select career opportunities that are most rewarding and have best vita-value for one’s ultimate professional goals emotional support mentees may need help with apprehension about a confusing application process, potentially conflicting pressure from parents vs. teachers, and the uncertain future of life as a graduate student mentees may question their interest in the field, doubt their ability to become as prolific as their faculty mentors, and feel torn between personal and professional goals/expectations during this life stage mentees may need encouragement to act justifiably confident and autonomously while they still feel inexperienced. may need help with long-term vision and meaningful priorities when selecting a career path or job prospect may need help feeling imperfect for the first few years and may need help focusing on what is within their control and what is not while awaiting tenure/promotion decisions skill building emphases on critically reviewing manuscripts, foundations in psychological theories, comfort with statistics competence in hypothesis generation, writing, statistics, critically reviewing others’ work emphasis on writing more quickly, serving as a reviewer, and asserting oneself as an expert in a specific content area learning how to cultivate the next generation of clinical scientists t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. clinical science mentoring play a central role in helping students conceptualize and design studies, collect and analyze data, interpret and report results, and develop scientific-writing skills. students also rely on their research mentors to guide their broader dissemination of re- search findings, including identifying opportunities to present research at conferences, building confidence and skill in oral presentations and fielding questions while also contextualizing this within the bigger picture of students’ strengths, areas for growth, and long-term goals. in these ways, the experience of graduate mentoring in clinical science is broad and challenges mentors to advise on an array of content and professional skill domains, while helping students to envision and plan for their overall trajectory. compounding these challenges, graduate mentoring over a - to -year period often requires adaptation to change (johnson, ). students’ interests or goals often shift, mentors’ research programs or lab structures may change, and students’ personal lives may evolve (e.g., they may marry or have children). thus, mentors need to help students through these transitions and must maintain the flexibility to help students find their own paths that align with changing interests or goals. a mentor may be called upon to serve as teacher, boss/supervisor, therapist, coach, colleague, taskmaster and/or friend. some of these roles may be concurrent and even conflict, necessitating careful navigation (johnson, jensen, sera, & cimbora, ). at times, the mentor’s loyalty may be tested as the mentor may be in multiple competing relationships with the mentee, serving, for instance, as the mentee’s clinical supervisor, research supervi- sor, and employer at the same time. if the demands of these different roles are in competition with one another (e.g., the mentor believes it would benefit the student’s professional- development goals more to spend time in clinical work but it would benefit the mentee’s research goals [and perhaps the mentor’s own goals] for the mentee to work on a research project), the mentor may be faced with a challenge. these challenges may be offset by helping students build other rela- tionships to facilitate professional-development opportunities, find support for challenging elements of the research process (e.g., statistics consultation), and garner additional feedback on research products (e.g., via committee members and outside collaborators). nevertheless, “the” mentor is expected to serve as the primary guide. facilitating students’ development of time management, pri- oritization, and work/life balance is another major task of effective graduate mentoring (lundgren & orsillo, ). if students are struggling with productivity, mentors may wish to point out when students should engage in self-care practices (e.g., sleep, exercise, socializing) or develop more efficient work habits and effective time-management practices. alterna- tively, mentors may play the role of helping students identify inconsistencies between their career goals (e.g., becoming ac- ademic scientists) and their passions (e.g., clinical work or teaching). graduate programs in clinical psychological science often convey, sometimes only implicitly, that there is one right or best path, typically that of the primary mentor. in contrast, effective mentorship involves helping students find their own best paths, those that they will find most fulfilling and navi- gating the emotional reactions (e.g., guilt, shame) they may have in response. it is natural for mentors to experience disap- pointment when their students choose different paths than those with which they began graduate school. thus, part of high- quality mentoring involves mentors addressing their own reac- tions to students’ behavior in a way that does not impede students’ goals. a final characterization and challenge of graduate mentoring in clinical science is that it can be a lifelong commitment, if so desired by the mentee. mentoring graduate students can encom- pass many stages of their careers (kaslow, bangasser, grus, mc- cutcheon, & fowler, ; lundgren & orsillo, ). for in- stance, mentors may advise students on their next career steps: clinical internship, postdoctoral fellowship, and faculty or other employment, on significant career opportunities (editorships, ad- ministrative roles), and even on complex negotiations as their careers progress. yet, this may not be desired by all trainees, who for professional or personal reasons, may elect to reduce contact with their graduate school mentors and establish a more autono- mous path. given these numerous roles and challenges, investiga- tion is sorely needed to identify successful mentoring approaches, specific techniques to avoid pitfalls, and optimal practices to foster students’ development and maintain a successful, collaborative mentor–mentee relationship. we offer three suggestions to facili- tate more research in this area. first, successful graduate mentoring begins during admissions. in our experience, clinical scientists often seek candidates with the most impressive academic credentials, the best fit to ongoing research, and indicators suggesting a high degree of productivity (e.g., writing style, statistical acumen). however, mentors should also consider their own work style, pet peeves, and prior work history to generate an honest self-appraisal of the type of mentee with whom they work best. we would all like to believe that we can effectively mentor any trainee, but we are human, and as psychologists we especially may be able to recognize that not all human dyads have an equal chance of maintaining a mutually satisfactory working relationship. some mentors may be especially effective in helping students develop a professional writing style, whereas others may feel most adept inspiring students to generate novel hypotheses independently. successful mentoring may be most likely when mentors have insight regarding their own strengths and weaknesses, and selected mentees who best fit with the array of professional and personal resources they are uniquely suited to provide. successful mentoring must also wrestle with role confusion. when mentors were trainees, they likely were exposed to varying expectations of graduate training. in some labs, graduate students are expected to work on lab projects or in other apprenticeship roles, regardless of any personal benefit gained from these expe- riences (i.e., an ethos of trainees “paying their dues”). in other labs, trainees may be expected to focus on their own projects almost exclusively. some mentors may recall substantial opportunities to meet with their advisor, with frequent and specific instruction; others may recall considerable autonomy and reliance on peers for guidance. these varying experiences produce faculty with widely varying assumptions regarding their role as a mentor. mentoring styles may vary considerably even within a department, a fact acutely perceived by graduate students who compare experiences between labs. there are few data to suggest whether one particular set of expectations or mentor roles is objectively more beneficial than another; however, mentors likely will benefit by gaining t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. gruber et al. awareness of their own style (especially as compared to their colleagues) and clearly articulating their proclivities with prospec- tive and current students. many difficulties within mentor–mentee relationships are mismatches between mentors’ expectations and mentees’ needs that could be reduced through improved commu- nication (e.g., hagerty, barger, taylor, carter, & gruber, ). communicating clearly with mentees may help ensure that grad- uate students know what to expect from their mentor and vice versa. role confusion also may emerge from many mentors’ dual capacity as their graduate student’s academic advisor and also as their direct research supervisor, perhaps even the student’s source of funding. these distinct roles often provide challenges to men- tors who may, on the one hand, want to support a trainee who is experiencing personal or professional difficulties completing grad- uate schoolwork, yet simultaneously has a vested interest in this same trainee’s successful completion of research requirements to ensure that the mentor’s project is progressing as intended or as required by funding agencies. as with other types of role confu- sion, this dilemma often may be addressed by explicitly commu- nicating to trainees when a mentor feels torn between two sets of expectations, wishes, or needs. by explaining to students why a shuffling of responsibilities may be needed, or why deadlines cannot be extended, for example, it often is easier for graduate students to make appropriate attributions regarding their mentor’s behavior (e.g., reducing a student’s responsibilities due not to perceptions of incompetence but to programmatic needs), and perhaps serving as a model to trainees for how they can similarly discuss complex decision-making with their mentor or when they become a mentor themselves. as with undergraduates, greater attention is needed on graduate students’ increasingly common experience in multiple-mentor re- lationships, which may have many benefits. mentors at multiple levels of seniority can help to offset differences in individual mentoring styles and may work to eliminate discrepancies that disadvantage students from underrepresented and/or diverse back- grounds. on the other hand, the introduction of multiple mentors can introduce new challenges, such as the need for mentees to navigate multiple relationships and addressing potentially conflict- ing guidance from mentors; these challenges may be particularly acute for students who are already vulnerable (e.g., female and underrepresented students). mentoring with multicultural humility is as important for graduate-student training as for undergraduate training, perhaps even more so given the frequency and intensity of mentor-graduate student interactions. these issues are embedded within the larger institutional context in which mentor–mentee interactions reside. do mentors receive regular evaluations? what strategies are in place for intervening when the mentor–mentee match is poor or deteriorates? are there clear guidelines regarding what constitutes unethical conduct and how to deal with it in a way that protects vulnerable parties? a healthy institutional context should facilitate regular discussions about mentoring and offer material support for the mentoring role, as well as for trainees who encounter challenging mentor experiences. this is particularly important when addressing concerns with professional behavior and power dynamics of mentor–mentee relationships. we live in a historical moment of awareness surrounding the ways in which power-discrepant relationships can be mishandled (e.g., #metoo movement), and mentors must be cognizant of the implicit dom- inance and they possess. this is especially key in considering that mentors are expected—and sometimes required—to financially support their trainees, creating additional dependence upon men- tors. it is critical for graduate mentors to remain attuned to the developmental process that is inherently part of graduate-school experience, reflecting students’ changing interests, goals, skills, and desire for autonomy. like successful parents, mentors should allow mentees to explore freely and safely during this transition period, without fear of disappointing powerful authority figures. many clinical-science faculty hope to “raise” mentees who will make impactful scholarly contributions. however, it may be better for mentors to focus on, and explicitly communicate, that they wish to raise mentees who will be happy and feel fulfilled, regard- less of the career path they choose. this seemingly trite suggestion has profound implications for the structure and content of routine advising meetings, mutual decisions regarding which projects graduate students will undertake, the selection of practicum and volunteer opportunities, and perhaps most importantly, the cre- ation of a safe culture in which mentees can honestly and vulner- ably seek the guidance and input that mentors have to offer. like any relationship, creation of a foundation of trust, nurturance, and support is the best context for a mentee to experience maximal growth. in the final year before internship, successful graduate mentoring includes being receptive to discussions with students of how to make tough choices and compromises (e.g., where to apply for clinical internships), and reconciling those in the context of important relationships or geographical preferences. mentees may need help negotiating (a) delegation of key aspects of the disser- tation research (e.g., final data collection) to other lab members and (b) a timeline for completion of key milestones (e.g., data analysis, dissertation drafts), to remain on track for graduation, while being realistic about the time demands of internship. clinical internship and postdoctoral fellow research mentoring the clinical internship and postdoctoral years can be among the most rewarding periods for mentoring because these mentors get to witness the birth of an autonomous scholar with an established identity beyond affiliations with any institution or mentor. mentees also begin to master their experiences of imposter syndrome, and to assert themselves as legitimate “experts” in one or more do- mains of clinical science. in clinical psychology, and particularly clinical science, the experiences during internship versus postdoc- toral fellowship years can be quite distinct, so each is discussed separately in the following text. clinical internship. there are several unique considerations with respect to research mentoring during the predoctoral intern- ship year, which is typically a time of significant personal and professional transition for clinical-science graduate students. now considered to be the “capstone” experience in clinical training prior to receipt of the doctoral degree (mcquaid & spirito, ), the internship typically involves a departure from the graduate- school institution, requiring a move to a new geographical loca- tion. within just year, students may find themselves balancing the personal demands of relocation (e.g., costs and efforts associ- ated with a move and adapting to a new environment) with an adjustment to the people, culture, and training expectations of a t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. clinical science mentoring new institution, in addition to completing any remaining require- ments of their graduate institution and— given the time-limited nature of the internship year—planning for and take the next steps in their professional lives. whether that is a postdoctoral fellow- ship, faculty position, or something else, it often entails such time-consuming activities as completing applications and traveling to interviews. hence, ongoing mentorship during this transitional time remains critical, which we discuss further in the next section. for students emerging from clinical-science programs, the in- ternship may also require a significant decrease in the proportion of effort toward research one has allocated to date. even for internships with protected research time, this year is largely ded- icated to clinical training. the transition to a largely clinical role during internship may be an adjustment not only for clinical- science students, but also for their graduate mentors “back home,” particularly with respect to expectations for research productivity. making these adjustments is essential, as encouraging students to focus on providing high-quality, evidence-based clinical services is an ethical mandate. another consideration is that the internship year is often when graduate students begin to transition out of their mentor’s labora- tory. the mentorship relationship may shift and evolve as students move toward professional independence. as such, this year is also an important time to plan for continued collaborations and future directions including refocusing dissertation research on article submission, as well as completion of other ongoing collaborative research projects. these will require ongoing mentorship, albeit from a distance. time permitting, it can be beneficial to maintain a regularly scheduled meeting, either by telephone or videocon- ference, to facilitate continuity in the collaborative work between graduate mentor and trainee. especially for (though not limited to) students who find themselves at internship sites with minimal opportunities for research, this ongoing relationship with the grad- uate mentor may be critical for maintaining research productivity and progress over the year. there have been some efforts to advance a focus on clinical science within internship training (atkins, strauman, cyranowski, & kolden, ; mcquaid & spirito, ; spirito et al., ), and students may find themselves with new research opportunities and mentorship in their new settings. as described by mcquaid and spirito ( ), students may encounter a continuum of research-training options on internship dictated at the program level, ranging from application of research knowledge on a clinical rotation (e.g., use of empirically supported assessments or inter- ventions), to didactics, active participation in a new mentor’s research and, in some cases, an opportunity to conduct an inde- pendent research study or receive mentoring in grant writing, all of which will vary depending on institutional focus and resources. complementing this perspective, atkins and colleagues ( ) highlighted certain content areas that may be especially amenable to research training during internship, given its applied focus, such as a focus on assessment or intervention research, program eval- uation, and/or training in dissemination and implementation meth- odologies. students may find such opportunities useful in inform- ing their existing research programs, and in some cases, inspiring a pivot to new directions. for the research mentor in this context, it will be critical to assess students’ research objectives for the internship year, and to work collaboratively with them to set concrete goals that are realistic within the structure of the internship, including the time allotted for research, if any. this goal setting must be balanced against students’ ongoing research commitments at the graduate institution, potentially including completing the dissertation, as well as potential personal commitments including long-distance relationships with partners at their home institution or elsewhere. postdoctoral fellows. postdocs are at the precipice of com- plete autonomy, but sometimes need a little push to feel ready for launch. having recently endured a remarkably rigorous and highly evaluative clinical internship process, many postdocs initially feel somewhat uncertain or even skeptical regarding their abilities. thus, a main goal for the postdoc mentor is to help mentees feel that they are as capable and prepared (or unprepared) as many faculty members once were at the same stage in their training. indeed, as with mentoring graduate students, mentoring postdocs may be most successful when mentors openly express their own uncertainties, past challenges, and areas of perceived weakness. postdocs learn from their mentors how best to acknowledge one’s own limitations, and how to cope with human moments of inse- curity, to seek consultation when needed, and to persist despite inevitable hassles and disappointments. of course, postdoctoral mentoring also has unique challenges. unlike most relatively standardized components of graduate stu- dent and internship training, postdoc positions vary widely in roles and responsibilities. in some cases, research postdocs are asked to serve as project coordinators; in others, they are offered substantial time to write grants and articles, and to pursue their own research program. this may be complicated further by the need to accrue clinical hours toward licensure requirements. negotiating mentees’ training goals and activities may require substantial dialogue. moreover, the balance of activities may change between the initial and subsequent years of postdoc. successful postdoc mentoring thus requires added flexibility to help ensure that the fellowship experiences are well-matched to mentees’ evolving needs. for instance, mentors might assume dual roles as both clinical super- visor and principal investigator within the first postdoc year, and the roles of a collaborator and peer/colleague subsequently (this can also be true for graduate mentors). inherent in every postdoctoral experience is the search for a “permanent” job. thus, a final consideration for the postdoc men- tor is to focus on professional development training that hones mentees’ skills in (a) conceptualizing and framing their research program, (b) writing clearly and boldly about prior experiences and goals in research and teaching statements, (c) constructing and delivering a job talk, (d) fielding questions about their research, (e) preparing for job interviews, and (f) negotiating job offers. more- over, postdocs will benefit from guidance regarding career options and the lifelong juggling of personal and professional ideals in- cluding expectations of a romantic partner or spouse (also true during graduate school and when applying for clinical internship), or demands of parenthood, for example. every day is a challenge and many requisite decisions represent compromises. the postdoc mentor can offer invaluable guidance and modeling to assist men- tees in beginning their journey as trained clinical scientists. emerging challenges. promoting multiple mentoring oppor- tunities remains challenging during this advanced training phase, when trainees may feel pressured to “narrow” their focus and hone their specialization and may even be reliant on a single postdoc- toral mentor for much of their guidance. a need for multiple career t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. gruber et al. perspectives is most needed at this time of life—whether deciding career options, seeking feedback on job applications, or building potential future collaborations as an emerging independent inves- tigator. issues of underrepresentation become more salient as women and minorities are most vulnerable to attrition in future tenure-track research careers (e.g., apa committee on women in psychology, ). mentoring efforts and evidence-based research on how best to retain successful women and underrepresented trainees in the field at this critical career juncture is warranted. institutional context is perhaps nowhere more salient than during clinical internship. because the internship year is a time of tran- sition and planning for next steps, research mentors at the intern- ship site may also find themselves in the position of providing significant guidance around new research directions, as well as postdoctoral-fellowship and faculty-position applications and decision-making. recognizing complex power dynamics that may exist for students who begin internship training with significant, ongoing relationships with their graduate mentors, internship men- tors may find themselves in the particularly delicate position of providing guidance around fairly substantive professional deci- sions, but with much less time to establish a working relationship with the intern. in that respect, internship mentors can offer guid- ance while simultaneously respecting that of interns’ home- institutions’ mentors, who may have greater knowledge of stu- dents’ strengths, interests, and professional goals. early-faculty research mentoring compared with that on mentoring students, the literature on mentoring faculty is far more limited, tending to be descriptive (e.g., narratives of types of mentoring programs, essays on how to mentor and on what junior faculty need) rather than empirical, and even that is largely based on case studies, surveys, and studies of mentoring programs without control groups, although there are exceptions (e.g., blau, currie, croson, & ginther, ). further, most published studies had relatively small samples, and many focus on training in academic medical centers (e.g., fleming et al., ; steele, fisman, & davidson, ), military centers (e.g., mcmains et al., ; o’neil et al., ), and other nonpsychol- ogy academic programs (e.g., moss, teshima, & leszcz, ). indeed, we were unable to locate any empirical studies of research mentoring of faculty in clinical psychological science or clinical psychology more broadly. clearly, this is a significant gap in the literature. that said, the existing literature clearly supports the value of mentoring junior faculty. for example, in the only randomized controlled trial that we could locate, blau et al. ( ) studied women faculty in economics departments. they found that, com- pared with those who did not participate in a mentoring program (n � ), those who did (n � ) had more publications in top-tier journals. in a noncontrolled study, yager, waitzkin, parker, and duran ( ) found that the large majority of the participants in a mentoring program (ethnic minority faculty in academic psychiatry departments) had submitted grant proposals, were awarded funding, and/or had been promoted. similarly, reynolds, pilkonis, kupfer, dunn, and pincus ( ) found that of participants in a mentoring program in an academic psychiatry department had received funding for grant applications written during the mentoring program. importantly, both the yager et al. and reynolds et al. programs involved funding and release time for mentees and required a great deal of infrastructure. none- theless, participants in other types of mentoring programs (e.g., “typical” mentor–mentee, peer mentoring, facilitated peer mentor- ing, team mentoring) generally report satisfaction and positive outcomes (e.g., fleming et al., ). such outcomes likely are no different for faculty in clinical psychological science. in addition to the general positive effect of mentoring, the literature also suggests that no single mentoring program is clearly better than any other. indeed, future research might focus on moderators of mentoring effects, particularly on the question of for whom do different types of mentoring work best, with an eye toward more personalized mentoring approaches. on the other hand, the literature suggests that there is a common set of needs or issues that pertain to mentoring faculty. thus, we provide a de- tailed list of issues that may be relevant to mentoring junior faculty in particular (see part b of the online supplemental material). here we focus on three common issues. first is mentoring that assists junior faculty in conducting research and in writing and submitting articles and grants in a timely fashion to complete the work necessary for tenure and promotion. mentoring in this arena ranges from the very practical and seemingly simple (e.g., how to pur- chase equipment at one’s university) to the personal and/or inter- personal (e.g., how not to let perfectionism impeded progress; how to network effectively with colleagues; how to connect mentees with colleagues at professional conferences). second, faculty must learn how to run a successful, productive research lab, which goes hand-in-hand with completing the work for promotion and tenure and is critical for ongoing job satisfac- tion. numerous essays have highlighted the challenges and dis- cussed the types of mentoring needed here (e.g., norris, dirnagl, zigmond, thompson-peer, & chow, ). mentors of clinical scientists may consider encouraging a “vertical team” model (johnson, ), which gives more senior students opportunities to mentor junior students. third, early career faculty may face new professional develop- ment and service roles. although the success of all junior faculty is aided by protecting their time, professional service (e.g., ad hoc reviewer and/or editorial board member) is typically a necessary component of faculty careers and relevant for promotion and tenure. mentors can play a key role in helping mentees select appropriate activities and can guide mentees toward roles that will increase their knowledge of clinical science at the field level. this will also increase their visibility among other clinical scientists, which, in turn, can feed back into success with tenure and promo- tion. early faculty also need mentoring in multiple areas (e.g., re- search, grant writing, teaching, navigating the university), so hav- ing multiple mentors, with different strengths and areas of exper- tise, may be helpful. diverse and underrepresented faculty have unique needs for mentoring; having mentors who understand the challenges they face and/or can help them find resources is critical (e.g., rockquemore, ). some institutions have developed mentoring programs designed to increase diversity in the academy, or partnered with outside groups with a similar mission (e.g., the national center for faculty development and diversity), whereas others may focus on bias and sensitivity training for individual faculty members who may serve as mentors. t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. clinical science mentoring http://dx.doi.org/ . /abn .supp faculty also need mentoring to help them understand and nav- igate their institution context. similarly, faculty should be aware that institutions have different approaches to mentoring and dif- ferent expectations for promotion and tenure. further, individuals in potential mentoring roles should be encouraged to create effec- tive mentoring structures within their institution. finally, research ethics, norms for professional behavior, codes of conduct, and awareness and management of power dynamics and hierarchical relationships are important targets for mentoring. mentors should pay particular attention to these issues, not only didactically, but in the nature of the mentoring relationship and what they model for mentees. the path forward in the preceding sections, we reviewed some of the most press- ing issues in our field that affect and underlie the effective men- toring of future and emerging clinical scientists. in this closing section, we widen the lens to pose bigger picture questions that the field should be ready to consider. how should mentors be trained? mentors receive little, if any, formal training in how to be an effective mentor. this be- comes more pressing as the landscape of what to mentor students in or about rapidly evolves, including the acceleration of novel methodological tools to address pressing clinical-science issues (e.g., mobile health technologies, open-science reforms, advanced computational-modeling tools) and changing landscapes for career settings (e.g., some nih-funded research t training programs support consider careers in industry settings, but many faculty do not possess the requisite knowledge of industry-tailored norms and expectations to be competitive). we must grapple with how men- tors can best train their mentees in skills and institutional contexts with which mentors themselves may not be familiar. how do we measure good mentoring? despite the lack of consensus around what constitutes good mentoring, we continue to evaluate faculty—and base their careers— on unreliable and un- standardized indices of mentoring effectiveness that are prone to bias (e.g., against women and members of underrepresented groups). further, the fact that mentors are beholden to the evalu- ation of their mentees can, to some extent, limit mentors’ capacity to follow their instincts and exercise judgments based on prior experience. any system of mentor evaluation that is based on the premise that good mentoring is that which results in high levels of mentee satisfaction seems incomplete and potentially self- defeating. much like clinical work itself, which often involves discomfort on the client’s part, we note that good mentorship often involves the mentor acting in ways that expose the mentee to some potential for distress (e.g., feeling challenged, taking risks, accept- ing uncertainty, asserting one’s rights and beliefs, receiving candid criticism). as noted earlier, there is a dearth of prospective research, particularly using methods other than self-report (e.g., callahan & watkins, ; johnson, ). there is a clear imperative for our field to apply the best methods in its scientific toolbox to build a body of research on evidence-based mentoring. observational studies and studies that obtain reports from pairs of mentors and mentees are needed to determine how these perspectives corre- spond to each other and with observable behavior, and the factors associated with disagreement. such work will depend on our devising and operationalizing reliable and valid measures of mentoring, career outcomes, and mentee and mentor satisfac- tion; collecting and pooling comparable data from different training programs; and using proper experimental and quasi- experimental designs to test critical mentoring questions. as the context and demands of clinical-science training and careers differ in significant ways from other areas of psychology, it is important to tailor these measures to specific domain practices and outcomes. what are the most important goals of mentoring? a recur- ring theme throughout this article is the importance of measurable outcomes for evaluating the effectiveness of mentoring. but which outcomes are most important? the answer to this fundamental question may differ by one’s perspective. as clinical-science men- tors, it is reasonable to endorse the goal of scaffolding students’ development into academic researchers who will seek the answers to clinically relevant questions and/or translational scientists who will bridge the science-to-practice gap. but clinical-science men- tors will also be called upon to scaffold students’ development into practicing clinicians who can competently deliver evidence-based and culturally sensitive treatments. how should we address and prioritize these quite different outcomes? moreover, not all out- comes are career centric. thus, this article raises the issue of promoting happiness as an important goal of mentoring. it is difficult to argue against the virtues of having happy mentors and mentees, and mentees should support a pathway to satisfying mentees’ professional goals that may affect their happiness, yet whether one achieves happiness falls outside of the boundaries of what professional mentors can be expected to provide. likewise, how do we weigh happiness as an outcome compared to needs for discoveries, methods, insights, treatments, and cures that will largely determine the future of our field? how many mentors is best? we began this article with reference to the myth of odysseus in which mentoring falls within the hands of a single “guru.” this mentor model has carried over time to current graduate-student admissions decisions and models of mentoring—students typically apply to work with a single mentor who oversees their training and professional development, provides emotional support, and often is held responsible for their success or failure. yet everyday experience suggests a radically different reality: mentoring is an endeavor of “villages” rather than individuals. students typically receive mentoring from a variety of sources in addition to their primary research mentor, including course instructors, directors of clinical training, on-site statisti- cians, and other clinical and nonclinical faculty. moreover, much mentoring comes from peers— other students who provide moral and informal professional support, including transmission of the programs’ values and psychoeducation on program and laboratory goals and expectations. this village approach is consistent with team-science approaches common in our fast-paced, growing, in- terdisciplinary field. the time may be ripe for clinical science to migrate toward a more fitting village model of mentoring. and yet, as the field moves toward increasingly complex networks of interdisciplinary teams of scientists, and thus increasing nuanced mentorship networks, this also creates additional com- plexity in terms of the interrelationships among team members, which has the potential to create unique challenges and oppor- tunities for the mentors. the need for greater understanding of effective mentoring and leadership in these complex interdis- t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. gruber et al. ciplinary team science models has never been greater (e.g., salazar & lant, ). is there a dark side to mentoring? a harrowing and popular fable of unconditional devotion, shel silverstein’s the giving tree (silverstein, ) teaches us that if we give away too much of ourselves we may suffer. yet many good mentors spend countless hours in meetings with students, responding to endless seas of emails, working outside “regular business hours” or during sab- baticals and even parental leaves to be responsive to trainees. this type of mentoring can overtap personal and professional resources, resulting in burnout or a failure to fulfill other professional respon- sibilities and expectations. moreover, mentoring demands are not distributed evenly throughout the profession, with some groups (based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, etc.) facing disproportionate demands and expectations. yet there are rarely formal discussions or infrastructures to support faculty through challenging mentoring scenarios, at a cost to both mentors and their trainees. we recommend that clinical science consider en- hancing infrastructure and institutional incentives (e.g., weighting mentoring into tenure and promotion decisions) for mentors to help them guide the next generation of clinical scientists. caveats as a generalist piece, our article has focused chiefly on men- toring a generation of clinical scientists who enter training equipped for the task at hand and ready to engage in the mentor- ship relationship. however, as most mentors can attest, a subset of mentees begin their training with significant challenges that dis- advantage them in terms of their ability to benefit from their educational experiences, including the mentorship relationship. mentoring these trainees may pose different challenges and the comments offered here are not intended to encompass all types of mentorship experiences. moreover, we acknowledge that it was not possible in this article both to address the breadth of the topic—mentoring issues from undergraduates through to many later stages of professional careers—and also to address in depth the issues and challenges that are unique to each stage (e.g., graduate students vs. early career faculty). which path to follow was a difficult decision to make, but ultimately we felt that for an initial article on the topic, it was most important to present a broad view of the field, commenting in brief on the complete develop- mental trajectory of clinical scientists, rather than to focus more deeply on specific developmental phases. we hope that our article will inspire subsequent articles to focus more deeply on the various phases of lifelong career development. concluding comments effective 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( ). mentoring from different social spheres: how can multiple mentors help in doctoral student success in edd programs? mentoring & tutoring, , – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . yager, j., waitzkin, h., parker, t., & duran, b. ( ). educating, training, and mentoring minority faculty and other trainees in mental health services research. academic psychiatry, , – . http://dx .doi.org/ . /appi.ap. . . received march , revision received august , accepted august , � members of underrepresented groups: reviewers for journal manuscripts wanted if you are interested in reviewing manuscripts for apa journals, the apa publications and communications board would like to invite your participation. manuscript reviewers are vital to the publications process. as a reviewer, you would gain valuable experience in publishing. the p&c board is particularly interested in encouraging members of underrepresented groups to participate more in this process. if you are interested in reviewing manuscripts, please write apa journals at reviewers@apa.org. please note the following important points: • to be selected as a reviewer, you must have published articles in peer-reviewed journals. the experience of publishing provides a reviewer with the basis for preparing a thorough, objective review. • to be selected, it is critical to be a regular reader of the five to six empirical journals that are most central to the area or journal for which you would like to review. current knowledge of recently published research provides a reviewer with the knowledge base to evaluate a new submission within the context of existing research. • to select the appropriate reviewers for each manuscript, the editor needs detailed information. please include with your letter your vita. in the letter, please identify which apa journal(s) you are interested in, and describe your area of expertise. be as specific as possible. for example, “social psychology” is not sufficient—you would need to specify “social cognition” or “attitude change” as well. • reviewing a manuscript takes time ( – hours per manuscript reviewed). if you are selected to review a manuscript, be prepared to invest the necessary time to evaluate the manuscript thoroughly. apa now has an online video course that provides guidance in reviewing manuscripts. to learn more about the course and to access the video, visit http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/ review-manuscript-ce-video.aspx. t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. clinical science mentoring http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /appi.ap. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /appi.ap. . . http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/review-manuscript-ce-video.aspx http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/review-manuscript-ce-video.aspx 	best practices in research mentoring in clinical science 	what do we know about clinical-science research mentoring? 	what don’t we know about clinical science mentoring? 	undergraduate and postbaccalaureate research mentoring 	graduate student research mentoring 	clinical internship and postdoctoral fellow research mentoring 	clinical internship 	postdoctoral fellows 	emerging challenges 	early-faculty research mentoring 	the path forward 	how should mentors be trained? 	how do we measure good mentoring? 	what are the most important goals of mentoring? 	how many mentors is best? 	is there a dark side to mentoring? 	caveats 	concluding comments 	references (reflected by pulse rate) are important predictors of the shift in blood pressure distribution observed when a low blood pressure community becomes urbanised. we would suggest that these same factors may play a part in at least the early stages of development of "essential hypertension." this project was supported by the wellcome trust. we thank clare poulter and jan lury for fieldwork. i kannel w'b. some lessons in cardiovascular epidemiology f'rom framingham. am] cardiol ; : - . working group on arteriosclerosis of the national heart, lung and blood institute. report ofthe wtorking group on artenrosclerosis of'the national heart, . ung and blood institute. bethesda: united states department of health and human services, public health service, national institutes of health. : v'ol , nih no - ; v!ol , nih no - . kannel w'b, neaton jd, wentworth d, et al. overall and coronary heart disease mortaltt ratcs itn relation to majlr risk tfactors in men screened for the multiple risk factor intervention trial. am heart , ; : - . sinnett pf, v'hyto hm. elpidemiological studies in a total highland population - 'ukisenta, ncw guinca: cardiovascular disease and relevant clinical, electrocardiographic, radiologic and biochemical findings. chronic dis ; : - . 'i ruswell as, kcnnellv mb, hansen jdl, lee rb. blood pressures of !kung bushmen in northern botswana. am heart] ; : - . shaper ag, w'right dh, kyobe j. blood pressure and body build in three nomadic tribes of northern kenya. east afr medj ; : - . shaper ag, leonard pj, jones kw, jones m. environmental effects on the body build, blood pressure and blood chemistry of nomadic warriors serving in the armv in kenya. east afrmedj ; : - . seser p, gordon d, peart ws, beighton p. blood pressure and its correlates in urban and tribal africa. lancet ;ii: - . cruz-coke r, etcheverry r, nagel r. influence of migration on blood pressure of easter islanders. lancet ;i: - . ( sever ps, poulter n. an hypothesis for the pathogenesis of essential hypertension based on a new model of migration-induced blood pressure elevation. in: hofman a, grobbee de, schalekamp madh, eds. early pathuogernesis of/'prnmarv hypertension. amsterdam: elsevier, . poulter nr, khaw klt, hopwood bec, ei al. blood pressure and its correlates in an african tribe in urban and rural environments. j epidemiolcommunity hfealth ; : - . poulter nr, khaw kt, sever ps. higher blood pressulres of urbani mnigranits from an af'rican low blood pressure po)pulationi are not duie to selective migration. amj hvilperiens ; : - s. i'oulter nr, lury ji), rhompson a. blood pressuires higher in the home than in the clinic in rural kenya. ] epidemlol (communiuv health ; : - . medical research (council working party. mrc trial of treatment of mild hypertension. br.medj ; : - . rose g. strategy of prevention: lessons from cardiovascular disease. br med ; : - . meneely gr, battarbee hd. high sodium-low potassium environment and hypertension. am] cardiol ; : - . langford hg. dietary potassium and hypertension: epidemiologic data. ann internmed ; : - . khaw kt, rose g. ipopulation study of blood pressure and associated f'actors in st lucia, west indies. inr]epidemiol ; : - . rikimaru t, fujita y, okuda r, et al. responses of sodium balance, blood pressure and other variables to sodium loading in papua new guinea highlanders. am] clin nutr ; : - . scotch na, geiger jh. epidemiology of essential hypertension: psycholiogic and socio-cultural factors in etiology. ] chronic d)is ; : - . poulter nr, shipley mj, bulpitt cj, markowe hj, marmot mg. pulse rate and hour urinarv sodium content interact to determine blood prcssure levels of male london civil servants. hsvpertens ; (suppl ): - s. koepke jp, dibona gf. high sodium intake enhances renal nerve and anti-natriuretic responses to stress in spontaneously hypertensive rats. hytpertension ; : - . light kc, koepke jp, obrist pa, willis pw. psychological stress induces sodium and fluid retention in men at high risk for hypertension. science ; : - . intersalt cooperative research group. intersalt: an international study of electrolyte excretion and blood pressure. results for hour urinary sodium and potassium excretion. brmedj ; : - . straessen j, bulpitt cj, thijs l, et al. svmpathetic tone and relation between sodium intake and blood pressure in the general population. br med ] ; : - . folkow b, grimby! g, thelesius . adaptive structural changes of the vascular walls in hypertension and their relation to the control of peripheral resistance. acta phvsiolscand ; : - . lever af. slow pressor mechanisms in hypertension: a role for hypertrophy of resistance vessels? hvpertens ; : - . klatsky al, friedman gd, seigelaub ab, gerard mj. alcohol consumption and blood pressure: kaiser-permanente multiphasic health examination data. n engli med ; : - . carvalho jjm, baruzzi rg, howard pf, ei al. blood pressure in isolated small-village populations in the intersalt study. hvpertenston ; : - . (accepted ]anuarv ) oxpentifylline treatment of venous ulcers of the leg mary-paula colgan, john a dormandy, peter w jones, ivor g schraibman, d gregor shanik, richard a l young abstract objective-to determine the effect of oxpenti- fylline on the healing of venous ulcers of the leg. design-double blind, randomised, prospective, placebo controlled, parallel group study. setting-four outpatient clinics treating leg ulcers in england and the republic of ireland. patients- consecutive patients with clinical evidence of venous ulceration of the leg in whom appreciable arterial disease was excluded by the ratio of ankle to brachial systolic pressure being > * . interventions-all patients received either ox- pentifylline mg three times a day by mouth or a matching placebo for six months (or until their reference ulcer healed if this occurred sooner) in addition to a locally standardised method of com- pression bandaging. main outcome measures-the primary end point was complete healing of the reference ulcer within six months. the secondary end point was the change in the area of the ulcer over the six month observa- tion period. results-complete healing of the reference ulcer occurred in of the patients treated with oxpentifylline and in of the patients treated with a placebo. life table analysis showed that the proportion of ulcers healed at six months was % in the group treated with oxpentifylline compared with % in the group treated with a placebo (log rank test x = - , p= ), which was significant (odds ratio= - , % confidence interval x to - ). conclusion-oxpentifylline used in conjunction with compression bandaging improves the healing of venous ulcers of the leg. introduction venous ulcers of the leg are a common cause of illness in the community. the condition has a preva- lence of %, which is similar to that of diabetes, and it recurs chronically.' ulcers of the leg are expensive to treat as they require regular dressing, often by district nurses. the cost to the nhs has been estimated to be £ for each unhealed ulcer a year. at present there is no proved pharmacological treatment, but this is not surprising as the pathophysiology of venous ulceration of the leg is poorly understood. two hypotheses have been advanced to explain the occurrence of venous ulcers of the leg in the context of the postphlebitic syndrome." the first hypothesis relates to the formation of a pericapillary cuff of fibrin, which acts as a barrier to diffusion and leads to local ischaemia of the tissues.' the second hypothesis concerns the phenomenon of white cell trapping, which aggravates the trophic skin changes that are typically seen in patients with venous hypertension."' oxpentifylline (trentai, hoechst) has been found to have fibrinolytic effects and to influence the behaviour of white cells. "' it therefore seemed reasonable to study vascular laboratories, st james's hospital, po box , dublin mary-paula colgan, md, director st george's hospital, london john a dormandy, frcs, consultant surgeon department of mathematics, university of keele, staffordshire peter w jones, phd, senior lecturer birch hill hospital, rochdale, lancashire ivor g schraibman, frcs, consultant surgeon trinity college, dublin d gregor shanik, frcs, professor ofvascular surgery west middlesex university hospital, isleworth, middlesex richard a l young, frcs, consultant surgeon correspondence and requests for reprints to: dr colgan. brawedj ; : - bmj volume april o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ this drug in patients with venous ulceration of the leg. patients and methods the trial design was a prospective, randomised, double blind, placebo controlled, parallel group study of patients and was conducted in four centres in england and the republic of ireland. consecutive eligible patients attending the leg ulcer clinic at each centre were randomised to receive either oxpentifylline ( mg three times a day by mouth) or a matching placebo. randomisation was performed in balanced blocks of eight with a separate list for each centre. treatment was continued for six months or until the ulcer healed if this occurred sooner. patients with ulcers that had shown no signs of healing after at least two months of routine outpatient treatment were considered to be eligible for entry into the study, provided that the ulceration was clinically thought to be ofvenous origin, that the ratio of ankle to brachial systolic pressure was > , and that there was no contraindication to the prescription of oxpenti- fylline. " the largest ulcer present was selected to be moni- tored as the reference ulcer for the duration of the study, provided that its diameter was between cm and cm. at the initial visit the reference ulcer was traced with an indelible pen on to a transparent acetate sheet.' the number of additional leg ulcers was also documented. patients were seen every two weeks for six months and the reference ulcers were traced at alternate visits. an ulcer was considered to be healed only when complete re-epithelialisation had occurred. details of the dressings used in the four centres were recorded. each centre used a two layer method of bandaging that was capable of producing adequate graduated compression." the bandaging method was standardised at each centre within the limits of clinical practice. all centres liaised closely with the local community or district nursing services to ensure continuity of the patients' dressings at home between study visits. a computerised system was developed to measure the area of the ulcers from the tracing. (autocad software adapted by datech, orpington, kent). all measurements were nmade by one trained observer, and the average of two readings was used for analysis. descriptive statistics were used to characterise the treatment groups at baseline.' the statistical methods included the x) test and the log rank test, which was used to compare the two treatment groups for overall healing of ulcers. the odds ratio was calculated for the rate of ulcer healing. the trial was conducted in accordance with the declaration of helsinki (venice amendment), and the protocol of the study was approved by the ethics committee at each centre. the informed consent of each patient was obtained in writing. results eighty patients were randomly allocated to receive either oxpentifylline or a placebo. table i shows the characteristics of the patients in each treatment group at baseline. there were no differences between treat- ment groups or between centres, or between our patients and those surveyed in a recent epidemiological study of patients with leg ulcers." the patients were quite healthy for their age and were of good nutritional state, as indicated by body mass index and plasma albumin concentration. one patient in the placebo group was withdrawn from the study when a derma- tologist diagnosed pemphigoid in an atypical ulcer. complete healing of the reference ulcer occurred in of the patients randomised to receive oxpenti- fylline and in of the patients randomised to receive a placebo. the results were analysed by the life table method, which gives the proportion of reference ulcers healed at each visit and takes account of the drop out rate. the results are shown in figure . by the end of the study % of reference ulcers had healed in the patients treated with oxpentifylline, compared with % in those treated with a placebo (log rank test x ,= - , p= - ; odds ratio= , % confidence interval to ). this result was significant. table i -characteristics of patients on entry to studv. v'alues are means (sd) unless stated otherwise treatment group oxpentifylline placebo characteristic (n= ) (n = ) age (years) - ( ) ( - ) sex ratio (m:f) : : height (cm) ( ) ( ) weight (kg) - ( ) - ( ) bodv mass index (kg/rm) - ( - ) ( ) no who smoked:never smoked : : onset of venous disease (years) (median, iqr) ( - , ) ( , onset of present ulcer (months) (median, iqr) ( , ) ( , ) no with history of varicose veins or phlebitis ankleindex - ( - ) - ( - ) albumin (g/l) (median, iqr) ( , ) ( , ) ulcer area (cm-) (median, iqr) - ( , ) ( - , ) no without other ulcers no with other ulcers iqr= interquartile range. . a) a) a) o . , o placebo * oxpentifylline log rank test= , p= time (weeks) fig -life table analysis ofproportion of ulcers healed at each visit many of the patients had additional ulcers at the start of the study (table i). these additional ulcers were monitored to see whether they had healed by the time the reference ulcer had healed. in only two patients (one in each treatment group) was an additional ulcer still present after the reference ulcer had healed. in the patient who received a placebo the persistent addi- tional ulcer developed anew during the course of the study. the area of the reference ulcer was calculated from the tracings made at alternate follow up visits. the median area of the ulcer for each treatment group at each follow up visit was studied so that information could be gained about the progress of the reference ulcer apart from its complete healing. these results are presented in figure , which shows a consistent improvement in the area of the ulcers in the patients receiving oxpentifylline compared with a variable outcome in those receiving a placebo. a reduction in the area of the reference ulcer at the final visit relative bmj volume april o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ to baseline was seen in of the patients receiving oxypentifylline compared with of the patients receiving a placebo (x = - , p= o ). the tolerability of the treatment was studied. un- wanted effects were comparable between the two treatment groups, with of the patients ( %) who received oxpentifylline and of the patients ( %) who received a placebo complaining of side effects (x l = i , p= ). there was an excess of drop outs in the group treated with a placebo ( / ( %)) com- pared with the group treated with oxpentifylline ( / ( %)), but this difference was not significant ( ,= - , p= ). most of the drop outs occurred early in the study, but in only one of these patients was there evidence of a reduction in the area of the ulcer. this particular patient was receiving oxpentifylline. the three patients taking oxpentifylline who withdrew from the study did so because of oedema and depres- sion, vomiting, and dyspepsia and diarrhoea. seven of the patients taking placebo withdrew because of purpura, skin rash, dizziness, diarrhoea (two patients), cellulitis and pain, and headache and nausea; the two others dropped out because of poor compliance and because an ulcer was diagnosed as pemphigoid. the unwanted effects described are listed in table ii. the rable ii- unwanted effects of oxpentifylline and placebo classified b type. values are numbers ofcomplaints type of complaint oxpentifvlline placebo system affected: central nervous respiratory cardiovascular gastrointestinal genitourinary i skin infection pain unspecified i total discrepancy between the incidence of adverse events and the incidence of drop out for each treatment group suggests that other factors, such as failure of the ulcer to respond, rather than the treatment itself might have been responsible for patients dropping out of the study. possible confounding factors were studied to see whether these had any effect on the healing of ulcers. the dressing and bandaging methods used were com- pared between the treatment groups but no differences were found. the effects of centre, the size of the ulcer at baseline, the length of history of venous disease, the duration of the current episode of disease, and the type of conservative treatment used were all studied for possible interactions with healing. no such inter- actions were detected. discussion we have confirmed a report that oxpentifylline might be effective in healing venous ulcers of the leg when added to a regimen of compression bandaging. the effect of different dressings on the healing of ulcers has been the subject of extensive research, but few of the studies have been properly controlled. a review of the subject found little evidence to show that particular dressings made any difference to healing rates.' high healing rates have recently been reported with a four layer compression bandaging method on its own,' but this study had an unusual design and used historical controls. the value of adequate two layer compression bandaging is well established. ' although pharmacological treatment has been advo- cated for the healing of venous ulcers, the few studies * oxpentifylline (n= ) o placebo (n= ) - q- -t t ' time (weeks) fig - ulcer area at each visi't. values are medians with o confidence intervals that have been placebo controlled have had design problems. their shortcomings have included inade- quate numbers of patients,' ' crossover design, ' and end points other than complete healing of the ulcer.' a well designed study of rutosides showed no effect on the healing of ulcers. two studies using profibrinolytic agents have yielded conflicting results. a study of defibrotide showed some effect on the healing of ulcers but was of crossover design, whereas a large controlled trial found that stanozolol was ineffective in promoting the healing of venous ulcers (a d r northeast et al, venous forum meeting, manchester, ). studies of the bacteriology of leg ulcers suggest that the role of antibiotics and anti- septics in promoting healing is limited to those with frank infection. the haemorrheological properties of oxpentifylline have been widely studied and described. of parti- cular interest in the context of our study are the properties of the compound with regard to the patho- physiology of venous ulcers. oxpentifylline improves the delivery of oxygen in ischaemic tissues, ' has fibrinolytic effects that are possibly mediated by leucocytes, ' and reduces the adhesion of polymorpho- nuclear leucocytes. ' these properties might explain the clinical benefit of oxpentifylline seen in our study. we conclude that the healing rates of venous ulcers of the leg will be increased appreciably by the addition of oxpentifylline to a standard regimen of dressing and compression bandaging. the study nurses and technicians were mrs j moller (london), mrs t kelly (london), mr d metoo (rochdale), and mr s stanley (dublin). we acknowledge the advice and help of drs s allen and m sugrue and the administrative support provided by hoechst uk limited. callam mj, ruckley cv, harper dr, dale jj. chronic ulceration of the leg: extent of the problem and provision of care. brmedj ; : - . harkiss kj. cost analysis of dressing materials used in venotus leg ulcers. pharmacvj ournal ; : - . browse nl. venous ulceration. br medj ; : - . hobbs jt. the post thrombotic syndrome. scott medj ; : - . browse nl, burnand kg. the cause of venous tulceration. lancet ;ii: - . burnand kg, whimster , naidoo a, browse nl. pericapillary fibrin in the ulcer-bearing skin of the leg: the cause of lipodermatosclerosis and venous ulceration. br medj ; : - . coleridge-smith pd, thomas p, scurr jh, dormandy ja. causes of s'enous ulceration: a new hypothesis. brmedj ; : - . thomas prs, nash gb, dormandy ja. white cell accumulation in dependent legs of patients with senous hypertension: a possible mechanism for trophic changes in the skin. brmedj ; : - . jarrett pem, moreland m, browse nl. the effect of oxpentifylline ('trental') on fibrinolvtic activity and plasma fibrinogen levels. curr med res opin ; : - . mlatrai a, ernst e. pentoxifylline improves white cell rheology in claudicants. clintcal hemorrheology ; : - . anonymous. abpi data sheet compendium - . london: datapharm publications, . allen s. a simple technique for recording varicose ulcers. praclitioner ; : - . tennant wg, park kgm, rucklcy cv. testing compression bandages. phlebology ; : - . armitage p, berry g. statistical methods in medical research. oxford: blackwell scientific, . callam mj, harper dr, dale jj, ruckley cv. chronic ulcer of the leg: clinical history. br medj ; : - . bmj volume april o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ w'eitgasscr h. 'the uise ot' pentoxilflline ["frental' ) in the treatment of leg ulcers: resuilts ol a dotuble-blind trial. i'liarrniaiherapeutica ; suppl : - . anonymous. d)rcssings for leg ulcers. drug the bull ; : - . blair sd, wright ) ) , backhouse cm, riddle e, meccollum cn. sustained cotnpression and hcaling of chronic vcnous ulcers. bri mid x; : - . arenas r, atoche c. i'ost-thrombotic leg tilcers: safety and efficacy ot treat- ment with pecltoxifylline (double-blind studv in patients). dernatiologica. revista .exiciana se'gundia eppoca ; : - . levh f. therapie des ulcus cruris venositm mit mauisedornextrakt und trimethvlhesperidinchalkon. therapieevochi ; : - . belcaro (, marelli c. 'reatment of venous lipodermatosclerosis and ulccration in venous hypertetision by elastic compression and fibrinolytic enhancement with dcfibrotide. phhiebolog, ; : - . mann rj. a double bliid trial of oral , (i-hndroxtxeth\l rtitosides for statis leg ulcers. br, clin pract ; : - . schraibman ig. 'i'he bacteriology of leg ulcers. phlebologi' ; : - . ward a, (lissold sp. pentoxifvlline: a review of its pharmacodytiamic and pharmacokilnetic properties, and its thcrapeutic efficacy. i)rugs ; : - . james dr, holland bm, hughes mr, joncs jg, wxardrop caj. ()xpentri- fvllinc: eftf'ects on rcd cell deformabilitv and oxygen availability f'ront the blood in intcrmittcnt claudication. clinical hernorrlihcologv ; : - . angelkort b, kiesewetter h. influence of' risk factors and coagulatioit phenomena on the fluidity of blood in chronic arterial occlusive discasc. scandj clin lab invest ; (suppl ): - . knox p. leukoc\te-mediated activation of the fibrinolvtic pathw\ay and the effects of pentoxifylline. in: mandell gl, novick wj, eds. pentoxifvlline and leukocyte function. somerville, new jersey: hoechst-roussel pharmaceuticals, : - . bertocchi f, p'roserpio p, lampugnani mg, detana e. the ctt'ect of pentoxifylline on polymorphonuclear cell adhesion to cultured endothelial cells. a preliminary report. in: mandell gl, novick wrj, eds. penioxifvl/inei and leukoctiie function. somerville, new jersey: hoechst-roussel pharmaceuticals, : - . (accepted anuary ) relation between dose of bendrofluazide, antihypertensive effect, and adverse biochemical effects jan e carlsen, lars k ber, christian torp-pedersen, peter johansen abstract objective-to determine the relevant dose of bendrofluazide for treating mild to moderate hypertension. design-double blind parallel group trial of patients who were given placebo for six weeks and then randomly allocated to various doses of bendro- fluazide ( - , , , or mg daily) or placebo for weeks. setting- general practices in zealand, denmark. patients- patients with newly diagnosed or previously treated hypertension, aged - , who had a mean diastolic blood pressure of - mm hg after receiving placebo for six weeks. main outcome measures-reduction in diastolic blood pressure and changes in biochemical variables (potassium, urate, glucose, fructosamine, total cholesterol, apolipoprotein a i, apolipoprotein b, and triglyceride concentrations). results-all doses of bendrofluazide significantly reduced diastolic blood pressure to the same degree ( - mm hg). clear relations between dose and effect were shown for potassium, urate, glucose, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein b concentra- tions. the - mg dose increased only urate con- centrations, whereas the mg dose affected all the above biochemical variables. conclusion-the relevant range of doses of bendrofluazide to treat mild to moderate hyperten- sion is - - - mg a day. higher doses caused more pronounced adverse biochemical effects including adverse lipid effects. previous trials with bendro- fluazide have used too high doses. introduction the use of thiazides for treating arterial hypertension has been criticised. the arguments have been that thiazides do not reduce excess mortality, do not reduce the incidence of myocardial infarction, increase known risk factors, and produce more adverse effects than previously realised. as no treatment has yet shown a clear reduction in mortality or morbidity from acute myocardial infarction interest has focused on the risk factors and adverse effects. evidence against thiazides was substantiated by a medical research council trial, which compared treatment with a fixed dose of bendro- fluazide ( mg/day) or a titrated dose of propranolol with placebo. there was no basis for choosing a dose of mg bendrofluazide. we investigated the relevant dose range of bendro- fluazide for treating mild to moderate arterial hyper- tension as this could affect both the choice and outcome of treatment. methods selection ofpatients-patients aged - presenting to general practices in zealand, denmark, with newly diagnosed or previously treated arterial hypertension (up to two drugs) who gave informed consent were eligible for the study. patients were excluded if they were pregnant or lactating; had had a myocardial infarction or stroke within the past six months; had angina pectoris; were being treated for heart failure, gout, or uncontrolled diabetes mellitus or with drugs that reduced lipid concentrations; were intolerant of bendrofluazide; had reduced kidney function (creatinine concentration > [tmol/l); did not take - % of the prescribed tablets while receiving a placebo at the start of the study. study design-patients whose blood pressure was between and mm hg after they had taken placebo for six weeks were randomly allocated in blocks of on a double blind basis to receive placebo or bendrofluazide at a dose of , - , , or mg a day. randomisation was performed from a list of computer generated numbers. the mg dose was chosen because this was used in the medical research council's trial and the and mg doses because they are recommended by the joint national committee on detection, evaluation, and treatment of high blood pressure.' the dose of mg was believed to represent a point on the lower part of the dose-response curve. the active tablets contained mg potassium chloride and either mg or - mg bendrofluazide (centyl k, leo pharmaceutical products). placebo and active tablets were identical in appearance and taste. all patients received four tablets daily, two in the morning and two at lunch. those receiving fewer than four active tablets daily were given the active tablets in the morning. patients were assessed on an outpatient basis for four, , and weeks after randomisation. biochemical variables were measured before ran- domisation and at the end of the study; these variables included total cholesterol, apolipoprotein a i, apolipoprotein b, sodium, potassium, glucose, fructo- samine, urate, and creatinine concentrations. the study was approved by the local ethical committee. methods ofassessment-the patient's blood pressures were measured twice, in the sitting position after five medicon, svanem llevej , dk- , k benhavn , denmark jan e carlsen, md, senior lecturer lars kober, md, resident christian torp-pedersen, md, senior lecturer leo pharmaceutical products, industriparken, dk- , ballerup, denmark peter johansen, phd, medical adviser correspondence to: dr carisen. brmed ; : - bmj volume april o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j. . . o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ building transformative capacity in southern africa: surfacing knowledge and challenging structures through participatory vulnerability and risk assessments article building transformative capacity in southern africa: surfacing knowledge and challenging structures through participatory vulnerability and risk assessments daniel morchain programme strategy and impact team (psit), oxfam gb, oxford, uk dian spear african climate & development initiative, university avenue south, university of cape town, cape town, south africa gina ziervogel environmental & geographical science building, south lane, upper campus, university of cape town, cape town, south africa hillary masundire department of biological sciences, university of botswana, gaborone, botswana margaret n angula department of geography, history and environmental studies, university of namibia, windhoek, namibia corresponding author: dian spear, african climate & development initiative, th floor geological sciences building, university avenue south, university of cape town, rondebosch , cape town, south africa. email: dian.spear@gmail.com action research , vol. ( ) – ! the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/arj http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - julia davies african climate & development initiative, university avenue south, university of cape town, cape town, south africa chandapiwa molefe department of biological sciences, university of botswana, gaborone, botswana salma hegga african climate & development initiative, university avenue south, university of cape town, cape town, south africa abstract although participatory approaches are becoming more widespread, to date vulnerabil- ity assessments have largely been conducted by technocrats and have paid little atten- tion to underlying causes of vulnerability, such as inequality and biased governance systems. participatory assessments that recognise the social roots of vulnerability, however, are critical in helping individuals and institutions rethink their understanding of and responses to climate change impacts. this paper interrogates the contribution of oxfam’s vulnerability and risk assessment methodology to enabling transformation at both personal and institutional levels. three vulnerability and risk assessment exer- cises were conducted in malawi, botswana and namibia by one or more of the authors in and . reflecting on these workshops, we explore the contribution that a process like the vulnerability and risk assessment may bring to transformation. we conclude that these types of inclusive and representative participatory approaches can shift narratives and power dynamics, allow marginal voices to be heard, build cross–scalar relationships and enable the co-creation of solutions. such approaches can play a key role in moving towards transformational thinking and action, especially in relation to climate change adaptation. keywords vulnerability assessment, adaptation, southern africa, participatory process, transfor- mative capacity, climate change introduction action research in the form of truly participatory, representative and inclusive vulnerability assessments may represent a much-needed shift in risk-reduction strategies. indeed, action research involves bringing together a range of action research ( ) stakeholders to participate in an inclusive process to integrate diverse knowledge and find solutions to problems that concern them and their communities (bradbury, ; brydon-miller, greenwood, & maguire, ). this is different to traditional research projects, which are largely conducted by experts and often miss the nuances of local context, perspectives and preferences (brydon-miller et al., ; ortiz arag�on & glenzer, ). they have also tended to focus on the biophysical impacts of hazards on systems and communities, whilst often over- looking socio-economic factors like governance and gender inequality (preston, yuen, & westaway, ). indeed, many vulnerability assessments undertaken in the context of climate change work have followed this traditional, technocratic approach. as such, vulnerability assessment approaches have largely lacked crea- tivity and innovation in their implementation, and likewise have failed to recognise vulnerability as a social-ecological construct (tschakert, van oort, st. clair, & lamadrid, ). ngos and civil society organisations have often filled this gap, albeit almost exclusively at a local level. information about these participatory vulnerability assessments have seldom been published in peer-reviewed journals, which limits their sectorial impact. however, even participatory vulnerability assessments have often failed to be sufficiently inclusive of women and marginal- ised groups, and few have created an environment that enables such groups to freely take part in the exercise and effectively share their knowledge – leading to ineffective risk-reduction strategies (morchain, prati, kelsey, & ravon, ). this lack of focus on social considerations and inequalities in vas means that issues of power and local knowledge are ignored (ravon, ). action research is essential for dealing with complex problems such as climate change in a holistic way, as it allows the root causes of marginalisation and vul- nerability to be explored and questioned (brydon-miller et al., ; ortiz arag�on & glenzer, ). this includes questioning the assumptions that drive the current ways in which we respond to global environmental challenges, and in doing so may open new paradigms of social change that position people, not technology alone, at the core of climate change solutions (o’brien, ). in practice, this means recognising that incremental adaptation efforts are often not enough to overcome the challenges presented by climate change and other development processes. instead, incremental adaptation should operate alongside more strategic approaches that enhance adaptive and transformative capacity and build resilience by addressing the systemic causes of vulnerability (butler et al., ; kates, travis, & wilbanks, ; pelling, o’brien, & matyas, ; ziervogel, cowen, & ziniades, ). to date, there has been limited work on how vulnerability assessments might feed into and support a transformative adaptation agenda. this paper addresses this gap by presenting an approach to vulnerability assess- ments that goes beyond a biophysical and technical focus to understand relational and structural vulnerabilities. it aims to reflect on how a cross–scalar vulnerability assessment process, carried out in malawi, botswana and namibia in and , might enable transformation that is rooted in social justice and that is built with the knowledge and experience from a wide range of actors across morchain et al. governance scales. as such, acting on climate change related vulnerabilities becomes an entry point to address multifaceted risks and obstacles to development. the approach draws on a social learning approach that chung tiam fook ( ) suggests can help to unearth structural challenges to identify optimal entry points for transformational adaptation. such learning is a key component of action research (burns, harvey, & ortiz arag�on, ). transformation the action research literature acknowledges that transformation is necessary for dealing with wicked problems such as climate change and inequality, where addressing root causes of marginalisation requires engaging with power relations (ortiz arag�on & glenzer, ). what is transformation and how is it enabled? here we understand transformation to be a process that, whether implicitly or explicitly, gradually or suddenly, re-examines the structures that contribute to or hinder the ability of people to have fair access to opportunities to achieve their wellbeing. literature on transformation is deeply embedded in trying to under- stand structural change and the importance of broader social transformation (few, morchain, spear, mensah, & bendapudi, ; pelling et al., ; ziervogel et al., ). from a justice perspective, transformation requires ques- tioning who holds power and accountability in society, and how power might be redistributed to increase representation and inclusivity. a current example of transformation is the #metoo movement, which has challenged historically paternalistic and misogynistic structures (institutions, reg- ulations, policies and practices e.g. in relation to wage disparities, insufficient rep- resentation of women in decision making bodies, but also in relation to the fundamental right to speak up and be heard without fear of reprisal). the move- ment is redrawing what is considered acceptable and unacceptable in the way men and institutions act in relation to women. in other words, #metoo is contributing to transforming the ways in which power dynamics can – and can no longer – define gender relations. processes like oxfam’s vulnerability and risk assessment methodology aim to inspire change that could be considered either transformational (i.e., the transfor- mation of adaptation practice); or transformative (i.e., the transformation of broader aspects of development through adaptation activity) (few et al., ). such a framing of transformation within vulnerability assessments enables an exploration of the forces shaping climate governance on a case-by-case basis. furthermore, processes like the vulnerability and risk assessment can contest and eventually contribute to transforming the very ideology of adaptation per se, which often solely aims to reduce biophysical impacts. through the lens of transformation, adaptation responses can be developed in a more inclusive manner that draws from fringe sources of knowledge (e.g. marginalised groups) and which frames adaptation in the broader context of development (de wit, ; morchain, ). action research ( ) we argue that transformation can be enabled by developing an integrated, holistic understanding of the broader system in which adaptation takes place, as well as through the building of relationships and the co-development of solutions (few et al., ; pelling et al., ; ziervogel et al., ). fundamental to enabling this is cross–scalar collaboration and participation between the multiple stakeholders that play a role in shaping current and desired future adaptation pathways – a feature of the vulnerability and risk assessment. not only can such a participatory approach help stakeholders to develop new skills and build relationships and networks across scales; it can give a voice to otherwise margin- alised individuals or groups, thereby building trust, empowering communities and creating opportunities to shift hierarchical structures of power and authority (see butler et al., ). through this exercise, stakeholders begin to gain a better understanding of how perceived risks and hazards might affect people differently. new voices, and possibly new leaders, emerge. with an integrated understanding of the problem, stakeholders can work together to find innovative solutions and develop a landscape-wide vision for alternative development pathways (morchain & kelsey, ). for engagement to lead to transformation, the process needs to be socially inclusive and relational. it also needs to challenge existing societal norms, values and beliefs, and compel stakeholders to question predominant knowledge and governance structures (jernsand, ). these potential outcomes are all indicators of transformation, as they initiate new ways of both knowing and doing (also see pelling et al., and butler et al., ). however, sustaining this change beyond the confines of multi-stakeholder engagement processes requires that transforma- tion is supported by an enabling – in many cases transformed – institutional envi- ronment. without this, deep-rooted and long-lasting change is unlikely to occur. this means that new policies, plans or agreements may need to be forged and that organisational structures and values may need to be revisited with transformation in mind. according to few et al. ( , p. ), radically changing this conventional formulation requires structural reorganisation (‘a major change in the governance structures that frame adaptation’) and reorientation (‘a reconfiguration of social values and social relations in adaptation’). investment in capacity building is also critical for enabling transformation. this is a common challenge in the developing country context, where resources are usually limited. burch ( , p. ) emphasises that ‘addressing a lack of techni- cal, financial, or human resources is less a matter of creating more capacity than of facilitating the effective use of existing resources’. part of increasing effectiveness in climate adaptation and development efforts depends, precisely, on ensuring responses are aligned with the needs of people directly affected, as can be identified through participatory vulnerability assessments. capacity building should not be exclusively understood as, or aimed solely at, building technical skills. indeed, leadership and process facilitation skills are key elements in capacity building. yet facilitation and leadership skills alone are not able to shift structures. rather, their objective should be to steer conversations and promote a constructive morchain et al. dialogue that challenges existing power dynamics. having transformation ‘cham- pions’ emerge from vulnerability assessments is an ideal outcome. key to these processes being long lived is community self-organisation, and the capacity and willingness of communities to initiate, and live with, change (butler et al., ; pelling et al., ). facilitation, understood in the broadest sense, thus plays a key role in shaping pathways to transformation. ziervogel et al. ( ) invite the exploration of an alternative paradigm that focuses on ‘transformative capacities’ as opposed to adaptive capacities. this con- scious shift demands a reconsideration of where change needs to happen and, as such, leads us to explore the extent to which socio-economic structures promote or hinder equity and sustainability – and subsequently challenge the social injustices existing within the system. for ziervogel et al. ( ), acquiring and using trans- formative capacities means that people can have a say in shaping the world that they wish to inhabit. this can be pursued by promoting empowerment through participation and co-creation. however, because this is likely to require shifts in agency and power, its success will partly depend on a wide spectrum of stake- holders welcoming, accepting, or exploring collaboratively what new paradigms might entail. the three mutually reinforcing transformative capacities that ziervogel et al. ( ) suggest are needed include: individual agency, social cohe- sion, and the promotion of a renewed spiritual and pragmatic awareness of the importance and fragility of our relationship with ecosystems. the three vulnerability and risk assessments that we ran in southern africa aimed to shift the discussion and the framing of adaptation towards building transformative capacity. the vulnerability and risk assessment process the vulnerability and risk assessment process, developed by oxfam in , was initially aimed at pushing staff, partners and community members to think beyond the frequently-used programmatic responses to challenges such as disaster risk, climate change impacts and addressing food insecurity, and to explicitly address structural challenges across levels of governance. this process has since been increasingly adopted by academia and multilateral organisations looking to devel- op a holistic understanding of challenges and opportunities from multiple perspec- tives. as such, the vulnerability and risk assessment methodology and the action research approach share the common objective of learning and co-development of knowledge in line with the principles social learning. they both call for a consid- eration of power dynamics and a greater understanding of context, which can result from bringing together different stakeholders with diverse knowledge and allowing these voices to be heard through inclusive and representative participa- tion. the vulnerability and risk assessment process aims to give stakeholders the opportunity to experience the benefits (and difficulties) of thinking about adapta- tion and development in a multi-hazard, multi-stakeholder, exploratory and par- ticipatory manner. in seeking social progress, then, the process of understanding action research ( ) and assessing vulnerability becomes as important, if not more, than its very find- ings (preston et al., ). the vulnerability and risk assessment is carried out in a two-day workshop that is facilitated by a combination of ngo/government officials or ngo/ academic partners. it seeks to include representatives from communities, civil society organisations, ngos, academia, local and national government and the private sector (morchain & kelsey, ). the first step in the four-step process is the initial vulnerability assessment, in which a list of hazards and issues are identified and prioritised in relation to the key social groups and livelihood activ- ities in question. all participants vote in these prioritisations. in the second step, impact chain exercise, participants map the direct and indirect impacts of these priority hazards and issues. this step aims to build a better understanding of how impacts can multiply and accumulate through systems over time and highlights possible leverage points for action. step , adaptive capacity analysis, fleshes out participant ideas for addressing challenges or system inequalities identified in step . in the final step, aligning findings with opportunities, the ideas developed are turned into implementable solutions by participants exploring possible funding opportunities and identifying key stakeholders that need to be engaged. where possible, it also links the findings of the vulnerability and risk assessment to existing plans and processes. this is important for establishing how the responsi- bilities for action might be shared amongst stakeholders and for reducing any possible duplication of efforts and/or allotted finances. the ultimate objective of this type of vulnerability assessment is to make plan- ning and decision-making processes more equitable and participatory, and to increase the agency of people experiencing reduced power to influence such pro- cesses. indeed, it is recognised that processes that genuinely enables stakeholder representation and participation can lead to more beneficial social and environ- mental outcomes (de vente, reed, stringer, valente, & newig, ). they also increase the potential for transformation by questioning prevailing values, norms and governance; developing new ways of working that are based on collaboratively-derived visions for an alternative development pathway and pro- viding a platform for the establishment of new partnerships and cooperatives, including through community self-organisation. the vulnerability and risk assessment, nevertheless, is merely a two-day exercise with stakeholders, and as such it only provides a structure under which these dialogues can start. the real test of the long-term sustainability of these objectives – and indeed of their expected outcome of promoting or achieving transformation – is in the follow- up and in subsequent efforts to consolidate relationships between stakeholders. methods linked to the ‘adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions’ research project, the universities of botswana, cape town and namibia worked with oxfam gb to promote research uptake. as part of this partnership an oxfam gb representative morchain et al. trained researchers at these universities in how to conduct a vulnerability and risk assessment process. workshops were conducted in botswana (masundire et al., ), malawi (morchain et al., ) and namibia (hegga et al., ) with different contexts (see table ), co-facilitated by the university staff and oxfam gb representative (all co-authors on the paper). ahead of the vulnerability and risk assessment, stakeholder-mapping exercises were conducted with local stake- holders, which led to the identification of the so-called knowledge group (the key stakeholders in the landscape in question). this ensured that a large diversity of views, including those of marginalised and least powerful groups, would be present in the room. ahead of the vulnerability and risk assessment workshop, individ- uals or institutions within the knowledge group were also asked to produce their own version of the lists of key ‘hazards and issues’ and of ‘social groups and livelihoods’, as a way to ensure that a wide range of perspectives informed the framing of the exercise. the vulnerability and risk assessment workshops brought together the knowledge group (ca. – persons) for a two or two and a half day event, where the four steps of the methodology were undertaken as a collaborative effort. in facilitating the three vulnerability and risk assessments, our intention as researchers and practitioners was to avoid influencing the process with the agendas of our project or organisations. this was due to ethical concerns, but also because a biased process would risk losing legitimacy in the eyes of stakeholders. however, the fact that we are all knowledgeable about climate change and development means that we inevitably added substance to the debate through our facilitation. reflexivity is important, and we recognise that our affiliations (as academics work- ing on climate change and an ngo working on poverty reduction) and the nature of our funding streams (i.e. the ‘adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions’ and the ‘tea revitalisation’ projects) themselves strongly framed the discussion. the out- come would surely have been different if we were health sector professionals, or even if we worked in the climate field but represented, for example, a multilateral bank. therefore, every vulnerability assessment undertaken is itself framed for a purpose, which affects its outcome. despite this, we sought to minimise this bias by framing the problem widely (as one of development and not exclusively of climate change) and by using our knowledge and experience to gently guide, rather than regulate, conversations. throughout the three workshops, we also consciously tried to promote discus- sions wherein stakeholders with the least power would have a safe and welcoming environment to speak, as well as enough time to do so. for example, we avoided using scientific jargon and encouraged speaking in mother tongue and using ver- nacular language among stakeholders. translators were available to assist when language was an obstacle, and in cases where less powerful groups seemed more comfortable discussing their ideas in small groups and voicing their consensus through a neutral translator, rather than a group representative, this was done. this bottom-up, participatory approach is fundamental to the vulnerability and risk assessment process. through ongoing engagement beyond the workshop, action research ( ) t a b le . k e y a sp e c ts o f v u ln e ra b il it y a n d r is k a ss e ss m e n t w o rk sh o p s c o n d u c te d in b o ts w a n a , m a la w i a n d n a m ib ia b a se d o n h e g g a e t a l. ( ), m a su n d ir e e t a l. ( ) a n d m o rc h a in e t a l. ( ). b o ts w a n a m a la w i n a m ib ia c li m at e s e m i- a ri d t ro p ic a l s e m i- a ri d f o c u s b o b ir w a s u b -d is tr ic t r u ra l a n d p se u d o -u rb a n m u la n je a n d t h yo lo m u n ic ip a li ti e s t e a in d u st ry o n e si c o n st it u e n c y in th e o m u sa ti r e g io n r u ra l l iv e li h o o d s c o m m e rc ia l a n d sm a ll -s c a le /s u b si s- te n c e li v e st o c k a n d c ro p fa rm in g ; m o p a n e c a te rp il la rs ; v e g e ta b le tr a d in g ; h a n d ic ra ft s; so c ia l g ra n ts t e a in d u st ry : s m a ll h o ld e r (s m a ll sc a le ) te a g ro w in g a n d c o m m e rc ia l (e st a te ) te a g ro w in g ; c o m m u n it y e n tr e p re n e u rs ; sk il le d a n d u n sk il le d la b o u r c o m m e rc ia l a n d sm a ll -s c a le /s u b si s- te n c e li v e st o c k a n d c ro p fa rm in g ; n o n -t im b e r fo re st p ro d u c ts (e .g .: m o p a n e c a te rp il la rs a n d m a ru la fr u it s) ; fi sh h a rv e st in g ; h a n d ic ra ft s; so c ia l g ra n ts s ta k e h o ld e rs p o li c y m a k e rs ; lo c a l a n d d is tr ic t g o v - e rn m e n t o ff ic ia ls ; n g o s; c o m m u n it y le a d e rs ; fa rm e rs a n d m o p a n e c a te r- p il la r h a rv e st e rs ; c h u rc h g ro u p ; c o m m u n it y -b a se d o rg a n is a ti o n s; u n e m p lo y e d yo u th t e a e st a te m a n a g e rs ; in te rn a ti o n a l a n d d o m e st ic te a tr a d e rs a n d re ta il e rs ; n a ti o n a l a n d d is tr ic t g o ve rn m e n t; lo c a l p o li c e fo rc e ; c iv il so c ie ty o rg a n is at io n s; u n io n re p re se n ta ti v e s; c o m m u n it y m e m b e rs ; n g o s o n e si c o m m u n it y, th e tr a d it io n a l a u th o ri ty , r e d c ro ss , th e s c o r e p ro je c t, th e o n e si c o n st it u e n c y d e v e lo p m e n t c o m m it te e , th e o n e si c o n st it u e n c y o ff ic e , o lu sh a n d ja h o rt ic u lt u re a ss o c ia ti o n , th e m in is tr y o f y o u th , s p o rt s a n d c u lt u re , m in is tr y o f a g ri c u lt u re , w a te r a n d f o re st ry a n d o m u sa ti r e g io n a l c o u n c il . s e le c te d v u ln e ra b il it ie s a n d so m e o f th e im p a c t c h a in (p a rt ia l li st ) . d ro u g h t ! re d u c ti o n in w a te r, c ro p y ie ld s, fo d d e r, m o p a n e c a te rp il la rs & w il d li fe sp e c ie s. . in a d e q u a te a lt e rn a ti v e s to a g ri c u l- tu re -b a se d li v e li h o o d s ! fe w e r o p ti o n s fo r in c o m e g e n e ra ti o n . . c li m a te c h a n g e ! re d u c e d : q u a n ti ty a n d q u a li ty o f te a p ro - d u c e d , in c o m e , fo o d se c u ri ty , a c c e ss to w a te r. . l o w w a g e s, h a rs h tr e a tm e n t a n d se x u a l h a ra ss m e n t o f te a . d ro u g h t ! re d u c e d : c ro p y ie ld s, fo d d e r, w a te r a n d g ra ss , n o n - ti m b e r fo re st p ro d u c ts . in c re a se d : li v e st o c k m o rt a li ty a n d lo ss o f w il d li fe . (c o n ti n u e d ) morchain et al. t a b le . c o n ti n u e d b o ts w a n a m a la w i n a m ib ia . f o o t a n d m o u th d is e a se ! e x tr a ti m e & c o st o f tr a n sp o rt a ti o n to fi n d n e w m a rk e ts . p lu c k e rs ! p o v e rt y, fo o d in se - c u ri ty , v ic ti m is a ti o n . a g e in g te a b u sh e s ! l o w y ie ld s, lo w q u a li ty , re d u c e d e m p lo y m e n t & in c o m e o p p o rt u n it ie s. . f lo o d ! in c re a se d : d a m a g e to in fr a - st ru c tu re , w a te r b o rn e d is e a se s, so il e ro si o n , lo ss o f li fe . d e c re a se d : g ra zi n g , c ro p y ie ld s . l a c k o f a c c e ss to c li m a te in fo rm a - ti o n ! c o m p ro m is e d p la n n in g p ro p o se d re sp o n se s (p a rt ia l li st ) . in c re a si n g aw a re n e ss a n d u p ta k e o f d ro u g h t m a n a g e m e n t st ra te g ie s . d e v e lo p in g m a rk e ti n g sk il ls a n d e d u c a ti o n . e x p lo ri n g a n d e x p lo it in g o p p o rt u n i- ti e s id e n ti fi e d su c h a s th e a b u n d a n c e o f g ro u n d w a te r fo r c ro p ir ri g a ti o n a n d b o tt li n g w a te r fo r h u m a n c o n su m p ti o n . im p le m e n ta ti o n o f n a ti o n a l c li - m a te c h a n g e la w a n d p o li c y ; p ro v is io n o f ta rg e te d w e a th e r & c li m a te in fo rm a ti o n . c re a ti o n o f a w o rk in g g ro u p to a d d re ss se x u a l h a ra ss m e n t; p o li c y d e ve lo p m e n t o n re d u c in g h a ra ss m e n t; tr a in in g o f w o rk e rs in in d u st ri a l & la b o u r re la ti o n s . in ve st m e n t in re se a rc h a n d d e ve lo p m e n t in th e te a se c to r . in fl u e n c e u p ta k e o f d ro u g h t m a n a g e - m e n t st ra te g ie s a n d a c c e ss to w a te r so u rc e s . u se o f e a rt h d a m s fo r fl o o d c o n tr o l . s tr e n g th e n in g a d v ic e a n d o p ti o n s fo r se a so n a l c li m a te in fo rm a ti o n fr o m e x te n si o n o ff ic e rs action research ( ) this type of approach can help to build trust, enhance the integration of knowledge and lead to creative and innovative solutions. the vulnerability and risk assessment process enhances the degree to which stakeholders take ownership of the problem, because knowledge and trust is built from within the knowledge group itself. this increases commitment to jointly finding and implementing sol- utions, rather than the identification and implementation of solutions being driven by external facilitators/researchers. identifying and acting on potential contributions to transformation the ambition behind conducting the vulnerability and risk assessments in botswana, malawi and namibia has not just been to understand vulnerability in a social-ecological landscape that faces both high impacts from climate and envi- ronmental change and considerable challenges around marginalisation and gover- nance. these assessments aimed to take an initial step towards collaboratively identifying transformation pathways in development practices through adaptation responses. because of the social learning principles in the design of the vulnerability and risk assessment process there is a focus on learning from each other, seeing different perspectives and collectively finding solutions. we believe the process started to sow the seeds of transformation. transformations that aim to shift behaviours, norms and practice need to be embedded and absorbed within social structures, and as such they exist as continually evolving processes; not as products. notwithstanding, there are other transformations that can result from technological breakthroughs, which can indeed be categorised as products – e.g. a radically adapted seed. these types of transformations are, nev- ertheless, less relevant to this discussion. much of the contribution to transforma- tion that the vulnerability and risk assessment workshops generated depended on their appropriate framing. these framings consisted of being deeply cognisant of power dynamics; seeing current problems in a holistic light; building new rela- tionships and networks based on trust; and contributing to future change (also see butler et al., ). each one of these is described in more detail below. participation, power and agency participatory processes such as vulnerability and risk assessment can shift dom- inant power dynamics (see jernsand, ). one place where power imbalances often reveal themselves is in group settings, where there tend to be unspoken rules as to who gets to talk and who is listened to. in the vulnerability and risk assessments, there was mostly a combination of external and internal facilitators, and each workshop was designed as a structured process that had both plenary and small group discussions. this meant that all participants were actively encouraged to participate. the facilitators managed to establish an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect, which encouraged stakeholders to express their views. this was morchain et al. especially important given that the participants were from various backgrounds and not all were formally educated. one participant in botswana reflected that ‘this was an opportunity for different views to come together. everyone was free to express themselves on any issue they wanted’. although some of the participants who were used to being listened to from their regular position of power tried to ‘push’ their opinions, others from the local villages, who might not normally say much in a context where there are government officials, managed to share valuable perspec- tives and were listened to. one stakeholder reflected that ‘at the beginning of day i didn’t understand why mopane caterpillar harvesters [who are predominantly female] were sitting around this table. now it is clear’. through the carefully facilitated vulnerability and risk assessment process, opportunities emerged across all three cases for power differentials to shift in small ways. this reflects a conscious effort to build agency of the least powerful (one key transformative capacity) by setting up processes for speaking ‘truth to power’ that can contribute to narrowing power differentials. in namibia, an expert from the agriculture sector acknowledged that he was impressed with the ‘wealth of knowl- edge and level of understanding of local farmers’. this illustrated the potential to transform how government officials and experts perceive farmers’ knowledge, and the possibility to open up new avenues for communication between groups that might otherwise have limited interaction with one another. recognition of the value of local knowledge encourages knowledge co-production, power sharing and egalitarianism, which is necessary for transforming conventional decision- making processes. vulnerability and risk assessments are certainly not a solution for shifting power, but rather speak to one of the potential ways in which this might be achieved. pushing the boundaries of existing structures of authority can be empow- ering, as evidenced by an elderly basket weaver who commented that ‘i used to think my ideas weren’t worthwhile. now i think i can make changes in my life and i know it is possible’. once stakeholders became comfortable working together they found value in the participatory approach. one participant said: ‘i’ve been thin- king. . .the next time we should invite ourselves to each other’s meetings rather than wait for people to come from far to do it’. indeed, participatory approaches that are initiated and facilitated internally are an important indicator of transformation. vulnerability and risk assessments can also serve to promote the agency of marginalised groups, as they raise awareness of people’s challenges in a semi-public space, thereby increasing the understanding – and accountability – of authorities. this could lead to the rise of so-called ‘champions’ at different levels. one striking aspect of the vulnerability and risk assessment process in malawi was the issue of harsh treatment and sexual harassment of tea pluckers. this was at first rejected as not being relevant or pertinent enough for discussions related to risk and vulner- ability – which reveals a narrow understanding of vulnerability – but was eventu- ally recognised by everyone as a key aspect. this shift was enabled by genuine representation in the group, and by creating an environment whereby one of the least powerful groups, the tea pluckers, managed to freely convey the issue of action research ( ) sexual harassment as fundamental to the industry’s sound operation and sustain- ability. in doing so, they gained support from the representative of the ministry of labour who, from a position of power, managed to impel tea estate managers to agree to the formation of a multi-stakeholder working group to look into this issue in more depth. this outcome shows that the vulnerability and risk assessment can also be a process whereby alliances are formed to push for a specific agenda to address vulnerability. it has also been found elsewhere that through collaboration, participants of such processes can have more power working together than indi- vidually (brydon-miller et al., ). shift in understanding the problem underpinning the conceptual frame of the vulnerability and risk assessment is the opportunity for participants to develop a richer understanding of the ways in which current issues and hazards affect different social groups and (eco)systems in the landscape, and how these interactions may overlap and possibly exacerbate the impact. this exploration includes an analysis of how impacts might be best addressed, drawing on knowledge from all stakeholders in the group. it is not surprising, therefore, that the vulnerability and risk assessments led to a shift in understanding the nature of the challenge at hand. as one of the participants in the namibian vulnerability and risk assessment said ‘through discussions i realized that it’s the information that is needed. if all the people were here to hear what we have discussed it would be easier for us to deal with the changes in climate. i am impressed and surprised by the information [we got] – some of it i didn’t know about.’ in namibia, the participants found the impact chain analysis exercise to be particularly valuable. as explained by a government official from the omusati region, ‘the part where we did the impact chain analysis in groups was useful and interesting because i came to understand the problems arising from the hazards’. this speaks to building the transformative capacity of changing how we view our relation to the natural environment (as described by ziervogel et al., ) as a key factor that can suffer, but also contribute to supporting people’s efforts to build their resilience. because different social groups experience the impacts of hazards differently, according to their vulnerability, the process allowed stakeholders to understand the same issues from different perspectives. in the malawi case, the vulnerability and risk assessment improved everyone’s understanding of the impacts faced by the tea industry and how different groups and sectors are affected. in environments that lack strong foundations of repre- sentative governance, existing power holders tend to understand the meaning of sustainability of an industry – tea, in this case – almost exclusively from economic/ financial perspectives, thereby overlooking important social aspects. the vulnerability and risk assessment in malawi showed that the industry’s morchain et al. sustainability has most often been measured according to domestic and macroeco- nomic indicators, while social risks have largely been ignored. discussions around promoting a living wage for unskilled labourers tended to be dismissed with argu- ments that suggested the industry’s profitability was more important. in this sense, the transformative element introduced by the vulnerability and risk assessment was to find a way to foster a multi-stakeholder dialogue whereby the full spectrum of hazards and issues could be jointly identified, assessed and prioritised. the fact that ‘sexual harassment and harsh treatment of unskilled workers’ emerged as one of the four key hazards represented a breakthrough that pushed social issues up in the discussion about the tea industry’s sustainability. as few et al. ( ) indicate, lasting transformative change requires the reorganisation of governance structures that promote social justice. as seen in the malawi case, such reorganisations can benefit from cross-sector partnerships among civil society, private sector (tea estates) and government (ministry of labour). through the vulnerability and risk assessment process in malawi, stakehold- ers became more aware of the importance of understanding the ‘big picture’ of the industry’s sustainability, which they began to realise depends not only on its finan- cial/economic productivity, but also on the wellbeing of its stakeholders. the emphasis on understanding the system holistically is definitely one of the important contributions that the vulnerability and risk assessments made. however, a vulnerability and risk assessment needs to be followed by a longer-term pro- cess, otherwise it is likely that participants will return to their former way of understanding climate impacts and adaptation. starting to see alternatives throughout the vulnerability and risk assessment process, the knowledge group became increasingly comfortable with one another, with the process and with each other’s points of view. through this process, the diversity of knowledge group members’ interests and knowledge led to new ideas on adaptation possibil- ities. these emerging alternatives to traditional ways of approaching development challenges is a key contribution of the vulnerability and risk assessment towards transforming the mindsets of stakeholders through collaborative and cross–scalar ways of thinking. in namibia, the vulnerability and risk assessment process helped the group to realise that there is a lack of self-organisation at the community level, and they learnt that being more organised could increase their resilience to drought. one adaptation idea that emerged in this case was that they could work together to set up a food bank mechanism at the traditional authority office. each household could contribute litres of mahangu (pearl millet) after each harvest, which would serve as a contingency plan for low rainfall seasons and contribute to com- munal food security. in malawi, the vulnerability and risk assessment was valued because it pro- moted ways to revise the members’ initial assumptions and to think beyond the action research ( ) obvious threats and opportunities to the industry; i.e. from understanding progress based on the industry’s financial competitiveness, to progress resulting from a combination of financial, social and environmental conditions. the vulnerability and risk assessment provided the methodological approach to do this, as well as a solutions-oriented approach that enabled participants to come out of the exercise not just with newly identified problems and risks, but also with jointly generated ideas to move forward. building social networks across scales in addition to being fundamental to action, relationship building is one of the most important outcomes of participatory processes (ortiz arag�on & glenzir, ). it is also essential for building the transformative capacity of social cohesion (see ziervogel et al., ). in all three of the cases, the vulnerability and risk assessment helped to forge new relationships between stakeholders, especially across different levels of governance. in namibia, a member of the constituency development committee said, ‘i networked with different stakeholders including unam (the university of namibia, a tertiary institution) and score’ (a united nations developed programme climate resilience project). this speaks to how the workshop linked people working at the local constituency level to those working on regional and national programmes and with national universities. a forestry officer at the namibia vulnerability and risk assessment specified how important it was to him to have ‘networking and harmonization of multi- stakeholders to have one objective of addressing the issue [of climate change]’. in botswana, the good results of the vulnerability and risk assessment exercise in bobirwa, together with strategic efforts by the university of botswana, caught the attention of national level government officials, who proposed running a national level training in mahalapye in august (which included a training on the methodology for district economic and district development officers from across the country). this provided a rare opportunity for ministers and directors to engage with planning officers and with marginalised groups to stress the impor- tance of bottom up development and adaptation planning in a practical way. the sustained engagement of high level government personnel beyond the mahalapye event, and the commitment of the trained district level officials from different parts of the country to support new vulnerability and risk assessment processes (e.g. coming to co-facilitate one vra workshop in chobe district in january ) suggests an honest, meaningful buy-in by key decision-makers. in addition to developing new relationships, stakeholders who do not usually speak to one anoth- er were exposed to each other’s views in a safe and informal space for dialogue. this helped not only in conveying information from the bottom up, but also from powerful stakeholders to those with less power. in malawi, for example, tea pluck- ers appreciated learning about the bigger picture operation of the tea industry and all its complexities, which seemed to spark a sense of belonging and unity with the other people present. morchain et al. beyond the vulnerability and risk assessment workshop adaptation responses often focus on discrete events and interventions aimed at reducing climate change risks, impacts and vulnerability. what is clear is that processes are just as important, particularly when more transformative changes are needed. as such, there are many conversations, activities, attitudes and struc- tural arrangements that can either support or hinder transformation. given that the two-day workshops were brief, the vulnerability and risk assessment in itself did not constitute transformation of the system, although it did start to shift ways of working. importantly, the vulnerability and risk assessment process set in motion novel and alternative conversations and processes that can continue to build transformative capacities and support transformation goals. in botswana, a series of engagements emerged from the vulnerability and risk assessment. the sub-district’s economic planner attended the initial workshop and asked the team from the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions project to consider convening another vulnerability and risk assessment workshop within the sub-district. he wanted staff to gain competence in running a vulnerability and risk assessment process so that the sub-district council could use the methodology for future planning, with the intention of undertaking genuinely bottom-up devel- opment planning processes. this ‘adoption’ of vulnerability and risk assessment as a planning tool by the sub-district management can be a significant contribution towards transformation, which crystallised in a national-level event where econom- ic and planning officers from all districts of the country were trained on vulnerability and risk assessment in august (with co-funding provided by the government of botswana). subsequently, a national newspaper featured a speech by the acting minister for presidential affairs, governance and public administration who endorsed the vulnerability and risk assessment, saying that it made development planning participatory, representative and inclusive. this indicates high-level buy-in to the process, which is essential for transforma- tion. separately, the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions team was also invited to contribute to the district development plan by adding a chapter on climate change. another significant influence beyond the vulnerability and risk assessment workshops was how the findings were shared through other platforms and arenas at both regional and sub-national levels. coming out of the namibian vulnerability and risk assessment, a short video was made on the process. this was used for teaching in south africa, the united kingdom and the netherlands in courses on vulnerability assessments and climate change and food security/devel- opment, more generally. in addition, the video was screened at the international adaptation futures conference in , and a vulnerability and risk assessment role play session was held to promote discussion on emerging vulnerability assess- ment approaches. the findings from the vulnerability and risk assessment workshops in namibia and botswana were also presented at the africa drought conference action research ( ) held in windhoek, namibia in . this prompted further informal engagements amongst the omusati regional council officials during the conference, co- organised by researchers from the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions proj- ect. this vertical interaction across scales is central to transformation, yet is often missing (pelling et al., ). it also provided an opportunity to share a multi- faceted understanding of vulnerability that drew on social, environmental and economic concerns, experienced differently, depending on scale and goals. in malawi, a direct impact after the vulnerability and risk assessment work- shop was the intention expressed by the representative of the ministry of labour to revisit existing statutes that protect unskilled labourers in the tea industry from sexual harassment and harsh treatment and review their enforcement to date. although it is difficult to assess direct causality, the vulnerability and risk assessment process – understood as an element in the larger context of the malawi tea programme – is likely to have contributed to the promotion of gender equality in the tea sector, in the form of subsequent investments and alli- ances with oxfam by large producers and retailers in the united kingdom. on the other hand, this example also shows that the vulnerability and risk assessment only initiated a moment of transformation. dealing with the deeper causes that have led to these attitudes and abuses would require a continued process aimed at addressing the underlying factors (such as through discussions facilitated by the working group intended to be created after the vulnerability and risk assessment). lessons learned and conclusions the vulnerability and risk assessment approach taken in namibia, botswana and malawi served to build transformative capacities among stakeholders, includ- ing the three identified by ziervogel et al. ( ), i.e. agency, social cohesion, and a new understanding of the relationship between people with ecosystems. the pro- cess enabled a crucial ‘inward journey’ at both individual and institutional levels. it also allowed possible adaptation actions to be identified and began paving the way for imagining more transformative opportunities that could jointly address both climate risks and broader developmental concerns. through the different workshop processes, new light was shed on how different hazards and risks play out in the three landscapes studied, how the impacts of these hazards manifest to affect social groups differently, and some of the underlying factors making people vulnerable. because of the nature of the vulnerability and risk assessment process, adaptation responses were explored in the context of the larger developmental challenge in the southern africa region, and from a diverse range of perspectives. in so doing, the process allowed a shift in understanding climate change as a biophysical challenge alone, to understanding it as a social issue, largely determined by existing power and governance arrangements. it also emphasised the need to include a spectrum of knowledge sources to reach an optimal understanding of the problems at hand. crucially, the vulnerability and morchain et al. risk assessments described here helped to identify and raise the profile of issues that had been previously unaddressed or not addressed sufficiently, but that none- theless contribute to the vulnerability of least powerful groups. for example, the challenges of mopane caterpillar harvesters in bobirwa; the sexual harassment and harsh treatment of unskilled labourers in the tea industry in thyolo and mulanje; and the lack of social and self-organisation preventing collective action at the community level in the omusati region of namibia, were all unearthed through the process. this indicates an early step toward transformation, in that it repre- sents the advancement of social justice outcomes that could, in the longer term, increase the effectiveness of adaptation efforts. shifting power dynamics by promoting and creating alliances between relatively powerless and powerful actors across several levels of governance is a step towards enabling transformation. alliances can be built so that issues affecting powerless groups can be acknowledged and addressed together with individuals and institu- tions with power, where previously these groups had no influence (e.g. the case of the ministry of labour in malawi supporting the plight of tea pluckers). the three cases discussed in this paper also show that facilitating women’s participation and enabling their voices to be heard by decision makers at higher governance levels is essential for securing social justice as a central objective of transformation in adaptation. it follows that connecting the outcomes of processes like the vulnerability and risk assessment with higher levels of government and other influential stakeholders, including multilateral organisations, is often vital for the seeds of transformation to have a chance to germinate. although vulnerability and risk assessment workshops can improve under- standing of the problem, forge relationships between different scales and sectors and identify possible solutions in themselves, for transformation to be enabled there needs to be a continued process rather than a one-off workshop. in addition, such a process should be increasingly driven by stakeholders (e.g. local govern- ments, civil society organisations), rather than by external organisations. this requires building the capacity and leadership of internal actors and organisations to convene, organise and facilitate such a process, which itself requires these actors to appreciate the value of investing their time in it. ideally, for actions to be taken forward, leaders that can create and maintain a constructive atmosphere among participants, including beyond the workshop process, should be identified. the national level training of government officials in botswana in august is illus- trative of this: following the training, the trainees applied their new skills by run- ning a vulnerability and risk assessment in mahalapye district. however, it became clear that ongoing support from the vulnerability and risk assessment promoters (in this case the university of botswana and oxfam gb) would still be needed if the vulnerability and risk assessment processes are to be repeated sub- nationally. in other words, stakeholders’ reactions to the activity suggested their mindset had welcomed the principles of vulnerability and risk assessment – and of transformation. however, even with a political mandate and will, such processes still need operational support. action research ( ) the implications of vulnerability and risk assessment-type processes are important to consider for development and climate researchers and practitioners. the first big change that is required is the way that people and organisations contribute to framing adaptation. rather than esteeming ‘expert’ sources of knowledge and prioritising the biophysical elements of climate change, a more holistic and people-centred framing is needed. second, it is important to recognise power and governance (including climate financing structures) as important shapers of both vulnerability and adaptation outcomes – and, subsequently, to include these as key determinants of climate and development research. third, by acknowledging social justice and the principles of inclusivity, and making repre- sentation and fair participation standard to adaptation practice, researchers and practitioners could contribute to a genuine shift in what the sector values. in this way, adaptation efforts would centre on people, not on infrastructure and other technical fixes. truly participatory vulnerability assessments tend to be convened and facilitat- ed by non-governmental or civil society organisations and are therefore rarely reported in peer-reviewed journals. action research offers the opportunity to main- stream vulnerability assessments in academic circles, with a renewed appreciation that vulnerability assessments need to address social injustice and the climate change adaptation problem beyond a technocratic/biophysical narrative. by cre- ating dialogue spaces, building social capital, confronting embedded practices and promoting learning, vulnerability assessments can help promote transformations in the face of complex challenges (ortiz arag�on & glenzer, ). indeed, engag- ing in participatory processes that can shift narratives and power dynamics; allow marginal voices to be heard; build cross–scalar relationships; and enable people to see the need for systemic change and co-created alternative solutions, is an impor- tant step in better understanding and influencing the context in which such trans- formations can occur. it is time for leading institutions in the climate change sector to recognise that achieving more socially just outcomes from adaptation efforts requires transform- ing the approaches they have so far pursued, even though this may risk their current influential positions. indeed, it would be disingenuous to call for transfor- mation in the sector, while expecting at the same time to preserve intact the roles and privileged positions of power of researchers, practitioners, and members of multilateral and donor institutions. transformation, after all, also requires looking inwards and being willing to dissent and disrupt an existing order that largely disregards justice in climate change adaptation. acknowledgements we are grateful to all the stakeholders for their active participation in the vulnerability and risk assessment workshops. irene kunamwene, kulthoum omari motsumi, nelly raditloaneng and elizabeth ndeunyema are thanked for assisting with facilitating small group discussions, and itireleng masilo and letsweletse mponang are thanked for morchain et al. translating. we welcome and invite your comments and reactions at our action research community’s interactive arj blog housed at arþ http://actionresearchplus.com declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article: some of this work was carried out under the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions project (assar). assar is one of four research programmes funded under the collaborative adaptation research initiative in africa and asia (cariaa), with financial support from the uk government’s department for international development (dfid) and the international development research centre (idrc), canada. the views expressed in this work are those of the creators and do not necessarily represent those of dfid and idrc or its board of governors. the south african department of science and technology is also acknowledged for funding some of this research. orcid id dian spear http://orcid.org/ - - - gina ziervogel http://orcid.org/ - - - references bradbury, h. 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( ). moving from adaptive to transformative capacity: building foundations for inclusive, thriving, and regenerative urban settle- ments. sustainability (switzerland), ( ), . retrieved from https://doi.org/ . /su author biographies daniel morchain is senior adviser of resilience & climate change adaptation at oxfam gb, based in oxford, uk. daniel was a co-principal investigator of the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions (assar) project ( - ). dian spear was the southern africa lead of the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions (assar) project ( - ) based at the university of cape town. gina ziervogel is an associate professor in the department of environmental and geographical science, and a research chair at the african climate and development initiative at the university of cape town. her research focuses on climate adaptation and development at both the household and municipal level, with a focus on applied and interdisciplinary projects. hillary masundire is a professor of ecology in the department of biological sciences at the university of botswana. he was the botswana lead of the assar project. margaret n angula is a senior lecturer in the department of geography, history and environmental studies at the university of namibia. her current research focuses on gender and vulnerability assessments as well as climate change adap- tation. she was a researcher on the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions (assar) project. julia davies was a senior research assistant on the adaptation at scale in semi- arid regions (assar) project at the university of cape town, where she con- tributed to research on climate change adaptation and development challenges in namibia and botswana. she is now a phd student in the school of geography and action research ( ) development at the university of arizona and is working on urban food security and climate change issues in sub-saharan africa. chandapiwa molefe was research assistant on the assar project, she coordinated and facilitated research themes in botswana, as well as contributing to research on climate change governance, social differentiation and dynamics of ecosystem services. salma hegga is an independent consultant and interdisciplinary researcher of environmental changes and disaster resilience. she was a post-doctoral research fellow on the assar project the adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions (assar) project. morchain et al. may journal - final dr. srijeeta mukherjee pg trainee, department of psychiatry, mkcg medical college, brahmapur, ganjam, odisha, abstract contemporary life is rapidly becoming digitalized. technology has percolated all spheres of human existence, blurring the dichotomy between online and off-line. social structures and discriminations already existing in everyday lives have also spilled online. hate, abuse, misogyny has encroached online spaces aiming to demean, hurt, and humiliate women and are a serious threat to the right of free speech. in this article, we look at how digital platforms and paradoxically helpful in generating awareness and improving participation via social media with more and more women sharing their experiences via #testimonials ( # metoo, #notokay, #raped never reported, etc ) and survivor selfies that go viral and generate public outcry that mobilizes socio-cultural and socio-political changes that strives to decrease the age-old gender divide. keywords: online hate, cyber sexual harassment, indian cyber laws, digilantism, psychological issues. introduction digital technologies including smartphones, social networking sites, video hosting sites, online multiplayer gaming, clouds/dropbox services, blogs, wearables with activity tracking, etc have dramatically changed contemporary lifestyle and communication (powell, ; lupton, ). they have a profound impact on all spheres of human behavior and existence. it has changed the ways we communicate, form relationships, and access information (lupton, ). the government of india recognizes the need to empower indian citizens digitally and increase digital literacy, launched the ‘digital india’ campaign in which aims to increase connectivity, participation, and improved access to public services. digital technologies provide new forms of social connectivity for constructing self- identities outside traditional institutions (family, work, or school), create personal space with definite boundaries as well as develop their social and professional lives to gain acceptance and recognition globally review article millennium women: sexual challenges in the digital era indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ), june issn - x https://www.iisb.org./ date of submission : march date of acceptance : may corresponding author : how to cite the article : doi : dr. srijeeta mukherjee e mail: srijeeta @gmail.com mukherjee, s. ( ). millennium women: sexual challenges in the digital era. indian journal of health, sexuality & culture, ( ), - . . /zenodo. (oksman, ). technology has become embedded in daily lives, permeating every nook and cranny increasingly blurring the dichotomies of online and off line (jamaludin, ). the rapidly developing information and communication technology have brought significant economic, political, and social changes so much so that 'life is digital' is not a hyperbolic claim ( lupton, ). society and technology are shaped mutually by human behavior and interactions. previously owing to the digital divide, poor access, and digital illiteracy, the internet was considered largely a masculine domain, developed for, and use by men (levmore and n u s s b a u m , ) . d u e t o i n c r e a s e d awareness, affordable smart phones and data-plans, women and other marginalized groups (lgbtq, people with disabilities, etc) are increasingly using the ‘net’ to share ideas, express opinions, and create niche online presence (green et al, ). with the globalization of digital communication, abuse, and harassment too has become global (henry and powell, ; powell, ; bartlett et al, ). women are disproportionately high recipients of these 'e-bile' followed by people of alternate sexuality and few men (jane, ).ninety percent of the slanderous comments, real or doctored images, and porn video content showcases verbal or physical aggression against women (mc glynn, ). online sexual harassment sexual harassment is a well defined and familiar term. it is a form of sex discrimination involving unwanted/ unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favor, and other conduct of verbal or physical nature that causes another person to feel offended, humiliated, fearful, or intimidated. it comes online when it is perpetrated with the aid of digital technology like on internet sites, such as chat rooms, public forums, social media, and online dating sites, or through private communications via mobile phone or email, including verbal and/or written comments and requests, and/ or graphic images (sethi & ghatak, ). dimensions of cyber sexual harassment (powell, ) are identified as: . gender-based harassment: it may be verbal, visual, and textual. these are unsolicited comments or abusive remarks and pile on threats directed at victims because of their gender invoking graphic imageries of rape, violence, and abuse to stimulate fear and other negative emotions. women, mainly college-aged girls, are ridiculed online for their sexuality and objectified (wajcman, ; hardaker, ). men receive the hate for their ideas and actions, the comments generally make fun of their perceived sexuality and diminish their manliness. most lgbtq people are attacked because of their sexuality doesn't conform to heterosexual society rules and they are accused of being sex offenders and sexually deviant. sexual and hate comments falsely accusing the victim of having stds, mental illnesses, etc flood the message boards and blog (hardaker, ). . unwanted sexual attention and experiences: perpetrators convey sexual messages by objectifying and reducing victims to be their sex organs (often described as diseased) existing solely for the pleasure of others (hardacker, ). inappropriate comments on intimate lives and subjects, unsolicited images and videosblatantly hinting sex-related activities either online or offline (baumgartner et al, ; sarkeesian, ).using camera-enabled smart phones to take photographs and videos of unsuspecting victims to share online. indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ) victim's contact information, social security numbers, medical conditions, and their availability for sex are advertised online rendering them vulnerable to violence by strangers beside the perpetrators (doxxing) (henry and powell ; eckert, ). . sexual coercion and sextortion: perpetrators pressurize victims to share nude photographs and videos then extort money with threats of sharing them with family and public, damaging r e p u t a t i o n , e m p l o y a b i l i t y, a n d increasingly exposed to sexual assault by strangers. many people (mainly women) are victims of revenge porn by their rejected ex-partners. fake online advertisement soliciting sex and lies about the victim's violent and m a s o ch i s t i c s e x u a l p r e f e r e n c e s populate the net created by often known people, ex-boyfriends, ex- husbands, coworkers, etc. nude photos and videos, doctored images appear on dedicated porn sites in case of non cooperation (englander, ; powell , ). several predators coerce and groom children online to produce child pornography (beech et al, ). . cyberstalking: malicious stalkers are using sophisticated technologies to keep tabs on their victims, hacking into personal devices, cars, homes, and offices. threatening anonymous emails and messages to victims and employers full of lies, accusing victims of misdeeds and offenses (spitzberg, ; borrajo et al, ; craven et al, ; fraser et al, ). what is common in all is they seek to insult, humiliate, and silence victims and diminish their online participation (powell and henry ; brody and vangelisti, ). despite the victim's efforts to remove from one site, these fester and return online like the head of medusa in some other sites. the net provides longevity to the hate, as comments and abuse can be retrieved online long after the victim has curtailed and censored their online activities. the proliferation of cyber sexual harassment india has million (january ) active internet users and has become the leading country with million people using face book, million users on twitter, and video sharing platform tiktok was downloaded by million indians by november . almost million indian smartphone users are on whats app or its local language counterpart (tech crunch, reuters). statistics show that the numbers are still increasing, with more people connecting online. higher educated people are using more internet. men and womendiffer in their internet use (bimber, ), with men voraciously consuming information and women gravitating towards communication. men are more likely to use the internet for recreation and women are rapidly catching up (statistics research department, ). due to the lack of digital literacy, many are unaware of their digital rights. for them, cyberspace is a disembodied and abstract virtual space that is very different from real lives, full of fun and games (powell ; benedickt ). while this may be true in some cases, the internet has its own darker aspects. sociologists argue that rigid gender roles and stereotypes experienced during face to face communications can be changed via digital means ( beck-gernsheim, ; cooper, delmonico, & burg, ) but physically existing and culturally sanctioned power structures, inequalities, and domination have spilled online. easy accessibility, freedom, anonymity, and lack of accountability has led to increased discrimination and sexism online (lapidot- lefler and barak, ). inappropriate behavior has become acceptable and indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ) naturalized in the wild west of the internet (franeck ). unlike contact or place- based offenses, online abuse can be perpetrated by a person occupying a different time zone with miles of distance between them and the victims (powell ). criminals, predators, stalkers also have become ubiquitous, lurking in innocuous online spaces, and targeting unsuspecting audience (borrajo et at, ; ybarra and mitchell, ). this means the technology- facilitated sexual harms perpetrated by them are undeniably substantial. the prevalence of on-line hostility is on the rise, getting uglier and filthier with time and increasingly gendered. internet trash talk, graphic threats of rape and violence, unsolicited requisitions and pornographic images, revenge porn videos and photographs have filled online platforms (jane, , , , ; barak, ). online misogyny, rape culture, and revenge pornography in her series of papers, emma a. jane states the 'online hyperbolic vitriol' has become a nor malized, commonsensical way to communicate online. it is commonly expected by anyone who is online voluntarily and voices opinions. gender wars are at their peak. hegemonic masculinity is threatened by the women occupying the supposedly male spaces (ballard and welch, ); fox and tang ). it has its roots in the age-old cultural tradition that women are inferior to men. their ideas, needs, wishes are subject to the whims of men and their existence is limited to domestic spheres, and those who overstep need to be put back into appropriate places. men have actively created several toxic online spaces where they ridicule, abuse, and humiliate women for participating in online activities and discussions (banet wieser and miltner, ). men infiltrate into online forums for only women or any neutral online forums and start posting immature and inappropriate comments which are described as ‘virtual manspreading’ (jane, ; stortz ). rape apologists post graphic rape and death threats (young, ; young and whitty, ). as with rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment ( mc donald, ), gendered cyber-harassment is frequently trivialized as not being a big deal, mocked and sheltered by stereotypes and rape myths. the responsibility is shifted to the victim, claiming that they were attention who resand asked for it, enjoyed it, and bought victimization upon herself ( loney howes, ). it is widely believed that violence is committed only by sexually deviant men and women exaggerate or make up the claims to cover their indiscretions and misdeeds (ging and siapera, ). these myths absolve perpetrators because it was online, and they didn't mean to do any harm (lonsway et al, ; dodge, ). many commentators gang up on the victim thus escalating the abuse (palermo et al, ). these activities are often under reported due to shame, lack of technical expertise, unresponsive law enforcement causing the victim to stew alone. according to citron , these offenses are usually legally intractable due to their personal and idiosyncratic nature (citron and franks, ; citron, ). sexting defined as sending sexually explicit p i c t u r e s, v i d e o s, o r t e x t m e s s a g e s electronically has become nor mative behavior as foreplay for future sexual activities (dir et al, ; drouin et al, ; ; mc daniel, ; klettke et al, ). while it's enjoyable consensually, it can quickly become ugly for people who assume or misperceive consent or interest in future face to face sexual interaction and can potentially lead to unwanted sexual experiences (choi et al, ; reyns et al, ). sexting and sexual violence are closely related. many women feel coerced to sext by partners who resort to manipulation and blackmail (revenge pornography) to exact indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ) cooperation (walker and sleath ; bartow, ). one study by brodie found that participants of sexting (especially men) are more impulsive and more likely to endorse sexual violence (brodie et al, ; florimbio et al, ). psychological impacts of online hate human beings are vicariously used to enjoy violence and conflict in movies, television and simulated computer games, the net with their relative anonymity and impunity help users to exercise aggression online against real human beings. vitriolic words and graphic threats have become a form of digital sadism (sest and march, ) where incivility and crude remarks are a competitive game among perpetrators. they derive pleasure and g ratification from the discomfort and distress of the victims (megarry, ). trollers relish the back-and- forth mockery and boast about their ability to create the most evocative venom, break taboos and elicit emotional responses from targets. this hate aims to exclude women from the production and consumption of tools, platforms, and services of digital infrastructure. constant remarks and threats cause the victims to experience long term emotional/ psychological trauma, symptoms of panic, anxiety, and depression, sexual problems, and attachment dysfunction primarily relationship anxiety and avoidance (ross et al, ). women report significantly low self-esteem and loss of self-confidence. for some the reactions from families and support groups based on the existing cultural myths, make it difficult to cope with the experience. there is also a constant fear of the safety of self and family (lindsey et al, ). females facing subordination and exclusion online, tend to withdraw from online platforms or change the ways of online interaction often at the cost of their profession. this has been termed ‘economic vandalism’ by e. a. jane (jane ). many women report restricting online post e x p r e s s i n g o p i n i o n s , u s i n g m a l e pseudonyms, playing male characters in games, avoiding controversial forums, and engaging the trollers to diminish the hate speech. to decrease the digital gender divide, many schools and organizations now provide sexual harassment awareness training to their members. research indicates that such training decreases the acceptance of rape myths. fighting ‘fire with fire’ digital technologies paradoxically also provide ways to combat abuse and hate by enabling vigilantism, activism, and justice (trottier, ; fileborn, ). confidential and anonymous reporting of sexual assault has empowered victims to alert authorities and take action against their assaulters. several victims of online sexual harassment are using the technology to publicly call out the perpetrators (diy justice onlineor digilantism), documenting evidence captured in their smart phones and sharing t h e i r e x p e r i e n c e s a s s e a r ch a b l e # testimonials with supportive online peer community, some are resorting to making public art, blogs and websites filled with images received by them over the years (vitis and gilmour, ). social media sites have become a forum for hashtags activism where victims- survivors, activists, advocates, etc can discuss their experiences, challenge the prevalent mindset, debate, and reframe policies. with this # going viral with multiple sharing and likes, these are also a bridge to gain the attention of the mainstream media and political groups and pressurize necessary changes in policies and laws (henry and powell, ) for faster justice (jane dobson, ). cyber laws in india it has become imperative to teach women especially young girls to identify acts of indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ) sexual harry in their nascent stage and keep evidence via screen shots and printouts that can help investigators to trace perpetrators. it's the first instinct to ignore and delete the materials but these only encourage abusers (sethi and ghatak, ). not reacting or responding to these seems to be the first response of the victims followed by blocking and reporting abuse in the sites that are obliged to disable them within hours under it rules . cybercrimes have no jurisdiction as these crimes are committed without any barriers of boundaries. so, this can be reported in any city irrespective of where the crime was committed. police cyber cells have been established especially for internet-related criminal activities. for those who don't wish to approach police can lodge complaints at national commission for women, who take it up with the police and in case of serious offenses can set up and inquiry to probe the issues. the it amendment act, has established a national nodal agency called indian computer emergency response team (cert-in) responsible for computer security threats that have issued guidelines on procedures, prevention, reporting, and response to cyber sexual harassment and abuse incidents. online grievance redressal can be done using emails, filling up incident reporting forms, telephones, fax, and letters addressed to the ministry of electronics and information technology. some of the cyber laws about sexual harassment under indian judiciary are: . section a of the ipc: under this law, people posting obscene comments on sns are liable for punishment up to one-year imprisonment with/without fine. unwelcome physical contact, explicit sexual overtures, showing pornography against the will and d e m a n d i n g s e x u a l f a v o r s a r e punishable with imprisonment up to years with or without fine. . section c of the ipc: punishment for voyeurism is described in this act with up to years of imprisonment in case of the first offense and up to years play in second offense. it especially describes private acts when unsuspecting women are watched, or their images/videos captured. it also i n c l u d e s t h e d i s s e m i n a t i o n o f consensual image to rd party (revenge porn). it is a criminal offense under both the it act and ipc . section d of the ipc: this section describes stalking. any man who follows a woman attempts interaction despite clear disinterest by a woman and monitors her activities via digital/electronic communications (except for detection /prevention of s u s p e c t e d c r i m i n a l a c t i v i t i e s , reasonable under circumstances) is punishable up to three years and up to five years in subsequent offenses along with monetary fine. . section of the ipc: this section has provisions for defamation. any spoken o r w r i t t e n wo r d , s i g n s, v i s u a l representation, the publication (obscene remarks, photos, or videos on social media) concerning any person that intends harm the public reputation of such person may be imprisoned for up to years with or without fine or both. . section of the ipc: this section deals with criminal intimidation. threats of injury to person, reputation, or property with the intent to cause alarm is punishable with a jail term of up to years. threats of grievous hurt are punishable for up to seven years. . section of the ipc: any person committing the offense of criminal i n t i m i d a t i o n u s i n g a n o n y m o u s communications is liable for punishment for upto two years. indian journal of health, sexuality & culture volume ( ), issue ( ) . section of the ipc: any sexual words, sounds, gestures, exhibits (photos or videos) posted on sns intruding upon privacy and modesty is punishable for up to years with fine. . section e and a of the it act: publishing sexual images in print or digitally that violates the privacy of an individual is penalized with imprisonment up to years and fine up to lakhs under e and seven years imprisonment and fines up to lakhs in a . section of the it act: publishing obscene material online. . s e c t i o n b : p u b l i s h i n g c h i l d pornography, online sexual grooming o f c h i l d r e n i s p e n a l i z e d w i t h imprisonment from to years and fine up to lakhs. . section of the ipc: any book, paper, pamphlet, drawing, painting, or representation deemed lascivious and obscene digitallyfalls under this provision. conclusion online communities and social media have empowered victim-survivors, advocates, activists, etc, and enabled widespread support for feminist activism. woman's testimonials have long served as a form of activism and justice-seeking but the online formats have enabled reclaiming several p r e v i o u s l y s i l e n t vo i c e s, i n c r e a s e d participation, generate awareness about gender mis recognition, validation of their experiences from global network and vindication for their sufferings. these have been recognized socially and politically, necessitating measures for reporting and action against perpetrators (powell and henry, ). laws have been modified to encompass the changing scenarios and people have been sensitized to this fundamental yet ‘new’ discrimination. thus, this widespread uproar is mot merely slacktivism (rotman, )but an all- powerful tool for activism and seeking both informal and formal justice (powell and henry, )against the age-old gender wars, to bring forth significant 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(jl : rsv) the devastation is vividly described in the first chapter. in the latter part of the second chapter, joel’s tone changes and he recounts how god will have pity on the people. then comes god’s promise: ‘i will restore to you the years which the swarming locusts has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter … you shall eat plenty and be satisfied’ (jl : – rsv). she recounts how she read the book of joel during repressive times in south africa and how it became: [a] metaphor in my life for the ravages of apartheid as well as for my own personal demons. the idea that god would repay the years that the locusts had eaten stayed with me. the destruction wrought by the in this contribution, the connection between redressing the past and doing justice in the present is explored by presenting the notion of ‘paradox’ as a response to ‘binary thinking’. in this regard, ‘paradox’ denotes contradictory, yet interrelated aspects that exist simultaneously. ‘binary thinking’ refers to either/or categorical aspects that cannot co-exist. two paradoxes are explored as a response to increasing polarisation because of a struggle in redressing past injustices: the paradox of remembering and forgetting and the paradox of difference and sameness. this is done by bringing the work of the south african practical theologian, denise ackermann, in conversation with the work of the croatian systematic theologian, miroslav volf. from different origins and experiences, both offer a way forward, and a way to move on beyond the devastation that is caused by dealing with injustice, difference and memory in a polarising fashion. the contribution concludes with a reflection on the notion of ‘ceding space’ from a trinitarian theological perspective. the ceding of space is proposed as act of transformation, as the outcome of the ideas proposed by ackermann and volf, and as a way to live together, ‘after the locusts’. keywords: paradox; binary; justice; transformation; identity; diversity; otherness; memory; hybridity; trinitarian theology. redressing the past, doing justice in the present: necessary paradoxes read online: scan this qr code with your smart phone or mobile device to read online. note: hts th anniversary maake masango dedication. this article represents re-worked aspects of a paper entitled ‘reconciling diversity ‘after the locusts’: a political-theological landscape’, presented at the conference entitled ‘land: texts, narratives and practices’, which took place at the university of pretoria from august to september . http://www.hts.org.za http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:tanya.vanwyk@up.ac.za https://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . https://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hts.v i . =pdf&date_stamp= - - page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access locusts would be restored. this thought drifted down into my subconscious … in troubled times i would retrieve it. (ackermann :xiv) she describes her time growing up during apartheid as being faced with different types of locusts and faced with daily decisions about ‘what to do, what to believe, how to act as a white person, as a south african and as a woman’ (ackermann :xiv). she wrote her ‘letters from a landscape of faith’ because south africans were living (around the year ) with the ravages of the locust years and longed for restoration and healing. ackermann’s reference to the devastation by the locusts, coupled with her reason for writing the book, has made a lasting impression on me because it is an apt description of what is happening in south africa and the whole world today ( ), namely, that we are living with the ravages of the locust years. the last few years have witnessed profound and rapid calls for transformations of all kinds, in many different spheres of life, across the globe. injustices of the past have come knocking on the door of the present: debates rage in many sectors about the effects of colonialism, racism, slavery and patriarchy and have resulted in an adamant chorus around the world of we have had enough (cf. van wyk ; pillay ). miroslav volf ( : ) described this as a summons to remember. this summons has led to an explosion of separate but related discussions that connect a range of issues: identity and diversity, borders and hospitality, transformation and justice (hill collins & bilge ; zakaria : – ). denise ackermann’s metaphor of the ravages of locusts and a longing for restoration is as relevant as ever. the question is, how to proceed? what comes after the locusts? in essence, dirk smit ( : – ) has the same concern in his contribution entitled justice and/as compassion. on the good samaritan and political theology, where he is concerned about the appropriate ways in which to respond to growing racism in society. smit illustrates how governments have historically responded to this challenge by utilising legal measures at their disposal and making racism illegal. smit ( ) remarks, however, in reference to the south african context, that: [t]he nonracialism (professed in the constitution) can clearly not be commanded, ordered, regulated, legalised – so how is it to be attained in a deeply racist society with racist histories and memories and racist legacies and structures? (p. ) one way is further polarisation and division: telling people who is to blame for their current situation and making them .in south africa, the #feesmustfall-movement swept through higher education centres in – . this happened together with renewed calls to end government corruption (see, e.g. ranjeni ). south africa has also witnessed many protests regarding continued violence against women, like the #thetotalshutdown-march, see, for example, the web page ‘#thetotalshutdown. my body – not your crime scene’, http://thetotalshutdown.org.za/; cf. reddy . during there has been a renewed and much stronger emphasis on the issue of land reform in south africa. globally, there have been a number of calls towards transformation and justice, as witnessed in the ‘#timesup’-; ‘#metoo’- and ‘#blacklivesmatter’ movements. government dictatorial rule has also been under the spotlight, like the umbrella movement in hong kong and venezuelans and zimbabweans, respectively, protesting against dictatorship. for a summary of these protests and movements, see miller ( ). afraid of those people. these arguments lead to two available options for those wanting to protect themselves from the other: ‘those responsible’ for your situation should be removed, and their trace in history abolished, or you should separate yourself (distance yourself) from them completely. because of the very nature of polarisation, this cuts both ways. therefore, debates about the removal of statues, the building of walls and the safeguarding of culture and identity are increasing and they have become violent. with regard to the south african situation, tinyiko maluleke ( ) has remarked: our language is violent and violence is our language … if there is an area in which the truth and reconciliation commission failed, and failed spectacularly, it is in the area of national anger management. we are an angry people. this is an angry nation. some of the angriest white as well as black people on earth live here. (p. ) are we to remain stuck in increasing polarisation and binary us/ them categories? i am of the opinion that the only way to move beyond the devastation of the locusts and the locust years is to search for collective ways of life, ways in which to share space (land, resources, opportunities) and therefore to find an authentic way to live with, and to reconcile, diversity. this entails a willingness to embrace, what i describe as, creative tension and therefore a willingness to engage with at least two paradoxes: the paradox of remembering and not remembering (forgetting) past experiences and events, and the paradox of difference and sameness, that is, the connection of identity to being demarcated while opening up space and ‘inviting in’. i chose the notion ‘paradox’ deliberately as a response to binary thinking, or thinking and acting according to binary oppositions that divide reality into either/or categories (elbow : – ; see also borderland ). in surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey, ackermann ( ) describes a paradox as a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd, but in reality it expresses a possible truth. for her, a paradox promises that apparent opposites can come together in our lives and that either/or thinking can be replaced with something that is closer to both/and (ackermann : ). in this contribution, i use ackermann’s notion of paradox as a departure point to reflect on what i think are necessary conditions for collective living and reconciling diversity – authentic transformation – in an era that demands it, longs for it and needs it. i do this in an attempt to move further away from division and polarisation and closer to the promise of the restoration in the form of both/and. i will bring ackermann’s work into conversation with that of the croatian theologian miroslav volf because their theology (and spirituality) has a certain spaciousness for holding the tension of opposites to flourish amidst the human condition. a final remark: a reflection on conditions for reconciling diversity, collective living and transformation is of the utmost importance in south african today because the debate about land reform, land distribution and land ownership. however, .see, for example, the analyses of the political essayist and columnist, pankaj mishra ( : – ), on the globalisation of rage. with regard to calls for statues to be removed, see eleftheriou-smith ( ) (see also bidgood et al. ; haden ). http://www.hts.org.za http://thetotalshutdown.org.za/ page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access the issues discussed in this reflection are of equal importance to redressing the past and doing justice in the present with regard to other historical and present phenomena, such as the role of women in society, religious intolerance and human sexual diversity, both in south africa and abroad. the paradox of remembering and forgetting an archaeology of memory in the early th century, the french novelist marcel proust reflected on the nature of memory in a work of fiction entitled a la recherche du temps perdu. when the work (consisting of multiple volumes) was translated into english, its title was rendered in two ways. between and , it was translated with the title remembrance of things past by c.k. scott moncrieff, and in the english translation was revised by terence kilmartin and published under the title in search of lost time (cf. proust ). both these titles depict memory from different vantage points. according to richard bradley ( : ), the first title suggests that remembering the past is an involuntary process, while the second ‘evokes a deliberate effort to remake a past that is out of reach’. in proust’s work, the role of memory is a central theme, as it has an effect on how one assigns meaning to experiences. in this regard, memory is depicted as both a creative act and an interpretation (bradley : ). it is almost as if the different renditions of the title of the book reflect this. this highlights for me the idea that the retelling of history, in whichever form (oral, written or monuments and landmarks), is an interpretative act. the retelling of history is the only way descendants and later generations have access to past events. this means history is related to remembering it and therefore related to memory. the most precise attempt to reproduce memories (or history) will yield different versions of it. different mnemonic techniques (a system of ideas, letters or associations which assist in remembering something) in oral history traditions might render slight variations of the events they are recounting and even large-scale ‘memories’ such as monuments or landmarks are modified, rebuilt, abandoned or replaced over time (bradley : ). remembering might, therefore, also include ‘the art of forgetting’ (forty & küchler ). one might say that what we do with history and how we carry it into the present or future are influenced by the paradoxical act of remembering and forgetting. this section considers this paradox with regard to the case at hand, namely, redressing the past and doing justice in the present. historical injustice grappling with the nature of historical injustice is often a necessary feature of political life … there are no easy answers. understanding and dealing with the moral consequences of the past is one of the most important political issues of our time, and yet also one of the most intractable. (ivison : ) ‘historical injustice’ is a multifaceted notion (ivison : ). i use the word ‘notion’ here because the reality of injustices that have taken place in the past cannot always be neatly demarcated or precisely defined. in general, it refers to wrongs committed by individuals or groups to other individuals or groups, where the victims themselves are now dead, but their descendants are alive today. in some cases, there are no descendants of the victims and in other cases the perpetrator(s) do not exist anymore, while the victims are still alive. if descendants of neither the victim nor the perpetrator are alive, there might not be a ‘historical injustice’ to answer, but a great harm has still been inflicted. ‘descendants’ may also refer to groups of individuals who have identified with a collective identity that has persisted through time (‘women’ as a group who have suffered under patriarchy, for example). according to the political scientist duncan ivison ( : – ), a consideration of the scope and nature of historical injustice is connected to six questions or issues: the normative weight of the past in debates about what is ‘owed’ to one another; the matter of which historical injustices matter and the reasons why they matter; the question of to whom the reparations are owed; the question of who should make the reparations (pay for it – in whichever way); the matter of which form of reparation will suffice and finally, the question of which political considerations to factor into account when defending or criticising reparations. reparations can take place in three modes (ivison : – ). the first one is restitution. this means restoring or returning that which was taken. this literal mode of reparation is not always possible; therefore, compensation as a second mode of reparation could be applicable. this might be complicated too because the value of that which was lost or taken cannot be determined or is too great to be compensated. a third mode of reparation is recognition or acknowledgement of those victims who have been denied basic humanity and subjectivity in the wrongs committed against them. recognition of responsibility is a separate but related aspect of reparation with regard to historical injustices. it is first and foremost based on the awareness of an injustice that has been committed, and secondly, it is based on the acknowledgement of how one has been complicit in the enactment of that injustice, which may have taken the form of social and political agency that had been denied to individuals or groups of people. recognition of responsibility can take the form of a public apology or collective remembrance. some injustices suffered can be compensated. a great number of injustices suffered cannot be compensated. how to respond or how to remember therefore becomes paramount. memory: how to respond? miroslav volf ( : ) recounts how he was summoned for military service in in the former communist yugoslavia. soon after he reported for duty, he realised that he was being http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access treated as a potential spy. he was married to an american and had received training (his christian theological study) in the west (germany and the united states), and therefore he was treated as a security risk. a letter from his wife was intercepted and used as a pretext for a first ‘conversation’ about his so-called subversiveness. the interrogations that would last for months had begun. he was not physically tortured, but the psychological torture of being at the mercy of the interrogator left its mark, as volf remarks: ‘even afterward, my mind was enslaved by the abuse i had suffered’ (volf : ). the presence of the chief interrogator was so vivid and constant; it was as if he had moved into the household of volf’s mind. gradually, however, the interrogator was relegated to the back of his mind and his voice drowned out. although the interrogator had been sidelined, volf’s response to the abuse and his reaction to it had not. when he started thinking about his response, he first of all felt a need for retribution. at some point, subconsciously, he realised that he could not give in to what he felt because he would be responding as a wounded animal and not a free human being. this was not an easy undertaking. volf acknowledges that holding onto the requirement to love one’s enemy becomes more difficult the more severe the wrongdoing is. evil will triumph, however, if the evil is returned because evil needs two victories to win: the first when an evil deed is committed, and the second when that evil deed is returned. the first evil would wither away if it is not regenerated with the second one. volf realised that although he had no control over the mistreatment against him, he did have the power to prevent a second evil. and so, he started ‘stumbling in the footsteps of the enemy-loving god’ (volf : ). did the decision not to retaliate resolve the entire experience? no. the difference is, the wrongdoing was now only repeated in his memory, and not in reality. therefore, the questions were, how should the perpetrator, and what he had done, be remembered? or forgotten? volf’s experience and thought processes illustrate what is at stake when it comes to debates about transformation that is prevalent because of past injustices knocking on the door of the present. at the heart of the paradox of remembering and forgetting, with regard to moving on, ‘after the locusts’, is the question about how much of one’s projected future should be ‘colonised’ by the locusts, whichever form they might take. his arguments about memory and the response to injustice are based on his theological convictions about the paradoxical nature and outcome of christian faith, which, as i will point out later again, is something he has in common with denise .volf’s introspection with regard to his memories is based on his interpretation of psalm : : ‘remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions, according to thy steadfast love remember me, for thy goodness’ sake, o lord!’ (rsv). he asks what it would mean if he remembered the wrongdoings of his interrogator in the way he would want god to forget his transgressions based on god’s love for him. he relates this conviction to his interpretation of the apostle paul’s statement in corinthians : : ‘for the love of christ controls us; because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all has died’ (rsv). in light of this volf asks, how should he remember the abuse of his interrogator, given christ’s atonement, for all. broadly stated, ‘remembering’ for volf, with regard to his experience of the ackermann. volf argues two broad points with regard to memory, which i emphasise here as i am convinced they are both of extreme importance for redressing the past and doing justice in the present. they are: remembering truthfully and condemning rightly (volf : – ). this pertains to the wronged person as individual as well as those that wronged the individual. remembering truthfully entails an interrogation of your own memories and a contextualisation of it: the time the wrongdoing took place, the system or structure in which it occurred and possibly also the context of the wrongdoer’s life. this will enable you to condemn rightly: ‘in memory, a wrongdoing often does not remain an isolated stain on the character of the one who committed it; it spreads over and colours their entire character’ (volf : ). that spread can only be contained if one remembers virtues alongside vices, good deeds alongside evil deeds. condemnation is done in forgiveness in which the doer and the deed are separated. in this regard, as elie wiesel ( ) has emphasised, redemption can (or may) be found in memory. given how deep some injustices can cut, this type of redemption might seem impossible, or even inauthentic. for volf ( : – ), however, the possible link between memory and redemption is subject to related decisions or actions, which entails, firstly, interpreting memories and inscribing them into a larger pattern of one’s life story and into a broader pattern of meaning – the suffering could have contributed to your own resilience or to the exposure of the abuse of power (for example). in order for this not to be a cheap rationalising or ‘cleaning-of-the-slates’ exercise, a second step has to be taken: the ‘acknowledgement’ of what happened and what was done (ivison : – ). this is not unqualified remembrance – it is the acknowledgement of the truth of what was done. therefore, an important part of remembering truthfully is ‘naming’. ‘interrogations’ cannot be described as ‘conversations’. when a euphemism like this is used, it masks (hides) injustice and injury. finally, memory can serve as a means of redemption because it can generate solidarity with victims (volf ): remembering suffering awakens us from the slumber of indifference and goads us to fight against the suffering and oppression around us … the memory of past horror will make us loathe to tolerate it in the present. (p. ) is remembering in this way co-dependent on forgetting? i think so. that is what i would like to emphasise in discussion with miroslav volf’s arguments. to remember includes forgetting – in an authentic way and with integrity. in my interrogator, is closely connected to the (biblical) notion of loving one’s enemy. for these references to his own theology, see volf ( : – ). .i recognise that memory is not only about remembering or forgetting wrongdoings. it is human to remember and therefore other events and experiences are remembered as well. memories are both painful and pleasant. we remember for different reasons and go to different lengths to remember: the birthday of a friend, a turn of phrase, crossing a bridge or fulfilling a commitment. because the chapter focuses on the balance between past and present with regard to collective living and reconciling diversity, the memories in focus here are those of wrongdoings. .‘if we value living in a society in which freedom is taken seriously, then we should take responsibility seriously’ (ivison : ). see also ripstein ( : – ) for the important connection between taking responsibility about committing wrongdoing in the past and doing justice in the present. http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access opinion, this does not mean forgetting the past into ‘non- existence’, that is, it never happened. what i would term ‘authentic forgetting’ is to forget ‘into the past’. this is forgiveness – ‘blotting out the offense so that it no longer mars the offender’ (volf : ). i would want to add, so that it no longer mars the victim either. the link i make here between ‘forgetting into the past’ and forgiveness is illustrated by kenneth briggs ( ) in his commentary on the film by martin doblemeier about the power of forgiveness: the process of cleansing oneself from vengeance and fury against someone who has caused you harm may take a long time and happen in fits and starts … but it isn’t intended to wipe away the offenses or take the violator off the legal hook. it is a more mysterious pathway that can leave both parties less burdened by inner and outer pain. many intertwine forgiveness with doing justice. (p. ) volf ( : ) is convinced that the only way to embrace this type of forgetting and embrace forgiveness is within a christian framework: ‘no argument independent of belief in the god of infinite love can be constructed to persuade those who want to keep a tight grip on strict retributive justice’. no one can be forced to not remember and no one may insist, that one who has suffered, should not remember. forgetting, in the way described here, is a gift, from the persecuted to the perpetrator, and must remain a gift freely given. the paradox that holds the promise of an open (and creative) future is therefore about remembering and not remembering: the experience or event of wrongdoing and injustice is not relegated to non-existence, but the memory of it does not have the ability to invade your existence to the point of your own non-being. memories can act as a sword that simply cuts everything to pieces. the same sword can, however, also be employed to defend justice. memories can act as a shield that protects comfort zones, but it can also be employed to protect justice. an imbalance between remembering and forgetting (or non- remembrance) will result in either hate and violence or nostalgia and ignorance. if we are able to embrace the tension and find fulfilment in the paradox, we might experience the realisation of the promise volf ( : ) alludes to: ‘the proper goal of the memory of wrongs suffered – its appropriate end – is the formation of the communion of love between all people, including victims and perpetrators’. in this regard, perfect love is the end (the purpose) and the end (final, no more) of memory. the paradox of difference and sameness identity markers and dimensions of identity a key issue with regard to reconciling diversity, collective living and transformation is the notion of ‘identity’ (fukuyama : – ). the reason for this, as michael rowlands ( : – ) has pointed out, is that concern with identity develops and grows consistently with the concern about the individual in a mass society – in other words, the more we grow in numbers (and in diversity), the greater concern is for holding onto, cultivating or demarcating ‘my own’ identity. postmodern philosophers like michel foucault ( , ) and pierre bourdieu ( : – , : – ) have created awareness of the potential dangers of categorising identity (and identity markers) because of the influence power has on the creation of those categories of identity (cf. meskell : – ). keeping this ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in mind (itao : – ; ricoeur , ), the notion of identity conveys a sense of individuality and personality: ‘the sameness of a person or thing is itself and not something else’ (rowlands : ). there are different ‘axes of identity’, or points of focus around which identity coalesce, such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class or age. there are other dimensions of identity that become apparent or are highlighted with regard to social roles and the connection or commitment to a piece of land or a country: religion, language, culture, nationality and the types of relationships you might enter into or be a part of. this could also be described as social identity. ian craib emphasised that every person has a number of social identities and that these entail constant organisation and negotiation (craib : – ). rowlands ( : – ) distinguishes between the psychology of identity and the political dimensions of identification. debates about hospitality and inclusivity are greatly determined by the political dimension of identification, as is seen, for example, in the research of belgian theologian eddy van der borght ( , : – ) on the nature of the christian church. he has illustrated the influence of identity markers such as ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnicity’ in reference to the historical struggle of the christian church to adhere to its confession of being one and catholic simultaneously. this is evidenced by the church’s struggle not only with diverse interpretations of church doctrine, but also with regard to an inclusive ecclesiology based on diverse notions of theological anthropology (cf. van wyk & buitendag : – ), as seen in the different denominations’ attempts to keep women out of ministry, constitute ethnic-based churches and continue religious debate about homosexuality (and for that matter, diverse sexual and gender identities). roland robertson ( : – ) has argued that modernisation has brought about identity problems, both in a psychological and a political sense, because it has evoked a sense of nostalgic desire: things were ‘better’ when everything happened at a slower pace, or when people kept to their designated social roles and spaces and everybody went to church on sundays (for example). it could be said that postmodernism (with the emphasis on the ‘-ism’) has brought about the same identity crisis for some because this paradigm shift is experienced or perceived as the loss of clearly demarcated boundaries and ‘truths’. in a climate where the maintenance of boundaries is perceived as safeguarding a so-called natural order or as the safeguard http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access against the loss of identity, anything that can threaten that maintenance is regarded with suspicion, or demonised or ostracised. xenophobia – fear of the other, or in context of my argument here, fear of the one who has different identity markers than i do – abounds. when this happens, identity becomes an instrument of polarisation and identity is the instrument of the creation of the us/them-binary (ackermann : – ). identity becomes indicative of sameness and continuity, and therefore inclusive immigration policies, the acknowledgement of diverse sexual and gender identities, inter-religious co-operation and liberation movements are countered at all costs because they are endangering who i am and endangering my way of life (zakaria : – ). as described in the introduction of this contribution, this polarisation becomes a locust-like plague, leaving devastation in its wake. that is why miroslav volf ( : ) has said, ‘it may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference’. in the following section, i will reflect on this. borders, identity and otherness miroslav volf was born in osijek, croatia (when it was part of the federal republic of yugoslavia), moved to novi sad, serbia (then part of yugoslavia) at the age of five. osijek was mostly roman catholic and novi sad, orthodox. volf’s father became a minister for a pentecostal community in novi sad. protestants was in the minority and pentecostals even more so. it is clear that volf had a number of margins and borders with regard to national and religious ‘axes of identity’ to contend with. his reflection on identity and otherness (crossing borders) stems from this context. this was amplified during the croatian war of independence ( – ) in which serbian fighters called četnik herded fast amounts of croats into concentration camps, assaulted them and raped the women. during the final stages of that war, volf is challenged by his mentor jürgen moltmann about whether he would be able to ‘embrace’ a serbian fighter – for him, the ‘ultimate other’. for volf, this was a question about identity, justice and the christian paradox of being demarcated and hospitable at the same time. the confession, jesus is lord, demarcates because it binds all who make the confession together and distinguishes them form those who do not. the very same confession, however, implies an inclusive invitation to ‘all the nations’ and does not hierarchically separate jew, greek, man or woman, based on different axes of identity (patterson ; cf. van aarde : – ). therefore, volf ( : ) asks: ‘what would justify the embrace? where would i draw the strength for it? what would it do to my identity as a human being and as a croat?’ based on this, his answer to moltmann is that he did not think that he can embrace his own ultimate other, but as a follower of christ he should be able to. this exchange illustrates how the paradox of difference and sameness can influence the balance between redressing the past and doing justice in the present and how notions of ‘identity’ factors into it. denise ackermann’s theological engagement with the relationship between the past and the doing justice in the present is based on embracing difference (ackermann : – ). she emphasises the notion of a ‘hybrid identity’ (ackermann : ). volf too emphasises hybridity in his reflection on the connection between identity and reconciliation. he is slightly hesitant that hybrid identity could entail the maintenance of fixed boundaries; however, he affirms that from a christian perspective, one would not want to get rid of hybridity (volf : , – , – ). for ackermann, crossing cultural barriers (or borders of any kind) is an almost automatic consequence of embracing multifaceted identity, or an identity made up of difference. in her letter to her granddaughters (ackermann : – ), she describes the hybrid heritage and therefore hybrid identity of both herself and her husband. although her theology engages substantially with the identity marker of gender (ackermann : – , : – ), in these reflections, language and culture are the most prominent identity markers. she and her husband both grew up speaking english and afrikaans and were familiar with ‘both cultures’. this was because of a mixed european ancestry on both sides. in particular, ackermann grew up speaking only english to her mother and only afrikaans to her father. she had the sense of trying to be ‘many selves’ as her father became a diplomat after the second world war (for her at age ) and thereafter she attended school on different continents. two languages became five: i have many memories of being the alien, a foreigner at school and, on returning from abroad, a stranger in my own country, even among my cousins. being a hybrid meant being an outsider. (ackermann : ) the attempt at ‘settling’ her identity became more difficult as she grew increasingly uncomfortable with and eventually opposed afrikaner nationalism – also within her immediate family circle. this was an identity marker that was utilised above all others during apartheid in south africa to separate (not distinguish) difference in a hierarchical fashion. the resultant alienation ackermann experienced from her family also shaped her identity and in the end her identity was ‘settled’ by embracing the contradictory aspects of it; in other words, she embraced the paradox of difference and sameness. for ackermann ( : – , : ), the very notion of ‘identity’ has a double meaning: it denotes sameness and difference – it is how one is identical to others, yet precisely how those who are identical to each other are different from others. therefore, the most important aspect of ‘identity’ is that it is shaped in ongoing dialogue with others (cf. taylor ). she does issue a warning: identity can become a dangerous issue if one identity is given a higher value than others. when this happens, identity becomes a polarising and dividing factor. the response to this polarisation, as i argue in this contribution, is rather to accept and embrace the .compare the work of bhabha ( : – ). he discusses the notion of hybridity in conjunction with ‘identity’ and the influence of colonialism. see also how his work was utilised by frenkel and shenhav ( ), in which they argue in favour of a shift from a binary epistemology to a hybrid epistemology in management. http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access simultaneous contradictory and hybrid identity of each other, at all times. as ackermann ( ) remarks: the temptation is either to take on the identity of one’s family or culture uncritically or to adopt a full identity from an alternative culture with equally little self-reflection. both are hideous mistakes. we cannot turn our back on our culture of origin; neither should we be its slave. we do not choose when, where, and to whom we are born. so both a sense of distance as well as a sense of belonging are necessary. belonging without distance is destructive. distance without belonging isolates us … the ways in which we deal with the question of difference shape our identities. (p. ) it is important to acknowledge and name ambiguity and contradiction in one’s engagement with difference. to address the devastation of the locusts entails the simultaneous presence of ‘borders’ and dialogue. borders show demarcation. borders are an expression of space. it is not a case of keeping out is bad and taking in is good. total inclusion collapses all borders. when this happens, the criteria and ability for distinguishing between repressive identity and affirming identity are lost. boundaries can only be crossed if the challenge of difference is met, and there is dialogue to exchange views particularly with those who differ from us (ackermann : ). this understanding of borders/boundaries being open and closed, on the cusp of sameness and difference, brings the notion of hospitality to mind (shepard : – ) and links up with miroslav volf’s paradoxical use of the metaphor of ‘embrace’ with regard to his exploration of reconciliation. in the ‘embrace’, there is a double act of opening and closing. indeed, there are four elements to the movement of embrace: opening the arms, waiting, closing the arms and opening them again: i open my arms to create space in myself for the other. the open arms are a sign of discontent at being myself only and of desire to include the other. they are an invitation to the others to come in and feel at home with me, to belong to me. in an embrace i also close my arms around the others – not tightly, so as to crush and assimilate them forcefully into myself, for that would not be an embrace, but a concealed power-act of exclusion; but gently – so as to tell them that i do not want to be without them in their otherness. i want them to remain independent and true to their genuine selves, to maintain their identity and as such become part of me so that they can enrich me with what they have and i do not. (volf : – ) for the borders to be crossed, boundaries to be transcended and ongoing dialogue to be authentic, certain conditions are necessary although dominant power relations need to be deconstructed, and private and public/political identity cannot be divided into isolated and closed identities that is separate from one another (taljaard : ). ackermann’s hermeneutics of paradox is actually a spirituality of paradox. her understanding of identity and context is closely related to her spirituality (taljaard : ), which is about living with freedom and with hope in the tensions that arise between dependence and autonomy, knowing and not knowing, faith and doubt. she emphasises that accepting the contradictions in herself will help her do so elsewhere: christian spirituality is about learning to live with trust and hope in the middle of tensions and contradictions … when we recognise tensions that are life-giving, we will not fall prey so readily to the tensions that are death-dealing. (ackermann : ) to move on, ‘beyond the locusts’ and the binary and polarising us/them, requires courage and creativity to thrive amidst sameness and difference and the promise of this paradox because (according to ackermann [ : ]) the power of the paradox presents us with series of open doors and open space – a space (according to volf [ : ]) in which new identities can continuously be-in-becoming. the similarities between ackermann’s experience and thought and that of volf are quite striking. it is to the notion of open space that i turn now in the concluding section. conclusion: ceding space and doing justice in the present in his work entitled moral man and immoral society, reinhold niebuhr ( ; cf. smit : ) asked the question if it is at all possible to make any meaningful difference in the face of entrenched systemic and structural injustice. in much the same way, and also related to the notion of justice, i have been thinking (and wondering) about ‘reconciling diversity’ for most of my theological education. the single greatest reason for this was the experience of how my own church community, the netherdutch reformed church (nrca), dealt with ‘difference’ in its history. the first woman to be ordained in the nrca was in . more than years later, there is only one woman on the central leadership committee (the general synod committee), which consists of people. only in did the nrca publicly recognise that the church was complicit in maintaining the structures of apartheid with their theological justification of it – and that it was wrong to do so. after this recognition, the nrca went through a painful schism that resulted in legal battles about church property which was illegally appropriated by parties within the nrca who disagreed with the nrca’s anti-apartheid declaration. this is an ongoing matter. at the synod meeting, the nrca ended years of theological debate in the church about homosexuality by confirming the conviction (belief) that god loves all human beings and that it is the church’s prophetic task to see that justice is done. in effect this means that ministers from my church denomination could marry gay couples. currently, http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access there are congregations in the church that are threatening to withhold their financial support of the larger church structure if the -statement/decision is not overturned. as a church community therefore, we are still experiencing challenges to move beyond the locust years. the recurring challenge we face is because of an inability to move towards the ‘promise of the paradox’ – that ‘space’ where apparent opposites can come together in our lives and either/or thinking (binary thinking) can be replaced with something that is closer to both/and. a major reason for this, in my opinion, is because the church is both trying to hang on to a romanticised nostalgia about things being better in the past and also trying to revisit history (to go back in time) and determine if so-called historical injustices were really intended as injustice. this pertains to their approach to racism, sexism, homophobia and also their participation in the current land debate in south africa. they are trying to go back in time to determine who did what to whom, first – because if the originating point or factor can be determined, the assignment of responsibility and the assignment of guilt can take place. this type of reasoning results in being stuck in us/them thinking. the problem, in its simplest form, is the nature of the relationship between past and present and specifically the relationship between remembering and forgetting – the paradox. this paradox relates to the others: dealing with difference and being hospitable. i use my own church community as an example, but they are by no means the only institutional church or denomination struggling with this. in my theological reflection about these paradoxes, i have turned to the christian church’s confession about belief in a trinitarian god for vocabulary to ask necessary questions and to describe creative possibilities for living with difference and transcending binary thought and practice (van wyk ). this more than anything else has been my partner in thought about ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ and the notion of or attempt at reconciling diversity. the primary influence on my thought in this regard has been the ‘social trinitarian’ theology of jürgen moltmann ([ ] :xiv), in which he conceives of god as a ‘society of equals and a community of being (cf. boff : – )’, in which there is a ‘perichoretic’ unity. this community exists by virtue of the reciprocal indwelling of the persons of the trinity. in this community of being, each of the persons is ‘spaces’ for each other and each one mutually cedes the others life and movement, that is, making themselves inhabitable for one another (moltmann [ ] , ), while remaining persons with particular identities. this is rather profound. if we truly believe what we confess, namely, that creation came to be according to the image of god, then creation in the image of a trinitarian god of reconciling diversity should have ample resources for dealing with diversity. but the idea or confession of imago dei, or imago trinitatis (volf ) is .a substantial amount of research has been done over a number of years about the notion and implications of the greek term ‘perichoresis’ in theology. see, for example, durand ( : – ) and rohr and morrel ( ). often a much debated and contested theological discourse in the church because it would assume an uncritical ‘correspondence’ between god and humanity. to this i always reply that there is not an ‘equation symbol’ between god and humanity, but rather that a social trinitarian understanding provides an ‘analogy’ for the way for humanity transcends binarity and the ensuing isolation and oppression that occurs. moltmann’s understanding of god as social trinity is connected to his view of god as a ‘broad place’ – a space in which there is no more cramping. his trinitarian thinking was his attempt at critically resolving the naive self-centredness of one’s, also his own, thinking. in his autobiography, a broad place, he states (moltmann [ ] ): of course i am a european, but european theology no longer needs to be eurocentric. of course i am a man, but my theology does not have to be androcentric in its emphasis. of course i am living in the so-called first world, but my theology does not have to reflect the ideas of those at the top, but should make the voices of the oppressed heard. (p. ) the greater the diversity, the greater the struggle to live with it. this struggle could become a plague of locusts, destroying everything in its path it if goes unchecked. what will be left of the land, so to speak? embracing the apparent contradiction between the past and the present, identity and difference, and borders and hospitality will enable us to cede living space to one another. in this regard, the creative tension of the paradox opens up space. opening, but more specifically, ceding space is justice in itself: to give up some of yourself and some of your space in order for all who inhabit the space to participate mutually and equally in opportunities, resources and land. ceding space will not be comfortable. paradoxes do not make sense and we would want to ‘settle’ them. embracing their tension, however, might just help us to live, creatively, collectively, and help us to flourish in the midst of our broken whole – our beautiful mosaic. acknowledgements competing interests the author declares that she has no financial or personal relationship(s) which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article. author(s) contributions t.v.w. is the sole author of this article. funding information this research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. data availability statement data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study. http://www.hts.org.za page of original research http://www.hts.org.za open access disclaimer the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the authors references ackermann, d.m., , ‘faith and feminism: women doing theology’, in j. de gruchy & c. villa-vicencio (eds.), doing theology in context, pp. – , orbis books, maryknowll, ny. ackermann, d.m., , ‘becoming fully human: an ethic of relationship in difference and otherness’, journal of theology for southern africa (november ), – . ackermann, d.m., , after the locusts. letters from a landscape of faith, william b. eerdmans publishing, grand rapids, mi. ackermann, d.m., , ‘“found wanting and left untried?” – confessions of a ragbag theologian’, in m. pillay, s. nadar & c. de bruyns (eds.), ragbag theologies. essays in honour of denise m. ackermann. a feminist theologian of praxis, pp. – , sunmedia, stellenbosch. ackermann, d.m., , surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey. ordinary blessings, lux verbi, cape town. bhabha, h.k., , ‘signs taken for wonders’, in b. ashcroft, g. griffiths & h. tiffin (eds.), the postcolonial reader, pp. – , routledge, london. bidgood, j., bloch, m., mccarthy, m., stack, l. & andrews, w., , ‘confederate monuments are coming down across the united states. here’ a list’, the new york times, august, viewed november , from https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/ / / /us/confederate-monuments-removed.html. boff, l., , ‘trinity as a society of equals’, in v.-m. kärkkäinen (ed.), the trinity. global perspectives, pp. – , westminster john knox press, louisville, ky. borderland, w., , binary opposition, hierarchy and god’s power in early christianity, viewed november , from http://www.mayanastro. freeservers.com/ binaryopp.htm. bourdieu, p., , ‘what makes a social class? on the theoretical and practical existence of groups’, berkeley journal of sociology , – . bourdieu, p. 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- -feesmustfall-political-failure-triggers-ticking-time-bomb/#.wymoz ejhiu https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/ - - -feesmustfall-political-failure-triggers-ticking-time-bomb/#.wymoz ejhiu https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/ - - -feesmustfall-political-failure-triggers-ticking-time-bomb/#.wymoz ejhiu https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/ - - -the-totalshutdown-march-is-not-a-protest-for-poor-black-women/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/ - - -the-totalshutdown-march-is-not-a-protest-for-poor-black-women/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/ - - -the-totalshutdown-march-is-not-a-protest-for-poor-black-women/ https://doi.org/ . /j. - . .tb .x https://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . https://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . https://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . https://doi.org/ . /ve.v i . political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in russia and the us full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rctc culture, theory and critique issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rctc political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in russia and the us maria brock to cite this article: maria brock ( ) political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in russia and the us, culture, theory and critique, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: jul . submit your article to this journal article views: view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rctc http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rctc http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rctc &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rctc &show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in russia and the us maria brock centre for baltic and east european studies (cbees), södertörn university, sweden abstract when cynical distance and ironic posturing have become the prevalent means of relating to public life, political humour is no longer considered subversive. it has been argued that both in russia and the united states, ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, thereby displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. this articles explores the twenty-first century potential of irony and cynicism to disrupt and subvert through parody, be it in the form of political satire or ironic protest, examining how similar paradigms are expressed across different geographical contexts. the ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices – wampole ( ) it has been observed that in the twenty-first century, political humour experiences difficul- ties gaining traction, as everyone appears to be in on the joke (hitchens ), while the internet has made sure that no topic is off limits: these days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly. (coe ) along similar lines, slavoj Žižek sees certain forms of irony as indicative of a stance of ‘cynical distance’, and notes that ‘what is really disturbing’ is the ‘underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance’ (Žižek : ). Žižek takes his cue from sloterdijk’s description of the modern cynic and describes cynical distance from ideology as mere illusion, and a belief in being able to maintain such aloofness shows how successfully we have been coopted by ideology: ‘in contempor- ary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. the ruling ideology is not to be taken seriously or literally’ (Žižek : ). while we may therefore cling to the idea that we have transcended false consciousness, we are in fact being duped into thinking we are free of ideological trappings merely because laughter is possible, or at times even encouraged. © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact maria brock maria.brock@sh.se culture, theory and critique , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:maria.brock@sh.se http://www.tandfonline.com this discussion draws on the multiple layers of cynicism at work in contemporary russia, as well as their interrelation with us and other western instantiations of irony. the choice of the us and russia as case studies is not accidental; each harbours modalities of political humour in response to, or as symptoms of specific political climates. if parts of american society are said to keep important questions at an ironic arm’s length, then in a similar vein it is cynicism that has been treated as the ultimate russian affliction. and while irony and cynicism may be distinct phenomena, they occupy neighbouring positions on the spectrum of ‘structures of feeling’. the following discussion does not aim to provide a cultural history of either phenomenon, but looks at specific instantiations of the two, at how irony and cynicism are not only interlinked but, also, how the former can be a form of response to the latter. the aim is thus not so much to illustrate differences but, rather, to show how paradigms are expressed in different contexts. the convergence of the two con- texts along certain fault lines will be thematically addressed throughout this discussion. satire or political humour are here treated as one expression of an ironic or cynical stance to dominant political and societal formations. indeed, it can be argued that this form of expression is a form of political communication in itself (purcell et al. ). sep- arate from the discussion focusing on these specific geopolitical locations, the article exam- ines the twenty-first century’s apparent failure to mobilise subjectivities in the name of political or societal ideals that seek to achieve a wholesale transformation of society. the notion of such a failure coexists with, or is contradicted by, the short-lived intensity and global legacy of the occupy movement – itself frequently employing humour in its acts of protest (e.g., yalçıntaş ). the efficacy of ‘ironic protest’ will also be examined as it is once more becoming a common modality in responding to political developments that seem themselves to have co-opted satire, currently most visibly exemplified by us president donald trump’s relationship with the public. ultimately, the two phenomena emerge not as contradictions, but as responses by a generation that frequently sees political engagement as inherently flawed and traditional politics as corrupt while simultaneously facing the chal- lenges of navigating the post-truth abundance of information circulating online. the article analyses specific examples of satire, as well as the responses of cultural com- mentators and academics to these manifestations of political humour. while the approach adopted is frequently theoretical, the study draws on a number of cases in russia, the united states and beyond that utilitise political humour in their performances or public appear- ances, as well as critical responses to them. an important question underpinning this article is whether there are (recent) political climates that are more conducive to political humour and satire and, more contentiously, eras during which these become more or less effective? after all, each dominant political regime produces forms of resistance, so can the same be said of the converging modalities of power in russia and the us, among others? in order to investigate the claim that an ironic stance precludes serious engagement, the first part of this article will ask what an ironic or cynical relationship to public life entails, examining how ‘living ironically’ can be a manifestation of cynical ideology. irony and cynicism in modern guises in the us, the archetypal contemporary ironist is represented by the hipster – a denomi- nation few ever see fit to apply to themselves, and which is frequently treated as a kind of subspecies of the millennial, itself a generation that has become the subject of numerous m. brock negative myths (thompson ). while there seems to be less agreement on what con- stitutes the essence or component parts from which hipsterdom is formed, it appears that whatever activities they partake in, be it their choice of dress, music or other forms of entertainment, hipsters do so through the prism of irony. the crux of the critique addressed at such ironists is their denial of the meaningfulness of any endeavour, includ- ing earnest participation in political life – a ‘commitment phobia’ to seriousness and the responsibilities this would entail: everything they do is ironic: from the clothes they wear to the tv-shows they watch, to the stupid facial hair they grow – it’s all an endless joke. there is no substance behind any of it. hipsters rebel against a shallow, materialistic, directionless society by being shallow, materi- alistic and directionless. (greif et al. : ) rather than constituting a rebellion, others have argued that irony functions as a defence mechanism, becoming effective in its very slipperiness and through the self-awareness of the ironist. in the words of literary scholar christy wampole, ‘to live ironically is to hide in public’ (wampole ). at the same time, bjørn schiermer argues that looking to hip- sters as a vessel of change is an inherently futile venture, as they do not rally behind a cause as much as they define themselves via the appreciation of certain cultural objects (schier- mer ). however, he insists that the charge of insincerity is perhaps misdirected, even if this sincerity is mostly applied to cultural and material artefacts – indeed, behind a humor- ous appropriation there often lies a celebration of authenticity. crucially, according to schiermer, their less overtly political stance may also be connected to their privilege, as ‘hipsters are young, white and middle class, typically between and years old’ ( : ). yet there are also consistent voices that disagree with the diagnosis of a disaffected, ironic youth, both in the us and in russia (rutten ). ‘new sincerity’ is regularly argued to have superseded ‘the age of irony’ (fitzgerald ), perhaps most insistently so after the terrorist attacks of / . in russia, too, ‘new sincerity’ refers to both an artistic movement as well as a more general stance currently thriving in many realms but especially on the internet in more personalised formats such as blogs (rutten ). however, this phenomenon is most likely neither a successor nor a predecessor to irony or cynical ideology as much as it may at times read like a reaction to them. indeed, the fuzzy ‘hipster’ label is in fact just as applicable to the preciousness of new sin- cerity and its aesthetic preoccupations and it, too, thrives on the internet. this is to say that the purported seriousness of the hipster does not necessarily offer a greater public engagement and its concern with emotions, on the contrary, seems to signal a withdrawal into private life at the same time as any form of external engagement takes place through online petitions and responses to calls for donations to charitable initiatives rather than participation in any form of protest or activism. the fears and anxieties projected onto millennials and their hipster brethren have become so acute that they have metamorphosed into doubts surrounding the efficacy of ‘clicktivism’ and whether social media activism can translate into ‘real’ (vs. virtual) politi- cal mobilisation (dean ; gladwell ; morozov ) . according to critics of this kind of political engagement, the medium’s effects amplify an already-prevalent cynicism to such a degree that one arrives at total political passivity (white ). simultaneously, social media are also at the centre of discussions around millennials’ supposed constant culture, theory and critique need for distraction in an updated version of neil postman’s amusing ourselves to death – with humour, especially in the form of memes going ‘viral’, operating as a kind of lingua franca that enables those most skilful at tapping into this register to become most visible and thus most powerful. in her analysis following the presidential elections in the united states, journalist and critic emily nussbaum goes so far as to argue that ‘we memed a president into existence’ (nussbaum ). while not dismissing these insights, this article argues that a more productive turn to political humour can be figured if one does not hope to find in it a possible trigger of social change, or even of a change in attitudes. after all: ‘empirical evidence on the effects of pol- itical satire consumption indicates that this media activity is decidedly neutral in terms of normative value’ (lance holbert : ). instead, ‘jokes provide insights into how societies work – they are not social thermostats regulating and shaping human behavior, but they are social thermometers that measure, record and indicate what is going on’ (davies : ). for the purposes of this discussion, this means (a) nevertheless taking political humour seriously and (b) examining it to see what it can tell us about the political and cultural sensibilities of a specific time or regime. the next section will examine specific manifestations of cynicism in the russian context, making a distinction between the cyni- cism of late soviet russia and the cynicism of russia under putin (roudakova : ). implicitly, it therefore argues for the importance of making such distinctions in order to ‘treat cynicism as a cultural practice that might have some universal features and some that are historically and culturally specific’ (roudakova : ). from late soviet to putin-era cynicism russia is often portrayed as steeped in multiple layers of cynicism: post-transition, post- modern and late-soviet, each of which has impacted majority political participation in specific ways. in the twenty-first century’s second decade, cynicism can appear to be the one type of discourse available to all groups of russian society. it encompasses those in government and business as much as those far from the centres of power and wealth. in , journalist peter pomerantsev claimed that, rather than conservative nationalism or neo-authoritarianism, the kremlin’s ultimate ideology is one of a cynical form of postmodernism incarnate in a political project: ‘a world of masks and poses, col- ourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth’ (pomerantsev ). the russian ‘postmodern’ elite are seen to prefer irony as its stance and spectacle as its central mode of being. in anthropologist natalia rouda- kova’s taxonomy of post-soviet cynics, these individuals suffer from the ‘cynicism of the friends of power’, which is displayed through ‘straight-talk jadedness, openly declared weariness, or tough-minded distrust of ideological proclamations’ (roudakova : ). in this reading, the battle for russia’s future is thus fought out between two opposing forces, an ‘overarching, triumphant cynicism, hateful cynicism which glories in its own cynicism and thinks everything is for sale and there’s no values, and an attempt at some sort of integrity’ (troitsky et al. ). sociologist lev gudkov also observes that russians in general have become increasingly cynical with the hardships of a lengthy transition and its failed promises (gudkov ). the immediate post-soviet period with its numerous upheavals and deprivations is seen to have led to mass depoliticisation, that is, a deep mistrust of political involvement. rather m. brock than resulting in a desire to exit this condition, he sees cynicism as being symptomatic of a stagnant society. thus, while ‘cynicism indicates the erosion of traditional value systems, the destruction of former beliefs and norms, the beginnings of deep socio-cultural changes in society’ (gudkov ), it cannot be regarded as heralding institutional or societal transformations. instead it makes subjects more suspicious of any vision of change. in consequence, the language of political communication came to be perceived as hollow, as political forces from the left to the right, in the words of philosopher and activist maria chehonadskih, ‘became formal operators without meaning’ (chehonadskih : ). it is in this sense that post-soviet russia can also be seen to have arrived at a post- modernist relativism which sees any political language as pure ideological jargon (cheho- nadskih ). russian cynicism as a cultural practice which has helped to consolidate authoritarian forms of governance (roudakova : ) is preceded by a cynicism which has its origin in the late soviet period – and which paradoxically appeared in response to the pol- itical discourse of its time. alexey yurchak describes how, for the last generation to have been born in the soviet union, socialism itself had become immutable, a kind of monolith serving as a backdrop on which a degree of freedom of expression could be achieved (yurchak , ). this was made possible through a type of non-participation in official communist events – beyond one’s physical presence – and the staging of a ‘parallel event’ accompanying it. socialist ideology had achieved ‘hegemony of representation’ through its omnipresence, that is, the almost complete absence of discourses that would contest the official narrative. however, he insists that just because this seemingly endless stream of representations of the same political messages was tolerated by most citi- zens, one should not necessarily interpret this as a sign of any actual belief in their content. on the contrary, it merely seemed that ‘no other public representation of reality within the official sphere could occur’ (yurchak : ). this uniquely coherent official sphere of representation tolerated no true resistance but, equally and paradoxically, it also tolerated no true recognition. both political activists and dissidents were regarded by many with suspicion. after all, they insisted on engaging seriously with an ideology which was surely so meaningless, yet so foundational to reality that this would equate questioning its very nature. the solution was in effect a kind of ‘pretense misrecognition’ – a going- through-the-motions while simultaneously, and in private, exposing the regime to ridicule through jokes, or anekdoty, whose production and private dissemination grew exponen- tially in the s and s. this is ‘cynical ideology’ in the extreme: not only does the engagement in ideological practices largely replace the belief in them, it effectively makes such belief redundant (Žižek ). political humour from perestroika to trump satire is militant irony, where moral norms are relatively clear, and standards are assumed against which the grotesque and absurd are measured – northrop frye ( / : ) by the early s, the political organisation of the soviet union had come to be seen by many of its citizens as both immutable and essentially empty. in one reading, jokes or anekdoty thereby operated as a kind of ‘hidden transcript’ (scott ), a type of resistance that granted subjects a sense of not having been co-opted entirely by the regime. however, culture, theory and critique such an abyss between public and private discourse could also be interpreted as having created a certain amount of psychic tension. in a freudian vein, yurchak credits the joke-work people engaged in so rampantly as having been able to release or resolve some of this tension, while at the same time ‘helping to sustain pretense misrecognition of the incongruous and to maintain concurrent official and parallel spheres’ (yurchak : ). this echoes aspects of serguei oushakine’s critique of soviet humour, where he insists that rather than offering a resolution to systemic oppression, these jokes ‘provided an impromptu manual, a curious cultural guidebook to pitfalls and idio- syncrasies of socialism’ (oushakine : ). in other words, they enabled a kind of begrudging coexistence while, at the same time, frequently highlighting not so much sys- temic failures as personal lapses, because ‘[t]he system’s failures never seemed to be sys- temic enough and had to be publically reframed and re-dressed as imperfections or mistakes of concrete individuals and groups’ (oushakine : ). this is perhaps best illustrated through an example: on the occasion of the anniversary of the great october socialist revolution, a meeting of party members is held in a village. the chairman of the local soviet gives a speech, ‘dear comrades! let’s look at the amazing achievements of our party after the revolution. for example, here sits maria. who was she before? an illiterate peasant woman, she had but one dress and no shoes. and now? she is an exemplary milkmaid known over the entire region. or look at ivan andreev. he was the poorest man in this village, had no horse, no cow, and even no axe. and now? he is a tractor driver, and has two pairs of shoes! or look at trofim semenovich alekseev. he was a nasty hooligan, a lowest drunkard, a dirty gadabout. nobody trusted him even with a snowdrift in wintertime, as he would steal any- thing his gaze fell upon. and now he’s a secretary of the party committee! here, socialism is credited with providing individuals with new opportunities to transform their previous circumstances, but depressingly (or hilariously), it is the most indolent and corrupt persons who end up benefitting the most. the blame is thus to be allocated not only to such a system, but even more so to the individuals who take advantage of these shortcomings. natalia roudakova insists that the distinction between this humour and the cynical humour of post-soviet russia is that the former betrays a belief in the essential meaningfulness of the soviet project, even if it faltered in much of its execution, while the latter is marked by an overabundance of cynical reason following the loss of a ‘world in common’ between subjects (roudakova ). returning to the question of political humour’s role, rather than paving the way for its disintegration, anekdoty were most likely a response to the soviet union’s tensions and conflicts. while the soviet union was officially in existence until the end of , this seems mostly to have been the result of institutional inertia. besides more pressing struc- tural and economic issues, there is only so much disidentification an ideological edifice can sustain, as it will gradually hollow it out from the core. this is how, in reference to hegel, Žižek defines the ‘silent weaving of the spirit’ or the underground disintegration of the spiritual substance of a community (Žižek ), which is eventually followed by its public collapse. taken from web collection of russian (chiefly soviet-era) jokes, last accessed . . , http://www.johndclare.net/ russ _jokes.htm m. brock http://www.johndclare.net/russ _jokes.htm http://www.johndclare.net/russ _jokes.htm the late soviet period of perestroika did in fact produce its very own genre of political parody – stiob. in short, stiob’s humour is characterised by an adherence to the form of normalised or hegemonic discourse while, by taking it to its extreme, simultaneously revealing the premise’s utter absurdity. one of the most memorable examples of stiob is the promulgation of the theory that vladimir ilyich lenin was a mushroom. in , musician sergey kuryokhin went on the tv programme the fifth wheel (Пятое колесо) to expound his theory that, as lenin and his revolutionary comrades had been great lovers and consumers of wild mushrooms, including hallucinogenic ones, their per- sonalities had gradually become displaced by the personality of a mushroom. his segment featured interviews with mycologists and botanists, and concluded with kuryokhin’s famous claim: i have absolutely irrefutable evidence that the october revolution was carried out by people who for many years had been consuming certain mushrooms. and in the process of being consumed by these people, the mushrooms displaced their personality. these people were turning into mushrooms. in other words, i simply want to say that lenin was a mushroom. while it would not be true to say that a majority of people hearing this subscribed to this theory wholesale, a sufficiently high percentage of the public found itself confused as to the seriousness of the message for the leningrad committee of the communist party to release an official statement in response to inquiries about the truth of the claims, insisting that these were false as ‘a mammal cannot be a plant’. naturally, their engagement with these claims only served to expose them to further ridicule. even though the relaxed censorship regime of perestroika may have provided the con- ditions for the dissemination of such theories, it indirectly also enabled the further public undermining of political discourse. the highly formalised language of socialist states had led to the forms of estrangement described earlier, described by yurchak as a ‘performative shift’ or turn away from literal or semantic meaning and toward performative meaning. further similarities between the late soviet union and the period of mature neoliberalism in the west emerge here. in their article, dominic boyer and alexey yurchak high- light how some of the ‘ironic modalities’ of late socialism are becoming increasingly preva- lent in other places, such as the united states. indeed, the common binary of (post- or still- socialist) east and capitalist west, corresponding to first and former ‘second’ world, is not only geographically imprecise, it also easily leads one to overlook tendencies that transcend these (partially imagined but constitutive) differences. while late capitalism may, for a time, have managed to withstand a degree of scrutiny due to the manner in which it has ideologically aligned itself with democratic forms of gov- ernment, it can be argued that parts of the west have undergone a similar process of hypernormalisation. in his eponymous work, film maker adam curtis claims that this is a process that has led to political reality becoming deliberately opaque, obscuring the true locus of power, all thanks to a process of careful manipulation which leaves sub- jects bewildered and confused amidst an abundant yet overly similar mediascape (curtis ). however, as alluded to earlier, prevalent modes of political discourse also produce their own genres of satire, specific instantiations of which are discussed in the next section. ‘lenin was a mushroom’, wikipedia entry, last accessed . . , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lenin_was_a_mushroom culture, theory and critique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lenin_was_a_mushroom hypernormalisation and american stiob according to jon stewart, creator and former host of the daily show, a central function in much us news media has shifted from informing the public to performing what he calls scripted ‘political theatre’, displaying a similar tendency towards overformalisation and employment of empty rhetoric. a satirical response to this tendency of hypernormalisa- tion of certain forms of discourse is a type of ‘american stiob’, exemplified in publications such as the onion and mcsweeney’s, tv programmes such as the daily show and stephen colbert’s colbert report, which ended its nine-year run in , as well as char- acters such as borat, who demonstrated how the exaggerated depiction of the post-soviet, oriental other can be turned against those most invested in its proliferation (condee ). like soviet stiob, here the utmost importance is placed on remaining in character in order to evidence total identification with the discourse that is being parodied. the aim of this kind of critical intervention is to break the frame of perception and to reveal the hollowness of the form by showing its disjuncture with the message, especially as it becomes almost impossible to critique a discourse with the very discursive tools it pro- vides, ‘to get critical traction on the discursive formalisation that is part of political exper- tise itself’ (boyer and yurchak : ). indeed, this is where yurchak locates the difference between the kind of cynical reason, or ‘going through the motions’, that charac- terises so much of contemporary western life, according to sloterdijk, and stiob’s ironic performance of an overidentification with ideology. however, while the hopeful may retain faith in the possibility that this performative shift will eventually reveal the hollowness of official discourse and thereby represent the beginning of substantial change, another outcome is that the public can happily move from laughing about the exploits of politicians, can indeed turn to these shows as a form of release while simultaneously and passively continuing to vote for these same poli- ticians due to the lack of any visible alternative – if they vote at all. the famous Žižekian example of canned laughter which expresses amusement on the viewer’s behalf, allowing a passive consumption of enjoyment, could be applied to this situation in which the parodic deconstructions of stiob enable the audience to experience transgressive enjoyment without any need for a more active response. with the election of donald trump, more and more criticisms regarding the detrimental effects of this kind of ‘interpassivity’ (pfaller ) have been laid at the feet of comedians. as alluded to in the introduction, the crux of this critique tends to be that satire, especially parody or impersonations in their most toothless guise, in fact enable a further depoliticisation of the political field by focus- ing on low-hanging fruit such as the us president’s more irksome mannerisms or his appearance. some critics, such as writer jonathan coe, even go so far as to blame contem- porary political humour for disincentivising active resistance: it creates a welcoming space in which like-minded people can gather together and share in comfortable hilarity. the anger, the feelings of injustice they might have been suffering beforehand are gathered together, compressed and transformed into bursts of laughter, and after discharging them they feel content and satisfied. (coe in bremner et al. ) at the same time, the ubiquitous availability of ironic humour means it has also made its way into the repertoire of conservatives and those even further to the right of the political spectrum. hence, if satire is potentially becoming less powerful as a tool of dissent, or has m. brock even become an integral part of the right’s communications arsenal, their opponents must now ask themselves the question posed by nussbaum: ‘how do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?’ ( ). hyperreal politics, hyperreal resistance with the increasing impression that ‘it’s all a show anyway’, it becomes harder not only to subvert the forms political discourse takes, but also to know how and where to apply the levers. contemporary life appears to be marked by a blurring of boundaries between the factual and the fictional. in this age of ‘hyperrealism’, the public is continuously assailed by a flood of images so all-encompassing that, according to baudrillard, it becomes difficult for social actors to distinguish between ‘concrete’ reality and the hyperreality of the image (baudrillard ). more importantly for the concerns of this discussion, some observers argue that what has become especially apparent since the us presidential election campaign is that this blurring of boundaries also affects the distinction between reality and satire. for many, the increasing overlap between fiction and reality, event and pseudo-event and truth and post-truth has reached its culmination in the election of a pre- sident who was previously a successful reality tv star, and who now seemingly employs those same techniques that made him successful in his political persona. as anthropologist janine wedel observed about american politics and political discourse in : ‘the idea of reality is being performed, but the reality of reality is more difficult to track and often undermined’ (wedel : ). this is perhaps the motivation for the hostility expressed by some journalists in response to stephen colbert and jon stewart’s attempts to leave the confines of entertainment and cross over into politics, one noteable example here being stephen colbert’s establishment of his own super pac in (day ). and while some demand of satirists to stay in their lane and not blur the boundaries too much, others criticise the very same satirists for their lack of efficacy, implying there is more they could do, or to do it differently. the bleeding of one realm into another as concurrent with hypernormalisation is some- thing that can also be observed in contemporary russia whose government, according to critic gleb napreenko, ‘does not appeal to any of the dimensions of truth, neither its uni- versality nor its subjective intimacy. instead, it operates in the horizonless register of illu- sions’ (napreenko , italics in original). while one way in which this is evident is the many guises of president putin’s persona (brock ), another illustration of a situation in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between parody and political reality is the continued political success of vladimir zhirinovsky. zhirinovsky, leader of the liberal democratic party, is the paradigmatic cynical politician, acting as putin’s buffoonish alter ego regularly engaging in obscene or xenophobic speech. this unthinkable alternative to putin draws ‘the votes of cynics, whose sole motive was to reduce to absurdity the sen- seless and boring parliamentary debates’ (budraitskis : ). thus, for example, in the midst of the crimean crisis he called for the abolition of the letter ы from the cyrillic alphabet, as, he claimed, ‘this is why they don’t like us in europe’, implying that difficul- ties of pronounciation are of greater concern than a geopolitical crisis involving the annexation of foreign territory. polit.ru, ‘zhirinovsky called for letter “ы” to become illegal’, polit.ru, . . , last accessed . . , http://polit.ru/ news/ / / /alphabet/ culture, theory and critique http://polit.ru/news/ / / /alphabet/ http://polit.ru/news/ / / /alphabet/ for those treating the russian public sphere as a world of masks and poses, a simula- crum with nothing at its core, there is little to no hope that this cynical relation to politics can lead to political transformation. yet this simplified picture of a mass withdrawal from the public sphere needs to be problematised. the persistent telling of political jokes in the soviet union was also evidence of a potential for resistance, in the sense of citizens trying to carve out a space of dissent, albeit privately – a case of critical as well as cynical distance. as discussed earlier, such jokes also hint at the fact that this space is needed in order to reaffirm a belief in societal, collective undertakings. the mass demonstrations which took place in russia’s largest cities – as well as surges of smaller-scale protests and strikes throughout the s (robertson ) – after parliamentary and presidential elec- tions in and respectively and, more recently, in the spring of , demonstrate a persistent dissatisfaction with the political field rather than a culture of total non-engage- ment (budraitskis ). such seemingly contradictory tendencies of cynical passivity against a backdrop of political theatre on the one hand and public protest on the other, prove not only that social change is frequently hard to predict – indeed, leading scholars failed to predict the end of the soviet union (cox ), which equally seemed to take the majority of its citizens by surprise (yurchak ). more importantly, it should alert scholars to the potentialities of a state in which significant segments of the population appear to be at best harbouring ambivalent sentiments towards an existing regime, which can translate into large-scale resistance after long periods of seeming disengagement. this is especially true of so-called ‘hybrid regimes’ which, according to graeme robertson, are particularly vulnerable to pressure from street protests: ‘whereas it takes large numbers of oppositionists to create problems in elections, relatively small numbers of protesters can generate great embarrassment for the authorities and create a real political problem’ (robertson : ). at the same time, the seeming contradiction between the large demonstrations in russia in the s and, in the space of a few years, the protest movement’s virtual dis- appearance in the face of presidential approval ratings climbing up to a high of per cent in june following the prolonged conflict with former ‘brother-nation’ ukraine, may in fact be not only the result of increased pressure from the government through arrests and ever-more restrictive laws. the cynicism that has shaped so much of the russian people’s relationship to politics may have helped to ‘create an illusion of critical political agency, mitigating rather than amplifying protest dynamics, and thereby reaffirming rather than unsettling existing power relations’ (roudakova : ). in roudakova’s view, internal divisions among protesters were magnified as they subscribed to the cynical belief that each side was being ‘conned’ by the government. this meant that the movement ended up being critically devoid of the kind of unified front needed to gain traction in such an increasingly repressive political environment, to further translate political dissatisfaction into concrete political demands, while, at the same time, for large swathes of the population an antagonistic nationalism offered an escape from a political field dominated by cynicism or recurrent disappointments. according to poll conducted by levada-center: http://www.levada.ru/eng/ m. brock http://www.levada.ru/eng/ citizens failing to revolt rather than coming full circle in this social diagnosis and concluding that cynicism can never serve as a force towards progress, one may still make the case that at the heart of some forms of cynicism and irony rests a moral core. viewed from this angle, cynicism can become a tool to ‘create the necessary distance between political subjects and oppres- sive circumstances – distance from which an agentive consciousness of resistance can take root’ (roudakova : ). ‘cynical distance’ here represents a first step towards greater participation in the public sphere, rather than an increased withdrawal from it. in fact, both irony and cynicism can originate not so much in an inability or unwillingness to engage seriously with the world, but in a continued disappointment in ‘the disgrace of how the world is, how we ourselves are, and how we might like things to be’ (bustillos ). what has been perceived as a tendency towards ‘narcissistic withdrawal’ (oushakine : ) in russians and the post-socialist world more generally (and that, crucially, applies to millenials as well) can then be reframed in some circumstances. in a more nuanced analysis of the so-called ‘apathy’ or political disengagement of post-socialist societies, these attitudes can in fact be said to represent a form of resistance to western ideas of democratic progress and the normative ideas this entails. in addition, as anthro- pologist jessica greenberg has argued, framing nonparticipation as failure could be doubly problematic, as in certain readings it serves to produce ‘failed subjects’, thereby orientalis- ing post-socialist subjects further: ‘this language of alienation, disaffection, and retreat implies that apathy is a withdrawal from not only failed state institutions and compro- mised political processes but a cultural-psychological state produced by political-social contexts’ (greenberg : ). instead, nonparticipation can be seen as a response to changing socio-political contexts and the way that, in the post-socialist world (though not only), the domain of politics is often seen as corrupted or contaminated, as the disappointments and hardships experi- enced after transition meet the ‘cynical distance’ of (post)modernity. while nonparticipation can be regarded as a key symptom of cynicism and acquies- cence to the status quo, greenberg insists that it can also be regarded as an ethical choice or attempt to remain a ‘a moral subject’ (greenberg : ), a way of escaping ‘the corrupting sphere of politics’ ( ), which is seen to be inhabited by the ‘rich, criminal and corrupt’ ( ). returning to irony and the us, richard rorty defends this structure of feeling in a not dissimilar manner by emphasising its ethical nature, so that it becomes not a lack of ser- iousness or sincerity per se but, rather, a refusal to subscribe to one metaphysical con- ception of the world over another. while the ironist may have radical doubts based on the contingency of any moral or philosophical framework, rorty insists that this hesitance to adopt any one framework is not incompatible with liberalism and opposition to forms of cruelty wherever they may occur. irony’s emphasis on self-fashioning places the onus on the individual to define such a stance in the absence of any guiding moral philosophy. at the same time, ironists are: […] never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves. (rorty : ) culture, theory and critique in the final analysis, however, rorty claims that an overwhelming sense of irony is unli- kely to spell the end of community – the example rorty raises is that of the decline of religious faith, which has not led to the feared disintegration of liberal societies. thus, while an ironic stance provides few of the assurances of other moral frameworks, it offers a new kind of historic sensibility. at the same time, this notion of irony as a non-destructive force – and, further along on this continuum, cynicism as a conservative societal mechanism – does not contradict the criticisms of non-engagement with which this discussion began. in fact, one may be able to discern in some instantiations of irony and cynicism a deep concern with how to take up an ethical stance, but one that may prove paralysing. who can (afford to) laugh? it has in recent times become clear that claims of a complete lack of political engagement among ‘millennials’ need to be revised in the face of the large-scale mobilisation of the occupy movement, a more recently reignited protest culture following the election of donald trump to office, as well as the recent popularity of politicians such as jeremy corbyn in the uk or bernie sanders in the us. and while the occupy movement has been criticised for its lack of leadership or failure to translate the protests into concrete political demands (gamson and sifry ), this maximal openness and commitment to a non-partisan politics of democracy managed to attract great swathes of those suffering from a disenchantment with traditional politics referred to above. the so- called ‘movement of the squares’ (gerbaudo ) was global in nature, referring to local protests in capital cities with simultaneous transnational links in countries as dispa- rate as the us, turkey and russia. crucially, these protests were largely driven by those selfsame allegedly disengaged young people. the ‘multiple temporalities’ that michael hardt speaks of in reference to these protests (hardt ) thus also points to a more global convergence of political climates – as seen already herein in relation to russia and the united states. however, the occupy movement’s dissolution may yet serve to increase this ‘cynical distance’ to participatory democracy. at the same time, more recent large-scale protests in the us in response to donald trump’s policies threatening women’s reproductive rights, or his stance on climate change and scientific evidence more generally, have already attracted negative scrutiny, be it for being too broad or for investing too many resources in the crafting of life-size caricatures and witty puns rather than in the creation of a unified platform for political action (garber ). indeed, the recent oversaturation of political satire produced online (crittenden et al. ) and the seeming ‘parody fatigue’ it has resulted in has led to very postmodern responses: articles that mock the idea that a well crafted joke could topple the president (e.g., loveness ), as well as the launch of a sister website of the onion which now produces meta-satire, or satire of the political satire that supposedly considered itself capable of triggering regime change. this impatience with the kind of protest that is being engaged in demonstrates once more the recurrent sense that satire’s potential efficacy has not been properly deployed – paradoxically, often by creators of satire www.resistancehole.clickhole.com m. brock www.resistancehole.clickhole.com themselves, with the blame apportioned to both creators and an audience deemed too apa- thetic, too cynical or too distracted by easy jokes. yet the phenomenon of activism, like that of political humour, is not monolithic. satire and humour have always been important elements of societal critique and political protest, but they can only ever represent a subset of the ‘activisms’ that seek to instigate change. it is important to acknowledge that this article does not do justice to the mobilisation – both ‘on the ground’ and in digital spaces – that has taken place under the banner of some recent instantiations of protest culture such as #blacklivesmatter, #sayhername and #metoo. these movements are an illustration of how the online sphere can also be a space of solidarity and accountability, demonstrating how digital activism needs to be con- sidered in a situated, context-specific manner, rather than from a deterministic and media- centric angle (kaun and uldam ). however, one important distinction from the focus of this article is that movements like black lives matter and me too have functioned largely without recourse to humour. while the fact that they were created in response to racist and gender violence and thus brought about by very palpable pain may be part of the explanation for this, it could also point to certain forms of political humour being a white, elitist – and frequently male – prerogative. indeed, when the feminist move- ment (itself frequently dominated by white, middle-class, cis women) does engage in forms of ‘memefication’ or ‘pop feminism’, thereby enabling its ideas to be widely shared, it is often accused of distilling and simplifying ideas, thus having to grapple with the ever looming specter of trivialisation and of ignoring or brushing off problematic racialised dynamics (baer ). nonetheless, humour is not antithetical to tackling painful issues. theresa o’keefe ( ) argues that irony and mockery are in fact crucial tools of resistance and subversion. in her critique of the tactics of activist group femen and the slutwalk-movement she clarifies that their ‘failure to inject mockery and irony into their approach means it is com- monly read as repetitive of such norms rather than subversive’ (o’keefe : ). in other words, the tactics of stiob have a place in activism as well, if well deployed and commu- nicated, by going beyond reproducing norms in acts of ‘blank parody’ (o’keefe : ). marxist theorist franco ‘bifo’ berardi applauds such an ironic use of protest in his appraisal of argentinian art collective erroristas of grupo etcetera who, in their perform- ances and actions, ‘promote the idea of “errorism” [as] an artistic response to the destruc- tion of civil rights that has accompanied the war on terror which they say is as much about “errors” as it is “terrorism”’. in berardi’s reading, their symbolic actions ‘are sufficient to produce a deconstructive effect over power’s unanimous conformity’ (clina- men ). for berardi, the only way to break through the cynicism is in fact to transcend the limits of language. however, it remains to be seen whether this hailing of political art and actionism simply transfers the fundamental issue from the realm of satire to that of art. what is more, while artists can be accused of a different kind of elitism or obscurant- ism, some are taking their performance into the open, to sites where art merges with protest, at times to confront the state or authorities directly. rather than seeing satire as replacing more effective forms of protest, then, experience has shown the two to be in a close and symbiotic relationship, as what unites both political art and political humour is the importance placed on breaking frames of perception. ‘the erroristas of etcetera’, http://www.wecreatetogether.net/ / / /the-erroristas-of-etcetera/ culture, theory and critique http://www.wecreatetogether.net/ / / /the-erroristas-of-etcetera/ such playing with symbols, so at odds with politicians’ habitual discourse, is reminis- cent of peter sloterdijk’s description of the kynic who rejects official culture and ideology by confronting them with irony and sarcasm (sloterdijk ). returning to russia, it has similarly been argued that ‘cynicism can only be stemmed by kynicism, not by morality. only a joyful kynicism of ends is never tempted to forget that life has nothing to lose except itself’ (lipovetsky ). russia has a long history of kynics resisting state cynicism through humorous refusals to play by the rules, including fictional characters such ostap bender of ilf and petrov’s twelve chairs and venichka of erofeev’s moskva-petushki, as well as underground artist dmitry prigov and, more recently, the women of pussy riot. speaking of the mass protests in russia in and , natalia roudakova expresses hope in the return of ‘parrhesia’ in the foucauldian sense. indeed, she sees irony as the prevalent register in which to ‘speak truth to power’, as the cynical discourses of post- soviet russia, followed by the aggressive nationalism of the last few years, have created a marked fear of pathos in the arena of political communication (roudakova ). conclusion this article has identified political modalities in russia and the us (and, arguably, beyond) that converge along certain fault lines. these include an overabundant yet similar media environment – a tendency that the -hour news cycle and digitial platforms have only served to enhance, combined with a lack of trust in what is being presented in that environment, a perceived shortage of credibility of established politics, a tendency to blur the distinction between – or even merging of – politics and spectacle, culminating in the impression of having reached a ‘hyperreal’ state where the borders between truth and fiction have become porous or entirely absent, and a disenchantment with traditional politics, leading to both cynicism as well as a protest culture that shares some political tactics and aesthetics across geographical borders. ultimately, this analysis necessarily leads us to the question of where this leaves satire, and whether it can intervene at critical junctures by drawing attention to injustices and inconsistencies committed by those in power. previously, this article outlined the existing argument that there is nothing inherently transformative about satire in the twenty-first century because ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can ‘consume’ outrage passively through various satirical media products. by displacing this outrage they can thus abstain from more active forms of resistance. more recent scholarship has suggested that the ubiquitous presence of humorous memes and satirical forms of expression has weakened impact of satire even further. however, the question posed herein is whether there was ever a belief in satire’s ability to effect any change at all, or whether one retroactively imputes this belief to previous generations and then ends up condemning them for not realising its full potential. in actual fact, it may be naïve to assume that political satirists ever saw it within their power to topple regimes, especially when working in a top-down medium such as television (basu ). the discussion above established early on that what is at stake is not to prove the efficacy of satire in triggering change, but to illustrate how it can nevertheless have a different political effect. in russia, against a backdrop of multiple layers of cynicism, pol- itical humour has reaffirmed its role both in the present and the past. humour served and served as a coping mechanism: in conditions of censorship, for example, it enabled citizens m. brock to create and reaffirm a sense of personal distance and to carve out a place from which to articulate political critique. stiob, the distinct genre of satire which emerged during late socialism and which mocks existing discursive traditions by reproducing them, and effec- tively over-performing an ideology that seemed as monolithic as reality itself, is one example of how hegemonic regimes affect the form political humour assumes. but with the increased prevalence of this type of humour being incorporated in formats that seek to offer political critique – notably in the us in shows such as the colbert report and the daily show and publications such as the onion, together with new sites of humour production and via dissemination on the internet – the increased visibility of pol- itical humour and a seemingly immutable ideological landscape have been read as having a correlative or even causal relationship, rather than as merely coinciding. however, it has been shown that there is no clear connection with irony and satire consumed ‘interpas- sively’, and action or inaction in other forms of public life, despite a seemingly decreasing faith in established politics. in fact, many commentators are still smarting from the per- ceived failure of the occupy movement, leading to another form of conflation, namely from the idea of satire leading to increased passivity and ‘cynical distance’ in subjects, to its utilisation in forms of protest as making the latter ineffectual and mere empty ges- tures. this article has instead argued for treating political humour as a legimate form of political communciation, which is consumed like other forms of communication, while also offering additional, original forms of critique. least constructive of all may be to expose political humour to the same cynical attitude that has subsumed so much of public life. instead, it may be useful to distinguish between different modes of cynicism. besides the cynicism of those in power and the passive and self-indulgent cynicism of the powerless, which is nevertheless marked by an attitude of disdain, there is a cynicism of despair. similarly, when speaking of irony, one should differentiate between the poseur and the self-conscious ironist. indeed, in some interpret- ations irony can become a form of humility, demonstrating ‘that we know we are not the center of the universe […] that we can find humor in the contrast between our natural self-centeredness and our likely inconsequentiality, at any given moment’ (bustillos ). significantly, these modes can persist in the same subject, activated under different circumstances. however, as this article has highlighted, ironic and cynical forms of humour can be fuelled by a common disenchantment with traditional politics, while simultaneously asking what it is to be an ethical, political subject. a major distinction between the two is the way irony harbours a hope and belief in the possibility of joy (berardi ), whereas cynicism does not. indeed, the former can produce the kind of joy that can spill over and promote collective action (segal ). however, far more dangerous than cynicism is the kind of nihilism which emerges at a time when the public sphere is treated as an illusion, truth seen as more slippery than ever and political allegiance a mere consequence of being trapped in the same ‘filter bubble’. satire, on the other hand, can inject an optimism into despair which may serve to reinvigorate the political arena. acknowledgements the author wishes to thank dr jenny gunnarsson-payne, the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments. culture, theory and critique disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by author. 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Žižek, s. . tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology. durham: duke university press. m. brock https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /how-to-write-the-worst-possible-column-about-millennials/ /?utm_source=atlfb https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /how-to-write-the-worst-possible-column-about-millennials/ /?utm_source=atlfb http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/artemy-troitsky-peter-pomerantsev-oliver-carroll/talking-point-is-culture-new-politics-in- http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/artemy-troitsky-peter-pomerantsev-oliver-carroll/talking-point-is-culture-new-politics-in- http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/artemy-troitsky-peter-pomerantsev-oliver-carroll/talking-point-is-culture-new-politics-in- http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ / / /how-to-live-without-irony/?_php=true% _type=blogs% _r= http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ / / /how-to-live-without-irony/?_php=true% _type=blogs% _r= http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /aug/ /clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /aug/ /clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism 	abstract 	irony and cynicism in modern guises 	from late soviet to putin-era cynicism 	political humour from perestroika to trump 	hypernormalisation and american stiob 	hyperreal politics, hyperreal resistance 	citizens failing to revolt 	who can (afford to) laugh? 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributor 	references toward an objective-based typology of e-business models d espite the staggering statistics cited for thenumber of internet users and the growth in e-commerce activity, not all e-businesses are sur- viving. more than twice as many shut down or declared bankruptcy in as in the preceding year. the famous boo.com fashion stores declared bankruptcy after less than one year of operations. webvan filed chapter in july . other well-known failures include garden.com, pets.com, and discount retailer value america. after the downfall of so many dotcoms, people have begun to wonder if e-commerce would ever live up to its expecta- tion of jolting the business world. consider the case of andrew yao, a distributor of steel products in asia who was deciding whether or not to launch isteelasia.com as a platform to trade steel in that region. according to kanter and yatsko ( ), a class- mate asked yao if he had ever heard of priceline.com, a pioneering e-commerce platform that puts consumers of airline tickets and other items directly in touch with sell- ers. priceline’s market capitalization, he said, was far higher than the airlines. so yao began thinking about the similarities between the steel and airline industries—both capital-intensive, both offering low returns on investment, and both plagued by inefficiencies. the decision proved difficult for yao because many e- businesses created around in asia were merely “me- too” strategies. such firms were not familiar with their revenue sources, and analysts had begun to question their business plans for raising capital. yao faced a strategic dilemma: if he created isteelasia.com, he would have to transfer the majority of his customers to the new plat- form, which would require a major financial commit- ment. “everyone was talking about their new idea for the internet,” said yao. “i asked myself: ‘what am i doing?’… i had to make a decision whether to build a processing facility or do something like isteelasia.com.” yao was confused because rarely have people asked why they need e-businesses in the first place. some companies feel compelled to create them simply because others have done so. is there a strategic objective an e-business can discussion of e-business models has gained popularity with the rise and fall of internet firms. numerous models have been developed and elaborated, but rarely has the underlying rationale been explained. this comprehensive typology sorts and classifies them according to two key strategic objectives that companies may consider in conducting e-commerce: relational and value-based objectives. such a typology is helpful in understanding existing e-business models, identifying potential areas for the development of new ones, and reinforcing the notion that the tried-and-true principles of successful business in the bricks-and-mortar world apply in the virtual world as well. long w. lam associate professor of management, university of houston- clear lake, texas (lam@cl.uh.edu) l. jean harrison-walker assistant professor of marketing, university of houston- clear lake, texas (walker@cl.uh.edu) toward an objective-based typology of e-business models fulfill that an existing bricks-and-mortar firm cannot? if so, then business models should clarify those objectives in the first place. in delineating strategic objectives for ex- pansion into e-business, a firm must identify the model appropriate to it—the model it will use in pursuit of its long-term performance goals. there may be as many as revenue-generating business models on the internet. some, such as the product sales vs. merchant models, are so closely related that one wonders if they are really fundamentally different methods. some business strategies, such as the infomediary or information collection models, are so immediately recognized and accepted that one could argue they are not business mod- els at all. to make matters worse, there is currently no sin- gle, cogent, and comprehensive typology of internet busi- ness models to point to. “defining, selecting and catego- rizing business models is a difficult and arbitrary process,” maintain strauss and frost ( ). our purpose here is to provide a typology of e-business models that speaks clearly regarding strategic objectives. the typology we have developed can assist companies in their decision on whether or not to expand into e-busi- ness and, if so, how their e-business can tie in to the cor- porate mission and objectives. e-business models: definitions and types e -business models are methods, concepts, frame- works, or architectures by which companies can use the internet or the web to carry out their strategies of capturing dominant market positions, establishing viable market niches, adding value for their stakeholders, or sustaining themselves over time. they have gained much attention recently because e-commerce has given rise to new ones, and even reinvented how bricks-and- mortars operate. as applegate ( ) explains: [since] the industrial age…we knew what we meant if someone said, “i sell insurance” or “i sell cars.” we had developed a shorthand way of describing how a business was structured, what type of people were needed, and what roles they filled.…in con- trast, the internet enables us to create new business models and redefine existing ones.…this highly interactive and engaging channel offers new oppor- tunities and enables development of new capabili- ties that were difficult to achieve before the com- mercialization of the internet. the industrial age business definitions with which we have become so familiar may have reached their limits. as sandberg ( ) notes, “we no longer talk about what business we’re in but what business model we use.” the popularity of e-businesses has given rise to numerous families of models. rappa ( ), for example, describes brokerage models as those that “bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions.” these can be further classified into online auction models, reverse auction models, bounty broker models, and so forth, depending on the specific form of the transactions. table identifies a number of popular models. recent years have seen sporadic attempts to classify exist- ing e-business models. most classifications were derived by authors using their specific disciplinary languages. for example, strauss and frost ( ) and shin ( ) use marketing’s four ps—product, price, place, and promo- tion—to arrange e-business models and strategies. afuah and tucci ( ) explain how business models can be structured around the value chain of suppliers and buyers. gordijn and akkermans ( ) use it systems and archi- tectures to explain how certain models add value to users. applegate analyzes business models based on their tech- nical platforms. dubosson-torbay et al. ( ) propose a number of dimensions to characterize e-business models (required security, traffic scale), but stop short at classify- ing them. our typology does not refute these efforts. rather, it serves a different purpose: to explain from a strategic viewpoint why companies need to create e-businesses in the first place. when any dotcom is created, most founders seem to have an indisputable need to believe in its necessity. however, the sudden deflation of the internet bubble has exposed the difficulty of being profitable in e-business. with the rapidly changing landscape of e-commerce, it is necessary to establish a robust typology that speaks to the strategic objectives of these e-business models, in addition to the technical details of how they should be operated. proposed objective-based typology t he purpose of a typology is to conceptualize the underlying dimensions of the subjects or phenom- ena being studied. essentially, it is a mental map of classification that allows for easier recognition of complex subjects and enables readers to classify them into fewer categories. for example, some of the most common typologies in management were developed by blake and mouton ( ) and miles and snow ( ) to classify strategy types, personality traits, and leadership styles. such classification frameworks have guided strategy and ob research for many years. when choosing e-business models, two questions emerge that speak to the strategic objectives of running an e-busi- ness. first, for what purpose will the website be used? per- business horizons / november-december https://isiarticles.com/article/ s x jra .. gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle karen dempsey* despite more than three decades of feminist critique, archaeological scholarship remains predom- inantly focused on the exploration of patriarchal narratives and is, therefore, complicit in reinfor- cing structural inequalities. questions must be asked of how the construction of archaeological knowledge affects representation and impacts upon our ‘archaeologies’. this article explores the relative absence of gendered approaches within archaeology through the lens of later medieval archaeology, with a micro-focus on castle studies in britain and ireland. are there reasons for the silence in relation to gender in the archaeology of the later middle ages, and what lessons are there for bringing about a more inclusive archaeology? keywords: later medieval archaeology, castle studies, gender, feminism introduction in archaeology, the story of the past is largely told through the experiences of men. there have been noticeably fewer explorations of the wider spectrum of gendered identities and ideolo- gies that undoubtedly existed during the human past. this is perhaps not surprising given that many inequalities based on sex, sexual preference or sexual identity persist to the present day. our versions of the past reflect the context in which archaeological knowledge is pro- duced: a patriarchal society in which (white) men are privileged above others tends to write a past based on the supremacy of males in highly stratified cultures, mirroring their pre- sent. more surprising is that this situation persists more than years after the first feminist critiques of archaeology (conkey & spector ; gilchrist ). does this general silence about gender within the discipline of archaeology represent a backlash against feminism? is it that feminist perspectives to the past are merely unpopular today, or are they viewed as too much of a challenge to the status quo? in a time of global feminist activism, encapsulated by movements such as ‘#metoo’ and ‘timesup’, ‘everyday sexism project’, ‘repealthe th’ and ‘musawah’, this absence cannot reflect a disinterested audience. rather, it demonstrates that archaeology is behind the times and needs to respond to contemporary global and inter- sectional feminist voices. this article represents a renewed call for explicit challenges to con- tinuing androcentrism within archaeology. it reviews the evidence for gender disparity in the authorship of archaeological publications. the impact of this inequality is explored through the lens of later medieval archaeology in britain and ireland (the period ad – is discussed here), before providing a feminist critique of castle studies. * department of archaeology, university of reading, whiteknights box , reading rg ab, uk (email: k. dempsey@reading.ac.uk) © antiquity publications ltd, . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. antiquity ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . mailto:k.dempsey@reading.ac.uk mailto:k.dempsey@reading.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . gender inequality and the construction of archaeological knowledge the gender imbalance in academia has been discussed thoroughly (see harley : – ; european commission ; van den brink & benschop : – ). in archaeology, this imbalance manifests in senior roles within academia and professional practice (hamilton : – ). how does such gender imbalance within the discipline affect the construction of knowledge and, in particular, the representation of women and the interrogation of gender in the past (conkey & gero ; gilchrist )? this question is addressed here by analysing ‘the oxford handbooks of archaeology’ series as an index for gender imbalance in author- ship. these volumes are commissioned as ‘go-to’ guides for students and professionals that make, shape and capture the state-of-the-art in the discipline. ten handbooks from a wide chronological, thematic and geographic range are considered: archaeology (gosden et al. ), anglo-saxon archaeology (hinton et al. ), ritual and religion (insoll ), north american archaeology (pauketat ), african archaeology (mitchell & lane ), european bronze age (fokkens & harding ), death and burial (stutz & tarlow ), neolithic europe (fowler et al. ), later medieval archaeology (gerrard & gutiérrez ) and childhood (crawford et al. ) (figure ). for balance, potential gender dispar- ity in authorship is also assessed within three journals of medieval archaeology published in france, britain and italy (figure ). for multi-authored papers, all authors were included in the analysis. figure . gender balance in a selection of oxford handbooks of archaeology (figure by the author). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, men dominate the authorship in eight of the ten handbooks (figure ). based on their pub- lic profiles, the authors presented as overwhelmingly white (over per cent) in all publica- tions. the gender disparity of the handbooks only somewhat contrasts with the three medieval archaeology journals (figure ). in the oxford handbook of later medieval archaeology (gerrard & gutiérrez ), for example, there are twice as many male authors as female authors. in the section on ‘power and display’, all five chapters are by men. in contrast, six of the nine papers in the ‘growing up and growing old’ section are by women ( per cent). the message for medieval archaeologists is that women = nurture/care, and men = power. in ritual and religion there were only female authors in contrast with male. women outnumber male authors in only two of the handbooks: childhood and death and bur- ial. these comparisons are revealing in relation to contemporary gender roles: today, women are largely responsible for the primary care of children and elderly people. world religions— organised or otherwise—still exclude women from roles as ritual specialists. while power and display are explicit themes in many of the oxford handbooks, gender is not. the discus- sions therefore only account for an assumed and projected heteronormative past, and anything beyond the ‘normative’ is unexplored, including queer or lgbtq+ perspectives. it could be argued optimistically that the discipline has ‘mainstreamed’ gender or, in other words, that gender has been embedded in wider interpretation and no longer requires explicit figure . breakdown of gender balance in three medieval archaeological journals: reti medievali, archéologie médiévale and medieval archaeology – (figure by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, discussion. this, of course, is precisely the problem: a particular gendered ideology is implicit throughout many archaeological texts—that of the lives and practices of white, able-bodied heterosexual men. this means that many archaeologists, not just men, write about what is effectively the modern status quo. not all men, of course, write exclusively about other men, or use masculinist perspectives; nor are all people with different gendered identities, including women, interested in writing about females, disenfranchised or underrepresented people. yet it remains the case that women and all those who fall outside the ‘mainstream’ category of the white, heteronormative male are noticeably absent from the narrative— both as topics for discussion and as authors. the question is: does this matter? do we need more diversity in authorship in order to see more diversity in the past? i argue that this is imperative. embracing different and diverse voices would enhance our understanding of both the past and the present. it is unlikely that people would openly oppose this sentiment, but the evidence suggests that we still fall short of achieving these aims. we must ask then: who is responsible for ensuring that we have diverse representation? the answer is, of course, all of us. together, we must strive to include others. we must all be reflective and conscious of what choices we make in relation to our archaeological practice; who is represented, as well as underrepresented, and who is affected. there is, however, a special onus on those ‘gatekeepers’ who control or influence archaeological discourse to be as inclusive as possible (ahmed ). this means actively addressing these disparities. it may also mean asking difficult questions or refusing to partici- pate in an event or publication that lacks fair representation, while recognising that, despite best efforts, such editorial balance can be difficult to achieve (gerrard & gutiérrez pers. comm.). while this article focuses on gender inequality and feminism, the wider “matrix of dom- ination”, which reinforces structural inequalities especially with regard to racism, must be acknowledged (collins : ). it is noted that the majority of authors were white males, and where women are included, they are also predominately white. it is hypocritical to argue for the greater inclusion of (white) women while ignoring the structural inequalities that result in the exclusion of people of colour—especially women of colour, indigenous peo- ple and trans and gender-non-conforming people. we must be careful not to forget (or deny) the inherently patriarchal structure of academia and the colonial origins of archaeology as a discipline (gosden ; kim ). a broad-brush analysis of race, class, sexual orientation and ethnicity, however, is not attempted here, as these require detailed attention in their own right (franklin ). racism, for example, exists and must be challenged in our discourses. a positive shift to address this—particularly within the disciplines of medieval history and literature—is the emerging field of ‘global middle ages’, which foregrounds studies of ‘race and racism’ and decolonises the middle ages as a eurocentric idea (heng ; kim ; montón-subías & hernando ). gendered archaeologies the twenty-first century has witnessed an increasing acceptance that gender is fluid, non- binary and non-normative (gosling ). gender differences are socially constructed, his- torically contingent and changing. for millennia, people have (re)negotiated context-specific gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, gendered roles and other aspects of their identities involving ethnicity, sexuality and age. awareness of this is evidenced by examples of gendered archaeologies (e.g. tringham ; gilchrist ; sørenson ; brück ), as well as archaeologies of sexuality figure . ‘filling in the gaps’: an outdated approach (image by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, (voss ). yet there remains a resistance (or an apathy) towards more broadly incorporating the ways that scholars have created, assembled and reinforced gender roles into archaeological accounts of the past. it is telling that there is no ‘oxford handbook of gender archaeology’, and studies that offer insights into what women and other gendered identities did in the past are still rare (dowson ; voss , ; ghisleni et al. ). problematically, gender-inclusive archaeologies often consist of ‘filling in the gaps’ of past narratives (figure ); this approach, however, fails to critique the gendered assumptions on which pre-existing inter- pretations were based (see tringham : ). also, the projection into the past of gendered ideologies based upon heteronormative family units is rarely challenged, although there are some exceptions; these include that of reeder ( ), who advanced the (contested) idea of a homosexual relationship to explain depictions of two egyptian elite males within their shared tomb (c. bc). this raises important questions: are scholars afraid that studies of gender, women or those who existed outside mainstream ‘normative’ society are not ‘acceptable’ within the establishment? can we attribute the paucity of gender research to anxieties about what is valued by the academy? are we reifying power dynamics in our scholarship that are more reveal- ing of the sexual politics of our world than those of the past (conboy et al. : )? gender and medieval archaeology in britain and ireland the paucity of research into gendered identities in the medieval past is difficult to comprehend. it seems that the closer we come to the white-washed, heteronormative and patriarchal ‘modern world’ (of europe), the harder it is to imagine an alternative past. in the context of medieval european archaeology, this may be because the medieval past can seem so familiar that it is easy to assume that we already know it intimately. we know people’s names, the places they lived, the words they wrote down, the plays they watched, the songs they sang, the fields they worked, and we have some of the things that they used, loved and cared about. further- more, modern religions still retain and perform certain aspects of their cosmology. the material culture of late medieval britain and ireland is incredibly rich. funerary monuments and effigies offer insights into mortuary practices and representations of the dead, while architecture provides a material context embodied with gender relations and domestic tensions (figure ). literary texts and images are a rich source for representations of rituals surrounding belief and devotion, but also of daily life and the gendered aspects of book ownership (figure ). the design, production, use and decommissioning of objects, such as ceramics and metalwork, further inform our understandings (figure – ). interweav- ing these ‘data’ with our investigations of social relations demonstrates how the archaeological record—in the widest interpretation of that term—can be used to tell less fragmentary stories about the gendered lives of medieval people. given the richness of our sources, it is curious that inclusive studies are not more common in medieval archaeology. why are other disciplines—particularly medieval history and literature— capable of exploring individual agency, social relations and the lived experiences of medieval men and women? (e.g. woolgar ; gee ; nolan ; martin ; moss ; jasperse ; delman ). key themes addressed in these cognate disciplines are sponsorship (patronage) and religious devotion among elite women, while non-elites, such as washerwomen, maidservants, midwives and prostitutes, feature somewhat less (rawcliffe ; müller ). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, these disciplines, however, still show an explicit awareness of the complex ways in which medi- eval people constructed their identities. this has resulted in innovative explorations of sexuality, the body, gendered identities, queerness and, of course, women and feminist activism (e.g. green ; l’estrange ; french ; maude ; moss ). the absence of these approaches is keenly felt in the study of later medieval archaeology, which remains shaped by the predominance of androcentric (male-biased) perspectives. gilchrist ( ) first examined inequality in the practice and discourse of archaeology in britain, later demonstrating how a gendered archaeological approach could reveal a more complex story of the past (gilchrist , , ). beyond gilchrist’s scholarship and work by johnson ( ), giles ( , ) and graves ( ), there has been an apparent resistance to the types of social approaches, such as embodiment, materiality or phe- nomenology, that have been employed in prehistoric studies (e.g. cooney ; brück ; carlin ). except in rare instances (e.g. gilchrist ; robb & harris ), archaeologies of the life course and the body have largely been neglected. studies that include queer theory (dowson ; voss ; ghisleni et al. ) are absent. gendered interpretations that explore lgbtq+ perspectives are non-existent and very rare across archaeology more generally. while some publications do foreground ‘gender’—a malapropos for the study of women—these largely tell stories of women in the male world (standley , ; hicks ; richardson ; wiekart ; collins ). with few exceptions, this perceived disinterest in gender contrasts with early medieval, anglo-saxon and viking studies, in which these subjects are explored to some extent (e.g. lucy ; poole ; o’sullivan ). is this indifference a reflection of unconscious bias in scholarly research or a conscious effort to reinforce a particular status quo? gendered differences are manifest in both past and present, and the absence of atten- tion to the performance of gender is therefore startling. figure . chepstow castle in wales (photograph by the author). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, figure . detail of st genevieve in ms book of hours (courtesy of university of reading special collections). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, figure . seal of margaret mareschall, countess of northfolch and lady segrave (photograph by the author, courtesy of charlotte berry, magdalen college, oxford). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, gender and castle studies: the missing link understanding the issues in relation to gender within castle studies requires some reflection; while this article does not provide a full historiography of castle studies, brief commentary is necessary (barry ; o’conor ; creighton ; hansson ). as with archae- ology more generally, castle studies requires an interdisciplinary approach to explore the past in full; the application of necessary methods, however, has been limited. nonetheless, the field has undergone a profound transformation over the past three decades, moving away from military frameworks (allen brown et al. ) and embracing dee- per explorations of space and place. new approaches have emerged that focus on the symbolic meaning of castles and explore what these buildings might have meant to the medieval person. the emphasis has shifted from simply recounting detailed architectural descriptions towards integrated, interpretative approaches that view the spatial arrangement of buildings as a reflection and enactment of cultural ideolo- gies (e.g. coulson ; heslop ; fairclough ; gilchrist ; marshall ; richardson ; mol ; o’keeffe ). subsequently, a new wave of castle studies operating at a landscape-scale have looked beyond the masonry buildings to propose that the castle was only one part of a seigneurial package. this complex comprised many features, including dovecotes, villages, earthworks, water features and farms, through which to display, enhance and manage lordly economic, political and cultural authority (hansson ; creighton & liddiard ). this shift in approach represents a reaction against long- standing essentialist arguments based on binary oppositional understandings: military vs domestic, and defence vs display. the debates that ensued resulted in a more critical discourse and an acknowledgement that castles served multiple roles (johnson ; speight ; liddiard ; creighton & liddiard ). while these methodologies were at one time beneficial, they are now problematic. land- scape studies are based on macro-scale approaches that concentrate on displays of power, eco- nomic production, ecological exploitation and diet (liddiard ; creighton ; o’conor et al. ; swallow ; beglane ). they rarely, however, address the micro- scale of daily life, or other issues such as gender, sexuality, emotion and the life course. castle studies has not yet fully embraced social archaeology. while spatial approaches have been a figure . exeter puzzle jug (courtesy of royal albert memorial museum and exeter city council). gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, key focus for archaeologists and architectural historians for two decades, they have not brought us any closer to understanding how people occupied these spaces. interpretations of the spatial arrangement of buildings remain heavily influenced by perspectives of mascu- line rationality (boys ). buildings are thought to have a ‘grammar’ to be ‘read’ (johnson ). medieval use of space is still characterised and debated through dualistic binaries: pub- lic vs private, sacred vs profane, military vs domestic and male vs female, thus reinforcing oppositional understandings of man vs women, self vs other, subject vs object. this culture of dualisms stems from androcentric thinking, in which man is the beneficiary. in other words, the male ‘subject’ is viewed as active, rational and powerful, the female ‘object’ is emo- tional, passive and can be exploited. while we can demonstrate that medieval society was highly stratified and that social space and interaction were regulated (gilchrist ; hannson ), there remains an onus on the gender scholar to prove that matters are anything other than male. buildings may be thought of as active agents, but often only in terms of masculine power, wealth and status. women, in this model, are determined as passive, secluded ‘objects’, excluded from the ‘loca- tion of power’, which is a male or masculine space (johnson ). if this view is accepted, then one could safely assume that this exclusion had a physical manifestation in the form of a particular set of rooms from which women were excluded or secluded within. yet, confus- ingly, the idea of ‘female space’ in the castle is persistently resisted, despite their obvious and tangible presence. goodall ( : ) contends that women and children were entirely absent from castles, and that medieval elite households were celibate and male. even if this were true, why are homosocial behaviours (moss ), performances of masculinities or potential male homosexual relations not explored in this scenario? our current view of the later medieval period typically comprises buildings, objects and landscapes often detached from each other. discussions of castles have not yet combined peo- ple, places and things together within their historical context. architecture has a much richer role to play in archaeological interpretation than as a passive reflection of human behaviour, or as a binary didactic instrument, containing or transmitting social cues. architecture must be examined in terms of lived experience and as material culture. while some scholars do concentrate on the latter, it is often analysed in a typological or scientific manner—especially pottery—and not contextualised spatially within the castle (e.g. creighton & wright ). people are mostly discussed in terms of power, as patrons or ruling lords; in other words, elite males or females who operated as such. taken together, these traits reveal the discipline’s lack of enthusiasm to engage in meaningful discourses about biographies, life cycles, social prac- tices, beliefs and identities. one key issue is that castle studies remains a male-dominated field. despite the ‘new wave’ of such studies moving beyond militarism, it still typically reproduces male-centred interpre- tations epitomised by a focus on political power or status. studies that focus on women often endeavour to insert the female into ‘traditionally’ male activities, rather than creating a nar- rative of the female experience of living in the medieval world (e.g. richardson ). this is problematic, as it results in ‘male qualities’ being prioritised in analyses of social activities. there is no doubt that castles and associated activities have been long viewed as male, where metonyms for masculinity comprised weapons, armour and horses (gilchrist : ). generally, castle scholars no longer explicitly depict the castle as an aggressively karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, male-only world of sweat and testosterone; the current, insidious ‘gender-blindness’ within castle studies, however, ensures the preservation of this now implicit ideology. women, and those who were (or are?) not accepted as part of mainstream society, are absent(ed)—fig- uratively and literally. it seems that the discipline is focused on maintaining a particular status quo in the present by projecting ‘known’ gender constructs and roles onto the past, thereby ignoring other possibilities (conkey & spector ). ideally, castle studies would foreground human-centred stories that emphasise the real complexities of everyday life, where—as today—the world is experienced through the spec- trum of human emotions. my current marie skłodowska-curie fellowship, ‘herstory’, aims to achieve this by focusing on castles as case studies across ireland, britain and france. crucially, it integrates people, places and things, and asks new questions of the arch- aeological evidence, such as: how was gender constructed and mediated in relation to the medieval castle? what was it like to be a person, other than an elite male, living in the medi- eval castle? what material and social practices shaped the world of the castle? the inclusion of gendered interpretations is a fundamental issue not just for castle studies, but also for medi- eval archaeology and archaeology more generally, where many scholars still take a singular view of the past: that of able-bodied, heterosexual men of power—in other words, the mod- ern ‘masculine’ status quo. conclusion archaeology reinforces or projects a real and mythologised patriarchal hierarchy within its scholarship. consistently endorsing male authors, male perspectives and male stories, it per- petuates the idea of ‘male activities’ as superior. this affects not only our understanding of the past, but also maintains the patriarchal status quo in the present. if a male-oriented narrative is dominant and represented in scholarship, and it is embedded within a patriarchal academy that reinforces androcentrism, then archaeological (or other) evidence that speaks to the con- trary will continue to be overlooked or disregarded. our discourses must create multi-vocal narratives that reveal the social complexities and diversity of the world. in an era of global feminist activism, it is no longer acceptable to portray the past through one master narrative that consistently ignores the lives and experiences of othered people, especially women and those who do not conform to the heteronormative or white eurocentric ‘ideal’. this means moving away from accepting or assuming binary and heteronormative notions of the past. our scholarship needs to stop identifying gender—especially in attempting to make women visible—and to acknowledge that gender is already there. rather than “add women and stir” (tringham : ), we need to weave a new story, reimagining all the threads of various ele- ments of past identities and social relations, and the wide spectrum of gendered identities, to form a rich tapestry of the past and the present that constructs it (figure ). if we remain com- placent to the current gender (and racial) disparity, we are complicit in reinforcing the unequal status quo, and we fail to reach a large part of the potential audience for archaeology—those who feel disenfranchised by patriarchal, heteronormative or colonial narratives. while we now accept that our ways of being in the present inform how we view and interpret the past, many scholars are unable (or unwilling?) to discuss their personal motivations for gender and medieval archaeology r es ea rc h © antiquity publications ltd, choosing a particular interpretative approach. the lack of reflection given to the author’s per- sonal perspective in many archaeological studies is a core issue in how structural inequalities endure, including the perpetuation of patriarchal approaches. discrimination today based on sex, gender or sexual orientation is intrinsically linked to the paucity of research on gender in the past. to combat this, we must all demonstrate who we are and why we ‘do’ our studies in our own particular way. to paraphrase virginia woolf, this means changing and adapting, re-arranging our rooms (physical, literal and digital) to encourage other people to take up and redefine that space in order to enable a diverse, multi-vocal archaeology. acknowledgements this project has received funding from the european union’s horizon research and innovation programme under grant agreement number . thanks to neil carlin, daisy black and aleks pluskowski for commenting on this article. a very special thanks to roberta gilchrist for assistance and constructive comments. this article adds to the conversation she initiated in antiquity in . figure . imagining the past as a textile: ‘entwined’ (image courtesy of jill sharpe). karen dempsey © antiquity publications ltd, references ahmed, s. . on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. durham (nc): duke university press. https://doi.org/ . / allen brown, r., h.m. colvin & a.j. taylor brown. . the history of the king’s works. london: her majesty’s stationery office. barry, t. . the study of irish medieval castles: a bibliographic survey. proceedings of the royal irish academy (c): – . https://doi.org/ . /priac. . . beglane, f. . anglo-norman parks in medieval ireland. dublin: four courts. boys, j. . beyond maps and metaphors? rethinking 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. . .x https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /annurev.anthro. . . https://doi.org/ . /annurev.anthro. . . https://doi.org/ . /annurev.anthro. . . 	gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle 	introduction 	gender inequality and the construction of archaeological knowledge 	gendered archaeologies 	gender and medieval archaeology in britain and ireland 	gender and castle studies: the missing link 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	references i artikel i filsafat voluntarisme misnal munir stat pengajar fakultas filsatat universitas gadjah mada filsafat voluntarisme (filsafat kehe'ndak) dalam . literatur sejarah filsafat barat jarang dibahas dalam konteks suatu aliran. namun tidak berarti pemikiran tentang kehendak belurn menjadikajian para filosof. para filosof barat, seperti so- crates dan plato, sudah membahasanya sejak yunani kuno. plato menempatkan 'kehendak' sebagai bagian dari jiwa yang disebutnya 'keinginan',yang mempunyai pengendalian diri (sophrosyne), pemikiran aristoteles dalam soal ini berhu- bungan dengan konsepnya tentang kebahagiaan. menu- rutnya, manusia dapat memperoleh kebahagiaan apa- bila ia menjalankan aktifitasnya dengan baik menu- rut keutamaan (arefe). hanyapemikiran yang disertai dengan keutamaan (arefe) ya.ng dapat membuat manusia bahagia. pengantar ajaran kaunl stoa tentallg kehen- dak di arahkan pada kehendak individual yang bersifat otonoln. kehendak itu halu~ tnuncul dali dilinya sendiri dan menjadl miliknva sendiri dan tidak pemah dikon- trol oleh individu yang lain.. tak seoran~ pun memiliki kekuatan yang mengatasl keltendak seseol"ang, dan kehendak itu jurnal fll~afat. juu · nlemiliki kebebasan dan semangat yang beltitik tolak jiwa (sahakian, : ). pada masa abad pertengahan filosof yang memj)erlihatkan tentang peranan kehendak dalam diri manusia adalah thomas aquinas. fa mengatakan bahwa ketidak tahuan berakibat pada tindakan kehendak, sejauh ketidal ahuan itu sendili merupakan kehendak bebas, dan ini teljadi dalam dua cara yang ber- sesuaian dengan cara-cara kehendak. pertama, sebab tindakan kehendakmem- bawa ke ketidak tahuan, ketika manusia tidak ingin mengetahui sesuatu. kedua ketidak tahuan itu menjadi suatu kehen- dak manakala kehendak itu menjawab sesuatu yang dapat dan hams diketahui (kaufman, : ). filosof perancis rene descartes memandang kehendak manusia sebagai sesuatu yang hampir tidak terbatas, jika dibandjjigkan dengan rasio yang melalui berbagai keterbatasan-keterbatasan. la mengatakan bahwa kekuatan kehendak- lah yang memungkinkan manusia memiliki kebebasan, dan dengan kehen- dak itu pula .manusia menembus kebun- tuan pemikiran (descartes, : - ). kant mengatakan kehendak adalah suatu jenis kausalitas yang termasuk da- lam kehidupan manusia yang bertsifat rasional, dan unsur kebebasan menjadi ciri dari setiap. kausalitas yang bersifat efisien, tidak tergantung pada faktor- faktor penyebab dari luar (kant, : ). filosof yang dengan jelas meletak- kan kedudukan kehendak di atas rasio (aka!) adalah schopenhauer. jika filosof sebelumnya (yunani kuno dan abad per- tengahan) menempatkan kehendak seba- gai pelayan rasio, atau disamakan deng- all rasio, nutka schopenhauer menem- patkan kehendak di atas rasio. menurut- nya hakekat manusia tidak terletak pada pemikiran atau rasionya, akan tetapi hakekat manusia itu terletak pada kehen- daknya. jadi pada hakekatnya manusia itu adalah kehendak (harun hadiwiiono ii, : ). ~ filosof jaman modern yang juga menempatkan peranan kehendak menga- tasi rasio adal nietzsche. jika scopen- hauer menempatkan kehendak sebagai unsur utama kehidupan, maka bagi nietzsche kehendak merupakan kekuatan bawah sadar yang mendorol :& manusia untuk 'berkuasa. kehendak untuk berkuasa ini menjadi titik pusat filsafat- nya untuk menghancurkan berbazai pandangan filsafat sebelumnya. ia sangat menekankan bahwa hidup ajalah ke- hendak untuk berkuasa dan itu adalah, jurnal filsafat, juu ' yang lebih hidup. kehendak, ulltuk berkuasa ini menurut nietzsche akan melahirkanmakhluk terbaik sebagai pe- menang dalam perlombaan hidup, sebab kehendak untuk berkuasa adalah doro- ngan hidup yang paling kuat (copleston, : ). dengan demikian kehendak dalam pandangan nietzsche adalah suatu kekuatan yang mendorong manusia un- tuk berkuasa. kekuatan kehendak di sini tidak hanya mengacu pada kekuatan la- hiriah, sepcrti kek"uatan otot atau tulang, melainkan daya yang mendorong manusia untuk menaati sesuatu, yaitu kehendak untuk berkuasa (deleuze, : ). ricoeur mengembangkan suatu pemahaman baru tentang kehendak yallg disebutllya dengan fenomenologi kehen- dak (toeti heraty, : ). ricoeur menggunakan metode fenomenologi husserl untuk mencari eidos atau hakekat sesuatu. la ingin memberikan suatu 'eldetika'tentang kehendak, suatu -pelukisall tentang eidos kehendak (beliens, : ). penyelidikan ri- coeur tentang kehendak ditujukannya untuk menemukan hakekat kebebasan dalam hubunganllya dengan kejahatan. pandangan ricreur telltang kehendak berkaitan juga dengan upaya dia ulltuk menerapkan metode hermeneutika. her- menutika menurut ricoeur seluas eksis- tensi dan pengalaman manusia (''aku '? la mempergunakan bermacam-macam uraian tentang kehendak manusia, keja- hatan, simbel, hubungan sosial dalam dunai politik, dan sebagainya (verhaak, : ). pengertian voluntarisme istilah voluntalisme mellunjuk kepada suatu aliran filsafat yang tokoh- tokohnya berkeyakinan bahwa 'kehen- dak' nlallusia mengatasi akalnya. kata tkehendak' dalam bahasa latin adalah voiuntas, jelman: ltriile, inggris: urill. penekanan bahwa kehidupan manusia didominasi oleh 'kehendak' mel'umbulkall aliran filsafat voluntalisme (ali-mudha- fir, : - ). para filosof yang tergabung dalam aliran ini 'berkeyakinan bahwa manusia dalam hidupnya tidak dikuasasi oleh ra- sio atau akal --sebagaimana yang diya- kinioleh kaum rasionalis-- melainkan oleh kehendak, kemauan, atau disebut juga dengan nafsu. dinamika perkem- bangan sejarah kehidupan manusia di- dorong kehendak yang kuat, sehingga manusia senantiasa mengalami kemajuan dalam segala aspek kehidupannya. para penganut aliran filsafat vol- untarisme fllembelikan tekanan yang berbeda tentang peran dan pengaruh ke- hendak bagi kehidupan manusia. kehen- dak menurut penganut voluntarisme merupakan unsur yang dominan dalam mengatur tindakan manusia. jika kaum rasionalis atau intelektualis mengatakan bahwa akal manusia merupakan faktor dominan dalam tindakan manusia, maka kaum voluntaris berkeyakinan bahwa segala aspek kegiatan manusia didorong oleh kehendaknya. kehendak merupakan hakekat manusia itu sendiri, hal ini ber- beda dengan kaum rasionalis yang ber- pendapat bahwa akal yang tampakdalam proses. berpikir merupakan hakekat manusla. aliran voluntarisme biasanya dila- wankan dengan intelek.walisme atau ra- sionalisme. illtelektualisme adalah aliran filsafat yang memandang bahwa rasio atauakal mallusia lebih menentukan tin- dakan manusia dibandingkan dengan ke- hendak. voluntalisme ~rpandangan se- baliknya, kehendaklah yang menguasai akal atau rasio manusia. kehendak me- nurut j?enzanut aliran voluntati.sme inerupakan unsur pokok yang menguasai mallusia, manusia tanpa kehendak tidak akan pernah mengalami perkembangan. berbagai pandangan tentang kehendak dalam fllsafat barat a. plato ( - sm filosof yang secara eksplisit meln- bams peranan kehendak dalam dili lnanusia pada masa yunani kuno ialah plato. plato mengatakan bahwa jiwa manusia itu· terdil; atas riga bagian atau lapisan. peruuna disebutnya akal atau ra- sio, yaitu bagian jiwa yang tertinggi. akal jurnal flls"afat. juu atau rasio ini disebut juga bagian ra- sional. bagian rasi nal ini merupakan unsur yang memimpin seluruhaktivitas manusia. bagian rasional oleh plato di- ibaratkan seperti sais yang mengen- dalikan kuda dalam suatu rangkaian kel~ta. kedua, disebut kehendak, kehen- dak menurot plato merupakan alat bagi akal atau rasio. kehendak olehplato di- ibaratkan seperti seekor kuda yang me- nrik gerobak atau pedati. plato menga- takan bahwa di dalam kehendak ini ber- semayam perasaan-perasaan yang lebih tinggi, seperti: keberanian, gila hormat, kemarahan, yang adil, dan sebagainya. ketiga, merupakan tempat bersemayam- nya nafsu-nafsu liar atau nafsu kebi- natangan manusia yang harus diatur oleh akal atau rasio (harun-hadiwijono i, : ). dalam filsafat plato ini kehen- dak ditempat kedudukannya dibawah akal atau rasio manusia. attinya dalam dili. manusia yang jerperanan adalah rasionya atau akalnya, sedangkan kehen- dak mell.lpakan pelayan dati. akal atau rasio. b.aristoteles ( - sm) ali.stoteles, sebagaimana halnya dengan plato, juga menempatkan kehen- dak sebagai bagian dari unsur ke- manusiaan. berbeda dengan plato yang membagi jiwa manusia dalam tiga bagian, maka ati.stoteles membaginya menjadi dua bagian. pemikiran aristo- teles tentang kehendak dapat ditemukan dalam penlbicaraan tentang keba- hagiaan. menurutnya manusia dapat memperoleh kebahagiaan apabila ia menjalankan aktifitasnya dengan baik. artin)ta supaya manusia bahagia iaharus menjalankan aktivitasnya menul'ut keu- tanlaan (arefe). hanya pemikiran yang disettai dengan keutamaan (arete) yang dapat membuat manusia bahazia. keu- tarnaan itu tidak hanya menyangkut "a- sio, akan tempi juga manusia seluruhnya. manusia bukan saja merupakan makh- luk intelektual, melainkan juga makhluk yang lllenlpunyai perasaall-perasaan, kinginan-keinginan, nafsu-nafsudan lain sebagainya (beltells, : ). dengan demikian dari pemikiran arsitolteles ini kehendak mencakup perasaan-perasaan, keinginan-keinginan, nafsu-nafsu itu. kehendak inilah yang mendorong manusia untuk melakukan tindakan-tin- dakan dalam hidupnya . oleh karena itu aristoteles membagi keutamaan itu menjadi dua macam, yaitu; keutamaan intelek.iuil dan keutamaan moril. keu- tamaan intelektui! bersumber dari rasio, sedangkan keutamaan moril bersumber dari kehendak manusia. namun demikian aristoteles tampaknya tetap meletakkan keutamaan intelek.iuil seba- gai keutamaan teltinggi yang mem- bimbing keutamaan mori!. c. thomas aquinas ( - ). filosof yang agak terang membi- earakan kehendak dalam filsafat abad pertengahan adalah thomas aquinas. aquinas mengatakan bahwa dalam diri manusia itu terdapat unsur berpikir dan berkehendak yang melandasi setiap per- buatanya. kedua hal ini menyatu dalam jiwa manusia sebagai kesatuan yang ti- dak dapat dipisahkan. oleh karena itu kesatuan manusia ini mengandaikan bahwa tubuh manusia hanya dijiwai oleh satu bentuk saja, yaitu; bentuk rohani. rohani ini dalam din manusia memben- tuk hidup lahiriah sekaligus juga hidup batiniah (harun hadiwijono i, : - ). dengan demikian dalam filsafat thomas aquinas jiwa adalah satu dengan tubuh dan sekaligus menjiwai tubuh. jiwa dan tubuh dalam diri manusia tidak terpisah akan tetapi dapat dibedakan menurut fungsinya. berdasarkan pemikiran bahwa jiwa itu menjadi satu dengan tubuh, maka thomas aquinas dalam melihat unsur- unsur dalam diri manusia itu juga belti- tik tolak dan pengandaian bahwa jiwa lebih berperanan dalam diri manusia. aquinas menegaskan bahwa jiwa itu memiliki daya jiwani, yaitu; ( ) daya jiwani vegetatip yang bersangkutan de- ngan pel' antian zat dengan pembiakan; ( ) daya jiwani yang sensitip adalah daya jiwani yang bersangkutan dengan jurnal fil)afat, juli ' keinginan; ( ) daya jiwani yang meng- gerakkan; ( ) daya jiwani untuk memikir dan ( ) daya jiwani unttlk me l genal (harun hadiwijono i, : ). daya memikir dan mengenal terdiri dali akal dan kehendak. akal adalah daya yang teltinggi dan termulia yang lebih penting dari kehendak. bagi thomas aquinas yang benar lebih tinggi daripada yang baik. mengenal adalah perbuatan yang lebih sempurna dibandingkan dengan menghendaki. uraian di atas semakin mengu- kuhkan pendapat bahwa pemahaman para filsof tentang kehendak sejak yu- nani kuno sampai abad pertengahan disubordinasi dibawah akal atau rasio. pandangan yang menempatkan kehendak dibawah rasio atau akal masih berlanjut sampai jaman modern dengan kemun- culan ali ran rasionalisme. d. rene descartes - ). pemikiran filsafat bared, terutama sejak dikemukakannya tesis "cogito ergo sum" oleh descartes, realitas dunia hanya difahami sebagai bagian dari ide (gagasan) manusia. altinya dunia dikuasai dan dikendalikan oleh ide atau gagasan. cara pandang seperti itu se- makin jelas pada filosof idealisme <riehte, schelling, dan hegel) yang meredusir seluruh realitas ke dalam ide atau gasa- gan manusia. hegel bahkan menyatakan dengan tegas bahwa ide yang dimengelti identik dengan kenyataan yang diamati. rene descartes adalah seorang ra- sionalis yang menjadi aeuan para filosof barat modern. la memandang kehendak manusia sebagai sesuatu yang hampir ti- dak terbatas, sedangkan rasio dihadap- kan pada berbagai keterbatasan. la me- ngatakan bahwa kekuatan kehendaklah yang memungkinkan manusia memiliki kebebasan, dan dengan kehendak itu pula manusia menembus kebuntuan pemikiran (descaltes, : - ). dengan demikian descaltes mengakui bahwa di dalam dili manusia selain rasio, ada unsur lain yang mempengaruhi ke- hidupannya, yaitu kehendak. descartes meyakini bahwa kehen- dak memiliki kemampuan yang tidak ter- batas, namun tetap berada di bawah pe- ngaruh rasio yang bersifat terbatas. hal ini tampak pada pemikirannya, bahwa hakikat manusia terletak pada rasio atau akalnya. ia bahkan menegaskan "cogito ergo sum'~ yaknisaya berpikir maka saya ada. kendatipundescartes mengakui adanya kehendak,akan tetapi ia tetap menempatkan akal sebagai pem- bimbing tindakan manusia. e. maine de biran ( - ) dalam jaman modern filosof yang membahas peranan dan kedudukan ke- hendak dalam diri manusia secara lebih jelas diawali oleh filosof ·perancis maine de biran.. maine de biran melihat manusia itu sebagai makhluk yang ber- tindak. tindakan manusia ini dilang- sungkan oleh kehendak yang mengalami hambatan (foeti hel~ty, : - ). tindakan yang dilangsungkan oleh ke- hendak yang mengalami hambatan ini memerlukan suatu tenaga yang cukup besar. tenaga inilah melahirkan penya- daran adanya aku. karena suatu tindakan memerlukan gerakan tenaga, dengan adanya peli:entangan antara kehendak dan hambatan, terjadilah penyadaran aku dengan jelas. namun demikian ak'u ini tidak merupakan person atau plibadi. aku ini lebih merupakansuatu saat pada arus kehidupan kesadaran yang telikat oleh waktu dan tetap tel~antung pada kemampuan untuk melangsungkan tin- dakan. ak."u hanya merupakan satu saat pada kehidupan rohaniah. dari pemikir- annya ini maine de biran telah meng- angkat peranan kehendak dalam dili manusia pada tataran aku (su~iek) meskipun masih bersifat temporal. ke- helldak menentukan eksistensi manusia . atau keberadaan manusia. f.. immanuel kant la mengatakan kehendak adalah suatu lenis kausalitas yang terrnasuk da- lam kehidupan manusia yang bersifat ra- sional, dan unsur kebebasan menjadi cit; dari setiap kausalitas yang bersifat efisien, tidak tergantung pada faktor- jurnal f'l~afat. juu · faktor penyebab dari luar (kant, : ). kebebasan kehendak meru- pakan salah satu ix>stulat dari rasio praktis. pendapat kant ini ditulisnya da- lam buku kritik der praktischen ver- nunft (kritik atas rasio pral is).kritik atas rasio praktis ini hendak menjawab pertanyaanapa yang dapat saya perbuat. pertanyaan kant ini dimaksudkannya untuk mencari jawaban dan menjelaskan dasar-dasar kaidah tindakan manusia. dasar-dasar kaidah tindakan manusia itu oleh kant dibedakan sebagai berikut. ( ) maksim-maksim; kaidah-kaidah yang berlaku subjel'tif. ( ) undang-undang; kaidah-kaidah yang berlaku secara umum, objek.'tif. ( ) imperatif hipotetis; yang berlaku secara umumsebagai syarat untuk mencapai sesuatu. ( ) im- pertatif kategoli.s; kaidah yang berlaku secara umum, selaiu dan dimana-mana (hamersma, : - ). kaidah yang paling memadai untuk menzatur norma-norma moral menurut kant adalah imperatif kategoris. kant mengatakan bahwa kaidah imperatif kategolis sebagai dasar perbuatan manusia dalam berbuat baik tidak ditentukan oleh alasan-alasan rasional, akan tetapi ditentukan olehperbuatan baik itu senditi. akan tetapi hal ini menimbulkan masalah karena di dunia kebaikan moral sering tidak menghasil- kan kebahagian. pada haj tujuan utama moral atau etika adalah kebaikan, kebai- kan harus menghasilkan kebahagiall sempurna. oleh karena itu kant menge- mukakan adanya tiga postulat, yaitu tiga syarat atau tuntutan yang memungkinan teljalinnya hubungan antara kebaikan moral dan kebahagian sempurna. postu- lat sebagai dasar bagi kebaikan moral dan kebahagian sempurna itu ialah: ( ) kebebasan kehendak, ( ) keabadian jiwa, ( ) adanya tuhan (hamersma, : ). di antara tiga jx>stulat di atas, ke- bebasan kehendak merupakan syarat mutlak bagi perbuatan yang berdasarkan imperatif kategoli.s. sebab, seseorang ti- dak mungkin dituntut tanggung jawab- nya jika ia tidak memiliki kebebasan ke- hendak dalam melakukan suatu perbuat- an moral. g. schopenhauer schopenhauer ( : ) menga~ takan bahwa kalau kita menerima dunia hanya semata~mata sebagai ide, maka ini merupakan pandangan sepihak yang di- timbulkan oleh abstraksi sewenang- wenang. padahal kesadaran hanya meru ~ pakan sebagian dari hakikat manusia. bagian hakikat manusia yang lain itu ialah 'kehendak'. schopenhauer mengidentikkan kehendak dengan se- suatu dalam dirinya. kehendak menurut- nya adalah .dorongan, insting, kepenting- an, hasrat, dan emosi. dalam setiap pe- ngalaman hidup manusia, subjek dan objek bukan merupakan hal yang terpisah sebagaimana hal-hal yang lain- nya (parker, :xvi). seluruh kehen- dak berasal dari keinginan yang tumbuh dari penderitaan manusia (sahakian, : ). dalamdiri manusia pikiran- pikiran (i'asio) hanya merupakan lapisan atas dari hakikat manusia. watak manusia di tentukan oleh kehendaknya. kehendak tidak mengenal lelah, karena terjadi tanpa kesadai'an, seperti halnya dengan jalannya jantung, pernafasan yang beraktifitas tanpa perlu kita pikirkan. lebih jauh schopenhauel' juga menjelaskan bahwa kehendak itu tidak hanya menjadi pendorong bagi manusia, akan tetapi kehendak juga menjadi daya pendorong didalam seluruh dunia, yaitu sebagai kehendak dunia. kehendak dunia juga berkembang dari yang tak sadar ke yang sadar. demikianlah kehendak menampakkan diri sebagai asas dunia. disini kehendak seolah-olah berperan sebagai daya hidup dalam dunia, kehen~ daklah yang menghidupi dunia dan menjadi motor penggerak perkembangan dunia dan manusia. oleh karena itu ke~ hendak pada schopenhauer menjadi daya pendorong hidup segala hal, sehingga pengertian kehendak diletakkan sebagai kehendak untuk hidup (wj e zur lebei ). berdasarkan landasan metafisik da- lam filsafat schopenhauer da:pat ditarik kesimpulan bahwa hakikat manusia tidak terletak pada pemikii'an, kesadaran atau rasio, melainkan pada kehendaknya. ke~ hendak sebagai hakikat terdalam di da~ lam diri manusia menjadi daya pen~ jurnal fil)afat. jull ' dorong seluruh aktivitas kehidupannya. kehendak sebagai daya pendorong itu menampilkan diri sebagai kehendak yang lebih tinggi dan kehendak yang lebih rendah. kehendak yang lebih tinggi tam- pak dalam proses berpikir yang mela ~ hirkan gagasan~gagasan tentang dunia. kehendak yang tampil sebagai kehendak yang lebih rendah tampak dalam per- buatan tubuh yang dapat diamati. ak- tivitas tubuh adalah pei'buatan kehendak yang telah diperagakan, yang telah diob- jetivir dalam luang dan wa .w (harun hadiwijono ii, : ). kehendak sebagai hakikat manusia tidak hanya berperan sebagai penggerak sehingga manusia mampu bertindak dan berpikir, akan tetapi juga menjadi peng~ gerak unsur elementer dalam tubuhnya. kehendak sebagai penggerak elementer berkembang dali keadaan yang tak sadar (yang tampak pada alam anorganis) menuju keadaan yang setengah sadar (alam ol'sanis) untuk seterusnya menam~ pakkan dili dalam kesadaran penuh pada manusia (kemampuan berpikii'). segala gejala atau penampakan yang mengelilingi manusia dalam ruang dan waktu hams dipandang sebagai penjel- maan kehendak. artinya hidup atau dunia fenomena adalah cerminan atau bayang-bayang dari kehendak. kehendak dan hidup ibarat badan dengan bayang~ bayangnya, sehingga dapat dikatakan di mana ada kehendak, di sana mestilah ada hidup, yang dapay dilingkas menjadi "kehendak untuk hidup" (schopenhauer, : ). kehendak yang paling nyata dalam hidup manusia adalah keinginan untuk melangsungkan ketumnan (hamersma, : ). bagi schopenhauer yang men~ dorong manusia untuk kawin adalah ke~ hendak yang menampak pada cinta kasih antar jenis (laki ~laki dengan perempuan). saling jatuh cinta laki-iaki dan perem- puan itu didorong oleh kehendak untuk hidup agar spesiesnya tidak punah (schopenhauer, : ). saling jatuh cinta yang didorong oleh kehendak ini juga berlaku dalam dunia tumbuh-tum- buhan dan binatang. pada umumnya setiap orang mencintai unsur-unsur yang qo ia sendiri tidak memilikinya. hal ini ber- alii kehendak alam mencoba untuk 'mengoreksi' atau saling melengkapi keti- dak sempurnaan genetis dari suatu part- ner atau pasangan melalui perkawinan. h. nietzsche senada dengan schopenhauer yang mengatakan kehendaklah yang menjadi pendorong al. ivitas manusia, nietzsche juga menegaskan bahwa manusia dalam hidupnya dikuasai oleh kehendak. be- danya, jika schopenhauer mengatakan bahwa kehendak sebagai daya pen- dorong untuk hidup, maka nietzsche menegaskan kehendak itu sebagai pen- dorong untuk berkuasa (sudiardja, : ). kehendak untuk berkuasa (wille zur n cht) ini terutama ditujukan nietzsche untuk melepaskan diri dali segala kekuasaan yang melingkupi manusia selama ini. dengan kehendak untuk berkuasa ini nietzsche meniada- kan segala pribadi yang lebih berkuasa dali rnanusia, termasuk kekuasaan tuban atas manusia. dengan kehendak untuk berl.'uasa inilah manusia dapat menjadi manusia unggul (uebemlensch). kehendak untuk berkuasa hanya dapat diperoleh dengan kekuatan dan ke- mampuan sendiri. sasaran akhir dari ke- hendak untuk berkljasa ini bagi nietzsche adalah tercapainya tingkat manusia unggul. tingkat manusia unggul ini hanya mungkin jika tidak ada kekuasaan di atas manusia, yaitu tuhan, oleh karena itu manusia harus menya- takan bahwa tuhan telah mati (nietzsche, : ).. untuk mencapai tingkat manusia unggul diperlukan waktu yang panjang dan bel ahap yang didukung oleh dorongan kehendak yang terns menerus. agar cita-cita menjadi manusia unggul itu tercapai, manusia haruslah berikhtiar dan merealisasikan diri secara terus menerus melampaui dirinya, dan. selalu berpikir bahwa manusia bukanlah sesuatu yang sudah selesai. manusia unggul itu diciptakan sendiri oleh dilinya, dengan membangun kemampuan cipta dan keunggulannya. basi nietzsche siapapun yang hen- dak mef\ladi pencipta, ia haruslah men- jurnal f'l~af-at. juu " jadi pemusnah dan pendobrak nilai-nilai (chairul arifin, : ). setiap nilai baru yang dibuatoleh. manusia harus da- pat memberikan arah yang berangkat dari kekurangannya sendiri menuju ke tingkatan yang lebih tinggi. untuk mewujudkan itu diperlukan kekuat- an,kecerdasan dan kebanggan pada diri sendiri. dengan demikian ·manusia un- &gul hanya dapat ditumbuhkan oleh ga- bungan tiga hal, yaitu; kekuatan, kecer- dasan dan kebanggaan. manusia unggul akan tercapai herdasarkan kemampuan individu itu sendiri. manusia unggul adalah mereka yang dengan kekuatannya dapat mengatasi l."umpulan-kumpulan manusia dalam massa, atau manusia yang dapat menguasai manusia lainnya. i. paul ricouer pada abad ke- , kehendak sebagai suatu kalian khusus dibahas oleh paul ricouer ~ ( - ...). ricouer mengem- bangkan suatu pemahaman balu tentang pengertian kehendak yang disebutnya dengan fenomenologi kehendak. erazinl 'v kohak dalam kata pengantar edisi ing- gelis buku ricour mengatakan bahwa arah filsafat kehendak dalam pandangan ricouer dapat diklasifikasikan menjadi tiga, yaitu: ( ) eidetik, aliinya kehendak yang disebabkan tugasnya sebagai suatu desklipsi fenomenologis tentang hakekat, yakni struk. l r keberadaan manusia di dalam duma. ( ) empilik, altinya kehen- dak yang di arahkan untuk nlenggam- barkan tugas refleksi yang menggerak- kan kembali aspek eidetik. ( ) poetik, artinya kehendak yang dipergunakan untuk analisis secara intensif terhadap visi kemanusiaan dali aspek penjelasan elnpirik (ricoeur, :xvi). fenomena kehendak menurut deskripsi eidetik membedakan suatu tin- dakan atau kegiatan kehendak menurut tiga gerak yang dikehendaki (vojunfaly), yaitu; ( ) aklj menentukall; ( ) aku menggerakkan tubuh; ( ) ak'u menyetu- jui (foeti heraty, : ). ketiga hal ini ditunjang oleh kegiatan kehendak. setiap gerakan kehendak ini juga nlem- punyai pasangan bukan-kehendak (initolunfary) masing-masing, dalaln arti bahwa bukan-kehendak menjadi latar belakang sebab bagi kehendak dan se- baliknya kehendak memberi fokus kepada bukan kehendak, selalu ada hubungan timbal balik antal'a yang dike- hendaki dengan yang tidak dikehendaki (bettens, : ). pertentangan antara yang dikehen- daki (volunfljry) dengan yang bukan- dikehendaki (involuntary) dapat dipe- cahkan manusia menurut dua ke- mungkinan, ialah bahwa ia mengg«::rak- kan kehendak ke arah h'ansendensi menuju tuhan, atau dapat pula sampai pacta kegagalan kehendak yang disebut dengan dosa. demikianlah antara kedua kutub fenomenologi kehendak manusia pada satu pihak memiliki kemerdekaan, sedangkan di lain pihak manusia dibatasi oleh alamnya. kedudukan manusia di antara kedua l.:utub tersebut menggam- barkan, bahwa pada kehendak selalu ada faktor bukan-kehendak dalam berbagai bentuk (tuti heraty, : ). manusia dengan kehendak itu bebas mengek- spresikan dirinya, sementara itu dilain pihak ternyata dalam hidupnya manusia sering berbuat sesuatu di luar kehen- daknya. bentuk-bentuk aliran filsafat voluntarisme richard taylor secal'a galis besar membagi ali ran filsafat voluntarisme menjadi empat bentuk, yaitu: ( ) psycho- logical voluntarism, aliran ini berpenda- pat bahwa akal berada dibawah kehen- dak; ( ) ethical voluntarism, menurut aliran ini perbuatan baik atau buruk di- dorong oleh kehendak manusia; ( ) theological voluntarism, adalah teori yang menggambarkan keunggulan ke- hendak manusia atas akalnya, kemudian konsepsi teologis yang menggambarkan keunggulan kehendak illahi atas kehen- dak manusia; ( ) memphisycal voluntar- ism, suatu pandangan yang menekankan pentingnya konsep kehendak untuk me- mahami problem-problem hukum, etika, dan tingkah laku manusia pada umum- nya (taylor, : - ). alil'an fil- safat voluntarisme, selain yang dikemu- kakan taylor adalah voluntarisme jurnal fll~afat. juli ' fenomenologis, yaitu suatu upaya untuk memahami kehendak melalui metooe fenomenologi (bettens, : ). berdasarkan bentuk-bentuk aliran tersebut di atas, maka suiit untuk me- nempatkan secara pasti kedudukan seorang filosof ke dalam salah satu alir- an. kesulitan itu terutama disebabkan oleh iuasnya pembahasan para filosof tentang peranan kehendak dalam diri manusia. seorang filosof kadangkala membicarakan berbagai dimensi yang sekaligus dapat dimasukkan ke dalam kategoli aliran-aliran tersebut. a.voluntarisme psikologis filosof yang terrnasuk dalam aliran voluntarisme psikologis adalah nietzsche. kehendak untuk berk-uasa pada filsafat nietzsche tidak memiliki akar metafisik, ungkapan nietzsche tentang kehendak untuk berkuasa semata-mata didorong oleh emosi psikis, yakni ketidakber- dayaan yang dialaminya sejak ked!. se- lain itu, kemuakannya terhadap berbagai nilai, norma, aturan main yang mengikat dirinya, yang dianggapnya sebagai sik- saan, merupakan fa ' or pendorong bagi nietzsche untuk membangun suatu kekuatan. sasaran akhir kehendak untuk berkuasa pada nietzsche adalah untuk membangun manusia unggul yang men gahancurkan berbagai nilai-nilai yang selama ,ini berla -u. b. voluntarisme etis filosof yang termasuk ke dalam ali- ran filsafat voluntalisme etis ada be- berapa orang, antal'a lain plato, kant, dan schopenhauer. bagi plato dan kant, ke- hendak adalah kekuatan yang men- dorong manusia melakukan tindakan- tindakan, baik tindak dalam bentuk per- buatan baik maupun yang buruk. bagi schopenhauer kekuatan kehendak yang tidak terbatas, sementara sarana untuk memenuhinya terbatas, melahirkan suatu filsafat moral yang didasarkannya pada moral budhisme. moral budhisme ini dipakai untuk menekan seminirnal mung kin gejolak kehendak manusia. c. voluntarisme theologis filosof yang termasuk aliran filsafat voluntarisme teologis adalah paul ri- couer. ia mengatakan ada sesuatu yang dapat dikehendaki manusia dan sesuatu yang di luar kehendaknya. penelusuran ricouer terhadap~ yang dikehendaki dan tidak-dikehendaki menggirinya ke suatu pemahaman tentang rmsteri kejahatan. ricouer juga termasuk aliran voluntar- isme fenomenologis. kehendakdi dalam diri manusia oleh ricouer di selidiki de- ngan menerapkan metode fonomelogi. d. voluntarisme metafisik filosof-filosof yang termasuk ke dalam aliran filsafat voluntarisme metafisis antara lain: ( ) maine de biran yang mengemukakan pendapat yang ber- beda de~an descartes. jika descartes menegaskan bahwa substansi pokok itu adalah 'al"u yang berpikir', atau ak."u ada karena berplkir, maka maine de biran justru mengatakal!nya dengan 'aku yang berkehendak', arttnya aku ada karena berkehendak. ( ) schopenhauer, filosof modern yang bersungguh meletakkan hakikat manusia bahkan alam semesta pada kehendak. kehendak bagi schopen- hauer adalah inti dati segala realitas, tumbuhan, hewan,manusia atau alam seluruhnya lahir, tumbuh; berkemabang karena dorongan kehendak. bentuk-bentuk ali ran filsafat vo- luntarisme juga dapat diklasifikasikan berdasarkan slkap mereka memandang akibat-akibat peranan kehendak pada manusia. bagi filosof yang melihat ke- hendak sebagai sumber penderitaan, se- pelti schopenhauer, dapat disebut vo- luntarisme pesimistik. fllosof yang me- nempatkan kehendak sebagai sarana untuk mewujudkan cita-cita manusia, seperti nietzsche dengan manusia ung- gulnya, maka ~ni dap~t .di~tegorilcin sebagal voluntarlsme opnnusnk. kesimpulan berdasarkan uraian yan$ telah di- paparkan, maka dapatlah d.lsimpulkan hal-hal sebagai belikut: . pembicaraan tentalls kehendak telah terdapat pada penlikiran filosof \"u- nani kuno. kehendak dalam filsafat yu- nani kruno sebagai bagian dan iiwa yang memberikan daya dorong bagi manusia untuk beltindak. tindakan ntanusia yang didorong oleh kehendak ini dikontrol jurnal fil)afat. juu ' oleh rasio dan akalnya agar kehendak itu tidak menyengsarakan hidup manusia. sebab, kebajikan tertinggi dalam hidup inimenulut mereka adalah pengetahuan. dengan pengetahuan manuslaakan mendapatkan kebahagiaan. . filosof abad tengah mengiden- tikkan kehendak ini de~an rasio. antara rasio dan kehendak tidakdapat dipisahkan ·akan tetapi keduanyadapat dibedakan melalui pengungkapan dalam kehidupan manusia. rasio akan tampak dalam aktifitas intelektual seda~kan ke- hendak menampakkan diri dalam ak' i- fitas etik atau prak.' is. . penukiran tentang kehendak mendapatkan tempatyang lebih dominan adalah dalam filsafat schopenhauer .dan nietszche. keduanya sependapat bahwa hakekat manusia itu adalah kehendak. akan tetapi bagi schopellhauerkehendak adalah untuk hidup, maka bagi nietzsche kehendak adalah untuk berkuasa menuju manusia unggul. . dalam abad ke- pengertian kehendak pada ricoeur dilawankan de- ~an yang bukan-kehendak. baginya da- lam diri manusia itu yang akan tampak dalam rerbuatannya ada hal-hal yang dapat dlkehandaki dan ada hal-hal yang tidak dikehendaki. pada kehendak terda- pat dua kutub, yaitu; kehendak di satu pihak dan kegagalan kehendak dipihak lain. . secara galis besar ada empat bentuk ali ran filsafat voluntarisme i yaltu; ( ) voluntarisme psikol<;>gis; ( ) vo untar- isme etis; ( ) voluntarisme teologis; ( ) voluntarisme metafisis; ( ) voluntarisme fenomenologis; ( ) voluntarisme pesimis- tik; ( ) voluntaristne optimistik. daitar pusfaka ali-mudhafir, , kall us teori dall a/ira.n dala.m fi/safat, libert)t, '''ogyakarta. bakker, anton, , ontologi alau mela.fisika ull uj , kanisius, \'ogyakalta. beltens, k., , ,,')ejarajl filsafat lll- nal i; da.ri tjlajes ke aristoteles, kanisius, yogyakarta. beliens, k., , sc;iarall fi/safat b{iraf abad xx, jilid ii, pt gramedia, ja- kal :a. chairul-amin, , kehendak untuk berkuasa friedriech wilhelm nietzsche, erlangga, jakal :a. copleston, f., , fiidriech nietzsche philosopher of culture, barnes & noble book, new york. deleuze, gilles, , nietzsche and phi- losophy, translated from germany by hugh tomlison, the athlone press, lundon. descartes, rene, , meditations on first philosphy, translated from french by john cottonghan, cam- bridge university press, cambridge. hammersma, harry, , tokoh-tokoh filsafat barat modern, kanisius, yogyakal :a. harun-hadiwijono, , sejarah fi safat bal"'llt i, kaninisius, yogyakarta. harun-hadiwijono, , sejarah filsafat barat ii, kanisius, yogyakal :a. kant, immanuel, , the critique of practical keason, translated uum germany by tohomas kingsmill abbott, encyclopedia britanica, inc. chicago. kaufman, walter, , pju osophic classics: lales to st. lomas, prentice hall, inc., new jersey. lorens bagus, , kbmus filsafat, pt. gramedia utama, jakalta. nietzsche, f.w., , lus spoke arathustra, translated ti'um ger- many by thomas common, the modern library, new york. parker, dewitt h., (ed) , schopen- hauer selections, charles sclibner's sons, new york. ricoeur, paul, , freedom and na- ture: e voluntary and the invol- untary, translated from french by erazim v. kohak, northwestern university press, boston. sahakian, william s., & mabel lewis sa- hakian, , ideas of e great philosophers, barnes & noble books, new york. sudiardja, a., , "pergulatan manusia dengan allah dalam antropolo$i nietzsche", dalam: sastrapratedja (ed) , mal usia multi dimensional, jurnal. fll)afat. juli ' gramedia, jakal :a. taylor, richard, , "voluntalism", da- lam: paul edwards (eds), re ency- clopedia of philosophy, the mac- millan company & the free press, new york. toeti-heraty, , aku dalam budaya, , pustaka jaya, jakalta. verhaak, c., , "aliran hermeneutik: bergumul dengan penafsiran", da- lam: fx. mudji shisno & f. budi hardiman (eds) , para filsuf penentu gerak zaman, kanisius, yogyakarta. ' wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ #timesup in native communities vol.:( ) archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - l e t t e r to t h e e d i to r #timesup in native communities matthew hoyer received: february / accepted: february / published online: march © springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature it was a cold night in the town of emmonak, alaska. it is almost always cold when you’re this far north, at the junction of the yukon river and the bering sea. a fishing village of just , there’s a certain chilling effect to the isolation. some feel it more than others. an unnamed -year-old alaska native woman was home for the night when a man broke in, raped her, and left. alone in the cold dark, she called the tribal police. nobody from the three-person unit was there to answer. she left a voice mail. they never called back. though isolated, this woman is far from alone. native american women are more likely to experience rape and sexual assault than any other demographic group— . times more likely than whites or african-americans, and times more likely than asian-americans (bachman, zaykowski, kallmyer, poteyeva, & lanier, ; tjaden & thoennes, ). reports from the department of justice suggest that one in three native women have been raped during her life- time (tjaden & thoennes, ), but on certain reservations, female leaders argue that nearly every single woman has been raped (williams, ). the issue is so ubiquitous that the native american women’s health education resource center published an illustrated book called what to do when you’re raped: an abc handbook for native girls. the book takes each letter of the alphabet and presents information on rape, as well as what to do and where to go for help. for these girls, it isn’t a matter of if, but when. even when these cases are given adequate attention by tribal authorities, there is rarely anything that can be done. in the supreme court case oliphant v. suquamish indian tribe, the court ruled that tribal governments do not have jurisdiction over non-natives. this established a dangerous legal loophole in which non-natives had the ability to tar- get native women without fear of repercussion. it created a clear example of what natives describe as “modern imperi- alism.” this loophole was only partially closed by the vio- lence against women reauthorization act of , which granted tribal courts the right to rule on cases of domestic violence between a non-native man and a native woman. this solution, however, failed to address issues of interracial sexual assault or rape, which continue to fall outside the reach of tribal courts. it is no coincidence that rapes and sexual assaults against natives are more likely to be interracial than for any other group (bachman et al., ). irrespective of the perpetrator’s race, not enough is done to support native victims. the federally sponsored indian health service (ihs) is charged with providing free health- care for millions of natives, yet often lacks the funding and resources to adequately do so. ihs hospitals are known to experience shortages of sexual assault kits, birth control, and tests for sexually transmitted diseases. they also lack the infrastructure to handle such cases, with just over half of ihs hospitals even offering examinations for victims of rape, comprising a total of healthcare providers trained in sexual assault examinations (williams, ). as the #metoo and #timesup movements march on, the national conversation tends to revolve around a long-overdue change in rape culture, an ambitious yet crucial process that will require widespread popular support over several years. such a change remains the most important step in ensur- ing that future generations are safer than our own. however, this national awakening possesses few opportunities for as straightforward and immediate an improvement as on our native reservations. we must expand the violence against women act and allow tribes the jurisdiction to rule on cases of interracial sexual assault and rape. we must fund the ihs and train native healthcare workers so that victims can receive adequate medical attention. these are perhaps the simplest first steps to take as we begin the fight against what has become systematic predation. native women are calling. is anyone going to answer? * matthew hoyer mhoyer@jhmi.edu johns hopkins university school of medicine, mcelderry street, baltimore, md  , usa http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf archives of sexual behavior ( ) : – references bachman, r., zaykowski, h., kallmyer, r., poteyeva, m., & lanier, c. ( ). violence against american indian and alaska native women and the criminal justice response: what is known (united states, department of justice). rockville, md: u.s. department of justice, national institute of justice, national criminal justice reference service. tjaden, p. g., & thoennes, n. ( ). full report of the prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: findings from the national violence against women survey (united states, department of justice, office of justice programs). washing- ton, dc: u.s. department of justice, office of justice programs, national institute of justice. williams, t. ( , may ). for native american women, scourge of rape, rare justice. the new york times. retrieved january , , from http://www.nytim es.com/ / / /us/nativ e-ameri cans-strug gle-with-high-rate-of-rape.html. http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/native-americans-struggle-with-high-rate-of-rape.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/native-americans-struggle-with-high-rate-of-rape.html 	#timesup in native communities 	references s jed .. editorial: international interest test   this is my final editorial. my first, in issue ,  (march ), appraised janelle reinelt’s championing of ‘internationalism’ as a paradigm for contemporary theatre scholarship. i recognized its conceptual and political value for a journal with the word ‘international’ in its title, but went on to assert that reinelt overstated the continuing significance of the nation as a related frame. i was wrong. at least, events since then have proved me so. so clamorous is the drumbeat of populist nationalism today, it is easy to forget how recently and rapidly it has taken hold at the centre of much global political discourse. in some places, such as trump’s america, bolsonaro’s brazil, duterte’s philippines and, albeit with differences, brexit britain, it has cemented a new and divisive political normal. in others, it has entrenched existing national chauvinisms and emboldened authoritarians to discredit opponents and dismantle democratic institutions. elsewhere, the impacts have been more subtle, but nonetheless insidious. the ‘fake news’ canard has been deployed by numerous governments in ways that have more to do with avoiding journalistic scrutiny than with regulating incendiary falsehoods. in australia, where i live, the developments are playing out at the day-to-day level in any number of different spheres. in late , following an outcry over revelations that in  the then minister for education vetoed $ million of highly competitive, peer-reviewed research grants in the arts and humanities, claiming that taxpayers would not approve of the expenditure, his successor announced that all such grants will henceforth be subject to a ‘national interest test’. the fact that applicants and reviewers alike must already demonstrate value for money and national benefit would appear to be irrelevant; arguments for the intrinsic, international or multiple but hard-to-predict benefits of high-quality research were inaudible. in an environment already characterized by wilful inaction on climate change, hardline policies on asylum seekers and ill-conceived stunts such as spontaneously mooting the relocation of australia’s israel embassy from tel aviv to jerusalem, the fact-free disparagement of intellectual enquiry simply conformed to a familiar and increasingly baleful pattern. so, yes, the ‘national interest’ is back, though it almost goes without saying that, where it is invoked, that phrase and its cognates promise neither to serve citizens fairly, nor to improve the international order of which nations are the constituent parts. to be sure, the causes of the current situation are complex and, to the extent they were borne of earlier distortions of nationhood and the depredations of globalization, understandable. progressive responses need to be correspondingly multifaceted and creative – and the pages of an academic publication are in many ways far from the forefront of this struggle. nevertheless, insofar as these recent theatre research international · vol.  | no.  | pp– © international federation for theatre research  · doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core developments offend some of the core values of this journal, there are at least two rules of thumb we might observe in understanding what we do, in relation to what has happened. the first is to keep in view the full complexity and diversity of the phenomena that the terms ‘nation’ and ‘international’ describe: nations are multifarious in themselves, and vary widely in their composition, rendering the international a dynamic and uneven domain. it was with this in mind that i revisited the nine issues of tri that have appeared since my first editorial, whose sustained diversity illustrates the international commitment both to those values on the part of writers in our field, and indeed to internationalism as one such value. of the forty-six articles or equivalent to have been published, thirty different nations or territories have been represented, with  per cent of the pieces requiring multilingual competence on the part of the authors. approximately half of the contributors have been located outside europe and america, and a little over two-thirds of the research has focused on non-euro-american sites. to be sure, there remains some unevenness in coverage: of that two-thirds, east, south and south east asia are well represented (fifteen articles); other areas, including the middle east (five), africa (five), south america (four) and oceania (four), less so. digging deeper into the figures reveals further imbalances and complications. for example, three of the africa articles are on south africa, and there have been no articles on the pacific. on the other hand, while proportionately more researchers are us- and europe-based, by nationality they are highly cosmopolitan and globally mobile. the relatively small number of american contributions, meanwhile, are amongst the most explicitly internationalist in scope – though even that metric is further complicated by articles on refugees, online archives and interplanetary performance. there is no room for complacency. the bulk of published scholarship in the journal continues to be produced in those places with the greatest investment in research- intensive universities, and where there tends to be a cultural, historical or institutional anglophone advantage. but the content of the journal also testifies to the fact that this landscape is changing rapidly. tri is doing well at remaining abreast of these changes, but there is always more to be done to get upstream of that, to drive those changes as much as reflect them, at least within the discipline of theatre studies, and in response to contemporary theatre practices. the second value we might bring to bear in light of recent global developments is knowing where and how to look, and what to disregard. theatrical stunts, media spectacles and highly effective political trolling have been integral to the rise of populist nationalism. it is tempting for those of us professionally responsive to aesthetic and political innovations, of whatever stripe, to go chasing after each new revelation or provocation. some do indeed demand sustained critical attention. but in other cases, the harder challenge is to avoid taking the bait, and instead look elsewhere, registering or indeed bringing to light what is hidden, latent or actively obscured. the articles in this issue represent a thoroughly international range of perspectives on performance that each, in their own way, directs our attention towards what is important, and asks us to think anew about what we find there. emma willis’s ‘acting in the real world’ presents a distinctive take on a current issue: accusations and revelations of sustained sexual misconduct in the acting industry – mainly rae editorial: international interest test https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core towards women – that have coalesced around the #metoo and time’s up movements. taking as her starting point the case of new zealand actor and teacher rene naufahu, who responded to accusations of sexual assault in his acting classroom with the claim that he was training students for the ‘real world of acting’, willis unfolds an enquiry into the ways in which ‘the method’ has long enabled iniquitous, if not abusive, practices. of particular interest is how the rhetoric of the method distributes the power to determine what is ‘real’ unevenly across the nexus of actor, director and teacher relations, masking exploitation with invocations of actorly truth on the one hand, and the realities of a highly competitive industry on the other. willis’s analysis importantly serves to contextualize recent developments both historically and in relation to lay understandings of acting and the public persona of the actor. in so doing, her article inaugurates several strands of enquiry concerning performance, power and the body that extend across the other articles in the issue. chen ya-ping’s ‘shen-ti wen-hua’, which she translates from the mandarin as ‘culture of the body’, offers a patient and lucid account of the fortunes of the body in taiwan as it was shaped by a succession of political and ideological regimes over the course of the twentieth century, and mobilized in response by performance artists and theatre-makers. the japanese empire, the dictatorial government of the nationalists who fled the chinese mainland in , and, following the collapse of authoritarianism in the s, the embrace of multinational capitalism, have all left their mark on how taiwanese bodies have been thematized and disciplined. against this background, chen highlights a number of key performances from the s onwards whose treatment of the body has moved in nuanced relation to these dominant trends: from direct political resistance, through the diversification of corporeal identities, to an enquiry into the cultural and spiritual sources of a new taiwanese identity that relates in complex ways to the consumer society of the s and beyond. accordingly, chen tells a story that is at once familiar from any number of locations over the course of the last century, and at the same time highly specific in its cultural configurations, as well, as the title suggests, as in the concepts and terminologies that have been used to interpret it. maría estrada-fuentes’s ‘performative reintegration’ picks up several of the historical concerns of chen’s article, and returns us to the present day. the basic question estrada-fuentes asks is how theatre can be used as a way of managing post-conflict processes through the attention it affords embodied practices and relations. the focus is contemporary colombia, which is currently working to integrate former combatants from a long and bloody civil war. it is tempting to write ‘integrate into mainstream society’, but estrada-fuentes’s point is that successful integration is a two-way process: as former combatants adapt to civilian life, so must society, or at least those parts with which they interface most directly, respond in kind, changing to reflect the new entity it has now become. while theatre has been used extensively as a means for ex-combatants to represent their experiences, estrada-fuentes was interested in exploring whether theatre might be more subtly and perhaps durably beneficial if focused more on process. she goes on to describe a series of workshops conducted with ‘reintegration tutors’ – case workers for the rae editorial: international interest test  https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ex-combatants. estrada-fuentes is honest about some of the obstacles she encountered in seeking to implement the project, but also illuminating on how the workshops prompted self-reflection on the part of the tutors, and increased sensitivity towards the often tacit dimensions of reintegration, informed by corporeal biographies that are complex and fraught, and require careful treatment as they are adapted to civilian functions. faisal adel hamadah’s ‘travelling theatre’ revisits the broad sweep of twentieth- century developments traced by chen in taiwan, but from the opposite side of the asian continent. while syrian playwright and intellectual saadallah wannous (–) is well known and well regarded, notes hamadah, this renown tends to be concentrated in a number of separate and often localized domains. hamadah therefore undertakes to provide a basis on which wannous’s achievements might be more widely recognized. he does so by outlining the international sensibility underpinning what has otherwise come to be seen as wannous’s specific contributions to arabic theatre. to begin with, hamadah considers in some detail the formative role wannous’s soujourn in paris during the tumultuous years of the late s had upon the development of his ideas. interacting with many of the most significant francophone theatre-makers of the time, argues hamadah, suggests that wannous’s subsequent work be considered in relation to post-colonial internationalism, even as he grew in stature as an artist and thinker upon his return to syria. instead of focusing on wannous’s well-known plays, hamadah considers his translations of european plays, particularly that of a relatively little-known peter weiss play, wie dem herrn mockinpott das leiden ausgetrieben wird (how mister mockinpott was cured of his sufferings) (). first staged in , wannous’s translation has gone on to be staged with startling regularity – far more so than weiss’s original, and especially during and following the arab spring. by placing wannous’s internationalism at the centre of his achievements, argues hamadah, we gain not only a new perspective on a signal figure of arab theatre, but also a means of thinking differently about the international theatre landscape: one including wannous’s ideas and innovations. bryan schmidt’s ‘fault lines, racial and aesthetic’ rounds out the issue by bringing us back to the contemporary moment, and the fate of localized cultural production within a globally informed discursive framework. he focuses on the national arts festival in south africa, a major annual event that is integral to the prosperity and reputation of the small host town, whose name was changed from the colonial-era grahamstown to makhanda in mid-. that change is a piquant reminder of how history and place intertwine, and in his article schmidt focuses on the ways the intensive place-making that the festival enacts reproduces many of the dynamics and divisions of race and class that have marked south africa’s past and continue to shape its present. schmidt demonstrates how comprehensively the festival has come to be understood and evaluated according to the discourse and metrics of the creative economy, and argues for an aesthetic approach to the event: one that can disclose its informal and affective registers. doing so, argues schmidt, sensitizes us to the lived experience of participants – mainly black south africans – whose commercial and creative labour contributes substantially to the ‘vibe’ of the festival, but which remains rae editorial: international interest test https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core constantly vulnerable to the policing and zoning of the town in ways that significantly complicate the stories the festival tells about itself. schmidt’s is the final article in this issue. we begin, however, with some remembrances of egyptian theatre scholar hazem azmy (–), who passed away suddenly during the annual conference of the international federation for theatre research (iftr), with which this journal is affiliated, in belgrade in july . as the astute, touching and wide-ranging recollections gathered here attest, hazem’s achievements ran the gamut from the intellectual to the institutional, always accompanied by a dose of immense personal charm. amongst numerous other achievements, in  hazem co-edited a special issue of tri with marvin carlson on theatre and the arab spring (, ). many readers of this journal no doubt also have personal memories of hazem, who was an integral member of the iftr community. i first encountered him when delivering a seminar paper at warwick university, where he was a wry phd student with a twinkle in his eye and an unexpectedly warm smile. we chatted periodically thereafter, and it was to find out what hazem had been thinking about recently that i attended the panel he was due to present on in belgrade. his absence was a puzzle to everyone, including his co-panelists. perhaps having spent time anticipating his arrival and conjuring his spirit in lieu during the session, learning the following day of his death likely hit all of us who had been in that room with uncanny force. the greater shock, of course, was for his many dear friends and collaborators in the iftr arabic theatre working group and beyond, some of whom are represented in these pages. i am very grateful to nora amin, marvin carlson, margaret litvin, mustafa riad and iman ezzeldin for their accounts of hazem’s life and achievements, and to sarah youssef and katherine hennessey for their assistance and advice. a bursary award to support student attendance at the annual iftr conference has been set up in hazem’s name, and you can donate at https://gogetfunding.com/hazem-azmy-iftr-bursary-award-fund. the outpouring of grief and appreciation that has followed hazem’s passing in this journal and elsewhere underscores not only the importance we attach to many of our peers, collaborators and interlocutors, but also how poor we often are at acknowledging it when in the thick of scholarly activity. in drawing this editorial to a close, this compels me only to redouble the thanks i owe those individuals who have made my editorship such a constant and humbling source of delight. i have been truly inspired by the patience and commitment shown by all of the individual authors whose articles have featured in the past nine issues. their ability to balance an impassioned engagement with their material and a willingness to sustain detailed attention to the nitty-gritty of the text over an often punishing drafting process is one of the hidden strengths of our discipline, and i thank them for revealing it to me. similarly, the many anonymous peer reviewers i have called upon in order to help maintain the high intellectual standard of the journal acted selflessly, graciously and promptly, and taught me a great deal in the process. the editorial board – for reasons of space, i direct you to the front matter of the journal for the roll of honour – have been an invaluable source of support and insight. the same goes for the iftr executive committee, especially president jean graham-jones, and vice president rae editorial: international interest test  https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://gogetfunding.com/hazem-azmy-iftr-bursary-award-fund https://gogetfunding.com/hazem-azmy-iftr-bursary-award-fund https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core elaine aston, who i knew i could rely on absolutely for astute advice and all-purpose wisdom, invariably on a lightning-fast turnaround. holly buttimore, commissioning editor of humanities journals at cambridge university press, has always paired effortless reliability and engagement with great good humour, and paul hague showed great professionalism and forbearance as production editor, before being ably replaced by keira keep. it is a lucky curse that the international remit of the journal has intertwined with my own personal and professional travels. i have sometimes thought i should maintain a tumblr account documenting the many places this journal has been edited (fig. ): what that would leave out would be the stoic faces of my long-suffering family – kaylene, lo, sum – as i sang out that i was ‘almost finished’ with a last paragraph or final email. i cannot thank them enough for their patience. like peer reviewing, book reviewing is another of those time-consuming activities that tends to receive little, if any, recognition from universities that, congenitally insecure about their place in the global pecking order, nevertheless require well-reviewed publications to reassure them of the quality of the employees beavering away under their very noses. senior reviews editor margherita laera worked with mary caulfield, meg mumford and latterly charlene rajendran to produce an invaluable resource not only for the profession, but also the discipline (the difference being subtle but significant). along with the many individual book reviewers, they have ensured that a properly international picture of scholarly theatre publishing is possible. caoimhe mader mcguinness has seamlessly taken on margherita’s role, while fintan walsh, of birkbeck university of london, now takes on the senior editorship of tri. fintan has been a fantastic associate editor; i owe him a huge debt. he is unflappable, with an unerring eye for what works in an article, and a keen sense of how to address what doesn’t. fintan will be joined by new associate editor silvija jestrovic, from the university of warwick. in her extensive meditations on theatre and exile, informed by her own life experiences, silvija brings a distinct sensibility that can only nuance the ways in which the journal performs its mission. finally, special thanks to my friend and colleague, assistant editor sarah balkin. all the best things about how this journal has functioned are down to sarah. the writer of every article has been on the receiving end of her patient but forensic quizzing on everything from page numbers to phrasing to the flow of an argument and the basis for a claim. and i have benefited hugely, not only from her sound judgement on major decisions, but also from the opportunity to maintain a running dialogue on the granular details of the content, which is really where the integrity of the journal stands or falls. all the strengths of the last nine issues can be traced to these individuals. and what are those strengths? scholarly expertise and rigorous, ethical research; agreed standards of evidence and persuasive argumentation; the sustaining of productive and respectful debate; writerly refinement and editorial scrupulousness; peer review; proofreading and copy-editing. these should be truisms of academic knowledge production. remarkably, however, we find ourselves needing actively to assert and affirm them as values worth holding onto in a political environment that ingeniously but rashly joins easy impulse with blind atavism, floating a procession of quick fixes to complex and enduring problems that can only render meaningful solutions harder and more remote. rae editorial: international interest test https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core yes, dear reader, it has come to this: we find ourselves looking again at the bread and butter of academic work, and discovering in it something approaching a moral purpose. this says more about the pass to which some societies have come than about any inherent virtue on our part. indeed, the risk of hubris is ever-present. our work is conventionally local and specific, or distributed over a wide but very slender network of readers and respondents. but there is also a cumulative effect and indeed an institutional heft to those efforts. it manifests in long-standing publications such as this one, testifying to values that are increasingly under threat in the environments where many of us live and work, and providing a small but durable resource for the cultivation of ideas about theatre that might pass the international interest test. note  purely for the purposes of this exercise, i am treating the brazilian theatre dossier in , , the cluster of essays on indian theatre in , , and the malaysian lecture-performance text in ,  as each equivalent to a single-authored research article. fig. . (colour online) tri brought to you by generator from (amongst other locations) a buia (sleeping platform) on the pacific island of marakei, republic of kiribati. rae editorial: international interest test  https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	editorial: international interest test 	note / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / · · · two guerrilla movements have disrupted digital humanities pedagogy in the past decade: the event syllabus, and the appropriation of twitter as a composition genre. the event syllabus typically presents as a web-based archive of articles that help the public both instruct themselves about racialized violence and provides resources to teach a kind of cultural competency in the classroom from a speci�c case. typically these begin with a call for public education through twitter with hashtags such as #fergusonsyllabus, #orlandosyllabus or #pulsesyllabus, and #charlestonsyllabus, the latter of which is now an edited collection from the university of georgia press. in our course, “#othellosyllabus: cyprus, ferguson, forest grove,” freshmen employed the rhetoric of hashtag activism to engage with critical race theory across a spectrum of texts, including a documentary on the black lives matter (blm) movement, william shakespeare’s othello, and jordan peele’s get out. in weekly twessays, posting responses during community lectures, and in devising a twitter play, the platform’s paradoxical mix of anonymity and very public writing worked to develop in students a cultural competency. the �rst-year seminar (or fys) curriculum offers an ideal platform to engage public debates through digital tools. at paci�c university each section is provided an upper-class student to mentor and lead classes themselves. our version of the course, supported by student mentor sienna ballou (a senior majoring in english literature with minors in spanish and dance), was inspired by several events the previous academic year including the presidential election which hit undocumented peers hard, followed shortly by local police reports of a pick-up truck trolling campus with a sign reading “black lives don’t matter.” then the trimet attack on two young women of color happened in portland. as a shakespearean, there is an added moral obligation to consistently engage with the politics of identity from which one might otherwise easily hide intellectually behind the deadest, whitest guy on the block. from this self-conscious positionality, combined with imperative social events, #othellosyllabus was born. the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play elizabeth tavares sienna ballou september twitter essay https://hybridpedagogy.org/ https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/ f -gismgvkq xokbmcep h f jeafcbqcjhxshhdlem/edit# https://ugapress.org/book/ /charleston-syllabus/ https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/national_resource_center/index.php https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-max-attack-what-we-know/ - https://hybridpedagogy.org/author/elizabeth-tavares/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/author/sienna-ballou/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/twitter-essay/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / through an articulation and re�ection of the activities that used twitter speci�cally to engage with issues of race in the course, this medium did, in fact, productively engage the complexity of a range of issues regarding race and digital activism. in the fall of , we opened our �rst-year seminar course with this sketch, “othello tis my shite,” from a episode of the popular comedy show key and peele. the sketch is more historically accurate than perhaps the show writers realized: of the nearly �ve hundred identi�able people of color living in tudor england, black people were present in almost every area of london and its suburbs at some point between and . theatre historian imtiaz habib has shown that the black presence can be “documented in ninety percent of the neighborhoods dominated by the theatre industry” which critics now most closely associate with shakespeare ( ). not only did the play-makers of renaissance theatre live alongside people of color, but those neighbors very likely attended �rst performances of othello as well as the two dozen other documented plays featuring characters of color—�gures from all over the mediterranean world. aside from offering a gateway for cultural context, the sketch establishes for students that it is okay to playfully embrace the complexities of shakespeare’s language. at the same time, the sketch makes clear that in order to develop social equality, as paul gorski and katy swalwell argue, it is necessary to stage stories that feature people of color, not just talk about their inequity initial tweets composed while watching a documentary on the black lives matter movement in order to practice critical listening skills. hashtags in the room our course experimented with the use of twitter both in and out of the classroom, primarily of�oading the practice of critical reading and evidence selection onto that platform. enabling a wider range of participation amongst the students, in one-on-one conferences students routinely mentioned feeling safer participating in this way due to a perceived sense of anonymity in which to deal with an ideologically and emotionally dif�cult topic. their words could be carefully chosen in a small extract rather than formulated in the huff and speed of verbal discussion. for example, the initial unit of the course was shaped around the questions of how forms of dichotomous rhetoric and argumentation undermine a community’s ability to communicate and collectivize. to set up this question as well as get students comfortable with using twitter in the classroom, we watched the vpro backlight series documentary on the blm movement, which has its origins in the seattle theatre scene. rather than take notes, students pulled out their phones to post at least three tweets with the course hashtag #othellosy during and in response to questions posed by the documentary. it took about twenty minutes before an outgoing music major posted an informational question about treyvon martin. more questions began to be posted, which evolved into incisive quotations from the �lm carefully composed for clarity and brevity. by the end of the session, students were actively sharing their own arguments in response to the �lm, and so extending the discussion beyond its initial conditions. elizabeth e. tavares @elizetavares how do bodies get used—for something? against someone?—in the play? use an emoji + short quotation. make every character count. #othellosy � am · sep , https://vimeo.com/channels/keypeele/ https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/b f-svzd kc?hl=en https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/black-lives-matter-vpro/ https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hash https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/elizetavares/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/elizetavares/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / an example twessay prompt that invited the use of emojis as employed by handles like @emojidickinson. twessay responses that practice both careful selection of evidence as well as manipulating formal constraints to create new meaning with emojis. after engaging one another through twitter in the classroom, the students evolved these skills in their homework. following the excellent work by jesse stommel and donna alexander, students created “twessays” to both strengthen concisions and develop arguable claims (as opposed to passive summary). digital humanist david crystal has demonstrated that “all the popular beliefs about [short-form digital writing] are wrong, or at least debatable. its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. nor is its use restricted to the young generation. there is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy” ( ). the twessay prompt was particularly successful in encouraging the production of a concrete idea with speci�c evidence because it asked for a very particular kind of observation. sienna used one-on-one mentoring to encourage students to form questions about and from all available writing (including the tweets) so they could identify how textual evidence in�uenced these ideas. in one end-of-week discussion, we both wondered what kind of essays might be produced from students stringing together twitter prompts as topic sentences. this is not to say that they did not also write formal essays, but in some ways the effectiveness of twitter to deal with the kinds of exigencies that racialized public activism asks makes sense: these are new and newly dif�cult questions, so perhaps they require new and newly organized mediums. the peer-mentor helped set the tone with a carefully crafted twessay. kylie ✌ ('ω'✌ ) @aalohilanii for 'twas that that gave away my . a liberal ! the of old gave . #othellosy � am · sep , see kylie ✌ ('ω'✌ ) s̓ other tweets dustin @fysd_gapusan "but i will wear my upon my sleeve for daws to peck at: am not what i am." #othellosy � pm · sep , from forest grove, or cal mccarthy @caldmccarthy #othellosy iago's comments, such as "barbary horse", show othello as an aminal, something less than human. it can bias others' perceptions � pm · sep , ethan @doan iago's use of "anthropophagi" when he is https://twitter.com/emojidickinson?lang=en http://techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu/feed-texting-twitter-and-the-student- - / http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/twessays-and-composition-in-the-digital-age/ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/txtng- https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/ pacx- vrj odkhcldtfnnhld _usl wrzmlg bvqjb msrajkao qlyafyr-yo x h yw wlf x ahk mt/pub https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/aalohilanii?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/aalohilanii?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/aalohilanii/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/aalohilanii/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/aalohilanii?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% 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etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan /status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / students follow the lead of their mentor with their own responses to a weekly twessay. the strawberry hydro�ask getting students to take ownership over rather than reject out of hand very old words is dif�cult. in this forum, twitter offered a useful avenue through which to apply devising techniques from the theatre industry in the classroom. generally, devising activities ask participants to test all the available ways of performing a particular scene as licensed by the text with their bodies. in literary studies, it is known as polysemy: the simultaneous presence of multiple, equally viable readings of a literary text. we experimented with this in othello and several professional adaptations of the story, including red velvet, a new play about the life of ira aldridge, the �rst person of color to play that eponymous role in . (the question of blackface performance and othello in particular is still very live as evidenced by blogger michelle villemaire’s photo-essay campaign, “my adventures correcting yellowface.”) these devising exercises were crucial in order for students to fully consider the stakes of the cinema and alternate endings of the �nal text of the course, the academy award-winning get out. (watch the original and alternate here.) discussion of the two endings, how they engage the performance history of othello and the ways in which they make audiences aware of their own biases surrounding police brutality, enabled students to articulate the extent to which performance choices matter — particularly when the stakes of the adaptation have purchase on issues of inclusion. with the royal shakespeare company twitter play productions such tweet sorrow ( ) and a midsummer night’s dreaming ( ) as examples, for their �nal collaborative project the students developed #othelloscrane, a modern retelling inspired by the town of othello, washington, a little less than �ve hours from their forest grove campus. located in the heart of the columbia basin, othello is home to the largest migration of sandhill cranes in the western hemisphere; thirty-�ve thousand of the birds, white and black with red face markings, return to othello from alaska every march. unsettled by the thought that there was a town named othello is a state founded on premises of exclusion of peoples of color and that remained segregated until late into the s, the birds served as a poetic conceit and coordinating metaphor for their production. dramaturgy and devising activities in class facilitated students determining the major “beats” or plot elements that could not be left out in order for the basic story to hold together. students used their own handles to perform different roles in each act over a �ve class-day period, or two weeks; most of the actual activity of performance took place over the course of the day outside of class time. the play famously opens with two men shouting racial epithets to desdemona’s father in the wee hours of the night; the students started their play at roughly one in the morning to mimic that temporality which a traditional play could never do. they also had to make choices about props and how to translate early modern materials into modern ones. particularly memorable was the strawberry stitched handkerchief that travels between characters, charting desdemona’s chastity or presumed lack thereof. instead, emulating the cultural speci�city of the paci�c northwest, students reimagined it as a hydro-�ask decked with strawberry stickers. students modi�ed their twitter pro�les, from images to the text of their pro�le description, to emulate characters. left: iago; right: othello. the students were especially innovative in three areas, employing all of their knowledge about the intersectional complexities of the play. informed by critical race theory frameworks learned in class earlier in the semester, they �rst manipulated their twitter pro�les to emulate the emotional place of a speci�c character in a speci�c act in the play, including changing their display name, pro�le, and background images. having developed g p p g discussing othello's future children makes the reader think that they will be inhuman #othellosy � pm · sep , https://youtu.be/oy fabfm_w https://www.homemademimi.com/get-picture-adventures-correcting-yellowface/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshckbit bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jumgziowst http://www.bleysmaynard.net/suchtweet/ https://youtu.be/m ixh_icbek https://wakelet.com/wake/c c cc- e - - eac- d ffca https://www.othellosandhillcranefestival.org/ https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/evmuhs o tec?hl=en https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/doan /status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / skills in composing short statements where form and function reinforce a uni�ed idea, these visual elements evolved over the course of the day a student was performing a role to take on more nuance and topicality. using kim f. hall’s scholarship on the intersection of race and beauty in literature and visual culture of the renaissance, students could then articulate how they used the palette of the pro�le to negotiate their own “fear of losing privilege” ( ). we then discussed strategies they chose to indicate a speci�c character’s racial or gendered privileges and what evidence from the playtext justi�ed their choice. dms were used to represent the effects of the aside, a renaissance staging tactic. a unique problem to adapting shakespeare to twitter as opposed to, say, frankenstein or the picture of dorian gray was the need to replicate asides. the technique has a number of bene�ts, including cultivating a sense of privilege in audiences — that they have access to special knowledge — as well as interrogating power dynamics inherent to public and private speech. much of the power behind iago’s choices is negotiated through asides, but how to replicate them in the ostensibly one-dimensional linearity of twitter? in a second stroke of inspiration, students used twitter’s dm feature. initially they had been messaging one another to strategize actions before posting the of�cial tweets. this gave them the idea to orchestrate a private conversation between characters in the dm window, taking a screenshot of this private conversation between characters, and posting the images to the public twitter thread to replicate the aside. in doing so, they maintained the visual cues that would mark this conversation as private, and yet make it public to the audience following along with the live twitter thread. rather than literally depict desdemona being struck, students decided to imply the action with a well-timed placement of the #metoo hashtag that was trending on social media in the wake of several celebrities being accused of sexual harassment. staged violence relies on physicality, which twitter lacks. no student wanted an image of themselves aping violence on the internet regardless of whether it was a performance. professional productions have historically struggled with this ethical crux; as erin sullivan has argued, “the more life- like the production became, the more it moved away from the suspended ethics of �ctional art and towards the codes of conduct expected, if not always realised, in the shared public sphere” ( ). at one point in the play, othello in his frustration and on the verge of another epileptic �t, not only slaps desdemona but does so in a very public way that undermines his political authority as general of the venetian army. after much deliberation, a brilliant solution emerged in discussion: students employed the #metoo hashtag, only just then blossoming online in late fall of , to suggest the violence without visualizing the action. jackie marchioro @marchiorojackie iago: shits about to go down #othelloscrane � pm · nov , see jackie marchioro s̓ other tweets hannah thornburg @han_thornburg des: #metoo #othelloscrane � pm · nov , see hannah thornburg s̓ other tweets https://www.jstor.org/stable/ https://shelleysfrankenstein.wordpress.com/frankenstein-a-public-literary-twitter-role-play-on-twitter/ https://litilluminations.wordpress.com/ / / /a-public-literary-twitter-role-play-oscar-wildes-the-picture-of-dorian-gray/ https://doi.org/ . / . . https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo?src=hash https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othelloscrane?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ /photo/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ /photo/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/hashtag/othelloscrane?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/han_thornburg/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / students used a color-�ltering app to represent the multiple deaths at the end of the play symbolically. the �nal mass death scene at the end of the play, where �ve characters die, four in the same room, posed similar problems. sienna worked with the students to devise a series of gestures and postures that would emulate the events, and then students used colorized photo apps on their phones to select only one color to present. in trying to �gure out how to resolve the play, the students came up with an ingenious choice that employed the event syllabus genre, intervened in the ongoing #metoo movement, and made clear the intersectionality of race and gender that was and has always been at stake in the resolution to the play. the cast analyzed and employed the rhetoric of hashtag activism to compose their own as an act of �nality to the play, making clear the intersectionality between violence against women and violence against people of color. the other side of the handle in order to fully merge the classroom and twitter spheres—and by extension, the concepts learned in the course with life outside the course— #othelloscrane needed an audience. as a �nal act of dissemination, the students participated in an end-of-term showcase wherein all the fys course sections shared some kind of project. in the spirit of their play, rather than be tethered to a table or trifold, they made signs that read “ask me about #othelloscrane.” moving between the other stationary presentations, they used pre-arranged, abbreviated scripts to share the play with / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / their peers, discuss the experience of performing in it, and process what they learned about the intersection between gendered and racialized internal dominance. because they could direct their peers to the hashtag, the play immediately traveled onto other phones and computers. the dissemination verbally and digitally was immediate and the click-rate hit more than six hundred individual users that day. families, scholars, and other students around the country were checking in as well. the play has now been archived online, and you can read it with wakelet. students kylie wong and dana mccarthy share their twitter play with a showcase attendee. in , the context of oregon’s overt whiteness as a state, recent racially-charged violence in the area, and its particular history of settler colonialism and racial expulsion merited, for us, the necessity of engaging with a seminal text of cultural difference. engaging with any other topic within the sphere of identity politics seemed ideologically, pedagogically, and personally beside the point. while the performance of the play made clear the intersectional stakes pitting race against gender in othello, its dissemination likewise made clear intersectional stakes pitting race against class. we could not have anticipated that such questions seem newly urgent in the wake of the summer of , marked by a dramatic re- engagement with racialized police brutality and the “digital divide” driven, in part, by the novel coronavirus pandemic. as teachers and institutions at all levels race to �nd ways to meet students where they are in terms academic and technologic, instruments such as the twessay and twitter play offer new and newly organized mediums by which students can formulate and particularize questions only newly dif�cult but certainly not new. · · · ·   published in twitter essay photo credit: jan baborák on unsplash reviewer: rebecca halpern reviewer: maha bali / ���� ��� reviewer: chris friend share https://wke.lt/w/s/lannl https://ulpdx.org/advocacy-and-public-policy/publication_archive/state-of-black-oregon- /view-state-of-black-oregon-document/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ / / /amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement/ https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs /projects/digital-divide/start.html https://hybridpedagogy.org/double-open-peer-review/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/bitmoji-classroom/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/twitter-essay/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/photo-credit-jan-baborak-on-unsplash/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-rebecca-halpern/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-maha-bali-mh-bly/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-chris-friend/ https://twitter.com/share?text=the% % othellosyllabus% a% twitter% as% play&url=https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / get the latest posts delivered right to your inbox. type your email... double-open peer review: shaping the teaching community hybrid pedagogy uses double-open peer review, strategically crafting teaching communities by pairing authors and reviewers with intention. the menagerie, myths and merits of the bitmoji classroom educators don’t have to forfeit fun for quality online learning, but they do need to build authentic learning when using digital simulation tools. © – hybrid pedagogy · · issn - https://hybridpedagogy.org/double-open-peer-review/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/bitmoji-classroom/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://lccn.loc.gov/ https://twitter.com/hybridped https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed/https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/rss/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / youth, gender, and perceptions of security in norway full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rady international journal of adolescence and youth issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rady youth, gender, and perceptions of security in norway nikolai george lewis holm, linn-marie lillehaug pedersen & elisabeth pettersen to cite this article: nikolai george lewis holm, linn-marie lillehaug pedersen & elisabeth pettersen ( ): youth, gender, and perceptions of security in norway, international journal of adolescence and youth, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: sep . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rady https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rady https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rady &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rady &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - youth, gender, and perceptions of security in norway nikolai george lewis holm , linn-marie lillehaug pedersen and elisabeth pettersen faculty of social sciences, nord university, bodø, norway abstract this article examines how and where issues of gender emerged in norwegian youths’ self-defined constructions of security. previous work has focused on security in relation to generational gaps and gendered perspectives, but there remains a need for further empirical research of an integrated perspective of security, gender and youth. drawing on data collected from interviews, this study provides insight into how youth understand the concept of security, seeking to isolate how and where gender related issues emerge in those perspectives. the findings of the study indicate that youth definitions of security are broad and cannot sufficiently be described by any one theoretical perspective on security; however, the youth often related their concept of security to how insecurities are experienced by others. thus, when discussions of gender or other factors of security disparity emerged, they did so with an understanding of their own privileged security perspective. article history received august accepted september keywords youth; young people; insecurity; security; gender introduction two historically neglected issues in discussions of security are those of youth and gender. in recogni- tion of the first oversight, the united nations security council (unsc) adopted resolution on december (unsc, ). sponsored by jordan, the resolution was the first ever such statement from the un on youth peace and security from the international body. reflecting on the importance of this development, ahmad alhendawi, un secretary-general’s envoy on youth, describe it as ‘ . . . a major breakthrough in our collective efforts to change the predominantly negative narrative on youth and recognize the significant role of young people in peacebuilding. youth have for too long been cast away as either the perpetrators of violence or its victims’ (alhendawi, ). indeed, society can unfairly label youth as perpetrators of crime, or push their concerns aside in favour of the elder statesmen of the world. unfortunately, while resolution was a breakthrough regarding youth, the text of the document scarcely touched upon the issue of gender. even when resolution did so, it addressed the gender only in the narrow context of sexual violence and ‘gender-sensitive employment’ (unsc, ). as such, it repeated of the shortcomings from unsc resolution ( ) which also adopted a narrow scope, focusing strictly on the role of women in conflict and peacebuilding, failing to embrace broader conceptualizations of gender or aspects of security beyond conflict. moreover, unsc lacked any references to youth beyond the occasional reference to ‘girls’. this was inherently reductive, minimizing the importance of both gender and youth in security to narrow and tokenistic components. as with youth, the absence of gender in discussions of security has not gone unnoticed. numerous scholars have pointed towards the importance of including gender into security analysis, discourse, and practice (see: hansen, ; hoogensen & rottem, ; hudson, ). contact linn-marie lillehaug pedersen linn-marie.l.pedersen@nord.no international journal of adolescence and youth https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - not only can failing to acknowledge gender perspectives limit the normative potential of analysis, it serves to mute the voices of many members of society from emerging in the greater discourse. this is particularly important when examining issues of crime or insecurity, as studies have indicated that gender reflexive analysis yields significant differences in results (Đurić & popović- Ćitić, ; franklin & franklin, ; smith & torstensson, ). for example, franklin and franklin ( ) have shown that young women perceive security threats more acutely than their elder counterparts, indicating an interplay between age, gender, and perceptions of insecurity. similarly, a study by vornanen, törrönen, and niemelä ( ) on youth in finland indicated that girls and boys tended to define insecurity differently. girls focused more on social insecurities, whereas boys focused more on threats to integrity. these results demand further empirical investigation on perspectives from youth on issues of gender and security. it is increasingly clear that there is value in not only examining the subject of security in regards to gender and youth independently, but also in combination. this article explores young people’s perspectives on themes of security, with an emphasis on how gender-related security issues emerge in their conceptualizations of security. drawing on interviews with youth from norway, it seeks to highlight the scope of how these young people understand the concept of security and how, if at all, their perspectives are influenced by or reflect gendered themes. in doing so, it demonstrates how even youth in one of the world’s safest and wealthiest countries have complex and reflective concerns regarding security and gender, thus highlighting the importance of these issues in any context. the first section addresses the challenges of incorporating gender in security analysis. then, it presents the methodological approaches, a description of the participant group, and relevant study limitations. the following section presents the research findings on youth and their notions of security. finally, the article discusses and summarizes the findings. the article will thereby demonstrates that not only did participants have varied and nuanced conceptualizations of security, but they construct their notions of security in a way that is conscious of gender disparity and sympathetic in regards to how insecurities are experienced by others. security and gender conceptually, security is an inherently contested notion that is subject to many approaches and definitions (ayoob, ; baldwin, ; blanchard, ; buzan, wæver, & de wilde, ; huysmans, ; rothschild, ). realists and neo-realists contend that security is the realm of the state, while proponents of human security argue that security starts at the individual level and extends upwards (paris, ). alternatively, there are those who argue that security is a socially constructed notion, sometimes deliberately, and a product of our social realities (balzacq, ; buzan et al., ; huysmans, ). security has been posited by ken booth ( ) to be an issue of emancipation. others build on the work of giddens and consider a form of ontological security, where actors seek to reconcile risks and uncertainties, positioning security as a sense of stability and continuity (huysmans, ; mcsweeney, ; mitzen, ). there is no shortage of paths to security analysis, each with their own set of champions and critics; however, this research seeks to understand how individual young people understand security, not to impose an understanding upon them. strict adherence to any such approach would inherently place restrictions and create limitations in the analysis that could potentially silence informant perspectives. as such, the work adopts a social constructivist perspective on security, while recognizing those same constructivist understandings of security may not apply, or may even be rejected by the participants. nevertheless, these issues mandate investigation, thus liotta ( , pp. – ) rightly sug- gests that security fundamentally boils down to three questions: security from what? security by whom? security through which means? however, when gender is incorporated, this picture becomes more complicated. regarding gendered understandings of securityhoogensen and rottem ( , p. ) suggest that the question ‘security for whom?’ should be added to n. g. l. holm et al. discussions of security. security and insecurity may not be experienced equally between groups. factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, and social position can result in different experiences of security (fox, nobles, & piquero, ; pain, ). studies have shown that women are often the most at risk or most susceptible to insecurities, yet their voices are often excluded from discussions of security (blanchard, ; hansen, ; woolnough, ). that being said, incorporating gender into security analysis means more than simply addressing the needs of women as a matter of rote. gender conscious analysis requires more than focusing exclusively on women’s issues, while casting aside issues of masculinity and male perspectives (romaniuk & wasylciw, ). neither should gender be construed as a polarity or contest between masculinity and femininity, as they can often overlap and blend with one another (brod & kaufman, ; hooper, ). as noted by cohn, hill, and ruddick ( , p. ) that ‘[g]ender is not only about individual identity or what a society teaches us a man or woman, boy or girl should be like. gender is also a way of structuring relations of power’. the security needs of women, men, and indeed all gender identities are potentially – but not necessarily – very different. security analyses need to be flexible around that possibility and the power dynamics that shape perspectives. as such, this analysis investigates the scope of youth security perceptions and values while remaining cognizant of the interplay between gender and perceptions of security. it remains open to any definitions or constructions of security, taking care not to impose pre-conceived notions of security upon participants. neither does it seek to coerce themes of gender out of participants. the aim is to encourages participants to sculpt their own definitions on the range and scope of security across personal, social scales and beyond. methods this research was conducted as part of a study on youth perspectives on global-to-local security in norway between january and december of . while other parts of the project focused on sense of place and security, this component serves as a deliberate, gender-conscious analysis of a subset of the data collected. the thematic complexity of security and the potential range of responses suggested that qualitative methods – namely, interviews – should be employed to ensure greater detail and context regarding participants’ perspectives (coffey, atkinson, & omarzu, ; rubin & rubin, ; silverman, ). however, interviewing is an interpretive process and it is essential to keep in mind that empirical data collected through interviews is produced and mediated by the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee (yanow & schwartz-shea, ). thus, it is important to be cognizant of how relational factors can influence data production. as the research investigates security perceptions of youth and young adults, it was first necessary to determine a definition of youth relevant to the given context in order to guide recruitment strategies. there is no universal definition of youth across countries or international organizations. un resolution defines youth as being from through years of age; however, other un agencies adopt alternative definitions, such as the department of economic and social affairs (undesa) which defines ‘youth’ as people between the ages of and (undesa, ; unsc, ). the norwegian ministry of children and equality has no strict definition of youth, instead reflecting on the economic and social role of individuals (wolf et al., ). youth is regarded as the age of transition from adolescence to adulthood, where students move to higher education and/or the labour market. in this phase of life, important issues play a role and shape their decisions concerning their future and how they relate to different security related issues, for example income and job security (walther, ). norway considers factors such as economic participation and consumption, suggesting a general range of individuals between the ages of and being classified as youth (wolf et al., ). with these considerations in mind, the youth who volunteered for interviews ranged from to years of age. out of the international journal of adolescence and youth interviewees, there were males and females participating. nine of them were under the age of majority, with being years or older. legal guardians for participants under the age of majority ( years old) were contacted to obtain written permission to participate in the research. data collection occurred through face-to-face semi-structured interviews. given the target group, recruitment began at local educational institutions – specifically, high school and university levels. university participants were recruited through invitations during classes. high school parti- cipants were recruited through contact with teachers and parents. additional interviews were solicited opportunistically using snowball sampling. admittedly, this method of recruitment cre- ated a bias in that participants were overly representative of higher educated segments of the population. interviews followed a basic guide developed by the authors, with the semi-structured approach allowing participants flexibility and space to reflect and define their own personalized security definitions and values. interviews were recorded, transcribed, and anonymized. participants were ethnic and gender reflective pseudonyms (see table ). all interviews were conducted by the authors in a one-on-one setting; however, some early interviews were conducted by two of the authorship team in order to harmonize interviewing strategies. when preparing for the interview process, age, gender, and social position were considered as factors that could potentially affect the relation between the young person and the researcher, and therefore the results of the study (see: kane & macaulay, ; longhofer, floersch, & hoy, ; padfield & procter, ). for a young person, sitting down in an office with an older researcher or someone of a different gender to discuss potentially sensitive questions might be uncomfortable or intimidating – there is an inherent power imbalance. as such, early stages of interviews were used to acclimatize the interviewee to the setting, procedure, motivation for research, and conveying importance of giving youth opportunities to voice perspectives on security. interviewees were encouraged to ask questions or bring up any concerns they had. main interview questions began with questions intended to set the power of definition in the hands of the young people. for example, all interviewees were asked the questions such as ‘what does security mean for you?’ and ‘what does it mean to feel secure?’ as a way of encouraging interviewees to reflect on their conceptual, emotional, and ontological reflections of security. similarly phrased inquiries into individual conceptualizations of security have successfully elicited unique and personalized definitions in other contexts, for example, holm’s ( ) study of youth in liberia, or as in the un development programme‘s ( ) report on human security. in seeking to table . interview participants pseudonyms, age, and gender. interview number and pseudonym age self-indicated gender – heidi f – inger f – iselin f – siv f – nanna f – tine f – turid f – terese f – mia f – anton m – vidar m – einar m – odin m – joakim m – rolf m – bent m – aksel m – torvald m – eirik m – mats m – morten m n. g. l. holm et al. define and scope their notions of security, other questions focused on security perspectives as related to their life, their community, international and global issues as well as other emergent topics based on previous responses. the transcribed interviews were analysed using nvivo. interviews were coded into predeter- mined and emergent thematic categories generated through multiple readings by the author team. predetermined categories included gender specific concerns, research question responses by gender, and influences on youth perspective, such as the role of media in feelings of insecurity. additionally, interviews were coded according to a heuristic framework based on vornanen et al.’s ( ) ‘circles of insecurity’ (see figure ). the tool visualizes insecurities in three nested circles, each corresponding to a different level of insecurities: the inner circle relates to a person’s emotions and experiences; the social circle involves a person’s social needs, interactions, and relationships; and the outer circle addresses external realities and uncertainties. it should be noted that while the vornanen et al. study focused on finnish youths’ perspectives on insecurity and the study presented here on norwegian youths’ perspectives, it does not impede the useful- ness of the circles of (in)security as a way of organizing or categorizing participant responses. this framework was selected as it provided an analytically relevant and efficient means for coding and categorizing the data while not imposing any definition of security onto the responses beyond a scoping/ scaling mechanism. additionally, the framework’s validity for the particular sample group was demon- strated from its previous use on a comparable sample group – that is, youth from a peer-nordic country figure . circles of insecurity. description: figure illustrates the ‘circles of insecurity’ as described by vornanen ( ) and applied in vornanen et al. ( ). the figure represents a way of describing and categorizing perceptions, understandings, and experiences of insecurity across three levels: inner, social, and outer. source: vornanen et al. ( ): .original (in finnish): vornanen : . international journal of adolescence and youth (finland). these codes were centred on personal, social, and external (in)securities. it should be men- tioned that in contrast to vornanen et al, this study asked not ‘what is insecurity?’ but instead, ‘what is security?’ this inversion of the question, as will be discussed, potentially yielded different results. data presentation this section presents the study results in two segments: firstly, those results that relate to how youth conceptualized and reflected on security in general, non-gendered terms; secondly, those results that illustrate the areas in which gender materialized as relevant to their reflections on security. additionally, each section is parsed across scopes and scales based on the circles of (in)security tool. general reflections on security the young people who participated in this study expressed a broad range of concerns and conceptualizations regarding security. while some focused on issues of personal safety and others more on issues of internationally security, the general trend was that the youth expressed complex conceptualizations of security that spanned inner, social, and outer circles. in regards to the inner circle of security – feelings of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, or the feeling of being threatened or unsafe – the majority of youth focused most strongly on issues connected to physical or personal safety [ , , – , – , , – , , ], but more universally, the positive emotions generated by feelings of predictability [ – ]. participants expressed these inner circle securities through both specific and abstract ways. a typical and often repeated concern was personal safety, particularly in regards to traffic [ , , , , – , - ]. probing about where a sense of security came from revealed more nuance. for example, anton stated that ‘[it] comes from feeling secure, for example . . . that nothing happens at school. for example, i work with electricity a lot, so that you try to be very careful that you do not get any in you’ [ ]. for him, having safe practices and routines he used while going about his day was a source of security. other participants addressed inner issues indirectly, connecting positive feelings of security and stability as rooted in perceptions of certainty in other circles. terese pointed to the confidence that she would always have clean water, enough food, and feelings of safety going to bed without locking her door. mats said ‘[security is] that i am safe. that society enables us to live a life without fear’ [ ]. for him, feelings of personal safety were rooted in the nature of the society itself. participants also indicated perspectives that reflect social circle security concerns. these generally involved feelings of belonging, group membership, relationships with friends and family. categories that typically emerged were security in relation to feeling of belonging and trust. eleven interviewees mentioned feelings of belonging in various ways, with referring to families as essential to feelings of security [ , , – , , , ] with of them defining friendships as a key factor [ , , – , ]. for example ‘ . . . that i have friends and family and people i am together with every day, that’s what is most important for me. that they are there, together with me, means a lot to my security’ [ ]. odin linked security with his family and friendships, defining the people closest to him as being the most important factors in his security. vidar also mentioned family and friends, going further and explaining it with respect to his community: that the city is quite all right to live in [is important]. a lot of opportunities for youth, like for example political parties and organizations, so that one can do something on one’s spare time. that is security . . . [ ] included within vidar’s concept of belonging is the ability to associate freely in one’s spare time in formalized groups. other participants, like rolf, addressed feelings of belonging in relation to the experiences of immigrants in his community: i think that i am in another group than many of the others that i go to school with. those who come from other countries, those who live in [name of the city], go to school and what i am afraid of, or not so afraid, but worried about is that they can group up and split into groups, and that they become against our society, that they will not become part of us. fall outside [society] . . . [ ] n. g. l. holm et al. while not an immigrant himself, he points to polarization and division in society as a source of insecurity, and the lack of belonging to the majority group as a concern – expressing this with the phrase: ‘fall outside [society] . . . ’ both rolf and morten reflected on notions of ‘us and them’ in their thoughts around immigration and security. however, morten, in contrast to rolf, reflected critically on the concept: ‘we have this concept, them against us [. . .] who are “us” and who are “them”? this is interesting. is it us against them? is it christians against muslims?’ [ ]. flipping the terms from ‘them against us’ to ‘us against them’ he challenges expectations of who is made insecure by a lack of belonging. he further dwelled on the question of how it must feel to be new in a country and that immigrant culture is pushed aside in favour of the culture in norway. as he formulates it, ‘ . . . that they can’t keep their own culture one can say’ [ ]. relations between societal groups was also an issue for mia – a member of a visible minority – who worried about racial tension as a source of insecurity. she noted, ‘i experienced a significant change after the refugee crisis. the atmosphere in society is different. i notice what people write and what they say. it is more racist now than before . . . just a couple of years ago it was better’ [ ]. a recurrent topic in many of the interviews was trust in relation to security, with many interviewees mentioning trust in the state institutions such as the police or democracy [ – , - , – , - ]. trust, or lack of trust, in politicians, authorities, police, military, or the governance system was highlighted when the participants talked about authorities. the young men and women made similar reflections concerning the authorities at a systematic level. the trust in that they ‘work’ for the population, was repeated often. as anton answered when asked about trust in the norwegian police: ‘i hope they work for me. there is perhaps a small chance they don’t, but in general, i think that they do. it could be that they also discover things, that for safety [reasons] are important or they have access to all information’ [ ]. trust, particularly connected to the principal of equality before the law and fair rule, was key to security. more specifically, having a belief that the system, or state, is working for the populations’ interest. interestingly, nanna was an exception to her peers, recounting an episode that disrupted feelings of trust. she said, ‘i think about this with security that before i trusted the police, and now i am not quite there, now i can’t trust them completely’ [ ]. she witnessed police behaviour that ran contrary to her expectations. as a result, she indicated a degree of scepticism regarding trust in treatment before the law or law enforcement. these results echo a study from saarikkomäki ( ), where finnish youth relayed higher degrees of trust in police services as a result of perceived professionalism, but also personal experiences and encounters. this is perhaps an indicator of fragility in perceived social circle securities. at the outer circle – those notions that relate to external realities, ranging from war, economic insecurity, crime, or other uncertainties – all participants voiced concerns of some kind [ – ]. in particular, participants’ referenced security issues around social welfare systems, terrorism, and environmental concerns amongst others. interstate conflict and war was a common theme across interviews [ – , – , – , ]; however, while the topic was often raised, it was downplayed in terms of likelihood. for example, despite raising the issue, vidar was explicit in his lack of fear, saying, ‘i think that there is no danger of attacks against me or norway today, so i am not afraid of that’ [ ]. numerous participants echoed similar sentiments [ , , – , – , - , , ]. risk of war was not seen as relevant in reality, suggesting that interstate conflict was viewed as a hypothetical concern rather than a real threat. interestingly, turid rejected the risk of war on norwegian territory while simultaneously reflecting upon the role and responsibility of norway in conflicts in other countries: i am not personally worried about war, no. i feel that we live in a stable area of the world, right? but i do think it is sad if there is war in other parts of the world, and the consequences of war other places [. . .] and then i think that we, who also share part of the responsibility of the conflicts in the world, do not take the responsibility for those parts of [the conflicts]. [ ] her concerns were less about risks for herself and instead about her country’s role contributing to insecurity in other parts of the world. international journal of adolescence and youth awareness of global interconnectedness also surfaced in regards to media consumption and their understandings of security and insecurity. for example, if topics touched on conflict, infor- mants referred to reading in newspapers or the internet, either tangentially or as the main point of their remarks. odin and siv put it thusly: i read newspapers. i think about the security as the global market [. . .] that is what makes us connected with the rest of the world and that we can live so well and safe here. so, military security is important. [ ] i think about putin, and trump and that guy in north korea [. . .] i don’t remember his name, but other places with violence, but it doesn’t concern me every much in my everyday life really, only when i watch news. [ ] both participants acknowledged the role of media in shaping their views of security, but to different degrees. odin noted how media has informed his understanding of the interconnected nature of security; however, siv perceived the issue of violence as something she considers only when watching the news, almost distant to her reality. over all, participants generally expressed feelings of sympathy with those experiencing insecurity more than they felt it in their own personal experience. these responses represent a description of the interviewees’ general understanding of security. the next section presents the ways in which gender or gendered issues emerged during the interview process. gender and reflections on security areas where gender emerged as relevant to conceptualizations of security spanned inner, social, and outer circles of security. many interviewees raised and connected the topic of gender to a number of security related issues, producing some clear examples of where they identified gendered issues [ – , , , , , , ]; however, the majority of interviewees did not [ – , , , - , - , – , ]. those with gender-cognizant perspectives expressed views typical to contem- porary discussions of gender, but some produced more unique and surprising reflections. discussions of inner circle themes were generally devoid of gendered aspects, except in two cases. iselin and einar described a concern for inner circle insecurities experienced by men: namely, higher male suicide rates and expectations of masculinity. iselin noted the gendered nature of this problem as follows: there are many in our age group that commit suicide, and this i think really is a big threat. there are many whom we don’t know how they are doing [. . .]. yes, boys, it is difficult for them to ask for help, but i feel that boys have such high pressure on them. they are supposed to be so tough and not show any emotions [ ] she expressed concerns that society encouraged young men to repress emotions and avoid expression of feelings or insecurities. einar expressed a similar sentiment: there are higher suicide rates for men, because they feel that they can’t talk with other men about feelings and such things as an example because one has to be so big and strong, right? and not be able to have feelings. so i feel that just by having people around me that i trust really makes feel more safe [ ] both informants connected the issue of suicide rates for men and boys to issues of emotional expression, the lack of social support, and the presence of social pressures. moreover, both participants pointed towards social expectations of masculinity as contributing to the suicide rates in men and boys. einar went further, addressing body image and stereotypes as they applied to young men, recounting the expectation that men ‘ . . . should be big and strong, and not only strong, but physically fit and not in a bad shape. but, i feel that this is a problem in society that will come to change in the future’ [ ]. the notion of not being allowed to have feelings is clearly part of the inner circle as it focuses on emotions like fear or anxiety; however, the topic represents an issue that bridges both inner and middle circles in that it combines issues of insecurity and emotion with having appropriate social supports and relationships. n. g. l. holm et al. interestingly, few other distinctions or reflections emerged in regards to the inner circle of security and gender. all informants appeared to exhibit similar range of thoughts on inner circle issues. specifically, participants’ personal feelings of security were usually connected to an onto- logical sense of security that emerges from issues linked better to social and outer circles. at the social circle, significantly more interviewees pointed to problems with gendered themes. two participants noted that gender stereotypes and expectations a common concern relating to bullying and social pressure [ , ]. another participant, morten, had concerns about local politics being a boys club. he said, ‘[t]he first thing i heard when i came here to [the city] was about [this kind of] camaraderie. so, this affects the trust [one has] to the politicians governing fairly, so one has to watch out for that’ [ ]. morten continued, expressing concern for gender imbalances in the system, which he viewed as a threat to democracy and social relations, saying, ‘i think that democracy is important and that, yes, inequality is really what weakens democracy and then it is too late. we have to ensure that it is not just rich men governing here. these are things i think about when i think about security’ [ ]. morten’s comments show concern about the political system and gender equality in relation to security. he presented an argument that exclusion and discrimination of women and others with political capital weakens the trust people have in institutions, which in turn affects the notion of society being secure. inequality and discrimination was also an issue for turid, who reflected on its economic manifestation: ‘when there is . . . inequality, it is the women that are effected the most here in norway. more women work part-time, and there is not equal payment and such things, yeah so . . . it is important with a gender perspective on security i think’ [ ]. she viewed the tendency of many women to work part time or in jobs that are paid less as issues of discrimination in the norwegian labour market and therefore of security. mia raised another social circle insecurity, expressing a concern relating to immigration and social integration. specifically, that gendered security disparities in other countries could poten- tially be reproduced in norway. she expressed concern for immigrant girls who might still be exposed to insecurity: it is really important that the security for girls and women improve, that we [in our community] look after that immigrant girls are treated well and that they receive good schooling. now it isn’t easy for the boys either, but girls are exposed to so much in the world. safety for girls is important. it is important for security. girls are exposed. it worries me and girls have to think about this every weekend and every day. [ ] she was impacted by what she perceived as a higher risk of victimization for women and girls from other countries. she later extended those concerns to all norwegian girls, noting that many girls make routinized safety considerations that do not exist in the same way for men and boys. nanna also pointed towards other countries in terms of social circle insecurities, such as women’s integration in society and access to education. a number of participants discussed gender disparity in outer circle such as climate change, conflict, and sexual violence [ – , , , , ]. turid expressed a concern that ‘ . . . it is women and children that suffer most due to climate change and things like that. so, they are often more affected by [insecurities]’ [ ]. women and children, from her perspective, bore the brunt of down- turns in security conditions. however, she also reflected on the gender specific risks to both men and women in certain circumstances, continuing, ‘ . . . in traditional conflicts, it is often the men that fight and die, but then women are also exposed. rape and such. they lose their husbands who provide income as well’ [ ]. also addressing sexual violence, mia reflected on how the issue influenced how she thought about other countries and the risks of travel: ‘i would certainly not travel to dubai on vacation [. . .] where you are put in jail if you are raped’ [ ]. similar to turid and mia, terese also discussed sexual violence, but at the same time expressed a feeling of safety in her community. she noted feeling safe when she is ‘[. . .] able to walk home in the middle of the night without being worried that someone will attack me or abuse me’ [ ]. terese focused on the feeling of safety in the environment where she lives made her feel physically secure, where by contrast, turid and mia noted that other women are exposed to serious existential risks. international journal of adolescence and youth the complex nature of sexual violence, security, and gender disparity was raised by rolf, although he struggled to resolve certain aspects of the issue: i think that rape of young girls, and that one talks about this, this is security we can say. there is talk about what one can do to avoid this, and it is not the girls’ fault. there is also talk about who [rapes] [. . .] one has to be realistic. girls can think a bit about what they wear. that can be a security measure, but i am not saying that it is their [the girls’] fault.[ ] he discussed rape and issue of victim blaming, first taking a clear stand about the crime not being the victim’s fault; however, he also uses words like ‘realistic’ and ‘security measure’ arguing that there are practical sides to this debate that the victims can consider, namely how they dress. rolf was alone amongst male participants to reflect on female specific issues. discussion in general descriptive terms, the interviewees had broad definitions of security which generally transected different circles of security. in their initial responses regarding definitions of security or what contributed to feeling secure, most youth focused primarily on outer circle issues, while a smaller share described a combination of both the outer and middle circles, with only two constructing definitions of security as something transected all three levels of the circle. the interviewees tended to focus on factors in which they have little direct control over, such as conflict, job security, the welfare system, environmental issues and war, to mention some. interestingly, most informants described their notions of security in line of external realities, or the outer circle of vornanen et al.’s ( ) model was a somewhat surprising result. expectations based on the finnish study suggested that middle and inner circle insecurities would emerge in youth descriptions of security, but that did not manifest in these qualitative interviews. while it is speculative, perhaps this difference could be explained by the nature of the question – that is, asking youth to define their concept of ‘security’ rather than their experiences of ‘insecurity’. alternatively, the use of face-to-face interview methods made it challenging for these young participants to feel comfortable discussing certain inner circle security issues like personal fears, anxiety, and self-esteem. as a result, external or social insecurities emerged rather than more personal inner circle issues. in relation to theoretical approaches to security studies, interviewee perspectives crossed between different schools of thought. for example, a recurring references to inner circle issues, such as feeling safe and being able to ‘live a life without fear’ [ ] indicate security as a sense of stability and continuity in line with an ontological concept of security. these feelings of security were bound (by some informants) to social circle issues like family and friends as a source of stability. connections between inner and social circles are reminiscent of human security construc- tions of security, where security is understood both for the individual and the aggregate in relation to one another. moreover, informant responses dealing with education, safety, and housing amongst others are often connected to the notion of human security. that being said, issues of equality and the social constraints on women in other countries suggest constructions inline with emancipatory security – youth perceive security as being connected to freedoms as opposed to control measures. other reflections from youth on issues of belonging and in/out groups are reminiscent of the concept of societal security concept from the copenhagen school, where identity and social belonging are key (see: buzan, ; mcsweeney, ; wæver, buzan, kelstrup, & lemaitre, ). interestingly, some of the participants also defined security in tradi- tional, realist terms, pointing towards security of the state. this emphasis was another key difference from vornanen et al.’s study; however, this possibly emerged as a result from the charged political atmosphere at the time and the ubiquitous media coverage of usa/north korea relations. regardless, these observations indicates that security is understood by youth as inherently complex, with no singular theory sufficiently reflecting the diversity and complexity of n. g. l. holm et al. these individual perspectives; however, the main similarity could be the desire for predictability and an ontological sense of security. while there were parallels between interviewees’ initial constructions in terms of the scope of security, unique issues emerged when analysing the data for gendered issues. while the scope of security was broad for all informants regardless of gender, the emphasis placed on those themes appeared to shift scales between genders. male interviewees touched on all circles in terms of scope, they emphasized their outer circle security concerns whilst minimizing inner circle discus- sions. specifically, human security issues like experiencing personal violence and realist notions of interstate conflict and state based security were typical for the young men during the interview process. female participants, by contrast, often weighed in on concerns across all circles in a balanced way, often connecting issues between circles. thus, while the scope of personal constructions and definitions were similar, indications of differences in weight and focus were noted between participants of different genders; however, this is largely anecdotal given the small- n nature of the study. other interesting findings were identified in those places where gender emerged as security theme in itself; although, it should be noted that only a handful of our interviewees connected issues of security in terms of gender at all. it is worth noting that only one male and one female interviewee reflected on security issues that directly affected a gender other than their own: rolf when reflecting on violence against women, and iselin when expressing concerns around male suicide. this was somewhat unexpected, given the timing of the interviews overlapped with the emergence of the #metoo across the media. regarding inner circle concerns, gender emerged in some participants’ constructions of security in relation to insecurities of self and feelings of inadequacy in relation to gender norms and expectations. feelings of inadequacy in this regard were simultaneously tied to social circle insecurities – that is, bullying and a lack of social supports. iselin and einar both constructed very similar accounts to how these interrelated insecurities manifested for both young men and young women. other social circle concerns raised by interviewees focused more strictly on women and insecurities that disproportionately affect women. when other social circle security issues were raised, they were presented in terms of gender disparity. more specifically, some interviewees pointed to economic and political inequality as areas where gender security disparity existed in norway. interestingly, many interviewees framed their security concepts not in terms of how it impacted themselves, but in relation to how insecurity was experienced by others. it was in this way that gender usually emerged. concern for the security of others emerged at all three circles; the inner circle where iselin addressed high suicide rates among men; the middle circle where vidar, rolf and mia reflect upon immigrants’ situation in norway; the outer circle where turid discussed conse- quences of war in other countries, especially women and girls, and rolf about sexual violence. similarly, morten’s reflections on unequal access to the political sphere – dominated by ‘rich men’ as he put it – showed an understanding of the insecurities of others. regarding violence, almost all participants expressed that they had little fear of experiencing such problems in norway; however, they often drew on examples of how others experienced such insecurities abroad. this is reminis- cent of hoogensen and rottem ( , p. ) argument that one asks the question ‘security for whom’ whenever discussing security. and the youth in this study repeatedly expressed concerns of security on behalf of others, as well as themselves. this is perhaps due to the sample reflecting a somewhat privileged group within global society, but worth noting as they were explicitly conscious of how others might have different experiences. outer circle securities were an area in which this reflection on security from afar was most evident, in particular with regards to the issue of sexual violence. rolf and mia’s comments highlight how security issues are understood differently based on perspective. mia talks about avoiding certain vacation destinations out of concern for her security as a woman, while rolf raised the issue of men as the perpetrators of rape. while his comments on the issue reflected international journal of adolescence and youth the gendered nature sexual violence, his framing of it is somewhat indicative of his distance from the issue as understood and experienced by his female peers. specifically, his remarks that women and girls should take precautions contrasted with turid and mia, who indicated that taking such precautions was already a fact of life for many women. even though he clearly states it is not the victims fault, he suggests that women can take security measures. he struggles to resolve his understanding of the moral principle against victim blaming, despite it clearly contrasting with his position – thus, he makes assumptions regarding safety strategies. similarly, rolf’s recognition of insecurity for women runs is in a way parallel to turid’s reflection on norway’s role creating insecurities abroad – that is, security is both individual and collective. overall, the common thread between interviews was the way in which youth attempted to understand security via the insecurity of others. however, whether with mia’s point on women in developing countries, morten’s reflection on women in politics, or iselin’s reflection on social pressure and male suicide, the youth were often empathetic and included a recognition of their own privileged position. they repeatedly defined and scoped their understandings of security cognizant of the fact that while they may have secure lives, this is a privilege not afforded to everyone, especially in terms of gender. concluding remarks the aim of this research has been to explore how youth understand and relate to the concept of security, highlighting areas in which gender emerges thematically across interviewees’ self-defined conceptualizations of security. the results of this study highlight how the security concerns of norwegian youth are broad, yet are characterized a high degree of nuance and empathy, particu- larly in regards to how others experience insecurity. participants in this study were able to craft definitions and scope of security as they understood it, expressing a high degree of ontological security. that being said, they pointed out that other persons may not exist in the same state of privilege. several participants’ highlighted gender as one of the main lines where these security disparities occur, pointing to issues like male suicide, women’s political empowerment, and gender pay disparities. in terms of theory, the interviewees at times meandered, through realist, emanci- patory, ontological, and human security perspectives. thus, the use of vornanan et al.’s circles of insecurity proved to be a helpful heuristic tool in breaking down the results; however, participant responses rarely held themselves to one layer, instead broaching all three circles, sometimes simultaneously. these qualitative explorations of individual youths’ perspective of security high- light the importance of in depth and detailed considerations when seeking to involve youth in the pursuit of security. the results of this study illustrate that youth perspectives on security are rich and worthy of deeper exploration and recognition. future research could include a quantitative study to identify any differ- ences in the perception of insecurities along gender lines, or a more specific study on how youth understand the security or insecurity as a sympathetic response to the experiences of others. similarly, further investigation into the role of other non-national identities such as sexual orientation or visible minority status could provide greater insight into minority youth relations to experiences of security. notes . norway continually ranks among the safest and most developed countries in the world according to numerous indexes. see, for example, the human development reports (undp, ), or the global peace index (iep, ). . results from the primary study are available within the norwegian language document (holm & pettersen, ). n. g. l. holm et al. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors nikolai george lewis holm phd in sociology. faculty of social sciences, nord university. linn-marie lillehaug pedersen phd fellow in sociology. faculty of social sciences, nord university. elisabeth pettersen is an associate professor. faculty of social sciences, nord university. orcid nikolai george lewis holm http://orcid.org/ - - - linn-marie lillehaug pedersen http://orcid.org/ - - - references alhendawi, a. 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( ). insecurity of young people: the meaning of insecurity as defined by – -year-old finns. young, ( ), – . wæver, o., buzan, b., kelstrup, m., & lemaitre, p. ( ). identity migration and the new security agenda in europe. london: pinter publishers. walther, a. ( ). regimes of youth transitions: choice, flexibility and security in young people’s experiences across different european contexts. young, ( ), – . wolf, m., blomquist, c., huq, r., kovacs, e., williamson, h., & lauritzen, p. ( ). youth policy in norway. strasbourg: council of europe publishing/cedex. woolnough, a. d. ( ). fear of crime on campus: gender differences in use of self-protective behaviours at an urban university. security journal, ( ), – . yanow, d., & schwartz-shea, p. ( ). interpretation and method: empirical research methods and the interpretive turn. new york: routledge. n. g. l. holm et al. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/youth/fact-sheets/youth-definition.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/trends 	abstract 	introduction 	security and gender 	methods 	data presentation 	general reflections on security 	gender and reflections on security 	discussion 	concluding remarks 	notes 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	orcid 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ the elusive and illusive quest for diagnostic safety metrics the elusive and illusive quest for diagnostic safety metrics gordon d. schiff, md , and elise l. ruan, md, mph harvard medical school center for primary care, boston, ma, usa; brigham and womens hospital center for patient safety research and practice, boston, ma, usa; tufts university school of medicine, boston, ma, usa. j gen intern med ( ): – doi: . /s - - - © society of general internal medicine not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. variously attributed to albert einstein, william bruce cam- eron, lord platt, and others can’t improve what you can’t measure? nonsense. over the decades my relationship with my wife has continuously improved. but i’ve never administered a survey to her, nor tracked metrics of our relationship. not only was this not needed for improvement, but likely would have been detrimental and disrespectful. don berwick speaking at institute for healthcare improve- ment forum diagnosis errors have come out of the periphery of the patient safety movement. with the publication of na- tional academy of medicine report improving diagnosis in health care and recent reports suggesting diagnostic errors are the leading types of errors reported by patients and a top reason they file malpractice suits, diagnostic errors are finally gaining the brespect^ they warrant. , , in the current issue of jgim, three leading voices in the movement to improve diagnosis propose a framework that they argue will help advance metrics of diagnostic performance within and across health care systems as well as enable researchers and systems to determine the impact of improvement interventions. the goal of developing and reporting standardized mea- sures related to diagnostic safety has been an elusive one. despite the urging of multiple organizations and advocates, crafting measures for diagnosis quality has not proven to be simple. but how will we know if we are making progress and how can we hold organizations and clinicians accountable without some objective measures? to overcome a host of past difficulties in creating such metrics, the authors propose a framework with seven criteria for designing measures of bundesirable diagnostic events^ (ude’s). they suggest six diagnoses as logical candidates for places to start. (olson, table ). one clue that this may not be so simple is the fact that in their article, olsen et al. mention twice that number of diagnoses as examples that would not lend themselves to the ude measurement framework, includ- ing herpes zoster, pneumothorax, adult onset stills, amyloid, alzheimer’s, depression, spinal metastasis, mitochondrial dis- orders, bacterial overgrowth, adrenal insufficiency, and certain psychiatric conditions. perhaps just by sheer coincidence, one of us (gs) has personally had two of these (zoster, pneumo- thorax) misdiagnosed by skilled physicians (in addition to initially self-misdiagnosing). thus this list is revealing not only because it suggests several personally experienced diag- nostic failures would be outside the purview of the ude framework, but we suspect that applying their criteria strictly for the type bnever-event^ ude’s they advocate would ex- clude most of the diagnostic errors and problems in the diag- nostic process that are occurring in healthcare today. let us examine just one of the diagnoses they suggest would be a good candidate, tuberculosis. tb is indeed important, being highly prevalent worldwide, as well as an important diagnosis not to miss or delay. consider the consequences of overlooking a hospitalized patient with active pulmonary tb, both in terms of exposure of other patients and health workers, as well as failure or delay in treating a seriously ill patient with lifesaving medications. so how should we go about designing the proposed ude performance metric? should we only mea- sure pulmonary tb? if we did, we would be excluding tb meningitis, miliary tb, and renal and spinal tb—all serious diagnoses not to miss. what about active vs. latent tb which is often difficult to differentiate. what about the false negative and false positive rates of various tb sputum, skin, and blood tests—how should we factor this in when evaluating care quality? the authors mention the finding of tb on autopsy would be the gold standard basis for this metric. however, autopsies are rarely performed in the usa, and subject to serious selection bias that would markedly limit the utility of finding missed tb as an accurate and fair diagnostic perfor- mance measure. finally, one would hope we do not have to wait for a patient to die to uncover diagnostic improvement opportunities. the purpose of raising these questions is not to nitpick or deny that smarter minds can overcome some of these technical challenges in crafting a tb, or other diagnostic performance measures. rather it is to raise more fundamental questions that those of us in the diagnostic safety movement as well aspublished online april , http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf clinicians and patients need consider. how will these metrics help us move forward, and importantly how will they posi- tively engage clinicians to achieve the goal of more reliable and timely diagnosis? outside in vs. inside out measurement quality guru w. edwards deming is reported to have said bwhen i see workers measuring themselves, i see quality.^ in this profound statement, he was both downplaying the value of external measurement as well as extolling the importance of motivated, empowered workers trained in self-measurement skills (e.g., using statistical process control (spc) charts to differentiate bspecial cause^ (special circumstances, unexpect- ed outlier defects) from bcommon cause^ variation (random variation that is part of the system) taking the initiative to examine and improve their own quality. there is an even deeper significance to this concept of ensuring quality by creating a culture where front line staff, rather than external inspection or metrics, are the key to safe diagnosis. to explain, consider an analogy to the modern day approaches to ensuring medication quality. for decades, us pharmacopeia (usp), the official certi- fier of chemical quality for drug products marketed in the usa, relied primarily on sophisticated laboratory methods for inspecting drug product samples produced and submit- ted by each manufacturer. using established laboratory techniques such as chromatography, usp scientists would check the purity and strength of the ingredients of these samples against reference standards to ensure they conformed to the strict standards that had been established for that drug entity. however, increasingly this inspection approach to medication quality has been displaced by a very different approach—continuous process verification, whereby continuous assurance is available to detect any unplanned departures and allow manufacturers to identify and adjust for them, thus helping prevent product failures. usp standards now provide precise formulas and prepara- tion guidelines, along with pure reference samples for test- ing, so that drugs can be made consistently, every time. a similar approach is the basis for iso (international organiza- tion for standardization) good manufacturing standards which bprovide requirements, specifications, guidelines or character- istics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes and services are fit for their purpose.^ in short, quality, safety, and efficacy are designed/built into the product, not binspected-in^ after the fact. perhaps we need to apply these state-of-the-art manufactur- ing constructs to improving diagnosis. what would be the steps to specify bwell-made^ diagnoses? for example, we should certainly want to ensure every test result was returned, acknowledged, and acted on as well as communicated to the patient by the ordering clinician. although this processes standard would appear to be a relatively straightforward one (at least compared to other more complex aspects of diagno- sis), we now know that both specifying and ensuring such a reliable closed loop system is not a trivial feat. under what conditions should diagnoses be produced (re- ally co-produced) with patients? given what we know about the importance of safety culture in general, could we specify (and even measure) organizational expectations, processes, and conditions for assuring quality diagnoses and learning from errors? (text box ) compare an organization that relied on publicly reporting of its bnever event^ numbers for the six proposed ude diagnoses vs. one that was hard-wired with meaningful process and learning culture and safeguards em- bodied in our diagnosis culture framework? in which organization/system would you feel safer and more confident that the safeguards were in place for reliable timely diagnosis? in which system would you rather be a patient? and in which would you rather work? text box . culture of diagnostic safety and improvement • replacing blame and fear with learning and improvement, so no one is afraid to ask questions, question a diagnosis, or transparently share when things go wrong • commitment to improving diagnosis, learning from delays and diagnostic process errors - organizational recognition that misdiagnosis is # cause of patient-reported errors - comprehensive reporting, appreciative investigation of adverse events - relentless curiosity/worry/conferencing: what we might be missing, what can go wrong in system - attention to details of diagnostic process and what can go wrong, awareness of limitations of tests • recognition that uncertainty is inherent in diagnoses, tests, illness presentation, and evolution; anticipation of common pitfalls - situational awareness of local, disease-specific, literature-reported vulnerabilities and pitfalls - hard-wired, proactive, reliable follow-up safety nets, and feedback systems to detect and protect - conservative approaches to testing and imaging, enabled by shared decision-making and reliable follow-up • respect for human limitations and need for cognitive, process support - decreased reliance on human memory, minimizing negative effects of stress, fatigue, fear, appreciating risks of multitasking - redesign of emr and communication systems to support cognition, collaborative diagnosis, follow-up • enhanced role for patients in co-producing diagnosis - working collaboratively to formulate history, diagnosis, monitor course, and raise and research questions we now know that so-called quality reporting (particularly those more market-oriented approaches to encourage patients to shop around for quality or financially incentivize (or pun- ish) institutions based on their performance) is vulnerable to a myriad of issues including problems with measurement, case mix adjustment, incentives to game measures to make perfor- mance look better than it is, neglect of areas (in this case different diagnoses) not covered, clinician cynicism and skep- ticism with bbox-ticking^ and ill-informed second guessing, and time and resources required to collect (often manually) data for pubic reporting of dubious proven value that present an incomplete picture of clinicians’ diagnostic work. , , these two approaches-metrics vs. culture– of course are not mutually exclusive requiring us to make an either/or choice. schiff and ruan: the elusive and illusive quest for diagnostic safety metrics jgim and in many ways, narrower outcome metrics and culture could work together in a complementary fashion. however, before we go down this bmetrics^ road, we need to critically weigh what such measurements will and will not bring to improving diagnosis. perhaps focusing more closely on collaborative learning from the stories and details of actual cases of diagnostic error can be a more powerful lever for accountably and improvement than bar graphs or pie charts. , the success of the #metoo movement in exposing and limit- ing sexual misconduct demonstrates the power of impact over metric. qualitatively understanding the plethora of diagnostic errors locally and across institutions can help us build the situational awareness and safety nets we need for better diagnostic conduct. acknowledgements: the authors acknowledges support for re- search in diagnostic error and improvement from crico (harvard affiliated organizations malpractice insurer) and the gordon and betty moore foundation. corresponding author: gordon d. schiff, md; harvard medical school center for primary care, boston, ma, usa (e-mail: gschiff@bwh.harvard.edu). compliance with ethical standards: conflict of interest: the authors have no financial conflicts. references . investigator q. not everything that counts can be counted. ; https://quoteinvestigator.com/ / / /everything-counts-ein- stein/#note- - . accessed / / , . . berwick dm. escape fire: designs for the future of health care. john wiley & sons; . . balogh e, miller bt, ball j. improving diagnosis in health care. national academies press; . . schiff gd, puopolo al, huben-kearney a, et al. primary care closed claims experience of massachusetts malpractice insurers. jama internal medicine. ; ( ): – . . the public's views on medical error in massachusetts. https://cdn . sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ma-patient- safety-report-horp.pdf. . olson a, graber, mark, singh, h. tracking progress in improving diagnosis: a framework for defining undesirable diagnostic events jgim . spi . . national quality forum. improving diagnostic quality and safety draft measurement framework. washington dc: national quality forum . berwick dm. continuous improvement as an ideal in health care. in: mass medical soc; . . greener i, harrington b, hunter d, mannion r, powell m. a realistic review of clinico-managerial relationships in the nhs: - . national institute for health research, service delivery & organisation programme. . . himmelstein d, woolhandler s. quality improvement:bbecome good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.^. health affairs blog. . . casalino lp, nicholson s, gans dn, et al. what does it cost physician practices to interact with health insurance plans? health affairs. ; ( ):w -w . . hoff, timothy j. next in line: lowered care expectations in the age of retail-and value-based health. oxford university press, . . berwick dm. the stories beneath. medical care. ; ( ): – . schiff and ruan: the elusive and illusive quest for diagnostic safety metricsjgim http://dx.doi.org/https://quoteinvestigator.com/ / / /everything-counts-einstein/#note- - http://dx.doi.org/https://quoteinvestigator.com/ / / /everything-counts-einstein/#note- - http://dx.doi.org/https://cdn .sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ma-patient-safety-report-horp.pdf http://dx.doi.org/https://cdn .sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ma-patient-safety-report-horp.pdf http://dx.doi.org/https://cdn .sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ma-patient-safety-report-horp.pdf 	the elusive and illusive quest for diagnostic safety metrics 	outside in vs. inside out measurement 	references #ustoo: implicit bias, meritocracy and the plight of black minority leaders in healthcare busari jo. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - #ustoo: implicit bias, meritocracy and the plight of black minority leaders in healthcare jamiu o busari , leadership in the mirror to cite: busari jo. bmj leader ; : – . faculty of health, medicine and life sciences, maastricht university, maastricht, the netherlands pediatrics, zuyderland medical center, heerlen, the netherlands correspondence to dr jamiu o busari, faculty of health, medicine and life sciences, maastricht university, maastricht, the netherlands; jamiu. busari@ maastrichtuniversity. nl received may accepted september published online first  october  © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. abstract in the fall of , the #metoo movement ushered in one of the most astonishing revolts against the perils of workplace- related harassment. several unsuccessful campaigns geared towards ending the harassment and subjugation of women in corporate organisations finally got a thrust that resulted in significant and far- reaching changes in many organisations. while the #metoo movement highlighted the pains and struggles of gender inequality over the years, an unintended consequence has been the shadow it has cast over the plight of other minority groups facing harassment in the workplace. in several academic and healthcare (learning) environments, people of colour, like women, face explicit and implicit forms of harassment on a regular, if not daily basis. unlike gender harassment, however, racial harassment affects both sexes with relatively more predominance among men. the effect of racial harassments does not just impact performance and self- confidence but also influences the opportunities available to black professionals to advance their academic and professional careers. in the academic and healthcare industries, the issue of how to tackle implicit bias and unfair practices is not clear- cut. while the subjugated feel the impact of bias, the perpetrators of the actions either lack the ability (or are unwilling) to acknowledge these biases. furthermore, the complexities inherent to the different contexts make it problematic if not impossible, to call out racist behaviours. in this paper, a real- life case scenario is used to provide a scholarly analysis of the dynamics of racial harassment, implicit bias and the impact on minority leader roles in healthcare delivery. introduction in the autumn of , the #metoo movement hit the spotlights and along with it came a major revolt that changed the culture of harassment against women in the workplace. what initially began as an alteration against powerful forces in the entertainment industry quickly gained momentum and spread to include other industries such as the media, politics and sports. through the #metoo movement, women found a new voice to point out harassment in the workplace, forcing companies and society to take the issue more seriously. as a result, more than prominent men lost their jobs to the crusade and nearly half of them were succeeded by women. some things we have learnt from the #metoo movement is the enormity of sexual harassment in the workplace, the emotional and psychological impact it has (had) on its victims and that the problem of sexual harassment is not limited to a specific industry. we have also learnt that not only women are victims of sexual harassment, and that the impact of #metoo is still reverberating in other domains, as we see more cases of harassment being linked to religious, academic and healthcare institutions. in many academic and medical learning environ- ments, people of colour (be they faculty or trainees) encounter harassment regularly, if not daily. these harassments could be overt and direct (eg, physical or verbal harassment) or they can be concealed (eg, implicit bias and psychological intimidation). regardless of their nature, however, the impact of harassment on personal performance and self- confidence adds more strain to the pre- existent challenges that people of colour face, both in their academic and professional lives. not too long ago, darrel g kirch, president of the aamc wrote an opinion piece on linkedin and shed light on the psychological and professional costs of racism in american healthcare and academic systems. in his eloquently crafted opinion piece, kirch skilfully drew the reader’s attention to the “elephant in the room”, articulating the problem of racial bias in academic medicine and highlighting the costs of (implicit) bias on the professional development of people of colour. in so doing, he revived the discussion about the way we ought to be interacting with each other as human beings, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, (dis)ability or age in academia and healthcare delivery. the case of dr brown dr brown (not his real identity) is a respected clinician and academic with acclaimed leadership competencies. he recently applied for a leader- ship position in a teaching hospital and was one of the candidates that made it to the last stage of a rigorous selection process. as part of the selec- tion procedure, dr brown underwent an executive matching assessment and received an unequivocal and positive recommendation by the executive matching firm for the job he was applying for. in addition to being considered competent for the job, the assessment showed that he had a healthy balance between his ‘people- oriented’ and ‘task- oriented’ competencies. ‘people oriented’ as used in this context referred to his capacity to demon- strate compassion and be empathetic with others. unfortunately, as things turned out, dr brown did not get the job although the search committee did acknowledge that he was a suitable candidate for the position and possessed the required competen- cies needed for the job. the reason why dr brown was not offered the job, however, was because the search committee felt that his strong ‘people- oriented’ profile posed a risk to the position he was applying for. the search committee told him that o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n o cto b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /leader- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ busari jo. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - leadership in the mirror they were looking for a directive and more task- oriented candi- date, which meant that his compassionate and empathetic lead- ership style was not a good match for the position and for the team the search committee was putting together. to the reader, it is understandable that dr brown was disap- pointed when he found out that he did not get the job. espe- cially, when we place it into the context that he was specifically cultivating his people- oriented skills to improve his capability as a healthcare leader and prepare himself for a role similar to the one he was applying for. what makes the narrative inter- esting, however, was the reason the search committee gave to support their decision not to offer dr brown the job, that is, their preference for a candidate with a directive and indifferent leadership style for the leadership position. while this explana- tion was seemingly admissible to the search committee, in the current era of value- based healthcare practices, it was not the sort of explanation expected to be used to rationalise leader- ship building at the top of a healthcare organisation. further- more, the evidence in the literature shows that individuals with demonstrable compassion, empathy, and excellent communica- tions skills are those whom we should be recruiting to lead our healthcare organisations. cognitive dissonance and implicit bias so, what is the reason for sharing dr brown’s story? the purpose of sharing this narrative is not because dr brown failed to get the job, but rather about the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of trying to understand why he did not get the job. to refresh our memory, cognitive dissonance is that state of mental distress that a person experiences when confronted with two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. the discomfort of cognitive dissonance arises when we face situations where previously held beliefs clash with new evidence that is presented to us and then we are forced to search for a way to resolve the contradiction and reduce the mental discomfort. in the case of dr brown’s interview, his being disqualified for a healthcare leadership position because he was ‘people- oriented’ and less directive triggers a cognitive dissonance that does not resonate with the core values of what it is to be a healthcare provider or leader for that matter. espe- cially, when we link this to the current evidence in healthcare leadership where compassion, emotional intelligence and good communication skills are considered to be essential competen- cies that every effective healthcare leader should possess. for the reasons described above and the collective under- standing that compassionate and emotionally intelligent leaders are needed in our healthcare systems, disqualifying a candidate based on ‘people- oriented’ qualities do not make sense. more- over, in dr brown’s case, a ‘logical’ explanation for why he was not offered the job after being cleared to be a suitable candidate remains wanting. this leaves the observer with questions about what the real reason could have been, not to offer dr brown the job. if we now expand the story to include the fact that dr brown was from an ethnic minority group (black), one may then wonder if his ethnicity could have been an underlying reason for not being offered the job (i.e., implicit bias). worldwide and in several corporate organisations, ethnic minorities are generally underrepresented in top executive positions. for this group of professionals, it is known that they are regularly exposed to different types of implicit and open biases in their work and also, when applying for promotion or seeking new jobs. anec- dotal experiences show that in situations where black minorities fail to secure a new job or a request for promotion, the explana- tion they receive is often vague and barely justifies the credibility of the unfavourable outcome. this in turn fails to eliminate any perceived implicit racial bias or ulterior political motive. in dr brown’s case, besides his ethnicity, one may wonder despite being cleared by the executive matching firm, if there were other issues that may have influenced the outcome the interview. for example, whether there were issues other than implicit bias that he probably was unaware of and which the search committee was unable or unwilling to share with him. one may also argue whether it was okay for the search committee to decide against his selection following the strongly favourable recommendation of the matching firm. in the same light, if the committee did decide to disregard the executive matching firm’s recommendation, then they should also have been prepared (and willing) to authentically describe the reason for doing so to the candidate. the question though, is who should be privy to this explanation, and do they owe this to the candidate? ultimately, for dr brown, there was no satisfactory explanation to quell the nagging question he had about the outcome of the procedure. the question he kept asking himself was ‘would i have got the job (with the same academic and professional credentials and the same positive assessment from the executive matching firm) if i were white?’. now, while the #metoo movement highlights decades of pain associated with the struggles for gender equality in our societies, an unintended consequence of this breakthrough is that the plight of other minority groups, for example, ethnic minorities facing harassment in the workplace may be (unintentionally) overshadowed. – furthermore, racial harassment unlike the harassment of women, affects both sexes with relatively more predominance among men. still, within this line of thinking, we can argue that the insurgence of #metoo has also brought in its wake, a revival to fight discrimination and the implicit biases meted out to all minority groups in general. although a lot has been learnt from the rise of the #metoo movement, the issue of how to tackle implicit bias and unfair practices in academic medicine is still difficult and unclear. while the recipients of implicit bias feel its impact, the perpetrators of such prejudices lack the ability or willingness to recognise, let alone acknowl- edge their actions. furthermore, the complexities inherent to the different contexts make it problematic if not impossible to call out racist behaviours, especially when the person calling it out is the subject at the receiving end. to support individuals who are hurt, put down, marginalised and abused by bias, we need to recognise the consequences of these biases to them and the patients they serve. we also have to realise that there is a price to pay for racism and the unfair prac- tices associated with it. this price includes the perpetuation of behaviours that do not align with the principles of a just culture and the marginalisation of particular groups within society. it means that there would be a poor representation of ethnic minorities in academic and healthcare sectors and a potential loss of highly qualified individuals from positions where they can contribute meaningfully to the system. there would also be a loss of diversity in the composition of teams and in the innovation that different individuals inject into academic and healthcare systems. on a personal level, there is the psycho- logical stress that it will cost individual practitioners of colour. therefore, like the #metoo movement, we need to address the ‘elephant in the room’ regarding racism in our academic and healthcare institutions. we need to recognise and acknowledge the impact of implicit bias on black academics and healthcare professionals (in leadership positions). as a clinician, educator and healthcare leader, i hold the firm belief that the foundation of exemplary leadership lies in our o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n o cto b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ busari jo. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - leadership in the mirror ability to demonstrate compassion and empathy. the evidence in the leadership literature supports this, showing that leaders who are compassionate, who have excellent communication skills and who demonstrate high emotional intelligence are very successful and are often the most effective leaders. the medical educa- tion literature also shows that compassionate and empathetic clinicians with excellent communication skills are often the ones that learners tend to associate with and regard as exemplary role models. conclusion although the awareness of racism exists in many organisations, the actions being taken to bridge the divide in terms of oppor- tunities for growth and participation are still insufficient. a few actions that can be taken to start the conversation however include embracing the lessons from the way women in academia and healthcare have tackled the imbalance. we can recruit expe- riences from the #metoo movement to support the plight of black minorities (#ustoo) who are aspiring for promotion or leadership roles through coaching. we need to create a ‘just’ community of practice, where unbiased meritocracy forms the motor that drives selection of candidates for academic promo- tion and job appointments. healthcare systems need to recruit more compassionate leaders with the capacity to serve their constituencies humbly and lead their teams with their hearts and heads (humble leadership). moving forward, we need a community of practice that embraces meritocracy and inclusiveness and ensures a just culture of practice. as healthcare leaders, we need to embrace ‘leading with compassion’ unflinchingly, knowing that it would always get us the results that will stand the test of time. finally, for the benefit of all, we need to acknowledge the mechanisms of implicit bias and find ways to prevent the potential harm it causes our patients and care providers. acknowledgements the author wishes to thank professor deepak dath (mcmaster university, hamilton, california, usa) for critically reviewing and providing helpful suggestions to the initial draft of this manuscript. contributors jb actively contributed to the conception, design, writing and critical review of this manuscript before submission. all those listed as authors qualify for authorship. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. disclaimer this paper has not been published or submitted elsewhere. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. orcid id jamiu o busari http:// orcid. org/ - - - references carlsen a, salam m, miller cc. #metoo brought down powerful men. nearly half of their replacements are women. new york times, . available: https://www. nytimes. com/ interactive/ / / / us/ metoo- replacements. html [accessed jul ]. bernard dl, hoggard ls, neblett ew, et al. racial discrimination, racial identity, and impostor phenomenon: a profile approach. cultur divers ethnic minor psychol ; : – . kirch dg. addressing racism and mistreatment in academic medicine: linkedin, . available: https://www. linkedin. com/ pulse/ addressing- racism- mistreatment- academic- medicine- kirch- m- d-/ [accessed may ]. chapman en, kaatz a, carnes m. physicians and implicit bias: how doctors may unwittingly perpetuate health care disparities. j gen intern med ; : – . porter me. what is value in health care? n engl j 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ 	#ustoo: implicit bias, meritocracy and the plight of black minority leaders in healthcare 	abstract 	introduction 	the case of dr brown 	cognitive dissonance and implicit bias 	conclusion 	references formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter tilburg university formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter blommaert, jan published in: international journal of multilingualism doi: . / . . publication date: link to publication citation for published version (apa): blommaert, j. ( ). formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter. international journal of multilingualism, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / . . general rights copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • you may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • you may freely distribute the url identifying the publication in the public portal ? take down policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/ e d d- ab- d - -a b fee f https://doi.org/ . / . . full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rmjm international journal of multilingualism issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmjm formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter jan blommaert to cite this article: jan blommaert ( ) formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter, international journal of multilingualism, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: feb . submit your article to this journal article views: view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rmjm https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmjm https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rmjm &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rmjm &show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - formatting online actions: #justsaying on twitter jan blommaert babylon, center for the study of superdiversity, tilburg university, tilburg, netherlands abstract the hashtag #justsaying is one of twitter’s global stock hashtags. the hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. in this paper, i shall look at dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered ‘translingual’ framing device, and i will attempt an analysis focused on the specific kinds of communicative actions it marks and organises. i shall use the notion of formatting as the point of departure: hashtags, as part of an innovative online scripted register, can be seen as formatting devices that introduce, proleptically, a recognisable framing effect on the statement (the tweet), often as a reframing response to other statements giving keys for complex and multiple but equally formatted forms of uptake. the hashtag, thus, appears to have powerful interactional structuring effects in formatting specific lines of action. article history received december accepted december keywords online-offline; social media; formatted action; twitter; hashtags; interactionism; translingualism translingualism in the online-offline nexus three substantive claims underlie the argument in this paper. one: in considering contem- porary forms of translingualism one can neither avoid online sites of scripted interaction as loci of research, nor the online-offline nexus as an area of phenomenal innovation. two: approaching such online forms of translingual interaction can benefit substantially from a radically action-centered approach, rather than from an approach privileging partici- pants and their identity features, or privileging the linguistic/semiotic resources deployed in translingual events. and three: addressing online forms of translingual interaction from this perspective can reveal core features of contemporary social life and serve as a sound basis for constructing innovative social theory. of the three claims, the first one is by now widely shared (see e.g. li wei & zhu hua, this volume). there is an increasing awareness amongst students of language in society that the online social world has by now become an integrated part of the sociolinguistic econ- omies of societies worldwide, and that the zone in which we situate our investigations should now best be defined as the online-offline nexus, with phenomena from the online world interacting with those of the offline world and vice versa. there are the specific rescaling and chronotopic features of online communication, where interaction © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact jan blommaert j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu international journal of multilingualism , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu http://www.tandfonline.com is, as a rule not an exception, no longer tied to physical co-presence and effectively shared timespace; and where interactions as a rule not an exception include translocal and trans- temporal rhizomatic uptake (cf. boyd, ; tagg, seargeant, & brown, ). and there are the outspokenly multimodal default characteristics of online communication. taken together, it is evident that online communication must be the locus of intense translingu- alism. my first claim gestures towards the theme of this collection: the online-offline nexus must turn translingualism into the rule, the normal, ordinary and unremarkable sociolin- guistic state of affairs. the two other claims might demand somewhat more attention. the second claim – an action-centered perspective on online interaction – is grounded in (but transcends) a serious methodological problem complicating research: the indeterminacy of participant identities online. given the widespread use of aliases and avatars on, for instance, social media platforms, nothing can be taken for granted regarding who exactly is involved in interactions. whether we are interacting with a man or woman, a young or an old person, a local or nonlocal one, someone communicating in his/her ‘native’ or ‘first’ language: none of this can be conclusively established (cf. li & blommaert, ). this straightforward feature of online interactions destabilises much of what we grew accus- tomed to in social studies, including sociolinguistic research. it makes us aware that our sociological imagination strongly hinged on the self-evident transparency of who people are, the communities they are members of, the languages that characterise them ethnolin- guistically and sociolinguistically. the sociological sample – one of these key inventions of twentieth century social science – cannot be reliably drawn from online data. thus we find ourselves in a research situation in which little can be said a priori about participants and resources involved in social action. the action itself, however, can be observed and examined, and my second claim is to put the analysis of actions central in online-offline nexus research as a firm empirical basis for theory construction (cf. szabla & blommaert, ). my third claim tags onto that: it is by looking at actions, and at how such actions effectively produce participants and resources, that we can get a glimpse of elementary patterns of social behaviour through interaction – an oppor- tunity for retheorizing our field. the target of this paper is to empirically demonstrate that. i shall do so by looking at a common feature of online interaction: the use of hashtags, in this case on twitter. the point i am seeking to make is that hashtags, as an entirely new feature in interaction interfering with established ones into a translingual whole, can be shown to be subject to rather clear and strict functions and norms of deployment. in garfinkel’s ( ) terms, they can be shown to involve formatted actions with a high degree of normative recognizability, turning them into transparent framing devices in twitter interactions. hashtags and translingualism if we see translingualism (pace the editors of this issue) as the fluid movement between and across languages or – more broadly – semiotic systems, hashtags definitely can serve as prime instances of translingualism. as a feature of social media scripted discourse, the construction ‘# + word(s)’ is a twenty-first century innovation. surely the sign ‘#’ itself was used before the advent of social media: it was, for instance, a symbol on dial phones and was widely used elsewhere as a graphic symbol indicating numbers or, in old-school international journal of multilingualism proofreading practices, indicating a blank space to be inserted in the text. but as we shall see, the social media use of hashtags cannot be seen as an extension of those previous forms of usage. when social media emerged, the hashtag was a free-floating resource that could be functionally redetermined and redeployed in a renewed sociolinguistic system. the fact that the symbol was not tied to a particular language or graphic system such as english or cyrillic script made it, like the ‘@’ sign, a polyvalent and user- friendly resource, capable of becoming part of global social media discursive repertoires – a process i called ‘supervernacularization’, (blommaert, ). this means that such symbols can be incorporated – by translanguaging actions – in a nearly unlimited range of language-specific expressions while retaining similar or identical functions. while the use of hashtags has by now become a standard feature of several social media applications (think of facebook and instagram) its usage is most strongly embedded in twitter. hashtags there tie together and construct topical units: within the strict confines of message length on twitter, hashtags enable users to connect their individual tweets to large thematically linked bodies of tweets and add specific orien- tations to specific tweets within that larger body (cf wikström, ). in that sense – but i shall qualify this in a moment – their function, broadly taken, is contextualisation: indi- vidual tweets can be offered to audiences as understandable within the topical universe specified by the hashtag. thus, the ‘#metoo’ hashtag (one of the most trending hashtags since the harvey weinstein scandal) ties together millions of individual tweets, pro- duced in a variety of languages around the world, within the topical universe of gender- related sexual misconduct and abuse. as a consequence, within twitter analytics, hashtags are used to define what is ‘trending’ or ‘viral’, and other forms of big data mining on social media likewise use hashtags as analytical tools for modelling topics and tracking partici- pant engagement and involvement (e.g. blaszka, burch, frederick, clavio, & walsh, ; wang, liu, huang, & feng, ). there is some work on what is called hashtag activism (e.g. bonilla & rosa, ; jackson, ; mendes, ringrose, & keller, ; tremayne, ) but qualitative sociolin- guistic or discourse-analytic work focused on hashtags remains quite rare (but see e.g. wikström, ; zappavigna, ). in a recent study, de cock and pizarro pedraza ( ) show how the hashtag ‘#jesuis + x’ (as in ‘#jesuischarlie’) functionally shifts from expressing solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack on the charlie hebdo editorial offices in paris, , to expressing cynicism and critique about hypocrisy when such forms of solidarity are being withheld from the victims of similar attacks elsewhere (as in ‘#jesui- sistanbul, anyone?’), or jocular and nonsensical uses as in ‘#jesuiscafard’ (‘i am a hang- over’). observe that the corpus used in de cock & pizarro pedraza’s study was multilingual, and that the ‘french’ origins of ‘#jesuis + x’ did not impede fluency of usage across language boundaries – the hashtag operates translingually. we can draw a simple but fundamental insight from de cock & pizarro pedraza’s study: the functions of hashtags are unstable, changeable and dynamically productive. the same hashtag can be functionally reordered and redeployed whenever the topical field of the hashtag changes (or can be seen to be changing). in the analysis of de cock & pizarro pedraza, ‘#jesuis + x’ shifts from an emblematic sign of (emotional and political) alignment to one of disalignment and even distancing. this shift in function – and the resulting plur- ality of functions – instantiate mature enregisterment in that different but related interac- tional stances are available to users; the hashtag ‘#jesuis + x’ has become a lexicalised but j. blommaert elastic signifier enabling and marking a variety of forms of footing within a connected the- matic domain (c.f., agha, ). it is, to adopt goffman’s ( ) terms now, a framing device, enregistered as such within a globally circulating and, of course, translingual, social media supervernacular. de cock & pizarro pedraza call the functions they described for the #jesuis + x hashtag ‘pragmatic’. as framing devices, however, hashtags are meta- pragmatic as well, they are interactionally established elements of voicing (agha, ). and the latter takes us to the core of my argument. functions of hashtags are interactionally established and should not be seen as simply the activation of latent and stable meaning potential. seen from an action perspective, the different forms of footing enabled by a hashtag such as ‘#jesuis + x’ represent different forms of communicative action within what goffman ( ) called a ‘realm’ – a ‘meaning- ful universe sustained by the activity’ (p. ). at first glance, the difference between this formulation and the prior ones centreing on contextualisation, (dis)alignment and enregis- terment seems minimal; in actual fact, the shift is quite substantial. we now move away from an analytical perspective focused on participants and resources (as in de cock & pizarro pedraza’s analysis) to one in which concrete actions are central and seen as the points from which both the participants’ roles and the values of the resources used in interaction emerge (c.f., cicourel, ; garfinkel, ; goodwin & harness goodwin, , ). enregisterment, from this action perspective, does not only stand for the for- mation of registers-as-resources but also as the emerging of formats for communicative action, in which such formats also include the ratification of participants and the concrete mode of effective deployment of semiotic resources. formats are framed patterns of social action, and i believe i stay very close to what goffman suggested when i define framing as exactly that: the ordering of interactional conduct in ways that valuate both the roles of participants and the actual resources deployed in interaction between them. #justsaying as action: basics i will now illustrate this by means of examples of the interactional deployment of the hashtag #justsaying. this hashtag – manifestly english in origin – is widely used on twitter (also in variants such as #justsayin, #justsayingg), also in non-english messages. and contrary to manyt other hashtags, it is not a topical marker but an explicitly metaprag- matic one. the expression ‘just saying’, in offline vernacular interaction, often indexes con- sistency in viewpoint and factual certainty in the face of counterargument (craig & sanusi, ). let us take a look at what can be done with it on twitter, and concentrate on the types of action it can contribute to. in what follows, i shall use examples of #justsaying deployed in dutch-language tweets from belgium and the netherlands, followed by approximate english translations. note that there is no dutch equivalent to #justsaying used on twitter: it is a fully enregistered (translingual) element in ‘dutch’ twitter discourse. i must first identify some basic actions performed and performable by means of #justsaying. standalone act a first observation is that #justsaying is very often used for a standalone communicative act: a tweet which is not part of a twitter ‘thread’ (a series of interactionally connected tweets) international journal of multilingualism but which appears as an individual statement, as in figure . those are standalone com- municative acts, but evidently they are not without contextualisation cues. in this tweet from early august , which says ‘after weeks of only pictures about the heat, all media are now swamped with pictures and videos with rain, thunder, and lightning’, the timing is the cue, as the author refers to the end of the heatwave that swept over western europe in that period. contextualisation can also take a more explicit shape, as when authors use topical hashtags tying their standalone statement into larger thematic lines, as in the tweet ‘suggestion for #fgov … reinstate national service to enable our chil- dren to defend themselves against the aggressive #islam in our #europe. matter of time before our #democracy has to be defended #manumilitari #justsaying’ (see figure ). in figure , we see that the standalone statement has an indirectly called-out and iden- tified addressee, the belgian government, hashtagged as #fgov. specific addressees can of course be directly called out through the use of the standard symbol ‘@’, and tweets by default have the author’s followers as audiences. thus, a standalone communicative act does not equal a decontextualised act nor an act that doesn’t invite uptake from addres- sees. on social media, standalone communicative acts are interactional by definition, for the congregation of one’s twitter followers (or a section thereof) will see the tweet on their timelines anyway, and they respond by means of ‘likes’, ‘retweets’ or ‘comments’, as we can see in examples and . i shall return to this point of addressee responses in greater detail below and underscore its importance. the main point here is: such standalone tweets are, thus, framed in goffman’s sense. they engage with existing ‘realms’ and select participants. and what they do within such meaningful units and in relation to ratified participants is to signal a particular footing: a self-initiated, detached, factual but critical, sometimes implicitly offensive state- ment not directly prompted by the statements of others and often proposed as the start of a series of responsive acts by addressees. they trigger and flag from within a recognisable figure . after weeks of only pictures about the heat, all media are now swamped with pictures and videos with rain, thunder and lightning. #justsaying. figure . suggestion for #fgov … reinstate national service to enable our children to defend them- selves against the aggressive #islam in our #europe. matter of time before our #democracy has to be defended #manumilitari #justsaying. j. blommaert universe of meaningful acts (the registers we use on twitter and the communities we use them with) a specific format of action involving particular forms of ‘congregational work’, the work we do in order to make sense of social actions and establish them as social facts (garfinkel, , p. ). we can paraphrase the format as: ‘here i am with my opinion, which i state in a critical, sober and detached way unprompted by others, and which i offer to you for interactional uptake’. let me stress this point once more: standalone acts such as those are not isolated or non-interactional, they are fully social acts performed in a collective of participants who know how to make sense of #justsaying action formats and their concrete contextualised instances. they merely initiate such action formats and, in that sense, provide an initial definition of their main ordering parameters. sidetracking and reframing when #justsaying is interactionally deployed in a thread, we see partly different things. what remains stable is the sober, confident and detached footing we encountered in the standalone instances. but very different formats of action are triggered and flagged by it. and before we engage with these formats of action, i must return to a particularly important feature of the examples that will follow: the duality of addressees. in a thread, an author responds directly to previous tweets and to those identifiable partici- pants involved in those previous tweets. but the individual response tweet also attracts responses from other addressees: the likes and (sometimes) retweets and comments from participants not directly operating within that specific thread. consider the following example, which is a tweet in response to two other users: ‘i’m not saying that something is wrong with large farms. just pointing out that cows are peanuts compared to the numbers in canada. no attack. no judgment. #justsaying’ (figure ). while the author directly responds to two other participants (@x and @y), her tweet receives a retweet and two likes from different twitter users. this is important, for we see two separate lines of congregational work here: one line performed between the figure . (response to @x and @y): i’m not saying that something is wrong with large farms. just point- ing out that cows are peanuts compared to the numbers in canada. no attack. no judgment. #justsaying. international journal of multilingualism author and her two called-out and identified interlocutors, the authors of previous tweets; another line performed between the author and addressees not involved in the thread but responding, very much in the way described for standalone acts, to the author’s specific tweet. two frames co-occur here, and this is important for our understanding of what follows. a format of action frequently triggered and flagged by #justsaying in twitter threads is ‘sidetracking’, or more precisely, opening a second line of framing. in the following series of tweets, the thematic universe of the thread is disrupted by the introduction of another one, initiated on the same detached and sober footing as the standalone cases i discussed above (see figure ): (participant ) can anyone ask @x whether she can unblock me? (participant , responding to participant ) me too … i don’t think i ever reacted against her … strange bitch figure j. blommaert (participant , responding to participants , ) calling women ‘bitch’ seems to me to be cause for blocking. #justsaying (participant , responding to participant ) strange madam ok then? the topic launched by participant is not uncommon among active twitter users: a com- plaint about being blocked by someone, @x, articulated here as an appeal to others to help being unblocked by @x. the direct response to this comes from participant , who endorses what participant says by expanding the case: he, too, was blocked by @x, apparently for no good reason. in this response, participant uses the term ‘bitch’ (‘wijf’), and this leads to the #justsaying reframing action by participant . from the actual case proposed by participant as the topic of the thread, participant shifts to an entirely different one related to the use of derogatory and sexist terminology within the moral framework of ‘proper’ twitter usage. the shift, thus, is more than just topical: it reorders the entire normative pattern of interaction. participant immediately responds defensively by offering an alternative, only slightly less derogatory term. a new frame has been introduced and a new format of action – from collaborative work on one topic to oppositional work on another – has been started. in opening a second line of framing, the participation framework is also redefined. in the above example, participant is sidelined as soon as the #justsaying remark is made, and the direct interaction in the thread is reordered: it becomes a direct engagement of participant with participant , and what started as a one-to-all thread becomes a one- on-one thread. a new line of action is generated by the #justsaying statement. #justsaying as complex reframing we have come to understand some of the basic actions in which #justsaying is used. now look at the following example, an interaction started by the mayor of antwerp (participant in the transcript) tweeting from his holiday site in poland about the gay pride held in his town that day (see figure ): (participant ) i’m still in poland but i wish all the participants in antwerp a great pride. [icon] being yourself safely and freely, that’s what matters today. [icon] (participant ) i find the cultural promotion of extra-natural behavior not suited for a conser- vative party. i have nothing agains lgbts, have something against their bashers, but also against publicity. (participant ) i grant everyone their freedom, but i find the promotion of counternatural acts entirely unacceptable. (participant ) let’s also prohibit publicity for traveling by plane then. people flying is a coun- ternatural thing as well. to give just example. but i’ll happily provide more examples if you wish. #justsaying #wearwithpride #antwerppride #narrowmindedpeople his tweet is meant as a public, one-to-all statement, and it has the expected effects: it goes viral with hundreds of ‘likes’ and a large number of retweets. apart from these forms of response, the tweet also develops into a thread: the mayor gets several ‘comments’ from participants addressed by his tweet. the mayor’s public salute to the antwerp pride (interestingly, without any topical hashtags) is critically commented on in two international journal of multilingualism turns by participant , someone who clearly aligns himself with the right-wing conserva- tive forces opposing the pride. observe that participant addresses the mayor in his responses and comments on the topic initiated by the mayor. he stays within the frame of the initial activity, and his comments receive a number of likes as well as comments. the #justsaying comment by participant is of particular interest, for it opens a new line of framing and reorders the participation framework. the mayor is eliminated as a rele- vant direct addressee and the frame he started is dismissed, as the #justsaying statement by participant is targeting the anti-lgbt turns made by participant . in addition, partici- pant connects his tweet explicitly with the antwerp pride by means of a string of topical hashtags. the tweet is shifted to another universe of meaning and another audience. like in the previous ‘blocking’ example above, the shift in participation framework is effective: participant gets a reply from participant after his #justsaying statement (see figure ): (participant ) there are less people throwing up when they see a plane, than people feeling sick when they see homosexual acts. figure j. blommaert (participant ) because it suits them well. the reason ensures that a message can be shared. now that is zum kotsen (sic, literally ‘to make you barf’). tells a lot about people. but feel free to move to russia if it annoys you that much. a new format of action has been started: an escalating, one-on-one fight between both participants, on the issue of what does or doesn’t constitute ‘counternatural’ conduct. but there is more. the topical hashtags in participant ’s tweet caused a larger shift in audience and universe of meaning, and so we get different lines of congregational work here. while participant enters into an argument with participant , his #justsaying state- ment gets eight ‘likes’ and a retweet from twitter users not otherwise active in this thread. so, parallel to the one-on-one thread developing within a one-to-all interaction started by the mayor, another one-to-all thread emerges, inviting very different forms of response. we see the full complexity here of the actions involved in reframing, and we can rep- resent them graphically (figure ). on twitter, what we see is a thread opened by the mayor’s one-to-all tweet which triggers collective as well as individual responses, all of it within the frame initiated by the tweet (frame in figure ). the thread, therefore, is a unit of action, but a composite and unstable one. why? because the #justsaying comment by participant shapes, within the thread as a unit of action, a different frame (frame in figure ). in frame , we also see collective as well as individual responses – we see the same genres of action, in other words – but they are performed figure international journal of multilingualism in a frame shaped by the #justsaying statement by participant . this frame is only indirectly related to frame , and it draws participant – who reacted initially within frame to the mayor’s tweet – into a different role and position, with a different interlo- cutor and with (partly) different audiences, on a different topic. the reframing of the actions means that they are thoroughly reformatted: while, formally, the participants in frames and appear to do very similar things, the difference in frame turns their actions into very different kinds of normatively judged congregational work, creating different social facts. what we see in these examples is how the hashtag #justsaying appears to ‘open up’ a seemingly unified and straightforward activity (the twitter thread) to different forms of social action invoking, and thus proleptically scripting, different modes of participation and different modes of uptake, appraisal and evaluation. it interjects, so to speak, entirely different formats of action into a goffmanian ‘realm’, enabling the shaping of very different ‘meaningful universes sustained by the activity’. as a framing device, #justsaying is thus more than a pragmatic-and-metapragmatic tool. it is something that proleptically signals various allowable modes of conduct and various forms of ratified participation and congre- gational work in social activities that appear, from a distance, simple and unified. hashtags and translingualism revisited the latter remark takes us to fundamental issues in methodology. many years ago, goodwin and harness goodwin ( ) told us that ‘there are great analytical gains to figure j. blommaert be made by looking very closely at how particular activities are organized’ (p. ). they made that point in a paper that demonstrated that what is usually perceived as one activity – a ‘conversation’, for instance – actually contains, and is constructed out of, a dense and complex web of distinct smaller actions, all of which have important contextua- lising dimensions and many of which reorder the patterns of roles and normative scripts assumed by the participants. about participants, the goodwin and harness goodwin ( ) later also observed that the frequent use of generalising category labels such as ‘speaker’ and ‘addressee’ again obscure important differences and shifts in the actual actions performed by participants in social interaction. one is not always an ‘addressee’ in the same way during a speech by a ‘speaker’, for instance: sometimes one is a distant addressee, at other moments an involved one; one’s response behaviour can be cool and detached at times and deeply engaged and emotional at others, positively sanction- ing specific parts of the talk and negatively sanctioning others. the appeal launched (and continuously reiterated) by the goodwins was for precision in analyzing social action as a key methodological requirement for discourse analysis, some- thing they shared with the likes of garfinkel, cicourel and goffman, and something that motivated my efforts in this paper. i tried to demonstrate that the interactional deploy- ment of the hashtag #justsaying involved multiple and complexly related forms of social action, including the profound reframing of activities in such ways that morphologi- cally similar actions (e.g. ‘likes’ or comments) are formatted differently – they are part of different modes of making sense of what goes on. the complexity of such discursive work, performed by means of a hashtag productive across the boundaries of conventionally established languages, to me demonstrates advanced forms of enregisterment and, by extension, of communicative competence (cf., agha, , ). this implies – it always implies – advanced forms of socialisation, for enregisterment rests on the indexical recognizability of specific semiotic forms within a community of users who have acquired sufficient knowledge of the normative codes that provide what goffman ( ) called ‘a foundation for form’ (p. ). translated into the discourse of translingualism, the complexity of discursive work performed by means of #justsaying demonstrates how translingual forms of this type have acquired a ‘foun- dation’, in goffman’s terms, and operate as enregistered, ‘normal’ features of semiotic repertoires within a community of users. such users are able to recognise #justsaying (even across language boundaries) as indexing a shift in interactional conduct, introdu- cing a different frame and allowing different forms of footing in what might follow. translingual practice of this kind is an established social fact; in line with the theme of this volume, it is mundane, banal and unremarkable, in spite of its complexity of func- tion and use. but recall the compelling appeal by the goodwins: we must be precise here. the rules for such translingual practices as were reported here are not generic, they are specific to concrete chronotopically configured situations of social media communication: inter- actions on twitter. the community of users, likewise, is ratified as competent in the use of such forms of discursive practice only within that area of social life – the valuation of their competence cannot be generalised or extrapolated without elaborate empirical argu- ment. and so the translingual practice i have described here is a niched social fact, part (but only part) of the communicative economies of large numbers of people occasionally enter- ing that niche. international journal of multilingualism the niche is new: at the outset of this paper i insisted that the use of hashtags in the way described here is a twenty-first century innovation, an expansion and complication of existing communicative economies. this is why i find it exceedingly interesting, for novelty means that people have to learn rules that are not explicitly codified yet; they have to actually engage in the practices and perform the congregational work required for an emerging code of adequate performance, in order to acquire a sense of what works and what doesn’t. they cannot draw on existing sets of norms of usage. my analysis of #justsaying has, i believe, shown that the use of hashtags cannot be seen as an exten- sion and continuation of prior forms of usage of the symbol ‘#’ – the symbol is used in ways that are specific to the social media niche that emerged in the last couple of decades, and the rules for its deployment are, thus, developed through congregational work performed by people who had no pre-existing script for its usage. as mentioned before, the value of semiotic resources (such as the hashtag) and the identities of its users (as competent members of a community of users) emerge out of the actions performed. in that sense and from that methodological perspective, the use of hashtags directs our attention to fundamental aspects of the organisation of social life, of meaning making, of interaction, and of language. there is room now for a theorisation of translingualism in which, rather than to the creative bricolage of cross-linguistic resources, we focus on complex and niched social actions in which participants try to observe social structure through their involvement in situations requiring normatively ratified practice – i’m para- phrasing cicourel ( ) here – in emerging and flexible communities populating these niches of the online-offline nexus. it is a move which parkin ( ) nicely summarised as ‘from multilingual classification to translingual ontology’, in which the translingual nature of communicative action is an entirely normalised point of departure, a default and mundane given upon which innovative insights can be built. notes . see herbert blumer’s famous formulation: ‘(…) social interaction is a process that forms human conduct instead of being merely a means or a setting for the expression or release of human conduct’ (blumer, , p. ). . the point that the widespread availability of online technologies has reshaped the sociolin- guistic system is missed by some critics of notions such as translanguaging, who point to the prior existence of formally similar or identical forms of language and/or script to argue that there is nothing ‘new’ happening. in such critiques, hymes ( ) important warning is disregarded: that the study of language is not merely a study of the linguistic system – the formal aspects of language, say – but also and even more importantly the study of the socio- linguistic system in which language forms are being distributed, functionally allocated and deployed in concrete social circumstances. the arrival of the internet has caused a worldwide change in the sociolinguistic system, provoking enormous amounts of sociolinguistically new phenomena. and even if such phenomena have linguistic precursors, they do not have any sociolinguistic ones. see blommaert ( ) for a discussion. . i collected a small corpus of #justsaying examples from my own twitter account between march and august (n = ), and found the hashtag incorporated into english, dutch, danish, spanish, hindi, bulgarian and arabic tweets. hashtags are also (and increasingly) used offline in marches and other forms of public demonstrations, and in advertisements. . ‘fgov’ is the twitter name of the belgian federal government; ‘manu military’ means ‘by the use of military force’. the author of this tweet is a former mp for a flemish extreme right-wing party. j. blommaert . one can note the explicit description of the footing for #justsaying statements here: ‘no attack. no judgment. #justsaying’. . the mayor is a controversial, very outspoken right-wing politician. the ‘victory’ icon he posts at the end of his tweet is a campaign emblem of his party, and the phrase ‘being yourself safely’ is a direct reference to the mayor’s re-election program. . in szabla and blommaert ( ) we analyzed a long discussion on facebook and called the entire discussion (composed of the update, comments and subcomments) the ‘main action’. in a more traditional sociolinguistic vocabulary, one can also see the overall unit of action the ‘event’. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. references agha, a. 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( ). discourse of twitter and social media: how we use language to create affiliation on the web. london: continuum. j. blommaert 	abstract 	translingualism in the online-offline nexus 	hashtags and translingualism 	#justsaying as action: basics 	standalone act 	sidetracking and reframing 	#justsaying as complex reframing 	hashtags and translingualism revisited 	notes 	disclosure statement 	references before #metoo: violence against women social media work, bystander intervention, and social change societies article before #metoo: violence against women social media work, bystander intervention, and social change jordan fairbairn department of sociology, king’s university college, london, on n a m , canada; jfairba @uwo.ca received: april ; accepted: july ; published: july ���������� ������� abstract: high-profile, social-media-fueled movements such as #metoo have captured broader public attention in recent years and sparked widespread discussion of violence against women (vaw). however, online prevention work was underway in the years leading up to #metoo, as the emergence and proliferation of social media enabled individuals to be increasingly active participants in shaping conversations about vaw. situated within feminist vaw scholarship and the social–ecological framework of violence prevention, this paper draws from interviews with a cross-section of service providers, public educators, activists, advocates, writers, and researchers to analyze “conversation” as a central theme in vaw prevention work in social media. results reveal that these conversations take place in three central ways: ( ) engaging wider audiences in conversations to raise awareness about vaw; ( ) narrative shifts challenging societal norms that support or enable vaw; and ( ) mobilization around high-profile news stories. the paper finds that, through these conversations, this work moves beyond individual-level risk factors to target much needed community- and societal-level aspects, primarily harmful social norms that circulate and become reinforced in digital media spaces. moreover, while bystander intervention has traditionally been approached as an offline pursuit to intervene in face-to-face situations of vaw, this paper argues that we can understand and value these vaw prevention efforts as an online form of bystander intervention. finally, resource challenges and vaw prevention workers’ experiences of harassment and abuse related to their online work highlights a need to strengthen social and institutional supports for this work. keywords: violence against women; social media; news media; social–ecological framework; prevention; bystander intervention; feminism . introduction the emergence and proliferation of social media has made it a critical tool for public mobilization about violence against women (vaw). this became particularly visible in , where the explosion of the #metoo movement (founded by activist tarana burke in ) drove exponential growth in awareness about women’s experiences of sexual violence [ ]. while there is still much to be done to pursue structural change [ , ], the #metoo movement has been a pivotal time for consciousness-raising and engaging wider audiences in conversations about sexual violence [ ]. however, social media-based conversations about vaw had been occurring prior to the takeoff of #metoo (for example, see elsherief, belding, & nguyen, [ ] for a summary of key twitter hashtags – ). as mendes et al. [ ] (pp. – ) explain: although #metoo is perhaps one of the most high-profile examples of digital feminist activism we have yet encountered, it follows a growing trend of the public’s willingness to engage with resistance and challenges to sexism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression via feminist uptake of digital communication. societies , , ; doi: . /soc www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /soc http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies societies , , of this wider movement should also be understood as building on the foundation of a long history of feminist activism and advocacy involving mass media [ – ]. situated within feminist vaw scholarship and the social–ecological framework of violence prevention [ , ], this study analyzes qualitative interview data from participants to explore the role of social media in their vaw prevention work. specifically, this paper analyzes the data category of “conversation” as vaw prevention work and finds these conversations take place in three central ways: ( ) engaging wider audiences in conversations to raise awareness about vaw; ( ) narrative shifts challenging societal norms that support or enable vaw; ( ) mobilization around high-profile news stories. this paper also takes up the concept of bystander intervention from the vaw field [ , ] to explore the value of this framework for understanding vaw prevention in social media. bystander intervention programs aim to move beyond the victim–perpetrator relationship to engage third-party individuals and the community at large in violence prevention. while bystander intervention has traditionally been approached as an offline pursuit to intervene in face-to-face situations of vaw, this paper argues that we can understand and value social media-based efforts as a form of online bystander intervention that moves beyond individual-level risk factors to target community- and societal- level risk factors such as harmful social norms that circulate and become reinforced in social media. the first part of this paper outlines the context for this study, beginning with key terminology and research findings and describing the social–ecological framework. the historical relationship between vaw prevention activism and mass media is then outlined, followed by a discussion of the growth of bystander intervention work. the second part of this paper presents and discusses results from a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with vaw prevention workers. these interviews provide a valuable context for understanding the significant social media work done in years prior to the explosion of the #metoo movement in . as this study will highlight, social media is an important space for many pre-social media violence prevention strategies (e.g., raising awareness among the general public; challenging sexist and misogynistic attitudes), while also adapting to new contexts (e.g., mobilization around news stories and trending hashtags) to capitalize on high-profile opportunities to resist harmful narratives and contribute feminist understandings to vaw discourse. in doing so, this work targets both individual comments and mass-media produced news content, thus representing the intersection of individual-level risk factors (i.e., attitudes and beliefs) with broader community and societal-level variables (i.e., social norms), an important contribution to vaw prevention. however, consistent with research that has pointed to public backlash to feminism and feminist research generally [ , , ], vaw prevention workers also experience gendered and sexualized abuse and harassment related to their online work as a significant challenge, pointing to a need to develop and foster additional prevention and support measures. . research context . . feminist approaches to vaw although there are multiple and intersecting forms of vaw, it is used here as an umbrella term to refer to intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women perpetrated by men. the world health organization [ ] (p. ) defines intimate partner violence as “one of the most common forms of violence against women and includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and controlling behaviours by an intimate partner”. this abuse occurs between individuals who are in a current or former intimate relationship, including legal marriages, common-law unions, or dating relations [ , ]. sexual violence is defined as any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work [ ] (p. ). intimate partner violence and sexual violence were brought onto the social agenda in the s by feminist activists and researchers, and have since received a great deal of recognition as a social, legal, and criminal justice issue [ – ]. societies , , of feminist perspectives on vaw maintain that an examination of gender and power is imperative to understanding violence, and that vaw stems from patriarchal social norms and structures and “attitudes held by individuals and institutions as opposed to some psychopathic sickness on the part of the abuser” [ ] (p. ). although gender is historically a focus of vaw prevention work, in recent decades feminist theory has evolved to encompass broader intersecting systems of oppression such as race and class [ ]. this is primarily due to the work of women of color and other marginalized groups, and perhaps most visible in the contributions of black feminist theory and critical race theory [ – ]. . . social–ecological framework of vaw prevention the social–ecological model, a widely-used framework for understanding vaw, understands how risk factors occur at individual, relationship, community, and societal levels, and targets prevention efforts accordingly [ , , ]. ecological understandings of vaw are important because they recognize the interconnectedness of various risk factors of vaw, and allow us to integrate individual level theories (e.g., social learning theory) with societal-level theories such as feminist perspectives [ ]. this model, including individual, relationship, community, and societal level factors, is summarized in table . table . levels (ecologies) of violence against women (vaw). level includes examples individual biological and personal history factors that may increase the likelihood that an individual will become a victim or perpetrator of violence. gender; age; attitudes and beliefs supportive of vaw. relationship factors that increase risk as a result of relationships with peers, intimate partners and family members. sexually aggressive peers; family environment characterized by violence; privileging patriarchal values above women’s safety. community community contexts in which social relationships are embedded such as schools, workplaces and neighborhoods. norms tolerant of vaw; weak community sanctions for perpetrators; lack of support from police and courts. societal larger, macro-level factors that influence sexual and intimate partner violence such as gender inequality, belief systems, societal norms and economic or social policies. norms supportive of vaw; male superiority and sexual entitlement; weak laws and policies related to sexual violence and gender equality. adapted from the world health organization [ ] and johnson and dawson [ ]. interdisciplinary and intersectoral public health approaches based on the ecological framework are increasingly being used in vaw prevention efforts [ ]. here, prevention strategies are classified into three types: primary prevention aims to prevent violence before it occurs (e.g., educational programming in schools and/or through social media); secondary prevention focuses on immediate responses to violence (e.g., health care services or treatments following violent victimization); and tertiary prevention attends to long-term care related to experiences of violence (e.g., rehabilitation and reintegration) and attempts to lessen trauma or reduce long-term disability associated with violence [ ]. until recently, primary prevention has been “relatively neglected” in the field of vaw prevention, with most resources directed towards secondary or tertiary prevention [ ]. primary prevention strategies are essential to long-term approaches to reducing vaw, and changing attitudes is a critical but elusive piece of prevention work [ ]. without attitudinal change (e.g., vaw is never acceptable), other prevention efforts (e.g., changing social norms, legislation, front line services) are less likely to be effective (or to be created in the first place). this study focuses on those engaged in primary prevention in social media contexts. social media is defined as “the wide range of internet-based and mobile services that allow users to participate in online exchanges, contribute user-created content, or join online communities” [ ] (p. ). the development and growth of social media such as facebook (created in ), youtube ( ), twitter ( ), and instagram ( ), and general proliferation of apps, blogs, and wikis demonstrate societies , , of how online sharing and collaboration have become principal components of an increasing number of initiatives. as these sites have become central to conversations about social issues, vaw prevention work has also evolved and expanded. historically, anti-violence work has focused on reducing risk among potential victims and perpetrators [ ]. in recent years, prevention approaches have evolved, from treating men simply as perpetrators of violence against women and girls or as allies of women in its prevention, to approaches that seek to transform the relations, social norms, and systems that sustain gender inequality and violence [ ] (p. ). specifically, effective programs include critical discussion about gender relationships and the acceptability of violence [ , ]. this approach is consistent with a social–ecological understanding of violence that views relational, community, and social prevention strategies, in addition to individual interventions, as essential to eliminating vaw [ , ], and with feminist approaches that emphasize the entrenchment of social and cultural phenomena such as sexism, misogyny, racism, and patriarchy as obstacles to vaw prevention [ , , ]. . . feminism, vaw prevention, and media social media encompass both traditional media (e.g., news media stories) as well as user-generated content (e.g., individual tweets) in digital spaces. thus, it is helpful to consider vaw prevention in traditional media in relation to how social media work mobilizes these efforts. in recent decades, mass media representations have garnered significant feminist attention as an important space for understanding and shaping attitudes and beliefs surrounding vaw. these critiques have centered on the role of mainstream media in perpetuating myths and stereotypes surrounding vaw that potentially impede social and political progress to address this violence [ ]. specifically, these critiques problematize patterns observed in mass media portrayals of vaw, such as: ( ) relying on rape myths [ – ]; ( ) focusing on perpetrator stress (financial, mental or physical health) as an explanation for domestic violence [ , ], ( ) framing domestic violence as an unpredictable private tragedy or isolated incident [ , ], ( ) emphasizing the spontaneous, “out of the blue” nature of violence by an otherwise ordinary individual [ , ], ( ) trivializing violence [ ]; ( ) subtle or overt victim blaming [ , ] and ( ) using primarily official news sources such as police and other criminal justice officials without including advocates and researchers [ , ]. news portrayals are both reflective of social norms and play a role in reproducing them, much like individual attitudes and beliefs [ , , ]. yet unlike individual attitudes and beliefs, news coverage has an authority of being purportedly objective and telling the true story of events; thus, these portrayals may be readily accepted as fact, despite harmful representations (e.g., victim-blaming, sensationalizing violence) [ ] that function as a “technology of violence” with discursive and material effects [ ] (p. ). misrepresentations may inflict psychological and emotional harm on survivors of violence and their families [ ] and miss the opportunity to be a source of public education (e.g., including information on early risk factors and/or helpline information) and positively influence public policy [ ]. because of this, the news portrayals and the public conversations that surround these events are important areas for societal change. numerous advocacy organizations have developed media guides and toolkits for reporting on vaw [ – ]. research and advocacy work in this area is significant because it is part of a broader climate that recognizes harm associated with media sexism and misrepresentation [ , , ], and demands gender equity in media more broadly [ , ]. solely critiquing media representations is no longer sufficient for change, and scholars and activists have additional resources and networks at their disposal to bridge critique and action. this relationship has continued to evolve as, within social media, advocates can now intervene more directly in narratives (i.e., post, tweet, or publish their own analysis in real time and for broader audiences) rather than (or in addition to) writing a letter to the editor or publishing a best practices guide. as kingston [ ] (p. ) explains, social media are increasingly sites of struggle over control, surveillance, and monetization, as well as sites of struggle over meaning, representation, societies , , of and participation. thus, there is a serious need for more feminist analysis and intervention in the politics of visibility and participation in these new media channels. lokot [ ] explains that feminist activism online has found much success in building networks that critique and disrupt dominant discourses, construct counternarratives, and connect conversations around specific events to broader feminist issues. korn and kneese [ ] (p. ) reiterate the value of discourse and narrative in public forums and their potential for affecting structural change: social media platforms create public forums where feminists may collectively create discourses apart from the dominant narrative. these counter-publics may in turn garner attention, thus having the capacity to alter institutional policies in physical locations, like universities and workplaces. the shifting media landscape presents new opportunities as well as challenges for vaw prevention work. conversations online frequently occur around current events; the comments sections of news stories, for example, frequently contain victim-blaming and questioning statements, as well as perpetrator-supportive statements [ ]. social media can be sites of resistance for challenging rape culture [ , , ], however, scholars have also documented emerging and shifting forms of online sexual abuse involving social media [ – ]. thus, social media presents additional opportunities to move beyond individual-level efforts to engage wider communities in violence prevention. . . beyond victims and perpetrators: the growth of bystander intervention bystander intervention programs aim to move beyond the victim–perpetrator relationship to shift focus to bystanders, generally defined as “third party witnesses to situations where there is high risk of sexual violence” [ ] (p. ). bystanders are recognized as a key to prevention because they can make the situation worse by supporting or ignoring behaviors, or can make the situation better by intervening in safe, nonviolent, and prosocial ways [ , ]. bystander intervention, then, can also be thought of as creating “upstanders” (a term with roots in genocide studies; see minow [ ]). while the concept of upstanders is similar in terms of understanding the active nature of interventions to speak out against injustice, this paper uses bystander intervention in order to ground this work in and contribute to existing vaw literature, in particular scholarship that considers bystander intervention in the context of social–ecological theory [ ] as well as social media [ , ]. for the most part, bystander intervention programs have focused on individuals in face-to-face social settings (e.g., school, parties, public transit) where the risk of violence appears imminent. however, bystander intervention can also focus on less immediate, low risk situations. for example, mcmahon and banyard [ ] (p. ) note that media portrayals are an opportunity for bystander intervention: another type of reactive bystander opportunities can be labeled low risk, which can be defined as situations in which negative attitudes toward women and/or sexual violence are expressed, but do not pose immediate or high risk of harm to potential victims of sexual assault. these bystander opportunities address the lower side of the continuum of sexual violence behaviors, such as calling out sexist language, questioning media portrayals that objectify women and girls, challenging the use of pornography, and confronting friends who rank girls’ appearances. bystander intervention demonstrates promising potential for reducing sexual violence through face-to-face programming in physical world settings [ ] as well as within traditional media (e.g., poster rape culture refers to an environment where sexual violence is expected, tolerated, and/or encouraged, and where women and girls are held responsible for their safety and/or blamed for their victimization [ ]. according to minow [ ] (pp. – ), “an upstander may speak out publicly against bigotry and injustice. an upstander may be a whistle-blower, who exposes wrongdoing in the hope of stopping it. an upstander may resist the temptations of silence and passivity by expressing and offering support directly to victims of bigotry and injustice. an upstander may provide immediate aid to victims of bigotry and injustice through physical rescue or other help . . . an upstander may speak out publicly or may instead engage in secret resistance. an upstander may rescue individuals who are in danger—through secret or overt actions.” societies , , of campaigns) [ ]. however, research has only recently focused on bystander intervention online [ , ], and this work focuses primarily on reactive interventions for individual acts of violence (e.g., online harassment, stalking). bystander behaviors can be thought of as reactive or proactive; reactive bystander behaviors are where a person intervenes in a situation that can lead to violence, and proactive bystander behaviors are when a person takes an action that promotes social norms that do not accept violence [ ] (p. ). the growth and popularity of social media has shifted many social interactions online as well as driven shifts in how news stories are reported and disseminated [ ], thus expanding possibilities for proactive bystander behaviors. . materials and methods . . participants data for this paper are drawn from interviews conducted with a cross-section of service providers, public educators, activists, advocates, writers, and researchers who are engaged in vaw prevention work (“vaw prevention workers”) from canada or the united states. exploratory interviews were conducted in and with four participants based on the author’s observations of their online vaw advocacy and education work; additional interviews were conducted in late . while social media has changed since (for example, the growth in the popularity of instagram), the specific social media sites that participants almost exclusively discussed (facebook and twitter) are still widely used among the public as well as activists and news organizations. moreover, this period represents an important juncture for developing understanding of the value of digital feminist activism broadly [ ] as well as a site for vaw prevention in particular [ , , , ]. the majority ( ) of these participants were recruited from a survey (n = ) on social media and vaw prevention conducted in early as part of the author’s larger research project . thus, participants were not a random sample, but were found through nonprobability sampling [ ]. such sampling is appropriate, given that this study seeks to gain a deeper understanding into the perspectives and work of those already committed to vaw prevention, rather than generalizing to the population at large. in addition to survey recruitment, two additional participants were recruited based on referrals from other participants and the author’s observations of their extensive engagement within social media. generally, or more interview participants is an acceptable sample size for qualitative research [ , ]. although each respondent had unique perspectives and experiences with vaw prevention work, themes related to their social media work were clear and no new themes were emerging after interviews. given this, the author concluded saturation of data, where “the same themes reoccur, or research participants report similar views and experiences” [ ] (p. ). this was also confirmed through constant comparative methods [ ] to refer back to themes from data collected as part of the larger study [ ]. to be interviewed, potential participants had to be doing vaw work involving social media and working primarily in canada or the united states. primary roles for interview participants included: directors or program managers within anti-violence organizations (n = ); communications directors participants use facebook in their work, use twitter. the survey was sent to a list of potential participants assembled from: ) vaw organizations and service providers where email addresses were publicly-available; ) academics/researchers and government agencies with publicly-available email addresses identified as part of a larger literature review and policy scan on vaw research and prevention programming; ) individual and organization contact drawn from a google alert for “canada violence against women” and “social media violence against women” for fourteen months prior to the launch of the survey. additionally, the author posted the survey link on twitter as well as through two listserves whose hundreds of members include feminist activists, advocates, researchers, academics, journalists, and policy analysts (among other roles). while by no means exhaustive, this initial process represented a solid starting point from which to snowball sample for additional participants. when circulating this invite, the author requested that participants also circulate the survey among their networks in order to get broader distribution into local networks that may not have prominent online presence and/or who would perhaps be more likely to respond if they received the survey invitation from a known contact. societies , , of or managers for non-profits (n = ); activists and public educators (n = ); journalists and writers (n= ), and researchers/academics (n = ). all individuals identified vaw prevention as a significant component of their work. all participants in this sample are women, and their age breakdown was as follows: percent (n = ) were between the ages of – ; percent (n = ) were – ; percent (n = ) were – ; and percent (n = ) were – years of age. the majority of participants live in urban areas: out of participants ( %) live in cities over , people; ( %) live in communities with , to , people, and ( %) live in cities of less than , . . . interviews qualitative interviewing is a historically important method of feminist research [ ]. a qualitative interview is described as follows: an interaction between an interviewer and a respondent in which the interviewer has a general plan of inquiry but not a rigid set of questions that must be asked in particular words in particular order. [ ] (p. ) the interview approach for this study was grounded in the feminist methodological principles that ( ) beginning from a point of individual’s voices and experiences will reveal greater understanding of broader social and political relations, [ , ]; and ( ) gender (and thus, gender-based violence or vaw), in addition to being an individual attribute, is also a social structure. risman [ ] (p. ) argues that the common pursuit of feminism is “to situate gender as embedded not only in individuals but throughout social life”. conceptualizing gender, and vaw, in this manner enables us to understand myths, misrepresentation, and misogyny in social media as more than individual issues. as such, this study aims to describe and validate participants’ experiences working in social media and to place these in a larger context of vaw prevention work. interviews were semi-structured, meaning they were guided by a set of key exploratory questions: ( ) could you describe your work related to vaw in social media ( ) what social media sites do you use the most? can you tell me about how you use each of them differently; ( ) can you tell me a bit more about what prevention involves related to your social media work? (i.e., how you view prevention in this realm; is it different than offline work?); ( ) could you tell me about some of the interactions and initiatives you have experienced on social media? (example of positive/successful? example of negative/not successful?); ( ) what would you do with social media (or change about social media) pertaining to vaw prevention if you could do anything? additional probing or clarification questions were asked as needed, including drawing from participants’ websites and/or social media profiles (e.g., “i see from your website you use instagram. could you tell me about that?”). interviews took place in person (n = ), by phone or skype voice call (n = ), by skype or google hangout with camera (n = ) or by google chat (text only) (n = ). interviews ranged in length from minutes to hour and minutes, and the average interview was minutes long. all interviews were recorded with permission, transcribed, and coded to identify key themes (discussed further shortly). . . analytical process each interview was transcribed and coded using nvivo qualitative analysis software using a combination of coding and memoing. coding involves “the development of concepts and categories in the recognition and ordering of themes”, while memoing is “the writing of notes and commentaries concerning ideas, patterns, and themes that occur to the researcher in the process of reading and coding data” [ ] (p. ). participants use social media for a variety of vaw prevention-related objectives to accommodate one interviewee’s request, one interview was conducted in writing by google chat in synchronous communication. this interview was approximately minutes in length. for further discussion of the coding process, see fairbairn [ ]. societies , , of [see for further discussion]. to contribute to recent work highlighting the importance of hashtag feminism and other conversation-based feminist activism online [ , , , , , , ], the analysis focuses on the data theme “conversation”. this theme is particularly salient to timely discussions of #metoo and broader social change, and was the most frequently-coded theme in the data overall (the term was used times throughout of interviews). in writing up the results, the author continuously referred to the coded interview data to ensure that interpretations and organization of the interview findings remained grounded in participants’ words. nonetheless, at the stage of data analysis, the researcher has a great deal of power [ ], because they are the narrator who is authoring a document that is “structured primarily by a researcher’s purposes, offering a researcher’s interpretations registered in a researcher’s voice” [ ] (p. ). to mitigate this power, the analysis relies on participants’ own words to describe and illustrate research findings [ ]. . results . . engaging wider audiences and raising awareness expanding conversations about vaw and garnering attention to its prevalence is an important goal for participants. some view social media as a place to start a conversation about a topic that has historically been a private issue rather than a public conversation. for example, one ngo director states that because we are only a small project a lot of this is learning what people would want from us, because violence against women, we’re talking about topics that are pretty much always conversation stoppers, right? there is a sense among participants that social media is an effective way to push forward uncomfortable conversations about vaw, and to interject feminist research and advocacy into platforms where this knowledge may not be the norm. for example, one advocate working at an ngo explains that social media can help to push stories and conversations into a more central public view: i think [about] the ways in which we can have those conversations. so i think that, you know, rape culture and social media brings two-sides of the story at the forefront in public. and that’s where some really unintelligent conversations happen, and some really intelligent conversations happen. i think of anita sarkeesian, and her ted video . . . [that] started off this conversation . . . i think another example is the #whyistayed twitter campaign. it starts to bring several conversations to light. there is a two-step process to this work, where content created to raise awareness about vaw (videos, hashtag campaigns) may be produced and distributed in social media, which then provides the space to connect and further discuss the issues raised. in addition to engaging the general public, this social media content enables participants to engage with like-minded organizations and raise awareness collectively, as one participant explains: hashtag feminism is “one of the most popular forms of feminist activism and involves using hashtags (the # symbol followed by a thematic word of phrase) to produce communities of conversation among disparate twitter users” [ ] (pp. ). following opie [ ] (p. ), quotations were selected using six criteria: ( ) the intensity of participant’s speaking voice (indicating emotional attachment/importance); ( ) the contradictory moment (where participants may contradict themselves or acknowledge the contradictions of their actions); ( ) emotional content or tone (indicating emotional attachment/importance and complexity of message); ( ) and the extent to which the participant uses whole sentences, rather than the more usual recursive/repetitive speech patterns (which may indicate certainty and/or a strong belief). in addition to opie’s criteria, quotes were selected that ( ) eloquently and/or explicitly stated things that other participants talked about less eloquently or obviously, as well as quotes that ( ) help to define where boundaries are constructed or challenged (e.g., “we do a, but not b”), since this is a preoccupation of my research. anita sarkeesian is a feminist media critic and media literacy video creator who has been the target of large-scale online harassment campaigns and violent threats, including death threats that forced her family to go into hiding in . #whyistayed was a hashtag that challenged victim-blaming myths around intimate partner violence, in response to national football league player ray rice’s video recorded physical assault on his fiancée janay palmer (now janay rice). societies , , of i feel like on twitter i can actually reach people who are following certain hashtags, etc. and who are really engaged in the issues, either activists, activists, or communicators in some way. by connecting through social media, individuals and organizations can, as one participant explained, work collaboratively to “signal-boost” (e.g., share, like) each other’s content in order to build momentum in their work. most participants work in a combination of online and face-to-face settings, and use social media for specific goals such as generating attention and awareness to vaw. in other words, vaw prevention in social media does not replace other forms of prevention, but rather expands this work. for example, one writer and activist explains how she sees hashtag activism as a supplemental, rather than a replacement, modality of vaw prevention: i know people disdain hashtag activism, but i hardly know anyone who only does hashtag activism. most of the people i know do hashtag activism in addition to other activism, so i don’t think people are doing it by and large and then saying, ok i don’t have to pay attention to this anymore. i think that it can be really effective in terms of raising consciousness about an issue really quickly and demonstrating that a critical mass of people experience this [vaw] . . . it is also really effective at generating traditional media attention, which really needs to happen. a key first step in vaw prevention work is to achieve broad public recognition that vaw is a social problem. for participants, the notion of “raising awareness” generally appears to mean getting mainstream populations (broader audiences outside of the vaw sector) to see vaw as a social problem: to take it seriously and want to take steps to prevent it from occurring. as the participant above explained, this is also aided by traditional media attention, a theme that will be discussed further below as well as in later sections. in some cases, participants are trying to evoke an emotional response to vaw. for example, one writer and advocate explains that they are trying to break through public apathy surrounding vaw: i want vaw to be something people are horrified by, but it’s so commonplace it doesn’t even register. people are numb to it. not everyone, but i get that feeling that as a culture we’re numb. or culturally we are outraged at the way other countries handle vaw . . . for instance when the world got upset about the way india responds to rape without taking a look at it at home. it’s ok to be offended at the way other people in other countries treat women but we don’t take a look at ourselves. like not looking at the high rates of violence against first nations women as part of a socioeconomic issue, which of course it is. several participants noted that social media facilitates raising awareness by enabling survivors to share stories about their victimization (similar to #metoo), as those with experiential knowledge are effective at connecting on an emotional level. for example, as one writer and advocate explains below: i’m a huge believer in storytelling and the power of free media. so from that perspective, i think that the internet is transformative in the fight against gender-based violence. because, for the first time ever, women can step out of the isolation that they’ve always been subject to, and share their stories . . . i think [this] can really engage people more empathetically to understand the scope of what we’re talking about. increased attention to vaw on social media and traditional news media is seen as an indicator of success for some. for example, one advocate and educator who has worked in vaw prevention for many years remarks that conversations around vaw are happening more frequently in her local media in the past year: i will always think of that big moment when [a local newspaper] had a cover page about rape culture and had the word rape culture. and it wasn’t like “does it exist?” it was “what do we do about it?” . . . you know, [the story] lacked nuance and they quoted mras [men’s rights activists] inside and societies , , of all kind of other things, but it was the mainstream. the word rape culture in [my city] has hit the mainstream. good, bad, or otherwise, when i say it now, people still get very defensive, and i still think it’s a really extreme word for a lot of people, but for me that was like, wow . . . so i think social media has for better or for worse allowed us to significantly speed up where we’ve come. i mean, speaking only on the issue of sexual violence, but i think we have made progress. other participants note that, despite the value of starting conversations to raise awareness, there is a need to link these narratives to broader societal and structural change. for example, one communications director explains that “thinking about the stories we tell in order to advance the policies we want is a really crucial piece of prevention”. the idea, then, is that conversations about vaw should be driven with a consideration of broader vaw movement goals in terms of community- and societal-level change. . . narrative shifts to change societal norms preventing vaw requires changing attitudes, beliefs, and social norms that tolerate, excuse, and encourage vaw, a historically challenging area of prevention [ ]. as highlighted earlier, harmful narratives around vaw include an absence of broader context (e.g., vaw terminology, research knowledge), as well as misogyny and reproduction of rape myths and other ingrained (false) beliefs about vaw (e.g., women frequently lie about sexual assault; violence is gender-neutral; women stay because they like the abuse). participants explain that public education efforts to promote understanding vaw as a social problem is often met with pushback from anti-feminist groups such as mra’s, as well as general public apathy or skepticism. for example, one blogger and advocate describes her use of social media around vaw in this way: the first thing is just raising awareness. and particularly trying to cut through some of the mra stuff that goes around about the “what about the men” kind of stuff. so trying to say, this isn’t it, we’re not trying to take away that it sucks about violence committed against anybody. the raising awareness about yes, this is still an issue, yes this is everybody’s issue, yes gender is still a factor. so i think that’s one really key thing. prevention work in social media highlights the gendered nature of intimate partner violence and sexual violence and specifically targets harmful myths and stereotypes about vaw. as one participant remarks, “i think the opportunities available in dialogue are significant for changing social norms. and social media for me is the natural place to change social norms”. the speed and reach of social media information-sharing means that it has the potential to disseminate myths around vaw, but also makes it a powerful tool for prevention work. one communications professional explains that their work involves “bringing communications strategy, big-picture narrative framing, to the work that is in the field.” when describing how they viewed changing narratives as a key part of the role of social media in vaw prevention, they explain the following: i do [see it] in two ways. one, is i think social media, because it moves so fast. it’s both potentially powerful and potentially dangerous because it can really, you can perpetrate a lot of myths very quickly . . . but i think that social media is particularly important because of the speed and the momentum, but also the reach . . . changing those really fundamental narratives around sexuality of women is difficult, because a lot of why women have been subjugated over time has always been fear of female sexuality. and i think that that’s really hard for a lot of people to grasp: that something that’s about violence against women, you know, violence around sexuality, is actually rooted in fear of sexual power. that’s complex stuff, and it’s really hard to tweet about it. individualized, simplistic explanations that focus on victim behaviors (e.g., “she was drunk, what did she think would happen?”) are easier to digest and are deeply engrained in societal understandings of this violence [ ]. as we see from this quote, one of the challenges of conversations societies , , of in social media is to effectively discuss community- and societal-level risk factors (e.g., gender socialization; norms around women’s sexuality). this complexity and nuance is particularly difficult to inject in a space where user attention spans and content space (e.g., character limits on twitter) may be restricted. as part of raising awareness, challenging behaviors that support and foster rape culture is a priority for vaw prevention work in social media. for example, one public educator and advocate explains the importance of education around abusive behaviors and bystander intervention: the primary focus of our outreach online is just the awareness, the education component . . . that public education component as far as educating people about rape culture, and making them understand what comments they made that are actually reinforcing that, or the behaviour that they have witnessed or experienced or perhaps even committed themselves, that it’s actually unacceptable. that kind of component has to take the lead online. while some participants work at organizations that provide front line support, for the most part, participants are not using social media to target individuals for one-on-one support. rather, social media work is primarily geared at broader publics and potential perpetrators. for example, one advocate notes: you’re definitely right in recognizing that much of our counselling and outreach type stuff directly to women is done in person . . . we have different approaches, and most of it is done in person when it comes to the direct contact to the women in crisis. more of our online stuff is directed at the public per se, when it comes to prevention from that angle as far as how to not be an abuser, that angle tends to be a big focus online. by educating individuals in a publicly accessible and sharable context, participants are trying to change both attitudes and beliefs (individual-level risk factors) in the short term, and social norms (community- and societal-level risk factors) in the long term. interventions can also be used reflexively to highlight problematic practices within vaw prevention work. for example, one activist and researcher explains she will use social media to call out victim-blaming messaging within her own community, as well as the media more broadly: a lot of the campaigns around violence are still so shitty, they’re still really focused on women’s behaviour. and even with [our organization] i think a lot of the, i don’t want to say older, but i’m going to, are still- they really internalize those messages of “women, you need to stay safe” [and so forth]. and when i see that, i mean it makes me very angry, and so i try to correct it and say, you know this is really problematic. but there’s still not widespread agreement on what even needs to be done to stop violence against women, let alone how we need the media to better respond. and i am thankful for being able to talk back to what’s out there, because i’m not the kind of person who logs on to [a news site] and puts comments, that’s not me. but yeah, i will respond to something i see from the media that’s posted, or something within [my community] that i feel is a problem. in this case, social media allows for a “talk-back” mechanism to voice dissent and highlight harmful narratives, and to push the broader movement forward. vaw prevention work has moved away from responsibilization narratives [ ] that focus on victim behavior (“don’t get assaulted”) towards accountability narratives that focus on perpetrators’ behavior (“don’t assault”). this can be seen in various participants’ comments when they talk about their goals related to prevention. for example, as one advocate explains, victim-blaming narratives (a central feature of rape culture) are a core target: we’ve finally made that transition from talking to young women about—it was a form of victim-blaming when we kept telling girls “don’t dress this way” or “don’t walk alone at night” or “carry this with you”. yeah, we’re trying to do harm reduction here, but at the same time it’s so important- we’ve finally moved away from that. societies , , of victim-blaming narratives from individuals and organizations (e.g., politicians, police, college campus representatives, media outlets), for example, are precisely the situations where vaw prevention workers are aiming to intervene and reframe. the use of social media to critique messaging is particularly important for powerful institutions like news media, which play an important role in public education about vaw, reproducing social norms around vaw, and shaping policy debates [ , ]. . . mobilization around high-profile news stories to understand the importance of intervening in vaw news stories, we can consider participants’ (many) frustrations with mainstream media. as discussed earlier, there has historically been much feminist activist and academic critique of news reporting of vaw as failing to convey context, nuance, and complexity around vaw. many participants have similar concerns, and several express frustrations over lack of control of the message. one activist, who has extensive experience as a news source in mainstream media, describes this lack of control: i’m kind of the dog and pony, the right poster girl. and they ask me for comments constantly. and i’ll respond of course, that’s my job. but i’m not in charge of what’s going on, i’m responding, reacting. and you must speak in sound bites. and you must be effective. and you really need to understand that what you’re saying, and the ways that you’re saying it, can change the tone of the story, because someone else is translating that for you. or they’re translating it to a certain party or public, who then hear it in yet different ways. additionally, as several participants explain, journalists often have limited understanding of vaw, and can themselves perpetrate harm through representation. for example, this same participant explains: journalists don’t understand the nature of the crime. and they’ll tell you that right away . . . it’s the first, second, third, and fourth case that the journalist who has just graduated is sent out on. so they are using their own biases, their own language, and their own misunderstandings of the crime, and repeating and solidifying myths and stereotypes. several participants view the news media as an arena that frequently counteracts vaw prevention objectives; as such, they feel it is important to intervene in these online discussions. social media enables this to be done publicly; for example, tweeting at the news organization that published a victim-blaming headline [ ]. this provides the feedback to the news organization, while also allowing other online bystanders to see the interaction and participate if so inclined. mobilization around news stories, particularly high-profile events, aims to bring a vaw lens to ongoing conversations surrounding current events and trending topics. this provides sociological context to shift understanding from individual level explanations (e.g., the perpetrator was a psychopath) to larger social forces contribute to the root causes of violence (e.g., the role of misogyny). for example, one advocate and public educator explains that social media is an important tool to provide (“force”) missing feminist analysis of current news stories: when a hashtag is covered in the mainstream media, when #solidarityisforwhitewomen is a story, when #yesallwomen- with that analysis of what happened in california, that analysis would not an aljazeera [ ] blog entry explains that the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen “was originally coined by blogger mikki kendall during a twitter debate about hugo schwyzer, an american academic and self-described male feminist. schwyzer has been accused of harassing non-white female bloggers and recently wrote that his critics drove him offline.” the hashtag gained worldwide attention as twitter users criticised the exclusion of nonwhite women from mainstream feminism. #yesallwomen was started as a response to the case of elliot rodgers who killed six people in santa barbara, california before taking his own life. prior to the killings, rodgers had posted a (now removed) youtube video with a manifesto “promising revenge on all the women who had rejected him” [ ] (para. ). as feeney [ ] (para. ) explains, “rodgers comments inspired an online conversation . . . around the #yesallwomen hashtag to criticize the way society teaches men to feel entitled to women at the expense of their health, safety, and in rodger’s case, lives.” societies , , of have existed without social media. i firmly believe that people on social media forcing them to talk about misogyny is what made that part of the conversation. as this quote suggests, in addition to producing news stories about incidents of vaw, mainstream media will cover stories trending on social media. here, the mobilization around the news event (rather than the original event) becomes the news story. in this vein, several participants pointed to the example of #beenrapedneverreported ,which received tens of millions of tweets and promoted the narrative that whether a survivor reports a sexual assault to police, and/or how long it takes them to do so, should not determine if we believe them, and that there are many reasons why survivors do not report sexual assaults (initially or ever). in these cases, social media (specifically, twitter) reaches a sort of tipping point where hashtags such as #whyistayed or #ibelievelucy (other campaigns that participants highlighted) begin to trend in response to inadequate social responses to vaw. in these cases, these hashtags challenged victim-blaming myths in response to two high profile events in : ( ) national football league player ray rice’s video recorded physical assault on his fiancée janay palmer, and ( ) lucy decoutere coming forward as one of the first survivors alleging sexual violence from former canadian broadcasting company radio host jian ghomeshi. in these scenarios, rather than the news media reporting on individual cases of violence, they are reporting on the social response to violence. as participants note, these hashtag conversations are visible, sharable, and searchable, enabling journalists to quote directly from this digital record, and other interested stakeholders to consume this content asynchronously. . . challenges conversations in social media gain the attention of those who may not normally pay attention to vaw. while new views and voices are positive in terms of expanding audiences and public education, they also present significant challenges related to ) resources and ) abuse and harassment. for many individuals juggling heavy workloads (often in resource-strapped non-profit roles), the pace of conversation in social media is a challenge. here, there is a difference between how organization and individuals use social media, where individuals (self-employed, freelance, and/or conducting unpaid labor online) can jump into these debates more readily. participants working in an organizational role (e.g., using an ngo twitter account) recognize this opportunity, but they have limited capacity to undertake the rapid response/engagement that is required to participate in that conversation. for example, one non-profit director explains that, given resource considerations, there is a choice to be made in order to have their message heard: people don’t realize that that’s the commitment they need to make to be able to respond and be timely, [otherwise] you lose the message. so i think the struggle for [our organization] is that i’m the only full time paid employee . . . we don’t have the resources to be as active as we can, so at times we have to choose. so it’s kind of some competing things, so you just react as fast as you can. the need to operate at the pace of socially-mediated news and conversation raises questions in terms of where to focus online work. this participant goes on to explain that, within social media, online comments sections place a burden of responsibility on their organization, and are one of the potentially negative outcomes of engaging wider audiences in conversations about vaw. as she explains, responding to trolling and/or negative comments is a particular challenge when it comes to joining conversations: it’s hard to negotiate, because you want to have a voice, but having a voice requires a person to have that voice . . . there are these small windows that if you had a team of people doing it, you are going #beenrapedneverreported was co-created by toronto star reporter antonia zerbisias and montreal gazette justice reporter sue montgomery, who decided to publicly share their own experiences of assault on twitter on october , . there were tens of millions of tweets, retweets and replies and national and international media outlets reported on it [ ]. societies , , of make a great change i think. because people are seeing that, and people are reading those comments but the fact of the matter is that really the only choice sometimes that we’re given because of low staff and the high amount of time that takes, is not to answer [trolls and negative comments]. while social media offers expanded opportunity for vaw prevention, without the addition of resources and social media expertise, it may be a lost opportunity or additional drain on already resource-strapped organizations. although many individuals are taking on social media work as personal (and unpaid) activism around vaw prevention, they do so oftentimes at great cost both in terms of time and energy. these challenges are further exacerbated by experiences of backlash, harassment, and abuse. several participants described experiencing online harassment and abuse as a result of their vaw prevention work in social media. however, these experiences are not uniform. some participants talk about being the target of rape threats or online hate-based campaigns because of their work, others talk about their fears of receiving such abuse. still others speak more generally about “trolls”, “incivility”, “vitriol”, and so forth. for example, one writer and activist detailed her experiences as follows: the worst, the two worst incidents i ever had, one was after i blocked comments on youtube, someone [found me online] and basically said, “you’re a liar, and i hope that someone kills you, i hope that it will be me”. so i had to call the police about that, which was fun . . . and then another time, someone on twitter said, “someone on facebook is using your picture, and you should really get it taken down.” and i found that someone had used my headshot as the front picture for this [harassment page] . . . when i found my picture, there were comments, about how i should head butt a gun, how someone should rape me with a watermelon, all these rape threats, how no one would have sex with me because i’m so ugly and i’m a pig, and i’m fat . . . and i was very close to just quitting, because it was really awful. another advocate and educator explains the effects of this harassment, and also illustrates that harassment is not limited to online abuse: there’s definitely stuff that has been threatening—i mean someone, somehow got my number and i got all these threatening phone calls last week. but i think to me it’s more- it’s just exhausting. it’s more exhausting . . . i think the threatening is maybe percent of it and the rest is just like really, fuck off. some participants have lobbied for social media platforms to take an active role in preventing violence enabled by their sites. for example, one advocate explains that it is important that social media companies take this abuse seriously because “[online abuse] curtails a lot of activism, and their—facebook and twitter’s—official definitions of what is abuse and what is not is pretty disheartening”. another participant, a writer and activist, details the misogynistic nature of these threats and argues that social media companies have a responsibility to be active bystanders and to explore online violence as a threat to women’s free speech: i started really paying attention to the nature of the harassment and the threats. and you know, a lot of it was just kind of intrinsically misogynistic language: “bitch” and “cunt” and “slut”. and critiques of my ideas or my work, often in those contexts just came down, as they often do, to violence, like hanging or rape or throttling . . . i want these companies to understand that women’s perceptions of all of these things- safety, harm, threat, free speech- are legitimate, and that they (the companies) need to take those into consideration . . . if you want to liberate speech, then you have to remove the violence that women are experiencing in life. challenges for discussing gender in the public sphere are well-documented [ , , ] and gender is a key factor in experiences of abuse and harassment on the internet [ ]. increasingly, online harassment is recognized as a form of vaw and a gendered silencing strategy [ – ]. given the high burnout rates among service providers, advocates, and activists, it is important to take the depletive effects of dealing with harassment (and/or fears of harassment) seriously. being forced out of social media, or even just certain social media sites, hinders prevention efforts. societies , , of as with historical efforts to mobilize against domestic violence in the home and sexual harassment in the workplace [ , ], identifying and responding to vaw online has some time to catch on. as one public educator explains, public recognition of the problem is a critical first step: in terms of the sort of cycle of raising awareness about an issue and getting people equipped, i think with sexual violence we’re at that bystander intervention and tactical [stage], like practical “this is what we can do to stop it”. whereas with online violence, we’re still trying to convince people that it’s a thing. as this work continues, it is important to value and support these efforts and to prioritize the well-being of those doing online work [ ]. in this vein, it is helpful to conceptualize vaw prevention work in social media as bystander intervention. . discussion and conclusions social media is an important space for many pre-social media violence prevention strategies such as raising awareness of vaw as a social problem and challenging sexist and misogynistic attitudes. in this study, we see how these strategies shift to and expand in facebook and twitter to capitalize on opportunities to shape conversations about vaw, such as through mobilization around high-profile stories and trending hashtags. what is perhaps unique to social media, beyond the speed and the reach of conversations, is that these stories, critiques, and commentaries are not happening in a private, face-to-face capacity, but are visible and shareable to an audience that could range from dozens to millions. because of the potential audience, then, there is an increased need to intervene in these social situations to not let myths and misrepresentations stand unchallenged, particularly when these come from powerful community figures and institutions such as police, political figures, and media. in this way, vaw prevention workers are “using culture to change culture” as one participant explained. this is in line with more recent prevention approaches aiming to transform social norms, relations, and systems that support vaw [ ]. this shift recognizes that communities, organizations, and institutions are also complicit in vaw and thus have a role to play in ending this violence. because of this complicity, it is important to unpack how bystander intervention can take place beyond individual interventions and target community and societal risk factors such as social norms supportive of vaw, sensational or victim-blaming media portrayals, or myths surrounding male superiority and sexual entitlement, as examples. perhaps because bystander intervention is generally presented as something that happens in physical, face-to-face settings, most participants do not describe their online work as bystander intervention. instead, they speak about public education more broadly, about working to change attitudes, beliefs, and social norms, or of teaching others to support survivors and intervene in situations that support or encourage vaw. however, understanding this work as bystander intervention is valuable for several reasons. first, it may build stronger networks. specifically, it can build common ground between socio-political activist networks (e.g., feminist activists) and those working in education and social psychology that may be more focused on individuals and geographically-bound communities (e.g., bystander intervention programs on college campuses). second, it may provide legitimacy and therefore, resources. this legitimacy is important because it could create opportunities for formal, funded programs and evaluation. bystander intervention programs such as the green dot [ ] and bringing in the bystander [ ] are funded, curriculum-based programs. currently, a great deal of social media work is unfunded (or indirectly funded) and informal practice. additionally, much social media activism and advocacy has been criticized for being “slacktivism” [ ]. even if this association is not explicitly used to refer to vaw prevention work, there may be hesitation to provide resources to social media work if it is viewed as competing with face-to-face work. a third reason to link vaw prevention in social media and bystander intervention, also related to legitimacy, is to acknowledge it as labor (in terms of time and emotional and financial resources). if social media work is creating additional strain on personal and organizational resources (which societies , , of many participants suggest is the case), it is important that we develop a research trail in this area. additionally, participants’ experiences of online violence, and emerging scholarship conceptualizing and documenting online vaw [ , , ], point to a potential need to develop anti-harassment interventions when this form of labor takes place. stemming from this, and as a fourth and final point, understanding social media work as a space for bystander intervention means that stakeholders can further consider how to design online spaces in ways that encourage reactive and proactive bystander behaviors. here, drawing from interdisciplinary research is particularly important, and we cannot simply transfer what we know about offline behavior online. for example, research from computer science and psychology suggests that likelihood of online bystander intervention may be affected by perceptions of surveillance and risk in chat rooms [ ]. additionally, contrary to notions of diffusion of responsibility, people may be more likely to intervene in situations where there are other people present and when they are aware they are being monitored by technology such as security cameras [ ]. by treating social media as a legitimate space for bystander intervention, we may be able to shift community responses and social norms in timely, personalized, and low-risk ways, while simultaneously supporting survivors and minimizing resource drain and abuse directed at vaw prevention workers. given the persistent and pervasive existence of vaw, prevention approaches should be creative and adaptable to shifting media technologies and changing cultural norms around communication. scholars such as banyard [ ] raise the need for fluid approaches to bystander intervention when exploring how best to target prevention efforts. as banyard [ ] (p. ) explains, a social–ecological model is particularly valuable in this capacity: ecological theory also reminds us that processes like bystander intervention are not static or linear and likely change over time with shifts in community experiences, attitudes, or policies. this next level of analysis is critical, as it helps us think more about the larger context around individual bystanders. influential variables at these broader levels may become leverage points for change themselves. by using social media to intervene in conversations and shape narratives surrounding vaw, participants translate typically offline bystander intervention strategies online into arguably lower-risk contexts (where physical victimization is not immediate, though we should not downplay the harmful effects of emotional and psychological violence both in and out of social media). vaw prevention workers are not only promoting and/or teaching active bystander intervention as something that should take place in face-to-face public settings (reactive and proactive bystander behaviors), but are engaging in additional proactive bystander behaviors by providing feminist analysis and critique and promoting anti-violence social norms. these efforts are grounded in the understanding that ( ) social media content (news coverage; online conversations) plays a role in shaping individual attitudes and beliefs that may support (or resist) vaw; and that ( ) inaccurate, sensational, stereotypical, and victim-blaming content is itself a form of harm requiring bystander intervention. expanding our understanding of bystander intervention to include such work allows us to value this work and also acknowledge the role of news media organizations and social media platforms as potentially complicit community members. of course, vaw prevention workers represent a more-easily mobilized population in that they are already committed to the goal of ending vaw. to what extent these strategies and ideals are transferable to broader publics outside this sector is an important area for further study to expand knowledge of online bystander intervention efforts. this expansion also requires further consideration of the challenges and risks of online vaw prevention work. while these online situations may be considered lower-risk, many individuals doing vaw prevention work experience challenges related to resources and are themselves targets of gendered and sexualized violence as a result of their public work. these findings support research highlighting the frequent abuse experienced by feminists online and the need to conceptualize this abuse as a form of vaw [ ], as well as the need to value and protect bystanders in prevention work [ ]. rather than creating silos of offline and online work, societies , , of further efforts are needed to support and advance this work as part of larger goals to strengthen community and social responses to violence. funding: this research was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada grant number [ - - ]. acknowledgments: thank you to myrna dawson, aaron doyle, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their guidance and feedback on this article. conflicts of interest: the author declare no conflict of interest. references . mendes, k.; ringrose, j.; keller, j. #metoo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. eur. j. women 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.wsif. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . https://www.anokatech.edu/studentservices/getinvolved/~{}/media/e c d aa bc ddd c fc.ashx https://www.anokatech.edu/studentservices/getinvolved/~{}/media/e c d aa bc ddd c fc.ashx https://www.anokatech.edu/studentservices/getinvolved/~{}/media/e c d aa bc ddd c fc.ashx https://firstmonday.org/article/view/ / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.chb. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjc/azw http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	research context 	feminist approaches to vaw 	social–ecological framework of vaw prevention 	feminism, vaw prevention, and media 	beyond victims and perpetrators: the growth of bystander intervention 	materials and methods 	participants 	interviews 	analytical process 	results 	engaging wider audiences and raising awareness 	narrative shifts to change societal norms 	mobilization around high-profile news stories 	challenges 	discussion and conclusions 	references s k e n È journal of theatre and drama studies : k i n ( g ) s h i p a n d p o w e r edited by eric nicholson skenÈ journal of theatre and drama studies founded by guido avezzù, silvia bigliazzi, and alessandro serpieri general editors guido avezzù (executive editor), silvia bigliazzi. editorial board simona brunetti, francesco lupi, nicola pasqualicchio, susan payne, gherardo ugolini. managing editor francesco lupi. editorial staff francesco dall’olio, marco duranti, maria serena marchesi, antonietta provenza, savina stevanato. layout editor alex zanutto. advisory board anna maria belardinelli, anton bierl, enoch brater, jean-christophe cavallin, rosy colombo, claudia corti, marco de marinis, tobias döring, pavel drábek, paul edmondson, keir douglas elam, ewan fernie, patrick finglass, enrico giaccherini, mark griffith, daniela guardamagna, stephen halliwell, robert henke, pierre judet de la combe, eric nicholson, guido paduano, franco perrelli, didier plassard, donna shalev, susanne wofford. copyright © skenÈ published in december all rights reserved. issn - no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher. skenÈ theatre and drama studies http://www.skenejournal.it info@skenejournal.it dir. resp. (aut. trib. di verona): guido avezzù p.o. box c/o mail boxes etc. (mbe ) – viale col. galliano, , , verona (i) contents kin(g)ship and power edited by eric nicholson eric nicholson – introduction anton bierl – the mise en scène of kingship and power in aeschylus’ seven against thebes: ritual performativity or goos, cledonomancy, and catharsis alessandro grilli – the semiotic basis of politics in seven against thebes robert s. miola – curses in aeschylus’ seven against thebes and in shakespeare’s richard plays elena pellone and david schalkwyk – “breath of kings”: political and theatrical power in richard ii miscellany anna novokhatko – epic-oracular markedness in fifth-century bce greek comic fragments april weintritt – the deliverymen of florentine comedy: - konrad wojnowski – performative uncertainty and antifragile theatre special section michael coveney – dominique goy-blanquet, shakespeare in the theatre: patrice chéreau, london: bloomsbury (the arden shakespeare) gherardo ugolini – when heroism is female. heracles at syracuse angelo righetti – measure for measure: shakespeare festival, roman theatre, verona, - july mark brown – waiting for godot in the marketplace: setting the edinburgh festival in context books received © skenÈ journal of theatre and drama studies : ( ), - mark brown* waiting for godot in the marketplace: setting the edinburgh festival in context abstract this article seeks, for those who are unfamiliar either with edinburgh’s summer festivals or, at least, with their origins and history, to set the festival programmes we have today (and, in par- ticular, the theatre programmes of the edinburgh international festival and the edinburgh fes- tival fringe) in their broader historical, economic and cultural context. it then considers (from the author’s subjective standpoint) four of the best theatre productions presented in edinburgh during the festivals of august : namely, samuel beckett’s waiting for godot, staged at the edinburgh international festival (eif) by the druid theatre company of ireland and directed by garry hynes; la maladie de la mort, a new adaptation of marguerite duras’s novella, written by alice birch and directed by katie mitchell, presented at the eif by french company théâ- tre des bouffes du nord; unsung, a new monodrama about the public and private lives of a ca- reer politician, by the flemish theatre collective skagen and performed by valentijn dhaenens as part of the fringe programme of the summerhall venue; and, finally, ulster american, a po- litical satire written for the traverse theatre’s fringe programme by scotland-based, northern irish playwright david ireland. keywords: curated; open-access; edinburgh international festival; fringe; song of the goat; beckett; druid; duras; théâtre des bouffes du nord; skagen; summerhall; david ireland; traverse * markbrown.teatro@gmail.com the ‘edinburgh festival’, which is held every august in scotland’s capital city, is celebrated as the world’s biggest platform for the arts. although often referred to as a single festival, the august events, in fact, consist of six separate festival pro- grammes including the edinburgh international festival and the edinburgh festi- val fringe (both of which were inaugurated in ). created in the spirit of optimism following the second world war, the suc- cess of these festivals owes a great deal to their location. known as ‘the athens of the north’ on account of its splendid gothic and georgian architectures, edin- burgh is, in many ways, an ideal festival city. not only does its beauty attract visi- tors, but, with a current population of just under half a million and a superb range details of five of the august festivals, and other festival programmes held in edinburgh throughout the year, can be found at: edinburghfestivalcity.com. the sixth programme in august is the edinburgh tv festival: thetvfestival.com (last access october ). alessandro serpieri and keir elam of permanent and temporary venues, the city has the perfect combination of size and infrastructure. any overview of the edinburgh events must take into consideration the signif- icant differences between the edinburgh international festival (eif) and the edin- burgh festival fringe (the fringe). the eif is a prestigious, relatively well fund- ed and, crucially, curated programme. by contrast, the fringe (which, in its enor- mous size, largely accounts for edinburgh’s status as the pre-eminent arts festival city in the world) is an open-access festival; if one can afford the registration, ven- ue, accommodation and other related costs, one can stage a show at the fringe. the scale and nature of the fringe makes it something of a double-edged sword in artistic terms. on the one hand, the programme offers audiences an ex- traordinarily exciting experience of the arts which is unrivalled in its size and di- versity. there can be few, if any, festival programmes in the world that provide arts lovers with a greater opportunity, not only to see the work of established artists, but also to stumble across previously undiscovered gems and excellent emerging artists. however, on the other hand, the open-access programming of the fringe promotes a commercial ‘free-for-all’; to find the undiscovered gems, one may well have to experience a considerable amount of lacklustre art. one sign of the fringe’s position as a commercially oriented arts ‘marketplace’ is that, in re- cent times, lucrative stand-up comedy has come to occupy a significantly larg- er section of the fringe brochure than theatre does. big name fringe producers, whilst they stage some interesting work, are widely considered to be primari- ly commercial operations. although few artists on the fringe make much mon- ey (many leave edinburgh out of pocket), the big producers tend to be the finan- cial winners. this said, there are fringe venues (most notably scotland’s new writing thea- tre the traverse and the summerhall arts centre) which run curated programmes in which artistic concerns take primacy over commercial ones. one small inci- dent, involving the acclaimed polish theatre company song of the goat, provides some insight into the contradictions of the fringe, and, in particular, the tensions including the splendid victorian playhouses of the festival theatre and the royal lyceum theatre, scotland’s new writing theatre the traverse and the converted church building of as- sembly roxy. ranging from lecture halls at the university of edinburgh to community halls and, even, public toilets; for example, irish theatre company semper fi staged their fine and memorable play ladies and gents in the public lavatories in st james place during the edinburgh fringe. the importance of the festival to the british state is reflected in the fact that it has been un- der royal patronage since its inception in . queen elizabeth ii was patron between and , at which point her son, prince edward, earl of wessex, became royal patron. the festival receives financial support from the city of edinburgh council, creative scot- land (the quasi-non-governmental organisation [or “quango”] tasked with dispensing public mon- ey to the arts), the scottish government and a number of corporate and individual sponsors and supporters. the festival is curated by its director fergus linehan, whose first programme was in . such as assembly, underbelly, pleasance and gilded balloon. or teatr pieśń kozła, to give them their polish name. mark brown eros in shakespeare between commercial and artistic motivations within the planet’s single largest arts programme. song of the goat’s devised, highly physical, visual, vocal and musical work stands in the tradition of the great polish theatre master jerzy grotowski (in- deed, “the goats”, as they are sometimes known, are based in the western pol- ish city of wrocław, which was home to grotowski’s famous laboratory theatre). as such, their work was a perfect fit for the programme of aurora nova, a curat- ed programme of international, largely european, visual theatre, dance and per- formance, led by german performer-turned-producer wolfgang hoffmann, which played in st stephen’s church during the edinburgh festival fringe from until ; a period in which, in my opinion, it staged the strongest curated thea- tre programme to be seen on the edinburgh fringe in the last three decades. the goats’ relationship with the fringe is a conflicted one. the company pre- sented chronicles – a lamentation ( ) and lacrimosa ( ) at aurora nova, to considerable critical and audience acclaim. however, despite this success, the artists felt that the commercialist and consumerist atmosphere of the fringe was at odds with the reflective, spiritual tone of their work. in , during the run of lacrimosa, the company’s artistic director, grzegorz bral, told me that song of the goat had decided not to play the fringe in future. the demise of aurora no- va as a fringe venue in the same year seemed to make the goats’ absence from the fringe programme more certain. however, following the establishment of the summerhall venue in and the appointment of its founding artistic director rupert thomson, bral and his company were attracted back to the fringe, play- ing songs of lear as part of the summerhall fringe programme in and return to the voice (a co-production with summerhall, presented in st giles cathedral) during the fringe of . the tension between the commercialist atmosphere of the fringe and the work of song of the goat had been clear from the very outset. my review of chroni- cles – a lamentation for the sunday herald in reflected on precisely this friction: the artistic overload of the edinburgh festival can itself become a party to our commercial culture’s promotion of shallow gratification. chronicles stands res- olutely against that impulse. in its exquisite use of light and flame, and its ach- ingly elegiac use of the human body, it appears like an ever-shifting caravag- gio painting. as near to perfect theatre as i have seen in a very long time, it is food for the soul. aurora nova has continued to bring work to the edinburgh fringe since in its capaci- ty as a production company. in its seven years at st stephen’s the programme showcased work by such acclaimed com- panies as akhe (russia), derevo (russia) and farm in the cave (czech republic). appointed senior programmer for dance and performance for the southbank centre in lon- don in . the scottish national newspaper which published its final edition on september , . its successor, the herald on sunday, began publication on september , . sunday herald, august , quoted on website of song of the goat: piesnkozla.pl/en/ar- chives (last access october ). setting the edinburgh festival in context alessandro serpieri and keir elam it is in the context of the above-outlined differences and tensions, both between the eif and the fringe, and within the fringe itself, that i invite the reader to con- sider the following reflections on four significant theatre productions staged in edinburgh as part of the festival programmes in august . as noted above, the eif enjoys considerable esteem, both nationally and internationally. its pro- grammes are able to attract some of the biggest names in world theatre, from ari- ane mnouchkine and her famed french company théâtre du soleil, to romanian auteur director silviu purcărete and the great german theatremaker peter stein. the programme was no different, with work by the exceptional irish thea- tre company druid and leading french company théâtre des bouffes du nord (in- cluding katie mitchell’s staging of a new adaptation of marguerite duras’s novel- la la maladie de la mort). druid’s offering, director garry hynes’s inspired production of beckett’s icon- ic, existential classic waiting for godot, was, for my money, the absolute high- light of the eif theatre programme. hynes’s staging of beckett’s most fa- mous drama is impressively and movingly attuned to a play that is simultaneous- ly cerebral-yet-playful, and bleak-yet-life-affirming. as i noted in a review written during festival, the druid godot succeeds in being “as deep as a treatise by kier- kegaard and as light as an evening at the music hall”. it does so, in large part, by playing directly to beckett’s quintessentially mod- ernist sense of the theatrical. the scenography itself (designed by francis o’con- nor) speaks volubly of its own theatricality. vladimir and estragon do their in- terminable waiting in a hyper-real, almost post-apocalyptic wasteland of dried, cracked earth. however, this barren landscape is illuminated boldly and brilliantly within a phosphorescent frame. the framing device is simple-yet-ingenious. were brecht alive to see it, one suspects he would consider it a great alienation effect. although the play is, in many ways, a french one (having been written orig- inally in french, as en attendant godot, some twelve years into beckett’s exile in paris), it is also very much an irish drama. this fact is emphasised beautifully by irish actors marty rea (vladimir) and aaron monaghan (estragon). their touch- ingly humane, comic and intelligent evocation of their characters’ co-dependency is expressed with charming physicality and a delicious enunciation that reminds us that the irish have long taken revenge on the british by very often writing and speaking the english language better than the british themselves. rea and monaghan’s clever, vaudevillian double act is matched by rory nolan as the brutish, yet ill-fated, despot pozzo and garrett lombard as his agonisingly oppressed (and repressed) slave lucky. nolan plays the tyrant with a grotesquely and humorously inflated sense of his own importance, all the better to express the pathos of his blindness in act two. lombard speaks lucky’s monologue with the tremendous sense of rhythm, meaning and poignancy that is demanded by, sure- who presented their show les naufragés du fol espoir (aurores) at the festival in . who was last at the eif with his acclaimed staging of goethe’s faust in . stein’s work at the eif includes the world premiere of scottish playwright david harrow- er’s play blackbird. sunday herald, august : scottishstage.wordpress.com/ / / /reviews-edin- burgh-festival- -august- / (accessed october ). mark brown eros in shakespeare ly, one of the great, humanistic speeches in world theatre. hynes is widely recog- nised as a leading director on the contemporary stage. this extremely intelligent and deeply sensitive godot can only enhance her reputation. if hynes’s staging of beckett was the standout theatre production of the eif programme, katie mitchell’s staging of la maladie de la mort (which marked her debut at the festival) was also highly accomplished and profoundly memo- rable. the production works with a script by writer alice birch which honours the spirit of duras’s book, whilst, in some significant ways, liberally altering its perspective. the novella (which, famously, duras wrote whilst in the grip of her ferocious alcoholism) tells the story of a man who, believing himself never to have experi- enced love, asks a woman, who is not a prostitute, if he can pay her to stay with him at a seaside hotel. during the sexual relationship that ensues, the woman comes to the conclusion that the man can never experience love, as he is suffering from “the malady of death”. in birch’s version the young woman appears to be a prostitute who has taken to sex work in order to raise her young child. mitchell’s staging, which combines powerfully a variety of media, brings an extraordinary intensity to the story. on the left of the stage sits a narrator (irène jacob) in a soundproof booth. in certain moments throughout the play she provides radio drama-style narra- tion. meanwhile, on alex eales’s extraordinary set (which is part radio studio, part film set, part accurate representation of a hotel room), actors laetitia dosch (the woman) and nick fletcher (the man) give performances that are painful- ly resigned (her) and alienated (him). as dosch and fletcher play out the agonis- ingly strained, sometimes sickeningly abusive relations between the characters (relations which are seemingly shaped by the man’s addiction to violent, hard- core pornography), a team of three camera operators work, with deliberate ob- trusiveness, around them. the consequent live film, which is projected onto a screen above the set, is cut with pre-recorded movie material depicting events be- yond the room and from the past. the music (by paul clark) and sound (by dona- to wharton) are understated, sinisterly premonitory and in perfect harmony with the general tone of the production. mitchell combines these elements with prodigious skill. every artistic form plays into and through the others. everything is at the service of the compelling and deadening atmosphere and of the intense, discomfiting performances. rarely does a stage adaptation of a prose fiction carry this kind of emotional and psycho- logical charge. this production is truly as brilliant as it is disconcerting. if the stagings of beckett and duras were the highlights of the eif theatre pro- gramme, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that two of the strongest fringe theatre pro- ductions emerged from the curated programmes at summerhall and the trav- erse. valentijn dhaenens (one of the quartet of theatre artists who make up ant- werp-based company skagen) is well known to edinburgh fringe audiences. the writer and performer had hits with his solo shows bigmouth and smallwar (which played as part of the traverse fringe programmes in and respec- tively). his fringe offering, unsung, a monodrama about the rise and fall of a career politician, was presented at summerhall. setting the edinburgh festival in context alessandro serpieri and keir elam in the play dhaenens takes on the role of a sharp-suited, image conscious pol- itician (who might be based on tony blair in the early days of new labour or emmanuel macron during his rapid rise to power). we witness the man’s pub- lic speeches, his private political machinations and his uncomfortable private life (the woman to whom we see him talk affectionately via webcam while he is on the campaign trail turns out not to be his wife, but his illicit lover). the interweaving of these elements is achieved beautifully. the staging is sim- ple, but very effective, and assisted smartly by skagen’s typically sharp use of video technology. the speeches, if not actually by blair and macron, certainly could be. their platitudinousness, hollow optimism and lack of substance are de- pressingly familiar, as is the perfectly observed, well-groomed persona in which dhaenens delivers them. the contrast between the politician’s public bonhomie and his private political ruthlessness is wonderfully stark; he stabs his long-term “friend”, and now politi- cal rival, “fatso” in the back, and would clearly, as the saying goes, “sell his grand- mother” to become his party’s candidate for the premiership. however, it is in the man’s personal meltdown (his marriage seems to have succumbed to the demands of his political career years ago) that the piece takes on real moral depth. dhaenens is absolutely captivating in his portrayal of a man in the grip of what the english writer alan sillitoe might have called “the loneliness of the long distance politician”. living in hotel rooms, cut off from the lives of his children and his mistress, not to say the regular lives of working and middle-class people themselves, the character becomes a resonatingly complex figure, simultaneously a perpetrator and a victim of the decadent political system that is western democ- racy in the twenty-first century. finally, politics are also to the fore in, arguably, the finest new play to be pre- sented in edinburgh during august . ulster american, written for the traverse theatre by actor and playwright david ireland, is an excoriating satire of both the london theatre business and the hollywood movie industry in the “#metoo” moment. the supposed liberalism of these totems of western culture are ex- posed to hilarious and purposeful challenge from the dramatist’s northern irish perspective. the play is set in the plush london apartment (cleverly envisioned by designer becky minto) of west end theatre director leigh carver (played with fabulously buttock-clenching liberalism by robert jack). there the director is meeting with, first, big name hollywood actor jay conway (an unforgettably gargantuan perfor- mance by darrell d’silva) and, arriving late, northern irish playwright ruth dav- enport (played with exceptional, comic rage and, indeed, violence by lucianne mcevoy). between conway’s arrival and davenport’s the playwright sets up gor- geously a comedy of ineffectual english liberalism (carver), fake political correct- ness and historical illiteracy (conway), and well-earned fury (davenport). not on- ireland, who is originally from belfast in northern ireland, trained as an actor at the roy- al scottish academy of music and drama (now the royal conservatoire of scotland) in glasgow. he received critical acclaim for his play cyprus avenue. he continues to work as an actor on stage and screen; in he gave a particularly notable performance as the titular, psychopath- ic ulster loyalist paramilitary in dc jackson’s play kill johnny glendenning. he lives in glasgow. mark brown eros in shakespeare ly does conway (who self-identifies as a catholic irish-american keen to strike a blow for irish republicanism) misunderstand davenport’s drama completely, but he also makes an extremely funny mockery of his professed feminism. davenport’s religious and political heritage (protestant and right-of-centre) and her feminine self-respect clash brilliantly with the distinct, and erroneous, political assumptions of the two men. what ensues is, as i observed reviewing the play early in its premiere run, like “a collaboration between a northern irish dario fo and quentin tarantino”. this unquestionable fringe success for the traverse owes as much to the universally excellent performances and director ga- reth nicholls’s fine grasp of the play as to ireland’s outstanding script itself. even in the mere quartet of theatre productions selected above we find a fas- cinating cross-section of the theatrical fare provided in edinburgh during its fa- mous summer festival seasons. an irish rendering of a beckett classic; a french adaptation of duras; a new, flemish political monodrama; and a premiere of a blazing, northern irish satire: this is edinburgh festival theatre in its great diver- sity and internationalism. fig. . song of the goat perform lacrimosa. photo: song of the goat. sunday herald, august : scottishstage.wordpress.com/ / / /reviews-edinburgh- festival- -august- / (accessed december ). setting the edinburgh festival in context alessandro serpieri and keir elam fig. .marty rea (vladimir), left, and aaron monaghan (estragon) in waiting for godot. photo: matthew thompson. fig. . la maladie de la mort. photo: stephen cummiskey. mark brown eros in shakespeare fig. . robert jack, darrell d’silva and lucianne mcevoy in ulster american. photo: sid scott. fig. . valentijn dhaenens in unsung. photo: danny willem. photo: sid scott attachment management. setting the edinburgh festival in context alessandro serpieri and keir elam multimedia appendix : supplemental methods supplemental methods : detailed data extraction description several factors pertaining to obtaining twitter premium api data contribute to the discrepancy between the , novel english geotagged tweets and the subsample sample of , novel english geotagged tweets that we use in this study. the twitter premium api has a maximum retrieval limit of tweets per data request and each request costs money. therefore, we had to optimize our requests. we decide to download tweets based on non-overlapping times in which they originated. this process led to the loss of some tweets during periods with more than tweets. for example, if we requested tweet between pm- pm on oct. and there were over tweets, say , we recovered only the first . the remaining tweets would have to be recovered in a separate request. therefore, we examined the data to try to ascertain the time of last tweet downloaded to then send a new request with non-overlap times to fill in missing tweets. however, this process was inherently error prone. in some cases, we lost a few minutes and in others we overlapped in time. this led to both some duplicate tweets and brief periods with missing data. after data cleaning we had , non-duplicates tweets but based on the twitter api counts there were , that should have met our search criteria. however, the counts data depend on the number of non-deleted tweets at the time of query. twitter support documentation states, “the counts delivered through this endpoint reflect the number of tweets that occurred and do not reflect any later compliance events (deletions, scrub geos). some tweets counted may not be available via data endpoint due to user compliance actions.” we queried the counts before retrieving the data, so in addition to having brief periods with missing data, some small number of tweets may have been deleted by the users. supplemental methods : description of the demographics pro algorithm demographics pro is a commercial service used to assess demographics and other characteristics of social media populations. we used their services to infer gender, age and race/ethnicity of the posters of revealed experiences. we provided twitter handles, or screen names, of posters categorized as having revealed an experience of sexual assault/abuse and early life experience of sexual assault/abuse. demographics pro then provided us with a distribution of gender, age and race/ethnicity for the handles we shared and similar data for a random sample of , twitter users in the us as a comparison. demographics pro uses a series of proprietary machine learning algorithms to estimate or infer likely demographic characteristics of twitter handles based on twitter behavior/usage. their predictions rely on signals from networks, consumption, and language use. they have created and validated their methodology against million twitter users. they require % confidence to make an estimate on a single demographic characteristic of a handle. importantly, they do not return individual level data to researchers for us to make independent assessments of their algorithms, rather they return aggregates on the sample. this is to ensure privacy for twitter users. see http://www.demographicspro.com/views/demographics_aboutmeth.shtml for more details. http://www.demographicspro.com/views/demographics_aboutmeth.shtml wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if 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twitter: an unattended methodological approach applied sciences article authority-based conversation tracking in twitter: an unattended methodological approach marçal mora-cantallops *,† , salvador sánchez-alonso , elena garcía-barriocanal and miguel-Ángel sicilia computer science department, universidad de alcalá, alcalá de henares, madrid, spain; salvador.sanchez@uah.es (s.s.-a.); elena.garciab@uah.es (e.g.-b.); msicilia@uah.es (m.-Á.s.) * correspondence: marcal.mora@uah.es † current address: plaza de san diego, s/n, alcalá de henares, madrid, spain. received: april ; accepted: may ; published: may ���������� ������� featured application: we propose a method capable of dynamically identifying and monitoring the most relevant discussion topics of a set of authorities, without human intervention. it is robust and interruption proof, not needing any set of seed words to start the analysis. abstract: twitter is undoubtedly one of the most widely used data sources to analyze human communication. the literature is full of examples where twitter is accessed, and data are downloaded as the previous step to a more in-depth analysis in a wide variety of knowledge areas. unfortunately, the extraction of relevant information from the opinions that users freely express in twitter is complicated, both because of the volume generated—more than tweets per second—and the difficulties related to filtering out only what is pertinent to our research. inspired by the fact that a large part of users use twitter to communicate or receive political information, we created a method that allows for the monitoring of a set of users (which we will call authorities) and the tracking of the information published by them about an event. our approach consists of dynamically and automatically monitoring the hottest topics among all the conversations where the authorities are involved, and retrieving the tweets in connection with those topics, filtering other conversations out. although our case study involves the method being applied to the political discussions held during the spanish general, local, and european elections of april/may , the method is equally applicable to many other contexts, such as sporting events, marketing campaigns, or health crises. keywords: twitter; topic tracking; data extraction; information retrieval; data mining . introduction the widespread use of social networking services (sns) and the fact that users increasingly trust the news shared by their contacts or friends over those in traditional media has significantly changed our information and communication habits. in particular, when contacts considered “opinion leaders” [ ] publish a story within their sphere of influence, their contacts/followers tend to give it more credibility than they would give the mainstream media. user activity in sns somehow reflects actual news and everyday-life trends. analyzing trends is highly relevant for understanding public opinion [ ], as it allows researchers to examine public conversations and debates in detail, evaluate the behavior of a product after a marketing campaign, or analyze reactions to a particular event, among others. since trending topics to some extent describe the opinion of a community and provide the means to analyze it, knowing where public attention is at a certain point in time becomes a topic of interest for researchers and professionals. appl. sci. , , ; doi: . /app www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /app http://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci appl. sci. , , of not all sns serve the same purpose in any case. twitter, which according to gadek [ ] is the reference in microblogging platforms, allows users to post short messages called tweets, and interact with the tweets posted by others replying to them, quoting or retweeting them. user messages often include hashtags as a way of explicitly marking the relevant topics, easing such monitoring and analysis. such a simple mechanism makes twitter especially convenient for information retrieval and automatic processing purposes, as vast amounts of data are generated every day; data which provides valuable information for many different domains, such as political communication, consumer behavior, or disaster management, just to name a few. these data are freely and publicly available through twitter’s application programming interface (api), allowing for real-time monitoring of users’ preferences, opinion, and behavior. twitter is a window open to the spontaneous communication model that takes place in the real world, a model rooted in the fact that user behavior and occurrences are unpredictable and dynamic. therefore, as messages in twitter reflect real-time news and everyday-life trends, and given that many events cannot be accurately foreseen—e.g., natural disasters or accidents—it is really hard for analysts to anticipate the wording that will be used by users in their hashtags. of course, if manual monitoring was carried out, new hashtags could be added as they appear as qualifiers of hot topics of interest, and yet this approach would have important shortcomings: • it would introduce a significant delay between the moment when a new topic emerges and the starting point of its tracking. such a delay would translate into losing relevant information or interactions; • human supervision, which is not always possible (e.g., late at night), would be necessary. unfortunately, depending on humans can cause the introduction of failures derived from fatigue, incorrect interpretation of the information, inability to detect and track relevant changes, and others. moreover, it is also worth noting that, through hashtags, users pretend to label their content in a word or expression that summarizes what they are talking about; this is, however, a linguistic construct, and therefore, it carries its limitations. for an averagely informed person, the meaning of a hashtag can be relatively easy to understand or infer, but for an automatic process, this can become a complex task, as even the most famous hashtags such as #metoo or #stayathome are not self-explanatory, and thus, need to be considered in their own context. hashtag wording is part of the game in twitter and often corresponds to specific (and deliberate) communication strategies. the mechanism we propose consists of two separate parts, each governed by an algorithm. the first algorithm identifies the hottest topics of conversation of a group of authorities. it does this by continuously monitoring any tweet from the authorities, producing as an output an always-updated list of hashtags that includes the most interesting topics of conversation. simultaneously, a second algorithm uses the current hashtag list as input, extracting and storing all the tweets tagged with any of the hashtags in the list. the whole mechanism must be initialized by setting up the set of authorities as well as some other parameters such as the time window frame (more details in section ). once running, the software—which aims to minimize the loss of information—works in unattended mode without human intervention. it is well known that political information is one of the most shared types of information on social media. in fact, literature on the use of twitter for political activities abound, such as those studies on the effect of social media, especially twitter, as a facilitator in political campaigns [ ] and protests [ ] worldwide. the fact is that two-thirds of social media users show some kind of political engagement by, for instance, following candidates, posting thoughts about political issues, or pressing friends to vote [ ]. this behavior is especially evident in twitter opinion leaders, who consistently show a higher involvement in political processes [ ]. besides, politically engaged young people integrate social media use into their existing organizations and political communications [ ]. this prominence of the use of twitter for politics, the interest that the study of political information awakens, and the rising concerns appl. sci. , , of about the effect of false stories (or “fake news”) on social media [ ] are what inspired us to apply our model to the analysis of political discussions during the spanish general elections as a use case, which will be further detailed in section . the remainder of this paper is organized as follows. the next section outlines related works, while the proposed approach is detailed in the methodology section. section presents a case study where our model is applied to the analysis of the political debate in twitter: the spanish general elections of april . finally, conclusions are discussed in section . . background . . social media, topics, and trends social media (or sns) are web-based services that allow individuals to create a profile, articulate a list of connections to other users, view and traverse such connections, and share content [ ]. although social media are today the primary source of information for many, the spread of information is still irregular, difficult to predict in nature, and incidental. methods that aim to track and retrieve given conversations are required to be flexible and dynamic enough to be able to follow them with the minimum information loss. to be able to accurately track opinion over time has been one of the main concerns of analysts for a long time [ – ]. with the advent of twitter, public opinion can be tracked continuously and in real time. in fact, twitter continuously publishes real-time produced lists of the most popular topics under discussion either locally or globally (also known as trending topics). many users consider something to be news when it becomes a twitter trending topic, even though the way twitter produces these lists of trending topics is unknown, as the algorithm used remains unpublished. it is relevant, however, that although twitter is assumed to classify trends according to every tweet published during a period, it only provides (via its api) a reduced sample of the entire stream for free. this limitation makes it difficult for those trying to extract trending topics from the whole data stream. however, our work does not aspire to replicate the way twitter produces its trending topic lists, and assumes working on a subset of the complete data to be reasonable. thus, twitter produces trending topic lists from all users’ tweets. however, the way information spreads in online social networks is more reminiscent of a complex contagion model where information diffusion is affected not only by the number of exposures to a piece of information but also by the exposure to multiple sources and their social influence [ ]. hence, users tend to follow other users on topics of their interest in order to acquire information on those topics. these later users, leaders of opinion or “authorities”, are sources of information for many individuals in this media environment, and consequently, become more influential, and the information diffused by them more “viral” [ ]. as mentioned, our work aims not at detecting global trending topics but instead at obtaining the relevant topics of discussion among a set of opinion leaders that we call “authorities”, and adapting the tracked keywords accordingly to retrieve the most relevant information throughout the duration of the monitoring. as a result, we will be able to: (a) observe how the topics of interest addressed by a set of authorities evolve; and (b) to extract the conversations linked to those topics, discarding any others, which will tell us how authorities’ public discourse has changed over time. . . topic tracking previous work has pointed out the difficulties of implementing reliable, precise, and fast trend detection [ ]. the high volume of information, the myriad different topics under discussion in any particular time, and the significant variations in the time and volume scales of social datasets stand in the way of direct tracking. many authors have addressed the problem of detecting new events from a stream [ , ]. the work by petrovic et al. [ ] described a method applicable to a stream of twitter posts, but although their system outperformed previous approaches, the results invariably include spurious information and not only news events as one would expect. one way appl. sci. , , of to overcome the limitations related to the analysis and classification of corpora is to look at the twitter hashtags (keywords or terms starting with “#”), which are the most common feature for users to connect and relate to within a larger networked discourse [ ]. d’heer et al. have shown how messages that include such hashtags have, in general, more informational value than tweets without them; these labeled messages are also often longer, connected with other topics, and enriched with hyperlinks [ ]. additionally, as enli and simonsen [ ] note, using hashtags is not an individual action: many actors, such as politicians, make use of them to reach outside their own connections and contacts. this is an example of how the use of social media by many sectors is closely-related to their professional practice. to be able to track hashtags accurately is, thus, critical to be able to analyze the discourse in twitter. however, difficulties arise when the researcher needs to predict what hashtag or word is going to be used by the public in a particular situation, and whether it is going to change in the process, alternating with modified or customized hashtags, so a flexible approach to the tracking becomes a requirement. in spite of this, many previous works follow a static tracking approach. for instance, fano and slanzi [ ] used twitter to monitor the discussion around a constitutional referendum held in italy for five weeks. even with a potentially disputed debate, they opted for a manual selection of five hashtags. similarly, reyes-menendez et al. [ ] tracked a single hashtag, #worldenvironmentday, to assess the public opinion around such an event. however, such opinion included only users that used hashtags in english, and therefore, discarded variants or hashtags written in different languages that could, potentially, be even more widely used, individually or altogether, than the official tag. takahashi et al. [ ] also used four static hashtags to analyze the messages in twitter in a natural disaster, even when the typhoon went on for five days. in their work about the eu election trends, tsakalidis et al. [ ] admit that when the selection of hashtags is static, missing data and losing track of the conversation is inevitable, even when they “aggregated tweets written in the respective language that contained a party’s name, its abbreviation, its twitter account name and some possible misspells” and “excluded several ambiguous keywords in an attempt to reduce the noise”. these examples reflect how when only the expected generic terms or the mainstream hashtags are used, relevant information is lost as they leave little space to unexpected events, shortly lived relevant topics or unusual wordings. in this line, it is also worth noting how different languages, abbreviations, misspellings, or ambiguous keywords can be problematic when using a static approach. within the general analysis of trending topics on twitter, some authors have tried to analyze what makes a topic trend [ ], what characterizes these topics [ ], what different types of emerging topics exist [ ], and even what characteristics are shared by users who started or had a greater influence in the dissemination of trending topics—what has been referred as twitter trend demographics [ ]. nevertheless, only a limited number of works have tackled real-time topic detection in twitter. choi and park [ ] proposed a method to detect emerging topics on twitter using high utility pattern mining (hupm), which takes the frequency of appearance and the utility of words into account. although their approach gives good results when detecting topics in known datasets, it is not designed to dynamically use the resulting topics for extraction. with a different approach, the work of adedoyin-olowe et al. [ ] aims to detect relevant events from a set of twitter posts, but it displays a similar problem as the analysis is conducted in postprocessing, instead of detecting events in near real time and tracking them to extract all the relevant tweets produced by the users. such adaptation is found in gaglio et al. [ ], who proposed a system able to progressively refine its query to include new relevant terms, reflecting the emergence of new topics or trends. in their conclusions, they also noted how “other systems were unable to capture the social aspects of the observed events [...] every time the users left the main topic and started to talk about unexpected events”. their work, however, presents a couple limitations that could have a relevant impact in many contexts, as an initial set of hashtags must be provided in advance, and afterwards, the adaptation is solely based on the extracted tweets, without considering the relevancy (or authority) of their authors. this could easily become an issue, as irrelevant hashtags can get into the system, gradually drifting to diverging topics. our proposed appl. sci. , , of solution aims to overcome the previous shortcomings by proposing a method which works in real time, provides precise outputs, and is adjustable against spurious emerging topics. it is important to clarify that the problem our model solves is a simplification of the general problem of trend detection and monitoring. as previously mentioned, other works monitor hashtags or topics in the tweets published by any user, while we analyze those tweets produced by a known set of users only. this set of users is not necessarily fixed—this can be customized—but it is quite stable and constrained. in any case, the size of the corpus is still enormous, and the variations in time and volume scale of our datasets are still there. to control these two aspects, and to do so dynamically in one pass is still challenging. as we will see in the next section, our solution provides excellent results without the need for any preprocessing or the creation/use of additional corpora. . method description the method that follows aims to provide a tool that, once a context has been chosen, is able to follow and extract the online conversation that is generated among twitter users in the most automatic manner possible, while keeping the possibility of manual adaptations whenever needed. this solution is loosely inspired by the resource management systems (rms) [ ] found in computing systems; as rms manage resources and processes and prioritizes them according to a set of criteria (such as relevancy or aging), the algorithm found in the current work aims to manage the pool of hashtags (or topics) that emerge from relevant sources in a particular subject and prioritizes them according to given criteria but also periodically updates and renews them following the pace of a rolling time window. in summary, a first script monitors the twitter stream, following all the posts by the “authorities” (a previously determined set of users that are deemed as relevant by the researchers in the studied context). their tweets are then examined to extract the hashtags they use, and a weight can be added to them (giving, for instance, more relevance to authorities with more followers). as a result, for each time period, an ordered list of hashtags (that are equivalent to conversation topics) is produced and passed to a separate script, that receives the top t terms, updates its tracking filter for the stream, and immediately begins to extract (and store) tweets from any user that match those terms. figure summarizes the process, which can be divided into four main steps: ( ) set of authorities; ( ) activity monitor; ( ) list of hashtags; and ( ) tweet collection. figure . general overview and flow of the proposed tool. . . set of authorities the first step of this method is to determine a set of relevant users (considered “authorities”) for the topic or context that is being analyzed. these are users that lead or start the conversation, such as political candidates in a political campaign or health authorities in a health crisis. the criteria can be set by experts in the field or by the researcher themself, but ensuring the quality of the set of authorities is key for accurate tracking. through the twitter api, the authorities are monitored, preventing an undesired drifting of our tracking to scopes outside the relevant context. such an approach is key to allow for unattended tracking, as the hashtag selection will change synchronously with the changes in the authorities’ public discourse. appl. sci. , , of when studying political campaigns, for instance, one would follow all the relevant politicians or candidates, and might consider including the media too. in disasters or health crises, one could use the official accounts from the related institutions, an approach that could also be used to study virtually any other domain. . . activity monitor the defined set of authorities in the previous step is used to filter the twitter api stream. the output is a constant flow of messages (tweets) where: ( ) the authority is the author of the post or retweet; ( ) the authority post has been retweeted; or ( ) a previous tweet from the authority is replied to. algorithm describes the flow that is followed by each tweet obtained from the “authorities” tracking. the aim of this first script is double: first, it accumulates the hashtags contained in the “authorities” messages and weights them; second, it is in charge of the time window, effectively setting the beat to which the system updates itself. algorithm : tweet monitor. input: a tweet coming from the “authorities” stream and ct ←− set of hashtags for current time window t. (ct is empty at the start of every time window t). output: c′t ←− an updated set of hashtags for the same window t (in case the period has not changed) or a new set of hashtags for the new window t + (ct+ ) (in case a new period has started) begin /* check for a new time window (and renew if true) */ if new time window then save ct to file /* store ct to use it later */ clear ct /* ct becomes ct+ */ end /* go over the tweet that was obtained from the stream */ for each hashtag in tweet do if hashtag not in ct then add hashtag to ct with weight w else increase ct[hashtag] w units end end end the collection c of hashtags in time window t (ct) contains the hashtags adopted by the authorities and included in their tweets in a single time period. the script stores all the hashtags from each post (they are recognized using the # character). here, it is possible to compute a weight w following a user-defined weight function, introducing a certain degree of flexibility in the prioritization, as the weight function can be adapted to the desired application. some examples include a simple repetition count (number of messages that include the hashtag in question), weighting by the user follower base (e.g., a larger potential impact of a hashtag if tweeted by a user with more followers), limiting the influence of large users by using the logarithm of the same number, or any other mathematical function that fits the application. the user must define the time window t, which again, allows for customization, as the tracking of different events might have different needs. when following a political election period or a public health crisis, for example, the rate of messages by the authorities is relatively slow, as are the user reactions, which often last for hours or days. in these contexts, the time window could be set at one hour or even one day. on the other hand, briefer events such as a football match or a song contest, where users basically comment during the event itself and react to what happens in them, would also appl. sci. , , of need a briefer window. whatever time period is chosen, the script stores an arranged collection of key terms (ct) for each of them. . . list of hashtags the collection derived from the previous step might contain a large number of hashtags; therefore, a subset must be chosen. multiple approaches are possible, but the one proposed here combines a certain number of “hot” topics with a few “emerging” ones, that will be used as an example for the selection (although this is also customizable by the researcher), as described in algorithm . algorithm : tweet extractor data: ct and ct− sto pwords is a list of undesired or spurious hashtags result: twitter stream tracking (at most) the top t hashtags, composed by h hot topics and e emerging trends begin /* generate the list of words(hashtags) to follow */ remove sto pwords from ct and ct− hot_hashtags = top h topics in ct emerging_hashtags = top e topics in (ct − ct− ) and not in hot_hashtags track_hashtags = hot_hashtags + emerging_hashtags /* note that (h + e) ≤ t */ /* t is the maximum number of hashtags to be tracked */ /* generate stream */ create stream tracking track_hashtags end the following steps are carried out in order to establish the hashtags that will be tracked in the extraction script: . in each window, the top h hashtags (referred as “hot”) in the list derived from the monitor step are selected according to their weight. the reasoning is that these are the keywords that the authorities are most strongly using on their posts; . additionally, for each window, the current list (ct) is compared to the previous period (ct− ); from the difference between them, a list of emerging terms (labeled as e) is obtained (as a customization, this method could look at the n previous windows in case it was appropriate for the application). the emerging hashtags are a list of keywords that represent topics that could easily become “hot” in the following windows (as they exhibit a fast growth) but they have not reached their peak yet. this way, the method is able to implement an early detection and tracking of newer topics; . the combination of hot and emerging hashtags from the previous steps forms a final set of t total hashtags (of at most h + e elements). this step is graphically described in figure ; . adding a set of stop words is another customization that might be useful for most of the applications in order to avoid capturing common daily spurious expressions used widely by twitter users (e.g., #happysunday, #goodnight or #followfriday). appl. sci. , , of figure . the final set contains t hashtags, which is a combination of the “hottest” (h) hashtags and the ones that are “emerging” (e) or rapidly rising. h and e are customizable for each application. . . tweet collection a separate script is then set up to track the final set of hashtags in a new stream. this second script is in charge of extracting all the tweets that match the filter (in this case, formed by the obtained t hashtags) in the twitter stream, what must be noted is a sample or subset of all the tweets that are being generated by the public users in twitter [ ]. case is ignored, so differences in the use of lower- or uppercase letters are avoided. this script is updated with a new list of terms in each window, which makes an unattended following of the public conversation around the relevant topics possible, while adapting the hashtags as they change in relevancy. finally, data processing can be done at a later stage or in (near) real time. . results the methodology described in the preceding section was applied to the period around the spanish general elections held on april , as the subject of our case study. . . political context and background the spanish general elections of april were relevant from multiple perspectives. pedro sanchez—leader of the socialist party (psoe)— had been governing in a minority since june , when he successfully used the no-confidence vote against the previous president and popular party (pp) leader mariano rajoy. sanchez defeated rajoy with the help (and votes) of left populists podemos as well as with several regional (catalan and basque) nationalist parties; however, he had to call for early elections after catalan nationalists withdrew support for the government’s budget. the situation was further complicated by the trial of catalonia independence leaders that began on february . talks on possible coalitions were delayed due to the local and european elections that were held on may. although conversations lasted for weeks and were featured prominently in the press, the term of office finished early as a result of the failure in government formation negotiations, culminating in pedro sanchez’s failed investiture voting on – july . in spain, it is not legal to request votes outside the official election campaign period, whose duration varies from election to election but which always ends two days before the election day. the day before the election, the so-called “reflection day” and the election day, explicitly asking for votes is not permitted. taking all this into account, our algorithm tracked the selected authorities (see section . ) from : cest on april (four weeks before the election day and two weeks before the official start of the campaign) until the end of july (with the final result of the failed investiture attempt). appl. sci. , , of . . selection of authorities a total of user accounts were monitored. most of them ( ) were individual accounts of the head candidate for every party in each province. given that spain is divided into provinces and two so-called autonomous cities, at most any party could have candidates. the distribution of the authorities is listed in table ; these are all the candidates that have twitter accounts. additionally, the thirteen official and verified accounts from each party are also added (there is an extra account due to the catalan branch of podemos). note how nation-wide parties such as psoe or pp have a number of authorities that is close to the maximum ( ) while regional parties have only candidates in their respective provinces (e.g., esquerra republicana de catalunya (erc) has four candidates on twitter, one heading each province). table . distribution of authorities among parties. party #authorities example party #authorities example coalición canaria @anioramas erc @junqueras compromís @joanbaldovi jxcat @jorditurull ciudadanos @albert_rivera podemos @pabloiglesias eaj-pnv @aitor_esteban pp @pablocasado_ eh bildu @oskarmatute psoe @sanchezcastejon en marea @baranauskas_ana vox @santi_abascal others as table shows, the selection was exhaustive and systematic, as it contained the full set of leaders per party (as well as the official account of each party) across all spanish provinces. remarkably, all those accounts combined have , , followers—spain has a population of approximately million people—and although many followers follow more than one account, it is worth noticing the order of magnitude, and thus, the deep reach that these accounts can achieve with a single tweet. . . experimental settings here, the logarithm of the author’s number of followers was chosen as the weight (w) function in order to reflect that “authorities” with a larger number of followers are considered more relevant (as they have a wider reach) but the order of magnitude was reduced to prevent the existence of disproportionately dominant authorities such as the parties’ accounts or the president themself. on the other hand, the time window (t) was set at one hour, allowing for more granularity and a faster response in extraction than a daily setting and being more representative than a few minutes window. in regard to the number of hashtags selected for extraction, a t of , with eight hot (h) and two emerging (e) hashtags was assumed as the optimal setting. additionally, a list of common stopwords derived from previous experiments and containing a list of spurious terms (such as #buenosdias or #felizlunes, the spanish equivalents of #goodmorning or #happymonday) was used to filter the resulting terms. . . experimental results after the authorities were selected (see sections . and . for reference), they were continuously monitored (see section . ), obtaining a list of hashtags in each time window (in this case, each hour). the total number of tweets by the authorities in the four months ( days/ h) tracked was , ; an average of between and tweets were obtained per hour (although this figure is obviously higher during the day and lower during the night). the total number of different hashtags (not case sensitive) produced by the authorities was , , although only a portion ( ) reached the top ten list at least once in the one-hour windows. table shows the most frequently found hashtags among the hourly top ten as a sample. appl. sci. , , of the extraction using the captured topics of discussion among the authorities (see section . ) resulted in , , tweets over days, an average , tweets per day (again, although a few exceptional days in april reach more than one million tweets and some in july go down to a few ten thousands). table . hashtags that appear in the largest number of hourly extraction lists. hashtag periods among the top #españaviva out of ( . %) # a ( . %) #absolució ( . %) #psoe ( . %) #freetothom ( . %) # m ( . %) #porespaña ( . %) #votapsoe ( . %) #hazquepase ( . %) #siemprehaciadelante ( . %) in order to illustrate how our approach follows the conversation topics, a sample of the most relevant hashtags is presented as a specific case study in the following subsections. in them, calendar heatmaps aree used to show the relevance of such hashtags over time; for the sake of clarity, the hourly classification has been averaged daily. thus, for instance, a hashtag that ranks first ( ) during h and fifth ( ) during the other is represented with a three ( ) in the heatmap. in addition, note that even though the relevancy of each topic in the top ten tracked hashtags obtained from the authorities is different (due to the assigned weight), they are all tracked equally in the extraction script. . . . general tracking first, we focus on the two most general hashtags, adopted by politicians, media, and general public to tag their messages related to both electoral periods. as the spanish general elections were held on april , the adopted hashtag was # a. on the other hand, the european and local elections were held on may, using an equivalent hashtag (# m). figure shows how our method tracked both hashtags consistently in their relevant periods (april and may, respectively), resulting in . million tweets being extracted. noticeably, two related hashtags were also captured in very specific subperiods: both right at the end of the respective voting day: #eleccionesgenerales a (general elections a) and #elecciones m (elections m). upon further inspection, we found out that #eleccionesgenerales a and #elecciones m were the hashtags used in media for the tv shows that tracked the recount as well as for the subsequent talk-shows that analyzed the results. opposite to what happened with the previous tags—# a and # m, probably easier to predict, short, and thus fast to type—here there is not a complete consistency between both hashtags, hindering the chances of predicting the second hashtag once the first one (#eleccionesgenerales a) is known. naively, one could expect something like #eleccioneseuropeas m (european elections m), which did not happen. in any case, the relevancy of these unexpectedly captured hashtags (#eleccionesgenerales a and #elecciones m) should not be underestimated, as in the day after both electoral processes, they reach a higher relevancy than their general counterparts (more details in figure ). for reference, the translation to absolute figures means that a total of , tweets— , discussing the results of the general elections and , for the european/local ones—would have been lost had it not been for the automated approach. appl. sci. , , of figure . tracking the relevancy of the general hashtags in the election period; notice how # a (campaign) is followed by #eleccionesgenerales a (results) and the interest in # m surges right afterwards, also ending in a result-related topic (#elecciones m) after the m vote. figure . daily relative amount of tweets extracted using # a, # m, #eleccionesgenerales a, and #elecciones m (in percentage). notice the spikes at the end of each electoral period for the latter two. . . . electoral campaign similar observations can be made when tracking both electoral processes changing the perspective to that of each political party (figure . the monitoring of authorities was conducted from april, twelve days before candidates kick-started the campaign and unveiled the official slogans of the parties. psoe’s and vox’s slogans, #hazquepase (make it happen) and #porespaña (for spain), however, were not used until april, while ciudadanos’ one (#vamosciudadanos, let’s go ciudadanos) was not presented until sunday april, where it had the most activity. the relative activity of each of the five nationwide parties is shown in figure , where the simultaneous and sudden fall of activity right after the campaign ends also becomes visible. appl. sci. , , of figure . calendar heatmap for the official slogan per party (top parties) during the spanish general elections campaign. figure . daily relative amount of tweets extracted using each party’s slogan (#hazquepase, #valorseguro, #vamosciudadanos, #lahistorialaescribestú, and #porespaña) in percentage. notice how the activity ceases after the election day. immediately after the end of the a campaign, there is remarkable surge of interest in the next campaign, as previously shown in figures and . our unattended tracking method eliminates the need to intervene; as soon as the new slogans are revealed, they are captured (figure ) just like in the previous campaign. a couple of things are worth mentioning here in any case. first, there was, in general, less interest in the m campaign than in the a from a communication point of view. second, the hashtags associated with the m process had, in general, little to do with those used during the a, which again, would have complicated early tracking of these. another case of interest is depicted in figure , with a side-by-side comparison between the official slogan of the party (#porespaña, for spain) and their preferred hashtag on social media (#españaviva, the living spain), which became the number one hashtag in % of the time windows (table ). this basically implies that, if only the “official” slogans had been followed, the extraction would have resulted in , tweets but failed to extract , tweets containing the #españaviva hashtag. this is just another example of an unpredictable topic that our method did capture which, in this particular example, coincides with the most used hashtag over the four months. appl. sci. , , of figure . calendar heatmap for the official slogan per party (top parties) during the european/local elections campaign. figure . side-by-side comparison between vox’ official slogan (#porespaña) and the most used hashtag on social media during the campaign (#españaviva). let us focus on the activity related to psoe—the party that won the elections—and follow the automatic evolution of their hashtags over time. as figure shows, the st of april marks the highest point for #laespañaquequieres (the spain that you want) where the psoe candidates asked their followers in twitter for suggestions on their candidature, supposedly to include them in their electoral program. the relevancy of this first hashtag quickly went down (without disappearing from the top in many time periods), handing over the baton to the official slogan for the a elections, #hazquepase (make it happen). however, the most notable effect of our method is clear when analyzing the third hashtag, #hicisteisquepasara (you made it happen). it is not only unlikely to predict the winner of the elections, but it is also nearly impossible to guess the hashtag that would be used to celebrate such event, with more than , tweets extracted during the h that followed the announcement of the results. in the fourth place, the then-new slogan for the m electoral process (#siemprehaciadelante, always going forward) greatly gained relevancy from the moment the a elections were over and until the new election process ended. incidentally, some authorities used a misspelling (#siemprehaciaadelante, with a double “a”) which was also captured during a few time windows, and although it was only used in extracted tweets (which could be considered anecdotal versus the , of the correct hashtag), it shows that even in cases where the authorities use misspellings or alternatives to the supposed hashtag, our method would have detected it and tracked it equally. the final calendar heatmap, at the far right in figure , reflects how the explicit message asking for votes—using the hashtag #votapsoe—only has activity coinciding almost perfectly with the campaign periods for both processes (from the th to the th of april and from the th appl. sci. , , of to the th of may) and the day of reflection (the election day eve). for illustrative purposes, the full evolution from the perspective of the extracted tweets is depicted in figure . figure . the evolution of psoe-related hashtags, since the spanish general elections pre-campaign to the european post-campaign. figure . daily relative amount of tweets extracted using the psoe-related hashtags in percentage (#laespañaquequieres, #hazquepase, #hicisteisquepasara, #siemprehaciadelante, and #votapsoe). notice how the activity responds to the electoral processes. . . . televised debates debates are arguably the most relevant events during electoral processes, and in particular, televised leaders’ debates. the conversation during political debates on tv often migrates to the online plane, so it is also relevant to look at the behavior of the unmanned methodology proposed here in regard to the main televised debates that happened during the spanish general election process, which are summarized in table . table . summary of the debates’ hashtags. (*) note that #eldebatedecisivo was not the hashtag for the debate but was widely used for the talk-shows that discussed its outcome. hashtag tv channel date tweets extracted #l neldebate la sexta / / : , #eldebateenrtve tve / / : , #debateatresmedia a /la sexta / / : , #eldebatedecisivo a /la sexta (*) , #debattv tv / / : , appl. sci. , , of during the first weekend of the campaign, a warm-up debate among female candidates—hashtagged with #l neldebate—was held on la sexta noche, a political late night show. then, the two main debates with the leaders of the main parties took place on the nd in the public television (tve) and the rd in atresmedia (a media corporation providing signal to both antena and la sexta tv channels). other regional debates, such as the one on catalan public television (tv ), were also captured; this one on the th of april, in particular, involved the leading candidates for barcelona. besides the detection of the topics themselves (see figure ), a few things are worth considering. first, the wording used in the hashtags is inconsistent, so again, even if the tve debate is tracked with #eldebateenrtve, the atresmedia one shortens the correct sentence “el debate en atresmedia” into #debateatresmedia. second, different languages are captured without the need for adaptation; #debattv , for instance, which is in catalan instead of spanish. third, all events happen during prime time on the nights of their respective days, but the discussion is as important (or, in some cases, even stronger) on the following day (see figure ). therefore, had we tracked the hashtag only during the tv program, at least half of the information would have been lost. finally, notice how the atresmedia debate was actually discussed on talk-shows using a different hashtag (#eldebatedecisivo, the deciding debate); this results in a dual conversation, one much weaker—hashtagged with the “official” #debateatresmedia, only , tweets—and another one which generates much more conversation—hashtagged with the spontaneous #eldebatedecisivo, , tweets. thus, tracking only the official hashtag for the debate would have meant a loss of almost a million tweets containing the bulk of the discussion. figure . calendar heatmap for the multiple televised debates with candidates. figure . daily relative amount of tweets extracted using the hashtags for each political debate in percentage (#l neldebate, #eldebateenrtve, #debateatresmedia, #eldebatedecisivo, and #debattv ). for the purposes of clarity, notice that the y-axis scale is not equal across all hashtags. appl. sci. , , of . . . event detection and tracking detecting events and tracking them is, indeed, one of the objectives of the methodology. in broad terms, the events taking place can either be desired (when they are part of the context under study) or undesired (when they are external phenomena). in figure , three different events are analyzed. the first event, hashtagged with #notredame, refers to the fire that devastated notre-dame de paris cathedral on the afternoon of april . consternation ensued, and most politicians quickly expressed their lament on social media. notice, however, how the tracking happens only during the highest point of global dismay (on the th, with the images of destruction after the fire was extinguished) and swiftly fades afterwards. as soon as the authorities change the subject, the topic—undesired for the political tracking—disappears. a similar case but with a routine event happens with #selectividad, a hashtag devoted to the university entrance exams that take place in june in spain. there are a few periods where the hashtag gains some relevancy among the top topics, corresponding to the dates where the test is held in different regions (so, each region’s politicians direct their posts to their own region’s students), but it also fades right afterwards. figure . calendar heatmap for a few events that happened between april and july , namely #notredame, #selectividad, #pride , and #orgullo . a different case takes place with #pride and #orgullo , two linguistic variants (english and spanish) of the same event, the annual lgbt pride festival. such a topic is not exempt from political content and discussion on social media, especially between conservative and progressive parties. this is reflected in the length of the topic tracking, which lasts for nine days in the first case and two weeks in the second (as expected, the spanish version is used for a longer time). these would be two examples of events that are somehow related to the conversation that is being tracked so such lengthy tracking represents the desired behavior. . . . languages many contexts might include more than one language, especially when a topic is tracked globally. in the case of spain, besides spanish, some regions have their co-official languages. most people in catalonia, for instance, use catalan as their first language and consequently “tweet” in catalan. two of the five top topics, tracked in more than one-fifth of the time periods, were related to the situation in catalonia after the independence referendum and the subsequent trial: #absolució (acquittal) and #freetothom (free everyone), were commonly used together reclaiming the liberation of the pro-independence leaders, as does #llibertatpresospolítics (freedom for the political prisoners). the former two raised their activity at the end of may (figure ) following several simultaneous events: three of the accused leaders were elected in the european elections, and the public prosecutor appl. sci. , , of found the separatist leaders guilty at the end of the trial, all while the winning party hypothetically needed the votes of the nationalists to elect its candidate as president. all these sparked a notable activity among some of the authorities which, even representing only around % of the total accounts tracked, often managed to bring the topic to the top. around , tweets were extracted using these hashtags in catalan, a relevant amount taking into account that they are in a language spoken roughly by % of the spanish population (not to forget the fact that they were recovered during june and july, a period of less activity in general). finally, #vadellibertat (this is about freedom) is also shown as an example of the slogan of a regional party being tracked, in this case, the one used by the catalan party erc. figure . calendar heatmap for #vadellibertat, #llibertatpresospolítics, #absolució, and #freetothom, all related to the catalan nationalist movement. . discussion political campaigns have been the subject of multiple previous works, as highlighted previously. however, this is to our knowledge the first attempt to obtain a dynamically adapted dataset over a period of four months of political campaigning and overall conversation. the prominence on the use of twitter for politics, and the interest that the study of political information awakens is what inspired us to apply our model to the analysis of political discussions in twitter. previous studies analyzed political campaigns using only a few static hashtags or terms; for instance, yakub et al. [ ] used three fixed terms (’trump’, ’clinton’ and ’election ’) to download tweets in the context of the us presidential elections, while lai et al. [ ] used a similar method to track the discussion on the referendum on the reform of the italian constitution. others included expected variations or lists of terms without ensuring their exhaustivity [ , ]. in comparison, during our study of the context of the spanish general and european/local elections, more than , different hashtags were generated by the authorities tracked, with different unique hashtags among the top topics in at least one time window. our research, therefore, proves how previous practices are undesired because, either when choosing a few general terms or when trying to guess potential terms, most of the information can get lost. furthermore, any unexpected relevant event is also left out, as the system is unable to adapt to the newer circumstances, while any potential wrong term is never removed. we have demonstrated that trying to guess hashtags leads to uncertainty; in our case of study, it would have been improbable to guess the terms that appeared throughout appl. sci. , , of the four month tracking, let alone the , different hashtags that were used at some point by the authorities selected. from a different perspective, it is also clear that following the local authorities in the context of the spanish elections has rarely resulted in hashtags or topics that escape the spanish (political) context; therefore, in the absence of methods or data that limit the extraction to a particular region, country, or community, our method seems to provide a reasonable approximation that can help future studies with similar needs. . conclusions our work shows how the described method is able to follow the conversation in a community or context of interest, monitoring the labels (hashtags) that the related “authorities” adopt in their scope of activity online, and adjusting such tracking as their messages and topics vary, even if they do so in a dramatic manner. we also demonstrated how the method is robust when faced with potential disruptions while avoiding the need to compile an initial list of “seed” words that could either bias or underestimate the actual conversation taking place. here, term selection does not depend on what is predicted by the researcher; instead, it is determined by the terms most used by the “authorities” together with the relative relevancy of each of them, a process that requires no external human intervention. the application of this method could, therefore, enrich any work that seeks to track the conversation around a topic without manual intervention. this approach reduces bias as well as the manual effort required when tracking a particular event—such as a debate—or other situation. the framework provided is applicable not only to politics but also to any other context, and therefore, its implications for research on social media, in general, are vast. additionally, it must be noted that this mechanism is not limited to twitter; with the proper adaptation, it could be applied to other sns with equivalent characteristics. in summary: • the proposed methodology is able to follow the conversation around a topic and optimize its tracking, with a quick adaptation and no need for human supervision; • the methodology is also robust against undesired events, misspellings, and the use of different languages and alternative terms; • fixed hashtag selection limits the information that researchers might be able to extract; it is desirable to adopt a flexible and dynamic approach. a few restrictions that limit this methodology should be noted. the first one is that an accurate and expert selection of the authorities is required. the researcher must, therefore, identify the relevant users in the discussion with care. in the case of politics, which was explored in our case study, selection is arguably straightforward as politicians, candidates, and political parties clearly lead the discourse around such matters. other contexts, however, might have less evident leaders of opinion. on the other hand, there are a few parameters that give flexibility to the system (length of the time window, weight, stop words, number of topics, etc.), but this is a double-edged sword as their determination is critical for the proper functioning of the tracking. therefore, testing is suggested before committing to a full-scale extraction, either in other smaller cases or in comparable cases when the uniqueness of the event does not allow for testing in the exact same context. dynamically adapting the list of authorities (adding or removing users from that set as things change over time) will be considered in future work, as especially in long-term tracking, some users might lose relevancy (e.g., candidates that have not been elected or have resigned), while others not included in the initial set might rise in relevancy (e.g., influential third parties or surprise elements). identifying the most relevant users in a particular period [ ] could mean adding or removing members from the list. additionally, and as appropriate parameter setting is critical to generalize the applicability appl. sci. , , of of the model, we will explore how these parameters can be assessed and their results compared in order to optimize their values in a minimally invasive way. author contributions: conceptualization, m.m.-c. and s.s.-a.; formal analysis, m.m.-c.; investigation, m.m.-c.; methodology, m.m.-c. and s.s.-a.; software, m.m.-c.; supervision, s.s.-a., e.g.-b. and m.-Á.s.; validation, s.s.-a., e.g.-b. and m.-Á.s.; visualization, m.m.-c.; writing—original draft, m.m.-c.; writing—review & editing, s.s.-a., e.g.-b. and m.-Á.s. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. abbreviations the following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: sns social networking services api application programming interface psoe partido socialista obrero español pp partido popular erc esquerra republicana de catalunya references . turcotte, j.; york, c.; irving, j.; scholl, r.m.; pingree, r.j. news recommendations from social media opinion leaders: effects on media trust and information seeking. j. comput. mediat. commun. , , – . 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[crossref] c© by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /ssrn. http:// rzy ul pt hv dqyuf.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/ / / .pdf http:// rzy ul pt hv dqyuf.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/ / / .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /dta- - - http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	background 	social media, topics, and trends 	topic tracking 	method description 	set of authorities 	activity monitor 	list of hashtags 	tweet collection 	results 	political context and background 	selection of authorities 	experimental settings 	experimental results 	general tracking 	electoral campaign 	televised debates 	event detection and tracking 	languages 	discussion 	conclusions 	references impact of a training programme on police attitudes towards victims of rape: a randomised controlled trial impact of a training programme on police attitudes towards victims of rape: a randomised controlled trial zoe mckee & katrin mueller-johnson & heather strang # the author(s) abstract research question does an in-service training programme designed to address the attitudes of student officers, uniformed response officers and specialist rape crime investigators towards victims of rape change their perspective on adult victims, both male and female, who report rape offences? data police officers from four separate policing roles completed questionnaires de- signed to measure their attitudes towards victims of rape. the questions were already validated and used four specific subscales: ‘asked for it’, ‘didn’t mean to’, ‘it wasn’t really rape’ and ‘s/he lied’. two questionnaires, one focused on male victims and one on females, were administered at different points in time. methods this randomised controlled trial used a block design, randomly assigning eligible police officers to treatment and control conditions within each of four groups. participants were grouped as rape detectives (n = ), uniformed response officers in urban areas (n = ); uniformed response officers in rural areas (n = ) and student officers (n = ). officers in the treatment condition undertook a bespoke training programme, based on an online college of policing e-learning programme, enhanced with audio and video content, discussion groups and short online webinar sessions delivered by a psychologist specialising in sexual offending. both groups were sur- veyed before and after the treatment group was trained. findings the training programme resulted in positive attitude changes towards male and female rape victims when responses are combined across all four police groups (but not within all groups separately) compared with the attitudes of those who did not undertake the training. effects were found for both levels of rape myth acceptance and assessment of victim credibility. the effect was largest for the subscales ‘s/he lied’ and ‘it wasn’t really rape’. training had more effect on attitudes towards female victims than towards males and more effect on uniformed response officers than on other categories of officers. conclusion the use of this mixed online webinar and in-person discussion group training delivery was effective in changing attitudes towards rape victims on issues relating to the treatment of people who report being raped. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * heather strang hs @cam.ac.uk extended author information available on the last page of the article published online: april cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:hs @cam.ac.uk keywords rape myth . rape . randomised controlled trial . victim credibility. police attitudes . sexual crime introduction rape is a paradox because, so often, victims are blamed for the offence (maier ). perceptions of rape can be predisposed to stereotype, bias and gender prejudice which may contribute to the high attrition rate at every stage of the justice system. only an estimated % of rape victims report the crime to the police (ministry of justice ), though even this figure should be interpreted cautiously. russell and hand ( ) suggest that the true number of individuals who do not report a sexual offence to the police may be unquantifiable. among the most common reasons victims do not report rape, two stand out: self- blaming attitudes and victim belief that others would blame the them (grubb and turner ). these factors are connected to problematic assumptions about what constitutes a ‘typical rape’ and the likely behaviour of victims and perpetrators. these attitudes are often referred to collectively as ‘rape myths’ (maier ), which distort the antecedents and consequences of the act. addressing these attitudes and beliefs may contribute to closing the ‘justice gap’ (temkin and krahe ) for victims of rape. beliefs and attitudes of officers given that police officers are the first contact victims of serious sexual offences have with the criminal justice system, it is especially important if, as temkin and krahe ( ) argue, adherence to rape stereotypes affects officers’ judgement and approach to investigations. while many factors may influence officers’ attitudes towards rape, parratt and pina ( ) found that those who displayed a higher level of rape myth endorsement were likely to perceive a victim as less credible, more responsible and attribute less blame to perpetrators of serious sexual offending. moreover, male officers tended to hold more negative attitudes towards victims than female officers (page ; brown and king ; suarez and gadalla ), and brown and king ( ) found no difference between police officers’ stereotypical attitudes and a sample of the wider (student) public. research findings suggest that rape myths can create an impact on decisions to report, perpetrate or prosecute. to ameliorate negative attitudes and adherence to rape myth attitudes among police officers, anderson and whiston ( ) suggest that the remedy lies in education and training. yet little is known about the impact of police training and the resulting effects on attitudes and behaviour towards rape victims in england and wales (sleath and bull ) and even less about its value for the police service of northern ireland (psni). the psni training programme—targeting attitudes towards rape myths the purpose of developing and testing the psni training programme was to help trainees explore and challenge misconceptions about rape, its impact on victims and the subsequent investigative process. an existing online course provided the foundation cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – for the psni test. this course was provided by the college of policing (cop) ncalt (national centre for applied learning and technologies) and is available to all uk police forces utilising ncalt. prior to the study, within the psni the online course was only ever viewed a small number of times by trainers—not by trainees. psni took the learning aims of the online package and themed a programme around these, utilising discussion, theory, audio and video content, as well as online webinar sessions delivered by dr. nina burrowes, a psychologist specialising in sexual offending and open source material from psychotherapist, dr. zoe lodrick. in collab- oration with the cambridge university police executive programme, psni then tested the course in a randomised controlled trial. research question the research question for this trial was whether officers who received the training would change their attitudes towards rape myth acceptance more than those who did not receive the training. the question was explored with four groups of officers in four different roles, so that psni could see whether the effect of the course varied by the kind of work the officers were doing. data this study was conducted within the police service of northern ireland (psni) between april and september . participants were serving officers and student officers from across the entire psni geographical area as follows: specialist rape officers (n = ), uniformed response officers in urban locations (n = ), uniform response officers in rural locations (n = ) and student officers (n = ). measures of attitudes were taken via a survey questionnaire for both the treatment and control groups at baseline (t ), again for the treatment group immediately after the -h training session (t ) and again for both groups weeks later (t ). the data used to evaluate the effects of the training programme consisted of the responses of the officers in the trainee group at t , t and t , and in the control group at t and t . outcome survey: measuring attitudes of rape myth acceptance the outcome measure for this training was the degree of ‘rape myth acceptance’ (rma) participants in this study showed. rma is understood to endorse generally false, but persistently held, attitudes and beliefs (temkin and krahe ; lonsway and fitzgerald ). over the past years, various tools have been developed to measure rma. the instrument used in this current research builds on scales that have been validated by demonstrating high levels of reliability (mcmahon and farmer ). the framework uses four subscales: she (or he) asked for it; it wasn’t really rape; he did not mean to; she (or he) lied. the answer format in the -item questionnaire, was, for each item, a five-point likert scale, ranging from = ‘strongly agree’ to = ‘strongly disagree’. each item was part of one of these four subscales. the items are included cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – in the appendix to this article. in this study, a higher score was coded as a greater rejection of rape myths. subscale :‘s/he asked for it’ ( items, maximum score = ; cronbach’s alpha female version = . ; cronbach’s alpha male version = . ) this myth suggests that victims cause their rape through dress, demeanour, being a certain ‘type’, initiating sexual intimacy and or consuming alcohol (burt ; lonsway and fitzgerald ; lovett and horvarth ). subscale : ‘he didn’t mean to’ ( items, maximum score = ; cronbach’s alpha female version = . ; cronbach’s alpha male version = . ) this myth refers both to a general excusing of male perpetrator behaviour and to the specific role of intoxication. the latter suggests that victims who are intoxicated are more responsible for the rape than perpetrators, who are credited as being less respon- sible because of alcohol consumption (mcmahon and farmer ). subscale : ‘it wasn’t really rape’ ( items, maximum score = ; cronbach’s alpha female version = . ; cronbach’s alpha male version = . ) the collective myths in this category refer to assumptions about physical force used by the perpetrator, injuries sustained by the victim or the degree of resistance, none of which need exist for a rape to take place. subscale : ‘s/he lied’ ( items, maximum score = ; cronbach’s alpha female version = . ; cronbach’s alpha male version = . ) this myth refers to assumptions about the number of false reports of rape made by victims, when it has been estimated that only % of reports to the police are false (lonsway and fitzgerald ). the survey was the subject of peer review and pilot with officers not involved in the experiment. the original version by mcmahon and farmer ( ) focused only on female victims of rape, so a second survey for male victims was developed, utilising the same questions with wording changes made for victim gender. the overall scale had a high level of reliability for both the female version (cronbach’s alpha at baseline = . ) and the male version (cronbach’s alpha at baseline = . ). methods the research design was a randomised complete block design (rcbd) (ariel and farrington ), in which officers were allocated randomly to either treatment or control within the four pre-identified blocks. the criterion for the blocking process related to officer role, whereby the subgroups were intended to be as homogenous as possible. in each subgroup, half of the participants were randomly assigned to receive the training programme. cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – prior to randomisation within each of the four blocks, a further condition in the form of pairing based on gender was used to generate equal gender distributions within the t and c groups of each of the four block random assignments. the only exception to the gender pairing was for the student officer group, which had only seven females in the cohort. for the student officers, simple random assignment was utilised to select trainees and controls. once matched (or not), random assignment was conducted using a web-based random number table (bachman and schutt ). the characteristics of the four blocks are as follows: block : specialist rape crime detectives already working in the field of rape crime across the organisation. they had varying degrees of experience and training in working with victims and cases of sexual violence. blocks and : urban and rural frontline uniformed officers who provide initial response to sexual crime incidents and had limited prior training in investigations of sexual offences. for the purposes of this experiment, they were only eligible if they had served with a minimum of year’s operational experience. block : student officers newly appointed to the police service and in the very early stages of training in a foundation programme. their first involvement in the experiment was on day of their foundation recruit training programme. the administration of the survey questions for the treatment group was consistent at t and t , and the environment and processes were well controlled. both treat- ment and control group participants were asked to attend specific locations and times to complete the survey, when the questionnaires were administered. both groups were administered both questionnaires: one questionnaire was female- victim-focused and the other male-victim-focused. with the exception of the student officers, all interviews took place within their normal paid shift pattern. to complete the student group surveys, students remained behind after their working day, on a voluntary basis to participate. participants were supervised during completion of the survey and were instructed that participation was anonymous and voluntary. at t , treatment and control groups were at the same location but separated, and both had minimal information about the purpose of the survey. at t , immediately after the training, only the treatment group answered the survey questions again. in the -week follow-up at t , due to operational impact and cost, the surveys were administered to both treatment and control operational officers by appointment at their individual work sites, individually or in small groups at the start of shift. the surveys were administered by officers not involved in the research project. whilst not ideal, it was the best that could be done in the circumstances. however, the student officers at t were brought to a single location, and the same approach used at t was employed. findings overall, the findings indicate the training programme resulted in positive changes in officer attitudes towards male and female rape victims in terms of reducing rape myth acceptance and increasing victim credibility (the latter results are not reported in this article). these effects were largest for the rape myth acceptance subscales ‘s/he lied’ and ‘not rape’. officers, particularly males, differed in their attitudes towards male and female rape victims, displaying a higher level of rejection cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – of rape myths for male victims than for female victims. there was also minimal decay effect between t and t for those in the treatment group. difference in attitudes between groups of officers at t (baseline) at baseline, participants (officers and students) completed the survey ( in the treatment group and in the control group), with completion rates of % for the treatment group and % for the control group. the results showed the treatment and control groups were generally equivalent at baseline across all blocks (see table and table ), with no significant differences between the attitude scales of t and c officers. effectiveness of the training programme: t –t differences in assessing effectiveness, the responses at t and t were compared for both treatment and control groups for the male victim and female victim surveys. table shows that for all treatment and control officers combined across the four blocks, the reduction in rape myth acceptance for female victims was significantly and substantially greater for treatment officers than for control officers. this greater change for the t group was found for all four of the scales for attitudes towards female victims. table shows t –t changes in attitudes towards male victims. in this survey, only two of the four dimensions showed more change for the treatment group than the control group: “he didn’t mean to, and “he lied.” table total sample t female victim survey female survey t treatment control mean sd n mean sd n signif. test effect size subscale she asked for it . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . . subscale he did not mean to . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . subscale not rape . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . . subscale she lied . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . . − . table total sample t male victim survey male victim survey t treatment control mean sd n mean sd n signif. test effect size subscale —asked for it . . . . t ( ) = −. p = . − . subscale —didn’t mean to . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . subscale —not rape . . . . t ( ) = . p = . . subscale —he lied . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – ta b le t ot al sa m pl e fe m al e vi ct im su rv ey t – t di ff er en ce f em al e su rv ey t – t di ff er en ce t re at m en t c on tr ol c on fi d en ce in te rv al m ea n d if f s d n m ea n di ff s d n t te st t c o he n’ s d l o w er u p p er s ub sc al e : s he as ke d fo r it − . . − . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . − . . s ub sc al e : h e di d n ot m ea n to − . . − . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . − . − . s ub sc al e : n o t ra p e − . . . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . − . − . s ub sc al e : s he li ed − . . − . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . − . − . cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – ta b le t ot al sa m pl e m al e v ic ti m su rv ey t – t di ff er en ce m al e su rv ey t – t di ff er en ce t re at m en t c o nt ro l c o nf id en ti al in te rv al m ea n d if f s d n m ea n di ff s d n t -t es t c o he ns d l ow er u pp er s u bs ca le h e as k ed fo r it − . . − . . t ( ) = − . p = . . − . . s u bs ca le h e di d no t m ea n to − . . − . . t ( ) = − . p = . − . − . − . s u bs ca le n ot ra p e − . . . . t ( ) = − . p = − . − . . s ub sc al e h e li ed − . . − . − . t ( ) = − . p = . − . . − . cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – specific training effects based on officer group rape specialist officer specialist officers in the treatment group did not show a statistically significant higher rejection than nontrainee controls of any of the four rape myths, following training, for either the male or female victim survey. this may be due to the fact they already have a sound knowledge, are trained to a higher level and work within the arena of sexual crime daily. they may also have an increased likelihood to respond more desirably given this is their specific arena of work. it is also possible that specialist officers are more ‘jaded’ in their views and not as open to change, due to the level of daily exposure to victims of rape. the potential for presenting as ‘desensitised’ is much higher for this group of officers (stamm ; figley ). fig. training relating to female victims: forest graph of effect sizes (cohen’s d) and confidence intervals, with the yellow diamond showing the overall effect size across all measures treated equally cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – frontline rural for both male and female victims, the training only had discernible impact on rural officers for one of the four subscales: the ‘s/he lied’ subscale (p = . ; p = . , es = – . ). there was no significant difference for the other subscales. frontline urban for female victims, the training had a clear impact on the attitudes of urban officers for the ‘not rape’ (p = . , es = − . ) and ‘she lied’ subscales (p = . , es = − . ); whilst for male victims of rape, there was clear impact only for the ‘he lied’ subscale (p = . , es = − . ). fig. training relating to male victims: forest graph of effect sizes (cohen’s d) and confidence intervals, with the yellow diamond showing the overall effect size across all measures treated equally cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – student officers there was no statistically significant training effect on the attitudes of student officers. this may be due to the fact they already had not yet been influenced by the cultural or group influence associated with policing or developed specific behaviours, secondary to attitudes due to their lack of exposure to these victim types (garner ). the t –t difference-in-difference effects of training in each of the four blocks, for each of the four measures, are presented in fig. . this figure uses a “forest graph” to display the point estimate of the effect size, which is larger when it lies further away from the centre vertical line. the graph also shows the extent of uncertainty around each effect size, with the horizontal line on either side of the point estimate showing more uncertainty when it is wider, and less uncertainty when it is smaller, on both sides of the estimated effect size. decay measurement of within-treatment-group decay was taken from the responses at t (immediately after training) compared with those weeks later (t ) (fig ). whilst there is usually an expectation of decay in training over time (blume et al. ), this analysis revealed only a minimal level of learning decay among those who experienced the training. the exception here was the student group, which was unsurprising given that the students were new to the police training environment and were the subject of a variety of new learning experiences in weeks between t and t . they also had no reference point in terms of rape victim contact or experience from which to draw. these findings indicate that the training had a more lasting impact across the specialist and frontline officers. more importantly, there was no decay in the areas where training had the most impact, the ‘s/he lied’ subscale. however, in their review of training outcomes from a range of studies, parratt and pina ( ) found that when training effects did occur, they did not usually last long. if this experiment were to be repeated, a worthwhile endeavour would be to conduct a – -month follow-up survey, to test the lasting impact of the training further. conclusions rape is a sensitive and controversial topic (parratt and pina ), so any kind of self- report attitude survey has a risk that respondents will answer in a ‘politically correct’ way (campbell ). furthermore, there is a risk that participating officers may feel constrained to respond in a socially desirable way. for this reason, participants were given the opportunity to disengage at any stage of the experiment, and this happened with one participant at inception of the study. the response of police has been found to directly affect victims’ willingness to engage in the criminal justice process (jordan ). although this study shows the effects of the training on rape myth attitudes is not uniform, the subscales that showed the greatest change (‘not rape’ and ‘s/he lied’) are arguably the most important. it is these two subscales that most directly impact the victim experience. cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – the rape myths associated with the ‘lied’ subscale reflect attitudes that lend them- selves to victim blaming (grubb and turner ; o’keefe et al. ) and establish disbelief as the default position (o’keefe et al. ). these attitudes can be proactively addressed by dealing with rape myth acceptance in police officers who have the most contact with victims of rape (sleath and bull ). at the initial stage, these are the frontline officers the group for whom the training appeared to have the greatest impact in this experiment. this result may indicate a greater willingness and openness to change or a gap not already addressed by the training (or lack of it) previously received. interestingly, the findings of no difference in the training effect in both the student and specialist officer cohorts are reflected in the findings of sleath and bull ( ). in their study of british officers, sleath and bull ( ) found that there was no difference between officers who had specialist training and those who did not in terms of results relating to victim blaming. however, they did find differences in perpetrator blaming, a result that was evident in this study. it is important to note that there was a change in attitude from t to t for the control groups as well as the treatment groups. this finding is interesting and somewhat unexpected, but it may be attributed to several factors. the study was conducted against a wider social backdrop that cannot be ignored: this included a high profile, -week rape trial involving prominent sporting figures and the consequent launch of a review of sexual crime through the criminal justice process in northern ireland. at the time of the rct, the #metoo movement was also high on the social agenda. the collapse of several high-profile rape cases in england, public protest resulting from the -week trial as well as extensive media, social media and public commentary may also have played a part in influencing attitudes. there may also have been a diffusion effect to the officers in the control groups from their colleagues who received the training. finally, if attitudes of police officers can be positively changed through training as shown in this study, for both male and female victims, then the resulting positive experience for victims could potentially be substantial. limitations sample size whilst having more cases might theoretically increase statistical power, the increased heterogeneity in a more diverse pool of participants may militate against size as a simple remedy (weisburd et al. ). despite the small sample sizes in this study, there were high rates of response and the rbd enhanced statistical power. “learned response” the administration of surveys was consistent at t and t , and the environment and processes were well controlled. however, given that the same survey was administered six times ( female and male victim surveys) for the treatment groups and four for the control groups (for whom no t was administered), there was a risk that a ‘learned response’ may apply and affect the outcomes. despite short breaks administered between each gender survey, the female survey was always administered first. whilst cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – this did maintain consistency, it may have been beneficial to alter the sequence of delivery and or the sequence of questions or presentation of the survey. with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been beneficial to have a t response from the control groups to provide more value and completeness for the analysis. the training programme designed specifically for this study, much time and effort were spent on the planning of the -h programme, with emphasis on the concepts, principles and techniques, as advocated by kirkpatrick and kirkpatrick et al. ( ). however, it was not subjected to a formal pilot period or external evaluation. despite its positive effect, this is assessed as a limitation. however, this study itself may now act as an evaluative tool for the training going forward, particularly given that little is known about the impact of police training in general and the resultant impact on attitudes and behaviour of officers (sleath and bull ). the nature of sexual crime rape is a sensitive and controversial topic (parratt and pina ). the style of a self- report survey may not always be conducive to establishing the nuances of sexual crime, and there is risk that respondents will answer in a ‘politically correct’ way (campbell ). a further issue, as highlighted by page ( ), was the potential propensity of officers to respond in a socially desirable way. this is the reason a social desirability scale (crowne and marlowe ) was used (not reported in this article). implications for research and policy this study revealed that specialist officers who deal directly with the overall investigation and engage most with victims did not benefit significantly from the training. the argument could be made that they had less to learn given their levels of victim exposure and training for their role. their lack of significant improvement in attitudinal response may also be due to their having higher levels of desensitisation and less willingness to change. notably, they are the group of officers most likely to investigate false reports of rape, and this may contribute to holding higher levels of disbelief of rape victims (o’keefe et al. ). conversely, it could be argued that as detectives, they are trained to be more probing and questioning of circumstances and to go where the evidence takes them. this research has also shown that the ‘pracademic’ approach is valuable and provides a robust and defensible contribution to the neglected arena of sexual crime research (jordan ), particularly in northern ireland, and more research in this area should be encouraged. sherman ( ) has warned that failure to recognise public views and seriousness of harm has the potential to destabilise police legitimacy. in this case, harm may be caused by the police response and their attitude towards victims of rape, not only from a criminal justice perspective but from a therapeutic one. reviewing and assessing available research to guide practice will support the institutionalisation of evidence- based policing (lum et al. ). we can therefore conclude that in the absence of any better plan for increasing the proportion of rapes that are accepted for prosecution, this programme may at least help cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – officers more readily to reject rape myths in their initial contact with victims. given the lack of programme effects with trainee officers and specialist rape officers, we can also show evidence about the most effective timing and targets of this short course of training: uniformed response officers with at least year of service in frontline operations. acknowledgements the first author would like to acknowledge the police service of northern ireland and the institute of criminology, university of cambridge, for their support of the research on which this article is based. the research was led by the first author as a thesis submitted to the university of cambridge in partial completion of the master of studies in applied criminology and police management at the police executive programme, institute of criminology. appendix likert scale rating: = strongly agree; = agree; = neutral; = disagree; = strongly disagree. construct of the subscales consisted of the following questions (adapted in their wording for the male survey) subscale : she asked for it (highest score achievable was ) . if a girl is raped while she is drunk, she is at least somewhat responsible for letting things get out of control. . when girls go to parties, wearing slutty clothes, they are asking for trouble. . if a girl goes to a room with a guy at a party, it is her own fault she is raped. . if a girl acts like a slut, eventually she is going to get into trouble. . when girls are raped, it’s often because the way they said ‘no’ was unclear. . if a girl initiates kissing or hooking up, she should not be surprised if a guy assumes she wants to have sex. subscale : he did not mean to (highest score achievable was ) . when guys rape, it is usually because of their strong desire for sex. . guys do not usually intend to force sex on a girl, but sometimes they get too sexually carried away. . rape happens when a guy’s sex drive gets out of control. . if a guy is drunk, he might rape someone unintentionally. . it should not be considered rape if a guy is drunk and did not realise what he was doing. . if both people are drunk, it cannot be rape. subscale : not rape (highest score achievable was ) . if a girl does not physically resist sex—even if protesting verbally—it cannot be considered rape. . if a girl does not fight back, you cannot really say it was rape. cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – . a rape probably does not happen if the girl has no marks or bruises. . if the accused ‘rapist’ does not use a weapon, you really cannot call it a rape. . if a girl does not say “no” she cannot claim rape. subscale : she lied (highest score achievable was ) . a lot of times, girls who say they were raped agreed to have sex and then regret it. . rape accusations are often used as a way of getting back at guys. . a lot of times, girls who say they were raped often led the guy on and then had regrets . a lot of times, girls who claim they were raped just have emotional problems. . girls who are caught cheating on their boyfriends sometimes claim that it was a rape. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references anderson, l. a. and whiston, s. c. 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( ). an updated measure for assessing subtle rape myths. social work research, ( ), – . ministry of justice ( ). official statistics: an overview of sexual offending in england and wales. statistical bulletin office for national statistics. o’keefe, s., brown, j. m., & lyons, e. ( ). seeking proof or truth: naturalistic decision-making by police officers when consideration rape allegations. in m. horvarth & j. brown (eds.), ( ) rape: challenging contemporary thinking. devon: willen. page, a. d. ( ). behind the blue line: investigating police officers’ attitudes toward rape. journal of police and community psychology, volume, , – . page, a. d. ( ). judging women and defining crime: police officers' attitudes toward women and rape. sociological spectrum, ( ), – . parratt, k. a., and pina, a. ( ) from real rape to real justice: a systematic review of police officers rape myth beliefs. aggression and violent behavior. may/june . volume , p – . russell, k j. and hand, cj. ( ) rape myth acceptance, victim blame attribution and just world beliefs: a rapid evidence assessment. aggression and violent behavior pp – . sherman, l. w. ( ). the rise of evidence-based policing: targeting, testing and tracking. in m. tonry (ed.), crime and justice in america, – , crime and justice: a review of research (vol. , pp. – ). chicago: university of chicago press. sleath, e., & bull, r. ( ). comparing rape victim and perpetrator blaming in a police officer sample: differences between police officers with and without special training. criminal justice and behavior, ( ), – . stamm, b. h. ( ). the proqol manual. the professional quality of life scale: compassion satisfaction, burnout & compassion fatigue/secondary trauma scales. idaho: sidran press. retrieved st november from: http://www.compassionfatigue.org/pages/proqolmanualoct .pdf. suarez, e., & gadalla, t. m. ( ). stop blaming the victim: a meta-analysis on rape myths. journal of interpersonal violence, ( ), – . temkin, j., & krahe, b. ( ). sexual assault and the justice gap: a question of attitude. north america: hart. weisburd, d., petrosino, a., & mason, g. ( ). design sensitivity in criminal justice experiments. crime and justice: a review of research, , – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / zoe mckee is a detective chief inspector in the police service of northern ireland. katrin mueller-johnson is an associate professor of criminology at the centre for criminology, university of oxford. heather strang is director of the lee centre of experimental criminology, institute of criminology, university of cambridge. affiliations zoe mckee & katrin mueller-johnson & heather strang zoe mckee zoe.mckee@psni.pnn.police.uk police service of northern ireland, belfast, uk centre for criminology, university of oxford, oxford, uk institute of criminology, university of cambridge, cambridge, uk cambridge journal of evidence-based policing ( ) : – 	impact of a training programme on police attitudes towards victims of rape: a randomised controlled trial 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	abstract 	introduction 	beliefs and attitudes of officers 	the psni training programme—targeting attitudes towards rape myths 	research question 	data 	outcome survey: measuring attitudes of rape myth acceptance 	methods 	difference in attitudes between groups of officers at t (baseline) 	effectiveness of the training programme: t –t differences 	specific training effects based on officer group 	rape specialist officer 	frontline rural 	frontline urban 	student officers 	decay 	conclusions 	limitations 	sample size 	“learned response” 	the training programme 	the nature of sexual crime 	implications for research and policy 	appendix 	references design and reporting modifications in industry-sponsored comparative psychopharmacology trials daniel j. safer, m.d. this review of recently published pharmaceutical industry–sponsored comparative psychotropic drug trials aims to classify apparent design and reporting modifications that favor the sponsor’s product. the modifications have been grouped into discrete categories, and representative examples of each are presented. strong circumstantial evidence suggests that marketing goals led to these adjustments. the consequences of marketing influences on comparative psychopharmacology trials are discussed in terms of conflicts of interest, the integrity of the scientific literature, and costs to consumers, as well as their impact on physician practice. —j nerv ment dis : – , occasionally, a pharmaceutical product enters the market that has some distinct advantages over its predecessors. soon thereafter, other companies manufacture and patent a similar drug, referred to as a me-too drug. then, an intense competition for market share develops for which the drug’s price is not the central issue (kessler et al., ; tarabusi and vickery, ). an important aspect of this com- petition is the publication of clinical trials showing the superiority of one drug over another that has a niche in the same market. the purpose of that re- search is not only to show the relative superiority of the company’s product, but also to show the draw- backs of the competing drug. the resulting publication of pharmaceutical com- pany–sponsored comparative drug research now oc- cupies a big share of the medical literature. it is fueled by marketing aims, so it is no wonder that an estimated to % of comparative drug treatment studies funded by pharmaceutical companies yield results that are favorable to their company’s product (cho and bero, ; davidson, ). furthermore, such sponsored research generally shows their product to be safer than its rival (mandelkern, ; rochon et al., b). to achieve the aim of demonstrating comparative superiority, certain design adjustments and reporting modifications are frequently utilized. these can in- clude the following: ) using a dose of the comparable drug that is outside of the standard clinical range, ) altering the usual dosing schedule of the competing drug, ) using misleading research measurement scales, ) picking endpoints post hoc, ) masking un- favorable side effects, ) repeatedly publishing the same or similar findings for impact, ) selectively high- lighting findings favorable to the sponsor, ) editorial- izing in the abstract, ) publishing the obvious, ) statistical obfuscation, ) selecting subjects and a time frame designed to achieve a favorable outcome, ) withholding unfavorable results, and ) masked sponsorship. these research modifications will be presented in this review in more detail with examples. then, the broader and untoward ramifications of competitive drug company–sponsored clinical research will be presented. this review of the psychopharmacology literature, primarily from the u.s., is selective and does not aim to present a comprehensive or a balanced perspec- tive of all pharmaceutical company–sponsored psych- otropic research. some have argued that bias in the literature is not infrequent and includes placebo- controlled registration trials and some government- sponsored research (conley, ; gorelick, ; moynihan, ). nonetheless, this report focuses on industry-sponsored comparative trials because these contain far more numerous and prominent examples of design and reporting modifications and because industry-sponsored studies now dominate the compar- ative drug trial literature (angell, ; davidoff, ). design adjustments and reporting modifications using doses outside the usual range for competitive advantage an obvious example of drug company–sponsored research designed to prove a point is that of a sec- departments of psychiatry and pediatrics, johns hopkins university school of medicine, baltimore, dunmanway, dundalk, md . send reprint requests to dr. safer. - / / – vol. , no. the journal of nervous and mental disease printed in u.s.a. copyright © by lippincott williams & wilkins doi: . / .nmd. . . d ond-generation neuroleptic compared to a relatively high dose of haloperidol. at least eight studies spon- sored by three different drug companies have com- pared their second-generation neuroleptic drug to a fixed high dose of haloperidol of mg per day (chouinard et al., ; deo et al., ; emsley ; goldstein et al., ; marder and meibach, ; simpson and lindenmeyer, ) or to an av- erage haloperidol dose greater than mg per day (lapierre et al., ; patris et al., ). using such an unusually high dose virtually ensures that the second-generation product will have fewer extrapy- ramidal side effects (eps) than haloperidol. in com- parative studies between second-generation neuro- leptics, unusually high fixed or average doses of risperidone ( . and mg/day) have also been used to achieve similar results (peuskens et al., ; tran et al., b). doses of haloperidol exceeding the customary lev- els of to mg/day produce no better clinical results than do doses above that range (baldessarini et al., ; mc evoy et al., ; rifkin et al., ), but they induce more eps (mc evoy et al., ; rosebush and mazurek, : stone et al., ; wong et al., ) and lead to far more treatment drop-outs (beasley et al., ; chouinard et al., ; tollefson et al., b; van putten et al., ). likewise, doses of risperidone above mg/day pro- duce more side effects and no greater therapeutic results than standard doses of to mg/day (love et al., ; nyberg et al., ). furthermore, a recent meta-analysis clearly revealed that doses of haloper- idol greater than mg/day produced significantly fewer favorable symptom scores than haloperidol at doses of less than mg/day (geddes et al., ). substantially altering the dose schedule of the comparison drug for competitive advantage commercially sponsored studies comparing two antidepressant drugs often schedule an unusually rapid and substantial dose increase in the one not manufactured by the sponsoring company. for ex- ample, in comparative studies of antidepressants, the dose of fluoxetine was increased to mg/day in over one half of the subjects at weeks (geerts et al., ), to an average of mg/day during weeks to (rudolph and feiger, ), and to an average of mg/day in of the subjects at weeks (armitage et al., ). likewise, sertraline was in- creased to an average of mg/day at weeks (feiger et al., ), and paroxetine was increased to mg/day in one third of the cases by weeks (kiev and feiger, ). doses and dose schedules beyond the usual range, particularly early in treatment, char- acteristically bring an increased rate of side ef- fects—as was the case in the studies referred to above. sometimes in comparative studies, the company- supported protocol used a relatively low dose of its own sponsored drug or the competing drug to accen- tuate efficacy or side effect differences from its rival. examples include a slightly high but reasonable mean dose of . mg/day of olanzapine compared with a clearly substandard mean dose of mg/day of clo- zapine for weeks through (bitter et al., ), and a low mean dose of mg/day of fluvoxamine compared to a moderately high mean dose of mg/day of fluoxetine after week (rapaport et al., ). another skewed design can be achieved by altering the customary timing of the drug adminis- tration. for example, in one study comparing parox- etine with amitriptyline, the amitriptyline was ad- ministered twice daily, which led to a prominent degree of daytime sleepiness (christiansen et al., ). using self-serving measurement scales and making misleading conclusions from measurement findings some researchers use unpublished rating scales, and as a group, these are said to constitute “a major source of bias in randomized controlled clinical tri- als” (marshall et al., ). clearly, industry-spon- sored researchers use rating scales that will attain the most favorable result for their product (sheehan, ). in studies of risperidone versus placebo and haloper- idol, drug company–sponsored researchers utilized the “worst eps score” to compare differential eps changes (chouinard et al., ; lemmens et al., ; marder and meibach, ; simpson and lindenmeyer, ). they reported that after a brief washout period, risperidone at doses of to mg/day given to chroni- cally medicated schizophrenic patients evidenced the same degree of eps as placebo. the company’s mar- keting personnel widely circulated this result (janssen pharmaceutica research foundation, ; borison et al., ), which misled many to assume that risperi- done at doses of to mg/day did not cause eps, because obviously a placebo given to treatment-naive subjects would not cause them. however, risperidone can indeed cause eps in customary doses (ho et al., ; lane et al., ; mullen et al., ; rosebush and mazurek, ). using a “worst eps score” can give quite different and potentially misleading results compared to final total eps scores or last recorded safer observations (tollefson et al., a). fortunately, most investigators at this time now use total and last observation scores to evaluate eps rating changes from baseline (bondolfi et al., ; marder et al., ; wirshing et al., ). another example involves defining treatment suc- cess using a % or greater decline in a symptom severity rating score. patients with schizophrenia may achieve a % decline in the brief psychiatric rating scale scores and yet remain “profoundly dis- abled” (gilbody et al., ). a further example in- volves defining treatment success as at least a % decline from baseline on a rating scale score for symptom severity for youths with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd). in an industry-spon- sored study, the majority of the groups that received the company product and methylphenidate achieved this goal and were thus deemed equivalent in their response. however, the cutoff score was so modest that % of the placebo subjects also met this stan- dard (heilgenstein et al., ), which was more than double the customary placebo response in adhd stimulant studies (greenhill et al., ). pre- sumably, if a standard symptom reduction cutoff score had been used, the reported drug equivalency would not have been achieved. selecting the major findings and endpoints post hoc kessler ( ) refers to comparative drug studies wherein “the putative advantage is related to an endpoint that was not the primary hypothesis tested by the study” (p. ). he adds, “such claims of superiority often depend on an analysis of multiple endpoints, a practice often referred to as data dredging.” thus, it is unclear whether a seven-week study had been originally designed to be an eight- week study. more suggestive is the side effect com- parison of venlafaxine and fluoxetine that was done one week into treatment (silva, ), which sug- gests that something was left out that would apply to a more meaningful assessment period. as schooler ( ) pointed out in her review of two industry-sponsored comparative drug trials, “perhaps in each case the researchers examined all the scores and reported only those that looked best for their drug” (p. ). carpenter ( ) likewise noted that industry studies “showing a superior effect of the spon- sor’s drug may be the result of scores of analyses searching multiple variables and reporting those that show an advantage” (p. ). tamminga ( ) similarly observed that in industry-sponsored stud- ies “the distinction between the a priori hypothesis and the secondary analyses is often lost” and a “whole rash of secondary analyses are used to present the results” (p. ). masking unfavorable side effects reports of sexual side effects from selective sero- tonin reuptake inhibitor (ssri) antidepressants range from % to % depending primarily on whether side effects were elicited merely by open- ended questioning or by a detailed inquiry (modell et al., ; montejo-gonzalez et al., ; zajecka et al., ). reports by sponsoring pharmaceutical companies tend to downplay sexual side effects of ssris by using open-ended or nonspecific questions about side effects (zajecka et al., ). in one in- stance, a drug company–sponsored review covering over , subjects treated with ssris simply did not list any sexual side effects on its -item side effect table (preskorn, ). at the opposite ex- treme, researchers from competing companies em- phasize the high rate of sexual side effects with ssris when their drug has a lower rate. these in- vestigators ask specific questions in order to bring out the high rate of sexual side effects that charac- terize ssri treatment so as to favor their product’s side effect profile (croft et al., ). repeatedly publishing the same or similar positive studies to increase the impact obviously, pharmaceutical manufacturers want to make sure that reports of their drug’s advantage over competing drugs in sponsored research receive wide circulation. their supported researchers consequently submit relatively similar findings to different journals, each with a slightly different emphasis but stressing the main themes. they also publish reviews of these same findings (gilbody and song; ; huston and moher, ). examples repeatedly showing an eps advantage with one second-generation neuroleptic over high-dose haloperidol include prominently over- lapping articles by one pharmaceutical company–sup- ported team (beasley et al., ; lane et al., ; tollefson et al., b; tran et al., a, ) and a very similar duplication of articles from another firm’s second-generation neuroleptic—which is well described by huston and moher ( ). still another pharmaceutical company followed this same pat- tern, sponsoring five studies comparing sertraline or fluoxetine with bupropion sr in order to reiterate the point about their drug having fewer sexual side effects than ssri drugs (coleman et al., ; gil- design and reporting modifications body and song, ; kavoussi et al., ; segraves et al., ; walker et al., ). an editorial in jama by rennie ( ) discussed in depth this problem of publication duplication. selectively highlighting findings favorable to the sponsor the selective reporting of the findings in industry- sponsored trials has merited criticism from experi- enced investigators (carpenter, ; davidoff et al., ). in this regard, schooler is quoted as follows: “they emphasize those parts of the data that are most favorable to their drug” (moukheiber, , p. ). as an example, in the placebo-controlled clin- ical trial comparing the effect of two antidepres- sants with each other to reduce anxiety symptoms, the abstract totally ignored the fact that the placebo effect for anxiety was in most respects comparable to that of the two antidepressants and that it re- sulted in far fewer side effects (trivedi et al., ). likewise, two studies mentioned an early treatment response of the sponsor’s drug in their abstract but did not mention that this relative benefit was no longer present by the end of the study (claus et al., ; wheatley et al., ). editorializing for the sponsor in the abstract in the seven-week study comparing fluvoxamine and paroxetine, the patients receiving paroxetine were given (at week ) a substantial mean dose of mg/day, whereas patients receiving fluvoxamine were given a relatively low mean dose (at week ) of mg/day. certain side effects were understand- ably higher in the paroxetine group. in their conclu- sions, the authors advised, “when a patient has dif- ficulty tolerating one ssri, the clinician may choose to change to a different agent within the same class” (kiev and feiger, ). in another study, risperidone treatment was shown to be comparable in efficacy and side effects to pimo- zide in the treatment of tourette’s disorder. two rela- tively minor differences favored risperidone, leading the authors to conclude that “risperidone may become the first-line treatment of tourette’s disorder, owing to a more favorable efficacy and tolerability profile” (bruggeman et al., , p. ). publishing the obvious to emphasize a point it is known from placebo-controlled clinical trials that certain second-generation antidepressants have far fewer sexual side effects than ssris. thus, it is not necessary to repeatedly compare that side effect between these drugs; the result is obvious before- hand. likewise, it has long been known that tricyclic antidepressants (tcas) are a risk for older adults with heart disease (roose, ). thus, the compar- ison of paroxetine with nortriptyline in older adults showing more cardiovascular problems with the lat- ter drug (nelson et al., ) does not add new information to the literature. in this respect, shimm and spece ( ) express concern about “scientifi- cally uninteresting and inconsequential clinical tri- als” (p. ). kessler et al. ( ) view such scien- tifically unnecessary trials as “thinly veiled attempts to entice doctors to prescribe a new drug being marketed by the company. . .” (p. ). touting nonsignificant but favorable differences and negating dropout differences statistically medical journal supplements provide numerous other examples of studies with small and modest- sized samples that report an advantage of one drug over another but avoid analyzing the difference statistically (bero et al., ; greene et al., ; hotopf et al., ; rochon et al., a). one exam- ple of this frequent pattern is from a paroxetine- clomipramine comparative study. a statistically in- significant difference was used to justify the author’s conclusion that paroxetine was “better tol- erated” (lecrubier and judge, ). one technique to accentuate a nonsignificant but supposedly favorable finding in a comparative study is to view it only in terms of relative risk (without pre- senting a range or confidence interval). this technique applied to a small sample often misleads and has re- portedly influenced physician prescribing patterns (bobbio et al., ; brett, , feinstein, ). when there is a substantial dropout of subjects before the end of a clinical trial, industry-sponsored researchers commonly use the last observation car- ried forward method to include the dropout data in the total results. this approach assumes a steady trajectory of the available findings from the drop- outs—which is seldom the case (allison and casey, ). consequently, it is usually preferable to avoid this form of statistical analysis (schooler, ). selecting subjects and altering the duration of trials to achieve a favorable outcome treatment resistance in schizophrenia research is not well defined (brenner et al., ). comparisons of safer second-generation neuroleptics with one another and with haloperidol in short-term drug company–spon- sored clinical trials of so-called treatment-resistant schizophrenic patients have resulted in findings that suggest that a number of second-generation neurolep- tics (aside from clozapine) are very beneficial for these patients. surprisingly, after only and weeks of treatment, % to % of patients so identified were found to respond to each of the new medications. however, these studies included a sizable number of patients whose treatment resistance was highly ques- tionable (marder, ). bondolfi et al. ( ), for ex- ample, included both treatment-resistant and treat- ment-“intolerant” patients, and one half of the patients studied by breier and hamilton ( ) were outpa- tients (presumably less emotionally disturbed than inpatients). the relatively brief clinical trials with olanzapine and risperidone suggested that these drugs were as effec- tive with treatment-resistant patients as clozapine, the present “gold standard” of such treatment (conley et al., a). however, it must be noted that clozapine treatment may take up to one year to achieve maxi- mum benefit (lieberman et al., ). when drug treat- ment comparisons of an even longer duration ( to years) are made with chronically impaired schizo- phrenic patients, clozapine to an even greater extent produces the best results (conley et al., b). withholding unfavorable results drug company–sponsored clinical drug trials are for the most part not publicly recorded (rennie, ), so that unfavorable trials can be kept from publication (friedberg et al., ; goldberg, ; gwynne, ; hillman et al., ; lauritsen et al., ). this unfortunately is still a fairly common practice (quick, ). the sponsoring company’s control of publication is aided by confidentiality agreements signed by the investigators before any project is financed (goldberg, ; gwynne, ; dickersin et al., ; rennie, ; shenk, ). masking sponsorship in multisite clinical trial studies, the pharmaceuti- cal company designs the research— usually in con- sultation with some of the outside team—and then all the clinical investigators carry out the protocol (council on scientific affairs, ). in some in- stances, the designers of the research do not put their names on the study, which makes the role of the pharmaceutical company less clear. this prac- tice has been referred to as “ghost authorship” (flanagin et al., ; rennie and flanagin, ). related to this concern is the fact that some authors still do not disclose the financial sponsorship of the research (krimsky et al., ). broader drawbacks of research linked to promotion lowers the scientific quality of published research friis ( ), in a lead editorial for acta psychiat- rica scandinavica, wrote that “the need of a com- pany to increase sales of a new drug easily creates a climate in which it is virtually impossible for the company’s own research department to produce un- biased studies of that drug” (p. ). the research department, in the view of some, might then “. . .rep- resent a subgroup of the marketing division, with the aim of producing scientific arguments for promoting sales.” drug company–sponsored symposia (published as supplements) are far less carefully peer reviewed than standard research reports, and their papers are consistently appraised as more misleading than are others in the published medical literature (bero et al., ; cho and bero, ; rochon et al., a). leads physicians to alter their prescribing options studies show that drug company promotion of their own sponsored published research findings— often containing a selective presentation of the relative mer- its of their products and the drawbacks of competitive products—successfully influences physician prescrib- ing practices (chren and landefeld, ; spingarn et al., ; ziegler et al., ). the use of “design- adjusted,” drug company–sponsored medical publica- tions that superficially appear like more scientifically solid research has been shown specifically to mislead physicians, resulting often in the prescription of rela- tively expensive and sometimes less appropriate drugs (bero et al., ; caudill et al., ; spingarn et al., ). drug company–sponsored articles reporting positive clinical trials in medical journals frequently convey to physicians the impression that their prescribed phar- maceuticals produce more favorable results than is the case in community practice. for example, studies of brief and extended drug company–sponsored clinical trials with olanzapine (n � ) report a dropout rate due to weight gain of less than one half of one percent (littrell et al., ; tollefson et al., b; tran et al., ), which suggests that it was not a problem. yet a design and reporting modifications nationwide survey of psychotic outpatients treated primarily with atypical neuroleptics reported that weight gain caused at least % of the medication nonadherence (weiden et al., ), particularly for the obese, who were three times more nonadherent for this reason than were those of normal weight (weiden, ). a second example of a misleading dependence on sponsored clinical trial data pertains to desmopres- sin for the treatment of nocturnal enuresis. in a com- pany-supported comparative clinical trial, both a bed- wetting alarm and desmopressin had relatively similar results during the treatment period, but no follow-up assessments were made (longstaffe et al., ). how- ever, two independent studies reporting the aftermath of similar comparative trials revealed that to months after the treatment ended only % to % who were treated with desmopressin ceased their enuresis, versus % to % who had been treated with the alarm (monda and husmann, : schulman et al., ; wille, ). adds unnecessarily to the cost of prescription drugs a me-too drug is a drug that has slight chemical differences from a frequently prescribed innovator drug so that the latter’s patent is not infringed. me- too drugs represent over % of all new drugs and are among the most heavily marketed (garattini, ). the cost of marketing prescribed drugs in the u.s. was over billion dollars in , which ex- ceeds the pharmaceutical industry’s expenditure for basic research (woosley, ). the cost of pharma- ceuticals has risen far more than other products in the u.s. economy and is a particular burden for those senior citizens whose only medical coverage is medicare (soumerai and ross-degnan, ). tends to have a corrupting effect on researchers the enticement of making a large amount of money by participating in drug company–sponsored clinical trials is not to be underestimated (eichenwald and kolata, a; eichenwald and kolata, b). along with this involvement and financial aid go ever-present pressures to endorse or support the company’s prod- uct (nemeroff, ). tends to distort the knowledge base and the terminology in the field the findings from a large number of comparative clinical trials that are financed by pharmaceutical companies are commonly included in literature re- views and meta-analyses. many are scientifically weak. their inclusion in a review may well alter the conclusions of a reviewer (and therefore the read- er). for example, stahl ( ) and ho et al. ( ), citing a drug company–sponsored study, accept the reported but misleading finding that “low”-dose ris- peridone has the same likelihood as placebo to in- duce eps. likewise, certain terms that reflect a drug compa- ny’s claim may enter into common medical usage. for example, the term ‘mood stabilizer’ is commonly applied in pharmaceutical company–sponsored studies to certain anticonvulsant and neuroleptic drugs as though they benefited mood beyond their acute and short-term anti-manic effects (sobo, ). the sheer weight of the company’s many suppos- edly favorable studies has its own impact. the pos- itive comparative findings of company-financed clin- ical trial research are widely disseminated and aggressively promoted. the fact that these findings are published in nationally circulating medical jour- nals suggests to physicians and to the public that they have high-level approval from within the med- ical establishment. limits research autonomy confidentiality agreements between the researcher and the sponsor delay research reporting and occa- sionally impede publication of findings deemed unde- sirable by the sponsoring company (blumenthal, ; chalmers, ; dickersin et al., ; phillips and hoey, ; rennie, , shuchman, ). influences physicians to decrease their prescriptions of less costly medications that have equivalent efficacy once second-generation neuroleptics became viewed as first-line medication treatments, physi- cians increasingly bypassed their neuroleptic prede- cessors— ones that, though still very useful, are no longer promoted. first-generation neuroleptics as a group cause far less weight gain than their succes- sors (allison et al., ) and their side effect pro- files are much better established. a recent meta- analysis of available data comparing conventional with second-generation neuroleptics by the national schizophrenia guideline development group of great britain concluded that they had equivalent efficacy and tolerability. therefore, the group rec- safer ommended that “conventional antipsychotics should usually be used in the initial treatment of an episode of schizophrenia unless the patient has previously not responded to these drugs or has unacceptable extrapyramidal side effects” (geddes et al., ). in support of this, a four-week, independently funded study recently revealed that modest average doses of haloperidol ( . mg/day; n � ) were equally as effective as average doses of risperidone ( . mg/ day; n � ) for neuroleptic-naive psychotic pa- tients, and that at these doses, the two neuroleptics had similar results on the development of eps (rosebush and mazurek, ). in like manner, independent reviewers have con- cluded that tricyclic antidepressants—whose pro- portional use has prominently decreased in the s (hirshfeld, )—are as efficacious for the treatment of depression as ssris (anderson, ), although they are far more hazardous in overdose. furthermore, for certain depressive subtypes (e.g., melancholia), the first-generation antidepressants appear to be more effective than ssris (parker et al., ). nonetheless, both second-generation an- tidepressants and second-generation neuroleptics are routinely reported to be “first-line agents” by opinion leaders who wield great influence when they present industry-sponsored studies at profes- sional meetings. conclusion the concerns raised herein relate largely to the very expensive, often misleading, and commonly wasteful drug trial comparisons of similarly effec- tive drugs that are sponsored by major pharmaceu- tical companies. in response to these concerns, nu- merous articles and editorials written over the last two decades in medical journals have focused on: “conflicts of interest,” “scientific misconduct” (chalmers, ), “is medicine for sale?” (angell, a), “commercial sources of influence” (avorn et al., ), and “the industrialization of clinical re- search” (rettig, ). furthermore, ethical practice guidelines have been written by the food and 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they related? hardy lj, neve h. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - professionalism and leadership in medical education: how do they differ and how are they related? louise jessica hardy, hilary neve view from the faculty to cite: hardy lj, neve h. bmj leader ; : – . faculty of medicine and dentistry, university of plymouth, plymouth, uk correspondence to louise jessica hardy, faculty of medicine & dentistry, university of plymouth, plymouth pl bu, uk; louise. hardy@ plymouth. ac. uk received september accepted september © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. it is widely accepted that both professionalism and leadership are important in medicine and in recent years have been defined and mandated by the general medical council (gmc). – yet, the defi- nitions of each are complex, vary between cultures and will almost certainly continue to be debated. both are social constructs and there is undoubtedly a close association and significant overlap between the two. so how do we see the relationship between ‘professionalism’ and ‘leadership’? are they iden- tical twins, sharing dna which makes it impossible to differentiate between them in anything but name? or siblings who share some characteristics but remain, at their heart, individuals pursuing separate identities, personalities and demanding semantic interpretations which are distinctly different? few would argue that professionalism and leader- ship share a value set which overlaps in many areas, explained clearly by reference to inarguable prin- ciples of sound behavioural qualities which might be characterised either as leadership or profession- alism. to be an effective leader in health, you need to demonstrate high standards of professionalism in all your roles. the gmc defines excellence in professionalism through a range of descriptors and desired competencies. they include being able to work collaboratively in teams and with patients, giving and responding to feedback, dealing effec- tively with stress, challenge and uncertainty, prior- itising time well, ensuring a good home–work balance, promoting patient safety, working ethi- cally and managing your own learning and devel- opment. leadership includes all of these, while shifting the focus beyond the direct delivery of high-quality patient care by individuals and teams. in a way leadership is about ‘taking profession- alism outwards’. being an excellent leader involves seeing and acting on opportunities and influencing and bringing others with you to improve quality within the wider healthcare environment. lead- ership requires individuals to understand health- care and political systems and to build on their existing professionalism skills to be become effec- tive in areas such as negotiation, facilitating change and project management. many of these qualities appear in two frameworks which guide those who strive to deliver leadership education and develop- ment in the national health service (nhs). first, the medical leadership competency framework and second, the nhs leadership academy’s more recent healthcare leadership model. understandings of professionalism have also extended beyond the individual to incorporate interpersonal, team and organisational elements as well as doctors’ responsibilities to their communi- ties and to society. in addition, professionalism is increasingly being viewed in terms of a developing professional identity—the beliefs and values that determine how individuals describe and view them- selves as a medical student or doctor. definitions of professionalism are influenced by cultural norms and differences and inevitably develop over time, as expectations of doctors, their learning and working contexts, technology and societal priorities also change. in his contribution to the nhs’s key frame- work for leadership, professor michael west points towards the need for compassionate lead- ership, citing four behaviours which could, argu- ably, define professionalism as much as leadership. they include attending to and understanding situa- tions faced by both staff and patients, empathising with distress and helping to alleviate this distress. moreover, there are evidence-based interventions which the leader can enact to encourage cultures of compassion, and these include the creation of clear and achievable objectives, exemplary people management and active support for effective team- working and improvement. these interventions are the hallmarks of excellent leadership and go beyond the conceptual ideal of compassion and into the territory of active personal development. key questions, therefore, are ‘how do i learn; what do i need to be able to demonstrate; and by when?’ not unreasonable in these times of port- folios, tests, ladders of competency, signoff, tick boxes and attainment. for medics, leadership grows best through a spiral learning approach, where leadership is acquired through experience, reflection and knowledge throughout their careers. putting it another way, leadership development is never ‘finished’, can be situation dependent and is often (but not always) related to the medic’s level of seniority in the nhs. at the basic end of the continuum (the start of the medical career, or even in medical school), it requires the individual to ‘lead self ’ by, for example, running to time, staying on top of priorities in both life and work and perhaps even acquiring some basic management skills such as overseeing a quality improvement project, or a rota. as the leader takes on wisdom, experience and more complex roles, she/he will need to develop and integrate deeper leadership abilities, such as how to manage other people, systems knowledge, greater self-awareness, emotional intelligence, the ability to resolve multifaceted problems and a willingness to reflect on and adapt leadership practice in the light of feedback. some will learn these skills and o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /leader- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ hardy lj, neve h. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - view from the faculty develop these capabilities more quickly than others, influenced perhaps by the opportunities presented and the level of personal interest. skilled leaders will recognise the need to flex their approach in different situations in order to maximise the effect of their leadership. they will feel comfortable with the notion that the nhs environment is constantly changing and unpredict- able, requires collaboration not control, listening not telling and that answers to questions are not always clean or definitive and may not be palatable to all. the newly recommended curriculum for developing leadership in medical undergraduates (fmlm ) recognises that young doctors in training require basic leadership in the early years of training (initially, perhaps, just an awareness of leadership), moving on towards understanding systems, organisations and deeper personal leadership as they progress through their careers. royal colleges will be building on this through inclusion of a suite of professional and generic capabilities (which includes leadership) in all curricula, to be assessed throughout specialty training. the notion of ‘shared’ or ‘collective’ leadership, where leadership is distributed across the organisation with everyone taking responsibility for its success, offers opportunities for doctors at all stages of their career. a key element of leadership, particularly where shared, is ‘followership’—the ability to actively and effectively support the leadership of others. professionalism is similarly mandated by the gmc, and argu- ably we can describe professionalism on a continuum in the same way as with leadership. becoming an effective self-regulated learner and reflecting on experience have both been iden- tified as key to developing as a professional. the literature also emphasises the impact of positive role models, the influence of power and hierarchy on learners’ professional development and the importance of being alert to the risks and benefits of the hidden curriculum. it seems likely that these are also key factors in leadership development. alongside this, increasing awareness of equality and diversity issues, unconscious bias, the #metoo movement, the rise of social media and patients’ use of the internet are influencing professionalism curricula, as are the issues of resilience, well-being and burnout. research showing that gender and anxiety may increase burnout in the transition from student to doctor (while a strong professional and social identify may be protective ) highlights the inter-relatedness of these issues, as well as raising questions about the responsibili- ties of organisations, teams and their leaders in protecting and supporting the professional development of members. so surely, when discussing the ability of an individual to conduct him/herself with confidence, integrity at work and to inspire trust in others—we are talking about both leadership and professionalism? on the other hand, there appear to be specific skills and values associated with professionalism which can and should be developed over time, with careful attention being paid to the development of the individual as he/she progresses through their career. the latter is certainly expected of leaders. few would argue that professionalism is a feature of medical life which should begin at the beginning (in medical school) and remain firmly at the heart of the individual throughout his/ her career. while recipients of care might reasonably expect their doctors to hold many of these qualities from the off, they would certainly expect them to be continually learning, devel- oping and refining their professionalism as they progress (and thus, continuously improving). meanwhile effective leadership includes creating a culture which values, motivates and supports people to become exceptional professionals, as well as engaging and empowering others to develop their own leadership quali- ties and abilities. in doing so, successful leaders will ensure that their organisation continues to deliver excellence and improve quality as it moves forward into the future. it is hard, therefore, to tidily conclude this article in any agree- able fashion other than to note that there are distinct but key differences which point more favourably towards the earlier metaphor of close siblings. we leave you, therefore, with the contention that leadership requires and promotes profession- alism but that professionalism may not, in and of itself, qualify you to lead. to lead effectively, you should actively attend to its development throughout your career. professionalism will run throughout; the beating heart of your leadership, of your iden- tity and of your reputation as an excellent doctor. twitter louise jessica hardy @louisehardyod and hilary neve @hilary_neve funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; internally peer reviewed. references . gmc. achieving good medical practice: guidance for medical students. london: general medical council, . . gmc. professional generic capabilities framework. london: general medical council, . . gmc. outcomes for graduates. london: general medical council, . . mckimm j, o’sullivan h. doctor as professional and doctor as leaders: same attributes, attitudes and values? british journal of hospital medicine ; : – . . nhs institute for innovation and improvement and the academy of medical royal colleges. medical leadership competency framework. rd. coventry: nhs institute for innovation & improvement, . . nhs leadership academy. the nhs healthcare leadership model, . available: https://www. leadershipacademy. nhs. uk/ resources/ healthcare- leadership- model/ [accessed may ]. . hodges bd, ginsburg s, cruess r, et al. assessment of professionalism: recommendations from the ottawa conference. med teach ; : – . . cruess rl, cruess sr, boudreau jd, et al. a schematic representation of the professional identity formation and socialization of medical students and residents: a guide for medical educators. acad med ; : – . . nhs improvement. developing people improving care: evidence-based national framework to guide action on improvement skill-building, leadership development and talent management for people in nhs-funded roles, . available: https:// improvement. nhs. uk/ resources/ developing- people- improving- care/ [accessed may ]. . west m, ecker r, 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doctors: a longitudinal cohort study. bmj open ; :e . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/louisehardyod https://twitter.com/hilary_neve https://www.leadershipacademy.nhs.uk/resources/healthcare-leadership-model/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/developing-people-improving-care/ https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/developing-people-improving-care/ https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/developing-collective-leadership-health-care https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/developing-collective-leadership-health-care http://dx.doi.org/ . /medu. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /tct. http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ 	professionalism and leadership in medical education: how do 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specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ taking down the sacred: fuck-me vs. fuck-you celebrity full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcel celebrity studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel taking down the sacred: fuck-me vs. fuck-you celebrity misha kavka to cite this article: misha kavka ( ) taking down the sacred: fuck-me vs. fuck-you celebrity, celebrity studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: mar . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcel https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcel &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcel &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule taking down the sacred: fuck-me vs. fuck-you celebrity misha kavka media studies department, university of amsterdam, amsterdam, netherlands abstract i argue that we must talk about fucking in order to dissect the tangle of power, gender and sex that has upheld hollywood-built celebrity. celebrity has always been a machinery of desire orga- nised around acts as well as fantasies of fucking, which processes of medial sublimation turn into the aura of the sacred. in the spirit of desublimation and desecration, i make a distinction between fuck- me and fuck-you celebrity, drawing on examples such as caitlyn jenner, tess holliday and rose mcgowan. whereas fuck-me celeb- rity abides by standards of feminine beauty, fuck-you celebrity openly addresses sex and power. in the post-weinstein era, it may be that the celebrity system, which has heavily favoured the fuck- me over the fuck-you, is beginning to shift. article history received january accepted september keywords celebrity; desecration; sublimation; weinstein; #metoo; caitlyn jenner; tess holliday; fuckability introduction my intent in this article is not to be sacrilegious, strictly speaking, nor to profane celebrity (which seems an unlikely consequence of scholarship), but rather to track celebrity through its own profanities. in homage to gayle rubin’s declaration in that ‘the time has come to think about sex’ ([ ] , p. ), my premise is similar, if coarser: the time has come for those of us who study celebrity to talk about fucking. that, after all, seems to be what everyone else is talking about, in an effort to name, dissect and desacralise the toxic tangle of power, gender and sex that has upheld the hallowed halls of hollywood-built celebrity. celebrity, i will argue, has always been libidinal, a machinery of collective desire organised around fantasies of who-is-fucking-whom as well as who-is-fucking-with-whom. in her article ‘thinking sex’, rubin reflects on the importance of emphasising sex ‘in times of great social stress’ because ‘[d]isputes over sexual behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties and discharging their attendant emotional intensity’ ([ ] , p. ). presumably, this becomes even more true when, as in our current stressful climate, it is less a matter of displacing social anxieties onto sexuality than of feeling anxious about sexual behaviour itself, especially when that behaviour takes place within a sphere that so consistently blurs sociality and sexuality – the sphere of celebrity. not so long ago, in june , caitlyn jenner was unveiled in the pages of vanity fair as the hot new babe of l.a., all eyes upon her as she channelled hollywood glamour to achieve the height of ‘fuck-me’ celebrity. her poses and poise were perfect, so much so that jon stewart (then of the daily show ) ironically praised her for winning the tv contact misha kavka m.kavka@uva.nl celebrity studies , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med- ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - commentators’ game of ‘comparative fuckability’. the fact that caitlyn is a transwoman, however, exposed the rules and norms of ‘fuck-me’ celebrity at the same time as she became its newest poster-girl. far less visible, although at least as loud, have been the fight-the-system proponents of ‘fuck-you’ celebrity, from the self-conscious punk aes- thetic of s’ courtney love, arguably the progenitor of contemporary resistance movements like pussy riot and the pussyhat project, to the visual and verbal resistance campaigns of models who set out to @effyourbeautystandards (an instagram site launched by tess holliday). but there are signs that the celebrity system, which up until now has heavily favoured the fuck-me over the fuck-you, is beginning to shift: the sudden shake-up in the star-making apparatus, followed by the seismic effects of the #metoo movement, has radically destabilised the old balance between fuck-me and fuck-you celebrity, as women such as rose mcgowan and stephanie clifford, a.k.a. stormy daniels, (re)build their own celebrity by talking back to the celebrity men who have used and abused them. whereas fuck-me celebrity requires a demure agreement not to talk about what we’re really talking about, in the name of decency and displacement, fuck-you celebrity talks openly about sex and its imbrications with power. in the spirit of harnessing some of this fuck-you attitude, i will here address the dynamics of celebrity and fucking to ask whether celebrity as we know it has in fact been desacralised in our norm-busting, trump-meets-weinstein time. in terms of individual star images, of course, celebrity is buoyed up on cycles of consecration and desecration, reflecting not just the brevity of fame that is buried in the etymology of the word ‘celebrity’ (rojek , p. ) but also the rise and fall of social value that accrues to stars as they slip in and out of the spotlight on waves of self- construction and -destruction. su holmes and sean redmond refer to the negative side of this pendulum as ‘fame damage’ ( , pp. – ), part of what redmond later calls the ‘metronome’ of discourses about celebrity which ‘swing this way, then that’ ( , p. ). despite the con/desecration cycle being business as usual, however, – seemed to mark a period when it was the institution of celebrity that was desecrated, and indeed, desecrated by exposure of its own workings. central to this take-down was the figure of harvey weinstein, who, as the powerful and highly visible studio head of first miramax and then the weinstein company, embodied the overlap between the institution, the industry and the person. weinstein and fucking a brief timeline of events in this intensive period might be helpful to jog our memories. on october , the new york times published an investigative report by jodi kantor and megan twohey, entitled ‘harvey weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades’, which details interviews with former female employees and the actor ashley judd (alongside a number of actors who refused to comment for the article) to reveal weinstein’s long-standing practice of sexually preying on young women and, when pushed, hushing up the evidence with pay-offs (kantor and twohey ). the article itself came not without context, as the reference to payment in the title indicates; although this was the first mention of weinstein’s name in sexual harassment allegations, the journalists’ investigation followed on the sacking in july of roger ailes, chairman and ceo of fox news, and then in april of bill o’reilly, the top-rated fox news host, celebrity studies for harassment allegations and settlements worth millions. whereas ailes and o’reilly, who did not exactly go quietly, sank into the annals of misbehaving oligarchs, the weinstein revelations were only just beginning. on october, weinstein was fired from the weinstein company by its board (including his brother and co-founder bob); on october, the new yorker published an exposé by ronan farrow with the subtitle ‘harvey weinstein’s accusers tell their stories’ (farrow ), which significantly shifted the discourse from sexual harassment to actual assault of women; on october, bafta suspended weinstein’s membership; and on october, in a nearly unprecedented move, the academy of motion picture arts and sciences voted to expel weinstein, as further accusations by women in the industry piled up thick and fast, and police in the uk and us moved to investigate allegations. from this hornet’s next of investigation, accusation and commentary, one accuser in particular took the lead, namely actress rose mcgowan. although named in the original new york times article but declining to comment for it, mcgowan became the most publicly and articulately furious of weinstein’s accusers, from revealing on october via twitter that he had raped her in to publishing a memoir, brave, in january alongside the release of a four-part documentary, citizen rose, one day later (citizen rose ; mcgowan ). the exposure of harvey weinstein’s treatment of women is central to the topic of desecrat- ing celebrity because it reflects not just the exploitative nature of the celebrity apparatus, but also the way in which such exploitation mines power differentials. in one sense, the weinstein allegations, however shocking, came as no surprise to a film industry that had been skating over the long-standing complicity of his colleagues, board members and assorted whisperers at hollywood cocktail parties. in another sense, however, it soon became clear that these were not just the events of one man’s downfall; rather, it is worth recalling that the initial weinstein accusations sparked the viral spread of the #metoo movement. instigated on october with a tweet from actress alyssa milano, which reignited activist tarana burke’s coinage of the phrase ‘me too’ in by calling on ‘all the women and men who have been sexually harassed, assaulted or abused [to write] “me too” as a status’ (stevens ), the movement took form as a cascade of social media activity that very quickly became about much more than abuses in the film or celebrity industries. originally developed by burke to provide a community for marginalised girls and women, especially of colour, who had experienced sexual abuse, the ‘me too’ tag, once attached to the visibility of the hollywood elite, opened the floodgates to countless devastating stories of women who had suffered abuse, rape and sexual trauma. what was exposed at this explosive juncture between weinstein’s outing and the #metoo movement is the gender/power nexus (one, moreover, that is racialised ) at the core of social organisations and industries, with the celebrity-making machinery of hollywood as the prime exhibit with the longest reach. weinstein was not just a larger-than-life celebrity himself, but also a maker of celebrities, an agent of celebrification (rojek ) as both institution and process. moreover, the #metoo movement, followed closely by the time’s up movement founded in january by hollywood celebrities, has made it very clear that the celebrification process is a toxic tangle of gender, power and sex. to no one’s surprise, given the longevity of casting-couch tropes, the weinstein, #metoo and time’s up maelstrom revealed that sex has been, and continues to be, the currency of celebrity. i mean this in strictly economic terms: sex is the down-payment demanded by powerful men from powerless women (and in some cases men) in exchange for the potential pay- m. kavka off of celebrity status. over and over again, weinstein’s accusers confirmed that they acquiesced to hotel-room meetings with him because they were hoping for a movie role, just as not doing so would have hurt their careers, that is, their status in the celebrification process. but this nexus is not about sex as an abstract attribute of media value, that is, about the extent to which the media frame can present someone as ‘sexy’. rather, it is about fucking – who is doing and being allowed to do what to whom, within institutional hierarchies of power that have little to do with sex appeal. this is why we need to be talking about fucking. thus, despite mcgowan referring in her book brave almost mythically to harvey weinstein only as ‘the monster’, this desecration of celebrity is about much more than just the exposure and (currently ongoing) prosecution of weinstein. rather, we need to be asking questions about what has happened to the sacred status of celebrity itself. if the currency of sexual exchange underpins celebrification, then the purpose of that exchange, from the perspective of the disempowered, is to wreak for themselves some of the aura or afterglow that is produced by the apparatus of the celebrity industry – an aura that is an effect of our own desire as celebrity consumers. to fuck or be fuckable are positions converted from the basely economic to the auratic by media enterprises and consumers. in this regard, the responses to weinstein, as agent, institution and process of celebrification, expose the media mechanics of hollywood halo-making. the mechanical convertibility of private to public desire, however, also enables the more abusive perver- sion of sexual exchange as its currency. the movement from classical fuck-me celebrity to contemporary fuck-you celebrity hinges on the technologies of mediated desire, taking us beyond the cinematic aura, in the benjaminian sense, that has projected the sacredness of celebrity and sustained its value system. from desecration to desacralisation to talk about the desecration of celebrity implies addressing the ways in which it is (or is not) sacred. there is broad agreement that, with the decline of the centrality of organised religion (the ‘death of god’ theory), religious impulses continue to exist but have become secularised. since the mid- th century, spurred by the publication of malcolm boyd’s christ and celebrity gods (boyd ), religious scholars have debated the extent to which ‘celebrity worship’ – a telltale metaphor – indicates that celebrities are treated as (reli- gious) idols and even taken to be gods. gary laderman, writing in , has claimed outright that ‘celebrity icons arouse the religious passions of followers in modern society’, producing ‘new gods’ worshipped on the sacred altar of celebrity culture (laderman cited ward , p. ). on the side of celebrity studies, chris rojek cogently argued the point in his field-setting book celebrity, aligning celebrity behaviour with shamanism because of stars’ ability to create ‘frenzy’ amongst fans from auratic spectacle ( , pp. – ), which led him to deduce a ‘considerable partial convergence between religion and celebrity’ in secular society (p. ). the word ‘partial’ interleaved into that phrasing indicates rojek’s unwillingness to grant celebrity the full status of the sacred on the grounds that ‘[c]elebrity culture is a culture of faux ecstasy’ (p. ), since it is based on ‘para-social interaction’ (p. ) and ‘staged authenticity’ rather than ‘genuine forms of recognition and belonging’ (p. ). rojek’s insistence on the para-social mirrors pete ward’s conclusion, after careful consideration of the relationship between religion and celebrity studies celebrity in gods behaving badly, that celebrity culture is a ‘para-religion’, in which ‘the sacred appears to be present, but . . . has somehow been (sub)merged in the profane’ ( , pp. – ). all of these terms – ‘partial’, ‘para’, ‘(sub)’ – indicate both an intellectual and a moral reluctance to conflate ‘the superficial, the gaudy’ aspects of celebrity (rojek , p. ) with the spiritual, transcendental, implicitly ‘genuine’ experiences of religion. i do not wish to conflate religious transcendence with celebrity worship, yet two points are worth noting about this caution regarding the sacral status of celebrity. firstly, just as ward insists on the ambiguities of celebrity culture ( , p. ), so rojek is fascinated by the ‘celebrity ceremonies’ of ascent and descent ( , pp. – ), arguing in effect for an oscillation between the sacred and profane status of stars. this oscillation suggests that especially in moments of desecration (the) celebrity can descend only because he/she was held to be sacred in the first place – and vice versa. secondly, whereas religion is arguably a set of practices, the sacred is a feeling, a collective experience of affect that the anthropologist emile durkheim, in his influential book the elementary forms of religious life ([ ] ), called ‘effervescence’. as such, no amount of caution about the para- social or the para-religious will take away from the fact that what feels sacred is in fact held sacred at any given moment, at least for the person experiencing the transcendental swell. this is not far off from what ward, in referring to the ‘subjective turn’ in religious studies, calls the alignment between celebrity and the ‘sacred self’ in popular culture, which ‘gives birth to a multiplicity of possible gods’ ( , p. ). nonetheless, this emphasis on self, whether as the source of divinity or embodied in ascending/descending celebrities, does not address the institution of celebrity or, more significantly, the way our desire is caught up within it. if we grant that individual stars can be worshipped as gods (such as elvis; see frow ), and grant, too, that the sacred can overflow individual bounds to colour the institution, then – in light of ascents and descents – can the sacral nature of celebrity itself be tarnished? the short answer is yes, because the sacred-effect of celebrity is riven with fucking, indeed grounded in the currency of sex, whereas the ‘properly’ sacred in mainstream religions is abstracted from sexual exchange. i have been using words like sacred, sacral and desecration loosely, but i would like to pause for a moment to better define my terms. to start with, ‘desecration’ as an action means ‘damaging or showing no respect towards something holy or very much respected’ (cambridge english dictionary), that is, violating the sanctity of something, hence profaning it. semantic examples usually involve a shrine, temple or mosque being desecrated by vandals, e.g. ‘there are still reports of vandalism and desecration of synagogues’ (cambridge english dictionary). but we should note that the disrespectful, irreverent or outrageous treatment of something holy does not necessarily affect its sacred status; it is perfectly possible that a shrine which has been desecrated will continue to operate as a shrine, even if it has been defaced, provided there is no consensus that it has thereby become ordinary or profane. the emphasis of desecration is thus on the action as well as authority, in a performative sense: if desecrators lack the authority to rescind the shrine’s sacred status, then it will continue to be treated as sacred (hence the outrage that commonly arises from acts of desecration). moreover, desecration is enacted on objects, but what happens in the abstract realm, if we are talking about something that is not strictly a ‘thing’ available for desecration? to overcome some of these linguistic limitations, i want to introduce another term: desacralisation (admittedly not a word – as yet). as the opposite of ‘sacralisation’, which according to the collins english dictionary m. kavka means ‘the act of making something sacred’, desacralisation would refer to the un-making or destruction of sacred status rather than the vandalisation of an object that has been, and may well remain, consecrated. desacralisation is thus a term that can be applied in the abstract, for instance to institutions. now, if we accept that the weinstein revelations and #metoo movement have had destabilising effects on celebrity as an institution, and if, moreover, we accept that structural as well as symbolic, not to mention industrial, change is afoot, then we may well be seeing the desacralisation of celebrity, at least in some form. but what, we should ask, is sacral about celebrity in the first instance? why is it appropriate to talk about desacralisation as an un-making of its sacred character? as i outlined above, the question has been addressed from the perspective of both celebrity studies and religious studies, but always with a nervous qualifier that whatever ‘efferves- cence’ may arise through and around celebrity should be designated para-sacred. the ‘para’, however, does not help us to understand the sacral aura of celebrity, that aura which walter benjamin ([ ] ) insisted had been stripped away by mechanical reproducibility, but which daniel herwitz argues has resulted in a ‘lost sacredness’ which leaves, as its remainder, ‘a new kind of aura’ ( , p. ). indeed, david ferris astutely notes that ‘aura thrives in its decline, and that the reproductive media are particularly conducive to this thriving’ ( cited herwitz , p. ). such remarks seem particularly pertinent to the celebrity system built in and by hollywood, which took a much longer tradition of theatrical and literary fame and successfully reshaped it into auratic spectacle through the mechanics of th- and now st-century media. in the process, stardom, and eventually celebrity, became the new zone of the auratically sacred, providing objects of (sometimes literal) worship in the form of star images available for intense emotional and psychological investment. the emphasis on investment, or sacralisation as meaning ‘to imbue with or treat as having a sacred character or quality’ (https://en.oxforddictionaries. com; my emphasis), takes us to the question of the relation between celebrity and desire. the libidinal economy of celebrity celebrity, as developed on the hollywood model of spectacularity, has always been libidinal; that is to say, it has been organised through the medial sublimation of sex and formulated around fantasies of who is fucking whom, on- as well as off-screen. two case studies, one from pre-hays code hollywood and the other from the millennial era of profane experi- mentation, should help to make the point. exhibit a is the romantic drama flesh and the devil ( ) with greta garbo, who was beginning to come into her own in her third american film, and john gilbert, then at the peak of his popularity as a silent film star. despite following a typical vamp plot (and, per requisite, ultimately killing off the seductress played by garbo), the film is remembered today for the intensely affecting first-kiss scene between garbo and gilbert, filmed in minimal light in a night-time garden. framed in a close two-shot as they talk, garbo’s character felicitas absentmindedly plays with an unlit cigar- ette, which she places between her own lips before languidly removing it, swivelling the cigarette around, and inserting it into gilbert’s mouth. cinematographically, this is merely a ploy that allows gilbert’s character leo to light a match, thereby setting garbo’s famously beautiful face aglow in a white halo. narratively, the lit match is another kind of lure, setting the stage for felicitas to blow it out as an invitation to a kiss – duly followed by leo removing the (still unlit) cigarette from his mouth and plunging forward to meet her proferred lips. celebrity studies https://en.oxforddictionaries.com https://en.oxforddictionaries.com this is a scene of sexual sublimation, with erotic contact initially enacted via a mediating prop: the cigarette as literal go-between. but it is also a scene of medial sublimation, turning garbo’s face, through the technical means of lighting and cinematography, into a halo of light that dazzles our eyes. ultimately, though, despite its hackneyed fictionality, this scene is most compelling as a sublimation of ‘real sex’, of who-is-fucking-whom, since not only is this the film in which garbo and gilbert met and became a celebrity couple, but it is this scene, the second they shot together, that director clarence brown recalled as ‘the damnd- est thing you ever saw. . . . those two were alone in a world of their own’ (cited golden , p. ). the collective ‘effervescence’ of this auratic moment, which is a product of props, cinematography and studio industry, was underpinned by a private affair. contemporary gossip magazines helped publicise the film by spreading news of garbo and gilbert’s intimacy, and audiences flocked to the cinemas to see their chemistry, or what we might call the halo-effect of their real-life desire. as gilbert astutely put it, the film functioned for others as ‘a brazen display of sex lure’, although (or precisely because) for him it was important due to ‘my meeting with a glorious person called garbo’ (cited golden , p. ). fast-forward some seven decades to exhibit b: eyes wide shut ( ), the last film directed by stanley kubrick, which was delivered to warner brothers only days before he died of a heart attack. although in many ways a benighted production – holding, as it does, the guinness world record for longest continual film shoot as well as saddling tom cruise with a stubborn reputation as a wooden actor (nicholson ) – eyes wide shut remains compelling as an exploration of conjugal sexuality and fantasy in a film that knowingly oscillates between the sublimation and desublimation of celebrity desire. kubrick intentionally cast a celebrity couple, the then-married tom cruise and nicole kidman, in the lead roles of bill and alice, going so far as to ‘psychoanalyz[e] his stars, prodding cruise and kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret’ (nicholson , para. ). although lightly masked as bill and alice, cruise and kidman are the actual draw- cards of eyes wide shut – a celebrity couple whose desire for each other is embedded in our desire to know the ‘truth’ of their fucking. indeed, in a gesture towards the ultimate desublimation, ‘fuck’ is the last word of the film, spoken by alice in a stilted conversation held in a toy store with a nervous bill, who fears the end of their marriage. instead, alice/ nicole declares them fortunate to have survived their ‘adventures’ and, in keeping with the source text of artur schnitzler’s traumnovelle (dream story), artfully questions whether these adventures were dream or reality, before asserting, while staring intensely into bill/tom’s eyes, ‘there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible. . . . fuck’. immediately the screen goes black, the final cut falls, and those of us who have been wanting tom and nicole to fuck – leave aside bill and alice – know that we have been had. in this moment the film reveals that the desire of and for celebrity is fundamentally our will to know and experience, courtesy of the camera, the truth of their fucking, however sublimated into aura. the only difference here from flesh and the devil is that, sans cigarette and well into the age of on-screen profanity, kubrick is in a position to self-reflexively make a film about sexual, medial and celebrity sublimation that turns his work into an endless deferral of our desire. against this sped-up film genealogy, i want to pause on the term ‘sublimation’ to explore its relation to the sacred aspect of hollywood-built celebrity. in a psychoanalytic sense, m. kavka sublimation can be traced back to freud, who defined it as a re-routing of libido (the drive aligned with the sexual and ego instincts together) into non-libidinal forms, that is, into more socio-culturally ‘valuable’ pursuits such as art, education or politics. simply put, sublimation means desexualisation, whereby sexual energy is channelled into less profane activities by means of the psychical process of displacement (verschiebung), which freud had ‘discovered’ at work in dreams. nonetheless, freud makes clear that this desexualised energy, which he refers to as the ‘displaceable energy’ (verschiebungsenergie) of sublima- tion, is still connnected to the libido: if this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy; for it would still retain the main purpose of eros – that of uniting and binding – in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego. ([ ] , p. ) the radical point to be grasped here is that any displacement of psychical energy retains the traces of where it has come from, leaving behind a breadcrumb trail of its re-routing. in other words, sublimation may be desexualised libido, but it continues to adhere to ‘the main purpose of eros’. of course, sublimation is also a religious term, precisely in the sense that profane sexual energy is re-channelled into higher pursuits; the will of the body, in effect, is displaced into spirit. my favourite lapsed catholic explains it to me this way: religious sublimation occurs through the process of squeezing sexuality out of the embodied subject, generating an ethereal affect, a collective yet intensely personal effervescence, that may be characterised as disembodied spirit. in catholicism, the tried and true mechanism of this squeezing is confession, a practice which foucault recognised to have been secularised into a scientia sexualis, whereby the scientific truth of the subject is produced through confession about one’s sexuality ( ). lacan, whose own mother was an ardent catholic, was fascinated by the trail of displacement from sexual to spiritual love, aligning his theory of jouissance – that pleasure so exquisite that it is experienced as pain – with the religious ecstasy of st teresa of avila. referring to bernini’s statue of st teresa, lacan dipped into the language of the profane to explain her sacred ecstasy: ‘you need but go to rome and see the statue by bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. there is no doubt about it’ ( , p. ). at the same time, moreover, there is little doubt about the sublimation at work, for ‘the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it [jouissance], but know nothing about it’ (lacan , p. ). the question of how ‘one face of the other, the god face’ (p. ) is related to an ‘other’ jouissance (barnard ) is too extensive to pursue here, but suffice to say that lacan’s notion of this exquisitely painful pleasure takes its lesson from freud’s verschiebungsenergie and connects the sacred with eros. without wishing to conflate the celebrity sacred, riven with fucking, with the properly sacred of an abstract body (that of the lord), this recourse to freud re-routed through lacan offers an approach to desacralised celebrity that is not sacrilegious. rather, to address the desecration – or, better, the desacralisation – of celebrity means taking seriously its sacred character, in effect if not in name, by understanding the role of sublimation in the history of celebrification as institution, industry and process. in mechanical terms, the sacred is the effect of a sublimation that remains sexualised precisely as a result of its desexualisation. as i have insisted, sublimation is the desex- ualised libido that upholds the sacred through verschiebungsenergie – that is, the drive celebrity studies towards displacement and deferral. the traces of this displacement are made obvious by means of confession, which holds historically not only for catholicism or the scientia sexualis but also for the contemporary means by which celebrity is maintained through the media mechanics of the confessional (see redmond ). it is by following this trail of displacement and deferral backwards, away from the sacred and towards its libidinal roots, that we approach the key to the sacred aura of celebrity: simply put, celebrity is about fucking, albeit fucking deferred. or, more accurately, it is about fucking displaced into the past perfect, into an act that we imagine has already occurred and whose after- effect, as mediated aura, we are now experiencing as collective affect. garbo and gilbert, kidman and cruise have already in some sense had sex right in front of us, but the cinematic works so that we grasp this knowledge, and the truth of the sexual currency of celebrity, with our ‘eyes wide shut’. of course, if #metoo has taught us anything, it is that fucking is always about power. thus, we need to add one more element to the equation: celebrity may be all about fucking, but not all fucking is created equal. fuck-me celebrity from a gender perspective, hollywood-built celebrity has long depended on the institu- tionalised production of women whose look, stance and performance to the camera signals, first and foremost, their sexual availability. we might call this the hollywood history of feminine im/posture, or less daintily, the equation of female celebrity with a feminine ‘fuck-me’ look. in the particular stances of this im/posture it does not matter whether these are the ‘good girls’ whose eyes are downcast or the bad girls who stare back; as laura mulvey has memorably argued, ‘[a]n idea of the woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies’ ( , p. ). signalling availability through the modestly averted look or the brazen stare signifies the woman’s ‘desire to make good’. this is why, after all, mulvey has argued that in classical hollywood cinema woman ‘speaks castration and nothing else’ ( , p. ), a castration threat which must be ameliorated by her disempowered status as object of the gaze. approaching mulvey’s male gaze from the gendered perspective of fuck-me celebrity, however, suggests two adjustments. first, rather than emphasis on castration, we should focus on sublimation as verschiebungsenergie, which means that actual fucking is displaced into sexual fantasy through the operations of the cinematic apparatus, especially narrative and mise-en- scène (recall garbo and the scandalous cigarette). second, rather than focusing on the woman’s objectification, which downplays her diegetic as well as extra-diegetic role in her own celebrification, we should instead pay attention to the way that cinematography and the im/posture of femininity displace the source of desire onto the woman, who appears to invite, implore, demand – ‘please fuck me’. fuck-me celebrity thus names the institutionalised, fully normalised relationship between celebrity and sexuality as situated within the gender/power nexus. this plays out, on the one hand, in sublimated fashion between the screen and the audience through technical processes of the media apparatus, and on the other hand between producers and performers – in often literal ways – through the processes of individual and industrial celebrification. in many ways marilyn monroe, who in any case seems to exceed the crucible of gaze theory, is the apotheosis of this relation. as richard dyer argues in his m. kavka chapter devoted to monroe in heavenly bodies, ‘monroe = sexuality’, not because this defined her but because ‘it is a message that ran all the way from what the media made of her in the pin-ups and movies to how her image became a reference point for sexuality in the coinage of everyday speech’ ([ ] , p. ). dyer points out, moreover, that monroe became a star because of the way she embodied sexuality, which was ‘felt to matter so much’ at that time ([ ] , p. ; orig. emphasis). but monroe is also the star who extended sexuality-based celebrity well beyond the hollywood industry, not only across ancillary media but to sports celebrity, literary celebrity and even political celebrity through her star couplings, thereby entangling the fuck-me stance demanded of women by hollywood stardom with the more modern gender/power nexus of celebrifica- tion. (is it too much to suggest that her notorious performance of ‘happy birthday, mr president’ smacks of ‘who do you have to fuck around here to get on stage’?). today the validation of fuck-me celebrity is more firmly institutionalised and invisibilised than ever before, but at least two important changes have occurred in recent years. first, there is a far greater range of intersecting media forms that allow for its overlapping expression and enactment, often constituting an echo chamber, but also, at least sometimes, allowing for a stance that counter-acts the expected fuck-me im/posture. second, there are changes afoot to the way that we think about gender, certainly amongst the educated younger generations, whereby gender is held to be fluid, multiple, performative, and so fully constructed as to be a matter of one’s own identity choice. this, in turn, has led to a new distribution model of fuck-me celebrity, now attached to bodies less on the basis of a strict male/female binary than on the basis of their availability for judgement on scales of ‘hotness’. indeed, it is my suspicion that as gender leverages itself out of the bed of binarism, there is more pressure being placed on the regulation of sex. here i don’t mean sex in the way that butler set it out in gender trouble, as a ‘foundational categor[y] of identity’ ( , p. xxix); nor do i mean sex as shorthand for sexual practice, in the sense of the broad spectrum of what people actually do with their bodies in eroticised spaces. rather, as should be clear, i mean sex more reductively as fucking, because this is a term that usefully marries the often harsh reality of erotically conjoined body parts with sexual fantasy on the one hand and social power on the other. ensconced as we are in a highly libidinised media culture, it is fair to say that these days we fuck with our screens as much as with our bodies – and we get fucked according to our imbrication in highly complex social and cultural systems of value assigna- tion or what we might call (vernacularising bourdieu somewhat) the ‘habitus of the fuckable’ in western media. the extent to which someone appears in this media habitus as ‘fuckable’ – and as a potential fuck-me celebrity – directly aligns with the regulatory frameworks of sexual ‘hotness’, which themselves follow and sustain norms of race, age, class, corporeal style, etc. let us call the value that accrues to such celebrity the ‘fuckability’ quotient, or fq, as a measure of personal value stripped down to the core question of how fuckable one is. unfortunately, i can’t claim credit for the term ‘fuckability’. the kudos there goes to jon stewart, ex-presenter of the daily show on comedy central, whose satirical analysis of the frenzied media response to caitlyn jenner’s reveal on the front cover of the july issue of vanity fair is a suave lesson in the gender politics of celebrity. pretending to be surprised at the normally ‘awful’ media’s enthusiastic acceptance of jenner as a woman, stewart sardoni- cally praises the various commentators for ‘wast[ing] no time treating her as a woman’ – that is, for tying the very proof of her femininity to the fact that she could, and should, now be discussed solely in terms of her looks. against a well-chosen montage of enthusiastic celebrity studies appraisals of the newly revealed caitlyn, stewart notes how quickly appreciation for the ‘inspirational olympian’ devolves to open-mouthed ogling at her ‘hotness’, with phrases like ‘she’s so sexy it hurts’ appropriately divided between women commentators feigning (or experiencing?) jealousy – ‘she looks better than i do!’ – and male commentators experiencing (or feigning?) arousal. everyone is thus involved as supporting players in an orchestrated heteronormative matrix that secures jenner’s place and role as a woman. although stewart glosses this montage with a sardonic, ‘now that you’re a woman, your looks are all we really care about’, the point made by the montage is about more than looks: it is quite clearly about her sexual appeal in heteronormative terms, that is, about assessing jenner in terms of her feminine fuckability. but there are, as stewart notes, two further elements to jenner’s becoming-woman. what stewart calls ‘phase of your transition’ is comparative fuckability, that is, the level of fuck-me appeal as qualitatively or even quantitatively compared to that of other women. a female fox commentator in the montage, for instance, asks ‘the most important ques- tion: does caitlyn have a better body than kim kardashian?’, echoing other commentators who ask whether jenner is ‘hotter’ than her ex-wife, kris jenner. such quotients can only be deduced through comparison, preferably of like with like, hence the centripetal urge to assert comparisons within the kardashian/jenner clan. as stewart points out, the slide into comparisons suggests that there is only so much fuckability to go around, a sum total of pie as it were, meaning that the high fq of one female celebrity necessitates the lower(ing) fq of another. or, as stewart smirks, ‘it’s how we keep the balance’. there are, however, two more balances in store. first, ‘the caveat we were missing’, according to stewart, is the adjustment of feminine fq based on the handicap of age. in this case, the old-hollywood glamourisation of jenner, courtesy of the celebrification powers of veteran photographer annie liebowitz, is enough to keep her fq high and overcome the fact of her age; as a commentator notes, ‘she looks good, especially for her age’. stewart links this to jenner’s successful transition to femininity, the proof of which lies in her being treated as a woman – and which includes ‘remind[ing] her that she has an expiration date now’. add in, he says, ‘a little slut-shaming and a dash of “anh, she’s probably not that hot in person”’, as media presenters comment on the effects of make-up and wonder how much of the image is photo-shopped, and the transition is complete: ‘welcome to being a woman in america’. the debut of caitlyn jenner, then, is a lesson in celebrity fuckability, which is to say, a lesson in how to be accepted as a woman through the im/posture of fuck-me celebrity. the definition and gender value of ‘woman’ here come down to being able to present oneself as fuckable, with appropriate modifications and/or makeover as required, which in turn means that fuckability can be distributed across cis as well as trans bodies. as a celebrity transwoman, however, what jenner’s successful transition exposes is that, while gender may be increasingly fluid, the place of femininity in the normative gender/ power nexus remains firmly entrenched. fuck-you celebrity above all, what must be secured for a female-identified body to attain fuckability are the standards of feminine beauty, as defined and repeatedly performed by media instantia- tions of celebrity. aesthetic standards relating to the body, hair, face and clothing must be met, whatever it takes, while criteria of race and age are understood to be ‘natural’ m. kavka limitations, less prone to successful modification and hence grounds for backhandedly complimentary discrimination (e.g. jenner ‘looks good, especially for her age’). in terms of body shape, fuckable women are expected to combine a narrow waist and taut belly with fulsome breasts (not necessarily natural) and long legs (heel-enhanced). unquestionably, the hair must be styled into flowing locks and the face must be perfectly contoured to accentuate big eyes over sharp cheekbones and pillowy lips. while the victoria’s secret model’s size-zero shape is still the gold standard for the erotically stripped-down body, fuckability is also increasingly associated with a big booty – provided that the buttocks round out from a slim waist and belong to a white-as-possible body. as dyer argues about marilyn monroe in the s, ‘[t]o be ideal monroe had to be white, and not just white but blonde, the most unambiguously white you can get’ ([ ] , p. ). while the long, flowing locks of our era no longer strictly have to be blonde, whiteness remains a default setting of fuckability, as is evident from the ‘kardashian effect’, that is, the popularisation of booty – despite its long association with non-white bodies – through the spectacularly mediated white woman (sastre ). in the echo chamber of concatenated media forms, advice abounds on how to achieve these standards, whether in the form of beauty tutorials or celebrity-endorsed products, but the question of why one wants to achieve feminine fq is suppressed since the premise of desirability as fuckability – and hence the aspiration to fuck-me celebrity – is a given. there are, however, other modes of embodiment within celebrity culture that explicitly disturb, dismantle or invert the premises of fuckability. this is what i call ‘fuck-you celebrity’, in both senses of the term: on the one hand, the inversion of fuck-me to fuck- you implies a reversal of (sexual) agency, in the sense that i am doing the fucking, while, on the other hand, the rhetorical force of the ‘fuck you’ serves as a statement of resistance and resilience, a rejection of the feminine fuckability standards that aims to foment a revolution against them. it is this fuck-you stance that articulates a challenge to the sacredness of celebrity, not simply as a desecration which might vandalise its pretty face (britney spears’ self-administered buzz cut immediately comes to mind), but as a desacralisation of its institutional conditions. fuck-you celebrity profanes the sacredness of celebrity as institution by directly challenging the traditional gender/power nexus which upholds the affects and effects of celebrity worship. fuck-you celebrity thus shifts the terms and channels of desirability, aiming primarily to desublimate the desire of and for celebrity by returning it to its bedrock in fucking. examples abound, but unsurprisingly they pop up largely on the cultural and industrial periphery, usually in media forms that are attached to subcultures and/or have lower entry thresholds than the moneyed establishments of the traditional media industries. for this reason, fuck-me and fuck- you celebrity modes have very different genealogies. although i will not attempt a complete excursus here, there are at least three forms of fuck-you celebrity that are relevant. the first relates to the history of the punk/goth/rebel girl, who expresses a fuck-you sensibility through wearable, inscribable and appropriable signifiers on and of her body, often juxtaposing feminine accoutrements with an aggre- sively anti-feminine attitude (which includes, no surprise, saying ‘fuck’ a lot). a foundational example here would be courtney love, from her s’ days as the lead singer of punk rock band hole, described somewhat nostalgically by vivian pencz as ‘a deliciously vicious fuck-up alchemizing pent-up pain and feminist rage into some of the most compelling music of her generation’ ( ). resplendent on stage at the celebrity studies glastonbury music festival in , love appeared in pale-pink bra and bright pink- sequinned short-shorts topped off by pink ballet slippers and fairy wings – a costume that symbolised the joy of reappropriating girliness as the out-of-place face for raucous guitar chords and raunchy lyrics. not uncoincidentally, this image resonates with the height of love’s musical celebrity, shortly after the release of hole’s acclaimed third studio album, celebrity skin. although the wistful nostalgia in vivian pencz’s description of s’ love as a ‘deliciously vicious fuck-up’ is a reminder that the punk/goth/rebel girl may have had her day, the tactic of yoking a desublimated girliness with fuck-you messages still prevails in bands like pussy riot and movements like the pussyhat project. another significant version of fuck-you celebrity, i would argue, is to be found in the increasingly visible full-figure girl, in particular, the ‘plus-size’ model, who explicitly challenges the body-shape standards and body-shaming tactics of the media industries that feed celebrification. one pertinent example here, amongst many, is tess holliday, a professional model and instagram queen (with . million followers), who founded the instagram movement @effyourbeautystandards in and a few years later published a memoir, the not so subtle art of being a fat girl ( ) before gracing the cover of cosmopolitan magazine in october . holliday obviously takes a great deal of pleasure in being the object of the lens, whether on photo shoots or in the selfies and home snaps that she assiduously posts to her instagram account. at the same time, by insisting on appearing in the ‘sexy’ poses usually reserved for fuck-me celebrity, she places herself consciously in the firing line of social media fat-shamers and ‘concern trolls’ (that is, people who write reproofs masquerading as care, such as ‘omg please get healthy’ [impeter_parker comment on @tessholliday, september ]). holliday thereby turns the spectacularity of her body – complete with tattoos of other arguably fuck-you celebrity women, such as mae west, dolly parton and the iconically fabulous miss piggy – into a political site within the habitus of the fuckable. holliday is, moreover, very clear in her messaging to the haters: ‘to the people that fight on my social media: i don’t give a fuck. get a therapist, phone a psychic or eat a fuckin’ burger . . . grow up’ (cited hoby ). it is her ‘i don’t give a fuck’ attitude that grants her fuck-you celebrity while aligning holliday with the ‘body positivity’ movement. notably, the @effyourbeautystandards instagram account is rife with posts that celebrate a wide spectrum of embodied iden- tities, including images not only of full-figured women but also of non-white, non- western, non-binary, non-heteronormative and differently abled people – all of whom, presumably, feel themselves to be resonant with the ‘effyou’ of the hashtag. as of , however, fuck-you celebrity has been most prominently defined by women ‘calling out’ the men who sustain the gender/power nexus that upholds fuck-me celebrity. to do so, these women often have had to break non-disclosure agreements, which, on the one hand, materialise and monetise the gender/power nexus, while, on the other hand, they can be put to use in the celebrification of the people who break them. the woman who has become synonymous with a $ , pay-out in exchange for signing an nda is stormy daniels, the porn star who had an affair with donald trump and was hushed up at the beginning of trump’s political campaign. she then revealed all in a minutes interview with anderson cooper, followed by the publication of her aptly titled book, full disclosure ( a), in which she fully disclosed the fucking that took place between her and trump. both the interview and the book caused concentric circles of media attention, resulting not only in daniels becoming a household name but also in her topping pornhub search trends m. kavka in (hassan ). while daniels insisted that her sexual encounter with a powerful man was consensual, even if she had to resign herself to it (daniels b), this is not the case for rose mcgowan, who accused weinstein of raping her in and has since become the torch-bearer for the #metoo movement in and beyond hollywood. in a pugilistic speech to the women’s convention held in detroit in late october , mcgowan told the cheering crowd that she ‘came to be a voice for all of us who have been told we are nothing, for all of us who have been looked down on, for all of us who have been grabbed by the mother- fucking pussy’; she then instructed the crowd to ‘name it, shame it, call it out, join me, join all of us as we amplify each other’s voices’. although speaking from celebrity positions in quite different industries, daniels and mcgowan have at least two things in common. first, they both speak from a stance of shamelessness, or, more accurately, from a position of rejecting the shame that they are expected to feel as the ‘porn star turned other woman’ and the ‘rape victim’, respectively. they not only embrace their hard-won shamelessness but turn the shame against the men who had been protected by their institutional power: ‘name it, shame it, call it out’, as mcgowan encourages her audience. in the process, they each deliver a fuck-you message to the men who cornered them into fucking. second, both of these women have rebuilt, and in the process amplified, their celebrity status, moving from fuck-me celebrity (literally in daniel’s case, given her career in pornography, and figuratively in the case of mcgowan’s film/tv career) to fuck-you celebrity. this (re)celebrification, morever, arises from the increase they have gained in value and visiblity by publicly talking back to the men who have abused them and mistaken their fuck-me im/posture. conclusion the exposure of the gender/power/sex dynamics in the weinstein celebrity-making appa- ratus, followed by the #metoo and time’s up movements, appears to be radically shifting the traditional preponderance of feminine fuck-me celebrity. i have argued that fuck-me celebrity sustains the sacred character of the institution by means of sublimation, by not talking about what we’re really talking about – namely, sex demanded by powerful men of powerless women (and sometimes men), which is then channelled via the media apparatus into libidinal gratification for audiences. having squeezed actual sex out of the equation (by forcing it, in too many instances, behind a hotel-room door), the process of celebrification creates a mediated aura that clings to fuck-me celebrity. at the core of what is sacred about celebrity, then, is an exchange: the disempowered must bear the shame and trauma of unwanted/unwarranted sex (‘i thought it was me . . . ’) in exchange for the possible pay-off of auratic celebrification. fuck-you celebrity, by contrast, rejects this shame and its traumatic internalisation. the fuck-you celebrity exposes sex and its gendered imbrication with power, desublimating the aura of celebrity even if it means accepting notoriety instead. if the sacredness of celebrity as an institution is dependent on sublimation, then the turn to openly talking about fucking – which is what i have been doing here – is an act of desublimation and, at least in intent, an act of desacralisation. i cannot say, of course, whether scholars in future will make a distinction between pre-weinstein and post-weinsten celebrity, whether the very institution of celebrity is undergoing a profound desacralisation or only momentary desecration. as i write this, there are drum beats suggesting that things may be returning to ‘normal’, that the excision of harvey weinstein from the institution may allow celebrity studies lesser mortals like louis ck to return to the screen at the same time that the film bohemian rhapsody wins awards with a largely male cast that is careful not to thank the suspiciously sacked director bryan singer (golden globes, ). indeed, some may well say that the power/gender/sex nexus has a terrible way of re-consecrating itself. and yet, in light of the conversations that we are and need to continue having, i remain hopeful. notes . although alyssa milano promoted the #metoo hashtag apparently without realising its provenance, her failure to credit tarana burke, who had founded the ‘me too’ movement to help marginalised and non-white victims of sexual abuse, was taken as evidence of broader problems of structural racism. the initial erasure of burke, who is african american, repeated a much longer history of the appropriation and silencing of black women’s voices in feminist struggles, as pointed out by women of colour who started their own hashtag campaign, #wocaffirmation. on learning of burke’s movement, milano hastened to credit her, first via social media and then on good morning, america (see garcia ). . nicholson ( ) argues that on-set ‘the line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred. the couple slept in their characters’ bedroom, chose the colour of the curtains, strewed their clothes on the floor, and even left pocket change on the bedside table just as cruise did at home’. while this was presumably a tactic by kubrick to elicit an ‘authentic’ performance from them, it also had the predictable effect of encouraging audiences ‘to project bill and alice’s unhappiness on [cruise and kidman’s] own marriage, which was already a source of tabloid fodder’ (nicholson , para. ). the ‘truth’ of this projection seemed confirmed in hindsight when cruise filed for divorce less than two years after filming wrapped. . freud goes on to say, with what mischievous grin on his face we can only imagine, ‘if thought-processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces’ ([ ] , p. ). in other words, studying celebrity is its own form of celebrity worship, as many of us know too well. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes on contributor misha kavka is professor of cross-media culture at the university of amsterdam. she has published widely on gender, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies. she is the author of reality television, affect and intimacy (palgrave macmillan, ) and reality tv (edinburgh up, ), as well as the co-editor of volumes on transnational reality television, gothic culture and feminist theory. references th annual golden globe awards, . tv, nbc. jan . barnard, s., . tongues of angels: feminine structure and other jouissance. in: s. barnard and b. fink, eds. reading seminar xx: lacan’s major work on love, knowledge, and feminine sexuality. albany: state university of new york press, - . benjamin, w., [ ] . the 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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html https://qz.com/ /fortnite-and-stormy-daniels-topped-pornhub-search-trends-in- https://qz.com/ /fortnite-and-stormy-daniels-topped-pornhub-search-trends-in- https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/ /jun/ /tess-holliday-first-size- -supermodel https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/ /jun/ /tess-holliday-first-size- -supermodel https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/ / /eyes-wide-shut-tom-cruise-nicole-kidman https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/ / /eyes-wide-shut-tom-cruise-nicole-kidman https://www.straight.com/blogra/dave-grohl-decides-hes-not-taking-courtney-loves-crazy-frances-bean-shit https://www.straight.com/blogra/dave-grohl-decides-hes-not-taking-courtney-loves-crazy-frances-bean-shit rubin, g., [ ] . thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. in: r. parker and p. aggleton, eds. culture, society and sexuality. london: routledge, - . sastre, a., . hottentot in the age of reality tv: sexuality, race, and kim kardashian’s visible body. celebrity studies, ( – ), – . stevens, h., . #metoo campaign proves scope of sexual harassment. chicago tribune, oct. available from: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-me- too-mayim-bialik- -story.html [accessed june ]. ward, p., . gods behaving badly: media, religion and celebrity culture. waco, tx: baylor university press. m. kavka https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-me-too-mayim-bialik- -story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-me-too-mayim-bialik- -story.html 	abstract 	introduction 	weinstein and fucking 	from desecration to desacralisation 	the libidinal economy of celebrity 	fuck-me celebrity 	fuck-you celebrity 	conclusion 	notes 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributor 	references to evaluate or not to evaluate?: a two-process model of innovation adoption decision making | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /jdm. corpus id: to evaluate or not to evaluate?: a two-process model of innovation adoption decision making @article{wang toeo, title={to evaluate or not to evaluate?: a two-process model of innovation adoption decision making}, author={nan wang}, journal={j. database manag.}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	nan wang 	published 	business, computer science 	j. database manag. usinginformationprocessingtheory(ipt)asthetheoreticallensandincorporatingvariousliteratures followingtheiptlens(e.g.,dual-thresholdinsignaldetection),thisarticledevelopsatwo-process modelofinnovationadoptiondecisionmaking,accountingforthepossibilityforpotentialadopters (atdifferentlevels)tomakeadoptiondecisions(adopt,donotadopt)withorwithoutanintensive evaluationoftheinnovation.specifically,thisarticleproposesthatthereisan… expand view via publisher igi-global.com save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	sensemaking 	information processing one citation citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency the differential effects of interpersonal justice and injustice on computer abuse: a regulatory focus theory perspective 	f. xu, x. wang, botong xue 	psychology, computer science 	j. database manag. 	 	 save alert 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	abstract 	topics 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women laura hawks, md; steffie woolhandler, md, mph; david u. himmelstein, md; david h. bor, md; adam gaffney, md, mph; danny mccormick, md, mph importance the #metoo movement has highlighted how frequently women experience sexual violence. however, to date, no recent studies have assessed the prevalence of forced sex during girls' and women’s first sexual encounter or its health consequences. objective to estimate the prevalence of forced sexual initiation among us women and its association with subsequent reproductive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes. design, setting, and participants a cross-sectional analysis of the - national survey of family growth was conducted, including a population-based sample of us women. the study was conducted from september to september . exposures self-reported forced vs voluntary first sexual intercourse. main outcomes and measures prevalence of forced sexual initiation, age of woman and partner/assailant at first sexual encounter, and odds ratios (ors) (adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics) for having an unwanted first pregnancy or abortion, development of painful pelvic conditions, and other reproductive and general health measures. results a total of women between the ages of and years were included in the study. after survey weights were applied, . % ( % ci, . %- . %) of respondents reported experiencing forced sexual initiation, equivalent to women in this age group nationwide. age at forced sexual initiation averaged . ( % ci, . - . ) years vs . ( % ci, . - . ) years for voluntary sexual initiation (p < . ). the mean age of the partner/assailant at first sexual encounter was years older for women with forced vs voluntary sexual initiation ( . ; % ci, . - . years vs . ; % ci, . - . years). compared with women with voluntary sexual initiation, women with forced sexual initiation were more likely to experience an unwanted first pregnancy ( . % vs . %; adjusted or [aor], . ; % ci, . - . ) or an abortion ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), endometriosis ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), pelvic inflammatory disease ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and problems with ovulation or menstruation ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). survivors of forced sexual initiation more frequently reported illicit drug use ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), fair or poor health ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and difficulty completing tasks owing to a physical or mental health condition ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). conclusions and relevance forced sexual initiation in women appears to be common and associated with multiple adverse reproductive and general health outcomes. these findings highlight the possible need for public health measures and sociocultural changes to prevent sexual violence, particularly forced sexual initiation. jama intern med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jamainternmed. . published online september , . invited commentary page supplemental content author affiliations: department of medicine, cambridge health alliance, cambridge, massachusetts (hawks, bor, mccormick); harvard medical school, boston, massachusetts (hawks, woolhandler, himmelstein, bor, gaffney, mccormick); city university of new york, hunter college, new york, new york (woolhandler, himmelstein); division of pulmonary and critical care medicine, cambridge health alliance, cambridge, ma (gaffney). corresponding author: laura hawks, md, department of medicine, cambridge health alliance, cambridge st, cambridge, ma (lhawks@hsph.harvard.edu). research jama internal medicine | original investigation (reprinted) © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/imd/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . /?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . mailto:lhawks@hsph.harvard.edu n umerous recent high-profile allegations of sexual vio-lence and the social movements that gained momen-tum in response to those events (eg, #metoo, #time- sup) have increased public awareness of the high frequency of sexual violence against girls and women in the united states. sexual violence is defined by the national institute of justice as a constellation of crimes including sexual harassment, non- penetrative sexual assault, and rape. more than % of women have experienced some form of sexual violence in their life- time, of whom half have been raped. exposure to sexual vio- lence has been associated with a wide range of adverse health outcomes. - the world health organization has recognized forced sexual initiation—an unwanted first sexual intercourse that is physically forced or coerced—as a distinct form of sexual violence. forced sexual initiation is a worldwide problem whose reported prevalence varies widely from . % to %. studies conducted predominantly outside the united states suggest that experiencing forced sexual initiation, which occurs at a time of heightened physical and psycho- logical vulnerability, may place girls and women at unique risks for adverse reproductive health outcomes, such as increased sexual risk behaviors, increased rates of hiv and other sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted first pregnancies. - several us studies have examined the asso- ciation between forced sexual initiation and health out- comes, but most focused narrowly on elevated rates of sexu- ally transmitted diseases, - are outdated, - or used measures that combined forced sexual initiation with subse- quent experiences of forced sex. to our knowledge, no recent data are available on the prevalence of forced sexual initiation, the sociodemographic characteristics of women who experience it, or the associa- tion between forced sexual initiation and reproductive, gyne- cologic, and general health outcomes among american women. we analyzed data from a nationally representative us survey to address these questions. methods data source and study population we analyzed data on adult (age, - years) women re- spondents to the - national survey of family growth. the national survey of family growth is a cross-sectional, mul- tistage, household-based nationally representative survey con- ducted by the centers for disease control and prevention that collects data on family life, marriage and divorce, pregnancy, infertility, use of contraception, and general and reproduc- tive health. the cambridge health alliance institutional re- view board, cambridge, massachusetts, deemed this study ex- empt from review because the data are deidentified and publicly available. surveys were conducted during in-person interviews, with sensitive questions, including those about forced sex, asked using audio computer-assisted self-interviewing. our data included the most recent -year waves of the female respon- dent survey (september -september ; september -september ; and september -september ). detailed information on survey design and sampling proce- dures is available elsewhere. response rates ranged from % to % for the included years. we excluded women with no history of vaginal intercourse, as well as respondents younger than years at the time of survey completion, who were not asked questions about sexual history. study variables forced sexual initiation and method of coercion we categorized women as having experienced forced sexual initiation if they responded “not voluntary” to the question, “would you say that this first vaginal intercourse [with a male] was voluntary or not voluntary, that is, did you choose to have sex of your own free will or not?” we categorized women re- sponding “voluntary” to this question as having experienced voluntary sexual initiation. all respondents who reported that their first sexual en- counter was not voluntary were then asked the following ques- tions regarding the method of sexual coercion. “were you given alcohol or drugs?” “did you do what he said because he was bigger than you or a grown-up, and you were young?” “were you told that the relationship would end if you didn’t have sex?” “were you pressured into it by his words or actions, but with- out threat of harm?” “were you threatened with physical harm or injury?” “were you physically hurt or injured?” “were you physically held down?” participants could report more than type of coercion. reproductive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes reproductive outcomes included the number of pregnan- cies, age at first pregnancy, number of lifetime sexual part- ners, abortion, unwanted first pregnancy, never using birth con- trol, or using fertility services. gynecologic outcomes included having undergone routine cervical cancer screening (for women aged ≥ years) or not ever having an hiv test or hav- ing received a diagnosis of fibroids, pelvic inflammatory dis- ease, endometriosis, or problems with ovulation or menstrua- tion. general health outcomes included having a diagnosis of diabetes, obesity (defined as body mass index > [calcu- lated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters key points question what is the prevalence of forced sexual initiation among women and girls in the united states and its association with reproductive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes? findings in this cross-sectional, nationally representative study of american women aged to years, . % reported forced sexual initiation (mean age at forced sexual initiation, . years). forced sexual initiation appeared to be associated with multiple adverse reproductive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes after adjustment for demographic confounders. meaning these findings could help clinicians improve the medical care of women and girls and inform the development of public health policies aimed at reducing forced sexual initiation in the united states. research original investigation association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women jama internal medicine november volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . squared]), current smoking, binge drinking (defined as con- suming ≥ alcoholic beverages on ≥ occasion in the past month), illicit drug use (defined as self-reported use of co- caine, crack, methamphetamine, or injectable drugs in the past months), self-reported health (fair or poor vs good, very good, or excellent), and difficulty completing tasks outside of the home owing to a physical or mental condition. all outcomes were prospectively selected based on past studies of the health sequelae of sexual violence. the gyne- cologic health outcomes (uterine fibroids, pelvic inflamma- tory disease, endometriosis, and problems with ovulation and menstruation) were selected because these conditions may be diagnosed in the workup of pelvic pain, which has been asso- ciated with sexual violence. , although no mental health di- agnoses were available in the survey data, we included re- sponses to the question, “in the past month, have you experienced difficulty completing tasks outside the home due to a physical or mental condition?” as an outcome that may reflect mental health problems. sociodemographic variables sociodemographic characteristics included the respondent’s age at the time of interview, race/ethnicity (white, black, or other), current poverty status (at/below federal poverty level vs above), and whether the respondent was born outside the united states (yes/no). statistical analysis we estimated the number and proportion of women in the united states aged to years who reported experiencing forced sexual initiation. we then compared the sociodemo- graphic characteristics of respondents who experienced forced and voluntary sexual initiation using a -tailed, unpaired t test for continuous variables and χ test for categorical variables. for women who experienced forced sexual initiation, we tabu- lated the proportions of those reporting each type of coercion during sexual initiation. we then examined the association between having expe- rienced forced vs voluntary sexual initiation and reproduc- tive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes in unad- justed and adjusted analyses. for the adjusted analyses of the continuous outcomes, we estimated the mean adjusted dif- ference between women who experienced forced vs volun- tary sexual initiation using multivariable linear regression mod- els that controlled for age, race/ethnicity, poverty level, and place of birth, similar to other studies assessing outcomes of sexual assault. - for categorical outcomes, we estimated ad- justed odds ratios (aors) using multivariable logistic regres- sion models that included the same set of control variables. we included negative control variable—ever diagnosis of can- cer (excluding cervical cancer)—to test for unmeasured con- founders. all analyses were conducted with stata, version . (stata- corp llc), using the complex survey design command pro- cedures that account for the national survey of family growth’s sampling strategy and weights provided by the centers for dis- ease control and prevention that allow extrapolation to the us population as a whole. we performed subsidiary analyses to explore whether characteristics associated with forced sexual initiation, such as early sexual initiation or multiple sexual assaults, might account for our findings of adverse outcomes associated with forced sexual initiation. first, we repeated our analy- ses of the association between forced sexual initiation and adverse outcomes stratified by age at first intercourse (< or ≥ years). second, we identified women who experi- enced forced sexual initiation and no other forced vaginal intercourse. we then repeated the analysis assessing asso- ciations between forced sexual initiation and adverse out- comes using only women reporting forced sexual initiation and no other forced intercourse. we performed additional subsidiary analyses to investi- gate whether potential confounding covariates not included in the main analyses would affect our findings. first, because the interval since sexual initiation might affect the likelihood of experiencing adverse outcomes, we conducted the main analyses with the additional covariate time since first sexual encounter. the covariate current age was removed from this model because it was colinear with time since first sexual en- counter. second, we added a covariate that captures the re- spondent's mother's level of education, which reflects child- hood socioeconomic conditions that may be associated with health outcomes. third, to control for assaults subsequent to sexual initiation, we added a covariate in the main model for later sexual assault. findings were considered significant at an α level of . . results the total unweighted sample included women aged to years with a history of vaginal intercourse. after apply- ing survey weights, . % ( % ci, . %- . %) of respondents reported experiencing forced sexual initiation, equivalent to women in this age group nationwide. the mean age at first intercourse for women with forced sexual initiation was almost years younger than for those with voluntary sexual initiation ( . years; % ci, . - . years vs . years; % ci, . - . years) (table ). the mean age discrepancy between study participants and their male partners/assailants at the time of sexual initiation was years greater among those for whom sexual initiation was forced ( . years; % ci, . - . years vs . years; % ci, . - . years). nearly three-fourths ( . %) of women who experienced forced sexual initiation were younger than years at the time of sexual initiation vs . % of women with voluntary sexual initiation (p < . ); . % of women reporting forced sexual initiation were aged years or younger vs . % of women with voluntary sexual initiation (p < . ). compared with women with voluntary sexual initiation, women with forced sexual initiation were less likely to be white ( . % vs . %; p < . ). women who experienced forced sexual initiation were somewhat more likely to be born out- side the united states ( . % vs . %; p = . ) and have in- comes below the poverty level ( . % vs . %; p < . ) and association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women original investigation research jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine november volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . table . sociodemographic characteristics of us women aged to years according to forced vs voluntary sexual initiation characteristic sexual initiation, % p value forced voluntary unweighted no. age, mean ( % ci), y . ( . - . ) . ( . - . ) . age at first sexual encounter, mean ( % ci), y . ( . - . ) . ( . - . ) . first sexual partner/assailant mean age, mean ( % ci), y . ( . - . ) . ( . - . ) <. age group at first sexual encounter, y ≤ . . <. - . . - . . ≥ . . race/ethnicity white . . <. black . . other . . poverty level or below . . <. born outside the united states . . . language spoken english . . . spanish . . other . . marital status married . . <. widowed . . divorced . . separated . . never married . . educational level less than high school . . . high school or equivalent . . some college . . college or beyond . . received cash assistance in the past year . . . family structure no children . . . parents with children . . single parent with children . . characteristics in childhood did not always live with parents . . <. ever lived in foster care . . age of mother at birth, y ≤ . . . - . . - . . ≥ . . unknown . . mother's educational level less than high school . . . high school . . some college . . college degree or beyond . . unknown . . research original investigation association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women jama internal medicine november volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . less likely to be college educated ( . % vs . %; p = . ); however, as presented in these data, all demographic groups reported substantial rates of forced sexual initiation. type of coercion used by assailant among women who reported forced sexual initiation, % (n = ) reported coercion by a partner who was larger or older, . % described experiencing verbal pressure, and . % were held down (table ). women with forced sexual initiation also commonly reported being given a drug ( . %) and experiencing a physical threat ( . %) or physical harm ( . %). association of forced sexual initiation with health outcomes women who experienced forced sexual initiation were more likely to have experienced an unwanted first pregnancy ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), ever had an abortion ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and to not have used birth control in their lifetime ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). women with forced sexual initiation were not more likely to have used fertility services ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . (table ). forced sexual initiation appeared to be associated with hav- ing received a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), endometriosis ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and problems with ovulation or menstruation ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). there was no association between forced sexual initiation and reporting recent cervical cancer screening ( . % vs . %; aor, % ci, . [ . - . ]) or never undergoing hiv testing ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ) (table ). women who reported forced sexual initiation more fre- quently reported being in fair or poor health rather than in good, very good, or excellent health ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), having difficulty completing tasks outside the home owing to a physical or mental condition ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and, although rates for this out- come were low in both groups, having past-year illicit drug use ( . % vs . %; aor, . ; % ci, . - . ) (table ). the nega- tive control analysis found no association between forced sexual initiation and ever diagnosis of cancer (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). subsidiary analyses in the subsidiary analysis assessing the association between forced vs voluntary sexual initiation and health outcomes af- ter stratification by age at first intercourse, all outcomes re- mained significantly associated with forced sexual initiation among those who reported first sexual intercourse when younger than years except for ever had an abortion. among women whose reported first sexual intercourse occurred at age years or older, forced sexual initiation was significantly as- sociated with adverse outcomes: ever having an abortion (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), pelvic inflammatory disease (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), problems with ovulation or menstrua- tion (aor, . ; % ci . - . ), and difficulty completing tasks outside the home (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). all other out- comes showed similar nonsignificant trends with wide % cis, suggesting lack of power. etable in the supplement dis- plays the details of the findings. in the subsidiary analysis that compared women report- ing forced sexual initiation but no subsequent sexual assault with women with voluntary sexual initiation, forced sexual ini- tiation was significantly associated with adverse outcomes: first pregnancy unwanted (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), never using birth control (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), pelvic inflam- matory disease (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ), and problems with ovulation or menstruation (aor, . ; % ci, . - . ). similar trends and wide % cis were noted for all other adverse out- comes (etable in the supplement). the subsidiary analyses evaluating additional potential confounders, including time since sexual initiation, respondent’s mother’s educational level attainment, and experience of forced intercourse at a time other than sexual initiation, yielded closely similar results to our main analysis. for example, pelvic inflammatory disease was sig- nificantly associated in all analyses: aor, . ( % ci, . - . ) (etable in the supplement); aor, . ( % ci, . - ) (etable in the supplement); and aor, . ( % ci, . - . ) (etable in the supplement). discussion for more than . million reproductive-age women ( in women in this age group), the first experience with inter- course was involuntary. a practicing physician is likely to see several patients each week who have experienced this form of trauma. forced sexual initiation was reported by women of all racial and ethnic groups and varied modestly by poverty sta- tus, level of educational attainment, or place of birth. the male partner/assailant was usually much older than the girl or woman, which was an age discrepancy not present for those reporting voluntary sexual initiation. in addition, women who had experienced forced sexual initiation had elevated rates of subsequent adverse reproductive, gynecologic, general health, and functional outcomes. united states studies have found elevated rates of sexually transmitted diseases and hiv risk behaviors associated with forced sexual initiation. - studies conducted predominantly outside the united states have suggested a link between forced table . type of coercion used by assailant to force sex among women who experienced forced sexual initiationa type of coercion used estimated women in united states, no. (%) any form ( . ) verbal pressure ( . ) partner larger or older ( . ) physically held down ( . ) physical threat ( . ) physically harmed ( . ) given a drug ( . ) threatened to end relationship ( . ) a respondents could provide multiple answers. association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women original investigation research jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine november volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . sexual initiation and earlier age of first intercourse, risk of future sexual assault, number of lifetime sexual partners, and likelihood of experiencing unwanted pregnancy. , - , , one study from ireland, which reported low rates of forced sexual initiation ( . %), suggested worse self-reported general and mental health among women with forced sexual initiation. our findings are generally consistent with these earlier studies but extend them by demonstrating that forced sexual initiation is associated with a broader range of adverse health outcomes in a contemporary sample of us women. the mechanisms through which forced sexual initiation may be associated with adverse health outcomes is not clear. our findings are compatible with the hypothesis that experi- encing sexual violence at a time of heightened psychological and physical vulnerability may have long-term deleterious se- quelae. in subsidiary analyses, our main results were mini- mally affected by controlling or stratifying for age at forced sexual initiation, having experienced repeated sexual as- saults, the respondent's mother's educational attainment, or follow-up interval. some previous investigators have equated forced sexual initiation with childhood sexual abuse, which is known to be a s s o c i at e d w it h a d ve r s e m e nt a l a n d p hy s i c a l h e a l t h outcomes. - however, our first subsidiary analysis suggests that adverse outcomes are associated with forced sexual ini- tiation regardless of the age at which it is experienced. women who experience early sexual violence are at increased risk of repeated sexual victimization later in life, which may suggest that our findings reflect the composite outcomes of repeated sexual assault. however, our second subsidiary analysis suggests that forced sexual initiation is associated with adverse outcomes, even among women who experience no further sexual violence. although our study was not designed to assess whether forced sexual initiation confers different or greater harms than subse- quent forced intercourse, the subsidiary analyses support the view that forced sexual initiation may be an important independent risk factor for adverse physical and mental health outcomes. the rate of forced sexual initiation that we identified is somewhat lower than in a study that analyzed data from the national survey of family growth, in which . % of women aged to years described their first intercourse as nonvoluntary. this finding may reflect a changing preva- table . association between forced sexual initiation and reproductive, gynecologic, and general health outcomes variable first sexual experience, % odds ratio ( % ci) forced (n = ) voluntary (n = ) unadjusted adjusteda reproductive health measures, mean ( % ci) no. of pregnancies . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) . ( . to . )b . ( . to . )b age at first pregnancy, y . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) − . (− . to − . ) b − . (− . to − . )b no. of lifetime sexual partners . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) . ( . to . )b . ( . to . b st pregnancy unwanted . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) ever had abortion . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) never used birth control . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) use of fertility services . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) gynecologic health measures recent cervical cancer screeningc . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) never had hiv testing . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) fibroids . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) pid . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) endometriosis . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) problems with ovulation or menstruation . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) general health measures diabetes . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) bmi> . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) current smoking . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) binge drinking alcohol used . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) illicit drug usee . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) fair or poor health . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) difficulty completing tasks outside the home . . . ( . to . ) . ( . to . ) abbreviations: bmi, body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared); pid, pelvic inflammatory disease. a adjusted odds ratios were controlled for age, poverty level, race/ethnicity, and place of birth. b difference between groups measured. c analyzed only for women aged years and older. d defined as consuming or more drinks on occasion during the past month. e defined as self-reported cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, or injectable drug use in the past months. research original investigation association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women jama internal medicine november volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . lence of forced sexual initiation, although the younger age range in the earlier study and slight changes in question word- ing make direct comparisons difficult. the ubiquity and apparent clinical outcome of forced sexual initiation should encourage those providing clinical care to women to develop tools to identify and treat the sequalae of trauma while avoiding actions that might contribute to re- traumatization. the agency for healthcare research and qual- ity recommends trauma-informed care “that recognizes the presence of trauma symptoms and acknowledges the role that trauma has played in their lives.” medical organizations, in- cluding the american academy of family physicians and american college of obstetricians and gynecologists, have ad- vocated trauma-informed care, but such care has not been widely adopted in clinical practice. - our findings also underscore the need for public health strat- egies to prevent forced sexual initiation and other forms of sexual violence. a centers for disease control and prevention report rec- ommended disseminating local programs that address sexual cul- ture and violence prevention skills, enhancing educational and job opportunities for women and girls, and creating protective environments within schools and work places. however, as the report acknowledges, the evidence supporting these recommen- dations is scant. the efficacy of the current criminal justice system in facili- tating recovery among victims of sexual crimes is controversial. hence, alternative forms of justice may be appropriate in some circumstances. the model of restorative justice, a conferencing model focusing on the experience of the victim and guided by a trained facilitator, may have a role in gendered crimes and war- rants further research. efforts should be devoted to the devel- opment of evidence-based public health approaches to sexual assault prevention and their effective dissemination. limitations our study has several limitations. first, its cross-sectional de- sign precludes causal inference. owing to the survey design, we were unable to adjust for some potentially important con- founders, such as sexual experiences prior to or following sexual initiation. although the associations that we identi- fied do not establish causation, they may be important for cli- nicians to consider. second, women who experienced forced sexual initiation may have experienced or begun experienc- ing some of the adverse health outcomes that we analyzed be- fore their assault. however, the young age at which forced sexual initiation often occurred makes it likely that most out- comes followed the assault. an unknown proportion of us boys and men experience forced sexual initiation, a phenomenon that has been poorly studied; however, the survey did not col- lect data from men regarding forced sexual initiation. as with all survey data, responses may be subject to recall bias, and it is possible that some health outcomes, such as those related to chronic pain, may influence women to recall sexual expe- riences differently. however, the negative control analysis pro- vides some support that confounding and recall bias are not likely to be very large in our study. conclusions a substantial proportion of american women may experi- ence forced sexual initiation, and the individual and public health implic ations of this exposure are far reaching. although additional research is needed, physicians should incorporate trauma-informed measures into their practices while advocating for the reduction of structural causes of sexual violence. article information accepted for publication: june , . published online: september , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . author contributions: dr hawks had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. concept and design: hawks, woolhandler, himmelstein, bor, mccormick. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: hawks, woolhandler, himmelstein, gaffney. drafting of the manuscript: hawks. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: all authors. statistical analysis: hawks, himmelstein. obtained funding: bor. administrative, technical, or material support: bor, mccormick. supervision: woolhandler, himmelstein, bor, mccormick. conflict of interest disclosures: dr hawks reported receiving grants from the national institutes of health during the conduct of the study. dr gaffney reported serving as a leader of physicians for a national health program, a nonprofit organization that favors coverage expansion through a single payer program, without financial compensation. no other disclosures were reported. funding/support: dr hawks received funding support from institutional national research service award t hp and from the cambridge health alliance. role of the funder/sponsor: the funding organizations had no role in the design and conduct of the study; 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(sma) - . . ravi a, little v. providing trauma-informed care. am fam physician. ; ( ): - . . basile kc, degue s, jones k, et al. stop sv: a technical package to prevent sexual violence. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/sv- prevention-technical-package.pdf. published . accessed february , . . van wormer k. restorative justice as social justice for victims of gendered violence: a standpoint feminist perspective. soc work. ; ( ): - . doi: . /sw/ . . invited commentary forced and coerced sexual initiation in women new insights, even more questions alison j. huang, md, mas; carolyn j. gibson, phd, mph the #metoo movement has opened a national conversation about nonconsensual sexual experiences among women, high- lighting the prevalence of problematic sexual behaviors that have historically been normalized or not discussed. more women are now speaking openly about forced or coerced sexual activ- ity, but there is much we still do not know about the long-term effect of these experiences on women’s health. as screening and recognition of the range of situ- ations and interactions that encompass sexual assault expand, we also should determine the consequences of these experiences for women across their lifespan. in this issue of jama internal medicine, hawks et al present data from a national household-based survey to determine the proportion of reproductive-age us women who considered their first sexual encounter with a male partner to be involuntar y by v irtue of being forced or coerced. building on prior research that reported increased risk for sexually transmitted infections after involuntary sexual initiation, the researchers also assess whether these women were more likely to experience a wide array of reproductive, gynecologic, and general medical conditions important to women’s functioning and well-being. among us women aged to years with a history of vaginal sexual intercourse, the investigators found that . %, or approximately in women, experienced a first sexual encounter that was forced or coerced. compared with women whose first sexual experience was voluntary, related article page research original investigation association between forced sexual initiation and health outcomes among us women jama internal medicine november volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://dx.doi.org/ . /ifpp. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /s https://dx.doi.org/ . /qai. b e b a cc https://dx.doi.org/ . /olq. https://dx.doi.org/ . /olq. https://dx.doi.org/ . /olq. https://dx.doi.org/ . /olq. https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/about_nsfg.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_ _ _puf.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_ _ _puf.htm https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://dx.doi.org/ . / - .t - - https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /jwh. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /jwh. . https://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/healthier-pregnancy/preventive/trauma.html https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/healthier-pregnancy/preventive/trauma.html https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/healthier-pregnancy/preventive/trauma.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/sv-prevention-technical-package.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/sv-prevention-technical-package.pdf https://dx.doi.org/ . /sw/ . . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ . /jamainternmed. . ?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . shooting yourself first in the foot, then in the head: normative democracy is suffocating, and then the coronavirus came to light original articles shooting yourself first in the foot, then in the head: normative democracy is suffocating, and then the coronavirus came to light paul r. carr published online: june # the author(s) postdigital science and education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - abstract this text starts with the premise that ‘normative democracy’ has rendered our societies vulnerable and burdened with unaddressed social inequalities. i highlight three central arguments: ( ) social media, and, consequently, citizen engagement are becoming a significant filter that can potentially re-imagine the political, economic, and social worlds, which increasingly bleed over to how we might develop and engage with ‘democracy’; to this end, i introduce a brief case study on the nefarious interpretation of the killing of jamal khashoggi in to underscore the tension points in normative democracy; ( ) capitalism, or neoliberalism, needs to be more fully exposed, interro- gated, and confronted if ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’ is to be re-considered, re-imagined, and re-invented; the perpetuation of social inequal- ities lays bare the frailty of normative democratic institutions; ( ) covid- has exposed the fault lines and fissures of normative democracy, illustrating here the ‘common sense’ ways that power imbalances are sustained, which leaves little room for social solidarity; i present herein the case of the economic/labor dynamic in quebec during the coronavirus. ultimately, i believe the quest to re-imagine a more meaningful, critically engaged democracy, especially during a context that is imbued with a political, economic, and public health crisis, cannot be delayed much longer. keywords normative democracy . coronavirus . covid- . hegemony . social media . social inequalities . citizen engagement . neoliberalism . québec * paul r. carr paulr.carr@uqo.ca département des sciences de l’éducation & chair-holder, unesco chair in democracy, global citizenship and transformative education (dcmÉt), université du québec en outaouais (uqo), gatineau, québec, canada http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:paulr.carr@uqo.ca postdigital science and education ( ) : – introduction we are taught to believe that we live in a democracy, that we have freedom, free speech and all sorts of rights and liberties, and that we are in control of our destiny. it is helpful to deconstruct every contour, nuance, concept, and meaning of democracy. to start, the ‘democracy’ i am referring to above is the larger-than-life, win-at-all-costs, ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’, the one with the, generally speaking, two main political parties, highly controlled elections, representatives who, in some way, (supposedly) represent constituents, the common legislative, administrative, and judicial institutions that are supposed to be neutral and devoid of political influence, and the other trappings that give the sense that one would have to be literally insane to not endorse such a regime (carr and thésée ). some might argue that we have no alternative, that we have no way out, and that this system that we have been led to believe is so fundamentally essential to our being cannot be rivaled by anything else. this normative democracy is considered to be the standard, the norm, the indisputable, unquestionable system that allows us to live, grow, prosper, and function. with this normative understanding of democracy, it can be difficult to introduce opposing, counter and/or critical proposals, philosophies, and changes that challenge the formal political structures and regimes. to be clear, this vision and version of normative democracy does not infer that historically marginalized peoples (starting with the first nations and african-americans within the north american context) necessarily sup- port formal power structures; rather, it is important to underscore that they, in general, continue to be further victimized by a system that upholds significant power differentials. so i stand on the outside of this behemoth monolith that has so shaped and dominated our realities and experiences. i am a part of a system that i feel uncomfort- able with (like many other people), yet the space to re-imagine and re-invigorate something different is tightly and hermeneutically sealed over our minds, requiring serious acrobatic contortions to overcome. again, vast social inequalities make supporting normative democracy an uneasy and debilitating option for broad swaths of the population but the normative structure and system in place does not lead to a plethora of openings and options to build something more engaging. to prove the point—or at least to expose it— we can ask how easy it is to speak (within broad, mainstream sectors of society) of developing a different, alternative democracy, espe- cially during election season, which seems to be increasingly all of the time (masket )? normative democracy, not the philosophical, political-science versions, is imbued in what could be considered ‘liberal democracy’, and this formulation/ conceptualization has been led, principally, by the western world, and, especially the usa. after some years of researching the meaning, manifestation and operationalization of democracy, i do not think that it is unfair to submit that for many people democracy should naturally equal the ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’ that is suffocating humanity. this is neither to say that most people are satisfied, uplifted, and enthralled with the status quo, nor to say that they are ignorant, disengaged and incapable of effectuating change. rather, it underscores how difficult and even unimaginable it is to consider another form of democracy. the linkage with education and education for democracy is key to this debate (apple postdigital science and education ( ) : – ; thésée, carr, duclos, and potwora ), and contextualizes how we think (and act) about the subject. to further clarify this context of how normative democracy manifests itself, i highlight the following examples from my research projects with colleagues over the years, which involved studies in some countries with roughly teacher educa- tion and educator participants (carr and thésée ): & we found that the vast majority did not have a robust, significant democratic experience in their own education; & that this has affected how they consider democracy and education; & that social justice is, for many, a difficult and problematic area to cultivate in and through education owing to a weakly asserted, structured, and supported institu- tional culture based on normative democracy; & that most considered that the space for inclusive and critical engagement in and through education is constrained, limited, and fraught with obstacles; & that racialized participants had significantly higher levels of experience, conscientization, and engagement with, for example, racism, antiracism, and efforts to address racial inequities, which further underscores how normative democracy closes down fundamental debate, dialog, teaching and learning as well as transfor- mative education while presenting the posture and framework of democracy. when democracy and education are considered to be naturally disconnected while not leaving room for a more critically engaged democracy, it is not difficult to imagine the suffocating nature of normative democracy. normative elections, the ones that have been so effectively presented by the usa as the backbone to any meaningful democracy, have been jettisoned into a cesspit of turmoil and intractable debate that often neglects problematizing some of the most intractable and germane issues (achen and bartels ; howe ; torcal and ramon montero ). not everyone involved in elections is corrupt or corrupted, or is afflicted with unsightly motivations, and people who go to the polls are not simply sheep being led to the proverbial slaughterhouse. there is a great deal of complexity as to why we vote and why we hope that there will be some hope in participating in mainstream democracy, but the faith in electoral democracy is waning almost everywhere (torcal and ramon montero ; carr and thésée ). yet, these normative elections, which are often ordered to measure with the threat of massive (real and rhetorical) carpet-bombing and worse, if not realized, are replete with all kinds of paradoxical anti-democratic maneu- vers, starting with who can be elected, how much money plays into the process, how media can control and shape the message, manipulation, and diversion is a fundamental component, how seeking to win is more a priority than seeking to build a meaningful democracy, and how capitalism is the enormous, indelicate, meandering proverbial - pound gorilla in the room (amico ; carr and thésée ). added to this is the role, the purpose, and place of education in supporting, cultivating, and building a critically engaged democracy as well as critically engaged citizen participation. it is extremely difficult to have one without the other (democracy without education, for example, or, rather, meaningful, critically engaged democracy without meaningful, critically engaged education). (see carr , and carr and thésée , as well as the unesco chair dcmÉt website at uqo.ca/dcmet/ for an archive of publications.). postdigital science and education ( ) : – and then, starting in late , the world started to feel the indelible, intractable, and (in)visible perturbations of the coronavirus, which emanated in china, and has quickly disseminated throughout all regions, making it a global pandemic. the number of people affected, contracting the virus, and ultimately succumbing to it, is increasing daily at this time but there is much analysis and data-crunching indicat- ing that, in many areas, after several weeks of self-distancing, hygienic measures, increasing testing, closing down all but ‘essential services’, and enhancing medical and health care measures, the ‘curve’ may be flattening. however, few people believe that the virus will disappear, nor that the cost, in terms of human life, will be entirely negligible. so what is the connection to democracy, capitalism (or perhaps more correctly neoliberalism), and covid- ? the vulnerabilities, inequal- ities, and fault lines that existed prior to the coronavirus have been exacerbated, and the virus has disproportionately impacted racialized, marginalized, and lower income communities. the contraction and death rates are higher, and the economic, labor, living, and social conditions have worsened, notably for already vulnerable communities. this pandemic, sadly, provides a tremendous and significant impetus to re-consider and re-calibrate our thinking around democracy (diamond ; giroux ; roy ). this text starts with the premise that ‘normative democracy’ has put us in a pickle, and that, although there are ways out if it, this will require breaking out of the glass box that has a great many of us believing that there is no alternative. i highlight three points related to democracy in this text, formulating the following central arguments: ) social media and, consequently, citizen engagement are becoming a significant filter that can potentially re-imagine the political, economic, and social worlds (outside of and beyond normative democracy), which increasingly bleed over to how we might develop and engage with ‘democracy’ (garrett ); to this end, the advent of ‘fake news’ is a worthy subject to explore here because a functioning democracy, to a certain degree, is dependent on media/political literacy, critical engagement/participation, and the capacity to communicate, analyze, and dissem- inate nuanced perspectives, ideas, and information; i introduce a brief case study on the nefarious interpretation of the killing of jamal khashoggi in (bbc news ) to underscore the tension points in normative democracy; ) capitalism, or neoliberalism, needs to be more fully exposed, interrogated, and confronted if ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’ is to be re-considered, re-imagined, and re-invented (lydon ); the perpetuation of social inequalities lays bare the frailty of normative democratic institutions; ) covid- has exposed the fault lines and fissures of normative democracy, illus- trating here the ‘common sense’ ways that power imbalances are sustained, which leaves little room for social solidarity (human rights watch ); i present here a small case study of the economic and labor dynamic in quebec during the coronavirus. ultimately, i believe the quest to re-imagine a more meaningful, critically engaged democracy, especially during a context that is imbued with a political, economic, and public health crisis, cannot be delayed much longer. postdigital science and education ( ) : – social media and citizen engagement capitalism, in addition to acknowledged and unacknowledged hegemony, is central to this model or framework, and a natural order and superiority flows effortlessly through thinking and believing that this is the only way to be, exist and function. democracy . , which considers more fluidly agency, power crystallizations, social justice, and individual as well as collectivist media and citizen engagement, is much messier than democracy . , which connects more directly with normative, representative, hege- monic, and electoral machinations (carr, hoechsmann, and thésée ). social media is an exemplary feature of this new environment and can help us draw out the fundamental question if greater media, communication, and online involvement can lead to more robust, critical democratic forms of citizen participation. elsewhere, with colleagues (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée ), i describe some of the overlapping components, processes, and concerns that help frame the context for social media, fake news, and citizen participation. it would appear that everyone today is somehow connected to social media, even if one does not have an account for one or many of the social networks that pervade, link and smother the socio-cultural landscape (keating and melis ). there are networks for an untold array of information sharing and gathering. nouns have become verbs as in ‘youtubbing,’ ‘blogging,’ ‘vlogging,’ ‘googling,’ ‘facebooking,’ etc.. the reach is significant, and the digital imprints (and foot- prints) are equally commensurate (sun, wang, shen and zhang ). one can do a search for a pair of shoes on amazon.com, and, magically, there will be ads for shoes on the personal facebook feed immediately afterward. algorithms are increasingly programming what we see, and aligning at least some of our attention on ‘stuff,’ for lack of a better word, where we might not otherwise be interested. this surveillance, usurpation and data-gathering was significantly exposed in , with facebook being highlighted for a particularly negative watershed year (sutton ; wong and morris ). among the litany of events, problems and phenomena that have plagued facebook, which are clearly not limited to this one, albeit prominent social network, were the following claims, findings and evidence, amongst other issues: algorithms connected to the ‘negative effects to referral traffic,’ unregulated ads that underscored the mueller investigation that has, as it focus, in large part, the russian involvement in the us presidential election, the cambridge analytica scandal that ‘obtained the data of tens of millions of facebook users without their knowledge or consent to help build a powerful political influencing tool,’ privacy and security issues, ‘special data-sharing arrangements with tech manufactures like amazon, apple and samsung,’ hacking of accounts, and regulation problems (sutton ). (carr et al. : ) fake news has leaped into mainstream consciousness over the past few years as if it is the problem hampering democracy. emphasizing that fake news is rarely neatly packaged within a singular category, the report cited above cautions that deception needs to be interrogated at various times while viewing media messages. with the postdigital science and education ( ) : – avalanche of fake accounts, fake (bot) users, and fake (or tampered with) algorithms, the terrain is fertile for fake news. this is especially the case if users, consumers, and citizens are conditioned to not question or verify what comes their way, are reluctant to disbelief ‘official’ sources, are ignorant, are disinterested, or are enveloped in turbulent news cycles with complex, nuanced, voluminous information, for which they are unable to decipher the diverse and divergent realities emanating from a particular situation, event, or reality (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée ). citizen participation requires critical engagement, and constructing media/political literacy, however de- fined, needs to be considered in order to better underpin meaningful forms of democ- racy (carr, cuervo, and daros ). the hailstorm of misinformation, misdirection, and disinformation during the early phases of the coronavirus mirrors the general online landscape, serving as both a tremendous opportunity and a mud-slide concurrently, and highlighting the potential for meaningful solidarity as well as, conversely, marginali- zation and xenophobia (ali and kurasawa ). i am also drawn to the nuanced layers that mackenzie and bhatt ( ) add to this debate, suggesting that ‘[b]ullshit is different from lying and it need not undermine trust, particularly when it is blatant’. (the literature around the notion and proliferation of ‘bullshit’ is linked to, and builds on, the work of harry g. frankfurt, notably the book aptly entitled on bullshit.) this is extremely relevant in contemporary times, given populist movements, xenophobic manifestations, and the denunciation of human rights, and the quest to diminish ‘news’ as being ‘fake’ as a basic principle emanating from some powerful leaders in the western world as well as elsewhere. at the same time, i acknowledge that the traditional media is anchored in biases and hegemonic trappings but am troubled that the ‘fake news’ caravan seeks to whitewash anything that may bring contrary dimensions to the debate, especially in relation to revealing, exposing, and countering mainstream narratives related to war, conflict, racism, inequalities, and the like. democracy . had a relatively controlled audience, whereas democracy . has let the floodgates open, and this means that there are now opportunities for critique, solidarity, and mobilization that may not have been as readily available previously, including diverse social movements that have taken off through social media (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée ). these social movements can be a force of change in society at the local, national, and global levels where governments and international institutions are unwilling, unable, or unmotivated to respond to the needs of the population. for instance, black lives matter (mundt, ross, and burnett ), #metoo (botti et al. ), occupy, and idle no more have all had a significant social media influence, and environmental, peace, and other movements have also been influential at diverse levels in mobilizing solidarity that surpasses cultural, linguistic, geographic, and political boundaries (carr et al. ; carty ). considering killing as a peripheral, irrelevant event, and the death of a saudi journalist within the quickly evolving media/social media landscape, i can think of what appear to be several major (media and/or social) events in recent times—noting full-well that by the time this article is published, they may not even be recognizable—including the khashoggi killing, the covington school student debacle, the parkland shooting, the postdigital science and education ( ) : – kavanaugh nomination, the thai cave recue, the (british) royal wedding, the mani- festations in haiti, the never-ending quest to build a ‘wall/barrier/fence’ between the usa and mexico, and the political/humanitarian crisis in venezuela, among many others. i apologize for the usa-centric focus here. as a canadian, i am fully cognizant of the depth and reach of usa tentacles, thinking, control, power, and influence in and on my own work, as well as on many others, even though i collaborate widely with colleagues in diverse jurisdictions and contexts, notably in latin america. the usa and its interests bleed over to every region of the world, and, although united statesians (the concept of ‘american’ is hotly contested and does not cover all of the peoples of the ‘americas’) may not be talking collectively (in a central way) about the world or may not be collectively immersed in ingratiating the usa into the infinite number of political and economic issues, concerns, and cultural representations of the other countries and peoples, the world is watching, listening, and being consumed by the behemoth of usa empire. the covid- pandemic also squarely places the usa within the core of the action, with daily pronouncements about blaming china, cutting off funding to the world health organization, downplaying the spread of the virus, boasting about how the virus has been beaten back, and spreading the political and economic reach of this country far and wide, in military, diplomatic, commercial, and (potentially) humanitarian ways. it seems as though the reality of this being a (global) pandemic, a far-reaching health crisis, is only partially the story, and the present manifestations in the usa of people demanding that ‘isolation’ be stopped, while so many are being infected and even dying, is almost incomprehensible, and social media concurrently exposes, denounces, disseminates, and provides an echo chamber for what is taking place. so i question what becomes news, indeed viral, and how does it become more than click-bait, algorithmic entertainment, the bouncing around in limited, like-minded networks, tepid sharing, and a platform for trolls? is it about numbers, the quantity of clicks, views, shares and reads, or something more substantive? at the same time, what are the true dimensions of the issue(s)? who frames it, how, and why, and to what end? what is omitted, downplayed, obfuscated, how and why? in the list of issues in the previous paragraph, we can think of many pitfalls, foibles, and problematic concerns as to what ‘issues’ look like in democracy . . all issues are not simply a usa problem, but connections to elites, hegemony, power differentials, and media framing are, i believe, worth establishing and interrogating. what is clear is that power differentials are at play in how fake news is constructed, disseminated, understood, and engaged with. the more volatile social media can push up against normative media in further determining how fake news can be projected, masked, embellished, and consumed. concerning the jamal khashoggi killing in october in istanbul (bbc news ), we can follow the usual process of focusing on hegemonic interests and avoiding contextual factors and backdrops. several significant and pivotal factors were down- or under-played in reporting on this tragedy. for example, the relationship to the saudi kingdom, human rights, billions upon billions of dollars in armaments sold to the saudis, the unimaginable assault by saudi arabia against yemen, and the impending famine and genocide in yemen as a result, women’s rights, journalistic freedom, and an unending series of beheadings by the quasi-untouchable saudi regime. undoubtedly, information, discussion, debate, reports, and mobilization on all of these fronts can be located and advanced through social media, in spite of the mainstream, hegemonic postdigital science and education ( ) : – vision. the point here is that central, controlled, and ‘manufactured’ debate, at least within a condensed and constrained optic and timeframe, shined a light on the actual killing of khashoggi in turkey, who did it, how, and why. yet, significantly, it was only weakly concerned with the other, what could/should be considered to be, highly pertinent and central issues that are/were intertwined within this quagmire. why such deference was paid to the saudi leadership in this case, when this same deference is not paid in many other instances, especially when the faulty regime is not an ally, is quite pertinent. the lack of historical, political, and economic context, combined with the propensity to avoid latching onto ‘research’, and a plurality of visions, perspectives, and experi- ences seem to be a predominant feature of how these stories crystallize. the khashoggi example, like others, contains an evolving set of circumstances and frames, as well as questions, and we are cognizant of how some segments of social media can provide differing narratives that can, consequently, re-shape the ‘official’ story. yet, the social media dimensions can also counter the formal hegemonic narrative, and this is where alternative forms of ‘democracy’ can start to take hold (jenkins, shresthova, gamber- thompson, kligler-velenchik, and zimmerman ). why the more critical dimensions within the khashoggi case (or the venezuela situation or others, for that matter) were/are not more broadly taken up by democracy . relates, i believe, to the hegemonic shaping/framing of the issues. it is also combined with a weakly focused mainstream media, whose reach is now consumed within the ‘fake news’ bubble, and a still questionable place, at least among many formal political leaders and their business sector supports, of uncontrolled social movements and social media within formal political spheres. however, i do believe that this last factor—social movements and social media being a mobilizing force—is, and will continue to potentially be, central to conceptualizing, developing, cultivating, building, and elaborating a more decent, meaningful, robust, and critically engaged democracy, in spite of the status quo aiming to maintain and sustain its hegemonic place. social media movements can also lead to dictatorship, genocide, and an infringe- ment of rights (sapra ). for instance, gayo-avello ( ) hypothesizes that social media may contribute but is not the central feature to democratization: in short, social media is not a democratizing catalyzer per se. it is just one of many factors, in addition to great tactical tools, provided the conditions in the nondemocratic country are suitable. moreover, there are many variables which can negatively affect the outcome of any uprising, even without the regime tampering with social media. in other words, social media does not make people free; freedom requires people taking risks and organizing themselves. (gayo- avello : ) social media cannot magically lead to class consciousness, anti-racism, peace, and social solidarity. however, it may be able to provide an outlet and legs to important stories, events, and realities for people who were only previously loosely connected. this could have a dual effect of further questioning and delegitimizing normative democracy, and also providing space and voice for marginalized interests, perspectives, postdigital science and education ( ) : – and arguments. social media is now indelibly a part of the citizen participation landscape. neoliberalism and the economics of freedom what is the point of living in a ‘democracy’ if you are one of those living in abject poverty, are homeless, and are working tirelessly to make ends meet but never achieve economic justice (ely yamin )? of course, the notion of having the ‘freedom’ to pursue your dreams, as in ‘the american dream’, is sufficiently grounded within normative debates to ensure that questioning entrenched, systemic, institutional, deeply grounded social inequalities will be quickly snuffed out. within the usa context, amadeo ( ) highlights the increasing social inequalities as follows: structural inequality seems to be worsening. between and , after-tax income increased % for the wealthiest % of households. it rose % for the top fifth. the bottom fifth only increased by %. that’s true even adding all income from social security, welfare, and other government payments. during this time, the wealthiest % increased their share of total income by %. everyone else saw their share shrink by – %. as a result, economic mobility worsened. the financial crisis saw the rich get richer. in , the top % of earners took home % of all income. (amadeo ) powers, fischman, and berliner ( ) have highlighted how research on poverty and social inequalities is poorly understood or operationalized, which further underpins weak policy responses to entrenched and systemic problems. similarly, it is helpful to problematize how wealth has been accrued historically through genocide, slavery, imperialism, war and conflict, colonialism, and a host of racialized, sexist, and other machinations in addition to piketty’s ( ) well- documented treatise capital in the twenty-first century. mclaren (see pruyn and malott ) has highlighted marx’s theory on surplus value and the limited mobility between the social classes, and the crushing blow of capital against labor; ultimately, the value of what is produced encounters hyper-inflation in the hands of investors, owners, and speculators without real production, which may seem locked into the days of children being exploited in coal mines over a century ago but there are still many parallels today. giroux ( ) has coined ‘casino capitalism’ to label the politico- economic system that enraptures the vast majority of formal, and to varying degrees, informal activity that underpin mass exploitation. he further elucidates the danger of continuing on the one-way neoliberal path before us: neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individual- ism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further postdigital science and education ( ) : – one’s individual needs and self-interests. matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political consider- ations. one consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society– now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. (giroux ) mclaren (see pruyn and malott ) and giroux (see giroux, sandin, and burdick, ) have also made a compelling case to interpret today’s reality as a politico- economic context that is launching us into hyper-sophisticated forms of fascism. within this backdrop, i believe that there is a great need, as there always has been, to be more fully engaged with (and in) education, in political circles and in public debate, in general, in relation to the philosophy and operationalization of capitalism and, in particular, to the all-encompassing mercantilization of all public and private goods, services, and experiences enveloped within neoliberalism. the covid- context has expedited and underscored the slippery slope toward authoritarianism, stripping away rights while creating socio-economic cleavages that are even more serious than before (giroux ). democracy . is tethered to democracy . conceptualizations of the world, but the door is (slightly) open to develop a new world, despite the titanic hegemonic vice-grip that maintains a stranglehold on education and public debate. as alluded to in the previous section, the collective ‘we’ are free to surf the web, consume, create, diffuse, comment, and cajole the other, whether the ‘other’ knows us, sees us, or cares about us or not. we are not frontally impeded from opening our eyes and ears. on the contrary, many movements have been stimulated from doing so—including the arab spring— although the aftermath re-captured regressive hegemonic features of what preceded it. the dilemma is that the corporate/business politico-economic (hegemonic) world has grown into this concurrently in-your-face and stealth, quickly-evolving, dynamic context seamlessly stamping its imprint in every way possible. the interplay between democracy . and democracy . , thus, offers tremendous potential for citizen participation and engagement while, simultaneously, presenting the quicksand mirage that we may not be as ‘free’ as we think we are, or we may not be as ‘engaged’ as we think that we are. neoliberalism has many people around the world gasping for air. covid- and the urgency to avoid returning to ‘normal’ now mired in a pandemic that vacillates from signs of encouragement that the ‘curve is flattening’ to fears that ‘community transmission’ is rapidly spreading through asymp- tomatic contact, there is enormous stress about when there will be an effective vaccination, how the health context will play out, and, increasingly, when will the ‘economy get back to normal.’ at this point in time—although we are aware of massive numbers (the information is not hidden, anyway) of unnecessary deaths in ‘developing’ countries related to hunger, disease, poverty, and conflict— we can see the extreme postdigital science and education ( ) : – concern within local, national, and international governments and institutions to get the economy working. while most of the world has emphasized ‘social distancing’ as a key measure to diminish the dissemination and transmission of covid- , an eerily bizarre phenomenon has taken hold in the usa (wong, vaughan, quilty-harper, and liver- pool ). disparate, semi-organized protests against ‘self-isolation’ are taking place in diverse locations, often replete with a range of arms and placards enunciating the right to, among other things, ‘haircuts’ and to ‘play golf.’ is it pure insanity, a case of hubris beyond all limits, an anti-science ideology that needs to play out in every sector—including the environment—or complete indifference to human suffering? while the usa situation deeply underscores the anxiety and agitation around the health/economy dichotomy, i present below a brief illustration of the neoliberalization of the political and economic convergence through an example of the coronavirus in québec (canada). québec, a predominantly french-speaking province of . million people in canada, provides an interesting illustration of how a jurisdiction within a federal framework has worked to mobilize, sensitize, and activate a range of health, economic, political, and education measures to confront covid- . there are daily press briefings, information sessions, directives, a vast media campaign, testimonies, and a host of consultations, which all serve to educate the public and to engage the citizenry concurrently. it would be disingenuous to simply criticize where there have been gaps and problems; the reality is that many people have worked diligently and courageously to create a sense of the gravity of the problem and to diminish the extent of the propagation of the virus. having a universal healthcare system has been, i believe, indispensable to understand- ing how to assess, allocate, distribute, and organize resources. this is not an individual problem but a vast, insidious collective one. it should be acknowledged as well that what we know is shifting and re-calibrating in real time, and decisions made on march were questioned and re-assessed by march and so on. moreover, what we know now cannot always be fully understood until later, and decisions that are taken in that light can lead to nefarious situations and the rampant spread of the virus. hindsight is / as the proverb goes so a fulsome diagnosis of what we are doing today will be more effectively critiqued once we are through to the other side of the pandemic. the situation in québec, one that is surely not unknown elsewhere, underscores the fragility of ‘normative’ democracy; this is, i believe, a question of normative democ- racy working the way that it does. one heart-wrenching issue that we are observing at this time is that the vast majority of deaths in québec, like elsewhere, is among those years of age and older, and particularly the + age-group. moreover, what many of us did not know or fully consider, the vast majority of deaths up until now within québec are among those who are in long-term care residences (in french, they are called cshlds), roughly %, which are essentially senior’s residences for people with health issues. the transmission within these residences is extensive and rapid, with an increasing number of personnel, nurses, and doctors also being affected. one residence, for example, experienced an overwhelming amount of infection (herron, discussed below), and there are others that have also been deeply affected. one might say that there are two public health crises at this time: one for the general population and another for these particular residences with this specific group. on the one hand, the population is astonished, sickened, and in shock (‘how could this happen?,’ ‘especially to “our elderly”?’). on the other hand, this was a serious postdigital science and education ( ) : – politico-economic cocktail being mixed for a couple of decades, massaged through diverse political parties within the normative democracy that adjudicates such matters. (why was there such sustained neglect and under-funding? why was this not flagged as a serious catastrophe in the making?). i would like to underscore that this is not a problem of one person, one political party, one decision, one law, or one particular model: it is the consequence of systemic, institutional failure/negligence as well as the thinnest wedges of normative democracy carrying the day over the broader public interest and good. i briefly present some of the specific underlying conditions that lay the groundwork for what is playing out within this vulnerable population at this time: a lack of monitoring, under-paying workers, and diminished policy importance and planning. media accounts provide information on the tragedy unfolding before our eyes. in one case, at herron, in western montréal, the chsld there, which is privately owned, experienced serious staffing shortages, insufficient equipment, poor oversight, inadequate support from oversight bodies, and unacceptable communications with health authorities. mckenna ( ) provides a sense of the chaos and suffering there: nurses were getting sick, too: six out of the seven registered nurses on staff were experiencing covid symptoms, and of seven licensed practical nurses (lpns), only four were still healthy. (…). about a quarter of the orderlies (préposés aux bénéficiares, or patient attendants) had also stopped working — either because they were experiencing covid symptoms or because they felt it was no longer safe to work at chsld herron. within weeks, a quarter of those patient attendants would test positive for covid- . (…). bedridden residents were lying in sheets stained brown up to their necks in excrement, so long had it been since their diapers had been changed. some were dehydrated and unfed. (…). the head of professional services at the ciusss, dr. nadine larente, is the doctor who went to help. she told the french-language newspaper la presse the place was in chaos: one lpn and two patient attendants were trying to care for residents. food trays had been placed on the floor, dishes untouched because residents with mobility issues could not reach them. (mckenna ). about double the number, proportionately, of seniors in québec opt for long-term care residences compared with the rest of the country, which could be a function of culture, policy, economics, and options available, and the rapidly aging québécois population is a further aggravating factor preparing the context (dougherty ). one expert (see lowrie ) noted that the spatial configuration ‘with long corridors and residents sharing rooms, have a harder time isolating sick residents from uninfected ones, compared to residences with house-style layouts, where residents live in smaller wings’ is another factor that helps explain the extreme transmission of the virus in chslds. with staff falling ill or refusing to come to work, there has been a massive campaign to recruit retired nurses and also to bring doctors and specialists into the overburdened long-term care system; the premier of the province has also asked for the military (over a thousand troops) to further provide support within these seniors’ residences. postdigital science and education ( ) : – social class and political power are fully intertwined in the quickly unraveling situation involving seniors’ residences in québec. raising the minimum wage in québec, for example, was vigorously opposed by the present government and others along the way, fearful that employers, especially small businesses, could not afford it. while there is no maximum wage being regulated, those struggling with the minimum wage are often obligated to work two or three jobs, to seek assistance elsewhere, and face other severe challenges, including in relation to housing, childcare, education, and the cost of living. the chsld situation brought everything to a head, with it being clearly obvious that those designated as ‘essential services’ were often those being paid the least in society. the premier took the almost unprecedented measure of apologizing for underpaying workers when it became difficult and problematic to staff these residences: ‘i know a lot of quebecers are asking themselves how we could have got ourselves in this situation,’ a sombre legault said at his friday briefing, address- ing the catastrophe unfolding in covid- -stricken long-term seniors’ resi- dences (chslds). ‘i myself have spent several days and nights asking what i should have done differently.’ ‘if i was able to redo one thing, i would have increased the wages of orderlies faster, even without the accord of the unions. i assume full responsibility. we entered this crisis ill equipped, and clearly the situation deteriorated for all kinds of reasons. the virus got in.’ (authier ). the premier also took a series of steps to increase pay for healthcare workers. as part of its effort to improve working conditions in the health-care system, quebec announced that nearly , employees in both the public and private sector will be getting temporary pay increases. workers who are in direct contact with the disease — such emergency-room professionals and nurses in coronavirus testing centres — will receive an % boost in their salaries. those working in long-term care homes, known as chslds, will also be among the , workers to benefit from the % raise…. another , people who work in the health-care system but aren’t as directly exposed to the disease, such as the nurses who staff the health line, will get a salary increase of %. and workers in private long-term care homes, many of whom make little more than minimum wage, will get an additional $ per hour. that measure appears designed to discourage these workers from quitting and staying home, to take advantage of federal financial assistance that’s worth $ a month. (shingler, stevenson, and montpetit ). one question that arises here is how these workers could have been underpaid for so long, and what the effect may have been, for them, the people receiving the care, the postdigital science and education ( ) : – healthcare institutions and system, and society as a whole. did it dissuade qualified workers from pursuing careers or staying in them? what were the other priorities that negated remunerating fairly such indispensable and ‘essential’ workers? on the economic side of the ledger, how efficient is it to underpay some employees and over-compensate others who have not actually done the work or who are, ironi- cally, considered to be disproportionately fundamental? is a : ratio for salaries at the top and the bottom reasonable or should it be : or : ? in canada, in general, the wage differentials are less extreme and odious than the usa, but the issue of social (in)equality is also a significant concern there. one study (mishe and wolfe ) focused on usa compensation provides some backdrop to how public services and priorities can be disproportionately affected. ceo compensation is very high relative to typical worker compensation (by a ratio of -to- or -to- ). in contrast, the ceo-to-typical-worker compensa- tion ratio (options realized) was -to- in and -to- in . ceos are even making a lot more—about five times as much—as other earners in the top . %. from to , ceo compensation grew by . % ( . % under the options-realized measure), far outstripping s&p stock market growth ( . %) and the wage growth of very high earners ( . %). in contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just . %. there is a lot of complexity to how covid- is analyzed, and comparing diverse sites/ jurisdictions/systems and how data are compiled and evaluated may not reveal the true breadth and scope of the reality. similarly, there are many moving parts and lots of people (remunerated and volunteer) involved and engaged, and there are also all kinds of activities aimed at supporting a solidified, vigorous response. my intention in presenting this case study is not to admonish or diminish those serious and important efforts. on the contrary, it is my hope that this pandemic will reveal a silver lining somewhere in that extreme vulnerabilities and shortcomings need to be rectified in order to ensure, as much as possible, that economics will not suffocate political considerations in the future. and i have not emphasized here the race, gender, and other pivotal underlying factors underpinning this pandemic, but they are also a significant piece of the puzzle. conclusion this text has underscored what ‘democracy’ we are trying to achieve, to cultivate, and to ingratiate. the focus and direction of my central arguments about the lack of bone fide democracy within a normative, mainstream political framework that preaches that we live in a developed democracy has, i believe, become accelerated and accentuated as a result of covid- . i have highlighted some of the fundamental issues and problems with ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy,’ and also emphasized the pivotal contextual shifts and cornerstones embedded in democracy . as well as democracy . . i have also made the case for more robust, critically-engaged citizen participation, which would require or, at the very least, benefit from new forms postdigital science and education ( ) : – of education and media/political literacy. the social media equation was brought to light since it serves as an unruly, uncontrolled, and rapidly evolving microcosm of the world, its diversity, its problems, its challenges, and its potential. i was careful to not make a definitive declaration related to achieving democracy through the potentially transformative technologies that now shape how we live and function and relate to the world. despite everything, we are still mired in conflict(s), in inequitable power relations, and in ‘democracies’ that are not very ‘democratic.’ we are still straddling democracy . , in which formal political declarations are fabricated with partisan political interests at the fore, the stock market is seemingly central to everything, and business elites are catered to at every level. similarly, tax cuts—regardless of political stripe—figure into everything, political parties shameless- ly line up to receive ‘donations’ (does anyone believe that they come with no strings attached?), tax breaks for companies must be considered as much as lower tax rates for the rich (does anyone believe that rich people will create more employment based on having more cash? if so, why are there so many off-shore accounts in tax-havens intended to not pay tax?), and (military) might is (still) right for many. the further the coronavirus expands, the more there is discussion about needing an economic balance to ‘get back to normal,’ and indicators such as the stock market are central to supposedly gaging what is happening (karabell ). of course, there have been lots of (incremental) changes, and lots of new laws, policies, practices, and shifts in cultural norms that have benefitted, generally speaking, women, racialized minorities, the poor, and the vulnerable. yet, social inequalities, despite massive technological and others changes, not only persist but, in many regards, are increasing. how could this be when there is so much wealth? why do so many people leave their countries in complete desperation, why is there still so much military conflict—most of which goes unreported—why do so many problems of poverty and discrimination persist in the most vulgarly palpable ways, why is there such little global outrage over the state and fate of indigenous peoples (the loss of land, language, culture and autonomy), and why is the ‘environment’ not the priority? this very partial list of questions is noteworthy because neoliberalism is, definitely, an accelerator to many of the problems we are facing (giroux ). to be clear here, this is not a binary proposition, and avoiding confronting real problems with real people will not address real suffering, oppression and marginalization (gray and gest ). we might ask: why are there (recurrent, entrenched) problems when there are so many people, projects, forces, and movements fighting for a more decent, robust, and (even) alternative democracy . , one that could place neoliberalism within a new, different and alternative landscape? how should hegemony be understood today when (many) people so freely believe that they have complete agency over their actions, thoughts and experiences, and when (many) people believe that voting is the (only) key? i would stress here that the binary capitalist-socialist, rich-poor binary is not the most productive lens through which to examine the complexity of such extreme power imbalances around the world. the debate around ‘democracy,’ i believe, needs to be more all-encompassing, involving all of the tentacles and blockages of neoliberalism into the class, race, gender, cultural, and other pivotal sociological markers of identity, and it also needs to carve out a place for how power works, is distributed and re- created. this debate needs to leave open the door for unknown questions and answers as well as (creative and alternative) processes and deliberations, accepting that the postdigital science and education ( ) : – normative elections in place are most likely not very beneficial for most people, and, most definitely, the massive numbers of people who do not participate, willingly or unwillingly (van reybrouck ). it is important to connect the local with the global, as we can through covid- . ely yamin ( ) provides a sense of the need to address global issues globally and to be leery of not considering the complexity of the linkages between complex problems. but that and many other challenges requires weaving human rights praxis—human rights for social change—into broader social movements, as well as working across disciplinary silos. the problems facing the rights movement are too complex for any one set of advocacy tools or any one field’s expertise. of course, there is no single monolithic ‘human rights community’ just as there is no unified ‘health and human rights community’. those tropes are used from the ‘inside’ to police the boundaries of orthodoxy and from the ‘outside’ to caricaturize sets of actors and strategies. yet, there are dangers of circling the wagons defensively around our professional tribes. the complexity of the chal- lenges posed by rampant inequality, the spread of authoritarianism and illiberal- ism, distrust in multilateralism, and climate cataclysm call for embracing justified critiques and opening up to new ideas and perspectives—and uniting with labor, environmental and many other social justice movements. (ely yamin ) inspired by paulo freire’s transformative work (freire ), i would advocate for more openness and acceptance of political realities that shape our lived experiences as well as an extremely healthy dose of humility as means to being able to understand, engage with, and be with the ‘other.’ i explore more fully the interconnections and inspiration of freire’s work with my colleague gina thésée (carr and thésée ). the hard-wired, testosterone-induced, keep-fundraising-at-all-times political systems that have been put in place all over the place need to be re-imagined before they suffocate themselves and everyone else. people will slowly divest themselves from the voting game, leaving it as an empty shell filled with a bunch of white guys in suites. (yes, there are some openings for other identities in this equation but the game was made by and for these guys.) freire wrote of conscientization, and i believe that to get there, we need to focus on peace, not war, social, and cultural development as opposed to economic development, solidarity, and emancipation rather than exclusively on individual rights and liberties, and the recognition that we are (all) human beings. as human beings, we are not required to be racist (no baby is racist but we learn to be so), sexist (a totally learned behavior), classist (exploiting one’s neighbor is not an obliga- tion), kill one another (who gets killed anyway? the rich or the poor, and who are they? do we care?), or live with so much misery, hatred, and oppression. ultimately, we are in the same boat (or world) together. one could see the glass half full with lots of progress all over the place, and, yet, the empty side of the glass contains real people living through unimaginable (for the full side of the glass) realities; the wage discrepancies and gaps in the québec example exemplify this reality. the quest for a meaningful democracy aimed at both sides of the glass would be a more conducive option, and re-imagining democracy will require more fully and, even disproportionately, considering the empty side of the glass. postdigital science and education ( ) : – taking a stand against democracy . and ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’ is a necessary condition to moving forward for this re-imagined democracy. donkervoort ( ) underscores that the pandemic has been exploited by ‘autocrats’ but that citizens can resist and coalesce around global initiatives to weaken and confront hegemonic forces. this could mean enhanced civil society engagement across all boundaries with an eye to unmasking and dismantling the concentration of wealth and power. covid- has exposed the need for a different universe, not only in terms of public health but also, importantly, in relation to democracy and citizen engagement (roy ). so while my foot, to return to the title, may be in taters, i’m hopeful— indeed, it may be the only way out if this—that my head will not be the ultimate causality as we strive to either sustain or re-imagine a democracy that can not only take us out of a pandemic but, rather, into social solidarity that will remove our bodies and minds (and souls) from imminent disaster. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references achen, c. h., & bartels, l. m. 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https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	shooting... 	abstract 	introduction 	social media and citizen engagement 	considering killing as a peripheral, irrelevant event, and the death of a saudi journalist 	neoliberalism and the economics of freedom 	covid- and the urgency to avoid returning to ‘normal’ 	conclusion 	references sexual harassment in the house of medicine and correlations to burnout: a cross-sectional survey original research ochsner journal : – , © by the author(s); creative commons attribution license (cc by) doi: . /toj. . sexual harassment in the house of medicine and correlations to burnout: a cross-sectional survey eva mathews, md, mph, rebecca hammarlund, phd, rumneet kullar, do, lauren mulligan, md, thanh le, ma, sarah lauve, carine nzodom, md, kathleen crapanzano, md our lady of the lake medical center psychiatry residency program, louisiana state university, baton rouge, la department of academic affairs, our lady of the lake medical center, baton rouge, la department of psychology, louisiana state university, baton rouge, la new york state psychiatric institute, columbia university medical center, new york, ny background: burnout is a major problem among physicians in the united states. women physicians experience higher rates of both burnout and sexual harassment than their male counterparts. some studies from asia and europe have shown a correlation between sexual harassment at work and burnout in women physicians, but no studies on this topic have been done in the united states. methods: for this study, women physicians with active louisiana licenses were invited to complete a cross-sectional self-report survey to assess burnout and sexual harassment. burnout was assessed with the -item maslach burnout inventory, and sexual harassment was assessed with a questionnaire adapted from the sexual experiences questionnaire and a series of follow-up items. results: the survey response rate was % ( of invitees). of the participants, % reported feeling burned out from their work at least once a week and % reported having experienced at least one inappropriate sexual incident in their career. ninety-six percent of respondents reported having experienced gender harassment from their colleagues, while % had experi- enced unwanted sexual attention from the same. additionally, ( %) participants reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment from patients or their families. colleague gender harassment was significantly correlated with burnout scores. conclusion: this study found that reports of burnout and gender harassment from colleagues were significantly correlated. the results also align with previous findings of high rates of sexual harassment in medical school and residency. more research should be done in this area, especially focusing on women in training, women of color, and sexual and gender minority individuals. keywords: burnout–professional, female, medicine, physicians, sexual harassment address correspondence to eva mathews, md, mph, our lady of the lake medical center psychiatry residency program, louisiana state university, o’donovan drive, baton rouge, la . tel: ( ) - . email: ematt @lsuhsc.edu introduction burnout is a major problem among physicians in the united states. in a national poll of more than , physicians, % reported burnout. burnout is not benign, as increased levels of burnout overlap with and may influ- ence levels of depression and suicide. in addition to hav- ing negative consequences for the burned-out physician, burnout has been related to poor patient outcomes. burnout may be defined several different ways. in this study, we used facets of maslach and jackson’s def- inition of burnout: emotional exhaustion (feeling emotion- ally drained, fatigued, and unable to connect to patients on a psychological level) and depersonalization (feeling callous towards people, treating patients as impersonal objects). recent research indicates gender differences in physi- cian burnout. a study of internal medicine residents found that women experienced emotional exhaustion more often than their male peers. in the medscape national physician burnout & depression report , nearly half of female physicians expressed feeling burned out vs % of their male peers, and lack of respect from administra- tors/employers, colleagues, or staff was one of the top contributors to burnout. addressing correlates and poten- tial causes of burnout is a crucial endeavor, as burnout has been shown to negatively impact patient care and col- league/staff interactions. the #metoo movement opened the conversation about sexual harassment in a variety of professional fields, includ- ing medicine. broadly, sexual harassment consists of sex- ual assault or coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harrassment. many studies have identified the onset of sexual harassment in medical school, which can result in deleterious professional outcomes for vic- tims, including reduced career advancement, reduced con- fidence in themselves professionally, and even leaving the field during training and beyond. - psychological sequelae associated with sexual harassment include isolation, guilt, volume , number , winter mailto:ematt @lsuhsc.edu sexual harassment and burnout in medicine anger, disrupted sleep, nightmares, fear, depression, stress disorders, and suicidal thoughts. , , a report from the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine in the united states noted that sexual harass- ment has not declined in the last years and identified gender harassment as the most common type of sexual harassment. examples of gender harassment include com- ments about women not belonging in leadership positions, demeaning comments about women, sexual insults, and crude sexual jokes. gender harassment devalues women in the workplace by communicating the idea that women do not belong or merit respect, and such harassment may be related to the higher burnout rates among women physicians. a study from japan found that women faculty at a large academic institution experienced higher rates of direct and indirect sexual harassment than their male counterparts (indirect harassment was defined as witnessing harassment of someone else), and for women, indirect harassment was associated with higher rates of burnout than direct sexual harassment. a study of physicians in sweden and italy showed that women physicians with suicidal thoughts, a common correlate of burnout, during the prior year were more likely to have experienced degrading experiences or harassment at work. some studies of physicians in the united states have shown that sexual harassment in the workplace is correlated with reduced career satisfaction, but these studies did not specifically measure burnout. , , , to our knowledge, no studies in the united states have examined the relationship between sexual harassment and burnout in female physicians. the primary purpose of this study was to address this gap in the literature and to identify the relationship, if any, between sexual harassment and burnout in female physi- cians with active licenses who are practicing in louisiana. we also wanted to examine the relationship between sex- ual harassment of female physicians by colleagues vs by patients and their families. we hypothesized that sexual harassment would be associated with female physician burnout. methods the study instrument was a cross-sectional, online, self- report survey. the study was approved by the louisiana state university health sciences center new orleans insti- tutional review board. participants we purchased a database of male and female physi- cians with active state of louisiana medical licenses from the louisiana state board of medical examiners (n= , ). the names of physicians who were marked in the database as retired or working in other states were removed (n= , ). next, researchers coded each name for sex, as this information was not included. we conducted internet searches to attempt to classify androgynous names. all male names (n= , ) were removed, leaving , names that appeared to belong to females. each name was assigned a random participant number from to , , and an online random number generator was used to create a list of , numbers within this range. the researchers used google to recheck the list of , . in this search, poten- tial participants were identified as males. those names were removed and were replaced by randomly selected addi- tional participant numbers. measures demographics. the first page of the survey contained items. the first item asked for the participant number from the postcard (refer to the procedure discussion). the remain- ing items asked for sex, year of birth, race, ethnicity, marital status, career stage (if currently in residency or year gradu- ated from residency), primary medical specialty (from a drop- down list of ), and current payment model. burnout. burnout was assessed with the -item maslach burnout inventory (mbi), a validated measure of burnout that assesses emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. , , for both items, respondents are asked to rate the frequency on a scale ranging from “never” to “every day.” high emo- tional exhaustion and high depersonalization were defined by a frequency of feeling emotionally drained or feeling cal- lous toward people at least once a week. sexual harassment. sexual harassment was assessed with a questionnaire adapted for the current study and a series of follow-up items about any instances of sexual harassment that respondents had officially reported at their institutions. sexual experiences questionnaire the sexual experiences questionnaire (seq) has been described as the gold standard measurement tool for sex- ual harassment, but it is more a series of somewhat related surveys than a single standardized measure. var- ious versions of the seq have been used that include different numbers of items as well as differently worded items, instructions, and response options. nevertheless, the original seq contains a number of face-valid items related to inappropriate sexual experiences and gender harassment. we adapted the version of the seq found in kearney for this study (table ). the kearney seq begins with items that ask if the respondent has ever been sexually harassed and how the respondent was harassed. we did not include these items in our survey, as other open-ended items were used to probe the same topics. next, the kear- ney seq contains items that measure gender harass- ment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. we preserved these subscales for our study, but we combined or deleted items to reduce redundancy (eg, items about unwelcome touching were combined), reducing the number of items to . in addition, we slightly reworded some items so they made more sense with the response options. for example, one item on the kearney seq stated “frequently made sexist remarks …,” which was redundant with the fre- quency response options (eg, can one “often” “frequently make sexist remarks”?). for our study, we deleted the word “frequently,” so the item stated, “made sexist remarks ….” table presents the original and the modified text for each survey item. in addition to shortening the scale, we adapted the response options so they were relevant to the respondent’s entire medical career. the original seq used the response options “never,” “once,” “sometimes,” “often,” and “very often.” our response options were “never,” “ or times in ochsner journal m ath e w s, e table . original text of and changes made to the sexual experiences questionnaire published in kearney item deleted/ modified/ number original text maintained? not modified modified text comments initial items: have you ever been sexually harassed while at the university? yes or no how were you harassed? deleted n/a these items were excluded in favor of our own open-ended items probing this issue. habitually told suggestive stories or offensive jokes? deleted n/a this item was deleted because it is redundant with item . made unwanted attempts to draw you into discussion of personal or sexual matters (eg, attempted to discuss or comment on your sex life)? maintained not modified made crude and offensive sexual remarks, either publicly (eg, in the office) or to you privately? maintained not modified treated you “differently”because of your sex (eg, mistreated, slighted, or ignored you)? maintained modified put you down, mistreated, slighted, ignored, or was condescending towards you because of your sex? combined text from items and ; all behaviors by which one could be treated differently because of sex were combined into one item. “treated you ‘differently”’was deleted and “because of your sex” was retained to create one item from two redundant items. gave you unwanted sexual attention? maintained not modified displayed, used, or distributed sexist or suggestive materials (eg, pictures, stories, or pornography)? maintained not modified frequently made sexist remarks (eg, suggesting that women are too emotional to be scientists or that men should not be the primary caretakers of children because they are not nurturing)? maintained modified made sexist remarks (eg, suggesting that women are too emotional to be scientists or that men should not be the primary caretakers of children)? “frequently”was deleted because it was redundant with the response options, while “because they are not nurturing”was deleted to shorten the item as the phrase is superfluous. attempted to establish a romantic relationship with you despite your efforts to discourage this person? deleted n/a this item is redundant with item , and item is the more precisely worded of the two items. “put you down”or was condescending to you because of your sex? deleted n/a combined with item . has continued to ask you for a date, drinks, dinner, etc, even though you have said “no”? maintained modified continued to ask you for a date, drinks, dinner, etc, even though you have said “no”? deleted the auxiliary verb has. vo lu m e ,n u m b er ,w in ter s e xu alh arassm e n t an d b u rn o u t in m e d ic in e table . continued item deleted/ modified/ number original text maintained? not modified modified text comments made you feel like you were being subtly bribed with some sort of reward or special treatment to engage in sexual behavior? maintained modified made you feel like you were being subtly bribed with some sort of reward (eg, faster promotion) or special treatment to engage in sexual behavior? combined text from items and ; item was used an example within item as the two items were redundant. made you feel subtly threatened with some sort of retaliation for not being sexually cooperative (eg, the mention of an upcoming evaluation, review, etc)? maintained modified made you feel subtly threatened with some sort of retaliation for not being sexually cooperative (eg, the mention of an upcoming evaluation or review, or implying you would be treated poorly)? combined text from items and and added text by the authors; item was used as an example within item , with which it was redundant; “or”was added twice and “implying”was inserted to make the combination make more sense. touched you (eg, laid a hand on your bare arm, put an arm around your shoulders) in a way that made you feel uncomfortable? maintained modified made unwanted and uncomfortable attempts to touch, stroke, or fondle you (eg, touching your arm or hand, stroking your leg or neck, etc)? combined text from items and as both are about unwelcome/uncomfortable touching and added text by the authors to better combine the items. made unwanted attempts to stroke or fondle you (eg, stroking your legs or neck, etc.)? deleted n/a combined with item . made unwanted attempts to have sex with you that resulted in you pleading, crying, or physically struggling? maintained not modified implied faster promotion or better treatment if you were sexually cooperative? deleted n/a combined with item . made it necessary for you to respond positively to sexual or social invitations in order to be well-treated on the job or at school? maintained modified made it necessary for you to respond positively to sexual or social invitations in order to be well-treated on the job? the words “or at school”were deleted. made you afraid you would be treated poorly if you didn’t cooperate sexually? deleted n/a combined with item . treated you badly for refusing to have sex? maintained not modified notes: response options for this study were “never,” “ or times in my career,” “sometimes in my career,” “often in my career,” and “very often in my career.” response options for the original kearney sexual experiences questionnaire were “never,” “once,” “sometimes,” “often,” and “very often.” gender harassment was assessed by items - , - , and ; unwanted sexual attention by items , , , and - ; and sexual coercion by items - and - . o ch sn erjo u rn al mathews, e my career,” “sometimes in my career,” “often in my career,” and “very often in my career.” we adapted the survey instructions to differentiate between different sources of the harassment behaviors. the seq – colleagues version asked about individuals at work as behavior sources, specifying that “individuals” referred to “faculty, physician colleague, nurse, pharmacist, etc.” the seq – patients and their families version speci- fied the source of the behavior as a patient or patient’s family member. finally, in addition to the adaptations described above, we added item asking if the respondent had been mistaken for a nonphysician care provider. we considered this item a face-valid signal of subtle gender bias (eg, the assumption that a female in a healthcare setting is not a physician). the survey instruments used in the study are shown in the figure. follow-up items the first follow-up item asked if the respondent had expe- rienced an inappropriate sexual incident that stood out in her memory. those who answered yes were asked ( ) how many such incidents they had reported (if none, the remain- ing follow-up items were skipped), ( ) if they felt the report(s) had been handled appropriately, ( ) when the most serious incident occurred, ( ) perceived severity of the incident, and ( ) if they would like to share their story. procedure a postcard invitation to participate was sent to the physi- cal address of each of the , randomly selected physi- cians on july , . the invitation contained a brief description of the study, the link for the online survey, and the invitee’s random participant number. upon follow- ing the link, invitees viewed an information page that pro- vided the usual components of an informed consent doc- ument and stated that clicking to continue indicated con- sent to participate. respondents completed all measures in the order described above. all items had the option to not answer. two weeks after the original invitation was sent, researchers used the participant numbers that respon- dents had entered in the survey to remove those who had already participated from the invitation list. reminder postcards were sent to the remaining invitees. in addition, we used internet searches to obtain email addresses for as many invitees as possible because only physical addresses were included in the original database. we sent email invitations to those for whom we found an email address, which was principally individuals at large institutions such as universities and academic medical centers. during the process of preparing reminders, we removed the names of invitees from the list because they were discovered to be out of state (n= ), male (n= ), retired (n= ), or a member of the research team (n= ). reminders were not sent to these individuals, so of the original , invitees were eligible to participate. the survey remained open until august , , at which time the data were downloaded. once the data had been cleaned and participant numbers were checked against the invitation list, the link between participant names and partic- ipant numbers was destroyed to ensure confidentiality. results respondents of eligible invitees, we received ( %) responses. however, respondents were removed from data analy- ses because they reported being retired, was removed because she did not answer any of the sexual harassment items, and duplicate responses were removed for a partici- pant who responded twice. the final participation rate was % ( of invitees). all respondents were female, and ( %) were residents. mean time since residency gradu- ation was . ± . years (range, to years). mean age (current year minus reported birth year) was . ± . years (range, to years). table presents the other demographic details for the sample. inappropriate sexual incidents in all, ( %) respondents reported having experienced an inappropriate sexual incident that stood out in their mem- ory. of these, ( %, or % of the total sample) did not officially report the incident. one woman wrote that she did not report because the perpetrator was the person to whom she would have to report the incident. of the women who reported at least one incident, only ( %) felt their reports were always handled appropriately. in contrast, ( %) felt that none of their reports were handled appropriately, and ( %) felt that only some of their reports had been handled appropriately. burnout forty-six ( %) respondents reported feeling burned out from their work at least once a week ( -item mbi item , representing emotional exhaustion), while ( %) said they never felt burnout. thirty ( %) respondents reported being more callous towards people at least once a week ( -item mbi item , representing depersonalization), while ( %) reported never experiencing callousness. twenty- three ( %) respondents reported experiencing both symp- toms at least once a week, and ( %) reported never expe- riencing either symptom. sexual harassment table presents descriptive statistics for the subscales of the adapted seq and item (eg, mistaken role) for both the seq – colleagues and the seq – patients and their families versions of the survey. sixty-nine ( %) respon- dents answered both surveys. although we adapted the seq for this study, the cronbach alpha for the subscales was comparable to that reported elsewhere. table also presents the percentage of respondents who reported the minimum score for each subscale and item of the adapted seq. in terms of colleague sources of harassment behavior, respondents who had never experienced gender harass- ment, unwanted sexual attention, and being mistaken for a nonphysician were in the minority, whereas the major- ity of respondents had not experienced sexual coercion. overall, % of respondents had been mistaken for a non- physician by colleagues. in the subset of individuals who had experienced harassment from both colleagues and from patients and their families, % had been mistaken for a nonphysician by both colleagues and by patients and their families. volume , number , winter sexual harassment and burnout in medicine figure. adaptedsexualexperiencesquestionnaire(seq)usedtoascertainsexualharassmentexperiencesandfrequen- cies from both colleagues and from patients and their families. cna, certified nurse assistant. colleagues vs patients and their families among respondents who completed both surveys, the mean score for colleague unwanted sexual attention (mean . ± . ) was significantly lower than patient/family unwanted sexual attention (mean . ± . ), t( )=– . , p< . . colleague sexual coercion (mean . ± . ) was significantly higher than patient sexual coercion (mean . ± . ), t( )= . , p< . , but patients and their fam- ilies (mean . ± . ) more often mistook participants for nonphysicians than colleagues did (mean . ± . ), t( )=– . , p< . . associations between burnout and gender bias table shows the correlations among the adapted seq subscales, item , and burnout item sum scores. only colleague gender harassment and colleague mistaken ochsner journal mathews, e figure. continued role (item ) were significantly correlated with burnout scores. we divided items in the gender harassment subscale into categories for analysis. sexist remarks and poor treatment because of gender were summed into “sexism items,” while sexual discussion, remarks, and materials were summed into “sexual items.” only colleague “sexism items” was signifi- cantly correlated with burnout. volume , number , winter sexual harassment and burnout in medicine table . demographics of survey respondents (n= ) variable n (%) race white/european american ( ) black/african american ( ) east asian/asian american ( ) south asian/indian american ( ) native american/alaska native ( ) mixed race ( ) ethnicity not hispanic/latinx ( ) hispanic/latinx ( ) marital status single ( ) married ( ) divorced ( ) widowed ( ) payment model employed ( ) self-employed ( ) no response ( ) specialty category medical ( ) surgical ( ) mixed medical-surgical ( ) no patient care ( ) no response ( ) standout incidents of the respondents who reported a standout sexu- ally inappropriate incident, provided the year the inci- dent happened. subtracting the year of the incident from the year of the survey, of the incidents ( %) happened in the past years, ( %) in the past years, and ( %) in the past years. the mean time since the incident was . ± . years. the year of standout incident was also compared to year of residency graduation. four inci- dents were reported by individuals currently in residency. of the remaining incidents, ( %) occurred after residency graduation. the remaining ( %) incidents occurred in the same year as residency graduation or earlier. discussion the purpose of this study was to determine if female physician burnout is correlated to sexual harassment expe- riences from either colleagues or from patients and their families. prior research has demonstrated that subjects of sexual harassment are at greater risk for symptoms such as anxiety, sadness, irritability, anger, sleeplessness, and weight loss, as well as major depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. , sexual harassment could, therefore, also impact the symptoms of burnout. we found that reports of burnout and gender harassment from colleagues were sig- nificantly correlated, largely attributable to items probing the frequency of sexist remarks and poor treatment because of gender from colleagues. the frequency of colleagues mis- taking respondents for nonphysicians was also significantly correlated with burnout. in contrast, gender harassment from patients and their families was unrelated to burnout, as were unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion from either colleagues or from patients and their families. one interpretation for this differential pattern of results is that disrespectful behaviors of patients and their fami- lies are easier for female physicians to cope with psycho- logically than disrespect from colleagues. even though both gender harassment and being mistaken for a nonphysician were reported as occurring approximately equally as often from colleagues and from patients and their families (table ), only colleague gender harassment and mistaken role were significantly correlated with burnout. the lack of relationship between burnout and unwanted sexual attention or sexual coercion is likely related to the relative frequencies of the types of sexual harassment. consistent with previous litera- ture, gender harassment was more frequently reported than the other types of harassment in our study. , in the subset that responded to both seq – colleagues and seq – patients and their families (n= ), % (n= ) of respondents experienced unwanted sexual attention from colleagues, whereas % (n= ) reported unwanted sex- ual attention from patients and/or their families. these find- ings support the idea that colleagues and patients and their families view female physicians in a less than professional light—as both unlikely to be a physician because of their gender and as an object of sexual interest. considering these findings, it is perhaps less than surprising that a small but startling minority of respondents overall had experienced sexual coercion from colleagues ( %), and in the subset of respondents who answered both surveys, % reported experiencing sexual coercion from patients and their fami- lies. while both unwanted sexual attention and sexual coer- cion were unrelated to burnout in this study, this lack of relationship should not be overinterpreted. particularly in the case of sexual coercion, the current study was likely under- powered to detect any effects, given the low percentage reporting it. additionally, burnout may not be the most appro- priate construct to measure the impact of such experiences on female physicians. thus, these reports should not be dis- missed. rather, they suggest that medicine is not isolated from other industries that have recently come under fire for their approach to dealing with claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. the moderate to large correlations between the adapted seq subscales from colleague and patients and their fam- ilies sources are consistent with prior literature and sug- gest that some individuals have such experiences more fre- quently than others. this finding could be interpreted as a reporting bias, such that the respondents in this study were more likely than other women to subjectively judge expe- riences as inappropriate or offensive. our study also has the potential for a sampling bias, such that women who have been harassed may have been more likely to par- ticipate. however, berdahl provides evidence to suggest that women in medicine may indeed experience more sex- ual harassment than other women. first, berdahl showed that some women, specifically those with more “masculine ochsner journal mathews, e table . descriptive statistics for the adapted sexual experience questionnaire (seq) percentage with respondents adapted seq/subscale minimum maximum mean ± sd α score of zero all respondents (n= ) seq – colleagues gender harassment . ± . . unwanted sexual attention . ± . . sexual coercion . ± . . mistaken role . ± . n/a subset that responded to both seq – colleagues and seq – patients and their families (n= ) seq – colleagues gender harassment . ± . n/a unwanted sexual attention . ± . n/a sexual coercion . ± . n/a mistaken role . ± . n/a seq – patients and their families gender harassment . ± . . unwanted sexual attention . ± . . sexual coercion . ± . . mistaken role . ± . n/a n/a, not applicable. gender harassment was assessed by survey (figure) items - , - , and ; unwanted sexual attention by items , , , and - ; and sexual coercion by items - and - . personality traits” such as independence, ambition, and ana- lytical ability, experienced more sexual harassment, and this finding was not attributable to a bias on their part to judge potentially inappropriate situations more negatively than other women. additionally, berdahl showed that women with “masculine traits” are at even higher risk of experiencing sexual harassment in workplaces that are male dominated. because medicine continues to be male dominated, it is per- haps of little surprise that sexual harassment experiences seem to be common in medicine. our results also align with previous findings of high rates of sexual harassment in medical school and residency in that our respondents reported incidents occurring during their years of training. surveys used for the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine sexual harassment report showed that % to % of medical students experi- enced sexual harassment, whereas the rate was only % to % for students in other postgraduate fields. some prior work suggests why the rate of sexual harassment is so high in medicine. for example, baillien et al identified several fac- tors operating at the level of the job, the team, and the orga- nization that increase the risk of sexual harassment and other types of bullying or violence in the workplace. among these factors are contact with third parties, gender ratios consist- ing of more men than women, and too strict (or too lenient) hierarchies, all of which apply in medicine. in medicine, patients and their families are third parties. employees who are in contact, particularly actual physi- cal contact, with third parties are at higher risk for sex- ual harassment. thus, medical students, residents, and physicians at all levels are more at risk of sexual harassment experiences than individuals in many other professions. the gender ratio in a workplace is a top risk factor for sexual harassment. specifically, sexual harassment is more frequent in workplaces with a greater number of men than women. despite the increasing number of women entering medicine, leadership positions and certain special- ties remain predominantly male. this uneven representation may result in the persistence of inappropriate gender-based expectations and gender power disparities. in other words, differences in gender socialization, such that males are rewarded for assertive behavior and females are encouraged to avoid confrontation, may be one mechanism that perpet- uates dominance and submissiveness in the workplace. additionally, because of sociocultural factors, males may feel more entitled to positions of power (especially within male-dominated workplaces), while females are expected to fill assistant/helper roles. these factors may result in the male dominance that has been observed in leadership posi- tions and certain fields of medicine. the results include lim- iting female physicians’ occupational and economic growth, as well as their vertical mobility via hindrance of entry into leadership positions. in addition, experienced physicians are employees of high power, both because they may occupy leadership positions and because of their monetary value to their organizations. the total cost of recruiting a new physician has been esti- mated to be $ , to $ , , per physician. - this cost may motivate organizations to protect physicians from facing the consequences of misconduct, and in turn, the physicians themselves may come to believe that workplace rules do not apply to them. such a mindset means that employees of high value may be at greater risk of becom- ing perpetrators of sexual harassment or other inappro- priate behavior. in contrast, medical students, residents, and early-career physicians have relatively little power in their organizations. they may not challenge conduct that makes them uncomfortable, including unwelcome sexual volume , number , winter sexual harassment and burnout in medicine table . correlations between burnout and adapted sexual experiences questionnaire subscales sum of burnout items adapted seq/subscale r p seq – colleagues gender harassmenta . . sexism items . . sexual items . . unwanted sexual attention . . sexual coercion - . . mistaken role . . seq – patients and their families gender harassmenta . . sexism items . . sexual items . . unwanted sexual attention . . sexual coercion - . . mistaken role - . . aitems in the gender harassment subscale were divided into cate- gories for analysis. sexist remarks and poor treatment due to gender were summed into sexism items, and sexual discussion, remarks, and materials were summed into sexual items. p, probability value; r, correlation coefficient. overtures. furthermore, victims of sexual harassment may be concerned that their statements will not be taken seri- ously or that they will face retaliation, particularly if the perpetrator is a high-value employee the organization will likely wish to protect. not surprisingly, the equal employ- ment opportunity commission found that % of workplace harassment is never reported. several study limitations are worth mention. the principal limitation of our study is the low response rate; we attribute that in part to the lack of email addresses available and, thus, having to use postcards to provide the link to the online sur- vey. the generalization of these results to all female physi- cians may be limited by our decision to restrict our survey to female physicians in the state of louisiana. sampling bias may also limit the results as those who responded to the survey may have had an increased interest in the subject matter and/or have been harassed, thus inflating the preva- lence rate. future research can attempt to obtain a higher response rate and less risk of sampling bias by inviting only participants with known email addresses and/or considering the use of social media for responses. second, the magnitude of associations between our adapted seq subscales and burnout largely fell within the small effect size range. this finding may stem from the afore- mentioned low response rate. however, significant associ- ations between our adapted seq subscales and burnout are likely not merely spurious or trivial. burnout is a com- plex, multifaceted construct that is influenced by a number of variables, including sexual harassment. to our knowledge, our study findings are among the first to suggest that sexual harassment plays an influential role in burnout in medicine. future research can expand on our findings by exploring potential mediating and moderating variables between sex- ual harassment and burnout. research on sexual harassment of women of color and of sexual and gender minority individuals (eg, gay, lesbian, transgender) is incomplete. current research shows that these minority groups experience more sexual harassment than white or heterosexual women. the majority of our respondents were white non-latinx physicians, and we did not collect information on sexual identity, so we could not evaluate the findings in these minority populations. we found that those who reported sexism and sexual harassment from patients were at increased likelihood of reporting parallel experiences from colleagues with signif- icant correlations among all of the subscales. this finding appears to support the notion that women who report one form of sexism or harassment have likely experienced other forms. investigation into how medical leadership is respond- ing to these situations should be explored. conclusion sexual harassment, which includes gender harassment, is present in medicine and occurs more frequently during the training period. gender harassment from colleagues, as well as colleagues failing to recognize female physicians as such, contributes to physician burnout. medical education lead- ership and administrators need to consider how to protect young learners and address the culture within medicine that allows these behaviors to occur. acknowledgments the results of this study were presented at a workshop entitled women physicians: wellness and burnout in the time of #metoo and #timesup at the american psy- chiatric association institute on psychiatric services confer- ence in chicago, illinois. the results were also presented at a workshop entitled medicine in the time of #metoo, taking stock and next steps at the alliance of academic inde- pendent medical centers annual meeting in tucson, ar. the authors have no financial or proprietary interest in the subject matter of this article. references . peckham c. medscape national physician burnout & depression report . medscape. www.medscape.com/slideshow/ -lifestyle-burnout- depression- . published january , . accessed november , . . bianchi r, schonfeld is, laurent e. burnout-depression overlap: a review. clin psychol rev. mar; : - . doi: . /j.cpr. . . . . halbesleben jr, rathert c. linking 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licensee ochsner journal, ochsner clinic foundation, new orleans, la. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /legalcode) that permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. volume , number , winter science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ scicomm speaks doi: . /science.aat ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ b b branding: a financial burden for shareholders? b b branding: a financial burden for shareholders? lars ohnemus copenhagen business school, porcelænshaven, copenhagen f, denmark . why don’t shareholders show interest in branding? in the business-to-business (b b) arena, does brand- ing create sustainable economic value for compa- nies and their shareholders? or, are other variables such as innovation, research, and manufacturing excellence the predominant business drivers? over the last few decades, the topic of branding has attracted increasing interest; however, little re- search has been conducted on the link between branding and the financial performance of compa- nies in the b b segment. in many cases, business-to- consumer (b c) activities have been the focus of research, while industrial branding has been treated as the ‘‘intellectual step-child’’ and been somewhat neglected. academic research in this field has been limited, and the scholarly literature has neither provided a comprehensive theoretical basis nor documented an empirical relationship between brand value and shareholder value (kerin & sethura- man, ). the result is that branding research in this field is frequently based on shaky foundations whereby key results and findings are debatable. bold claims shared by balmer ( ) and grönroos ( ) challenge the widely accepted perception business horizons ( ) , — www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor keywords b b branding; financial performance; return on branding; market orientation abstract is branding an effective tool for generating shareholder wealth for companies that are active in a business-to-business environment? or, do other factors such as innovation and manufacturing efficiency–—or the lack thereof–—create or destroy shareholder wealth? based on an examination of almost , companies listed either on the united states or european stock exchanges, this study reveals this crucial relationship could be described as a w-shaped curve with five distinctive phases, depending on the strategic branding position of the company. used strategi- cally, business-to-business (b b) companies with a balanced corporate brand strategy generally yield a return to their shareholders that is %- % higher. it is therefore vital that key executives, including the board of directors, systematically assess and monitor the strategic branding position of their company and how their branding investments are performing against key competitors. this study reveals that share- holders should insist on systematic performance feedback from the corporation regarding all key items in the balance sheet–—including branding. as disclosed herein, very few of the companies analyzed possessed an optimal balance between branding and financial performance. # kelley school of business, indiana university. all rights reserved. e-mail address: lo.int@cbs.dk - /$ — see front matter # kelley school of business, indiana university. all rights reserved. doi: . /j.bushor. . . mailto:lo.int@cbs.dk http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.bushor. . . that branding always creates wealth, and suggest that in reality branding can, therefore, frequently be a major cause of wealth destruction for share- holders. in addition, branding is becoming more and more a question of survival, since many companies face the universal challenge of converging both quality standards and manufacturing costs. this is prompted not only by global manufacturing, en- hanced knowledge, and design sharing possibili- ties, but is also due to the fact that companies have increasingly easier access to the same finan- cial resources and international distribution chan- nels. put more succinctly, innovation and time to market are important, but have lost much of their value as strategic tools that protect against ‘‘me- too’’ products; flsmidth experienced this, for example, when protecting their global leadership position in the cement plant industry against ag- gressive chinese competitors. this being the case, branding may represent one of the last remaining means by which a company operating in the industrial field can achieve a sustainable competi- tive advantage. ultimately, this has wide ramifi- cations, particularly in a b b context. a well positioned and powerful brand provides a highly effective barrier against competitors, and in- creases information efficiency and attracts cus- tomers, since it reduces the risk of making wrong purchase decisions. it also creates a competitive advantage which translates into enhanced pricing and distribution power. for european companies in particular, branding increasingly constitutes a major strategic chal- lenge, because their brands are less well known on a global scale; according to interbrand, only of the top global brands are of european origin (kiley, ). historically, american b b companies such as general electric, honeywell, intel, and caterpillar have been much faster to establish glob- al brands than their european competitors. increas- ingly, european players are also getting ‘‘squeezed’’ by east asian competitors like tata, mitsubishi, and lenovo. the principal objective of this article is to pres- ent and discuss the strategic relationship between branding and financial performance in a b b con- text, and to address the fundamental research question: can the financial benefits of branding be measured and, if so, what are the conclusions for shareholders investing in b b companies? given this ambitious starting point, a series of matters require addressing. what definition of branding and brand equity apply to the b b field? would other critical variables, such as innovation and manufacturing costs, exert a disruptive influence on the research presented in the article and ulti- mately lead to biased and inconclusive findings? furthermore, is there truly any difference in brand- ing strategies between industries, or are we dealing with universal methods and approaches that can be applied to all companies and product types? these intriguing questions are analyzed and discussed in the following sections. . branding in b b context: is it different from b c activities? conceptually, the difference in marketing orienta- tions between companies producing consumer goods versus those producing industrial goods or services is significant. there is also a major theoret- ical difference in their approach to branding. a general assumption exists that there is close long-term cooperation (sales orientation) between producers of industrial goods and services and their customers, whereas consumer goods companies focus more on the short-term marketing mix and segmentation models (anderson & narus, ; kotler & pfoertsch, ). the level of complexity in this field is exception- ally high, because firms can apply radically different branding and pricing models, and have industry- specific distribution models, and the extensive use of patents can either increase or decrease overall average profitability. the brand expecta- tions of b b customers are also significantly differ- ent from other segments. a well positioned brand in this field should provide substantial reassurance to business customers, since the purchaser’s entire fate could be totally dependent on it. the stronger the reputation and inherent goodwill of the brand, the greater the likelihood that the company pos- sesses competitive advantages and more pricing power which would ultimately provide its share- holders with above-average returns. general elec- tric is a prime example of how this can be achieved consistently on a global scale. in this research sam- ple, ge spent . % of corporate turnover on brand- ing activities (including the costs of running subsidiaries), while other players in this field spent up to %- %. the application of a universal, con- sistent, and focused brand strategy has provided global scalability and branding efficiency, which translates into enhanced shareholder performance. furthermore, mass communication can be used to a much lesser extent than it is in the field of fast- moving consumer goods. the focus is also different, since b b branding–—as a general rule–—requires the development of a positive reputation, goodwill, and the commitment of the entire company to a set of l. ohnemus https://isiarticles.com/article/ internet searches for sexual harassment and assault, reporting, and training since the #metoo movement letters research letter internet searches for sexual harassment and assault, reporting, and training since the #metoo movement on october , , following the public accusations of sexual harassment and assault against film producer harvey wein- stein, actress alyssa milano encouraged victims to bring the taboo topic out of the shadows by sharing their own stories on social media. #metoo was tweeted times the day af- ter milano’s post and generated widespread support with scores of accusations made against media, political, and business lead- ers, giving voice to previously unheard victims. however, the implications for the victims whose perpetrators are not pub- lic figures is unknown. to fill this knowledge gap, we exam- ined how internet searches for sexual harassment and/or assault changed following #metoo. methods | we monitored the volume of google searches origi- nating from the united states that were indicative of sexual harassment and/or assault awareness (all searches including the term “sexual” and the terms “harassment” or “assault”) from january , , through june , . we further monitored the subset of these searches that focused on seek- ing resources for reporting of sexual harassment and/or assault (searches that also included “report” or “reporting”) and preventive training (searches that also included “train” or “training”). the search volumes were provided as a ratio of all google searches (per million), thereby adjusting for changes in google usage over time. raw search count esti- mates were inferred using comscore estimates (http://comscore. com). we compared observed search volumes after october , , to the counterfactual scenario manufactured from pre- dicted search volumes using the autoregressive integrated mov- ing average (arima) algorithm of hyndman and khandakar applied to weekly trends from january , , to october , (before #metoo). the ratio of observed and predicted vol- umes with bootstrapped confidence intervals (cis) were com- puted using r, version . . (r foundation). because these analyses were based on public aggregate data, institutional re- view board approval was not required. results | sexual harassment and/or assault searches were % ( % ci, %- %; p < . ) higher than expected from oc- tober , , to june , , reaching record highs (figure). moreover, observed searches remained higher than expected each week until months after #metoo began. in absolute terms, the post-#metoo period corresponded with the great- est number of sexual harassment and/or assault searches ever recorded in the united states, with to million searches from october , , to june , . searches related to reporting and preventive training for sexual harassment and/or assault were % ( % ci, %- %; p < . ) higher and % ( % ci, %- %; p < . ) higher than predicted from october , , to june , . both spiked weeks after #metoo began and remained greater than expected for all weeks except . discussion | despite the well-documented evidence that sexual harassment and/or assault has major public health implications, it has received little national attention. the #metoo movement has prompted substantial interest in not only sexual harassment and/or assault, but also actionable out- comes for reporting and prevention. figure. us google searches for sexual harassment and/or assault awareness, reporting, and training / / r el ev an t se ar ch es p er m ill io n g oo gl e se ar ch es , n o. date searches greater than expected observed searches expected searches awareness searchesa / / / / / / / / / / r el ev an t se ar ch es p er m ill io n g oo gl e se ar ch es , n o. date reporting searchesb / / / / / / / / / / r el ev an t se ar ch es p er m ill io n g oo gl e se ar ch es , n o. date training searchesc / / / / / / / / / / / / / / weekly google search volumes are shown. a, all searches that included the terms “sexual” and “assault” or “harassment.” b, the subset of searches that also included the terms “report” or “reporting.” c, the subset of searches that also included the terms “train” or “training.” the dashed vertical line in each graph indicates when #metoo was first tweeted by alyssa milano on october , . jama internal medicine february volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / http://comscore.com http://comscore.com http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . search trends are only proxies for engagement, and sen- tinel surveillance (such as surveys) will clarify these early find- ings. however, our findings demonstrate the power of grass- roots movements to respond to large-scale public health crises. these results suggest that #metoo may have reduced the stigma of sexual harassment and/or assault as more seek help. public health investments in preventing sexual harass- ment and/or assault is disproportionately small compared with the scale of the problem, in part because the problem is hid- den from the public. with millions more persons than ever voic- ing their needs months after #metoo began, public health lead- ers should respond by investing in enhanced prevention training and improving resources for survivors. theodore l. caputi, bs alicia l. nobles, phd, ms john w. ayers, phd, ma author affiliations: health equity research lab, cambridge health alliance, harvard medical school, cambridge, massachusetts (caputi); division of infectious diseases and global public health, department of medicine, university of california, san diego, la jolla (nobles, ayers). accepted for publication: august , . corresponding author: john w. ayers, phd, ma, department of medicine, university of california, san diego, gilman dr, ste central research services facility (crsf), gilman drive, la jolla, ca - (ayers.john.w@gmail.com). published online: december , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . author contributions: dr ayers had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. concept and design: caputi, ayers. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: caputi, nobles, ayers. drafting of the manuscript: caputi, nobles, ayers. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: caputi, ayers. statistical analysis: caputi. obtained funding: caputi. administrative, technical, or material support: caputi, ayers. conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. funding/support: this research was funded by the university of california, san diego, center for aids research via the national institutes of health (p ai ). role of the funder/sponsor: the funder had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication. . zacharek s, dockterman e, edwards hs. time person of the year: the silence breakers. time. . http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence- breakers/. accessed august , . . ayers jw, althouse bm, dredze m. could behavioral medicine lead the web data revolution? jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . khandakar y, hyndman rj. automatic time series forecasting: the forecast package for r. https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v i . accessed july , . . breiding mj, smith sg, basile kc, walters ml, chen j, merrick mt. prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence victimization—national intimate partner and sexual violence survey, united states, . morbidity and mortality weekly report. . https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss a .htm. accessed july , . . kennedy ac, prock ka. “i still feel like i am not normal”: a review of the role of stigma and stigmatization among female survivors of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. trauma violence abuse. ; ( ): - . doi: . / . waechter r, ma v. sexual violence in america: public funding and social priority. am j public health. ; ( ): - . doi: . /ajph. . temporal trends in unstable angina diagnosis codes for outpatient percutaneous coronary interventions recent health care policy initiatives have focused on reduc- ing misuse or overuse of expensive cardiovascular proce- dures. the appropriate use criteria (auc) for coronary revascularization were re- leased in with the aim of reducing inappropriate per- cutaneous coronary interven- tions (pcis). in addition, national efforts to provide hospitals with information about their performance on pci appropri- ateness began in . since these initiatives were enacted, the volume of pcis performed for nonacute indications in the united states has declined, as have rates of pcis considered inappropriate. , some have declared this a policy success—that the fewer in- appropriate pcis performed nationally reflect better selec- tion of patients likely to experience improved outcomes. how- ever, it may be that these initiatives incentivized physicians to classify patients with stable chest pain as having unstable angina (ua) to meet auc. to explore this possibility, we ex- amined trends in pcis coded for acute indications in the out- patient setting in large and geographically dispersed states. author audio interview invited commentary page figure . proportion of percutaneous coronary interventions (pcis) coded for acute indications in the outpatient and inpatient settings pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, % year acute outpatient interventionsa pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, % year acute inpatient interventionsb michigan michigan florida florida new york new york a, acute outpatient pcis. b, acute inpatient pcis. proportions reflect pcis coded for acute indications in the outpatient setting, or pcis coded for acute indications in the inpatient setting, divided by total pcis (acute and nonacute in both outpatient and inpatient settings) for each state by year. letters jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine february volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / mailto:ayers.john.w@gmail.com https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v i https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss a .htm https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://jamanetwork.com/learning/audio-player/ . /jamainternmed. . /?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . ongoing gender inequity in leadership positions of academic oncology programs: the broken pipeline invited commentary | oncology ongoing gender inequity in leadership positions of academic oncology programs the broken pipeline laila a. gharzai, md, llm; reshma jagsi, md, dphil reaching gender parity in medical school enrollment this year should have come as no surprise— women have represented more than % of the us medical student body since . what should surprise us is the marked underrepresentation of women in more senior positions in medicine, even now, despite women’s long-standing near-parity among medical school enrollees. the study by chowdhary et al adds to the increasing body of knowledge documenting this concerning fact with a comprehensive overview of gender distribution in the leadership of academic oncology programs in the united states, providing important benchmarking data for the field. in an analysis of faculty from accreditation council for graduate medical education– accredited oncology programs, they have confirmed findings seen across medicine demonstrating that the gender distribution of leadership of academic oncology programs remains overwhelmingly unequal. women faculty represented . % of the total faculty body in medical oncology, radiation oncology, and surgical oncology programs, consistent with representation of women in the body of all actively practicing physicians as well as academia at large. however, representation of women in leadership positions was lower, at only . % overall (medical oncology, . %; radiation oncology, . %; and surgical oncology, . %). additionally, representation of women in chair positions was even worse, with only . % of departments chaired by a woman (medical oncology, . %; radiation oncology, . %; and surgical oncology, . %). these findings are consistent with previous studies showing that women hold only a small minority of other visible and influential positions in medicine, such as authorship, leadership of medical specialty societies, and editorial board membership. a common metaphor for describing the diminishing proportion of women observed at each level of leadership has been that of a pipeline. some believe the pipeline is simply long: progress is slow owing to the sheer length of the path to senior positions and the lag time before the people who compose the overwhelmingly male older cohorts retire. if the pipeline were simply slow, representation of women would increase initially in the early ranks and then later in more senior positions over time as women who entered medical school in gender equitable cohorts advanced through their careers. despite near-parity in medical schools for decades, this has simply not materialized, raising concerns that the pipeline is not simply long but also leaky, with women dropping out of the pathway that leads to leadership in the field owing to gender-specific challenges. a multitude of factors contribute to this phenomenon. thanks to the #metoo movement and the recent landmark report of the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, a newfound awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment in medicine has developed. one newly founded organization, time’s up healthcare, advocates for treating sexual harassment and gender inequity as health care quality improvement challenges requiring changes to structures and processes that will ultimately lead to measurable changes in outcomes. however, despite the power of such movements, challenges and misconceptions linger, including the false belief that sexual harassment must involve sexual coercion or assault. while egregious instances of assault and coercion do occur, a key insight from decades of research in organizational psychology is that gender harassment represents a wider set of shockingly common behaviors. together with more unconscious forms of gender bias and systemwide policies that disadvantage women, a complex set of barriers contributes to the leaks in the pipeline that leads to leadership for women. + related article author affiliations and article information are listed at the end of this article. open access. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) march , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . prior studies have shown that women are paid less, spend more time on parenting and domestic responsibilities, experience higher rates of burnout, and face other challenges in reaching the leadership positions analyzed in the study by chowdhary et al. contributing factors include unconscious bias, the motherhood penalty, and lack of mentorship, among others. recent studies have documented how these challenges play out within the field of oncology specifically. duma and colleagues documented that women speaking at a prominent national oncology meeting were less likely to be introduced by professional titles. knoll and colleagues documented that women attend fewer national conferences despite being equally convinced of the important benefits of attendance, and the biggest reported obstacle to attendance was related to childcare. all of these factors combine to dispel the long (but intact) pipeline myth and lend credence to the idea of a leaky pipeline in which women will, absent intervention to patch the leaks, never make it to leadership positions at the rate expected based on their representation among medical students. as our awareness of these factors contributing to gender inequity continues to increase, we have only one way to move forward—to act just as we do in battling the disease of cancer itself: we must address these issues with evidence-based interventions. interventions that have the ability to address the root causes of gender inequity offer the most opportunity to repair the pipeline. for example, unconscious bias training may mitigate inequitable treatment, such as when women are offered less pay, expected to share more administrative burdens, or are evaluated based on past accomplishments when men are evaluated based on future potential. addressing harassment through strong institution-wide policies helps to create a psychologically safe environment that not only maintains intellectual capital but also promotes organizational performance. equitable leave policies, for men and women, help to support motherhood in an era when society continues to impose gendered expectations, while also helping to shift norms overall to allow fathers to take on truly equal participation in parenting. term limits for the upper echelons of leadership give women the opportunity to seek out leadership positions. evidence suggests that when such interventions are appropriately deployed, they are able to improve representation of women in leadership. additionally, the role of mentorship and sponsorship in promoting equity is key. interestingly, chowdhary et al found that those departments with women in leadership had a higher rate of women faculty representation ( %- % higher). in the era when women medical students outnumber men medical students, the need for visible women role models is likely to be especially important as well. continuing to work on diversity at all levels is critical—the need to promote gender equity stems not just from respect that should be afforded to each of us individually, but also from documented evidence that gender diversity improves innovation and organizational performance. studies have even suggested that women may provide better clinical care in some settings, particularly for women patients, suggesting that diversity within the profession is essential to achieve the ends we pursue together. additionally, a diverse workforce better represents the diverse population and stakeholders served by organizations. thus, gender equity is critically important. chowdhary et al have provided data necessary to outline the work that remains to be done in academic oncology. oncologists must encourage our profession to begin the process of cultural transformation necessary to improve equity and bring more women into leadership positions. we owe it to each other, to the women in our field who will come after us, and to our patients—it is time to fix that broken pipeline. article information published: march , . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . open access: this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. © gharzai la et al. jama network open. jama network open | oncology ongoing gender inequity in leadership positions of academic oncology programs jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) march , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/pages/instructions-for-authors#secopenaccess/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . corresponding author: reshma jagsi, md, dphil, department of radiation oncology, university of michigan, e medical center dr, ann arbor, mi (rjagsi@med.umich.edu). author affiliations: department of radiation oncology, university of michigan, ann arbor. conflict of interest disclosures: dr jagsi reported receiving grants from the national institutes of health and national cancer institute, doris duke foundation, and komen foundation; receiving grants and personal fees from the greenwall foundation; personal fees from vizient and amgen; owning stock in equity quotient; and being a founding member of time’s up healthcare. no other disclosures were reported. references . chowdhary m, chowdhary a, royce tj, et al. women’s representation in leadership positions in academic medical oncology, radiation oncology, and surgical oncology programs. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . . jagsi r, means o, lautenberger d, et al. women’s representation among members and leaders of national medical specialty societies [published online october , ]. acad med. doi: . /acm. . jagsi r, tarbell nj, henault le, chang y, hylek em. the representation of women on the editorial boards of major medical journals: a -year perspective. arch intern med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /archinte. . . . national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. national academies press; , doi: . / . . beeler wh, cortina lm, jagsi r. diving beneath the surface: addressing gender inequities among clinical investigators. j clin invest. ; : - . doi: . /jci . jagsi r, griffith ka, stewart a, sambuco d, decastro r, ubel pa. gender differences in the salaries of physician researchers. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . perumalswami cr, griffith ka, jones rd, stewart a, ubel pa, jagsi r. patterns of work-related burnout in physician-scientists receiving career development awards from the national institutes of health. jama intern med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jamainternmed. . . duma n, durani u, woods cb, et al. evaluating unconscious bias: speaker introductions at an international oncology conference. j clin oncol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jco. . . knoll ma, griffith ka, jones rd, jagsi r. association of gender and parenthood with conference attendance among early career oncologists. jama oncol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jamaoncol. . . mangurian m, linos e, sarkar u, rodriguez c, jagsi r. what’s holding women in medicine back from leadership. harvard business review. june , . jama network open | oncology ongoing gender inequity in leadership positions of academic oncology programs jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) march , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / mailto:rjagsi@med.umich.edu https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. https://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /archinte. . . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /archinte. . . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /jci https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /jco. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamaoncol. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . introduction to the special issue on the politics of hate: community, societal and global responses introduction to the special issue on the politics of hate: community, societal and global responses hannah mason-bish & loretta trickett published online: january # springer nature b.v. this special issue is brought to you at a time of increasingly uncertain global politics whereby concerns about hate crime and prejudice are a pressing social and political issue. across the world there continues to be unprecedented levels of refugees displaced from their homes through conflict or persecution including those from syria, afghanistan, african, south sudan, myanmar and somalia amongst others. we are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. around the world, . million people have been forcibly displaced. that’s the most since world war ii, according to the u.n. refugee agency (unhcr). most people remain displaced within their home countries, but about . million people worldwide have fled to other countries as refugees, over half of whom are under the age of . there are also an estimated million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. this comes at a time when the terms refugee, asylum seeker and migrants have become merged and political and media rhetoric has depicted those affected as ‘other’ and unwanted (banks ). , as a result we have seen a growth in human rights abuses as in russia whilst elsewhere supposedly liberal countries disengaging with human rights laws and international treaties as agreements as shown in brexit and crime, law and social change ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/briefing/ / / a /car-displacement-reaches-unprecedented-levels- .html https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/italy-election-results-populsim-resurgence-europe-anti-eu- silvio-berlusconi- -star-movement-luigi-di-a .html unmasking deviance: the visual construction of asylum seekers and refugees in english national newspapers. critical criminology, ( ), pp. – . https://investigaterussia.org/human-rights-abuses https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-crimea-putin-human-rights-abuses-un- accusations-claims-a .html https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /may/ /conservatives-to-push-forward-on-manifesto-and-scrap- human-rights-act * hannah mason-bish h.mason-bish@sussex.ac.uk university of sussex, falmer, brighton bn rh, uk nottingham trent university, shakespeare street, nottingham ng fq, uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/briefing/ / / a /car-displacement-reaches-unprecedented-levels- .html https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/briefing/ / / a /car-displacement-reaches-unprecedented-levels- .html https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/italy-election-results-populsim-resurgence-europe-anti-eu-silvio-berlusconi- -star-movement-luigi-di-a .html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/italy-election-results-populsim-resurgence-europe-anti-eu-silvio-berlusconi- -star-movement-luigi-di-a .html https://investigaterussia.org/human-rights-abuses https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-crimea-putin-human-rights-abuses-un-accusations-claims-a .html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-crimea-putin-human-rights-abuses-un-accusations-claims-a .html https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /may/ /conservatives-to-push-forward-on-manifesto-and-scrap-human-rights-act https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /may/ /conservatives-to-push-forward-on-manifesto-and-scrap-human-rights-act mailto:h.mason-ish@sussex.ac.uk debate around scrapping the human rights act in the uk leading to substantial hate crime rises. this is part of a global rise in populist politics and right wing politics including an increase in the far right movement feeding xenophobia through a distrust of migrant and refugees. alongside this there have been steep rises in islamophobia fuelled in large part by ideology and political developments including trump’s muslim ban. hate manifests itself in individual incidents of street violence; verbal abuse and desecration of religious sites on a local level. nationally and internationally we have seen media demonization, bans on veiling, religious profiling, restrictions on religious buildings, employment discrimination, criminalization, and programmes against muslims in the usa, australia, the central african republic, india, myanmar, russia, sri lanka, and elsewhere, often with state complicity. these are the practical manifestations of the political and cultural functions of islamophobia over the last two decades. in addition to this there have been hate crime rises against disabled people fuelled in part by policies and media coverage which serves to ‘scapegoat’ them as benefits scroungers within the few countries that includes disability as a hate crime category. it follows therefore that the efforts of those working in the field of hate crime as scholars and in public policy roles become ever more important. good examples of combined efforts in europe include the work of the eu and its member states in making these crimes more visible and holding perpetrators to account by unmasking the bias motivation behind criminal offences and to improve recording practices which includes fra’s work in documenting the extent of prejudice against groups such as roma, lgbt, muslims, and migrant communities and the high level group on combating racism and xenophobia including that on-line by working with civic society organisations and communities. other examples include the eus work on developing a code of conduct for social media sites including facebook, microsoft, twitter for regulating hate speech on-line. grassroots politics to combat prejudice are also increasingly important ; an example of which can be seen in the metoo movement and the introduction of misogyny hate crime policy by nottinghamshire police in the uk following research by a civic organisation in the county. this special issue consists of a selection of papers presented at the international network of hate studies conference in . they focus on responses to hate crime and offer an excellent collection of papers which provide much needed perspectives on how states can and should respond to hate crime. in his paper on combating hate crime rises after eu referendum https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- , https://www.theguardian. com/society/ /sep/ /hate-surged-after-eu-referendum-police-figures-show https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fear-of-migrants-feeds-growth-of-italy-s-far-right- . rise in disability hate crimes uk scrounger rhetoric https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/disability-hate- crime-reports-increase- -home-office_uk_ e f ee b a d df https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /jul/ /combat-disability-hate-crime-understand-people-commit https://www.fra.europa.eu/en/theme/hate-crime “code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/ / / /international-islamophobia-calls-for-a-global- grassroots-resistance https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/opinion/me-too-hashtag- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-nottinghamshire- /misogyny-is-now-a-hate-crime https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/huge-survey-hate-crime-nottingham- mason-bish h., trickett l. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /sep/ /hate-surged-after-eu-referendum-police-figures-show https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /sep/ /hate-surged-after-eu-referendum-police-figures-show https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fear-of-migrants-feeds-growth-of-italy-s-far-right- . https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fear-of-migrants-feeds-growth-of-italy-s-far-right- . https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/disability-hate-crime-reports-increase- -home-office_uk_ e f ee b a d df https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/disability-hate-crime-reports-increase- -home-office_uk_ e f ee b a d df https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /jul/ /combat-disability-hate-crime-understand-people-commit https://www.fra.europa.eu/en/theme/hate-crime https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/ / / /international-islamophobia-calls-for-a-global-grassroots-resistance https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/ / / /international-islamophobia-calls-for-a-global-grassroots-resistance https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/opinion/me-too-hashtag- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-nottinghamshire- /misogyny-is-now-a-hate-crime https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/huge-survey-hate-crime-nottingham- xenophobia towards migrants, william arrocha discusses the timely concern of vio- lence and hate directed towards refugees in the global north. he argues that the humanitarian crisis which has caused millions to flee their homes is often met with a lack of sympathy and in fact political and popular discourse which frames them as problematic. as such, arrocha argues for compassionate migration in order to foster empathy and to better understand the crisis facing migrants rather than making them subjects of hatred and hostility. his is a timely and important paper. azra junuzovic similarly addresses the importance of understanding the political will for change in the context of government action. the paper focuses more specifically on the role of international organisations in addressing hate crime, including the relevance of internal factors such as pressure from civil society groups. in recent years we have seen increasing international efforts to combat hate crime and junuzovic provides a much needed examination of how these might really influence change. fundamentally this means international organisations exercise greater evaluation of their won effectiveness by sharing good practice and work more closely with civil society organisations. it is the issue of co-operation that mike whine then addresses in his paper. taking the requirements on european states to combat hate crime as his starting point, he then critically examines the need for criminal justice agencies and civil society to work together. whine offers his analysis from the perspective of someone who has worked within ngo’s for many years and as such is grounded in experience. by using specific case studies for illustration he demonstrates how the expertise and knowledge the civil society can offer is central in responding to hate crime. paper four by piotr godzisz also looks at government responses but from the perspective of lgbt policy specifically. he shifts our gaze away from the west to look at balkan countries and asks why hate crime laws are passed but then rarely used. godzisz observes that often legislation is changed as part of the democratization process but without resources and favourable sentiments at the more local level, provisions are not successfully utilised. the paper continues the themes of the previous papers in the special issue by drawing on themes of co-operation and the multiple layers needed for hate crime to be combated successful. just as godzisz examines countries where laws are passed as part of a wider international picture, the final paper by schweppe and haynes looks at a country without hate crime legislation. by drawing on an analysis of parliamentary debates they demonstrate the importance of under- standing the irish “anomaly” which needs to be understood in the context of the current political landscape. furthermore, they note the ways in which civil society organisa- tions can have an influence by shaping debates around which victim groups to include. in the end these discussions limited the passage of hate crime legislation. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. introduction to the special issue on the politics of hate:... 	introduction to the special issue on the politics of hate: community, societal and global responses love actually y la esfera musical como cómplice de la perpetuación de los roles de género tradicionales = love actually and the musical sphere as an accomplice to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - eissn: - doi: https://doi.org/ . /pmrt. love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales love actually and the musical sphere as an accomplice to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles beatriz hernÁndez polo universidad de salamanca beahp@usal.es resumen: la comedia romántica sigue siendo a día de hoy uno de los géneros cinematográficos más demandados por la sociedad de consumo. a pesar de los numerosos ejemplos recientes en los que aparecen nuevos enfoques de género, prevalece el empoderamiento de la mujer o se visibiliza su ausencia, muchas de las comedias románticas que han copado la gran pantalla y han pasado a ser considerados clásicos del cine comercial, se cimientan en la perpetuación de los roles tradicionales. este es precisamente el caso concreto de las tramas paralelas que se suceden en la película love actually (reino unido, ), dirigida por richard curtis, considerada una de las comedias románticas inglesas más populares de la historia y cuya banda sonora sería, además, proyectada como potente producto de ventas. precisamente al respecto, el pasado mes de diciembre, catorce años después de su estreno, las redes sociales abrían un hilo de discusión donde proponían una visualización del filme desde una perspectiva feminista. a lo largo de nuestro artículo no solo estudiaremos los roles desempeñados por los personajes femeninos y masculinos, cuya caracterización perpetúa la imagen de la mujer entre otros como cuidadora, objeto sexual, madre, femme fatale y del hombre como ente poderoso, culto y naturalmente infiel, sino que nos centraremos en qué elementos constituyen el envolto- rio atractivo que logra convertir una trama sustentada en unos principios claramente desigualitarios en una candorosa pieza cinematográfica que https://doi.org/ . /pmrt. beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - persigue ser una oda al amor en todas sus modalidades. en este proceso, como veremos, junto al ambicioso reparto de actores o el recurso del humor, la música actuará como cómplice y eje principal en el desarrollo de las diferentes tramas sustentando la caracterización de roles y como adalid de las principales escenas de la película. palabras clave: género; roles; comedia; música; banda sonora; estereotipos. abstract: the romantic comedy remains today as one of the most demanded film genres by the consumer society. in spite of the numerous and recent examples in which we can find a new gender approach, where the empowerment of women prevails or their absence is visible, most of the romantic comedies that have reached the big screen and have been considered classics of commercial cinema, are based on the perpetuation of traditional roles. this is precisely the case of the parallel plots that occur in the movie love actually (united kingdom, ), directed by richard curtis, considered one of the most popular english romantic comedies developed in christmas and whose soundtrack would be, also, projected as a powerful sales product. last december, fourteen years after its premiere, social networks opened a chain of discussion where they proposed the visualization of the film from a feminist perspective. throughout our article we won’t only study the roles played by the female and male char- acters, whose characterization perpetuates the image of the woman, among others, as caregiver, sexual object, mother, femme fatale, meanwhile men are projected as powerful, cultured and unfaithful, but we will focus on those elements which constitute the attractive package that manages to convert a plot based on clearly unequal principles in a candid cinematographic piece that pursue being a poem of love in all its forms. in this process, as we will see throughout the text, along with the ambitious distribution of the group of actors and the use of the sense of humor, music will act as an accomplice and main object in the development of the different plots, supporting with the characterization of roles and as a key ingredient of main scenes of the movie. keywords: genre; roles; comedy; music; soundtrack; stereotypes. en las corrientes de la nueva musicología que comienzan a manifestarse en la década de los ochenta en estados unidos, la visión posmodernista y relativista iría poco a poco imponiéndose frente a la perspectiva etnocéntrica y hegemónica beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - que tendría como testigo y referente de la historia al hombre blanco, occidental, heterosexual y de clase media-alta. en esta corriente comenzaría a abrirse paso una musicología que apostaría por la visualización de los grupos sociales que habían sido obviados en los dogmas y el trazado de la historia, entre ellos, las personas de diferente raza, lo no occidental, el colectivo lgtbi, las personas procedentes de los contextos más desfavorecidos y también las mujeres. ahora bien, la investigación actual no duda de que la nueva historia pasa por decons- truir los conceptos y discursos hegemónicos que han prevalecido hasta casi el presente y repensarlos desde una perspectiva crítica y abierta, que además ponga de manifiesto las situaciones de injusticia y desigualdad que han experimentado determinados sectores como los aludidos anteriormente. y en consecuencia, la evolución, la reconstrucción de la historia en todas sus dimensiones pasa por la mirada a mayorías y minorías, a todas las dimensiones geográficas, económicas, políticas, sociales y culturales y necesariamente va de la mano con una reeducación social en la que todavía nos hallamos inmersos. por otro lado el cine, como producción artística y cultural, constituye indu- dablemente una herramienta que ofrece la posibilidad de que la sociedad pueda conocer y repensar los procesos históricos, sociales y culturales del pasado y del presente desde una nueva dimensión y a través de los ojos de guionistas, direc- tores y productores. de ahí la proliferación de biopics y de guiones inspirados en historias o situaciones reales que persiguen acercarnos a épocas, contextos o fenómenos como la segregación racial o la sexualidad a través de personajes con los que poder empatizar, como por ejemplo sucede en algunas de las últimas películas nominadas a los premios Óscar, moonlight ( ), green book ( ) o the favourite ( ). sin embargo, frente al género de un cine social o, al menos, con motivación social, que de una u otra forma pretende concienciar al público ante situaciones reales inspiradas en la problemática que se viven, se han vivido o que podrían vivirse, tenemos una cartelera de cine comercial que, en una gran proporción, todavía a día de hoy sigue siendo objeto de crítica por el número y la forma en la que se proyecta la mujer y la feminidad. en los últimos años estamos asistiendo a un escenario reivindicativo donde empieza a denunciarse la masculinizada industria del cine, solicitando una presencia más activa de la mujer tanto delante como detrás de las cámaras. gracias a platafor- mas como el #metoo, que tendría notoria presencia en la industria de hollywood, o a la sororidad que se ha manifestado entre las mujeres víctimas directas e indi- rectas de la inequidad, la sociedad europea cada vez está más concienciada acerca de esta problemática social y de la, aún hoy, masculinizada industria del cine (brown, ). de este modo, son numerosas las muestras cinematográficas que en los últimos años visibilizan las injusticias y los derechos de las mujeres, tales como figuras ocultas (hidden figures, estados unidos, ), big eyes (estados beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - unidos, ), collette, (reino unido, ) carol (reino unido, ), la fuente de las mujeres (la source des femmes, bélgica, ), mustang (francia, ), sufragistas (suffragette, reino unido, ), una cuestión de género, (on the basis of sex, estados unidos, ) o tres anuncios en las afueras (three billboards outside ebbing, missouri, reino unido, ). en definitiva, múltiples ejemplos llegan a la gran pantalla logrando visibilizar y cooperar en el empoderamiento de la mujer, hacer frente al techo de cristal y denunciar situaciones que fueron decisivas en este proceso a lo largo de la historia. al margen de otros ejemplos de las, cada vez más, películas que narran y visibilizan historias de mujeres, de todas las culturas, facetas y que apuestan por su empoderamiento y el cuestionamiento del patriarcado, llama poderosamente la atención la presencia periódica de una comedia romántica que se ha convertido en un clásico navideño, love actually. a pesar de los numerosos años transcurridos desde el estreno de love actually (reino unido, ), no ha sido hasta tiempos recientes cuando, a raíz de las progresivas movilizaciones que culminarían en el de marzo de y al consiguiente impulso en la concienciación a nivel nacional en torno a los roles de género, cuando público y crítica parecen haber reparado en la distribución desigualitaria de los roles y tramas proponiendo la visualización del filme desde una perspectiva de género que hasta el momento había sido obviada (filardi, ). en ese sentido, si bien, por un lado nos preguntamos cuáles han podido ser las razones por las que durante quince años la cinta se haya convertido en un clásico que sigue año tras año formando parte indiscutible de la parrilla televisiva en las festividades navideñas y que haya prevalecido la visualización irreflexiva aderezada por las tramas y el amor, a la mirada crítica desde una perspectiva de género, por otro, trataremos de ir más allá. y es que, no solo pretendemos limitarnos a poner de manifiesto la perpetuación de los roles tradicionales que se trazan en la cinta, sino que, más concretamente, trataremos de imbuirnos en el papel que desempeña la música en el desarrollo, enfatización o la confección de estos roles de género tradicionales que, como veremos prevalecen a lo largo del largometraje. love actually es una película con guion original ambientada en el momento de su producción, donde se acusa que incluso tony blair, primer ministro inglés entre y , tendría un gran parecido con el actor hugh grant. con esto nos proponemos matizar que la película en particular, como cualquier otra producción artística, debe ser entendida dentro de su contexto de creación para poder extrapolar hipótesis y conclusiones. de este modo, nadie duda de que la película refleja la realidad en torno a género que se vivía en el año , en este caso, en la sociedad de reino unido, la cual, históricamente, se caracteriza por su férreo apego a las tradiciones y donde a pesar del cosmopolitismo vigente en muchos de sus núcleos urbanos y del peso de la figura monárquica, hoy día mujer, los pilares de la sociedad han sido conservadores con gran presencia masculina beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - (ashby, ). así, en palabras de olivia hetreed, guionista y escritora inglesa, en la actualidad y precisamente desde , presidenta de la principal asociación de guionistas de reino unido, la writers’ guild of great britain (wggb), el cine actual todavía «no sirve como muestra de la realidad», dado que las historias que cuenta son eminentemente masculinas, así mismo, pone de manifiesto que pese a que en reino unido hay mujeres creadoras y público potencial para consumir estas producciones, la toma de decisiones en torno a la industria del cine inglés sigue estando en manos de los hombres (belinchón, ). a priori, love actually como historia coral, en la que se reúnen múltiples tramas, trata de hacer un recorrido por el amor en todas sus manifestaciones humanas. entre personas de diferente raza, escalafón social, formación acadé- mica, entre padres e hijos, entre hermanos, en matrimonios jóvenes, matrimonios maduros, entre amigos, abarcando además temas anejos como la infidelidad, la viudedad o la sexualidad. la película de nacionalidad inglesa, de en torno a dos horas de duración, sería dirigida por richard curtis, quien se estrenaba como director tras haber participado como guionista de cintas como four weddings and a funeral o notting hill y sería proyectada con gran éxito en taquilla en las navidades del . catalogada como drama, comedia y romance, cuenta con un reparto de actores espectacular, entre los que podemos mencionar a emma thompson, liam neeson, alan rinkman, keyra knightley, mr. bean (rowan atkinson), colin firth, hugh grant, laura linney y claudia schiffer, entre otros, que sin duda contribuiría indudablemente a su rotundo éxito en taquilla. por su parte, la banda sonora, publicada también en , cuenta con dieciocho pistas y se convertiría también en un producto de ventas, donde la música forma parte inherente de unas tramas muy jugosas para un análisis de género. craig armstrong (glasgow, ), por su parte, será el encargado de coordinar una banda sonora que prácticamente no deja de sonar en ningún momento y que integra música preexistente en su versión original, música preexistente versionada y original, y tres temas de música original incidental compuestos por el propio armstrong. en total diecisiete temas que serían comercializados bajo el título love actually: original motion picture soundtrack ( ). si hacemos un fugaz repaso por los personajes, entre los papeles femeninos tenemos a una mujer madura casada y madre de dos hijos víctima de la infidelidad de su marido, a una mujer que ha asumido el rol de cuidar a su hermano con un trastorno psiquiátrico grave, a una niña popular que canta en un grupo del colegio, a una mujer joven que trabaja como secretaria y que seduce a un hombre casado, a una asistente personal del primer ministro inglés en downing street, procedente de una clase social media-baja, a una mujer portuguesa del ámbito rural, que entra a trabajar como asistenta de hogar en la casa temporal de un escritor inglés, y por último, a una mujer joven, cuya única información de la que disponemos en el beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - momento de la trama es su papel como novia en la boda que se celebra. por otro lado, en los papeles masculinos nos encontramos con un hombre maduro casado y directivo de una empresa que es seducido por su secretaria, un primer ministro inglés, un escritor, hombre culto que es víctima de un desengaño amoroso y se traslada a una villa del sur de francia donde precisa la ayuda de una asistente de hogar, un joven perceptiblemente sensible y detallista, amigo del marido de la chica de la que está enamorado en secreto, un hombre viudo, un niño impopu- lar que se propone captar la atención de la chica más popular del colegio y por último, una vieja gloria del rock que trata de recuperar su popularidad mediante la grabación de un hit navideño. en definitiva, políticos, intelectuales, directivos o artistas, con solvencia económica y posiciones influyentes llaman la atención frente a mujeres que ejercen únicamente como madres, amas de casa, asistentes y secretarias, subordinadas al sector masculino. a continuación, pasaremos a repasar brevemente algunas de las subtramas, con objeto de situar a los personajes y el papel que ejerce la música en la confección de los roles de género tradicionales que se reflejan a lo largo del largometraje. el primer ejemplo que nos proponemos analizar es la historia protagonizada por karen y harry, un matrimonio convencional, maduro y con hijos. karen, representada por emma thompson, se perfila como una madre paciente, empática, inteligente y volcada en la crianza de sus hijos que, en la mayor parte de las escenas, aparece dentro del hogar o llevando a cabo tareas vinculadas a su condición de madre o esposa y de la que no se menciona ningún vínculo profesional. por su parte harry, representado por alan rickman, es directivo de una empresa, con lo que se matiza una vida laboral ajena al entorno doméstico, en la que se plantea una relación extramatrimonial con una joven subordinada, secretaria de su oficina. el personaje en discordia de la trama es mia, interpretada por heike makatsch, que aparece caracterizada como una femme fatale que supone una tentación para la debilidad de harry, con corte de pelo estilo bob de los años veinte, signo de la mujer liberada y pigmentos rojo intenso en sus labios (clément, ). en la trama, la música sale a colación en el momento clave en que karen descubre la posible infidelidad de su marido cuando, en lugar del cordón de oro y el colgante en forma de corazón que había descubierto de manera accidental, bajo el árbol encuentra un disco de joni mitchel con una nota aneja en la que harry le señala «para que siga cultivando su educación sensitiva». en la escena que sigue aparece la música diegética cuando karen, consciente de la humillación, llora mien- tras escucha sola, en el reproductor de su habitación, el tema «both sides now» del disco que acaba de recibir, aunque después simula normalidad para asistir en familia a la función navideña del colegio. el tema potencia el sabor amargo de la escena y matiza el mensaje de las «dos caras» de su propio marido que acaba de descubrir. sin embargo, al mismo tiempo se ponen de manifiesto también las dos beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - caras de la infidelidad, la mujer humillada y la mujer culpabilizada, alternándose en la misma secuencia, las imágenes de karen, llorando en su dormitorio, y las de mia, en su propia casa, en ropa interior, independiente, satisfecha con la consecu- ción del colgante, su capricho y su objetivo. podríamos pensar que el cedé de joni mitchel junto al mensaje constituye un obsequio menos superficial, y sentimentalmente más valioso, máxime cuando en la compra del colgante, en la que mr. bean ejerce como vendedor, harry muestra un ostensible desinterés. en ese sentido, su imagen, que a lo largo de la cinta aparece fortalecida como jefe y como padre, tampoco se ve excesivamente deteriorada como esposo. sin embargo, curiosamente será el hecho de que el regalo sea un cedé y no una joya lo que lleva a karen a sentirse desolada. pero ¿qué lectura debemos hacer de ello? ¿se trata solo de descubrir un regalo para una tercera persona o la dureza radica también en la conciencia del paso del tiempo y la pérdida del rol de mujer bella y deseada en la madurez? en nuestra opinión, el planteamiento subyacente de toda esta secuencia gira explícitamente en torno a la belleza y al atractivo físico. el desarrollo de la misma, aderezada con el tema de «both sides», pasa por mostrar primeros planos y planos tres cuartos del cuerpo de las dos mujeres protagonistas, realzando por un lado el sobrepeso, el vestuario clásico y abultado de karen al tiempo que proyectan el cuerpo de mia en ropa interior y con el colgante. se presenta así a la mujer humi- llada y se contrapone a la mujer responsable de la infidelidad, la mujer arpía que por su propia ambición y codicia es capaz de seducir a un padre de familia. se la culpabiliza y señala incluso con el disfraz diablesco con el que mia asiste a la fiesta de navidad de la empresa, en la cual karen, también presente, la descubre bailando con su marido. en este nuevo ejemplo de música diegética, cómplice de la infidelidad, termina con la advertencia de karen a su marido del peligro de acercarse a una mujer así, lo que contribuye a proyectar una vez más que la actua- ción de mia es un acto de maldad, mientras que la de harry lo es de debilidad. otra de las subtramas es la protagonizada por juliet, personaje interpretado por keira knightley. en ella se narra la boda entre ella y peter, interpretado por chiwetel ejiofor. uno de los momentos más populares del filme será la boda en la que mark, interpretado por andrew lincoln, el mejor amigo del novio que está silenciosamente enamorado de juliet, les ha preparado una sorpresa a la pareja contrayente con una interpretación en directo de una versión de all you need is love, de the beatles, en la que los diversos ejecutantes se levantan y aparecen por los diferentes rincones de la iglesia. teniendo en cuenta que el matrimonio es entre un hombre negro y una mujer blanca, la cuestión racial resulta ciertamente signi- ficativa. en ese sentido, nos detendremos brevemente a analizar quién participa en el aderezo musical de la boda, que entrelaza la popular marcha nupcial de félix mendelssohn con el comienzo de la marsellesa que marca el inicio del clásico de beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - the beatles, interpretados por el organista, un hombre blanco. en primer lugar, arriba en el coro aparecen dos pequeños conjuntos vocales formados por mujeres y hombres negros y blancos y entre ellos un cantante solista de raza negra, inter- pretado por el cantante de soul lynden david hall, fallecido en , pocos años después del rodaje. después se suma el cuarteto clásico, formado por dos hombres, violín primero y violonchelo y dos mujeres, violín segundo y viola. a continuación aparecen progresivamente los vientos entre los invitados, sentados en los bancos, entre los que ya no encontramos a ninguna mujer, sino únicamente hombres y en su gran mayoría blancos. en concreto, y por orden de aparición, tres trompetas interpretadas por tres hombres blancos, dos flautistas por dos hombres blancos, tres trombones por dos hombres blancos y un hombre negro y dos saxofones por un hombre negro y otro blanco. y, por último, la intervención termina con un solo de guitarra eléctrica interpretado también por un hombre blanco. Únicamente aparecen dos hombres de raza negra que, concretamente, tocan el trombón y el saxofón. en definitiva, se vuelve de nuevo a recurrir a estereotipos tradicionales, normativos y etnocéntricos en cuestión de raza, género y música. si bien por un lado se perpetúa el estereotipo de música clásica interpretada por personas de raza blanca, por su parte, las personas de raza negra figuran en papeles, bien ligados al góspel, como entre el coro en la boda y el solista de soul o bien al jazz, como el trombón y el saxofón. y en lo que respecta a las mujeres, las encontramos como intérpretes vocalistas de góspel y únicamente nos topamos con instrumentistas de raza blanca, en concreto una intérprete de violín y otra de viola. volviendo a los protagonistas de la trama, sin lugar a dudas, el personaje central es juliet, ya que tanto durante como después de la boda, su pareja desempeña un rol pasivo e intrascendente. no obstante, en ningún momento se proporcionan datos acerca de sus respectivas dedicaciones laborales, de forma que en la cinta parece ser una cuestión secundaria. por el contrario, la única preocupación de juliet en el momento de la trama gira en torno a su boda. lo más importante en ese momento de su vida parece ser todo lo concerniente a la celebración. se verá inmersa en un triángulo amoroso cuando decida acudir al mejor amigo de su novio en busca del registro videográfico y en concreto de buenos planos de su vestido. tras la visualización del vídeo de la boda grabado por este, en el que únicamente aparecen planos suyos y ninguno de su marido, se dará cuenta de que el verdadero motivo por el que mantenía esa distancia aparentemente fría es que estaba enamorado de ella y al mismo tiempo se desmiente la homosexualidad sobre la que se hipotetiza en algunos diálogos. la música incidental seleccionada para la secuencia es «glasgow love theme», una de las tres únicas partituras originales compuestas para el largometraje que enlaza con el tema de dido, «here with me», escogido para la escena en la que mark sale a la calle al verse descubierto y se debate entre su lealtad a peter y sus sentimientos hacia juliet. en el desenlace de la historia mark acude a casa de juliet con una serie de carteles con texto y fotografías cuyos comentarios aluden esencialmente a cuestiones relacionadas beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - con el aspecto físico y un reproductor musical que será cómplice de la trama, con voces blancas cantando villancicos en forma de aguinaldo para poder confesar sus sentimientos a juliet sin la sospecha de peter. nos encontramos aquí con un sutil intento de superar estereotipos de raza y de sexualidad pero que sin embargo resulta en un papel muy poco significativo para el novio, y en el que nuevamente la pareja protagonista son mujer y hombre blanco. en tercer lugar, tenemos la historia protagonizada por colin firth, escritor que tras descubrir la infidelidad de su esposa con su propio hermano decide marcharse a un pequeño pueblo del sur de francia, localizado en un enclave rural idílico que aporta distancia contextual al ambiente navideño e invernal que se impone en el resto de las tramas. durante su estancia, contará con los servicios de una joven portuguesa proveniente de una familia humilde y rural que asume las tareas de hogar mientras él escribe. no hablan el mismo idioma, ella le habla en portugués y él en inglés, por lo que la música incidental compuesta para esta trama, concretamente «portuguese love theme», actúa como argamasa en el desarrollo de los diálogos infructuosos. la música trata de situar al espectador en el contexto campestre, así como de aderezar los progresivos gestos de complicidad que se dan entre ambos. una de las escenas más significativas y en las que el tema de música incidental alcanza su mayor desarrollo e intensidad es cuando, al ir a recoger una taza, accidentalmente aurelia provoca que el manuscrito de jamie vuele hacia el lago. la decisión de la joven pasa por quitarse la ropa y saltar al agua en ropa interior, con la intención de recuperar los papeles. valentía y decisión que contrastan con la actitud de jamie, que se lanzará eminentemente por cortesía, pero vestido. resulta en esencia significativo el primer plano que recorre todo el cuerpo de aurelia en ropa interior bajo la mirada atenta del escritor, de forma que podríamos entender que se recurre a mostrar el cuerpo, adornado con un tatuaje, en aras de que prevalezca en el espectador la percepción de aurelia como mujer sexualizada y en cierto modo exótica ante el de sirvienta rural, ya que a lo largo de la trama queda patente la perpetuación del rol tradicional de hombre intelectual y de elevado poder adquisitivo frente al de mujer humilde y con poca formación. otra de las historias atañe a un padre, daniel, interpretado por liam neeson y un niño sam interpretado por thomas sangster, que atraviesan un momento de duelo por la pérdida respectiva de su esposa y madre. el centro de la trama muestra la relación paternofilial entre ellos, y el acercamiento a las vivencias de amor de infancia, teniendo en cuenta que sam se profesa enamorado de la chica popular de su colegio, joanna, interpretada por olivia olson. en esta historia, la música adquiere nuevamente un papel significativo para el desarrollo de la acción, y más concretamente para la confección de roles. dado que la niña es cantante, lo que nos sitúa una vez más en el rol de mujer históricamente aceptado como vocalista, sam decide aprender a tocar la batería. en este sentido la batería se beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - impone como la herramienta seleccionada, por un lado, para conferir a sam, de aspecto aniñado e impopular, una planta más masculina y enérgica. tras horas de ensayo, protagonizan junto a otros niños la función de navidad donde ella canta sola ante el auditorio una versión del clásico «all i want for christmas is you» de mariah carey. por su parte, si bien el padre no busca ningún tipo de relación a lo largo de la película en señal de duelo, al final termina con un acercamiento casual a una mujer, carol, interpretada por claudia schiffer, que deja abierta la puerta a una futura relación, como podemos ver, no con cualquier mujer. por otro lado, una de las historias centrales con mayor peso en el largometraje es la protagonizada por el primer ministro hugh grant, y su asistente, natalie, interpretada por martine mccutcheon. una mujer con un cuerpo con curvas que aparece mostrado en frecuentes planos tres cuartos, de clase social media-baja, procedente de un barrio conflictivo de la capital, que utiliza un lenguaje inapropiado para trabajar en downing street. pero eso es lo que parece diferenciarla dentro de un mundo plagado de convencionalismos diplomáticos y hace que el primer ministro la seleccione, sintiéndose atraído por esa patente naturalidad. sin embargo, lo que desencadena el conflicto es un acoso por parte del presidente de los ee. uu. que queda retratado como un ente poderoso que a través de su influencia puede obtener absolutamente todo. el primer ministro interpreta la conducta como un coqueteo que desencadena en él un conflicto de celos que le lleva a tomar la deci- sión de trasladar su puesto de trabajo a otra parte y desplazarla lejos de él. esta trama es la tercera que dispone de su propia partitura de música incidental: «pm’s love theme», de carácter institucional y presidencial que se superpone al tema portugués y sirve como vehículo en las tres persecuciones finales. por otro lado, la música diegética en esta historia no es clave, no obstante, sí lo es para matizar la imagen más humana, menos diplomática y más divertida del propio presidente, que baila «jump» de the pointer sisters por todas las dependencias presidenciales y lo que le distancia del mundo encorsetado y la diplomacia y le acerca al mundo real en el que vive natalie. común a estas tres últimas tramas mencionadas, en el momento álgido de la película, aderezado por el tema de música incidental «the pm’s theme», confluyen tres persecuciones, la del primer ministro en busca de natalie, seguida de la de sam en busca de joanna en el aeropuerto y por último, la de jamie en busca de aurelia en el pueblo francés donde su familia portuguesa regenta un mesón. en los tres casos la acción revela el rol pasivo de la mujer y muestra cómo la iniciativa en una relación recae sobre el hombre. una de las historias más agridulces del largometraje que, sin duda, contribuye a la calificación de drama es la que concierne a sarah, interpretada por laura lindsey y arquetipo de mujer cuidadora que trabajadora al mismo tiempo en una oficina. dedica todo su tiempo libre a cuidar de su hermano enfermo, interno en un centro psiquiátrico con brotes violentos, al que visita diariamente y con el que habla por beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - teléfono de forma muy frecuente. su deber y su responsabilidad es el cuidado de su familiar y esto le obliga a renunciar a otras facetas de su vida sentimental. cuando comienza una relación con uno de sus compañeros, no puede dejar de atender las llamadas caprichosas de su hermano, de tal forma que el amor a su hermano se sitúa por encima de cualquier otra relación. la música que acompaña a esta trama está muy lejos de la bucólica banda sonora que acompaña la campiña o los villancicos que resuenan a lo largo de toda la cinta. de hecho, el silencio y la repentina irrupción del reconocible tono de nokia será la música diegética, el desencadenante que le lleva a sarah a decidir en un corto lapso de tiempo entre ella y karl, interpretado por rodrigo santoro, o ella y su hermano. nos pregun- tamos si hubiera funcionado igual en el caso de que en vez de una mujer hubiera sido un hombre quien ejerciera un papel como cuidador, si fuera un hombre en la misma situación el que estuviera al cuidado de un familiar y renunciara a vivir una relación por el cuidado de aquel. en ese caso, nos preguntamos, ¿se entendería, funcionaría igual de bien? ¿o implícitamente tenemos muy asumido el papel de mujer como cuidadora, responsable del bienestar de los demás? tal vez sea por ello por lo que la trama resulta triste, pero al fin y al cabo no llega a resultar chocante. por último, el protagonista que enmarca el comienzo y final de la película es billy mack, encarnado por bill nighy. en una película atestada de canciones populares navideñas, las versiones de música preexistente son la clave musical de toda la película. en esta línea, billy mack se perfila como un viejo cantante de pop, ex-heroinómano que trata de dar un nuevo impulso a su carrera en declive con la grabación de un single navideño con el que pretende ganar mucho dinero. a pesar del éxito efímero que cosecha, su vida se le revela vacía y aprecia en su manager, joe, a su único ser querido en una relación se insinúa como un amor o cariño entre hombres por dejadez, pero no homosexual. sin embargo, al margen de todo esto, la trama de billy mack nos muestra una de las escenas más sugestivas para analizar desde el punto de música y género: el videoclip correspondiente al hit navideño «christmas is all around you». esta será una de las pocas secuen- cias donde aparezcan mujeres tocando instrumentos. en este caso, se trata de un grupo de mujeres muy sexualizadas, con minivestidos de papá noel que rodean a un billy mack vestido, en cambio, íntegramente de traje. las siete mujeres cuya denominación en el reparto figura como vixen, lo que traducido al castellano es zorra, forman la banda que acompaña a billy, y por consiguiente aparecen tocando la batería, el bajo, la guitarra o los teclados mostrando posturas y gestos obscenos mientras fingen tocar los instrumentos (frith y mcrobbie, ). en definitiva, y como conclusión, si bien love actually, «realmente amor», habla de que el amor está en todas partes, repara en el amor al hijo, en el amor al hermano, en el amor no correspondido, en el amor correspondido, en el amor entre personas de diferentes razas, en el amor entre personas de diferentes países beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - y lenguas, en el amor entre personas de diferente clase social, de diferente escala- fón, rango, en el amor maduro, en la infidelidad, en el cariño entre amigos, y sin embargo, no deja espacio alguno para el amor entre personas del mismo sexo —al parecer en el montaje definitivo se eliminó una de las tramas protagonizada por una pareja formada por dos mujeres—, en lo que podríamos interpretar como un estigma de la sociedad británica en particular y europea en general, que se muestra cosmopolita y abierta, pero al mismo tiempo, tradicional y conservadora en torno al concepto de familia. como resultado de ello, nos encontramos con la prevalencia de la heterosexualidad normativa y homosexualidad únicamente como sospecha. así mismo, en todas las tramas analizadas, hallamos una posición económica y laboral ventajosa para los hombres. en ese sentido, los roles asignados a las mujeres son los tradicionales como madres, cuidadoras, trabajadoras subordinadas, objetos sexuales, femme fatal, novias, amas de casa y asistentes. de hecho, el perfil de los papeles masculinos, gira en torno a los factores que han venido condicionando la masculinidad tradicional, y que son el poder adquisitivo y la solvencia económica, la formación académica, la heterosexualidad, el rol secundario en el hogar y los altos cargos laborales. quince años después de su lanzamiento nos preguntamos qué consecuen- cias ha podido tener, tiene o podría tener en el futuro la visualización del filme. teniendo en cuenta que un target predominante al que va dirigida esta clase de películas son mujeres, sería conveniente promover una visualización crítica y entendida desde la evolución de la sociedad en políticas y cultura de género. sin embargo, al igual que sucede con otras películas del género romance, el cine es un crisol de la sociedad y en muchas ocasiones un reflejo real de lo que sucede. ¿pueden tener consecuencias en la percepción de los roles sociales de género de quien lo observa? ¿el público es consciente de los mensajes que recibe? ¿cuáles son esos mensajes? ¿se corre el riesgo de que de forma inocente y sutil la película siga avivando el asentamiento de los roles de género tradicionales? ¿cuál es el mensaje ético y moral que nos transmite? en primer lugar, que la mujer transige y se sacrifica. que sobre ella recae el peso de la responsabilidad familiar como madre, esposa y cuidadora, pero también la responsabilidad en las infidelidades. mientras que por su parte, sobre el hombre recae el peso de la responsabilidad laboral, económica y política. que el cuerpo de la mujer es un objeto de reclamo que puede utilizarse como aderezo o como adorno meramente visual, mientras que en muy contadas ocasiones se hace lo propio con el del hombre. ¿significa que la mujer y el hombre espectadores se sienten cómodos viendo a otras mujeres y hombres desempeñando estos papeles? ¿cuáles son las claves para que un guion desigualitario siga funcionando y que el mensaje en torno a los roles de género se perciba con suma sutileza? bajo nuestro punto de vista podemos hablar de varios factores paralelos entre los que sobresale la prestigiosa selección beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - del reparto con una o varias celebridades en cada historia paralela, a lo que sin duda corresponde atribuir el crédito y popularidad de la producción. pero en este proceso no resulta menos importante la rapidez de las tramas, que transcurren y evolucionan sin solución de continuidad y favorecen un visionado de la película con un ritmo intrépido y sin espacios para el silencio, la dispersión y la reflexión. en ella todo se sucede a gran velocidad con lo que la finalidad parece estar en una percepción holística y no en una percepción fragmentada y anecdótica. en segundo lugar, no podemos dejar de mencionar el humor inglés y la presencia de ingredientes cómicos en prácticamente todas las tramas que actúa como filtro de estos tópicos y a la vez ornamenta el desarrollo de las tramas en un ambiente amable. por último, bajo nuestro punto de vista, a lo largo del largometraje de love actually, la música actúa como cómplice de la perpetuación de los roles de género tradicionales, dado que a lo largo de las tramas actúa como bisagra y en muchos casos apela a la emoción fácil y ampulosa en el espectador. la música está presente de forma continua tanto en su forma diegética como incidental. en numerosas ocasiones podemos percibir la fuente en momentos clave de las subtramas. ejemplo de ello es el cedé como prueba de la infidelidad que hará tambalearse el bienestar familiar, al tiempo que remarca por un lado a la mujer madura, centrada en un crecimiento espiritual, que debe transigir, y por otro a la mujer joven y codiciosa preocupada por su belleza, a quien se señala como culpable del conflicto. también el tono de nokia de las llamadas del hermano de sarah. a lo largo del mismo sarah debe tomar una decisión y decidir un camino en el que la prioridad sean sus propios deseos o el cuidado de su hermano, sin que parezca que pueda haber un punto intermedio. la función musical navideña donde el niño se estrena como estrella del rock y la niña deja boquiabierto al auditorio con su voz, es la prueba de oro para conseguir a la chica. y por otro lado, también al respecto de la música diegética podemos observar la interpretación musical los roles de género tradicionales. los instrumentos que aparecen en la película son interpretados por hombres en su gran mayoría (ramos, ). tan solo hay tres excepciones, el cuarteto de la boda, las mujeres como vocalistas en los coros y las mujeres como instrumentistas de la banda de rock de billy mack, en cuyo caso su papel como instrumentistas es ridiculizado y su aparición responde a un mero objeto ornamental y sexualizado. por último, respecto a la música incidental me gustaría reparar en la trama final, donde se desarrolla el tema del primer ministro. en ella se superponen tres persecuciones, el primer ministro en busca de natalie, sam en busca de joanna y jamie en busca de aurelia. lo que incentiva el rol de hombre activo y mujer pasiva, a la espera de los pasos y las acciones ejecutadas por él. en definitiva, en todos los amores, en todas las historias, la música ejerce una función determinante, ya sea como eje de conflicto, como punto de inflexión, de beatriz hernÁndez polo love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicionales [ ] ediciones universidad de salamanca / popular music research today, pp. - acercamiento, de desenlace. aparece en su forma diegética constantemente en algunas de las historias, y sin embargo en otras en su forma incidental, contextua- lizando o bien enfatizando la trama emocional, y de una u otra forma, la música se presenta a lo largo de toda la cinta como un referente claramente significativo, a la hora de llevar a cabo una lectura desde la perspectiva de género. a lo largo de este artículo no pretendemos denunciar el tratamiento de roles, sino visibilizarlos y plantear la necesidad imperante de ser conscientes de lo que estamos viendo y consumiendo. el peligro de que con un envoltorio dulce demos por óptimo lo que puede ser una normalización de roles que no representan la realidad igualitaria a la que la sociedad occidental parece que quiere aspirar. referencias bibliogrÁficas arranz, f. 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( ). la perspectiva de género y la música popular: dos nuevos retos para la musicología. oviedo: krk ediciones. https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/cultura/ / / /love-actually-fuese-encantadora-pelicula-siemprecreimos-era/ .htm https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/cultura/ / / /love-actually-fuese-encantadora-pelicula-siemprecreimos-era/ .htm https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/cultura/ / / /love-actually-fuese-encantadora-pelicula-siemprecreimos-era/ .htm http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/ -the-data-that-reveals-the-film-industrys-woman-problem http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/ -the-data-that-reveals-the-film-industrys-woman-problem https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/hollywood-movies-diversity.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/hollywood-movies-diversity.html 	love actually y la esfera musical como cÓmplice de la perpetuaciÓn de los roles de gÉnero tradicion 	referencias bibliográficas yang hu and xuezhu shi the impact of china’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations article (accepted version) (refereed) original citation: hu, yang and shi, xuezhu ( ) the impact of china’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations. contemporary social science: journal of the academy of social sciences. issn - doi: . / . . © academy of social sciences this version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / available in lse research online: may lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. this document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsoc /current http://doi.org/ . / . . http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science contemporary social science themed issue on ‘family change, intergenerational relations and policy responses’ guest editors: fran bennett, julia brannen and linda hantrais (corresponding guest editor) the impact of china’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations yang hu (corresponding author), department of sociology, lancaster university address: bowland north, bailrigg, lancaster university, lancaster la yn, uk email: yang.hu@lancaster.ac.uk orcid: - - - yang hu is a lecturer in the department of sociology at lancaster university, uk. he is also an early career fellow at the work family researchers network, usa. his research focuses on the sociology of families and intimate relationships, race/ethnicity and migration, and east asian societies. he is author of chinese–british intermarriage: disentangling gender and ethnicity (palgrave macmillan, ). he has published in the journal of marriage and family, european sociological review, journal of sex research, demographic research, environment and planning a, journal of family issues, and british journal of sociology of education. xuezhu shi, department of economics, london school of economics address: houghton street, london, wc a ae, uk email: x.shi @lse.ac.uk orcid: - - - author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science xuezhu shi is a doctoral researcher in the department of economics at the london school of economics, uk. her research interests are health, gender and family economics in developing countries, and in china in particular. in her research, she draws on economic theories and uses panel surveys and administrative datasets to examine health, wealth and gender inequalities, and the interrelations between public policies and individual decision- making. acknowledgements the data used in this research are from the china family panel studies (cfps), funded by the programme of peking university and carried out by the institute of social science survey of peking university. the authors are solely responsible for the analyses and interpretations presented in this article. words: , words (including abstract, main text, references, table and figures, excluding cover pages) author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science the impact of china’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations abstract drawing on data from the china family panel studies, this article assesses the state of gender equality among chinese children under the one-child policy. we demonstrate the importance of conducting intra-gender and inter-gender comparisons taking into account the perspectives of parents and children and the intergenerational (in)congruence between these two perspectives. our results show that parents invest more financial resource and time in educating singleton than non-singleton children, which partially supports the hypothesis of intra-gender equality. the findings for children’s subjective perceptions of their own life circumstances do not consistently support this hypothesis. since gender differences in intergenerational investment and children’s subjective perceptions varied little by sibship structure, the hypothesis of inter-gender equality is not consistently supported. we found a stronger negative association between the presence of male and elder siblings and intergenerational investment in girls, and a larger male–female gap in intergenerational investment in urban than in rural areas. we also report a considerable intergenerational incongruence between parents’ and children’s perspectives. our findings call into question the effectiveness of intervening solely in parental behaviour and intergenerational investment to enhance children’s outcomes. they underline the importance of considering both intra- gender and inter-gender inequalities in moving the gender revolution forward. keywords comparative dimensions, comparative perspectives, gender equality, intergenerational relations, one-child policy, post-reform china. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science introduction introduced in , china’s one-child policy was replaced by the universal two-child policy in (wang, gu, & cai, ). as the world’s most extensive population control policy, the one-child policy has been a major driver of otherwise unlikely demographic shifts in aspects such as family downsizing and the rise of patriarchal demographics featuring a highly skewed sex ratio (basten & jiang, ). these shifts led to considerable yet unintended changes in intergenerational and gender relations in the chinese family (kim & fong, ; tsui & rich, ). a major change, according to many scholars (fong, ; lee, ), was the rise of gender equality among singleton girls who enjoyed unprecedented intergenerational support and investment ‘because they do not have to compete with brothers’ for resources (fong, : ), particularly in urban areas (xu & yeung, ; zhai & gao, ). in this article, drawing on data from the china family panel studies (cfps), we assess the state of gender equality among chinese children under the one-child policy by examining the ways in which intergenerational investment and children’s subjective perceptions of their own circumstances vary by sibship structure and differ between daughters and sons. in doing so, we make two contributions to existing scholarship. first, claims about rising gender equality under the one-child policy are founded primarily on evidence that, compared to children with siblings, singletons in the one-child generation receive greater financial and time investment from their parents and extended family members (fong, ; liu, ; tsui & rich, ). we contend that this intra-gender evidence does not suffice to demonstrate the achievement of gender equality between girls and boys. underlining the importance of comparison referents, we argue that substantially different evaluation outcomes may arise from inter-gender comparison between girls and boys and intra-gender author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science comparison between singleton girls and boys and their same-sex counterparts with siblings. second, following the tradition of social mobility and stratification research, previous and, particularly, quantitative research has focussed on parent-to-child intergenerational transfers (lee, ; xu & yeung, ; zhai & gao, ). this approach overlooks children’s subjective views on their own life circumstances, and the presence or absence of gender disparities in such views. since the gendered pattern of children’s perceptions does not necessarily mirror that of parents’ intergenerational investment, we suggest that scholars should examine the perspectives of both parents and children, and scrutinise the intergenerational (in)congruence between the two perspectives. the one-child policy and social change in post-reform china in , the one-child policy was formally introduced to curb population growth, although the state framed it as a public health policy and claimed that ‘family planning benefits the health of mothers and children’ (see supplemental figure s ). despite the strict enforcement of the policy, particularly at its early stage in the s and early s, exceptions were permitted for certain social groups to have a second child, such as ethnic minorities (comprising around % of the chinese population in ), disabled servicemen, and in some rural areas if a couple’s first-born was a girl (murphy, tao & lu, ). in the s, some provinces began to permit a second child when both parents were singleton children (murphy et al., ). despite its uneven and segmented implementation, the one-child policy has played a pivotal role in creating china’s new demographic reality. under the policy, the one- child family structure ‒– and particularly the four grandparents, two parents and one child ( – – ) structure — became prevalent (wang & fong, ). nevertheless, the persistence of patrilineal son preference encouraged some parents to turn to sex-selective abortion and author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science female infanticide to secure male heirs, creating a highly imbalanced sex ratio at birth of an estimated males per females in (greenhalgh, ). [figure about here] a vast rural–urban gulf underlies the implementation and consequences of the one-child policy (greenhalgh, ; murphy et al., ), as depicted in figure . from its inception, the policy was more rigorously implemented in urban than in rural areas across most chinese provinces. in – , china initiated its market reforms and the open-door policy, which were followed by the state-guided programmes of societal modernisation, privatisation, and urbanisation (chan, ). due to uneven socioeconomic and cultural development and the rapid rise of urban centres, urban china today remains socioeconomically better off than rural areas, and patrilineal son preference is de-traditionalised to a greater degree in urban than in rural areas (hu & scott, ). rural–urban disparities have been exacerbated by the hukou system, which distinguishes between rural and urban household registration and thereby confers differentiated access to socioeconomic and welfare resources such as medical, education and unemployment subsidies in rural or urban places of registration (chan, ). the one-child policy and intergenerational gender equality despite its creation of the patriarchal demographic pattern, paradoxically, the one-child policy may have helped foster greater gender equality among chinese children. such gender equality may be noted in the intergenerational transfer of resources. the prevalence of the – – family structure and china’s rapid socioeconomic development may have enabled and encouraged chinese families to concentrate the investment of available financial and non- pecuniary resources, such as time and attention, on singleton children (fong, ). given the scarcity of state welfare for elderly people in many parts of china, parental investment in children is fuelled in part by the expectation of reciprocal provision of old-age care from author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science children (hu, ). although patriarchal traditions oblige male more than female children to observe filial obligations (hu & scott, ), singleton sons and daughters — as the only children in their respective families — may equally be required to ensure their parents’ old- age security (hu, ). a shift has also occurred in the social, cultural and political context of gender equality in recent decades. patrilineal son preference has received less support from members of the post-reform generation than from their predecessors (hu & scott, ). the highly skewed sex ratio may have unintendedly elevated the status of young women as ‘rare’ resources in social arenas such as the marriage market (greenhalgh, ). under the one-child policy, the presence or absence of siblings and specific sibship structures are imbued with cultural and symbolic meaning. patrilineal son preference may have encouraged parents to have multiple children to secure a male heir, despite hefty fines for breaking the law (murphy et al., ). although ethnic minorities and many rural families were allowed to have a second child, the segmented implementation of the ‘second-child policy’ was inherently selective, with the aim of accommodating the stubborn persistence of patrilineal values in these social groups (murphy et al., ). by contrast, however, parents’ conscious preference to have only one child, and particularly one daughter, may in part reflect their self-selective departure from patrilineal values (hu, ). in recent years, progress toward gender equality may also have been propelled by state and activist campaigns such as the care for girl and metoo movements. comparing perspectives: parents vs children against the backdrop of societal individualisation in post-reform china (yan, ), we should not overlook potential gender (in)equality in children’s subjective views on their own author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science life circumstances. the market transition and dissolution of work units unmoored the one- child generation from collectivist and patriarchal traditions (yan, ), fostering a sense of individual personhood (fong, ). such individuality is often projected through individualised educational and career aspirations (fong, ; liu, ) and the self- reflexive approach adopted by singleton children to construct a sense of subjective wellbeing (kim & fong, ; wang & fong, ). however, children’s subjective perception remains largely absent from the assessment of gender equality under the one-child policy. following the tradition of socioeconomic mobility research, previous studies on china have predominantly focussed on the one-way traffic of parent-to-child care provision and the transfer of economic and human capital (lee, ; liu, ; xu & yeung, ). irrespective of parental investment, children construct independent views on their own lived experiences (fong, ; hu, ), and these views may help shape their life aspirations, subjectively perceived sense of gender (in)equality, and subjective wellbeing. in this article, we contend that how children make sense of, and act upon, their own lives is at least as important as the amount of intergenerational investment they receive. distinguishing between parents’ and children’s perspectives also enables us to explore potential intergenerational (in)congruence. if familial resources are concentrated on singleton children (compared to children with siblings), and intergenerational investment in singleton girls and boys tends to be equal (fong, ; kim & fong, ), it is important to determine whether these patterns in investment are mirrored by, and thus explain, disparities within children’s own perceptions. examining this intergenerational (in)congruence may reveal whether gendered intergenerational investment translates into the gendered ways in author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science which children make sense of their lives. intergenerational (in)congruence also has direct policy relevance, shedding light on the potential effectiveness of intervening solely in adult family members’ behaviour in an attempt to enhance children’s outcomes. intra-gender vs inter-gender comparison it is widely acknowledged that gender equality is defined through relative social comparisons, and such comparisons are conducted in multiple dimensions (hu & yucel, ). the claim that greater gender equality existed among chinese children under the one-child policy was based one-sidedly on intra-gender evidence comparing singleton girls and boys to those with siblings (fong, ; liu, ; xu & yeung, ). only a small number of studies have considered male–female equality, and conducted inter-gender comparison between singleton daughters and sons (lee, ). it is necessary to distinguish between intra-gender and inter- gender comparisons. conceptually, the two comparative dimensions represent distinct pathways in the gender revolution. whilst the former underlines the need to move the gender revolution forward by reducing within-gender disparities, the latter capitalises on the achievements of gender egalitarianism by narrowing female–male inequalities (hu & yucel, ). furthermore, the presence of siblings may affect the amount of resources available for investment in each child as well as the ways in which resources are (unevenly) distributed between siblings (wang & fong, ). we cannot necessarily infer that the one-child policy has fostered gender equality between girls and boys merely from evidence that singleton girls in the one-child generation receive more intergenerational investment than their counterparts with siblings (fong, ; wang & fong, ). methodologically, scholars need to conduct both intra-gender and inter-gender comparisons, and triangulate evidence from the two comparative dimensions. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science hypotheses h (intra-gender difference): singleton children enjoy a greater amount of intergenerational investment (h a) and more positive subjective perceptions of their life circumstances (h b) than their counterparts with siblings; and the intra-gender difference between singleton and non-singleton children is greater in urban than in rural areas (h c). h (inter-gender difference): the gender gap in intergenerational investment (h a) and children’s subjective perceptions of their life circumstances (h b) is smaller between singleton girls and boys than that between girls and boys with siblings; and the difference in the female–male gap between singleton and non-singleton children is greater in rural than in urban areas (h c). h (intergenerational congruence): differentials in intergenerational investment mediate and thus explain gender and sibship-structure differences in children’s subjective perceptions. if singleton daughters indeed enjoyed gender equality under the one-child policy, we would expect both hypothesis and hypothesis , which take account of both parents’ and children’s perspectives and distinct comparative dimensions, to hold. due to the persistence of son preference in rural as opposed to urban china (hu & scott, ), we expect the inter- gender discrepancy between girls and boys to be greater in rural than in urban areas. as the one-child policy was more rigorously implemented and patrilineal ideals are de- traditionalised to a greater degree in urban than in rural china, the presence of younger (male) siblings for urban girls could indicate that the parents may have a particularly strong son preference (murphy et al., ). therefore, we would expect that the intra-gender difference between singleton and non-singleton children to be greater in urban than in rural areas. if author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science differentials in intergenerational investment are primarily responsible for disparities in children’s subjective perceptions, we would expect hypothesis to hold. data and methods we used data from the cfps. in the survey, individual face-to-face interviews were conducted with both child and adult members of the sampled households, thereby capturing the perspectives of both parents and children. multi-stage probability-proportional-to-size sampling was used to construct a nationally representative sample of , households from provinces. the response rate at the household level was . %. the self-completion module was only completed by children aged – in (n = , ). to construct our analytical sample, we first eliminated children outside this age range and children who did not attend school. we then eliminated cases with missing information for key variables ( . % of the original sample), yielding a final analytical sample of , school children, of whom % were female and % were from urban areas. the mean age of the girls was . and that of the boys was . . the little’s test was conducted to ensure that our list-wise deletion of missing cases was completely at random. table displays detailed sample characteristics. [table about here] dependent variables we capture gender equality outcomes using a wide range of indicators, taking account of both parents’ and children’s perspectives, and the pecuniary and non-pecuniary dimensions of intergenerational investment. first, we measured annual family expenditure (in chinese yuan, including input from both parents and extended family members) on a given child’s education, covering both school and extra-curricular activities; the relative percentage of total author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science family expenditure represented by educational expenditure on the child; and the total weekly time spent by parents and extended family members on supervising the child’s academic work. no statistically significant gender difference was noted at the % level for intergenerational pecuniary investment. however, a stark rural–urban gap was found in both absolute (t = . , p < . ) and relative (t = . , p < . ) educational expenditure and parents’ non-pecuniary investment of time in their children (t = . , p < . ). the cfps also asked the child respondents the following question: ‘do you think girls are faced with greater pressure than boys in society?’. the survey interviewers were instructed to elaborate on the term ‘pressure’ as the ‘stress and challenge perceived by an individual’. although the nature and source of ‘stress’ and ‘challenge’ may differ considerably for girls and boys, the measure usefully captures the diffuse sense of gender (in)equality as subjectively perceived by children. the responses were recorded on a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ scale, which we reversed so that the baseline category (‘ ’) indicated perceived gender inequality and ‘ ’ indicated perceived gender equality. around two-thirds of the children perceived that, compared to boys, girls are under greater ‘pressure’ in society. a higher proportion of boys ( %) than girls ( %, χ = . , p < . ) perceived society to be gender equal, and the rural–urban gulf was noted only among girls (χ = . , p < . ). the children’s educational aspirations reflect their subjective projection of individual agency and personhood (fong, ). we measured educational aspiration as the number of years of schooling that the child respondents aspired to complete. on average, the girls had higher educational aspirations than the boys (t = . , p < . ), and the urban children had higher educational aspirations than their rural counterparts (t = . , p < . ). perceived happiness is indicative of children’s generalised sense of subjective wellbeing and how they themselves fare in life. the cfps asked the children: ‘in general, how happy are you?’, to which author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science responses were recorded on a -point scale ranging from ‘very unhappy’ ( ) to ‘very happy’ ( ). on balance, urban children reported enjoying greater happiness in their lives than their rural counterparts (t = . , p < . ). sibship structure the key independent variables were a series of dummy variables capturing children’s sibship structure, i.e. whether the children had one or more elder and younger brothers, elder and younger sisters, respectively. as it was rare for more than one person to appear in each sibship role, we coded as ‘yes’ ( ) cases in which a child had one or more siblings in a given sibship position. we experimented with disaggregating each sibling position by more specific age groups, such as pre-school and school-age. however, this distinction was not found to make a statistically significant difference to the outcome variables, and did not contribute to increasing the overall model fit. it was therefore excluded from our final analysis. the results confirm that the one-child policy has only been loosely implemented, particularly in rural areas, as % of the girls and % of the boys were the only children in their respective families. while % of the urban children were the only children in their respective families, only % of the rural children were the only child (χ = . , p < . ). the results also delineate a nuanced demographic reality under the policy: whereas the girls ( %) were much more likely than the boys ( %) to have younger brothers (χ = . , p < . ), the boys ( %) were more likely than the girls ( %) to have elder sisters (χ = . , p < . ). despite the one-child policy, parents upholding patrilineal son preference usually attempt a second child to secure a male heir if their first-born is female (greenhalgh, ). author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science covariates we controlled for children’s age and its quadratic form to account for non-linearity. as well as distinguishing between rural and urban ( %) location of residence, we controlled for rural vs urban ( . %) hukou (household registration) status (chan, ). children’s academic performance may influence both their self-perception and the educational investment they receive from parents. we measured the children’s academic performance by adding up their scores in standardised maths and literacy tests conducted as part of the cfps. we included a dummy variable for boarding school (zhudu) attendance ( . %), as this may influence the time children could spend with their parents and siblings as well as children’s own sense of independence. we also controlled for parents’ years of schooling (m = . , sd = . ) and single-parenthood ( . %). as parents’ gender roles may influence gendered intergenerational relations (hu, ), we distinguished dual-earner families ( . %) from male-earner families. at the family level, we also controlled for annual family income per capita and the number of routine residents in the household (m = . , sd = . ) (see online supplemental material for the covariates tested in our preliminary analysis but excluded from this article). analytical strategy we used hierarchical regression models with random intercepts at the family level to account for the clustering of multiple children within the same family and any unobserved heterogeneities at family level. we log-transformed parents’ financial and time investment in children’s education and family income per capita, due to their skewed distributions. linear regression models were fitted for all the dependent variables except children’s perceptions of society’s gender equality, for which a binomial logistic regression model was fitted. the first set of models were fitted separately for girls and boys for intra-gender comparison. the author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science interaction terms between rural vs urban residence and the sibship dummies were then added to the models to explore rural–urban differences. the second set of models were fitted using the full sample to enable inter-gender comparison between boys and girls across sibship structures. similarly, the rural–urban interaction terms were added to the models. third, we included the intergenerational investment measures in the models predicting children’s subjective perceptions to test whether differences in the former mediated the relationships between sibship, gender and rural/urban residence, respectively, and children’s subjective perceptions. to aid the interpretation of the results and conserve space, we graphed the marginal effects for the key variables (see supplemental online material for full results). the variance inflation factor (vif values < ) test was conducted to ensure that no multicollinearity existed between the predictors. although parents may self-select to have more than one child, our additional tests correcting for this selection yielded results that were consistent with those reported in this article. this may be because the self-selection is closely related to, and thus captured by, observed traits such as rural vs urban hukou and residence (for example differentiated endorsement of patrilineal values) and family socioeconomic status such as capability to pay fines. findings in this section, we first present the intra-gender comparative findings, separately for girls and boys. we then present the inter-gender comparative findings. lastly, we report the results for the intergenerational (in)congruence between the perspectives of children and parents. intra-gender comparison: girls [figure about here] author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure depicts the marginal effects of sibship on intergenerational investment in girls and on their subjective perceptions. the results support hypothesis a: compared to singleton girls, those with siblings received less financial investment in their education. specifically, financial investment in girls’ education was negatively associated with the presence of younger brothers, elder brothers and elder sisters, respectively, but not that of younger sisters. these negative associations were found to be similar in both the absolute amount of investment and the relative proportion of the family’s total expenditure represented by such investment. the proportion of family expenditure spent on girls’ education was negatively associated with the presence of younger sisters. these findings are consistent with china’s traditional patriarchal hierarchy, which gives precedence to male and elder siblings: the distribution of resources trickles down the gender-cum-age lineage (hu & scott, ). moreover, a low level of correlation was found between financial and non-pecuniary investment in girls (pearson’s r = . , p < . ), and sibship seemed to have varying effects on intergenerational time and financial investment in girls’ education. parents spent less time supervising their daughters academically in the presence of male but not female siblings. the results do not consistently support hypothesis b, as the girls’ subjective perceptions and aspirations varied little by sibship structure. only a few exceptions were noted. compared to singleton girls, those with elder brothers (or = . , p < . ) had marginally lower odds of reporting the perception that, compared with boys, girls are faced with greater ‘pressure’ in society. this may be attributed to the patriarchal ideals that oblige the eldest male sibling (eventually) to shoulder the responsibility of heading up the family (hu & scott, ). rural girls with younger sisters had lower educational aspirations than their singleton counterparts (b = – . , p < . ). rural girls with elder brothers (b = – . , p < . ) and author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science particularly younger brothers (b = – . , p < . ) reported feeling less happy with life than their singleton counterparts. supporting hypothesis c, the negative associations between the presence of siblings and intergenerational investment of both financial resources and time in girls were stronger in urban than in rural areas. in part, this may be because of the higher cost associated with raising a child and tighter time constraints faced by parents in urban as opposed to rural areas. intra-gender comparison: boys [figure about here] figure depicts the results for boys’ intra-gender comparisons. hypothesis a is supported by the results: the presence of siblings consistently predicted a smaller proportion of intergenerational investment in boys’ education relative to total family expenditure. in terms of boys’ subjective perceptions, the results do not consistently support hypothesis b. the presence of elder sisters positively predicts the perception of urban boys that girls and boys are faced with similar levels of ‘pressure’ in society (or = . , p < . ). in urban areas, elder sisters may serve as role models for their younger brothers, sending positive signals regarding gender equality (lu & trieman, ). urban boys with elder brothers (b = – . , p < . ) and younger brothers (b = – . , p < . ), respectively, reported lower educational aspirations than their singleton counterparts. patriarchal traditions oblige chinese men to honour their families by achieving educational and professional success (hu & scott, ). compared to boys with siblings, singleton boys — as their families’ ‘only hope’ — may feel under particular pressure to record high achievements (fong, ). boys with siblings were found to be generally less happy in life than their singleton counterparts, although this difference was not statistically significant at the % level. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science no consistent empirical support was found for hypothesis c. compared to singleton boys, boys with elder brothers in rural areas (b = – . , p < . ), younger brothers in rural areas (b = – . , p < . ) and elder sisters in urban areas (b = – . , p < . ) received less financial investment in their education. no consistent rural–urban differences were observed in the associations between sibship structure and intergenerational investment in boys and in boys’ subjective perceptions. inter-gender comparison: girls and boys [figure about here] figure depicts the marginal differences between girls and boys in intergenerational investment and in children’s subjective perceptions across sibship structures. the findings do not support hypothesis a, which predicts that singleton boys and girls enjoy greater inter- gender equality in intergenerational investment than their counterparts with siblings (see liu, ; tsui & rich, ). we found little gender difference (at the % level) in intergenerational investment, irrespective of sibship structure. the only exception was that urban parents invested more in the education of boys with elder brothers than girls with elder brothers, in terms of both financial resources (bmale-female = . , p < . ) and time (bmale-female = . , p < . ). the gender gap in the likelihood of children perceiving that girls and boys are faced with similar levels of ‘pressure’ in society varied little with sibship structure. thus, the results do not appear to support hypothesis b that, from children’s perspectives, greater gender equality exists among singleton than non-singleton children. however, consistent with hypothesis c, a considerable rural–urban difference was noted. compared to their urban author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science counterparts, rural girls and boys were more likely to differ in their views on the presence (or absence) of differentiated levels of societal ‘pressure’ on girls and boys. no statistically significant gender difference was found in educational aspiration among singleton children. in families with siblings, however, girls had higher educational aspirations than boys, particularly in urban areas. this finding may have two concurrent explanations. first, boys with siblings may be less likely to perceive themselves as their families’ ‘only hope’, reducing their aspirations relative to those of singleton boys (fong, ). second, girls with siblings may attach particular value to education as a means of changing their gendered fate (lee, ), resulting in high aspirations. on balance, the girls reported having enjoyed greater happiness in life than the boys. the gender gap was particularly prominent among singleton children in rural areas (bmale-female = – . , p < . ). this may be because, compared to rural girls with siblings, singleton girls in rural areas are less likely to live in families that closely endorse patrilineal ideals. in urban areas, the gender gap in children’s perceived happiness in life was prominent among children with younger brothers (bmale-female = – . , p < . ) and elder sisters (bmale-female = – . , p < . ), respectively. these results may be related to the divergent ways in which urban girls and boys are influenced by the presence of younger brothers and elder sisters. whereas urban boys’ perceived happiness in life was negatively associated with the presence of younger brothers and elder sisters (see figure ), urban girls with younger brothers and particularly elder sisters enjoyed greater happiness in life than their singleton counterparts (see figure ). these results may partly reflect the de-traditionalisation of patrilineal values in urban china (hu & scott, ). as a result, it is unlikely that the presence of younger brothers ‘downgrades’ the status of urban girls and thus negatively affects their subjective wellbeing, author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science as it may do in rural areas. by contrast, the presence of elder sisters may act as a positive role model that helps to enhance girls’, but not boys’, subjective wellbeing in urban areas (lu & trieman, ). comparative perspectives and intergenerational incongruence in figures , and , the grey dashed lines represent the marginal effects of the models, including intergenerational financial and time investment, in predicting children’s subjective perceptions. our findings did not support hypothesis that differentials in intergenerational investment mediate and therefore explain disparities in children’s subjective perceptions. the inclusion of intergenerational investment measures made almost no difference to the marginal effects of sibship, gender and rural–urban residence on children’s subjective perceptions. this intergenerational incongruence may in part be due to the (re)production of cross- generational gender inequalities through channels other than the intergenerational pecuniary and non-pecuniary investment investigated in this research, such as the gendered performance of domesticity (hu, ), marital orientation and mobility (hu, ), and gendered work and occupational orientations (bian, ). conclusions in this article we addressed three intersecting social currents under china’s one-child policy: family and sibship structures (greenhalgh, ; wang et al., ); intergenerational relations between parents and children (fong, ; kim & fong, ); and gender (in)equality (hu, ; wang & fong, ). we drew on nationally representative data to assess the prevalent conjecture that china’s one-child policy may have helped to create greater gender equality among singleton children (fong, ; liu, ; wang & fong, ). author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science first, our findings show that substantially different evaluative outcomes may arise from intra- gender and inter-gender comparison. singleton children received more financial investment in their education than their non-singleton counterparts; and parents spent less time supervising girls’ academic work in the presence of male siblings. these findings may appear to support the argument that, under the one-child policy, chinese families were able to concentrate their resources on their singleton children (wang & fong, ). nevertheless, the results from inter-gender comparisons revealed little discrepancy in intergenerational investment of money and time in the education of boys and girls, irrespective of sibship structure. arguably, the resource concentration on singleton children — girls and boys alike — may simply be an artefact of the financial strain faced by families with multiple children (as opposed to one-child families), which may affect the available resources parents can invest in a given child rather than the ways in which resources are distributed. the discrepant findings of the intra-gender and inter-gender comparisons challenge the assumption that the intra-gender advantages enjoyed by singleton daughters over their non-singleton counterparts (fong, ; liu, ) can readily add up to female–male gender equality. therefore, it is pertinent to consider both intra-gender and inter-gender disparities in moving the gender revolution forward (hu & yucel, ). second, the perspective of the comparison matters. we caution against a one-sided focus on parents (lee, ; xu & yeung, ) and the neglect of children’s perspectives in research on the legacy of the one-child policy. it is clear from our findings that little intergenerational association exists between patterns of intergenerational investment and those of children’s subjective perceptions of their life circumstances in both the intra-gender and inter-gender dimensions. children’s subjective perceptions matter not only in their own right. our author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science findings also suggest that differentials in parental behaviour across sibship conditions cannot be assumed to explain how children make sense of their own lives. the results therefore problematise the assumption undergirding mainstream policy interventions in china that gender equality among children can be achieved solely by changing the ways in which parents behave and by equalising intergenerational investment (zhai & gao, ). third, our findings problematise the assumption that greater gender equality may exist among urban as opposed to rural children under the one-child policy (fong, ; fong, ). the results for rural–urban disparity differed considerably between parents’ and children’s perspectives. consistent with the observation that urbanites adhere less closely to patriarchal values than rural chinese (hu & scott, ), we found that rural boys and girls differed more than their urban counterparts in their perceived sense of societal ‘pressure’ on them. in contrast, however, the negative association between the presence of male and elder siblings and intergenerational investment in girls’ education was stronger in urban than in rural areas. this observation may be attributed to an endogenous selection effect: given the strict implementation of the one-child policy and hefty extra-child fines in urban china (murphy et al., ), urbanites who chose to break the policy may have a particularly strong preference for sons, although the overall level of adherence to patrilineality remains stronger in rural than in urban areas (hu & scott, ). the limitations of our study indicate several promising directions for further research. first, intergenerational relations and the progress toward gender equality are dynamic, and are closely embedded in their socio-historical contexts. yet our analysis provided only a static snapshot of the dynamic processes. ideally, future efforts should be made to collect longitudinal and time-series data and conduct in situ qualitative fieldwork to capture the author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science temporal dynamics of intergenerational and gender relations under the one-child policy and the new universal two-child policy. second, our analysis focused specifically on the intergenerational relations between parents and adolescent children. however, given the rapid pace of population ageing in china, members of the one-child generation may soon take on the responsibility of providing socioeconomic support and care for their elderly parents and grandparents. as the life course dynamics of the singleton children unfold, future scholars could usefully explore how the one-child family structure may influence the potentially gendered provision of old-age care in 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( ). center-based care in the context of one-child policy in china: do child gender and siblings matter? population research and policy review, ( ), – . doi: . /s - - - author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table . sample characteristics girls boys gender difference variable min max all rural urban rural vs urban all rural urban rural vs urban all rural urban sibship only child . . . *** . . . *** *** *** + elder brother . . . *** . . . * ns ns ns younger brother . . . *** . . . *** *** *** *** elder sister . . . *** . . . *** *** *** ** younger sister . . . *** . . . *** ** + * parents’ perspective annual expenditure on the child’s education (¥) a , , , *** , , *** ns ns ns ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) % total family expenditure on the child’s education a . . . . *** . . . *** ns ns ns (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) weekly time supervising the child academically (hour) . . . *** . . . *** *** ns ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) children’s perspective perceiving society as gender equal . . . * . . . ns *** *** * educational aspiration (year) a . . . *** . . . *** * ns * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) perceived happiness in life . . . * . . . * *** * ** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) covariates age . . . ns . . . ns ns ns ns ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban hukou (ref = non-urban) . . . *** . . . *** ns + ns academic performance . . . *** . . . *** *** ** * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) boarding school (ref = no) . . . *** . . . *** ns ns + parents' education (year) . . . *** . . . *** ns ns ns ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) single-parent family (ref = two-parent) . . . ns . . . + + ns + dual-earner family (ref = male-earner) . . . *** . . . *** ns ns ns annual family income per capita a , , , , *** , , , *** ** *** ns ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) ( , ) family size . . . *** . . . *** *** *** ns ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) n , , , note: a top % replaced to be equal to the th percentile to minimise the influence of outlier cases. standard deviations in parenthesis. mean score for continuous variables, and percentage for categorical variables. dummy variables have a minimum of and a maximum of . two-tailed t-test for continuous variables and chi- square test for categorical variables. ¥ ≈ £ . in . ns = not statistically significant at the % level, + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure . gender ratio at birth in china – , by rural–urban context source: china statistics yearbooks. last accessed september : http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/statisticaldata/annualdata/ author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure . marginal effects of sibship among girls, with % confidence intervals, by rural– urban residence (reference = singleton girls, n = , ). note: or = odds ratio. logistic regression for perceived gender equality. all covariates held constant. grey dashed lines indicate results from the models including intergenerational investment. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure . marginal effects of sibship among boys, with % confidence intervals, by rural– urban residence (reference = singleton boys, n = , ). note: or = odds ratio. logistic regression for perceived gender equality. all covariates held constant. grey dashed lines indicate results from the models including intergenerational investment. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure . marginal male-female differences, with % confidence intervals, by sibship status and rural/urban residence (reference = female, n = , ). note: or = odds ratio. logistic regression for perceived gender equality. all covariates held constant. grey dashed lines indicate results from the models including intergenerational investment. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science supplemental online material for the impact of china’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations in this document, we present further contextual information about the one-child policy and full results for the two-level random-intercept regression models. in figure s , we present an official poster promoting the one-child policy as a public health campaign, instead of a population control policy. in tables s to s , we present the results for the key predictors predicting each of the six dependent variables. because the results for the covariates changed little within each set of models, in table s we present the results for the covariates from the models (marked by a red asterisk ‘*’ in tables s to s ) based on the full sample. in our preliminary analysis, we also experimented with including parents’ occupation, communist party affiliation, the presence of grandparents at home and elder siblings’ participation in paid work. however, these variables were not included in the final analysis, as they did not show a statistically significant association with the dependent variables measuring the gender empowerment outcomes, and their inclusion neither increased the overall model fit nor affected the results for the other variables. this may be because the effects of these variables have already been captured by variables such as parents’ education, the family’s socio-economic status and size. author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science figure s . ‘family planning benefits the health of mothers and children’. poster created and produced by the family planning office of kunming, circa . source: national library of medicine, national institute of health, usa. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/chinesefamilyplanning/culturalrevolutionpg .html. last accessed: february , . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept models predicting annual expenditure on the child’s education (log) girls: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only-child all: gender *only-child *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother – . ** – . + – . – . + – . ** – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister – . * – . ** – . – . – . + – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . ** – . * – . * – . ** – . ** – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister – . – . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) . . *** . ** . *** . *** . * . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother – . ** . – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister – . ** – . ** – . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother . . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) male * only child – . – . + ( . ) ( . ) urban * male – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child . ( . ) urban * male * only child . ( . ) male * elder brother . – . ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother . – . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother . * ( . ) urban * male * elder sister . ( . ) urban * male * younger brother . ( . ) urban * male * younger sister – . ( . ) covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes bayesian-information-criterion , , , , , , , , log-likelihood – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , n , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept models predicting the percentage of total family expenditure spent on the child’s education (log) girls: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only-child all: gender *only- child*rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship* rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother – . *** – . *** – . * – . * – . *** – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister – . *** – . *** – . – . * – . ** – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . *** – . ** – . * – . * – . *** – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister – . * – . ** – . – . * – . + – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) . . + . ** . * . * – . . * . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother – . ** – . – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister – . *** – . * – . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) male * only child – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child . ** ( . ) urban * male * only child – . ( . ) male * elder brother . . ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother . . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother . ( . ) urban * male * elder sister . ( . ) urban * male * younger brother . ( . ) urban * male * younger sister – . ( . ) covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes bayesian-information-criterion , , , , , , , , log-likelihood – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , n , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept models predicting weekly time supervising the child’s academic work (log) girls: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother – . * – . – . – . + – . + – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister . – . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . * . – . . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister . – . . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) . . . + . . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother – . . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister – . – . ** . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) . + . . * . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . + . + ( . ) ( . ) male * only child – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male . . ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child . ( . ) urban * male * only child . ( . ) male * elder brother . – . ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister – . * – . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother . . ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother . + ( . ) urban * male * elder sister – . * ( . ) urban * male * younger brother . ( . ) urban * male * younger sister . ( . ) covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes bayesian-information-criterion , , , , , , , , log-likelihood – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , n , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept logistic regression models predicting the odds of children’s perceiving society as gender equal girls: sibship girls: sibship boys: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child* rural/ urban all: gender *only- child* rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother – . + – . + – . – . – . + – . + – . – . – . * – . * – . * – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister . . . + . * – . – . . . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . – . – . . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister . . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) . . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . . . . – . . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) . *** . *** . *** . *** . ** . ** . * . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * only child – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * only child . . ( . ) ( . ) author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science male * elder brother . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister . + . + . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother . . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder sister . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger brother – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) covariate yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes parental investment no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes bayesian-information-criterion , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , log-likelihood – , – , – – – , – , – – – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , n , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept models predicting children’s educational aspirations girls: sibship girls: sibship boys: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child *rural/ urban all: gender *only- child *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother . . – . – . . . . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister . . – . – . . . . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . – . – . ** – . ** – . – . – . + – . + – . + – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister – . + – . + – . – . – . * – . * – . – . – . * – . * – . * – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) – . – . – . – . – . – . . . – . – . . . – . – . . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother – . – . – . ** – . ** – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister . . – . – . – . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother – . – . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister . . – . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) – . – . . . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * only child . . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male – . ** – . ** . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * only child . * . * ( . ) ( . ) male * elder brother – . – . . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister – . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother – . – . + ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger brother – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger sister – . – . + ( . ) ( . ) covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes parental investment no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes bayesian-information-criterion – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , log-likelihood , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the key variables from two-level random-intercept models predicting children’s perceived happiness in life girls: sibship girls: sibship boys: sibship boys: sibship girls: sibship *rural/ urban girls: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban boys: sibship *rural/ urban *all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child all: gender *only- child *rural/ urban all: gender *only- child *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban all: gender *sibship *rural/ urban predictor b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) elder brother – . * – . * – . – . – . + – . + – . – . – . * – . * – . + – . + ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) elder sister . . – . – . . . . . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger brother – . * – . * – . – . + – . ** – . ** – . – . – . * – . * – . ** – . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) younger sister – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . – . + – . * – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban residence (ref = rural) . . . . – . – . . . . . . . . . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder brother – . – . . . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * elder sister . . – . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger brother . + . + – . – . . + . + ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * younger sister – . – . – . – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male (ref = female) – . * – . * – . – . – . *** – . *** – . *** – . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) only child (ref = no) . * . * . * . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * only child – . – . – . * – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male – . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * only child – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * only child . * . * ( . ) ( . ) male * elder brother . . . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * elder sister – . – . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger brother . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) male * younger sister . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder brother . . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * elder sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger brother – . + – . + ( . ) ( . ) urban * male * younger sister – . – . ( . ) ( . ) covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes parental investment no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes bayesian-information-criterion , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , log-likelihood – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , – , n , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note: see table s for results for the covariates. individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . author accepted manuscript | contemporary social science table s . results for the covariates from two-level random-intercept models (n = , for all models) annual expenditure on the child’s education (log) % of total family expenditure on the child’s education weekly time supervising the child academically (log) children’s perceiving society as gender equal children’s educational aspirations children’s perceived happiness in life covariate b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) age – . ** – . * – . *** – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) age . ** . * . ** . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) urban hukou (ref = rural) . *** . *** . *** . * . *** – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) academic performance . *** . *** – . *** . . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) boarding school (ref = no) . *** . *** – . *** . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) parents’ schooling years . *** . . *** – . . *** . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) single-parent family (ref = no) – . + . – . * . – . – . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) dual-earner family (ref = male-earner) – . – . . + . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) family income per capita (log) . *** – . + . * – . . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) family size – . – . *** . ** – . – . – . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) note: because the results for the covariates predicting each dependent variable changed little across the models with different specifications of the key predictors, we report the results for the covariates based on the full samples (models marked by a red asterisk ‘*’). the results continue from the first models for the full sample in tables s –s . individual-level intercept and family-level random intercepts omitted from the table. + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . , *** p < . . 	shi_china’s one-child policy_accepted_cover 	shi_china’s one-child policy_accepted_author the secret silent spaces of workplace violence: focus on bullying (and harassment) laws review the secret silent spaces of workplace violence: focus on bullying (and harassment) allison j ballard * and patricia easteal faculty of business, government and law, university of canberra, act , australia; patricia.easteal@canberra.edu.au * correspondence: allison.ballard@canberra.edu.au; tel.: + - - - received: august ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: any form of workplace abuse, be it bullying, sexual or non-sexual harassment, or other forms of workplace violence, represents a significant problem for both workers and organisations. the reality that worker complaints of such abuse are often silenced, frequently for long periods of time, has recently been spotlighted by the #metoo movement. in this article we focus particularly on workplace bullying (some definitions include harassment). we explore how potential, and actual, complaints of such abuse may silenced—both before complaints are ever made, and also at different points along the complaint or dispute resolution process. we investigate how definitional and naming issues, worker ignorance and incapacity, workplace investigations, (alternative) dispute resolution and the legal pathways available to targets of workplace bullying and harassment may act to silence complaints. we also provide some practical suggestions for the targets of workplace abuse. keywords: bullying; harassment; workplace abuse; violence; silencing; naming; reporting . introduction if there is any doubt about the existence, endemic nature of, and silencing of workplace violence, perhaps one of the best contemporary illustrations of its omnipotence is that evidenced by #metoo. while this movement began in – , it finally ‘went viral’ in late , when a number of female actors spoke-up about often chronic (sexual) harassment experienced at work, typically at the hands of powerful older men. #metoo’s grounding sentiment and driving force though is even older: this reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. but it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don’t even seem to know that boundaries exist. they’ve had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can’t afford to lose. they’ve had it with the code of going along to get along. they’ve had it with men who use their power to take what they want . . . (zacharek et al. ) while targets (and others) may have early opportunities to voice concerns about unacceptable and inappropriate behaviours directed towards themselves or others at work, they often choose to remain silent, particularly in respect bullying and harassment and other forms of workplace violence. they remain silent in the face of horrendous conduct. they do not speak-up. why? as the movement was started by black activist tarana burke while working with young girls in america who were survivors of sexual violence: #metoo: ten years before it was a hashtag, it began as one woman’s search for safety (abc news online n.d.). (house of representatives standing committee on education and employment , p. ). ibid, pp. – . we define workplace abuse to include bullying, sexual harassment and non-sexual harassment and other forms of workplace violence. laws , , ; doi: . /laws www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws laws , , of illustrated in figure below, in this article, we respond to that question by focusing on workplace bullying and examining some of these potential sites of silencing. in this way, we explore some of the potential contributors to not speaking-up, complaining and/or reporting. while there is no internationally agreed definition of workplace bullying, einarsen’s definition, which incorporates mobbing, emotional abuse, harassment, mistreatment and victimisation as part of the bullying phenomenon, is utilised here: the systematic persecution of a colleague, subordinate or superior, which, if continued, may cause severe social, psychological and psychosomatic problems for the victim. (einarsen , p. ) laws , , x for peer review of illustrated in figure below, in this article, we respond to that question by focusing on workplace bullying and examining some of these potential sites of silencing. in this way, we explore some of the potential contributors to not speaking-up, complaining and/or reporting. while there is no internationally agreed definition of workplace bullying, einarsen’s definition, which incorporates mobbing, emotional abuse, harassment, mistreatment and victimisation as part of the bullying phenomenon, is utilised here: the systematic persecution of a colleague, subordinate or superior, which, if continued, may cause severe social, psychological and psychosomatic problems for the victim. (einarsen , p. ) figure . workplace bullying abuse incident stages–decision-making questions that may lead to silence. silencing is a major issue as illustrated by the disparity between the alleged epidemic incidence of workplace bullying in australia, the low reporting of such behaviour (easteal and hampton ), and the (relatively) few australian court and tribunal cases which have been heard and decided (ballard and easteal ). figure above suggests that as an initial step, a worker must transform their adverse workplace experience into some form of a problem, controversy, or ‘dispute’ (hoffmann ). that is, the wronged party must first realise that a problem in fact exists (that is, they must, for example, be able to ‘name’ the experience as bullying or harassment) (ballard and easteal a). the target must then attribute this problem to another person (e.g., blame the alleged perpetrator) and bring it to their attention (hoffmann , p. ) or to the attention of another person or entity, such as the employer/organisation. rather than reporting the offending behaviour, the target may decide that the best strategy may be to remain quiet, find another job, and/or leave the organisation. while some decisions to quit (or stay) are based on a sort of expected-benefit rationale, others are driven by more intuitive or routinised decision-making processes (harman et al. , pp. – ). these decisions may be influenced by a range of ‘shocks’ or precipitating events (for example, a fight with the boss, an unexpected windfall, or an unanticipated job offer) and by an employee’s degree of harassment and other forms of workplace violence. workplace bullying is increasingly referred to as a silent epidemic. see (williams ; hanley et al. ). •was it 'bullying'? •what is 'bullying' anyhow? •what should i do now? •should i tell someone / forget about it /ignore it/leave? potential silencers at incident •do i complain/ report? •who do i complain/ report to? •how do i complain? •what will happen to me if i complain? potential workplace silencers post-incident •alternative dispute resolution(private and/or court-referred)? •legal pathways? •was justice done? •confidentiality agreeements? •insurance? potential silencers along internal /external workplace resolution pathways figure . workplace bullying abuse incident stages–decision-making questions that may lead to silence. silencing is a major issue as illustrated by the disparity between the alleged epidemic incidence of workplace bullying in australia, the low reporting of such behaviour (easteal and hampton ), and the (relatively) few australian court and tribunal cases which have been heard and decided (ballard and easteal ). figure above suggests that as an initial step, a worker must transform their adverse workplace experience into some form of a problem, controversy, or ‘dispute’ (hoffmann ). that is, the wronged party must first realise that a problem in fact exists (that is, they must, for example, be able to ‘name’ the experience as bullying or harassment) (ballard and easteal a). the target must then attribute this problem to another person (e.g., blame the alleged perpetrator) and bring it to their attention (hoffmann , p. ) or to the attention of another person or entity, such as the employer/organisation. rather than reporting the offending behaviour, the target may decide that the best strategy may be to remain quiet, find another job, and/or leave the organisation. while some decisions to quit (or stay) are based on a sort of expected-benefit rationale, others are driven by more intuitive or routinised decision-making processes (harman et al. , pp. – ). these decisions may be influenced by a range of ‘shocks’ or precipitating events (for example, a fight with the boss, workplace bullying is increasingly referred to as a silent epidemic. see (williams ; hanley et al. ). laws , , of an unexpected windfall, or an unanticipated job offer) and by an employee’s degree of ‘embeddedness’ within an organisation. choosing ‘exit’ over complaint though is not always an option which is open to the worker. some people may choose to stay (and remain silent), because of loyalty to the organisation, for fear they would be unable to find a comparable position (or indeed any position) elsewhere, or because they may be reluctant to ‘sacrifice’ employment benefits accrued over a lengthy period of service with the organisation (which may also be understood as a form of ‘entrapment’ and ‘embeddedness’). if the target desires a legal or other remedy they will need to file some sort of claim or grievance, which may theoretically become a (legal) dispute if the other party rejects it. to become a formal grievance that can be addressed by an organisation’s official grievance policy or procedure, a dispute must essentially be made ‘public’. for some, making such an issue or concern public, offends their sense of privacy and dignity, fearing it may signal to the world that they cannot properly manage their working (public) life. such a perception may facilitate their silence. we now look at each decision-making stage more closely commencing with ‘something happens’ in which we examine the potential silences arising from both naming/definitional issues and the ignorance/incapacity of bullying targets. in the next section (breaking the silence in the workplace) the possible silences associated with workplace investigations and worker’s compensation insurance are considered. then in the ‘silence of the legal pathways’ we look at the ways in which the available causes of action and alternative dispute resolution (adr) can also silence targets. finally, we highlight possible ways to foster voice in organisations and offer some practical tips for targets of workplace bullying and harassment. . stage —something happens . . silence due to naming/definitional issues discussing, complaining about, or remedying phenomena that have no shared or understood name or meaning presents significant difficulties. although bullies have always existed, once a phenomenon, such as ‘workplace bullying’, ‘harassment’, ‘abuse’ or ‘violence’ is named, it is more easily talked and thought about (and acted upon). there are multiple synonyms for ‘bullying’ both in australia and internationally (ballard and easteal a, pp. – , ). this becomes problematic, particularly when trying to determine the incidence/prevalence of the (alleged) workplace abuse or in developing strategies to remedy it. if the problem is not defined consistently across workplaces, organisations, cultures, legislatures, or case law, it is difficult to truly understand the nature or extent of the problem or to adequately address it. despite the explosion of research around workplace bullying, particularly since the s, there is (still) no universally accepted understanding of ‘workplace bullying’. in some languages there is not even a linguistic term of describe the phenomenon or to convey its various behavioural aspects. nevertheless, as suggested by einarsen’s definition above, the phenomenon is typically understood as encompassing a wide spectrum of actions, ranging from lower-level workplace aggression and incivility, unreasonable work practices and inappropriate behaviours—some of which may be used as tactics to disguise and mask sadistic behaviours , such as sexual assault and homicide. ‘embeddedness’ can be likened to ‘a net or web in which an individual can become stuck’: (mitchell et al. , pp. , ). (harman et al. , p. ). see also (mitchell et al. ; ibid, p. ). (berthelsen et al. , pp. – ; harman et al. , pp. , ; rusbult and farrell , pp. , ; mitchell et al. , pp. , ). ibid. ibid. (margevičiūtė , pp. , ; wrench , p. ). ibid at p. . for example, joking and initiation rites (mayhew et al. , pp. – ). laws , , of using the ‘wrong’ words to describe social problems may not only distort perceptions, but also can affect the decisions made by leaders (such as law and policy makers) to address those problems (burke , p. ). decision-makers’ and employers’ interpretations of concepts like ‘reasonable’ behaviour take place in socio-legal arenas in which so-called objective standards are, in reality, neither neutral nor inevitable. . . the silence of ignorance and incapacity we suggest there is a silencing associated with the failure to conceive of conduct as being an act of bullying in the first place, and also with a target’s capacity to deal with it (even if it is in fact understood as a problem). we label this as the silence of ignorance and incapacity. workplace abuses, such as bullying and harassment, can be associated with debilitating emotional, psychological and physical illness and injuries, which can render a target partially or completely incapable of complaint. in addition, other forms of harm can arise even when a target does not perceive certain behaviour as a ‘problem’ or as ‘bullying’. this lack of insight or perception, can, like mental and physical illness and injury, make any action to challenge the offending behaviour problematic. to illustrate this, if bullying manifests as the inequitable allocation of work, shifts, or overtime, or the denial of a promotion, training opportunities, or relevant job information, the target experiences a measurable harm. this harm may be by way of economic or status loss or a fall in work performance and it can occur even though the offending conduct is never understood by the affected individual as ‘bullying’ (wrench , pp. , ; jalloh , pp. , ; unison , p. ). such ‘ignorance’ may be more likely to harm minorities; as brake observes ‘since perceiving and acknowledging discrimination [and arguably also bullying and harassment] is a prerequisite for engaging in any form of considered resistance to it, stigmatised social groups are less inclined to challenge systemic discrimination, thereby silently facilitating it’ (brake , pp. , ). an incapacity to either ‘take on’ the bully/perpetrator/abuser or to report the behaviour can both be exacerbated by, and contribute to the physical and psychological problems that are correlates of being victimised. these include: fear, stress, and depression, shock, despair, anger, apathy, helplessness, insomnia, chronic fatigue, sadness, shame, guilt, anxiety, distrust, disgust, disbelief, powerlessness, irrecoverable loss of self-esteem, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), phobias, and various cardiac and musculo-skeletal problems (nielsen and einarsen , p. ; cortina and magley , p. ). it is known too that the damage caused by bullying (for example, reduced social status and confidence) ‘can continue, even after the bullying has ended’ (peterson ; olweus ). targets of prolonged bullying may have more severe stress reactions than women who have been raped or train drivers confronted with ‘death by train’ (mayhew et al. , pp. – ). difficulties in both complaining about and addressing bullying and harassment may be further intensified if a target self-medicates with drugs and alcohol, or if their social support networks collapse as a sequela to the workplace abuse (einarsen et al. , p. ). also, workers who endure mistreatment in silence, may experience the highest levels of psychological and physical harm (salin et al. , p. ). so, in effect there is a potential ‘double whammy’ with a person who is unable to complain on account of some mental, emotional or physical incapacity, being more likely to suffer further harm because they cannot or do not complain. incapacity may also be worsened if the organisation/employer colludes in the bullying or acts as a perpetrator by creating oppressive, hostile, or toxic environments. this includes the organisation (or more particularly, its representatives or managers) scheduling targets for (unnecessary) medical and psychiatric assessments, subjecting targets to (dubious and undeserved) performance management plans, alleging breaches of the organisation’s values or code of conduct (and then undertaking questionable workplace investigations), and terminating targets for redundancy (hoel ; stacey ) or for (alleged) poor work performance or misconduct. laws , , of such activities do not inevitably equate with bullying but importantly, they may. problematic management activities might also intensify after an employee has complained about bullying. where such activities appear (on their face) to be a legitimate exercise of an organisation’s power, it may be difficult for a target to even conceptualise the behaviour as bullying, let alone to formulate a plan for complaining about it. in these ways and others which will be looked at next, organisations can both perpetrate and silence workplace abuse. . stage —breaking the silence in the workplace while many targets do try and tackle bullying with various coping strategies, few manage to stop the conduct without outside help (hogh et al. , pp. , ; martino et al. , pp. – ). even where a worker is able to name what has occurred as ‘bullying’ or ‘harassment’ and does speak-up, they may subsequently be ‘silenced’ by a range of factors that typically only come into play after they have made a complaint. such factors may include workplace investigations and adverse conduct on the part of worker’s compensation insurers and rehabilitation providers as discussed below. additionally, as alluded to above, targets may be subject to work-related victimisation (wrv) on account of reporting. wrv may include intentional reprisals in the form of termination, involuntary transfer, demotion, poor performance appraisals, and/or the deprivation of jobs perks and overtime opportunities (cortina and magley , pp. – ). targets may also be subject to social retaliation victimisation (srv) including intentional social reprisals by peers, subordinates, and managers (cortina and magley , pp. – ). such reprisals are often less tangible and formal than wrv. srv can include (further) harassment, name-calling, ostracism, blaming, threats, and the ‘silent treatment’ (cortina and magley , pp. – ). retaliation, the ‘fastest growing discrimination claim,’ is what brake calls powerful medicine which acts to suppress complaints and preserve the status quo of the social order (brake , p. ); though abused workers have also been known to retaliate against their supervisors. brake argues that fear of retaliation is [emphasis added]: . . . the leading reason why people stay silent instead of voicing their concerns about [things like] bias and discrimination. when challengers are brave enough to overcome their fears of speaking out, retaliation often steps in to punish the challenger and restore the social norms in question. to a large extent, the effectiveness and very legitimacy of discrimination law turns on people’s ability to raise concerns about discrimination without fear of retaliation. (brake , p. ) when (voice) strategies fail and employees fear or experience possibly retaliatory actions, they may reach-out to a union, or take long-term sick (or personal) leave, after which they often resign, ‘wash their hands of the situation’ and take their talents elsewhere (lutgen-sandvik , iii); sometimes never to return to paid employment. they may also find themselves terminated from their employment as illustrated in a survey conducted by the (us) workplace bullying institute, which found that per cent of targets were forced out, fired ( per cent), transferred ( per cent), or resigned their see for example the australian anti-bullying case of lynette bayly [ ] fwc ( april ) where an executive director claimed that her employer only levelled misconduct allegations against her in response to a bullying complaint she made against other executives early in . this is a cause of action where an employee alleges the employer has made a detrimental job decision in response to the employee’s having made a discrimination complaint or ‘protected expression’: (sherwyn et al. , pp. , ). though high levels of employee ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘agreeableness’ mitigate the relation between abusive supervision and employee retaliation: (lian et al. , pp. , ). nationwide news pty ltd v naidu & anor; iss security pty ltd v naidu & anor [ ] nswca ( december ) [ ], [ ]; morabito v comcare [ ] aata ( july ) [ ], [ ]; (vickers , p. ). ibid, p. . laws , , of employment ( per cent). by comparison only per cent of perpetrators were terminated while just per cent resigned. . . workplace investigations where allegations of workplace abuse are made to an organisation, the organisation is generally bound to conduct some form of workplace investigation. in the australian capital territory (act) public service for example, a centralised professional standards unit (psu) is responsible for conducting or overseeing all investigations into ‘inappropriate’ workplace behaviour. all act government investigation functions were consolidated at the end of in a bid to improve timeliness, increase consistency and quality, and ensure independence and fairness (condon , p. ). in , of matters referred to the psu, (or almost per cent) resulted in findings of unsubstantiated allegations. the investigation process is an adversarial one which pigeon-holes the complainant as the ‘victim’ and the respondent as the (alleged) ‘offender’. it tries to deter poor behaviour through punishment, though such behaviour is often engaged in by more than one party and can be linked to an entrenched culture of poor behaviour (condon , p. ). workplace investigations (and alternative dispute resolution (adr) as discussed below) may be conceptualised as part of the resolution process. by violating procedural fairness norms, workplace investigations may carry significant risks for employers if improperly conducted. they may be compromised by, for example, bias and pre-determined outcomes. such risks are greater where the investigator is not truly independent or is an employee and also where are no (or inadequate) workplace policies (ballard and easteal b). workplace investigations have the capacity to silence the targets of workplace abuse and other complaints of workplace misconduct. they may also undermine fair and just workplaces and result in unfair and disputed outcomes which may end in litigation (ballard and easteal b). for instance ballard and easteal ( b) research which included the views of a small sample of workplace investigators found that: [i]nvestigations could be compromised due to the inexperience, lack of time and lack of qualifications and understanding of the rules of evidence, procedural fairness culminating in the investigator not adopting a neutral mind-set, but setting out to ‘prove’ the allegation]. (ballard and easteal b) several respondents reported that ‘influencing’ (e.g., being told of the organisation’s desired investigation outcome) may commence before the investigation—at the time of tendering for a workplace investigation, during the process, and afterwards (ballard and easteal b). where a target is subjected to a prejudged workplace investigation or is otherwise aggrieved about the process, they will not always not have the capacity or resources to complain about or challenge the process or outcome. this too is a form of silencing. . . silence due to insurers another potential source of silence in relation to reporting (or reported) workplace abuse are the actions of insurers (holley et al. , pp. , ), including through requiring medical assessments, evidence and reports (often construed as expert and/or independent reports) in respect of targets in worker’s compensation and similar claims. such assessments (which may deter targets from claiming in the first place or encourage them to later discontinue a claim) may be conducted at the behest of respondent (employer) parties (workers typically cannot afford their own expert reports). given this, such reports are often, unsurprisingly, supportive of both the employer and the role of worker’s compensation insurers and rehabilitation practitioners (whose adverse treatment of an injured worker namie ( ) and harvey et al. ( , p. ) also found that the prognosis for targets is typically worse than that of bullies: eighty-two per cent lose their jobs— per cent involuntarily and per cent by ‘choice’. laws , , of may facilitate secondary psychological injuries) (holley et al. , p. ). insurers may decline compensation for injuries purportedly attributable to workplace abuse; often with spurious reasoning (holley et al. , p. ). this strategy forces the target to either seek a review of that decision or to simply walk away in silence. insurers may also mandate multiple assessments of injured workers in a process designed to ultimately procure a ‘favourable’ report for the insurer (for example one recommending minimal treatment) (holley et al. , p. ). in addition, they may require attendance at medical appointments at short notice, often at inconvenient locations, with the threat of suspending weekly compensation payments should the worker not attend (holley et al. , p. ). ‘rehabilitation’ providers may also silence targets through a range of potentially intimidating tactics, such as pressuring recuperating workers to ignore the treating doctor’s advice and return to work (holley et al. , p. ). employers and rehabilitation providers have also been known to accompany targets/applicants/plaintiffs to their medical appointments and attempt to direct medical practitioners in respect of their assessment of the worker (we are union ohs reps n.d.). . stage —silence of legal pathways in australia, the targets of workplace bullying—or to be more precise, typically the lawyers of the targets—must generally ‘shop around’ or try to ‘fit a square peg through one of a variety of differently shaped holes’ in order to identify a sustainable course of action, or cause of action (ash and scott ; bible , pp. , ). navigating the negotiation and litigation jungle that is workplace bullying requires ‘cutting the cloth to fit the suit’ (ballard and easteal ). the ways in which lawyers perceive the (in)adequacies of each potential remedy affect the tailoring. as weissbourd and mertz point out, the law engages in ‘routine creativity’ in categorising particular events as legal types, even in the most ordinary and uncontested cases (merry , pp. , ). if no appropriate cause of action can be applied to the particular circumstances there may simply be no applicable remedy or relief. even though there are many potential remedies for workplace abuse, not all are suitable or applicable to every factual scenario. as such, the available remedies (or rather the lack of them) may have the potential to silence targets. for example, seeking remedy by way of an anti-bullying order under the fair work act (cth) (the fw act) is restricted to those who are covered by the national regime; still employed by the relevant organisation; subjected to ‘repeated’ acts of bullying; and who have complied with the necessary procedural requirements to gain access to the jurisdiction (ballard and easteal a). while workers may take the preliminary step of making an anti-bullying application, they often fail to follow-through with their application, despite repeated contacted attempts by the fair work commission (fwc) (ballard and easteal a),—effectively they are ‘self-silenced’. furthermore, inaction (and silence) under this and other legal regimens may have economic or financial correlations. private lawyers are not always affordable and legal aid/community legal service lawyers are not necessarily available to assist with employment disputes. discontinuing or failing to persist with an application may therefore be linked to the inability of targets to obtain legal assistance or to targets’ learning that parties to relevant actions under the fw act (e.g., applications for anti-bullying orders or remedy for unfair dismissal, breach of the general protections, or unlawful termination) are generally required to cover their own costs, including legal fees. in addition, there is no jurisdiction for the fair work commission (fwc) to award financial compensation in respect of anti-bullying applications. and, it is little known, even within australia’s legal community, that financial settlements and employment separation are sometimes negotiated in the context of anti-bullying applications. this is not to say though that within the confines of a confidential mediation or conciliation, such deals are not done. in the legal practitioner author’s experience. see also, (hamberger and dean ). laws , , of with respect to the unfair dismissal regime, only those targets who have worked for the employer for the requisite period of time and who meet other criteria, such as award coverage or income threshold, are eligible to make an unfair dismissal application. there are similar barriers with respect to the other available causes of action under the fw act and also in respect of evidentiary requirements. for example, targets of workplace bullying, like complainants of other types of adverse action, including unlawful discrimination, may have difficulty establishing they were subject to unlawful conduct (allen ). where the complainant bears the onus of proof (as they typically do under australian anti-discrimination law), they may not have ready access to the evidence needed to discharge this burden. inability to obtain such evidence may be due to the employer blocking access to the workplace or to work emails and other relevant documentation. adr and silencing like workplace investigations, alternative dispute resolution (adr) has the potential to silence targets and to undermine attempts to resolve workplace bullying and provide satisfactory redress. adr may also conceal potential future and ongoing harm to the target, including by denying them later redress (apart from those areas that cannot be ‘contracted out of’, even in a confidential settlement agreement). adr’s limitations are important to acknowledge as most employment disputes typically involve some type of adr process. as reported by the commonwealth attorney general: . . . not everyone with a dispute goes to court . . . [there are] other, less formal pathways that are used every day to resolve disputes. most people resolve their disputes themselves. others seek assistance from an independent third person or body . . . there are many ways to resolve disputes outside of the courts . . . worker concerns in respect of adr in the context of bullying matters include: unequal bargaining power in negotiating settlement; concerns about mediator impartiality; insufficient opportunity to be heard and/or for fact-finding; and unjust outcomes (ballard and easteal b). even with ‘settled’ matters (which non-parties might equate with a successful process and outcome), some targets express dissatisfaction with both process and outcome, sometimes believing there were unintended benefits for the perpetrators. targets may feel anger, betrayal, and frustration at the process by the requirement to sign confidential deeds of release or ‘gag orders’, which prevent them from discussing what happened, or the way in which the dispute was finally resolved (sourdin ). we suggest that aligned with this is a silence, which may be said to compromise the rule of law—open and transparent justice, and precedent-setting. . ways of allowing more voice standard operating procedures, behavioural norms, values, rules of conduct, taboos, key personalities, and the daily climate or civility of an organisation are each relevant in creating positive cultures (harvey et al. , pp. – ). as lachman et al. observe though, no one solution exists for the complex social problem of negative human interaction within an organisational culture. an ethical culture requires leaders to have the moral courage to address disruptive behaviour, regardless of who is violating the desired code of conduct. section of the fair work act (cth). note that in general protections matters, there is typically a reverse onus of proof. in australia, these generally includes the right to make a worker’s compensation claim and to pursue statutory superannuation entitlements. (australian government, attorney-general’s department , p. ). (lachman , p. ; harvey et al. ; ibid, p. ). (lachman ; ibid, p. ). laws , , of the role of senior managers in leading the [cultural] change process cannot be over-emphasised. leading by example is key if employees are going to change their own behaviour. (suff and streber , p. ) therefore, organisations should be recruiting (protecting and retaining) individuals who are ‘citizens of the firm’—those who are optimistic, innovative, change agents who can safely and effectively guide other employees through technological change and organisation restructuring (harvey et al. , p. ); these are times, which typically present a greater risk of workplace bullying (liefooghe and mac davey , p. ). . . changing workplace practices in addition to addressing any deficiencies in leadership, organisations also need to address deficiencies in work design and organisational morality—where the substandard treatment of individuals is tolerated (or perhaps worse, expected) (liefooghe and mac davey , p. ; harvey et al. , pp. , ). one way of increasing the awareness of any organisational problem is to encourage the reporting of complaints. such a reporting process must be formal, non-judgemental (harvey et al. , p. ); supportive, fair, just, respectful, ethical, and available to both targets and witnesses. organisations must also be prepared to support targets (and alleged perpetrators) before, during and after bullying events, including by providing programs that demonstrate their options in response to bullying, and with review mechanisms that can be used without fear of retaliation (harvey et al. , p. ). support also needs to be provided to alleged perpetrators (and others) including through additional training, awareness-raising, coaching, and counselling (harvey et al. , p. ). should these measures fail, putting appropriate mechanisms in place to terminate chronic bullies from the organisations may be necessary (harvey et al. , p. ). investing in employee and managerial capacity to deal with relationship issues where they may lead to behavioural problems at work will help provide both workers and management with the resources they need to tackle the problem (harvey et al. , p. ). doing so can enhance commitment and loyalty to the organisation [emphasis added]: a senior manager (who was the subject of multiple complaints from staff) once told me that in his years of working for the organization[sic], the coaching he received as a result of the complaints that had been made against him was the greatest thing the organization [sic] had ever done for him—it had completely changed the way he managed and communicated with his staff. he felt as though the organization[sic] had invested in him. (harvey et al. , p. ) borgald and theixos argue that empathy can be taught and learned, ergo empathy training is a ‘better (more just, more inclusive, and likely more beneficial) response to bullying’ (borgwald and theixos , pp. , ). (alleged) perpetrators (like (alleged) targets) experience anxiety consequent to the possible rejection by their community and so a process of ‘inclusion allows perpetrators to experience increased desires to perceive themselves as acceptable people’ (borgwald and theixos , p. ). . . changing workplace policies implementing appropriate workplace policies (and following them) could contribute to better workplace cultures. a ‘dignity at work’ policy for example, may be a first step in deterring aberrant behaviour, such as bullying and harassment, and dealing with specific incidents of bad conduct. for a policy to be effective it needs to ‘promote the positive behaviours that can encourage a culture of dignity and respect at work’ (suff and streber , p. ). sound workplace policies (clear statements of the standards of behaviour expected by the organisation) can help to tackle bullying through laws , , of prevention, and so employers are advised ‘to develop workplace bullying policies that articulate commitments to promoting a workplace that does not tolerate bullying’. merely introducing a bullying/harassment policy though is not enough to eliminate inappropriate behaviour; ‘an organisation’s approach needs to be integrated within the range of its people processes and systems in order to be effective’ (suff and streber , p. ). and there are counter arguments to zero-tolerance approaches. some see such policies as potentially intrusive, punitive, counter-productive, ineffective in reducing bullying and violence, possibly leading to a surge in covert bullying, and possibly harming both targets and perpetrators. further, naming behaviours as ‘bullying’ may deflect an organisation’s legal responsibility for a safe and equitable environment onto an individual or a group of individuals, blaming them and making liable for the unlawful conduct. . . improving workplace investigations investigative processes can be expensive, time-consuming, traumatic and disruptive to the workplace (condon , p. ). while they may sometimes be a necessary component of the solution, and can indicate the root cause, they are not the answer to resolving workplace issues or changing challenging workplace behaviour, particularly those that are relationship-based (condon , p. ). as condon observes: there is no one magic formula for dealing with workplace issues but restorative or remedial approaches support a practical approach and give staff an element of control in the process and, more importantly, the solution to the issue. some of the things we encourage work areas to try are empowering staff or managers to address the issues themselves or a more structured intervention, like a facilitated discussion, mediation or coaching. sometimes it is necessary to work with the broader team dynamics or culture. (condon , p. ) the aims of an investigation/misconduct process should be to identify and correct poor behaviour, develop positive working relationships, resolve conflict at the lowest possible level and only escalate to a misconduct process when necessary (that is when the behaviour is serious, repeated or continued, or there is a serious power imbalance between the parties) (condon , pp. – ). if i had a dollar for every time a hr area told me, ‘well we tried to do mediation but one of the parties (usually the complainant) wasn’t open to it, so now we’re going to refer it for investigation’. how is that fair on the employee who was prepared to work on ways to fix the issue? . . . at the moment, on occasion we allow people to inappropriately use or hijack the misconduct or discipline process rather than be personally accountable for their relationships and behaviour in the workplace. where relationship deterioration between staff is the root cause of behavioural problems, punitive processes are not going to resolve the issues and could, in fact, have the opposite effect. (condon , p. ) . . improving the anti-bullying regime it does appear that the fwc is taking a steady, incremental, and even-handed approach to the development and oversight of the anti-bullying jurisdiction. as evidenced by its track record with respect to other types of applications, which may also involve workplace bullying (for example, unfair dismissals and general protections matters), the fwc has also been able to resolve the majority of anti-bullying applications matters without proceeding to hearing. (house of representatives standing committee on education and employment , pp. , ). (borgwald and theixos , pp. – , ; stein , p. ). for instance, including because of the impact of the ‘bully label’ which creates a whole new category of stigmatised ‘other’: the bully. (stein ; ibid, p. ). laws , , of while the jurisdiction has not elicited the flood of applications that were anticipated at the outset, generally receiving only around applications each year, it must be said that the fwc has efficiently handled those matters that did come its way. the applicant in the first order made under in the jurisdiction: applicant v respondent (ab / ); applied to the fwc to revoke its earlier order just before christmas in . she wrote: since our last meeting there has been a negligible amount of conflict between a and myself, and i have felt comfortable approaching my supervisor, b, with any concerns that i have. the past year of intervention from fair work has been very positive and helpful and i am very grateful for the support that has been given to me by senior deputy president drake. i think that the new year is an appropriate time to lift the orders and that it is in the best interest of everyone involved to do so. it is likely that more bullying matters might be resolved if the parties engaged constructively with the process rather than seeking to obstruct it through various tactics, such as stalling or making jurisdictional and other objections to the process. if the parties did engage positively (in keeping with the way the regime clearly intends that they do) the ultimate possibility that the fwc might make an anti-bullying order could be short-circuited early in proceedings. this would increase the likelihood of improved and ongoing working relationships. the employee’s ‘reasonable belief’ that he or she has been bullied (whether or not the employer shares this view and whether or not this view is true or well-founded) could be acknowledged by the respondent employer and addressed. mediations (if held) and preliminary conferences could be better utilised by the parties to try and resolve the issue and seek an agreed way forward without the fwc needing to proceed to hearing, determination and possibly an order (with the accompanying publicity). the jurisdiction is designed to resolve matters expeditiously so as to preserve the working relationships between the parties without having to proceed to the ‘last resort’: issuing an anti-bullying order. while the paucity of orders issued since might be seen by some as evidence of a deficiency, it could also be characterised as a marker of success. in other words, the regime is doing exactly what it was designed to do. the fwc manages applications expeditiously with the goal of keeping the targets of bullying employed and at work; resolving the bullying without needing to use its iron fist to crack down and issue orders. where relationships have irretrievably broken down, and the employment comes to an end as a consequence, targets have other causes of action available to them. where money does change hands in the context of a confidential anti-bullying adr process and settlement, it would not be expected that the target would then return to work; rather any offer of payment would generally be made in the context of the worker agreeing to resign their employment. this is inconsistent with the anti-bullying jurisdiction’s stated goals of keeping the worker at worker. . . improving adr concerns about just outcomes in respect of bullying and harassment complaints subject to an adr process were raised in ballard and easteal’s work, which concluded that better outcomes are possible: the idea of success is broadened where targets feel that they have been given voice and achieved a measure of justice. this prospect seems enhanced by legal representation helping to balance a landscape skewed by power imbalances, by the psychological and physical effects of bullying, and by the target’s perception of mediator bias. (ballard and easteal b, p. ) applicant [ ] fwc . on december the fwc, in response to the applicant’s submission, revoked its orders of september . of course, as in other matters, the mediation of bullying disputes will not be appropriate in all cases, and the compulsory mediation of anti-bullying disputes may be problematic for many targets. laws , , of another issue with adr mentioned earlier is the confidentiality and non-disclosure nature of the settlement agreements. these might be obviated by legislative reform. for example, in the us, arizona has legislation pending that would void non-disclosure agreements targets that ensure their silence. (zacharek et al. ). we note that pro-employer advocates might argue that this would discourage settlement because employers would not want to pay money to targets if they could not do so under a veil of secrecy. however, where a matter does proceed to hearing and is determined, the monetary awards are publicly available. similar public disclosure of agreements reached through adr would alleviate some of the concerns around lack of transparency and precedent, but could also be a catalyst to those organisations that have been ‘caught with their pants down’ to do something constructive about the conduct, which led to the proceedings under the spotlight. . . legislative protection from retaliation brake argues that legal scholarship has paid insufficient attention to ‘the ways people are punished for challenging inequality and the law’s response to these challenges’ (brake , p. ). and that addressing retaliation is typically only regarded as an afterthought and as a relatively small part of the overall scheme for enforcing substantive legal protections (brake , p. ). legislative recognition of the act of retaliation itself, as a form of discrimination, would push the boundaries of the ‘dominant understandings of discrimination in useful and productive ways’ (brake , p. – ). under this proposal, the target/s of retaliation claimant need not establish that she was treated worse because she was a woman, because he was homosexual, or because of being muslim, rather the argument would be that the targets were penalised for challenging sexist practices, sexual orientation or religious bias (brake , p. – ). in australia there are a number of legislative protections against victimisation or retaliation, including at sections – of the work health and safety act (cth), section of the public interest disclosure act (cth), sections – of the fair work act (cth), and section of the anti-discrimination act (nsw). in order to be successful in a victimisation complaint under the anti-discrimination law in nsw, a person must be able to establish some detriment that breaches the legislation. the benefits of such protective provisions are highlighted by james v department of justice, corrective services nsw [ ] nswcatad , a case heard in the nsw civil and administrative tribunal (ncat). ms james made a complaint of bullying and sexual harassment (assault) in employment against a senior manager and was subsequently transferred, allegedly for ‘safety’ reasons, to another workplace for the duration of the investigation into her allegations. when the investigation concluded that the allegations were not substantiated, ms james was not returned to her original workplace. she then made a further complaint to the anti-discrimination board of nsw alleging that her treatment ‘during and after the investigation, in being relocated to a different workplace and not returned, was detrimental conduct amounting to victimisation’ (mattson ). when the matter did not settle at conciliation, ms james asked that it be referred to the ncat. the tribunal determined, on the balance of probabilities, that ms james was not returned to her workplace because of the complaint and therefore that she had been victimised, noting that no intent to victimise was needed. she was awarded $ , in general damages in view of her diminished workplace status, loss of career enjoyment and quality of life, lost chances for promotion, and ongoing and significant distress. these provisions proscribes prohibited conduct for a discriminatory reason, for example terminating a complainant’s employment because they raised or proposed to raise an issue or concern about work health and safety. (anti-discrimination board of nsw ). laws , , of . practical tips for targets any form of workplace violence can be a difficult and traumatic experience for the target of that abuse. if a worker suspects they are experiencing bullying and/or harassment, in the first instance they should obtain further information about the sort of conduct that does (and does not) constitute bullying. they should also review any applicable enterprise agreement, employment contract, or workplace bullying policy to see what steps if any are prescribed for them to follow (safe work australia ). additionally, it is helpful to discuss any concerns about workplace conduct with their general practitioner at the earliest opportunity, and, where appropriate to seek referral to a psychologist for counselling. many australian employers also have employee assistance programs that provide free access to counselling support and related services for workers who are experiencing difficulties at work and/or outside of work. in addition, organisations, such as lifeline or beyond blue, can provide assistance to targets of workplace bullying and harassment (safe work australia ). it is useful for targets to document all relevant incidents by date, keeping a diary or record of what happened and any witnesses (australian human rights commission ). developing a chronology of events may also be helpful (nsw government justice law access n.d.), as may keeping copies of any relevant work emails or other documents which evidence the bullying conduct. targets should also consider discussing the situation with their union representative and/or a lawyer or another trusted individual at any early stage for both legal and psychological support. as a general rule, the sooner the offending behaviour is addressed, the more likely it is that harm and long term adverse consequences can be minimised. as caponecchia and wyatt observe: addressing a report of alleged workplace bullying early will hopefully result in less formal procedures being undertaken, which can minimise the impact of the situation on all parties. (caponecchia and wyatt , p. ) . conclusions as we have seen, complaints may be silenced in many ways at different points in the workplace violence/abuse to resolution process. in different ways and to differing extents these silencing mechanisms contribute to the gap between the claimed prevalence of the abuse and the number of cases formally disposed of by a court or tribunal. targets are the most researched component within the bullying scenario (rayner ; beale and hoel ). the predominant individualised focus has, in turn, influenced the mechanisms which organisations have used to counter workplace bullying, often through (post-occurrence) interventions rather than by preventative approaches (berlingieri , p. ), such as changing the workplace culture. valid and reliable methods to assess the (true) extent and nature of workplace bullying are important for developing and implementing effective intervention strategies to prevent workplace bullying, and also to influence legal and policy-related issues (nielsen et al. , p. ); yet there has been little consistency in approach. this is an issue which governments, organisations, and employers need to consider seriously to address the problem, by nipping it in the bud (nielsen et al. , p. ). targets cannot complain about abuse if they do not perceive a problem. therefore, the education of workers and organisations about what bullying is (and is not) and appropriate ways to seek redress is crucial, as is the development of organisational cultures, practices and processes which eliminate see for example, (interagency roundtable on workplace bullying ). this observation is based on the legal practitioner author’s experience but is also supported by the approach underpinning australia’s anti-bullying jurisdiction. see for example, (purpora et al. , p. ), where the authors note that ‘horizontal violence’ has been defined and measured differently across different studies. laws , , of the occurrence of bullying in the first place. as peterson observed, it is better to render those in your care competent rather than to protect them (peterson , p. ). this is not about developing a zero tolerance approach, but rather facilitating ways for inappropriate conduct and misconduct to be identified and dealt with in a way which both minimises harm and undercuts those great facilitators of employee/worker silence: fear of retribution, retaliation and revenge. to this end perhaps we should take up brake’s suggestion and legislate to make ‘retaliation’ itself a protected attribute, rather than simply, a cause of action that only comes into play when targets have first exercised their statutory rights to make a formal complaint about some form of adverse unlawful workplace conduct (e.g., sexual harassment or discrimination). author contributions: a.jb. is the principal author. both authors contributed intellectually to the conceptualisation and the writing of the article. funding: no external funding was provided in respect of this research. allison j ballard is the recipient of a (non-monetary) australian government research training program scholarship. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references abc news online. n.d. available online: http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /me-too-a-beginning-not-an- end-of-fight-against-sexual-abuse/ (accessed on october ). allen, dominique. . reducing the burden of proving discrimination in australia. sydney law review : . anti-discrimination board of nsw. . why don’t people complain about discrimination and harassment? legal case: victimisation and sexual harassment. august . available online: http://www.antidiscrimination.justice.nsw.gov.au/pages/legal-cases/why-people-don\t \ textquoterightt-complain-discrimination-harassment.aspx (accessed on october ). ash, abraham, and kyle scott. . workplace bullying reforms: fair work commission to deal with bullying claims. clayton utz. april . available online: http://www.claytonutz.com.au/publications/news/ / /workplace_bullying_reforms_fair_work_commission_to_deal_with_bullying_claims.page (accessed on october ). australian government, attorney-general’s department. . your guide to dispute resolution; canberra: national dispute resolution advisory council. available online: https://www.ag.gov.au/legalsystem/ alternatedisputeresolution/documents/nadrac% publications/your-guide-to-dispute-resolution. pdf (accessed on october ). australian human rights commission. . workplace bullying: violence, harassment and bullying fact. available online: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/workplace-bullying-violence-harassment-and- bullying-fact-sheet (accessed on october ). ballard, allison, and patricia easteal. . mapping the legal remedy pathways for workplace bullying: a preliminary overview. alternative law journal : – . 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we were lost (for one) in the later s and early s, caught in the middle of post-modern capriciousness (“po-mo”—where a little bit of the past, on the cheap, was skim- coated onto building facades), it’s bedfellow “new urbanism,” a new formalism canonised by philip spool | issn - | e-issn - | volume # | issue # johnson’s “deconstructivist” exhibition at moma, and strangely, a revival of classical architecture. on top of that, opportunities for architects to build were few in a global recession. but being lost at this earlier time was not without reflection, pondering, and intensive, critical thinking and making; in other words, being lost then was productive for architecture. lamentably, architecture today no longer embraces this disorientation as a means to propel it; instead, architecture today babbles shards and fragments of the past without any objective or strivings (if, as rossi and tafuri argued back then, objective is too strong a word for architecture). there seems to be little at stake for architecture today, apart for gaining notoriety and being cool. notoriety and being cool isn’t bad – architects have long thrived on it – but is that all that’s left for us today? hb: i believe that’s not what’s left for us today. advancements in robotics, cyber-physical systems, etc. bring about the opportunity for architects to reinvent themselves. robotic production empowers architects to become master builders, and robotic operation challenges them to envision buildings as interactive environments. however, architectural practices and the building industry are slow in engaging with these technologies. considering that automation has been successfully implemented by other industries for decades now, how is it possible that the building industry still adheres not to high but to low technology principles? kg: building practices, building construction management, and the organisation of the building construction business are entrenched in the past. there is not sufficient incentive to change. meanwhile—and here is the good news about architecture today—a small segment of the architectural community is thankfully developing new building materials, new building systems, new ways of building with machines, and embedding new technologies into buildings that make them smarter and more sustainable. but the bridge between these innovations and their implementation in the building industry is a tenuous line seldom crossed. higher profile architecture commissions can make the journey, bringing their architects notoriety and that cool factor (sought after or gratefully welcomed). perhaps we have to rely on national and local government building codes to compel the use of such innovations. the future of the planet and the society that inhabits it rely partly on designing and building innovatively. it’s paramount. hb: if the building industry would be willing to apply the intellectual model of high technology, the integration of computation, automation, and cyber-physical systems in design-to-production processes would need to be on their agenda. kg: maybe the building industry will not be first in the application of high technology in the design-to- production process. the manufacturers of appliances, industrial machines, and hardware are perhaps better prepared to prefabricate, mass-produce, and mass-customise buildings. it’s difficult to think through the extraordinary ramifications of this paradigm shift in the building industry on the built environment, workers, and the business of building, but i think this future trajectory is inevitable. this likely means architects will have to become, far-more so, something other than the cottage industry that we’ve long been. designers of a different ilk –industrial designers, interaction designers, and information designers – may be better prepared for the challenge. hb: what then are the implications of this shift on architectural education? kg: i think we have architectural education all wrong today. along with today’s architectural practice and the building industry, architectural education is lost, in my judgement. the biggest shortcoming of architectural education is its isolation. sure, there are a few remarkable efforts by architectural educators to connect architectural education and architectural research within the schools to other disciplines across the campus for the mutual advances of architecture and these other concerns. but overall, architecture seems absurdly stuck in that romantic, atelier-beaux arts model: the architecture studio filled with architecture spool | issn - | e-issn - | volume # | issue # students overseen by the architecture master. (once in a while, maybe a collaboration occurs with landscape architecture or, god willing, planning or urban design.) from this, there is little of substance generated that speaks to those potential collaborators from other parts of the academy: scientists and engineers and humanities scholars investigating digital technology, materials, biological systems, the environment, the mind and the body, society, policy. too many architecture schools continue to cultivate in our young people an architect’s propensity for naval gazing and narcissism, and it’s not getting too many of us anywhere. on the topic of training architecture students, i have yet to find an architect that can characterise the objective better then violet le duc, who offered (as a critique of the beaux arts) that we should “train their young minds to reason and to become aware of all their deficiencies, instead of exciting their youthful vanity.” architecture schools do a lot today to excite youthful vanity at the neglect of challenging students intellectually, pondering the limitations and opportunities of architecture, expanding the skill set well beyond traditional limits, and expanding students’ vision to the vastness of designing a future for this planet which demands that architects work intimately with fellow collaborators from not just the usual trades (that we’ve commandeered over the centuries) but from so many other disciplines relevant to and prepared for the challenges and opportunities of living today. around the globe, we have real challenges and real opportunities where architecture can make a difference, but we’re only opening the door a little bit to these fantastic possibilities for the future. opening the door a little bit is perceived to be safe, protective of the way architects do and have long done things, but i think this cowardice or resistance to change may be the death of architecture outside a very narrow band of elite, boutique practices that can persist in the old vocation of architecture. have we already arrived at this finality? figure interactive, portable learning tool for children enhancing personal and computational expression, and particularly, playful storytelling (© architectural robotics lab). spool | issn - | e-issn - | volume # | issue # hb: if such resistance to change may be somewhat understandable when it comes to practices, it is unclear why academia, where change is supposed to happen, is resisting. while several academic groups are working on these topics, compared to the resisting majority, they represent a very small percentage that even, after a decade, is still operating as avant-garde. considering that responsive architecture had already been introduced by nicholas negroponte in the s, as the result of the integration of computing power into the built environment, we look back at a history of more than a half-century. in the s, new works of responsive architecture have emerged such as decoi’s aegis hypo-surface acting as a programmable skin, and nox’s freshwater pavilion containing a programmable audio–visual interior. later, mit’s kinetic design group has been developing intelligent kinetic systems which re-configure to meet changing needs, while the interactive architecture lab at bartlett has been constructing interactive installations that are integrating robotics, material science, and computational technologies. in the last decade, robotics have been increasingly employed not only for activating building components but also for producing them. in particular, ethz and bartlett have been active in developing robotic production techniques. ourselves at tud and you at cornell have been also contributing to advancing robotics integrated into building processes and buildings. however, the knowledge transfer from academic environment to industry remains rather slow. kg: you and i, and the peers you reference, stand outside the current practice and the academy. why? on one hand, i think that architectural production still demands, as vitruvius saw it two thousand plus years ago, that an architect that knows a little bit about a lot of things. making architecture is complicated, and so it requires wide-ranging competencies. i don’t view this cardinal trait of the architect “knowing a little about a lot” as being at all a bad thing; quite the contrary, i think; rather, that it’s a marvelous aspiration: the architect as a culivated renaissance figure. but this character of knowing a little bit about a lot is also against the grain of today’s world that requires, increasingly, also, specialisation. and i don’t think specialisation—an intensive, singular focus—is the “strong card” of the architect. moreover, i wonder whether the architect of today is really as cultivated as the architect of just twenty years ago, when architects were maybe poorer financially but richer in thinking and engagement—of the arts, of design, of philosophy and critical thought. with greater professional opportunity (in better economic times) came a diminishing intellectual engagement. sadly, i don’t see students or younger faculty members as interested in a lot of things that the previous generation embraced. on the other hand, i’m fearful that, in architecture today, we are witnessing a new conformism. through history, architects have been beholden to the likes of popes, kings, dictators, and nobles who were able to pay for works of architecture. this is unchanged. but recently, there seems to me an odd twist to these relations: architects (given the opportunity) create singular works to feed the hunger of a few, very empowered people, and the result is a stream of novel additions to the built environment that don’t have much more to say to us, or about us, than “look at me.” it’s a march of the same novelty, which is tiring. in the past, maybe architecture reflected some yearnings of society. today, we have architecture-as- trophies, awarding their owners for winning (?) the game. the new conformity in architecture is in pleasing the winners with yet another architectural icon materialised to honour their achievement. and the academy is oddly complicit with architectural practice in this tendency. why? a lack of imagination? an intellectutal fatigue? the seduction of digital means? an addiction to social media? hb: so where are we – you and i and the others i mentioned – in all this? spool | issn - | e-issn - | volume # | issue # kg: clearly outside. and misunderstood. we are architects who were taught to know a little bit about a lot. we are still curious. and, at the same time, we are specialised. it’s no small achievement – to be architects that know a little bit about a lot, to be curious, to be also specialised – but it situates us as a threat to the status quo of the moment, or perhaps it situates us such that we can be ignored by the architectural current—an indomitable force. but i think what our little, loose thread collective is striving for (not discounting others like us that we do not yet know) is forging an inevitable future in which buildings, significant or more solemn, are increasingly the products of manufacturers and design entities and means of production that are not the mainstay of today’s architectural practice and the academy. on perhaps a related subject, the architectural profession continues to be predominately male, despite gains by women in numbers of students entering the schools. do you think, perhaps, we might find hope for the future of the profession in women leaders? like so much of the cultural and media world, architecture is having its #metoo moment with richard meier’s disgrace and the circulation of the shitty architecture men list. do you have a sense that perhaps a new geneariton of female architects can resist the trappings of the architect-client relationship and forge a path to self-growth and architectural exploration? and, finally, what do you envision the small group of cohorts, and others like us, might do to maintain or advance the same. your final words concerning this glimmer of a prospect might be an optimistic ending to our conversation, at least for now. hb: when it comes to women leadership and gender balance in academia, there is still room for improvement. for instance, the tu delft feminists legitimately complain about the imbalance between student and professor female representation. how a more balanced gender representation would change the profession and how the small group of cohorts, and others like us, might advance it is still unclear; but to quote the tu delft feminists it is clear that “we need to learn not to centre whiteness, heterosexuality and masculinity as the default human body and experience, as we now almost universally do. we need to challenge assumptions about superiority based on old, neo-colonial narratives that allowed a few to dominate many. in this way, we can stop reproducing discrimination and oppression of ‘others’ without even noticing what we are doing. through education we have an opportunity to transcend binary and essentialist thinking to become infinitely more nuanced and sublime as professionals, and as human beings. we can’t design and think effectively about the complexity of the built environment without this richness at heart. why condemn another generation to standards that don’t fit, technologies that won’t sustain, and practices that exclude far too many?” kg: you offer many compelling thoughts and questions here that i embrace and ponder. i look forward to our continuing conversation, which dates back many years. i hope it continues for many years to come. issn (online) - educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts: avoiding the zero-sum game of campus free speech versus inclusion nancy thomas tufts university author note nancy thomas, institute for democracy and higher education, tisch college, tufts university. correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to nancy thomas, director, institute for democracy and higher education, tisch college of civic life, tufts university, lincoln filene hall, medford, ma . e-mail: nancy.thomas@tufts.edu mailto:nancy.thomas@tufts.edu educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) abstract the debate over free speech and inclusion in higher education is not new, but it has reached new levels of vitriol and confusion as legislators and others beyond the academy argue for unfettered speech. mandating speech rights on campuses undercuts decades of learning around diversity, inclusion, and equity in higher education and in public life by mainstreaming undemocratic forces in some factions in u.s. society that thrive on creating divisiveness and fear of “the other.” those with an absolutist perspective take a zero-sum game approach by pitting the important american principles of freedom and individualism against the equally important principles of equity and community. not only is this an unnecessary choice, but it infringes on academic freedom and the right of academics to decide how best to educate for the health and future of democracy. academic content, standards, norms, and pedagogy should be based on educational goals and objectives. the solution lies in fostering discussion about democratic principles and practices as well as a sense of shared responsibility among members of a campus community for student learning and success. keywords: academic freedom, free speech, diversity, equity, inclusion, civic learning and engagement, political learning, campus climate, campus culture, educating for democracy, student activism, dialogue, deliberation educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) since the election season, many people and organizations outside of academia—legislators, partisan pundits, and self-appointed watchdogs—have weighed in on the state of free speech on college and university campuses. for instance, in august , drawing from model legislation drafted by the goldwater institute (goldwater, ), north carolina passed the restore campus free speech act, which mandated that the board of regents adopt regulations protecting controversial speakers and disciplining students who interrupt those speakers. the law also requires academics to remain “neutral” about political controversies. campus free-speech laws have been passed in california, colorado, florida, missouri, tennessee, utah, virginia, and wisconsin, and have been proposed in georgia, illinois, michigan, nebraska, and wyoming (see appendix); the louisiana governor, however, vetoed proposed legislation in june (deslatte, ), and the kansas senate narrowly rejected a bill in march (hancock, ). though they all fall under the category of free-speech legislation, the laws vary from state to state: some allow speakers to seek monetary damages from institutions from which they are disinvited; others mandate that students who interfere with speakers face disciplinary action; and others eliminate free speech “zones.” the federal government has also become involved in such matters. in october , u.s. attorney general jeff sessions announced that the justice department would intervene in cases related to speech on campus and since then the department has filed a “statement of interest” in at least three cases (greenwood, ; u.s. department of justice, ). people on both sides of the political aisle have derided free speech codes and zones, as well as “coddling” students by “creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse” (lukianoff & haidt, ). jeffrey herbst, current president of the newseum, has insisted that the “real problem” facing colleges and universities is “an alternative understanding of the first amendment” as a right to “prevent expression that is seen as particularly offensive to an identifiable group, especially if that collective is defined in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity” (herbst, , p. ). meanwhile, in august , academics—indeed, the entire nation— watched in horror as white supremacists carrying torches marched in charlottesville and a man plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, murdering heather heyer and injuring dozens of others. two weeks later, educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) white nationalists, marching in a self-described “free speech rally” in boston, faced a response from over , counter-protesters (danner, ). shortly thereafter, a unanimous, bi-partisan congress passed a joint resolution denouncing what had happened and decrying white supremacy and neo-nazism as “hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the united states” (joint resolution , ). countering bad speech with more speech and good speech has seemingly been embraced as a sensible solution, not only in the public square but on campuses. i regularly serve on conference panels or work with faculty or administrators on this topic. in my conversations with leaders of public higher education institutions, they have made clear their legal parameters. they may not prohibit or censor speech absent ( ) violence or dangerous actions, ( ) imminent safety concerns, ( ) disruption to in-class education (and, in some cases, to living spaces or professional offices), or ( ) repeated harassment targeting individuals, not groups, because of their social identity. while i do not agree that public institutions have no choice but to allow all speech, i also do not think that the occasional racist speaker who addresses a few dozen people largely from off-campus represents the most significant challenge facing campuses. i am more concerned by how students and faculty who express hateful or discriminatory views can deeply affect the learning experiences of other students, particularly those who are the targets of that speech. the university of alabama recently expelled such a student (kerr, ) while the university of nebraska allowed another student to stay (quilantan, ). on campuses where these toxic students persist, faculty and administrators breathe a sigh of relief when they graduate, after which the campus climate improves, not just for minoritized groups but for all students. yet, i have an even deeper concern about the rise of undemocratic forces in some segments of american society and the ability—or, rather, inability—of colleges and universities to name and teach about those forces the first amendment applies to government actors, which include public colleges and universities but not private institutions. private institutions have more leeway, but for most, free expression is important to robust learning and ideas, and as a result is often a normative value, if not a written principle, in institutional handbooks or the written materials of both public and private institutions. the first amendments is the subject of thousands, if not millions, of pages of judicial decisions, law review articles, books, chapters, articles, and courses, so i cannot provide a “primer” in this space. i have, however, recorded a webinar that offers a short overview of the law. i also recommend chemerinsky and gillman’s free speech on campus ( ). https://idhe.tufts.edu/resources?field_research_type_tid=all&field_research_theme_tid= educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) without government intrusion. both are matters of academic freedom, particularly of how colleges and universities educate for responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy. i certainly understand the appeal of the argument that colleges and universities should be places of unfettered speech. of all the ideals expressed in the bill of rights, freedom of speech is arguably the most cherished. most americans support the right to free speech and strongly oppose government censorship (wike & simmons, ). in fact, free speech possesses transcendent value in the united states; citizens feel strongly that they should be free to express their views on the most controversial ethical, political, and social issues of the day. free speech is widely held as an essential individual protection against unreasonable government intrusion. it is also critical to democratic governance, since the robust exchange of information and ideas is central to responsible civic engagement, such as voting and informed oversight of public affairs and policy making. without free expression, civil rights and other social movements could be suppressed. without a doubt, these are valid and powerful arguments. that said, i encourage a more rigorous discussion about free speech on campus, one that is framed by educators, not partisan lawmakers or self-appointed watchdogs outside of higher education. not only do these laws infringe on students’ rights to speech (protest and activism), they overreach. in , in a case about obscenity in commercial speech, chief justice burger warned against adopting “an absolutist, ‘anything goes’ view of the first amendment” (miller v. california, ). free speech is not, nor has it ever been, “absolutist,” particularly on college and university campuses, which are not synonymous with public square or streets; rather, they are learning environments with educational standards and goals. despite its legal backing, unfettered speech on campuses may undermine decades of learning around diversity, inclusion, and equity in higher education and public life, and allow undemocratic forces that thrive on creating divisiveness and fear of “the other” to seep into the mainstream. an absolutist perspective takes a zero-sum game approach to this issue by pitting the important american principles freedom and individualism against the equally important values of equity and community. this is an unnecessary and ill-advised choice, since it infringes on the i use the terms citizen, citizenry, and citizenship throughout this article to denote residency and civic participation, not legal status. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) right of academics to decide how best to educate for the health and future of democracy. content, standards, norms, and pedagogy should be based on educational goals and objectives, not politically motivated external mandates. civic learning for a strong democracy and academic freedom are symbiotic. academics enjoy the privilege of academic freedom so they can fulfil their responsibilities to educate for a stronger democracy (thomas, ). campuses must discuss and establish institutional norms for achieving and sustaining this symbiosis. how did we get here? decades of work on diversity, equity, and inclusion much of the current debate about speech on campus traces back decades to efforts in higher education to serve new populations of students. affirmative action, increases in minority student enrollment, and the introduction of interdisciplinary programs such as women’s studies and african-american studies prompted fierce backlash from people who disagreed with the critical frameworks informing these emerging disciplines or who wanted (whether consciously or subconsciously) to maintain racial and gender hierarchies. higher education came under attack for diluting “the canon” and “closing minds” (bloom, ), for enabling “tenured radicals” (kimball, ), and for separating groups of people through multiculturalism and political correctness (d’souza, ). as a new university attorney specializing in academic and student affairs in the late s, i spent more time addressing this topic (and in loco parentis) than any other issue. from my perspective, campuses at that time looked like hotbeds of bigotry and intolerance. some incidents were characterized as sophomoric, misguided attempts at humor. student groups, for instance, raised money by selling t-shirts that read, “ reasons why beer is better than women” (“# : beer doesn’t get jealous when you grab another one” and “# : when you are finished, the bottle is still worth cents”). fraternity pledges wore blackface while performing skits in front appreciative audiences. some “pranks” were both abhorrent and dangerous; one fraternity was suspended after two members passed out and were left naked, their bodies painted with racial slurs, at a nearby black college (applebome, ). many of these incidents represented intentional expressions of hatred and bigotry: swastikas and racist graffiti on walls; anonymous notes containing racist or homophobic; hate mail sent to women attending formerly men’s colleges. professors also faced personal attacks. students directed vicious and belittling educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) verbal attacks at faculty based on their personal characteristics and social identity (e.g., see casey, ). in a survey of black students at predominantly white colleges across the country, four out of five respondents reported having experienced some form of racial discrimination (applebome, ). these acts of blatant hatred and bigotry still happen, but in the s and s, their frequency—and the fact that they were largely student-peer-driven—shocked educators. bewildered and outraged, well-meaning administrators (and their lawyers) sought to shield new students from intimidation and from negative educational experiences that were substantially different from and unequal to the learning experiences of traditional students. responses varied. most colleges and universities already had in place anti- discrimination policies that protected employees and students on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, religion, physical ability, and, increasingly, sexual orientation. between and , an estimated one third of colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes (gould, , pp. - ), which were met with charges of censorship, identity politics, and political correctness. courts consistently struck down speech policies at public institutions as vague or overly broad and therefore unconstitutional (e.g., see doe v. university of michigan, ). campuses had a difficult time making the case that hate speech directed at groups protected under nondiscrimination laws rose to a level of targeted, repeated harassment that created truly hostile, illegal learning environments. dissuaded from attempting to regulate student speech, campuses responded by implementing curricular and co-curricular interventions, such as cultural studies and centers, intergroup-relationship programs, interfaith centers, first-year experiences, living-learning communities, internal assessments of institutional climates for diversity, and more. part of the motivation behind these efforts was practical. prospective employers sought diverse candidates, especially as research repeatedly demonstrated an association between gender and racial workforce diversity and greater profits, earnings, and customer share (herring, ) and enhanced leadership, innovation, and productivity (robinson, pfeffer, & buccigrossi, ; thompson-reuters, ). in other words, campuses needed to admit and graduate diverse groups of students to keep up with employer demands. over time, efforts to diversify programs and people became more mainstream, with many colleges and universities eventually supporting offices and senior positions in diversity and inclusion. legal challenges to considering race in educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) admissions failed, at least temporarily (gratz v. bollinger, ; grutter v. bollinger, ), and though racist speech and incidents still occurred, they were normatively unacceptable and were often subject to stringent disciplinary responses. i will not pretend that all became quiet, inclusive, and equal. significantly, income gaps between people of color and whites remain as extreme as they were five decades ago (campos, ). organizations like the southern poverty law center and the anti-defamation league highlight, through rigorous tracking, the sickening numbers of hate crimes against racial, religious, lgbtq, and ethnic groups. structural inequality continues to plague this nation, particularly in the criminal justice and education systems. the academy continues to struggle to differentiate among naïve or uninformed statements, senseless but intentional insults, genuine injury, and provocative yet productive conflict and dissent. these trends notwithstanding, i found it hopeful that, over the course of three decades, the right and responsibility of colleges and universities to educate for a diverse workforce and democracy became well established and that racist, sexist, and other forms of hate speech became more normatively, culturally, and institutionally unacceptable. arguably, things changed during and since the election season. according to statistics collected by the u.s. department of education, the number of hate crimes rose approximately % in the latter part of (bauman, ). in january , the anti-defamation league reported that racist fliers, banners, and stickers were found on college campuses times in the fall of , three times more than the cases reported the previous year; incidents had already taken place in january (anti-defamation league, ). in the spring issue of intelligence report, the southern poverty law center reported that the number of hate groups rose to in , up % from (beirich & buchanan, , p. ). neo-nazi groups saw the greatest growth in , up from to (pp. - ). anti-muslim groups also rose for the third straight year, tripling in - and increasing another % in (p. ). distressingly, colleges and universities seem to be primary targets of white supremacist and hate groups. the states’ free-speech laws may mainstream these perspectives and, in the process, set the nation back decades. the academy has been here before and responded with concerted educational initiatives. academics do not need to rehash this debate or roll back progress. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) pitting freedom against equity i argue that americans have been duped into playing a zero-sum game between the core democratic principles of freedom and equity. clearly, americans value freedom, but when freedom means “i demand my right to live free of any responsibility for others or for society,” it can result in harm, if not sustained inequality, for others. unfortunately, academics oftentimes feel forced to choose between the two. first published in , habits of the heart (bellah, madsen, sullivan, swidler, & tipton) was discussed widely at the time i returned to school to study education leadership and policy. using alexis de tocqueville’s visit to america as a launching off point for their book, the authors identified individualism as the driving cultural force in society. individualism, they argued, caused (and causes) americans to form small communities of family and friends and isolate themselves from broader society—an observation that still resonates today. in their chapter entitled “pursuit of happiness,” the authors wrote: freedom is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held american value. in some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one…. [i]f the entire social world is made up of individuals, each endowed with the right to be free of others’ demands, it becomes hard to forge bonds of attachment to, or cooperation with, other people since such bonds would imply obligations that necessarily impinge on one’s freedom. (bellah et al., , p. ) they concluded that individuality and community are not opposed but, instead, mutually dependent. americans recognize that too much freedom undermines a democratic republic, which is why they accept representative systems in which lawmakers are charged with making just laws that, for example, prohibit discrimination. more recently, the work of danielle allen ( ) has made a compelling and, to my mind, persuasive case that defining documents in u.s. history identify equality as a core democratic principle in american society. relying on the first space constraints in this article prevent the important discussion clarifying the terms equity, equality, and equal opportunity. i distinguish them this way: providing fair access (equal opportunity) or treating everyone the same way (equality) is not the same as considering educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) line in the declaration of independence—“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—and other historical sources, she echoed the concerns expressed in habits of the heart: political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other. as a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. we think we are required to choose between freedom and equality.… such a choice is dangerous. if we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place. i for one cannot bear to see the ideal of equality pass away before it has reached its full maturity. (allen, , p. ) i am not arguing for neutrality, that colleges and universities should somehow remain agnostic about which social ends—that is, freedom and individualism or equity and community—carry more heft. there are also other important considerations, such as individual and collective well-being, personal and shared responsibility, and social connectedness. when the relative weights of democratic principles are “objectively” balanced to force a choice, the outcome all too often reflects the opinions and preferences of those in power. any exploration of these tensions that places free speech in the default position and starting point will tip the discussion in favor of freedom and individualism and away from equity and community. higher education’s responsibility to educate for democratic citizenship and the hierarchy of prevailing democratic principles is an inherently political task rendered more difficult by today’s hyper-partisan context. both americans and elected officials have become increasingly polarized over the past years (pew research center, ) and it is affecting perspectives on higher education. in july , the pew research center reported that % of republicans indicated that colleges and universities have a negative effect on “the way things are going in this country” (fingerhut, ). in october , gallup reported that % of republicans had “some” or “very little” confidence in higher education because they believed that colleges and universities are “too liberal,” “push their own differences in order to achieve fair outcomes (equity). the terms are related but not interchangeable. this compares with the results of the survey in which % of respondents said higher education’s effect was negative, and % said it was positive. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) agendas,” and “don’t allow students to think for themselves” (gallup, ). in contrast, democrats in the same poll believed that higher education is “essential to the nation” but too expensive (gallup, ). a critical examination of freedom and equity should include an explicit examination of power and opportunity. for freedom to have meaning, everyone in the society should live in a climate of acceptance and tolerance in which choices can be made freely. the nation has yet to eradicate economic, social, and political inequality, in its systems and structures and in the hearts of its citizens. colleges and universities should model for society ways to make equity more than an aspiration—which may mean adopting a view of freedom as essential but also accountable to the campus community. academic freedom and campus climates academic freedom is most often understood as comprising protections for individual faculty members against unreasonable censorship of or interference by governments, administrations, or boards in their teaching, scholarship, or expressions of public opinion. at private institutions, academic freedom is usually interpreted as a contractual right; at public institutions, it is both contractual and constitutional. however, faculty academic freedom has limits. institutions can sanction faculty for unprofessional conduct, ineffective teaching, false statements, arbitrary grading, or refusal to adhere to certain policies (e.g., accreditation requirements). it is widely accepted that, subject to professorial professional standards (e.g., fair grading), professors have academic freedom in the classroom. they have the right to establish standards for student learning, behavior, civility, and respect. they may establish requirements regarding the expression of students’ opinions, insisting that statements be supported by evidence and facts. likewise, they may demand acceptable sources for intellectual arguments. they may also forbid students from interrupting classroom learning by, for instance, bringing in disruptive guests or insulting the professor. academic freedom also belongs to individual institutions. u.s. supreme court justice frankfurter in sweezy v. new hampshire ( ) wrote: it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation. it is an atmosphere in which there prevail the “four essential freedoms” of a university—to educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study. the freedom of a university to make its own educational judgments served as one rationale in the major affirmative action cases allowing institutions to determine, on academic grounds, whether race could be considered in admissions decisions (grutter v. bollinger, ; regents of the university of california v. bakke, ). people outside of academia, such as lawyers and politicians, draw lines on campus demarcating the limits of speech: in certain spaces, mainly the classroom, educators may control speech because that is where learning happens, while in other spaces (e.g., the quad), speech cannot be limited. these arbitrary and outdated lines fail to reflect the current research on how students learn and the importance of context, institutional culture and climate, and the learning environment. numerous studies have pointed convincingly to the significant impacts of the larger learning environment, not just the classroom, on student learning and success. for example, in their review of years of research on how to improve student learning, pascarella and terenzini ( ) found that multiple forces shape learning and success and called for a broad range of interconnected changes and improvements. reason and terenzini identified the “organizational context” as critical to the student experience (reason, ), while campus culture and climate have become common concerns of academics seeking proactive rather than reactionary approaches to challenges on campus (peterson & spencer, ; ryder & mitchell, ) and to improving student learning outcomes (hurtado, griffin, arellano, & cuellar, ; tierney, ). in fact, some researchers have used the terms culture and climate interchangeably (glisson & james, ; hart & fellabaum, ). educators typically study campus climates to gain an understanding of and to address a particular problem (e.g., alcohol use, sexual misconduct) or to gain insight into the experiences of students with different social identities (e.g., women, students of color, historically marginalized groups) (hurtado et al., ; kuh et al., ). the research institute i direct studies campus climates in the context of political learning and engagement in democracy, exploring students’ perceptions about culture (norms, traditions, and symbols), structure (offices and programs), human attributes (compositional diversity, behaviors), and internal (decision making) and external (political context) forces (thomas & brower, ). educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) it simply does not make educational sense to conclude that learning is relegated to the classroom when decades of research suggest that learning is deeply connected to a complex ecosystem across campus. colleges and universities have the academic freedom to set educational standards and goals beyond the classroom. in research conducted by the institute for democracy and higher education at tufts university, my colleagues and i found that students want free expression but draw the line at hateful speech (thomas & brower, ). more recently, a march gallup/knight foundation survey of u.s. college students revealed that while students supported the first amendment generally, they approved of limits to speech in support of a campus learning environment in which diversity and inclusion are respected and protected. specifically, % of students supported limiting hate speech on campus ( % supported unlimited speech) and % believed that shouting down speakers is sometimes acceptable (gallup/knight foundation, ). these attitudes help explain the motivations behind student protests and attempts to shut down speakers whose views they believe to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. three decades ago, administrators drove efforts to diversify higher education and create welcoming campus learning conditions for new student populations. today, the drivers are the students. i agree that shouting down or blocking access to controversial speakers is not good practice. in addition to potentially disrupting learning, shouting down speakers has the potential to garner support for that speaker’s viewpoints. instead of censoring or punishing student protesters, educators (and decision makers, including state legislators) need to listen to students and hear what they are saying when they try to interrupt speakers or demand a disciplinary response to classmates who unapologetically espouse hate against minorities, since those students may also be responding to toxic and exhausting learning conditions. movements like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter serve as critical reminders that discrimination is embedded in structures, cultures, attitudes, behaviors, and political systems that impact lives; students expect their colleges and universities settings to be different and better. campuses are their temporary homes, and when students protest, they may be taking responsibility for those homes, effectively saying, “not in my back yard.” they want institutional leaders to acknowledge that not all attitudes and speech belong in a learning environment, particularly, as the u.s. congress articulated in the wake of the charlottesville march, “hateful expressions of educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the united states.” academic freedom gives educators the right to teach toward the goals of diversity and inclusion and maintaining healthy campus climates for all, not just some, students. ultimately at stake is the ability of colleges and universities to educate not only for democracy but also against undemocratic forces emanating nationally and globally. next steps i write this article under the assumption that u.s. colleges and universities share certain goals, namely that students will learn and graduate with the knowledge and skills they need for individual success and prosperity, and that students will be prepared to participate in and shape a democracy that is truly participatory and deliberative, representative and equitable, educated and informed, and effectively and ethically governed (thomas, ). how higher education institutions achieve these goals should be shaped by academics, not external policy makers. in the concluding sections, i offer some concrete suggestions for college and university educators. assess the campus climate for political learning and engagement in democracy do not assume that students, faculty, and staff feel a certain way (e.g., oppressed, insulted, angry, apathetic, hopeless), that normative values espoused by the institution (e.g., respect, social responsibility) shape the campus community, or that curricular efforts (e.g., civic learning experiences) achieve their goals. assess your campus climate and identify the strengths and weaknesses surrounding political learning, discourse, equity, and participation. at the institute for democracy and higher education, my colleagues and i developed a conceptual framework for examining an institution’s structures, norms and culture, attitudes and behaviors, and internal decision-making process, as well as the external political forces surrounding an institution. we recommend qualitative approaches—predominantly focus groups—because “the medium is the message.” campuses need to develop habits of discussion across differences of social identity, political perspective, and lived experiences. embed those practices in the assessment process. bolster student well-being and social cohesion educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) our research found that creating conditions for political learning was connected to the social-emotional well-being of students and social cohesion among diverse groups of students. students need to develop trusting relationships with each other and with faculty. colleges and universities can support strong faculty-student relationships and advising, establish hotlines and services for students who may be at risk emotionally, academically, or financially, and create welcoming physical spaces for historically underserved, commuter, nontraditional, and international students. these efforts should also include providing opportunities for students with more conservative perspectives to find each other and find a niche on campus. host campus-wide dialogues on institutional norms and structures campus-wide dialogues should be carefully organized and facilitated. it helps if a campus already teaches students, faculty, and staff the arts of facilitation and discussion. on four of the most politically engaged campuses we visited to conduct studies of political climates, students, regardless of their discipline, took required courses in which they were taught, as one student explained, to “disagree without being disagreeable.” in these courses, students learned to frame issues; to examine multiple, even unpopular, perspectives; to advocate, often for a position they did not personally hold; and to discuss controversial issues across differences of social identity and political ideology. the professors had been trained and were viewed by the students as skilled discussion leaders capable of defusing conflict without stifling viewpoints. one caveat, however, is that the professors held students to high intellectual standards and required them to support opinions with evidence and facts. students reported that, despite contentious debates, they left the classroom “still friends.” on other campuses, students learned to engage in difficult discussions in co-curricular experiences. on one campus, students could not participate in community-based learning or study abroad without participating in intergroup dialogue training and mock conversations. two of the institutions supported centers for public dialogue and local problem solving. on one campus, seniors in student government trained incoming student government members and leaders of sga- supported clubs in the arts of dialogue and collaborative decision making. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) host discussions on free speech and inclusion colleges and universities should host campus-wide dialogues on the first amendment, its history and current application in higher education, and the many perspectives on it. present the “absolutist” perspective alongside the perspective that hate speech is not welcome on a college campus. this will increase knowledge about the importance of free speech, enhance awareness of how some speech affects different people, and advance discourse skills. as i noted earlier, colleges and universities struggle to differentiate among naïve or uninformed statements, senseless but intentional insults, genuine injury, and provocative yet productive conflict and dissent. students share responsibility with others in the campus community for making their learning experiences, and those of their peers, positive and productive. yet, there should be room for mistakes, naiveté, and dissent. conflict is almost always an opportunity for learning. again, i am no fan of speech codes, and i do not think that institutional dialogues should result in speech codes or regulations. the best response, as campuses learned in the s, is through educational programming. speech “zones” and “walls” where people are encouraged to share their views, even if unpopular, can spur discussions and ideas; however, free speech should not be exclusively relegated to these spaces. revisit symbols and traditions traditions and symbols matter. students and faculty at the campuses the institute visited could point to events—a first-day celebration, a convocation parade in which faculty wearing academic regalia walked with the students, or a graduation with a community picnic—that sent messages to the campus community about the importance of community and social cohesion. alternatively, imagine students walking onto campus the first day and facing a banner espousing white nationalist groups, which nearly happened at appalachia state university in the fall of (bawab, ). such messaging is antithetical to the aims of higher education and will negatively impact an institution’s ability to achieve its educational goals. many campuses today are engaging in discussions about buildings named after people who held anti-semitic or racist views. these discussions offer myriad learning opportunities for students about democracy’s history, principles, practices, educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) and tensions. when done well, they can bring a campus together around shared goals and means for achieving those goals. support student activism and leadership; listen to student perspectives student activism is nothing new to higher education, but it may be approaching levels not seen in nearly a half century. in the s and early s, students protested the vietnam war, gender discrimination, and racial discrimination. in the s, they fought against apartheid in south africa, demanding that their institutions divest from companies that supported racist regimes and, later, sweatshop labor. in that era, students also demanded changes in curricula, expanding interdisciplinary and cultural studies to the point that they are now common in higher education. on some campuses, student activism has been met with punishment, sometimes driven by pressure from legislators, donors, or trustees. the most extreme response to student activism, of course, happened at kent state university, where the ohio national guard opened fire on demonstrators, and, two weeks later, at jackson state university, where two black students were killed by campus police during a confrontation. the black lives matter movement against police violence and institutionalized racism triggered demonstrations and “die-ins.” as a result of the election, students have left campus to participate in women’s marches and other protests nationwide. likewise, the recent surge of interest in decreasing gun violence among high school students has spread to colleges and universities. higher education institutions can expect more activism on the part of students, including activism about limiting free speech in the interest of eliminating hateful rhetoric, discrimination, and undemocratic forces in parts of the nation, as well as activism against policies viewed as liberal, such as affirmative action. rather than trying to quash these efforts, colleges and universities should view them as opportunities to work with students to teach the arts of organizing, social change, and collaborative leadership. activism should be welcomed as perhaps the clearest example of students taking initiative and exercising leadership. students want to be heard. perhaps the best response is to listen. make decisions based on sound academic grounds, not partisan perspectives making decisions about educational content based on party affiliation is impermissible. college and university administrators need to be honest about their educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) motives when screening speakers or censoring viewpoints. understandably, this is challenging. when members of political parties stand behind policies and actions that are antithetical to educational values and goals, including inequality and discrimination, it is hard to condemn ideas without sounding partisan. hopefully, the lines will get easier to draw. tellingly, influential republican leaders have come out against the “unite the right” rally in charlottesville. conservatives and liberals do and should debate issues such as crime, mass incarceration, terrorism, gun control, etc., and in doing so, welcome all perspectives. the problem is not republicans or even conservative perspectives per se; the problem is white supremacy, white nationalism, and demagogic populism, as well as inequality and discrimination. talking about ideas, not parties, will help academics avoid conflating these many influences. resist partisan intrusion in academic affairs the assumption that students are easily indoctrinated and that they are not allowed to think for themselves, as revealed in the gallup report, is unsupported by research. according to the higher education research institute at ucla, incoming students arrive with already formed political viewpoints. in fact, the first-year class in was the most politically polarized group in the -year history of the freshman survey (eagan et al., ). in addition, several studies have refuted the claim that students change their political orientation while in college (colby, beaumont, ehrlich, & corngold, ; mariani & hewitt, ; woessner & kelly-woessner, ). examining a nationally representative sample of more than , undergraduates, mayhew, rockenbach, selznick, and zagorsky ( ) concluded that after the first year of college, % of students viewed liberals more favorably than when they arrived on campus and % viewed conservatives more favorably. the authors concluded that “college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals” (mayhew et al., ). this is precisely the kind of outcome educating for democracy should yield. uphold democratic principles and practices inevitably, academics will find themselves forced to make statements and take positions that promote democratic principles and practices—and there are many opportunities. many states have strict voter identification laws that disallow the use of student ids for voter registration. in new hampshire, the legislature is educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) currently considering a bill that would prevent students from voting in their places of domicile, despite a clear mandate from the u.s. supreme court conferring that right to students. in other legislation, north carolina lawmakers forbid the removal of confederate statues from public property, despite the governor’s admission that the law “overreaches” into local affairs (campbell, ). they had also passed a regulation prohibiting law students at a civil rights clinical program from engaging in their core work, litigation (roll, ). these efforts undermine students’ ability to participate in democracy, and colleges and universities must take a firm stance against them. colleges and universities need to move beyond viewing speech as a mandate and appreciate the current conditions as a learning opportunity. they need to provide students, faculty, staff, and, arguably, communities external to the campus (legislators, too) with forums for understanding why these tensions exist and how, collectively, members of the campus community can create the kind of educational environment where democratic principles and practices thrive. in this process, colleges and universities, particularly public institutions, will need to make some hard choices when faced with unapologetic white nationalists, for instance. in making these choices, colleges and universities will need to consider the undemocratic forces at work nationally and globally, as well as higher education’s role in educating for democracy’s health and future. ultimately, i hope that academics will grapple with what it means to educate for the democracy that most want but that we do not have. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) references allen, d. 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( ). i think my professor is a democrat: considering whether students recognize and react to faculty politics. ps: political science and politics, ( ), , . https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/business-case-for-diversity/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/business-case-for-diversity/ https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-california-college-free-speech-case https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-california-college-free-speech-case https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-california-college-free-speech-case http://www.pewglobal.org/ / / /global-support-for-principle-of-free-expression-but-opposition-to-some-forms-of-speech/ http://www.pewglobal.org/ / / /global-support-for-principle-of-free-expression-but-opposition-to-some-forms-of-speech/ educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) author biography dr. nancy thomas directs the institute for democracy and higher education at tufts university’s jonathan m. tisch college of civic life, conducting research and providing assistance to colleges and universities to advance student political learning and participation in democracy. the institute’s signature initiative, the national study of learning, voting, and engagement (nslve), is a large dataset for research and provides each of the + participating colleges and universities with their students’ aggregate voting rates. her work and scholarship center on higher education’s democratic mission, college student political learning and engagement, free speech and academic freedom, and deliberative democracy on campuses and in communities. she is the author of multiple book chapters, articles, and the monograph, educating for deliberative democracy. she is an associate editor of the journal of public deliberation and a senior associate with everyday democracy. she received her law degree from case western reserve university school of law and her doctorate from the harvard graduate school of education. educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) appendix free speech laws passed or proposed as of march , laws passed state: california title: campus free speech act url: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billtextclient.xhtml?bill_id= a ca state: colorado title: right to free speech at public higher ed institutions url: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb - state: florida title: the campus free expression act url: http://www.flsenate.gov/session/bill/ / /billtext/er/html state: missouri title: campus free expression act url: http://www.senate.mo.gov/ info/pdf-bill/perf/sb .pdf state: north carolina title: north carolina restore/preserve free speech act url: https://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/billlookup/billlookup.pl?session= &billid= h state: tennessee title: campus free speech protection act url: http://www.capitol.tn.gov/bills/ /amend/sa .pdf state: utah title: campus individual rights acthttps://le.utah.gov/~ /bills/static/hb .html https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billtextclient.xhtml?bill_id= aca https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billtextclient.xhtml?bill_id= aca https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb - http://www.flsenate.gov/session/bill/ / /billtext/er/html http://www.senate.mo.gov/ info/pdf-bill/perf/sb .pdf https://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/billlookup/billlookup.pl?session= &billid=h https://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/billlookup/billlookup.pl?session= &billid=h http://www.capitol.tn.gov/bills/ /amend/sa .pdf educating for democracy in undemocratic contexts ejournal of public affairs, ( ) title: campus free speech protection act url: https://le.utah.gov/~ /bills/static/hb .html# b- - state: virginia title: higher educational institutions’ free speech on campus url: https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp .exe? +sum+hb state: wisconsin title: campus free speech act url: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/ /kremer/media/ / - _ .pdf legislation proposed but not yet passed state: georgia title: georgia campus free speech act url: http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-us/display/ /sb/ state: illinois title: campus free speech url:http://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?docnum= &gaid= &ga= &doctypeid=hb&legid= &sessionid= state: michigan title: campus free speech act url: http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(s(cybxwk twt clqpyzm gsh))/mileg.aspx?page = getobject&objectname= -sb- state: nebraska title: higher education free speech accountability act url: https://nebraskalegislature.gov/floordocs/ /pdf/intro/lb .pdf state: wyoming title: higher education free speech protection act url: http://legisweb.state.wy.us/ /introduced/hb .pdf https://le.utah.gov/% e /bills/static/hb .html# b- - https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp .exe? +sum+hb http://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/ /kremer/media/ / - _ .pdf http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-us/display/ /sb/ http://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?docnum= &gaid= &ga= &doctypeid=hb&legid= &sessionid= http://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?docnum= &gaid= &ga= &doctypeid=hb&legid= &sessionid= http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(s(cybxwk twt clqpyzm gsh))/mileg.aspx?page=% bgetobject&objectname= -sb- http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(s(cybxwk twt clqpyzm gsh))/mileg.aspx?page=% bgetobject&objectname= -sb- http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(s(cybxwk twt clqpyzm gsh))/mileg.aspx?page=% bgetobject&objectname= -sb- https://nebraskalegislature.gov/floordocs/ /pdf/intro/lb .pdf http://legisweb.state.wy.us/ /introduced/hb .pdf copyright © korean neuropsychiatric association human rights and equality have progressed and matured slowly. in the progress, we had gained the civil and female suffrage. moreover, another transformation recently springs up around the world. that is the me too movement. the me too movement (or #me too) is a movement against sexual harassment and assault. #metoo spread on social media in october , and then it revealed the prevalence and magnitude of problems with sexual harassment and assault, especially in the workplace, including academia and medicine. research showed that about % of women and % of men among u.s. academic medical faculty members reported ex- periencing sexual harassment. other reported that % of medical trainees and students experienced harassment or discrimination during training. moreover, this movement has led widespread discussion about how to stop problems with sexual abuse or harassment at work. the world no lon- ger considers these issues to be solved by individuals. there have been some barriers among these discussions or debates which should be overcome in the future. one of them is a vigilance movement to keep a distance from other gender. for example, some men have expressed the desire to keep a greater distance from women. perhaps such a reaction is be- cause they do not fully understand what actions is considered inappropriate or wrong. and it is more worrying that those responses seem to be reactive aggression behind it. such a confrontation between genders does not help solve the prob- lem with sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. other is a wrong prejudice; when the problem with sexual ha- rassment is accused, it is sometimes regarded as an accuser’s fault or evidence of social maladjustment. this misguided prejudice and atmosphere have kept victims in silence for a long time. therefore, this wrong prejudice should be elimi- print issn - / on-line issn - open access nated. it was suggested that the #me too movement has shifted the norms surrounding sexual harassment in workplaces. one of them is the agreement that sexual harassment (not just sexual assault) constitutes a threat and is unacceptable in the workplace. it requires policies, education, and training to accomplish these shifts of the norm. policies must include an effective re- porting and investigation system. because there is a general consensus that a lack of effective reporting systems is a major factor that drives sexual misconduct in the workplace. some organizations have set up an independent intermediary or outside system or options with a hotline to report inappropri- ate actions. and it needs to develop public policies and sys- tems to provide protection and support services for legal and psychological issues. above all, education and training are more important and necessary. the contents of the education and training should include as the followings: what words and behaviors are sexual harassment or gender bias, and when she or he experiences or observes sexual harassment or gender bias, she or he can speak up without fear and should be en- couraged to do. this recent transformation is not limited to sexual harass- ment and assault, but it should be expanded as follows: dis- crimination or harassment based on gender, race, color, reli- gion, national origin, gender orientation, gender identity, age, or disability will not be tolerated in anyone. we all have to act and participate to achieve the shift and change. references . zacharek s, dockterman e, edwards hs. the silence breakers. time. available at: http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence- breakers. accessed march , . . isaacs d. sexual harassment. j paediatr child health ; : - . . launer j. sexual harassment of women in medicine: a problem for men to address. postgrad med j ; : - . . drezner dw. #metoo and the trouble with new norms. washington post. available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/postevery- thing/wp/ / / /metoo-and-the-trouble-with-norms. accessed february , . perspective #me too movement; it is time that we all act and participate in transformation bun-hee lee maum & maum psychiatric clinic, seoul, republic of korea https://doi.org/ . /pi. . .  correspondence: bun-hee lee, md, phd maum & maum psychiatric clinic, gosanja-ro, dongdaemun-gu, seoul , republic of korea tel: + - - , fax: + - - , e-mail: lee.bunhee@gmail.com cc this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/ . ) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduc- tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pi. . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - h e c h t possible roles of women architects in the materialization of architecture in chile keywords woman profession visibility feminism #metoo despite having re-emerged strongly in , the debate on the role of women in society is not new. neither is in architecture. based on a research work conducted years ago, the following text reflects on the invisibility of women in arq’s history and, from there, on the way we understand the discipline and the profession. i n the year , before the #metoo era and the so-called fourth-wave feminism, one of my jobs was to work in a rq’s editorial production. although a woman directed the journal – montserrat palmer – it had scarcely published buildings by chilean women architects. in parallel, after five years of being an assistant and three more years collaborating in various classes, i had finally achieved my first independent course at the school of architecture of the pontificia universidad católica de chile, the third year research studio, an optional studio. its main goal was (and still is) to develop a controlled disciplinary research exercise, where the work is intended to acquire a collective dimension (usually by addressing a common topic jaime besa, hilda carmona low. facultad de ciencias físicas y matemáticas, campus san joaquín u c , santiago, . fuente / source: revista auca – (ago. ). en la leyenda sólo se menciona a besa como autor. / captions only mention besa as the author. abraham schapira, raquel eskenazi, león messina. edificio ultramar, viña del mar, . fotografía / photo eduardo waissbluth. santiago aguirre, inés frey. edificio pecchi, concepción, . fotografía / photo patricia silva. a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e r o m y he c h t ma r c h a n t profesora titular, escuela de arquitectura pontificia universidad católica de chile, santiago, chile developed from exemplary cases) while taking part in a collaborative research effort focused on chilean architecture, urban planning, and landscape. at that time i already had an incipient – and precarious – interest in landscape studies, but i resisted delving into them because of the prejudice concerning its supposed connotation as an area of knowledge of plants and flowers and, therefore, belonging to the female field. in the same terms, i was disturbed by the fact that, when going through publications aimed at reviewing the causes – i.e. characters and buildings – behind the materialization of architecture in chile, the presence of women architects appeared as diminished, even when at first glance the access to professional studies already approached a ratio of : between men and women. without going any further, in what constitutes in my opinion the most comprehensive review on national architectural production written so far, at least between and , humberto eliash and manuel moreno only name seven practicing women professionals: inés frey bruggemann, montserrat palmer trias, yolanda schwartz apfel, angela schweitzer lopetegui, margarita pisano fisher, iris valenzuela alarcón and ana maría barrenechea. against this background, i suggested a studio that systematically studied and unveiled the work of a group of women during the above-indicated period of time. this, from the belief – or stubbornness gabriela gonzález, edmundo buddemberg. escuela de medicina de la universidad de concepción, concepción, . fotografía / photo arturo lyon. luz sobrino. edificio san martín , concepción, . fotografía / photo camila martin. hugo gaggero, margarita pisano. casa gaggero pisano, santiago, . fotografía / photo ronald ruiz. yolanda schwartz. anteproyecto concurso. remodelación bellavista (mención honrosa), valparaíso, . reconstrucción / model by ariel chiang. h e c h t – that such production had somewhat contributed to the development of modern architecture in chile, thus responding to the demands of urban transformation based on new architectural-institutional / housing / recreational parameters and experiments. with the purpose of ordering and limiting the work, i established three constraints as a starting point for background search: first, to use the book arquitectura y modernidad en chile / : una realidad múltiple ( ) as a source on the different moments that characterized the implementation of modern architecture in our country; second, to reduce the selection of possible case studies to the same period of time proposed by eliash and moreno; and, third, to limit the field of study to those women graduated from the universidad de chile and the pontificia universidad católica de chile, considering that they already provided and names respectively. although gender issues were not part of my repertoire back then, i must admit that it was not easy to approach the studio, as there was a certain initial reluctance from the students to develop the exercise, given the difficulty of acknowledging any female leader among chilean architects. and, objectively speaking, it was a valid concern facing the inability to establish whether women were capable of producing a work that allows any of them to become a sort of ‘master’ for its peers, who, undoubtedly, need certain accessible and measurable parameters to develop a profession based on the intuition of design, and that is taught by attributing to that act the same degree of relevance – even when whoever has e d i f i c i o m a n a n t i a l e s luis izquierdo, antonia lehmann, josé domingo peñafiel, raimundo lira publicado en / published in a r q (julio, ): - a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e established a professional practice knows how many other tools are needed in order to survive in the field. to vindicate the female genre within a ‘star system’ based on what was defined by consensus as good architecture could not be further from my initial statement – to identify, objectively, possible roles of women architects by recognizing a work that had persisted in time. in other words, my question was, simply and paraphrasing eliash and moreno, whether chilean architecture between and had actually constituted a ‘multiple reality’ in terms of those who built that modernity. methodologically, architects were first identified from the original list of women, considering whether their biographical or documentary background was accessible. then, the students fabiola carreño, ariel chiang, gonzalo claro riesco, carolina contreras, arturo lyon gottlieb, camila martin, ismael rengifo streeter, pablo ropert, daniel rosenberg, ronald ruiz, patricia silva, macarena vergara, eduardo waissbluth and angélica zabala núñez selected from that initial group those professionals with more than two built works and devoted themselves to establish a professional-biographical account of them – including education, influences, travels, publications, works, and projects; placing them within the historical context of chilean modern architecture development and thus, in turn, in a larger context. as a result of a task that ultimately became extremely enthusiastic, it was possible to identify raquel eskenazi rodrich, working within the schapira- g a l e r í a pat r i c i a r e a dy luis izquierdo, antonia lehmann, mirene elton, mauricio léniz publicado en / published in a r q (diciembre, ): - h e c h t eskenazi-messina office, as a key agent in the definition of a modern coastline in viña del mar and in incorporating the balcony as an intermediate space in the district of providencia. margarita pisano fisher, who together with hugo gaggero built a local version of the ‘wrightian’ proposal in the house in pedro de valdivia norte. inés frey bruggemann (acting independently or with her husband, santiago aguirre) and her modern interior designs in two houses in santiago, or the new structural architectures in concepción after the earthquake. luz sobrino sánz, operating in that same city, with an operation of infilling the urban grid through over buildings. the scope of formalization of modern social postulates in the design of inés de suárez park, by ana maría barrenechea and team; the technological innovation of the school of medicine at the universidad de concepción by gabriela gonzález de groote and edmundo buddemberg; and the experimentation with the language of metabolism in the competitions of the late s developed by yolanda schwartz apfel. or the role of the latter in the furniture-structure symbiosis at her home in the district of la reina. victoria maier mayer’s late transfer of modern ideas to the local scene, two decades after her trip to vienna in . or the possibilities of understanding the landscape project as a synthesis of urbanization processes and natural systems in the proposals of hilda carmona low and jaime besa for the faculty of engineering in san joaquín and two developments in the district of vitacura, both in santiago. e d i f i c i o p l a z a p e d ro m o n t t cecilia puga publicado en / published in a r q (diciembre, ): - a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il eit seems to me that this brief description is an actual evidence of the roles played by barrenechea, carmona, frey, gonzález, maier, pisano, schapira, schwartz and sobrino in building modern architecture in chile, characterizing areas of professional expertise that until now are characteristic of the discipline: teaching or research activities and public positions – although scarcely within the head ones – together with a practice in the private sphere, most of the time within a non-autonomous system, that is, associated to a relative or as part of a larger team. eighteen years after the completion of the research studio, and faced with the self-imposed exercise of reviewing the first issues of a rq with the same criteria used in , i believe that you – male or female reader – would be surprised. while it seems that the new century has brought with it new possibilities regarding the necessary recognition of female participation in the professional sphere, my review shows quite the opposite. if we exclude the publication of final degree projects and/or studio results, works outside chile, participation in montages and/or ephemeral exhibitions, essays, interviews and/or critical analyzes (and works by the former editor of the magazine until ), it is only possible to identify seven names with more than two different works built locally. the first reference under these parameters appears in with paulina courard, who through the proposal of parks and urban walks developed within the office teodoro fernández arquitectos, has become a silent g i m n a s i o m u n i c i pa l d e s a l a m a n c a mario carreño, piera sartori publicado en / published in a r q (abril, ): - h e c h t c a s a s m u s e o d e l o m at ta (co n c u r s o, p r i m e r p r e m i o) luis izquierdo, antonia lehmann publicado en / published in a r q (diciembre, ): - s a l a d e d e g u s tac i ó n paulina courard publicado en / published in a r q (julio, ): - a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e pa rq u e i n é s d e s uá r e z teodoro fernández, paulina courard publicado en / published in a r q (mayo, ): - a r q (diciembre, ): - t r e s pa rq u e s alberto montealegre, myriam beach publicado en / published in a r q (diciembre, ): - h e c h t agent in the construction of landscape architecture in chile . something similar happens with myriam beach in the work developed with her husband alberto montealegre; however, their contributions to the debate on the role of landscape projects are synthetically captured in a single issue , analogous to that of margarita murtinho and maría josé castillo in the experiments on housing developed at the beginning of the s with francisco vergara . these are followed by antonia lehmann scasi-buffa, the only one to receive along with her husband, luis izquierdo wachholtz, the national architecture award and who has been exceptionally recognized as an operative individual within an over -years joint practice thanks to the construction of multiple institutional and housing buildings, in addition to a hundred single-family houses . cecilia puga larrain, on the other hand, is reflected in her persistent ability to reveal the solidness of structures and materials in buildings as part of an unusual practice, at least according to a rq standards: mostly working independently or, sometimes, leading teams. finally emerges piera sartori del campo, who along with her husband mario carreño zunino has developed over the last decade a consistent practice, linking location, budget, and construction of a continuous relationship between interior and exterior space. interestingly enough, sartori has not needed an action re-affirmative of her role, undoubtedly due to the renowned performance in the field of design that both had during their time in lo contador. e d i f i c i o l o f t p l a z a b r a s i l francisco vergara, maría josé castillo, margarita murtinho e d i f i c i o p l a z a y u n g ay francisco vergara, maría josé castillo, margarita murtinho publicado en / published in a r q (julio, ): - a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il eit is true that every publication has an editorial bias, specifically in the case of a journal that has sought to position itself as ‘the’ organism of dissemination of chilean architecture.through the publishing of a certain range of ideological debates associated, for example, with class inequality in urban distribution, gentrification, and housing policies, over the last years arq has tried to redefine architectural practice. it has also sought to influence a redistribution of design’s influence over education by discussing, for example, the social responsibilities of chilean professionals and by proposing an alignment of practice with new technologies. without necessarily falling into the easy way out (such as an eventual quota of pages according to gender), i look forward to the possibility of making an approach to a group scarcely represented in the hundred published issues. if we go back to my students’ issues in the year , perhaps one could reflect not so much on the causes behind invisibility, but rather on the consequences of a silent participation in the materialization of chilean architecture. such absence has triggered, for instance, prejudices within the female genre itself, convinced at times that leadership can only be found in the management of professional offices, in the production of the domestic sphere or in the so-called landscape work (without going any further, consider the early opinion of this author). and if we assess our own evolution and actions within the local context, we will undoubtedly find painful discriminatory experiences caused by those who are unable to handle their hypothetical power or respect those who have not been praised as gurus by their peers. perhaps, then, one of the following hundred issues of the magazine could risk producing high-level critique on the work of women architects, regardless of their professional links, and thus open a discussion on the interest of the work that’s done and its contribution, modest but real, to the transformation of chilean architecture. arq h e c h t notas / notes up to issue (nov. ) there are published works by female authors, either independently or associated. see “arq magazine historical archive - ” ( ), ediciones a r q (sept. ) <http://www.edicionesarq.cl/seccion/archivo-historico/> mentions can be found in the following chapters: “los escenarios del cambio” [scenarios of change] ( : - ), in which a review of important buildings in the s, mentions “the houses in sánchez fontecilla by santiago aguirre and frey [inés]”; “causas y efectos” [causes and effects] ( : ), where in relation to the mechanisms of contact with foreign models, the text indicates the opportunity that architects had to study or work with international modern masters, among them, “m[ontserrat]. palmer with coderch y martorell, bohigas, mackay”; and in “le corbusier: una influencia aparentemente dominante” [le corbusier: an apparently dominant influence] ( : ), where it is indicated that: “[...] subsequent generations – although they never completely abandoned the purely iconographic references – eased the contradictions between image and content, or between form and structure. a second moment of influence was thus configured, in which the transcription of images is followed by a reworking of architectural, urban and constructive types. exposed concrete appears, together with seismic calculation, new urban proposals, as new opportunities to deploy the corbusian ideas in all of their dimensions and for better understanding the own problems. it is the moment of singular works by jorge aguirre, enrique gerbhard, waldo parraguéz, costabal and garafulic, zacarelli and gacitúa, s. aguirre and inés frey, etc. [...] at the end of the s and during the ‘ s, the most significant and mature works of corbusian pattern are found [...]. these successful examples encourage younger generations within architectural circles to insist on the corbusian path. this is the case of [...] yolanda schwartz (schwartz house), angela schweitzer (municipality of valdivia) [...]” ( : - ). in the chapter “estados unidos y la modernización integral” [the united states and the integral modernization] the influence of wright is indicated through “horacio borgheresi’s first houses, hugo gaggero and margarita pisano’s house [...]” ( : ). in “chillán o el racionalismo pragmático” [chillán or the pragmatic rationalism], two documents appear ( : ): one is the press release “arquitectos chilenos se dirigen al urbanista señor le corbusier,” signed among others by inés frey, supporting his visit for the city’s reconstruction. the other ( : ) is the list of professionals prepared in by the intendancy of santiago to support the same effort. the list includes frey (no. ) and inés floto (no. ). the book also shows two photographs of the municipality of valdivia, by schweitzer ( : , ), another one of the cerrillos airport in santiago, by iris valenzuela ( : ), the plan ( : ) and a photograph ( : ) of merino house, by aguirre y frey, and universidad de chile headquarters’ in temuco by ana maría barrenechea, osvaldo cáceres, f. ehijo, a. rodríguez and yolanda schwartz ( : ). to the above-mentioned references, it is interesting to add what’s indicated by felicitas klimpel ( ): “the architects association has women enrolled, a large part of them work as architects in state agencies. this is a career that attracts women. many start these studies and even finish them, but cannot get their diplomas given the elevated cost of the projects they must submit before obtaining such degree. the following work as architects at the works department in the municipality of santiago: ester durán, violeta del campo, mariana valverde, aída ramírez, graciela espinoza, alicia henot, and maría t. rojas m. in the ministry of public works, are: maría luisa montecinos, sara poldesch, and iris valenzuela. at the housing corporation work the architects elena macho, victoria mayer, and maría schuman. an architect of the municipal works department in arica is maría luisa barrios. the architects maría silva, inés araya, esmeralda rojas, and antonieta motta work for the railway association. at the public workers association are: graciela marcos, sofía peralta in ancud; luz sobrino in concepción, angela schweitzer in valdivia. in santiago, the names of the architects inés frey, aída rivera, inés floto, maría vergara, amanda godoy, ana maría barrenechea, elsa fuentes, and marta martínez are well known. maría rojas gonzález has designed and coordinated plenty of works. she is an assistant in the course descriptive geometry at universidad católica and surveyor at the public workers association. johanna zeppelin de herrera was the head of individual construction at the state railways association fund until ” (klimpel, : ). to this a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e bibliografía / bibliography b e r k e l e y, ellen perry; m c q u a i d, matilda (eds.), architecture: a place for women. washington, d.c . : smithsonian institution press, . e l i a s h , humberto; m o r e n o, manuel. arquitectura y modernidad en chile / : una realidad múltiple. santiago, ediciones universidad católica de chile, . k l i m p e l , felicitas. la mujer chilena (el aporte femenino al progreso de chile) - . santiago, editorial andrés bello, . reference – where, although no specific production is explicitly stated, at least a considerable number of architects working in chile ( ) are enumerated – it should also be added that between and , architects from the universidad de chile and from u c graduated. see the lists in “materialización de la arquitectura moderna en chile ( - ): posibles roles de las arquitectos,” research studio school of architecture u c , prof. romy hecht, assitant pedro alonso ( nd term, ): - . the papers are available at general collection lo contador u c library, ref. . t ( º sem. ). i do not intend for the readers to agree with my criteria, but i remind you that the exercise was to repeat the process of selecting names according to the parameters deployed in the studio during the year . see a r q (may ): – [reappears en a r q (dec. ): – ]; a r q (dec. ): – ; a r q (jul. ): – ; and a r q (aug. ): – . see a r q (dec. ): – . see a r q (jul. ): – . it is worth noting that margarita appears a third time, in a r q (sept. ): – . see a r q (dec. ): ; a r q (dec. ): – ; a r q (jul. ): ; a r q (jul. ): – ; a r q (dec. ): ; and a r q (dec. ): – . see a r q (jul. ): - , a r q (dec. ): - , a r q (dec. ): - , a r q (aug. ): - . see a r q (mar. ): , a r q (jul. ): - , a r q (aug. ): - , a r q (apr. ): - , a r q (aug. ): - , a r q (apr. ): - . speaking from her own experience, denise scott brown has already produced an extensive debate on the possible reasons for female invisibility in the profession. i suggest her first published piece on the subject, “room at the top? sexism and the star system in architecture,” (berkeley and mcquaid, : - ). see also the historiographical reconstruction of margarita pisano’s trajectory by alejandra celedón and gabriela garcía de cortázar, a r q (mar. ): - . romy hecht marchant <romyhecht@uc.cl> architect and master in architecture, pontificia universidad católica de chile, ; phd in history and theory of architecture, princeton university, . has been a researcher at dumbarton oaks, washington, d.c . ( , - ) and visiting professor at harvard university ( ), universidad nacional de rosario ( ) and pontificia universidad católica de lima ( ). her essays have been published in retorno al paisaje (evren, spain, ) and arquitectura en el chile del siglo xx: iniciando el nuevo siglo - (ediciones a r q , chile, ) and in the journals new architecture (china), harvard design magazine (u s a ), studies in the histories of gardens and designed landscapes (u k ) and a r q , revista c a , revista y trace (chile). with danilo martic, translated john b. jackson’s the necessity for ruins and other essays (ediciones a r q , ). she is co-founder of the website lofscapes (www.lofscapes.com) and the n g o cultura de paisaje en chile (www. culturadepaisaje.com). she is currently a researcher in fondecyt project and tenure professor at the school of architecture u c . http://www.lofscapes.com http://www.culturadepaisaje.com http://www.culturadepaisaje.com soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci article moving with touch: entanglements of a child, valentine’s day cards, and research–activism against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures suvi pihkala *, tuija huuki and vappu sunnari faculty of education, university of oulu, fi- oulu, finland * correspondence: suvi.pihkala@oulu.fi received: may ; accepted: july ; published: july abstract: in this paper, we respond to feminist new materialist scholars’ calls to explore what research in the field of gendered and sexual violence can be, do, and become. this paper explores the microprocesses of change within the more-than-human child–card entanglements as part of our research–activist campaign addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. drawing on one of our creative workshops, we generate three analytical readings that map touch. we focus, first, on the intra-action of bodies, objects, and abstractions that reconfigures painful experiences of harassment for recognition; second, on the affective charge in moments and movements of response and resistance; and third, on what else touch can become when it travels across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. re-engaging with our research–activism, we propose that different kinds of touch converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that reconfigures painful experiences of gendered and sexual harassment for recognition, response, and resistance. connecting to feminist new materialist endeavors to envision and enact response-able research, we propose that ‘moving with touch’ helps us shed light on the microprocesses of change in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and invite movement. keywords: barad; children; creative methods; feminist new materialisms; research–activism; response-ability; sexual harassment; touch . introduction sexual harassment was brought to renewed attention in , prompted by the global ‘#metoo’ movement. having spent nearly years exploring gender and sexual power plays among children in school settings, our research team—including tuija, who was following the debate closely—was deeply affected by the discussion, which mostly ignored the ways sexual harassment connects to and permeates children’s peer cultures. this combination of the ‘hashtag feminism’ (mendes et al. ) against sexual harassment, the public debate, and our numerous research encounters with children marked the ‘beginning in the middle’ of our research–activist project. theoretically, our research– activist approach was inspired by feminist new materialist and, in particular, ‘phematerialist’ work (e.g., renold and ringrose ), which have generatively merged feminist research with deleuzian/spinozian activist philosophies (e.g., braidotti ) and the theories of micropolitics of change (manning ; massumi ) and affect (e.g., blackman and venn ) in order to envision ways of doing educational research capable of generating material changes in wider social spheres (e.g., renold ; ringrose et al. ). the creative arts-based research-activist project, titled #metoo postscriptum, that shaped the direction of this article, was designed and implemented by two of the authors—tuija and suvi— during the weeks before valentine’s day in . it emerged from tuija’s broader ongoing research soc. sci. , , of and from a long continuum of research on gendered and sexual force relations by the authors (huuki and renold ; huuki et al. ; holford et al. ; pihkala and huuki ; sunnari et al. ; sunnari ). although it is often discussed only in relation to adults, research shows that sexual harassment—verbal, physical, material, emotional, or psychological sexual abuses of power—also affect young people in multiple, contradictory manners as normalized, everyday hetero-sexisms circulating within young peer cultures, media, and the wider social and cultural discourses (gillander gådin ; holford et al. ; meyer ; renold ; stein ; sunnari ; sunnari et al. ). however, young people are left with insufficient support for navigating these often contentious terrains of gender and sexuality (renold ). drawing inspiration from child-led activism in wales (renold , ; renold and ringrose ), the #metoo postscriptum campaign engaged children aged – years in creative workshops to explore their experiences of sexual harassment and to communicate those experiences to decisionmakers and the public. in this paper, we return to and re-engage with one of the workshops, a workshop with a group of eight girls, and map the iterative intra-action of valentine’s day cards, girls, experiences of past harassment, the research–activist campaign, and our own engagements and entanglements during the campaign. in re-engaging with the workshop, we employ touch as a steering concept that reanimates and enlivens within and through three analytically enacted moments at focus in this paper. drawing on barad’s ( ) agential realism, with the first moment, we map more-than-human touch, focusing on the materiality of the workshop. we render visible how bodies, tables, movement, space, objects, postscripts, past, present, and research–activism intra-act, generating conditions of possibility for painful experiences to reconfigure for recognition. then, we map what else touch can do, focusing on the affective charge in the moments and movements of response and resistance in the intra-action of past experiences, valentine’s cards, and a makeshift mailbox. our third and final analysis maps what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains, reaching towards, sticking to us, and traveling to wider change-making terrains. mapping and moving with touch enable us to become open to the microprocesses and micropolitics of change and, as explored in this paper, to the ways in which painful experiences of harassment can be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance. as invested and interested in co-constructing and theorizing response-able, everyday practices of change-making (huuki ; pihkala et al. ; pihkala ), this paper contributes to the recent calls to envision response-able research and practice and to illuminate and theorize the microprocesses of change in our research endeavors (ringrose et al. ; renold ). ‘moving with touch’ within our creative research–activism sheds light on the affordances of feminist new materialism-inspired approaches that are attuned to materiality, relationality, and becoming. we argue that our research– activism, predicated on creative, multimodal, more-than-human sense-abilities, fostered conditions in which unwanted, painful, silenced, and unaddressed experiences could be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance in ways that exceed the limits of humanistic and talk-based modes of engagement. beginning from within entanglements and relationality, as opposed to pre-existing subjects and objects, enables us to attend to the material-discursive practices of body, object, gesture, movement, silence, voice, space, history, feeling, and touch and how these human and more-than- human elements intra-act, producing particular and contingent outcomes (barad ). we maintain informed by our long-term work with children around sensitive topics of gender and sexual harassment, the workshops were held in single-sex groups with the aim of ensuring safe possibilities for the participants to explore and communicate their experiences of their friendship and relationship cultures. within the scope of this research, it was not possible to address the children’s experiences of gender, but grounded in our long- term research on gender and power in child peer cultures, we were familiar with the specific context of our research–activism in finland. in this context, issues of gender are sensitive, unaddressed, and often silenced, which make them difficult to address. the grouping by assumed gender aligned with the accustomed and dominant practices of the schools. it was based on our previous experiences of working in mixed-gender groups where the sensitivity and difficulty of the topic causes anxiety and dominant modes of gender expression become enforced. in order to work with and rework gender dichotomies, the groups were thus divided by assumed gender. however, our approach during our engagements with the children remained sensitive to the children’s diverse gender expressions. soc. sci. , , of that working from within such entanglements enables elbow room for the unexpected and emergent and prompts us to not limit our inquiry to interpretations and instead invest in how research can be made to matter in the world (ringrose et al. ). by thinking with theory and moving with touch, we make a speculative gesture towards theorizing what else touch can be, do, and become. methodologically, mapping different kinds of touches causes them to converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that yields a nuanced account of the intra-active moments when subtle shifts of change occur. it does so in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and incite and invite movement. . each intra-action matters: envisioning the microprocesses of change in research against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures this paper connects to the expansive work inspired by feminist new materialist theories related to affect, materiality, and the relationality of human and more-than-human others (e.g., barad ; braidotti ; dolphijn and tuin ). this work has elicited heightened attunement and thoughtfulness in feminist research and social sciences more widely with respect to how bodies, objects, and discourses affect one another and are affected upon and how power, agency, and change, for example, are imagined (fox and alldred ; ringrose et al. ). in phematerialist work, the reimagination of how gender, power, and sexuality matter in children’s lives and, importantly, how change and transformation could be evoked (renold and ringrose ), has prompted—to use a term borrowed from barad ( ) and haraway ( )—response-able research and pedagogy (renold ; ringrose et al. ; taylor ). this call also acts as our motivation and inspiration to move with touch as we work to attune to and capture the subtle shifts of change within our research–activism. in gauging such ‘microprocesses of change’ as they occur, we employ three pivotal threads from barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology. barad ( ) introduced the idea of agential realism, proposing that the world and things ‘come to matter’ through agential cuts enacted through ongoing intra- action; that is, objects, abstractions, discourses, and even space and time do not pre-exist their relatings. this means that phenomena, such as gender and sexual harassment as the object of our inquiry and activism, too, must be understood to become intelligible through specific and contingent material-discursive arrangements or apparatuses of bodily production (barad ). it is perhaps particularly in the matterings of gender and sexuality—and sexual harassment—where barad’s thinking works to make visible the agential force of discursive practices upon matter, and vice versa. in this paper, intra-action, then, heightens our attention in relation to the dynamic ontological entanglements of human and more-than-human others—that is, how bodies, objects, movement, time, discourse, feelings, and gestures intra-act within and through the workshop. furthermore, for barad ( ), time does not work in a mode of linearity. this challenges the ways we understand change, which can no longer be perceived to follow from a past that once was but, rather, emerges through the iterative differentiating and reworking of a past that was never left behind and a future that is already present (barad ). in this sense, each intra-action matters as a more-than-human and more-than-present encounter that holds the possibility ‘to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (barad , p. x). considering the past experiences of pain, hurt, silence, and denial materializing for recognition through our research–activist apparatus against sexual harassment, barad’s thinking helps us attune to the intra-active entanglements anew. it helps us consider how, as we move, craft, and talk with the children, the intra-active entanglements of bodies, things, moments, and places come together and hold the possibility for making a difference in how sexual harassment matters. there is a breathtaking intimacy to this, as barad ( ) writes. she brings the ethico-onto-epistemology of agential realism in touch with touch, stating that ‘touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability’ (barad , p. , italics removed). indeed, the ethicality at the marrow of mattering—as captured in the hyphenated notion of ‘response-ability’ (barad ; haraway )—is ‘always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not- becoming’ (barad , p. ). it is an invitation and an obligation to enable and welcome the response of the other that inhabits ‘each meeting’ (barad ). soc. sci. , , of enriching our thinking about the intra-active entanglements of our research–activist encounters with touch and response-ability enables us to imagine the intra-activity at stake as materially crowded, affectively charged, and temporally rich—more-than-human and more-than-present— entanglements that are ethical from the get go. this thinking also reanimates ‘our responsibility to be in touch’ (barad ) in our research–activist endeavors. as we maintain, how we co-compose the materials, creative practices, and human and more-than-human others matters. it matters to the ways we can help children identify and share with others their experiences and concerns related to sexual harassment and how we can foster possibilities for change in children’s peer cultures. indeed, barad ( , p. ) asks us to ‘tak[e] responsibility for the fact that our practices matter; the world is materialized differently through different practices’. this ethics as ‘always-already’—response- ability (barad ; haraway )—casts a challenge and obligation to ‘cultivate the capacity to respond’ (haraway , p. ) and to reimagine the ethico-political potentiality in ‘each meeting’ in our attempt to both make inquiries into and co-compose conditions for co-flourishing. . method and materials: moving with touch as part of the #metoo postscriptum campaign, we organized and implemented arts-based workshop sessions focusing on gendered and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations with a total of children aged – years at schools in finland. when organizing the workshops, we endeavored to create specific conditions that provide access to new ground and enable safe and creative intra-action (barad ), so as to allow the participants to explore the ambivalences, contradictions, pains, and pleasures embedded in the gendered and sexual power relations of pre- teen peer cultures. such conditions could be understood to constitute what massumi ( ) calls ‘enabling constraints’, which propose a specific object of concern without, however, imposing preconceived notions about the final destination or outcome (massumi , p. ). enabling constraints, as we built upon them here, are carefully and purposefully made arrangements that cultivate conditions of response (barad ; haraway ) and that simultaneously mark our response-ability and accountability with respect to the becomings and not-becomings we help enact (barad ). the workshops involved activities related to the topic of sexual harassment. during the workshops, the children engaged in discussions and exploration of gendered and sexualized peer cultures and sexual harassment, created and drew valentine’s day cards, and—if they chose to do so—wrote their own experiences of harassment in the postscripts of their cards. in addition to the workshops with the children, a pop-up stand was set up in a university café to allow student teachers and faculty members to partake the campaign by sharing their own childhood experiences of harassment. through our research–activism, our aims were to generate data on children’s experiences of sexual harassment in peer relations, communicate those experiences with children to wider audiences, and engage in political debate and social transformation. as part of the latter, after the workshops, the research team collected and sent the cards to every member of the finnish parliament and published excerpts from the notes and cards on the campaign website (huuki and pihkala ). the cards with the postscripts were intended to remind decisionmakers and the finnish public of the need for systematic and consistent work to address sexual harassment, which affects not only adults but also children. the human and more-than-human ‘participants’ of the occurring in advance of valentine’s day, in our project, the #metoo became linked with the postscript section of a valentine’s day card. the postscript worked to make visible the often-ignored nature and the silence regarding sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations (pihkala and huuki ). using the hashtag connected the project to the momentum afforded by the digital feminist activism of the #metoo movement (mendes et al. ). as part of our wider interest in investigating gender and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, the workshops were video-recorded, accumulating a total of h of audio–visual recordings, pages of transcripts, pages of extended field notes, and digitalized cards, of which the data for this paper involve h and min of audio–visual recordings from the workshop session in question. soc. sci. , , of campaign, such as the children, researchers, public, the decisionmakers, hands, chairs, tables, space, paper slips, pens, and arts and crafts; and the multiple modalities of the creative activities, such as the movement, crafting, speech, and writing, were understood as active and lively coplayers that came together in unexpected ways, as well as through our purposeful material, research–activist engagements that aimed to foster possibilities for the children to explore, address, and communicate their experiences of harassment. the ethical considerations in relation to the project were ongoing before, during, and after our engagements with the children. as a ‘spin off’ and part of tuija’s ongoing research project, the #metoo postscriptum campaign had obtained a statement from the ethics committee of human sciences at the university of oulu, finland and followed the policies of the schools in all matters of child protection. the workshop participants were recruited by contacting local schools and teachers interested in participating in the campaign. information letters and consent forms were sent to the children and their legal guardians to be signed before participation. these letters included research- based information about gender and sexual harassment as the theme of the workshops, as well as information about the creative activities of the workshops and the campaign. they also included details about the use of the produced data and the possibility that the notes could be shared publicly and in research publications. these issues were discussed again with the children in the beginning of every workshop and additionally brought up whenever it seemed important. the activist orientation of the project was materially present in the creation of the valentine’s day cards as the children themselves chose the members of parliament to whom their cards would be sent. the children were able to withdraw at any time or negotiate their own way of participating. for example, in some of the workshops, a few of the participants created cards that they did not want to share as part of the campaign. those cards, or any cards that were ambiguous with respect to the children’s consent, were excluded from the project. even when carefully considering ethics as part of our praxis, engaging children in research– activism involves ongoing response-ability with respect to the project as it unfolds and, for example, becomes public. we maintain that staying with the complexities and trouble (haraway , , ) involved is important, as the entangled constellations of research and activism can produce processes of social change and transformation both within the lives of the children and within the wider terrains of social and educational policies and practices. particularly in relation to sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, which is a silenced and often unaddressed topic in schools, asking what matters to the children themselves is important. this, along with the premise of moving beyond merely stating the state of things in research on children’s peer and relationship cultures (e.g., huuki and renold ; renold ), guided our research–activist aim of helping children’s experiences and voices to be heard, sensed, and felt so as to cultivate conditions for co-flourishing. building upon the project, in this paper, we generated an analysis focusing on and departing from one of the workshops. the data are comprised of video-recordings of a workshop with eight girls, postscript notes in which the children described their experience and collaborative reflections, and personal field notes taken by the research team members. when returning to the data, our aim was not so much to gain access to some undisputable truth about the workshop. rather, the data helped us slow down—touch, sense, feel, and think—with the material, affective, and temporal entangledness involved. over the course of the research process—while we were engaged in the workshops, cataloguing the research materials, publishing results, and returning to the data to write this paper—the data were iterated upon, continuously reassembled, and engaged in diffractive encounters that ‘pulled in’ different times and spaces. theory is ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and tuin ) in the three analytically enacted moments— that is, moments enacted by us through agential cuts (barad ) within particular, contingent apparatuses of knowing (see also lenz taguchi and palmer ). in this paper, such cuts were inspired by touch. touch, as it unfolded for us here, carries resemblance to affect, as in ‘being affected’. it is also a bodily practice and a mundane moment, for example, a pen touching a paper or project ‘gender-based violence in pre-teen relationship cultures: how history, place, affect and arts interventions matter’, grant number . soc. sci. , , of a hand holding a paper slip. it is these affective and material tenors of touch that invited our attention. however, informed by and diffractively engaging with barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology, discussed previously in this paper, touch became removed from its human orbit. thus, in the three analytical sections below, we map, first, more-than-human touch focusing on the materially crowded moments within the workshops. in the second section, our focus becomes drawn to the affective charge, and we explore what else touch as a mode of material feeling and thinking does in moments of response and resistance. in the final analytical section, we focus on what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. by mapping and moving with touch, we engage touch as a more-than-human and more-than-present player that intra- actively engages in the material-discursive practices within and through which sexual harassment ‘comes to matter’ and, as we explore, potentially a player that engenders conditions of possibility for subtle shifts, marking and making differences that matter in the hurt, silence, normalization, and denial of gender and sexual harassment by enabling the opening up to change and transformation towards co-flourishing. . research–activist encounters below, we provide two accounts of the workshop. the accounts that we offer regarding the workshop must not be understood as a set of passive props but, rather, as a space–time entangled, affectively charged environment through and within which ‘what is “in” the foreground [is allowed] to acquire the shape that it does’ (ahmed , pp. – ). in addition to describing the process of the workshop, we attune to the affective atmosphere (stewart ) of the entanglements of the girls, the notes, movement, gestures, utterances, tables, chairs, and a makeshift mailbox, which will then be iterated in the following three analytical sections. . . the workshop similar to all the workshops, this workshop began with the children—eight girls in total— gathered in a circle of chairs. two student teachers led the session, and suvi participated. the student teachers read research-based statements about children’s friendship and relationship cultures. every time the participants agreed with the statement, they would stand up and switch seats. if they disagreed, or were unwilling or unable to take a stand, they would remain in place. the movement of one girl would easily stir movement in others. sometimes, amidst bodies anchored in place to be, then again, on the move, discussions would unfold, causing us to linger on a topic for longer. sometimes the topics would ‘touch’ the girls in a particular way, generating giggles or evoking stories—things the participants knew—about the ongoing relationships and romantic undercurrents within their peer relations. those ‘knowings’ were sometimes voiced aloud and other times evident only in quick glances and smiles. after the introduction to the topic of sexual harassment, the children were told about the research–activist campaign in more detail. they were instructed to craft valentines’ day cards and, if they chose, to write about harassment they had experienced. slips of paper with examples of some of the experiences disclosed in previous workshops with young people were put on the wall to prompt reflection. the notes described contentious and troubling touches and experiences with just a few words or a sentence, such as ‘i have been slapped on the butt’ or ‘some boys in our class groped between girls’ thighs with a ruler’. soon, the children began to collect materials to create their valentine’s day cards. they gathered in a close group around one of the tables, chatting while they cut and folded the base of the cards and decorated them with drawings, tapes, stamps, glitter glue, and colors. when the cards were nearly ready and the participants began to contemplate their postscripts, the atmosphere shifted. if they had previously been gathered together, they seemed to scatter around the classroom, taking their newly crafted cards or empty slips of paper with them. for some of the children, it seemed difficult to think of something to write. this was expected, as not all children are caught up in same ways within the flows of peer and relationship cultures. others hunched over their cards to shelter the affective, intimate, precarious space in which their experiences of harassment could be safely figured in words, soc. sci. , , of written down, attached to the card, and eventually, slipped into a makeshift mailbox that was set up on one of the tables. once placed in the mailbox, the notes and cards became part of the campaign. some of them were curated for publishing online, and all of them were mailed to decisionmakers. gradually, the workshop session came to a close as the children left the classroom to get lunch, leaving the research team with the video recordings and the to-be-written research notes, the box of cards, and lingering affects—as we will elaborate upon below—which became reassembled within the broader research–activist apparatus of change-making regarding sexual harassment (pihkala and huuki ). . . a girl with a note in the latter half of the workshop, one girl caught suvi’s attention. at this point, the girl had already put her valentine’s day card in the makeshift mailbox. she was one of the first participants to finish her card, but it did not include a postscript. suvi remembered telling her that this was okay, as we could use such cards if someone else had several bits of stories to share. after completing the activity, she returned to the table where the others were still making their cards. later, the girl began to meander around the room, walking from one table to the next and looking at the arts and crafts on the tables. we do not know what made her get up. perhaps she was prompted by the fact that others had begun to find more private spaces to write, or perhaps the request to share experiences was made more insistent by the movement of bodies and shift in attention. the girl halted by one of the tables, on which we had spread the notes that were previously hung on the wall to evoke discussion and reflection. she continued on but returned, pausing a bit longer by the table and whispering with another girl who had joined her there. having looked at the notes for a while, the girl asked, ‘could one write something like that?’ as she pointed to one of the notes. suvi confirmed that she could and encouraged her to write something down if she still wanted to. without saying much more, she took an empty slip of paper, returned to the table where she had been before, and began to write. moments later, the girl rose and walked to the makeshift mailbox, clutching the paper note, which was a little less than half the size of an a paper, close to her chest. then, carefully doubling the paper without folding it, as if to keep her writing sheltered from others, she reached towards the makeshift mailbox and slipped her note in. she stepped to the side, looked back at the box and then walked away, hands casually in her jumper pockets, but it felt that what just happened was anything but casual. after the workshop ended and we returned to our office to catalogue the cards, suvi noticed that very same paper note, remembering the color and size. she remembered how the girl moved and halted at the table, the pointing, the card, and the curve of the note as she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox. all the details were pulled into that moment of recognition in the office. in her note, which, as part of the campaign, became entangled in the wider mosaic of experiences of harassment, the girl shared her painful experience from a few years back. even though she sheltered the note from the eyes of her classmates, her slipping it into the makeshift mailbox, instead of the cards to be excluded from the project, gestured perhaps a political moment and movement of speaking out. we have not identified her experience in its singularity to ensure the girl’s anonymity and because our focus is not on the experience described on the note but, rather, on the microprocesses of change and the subtle shifts that unfolded within and through the workshop. however, to respect this movement from silence to speaking out and speaking up, we have elsewhere made parts of the children’s notes public (see huuki and pihkala ; pihkala and huuki ). . past–present child–card entanglements of response-ability in this section, we map touch through the three analytically enacted moments. each section, while entangled in nature, draws attention in specific ways to the productivity of the materiality, affective charge, and movements across time–space domains, as has been elaborated previously. soc. sci. , , of . . mapping touch as more-than-human the design of the workshops—its different modalities and creative activities, as elaborated previously in this paper; the size and composition of the group; and the attention to more-than- human—were co-constructed so as to enable an atmosphere that ‘touches’ enough to enable ‘responsiveness’, that is, to help children explore, communicate, and address experiences of harassment that easily tend to be overcast by deafening silence when addressed in the primary school classroom. during the workshop, the girls gathered together, moved about, and stayed still while crafting with papers, pens, glitter glue, tapes, and colors. the notes laid out on the table carried traces of experiences of harassment, connecting the workshop to the collective history of felt and sensed touches of sexual harassment, be it physical, verbal, or otherwise, enfolded in this entanglement of child-bodies, notes, circles, tables, and the campaign. this intra-action of bodies, movements, and materials opening up to the unexpected and emergent is our first analytical cut. for barad ( ), touching is not centered on a human being, nor is it only affective. it is ontological and epistemological. touching is what matter does. with this understanding of touch, the girls’ movements and haltings, rummaging through the arts and crafts materials, writing and drawing, and re-membering (barad ) past experiences fail to return to any one individual alone. similar to the girl with the pointed finger tentatively asking if it could be ‘something like that’, the ‘it’ that comes to matter fails to return to an individual imagination or recognition only. rather, within the intra-active entanglement of glitter glue, colors, paper slips, past-presents, and engaged bodies— sitting and moving in a circle and sharing experiences—it is not only the girls that touch and are touched. thinking along the lines of barad, both the girls and the matter—things, moments, and places—wander and wonder, curiously sensing and touching their im/possibilities, imagining, and inventing (barad , ). in these moments of moving, halting, inciting, and inviting human and other than human bodies, matter, in its curious and imaginative ‘self-touching’ form (barad ), reconfigures the girls’ experiences for recognition in new ways. as bodies move within the circle of chairs; smiles appear; pens touch paper; bodies shift and sway in proximity and distance; gazes fall on notes; and past experiences make themselves present, touches subtly shift and rework hurtful, painful, unaddressed, and deep-seated experiences—even an experience from two years ago—for recognition, bringing something within reach that was not present before and perhaps reachable in a way that was not possible before. . . what else touch can do: the affective charge in response and resistance our second analytical moment enacts a cut that draws focus to the affective charge in the intra- action of notes, bodies, and a makeshift mailbox. we return to the girl who clutched the note to her chest, carefully sheltering it from others, while also sharing it with others once she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox on the table. in the affectively charged mo(ve)ment of this ‘held-shared’ note from the intimacy of the girl’s chest to the public space of the makeshift mailbox, being touched does something else; it reconfigures conditions of possibilities for touching in response. when we returned to and re-engaged with this moment, we were caught by its force, as well as by our own visceral responses during the campaign. to elaborate, we had set up a pop-up stand in the university café to engage student teachers and faculty members in the campaign. the pop-up stand enabled passers-by to craft their own valentine’s day cards and include their stories of harassment during childhood as postscripts. while sitting by a table in a busy café, we also wrote down our experiences. more than once, we found ourselves confronted with the difficulty and discomfort of doing so. an array of charges passed through our bodies: who sees me; who passes by; who sees the painful experience that comes to matter and is made to matter in this moment. we understand such charges as sensed-felt resonances and dissonance between the sensitivity of the experience, deep-seated anxieties related to our experiences of harassment and abuse, and the publicity both in that moment and inherent in the promise of the campaign, which invited us to explore intimate experiences and make them matter for others. it is through those embodied affective encounters and similar experiences shared by colleagues that we began to speculate about the ways soc. sci. , , of the intra-active moment with the girl, the note, the moving–holding hands, and the makeshift mailbox was iteratively reconfigured from within the material and affective entanglements of the research–activist campaign. as we sensed-felt while writing our own notes about harassment, in this moment, with the girl and the note and the materiality and affects of our research–activist workshop, touch was a sensed- felt resonance that intra-acted with the cards, the pens, the tables, the public space of the café, the passing bodies, and the rhythm of academic work and time and opened up towards a possible other world, generating new patterns of diffraction. perhaps this touch is what clare hemmings ( ) calls affective dissonance, the incongruity of ontology and epistemology and of being and knowing, which is felt as a visceral force, such as uncertainty, shame, upset, decidedness, and courage. this force marks the sense and feel of something coming within reach that was not there before in a way that invites engagement. for hemmings ( , p. ), it is such dissonances that hold political possibility and the promise of movement. the movement within this entanglement of the girl—and, indeed, us as well—the note, and the embodied practice of holding the note close while reaching towards the makeshift mailbox unfolds as a mo(ve)ment of response, response-ability, and resistance. we contend that what touch as a more-than-human player does in this moment is that it co- constitutes a site and space of response—a space enfolded with affects, things, places, and moments and unfolding towards resistance. amplified by our own responses to writing down our pasts, we understand that the ability to be moved and affected to reach in resistance and to disturb the norms of what can be said, what can be resisted, what can be disrupted—be it the heterosexist normativities or intra-generational trauma (huuki and lanas )—is frail and precarious. yet, we maintain that the intra-active entanglement of the cards, the words written in the postscripts, the makeshift mailbox, and the promise and possibility of action enfolded in it allowed the past experience of hurt— the recognition—to reconfigure and to be not only known but to be resisted. . . what else touch can become: gathering up and holding together/apart across time–space domains as we curated the cards for the campaign website, the note became reanimated, making sense- able the response-ability and accountability it crafted by inviting and obliging us to care about it and to be careful with it without certainty if the ‘it’ is the card, the ‘data’, the words written in the cards, the girl who wrote it, the upsetting experience described in the note, the hurt embedded within it, or perhaps the academic writing about ‘it’. the intra-active entanglement of the child, cards, creative practice, research, and activism diffracts, sending out ripples that, no matter how small, hold the potentiality for ‘consequential meanings’ (haraway ). this touch of the girl’s response held its grip when we selected excerpts from the cards to publish on the campaign website and when the upset and hurt became realigned in the title of a news article in a national newspaper, (re-)making us as (modest) witnesses, complicit, and response-able (haraway , ). for haraway ( , p. ), this is exactly what touches can do: they shape and ramify accountability, where ‘[a]ccountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions’ but mundane practices of becoming with. as explored earlier in this paper, due to the affective charge sensed and felt by us while writing notes about our childhood experiences of harassment, there was a familiarity that resonated from the entanglement of the girl, the note, and the makeshift mailbox. it would be rather easy to foreground how we were emotionally affected by the girl’s story and how the touch–affect jumps back and forth, first during the workshop and again in the office, from us to the girl and from the girl to us or to all those ‘others’ who we can imagine being touched. perhaps it was the familiarity in the dissonance of holding close and disclosing that we recognize, of keeping hidden but wanting to seize the opportunity to disrupt conventional silences around touches that hurt—to reach and touch in resistance. the sense of familiarity moves us to speculate that we were not merely slightly grazed by this one experience and the touches surrounding it; rather, in being touched by the girl’s experience, matter, time, and space realigned and reinvented itself in a reiterative practice of reconfiguring (barad ). in effect, we argue that touch, as mapped here, reaches and holds across and beyond soc. sci. , , of space–time domains. our adult researcher bodies hold and carry ‘impressions’ of our own past touches—such as a re-membered slap—which, as barad ( ) notes, never left us. new touches stick to us, such as the touch–affect from the girl. these touches did not just stick and jump but became more-than-human and more-than-present players in this research–activist constellation. each touch invents new matter forms by gathering up and holding together/apart the past and present (barad ), the researcher-adult, the researcher-child, the girl with the note, the researcher with a note, and, perhaps, also the pre-teen girls that have been and will be affected by sexual harassment in their peer relations. neither the girl being touched nor we, who were being touched by the girl-being-touched, were contained in the ‘touch-encounter’. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), we enter into relations of response not because of what touches us from afar but because there were never separate parts to begin with. indeed, response-abilities are not crafted from a graze. in other words, they are not created by ‘knowing’ the girl’s troubling experience but from the capacity of us be(com)ing (with) in touch (see pihkala ), that is, the capacity of touch to draw times, spaces, and matter into new relations, inviting touch in response. . microprocesses of change and the possibilities of moving with touch knowing what we know and feeling what we feel, any of the notes from our research–activist campaign might be swarming with as many affects, times, and embodied materiality as surround the workshop or the girl with the note as discussed in this paper. nonetheless, in this particular entangled practice of engagement, this girl touched us, took hold of us, and pulled us to move with touch in response. furthermore, slipped into the makeshift mailbox, the girls’ notes, ‘crafted from and carrying their experience’ (renold , p. ), became ‘knotted’ with the wider change-making apparatus against sexual harassment: the campaigns, personal accounts, public debate, and (digital) feminist activism that have enabled young people to speak out against ‘rape culture’ in new ways (mendes et al. ). to claim how the campaign mattered to the girls—or any of the participants— would be speculative at best. however, the children’s need to address and explore their concerns related to gender and sexual peer cultures has been tangible time and time again as the children have voiced the need for safe spaces where sensitive topics could be discussed. for this, engaging children with creative activities can enable subtle shifts and minor gestures (manning ) towards sustainable alternatives in peer relations when imagined worlds are materialized through crafting, drawing, and writing. the research–activist encounters of our creative workshop against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures is materially rich, affectively charged, and temporally entangled. in gauging the microprocesses of change as they occur, we mapped touch and explored what else touch(es) can do. as we mapped in our analysis, the entanglement of the group of girls, valentine’s day cards, past, and present involved different kinds of touches in different registers, such as embodied, corporeal touches of gropes and slaps; verbal touches; material touches of pen on paper; present touches that leave impressions and linger; past touches that carry the residues of the past; the touch–affects that slip through cognition shooting straight through our bodies in resonances and dissonances; and the onto-epistemological touches that sense the virtual in an exploration of the possible, quantum, and queer touches, as discussed by barad ( ). just as touch seems to settle in senses, it is already on the move, reaching, holding, and gathering. the childhood slaps and gropes reached the valentine’s day cards in a café, the child-bodies reached a researcher-child, a finger reached for a pile of notes, a hand reached for the makeshift mailbox, the mailbox reached us, and the otherwise-made-possible reached the body-in-reach. we maintain that there is a particular benefit in thinking of the microprocesses of change with touch. for one, mapping touch, as we did here, enabled us to capture the subtle shifts in the children’s unaddressed, silenced, normalized, hurtful experience. rather than being here and there—or this or that—touches intra-acted within and through the workshop as more-than-human and more-than- present players and converged into an inventive, imaginative, sensing-feeling, matter-realizing apparatus, which activated recognition of, response to, and resistance against sexualized and soc. sci. , , of gendered force relations. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), this is what touch—when thought of in the quantum mode—can do: sense and feel and gather up and hold together/apart (barad , ). drawing matter into new relations, characterized by indeterminacy waiting to remake momentary alliances, touch reworks and recrafts response-abilities (barad ; haraway ). for another, the ethico-political tone of touch is intimate and entangled. with touch, it is impossible to keep one’s distance or disavow how we are touched and how the ways we touch shape and co-constitute the conditions of possibilities for touching in response and resistance to the ‘other’. our experience of being touched by the girls’ experiences and our research–activism, which brought disparate matters and modalities together, generating the imaginative, creative, sensing-feeling apparatus, knotted us in webs of manifold more-than-human and more-than-present touches that diffractively reconfigured ever-new possibilities for change. for us, as researchers and activists, thinking with touch engages theory in ways that moves and transforms relations, engagements, and accountabilities. we contend that this is the way feminist new materialist touch works: it is not only ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and tuin ) but becomes enacted when objects, bodies, abstractions, and moments intra-act—how they sense and feel, imagine and invent, reach in response, gather up, and hold together. finally, thinking about our research–activism with touch draws attention to the affective, material, and temporally entangled encounters that contest and remake what is possible, producing ‘differences that matter’. while the anatomy of these encounters cannot be laid bare, engaging them with new conceptual companions—as we did in this paper—can help enrich the ways we think, feel, and practice research in ways that can make a difference. indeed, moving with touch aligns with more-than-theoretical approaches to what research can do. it speaks to the power and potentiality of and responsibility to participate in co-composing research encounters that invite and enable response to the other. this demands that we carefully co-compose thick, material, and affective encounters that invite and enable children, researchers, and others to sense, feel, think, imagine, wander, and wonder with—to become with (haraway )—the postscripts, cards, pens, papers, space, and time and, through subtle shifts, make new kinds of, more livable, worlds. to close with a tentative gesture, mapping what touches do encouraged us to also imagine a touch that is of a world-making kind (haraway ) and one that creates accountability and response-ability (barad ). with this, we maintain that moving with touch is an open-ended endeavor but one imbued with conviction. touch not only brings other beings, spaces, and times together (or to matter) but also leaks out to other worlds by reaching in response and resistance, touching and carefully holding those other visions, worlds, and possibilities. at the same time, we are not left untouched; as we reach out, response and resistance stick to us. author contributions: conceptualization, s.p. and t.h.; investigation, s.p. and t.h.; methodology, s.p. and t.h.; writing—original draft, s.p.; writing—review & editing, t.h. and v.s. funding: this research was partly funded by academy of finland, grant number . acknowledgments: we would like to acknowledge communal and visual artist anna koivukangas for suggesting the title #metoo postscriptum to us when we were planning the project. we wish to thank the student teachers involved in the workshops as well as the teachers and most importantly the children and schools without whom the #metoo postscriptum would not have been possible. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflicts of interest. references ahmed, sara. . orientations matter. in new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. edited by diana coole and samantha frost. durham: duke university press, pp. – . barad, karen. . meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: 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of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ introduction – speaking subjects: celebrating twenty years of lacey’s unspeakable subjects gina heathcote* and arlie loughnan** the calendar year has seen an unprecedented rise in public discourse, globally, on issues that had previously been the domain of feminist and gender scholarship. key issues such as the challenging of sexual harassment and sexual assault as well as the need for diverse representation in public institutions became headline news. campaigns such as tarana burke’s #metoo project and the #womenswave spread from their us origins into a series of larger – global – conversations. for feminist activists and academics these are interesting times where decades of intergenerational work is being captured – and debated – in mainstream public discourse. the year also marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of professor nicola lacey’s seminal feminist account of legal thinking, unspeakable subjects: feminist essays in legal and social theory ( ). to mark the commencement of a third decade since the publication of unspeakable subjects we hosted an event at soas university of london to consider the continuities and relevance of the book in . scholars from law, criminology, gender studies, queer studies and sociology came together to discuss both the book and lacey’s wider intellectual contribution to the field of feminist legal studies. one of the outcomes of the symposium is this collection of personal and academic reflections as well as academic articles published in feminists@law. what was striking at the symposium, and also in this collection, is the importance and relevance of unspeakable subjects to this particular moment. as the history of feminist ideas and activism infiltrates public debate, it seems not just timely but absolutely crucial that the intellectual origins of contemporary debate be re-examined and remembered. the analysis of the tensions within feminist theories and their role in propelling insight into understandings of gender law reform is particularly pertinent. unspeakable subjects draws out the role of feminist jurisprudence in relation to legal theories more broadly – establishing templates for engaging the ‘big’ questions in legal theory from the construction of public and private, understanding of legal authority and theories of justice – while also situating feminist jurisprudence in dialogue with adjunct critical accounts, in particular legal accounts of race, political economy and sexuality. at the same time, the substantive examples in unspeakable subjects – sexual assault, pornography/censorship, and political arrangements – prefigure the spaces where feminist work enters public discourse in . in this collection these continuities between lacey’s oeuvre and contemporary conversations are enlarged – drawing out the power, persistence and relevance of her contribution to feminist legal theories over time. each of our contributors has also benefited from intellectual mentoring and friendship with niki – something that was given considerable attention at the symposium, drawing out the * reader in gender studies and international law, centre for gender studies and school of law, soas university of london, uk. email gh @soas.ac.uk ** professor of criminal law and criminal legal theory, school of law, university of sydney, australia. email arlie.loughnan@sydney.edu.au on the origins of #metoo see emejulu ( ). mailto:gh @soas.ac.uk mailto:arlie.loughnan@sydney.edu.au heathcote and loughnan introduction – speaking subjects ___________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ commitment to feminist care that she continues to bring – and always has brought – into intellectual spaces. as editors our turn to lacey’s work marks these memorable and formative personal engagements with her that we – and all the participants at the symposium further affirmed – felt was an important element of the feminist scholar and her scholarship. the publications here also represent a desire to recognise, and celebrate, the very distinctive feminist jurisprudence and feminist legal theories that have emerged in the british context and within which lacey’s work is central. noting that the field of feminist legal theory is often assumed to be dominated by us feminist voices, whether us radical, liberal or cultural feminisms as well as us critical race feminisms, we felt it timely to recognise the voices beyond us debates that have been pivotal in marking and establishing the field of feminist legal studies. within that field, lacey’s contribution is significant and unspeakable subjects stands as a particularly important contribution that responds to and elaborates on debates within, as well as criticisms of, us feminist legal theories. our project is thus also a paying of attention to feminist histories and a conscious act of engaging feminist trajectories and roots for their continued pertinence and relevance in an era where such histories are all too often forgotten or discarded in the search for new scholarship, new ideas and accounts. ***** the submissions here demonstrate the contemporary relevance of re-reading and returning to unspeakable subjects in this moment when the politics of austerity, renewed legal challenges to women’s autonomy and the need for intersectional approaches emerge as pressing issues within wider social discourses. as such, the symposium and this collection weave between established accounts and contemporary issues, drawing on each to develop new insight through the return to and elaboration of the persistence of the central claims of unspeakable subjects. looking across the collection of papers brought together in this special issue, a number of themes emerge. one prominent theme in the collection is the ongoing relevance of the critique of liberal law offered by lacey in unspeakable subjects. in particular, the lesson that feminist theorists must critically interrogate the apparently neutral and objective language of law – evident in the notion of the reasonable man and the gender neutrality of criminal defences, for example – remains as pertinent as ever. as emily jackson writes in her contribution, in the field of medical ethics and law, the apparent neutrality of law is embodied in the individualistic, autonomous patient, who makes rational decisions and is unaffected by the doctor-patient power dynamics. as legal systems respond to rapid social, political and technological change, the need to expose the ways in which liberal laws are cut through by power relations remains as great as ever. one of lacey’s central concerns in unspeakable subjects is to offer a critical examination of legal and state claims to do justice for citizens in the polity. in her analysis of the welfare state, lacey identifies as a central move a shift from ‘private to public patriarchy’ ( : ) at the heart of welfare provision. insa koch picks up this theme with her analysis of the gendered nature of austerity policies relating to access to council housing stock. with reference to a larger ethnographic study (koch ), koch argues that inequalities of eligibility and access are patterned along gender lines, where they frequently intersect with issues of race and class. her examination of women’s actual and lived experiences of welfare provides a strong critique of the gendered workings of ‘austerity’ politics, founding a strong case for political reform, feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ and demonstrating the ongoing need for the kind of critical analysis of state power presented in unspeakable subjects. concern with austerity also animates irene gedalof’s contribution to the collection. like lacey, gedalof is concerned to open our ideas of social justice to a recognition of collective differences and, with this, to challenge the public/private divide that stabilises and reinforces gender norms. for gedalof, this challenge is only more urgent in a political moment that, as she writes, ‘refuses precisely these recognitions’. referring to her monograph critically analysing neo-liberal austerity narratives (gedalof ), gedalof argues that the policies and practices of austerity individualise the problem of inequality and the crisis it provokes, and construct the problem of the ‘irresponsible parent who fails to reproduce properly inside the normatively gendered framework of marriage’, generating a culture of worklessness across the generations. in this policy discourse, ‘social justice’ works to deny ‘social context, social institutions, communities and cultures’ (lacey : ), drawing attention to the limits of liberal theories of justice and the pertinency of their critique, both now and at the time unspeakable subjects first appeared. another theme of the collection revolves around reflection on the nature of feminist jurisprudence. just as unspeakable subjects engages in critical reflection about the state of feminist theory, and encourages scholars to maintain reflexivity about their scholarly practice, gina heathcote draws out the need for ‘feminism’s power to question and reshape the categories of traditional debate’ (lacey : ) within legal writing and research to be actively and explicitly engaged. with a focus on legal subjectivity, heathcote seeks to articulate new methods of critique and reform to re-imagine a legal subject beyond sex difference, permitting greater engagement with difference within and throughout gendered lives. for heathcote, lacey’s work in unspeakable subjects provides a stimulus to advance feminist jurisprudence in examining the foundations of law, thus ensuring that contemporary feminist legal theories are better able to commence dialogues that respond to contemporary ‘feminist writing on gender and race, subjectivity and silencing/listening’. yet another theme evident in the collection concerns the contribution unspeakable subjects makes to debates within particular legal subfields. in her contribution, arlie loughnan picks up on lacey’s work in criminal law theory, and draws connections between this work and lacey’s feminist legal theory. as a criminal law theorist, lacey has pioneered a ‘critical’ approach to the study of criminal responsibility, leading the field in taking on the dominant legal-philosophical tradition of scholarship to make the case for the influence of social arrangements, power structures, and traditions and practices on the normative concepts such as criminal responsibility that structure criminal law (e.g. lacey ). and, in interdisciplinary work that may be seen as a bridge between her feminist theoretical work and her criminal law theory, lacey examines the ways in which gender and responsibility and crime have come together and apart in different historical periods (lacey ). inspired by this and other work of lacey’s, loughnan analyses women’s responsibility for crime over the twentieth century. drawing on a larger work examining australian criminal law (loughnan ), she points to the persistence of specificity and particularity in responsibility for crime that subsists beneath the general story of the triumph of generality and universalism in criminal responsibility, but which escapes the attention of mainstream responsibility scholars. in this account, loughnan joins lacey in exposing ‘the politics of the criminal law’ by reference to the ‘departures of legal doctrine from its own standard method’ (lacey : ). heathcote and loughnan introduction – speaking subjects ___________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ chiara cooper’s article in this collection also picks up on the contribution unspeakable subjects makes to particular issues within criminal law, namely sexual autonomy and consent. for cooper, unspeakable subjects offers a solid basis for an exploration about the value of sexual consent in the context of ‘ambiguous’ sexual misconduct brought to the fore in the #metoo movement. cooper argues that the current view of sexual consent in rape law and in society ‘fails to account for nuanced understandings of sexual abuse(s)’ and thus fails to accommodate the experiences of survivors of abuse. following lacey in seeking to disrupt the white, able bodied, masculine, heterosexual body as the legal norm (lacey : - ), she advocates a ‘more inclusive sexual politics’ away from the autonomous understanding of consent to one which acknowledges gendered power relations, environments and societal structures. a final theme to emerge in this collection relates to feminist networks or friendships in the academy. it is clear that lacey’s contribution to fostering such networks, and mentoring her students and colleagues, is unsurpassed. part of this contribution comes from lacey’s work. as sharon cowan writes in her contribution, ‘unspeakable subjects … became a cornerstone, and a turning point’ in her doctoral thesis, giving her ‘permission to be bolder’ and expand her intellectual horizons. for cowan, the influence of this work, and lacey’s role as her doctoral examiner, was the beginning of a long friendship, as she has remained ‘a supporter, a referee, an interlocutor and an enormous inspiration’ since then. similarly, for jackson, working with lacey at lse over many years has been a great fortune. as jackson writes, ‘quite simply, through niki’s work and through her example, i have learned how to think and write critically about the law’. as these comments indicate, lacey’s contribution to feminism is truly lived – in her friendships, the support she offers to others and in her interactions with students and colleagues, as well as in her scholarship. in this way, lacey embodies the feminist academic practice she writes about in unspeakable subjects. ***** we hope you will agree with us that the outcome is an impressive set of reflections and research on the place of feminist legal theory in : from austerity politics in britain to the complexity of #metoo on sexual politics in legal systems, the collection draws in a range voices, methodologies and laws in a manner that recalls the breadth and depth of unspeakable subjects. we cannot think of more appropriate words with which to conclude this introduction than to quote cowan’s contribution to the collection: niki is one of the best known and best loved feminist legal and social theorists, in the uk and beyond. she is an intellectual giant, prolific, creative, collaborative, and extremely busy. and yet, she is unstinting in her commitment to mentoring, nurturing and encouraging young scholars from all sorts of disciplines. we agree wholeheartedly, and are delighted to present this collection in celebration of the wonderful unspeakable subjects and its wonderful author. feminists@law vol , no ( ) __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ references akwugo emejulu, ‘on the problems and possibilities of feminist solidarity: the women's march one year on’ ( ) ( ) ippr progressive review . irene gedalof, narratives of difference in an age of austerity (palgrave, ). gina heathcote, feminist dialogues on international law (oxford university press, forthcoming ). insa koch, personalising the state: punishment, class and state failure in urban britain (oxford university press, ). nicola lacey. unspeakable subjects: feminist essays in legal and social theory (hart, ). nicola lacey, women, crime and character: from moll flanders to tess of the d’urbervilles (oxford university press, ). nicola lacey, in search of criminal responsibility: ideas, interests and institutions (oxford university press, ). arlie loughnan, ‘women’s responsibility for crime: dynamics of change in australia since the turn of the twentieth century’ ( ) ( ) law & history . years after tiananmen: dissent is not dead years after tiananmen: dissent is not dead elizabeth economy journal of democracy, volume , number , april , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /jod. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /jod. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ dissent is not dead elizabeth economy elizabeth economy is c.v. starr senior fellow and director for asia studies at the council on foreign relations, and a distinguished visiting fellow at the hoover institution, stanford university. she is the author of the third revolution: xi jinping and the new chinese state ( ). thirty years ago, tens of thousands of chinese university students de- scended on beijing’s tiananmen square—a landmark of chinese com- munist party (ccp) power—to advocate democracy and transparency. more than a million chinese citizens eventually demonstrated peace- fully over a period of six weeks. while the charismatic students in bei- jing claimed the international spotlight, chinese citizens from all walks of life, in both cities and rural areas, also took to the streets to call for political and economic reform. in his profound essay, dissident and historian wang dan reminds us what, precisely, these citizens were asking for. they wanted chinese his- tory to be accurately recounted and chinese people to enjoy the basic freedoms of speech and assembly. they also wanted more money to go to education, and—as a way of addressing official corruption—they wanted transparency with regard to officials’ pay. in the china of , these were significant asks. today, given the formidable security apparatus that the current ccp leadership has built, they seem almost unimaginable. the government’s approaches to quelling dissent form a highly effec- tive mix. they include the restoration of maoist-era mobilization tech- niques, the widening use of ever-advancing surveillance technologies, and the launch of a nationwide experiment in social engineering—the social credit system. despite these fierce deterrents, however, chinese intellectuals continue to call for political reform and opening; interest groups, entrepreneurs, and reform-minded economists question the heavy hand of the party-state; and broad nationwide movements seek large-scale social change. thus, in critical respects, the political values and spirit of collective journal of democracy volume , number april © national endowment for democracy and johns hopkins university press years after tiananmen journal of democracy action embodied in the democracy movement have endured and even thrived. as the world’s market-based democracies debate the rela- tive success—or failure—of thirty years of “engagement” with china, the continuing calls for political reform and expressions of citizen ac- tivism within the country should factor into any assessment of engage- ment’s impact and value. it is easy to look at the current climate of political repression and assume that little has changed in state-society relations since , or even that the democracy movement of that year was for naught. in fact, however, while the movement failed to reach its stated goals, the po- litical values and spirit of action embraced by those who took part in it have persisted. during the thirty years since tiananmen, china has experienced a profound transformation in the nature of civil society and collective political action. from the mid- s through the early s, chinese civil society blossomed. thousands of ngos, often working with western counter- parts, emerged to tackle a wide array of social challenges, including the environment, domestic violence, food safety, and the education of migrant children, among others. (one chinese ngo even helped to train citizens to run as independent candidates in local elections.) political debate flourished. groups of lawyers and others held monthly dinners in cities throughout the country, where they strategized on how to achieve legal and broader political reform. most notably, in , a group of chinese intellectuals and others— many of them veterans of —drafted charter to call once again on the ccp to undertake political reform. the effort was ultimately unsuc- cessful, and its architects paid a steep price: some went to jail; tragically, some even spent their last years in prison. liu xiaobo ( – ), the winner of the nobel peace prize, was among this last group. yet the push for political reform continued in myriad ways. the in- ternet became a virtual political space for netizens calling for greater transparency, the rule of law, and accountability in china’s political sys- tem. several well-known billionaire entrepreneurs, with tens of millions of online followers, lent their voices to causes such as environmental protection, political reform, and the fight against corruption. renowned chinese sociologist sun liping estimated that the number of citizen pro- tests throughout the country doubled between and , reaching a striking , in the latter year. many were successful. the revival of repression in , the expansion of space for speech and action came to an abrupt end. in november of that year, the ccp at its eighteenth party congress chose new leaders. incoming general secretary xi jinping moved quickly to consolidate his power while solidifying the ccp’s pri- elizabeth economy macy, showing scant tolerance for debate or activism regarding political reform. he and the rest of the ccp leadership launched an ideologi- cal campaign to root out western thought and values, firing professors critical of ccp policies and replacing top university administrators with ccp loyalists. the media was placed under new restrictions: some in- dependent journals were shuttered; others quickly adapted their content to the new regulations. the ccp also ramped up internet censorship, more tightly controlling the nature and flow of information, and sought to silence the popular billionaire bloggers with political attacks. in janu- ary , beijing implemented a new law on foreign ngos, causing the number of them operating in china to plummet from more than seven thousand to about four hundred. many of these ngos had played key roles in funding and building the capacity of their chinese counterparts. reaching more deeply into chinese political and economic life, xi called on all ngos and private businesses—including joint ventures with multinationals—to establish ccp cells and hand them power over major decisions such as where to invest. in this way, xi has further blurred the distinction between public and private and made every orga- nization more than ever an extension of the party-state. the xi leadership has also married technology to traditional forms of political control to create a fearsome surveillance state. for example, the government has revitalized systems of informants in classrooms, neigh- borhoods, and workplaces who report on others’ “incorrect” thoughts or suspicious political behavior. in the xinjiang uyghur autonomous re- gion, where beijing has launched a campaign against “terrorism, sepa- ratism, and religious extremism,” the ccp has dispatched more than a million officials to live in the homes of the region’s uyghur muslims, subjecting them to political education and reporting on their political, cultural, and religious practices. the regional government has also detained as many as a million uyghur muslims in “reeducation” and forced-labor camps. what this human monitoring network does is magnified tenfold by the network of electronic eyes that blankets the country. the govern- ment has placed more than two-hundred–million cameras—about one camera for every seven people—on street corners and in train cars, shopping malls, and classrooms to keep watch on every aspect of chi- nese daily life. the plan, reportedly, is to triple the number of cameras by . alongside this staggering surveillance infrastructure, the ccp regime is already deploying additional recognition technologies that can identify people by their voices or the way they walk. then there is the social credit system—a massive social-engineering project designed to shape the behavioral preferences of chinese citizens across a wide range of measures. underway in more than forty pilot pro- grams, it calculates the aggregate “trustworthiness” of citizens based on such considerations as whether they have repaid their loans, jaywalked, journal of democracy or otherwise misbehaved in public places. some of the pilot programs account for how many hours of video games a citizen plays or whether someone purchases chinese as opposed to foreign-made goods. failing to repay one’s debts is rated as particularly egregious. stirring memories of mao-era public shaming, some cities are plastering the faces of debt defaulters on large billboards. there is a phone app that can tell its user when a debt defaulter is nearby. a poor social-credit score can bar one from buying property or board- ing a plane or train. (already more than ten-million people with low scores cannot travel by plane or high-speed rail.) high scores, by contrast, can bring benefits such as priority boarding at the airport or deposit-free access to bike-shares. the social credit system also uses social pressure to encourage desired behavior; in some pilot projects, for example, score reductions hit not only people who take part in protests but their friends too. beijing has vowed that by the social credit system will encompass every chinese citizen. the irrepressible chinese the space for dissenting voices and action has narrowed considerably over the past six years. topics once open are now closed. in , for example, devastating floods in beijing brought an outpouring of altru- ism. residents of the capital used the internet to reach out to one another and to open their homes to stranded strangers, as well to criticize lo- cal officials for their handling of the crisis. in , major flooding in shandong province led the government to censor unofficial reporting and even to arrest two women who, in private emails, had discussed their worry that the carcasses of the quarter-million pigs drowned in the deluge might transmit disease. yet political space has not closed completely. scholars continue to pen articles that call for political reform and opening. tsinghua univer- sity law professor xu zhangrun, for example, published an essay in july criticizing personality cults and calling for xi’s elimination of the two-term constitutional limit for the presidency to be reversed. guizhou university economics professor yang shaozheng publicly defended constitutionalism and the rule of law; and zhang weiying, an adminis- trator at peking university, “argued that china’s economic development had occurred in spite of and not due to the ‘chinese economic model.’” broad social movements that cross class, gender, and geographic boundaries have also emerged in new and potent forms around issues of women’s and lgbtq rights and the environment. as china’s feminist #metoo movement took off in , more than thirty-million chinese discussed “sexual harassment” on wechat in just one month. feminist scholar leta hong fincher has noted that chinese feminists are not only speaking out on issues of violence against women or discrimination in elizabeth economy the workplace but also actively opposing the government’s efforts to push marriage and procreation, telling women that “they have the right to control their own bodies and they should not have to marry or have babies if they don’t want to.” importantly, chinese activists are not single-issue actors. some feminists, for example, are also raising ques- tions about labor practices, the uyghurs, and lgbtq concerns. online crowdfunding has allowed activists to reach out to the broader public to pay for things such as subway ads denouncing sexual harassment. workers’ rights also have engaged a broad spectrum of chinese so- ciety. in a fascinating case, chinese students from university marxist societies joined forces with labor activists to assist factory workers in establishing independent trade unions. in , students traveled to shenzhen to support a protest at a welding-equipment factory by work- ers seeking to form independent trade unions; thousands of other chi- nese citizens signed petitions supporting the workers. as one student stated, “lots of fellow students say: this incident is about workers, what does this have to do with students? i’ll tell them one thing: today’s stu- dents are tomorrow’s workers.” chinese workers have remained a significant source of social protest throughout the xi period. in , recorded labor protests topped , . the rapid introduction of technology has already proved a new source of unrest. in june , long-haul truckers launched a strike across mul- tiple provinces over a logistics app that was forcing them to bid their fees so low that they could no longer make a living. labor unrest is likely to escalate as the chinese economy slows and new technologies press workers hard or even replace them. the democracy movement marked the apex of chinese citizen activism and protest in the post-mao era. it also has exerted a profound and lasting influence on the political psyche of the established democra- cies. the iconic images of those days—of hunger-striking students, of the papier-mâché goddess of democracy staring down mao’s portrait in tiananmen square, and of the lone man calmly confronting the tanks on chang’an avenue—have come to stand for both china’s democratic potential and the failure to realize it so far. the xi administration’s suc- cess in reversing many of the post- advances in popular political participation—whether through the media, the internet, or ngos—has further reinforced a sense that the policy of engagement with china has failed. efforts to draw china into the international liberal order have not turned the country into a market democracy. on the contrary, it is now a place whose president busily seeks to spread elements of an authoritar- ian “china model” across the globe. such a grim assessment, however, is short-sighted and ignores several truths. first, through engagement the market democracies have made— and continue to make—a profound impact on the development of civil society and political action in china. in addition to providing support to journal of democracy chinese ngos, the international community has been leading by example on issues of environmentalism, feminism, and lgbtq rights, bolstering the work that chinese civil society is doing in these fields. furthermore, while the xi government may appear all-powerful, po- litical fissures are widening, and there are many pockets of discontent. there are liberal intellectuals and entrepreneurs who dislike the ccp’s growing intrusiveness; retired party elders who are unhappy about xi’s personality cult and his dismantling of succession procedures; work- ers who are losing jobs and money as technology gains ground; and nationwide social movements that demand broad changes. these actors all continue to push for political and social reform even if they succeed only rarely, and even then only at the margins. in the end, political change is a long game. as writer eric fish has commented in discussing the potential of the generation of chinese mil- lennials to take up the cause of political reform: “when they used tanks and machine guns [around tiananmen square] the government sent a pretty effective message that it wasn’t going to tolerate protest anymore. but they then erased, or attempted to erase, tiananmen. the side-effect is, the next generation that wasn’t around to receive that message— there’s not that fear that there once was about stepping out of line.” china has not yet realized the dreams of the democracy movement, and it may not even appear to be moving on the right track—but we have not reached the end of chinese history. notes . “china’s charter ,” trans. perry link, new york review of books, january , www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /chinas-charter- . . alan taylor, “rising protests in china,” atlantic, february , www.theatlan- tic.com/photo/ / /rising-protests-in-china/ . . yojana sharma, “beijing signals tighter control over dissenting scholars,” university world news, november , www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story= . . “fact sheet on china’s foreign ngo law,” chinafile, november , www. chinafile.com/ngo/latest/fact-sheet-chinas-foreign-ngo-law. . steven jiang, “chinese uyghurs forced to welcome communist party into their homes,” cnn, may , www.cnn.com/ / / /asia/china-xinjiang-home-stays- intl/index.html. . nick cumming-bruce, “rights groups seek u.n. inquiry into china’s mass deten- tion of muslims,” new york times, february ; stephanie nebehay, “u.n. says it has credible reports that china holds million uighurs in secret camps,” reuters, august , www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un-iduskbn kv su. . paul mozur, “inside china’s dystopian dreams: a.i., shame and lots of cameras,” new york times, july , www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/china-surveillance- technology.html. www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /chinas-charter- www.theatlantic.com/photo/ / /rising-protests-in-china/ www.theatlantic.com/photo/ / /rising-protests-in-china/ www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= www.chinafile.com/ngo/latest/fact-sheet-chinas-foreign-ngo-law www.chinafile.com/ngo/latest/fact-sheet-chinas-foreign-ngo-law www.cnn.com/ / / /asia/china-xinjiang-home-stays-intl/index.html www.cnn.com/ / / /asia/china-xinjiang-home-stays-intl/index.html www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un-iduskbn kv su www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/china-surveillance-technology.html www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/china-surveillance-technology.html elizabeth economy . nadra nittle, “spend ‘frivolously’ and be penalized under china’s new social credit system,” vox, november , www.vox.com/the-goods/ / / / / china-social-credit-score-spend-frivolously-video-games. . keegan elmer, “chinese debtors shamed with broadcast of names and faces on giant screens on may holiday,” south china morning post (hong kong), may , www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /chinese-debtors-shamed-broadcast- names-and-faces-giant-screens. . jezzamine wolk, “china develops app to monitor ‘deadbeat debtors,’” fox news, january , www.foxnews.com/tech/china-develops-app-to-monitor-dead- beat-debtors. . frank fang, “millions of chinese cannot travel by air or train under china’s social credit system,” epoch times, may , www.theepochtimes.com/millions-of- chinese-cannot-travel-by-air-or-train-under-chinas-social-credit-system_ .html. . genia kostka, “china’s social credit systems are highly popular—for now,” european voices on china, september , www.merics.org/en/blog/chinas-social- credit-systems-are-highly-popular-now. . xu xhangrun, “our current fears and expectations” (in chinese), the initium, july , https://theinitium.com/article/ -opinion-xuzhangrun-fear-hope; nicole hao, ”chinese professor gets fired for advocating constitutionalism,” epoch times, september , www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-gets-fired-for- advocating-constitutionalism_ .html; sharma, “beijing signals tighter control over dissenting scholars.” . han zhang, “one year of #metoo: how the movement eludes government sur- veillance in china,” new yorker, october , www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ one-year-of-metoo-how-the-movement-eludes-government-surveillance-in-china. . leta hong fincher, “#metoo and the feminist awakening in china,” interview by bill bishop, axios, october , www.axios.com/metoo-feminist-awakening-in- china- d - - -b e-d ba .html. . sarah zheng, “the fight against gender violence goes on for china’s ‘feminist five,’” south china morning post, july , www.scmp.com/news/china/society/ar- ticle/ /fight-against-gender-violence-goes-chinas-feminist-five. . leta hong fincher, “china’s feminist five,” dissent, fall , www.dissent- magazine.org/article/china-feminist-five. . “why the jasic dispute matters: this year and in the years to come,” china la- bour bulletin, december , https://clb.org.hk/content/why-jasic-dispute-matters- year-and-years-come. . sue-lin wong and christian shepherd, “china’s student activists cast rare light on brewing labor unrest,” reuters, august , www.reuters.com/article/us-china- labour-protests-insight-iduskbn l . . the app is called yunmanman. see “minitrue: delete news on truck drivers’ strike,” china digital times, june , https://chinadigitaltimes.net/ / /mini- true-delete-news-on-truck-drivers-strike. . gwynn guilford, “ years after tiananmen, chinese millennials are forgetting to fear their government,” quartz, june , https://qz.com/ / -years-after- tiananmen-chinese-millennials-are-forgetting-to-fear-their-government. www.vox.com/the-goods/ / / / /china-social-credit-score-spend-frivolously-video-games www.vox.com/the-goods/ / / / /china-social-credit-score-spend-frivolously-video-games www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /chinese-debtors-shamed-broadcast-names-and-faces-giant-screens www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /chinese-debtors-shamed-broadcast-names-and-faces-giant-screens www.foxnews.com/tech/china-develops-app-to-monitor-deadbeat-debtors www.foxnews.com/tech/china-develops-app-to-monitor-deadbeat-debtors www.theepochtimes.com/millions-of-chinese-cannot-travel-by-air-or-train-under-chinas-social-credit-system_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/millions-of-chinese-cannot-travel-by-air-or-train-under-chinas-social-credit-system_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/millions-of-chinese-cannot-travel-by-air-or-train-under-chinas-social-credit-system_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/millions-of-chinese-cannot-travel-by-air-or-train-under-chinas-social-credit-system_ .html https://theinitium.com/article/ -opinion-xuzhangrun-fear-hope www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-gets-fired-for-advocating-constitutionalism_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-gets-fired-for-advocating-constitutionalism_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-gets-fired-for-advocating-constitutionalism_ .html www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-gets-fired-for-advocating-constitutionalism_ .html www.axios.com/metoo-feminist-awakening-in-china- d - - -b e-d ba .html www.axios.com/metoo-feminist-awakening-in-china- d - - -b e-d ba .html www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /fight-against-gender-violence-goes-chinas-feminist-five www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/ /fight-against-gender-violence-goes-chinas-feminist-five www.dissentmagazine.org/article/china-feminist-five www.dissentmagazine.org/article/china-feminist-five https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-labour-protests-insight-iduskbn l https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-labour-protests-insight-iduskbn l https://chinadigitaltimes.net/ / /minitrue-delete-news-on-truck-drivers-strike https://chinadigitaltimes.net/ / /minitrue-delete-news-on-truck-drivers-strike https://qz.com/ / -years-after-tiananmen-chinese-millennials-are-forgetting-to-fear-their-government https://qz.com/ / -years-after-tiananmen-chinese-millennials-are-forgetting-to-fear-their-government s xjra .. article plainclothes policewomen on the trail: nypd undercover investigations of abortionists and queer women, – elizabeth evens in early twentieth-century new york city, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. these early female entrants to the new york police department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with progressive era vice reform; they tended to be work- ing class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. the nypd instrumentalized policewomen’s bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. but plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood. “women criminals sometimes ‘get away with it’ when only the men police officers are involved by the artful use of their feminine charms,” complained prominent journalist and public administrator louis brownlow in ; “i have known it to happen.” but, “not so when the policewoman is on the trail,” he proclaimed. brownlow captured the logic underpinning early policewomen’s success within the profession—their capacity and willingness to increase surveillance of other women. “some forms of crime,” he continued, “are more or less the spe- cial business of women criminals, and in this field the policewoman often is able to do quicker and more effective work than men police officers”—a dynamic most evident in investigations of criminalized female sexuality, including abortion and same sex desire. by employing women investigators, municipal police extended the state’s gaze into feminine spaces hitherto hidden from sight. crucially, policewomen themselves benefited from their gendered expertise. in the new york police department (nypd), the first female investigators were working class matrons furnished with a rare route to meaningful social mobility at the expense of women already marginalized. the foremost journal of women in policing reprinted brownlow’s article that concluded: “her feet may not be flat, but the policewoman is not a bad detective.” nypd women developed undercover techniques around the turn of the twentieth century, honed them through investigations of abortion, and later extended these methods to police queer women. from , white policewomen led the regulation of abortion in new york city primarily through plainclothes investigations in which they used language, clothing, thank you to the modern american history team—sarah phillips, brooke blower, and the editorial assistants—as well as the anonymous reviewers. this research owes much to jonathan bell and mara keire, to those at the new york municipal archives, and to barbara kahn and jonathan ned katz, who extensively researched and generously shared eve adams’ story with me. this article was completed with the financial support of the wolfson foundation. louis brownlow, “the policewoman and the criminal,” national municipal review , no. (july ), extracts reprinted in “the city and citizen,” international association of women in policing bulletin , no. (nov.–dec. ), reel zan- , periodicals and microform records, new york public library. © the author(s) . published by cambridge university press modern american history ( ), , – doi: . /mah. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://orcid.org/ - - - https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /mah. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core and narrative to pose as women with untenable pregnancies in order to target midwives from central, southern, and eastern europe. yet, this process also imperiled policewomen’s own moral and sexual reputations. during investigations they received invasive pelvic exams and later testified about these intimate procedures before all-male grand juries and the court of general sessions. having made themselves indispensable to policing, they adapted plainclothes techniques according to heightened regulation of queer nightlife and the intensification of the federal deportation machinery in the s. policewomen were critical, but often overlooked, arbiters of urban sexual mores during the progressive era. in the substantial literature on moral reform in new york city, historians have argued that because of political and police corruption, it fell to private reform groups to define and enforce moral order. scholarship has focused on how organizations such as the committee of fourteen, the society for the suppression of vice, and the rockefeller grand jury controlled sex work, homosexuality, and birth control. policewomen’s work reveals that the state was more innovative and invested in methods to police criminalized female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood. although women are familiar figures in the urban reform landscape, historians have focused on their roles as middle-class philanthropic volunteers or as college-educated social workers who harnessed welfare policy for reform. a generation of historians of the gendered welfare state grappled with how these women also used assistance as an instrument of social control. however, women’s use of punitive tools is less studied. as in welfare, male administrators were more likely to cede professional territory in matters relating to women and their criminality. informed by this perceived gendered divide between welfare and punitive work, histories of policewomen have presented them as “nurturant” social workers or “municipal mothers.” the nypd applied women’s police titles inconsistently. for clarity, i use “policewoman” to refer to nypd women who performed investigative work. most of these women retained the rank of “matron” until , but their work was distinct from the care of the stationhouse and many were temporarily assigned to other nypd squads. on the connection between policing midwifery and abortion, see leslie reagan, “linking midwives and abortion in the progressive era,” bulletin of the history of medicine , no. (winter ): – . timothy j. gilfoyle, “the moral origins of political surveillance: the preventive society in new york city, – ,” american quarterly , no. (autumn ): – . also on the society for the suppression of vice, see nicola kay beisel, imperiled innocents: anthony comstock and family reproduction in victorian america (princeton, nj, ). on the committee of fourteen, see george chauncey, gay new york: gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, – (new york, ); and mara l. keire, for business & pleasure: red-light districts and the regulation of vice in the united states, – (baltimore, md, ). for recent scholarship considering the rockefeller grand jury investigations, see brian donovan and tori barnes-brus, “narratives of sexual consent and coercion: forced prostitution trials in progressive-era new york city,” law and social inquiry , no. (summer ): – . gwendolyn mink, “the lady and the tramp: gender, race, and the origins of the american welfare state,” in women, the state, and welfare, ed. linda gordon (madison, wi, ), ; robyn muncy, creating a female dominion in american reform, – (new york, ), , – ; gwendolyn mink, the wages of motherhood: inequality in the welfare state, – (london, ), . a notable exception is mary odem, delinquent daughters: protecting and policing adolescent female sexuality in the united states, – (chapel hill, nc, ). for analysis of women’s regulatory work on ellis island, see val marie johnson, “protection, virtue, and the ‘power to detain’: the moral citizenship of jewish women in new york city, – ,” journal of urban history , no. (jul. ): – ; and jessica pliley, “the petticoat inspectors: women boarding inspectors and the gendered exercise of federal authority,” journal of the gilded age and progressive era , no. (jan. ): – . johnson and jennifer fronc examined undercover women in the committee of fourteen’s macy’s department store investigation in val marie johnson, “‘look for the moral and sex sides of the problem’: investigating jewishness, desire, and discipline at macy’s department store, new york city, ,” journal of the history of sexuality , no. (sep. ): – ; and jennifer fronc, new york undercover: private surveillance in the progressive era (chicago, ), – . muncy, creating a female dominion, xv. dorothy schulz described the “nurturant roles first carved out by early policewomen,” in “a precinct of their own: the new york city women’s precinct, – ,” new york history , no. (winter ): – . see elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core historian mary odem, however, in called for scholars to recognize how “the professional success and status of early police women rested on their control and surveillance of other wom- en’s sexuality and social behavior.” in the two decades since odem’s call, this connection has become even more urgent as activists and academics have theorized “carceral feminism,” which delineated how some women encouraged and legitimized the expansion of state power in the late twentieth century under the guise of claiming new protections for women. these theori- zations demand a reckoning with the longer history of white women’s complicity in and col- lusion with the carceral state. in this article, i demonstrate how the first-wave feminist goal to see women enter male-dominated professions and government institutions harmonized with the aims of moral regulators, who wished to extend their reach into female immigrant spaces that had hitherto eluded them. the historical oversight of policewomen’s work stems, in part, from the notorious sparsity of policing records due to self-censorship and, in new york city, the accidental destruction of the policing museum. i use newly catalogued district attorney felony indictments ( – ) held at the new york municipal archives. these documents vary in scope; some files contain only affidavits listing demographic information about the accused, while other records include correspondence, physical evidence, interview transcripts, and other material gathered by police and prosecutors. i read these sources alongside trial transcripts from the court of general ses- sions, police reports, and municipal correspondence to document how policewomen’s bodies became a conduit for the policing of urban immigrant populations in the progressive era. an analysis of policewomen’s undercover work illuminates how they carved out a unique role in controlling other women’s sexuality and reproduction. new york policewomen sur- veilled immigrant midwives, coerced working class women to testify in abortion trials, and, in the s, applied these methods to criminalize queer women. this work represented white women’s installation as agents in the carceral state. plainclothes police matrons in the late nineteenth century, middle class voluntarist women mobilized around issues of female criminality by calling for institutional change in policing and prisons. organizations like the women’s christian temperance union and the women’s prison association also gloria myers, a municipal mother: portland’s lola greene baldwin, americas first policewoman (corvallis, or, ). mary e. odem, review of from social worker to crime fighter: women in united states municipal policing, by dorothy moses schulz, and a municipal mother: portland’s lola greene baldwin, america’s first policewoman, by gloria e. myers, american historical review , no. (apr. ): – . elizabeth bernstein, “carceral politics as gender justice? the ‘traffic in women’ and neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights,” theory and society , no. (may ): – ; victoria law, “against carceral feminism,” jacobin magazine, oct. , , https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /against-carceral-feminism/ (accessed nov. , ); molly smith and juno mac, revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights (london, ), – ; denise tomasini-joshi, asha bandele, victoria law, mariame kaba, and erin cloud, “finding justice for victims in the #metoo era,” mar. , , open society foundations recording, http:// www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/finding-justice-for-victims-in-the-metoo-era (accessed jan. , ). matthew guariglia, “what the loss of the new york police museum means for criminal justice reform,” washington post, may , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /what-loss-new-york- police-museum-means-criminal-justice-reform/ (accessed may , ). new york district attorney indictments ( – ) at the new york municipal archives, new york [here- after nyma, da], became available in following a grant from the national endowment of the humanities to rehouse, index, and create a digital database for over , indictments. histories of policewomen usually rely on published writings and philosophies, written by policewomen them- selves and middle-class reform women. when scholar janis appier did examine case files in her study of lapd policewomen, she complicated the idea of “mothers to all” advanced elsewhere in policing women: the sexual politics of law enforcement at the lapd (philadelphia, ), . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /against-carceral-feminism/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /against-carceral-feminism/ http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/finding-justice-for-victims-in-the-metoo-era http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/finding-justice-for-victims-in-the-metoo-era http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/finding-justice-for-victims-in-the-metoo-era https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /what-loss-new-york-police-museum-means-criminal-justice-reform/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /what-loss-new-york-police-museum-means-criminal-justice-reform/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /what-loss-new-york-police-museum-means-criminal-justice-reform/ https://www.cambridge.org/core envisioned appointing white female matrons as a means of injecting moral propriety into the disorderly, mixed-gender stationhouse and improving the treatment of incarcerated women. the first matrons entered new york prisons in the mid-nineteenth century, but reformers gained renewed impetus in subsequent decades following high profile cases of male officers’ sexual misconduct. with this momentum, the new york state governor signed a bill in pledging to install matrons to all stationhouses. isabella goodwin was typical of this first generation of matrons. born in to a working-class family in greenwich village, in she married nypd roundsman john goodwin and the pair had four children at the time of john’s death just eleven years later. thirty-one years old, widowed, and needing to support her family, goodwin took the civil service exam and became a matron at mercer street station in . as opposed to the genteel prison reformers, early matrons tended to be working-class white women, many were widows, and they often possessed family traditions of policing. some matrons were first- or second-generation immigrants from western europe, while african american, jewish, and italian applicants faced discrimination in the civil service entrance exam. for eligible applicants, the matron position offered financial and job security, a connection to familial ties in policing, and a rare route to meaningful social mobility. but matron work was physically demanding and took place in testing environments. matrons spent long shifts, during the day and overnight, in poorly maintained, uncomfortable stationhouses. here they searched the bodies of female detainees, dealt with intoxicated women and rough sleepers, and managed overcrowded cells. in addition to these tasks, they tended to children who were temporarily and permanently lost by their parents, as well as to sick women awaiting medical attention. the laborious nature of this work made it unappealing to middle- class women. the introduction of matrons also coincided with an increase in the number of women arrested by the nypd. perhaps policemen felt more comfortable detaining women with the knowledge that they would enter a matron’s custody. from these beginnings, wom- en’s presence furthered the ability of municipal police to regulate female residents. most matrons spent their police careers within the stationhouse, but a small number of opportunistic matrons sought new duties, at first within the precinct by assisting on investiga- tions involving women and children in police custody, drawing upon perceived feminine exper- tise. mary sullivan became a matron in harlem in and swiftly sought new work by earning the confidence of female detainees to elicit key details of crimes. in her autobiography entitled my double life—a nod to the importance of undercover work to policewomen’s pro- fessional identities—sullivan alleged that some “women prisoners very much resented my pres- ence among the detectives” as “i ruined the coquettish role which feminine prisoners and witnesses often like to assume and which the men usually encourage.” this prowess led her outside the stationhouse to extend nypd surveillance into female spaces. police estelle freedman, their sisters’ keepers: women’s prison reform in america, – (ann arbor, mi, ); mary aldrich-moodie, “staking out their domain: women in the new york city police department, – ” (ph.d. diss., university of north carolina, ), , – . of those who worked on abortion cases, one woman was an irish immigrant, one had irish grandparents, and the other was born in new york to parents from the german speaking alsace-lorraine. the first black, irish, and jewish policewomen were hired in by bypassing the civil service exam, discussed later in the article. on dis- criminatory recruitment processes, see james lardner and thomas reppetto, nypd: a city and its police (new york, ), – . this is the subject of chapters and of aldrich-moodie, “staking out their domain,” – , . see also, dorothy moses schulz, “the police matron movement: paving the way for policewomen,” police studies: the international review of police development , no. ( ): – ; “what the matron does,” the sun, nov. , , . mary sullivan, my double life: the story of a new york policewoman (new york, ), . on the nypd’s employment of charles dancy, a black informant, to surveil black communities, see lashawn d. harris, “‘women and girls in jeopardy by his false testimony’: charles dancy, urban policing, and black women in new york city during the s,” journal of urban history , no. ( ): – . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core headquarters did not issue a coherent policy on this work; rather, women “made their own jobs” by rendering themselves indispensable. for ambitious matrons, these ad hoc investiga- tions became their only route to promotion. upon her appointment to the detective bureau, sullivan proudly reflected that “the tiresome, confining days of sitting in the rear of clinton street stationhouse were over at last.” policewomen adopted plainclothes to gain information and to catch suspects in the commis- sion of a crime. undercover work was an existing part of the turn-of-the-century professional woman’s toolkit. female journalists, most infamously nellie bly in her new york world exposé of the women’s lunatic asylum at blackwell island, showed how gendered undercover tasks offered women a rare route to professional renown. longstanding gender ideologies informed a belief in feminine powers of observation and knowledge of women’s networks, and these powers gained new importance in private reform initiatives. organizations like the new york probation and protective association and big sisters movement, in addition to groups devoted to specific communities such as the young women’s hebrew association, relied upon female-led surveillance. mary sullivan situated policewomen’s undercover work within traditions of gendered expertise to stress its skilled nature. she argued that police- women needed to be more than investigators: they needed to possess the observation and note- taking skills of a reporter; the language abilities of an accomplished linguist; and the character work, costumes, and vocal abilities of an actress. in the s, the nypd increasingly relied upon matrons’ sleuthing skills to resolve a range of cases, particularly those affecting women. practicalities partially inspired this system, as men could not convincingly pose as victims of certain crimes. additionally, as a minority presence on the police, women aroused less suspicion; their femininity masked their state-given regula- tory power. newspapers widely reported tales of female sleuths catching criminals, albeit often in a cartoonish tone. in one of her many investigations of fortune tellers, isabella goodwin posed as the childhood sweetheart of clairvoyant frank henry wolf, who targeted widows and duped them into investing in a fake stock company. she “gushed for a year to reach alleged swindler’s heart,” proclaimed one news story under the headline “mrs. goodwin’s love lure led to prison.” newspapers conflated policewomen’s personal and professional lives to titillate their readers. when goodwin remarried in , the sun announced that goodwin “changed her name again, as she frequently has done in the past, but this time not for police reasons.” such reporting showed the centrality of undercover work to the policewoman’s public persona and revealed a preoccupation with their sexuality that would also permeate the courtroom. by the second decade of the twentieth century, undercover work emerged as a primary means of professional recognition for policewomen, leading to commendations, money, and promotions. by , isabella goodwin was experienced in cases involving fortune tellers, spir- itualists, false medical practitioners, and con artists. despite her transfer to the detective bureau, she retained the “matron” title and salary. her status changed in february , when two bank clerks transporting $ , between branches via taxi were robbed at gunpoint in an infamous sullivan, my double life, , . on the transfer from surveillance of women’s welfare to policing repertoire in england, see louise jackson, women police: gender, welfare and surveillance in the twentieth century (manchester, uk, ), . female journalists also went undercover to investigate abortion in the late nineteenth century, such as augustus st. clair’s “evil of the age” series for the new york times in and the “girl reporter” of the “infanticide” series for the chicago times in – . see appier, policing women, – and sullivan, my double life, , , – . jackson, women police, – . “mrs. goodwin’s love lure led to prison,” the sun, nov. , , . louise jackson makes this observation about women’s undercover work in s britain in women police, . “detective’s new husband is her own secret affair,” the new york herald, nov. , , . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core case known as the “taxicab robberies.” the nypd could not locate their main suspect, “eddie the boob” kinsman, so they pursued his girlfriend “swede annie.” to do so, the deputy com- missioner looked to isabella goodwin. the matron donned a “shabby suit” and “old shoes” to seek employment in annie’s rented accommodation as a maid in order to gather evidence. goodwin immersed herself in the role: she served three meals a day; “swept and scrubbed the floors”; and collected rent, all the while conducting policework by listening “through the key hole.” when she learned that “swede annie” had some new clothing, she followed her hunch and telephoned the shop owners, discovering that the suit was purchased in albany with the stolen dollar bills. her information led to the arrest of the perpetrators and inspired national newspaper headlines, a special police commendation, and, at age forty-seven, goodwin became the first female detective in the united states, earning a salary equal to male officers. as a detective, investigating abortion became one of her main duties. undercover abortion investigations, – abortion was particularly visible in nineteenth-century new york city; it was the site of the cat and mouse chase between madame restell, the most infamous abortionist in united states his- tory, and anthony comstock, the well-known leader of anti-vice campaigns. at the turn of the century, people traveled from all over the state and further afield to access abortion, while the daily press ran sensationalized accounts of abortion-related deaths. although notorious, abor- tion seemed impossible to police. medically, the presentation of spontaneous miscarriage and induced abortion were often indistinguishable. practically, abortion occurred in physical spaces and social networks beyond regulators’ reach. and legally, most eyewitness testimony entailed the complicity of a witness in the crime. while most women who had abortions in the criminal era survived, these regulatory challenges meant that the historical record disproportionately captured abortion-homicides. informed by this, histories of abortion in the early twentieth century have focused on the regulation of “dangerous” practitioners who caused women’s deaths. however, in new york city, there were significantly more arrests for abortion when a woman survived; the state was more interested in controlling abortion than previously thought (figure ). in the early twentieth century, physicians’ efforts to regulate abortion dovetailed with their desire to marginalize midwives in the competitive medical marketplace. for new york’s immi- grant communities, midwives played a vital medical and social role, as they shared a language with their patients, paid house visits, and spread information and gossip. as community insiders, their authority often outstripped that of physicians. midwife services were also “only woman detective relates how she captures,” the sun, aug. , , . “the first municipal detective in the world,” new york times, mar. , , . beisel, imperiled innocents; janet farrell brodie, contraception and abortion in nineteenth-century america (ithaca, ny, ); amy gilman srebnick, the mysterious death of mary rogers: sex and culture in nineteenth-century new york (new york, ); cheree carlson, the crimes of womanhood: defining femininity in a court of law (urbana, il, ), – . on the myth of the “back-alley butcher,” see rickie solinger, beggars and choosers: how the politics of choice shapes adoption, abortion, and welfare in the united states (new york, ), – ; and carole joffe’s remark- able work on the decades before roe, “portraits of three ‘physicians of conscience’: abortion before legalization in the united states,” journal of the history of sexuality , no. ( ): – . looking at coroner records, leslie reagan argued, “from the late nineteenth century through the s, the state prosecuted abortionists primarily after a woman died.” leslie reagan, “about to meet her maker: women, doctors, dying declarations, and the state’s investigation of abortion, chicago, – ,” journal of american history , no. (mar. ): – . reagan, “linking midwives and abortion in the progressive era”; elizabeth ewen, immigrant women in the land of dollars: life and culture on the lower east side, – (new york, ), – . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core economical, as they charged less money than physicians and tended to both mother and infant. state and private organizations subjected midwives to greater surveillance, as the par- ticular embodiment of nativist fears. midwives represented immigrant women’s networks of exchange and autodidactic knowledge production that did not conform to the increasingly exclusive definitions of medical authority. this led professionals to brand midwives “danger- ous.” as nurse and leader of the settlement house movement, lilian wald summarized: “perhaps nothing indicates more impressively [the medical establishment’s] contempt for alien customs than the general attitude taken toward the midwife.” “the two terms ‘midwife’ and ‘abortionist’ are synonymous,” argued elisabeth crowell in a article for charities and commons, blaming midwives for the majority of the estimated , abortions committed annually in the city. in , crowell, a nurse by trade, posed as a board of health inspector to investigate over midwives in immigrant neighborhoods on manhattan’s upper and lower east side. her report led to the midwifery law that empowered the board of health to issue and demand licenses, annual registration, and inspec- tions of literacy, cleanliness, and equipment. private reform groups responded to this man- date with greater surveillance of midwives. in , ruth standish baldwin of the committee of fourteen investigated twenty-seven midwives who advertised in foreign-language newspapers, finding that twenty-three agreed to perform an abortion. baldwin described one midwife’s office as “indescribably dirty” with a “foul odor,” and the midwife herself as intox- icated, telling “revolting stories,” including “relieving young girls” through abortion. baldwin’s description drew upon white slavery narratives of a young female victim, a vision figure . data from nypd annual reports – on the type of abortion offense. “all other types” includes abor- tions arrests listed as “unclassified,” “attempted,” “committed on patient by female,” “committed on patient by male,” and “committed on other persons.” judy barrett litoff, “forgotten women: american midwives at the turn of the twentieth century,” the historian , no. (feb. ): – . lilian wald, the house on henry street (new york, ), – . elizabeth crowell, “the midwives of new york,” in the american midwife debate: a sourcebook on its modern origins, ed. judy barrett litoff (new york, ), – , . see also reagan, “linking midwives and abortion in the progressive era”; and joyce thompson and helen varney burst, a history of midwifery in the united states: the midwife said fear not (new york, ), . research committee of the committee of fourteen, the social evil in new york city: a study of law enforcement (new york, ), – , . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core central to the committee’s work, but she cast the midwife, rather than a male seducer, as the predator. white slavery narratives deployed xenophobia and antisemitism to paint an image of foreign villains “who despoiled the purity of a young, white, christian victim and lived off the proceeds of her shame,” as historian val marie johnson described. the committee’s inspec- tor mapped these tropes onto the midwife to justify the “constant and painstaking supervision” and heralded women’s special role in this regulation. under the leadership of lieutenant dan costigan, nypd special squad number two per- formed a range of undercover vice investigations, but between and their main inves- tigative duty was policing abortion. policewomen had previously partnered with private medical interests to defend the boundaries of professionalism, with isabella goodwin working with a female detective of the new york county medical society to gain evidence against irreg- ular practitioners. this new squad extended these shared interests and consisted of two teams of two women: ada brady and maude leslie, and isabella goodwin and adele priess. goodwin was a working-class new yorker, while brady was a first-generation irish immigrant. matron adele priess, who worked as a translator on investigations with goodwin, was born in new york to parents from alsace on the french-german border. she learned german “through having heard it spoken at home” and worked as a language teacher before her marriage to a german migrant. special squad two assembled a team of ambitious, experienced matrons, whose class and immigration status reflected the communities they sought to police. in a precedent-setting january case, isabella goodwin and adele priess visited a mid- wife’s office at east th street, in the immigrant populated yorkville neighborhood on manhattan’s upper east side. matron priess had a muddled conversation in german with mid- wife pauline papp, who would have preferred to use hungarian. in their polyglot discussion, priess explained that goodwin missed menstruation, suffered morning sickness, and feared she was pregnant. they needed to end the pregnancy because she “was a widow, she works in an office, and her friend is a married man.” midwife papp declined to give medicine and recommended instead that she undertake a pelvic examination, citing her twenty-three years of midwifery experience and training in budapest. but goodwin hesitated. papp suggested that she go home instead, take a hot english mustard bath, wrap up warm, and return in the morning if these measures did not induce an abortion. when the policewomen returned to papp’s office the next day, she agreed to perform an operation for twenty-five dollars. when the pair tried to haggle, she explained that while they may find someone that charged less, she knew how to do it “well and right.” the women agreed and goodwin lay on her back on the cold dining room table. she drew her knees up, placing her feet flat on the wooden surface, and lifted her skirts in preparation for the intimate exam. she felt the midwife’s fingers inside her and saw her reach for surgical instruments. papp positioned a syringe at the entrance to detective goodwin’s vagina. at this moment, the policewoman announced she felt sick with nerves and her partner ran to the window, where she drew a handkerchief to her face. two male officers waiting on the street recognized this gesture as a signal and entered the apartment. they arrested the midwife, who protested in english that “all midwives fix.” johnson, “protection, virtue, and the ‘power to detain,’” . committee of fourteen, the social evil in new york city, . see elizabeth evens, “‘the most doctored woman in new york’: medical professionalism and surveillance in the career of detective frances benzecry,” society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era blog, oct. , , https://www.shgape.org/the-most-doctored-woman-in-new-york-medical-professionalism-and-surveillance- in-the-career-of-detective-frances-benzecry/ (accessed jan , ). ada brady also occasionally worked with a nurse, helen callogran. people v. pauline papp, jan. , , p. , trial , reel , new york court of general sessions, criminal trial transcripts collection, new york lloyd sealy library [hereafter nycgs]. people v. papp, . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.shgape.org/the-most-doctored-woman-in-new-york-medical-professionalism-and-surveillance-in-the-career-of-detective-frances-benzecry/ https://www.shgape.org/the-most-doctored-woman-in-new-york-medical-professionalism-and-surveillance-in-the-career-of-detective-frances-benzecry/ https://www.shgape.org/the-most-doctored-woman-in-new-york-medical-professionalism-and-surveillance-in-the-career-of-detective-frances-benzecry/ https://www.cambridge.org/core goodwin and priess recounted these events on the witness stand in the court of general ses- sions, where the case created new precedent: a woman did not have to be pregnant for the defendant to be guilty of an attempted abortion. judge j. mclaughlin dissented and argued that papp’s case ought to be dismissed as “had the defendant succeeded in doing all that she intended to do she would not have committed the crime of abortion.” although this com- plaint haunted the method, the nypd deployed it as the primary means of policing abortion. the new york district attorney recorded twenty special squad two cases against twenty-five defendants, but most investigations did not lead to indictments and isabella goodwin alone recalled working on forty such cases. women were uniquely capable of carrying out these investigations, and not only because their bodies could meet the evidentiary bar, but also because female relationships linked each stage of criminal abortion: sourcing an abortionist, attending the procedure, aiding recov- ery, and offering compassion. because of the homosocial nature of abortion, women could, and did, seek a special role policing the crime by disrupting the physical and social spaces that eluded their male colleagues. the disguises policewomen adopted indicated which practitioners and patients they sought to control. when abortion was criminalized in the nineteenth century, physicians and feminists alike argued that genteel white women most frequently sought abortions. against the backdrop of high immigration rates from ireland, and from eastern and southern europe, this rhetoric evoked the nativist specter of “race suicide.” this image of the white upper class aborting woman endured into the early-twentieth century, most patently in the film where are my children?, written and directed by lois weber for universal pictures. however, in prac- tice, regulatory efforts did not focus on manhattan’s affluent white doctors and their clientele. rather, municipal policewomen targeted the immigrant neighborhoods of yorkville, east harlem, and the lower east side. they posed as working-class immigrant mothers using lan- guage skills and adopting accents. the nypd co-opted and then weaponized the class and gen- der community that matrons shared with those they policed in order to destabilize and dismantle the networks upon which criminal abortion depended. in some plainclothes people v. papp, . cited in contemporary legal handbooks, for instance, arthur b. spingarn, laws relating to sex morality in new york city (new york, ), . judgment included in case , folder , box , nyma, da. case numbers relate to special squad two cases between and . people v. bertha schmulenson, jan. , , p. , case , reel , nycgs. on female networks of exchange in the pre-industrial era, see linda gordon, woman’s body, woman’s right: a social history of birth control in america (new york, ), – ; leslie reagan, when abortion was a crime: women, medicine, and law in the united states, – (berkeley, ca, ), – . harris, “women and girls in jeopardy”; stephen robertson, “harlem undercover: vice investigators, race, and prostitution, – ,” journal of urban history , no. (may ): – . nicola beisel and tamara kay, “abortion, race, and gender in nineteenth-century america,” american sociological review , no. (aug. ): – ; where are my children?, directed by lois weber and phillips smalley (universal, ). the new york district attorney indictments record that the nypd arrested individuals following police- women’s undercover investigations between and . those arrestedlived at separate addresses; eleven in yorkville, eight in the lower east side, six in harlem, two in midtown, and one on the west side. yorkville, bound by nd street to the south and th street on the north, central park, and the east river, was home to irish, german, hungarian, czech, slovakian, and italian immigrants. the lower east side was home to groups of immi- grants, particularly following waves of italian, jewish, and eastern european migration from the s. at the turn of the century, irish and jewish populations began to leave east harlem, and by the s a large part was an italian community, as robert orsi detailed in his study of religion in this area. see “yorkville” and “lower east side” in kenneth jackson, lisa keller, and nancy flood, eds., the encyclopedia of new york city (new haven, ct, ), ; lawrence epstein, at the edge of a dream: the story of jewish immigrants on new york’s lower east side – (san francisco, ); robert orsi, the madonna of th street: faith and community in italian harlem, – (new haven, ct, ), – . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core investigations, white policewomen investigated black spiritualists and medical practitioners—as mary sullivan documented in her autobiography—but there are no records of white police- women targeting black midwives in their abortion investigations. policewomen constructed narratives of reproductive vulnerability to create believable dis- guises. their stories were reminiscent of the real women who wrote letters to birth control advocate and eugenicist margaret sanger’s journal, the birth control review, asking for abor- tion information. in a december letter, “mrs l s” was seventeen years old, had two infant children under the age of two, and suspected she was pregnant again. she wrote to the review of her health problems, her pain, her difficulty breastfeeding, and that she weighed just ninety- six pounds. the teenager confided that if her husband discovered her pregnancy he would “beat the life out of” her and she would “give or do anything not to have another baby.” she was “entirely at [their] mercy.” similarly, twenty-four-year-old “mrs c b” stressed the financial, familial, and health reasons for seeking an abortion. in may , she detailed the expenses for her husband, child aged ten months, and disabled parents-in-law: her husband’s wage was $ , they paid $ rent, $ . for milk, $. for baby food, and $ . for their own meager diet of dry vegetables, bread, and coffee. in investigations, policewomen imitated these nar- ratives by wearing black to pose as widows, asking for a reduced fee, and emphasizing the num- ber of children they had in order to nurture a false and misleading community with the midwives. policewomen’s evocations of aborting women were not always convincing however. in her autobiography, margaret sanger recalled a police raid of her recently opened brownsville clinic in october . brooklyn detective margaret whitehurst visited the clinic and claimed to be a penniless mother of two, but staff remained skeptical as she did not appear “overburdened or anxious” and was “well fed as to body and prosperous to clothes.” most conspicuously, whitehurst insisted on paying two dollars for the ten-cent copy of sanger’s writings. when she left, sanger allegedly pinned the two-dollar bill to the wall with the caption “received from mrs. – of the police department, as her contribution.” she gave a scathing description of whitehurst to the brooklyn daily eagle following her arrest, stating that perhaps the woman detective “did only her duty,” but sanger would “rather scrub floors for [her] bread than earn it by fighting [her] sisters.” even when confronted with policewomen’s direct testimony and, frequently, reliance on lan- guage interpreters to understand proceedings, midwives protested the criminalization of their behavior. they organized in protective associations to furnish legal aid when members faced abortion charges and attended trials to study the faces of female investigators. in march , policewoman ada brady accused sixty-nine-year-old german midwife elizabeth bayer of attempted abortion following an undercover investigation. bayer wrote to the district attor- ney asking to appear before the grand jury and “tell them my story” of a “perfect record” main- tained over thirty-three years practicing midwifery. it is unclear whether bayer did appear in court, but the case against her was dismissed. her letter showed how a working class, immi- grant woman—usually seen as the subject of social control—harnessed the legal system to con- test her treatment. in trials, midwives employed defense attorneys with whom they shared a nationality and culture. together they drew attention to language barriers between police and midwives, questioned policewomen’s accounts, and undermined their methods. sullivan, my double life, – . mrs l s, “letter no. ,” dec. , , the birth control review , no. (jan. ): . mrs c b, “letter no. ,” undated, the birth control review , no. (may ): . margaret sanger, margaret sanger: an autobiography (new york, ), – . “mrs. sanger, after night in jail, has new worries,” brooklyn daily eagle, oct. , , . crowell, the midwives of new york, ; committee of fourteen, the social evil in new york city, . letter from elizabeth bayer to edward swann, mar. , , case , folder , box , nyma, da; donovan and barnes-brus, “narratives of sexual consent and coercion,” . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core midwives also exploited policewomen’s professional precarity to discredit their testimony. when asked why she performed a pelvic exam on detective isabella goodwin, pauline papp alleged that she “was positive that [goodwin] was not pregnant,” but “that she was syphilitic.” in another case, russian jewish midwife bertha schmulenson argued that she examined the policewoman as “her stomach was very fat.” midwives impugned policewomen’s respectability as a form of resistance that highlighted the gendered tensions between women and their female regulators. the tension could stifle abortion investigations. policewoman mary sullivan claimed that when policewomen tried to arrest female midwives, they would “fling their instruments out the window, tear their hair, and beat their heads against the wall,” whereas a male arrestee hesitated to “make himself ridiculous by struggling against a feminine police officer” and instead “sheepishly” accompanied them to the precinct. in abortion trials, policewomen’s gendered precarity became a resource for midwives to protest their criminalization. abortion investigations were a thus a paradox for policewomen. on one hand, these cases led to career advancement; isabella goodwin and adele priess received a merit on the honor roll because of their arrest of an abortionist. yet, despite representing the state and serving as gatekeepers of feminine respectability, the investigative method demanded that special squad two behave disreputably. in the masculine courtroom, policewomen’s bodies were key evi- dence, and attorneys scrutinized their moral character by asking about their marital status, hus- band’s job, and number of children they had. despite the ruling that a woman did not need to be pregnant for an abortion attempt, the manner of the insertion of hands and instruments into female officers’ vaginas emerged as a key moment as the court grappled to establish intent. prosecutors’ and defense attorneys’ questions echoed the titillating newspaper accounts of female sleuths. undercover abortion investigations resulted in comparatively few indictments and convic- tions. but despite limited prison sentences, these cases punished midwives by printing their names in newspapers and confiscating medical equipment. more importantly, this plain- clothes work destabilized the female networks central to the practice of abortion during the criminal era, the effects of which cannot be measured by counting affidavits. when police- women gained an ally in the first female nypd deputy police commissioner in , their dis- comfort with the investigative process, as well as the limited number of convictions secured, led to the suspension of undercover abortion investigations. female management and the changing surveillance of women’s sexuality in january , ellen o’grady became fifth deputy commissioner of the new york police department, the first woman to hold that rank. o’grady was an irish immigrant, widowed mother to three daughters, and a brooklyn probation officer of ten years. writer djuna barnes commented on o’grady’s commanding presence, writing that she possessed a mouth that “moves for the state.” incoming mayor john hylan appointed her in response to the people v. pauline papp, . people v. bertha schmulenson, , . ibid., . “women detectives honored,” new york tribune, feb. , , . brian donovan analyzed progressive era trials and showed how defense attorneys questioned the sexual respectability of female witnesses in white slave crusades: race, gender, and anti-vice activism, – (urbana, il, ), – . lashawn harris described how newspapers maligned supernatural workers, who were also targets of plain- clothes female officers, in sex workers, psychics, and numbers runners: black women in new york city’s underground economy (urbana, il, ), . “women police deputy in office,” new york tribune, jan. , , ; djuna barnes, “woman police deputy is writer of poetry,” in vivid and repulsive as the truth: the early works of djuna barnes, ed. katharine maller (new york, ), . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core shifting policing concerns of world war i and the expansion of voting rights to women. with the united states’ entry to the war, the regulation of female sexuality assumed a new impor- tance as a paramount issue of national defense and keeping soldiers “fit to fight.” this changed the status of the policewoman in new york and nationally. in , the federal government formed the commission of training camp activities (ctca) that, empowered by the chamberlain-kahn act, aimed to halt the spread of venereal disease by subjecting “suspicious looking” women to involuntary medical examinations, imprisonment, and possible long-term confinement to a reformatory or detention center. while some female reformers led criticisms of this program, other women engineered this regulation. in many cities, these wartime powers were a catalyst for the introduction of women in policing for the first time, as the ctca recruited a new cadre of middle class volunteers as “patrolwomen” to regulate wartime sexual and social behavior. meanwhile in new york city, the war added personnel and duties to a movement well versed in the regulation of female sexuality. ellen o’grady hired six patrolwomen from the milieu of college educated, volunteer, or politically affiliated women, distinct from the earlier generation of matrons. meanwhile, in may , commissioner richard enright bypassed the civil service exam to appoint new york’s first african american, italian, and jewish policewomen—cora parchment, rae nicoletti, and rose goldstein—tasked with surveilling neighborhoods of their ethnic and racial backgrounds. o’grady also created a new “social welfare” squad under her direct supervision in february , recruiting isabella goodwin, adele priess, maude leslie, and ada brady, the four police- women who previously comprised the abortion squad. in the nypd annual report, o’grady denounced the former method of policing the “horrible crime” of abortion: the fifth deputy commissioner did away with the old custom that compelled a female representative of the police department to submit herself to a physical examination in order to gain evidence against abortionists. the manner of getting evidence now is less dangerous and not so degrading. the old method was useless, no convictions being pos- sible as the female representing the police department was forced to voluntarily partici- pate in the commission of a crime, and became, consequently, an accessory. the wonder is that nobody saw the worthlessness of the practice before. when a woman ascended to nypd leadership, she took steps to guard the female officers in her employ. social mobility, longevity in policing, and a powerful ally amplified veteran police- women’s voices, leading to improved working conditions and mitigating their courtroom humiliation. however, these professional women’s empowerment continued to come at the expense of other women. despite o’grady’s disavowal, undercover abortion investigations con- tinued in a modified form. instead of policewomen’s bodies, the nypd now placed young working-class women, who had previously had an abortion, on the line. “woman named as police deputy in new york,” the hartford courant, jan. , , . scott stern, the trials of nina mccall: sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women (boston, ), ; odem, delinquent daughters, – ; schulz, “a precinct of their own,” , – ; courtney shah, “‘against their own weakness’: policing sexuality and women in san antonio, texas, during world war i,” journal of the history of sexuality , no. (sep. ): – . indeed, the titles “patrolwomen” and “policewomen” were only merged in . “six policewomen put on the force,” new york times, aug. , ; schulz, “precinct of their own,” . parchmont resigned just months later and was replaced by lawon bruce, the second black woman on the nypd. see aldrich-moodie, “staking out their domain,” – . “enright overrules woods decision in new shake-up,” new york tribune, feb. , , . nypd, “annual report” (new york, ), . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core policewomen experimented with alternative methods of abortion control before o’grady’s appointment. in may , matron ada brady went undercover to gather evidence against german midwife augusta peters for performing an abortion. in this case, instead of prosecut- ing peters, the nypd recruited her as an informant. thus when twenty-two-year-old finnish iraka monthan visited peters two months later, the midwife instructed her to return to an abor- tionist who had ended her pregnancy before. peters then informed the nypd who sent detec- tive isabella goodwin to pursue monthan to the office of german midwife lena motz, but goodwin arrived too late to stop motz inserting a firm rubber bougie in monthan’s vagina. iraka monthan did not miscarry until weeks later, at which time she was incarcerated in the waverly house detention center. goodwin coerced monthan into complying with the prose- cution, allegedly telling her “that if [she] didn’t tell that story to the harlem police court [she] will get in prison for five years.” when monthan took to the stand, she endured ques- tions about her sexual history, the circumstances of the abortion, and her knowledge of police- women’s involvement, all the while feeling the experienced eyes of the detective upon her. as the assistant district attorney commented in the trial, the young woman had become the inad- vertent “stool pigeon.” thus, although aborting women often avoided prosecution, the state found ways to punish them beyond obtaining a conviction. in , policewomen again coerced a pregnant woman into supplying evidence in an abor- tion trial. two policewomen approached twenty-eight-year-old and pregnant anna colwell and instructed her to return to a male doctor who had previously performed an abortion for her. the policewomen accompanied her to the office, where colwell received a pelvic exam- ination. when the case went to trial in , colwell, instead of the policewoman, endured bel- ligerent questioning. attorneys told her that she had committed a crime, read her the law, warned her of the potential penalty, and asked her in detail about the attempted procedure. colwell expressed her discomfort on the stand and complained that the investigation had con- tinued for over two years, during which time she had “lost two positions,” had to take care of “a sick baby,” and “was ashamed of everything.” policewomen had decisively shifted the burden of the demeaning investigative process. meanwhile, ellen o’grady adopted a casework approach that commenced new types of sur- veillance. in , anna vogel wrote to mayor john hylan’s office—a common tactic for cit- izens seeking redress—as she had gotten pregnant from an extramarital affair while her husband served abroad, and sought help. o’grady visited her on several occasions and oversaw her move to a maternity home. her case report conveyed frustration with vogel, whom she chastised for wearing corsets that were too tight in an effort “to conceal her condition,” causing the baby to be underweight. but what irked the deputy commissioner most was that when vogel’s husband, “who she deceived,” returned, vogel would have given the infant to the sisters ada brady v. augusta peters, mar. , , case , folder , box , nyma, da. augusta peters’s lawyer samuel dickheiser later defended midwife lena motz, who peters had implicated. he raised this issue in the trial people v. lena motz, , p. , trial , reel , nycgs. monthan had initially avoided returning to lena motz because she was gravely ill following the first procedure. waverly house case , july , , case , folder , box , nyma, da. this bougie remains in the da indictment folder to this day. people v. lena motz, . ibid., . the district attorney declared “the ends of justice do not require us to proceed against” women who had abor- tions, john f. o’neil, “memo for mr ryttenberg,” jan. , , case , folder , box , nyma, da; reagan, “about to meet her maker,” . people v. frederick van vliet, jan. , , case , folder , box , nyma, da; people v. frederick van vliet, dec. , case , folder , box , nyma, da. people v. frederick van vliet, aug. , , p. – , trial , reel , nycgs. ibid., – . ibid., . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core at the new york foundling asylum, thus bearing no consequences for her transgressions. policewomen maintained their position as gatekeepers of reproductive surveillance. notably, o’grady exercised only limited authority within the male-dominated world of the nypd. if she protested institutional misogyny, she undermined her own position. two cases illustrate both o’grady’s agency, but also her circumscribed approach, to sexual assault. on december , , o’grady received complaints that two wealthy, influential men had sexually assaulted two seventeen-year-old girls. she sent adele priess to arrest them, but police commis- sioner richard enright’s staff secretary blocked the matron. o’grady wrote to enright on december : “it is high time that millionaires like seaman and dempsey [the accused rapists] are punished for taking pretty children into their apartment for immoral purposes.” the commissioner could not “deter [her] in the performance of [her] duty.” another allegation of sexual assault had passed o’grady’s desk in april , in which a prison matron complained that a male guard sexually assaulted female inmates as he escorted them alone through a passage from the jail to a van that took them to court. o’grady judged the case to be false because the female witnesses had “prison records,” and a victim allegedly lied frequently, according to her probation officer. instead, o’grady attributed the claim to a personality clash between the matron and the guard. this case was not reported in newspapers, and o’grady never compared it to her protests, but her judgment of the accusers in this case echoed her report on pregnant anna vogel and treatment of the “stool pigeons” in abor- tion investigations, whose own criminality was implicated in their cases. in o’grady’s eyes, per- haps, these cases did not conform to the standards of perfect victimhood exemplified in the teenagers reportedly assaulted by the millionaires seaman and dempsey. when o’grady sought to prosecute the two wealthy men in december , commissioner enright marginalized her within the department, by diverting her staff to other duties and no longer supporting any of her initiatives. her outspoken critique had come at a price. one year later, o’grady marched into enright’s office and threw her badge on the desk, announcing: “i could not stay and retain my self-respect and independence. i was forced to resign. there was nothing else i could do.” expanding undercover techniques and surveilling queer women o’grady’s resignation was followed by another setback for the policewoman’s cause. in early , the nypd established an experimental women’s precinct that, despite a well-publicized opening, soon fell into obscurity and quietly closed in september with no official reason. these two events placed women in new york policing in complex dialogue with the nascent national policewomen movement. established in , the international association of women police (iawp) grew with the wartime and postbellum expansion of policewomen to new cities. the iawp pursued professionalization through a monthly bulletin that detailed information about affluent donors, instructions to lobby state legislatures, and even reading lists to learn more about the movement. it promoted a vision of the modern policewoman that stressed education—ideally at the college level—and formal training according to the ideals of “prevention and protection.” ellen o’grady to marian hylan, dec. , , roll , departmental correspondence: police department, new york municipal archives mayor hylan papers [hereafter nymahp]. also cited in aldrich-moodie, “staking out their domain,” – . ellen o’grady to richard enright, dec. , , roll , nymahp. chas i stengle to mayor hylan, apr. , ; ellen o’grady to chas i. stengle, apr. , ; ellen o’grady case report, apr. , , roll , departmental correspondence: police department, nymahp. “mrs o’grady, hurling shield at enright, quits; assails commissioner,” new york tribune, dec. , , . historian dorothy schulz has argued that its closure stemmed from the precinct’s aim to house women who had not committed a crime, which encroached upon the established charity sector and conflicted with the concur- rent push to professionalize social work. see schulz, “precinct of their own,” – . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core in new york, despite the appointment of some middle class women after world war i, in , of seventy-five policewomen officially employed by the nypd, fifty-five were former matrons, including mary sullivan. however, like o’grady, sullivan endured a backlash when challenging nypd priorities. “the story of my eclipse began in ,” she wrote in her autobiography, when she petitioned the state legislature to change the status of the “matron,” who were “paid less than the patrolmen, had no opportunities for promotion, and were given very low pensions” comparatively. in may , sullivan’s complaint achieved leg- islative assent and matrons became “policewomen,” but sullivan also earned a reputation as a troublemaker. because she had “stepped out of [her] place,” when all nypd women were reas- signed following the fleeting women’s precinct, sullivan found herself consigned to a station- house. for sullivan, “to be sent back to matron duty after having served on the homicide squad and worked on important cases for the district attorney’s officer was a stunning blow.” meanwhile, the nypd established a new twelfth division plainclothes squad, composed of “entirely fresh personnel.” amongst this squad were barbara popkin and margaret taylor, who recommenced undercover abortion investigations using the pelvic exam method. according to a annual report, they were “highly successful” in this practice. policewomen extended undercover methods to police different crimes. new recruit margaret leonard, for example, surveilled the streets in plainclothes to gain evidence against “mashers”—men who verbally or physically harassed women on the street. policewomen also expanded their expertise in matters of criminalized female sexuality in a landmark case involving a lesbian tearoom operator, which saw margaret leonard team up with mary sullivan, who returned to her investigative duties following the appointment of a new police commissioner. much like the women of the midwife’s office, queer women occupied liminal social venues and urban spaces that male members of the nypd could not easily access. once more, policewomen pioneered investigative methods to extend state surveillance. in june , the veteran sullivan and rookie leonard partnered to use undercover methods to investigate a greenwich village tearoom, “a ‘hangout—where ladies prefer each other,’” on the ground floor of macdougal street. sullivan published an account of the case in the october iawp bulletin, describing it as typical of the “careful vigilance and observation” exercised by policewomen and the “drastic measures” taken to “clean new york of vicious moral per- verts.” the case was so significant that sullivan repeated it at length in her autobiogra- phy, citing the raid as an innovative example of policework for readers’ information and entertainment. following a complaint to the district attorney, sullivan and leonard investigated the propri- etress of the tearoom, eve adams, a polish jewish émigré, born chawa zloczewer, with a back- ground similar to the midwives. historians have detailed how state and private actors policed sexual acts between men in the early twentieth century, often arguing that male sexuality was more visible to authorities. the ariston bath raids and newport naval investigation theresa melchionne, “policewomen: their introduction into the police department of the city of new york” (m.a. diss., hunter college, ), – . sullivan, my double life, – ; “police women win same rank and pay as men,” new york tribune, may , , . unfortunately, due to damage from damp, only the affidavit in these cases remains. margaret taylor v. philip korn, oct. , , case , folder , box ; barbara popken v. jane adler, oct. , , case , folder , box ; barbara popken v. pietrina gennare, june , , case , folder , box ; barbara popken v. augistina zumlauska, aug. , , case , folder , box ; barbara popken v. margaret reid, jul. , , case , folder , box , nyma, da; nypd, “annual report,” , , . “pincher pinches a knee; pinched by his pinchee!” daily news, dec. , , . mary sullivan, “the tea room case,” iawp bulletin, oct. , – . on policing queer male immigrant bodies, see nayan shah, stranger intimacy: contesting race, sexuality, and the law in the north american west (berkley, ca, ), – . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core even harnessed plainclothes techniques. meanwhile, histories of queer women have focused on carceral institutions as sites where female same sex desire was expressed, identified, and repressed. yet, in the s, queer women also became more visible in urban centers, because of changing patterns of female marital practices and employment. these two policing trends coalesced in the tearoom case. when leonard and sullivan visited the tearoom, they sat separately in the “artsy” venue, adorned with dark wooden beams, pewter, and “andirons that might have dated from the american revolution.” in her account, sullivan painted eve adams as the sexual aggressor, a “wild looking individual,” who approached leonard “with the directness of a stone from a slingshot.” adams did not conform to feminine codes of dress or styling; in sullivan’s words, she had “cropped hair that was combed back in a ragged pompadour, and a mannish suit supplemented with a collar and tie.” indeed, her adopted name was a nod to the gender nonconformity she embodied. mary sullivan suffused her account with homophobic stereo- types characterizing adams as possessing unrestrained, masculine sexuality and suggested that she favored only inappropriately young women such as the “girlish” leonard. in her pub- lished accounts, sullivan omitted that the policewomen had in fact visited the tearoom on three occasions in attempts to make adams’ acquaintance. through this dissemblance, the policewoman inverted the reality of the state’s aggressive pursuit of its queer female residents. on her third visit, leonard arranged to attend a matinee with adams and allegedly, “en route in a taxi from the tea room to the theater, the woman spoke flatteringly of the police- woman’s charms, addressed her in endearing terms, and embraced and caressed her,” kissing her “so ardently in the taxi that several policemen became interested, and [leonard] had to wave her handkerchief as a signal not to interfere.” while sullivan surely embellished the account, policewoman leonard implicated her own reputation, recalling in later testimony that adams placed her hands “under my coat and on my breast” and “kissed me profusely.” after the theater, leonard and adams went to a restaurant and danced a waltz, before returning to the washington square apartment, where adams gifted the policewoman a copy of her self- published collection of studies lesbian love. according to leonard, the five-foot-tall adams chauncey, gay new york, ; george chauncey, “christian brotherhood or sexual perversion? homosexual identities and the construction of sexual boundaries in the world war one era,” journal of social history , no. (winter ): – ; sherry zane, ‘“i did it for the uplift of humanity and the navy’: same-sex acts and the origins of the national security state, – ,” the new england quarterly , no. ( ): – ; brian donovan, respectability on trial: sex crimes in new york city, – (albany, ny, ), – . estelle freedman, “the prison lesbian: race, class, and the construction of the aggressive female homosexual, – ,” feminist studies , no. (summer ): – ; sarah potter, “‘undesirable relations’: same-sex relationships and the meaning of sexual desire at women’s reformatory during the progressive era,” feminist studies , no. (summer ): – ; cheryl hicks, “‘bright and good looking colored girl’: black women’s sexuality and ‘harmful intimacy’ in early-twentieth-century new york,” journal of the history of sexuality , no. (sep. ): – . cookie woolner, “‘woman slain in queer love brawl’: african american women, same-sex desire, and violence in the urban north, – ,” the journal of african american history , no. (summer ): , ; christina simmons, “companionate marriage and the lesbian threat,” frontiers: a journal of women studies , no. (autumn ): – . sullivan referred to eve adams under the pseudonym “billie” in her account; sullivan, my double life, . see also chad heap, slumming: sexual and racial encounters in american nightlife, – (chicago, ), . sullivan, my double life, , ; freedman, “the prison lesbian,” ; hicks, “‘bright and good looking colored girl,’” . federal deportation hearing at the women’s workhouse, welfare island, overseen by inspector thomas conroy, “record of the hearing in the case of chawa zlotchover alias eve adams” ( – nov. ), . courtesy of barbara kahn via steven seigel, of the buttenwieser library of nd street y. sullivan, “the tea room case,” – . federal deportation hearing, “record of the hearing in the case of chawa zlotchover,” . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core then thrust her onto the bed and tried to become intimate with her, at which point the police- woman made her excuses to signal other police officers. as in abortion cases, the police- woman’s body was implicated in the investigation, suggesting the complex interplay between leonard’s exploitation within the masculine institution of policing that sought to instrumental- ize women’s bodies as tools of surveillance, and her own agency and pursuit of professional advance. when the nypd raided the tearoom, they arrested eve adams. the policewomen next encountered adams in a deportation hearing at the women’s work- house on welfare island in november . following her arrest, adams was sentenced for the crimes of disorderly conduct and authoring an indecent book, during which time the federal government issued a warrant for deportation. there existed no legal grounds to exclude women based on same sex desire; nonetheless, in this era immigration officials experimented with different clauses to exclude queer people at the border. inspector thomas conry pre- sided over the hearing that grappled with queer female sexuality; the court asked if anyone had ever accused adams of “practicing sapphism” and whether she tried to “make love” to policewoman leonard, but they spent more time tying her case to prostitution. first, conry suggested adams ran a brothel, second that she personally sold sex, and third, that she partic- ipated in the “white slave” traffic, asking if during her a visit to poland she tried “to bring several young girls to the united states … for immoral purposes.” in comparison to vague notions of queer female sexuality, immigration officials possessed tools to regulate prostitution and immigration officials co-opted the accusation of selling sex to deport a range of nonmar- ried women. here, they attempted to apply these rules to eve adams. although the policewomen took pains to characterize the tearoom proprietress as having unrestrained sexuality, she was stoic in her court appearances, firmly rejecting the charge of prostitution. what is more, policewomen’s investigations sought to persecute not just adams, but the whole tearoom clientele and broader queer community. but eve adams refused to give the names of anyone else associated with the tearoom or involved in publishing lesbian love. “she had stood pat,” variety reported. like the midwives, she mobilized her community to contest her arrest. adams’s uncle, alexander migdall, a u.s. citizen who lived in connecticut, appeared at the hearing and spoke to her character: “i certainly do not believe that she is guilty of prostitution” and “i vouch that any book written by my niece, according to her good character and reputation, could never be immoral.” migdall also offered to furnish her bond of $ , . amid the confusion about the appropriate charge and accusation of prostitution, policewomen made the case for deportation. margaret leonard emphasized eve adams’ gender transgressions in paying for dinner and the theater (something she denied) and also her same sex desire, in keeping “her arm around [the policewoman’s] shoulder all thru the performance.” at one point in the hearing, when adams’ attorney questioned “how are you qualified to state [tearoom customers] are degenerates?” leonard argued that “her own judgement” prevailed. in their testimony and published accounts, policewomen leonard and sullivan asserted themselves as the only necessary arbiters of queer women’s sexuality and criminality. the immigration inspector decided there was insufficient evidence for the charge of prostitution, sullivan, my double life, . jack kenny, “modern eve adams driven from eden,” daily news, dec. , ; margot canaday, the straight state: sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century america (princeton, nj, ), – , – . federal deportation hearing, “record of the hearing in the case of chawa zlotchover,” . deirdre moloney, “women, sexual morality, and economic dependency in early u.s. deportation policy,” journal of women’s history , no. (summer ): – . “eve addams’ ring of rich cultists,” variety, july , , . federal deportation hearing, “record of the hearing in the case of chawa zlotchover,” – . federal deportation hearing, “record of the hearing in the case of chawa zlotchover,” . modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core but “the testimony of the policewoman … tends to show that this alien is a degenerate.” on december , , the united states government deported eve adams. conclusion by virtue of their gender and class, policewomen claimed a unique position and power in the punitive infrastructure erected to control female sexuality and reproduction in the progressive era. on one hand, the nypd instrumentalized policewomen’s bodies to extend state power. if women wished to challenge the status quo, they faced backlash from the male-dominated hier- archies in policing—for instance, when mary sullivan fought to improve matrons’ status or when ellen o’grady pursued two wealthy men for sexual assault. but gender also underpinned policewomen’s success and mobility in the profession, and in turn these professionals devised feminine modes of surveillance that increased the state’s capacity to criminalize female sexuality. although policewomen professed an ethic of “prevention and protection,” an analysis of their cases shows that for marginalized women, they often represented punishment and con- trol. policewomen wielded a different professional toolkit than male officers, which included not just the instruments of welfare and social assistance, as typically argued, but also significant carceral and punitive power. indeed, for many, this proved key to both their public personas and professional identities. as mary sullivan explained in the final page of her autobiography, any “social services features” of the job were secondary to “the excitement, the danger” she felt when stamping out crime; “few things in the world” were “more thrilling” than “the moment of revealing [her]self to a trapped and startled crook as a woman detective.” elizabeth evens is a phd candidate at university college london, uk, and her thesis, entitled “regulating women,” examines early female entrants to medicine and law enforcement and their surveillance of other women’s reproduction and sexuality. ibid., – . after leaving the u.s., adams lived in poland before saving the money to finance a move to paris. upon the outbreak of world war ii, she moved to italian-occupied nice to avoid the nazi persecution of jewish europeans. in , when italy allied with germany, eve adams was deported once again, this time to auschwitz-birkenau, where the nazis murdered her upon arrival. playwright barbara kahn did much to recover eve adams’ story in her corpus of work. adams’ life is the subject of a forthcoming biography by jonathan ned katz. see reina gattuso, “the founder of america’s earliest lesbian bar was deported for obscenity,” http:// www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-was-first-gay-bar (accessed aug. , ). ‘editorial,’ iawp bulletin, may , ; kali gross, “african american women, mass incarceration, and the politics of protection,” journal of american history , no. (jun. ): – . muncy, creating a female dominion, – . sullivan, my double life, . elizabeth evens downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-was-first-gay-bar http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-was-first-gay-bar http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-was-first-gay-bar https://www.cambridge.org/core 	plainclothes policewomen on the trail: nypd undercover investigations of abortionists and queer women, -- 	plainclothes police matrons 	undercover abortion investigations, -- 	female management and the changing surveillance of women's sexuality 	expanding undercover techniques and surveilling queer women 	conclusion influencing gender specific perceptions of the factors affecting women’s career advancement opportunities in the united states volume , number research summary for practice december influencing gender specific perceptions of the factors affecting women’s career advance- ment opportunities in the united states by kevin taliaferro, national intelligence university copyright © , kevin taliaferro. this article is published under a creative commons by-nc license. permission is granted to copy and distribute this article for non-commercial purposes, in both printed and electronic formats this research investigates the sociological, psy- chological, and physiological factors known to affect women’s career advancement opportuni- ties. it examines how awareness and knowl- edge shared through the #metoo (hashtag me too) movement influenced gender specific per- ceptions about the factors affecting women’s workplace opportu- nities. finally, it rec- ommends measures to alter the divergent gen- der perceptions that remain an obstacle to gender equality in the workplace. this study was con- ducted because gender inequalities continue in the u.s. workplace in . currently women fail to advance in ca- reers at the same rate as men, and they are paid % less for similar work with equal skills and experience. women comprise approximate- ly % of the u.s. population and % of the workforce, so equality would dictate a one-to- one male to female ratio throughout all levels of government and private industry. the cur- rent male to female ratio in the u.s. congress is four-to-one. the male to female executive ratio in fortune companies is three-to-one, and in the u.s. government it is two-to-one. to better understand the factors influencings gender inequalities in the workplace, the re- searcher conducted a mixed method experi- mental study. the research began with a litera- ture review that produced enlightening results regarding the sociological, psychological, and physiological factors affecting women’s career advancement opportunities. to further examine those factors, the researcher conducted qualitative study to determine if any significant differ- ences existed in gender specific perceptions of male and female work- place performance, drive, confidence, com- petitive nature, rela- tionships, and family responsibilities. study results aligned with the literature re- view findings and confirmed both genders recognize significant gender differences exist regarding each of those factors. the unexpect- ed discoveries were the significantly different perceptions men and women hold about the or- igins, causes, and effects of the factors known to impact women’s career advancement oppor- tunities. to more deeply investigate the gender percep- tion gap discovered in study , the researcher conducted a mixed method experimental study using interviews in qualitative study to as- sess the significance of the differing male and female perceptions. men and women have significantly different perceptions of the origins, causes, and effects of the career ob- stacles women currently face, but the events surrounding the #me- too movement may be reducing the gender perception gap. keywords: equality, workplace, gender, culture, metoo, #metoo gender-specific perceptions of career advancement volume number to validate the study findings, he used surveys in quantitative study to assess the level of impact the awareness and knowledge generated by the #metoo and surrounding media events had on the gender perception gap. by comparing pre- and post-treat- ment interview and survey data from those three studies, the researcher was able to qualify and quan- tify the impact awareness and knowledge shared through the #metoo mass media events had on gen- der specific perceptions of women’s equality strug- gles in the workplace. the literature review was the primary means used to investigate rq : what sociological, psychologi- cal, and physiological factors affect women’s career advancement opportunities? an examination of scholarly works identified three sociological factors, nine psychological factors, and two physiological factors perceived to affect women’s career advance- ment opportunities. that examination also high- lighted specific traits women exhibit within the psy- chological factors that negatively impact their career advancement opportunities. believing men and women shared more positive attitudes and perceptions about those female traits than indicated in the lit- erature review findings; the researcher conduct- ed qualitative study to test his premise that there are no gender perception differences in male and female workplace perfor- mance, confidence levels, competitive nature, will- ingness to accept profes- sional risks, and choices that impact careers. study also addressed rq : how do gender specific per- ceptions about male and female confidence levels, competitive nature, workplace performance, emo- tions, interactions, relationships, attitudes, desires, and choices impact women’s career advancement opportunities? primary data was collect through interviews with eight participants - four males and four females. participants were randomly selected from five different industries and three primary age groups: baby boomers (born - ), gener- ation x (born - ), and millennials (born - ). an equal number of males and females was selected to gain a balanced mix of perceptions. an unexpected discovery from study identified a gender perception gap between men’s and wom- en’s views of the origins, causes, and effects of the factors influencing women’s’ career advancement opportunities. viewing the gender perception gap as an obstacle to achieving true gender equality in the workplace, the researcher began to explore mea- sures to influence and possibly reduce the gap. the timeliness and impact of the #metoo media events provided a unique opportunity and enabled the re- searcher to further examine the events’ effects on gender specific perceptions of women’s issues in the workplace in study and study . qualitative study examined rq : how signifi- cantly did the #metoo media events influence gen- der specific perceptions about the factors affecting women’s career advancement opportunities? for qualitative study , the researcher replicated the qualitative approach used in study to ensure con- sistency in the investigation process and most ac- curately assess perception changes likely generated through the #metoo movement. the same inter- view questions were asked of the same eight partic- ipants interviewed one-year prior in study . four additional participants were interviewed in study to compare consistency of answers and help identify any possible demand effect in the second interview responses, where participants may have anticipated a desired outcome and changed their answers. for quantitative study , the researcher used two pre- and post-treatment surveys to explore rq : what level of impact did the #metoo media events have on the gender perception gap regarding the sociological and psycho- logical factors known to affect women’s career advancement opportu- nities? study also ad- dressed the research hy- pothesis: the awareness and knowledge generat- ed by the #metoo media events will strongly cor- relate with reductions in the gender perception gap regarding factors known to impact women’s career advancement opportuni- ties. for quantitative study , the researcher repli- cated portions of three national-level pew research center surveys conducted between and . twenty-three pew survey questions that fell within the scope of this research and closely aligned with study objectives were regenerated for use as a post- event collection tool. the researcher developed and launched the study surveys using the qualtrics survey software. he anonymously invited adult business professionals from three dba cohorts, their interested business associates, and coworkers from his organization to participate. findings the study results from the qualitative interview study strongly aligned with the literature review findings and failed to support the research premise. the qualitative analysis showed men and women generally agreed women underperform, have low- er confidence levels, are less competitive, more risk averse, and far more likely to make choices that neg- study identified a gender percep- tion gap between men’s and wom- en’s views of the origins, causes, and effects of the factors influenc- ing women’s’ career advancement opportunities. muma business review taliaferro atively impact their careers. though men and wom- en mostly agreed there are performance differenc- es between men and women in the workplace, the truly interesting discoveries in this study were the differing male and female perceptions of why such differences exist. women believed the root cause of their inability to advance at the same rate as men is ultimately a result of males actively and passively discriminating against them and creating a promo- tion system that prevents women from advancing at the same rate as men. men believed women have the same opportunities and as much control over their careers as men. the men alluded they have little di- rect bearing on women’s underperformance, lower confidence levels, aversion to competition and risks, and family choices. men perceived women in full control of their own character, emotions, and home situation and believe women are only limited by their own desires, priorities, choices, and willingness to sacrifice. the study qualitative analysis indicated a moder- ate shift from divergent gender perceptions in study to convergent viewpoints in study following the #metoo media events. overall, the #metoo media event correlated strongly with the mod- erate shift in men’s and women’s perceptions of the psychological factors known to affect women’s advancement opportu- nities in the workplace. though men and women still have differing views of the factors impacting women’s career advancement opportunities, the majority of male and female participants expressed a positive outlook for the future, expected positive change, and embraced just and equal treatment for both genders. in quantitative study , there were fewer signifi- cant differences in the post-event results indicating the gender perception gap regarding the sociological and psychological factors known to affect women’s career advancement opportunities was reduced by % following the #metoo media events. there- fore, the research hypothesis was satisfied that there is a strong correlation between the awareness and knowledge generated by the #metoo media events and reductions in the gender perception gap regard- ing factors known to impact women’s career ad- vancement opportunities. overall, the qualitative interview analysis indicated a moderate shift from divergent gender perceptions in study to convergent viewpoints in qualitative study following the #metoo media events. the statistical results of quantitative study showed men’s perceptions changed moderately with a more positive view toward women’s issues. women’s per- ceptions also changed moderately, but with a more negative view about workplace equality issues. those outcomes aligned with the qualitative study results and validated the study research findings. conclusions with outcomes from three independent qualita- tive and quantitative investigations aligning, the researcher concluded the overall statistical results demonstrate a strong impact on men’s and women’s perceptions and a largely reduced gender percep- tion gap following the #metoo media events. be- cause it is unknown if those changes are permanent, the researcher believes future research could focus on awareness, education, and accountability initia- tives to more adequately address gender equality problems in the workplace and bring about lasting change. this research demonstrates how a host of sociologi- cal, psychological, and physiological factors combine to create an atmosphere that cultivates gender in- equalities. the findings are consistent that both genders perceive differ- ences in male and female workplace performance, confidence levels, com- petitive nature, willing- ness to accept profession- al risks, and choices that impact careers. the re- searcher also discovered that men and women have completely different views of the origins, causes, and effects of the factors known to impact women’s career advancement opportunities. the gender perception gap that results from men’s and women’s misunder- standings and misperceptions about the influencing factors and traits is problematic and clearly impedes gender equality. though difficult to change, those misunderstandings and misperceptions must be re- solved and the gender perception gap eliminated for women to achieve true workplace equality in pay, benefits, and advancement opportunities. where to find out more for more information on this research, contact kev- in taliaferro at kct @mail.usf.edu or kevin.taliafer- ro @dodiis.mil. inquiries may also be mailed to: kevin taliaferro psc , box apo ae, women believed the root cause of their inability to advance at the same rate as men is ultimately a re- sult of males actively and passively discriminating against them ... men believed women have the same opportunities and as much control over their careers as men. gender-specific perceptions of career advancement volume number review this article was accepted under the editorial peer review option. for futher details, see the descrip- tions at: http://mumabusinessreview.org/peer-review-op- tions/ dr. kevin taliaferro is director of the national intelligence university european academic center at royal air force molesworth, united kingdom. he is respon- sible for niu’s graduate programs in europe and manages three sites offering the master of science of strategic intelligence degree. he previously served as niu’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, where he was responsible for the university’s budget planning and execution, personnel, logistics, and facilities requirements. he is a retired united states air force officer with , flying hours and extensive leadership and program man- agement experience. author references catalyst. ( ). pyramid: women in s&p companies. retrieved from http://www.catalyst. org/knowledge/women-sp- -companies center for american women and politics (cawp). ( ). women in the u.s. congress . re- trieved from http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/wom- en-us-congress- federal equal opportunity recruitment program (feorp) report to congress-office of per- formance management (opm) fy feorp. ( ). retrieved from https://www.opm.gov/ policy-data-oversight/diversity-and-inclusion/ reports/feorp- .pdf u.s. bureau of labor statistics (us bls). ( ). women in the labor force: a databook. re- trieved from http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/ womens-databook/archive/women-in-the-labor- force-a-databook- .pdf u.s. census bureau. ( ). population demo- graphics. retrieved from http://factfinder.census. gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview. xhtml?pid=acs_ _ yr_dp u.s. department of labor (us dol). ( ). break- ing down the gender wage gap. retrieved from https://www.dol.gov/wb/media/gender_wage_ gap.pdf to achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs to achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs indrastra.com/ / /gender-equality-women-entrepreneurs- - - - .html by dr. shamshad akhtar under-secretary-general, united nations and executive secretary of economic and social commission for asia and the pacific (escap) in , we have an opportunity to accelerate progress towards gender equality. movements such as #metoo have shone the spotlight on an unacceptable status quo and demonstrated how too many women the world over continue to be deprived of respect and equal opportunities. let’s use international women’s day to build on this global momentum for change and suggest targeted solutions to empower women across our economies and societies. women entrepreneurs have a key role to play. in asia and the pacific, there has been some progress towards greater equality. maternal mortality rates have dropped by over percent between and . an equal number of girls and boys are now enrolled for primary school education, and near parity exists for secondary and tertiary education. but overall progress remains much too slow. on our current trajectory, south asia would achieve gender equality in years, central asia in and east asia and the pacific in . at this rate, most women will be dead before they are equal. we need to speed things up. / http://www.indrastra.com/ / /gender-equality-women-entrepreneurs- - - - .html https:// .bp.blogspot.com/-vidx tniz /wqdgx_vkpmi/aaaaaaaas w/gcz bazueca incznn gl un- ko jvwclcbgas/s /downloads - .jpg https:// .bp.blogspot.com/-b_uez ymgdw/wp lgfotyi/aaaaaaaas o/ur_vvkhf_mme nh vfc pa i vjf-saclcbgas/s /aidn .png with this objective in mind, the obstacles women face to find decent work or set up a business in asia and the pacific deserve special attention. female labor force participation has declined in our region over the past thirty years. most working women are trapped in precarious, informal employment, characterized by low wages and dangerous working conditions. women are relied on to give up to six hours unpaid care work a day: invaluable to society but thwarting career prospects, ambitions, and political representation. we know that setting up a business is a key means for women to empower themselves and break out of poverty. but just as becoming an employee is harder for women, so is becoming an entrepreneur. barriers include a lack of access to education or training, and limited access to ict, market information, and finance. indeed, women-owned smes with reliable funding sources are few and far between, in part because land is often required as collateral for credit in a region where women make up a small minority of landholders. burdensome registration procedures combine with societal prejudice to frustrate women’s entrepreneurial potential. the good news is that despite these constraints, the number of women entrepreneurs has been increasing in the asia-pacific region. women entrepreneurs in asean countries have been particularly successful. the proportion of firms with women owners stands at nearly percent in the philippines, over percent in thailand and over percent in viet nam. this has been achieved through gender-responsive budgeting, programmes to support smes, and strong civil society advocacy to ensure women’s entrepreneurship is prioritized in national policymaking. at the united nations economic and social commission for asia and the pacific (escap) we want to build on this success and work with countries across policy areas to develop a gender-responsive entrepreneurial ecosystem. four areas are critical to doing so. first, we need to improve women’s access to diverse sources of financing. women entrepreneurship bonds, impact investment funds and gender responsive fintech solutions are needed to quicken the pace of change. combined with measures to improve financial literacy, these solutions should improve access to finance but also reduce transaction costs and support broader growth. second, we must improve women’s access to ict and innovative technologies. dedicated support is needed for women sme owners wishing to adopt the latest technology to improve business processes, product promotion and sell into bigger markets. this should be accompanied by lifelong education and training opportunities to enable women to ride successive waves of ict innovation. third, we need to promote a gender-responsive policy environment. public and private institutions should increase the number of women entrepreneurs on advisory boards and the banking sector should be incentivized to serve women better. streamlined business registration procedures and proactive outreach to potential and existing women entrepreneurs can make a real difference. women entrepreneur networks, ensuring women’s voices are heard clearly in chambers of commerce, business associations or civil service commissions, must be part of the picture. making life easier for women entrepreneurs is to support women’s empowerment. it can / help eliminate gender inequality, protect a fundamental human right and bring considerable economic benefits. gender equality in asia would increase per capita income by percent over sixty years. this would make a huge contribution to achieving sustainable development and reducing poverty. on international women’s day, my hope is that governments across asia and the pacific will be entrepreneurial about achieving equality and give women the support and opportunities they deserve. about the author: dr. shamshad akhtar is an under-secretary-general of the united nations and the tenth executive secretary of the economic and social commission for asia and the pacific. she currently serves as the coordinator of the five united nations regional commissions. dr. akhtar has previously served as governor of the central bank of pakistan. in her capacity as governor, ms. akhtar was also the chairperson of the central bank board and its affiliates, as well as a governor of the imf. cite this article: akhtar, s. "to achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs", indrastra global vol. , issue no: ( ), , http://www.indrastra.com/ / /gender- equality-women-entrepreneurs- - - - .html | issn - / http://www.unescap.org/executive-secretary/biography http://www.unescap.org/ http://www.indrastra.com/ / /gender-equality-women-entrepreneurs- - - - .html 	to achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs harassment in science is real a s the rallying cry against sexual harassment and bullying in many fields, including aca- demia, continues to grow, more and more victims are coming forward with their sto- ries, reflecting how this damaging culture has been the norm across sectors for decades. studies of women in academia report that more than half have experienced harassment. this behavior has remained ob- scured for many reasons: fear, resignation, and accep- tance. the scientific com- munity must recognize the difficult conversations that have started and embrace this watershed moment as an opportunity for rapid and essential cultural change. in our own fields of geo- physical and environmen- tal sciences, in which teams of researchers travel to far corners of the planet, harassment has long been a reality. huts atop frozen ice sheets, bunks on research ves- sels, and poster-strewn office halls have all hosted scenes of inexcusable behavior. our own personal stories comprise more than three decades of scientific achievement, yet cultural change in our fields seems as slow as the glaciers we study. senior scientists have touched us inappropriately and have repeatedly in- vaded our personal space. many of our male colleagues believe harassment is a thing of the past, yet some of these events occurred in the last years. we have re- mained silent, fearful of the ramifications. when we did speak up softly, we saw no consequences, no action, and no change. we have witnessed friends, employees, and colleagues suffer in a culture that looks the other way, labeling bullying and harassment as “antics” or disguis- ing them as rigorous scientific review. the consequences for the harassed, bullied, and as- saulted are real. women and men affected by harass- ment struggle to get jobs, secure tenure, win research funding, get appropriate authorship on papers, and receive scientific recognition. perpetrators gain power and prestige. victims—often students and postdocs who wield little power—“choose” other paths. since news of the sexual misconduct of film execu- tive harvey weinstein broke, the #metoo movement de- nouncing harassment is alight across the sciences. people are speaking up and sharing stories that they have hid- den for decades. we know from our research that melt- water produced by a warming climate can make glaciers move faster. we know, too, that major social events can trigger rapid changes in communities. the recent high- profile harassment cases are an opportunity to change the basic ethical culture of science. cultural change must occur at the individual, team, profes- sional society, and institutional levels. this year, the american geophysical union adopted a new ethics policy that defines bullying and harassment as scientific misconduct. the american geosciences insti- tute, which encompasses more than scientific societies, is working to adopt a common statement to address harass- ment. as societies move for- ward, harassers will no longer be bestowed academic honors while victims sit quietly in the audience. change must come to institutions where harassers retire or resign and go to new institutions to begin again. the greatest opportunity for cultural change rests with individual scientists, teams, and professional societies. men and women need to lis- ten, speak up, and learn and teach about the prevalence of harassment. field teams and laboratory groups must openly discuss the culture and develop codes of conduct and equality alongside safety protocols. societies and institutions must provide training for scientists at all career stages—especially for senior scientists—on how to be ethical leaders and how to confront harassers. sci- ence requires diverse, innovative thinkers to protect our global citizens, understand our home planet, and push us to the outer reaches of space. efforts in three arenas— individuals working to understand the prevalence of harassment, teams developing a code of conduct, and societies providing training toward ethical leadership— have the potential to stimulate powerful change. –robin e. bell and lora s. koenig harassment in science is real robin e. bell is a professor at the lamont-doherty earth observatory of columbia university, palisades, new york, and is president-elect of the american geophysical union. robinb@ ldeo.columbia.edu lora s. koenig is a senior research scientist at the national snow and ice data center in the cooperative institute for research in environmental sciences at the university of colorado, boulder, colorado. lora.koenig@ colorado.edu . /science.aar “…cultural change rests with individual scientists, teams, and professional societies.” c r e d it s : (i n s e t ) c h r is t ia n h a r t m a n n / r e u t e r s (t o p r ig h t ) c o u r t e s y o f l a m o n t -d o h e r t y e a r t h o b s e r v a t o r y ; (b o t t o m r ig h t ) n a s a s c i e n c e sciencemag.org editorial december • vol issue da_ editorial.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ harassment in science is real robin e. bell and lora s. koenig doi: . /science.aar ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience copyright © , american association for the advancement of science o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ the ugly face of whiteness in the contemporary us – and how to encounter it kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) creative commons attribution . international issue ( january ) the ugly face of whiteness in the contemporary us – and how to encounter it robert a. winkler international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) contact: robert.winkler@gcsc.uni-giessen.de abstract: in backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america, george yancy, scholar of the philosophy of race, shares the racist backlash he encountered as a reaction to his open letter “dear white america.” besides reproducing the original letter – a decisive call for an honest contestation of white racism in the us – the volume courageously engages with the various manifestations of hate speech it elicited. most importantly, yancy further conceptualizes the possibility of forging a coherent antiracist white subject position which he finds exemplified in some of the positive responses to his letter. how to cite: winkler, robert a.: “the ugly face of whiteness in the contemporary us – and how to encounter it [review on: yancy, george: backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america. lanham/boulder/new york/london: rowman & littlefield, ]”. in: kult_online ( ). doi: https://doi.org/ . /ko. . https://doi.org/ . /ko. . - - kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) the ugly face of whiteness in the contemporary us – and how to encounter it robert a. winkler international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) yancy, george: backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america. lanham/ boulder/new york/london: rowman & littlefield, . pages, . usd. isbn: - - - - . abstract: in backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america, george yancy, scholar of the philosophy of race, shares the racist backlash he encountered as a reaction to his open letter “dear white america.” besides reproducing the original letter – a decisive call for an honest contestation of white racism in the us – the volume courageously engages with the various manifestations of hate speech it elicited. most importantly, yancy further conceptualizes the possibility of forging a coherent antiracist white subject position which he finds exemplified in some of the positive responses to his letter. amidst the #metoo debate, the second year of president trump’s reign, and ongoing racial oppression in the us, george yancy’s backlash is a blow to the jaw, a suffering, an imposition – but an inevitable one. in a painstakingly detailed manner, george yancy, an african american professor of philosophy at emory university, displays the racist backlash he has had to encounter as reaction to his letter “dear white america,” which was published on december , in the new york times’ column, the stone. consequently, the first chapter is a reprint of the original letter (p. - ); therein, yancy asks white america to listen with love to his request to become “‘un-sutured,’” meaning to openly and honestly engage in the painful process of letting go of “‘white innocence’” ( ). within a society intrinsically built upon white supremacy, as the us is, the individual privilege afforded by whiteness comes at the cost of systemic epistemological, psychological – and physical – violence against black bodies and bodies of color. yancy models what he is asking of white america by acknowledging that he himself is a sexist: within a patriarchal, sexist society, he reasons, he has been complicit in and allowed himself to be seduced by the sexual objectification and degradation of women (cf. - ). this - - kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) painful realization necessitates a constant struggle and self-examination in order not to give in to the temptation to wear the “mask of sexism,” but to “refuse to hide behind that mirror that lies to me about my ‘non-sexist nobility’” (p. ). transferring this mechanism to whiteness, yancy proposes that his white readers engage with their own implicit racism in the same manner: “white america, are you prepared to be at war with yourself, your white identity, your white power, your white privilege? are you prepared to show me a white self that love has unmasked? i’m asking for love in return for a gift” (ibid.). in the book’s introduction (p. - ), yancy acknowledges that although having anticipated some hostile reactions, he was stunned by the quality and quantity of hate speech directed at him; therefore, the almost unbearable second chapter, entitled “dear [n-word] professor” (p. - ) displays the racist hatred that cracked open in the aftermath of the letter’s publication [given my subject position as a white heterosexual man and yancy’s delineation of the original phrase’s dehumanizing impact, i choose to fall back on the term ‘the n-word’ in order not to reproduce and perpetuate the racial violence brought about by the usage of the original expression.] the chapter presents excerpts from the racializing, objectifying, sexualizing, degrading, and outright threatening responses that have reached yancy via email, mail (some of them handwritten!), and voice messages verbatim. he then meticulously contextualizes these expressions of hate within the history of white racism in the us. by way of an example, yancy analyzes the grotesque assumption that he had only written the letter to seduce white women (and men!) as an actualization of the theme of the “hypersexualization of the black body” (p. ). consequently, “[t]he intersection of sex and race is a twisted and perverse staple within the white imaginary” (ibid.) which not only unleashed the lynching of black male bodies and justified the rape of black female bodies, but becomes actualized in the above mentioned assumption – in fact a projection of the white imaginary. the deconstruction of these responses is not carried out in a neutral or objective manner, as yancy directly addresses the reader to share the terror, disgust, anger, frustration, and angst thereby inflicted upon his body and soul. the chapter closes with james baldwin – whose deep insights into the nature of racism in the us serve as intellectual and emotional guidance for the entire book – and his crucial question: “‘what white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a [n-word] in the first place’” (p. ). the third chapter addresses the white liberal reader, who states in disgust his/her repudiation of the openly racist responses to yancy’s letter (p. - ). however – and that is the crux with whiteness – yancy powerfully demonstrates that the sympathetic white liberal is not to be released from responsibility for the white racist system. in contrast to the openly racist white acknowledging his/ her racism, the “opaque white racist self” (p. ) claims to be antiracist and denies the individual privilege afforded within and due to the underlying racialized matrix. this kind of white self equally - - kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) thrives on the embodied location of whiteness, whose racial hierarchization tends to slip conscious reflection although its logic, in turn, also organizes the white body and mind. here again, yancy directly challenges the sympathetic white reader: “the white self that you are […] has already arrived too late to determine the complex and insidious ways in which white racism has become embedded within your white embodied self” (ibid.). as a consequence, the embodied whiteness of the opaque white racist self becomes invisible, unmarked, naturalized – and thereby exactly reinforces the white normative framework. besides referring to the experience of teaching whiteness in the classroom, yancy points to numerous powerful everyday experiences to flesh out his argument. after the book’s tour de force, it ends on a hopeful note with the fourth chapter “accepting the gift” (p. - ). building upon his earlier work in the field, yancy conceives the process of un-suturing as intertwined attitude and social practice, which affords the white subject the possibility to engage with his/her racist socialization and embodiment. whereas the prior process of suturing entails the closure, the making invulnerable and untouched of the white subject to normalize and purify whiteness (cf. p. ), “[t]he process of un-suturing disrupts; it troubles and unsettles; it risks forms of openness or embodied gestures—un-sutured gestures that are linked to the ways in which the world reveals itself differently. un-suturing is a form of exposure, an opening, a corporeal style and a dispositional sensibility that troubles the insularity, in this case, of the white gaze” (p. ). the respective un- sutured responses from white readers to his letter closing the book are encouraging demonstrations that, after all, an open engagement with the intricate nature of whiteness is possible and necessary. george yancy’s backlash enables an uncomfortable insight into the state of race relations in trump’s america. the author counters the disclosure of incredible hate he has received in response to his call for an honest engagement with whiteness with a powerful historical and theoretical comprehension of the implicit working mechanisms and explicit manifestations of white racism. most significantly, the volume further conceptualizes the process of un-suturing as a possible means to engage in the unfinished project of tackling white privilege and forging an antiracist white subjectivity. in equal parts contemporary document, testimony, confession, and call to action, the seminal backlash is destined to join the ranks of the courageous engagements with the white racist mind created by the likes of henry louis gates jr. and michael eric dyson. - - kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) german abstract: die hässliche fratze des ‚weiß-seins’ in den heutigen usa – und wie ihr begegnen in backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america verarbeitet george yancy, afroamerikanischer professor für philosophie, die rassistischen angriffe, die ihn als reaktion auf seinen offenen brief „dear white america“ ereilten. der band beinhaltet nicht nur den brief – ein entschiedener appell für eine ehrliche auseinandersetzung mit weißem rassismus in den usa – sondern setzt sich auch entschlossen mit den vielfältigen rassistischen manifestationen auseinander, die er hervorgerufen hat. darüber hinaus entwickelt yancy theoretisch weiter, wie eine kohärente antirassistische subjektposition aussehen könnte und wie er sie in einigen der positiven repliken auf seinen brief verwirklicht sieht. robert a. winkler international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) contact: robert.winkler@gcsc.uni-giessen.de how to cite: winkler, robert a.: “the ugly face of whiteness in the contemporary us – and how to encounter it [review on: yancy, george: backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america. lanham/boulder/new york/london: rowman & littlefield, ]”. in: kult_online ( ). doi: https://doi.org/ . /ko. . microsoft word - jp - -  abstract—social media has loomed as the most effective tool in recent times to flag the causes, contents, opinions and direction of any social movement and has demonstrated that it will have a far- reaching effect on government as well. this study focuses on india which has emerged as the fastest growing community on social media. social movement activists, in particular, have extensively utilized the power of digital social media to streamline the effectiveness of social protest on a particular issue through extensive successful mass mobilizations. this research analyses the role and impact of social media as a power to catalyze the social movements in india and further seeks to describe how certain social movements are resisted, subverted, co-opted and/or deployed by social media. the impact assessment study has been made with the help of cases, policies and some social movement which india has witnessed the assertion of numerous social issues perturbing the public which eventually paved the way for remarkable judicial decisions. the paper concludes with the observations that despite its pros and cons, the impacts of social media on the functioning of the indian government have demonstrated that it has already become an indispensable tool in the hands of social media-suave indians who are committed to bring about a desired change. keywords—impact, indian government, misuse, social media, social movement. i. introduction ocial media has emerged as a powerful mass mobilization platform in the recent past. these it-aided applications are radically redefining new forms of virtual networks, which are being increasingly used for a range of activities such as mutual interests, thoughts, sentiments, interpretations, information share and modify accessible content through easily operated resources, like, messages, comments, digital photos or videos and data generated through online communications and so on. they introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities, networking and individuals [ ]. social media has displayed some unique role in transforming the form of communication that establishes newer network potential that influences individual and consequent collective public opinion formation and participation for achieving targeted objectives. ii. methodology this research categorizes the role and impact of social media in four categories; firstly, its use as a platform for organizing a social movement; secondly, as a platform for   priya sepaha, prof. (dr.), director, law colloquy is with the department of law, india (e-mail: priyasepaha@gmail.com). advocacy on a particular issue and policy formulation; thirdly, its impact on politics; and, lastly, its impact on the judiciary. the impact assessment study has been made with the help of cases, introduction of new policies and the role of some of the social movements which india has witnessed in recent years, in which, the pronounced assertion of public opinion perturbing the inaction by the government on various prevailing and emerging social issues eventually paved the way for some remarkable judicial decisions. iii. influence of social media worldwide social media has registered its powerful presence and demonstrated worldwide usage. according to statista.com, facebook, youtube and whatsapp are ranked top three among all the social networking applications. fig. most popular social networks worldwide as of april , ranked by number of active users (in millions) [ ] the impact of social media in terms of active users can evidently be seen from the chart above. facebook is the most popular social media app with % usage globally, youtube and whatsapp are equal second with %, while facebook messenger is ranked third with %. in order to appreciate the impact of social media in terms of users residing in a particular country, it is necessary to look at those leading countries having the maximum number of facebook users. it is evident that india is one of the leading countries % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % % sales facebook youtube whatapp facebook messenger we chat instagram tumblr qq qzone sina weibo reddit twitter baidu tieba skype impact of social media on the functioning of the indian government: a critical analysis priya sepaha s world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / globally in terms of facebook usage, according to the data shown in fig. . to get an in-depth knowledge of the impact of social media on the public at large, it will be useful to study the data on the usage of other social media also. fig. leading countries based on the number of facebook users as of april (in millions) [ ] fig. penetration of leading social networks in india as of rd quarter of [ ] fig. notable social movements which have influenced the functioning of the government iv. impact of social media on social movements in india social media encourages dialogue between remotely located individuals and facilitates an independent exchange of thoughts and views in a democratic and substantial manner. the social movement activist takes advantage of the widespread utilization of digital social media, for instance, facebook, whatsapp, twitter, instagram and so on, as a new dimension to social activism with the help of numerous movements to make changes in the structure and functioning of government as well as other institutions. some of the notable social movements which have influenced the functioning of the government in the recent past are stated below: a. platform for social movements . #metoo the movement was started by tarana burke in with the slogan #metoo. the slogan’s original drive was to acknowledge the pervasiveness of abuse in society. this campaign was popularized by alyssa milano to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault continues to prove the power of social media for activism. this movement created an unprecedented moral awakening, and has resulted in being the driving force behind many resignations, firings, policy change and lawsuits across many industries, organizations and governments. this movement serves as an open platform for every woman who has been a victim of harassment to raise her voice. stimulated by a global campaign against sexual harassment and assault, women across the spectrum opened up and shared their stories. no field has remained untouched, from hollywood to bollywood, multi-national corporations (mncs) to low-wage industries, the hospitality industry to hospitals, academia to politics, media to technology, women have been speaking out about their personal nightmare openly. the #metoo movement rocked india in when actress tanushree dutta accused actor nana patekar of sexual harassment during a film shooting in . gradually, social media was flooded with a series of posts by other women who shared their experiences with the world. in india, people from all walks of life, as well as actors, film directors, advertising tycoons, artists, writers, media and politicians, and female professionals have discussed and openly condemned the loathsome conduct of errant individuals at the workplace. from unwanted attention in the office to sexual innuendos on the film set, there were many kinds of allegations that surfaced to gradually force law enforcement agencies to take appropriate legal actions [ ]. . sanitary napkin awareness movement a private study conducted by ac nielsen called the "sanitary protection: every woman's health right" stated that merely - % of women use hygiene sanitary napkins in india. it affirms that % of women in india are forced to use ashes (a locally available absorbent material), newspapers, sand husks and dried leaves during their periods because of the unaffordability of sanitary pads. due to this unhygienic practice, more than % of women suffer from reproductive tract infections [ ]. however, the high price of sanitary napkins is not only reason women use these alternatives, a india indonesia mexico vietnam turkey % % % % % % % % % % % facebook you tube whats app facebook messenger instagram google plus twitter skype linkedin pinterest hike platform for social movements: -me too -sanitary napkin awareness movement impact on politics and public policy : -publicity & exit poll -anti corruption movement -cambridge analytica case impact on the executive : -clean india --save & educate girl child impact on the judiciary: - jassica lal case - nirbhaya case world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / general lack of unawareness of good hygiene practices emerged as one of the major health problems and challenges in india [ ]. the indian government and educational institutions used to conduct many awareness campaigns on this issue and promote the benefits of using sanitary napkins. however, the revolutionary drive was made by a movie ‘padman’, based on the true story of arunachalam murgananthanam, which has created a wave on every form of media. bollywood stars, male and female, started a campaign posting their photos with a sanitary napkin and related misconceptions trending to social media. women and men are found equally enthusiastic about discussing its importance and uploading photos with sanitary pads to break the taboos and support women, especially to those residing in rural parts of india. going a step further, some activists even questioned the government for the heavy tax enforced on sanitary napkins and the lack of support for women in rural areas. raising their voice, they demanded the removal of tax on pads and the initiation of menstrual education and hygiene awareness campaigns for women on a large scale. as a result, the delhi government announced that it will cut taxes from . % to % for sanitary pads costing above rs , but the fight for imposing zero gst tax on all female hygiene products has just begun and its impact is bound to be visible in near future [ ]. b. impact on politics and public policy social media is playing a significant role in redefining indian democracy, as it has become a new mode of reaching out to a younger, aspiring population eager to redefine the direction and design of india’s future. . election political parties encourage social media users in india to join their bloc through tweets, status updates, and expressing support through blogs on social media platforms preferably, facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twitter and youtube, to get more connected. it has become a powerful mode of publicity which affects exit poll and eventually elections. social media played a vital role in the phenomenal success of bhartiya janta party’s online campaign during the lok sabha elections. according to the internet and mobile association of india (iamai) report , the major change in the general election can be attributed to the strategic shift which the political parties made in their election campaigns by involving social media. the presence of social media in the general elections in india could be clearly felt, as the magnitude of campaigning was evidently commensurate with the funds spent by political parties in engaging social media. political parties had allocated - % of election budget expenses to social media as per the iamai report [ ]. . anti-corruption movement anna hazare, the famous social activist, used social media to unite people in new delhi to launch a campaign to introduce the jan lokpal bill in the name of the anti- corruption movement . the use of social media greatly helped in rapidly spreading the critical perspective on the anti- corruption movement; finer points of the law, legal and constitutional issues, as well as flawed notions such as “supremacy of the parliament” were discussed and debated with inputs from experts in the public domain. according to reports in newspapers, twitter and facebook, the impact of this movement was so widespread that more than , people on facebook joined hands in support. the growth of the page was organic. all major parts of the country, especially cities like mumbai, bangalore, and delhi virtually took part, with people demonstrating their solidarity by organizing “candle light support” rallies and pledging their support for anna hazare. over , photos and videos were uploaded by supporters on the fan page. around , users uploaded a badge on their facebook profile picture via pic badges. a facebook event called “ , missed calls” attracted over , people, while a further , people supported the event by leaving a missed call on a government telephone number. anna hazare himself had more than , fans on his fan page and , people on the event page to garner support. renowned celebrities and influential figures have actively tweeted their support, and seven out of trending topics in india were about the movement. [ ] this social movement on social media not only supported the cause for which anna hazare rallied for a long time, but is also credited with helping in the launching of a new political party in the country, namely, aam aadmi party and its flamboyant candidate, arvind kejriwal. it would not be out of place to mention that the credit for his surprise victory in delhi against major political parties can be largely attributed to the popularity and publicity earned by him due to the effective use of social media. . cambridge analytica case cambridge analytica is a data analytics firm based in london. the illegal collection of personal data by cambridge analytica was first reported in december by harry davies, a journalist for uk newspaper, ‘the guardian’. later, on march , , the scandal exploded when three news organizations, ‘the observer’, ‘the guardian’ and ‘the intercept’, published articles which caused widespread public uproar. the articles alleged that during the general elections in india, cambridge analytica had provided services both to the ruling as well as the opposition party to carry out "in-depth electorate analysis" and influence voters, including in the elections to the bihar legislative assembly. as per a report, indian facebook users used a cambridge analytica app, which in turn revealed the statistics of , users. in addition, cambridge analytica whistle-blower, christopher wylie, alleged that the company has agencies and staff in india and that the indian national congress party was a leading customer. a bbc documentary clipping depicting the poster of an office bearer of the indian national congress with christopher wylie, a former cambridge analytica expert, went viral in india, sparking allegations that the company was world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / deploying both conventional and social media in order to subvert indian voters away from the bharatiya janata party and towards the inc as part of a neo-colonial effort to undermine indian politics in favor of vested interests [ ]. for these incidents, which united public opinion, facebook ceo mark zuckerberg was held liable and steps were taken in the us and uk to ensure that facebook and other social media companies are made accountable to the government. as a result, shares of facebook also fell in price by more than $ billion in days. ultimately, mark zuckerberg had to testify before the united states congress [ ], [ ]. the scandal was significant for provocative open dialogue on ethical standards and moral principle for social media corporations, political consulting organizations and politicians. consumer advocates called for better consumer protection in online media and the right to privacy as well as curbs on misinformation and propaganda. c. impact on the executive . clean india the prime minister of india, launched the swachh bharat mission (clean india movement) on october , , with the aim to achieve a ‘clean india’ by . with the hope to sensitize the public towards the issue of cleanliness and sanitation and develop a civic sense, pm modi called on all members of society to join the campaign. the pm decided to initiate this drive by giving key importance to use social media and thereby ensure to keep this campaign outside the purview of the bureaucratic red-tapism [ ]. many of the pm’s followers on twitter, fb, instagram had enthusiastically taken up the task, with post after post declaring support with hashtags like #mycleanindia and #myideaofswachhbharat. people from different segments of society have come forward and joined this mass movement of cleanliness. millions of people across the country had whole heartedly participated in this campaign which included, government officials, bollywood actors, sportspersons, industrialists, spiritual leaders, ngos and local community centers and so on, to make india clean, by organizing frequent cleanliness campaigns to spread awareness about hygiene through plays, music, print and social media, skit etc. [ ]. mass awareness through the message of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ inspired the citizen for a neat and cleaner india, and eventually, they started paying attention to sanitation and sustaining a hygienic environment [ ]. . save & educate girl child the un has declared october as international girl child day to highlight the disparity and different types of discrimination that girls face. other than violence and discrimination, education also is also a sector in which the girl child is confronting segregation. the save girl child theme has been the focal point of consideration of everybody everywhere throughout india so as to improve the overall social and economic status of women. female infanticide had been declared illegal even before independence. but the law could not be implemented in letter and spirit even after adding provisions against forced miscarriage in the indian penal code, . under the global umbrella name - save girl child/beti bachao abhiyan - numerous activities for spreading awareness, have been launched by the central and state governments, as well as independent bodies, which will help in changing the behaviors of people towards the girl child. some of the save girl child initiatives launched by the central or state government are as follows:  a ‘ladli scheme’ was launched and implemented by the delhi and haryana state governments in , with the aim to control female foeticide for improving the status of the girl child through education and ensuring equal gender rights.  the ministry of women and child development launched the ‘sabla scheme’ in , with the aim to empower adolescent girls through education.  the ministry of women and child development launched the ‘dhanalakshmi scheme’ to provide financial benefits to families for the registration and immunization of a girl child after birth.  the ministry of women and child development launched the ‘kishori shakti yojna’ campaign with the aim to improve the nutritional and health condition of adolescent girls.  ‘sukanya samridhi yojana’ is a government-backed savings scheme as part of “beti bachao, beti padhao yojana” which was launched to ensure equitable share to a girl child by the family.  the ministry of women and child development launched beti bachao, beti padhao (meaning save girl child and educate girl child) in for the welfare of women.  all the above schemes could be implemented more efficiently and effectively because the use of social media led to mass awareness, and thereby helped in the success of these schemes. d. impact on the judiciary social media as an influential network has played a vital role in pressuring the government to introduce appropriate changes in the existing laws with the public showing a keen interest in high-profile cases, such that they were minutely observed and followed by the common man. as a result of the increased public scrutiny, the courts were ultimately forced to conduct speedy trials and ensure that the judgement is delivered adequately. some of the notable cases are mentioned below: . jessica lal murder case one of the most shocking high-profile cases in delhi was the jessica law murder case. the victim was a model who worked as a celebrity barmaid at a crowded socialite party. on the night of her murder, jessica had refused to serve a drink to a male customer as the bar was closed. the son of the son of the former indian national congress, manu sharma, was later convicted for her murder. this was a prototypical case in its world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / own way of an average family taking on rich and powerful opponents, which struck a chord in society. the trial also revealed the lacuna of the legal system as key witnesses turned hostile one after another, which was one of the major reasons for the delay in justice [ ], [ ]. the case was something of a pot-boiler where fashion, high society, crime, political influence and media activism all came together [ ]. the case became a nationwide public outcry; later, due to the intense media interference, the case took a new turn, when it was evident that the media had shaped this particular case and brought justice. it was the power of the masses that got the victim justice without the use of force [ ]. . delhi gang-rape (nirbhaya case) delhi was shocked in december , when a brutal and heinous gang rape was reported. the incident engendered extensive national and international coverage and the act was widely condemned, both in india and abroad. social media provided the much-desired space to remotely located individuals to convey their anger against the act as well as their annoyance at the almost in-effective laws that existed against the perpetrators of such heinous offences. this was instrumental in catalyzing a mass movement against the rape laws in india, which eventually led to the introduction of appropriate amendments in the relevant laws in . the discretionary power of courts to reduce the term of sentence for any period less than seven years was abolished. the punishment is made severer for repeat offenders including the provision of a death sentence as per the severity of the case [ ]. in the indian penal code, section a-d was introduced which specifically defines stalking, voyeurism, unwanted sexual advances and touches as specific offences. it has ensured that these extremely dangerous behaviors can no longer be ignored or trivialized. likewise, recognizing the acid attacks on women in india as one of the most heinous crimes, a act introduced provisions specially criminalizing the acid attacker and introducing measures for protecting possible victims of these attacks [ ]. v. findings in light of the above, it is observed that social media has emerged as a powerful tool in the recent past which has made a tremendous impact on the various government institutions of india. social media has emerged as the best apparatus, in recent times to flag the issues, content, opinions and direction of any social movement, and has demonstrated that it will have a far-reaching effect on government, in the future also. early indicators point out that it will be instrumental in radically changing the structure, functioning and policies of governments. social movement activists, in particular, have effectively demonstrated that social media as a tool has tremendous potential to bring about a desired change. they have extensively utilized the power of digital social media (facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp and so on) to streamline the effectiveness of social protest on a particular issue through extensive successful mass mobilizations. the research analyses showed that social media is extensively used as a power to catalyze social movements in india mainly in four ways; firstly, in the execution of many social issues particularly - #metoo, use of sanitary napkin, and the anti-corruption movement. secondly, used by the government to promote social causes, like, save girl child, educate girl child, clean india are some noteworthy social movements which were conceived, executed and brought to their logical conclusion by using social media. thirdly, the indian judicial system has, under the impact of social media, expeditiously and rightfully pronounced decisions in many high-profile cases. india witnessed a colossal social movement which remarkably amended laws and persuaded the justice system to deliver speedy and fair trials, most notably, the jessica lal, nirbhaya case. lastly, social media is a powerful mode of publicity. india’s political parties have aptly used it during and after the elections. however, it is evident that gradually social media is becoming instrumental in changing the legislative system as well as the fate of indian democracy. vi. conclusion freedom of expression is one of the fundamental rights to express an opinion through any medium. in the past, print and electronic media played a vital role in society. the media in its new avatar, i.e. social media, has very rapidly changed both the condition and direction of government. social media has an extensive influence to affect public opinion in a revolutionary way, to spread information, making it instantaneous and allowing it to reach the public at large. it has become a new cohort of activism and consequently, exerts influence in the functioning of government in an open, consultative and comprehensive way. references [ ] boyd, danah m.; ellison, nicole b. "social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship". journal of computer-mediated communication. . ( ): – . doi: . /j. - . . . [ ] https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /global-social-networks- ranked-by-number-of-users/ (accessed on th april ) [ ] https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /top- -countries-based-on- number-of-facebook-users/, (accessed on th april ). [ ] https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /india-social-network- penetration /, (accessed on th april ). [ ] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ -the- year-when-metoo-shook-india/ -the-year-of-metoo-in- india/slideshow/ .cms, (accessed on nd march ). [ ] https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/factly-epaper- factly/taxing+sanitary+pads+what+is+it+all+about-newsid- , (accessed on th february ). [ ] nilesen a.c. ( ). sanitary protection: every woman's health right. a survey was undertaken by ac nielsen. reviewed and endorsed by community development organization plan india, the survey was conducted in october and involved , women in the menstrual age and gynaecologists from across india. [ ] https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/social-media-politics/, (accessed on th september ). [ ] https://www.techinasia.com/social-media-played-a-major-role-in-india- fight-against-corruption (accessed on th september ). [ ] https://arstechnica.com/tech-olicy/ / /cambridge-analytica-shuts- down-after-facebook-user-data-scandal/(accessed on th september world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / ). [ ] https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-facebook-privacy- awakening/ (accessed on th june ). [ ] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /mar/ /the-cambridge- analytica-scandal-changed-the-world-but-it-didnt-change-facebook (accessed on th june ) [ ] https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/government_tr_rec/swachh-bharat- abhiyan- /, (accessed on nd january ). [ ] https://archive.the-ipf.com/the-role-of-the-media-in-jessica-lals-murder- case/, (accessed on nd february ). [ ] http://blogs.reuters.com/india/ / / /role-of-the-media-in-jessica- lall-case/, (accessed on nd february ). [ ] https://www.thequint.com/videos/nirbhaya-case-changes-to-criminal- law, (accessed on th march ). prof. (dr.) priya sepaha is professor of law and an experienced director with a demonstrated history of working in the education management sector. she is m.a. (english), m.phil. (english), ll. b, ll.m (criminology) and ugc net. she did her phd (law) from jamia milia islamia, new delhi. she has worked extensively in the field of criminology, criminal law, personal law and torts. she started the law website, “https://www.priyasepaha.com/”, youtube channel “dr priya sepaha” and fb page, instagram page “law colloquy” where she actively shares articles, legal news, lecture series and so on for law awareness. she is also a senior peer reviewer and member of editorial board on arts, management and social sciences in various national and international journals, notably in india, japan, uae and united states including world academy of science, engineering and technology (since ). she is a passionate writer on various aspects of criminal law, criminology, penology and victimology. she has written books titled, “penology and treatment,” “comparative cr.p.c.,” “probation and parole,” “collective violence and criminal justice system”, “privileged class deviance” and “psychopath behaviour: a need for therapeutic approach”. she has also written many articles on psychopaths, mentally ill criminals, gender issues, a crime against women, surrogacy, incest, sexual abuse and so on in many national and international journals. she has presented papers in many national and international conferences, distinctively in harvard (the united states), oxford (united kingdom), cambridge (united kingdom), brighton (united kingdom), singapore, bangkok and khon kaen university (thailand). she had the distinction of being the keynote speaker at the international conference held at cambridge. she has also chaired the sessions at international conferences held at oxford, cambridge and bangkok. she was adjudged the best presenter at the international conference held in singapore. she was awarded swami vivekananda excellence award in the field of “academic administration” by world’s achiever’s foundation and confederation of indian universities, delhi, awarded for “environment protection and development ” by scientific and environment research institute at “world clean environment congress ”,“national teaching excellence award ” from international benevolent research foundation and “indian education award, ” in the field of “research in education” and “excellent researcher award (female)" by international academic and research excellence award (iare- ). world academy of science, engineering and technology international journal of law and political sciences vol: , no: , international scholarly and scientific research & innovation ( ) isni: o pe n s ci en ce i nd ex , l aw a nd p ol it ic al s ci en ce s v ol : , n o: , w as et .o rg /p ub li ca ti on / wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ legal solutions to street sexual harassment in the #metoo era all rights reserved © mount saint vincent university, ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice legal solutions to street sexual harassment in the #metoo era denise brunsdon volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article brunsdon, d. ( ). legal solutions to street sexual harassment in the #metoo era. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article street sexual harassment is the unwelcome commoditization of women’s bodies by fellow citizen-strangers. this harm is under-recognized by traditional, anglocentric common law. this paper begins by discussing the #metoo wave, in particular by suggesting that it is a re-branded version of the feminist movement that is helpful but not sufficient to address street sexual harassment. second, the paper outlines how street sexual harassment harms women. third, some contextual analysis of why governments and legal systems have been slow to address street sexual harassment are provided. fourth, the paper assesses the various areas of the law that may be used to curb street sexual harassment. finally, this paper canvasses the ways other governments have taken action against street sexual harassment. ultimately, this paper argues that the lack of protection of the basic civil right to use the public sphere free of sexual harassment is a failure of the canadian justice system, and a criminal response remains essential. other methods of legal regulation are inadequate without the social condemnation that criminal law carries. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal issue . / research legal solutions to street sexual harassment in the #metoo era denise brunsdon, jd, mba, is an associate at ben- nett jones llp (calgary) and is the recipient of the queen’s golden jubilee medal, in particular for her gender-based community volunteer work. she has published broadly on issues of gender and techno- logy, and gender and politics. abstract: street sexual harassment is the unwelcome commoditization ofwomen’s bodies by fellow citizen- strangers. this harm is under-recognized by tradi- tional, anglocentric common law. this paper begins by discussing the #metoo wave, in particular by sug- gesting that it is a re-branded version of the feminist movement that is helpful but not sufficient to address street sexual harassment. second, the paper outlines how street sexual harassment harms women. third, some contextual analysis of why governments and legal systems have been slow to address street sexual harassment are provided. fourth, the paper assesses the various areas of the law that may be used to curb street sexual harassment. finally, this paper canvasses the ways other governments have taken action against street sexual harassment. ultimately, this paper argues that the lack of protection of the basic civil right to use the public sphere free of sexual harassment is a failure of the canadian justice system, and a criminal response remains essential. other methods of legal regulation are inadequate without the social condem- nation that criminal law carries. keywords: street sexual harassment; #metoo; street harassment; catcalling; law; sexism; feminism; canada; united states; criminal; critical legal studies; legislation introduction street sexual harassment is the unwelcome commodit- ization of women’s bodies by fellow citizen-strangers. street sexual harassment can be defined as unwanted comments, gestures, and actions made in a public place related to the innocent party’s perceived sex, gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation (stop street harassment ). this includes actions such as whistling, leering, sexist slurs, persistent requests for a name or number, following, flashing, and public masturbation (stop street harassment ). histor- ically, this behaviour has been described using the un- gendered and non-descript term of “catcalling.” the insults—or “compliments” as they may be mischarac- terized by perpetrators—can be frequent but unpre- dictable. this consistent but randomized violence creates sizeable harm by making public space uncom- fortable, even unsafe, for women. dread of this im- pending violation of dignity is a state of oppression for many women. this harm is under-recognized by traditional, anglo- centric common law. the #metoo wave ofthe femin- ist movement has brought a renewed interest in, and public discourse about, the oppression that mainly women face, usually at the hands ofmen. personal ex- periences—so prominent in the #metoo wave—are often absent in legal discourse and, to some extent, academic research generally. the feminist movement, in contrast, relies on the power of storytelling and consciousness-raising to counteract the dominant male viewpoint. this paper explores the ways that the #metoo wave of feminism has raised awareness of sexual harassment, how this might bring attention to street sexual harassment in canada, and the potential legal remedies available. atlantis journal issue . / this paper begins by discussing the #metoo wave, in particular by suggesting that it is a re-branded version ofthe feminist movement that is helpful but not suf- ficient to address street sexual harassment. second, the paper outlines how street sexual harassment harms women. third, some contextual analysis of why governments and legal systems have been slow to address street sexual harassment is provided. fourth, the paper assesses the various areas ofthe law that may be used to curb street sexual harassment. finally, this paper canvasses the ways other govern- ments have taken action against street sexual harass- ment. ultimately, this paper argues that the lack ofprotec- tion of the basic civil right to use the public sphere free of sexual harassment is a failure of the canadian justice system, and a criminal response remains es- sential. other methods of legal regulation are inad- equate without the social condemnation that criminal law carries. the #metoo context i contend that the true value of#metoo is not in its expression as a new “movement.” rather, #metoo fits within the greater feminist movement, and is not a separate movement unto itself. this article there- fore labels the movement as a “wave” within the fem- inist movement, an approach endorsed by others (parry ). the #metoo wave of feminism is a modern and di- gitally-flourishing take on a traditional pillar of the women’s movement: consciousness-raising. women sharing their oft-similar stories of gender-based viol- ence creates a unifying experience out of what can seem to be an individual or even invisible problem. the #metoo wave has created a more open social climate for discussing gender-based violence, includ- ing street sexual harassment. many #metoo stories seem to include—and re- sponses to these stories gain oxygen from—the abuse of power. this is evident in the #metoo focus on weinstein-style harassment, i.e. abuse within a rela- tionship ofunequal power. however, this focus poses a challenge to addressing issues ofstreet sexual harass- ment, or sexual assault more generally, where the issue is not about an individual asserting and abusing their power over a more vulnerable colleague or date. acts of street sexual harassment are more randomized and anonymous. perhaps because a single incident of street sexual harassment is less destructive or violent than a rape, it is wrongly deemed innocuous. the more universal an experience in men’s lives, the more often society rationalizes street sexual harassment as a harmless experience (e.g., “boys will be boys,” “locker room talk,” and various other anachronisms for broad-based and socially acceptable gender violence). this ignores how a hundred incidents of harassment invade the psychological safety and self-worth ofwo- men. the genesis of#metoo mainly regarded the struggles of privileged, white, cis, wealthy, and often celebrit- ized women, the root theme of this wave of the fem- inist movement. the lessons, however, can and should be broader. intersectional analysis acknowledges that multiple spheres of structural disadvantage exist but cannot be understood by simply adding layers ofdis- advantage. race, gender expression, and all the factors that signal non-conformity to the patriarchy’s ideal- ized woman can affect the way she is harassed and the harms she experiences. notions of attractiveness are socialized, including social preference by race, eco- nomic status, gender expression, and physical ability. the harm from street sexual harassment varies based on social preference and status. street sexual harass- ment is not reserved for women who are deemed so- cially desirable, and can also be used as a tool to police and demean women perceived as undesirable or nonconformist. thus, while the #metoo wave of feminism has provided an important shift toward personal and widely shared stories, an intersectional feminist lens is also necessary to address street sexual harassment. atlantis journal issue . / the harm many women can still recall their first personal ex- perience with street sexual harassment because it was traumatizing (trudy ; vinciguerra ). norma anne oshynko wrote in her master of law thesis that “street harassment can best be understood as an integral part of a system of sexual terrorism which allows men to dominate and control women” (oshynko ). street sexual harassment tells women that our pres- ence in the public sphere is open for comment and criticism by strangers. the attacks remind women that our bodies are commodities to be freely con- sumed and commented upon by fellow citizens. sev- eral scholars have argued that street sexual harassment—and the lack of legal recourse available to survivors of it—is an ongoing denial to grant wo- men their basic human rights. gender scholar robert allen wrote: whether in the workplace or on the street, the purpose of sexual harassment is to reduce wo- men to objects sexually vulnerable to men, and to reestablish the traditional power relation- ship between men and women. indeed, wo- men’s sexual vulnerability to men is a key locus ofmale power, something men learn to expect. ( , ) as cynthia grant bowman wrote in her harvard law review article, street harassment is the denial ofa ba- sic civil liberty: the most fundamental definitions of liberty include the right of an individual to go where she chooses in spaces that are public. indeed, liberty of this sort is essential to equal particip- ation in the affairs of the polis. the security to move about in public, what blackstone called “the power of locomotion,” is one of the most basic civil rights; it is essential to the rights to assemble and petition for redress of griev- ances—the primary prerequisites to participa- tion in public affairs and admission to the public realm. thus, when the law fails to pro- tect women from street harassment, it deprives them of one of the basic goods for which gov- ernment was ordained, leaving them in an hobbesian wilderness men do not share. ( , - ) image : a sample ofonline posts sharing thoughts about and personal experiences ofstreet sexual harassment. (clockwise from top left: collazo ; unknown; laxer ; alston ; moore ; boosil ; completestreetscat ) atlantis journal issue . / more specifically, the many harms of street sexual harassment include feeling powerless, dehumanized, and isolated; fearing for one’s safety; and the practical effects ofchanging one’s daily habits, including going outside less and at more restricted times (davis ; fox ). no recitation of the harm flowing from street sexual harassment would be complete without noting the role that sexual harassment plays in con- doning gender-based violence. widespread objecti- fication of women’s bodies is linked to violence against women (american psychological association ; oddone-paolucci, genuis and violato ). recognizing these harms is important because dam- ages are a key element under the law, but also because such recognition helps to stamp out the myth that some women enjoy street sexual harassment. as with other forms of sexual violence, myths exist to rein- force the acceptability of the violating conduct. that “catcalls” are inoffensive and even flattering is one such myth. new york post writer doree lewak con- troversially wrote of street harassment as a “drive-by dose ofconfidence [that] is the -second antidote to all that negative feedback in the real world” ( ). although some women may claim that they enjoy the experience, this does not address the lack of consent to such harassment by all women. the statistics the nature of street sexual harassment makes it diffi- cult to track; it is constant yet unpredictable. often, the woman is alone and the only witnesses are friends of the offender. often, the harassment comes from a moving vehicle. hollaback! and cornell university began a large-scale research survey on street harassment in . there were over , respondents overall, making this survey the largest analysis ofstreet harassment to date. the study found that, globally, the majority of wo- men experience their first incident of street harass- ment during puberty (livingston ). in canada, women participated in the survey: % reported their first experience with street harass- ment between the ages of and , and % ofwo- men reported being followed by a man or group of men that made them feel unsafe during the past year (livingston ). over % of women reported changing their daily lives to avoid harassment, for ex- ample by taking different modes oftransportation or a different route home, not going out at night, not so- cializing, feeling distracted at school and work, and changing the time of leaving an event or location (livingston ). a hollaback! ottawa com- munity consultation on street sexual harassment found that % of respondents had experienced har- assment on the street in the past year (hollaback! ot- tawa ). image : tom fonder atlantis journal issue . / relevant academic theories a primary reason for the lack ofgovernment priority given to street sexual harassment is its disproportion- ate effect on women. as briefly discussed below, dominance feminism best explains the lived experi- ences of women subjected to street sexual harass- ment. critical legal studies (cls) also helps explain why women are refused full and equal access to legal protections and why the law systematically under- serves less powerful communities. dominance feminism emphasizes the difference in power between men and women and how men’s in- terests dominate the agenda in a patriarchal society (chamallas ). women’s lack of power means a lack of voice in state priorities and governance (mackinnon ). street sexual harassment does not often attack male dignity. the status quo allows men to engage in street sexual harassment at their whim. thus, the current system of what is deemed acceptable street sexual harassment shoulders women with the majority ofthe harm. dominance feminism explains why street sexual harassment is not men- tioned in the house of commons or newspapers (baumgardner and richards ). such awareness would require the legislature and media to step out ofthe dominant male perspective. critical legal studies has value in dissecting discrim- ination within the law. cls deconstructs the way that power embeds and recreates itself within the legal system, never devolving to the vulnerable. crit- ical legal theory posits that: legal thought originates, of course, within the consciousness of the dominant class because it is in this class’ interest to bring it into being, but it is accepted and interiorized by everyone because of the traumatic absence of connec- tedness that would otherwise erupt into awareness. (gabel ) feminist legal theorists would point out that the dominant class is overwhelmingly male. relevant canadian law sexual harassment has been recognized as an offence under the anti-sex discrimination provisions in the human rights codes present across canada’s provinces (janzen v. platy ). freedom from sexual harass- ment is thus a human right in part because sexual harassment is an affront to dignity, personal integrity, autonomy, and personhood (allen ; british columbia law institute ). chiefjustice dickson for the supreme court stated in that sexual harassment is “an abuse ofboth eco- nomic and social power” (janzen v. platy ). courts have recognized that sexual harassment in- cludes leering (webb v. cyprus pizza ), sexually suggestive gestures (sharp v. seasons restaurant ontario ), and derogatory or degrading remarks. these legal cases involved workplace sexual harass- ment, however, not street sexual harassment. in considering street sexual harassment, one funda- mental question is whether the legal response should be a matter ofprivate or public law, as both could play a role. broadly speaking, public law is an umbrella term to describe the areas oflaw that affect society as a whole, and private law regards disputes between indi- viduals and commercial entities. after reviewing ele- ments of private law, this paper argues that, ultimately, the social condemnation aspect of public law, in particular, the criminal code established by the federal government, makes it a more useful avenue to begin addressing street sexual harassment. the criminal code is taught to law students as the set of rules the government uses to indicate what behaviour the state condemns and will punish through a reduc- tion in civil liberties. i. private law feminist scholar catharine mackinnon ( ) wrote: “sexual harassment, the event, is not new to women. it is the law ofinjuries that it is new to” ( ). in a law society ofupper canada (lsuc) conference pa- per, lawyers stated a similar idea: “there is no inher- atlantis journal issue . / ent barrier preventing resourceful counsel from con- ceiving a cause of action arising from circumstances wherein a client has been the victim ofsexual harass- ment” (lsuc , d- ). this progressive stance would prove naive. sexual harassment by way of sex discrimination has been a proven tort (lajoie v. kelly ), but courts have been reticent to recognize it in other instances (seneca college v. bhadauria ). the alberta court of queen’s bench said that whether the court recognized a tort of sexual harassment “is still an open question” (campbell- fowler v. royal trust co. ). gillian demeyere provides a helpful summary of sexual harassment torts to date: while courts have uniformly allowed actions for breach of contract based on alleged sexual harassment to proceed, the treatment of ac- tions in tort has been less consistent. some courts have declined to exercise their jurisdic- tion over claims asserting independently re- cognized torts where the conduct alleged might be also described as sexual harass- ment.... there can be little dispute that the wrong of sexual harassment can include the violation of interests long protected by the common law. indeed, the pleadings approach concedes as much, by finding actions that plead independ- ently recognized causes of action to be within the jurisdiction ofcommon law courts. but by holding actions that plead merely “sexual har- assment” to be beyond the jurisdiction of the common law, the pleadings approach impli- citly declares that the wrongfulness of sexual harassment consists wholly in the fact that it is a form of sex discrimination. so understood, the common law cannot come to recognize a new tort of sexual harassment, because bhadauria tells us that sex discrimination falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of human rights commissions. ( , , ) the courts have recognized a tort of sexual harass- ment by other names, recognizing that sexually har- assing conduct is tortious. but court recognition of the explicit tort remains weak. the established torts of battery, sexual assault, nuisance, and emotional distress all hold elements relevant to street sexual har- assment. as mentioned earlier in this article, sexual harassment results in a loss of dignity, autonomy, personhood, and personal integrity (bc law institute , at ). additional harms flow from any ofbat- tery, assault, nuisance, or emotional distress that is sexual or gender based “including difficulties relating to depression, anxiety, mood disorders, disturbances of sleep, eating, sexuality, personality, interpersonal relationships, child development, and learning abilit- ies” (british columbia law institute , ). tort law and its awards have recognized such damages. sexual assault is an accepted sexual violence tort, of- ten seen in cases of childhood sexual abuse. even with near-universal societal rejection of rape, cana- dian courts have not awarded civil remedies for sexual assault consistently. the harm of sexual assault “has not yet been fully recognized by the civil justice sys- tem” (british columbia law institute ). craig brown and melanie randall ( ) argue for an ex- pansive, public insurance-like system: this leads us to examine alternative ways that the financial resources available to automobile accident victims might also be available to be- nefit victims of domestic and sexual violence. this involves the reform of the criminal injur- ies compensation system and a clear articula- tion of a rationale for compensation. given that this would involve significant public ex- penditure, and therefore political opposition, we also consider models for a private insurance response. our conclusion is that the only vi- able solution to the gross under-compensation of those injured by acts ofdomestic and sexual violence in canada, is a substantially enhanced public compensation scheme. ( ) if sexual assault survivors do not feel adequately compensated by the civil justice system, there is little hope for victims of street sexual harassment. one problem is that there is rarely any physical evidence. atlantis journal issue . / further, unlike a rape at a house party, where wit- nesses may have a personal connection with the com- plainant, there is not necessarily a personal connection with witnesses on a public street corner. legal remedies in civil suits are aimed to put the plaintiff in the situation they would have been in but for the wrong done to them. courts have struggled to adequately award damages to sexual assault survivors seeking to be put in the situation they would have been in prior to the acute attack; street sexual harass- ment survivors have even less reason for hope. com- pensable losses due to street sexual harassment too often result from cumulative experiences and are, therefore, too multi-causational to satisfy the tort framework. db et al. v. johnson ( ) is one canadian civil litig- ation case related to street sexual harassment that proved a success. various plaintiffs filed a claim against their neighbour for damages arising from as- sault, battery, and intentional infliction of mental suffering. the behaviour included making lewd sexu- al suggestions and comments, verbal sexual harass- ment, inappropriate touching (such as grabbing breasts and buttocks, sometimes in public). the court commented that “[t]he whistling, catcalls and insults by themselves, however objectionable, cannot support a claim for damages.” nonetheless, the court decided that “non-consensual touching aside, each of the female plaintiffs, satisfied me that they had suffered humiliation and intimidation and an appre- hension of sexual assault.” the court assessed dam- ages at between $ and $ , per plaintiff. unhelpfully, this victory was only possible because there was an identifiable defendant making continu- ous and traceable assaults. it is also worth noting that the defendant did not defend in the action. a british columbia report on civil remedies in cases of sexual assault recommends extending the bases for liability to include negligence, vicarious liability, and breach ofnon-delegable duty (british columbia law institute ). an expanded conception of sexual assault and its causes increases the chances of remed- ies for survivors. it also increases potential street sexual harassment recovery when combined with growing class action capacity in canada. the basic purpose ofclass action law is to change the costs and benefits in any legal situation so plaintiffs can band together to distribute the costs of litigation across a number ofplaintiffs who each have a right to a remedy that would not individually be sizeable enough to warrant a law suit. companies that might normally breach their duties because the harm to an individual customer would not merit an expensive ac- tion become justly exposed to their aggregate liability (canadian bar association: bc branch ). street sexual harassment class action suits could use traditional negligence and vicarious liability law to build class actions against the actors whose inertia fa- cilitates street sexual harassment. examples might in- clude outdoor construction companies that refuse to act against staff or contractors who sexually harass passersby, municipalities whose inaccurate transit schedules leave women vulnerable for long periods of time, or bars that, instead of calling the police, eject harassing patrons who then move to verbally harass others in the public sphere. overall, private tort law has struggled to account for women. margot schlanger ( ) has explored the reasonable person standard in torts and its bias toward what men deem reasonable. martha chamallas’ re- search has determined that “the negligent infliction of emotional harm and negligent interference with rela- tionships are low in the hierarchy of compensable harms, in part because of their cognitive link to wo- men and women’s injuries” ( , ). remedies for gender-based violence are no different. in “gendered harms and the law oftort: remedying (sexual) harassment,” joanne conaghan identified structural concerns within tort law: it may be precisely because the law recognizes the “wrong” inherent in defamation that it is socially perceived; it may be because the law denies a remedy for many of the acts which constitute sexual harassment that it is too often atlantis journal issue . / socially denied. in other words harm is socially constructed and legally constituted; unless a harm is recognized as such by society and by law, it is not experienced as such. that is why for years many women have put up with sexual harassment without complaint: the social and legal failure to recognize the injury entailed has led women simply to endure it, repressing their feelings of violation, incipient outrage, the sense that a wrong had been perpetrated [foot- notes removed]. ( , ) even established gender-based harms struggle within status quo tort law; new concepts such as street sexual harassment face many challenges. though conaghan ( ) and brown and randall ( ) argue for a continued use of tort law as part of the feminist pro- ject, this article argues it cannot be the only avenue for upheaval, particularly where street sexual harass- ment is concerned. the threshold for intention in any torts—albeit on the balance of probabilities—may be too onerous in most cases ofstreet sexual harassment. ii. public law the criminal law also has a poor record addressing gender-based violence. sexual assault rates are disturb- ingly high and convictions disturbingly low; this has been driven by many factors related to systemic miso- gyny in the policing and judicial establishments (ran- dall ). the outcome for more fleeting forms of gender violence, such as street sexual harassment, re- mains an open question. the following portion ofthe article will address specific sections ofcanada’s crim- inal code. there is no code provision squarely focused on street sexual harassment. section . assault the s. sexual assault provision of the criminal image : this chart provides a short form ofthe key criminal code provisions that could be argued to be applicable to street sexual harassment. atlantis journal issue . / code does not work well for street sexual harassment because street sexual harassment involves words and not physical touching or force, as described under s. . (a). under s. . (b), any act or gesture that is reasonably perceived as a subjective threat could be considered assault. so, although the collection of street sexual harassment experiences in a woman’s life may be threatening on the whole, each incident will likely seem too benign to reach the s. threshold. highly menacing sexual harassment—even on the street—could reach this threshold, however. section . harassment the s. criminal harassment provision is often called the anti-stalking provision. however, much re- search exists on the section's deep inadequacy in ad- dressing stalking (for example, see macfarlane ). section sets too high a threshold for use against street sexual harassment. the code requires “re- peated” acts. although women’s lived experiences of street sexual harassment are repeated, the perpetrator is usually different in each instance. because the code historically requires that a single harasser attack the same women repeatedly, street sexual harassers who randomize their attacks on different women re- ceive impunity under this current provision. section . indecency the public indecency sections of the code hold po- tential to curb street sexual harassment. street sexual harassment is instinctively—as the harm discussed above provides—an indecent act. unfortunately, des- pite a rich body ofstatutory interpretation, indecency has never been thoroughly interpreted through a feminist lens. anti-pornography issues involving de- cency have focused on overall threats to women, but within the community standards test. the com- munity standards test is a judicial endorsement of tyranny of the majority. this is demonstrated by the court’s recognition that public opinion surveys may be appropriate to measure “a general average ofcom- munity thinking and feeling”(r v. labaye ). the court has focused on the “harm” issue within the community standards test, arguing that social norms are not determinative but this half-measure is insuf- ficient. lise gotell cites jeffrey weeks in her deconstruction of the butler decision. in r v. butler, butler, a man- itoba video storeowner, was convicted under the criminal code obscenity law for distributing porno- graphic videos. butler claimed the code violated his constitutional right to freedom of expression. the court upheld the obscenity law as a justifiable restric- tion on freedom of expression. weeks (and then go- tell) wrote: “moral panics are flurries of social anxiety, usually focusing on a condition or person, or a group of persons, who have become defined as a threat to accepted social values and assumptions” (weeks , ). gotell ( ) notes that the butler factum sub- missions embody the core problem with the com- munity standards test: the role of law as guardian of the moral uni- verse is clearly defended and applauded in each of these factums. implicit here is the assump- tion that the depiction of sexual practices that lie outside of majoritarian norms constitutes a threat to the community itself. ( ) although some feminists interpreted butler as a vic- tory, the victory is steeped in a problematic legal framework. queer theorists such as brenda cossman ( ) contend that butler did not apply a feminist lens to community standards. as gotell ( ) states, “butler merely provide[d] a new feminist language to legitimize and modernize what is really an old conser- vative, moral agenda” (at ). community standards tests such as those discussed in butler—even those that purport to focus on harm over norms—are antithetical to feminism. community standards embody normative social codes of conduct that have oppressed women throughout anglocentric history. the weakness ofthe community standards test is directly linked to indecency, a concept that has for years been used to regulate women’s behaviour through government-sponsored regulation of sexual and artistic preferences. the decency provisions are also steeped in gender roles: the male-dominated le- gislature and courts are here to protect women and children from exposure to culture that is unseemly and “slutty.” more modern interpretations of inde- atlantis journal issue . / cency based on community standards and harm have facially attempted to move away from embodying majority preferences, but feminists have effectively exposed such court claims (cossman ). i con- tend that such decency provisions are the sword of moral panic and a key tool in regulating women’s sexual behaviour. to call on legal definitions of de- cency and community standards to protect women against street sexual harassment therefore seems counterproductive. the criminal code, as the book of rules to indicate social condemnation of beha- viours, should focus on the harassers, not on the so- called decency ofthe harassed. i suggest that the courts and the legislature should avoid the community standard in reviewing the de- cency of street sexual harassment according to s. ( ) and move toward a more feminist focus on the agency ofeach individual woman. leading schol- ars in the us have similarly argued for a sexual har- assment doctrine that employs a reasonable person standard that accounts for complainants' intersec- tional identities (onwuachi-willig ). the relevant “flashing” provision, under section . (b) of the criminal code, will not be considered under the scope of this paper because “flashing” is an obvious and recognized form ofextreme street sexual harassment. the “flashing” sections state that anyone who (a) causes a public disturbance by shouting, us- ing insulting language, using obscene language, or molesting another is guilty ofdisorderly conduct, and any person who (c) loiters in public and obstructs persons who are in the same place is committing a crime. either (a) or (c) could be used to criminalize street sexual harassment. even if the harassment is not as obviously acute or offensive as flashing, an action that disturbs a woman in public should be considered a disturbance if she feels the language directed to her was insulting, obscene, or bothersome (the traditional definition of molestation) sufficient to satisfy ss. - . finally, any street sexual harassment that results in a woman feeling uncomfortable while walking her preferred public route should be considered obstruc- tion. to make a woman uncomfortable in public is a core kind of obstruction. obstructing women’s free participation in the public sphere is central to the negative impact of street sexual harassment. in this way, ss. - are the most fitting response to street sexual harassment. to properly capture and condemn street sexual har- assment, the public indecency provisions provided in ss. - should be made more generic to encom- pass verbal indecency, or the list of indecent acts should be expanded beyond such physical acts as flashing to explicitly include indecent verbal assaults. section . nuisance section is the last potential option to criminalize street sexual harassment. satisfying subsection (a) re- quires viewing street sexual harassment as endangering women’s health and comfort. it also requires viewing the (predominantly female) victims as members ofthe public. this should be straightforward. however, the legal community has a history of accepting the male viewpoint as the norm and actively asserting the male right, under and in the law, not to know about the ex- periences ofwomen. feldthusen ( ) references the danger present when a dominant group assumes, uses, or imposes their narrative as the neutral viewpoint: “[m]most male law professors still refuse to consider, let alone engage with, the issues. instead they exercise the male ‘right not to know’: to ignore, deny, neuter, trivialize, and redefine gender issues in legal educa- tion” ( - ). envisioning a new code provision as is evident from the above discussion, there is no code provision squarely focused on street sexual har- assment. none of the existing laws are easily adapt- able. overall, the indecency and nuisance portions of the code seem prima facie more useful than the assault or harassment portions. in two recent cases, the canadian courts have ad- atlantis journal issue . / dressed possible use ofthe code provisions to penalize street sexual harassment. in r v. kohl, the complain- ant was jogging when the accused, a stranger to her, jumped out from behind bushes and blocked her way in a threatening and frightening manner; the accused did not touch her or speak to her. the complainant ran away and the accused chased her down the street. when the complainant ran to a house to seek help, the accused stood at the end of the driveway and stared at her. the complainant stated that she was very frightened. in this case, the accused was con- victed of criminal harassment under s. ( )(d) and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment. he ap- pealed the conviction and the sentence. the appeal of the conviction was dismissed, but the sentence appeal was allowed to reduce the sentence to two years, with conditions. this is an extreme case of street sexual harassment that met the threshold for criminal har- assment as envisioned by the code. in r v. burns, the perpetrator whistled at the com- plainant and said "nice butt" or "nice ass." after the complainant ran to get away, the appellant called out, "are those pants painted on?" the appellant was acquitted of the conviction for harassment, with the court noting: while the [perpetrator’s] conduct was clearly inappropriate and unwanted, we do not see the incident as amounting to threatening conduct within the meaning of those words in s. ( )(d). although the complainant justifi- ably felt upset and scared by the appellant's conduct, viewed objectively, we do not see it as rising to the level ofa "tool of intimidation de- signed to instill a sense offear. (r v. burns) this court decided that this very common example of street sexual harassment did not warrant sanction under the code. despite inadequacies, criminal law stands as our soci- ety's main mechanism to condemn actions. i there- fore contend that the canadian legislature should enact new criminal laws against street sexual harass- ment. street sexual harassment provisions may not be easy to prosecute, but neither are many provisions of the criminal code regarding sexual violence. con- demnation under the code is an important start to es- tablishing the basic type of conduct that will not be tolerated. a new provision eschews the need to re-en- vision older provisions alongside unbiased statutory interpretation. the struggle to recognize sexual harassment is ampli- fied by the law’s chosen human rights approach, which requires the right be tied to a status; for example, that ofan employee. this caveat hinders the full protection of dignity that women deserve in all roles and situ- ations. the advantage of a criminal law approach to street sexual harassment is that it codifies the breach of attacks on dignity across the citizen experience. i. looking internationally many jurisdictions around the world have taken ac- tion to curb sexual harassment and provide helpful lessons or ideas that canada should consider. for ex- ample, in , un women launched targeted pro- grams to increase women’s public safety in ecuador, egypt, india, papua new guinea, and rwanda (united nations ). in , the nepal police implemented a focused campaign to curb sexual har- assment on public buses. police register complaints and file reports regarding the places and circumstances of harassment (stop street harassment ). in the district ofcolumbia, it is now illegal to engage in ab- usive language or conduct that disturbs a person's path through a public space (badger ). in march , peru passed an anti-sexual harassment law that states that any act or threat affecting the freedom and dignity of movement and the right to physical and moral integrity of vulnerable peoples is harassment and punishable (steinkellner ). belgium and portugal have made it illegal to sexually harass or in- timidate a person and violation of the law is punish- able by a fine ofup to one year in prison; portugal has made it three years if the victim of harassment is younger than years (king ). in november of , belgium handed its first court judgment related to street harassment. the state fined a man nearly € for harassing a female police officer (flanders today ). atlantis journal issue . / many jurisdictions have taken the route of ticketing for street sexual harassment. in partial response to the #metoo movement, france has passed legislation which will target several forms of sexual harassment, including street harassment. the new law will ban “insulting, intimidating, threatening and following women in public spaces,” any ofwhich can lead to a fine of up to € . france’s junior minister for gender equality, marlène schiappa, stated, “harass- ment in the street has previously not been punished. from now on, it will . . . forbid insulting, intimidat- ing, threatening and following women in public spaces" (politico ; harper’s .) there are some significant drawbacks, however, to a ticket-based regime, including the potential for bias in implementation and the potential for dispropor- tionately targeting marginalized groups (white ). further, a ticketing system may undermine any message the state intends to make about the seri- ousness of street sexual harassment. compared to the more common breaches that result in tickets—speed- ing, parking incorrectly, riding a bicycle without a helmet—tickets send no strong message about soci- ety’s unwillingness to accept a particular behaviour. ii. recent canadian developments in march , the standing committee on the status of women conducted a study on violence against young women and girls in canada and presented their findings and recommendations to par- liament (house of commons ). the committee provided recommendations to help prevent gender- based violence. a few recommendations recognized the lack ofresearch on street harassment and called for the government of canada to fund initiatives, in- cluding new research and analysis of existing research that addresses intersectional violence, street harass- ment, and sexual harassment in public spaces and its effects on women (house ofcommons ). the government ofcanada proposed bill c- , an act to establish gender equality week, to recognize certain hardships faced by women. the act proclaims the last week of september each year in canada as “gender equality week.” the bill received royal as- image . this graphic shows some ofthe activist work being done to bring street sexual harassment to the fore. (hui ; brown ; killermann ; magwood ; romano ; white ; jurecko ; crosby ; gillis ). atlantis journal issue . / sent on june , , and september saw the first gender equality week. the notable feature about this act is that debates on the issue re- flect recognition of “[c]atcalling, harassment on the street, slut shaming, [and] victim blaming” as com- monplace, and that “[w]e need to raise the bar on those” (house ofcommons debates ). yet, not- ably, the act itselfdoes not explicitly recognize street harassment. kiera liblik has noted that canada has ratified the convention on the elimination ofall forms ofdis- crimination against women (cedaw), a un docu- ment focused on eliminating sex-based discrimination, and has suggested that failing to criminalize street harassment would be against the in- terests ofcedaw(liblik ). conclusions many women’s organizations, including women in cities international and hollaback!, are helping to share personal stories and raise consciousness about street sexual harassment. street sexual harassment is an affront to human dignity and the right to parti- cipate freely in the public sphere, a basic civil liberty. street sexual harassment—and the lack of legal re- sponse to it—is therefore an ongoing denial of basic rights. the shift in awareness and recognition of workplace sexual harassment provides some hope for similar change regarding street sexual harassment. however, judicial systems still struggle to bring justice to women survivors of workplace harassment. no current canadian law may be sufficient to address street sexual harassment, due to historical bias in construction and application of the law. new crimin- al laws are therefore required. other jurisdictions are enacting stronger anti-street harassment provisions than canada. it is time for our legislators to lead on women’s right to dignity in public. endnotes . the butler decision is one of the better-known in- decency decisions. this article will refer to butler be- cause it engages core questions around indecency. little sisters book and art emporium v. canada (min- ister of justice) [ ] scr is an equally rel- evant and concerning decision. . craig ( ) states: “chief justice mclachlin de- termined in labaye that the type ofharm identified in butler (that being ‘conduct which society formally re- cognizes as incompatible with its proper functioning’) must be assessed not by community standards of tol- erance, but rather by those norms which our society has formally recognized in the constitution or similar fundamental laws: ‘the inquiry is not based on indi- vidual notions ofharm, nor on the teachings ofa par- ticular ideology, but on what society, through its fundamental laws, has recognized as essential. views about the harm that the sexual conduct at issue may produce, however widely held, do not suffice to ground a conviction. this is not to say that social values no longer have a role to play.’” [footnotes removed] acknowledgements i wish to thank alexandra heine, mikayla hill, sydney olsen, victoria rudolf, and, in particular, gitanjali keshava and darci stranger for their research assistance. atlantis journal issue . / references allen, robert l. . “stopping sexual harassment: a challenge for community education.” in race, gender, and power in america: the legacy ofthe hill-thomas hearings edited by anita hill & emma coleman jordan, . oxford: university press. alston, lauren. . “state ofthe streets: alberta, canada.” hollaback.org. http://www.ihollaback.org/?s=canada. american psychological association. . “task force on the sexualization ofgirls report.” http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report .aspx. badger, emily. . “harassing women on the street isn’t just offensive. it’s also often illegal.” washington post (october , ). http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/w p/ / / /catcalling-women-on-the-street-isnt- just-offensive-its-also-often-illegal/. baumgardner, jennifer and amy richard. . manifesta: youngwomen, feminism, and the future. st ed. newyork: farrar, straus and giroux. boosil, samantha (@samanthadjb). . twitter post. may , . bowman, cynthia grant. . 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street-harassment/ trudy. . “street sexual harassment and post traumatic stress disorder.” gradientlair.com. http://www.gradientlair.com/post/ /stree t-harassment-ptsd united nations women. . “creating safe public spaces.” http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we- do/ending-violence-against-women/creating-safe- public-spaces . .j.eco. . economics ; ( ): - http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/j/eco doi: . /j.eco. . issn: - x (print); issn: - (online) the economic cost of gender inequality: the global progress and creating change june choon wai yee * , kenneth lee kwing-chin school of pharmacy, monash university malaysia, selangor, malaysia email address: * corresponding author to cite this article: june choon wai yee, kenneth lee kwing-chin. the economic cost of gender inequality: the global progress and creating change. economics. vol. , no. , , pp. - . doi: . /j.eco. . received: january , ; accepted: february , ; published: march , abstract: background: gender inequality is a contentious matter that cuts across economic and social aspects that are still prevalent globally. it is often framed as a problem of women, but in reality, it is more than that. gender gaps that include lack of under-representation of women in the workforce and especially in senior positions are significant issues that pose substantial economic costs to countries. gender inequality often manifested as discrimination in their advancement in careers, and higher time spent on household and care duties compared to men. methods: the economic loss that results from gender gaps were reviewed. against the same backdrop, countries with progressive and more inclusive policies were analysed in order to draw lessons that could be potentially useful for countries that are heading the direction of narrowing if not close the gender gaps. results: despite there are more initiatives to address this alarming issue over the years, progress towards gender equality is still far from satisfactory and gaps remain even in the dawn of . much remains to be done. to that end, some potential solutions and policies that have proven to be cost- and time effective in pursuit of gender equality are discussed in this paper. conclusion: we conclude that there is no blanket solution for addressing gender inequality. achieving gender equality will most likely to remain an uphill battle, but not one that is impossible to be overcome. keywords: gender, inequality, economic, costs . introduction in many countries, the average educational attainment by girls remains lesser than boys and literacy level is higher for men than women. apart from these gender gaps in educational attainment, gender discrimination and social standards continue to shape the terms of female labour force participation. women are less likely than men to join the workforce and to work for pay. even when they do, they are more likely to work on a part-time basis, a more informal sector, or positions with lower pay. these drawbacks are converted into significant gender gaps in earnings, which in sequence, reduce women’s bargaining power and voice. on the whole, gender inequality affects women and girls in ways that deny them their fundamental human rights. this lack of equal opportunities for girls and women causes substantial economic costs not just for them, but also for their families and countries. achieving, or at least, narrowing the gender equality gaps would create a more inclusive, sustainable and thriving ecosystems. much work has been done within this space over the years. the global gender gap report has monitored progress in closing gender gaps since [ ]. a recent report published by the international labour office concluded that there is a long way to go in this regard and the journey to equality is far from over [ ]. in the european union (u.n.), progress in gender equality is encouraging, although this progress can be accelerated. the report on equality between women and men in the eu also mentioned that the recent #metoo movement helped in bringing women’s rights back in the public attention. the on-going evaluation of the principle of equal pay in the eu will provide the foundation to reinforce this principle and close the gender inequality gap down. although still lacking behind, developed and developing countries have made progress. our main objectives are to have a better understanding of why the progress is still slow and what are the initiatives that could be taken to accelerate it. june choon wai yee and kenneth lee kwing-chin: the economic cost of gender inequality: the global progress and creating change this article presents a clear and detailed case of economic costs of gender inequality. there is a need to review various progressive initiatives and successful policy implementation in countries that are advancing to narrow and eventually close the gaps in gender inequality. . methodology a review of literature to look into successful interventions and how these can be implemented in several areas to improve employment opportunities and earnings for women was performed. scandinavian countries such as finland, norway, and sweden have been known to lead the way in narrowing gender gaps compared to other countries. to this end, we reviewed the initiatives and successful policy implementations in these countries to compare the approaches, success rates and discuss the best way forward in addressing this pressing concern. . results after its global report in , “the power of parity: how advancing women’s equality can add $ trillion to global growth” mckinsey explored the challenge of gender inequality in the asia pacific (apac), one of the most economically dynamic regions in the world [ ]. “the power of parity: advancing women’s equality in asia pacific” published in , reported that gender inequality is high overall in apac, with significant variations among countries [ ]. it was projected that apac countries could add $ . trillion to their collective annual gdp by , a per cent increase over the business-as-usual trajectory if women’s equality is advanced. “global gender gap report ” by the world economic forum compared gender gaps across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment [ ]. under the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, only per cent of the gap had been closed thus far and the presence of women in the labour market was persistently less than men. in emerging market like malaysia, woman labour force participation stands at only . per cent, a figure far from the male rate of . per cent [ ]. also, gender gaps tend to widen in parallel with seniority level. globally, only per cent of senior private sector’s managers and the public sector’s officials are women [ ]. the presence of women on corporate boards or as top business leaders is even more limited: a woman leads only . per cent of firms globally. on average, . per cent of board members in oecd countries are women, with an even lesser representation in emerging economies [ ]. in another report by the worldbank group published in , women account for a mere per cent of human capital wealth compared to per cent for men globally [ ]. especially glaring in low- and lower-middle-income countries, women account for a third or less of human capital wealth. the report also revealed that on a per capita basis, gender inequality in earnings could lead to losses in a wealth of $ , per person globally. losses vary between regions and countries due to levels of human capital wealth, and thus losses in wealth due to gender inequality, tend to rise in absolute values with economic development. against the same backdrop, the most significant losses occur in oecd countries. one hundred forty-one countries included in the analysis, the loss in human capital wealth due to gender inequality is estimated at $ . trillion with the assumption that women are earning as much as men. this amount comes up to about twice the value of gdp globally. in other word, human capital wealth could increase by . per cent globally, and total wealth by . per cent with gender equality in earnings. the report identified two critical drivers for women to have fewer earnings and thereby lower human capital wealth than men were found to be lower labour force participation rates and fewer hours worked in the labour market, substantiated with lower pay. these factors denied the productivity of many women due to the social norms and how they were relegated to unpaid care and work. women’s under-representation in business-leadership positions is a global issue that needs to be addressed. several factors contributed to this. one of the critical factors is the unequal burden of household and care responsibilities that women continue to shoulder. globally, women still spend multiple-folds as much time as men on these responsibilities. even in countries like the united states, women spend almost twice as much time as men on unpaid domestic work [ ]. the responsibilities shouldered by women is not only due to overall standards of living, as they still spend more than four times that of men even in advanced economies such as japan [ ]. a negative gender gap relationships between women’s relative amount of time spent on unpaid domestic work, economic participation and opportunity are consistent across developed and developing countries. reducing the gender gap in labour force participation by per cent by could (through increases in the size of their labour forces) add percentage point to projected baseline gross domestic product growth across the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) over the period - , and almost . percentage points if gender participation gaps were halved by [ ]. inaction is costly, and the economic case for gender equality is clear. . discussions despite women’s dramatic gains in education, their representation in leadership roles remains low [ ]. women’s underrepresentation in leadership restricts the presence of female voices in making decisions and denies girls and young women of positive role models. many oecd countries have introduced policies that encourage gender balance on boards and in senior management. affirmative action measures to move more women into leadership have been implemented. battling stereotypes requires a broad, societal acceptance that women are indeed capable of achieving as much as men. today, motherhood is still made to look as though it is economics ; ( ): - somewhat a disadvantage. mothers are often overlooked in promotions. for some, child care is unavailable, unaffordable, or inappropriate. many families with young children are forced to choose between spending a substantial portion of their pay on child care or finding a cheaper, but potentially lower-quality care option, or giving up the workforce altogether to become a full-time caregiver. whether due to high cost, limited availability, or inconvenient program hours, child care challenges are driving parents out of the workforce at a worrying rate. in alone, an estimated million parents made career sacrifices due to problems with child care [ ]. child care has become a barrier to work, often for mothers, who disproportionately shoulder more unpaid caregiving responsibilities when child care is not available or affordable [ ]. in another survey conducted by the center for american progress, mothers were per cent more likely than fathers to report that they had personally felt the negative impact of child care issues on their careers [ ]. besides, it is the mother who often compelled to make job decisions based on child care considerations regardless of the interest of their financial situation or career aspirations. working hours can be long and unpredictable, in addition to having to pay their shares for rising health care and living costs. women’s earning capacity stalled after having children and mothers spend considerably more time taking care of children than fathers do [ ]. this opportunity cost translates into women’s inability to fully participate in the labour force, resulting in financial stability and livelihoods suffer. very few parents have sufficient financial resources to choose between work and family. in the u.s., businesses suffer a loss of an estimated $ . billion annually because of their employees’ child care challenges. nationally, the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due to the child care crisis totals an estimated $ billion each year [ , ]. this reiterates the fact that the issue of gender inequality has spiral effects. when policymakers talk about choices that parents can make, they only target mothers. a man hardly gets asked how he divides his time between work and family. women’s choices have long been restricted before the term ‘choice’ became increasingly politicised in shaping policy debates. in , nobel-winning economist gary becker in his landmark work, “a treatise on the family”, argued that home behaves like a free-market where each family functions as a small factory, with each member making rational choices to maximize value [ ]. becker explored the economic implications of the most personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse, and allocation of time to child care as well as to careers. on decision making, many women still feel guilty and even shamed by others, for choosing work and leaving their child in inadequate care. they deliberately choose to work in scaled-back jobs, giving up on the prospects of advancing their career or in other decisions that they would not have made under different circumstances. the shift in societal attitudes toward women’s role is a powerful force that can enable—or hold back—progress of gender inequality. it is time to stop framing the term ‘choice’ as a woman’s decision and ability to choose between work and family when, in reality, it often feels like there is no choice at all. cultural and social transformations will not happen overnight. more policies with cost- or time-effective solutions to care needs, such as child care within a workplace and flexible working options are much needed. realignment of attitudes and burden of household and care duties such as longer paid maternity and paternity leave have long been debated. paternal leave with stronger financial incentives is essential for gender equality in paid and unpaid work, as it encourages parents to share caregiving more equally and allows mothers’ labour market participation. most gender-equal countries are all dominated by nordic countries [ ]. to date is iceland remains the most gender-equal. it has closed over per cent of its overall gender gap. norway follows iceland ( . per cent, sweden and finland . per cent). in february , finland's new government announced one of the most equitable parental leaves policies in europe [ ]. all finnish parents are now entitled to the same parental leave, nearly seven months’ paid leave, half of which will be non-transferrable, while all references to maternity and paternity leave are being scrapped. paid allowance will increase to a combined months, which works out as days per parent. it is estimated that the changes will cost an extra € m (£ m; $ m). the government’s message is loud and clear: all parents, regardless of their background and circumstances, are equal in this endeavour. within the same context, another study of four countries; namely the u.s., australia, the uk and denmark found that fathers who had paternity leave were more likely to share care duties like feeding, dressing, bathing and spending quality with their child at the end of the leave. hence, this led to another rather intriguing school of thinking; equal parenting and shared care duties were not about the rights of the parents after all, but the rights of the child. its neighbour sweden is perhaps europe's most generous system with parental leave of days each after a baby's birth. sweden, norway, iceland, estonia and portugal were praised in a unicef report for offering the best family-friendly policies [ ]. nordic countries had been leading the way on giving fathers entitlement that could not be transferred to the mother. the european union is also heading that way, with a directive giving member states three years to provide each parent with a minimum of four months' leave, including two months that are not transferrable. lessons can be drawn from these progressive countries, that is if a country is genuinely serious about closing the gender inequality gap, the only way is to overhaul parenting policy and culture and this will have to begin to now. the issue of affordability needs to be addressed through increases in subsidies, or the introduction or expansion of free childcare hours or more direct support from the public sector in providing new facilities for young children. although there are more progressive organizations offering flexibility and more family-friendly policies in workplaces than ever before, the progress is still slow and uneven. there is a need for more concerted efforts to lead cultural change at both micro and june choon wai yee and kenneth lee kwing-chin: the economic cost of gender inequality: the global progress and creating change macro level to address attitudes about women’s role in society. discrimination and biases against women need to be recognized and tackled. gender equality and comprehensive education in the school curriculum encourages young minds to strive for more healthy and equal relationships. it is time to step up efforts through sustainable campaigns, monitoring policies directed at gender equality, more public investment, and the introduction and expansion of legal measures to ensure equal opportunities for women. . conclusion the practical and economic implications of gender inequality are enormous, impacting women, parents, employers, taxpayers and nations. gender inequality is a pressing global concern that needs urgent attention. promoting gender equality needs progressive and inclusive policies to level the playing field for women. equality is essential in increasing the wealth of nations and enable countries to develop in a more inclusive, thriving and sustainable ways. although there is progress in policies and affirmative action measures, gender gaps persist. progressive policies to close the gaps of gender inequality a reality is a must-have rather than nice-to-have. references [ ] world economic forum, “the global gender gap report ’, . [ ] international labour organization, “a quantum leap for gender equality – for a better future of work for all’, . [ ] mckinsey global institute, “the power of parity: how advancing women’s equality can add $ trillion to global health,” september . [ ] mckinsey global institute, “the power of parity: advancing women’s equality in asia pacific,” april . [ ] world economic forum, “insight report: global gender gap report ,” . [ ] murad d., “malaysia benefits by investing in women,” november . the star online. [ ] wordon q. and la brierre, “the cost of gender inequality. the unrealized potential: the high cost of gender inequality in earnings,” may . the world bank. [ ] economic report of the president, “chapter : the economics of family-friendly workplace policies,” february . [ ] yamaguchi k., “japan’s gender gap,” finance and development, march . vol , no. . [ ] oecd, the pursuit of gender equality: an uphill battle, oecd publishing, paris. . [ ] the american association of university women, “barriers and bias: the status of women in leadership,” . [ ] schochet l., and malik r., “ million parents forced to make career sacrifices due to problems with child care,” center for american progress, . [ ] parker k., “women more than men adjust their careers for family life,” pew research center, . [ ] halpin j., agne k., and omero m., “affordable child care and early learning for all families”, washington: center for american progress, . [ ] population reference bureau, “progress in u.s. women’s well-being stalled in recent generations,” . [ ] bishop-josef a. et al., “want to grow the economy? fix the child care crisis” washington: council for strong america, . [ ] becker gs., “a treatise on the family, ”harvard university press, . [ ] wamsley l., “finland's women-led government has equalized family leave: months for each parent”, npr, . [ ] “are the world's richest countries family friendly? policy in the oecd and eu,” unicef, . effects of sexual harassment on advancement of women in academic medicine: a multi-institutional longitudinal study eclinicalmedicine ( ) contents lists available at sciencedirect eclinicalmedicine journal homepage: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/eclinicalmedicine research paper effects of sexual harassment on advancement of women in academic medicine: a multi-institutional longitudinal study anita raja,b,*, karen m. freundc, jennifer m. mcdonaldd, phyllis l. carre a center on gender equity and health, university of california san diego school of, medicine, gilman drive, san diego, ca, usa b department of education studies, university of california, san diego, ca, usa c tufts medical center and tufts university school of medicine, washington street, boston, ma, usa d association of american medical colleges, patton blvd, washington, dc, usa e massachusetts general hospital, harvard medical school, ma ( newton street, boston, ma, usa a r t i c l e i n f o article history: received august revised february accepted february available online march * corresponding author at: uc san diego school of me jolla, ca , usa. e-mail address: anitaraj@ucsd.edu (a. raj). https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . - /© published by elsevier ltd. this is an o a b s t r a c t background: sexual harassment of women in academic medicine may impede advancement and productivity. this study analyzes the longitudinal effects of sexual harassment on academic advancement and productivity among women. methods: we undertook a longitudinal analysis to predict effects of sexual harassment reported in on career outcomes measured in � , among a sample of women in academic medicine (n = ) recruited from u.s. medical schools. measures included survey data from on sexual harassment (pre- dictor), and � data on retention in academic medicine, rank, leadership positions, and refereed publications (outcomes), captured from surveys and public records. we used multivariable models to test effects of sexual harassment on study outcomes, adjusting for socio-demographics, employment-related var- iables, and gender discrimination. findings: in , % of women reported any workplace sexual harassment, and % of women reported severe harassment (e.g., threats or coercive sexual advances) in the workplace. multivariable regression models showed no significant effects of sexual harassment. however, severe sexual harassment was associ- ated with higher odds of attaining full professorship by � (aor: ¢ ; % ci ¢ , ¢ ; p = ¢ ). interpretation: contrary to our hypothesis, women reporting severe workplace harassment in were more rather than less likely to advance to full professor. women seeking advancement may be more vulnerable to sex- ual harassment in academic medicine vis a vis greater exposure to those who abuse their position of authority. funding: nivh r gm ; doris duke foundation d ; bmgf opp © published by elsevier ltd. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /) keywords: sexual harassment academic medicine faculty gender discrimination dicine, gilman drive, la pen access article under the cc by-nc-nd license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /) . introduction there is increased national attention to the issue of sexual harass- ment, including a report from the u.s. national academies of science, engineering, and medicine (nasem) demanding reduced institu- tional tolerance of such abuse [ ]. historic trends do suggest a decline in sexual harassment in academic medicine in the u.s. from to [ , ]. a multi-institutional study of academic medicine found that % of women and % of men had experienced sexual harassment in the course of their professional careers [ ]. using simi- lar measures, a survey of k-awardees (junior faculty grant awards in the united states providing mentored transition to research independence) in academic medicine found that % of women and % of men had experienced workplace sexual harass- ment [ ]. while this decline is laudable, these findings still indicate that almost one in three women in academic medicine have been sexually harassed at work. further, recent research with female resi- dents highlights great variation in risk for harassment across spe- cialty, with lowest risk reported among pediatric residents and highest risk among surgeons [ ], which notably corresponds with sex parity imbalances in these fields (i.e., pediatrics is female-dominated and surgery male-dominated) [ ]. overall, these data point to ongo- ing need to address this issue in academic medicine. potential professional harms of workplace sexual harassment are substantial, including stress, lower productivity and even loss of employment [ , ]. a report from nasem indicates that job stress and mental/physical health consequences of workplace sexual harassment are linked to declines in employee performance, advancement, and retention [ ]. the hierarchical nature of academic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:anitaraj@ucsd.edu https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://doi.org/ . /j.eclinm. . http://www.sciencedirect.com http://https://www.journals.elsevier.com/eclinicalmedicine research in context evidence before this study the #metoo movement has brought to light the pervasiveness of sexual harassment of women in the workplace across fields, including academic medicine, but little research with academic medical faculty in the united states (u.s.) exist on the topic. a multi-institutional study of academic medical faculty in found that % of women and % of men had experienced sex- ual harassment in the course of their professional career. a study of junior faculty in academic medicine found that % of women and % of men had experienced workplace sex- ual harassment, suggesting a decline in these abuses though still too prevalence for women. no research has analyzed this issue longitudinally to assess whether it may affect productivity and advancement. added value of this study this study builds on previous research by offering the first lon- gitudinal study of sexual harassment among women in aca- demic medicine. we assessed the associations between women’s reports of sexual harassment in on advancement and productivity as measured in -� , among a sample of women (n = ) recruited from u.s. medical schools. implications of all the available evidence this longitudinal study of women in academic medicine dem- onstrates that women with a history of severe sexual harass- ment have increased odds of attaining full professorship. women pursuing career advancement may be in more vulnera- ble positions vis-�a-vis greater exposure to men in authority who engage in abuse of power. alternatively, women recogniz- ing/labeling experiences of severe harassment may be better able to cope and advance professionally. importantly, those experiencing early career sexual harassment remain at greater risk for these abuses even after achieving seniority. systematic change in the hierarchical and gender-biased culture and cli- mate of academic medicine is needed, because opportunity for advancement in this male-dominated field should not require women to be more resilient or tolerant in the face of assault. fig. . flowchart on original study sample and analytic subsamples. a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) medicine facilitates these abuses, both normalizing harassment and allowing perpetrators to act with impunity [ , , ]. in such contexts fears of retaliation and of loss of opportunity or employment main- tain low reporting of sexual harassment [ ]. women in academic medicine who have experienced this workplace harassment also report perceived negative effects of it on professional confidence and career advancement [ ]. however, a similar cross-sectional study assessing associations between sexual harassment and productivity and career advancement did not yield significant associations [ ]. a recent cross-sectional study with female residents did find an associ- ation of sexual harassment with stress [ ], and qualitative research suggests that this may affect productivity over time [ ]. longitudinal analysis of this issue may provide greater insight, and would allow for assessment of the potential longer-term effects of sexual harassment over a woman’s career trajectory. unfortunately, there is limited access to longitudinal data on this topic in academic medicine. the aforementioned study, however, did include follow-up data from � for a subsample of participants who agreed to fol- low-up for assessments of longer-term tracking of career outcomes. these data offer, to our knowledge, the only available longitudinal data allowing for analysis of longer term career effects of sexual harassment among academic medical faculty. in this study, we assess longitudinally whether sexual harassment predicts career advancement outcomes among women in academic medicine from across medical schools in the united states from the period of to � . while outcome data were collected prior to the #metoo movement and are not necessarily reflective of issues of sexual harassment for junior faculty today, they provide insight into the realities and experiences of senior female faculty in academic medicine, many of whom continue to work in the field. . methods this study uses longitudinal data from a cohort of academic medical faculty recruited across medical schools in the united states, as part of the national faculty survey in ; study participants consenting to follow-up were re-surveyed in the � academic year. . . baseline survey the baseline survey was conducted with a representative sample of academic medical faculty from each of randomly selected continen- tal u.s. medical schools. medical schools eligible for selection were those with or more faculty (� women and � underrepre- sented minority faculty). schools were balanced for public and private status and across four national regions (northeast, south, midwest, west). within each school, the original study investigator team ran- domly selected six faculty in each of the cells: graduation cohorts (before , � , after ), sex (male, female), and areas of medical specialization (generalist, medical specialties, surgical special- ties, basic science). women who graduated before and underrep- resented minorities were oversampled in the original study to ensure adequate numbers of faculty for analysis, as the original study focused on cross-sectional analysis of sex and racial/ethnic differences in advancement and promotion of academic medical faculty in the united states. while the original study was not focused on sexual harassment or gender discrimination, these data were collected with the cohort, allowing opportunity to analyze longitudinally whether these experiences predicted advancement outcomes among women. . . sample approximately % of all invited faculty responded and partici- pated in the initial mail-in questionnaire (n = ); of these respondents, ( %) consented to participate in follow-up research. we were able to obtain follow-up data for ( %); participants had died and two did not provide information on sex. of our sample (n = ), we were able to obtain follow-up survey data for ( %); for the remaining (n = ), outcome variables were obtained from publicly available databases (fig. ). a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) the original baseline participants providing sexual harassment and gender discrimination data were majority white ( % for males and females) and over age (for males: % < , % � , % +; for females: % < , % � , % +) in [ ]. in the initial survey, half of women were at the assistant professor ( %) or instructor level ( %), where less than half of men were at these levels ( % assistant profession, % instructor) [ ]. approximately one- quarter of men ( %) and women ( %) were associate professors in the survey, and mean number of publications was for women and for men [ ]. subsequent studies with the sample doc- ument sustained sex differences in promotion to full professor and publication productivity over time [ , ]. participants were % gen- eralist, % medical specialists, % basic scientists, and % surgical specialists [ ]. we compared our analytic subsample to participants in the original sexual harassment study and found no significant dif- ferences between groups on these indicators. . . baseline measures the survey included items on sexual harassment at work as well as items on socio-demographics, respondents’ professional profile and institutional characteristics, and gender discrimination (i.e., dif- ferential treatment based on sex but due to gender norms and expectations attached to sex) at work. a single yes/no item assessed whether the participant had ever encountered sexual harassment, which we defined as having experi- enced unwanted sexual comments, attention, or advances by a supe- rior or colleague in their professional career. this item was developed based on a standard definition of sexual harassment at training institutions [ , , ]. those responding yes to sexual harass- ment in their career were then asked, again using yes/no questions, if they had ever experienced specific forms of more “severe” sexual harassment. items assessed behaviors indicative of greater levels of pressure or humiliation, consistent with definitions used by the nasem [ ]: unwanted sexual advances, subtle bribery to engage in sexual behavior, threats to engage in sexual behavior, or coercive advances. we categorized participants reporting yes on any item as having experienced severe sexual harassment [ , , ]. covariates included were baseline demographic and employ- ment-related variables known to be associated with outcomes of interest based on our prior research using these data [ , , , , ]. items on socio-demographics included age, race/ethnicity (dichoto- mized as non-white and white), marital status (dichotomized as mar- ried/partnered versus other), and parental status (dichotomized as � children versus other). items related to the respondent’s profes- sional profile included academic department (categorized as general- ist, surgical specialties, medical specialties, and basic sciences); years since first faculty appointment; and percentage of time spent in administration, research, clinical work, and teaching. geographic region of the institution was also included (northeast, south, mid- west, and west). mean years since first faculty appointment was re- calculated to yield � data, using the reported years since appointment reported in and the date at which follow-up data were obtained from the participant in � . age was subsequently excluded from covariates in all adjusted models due to collinearity with years since first faculty appointment. gender discrimination was assessed via two items using five- point likert scales anchored by “no, never,” and “yes, frequently.”[ ] the first item asked whether the respondent perceived any gender bias or obstacles to career success or satisfaction. a second item asked if the respondent had ever been left out of professional advancement opportunities due to gender/sex. we created a composite dichoto- mous gender discrimination variable where “yes” was defined as a faculty member responding yes/possibly/probably to either per- ceived gender-specific bias or discrimination in professional advancement questions. we viewed this variable as a potential covariate based on observed association with sexual harassment [ ]. we use the terms gender discrimination and gender bias, rather than sex discrimination and sex bias, to account for the fact that these forms of discrimination and bias are rooted in socially constructed gender norms and expectations that hold individuals to a socially defined gender binary (i.e., male and female). . . follow-up data we conducted a second survey in the � academic year among those who agreed to participate in follow-up studies. we compared the cohort with this follow-up subsample and found no significant differences in outcomes by sex [ ]. we invited partici- pants to complete the follow-up survey either online or via mail. to ensure baseline and follow-up data were correctly linked to the same participant, we collected demographic information (sex, year of birth, and race/ethnicity) again for purposes of verification; surveys also included all items from the baseline survey on sexual harassment and gender discrimination as well as outcomes of interest: academic rank, senior leadership, retention in academia, and number of refer- eed publications. sexual harassment and discrimination items were assessed for the period of to time of interview, in order to assess whether these abuses occurred in the period since last interview. we provided individual remuneration ($ ) to faculty completing the follow-up survey. for non-respondents to the follow-up survey, we developed a methodology to access publicly available databases to assess aca- demic rank, senior leadership, retention in academia, and number of refereed publications. using name, departmental affiliation, year of birth, and academic institution in as personal identifiers, we searched for the subject’s current academic affiliation, presence of any leadership position, and professional activities outside of aca- demic medicine, and included data where a match occurred. we used the bibliographic database scopus [ ] for total number of peer-reviewed publications through . we conducted a reliability assessment of self-report publication rates and scopus data, which indicated good validity of data from online sources; % of women and % of men had agreement between self-report and scopus within % of the absolute number of publications. the proportion of faculty with self-report higher than scopus was the same for men and women ( %), suggesting that we did not introduce gender bias by using scopus data. we used self-reported data when available, supplementing them with data obtained from publicly available sour- ces for all analyses. this approach allowed retention of the full fol- low-up subsample with known sex (n = ). (note: all individuals included in this study identified as either male or female.) outcome variables were based on combination of self-report and online data and were: academic rank, senior leadership, retention in academia, and number of referred publications. academic rank was dichotomized as full professor versus all other (lower) ranks. we spe- cifically focused on full professorship because the follow-up period was years, which would capture stagnation at the associate pro- fessor level (or lower) and attrition from academic medicine. reten- tion in academia was dichotomized as retained in academia (working in an academic, foundation, or government setting, including retiring from such settings) or not (in private practice, industry, or another non-academic setting, including retiring from such settings). [note: in the united states, academics may spend time in government or foundations, which are not tied to profit or product-focused research as would be seen in industry. such jobs are similar in nature and scope to academic positions, and can include training of junior schol- ars such as post-doctoral positions, again as seen in academia [ , ].] two investigators (pc, kf) coded all senior leadership posi- tions (e.g., provost, dean, associate dean, department chair, center director, chief executive officer). we thencreated a dichotomized table demographic and faculty characteristics of participants in and advancement out- comes in � for the total sample and by sex [ ], national faculty survey fol- low-up study. variable total sample (n = ) n (col%) male (n = ) n (col%) female (n = ) n (col%) p-value characteristics mean age in years (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . race ¢ non-white ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) white ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) marital status � ¢ other ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) married/living with partner ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) parental status � ¢ no children ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) children ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) region ¢ northeast ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) south ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) midwest ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) west ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) rank instructor ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) < ¢ assistant professor ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) associate professor ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) full professor ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) other ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) department ¢ generalist ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) surgical specialist ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) medical specialist ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) basic sciences ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) mean years since first faculty appointment (sd) ( ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ advancement outcomes ( ) full professor ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ¢ senior leadership ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ¢ retention in academia ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ mean number of refereed articles (sd) ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) < ¢ percentages do not always correspond to n/n due to missing data. missing data are excluded from the denominator. demographic and faculty characteristics were based on data as these survey data were available for all participants. mean years since first faculty appointment was the only covariate based on data, and this was calculated using the survey data from in addition to the year at which follow-up data were collected. based on fisher’s exact test. based on t-test; sd: standard deviation. a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) variable on senior leadership. number of peer-reviewed publications was measured as a continuous variable. . human ethics institutional review board approval for the study was received from boston university, tufts medical center, and - through a reli- ance agreement with tufts medical center - massachusetts general hospital. . statistical analyses only participants with complete data were included in analyses. due to non-availability of sampling data and information on non- respondents, we did not account for the design or non-response in these analyses. we obtained summary statistics (proportions, means, and standard deviations [sds]) for all variables, for the total sample and by sex. as appropriate, differences in the distributions of charac- teristics by sex and outcomes (rank, senior leadership, retention in academia, and number of publications) were conducted using fisher’s exact tests (categorical variables) or t-tests (continuous variables). due to the small proportion of men reporting sexual harassment, subsequent analyses assessing effects of sexual harassment on career outcomes were limited to women. we conducted descriptive analy- ses on workplace sexual harassment and gender discrimination for the period prior to (baseline reports) and the period from to � (follow-up reports). we used generalized estimating equations accounting for repeated measures to detect significant change over time on these variables. we conducted bivariate and multivariable analyses to assess asso- ciations between sexual harassment reported in with outcomes reported in � , among women. we obtained adjusted odds ratios (aors) and % confidence intervals (cis) from multivariable logistic regression models for analyses with categorical outcomes (rank, leadership, retention), and an adjusted incident rate ratio from negative binomial regression for our continuous or count outcome (number of refereed publications). we used a backward selection process to develop parsimonious multivariable models and forced “sexual harassment” into the model, retaining covariates with p < ¢ . we opted for backward rather than forward selection as some covariates are correlated, and forward selection could result in selected variables becoming non-significant upon inclusion of a sub- sequent variable. we also included number of publications as a covariate for our model to predict full professor, given the demon- strated association between publication record and promotion [ , ]. we conducted all analyses using sas ¢ . all tests were two-sided, and we considered p-value < ¢ as significant. . results at baseline women were less likely than men to be married, have children, and be a full professor (p< . ) (table ). in � , women remained less likely to be full professor ( ¢ % vs ¢ %; p � ¢ ), and were also less likely to have attained a senior leader- ship position ( ¢ % vs ¢ %;p � ¢ ) or remain in academia ( ¢ % vs ¢ %; p = ¢ ); they also had fewer peer-reviewed publi- cations than their male counterparts [mean (sd): ¢ ( ¢ ) vs ¢ ( ¢ ); p< ¢ ]. in , women as compared with men reported higher rates of gender discrimination ( ¢ % vs. ¢ %) and sexual harassment ( ¢ % vs. ¢ %), and ¢ % of women reported severe sexual harass- ment in the forms of unwanted and coercive sexual advances, as well as bribery and threats to engage in sexual behavior (table ). while these baseline prevalence rates are for the full sample, they are com- parable to rates for the subsample reached for follow-up survey data. women reported lower prevalence of workplace sexual harassment for the period between baseline and follow-up, relative to what was reported at baseline (follow-up prevalence ¢ %, p < ¢ ), while men reported similar rates for both time periods (follow-up preva- lence ¢ %, p = ¢ ). gender discrimination produced similar find- ings, with women reporting lower prevalence of workplace gender discrimination between the period of baseline and follow-up, relative to what was reported at baseline (follow-up prevalence ¢ %, p < ¢ ), while men reported similar prevalence for both time periods (follow-up prevalence ¢ %, p = ¢ ). to explore whether sexual harassment and gender discrimination reported in were associated with having experienced these abuses in period from the survey to the � survey, we conducted a simple post-hoc analysis with the subsample of women providing these survey data at both time points (n = ). among this subsample, we found that ¢ % of women (n = ) reported harass- ment in and in � (the latter indicative of the period table prevalence of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in and � and change prevalence over time, by sex, national faculty survey. male female (n = ) n (%) � (n = ) n (%) p-value (n = ) n (%) � (n = ) n (%) p-value sexual harassment ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) < ¢ severe sexual harassment ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) < ¢ unwanted sexual advances ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � subtle bribery to engage in sexual behavior ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � threats to engage in sexual behavior ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � coercive sexual advances ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � gender discrimination ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) < ¢ gender bias/obstacles to career success ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � left out of professional advancement due to gender ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) � percentages do not always correspond to n/n due to missing data. missing data are excluded from the denominator. obtained from generalized estimating equations (gee) accounting for repeated measures. a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) subsequent to the survey up to the � survey. two in five ( ¢ %; n = ) reported harassment only on the survey, and ¢ % (n = ) reported sexual harassment only on the sur- vey. more than one-third of women ( ¢ %; n = ) reported no sex- ual harassment on either survey. women who reported harassment in were significantly more likely to report sexual harassment in the subsequent period up to � (p< ¢ ). for the female subsample with gender discrimination data available at both time points (n = ), ¢ % (n = ) reported gender discrimination in and on the � survey (again, the latter for the period from the survey to the � survey). more than one in five ( ¢ %; n = ) reported gender discrimination in but not on the � survey. smaller percentages reported gender dis- crimination only on the � survey ( ¢ %, n = ) or on nei- ther survey ( . %; n = ). [note: sexual harassment and gender discrimination prevalence estimates for did not differ for the subsample with � follow-up survey data on harassment and discrimination as compared to the full follow-up sample included in our main analyses (table ).] . . effects of sexual harassment bivariate analyses (table ) and multivariable regression models (table ) indicated no statistically significant associations between prior discrimination or sexual harassment and career outcomes among women. however, women who reported severe sexual harassment achieved full professorship at a higher rate [adjusted odds ratio (aor): ¢ , % confidence interval (ci): ¢ , ¢ ; p = ¢ ]. as the data on sexual harassment in � is a secondary anal- ysis for the smaller subsample of follow-up participants providing survey data in � , we did not create regression models to assess these cross-sectional associations. nonetheless, we graphed table bivariate associations between gender discrimination and sexual harassment and academic variable full professor senior lead no (n = ) yes (n = ) p-value no (n = ) yes (n n (%) n (%) encountered sexual harassment ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( encountered severe sexual harassment ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) < ¢ ( ¢ ) ( percentages do not always correspond to n/n due to missing data. missing data are exc based on fisher’s exact test. based on t-test; sd: standard deviation. reported experiences of sexual harassment among women in and in � , by full professor/not full professor at each time point (fig. ). this graph reinforces our multivariable finding on the association between reports of severe sexual harassment in and achieving full professor by � , but suggests no difference by rank in terms of reports of sexual harassment at follow-up. . discussion findings from this longitudinal study of more senior women in academic medicine demonstrate that those who experienced severe sexual harassment earlier in their professional careers, about one in three of these women, were significantly more likely to advance to full professor. this finding and the lack of associations between sex- ual harassment and other study outcomes are contrary to that seen in prior descriptive and cross-sectional research [ , ]. these findings are also inconsistent with prior cross-sectional research with this same cohort which found no correlational association between harassment and career advancement outcomes in [ ]. the dif- ference in our findings and these prior publications may be attribut- able to prior research being limited to cross-sectional analyses and possibly a more limited period between the time of harassment and outcomes [ ]. our longitudinal findings may more accurately reflect that this senior cohort of women persisted and advanced in medicine despite harassment and discrimination, an unacceptable but too often required situation for women in the workplace. these findings are particularly notable given prior analysis of these data document- ing that women relative to men were less likely to advance to full professor in this same timeframe [ ]. a potential explanation for these findings is that women seeking advancement in male-dominated academia, with its historic toler- ance of such abuses, have increased opportunity for exposure to harassment. prior research indicates greater risk for workplace sexual advancement of women in academic medicine, national faculty survey. outcomes ership retention in academics number of refereed articles = ) p-value no (n = ) yes (n = ) p-value (n = ) p-value n (%) mean (sd ) ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ¢ ( ¢ ) ¢ ¢ ) ¢ ( ¢ ) ( ¢ ) ¢ ¢ ( ¢ ) < ¢ luded from the denominator. table adjusted odds ratios (aor), adjusted incident rate ratio (adj. irr), and % confidence intervals (ci) from multivariable regressions to evaluate the association of gender discrimination and sexual harassment with academic advancement of women in academic medicine, national faculty survey . full professor (n = ) senior leadership (n = ) retention in academics (n = ) number of refereed articles (n = ) aor ( % ci); p-value adj irr ( % ci); p-value sexual harassment ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ severe sexual harassment ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ ¢ ( ¢ , ¢ ); p = ¢ excludes missing data. logistic regression adjusted for region (northeast, south, midwest, west), department (generalist, surgical, medical/other, basic sciences), type of institution (aca- demic, other), years since first faculty appointment, percent of time in administration, and percent of time in research. logistic regression adjusted for department (generalist, surgical, medical/other, basic sciences), type of institution (academic, other), and percent of time in administration. logistic regression adjusted for race (white, non-white), marital status (married/living with partner, other), region (northeast, south, midwest, west), department (generalist, surgical, medical/other, basic sciences) and years since first faculty appointment. negative binomial regression adjusted for parental status (no children, have children), department (generalist, surgical, medical/other, basic sciences), type of institu- tion (academic, other), years since first faculty appointment, percent of time in administration, and percent of time in research. a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) harassment in male-dominated professions and environments, including medicine, where advancement opportunity depends on a hierarchical power structure (i.e., advisors and mentors) [ , , - ]. recent research with medical residents corresponds with these find- ings, with higher past month prevalence of sexual harassment reported in the male-dominated field of surgery relative to the female-dominated field of pediatrics [ ]. research from academic medicine similarly shows that harassment most commonly occurs from a supervisor or colleague [ ], and can include “quid pro quo harassment,” making women seeking advancement more vulnerable to these abuses [ ]. our finding that % of women have experienced quid pro quo harassment reinforces this point. studies indicate that across science, engineering, and medicine, medical students are at the greatest risk for sexual harassment, potentially also resulting in greater tolerance of these abuses [ , ]. greater understanding of the frequency and chronicity of harassment and the nature of the rela- tionship to the perpetrator, as well as of support systems used by vic- tims, would offer more insight into our findings. nonetheless, findings support that women are demonstrating resiliency and advancement in the context of workplaces that do not protect them from sexual harassment and gender discrimination [ ]. while these findings are important, they may not necessarily hold true for newer professionals in academic medicine, particularly subse- quent to the #metoo movement and recent responses from the national academies of science, engineering and medicine (nasem) offering clarity on these abuses and their unacceptability [ ]. there is some research, with a convenience sample of working women, which suggests that sexual harassment in the workplace has declined since the #metoo movement [ ]. however, studies on the topic with nationally representative samples indicate no change in prevalence of sexual harassment over the period of (pre-#metoo) to and fig. . sexual harassment and severe sexual harassment in academic medicine reported in fessor or not) in and in � . [ - ]. this study offers important advancement over prior work by offering a longitudinal examination of the topic, but we must continue to collect data and follow-up with women and men on their experiences of sexual harassment in academic medicine today. the opportunity to use these data to promote change cannot be overstated given the substantial and growing response to pressures for change, based on the nasem report and the larger #metoo movement. for example, the united states national institute of health (nih), the nation’s federal health research body, has in response to this report set new standards for monitoring and accountability of these abuses [ ], and the head of nih has vowed not to speak on any “manels” (i.e., male-only expert panels) [ ]. detailed data on chronicity of sexual harassment are not available in the current study, but analysis of prevalence of sexual harassment at baseline and subsequently for the period from baseline to � follow-up among the subsample providing follow-up sur- vey data do indicate a decline for women over time, though no change for men. notably, those reporting sexual harassment at baseline were more likely to report it at follow-up as well. similar findings are seen for gender discrimination, which is strongly linked to sexual harass- ment [ - ]. importantly, these findings indicate that harassment and discrimination persist across women’s career trajectories, even though some reduction is seen. women’s lower risk for sexual harassment and assault with increased age is well-documented [ , ], but work- place sexual harassment may also be declining. there is some evidence which suggests that this is the case for academic medicine [ , ]. none- theless, as our findings support, it remains unacceptably high even for participating women with academic seniority; more than one in five reported workplace sexual harassment in the follow-up period. prior research documents that institutional climate and culture affect the likelihood of abusive and discriminatory behaviors, and this may and for the period of to � among female faculty by rank (full pro- a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) explain persistence of these experiences over time [ , ]. [climate refers to the shared perceptions of the institutional environment (e.g., allowance for dating among colleagues), where culture is the often more deep-seated norms and values of the institution that define its identity (e.g., norms related to sexual language or interactions in the workplace) [ ].] such cultures also maintain victims’ silence with direct or indirect threats of vindictive retaliation [ ]. we cannot, though, assume that these findings are institution-specific, as we know that changing institutions remains common among faculty [ ]. likely this is a broader concern for the field with continued dispropor- tionate burden to those early in career. female medical students may learn early to navigate these risks, and perhaps all the more so when our sample was in training. as such, our cohort of female faculty may have entered our study with a pre-existing resiliency to advance despite exposure to harassment and discrimination at work, and it is possible that those who did not want to continue to endure these abuses in the academic setting opted out of academic medicine. research demonstrates that sexual harassers are often serial abusers, maintaining their position at their institution with impunity or trans- ferred to other organizations without notification of the abuses they perpetrated [ ], and this speaks to the problem with both the abusers and the bystanders in power that allow the abuse to continue. in such contexts, it may be that those women willing and/or able to navigate these abuses are disproportionately represented in academic medi- cine, at least for the generation of faculty included in this study. study findings indicate very low rates of sexual harassment of men, but the nature of the assessment may not have sufficiently identified men’s experiences. a recent national study found that the most com- mon form of sexual harassment men experience is emasculation and homophobia [ ]. sexual and gender minorities also face greater risk for such workplace abuses [ ], which the current measure may not have been sufficiently sensitive to detect. nasem recently offered a broader definition of sexual harassment: “(one) gender harassment (verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender), (two) unwanted sexual attention (verbal or physical unwelcome sexual advances, which can include assault), and (three) sexual coercion (when favorable professional or educational treatment is conditioned on sexual activity [quid pro quo]).”[ ] this definition goes beyond directly targeting an individual, recognizing that a sexually hostile environment itself can be sexually harassing even if specific individu- als are not directly targeted [ ]. more research is needed to understand men’s experiences of harassment and bullying in academic medicine. while these longitudinal findings offer important insight, they must be considered in light of certain study limitations. our primary predictor, sexual harassment, is based on self-report, and did not include information regarding the relationship of the respondent and perpetrator(s). self-report data can be subject to social desirability and recall biases. severity of sexual harassment can also be subjec- tive, though we based our definition as used in the original study [ ] and adherent to definitions from nasem [ ]. additionally, for fol- low-up data on sexual harassment, low response rates may introduce bias. however, we found a similar percent of women reporting sexual harassment in as that seen among those who responded in ( � %). further, these data are, to our knowledge, the only data on chronicity of sexual harassment (reports of harassment over both periods) for academic medical faculty, indicating their value despite the more limited sample. importantly, however, the data from this study are specific to later in career and life individuals, who were recruited based on their faculty position in . findings thus cannot be generalizable to junior faculty today, but may still offer a cautionary tale for these younger cohorts and the institutions in which they work, where both affected women and those who har- assed may continue to work in senior faculty positions. an additional limitation is potential selection bias related to sex- ual harassment for participants in the original baseline study versus non-responders. our sample from had a % participation rate, and the untapped % may have been more or less likely to have experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination. we unfor- tunately have no data on non-respondents and thus cannot assess whether selection bias is a concern for the sample. while these data exist in the aamc’s faculty roster survey [ ], they are unavailable for analysis due to confidentiality concerns. nonetheless, our sample is largely demographically comparable to academic medicine faculty according to the aamc report [ ], suggesting a lower risk for selec- tion bias. an additional concern is our inability to understand the institutional context of these data. the original data anony- mized schools for their protection, so while we can compare differen- ces across schools, we cannot know institutional indicators that may affect harassment, such as the proportions of female faculty or faculty leaders in a given school in or currently. future research should examine this issue. generalizability of our sample is also limited to female academic medical professionals in the united states, and from a period prior to the #metoo movement. greater public awareness and intolerance of sexual harassment may yield different findings regarding prevalence of sexual harassment today and with younger cohorts, and possibly with cohorts of clinicians and health researchers who do not pursue positions in academic medicine. unfortunately, past year data from graduating medical students indicate that % received unwanted sexual advances and % were subjected to offensive sexist remarks during medical training (sex disaggregated data are unavailable) [ ], suggesting that the issue of sexual harassment, even if declining, persists and occurs early in career. importantly, we did not assess mental health outcomes; depression is a well-recognized effect of harassment that can potentially mediate effects of harassment on advancement [ , , , ]. further research with mental health considerations is needed. additionally, demographic and occupational related risks for sex- ual harassment could not be a focus of this study to the relatively small cell sizes that would result from splitting data further. more research is needed to consider intersectional vulnerability to sexual harassment, including vulnerability based on subspecialty and the male dominance of that subspecialty, as well as differences by demo- graphic indicators related to marginalization (race/ethnicity, geo- graphic region, disability, and sexual minority identification). replication of this study with a larger sample would offer an impor- tant opportunity to understand these issues better. this longitudinal study of women in academic medicine demon- strates that women with a history of severe sexual harassment have increased odds of attaining full professorship. women pursuing career advancement may be in more vulnerable positions vis-�a-vis greater exposure to men in authority who engage in abuse of power. alternatively, women recognizing/labeling experiences of severe harassment may be better able to cope and advance professionally. importantly, among this cohort of older faculty, those experiencing early in career sexual harassment remain at greater risk for these abuses even after achieving seniority. monitoring sexual harassment through annual surveys in academic medicine should be a priority, as should accountability structures to maintain a climate of safety [ ]. systematic change in the hierarchical and gender-biased climate and culture of academic medicine is needed [ ], because opportunity for advancement in this male-dominated field should not require women to be more resilient or tolerant in the face of assault. further, while women may be surviving these abuses, this does not mean they have no effect. they may in fact contribute to ongoing sex differ- ences seen in advancement and productivity documented in other studies. [ , ] more prospective work is needed to determine how these findings may differ across generations of faculty, and to assess if things are getting better. while findings are specific to the united states (u.s.), they may be meaningful beyond the u.s. as the number of women entering medicine across the world increases. the time is now to stop sexual harassment in academic medicine. while findings a. raj et al. / eclinicalmedicine ( ) demonstrate women’s resilience despite these abuses, women’s suc- cess and advancement should not require persistence in the face of ongoing mistreatment in the workplace. declaration of competing interest ms. mcdonald reports personal fees from partners healthcare, outside the submitted work. the other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. acknowledgements this work was funded by the national institutes of health (grant number r gm ) and the doris duke foundation (grant num- ber d ). support for developing the collection of supple- mental papers to the lancet series on gender equality, norms and health, including this paper, was provided by the bill and melinda gates foundation and the ministry of foreign affairs and interna- tional cooperation of the united arab emirates. study sponsors had no involvement in study design, data collection, data analysis, inter- pretation of findings, the writing of this paper, or the decision to sub- mit the paper for publication. nih r gm ; doris duke foundation d . statement of authorship ar and pc conceptualized the research question and hypotheses, and guided the analytic approach. ar led the literature review and writing of the introduction and result, and contributed to interpreta- tion of study findings. pc guided discussion and interpretation of study findings. kf contributed to the refinement of the research ques- tion, guidance on variable construction, and analytic approach, and led the writing of the methods section of the paper. jm supported sci- entific writing and formating of the paper. all authors provided sub- stantive review of the paper and approved the final submitted paper. ar as corresponding had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication references [ ] nasem. the national academies collection: reports funded by national institutes of health, washingtondc: national academies of sciences, engineering, medicine (nasem). policy global affairs committee on women in science, engineering and medicine. committee on the impacts of sexual harassment in academia. national academy of sciences. national academies press (us); . 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http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/our-work/nationalstudy/ study/ http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/our-work/nationalstudy/ study/ https://www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research-training/initiatives/sexual-harassment/ -notice-extramural-sexual-harassment.pdf https://www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research-training/initiatives/sexual-harassment/ -notice-extramural-sexual-harassment.pdf https://www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research-training/initiatives/sexual-harassment/ -notice-extramural-sexual-harassment.pdf https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/time-end-manel-tradition https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/time-end-manel-tradition http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref https://www.aamc.org/data/facultyroster/reports/ /usmsf .html https://www.aamc.org/data/facultyroster/reports/ /usmsf .html http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref 	effects of sexual harassment on advancement of women in academic medicine: a multi-institutional longitudinal study 	 . introduction 	 . methods 	 . . baseline survey 	 . . sample 	 . . baseline measures 	 . . follow-up data 	 . human ethics 	 . statistical analyses 	 . results 	 . . effects of sexual harassment 	 . discussion 	declaration of competing interest 	acknowledgements 	statement of authorship 	references ‘safeguarding’ as humanitarian buzzword: an initial scoping commentary open access ‘safeguarding’ as humanitarian buzzword: an initial scoping kristin bergtora sandvik , abstract suddenly, talk of ‘safeguarding’ and a sector-wide ‘safeguarding crisis’ seems to be everywhere. grappling with the scope and content of ‘safeguarding’ as a parameter of humanitarian practice, this commentary asks questions about the framing of safeguarding as a buzzword: about what buzzwords do, whether safeguarding is a global buzzword, whether it is a reframing of old concerns and historical accountability efforts, what is new about it—and finally, what kind of reflections and responses this newness should engender. keywords: buzzwords, humanitarian accountability, safeguarding, sexual exploitation, sexual violence introduction suddenly, talk of ‘safeguarding’ and of a sector-wide ‘safe- guarding crisis’ seems to be everywhere. in the wake of the oxfam scandal in haiti, where the organization is per- ceived to have failed to act on sexual misconduct by staff in the aftermath of the earthquake and then to have attempted a cover-up, the aid sector is now engaging in ‘safeguarding’ exercises (bbc ). while initially based on a uk legal definition that applied to vulnerable adults and children, safeguarding has acquired a broader mean- ing, which includes all actions by aid actors to protect staff from harm (abuse, sexual harassment and violence) and to ensure staff do not harm beneficiaries. as observed by bruce-raeburn ( a), this is common practice: the aid sector has ‘careened from one theory of change to another, all the while leaving a trail of buzzwords, jargon, and con- cepts’. in , ‘and without missing a beat’, bruce-raeburn notes, ‘safeguarding joined the aid sector lexicon’ (bruce-raeburn a). considering the scope and content of ‘safeguarding’ as a parameter of humanitar- ian practice, this commentary asks questions about the framing of safeguarding as a buzzword. i do not claim that this piece is exhaustive or the ‘best’ way to think about safeguarding. due to its format, it does not provide a full survey of sources and references. my aim is to reflect critically on what the ‘safeguarding’ concept consists of, and thus to contribute to the insti- tutional memory of the international humanitarian in- dustry. in a sector with a rapid turnover of personnel, and against the backdrop of fast changing global mores on sexuality, power and gender relations, an important task for humanitarian scholars is to provide a critical analysis of institutional memory. i suggest that, as aca- demics, our priority should not be to ‘improve’ humani- tarian practice as such, but to contribute to critical contestations over projects and concepts—in particular, those framed in terms of moral outrage. my intention here, then, is not to unpack legal definitions of safe- guarding or to evaluate their evolution or dissemination in the humanitarian system. instead, i explore safeguard- ing as a humanitarian buzzword, asking what buzzwords do, whether safeguarding is a global buzzword, how far it is a reframing of old concerns and historical account- ability efforts, what is new about it—and finally, what kind of reflections and responses this newness should engender. what do buzzwords do? as cornwall and brock ( ) explain, buzzwords con- fer the legitimacy aid actors need to justify their inter- ventions. buzzwords frame problems by singling out some aspects of a situation and thereby defining courses of action. buzzwords are used to create problem state- ments that by their nature call for certain kinds of solu- tions. successful buzzwords engender institutional and economic consequences: according to dijkzeul ( ), correspondence: bergtora@prio.no prio, po box , grønland, oslo, norway department of criminology and sociology of law, university of oslo, oslo, norway journal of international humanitarian action © the author(s). open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. sandvik journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:bergtora@prio.no http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / such issues as sexual violence in war go from being unrecognized, ignored or forgotten to becoming an in- dustry that appropriates funding, taking attention and resources away from other humanitarian needs and problems, and from addressing root causes. has safeguarding become a global buzzword? while safeguarding is clearly in the early stages of following the buzzword trajectory, the tentative answer is ‘no’—or at least ‘not yet’. it remains a buzzword largely confined to certain humanitarian policy arenas in the global north. safeguarding, together with a series of high-profile sexual exploitation scandals, originated in the uk: the uk gov- ernment and large uk ngos are the industry leaders in- stitutionalizing the concept through contentious ‘safeguarding summits’ (gov.uk a) that have led to protests and boycotts by activists (parker ). as part of its response, the uk government has launched a new interpol/save the children coordinated vetting project, soteria, that will provide criminal record checks and im- prove information sharing (gov.uk b). nevertheless, while sexual misconduct has moved to the top of most agencies’ policy and public relations agenda, there are wide variations in terminology and problem-framing across the sector. for example, when, in spring , members of interaction (a us ngo alli- ance) signed a pledge on preventing sexual abuse, and ex- ploitation by and of ngo staff, the word ‘safeguarding’ was not used (interaction ). the icrc has decided to con- tinue to use ‘sexual violence prevention and response’, and ‘sexual misconduct’ in the code of conduct (as i learned from a conversation with an anonymous aid worker). the ifrc uses ‘sexual and gender-based violence’. the decision not to adopt ‘safeguarding’ as a buzzword appears to be partly to do with the fact that ‘safeguarding’ can relate to many other projects and problems: the icrc has, for in- stance, drawn attention to the importance of ‘safeguarding healthcare’ (icrc ). the ifrc uses ‘safeguarding’ to de- scribe a range of priorities, including youth policy and envir- onmental protection (ifrc n.d.; ifrc ). safeguarding has also been a commonly used concept in international aid: for example, it is employed by the world bank with respect to environmental and social frameworks (world bank ). at the same time, the notion of safe- guarding has already been severely criticized for its lack of inclusiveness and for being yet another costly top-down ini- tiative (bruce-raeburn a) designed to save the face of large organizations, where ‘the safeguarding industry was hatched and experts magically appeared and promises of change were made’ with little attention to local and national context or participation (bruce-raeburn b). is safeguarding new? to understand the broader context of safeguarding, it is necessary to ask, what is old? at its core, the idea of safeguarding is to reinforce the humanitarian imperative to do no harm, by preventing ‘sexual abuse and exploit- ation’. as i will explain below, humanitarians have long been concerned about this and tried to do something about it. however, when one examines the struggles of the humanitarian sectors over the past decades—my frame of reference goes back to the early-mid s, while that of others will be longer or shorter than that— it becomes clear that safeguarding can also be thought of as the label currently put on an ongoing crisis of legit- imacy. in broad terms, safeguarding then becomes the latest instalment of the three-decade long humanitarian accountability project (jacobsen and sandvik ; sandvik ). humanitarian accountability first emerged as a concern in the s and was institutionalized through the code of conduct for the international red cross and red crescent movement and ngos in disaster relief (icrc ). the findings of the joint evaluation of emer- gency assistance to rwanda represented a defining mo- ment in the understanding of humanitarian accountability (borton ) and resulted in several sector-wide initia- tives. the sphere project, launched in , focuses on both humanitarian ethics via the humanitarian charter and technical regularization of humanitarian action through the minimum standards in disaster response (nadig ) and continues to provide guidance to the sector through updated handbooks. other accountability initiatives, like hap international (the humanitarian ac- countability project) and people in aid also emerged (these two became the chs alliance in ), and eventu- ally, humanitarian accountability became a separate mini-industry within the sector. efforts to streamline the sector’s accountability initiatives culminated in with the revised core humanitarian standards (chs alliance ). throughout this period, sexual exploitation has been considered the worst possible behaviour humanitar- ian workers can be guilty of, but it has not been clear what constitutes exploitation and which relationships exploit- ation takes place in (sandvik ). the next question is ‘what is new’? while there might be disagreement as to the historical trajectory and geo- graphical scope of ‘safeguarding’, it also appears that something is new in the landscape surrounding safe- guarding and that this newness will inevitably impact its content. central to this are the rapidly evolving and sometimes overlapping global political and legal initia- tives addressing sexual exploitation, harassment and prostitution. a useful way to scope ‘newness’, therefore, is to map out the changing policy contexts of the sexual exploitation of beneficiaries, the sexual harassment of subordinates and co-workers, the acquisition of com- mercial sexual services and, finally, the general technolo- gization of humanitarian space. sandvik journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of a changing global morality i suggest that safeguarding must be understood in the context of significant changes over the last years in the standards of global public morality regarding the conduct of personnel working for international organiza- tions and ngos when vulnerable adults and children are involved. in phnom penh in , in his only policy statement on sexual activity by personnel, yasushi aka- shi, head of the un peacekeeping mission untac (united nations transitional authority in cambodia) said in a staff meeting that young men needed to have fun, i.e. buy sex, and that ‘boys will be boys’ (although untac staff were told not to park un vehicles in front of brothels) (ledgerwood ). however, since then, the normative perspectives and positions of international organizations have rapidly evolved, at least on paper. unhcr’s guidelines on sexual violence and refu- gees expressly mentioned ‘international refugee workers’ as being implicated in sexual violence against refugees (unhcr ). in , the joint unhcr and save the children uk report on the sexual exploitation of refugee children in west africa documented allegations against agencies and individuals (naik ). in , in a wording that now seems odd, the secretary general’s bulletin st/ sgb/ / , which set out special measures for protec- tion from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, noted that these acts constitute serious misconduct and grounds for disciplinary measures: ‘sexual relationships between united nations staff and beneficiaries of assist- ance’ are ‘based on inherently unequal power dynamics’. they ‘undermine the credibility and integrity of the work of the united nations’—and in consequence, they are ‘strongly discouraged’ (secretary general ). in continuation of the work to protect vulnerable adults and children, during the past years, the humanitarian sector has seen a flurry of institutional initiatives and shifting acronyms. the effort to prevent sexual exploit- ation and abuse is now commonly known by the acro- nym ‘psea’ and is led by the iasc (inter-agency standing committee). women’s rights and metoo safeguarding has emerged at a key historical moment for women’s rights, as well as for the humanitarian sec- tor. the current ‘safeguarding crisis’ follows a global metoo movement that has had a particularly significant impact in some of the biggest donor countries in the global north, highlighting a high level of sexual exploit- ation and harassment, as well as widespread impunity. sexual harassment in the workplace is no longer some- thing that is just officially frowned on: it is increasingly considered to undermine workers’ labour rights and to be highly detrimental to effectiveness, output and reputation. for the humanitarian sector, this means that concern about protection against predatory behaviour now goes beyond the relationship between aid worker and beneficiary, to encompass workplace relations be- tween seniors and juniors, as well as between individuals where no formal hierarchical relationship exists. at the same time, the response to sexual harassment is also shaped by broader trends in the humanitarian sector: the professionalization and legalization of aid work (lohne and sandvik ) and the emergence of a duty of care standard for humanitarian workers (merkelbach and kemp ; sandvik ), including the applica- tion of domestic labour law protection against abusive bosses and co-workers (fairbanks ). in tandem with this (and in interesting contrast to the focus on benefi- ciary resilience), there has been an emergence of a us-inspired ‘humanitarian wellness’ language and well- ness training for humanitarians with a focus on self-care (humanitarianwellbeing n.d.) a vanishing distinction between transactional and exploitative sex the interpretation of what safeguarding means is also shaped by changing cultural perceptions of transactional sex and prostitution, primarily in the global north. while the metoo campaign is of very recent date, it links up with a more longstanding trend in big donor countries, namely the de facto criminalization of prosti- tution by criminalizing the buyer. whereas codes of conduct have been promoted as a key mechanism for governing the sexual behaviour of humanitarian workers (matti ), the act of buying sex is increasingly con- strued legally and ideologically as a criminal practice. in my view, this is possibly the most difficult field of social practice covered by safeguarding, and where it is vital to think carefully so that one can tread the fine line be- tween justifiable moral censure and moralistic outrage. is moralistic outrage necessarily a bad thing? the view appears to be an emerging that paying for sex, anywhere and at any time, is incompatible with being a ‘good’ hu- manitarian worker and dependable employee; the dis- tinction between paying for sex and exploiting someone for sex is being erased. while buying sex in the s, for example, appears to have been a fairly common practice in the aid world (broadly defined), much of the moral indignation previ- ously linked to prostitution and aid was linked to the hiv/aids epidemic and the fact that buying sex helped spread the epidemic at home and abroad (ledgerwood ). today, in such donor countries as canada, france, iceland, ireland, norway and sweden, buying sex is illegal and is punished with fines or prison sen- tences (procon.org ). at the same time, criminalization remains extremely controversial. global sandvik journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of prostitution activism has long been an ideological battle- field, with a seemingly unbridgeable abyss between those who see prostitution as violence against women and those who want it regulated as work, regardless of gen- der. while i am not aware of any comprehensive effort to track the consequences of criminalization for sex workers, new research indicates that vulnerable women in prostitution become more vulnerable through criminalization in the global north (jahnsen and skil- brei ; skilbrei ). thus, when trying to gauge an appropriate scope for the idea of safeguarding, it is ne- cessary to reflect on the usefulness (and normative ap- propriateness) of maintaining a conceptual distinction between procuring sexual services from a beneficiary or vulnerable person—and buying them from sex workers not positioned as recipients or as being in a position of vulnerability in the humanitarian field. can safeguarding be technologized? a final point concerns the current humanitarian recourse to technology (sandvik et al. ) and the how of safe- guarding regulations. as critics, we must be alert to efforts to ‘technologize’ safeguarding responses. increasingly, hu- manitarian action is being quantified and remotely con- trolled (duffield ; jacobsen and sandvik ). the soteria initiative mentioned above serves as a good ex- ample of this trend. the demand for measurements and ‘evidence-based approaches’ engender a framing of social life and its problems that lends itself to a focus on aspects of ‘the social’ that can be counted and classified (or be made classifiable and countable). this emphasis on quan- tification may engender a reductive form of accountability resulting from distilling social life into excessively ‘neat categories’ (merry ). in a parallel but closely related development, surveillance is becoming an increasingly common technique of humanitarian governance (dijkzeul and sandvik ). while the stated objective of equip- ping humanitarian workers with tracking devices is to pro- tect missions in an increasingly fractured humanitarian space (for an example, see the itrack n.d.), this approach raises difficult ethical questions (o’mathúna et al. ) about privacy and work/life balance. it also risks creating a sense of complacency, if agencies rely on number crunching and digital processes to tell them what kind of risk their workers constitute (their profile), where their workers are (their location on a map) and what they are doing (legible actions that produce data). none of these remote-control strategies correspond meaningfully to the need to reduce power imbalances and empower those in precarious positions, be they beneficiaries or staff. conclusions the aim of this commentary has been to show how safe- guarding means different things to different people, depending on where they are situated within the aid sec- tor: variations are based on gender, nationality, geo- graphical location and age. hence, understanding ‘safeguarding’ as a normative bundle based on humani- tarian sector-specific responses to ‘internal’ events in the humanitarian space as well as to broader social, cultural and political developments, is perhaps the best way of coming to terms with its meaning and potential impact on the sector. in conclusion, as has been indicated, there is nothing ‘obvious’ about the content of the safeguarding concept or how it is being mainstreamed. charges of face-saving and tokenism—the view that safeguarding is yet another western-centric practice, and frustrated complaints about the absence of meaningful field participation and local consultations when safeguarding approaches are formulated need to be taken seriously and addressed carefully. there is also a trade-off: making policies more comprehensive, in terms of who is protected against what, and who is responsible for taking which precau- tionary measures and/or imposing what type of sanc- tions, raises difficult questions about personal liberties and the scope of humanitarian morality. at the same time, on an institutional level, agencies that claim an ab- sence or near absence of harassment, sexual exploitation and violence now appear suspect—and not on top of their duty of care obligations. a practical first step for holding agencies accountable is to require detailed an- nual descriptions of how existing policy is being implemented. endnotes i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point. see generally hoppe and williamson . scholarly engagement with the concept is just emer- ging, see hilhorst et al. ; lewis . the enormous amount of policy documentation avail- able on psea is outside the scope of this commentary. for an overview of iasc policies, see https://interagen- cystandingcommittee.org/product-categories/ protection-sexual-abuse-and-exploitation the idea that criminalization is an appropriate tool to ‘end impunity’ for sexual violence in conflict is contested (houge and lohne ; lemaitre and sandvik ). i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation. i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for empha- sizing this point. acknowledgements i am grateful to anonymous humanitarian workers and peer reviewers providing valuable input for this commentary. funding humanitarianism, borders, and the governance of mobility: the eu and the ‘refugee crisis’, funded by the research council of norway - . sandvik journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/product-categories/protection-sexual-abuse-and-exploitation https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/product-categories/protection-sexual-abuse-and-exploitation https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/product-categories/protection-sexual-abuse-and-exploitation availability of data and materials data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. author’s contributions the author is sole author. the author read and approved the final manuscript. competing interests the author declares that she has no competing interests. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. received: november accepted: january references bbc ( ) oxfam haiti allegations: how the scandal unfolded, february . https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- . accessed jan borton, j ( ) the joint evaluation of emergency assistance to rwanda. https://odihpn.org/magazine/the-joint-evaluation-of-emergency-assistance- to-rwanda/. accessed jan bruce-raeburn, a ( a) opinion: systemic racism and sexism undermine efforts to make aid sector safer, october . https://www.devex.com/news/ opinion-systemic-racism-and-sexism-undermine-efforts-to-make-aid-sector- safer- . accessed jan bruce-raeburn, a ( b) opinion: without systemic change, safeguarding will only keep ingos safe — not 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worldbank.org/curated/en/ /review-and-update-of- the-world-banks-safeguard-policies-environmental-and-social-framework. accessed jan sandvik journal of international humanitarian action ( ) : page of http://www.refworld.org/docid/ ae b e .html http://www.refworld.org/docid/ ae b e .html http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/ /review-and-update-of-the-world-banks-safeguard-policies-environmental-and-social-framework http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/ /review-and-update-of-the-world-banks-safeguard-policies-environmental-and-social-framework http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/ /review-and-update-of-the-world-banks-safeguard-policies-environmental-and-social-framework 	abstract 	introduction 	what do buzzwords do? 	is safeguarding new? 	a changing global morality 	women’s rights and metoo 	a vanishing distinction between transactional and exploitative sex 	can safeguarding be technologized? 	conclusions 	i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point. see generally hoppe and williamson . 	acknowledgements 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	author’s contributions 	competing interests 	publisher’s note 	references s x jra .. growing outrage cass r. sunstein robert walmsley university professor, harvard university, boston, ma, usa abstract: why and when does outrage grow? this essay, based on the lse behavioural public policy lecture delivered in february , explores two potential answers. the first points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had previously suppressed. the second points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had not previously felt (and may or may not now feel). the intensity of outrage is often a product of what is most salient. it is also a product of ‘normalization’; people compare apparently outrageous behavior to behavior falling into the same category in which it is observed, and do not compare it to other cases, which leads to predictable incoherence in judgments. these points bear on the #metoo movement of and and the rise and fall (and rise again, and fall again) of discrimination on the basis of sex and race (and also religion and ethnicity). submitted february ; accepted february i begin with two tales. . in the late s, when i was a visiting professor at columbia law school, i happened to pass, in the hallway near my office, a law student (female) speaking to an older law professor (male). to my amazement, the professor was stroking the student’s hair. i thought i saw, very briefly, a grimace on her face. it was a quick flash. when he left, i said to her, “that was completely inappropriate. he shouldn’t have done that.” her response was immediate and dismissive: “it’s fine. he’s an old man. it’s really not a problem.” thirty minutes later, i heard a knock on my door. it was the student. she was angry, and she was outraged, and she was in tears. she said, “he does this all the time. it’s horrible. my boyfriend thinks i should make a formal email: csunstei@law.harvard.edu behavioural public policy ( ), : , – © cambridge university press doi: . /bpp. . terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:csunstei@law.harvard.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core complaint, but i don’t want to do that. please – i don’t want to make a fuss. do not talk to him about it and do not tell anyone.” . in , i was walking through a cafeteria at my law school when a group of african–american students stopped me to ask, “what do you think of the seal?” i had no idea what they were asking about. my immediate thought was that something bad might have happened to a seal – say, at the new england aquarium – and so i almost asked, “is the seal ok?” but they were asking about the harvard law school seal, which had come from a slave-owner. the seal became the source of considerable local outrage and spurred student protests on a wide variety of race-related issues. it was elimi- nated in . my topic here is outrage, its growth, and its relationship to the idea of #metoo, writ very large. in , that particular hashtag went viral, spurred as it was by disclosures of sexual assault and related behavior by harvey weinstein, and also of sexual harassment by a wide range of public figures. both of the tales just told have #metoo features, but the dynamics are different. i am acutely aware of the sheer size of the topic, and will mostly restrict myself to two propositions, which the tales respectively exemplify. the first is that that when norms start to collapse or to be revised, people are unleashed, in the sense that they feel free to reveal what they believe and prefer, to disclose their experiences, and to talk and act as they wish. if they are out- raged, they can disclose that fact. new norms, and laws that entrench or fortify them, lead to the discovery of pre-existing beliefs, preferences, and values. discovery of the intensity of people’s outrage, and even its existence, can be startling, at least to many people. in various times and places, the women’s movement has been an example. the same is true for the civil rights movement of the s, the movement for lgbt rights, and the disability rights movement. it is also true for the pro-life movement. often an antecedent feeling of humiliation is the founda- tion for outrage. once norms are relaxed, outrage can become an immensely powerful force. the second proposition, exemplified by the second tale, is that revisions of norms can construct preferences and values, leading to an expression of outrage that did not exist before. no one is unleashed. people are changed in ways large or small. they express outrage that they may not actually feel – and if they feel it, it is for the first time. something like this can be said for what i did, in response to this exchange, is a story for another occasion. c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the anti-smoking movement, the objections to genetically modified organisms, and the rise of nazism. for new or revised norms to be effective, of course, they usually have to be able to attach themselves to pre-existing preferences or values; that is certainly true in my second tale. outrage about the harvard law school seal was con- nected with pre-existing judgments about race and racism. the only point is that people come to make judgments (whether particular or general) that they did not hold before, and that they had no occasion to suppress. (before , hardly anyone was exercised about the harvard law school seal.) with respect to the phenomenon of unleashing: when certain norms are in force, people falsify their preferences, their values, and their experiences, or are silent about them. as a result, strangers and even friends and family members may not be able to know about them. they may have no idea. people with certain political or religious convictions, or simply painful experi- ences, might just shut up, even if they are outraged. once norms are revised, people will reveal pre-existing preferences and values, which norms had suc- cessfully suppressed. what was once unsayable is said, and what was once unthinkable is done. in the context of sexual harassment, something like this account is broadly correct: before the term itself existed, women did not like being harassed, or even hated it, and revision of social norms was necessary to spur expression of their feelings and beliefs. (this account is incomplete, and i will complicate it.) as we shall see, law often plays a significant role in fortifying existing norms, or in spurring their revision. part of the importance of judicial rulings that forbid sexual harassment is that they revised norms. whenever a new leader is elected, or whenever new legislation is enacted, it may have a crucial and even transformative signaling effect, offering people information about what other people think. if people hear the signal, norms may shift, because people are influenced by what they think other people think. outrage is often fueled in that way. but some revisions of norms, and the laws that entrench those revisions, do not liberate anything. as norms begin to be altered, people come to hold, or to act as if they hold, preferences and values that they did not hold before. revisions of norms, and resulting legal reforms, do not uncover suppressed desires. they produce new ones, or at least statements and actions that are con- sistent with new ones. outrage can fill a vacuum. preference falsification and norm entrepreneurs jon elster emphasizes that social norms are “sustained by the feelings of embar- rassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame that a person suffers at the prospect of growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core violating them” (elster, , p. ). elster’s quartet is worth underlining: embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame are different from one another. the student at columbia law school felt all four. my central topic here is discrimination. in the simplest cases, the objects of discrimination (emphatically including sexual harassment) are outraged, and the norm prevents them from stating or acting on it. their beliefs and prefer- ences may even be falsified (as it was when the law student initially assured me that she did not object to what the professor was doing). in that respect, the objects of discrimination are like actors in a play; they are reciting the expected lines. in cases of sex and race discrimination, that is a familiar phe- nomenon. the legitimation of outrage brings it out of the closet. in circumstances of this kind, large-scale change is possible. suppose that many people within a population object to discrimination, but because of exist- ing norms, they do not say or do anything. they falsify their preferences. suppose that the objectors have different thresholds for raising an objection. a few people will do so if even one person challenges or defies the norm; a few more will do so if a few people challenge or defy the norm; still more will do so if more than a few people challenge or defy the norm; and so on. under the right conditions, and with the right distribution of thresholds, a small spark can ignite a conflagration, eventually dismantling the norm. there is an important role here for ‘norm entrepreneurs’, operating in the private or public sector, who oppose existing norms and try to change them. norm entrepreneurs draw attention to what they see as the stupidity, intrusive- ness, or ugliness of current norms. they may insist that many or most people secretly oppose them (and thus reduce pluralistic ignorance, understood as ignorance about what most people actually think). they may describe their experiences. norm breakers – those who simply depart from existing norms, and refuse to speak or act in accordance with them – may or may not be norm entrepreneurs, depending on whether they seek to produce some kind of social change, or instead wish merely to do as they like. norm entrepreneurs might turn out to be effective, at least if the social dynamics work out in their favor. they might be able to signal not only their outrage and personal opposition to the norm, but also the existence of widespread (but hidden) outrage and opposition as well. the idea of a ‘silent majority’ can be a helpfully precise way to signal such outrage and opposition. importantly, norm entrepreneurs might also change the social meaning of the best discussion of the general phenomenon and its importance is timur kuran ( ). the classic account is mark granovetter ( ); the idea is productively extended in timur kuran ( ). c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core compliance with the norm: if they succeed, such compliance might suggest a lack of independence and look a bit pathetic, whereas those who defy the norm might seem courageous, authentic, and tough. the outrage heuristic a number of years ago, i was involved in a series of studies of outrage, punitive intentions, and monetary punishments. our basic finding was that when ordin- ary people are thinking about how much to punish people, they use the outrage heuristic. they begin by deciding how outrageous the underlying conduct was, and their judgments about punishment build on that decision. we found that people’s outrage judgments, on a bounded numerical scale, almost exactly predicted their punitive intentions on the same scale. that means that people are intuitive retributivists. unless prompted, they do not think about optimal deterrence (and even when prompted, they resist the idea). one of our studies tested the effects of deliberation on both punitive inten- tions and monetary judgments (schkade et al., ). the study involved about jury-eligible citizens; its major purpose was to determine how indi- viduals would be influenced by seeing and discussing the punitive intentions of others. our central goal was to explore how social interactions heighten outrage. people were initially asked to record their individual judgments privately, on a bounded scale, and then to join six-member groups to generate unanimous ‘punishment verdicts’. hence, subjects were asked to record, in advance of deliberation, a ‘punishment judgment’ on a scale of – , where indicated that the defendant should not be punished at all and indicated that the defendant should be punished extremely severely. (recall that outrage judg- ments on such scales are mirrored by punishment judgments, so we were essen- tially measuring outrage.) after the individual judgments were recorded, jurors were asked to deliberate to a unanimous ‘punishment verdict’. it would be rea- sonable to predict that the verdicts of juries would be the median of punish- ment judgments of jurors, but that prediction would be badly wrong. the finding that i want to emphasize here is that deliberation made the lower punishment ratings decrease when compared to the median of pre-deliberation judgments of individual jurors – while deliberation made the higher punish- ment ratings increase when compared to that same median. when the individ- ual jurors favored little punishment, the group showed a ‘leniency shift’, most of the work was done in collaboration with daniel kahneman and david schkade. for a collection, see cass r. sunstein et al. ( ). growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core meaning a rating that was systematically lower than the median pre-deliber- ation rating of individual members. that means that when people began with low levels of outrage, deliberation produced lower levels still. but when individual jurors favored strong punishment, the group as a whole produced a ‘severity shift’, meaning a rating that was systematically higher than the median pre-deliberation rating of individual members. in groups, outrage grows. outrage and group polarization what accounts for the leniency shift and the severity shift? the simplest answer lies in the phenomenon of group polarization (see sunstein, ). this is the pervasive process by which group members end up in a more extreme position in line with the pre-deliberation tendencies of group members. it is now well known that if a group has a defined median pos- ition, members will shift toward a more extreme version of what they already think. consider some examples of the basic phenomenon, which has been found in over a dozen nations (see brown, , p. ) : (a) a group of mod- erately pro-feminist women will become more strongly pro-feminist after dis- cussion (see myers, ); (b) after discussion, citizens of france become more critical of the united states and its intentions with respect to economic aid (brown, , p. ); (c) after discussion, whites predisposed to show racial prejudice offer more negative responses to the question of whether white racism is responsible for conditions faced by african–americans in american cities (myers & bishop, ); and (d) after discussion, whites pre- disposed not to show racial prejudice offer more positive responses to the same question (myers & bishop, ). why does deliberation drive low punishment ratings down and move high punishment ratings up? there are three answers. the first involves the exchange of information within the group. in a group that favors a high pun- ishment rating, group members will make many arguments in that direction and relatively few the other way. speaking purely descriptively, the group’s ‘argument pool’ will be skewed in the direction of severity. group members, listening to the various arguments, will naturally move in that direction. the initial dispositions of group members will determine the proportion of argu- ments in the various directions. and individuals will respond, quite rationally, these include the united states, canada, new zealand, india, bangladesh, germany, and france (see, e.g., zuber et al., [germany]; abrams et al., , p. [new zealand]). of course, it is possible that some cultures would show a greater or lesser tendency toward polarization; this would be an extremely interesting area for empirical study. c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core to what they have heard, thus moving in the direction suggested by the domin- ant tendency. in this way, outrage breeds more outrage. the second explanation involves social influences. most people want to be a certain way and also to be perceived in a certain way. if you are in a group that is outraged and wants to punish someone severely, you might find it uncom- fortable to be urging relative leniency. to protect your reputation, and perhaps your self-conception, you might move, if you move at all, in the most favored direction. to be sure, some hardy souls will not move at all, and those who are self-identified contrarians might deliberately move in the opposite direction, rejecting the dominant view just because it is the dominant view. but what we observed, and what is generally observed, is that most of those who move tend to go in the group’s preferred direction – and that as a result, the group will be more extreme than its members before deliberation began. with respect to outrage, the lesson is clear. to preserve their preferred self-image, individuals, finding themselves in an outraged group, will tend to become more outraged still. the third explanation begins by noting that people with extreme views tend to have more confidence that they are right and that as people gain confidence, they become more extreme in their beliefs. the intuition here is simple: those who lack confidence, and who are unsure what they should think, tend to moderate their views. it is for this reason that cautious people, not knowing what to do, are likely to choose the midpoint between relevant extremes. but if other people seem to share one’s view, that person is likely to become more confident that that view is right – and hence to move in a more extreme direction. we can easily see how the third explanation might apply to outrage in par- ticular. someone has done something that seems wrong. it might be a spouse, who has spoken unkindly, rudely, or cruelly. it might be an employer, who has exceeded the appropriate bounds in one or another way. it might be a corpor- ation. it might be a public official. if people are asked about their reactions in their purely individual capacities, they might think: ‘not good’. but if they are speaking with one another, they might end up confirming one another’s initial instincts, leading to greater confidence and eventually to the thought: ‘horrific; intolerable’. a supplemental point involves salience. discussion of bad conduct will heighten people’s attention to it, leading to more intense reactions. what was once a background fact, or part of life’s furniture, might become one of the most important things in the world. normalization and categories levels of outrage are specific to categories. if someone is very rude on twitter, at a lunch table, on the highways, in a security line, in a meeting, or in growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core comments on an academic paper, people might see red; it is as if something truly awful has been done. by contrast, some actual crimes (say, shoplifting or in some cases tax evasion) might produce only a modest level of outrage. but on reflection, people would agree that rudeness is less outrageous than criminality (or at least most forms of criminality). in the context of outrage and punishment decisions, our most striking finding is that people’s judgments about cases, taken one at a time, are very different from their judgments about the very same cases, taken in the context of a problem from another category (see sunstein, ). an example: people were asked to assess a case involving personal injury on a bounded punishment scale and also on a monetary scale. people were also asked to assess a case involving financial injury, again on a bounded punish- ment scale and on a monetary scale. when the two cases are judged in isolation, the financial injury case receives a more severe rating and a higher monetary award. but when the two cases are seen together, there is a significant ‘judg- ment shift’, in which people ensure that the financial award is not much higher, and for many respondents is lower, than the personal injury award. in short, people’s decisions about the two cases are very different, depending on whether they see the case alone or in the context of a case from another category. notice that monetary awards shift, and that outrage (the foundation of intention to punish) shifts as well. apparently the level of outrage will differ depending on whether a case is seen in isolation or instead in the context of cases from other categories. exactly the same kind of shift is observed for judgments about two problems calling for government regulation and expenditures: skin cancer among the elderly and protection of coral reefs. looking at the two cases in isolation, people will pay more to protect coral reefs, and register more satisfaction from doing that. but looking at the two cases together, people will be quite dis- turbed at this pattern, and will generally want to pay more to protect elderly people from cancer. here, too, there is a significant shift in judgment. is this a problem? and what accounts for the switch? consider a preliminary account. when people see a case in isolation, they naturally ‘normalize’ it by comparing it to a set of comparison cases that it readily calls up. if you are asked, ‘is a great dane big or small?’, you are likely to respond that it is big; if you are asked, ‘is a toyota tercel big or small?’, you are likely to respond that it is small. but people are well aware that a great dane is smaller than a toyota tercel. people answer as they do because a great dane is compared with dogs, whereas a toyota tercel is compared with cars. so far, so good; in these cases, everyone knows what everyone else c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core means. we easily normalize judgments about size, and the normalization is mutually understood. in the context of outrage, something similar happens, but it is less innocuous. in general, the level of outrage undergoes a similar process of normalization. if an academic colleague has offended you, for example by saying that your recent work is ‘dreadful’ and ‘should not have been published’, you might be extremely outraged, simply because you compare the comments to ordinary collegial behavior, and do not naturally compare them to other sorts of behav- ior, such as rape and assault. it might take a self-conscious cognitive exercise to decide that the offensive comments are not, in the scheme of things, deserving of a high level of outrage. when evaluating a case involving financial injury, people apparently ‘nor- malize’ the defendant’s conduct by comparing it with conduct in other cases from the same category. they do not easily or naturally compare that defen- dant’s conduct with conduct from other categories. because of the natural com- parison set, people are likely to be quite outraged by the misconduct, if it is far worse than what springs naturally to mind. the same kind of thing happens with the problem of skin cancer among the elderly. people compare that problem with other similar problems – and conclude that it is not so serious, within the category of health-related or cancer-related problems. so too with personal injury cases (normalized against other personal injury cases) and pro- blems involving damage to coral reefs (normalized against other cases of eco- logical harm). the key point is that when a case from another category is introduced, this natural process of comparison is disrupted. rather than comparing a skin cancer case with other cancers, or other human health risks, people see that it must be compared with ecological problems, which (in most people’s view) have a lesser claim to public resources. rather than comparing a financial injury case to other cases of business misconduct, people now compare it to a personal injury case, which (in most people’s view) involves more serious wrongdoing. as a result of the wider view screen, judgments of outrageousness and appropriate punishment shift, often dramatically. most of the time, people’s failure to use a wide view screen, in thinking about the appropriate degree of outrage, is not damaging. that failure is a way of economizing on thinking. but for law and policy, the process of normalization, and the use of a narrow view screen, produces serious problems. the difficulty is that when people assess cases in isolation, their view screen is narrow, indeed limited to the category to which the case belongs, and that as a result, people produce a pattern of outcomes that makes no sense by their own lights. in other words, the overall set of outcomes is one that people would not growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core endorse, if they were only to see it as a whole. (with respect to outrage, readers can think of their own preferred examples.) parallel worlds and multiple equilibria it is important to emphasize that with small variations in starting points, and inertia, resistance, or participation at the crucial points, significant changes in statements or in actions may or may not happen. outrage may fizzle or grow. suppose that a community has long had a norm in favor of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; that many people in the community abhor that norm; that many others dislike it; that many others do not care about it; that many others are mildly inclined to favor it; and that many others firmly believe in it. if norm entrepreneurs make a public demonstration of opposition to the norm, and if the demonstration reaches those with relatively low thresh- olds for opposing it, opposition will immediately grow. if the growing oppos- ition reaches those with relatively higher thresholds, the norm might rapidly collapse. in many places in the world, that is exactly what happened in recent decades. but if the early public opposition is barely visible, or if it reaches only those with relatively high thresholds, it will fizzle out, and the norm might not even budge. in many places in the world, that has happened, too. these are the two extreme cases. we could easily imagine intermediate cases, in which the norm suffers a slow, steady death, or in which the norm erodes but manages to survive. it is for this reason that otherwise similar communities can have multiple equilibria, understood here as apparently or actual stable situa- tions governed by radically different norms. after the fact, it is tempting to think that because of those different norms, the communities are not otherwise similar at all, and to insist on some fundamental cultural difference between them. but that thought might well be a product of an illusion, in the form of a failure to see that some small social influence, shock, or random event was responsible for the persistence of a norm in one community and its disintegra- tion in another. some of the most interesting work on social influences involves the existence of informational and reputational ‘cascades’; this work has obvious relevance to the growth of outrage (see bikhshandani et al., ). a starting point is that when individuals lack a great deal of private information (and sometimes even when they have such information), they are attentive to the information pro- vided by the statements or actions of others. if a is unaware whether genetic modification of food is a serious problem, he may be moved in the direction of alarm if b seems to think that alarm is justified. if a and b believe that c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core alarm is justified, c may end up thinking so too, at least if she lacks independ- ent information to the contrary. if a, b, and c believe that genetic modification of food is a serious problem, d will have to have a good deal of confidence to reject their shared conclusion. the result of this process can be to produce cascade effects, as large groups of people eventually end up believing something simply because other people seem to believe it too. it should be clear that cascade effects may occur, or not, depending on seemingly small factors, such as the initial distribution of beliefs, the order in which people announce what they think, and people’s thresholds for abandoning their private beliefs in deference to the views announced by others. though the cascades phenomenon has been discussed largely in connection with factual judgments, the same processes are at work for norms; we can easily imagine outrage cascades (information-induced or otherwise), which may well produce social change and legal reform. some such cascades may be a product of information; some may involve values. suppose, for example, that a believes that discrimination against transgender people is wrong, that b is otherwise in equipoise but shifts upon hearing what a believes, that c is unwilling to persist in his modest approval of discrimination against transgender people when a and b disagree; it would be a very confident d who would reject the moral judgments of three (apparently) firmly committed others. in such contexts, many people, lacking firm convictions of their own, may end up believing what (relevant) others seem to believe. stylized as the example is, changes in social attitudes toward smoking, recyc- ling, and sexual harassment have a great deal to do with these effects. and here as well, small differences in initial conditions, in thresholds for abandoning private beliefs because of reputational pressures, and in who hears what when, can lead to major differences in outcomes. and again: after the fact, it may all seem inevitable, a product of historical forces, even if serendipity played an essential role. a ‘down look’ for discrimination, of course, it is too simple to say that its objects are opposed and suppress their outrage. when discrimination is widespread, and when existing norms support it, its objects might see it as part of life’s furniture. an intriguing wrinkle is that when a cascade gets going, people might underrate the extent to which those who join it are reacting to the signals of others, and not their own private signals. for that reason, they might see the cascade as containing far more informational content than it actually does (see eyster & rabin, ; eyster et al., ). norm entrepreneurs have a strong interest in promoting this mistake. growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core that metaphor buries a lot of complexity. sometimes people may feel hurt or burdened, but their sense of pain or injury may not be transformed into a claim or even a feeling of injustice. some preferences are adaptive; they are a product of existing injustice. if a victim of sexual harassment genuinely believes that ‘it’s not a big deal’, it might be because it’s most comfortable or easiest to believe that it’s not a big deal. there is a spectrum here, from real pain (but still, it’s not a big deal) to a feeling that it is just life (and not really painful). consider gordon wood’s account of the pre-revolutionary american col- onies, when “common people” were “made to recognize and feel their subor- dination to gentlemen,” so that those “in lowly stations … developed what was called a ‘down look’,” and “knew their place and willingly walked while gentlefolk rode; and as yet they seldom expressed any burning desire to change places with their betters” (wood, , pp. – ). in wood’s account, it is impossible to “comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness” (wood, , pp. – , emphasis added). (is wood right? did they really accept their own lowliness? it’s hard to know – but let’s bracket that point.) wood urges that as republicanism took hold, social norms changed, and people stopped accepting their own lowliness. his account is one of an outrage cascade, but not as a result of the revelation of pre-existing preferences. with amazement, john adams wrote that “idolatry to monarchs, and servility to aristocratical pride, was never so totally eradicated from so many minds in so short a time” (wood, , p. ). david ramsay, one of the nation’s first historians (himself captured by the british during the american revolution), marveled that americans were transformed “from subjects to citizens,” and that was an “immense” difference, because citizens “possess sovereignty. subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have her- editary rights superior to others” (wood, , p. ). thomas paine put it this way: “our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of a country. we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used” (paine, , p. ). adams, ramsay, and paine appear to be speaking of new preferences, beliefs, and values, rather than the revelation of suppressed ones. in their account, nothing is unleashed. how new preferences arise remains imperfectly understood. while the framework of preference falsification and unleashing captures much of the territory i am exploring, it is complemented by situations in which adaptive preferences are altered by new or revised norms. there are also intermediate cases, involving what might be called partially adaptive preferences. objects of discrimination may not exactly accept c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core discrimination. as noted, they might feel pain or a burden. they might live with it, and do so with a degree of equanimity, thinking that nothing can be done. it is not a lot of fun to beat your head against the wall. in cases of par- tially adaptive preferences, objects of discrimination are not like actors in a play; they are not falsifying their preferences. they hear a small voice in their heads. they might even feel outrage, but it simmers. once norms change, some inchoate belief or value might be activated that was formerly sup- pressed, or that was like that small voice. it is fair enough to speak of liberation, but the case is not as simple as that of the law student at columbia. liberating outrage some norms reduce discrimination, but others increase it. suppose that people have antecedent hostility toward members of social groups; suppose that social norms constrain them from speaking or acting in ways that reflect that hostil- ity. on one view, this is the good side of ‘political correctness’; it prevents people from expressing ugly impulses. but norms that constrain sexism and racism are of course stronger in some times and places than in others, and they can be relaxed or eliminated. in the aftermath of the election of president donald trump, many people fear that something of this kind has happened (and are fearing that it continues to happen). the basic idea is that president trump is a norm entrepreneur; he is shifting norms in such a way as to weaken or eliminate their constraining effects. he is allowing people to express their real concerns, including their sense of outrage. it is difficult to test that proposition in a rigorous way, but consider a highly suggestive experiment. leonardo bursztyn of the university of chicago, georgy egorov of northwestern university, and stefano fiorin of the university of california at los angeles attempted to test whether president trump’s political success affects americans’ willingness to support, in public, a xenophobic organization (bursztyn et al., ). two weeks before the election, bursztyn and his collea- gues recruited people from eight states that the website predictwise said that trump was certain to win (alabama, arkansas, idaho, nebraska, oklahoma, mississippi, west virginia, and wyoming). half the participants were told that trump would win. the other half received no information about trump’s projected victory. all participants were then asked an assortment of questions, including whether they would authorize the researchers to donate $ to the federation for american immigration reform, accurately described as an anti-immigrant organization whose founder has written, “i’ve come to the point of view that for european–american society and culture to persist growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core requires a european–american majority, and a clear one at that” (bursztyn et al., , p. ). if participants agreed to authorize the donation, they were told that they would be paid an additional $ . half the participants were assured that their decision to authorize a donation would be anonymous. the other half were given no such assurance. on the contrary, they were told that members of the research team might contact them, thus suggesting that their willingness to authorize the donation could become public. for those who were not informed about trump’s expected victory in their state, giving to the anti-immigration group was far more attractive when ano- nymity was assured: % authorized the donation under cover of secrecy as opposed to % when the authorization might become public. but for those who were informed that trump would likely win, anonymity did not matter at all. when so informed, about half the participants were willing to authorize the donation regardless of whether they received a promise of anonymity (bursztyn et al., ). the central point is that information about trump’s expected victory altered social norms, making many people far more willing to give publicly and eliminating the comparatively greater popularity of anonymous endorsements. as an additional test, bursztyn and his colleagues repeated their experiment in the same states during the first week after trump’s election. they found that trump’s victory also eliminated the effects of anonymity – again, about half the participants authorized the donation regardless of whether the authorization would be public. the general conclusion is that if trump had not come on the scene, many americans would refuse to authorize a donation to an anti- immigrant organization unless they were promised anonymity. but with trump as president, people feel liberated. anonymity no longer matters, appar- ently because trump’s election has weakened the social norm against support- ing anti-immigrant groups. it is now more acceptable to be known to agree “that for european–american society and culture to persist requires a european– american majority, and a clear one at that” (bursztyn et al., , p. ). the central finding can be seen as the mirror image of the tale of the law student and the law professor. for a certain number of people, hostility to anti-immigrant groups is a private matter; they do not want to voice that hos- tility in public. but if norms are seen to be weakening or to be shifting, they will be willing to give voice to their beliefs. we can easily imagine much uglier versions of the central finding. when police brutality increases, when hateful comments or actions are directed at members of certain religious groups, when white supremacy marches start, when ethnic violence breaks out, when mass atrocities occur, and when geno- cide is threatened, one reason is the weakening or transformation of the social norms that once made the relevant actions unthinkable. c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core internalized norms my emphasis has been on situations in which people have an antecedent sense of outrage, whose expression a norm blocks; revision of the norm liberates them, so that they can talk or act as they wish. i have also noted that some norms are internalized, so that people do not feel chained at all. once the norm is revised, they speak or act differently, perhaps expressing outrage, either because they feel constrained by the new norm to do that, or because their preferences and values have actually changed. orwell’s nineteen eighty-four is a chilling tale of something like that, with its terrifying closing lines: “but it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. he had won the victory over himself. he loved big brother” (orwell, , p. ). that is the dark side. but return to the case of sexual harassment. many men are appalled by the very thought of sexual harassment. they endorse, and do not feel constrained by, norms against it. for them, norms and legal rules against sexual harassment are not a problem, any more than norms and legal rules against theft and assault are a problem. for such men, we do not have cases of preference falsification. for some of them, it might be clarifying to speak of adaptive preferences. but it is better to say that the relevant people are committed to the norm, so that defying it would not merely be costly; it would be unthinkable. something similar can be said for many actions that conform to social norms. most people are not outraged by the nonexistence of a social norm against dueling. for many people, seatbelt buckling and recycling are not prop- erly characterized as costs; they are a matter of routine, and for those who buckle their seatbelts or recycle, the relevant actions may well be taken as a net benefit. when the social norm is one of considerateness (see ullmann- margalit, ), those who are considerate usually do not feel themselves to be shackled; they want to be considerate. when this is so, the situation will be stable; norm entrepreneurs cannot point to widespread, but hidden, outrage or dissatisfaction with the norm. but for both insiders and outsiders, it will often be difficult to distinguish between situations in which norms are internalized and situations in which they merely seem to be. that is one reason that stunning surprises are inevitable. recall that another reason for unpredictability involves interdependencies among agents, which can produce changes that cannot be anticipated in advance (lohmann, ). growing outrage terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core acknowledgments this essay draws on, and can be seen as a companion piece to, cass r. sunstein, unleashed, social research (forthcoming ). i am grateful to the editors of social research for permission to draw on that essay here. references abrams, d. et al. ( ), ‘knowing what to think by knowing who you are’, british journal of social psychology, ( ): – . bikhshandani, s., d. hirshleifer, and i. welch ( ), ‘a theory of fads, fashion, custom, and cultural change as informational cascades’, journal of political economy, ( ): – . brown, r. ( ), social psychology, nd ed. new york: free press. bursztyn, l., g. egorov and s. fiorin ( ), from extreme to mainstream: how social norms unravel. available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w (accessed: february ). elster, j. ( ), ‘rationality, emotions, and social norms’, synthese, ( ): – . eyster, e. and m. rabin ( ), ‘naïve herding in rich-information settings’, american economic journal: microeconomics, ( ): – . eyster, e., m. rabin and g. weizsacker ( ), an experiment on social mislearning. available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= (accessed: february ). granovetter, m. ( ), ‘threshold models of collective behavior’, american journal of sociology, ( ): – . lohmann, s. ( ), ‘i know you know he or she knows we know you know they know: common knowledge and the unpredictability of informational cascades’, in d. richards (ed), political complexity: nonlinear models of politics, ann arbor: university of michigan press. kuran, t. ( ), private truths, public lies, cambridge: harvard university press. myers, d. g. ( ), ‘discussion-induced attitude polarization’, human relations, ( ): – . myers, d. g. and g. d. bishop ( ), ‘the enhancement of dominant attitudes in group discuission’, journal of personality and social psychology, ( ): – . orwell, g. ( ), nineteen eighty-four, new york: signet. paine, t. ( ), ‘letter to the abbe raynal’, in d. e. wheeler (ed), life and writings of thomas paine, new york: vincent parke and company. schkade, d. et al. ( ), ‘deliberating about dollars: the severity shift’, columbia law review, ( ): – . sunstein, c. r. et al. ( ), ‘predictably incoherent judgments’, stanford law review, ( ): – . sunstein, c. r. et al. ( ), punitive damages: how juries decide, chicago: university of chicago press. sunstein, c. r. ( ), going to extremes, oxford: oxford university press. ullmann-margalit, e. ( ), normal rationality, oxford: oxford university press. wood, g. ( ), the radicalism of the american revolution, rev. ed. new york: vintage books. zuber, j. et al. ( ), ‘choice shift and group polarization’, journal of personality and social psychcology, ( ): – . c a s s r . s u n s t e i n terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nber.org/papers/w http://www.nber.org/papers/w https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /bpp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	growing outrage 	preference falsification and norm entrepreneurs 	the outrage heuristic 	outrage and group polarization 	normalization and categories 	parallel worlds and multiple equilibria 	a ‘down look 	liberating outrage 	internalized norms 	acknowledgments 	references cghr, peaceful assembly online research pack - 	 the	right	of	peaceful	 assembly	online:		 research	pack	 	 centre	of	governance	&	human	rights	(cghr)	at	the	university	of	cambridge	 and	the	university	of	east	anglia	law	school	 	 	 	 	 november	 	 	 	 	 prepared	for	the	meeting	of	experts	and	the	un	human	rights	committee	 in	drafting	general	comment	 	on	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	(article	 	iccpr),	 - 	december	 ,	at	cghr	cambridge.	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 research	by	ella	mcpherson,	sharath	srinivasan,	eleanor	salter,	katja	 achermann,	camille	barras,	allysa	czerwinsky,	bronwen	mehta	and	 muznah	siddiqui	(university	of	cambridge)	and	michael	hamilton,	suzanne	 dixon	and	jennifer	young	(university	of	east	anglia) 	 citation:	mcpherson,	e.	et	al,	(november	 )	‘the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	online:	 research	pack’,	cambridge:	university	of	cambridge	centre	of	governance	and	human	 rights	 				 ©	university	of	cambridge	centre	of	governance	and	human	rights,	 	 you	are	free:	 to	copy,	distribute,	display,	and	perform	the	work	 to	make	derivative	works	 	 under	the	following	conditions:	 attribution	—	you	must	give	the	original	author	credit.		 non-commercial	—	you	may	not	use	this	work	for	commercial	purposes.		 share	alike	—	if	you	alter,	 transform,	or	build	upon	 this	work,	you	may	distribute	 the	 resulting	work	only	under	a	licence	identical	to	this	one.		 please	see	full	details	of	this	license	here:		 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /uk/				 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 centre	of	governance	and	human	rights,	university	of	cambridge		 	alison	richard	building	·	 	west	road	·	cambridge	·	cb 	 dt	·	united	kingdom	 www.cghr.polis.cam.ac.uk 	 table of contents foreword	................................................................................................................................................	 	 introduction	-	executive	summary	...............................................................................................	 	 .	purpose(s)	of	assembly	online	...................................................................................................	 	 .	public	versus	private	...................................................................................................................	 	 the	logics	of	online	places	...................................................................................................................	 	 precedents	for	thinking	about	private	places	and	the	right	to	assembly	...........................	 	 privately	owned	but	publicly	accessible	spaces	..........................................................................................................	 	 anonymisation	and	encryption	...........................................................................................................................................	 	 .	presence	and	participation	......................................................................................................	 	 what	is	participation?	..........................................................................................................................	 	 online	participation	..............................................................................................................................	 	 further	considerations	........................................................................................................................	 	 .	temporariness	and	permanence	............................................................................................	 	 ‘temporary’	as	a	definitional	element	of	‘assembly’	..................................................................	 	 temporariness	and	online	assemblies	...........................................................................................	 	 permanence	of	online	trace	................................................................................................................	 	 synchronicity	of	participation	in	online	activity	.........................................................................	 	 timeframe	of	assembly	........................................................................................................................	 	 .	peaceful	and	non-peaceful	........................................................................................................	 	 defining	peaceful	in	online	contexts	...............................................................................................	 	 trolling	and	online	assemblies	.........................................................................................................	 	 hacktivism	and	online	assemblies	...................................................................................................	 	 .	state	obligations	...........................................................................................................................	 	 internet	blocking	....................................................................................................................................	 	 state	surveillance	...................................................................................................................................	 	 state	facilitation	through	legal,	infrastructural	and	educational	frameworks	.................	 	 the	challenges	of	protecting	transnational	online	assemblies	..............................................	 	 .	key	questions	.................................................................................................................................	 	 			 	 	 foreword	 this	 research	 pack,	 on	 the	 right	 of	 peaceful	 assembly	 online,	 is	 the	 outcome	 of	 an	 interdisciplinary	collaboration	between	staff	and	students	at	cambridge’s	centre	of	governance	 and	human	rights	and	the	university	of	east	anglia	law	school.	 	we	initially	produced	this	 research	as	background	for	an	expert	meeting	convened	in	december	 	at	the	university	of	 cambridge	to	inform	the	drafting	of	general	comment	 	on	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly.		 we	were	delighted	that	this	expert	meeting	enabled	the	renewal	of	long-standing	partnerships	–	 including	with	professor	christof	heyns,	a	member	of	the	un	human	rights	committee,	and	the	 committee’s	rapporteur	in	drafting	general	comment	 	–	as	well	as	the	creation	of	new	ones	–	 such	as	with	the	european	center	for	not-for-profit	law.		the	event	was	organized	within	the	 framework	of	the	‘greater	protection	and	standards	setting:	united	nations’	project,	managed	by	 the	european	center	for	not-for-profit	law	(ecnl),	in	turn	made	possible	by	the	international	 center	for	not-for-profit	law	(icnl),	and	funded	by	the	government	of	sweden.		 we	are	equally	delighted	to	make	this	research	available	to	wider	publics	through	publishing	it	 as	a	research	pack.		we	wish,	in	particular,	to	extend	our	thanks	to	the	student	research	team,	led	 skilfully	by	eleanor	salter,	who	provided	clear	insight	into	a	nebulous	and	challenging	topic.	the	 team	was	comprised	of	post-graduates	across	a	range	of	diverse	fields,	departments	and	the	two	 universities,	and	they	admirably	produced	this	detailed	research	pack	in	a	matter	of	weeks.	the	 interdisciplinary	spirit	of	this	project	has	been	invaluable	in	distilling	the	many	debates	on	the	 right	of	peaceful	assembly	online	–	be	they	legal,	technical,	political	or	sociological.	 there	are	many	contemporary,	technology-driven	challenges	to	traditional	 interpretations	of	 human	rights,	and	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	is	no	exception.		this	research	pack	aims	to	 contribute	to	interpretations	of	the	right	of	assembly	by	considering	how	new	technologies	and	 the	increasingly	digitally-mediated	nature	of	interactions	problematise	existing	understandings	 of	the	way	in	which	individuals	intentionally	gather	together	with	others.	a	question	that	runs	 throughout	our	research	is	the	role	for	states	and	private	companies	in	the	non-interference	in	 and	facilitation	of	online	assembly.	we	also	disentangle	some	of	the	theoretical	debates	around	 publicly-accessible	 but	 privately-owned	 spaces,	 presence	 and	 participation,	 temporality	 and	 peacefulness	with	regard	to	online	assemblies	and	provide	a	range	of	empirical	evidence	to	 inform	these	debates.	a	consideration	of	the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly	as	practiced	online	has	 implications	for	the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly	face-to-face.	this	makes	this	research	pack’s	 contribution	multi-directional,	informing	the	right	to	gather	in	all	forms.	 the	 use	 of	 information	 and	 communication	 technologies	 can	 help	 activists	 and	 protesters	 coordinate	peaceful	assemblies,	 and	 it	 can	provide	spaces	 for	gatherings	 that	 transcend	 the	 constraints	of	 location	and	time.	but	technology	also	brings	threats	to	the	right	of	assembly,	 including	denials	of	access,	 the	chilling	effects	resulting	 from	new	and	exacerbated	forms	of	 surveillance	and	discrimination,	and	interference	obscured	by	digital	mediation.		we	hope	this	 research	 pack	 presents	 a	 useful	 contribution	 to	 the	 work	 of	 academics	 and	 human	 rights	 practitioners	working	to	understand	and	support	the	embodied	exercise	of	the	right	of	assembly	 in	the	different,	and	often	hybrid,	spaces	in	which	it	occurs.	 	 dr	ella	mcpherson	and	dr	sharath	srinivasan	(cghr)	and	 dr	michael	hamilton	(uea	law	school)	 introduction	-	executive	summary	 	 the	types	of	assembly	covered	by	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	have	been	thoroughly	fleshed	 out	in	the	physical	realm	to	include	static	assemblies	(such	as	public	meetings	and	sit-ins),	and	 moving	assemblies	(such	as	processions	and	marches). 	while	the	precise	boundaries	of	the	right	 of	assembly	offline	continue	to	be	tested	and	to	evolve,	there	is	much	less	clarity	regarding	the	 essential	nature	of	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	online.	 the	 development	 of	 information	 and	 communication	 technologies	 (icts)	 has	 fundamentally	 changed	the	ways	in	which	we	interact	with	one	another,	a	key	dimension	being	the	facilitation	 of	the	mediation	of	interpersonal	interactions	across	time	and	place.	the	past	twenty	years	has	 seen	 the	emergence	of	new	tools	whose	use	support	 the	holding	of	physical	assemblies,	an	 expanding	 terrain	of	networked	spaces	 in	which	people	 come	 together	 (many	of	which	are	 privately	owned,	but	publicly	accessible),	and	forms	of	gathering	that	might	properly	be	regarded	 as	the	functional	equivalent	of	offline,	real-world	assemblies.	 the	utility	of	online	tools	for	planning	and	promoting	real-world	assemblies	is	clear .	so	too,	the	 willingness	 of	 state	 authorities 	 -	 often	 with	 the	 cooperation	 of	 relevant	 private	 actors	 -	 to	 respond	to	these	technological	innovations	with	highly	restrictive	measures. 	 	in	this	regard,	the	 revised	draft	of	general	comment	 	provides	that:		 ‘...	states	parties	shall	...	refrain	from	unduly	blocking	internet	connectivity	in	relation	to	 demonstrations.	the	same	applies	to	geo-targeted	or	technology-specific	 interference	or	 hindering	 of	 connectivity.	 states	 parties	 should	 ensure	 that	 self-regulation	 by	 internet	 service	providers	does	not	unduly	affect	assemblies	and	that	the	activities	of	those	providers	 do	not	unduly	infringe	upon	the	privacy	or	safety	of	assembly	participants.’ 	 in	contrast,	the	concept	of	assembling	online	-	and	of	the	internet	as	a	space	for	such	assemblies	-	 is	not	immediately	self-evident,	though	it	has	been	afforded	recognition	by	a	range	of	human	 rights	actors	and	institutions.	in	a	joint	report	in	 ,	for	example,	the	un	special	rapporteurs	 on	freedom	of	assembly	and	of	association,	and	on	extrajudicial,	summary	or	arbitrary	executions,	 osce/odihr	-	venice	commission,	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	( nd	ed.,	 )	para	 .	 	gerbaudo,	p.,	( ),	tweets	and	the	streets:	social	media	and	contemporary	activism,	london:	pluto	 press	 	dw,	( ),	iran:	internet	shutdown	slowly	ends	as	us	imposes	sanctions.	accessed	at:	 /www.dw.com/en/iran-internet-shutdown-slowly-ends-as-us-imposes-sanctions/a- 	 	a/hrc/ / ;	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	 association,	maina	kiai,	 	may	 ,	paragraph	 :	‘the	special	rapporteur	notes	the	increased	use	of	the	 internet,	in	particular	social	media,	and	other	information	and	communication	technology,	as	basic	tools	 which	enable	individuals	to	organize	peaceful	assemblies.	however,	some	states	have	clamped	down	on	these	 tools	to	deter	or	prevent	citizens	from	exercising	their	right’,	also	citing	a/hrc/ / ;	report	of	the	 special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	the	right	to	freedom	of	expression,	frank	la	rue,	 para	 ,	in	recommending,	inter	alia,	that	‘all	states	[should]	ensure	that	internet	access	is	maintained	at	 all	times,	including	during	times	of	political	unrest.’	 	a/hrc/ / ,	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	 association,	clément	nyaletsossi	voule,	on	the	opportunities	and	challenges	facing	the	rights	to	freedom	 of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	association	in	the	digital	age.	 	human	rights	committee	general	comment	no.	 	article	 :	right	of	peaceful	assembly,	revised	draft	 prepared	by	the	rapporteur,	mr.	christof	heyns:	draft	as	adopted	on	first	reading	during	the	 th	 session	( 	october	–	 	november	 ),	para	 	 recognised	 ‘that	human	rights	protections,	 including	 for	 freedom	of	assembly,	may	apply	 to	 analogous	interactions	taking	place	online.’ 		 the	revised	draft	of	general	comment	 	itself	notes	that:	 ‘...	although	the	exercise	of	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	is	normally	understood	to	pertain	 to	the	physical	gathering	of	persons,	comparable	human	rights	protections	also	apply	to	 acts	of	collective	expression	through	digital	means,	for	example	online.’ 	 the	question	of	what	makes	online	activity	analogous	to	physical	assemblies	offline	so	as	to	 engage	the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly	(either	alone,	or	in	combination	with	the	right	to	freedom	 of	expression	and/or	the	right	to	freedom	of	association)	is	far	from	straightforward.	this	report	 seeks	to	explore	the	different	elements	of	‘peaceful	assembly’	with	a	view	to	illuminating	more	 precisely	the	nature	of	this	right	when	it	is	exercised	online.			 the	term	‘assembly’	is	not	defined	within	article	 	of	the	covenant.	instead,	manfred	nowak	has	 noted	that	‘it	must	be	interpreted	in	conformity	with	the	customary,	generally	accepted	meaning	 in	national	legal	systems,	taking	into	account	the	object	and	purpose	of	this	traditional	right.’ 	 nowak	 further	 argues	 that	 ‘only	 intentional,	 temporary	 gatherings	 of	 several	 persons	 for	 a	 specific	purpose	are	afforded	the	protection	of	freedom	of	assembly’.	with	notable	similarities,	 the	un	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	association	defined	 ‘assembly’	as	‘an	intentional	and	temporary	gathering	in	a	private	or	public	space	for	a	specific	 purpose’. 	 the	 european	 court	 of	 human	 rights	 recently	 sought	 ‘[t]o	 avert	 the	 risk	 of	 a	 restrictive	interpretation’	by	refraining	‘from	formulating	the	notion	of	an	assembly,	which	it	 regards	as	an	autonomous	concept,	or	exhaustively	listing	the	criteria	which	would	define	it…’ 	 nonetheless,	 the	 strasbourg	 court	 has	 described	 an	 ‘assembly’	 as	 ‘the	 gathering	 of	 an	 indeterminate	 number	 of	 persons	 with	 the	 identifiable	 intention	 of	 being	 part	 of	 the	 communicative	process.’ 		 these	different	formulations	point	to	a	central	dilemma	that	lies	at	the	core	of	this	report:	if	there	 is	to	be	parity	between	the	interpretation	of	‘peaceful	assembly’	online	and	offline	(so	as	not	to	 stretch	 the	 ordinary	 meaning	 of	 the	 term),	 the	 way	 in	 which	 ‘peaceful	 assembly’	 online	 is	 conceptualised	and	defined	will	have	consequences	for	its	definition	offline	(and	vice-versa).	this	 report	seeks	to	contribute	to	the	resolution	of	this	dilemma,	premised	on	the	need	to	recognise	 these	new	and	dynamic	 forms	of	collective	 interaction	and	 the	corresponding	 imperative	of	 anchoring	their	protection	within	the	existing	matrix	of	human	rights	protections.	 the	report	is	structured	around	six	key	dimensions	of	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly	that	have	 particular	purchase	in	relation	to	its	exercise	online	(in	each	case,	taking	as	a	starting	point	the	 relevant	context	and	corresponding	legal	standards	and	doctrines	that	apply	in	relation	to	real- world	assemblies,	offline).	the	six	dimensions	are,	respectively:	 	a/hrc/ / ,	joint	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	 of	association	and	the	special	rapporteur	on	extrajudicial,	summary	or	arbitrary	executions	on	the	 proper	management	of	assemblies,	 	february	 ,	para	 . 	human	rights	committee	general	comment	no.	 	article	 :	right	of	peaceful	assembly,	revised	draft	 prepared	by	the	rapporteur,	mr.	christof	heyns:	draft	as	adopted	on	first	reading	during	the	 th	 session	( 	october	–	 	november	 ),	para	 .	 	nowak,	m.	un	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights:	ccpr	commentary,	p. ,	para	 .	 	a/hrc/ / ,	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	 association,	maina	kiai,		 	may	 .	 	navalny	v	russia,	application	nos.	 / 	and	four	others,	[gc]	judgment	of	 	november	 ,	 para	 .	 	tatár	and	fáber	v.	hungary,	 	june	 ,	app.	no.	 / 	and	 / ,	p.	 . ) purpose	 ) public/private	 ) presence	and	participation	 ) temporary	and	permanent	 ) peaceful	and	non-peaceful	 ) state	obligations	(including	those	in	relation	to	surveillance)		 each	of	these	are	summarised	below,	based	on	the	more	extensive	analysis	that	follows,	followed	 by	a	list	of	the	main	questions	that	require	attention	when	considering	whether,	and	if	so	how,	to	 extend	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	to	the	online	realm.	 purpose:	 the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	is	distinctive	from	the	individual’s	right	to	freedom	of	expression	 and	the	right	of	 individuals	to	 freedom	of	association.	 it	speaks	to	other	dimensions	of	how	 individuals	participate	in	society	and	public	affairs,	including	to	influence	government	policy	and	 accountability.	it	attends	to	how	individuals	may	come	together	to	communicate,	exchange	and	 act	 to	 address	 common	 concerns.	 arguably,	 this	 right	 is	 concerned	 with	 allowing	 for	 the	 expressiveness	 of	 the	 ‘body	 politic’	 beyond	 individual	 expression	 and	 besides	 more	 formal	 association.	from	here,	in	an	increasingly	digitally	mediated	world,	the	spirit	and	purpose	of	 article	 	 should	 necessarily	 extend	 to	 the	 communicative	 spaces	 where	 individuals	 come	 together	to	speak	and	act	to	realise	their	participation	in	the	political,	social	and	cultural	life	of	 their	society.	whereas	some	of	the	parameters	of	the	interpretation	of	article	 	have	their	roots	 in	physical	assemblies	as	the	dominant	if	not	primary	instantiation	of	the	right,	these	parameters,	 such	as	aspects	of	temporality,	boundaries	of	public,	and	definitions	of	participation,	must	be	 open	to	fresh	interpretation	or	must	yield	way,	where	and	when	the	spirit	and	purpose	of	what	 article	 	protects	requires	this.	 public/private:	 all	assemblies	must	 take	place	 in	a	place,	whether	a	market	square,	a	home,	a	social	media	 platform	or	a	petition	website.		these	places	are	usually	but	not	always	governed	by	people	other	 than	those	participating	in	the	assembly,	which	means	that	these	places	usually	have	logics	or	 rules	 of	 their	 own	 that	 may	 or	 may	 not	 align	 with	 the	 logics	 of	 the	 assemblies.	 	 	 because	 participants	 in	 a	 particular	 assembly	 must	 interact	 and	 express	 themselves	 within	 that	 assembly’s	place,	their	interactions	and	communications	are	possibly	inflected	by	that	place’s	 logic.		for	example,	they	might	only	be	able	to	gather	in	a	place	at	during	daylight	hours	or	might	 face	noise	restrictions	that	keep	their	volume	at	a	certain	level.	 online	assemblies,	or	online	parts	of	hybrid	assemblies,	are	like	offline	assemblies	in	this	respect	 but	with	at	least	two	related	complications	that	are	much	more	prevalent	in	online	than	offline	 places.		the	first	relates	to	the	mediation	afforded	by	the	use	of	icts,	which	in	turn	affects	the	 extent	and	ways	by	which	the	logics	of	online	places	inflect	online	assembly	communications.		the	 second	relates	to	the	predominant	type	of	logics	governing	these	online	places,	which	tend	to	be	 anchored	in	private	rather	than	public	ownership.		this	section	will	explain	each	in	turn,	focusing	 on	 how	 the	 commercial	 logic	 of	 private	 online	 spaces	 restricts	 the	 registers,	 distorts	 the	 transmission,	and	allows	external	parties	to	eavesdrop	on	the	reception	of	the	interactions	and	 communications	 integral	 to	assembly.	the	section	then	 looks	to	offline	precedent	as	well	as	 considerations	for	protecting	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	enacted	in	online	places,	focusing	in	 particular	on	arguments	compelling	private	places	to	make	spaces	for	online	assemblies	and	 states	and	corporations	not	to	interfere	with	participants’	abilities	to	protect	themselves	from	 surveillance	 presence	and	participation:	 because	of	how	digital	communications	work,	the	protection	of	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	 online	involves	interpreting	what	constitutes	‘participation’	or	‘presence’	in	an	assembly	for	new	 empirical	phenomena.	the	right	to	freedom	of	expression	is	evidently	in	play,	but	should	the	 definition	of	participation	in	an	assembly	be	expanded	to	include,	for	example,	facebook	page	 ‘likes’	 or	 adopting	 profile	 ‘badges’	 or	 hashtags?	 defining	 thresholds	 on	 what	 constitutes	 participation,	and	whether	or	not	 there	 is	sufficient	collective	purpose	of	assembly,	appears	 fraught.	however,	starting	from	a	focus	on	state	obligations	not	to	interfere	appears	to	be	more	 tractable.	by	expanding	the	definition	of	participation	to	include	more	passive	actions	or	mere	 presence	in	an	online	space,	the	distinctiveness	of	the	right	of	assembly	could	be	lost.	the	risk	of	 not	doing	so	may	be	to	exclude	from	the	protective	scope	of	the	right	individuals	who	might	 deserve	or	benefit	from	protection.	 temporary	and	permanent:	 the	 online	 realm	 of	 assemblies	 calls	 into	 question	 the	 element	 of	 temporality	 in	 (some)	 conventional	definitions	–	or	the	received	understanding	–	of	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly.	 online	assemblies,	with	their	permanent	digital	trace,	often	lack	a	clearly	defined	timeframe	are	 not	‘temporary’	in	the	same	way	as	protests	or	marches.	by	extension,	there	may	also	be	less	 contemporaneousness	in	some	online	interactions	(such	that	they	are	not	‘gatherings’	in	ways	 that	physical	assemblies	appear	to	be).	if	we	consider	that	the	concern	with	the	temporary	nature	 of	physical	assemblies	reflects	the	need	to	distinguish	them	from	the	right	to	association,	and	that	 in	any	case,	the	right	of	assembly	should	not	be	interpreted	narrowly	(protest	camps	that	might	 extend	for	months	or	years	have	also	been	found	to	fall	within	the	definition	of	assemblies),	then	 the	purpose	of	the	right	should	not	be	vitiated	by	the	peculiarities	of	how	time	and	record	operate	 with	 digital	 communications.	 nevertheless,	 challenges	 arise	 with	 the	 extent	 of	 protection	 afforded	over	time	to	online	assemblies,	for	example	with	delimiting	assembly	for	never-ending’	 comment	streams,	allowing	for	the	role	of	mediators	and	administrators	in	determining	who	 participates	and	when,	and	protecting	against	the	vulnerability	of	digital	media	to	strategies	to	 generate	virality,	such	as	bots,	paid	advertising/promotion	etc.	it	is	worth	noting	that	because	 online	and	‘offline’	worlds	invariably	merge	and	because	permanent	digital	traces	of	recordings,	 commentaries	and	further	participatory	actions	relating	to	‘temporary’	physical	assemblies	are	 common,	questions	of	temporality	already	arise	with	respect	to	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	in	 a	digital	age.	 peaceful	and	non-peaceful:	 besides	the	content	of	expression,	online	assemblies	may	call	 into	question	what	constitutes	 ‘peaceful’	when	assemblies	lead	to	collective	action	taken	in	the	form	of	trolling	or	hacktivism,	 such	as	denial	of	service	attacks	(dos	attacks)	or	distributed	denial	of	service	attacks	(ddos	 attacks).	states	are	obliged	to	protect	online	assemblies	that	fall	within	the	definition	of	‘peaceful’,	 but	the	diffuse	nature	of	online	assemblies	raises	challenges	for	how	to	protect	the	right,	including	 the	 rights	 of	 dissenters,	 while	 placing	 limits	 on	 content	 or	 actions	 that	 are	 not	 ‘peaceful’.	 consideration	may	need	to	be	given	to	the	circumstances	in	which	the	principle	of	individualised	 restriction,	 distinguishing	 between	 peaceful	 and	 non-peaceful	 participants,	 can	 actually	 be	 implemented	online	(in	contrast,	for	example,	with	geo-targeting	and	widespread	interference	 with	connectivity).	 	 state	obligations	(including	those	in	relation	to	surveillance):	 in	 recognising	 the	 right	 of	 peaceful	 assembly	 online,	 states	 must	 not	 persuade	 or	 coerce	 individuals	 to	 restrict	 themselves	 only	 to	 online	 assemblies	 (as	 a	 substitute	 for	 real-world	 assemblies).	 moreover,	 states	 may	 have	 distinctive	 obligations	 to	 not	 interfere	 with	 and	 to	 facilitate	online	assemblies.	as	regards	negative	obligations,	non-interference	would	include	not	 using	technology	in	order	to	block,	filter	or	remove	content	online	where	that	would	interfere	 with	the	legitimate	exercise	of	the	right.	there	is	also	a	risk	that	states	may	police	or	surveil	the	 internet	more	severely	by	citing	the	duty	to	preserve	national	security	or	public	order.	as	regards	 positive	obligations,	 states	 should	create	a	 legal	 framework	 that	 is	 conducive	 to	 individuals	 exercising	their	right	to	participate	 in	online	assemblies,	 from	access	to	the	 internet	to	data	 protection	and	from	the	facilitation	of	electronic	means	of	participation	to	appropriate	oversight	 of	surveillance	measures.	practical	and	effective	protection	for	the	right	to	freedom	of	peaceful	 assembly	online	includes	upholding	the	principle	of	‘content	neutrality’	(especially	as	regards	 gatherings	by	minority	groups	or	assemblies	that	convey	dissenting	viewpoints).	states	will	also	 have	 to	 facilitate	 (and	 not	 unduly	 interfere	 with)	 the	 rights	 of	 individuals	 participating	 in	 transnational	assemblies	online,	or	individuals	participating	from	their	jurisdiction	in	assemblies	 directed	at	or	concerned	with	third	party	states	and	societies.	 the	following	sections	provide	examples	and	further	considerations	for	each	of	these	issue	areas.		 the	report	concludes	with	some	key	questions	arising	from	the	research	and	reflection	we	have	 done	on	these	dimensions.	 	 	 .	purpose(s)	of	assembly	online	 some	definitions	of	‘assembly’	(including	the	draft	general	comment)	articulate	the	purposive	 element	of	gathering	as	being	for	 ‘a	common	expressive	purpose’. 	in	contrast,	both	manfred	 nowak	 and	 the	 un	 special	 rapporteur	 on	 the	 rights	 to	 freedom	 of	 peaceful	 assembly	 and	 association	define	the	purpose	of	assemblies	more	broadly,	stating	that	assemblies	need	only	 have	a	‘specific	purpose’. 	 the	draft	general	comment	recognises	a	range	of	purposes	that	assemblies	may	fulfil.	these	 include	shaping	societies	using	persuasion	rather	than	force	and	advancing	ideas	and	aspirations	 publicly	(thereby	helping	to	gauge	the	extent	of	support	for	the	message	being	conveyed).	in	this	 regard,	it	can	be	seen	that	assemblies	generally	entail	a	performative	element.	this	constitutive	 performative	purpose	concerns	more	than	what	is	explicitly	said	or	written	and	contributes	to	 the	visibility	of	marginalised	groups 	not	least	by	showcasing	the	number	of	supporters	of	a	cause	 or	campaign 	(whereupon	‘the	medium	is	the	message’.) 	 assemblies	can	also	create	opportunities	for	inclusive	participation	and	may	be	of	particular	 importance	 to	 marginalised	 and	 disenfranchised	 members	 of	 society. 	 the	 un	 special	 rapporteur	has	noted	that	 ‘[a]ssemblies	play	a	vibrant	role	in	mobilising	the	population	and	 formulating	grievances	and	aspirations,	facilitating	the	celebration	of	events	and,	importantly,	 influencing	states‟	public	policy.’ 	jack	balkin	also	emphasises	that	assemblies	and	freedom	of	 speech	are	vital	to	‘make	state	power	accountable	to	citizens.’ 	 in	addition,	the	right	to	participate	can	help	shape	autonomy	and	affirm	identities.	however,	 nowak	suggests	that	for	the	right	of	assembly	to	be	engaged,	such	information	or	ideas	should	be	 ‘directed	at	the	public’	and	so	the	right	of	assembly	is	to	be	‘understood	as	a	special,	institutional	 form	 of	 freedom	 of	 expression	 conditioned	 by	 its	 specific,	 democratic	 meaning.’ 	 he	 argues	 therefore	that	‘the	specific	protection	of	freedom	of	assembly	aims	at	the	discussion	or	proclamation	 of	 information	 and	 ideas	 within	 the	 meaning	 of	 art. ( )	 that	 is	 not	 dealt	 with	 or	 guaranteed	 elsewhere.’ 	observing	that	some	legal	systems	regard	‘community	festivals,	public	attractions,	 church	services	or	marriage,	funeral	or	religious	processions’	as	assemblies,	while	other	states	 	human	rights	committee	general	comment	no.	 	article	 :	right	of	peaceful	assembly,	revised	draft	 prepared	by	the	rapporteur,	mr.	christof	heyns:	draft	as	adopted	on	first	reading	during	the	 th	 session	( 	october	–	 	november	 )	para	 .	similarly,	osce/odihr-venice	commission	( ).	 guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	 nd	ed.,	para	 .	 	nowak,	m.,	( ),	un	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights:	ccpr	commentary,	 nd	ed.	kehl:	n.p	engel,	 p. ;	a/hrc/ / 	( 	may	 ).	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	 peaceful	assembly	and	of	association,	para	 .	 	butler,	j.,	( ),	notes	toward	a	performative	theory	of	assembly,	cambridge,	ma:	harvard	university	 press.	 	for	example,	the	initial	intention	of	#metoo	was	to	“give	people	a	sense	of	the	magnitude	of	the	 problem”.	alyssa	milano	( . . ).	[twitter]	accessed	at:	 https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/ 	 	mcluhan,	m.,	fiore,	q.,	and	agel,	j.,	( ),	the	medium	is	the	massage:	an	inventory	of	effects,	new	 york:	random	house.	 	human	rights	committee	general	comment	no.	 	article	 :	right	of	peaceful	assembly,	revised	draft	 prepared	by	the	rapporteur,	mr.	christof	heyns	draft	as	adopted	on	first	reading	during	the	 th	 session	( 	october	–	 	november	 )	 	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	association,	 maina	kiai	a/hrc/ / ,	 	may	 ,	para	 .	 	jack	m.	balkin,	cultural	democracy	and	the	first	amendment,	 	nw.	u.	l.	rev.	 	( ).	see	also,	 a/hrc/res/ / ,	human	rights	council	 / ,	 	october	 	(preamble).	 	nowak	(n )	 	para	 .	 	ibid	 	para	 .	 only	afford	 the	protection	of	 the	right	 for	political	purposes,	nowak	argues	 that	 freedom	of	 assembly	serves	 the	crucial	democratic	purpose	of	 ‘informing,	expressing	and	 implementing	 political	opinions.’ 	at	the	same	time,	he	acknowledges	that	the	ideas	being	proclaimed	need	not	 be	of	a	party	political	or	current	events	nature.	in	this	regard,	it	is	noteworthy	that	the	european	 court	of	human	rights	has	acknowledged	that	article	 	echr	can	be	engaged	for	assemblies	‘of	 an	essentially	social	character’. 	 according	to	the	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 ,	para.	 ,	‘while	commercial	gatherings	 would	not	generally	fall	within	the	scope	of	what	is	protected	by	article	 ,	they	are	covered	to	 the	extent	that	they	have	an	expressive	purpose’. 	in	the	context	of	offline	assemblies,	however,	 it	is	notoriously	difficult	to	ascertain	whether	or	not	an	event	should	be	regarded	as	commercial.	 for	example,	charging	entry	fees	to	events	such	as	the	pride	in	manchester	raises	such	issues	of	 line-drawing. 	 yet	 freedom	 of	 assembly	 is	 not	 coextensive	 with	 freedom	 of	 expression,	 nor	 should	 it	 be	 subordinated	 to	 freedom	 of	 speech,	 as	 underscored	 by	 several	 scholars. 	 for	 example,	 participation	 in	 assemblies	 may	 also	 have	 an	 associational	 purpose	 (quite	 apart	 from	 any	 expressive	or	communicative	function).	this	non-expressive	dimension	should,	as	tabatha	abu	 el-haj	 argues,	 be	 recognised	 and	 valued	 because	 associational	 activities	 are	 ‘incubators	 of	 relationships’	not	just	‘incubators	of	ideas’. 	beyond	simply	asserting	opinions,	assemblies	help	 build	and	preserve	solidarity,	modes	of	resistance 	and	identities. 	this	plays	a	crucial	role	for	 minorities,	furthering	personal	development	and	“a	pluralistic	and	tolerant	society”. 	the	sense	 of	solidarity	is	in	turn	essential	to	collective	action. 	 having	summarily	mapped	the	various	purposes	of	offline	assemblies,	the	question	arises	as	to	 whether	these	(or	other)	purposes	can	equally	(or	partly)	be	realised	through	analogous	online	 interactions	-	either	where	these	(a)	are	not	already	protected	by	article	 	or	article	 	iccpr,	 or	(b)	might	deserve	additional	recognition	as	also	falling	within	the	protective	scope	of	article	 ?	 	ibid	 	para	 .	 	friend	and	others	v	uk,	appl	nos	 / 	and	 / ,	 	november	 	(admissibility),	para	 	 and	huseynov	v	azerbaijan,	appl	no	 / ,	 	may	 ,	para	 .	 	human	rights	committee	general	comment	no.	 	article	 :	right	of	peaceful	assembly,	revised	draft	 prepared	by	the	rapporteur,	mr.	christof	heyns:	draft	as	adopted	on	first	reading	during	the	 th	 session	( 	october	–	 	november	 ),	para.	 	 	parkinson,	h.	j.	( th	february	 )	‘manchester	pride	is	charging	£ 	a	ticket	this	year.	that’s	a	bit	 rich’,	the	guardian,	accessible	at:	 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /feb/ /manchester-pride- -ticket-prices- inclusivity	 	salát.	o.,	( ),	the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly,	hart;	in	the	us	context:	bhagwat,	a.,	( ),	 ‘associational	speech’,	yale	l.	j.	 ,	 ;	inazu,	j.	d.,	( ),	confident	pluralism,	university	of	chicago	 press.	 	el-haj,	t.	a.,	( ),	‘friends,	associates,	and	associations:	theoretically	and	empirically	grounding	the	 freedom	of	association’,	 	arizona	law	review	 ,	and	at	 :	‘the	message	of	an	organizations	may	be	 much	less	critical	for	determining	whether	it	should	be	entitled	to	constitutional	protection,	as	an	 association,	than	the	nature	of	the	relationships	within	it	and	the	ways	in	which	they	are	organized.’	 	inazu,	j.	d.,	( ),	confident	pluralism,	university	of	chicago	press.	 	osce/odihr	( ),	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	 nd	ed.,	p.	 .	on	the	use	of	cyber- activism	to	express	one’s	identity,	see	also:	petray,	t.	l.,	( ),	‘protest	 . :	online	interactions	and	 aboriginal	activists’,	media,	culture	&	society,	 ( ),	p.	 - .	 	osce/odihr	( ),	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	 nd	ed.,	p.	 .	 	castells,	m.,	( ),	networks	of	outrage	and	hope:	social	movements	in	the	internet	age,	john	wiley	&	 sons.	 as	noted,	collective	expression	is	regarded	by	many	as	being	one	of	the	core	definitional	elements	 of	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly. 	this	clearly	applies	to	online	assemblies	too	–	online	activity	 is	frequently	undertaken	for	expressive	purposes	and	even	being	part	of	an	online	group	can	of	 itself	be	interpreted	as	having	an	expressive	component. 	 in	terms	of	assemblies	having	an	associational	(vs.	purely	expressive)	purpose, 		examples	of	how	 this	happens	online	can	be	found	in	gerbaudo’s	analysis	of	the	use	of	social	media	during	protests	 not	only	to	‘convey	abstract	opinions’	or	organise	physical	assemblies,	but	to	‘give	a	shape	to	the	 way	in	which	people	come	together	and	act	together.’ 	similarly,	cmeciu	and	coman	describe	 how	‘online	communities’	collective	identities’	were	built	online	during	both	online	and	offline	 anti-fracking	protests	in	romania. 	 given	that	a	virtual	form	of	connectivity	might	be	particularly	important	to	those	members	of	 society	who	are	vulnerable,	marginalised	and/or	disenfranchised,	does	the	ability	to	assemble	 online	 level	 the	 playing	 field	 for	 these	 citizens,	 enabling	 them	 to	 access	 and	 participate	 in	 (sometimes	amorphous	and	transient)	social	groups?	smith	erkstrand	believed	that	the	internet	 provided	opportunities	for	people	with	disabilities	to	participate	and	interconnect	with	the	public	 sphere. 	 whilst	accepting	that	merely	because	a	form	of	online	interaction	might	substitute	for	an	assembly	 offline,	 it	does	not	 for	 that	 reason	alone	become	 an	assembly,	does	 the	 internet	provide	an	 alternative	mechanism	for	some	individuals	to	assemble	and	so	by	extension,	form	opinions	and	 develop	autonomy,	when	physical	participation	is	otherwise	unavailable	to	them?	in	other	words,	 if	an	individual	is	unable	(physically	or	mentally)	to	participate	offline,	should	their	right	to	join,	 or	otherwise	show	solidarity	with,	the	same	assembly	through	online	means	be	protected	by	 article	 ?	 an	american	report	on	digital	inclusion	noted	that	people	with	disabilities	did	not	have	the	same	 level	of	social	participation	that	able	bodied	people	did.	the	study	indicated	that	whilst	 . 	 percent	of	able-bodied	people	regularly	attended	group	meetings,	only	 . 	percent	of	people	 with	disabilities	did	the	same.		this	included	participation	in	political	groups. 	 given	the	potential	barriers	 to	participation	 in	real-world	assemblies,	whereby	some	people	 cannot	easily	communicate	because	of	physical	or	mental	barriers,	internet	platforms	provide	 opportunities	for	them	to	associate	with	and	participate	alongside	others	online:	 ‘web	tools	and	social	media	sites	that	connect	the	online	voices	of	people	with	 disabilities	are	revolutionizing	how	they	are	heard	and	how	they	assemble.	 	the	osce	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	(draft	of	 rd	edition)	define	an	assembly	as	“the	 intentional	and	temporary	presence	of	a	number	of	individuals	in	a	public	place	for	a	common	expressive	 purpose”	(para.	 ).	the	achpr	guidelines	on	freedom	of	association	and	assembly	in	africa	use	the	 notion	of	“expressive	purpose”	(para.	 ).	 	inazu,	j.	d.,	( ),	‘virtual	assembly’,	 	cornell	l.	rev,	 ,	pp.	 - .	 	hamilton,	m.,	( ),	toward	general	comment	 	on	article	 	iccpr.	ecnl/uea.	 	analysis	of	the	arab	spring	in	egypt,	indignados	movement	in	spain	and	occupy	wall	street	in	the	usa.	 gerbaudo,	p.,	( ),	tweets	and	the	streets,	pluto	press,	p.	 .		 	cmeciu,	c.	and	coman,	c.,	( ),	‘digital	civil	activism	in	romania:	framing	anti-chevron	online	 protest	community	“faces”’,	comunicar.	 :	xxiv.	 	smith	ekstrand,	v.,	( ),	democratic	governance,	self-fulfilment	and	disability:	web	accessibility	 under	the	americans	with	disabilities	act	and	the	first	amendment,	communication	law	and	policy	 ( ),	p.	 .	 	us	national	council	on	disability,	( ),	the	power	of	digital	inclusion	report:	technology's	impact	on	 employment	and	opportunities	for	people	with	disabilities,	accessed	at:	 https://ncd.gov/publications/ /oct 	 recent	on-site	protests	by	disabled	activists	against	proposed	measures	in	 congress	to	eliminate	obamacare	relied	on	social	media	and	hashtags	like	 #cripthevote	 and	 #adaptandresist	 to	 organize	 and	 take	 action	 in	 real	 space.’ 	 online	assembly	could	be	instrumental	in	establishing	a	dialogue	not	only	within	civil	society,	but	 also	between	civil	society	and	governmental	actors. 	the	purpose	of	online	peaceful	assembly	 here	could	be	to	give	a	voice	to	those	who	are	literally	voiceless	or	a	sense	of	gathering	to	those	 who	 could	 not	 attend	 a	 physical	 gathering.	 it	 might	 facilitate	 a	 sense	 of	 community	 and	 participation	for	those	who	otherwise	may	feel	excluded	both	socially	and	politically,	allowing	 them	to	meaningfully	engage	in	a	public	domain.	in	a	similar	logic,	the	possibility	to	take	part	in	 online	assemblies	at	slightly	different	points	in	time	should	also	be	considered	in	the	light	of	the	 wider	democratic	purpose	of	the	right	to	assembly.	online	assemblies	can	widen	access,	both	 time-wise	 and	 space-wise,	 to	 the	 exercise	 of	 this	 democratic	 right	 by	 people	 who	 would	 otherwise,	for	whatever	reason,	not	be	able	to	participate,	thereby	circumventing	shortcomings	 of	physical	assemblies	imposed	by	the	need	of	synchronicity	stricto	sensu. 	 the	performative	and	associational	purposes	of	real-world	assemblies	can	also	be	translated	into	 the	online	sphere.	for	example,	a	digital	tool	called	‘thunderclap’	co-ordinates	a	message	across	 several	 social	 media	 platforms	 simultaneously.	 supporters	 sign	 up	 to	 participate	 and	 thus	 virtually	pursue	a	common	expressive	purpose. 	the	number	of	supporters	conveys	a	message	 in	itself	-	one	that	 is	not	captured	by	the	individual	freedom	of	expression	alone,	and	which	 provides	a	gauge	of	support.	other	examples	of	associational	value	are	the	#metoo	movement 	 and	in	india	in	 ,	people	rallied	on	social	media	to	request	the	enactment	of	an	anti-corruption	 law. 		 the	various	functions	of	assemblies	do	not	necessarily	correspond	to	a	clearly	enunciated,	explicit	 common	expressive	purpose	but	are	instead	indicative	of	a	connection	beyond	expression.	in	this	 regard,	the	notion	of	connective	action,	proposed	by	bennett	and	segerberg	in	opposition	to	the	 traditional	 form	 of	 collective	 action,	 sheds	 light	 on	 some	 peculiarities	 of	 online	 assemblies.	 connective	actions,	such	as	the	 indignados	and	occupy	protests,	are	 less	organised	forms	of	 actions	involving	the	‘self-motivated’	sharing	of	‘easily	personalized’	ideas	on	digital	media.	in	 contrast	to	the	need	for	a	‘common	…	purpose’,	this	form	of	action	thus	accommodates	a	level	of	 diversity	in	the	purposes	pursued	by	individual	participants	in	connective	action. 	the	analysis	 of	 the	 hashtag	 #metoo	 uncovers	 the	 variety	 of	 intentions	 of	 digital	 ‘participants’	 to	 the	 		smith	ekstrand	(n 	) .	 	osce/odihr	( ).	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	 nd	ed,	p.	 .	 	see	report	by	the	special	rapporteur	of	may	 ,	para	 ,	on	the	“value	of	technology	to	facilitate	 people’s	rights	to	public	participation”.	 	in	 	the	labour	party	and	 	supporters	simultaneously	tweeted:	“it’s	time	to	deal	with	david	 cameron’s	cost	of	living	crisis."	let’s	freeze	gas	and	electricity	bills.	#freezethatbill”.	this	message	appeared	 on	the	online	feeds	of	four	and	a	half	million	people.	hern,	a.,	( th	november	 ).	labour's	 thunderclap	heard	by	 . 	million	twitter	users,	the	guardian,	accessed	at:	 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /nov/ /labours-thunderclap-twitter-freezethatbill- tweeted-simultaneously.		 	snyder,	c.	and,	lopez,	l.,	( 	december	 ),	tarana	burke	on	why	she	created	the	#metoo	 movement	–	and	where	it's	headed,	business	insider,	accessed	at:	 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-metoo-movement-started-where-its-headed-tarana-burke- time-person-of-year-women- - ?r=us&ir=t	 	times	of	india,	( 	december	 ),	all	you	want	to	know	about	lokpal	bill,	times	of	india,	accessed	 at:	http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/all-you-want-toknow-	about-lokpal- bill/articleshow/ .cms			 	bennett,	w.	l.	and	segerberg,	a.,	( ),	“the	logic	of	connective	action”,	information,	communication	 &	society.	 : ,	p.	 .	 movement. 	this	example	shows	how	the	purpose	can	vary	over	time	and	depending	on	the	 person,	and	depart	from	the	ideas	of	a	movement’s	organisers	or	initiators.	it	may	therefore	 question	the	need	to	open	the	definition	of	assembly	to	a	multiplicity	of	purposes	rather	than	 being	limited	to	‘a’	(one)	common	expressive	purpose.	 finally,	just	as	issues	of	line-drawing	arise	in	relation	to	the	concept	of	‘commercial’	assemblies	 offline,	so	too	the	commodification	of	personal	data	raises	questions	regarding	the	circumstances	 in	which	an	online	assembly	might	properly	be	considered	to	be	‘commercial’	in	nature.	on	the	 basis	of	the	standard	articulated	in	the	draft	general	comment	(that	commercial	assemblies	are	 protected	under	article	 	to	the	extent	that	they	have	an	expressive	purpose),	it	may	be	that	no	 further	issue	arises	where	some	expressive	purpose	can	be	demonstrated.	it	may	nonetheless	be	 worth	 considering	 whether	 there	 are	 any	 circumstances	 in	 which	 the	 commodification	 of	 personal	data	generated	by,	or	in	connection	with,	an	online	gathering	might	outweigh	or	negate	 any	expressive	purpose	such	a	gathering	may	have.	 	 	 	these	intentions	include	notably	“promoting	solidarity”,	“divulging	information	about	personal	 experiences,	asserting	knowledge	about	social	norms,	objecting	to	the	status	quo,	speaking	about	and/or	 criticizing	online	activism,	and	exploiting	the	buzz	of	the	hashtag	to	advance	other	ideas”.	wood,	m.	k,	( 	 november	 ).	language	in	digital	activism:	exploring	the	performative	functions	of	#metoo	tweets,	 digit	magazine,	accessed	at:	https://www.diggitmagazine.com/academic-papers/language-digital- activism-exploring-performative-functions-metoo-tweets			 .	public	versus	private	 all	assemblies	must	 take	place	 in	a	place,	whether	a	market	square,	a	home,	a	social	media	 platform	or	a	petition	website.		these	places	are	usually	but	not	always	governed	by	people	other	 than	those	participating	in	the	assembly,	which	means	that	these	places	usually	have	logics	or	 rules	 of	 their	 own	 that	 may	 or	 may	 not	 align	 with	 the	 logics	 of	 the	 assemblies. 	 because	 participants	 in	 a	 particular	 assembly	 must	 interact	 and	 express	 themselves	 within	 that	 assembly’s	place,	their	interactions	and	communications	are	possibly	inflected	by	that	place’s	 logic.		for	example,	they	might	only	be	able	to	gather	in	a	place	at	during	daylight	hours	or	might	 face	noise	restrictions	that	keep	their	volume	at	a	certain	level.	 online	assemblies,	or	online	parts	of	hybrid	assemblies,	are	like	offline	assemblies	in	this	respect	 but	with	at	least	two	related	complications	that	are	much	more	prevalent	in	online	than	offline	 places.		the	first	relates	to	the	mediation	afforded	by	the	use	of	icts,	which	in	turn	affects	the	 extent	and	ways	by	which	the	logics	of	online	places	inflect	online	assembly	communications.		the	 second	relates	to	the	predominant	type	of	logics	governing	these	online	places,	which	tend	to	be	 anchored	in	private	rather	than	public	ownership.		this	section	explains	each	in	turn	and	then	 looks	to	offline	precedent	as	well	as	considerations	for	protecting	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	 enacted	in	online	places.	 the	logics	of	online	places	 an	interaction	involves	the	production,	transmission	and	reception	of	a	communication.		because	 participants	are	often	communicating	face-to-face	in	offline	assemblies,	the	logic	of	the	place	they	 are	in	is	likely	to	influence	the	production	of	the	communication,	including	who	speaks,	what	is	 said	and	how,	as	well	as	its	reception,	like	who	hears	whom.		because	it	is	synchronous,	however,	 the	 logic	 is	 unlikely	 to	 affect	 the	 communication’s	 transmission	 except	 with	 respect	 to	 amplification,	echoing	and	muffling	–	but	these	effects	can	relatively	quickly	be	deciphered	by	 participants,	who	can	then	adjust	for	them.	 in	contrast,	the	mediation	of	online	interactions,	which	is	about	extending	transmission	across	 time	 and	 space,	 provides	 greater	 opportunities	 for	 the	 logic	 of	 that	 online	 place	 to	 impact	 transmission	in	a	way	that	is	much	more	difficult	for	participants	to	anticipate	and	thus	adjust	 for. 	 	 we	 are	 talking	 here	 about	 the	 opacity	 of	 visibility	 algorithms,	 for	 example,	 and	 the	 narrowing	of	cues	 	in	mediated	versus	face-to-face	communication	that	make	it	more	difficult	 to	assess	with	whom	you	are	interacting.	the	amplified	impact,	thus,	of	the	place’s	logic	on	the	 online	assembly	urges	a	critical	consideration	of	that	logic	which,	in	the	case	of	privately-owned	 online	assemblies,	is	often	driven	by	norms	of	neoliberal	capitalism.	 although	some	publicly-owned	places	conducive	to	online	assemblies	certainly	exist,	such	as	the	 uk	government’s	petitions	website	(petition.parliament.uk),	most	of	the	places	where	we	can	 interact	with	each	other	online	are	privately-owned.	with	almost	a	third	of	the	world’s	population	 as	active	users,	facebook	dominates,	but	is	joined	by	its	commercial	sister	companies,	such	as	 instagram,	as	well	as	its	commercial	competitors,	such	as	twitter.		of	course,	not	all	icts	follow	a	 commercial	logic;	some,	like	mastodon,	are	communally	owned.	still,	because	of	the	‘network	 	mcpherson,	e.,	( ),	“social	media	and	human	rights	advocacy”,	the	routledge	companion	to	media	 and	human	rights,	ed.	tumber,	h.	and	waisbord,	s.,	london:	routledge,	 – .	 	mcpherson,	e.	( ),	“risk	and	the	pluralism	of	digital	human	rights	fact-finding	and	advocacy”,	 new	technologies	for	human	rights	law	and	practice,	ed.	land,	m.	k.	and	aronson,	j.	d.,	cambridge,	uk:	 cambridge	university	press,	 – .	 	thompson,	j.	b.,	( ),	the	media	and	modernity:	a	social	theory	of	the	media,	stanford,	ca:	stanford	 university	press. effect,’	which	explains	the	social	media	oligopoly	via	our	tendency	to	flock	to	sites	where	our	 friends	already	are,	these	sites	have	difficulty	gaining	traction.	 as	 shoshana	 zuboff	 argues	 in	 her	 bestselling	 book,	 the	 age	 of	 surveillance	 capitalism,	 ict	 companies	such	as	facebook,	amazon	and	google	collect	such	(personal)	data	‘in	order	to	nudge,	 coax,	tune	and	herd	behaviour	toward	profitable	outcomes.’ 	predominant	ways	in	which	these	 companies	earn	profit	is	through	commodifying	personal	data	and	selling	it	to	third	parties	as	 well	as	through	selling	users	as	audiences	to	advertisers. 	this	logic	of	these	online	places	can	 interfere	with	the	logic	of	online	assemblies	at	the	stages	of	the	production,	transmission	and	 reception	of	their	communications,	and	we	provide	examples	of	these	in	turn.	 at	the	production	stage,	the	logic	of	profit	encourages	particular	types	of	communication	in	order	 to	be	picked	up	by	the	algorithm	that	determines	visibility.		for	example,	a	guide	facebook	had	 on	its	website	for	how	non-profits	could	reach	audiences	prescribed	a	very	particular	style	of	 ‘voice,’	 namely	 ‘inspiring,	 solutions-oriented’	 rather	 than	 ‘placing	 blame’	 –	 thereby	 recommending	against	one	of	the	key	registers	of	online	assemblies	that	gather	in	the	name	of	 accountability	and	social	change. 	at	the	transmission	stage,	these	algorithms	determine	what	is	 visible	to	whom	–	and	what	is	invisible.		for	example,	activists	posting	important	evidence	of	 human	 rights	 violations	 may	 see	 it	 disappear	 because	 the	 violence	 it	 documents	 is	 seen	 as	 contravening	community	standards	designed	to	keep	social	media	platforms	palatable	and	thus	 profitable. 		another	way	in	which	visibility	is	inflected	by	the	logics	of	platforms	is	the	visibility	 of	one’s	interlocutor;	the	reduction	of	clues	about	this	interlocutor	may	allow	external	parties	to	 slip	into	the	online	assembly	unnoticed,	where	they	may	set	surveillance	traps	for	activists	or	 unleash	armies	of	bots. 		at	the	reception	stage,	the	model	of	surveillance	capitalism	also	sets	the	 stage	for	easy	eavesdropping	by	external	parties,	both	commercial	and	governmental.	 all	of	 the	above	assumes	participation,	but	 the	 logic	of	online	places	also	 inflects	who	 feels	 comfortable	and	thus	able	to	participate	–	and	goes	far	beyond	the	issue	of	digital	divide.		safiya	 umoja	noble	carefully	and	devastatingly	documents	in	her	book,	algorithms	of	oppression,	how	 google’s	corporate	logic	renders	racist	and	sexist	search	results	–	for	example,	porn	sites	returned	 for	a	search	on	‘black	girls’.		porn	companies	are	very	adept,	both	through	digital	literacy	and	 through	financial	capital,	at	search	engine	optimisation,	and	this	allows	them	to	manipulate	and	 outright	pay	for	their	placement	at	the	top	of	such	a	search	result. 		such	outright	hostility	against	 	zuboff,	s.	( ),	the	age	of	surveillance	capitalism:	the	fight	for	a	human	future	at	the	new	frontier	 of	power,	london:	profile	books	 	on	the	issue	of	commodification	see	for	instance	barbero,	m.	(et	al),	( ),	study	on	emerging	issues	of	 data	ownership,	interoperability,	(re-)usability	and	access	to	data,	and	liability:	a	study	prepared	for	the	 european	commission	dg	communications	networks,	content	&	technology,	accessed	at:	 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/study-emerging-issues-data-ownership- interoperability-re-usability-and-access-data-and;	datenethikkommission	der	bundesregierung,	 gutachten	der	datenethikkommission	(october	 ),	accessed	at:	 https://www.bmi.bund.de/shareddocs/downloads/de/publikationen/themen/it- digitalpolitik/gutachten-datenethikkommission.html;	cf.	elvy,	s.,	( ),	‘commodifying	consumer	data	 in	the	era	of	the	internet	of	things’,	 	bc	l	rev	 ;	evans,	b.	j.,	( ),	‘much	ado	about	data	 ownership’,	 	harv	l	j	&	tech	 ;	litman,	j.,	( ),	‘information	privacy/information	property’	 	stan	 l	rev	 .		 	mcpherson,	e.,	( ),	“social	media	and	human	rights	advocacy”,	the	routledge	companion	to	media	 and	human	rights,	ed.	tumber,	h.	and	waisbord,	s.,	london:	routledge,	 – .	 	madeleine	bair,	“navigating	the	ethics	of	citizen	video:	the	case	of	a	sexual	assault	in	egypt,”	arab	 media	&	society	 	( ):	 – .	 	youmans,	w.	l.	and	york,	j.	c.,	( ),	“social	media	and	the	activist	toolkit:	user	agreements,	 corporate	interests,	and	the	information	infrastructure	of	modern	social	movements,”	journal	of	 communication	 ,	no.	 :	 – .	 	noble,	s.	u.,	( ),	algorithms	of	oppression:	how	search	engines	reinforce	racism,	new	york:	nyu	 press.	 particular	 groups	 structurally	 enabled	 by	 online	 places	 may	 well	 have	 a	 chilling	 effect	 on	 participation	in	online	assemblies,	and	this	is	a	differential	effect	that	most	impacts	minorities.		in	 a	related	fashion,	we	know	that	the	threat	of	surveillance	capitalism,	and	its	enablement	of	state	 surveillance,	 is	 silencing.	 again,	 this	 is	 not	 an	 equal	 opportunity	 silencer,	 but	 one	 that	 disproportionately	impacts	potential	participants	who,	because	of	their	identity	group	and	the	 way	these	groups	have	been	treated	by	their	governments	in	the	past	and	present,	are	most	wary	 of	being	monitored. 	this	is	exacerbated	by	sites	requiring	that	users	use	their	legal	names;	 facebook’s	policy	is	the	following:	‘the	name	on	your	profile	should	be	the	name	that	your	friends	 call	you	in	everyday	life.	this	name	should	also	appear	on	an	id	or	document	from	our	id	list.’ 			 the	question	which	 therefore	arises	and	requires	particularly	careful	 consideration	when	 it	 comes	to	the	exercise	of	any	human	right	online	on	platforms	provided	by	private	ict	actors	is,	 who	can	access	such	data	and	for	what	purposes.	with	regard	to	online	assemblies,	a	commentary	 on	such	a	right	should	take	into	account	any	potential	effects	that	collection	and	commodification	 of	participants’	(personal)	data	may	have	on	the	exercise	of	their	human	rights,	in	particular	any	 chilling	 effect	 private	 surveillance/monitoring	 may	 have	 on	 their	 enjoyment,	 the	 potentially	 (ethically/legally)	offensive	effect	of	the	monetisation	of	human	rights	or	discriminatory	and	 inhibiting	barriers	to	access	assembly	sites.	 precedents	for	thinking	about	private	places	and	the	right	to	assembly	 the	above	considerations	of	how	the	logics	of	private	online	spaces	might	interfere	with	the	right	 to	(online)	assembly	raise	questions	about	how	such	interferences	might	be	remedied.	 	this	 occurs	against	the	backdrop	of	the	un	guiding	principles	on	business	and	human	rights,	which	 outlines	how	states	and	corporations	must	work	together	on	human	rights,	the	former	in	terms	 of	protecting	and	the	latter	in	terms	of	respecting. 		we	can	look	to	existing	work	in	this	area	to	 begin	sketching	out	potential	avenues	for	remedy	both	in	terms	of	supporting	assemblies	 in	 private	 places	 and	 in	 terms	 specifically	 of	 participants’	 abilities	 to	 protect	 themselves	 from	 surveillance	through	anonymisation	and	encryption.	 privately	owned	but	publicly	accessible	spaces	 in	appleby	v	uk 	-	a	case	in	which	the	applicants	had	been	stopped	from	setting	up	a	stand	and	 distributing	 leaflets	 in	a	privately-owned	shopping	centre	 -	 the	strasbourg	court	 found	 that	 article	 	echr	(freedom	of	expression)	does	not	bestow	any	‘freedom	of	forum’	for	its	exercise.	 the	court	emphasised	that	‘regard	…	must	also	be	had	to	the	property	rights	of	the	owner	of	the	 shopping	centre	under	article	 	of	protocol	no	 .’ 	 the	strasbourg	court	did,	however,	hold	that,	in	certain	circumstances	a	positive	obligation	could	 arise	for	the	state	to	regulate	property	rights	to	allow	public	access	to	private	space	for	the	 purpose	of	exercising	convention	rights	-	namely,	‘where	the	bar	on	access	to	property	has	the	 effect	of	preventing	any	effective	exercise	of	freedom	of	expression	or	it	can	be	said	that	the	 	ibid.	 	facebook,	what	names	are	allowed	on	facebook?	accessed	at:	 https://www.facebook.com/help/ .	 	human	rights	council,	guiding	principles	on	businesses	and	human	rights,	accessed	at:	 https://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/guidingprinciplesbusinesshr_en.pdf	 	application	no. / ,	judgment	of	 	may	 ,	para	 .	in	this	case,	the	applicants	were	able	to	 campaign	in	the	old	town	centre	and	to	employ	alternative	means	of	making	their	protest.	the	court	 therefore	found	no	breach	of	article	 	(further	stating	that	their	article	 	claim	did	not	require	 separate	consideration	since	no	separate	issues	arose).	see	also,	fenwick	and	hamilton,	p. ,	fn	 .	 	in	this	regard,	it	is	notable	that	the	covenant	has	no	parallel	provision	that	protects	the	peaceful	 enjoyment	of	possessions	(cf.	article	 (d)(v)	icerd	and	article	 ( )	cedaw). essence	of	the	right	has	been	destroyed.’	the	court	gave	the	example	of	‘a	corporate	town	where	 the	entire	municipality	is	controlled	by	a	private	body’. 	 arguably	(and	with	direct	bearing	on	 the	concept	of	online	assembly)	 there	 is	an	emergent	 jurisprudential	recognition	that	ownership	should	not	of	itself	be	dispositive. 	the	us	‘public	 forum’	doctrine,	for	example,	transcends	strict	questions	of	ownership	and	potentially	affords	 greater	protection	to	assemblies	on	privately-owned	land	so	long	as	they	can	be	classed	as	a	 public	 forum. 	 of	 direct	 relevance	 here	 is	 the	 case	 of	 knight	 first	 amendment	 institute	 at	 columbia	university	and	others	v.	donald	j.	trump	and	others, 	in	which	the	president’s	blocking	 of	critics	from	his	twitter	account	was	successfully	challenged	under	the	first	amendment.	the	 u.s.	court	of	appeals	for	the	second	circuit	rejected	the	president’s	argument	that	his	twitter	 account	was	‘...	simply	the	means	through	which	he	participates	in	a	forum	and	not	a	public	forum	 in	 and	 of	 itself.’ 	 instead,	 the	 appeals	 court	 upheld	 a	 	 district	 court	 ruling	 that	 the	 @realdonaldtrump	twitter	account	was	a	‘public	forum’	(and	thus	subject	to	first	amendment	 protection	from,	as	in	this	case,	viewpoint	discrimination). 	 it	would	be	possible	to	construct	an	appleby	argument	for	a	state	obligation	to	facilitate	access	to	 facebook	for	the	purpose	of	assembly/expression.	 a	similar	argument	was	made	in	the	us	case	of	packinghan	v.	north	carolina 	where	the	supreme	 court	struck	down	a	law	banning	sex	offenders	from	social	media	sites	used	by	children,	because	 of	the	restriction	of	freedom	of	expression.		 ‘by	prohibiting	sex	offenders	from	using	those	websites,	north	carolina	with	one	broad	 stroke	bars	access	to	what	for	many	are	the	principal	sources	for	knowing	current	events,	 checking	ads	for	employment,	speaking	and	listening	in	the	modern	public	square,	and	 	see	further,	fenwick	h.	and	hamilton,	m.,	( ),	‘freedom	of	protest	and	assembly’,	chapter	 	in	 fenwick	on	civil	liberties	and	human	rights,	 th	edn,	london:	routledge	 	see,	for	example,	the	judgment	of	german	federal	constitutional	court,	finding	a	general	ban	on	 demonstrations	in	frankfurt	airport	(which	resulted	in	the	termination	in	march	 	of	a	protest	by	 members	of	the	‘initiative	against	deportations’)	to	be	disproportionate.	the	court	held	that	the	‘direct	 binding	force	of	the	fundamental	rights	does	not	only	apply	to	enterprises	which	are	completely	in	public	 ownership,	but	also	to	enterprises	owned	both	by	private	shareholders	and	the	state	over	which	the	state	 has	a	controlling	influence.’	bverfg,	 	bvr	 / 	of	 . . ,	para. - .	see	also	para	 :	‘decisions	 that	restrict	freedom	of	assembly	which	a	public	or	publicly	controlled	enterprise	bases	solely	on	private	 law	cannot,	however,	extend	the	powers	of	encroachment	of	state	authorities	in	respect	of	assemblies	or	 even	justify	them.	if	the	authorities	competent	for	assemblies	make	decisions	relating	to	an	assembly	in	 the	airport	area	or	the	police	intervene	to	enforce	rights,	they	must	in	principle	involve	the	operator	of	 the	airport	as	the	affected	party	and,	where	applicable,	take	account	of	its	assessments	...’	accessed	at:	 https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/shareddocs/entscheidungen/en/ / /rs _ b vr en.html	 	note,	for	example,	judge	pinto	de	albuquerque’s	dissenting	opinion	in	the	strasbourg	case	of	 mouvement	raëlien	suisse	v	switzerland	[gc],	appl	no	 / ,	 	july	 ,	in	which	he	urges	his	 fellow	judges	to	draw	on	the	us	doctrine	and	distinguish	between	traditional	public	forums,	limited	 public	forums	and	non-public	forums.	similarly,	his	concurring	opinion	in	krupko	and	others	v	russia,	no.	 / ,	 	june	 ,	para	 .	 	july	 ,	 ,	no.	 - -cv	( d	cir.	jul.	 ,	 )	 https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/a ecc a / . . _ecf- - _opinion.pdf		 	ibid		p. ,	lines	 - .	 	 	civ.	 	(sdny,	 	may	 ),	at	pp. - .	the	district	court	noted	that	the	‘account	is	generally	 accessible	to	the	public	at	large	without	regard	to	political	affiliation	or	any	other	limiting	criteria.’	noting	 relevant	‘public	forum’	jurisprudence,	it	emphasised	the	‘interactivity	of	twitter’	and	emphasised	 governmental	control	rather	than	complete	governmental	ownership	(holding	also	that	‘a	space	can	be	“a	 forum	more	in	a	metaphysical	than	in	a	spatial	or	geographic	sense,”…	and	may	“lack	a	physical	situs,”	…	 in	which	case	traditional	conceptions	of	“ownership”	may	fit	less	well.’)	 	 	s.	ct.	 	( )	https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/ pdf/ - _ l .pdf		 sharath srinivasan otherwise	exploring	the	vast	realms	of	human	thought	and	knowledge.	these	websites	 can	provide	perhaps	the	most	powerful	mechanisms	available	to	a	private	citizen	to	make	 his	or	her	voice	heard.	they	allow	a	person	with	an	internet	connection	to	“become	a	town	 crier	with	a	voice	that	resonates	farther	than	it	could	from	any	soapbox.’	 however,	if	states	were	required	to	facilitate	access	to	facebook,	this	would	provide	facebook	 with	an	enormous	advantage	over	competitors	(those	not	large	enough	to	be	viewed	as	a	‘public	 square’)	and	would	be	likely	to	hamper	new	entrants	to	the	market.		 it	could	be	argued	that	a	better	way	to	protect	these	rights	would	be	to	allow	the	establishment	 of	a	platform	which	is	a	public	utility 	–	perhaps	funded	by	taxing	facebook,	google	and	some	of	 the	 other	 main	 players	 –	 rather	 than	 protecting	 facebook’s	 dominant	 status	 as	 a	 space	 for	 assembly	and	expression.		given	the	network	effects	mentioned	above,	however,	this	is	a	difficult	 proposition.	 anonymisation	and	encryption		 the	un	human	rights	council	has	recognised	that	‘privacy	online	is	important	for	the	realisation	 of	the	right	to	freedom	of	expression	and	to	hold	opinions	without	interference,	and	the	right	to	 freedom	 of	 peaceful	 assembly	 and	 association.’ 	 it	 accordingly	 emphasised	 that	 ‘technical	 solutions	to	secure	and	protect	the	confidentiality	of	digital	communications,	including	measures	 for	encryption	and	anonymity,	can	be	important	to	ensure	the	enjoyment	of	human	rights,	in	 particular	[…]	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	association.’ 	states	are	therefore	called	upon	 ‘not	to	interfere	with	the	use	of	such	technical	solutions,	with	any	restrictions	thereon	complying	 with	states’	obligations	under	international	human	rights	law.’ 	similarly,	the	former	un	special	 rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	human	rights	and	fundamental	freedoms	while	 countering	terrorism,	martin	scheinin,	has	argued	that	 freedom	of	association	and	assembly	 ‘often	require	private	meetings	and	communications	to	allow	people	to	organise	in	the	face	of	 governments	or	other	powerful	actors.’ 	in	the	united	states,	for	instance,	police	infiltrated	an	 activist	group	planning	an	anti-trump	protest,	interfering	with	the	right	to	freedom	of	peaceful	 assembly	 according	 to	 a	 spokesperson	 of	 the	 american	 civil	 liberties	 union. 	 accordingly,	 blanket	 requirements	 of	 real	 name	 registration	 imposed	 by	 state	 legislation,	 much	 like	 law	 enforcement	efforts	to	collect	identification	without	reasonable	suspicion	and	a	judicial	warrant,	 do	not	meet	the	requirement	that	restrictions	to	rights	be	both	necessary	and	proportionate	in	a	 democratic	 society. 	 rather,	 the	 ability	 to	 communicate	 and	 associate	 with	 others	 without	 identifying	oneself	is	a	necessary	requirement	to	exercise	one’s	freedom	of	assembly,	speech	and	 privacy. 	 	pickard,	v.,	( ),	“public	investment	for	global	news”	centre	for	international	governance	innovation,	 accessed	at:	https://www.cigionline.org/articles/public-investments-global-news		 	human	rights	council,	the	promotion,	protection	and	enjoyment	of	human	rights	on	the	internet,	un	 doc.	a/hrc/ /l. /rev. 	( 	july	 ),	preamble;	cf.	rona,	g.	and	aarons,	l.,	( ),	‘state	 responsibility	to	respect,	protect,	and	fulfil	human	rights	obligations	in	cyberspace’	 	journal	of	 national	security	law	&	policy	 ,	 .	 	ibid	 	ibid	para	 .		 	human	rights	council,	rep.	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	human	 rights	and	fundamental	freedoms	while	countering	terrorism,	un	doc.	a/hrc/ / 	( 	december	 ),	para.	 .		 	levine,	s.,	( ),	‘los	angeles	police	spied	on	anti-trump	protesters’,	the	guardian.	 	pokempner,	d.	( ),	‘cyberspace	and	state	obligations	int	eh	area	of	human	rights’	in	katharina	 ziolkowski	(ed),	peacetime	regime	for	state	activities	in	cyberspace:	international	law,	international	 relations	and	diplomacy,	nato	occd	coe	publication:	tallinn,	 .	 	rona,	g.	and	aarons,	l.,	( ),	‘state	responsibility	to	respect,	protect,	and	fulfil	human	rights	 obligations	in	cyberspace’	 	journal	of	national	security	law	&	policy,	 ,	 .	 further	considerations	 in	a	rapidly	shifting	landscape,	the	predominance	of	private	places	as	sites	for	assemblies	 is	 uncertain,	not	only	because	of	new	corporate	actors	and	new	state	regulation,	but	also	because	 the	existing	behemoths	are	morphing.		for	example,	facebook	ceo	mark	zuckerberg	announced	 earlier	this	year	that	facebook	would	shift	its	focus	away	from	a	‘town	square’	model	and	more	 towards	a	‘living	room’	model	–	i.e.	from	a	more	public	online	place	to	a	more	private	one. 		what	 is	certain,	however,	is	that	assemblies,	whether	online	or	offline,	will	almost	always	be	subject	to	 the	logics	of	external	actors	through	their	uses	of	place	to	assemble,	and	that	these	may	often	be	 commercial	logics	and	private	spaces.		with	regard	to	online	assemblies,	a	commentary	on	such	 a	 right	 take	 into	 account	 any	 potential	 effects	 such	 a	 collection	 and	 commodification	 of	 participants’	(personal)	data	may	have	on	the	exercise	of	their	human	rights,	in	particular	any	 chilling	 effect	 private	 surveillance/monitoring	 may	 have	 on	 their	 enjoyment,	 the	 potentially	 (ethically/legally)	offensive	effect	of	the	monetisation	of	human	rights	or	discriminatory	and	 inhibiting	 barriers	 to	 access	 assembly	 sites.	 	 this	 raises	 several	 points	 worth	 further	 consideration:				 . protection	may	conflict	with	anti-trust/competition	law	that	seeks	to	limit	or	reduce	the	 dominance	of	some	of	the	main	online	platforms.		in	seeking	to	protect	the	users	of	online	 platforms,	care	must	be	taken	not	to	unduly	benefit	particular	platforms.	 . the	business	model	of	platforms	such	as	facebook	creates	a	cost	to	online	presence	in	 terms	of	personal	data.		 . the	 monetisation	 of	 content	 on	 platforms	 such	 as	 youtube	 means	 the	 aim	 of	 some	 contributors	is	to	increase	traffic	to	their	site,	using	provocative	or	extreme	content	which	 will	provoke	a	response.		they	are	not	interested	in	the	quality	of	the	debate	–	only	in	the	 amount	of	traffic	on	their	site.	 . the	 business	 model	 of	 facebook	 has	 increased	 the	 volume	 of	 fake	 news,	 as	 another	 consequence	of	the	desire	to	increase	traffic	to	certain	sites.		this	has	a	detrimental	effect	 on	democracy.	 . several	campaigns	exist	to	persuade	the	major	social	media	platforms	to	remove,	not	just	 illegal,	but	also	harmful	content 	–	such	as	material	relating	to	self-harm	on	instagram.	 protection	of	the	right	to	assemble	on	those	platforms	may	make	these	outcomes	more	 difficult	to	achieve.		 . should	there	be	a	right	to	exclude	participants	from	online	assemblies	(noting	that	this	 question	has	arisen	in	relation	to	offline	assemblies)? 	there	are	those	in	positions	that	 can	control	 the	common	purpose	of	assemblies	online	and	can	restrict	who	can	 join	a	 group.		 this	 is	 pertinent	 to	 facebook	 groups,	 for	 example	 where	 administrators	 or	 moderators	can	choose	to	have	control	over	who	is	admitted	as	a	member	and	what	can	be	 expressed	on	that	page.	 in	this	regard,	one	might	question	whether	the	public/private	 nature	of	the	(online)	space	in	which	an	assembly	occurs	ought	to	be	regarded	as	the	sole	 	zuckerberg,	m.,	( ),	a	privacy-focused	vision	for	social	networking,	facebook,	accessed	at:	 https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social- networking/ /	 		digital	trends,	( ),	“instagram	expands	ban	on	content	relating	to	self-harm	and	suicide”	digital	 trends,	accessed	at:	https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/instagram-expands-ban-on-content- related-to-self-harm-and-suicide/		 	see,	in	particular,	hurley	v.	irish	american	gay,	lesbian,	and	bisexual	group	of	boston,	 	u.s.	 	 ( ).		“specifically,	the	court	held	that	to	force	the	parade	organizer,	the	south	boston	allied	war	 veterans	council	("council"),	to	include	a	gay	and	lesbian	group	in	the	parade	violated	the	organizer's	 first	amendment	right	of	free	speech	in	that	it	compelled	speech	the	council	did	not	choose	to	make.”	[…]	 thus,	the	supreme	court's	protection	of	the	council's	first	amendment	rights	ignores	the	shift	in	the	 focus	of	the	first	amendment	which	is	now	intended	to	protect	subordinated	groups	such	as	the	gay	and	 lesbian	association	in	this	case.”	see	also,	buske,	s.	( ),	'hurley	v.	irish-american	gay,	lesbian	and	 bisexual	group	of	boston',	 	depaul-lca	j	art	&	ent,	l	 	 determinant	of	whether	the	assembly	itself	is	regarded	as	a	private	event	(with	concomitant	 powers	to	control	purpose	and	message)	or	a	public/civic	event	(in	contrast,	engaging	 obligations	relating	to	equality	and	non-discrimination	protections). 	 	 	 	stychin,	c.,	( ),	‘celebration	and	consolidation:	national	rituals	and	the	legal	construction	of	 american	identities’,	 	oxford	journal	of	legal	studies,	 	 .	presence	and	participation	 what	is	participation?	 in	most	elaborations	of	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly,	the	individuals	that	are	protected	are	 referred	to	as	 ‘participants’,	however	the	un	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	 peaceful	assembly	and	of	association	reports	fail	to	provide	clear	definitions	of	‘participants’	and	 ‘participation’ .	while	there	has	been	clarification	that	children,	as	well	as	migrants,	asylum	 seekers	and	other	foreign	nationals	and	stateless	peoples	can	be	considered	participants ,	under	 what	conditions	an	individual	becomes	a	‘participant’	remains	ambiguous.	this	lack	of	clarity	has	 serious	implications,	both	online	and	offline,	for	understanding	which	actions	and	thus,	which	 individuals	carrying	out	those	actions,	are	protected,	and	which	are	not.	 furthermore,	an	assembly	requires	the	presence	of	‘a	number	of	individuals’. 	this	collective	aspect	 is	 inherent	 to	 the	right	of	 freedom	to	assembly, 	and	distinguishes	 it	 from	(the	aggregation	of)	 individual	expressions. 	the	actual	number	of	demonstration	participants	is	a	frequent	object	of	 contention	between	organisers/supporters	and,	among	others,	government	entities	or	media,	which	 illustrates	the	significance	of	numbers	in	assemblies.	because	the	mere	gathering	of	people	conveys	a	 message,	assemblies	have	a	performative	effect	per	se;	another	way	they	do	so	is	for	example	by	 contributing	to	the	visibility	of	marginalised	groups 	(in	line	with	the	idea	that	‘the	medium	is	the	 message’ ).	 significant	attention	has	been	placed	on	determining	what	constitutes	an	offline	assembly,	with	 the	un	human	rights	committee	explicitly	including	static	assemblies	such	as	public	meetings	 and	sit-ins,	alongside	moving	assemblies	such	as	processions	and	marches. 	these	examples	of	 legitimate	offline	assemblies	have	since	been	upheld	by	various	bodies,	including	the	osce	and	 the	african	commission	on	human	and	peoples’	rights. 	in	many	of	these	contexts,	there	are	 forms	of	participation	that	clearly	fall	within	the	protections,	for	example,	marching	in	a	protest	 or	joining	a	sit-in.	however,	as	raised	by	inazu,	even	within	the	physical	realm,	the	lines	for	what	 constitutes	actual	participation	itself	are	problematic. 	 	human	rights	council	( ),	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	 assembly	and	of	association,	a/hrc/ / .	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .		 	osce/odihr,	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	( nd	edition,	 )	para	 . .	 	general	comment	no.	 	( )	 	see	communication	no	 / ,	kungurov	v	uzbekistan,	views	adopted	 	july	 ,	 ccpr/c/ /d/ / :	‘some	communication	efforts	are	much	more	effective,	and	much	more	 correspond	to	the	rightful	wishes	of	the	communicators,	when	they	are	done	as	a	group	rather	than	 individually’	(para.	 . ).	 	butler,	j.,	( ),	notes	toward	a	performative	theory	of	assembly,	harvard.	 	mcluhan,	m.,	and	fiore,	q.,	with	agel,	j.,	( ),	the	medium	is	the	massage:	an	inventory	of	effects,	new	 york:	random	house.	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .		 guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	( ),	osce	office	for	democratic	institutions	and	 human	rights	(odihr),	p .	see	also	african	commission	on	human	and	peoples	rights’,	guidelines	on	 freedom	of	association	and	assembly	in	africa,	para	 .		 	inazu,	j.	d.,	( ),	virtual	assembly,	 	cornell	l.	rev,	 ,	p .		 using	the	various	official	definitions	of	the	right	to	assembly	as	a	starting	point 	 ,	it	is	evident	 that	 intention	 and	 purpose	 are	 necessary	 components	 of	 participation	 in	 an	 assembly,	 thus	 implying	that	merely	being	present	at	an	event,	or	in	the	online	equivalent,	‘liking’	an	online	page	 or	being	a	non-active	member	of	an	online	group	with	no	intention	of	being	involved	in	the	 assembly’s	purpose	does	not	constitute	participation.	this	 therefore	suggests	 that	 there	 is	a	 minimum	bar	for	action	that	differentiates	participation	from	mere	presence	in	a	space.	 online	participation	 where	exactly	the	minimum	bar	for	participation	should	be	drawn	in	the	online	sphere	remains	 very	much	up	for	debate.	while	digital	technologies	have	generated	new	spaces	and	means	of	 participation,	often	enabling	greater	accessibility	and	ease	of	action, 	this,	according	to	petray,	 has	 simultaneously	 facilitated	 a	 rise	 in	 ‘push-button	 activism’,	 low-intensity	 actions	 or	 ‘slacktivism’ ,	which	may	or	may	not	reach	the	minimum	bar	of	action	to	constitute	participation	 in	an	assembly.	 in	order	to	address	these	concerns,	there	are	some	empirical	and	theoretical	instances	where	 appeals	to	the	right	to	assembly	have	been	cited	that	we	can	use	as	reference.	in	her	study	for	 impact	 (india,	 malaysia,	 pakistan	 advocacy	 for	 change	 through	 technology)	 media	 expert	 gayathry	venkiteswaran	suggests	that	the	right	to	online	assembly	includes	the	following	actions:	 ‘coordinating,	organising,	gathering,	planning	or	meeting	on	platforms	available	online’. 	more	 specifically,	 the	un	special	rapporteur	has	explicitly	stated	that	the	use	of	online	petitions	 is	 evidence	of	online	assembly, 	something	also	stated	by	the	council	of	europe’s	 	explanatory	 memorandum, 	logically	implying	that	petition-signing	comes	under	the	umbrella	of	protected	 participation.	the	sharing	of	information	related	to	a	group’s	plans	and	identity	has	also	been	 considered	a	protected	action	by	the	un	special	rapporteur. 	in	her	analysis	of	online	assembly	 in	central	and	eastern	asia,	venkiteswaran	suggests	that	the	use	of	specific	picbadges,	virtual	 ornaments	 placed	 over	 facebook	 profile	 pictures,	 could	 also	 constitute	 an	 assembly,	 as	 widespread	use	of	the	same	picbadge	has	been	used	as	a	form	of	identity	construction	or	protest,	 specifically	in	the	case	of	the	bersih	 . 	protests	in	malaysia. 	 although	not	all	online	assemblies	require	organisers,	with	some	 in	 fact	outright	dismissing	 official	hierarchies	in	favour	of	a	more	egalitarian	model ,	the	un	special	rapporteur	and	the	 un	human	rights	committee	explicitly	state	that	any	forms	of	organisation	prior	to	an	assembly	 come	under	the	protected	actions	of	assembly.	actions	protected	under	this	requirement	include:	 	human	rights	council	report	(june	 ),	a/hrc/ / ,	p .	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .		 	bennett	w.	l.,	and	segerberg,	a.,	( ),	“the	logic	of	connective	action”,	information,	communication	 &	society	( : ,	 ),	p.	 	 	petray,	t.	l.,	( ),	“’protest	 . :	online	interactions	and	aboriginal	activists’,	media,	culture	&	society	 ( ),	p - .	 	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	malaysia	and	pakistan:	 trends,	challenges	and	recommendations,	apc	impact,	p .	 	human	rights	council	( ),	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	 assembly	and	of	association,	a/hrc/ / ,	p .	 	council	of	europe	steering	committee	on	media	and	information	society	( )	b.	recommendation	 cm/rec( ) 	of	the	committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	on	a	guide	to	human	rights	for	internet	 users	–	explanatory	memorandum.	 	a/hrc/ / ,	p .	 	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	malaysia	and	pakistan:	 trends,	challenges	and	recommendations,	apc	impact,	p .		 	bennett,	w.l.	&	segerberg,	a.,	“the	logic	of	connective	action”,	p. .	 ‘[the]	 dissemination	 of	 information	 about	 an	 upcoming	 event; 	 travelling	 to	 the	 event; 	 communication	 between	 participants	 leading	 up	 to	 and	 during	 the	 assembly;	 conveying	 information	about	the	assembly	to	the	outside	world;	and	leaving	the	assembly	afterwards.’ 	 while	some	of	these	actions	apply	more	appropriately	to	offline	assemblies,	the	explicit	reference	 to	communication	between	participants	prior	and	during	an	assembly	can	evidently	be	applied	 to	online	assemblies.	 further	considerations		 from	the	above	examples,	it	is	evident	that	a	wide	array	of	actions	are	protected	under	the	right	 to	 assembly,	 however	 these	 examples	 leave	 a	 lot	 of	 contested	 space	 for	 effectively	 defining	 participation,	with	the	most	contentious	being	outlined	below.	 passive	participation	 through	possibly	excluding	more	passive	forms	of	participation,	an	understanding	of	the	freedom	 of	online	assembly	predicated	on	intention	and	purpose	could	be	problematic,	especially	when	 considering	who	may	need	to	be	protected	by	this	right	in	the	face	of	broad	surveilling	efforts	by	 governments.	 the	un	special	rapporteur	clément	nyaletsossi	voule	has	implicitly	provided	an	argument	for	 the	expansion	of	 the	definition	of	participation	 to	 include	more	passive	 forms	of	 action,	by	 recognising	 that	 governmental	 tools	 are	 ‘used	 to	 identify	 and	 surveil	 all	 individuals	 who	 participate	 in	 a	 particular	 event	 or	 are	 present	 in	 a	 certain	 public	 space.	 these	 forms	 of	 identification	 and	 data	 collection	 violate	 the	 individual’s	 anonymity	 in	 public	 spaces’ .	 a	 widening	of	the	definition	to	protect	those	present	in	a	space	has	also	been	implied	by	the	unhrc	 draft	comment	 ,	which	stated	that,	‘no	one	should	be	harassed	or	penalised	as	a	result	of	their	 attendance	 at	 demonstrations ’,	 which	 suggests	 that	 merely	 attending	 a	 demonstration	 is	 protected	under	the	right	to	assembly,	without	it	necessarily	being	predicated	on	support	for	the	 assembly’s	 cause.	 physical	 attendance	 in	 its	 offline	 form,	 it	 could	 be	 argued,	 would	 be	 the	 equivalent	 of	 passive	 membership	 in	 an	 online	 group	 or	 liking	 a	 page,	 meaning	 that	 the	 protections	of	the	right	to	assembly	could	be	applied	even	if	more	active	forms	of	participation	 were	not	carried	out.	 by	recognising	that	the	risk	to	individuals	from	surveillance	is	not	just	related	to	their	direct	 action,	but	also	their	mere	presence	in	an	online	space	in	the	above	passages,	the	un	special	 rapporteur	and	the	unhrc	have	offered	the	potential	for	more	passive	forms	of	participation	to	 also	be	protected	by	the	right	to	online	assembly,	despite	it	not	being	explicitly	included	within	 the	right	to	assembly	definitions.	 however,	while	widening	protections	may	be	seen	in	a	largely	positive	light,	through	expanding	 the	definition	 too	 far,	participation	 in	an	assembly	could	be	 left	with	having	no	meaningful	 distinction	 from	 merely	 existing	 within	 a	 public	 space,	 thus	 undermining	 the	 strength	 and	 usefulness	of	the	right.	 	tulzhenkova	v.	belarus	( )	(ccpr/c/ /d/ / ),	para	 . .	 	evrezov	and	others	v.	belarus	( ),	(ccpr/c/ /d/ / 	and	corr. ),	para.	 . .	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .		 	a/hrc/ / ,	p .	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .	see	also	 ccpr/c/mrt/co/ ,	para.	 .	see	also	general	assembly	resolution	 / ,	operative	para.	 	 unclear	motives	 the	use	of	coordinated	hashtags	has	also	been	widely	accepted	as	a	form	of	participation	in	online	 assembly,	with	venkiteswaran	likening	their	usage	to	creating	online	meetings	where	people	are	 essentially	 coming	 together	 to	 discuss	 issues	 much	 like	 in	 a	 physical	 meeting .	 however,	 defining	hashtags	as	participation	can	be	problematic	as	their	usage	does	not	necessarily	imply	 intended	support	 for	an	assembly.	this	can	be	seen	in	the	#metoo	movement,	whereby	the	 hashtag	 was	 also	 mobilised	 by	 movement	 opponents	 to	 contest	 the	 claims	 made	 by	 the	 movement .	similar	commentary	can	be	made	regarding	liking	a	page,	or	joining	a	group,	as	it	 does	not	necessarily	indicate	a	desire	to	gather	for	a	common	purpose.	therefore,	the	blanket	 acceptance	of	the	use	of	a	hashtag	or	the	liking	of	a	page	as	a	legitimate	form	of	participation	in	 an	assembly,	could	expand	the	protections	to	those	that	do	not	identify	with	an	assembly,	or	even	 outright	oppose	it,	whether	or	not	this	takes	place	in	a	counter-assembly.	 deployment	of	bots	and	fake	accounts	 another	debated	area	 in	the	discussion	of	 legitimate	participation	 in	online	assembly,	 is	 the	 deployment	 of	 bots	 and	 the	 use	 of	 human-operated	 fake	 accounts.	 just	 as	 the	 guidelines	 surrounding	 the	 right	 to	 peaceful	 assembly	 have	 not	 adequately	 established	 whether	 paid/incentivised	participation	is	protected	within	offline	assemblies ,	the	issue	of	incentivised	 and	non-authentic	participation	raises	its	head	in	the	virtual	world.	 although	private	companies,	such	as	facebook,	have	been	pressured	to	clamp	down	on	the	use	of	 fake	accounts	and	bots	in	the	wake	of	scandals	such	as	the	russian	interference	in	the	 	 elections,	and	the	deployment	of	volunteers	and	manufactured	bots	in	the	philippines	in	 ,	 whether	or	not	these	constitute	legitimate	forms	of	participation	in	online	assembly	remains	 controversial .	the	legitimacy	of	the	use	of	bot	deployment	has	also	been	raised	in	relation	to	 online	assembly	in	cases	of	distributed	denial	of	service	(ddos)	attacks,	with	the	anarchic	body	 anonymous	claiming	that	it	is	a	form	of	legitimate	protest	comparable	to	sit-ins	and	thai	actors	 using	it	to	reveal	weaknesses	in	governmental	encryption	systems ,	while	others	have	cited	 examples	in	myanmar,	malaysia	and	hong	kong	whereby	governments	have	used	artificially- generated	 ddos	 attacks	 to	 shut	 down	 independent	 media	 and	 protestor	 communication	 platforms .	 in	 relation	 to	 the	 use	 of	 fake	 accounts	 and	 bots,	 the	 un	 special	 rapporteur	 on	 freedom	 of	 association	and	expression	for	his	part	has	condemned	the	case	of	omani	authorities	hijacking	 accounts	and	flooding	social	media	in	order	to	dilute	genuine	protests ,	including	this	incident	 	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	malaysia	and	 pakistan:	trends,	challenges	and	recommendations,	apc	impact,	p .		 	wood,	m.	k.,	( ),	“language	in	digital	activism:	exploring	the	performative	functions	of	#metoo	 tweets”,	digit	magazine.	accessed	at:	https://www.diggitmagazine.com/academic-papers/language- digital-activism-exploring-performative-functions-metoo-tweets	 	hamilton,	m.,	( ),	towards	general	comment	 	on	article	 	iccpr:	the	right	of	peaceful	 assembly,	p .	 	vaidhyanathan,	s.,	( ),	anti-social	media:	how	facebook	disconnects	us	and	undermines	democracy,	 oxford	university	press.		 	sombatpoonsiri,	j.,	( ),	growing	cyber	activism	in	thailand,	carnegie’s	civic	activism	network.		 	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	malaysia	and	 pakistan:	trends,	challenges	and	recommendations,	apc	impact,	p .	see	also,	tsui,	l.,	( ),	the	 coming	colonization	of	hong	kong	cyberspace:	government	responses	to	the	use	of	new	technologies	by	 the	umbrella	movement,	chinese	journal	of	communication	 : .			 		a/hrc/ / ,	p .	 among	the	broader	issue	of	‘trolls	[being]	instructed	to	disseminate	propaganda,	isolate	or	drown	 out	critical	views,	and	inhibit	anti-government	movements,	while	amplifying	the	messages	of	 government	officials	and	boosting	 follower	numbers’ .	while	 the	right	 to	assembly	equally	 protects	oppositional	protests,	 including	those	 in	support	of	the	government,	 the	un	special	 rapporteur’s	statement	against	oman	and	the	wider	use	of	trolls,	suggests	that	there	are	limits	to	 this	right	when	it	directly	impinges	on	the	ability	of	others’	right	to	online	assembly,	or	corollary	 rights	such	as	expression.	these	comments	therefore	suggest	that	there	are	cases	in	which	bot	 and	 fake	 account	 deployment	 is	 not	 considered	 participation	 protected	 under	 the	 right	 to	 assembly,	however,	in	what	contexts	this	is	the	case,	remains	unclear.	 parallel	motives	 by	including	‘journalists,	human	rights	defenders	and	others	involved	in	monitoring,	including	 documenting	or	reporting	on	assemblies’ ,	the	unhrc	has	expanded	the	protections	of	the	right	 to	assembly	to	specific	motives	which	do	not	necessarily	align	with	the	purpose	of	the	assembly.	 with	the	nature	of	journalism	having	significantly	shifted	with	the	invention	of	the	internet	and	 -hour	media	cycles,	and	fake	news	and	the	spread	of	misinformation	from	publications	that	 claim	 journalistic	 credibility,	 what	 constitutes	 legitimate	 monitoring,	 documentation	 and	 reporting	is	also	an	area	that	requires	clarification.	 virtual	participation	in	an	offline	assembly	 a	further	complication	arises	when	determining	how	to	classify	an	assembly	and	thus	the	nature	 of	the	participation.	as	highlighted	by	inazu,	the	distinction	between	online	and	offline	assemblies	 is	frequently	blurred ,	which	may	problematise	how	forms	of	participation	are	understood	in	a	 specific	 context.	 in	 recent	 years,	 several	 high-profile	 cases	 have	 highlighted	 this	 crossover,	 including	the	banning	of	an	erdoğan	video	link	to	rally	in	germany	in	 ;	and	the	fining	of	 singaporean	activist	jolovan	wham	for	holding	an	unpermitted	assembly	that	featured	a	skype	 call	 from	hong	kong	activist	 joshua	wong	 in	 .	these	 instances	raise	questions	as	 to	 whether	cases	including	online	speakers	should	be	considered	examples	of	online	assembly,	or	 whether,	due	to	the	audience	being	primarily	offline,	 these	are	examples	of	offline	assembly	 featuring	virtual	participation.	 on	a	practical	basis,	the	question	of	who	qualifies	as	a	participant	is	essential	when	issues	of	 liability	arise,	for	example	in	the	case	of	non-peaceful	assembly. 	while	this	is	an	issue	also	 	ibid	para	 .		 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .		 	inazu,	j.	d.,	( ),	virtual	assembly,	 	cornell	l.	rev,	 ,	p. .	 	the	guardian,	( ),	turkey	condemns	german	court	for	banning	erdoğan	video	link	to	rally,	 accessed	at:	https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jul/ /erdogan-supporters-cologne-germany- turkish-rally	 	hong	kong	free	press,	( ).	singapore	charges	activist	for	holding	public	assemblies,	including	a	 skype	talk	with	joshua	wong,	accessed	at:	https://www.hongkongfp.com/ / / /singapore- charges-activist-for-holding-public-assemblies-including-a-skype-talk-with-joshua-wong/	 	see	jarman,	n.	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	the	internet,	unpublished,	p.	 :	“this	may	raise	some	 questions	that	may	need	to	be	considered	in	relation	to	the	organising	of	an	assembly	and	in	terms	of	the	 state	holding	‘organisers’	to	account	for	failure	to	notify,	for	ignoring	restrictions	or	prohibitions,	or	for	 disrupting	public	order.	it	raises	the	question	that	if	there	are	no	‘official’	organisers	might	some	 authorities	decide	to	hold	any	or	all	participants	liable	for	‘organising’	an	assembly?”	 related	to	offline	assemblies,	it	could	become	of	higher	import	in	online	assemblies,	as	many	lack	 an	official	structure	or	organiser. 	 on	a	human	rights	basis,	it	is	essential	to	acknowledge	that	the	current	guidelines	relating	to	the	 right	to	assembly	may	fail	to	protect	those	who,	on	the	one	hand	may	be	at	risk	of	being	deemed	 as	participants	by	authorities,	while	on	the	other	hand	have	not	reached	the	minimum	bar	for	 action	necessary	for	them	to	be	afforded	the	protections	of	the	right	to	assembly.	in	the	recent	 arrests	linked	to	social	media	usage	in	egypt	in	the	wake	of	the	viral	mohamed	ali	videos,	physical	 phone	 confiscations	 were	 conducted,	 with	 checks	 not	 just	 of	 user	 posts,	 but	 also	 of	 group	 membership	and	the	usage	of	oppositional	hashtags	such	as	# .-,سا%_*()_ة%افك .	the	broad	framing	 of	the	justifications	for	the	arrests	for	online	activity,	including	of	children,	such	as	‘disseminating	 false	 information’,	 and	 more	 problematically	 ‘misusing	 social	 media’	 and	 ‘membership	 in	 a	 terrorist	 group’ ,	 suggests	 that	 a	 broader	 definition	 of	 participation	 in	 assembly	 may	 be	 required	in	order	to	ensure	that	even	those	that	don’t	necessarily	actively	engage	with	group	 activities	remain	protected	under	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly.	 		 	 	 	 	 	 	 	see	the	analysis	of	bennett	and	segerberg	on	connective	actions,	as	opposed	to	traditional	forms	of	 collective	action	with	higher	level	or	organisation	resources.	connective	actions,	such	as	the	occupy	and	 indignados	protests,	are	“based	on	personalized	content	sharing	across	 media	networks”;	these	networks	replace	the	organisational	structures.	bennett,	w.l,	and	segerberg,	a.	 ( ),	“the	logic	of	connective	action”,	information,	communication	&	society,	p.	 	 	amnesty	international,	( ),	egypt:	unprecedented	mass	arrests	designed	to	send	message	that	 protests	will	be	crushed,	accessed	at:	https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/egypt- unprecedented-mass-arrests-designed-send-message-protests-will-be-crushed	 .	temporariness	and	permanence	 ‘temporary’	as	a	definitional	element	of	‘assembly’	 as	noted	in	section	 	(‘purpose’)	above,	manfred	nowak	says	that	‘only	intentional,	temporary	 gatherings	of	several	persons	for	a	specific	purpose	are	afforded	the	protection	of	freedom	of	 assembly.’ 	in	 	the	special	rapporteur	defined	assembly	as	‘an	intentional	and	temporary	 gathering	in	a	private	or	public	space	for	a	specific	purpose.’ 	 	the	use	of	temporary	in	the	 definition	of	 ‘assembly’	may,	 in	part,	have	been	to	separate	freedom	of	assembly	from	more	 formalised	group	activity,	protected	under	freedom	of	association.	 however,	longer	protests	such	as	those	of	the	occupy	movement	have	raised	issues	with	the	 requirement	that	an	assembly	be	temporary.		it	is	unclear	what	temporary	means	and	at	what	 point	an	assembly	becomes	permanent.	for	example,	the	greenham	common	peace	camp	was	 active	for	 	years.	given	this	interpretative	uncertainty,	the	invocation	of	the	term	‘temporary’	 potentially	 creates	 an	 opening	 for	 state	 interference	 with	 an	 assembly,	 based	 solely	 on	 its	 duration.	 in	the	current	draft	of	general	comment	 	‘temporary’	does	not	feature	in	the	definition	of	an	 assembly	in	paragraph	 ,	which	is	‘a	non-violent	gathering	of	persons	with	a	common	expressive	 purpose	in	[a	publicly	accessible/the	same]	place.’ 		however,	paragraph	 ,	which	addresses	 restrictions	on	the	time	of	assemblies,	makes	several	comments	relevant	to	the	duration	of	an	 assembly:	-	 ‘while	there	are	no	fixed	rules	about	restrictions	on	the	duration	of	peaceful	assemblies,	 participants	must	have	sufficient	opportunity	to	effectively	manifest	their	views.		peaceful	 assemblies	 are	 generally	 by	 their	 nature	 temporary	 and	 should	 be	 left	 to	 end	 by	 themselves….	the	duration	and	frequency	of	a	demonstration	may	play	a	central	role	in	 conveying	its	message	to	its	target	audience.’ 	 this	conceptual	ambiguity	as	regards	temporariness	meets	a	structural	ambiguity	with	online	 assembly	given	that,	due	to	the	affordances	of	icts,	participants	are	distributed	across	time	and	 place.	 temporariness	and	online	assemblies	 where	 online	 activity	 takes	 the	 form	 of	 a	 meeting	 (similar	 to	 an	 online	 classroom)	 where	 participants	 join	by	 logging	 in	and	are	then	able	to	contribute	to	a	group	discussion	for	the	 duration	of	the	meeting,	there	is	no	issue	with	temporariness.		the	meeting	has	a	fixed	start	time	 and	participation	ends	when	the	user	logs	out	or	the	meeting	is	shut	down	by	the	administrator. 	 	nowak,	m.,	( ),	un	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights:	ccpr	commentary,	 nd	ed.	kehl:	n.p	 engel,	p. .	 	a/hrc/ / 	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	 association,	 st	may	 ,	para	 .	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 	 	ibid	para	 	 	for	example,	alcoholics	anonymous	hold	online	meetings,	via	skype	or	zoom,	for	those	who	are	 unwilling	or	unable	to	attend	offline	meetings.		they	have	a	fixed	start	time	and	a	log-in	procedure	to	join.	 some	are	closed	(only	for	those	with	an	alcohol	problem)	but	others	are	open	to	the	public.	accessed	at:	 https://alcoholics-anonymous.eu/online-meetings/	https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/aa- meetings/about-aa-meetings		 however,	online	protest	action	often	takes	the	form	of	users	making	posts	in	the	location	of	their	 choice.		ostensibly	such	posts	fall	squarely	within	the	sphere	of	freedom	of	expression.	however,	 there	may	be	elements	–	such	as	contemporaneous	numerosity	or	the	use	of	online	technology	to	 link	individual	posts	into	a	collective	expression	–	which	make	it	arguable	that	the	action	of	those	 users	also	engages	the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly.			 the	term	‘temporary’	creates	a	range	of	problems	for	online	assemblies	that	are	distributed	over	 time	and	place.		these	include	(a)	permanence	of	the	trace	of	possible	online	assemblies,	(b)	 synchronicity	of	participation	–	particularly	where	the	online	activity	is	spontaneous	rather	than	 organised;	and	(c)	time	frame	of	online	assemblies	(when	do	they	start	and	end?).		 three	questions	arise	with	linked	online	activity	such	as	posting	with	a	hashtag	or	commenting	 below	an	online	news	article,	facebook	post	or	tweet.	does	lack	of	contemporaneity	(or	evidence	 thereof)	prevent	it	being	a	gathering?		does	lack	of	a	timeframe	prevent	it	from	being	temporary?		 is	there	anything	about	this	activity	which	engages	article	 	protections,	in	addition	to	those	of	 article	 ?	 permanence	of	online	trace	 the	permanent	 footprint	or	 trace	of	online	 interactions	could	be	considered	as	a	 record	or	 evidence	of	an	assembly	of	people	who	are	gathering	or	have	gathered	online.	this	record	should	 not	preclude	any	such	assembly	from	being	considered	temporary,	just	as	the	television	recording	 of	an	offline	assembly	does	not	stop	it	from	being	temporary.	however,	although	arguable	in	the	 era	of	proliferating	cameras,	traces	of	online	assemblies	are	perhaps	more	permanent	than	traces	 of	offline	assemblies.	these	digital	traces	remain	visible	unless	they	are	removed	either	by	the	 author	or	the	administrator	of	the	site	where	they	are	posted,	and	even	then	may	live	on	in	 personal	archives,	facilitated	by	screenshot	tools,	and	in	public	archives	such	as	the	wayback	 machine.	 the	permanence	of	posts	made	 in	online	assemblies	creates	a	 risk	 to	participants	of	 future	 adverse	consequences.	imprisonment,	police	brutality	and	government-mandated	shutting	down	 of	 the	 internet,	 have	 been	 some	 of	 the	 consequences	 to	 the	 authors	 of	 permanent	 posts. 	 surveillance	 is	 a	 more	 complex	 issue	 online	 and	 is	 elaborated	 on	 below.	 posts	 are	 publicly	 accessible	by	anyone	when	posted	on	a	public	forum	and	many	participants	are	identifiable	by	 their	 publicly	 accessible	 online	 profiles.	 in	 addition,	 the	 state’s	 use	 of	 technology	 to	 reveal	 identities	obscured	by	privacy	settings	anonymity	tools,	as	well	as	the	deployment	of	punitive	 counter-measures	 against	 participants	 based	 on	 their	 past	 connection	 to	 collective	 online	 expression	could	be	considered	a	violation	of	article	 .		 synchronicity	of	participation	in	online	activity	 the	situation	where	the	temporary	action	of	a	series	of	users	is	evidenced	by	a	permanent	online	 trace	raises	temporal	issues	that	do	not	exist	offline.	posting	can	be	done	in	seconds,	and	it	is	not	 possible,	from	the	perspective	of	a	viewer	of	the	posts	(though	it	may	well	be	possible	from	inside	 the	companies	whose	technology	it	is),	to	be	sure	that	more	than	one	person	is	ever	present	at	 the	same	time.	users	may	be	posting	contemporaneously	or	remaining	online	to	read	the	posts	of	 other	users	at	the	same	location	or	leaving	before	another	user	posts.	so,	how	can	they	be	said	to	 have	gathered	at	all?	where	there	may	be	an	element	of	synchronicity	to	the	posts	–	where	they	 are	made	in	the	same	online	location,	for	the	same	purpose,	in	response	and	proximate	in	time	to	 a	particular	event	or	organisational	activity	–	can	it	be	argued	that	they	do	not	need	to	take	place	 	africa	news,	( ),	zimbabwe	protest:	#thisflag	pastor	arrested	on	final	day	of	protests,	accessed	at:	 https://www.africanews.com/ / / /zimbabwe-protests-have-the-authorities-shut-down-the- internet/	 at	exactly	the	same	time?	if	so,	then	when	does	the	online	assembly	start	and	end	–	particularly	 where	the	online	space	in	question	is	being	used	for	a	variety	of	different	purposes? 	 article	 ,	in	its	submission	to	the	un	human	rights	committee	concerning	gc ,	suggested	that	 assembly	should	be	defined	broadly	to	‘reflect	the	increasingly	creative	ways	in	which	people	 collectively	exercise	their	rights	to	freedom	of	expression,	in	particular	online	in	the	digital	age.’ 	 they	suggested	it	‘should	mean	any	collective	act	of	expression	between	two	or	more	people	with	 proximate	unity	of	purpose,	time,	and	place.’ 	when	addressing	unity	of	time,	they	argued	that	 ‘an	assembly	implies	multiple	expressive	acts	taking	place	close	in	time,	though	not	necessarily	 with	exact	contemporaneity.		a	group	of	individuals	engaging	in	a	series	of	expressions	which	 closely	follow	each	other	may	still	be	considered	an	assembly,	for	example.’ 	 this	definition	of	assembly	could	encompass	the	situation	where	a	number	of	people	make	a	 series	of	 temporally	proximate	posts,	provided	 they	also	have	proximate	unity	of	place	and	 purpose.		just	as	participants	in	an	offline	assembly	choose	a	physical	space	in	which	to	hold	their	 assembly	and	interact,	so	do	those	in	an	online	assembly,	and	this	may	range	from	a	chat	thread	 to	a	hashtag	on	twitter	shows	the	users’	intention	to	link	their	tweets	to	a	series	of	other	tweets.		 a	hashtag	provides	greater	specificity	to	the	‘online	address’	of	the	activity	and	evidences	the	 users’	intention	to	make	a	collective	act	of	expression.	 in	 	the	un	special	rapporteur’s	report	stated	that	‘technology	serves	both	as	a	means	to	 facilitate	the	exercise	of	the	rights	of	assembly	and	association	offline,	and	as	virtual	spaces	where	 the	rights	themselves	can	be	actively	exercised.’ 	it	could	be	argued	that	the	use	of	technology	 (such	as	linking	by	hashtag)	which	enables	more	proximate	unity	of	place,	engages	the	right	to	 freedom	of	assembly.	 there	are	advantages	to	adopting	article	 ’s	definition	of	assembly.		first,	it	would	seem	absurd	 for	article	 	protection	to	turn	on	the	happenstance	of	two	posts	being	made	at	the	same	time.	 second,	there	may	be	users	‘present’	at	the	online	space,	reading,	liking	or	sharing	the	posts	and	 there	may	be	no	easily	accessible	evidence	of	this	presence.	third,	requiring	contemporaneity	 would	unduly	advantage	coordinated	activity,	organised	by	those	with	greater	online	followings,	 who	already	have	a	more	powerful	voice. 	similar	contemporaneity	would	be	less	likely	to	occur	 	for	example,	“me	too”	and	#metoo	have	been	used	in	a	variety	of	ways	and	for	a	variety	of	purposes	 since	 .		the	greatest	collective	use	was	in	response	to	the	harvey	weinstein	allegations	in	 ,	but	 posts	(some	of	which	are	hostile	to	the	movement)	continue	to	be	made	today.			 the	washington	post,	( ).	the	woman	behind	‘me	too’	knew	the	power	of	the	phrase	when	she	 created	it	—	 	years	ago,		accessed	at:		https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/ / / /the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she- created-it- -years-ago/	and;	#kot	(kenyans	on	twitter)	has	been	used	for	several	years	for	purposes	 including	asserting	group	identity,	social	and	commercial	information	sharing	and	mobilising	(on	and	off- line)	in	response	to	particular	issues.	bbc	news,	( ).	bbc	pop	up	kenya:	why	#kot	is	a	force	for	 change	and	comedy,	accessed	at:	https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine- /bbc-pop-up- kenya-why-kot-is-a-force-for-change-and-comedy	 	article	 	submission	to	general	comment	 	on	article	 	(the	right	to	freedom	of	assembly)	para	 	 accessed	at:		http://www.ohchr.org/documents/hrbodies/ccpr/gc /article .docx				 	ibid	para	 		 	ibid	para	 		 	a/hrc/ / 	( th	may	 )	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	 assembly	and	of	association,	para	 	 	for	example,	alyssa	milano,	who	coordinated	#stateofthedream	postings	as	counterprogramming	to	 president	trump’s	state	of	the	nation	address	on	 st	january	 ,	has	 . 	million	followers	on	twitter.		 she	was	able	to	ask	them	to	post,	using	#stateofthedream,	at	the	same	time		 the	next	web,	( ),	alyssa	milano	plans	online	protest	for	trump’s	state	of	the	union.	accessed	at:	 https://thenextweb.com/politics/ / / /alyssa-milano-plans-online-protest-for-trumps-state-of- the-union/	 where	the	online	activity	results	from	an	unplanned	incident;	however,	it	may	still	be	intentional,	 purposeful,	connected	online	activity.		 however,	there	are	also	disadvantages.		first,	it	is	unclear	what	is	meant	by	proximate	unity	of	 time	–	same	hour,	same	day,	same	week?		second,	whilst	article	 	acknowledges	an	assembly	 can	be	‘two	or	more	people’,	the	phrases	‘multiple	expressive	acts’	and	‘series	of	expressions’	 suggest	that	it	would	only	apply	to	more	numerous	acts	of	expression	–	so	how	many	would	be	 enough	and	would	more	than	one	suffice?	third,	it	would	only	be	possible	to	know	if	there	were	 multiple	acts	of	expression,	with	proximate	unity	of	purpose,	time	and	place,	by	reading	the	posts,	 after	(or	at	least	part	way	into)	the	event.	not	all	activity	using	the	same	hashtag	(for	example)	 would	qualify.	what	advance	protection	of,	for	example,	the	operation	of	a	hashtag	would	be	 appropriate?		 a	possible	answer	to	the	last	question	is	 found	in	the	revised	draft	of	general	comment	 ,	 paragraph	 ,	which	says:	 ‘states	parties	shall,	for	example,	refrain	from	unduly	blocking	internet	connectivity	in	 relation	 to	demonstrations.	 	the	same	applies	 to	geo-targeted	or	 technology-specific	 interference	or	hindering	of	connectivity.’ 	 technology-specific	interference	or	hindering	of	connectivity	could	include	blocking	the	linking	 operation	of	a	hashtag,	thus	preventing	an	assembly	from	taking	place.	this	might	also	include	 flooding	a	hashtag	with	tweets	generated	by	bots,	thus	making	it	hard	for	participants	to	sustain	 interactions	with	each	other	-	and	possibly	triggering	the	social	media	platform	algorithms	that	 limit	the	visibility	of	hashtags	artificially	pumped	up	through	the	use	of	bot	farms. 	 a	further	issue	is	that,	as	well	as	applying	to	a	series	of	posts	on	a	non-personal	space	(such	as	a	 hashtag),	article	 ’s	definition	could	also	encompass	streams	of	comments	on	a	more	personal	 space	(such	as	a	facebook	page	or	tweet).		this	might	conflict	with	the	ability	of	the	‘owner’	of	the	 space	to	block	individuals	from	commenting	or	remove	the	original	post	(or	indeed	the	whole	 page	or	profile).			although	the	court	in		knight	first	amendment	inst.	at	columbia	univ.	v.	trump,	 no.	 : -cv- 	(s.d.n.y.),	no.	 - 	( d	cir.),	found	that	president	trump’s	twitter	account	 was	a	public	forum	and	therefore	blocking	comments	breached	the	first	amendment,	this	would	 not	be	the	case	for	the	vast	majority	of	other	social	media	accounts.		where	the	page	is	monetised	 (e.g.,	aiming	to	attract	advertising	revenue)	it	may	also	encourage	the	production	of	fake	news	or	 extreme	content	designed	to	increase	the	activity	on	that	site.	 timeframe	of	assembly	 the	revised	draft	of	general	comment	 ,	paragraph	 ,	recognises	that	article	 	protection	 extends	beyond	the	immediate	time	frame	of	the	offline	assembly	to	protect	associated	activities,	 including	dissemination	of	information	and	communication	between	participants	leading	up	to	 and	during	the	assembly.		it	goes	on	to	say,	in	paragraph	 ,	that	these	associated	activities	may	 happen	online,	presumably	 for	both	online	and	offline	assemblies.	there	 is	scope	to	explore	 further	what	such	antecedent	or	subsequent	activities	might	be	in	an	online	setting.		 in	addition,	and	in	contrast	with	a	more	formalised	online	meeting,	it	may	not	be	possible	to	say	 exactly	when	a	collective	interaction,	manifesting	as	a	series	of	linked	online	posts,	started	and	 ended.		however,	this	should	not	necessarily	stop	it	being	regarded	as	temporary.		collective	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 		 	daniel,	l.,	( th	february	 ),	rise	of	the	peñabots,	accessed	at:	 https://points.datasociety.net/rise-of-the-penabots-d f fe d 	 	 interactions	may	start	as	a	response	to	an	event	and	will	naturally	end	when	people	have	had	an	 opportunity	to	express	themselves.	there	may	be	similar	uncertainty	around	the	exact	time	frame	 of	 a	 spontaneous	 offline	 assembly,	 which	 again,	 should	 not	 stop	 it	 being	 regarded	 as	 being	 protected	under	article	 .	 an	example	of	online	assembly:	#thisflag	in	zimbabwe	 there	 is	 little	doubt	 that	 temporary	protest	activity	 can	 take	place	online	using	 the	 linking	 operation	of	a	hashtag.		the	more	important	question	is	whether	this	activity	engages	the	right	to	 freedom	of	assembly,	through	elements	which	take	it	beyond	the	realm	of	expression.	 for	 example,	 #thisflag 	 was	 used	 by	 those	 responding	 to	 a	 video	 posted	 by	 pastor	 evan	 mawarire	on	 nd	april	 ,	to	his	personal	facebook	page	and	other	social	media	accounts,	 using	 the	 hashtag	 #thisflag.	 the	 video	 (viewed	 and	 shared	 thousands	 of	 times)	 used	 the	 zimbabwean	 flag	 to	 illustrate	 problems	 caused	 to	 him,	 as	 a	 zimbabwean	 citizen,	 by	 the	 government.	 many	 other	 zimbabweans,	 including	 members	 of	 diasporic	 communities,	 made	 videos	or	posts	describing	their	own	similar	experiences,	which	they	linked,	both	to	the	original	 post	and	other	similar	posts,	using	#thisflag.									 the	synchronicity	of	this	response	was	comparable	to	a	spontaneous	assembly.		users	located	 their	posts	intentionally	at	the	same	online	address,	via	#thisflag.		the	users’	purpose	in	doing	so	 was	to	support	the	initial	post	by	asserting	group	solidarity	and	strengthen	the	impact	of	the	 protest,	by	an	act	of	collective	expression.	whilst	freedom	of	expression	protected	the	users’	right	 to	make	the	individual	posts	exactly	as	they	did,	it	may	not	have	prevented	the	government	from	 employing	 ‘technology-specific	 interference,’ 	 blocking	 the	 operation	 of	 the	 hashtag	 and	 preventing	the	greater	impact	of	a	linked	series	of	posts,	viewable	together	through	searching	 #thisflag.		 the	linked	posts,	which	form	the	record	of	users’	online	activity,	were	also	the	means	by	which	 the	protestors	attracted	government	and	media	attention,	and	other	followers	to	their	cause	-	 numerous	linked	posts	being	more	impactful/news-worthy	than	individual	posts.	 	one	of	the	 responses	of	the	zimbabwean	government	was	to	criminalise	action	using	the	national	flag. 	as	 the	flag	was	the	element	being	used	online	to	link	the	individual	expressions	of	grievance	by	 zimbabwean	citizens,	is	this	arguably	an	interference	with	their	right	to	freedom	of	assembly	as	 well	as	their	right	to	freedom	of	expression?	 interference	by	the	zimbabwean	government	with	freedoms	of	assembly	and	association	offline	 (which	persists	today )	would	have	made	it	more	difficult	for	zimbabwean	protesters	to	have	 found	each	other,	without	the	linking	function	of	#thisflag.	 these	initial	posts	are	still	viewable	through	a	search	of	“#thisflag”	on	twitter.		however,	this	 initial	spontaneous	response	to	pastor	mawarire’s	video	has	ended.		it	was	replaced,	first	by	an	 organised	online	protest	in	may	 	(again	using	#thisflag)	and	then	by	offline	protests,	which	 	gukurume,	s.,	( ),	#thisflag	and	#thisgown	cyber	protests	in	zimbabwe	:	reclaiming	political	space.	 ( )	african	journalism	studies	 	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 		 	npr,	( ),	can	hashtags	and	pop-up	protests	topple	a	leader?,	accessed	at:		 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/ / / / /can-hashtags-and-pop-up- protests-topple-a-leader				 	end	of	mission	statement	of	the	united	nations	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	 peaceful	assembly	and	of	association,	mr.	clément	nyaletsossi	voule,	on	his	visit	to	zimbabwe	( - 	 september	 )	accessed	at:	http://zw.one.un.org/newsroom/news/end-mission-statement-united- nations-special-rapporteur-rights-freedom-peaceful	 were	coordinated	using	#thisflag	(use	of	online	activity	as	a	tool	for	offline	assemblies	already	 being	recognised	as	a	protected	activity).		the	#thisflag	continues	to	be	used	for,	amongst	other	 things,	news	relating	to	the	imprisonment	of	protesters,	posts	evidencing	police	brutality	and	 posts	criticising	the	#thisflag	movement.		 	 	 	 	 	 	 .	peaceful	and	non-peaceful	 defining	peaceful	in	online	contexts	 of	 central	 importance	 to	 formulating	 the	 right	 to	 peaceful	 assembly	 online	 is	 the	 conceptualisation	of	‘peaceful’	in	an	online	space.	the	draft	 rd	edition	of	the	osce/odihr	-	 venice	commission	guidelines	on	the	right	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	defines	the	term	 ‘peaceful’	as	including:	 ‘conduct	that	may	annoy	or	give	offence	to	individuals	or	groups	opposed	to	the	ideas	or	 claims	that	the	assembly	is	seeking	to	promote.	it	also	includes	conduct	that	temporarily	 hinders,	impedes,	or	instructs	the	activities	of	third	parties,	for	example	by	temporarily	 blocking	traffic.	as	such,	an	assembly	can	be	entirely	 ‘peaceful’	even	if	 it	 is	 ‘unlawful’	 under	domestic	 law.	the	peaceful	 intentions	of	 the	organizers	and	participants	 in	an	 assembly	should	be	presumed,	unless	there	is	convincing	evidence	of	intent	to	use	or	 incite	violence.’ 	 while	the	osce-venice	commission’s	definition	of	peaceful	was	intended	primarily	for	offline	 demonstrations	invoking	a	right	to	peaceful	assembly,	it	can	also	be	applied	to	conceptualising	 peaceful	online	assemblies	as	well.	a	key	part	of	this	definition	is	that	a	peaceful	assembly	can	 include	 conduct	 that	 annoys	 or	 offends	 others,	 allowing	 for	 the	 protection	 of	 diverse	 and	 controversial	messages	under	the	right	of	peaceful	assembly.	however,	 this	definition	raises	 essential	 questions	 around	 the	 protection	 of	 harmful	 or	 violent	 speech,	 particularly	 hateful	 speech.	to	what	extent	is	hateful	speech	(sexism,	racism,	transphobia,	anti-semitism)	protected	 under	this	definition	of	a	peaceful	online	assembly?	 related	 definitions	 of	 harm,	 inciting	 violence	 and	 intimidation	 are	 also	 pertinent	 to	 conceptualising	‘peace’	in	online	assemblies.	the	osce-venice	commission	guidelines	make	clear	 that	 the	peaceful	 intention	of	 those	assembling	 should	always	be	presumed,	 ‘unless	 there	 is	 convincing	evidence	of	 intent	 to	use	or	 incite	 violence.’ 	the	concept	of	 intimidation	 is	 also	 relevant	to	this	discussion.	drawing	on	us	case	law,	intimidation	can	be	conceptualised	as	a	true	 threat,	where	a	speaker	‘directs	a	threat	to	a	person	or	group	of	persons	with	the	intent	of	placing	 the	victim	in	fear	of	bodily	harm.’ 	in	online	contexts,	determining	whether	a	user	or	group	 intends	to	harm	or	intimidate	another	or	incite	violence	is	further	complicated	by	the	landscape	 of	the	internet	that	allows	for	anonymity	and	trolling.	as	such,	it	can	be	difficult	to	determine	the	 intent	behind	online	communications,	or	definitively	determine	whether	certain	speech	intends	 to	cause	harm	or	threat	to	others.	a	central	aspect	of	defining	peaceful	online	assemblies	 is	 defining	the	associated	concepts	of	harm,	intimidation	and	inciting	violence	in	online	spaces.	 trolling	and	online	assemblies	 central	to	the	conversation	of	peaceful	online	assemblies	–	and	to	online	communication	more	 generally	–	is	the	concept	of	trolling.	trolling	involves	a	spectrum	of	behaviours	that	range	from	 aggressive	 and	 hostile	 verbal	 attacks	 that	 meet	 the	 legal	 threshold	 of	 harassment	 to	 more	 innocuous	forms	that	include	mischievous	activities	not	meant	to	cause	distress	to	the	target,	such	 as	culture-jamming	through	defacing	images	of	corporate	logos	and	ads	to	incite	public	ridicule	 	venice	commission/osce/odihr,	guidelines	on	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	(second	edition,	 ),	p.	 .	accessed	at:	https://www.osce.org/odihr/ ?download=true.		 	ibid.	 	virginia	v.	black,	 	u.s.	 	( ),	para.	 . and	criticism 	 .	while	culture	jamming	is	a	more	benign	form	of	trolling,	it	nonetheless	is	an	 important	part	of	modern	online	activism	and	should	be	considered	in	discussions	of	whether	 trolling	 will	 be	 protected	 under	 a	 proposed	 right	 to	 peaceful	 online	 assemblies.	 in	 ,	 a	 maryland-based	feminist	group	called	force:	upsetting	rape	culture	created	a	website	to	spoof	 victoria’s	secret’s	pink	line	of	underwear	that	included	phrases	such	as	‘unwrap	me’	and	‘sure	 thing’,	which	the	organisation	viewed	as	promoting	access	to	women’s	bodies	without	consent .	 the	website,	pinklovesconsent.com	(which	is	still	currently	active	and	bears	striking	semblance	 to	the	company’s	official	site),	involves	a	variety	of	models	outfitted	in	underwear	with	slogans	 such	as	‘no	means	no’,	‘let’s	talk	about	sex’,	and	‘ask	first’ .	as	force’s	culture-jamming	falls	 under	the	conceptualisation	of	a	peaceful	online	assembly,	it	is	paramount	that	more	harmless	 instances	of	culture-jamming	and	 trolling	be	considered	when	drafting	 the	right	 to	peaceful	 online	assemblies.	 other	 instances	 of	 trolling	 can	 also	 revolve	 around	 political	 ideologies,	 as	 is	 the	 case	 with	 r/thedonald.	r/thedonald	is	a	subreddit	where	political	trolls	who	support	donald	trump	have	 built	their	own	online	community	around	supporting	him	while	also	engaging	in	tactics	that	 strategically	spread	misinformation	and	generated	content	 to	disrupt	others,	 some	of	which	 incorporates	hateful	speech .	political	trolls	like	users	of	r/thedonald	further	complicate	the	 issue	of	protection	under	a	proposed	right	to	peaceful	online	assembly.	while	the	group	clearly	 fits	the	definition	of	an	online	assembly,	they	engage	in	trolling	tactics	that	use	hateful	speech	 against	others,	casting	doubt	on	whether	their	assembly	falls	under	definitions	of	peace.	to	what	 extent	can	political	trolls	be	protected	under	the	right	to	peaceful	online	assembly?	 hacktivism	and	online	assemblies	 similar	questions	arise	about	the	role	of	hacktivism	and	whether	this	falls	under	the	protection	 of	the	right	to	peaceful	online	assembly.	hacktivism,	much	like	trolling,	involves	a	spectrum	of	 computer-mediated	behaviours	that	attempt	to	call	attention	to	particular	social	and	political	 issues. 	on	extreme	ends,	hacktivism	can	involve	spreading	viruses,	breaking	into	high-security	 servers,	defacing	government	and	corporate	websites,	and	threatening	public	health	and	safety.	 	 in	addition,	hacktivism	can	sometimes	 include	denial	of	 service	attacks	 (dos	attacks)	or	 distributed	denial	of	service	attacks	(ddos	attacks)	on	corporate,	government,	and	military	web	 sites	wherein	hacktivists	obstruct	access	to	these	websites	for	other	users.	for	instance,	thai	 activists	relied	on	ddos	attacks	in	 	to	shut	down	several	government	websites,	including	the	 ministry	of	information,	technology,	and	communications	and	the	main	thai	government	portal	 to	protest	against	the	government’s	decision	to	limit	access	to	websites	deemed	inappropriate. 	 	phillips,	w.,	( ),	this	is	why	we	can’t	have	nice	things:	mapping	the	relationship	between	online	 trolling	and	mainstream	culture,	cambridge:	mit	press.	 	calabrese,	a.,	( ),	“virtual	nonviolence?	civil	disobedience	and	political	violence	in	the	information	 age”.	info,	 ( ),	 - .		 	madden,	s.	et	al.,	( ),	‘who	loves	consent?	social	media	and	the	culture	jamming	of	victoria’s	 secret’,	public	relations	inquiry,	 ( ),	pp.	 – .	 	pinklovesconsent.com,	( ),	accessed	at:	 http://pinklovesconsent.com/pink/www.victoriassecret.com/pink/newstyles.html			 	flores-saviaga,	c.	i.,	keegan,	b.	c.	and	savage,	s.,	( ),	mobilizing	the	trump	train:	understanding	 collective	action	in	a	political	trolling	community.	in	twelfth	international	aaai	conference	on	web	and	 social	media.	 	newman,	l.	h.,	( ),	“hacktivists	are	on	the	rise	–	but	less	effective	than	ever”,	accessed	at:	 https://www.wired.com/story/hacktivism-sudan-ddos-protest/#.		 	calabrese,	a.,	( ),	“virtual	nonviolence?	civil	disobedience	and	political	violence	in	the	information	 age”.	info,	 ( ),	 - .		 	bbc	news,	( ),	thai	government	websites	hit	by	denial-of-service	attack.	accessed	at:	 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia- .	 	the	 	savetheinternet.in	campaign	also	used	hacktivism	to	fight	for	internet	neutrality,	 flooding	 india’s	 telecom	 regulator	 with	 emails	 in	 protest. 	 in	 a	 sense,	 dos	 attacks	 can	 be	 conceptualised	as	a	virtual	sit-in,	wherein	activists	occupy	a	virtual	space	by	disrupting	its	web	 traffic.	similarly,	dos	attacks	can	be	likened	to	offline	occupy	movements	where	activists	take	up	 physical	spaces	and	refuse	to	move	so	that	others	may	pass	through. 	 in	defining	a	comprehensive	right	to	peaceful	assembly	online,	it	is	paramount	that	the	right	 addresses	key	questions	around	trolls	and	hacktivists.	currently,	the	human	rights	organisation	 article	 	argues	that	hacktivism,	as	a	form	of	collective	action	used	to	protest,	can	be	considered	 for	protection	under	freedom	of	expression	and	assembly ,	which	 lays	the	groundwork	for	 extended	protection	of	hacktivism	under	the	right	to	peaceful	online	assembly.	however,	states	 must	make	clear	whether	the	actions	of	trolls	and	hacktivists	are	protected	under	this	right,	and	 what	the	parameters	of	these	protections	will	be.	 	 	 	leyden,	j.,	( ),	hand-cranked	‘ddos’	floors	thai	government	website	amid	protests,	accessed	at:	 https://www.theregister.co.uk/ / / /hand_cranked_ddos_floors_thai_gov_sites/.	 	bbc	news,	( ),	why	‘save	the	internet’	is	trending	in	india.	accessed	at:	 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending- .		 	calabrese,	a.,	( ),	“virtual	nonviolence?	civil	disobedience	and	political	violence	in	the	information	 age”.	info,	 ( ),	 - .		 	article	 ,	( ),	the	right	to	protest.	accessed	at:	https://right-to-protest.org/wp- content/uploads/ / /right-to-protest-background-paper-en.pdf.		 .	state	obligations	 under	the	existing	application	of	article	 ,	state	obligations	have	been	characterised	in	both	 negative	and	positive	terms.	with	regards	to	the	former,	a	negative	obligation	entails	the	principle	 of	non-interference	and	requires	the	state	to	practice	tolerance	and	restraint,	particularly	in	cases	 where	legal	procedures	or	administrative	policies	have	not	been	followed.	even	in	the	case	of	an	 illegal	assembly,	so	long	as	it	satisfies	the	conditions	of	being	peaceful	in	nature	and	purpose,	the	 state	is	obliged	to	protect	the	right	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly,	as	has	been	noted	by	the	 european	court	of	human	rights.	conversely,	the	doctrine	of	positive	obligations	imbues	the	 state	with	the	responsibility	and	duty	to	act	in	order	to	facilitate	and	allow	the	effective	exercise	 of	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly.	 the	implications	of	translating	the	application	of	this	right	to	online	assemblies	are	manifold.	the	 distinctive	 characteristics	 and	 properties	 of	 online	 assemblies	 (such	 as	 the	 absence	 of	 an	 organiser,	 spontaneity,	 speed	 of	 development	 or	 an	 unlimited	 number	 of	 participants’ )	 stretches	 the	 boundaries	 of	 existing	 state	 obligations	 with	 regards	 to	 article	 .	 given	 the	 transnational	nature	of	the	 internet	and	digital	platforms,	there	 is	also	a	need	to	clarify	and	 identify	the	extent	and	type	of	state	jurisdiction	and	obligations	within	the	particular	context	of	 online	assemblies.		 furthermore,	the	variety	of	purposes	served	and	facilitated	by	digital	platforms	and	the	internet	 in	general	underscores	the	need	to	formulate	state	obligations	in	relation	to	online	assemblies,	 given	the	heightened	link	between	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly	online	with	other	rights	such	as	 freedom	 of	 association,	 expression,	 non-discrimination	 and	 privacy.	 state	 actions	 which	 compromise	one	of	these	rights	in	a	digital	and	online	setting	necessarily	affect	other	rights	as	 well,	hence	underscoring	the	need	and	urgency	to	increase	the	scope	of	article	 	to	include	rights	 enjoyed	online.		 there	are	a	variety	of	ways	in	which	states	can	interfere	with	the	freedom	of	online	assembly,	 including	internet	blocking	and	the	silencing	effects	of	surveillance.	 internet	blocking	 in	the	past,	states	have	employed	the	use	of	cyber	technology	in	order	to	violate	human	rights	and	 interfere	with	or	curtail	the	enjoyment	of	these	rights	in	cyberspace. 	in	his	report	of	 ,	the	 un	special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	the	right	to	freedom	of	opinion	and	 expression	noted	and	expressed	reservations	on	‘the	emerging	trend	of	timed	(or	‘just-in-time’)	 blocking	to	prevent	users	from	accessing	or	disseminating	information	at	key	political	moments,	 such	as	elections,	times	of	social	unrest,	or	anniversaries	of	politically	or	historically	significant	 events’. 	as	previously	noted,	the	overlap	of	various	rights	in	a	digital	platform	means	that	by	 interference	 with	 one	 particular	 right	 such	 as	 a	 citizen’s	 freedom	 of	 expression	 online	 has	 ramifications	for	other	rights,	in	particular	the	right	to	assembly.	the	blocking	of	websites	and	 social	 networking	 platforms	 prevents	 citizens	 from	 participating	 in	 intentional	 gatherings	 created	for	a	specific	purpose	online.	 	committee	of	experts	on	cross-border	flow	of	internet	traffic	and	internet	freedom	(msi-int),	( ),	 draft	report	on	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	on	the	internet,	accessed	at:	 https://rm.coe.int/ a b	p. 	 	rona,	g.	and	aarons,	l.,	( ),	‘state	responsibility	to	respect,	protect,	and	fulfil	human	rights	 obligations	in	cyberspace’	 	journal	of	national	security	law	&	policy	 ,	 .	 	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	the	right	to	freedom	of	opinion	 and	expression,	frank	la	rue	(a/hrc/ / ),	p.	 .	 it	has	similarly	been	argued	that	‘using	communications	‘kill	switches’	(i.e.	shutting	down	entire	 parts	 of	 communication	 systems)	 and	 the	 physical	 takeover	 of	 broadcasting	 stations	 are	 measures	which	can	never	be	justified	under	human	rights	law’. 	examples	of	such	instances	 include	switch-offs	in	egypt,	libya	and	syria	in	 . 	such	methods	may	also	be	used	in	order	 to	interfere	with	the	right	to	peacefully	assemble	online	or	the	organisation	of	physical	assemblies	 by	digital	means.	in	this	regard,	the	ngo	article	 	observes	that	measures	such	as	blocking,	 filtering,	or	removal	of	online	content	should	be	prohibited	as	they	are	‘almost	always	likely	to	be	 disproportionate,	 as	 there	 is	 a	 significant	 danger	 of	 over-blocking.’ 	 therefore,	 the	 state’s	 obligation	to	non-interference	under	article	 	should	be	extended	to	include	its	misuse	of	cyber	 technology.	 state	surveillance	 state	surveillance	serves	as	a	contentious	point	with	regards	to	the	balancing	of	the	aims	of	state	 security	with	the	protection	and	preservation	of	human	rights.	surveillance	might,	for	example,	 be	claimed	as	a	justified	interference	with	article	 	under	the	interest	of	promoting	national	 security.		in	his	analysis	of	social	media	policing,	trottier	claims	that	group	affiliations	and	friend	 networks	are	among	the	types	of	information	that	police	have	legal	channels	to	obtain	about	 citizens	from	social	media	platforms,	with	many	countries	such	as	austria	and	canada	passing	 legislation	to	reduce	the	threshold	or	completely	remove	the	need	for	obtaining	warrants	to	 access	this	data. 	 	 the	human	rights,	big	data	and	technology	project	has	highlighted	that	active	participation	is	not	 necessarily	a	prerequisite	for	being	a	target	of	anti-assembly	surveillance,	with	surveillance	being	 used	by	governments	to	‘identify	and	target	particular	individuals	on	the	basis	of	their	known	or	 inferred	associations’. 	thus,	the	mere	joining	of	an	online	forum	or	group	or	interacting	with	a	page	 or	event,	regardless	of	intention	or	identification	with	the	purpose	of	the	assembly	could	be	action	 enough	 for	 an	 individual	 to	 become	 a	 surveillance	 target.	 while	 facebook	 allegedly	 closed	 the	 loopholes	for	private	group	membership	lists	to	be	publicly	accessible	in	 	and	disabled	the	old	 social	graph	search	systems,	many	states	and	private	surveillance	companies	are	still	collecting	these	 forms	of	data	through	a	number	of	different	mechanisms.	 the	uncertainty	over	whether	and	by	whom	one’s	communications	will	be	monitored	or	accessed	 may	have	a	chilling	effect	on	one’s	willingness	to	participate	in	and	to	exercise	one’s	right	to	 peaceful	assembly	online.	for	example,	‘a	recent	poll	in	the	united	kingdom	found	that	one	third	 of	 individuals	 were	 disinclined	 to	 participate	 in	 protests	 because	 of	 concern	 about	 their	 privacy’. 		 	osce,	‘joint	declaration	on	freedom	of	expression	and	access	to	information’( 	june	 )	accessed	 at:	https://www.osce.org/fom/ ?download=true	 	see,	the	guardian,	( ),	“egypt's	big	internet	disconnect”,	accessed	at:	 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jan/ /egypt-internet-	uncensored-cutoff- disconnect;	the	guardian,	( ),	“the	truth	about	twitter,	facebook	and	the	uprisings	in	the	arab	 world”,	accessed	at:	http://www.theguardian.com/world/ /feb/ /twitter-facebook-uprisings- arab-libya	 	article	 ,	‘the	right	to	protest	principles:	background	paper’	( ),	accessed	at:	 https://www.article .org/data/files/medialibrary/ /protest-background-paper-final-april- .pdf	 	trottier,	d.,	( ),	policing	social	media,	canadian	review	of	sociology,	 ( ).	 	fuchs,	c.,	( ),	social	networking	sites	and	the	surveillance	society:	a	critical	case	study	of	the	usage	 of	studivz,	facebook,	and	myspace	by	students	in	salzburg	in	the	context	of	electronic	surveillance,	p .	 	the	human	rights,	big	data	and	technology	project,	( ),	“the	universal	declaration	of	human	 rights	at	 :	putting	human	rights	at	the	heart	of	the	design,	development	and	deployment	of	artificial	 intelligence”,	p .	 	a/hrc/ / ,	p.	 .	 	 consequently,	any	surveillance	measures	undertaken	by	a	state,	whether	in	cooperation	with	 internet	intermediaries	or	not,	‘should	be	targeted,	precisely	defined,	subject	to	effective	external	 oversight’	in	addition	to	complying	with	the	general	requirements	for	lawful	derogation. 	this	 includes	conducting	an	‘independent	authorisation	of	surveillance	measures’ 	and	‘independent	 ex-post	reviews’. 	 echoing	the	declaration	of	the	committee	of	ministers	of	the	council	of	europe	( 	may	 ),	 states	 therefore	 have	 an	 obligation	 to	 ‘ensure	 protection	 against	 online	 surveillance	 and	 to	 enhance	the	free	expression	of	information	and	ideas,	member	states	should	respect	the	will	of	 users	of	the	internet	not	to	disclose	their	identities.’ 	this	is	especially	important	in	cases	where	 ‘persons	may	be	associated	online	without	their	express	consent	and	not	of	their	own	volition.	 such	involuntary	associations	or	memberships	should	not	lead	to	legal	consequences	for	the	 persons	concerned.’ 	a	state	may	not	evade	this	responsibility	under	international	human	rights	 law	by	facilitating	unlawful	or	arbitrary	surveillance	on	the	part	of	another	state	with	a	view	 towards	benefiting	from	information	gained	through	what	amounts	to	unlawful	searches	and	 seizures. 	it	may	neither	directly	or	indirectly	impose	a	general	obligation	on	intermediaries	to	 monitor	content	which	they	merely	give	access	to,	or	which	they	transmit	or	store,	be	 it	by	 automated	means	or	not.’ 	states	must	in	particular	refrain	from	exerting	any	kind	of	pressure	 on	internet	intermediaries	through	non-legal	means.	 the	committee	of	ministers	to	the	council	of	europe	also	recommends	that	states	should	make	 publicly	available	comprehensive	information	on	the	number,	nature	and	legal	basis	of	content	 restrictions	or	disclosures	of	personal	data.	similarly,	states	should	require	intermediaries	to	 disclose	and	make	easily	accessible	meaningful	information	on	any	kind	of	state	interference	in	 the	exercise	of	their	users’	rights	and	freedoms. 	state	authorities	should,	moreover,	be	obliged	 to	obtain	‘an	order	by	a	judicial	authority	or	other	independent	administrative	authority,	whose	 decisions	are	subject	to	judicial	review,	when	demanding	intermediaries	to	restrict	access	to	 content. 	while	these	recommendations	were	made	with	regard	to	the	freedom	of	expression,	 they	could	arguably	be	extended	to	the	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly.	not	only	would	such	an	 obligation	be	mandated	by	the	data	protection	principle	of	transparency	as	mentioned	above,	but	 it	would	also	allow	individuals	participating	in	peaceful	online	assemblies	to	assess	to	judicially	 	council	of	europe	committee	of	ministers,	( ),	‘recommendation	cm/rec( ) 	of	the	 committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	on	the	roles	and	responsibilities	of	internet	intermediaries’,	 appendix,	para.	 . . .		 	council	of	europe	committee	of	experts	on	cross-border	flow	of	internet	traffic	and	internet	freedom	 (msi-int),	( ),	draft	report	on	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	on	the	internet,	accessed	at:	 https://rm.coe.int/ a b,	citing,	kennedy	v.	the	united	kingdom,	 	may	 ,	app.	no.	 / ,	 p.	 ;	dumitru	popescu	v.	romania,	 	april	 ,	app.	no	 / ,	p.	 ,	 .	 	ibid	citing	association	for	european	integration	and	human	rights	and	ekimdzhiev	v.	bulgaria,	 	june	 ,	app.	no.	 / ,	p.	 .	 	council	of	europe,	committee	of	ministers,	declaration	on	freedom	of	communication	on	the	internet	 (adopted	by	the	committee	of	ministers	on	 	may	 	at	the	 th	meeting	of	the	ministers'	deputies)	 	venice	commission	and	osce/odihr,	guidelines	on	freedom	of	association,	 ,	para.	 .	 	see	international	law	commission,	draft	articles	on	responsibility	of	states	for	internationally	 wrongful	acts	( ),	articles	 	and	 .		 	council	of	europe	committee	of	ministers,	( ),	‘recommendation	cm/rec( ) 	of	the	 committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	on	the	roles	and	responsibilities	of	internet	intermediaries’,	 appendix,,	para.	 . . .	 	ibid	para.	 . . .		the	estonian	legislation	(personal	data	protection	act)	sets	clear	limits	in	this	regard,	 as	the	collection	and	use	of	personal	information	by	public	authorities	is	subject	to	the	individual’s	 consent	(freedom	house,	“estonia:	country	profile”	(freedom	on	the	net	 ),	accessed	at:	 https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/ /estonia	 	ibid	para.	 . . .	 challenge	any	kind	of	monitoring	or	 interference	 if	deemed	excessive	analogously	 to	offline	 physical	assemblies.			 state	facilitation	through	legal,	infrastructural	and	educational	frameworks	 states	are	not	only	obliged	 to	respect	and	protect	 the	right	 to	peaceful	assembly	online.	as	 underscored	by	the	inter-american	court	of	human	rights	and	the	european	court	of	human	 rights,	states	also	have	a	positive	obligation	to	facilitate	the	exercise	of	this	right	by	promoting	 the	formation	of	peaceful	assemblies	and	ensuring	its	ability	to	carry	out	the	purpose	for	which	it	 was	created.	this	can	be	conducted	through	the	creation	of	an	enabling	legal	framework.	for	 example,	in	kawas-fernandez	v	honduras,	the	iacthr	noted	that	‘the	free	and	full	exercise	of	this	 right	[to	freedom	of	association]	imposes	upon	the	state	the	duty	to	create	the	legal	and	factual	 conditions	for	them	to	be	able	to	freely	perform	their	task.’ 	whilst	this	legal	ruling	was	made	 in	relation	to	the	right	of	association,	it	can	also	be	transposed	to	the	right	of	peaceful	online	 assembly.	 the	‘factual’	conditions	in	this	instant	can	relate	to	ensuring	both	access	to,	and	the	independence	 of,	the	internet.	the	committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	of	the	council	of	europe	in	its	 recommendation	cm/rec( ) 	on	the	roles	and	responsibilities	of	internet	intermediaries	 accordingly	observed	that	‘access	to	the	internet	is	a	precondition	for	the	exercise	of	convention	 rights	and	freedoms	online’. 	in	addition	to	promoting	the	accessibility	of	the	internet,	states	 are	also	obliged	to	ensure	that	internet	connectivity	is	‘affordable,	secure,	reliable	and	ongoing’. 	 the	last	characteristic	is	particularly	important	in	relation	to	online	assemblies,	as	they	can	be	 distinctively	spontaneous	in	nature,	and	thus	require	an	ongoing	connection	in	order	to	enable	 citizens	to	effectively	participate.	 however,	access	to	affordable	and	independent	internet	services	is	not	only	important	for	the	 exercise	 of	 the	 right	 to	 peaceful	 assembly	 online.	 rather,	 it	 is	 also	 an	 instrument	 which	 considerably	facilitates	the	exercise	of	this	right	offline.	as	un	special	rapporteur	frank	la	rue	 observes	the	internet	has	become	‘an	indispensable	tool	for	full	participation	in	political,	cultural,	 social	and	economic	life’. 	and	while	the	un	special	rapporteur’s	call	for	internet	access	to	be	 maintained	even	in	times	of	political	unrest	was	made	with	respect	to	freedom	of	expression,	it	is	 thus	arguably	equally	pertinent	with	regard	to	the	right	to	peaceful	assembly. 		 	 	merits,	reparations	and	costs,	judgment	of	april	 ,	 .	series	c	no.	 ,	para	 .	accessed	at:	 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_ _ing.pdf		 	council	of	europe	committee	of	ministers,	( ),	‘recommendation	cm/rec( ) 	of	the	 committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	on	the	roles	and	responsibilities	of	internet	intermediaries’.	 	recommendation	cm/rec	( ) 	of	the	committee	of	ministers	to	member	states	on	measures	to	 promote	the	public	service	value	of	the	internet.	 	frank	la	rue,	‘report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	the	right	to	 freedom	of	opinion	and	expression’	(un	ga	doc.	a/ / ,	 	august	 ),	para.	 ;	the	un	human	 rights	council	since	adopted	a	non-binding	resolution	condemning	the	states	that	intentionally	disrupt	 citizens’	access	to	the	internet,	see	human	rights	council,	‘the	promotion,	protection	and	enjoyment	of	 human	rights	on	the	internet’	(un	doc.	a/hrc/ /l. ,	 	june	 );	cf.	pokempner,	d.,	( ),	 ‘cyberspace	and	state	obligations	in	the	area	of	human	rights’	in	katharina	ziolkowski	(ed),	peacetime	 regime	for	state	activities	in	cyberspace:	international	law,	international	relations	and	diplomacy,	 nato	occd	coe	publication:	tallinn,	who	argues	that	access	to	information	online	is	a	necessary	 condition	for	the	fulfilment	of	many	human	rights	and	should	thus	itself	be	considered	a	human	right.		 	frank	la	rue,	‘report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	promotion	and	protection	of	the	right	to	 freedom	of	opinion	and	expression’	(unga,	human	rights	council	 th	session,	unga	doc.	a	 hrc/ / ,	 	may	 ),	para.	 ,	 .		 additionally,	state	obligations	may	be	extended	towards	the	provision	of	digital	 literacy	and	 targeted	digital	access,	in	order	to	enable	inclusivity	and	equality	for	citizens	to	be	able	to	access	 and	participate	in	online	assemblies.	this	applies	across	all	ages,	and	is	critical	in	order	that	 citizens	‘understand	the	structures	and	syntax	of	the	digital	world’. 	digital	spaces	have	indeed	 important	potential	for	widening	participation	opportunities	for	individuals	usually	excluded	or	 marginalised	from	physical,	 traditional	 forms	of	assemblies ,	such	as	religious	and	political	 minorities,	women	or	lgbt	persons. 	one	can	therefore	argue	that	states	are	to	pay	special	 attention	(e.g.,	proactive,	targeted	measures)	to	facilitate	access	to	digital	technologies	for	specific	 categories	of	the	population,	with	the	aim	to	help	realising	political	rights,	including	the	right	to	 assembly.	this	is	specifically	important	with	regard	to	the	disabled,	as	for	example	in	the	uk	‘ %	 of	people	with	registered	disabilities	have	never	been	online’ ,	and	have	thus	not	been	able	to	 participate	in	meaningful	online	engagement	and	assembly.	 furthermore,	states	have	a	positive	obligation	‘to	protect	human	rights	and	to	create	a	safe	and	 enabling	environment	for	everyone	to	participate	in	public	debate	and	to	express	opinions	and	 ideas	without	fear,	including	those	that	offend,	shock	or	disturb	the	state	official	or	any	sector	of	 the	population’. 	in	particular,	states	must	refrain	from	creating	‘insurmountable	barriers’	by	 preventing	the	access	of	information	and	criminalising	online	expression. 	 the	challenges	of	protecting	transnational	online	assemblies	 as	human	rights	responsibilities	are	primarily	territorial,	the	potential	transnational	dimension	 of	online	assemblies	raises	manifold	questions	with	regard	to	the	obligations	of	states	to	respect,	 protect	and	fulfil	human	rights	online. 	the	exercise	of	a	human	right	such	as	the	freedom	to	 peaceful	 assembly	 online	 may	 be	 affected	 either	 by	 extraterritorial	 conduct	 of	 foreign	 state	 organs	or	by	the	extraterritorial	effect	of	the	assembly	itself	as	a	domestic	act.	questions	therefore	 arise	with	regard	to	the	relationship	between	classical	public	international	law	principles	such	as	 sovereignty	and	non-intervention	and	the	protection	of	human	rights	in	cyberspace.	concerning	 the	exercise	of	jurisdiction	over	online	assemblies,	which	in	traditional	human	rights	law	would	 require	either	control	over	territory	or	over	person,	the	commentary	should	address	how	these	 concepts	play	out	in	the	online	realm. 	 the	question	of	jurisdiction	is	particularly	significant	when	considering	forms	of	transnational	 digital	assemblies,	 such	as	#metoo	as	addressed	below.	after	all,	 an	 interference	with	or	a	 	house	of	lords	select	committee	on	communications,	 nd	report	of	session	 – ,	regulating	in	a	 digital	world	 	report	of	the	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	association,	 	 may	 ,	§ ,	referring	to	a/hrc/ / 	 	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	malaysia	and	pakistan:	 trends,	challenges	and	recommendations.	apc	impact,	advocacy	for	change	through	technology,	p.	 .	 accessed	at:	https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/freedom-assembly-and-association-online-india-mala	 	office	for	national	statistics,	‘internet	users,	uk:	 	internet	use	in	the	uk	annual	estimates	by	age,	 sex,	disability	and	geographical	location.’	accessed	at:	 https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/itandinternetindustry/bulletins/internetusers/ 	 	ibid	preambular	para.	 .		 	rona,	g.	and	aarons,	l.,	( ),	‘state	responsibility	to	respect,	protect,	and	fulfil	human	rights	 obligations	in	cyberspace’	 	journal	of	national	security	law	&	policy,	 ,	 .	 	see	altwicker,	t.,	( ),	‘transnationalising	rights:	international	human	rights	law	in	cross-border	 contexts’,	 ( ),	european	journal	of	international	law,	 - .		 	see	for	instance	altwicker,	t.,	( ),	‘transnationalising	rights:	international	human	rights	law	in	 cross-border	contexts’,	 ( ),	european	journal	of	international	law,	 - 	and	berkes,	a.	( ),	 ‘human	rights	obligations	of	the	territorial	state	in	cyberspace	of	areas	outside	its	effective	control’,	 ( ),	israel	law	review,	 - ;	further	more	generally	schmitt,	m.	n.	( ),	tallinn	manual	 . 	on	the	 law	applicable	to	cyber	operations,	 nd	ed,	cambridge:	cambridge	university	press		 violation	of	a	human	right	can	only	be	claimed	if	jurisdiction,	and	therefore	the	applicability	of	 human	 rights	 law	 has	 been	 established. 	 the	 commentary,	 in	 addition	 to	 reviewing	 the	 expansion	of	article	 	to	the	online	context,	should	thus	also	address	a	possible	expansion	of	 article	 ,	which	limits	the	iccpr’s	scope	of	application	to	all	individuals	within	a	state’s	territory	 or	subject	to	its	jurisdiction.	in	order	to	ensure	state	compliance	with	the	obligations	detailed	 above,	 the	 scope	 of	 article	 	 should	 be	 expanded	 to	 include	 the	 provision	 of	 international	 assistance	 and	 cooperation,	 in	 addition	 to	 individual	 state	 obligations.	 notwithstanding	 the	 sovereignty	and	non-interference	issues	potentially	raised	by	the	extraterritorial	application	of	 provisions	implemented	to	protect	human	rights,	the	ecj’s	recent	judgment	in	eva	glawischnig- piesczek	v	facebook	 ireland	limited 	exemplified	how	 this	protection	can	produce	effects	 worldwide.	 far	 from	being	confined	 to	 the	boundaries	of	a	 single	 state,	 assemblies	 can	 indeed	entail	 a	 transnational	dimension,	which	is	amplified	by	possibilities	of	the	digital	age.	firstly,	this	is	the	 case	if	assemblies	aim	at	addressing	an	issue	of	global	nature. 	secondly,	the	assembly	locus	 itself	can	extend	across	borders ,	with	various	levels	of	interconnectedness	between	different	 events.	for	example,	the	#metoo	movement,	which	provided	women	with	an	online	platform	 articulated	around	a	common	expressive	purpose	and	arguably	met	definitional	criteria	of	an	 online	assembly	(see	section	 	in	this	regard),	reached	a	global	scale,	even	though	the	hashtag	 was	renamed	in	some	countries.	 aside	from	addressing	issues,	transnational	assemblages	on	digital	platforms	may	be	used	as	an	 incentive	and	space	to	create	imagined	communities	such	as	diasporas	(for	example	palestinians	 and	tamils).	structuring	and	mobilising	around	a	human	rights	discourse,	these	hyperlinked	 communities	are	simultaneously	local	and	transnational	through	their	ability	to	assemble	in	a	 cohesive	online	space,	and	separately	in	physical	assemblies. 	 	 	 	 	altwicker,	t.,	( ),	‘transnationalising	rights:	international	human	rights	law	in	cross-border	 contexts’,	 ( ),	european	journal	of	international	law,	 ,	 .	 	ecj,	eva	glawschnig-piesczek	v	facebook	ireland	limited,	c- / 	( . . ).	 	council	of	europe,	assembly,	association	and	participation,	accessed	at:	 https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/assembly-association-and-participation	 	see	 	report	by	special	rapporteur	on	the	rights	to	freedom	of	peaceful	assembly	and	of	 association,	§	 ;	venkiteswaran,	g.,	( ),	freedom	of	assembly	and	association	online	in	india,	 malaysia	and	pakistan:	trends,	challenges	and	recommendations,	apc	impact,	accessed	at:	 https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/freedom-assembly-and-association-online-india-mala	 	rerouting	the	narrative:	mapping	the	online	identity	politics	of	the	tamil	and	palestinian	diaspora	 priya	kumar	 .	key	questions	 the	review	of	the	purpose	and	nature	of	online	assemblies	presented	in	this	report,	along	with	 consideration	of	 the	key	 issue	areas	of	public	versus	private	online	assembly	places,	digital	 presence	 and	 participation,	 temporariness	 and	 permanence	 online,	 what	 might	 count	 as	 peaceable	versus	non-peaceful	online	assemblies,	and	state	obligations	has	raised	some	key	 questions	that	the	expert	meeting	may	want	to	consider	as	participants	move	towards	informing	 the	work	of	the	un	human	rights	committee	in	drafting	general	comment	 	on	the	right	of	 peaceful	assembly.	 . need	there	be	definitional	parity	between	‘peaceful	assembly’	offline	and	online?	 . can	online	interactions	serve	purposes	that	are	not	already	protected	by	article	 	 and/or	article	 	iccpr,	or	which	might	deserve	additional	recognition	so	as	to	also	fall	 within	the	protective	scope	of	article	 ?	 . given	the	potential	for	individual	‘re-appropriation’	of	the	purpose	of	an	online	 assembly,	should	a	(single)	common	expressive	purpose	still	be	a	definitional	criterion	 or	should	the	definition	allow	for	a	multiplicity	of	purposes?		 . what	is	the	appropriate	threshold	for	recognising	an	online	platform	as	constituting	 either	a	‘public	forum’	or	‘publicly	accessible	place’	whereby	restrictions	on	access	might	 properly	engage	the	protection	of	article	 	iccpr?		 . what	constitutes	‘participation’	in	an	online	assembly?	what	is	the	minimum	bar	of	 action	required	to	qualify	as	participation?	for	example,	can	using	hashtags	or	joining	 groups	constitute	participation,	or	is	there	a	need	to	also	elaborate	a	more	specific	 intention/motive?	 . does	the	deployment	of	bots	or	fake	accounts	(including	in	cases	of	ddos	attacks)	 constitute	participation	in	an	online	assembly?	 . how	should	virtual	presence	in	an	otherwise	offline	assembly	be	understood?	 . given	that	draft	general	comment	 	recognises	a	wider	array	of	activities	–	beyond	the	 temporal	span	of	an	assembly	event	itself	–	as	falling	within	the	protective	scope	of	 article	 , 	what	would	such	prior-	or	post-	assembly	activities	potentially	encompass	 in	the	online	context?	 . does	the	lack	of	a	clear	time-frame	(start	and	end	points)	prevent	online	interactions	 from	being	classed	as	an	‘assembly’?			 . is	contemporaneous/synchronous	activity	necessary	for	online	interaction	to	be	 considered	as	‘assembly’?		 . would	a	permanent	online	trace	ever	prevent	an	assembly	from	being	temporary?		 . how	should	‘peaceful’	be	interpreted	in	the	context	of	online	assemblies?	 . can	the	principle	that	the	authorities	must	distinguish	between	peaceful	and	non- peaceful	participants	be	straightforwardly	applied	online?	what	types	of	online	 restriction	can	be	individualised	(or	is	there	a	tendency	towards	blanket	regulation	with	 collateral	effect)?	 . does	the	right	to	peaceful	online	assembly	extend	to	groups	or	organisations	that	use	 hateful	speech,	trolling,	or	hacktivism?	what	thresholds	(eg.	‘intimidation’;	‘coercion’)	 might	appropriately	demarcate	the	boundaries	of	‘peacefulness’	in	the	context	of	online	 assemblies?		 . do	dos/ddos	attacks	fall	within	the	scope	of	a	peaceful	online	assembly,	and	if	so,	to	 what	extent	are	they	protected?	at	what	point	do	online	acts	of	service	disruption	 become	non-peaceful?	 . how	can	the	transnational	nature	of	online	assemblies	be	effectively	addressed	through	 state	obligations?	 	human	rights	committee	( ),	revised	draft	general	comment	no.	 	on	article	 (right	of	 peaceful	assembly)	of	the	international	covenant	on	civil	and	political	rights,	para	 .	 “these women are making a statement against rape and yet the only thing y'all can focus on is ‘eww they're naked’”: exploring rape culture on facebook in south africa vol.:( ) gender issues https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x o r i g i n a l a r t i c l e “these women are making a statement against rape and yet the only thing y’all can focus on is ‘eww they’re naked’”: exploring rape culture on facebook in south africa zaida orth  · michelle andipatin  · brian van wyk © the author(s) abstract sexual assault on campuses has been identified as a pervasive public health problem. in april , students across south african universities launched the #endrapecul- ture campaign to express their frustration against university policies which served to perpetuate a rape culture. the use of hashtag activism during the protest served to spark online public debates and mobilize support for the protests. this article describes the public reactions to the south african #endrapeculture protests on the facebook social media platform. data was collected through natural observations of comment threads on news articles and public posts on the student protests, and subjected to content analysis. the findings suggest that the #nakedprotest was suc- cessful in initiating public conversations concerning the issue of rape culture. how- ever, the reactions towards the #nakedprotest were divided with some perpetuating a mainstream public discourse which perpetuates rape culture, and others (re)pre- senting a counter-public that challenged current dominant views about rape culture. two related main themes emerged: victim-blaming and trivialising rape culture. victim-blaming narratives emerged from the commenters and suggested that the protesters were increasing their chances of being sexually assaulted by marching topless. this discourse seems to perpetuate the notion of the aggressive male sex- ual desire and places the onus on women to protect themselves. other comment- ers criticised the #nakedprotest method through demeaning comments which served to derail the conversation and trivialise the message behind the protest. the public reaction to the #nakedprotest demonstrated that rape culture is pervasive in soci- ety and continues to be re(produced) through discourse on social media platforms. however, social media also offers individuals the opportunity to draw from and par- ticipate in multiple counter-publics which challenge these mainstream rape culture discourses. keywords rape culture · social media · qualitative · content analysis · facebook comments · university protest extended author information available on the last page of the article http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf gender issues introduction immortalised in greek mythology and pop culture alike, medusa is recognised as a monstrous, snake-headed creature who preys on men of all ages. however, a lesser-known detail about the gorgon is that the origin of her appearance is a result of her rape. indeed, medusa was once a beautiful woman who caught the attention of the sea god, poseidon. following her rejection, poseidon attacked medusa in the temple of athena, where she was seeking refuge. athena, who was angered at the desecration of her sacred temple, turned medusa into the famed monster. this centuries-old myth represents themes of a rape culture, which is continuously perpetuated to this day. the term ‘rape culture’ was first conceptu- alised in by susan brownmiller in her book, against our will, to describe a culture or pervasive ideology, in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are consequently blamed for their assaults [ , , , ]. drawing from social construction theory, researchers have determined that rape is perpetuated through the construction of rape culture [ ]. that is, societal attitudes or behaviours towards gender and sexuality that normalise sexual violence, are constructed and reproduced in society through modelling and social learning [ , , , ]. rape culture promotes rape by socialising boys and men to be sexual aggressors, and girls and woman to be sexually passive [ ]. consequently, society has accepted that relationships involving male sexual aggression are natural and normal [ ]. at the time of its release, brownmiller’s book was credited with changing pub- lic perception and attitudes towards rape, which in turn influenced changes in american laws regarding rape [ ]. despite this influence, it seems that for the last few decades the concept of rape culture itself has remained within gender and feminist studies discourse. it is only more recently that we see discussions and critiques around rape culture entering the mainstream discourse. this is evident in the increase of global social media movements such as #timesup, #metoo, and #menaretrash, which were formed as a way to draw attention to the preva- lence of sexual assault in various spheres of life and to critique societal norms which allow these acts to continue. the revival of the concept of rape culture in the public consciousness can be attributed to the growth of digital feminism and activism, which utilises social media technologies to develop counter-pub- lics, and in turn, allows users to initiate and engage in conversations about sexual violence that challenge and contradict established social and legal norms by cir- cumventing the gatekeepers of traditional media [ ]. various studies have shown that social media has the potential to be a significant tool of public education, engagement and activism. however, as with any new technological advancement, we need to understand the mechanisms which support and influence communica- tion phenomena and engagement on these platforms. according to baym and boyd [ ], social media complicates the nature of pub- lic life as it mirrors, magnifies and complicates various aspects of everyday life, which allows people to critique and question practices that are presumed to be stable and to raise awareness about social issues. in other words, we find our- selves replicating real-world practices, behaviours and attitudes in our social gender issues media spaces. however, in social media, the boundaries between presence and absence, time and space, freedom of speech and censoring, and private and public are blurred and reconstructed [ ]. therefore, to better understand online engage- ment and discourse concerning social problems such as rape culture, we must consider the role and functionality of the ‘public’ and ‘counter-publics’ that existed before the rise of these platforms. the term ‘counter-public’ was first coined by felski ( ) and later refined by fraser ( ) to critique habermas’ ( ) notion of the ‘public sphere’ [ ]. according to habermas, the public sphere emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when relatively well-off individuals gathered together as a group of private individuals to engage on matters of mutual and public concern and consequently served to mediate between the state and private individuals [ ]. cen- tral to habermas’ ideal of the public sphere are the principles of universal inclusion and absolute equality among its members, both of which are necessary to ensure transparency and successful engagement in the public sphere. however, in reality, the public sphere was much less open and less equal than habermas’ account sug- gests. according to charles and rohwer [ ], access to the public was associated with the white, male middle-class, as people of colour, women, workers and other marginalised groups have historically been excluded from participation in these pub- lic spheres. despite the exclusion of these groups, the ‘public’ maintained its claim of open and universal participation and in doing so perpetuated the idea that ‘public con- cerns’ reflected the interests of all rather than the ‘white, male, literate and prop- ertied’ subjects who made up the public [ ]. consequently, counter-publics were formed as alternative publics that served as a forum where those who were excluded from public participation could share their narratives and lived experiences and legitimize their counter-discourse by challenging mainstream publics to acknowl- edge and respond to these realities [ , ]. for example, scholars have studied how the exclusion of women and african americans from public engagements have led to the rise of the feminist counter-public and the black public sphere as alternative routes of public engagement and political influence [ , ]. these counter-publics gained traction through various avenues such as the increased availability of feminist and/or african american journals, the establishment of organisations such as the negro women’s club movement, the development of feminist literary circles and organised activism [ ]. however, the opposition of these counter-publics served as a threat to the values and ideals of the dominant mainstream public, and as a result, were stigmatized and deemed inferior as a way of discrediting the movements [ ]. therefore, we need to move away from narratives which describe the public as a space of equal access and participation, rather we must understand the public sphere as a desirable space of privilege and legitimacy. in contrast, the counter-publics rep- resent the other, the deviation from the norm of society [ ]. this point is crucial in understanding how societal problems affecting people of colour, women, members of the lgbt + community, migrants and many other groups continue to be invali- dated or dismissed in the public sphere. in the context of feminist activism, the ‘counter-public’ represents a plurality of intersecting spheres to account for specific discursive spaces and practices of gender issues women’s experiences and knowledge which seek to infiltrate and dismantle dom- inant narratives within a patriarchal sphere [ , , ]. several studies illustrate how young people, feminists, and activists utilise social media to raise awareness, and hold perpetrators and those responsible for practices of rape culture account- able when mainstream media fails to do so [ , , ]. social scientists stressed the importance of investigating the presence and nature of rape culture on social media as this has become the standard of how many people acquire their news and view- points on cultural issues [ , , ]. for example, the majority of young women in the united states report that they were first made aware of concepts such as “rape culture’ through social media platforms [ ]. it is thus suggested that social media may serve as a pedagogical tool and a key resource for feminist education and activ- ist terminology. indeed, studies have documented how young people in the global south have utilised social media as a tool of empowerment to disseminate informa- tion and mobilise support for social change [ , , ]. however, there remains a dearth of research examining the phenomena of rape culture on social media plat- forms [ ]. #endrapeculture protest in south africa in april , students from university campuses across south africa precipitated protests and hashtag campaigns such as #endrapeculture, #nakedprotest, #endpatri- archy and #chapter (referring to the south african constitution which aims to protect the rights, safety and dignity of all students), to raise awareness of universi- ties’ policies relating to sexual assault and rape on campus, which were critiqued for perpetuating a rape culture [ ]. the protests were a clear indication of students’ frustration with universities’ lack of addressing rape and sexual assault on campus and the various institutional policies which may inadvertently be contributing to the problem [ ]. this problem is not unique to south africa, as campus administra- tions in other parts of the world are being criticised for the role they play in protect- ing the perpetrator and engaging in processes of victim-blaming [ , ]. through the use of the hashtag campaigns, the south african #endrapeculture student pro- tests reflected an online counter-public which served to attract attention, spark debates and mobilise support for the rape culture protests. additionally, by using these hashtags, the south african protests mirrored similar rape culture protests that occurred in other universities across the globe, thereby strengthening the reach and scope of these counter-publics [ , , ]. the current study explored rape culture discourse that emerged from the social media debates regarding the south african #endrapeculture protests. according to zalenski et  al., the communication that occurs within social media platforms can either reinforce or challenge the dominant socially constructed view of rape culture [ ]. from a postmodern feminist framework, it can be argued that social media can perpetuate the hegemonic language and power found within a patriarchal soci- ety that undermines women and reinforces male sexual aggression [ ]. alterna- tively, social media can challenge the dominant narrative and bring new information to light that deconstructs the dominant ways of framing reality and its associated gender issues binary categories. various studies have shown that rape and sexual assault is a prevalent problem within university and college campuses [ , ]. exploring the comments relating to the #endrapeculture protests provides insights regarding a rape culture within this context. understanding this discourse and exploring the way it emerged and was constructed on social media can provide information to inform educational efforts and interventions to address sexual assault and rape on campus. additionally, it can provide insight into the potential and limits of social media as a tool to address these issues on campus [ , ]. methodology an exploratory design with a constructionist strategy of inquiry was used as this paradigm is centred on the assumption that meaning is constructed by humans as they engage in the world they interpret [ , ]. this approach is aligned with the post- modern feminist framework used in this study, which involves challenging dominant knowledge claims, especially those that suggest a universal ‘truth’ exists which can be seen as ahistorical and stable [ ]. data collection natural observation was conducted on the comment section of facebook posts relat- ing to the april #endrapeculture student protest. facebook was chosen as a suitable site to conduct the natural observation of the comment section, as it is a popular social media site and the comments were available in the public domain. considering that the posts were public; there was no need to request access to online communities, nor was there any need to request consent [ , , ]. during the data collection phase, news stories and public posts relating to the #endrapeculture protests were searched for on facebook using the hashtags: #rureferencelist, #nakedprotest, #endrapeculture and #chapter . only public posts and articles that were posted during the #endrapeculture and #nakedprotests (between and april), with a comment thread of or more comments were included in the analysis [ , ]. according to lijadi and van schalkwyk, facebook posts that generate more than comments indicate sufficient discussion and are suitable for observation [ ]. posts meeting the abovementioned criteria were cop- ied into a data sheet along with the comments. the data sheet indicated the type of post (i.e. personal, news report, video etc.), the date posted, the date accessed, the number of shares and reactions [ ] and the number of comments. during the data cleaning phase, the comments were copied into a new document, formatted and de- identified by deleting the profile pictures, usernames and any other personal infor- mation of the commenters. none of the comments was translated as we tried to keep to the original text. during the de-identification process, we numbered each user and used the letter ‘m’ to designate male users and ‘f’ for female users (ex. user , f). gender issues data analysis the data sheets were loaded onto atlas ti and analysed through qualitative con- tent analysis. content analysis describes a process of analysing written, verbal or visual communication messages [ , ]. as a research method, content analysis is used as a systematic and objective means of describing and quantifying phenom- ena, with the purpose of making replicable and valid inferences from data, to pro- vide new insights and a guide for practical action [ ]. a total of comments were collected from eight facebook posts in august . the data analysis involved the construction of an unconstrained categorisa- tion matrix based on themes from previous studies. however, due to the scar- city of studies that specifically explored rape culture discourse on social media platforms, we also utilized information from other studies delineating the con- cept of rape culture to develop the categorisation matrix [ , , , , , ]. the initial categories included victim-blaming, perpetrator support, survivor support, statements about the law and society, and the presence of patriarchy. using an unconstrained categorisation matrix allowed for inductive principles to filter through the analysis process, by viewing the categories in the matrix as fluid rather than fixed [ , ]. this approach was more aligned with the postmodern feminist framework of this study, by recognising that current concepts and cat- egories of rape culture are not static nor universally true. following the develop- ment of the matrix, the authors re-read the data to better understand the context and nature of the comments. the first round of coding in atlas ti involved devel- oping conceptual codes to describe the data. following this, codes were further refined and categorised using the matrix. some of the codes that emerged as sig- nificant did not align with the initial codes in the unconstrained matrix. as such, some of the themes in the matrix were removed and new themes were added to the matrix to better reflect the data. the methodology of this study is described in further detail in another article [ ]. ethical considerations ethics approval was obtained from the university of the western cape’s senate research and ethics committee. as this study involved collecting data on social media, ethical decision making surrounding this study was based upon the guide- lines proposed by the association of internet researchers (aoir) [ ], the brit- ish psychological society’s (bps) inter-mediated research document [ ] and the facebook privacy policy. with regards to the natural observation of the comment section of posts concerning the #endrapeculture protests, the comments were already posted in a public domain and could be read and accessed by any person with a facebook account. furthermore, the facebook privacy policy states that users can control who is able to view the information they post or share. when a facebook user shares a status update or other form of media, they can use the gender issues audience selector tool to determine if the post will be shared with friends or with the public [ ]. based on this, it is argued that the comments on the #endrape- culture posts are perceived in the public domain as they interacted with people in the comment section that were not their ‘facebook friends’. as such, the natural observation of the comment section did not require consent, as the information was publically available. findings the findings from the current study suggest that the #nakedprotest was successful in introducing the concept of rape culture to the mainstream public and eliciting discussion centred on the topic of rape culture in society. this can be seen in the type of posts (i.e. mainstream media such as radio and news pages reporting on the protest) and the quantity and context of the comments. since we only included arti- cles that were posted during the time of the protest, we may have missed articles that were posted in the days after the protest. additionally, facebook functions according to a specific algorithm which could potentially have influenced the search results. however, based on the rich nature of the data, we find that the included comments were sufficient. a total of comments from eight facebook posts were collected and analysed (table  ). theoretical saturation was reached at this point, in which no new themes emerged from the data and comments began to seem repetitive [ , ]. based on the recommendations by lijadi and van schalkwyk it can be concluded that the #nakedprotest action was successful in generating sufficient discussion in relation to the posts [ ]. although little standardisation exists regarding how to draw inferences on the significance of the level of engagement per post through the number of posts and comments on facebook, a similar study exploring the percep- tions of rape culture on a campus in the united states of america collected com- ment threads from posts made by two local news stations that had and com- ments, respectively [ ]. table summary of user engagement for each facebook post analysed posted by type of post number of comments reactions shares news page post with a video link public entertainment page feature article radio page public facebook user public facebook user public news page feature article university entertainment page anonymous post facebook user public total gender issues the findings from this study suggest that the public reaction to the #nakedprotest was divided between mainstream public and counter-public discourses; with some of the commenters criticising the protesters and their method of protesting, and oth- ers showing their support of the campaign. commenters who were against the pro- test were shown to perpetuate a rape culture discourse through attitudes related to victim-blaming and trivialising rape culture. on the other hand, some commenters supported the protest and in doing so formed an online counter-public, which served to challenge the dominant narratives that perpetuated rape culture. the following section will highlight the two themes of victim-blaming and trivialising rape culture in relation to these two opposing reactions. victim‑blaming victim-blaming is functional, as it serves to uphold the power relations in society by absolving perpetrators from punishment and allowing individuals to socially distance themselves from victims of rape and sexual assault [ , ]. traditionally, when we hear the phrase "victim-blaming," it is usually related to the context of rape and sexual assault. various studies have focused on exploring and measuring con- structs of victim-blaming as it relates to sexual assault specifically [ , , , , ]. the findings suggest that some of the commenters perpetuated victim-blaming practices through comments directed at the #nakedprotesters. these narratives were often challenged by people who called out those commenters for victim-blaming. perpetuating victim‑blaming user (m) some of the rapist were busy playing “my mother told me to choose that but l want the best of them all" pointing so if any of them fine ones get raped don’t be astonished cause they asking for it user (m) by exposing your body you are creating more rapists, my dear. would rather demonstrate fully covered to stop any potential rapist. as it stands you are very inviting in the first comment, user suggests that rapists observing the #nakedprotest- ers were planning on choosing their next victim from the protesters. he also sug- gests that by marching topless, the protesters are asking to be raped, therefore, they should not be surprised if it happens. the second comment suggests that the display of naked female bodies can create more rapists. on the other hand, protesting fully covered would be more effective to stop ‘potential rapists’. the comment further suggests that the protester’s naked bodies are an invitation. in previous studies, victim-blaming emerged in discussions centred on how believable the survivor’s accounts were [ , , ]. in these studies, commenters would point out details surrounding the circumstances in which the assault occurred to portray the survivor as an unreliable storyteller that was somehow complicit in their assault (e.g. “she wanted it” or “no believes the slut who cried rape”) [ , gender issues ]. these studies focused on exploring a rape culture discourse that emerged on social media following a publicised event of sexual assault (ex. bill cosby case or the steubenville rape trials). in these cases, the victim-blaming narrative is linear and easily recognised. however, the #endrapecultre and #nakedprotests were not aimed at seeking justice for a specific victim(s) of sexual assault, rather they were trying to create awareness of the broader social mechanisms which allow rape to be perpetuated, specifically on university campuses. therefore, it was surprising that victim-blaming emerged as such a dominant theme in our study. both of the above comments suggest that woman being topless is seen as an invi- tation to be raped; thereby implying that the way a woman dresses can either bring occasion to or prevent sexual assault. this serves to reinforce the notion that women need to take responsibility to prevent themselves from becoming victims of sexual assault by dressing “appropriately” [ , ]. victim-blaming is an integral part of rape culture discourse as it relates to the normalisation of male sexual violence in society. this narrative suggests that we are taught that sexual violence and male sexual aggression is the norm [ , ]. there- fore, women are expected to anticipate sexual violence against them and should sub- sequently enforce behaviours and actions to avoid such encounters. essentially the argument follows that if women enter a situation where there is a strong chance they might be assaulted, they should avoid engaging in behaviours that may increase that chance. however, the fallacy of this argument is revealed when women, children and men become victims of sexual assault in circumstances where sexual violence is not anticipated. in these cases, the victim-blaming narrative becomes incompatible. for example, news reports of rape cases where victims were subsequently murdered, are free of comments regarding the victim’s circumstances and are rather replaced with calls for justice and the perpetuation of narratives portraying rape and rapists as senseless deviants needing to be locked away from society. a recent example of this is the case of uyinene mrwetyana, a young student who was raped and murdered on the th of august after she went to collect a package by the post office [ ]. following this, thousands of south africans gathered to protest the ongoing gen- dered based violence affecting the country [ ]. this disjunction is related to the “just-world hypothesis”, a cognitive bias that an individual receives morally fair outcomes and consequences based on their behav- iours and actions [ ]. just world beliefs (jwb) derive from people’s desire to live in a world that is just and fair, thereby perpetuating a ‘you reap what you sow’ men- tality [ ]. in this framework, victims are blamed for their misfortunes, whether it is related to abuse, sexual assault or poverty [ ]. the comments related to the #nakedprotest implicitly reveal that the protest- ers should have known better than to march topless in the streets where they may be “inviting” a “potential rapist” to take action. comments such as these serve to warn the protesters by pointing out that their behaviour might result in them being sexually assaulted, and if this should happen they would have no one to blame but themselves. furthermore, by describing the “potential rapists” the commenters are reinforcing the notion that rape is faceless, and driven by male sexual needs. consequently, this leads to the belief that rape is a deviant event that happens to women who failed to follow societal warnings to keep themselves safe [ ]. in line gender issues with jwb, the protesters are seen as violating societal standards of appropriate and acceptable dress. therefore, they become rape-able. challenging victim‑blaming user (f) stop victim blaming! these protests need to happen so people like you can gain awareness that the issue isn’t with the victim. your analogy is a clear indication of this very issue. why should kids be given the responsibil- ity not to be free or naked if they please so they don’t ’provoke’ or ’seduce’ the monsters? cause that’s what paedophiles and rapists are right? senseless beasts who can’t control themselves so we shift the blame to the victim because they provoked the senseless animalistic being that has no control over them- selves? this is what your analogy is communicating to myself and many others user (f) user there is no such thing as displaying yourself for more rape, that’s disgusting. no one should be deemed rape-able or blame the victim of rape. stop justifying rape and making it seems like it’s a sequence of events that leads to the act of rape. the mere fact that sweets are on display in a shop does not mean you have a right to steal them. that should be common sense. the above comments suggest that commenters who supported the protest recog- nised the victim-blaming comments aimed towards the #nakedprotesters and chal- lenged these through posting their own counter-narratives. the comment made by user attempts to challenge the idea that rapists and paedophiles are unable to con- trol their sexual desires and that the ‘victim’ should not take responsibility. simi- larly, user ′s comment uses an analogy to draw attention to the fact that what a woman wears should not be considered an invitation to rape. recently, the #safetytipsforladies movement trended across social media. this movement was started by hilary brownman-smart in march to express her exasperation with the dominant anti-rape advice articles which serve to perpetuate victim-blaming attitudes [ ]. according to brownman-smart: i am absolutely sick to death of being told what to wear and what to do and how to be, as though any of that will somehow save me from being raped. it’s not a woman’s responsibility to prevent sexual assault. how about we teach men not to rape instead? [ ] according to furuhata, this hashtag movement represented a ‘symbolic rerout- ing’ of anti-rape discourse that marks a change in the direction concerning how we talk about and politicise sexual violence and its prevention [ ]. the findings sug- gest that counter-narratives on victim-blaming stemming from hashtag movements such as #safetytipsforladies are being reproduced in online debates such as these, which provides more support for similar counter-publics across the globe. there- fore, the commenters may not have consciously set out to form a counter-public (and may not even be aware of its existence). however, by drawing attention to and challenging the comments which perpetuated victim-blaming, they echoed similar gender issues counter-publics formed in other contexts, and in doing so increased the reach of the victim-blaming counter-narrative. trivialising rape culture rape culture is maintained through a variety of mechanisms. however, denial of rape culture and the silencing of victims are two disempowering methods [ , ]. denial is sustained and maintained through shared values, violence and fear. fam- ilies and friends of perpetrators of sexual violence deny that someone they know could be capable of such an act. by accepting the realities of rape and rape culture, people need to accept that rapists are not mentally disturbed deviants, rather they are people who have social ties, and can, therefore, be someone who is known to them. they would need to accept that sensible people in their lives are in fact capable of committing such a senseless act of violence. the denial of both the act of rape and the culture that perpetuates it leads to the assumption that neither the act nor the culture exists [ ]. however, to deny rape culture when it presents with real social ramifications is to deny the experiences of those who have been affected by it [ ]. throughout the comment section, rape culture trivialisation emerged through dis- course aimed at criticising the protest method and demeaning the protesters. on the other end of the spectrum, people called out the commenters who focused more on other aspects of the protest, rather than the message being conveyed. demeaning the protesters user (m) these people obviously don’t want to study, next they will be pro- testing about cloudy days or being lied to about father christmas. let’s start protesting about the healthy gym freaks because they make the rest of us look fat..! user (m) but protesting like this is so outright pathetic and attention seek- ing user (m) don’t you people have anything better to do¿???????? how can the situation be so out of control that this needs to be protested in this manner? the above comments are aimed at the #nakedprotesters and suggest that these protesters are only raising the issue at hand because they do not want to study. the comment made by user suggests a sense of denial as he does not believe the situ- ation to be so bad that it warrants protest action. these comments suggest that peo- ple engaged in ad hominem tactics, a fallacious argumentative strategy which hin- ders effective discussion of a topic by attacking the character or motive of the person making the argument [ ]. comments criticising the attire of the protesters present with a two-fold function. on the one hand, it reinforces sexualised and heteronorma- tive views of the female body. on the other hand, it serves to trivialise the message behind the protest as the commenters choose to focus more on the protester’s state of undress, rather than engaging with the issues being raised. gender issues challenging trivialisation tactics user (f) “these women are making a statement against rape and yet the only thing y’all can focus on is ‘eww they’re naked’ user (f) how is being raped by your fellow student nonsense? everyone has a right to education and a chosen profession. if you’re a victim of rape should you judge carry on with your studies as if nothing happened? what if it happens to someone else? user (f) are people so indoctrinated by rape culture that the only thing they took from this video is the fact that there are exposed breasts? user (f) (user , f) you are focusing on one aspect of this protest and condemning it. the comment made by user challenges the idea that the student protest is ‘nonsense’ by challenging people to think about it in a way that personalises the situation, while the comments made by user and user challenge the fact that some people only seem to focus on one aspect of the protest, rather than the mes- sage. the above comments also point towards the emergence of a counter-public within the comment threads. these commenters directly challenged those who insulted the protesters or focused more on the method rather than the message of rape culture, which was emphasised as the problem. discussion the present study explored rape culture discourses resulting from the public reac- tions towards the #endrapeculture and #nakedprotests that occurred across south african campuses in april . similar to previous studies [ , , , , ], we found that social media played a key role, not only in drawing attention to the protest, but also providing a space for people to engage in debate and discussion around the topic of rape culture. furthermore, the findings suggest that rape cul- ture discourses were prominent within the comment threads, with victim-blaming and trivialising rape culture representing the dominant attitudes of expression. these reactions to the protests are not unique to the current context as previous studies exploring perceptions of rape culture on social media also found victim-blaming attitudes to be a significant finding [ , ]. therefore these findings are not alto- gether surprising. indeed, for the past few decades, research on rape and its related factors have shown that the dominant mainstream attitudes towards rape and sexual assault have persistently reflected a rape culture discourse in which women are often shamed and blamed for their assault. however, what has changed is the increased availability and access to social media and communication technologies which allows people to discuss issues around rape at a much broader level than ever before. previous studies have shown that social media represents a growing arena of engagement, discussion and con- flict between those who speak out against the perpetuation of rape culture through gender issues practices of victim-blaming, slut-shaming and perpetrator support and those who engage in these cultural practices [ , , , ]. similarly, our findings also indi- cate the emergence of an online counter-public, as many commenters rejected and challenged discourses which perpetuated victim-blaming practices and trivialised the issue by focusing more on the method of the protest, rather than the message behind it. previous studies have shown how young feminists use social media to respond to rape culture and hold accountable the purveyors of its practices and ways of thinking when mainstream media, police and other authorities do not [ , ]. the findings from this study reflect previous studies which indicate that people who challenge victim-blaming and the trivialisation of rape culture online seek to inter- rupt the cultural support that normalises male sexual violence [ , , ]. it indi- cates that people can use social media to collectively respond and challenge domi- nant discourses surrounding sexual violence and rape culture. based on this, we wish to highlight two points. firstly, our findings support previ- ous studies that found victim-blaming and trivialising rape culture to be dominant themes, which it is concerning. as previously mentioned, the victim-blaming dis- courses emerged in our study, despite the lack of an identifiable victim. this sug- gests that victim-blaming discourses are ingrained in the public consciousness, even in the absence of sexual assault. additionally, we argue that these unchang- ing attitudes towards rape, sexual assault and gender-based violence suggest that the mainstream patriarchal public sphere has failed to accept and legitimise the counter-narratives resulting from the feminist counter-public. according to gouws, it is important to understand the way we talk about rape culture, or the discourse around rape culture, as this determines how rape culture is constructed, the extent and nature of moral outrage, and which solutions are pursued [ ]. furthermore, this discourse determines to what extent rape culture will be conceptualised as a politi- cal, societal, and institutional or health-related problem, and will thus be addressed according to those terms [ ]. therefore, government, public health officials, media and policy makers must address this issue by increasing public awareness and edu- cation around rape culture. secondly, we wish to highlight the significant role social media plays in creating and maintaining counter publics which challenge mainstream discourse around rape culture. before the advent of digital and social media communication technologies, people had to engage in various strategies and modes of communication to firstly establish a counter-public and secondly, to maintain it despite efforts from the public to dismantle and outlaw these groups [ , ]. despite these struggles, we see that these counter-publics were successful in bringing about various legislative changes such as the abolishment of the jim crow laws and the advent of women’s suffrage [ ]. these changes were made possible as the counter-publics provided the oppor- tunity of increased public participation from those individuals who were previously excluded. social media platforms allow people to continue and improve upon the practice of developing and maintaining counter-publics. for example, the #endrapeculture protest not only mobilised support from universities across south africa, it also allows for comparison to be drawn and lessons to be learnt from simi- lar protests in other parts of the world, thereby increasing the scope and shared nar- rative of rape culture as a counter discourse. gender issues however, these movements are not without critique. scholar researching online movements have often suggested that social media can be used for slacktivism [ ]. in other words, the activism that occurs on these platforms are seen as superficial at best and do not translate to real-world changes [ ]. here we reiterate the argument made by baym and boyd [ ] to state that real-world practices are often replicated on social media. in other words, any form of activism and advocacy that occurs on these platforms is driven by individual determinism, not the technology itself. based on our findings, we are unable to make conclusions regarding the ‘real world changes’ that may have resulted from the #endrapeculture protests, however, we do argue that the value of social media lies in its ability to create opportunities for peo- ple to learn and engage on a variety of social issues that they otherwise may not have been exposed to. this in turn, allows for the proliferation of counter-narratives which lend support to counter-publics. to utilise social media technology effectively as a tool to aid in rape culture edu- cation and activism, we need to first understand how people use these platforms to engage in discussion and debate. therefore, rape culture attitudes and practices online are reflective of attitudes and practices offline. as such, understanding the role of social media in shaping public opinions, attitudes and willingness to speak out against sexual assault can contribute to the facilitation of preventative measures against rape and sexual assault. limitations we found that social media may be a valuable tool for researchers, both as a research site and a data collection tool [ , ]. facebook is considered one of the most pop- ular social networking sites and through this platform, we were able to collect rich qualitative data in a short amount of time. therefore, we note that our findings are limited to this context as we did not include data from any other social media plat- form in the analysis. however, the results from our study are useful as it allows for comparisons to be made with similar studies. for example, stubbs-richardson et al. [ ] examined rape culture discourse on twitter and also found victim-blaming to be a dominant theme. additionally, as the comments were collected in retrospect, there was no way for us to interact with the users in real-time. however, in another article, we explain how we conducted focus groups on facebook as a way of trian- gulating the data [ ]. another point of consideration is related to the gender of the commenters and the language they used to post comments. for this study, we could only determine the gender of the participants based on their usernames and pro- files. however, we recognize that in doing so overlooks the multiplicity of gendered expression (and the intersection of sexuality) that may occur on these platforms. as such, the current study could not conclude how gender and sexuality intersect with gbv and rape culture discourse. while we did not include language as part of our analysis, it was interesting to note that the comments were posted in english. con- sidering the diverse language demographics in south africa, this suggests that many of the commenters may have been communicating in their second or third language [ ]. from a linguistic perspective, it would be interesting to see how rape culture gender issues is expressed in different languages. however, this also raises questions regarding the strategies individuals use to participate in publics and counter-publics. more research is needed to understand how factors such as gender (from a non-binary per- spective) and language may influence rape culture discourse, and what effect these have on legitimising narratives that emerge from the counter-public. funding ms zaida orth received funding from the oppenheimer memorial trust (omt) (trace id: m vx hhd ) and the national research foundation (nrf) (grant no.: ) towards the com- pletion of her ma research psychology degree. this manuscript is based on findings from ms orth’s thesis which she submitted in accordance with the requirements of her ma degree. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. ethical approval all procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the hel- sinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. informed consent no informed consent was needed for this study. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative com- mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. references . armstrong, c. l., & mahone, j. 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( ). exploring rape culture in social media forums. computers in human behavior. https ://doi.org/ . /j. chb. . . . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. affiliations zaida orth  · michelle andipatin  · brian van wyk * zaida orth zaidaorth@gmail.com michelle andipatin mandipatin@uwc.ac.za brian van wyk bvanwyk@uwc.ac.za department of psychology, university of the western cape, robert sobukwe rd, bellville  , south africa school of public health, university of the western cape, robert sobukwe rd, bellville  , south africa http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethicspdf https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /ghs. . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /j.chb. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.chb. . . http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - 	“these women are making a statement against rape and yet the only thing y’all can focus on is ‘eww they’re naked’”: exploring rape culture on facebook in south africa 	abstract 	introduction 	#endrapeculture protest in south africa 	methodology 	data collection 	data analysis 	ethical considerations 	findings 	victim-blaming 	perpetuating victim-blaming 	challenging victim-blaming 	trivialising rape culture 	demeaning the protesters 	challenging trivialisation tactics 	discussion 	limitations 	references ea .indd a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – mikrobioota – inimese vältimatu partner agu tamm – tartu Ülikooli emeriitprofessor akadeemiline loeng tartu Ülikooli arstiteaduskonna . aastapäevale pühendatud teaduskonverentsil . oktoobril agu tamm i n i m e s e m i k r o b i o o t a k s ( m b ) n i m e t a- takse inimkeha kõikide mikroorganismide kog umit. a r v utuslik ult on neid niisama palju kui inimkeha muid rakke ( : ). seega pakuvad uurimused rikkalikult detaile, aga vähem üldisi vaateid, mb-töödes dominee- rivad enamasti mõju negatiivsed aspektid. ka autor i enda v arasemad uur i ng ud on pi irdu nud soole m i k rof loora a k ti ivsuse suurenemise ning vähiriski ja toitainete imendumise häirete seoste uurimisega. tänu uute meetodite kasutuselevõtule o n v i i m a s e l a a s t a k ü m n e l p l a h v a t u s l i- kult aktiveerunud mikrobiaalsete mõjude uurimine inimesel. verstapostidena sellel teel peaks nimetama kaht suurt projekti: usa national institutes of health human microbiome project ( hmp ) ja euroopa liidu seitsmenda raamprogrammi projekt metagenomics of the human intestinal tract ( metahit ). mikrobioomiks nimeta- ta k se kõi k ide nende m i k roorga n ism ide genoomide kogumit. see suhe olevat ( ) inimese genoomiga võrreldes : mikro- bioota kasuks! mõlema projekti eesmärgiks seati uurida meie kehas ja kehal elavate mikroobide kogu- kondi ning selgitada nende rolli inimeste te r v i s ele ja h a ig u s tele. h m ps k ä sit le t i mikroobe enam kui paikmest, sh nahalt ja igemetaskutest kuni tupe tagumise võlvini. me t a hi t-s keskendut i sooles t i k u le k u i mikroobide suurimale reservuaarile, selle seostele kahe euroopas olulise häirega – põletikulise soolehaigusega (inflammatory bowel disease, ibd) ja rasvumisega. olulise tulemusena suudeti isikuid väljaheiteproo- v ide me t age no om i l i s e s e k ve ne e r i m i s e alusel ( ) rühmitada ühte kolmest entero- tüübist, mis on määratletud domineeriva mikroobi perekonna bacteroid’i, prevotella või ruminococcus’e alusel ( , ). teised uurijad on soovitanud liigitada uuritavaid isikuid vastavalt nende mikrobioomide geneetilisele n-ö liigirikkusele: kas arvukus on alla või üle geeni ( ). vaesemat mbd on leitud soolepõletikuga haigetel ja rasvunutel. u u e d u u r i m i s m e e t o d i d v i i ma sel aa st a k ü m nel on m i k robioom i uurimise meetodeid – lisaks klassikalistele k u lt uu r idele – a rendat ud kol mes põh i- suunas: dna järjestuse uuringud ( s rrna, dna nn hajus tulistamine, ingl shotgun), rna ekspressiooni uuring ud ja väikeste molek u l ide uu r i ng ud (metaboloom i k a). senini on esiplaanil olnud püüdlused selgi- tada, millised organisme võib leida sooles ja m i l l i ne on nende su htel i ne a r v u k us, vähem on uuritud, millised on selle koosluse funktsioonid. m i k r obioom i uu r i mu sed on a nd nud rohkesti infot metaboolsete radade kohta sooles. on suudetud kirjeldada vähemalt metaboolset rada mb kui koosluse genoomis, näiteks lak toosi ja teiste suhk r ute ning aromaatsete aminohapete lammutamisest k u n i fe( ii ) ok südatsioon i n i. Ük s nende geneetiliste meetodite suurimaid puudusi on, et ei suudeta näidata isiku mb tegelikku metaboolset aktiivsust, kuna tuvastatakse nii ekspresseeritud kui ka mitteekspres- seeritud geene. infot võib genereerida ka surnud rakkudest ( ). samas on teada, et rohkem kui pooled roojaproovides olevatest rakkudest ei ole elujõulised või on tugevalt kahjustatud. kui rna-põhiselt rakke sortida ning mb mikroobide koguarvu ja aktiivseid populatsioone eristada, võib leida suuri erinevusi. seetõttu, kui kasutatakse töötle- mata roojaproove, ei tohiks funktsionaalset mikrobioomi tuletada ainuüksi dna-põhiste eksperimentide andmete testide alusel ( ). seev ast u v ä i keste molek u l ide uur i m i ne a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – ( lühikese ahelaga rasvhapped, fenoolid, polüamiinid, h , ch jpt) annab küllaltki hea kvantitatiivse ülevaate toimuvast konk- reetsel isikul. kokkuvõttes on metaboloomi uuringud osutanud mb mõjule vähemalt koele-elun- dile (sool, maks, aju, rasvkude, skeletilihas), kuid ka energia ainevahetusele ja paljudele immuunprotsessidele. samas tuleb arves- tada inimese mb koostise tohutut indivi- duaalset erinev ust ( ). s o o l e m i k r o b i o o ta ja p e r e m e h e d i e e t tundub loogiline, et esmane küsimus on ikka, milline on dieedi mõju soole mb-le, ja sealt edasi, kas mb kaudu saaks mõjus- tada peremeest. on selge, et sama dieet ei mõjusta erinevaid inimesi ühtviisi. kui võrreldi geneetiliselt rasvunud hiirte soolte mbd nende la hjade pesa kon na kaaslaste omaga, samuti rasv unud ja lahjasid vaba- ta htl i k ke i n i mesi, selg us, et ras v u m i ne on seotud kahe domineeriva bakteriaalse hõimkonna bacteroidetes’e ja firmicutes’e suhtelise ar v uk use muutustega. ilmnes, et rasvunu mikrobioomil on suurem võime saada dieedist energiat. enamgi, see tunnus osut u s ü lek a nt av a k s: k u i idu v abu h i i r i kolon i seer ida r a s v u nud i n i mese mbg a, s uu r end ab see nende h i i r te keh a r a s v a kogust oluliselt enam kui n-ö lahja mbga kolon i seer i m i ne ( ). ta a n l a s tel teht ud uurimus näitas, et inimese rasv umisega seotud signaal seedetrakti mikrobioomist võib olla palju tugevam kui inimese praegu teadaolevast genoomist saadav signaal, kui püütakse eristada rohke ja vähese geeni- arv uga isikuid ( ). praktilise rakendusena: sel osal rasv unuist, kelle organism allub püüdlustele kehakaalu vähendada mingit tüüpi dieediga, on mb geenisagedus väiksem ja suurema variaablusega. Ühek s soole m i k robioom i uu r i ng ute silmapaistvaks tulemuseks on akkermansia muciniphila lug u. a. muciniphila avastati . aastal. uue generatsiooni uuringute alusel osutus ta kõige arvukamaks üksiklii- giks inimese sooles ( , – % kogu bakterite hulgast). ta on gramnegatiivne anaeroobne bakter, spoore ei moodusta ja on spetsia- liseerunud lima kasutamisele. kui teda on vähe, on soole limakiht õhem, kuid enam on rasvumust, diabeeti, kardiometaboolseid haigusi ja madala intensiivsusega põletikku ( ). arv ukatel prekliinilistel mudelitel on näidatud, et a. muciniphila manustamine kaitseb hiiri toidust põhjustatud rasvumise eest, suurendab soole limaskesta barjääri funktsiooni ja vähendab insuliiniresistent- sust, samuti soole- ja süsteemset põletikku ( ). a. muciniphila välismembraanis esinev spetsiifiline valk (a muc_ ), millel on samasugune toime kui bakteril, võib osutuda tugevaks kandidaadiks edasiste ravimite väljatöötamiseks ja sel rav imil oleks lai kasutusvaldkond. m i k r o b i o o ta ja a l at o i t l u s k va Š i o r ko r i n Ä i t e l nagu teada, pole maailma tervishoiu suurim probleem ülekaalulisus, vaid nälg. esimestel eluaastatel on suurim lapse surma põhjus- taja alatoitumus. kvašiorkor, tõsine ägeda alatoitluse salapärane vorm, on ebapiisavate toitainete tarbimise ja täiendava keskkonna- koormuse tagajärg. on selgunud, et üksnes kasutusvalmis terapeutiline toidu ( kv tt ) laialdasest rakendamisest ei piisa suremuse vältimiseks ( ). toidu mõju, ükskõik kui rikas see on, sõltub olulisel määral vastu- võtva peremehe soolestiku mikroobidest, mis võivad muutuda ka vaenulikuks ( , ). ma law i on ü k s sel l i seid m a id, k u s u mb es pr ot sent i a l l a v i iea a s t a s tes t lastest on kängu jäänud, protsenti on alakaalulised. leiti, et amoksitsilliini või tsefdiniiri lisamine kv tt-le kvašiorkoriga laste ravis parandas märgatavalt taastumist, vähendas suremust ja suurendas kehakaalu. r av iefek t i selg itades uu r it i ma law i ka k si k ute paar i, kel lest %-l ol i k v t t lahkneva raviefektiga ( ). kui lahkevate tulemustega kaksikute fekaalset mbd siirati gnotobiootilistele hiirtele, ilmnes, et malawi toidul oleva kvašiorkori mb põhjustas retsi- pienthiir tel märk imisväärset kehakaalu kaotust, millega kaasnesid häired aminoha- pete ja süsivesikute metabolismis. selleks, et kaalukaotust vältida, pidi mbs leiduma mikroobide kombinatsioon (r. gnavus + c. symbiosum), mis soodustaks insuliinisarnase kasvufaktori produktsiooni ( ). need leiud viitavad soolestiku mb-le kui kvašiorkorit põhjustavale teguritele. tugeva alatoitluse rav i a nt ibioot i k u m idega võib mõjutada selle inimese mb koostist, et soodustada toitainete paremat kasutamist. m i k r o b i o o ta ja a ju p r e k l i i n i l i s e d j a k l i i n i l i s e d u u r i n g u d on nä ida nud k a hesuu na l ist koostoi met a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – aju-soole-m ik robioom i teljel. soolestik u mik roobid edastavad impulsse kesk när- v isüsteemi ( kns) vähemalt kolme paral- leelse ja interak tiivse kanali kaudu, mis hõlmavad närvisüsteemi, sisesekretsiooni ja immuunsüsteemi signaale. aju võib mõju- tada soolestiku mikrobiootika koostist ja f u n k tsioon i autonoomse nä r v isüsteem i kaudu, modu leer ides teat ud sooleosade motoorikat, soolepassaaži ja -sekretsiooni ning soole limaskesta läbilaskv ust, samuti ( potentsiaalselt) hormoonide luminaalse sek retsiooni kaudu, k ui moduleeritakse otseselt mikroobset geeniekspressiooni. p r ek l i i n i l i s e d uu r i ng ud k i r jeld av ad seost soole-mikrobioomi ja ärritatud soole s ü nd r o om i ja r a s v u m i s e v a hel , ag a k a seoseid mitmete psühhiaatriliste ja neuro- loogiliste haig uste patogeneesi tasandil ( ). selliseid varasemaid viiteid enamasti ignoreeriti, kuni sudo kaasautoritega ( ) nä itas . aasta l esi mesena, et soole normaalse mb puudumine varajases eas mõjutab märk imisväärselt täiskasvanud hiire stressitundlikkust ja et neid muutusi võib osaliselt vähendada soolestiku varajase koloniseerimisega tavapärase mbga, isegi ühe liigiga. edasised uuringud on iseloomustanud mbst lähtuvaid neurokeemilisi muutusi. muut ub aju koore ja h ipoka mpuse poolt toodetud neurotroopsete faktorite tase, väheneb hipokampuse serotoniini ( -ht ) r e t s e p tor i a e k s pr e s s i o o n , s u u r e n eb vöötkeha monoamiini käive ja sünapsite plastilisus väheneb ( , ). knsi ja mikro- bioota suhtlust vahendavad mitmesugused mikroobide toodetud molekulid, sh lühikese ahelaga rasvhapped, sekundaarsed sapp- happed ja trüptofaani metaboliidid. mb võib iseseisvalt toota või kaasa aidata mitmete neuroaktiivsete molekulide, sealhulgas, kuid mitte ainult γ-aminovõihappe, serotoniini, noradrenaliin i ja dopam iin i tootm isele. siiski pole seni teada, kas virgatsid jõuavad a sja koh a s tes s e r e t s e ptor ites s e või k a s saav utavad piisava taseme, et peremehel reaktsiooni esile kutsuda. mitmete psühhiaatriliste (depressioon, ärevus) ja neuroloogiliste haiguste (parkin- soni tõbi, autismispektri häired) puhul kaas- nevad patsientidel märkimisväärsed seede- traktivaevused. seetõttu viitavad hiljutised uuringud soolestiku mb tähtsusele mitte ainult gastrointestinaalsete sümptomite patofüsioloogias, vaid ka mb potentsiaal- sele rollile esmases haiguses. kaks erinevat tüüpi uuringut võiksid viidata põhjuslikule seosele. esiteks, e. coli alatüüpide puhangud v iisid tabandatud elanikkonnas kanadas ja saksamaal depressioonist ja ärev usest põhju st at ud sü mptom ite sagenem i sen i ( ). teiseks, depressiivse inimese väljaheite mikroobide transplantatsioonid põhjustasid rotimudelites depressiivset käitumist ( ). võimalikule põhjuslikule seosele viitavad need andmed, mis näitavad, et parkinsoni tõve mudeli närilistel suurenevad liikumis- häired, kui neile üle kanda parkinsoni tõvega patsientide mb, aga seda toimet ei ole, kui üle kanda tervete kontrolliisikute mb ( ). sel juhul võivad seedetrakti sümptomid olla juba haiguse prodroomiks. selline võimalus muudab soolestiku mb paljutõotavaks teabe- allikaks parkinsoni tõve diagnoosimisel ja prognoosimisel. kokkuvõttes, kliiniliste andmete kogu- nedes võib selg uda mb m it mekesi ne ja oluline mõju knsi fenotüüpidele. mõiste- tavalt on käimas olevate teadusuuringute eesmärk tuvastada uusi ravimärklaudu ja töötada välja ravistrateegiaid. m i k r o b i o o ta ja k a r t s i n o g e n e e s a r ves t ades soole m i k r of loor a ü l i s uu r t metaboolset võimekust, on ammu arvatud, et mõnel ju hu l suuda k s m ik rof loora ka kok a r tsi nogeene toota ( ). si isk i pole sellised otsese teg uri otsing ud suutnud selgitada soolevähi teket isegi perekondliku polüpoosi korral. a lles v iimastel aastatel, kui on fekaalse mb kõrval hakatud uurima jämesoole limaskestaga seotud mikroobe ( ) või mikrobioome ( ), on tek k inud selgem ettek ujutus jämesoolevähi pato- geneesi s t . dejea k a a sautor iteg a ( ) t uv astas perekond l i k u adenomatoosiga patsientide jämesoole limaskestal koldelisi ba k ter iaa l seid biof i l me, m i s koosnesid peamiselt escherichia coli’st ja bacteroides fragilis’est. võrreldes ter vete inimestega oli patsientide jämesoole limaskestal väga rikkalikult geene, mis kodeerivad onko- tok si i n ide sek ret sioon i ( kol iba k t i i n i ja bacteroides fragilis’e toksiini). tuumorile v a s t u võt l i ke h i i r te kokolon i s e e r i m i ne nende k a he t üvega suu rendas i nterleu- kiin- sisaldust sooles ja dna kahjustust soolepiteelis. neil hiirtel kiirenes kasvaja tekkimine ja suurenes suremus, võrreldes ainult ühe bak teritüvega koloniseeritud a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – hiirtega. seega, tuumori tekkeks on vaja mitme kahjustava teguri üheaegset toimet otse l i maskesta le, l isa k s mõjutab orga- nismi veel peremeesorganismi geneetiline eelsoodumus haiguse suhtes. a n a lo og ne on ol nu d m aov ä h i p ato - geneesi selg ita m i ne. helicobacter pylori krooniline infektsioon on kõige tugevam teadaolev riskitegur mao adenokartsinoomi tekkeks, kuid siiski mitte ainus. Üllatusena on mikrobioomi uuringud tõestanud mao limaskesta rohket kolonisatsiooni ( hõim- konna mikroobidega!), viidates h. pylori’le kui olulisele mao mb regulaatorile ( ). h. pylori on gramnegatiivne bakter, mis selektiivselt koloniseerib mao epiteeli ja mida peetakse mao mb endogeenseks liik- meks, sest populatsioonides on – % ( ) nakatunud h. pylori’ga. samas vaid – %-l h. pylori’ga koloniseeritud isikutest areneb mao adenokartsinoom ( , ). selles prot- sessis on vaja arvestada nii h. pylori tüvede erineva virulentsuse ja adhesiivsusega kui ka peremehe interleukiini -beeta ja tuumori nek roosi f a k tor-a l f a polü mor f i sm ideg a, samuti keskkonnateguritega nagu suure soolasisaldusega ja rauavaene dieet. seega, olukordi, kus mb seostub pere- mehe haiguste riski suurenemisega või häire tekkega, tuleks käsitleda kui kõrvalekallet mb ja peremehe vastastikusest kasulikust koostööst ( ). m i k r o b i o o ta p o s i t i i v n e m Õju o n l e i t u d , e t s o ol e m i k r o ob i d t o o v a d peremehele kasu õige mitmel viisil. nende seni teadaolevad soodsad mõjud hõlmavad järgmisi protsesse ( ): • soodustatakse kasulike toidukomponen- tide muundamist ja hõlbustatakse nende kasutuselevõtmist; • valmistatakse kasulikke fermentatsioo- niprodukte, mis mõjutavad soolesisaldise ph-d ja mõjustav ad soole l imaskesta epiteelirakke; • tõrjutakse välja patogeene, konkuree- rides nendega kinnituskohtade pärast soole limaskestal; • vastastikustes mõjutustes soole immuun- süsteemiga aidatakse kaasa nii loomuliku kui ka omandatud immuunfunktsiooni kujunemisele ja reguleerimisele; • mü rg i seid a i neid k a s muu nd at a k se, lahjendatakse või eemaldatakse; • väljaheite hulga moodustamises osaledes vähendatakse mao-soole passaaži aega. ko o s t Ö Ö va ja d u s m i k r o b i o o ta u u r i m i s e l ja r a k e n d a m i s e l mb seoste ja võimalike mõjude tulemusliku uurimistöö üks eeldusi on erialade koostöö. Ülalpool kõneks olevais mb uurimise metoo- dikais tunnevad end mugavamalt preklii- niliste erialade spetsialistid, kuid kaugem eesmä rk on t u lemu si saada k l i i n i l i stes olukordades, mida valdavad täies ulatuses üksnes nende erialade spetsialistid. täna- päevase teadustöö üldine tendents aga on pea igal alal süvenemine üpris kitsale lõigule omaenda er ia la s. pa r i ma lõppt u lemu se saav utamiseks on aga vaja käsitluse konk- reetsust võimalikult kõigis valdkondades. kuna suur osa ( kuni %) mbst on seni osutunud mittekultiveeritavaks, on kultuu- rist sõltumatute molekulaarsete meetodi- tega saadud palju uusi teadmisi soolestiku mb koostise ja mitmekesisuse kohta. on ilmnenud, et inimese soole mb on veelgi keerulisem ökosüsteem, kui varem eeldati. enamik kultuurist sõltumatutest meeto- ditest tuginevad väga konser vatiivse s ribosomaalse rna (rrna) geeni järjestusele bakteritel ja arhedel. a ndmete hiiglaslik hulk omakorda nõuab mikrokiipide kasu- tamist ning uusi biostatistika meetodeid. samas peab arvestama, et vaatamata oma nimetatud eelistele ei suuda metagenoomika määrata mikroobse geeni ekspressiooni. soolesti k u m i k robioom i f u n k tsionaa lse aktiivsuse määramiseks on vaja kasutada teisi meetodeid nagu ainevahetuse vahe- ja lõpp-produk tide määramist (metaboloo- mika). m i k r o b i o o ta ja t s Ü k l i l i s t e a m i n o h a p e t e m e ta b o l i i d i d n e e r u h a i g u s t e n Ä i t e l alljärgnevalt on püütud viidata vajadusele taotleda konkreetsust nii meetodites, ekspe- rimendi seadetes, kliinilistes andmetes kui ka terminites. aastakümneid olid teada ja kliinilistes uu r i ng utes r a kendat ud sel l ised soolest p ä r i n e v a d b a k t e r i a a l s e d m e t a b ol i i d i d nagu indool ja p-kresool. neid tunti tüüpi- liste ureemia toksiinidena. samas ei seos- tatud nende tekkimist kindlate mikroobi- dega ega aminohapetega, vaid lihtsalt nn valkude bak teriaalse fermentatsiooniga. siis aga selgus, et nende ühendite suurem sisaldus veres seostub kroonilise neeruhai- gusega patsientide suurema suremusega südame-veresoonkonnahaigustesse ( , ). a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – järgneval põhjalikumal analüüsil osutus p-kresool selliste südame-veresoonkonna- haiguste ennustajaks, mis ei sõltunud ei glomerulaarsest filtratsioonikiirusest ega traditsioonilistest framinghami risk ite- guritest ( ). autorid küll ei teadnud, kas p-kresool kui kardiovaskulaarne riskitegur on pat sient idel mod i f it seer it av. va st av katse prebiootilise oligofr uk toosinuliini manustamisega nädala jooksul vähendas oluliselt p-kresüülsulfaadi tekkimise kiirust ja seerumi kontsentratsiooni hemodialüü- sipatsient idel. sa ma l aja l i ndok süü lsu l- faadi vastavad näitajad märkimisväärselt ei muutunud ( ). nende leidude põhjal järeldasid autorid, et indoksüülsulfaat ja p-k resüü lsu lfaat pärinevad teineteisega m it teseot ud ba k ter iaa l se a i ne v a het u se radadelt, jättes lahtiseks küsimuse nende produktide potentsiaalsetest tootjatest. i ndool ig a er i l i s t v a id lu s t ei tek i, e t selle tootjad on paljud indoolpositiivsed mikroobid, mille toksiline produkt sulfa- teer it a k se m a k sa s. p-k r esool ig a ol i a si keerukam. selle artikli autori töörühm on juba varem avaldanud andmed türosiini kohta n ing p-hüdrok sü-fenüü lääd ik hap- pest p-kresooli tootvate mikroobide kohta nii in vitro ( , , ) kui ka in vivo ( , ). töörühm leidis rohkem seoseid katse- loomade soole limaskestal resideeruvate mikroobidega kui soolevalendiku mikroobi- dega. p-kreooli eeldatavate produtseerijate hulgas on nii aeroobe nagu stafülokokid kui ka anaeroobe nagu klostriidid, bakteroidid ja bifidobakterid ( , , ). bakke ( ) on postuleerinud, et efektiivseks tootmiseks olgu vastavaid mikroobiliike keskkonnas kaks, kuna protsess kulgeb vaheühendite kaudu. erineva ja selektiivse toimespekt- riga antibiootikumide manustamise järel käitusid p-kresool ja indool täiesti erine- valt, mistõttu on alust kinnitada, et nende tootjad on valdavalt erinevad ( ). hilju- tised ülevaated tõendasid, et p-k resooli tootjad paigutuvad hõimkonda firmicutes (clostridia, ruminococcaceae jms), indool- positiivseid aga leidub lisaks veel muus hõimkonnas ( ). saito . aasta in vitro katsetes täpsustati, et p-kresooli tootsid rohkesti coriobacteriaceae ja clostridium’i klastritest xi ja xiva testitud liigid, teised liigid vähem ( ). kui siia lisada, et just clostridium’i klastri xiva rühm võib moodus- tada kuni % limakihiga kinnitatud mbst, siis saame taas viite jämesoole limaskesta mb spetsiifilise rolli kohta, kuid ka täpsema määratluse, kust otsida p-kresooli tootjaid. teiseks on niisama oluline k liiniliste a n d m e t e ko n k r e e t s u s . a l lp o ol m õ n e d vastavad näited. neeruhaiguste puhul on selged kriteeriumid haiguse raskuse kohta. neid staadiume tuleb uurijail seoste otsi- misel kindlasti arvestada. annab ju metabo- liitide määramine hetkeseisu biokeemiliste sündmuste kohta kroonilise neeruhaiguse prog resseer u m isel. sha h ja kaasautorid ( ) tuvastasid läbilõikelises metaboliitide uuringus, et plasma metaboliitide profiilid on ., . ja . faasis kroonilistel neeruhaigetel oluliselt erinevad. muutused puudutasid a rg i n i i n i a i ne v a he t u s t, koag u l at sioon i ja põleti k u suurenem ist, karbok sü laad i anioonide transportimist ja steroidhormoo- nide tootmise vähenemist neerupealistes. nende erinevuste arvestamisega võib jõuda neeruhaigustega seotud etapispetsiifiliste biomarkeriteni. rhee kaasautoritega ( ), kasutades plasmaproove -lt framing- hami uuringus osalenud inimeselt, kellel aastat varem polnud kroonilise neeruhai- guse tunnuseid, leidis, et haiguse ilmumist võib prognoosida ainult metaboliidi alusel ( kromato-mass-spektromeetriline määra- mine). siinkohal tuleb ka lisada, et ainult osa neist metaboliitidest pärinesid mbst, ülejäänud aga peremehe ainevahetusest. seega, üht olulist faktorit – mb korrelat- sioone – uurides ei või tähelepanuta jätta ka muid samal ajal toimivaid tegureid. poesen kaasautoritega ( ) uuris samal aja l nelja r ü h m a ( hemod ia lüü si saav ad patsiendid, ter ved isikud, vanusega sobi- tatud terved ja isikud, kes sõid sama toitu ko du s). ku ig i hemo d i a lüü si ja mõlem a ter ve kontrollrühmaga patsientide välja- heiteprof iilid eristusid selgesti, vähenes see erinev us sama toitumisharjumusega leibkon n a t u lemu s te a r vesse võt m i sel . seevastu ilmnesid märkimisväärsed erine- v used rottide väljaheiteproov ide vahel nädalat pärast / -nefrektoomiat, võrreldes nefrektoomiata opereeritud rottidega ning see viitab siiski sõltumatule neerufunkt- siooni kahjustuse mõjule katseloomadel. seega saab seostada kroonilist neeruhai- g u st jä mesoole spe t si i f i l i se m i k roobse ainevahetusega, k uigi neer ufunk tsiooni kahjustuse mõju inimesel võib iseenesest olla vähema tähtsusega võrreldes toidu ja muude neer u ha ig usega seot ud teg ur ite (ravimid, kaasnevad haigused) mõjuga. a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – s e l ge m a d e r i n e v u s e d s o o l e m i k r o - bioomis ilmnevad lõppstaadiumis neeruhai- guse korral ( ). võrreldes sadu toimivaid taksonoomilisi ühikuid ( ttü, ingl otu ), leiti, et patsientidel oli brachybacterium’i, cate nibac te r ium ’i , ente robac te r iac eae, halomonadaceae, moraxellaceae, nesteren- konia, polyangiaceae, pseudomonadaceae ja t hiothrix ’i perekon na ta k sonoom i l isi ühikuid tunduvalt enam. eelmisele viitele analoogses nefrektoomiaga rotikatses leiti ba k ter iaa l se te tt ü-de suu r i m er i ne v u s ureemiliste ja kontroll-loomade vahel, eriti lactobacillaceae ja prevotellaceae perekon- dade vähenemine. seega esineb ureemia korral soolestiku mikrobioomis ulatuslikke muutusi. selle nähtuse bioloogiline mõju ei ole teada ja ootab edasist uurimist, et jõuda kliinilise rakenduseni. s e n i j ä ä b k a l a ht i s e k s , k u m b n e i s t muutustest on primaarne, kas düsbiootiline mikrobioom on kroonilise neeruhaiguse põhjus või tagajärg. kui vastastikuste stimu- latsioonide circulus vitiosus on juba käivi- tunud, genereeritakse suuremas koguses ureemia toksiine sooles. kuidas neid prot- sesse maha suruda, peavad näitama edas- pidised laiaulatuslikud uuringud, enne kui saab soovitada mõnd meetodit kliiniliselt rakendada ( ). a meerika Ühendriik ide d iabeed i, seede- ja neer u ha ig uste insti- tuut ( niddk ) ongi käivitanud kaks sellist projekti, et kombineerida metagenoomika ja metaboloomika võimalusi neeruhaigete uu r i m isel ( ). p r aeg u sek s on nä ha, et metagenoomika võimaldab avastada olulisi suundi mb koostises, sh ulatuslikus seni kultiveerimata mb osas, metaboloomika aga dešifreerida seni tundmatuid funkt- sionaalseid seoseid peremeesorganismi ja mb vahel. siiski tuleb arvestada, et nendel paljutõotavatel meetoditel on nii oma eelised kui ka oma piirangud. t u l e m u s t e s Õ lt u v u s m e e t o d i t e s t hugon jt ( ) võrdlesid tänapäevaseid meeto- deid väljaheite mb uurimisel. nende analüüs hõlmas grami järgi värvimist, voolutsüto- meetriat, transmissioon-elektronmikroskoo- piat ( tem ), bacteroidetes’e ja firmicutes’e hõimkonna kvantitatiivset reaalajalist pcri (qpcr) ja v -pi i rkon n a le suu n at ud s rrna geenimaterjali pürosekveneerimist. autorite arvates näitas uuring, et inimese soole mikrobioota kogu mitmekesisus ei ole teada, sest erinevate tehnikatega saadakse väga erinevaid t ulemusi. nad järeldasid põhjendatult, et bakterikogukondade üldise koostise hindamiseks tuleb kombineerida mitmeid meetodeid ja et igast meetodist tulenevate lahknevuste tundmine võiks olla kasulik molekulaarsete uuringutega leitud oluliste erinev uste selgitamisel. ko n k r e e t s u s t ja tÄ p s u s t k a t e r m i n i t e s lõpuks on soov itatav taotleda konkreet- sust ja täpsust ka terminites. planeeritud rahvusvahelisi projekte nimetatakse „hästi määratletud uuringuteks“ ( ). nende jälgi- tavust soodustab konkreetsus ka terminites. ka käesolevas tekstis on eespool sageli kasu- tatud soole mikrobioota sünonüümina välja- heite materjali mbga, nagu paljud autorid kasutavad. tegelikult on siiski tegemist vaid jämesoole valendiku distaalse osa mbga, mis on kõige kergemini kättesaadav materjal. samas võib väljaheitest saadud mb uurimise t u lemu s er i neda jä mesoole l i maskest a l limakihis resideeruvast kooslusest, kindlasti erineb see suuresti peensoole mbst. nii ongi selle artikli sissejuhatuses kirjeldatud mb „enterotüüpe“ soov itatud ( ) nimetada pigem „fekot üüpidek s“, sest peensooles domineerivad hoopis perekonnad strep- tococcus, clostridium ja veillonella. m i k r o b i o o ta u u r i m i s e p e r s p e k t i i v i d mb uurimise perspektiividest tuleks nime- tada soovi a) avastada uusi olulisi seoseid, sh positiivseid teineteist toetavaid suhteid mb ja peremeesorganismi vahel; b) mõjus- t ad a m bd p er emehele soo d sa s suu n a s; c) metoodilisi probleeme, mille lahendamine k iirendaks k liiniliste seoste uurimist ja rakendusi. a r vestades uute andmete rohkust, on uute seni kirjeldamata seoste avastamine ootuspärane. siis peab ainevahetusradade uurimine näitama uusi sihtmärke, mille kaudu saaks süsteemi mõjustada. siinkohal oleme tõesti vaid tee hakul. peamiselt on hästi teada või ma lused mõjustada mbd erineva toimespek triga antibiootik um i- dega. nende vajaduses akuutsetel juhtudel pole kahtlust. väga vähe on seni uuritud tegev uste pikaajalisi tagajärgi ja kõrvaltoi- meid, sh antibiootikumide kaugtagajärgi. kuidas targalt juhtida seda nõrka põleti- kureaktsiooni inimese organismis, mida a r s t i t e a duskonn a a a s ta pÄ e v eesti arst ; ( ): – seostatakse ka soole mbga ja on tõsise huvi objektiks nii südame-veresoonkonna- kui ka liigesehaig uste pu hu l? osa t u lev ik u- lo ot u si on p a ndu d pr ebio ot i k u m ide le, mis järgivad looduslikke mõjutusi mb-le. eeldatakse, et inuliinitüüpi fruktaanidel ja g a la k to-ol igosa h ha r i id idel või k s ol la mõju metaboolse endotokseemia raviks või väikese aktiivsusega põletiku vähendami- seks ülekaalulistel ja rasv unud inimestel ( , ). samas ei ole tõenäoline, et üks ja sama prebiootikum (või mis tahes muu faktor) sobib üht v iisi kõikidel juhtudel. tõendu spõh i ne r av i eeldab v a st av at diagnostikat. kui praegu on teada, et mbs saab eristada vähemalt põhimõtteliselt erinevat mb tüüpi, siis on ootuspärane, et igale neist võib (võivad) olla ainult temale sobiv(ad) mõjustaja(d). esimene väga suur probleem on see, kuidas ja millal suude- takse lahendada metood ilised rask used mb ja peremehe suhete hindamisel nüüd, mil tänu keerukatele mb kultiveerimiseta molekulaarsetele tehnikatele on täielikult muutunud ettek ujutus mb koostisest ja rollist. kas need mb tüübid on inimesel aastatepikku püsivad või saab neid ka muuta soovitavas suunas? kas nende variantidest sõltub toitainete ja ravimite käsitlus? alus- tuseks püütakse välja selgitada n-ö ter ve inimese mb koostis. kuidas def ineerida 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t i o n s a i m e d a t modif ying microbiota: a systematic review. ann intern med ; : – . dp .incorporating option values into the economic evaluation of health care technologies centre for health economics incorporating option values into the economic evaluation of health care technologies stephen palmer peter smith discussion paper   incorporating option values into the economic evaluation of health care technologies stephen palmer and peter smith centre for health economics university of york york yo dd england march che discussion paper abstract despite uncertainty being intrinsic to economic evaluation of health care, existing techniques for handling uncertainty remain underdeveloped compared to the formal techniques commonly applied in the business sector. this paper develops an alternative approach to handling uncertainty in economic evaluation based on the quantification of uncertainty using ‘option pricing’ techniques. the central feature of option pricing is that investments are rarely ‘now or never’ propositions. the presence of uncertainty and the degree of irreversibility of a decision makes it clear that some flexibility in the timing of a decision is often a desirable characteristic with an economic value. we demonstrate how, with modification, option pricing techniques can be applied to the decision rules for economic evaluation, illustrating how the presence of even modest degrees of uncertainty can give rise to substantial changes in the investment criterion for economic evaluation. the paper concludes by identifying the key determinants of the ‘option value’, namely the presence and type of uncertainty; the ability to defer a decision; and the irreversibility of the decision. the relative significance of each of these key determinants on the decision rules for economic evaluation will depend on the particular characteristics of the technology under consideration. incorporating option values into economic evaluation introduction uncertainty is intrinsic to all economic evaluation. indeed it can be argued that, in the absence of uncertainty, economic evaluation is trivial, obviating the need for highly trained and moderately well paid economists. uncertainty in the economic evaluation of health care technologies is no less acute than in any other sector of the economy. yet, while the business sector has developed a number of formal techniques for handling uncertainty in investment appraisal, methodologies for incorporating uncertainty into health technology evaluation are currently at best crude, and are at worst distinctly misleading. the conventional approach towards handling uncertainty in corporate sector project appraisal is to use expected cash flows as the basis for net present value (npv) calculations. the uncertainty implicit in the project is then reflected in an adjustment to the discount rate, using methods such as the capital asset pricing model. these methods rely on the existence of a competitive market in corporate finance, and are probably not relevant to health care evaluation. moreover, the npv approach has come under increasing criticism because it ignores a fundamental consideration that applies to many investment decisions: namely, the irreversible nature of the investment decision. in practice, once a commitment to invest (or abandon) has been taken, the investment becomes a sunk cost. in effect, the firm loses an important option as to when and whether to invest (or abandon). like all assets, this option has an economic value, and an irreversible decision entails a loss of such value. the loss of an option should therefore be included as a cost of the associated project (trigeorgis ). this insight can explain why there often appears to be a good deal of inertia in the corporate sector’s investment choices. in practice, many firms choose to invest only in projects that exceed the market’s required rate of return by a considerable amount. similarly, they tend to abandon a project only when its expected rate of return appears to fall well below the required market rate of return. a powerful explanation for such behaviour is that by delaying a decision the firm is in both cases retaining a valuable option – in the first case an option to decide at some time in the future not to invest; in the second, an option to continue operating – that would be destroyed by definitive action. in effect, the firm defers an apparently optimal decision, in the hope that better information will become available in the future. in our view, this criticism of the corporate sector npv approach also has important implications for conventional approaches to health care technology assessment. in practice, many health care decisions involve considerable uncertainty, often involving an irreversible commitment of resources. yet in the rapidly changing world of health technology, there might often be powerful reasons to “wait and see”, rather than definitively to accept (or reject) a new technology. the purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of an options approach to health technology evaluation, and to discuss the implications for evaluation methodologies. the intention is to indicate how it is possible in some circumstances not only to indicate the magnitude of certain types of uncertainty, but also to quantify its impact on any economic evaluation. che discussion paper the paper is organized as follows. section evaluates existing techniques for handling uncertainty in economic evaluation, exploring the roles and limitations of sensitivity and statistical analyses. section explores the use of an alternative approach, the ‘options’ approach. this section describes how uncertainty, irreversibility and the timing of the investment can have profound implications for the conventional investment rules. finally, section examines the implications of the ‘options’ approach with respect to health technology assessment. incorporating option values into economic evaluation . uncertainty in economic evaluation all cost-effectiveness analyses produce estimates of the costs and outcomes of interventions in conditions of uncertainty. this uncertainty will be associated with the data inputs, such as estimates of resource use, the probability of particular clinical events and the unit costs of resources; the methods of analysis used, such as the discount rate employed; and the extent to which the analysis can be generalized to routine clinical practice (briggs et al ). for particular inputs, the analyst may have a very good knowledge of what the true values are based on clinical trials and observational studies. for other aspects of the study, however, the current level of certainty concerning the correct value may be extremely limited. the degree of uncertainty in an evaluation will in part be determined by the quality of its data sources. the debate that exists in clinical evaluation about the value and feasiblity of randomized controlled trials (rcts), relative to observational studies (black ), also takes place in relation to economic analysis. increasingly, rcts are being used as a vehicle for the collection of resource use and outcome data for economic evaluation (drummond ). although many consider the rct to be the ideal design to measure key parameters in an evaluation (e.g. clinical effectiveness), decision making may require this data to be augmented by information from other sources and plausible assumptions about parameters that are hard to measure. for example, although an economic evaluation may demonstrate that a given technology is cost-effective in a particular context, or cost-effective based on an intermediate outcome, uncertainty about either the generalisability of the results or the link between intermediate outcomes and final health outcomes may affect the usefulness of the findings. in these cases there is a clear role for modelling in linking intermediate clinical endpoints to final outcomes (e.g. life years saved) or generalising results to other settings (buxton et al ). hence, decision analytic models are commonly used as a framework to synthesise data from a range of sources and assumptions regarding unmeasured (or unmeasurable) parameters (weinstein et al ; thornton et al ; dowie ). hitherto, two techniques for handling uncertainty have traditionally been considered relevant in health care evaluation: sensitivity analysis and statistical analysis. table summarizes the variety of methods that can be used in these approaches, which are now considered in turn. table : existing approaches for assessing uncertainty in economic evaluation sensitivity analyses statistical analyses parameter uncertainty • one-way sensitivity analysis • multi-way sensitivity analysis • scenario analysis (inc.max- min analysis) • threshold analysis • probabilistic sensitivity analysis • box method • taylor series method • nonparametric bootstrap method • fieller theorem method che discussion paper sensitivity analysis until recently, sensitivity analysis has been used as the standard way of dealing with uncertainty in cost effectiveness analysis. the importance of employing sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of a study’s conclusions has been well documented (weinstein ) and is reflected in pharmaceutical guidelines which recommend both the incorporation of sensitivity analysis and the quantitative reporting of these analyses in pharmacoeconomic evaluations (commonwealth department of human services and health ; ontario ministry of health ; canadian co-ordinating office for health technology assesment ; task force on principles for economic analysis of health care technology ). in a sensitivity analysis, some integral input (or inputs) in the calculation is changed by a meaningful amount or varied from worst case to best case, and the cost-effectiveness ratio (cer) is recalculated. the resulting difference in the ratio provides the analyst with an indication of how sensitive the results are to a substantial but not implausible change in that parameter. if the major results are insensitive to a reasonable variation in a parameter, then the analyst can be relatively sure that the conclusions are robust to the assumptions made about that parameter. in cases where variations in parameters cause wide divergences in the estimated cer, threshold analysis can be performed to identify critical values of particular inputs which cause the cost-effectiveness to change from dominant to non-dominant, or in the case of incremental cers, the critical values which cause the ratio to exceed the maximum acceptable value. the decision maker can then make assessments of the relative likelihood of each scenario before deciding whether to implement the programme. table : cost-per-qaly estimates (£) for medical procedures after sensitivity analysis of outcome and survival data procedure gudex’s cost per qaly estimates (£) cost per qaly estimates (£) after sensitivity analysis of outcome and survival data . scoliosis surgery for neuromuscular illness . shoulder joint replacement . kidney transplant . surgery for idiopathic scoliosis in adolescents . treatment of cystic fibrosis with ceftazidime . haemodialysis . continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (capd) - - - - - - - source: petrou et al ( ).[ ] the potential problems the decision makers face in interpreting the results of sensitivity analysis can be clearly illustrated. in table seven procedures (petrou et al ) have been initially ranked in terms of their incremental cost per qaly estimates. according to the incorporating option values into economic evaluation efficiency criterion, scoliosis surgery, with the lowest cost per qaly gained, represents the most efficient intervention. however, these point estimates do not provide an indication of the likely impact that any uncertainties may have on the point estimate of the cer. table provides a graphical illustration of the potential differences in cost-per-qaly estimates for different medical procedures following sensitivity analysis of outcome and survival data. if the critical cut-off point had been set at £ , per qaly, using the point estimates of the cost-per-qaly estimates would lead the decision maker to adopt procedures - . since the cost-per-qaly estimates for procedures - exceed the critical threshold the decision maker would not choose to adopt these from an efficiency perspective. however, when the impact of uncertainty is explored using sensitivity analysis, the decision becomes less clear. while scoliosis surgery for neuromuscular illness has the lowest point cost per qaly estimate, it also has the largest range in cost-per-qaly estimates following sensitivity analysis. the implication is that scoliosis surgery could be either the most efficient or least efficient intervention presented. similarly the ranges in cost per qaly estimates could mean that the true cer for procedures , and lies outside the critical threshold value, while only kidney transplantation can be deemed robust according to the efficiency criterion since the range of the cer lies within the constraint imposed. furthermore, treatment of cystic fibrosis with ceftazidime could potentially be deemed efficient since the lower end of the cer range lies within the cost-per-qaly constraint. table : graphical representation of the impact of sensitivity analysis on the cers procedure . scoliosis surgery for neuromuscular illness . shoulder joint replacement . kidney transplant . surgery for idiopathic scoliosis in adolescents . treatment of cystic fibrosis with ceftazidime . haemodialysis . continuous ambulatory preoneal dialysis (capd) £ £ £ £ £ £ che discussion paper statistical analysis the trend towards conducting prospective economic evaluations alongside clinical trials increases the opportunity for measuring the whole distribution of costs rather than simply producing a point estimate (‘wholly stochastic’ analysis), allowing statistical tests of economic hypotheses to be performed (coyle , office of health economics ) and uncertainty in stochastic data to be quantified using confidence intervals (o’brien and drummond ). the confidence interval (ci) provides a statistical measure of precision for estimates with sample variation. the conventional % ci defines a range of values for the cer within which one can be % confident that the true value lies. the calculation of confidence intervals around cost-effectiveness ratios is considered particularly important because the economic importance of a change in costs can only be considered in combination with the clinical importance of changes in effect (drummond and o’brien ). statistical analysis has a considerable advantage over simple sensitivity analysis in being able to consider multiple sources of uncertainty and, over multiway sensitivity analysis, by providing decision makers with an easily interpretable result (i.e. a p-value relating to the differences in the cer allowing for uncertainty). however, particular problems in statistical analysis arise in the calculation of confidence intervals around cost-effectiveness ratios. the distribution of the ratio may be unknown, and there is no known unbiased and efficient estimator of the ratio’s standard error. although at present there is no general consensus on the most appropriate method of conducting such statistical analysis, this area is currently an active field of research and it is likely that this will be an extremely promising approach. in the presence of uncertainty, the reporting of the confidence intervals around cers in statistical analysis clearly enables decision makers to make more informed judgements about the value for money of an intervention than using sensitivity analysis (polsky et al ). however, similar problems to those described for sensitivity analysis will occur when decision makers are faced with interpreting the results of cer whose confidence intervals exceed the critical threshold value. in the end, in such circumstances, the decision becomes a matter of judgement for which quantitative data can give only limited guidance. incorporating option values into economic evaluation . the “options” approach the central insight of the options approach to investment appraisal is that most investment decisions have three important characteristics: . there exists a degree of uncertainty about the future state of the world; . the investment entails an essentially irreversible commitment of resources; . there is usually some discretion as to the timing of the investment. conventional cash flow techniques treat these issues in a rather unimaginative and unrealistic fashion. in particular, it is usual to consider the investment as being "now or never", and little attention is paid to the possibility of deferring a decision until some later time, when better information regarding costs and benefits may be available. yet in practice deferral is one of the most important (and frequent) decisions taken. this being the case, it is clear that some flexibility in the timing of an investment decision is often a desirable characteristic with an economic value. the question therefore arises: how can we value such flexibility? the answer lies in some form of option pricing theory. options are ubiquitous in economic life. hitherto, most academic and practitioner emphasis has been on financial options, in the form of various sorts of derivative securities. however, as trigeorgis ( ) notes, there is no reason to exclude more concrete situations (what have become known as "real" options) from the analytic framework. examples include the valuation of mineral rights or film rights, or decisions to invest in research and development (which may confer an option to enter a market). indeed it is probably the case that option considerations are dominant when real investment decisions appear to fly in the face of npv calculations. for example, it is well documented that firms are much more cautious about big investments (market entry) than npv calculations suggest they should be. this may be because they consider deferral to be a valuable strategy. in the same way, this would explain the well-documented corporate reluctance to exit markets even when npv rules would suggest abandonment. in this respect, apparent conservatism in the investment market is readily explained in terms of reluctance to make irreversible decisions and the associated retention of options. note that a decision to proceed with an irreversible decision is equivalent to a loss of a hitherto available option. a simple example in order to explore some of the important issues underlying option pricing theory, we present a very simple stylized model within a cost-benefit framework, equivalent to the traditional npv evaluation framework, with the concept of “net social benefit” (nsb) replacing the npv criterion. consider an investment of instantaneous cost c(= ) which yields expected benefits with financial value b in perpetuity. depending on the future state of the world, those benefits might be large (l= ) with probability q or small (s= ) with probability ( -q). the situation is shown below, and we assume numerical values as shown. we assume q= . and a discount rate r of % per annum. che discussion paper if the investment is to be made now, then the expected future stream of benefits is [ql + ( - q)s] = [ . * + . * ] = £ per annum. hence the nsb of the investment is as follows: if on the other hand investment can be deferred for one year, then the future stream of benefits would be known with certainty. the current nsb of the project if benefits are favourable will be: while the current nsb of the project if benefits turn out to be unfavourable will be thus, the decision maker would only implement in one year's time if the benefits turned out to be favourable. otherwise the project would be abandoned (with nsb therefore zero rather than - ). the nsb of the project with deferral is therefore . *nsb + . * = , . note that this exceeds the nsb of the project implemented immediately by . that is, although the benefits are deferred for one year, the loss arising from the delay in implementation is more than offset by the improved information which permits the decision- maker to abandon the project in unfavourable circumstances. note that in this situation the value of the option to abandon the project can be quantified at , the difference between the nsbs with and without deferral. in effect, the value of the option is the difference between the benefits arising from abandonment in unfavourable circumstances and the costs of deferring immediate implementation. clearly this example is very artificial. however, at least conceptually, it can be readily extended to many time periods and many more states of the world. it highlights a number of issues that are features of most option valuations. notably, other things being equal the greater the level of uncertainty implicit in the decision (either in cash flows or discount rates), the greater the value of the option, as it becomes more worthwhile to await new information. an associated issue is that, as the time for which a decision may be deferred increases, so the value of the option increases. it is perhaps interesting to note that option pricing theory explains why many decisions are much more sensitive to uncertainty in discount rates than to the absolute level of discount rates. ,=./+-= )r+( q)s-( +ql +-c=nsb t = t ∑ ∞ ,]=./+[- . = )r+( l +c- r]+[ =nsb t = t ⎥ ⎦ ⎤ ⎢ ⎣ ⎡ ∑ ∞ ]=-./+[- . = )r+( s +c- r]+[ =nsb t = t ⎥ ⎦ ⎤ ⎢ ⎣ ⎡ ∑ ∞ incorporating option values into economic evaluation however, most importantly, the example indicates that - providing a small number of important elements of the problem can be modelled - there is no reason why the value of an option should not be quantified just like any other valued asset. of course, the methodology for such quantification is far from straightforward. in particular, it may in general involve complex dynamic optimization methods with demanding data and computational requirements. however, in most circumstances the valuation problem can be reduced to a relatively manageable format, so that apparently complex situations are not necessarily analytically or computationally intractable. central to the option pricing problem is the modelling of uncertainty. traditionally, uncertainty in option pricing theory has been modelled using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. uncertainty is modelled as a stochastic process, in which the variable of interest evolves over time in a partially random fashion. in this respect, two particularly important useful tools are the wiener process and the poisson process. under the wiener process (also known as brownian motion), an underlying random variable varies incrementally with known variance in each time period. the simplest form of this form of uncertainty is the random walk, in which the best predictor of tomorrow's value is today's value. the change from today to tomorrow follows a normal statistical distribution. in health care, it might be used to model a continuously varying variable such as (say) the prevalence of a disease. quite frequently a "drift" is introduced into the wiener process, which allows a systematic trend to be modelled independently of the random element. this might be incorporated (say) in order to model an expected downward drift in the price of a drug. figure illustrates a typical wiener process with upward drift. the mathematical form of this process can be written as: dzdtdx σα += where x is the variable of interest, dx is its movement in small time dt, α is the drift parameter, dz is the stochastic change in time dt, and σ is the standard error of the random change per unit time period. a number of further generalizations of the basic wiener process can be introduced where necessary. in the simplest form of a poisson process, a random variable can take only two values and has a fixed probability in each time period of changing from one to the other. this process is used to model situations in which the variable of interest is subject to rare but critical "jumps". in health care, it might for example be used to model the emergence of a new drug (which constitutes a discrete shock to the associated market). the magnitude of the jump may also be allowed to vary (for example, the improved efficacy offered by the new drug may be allowed to vary stochastically). che discussion paper figure : wiener process with drift time the type of stochastic process used in any modelling work must of course depend on the nature of the problem under investigation. however, having decided how to model uncertainty, the next stage is to estimate the implications for the economic evaluation. two basic approaches have been applied in the corporate sector: dynamic programming and continuous calculus. the structure of the simple example given above is similar to the familiar decision tree of conventional decision analysis, and one solution method could be the familiar method of "folding back" the decision tree using backward induction. dynamic programming is a more general and efficient method of solving such problems. with modern computing capability, calculation of multiperiod, multiple state examples may often be feasible, the most problematic issue often being the availability of relevant data rather than the solution method. dynamic programming can also be extended to continuous rather than discrete time. the continuous calculus approach has been widely applied in financial economics, where it is used to value financial options and has therefore become known as "contingent claims analysis". it yields very similar results to dynamic programming, the key difference being that dynamic programming requires an exogenously specified discount rate. contingent claims analysis depends on the existence of a complete market in tradeable assets, and can then treat the interest rate as endogenous. given the nature of health care, it is probably more appropriate to use the dynamic programming formulation, with exogenously fixed discount rate. incorporating option values into economic evaluation a more general example we now consider a more general treatment of an investment decision, which is analogous to a typical decision as to whether or not to implement a new health technology. we consider the benefits of the technology to be valued as v, and there is an investment cost of i. let the discount rate be ρ. then suppose the value of the project evolves over time according to the geometric brownian motion vdzvdtdv σα += which unfolds over an infinite time horizon. here v is the variable of interest (the value of the technology), dv is its movement in small time dt, α is the drift parameter, dz is the stochastic change in time dt, and σ is the standard error of the random change per unit time period. note that, compared with the pure wiener process, the formulation of this process introduces a term in v on the right hand side, which effectively allows us to model percentage changes rather than absolute changes in the variable v. using dynamic programming, dixit and pindyck show how this formulation gives rise to a differential equation )()( =−′+′′ fvfvvfv ρασ with a set of associated boundary conditions. the function f(v) is the current value of the investment if its current estimated benefits are v (that is, before implementation, f(v) comprises the sum of the “intrinsic” value v and the option value of having the potential to implement v). this set of equations has a solution of the form βavvf =)( where ) ( ) () ( − −− = ββ β β β i a and / // σρσασαβ +⎥⎦ ⎤ ⎢⎣ ⎡ −+−= more importantly, the solution yields an optimal value of v, denoted v*, which is such that once v exceeds v*, the technology should be implemented. v* is given by: iv * − = β β from the point of view of this paper the key observation is that v*/i, the required benefit cost ratio, is not a constant. with no uncertainty (σ = ), v*/i = . that is, the critical benefit:cost che discussion paper ratio is . this reflects the traditional cash flow rule that in order to invest, benefits must simply exceed costs. however, if uncertainty exists (σ > ) then the critical ratio v*/i depends on the value of β, which is itself determined by the discount rate ρ, the drift parameter α and the stochastic standard variability σ. in order to illustrate the importance of this result, consider the perfectly reasonable situation in which the annual discount rate is % (r = . ), there is no drift (α = ) and the estimated value of v has an annual standard deviation of %. this implies that σ = . . then it can be readily shown that β = . , and the critical ratio v*/i becomes . . that is, estimated benefits must be % higher than costs before implementation is optimal. more generally, figure illustrates the relationship between the amount of uncertainty σ and the critical ratio, given r= . and "= . note the rapid increase in the ratio associated with quite modest increases in uncertainty. figure : v* as a function of sigma . . . . . . . . . sigma v * finally, figure demonstrates the value of the option to invest. if the investment is a now or never proposition, then the value of the option is shown by the solid line. if the benefit-to- cost ratio exceeds (nsb positive), the option value is the estimated value of the net benefits. if the ratio is less than (nsb negative) then the value of the option is zero, because in that case the decision maker will choose not to make the investment. however, if the investment can be postponed, then the option is valuable even if the computed benefit-to- cost ratio is less than (represented by the dashed line). even though the investment may have a zero or negative nsb were it to be undertaken today, the option still has a value because the delay gives room for the hope that additional information will reduce the uncertainty associated with the investment. incorporating option values into economic evaluation figure : the value of the technology . . . . . computed benefit ratio v al ue che discussion paper . implications for health technology assessment crucial to the options approach is the notion that the passage of time will tend to reveal new estimates for key sources of uncertainty. in practice this will often be the case. for example: • the equilibrium price of new drugs or capital equipment will become clearer once the initial stage of the product life cycle has ended; • estimates of the long term benefits of a therapy and the generalisability of the results will become clearer as more trials become available, and longer term outcomes are reported; • the external validity and generalisability of the results of pharmacoeconomic evaluations will become evident when the results of late phase iii, post-marketing and phase iv studies are reported; • estimates of population costs and benefits will become clearer as more epidemiological evidence is assembled. if an “all or nothing” decision is taken now, the data available may preclude secure judgement, leading to the potential for an incorrect decision. if a decision on implementation is delayed, then some short term losses may be incurred (if the therapy subsequently turns out to be cost-effective) but this must be weighed against the potential for making a more informed decision at a later date, when better data may be available. the results outlined above may therefore have crucial implications for the economic evaluation of health care technology. they imply that the presence of even modest degrees of uncertainty may give rise to substantial increases in the cost-effectiveness ratio in order for implementation to be recommended. in this section we first outline the main strands of economic evaluation methodology, and summarize the principal issues they give rise to. we then discuss their shortcomings from an options perspective. cost-benefit analysis most of the theory of option pricing has been developed in the context of the net present value model, as applied to the commercial sector. within health care, this is analogous to the principle of cost-benefit analysis (cba), which represents the most comprehensive and theoretically sound form of economic evaluation (robinson ) being explicitly grounded in welfare-economic principles. practical measurement difficulties and objections to valuing health benefits in monetary terms, however, have tended to limit the use of cba in the health care field. instead, cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analyses, which value health outcomes in non-monetary units, have become more prevalent form of analyses in this area (elixhauser et al ). whilst these approaches avoid the objections raised regarding the monetary valuation of health benefits, the efficiency of alternative interventions cannot be assessed using the net-benefit criterion. instead, the ratio of cost to effect is calculated. incorporating option values into economic evaluation cost-effectiveness analysis in cost-effectiveness analysis (cea) the health benefits of alternative interventions are measured in non-monetary units such as life years ‘saved’ or quality-adjusted life years (qalys). since costs and benefits are measured in non-comparable units, the central measure of relative efficiency becomes the ratio of costs to benefits (e.g. cost per life-year saved or quality-adjusted life years). the cost-effectiveness ratio (cer) for comparing the alternatives is the difference in their costs (∆c) divided by the difference in their effectiveness (∆e), or cer = c/e (∆c/∆e). the cer ratio represents the incremental cost of obtaining a unit health effect (e.g. cost per year of life saved, cost per quality-adjusted life year gained) from a given health intervention when compared with the next best alternative. within cea, an intervention is considered dominant (more efficient) if it results in higher (or equivalent) benefits and lower costs than the existing intervention (drummond et al ). similarly, when the new intervention results in lower (or the same) benefits at a higher cost, this intervention is inefficient relative to the existing intervention. accordingly, interventions in each of these categories are considered to provide compelling evidence for adoption and rejection respectively from an efficiency perspective (laupacis et al , drummond et al ). however, such a decision rule does not enable the relative efficiency of those interventions which are either: more effective and more costly or, less effective and less costly, or indeed whether a dominant intervention is worth pursuing at all when compared to other independent health care programmes (birch and gafni ). in these instances the relative efficiency of an intervention cannot be assessed without reference to a critical ratio (or threshold value of the incremental cer) which is used to determine whether a particular value of the cost-effectiveness ratio is considered acceptable. determining the critical ratio for cost-effectiveness analysis the most appropriate method for determining the critical ratio has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years (birch and gafni ; johannesson and weinstein ; johannesson ). while a number of alternative approaches have been identified (e.g. reference to published qaly league tables, rule of thumb), two alternative approaches have been established as the most theoretically correct methods for establishing the critical ratio for the cer (karlsson and johannesson ). the first approach is based on the maximisation of health gain subject to an explicit budget criterion. for programs competing for a limited budget, the choice of treatments will depend on the size of the budget. interventions are ranked according to their incremental cost-utility ratios from lowest to highest. for a specified budget, the optimal decision rule is choose the intervention with the lowest incremental cur and then add independent treatments or replace mutually exclusive treatments from the list until the resources are depleted (weinstein and zeckhauser , weinstein and stason ). hence, the lower the value of the incremental ratio, the higher the priority in terms of maximising health benefits derived from a given level of expenditure. the point at which resources are exhausted defines a che discussion paper maximum price for a unit of effectiveness (e.g. £ , per qaly) that is affordable within an explicit budget constraint, based on the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of the marginal intervention. the relative efficiency of any new intervention can then be assessed in relation to the marginal intervention(s) which would be replaced if the new intervention were funded. the second approach is based on willingness to pay, where the maximum price society is prepared to pay to gain one unit of additional health outcome is derived. rather than using the existing budget for health care as a decision rule, this method implicitly yields a budget for health care based on the aggregate costs for all programmes that meet the criteria. in a similar manner to the ranking of interventions based on an explicit budget, mutually exclusive and independent programmes are ranked and selected according to the maximum willingness to pay. hence, any new intervention must have a lower incremental cost per qaly ratio than the wtp criterion. applications of option pricing theory to the evaluation of health care technologies the basic premise of the critical ratio for cost-effectiveness analysis is to allow a definitive decision to be made regarding whether an intervention should or should not be implemented on efficiency grounds. however, as previously demonstrated with reference to the npv calculations, the derivation of a single, definitive critical cer should only be deemed appropriate in conditions of perfect information. hence, when uncertainty exists in an evaluation, the use of a single criterion for an immediate accept/reject decision may not be appropriate. in the area of health technology assessment, there may be instances where delaying an investment decision is possible in anticipation that improved estimates of key sources of uncertainty will be revealed in the future. accordingly, it is evident that option pricing theory could be used to value the option to defer a decision until more definitive information is available. in these instances, incorporating the value of this option will have significant implications for the critical cer. the identification of the critical cer enables the impact of uncertainty to be quantified in cost-effectiveness analysis with minor modifications to the nsb calculations reported previously. under these revised calculations, the optimal value of v, denoted by v*, represents the maximum acceptable value for the incremental cer. for example, suppose that the critical cut-off value for the ratio had been set at £ , per qaly (representing the value of the marginal intervention which would be displaced by a new intervention). theoretically, any new intervention which has a cer less than £ , per qaly should thus be implemented in favour of the marginal intervention. however, this criterion only applies in a situation of perfect information and no uncertainty (σ = ). when uncertainty exists (σ > ), then the critical ratio should be altered using option price techniques to take account of the type and level of uncertainty. we previously illustrated the situation in which the annual discount rate is % (r = . ), there is no drift (α = ) and the estimated value of v has an annual standard deviation of incorporating option values into economic evaluation %. under these condition it was shown that β = . , so that the critical ratio, v*/i, for the npv calculations became . . hence, according to the revised net-benefit criterion, the benefits of a project would have to exceed the costs by % before immediate investment was considered the optimal strategy. in a similar manner, uncertainty in cea can be incorporated into the cer. using the same example, the revised decision rule results by dividing the critical cut-off qaly value by . (i.e. £ , per qaly). in this example, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of the new intervention must be less than or equal to £ , per qaly before immediate implementation is considered optimal to the decision to defer until further information is available relating to the source(s) of uncertainty. in the area of economic evaluation, the role of option pricing may have several important applications. in particular, the approach seems suited to the evaluation of medical technologies that have high initial set-up and operating costs (commonly referred to as the ‘big ticket technologies’), such as computed tomographic scanning (ct), magnetic resonance imaging (mri) and extracorporeal emission tomography (eswl). the significant sunk costs associated with these technologies will reduce the irreversibility of an investment decision leading to an extremely high cost of abandonment if the technology is subsequently shown not to be cost-effective. furthermore, since high-technology markets are often characterised by a high level of future innovation, existing technologies may be superseded by second generation technologies relatively rapidly. in these cases, the cost of abandonment, upgrading an existing technology, or purchasing the next generation should be considered as part of the investment decision. although most attention regarding the ‘big ticket technologies’ has focused on areas of high technology with large sunk costs, it has also been argued that a second category should include technologies with lower initial set-up and operating costs, but which may be used extensively in patient care (johansen and racoceanu ). the widespread diffusion of low cost, high utilisation technologies seems particularly relevant in health care. for example, implementation of a new screening programme involving little setup costs may at first glance appear readily reversible. yet in practice the implementation of the programme may have changed perceptions and expectations, rendering infeasible a reversal of the policy. depending on the degree of diffusion, the sunk costs associated with implementing an inefficient intervention could be considerable. a further application could be in the area of pharmaceuticals as an aid to formulary and reimbursement decisions. in applying this model to the pharmaceutical industry, a distinction could be made between areas of therapeutic activity in which the new therapy is significantly different from existing medical therapy (i.e. new chemical entities) and therapeutic areas with products that may have only slight advantages over, or even duplicate, existing therapy (me- too drugs and generics). in each of these areas the life-cycle of each product and the relative costs will, in part, be determined by the prevailing market conditions including the degree of product innovation, the number of similar products and the length of patent life for new chemical entities. option pricing could be used to incorporate the likely downward drift in pharmaceutical prices resulting from the competition between generic products, while che discussion paper extreme ‘one-off’ shifts in prices caused by the expiration of a patent and the onset of generic competitors could be explored using a poisson ‘jump’ model, where the passage of time to the jump will be determined by the remaining patent life of a product. clearly if option considerations are important then they may lead to considerable variations in the critical cut-off value for the incremental cer, if the chosen interventions are to maximise the health benefit achievable in relation to the resources used. the notion that the relative efficiency of a new intervention can be assessed with reference to a single critical ratio is clearly incorrect. the key determinants of any option value, and hence of variation in the value of the critical cer in health care are: • the magnitude of uncertainty in parameter estimates; • the extent to which deferral is possible for some significant (possibly indefinite) period; • the extent to which the decision to implement is irreversible. we have already noted the importance of uncertainty in most evaluations, and of course most decisions can be deferred indefinitely. however, the third criterion of irreversibilty may need a little more consideration when applied to health technology assessment. an irreversible decision is one that entails an unrecoverable sunk cost. clearly the extent to which the introduction of a health care technology is irreversible will vary depending on circumstances. the most obvious example of an irreversible decision is one in which a major piece of capital equipment is purchased. yet if this equipment is readily resold on the open market, the implementation may not be as irreversible as it appears. on the other hand, programmes involving little setup costs may not be readily reversible if perceptions and expectations have changed the degree that reversal of the policy is no longer feasible. in general, we would expect technologies to exhibit variable degrees of irreversibility, leading to associated variations in the critical cut-off level. incorporating option values into economic evaluation discussion the aim of this paper is to illustrate the implications of incorporating uncertainty into the decision rules of economic evaluation. we have used a cost-benefit framework in order to illustrate the principles. however, we see no intrinsic difficulty in applying the principles of option pricing theory within the context of cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analysis. the principle that deferral may confer benefits is not altered by the evaluative framework used. however, the discrete treatment of costs and benefits may give rise to special methodological issues. in particular, it may be useful to consider separately the nature of the uncertainty associated with costs and that associated with benefits. we have shown that – if option considerations are important – they may lead to considerable variations in the critical cut-off value for the incremental cer if the chosen interventions are to maximise the health benefit achievable for a given level of resources. the paper has concentrated on the macro implications of option pricing for particular technologies. there is however no reason why it should not also be applicable at the micro level of the individual patient. for example, treatments exhibit different degrees of uncertainty and different degrees of reversibility. furthermore, there are conditions where there may be the ability to defer a decision until more definitive information is available, which could be considered a relevant strategy at this level (e.g. watchful waiting in the management of small abdominal aortic aneurysms and benign prostatic hyperplasia). an option pricing approach may offer the possibility of more systematic advice on the preference ordering for particular treatments for the individual. we hope that this paper has demonstrated that there is strong prima facie evidence that the existence of options in health care gives rise to potentially very large variations in the decision rules conventionally used to evaluate health care technologies. we have shown that – taking a very general model and some reasonable assumptions – large variations in critical cut-off values are likely between technologies exhibiting variations in uncertainty or reversibility. if our arguments are accepted, the key issue that remains to be addressed is how the option pricing issue can be incorporated operationally into health care evaluation. we suggest that in order to do so the following questions need to be addressed: • how can the uncertainty implicit in a health care evaluation be quantified? • to what extent is the intervention irreversible? • to what extent can decisions be deferred? • how can the associated option considerations be incorporated into the evaluation? • what are the implications for the cost-effectiveness cut-off values? one final consideration is that all of the analysis described here assumes an essentially passive approach towards the emergence of new information. it may well be fruitful, however, to seek to integrate the options approach with decision analytic approaches toward acquisition of effectiveness information (claxton, forthcoming). the intention would be that, che discussion paper rather than acting as a passive recipient of new information, the regulator should be able to make judgements about where research effort should be directed towards accumulating more information. this line of enquiry offers a potentially fertile agenda for future research. incorporating option values into economic evaluation references birch s and gafni a. cost effectiveness/utility analyses. do current decision rules lead us to where we want to be? journal of health economics ; 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( ): . . dixit ak, pindyck rs. investment under uncertainty. princeton, princeton u.p, . dowie j. evidence-based, cost-effective and preference-driven medicine: decision analysis based medical decisions is the pre-requisite. journal of health services research policy ; : - . drummond m, o’brien b. clinical importance, statistical significance and the assessment of economic and quality of life outcomes. health economics ; : - . drummond m. economic analysis alongside controlled trials. department of health . drummond m, o’brien b, stoddardt g, torrance g. methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. second edition. oxford university press, . elixhauser a, halpern m, schmier j, luce b. health care cba and cea from to : an updated bibliography. medical care ; ( ):ms -ms . che discussion paper johannesson m, weinstein m. on the decision rules of cost-effectiveness analysis. journal of health economics ; : - . johannesson m. on the estimation of cost-effectiveness ratios. health policy ; 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( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - conferencia «hitting the back of the net as a fottball interpreter» miércoles, de enero de . cantoblanco. organiza: antesala de babel. departamento de traducción e interpretación. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. coordinador: josé luis aja. ponente: ronan malt. resumen en esta charla, ronan malt describió su experiencia profesional diaria como tra- ductor e intérprete en el mundo del deporte, una actividad caracterizada por su gran variedad: desde la cobertura de conferencias de prensa hasta transmisiones en vivo y entrevistas en radio y televisión, así como la prestación de servicios de interpretación y mediación para clubes y aficionados. en el campo del periodismo y la traducción, ronan malt es un colaborador habitual de la prensa deportiva especializada: sus artículos y traducciones se han publicado en periódicos como as o marca, así como en las redes sociales de diferentes equipos y organizaciones deportivas. también vale la pena mencionar que ronan se ha especializado en la traducción de informes mé- dicos, que requieren una capacitación paralela muy específica en el campo de la terminología médica. su pasión por el fútbol es quizás su principal habilidad profesional, aunque ob- viamente tiene que aportar a su trabajo los otros conocimientos y técnicas que se requieren de cualquier traductor o intérprete: la capacidad de escuchar y concen- trarse, las habilidades para tomar notas, un uso exigente de fuentes terminológicas y una gran capacidad para hablar en público, así como un talento para la gestión y negociación. ronan malt es un intérprete y traductor nativo de inglés y especializado en fút- bol. es licenciado en lenguas modernas por la universidad de durham en . posteriormente, hizo un máster en interpretación (london metropolitan university). Ávido fanático del fútbol desde muy joven, ronan ha logrado combinar con éxito su pasión por los idiomas y su gran interés por el hermoso juego en su trayectoria profesional elegida. sus idiomas de trabajo son el español y el francés, y cuenta con una gran experiencia en el campo, sobre todo actuando como intérprete de pep mel durante su estancia en el equipo de la premier league, west bromwich albion. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - exposición de revistas de la universidad pontificia comillas y del grupo de comunicación loyola: «una muestra de la labor editorial de la com- pañía de jesús» del lunes de enero al viernes de febrero de . cantoblanco. organiza: biblioteca. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. resumen la biblioteca, entre el de enero y el de febrero, acercó a nuestra comunidad universitaria una muestra de las revistas científicas editadas por el servicio de pu- blicaciones de nuestra universidad, que cuenta con un importante fondo y una larga trayectoria en la difusión del trabajo docente e investigador, especialmente de los miembros de sus facultades, escuelas e institutos. sus títulos son: comillas journal of international relations, estudios eclesiásticos, icade, migraciones, miscelánea co- millas, padres y maestros, pensamiento y revista iberoamericana de bioética. también formaron parte de esta muestra las revistas de la compañía de jesús. existen ahí personas e instituciones jesuitas cuya tarea es ofrecer mediante el estudio y la reflexión una respuesta a las necesidades del mundo actual, poniendo el evan- gelio en diálogo con las culturas, las ciencias y las tradiciones religiosas. comunida- des científicas, universidades, instituciones de formación, publicaciones y centros fe-cultura integran este apostolado intelectual jesuita. apostolado que hoy se lleva a cabo especialmente en áreas como la teología, las ciencias sociales y humanas, el ámbito tecno-científico y la ética, a través de la publicación de libros y revistas. entre esas ediciones, la biblioteca de la universidad pontificia comillas cuenta con una amplia colección de sus publicaciones y quiso ofrecer a la comunidad universitaria una selección de sus revistas: catequética, homilética, jesuitas, manresa, mensajero, el promotor, razón y fe y sal terrae. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - charla: «claves y orientación en la atención a las víctimas de violencia de género» miércoles, de enero de . cantoblanco. organiza: facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. ponentes: fundación luz casanova. resumen el pasado de enero, la fundación luz casanova nos ofreció un taller: «claves y orientación en la atención a las víctimas de violencia de género». el encuentro en- tre más de cincuenta asistentes tuvo un doble objetivo: en primer lugar, dotar a los profesionales, presentes y futuros, de habilidades necesarias para llevar a cabo una intervención efectiva con las víctimas de violencia de género; en segundo lugar, con- tribuir a que profesionales que trabajan con adolescentes, desde distintos ámbitos, puedan identificar patrones de conducta violenta en las relaciones de noviazgo entre adolescentes. la violencia contra la pareja es un grave problema social que afecta a un volumen muy alto de mujeres y menores en nuestro país. las mujeres víctimas de violencia de género no responden a un único perfil, la lacra de la violencia de género afecta a toda la sociedad en su conjunto. la incidencia de la misma nada tiene que ver con la edad, el nivel formativo o el nivel económico. en lo que va de año, han sido asesinadas mujeres en españa, por hombres que eran o habían sido sus parejas sentimentales. detrás de todas estas mujeres asesinadas, manifestación más grave del problema, están, además, muchas más mujeres que están sufriendo o han sufrido malos tratos dentro de sus relaciones de pareja. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - jornada de orientación profesional en el ámbito de la traducción y la interpretación médico-sanitaria miércoles, de enero de . cantoblanco. organiza: departamento de traducción e interpreta- ción. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. resumen esta jornada de orientación profesional fue impartida a alumnos de .º, .º y .º del grado de traducción e interpretación y del doble grado con relaciones interna- cionales de la universidad pontificia comillas en el marco de proyección profesional futura una vez finalicen los estudios. las jornadas de orientación se centraron en las salidas profesionales en los distintos sectores biosanitarios desde el punto de vista lingüístico del traductor o el intérprete. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - jornada: «política exterior de alemania» miércoles, de febrero de . cantoblanco. organiza: departamento de relaciones internacionales. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. coordinador: departamento de relaciones internacionales. facultad de ciencias huma- nas y sociales. ponentes: pedro rodríguez, josé maría marco. moderador: carlos rico. resumen las elecciones del pasado de noviembre en estados unidos han tenido al mun- do en vilo. la superpotencia tenía que decidir entre dos candidatos muy peculia- res que suscitaban una enorme desconfianza entre el electorado americano. «con la amplia audiencia de los debates, comparables con la final de la superbowl, convive un superávit de desconfianza, que en las encuestas ronda el %», afirmó pedro ro- dríguez, profesor de relaciones internacionales, durante la mesa redonda celebrada en la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales de la universidad en la que, con la moderación de carlos rico, también profesor del departamento, se analizó a los can- didatos y el futuro de la política doméstica y exterior de estados unidos. rodríguez estuvo acompañado por josé maría marco, otro de los profesores de relaciones internacionales, que se refirió al populismo que, de la mano de trump, se vivió en esta campaña. «el populismo es una línea profunda de la democracia estadounidense y viene de principios del siglo xix. la política norteamericana tiene un estilo paranoico, y el último de ellos fue mccarthy, que perdió el contacto con la realidad social», aseveró marco. «trump es un outsider que desesperadamente quie- re que le tomen en serio los insiders. aunque parece que se ha apropiado del decálogo de todo lo que no debe hacer un candidato durante las elecciones y a veces es un poco torrente, otras un poco tony soprano…», bromeó rodríguez. ambos ponentes coincidieron en la complejidad del sistema electoral estadouni- dense, basado en elecciones primarias para elegir a los candidatos, un sistema que se consolidó en con el enfrentamiento nixon-kennedy, y que en el partido demó- crata tiene la particularidad de la figura de los superdelegados, «producto de expe- riencias frustrantes en la elección de candidatos válidos», dijo rodríguez. respecto eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - a trump, rodríguez dejó claro que «movilizó a millones de votantes que no habían participado nunca en las primarias republicanas». en cuanto a las encuestas, marco se mostró convencido de que sería difícil que trump recortase a hillary su ventaja, aunque rodríguez fue más prudente: «como periodista, yo viví la elección al gore-george bush [en la que ganó bush tras un recuento agónico en florida] y no se puede dar nada por sentado hasta el último minuto». durante la presentación, carlos rico se preguntó si tras estas elecciones convul- sas en estados unidos cambiarían las grandes líneas políticas de la superpotencia. en este sentido, marco afirmó que, si bien trump es imprevisible, «no habría grandes cambios y con españa no habría grandes rupturas en política internacional». tras la charla, las palabras que emilio sáenz-francés pronunció durante la pre- sentación cobraron todo su sentido: «en comillas hay un nivel de expertise sobre estados unidos que pocas universidades pueden presumir de tener». eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - «coloquio con el actor y director de doblaje. la voz de gérard depardieu» miércoles, de marzo de . cantoblanco. organiza: antesala de babel. departamento de traducción e interpretación. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. coordinador: josé luis aja. ponente: camilo garcía. resumen el blog de «comillas babel» nos cuenta cómo el pasado miércoles de marzo, dentro del marco de las actividades de la semana de la lengua francesa y la franco- fonía, tuvimos el placer de recibir a camilo garcía, un actor y director de doblaje español que ha puesto voz a muchos actores, entre los que se encuentran gérard depardieu, anthony hopkins y harrison ford. a lo largo de este entretenido encuentro, camilo garcía hizo un recorrido por la filmografía de depardieu, mostró los entresijos de la traducción audiovisual para el doblaje y acercó a los asistentes a la figura del actor de doblaje y del ajustador para doblaje. además, toda su ponencia fue acompañada de anécdotas y fragmentos cinematográficos de obras de depardieu que servían para ilustrar aquello que iba en- señando, haciendo mucho más fácil y entretenida la intervención. fue una ponencia muy didáctica y divertida, que culminó con una gran ronda de preguntas en la que los alumnos y asistentes a la conferencia aprovecharon para averiguar algunos de los grandes secretos de la traducción audiovisual y el doblaje. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - ciclo: la antesala de babel conferencia: «les interprètes de l’empire ottoman». traducción simul- tánea a cargo de los alumnos del máster de traducción e interpretación miércoles, de marzo de . cantoblanco. organiza: departamento de traducción e interpretación. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. coordinador: josé luis aja. ponente: alina pelea, universidad universidad babeş bolyai (cluj-napoca). resumen el pasado miércoles de marzo concluyó el ciclo de conferencias la antesala de babel correspondiente al curso - . en esta última sesión, dedicada a la vida y formación del intérprete durante el imperio otomano, nuestra invitada, la profesora alina pelea (universidad babeş bolyai, cluj-napoca), nos deleitó con una brillante reflexión histórica sobre la vida de los dragomanes [https://www.universalis.fr/dic- tionnaire/truchement/], término con el que se designa a los intérpretes en el mundo árabe y en oriente medio. los dragomanes en la corte del sultán son un claro testimonio de la riqueza cul- tural y lingüística que caracterizó al imperio otomano, cuyas fronteras se extendían desde la europa central hasta oriente medio y el norte de África. el oficio del drago- mán solo podía ser desempeñado por extranjeros, pues a los turcos les estaba vetada la práctica de lenguas propias de los infieles. debido a ello, la mayor parte de los dra- gomanes eran de origen griego, italiano, o maltés, así como procedentes del norte de África y de diversos puntos de los balcanes [https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/ ]. aunque el imperio otomano reconocía a los dragomanes como ciudadanos de pleno derecho, éstos no dejaban de ser extranjeros y, en ocasiones, se sentían en la tierra de los invasores. por ello aprovechaban el contacto directo con el sultán para favorecer la suerte de sus países de origen. de hecho, el papel de los dragomanes procedentes de los principados de valaquia y moldavia, tierras de interés estratégico para el sultán por ser avanzadilla del imperio hacia el continente europeo, fue tras- cendente por sus repercusiones políticas y diplomáticas. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - el papel del dragomán se caracterizaba, en ocasiones, por su dimensión política, por lo que podía ser de alto riesgo. algunos dragomanes cayeron en desgracia y paga- ron las intrigas de corte y las veleidades del sultán con la muerte. el papel del dragomán se consideró, al principio, de escaso interés social, pero muchos de ellos lograron convertirse en consejeros del sultán gracias a la facilidad de palabra, al don de lenguas y a su erudición. por esta razón fueron ganando peso en el entorno de la corte y llegaron a ser figuras de relevancia política, lo que supuso un notable ascenso en la sociedad. algunos testimonios gráficos nos permiten observar la riqueza de sus vestimentas, así como la ceremonia y el protocolo que caracteriza- ban a las audiencias con el sultán. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - v jornadas. «las distancias en la educación. nuevas formas de recorrer las distancias educativas» miércoles y jueves, y de marzo de . cantoblanco. organiza: facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. coordinadora: maría rosa salas labayen. ponentes: pepe menéndez, ciro caro, jesús damián fernández, isaac pérez, aitziber agui- rre y javier espinosa. resumen las v jornadas de educación organizadas en nuestra facultad el pasado marzo estuvieron constituidas por distintas actividades: conferencias, talleres y cinefórum. participaron en ellas pepe menéndez, ciro caro, jesús damián fernández, isaac pé- rez aitziber aguirre, javier espinosa y ponentes externos. entre los temas tratados, se abordaron alternativas en la escuela y se pensó acerca del valor educativo del humor para crear e innovar. múltiples talleres tuvieron lugar durante los dos días de las jornadas. la distri- bución de los mismos fue la siguiente: «aprende a emocionarte», «nada es lo que parece: matemarearte», «escuelas creativas: menú de aprendizaje», «quiero gamifi- car ¿por dónde empezar», «gamificación en el aula», «recursos para el aprendiza- je integrado de contenidos y lengua extranjera», «design thinking for educator», «espacios maker en la enseñanza de las asignaturas stem en centros escolares», «neurodidáctica, del laboratorio al aula», «aprender con globos», «aprendizaje ba- sado en retos en educación física» y «mindcraft: education edition y su aplicación en el aula». eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - congreso: «feminismo: impacto y papel del feminismo en el mundo» martes, de abril de . cantoblanco. organiza: facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. ponentes: maría teresa arias bautista, silvia martínez cano, azucena gonzález, mercedes llorente, pablo lla- ma, silvia bara, laura carrasco florido y mónica torres. resumen el segundo curso de doctorado del programa «individuo, familia y sociedad: una visión multidisciplinar», junto con la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales, or- ganizó este congreso en torno al papel e impacto del feminismo en nuestra sociedad actual. a la luz de los eventos más recientes —entre otros el movimiento social #me- too en contra del acoso de las mujeres y la histórica manifestación del pasado de marzo— tuvo lugar el pasado de abril una jornada de encuentro entre la teoría y la práctica del feminismo, de interés para todas las disciplinas reunidas en el campus de cantoblanco de nuestra universidad. el congreso contó con un primer bloque que sirvió para contextualizar tanto histórica como teóricamente el feminismo como corriente de pensamiento y movi- miento social. los ponentes del congreso fueron maría teresa arias bautista, silvia martínez cano, azucena gonzález, mercedes llorente, pablo llama, silvia bara, laura carrasco florido y mónica torres. en el segundo bloque diversos profesiona- les contaron el modo en que han dado a su práctica un enfoque feminista y de lucha por la igualdad. el congreso se cerró con una mesa redonda que pretendió poner diversas caras al feminismo, que lejos de ser una corriente homogénea adopta enfo- ques muy plurales. eventos y actividades de la facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales vol. ( ), núm. miscelÁnea comillas pp. - iii jornada sobre trabajo social sanitario. «el trabajo social en la atención sociosanitaria» miércoles, de junio de . cantoblanco. organiza: departamento de sociología y trabajo social. facultad de ciencias humanas y sociales. colabora: orpea residencias. moderadores: gema gallardo pérez, m.ª rosario luis-yagüe lópez, daniel gil martorell. ponentes: susanne margret cadera, manuel gil parejo, miguel garcía-baró, concepción vicente mochales, francisco garcía cano, mª rosario luis-yagüe lópez, rut maría tirado garcía, ursula díaz torres, carlos hernandez fernández. resumen el departamento de sociología y trabajo social de la facultad de ciencias hu- manas y sociales de la universidad pontificia comillas de madrid organizó el pasado de junio esta iii jornada de trabajo social sanitario y de la atención sociosani- taria, que mantiene como un hilo conductor el objetivo fundamental que animó al origen y al desarrollo de este espacio de estudio, reflexión y debate que se inició hace tres años con la primera jornada: establecer un marco de reflexión desde el trabajo social y su relación con los procesos de salud-enfermedad desde una perspectiva humanista y que tuviera como eje la reflexión ética sobre la intervención profesional. en la primera jornada se abordó el tema de la humanización del espacio sociosani- tario, para trabajar en la siguiente los límites de la autonomía y la participación en salud, tanto desde el marco deontológico de los profesionales del trabajo social en este campo, como de los pacientes y usuarios. por este motivo, esta nueva jornada de trabajo se presentó con el objetivo de vin- cular esta reflexión sobre los valores y la intervención con los modelos teóricos que se usan en el trabajo del día a día y cómo se concreta dicha relación en las prácticas de los profesionales. la reflexión sobre si es adecuado, en nuestro ámbito profesio- nal, una separación del conocimiento y los valores fue el contenido central de este encuentro. todo desde una concepción y un planteamiento humanista del trabajo social, no solo como modelo de intervención sino como elemento consustancial a su ser profesional y a su reflexión disciplinar. women in public policy and public administration? karen johnston, faculty of business and law university of portsmouth richmond building portland street portsmouth po de keywords: gender, equality, representation, representative bureaucracy, public administration abstract this article explores the persistence of gender inequality in public administration in the uk and globally. the implications for the continued under-representation of women are explored. the data reveals vertical and horizontal occupational gender segregation, which the article argues, drawing upon representative bureaucracy research, has policy outcomes for beneficiaries of public services. impact the recent social movement campaigns and media coverage about sexual violence against women (e.g. metoo) has highlighted the prevalence of this egregious issue; the publication of the gender pay gaps in uk organizations despite the equal pay act ( ) demonstrates continued inequalities; and as this article demonstrates the data on women in public administration reveals the persistence of gender inequality in public sector employment. this has implications for public administration institutions. the article argues that the lack of representation of women and other minorities has policy outcomes for the legitimacy, trust, integrity in public institutions, and public policy productivities and performance (kingsley, ; epp et al, ; riccucci, van ryzin and lavena, ; peters, schröter and von maravic, ; hong, a; b). introduction: women in public policy and public administration? there is persistent under-representation of women in public administration as secondary data reveals that across the globe there is variance in the representation of women within public sector organizations (see figure ). central and eastern europe have relatively high rates of female representation in public administration institutions. this is explained by the communist legacy of the feminization of the workforce, women’s higher educational attainment, state support for childcare and an egalitarian approach to female labour force participation (pollert, ). the under-representation of women also reflects the paucity in female careers to leadership and senior decision-making positions (see figure ). so, while ukraine may have % representation of women within the ranks of its public administration only % of women are represented in senior leadership levels and similarly in russia where % of women are employed only % of women have reached leadership positions within its public administration (ernst and young, ). other countries such as south africa and botswana are approaching parity in terms of overall representation of women in leadership positions. in the case of south africa this is largely due to affirmative action policies and in botswana the investment in education and public administration. as expected in more patriarchal cultures such as those of the middle east the role of women in paid employment is restricted or even prohibited due to socio-cultural and religious mores. in liberal democracies with traditions of greater equality such as the uk, belgium, france, netherlands and germany there is an under-representation of women in public administration, despite decades of equality legislation and european union (eu) policy directives. the lack of female representation in these countries is partly explained by a number of factors. in many of these countries there is a significant pay differential between public and private sectors. for example, in germany women in the public sector can expect to earn % less than their male colleagues (ernst and young, ; eurostat, ). other factors which affect female paid employment and labour market participation is the relatively high level of childcare costs (ernst and young, ); poor policy implementation of equality policy (stratigaki, ); and extant masculine organizational cultures reinforced by anglo-saxon public administration reforms of new public management (npm) (stivers, ). [insert figure and about here] the paper argues that women remain under-represented and under-employed in many public institutions of administration with implications for public policy and service delivery. the paper therefore first outlines the research method used to provide evidence for the argument. second, the paper provides a review of extant research and literature on representative bureaucracy to substantiate the argument. finally, the paper concludes with a research agenda and the view that the continued under-representation of women (and other minorities) in public bureaucracies undermines the performance and trust in public institutions. research method the research method for the paper involved a comprehensive review of secondary data on the representation of women in public administration and a systematic literature review (see denyer and transfield, ) of representative bureaucracy research. the secondary data collection on the descriptive representation of women in public administration involved searches on websites of national governments, supranational organizations, and third sector and consultancy reports. the website searches involved collating data on the representation of women from datasets available from the undp, oecd, world bank, european commission, national government offices (e.g. south african public service commission, uk office of national statistics), and publicly available reports (e.g. fawcett society, ernst and young) using the search terms: ‘female’; ‘women’; ‘representation’; ‘government’; ‘public administration’; ‘public sector’; ‘public management’ and/or ‘public leadership’. while there was readily available data on female representation in legislatures there was less data on female representation in public administration. the collated data is represented in the figures and tables within this paper. the systematic literature review first involved a literature search on the representative bureaucracy from google scholar, emeraldinsight, ingenta, jstor, proquest, sciencedirect, wiley online library and web of science. the search was limited to english-language books, book chapters and double-blind peer-reviewed journal publications to ensure the inclusion of robust empirical research. the first stage of systematic literature review examined year of publication; title; author(s); research focus; methodology; context of the study and research findings. it was observed that much of the research emanated from the united states of america (us) within the education sector and focused on african-americans as a minority demographic group. the second stage of the systematic literature review was to categorize the research findings. an analysis of the research revealed three categories of research findings: ( ) service outcomes for beneficiaries of representative bureaucracies; ( ) legitimacy, trust and integrity of bureaucracies through improved representation; and ( ) productivities and performance of representative bureaucracies. this categorization of the research is reviewed and discussed within this paper under sub-headings. the final stage of the systematic literature review was to assess the research gaps and suggest a research agenda. female representation in public administration the lack of female representation in public administrations reveals vertical and horizontal occupational gender segregation. vertical occupational gender segregation is often referred to as ‘glass ceilings’ where women struggle to reach leadership and senior decision-making positions (mctavish and miller, ). in many public bureaucracies women tend to be concentrated in lower level and lower paid positions within the public sector hierarchy with paucity in career trajectories to the upper echelons (mctavish and miller, ). horizontal occupational gender segregation is when women are concentrated in specific sectors or professions of public administrations such as education and health sectors. this is referred to as ‘glass walls’ with women stereotypically associated with feminine professions such as caring roles (guy and newman ; kerr et al ). there is also intra-professional gender segregation. for example, in the medical profession women tend to be concentrated in general practice careers, while men in careers perceived to be more prestigious such as surgery (miller and clark, ). the result of occupational gender segregation is often the under-value and under-employment of women. a case in point is uk public administration. in terms of vertical occupational gender segregation women constitute % of civil service permanent secretaries, % of the senior civil service, % of local government chief executives, % of university vice-chancellors, % of secondary head teachers and % of national health service (nhs) chief executives (fawcett society, ). the data reveals paucity of female career progression to leadership positions despite the fact that the overall number of female employees in uk public administration since outnumbered men (fawcett society, ). despite the headcount number of female employees accounting for % of the uk public sector workforce (see table ), women face barriers to attaining leadership positions. similarly, in local government where women constitute % and in the nhs % of the workforce women struggle to reach leadership positions (fawcett society, ). in terms of horizontal occupational gender segregation, women tend to be concentrated in health, education and social care with high proportion of the workforce being women. as table demonstrates the uk civil service has approached gender parity, but a disaggregation of data reveals that women are less represented in the cabinet office, foreign and commonwealth office and chancellor’s departments which are great offices of state; departments of defense, international trade and transport; and regulatory agencies such as food standards agency, national crime agency, office of rail and road, and uk export finance. these types great offices and regulatory agencies are often associated with masculinity (see newman, ). the secondary data provides descriptive statistics on the lack of female representation at leadership levels and in certain sectors and professions in public administration. what are the possible explanations for vertical and horizontal occupational gender segregation? [insert tables and about here] barriers to female representation in public administration much has been written about the barriers to women in organizations and progression to leadership positions and in professions. the barriers range from discrimination, prejudice, harassment, stereotyping gender roles, work-life conflicts, unconscious bias, to organizational culture, structures, and processes such as performance evaluation regimes and some reforms. the barriers to women in employment stem mainly from the social construction of gender in society (walby, ). gender is the societal values assigned to biological sex categories of male and female (walby, ). sex roles are translated into gender roles in society and the workplace (rhode, ). gender involves values and qualities attributed to masculinity or femininity (duerst-lahti and kelly ). women’s femininity is associated with their reproductive, maternal, caring and domestic roles (gamble et al, ; hakim, ). in most societies the social construction of sex creates gender roles where a patriarchal power structure is maintained (nicolson ). most societies value patriarchy with men in positions of power and women in subordinate roles. according to king ( ) societies value masculine behaviours of assertiveness, aggression and leadership above feminine values associated with nurturance, submissiveness and dependence. some observers argue that public life is considered the domain of men with women excluded or regarded as ‘other’ (duerst-lahti and kelly, ; mazur and pollock, ). public administrations like any other organization are gendered since the organizational dominance of men and control of power is to the disadvantage of women (duerst-lahti and kelly, ; ferguson, ; kelly and newman, ; savage and witz, ). king ( ) has identified four ways in which masculine power manifests in public administrations: ( ) organizations are the domain of men because men are more likely to be leaders; ( ) organizations are the masculine domain since expectations about gender is embedded in culture which leads to a preference for the masculine over the feminine; ( ) the state is a masculine domain and therefore governance, politics and the administrative state reflects the cultural preference for masculine over feminine; and ( ) leadership and management is a masculine domain since society’s cultural preference for masculine can be seen in definitions of leadership such as being assertive and aggressive. organizations value masculinity and associated agentic behaviours such aggression, assertiveness, control, ambition, dominance, forcefulness, independence, self-confidence, and competitiveness (eagly et al, ). in an organizational context agentic behaviours include speaking assertively, competing, influencing and making problem-solving suggestions are valued (eagly et al, : ). men who display agentic behaviours in organizations are valued and rewarded. while femininity associated with communal behaviours such as having concern for others, being helpful, kind, sympathetic, having interpersonal sensitivity, and being nurturing and gentle is less valued by organizations (eagly et al, : ). studies have shown reward systems and work processes which privilege masculine traits and male working patterns reinforce organizational masculinity (maier, ; sheridan, ). much of the barriers to women’s vertical and horizontal career progression in public administrations stems from the social construction of the biological categories of sex with masculinity being valued. the outcomes of the lack of representation in public administrations is demonstrated by extant research of representative bureaucracies. representative bureaucracy representative bureaucracy theory the theory of representative bureaucracy distinguishes between passive and active representation (mosher, ). passive representation refers to the extent to which a public institution includes individuals from demographic groups such as women, racial and ethnic minorities within the ranks of the bureaucratic organization (bradbury and kellough, ). passive representation is the extent to which the public bureaucracy employs the proportionate share of population demography within its ranks (riccucci and saidel, ). active representation as when a bureaucrat ‘stands for’ a demographic group by virtue of connection, resemblance and reflection (pitkin, : ). thus the bureaucrat, consciously or unconsciously, ensures a citizen or group’s interests with shared demographic identity included in policy-making (bradbury and kellough, ). the advocacy of citizens by bureaucrats of the same demographic group in the policy process is to ensure decisions benefit these citizens or is actively represented (hindera, ; keiser et al, ; sowa and seldon, ). for active representation to take place, passive representation has to be present. bureaucrats of the same demographic background as citizens they serve are influenced by socialization experiences and the development of values, attitudes and opinions, which influence their policy decisions (bradbury and kellough, ; meier, ; saltzstein, ). according to meier and nigro ( : ) bureaucratic attitudes and values are determined by their social environment. when bureaucrats and the public share value orientation then bureaucrats will pursue and advocate courses of action for those citizens (meier and nigro, ). a number of studies have shown that passive representation with active representation has beneficial outcomes for minority groups (brudney, herbet and wright, ; dolan, ; dolan and rosenbloom, ; hindera, ; hindera and young, ; keiser et al, ; meier, ; meier and nicolson-crotty, ; rehfuss, ; riccucci, ; riccucci and saidel, ; saltzstein, ; ; selden, brudney and kellough, ; thielemann and stewart, ; weldon, ; wilkins, ; wilkins and keiser, ; wise, ). representative bureaucracy: outcomes meier, stewart and england ( ) empirically demonstrated that as the number of african- american teachers increased across public school districts (passive representation), the inequitable segregation of african-american students into lower ability tracks and disciplinary measures decreased (active representation). further studies by meier and stewart ( ) and meier ( ) of other us school districts reached similar conclusions. meier, wrinkle and polinard ( ) also found that in school districts in the us both minority and non-minority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. they concluded that the increased presence of african-american and latino teachers did not have detrimental outcomes for white students and that both minority and majority groups benefitted in school performance by higher levels of minority representation. similarly, riccucci ( ) found that diversity in public sector organizations has beneficial outcomes for minority and majority groups from improved organizational performance. research by wilkins ( ) and wilkins and keiser ( ) found that female child support enforcement supervisors provided active representation to female clients who directly benefitted from increased child support collections. keiser et al’s ( ) research of female administrators and teachers in schools found that there were higher test scores and advance placement rates for girls since female bureaucrats identified with their sex as opposed to the organization. bradbury and kellough ( : ) similarly found that attitude congruence between african-american bureaucrats and citizens proved to be a powerful predictor for active representation. thus, attitudes and values shaped by socialization, as opposed to adherence to bureaucratic organizational norms, was important to active representation. extant research that has empirically demonstrated the benefits of representative bureaucracies have found that there are factors which enable passive representation to be translated in active representation. meier’s ( ) study concluded that representation is enhanced when there is political support and a critical mass of representation. critical mass concerns the proportionality of representation (kanter ). kanter ( ) in her research of men and women in organizations found that an organization can have skewed representation when a majority group has preponderance over another; tilted representation occurs when ratio of majority to minority is closer; and balanced representation when there is equal proportionality between groups. kanter ( ) found that organizations have mostly skewed representation with ‘dominants’ and ‘tokens’. kanter ( ) argued that women were ‘tokens’ in organizations as they were regarded as ‘different’ and risked exclusion from the dominant group (men) if they did not conform or where perceived to be disloyal (kanter, ). kanter ( ) argued that women’s relative ‘newness’ in the labour market and workplace required adjustment from men in the organization, but as women become a more ‘fixed’ presence and increased in number in the workplace, men would learn to accommodate women in the organization. kanter ( ) therefore argued for a critical mass of representation where women’s representation in the workplace and organization increased to the extent the ‘skew-ness’ was addressed. hindera and young ( ) found that critical mass was a factor for active representation. they found that within us equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) district offices there was an over-representation of minorities, which created a critical mass. critical mass created an opportunity for cross-socialization with one group of bureaucrats affecting other’s decision making (hindera and young, : ). hindera and young ( : ) showed that when: ( ) the situational critical mass threshold was not exceeded, active representation could not take place; ( ) critical mass was exceeded but there was no plurality of african-americans, active representation emanated from passive representation at a basic level of policy implementation; ( ) there is plurality but no majority of african-americans, active representation results from passive representation from both african-american and white bureaucrats; and ( ) african-americans constitute a majority or is the dominant group in the organization, there is a hyper-responsiveness of active representation. however, much of the research on critical mass and representative bureaucracies aggregate findings for the organization or examines to critical mass at one level of a public organizations such as street level (see lipsky, ). few studies have attempted to disaggregate outcomes of representative bureaucracy at various levels of the organizational hierarchy. for example, while andrews and johnston miller ( ) found active representation of women by female police officers at lower levels of the police hierarchy, johnston and houston ( ) found that active representation of women at leadership levels of the police did not hold true. another factor that influences active representation is discretion (meier and bohte, ). a study by thielemann and stewart ( ) found that there was beneficial provision of services to people living with aids at the level where bureaucrats and citizens interact. at street-level discretionary power enabled active representation (keiser et al, : ). meier ( ) argues that bureaucracies which are more rule-bound, active representation is restricted as bureaucrats have fewer opportunities to shape services to benefit a particular minority group. research by seldon ( ) and seldon, brudney and kellough ( ) also found discretion to be an important factor in the translation of passive to active representation. they found that within the us department of agriculture the farmers’ home administration rural housing loan program, african-americans were awarded a larger proportion of loans in districts with a higher number of african-american county supervisors. sowa and seldon ( ) found that minority supervisors in the farmers’ home administration rural housing loan program would actively represent minorities if there were administrative discretion and minority role identification with the citizens. furthermore, there were beneficial outcomes for a minority group when traditional bureaucratic rule adherence and standard operating procedure compliance were superseded (sowa and seldon, ). keiser et al ( : ) found that policy salience was important for active representation. they argued that active representation of women occurs when female bureaucrats identify with the women as clients of public services and when the policy issue influences the client-bureaucratic relationship (keiser et al, : ). a policy issue is gendered or regarded as ‘women’s issues’ when: ( ) the policy directly benefits women as a class; ( ) the gender of the bureaucrat changes the client-bureaucratic relationship; or ( ) the issue is identified as a women’s issue by the political class (keiser et al, ). sexual violence is considered a gendered policy issue and more likely that female bureaucrats would act in the interests of female victims (andrews and johnston miller, ). a study by meier and nicholson-crotty ( ) for example found that a larger percentage of female police officers were associated with a greater willingness among women as clients to report sexual assaults. there was evidence of active representation with higher sexual assault arrest rates by female police officers. meier and nicholson-crotty ( ) concluded that female police officers shared a set of values about the seriousness of rape because they had a common set of gender related experiences (meier and nicholson-crotty, : ). a similar study by andrews and johnston miller ( ) empirically proved that where there were higher levels of passive representation for women at street-level in english police forces there was a higher arrest rate for domestic violence. collectively the research demonstrated that passive representation of women had resulted in improved service delivery for women as victims of sexual violence. as mentioned above socialization and group identification is important in translating passive to active representation. however, identification and socialization can be mediated by organizational socialization (johnston and houston, ). organizational context, structure, hierarchy, rules and regulations and norms may depersonalize relationships making bureaucrats less likely to identify with groups outside the bureaucracy (ferguson, ; keiser et al, ). keiser et al ( : - ) found that representative bureaucracy worked better for females in less hierarchical organizations. keiser et al ( : ) conclude that ‘for those seeking to increase active representation on the basis of gender, attention must be paid to not only increasing overall passive representation but also the structure of the organization and the representation at upper levels of the organization.’ similarly, johnston and houston’s ( ) research found that senior female police officers, socialized in a masculine police organizational culture, adopted masculine values and norms, and were less likely to actively represent women in addressing sexual violence. kim ( ) research also found organizational socialization an important factor, which could affect active representation. kim’s ( ) study of the passive representation of women in the us senior executive service (ses) showed that the allocation of line-item budgets benefitted women and minorities in the presidential request budget for the period to . kim ( : ) argues that passive representation was necessary, but not sufficient since organizational socialization, recruitment processes, organizational rules and peer pressure restrain bureaucrats of certain demographics and social backgrounds from exercising active representation. kim ( ) concludes that street-level bureaucrats are subject to less organizational socialization and will use their discretion at this level to advocate the interests of those who share the same demographic origins. dolan’s ( ; ; ) studies of female passive representation in the ses also found that men and women held comparable responsibilities with women rating their influence of over policy in distributive agencies higher than those of men. dolan ( ) found that the policy preferences of women in the ses was congruent with those of women as a minority group, suggesting that organizational socialization did not eroded ses women in senior positions from actively representing women. in a later study, dolan ( : ) argued that distributive agencies were more conducive to female leadership and women progressed in these organizations by adopting strategies that worked for men. another study by rehfuss ( ) on the representation of women and minorities in executive positions of the california career civil service found women and minorities appear to share a ‘management ideology’ with their white male counterparts. this ideology is developed during organizational socialization and works against active representation (rehfuss, : ). wilkins and williams’ ( ) study demonstrated the affect of organizational socialization on active representation. they found that african-americans and latinos in the san diego police department were racial profiling in the case of vehicle stops. of significance was the finding that as the presence of black police officers increased so did the racial disparity in vehicle stops (wilkins and williams, : ). the researchers found that in a bureaucracy, such as the police, where there are high levels of formal and informal organizational socialization, it is less likely that active representation will take place (wilkins and williams, ). the extant scholarly research demonstrated that passive representation is important to the active representation of minority citizens and demographic groups. a review the research shows that critical mass, policy salience, discretionary power, and organizational structure and socialization are important factors for ensuring active representation and beneficial outcomes for recipients of public services. representative bureaucracy: trust and legitimacy in addition to beneficial service outcomes of representative bureaucracies, the extant research also demonstrates important implications for trust in public institutions. in most societies, women constitute approximately % of the population (undp, ), if half of a country’s population is under-represented in its institutions of public administration, arguably it is not representative of the population it serves. kingsley ( ) first argued, when writing about the british civil service, that a bureaucracy cannot be representative of society if its public administration is disproportionately drawn from elites. thus, the notion of a public service that serves all of the public is questionable when it does not represent the population. public administrations that do not represent the society it serves, erodes trust and legitimacy in government (peters, schröter and von maravic, ). society may legitimately question whether its public administration, disproportionately drawn from one particular demographic group, can be trusted to make decisions and deliver services in the interests of society as a whole. epp et al ( ) book entitled, ‘pulled over’ has shown how stop and searches by police in the us has severe implications for african-americans’ trust and legitimacy in the police. the riots in the us after members of the african-american community were shot by the police when ‘pulled over’ is evidence of communities’ loss trust in the police to protect, serve and uphold the rule of law and justice. similarly, research by hong ( a) of uk police forces showed that an increase in ethnic representation resulted in a decrease in conduct complaints against the police. hong ( b) argues that a representative police force that reflects the community it serves may effectively catalyze bureaucratic integrity. riccucci, van ryzin and lavena ( ) also found that increasing the number of women in domestic violence police unit, increased female perceptions of trust, fairness and job performance of the public bureaucracy. representative bureaucracy: public policy productivities and performance a second and related outcome of unrepresented public administration is poor policy making. if policy makers do not include a broad spectrum of the populace, then societal interests as a whole would not be included the policy process. there is an input deficit in policy making. the quality of decision-making suffers, resulting in poor policy outcomes, service delivery and public sector organizational performance (johnston miller and mctavish, ). scholarly research has shown that more representative bureaucracies are better performing organizations. pitts ( ; ) for example found that more representative bureaucracies had higher levels of job satisfaction, which impacted upon organizational performance. andrews, ashworth and meier ( ) found that more representative uk fire authorities tended to be more effective organizations. peters, et al ( ) also found that representative bureaucracy improved quality of organizational output. this is explained by the fact that diverse bureaucrats contribute a diverse set of skills, knowledge and experience to the organization (peters et al, ). they argue that there is a positive association between representation and overall organizational performance (peters et al, ). hong ( b) found that there is increased organizational efficiency from greater diversity of viewpoints or ideas within an organization and therefore a wider array of resources is available for problem solving. a longitudinal study by fernandez and lee ( ) of south african national public administration departments from to found that organizations which were more representative of the population, in a post-apartheid dispensation, achieved a higher percentage of organizational goals. they found empirical evidence that the more representative public bureaucracies were more effective organizations (fernandez and lee, ). andrews and johnston miller ( ) showed that more representation of female police officers resulted in more domestic violence arrest rates. riccucci ( ) and bradbury and kellough ( ) research also found that more representative bureaucracies tended overall to be better performing organizations. although the benefit of representative public administrations is evident from extant research with implications for trust, legitimacy and performance, there remains a persistent lack of women and other minorities in public institutions despite legislation such as the uk equality act ( ) and eu gender equality policy directives (miller, ). thus, legislation in itself will not necessarily increase representation of public bureaucracies. the challenge for governments is to address the dominant masculine paradigm. globally, governments have adopted neo-liberal public sector reforms such as npm (stivers, ) and a ‘management ideology’ (rehfuss, ) in an attempt to improve the performance of the public sector. however, a paradox emerges. governments attempts improve the performance of the public sector through npm reforms reward and reinforce masculinity, which negates the gains of representative bureaucracies. research is needed on the mitigating impact of public sector reforms on representation of women and minorities. research agenda: improving representation a review of secondary data and extant research reveals scope for future research to improve representation in public administration. first, there be a systematic evaluation of governments to increase the passive and active representation of women (and other minorities). in order to understand how to improve representation baseline data is needed. there is a research deficit on a global scale as well as a longitudinal analysis of the representation of women in public administrations. while the supranational bodies such as the undp, oecd and european commission have raised the issue of gender equality and placed it on the policy agenda, there often lacks a sustained and systematic effort to study representation, career progression and policy outcomes for women. the collection and collation of secondary data for this paper, proved that there needs a database of female representation in public administrations across the globe over a number of years. the dataset could include data on representation at national and sub-national levels as well as types of public institutions (e.g. police). the data would prove useful for national governments and public administrations in benchmarking representation and what actions are needed to redress the lack of representation. thus, across countries, levels of government and types of public institutions (e.g. distributive, regulatory, etc.) lessons could be learned and better practices shared. for example, the data has shown that botswana has made gains in female representation, but beyond the descriptive analysis there should be further research on how these gains were achieved and implications for women as public sector employees and recipients of services. similarly, at sub-national level in the uk the scottish first minister (a woman) has appointed a gender balanced government with a female permanent secretary. here too are lessons to be learned across devolved polities of whether passive representation has resulted in active representation and the implications for women. the outcomes for women employed and as beneficiaries of types of public sector organizations (e.g. distributive versus regulatory) would offer valuable comparative data. a related and second research agenda issue is to address a research deficit of the impact of political culture and architecture on the representation of bureaucracies. there has been research, from a political science perspective, on the influence of feminist movements on public policy (see mazur, ) and how political culture and architecture can enable or hinder the representation of women in public policy (haussman et al, ; chappell ). for example, haussman et al’s ( ) found that the political culture and architecture creates opportunities for women’s political activism through access to multiple policy making sites; enables forum shopping which allows women to work around blockages at one level of governance to take advantage of another; and policy innovations in one jurisdiction are transferred to others. there is scope for further research on the extent to which a masculine political culture inhibits the passive and active representation of women in public sector employment as well as women as beneficiaries of public services. similarly, research is needed on the extent to which the political architecture of a country with sub-national polities enables or inhibits passive and active representation. a third issue for a research agenda is to disaggregate organizational hierarchies and analyse intra- organisational and intra-professional representation. as mentioned previously much of the research is conducted at the lower levels of the hierarchy and within one public sector organization. more meaningful organizational interventions could be made if there was a holistic analysis of representation within organizations, professions and across public sector organizations. furthermore, an analysis of the impact of critical mass, where it may exist, at various levels of an organization could provide a more nuanced insights of critical mass within contemporary public sector organizations. the examination of critical mass and representation at all levels of an organization would also offer opportunities for lessons to be learned and knowledge to be transferred. finally, it is worth noting that much of the research on representation stems from the us. there is scope for comparative international studies, drawing on the suggested dataset (see above), to understand representation within contexts and cultures of various societies. globally, policy or knowledge transfer on ways in which to improve representation in public administration is needed. finally, while this paper focussed on the representation of women in public administration there is scope for research beyond gender or race (mostly evident from the us). research on the lack of other minorities as well as the intersectionality of identities is needed (breslin, pandey and riccucci, ). conclusion the paper collated and analyzed secondary data outlining patterns of gender inequality within public administrations. despite years of gender equality legislation and policies, particularly in liberal democracies, there remains persistent gender discrimination and occupational segregation. moreover, the data belies egregious outcomes for women as employees and as recipients of public services. the paper also reviewed literature and extant research, which showed the beneficial outcomes of a representative bureaucracy for public sector performance, trust and legitimacy. although the benefits of representative bureaucracy have been demonstrated by extant research, the dominant masculine paradigm in public administration mitigates these gains. as meier ( ) argues representative bureaucracies could be a solution to improve the overall performance of public administrations. a research agenda was therefore suggested as ways to improve representation in public administration, providing opportunities to exchange knowledge of better practices with improving performance through representative public value. references: andrews, r. and johnston miller, k. 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( ), representative bureaucracy in b.g. peters and j. pierre (eds.), handbook of public administration, thousand oaks, california: sage. figure : percentage of female representation in public administrations ( – ) sources: ernst & young ( ); european commission ( ); undp ( ) figure : percentage of female public administration leaders sources: ernst & young ( ); european commission ( ); undp ( ) table : gender representation in uk public sector ( ) public sector employment by gender: headcount male female total , , , % % part time public sector employment by gender: headcount male female total , , % % : public sector employment survey: part time is defined as working less than the organisation's normal weekly hours. source: office for national statistics ( ) table : gender representation of uk civil service ( ) senior civil service level grade and senior and higher executive officers executive officers administrative officers and assistants male female % female male female % female male female % female male female % female male female % female total % fema le attorney general's departments % % business, energy and industrial strategy % % cabinet office % % other cabinet office agencies % % % % % % chancellor's other departments % % % % % % charity commission % % % % % % communities and local government % % % % % , % culture, media and sport % % % % % % defence % , , % , , % , , % , , % , % department for exiting the eu % % % % .. .. % department for international trade % % % % % , % education % % , % % % , % environment, food and rural affairs % % , , % % , % , % estyn .. .. % .. % .. % food standards agency % % % % % , % foreign and commonweal th office % % , % % % , % health % , % , , % % % , % hm revenue and customs % , , % , , % , , % , , % , % hm treasury % % % % % , % home office % , % , , % , , % , , % , % international development % % % % % , % justice % , , % , , % , , % , , % , % the national archives .. .. % % % % % national crime agency % % , % , % % , % northern ireland office % % % % .. % office for standards in education % % % % % , % office of gas and electricity markets % % % % % % office of rail and road % % % % % % office of qualifications and examinations regulation % % % % .. .. % office of water services % % % % .. .. % scotland office % % % .. % % scottish government % , % , , % , , % , , % , % transport % % , , % , , % , , % , % uk statistics authority % % % % % , % uk export finance .. % % % % % uk supreme court .. .. .. % .. .. .. % wales office .. .. % .. .. .. .. % welsh government % % , % % % , % work and pensions % , , % , , % , , % , , % , % all employee , , % , , % , , % , , % , , % , % source: raw data from office of national statistics ( ), calculations by author 	keywords: gender, equality, representation, representative bureaucracy, public administration 	abstract 	conclusion 	references: 	sources: ernst & young ( ); european commission ( ); undp ( ) 	figure : percentage of female public administration leaders nakladatelství karolinum univerzita karlova - karolinum 		 		 		 		 			 				 						nakladatelství karolinum 				 				 					 					menu 				 				 					 						 						 					 				 				 						Česky / english 				 				 	 	 							knihy 								novinky 	témata 	edice 						 	 		Časopisy 				 						o časopisech 					 	 						open access 					 	 						předplatné 					 	 						kontakty 					 	 	 		informace a služby 				 						o nás 					 	 						informace a opatření 					 	 						katalogy 					 	 						e-knihy 					 	 						open access 					 	 						pro média 					 	 						distribuce 					 	 						tiskárna a dtp 					 	 	 		pro autory 				 						informace pro autory 					 	 						formuláře a návody ke stažení 					 	 	kontakt 	 								english 						 	 			 		 	 		 			 				 					 					 					 						 							historie 							jaroslav Čechura 							historik jaroslav Čechura se v předkládané monografii zaměřuje na období třicetileté války. turbulentní události z všednodennosti sedláků a selek na gruntech třeboňského panství popisuje autor díky práci s několikerým typem pramenů, pozemkovými a jiterními knihami, poddanskými soupisy, matrikami, populačními seznamy, výhosty, urbáři, egodokumenty či robotními seznamy. 							přečíst 						 					 							 				 					 					 						 							historie 							mniši, dvořané, literáti 							v knize naleznete několik studií, které se věnují různým aspektům cisterciáckého řádu (například vizitacím, medicíně, politickým aktivitám) a prostředí panovnického dvora krále václava ii. ( – ), mimo jiné pozapomenuté osobnosti jana z ostrova. obě témata se prolínají v závěrečné části věnované kronice chronicon aulae regiae. 							přečíst 						 					 							 				 					 					 					 						 							katalog 							katalog jaro 							připravovaná kniha karla hvížďaly a jiřího přibáně, františka Šmahela, filipa lába, či mařatkova gastroenterologie a mnoho dalších! novinky nakladatelství karolinum na období jaro/léto naleznete v našem novém katalogu. 							přečíst 						 					 							 				 					 					 					 						 							filozofie 							k jubileu miroslava petříčka 							studenti a kolegové miroslava petříčka vydali u příležitosti jeho životního jubilea počet z vlastního myšlení a bádání, které se po jeho vzoru pouští do této riskantní oblasti. mimořádně silná sestava autorů několika generací má široký záběr: od astronomie po animovaný film, od prousta po hraničáře.  							přečíst 						 					 							 			 		 	 	 		 			 				knihy 				 					novinky 					témata 					edice 				 			 			 			 	 		 			 		 		mezi zdarem a zmarem 	 	 		payne, jan 	 	 		 			 		 		mniši, dvořané, literáti 	 	 		charvátová, kateřina 	 	 		 			 		 		příběh školní šikany 	 	 		zvírotský, michal 		bendl, stanislav 		richterová, magdalena 	 	 		 			 		 		neklidné století 	 	 		Čechura, jaroslav 	 	 		 			 		 		světla a stíny husitství (události – osobnosti – texty – tradice) 	 	 		Čornej, petr 	 	 		 			 		 		lamentation for , victims 	 	 		weil, jiří 	 	 		 			 		 		hermeneutika a metaforika čísel 	 	 		kůrka, petr 		velický, bedřich 	 	 		 			 		 		nástroj prospěšný, či vražedný? 	 	 		gecko, tomáš 	 	 		 			 		 		fašismus 	 	 		griffin, roger 	 	 		 			 		 		jak vzpomínáme na normalizaci 	 	 		pinkas, jaroslav 	 	 		 			 		 		blood and blood components, hematopoiesis, selected methods used in cytology, histology and hematology 	 	 		křížková, věra 	 	 		 			 		 		spielräume der modernen linguistischen forschung 	 	 		kloudová, věra 		Šemelík, martin 		racochová, alžběta 		koptík, tomáš 	 	 		 			 		 		myšlení hranice / hranice myšlení 	 	 		prášek, petr 		roreitnerová, alena 	 	 		 			 		 		o službě slova, víře a spasení 	 	 		landová, tabita 	 	 		 			 		 		chlap kousl psa 	 	 		koukolík, františek 	 	 		 			 		 		chci studovat němčinu na vysoké škole! 	 	 		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	 		 			 		 		prÁvnĚhistorickÉ studie 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		historickÁ sociologie 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc interpretationes 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		orbis scholae 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc studia territorialia 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		orbis scholae 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc geographica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc philologica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		prague medical report 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		central european journal for contemporary religion 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		acta medica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		reflexe 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc theologica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc philosophica et historica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc iuridica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		acta medica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		ibero-americana pragensia 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		prÁvnĚhistorickÉ studie 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc iuridica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc interpretationes 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc kinanthropologica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		european journal of environmental sciences 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc theologica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		prague medical report 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc geographica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc philologica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		acta medica 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		historickÁ sociologie 		ročník: Číslo: 	 	 		 			 		 		auc historia universitatis carolinae pragensis 		ročník: Číslo: 	 			 			 		 	 	 		 			 				kalendář akcí 				 					novinky z karolina 					informace o akcích a nových titulech nakladatelství. 					 						 						přihlásit se k odběru 					 				 			 			 				blog 				 					 					fašismus podle rogera griffina 					 . . 					v edici politeia vychází již druhá kniha jednoho z největších odborníků na fašismus, britského profesora moderních dějin a politického teoretika na oxford brookes university rog... 				 			 			 				 					 twitter 					tweets by karolinumpress 				 			 		 	 		 			 			 				 					 						 							nakladatelství karolinum 							ovocný trh / 							 praha 						 						 							cupress@cuni.cz 							+ 						 					 				 				 					 							 							nakladatelství 							 									katalog knih 	ediční plán 	pro média 	blog 	kalendář akcí 							 						 						 							distribuce 							 									knihkupectví karolinum 	kontakt a objednávky 	pro obchodní partnery 							 						 						 							tiskárna a dtp 							 									kontakt a služby 	vybavení tiskárny 							 						 					 				 				 					 						 						 						 						 						 					 				 				 					© karolinum 				 			 		 		 		 	 		 		 		 		 		 		 		 		 			 	 	 jcss ( ) v. . the challenges and trends of deploying blockchain in the real world for the users’ need chun-wei chiang eber betanzos saiph savage* (received february ; accepted july ) abstract blockchain technology is a decentralized and open database maintained by a peer-to-peer network, offering a “trustless trust” for untrusted parties. despite the fact that some researchers consider blockchain as a bubble, blockchain technology has the genuine potential to solve problems across industries. in this article, we provide an overview of the development that blockchain technology has had in and point out the challenges of deploying blockchain-based applications in the real world from a human-computer interaction view. we propose that blockchain practitioners should design blockchain applications from users’ perspective, think about who the users are, and what they need. furthermore, we also lay out possible future trends for blockchain based systems. keywords: blockchain, decentralized, human centered design, human- computer interaction, real world applications. chun-wei chiang: hci lab, west virginia university, morgantown, wv, usa. eber betanzos: cyber ethics center, universidad nacional autonoma de mexico (unam), mexico| federal audit office, mexico. saiph savage: (corresponding author) hci lab, west virginia university, morgantown, wv, usa- email: saiph.savage@mail.wvu.edu commentary this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (cc by nc), which permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. journal of cyberspace studies volume no. july pp. - w e b p a g e : h t t p s : / / j c s s . u t . a c . i r . e m a i l : j c s s @ u t . a c . i r print issn: - . e-issn: - . doi: . /jcss. . chun-wei chiang, eber betanzos and saiph savage jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. introduction blockchain technology is mainly known as the technology that supports cryptocurrencies. however, cryptocurrencies are just one of the possible blockchain based applications that may exist. blockchain technology is a distributed ledger that verifies and perpetually records the transactions on a distributed peer-to-peer network. blockchains are used to solve the trust issues among different parties. researchers and practitioners utilize blockchain technology to solve the existing difficulties in different areas, such as financial institutions, manufacturing industry, and public governance. although blockchain technology has great potential to revolutionize internet systems and reformulate the industry and economies, only few blockchain-based systems successfully developed (lavazova et al., ). people seldom use blockchain-based systems, and blockchain technology does not play an important role in the real world. currently, most blockchain researchers focus on introducing blockchain technology in different scenarios or improving the deep infrastructures of the blockchains, while the studies on the users and the potential users of the blockchain systems are limited. it can be said that humans are one of the most important players in a system. a system will be worthless until people actually make use of it. the state of affairs has attracted the attention of numerous human-computer interaction (hci) researchers to form workshops in order to identify the fundamental human challenges requisite in interactions with blockchain and distributed ledger technology (elsden et al., ; lavazova et al., ). the goal of both workshops is to help blockchain based systems to address people’s (including developers and end-users) needs. still, the necessity to integrate the blockchain technology into user-centered interactive systems calls for an essential challenge for design and engineering. in this commentary, we will review key developments of blockchain technology and provide a guideline for the upcoming blockchain features in from an hci perspective. blockchain technology the concept of blockchains originated from the studies of nakamoto ( ) that experimented with cryptography to link the current transaction data, called block, to the previous block by recording its cryptographic hash and timestamp. blockchains ask different computers in the network to help verify the transactions and maintain the network, and these computers are called “node”. the blockchain technology cannot be dissociated from the electronic cash system until buterin ( ) proposed ethereum that allows the developers to create the challenges and trends of deploying blockchain in the real world for the users’ need jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. consensus-based applications. the applications, also known as smart contracts, allow the performance of credible, trackable and irreversible transactions without third parties. given that ethereum helped to reduce the difficulty in developing blockchain applications, blockchain technology started to develop vigorously. blockchains can be separated into two kinds of protocols based on the different types of participants in the blockchain network: “public blockchains” and “permissioned blockchains”. public blockchains, like bitcoin and ethereum, enable anyone to become the nodes to verify the transaction. while the permissioned blockchains, such as hyperledger, only allow the parties which are identified and have permission joining the network. although permissioned blockchains have better capacity and higher speed than the public blockchains, it hard to say which protocol is better than the other, as the node sizes and end-users are different. the state of blockchain in compared to the early years of blockchain technology, enterprises focused more on applying blockchains than exploring them (deloitte, ). blockchains kept growing in popularity as people across multiple industries found new applications for it in . researchers and practitioners announced that they had advanced in blockchain applications. both public and permissioned blockchains made remarkable headway. in the following section, we are going to outline different blockchain applications in different industries in . blockchain in financial services the financial sector was the first industry to explore blockchain technology. beyond cryptocurrency, blockchain technology can be used in other financial services, such as foreign exchange, insurance, and loan. both public blockchain and permissioned blockchain had a breakthrough. for permissioned blockchains, banks tried to unite to create blockchain platforms that can reduce the operation fee of foreign exchange and bilateral payments. for example, goldman sachs and morgan stanley used ibm’s permissioned blockchain to reduce the cumbersome bilateral payments operations (baydakova, ). blockchain researchers also used blockchain and iot for car auto- insurance claim and adjudication (oham et al., ). blockchain in government governments also have a massive interest in blockchain technology. they have used the technology for voting, land registry, and digital chun-wei chiang, eber betanzos and saiph savage jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. identity. since blockchains cannot be manipulated by a single party, even the government, it helps citizens to trust the governments more which can result in a reduction of corrupt officials. for example, west virginia government allows its citizens who serve outside to mobile vote through blockchains and digital identity technology (nguyen, ). india also used blockchain for land transform, avoiding local official accepting bribes (kshetri & voas, ). the use of blockchain technology in the public sector represents one highly effective way of providing reliable services, at low cost, based on open and transparent technology for all participants, gaining trust (where is not) in public institutions and effectively combats corruption. blockchain has been applied to public policy solutions also in mexico. in march , the world economic forum (wef) presented a case study on corruption in mexico, where it issued as a recommendation the development of applications based on blockchain technology, with the aim of increasing transparency, to ensure the authenticity of public information and improve public confidence in the government (world economic forum, ). this initiative lead academics, practitioners, and people in government to start designing a national blockchain strategy (currently under consideration with mexico federal government) where the technology could be used to fight corruption at scale (savage et al., ). this initiative has started to gain traction from blockchain accelerators across the world, such as mousebelt, where they are all working together to design blockchain based systems that use smart contracts to oversee the progress of infrastructure projects, and ultimately help curb corruption. blockchain in social good blockchain, cannot only impact commercial usage, but it also makes some contributions in social good. charity or government organizations can use blockchain to trace how they use the funding for helping those in difficult situations. for example, mexican immigrants remit a lot of money to their hometown for community development, but they have low faith in the government, and thus the contribution is limited (chiang et al., ). therefore, researchers built a blockchain cooperation platform for community developments (chiang et al., a). the platform helped the immigrants, citizens, and governments supervise the process of community development. blockchain in the supply chain blockchain records all the transactions, and the records cannot be removed. companies integrate iot into the blockchain to record the the challenges and trends of deploying blockchain in the real world for the users’ need jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. production steps. they build accountable systems for the supply chain. it is easy to find out which process is erring when customers receive poor quality products. for example, walmart collaborate with ibm, asking its suppliers to record the water quality, temperature when plant and transport mango (kamath, ). challenges about blockchain despite the fact that researchers and practitioners promise a great vision for the blockchain applications, the public seldom uses the application based on the blockchain technology. not only the blockchain infrastructures but also user adoption is also a key issue that blockchain practitioners have to take into consideration. in this section, we present the challenges of blockchain’s widespread adoption from the hci perspective. users of blockchain applications before starting the blockchain applications design, practitioners have to consider who the end-users of the system is and whether they need blockchain to solve their problems. despite the blockchain technology are used in different industries, the common point of these applications is to solve the trust problem from the system. for example, tian ( ) proposed a supply chain traceability system to make the end- users believes the food is safe. what is more, the original intention of blockchains is to replace centralized middleman in transactions or agreements. it is true that centralized middleman can be corrupt and can misappropriate the agreements. however, it does not perform that the public does not trust centralized organizations. the report (edelman, ) revealed that % of the public trusted the technology companies, and only % public trusted in financial institutions, but only % trust blockchain technology more than large financial institutions (noto, ). although blockchains are committed to providing “trustless trust” (werbach, ), how people trust is the main issue for spreading the technology at scale if the public relies more on the system than in the blockchain technology, the blockchain applications are more difficult to promote. therefore, blockchain applications will flourish in areas where people have less faith in the original system, such as public governance, media, and financial services. government organizations can use blockchain to build transparency, accountability, and civic participation platform to increase citizens’ trust in the governance systems (chiang et al., a). due to the transparency of the blockchain, citizens can chun-wei chiang, eber betanzos and saiph savage jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. clearly understand when and why any government agencies execute the strategy. therefore, the open government partnership (https://www. opengovpartnership.org/) recommends that the affiliate countries should invest in blockchain technology as a way to promote ogp principles to improve the co-creation of high-quality governance and dialogue between societies. blockchain for media helps the socially vulnerable groups outspeak their opinion without the bother from centralized organizations. for example, tucker and pang ( ) reported that chinese “#metoo” activists document stories on the blockchains to avoid the suppression of the chinese government. the boundaries between blockchain networks and real-world current blockchain networks are not sufficient to address the needs of intended users. the two main technical problems of using blockchain in the real-world are the re-intermediary and the oracle problem. the re-intermediary problem refers to the fact that the public still needs a middleman to get connected to the blockchain as they cannot easily access the blockchain networks. for instance, looking at the example of what is taking place in the food supply chain kamath ( ) reported that walmart reduced the time for tracking mango origins through ibm’s hyperledger fabric. hyperledger fabric is a permissioned blockchain network, which only allows for the permission parties to verify and view the data. in other words, the public cannot discern the truthfulness of the information directly. the public has to rely on these permission parties, such as walmart and ibm, revealing the information on hyperledger fabric to know the source of mango. from customers perception, they still have to believe centralized organizations. using blockchain, in this case, draws no difference with using centralize databases or distribute databases across companies. oracle service is a data carrier which provides off-chain information to blockchains. blockchain-based applications (smart contracts) generally do not have any information about the real world. however, they do require such information to initiate the contracts. for instance, a flight insurance smart contract assures the customer’s flight will not delay. if delayed, the contract would compensate for the customers’ damages. to trigger the contract, the application has to identify whether the flight was delayed or not. thus, they need oracle service to obtain information from external apis. however, most oracle services are centralized, which create another reintermediation problem, and can only handle simple information provided by apis. the challenges and trends of deploying blockchain in the real world for the users’ need jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. to solve the reintermediation problem, the permissioned blockchain providers have to delegate their capability of control to the public, allowing the public to supervise how the data creates and inputs to the network. the public blockchains have to reduce the block sizes and improve the mobile blockchain applications so that the end users can easily access the information on the blockchain without the middleman. for the oracle problem, researchers can integrate the blockchain with iot (internet of thing) to provide authentic data, or probe into the design of decentralized oracle service through human powered, such as the people they trust or crowd workers. for example, chiang, kasunic and savage ( b) proposed chaingov, which allows immigrants’ family and friends help immigrants to supervise how the government uses the funding, shown in figure . despite researchers always employee crowd workers for simple tasks, there is some tool to train crowd workers to do more complex work (chiang et al., b). we believe integrating blockchain with crowdsourcing can solve more complicated oracle request in . figure . chaingov workflow, which allows the local community as the agents of immigrants to supervise the government what will it bring in the future? from the hci perception, it is important for blockchain researchers and practitioners to focus more on the users of blockchains. blockchain technology should not be used as “trustless trust” to replace current systems but as “trustworthy trust” to help the users have more confidence in current systems. as orcutt ( ) commented, “in , it (blockchain) will start to become boring.” in , researchers will reduce the publications on how to use blockchain in some “fancy” use case and start to make blockchain applications more practical and fit users’ lifestyle. from the users’ need, the blockchain will have better development in public governance, media, and financial services industries. moreover, permissioned blockchain providers will start to decentralize their control capability to the public from allowing verified customers to join the permission blockchain. public blockchain developers will decrease the difficulties of connecting to the network and chun-wei chiang, eber betanzos and saiph savage jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. provide decentralized oracle service. most of all, both public blockchain and permissioned blockchain will integrate with iot to provide trustful data. declaration of conflicting interests the authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. references baydakova, a. ( , november ). goldman, morgan stanley go live with cls’ ibm-powered blockchain. retrieved february , , from https://www.coindesk.com/goldman-morgan-stanley-go- live-with-cls-ibm-powered-blockchain. buterin, v. ( ). a next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. white paper, ( ). chiang, c.w., betanzos, e. & savage, s. ( a, april). exploring blockchain for trustful collaborations between immigrants and governments. in extended abstracts of the chi conference on human factors in computing systems (p. lbw ). acm. doi: . / . . chiang, c.w., kasunic, a. & savage, s. ( b). crowd coach: peer coaching for crowd workers’ skill growth. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, (cscw), . doi: . / . chiang, c.w., anderson, c., flores-saviaga, c., arenas jr, e., colin, f., romero, m., ... & savage, s. ( , november). understanding interface design and mobile money perceptions in latin america. in proceedings of the th latin american conference on human- computer interaction (p. ). acm. doi: . / . . deloitte ( ). deloitte’s global blockchain survey. retrieved from https://www .deloitte.com/content/dam/deloitte/ cz/documents/financial-services/cz- -deloitte-global- blockchain-survey.pdf. edelman ( ). edelman trust barometer : executive summary. edelman. retrived from https://sharedvaluemedia.com/wp- content/uploads/ / / - -edelman-trust- barometer-executive-summary- .pdf. elsden, c., nissen, b., jabbar, k., talhouk, r., lustig, c., dunphy, p., ... & vines, j. ( , april). hci for blockchain: studying, designing, critiquing and envisioning distributed ledger technologies. in extended abstracts of the chi conference the challenges and trends of deploying blockchain in the real world for the users’ need jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. on human factors in computing systems (p. w ). acm. doi: . / . . kamath, r. ( ). food traceability on blockchain: walmart’s pork and mango pilots with ibm. the journal of the british blockchain association, ( ): . kshetri, n. & voas, j. ( ). blockchain in developing countries. it professional, ( ): - . doi: . /mitp. . . lavazova, o., dehling, t. & sunyaev, a. ( , january). from hype to reality: a taxonomy of blockchain applications. in proceedings of the nd hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss ). nakamoto, s. ( ). bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. retrieved from https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. nguyen, t. ( , august ). west virginia to offer mobile blockchain voting app for overseas voters in november election. retrieved february , , from https://www.washingtonpost. com/technology/ / / /west-virginia-pilots-mobile- blockchain-voting-app-overseas-voters-november-election/. noto, g. ( , november ). do millennials trust bitcoin more than banks? bank innovation. retrieved february , , from https://bankinnovation.net/ / /do-millennials-trust- bitcoin-more-than-banks/. tian, f. ( , june). a supply chain traceability system for food safety based on haccp, blockchain & internet of things. international conference on service systems and service management (pp. - ). ieee. doi: . /icsssm. . . oham, c., jurdak, r., kanhere, s.s., dorri, a. & jha, s. ( ). b-fica: blockchain based framework for auto-insurance claim and adjudication. arxiv preprint arxiv: . . orcutt, m. ( , january ). in , blockchains will start to become boring. retrieved february , , from https://www. technologyreview.com/s/ /in- -blockchains-will- start-to-become-boring/. world economic forum ( , march). partnering against corruption initiative – infrastructure and urban development (rep.). retrieved february , , from world economic forum website: http:// www .weforum.org/docs/wef_paci_iu_report_ .pdf. tucker, c. & pang, y. ( , october ). chinese activists are using blockchain to document #metoo stories. retrieved february , , from https://hbr.org/ / /chinese-activists-are- using-blockchain-to-document-metoo-stories. chun-wei chiang, eber betanzos and saiph savage jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j u l. savage, l., salas, r. & savage, s. ( ). blockchain for governance and civic participation in mexico, , white paper. retrieved july , , from https://www.dropbox.com/s/burp zau pbv oa/ enb% % % .pdf ?dl= . werbach, k. ( ). trust, but verify: why the blockchain needs the law. berkeley tech. lj, , . narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia claudia andrade ecchio pp. - claudia andrade ecchio dra. en literatura chilena e hispanoamericana, universidad del desarrollo. santiago, chile. correo electrónico: c.andrade@udd.cl; lalaithdolin@hotmail.com es integrante de la otra lij, espacio de producción de conocimiento y de difusión de la literatura infantil y juvenil, y de ring latinoamérica, red de investigadores de narrativa gráfica. universum · vol. · n° · · universidad de talca narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamÉrica: el autocÓmic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia drawn and written by latin american women: the autocomic as a space of both questioning and denunciation resumen la narrativa gráfica ha experimentado una explosividad sorprendente, lo que se evidencia tanto en la cantidad de nuevas publicaciones anuales como en la calidad y el alcance de sus propuestas discursivo- visuales. en el caso particular de latinoamérica, se ha gestado en la última década una producción que rescata, desde una vereda otra, el relato autobiográfico, ampliamente utilizado en clásicos del género como hadashi no gen, maus y persépolis. asimismo, se visualizan temáticas, técnicas y entramados discursivos diferentes, a través de los cuales, en mi opinión, se construye una subjetividad textual y gráfica traspasada por la necesidad de aprehender la memoria individual en la experiencia cotidiana y, a partir de este ejercicio, (de)construirse como agente crítico del entramado social actual de nuestro continente. en este contexto, este artículo pretende indagar en el autocómic visual de tres autoras contemporáneas: power paola (virus tropical, ), agustina guerrero (diario de una volátil, ) y marcela trujillo (Ídolo, una historia casi real, ), a partir del análisis de los discursos que el yo-enunciador articula en torno a códigos culturales de orden patriarcal, lo que permite a las voces autorales revelar —y rebelarse— frente a dispositivos hegemónicos, desde una posición que cuestiona, incluso, el androcentrismo tradicional de la historieta. palabras claves: narrativa gráfica latinoamericana, escritura de mujeres, autobiografía, enunciación, autocómic. artículo recibido el de marzo de . aceptado el de julio de . doi:http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - abstract graphic novels have become surprisingly popular. this is evidenced in the quality, quantity, and relevance of year-to-year publications, all of which develop interesting narrative and discursive proposals. in the case of latin america, the production of the last decade has been focused on rescuing, promoting, and developing the autobiographical story genre. going beyond staples such as hadashi no gen, maus and persepolis, the local production visualises a number of themes, techniques, and discursive frameworks. all of these contribute to the formation of a text and image-nurtured canvas, driven by the necessity to encapsulate the memory of the individual in an every-day context. this allows the critical (de)construction of the social framework of our continent. the present paper explores the world of autocomics by means of three contemporary authors: power paola (virus tropical, ), agustina guerrero (diario de una volátil, ) and marcela trujillo (Ídolo, una historia casi real, ). an analysis of the corpus will show how the stories’ narrators-enunciators unveil —and rebel against— the informing patriarchal framework whose hegemony permeates both the narrated world and the traditional androcentrism of the comic-book industry as a whole. keywords: latin american graphic novels, women’s writing, autobiography, enunciation, autocomic. el yo-enunciador y yo-grÁfico en la narrativa visual autobiogrÁfica en su libro el espacio biográfico. dilemas de subjetividad contemporánea ( ), la investigadora argentina leonor arfuch nos hace conscientes de tres aspectos que no debemos soslayar quienes abordamos las llamadas ‘escrituras del yo’. primero, que estas escrituras ponen en tensión la indagación del mundo privado —en tanto tiempo transcurrido y vivido por un sujeto concreto— y su relación con el nuevo espacio de lo social ( ); en este sentido, se trata de un ‘yo performativo’, cuyo campo de acción no claudia andrade ecchio narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia se ciñe meramente a un modo de expresión o de representación, sino a un procedimiento, es decir, a un conjunto de estrategias ficcionales a través de las cuales se auto-representa. dirá arfuch: no tanto la ‘verdad’ de lo ocurrido sino su construcción narrativa, los modos de nombrar(se) en el relato, el vaivén de la vivencia o el recuerdo, el punto de la mirada, lo dejado en la sombra… en definitiva, qué historia (cuál de ellas) cuenta alguien de sí mismo o de otro yo ( ). no se trata, por tanto, solo del establecimiento del pacto autobiográfico propuesto por phillipe lejeune ( ), quien, junto con poner el acento en el contrato de lectura, sitúa en el nombre propio —compartido por el autor, el narrador y el protagonista del relato— la clave textual para distinguir el discurso autobiográfico de otros cercanos (como el de la biografía, el diario íntimo, la autoficción, entre otros) . en mi opinión, más bien estamos frente a una ‘posición enunciativa’ que cuestiona su propio ejercicio de autoconstrucción identitaria a través de un sujeto enunciador provisorio que, en su calidad de ser hablado y de hablar, a su vez, en otras voces, se manifiesta consciente de su descentramiento así como de la presencia de las voces ajenas en su discurso. segundo, que estas narrativas del yo surgen frente al fracaso de los sujetos colectivos (el pueblo, la clase, el partido, la revolución) y, sin embargo, en tanto relatos de experiencias, son “[…] expresión de una época, de un grupo, de una generación, de una clase, de una narrativa común de identidad” ( ). para arfuch, el espacio biográfico, en su doble articulación entre el yo y el nosotros, nos presenta un desafío: el hallazgo de una voz autobiográfica en sus acentos colectivos ( ) por medio de la cual haya una ‘revalorización de la idea misma de minoría’ en tanto diferenciación de la norma hegemónica, que desafía la posición centro a partir de un ‘yo enunciativo periférico’, el la investigadora chilena lorena amaro ( ) afirma, respecto de la propuesta de lejeune, que para este autor es posible diferenciar la autobiografía y la ficción a partir de “[…] la identidad del nombre compartido por el autor, el narrador y el protagonista de un relato. lo que llama pacto autobiográfico es la afirmación de esa identidad en el texto, mediada por la lectura; esto es, que el lector, al ver que estas tres entidades comparten un nombre, puede afirmar con certeza que está leyendo una autobiografía” ( ). que, siguiendo la propuesta de nelson osorio ( ), produce estrategias que cuestionan, ironizan y/o rechazan el campo simbólico de poder. en esta misma línea, lorena amaro ( ) propone que la autobiografía, en tanto género histórico, si bien comparte con las memorias el repaso de ciertos acontecimientos desde una óptica personal, introduce un nuevo elemento: “[…] la reflexión en torno al desarrollo de la propia personalidad, muy en sintonía con la importancia que la modernidad le comenzaba a atribuir al sujeto y su individualidad” ( ). en este sentido, el llamado sujeto autobiográfico se construye sobre la base de estrategias enunciativas que, por un lado, aseguran una ilusión de verosimilitud básica para el establecimiento de un pacto de lectura de orden factual y, por otro, dan cuenta de la centralidad del espacio subjetivo en términos de escritura y voz. tercero, que en la medida que las formas del espacio biográfico cuentan una historia o experiencia de vida, están sujetas a los procedimientos compositivos propios de la narratividad y, por tanto, al eje de la temporalidad. en este contexto, la heteroglosia de la voz narrativa, el insoslayable dialogismo, los mecanismos lingüísticos de inscripción y despliegue del yo/nosotros, entre otros, configuran una identidad entendida como “un trayecto siempre abierto a la diferencia” (arfuch ), un acto de habla a través del cual no solo se comunica algo (en términos de compartir), sino que enuncia una ilusión de presencia siempre desplazada, diferida, que configura el quién del espacio biográfico. en el caso de la narrativa gráfica, el investigador español alfredo guzmán ( ) distingue dos formas de autocómics: factual y ficcional. en ambos casos, esta forma discursiva permite, a través de la creación de un yo- gráfico, la construcción de un discurso de identidad, pero con procedimientos disímiles. en los autocómics de orden factual, la enunciación se articula a partir de cuatro elementos: la identidad entre el personaje principal y el autor, la comprensión por parte del lector que está frente a una enunciación factual —por lo que es necesario que tenga una referencialidad discursiva sólida que se afirme para aclarar la veracidad de la obra—, la presencia de un narrador extra-homodiegético actorizado con focalización interna fija —es decir, un claudia andrade ecchio narrador que describe las acciones que realiza el personaje y que admite únicamente una voz narrativa centrada en una sola persona— y una densidad referencial que concentre la mayor cantidad de información para autentificar a la persona y, con ello, el relato ( - ). por su parte, los autocómics ficcionales no se respaldan en el pacto referencial y, aunque a veces se incluye al autor como personaje central, no busca persuadir al lector de la veracidad del relato: la autofabulación en el cómic es un acto lúdico que no transita exclusivamente por la autorrepresentación, sino que tiene lugar también en la construcción de anécdotas y en las situaciones inverosímiles en las que se sitúa, en las que dar testimonio de la vida real deja de ser lo importante y se utilizan los recursos de la ficción para contar cualquier tipo de fantasía ( ). en el caso de los autocómics de ficción, la enunciación pone en juego otro tipo de mecanismos, entre los que destacan lo inverosímil (con variantes que van desde la invención de situaciones que hacen evidente la ficción hasta la elaboración de historias en las que lo real queda relegado solo al vínculo entre el autor y el yo-gráfico), lo biográfico (en los que se recurre a la autoficción en búsqueda de la memoria o del entendimiento del pasado) y lo especular (en el sentido que suele haber una intromisión del autor en la diégesis, en la que no es un personaje principal) (guzmán - ). en este sentido, y siguiendo lo propuesto por arfuch, en la narrativa visual de corte autobiográfico —sea autocómic factual o de ficción— estamos frente a un yo que no solo se construye a través de procedimientos narratológicos (a los que habría que adicionar la representación gráfica de sí mismo), sino, principalmente, ante un tipo de enunciación que se articula a partir de un relato retrospectivo, finito en términos de proyecto escritural acotado y que, a la vez que resignifica el camino de vida a partir de instancias de auto-reconocimiento y de auto-ficción, dialoga con su entorno en tanto se identifica con una generación, una clase, una etnia, un sexo-género, etc. estas disquisiciones respecto de la construcción del yo autobiográfico en la narrativa visual —en su doble articulación enunciativa y gráfica— narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia nos llevan, además, a preguntarnos por la perspectiva ideológica de quien codifica. si seguimos a maría isabel filinich ( ), para quien el sujeto de la enunciación se articula entre un enunciador, que codifica desde ‘cierta perspectiva’, y un enunciatario, que decodifica desde ‘cierta inteligibilidad’ ( - ), en la enunciación se conjugan dos procesos intersubjetivos —un yo que produce un discurso apela a un tú que lo interpreta—, en los que se fungen la heteroglosia y el dialogismo bakhtinianos con diversas formas de apelación y efectos de modalización que, desde benveniste , han permitido analizar el discurso como un conjunto de acciones subjetivizadas que operan en la liminaridad del lenguaje mismo. el sujeto de la enunciación dispone de ‘formas vacías’ para expresar el yo-aquí-ahora (los deícticos) y de ‘formas llenas’ para manifestar una actitud ante lo dicho (los modalizadores), lo que colabora en la plasmación de un ‘tono’ que el enunciador adopta para producir los efectos deseados; dicha tonalidad permite, por un lado, identificar la base afectiva del acto comunicativo (spang - ) y, por otro, plasmar una visión de mundo . el sujeto de la enunciación, en consecuencia, realiza un acto performativo que conjuga decir, hacer y padecer, en cuanto la acción de enunciar implica una ‘dimensión pasional’, en la que se combinan la modalización con la modulación del discurso, las que “[…] centran el discurso no en la realización, en el cumplimiento de una acción, sino en una fase previa que potencializa la acción y predispone el imaginario” (filinich ). es, precisamente, en esta fase previa en donde se juega la dimensión ideológica del acto de enunciación. bakhtin, en su análisis de los tonos de la novela , distingue entre tonalidades monológicas y dialógicas: mientras las primeras apuntan a la univocidad y transmisión del mensaje, estrategia quien produce el discurso, además, puede elegir modalidades de enunciación a partir, por ejemplo, de la selección de verbos modales, tales como deber, poder, soler, querer, necesitar, tener, que expresan una actitud del sujeto ante la acción verbal (Álvarez, ; filinich, ). cfr.: “la naturaleza de los nombres propios” y “la subjetividad en el lenguaje”. cfr.: “el problema de los géneros discursivos” (bakhtin, estética de la creación verbal - ). cfr.: “de la prehistoria de la palabra en la novela” (bakhtin, problemas literarios y estéticos - ). claudia andrade ecchio de la hegemonía simbólica y cultural cuyo objetivo es el establecimiento de una verdad de carácter oficial e indiscutible, las segundas construyen la multivocidad y la pluritonalidad, estrategia que disputa con la oficialidad (en tanto centro) el estatuto de verdad inalienable de los mensajes que promueve a través de mecanismos de subversión y distanciamiento. a raíz de lo expuesto, se entiende que la instancia de la enunciación responde a una ‘práctica discursiva situada’ (filinich ), pues tanto el yo que enuncia como el tú al que apela están determinados por la sociedad y la cultura de la que participan y que, a la vez, construyen. tanto modulaciones como modalizaciones atingentes a la instancia de enunciación corresponden a elecciones determinadas por razones estratégicas de carácter apelativo-perlocutivo, pues, a la vez que apelan a un otro buscan producir un efecto en él. en el caso de la narrativa visual de carácter autobiográfico, el yo-enunciador se permea a través de los discursos que encarna el protagonista, perspectiva desde la cual se articula no solo la visión de mundo que se quiere relevar, sino, además, la postura ideológica que se desea plasmar. ello se refuerza a partir de la construcción del yo-gráfico, el que se configura no solo a partir del pacto de lectura —sea de orden factual o ficcional—, sino también de la identificación entre quien lee y el yo auto- representado en el cómic, que se erige como un mecanismo ideológico clave a partir del cual es posible develar cómo se refuerzan o cuestionan determinadas posiciones enunciativas, ello atendiendo a los elementos que se relevan o se invisibilizan, sea de manera explícita o implícita. en virtud de lo discutido previamente, a continuación se propondrá un acercamiento preliminar a los autocómics de tres autoras latinoamericanas: la colombiana power paola (virus tropical, ), la argentina agustina guerrero (diario de una volátil, ) y la chilena marcela “maliki” trujillo (Ídolo. una historia casi real, ), a partir del análisis de la construcción del yo-enunciativo-gráfico presente en sus trabajos gráficos, perspectivas enunciativas y visuales que, no solo se sitúan en una posición de denuncia ante aquellos códigos culturales de orden patriarcal, sino que, además, se erigen como un sujetos femeninos conscientes de su propia —y necesaria— urgencia narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia por posicionarse, mostrarse y narrarse. virus tropical o la crÍtica a la cultura patriarcal virus tropical de power paola puede describirse como un autocómic de formación, pues aborda la infancia y adolescencia de su protagonista, hija de un ex sacerdote y de una madre mística, cuyo viaje de quito a cali, a nivel simbólico, representa el recorrido desde el sometimiento a las normas de la sociedad patriarcal hacia la autoconsciencia y la rebeldía. dado que se trata de una autoficción biográfica, el yo-gráfico va cambiando a medida que el personaje principal crece, lo que permite apreciar sus transformaciones físicas con el paso de los años. asimismo, a través de las ilustraciones, es posible darse cuenta de la timidez de la protagonista, de qué le causa inquietud o rabia, y, en particular, cómo el corte de pelo —que va de dos chapes amarrados con cintas negras a un cabello suelto, largo y rapado en la nuca, que solo en algunas instancias es tomado en una cola— evidencia el recorrido de la subordinación hacia la autoafirmación. lo más interesante de esta obra gráfica, en términos de reflexión en torno a la identidad femenina, es la presencia de un yo-enunciador que cuestiona abiertamente la construcción simbólica androcéntrica que legitima y naturaliza la subordinación de la mujer. la niña, incluso antes de nacer, es catalogada por un facultativo como un “virus tropical” (primera viñeta, imagen ) , situación que, si bien se presenta con cierta jocosidad, muestra de manera concreta una mirada acerca de lo femenino como ‘una enfermedad infecciosa’, que desestabiliza la racionalidad y que altera la ‘temperatura corporal’, un ‘algo extraño’ que debe ser puesto en observación y, en caso de ser necesario, verse sometido a los dispositivos de control patriarcal, publicado en partes en colombia ( , y ) y después como libro completo en por editorial común, argentina. en fue adaptado a formato fílmico, bajo la dirección de santiago caicedo, y ya ha cosechado varios premios, entre ellos, el de mejor película de animación y canción original en los premios macondo ( ). las imágenes de virus tropical se encuentran en el anexo . claudia andrade ecchio representado aquí por las figuras masculinas (médicos y padre, en primera instancia; después compañeros de curso y parejas). en otra escena (última viñeta, imagen ) se grafica la violencia discursiva a la que están sometidas las mujeres, la vulneración de sus cuerpos e incluso de sus opciones de vida. la madre, en una camilla ginecológica, debe enfrentar las voces opinantes frente a su ‘extraña condición’ y, con posterioridad, cuando ya se confirma su embarazo y le cuenta al padre —que aúna en su figura, a lo menos, dos poderes simbólicos que han constreñido a las mujeres: lo masculino-centro y lo católico-norma—, este manifiesta “estoy seguro de que esta vez sí será hombrecito” (última viñeta, imagen ), aludiendo a su propia necesidad de trascendencia y a un mandato implícito hacia su mujer, quien ya le ha dado dos mujeres, claudia y patricia. sin embargo, la madre se rebela y, al momento de elegir el nombre para su hija, es ella quien impone su voluntad: “no, esta vez yo escojo el nombre, se va a llamar paola” (última viñeta, imagen ). en términos de la construcción del yo-mujer y de la crítica al modelo androcéntrico, las imágenes más significativas son las que inician los episodios titulados “adolescencia” e “identidad” (imágenes y , respectivamente), que se contraponen al yo-gráfico niña (imagen ), porque se constata la transformación del personaje principal en una adolescente que desborda su feminidad en símbolos que discuten, precisamente, el modelo, por ejemplo, la centralidad del cuerpo femenino, la sangre negra de la menstruación, el diablillo y el angelito que representan tanto las contradicciones de la pubertad como el cuestionamiento frente a las imposiciones del mundo adulto, el jockey con el símbolo de la paz y los patines, el volcán de fondo en erupción, la embarcación aparentemente a la deriva, entre otros, los que apuntan a mostrar la experiencia caótica del paso de la infancia a la adolescencia, en particular para las mujeres, quienes tienden a ser vistas en esta etapa, desde la cultura androcéntrica, como sujetos explosivos y veleidosos, como cuerpos deseantes y deseados, y cuyas manifestaciones de descontrol, más que potenciadas, deben ser constreñidas. por su parte, las secuencias de paola niña conversando con su padre en narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia el baño (imagen ) y las ilustraciones de paola adolescente (imágenes y ) dan cuenta de una estrategia implícita de cuestionamiento al modelo patriarcal a partir de la elección del yo-gráfico así como de los discursos que articula el yo- enunciador. por un lado, se ve a la protagonista en una posición de inferioridad frente a la figura paterna (imagen ), no obstante, el espacio físico en el que se da la conversación, el contenido onírico que molesta al padre y la sugerencia del concurso de dibujo para conocer al santo padre ponen en evidencia la crítica del yo-enunciador frente a los imperativos androcéntricos encarnados por el padre/sacerdote, quien intenta desviar la creatividad ‘peligrosa’ de la hija hacia algo que considera ‘más productivo’, alejándola del espacio del deseo. por el otro lado, paola es el centro de la ilustración porque es su figura, sangrante (imagen ) y rebelde (imagen ), y ya no su contraposición con el padre, quien emerge como sujeto autónomo que busca no solo su identidad sino su propia forma —ya no la de los demás— de ver, estar y padecer el mundo. la transversalidad de este autocómic de formación no solo está en la historia de crecimiento de la niña a mujer, sino, en especial, en los imaginarios que evidencian y discuten por medio del yo-enunciador y el yo-gráfico, en particular en torno a la cultura patriarcal en el contexto latinoamericano. la escena final, que muestra a la protagonista de espaldas al lector, caminando por la calle con solo una mochila al hombro, es el inicio de lo que vendrá: “sentía que desde hacía algún tiempo todo había ido llevándome a este punto, a prepararme para salir al mundo y hacer mi vida” ( ). el ‘virus tropical’ que es paola, pasados estos ‘años de aprendizaje’, camina al encuentro de su propia autonomía, ahora consciente de las dificultades que enfrentará por el solo hecho de ser mujer, pero como agente desestabilizador y de cambio, y no de replicación y perpetuación del modelo. diario de una volÁtil o el cuestionamiento a los estereotipos femeninos el diario ilustrado de agustina guerrero —cuyo origen es un blog del claudia andrade ecchio mismo nombre iniciado en — se caracteriza por presentar una serie de entradas en los que un yo-enunciador registra su cotidianidad a través de un yo-gráfico multifacético, carismático y extraordinariamente voluble. dichas entradas carecen de una orientación cronológica (no está fechado), por lo que, a ratos, más que un diario parece una serie de pensamientos ilustrados, algunos por medio de una imagen única, otros en secuencias, e incluso introduciendo unas tiras cómicas breves. la protagonista del diario es ‘la volátil’, una treintañera que viste siempre con una camiseta a rayas, y que es descrita en el paratexto de la contraportada como una mujer que “[s]abe lo que le gusta, quién es, y lo que ganó con la madurez: algunas partes del cuerpo más fofas, ¡pero también convicciones! […] es sensible, un poco desprolija y muy efusiva” (contraportada edición sudamericana). es interesante constatar que se haya utilizado el término ‘volátil’ —que se asocia con variabilidad e imprevisibilidad— para denominar al yo-gráfico y no un nombre propio. hay aquí, en mi opinión, una elección consciente de mostrar este desbordamiento en el habla, en el cuerpo, en los pensamientos, en los actos, incluso en la multiplicidad de entradas, como una forma de discutir los discursos construidos desde la ideología patriarcal en torno a las mujeres (imágenes y ) . entre los discursos que han pretendido legitimar la subordinación de las mujeres se encuentra el de la inferioridad, que se relaciona con cualidades vistas como propias de los sujetos femeninos, por ejemplo, el infantilismo, la sensibilidad o la carencia de determinadas cualidades físicas, morales e, incluso, intelectuales. la volátil pareciera condensar, precisamente, en su figura desbordante, su gestualidad exacerbada y su habla explosiva, ese imaginario femenino de la mujer infantil, veleidosa y sensiblera; sin embargo, desde mi lectura, se trata más bien de procedimientos paródicos que ponen en juego el yo-enunciador, los que se manifiestan en la utilización de recursos hiperbólicos y carnavalescos propios del discurso dialógico descrito por bakhtin (imágenes y ), los que, a través de la risa, desarticulan la construcción simbólica androcéntrica de la mujer llorona, cambiante e imposible de comprender desde las imágenes de diario de una volátil se encuentran en el anexo . narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia la lógica masculina. el diario juega todo el tiempo con este imaginario; de hecho, la pareja de la protagonista, cuando aparece, se le ve confundido frente a la volatilidad de su compañera, lo que demuestra con el ceño fruncido, las cejas enmarcadas en actitud dubitativa y los ojos levantados mirando el techo, siempre intentando no perder la paciencia con ella. en ello, justamente, hay una crítica encubierta a la mirada masculina condescendiente y que aparenta comprensión sin haberla: “a las mujeres hay que quererlas, no entenderlas” es la frase cliché que sintetiza la postura del hombre respecto de su mujer volátil. junto a lo anterior, uno de los aspectos centrales que discute este autocómic es la desarticulación del discurso-centro en torno al cuerpo ‘perfecto’ de las mujeres. la volátil se ríe de su propia corporalidad que no se ajusta a la norma patriarcal: su pelo tomado en tomate, su cara desgreñada en las mañanas, sus posturas mientras realiza labores domésticas, sus expresiones faciales. todo en ella pone de manifiesto, a la vez que critica, las imposiciones de todo tipo a las que las mujeres se ven sometidas. entre la multiplicidad de imágenes, destaco dos: en la primera se muestra una secuencia donde la protagonista se intenta colocar una panty media (imagen ), mientras que en la segunda, se la muestra duchándose (imagen ). ambas instancias corresponden a momentos de la vida cotidiana —vestirse y bañarse—, no obstante, retratan, a nivel simbólico, por un lado, las dificultades de cumplir con parámetros de belleza física alejados de la realidad de las mujeres y la frustración que provoca el ‘no calzar’, y, por otro, el auto-placer femenino. en este sentido, el diario, a través de un yo-gráfico desbordado y desbordante, cuestiona no solo el discurso de inferioridad, sino también el menosprecio frente a esta forma de ser mujer, que no está acorde a los ideales de mesura, pudor y silencio que, tradicionalmente, se les han exigido a los sujetos femeninos. en este sentido, la volátil reivindica a este tipo de mujer que, desde la ideología patriarcal, es descrita como la histérica, la loca, la bulliciosa, y pone el acento en una interioridad y corporalidad femeninas que se exponen sin tapujos por medio de un diario íntimo, en el que la apuesta del yo-enunciador es, precisamente, dejar el espacio de lo privado asignado a la mujer para disputar el espacio público, lo que, en términos de escritura autobiográfica, claudia andrade ecchio podría reflejarse también en el cambio de formato y medio de difusión: desde el diario íntimo/papel al blog/digital. Ídolo o la reivindicaciÓn de la mujer en el circuito androcÉntrico del cÓmic la identidad femenina también se construye mediante los estereotipos de género sexual, los que son útiles para el orden de la sociedad patriarcal, en la medida que normalizan códigos de conductas que le asignan a la mujer el espacio privado y del hogar, el servicio doméstico y la crianza, mientras que permiten al hombre desplegarse en el espacio público. estos roles de sexo-género son normados y aceptados por la sociedad, aprendidos e internalizados en la familia y la escuela, y sustentados por la religión y los medios de comunicación, entre otros aparatos ideológicos. en Ídolo. una historia casi real de marcela trujillo, uno de los temas que atraviesa el relato gráfico es el posicionamiento de las ilustradoras en un espacio de poder que, tradicionalmente, ha estado bajo la esfera masculina. la historia se enmarca en un viaje realizado por la protagonista a una feria de ilustración de lima, en donde tiene la oportunidad de conocer a su ‘ídolo’, rolf runde, un famoso dibujante de origen noruego, con quien, efectivamente, tendrá un encuentro fortuito pero significativo (imágenes y ) . sin embargo, el relato gráfico no se queda en solo la exposición de la anécdota personal: por un lado, y a través de la metaficción, introduce una trama paralela en donde personajes de sus cómics (maliki cuatro ojos y el chanchito kokoro) junto a dos santas peruanas (santa rosa de lima y sarita colonia) nos sumergen en el centro del deseo de la protagonista por medio de una experiencia a la vez onírica, surrealista, neobarroca, en la que el cuerpo se torna central; por otro, en el desarrollo de las actividades características de una feria de este tipo, se nos muestra a otras ilustradoras (entre ellas, la misma power paola), quienes, a través de su participación en la charla “mi cuerpo es las imágenes de Ídolo, una historia casi real se encuentran en el anexo . narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia mío, representaciones de cuerpos femeninos en el cómic hecho por mujeres”, critican abiertamente la forma en que las mujeres han sido representadas por los hombres en el cómic (en particular, el de superhéroes) y plantean sus dificultades a la hora de abordar críticamente su propio ejercicio narrativo- visual (imagen ). por su parte, la relación entre el personaje principal y su ídolo permite al yo-enunciador abordar dos temas significativos: primero, la construcción de una masculinidad-otra, que se manifiesta en distintos momentos de la obra pero que, en particular, destaca en la escena en la que marcela le confiesa a un amigo argentino que todos los hombres con los que ha estado se le han puesto a llorar en la cama (imagen ); segundo, la denuncia pública frente a un acto de misoginia, abuso de poder y acoso laboral que la autora debió sufrir en su vida real, perpetuado por los editores de su primer libro (imagen ). esto último es relevante, en la medida que la ilustradora pasó años sin contar el episodio en el que participaron el comediante rodrigo salinas (quien, en esta obra, tiene apellido salineros), carlos reyes y rodrigo dueñas, todos de feroces editores, a quienes no denunció en su momento porque, en palabras de la propia maliki, “me dio miedo […] [y] no quise meterme en un cacho” (el desconcierto). en este contexto, el yo-enunciador deja en evidencia la importancia de hablar de la experiencia traumática, no solo como un mecanismo de liberación personal sino, principalmente, como un ‘ya no más’ al ninguneo y al abuso de poder de la sociedad patriarcal, consigna que movimientos como #metoo o las marchas feministas en todo el mundo han hecho carne y que manifiesta, más que una rabia contenida, un grito de ‘no vamos a callar nunca más’. el yo-enunciador de este autocómic no se queda solo en la denuncia frente a la violencia de género o los micromachismos que experimentan las mujeres en el ámbito de la ilustración y la historieta, sino que, además, manifiesta la importancia de la sororidad en espacios donde la cultura patriarcal —entendida aquí como forma de depredación— intenta tanto invisibilizar el trabajo realizado por mujeres como perpetuar un estereotipo físico específico sobre cómo deben ser representadas en la narrativa gráfica. la protagonista lo enuncia con claridad en la charla sobre las representaciones del cuerpo claudia andrade ecchio femenino en el cómic: “lo que yo veo es que las mujeres no sólo nos retratamos físicamente, sino que retratamos la idea que tenemos de nosotras… y muchas veces esa idea es todo menos pasiva, sumisa, sensible o un mero complemento para satisfacer al hombre” ( ). aquí, justamente, se haya el centro de la crítica expuesta a través de esta novela gráfica y el hecho de destinar varias viñetas a la charla misma da cuenta de la urgencia de hablar de estos temas, de darle voz a las mujeres que escriben e ilustran cómics, a sus aspiraciones e inquietudes, a sus luchas y a las vicisitudes que deben sortear. a modo de cierre los estudios sobre las operaciones e implicaciones ideológicas de los discursos han puesto en evidencia que la interacción entre autor, texto y lector no se construye sobre un espacio vacío, sino que se produce y es recibida por sujetos traspasados por posicionamientos ideológicos, políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales que, explícita o implícitamente, están presentes en la comunicación en general. a raíz de ello, se hace necesario abordar, desde las propuestas teóricas en torno a la instancia de enunciación, la construcción del yo-enunciador en la narrativa gráfica de corte autobiográfico, en la medida que, junto con presentarnos un yo-gráfico, colabora en la transmisión, discusión y subversión de discursos sociales y culturales vigentes o no en un momento histórico determinado. en tanto práctica situada, estas narrativas visuales se inscriben en un contexto latinoamericano donde, por un lado, las autoras luchan por posicionar sus formas de representación de la realidad, de contar historias e ilustrarlas, en un espacio que, tradicionalmente, ha estado traspasado por la mirada —y el ejercicio— de los hombres; por otro, a partir de estrategias que buscan poner en evidencia las prácticas patriarcales, las autoras han construido yo-gráficos cfr.: van dijk, “política, ideología y discurso” ( ); Žižek, “introducción. el espectro de la ideología” ( ); thompson, ideology and modern culture. critical social theory in the era of mass communication ( ); mannheim, ideología y utopía. introducción a la sociología del conocimiento ( ). narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia femeninos que cuestionan la cultura androcéntrica en términos de corporalidad y estereotipos, y han articulado discursos de crítica a dicho modelo por medio de un yo-enunciador que se posiciona desde el develamiento de ‘malas prácticas’ y el activismo. retomando el inicio de este artículo, la liminaridad propia de la enunciación, la dimensión ideológica que se permea a través de ella, la identificación como estrategia apelativo-perlocutiva, la denuncia desde este yo-periférico construido textual y visualmente en el autocómic, la presencia del yo/nosotros/otros propio del espacio biográfico, hacen de la narrativa gráfica de corte autobiográfico una instancia única para que las ilustradoras posicionen temas como la descosificación del cuerpo femenino, el empoderamiento de las mujeres y la discusión de los estereotipos de género-sexual, desde una práctica conscientemente contestataria y performativa. bibliografÍa Álvarez, gerardo. “el texto y su enunciación”. textos y discursos. concepción: universidad de concepción, . - . impreso. amaro, lorena. vida y escritura. teoría y práctica de la autobiografía. santiago: ediciones universidad católica de chile, . impreso. arfuch, leonor. el espacio biográfico. dilemas de subjetividad contemporánea. buenos aires: fce, . impreso. bakhtin, mikhail. estética de la creación verbal. trad. tatiana bubnova. madrid: siglo xxi, . impreso. ———. problemas estéticos y literarios. trad. alfredo caballero. la habana: arte y literatura, . impreso. benveniste, emile. “la naturaleza de los pronombres” y “de la subjetividad en el lenguaje”. problemas de lingüística general i. méxico d.f.: siglo xxi, . - . impreso. filinich, maría isabel. enunciación. buenos aires: eudeba, . impreso. guerrero, agustina. diario de una volátil. buenos aires: sudamericana, . impreso. claudia andrade ecchio narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia guzmán, alfredo. “autocómics factuales”. figuraciones del yo en el cómic contemporáneo. tesis de doctorado, universidad autónoma de barcelona, . - . web. feb. . https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/tesis/ /hdl_ _ /acgt de .pdf lejeune, philippe. el pacto autobiográfico y otros estudios. trad. ana torrent. madrid: megazul-endymion, . impreso. el desconcierto. “marcela “maliki” trujillo y su episodio de abuso de poder: “no pude hacer la denuncia legal porque me dio miedo”. entrevista dada el / / . web. mar. . https://www.eldesconcierto. cl/ / / /marcela-maliki-trujillo-y-su-episodio-de-abuso-sexual- con-un-editor-no-pude-hacer-la-denuncia-legal-porque-me-dio- miedo/ osorio, nelson. “ficción de oralidad y cultura de la periferia en la narrativa mexicana e hispanoamericana actual”. literatura mexicana hoy. del al ocaso de la revolución. ed. karl kohut. alemania: vervuert verlag, . - . impreso. power paola. virus tropical. buenos aires: la editorial común, . impreso. spang, kurt. “acerca de los tonos en la literatura”. revista de literatura lxviii. (jul.-dic. ): - . web. feb. . http://revistadeliteratura.revistas.csic.es/index.php/revistadeliteratura/article/ viewfile/ / &a=bi&pagenumber= &w= trujillo, marcela. Ídolo. una historia casi real. santiago: penguin random house, . claudia andrade ecchio portada virus tropical editorial común, argentina ( ). imagen anexo : imÁgenes virus tropical de power paola narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia imagen imagen imagen imagen claudia andrade ecchio imagen narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia anexo : imÁgenes diario de una volÁtil de agustina guerrero portada diario de una volátil editorial sudamericana, argentina ( ) imagen imagen imagen claudia andrade ecchio imagen imagen imagen narrativa visual producida por mujeres en latinoamérica: el autocómic como espacio de cuestionamiento y denuncia anexo : imÁgenes Ídolo. una historia casi real de marcela trujillo portada Ídolo. una historia casi real editorial penguin random house, chile ( ). imagen imagen imagen imagen imagen untitled kent academic repository full text document (pdf) copyright & reuse content in the kent academic repository is made available for research purposes. unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg creative commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. versions of research the version in the kent academic repository may differ from the final published version. users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. users should always cite the published version of record. enquiries for any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.uk if you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the kar admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html citation for published version sanders-mcdonagh, e. and peyrefitte, m. ( ) space, power and sexuality: transgressing spatial boundaries and interstices of transgression. gender, place and culture, ( ). pp. - . issn - x. doi https://doi.org/ . / x. . link to record in kar http://kar.kent.ac.uk/ / document version author's accepted manuscript space, power and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstices of spatial boundaries abstract: the themed section consists of articles that explore the relationship between power and space in relation to gender and sexuality by looking at processes of transgression, subversion or expansion of normative spatial practices and narratives. using a theoretical framework that draws out power and space within a more specific context of feminist and queer literature, the papers explore the possibility to transgress, subvert or expand norms at the interstices of spatial boundaries beyond traditional binaries and hierarchies. collectively, the papers call for a continued theoretical and methodological focus into the importance of looking at everyday sites of struggles and resistance in the crevasses, the liminal zones of space. the transgression of spatialized norms of sexuality and gender present a transformative potential that should be recognized for its political significance but, we argue, with caution as heteronormative and heteropatriarchal norms too often remain de rigueur in a neoliberal context. keywords: power; sexuality; norms; transgression; space introduction since we began working on this special issue in , a lot has happened in the world that makes the topics explored in the four articles presented here even more salient to feminist geography. the rapid and frightening changes to the political landscape makes clear the need to bring together papers that explore questions of space, power and transgression/subversion in relation to gender and sexuality. indeed, we are observing in the us and much of western europe a shift in the political spectrum that is increasingly skewed towards neoliberal and conservative ideologies that contribute to the exclusion of other in many guises; these others that do not conform to heteropatriachal norms are increasingly singled out and positioned as a challenge to the existing masculine and heteronormative social order. these political changes are deeply troubling as polarizations appear to be growing as a result of socio-political shifts. this also appears to be, perhaps paradoxically, a consequence of ideological boundaries being increasingly blurred and redrawn. in this context, the question of gender and sexuality takes a new prominence especially if we think of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy as two complementary processes of oppression. forms of resistance and contestations have however found ways to continue to express themselves - sometimes with dramatic effects. on the january , millions of women marched in cities across the world to protest and rally against the political order (moss and maddrell, ). for a day at least, women were able to reclaim the streets of cities on a global scale as a space of resistance and solidarity (falola and west ohueri, ). in the virtual space of the twitter-sphere, the #metoo and #timesup movements emerged as a response to the weinstein affair and other cases involving powerful figures of the entertainment industry. these public revelations not only revealed the scale of sexual harassment in hollywood, they also began to shed some light on a more widespread issue affecting women in the everyday places and spaces of the worlds in which they work, live, inhabit. these two examples of contestation have not been all-encompassing and a number of voices remain unheard as there are other class and race-based power relations in the experience of gender and sexuality that are not represented (or perhaps, more accurately, are silenced) in the current atmosphere of feminist anger (rose-redwood and rose-redwood, ). the question of non-heteronormative people’s experience of violence in different forms and in different public and private areas of their lives also remains less prominent in these contestations. however, these examples, which are to be considered for their geographical and spatial dimension as much as the fact that they are a question of time, history and genealogy, make clear the importance of trying to make sense of the relationship between power and space in order to understand the normalizing and constraining effect of power over space and how this hegemony might best be challenged. as such in this introduction, we explore conceptualization of space and power and the particular question of transgression; the articles in this special issue speak particularly to transgression/ subversion and the disruption of the ‘order of things’. taken together, these four articles allow us to make an argument for the importance of looking at everyday sites of struggles and resistance in the crevasses, the liminal zones and the interstices of space. conceptualizing space and power space, as certeau ( ) puts it, ‘occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities’ (certeau , ). in defining space as the result of an interaction of power-loaded matrices and trajectories, certeau ( ) identifies forms of subversion to the established order and innovatively demonstrates the possibility of circumventing the formulaic quality of ‘ways of operating’ in space through alternative and subversive ‘ways of using’ and what he refers to as ‘tactics’. his argument on spatial practices offers an analysis of everyday negotiations of place using walking in the city as an example of the ways in which place can be appropriated beyond the ‘the “geometrical” or “geographical space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ ( , ). this conceptualisation conveys the saliency of agentic forms of transgression or subversion in space. before certeau, foucault who conceptualised power as ubiquitous, pervasive and capable of taking different forms in different spaces (as for instance biopower, disciplinary power, pastoral power, and psychiatric power), including through embodiment, also envisaged the possibility to go against norms and the extent to which this can be possible (see, for instance, foucault , ). foucault’s work has notably been embraced by some geographers (philo , howell ). philo ( ) calls for a re-reading of foucault, particularly specific aspects of his latest published works (for e.g. the collège de france lectures), which confer an engagement with space, spatial relations and power that, he considers, should be of particular interest to geographers. philo ( ) had already advanced the idea of a “foucault’s geography” as a “truly” postmodern human geography” (philo , ) especially in the ‘taking seriously of space, place and geography as sources of fragmentation’ (philo , ). the foucauldian concept of heterotopia for instance has been used to explore hidden and marginalised spaces of difference: see lee ( ) on the blurring of boundaries between war and domesticity; bailey and shabazz’s themed issue on ‘gender and sexual geographies of blackness’ ( ) expanding foucault’s theory of heterotopias ‘to consider the ways in which heterotopic spaces are simultaneously racialized, gendered, and sexualized’ (bailey and shabazz , ); and in this issue, neville ( ) reads online slash communities as heterotopias as safe counter-sites. at the juncture of power relations, spaces of resistance can indeed be formed even if ‘actual resistance is not inevitable and might be relatively scarce’ (ettlinger , ). different people or different groups of people find alternatives in the nexus of power relations and ‘power-geometries’ (massey ) that constitute space. they find or create alternative places to be, or alternative ways of being in place, and in finding a place or space to define themselves, they are at times able to challenge prescribed identities. these theoretical frameworks also highlight the capability for agency to express itself through choice and creativity in practices and processes of meaning-making - ultimately with the effect to rethink spatial practices and meanings. we, and the authors of the articles in this themed section, retain the everyday quality of forms of transgression or subversion in space, by empirically considering spatial practices and processes of meaning-making that have the potential to form a collective set of resistance to prescribed notions and spatial organizations and productions of gender and sexuality in line with feminist geographers who have pursued a critical reading of space that incorporate a focus on gender and sexuality. critically reading space through gender and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstice. gender and sexual subjectivities, in particular, are often determined by the inequality imbued in the power-geometries of space or what cresswell ( ) calls the ‘(…) systematically asymmetrical arrangement of power’ (cresswell , ). the spatialization of gender and sexuality constitutes a central turn as it recognises variations in the ways in which gender and sexuality can be expressed and lived in different spaces and places. speaking about the importance of politics in relation to sexual identities and spaces, brown, browne and lim argue that: power might be understood as myriad entanglements of resistance and domination that are mutually constitutive of each other. power operates through how we interact with one another, how we regulate each other’s behavior and consequently make the spaces that we inhabit ( , ). the disciplining imperatives of power relations often serve to normalize, at the expense of others, some sexual and gendered identities as well as their expression and movement in space. each paper in this issue engages with different forms of contestation and disruption of spatial norms, their binaries and hierarchies understanding power as both a source of resistance and domination, and considering its inclusion in geographical understandings of the politics of space and place (see ahmed , hemmings , curren ). indeed, the papers illustrate the political nature of particular places (real or imagined, physical or virtual) and the ways traditional power structures and relations are disrupted in the wake of transgressive sexed/gendered practices as well as meaning-making processes. this necessitates both a material understanding of spatial divisions, but also a consideration of how ontological or emotional transgressions impact people moving in and through particular spaces and places. the strength of feminist and queer theory has been to engage in the disruption of hegemonic structures of power relations that govern identities and their embodiment by highlighting the narratives and practices that contest or extend the norm (oswin ). baydar ( ) speaks for instance of the alteration of normative spatial practices in the sexualized production of space. one of the effects of power over space is in the production and maintenance of norms that are defined in binary terms. the feminist and queer geography literature has instead informed a non-binary approach to a critical reading of sexuality and gender conceptualizing space as fluid and not fixed. doan ( ) for instance identifies what she calls ‘the tyranny of gendered spaces’. for doan ( ) this tyranny is characterized by a persisting gendered dichotomy that constrains the expression and experience of gendered differences in space. interrogating and in turn challenging the tyranny of gender categories and their spatial correspondence present a transformative potential. doan ( ) makes a pertinent argument in relation to intersexed and transgendered populations and how this tyranny affects both their private and public life albeit in different ways. focusing on heterosexuality and the moral geographies of prostitution, hubbard ( ) highlights a binary between ‘moral and immoral heterosexual identities’. oswin ( ) takes the argument further. although a ‘scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing’ (oswin , ), she argues that a queer geographical approach should adopt a broader scope that considers ‘such issues as transnational labour flows, diaspora, immigration, public health, globalization, domesticity, geopolitics and poverty’ and as such ‘demonstrates the use of queer theory to these central concerns of critical geography far beyond analysis of their relationship to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered lives’ (oswin , ). we contend that this research agenda remains important and this themed issue is situated within literature from feminist and queer geographers that have engaged with gender and sexual binaries at the intersection of different social factors in a number of socio-spatial contexts and empirical settings as examples, we can cite the work of podmore ( ) using montreal’s boul. st laurent to dismiss a heterosexual and homosexual binary in the way the city is experience by lesbians; little ( ) and little and panelli ( ) on rural gender identity and the importance of critically addressing hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity; bailey ( ) on the black lgbt ballroom community and the ‘spatial practice of possibility’ in urban detroit. in the context of the neo-liberal city, gentrification imposes a particular set of power relations at the intersection of class, gender and sexuality (kern a, b). this themed issue begins with buckingham, degen and marandet’s paper situated in the context of ‘large-scale gentrification and neoliberalisation, which leaves fewer interstitial places available for non-conforming populations, and the organisation which supports them’ (buckingham, degen and marandet , ). their paper contends a strong relationship between spatial practices of subversion, transformation of space and the self or sense of self. in this buckingham, degen and marandet ( ) further demonstrate the importance of place and how it is possible to carve out a space of opportunity through co-creation. in order to understand the relationship between place and sex work they look at ‘the quotidian’ and ‘the gentrified’ in two areas of london undergoing gentrification: tower hamlets and kings cross. with this distinction, buckingham et al. ( ) offer an alternative and feminist reading of street-sex work that pay particular attention the ‘lived body’ in ‘lived spaces’ as well as the possibility for different forms of identification and ways of being women in terms not simply defined by their sex work. in another part of london where hegemonic processes (sanders-mcdonagh et al, ) of gentrification are also narrowing down the possibilities for queer geographies of sexuality, sanders-mcdonagh and peyrefitte’s ( ) contribution focuses on two sex shops in soho (london). one of the effects of this hegemonic gentrification is the sanitization of the area by eliminating or displacing practices that do not conform to a respectable norm in this case especially in relation to sexuality. these two shops however cater for a wide range of sexual practices and orientations and thus present examples of the ways in ‘which sex shops in this part of london have moved away from being masculine, seedy spaces, to places where queer possibilities emerge for a wide range of people seeking out sexual retailing’ (sanders- mcdonagh and peyrefitte, ). their existence and the queer possibility that they therefore represent notably through their co-location and ‘the attendant history of the area’ contest the organization of public space along heteronormative but also homonormative lines (podmore ). by way of counteracting another form of spatial marginalization in a different urban and national context, la fundacion de diciembre (in madrid, spain) opened up to specifically support older lgbt people (weicht and radicioni ). exploring the gendered/sexed practices of its residents, weicht and radicioni argue that the social centre and its accompanying initiatives provide a space which represents the past and present struggles for the recognition of rights, the caring relationships and the histories with which these groups identify. the paper thus focuses on the transformative power of the active and collective making of caring spaces through which narratives of care, collective sexual and gender recognition and practices of love/friendship caring relationships can replace both traditional/informal forms of living together and caring and institutional spaces that provide professional care. the work of weicht and radicioni provide a fascinating insight into the ways in which ‘bodies out of place’ can find a place of inhabitance where they can be expanded to use ahmed’s expression (ahmed , ). as another example of alternative spaces where norms are contested, neville’s paper on gendered and sexed identities draws on large-scale survey data from women who write gay male erotica and pornography to suggest that particular virtual spaces are safe spaces. for her participants, online slash communities offer women a chance to explore their own gender and sexuality, and as a result they are able to challenge heteronormativity and gender conformity. however, neville’s study demonstrates that m/m online fandoms are not only providing safe online spaces but can also constitute real spaces as heterotopias where ‘alternative identities can be reflected and where subordinated groups can find support and collective resistance (warner , fraser )’ (neville ). in looking at the relationship between virtual and real-life spaces, neville is able to uncover the different significations of slash such as being a gateway to activism, a medium for knowledge building and a place for personal discovery. her analysis of these dimensions shows that ‘there is a rejection of overly- rigid policing of the boundaries of these spaces, and an enthusiasm for the idea of them as heterotopias, counterpublics, spaces that are radical and have the potential to be genuinely transformative’ (neville ). conclusion in recognizing the interstices that constitute space in its diversity, the different papers in this special section expand scholarly knowledge – theoretical, methodological and empirical – that disrupts conceptualizations of space. beside a gendered and feminist theoretical and conceptual lens, the papers in this special issue indeed display a range of methodological approaches showing the diversity and the creativity of a scholarship that explore the interstices of power relations in space. in doing so, the collection presents examples of different ways in which space and place can be understood and conceptualized through practices but also processes of meaning- making allowing for the shifting of normative boundaries – geographies of sexuality that are not determined by what brown et al. ( ) have warned as ‘the theoretical orthodoxy’ of queer theorizing. as such, a critical geography of space and place should recognize the porosity and the malleability of borders around places as they are being drawn and redrawn by the power-relations that constitute space. this themed issue present different examples of the possibility to carve out a space of transgression of heteronormative/homonormative and heteropatriarchal structures, whether it is in the everyday spaces of the queer care home, through support services, in sex shops or in online slash communities. the papers overall offer an empirically grounded insight into the possibilities to subvert, transgress and transform spaces by investigating different cases of sexed and gendered narratives and practices in a variety of contexts. they offer an invitation to continue turning our academic lens at the liminal zones, the interstices or crevasses of space: the spaces that are carved out outside the norm. the interstices in some contexts are becoming narrower and this is most potent in buckingham, degen and marandet’s ( ) and sanders-mcdonagh and peyrefitte’s ( ) papers which deal with the effect of gentrification in the neoliberal city. in weicht and radicioni’s ( ) and neville’s ( ) papers, the interstices remain ‘marginal’ but a real alternative space of expression and transformation. in all cases, the papers demonstrate the transformative possibility of transgression. as moss and dyck ( : ) argue: transgression may be contested, as in the use of threat and violence, or alternatively through self-surveillance in fear or acceptance of dominant norms. if ‘successful’, transgression as a transformative politics adding to the multiplicity of meanings of a particular place. we can question the extent to which the gendered and sexed practices and narratives that carve out transformative spaces have enough political weight in their transgression. in the current political context, this special issue presents, with a degree of optimism, alternative voices that contest the neoliberal and heteropatriarchal consensuses that spatially govern people’s lives and bodies. conversely, we contend that their transformative political strength lies in the recognition of their existence and this recognition should continue to inform a research agenda in critical geography. acknowledgements we would like to thank the contributors to this special issue for taking this journey with us and for bringing to the discussion the originality and strength of their individual research. we would also like to thank the editorial board of gender, place and culture, especially pamela moss who has been incredibly supportive and committed to our project. her comments on the introduction have been invaluable. references ahmed, sara. . queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. london: duke university press bailey, marlon. . “engendering space: ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in detroit.” gender, place and culture ( ): - . bailey, marlon and shabazz, rashad. . “editorial: gender and sexual geographies of blackness: anti-black heterotopias (part ).” gender, place and culture ( ): - . baydar, gulsum. “sexualised productions of space.” gender, place and culture ( ): - . brown, gavin, kath browne and jason lim. . “introduction or why have a book on geographies of sexualities?” in geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics edited by kath browne, jason lim and gavin brown. farnham: ahsgate, - certeau, michel de. . the practice of everyday life. london: university of california press. cresswell, tim. . “new cultural geography-an unfinished project?” cultural geographies ( ): - . doan, petra. l. “the tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy.” gender, place and culture ( ): - . ettlinger, nancy. . “governmentality as epistemology.” annals of the association of american geographers ( ): - . falola, bisola. and west ohueri, chelsi. . “resist, persist, desist: building solidarity from grandma ella through baby angela to the women’s march” gender, place and culture, ( ): - foucault, michel. . madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason. london: routledge foucault, michel. . discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. penguin books, london hubbard, phil. . “desire and disgust: mapping the moral contours of heterosexuality.” progress in human geography : - . howell, philip. ( ) “foucault, sexuality, geography” in crampton, j. and elden, s. (eds), space, knowledge and power: foucault and geography, burlington, vt: ashgate, - kern, leslie. a “selling the ‘scary city’: gendering freedom, fear and condominium development in the neo-liberal city.” social and cultural geography ( ): - . kern, leslie. b. “gendering reurbanisation: women and new-build gentrification in toronto.” population, space and place : - . lee, janet. . “fany (first aid nursery yeomanry) ‘other spaces’: toward an application of foucault’s heterotopias as alternate spaces of social ordering.” gender, place and culture ( ): - little, jo. . “rural geography: rural gender identity and the performance of masculinity and femininity in the countryside.” progress in human geography ( ): - . little, jo and ruth panelli. . “gender research in rural geography.” gender, place and culture ( ): - . massey, doreen. . for space. london: sage publication moss, pamela. and maddrell, a. . “introduction: emergent and divergent spaces in the women’s march: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion” gender, place and culture, ( ): - moss, pamela. and dyck, isabel. . “embodying social geography” in anderson, k. domosh, m., pile, s. & thrift, n. (eds). handbook of cultural geography. london: sage publication: - oswin, natalie. . “critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space.” progress in human geography ( ): - . philo, chris. . “a ‘new foucault’ with lively implications – or the ‘the crawfish advances sideways.’” transactions of the institute of british geographers : - . philo, chris. . “foucault’s geography.” environment and planning d: society and space : - . podmore, julie. . “critical commentary: sexualities landscapes beyond homonormativity.” geoforum : - . podmore, julie. . “lesbians in the crowd: gender, sexuality and visibility along montreal’s boul.st-laurent.” gender, place and culture ( ): - . rose-redwood, cindyann. and rose-redwood, reuben. . “ ‘it definitely felt very white’: race, gender and the performative politics of assembly at the women’s march in victoria, british columbia”, gender, place and culture, ( ): - sanders-mcdonagh, erin, peyrefitte, magali and ryalls, matt . .”sanitising the city: exploring hegemonic gentrification in london’s soho, sociological research online, ( ) excuse us for living editor’s introduction to this issue excuse us for living carol iannone published online: april # springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature did you ever wonder how the trojans could have been so unwary as to let that giant wooden horse pass through their gates and into the heart of their city without careful inspection? warnings arise from different sources, but something always prevents the trojans from heeding them. the greeks had sailed away, of course, or so they made the trojans think, and helen, the original trophy wife, remained in troy. it must have seemed to the trojans that a kind of victory had been secured, that they had endured the worst a city could endure and yet were still standing after ten years of siege, albeit with significant losses to themselves. i’ve heard it said, too, that troy may have had a special relationship to horses; their selfless hero hector, now dead, his body mutilated, at the hands of the self-centered greek champion achilles, was known by the epithet “tamer of horses” (actually the last, heartbreaking words of the iliad). was the wooden horse not a kind of homage to their city, perhaps in the way the image of the statue of liberty in tiananmen square honored the united states? come to think of it, what about the trojan horses the academic world has incautiously allowed inside its gatesover the past half century orso—women’s studies, black studies, gay studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, and so on in an expanding list, encompassing diversity, multiculturalism, sustainability, and more. it could be argued that these things were advanced at first according to our values—equity, fairness, tolerance,openness,justice,generosity.onceinside,however,their treacherous nature unfolded, undercutting genuine scholarship and the traditional western heritage of great works, and eventually stifling academic freedom and healthy debate. well, didn’t president reagan warn, quoting a wise unknown person who prophesied that if fascism ever comes to america, it will come in the name of liberalism? acad. quest. ( ) : – doi . /s - - - carol iannone is editor-at-large of academic questions, east th street, th floor, new york, ny ; iannone@nas.org. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf as recently as , at the democratic national convention, illinois state senator barack obama lit up the country with his rousing keynote address, a colorful rendition of martin luther king jr.’s dream. “well, i say to them tonight,” obama challenged those who saw america as divided, “there is not a liberal america and a conservative america—there is the united states of america. there is not a black america and a white america and latino america and asian america—there's the united states of america.” the audience and the country responded with cheers and put the unknown state senator into the white house four years later. of course, during that same period, obama was absorbing the anti-semitic and anti-american diatribes of the reverend jeremiah wright during his sunday worship, so perhaps was a kind of cusp point, in which two modes of seeing and experiencing america were rubbing against each other, like tectonic plates. recent events show just how far from that earlier declaration of unity we’ve come. a duke professor got in trouble for suggesting that chinese students take the opportunity of being on an american campus to practice their english instead of conversing among themselves in chinese, excluding others around them. the professor had to resign and duke issued a fulsome apology—to the students. longtime nbc anchorman tom brokaw was roundly vilified for daring to recommend that hispanics seek to assimilate. starbucks founder howard schultz’s sunny recollection of having friends of different races while growing up was greeted with a stormfront of hostility. and while amy wax was punished for the crime of advancing bourgeois values as the key to a successful life, george bridges, president of evergreen college, was bullied by protesting students for mere hand gestures that appeared too authoritative. (speaking of starbucks, remember first mate starbuck of the pequod, of quintessential liberal new england temperament, totally flummoxed by the belligerent obsessiveness of captain ahab?) so far from being one america, it seems one part thinks the other part should agree to a position of subservience, surrendering its “white male privilege” and devoting itself to perpetual penance for “white supremacy” in the form of ongoing deference to non-whites, and in the case of men, to women. one scholar is explicitly calling for classics journals to stop publishing the scholarly work of white men in favor of non-whites and women. princeton professor dan-el padilla peralta wants “reparative epistemic justice,” as roger kimball explains in the march new criterion, “i.e., the expulsion of whites from the discipline and . . . the end to colorblind assessment of merit.” at the c. iannone society for classical study conference in san diego in january of this year, padilla demanded that “holders of privilege will need to surrender their privilege. in practical terms, this means that . . . white men will have to surrender the privilege they have of seeing their words printed and disseminated; they will have to take a backseat so that people of color—and women and gender-nonconforming scholars of color—benefit from the privilege of seeing their words on the page.” kimball describes this as par for the course in latter day academia; for me, things are moving fast and i advise being on alert. but our cause, it is just, and in some areas of our polity circumstances have improved. vigorous discussion of the merits of mass immigration, both legal and illegal, is at least out in the open, instead of being crushed with cries of racism and bigotry and suffocated with worn out clichés about pulling up the gangplank. i remember when “culture” was a forbidden word in evaluating the causes of social dysfunction. now culture is readily utilized in diagnosing current ills, a result, perhaps, of the previous lack of deference to its explanatory power in supporting a free society. in more specific ways, too, there are good signs. the activist conservative student movement, turning point usa, is moving along impressively in its efforts to add balance to our politically monochrome campuses, with exceptional young leaders such as white male charlie kirk and black female candace owens. a number of states have enacted campus free speech laws—virginia, missouri, arizona, kentucky, colorado, north carolina, tennessee, utah, wisconsin, and florida—and president trump has indicated that he will issue an executive order tying the protection of campus free speech to federal funding. those of us committed to reasserting the principled pursuit of knowledge are not about to be fooled into premature declarations of victory by any wooden horses, though, and there are none on the horizon anyway. but we thought it time for a special feature assessing our progress, at least to some extent, “reforming higher education: victories, advances, and setbacks.” peter bonilla, vice president of programs at the foundation for individual rights in education, suggests that the hardest won victories may be those accomplished through litigation. in “two victories for academic freedom,” he tells in fascinating and instructive detail of the successful outcomes of lawsuits filed by mike adams at the university of north carolina wilmington, and by john mcadams at marquette, in which the national association of scholars filed an amicus brief. excuse us for living in “the confucius institutes,” nas director of research rachelle peterson explains how efforts at exposing the fraudulence of the china-backed confucius institutes have resulted in legislative and university actions to close them down on fifteen campuses so far. peterson’s own nas report outsourced to china: confucius institutes and soft power in american higher education was a major contribution to these efforts. in the manner of “our flag was still there,” nas public affairs director glenn m. ricketts is able to detail the number of academic enclaves that continue to offer a solid curriculum in western civilization, some longstanding and some more recently founded by nas members, in “saving remnants: where western civ thrives.” in the advances category, once again, we have to acknowledge the continuing strength of the justice system in resisting the onslaught of campus fascism. in “due process, devos, and the courts,” kc johnson sees two factors in the improvement of the atmosphere surrounding sexual misconduct allegations on campus. one is the wave of successful lawsuits confronting the injustices of the title ix guidelines that were instigated by the obama department of education. the other is current secretary of education betsy devos herself, for rescinding the “dear colleague” letter from the obama doe that, in effect, denied due process and virtually instituted #metoo standards in sexual misconduct procedures, and for advancing improved guidelines. nas president peter wood has written a letter to devos, available at the nas website, generally approving of her proposals and making further suggestions. in “harvard hoist on its own petard,” john s. rosenberg describes how the lawsuits against harvard’s admissions policies, slanted against asians, are usefully revealing the flaws and injustices in affirmative action in general. we could add to these advances the rollbacks in hurtful sustainability regulations. and although the results are far from satisfactory, nas was able to command the attention of the testmakers and secure some improvements in the advanced placement history tests. now to the setbacks, and we must admit they are considerable. nas director of communication david randall outlines how the last outpost of objectivity in scholarship is being compromised in “politicized science.” in “diversity discontent,” charles geshekter deplores the multicultural diversity pledge now operative throughout the california state university system in which faculty members must “pledge fealty to diversity through what amounts to a loyalty oath,” as he describes it. the new requirements are unsurprising to longtime nas member geshekter. both california’s university c. iannone systems “have spent twenty years trying to circumvent proposition (now article , section of the california constitution),” he writes, which prohibits any consideration of race in public employment, public contracting, and public education. nevertheless, in defiance of this statute in , the san diego state president and the academic senate approved new plans to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. the plans establish released time opportunities for current faculty to receive “hands-on training” concerning implicit bias, racial/gender microaggressions, cultural competency, teaching practices for underserved students, and something called “collective sense making.” geshekter marshals his decades of experience as a professor of african history at california state university, chico to deflate any pedagogical or scholarly justification used to adduce the efficacy of such training. millions of taxpayer dollars are going to locate russian “collusion” in the election, but if you want to find russian-soviet-marxist influence in the academy, just take one step and it will fall on your head. aside from the marxist paradigm of oppressor and oppressed infecting and inflaming every discipline, mike adams’s contribution to the setbacks section of our feature, “queer criminology: new directions in academic irrelevance,” tells of an entire new and totally specious subdiscipline emerging from marxist principles. moving to our articles section in this issue, readers interested in russian influence will find jon k. chang’s “on ethnic cleansing and revisionist russian history,” showing the lengths to which western scholars went to preserve the leftist fantasy that the soviet union was devoid of racial animus. and for that matter, marxist inflected “scholarship” is impinging on higher education in, of all places, eastern europe. see “academic freedom and the central european university,” by stephen baskerville. we’ve all heard by now of the “irreproducibility crisis,” the discovery that many—perhaps most—scientific studies do not yield similar results upon repetition. that’s just one problem, writes john staddon, professor emeritus, department of psychology and neuroscience, duke university, and one that is being addressed. staddon explains “object of inquiry: psychology’s other (non-replication) problem,” that is, “drawing conclusions about the psychology or physiology of individuals from group averages.” aq advisor paul hollander was practically born to show how wrong jason stanley’s new book, how fascism works: the politics of us and excuse us for living them, is on the subject of fascism. stanley is the jacob urowsky professor of philosophy at yale. williams college professor darel e. paul talks with peter wood on episode # of curriculum vitae, a new series of weekly one hour podcasts at the nas website. paul discusses his book, from tolerance to equality: how elites brought america to same sex marriage, reviewed in this issue by robert maranto. in addition, barry latzer’s short take, “the futility of gun control as crime control,” arose from his podcast, episode # , in which he discusses “race, crime, and culture,” his contribution to our winter special feature on unorthodox ideas. a second short take in this issue is john agresto’s evocation of “the liberal arts as magic and as paradox.” three poems polish off the issue, two by david randall in his third appearance, and the second by a new contributor, michael lurie. and peter wood has some surprises in this issue’s books, articles, and items of academic interest. c. iannone 	excuse us for living refleksi aktuallitas fenomenollogi edmund hussejrll dallam jfillsafat .jurnal edisi ' paruh pertama abad yang sangat berpengaruh dalam sejarah .. meminati filsafat dan prihatin dengan dewasa ini, yang menurut u..&&...~"'''''''lla.a.a.a.a. rnacarn-rnacarn va~~vu.a.&~~~~ apa adanya .. semboyannya zu den sachen selbst' (kembalilah kepada sendiri (verhaak, : ) cocok dengan filosofinya .. edmund huss~rladalah orang yang telahmeletakkan pengarull paling kuat··· danmendalam atas pemikiran- pemikiran filsafat setelah bergson. dia adalah seorang ·.pelopor fenomenologi yang iahir· di prossvitz (moravia) padatahun , dan meninggalpada tahun .. diaadalah· seorang filsuf jerman keturunan yahudi .. kebebsaran edmund husserl sebagai seorang filsuf, terkenal·dari hasil karyanya yangcukup banyak .. buku-bukukarya edmund husser} yang terkenaldan besar pengaruhnya bagi perkembangan ilmupengeta.huan dewasailli,.·atara· lain: .·.·philosophie·· cler arithmetik.·( - }; logische untersuchungen ( ); ideen .• zuei~er phanomenologie undphanomenologischen philosopie. ( ); formale und· transzendentale ····logik ( ); erfahrung und urteil ( ) : -- metode •. refleksi aktualitas fenomenologis edmund husserl karakteristik filsafat kontemporer; dan fenomenologi edmund husserl. demikian juga pada ma~nusla memiliki kemampuan i':jl i.r-j t+ :lll. i lfi:jl+ l t filsafat kontemporer kapan filsafat kontemporer sangat sulit dipastikan secara eksata. ada yang menyebut filsafat kontemporer muncul setelah abad xix; ada yang menyebut filsafat kontemporer adalah filsafat abad xx; dan beerling menyebut filsafat kontemporer sebagai 'filsafat krisis'.yang dimaksud filsafat krisis,bahwaposisi-posisi penting dari filsafat-filsafat jaman dahulu, pokok-pokok dasar yang penting dari .filsafat itu tidak dapat. dipertahankan dan tidak dapat dibenarkan lagi atau disangsikan kebenarannya. tetapi kita harns berhati-hatiuntuk mengambil kesimpulan. sebab hal itu bukanlah berarti bahwa posisi-posisi dahulu dari filsafat - seperti dari idealisme, subjektivisme atau rasionalisme -pada waktu itu telah dilenyapkan secara radikai danuntuk selama-lamanya. pada waktu ini aliran-aliran tersebut hanya mengalami suatu masa yang kurang baik baginya (beerling, : ). lebih lanjut yang dipakai sebagai referellsi dalam penulisan ini sebagai berikut: filsafat kontemporer adalah filsafat yang.muncul dalam abad xx (dewasa ii), yang·memiliki kecenderungan sebagaimana yang dikemukakan oleh bochenskidalam bukunya contemporary european philosophy$ bochenski mencatat beberapa kecenderungan filsafat kontemporer sebagai berikut .. memaharniyang-ada secara langsung. .pluralisme. filsafat kontemporerpada umumnya menolak idealismeatau materialisme yang monistik dari filsafat abad ejurnal edisi khusus agustus ~ xix, kecuali alexander. dan crose yang dikenal sebagai idealis monis, tetapi mereka termasuk dalamkelompok minoritas. . aktualisme. aktualisme adalah filsafat yang meoloak adanya substansi-substansi,dalam filsafat kontemporer thomisme dan neorealisme inggris yang masih menerimanya, tetapi aliran seperti neokantianisme, fenomelogi, dan aliran metafisika baru menolaknya. . peronalisme. sebagaian besar filsafat abaa aewasa ini kembali menaruh perhatian besar kepada 'human person' terutama niiai-niiai unik yang melekat pada 'human person' itu (bockenski, : - ). di samping beberapa karakteristik yang sudah disebutkan di atas, filsafatkontemporer memiliki juga semacam 'external feature', seperti teknik, produktivitas dan interdependensi. di antaranya yang paling meninjol adalah sifat interdependensi. dalam filsafatkontemporer tercemin adanya saling ketergantungan dan saling relasi antar berbagai gerakan, mazhab dan negara (bochenski, : ; siswanto, : ). atas dasar karakteristik di atas, dapat disimpulkan bahwa orientasi dasar yang mewarnai filsafat kontemporer dapat dibedakan ke dalam dua kelompok , yaitu filsafat yang beroientasi pada 'ajaran' dan filsafat yang berorientasi pada 'metode'. filsafat yang berorientasi pada ajaran dikelompokkan ke dalam tiga kelompok: pertama, filsafat yang masih membawa semangat filsafat abad xviii (empirisme, materialisme, positivisme, kantianisme dan hegelian). kedua, filsafat yang masih menerima pengaruh filsafat (vitalisme) dan filsafat yang kepada antara dapat disebut: logika matematika, fenomenologi, hermeneutika, strukturalisme, dan yang paling terbaru dekonstruksi .. khusus mengenai metode fenomenologi yang pertama kali muncul dirintis dan dikembangkan oleh edmund husseri, selanjutnya mendapat perhatian khusus dari eksistensialisme dan aliran metafisika baru. • refleksi aktualitas fenomenologis edmundhusserl fenomenologi edmund husserl kata 'fenomenologi' berasal dari bahasa yunani 'phainomeno' dan 'logos'. 'phainomenon'berarti tampak dan 'phainein' sedangkan 'logos' kata, ucapan, pertimbangan. dalam arti luas, fenomenologi gejala-gejala atau yang tampak. dalam arti sempit, ilmu tentang fenomen- fenomen yang menampakkan diri kepada kesadaran kita (bagus, : ). fenomenologi menurut pemahaman edmeund husserl merupakan suatu analisis deskripsi serta itropeksi mengenai kedalaman dari semua bentuk kesadaran dan pengalam- pengalam langsung: relegius, moral, estetis,konseptual, selia inderawi. untuk edmund husserl kemudian menegaskan, perhatian filsafat hendaknya difokuskan pada penyelidikan tentang'lebenwelt' (dunia kehidupan) atau 'erlebnisse' (kehidu pan su bjektif dan batiniah). penyelidikan ini hendaknya menekankan watak intensional kesadaran, dan tanpa mengandaikan praduga-praduga konseptual dari ilmu-ilmu empiris (bagus, : ). bagi husserl, fenomenologi meru paka metode dan filsafat. fenomenologi sebagai metode membentangkan langkah-iangkah yang harus diambil sehinga kita sampai pada fenomena yang murni (titus, : ). fenomenologi mempelajari dan melukiskan ciri-ciri intrinsik fenomen- fenomen sebagaimana fenomen-fenomen itu sendiri menyingkapkan kepada kesadaran. setiap orang harus serta hakiki dan intuisi disebut fenomenologi memberi pengetahuan yang perlu dan esensial mengenai apa yang ada (titus, : ).di sini fenomenologi dapat dijelaskan sebagai metode ejumal edisi khusus ' kembali ke benda itu sendiri,oleh karena dalam tahap-tahap penelitiannya menemukan objek-objek yang membentukdunia yang'manusia alami. menurut husserl untuk mencapai hakikat murni harus diadakansemacam pemberishan atau penyaringan (reduksi). hakikat murni adalah. sampai pada benda itu sendiri (zalihnya): 'zur den sachen selbst' sebagaimana yang menjadi semboyannya. menurut husserl terdapat tiga macam reduksi: reduksi fenomenologis, reduksi eidetis, dan reduksi transendental (delfgaauw, : ). pertama, reduksi fenomenologis: menyaring pengalaman sehingga orang sampai pada, fenomen semurni- murninya, setiap orang (subjek) harns melepaskan benda itu dari pandangan-pandangan lain: agama, adat, pandangan ilmu pengetahuan. jika berhasil maka akan sampai pada fenomen yang sebenarnya. dengan kata lain, untuk mencapai pada fenomen yang sebenarnya adalah dengan menempatkan tealitas benda-benda di luar kita antara kurung (epoche). dalam reduksi ini, husserl meninggalkan sikap alamiah yang biasa pada orang 'biasa' yang tanpa ragu-ragu melihat benda- benda dan tidak sebagai gejala kesadaran saja. yang muncul dalam kesadaran ialah gejala (fenomenon). kedua, reduksi eidetis: menghilangkan semua perbedaan-perbedaa dari sejumlah item yang ada dalam khayalan sehingga tinggal saja suatu 'esensi'. dengan kata lain, semua yang lain yang bukan inti eidos, fenomen perlu diletakkan di dalam tanda kurung. dengan demikian akan sampai pada hakikat sesuatu. pengertian inilah dalam arti yang muri. dalam hal ini hakikat oleh yang ...",,a,llilvv!u'''l ialah struktur dasariah, yang meliputi: fundamental, hakiki, semua relasi hakiki y,""jll;jl."' .a. x~,,",,v.""''''''''''''a,u.j.l objek-objek lain yang disadari (bakker, : . ketiga, reduksi transendental: reduksi ini merupakan pengarahan ke subjek, dan mengenai tetjadinya penampakan sendiri, dan mengenal akar-akarnya dalam kesadaran (bakker, : ); bukan lagi mengenai objek atau fenomen, bukan mengenai hal-hal sejauh menampakkan diri kepada kesadaran. dalam reduksi ini yang harns ditempatkan dalam • refleksi al:tualitas fenomenologis edmund husserl kurung ialah eksistensi dan segala sesuatu yang tiada hubungan timbal-balik dengan kesadaran murni, diterapkan kepada subjeknya dan perbuatannya, kepada kesadaran ketiga husserl pengakuan dan harus diakui hanyalah 'das ich'yang dengan 'bewusstsein'-nya (kesadaran) yang pula" (drijarkara, : ).. artinya satu -satunya realitas yang boleh dan harusdiakui dengan mutlak ialah dari 'das ich'; "yang di atas semua situasi yang segala pengalaman, sadar akan sendiri" sadar di sini bukanlah kesadaran sehari-hari berhadapan kejasmanian, melainkan· kesadaran yang supraempiris, yang atas semua pengalaman, yang transendental bila memperhatikan rangkaian· peikiran husserl di atas, dapat dikatakan bahwa fenomenologi husserl tidak terdapat kriteria untuk menentukan kesahian suatu kebenaran; ditekankan dalam fenomenologinya adalah 'intersubjektivitas'~ dan basis filosofis husserl ialah bahwa dunia yang tampak ·ini tidak memberi kepastian, kita harusmencarinya dalam 'erlebnisse': pengalaman yang sadar, "pertemuan dengan aku" .. aku ini harus dibedakan dengan 'aku emp[iris'yang tidak murni yangmerupakan dunia benda.. "aku" ini harus dikurung dan kemudian kita menuju 'aku murni yang mengatasi semua -pengalaman .. prlnslpnya manusia, melalui kebebasan. merupakan sisi realitas kebebasan, satu sebutan bahwa seseorang bebas berarti yang lain juga bebas .. bebas berarti tak seorangpun dapat .jurnal edisi khusus agustus ' illg.u.:)jlu dalam mengejar dihadapkan pada suatu dilemma, yaitu bebas atau sarna sekali tidak bebas .. dernikianlahgambaran umum tetang fenomenologi kesadaran, tanpamengandaikan praduga-praduga ..l'"",.jll!lj''l",... vii..ii.it.u..i. dari ilmu -ilmu empiris. sebagai konsekuesinya kebebesan yang demikian itu tentunya selalu disertai dengan tanggung jawab, dan mengetahui bahwa semua perbuatannyabersumberdari kebebasannya. pertanggungjawaban itu tidak terbatas'pada diri sendiri tetapi juga tanggung jawab terhadap orang lain bahkan seluruh dunia. dengan pertangg'ungjawaban yang mengikutsertakan orang lain, berarti menunjukkan solidaritas manusia. jadidalam rangka mengejar citra diri manusia mau tidakmau seseorang harus memilih perbuatannya yang terbaik bagi semua orang. manusia dengan kebebasannya. adalah kemampuan permanen untuk menarik dirinya .dari masa lampau, sehingga selalu dapat dimungkinkan suatu permulaan barn sesuai dengan penemuan barunya melalui kesadaran murni yang ditemui kemudian. di sinilah· optimistik husserl selalu merangsang, menggugah keberanian,manusia, memberi harapan,membuat segala kemungkinan berubah. sedangkan aspek 'negatip yang menjadi kelemahan pemikiran husserl justru terletak pada puncak kekuatannya, dengan konsep kesadaran (subjek) murni, manusia pada hams menolak eksistensi mempengaruhi dengan segala atuirannya, pandangan dan nilainya kepada orang lain. hal ini berarti mendorong. mausia kreatif dan progresifdalam menghadapui dunia. kebebasan ini mengingatkanpada sokrates sendiri', sedangkan mengajarkan supaya • refleksi aktualitas fenomenologisedmund husserl husserl yang dapat disampaikan dalam bagioan ii. selanjutnya, bagian berikut akan dikemukakan 'aktualitas fenomenologi husserl dalam filsafat kontemporer' metode fenomenologi husserl dan pengaruhnya fenomenologi husser! tidak diragukanmemberikan sumbangan .. terhadap cara berpikir kefilsafatan maupun perkembanganbeberapa disiplin ilmu sosial/kemanusiaan. ini tidak berartibahwa filsafat telah menemukan terminal terakhirnya. maksudnya, sikap kritis yang radikal harus tetap dijadikan sema.ngat seperti dittlntut oleh husserl. menu rut pendapat ini, seseorang yang menerima gagasan -gagasan kefilsafatan secara dogmatis adalah sikap anti filsafat dan sekaligusanti fenomenologis. fenomenologi husserl· telah menawarkan suatu metode penyelidikan/pemahaman telltang realitas. sebagai suatu metode, ia berpeluang untuk diadopsi dalammenyelidiki dan memahami problem-problem aktuai yang dihadapi manusia. pada filsafat kontemporer, para filsuf eksistensialisme yang banyak terpengaruh dan berusaha mengaktualisasikan metooe fenomenologi itu dalam pemikiran mereka. para filsuf eksistensilisme memakai metode fenomenologi, pada unlumnya dalam analisis eksistensi.. filsuf-filsuf eksistensilis yallg memakai metode fenomenologi, antara lain: satire, merleau- ponty, ricouer, dan ·lain sebagainya. namun demikian,mereka tidak menerima begitu saja pendapat husserl tentang sikap objektif, reduksi pokok yang pertama, yang menyisihkan ejumal edisi khusus agustus .' intennsional. fenome diselidiki. sejauh disadari secara langsung dan sponta, sebagai 'yang lain' dari kesadaran (bakker, : ). para eksistensialis mempertahankan aspek non- diskursifdalam intuisi. subjek, namumerekatidak mengikuti tekanan husserl pada sikap objektif dan kontemplatif. fenomen dianalisa menurut semua unsur husserl lainnya. harus dibersihkan dari segalapenyempitan dan interpretasi. berat sebeleh; sehingga mulai tampak dasar asali, yaitu dunia eksistensi nyata (bakker, : ). dengan analisa ini ditemukan sifat-sifat pokok yang berlaku bagi eksistensi manusia,yang sekaligusunik, dan berlaku··bagi setiap manusia. berikut ini akan dikemukakan sejauh mana letak ketergantungan ketiga filsuf(sartre, merleau -ponty, ricoeur) dari fenemenologi husserl, yang mereka ikuti untuk menyelidiki/memahami problem-problem aktual yang dihadapi manusia (tentang realitas). metode yang dipergunakan sartre secara keseluruhan tidak berbeda dengan para. eksistensialis lainnya, yaitu .metode fenomenologi. sartre pada awal mulanya mengikuti fenomenologi husser!, namun kemudian ia membelot. menurutsartre, fenomenologi husserl itu kering .dan netral; tidak memberikan penkelasan yang memuaskan tentang ada- nya fenomen-fenomen, karena tidak membedakan secara prinsipialobjek. dengan tampaknya objek. husserl berhenti pada esensi, dengan demikia tidak pernah mencapai ada-nya sesuatu objek. salire berkeyakinan bahwa ada merupakan syarat bagi tampaknya sesuatu (bertens, : ). untukitu kemudian sartre lebih tertarik kepada ide heidegger, yang mengungkapkan arti hakikat 'ada' dalam sein und zeit (ada waktu), heidegger membahas tentang makna hidup dan makna kenyataan. tema pokok buku ini adalah sebuah pertanyaan fundamental: apa maknanya, bahwa kitaada? (hamersma, : ). heidegger menganalisa keberadaan manusia di dunia dengan analisa fenomenologi. eksistensi adalah absurd, manusia ada di dunia tidak dipilihsendiri, melainkan sebagai sesuatu yang telah ditentukan.manusia 'dilemparkan' dalam • refleksi aktualitas fenomenologis edmund husserl .ajl ll a-_&.lu,... .a._aii.._jla. iio-_v sebagai husserl memperolep peranan barn pada merleau-ponty. pada faktisitasyang penuh 'keprihatinan' (hamersma, : ). bagi sartre, fenomenologi husserl masihmemuat kelemahan. kelemahannya terdapat pada sikap ilmiah menjadi ~ va"' t "' "" ~~ antara yang dunia yang me:najmp,aklcan dirinya, dunia yang dihidupi atau manusiawi. dengan kata dengan memberi peranan besar kepada kesadaran lengkap dengan emosi,kebencian, a~_ii-'l. .ji.""'il. -il-""'jli."l penderitaan, keterasingall, dan kerinduannya dikawinkan dengan dialektika karl marx, maka filsafat satire menjadi suatu eksistensialisme yang humanise jadi dari husserl, sartre hanya meminjam fenomenologi yang melingkupi intensionalitas kesadaran ya:ng dengan kebebasannya" apa yang dilakukan oleh satire itu, nampak sejalan dengan orientasi filsafatnya yang melibatkan diri secara politik dan sosial dalam masyarakat.. titik tolakpembahasan hubungan subjek-objek diteljemahkan ke istilah etre-pour-soi dan hadir untuk hadir pada (heraty, : ~ )o satire antara keduanya meustahil terjadi sintesis .. melihat subjektivitas sedemikian rupa, sehinzga manusia menjadiancaman .jurnal edisi ' pokoknya pengertian intensionalitas int diperluas pengertiannya, sehingga tidak saja meliputi kegiatan-kegiatan kesadaran, melainkan mengenai pula h'ubungan dengandunia iuar dan hubungan dengan manusia lain.. deskripsi fenomenologi yang olehhusserl dimaksudkan untuk kembali kepada sesuai dengan dan sampai kepadasikap ilmiah barn, bagi merleau -panty terutama &diartikan sebagaisuatu protes terhadap pendekatan benda~benda secaraobjektif dengan hubungan-hubungan kausalnya. meumt diahendaknya benda-benda dikembalikan kepada sebuah .dunia penghayatan, lebenswelt menyryt i-iusserl merleau ... ponty berorientasi kepada karyahusserl yang terakhir (bruzina, : ) ,di mana tema penghayatan dunia lingkungan hidup atau lebenswelt lebih diperhatikan. iniberbeda dengan sartre yang bertolak dari kaerya awal husserl yang terutama mengambil tema ini kesadaran atau kesadaran. itu sendiri. hal iniberati bahwamerleau-ponty menolak analisis yang menganggap lebenswelt ini berpangkal; pada kegiatan subjek, sebagai suatu kecenderungan yang idealistik, mengarahkan segalanya kepada kesadaran kembali (heraty, : ). reduksi fenomenologik ini sementara menyingkirkan realitas sebuah dunia ilmiah bagi husserl dandimaksudkan u·ntuk menemukan kejernuhan struktur-struktur logik. merleau - ponty mengokohkan kesimpulan, bahwa the great reductio is the imposibility of complete reduction dalam toeti -hertay, : sehingga ia dari hakikat bagi merleau -ponty secara· tidak langsung menjelaskan ketunggalan·fakta-faktapada penghayatan yang malah pertama-tama ditanggalkan oleh reduksi husser tadi. jadi hakikat atau eidos digunakan sebagai latar belakang penghayatan konkret.. inilah suatu pokok pemikiran · • refleksi aktualitas fenomenolog;s edmund husserl eksistensialis yang bergeser minat dari hakikat, essence atau eidos ke eksistensi, dari hakikat abstrak kepada kehadiran konkret. murni tersebut.. meskipun akhirnya melibatkan luar, tidak menjadikan dunia ii sebagai pusat perhatian seperti pada merleau-ponty .. samplng yang ............. a ...__ ..... "'........ tempat yang berbeda dalam tanggapanya, subjektivitas atau rasionalitas bagi merleau-ponty mendapat tanggapan berbeda pula, sehingga tugas fenomenologi ialah untuk mengungkapkan the nlystery of the world and the mystery reason .. di satu pihak misteri dunia,di pihak lainmisteri rasio manusia secara bersama merupakan suatu kebertautan, hubungan antara keduanyamerupakan suatuengagement (ponty, : ; heraty, : ) .. menutut husserl, pokok-pokok tersebut di atas akan lebih nyata bila diteliti dalam lapangan fenomenologik, mana berarti penjernihan fenomena sekaligus .. merleau -ponty menanggapi lapangan fenomenologik sebagai suatu lapangan suatu lapangan kegiatan untuk suatu phenomenal terutama menunjang fenomenologi hl c'c't=t>"t"" yangmenekankan ... reduksi eidetik. ejumal edisi khusus agustus ' namun ricoeur menyadari keterbatasan' suatu deskripsi eidetik,·yang maksudnya menangkap ·struktur-struktur eidetik bila menghadapi misalnya gejala kehendak dan emosi. ricoeur melihat deskripsi ini sebagai taraf mempunyai maksud-maksud sampai pada suatu pandangan tentang manusia dalam suatu metafisika., dengan demikian ia berkeberatan terhadapfenomenologi husserl yang disebut olehnya sebagai 'fenomenologik deontologik' (spiegelberg, dalam toeti - heraty, : ). dan membatasi diri pada gejala-gejala kesadaran saja. ricoeur meninggalkan suatu idealisme dogmatik untuk idealisme metodeik. artinya bahwa deskripsi gejala kesadaran hanya diguakannya sebagai titik tolak, terutama dalam pengenlbagan metodenya. di samping itu, ricoeur juga berusaha mengatasi prasangka logisistik pada husser!. ricoeur berminat kepada gejala kehendak dan ernosi yang justru pertama-tama ditanggalkan pada reduksi eidetik husserl ricoeur ingin sampai pada suatu filsafat tentag manusia yang mengatasi keterbatasan gejala -gejala kesadaran saja. ricoeur, dalam hal ini ingin memamfaatkan juga penelaahan problem secara ilmiah, terutama oleh psikologi. dalam konteks ini ricoeur memamfaatkan juga wawasan,.,;wawasan bellaviourism psikologi gestalt dan psikoanalisa ·dalam filsafatnya tentangmanusia tersebut (heraty, : - ). hal yang demikian kurang lebih juga telah dilakukan oleh merleau-ponty namun terdapatperbedaannya pula. merleau- memusatkan perhatian kepada psikologi persepsi, ricoeur menelaah kehendak. fenomena.. dengan ini dimaksudkan struktur intensionalitas pada fenomena. kesadaran menurut proses dan objek,atau act dan content. taraf·eidetik murni (heraty, : ). pada taraf pertama ini ada keberatan.. keberatan taraf ini ialahketerbatasannya yang hanya sesuai untuk menghadapi • refleksi aktualitas fenomenolog;s edmund husserl gejala kesadaran murni serta takmampu menangkap hubungan atara kesadaran da tubuh.. hal terakhir ini merupakan suatu 'misteri' bagi ricoeur pada penghayatan fenomenologinya men~~emulg ka.n suatu yang adakalanya a""'''''-)i.. __ lp.i"_ .....'............ li. konstitusi aktif, ialah konstitusi fenomena dan mengemukakan pula konstitusi pasif, dimana fenomena telahditemuka secara tersedia. pendapat pertama dikenal dengan pengertian idealisme transendental inilah yang ditinggalkan ricoeur. sedangkan taraf kedua akan lebih medapat perhatian dalam 'fenomenologi hermeneutik' yang masih akan dijelaskan kemudian, dimaa bagi subjek fenomena telah tersediadalam bentuk 'simbol'dan 'mitos' (heraty, : ) .. ketiga, taraf ontologi kesadaran yang berusaha menempatkan status kesadaran dalam keseluruhan ontologik atau metafisik" lni berarti bahwa ricoeur akan sampai kepada suatu filsafat antropologi dan akhirnya pula sampai kepada pemikiran persoalan kebebasan, 'freedom' dan pula gagalnya kebebasan ini pada pengertian tentang manusia yang telah lhilaf, pada manusia sebagai 'fallible man' (heraty, : ). fenomenologi pada ricoeur itu dikembangkan dengan maksud-maksltd yang jauh, berusa'ha memberi gambaranyang total dankonprehensif tentang manusia. untuk maksud khusus dikembangkanya fenomenologi kehendak. inl n i::jlnopnj~l dinamika kehendak ditunjang oleh 'prinsip : ), sehingga untuk suatu deskripsi dinamika kehendak mencakup usur bukan-kehendak dan meneliti pula relasi antara kehendak dan bukan kehendak.. yang menarik dalam hubungan ini ialah, ' bahwa dalam deskripsi bukan-kehendak ikut unsur jasmani,. hal maa sampai kini takdapat diikutsertakan dalam penelaahan struktur eidetik dapa gejala kesadaran. fenomena kehendak menurut membedakan suatu tindakanatau kegiatan kehe:ndal menu rut gerak yang dikehe~daki, menentkan, menggerakkan tubuh, aku menyernjui' ~~ : ). ketiga-tiganya ditunjang oleh kegiatankehendak. gerak kehendak mempunyaipasangan atau korelatbukan- kehendak masing-masing, dalam artibahwa 'bukan-kehendak menjadi latar-belakang sebab' bagi kehendak dan sebaliknya kehendak memberi fokus kepada bukan -kehendak. gerak pertama sebagai suatu keputusan ('decision') tampak jertama-tama sebagai hasil analisis intensionalitas. gerak kedua ialah .kelengkapan perencanaan koson.g oleh keputusan sebagai gerak pertama dan dengan analisis intensional menampilkan'gerak atau kegiatan' st.-'bagai kelanjutan keputusan. gerak terakhir atau ketiga dipel'lukan untuk menyempurnakan kehendak yang diawali oleh suatu keputusan, dikonkretkan oleh kegiatan dan merupakan persetujuan. persetujuan ini merupakan 'keikhlasan untuk menerima suatu keniscayaan' (heraty, : - g). di antara ketiga taraf inilah yag paling utama menanlpilkan dimensi kemerdekaan dalam pertentangan dengan keniscayaan. ricoeur mengemukakan perumusa scbagai berikut: ' keikhlasan adalah gerak kemerdekaan kearah alam supaya dipersatukan dengan keniscayaan mutlakl ya dan mengubahnya menjadidirinya sendiri' (rasmusse, : i; ). penggunaan ·metode atau deskripsi eidetik dalam .l'o.\..-!.u.u.u.;x.,;a..u.ii.uj.l besar', ricoeur hendak memperluas deskripsi dengan mengikutisertakan perwujuda dengan memperoleh paradoks antara kemerdekaal dan alam. paradoks ii dipecahkan oleh manusia meurut dua kemugkinan, ialah bahwaia menggerakkan kehendak kc,arah 'transendensi', tetapidapat pulasampai kepada kegl\~alan • refleksi aktualitas fenomenolog;s edmund husserl kehendak yang pada manusia dengan peristilahan religius disebut 'dosa' .. oi antara kedua kutub fenomenologi kehendak kita lihat satu pihak kemerdekaan,di pihak alam suatu eksistensial' manusia sebagai eksistensi dan kita hadapi pada eksistensial kedua kutub ialah kemerdekaan lagi pihak, di pihak lain kekhilafan manusia atau 'fallibility' .. tahap ketiga ialah kenyataan yang dinilai menurut keberhasilan atau kegagalan kehendak: transendensi atau dosa (heraty, : ) .. pada tahap ketiga ini oleh ricoeul'l diikutsertakan 'metode hermeneutik', ilah metode 'penafsiran' melengkapi kedua sebelumnya. demikianlah sekelumit hasi! refleksi (tangkapan dan interpretasi) terhadap "aktualitas .fenomenologi husseri dalam filsdafat kontemporer' pada tiga filsuf: satire, merleau-ponty, dan ricoeur dari sekian banyak filsuf yang juga berusaha untuk mengaktualisasikan fenomenologi husserl dalam pemikirannya, yang dapat disampaikan dalam tulisan ini. penutup berdasarkan paparan di atas dapatlah diambil kesimpulan bahwa seorang filsuf yang mengetrapkan metode fenomenologi, tidak akan menerima begitu saja kebenaran ia akan mencari dalam usaha mendalam dilaksanakan dengan dalam hal ini ada tiga tahap, yaitu reduksi fenomenologi, reduksi eidetis, dan reduksi transendental ejurnal edisi khusus agustus ' sedangkan dalam usaha pemikirankefilsafatan, fenomenologi merupakan metode untuk menganalisa unsur intuitif· dari pengertian kita, sehingga kita berhasil menemuka intisari atau .a.s.iii.ji,.a"................... dari barang-barang dalam usahanya telah berhasil menemukan evidensi-evidensi yang ug.,n~"'-'-'i;.ar.ji" yang merupaka:n 'dasar yang dan tidak dapat dibantah lagi. sementara itu, para. filsufeksistensialis (sartre, merleau-ponty, ricoeur) mengetrapkan metode fenomenologi untukmemandang. kehidupan manusia sebagaimana adanya. dengan metode fenomenologi, mereka berhasil membeda- bedaka beradanyamanusia dengan beradayang lain. beradanya manusia adalah bereksistensi.. sedang berada·· yang lain juga berada, namun tidak bereksistensi. oleh karena manusia mempunyai cara berada yang khusus. cara itu berupa kesibukan manusia, baik berupakesibukan dengan diri sendiri maupun dengan dunia luar. dengan megarahkan pengetrapan metode fenomenologi ke suatu ·aspek tertentu, akan tercapai suatu pengertioan yang tertentu. dengan mengarahkanpengetrapan metode itu ke aspek esensi atau intisari, akan menemukan hakikat dari sesuatu hal yang bersangkutan. sebaliknya, dengan mengarahkannya ke aspek kehidupan manusia yang konkret seperti yang dilakukan oleh filsuf eksistensialis,akan dapat menemukan eksistensi manusia yangpenuhkesibukan. oleh karena itu dapat disimpulkan, bahwa fenomenologi sebagai metode adalah baik sekali untuk diterapka dalam usaha pemikira.n kefilsafatan. metode ini memberi jalan kepada manusia (subjek) utuk mencari dan vvt,cl""""'f"l f"\< ':! kebenaran yang sedalam-dalamnya, menganjurkan begitu yang secara memaksa itu, .·fenomenologi sebagai metode sangat ljaik diterapkan sebagi dasar analisis sosial/kemanusiaan. • reflek..'ii aktualitas fenomenologisedmundhusserl daitar pustaka f safat kolltelnporel; fakultas filsafat ugm., historical introduction, nijhoff, the hague. university of california angeles. bruzina, r, , logos a.nd eidos, the concept phenomenology, university of kentucky, mouton, tile hagus - parise delfgaauw, b., , filsafat abad , alih bahasa soejono soemargono, tiara wacana, yogyakarta. drijarkara, n., , percikan filsafat, pembangunan, jakarta~ hamersma, , tokoh- tokoh iy/safa! sara! modern, gramedia, jakarta. harun hadiwijono, , sari ~iara}l filsafat bal"llt kanisius, yozyakarta o sisv{anto, , laporan penelitian, y ogyakarta~ lorens bagus, , "edmund husserl kembali pada benda- benda itu sendiri" dalam fx. mudji sutrisno & f. budi pa.ra penentlj • jurnal edisi khusus agustus .' titus, smith, nolan, , persoalan-persoalanfiisaftit, dialih bahasa oleh prof. dr. h.m.rasjidi, bulan bintang, jakarta. gramedia, jakarta. athanasiou, a., kolocotroni, v. and papanikolaou, d. ( ) on the politics of queer resistance and survival: athena athanasiou in conversation with vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou. journal of greek media and culture, ( ), pp. - . (doi: . /jgmc. . . _ ) there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / deposited on: march enlighten – research publications by members of the university of glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . /jgmc. . . _ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jgmc. . . _ http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ interview vassiliki kolocotroni | dimitris papanikolaou | athena athanasiou on the politics of queer resistance and survival on the politics of queer resistance and survival: athena athanasiou in conversation with vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou athena athanasiou panteion university of social and political sciences athena athanasiou is professor of social anthropology and gender theory at panteion university of social and political sciences, athens. she is the author of agonistic mourning: political dissidence and the women in black (edinburgh up, ); Ζωή στο Όριο: Δοκίμια για το Σώμα, το Φύλο και τη Βιοπολιτική (life at the limit: essays on gender, body and biopolitics) (ekkremes, ); Η kρίση ως kατάσταση ‘Έκτακτης aνάγκης’ (crisis as a ‘state of exception’) (savvalas, ); and (with judith butler) dispossession: the performative in the political (polity press, ). she has also edited the collections Φεμινιστική Θεωρία και Πολιτισμική Κριτική (feminist theory and cultural critique) (nisos, ); (with elena tzelepis), rewriting difference: luce irigaray and ‘the greeks’ (suny press, ); Βιοκοινωνικότητες: Θεωρήσεις στην Ανθρωπολογία της Υγείας (biosocialities: reflections on the anthropology of health) (nisos, ); and (with mina karavanta et al.), Αποδομώντας την Αυτοκρατορία: Θεωρία και Πολιτική της Μετααποικιακής Κριτικής (deconstructing the empire: theory and politics of postcolonial studies) (nisos, ). she has been a fellow at the center for the study of social difference at columbia university. she is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journals critical times and feminist formations. contact: syngrou avenue, athens , greece. e-mail: athenaathanasiou @gmail.com dimitris papanikolaou https://orcid.org/ - - - st. cross college, university of oxford dimitris papanikolaou is an associate professor of modern greek studies at the university of oxford. he has written the monographs: singing poets: literature and popular music in france and greece (legenda, ), “those people made like me”: c.p.cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (patakis, , in greek) and there is something about the family: nation, desire and kinship in a time of crisis (patakis, , in greek). his editorial work includes the new editions of the work of costas taktsis in greek and the special issue of the journal of greek media and culture on cavafy pop ( ; co-edited with eleni papargyriou). he is currently completing the book greek weird wave: a cinema of biopolitics, for edinburgh university press. contact: , wellington square, oxford, ox jf e-mail: dimitris.papanikolaou@stx.ox.ac.uk vassiliki kolocotroni https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - university of glasgow vassiliki kolocotroni is a senior lecturer in english literature at the university of glasgow. she is a co-editor of modernism: an anthology of sources and documents and the edinburgh dictionary of modernism (edinburgh up, ; ); women writing greece: hellenism, orientalism and travel (brill ); in the country of the moon: british women travelers to greece – (hestia, ), a special issue on muriel spark for textual practice ( ) and two books on the surrealist poet and theorist nicolas calas (ypsilon, , ). she has published journal articles and book chapters on various modernist and twentieth-century writers and theorists, such as woolf, joyce, rhys, conrad, spark, quin, freud, benjamin, derrida and kristeva and is currently at work on a study of modernism and hellenism. vassiliki kolocotroni (vk) and dimitris papanikolaou (dp): thank you for agreeing to contribute to our special issue by answering our questions and perhaps posing more of your own. much of the critical thinking and writing represented by the essays published in this volume is indebted to your vision and vigilance as a theorist, teacher and activist. may we start by a simple question? is there a new queer greece? if yes, where? in what tactics, movements, collectivities, cultural work, demands can it be found? athena athanasiou (aa): thank you, vassiliki and dimitri, for this conversation, and this question which is posed in a highly charged moment of political grief, in the immediate aftermath of zak kostopoulos’s death after a brutal public beating in the centre of athens. this horrific occurrence has elicited outrage and collective antiracist protest, lgbtqi rallies have taken place demanding justice for zak, and the three of us have signed the petition ‘the responsibility of our grief’, endorsed by more than academics from universities in and outside greece. a queer activist and drag performer committed to raising awareness about hiv through the organization ‘positive voice’, zak was kicked to death by a shop owner allegedly ‘protecting his property’ and a mob of male onlookers and policemen, as he was lying wounded on the ground, unarmed, utterly degraded and dislocated, radically exposed to homophobic and police brutality, designated as a dangerous and disposable body. when the policemen who arrived at the scene, instead of stopping the assault, handcuffed zak, who lay bleeding on the ground, rather than his assailants, it became outrageously clear whose vulnerability mattered and whose didn’t. to compound the dehumanizing ‘justice’ meted out to zak, his body was transported to the hospital to be certified dead on arrival with the handcuffs still on. survival emerges as a politically saturated struggle. the queer body, radically exposed to brutality, is construed by the lynching mob as inherently threatening and dangerous, and thus police violence is justified not only as self-defence but also as protection of public (heteronormative, white, national, bourgeois) safety. so we might consider: what claims of social justice and political freedom are we making, then, when we come together to share our grief for zak’s unjust death but also to affirm his life and practices of freedom despite and against the legitimation of police violence? and by what means do we draw inspiration on zak’s practices of freedom when we resist and oppose the normativity of racist hate crimes? the next scheduled demonstration is fittingly named after a phrase used by zak in an interview: ‘violence isn’t my thing’. i think we can discern here a possibility for an ethics of nonviolence as a mode of political embodiment, whereby vulnerability as a differentiating effect of power is not disavowed and grief is collectively and relationally mobilized. for me, this possibility does not denote a moral pacifist position but rather stands as a political articulation of bodies on the line, avowing their vulnerability, opposing police force and refusing to be violated. can we imagine a world through this possibility of political subjectivity? vk and dp: thank you for this opening frame, which gives your answer to our questions an added poignancy and prescience. it is worth noting that video footage of the events that led to zak’s death, which were circulated widely online, played a crucial role in this case, perhaps becoming a determining factor for the way the public reacted. given your own past philosophical interventions on the subject, perhaps a question about public appearance would be in place? aa: indeed, how do we think about the appearance of bodies in the public sphere? what happens when tv screens and social media are saturated with images of police brutality? what kind of visual and sensual familiarity is enacted in watching the video footage showing zak’s lynching? one hopes that this video footage can be used as visual proof of police violence in the fight for justice. however, the repeatedly aired images become part of a visual field already entrenched in and infused with racist and homophobic structural violence that determines who counts as a recognizable subject and whose vulnerability matters. surely, the repeated tv images seemed to manufacture a securitarian consent and initially worked to further anaesthetize those who ‘empathized’ with the assailants and were too quick to state that ‘he got what he deserved’. but, at the same time, many people were mobilized to political action, despite and against the established order – and ordinariness – of heteronormative bourgeois apathy. however, in and of itself, even the most explicit visual evidence cannot be guaranteed to be taken as indisputable ‘proof’ of police brutality. and so our political struggle for accountability cannot rely on the ‘objectivity’ of available images. it has to make space for ensuring accountability and justice. what may be most important right now is to not let this go. and so the question becomes what kinds of reflective commitment bind us to one another in this struggle against prevailing schemes of normative violence, including, significantly, neo-nazi and far-right violence still on the rise in greece. it always takes enormous amounts of collective persistence and courage, critique and creativity. it seems to me to be worth remembering the ways in which visual evidence – namely, the video footage of eric garner, an unarmed black man, showing him surrounded by police and placed in a chokehold – played a significant role in galvanizing the black lives matter movement and demonstrations that oppose police brutality against black people in the united states. thousands of marchers took to the streets in anger and protested chanting garner’s last words: ‘i can’t breathe’. eric garner, as we know, died from a chokehold applied by police officers while he pleaded for a breath of air eleven times. despite the clear use of excessive force, however, a grand jury failed to indict the police officer, which also resonates with the failure to indict the white officers responsible for the racist beating of rodney king. in sharing my grief and sense of despair about zak’s death with a friend earlier today, i used a phrase which in greek implies something like how do we go on living or surviving, or, perhaps more accurately, on what conditions do we live on. my friend replied: ‘together’. indeed, this performativity of embodied relational agency offers the possibility of politicizing the conditions of survival and what counts as life amidst ongoing loss through figuring a break with the present order(ing) of things and giving a sense of what a ‘different life’ might consist of. at least so i hope. vk and dp: from the way you described this last encounter, but also taking into account the initial question that provoked your chain of thoughts, it seems that you propose these new forms of ‘togetherness’ as deeply queer engagements: intersectional, non-normative, constantly in flux but also demanding, constantly orientated by the relationality of embodied desire and the shattering of loss. to return to that initial question, could we define ‘new queer greece’ on that basis? how problematic (or enabling) do you find this term? aa: it seems to me that every ‘new’ risks promoting a normalizing, sequential and teleological view of temporality. so, yes, i find the term problematic but also perplexing and thus enabling. i wonder: does ‘new queer’ imply a decisive break from previous or ‘older’ enactments of queer analytics? and what about the concept ‘greece’? how is ‘greece’ performed in this ambivalent conceptual framework of new queerness or queer newness? is there such a thing as ‘new queer greece’? what logics of location and identification does this rubric mark out? what non-normative formations and subjugated knowledges of being-in-the-world does it shift our attention to? can there ever be such a thing as ‘queer time’ and ‘queer space’ – to recall j. jack halberstam? along with many other people, i am interested, then, in the term’s potential to open up possibilities of queering time and space. for me, ‘new queer greece’ registers a critical desire to displace or denaturalize ‘straight temporality’ and reproductive time lines – their hierarchies and power dynamics – from the standpoint of greece and beyond. as the concept of ‘queer’ travels and gets translated across transnational and transcolonial relations and non-relations, the question is what normative claims are made and unmade in its name, in different contexts. queer is always in need of queering, and in this case, each of the terms in the title is in need of queering. i think this kind of provocation is performed in the project of this special issue. queering ‘greece’, in this sense, cannot be centred on greece, but rather positions us, ex-centrically, both within and beyond the (temporal and spatial normativity of the) nation-state, and decidedly against greek nationalism. so ‘new queer greece’, or – perhaps more accurately for our purposes here – ‘new greek queer’, is either antinationalist and non-homonationalist or does not exist. the critical perspectives of queer transnationalism, queer of colour critique and queer diaspora studies have mobilized interesting analytics regarding the interstices between queerness and the politics of location and positionality. it seems to me that queerness is a critical framework through which we might productively problematize both the erasure of local/translocal/glocal specificity in eurocentric universalist modalities of scholarship and the invocation of reified localization as an authenticated critique of colonial capitalist modernity. queer critique is inextricably bound up with particular contexts, flows, turns, returns, relocations and dispersals across space and time. and so i would like to situate ‘new queer greece’ in such disparate and alternate topographies and temporalities, in such affective and political economies, which include queer locations and translocations, diasporas and immigrant imaginaries. it was through the perspective of such translocal and citational performativity that i tried, in my work on ‘women in black’ agonistic mourning in former yugoslavia, to grapple with a modality of political activism that critically addresses the uneven conditions of grievability, in judith butler’s terms, in the face of political loss, despite and against ethno-nationalist and heteronormative formations. i was interested in understanding the ways in which these political subjects, acting in the context of a multilayered queered, antinationalist and antifascist feminism, troubled the established intelligibility of memorability by embodying the eventualities involved in their own and other’s dissident un/belonging. i was interested in this queering going on in the very complexities and complicities of belonging. to return to your question on new queer greece: as you both know, various queer collectivities in greece seek to situate their critical interventions beyond (and despite) the boundaries between academic and political engagement. what fascinates me about such critical situatedness that traverses genres and eschews binaries, is that it enables us to trace the nuanced ways in which theory is ‘already at work in the exercise of political discourse’, as butler puts it. in a way, this resonates with the resourceful archive of radical feminism and the autonomous feminist movement in greece. this is the archive where my own formative moments of feminist positionality are also to be traced. one only hopes that it will be by virtue of such political collective historicities that feminist discourses emerging from ex-centrically situated, non-eurocentric, non-us contexts, will be able to effectively counteract the #metoo neoconservative privatization of feminism. this is, of course, one more symptom of the rightward move of organized feminist and gay politics in the united states during the past decade. but the varied historicities of feminist and queer encounters in different contexts pose different challenges to a critical queer feminist decolonial politics. they raise the question of feminist-queer differences and coalitions, but also the divisions and embattlements among feminists and among queer subjects, a question that emerges – although not really addressed and productively dealt with – whenever difficult and charged issues come up, such as the question of adjudicating sexual harassment complaints: what does it take to ask how to problematize the heteronormative logic that often underlies institutionalized antiharassment discourse? in my opinion, we need a space – theoretical and activist at once – where such questions can be formulated. these issues pertain to the fraught intersections of feminism, queer and knowledge. if we take ‘queer’ as a verb, as i believe we should, we find ourselves engaging in the immanent politics of troubling inscriptions of normative intelligibility by forging creative, sustainable and transversal interconnections for the purpose of engendering transformative and transfigured presents and futures. how to enact queer as a designation of political alliance, then, including queer-feminist, but also queer- anticolonial, queer-left/marxist, queer-disabled/crip and so on? queerness thus emerges as a performative gesture of decentring, dis-orienting and re-orienting bodies and worlds, locations, categories, identities, affiliations, affectivities, desires and imaginaries. it is also, for me, a way of becoming in touch with the moment through which intersectional oppressions and exclusions can be effectively challenged and emancipatory resignifications can happen. rather than instantiate a queer ‘identity’ then, what difference might it make to spectralize the historicity of subjectivation by means of thinking further about/through the temporal and spatial normativity of gender, sexuality, race, class and able-bodiedness? at issue, thus, is a political and affective force of disidentification from fixed and polarizing categories of ‘here’ and ‘there’ as well as ‘now’ and ‘then’. for me, queerness becomes a provisional and tenuous occasion for multidirectional repositioning and reimagining as a way out of the heteronormative, racialized, nationalist, capitalist organization of time. it seems to me that the point of engaging in queer scholarship is to work through and with the sense of not being at one with our actualized and actualisable present and its geopolitical histories of racialization and racialized sexuality, white nationalism, economic injustice and (neo-)colonial dispossession. vk and dp: ‘we are spoken, we are open to linguistic harm, we are exposed to the psycholinguistic and social affect of identitarian names and yet we are not those names.’ in your work you have consistently addressed the stronghold of identitarian reflexes, both in a context of active, contingent social resistance, but also in terms of the affect of recognition and the contradictions that must be faced at both the personal and political level. are these theoretical and embodied, political challenges particularly knotted around the name ‘queer’? are they to be thought differently? aa: yes, in the text you mentioned, i tried to think through the possibilities of disidentification and misrecognition in gender and queer resistance. we do not own the signifiers and categorical names to which we are subjected and through which we are interpellated as subjects (i.e. ‘woman’); but they do not own us either, as they are constitutively incomplete, and as we are, always already, outside ourselves. i try to think of the political possibilities of such uneasy and ambivalent belonging. what are the political possibilities of the dispossession upon which our affective being/becoming is premised? perhaps such questions put us in a position where we can effectively think through both the struggles for recognition but also the failures of the politics of recognition. and we may have to think more about how a rights-based approach often fails to account for struggles of social justice. thus, our critique of a politics of recognition might involve also the question whether there can be a queer politics and affectivity of recognition. i think it is important to reconceive and work through the rubric of queer recognition as a mode of queering recognition, its injuries and innovations. perhaps the historical present requires ways of perceiving political temporality beyond ‘cruel optimism’, but also beyond cruel nihilism – namely, the idea that just because all transformations oriented towards social inclusion (including liberal legal reforms in the realm of the politics of recognition) are susceptible to being turned into sites of cooptation, they are merely weapons of the state and the status quo, and thus irrelevant, unnecessary and even dangerous. the question is how to develop and enact alternative ways, affects and genres of living in the present without letting normative fantasies and attachments become the horizon of our political desires. perhaps what we need to work through right now is alternative political, ethical and affective structures of temporality and ‘im/possibility’, beyond the inherited orthodoxies of both presentism and futurism. incidentally, this is something i’m currently struggling with: utopia, affect, inappropriate/d humanities and the critical methodology of the not-yet. and perhaps this would interestingly speak to what you, dimitri, have so aptly called ‘archive trouble’. vk and dp: to bring to the table another designation of the term ‘humanities’, could you say more about how you deploy the term ‘queer’ in your pedagogical practice? aa: i would like to think, along with students and colleagues, both within and beyond the institutional machine of the university, and definitely beyond and despite the university’s narcissistic monopoly on the production of knowledge, about how we might reimagine and recraft, again and again, queer scholarship that could account at once for subjugated knowledges of economic precarity, migrant and refugee displacement, nationalist violence, transgender embodiment, racialized dispossession, and those modes of dispensability and inappropriate/d subjectivation that remain unaccountable and uncapturable by our available appellations and identificatory apparatuses. and so we might do well to consider questions such as: how does queerness matter in our critical pedagogical practices? how does it matter in our allied work? how is it mobilized as an embodied, affective, imaginative performative instance of teaching and (un)learning against the grain of white bourgeois heteronormative power-knowledge? what is most interesting is to figure out how to deploy queer as a way to trouble normalizing and oppressive universalities within the university and beyond. and how to do so in the midst of far-right anti-intellectualism and neoliberal attacks on public education, critical theory and the university. in the era of the corporate university, i think it has its own significance that universities are still public in greece and don’t rely on tuition and private funding. such questions resonate with patricia hill collins’s work on critical public pedagogy in reference with black feminism as a project of social justice. the matter of queer pedagogies and, more specifically, the question of what might be queer in pedagogical practices point, for me, to the ongoing need to expand and multiply the sites in which queer studies takes place. this is something that halberstam has also discussed in terms of unsettling the boundaries between theory, activism, the campus and the communities. and this is partly why i’m moved that some of the scholars who contribute to this special issue are my students and colleagues from/with whom i’ve been learning and unlearning so much and in so many remarkable ways all along, and specifically on the conditions of critical possibility beyond and despite the cruel imperatives of the global marketplace and the precarization of jobs. my sense is that attending to the affectivity and performativity of intellectual solidarity and friendship plays an important role in the ways in which we are moved towards and by our critical epistemologies. in this sense, despite its limits and problematic aspects, queer remains an important epistemological and political concern for me as a transdisciplinary and transversal critique of the conditions of time and space that render certain livelihoods impossible, and, at the same time, as a performative exploration of (im)possibilities of world-making. but although queer carries with it a potentially subversive promise, i don’t believe there is anything inherently radical or subversive about ‘queer studies’. we should ask, again and again, following eng, halberstam and muñoz : ‘what’s queer about queer studies now’? the queer/ing that i find enabling is a post-foundational political concept and embodied pedagogy that refuses assimilation and offers the possibility of figuring an immanent critique of the present. judith butler’s idea of ‘critically queer’ offers such a way to trouble the liberal subjective formation of ‘sexual identities’. vk and dp: as you do now, you have often made reference in your work to a ‘(post)- queer framework’, while stressing the ‘very undefinability and productive indeterminacy signalled by the term “queer” […] [that] lends itself not only to a critique of heteronormative presumptions but also to opening the stage for theorising unfinished, unfinishable and reanimated temporal proprieties as well as their future possibilities’. yet one feels the temptations to ask: where do you stand on the matter of definition? are there specific moments and/or spaces of contestation and resistance that require strategic definition, or is that a trap of interpellation per se? aa: well, i think that we will be asking this question for some time to come. the dialectical suspension between contestation and interpellation in the realm of defining, naming, and labelling cannot and should not be assumed in advance or answered away by means of programmatic ‘definitions’. how could anyone be sure? in any case, what interests me about the term queer is precisely the indefinability and indeterminacy that marks its critical genealogies – their incalculable potentialities and misfires. i would suggest that we learn from the queer performativity of putting histories of violence and derogatory interpellation to non-normative use. i think it is important to invoke, again and again, what has enabled derogatory significations of oddness, strangeness, and dehumanized out-of-placeness to be used to violate and abject non- heteronormative desires and lives, but also what motivates on occasions these abjected people, collectively, to question and take back these injurious terms and re-appropriate them against regimes of violation and dehumanization. so how to remain open to what it means for (our) bodies to be situated in – and moved by – such performative acts in (and over) space and time? how to acknowledge and theorize these moments of despair as they become events of radical possibility? it is important to use the term precisely to acknowledge the political performativity of making the effects and affects of despair work in another form. in disrupting and disorientating the normative powers of naming and defining, queerness becomes a springboard for reanimating unfinished and unfinishable temporalities and for opening up new interrelations and ‘orientations’ – sexual or otherwise. so, for me the point can be made quite simply, albeit very schematically: there are by all means moments and spaces of contestation that require ‘definitions’ and we must undertake this task and take on this responsibility, even though – or precisely because – such definition might end up working as a trap of interpellation. i think we should always take into account, in our (re-)theorizing and (re-)politicizing, that definitions allow power to work through discursive formations, and, as such, they lay claim on us. at the same time, however, definitions are subject to reiteration, redirection and change. they are not simply given but rather are actively produced, expropriated, deconstructed, performatively reclaimed, enacted and mobilized. instead of producing fixed and familiar meanings, then, thinking with concepts and definitions might be a way to rethink such concepts and definitions and thus counter, even provisionally, the authority of discourse and the pervasive powers of interpellation. this is why it is always important, i think, to work with what exceeds available definitions. to take this point a little further: if taken as a deconstructive project, queerness is not about evading the pressing needs of actuality (as is the habitual accusation of political impracticality) including those of offering what you call ‘strategic definitions’ even as necessary errors. and it is definitely not about evading or disparaging the need and the duty of taking a stance. taking a stance takes place as a performative way of inhabiting and acting in the world. it may involve making turns, wandering off, going astray in unwieldy directions, and deviating from assigned lines of demarcation, even, hopefully, taking apart the apparatuses that generate injurious and exclusionary lines. in many respects, taking a stance and engaging with the present may (or should i say must?) involve a poetics of the aporetic. thus, any sense of critical (and self-critical) agency against regulatory designations and exclusionary identity categories involves a struggle against being totalized by proper names saturated with differential operations of power, and against being complicit in the interpellations they harbour. in short, to queer definitions is also to offer definitions as well as to open up how definitions come to matter. to queer definitions is also to relate to the indefinability yet to come. vk and dp: recent queer criticism has focused on two issues that seem to stand on opposite sides of the queer political spectrum. on the one hand, an insurgence of homophobia and racist legislation in many parts of the world (a new ‘global homophobia’ often connected to geopolitical changes and neo-nationalist rhetoric and agendas); and on the other, the exploitation of glbtqi demands in order to strengthen neoliberal and/or neo-colonial agendas through a politics of what jasbir puar and others have termed ‘homonationalism’ and ‘pinkwashing’. how intertwined are these two tendencies, the neohomophobic and the homonationalist? can we see similar traits in greece? aa: your wonderful question makes me think of how to bring work on queer theory, the liberal state, discourses of sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of neoliberal and neo-colonial agendas. a challenge inherent in this task is how to not assimilate queer into normative kinship structures, the nation, property ownership, racialized capital and settler colonialism. jasbir puar has convincingly argued that pinkwashing is a normative mechanism that does not only regulate queerness, but also works to rehabilitate the biopolitical matrices that define able-bodied, masculine, reproductive, virile, homonational citizenship. i would add that the accusation that criticism of israel and its politics of occupation and dispossession entails anti-semitism is a crucial component of the very mechanisms of pinkwashing and homonationalism. homonationalism denotes the biopolitical management of queerness through the tenuous incorporation of certain queer subjects into the agendas and ideologies of imperialism, militarism and the reproductive nation state. for me, it offers a conceptual frame for grasping the complexities of complicity. but again, we need, i think, to move beyond a clear-cut and reified opposition between ‘complicity’ and ‘resistance’. instead of the structural registers of interiority/exteriority vis-à-vis the exigencies of power relations, i would like to think my way through modalities of movement and engagement that cross through the established paradigms of the political and their universal claims to truth. besides her influential work on israeli homonationalism, puar’s analysis in her recent book the right to maim is equally insightful : she interrogates israel’s policies towards palestine by outlining how israel brings palestinians into a biopolitical state by rendering them available for injury and by enabling the mass debilitation of palestinian racialized bodies. puar argues that the production of debilitation and disability is a biopolitical process not reducible to either the pair of ‘make die/let live’ under the sovereign or the pair of ‘let die/make live’ under biopolitics. as a biopolitical register, ‘the right to maim’ denotes the production of precarious populations. i think this valuable modification of the foucauldian schema through an examination of how global racialization works to debilitate can be productively deployed, in the context of critical intersectionality and assemblage theory, and in the service of articulations of present and future resistance to the effects of political dispossession and humanitarian militarism. homonationalism was first coined by puar in order to address the us ‘war against terrorism’ and israel’s self-proclaimed representation as a gay-friendly state. for me, it is both a field of power and a conceptual frame that implies the complicity of queerness in certain geopolitical and transnational paradigms of human rights, bourgeois consumerism and regimes of racial politics. but what happens when this frame is transposed onto other locations? i think an analytics of such transposition and of various homonationalisms requires taking into account not only differing geopolitical formations but also differing epistemic configurations. your question about greek homonationalism makes us think of the affective linkages between sexuality and nationalism. this brings to mind the slogan ‘we are queer. we are proudly the shame of the nation’ put forward by the athenian queer group qv (queericulum vitae), in response to neo-nazi golden dawn demonstrations against the staging of terence mcnally’s play corpus christi at the chytyrion theatre in athens, in october , amidst austerity policies and various responses to them, including nationalist ones. this and other queer collectivities (such as amoqa, kiouries, greek transgender support association, rainbow families and others) engage in a struggle against racialized gendered violence and have addressed neoliberal politics as a national and sexual project by mobilizing antinationalism, antifascism and a critique of homonormalization. the discursive and activist tactics of these collectivities differ from those deployed by the identity-oriented lgbt discourses, with their focus on liberal gay rights and the same-sex marriage agenda. for my part, this is by no means to disregard the right to homosexual marriage (at least insofar as the institution of marriage still exists as a form of legal recognition and protection), but rather to critically question how the abolition of a discrimination may slip into an act of normalization. in order to understand how queerness and racialization are intertwined, we need to take into account the role of the production, regulation and normativisation of desire in the operations of nation building. national citizenship, in its racial–sexual historicity, is ‘bodied’ as a condition of idealized and exclusive intimacy sustained by biopolitical practices of population regulation and assimilability. the control of women’s bodies becomes the vehicle through which the reproduction of the gendered and racialized nation is made possible. consider how neoliberal governance through debt and austerity interlocks with racializing securitization and militarism in processes of white nation making in present- day europe. consider also the dynamics of the normativisation of gender and sexuality in relation to national bordering. multi-sited and translocal accounts of queer migration politics and lgbti refugees have offered important insights with respect to the ways in which national processes of belonging and subjectivation emerge not only as bordered spaces but also as spaces of dissensus. for my part, the coalitional politics emerging across queer, migrant, refugee and racial justice movements offers unique possibilities for remaking the world in our historical present. in my opinion, an important self-reflexive question for critical queer theorizing is how to address and counteract the epistemological occlusion of the differential positionalities of queers of colour, trans people of colour, migrant women and migrant queers. so it is through this critical and reflexive figure of positionality and self- positionality vis-à-vis the dynamic complexity of power that i understand and engage the term ‘homonationalism’. i wouldn’t take the invocation of this critical term as a call to occult the persistent ways in which the nation is heteronormative but rather as a discursive register through which to reflect how ‘gay-friendliness’ can become an instrumental component in the articulation of ‘proper’ national citizenship. i think the task here is to reflect on what it is that constitutes the very impulse to mainstream queer and how to mobilize the critical capacity of queer politics in multivalent ways that enable the restless re-theorizing and re-politicizing of the cross-cutting registers of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationalism and imperialism. this requires attending to what slips between the lines in queer constellations of other places, subjects, objects and times. and it is about the passionate possibility of lived experiences, lines of allegiance and critical epistemologies to rework the very conditions by which our historical present is marked in contexts of duress, grief, but also relationality and desire. i take this possibility to be interminably complicated, but also politically exhilarating. references athanasiou, athena ( ), ‘“who” is that name? subjects of gender and queer resistance, or the desire to contest’, european journal of english studies, : , pp. – , p. . ——— ( ), agonistic mourning: political dissidence and the women in black, edinburgh: edinburgh university press. butler, judith ( ), ‘critically queer’, glq, : , pp. – . ——— ( ), excitable speech: a politics of the performative, new york, london: routledge. ——— ( ), precarious life: the power of mourning and violence, london, new york: verso. ——— ( ), frames of war: when is life grievable?, london, new york: verso. berlant, lauren ( ), cruel optimism, durham, nc, london: duke university press. collins, patricia hill ( ), on intellectual activism, philadelphia, pa: temple university press. eng, david l., halberstam, judith and muñoz, josé esteban e. (eds) ( ), what’s queer about queer studies now?, social text (special issue) : - (fall- winter), pp. – . halberstam, judith ( ), ‘reflections on queer studies and queer pedagogy’, journal of homosexuality, : – , pp. – . ——— ( ), in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives, new york: new york university press. papanikolaou, dimitris ( ), ‘archive trouble, ’, in kateryna botanova, christos chryssopoulos and jurriaan cooiman (eds), culturescapes: archaeology of the future, basel: cristoph merian verlag, pp. – . puar, jasbir k. ( ), terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, durham, nc, london: duke university press. ——— ( ), the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability, durham, nc, london: duke university press. rancière, jacques ( ), dissensus: on politics and aesthetics (ed. trans. stephen corcoran), london, new york: continuum. schulman, sarah ( ), ‘israel and “pinkwashing”’, the new york times, november. notes . on this incident, see also the editors’ introduction, this issue. . ‘for zak: the responsibility for our grief’, https://nomadicuniversality.com/ / / /for-zak-the-responsibility-for-our-grief/. accessed october . . see halberstam ( ). . see athanasiou ( ). . see butler ( , ). . see butler ( : ). . see athanasiou ( ). . see berlant ( ). . see papanikolaou ( ). . see, for instance, collins ( ). . halberstam ( ). . see eng et al. ( ). . see butler ( ). . athanasiou, ‘“who” is that name?’, p. . . see, for instance, puar ( ) and schulman ( ). . see puar ( ). . on this concept as an underpinning and shared space of radical reorientation and redistribution of the ‘normal’ and the ‘sensible’, or politically legible, see also rancière ( ). vassiliki kolocotroni, dimitris papanikolaou and athena athanasiou have asserted their right under the copyright, designs and patents act, , to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to intellect ltd. mergedfile a dissertation submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree by examining committee members: 	 ii	 abstract sexism, sexual harassment, and the objectification of women are issues that have gained a new level of salience in our political culture. the phrase “me too” has captured the pervasiveness of these experiences. feminist theorists in particular, have long recognized the political significance of marginalization and discrimination on the basis of gender, and how even events that occur in the private sphere can have political implications. however, positivist scholars of political science have paid less attention to these seemingly non-political factors as potential predictors of political engagement. this dissertation is an effort to shed light on how gender-based discrimination affects women in the electorate and how they engage in the political sphere. through a combination of observational research, survey experiments, and lab experiments, i demonstrate that under certain circumstances, gender-based discrimination can depress women’s political engagement and under other circumstances, gender-based discrimination can actually act as an impetus to political engagement and activism. the goal of this dissertation is two-fold. first, i argue and empirically demonstrate that sexism, sexual harassment, and the objectification of women have explicit political consequences. second, i illuminate the moderating factors in this relationship between gender-based marginalization and political engagement. i explore how group consciousness, ideology, and emotions affect the connection between marginalizing experiences and political engagement and behavior. my findings uncover a complicated relationship between marginalizing experiences and political engagement. these experiences can depress engagement, but can also become events that galvanize political activity. the most important contribution of this dissertation is underscoring the need for 	 iii	 scholars to consider how the lived experiences of marginalized groups shape the way they approach politics. 	 iv	 to my mother, for everything. 	 v	 acknowledgements i first want to thank vin arceneaux. without his support, advice, and belief in my work, i would not have been able to complete this dissertation. i am forever grateful for the opportunity to work in the behavioral foundations lab and to use the lab’s resources to conduct my own research. his thoughtful feedback made this a better project. having vin as an advisor made graduate school and the process of writing a dissertation seem so much less daunting. i feel fortunate to have had an advisor who elevates the voices of junior scholars. thank you so much, vin. i would also like to thank nyron crawford and heath fogg davis for serving on my committee and helping me turn my scattered ideas into a dissertation. having them as both teachers and committee members has been a huge privilege and i am a better political scientist because of them. thank you to johanna dunaway for not only serving as my outside reader, but for her unique insights, suggestions, and mentorship. i must also express my gratitude to ryan vander wielen, bert bakker, hillel soifer, robin kolodny, amanda friesen, and david nickerson for reading my work, attending my talks, and proving me with constructive feedback that helped me move forward with this project when i felt stuck. i would be remiss to not thank my fellow graduate students at temple. i am especially grateful to my fellow cohort members lauren rowlands, ethan fried, and joel blaxland for their moral support and friendship. i want to thank amanda milena alvarez, my “academic life partner,” for inspiring me every day to do the work that i believe in and for always reminding me that i am not in this alone. 	 vi	 i also want to acknowledge my undergraduate advisor from wilkes university, thomas baldino, for encouraging me to pursue my ph.d. i would not have made it to temple without his advice and his insistence that i was indeed capable of writing a dissertation. i want to recognize my family for their unconditional support throughout this process. my aunts, ellen malone and mary sparks, and my uncle, tom malone, have supported my academic pursuits since i was child, and have always made me feel like i was capable of anything. my little brother, harry gothreau, has rooted me on for the past five years and never once asked me when i would be done with school. i want to acknowledge my best friend, courtney conway, who was always there to remind me that my worth is determined by more than just my ability to succeed in academia. thank you to arnie, my canine best friend, who sat by my side while i finished this dissertation and steffi kasparek for bringing him to me. finally, i want to thank my parents, joan malone and stephen gothreau. none of my accomplishments would have come to fruition without them. their love and support has been limitless. my dad is the reason i became interested in politics. he sparked an intellectual curiosity in me that helped me push forward when my belief in my own work waned. my mom gave me the courage to write a dissertation that is meaningful to me, and borne of my own experiences. i love you both. 	 vii	 table of contents page abstract………………………………………………………………………..……..ii dedication…….…………………………………………………………….…….….iv acknowledgements……..……………………………………………….………..v list of tables….………………………………………………………………….…ix list of figures……….……………………………………………………………....x chapter . introduction……………………………………………………………………... sexism and politics……………………………………………………………….. discrimination and political engagement…………………...…………………… plan of the dissertation………………………………………………...…………. . the political consequences of self-objectification…….……… introduction. ………………………………..…………………………………… what is self-objectification?.…………………………………………………… the consequences of self-objectification……………………………………… self-objectification and political engagement……………………………….…. research design………………………………..……………..…………………. results………………………………..……………..……………………...……. implications and conclusion………………………………..…………………… . me too: the impact of sexism on political engagement and the moderating impact of gender consciousness…………………...……. 	 viii	 gender-based discrimination and its consequences……………………………. sexist events, political engagement, and group consciousness………..……… data and measures……………………………..…………………………..……. the relationship between gender discrimination and feminist identity development……………………………..……………………………………… results………………………………………………………………………….... discussion…………………………..…………………………………………… . the relationship between gender discrimination and sociopolitical behavior………………………………………………...…….. sexism, discrimination, and political engagement……………………...……… research design…………………………..………………………………...…… results…………………………..……………………………………………….. concluding remarks…………………………..……………………………..….. . conclusions…………………………………………………………………...… summary of findings……………………………………………………………. future work………………………………………………………………...…… bibliography. ……………………………………………………………………… appendix….....……………………………………………………………………...… 	 ix	 list of tables table . descriptive statistics for body shame and body surveillance scales………….... a. descriptive statistics mturk sample…………………………………………..… a. ols regression results: internal political efficacy………………………...…… a. ols regression results: political interest…………………….……….………… a. ols regression results: political information-seeking………………….……… a. ordered logit model: robustness check………………….……………...……… a. ols model: gender egalitarianism……………….……………………………... a. descriptive statistics for mturk sample……………………………………...… a. ols regression: internal political efficacy…………………………………..… a. ols regression: political interest…………………………………………….… . a. ols regression: political participation………………………………………… a. ordered logistic regression results………………………………………….… a. descriptive statistics for laboratory sample……………………………...……. a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………….. a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………………...……… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… a. ols regression (model ) ……………………………………….…………..… 	 x	 list of figures figure . example of objectifying advertisements………………………………………… . the relationship between self-objectification and political engagement...……. . differential effect of body shame on efficacy by gender………...…………….. . differential effect of body shame on political interest by gender…………...…. . effect of body shame on information-seeking for men and women…………… . effect of body surveillance on information-seeking for men and women…...… . differential effect of body shame on gender egalitarianism by gender……….. a. body surveillance posterior distribution……………………………………….. a. body shame posterior distribution…………………………………………..…. . the relationship between sexism and political engagement…………………… . reported sexist and objectifying events………………………………………… . marginal effect of sexist events and interpersonal objectification on efficacy over the range of gender consciousness…………………………………………………..… . marginal effect of sexist events and interpersonal objectification on political interest over the range of gender consciousness…………………………………….… . marginal effect of sexist events and interpersonal objectification on political participation over the range of gender consciousness………………………………… . predicted political participation at varying levels of gender consciousness…... a. marginal effect of sexist events on efficacy over the range of fids (model )……………………………………………………………………………………….. 	 xi	 a. marginal effect of sexist events on efficacy over the range of fids (model )……………………………………………………………………………………..… a. marginal effect of sexist events on efficacy over the range of fids (model )……………………………………………………………………………………… a. marginal effect of sexist events on efficacy over the range of fids (model )……………………………………………………………………………………… . audio transcript…………………………………..……………….……………... . ols regression results…………………………………..……………………… . estimated coefficient of the treatment by gender consciousness….………....... . ols regression results…………………………………..……………………… . ols regression results…………………………………..…………………..….. 	 	 chapter introduction sexism goes so deep that at first it’s hard to see: you think it’s just reality. -alix kates shulman	 for many women, sexism, objectification, and even sexual harassment are daily experiences (fitzgerald & shullman ; swim, hyers, cohen, & ferguson ). the #metoo movement has shone a spotlight on the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment. in just three months, . million tweets with the hash tag were shared on twitter, and countless women shared their stories (chou ). as the presidential election underscored, the political sphere is far from being devoid of sexism and rhetoric that objectifies and dehumanizes women. one candidate was accused of sexual misconduct by several women, while the other candidate was subject to gender-based attacks and sexist rhetoric. now more than ever, we are experiencing a cultural moment that is highlighting how gender fundamentally shapes our life experiences. the field of political science has long acknowledged the impact that sexism and sexist stereotypes can have on female candidates and their electoral success (huddy & terkildsen ; sanbonmatsu & dolan ). there is a wide breadth of literature on sexist media coverage, gender differences in the evaluation of candidates, and the impact of these factors on women’s representation in political institutions (kahn & goldenberg ; kahn ). political scientists have not shied away from addressing sexism, but there are still significant gaps. the literature is focused on the impact of sexism on political elites and neglects an important discussion about the impact on everyday 	 	 women. how do sexism, sexual harassment, and other marginalizing experiences, something so omnipresent in women’s lives, affect american women and their sense of political engagement and political efficacy? this dissertation is an effort to shift the focus from sexism’s effect on political elites to shed light on how sexism, as well as other forms of gender-based marginalization and discrimination, affect american women in the electorate. i conceive of marginalization as the everyday prejudiced experiences that traditionally oppressed and stigmatized groups have. this will aid us in going beyond standard predictors of political behavior such as education, income, and access to resources. this chapter will serve as a brief review of the most relevant literature. i will outline the literature on sexism and politics, discrimination and political engagement, and the prevalence of gender-based discrimination to set up the motivating question of this dissertation. i will then provide an overview of the three papers that follow. sexism and politics there is a wealth of literature on why women do not have parity in elected offices in the united states. much of this research focuses on the way that gender stereotypes effect how voters perceive candidates. for example, evidence shows that voters expect female candidates and politicians to be compassionate given that this is a stereotype that applies to women broadly (huddy & terkildsen ). women are also seen as more liberal and less capable of handling national security and foreign policy issues (lawless ; sanbonmatsu & dolan ; hayes ). schneider and bos ( ) challenge this literature by suggesting that female politicians make up a subtype within the broader 	 	 group of women with their own set of stereotypes. ultimately, this can be even more damaging for female politicians as they are seen as coming up short on “masculine qualities,” as well as the positive qualities attributed to women generally. preference for male candidates is evidenced in the recruitment process of political parties and politicians as well (sanbonmatsu ). there is also a considerable literature on sexist media coverage of political candidates. not surprisingly, scholars have found that women do not receive the same press treatment as male candidates. women receive less news coverage overall, even when the competitiveness of the race is controlled for, and the coverage they did receive was often about their viability as candidates and not about issue positions (kahn & goldenberg ; kahn ). women also receive more personal coverage than their male counterparts, and often that coverage focuses on physical appearance and dress (devitt ; heldman, carroll, & olson ). the media also tends to focus on the “first woman” frame instead of the candidate’s policy issues (kahn ; heldman et al. ). there is also an extensive literature worth noting that explores the mechanisms in place that keep women from running for office in the first place. before women can actually run for office, they need to be nominated by a political party. parties can act as gatekeepers to candidacy for office, which often leads to the exclusion of potential women candidates (norris & lovenduski ; krook ). this is one way in which institutional structures can lead to sexist outcomes. 																																																								 	more specifically, women are seen as coming up short on “masculine” qualities such as “assertiveness” and “self-sufficient,” but also positive “feminine” qualities like “honesty” and “warmth.” essentially, female politicians are punished for not possessing the masculine qualities that are seen as necessary for politics, but they are also punished for not possessing positive stereotypically feminine qualities. 	 	 the literature briefly outlined above is valuable in elucidating the way in which women experience the political world differently from men. it’s clear that women who run for public office or who are already in public office are often subject to sexism and discrimination, from their peer, the electorate, and the media. this sexism is manifested in the application of stereotypes, media coverage, and the institutional structures that make it difficult for women to run for office and win. discrimination and political engagement the studies that have linked discrimination and political participation suggest that social organizing and political activism can be collective responses to everyday prejudice (simpson & yinger ). the established consensus in political behavior research is that discrimination by political institutions motivates those who are marginalized to engage in politics in an effort to protest their status (miller, gurin, gurin, & malanchuk ; pantoja, ramirez, & segura ; barreto & woods ; cho, gimpel, & wu ; page ). however, more recent work finds that interpersonal discrimination, opposed to structural or institutional discrimination, can actually be demobilizing and cause individuals who experience this type of discrimination to withdraw from political life (oskooii ). with the exception of this most recent work, the extant research does not focus on interpersonal discrimination, but rather, structural or explicitly political discrimination against marginalized groups. the literature on discrimination and political engagement focuses chiefly on those with marginalized racial and ethnic identities. for example, cho et al. ( ) find that events following / mobilized arab-americans in the united states and led to greater 	 	 political activity. the authors purport that this increased mobilization was in response to threatening and discriminatory policies against arab-americans. pantoja et al. ( ), compare the voter turnout among cohorts of naturalized and native-born latino citizens. they find that latinos who were naturalized in california during a time of anti- immigrant rhetoric and legislation were more likely to vote in the election than latinos who were naturalized in texas and florida where anti-immigrant rhetoric was not as salient. some more recent literature has focused on groups other than racial and ethnic minorities. for example, matilla and papageorgeiou ( ) look at how perceptions of discrimination affect the political participation of those with disabilities. conventional wisdom suggests that in general, disabilities depress political participation. however, the authors find that although disability decreases voting when associated with perceptions of discrimination, it increased participation in demonstrations and contact with politicians. taking a more nuanced approach to conceptualizing discrimination and using american muslims as the population for his analysis, oskooii ( ) distinguishes between systemic or political discrimination and interpersonal discrimination. oksooii ( ) notes systemic or political discrimination, “typically refers to discriminatory laws, campaign messages, policies, or practices carried out by state or private institutions and/or their affiliated actors” (p. ). using survey data from the - muslim american public opinion survey and the pew research center study of american muslims, he finds that systemic discrimination is associated with increased political mobilization, whereas interpersonal discrimination has the opposite effect and causes many to retreat from the political sphere. 	 	 the mechanism that mobilizes racial and ethnic groups subject to discrimination to engage in politics, in part, is a sense of group consciousness and linked fate (jamal ; ysseldyk et al. ; lin ). group consciousness is considered to be a political resource that explains the high levels of political participation among some marginalized groups (sanchez ; sanchez and vargas ). the existing research suggests that as marginalized group members experience discrimination, their awareness of their status of being part of a group that is receiving unfair treatment is increased. this leads to a sense of linked fate or group consciousness (pantoja et al. ; barreto and woods ; cho et al. ; sanchez ). on the other side of the coin, system- justifying beliefs tend to dampen reactions to inequities. endorsement of system- justifying beliefs coupled with unequal outcomes actually undermines political mobilization (osborne and sibley ). this modest literature on the connection between discrimination and political engagement suggests that social organizing and political activism are collective responses to discrimination and marginalization. this work also delves into the mechanisms that drive the relationship between perceptions of discrimination and political mobilization. however, there is also some evidence that the type of discrimination is consequential in its effect on political engagement (oskooii ). furthermore, this work focuses on ethnic and racial discrimination, rather than gender-based discrimination. this is a useful starting point to theorize about the potential effect of gender discrimination against women on political engagement, but we also know that gender and race are not equivalent marginalized identities. 																																																								 	for more discussion on the difference between linked fate and group consciousness, see chapter . 	 	 plan of the dissertation the literature outlined above may at first seem unrelated, but actually reveals a significant gap in the literature on political participation and gender and politics. the scholarly research on sexism and politics focuses primarily on those running for public office or those already in public office. the research on discrimination and political participation mainly lies in the realm of race, ethnicity, and politics. to my knowledge, there has been no systematic study of the relationship between gender discrimination and political participation. this dissertation investigates the connection between gender discrimination, broadly conceived, and political engagement, as well as the factors that moderate this relationship. using a combination of surveys, survey experiments, and laboratory experiments, i highlight the continued relevance of personally-experienced discrimination and marginalization to scholars of political behavior. this dissertation takes a three-article format. the project’s first article uses a survey experiment to explore the effect of self-objectification on political engagement. results from the survey experiment are presented that demonstrate how self- objectification undermines women’s political engagement, and more specifically, feelings of political efficacy. the chapter begins with a discussion of the psychology literature on self-objectification and its relationship to cognitive functioning, behavioral outcomes, and self-efficacy. results from the survey experiment suggest that the negative consequences of self-objectification extend into the political realm as well. this article problematizes the objectification of women’s body in our culture and reveals political consequences. 	 	 in the second article, i go beyond just objectification to explore how other forms of gender-based discrimination and marginalization correlate with political engagement and behavior. i hypothesize that there are circumstances in which personally-experienced sexism and discrimination can increase political engagement and activism. i argue that women who are high in gender consciousness will become galvanized by sexist and discriminatory events and engage in political participation as a response. women who are low on gender consciousness will not become mobilized by the same accumulation of discriminatory experiences. gender consciousness, which consists of factors such as feelings of linked fate with other group members and an acknowledgement of one’s membership in a marginalized group, moderates the relationship between discrimination and political engagement. experiences of discrimination, coupled with high levels of gender consciousness, can act as an impetus to political mobilization. in the final empirical chapter of my dissertation, i build upon the findings from my first two studies and seek to establish a causal relationship between gender-based discrimination and political engagement. in an ongoing lab experiment, i use bogus feedback on a cognitive task to prime personally-experienced sexism. i consider the role of gender consciousness and linked fate, emotional appraisal, and ideology as moderators in the relationship between exposure to sexism and political engagement. i also measure physiological response in the form of skin conductance (scl), a common measure of emotional arousal or attentiveness generated by the sympathetic nervous system, to examine subjects’ response to exposure to sexism. the goal of this dissertation is to illuminate the ways in which seemingly non- political factors end up having explicit political consequences. feminist political theory 	 	 has long recognized how gender-based marginalization is inherently political (de beauvoir ; young ; bartky ; hooks ). however, discussions of everyday prejudice, sexism, and sexual harassment are absent from empirical work in political science. marginalizing experiences, particularly ones that occur routinely, are formative in people’s lives. political science has addressed the effect that sexism has on political elites, but has paid scant attention to how marginalization on the basis of gender affects american women. this is particularly important as we enter a cultural moment in which no topic is more salient than the treatment of women at work, in public spaces, and in politics. 	 	 chapter the political consequences of self-objectification abstract research has shown that women are significantly less politically engaged than men at both the mass and elite levels (bennett & bennett ; verba, burns, & schlozman ; burns, schlozman, & verba ; lawless & fox ; pruysers & blais ). more recent scholarship has found that structural factors and standard predictors of political behavior no longer sufficiently explain this persistent gap in engagement (atkeson & rapoport ; wen ; preece ). in the present study, i take a novel approach to exploring the discrepancy in men and women’s political engagement. i posit that self-objectification, a psychological mechanism more commonly found in women, undermines engagement. when women self-objectify, their cognitive resources are significantly diminished and they fail to see themselves as agents of change. i conduct a survey on a sample of both men and women. i find that trait self- objectification is negatively related to internal political efficacy, political interest, and propensity to seek political information. theses results demonstrate that the negative consequences of the sexual objectification of women extend into the political sphere and in part, drive the gender gap in engagement. 	 	 “the sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. the gaze of the other is internalized so that i myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised.” -sandra lee bartky introduction women are objectified in popular culture, the media, and in the political sphere (lanis & covell ; heflick & goldenberg ; galdi, maass, & cadinu ; schooler ). the objectification of the female body has become normalized in american society. this persistent objectification leads to a phenomenon known as self- objectification, which occurs when individuals internalize observer’s perspectives of their physical bodies (fredrickson & roberts ). psychologists have documented the adverse effects that self-objectification can have on a woman’s mental health, cognitive functioning, and self-efficacy (fredrickson, roberts, noll, quinn, & twenge ; gapinski, brownell, & lafrance ; noll & fredrickson ; roberts & gettman ). building on the extensive literature on self-objectification, i explore whether or not the negative consequences of self-objectification extend to the political sphere. in particular, i look at the well-established gender gap in political engagement. extant research has found that women are less engaged in politics at both the mass and elite levels (burns, schlozman, & verba ; lawless & fox ; pruysers & blais ; verba, burns, & schlozman ). despite the fact that women vote at the same rates as men, they consistently report being less interested in politics, are less knowledgeable, express their political attitudes less than men, and are less politically efficacious (beckwith ; bennett & bennett ; delli carpini & keeter ; huckfeldt & 	 	 sprague ; preece ; verba et al. ). men and women diverge sharply in their confidence to comprehend politics, and women are more likely to believe that politics is too complicated for them to understand (gidengil, giles, & thomas ; pruysers & blais ). this paper presents the results of a survey study designed to test the hypothesis that self-objectification has a negative effect on political engagement in women. i go beyond measuring standard predictors of political behavior to posit this psychological mechanism, found in higher levels in women, as a predictor of political engagement. my results support the notion that state self-objectification negatively correlates with various measures of engagement. these findings underscore the relevance of the sexual objectification of the female body in the media, popular culture, and in the political sphere, to political outcomes. they also highlight the importance of psychological explanations for the gender gap in political engagement. what is self-objectification? the notion of objectification has been discussed by many feminist theorists writing from a social constructivist perspective. simone de beauvoir, sandra bartky, and iris marion young all wrote about the objectification of the female body (bartky ; de beauvoir ; young ). bartky ( ) states, “sexual objectification occurs whenever people’s bodies, body parts, or sexual functions are separated out from their identity, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or regarded as if they were capable of representing them.” nussbaum ( ) builds on bartky’s definition to assert that objectification involves the denial of autonomy, treating the object as lacking agency, and 	 	 denying the object subjectivity. she also asserts that the objectifier often treats the object as interchangeable with other objects of the same type. objectification is to treat a human being in one or more of these ways. ultimately, a theory of objectification was developed to understand the consequences of living in a culture that sexually objectifies women. objectification theory posits that women are often treated as simply bodies or body parts. more specifically, they are treated as bodies that exist for the consumption and pleasure of other (fredrickson & roberts ). fredrickson and roberts ( ) explain, “the common thread running through all forms of sexual objectification is the experience of being treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use to (or consumption by) others” (p. ). the crux of objectification is the degradation or even elimination of another’s agency and personhood. building on nussbaum’s work, caroline heldman developed the sex object test (sot) to determine whether images are objectifying or not. she asserts that sexual objectification is present if the image only shows parts of a sexualized person’s body, if the sexualized person is a stand-in for an object or is interchangeable, or if the image affirms the notion of violating the bodily integrity of a sexualized person that is unable to consent. the sot test also classifies images that portray the sexualized person as a commodity as objectifying. the advertisements in figure . are images that would qualify as sexually objectifying based on the sot. the first image clearly shows a woman being portrayed as an object, while the second image suggests a violation of the bodily integrity of the sexualized person. the third image meets the first criteria of the sot in which only part of a sexualized person’s body is shown. 	 	 figure . : example of objectifying advertisements 	 	 objectification can occur in interpersonal encounters, but even more often, in mainstream media. the proliferation of marketing and entertainment media has heightened the amount of sexually objectifying images and words we are exposed to (heldman & wade ). the average american is exposed to over , ads each day (story ). content analyses have concluded that the media focuses on the body and appearance as the main components of sexual desirability (aubrey ). the increased access to smartphones amplifies exposure to objectifying media. interpersonal sexual objectification refers to objectification that women directly experience. this can occur in relationships with family and friends, colleagues, or in public spaces. kozee, tylka, augustus-horvath, and denchik ( ) developed a scale to measure these instances of interpersonal objectification that includes two factors: body evaluation and unwanted explicit sexual advances. this type of objectification captures the notion of the “objectifying gaze,” or the sexual evaluation of women’s bodies. 	 	 objectification can have damaging effects on the hearts and minds of women. one of these effects is self-objectification. when women self-objectify, they internalize observers’ perspectives of their physical bodies. as quinn et al. ( ) state, “being in a state of self-objectification signifies that a person has moved from a subjective sense of self as agent to a sense of self as object” (p. ). the insidiousness of self-objectification is that it can pervade every aspect of a woman’s life, including her mental health, cognitive functioning, and self-efficacy. scholars have found that self-objectification can contribute to a host of mental health issues, including anxiety and depression (huebner & fredrickson ). it can cause feelings of shame, increased body surveillance, and intentions to have cosmetic surgery (calogero, pina, & sutton ). some studies have found that inducing women to self-objectify negatively impacts cognitive performance on challenging tasks (fredrickson et al. ). self-objectification is both a stable trait and a context-dependent state (fredrickson et al. ). “trait” self-objectification is a person’s overall propensity to see themselves as objects. this type of self-objectification is cultivated over a lifetime and remains relatively stable. context-dependent or “state” self-objectification is not a stable trait. this type of self-objectification can occur in any situation where physical appearance is made salient. this could occur when an objectifying ad is viewed, when a person is subject to street harassment, or even upon receiving an appearance-based compliment. 	 	 the consequences of self-objectification psychologists have found that self-objectification contribute to anxiety and depression (huebner & fredrickson ). self-objectification can also lead to sexual dysfunction and disordered eating (calogero, davis, & thompson ). furthermore, it has been linked to behavioral health outcomes such as self-injury and substance abuse (calogero et al. ). some studies have found that inducing women to self-objectify negatively impacts cognitive performance on challenging tasks (fredrickson et al. ). women who self-objectify have lower self-esteem and self-efficacy (gapinski et al. ). self-efficacy is the belief in one’s own capability or effectiveness in any particular situation. research in psychology indicates that those who are more self- efficacious are healthier and generally more successful (bandura ). gapinski, et al. ( ) found that self-objectification, as both a stable and enduring trait and as a situationally-induced state, was correlated with increased negative feelings, decreased intrinsic motivation, and diminished cognitive functioning. women are more vulnerable to self-objectification than men. this is relatively unsurprising considering our culture tends to objectify the female body more often than the male body (fredrickson & roberts ). this notion is supported by the scholarly research on the antecedents of self-objectification. calogero et al. ( ) find that internalized media ideals for appearance contribute to self-objectification. the authors state, “this suggests that the viewing of sexually objectifying images of women in visual media (e.g., magazines, music videos, television shows) may be a contributing factor to the chronic viewing of oneself as a sexual object if those images become integrated into one’s self-perception” (p. ). stranger harassment, the sexual harassment of women in 	 	 public places by men who are strangers, is also positively related to self-objectification (fairchild & rudman ). many different individual-level differences in personality contribute to whether or not someone is likely to self-objectify, but culture and socialization play a significant role as well. women tend to be higher trait self-objectifiers than men, and show more variability across individuals than men do (fredrickson et al. ). roberts and gettman ( ) found that when exposed to an objectifying prime, women’s ratings of negative emotions were higher and their ratings of the appeal of physical sex significantly lower than women not exposed to the prime. in contrast, men were unaffected by the objectifying prime. huebner and fredrickson ( ) explore the role of autobiographical memories in self-objectification from two perspectives: the original first person perspective (field images) and that of an outside observer (observer images). the authors assert that observer imagery could potentially result from the emotions and self-awareness that are associated in objectifying situations. they found support for the hypothesis that female participants report more observer imagery than male participants, both for memories in general and for memories of situations wherein women are likely to be objectified. this is consistent with the idea that self-objectification involves viewing yourself from the perspective of others. there is some evidence that self-objectification is negatively related to both internal and external political efficacy. heldman and cahill ( ), through survey data, 																																																								 men and gender non-conforming people are also the victims of stranger harassment, but the overwhelming majority of victims identify as women. interestingly, fairchild and rudman ( ) found that this was only true for women who used common strategies for coping (e.g. passive, self-blame, or benign), but not women who used more active coping strategies (e.g. confronting the harasser). 	 	 found that respondents who were high self-objectifiers exhibited lower rates of internal political efficacy than other respondents. specifically, they found that among the high self-objectifiers, only % had a high level of internal efficacy whereas among the low and medium self-objectifiers, . % had a high level of internal efficacy. the survey data collected by heldman and cahill ( ) is an important starting point, but are always internal validity concerns with the collection of survey data. the relationship between internal efficacy and self-objectification has not been sufficiently investigated. it is only recently that scholars have begun to look at psychological mechanisms as powerful predictors of political behavior. calogero ( ) found support for the notion that self-objectification renders women less engaged in gender-based social activism. greater self-objectification was related to more gender-specific system justification which mediated the link between self-objectification and social activism. this meditational model was true for both trait and state self-objectification. for the purposes of this study, this research is particularly relevant as it provides some evidence that self-objectification can thwart political activism among women. scholars have found that context-dependent self-objectification can be primed in experimental settings. fredrickson et al. ( ) manipulated self-objectification by having participants try on either a swimsuit or a sweater while completing a difficult cognitive task. they found that women in the swimsuit condition that was intended to prime self-objectification, performed worse on the task. tiggeman and boundy ( ) used two subtle environmental cues to prime the emotion. one of the manipulations was an environmental manipulation in which the room where the participants had to complete 	 	 the study had two full-length mirrors, a set of bathroom scales, and a small display of fashion magazine covers on the room divider. the other experimental manipulation was that half of the participants received an appearance compliment, and the other half received no comment. this research shows that self-objectification can be primed in an experimental setting. whether we are cognizant of it or not, we all participate in the act of self- objectification. it is natural for someone to self-objectify when their physical appearance is made salient. however, the psychology literature has demonstrated that chronic self- objectification can have negative consequences on emotion well-being and cognitive functioning, particularly for women. even when men display similar levels of self- objectification as women, they tend not to experience the same psychological consequences (roberts & gettman ). the aim of this study is to explore whether or not these consequences extend to the political realm. self-objectification and political engagement there is a scant amount of literature linking self-objectification to political outcomes. heflick and goldenberg ( ) examined the presidential election and posited that the objectification of vice-presidential candidate sarah palin was detrimental to the republican ticket. the authors suggest that the heavy national focus on palin’s appearance led to the perception that she was less competent, warm, and moral. they also suggest, although they do not test this assertion empirically, that this intense objectification may have even undermined the competency of her own performance. in an experimental study, heflick and goldenberg ( ) found that asking subjects to 	 	 focus on and write about palin’s appearance reduced perceptions of her humanity and competence. these findings are particularly troubling considering a candidate’s perceived level of competence plays a significant role in vote choice (todorov, mandisodza, goren, & hall ). these studies that explore how sexual objectification can negatively impact female political candidates is an important step in acknowledging how our culture of objectifying female bodies can pervade the political sphere. however, we have yet to fully consider how objectification, as well as self-objectification, could impact the way the average woman approaches politics. the evidence we do have suggests that self- objectification could undermine women’s political participation. because of the pervasive forces of society and its objectification of women, in many cases, women turn inward to objectify themselves. i advance the theory that women who are high self-objectifiers fail to see themselves as agents of change. when women self-objectify their cognitive resources are significantly diminished (fredrickson et al. ; gapinski et al. ; gay & castano ). self-objectification puts one in a state of vigilant body monitoring, increased anxiety, and lowered feelings of overall competence. this state is inconsistent with feelings of efficacy, interest, and overall political engagement. internal efficacy is a feeling of competence and capability, and it is anchored by feelings of self-esteem (clarke & acock ). possessing efficacy undoubtedly requires not only self-esteem and competence, but likely requires cognitive resources as well. women who are high self-objectifiers self-monitor diligently. as fredrickson et al. ( ) state, “this self-conscious appearance monitoring can disrupt an individual’s stream of consciousness, and thereby limit the mental resources available for 	 	 other activities” (p. ). in this case, i am discussing self-objectification as a stable and enduring trait. if so much of one’s cognitive resources and self-efficacy are diminished, it is likely that this translates to efficacy in the political sense. therefore, i hypothesize that: 𝐻!: women who are high trait self-objectifiers will have lower internal political efficacy than those who are low trait self-objectifiers. the negative political consequences of self-objectification likely extend beyond just efficacy. if those who are high self-objectifiers have decreased self-esteem and cognitive resources, it is likely that they would be less politically engaged in other ways as well. this leads to my second and third hypotheses: 𝐻!: women who are high trait self-objectifiers will have less political interest than those who are low trait self-objectifiers. 𝐻!: women who are high trait self-objectifiers will display less political information- seeking behavior than those who are low trait self-objectifiers. taken together, efficacy, interest, and information-seeking behavior, are a solid operationalization of political engagement. decades of research in political science emphasize the importance of internal efficacy in political agency and democratic participation (almond and verba ; pinkleton and austin ). to be engaged in politics, it stands to reason that one must be efficacious, interested, and willing to seek out politically relevant information. figure . . summarizes the proposed relationship between self-objectification and political engagement. 																																																								 the notion that increased self-objectification increases cognitive has been established by the psychology literature. i am not claiming that increased cognitive load is the causal mechanism that decreases efficacy. however, it is likely a contributing factor. 	 	 figure . : the relationship between self-objectification and political engagement the extant literature suggests that self-objectification is more common in women than it is in men (fredrickson et al. ). furthermore, there is some evidence that even when men display similar levels of self-objectification as women, they do not suffer the same negative psychological consequences (roberts & gettman ). i hypothesize that the differential impact of self-objectification on men and women likely carries over into the political realm as well. as self-objectification increases, women will become less engaged, whereas for men, self-objectification will have no effect on their level of engagement. self-objectification	 − political efficacy, interest, and information-seeking − cognitive resources, self-efficacy, feelings of competence + body monitoring and anxiety 	 	 recent research on self-objectification and women’s political consciousness lends supports for my theory. calogero ( ) finds that greater trait self-objectification was related to more gender-specific system justification and less engagement in gender-based social activism. in other words, women who are high self-objectifiers were more likely to be content with the status quo in terms of gender relations and less likely to engage in efforts to improve the status of women. similarly, calogero, tylka, donnelly, mcgetrick, and leger ( ) find that the belief that beauty is a type of currency, self- objectification, and support for the gender status quo were negatively related to gender- based activism. this research indicates that there is a relationship between self- objectification and political consciousness and activism as it relates to gender-based attitudes. the psychology literature has thoroughly demonstrated the negative impacts that self-objectification can have on a woman’s mental health and cognitive functioning. women who are high self-objectifiers are more likely to feel ashamed of their bodies, pursue cosmetic surgery, develop eating disorders, experience sexual dysfunction, perform poorly on cognitive tasks, and feel negative emotions (calogero et al. ; calogero et al. ; tiggeman & boundy ). however, we have yet to explore the political consequences of something so omnipresent in many women’s lives. research design participants to test the proposed hypotheses, in june of i recruited male and female respondents to participate in an online survey through amazon’s mechanical turk (see 	 	 appendix a. for more detailed demographic information). six respondents were dropped for completing less than % of the survey instrument. participants ranged from age to age (m= . , sd= . ), and . % of the sample had a bachelor’s degree or higher. out of the participants, . % identified as white, . % as black, . % as hispanic, . % as asian, and . % as more than one race. the median reported yearly income was $ , to $ , . participants were compensated $ . for completing the study. while the sample was quite diverse, it is younger, more educated, and more liberal than the united states population. while this limits external validity somewhat, mturk samples tend to be more representative than in-person convenience samples (berinsky et al. ). procedures and measures after consenting to participate in the study, all respondents were asked to take a pre-test which included mckinley and hyde’s objectified body consciousness scale (obcs). this questionnaire is a measure of trait self-objectification. two of three sub- scales were included; ) body surveillance, and ) internalization of cultural body standards (body shame). this scale was derived from feminist theory and is designed to measure the behaviors and attitudes that contribute to women’s negative body experience (mckinley and hyde ). the body surveillance sub-scale includes statements like, “i rarely compare how i look with how other people look,” and “i am more concerned with what my body can do than how it looks.” the body shame sub-scale includes statements 																																																								 following moradi and varnes’s ( ) research on the factor structure of the obcs, i only utilized the body surveillance and body shame sub-scales. in their analysis they found that the factor loadings for the control beliefs items were low, indicating that these items were poor measures of the control beliefs factor. the control beliefs scale also yielded a theory- inconsistent negative correlation with the body surveillance factor and the body shame factor, as well as a low cronbach’s alpha. 	 	 such as “i feel like i must be a bad person when i don't look as good as i could,” and “i would be ashamed for people to know what i really weigh.” response categories were on a scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree), with a “not applicable” option. not applicable responses were treated as missing values, and appropriate items were reverse coded such that higher scores indicated higher levels of body surveillance and body shame. using these items on the sub-scale, the goal was to generate scores for each latent variable. scholars have typically used confirmatory factor analyses to uncover the factor structure of the obcs. using factor analysis allows items on the scale to have different weights. however, standard factor analyses treat each factor score as deterministic, and does not take into consideration that these estimates are uncertain. to better account for potential measurement error, i used bayesian ordinal factor analysis to estimate scores for each respondent on separate body shame and body surveillance scales (treier & jackman ). this is a more rigorous statistical technique that allows for the incorporation of measurement error into the regression models. specifically, i used a monte carlo markov chain to estimate the model , times, each time randomly sampling a factor score from each respondent’s posterior distribution. distributions of the posterior means can be found in appendix a. . 																																																								 various diagnostic tests, including the geweke diagnostic (geweke ) were run to confirm that two parts of the chain (first % and the last %) were asymptotically independent of each other. raftery and lewis’s diagnostic, as well as traceplots to ensure that the chain did not get stuck in certain areas of the parameter space. 	 	 table . : descriptive statistics for body shame and body surveillance scales average posterior distribution statistics: body shame body surveillance range . . mean . -. standard deviation . . cronbach’s alpha on scale items . . correlation between factor scores . . & posterior means the survey also included a variety of demographic questions. the primary dependent variables are questions tapping political engagement. the four internal efficacy items were the standard items used on the national election study developed by niemi, craig, and mattei ( ). these items include statements like “i consider myself to be well-qualified to participate in politics,” and “i feel that i could do as good a job in public office as most other people.” response categories were on a scale from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). items were coded such that higher values indicated a more efficacious answer. scholars have found evidence that these four items display high internal consistency, and both confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that the items measure a single concept that is robust across major subgroups (niemi et al. ; morrell ). in this sample, these four items displayed a high level of internal consistency (𝛼=. ). confirmatory factor analysis using promax rotation was used to render factor scores for the efficacy items with higher scores indicating more efficacious answers. 	 	 political interest was measured with two items tapping interest in both political campaigns and current events. items were coded such that higher values indicated more interest. confirmatory factor analysis using promax rotation was also used to render factor scores for the political interest items with higher scores indicating more political interest. the two items displayed high internal consistency (𝛼=. ). the post-test also measured information seeking behavior. participants were required to read a brief news article. they were then asked how likely they would be to look for more information related to the story, or to read another news story about related issues if they encountered one. this measure gets at one’s propensity to not only be interested in politics, but to actively seek out more political information. finally, respondents completed a battery of questions from the world values survey on gender egalitarianism (mcdaniel ). this included six questions about women’s equality in jobs, education, and politics, as well as questions about women’s role in the workplace and as mothers. the six items displayed an acceptable level of internal consistency (𝛼=. ). items were coded such that higher 																																																								 	respondents were asked, “some people don't pay much attention to political campaigns. how about you? would you say that you have been very much interested, somewhat interested, or not much interested in the political campaigns this year?” and “some people seem to follow what's going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there's an election going on or not. others aren't that interested. would you say you follow what's going on in government and public affairs most of the time, some of the time, only now and then, or hardly at all?” 	summated rating scales were also created with the interest and efficacy items. substantive results were unchanged when the models were run using the summated rating scales instead of the factor scores. the information seeking question was measured on a -point scale from extremely likely to extremely unlikely. i treated this as a continuous variable, although as a robustness check, i also ran this model as an ordered logit model, which can be found in the appendix. substantive results were unchanged. the article involved a discussion of a texas legislative session on sanctuary cities, and a bill that would ban them and punish local governments that do not comply with the law. 	 	 responses indicated more gender egalitarianism, and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on all six items. results to test the hypothesis that women who are high trait self-objectifiers will have lower internal political efficacy than those who are low trait self-objectifiers (𝐻!), i ran an ols model regressing the internal political efficacy scale on education, ideology, income, gender, the body shame scale, and the body surveillance scale, as well as an interaction between gender and both self-objectification scales. i chose this set of controls as they are all potential predictors of political engagement. regression results can be found in appendix a. , table a. . contrary to theoretical expectations, body shame has a significant (p<. ) positive impact on efficacy, however, the significant interaction (p<. ) between body shame and gender shows that for women, the effect of body shame is negative. figure . illustrates the differential effect of body shame on internal political efficacy on men and women. we see that for men, body shame actually has a positive impact on efficacy, whereas for women, there is a negative impact. body surveillance has no discernable impact on efficacy levels. these results display partial support for 𝐻!. 																																																								 	education was coded on a scale of through , being “less than a high school diploma,” and being “post-college degree.” ideology was coded on a scale of through , being “very liberal” and being “very conservative. party was dummy coded for republicans and for democrats. gender was dummy coded for those identifying as men and for those identifying as women. 	 	 figure . : differential effect of body shame on efficacy by gender to test the hypothesis that women who are high self-objectifiers will also be less politically interested, i regressed the political interest factor scores on the same set of controls, as well as the surveillance and shame scales interacted with gender. support was also found for 𝐻!. although there was no main effect of either body shame or body surveillance, the interaction between body shame and gender was significant (p<. ), showing that body shame has a negative effect on interest, but only for those who identify as women. we see in figure . that for women, increased body shame decreases political interest, whereas for men, there is no significant impact. full ols regression results can be found in appendix a. , table a. . 	 	 figure . differential effect of body shame on political interest by gender to test the final hypothesis that women who are high self-objectifiers will show a decreased propensity to seek out political information than those who are low self- objectifiers, i regressed the -category information-seeking variable on the same set of covariates as in the models for 𝐻! and 𝐻!. consistent with my hypothesis, the interaction between the body shame scale and gender was significant (p<. ), as well as the interaction between body surveillance and gender (p<. ), indicating that shame and surveillance have a negative impact on information-seeking, but only for women. it’s worth noting that these interactions were the only significant predictors in the model. figures . displays the predicted levels of information-seeking over the range of body shame and body surveillance scores for men and women. in figure . , we see that if anything, there is a positive relationship between body shame and information-seeking for men. figure . also shows the clear negative impact of shame on information- 	 	 seeking for women. figure illustrates a similar pattern with the body surveillance scores. figure . : effect of body shame on information-seeking for men (top) and women (bottom) 	 	 figure . : effect of body surveillance on information-seeking for men (top) and women (bottom) finally, with no a priori hypothesis, i wanted to explore the impact of self- objectification on gender egalitarianism, which was measured with the gender egalitarianism items from the world values survey. i used ols to regress the gender 	 	 egalitarianism factor scores on the interaction between gender and the self-objectification scales, as well as the controls. interestingly, there was a significant negative main effect of body shame on gender egalitarianism (p<. ), but a significant positive main effect of body surveillance on gender egalitarianism (p<. ). however, the significant interaction term between body shame and gender (p<. ) indicated that this negative relationship only holds for men in the sample. in other words, as body shame increases for men, they display less egalitarian attitudes. for women, there is actually a slight positive relationship. figure . displays these differential effects. figure . : differential effect of body shame on gender egalitarianism by gender implications and conclusions the literature on the gender gap in political engagement is expansive. however, much of this research centers around structural factors such as access to education, income, access to other resources, and other macro-level forces as drivers of this gap. 	 	 these explanations become problematic as women are now increasingly integrated into the workforce, have surpassed men in terms of educational attainment, and have access to more resources than ever. furthermore, recent scholarship shows that even when controlling for existing structural disparities, the gender gap in engagement persists (atkeson & rapoport ; preece ; wen ). more recently, scholars have put forth psychological explanations for the gap in engagement. for example, one reason that women may be less engaged is that they lack the confidence to fully participate in politics (preece ). building off of this notion, i posit that self-objectification is one such psychological mechanism found in higher levels in women, that undermines their engagement in politics. the extensive literature on objectification theory teaches us that self-objectification decreases feelings of overall efficacy and competence, likely exacerbating the confidence gap between men and women in the political realm. self-objectification is also a reminder to women that their value and self-worth is derived from their physical appearance, underscoring their sense that they do not belong in politics. essentially, women with high trait self-objectification do not think of themselves as agents of change. there are of course limitations to this study. due to the observational nature of this work, we cannot be completely confident that the relationship between self- objectification and political engagement is causal. additionally, the sample is not totally representative of the broader population of americans, which limits this study’s generalizability. in the future, it would be fruitful to replicate these findings using a larger and more representative sample in the u.s., as well as outside of the u.s. in countries with various of female objectification. despite these limitations, this study provides 	 	 compelling evidence of a robust relationship between self-objectification and political engagement that holds up to a variety of controls. body shame was negatively related to internal political efficacy, interest, and information-seeking. interestingly, body surveillance had no significant impact on any of the dependent variables except information-seeking. this suggests that shame, the more affective component of self- objectification, plays a larger role in impacting political engagement. body surveillance, which is theoretically linked more to appearance monitoring and the disruption of an individual’s attentional resources, seems to have a less significant effect on engagement. the most important contribution of this study is shedding light on how seemingly non-political factors like objectification, end up shaping political engagement. the sexual objectification of women has been a salient topic for many years with both academics and the public speculating about the ramifications of a culture that emphasizes female beauty standards. there is a wealth of evidence that shows that objectification, and consequently, self-objectification, have dire consequences for women’s mental health and cognitive functioning. the results in the present study suggests that the negative consequences of self-objectification for women extend into the political realm as well. 	 	 chapter me too: the impact of sexism on political engagement and the moderating effect of group consciousness abstract sexism, sexual harassment, and the objectification of women are issues that have gained a new level of salience in our political culture. the phrase “me too” has captured the pervasiveness of these experiences. the present study is an effort to demonstrate how the marginalizing experiences that women have in their everyday lives affect their engagement in the political sphere. i test the primary hypothesis that gender-based discrimination has an effect on both political engagement and behavior utilizing data from a sample of women living in the united states. findings indicate that here is a robust connection between gender-based marginalization and political engagement. women who experience more discrimination and marginalization become more engaged in politics. however, this relationship is conditional on levels of group consciousness. these results underscore the relevance of discrimination to the study of political engagement, as well as the importance of group consciousness in understanding how women perceive and cope with discrimination. 	 	 sexism goes so deep that at first it’s hard to see: you think it’s just reality. -alix kates shulman sexism, sexual harassment, and objectification are all ways in which women are marginalized in which men are generally not. sometimes these events and experiences are relatively minor, and other times they are significant. gender-based discrimination is commonplace and makes up the “lived experience” of women (feagin & sikes ). these experiences range from seeing a sexually objectifying advertisement, to hearing a sexist comment, to being the victim of sexual violence. although these events are different from each other, they are all rooted in a patriarchal system that fundamentally denies women of the same freedoms that men enjoy. the few studies that have linked discrimination and political participation suggest that social organizing and political activism can be collective responses to the type of everyday prejudice described above (simpson & yinger ). however, recent work finds that interpersonal discrimination can actually be demobilizing and cause individuals who experience this discrimination to withdraw from political life (oskooii ). with the exception of this study, the extant research does not focus on interpersonal discrimination, but rather, structural or explicitly political discrimination against marginalized groups. moreover, there are virtually no studies exploring personally- experienced gender discrimination and its effect on political behavior. how do the everyday marginalizing experiences that women have affect the way in which they approach politics? 	 	 sexism toward political candidates, rather than citizens, has largely occupied the focus of the political science research. this is likely due to the fact that it is easier to see the logical connection between sexism and electoral success. however, we have yet to consider how sexism impacts women in the electorate. the limited research on discrimination and political behavior would suggest that discrimination and unfair treatment can spur individuals to become engaged and active in politics (barreto & woods ; cho, gimpel, & wu ). this work focuses on ethnic and racial discrimination, rather than gender-based discrimination. this is a useful starting point to theorize about the potential effect of gender discrimination against women on political engagement, but we also know that gender and race are not equivalent marginalized identities. furthermore, the extensive psychology literature has documented the negative effects of sexual harassment and sexism on women. discriminatory events take a toll on women’s mental health and cognitive functioning (klonoff & landrine ). social psychologists have found that experiences with interpersonal discrimination can lead to depression, as well as feelings of inferiority and lowered self-esteem (branscombe, schmitt, & harvey ; verkuyten ). these are all consequences that are inconsistent with high levels of political engagement. i argue that gender-based discrimination can both act as an impetus and an impediment to political engagement. sexist experiences are impactful events that women internalize (klonoff, landrine, & campbell ; miles-mclean et. al. ; swim, hyers, cohen, & ferguson ). they are constant reminders of the power differentials between men and women. i posit that group consciousness moderates the relationship between sexist events and engagement. for women who are high in gender 	 	 consciousness, gender-based discrimination leads to higher levels of engagement. for women who are low in gender consciousness, gender-based discrimination will have no effect on engagement, and could potentially even lead to decreased engagement. i explore this theory empirically using data collected from an online sample of women living in the united states. i also consider how these findings relate to the #metoo movement and the political mobilization around combatting sexual harassment and sexual violence. i find support for the notion that sexist events spur political engagement when paired with higher levels of gender consciousness. taken together, these results suggest that scholars of gender and politics, as well as political behavior more generally, should consider the role of discrimination and everyday prejudice in the study of political engagement. gender-based discrimination and its consequences before explicating the connection between gender-based discrimination against women and political engagement, it is first essential to understand the nature and prevalence of discrimination. the crux of discrimination is that it reinforces existing systems of dominance and subordination. krieger ( ) states, “discrimination is a socially structured and sanctioned phenomenon, justified by ideology and expressed in interactions, among and between individuals and institutions, intended to maintain privileges for members of dominant groups at the cost of deprivation for others” (p. ). discrimination can broadly be classified into two categories. as oksooii ( ) notes systemic or political discrimination, “typically refers to discriminatory laws, campaign messages, policies, or practices carried out by state or private institutions and/or their affiliated actors” (p. ). in the context of discrimination against women, examples of 	 	 systemic discrimination include laws that limit women’s reproductive rights and institutional features in politics that keep women from running for public office. interpersonal discrimination occurs between individuals. it can come from family, friends, or strangers in private or public settings. the focus of this work is on women’s experiences with interpersonal discrimination as i am interested in the effect of seemingly non-political factors on political outcomes. furthermore, interpersonal discriminatory events such as street harassment, sexist jokes, and workplace harassment are near daily experiences for many women (fitzgerald ; klonoff & landrine ; pew ). importantly for this study, they are also experienced directly in a way that systemic discrimination is often not. interpersonal gender-based discrimination can take a multitude of forms. scholars have documented the ubiquity of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace (fitzgerald ), sexist comments (swim et al. ), and both interpersonal and media sexual objectification (fredrickson & roberts ; kozee, tylka, augustus-horvath, & denchik ). everyday sexist events include sexist degradation such as being called a sexist name, hearing sexist jokes, or being disrespected because of one’s identity as a woman. a sexist event can also include discrimination in both distant and close relationships, as well as in the workplace (klonoff & landrine ). utilizing the schedule of sexist events that measures these experiences, klonoff and landrine found that % of the women surveyed reported experiencing sexist events at least once in their lifetime, and % reported experiencing sexist events at least once within the past year. the most commonly reported events were being forced to listen to sexist or sexually degrading jokes ( %), being sexually harassed ( %), being called sexist 	 	 names ( %), and being treated with a lack of respect ( %). more recent data shows similar patterns. according to a survey of , full-time and part-time women employees, in women had experienced sexual harassment (huffington post). a survey conducted by the non-profit, stop street harassment, found that % of women experienced some form of sexual harassment (npr ) and a survey conducted by pew found that % of women in the united states say that they have faced discrimination on the job because of their gender. these estimates are likely rather conservative given that women are often reluctant to label an event as sexist or as constituting sexual harassment (magley, hulin, fitzgerald, & denardo ). perceived sexist events are considered to be stressors and are linked to psychological issues for those who experience these events (klonoff & landrine ; swim et al. ). counseling psychologists have long theorized about the potential for psychological distress due to experiences of discrimination and oppression (clark et al. ; landrine & klonoff ). klonoff & landrine ( ) purport that sexist events over a lifetime are distal causes of psychological distress, and more recent sexist experiences are proximal predictors of distress. the authors find that both recent and lifetime perceived sexist events were related to obsessive-compulsivity and anxiety. lifetime sexist experiences were also related to somatic symptoms, and recent events were related to depressive symptoms. klonoff and landrine ( ) find that sexist events actually have a greater negative impact on women’s physical and mental health than 																																																								 	the stop street harassment survey broadly defined sexual harassment to include verbal sexual harassment, unwelcome sexual touching, cyber-sexual harassment, being physically followed, unwanted genital flashing, and sexual assault. the authors also note that more significant events, such as physical sexist discrimination like rape and sexual assault, regardless of the time of occurrence, also act as proximal predictors of psychological distress. 	 	 generic stressors, even when controlling for appraisal, social support and coping style. the authors ( ) state, “this is because sexist events are inherently demeaning, degrading, and high personal; they are attacks upon and negative responses to something essential about the self that cannot be changed: being a woman. sexist discrimination thereby has a higher potential to erode women’s physical and mental health” (p. ). victims of workplace sexual harassment experience negative consequences as well, such as job dissatisfaction and absenteeism (fitzgerald et al. ; schneider, swam, fitzgerald, & murphy ). they also experience nervousness, anger, low self- esteem, and elevated stress (crocker & kalemba ). everyday sexism has ramifications as well. swim et al. ( ) found that women experience approximately one to two impactful sexist incidents per week. these incidents affect women’s psychological well-being by decreasing their comfort, increasing feelings of anger and depression, and decreasing self-esteem. simply put, more experiences with sexist events leads to more psychological distress for women (fischer & holz ; klonoff, landrine, & campbell ; szymanski, gupta, carr, & stewart ). the psychology literature shows that accumulated marginalizing experiences have consequences on women’s mental health, cognitive functioning, and their behavior. everyday incidents make up the fabric of people’s lives. for members of traditionally oppressed groups, everyday prejudiced events are a significant part of these experiences. these incidents take place at home, with family or friends, at work, or out in public. like another other daily hassle or stressful life event, they have a non-trivial impact on psychological well-being (swim et al. ). 																																																								 the authors conceptualize sexist incidents as gender role stereotypes and prejudice, degrading comments and behaviors, and sexual objectification. 	 	 sexist events, political engagement, and group consciousness the scant research on discrimination and political engagement would lead us to think that perhaps gender discrimination mobilizes women to become more involved in politics. we know from the literature on race and ethnicity that perceptions of prejudiced treatment can spur political action (simpson & yinger ; barreto & woods , cho et al. ). on the other hand, it’s possible that gender discrimination dampens political engagement among women. as previously discussed, these events have negative psychological consequences. they are often demoralizing experiences that lower women’s self-esteem, cause anxiety, and remind women of their subjugated status in society. these are all things that seem inconsistent with a state of high political engagement. this conclusion is supported by recent work on muslim-americans’ experiences with interpersonal discrimination and sociopolitical behavior (oskooii ). this study finds that interpersonal discrimination actually causes some to retreat from the political sphere, whereas political or structural discrimination is associated with mobilization. i advance the theory that marginalizing events can either stifle political engagement or be a motivating force that increases engagement. women are not a monolith and the effect of discrimination on political engagement may not be constant across all women. i argue that the key moderator in the relationship between discrimination and engagement is gender consciousness. essentially, to become mobilized by discrimination, one has to acknowledge that they are indeed subject to 	 	 discriminatory events that are based in sexism and patriarchal societal norms. appraisal of discriminatory events and how women perceive their status as part of a marginalized group is key. the mechanism that mobilizes racial and ethnic groups subject to discrimination to engage in politics is a sense of group consciousness and linked fate (jamal ; lin ; ysseldyk et al. ). group consciousness is considered to be a political resource that explains the high levels of political participation among some marginalized groups (sanchez & vargas ). i argue that this is the case for women as well, although there is more heterogeneity in levels of group consciousness. group consciousness involves three major factors (miller, gurin, gurin, & malanchuk ). first, it involves identification with a particular group or social stratum. secondly, group consciousness requires a level of political awareness about the group’s position in society relative to others. finally, it involves a commitment to collective action with the goal of realizing the group’s interest. gender consciousness is a sense of belonging to women as a social group or social identity, as well as having a psychological connection to one’s gender identity (conover ). cassese and holman ( ) explain, “gender consciousness, and social identity more generally, is a multifaceted construct consisting of factors like perceptions of group-based discrimination and feelings of linked fate with other group members” (p. ). for group consciousness to be present, one must have a sense that their group is subject to unfair discrimination and that their own well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of the entire group. this feel of linked fate, which is conceptually very similar to group 																																																								 	past findings indicate that the varied level of group consciousness among women is in part due to the high levels of contact and close relationships that most women have with men (henderson- king & stewart ; gurin, miller, & gurin ). henderson-king and stewart ( ) also note that gender functions as both a personal and social identity and because gender is central to one’s personal identity, women are less likely to develop high levels of group consciousness. 	 	 consciousness, has been shown to motivate political engagement. members of marginalized groups are more aware of group membership than are dominant group members. this often leads to the development of group consciousness (duncan ; gurin ). the relationship i propose is illustrated in figure . figure . : the relationship between sexism and political engagement i argue that women who are high in gender consciousness will become galvanized by sexist and discriminatory events and engage in political participation as a response. if one acknowledges their own status as a marginalized person, they are more likely to attribute sexist events to a society that systematically discriminates and disadvantages women. they are also more likely to see political action as a way to cope with and experiences	of	sexism	 and	gender-based	 discrimination	 political	 engagement/efficacy/behavior	 	 moderator:	gender	 consciousness		 	 	 confront marginalization. additionally, there is evidence that recent sexist experiences combined with a commitment to social change is related to lower levels of self-silencing (watson & grotewiel ). marginalizing events combined with high levels of gender consciousness is likely to be positively associated with political engagement. women who are low on gender consciousness will not become mobilized by the same accumulation of discriminatory experiences. they likely do not attribute these events to a larger system that disadvantages and marginalizes women. it is also possible that they do not see these events as constituting sexism or discrimination. for these women, sexist events could potentially depress political engagement. these experiences can lower self-esteem, cause feelings of inferiority and powerlessness, and depression. my argument emphasizes the protective role of feelings of linked fate, an acknowledgement of one’s membership in a marginalized group, and the belief that women have less access to power and resources than men. scholars have found that even the perception of gender inequality can promote political participation and engagement among (bernstein ). it is likely that actually experiencing discrimination and sexism would have the same effect. however, i hypothesize that this effect is conditional on gender consciousness. 																																																								 	of course, political activism is not the only way in which women respond to or cope with gender-based discrimination. there is a sizeable literature on how women cope with sexist experiences (fitzgerald ; fitzgerald et al. ). these coping mechanisms can include more active mechanisms like confronting the harasser, discussing the event with friends, or filing a formal complaint. passive coping mechanisms include ignoring the behavior, engaging in self- blame, and deeming the event as benign. however, literature suggests that group consciousness spurs political activism (duncan ). women who are high in group consciousness are more likely to see engaging in politics as a way to cope with or address discrimination. 	 	 data and measures participants to test the proposed hypotheses, in march of , i recruited participants through amazon mechanical turk (see appendix a. and a. for details regarding the recruitment process and more detailed demographic information). mturk provides a more representative sample than in-person convenience samples (berinsky, huber, & lenz ). all participants were pre-screened such that only those who identified as women were able to complete the survey. participants ranged from age to (m= . , sd= . ), and . % of the sample had a bachelor’s degree or higher. out of the participants, ( . %) identified as white, ( . %) as black, ( . %) as asian, as latino/a or hispanic ( . %), and ( . %) as multi-racial. according to united states census data ( ), this sample is relatively representative of the population, although significantly more educated. the median reported yearly income was “$ , to $ , .” participants were compensated $ . for completing the survey. gender discrimination after consenting to participate in the study, participants first completed the interpersonal sexual objectification questionnaire (kozee et al. ). the isos is a measure of objectification that occurs through personal interactions and relationships. the first -items in the scale are a measure of body evaluation (i.e. “how often have you heard a rude, sexual remark made about your body?”, “how often have you overheard inappropriate sexual comments made about your body?”) and the last -items are a measure of unwanted explicit sexual advances (i.e. “how often have you been 	 	 touched or fondled against your will?”, “how often has someone made a degrading sexual gesture towards you?”). response categories were “never,” “rarely”, “occasionally,” “frequently,” and “almost always.” maximum likelihood factor analysis was conducted on the items from the isos, and latent factors were allowed to correlate. i opted to conduct factor analysis to allow items on the scale to have different weights. the sample size of exceeds recommendations that sample sizes of at least are sufficient for cfa (kline ). maximum likelihood estimation is also robust to multivariate non-normality (weston & gore ). scores on the scale ranged from - . to . with a median score of -. and a standard deviation of . . participants then completed -items from the schedule of sexist events (klonoff & landrine ). the sse was designed to measure daily sexist events across a wide range of different domains (i.e. “how often have you been treated unfairly by your employer, boss, or supervisors because you are a woman?”, “how often have you heard people making sexist jokes, or degrading sexual jokes?”). the scale was developed to be analogous to other stressful and negative life events. maximum likelihood factor analysis was also conducted on the items from the sse. latent factors were allowed to correlate. scores on the sale ranged from - . to . with a median score of - . and a standard deviation of . . these two scales are two slightly different operationalizations of gender discrimination. the isos scale taps objectifying events, body evaluation, and 																																																								 factor analysis has revealed that the sse yields three reliable factors, “sexist degradation and it’s consequences,” “unfair and sexist events at work/school,” and “unfair treatment in distant and close relationships” (matteson & moradi ). i also used only the sse-recent as to not fatigue participants. 	an important feature of the sse and isos is that the majority of the items do not explicitly ask about “sexism.” this alleviates concerns that perhaps women who are more conservative and do not interpret these experiences as sexist would then underreport. indeed, research shows that women are often reluctant to label an event as sexist or as constituting sexual harassment (magley et al. ). 	 	 unwanted sexual advances whereas the sse taps unfair treatment in the workplace, gender stereotypes, and workplace harassment. in the subsequent analyses, i look at sexist and objectifying events separately to see if there are differential effects based on the type of gender discrimination. after completion of the sse, participants answered questions from the coping with sexual harassment scale (fitzgerald ; fitzgerald et al. ) and a big five questionnaire. measuring gender consciousness: feminist identity development participants completed a modified version of the feminist identity development scale (bargad and hyde ). the full fids scale is -items, so in the interest of not fatiguing participants, -items that best tapped gender consciousness, linked fate, and perceived discrimination were included (i.e. “i’ve never really worried or thought about what it means to be a woman in this society.”, “i used to think there wasn’t a lot of sex discrimination, but now i know how much there really is.”, “i feel angry about the way that women have been left out of the history text books.”). responses were coded such that a higher value indicated a “more gender conscious” response. the items displayed a high degree of internal validity (𝛼=. ). maximum likelihood factor analysis was also conducted that revealed that most of the variance was explained by one factor. scores on the scale ranged from - . to . with a median score of -. and a standard deviation of . . importantly, all but one of the items on the scale did not explicitly ask about “feminism.” this was done for a few reasons. first, the goal was to tap gender 																																																								 	there is a relatively extensive literature on the convergent validity, temporal stability, and internal consistency and reliability of the fids (bargad and hyde ; gerstmann and karmer ; moradi and subich )	 	 	 consciousness and a sense of linked fate more so than identification with the feminist label. secondly, because the term “feminist” is politicized, there was concern that including it in some of the question items would simply be capturing the fact that highly identified feminists are simply more likely to be politically engaged in the first place. finally, this takes care of some concern that this operationalization is just a correlate of ideology or partisanship. this sub-set of questions from the fids captures a variety of individuals who psychologically identify with women as a group while avoiding any obvious ideological connotations. political engagement the primary dependent variables are questions tapping political engagement. i utilized commonly used measures of internal political efficacy (niemi et al. ) and political interest (shani ). responses were coded such that higher scores corresponded to more efficacious and interested responses. maximum likelihood factor analysis was conducted on the internal political efficacy items. scores on the scale ranged from - . to . with a median of . and a standard deviation of . . a summated rating scale was created with the two items tapping political interest. scores ranged from to with a median score of . and a standard deviation of . . a measure of political participation was created using four dichotomous questions about engaging in various acts of political participation within the past year (signing an online petition, attending a public rally or demonstration, donating money to a political campaign or cause, and posting on social media about an issue that matters to you). maximum likelihood factor 																																																								 	factor scores from the fids scale still correlated modestly with ideology and party identification. ideology and party identification are included as control variables in all regression models. 	 	 analysis was conducted on the four political participation measures. scores ranged from - . to . with a median of . and a standard deviation of . . as a robustness check, i created an additive scale with the four dichotomous political participation measures and estimated the model as an ordered logit (appendix a. ). substantive results were unchanged. control variables education was measured on a four point scale (“high school grad,” “some college,” “college grad,” and “post-college grad”). income was measured on a five point scale (“under $ , ,” “$ , to $ , ,” “$ , to $ , ,” “$ , to $ , ,” and “over $ , ”). ideology was measured on a six point scale coded such that higher scores indicate more conservative political ideology (“very liberal,” “liberal,” “somewhat liberal,” “somewhat conservative,” “conservative,” “very conservative”). race was dummy coded such that indicated those who identified as white. party identification was dummy coded such that indicated those who identified as democrats. age was measured in years. the relationship between gender discrimination and feminist identity development the sections above introduced the argument that gender discrimination leads to increased political engagement for women high in gender consciousness. there is plausible concern that perhaps women who are high in gender consciousness are already more politically engaged and simply report experiencing more gender discrimination because they are more attuned to and sensitive to sexism. to address this potential 	 	 confound, it is useful to look at the reported levels of gender discrimination across the feminist identity development scale. figure depicts the reported levels of both sexist and objectifying events over the range of the feminist identity development scale. we see that for those higher on the feminist identity scale seem to report slightly more sexist events. the reported amount of objectifying events is relatively similar across varying levels of feminist identity development. this provides relatively solid evidence that an over-reporting of gender discrimination among those high in gender consciousness is not driving the results of the analyses. it is also worth noting that there are only weak positive correlations between sexist events and feminist identity development (r=. ) and objectifying events and feminist identity development (r=. ). 	 	 figure . : reported sexist and objectifying events over the range of gender consciousness results to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between sexist events and political engagement and the moderating effect of feminist identity development, i regressed internal political efficacy on the schedule of sexist events (sse) factor scores, the gender consciousness factor scores, and the interaction between the two. i controlled for education, income, ideology, race, party identification and age. the full models can be found in appendix a. , table . strong support was found for hypothesis . although the sexist events term was not significant, the interaction between sexist events and gender consciousness was positive and significant (p<. ). 	 	 due to the difficult of interpreting interaction terms, this finding is better illustrated graphically in figure . essentially, model shows that as gender consciousness increases, so does the estimated coefficient for sexist experiences. in other words, for women who are relatively high in gender consciousness, sexist experiences actually become galvanizing events that increase their levels of internal political efficacy. for women who are low in gender consciousness, sexist experiences have no impact on efficacy. to check the robustness of this finding, i ran the same model, but with the interpersonal sexual objectification scale (isos) factor scores. this model also provides support for my hypothesis. gender consciousness moderates the relationship between sexist/objectifying events and internal political efficacy. tests of linearity assumptions can be found in appendix a. using diagnostics suggested by hainmueller, mummolo, and xu ( ). 																																																								 	the isos taps the same underlying concept as the ssh, but gets at more explicitly sexually objectifying experiences like unwanted sexual advances and body evaluation. 	 	 figure . : marginal effect of sexist events (left) and interpersonal objectification (right) on efficacy over the range of gender consciousness to further evaluate the relationship between discrimination and political engagement, i regressed political interest on sexist events (sse) and objectifying events (isos) factor scores, the gender consciousness factor scores, the interaction between the two, and the same set of covariates specified in the first two models. a similar pattern emerges in which women who are high in gender consciousness experience more political interest as sexist events increase. women who are low in gender consciousness seemed to display lowered interest as sexist events increase, although this relationship is not statistically significant. this relationship is less pronounced when we look at 																																																								 	these figures are showing us that as gender consciousness increase (x-axis), the coefficient for sexist/objectifying increases (y-axis). in other words, gender consciousness bolsters the positive effect that sexist/objectifying experiences have on internal political efficacy. i also looked at the marginal effect of sexist/objectifying experiences on the fids and there is a symmetrical effect. 	 	 objectifying events, but the general pattern holds. the full regression models can be found in appendix a. , table . figure . : marginal effect of sexist events (left) and interpersonal objectification (right) on political interest over the range of gender consciousness internal political efficacy and political interest are measures of political engagement, but can experiences with sexist events actually affect political behavior? to assess this question, i created a variable using four different dichotomous measures of political activity. the political activity factor scores were regressed on the same set of covariates specified in the previous models. full results can be found in appendix a. , table . once again, there is a strong relationship between sexist experiences and 																																																								 	the question wording was, “people engage in social, civic, and political activity in different ways...... over the past months, have you done any of the following, or not?” the four activities were “signed an online petition,” “attended a public rally or demonstration,” donated money to a campaign or cause,” and “posted on social media about an issue that matters to you.” 	 	 political activity (p<. ). women who experience more sexist and objectifying events engage in more political activity. again, this relationship appears to be moderated by gender consciousness. women who are high on the gender consciousness scale are the most mobilized by sexist experiences. this pattern does not hold for objectifying events, although there is a positive and significant main effect of objectifying events on political participation (p<. ). figure shows that as gender consciousness increases, so does the estimated coefficient for sexist experiences. this relationship is much less pronounced when using the objectifying events scale. figure . : marginal effect of sexist events (left) and interpersonal objectification (right) on political participation over the range of gender consciousness to results presented so far have demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between sexist and objectifying events and political participation and engagement that is 	 	 moderated by feminist identity development. to further illustrate this moderating effect, figure depicts the level of participation across sexist and objectifying events for women at varying levels of gender consciousness. we see a particularly sharp difference between women who are one standard deviation about the mean gender consciousness score and those who are one standard deviation below the mean gender consciousness score. figure . : predicted political participation at varying levels of gender consciousness 	 	 discussion the goal of this study was to investigate the connection between gender discrimination and political engagement, and the moderating impact of group consciousness. political scientists have focused almost exclusively on the impact that sexism has on the electoral success of elite female candidates, while paying scant attention to how marginalization on the basis of gender affects women generally. results indicate that personally-experience gender discrimination can mobilize women to become politically engaged. however, this relationship is conditional on gender consciousness. women who were low on gender consciousness were not mobilized by sexist events. these findings are in line with literature on black americans experiences with everyday prejudice. prejudice and marginalization spur social organizing and political activism (simpson & yinger ; swim, cohen, & hyers ). these results are also consistent with the limited data on personally-experienced sexism and political engagement (bankert & williamson ). there are limitations to this study. due to the observational nature of this work, we cannot be completely confident that the relationship between sexist and objectifying events and the dependent variables is causal. in the future, studies could employ experiments to further investigate the causal link between marginalizing events and political engagement and participation. additionally, the sample is not totally representative of the broader population of american women, which limits this study’s 																																																								 these authors find that women who have experienced gender discrimination report higher levels of political interest and participation, however, this finding only holds for liberal women. 	 	 generalizability. it is significantly more liberal and educated, both factors that could be associated with a higher likelihood of reporting marginalizing events. despite these limitations, the connection between marginalizing events and political engagement and participation is robust. the correlation holds up to a variety of controls and across several different measures of political engagement with two different operationalizations of gender discrimination. this research highlights the continued relevance of personally-experienced discrimination and marginalization to scholars are political behavior. the everyday lived experience of marginalized groups impacts the way in which they approach the political sphere. the evidence presented here comports with the literature on the racial and ethnic discrimination that shows how everyday prejudice and marginalization can increase political engagement and social activism. however, these findings also underscore the way in which women are not a monolith that behave politically in a cohesive way. for women, gender consciousness is an important variable that makes sexist and discriminating events mobilizing. women who have a high degree of gender consciousness recognize that discriminatory events relate to a larger system that disadvantages and marginalizes women. they are more likely to see politics as an avenue for redress. women who do not possess a high degree of gender consciousness do not see their own fate as linked to the fate of women generally. consistent with system justification theory, they may not even see these events as problematic or discriminatory (jost & kay ). these results suggest that scholars of political behavior and gender and politics should consider personally-experienced discrimination as a predictor of political engagement. 	 	 chapter the relationship between gender discrimination and sociopolitical behavior abstract the extant literature on discrimination and political behavior suggests that perceptions of marginalization and prejudice increase political engagement and activism. the vast majority of this literature focuses on marginalized racial, ethnic, or religious identities. there is virtually no research on the impact of gender-based discrimination on sociopolitical behavior. furthermore, much of this work is observational in nature, limiting the causal claims we can make regarding personally-experienced discrimination and political behavior. this paper explores the relationship between personally- experienced gender discrimination and political engagement and activism. using a laboratory experiment, participants received bogus feedback after a cognitive task that led them to believe they performed poorly. women in the treatment group were told that their gender accounted for their poor performance, priming personally experienced sexism. i consider the role of gender consciousness and linked fate, emotional response, and ideology as moderators in the relationship between exposure to sexism and political engagement. i also measure physiological response in the form of skin conductance (scl), a common measure of emotional arousal or attentiveness generated by the sympathetic nervous system, to examine subjects’ response to exposure to sexism. 	 	 the role of sexism and sexual harassment in shaping women’s everyday lives has never been a more salient topic in the media and in our political culture. we are only beginning to understand the prevalence of gender discrimination, sexism, and sexual violence. despite the acknowledgement that discrimination and gender-based marginalization is pervasive, there is very little work done that seeks to understand how this discrimination impacts political behavior. how does gender discrimination, something that constantly punctuates the lives of so many women, affect how they approach the political sphere? it is well-established in the race and politics literature that experiences of discrimination can motivate individuals to take part in politics (simpson & yinger ; barreto & woods ; cho, gimpel, & wu ; oksooii ). however, as oskooii ( ) states, yet, despite the historical present prevalence of prejudice in both social and political domains, the direct relationship between discrimination and sociopolitical behavior is still relatively understudied. discrimination is rarely the focal point of the most comprehensive studies related to the civic and political engagement of minorities. consequently, our understanding of how discrimination affects the political behavior of marginalized individuals is limited (p. ). this dearth of literature on the relationship between discrimination and political engagement is particularly true in the case of gender-based discrimination. this is 	 	 surprising given the fact that women are a historically marginalized group in the united states that have been discriminated against and oppressed in both the political sphere and the private sphere. the study of the “gender gap” in political engagement has received a significant amount of attention from political science scholars (verba, burns, & schlozman ; burns, schlozman, & verba ; lawless & fox ; pruysers & blais ) and some scholars have made vague reference to the notion that sexism and the way in which women are socialized undoubtedly affects their levels of political engagement (bennet & bennet ; burns et al. ; atkeson ; gidengil, giles, & thomas ; preece ). however, there has been no systematic study of the way in which gender-based discrimination, an omnipresent force in the lives of many women, affects political engagement. rather, political scientists have focused on the way in which structural disadvantages have driven the gender gap in engagement, and how sexism affects political elites. in one of the only studies linking gender-based discrimination to political action, duncan ( ) finds that experiences with sexual harassment, which she includes as a measure of “life experiences with oppression,” were associated with higher levels of feminist consciousness, and in turn, increased propensity to engage in women’s rights activism. there are significant limitations to this study. the measurement for sexual harassment was a yes or no question asking if the respondent had experienced sexual harassment at work or school. the dichotomous coding does not allow for variation in how often the respondent had experienced harassment, and the inclusion of only one question does not cover the myriad of ways in which women are discriminated against and oppressed. furthermore, this work explored the development of feminist 	 	 consciousness and women’s rights activism. the present study is focused on how group consciousness, opposed to a politicized gender identification like feminist consciousness affects political engagement and participation generally. this article investigates whether gender-based discrimination affects women’s engagement in politics. the race and politics literature would lead us to believe that gender-based discrimination would increase political engagement. however, there are important and distinct differences between race and gender as identities, and the way in which women are marginalized verses the way people of color of marginalized. the majority of the race and politics literature has found that discrimination is politically mobilizing (barreto & woods ; cho et al. ; simpson & yinger ). however, most of this literature does not differentiate between systemic discrimination and personally-experienced discrimination. more recent literature has found that personally-experienced discrimination in particular can be politically demobilizing (oskooii ). to test whether personally-experienced discrimination impacts political engagement, i employ a randomized laboratory experiment in which personally- experienced discrimination is simulated. i consider the role of emotional response, physiological response, gender consciousness, and ideology in the relationship between discrimination and political engagement. in line with the race and politics literature, i find that discrimination can be politically mobilizing. however, this relationship is conditional on gender consciousness. these findings have broad implications for the 																																																								 	for a detailed discussion of gender consciousness and how it related to political engagement and participation, see chapter . 	 	 literature on political behavior and the predictors we consider when studying political engagement and mobilization. sexism, discrimination, and political engagement women are discriminated against in a multitude of ways. gender discrimination encompasses things like sexism and harassment, but can also include discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. for the purposes of this work, i am focused on the ways in which those who identify as women experience discrimination. even more specifically, i am interested in the everyday discriminatory events and micro- aggressions that punctuate women’s lives. interpersonal discrimination is particularly insidious as it cannot always be dealt with in a legal fashion in the way that overt forms of discrimination can. research shows that for many women, events such as street harassment, sexist comments and jokes, and workplace harassment are comment experiences (fitzgerald ; klonoff & landrine ; pew ). at first the relationship between personally-experienced discrimination and political participation may seem like an unlikely one, particularly because marginalized groups tend to have fewer resources associated with political engagement (brady et al. ). however, the literature on race, ethnicity, and politics has found a robust correlation between discrimination and political mobilization. scholars find that a sense of group consciousness and linked fate, in part, explains the mobilization of racial and ethnic groups subject to discrimination (jamal ; lin ; ysseldyk et al. ). group consciousness is considered to be a political resource that explains the high levels of political participation among some marginalized groups that we would otherwise expect not to participate (sanchez & vargas ). given these findings, i hypothesize 	 	 that group consciousness moderates the relationship between sexism and political engagement. 𝐻!: the relationship between exposure to sexism and political engagement is moderated by gender consciousness. 𝐻!!: for women who are high in gender consciousness, exposure to sexism will increase political engagement and political activity. 𝐻!!: for women who are low in gender consciousness, exposure to sexism will have no effect on political engagement and political activity. i also propose that ideology moderates the relationship between sexist events and political engagement. on the anes, liberal women were more likely to report that they experienced gender discrimination in comparison to conservative women (bankert & williamson ). this is not likely to be due to actual differences in experiences, but rather, perceptions of those experiences as sexist. research indicates that some women are indeed reluctant to label an event as sexist or as constituting sexual harassment (magley, hulin, fitzgerald, & denardo ). liberal women might be more likely to perceive the feedback as sexist and therefore also be more likely to be mobilized by it. this leads to my second set of hypotheses: 𝐻!: the relationship between exposure to sexism and political engagement is moderated by ideology. 																																																								 	i use the terms “discrimination” and “sexism” as interchangeable as i consider discrimination to reinforce existing systems of dominance and subordination. krieger ( ) states, “discrimination is a socially structured and sanctioned phenomenon, justified by ideology and expressed in interactions, among and between individuals and institutions, intended to maintain privileges for members of dominant groups at the cost of deprivation for others” (p. ). sexism is one manifestation of discrimination. 	 	 𝐻!!: for liberal women, exposure to sexism will increase political engagement and political activity. 𝐻!!: for conservative women, exposure to sexism will have no effect on political engagement and activity. it is likely that women who perceive the feedback on the cognitive task as sexist will be more emotionally aroused by it. perceived sexist events are stressors and are linked to psychological issues and negative emotions like anger and obsessive- compulsivity (klonoff & landrine ; swim, cohen, & hyers ). we know from the political science literature that some emotions are associated with increased political mobilization. specifically, we know that anger is a mobilizing emotion (valentino et al. ). anger tends to boost political efficacy (valentino, gregorowicz, and groenendyk ; weber ). this leads to my third hypothesis: 𝐻!: women who report increased feelings of anger after exposure to sexism will be more politically engaged than women who do not feel increased anger. although self-reported emotional responses are useful, people are often motivated to misrepresent how they really feel, or they have unconscious emotional responses to stimuli that they may not even be cognizant of. for this reason, i also collect a physiological measure in the form of skin conductance levels (scl), an unobtrusive measure of emotional arousal (dawson, schell, & filion ). although our physiological measure will not give us the valence of the emotion, both strong positive, 	 	 like enthusiasm, and strong negative emotions, like anger, can motivate political participation (valentino et al. ). therefore, my final set of hypotheses are: 𝐻!!: women who are more physiologically aroused by exposure to sexism will be more politically engaged. 𝐻!!: women who are less physiologically aroused by exposure to sexism will be less politically engaged. research design to explore the relationship between personally-experienced gender discrimination and political engagement we could ask a representative sample to report how often they experience discriminatory events, as well as questions about political engagement and participation. however, we would not be sure that this relationship is causal. it is possible that women who are more politically engaged tend to systematically report more sexist and discriminatory experiences. therefore, to test my hypotheses i employ an experiment in which personally-experienced sexism is simulated in a laboratory setting. the study was conducted in an experimental lab at a large urban university in the northeast in the winter of - . a total of participants who identified as women were recruited for the study. participants were compensated with a $ amazon gift card for the -minute study. upon signing the informed consent, participants completed a pre-test survey with demographic items, items from the schedule of sexist events (klonoff & landrine ) and the interpersonal sexual objectification scale (kozee, 																																																								 	this set of hypotheses will not be presented in the results section of this dissertation as the physiological data has not been analyzed yet. 	four participants were excluded from the analyses for not completing the post-test. 	 	 tylka, augustus-horvath, & denchik ). they also completed items from the coping with sexual harassment questionnaire (fitzgerald ; fitzgerald et al. ), as well as the feminist identity development scale (bargad & hyde ), a big five personality measure, and an issue attitudes questionnaire. this inclusion of the latter two batteries were added to create some space in between the isos and the sse and the treatment to reduce any possible demand effects. upon completion of the pre-test survey, participants were connected to the biopac system by trained research personnel. two sensors were placed on the middle and pointer fingers to measure individual difference in electrodermal response to the sexist feedback using skin conductance levels (scl). this is a standard approach to gauging physiological sensitivity (dawson, schell, & filion, ). scl is a measure of electrodermal activity or the degree to which people sweat, which is an index of people’s emotional arousal generated by the sympathetic nervous system. because the sympathetic nervous system is difficult to control through conscious effort, scl provides an unobtrusive measure of emotional arousal caused by the feedback. after being connected to the biopac, participants completed a brief cognitive task called the nonsense syllogisms test, which is used as a measure of logical reasoning from the kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests (ekstrom et al. ). after completion of the cognitive task, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group and were told that they would receive audio feedback on their 																																																								 	i used items from the sse, isos, and fids scales with the highest factor loadings. to decrease participant fatigue and potential demand effects, i reduced the number of items from each scale. i choose the nonsense syllogisms test because it makes no reference to politics. i am interested in whether or not sexism in women’s daily lives affects their levels of political engagement. this closer approximates these experiences. i would also argue that this is a more difficult test of the hypotheses.	 	 	 performance on the task. participants in the treatment group were given bogus feedback that indicated they did poorly on the task and their poor performance was likely due to their gender. participants in the control group were given bogus feedback that indicated they did poorly on the task, but there was no mention of gender. the feedback statements were pre-tested on amazon’s mturk to ensure that the statements were perceived as both sexism and realistic. the full audio feedback transcripts are displayed in figure . . figure . : audio transcript control condition you received a score of % on the cognitive task. this is a below average score for this syllogisms test. psychology research shows that this nonsense syllogisms task is a reliable and valid measure of logical reasoning skills. treatment condition you received a score of % on the cognitive task. this is a below average score for this syllogisms test. psychology research shows that women perform worse on logical reasoning tasks than men. men tend to have superior logical reasoning skills. after receiving the feedback on the cognitive task, participants completed the brief discrete emotions questionnaire (harmon-jones, bastian, & harmon-jones ) to measure self-reported emotions and questions measuring political engagement. i measured political interest (shani ) and internal efficacy, (niemi, craig, & mattei ). as a measure of political participation, respondents were asked how likely they would be to sign a petition, donate to a political campaign, attend a rally, and post about a 																																																								 	audio feedback was used opposed to written feedback to ensure that we would know exactly when the treatment started and ended for the purposes of analyzing the physiological data. this also ensures that the participants were actually exposed to the treatment. 	this was done to ensure that the two groups were parallel and the only difference is the mention of gender in the treatment group. 	 	 political issue on social media. i also included a measure of propensity to engage in a future study that involved discussing politics with a focus group. finally, participants were debriefed regarding the purpose of the survey study, and provided with resources to refer to if they are experiencing emotional distress. results measures to measure gender consciousness, i created a summated rating scale with the thirteen gender consciousness items from the feminist identity development scale (𝛼=. ). the scale ranged from to . higher scores indicated higher levels of gender consciousness. ideology was measured on a six-point scale with higher numbers indicating a more conservative ideology. race was dummy coded ( =white, =non- white), and education was measured on a five-point scale from “no high school diploma” to “post-graduate degree.” emotions, including anger, were coded on a seven-point scale with higher scores indicating higher levels of emotion. finally, summated rating scales were created with the four internal efficacy items (𝛼=. ) and the four items tapping political participation (𝛼=. ) to operationalize political engagement and participation, as well as the two items measuring political interest (𝛼=. ). therefore, there are three outcome variables of interest: internal political efficacy, political participation, and political interest. 																																																								 	the question read, “the behavioral foundations lab is conducting another upcoming study. we are interested in the political attitudes of college students. you will share our political attitudes and opinions have a discussion about these attitudes among your focus group. how interested would you be in participating in this study?”	 	 	 to test the first hypothesis that gender consciousness moderates the relationship between exposure to sexism and political engagement, i regressed my measures for political engagement on gender consciousness, as well as the interaction between gender consciousness and the treatment. i controlled for ideology, race, and education. figure . depicts the regression results for all three models with the full set of controls. full regression results can be found in appendix a. . strong support was found for the first set of hypotheses. there was no main effect of the treatment on internal political efficacy, the interaction between the treatment indicator and gender consciousness is positive and significant (p<. ). however, the model with political participation as the outcome variable displayed very interesting results. the main effect of the treatment was negative and significant (p<. ). however, the interaction between the treatment and gender consciousness was positive and significant (p<. ). figure . displays the differential effect that the treatment had on those who were high in gender consciousness verses those who were low in gender consciousness. again, those who were high in gender consciousness seemed to be mobilized by the sexist feedback. for those who were on the very low end of gender consciousness, the treatment had no effect and is actually trending in a negative direction. with more statistical power, it is likely that the treatment would have had a significantly negative impact. finally, the variables of interest had no significant effect on political interest. 	 	 figure . : ols regression results figure . : estimated coefficient of the treatment by gender consciousness 	 	 to test my second set of hypotheses, i regressed my measures for political engagement on my treatment variable, ideology, the interaction between the treatment and ideology, as well as my controls. figure . shows the results of the regression models with the full set of controls. regression results can be found in appendix a. . very little support was found for 𝐻!. ideology did not moderate the relationship between the treatment and political engagement. although, the interaction between the two variables was negative and significant (p<. ), suggesting that more conservative women in the treatment group displayed less propoensity to engage in politics, the correlation was not robust with the addition of controls. figure . : ols regression results 	 	 lastly, to test the hypothesis that anger moderates the relationship between sexism and political engagement, i ran a pair ols regressions to determine if anger moderates the relationship between sexism and political engagement. no support was found for 𝐻!. those who self-reported higher levels of anger after the treatment did not display significantly higher levels of political engagement. figure . displays the results of the regression models. figure . : ols regression results concluding remarks gender-based discrimination and sexism are salient topics in our current political discourse. the #metoo movement, the election of donald trump, and the nomination of brett kavanaugh to the supreme court have made this topic more relevant to politics than ever. however, discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault have always been part 	 	 of women’s lives. although work in political science has addressed the way sexism affects women political candidates and politicians, there has been no systematic study of how gender-based discrimination and marginalization affects women in the electorate and how they engage in politics. the study presented here is one of the first steps towards establishing a research agenda that explores the role of discrimination in shaping women’s political lives. 	 	 chapter conclusion “the personal is political for so many.” -tarana burke an unprecedented number of women are running for president in the race. despite the sexist attacks against hillary clinton in the presidential race, a historical number of women won in the mid-term elections. women, many angered by the sexism present in the election, are running for political office and they are winning. the presence of women in politics at the elite level is important and worthy of study. however, sexism and gender discrimination impacts all women. this dissertation has highlighted the ways in which gender-based discrimination can affect how women engage in politics. the world’s first mass movement against sexual abuse and violence, #metoo, has shifted the way in which we think about harassment, gender, and privilege. it has reminded us that the personal is inherently political. sexual harassment and sexual violence have been dealt with in the legal system for many years. as catherine mackinnon ( ) notes, the legal breakthroughs that defined sexual harassment and violence as sex discrimination were in many ways a necessary precondition for the #metoo movement. however, #metoo has not been based in legal battles. the battleground of this social movement has been based in the mainstream and social media, as well as on the political world stage. feminist political theorists have always recognized that the personal is political, and that the multitude of ways in which women are oppressed in the private spheres 	 	 affects how they engage with the public sphere. in fact, the division of the public and private sphere has often led to issues of violence against women to be “privatized” (pateman ). under the guise of the protection of liberty, the private sphere became a place of oppression for women. in private, women can still be marginalized, powerless, and be subject to violence (young ). through a combination of survey and experimental research, i show that the consequences of gender-based marginalization extend to the political sphere in an empirically demonstrable way. summary of findings in the first paper, i explored how self-objectification impacts political engagement. drawing from an extensive literature in psychology on the mental, physical, cognitive, and behavioral impacts of self-objectification, i argue that self-objectification undermines women’s political agency, efficacy, and propensity to engage in political activity. i find support for the hypothesis that state self-objectification is related to lower levels of internal political efficacy, interest, information-seeking, and gender egalitarianism. consistent with the psychology literature, the negative consequences of self-objectification only held for women in the sample. the strongest correlation was found between body shame and the outcome variables. body surveillance had no significant impact on any of the dependent variables with the exclusion of information- seeking behavior. this suggests that shame, the more affective component of self- objectification, plays a larger role in impacting political engagement. body surveillance, which is theoretically linked more to appearance monitoring and the disruption of an individual’s attentional resources, seems to have a less significant effect on engagement. 	 	 this first empirical article problematizes the objectification of women’s bodies in popular culture and in the media. the evidence presented suggests that women who internalize cultural beauty ideals and turn inward to see themselves as objects, are less likely to become engaged in politics. this work builds on other research that finds that self-objectification disrupts involvement in gender-based activism by increasing support for the status quo (calogero ). evidence presented here shows that self- objectification does not undermine only gender-based political activism, but political engagement generally. future research should further uncover the mechanism that links self-objectification and political engagement. the second empirical article focuses on gender discrimination broadly, and its impact on political engagement. utilizing commonly used psychological measures, i collected large sample survey data on women’s experiences with various forms of gender-based marginalization and discrimination, as well as political engagement measures. building on the race, ethnicity, and politics literature, i posit that gender discrimination can galvanize political engagement and activity, although the relationship is conditional on gender consciousness. i find support for the notion that sexist events spur political engagement when paired with higher levels of gender consciousness. personally experienced discrimination and sexism were associated with higher levels of political efficacy, interest, and political activity. this work underscores the continued relevance of personally-experienced discrimination and marginalization to scholars of political behavior. evidence from the second empirical article comports with the literature on racial and ethnic discrimination and political engagement and social activism. taken together, 	 	 these results suggest that scholars of gender and politics, as well as political behavior more generally, should consider the role of discrimination and everyday prejudice in the study of political engagement. these results may also shed light on the increased political activism spurred by the #metoo movement. future research could explore the role of ambient sexism on political engagement, as well as how multiple intersecting identities interact to shape the way in which women respond to discrimination. it would also be fruitful to parse out exactly what type of gender-based marginalizing events are the most mobilizing. the final dissertation article builds upon the findings from the second empirical study. using a novel experimental design to “prime” personally experienced sexism in a laboratory setting, i find that gender discrimination spurs political engagement. as in the second study, this relationship is conditional on gender consciousness. there was some evidence that ideology also moderated this relationship, with liberal women being more mobilized by the treatment than conservative women, although this finding was not robust to the additional of control variables. these experimental findings make us particularly confident that the relationship between discrimination and political engagement is indeed, causal. future work the first contribution of this dissertation is shedding light on the political nature of sexism, sexual harassment, and all forms of gender-based marginalization. these events punctuate women’s lives and have an impact on how women see their role in politics. i present some evidence that when women internalize sexism and turn inwards to 	 	 see themselves as objects instead of full people with agency and power, political consciousness and engagement can be undermined. other evidence i offer suggests that marginalizing events can also be mobilizing. survey and experimental research demonstrates that gender discrimination increase political engagement, although this relationship is moderated by gender consciousness. women with a stronger sense of linked fate are more mobilized by discrimination. the second contribution of this dissertation is expanding the variables we consider to be predictors of political engagement. the study of political behavior occupies an important place in the field of political science, and many theories have been developed to understand why some people engage in politics while others do not. we know that factors like 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( ). religious and ethnic discrimination: differential implications for social support engagement, civic involvement, and political consciousness. journal of social and political psychology, ( ), - . 	 	 	 appendix demographic information table a. : descriptive statistics mturk sample 	 overall	 n=	 	 age (mean (sd))	 . ( . )	 education (%)	 	 less than hs	 ( . ) 	 hs grad	 ( . ) 	 some college	 ( . ) 	 currently in college	 ( . ) 	 college grad	 ( . ) 	 post-college grad	 ( . ) 	 democrat (%)	 ( . ) 	 income (%)	 	 under $ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , -$ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , -$ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , -$ , 	 ( . ) 	 over $ , 	 ( . ) 	 female (%)	 ( . ) 	 ideology (mean (sd))	 . ( . )	 white 	 ( . ) 	 study recruitment between june st and june th of , male and female respondents living in the united states were recruited via the survey recruitment platform, amazon mechanical turk. the internet panel was recruited to participate in a study about “body image, demographic information, and gender attitudes.” participants were compensated $ . for completing the -minute survey. 	 	 table a. : ols regression results: internal political efficacy dependent variable: internal political efficacy education (ref=less than high school grad) high school grad - . ( . ) some college - . ( . ) college grad . ( . ) post-college grad . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) income (ref=less than $ , a year) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) $ , to $ , . ( . ) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) over $ , - . ( . ) gender ( =women) - . *** - . *** ( . ) ( . ) shame scale . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) surveillance scale - . - . 	 	 ( . ) ( . ) genderxshame - . ** - . * ( . ) ( . ) genderxsurveillance - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression results: political interest dependent variable: political interest education (ref=high school grad some college . ( . ) college grad . ( . ) post-college grad . ** ( . ) party id ( =democrat) - . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) income (ref=less than $ , a year) $ , to $ , . ( . ) 	 	 $ , to $ , . ( . ) $ , to $ , . ( . ) over $ , - . ( . ) gender ( =women) - . - . ** ( . ) ( . ) shame scale . . ( . ) ( . ) surveillance scale . . ( . ) ( . ) genderxshame - . - . * ( . ) ( . ) genderxsurveillance - . . ( . ) ( . ) constant . . ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r - . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . (df = ; ) . (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression results: political information-seeking dependent variable: political information-seeking education (ref=less than high school grad) high school grad - . ( . ) some college - . ( . ) 	 	 college grad - . ( . ) post-college grad - . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) income (ref=less than $ , a year) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) over $ , - . ( . ) gender ( =women) . . ( . ) ( . ) shame scale . . ( . ) ( . ) surveillance scale - . - . ( . ) ( . ) genderxshame - . ** - . * ( . ) ( . ) genderxsurveillance - . * - . * ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . * (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . 	 	 table a. : ordered logit- robustness check dependent variable: political information-seeking education (ref=less than high school grad) high school grad . ( . ) some college - . ( . ) college grad . ( . ) post-college grad . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) income (ref=less than $ , a year) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) $ , to $ , - . ( . ) $ , to $ , . ( . ) over $ , - . ( . ) gender ( =women) . . ( . ) ( . ) shame scale . . ( . ) ( . ) surveillance scale - . - . ( . ) ( . ) genderxshame - . ** - . * ( . ) ( . ) genderxsurveillance - . * - . 	 	 ( . ) ( . ) observations note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols model: gender egalitarianism dependent variable: gender egalitarianism education (ref=high school grad) some college . ( . ) college grad - . ( . ) post-college grad . ( . ) ideology - . *** ( . ) income (ref=less than $ , a year) $ , to $ , . ** ( . ) $ , to $ , . *** ( . ) $ , to $ , . *** ( . ) over $ , . * ( . ) gender ( =women) . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) shame scale - . *** - . *** ( . ) ( . ) surveillance scale . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) 	 	 genderxshame . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) genderxsurveillance - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant - . *** - . ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . 	 	 figure a. body surveillance posterior distribution figure a. body shame posterior distribution . . . . . - - - values de ns ity ind postmeans . . . . . - - values de ns ity ind postmeans 	 	 study recruitment between march th and march th of , female adults living in the united states were recruited via the survey recruitment platform, amazon mechanical turk. the internet panel was recruited to participate in a “gender and political attitudes study.” participants were compensated $ . in amazon.com credit for completing the - minute survey. mturk provides a more representative sample than in-person convenience samples (berinsky, huber, and lenz ). hit advertisement: we invite you to take part in a research study about gender identity and political engagement. this survey will take approximately minutes to complete. you will be compensated $ . for participation in the study. 	 	 table a. : descriptive statistics for mturk sample overall n= age (mean (sd)) . ( . ) education (%) less than high school grad ( . ) high school grad ( . ) some college ( . ) college grad ( . ) post-college grad ( . ) party identification democrat ( . ) independent ( . ) republican ( . ) other ( . ) income under $ , ( . ) $ , to $ , ( . ) $ , to $ , ( . ) $ , to $ , ( . ) over $ , ( . ) white(%) ( . ) ideology (%) very liberal ( . ) liberal ( . ) somewhat liberal ( . ) somewhat conservative ( . ) conservative ( . ) very conservative ( . ) 	 	 table a. : ols regression: internal political efficacy dependent variable: internal political efficacy ols (model ) (model ) education (ref=high school grad) some college . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) college graduate . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) post-college graduate . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ideology . . ( . ) ( . ) age . . ( . ) ( . ) party ( =democrat) - . - . ( . ) ( . ) race ( =white) . . ( . ) ( . ) income(ref=under $ , ) $ , to $ , . * . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) over $ , . - . ( . ) ( . ) ssescale . ( . ) isosscale . * ( . ) fids . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) 	 	 ssexfids . ** ( . ) isosxfids . * ( . ) constant - . *** - . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression: political interest dependent variable: political interest ols (model ) (model ) education (ref=high school grad) some college . . ( . ) ( . ) college graduate . ** . ** ( . ) ( . ) post-college graduate . ** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ideology . - . ( . ) ( . ) age . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) party ( =democrat) - . - . ( . ) ( . ) race ( =white) . . ( . ) ( . ) income(ref=under $ , ) 	 	 $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , - . - . ( . ) ( . ) over $ , . - . ( . ) ( . ) ssescale . ( . ) isosscale . ( . ) fids . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ssexfids . ** ( . ) isosxfids . ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression: political participation dependent variable: political participation ols (model ) (model ) education (ref=high school grad) some college . . 	 	 ( . ) ( . ) college graduate - . . ( . ) ( . ) post-college graduate . . ( . ) ( . ) ideology - . - . ( . ) ( . ) age . . ( . ) ( . ) party ( =democrat) - . - . ( . ) ( . ) race ( =white) - . - . ( . ) ( . ) income(ref=under $ , ) $ , to $ , . * . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) over $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) ssescale . *** ( . ) isosscale . *** ( . ) fids . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ssexfids . * ( . ) isosxfids . ( . ) constant - . - . ( . ) ( . ) observations 	 	 r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . tests for linearity hainmueller, mummolo, and xu ( ) figure a. : marginal effect of sexist events on efficacy over the range of fids (model ) 	 	 figure a. : marginal effect of objectifying events on efficacy over the range of fids (model ) figure a. : marginal effect of sexist events on interest over the range of fids (model ) 	 	 figure a. : marginal effect of sexist events on interest over the range of fids (model ) table a. : ordered logit results (models and ) dependent variable: political participation education (ref=high school grad) some college - . - . ( . ) ( . ) college graduate - . - . ( . ) ( . ) post-college graduate - . - . * ( . ) ( . ) ideology - . - . ( . ) ( . ) age . . ( . ) ( . ) race( =white) - . - . ( . ) ( . ) income (ref=under $ , ) 	 	 $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) $ , to $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) over $ , . . ( . ) ( . ) ssescale . *** ( . ) isosscale . *** ( . ) fids . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ssexfids . ** ( . ) isosxfids . ( . ) observations note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . 	 	 table a. : descriptive statistics for laboratory sample 	 overall	 n=	 	 education (%)	 	 high school diploma	 ( . ) 	 currently in college	 ( . ) 	 college graduate	 ( . ) 	 post-college graduate	 ( . ) 	 ideology (%)	 	 very liberal	 ( . ) 	 liberal	 ( . ) 	 somewhat liberal	 ( . ) 	 somewhat conservative	 ( . ) 	 income (%)	 	 under $ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , to $ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , to $ , 	 ( . ) 	 $ , to $ , 	 ( . ) 	 over $ , 	 ( . ) 	 white (%)	 ( . ) 	 republican (%)	 ( . ) 	 	 table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: internal political efficacy gender consciousness . - . ( . ) ( . ) treatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) education . ( . ) race ( =white) . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) genderconsciousnessxtreatment . * . 	 	 ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . ** (df = ; ) . ** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: political participation gender consciousness . . ( . ) ( . ) treatment - . ** - . ** ( . ) ( . ) education - . ( . ) race ( =white) - . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) genderconsciousnessxtreatment . ** . ** ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . 	 	 table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: political interest gender consciousness . ** . ( . ) ( . ) treatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) education - . ( . ) race ( =white) - . ( . ) ideology - . ( . ) genderconsciousnessxtreatment . . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: internal political efficacy ideology - . ** - . ** ( . ) ( . ) treatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) education . 	 	 ( . ) white . ( . ) ideologyxtreatment . . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . ** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: political participation ideology - . - . ( . ) ( . ) treatment . * . ( . ) ( . ) education . ( . ) white - . ( . ) ideologyxtreatment - . * - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) 	 	 f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . ** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: political interest ideology - . * - . * ( . ) ( . ) treatment . . ( . ) ( . ) education . ( . ) race ( =white) . ( . ) ideologyxtreatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . *** (df = ; ) . ** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: internal political efficacy anger . . ( . ) ( . ) treatment . . ( . ) ( . ) education . 	 	 ( . ) white . ( . ) ideology - . *** ( . ) angerxtreatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . (df = ; ) . *** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : ols regression (model ) dependent variable: political participation anger . . ( . ) ( . ) treatment . . ( . ) ( . ) education . ( . ) white - . ( . ) ideology - . *** ( . ) angerxtreatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations 	 	 r . . adjusted r - . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . (df = ; ) . * (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . table a. : regression (model ) dependent variable: political interest anger . . ( . ) ( . ) treatment . . ( . ) ( . ) education . ( . ) race ( =white) . ( . ) ideology - . *** ( . ) angerxtreatment - . - . ( . ) ( . ) constant . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) observations r . . adjusted r - . . residual std. error . (df = ) . (df = ) f statistic . (df = ; ) . ** (df = ; ) note: *p< . ; **p< . ; ***p< . 	title line one: the political consequences of gender-based 	title line two: marginalization 	title line three: 	title line four: 	doctor of xxx: doctor of philosophy 	author's name: claire malone gothreau 	diploma date: may 	mentor's name and dept: kevin arceneaux, advisory chair, political science 	committee member's name and dept : nyron crawford, political science 	committee member's name and dept : heath fogg davis, political science 	committee member's name and dept : johanna dunaway, external member, texas a&m university 	external committee member's name and affiliation: ps • january john gaus award lecture © american political science association, introduction and acknowledgements i am humbled and honored to be standing before you as the recipient of the john gaus award from the prestigious ameri- can political science association. i’d like to first thank my nominators, rosemary o’leary and tony bertelli; thank you for your continued colleagueship and friend- ship. i’d also like to thank the selection committee, kelly leroux, chair, jill nich- olson-crotty, and andy whitford. in addi- tion, there are a number of people here who have been colleagues, mentors, friends, and even deans, who have been instrumental in my career and i’d like to thank them: david rosenbloom, frank thompson, carolyn ban, my current dean charles menifield, and my former dean marc holzer. i’d also like to thank beryl radin, a senior woman in the field, who has been very gracious and generous with her time and advice. in the beginning it is a somewhat circuitous path that leads me here today, in that the people i was living with when i was in high school didn’t intend for me to go to college, despite my protestations to the contrary. by the time i finished high school and i left there and connecticut, college was not even on my radar screen. long story short, i ended up in miami, florida after graduating high school, and started working as a book- keeper for the dobbs house at the miami international airport. dobbs ran airport restaurants and was a us airline food caterer at the time and i was very good with numbers. in the first year that i was at dobbs, i trained two persons, both men who were white, to be my supervisor. and shortly thereafter, a young mba grad was hired to run the operations in our unit at the airport. and one of the first things he did was fire anyone over years of age, and anyone who was black or brown, notwith- standing their age. i knew we had a civil rights law, but i just knew instinctively that this was wrong. these were the values instilled in me by my beloved parents. they taught me right from wrong and that treat- ing people differently because of their race, color, or religion was just plain wrong. [we didn’t talk about gender as much, because my maternal and paternal grandmothers were the matriarchs of our roost.] so, i confronted him about his actions, and i was promptly fired (it is the first and only time i was fired from any job), and it was at this moment i decided it was time for me to go to college. i mention this experi- ence because it touched upon one issue that would draw me to the field of public admin- istration. i always believed that govern- ment had a responsibility to address social problems and bring about positive change. and this certainly fits the tradition of john gaus, who in his book, reflections on public administration ( ), recounts how crises as well as changes in people, place, tech- nology, and philosophy in the first half of the th century led citizens in the us to repeatedly to look to government for relief. i started out taking liberal education courses at miami dade community college before i transferred to florida international university. and it was there that a political science professor introduced me to public administration. i asked him, “what exactly is public administration,” and his response was the typical one we rely on when we respond to family and friends who ask us the same question: “it’s similar to a busi- ness administration degree but only in government.” it wasn’t until years later that i attempted to pull together how i defined public administration, which resulted in my logic of inquiry book, public administra- tion: traditions of inquiry and philosophies of knowledge ( ). i earned a bachelor’s of public admin- istration and it was in this program that i first read about something called the “new public administration.” it was only text- on our journey to achieving social equity: the hits and misses norma m. riccucci, rutgers university norma m. riccucci, board of governors distinguished professor in the school of public affairs and administration at rutgers university, delivers her john gaus award lecture titled “on our journey to achieving social equity: the hits and misses” at the apsa annual meeting. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, book coverage, however, so it was very cursory. it was in the first edition of nick henry’s public administration and public affairs ( ), which i still have on my bookshelf. and, it doesn’t even refer to social equity, which would become a central focus of my research. rather, henry ( , ) writes that: the focus is disinclined to examine such traditional phenomena as efficiency, effectiveness, budgeting, and administrative techniques. conversely, the new public administration is very much aware of normative theory, philosophy, and activism. the questions it raises deal with values, ethics… and the broad problems of urbanism, technology, and violence. if there is an overriding tone to the new public administration, it is a moral tone. i wanted to learn more about the new public administration, so i went to the card catalogue at the fiu library and looked for the book referenced by henry: frank marini’s ( ) toward a new public admin- istration: the minnowbrook perspective. not there, but i would later return to the issues addressed by new public administration. i instinctively knew as an undergrad student in public administration that i wanted to go on for a phd in the field and focus on issues of social change. i was particularly interested in race and gender relations. my professors at fiu were grad- uates mostly of the maxwell school (e.g., ann-marie rizzo) and usc, and encour- aged me to choose one for my mpa and the other for my phd. working on my mpa at usc, i had the privilege of working with folks such as wes bjur and bob biller. i also wondered if there were any women in public administration, and was so happy to learn of beryl radin at usc. but, i discovered that she was at the dc campus, so it would be another years before i would have the pleasure of work- ing with her. in my phd program at the maxwell school, i studied under david rosen- bloom, whose intellectual history of public administration course solidified by commitment to public administration. in the phd program, i learned of the signifi- cant contributions that george frederick- son made to the field, when he wrote his chapter in marini’s toward a new public administration. here frederickson ( , , emphasis in original) wrote that: the rationale for public administration is almost always better (more efficient or economical) management. new public administration adds social equity to the classic objectives and rationale. conventional or classic public administration seeks to answer either of these questions: ( ) how can we offer more or better services with available resources (efficiency)? or ( ) how can we maintain our level of services while spending less money (economy)? new public administration adds this question: does this service enhance social equity? defining social equity, frederickson ( : ) then went on to say that the procedures of representative democracy presently operate in a way that either fails or only very gradually attempts to reverse systematic discrimination against disadvantaged minorities. social equity, then, includes activities designed to enhance the political power and economic well being of these minorities. frederickson thus advanced the seminal theoretical justifications for social equity as a critical value in public administration (also see frederickson ; ), indeed referring to it as the “third” pillar of the field. the concept of social equity has since assumed a host of different meanings, but it continues to center on the tenets set forth by frederickson—fair and just treat- ment and the equal and equitable distri- bution of benefits to the society at large. as susan gooden ( ) and gooden and shannon portillo ( ) point out, social equity is fundamental to the fulfillment of democratic principles. david rosen- bloom’s federal equal employment oppor- tunity ( ) was one of the earliest, most comprehensive books that reported on the federal government’s experiences with equal employment opportunity, which also shapes the contours of the concept of social equity. viewed collectively, social equity can thus be construed as the democratic consti- tutional values of fairness, justice, equal opportunity, equity, and equality (see, for example, rosenbloom, ; jennings ). it embodies a host of concepts, legal tools, and public policies includ- ing, from the perspective of employment, equal employment opportunity, affirma- tive action, and diversity initiatives. the value, worth, and effectiveness of modern democratic governance particularly in a pluralistic society is inextricably linked to a diverse corps of civil servants gener- ally, but in particular in the upper reaches of government bureaucracy. in this sense, two of the key pillars of public adminis- tration—efficiency and effectiveness—are contingent upon the strength of the third— social equity. some of my early work focused on the use of affirmative action, which continues to be one of the most polemical and polar- izing issues over the past several decades. some of my work here was intentionally normative, in the tradition of the new public administration. scholars, practitio- ners, and policymakers have debated the appropriateness and potential effective- ness of affirmative action since its incep- tion. after decades of legal wrangling and uncertainties, the us supreme court issued a ruling, in , grutter v. bollinger that paved the way for not only universities but also government employers to rely on affir- mative action policies in order to redress past discrimination as well as to promote or enhance diversity in the classroom and the workplace. but, the bar has been set rela- tively high by the court—at least a major- ity of its members—and so we continue to grapple with such issues as the use of scores on tests, such as sats, gres, merit exams, and the weight they should be accorded in making admissions, hiring, or promotion decisions (i’ll turn to the more recent affir- mative action case, fisher v. university of texas, later). the first us supreme court decision on affirmative action, the regents of the university of california v. bakke case, essen- tially asked the question, can we set aside test scores and rely solely on race to admit students to a university or college? at that time, the question of why the test scores of certain groups such as african ameri- cans were systematically lower than that of whites was not considered. alan bakke claimed that his mcat scores among other measures were higher than the persons of color admitted to the medical program; hence, bakke concluded, less qualified persons of color were being admitted over him. in the bakke case, the high court, in a marvel of indecision, supported the general principle of affirmative action in admissions but struck down its use by the university of california under the four- teenth amendment of the us constitu- tion and title vi of the civil rights act of ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, because of its overwhelming reliance on race. today, it seems widely accepted that test scores are not perfect measures of abil- ity, competence, or merit. but, early on, it may be recalled, tensions between merit and equity ran high. the value of merit has been particularly significant to our field in that government employers historically relied on “merit” exams to select or promote employees. whether designed to depoliti- cize government service or identify “quali- fied” civil servants, the importance and value of merit have been clear both histor- ically and politically. but, as the value of social equity became increasingly impor- tant, the general populace began to ques- tion the compatibility of merit and equity specifically asking, if we pursue equity, do we sacrifice merit? many public administra- tionists believed that a socially diverse work force could only improve the legitimacy of government. indeed, they saw greater qual- ity in the delivery of government services. lloyd nigro ( , ), for example, in the first affirmative action symposium appear- ing in public administration review argued that “to be truly effective, our public organi- zations must be representative in the most positive and meaningful sense of the word.” he went on to say that “representativeness is counted on to act as a sort of internal ‘thermostat’ on administrative behavior, keeping it within the boundaries set by soci- etal values and attitudes” (nigro – ). even frederick mosher ( , ), in his classic democracy and the public service, which greatly influenced my career, stated in the first edition, published in : the ideals which gave support to merit principles were of course never fully realized. in fact, given the gross imperfection in american society and its toleration of discrimination and of a more or less permanently underprivileged minority, some of those ideals were, in part at least, mutually incompatible. the concept of equal treatment hardly squares with competitive excellence in employment when a substantial part of the population is effectively denied the opportunity and/or the motivation to compete on an equal basis through cultural and educational impoverishment. in the second edition of his book, published in , mosher ( , ) returned to this issue and argued that the merit system must continually evolve in conjunction with, and ultimately to accommodate, changes in societal values. he stated that “the principles of merit and the practices whereby they were given substance are changing and must change a good deal more to remain viable in our society” (mosher , ). the real issue behind the debate, to be sure, could not be reduced to how equity was defined. rather, the critical issue which galvanized the debate was the underlying assumptions about how equity would be achieved. that is to say, those who viewed equity as a challenge to merit simply assumed that less qualified women and people of color would be hired over better qualified white males (see, e.g., stahl ). importantly, though, there was very little empirical proof to substantiate this claim. this issue of merit versus equity may be playing out in an interesting, politically- motivated manner today, as seen in the lawsuit filed by asian americans against harvard university (students for fair admis- sions v. harvard ; ). test scores or more broadly scoring systems continue to be relied upon and can be manipulated to control the desired outcome. most univer- sities today rely not on a single test score but rather on a battery of tests when they make admissions decisions. in its admis- sions’ process, harvard scores applicants on five categories: academic, extracurricu- lar, athletic, personal, and “overall,” which is not an average of the other criteria; it is here that an applicant’s race or ethnicity, for example, could be included. applicants are ranked from to , with being the best. the lawsuit, which was brought by the anti- affirmative action group, students for fair admissions (sffa), alleges that while asian american applicants have strong academic records, harvard discriminates against them by scoring them lower on personality traits. the lawsuit claims that harvard caps the number of asian amer- ican students by placing more weight on subjective, non-merit-based criteria in admissions. parenthetically, edward blum is the founder of sffa; blum was the driv- ing force behind the fisher v. university of texas case that i will address shortly. under the obama administration, the justice department and the department of education in may of decided to take no action on a similar complaint against harvard’s admissions. under the trump administration, the department of justice led by attorney general jeff sessions decided to launch the investigation into harvard’s admissions practices to explore that same claim. [the trump administra- tion also abandoned president obama’s policy calling on universities to consider race in order to diversify their student bodies.] many are persuasively arguing that blum is pursuing the case to force the high court to issue a negative ruling on affir- mative action. there are also concerns that the justice department will use the case to argue that all race-conscious admissions are a violation of the us constitution and title vi civil rights act. the harvard suit alleges that the university uses race as a dominant factor in admissions and engages in “racial balancing.” the lawsuit also claims that harvard overlooks race-neutral alterna- tives when making admissions decisions and that in its efforts to promote diver- sity, it harms asian americans. the sffa claims that harvard relies on the same type of stereotyping and discrimination against asians that it used to justify quotas to bar jewish applicants in the s and s (students for fair admissions v. harvard ; hartocollis ; lane ). interestingly, dana takagi ( ) in her book, the retreat from race: asian ameri- can admissions and racial politics, makes the case that universities have deliberately manipulated entrance criteria to disad- vantage asian american applicants. she points to, for example, an over reliance in some cases on athletic ability as a pivotal criterion, which early on had a negative impact on asian american applicants. a number of universities, including harvard, brown, cornell, and princeton faced such complaints in the s (the harvard plan ). in this sense, elite universities want it both ways: rely on test scores and other “specific measures” of performance when it suits their interests, but eschew them when they don’t (also see warikoo ). the us district court will determine whether harvard has discriminated against asian americans in admissions under title vi of the civil rights act and it is possible that the case will make its way to the high court, where blum and the sffa hopes to see fisher v. university of texas over- turned. let me briefly address that case as it provides the current legal standing on a critical social equity tool, affirmative action. fisher v. university of texas most perceive the high court as being neutral, with each justice issuing an opin- ion or decision in a vacuum; that they ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, operate in silos. well, this is not the case. the high court’s rulings are rendered through negotiations and compromises between and among the justices. this was certainly the case in with fisher, where the high court was expected to strike down the race-conscious program, despite the – ruling in the grutter v. bollinger case, mentioned earlier. certainly the compo- sition of the court had changed since then, but the issue goes beyond this. in fisher ( ) the court did not make a substan- tive ruling on the use of race in admissions, but instead remanded the case to the us court of appeals for the fifth circuit, which had upheld the use of race. the supreme court in its – ruling instructed the fifth circuit to closely examine the issue of “criti- cal mass,” which universities rely on when justifying their use of race in admissions. although universities do not seek to admit a specific percentage of students of color, they do seek to enroll a critical mass of underrep- resented students to ensure the creation of diverse learning environments, which bene- fit all students by producing “cross-racial understanding and the breaking down of racial stereotypes” (see grutter , ). surprisingly, justices sotomayor and breyer signed on with conservative block of the court—chief justice roberts and justices scalia, alito, and thomas, as well as the swing vote, kennedy, even though they did not agree with the conservative justices view that critical mass was really a façade or pretense for racial balancing, or worse “quotas.” the notorious rbg ( justice ginsburg) not surprisingly wrote the sole dissent in fisher opining that the affirma- tive action programs should be upheld, period; justice kagan recused herself from the case as she was solicitor general when the department of justice filed an amicus curiae or friend-of-the-court brief in fisher when the case was before the fifth circuit. so why was there no substantive ruling in the case, and why did the liberal justices breyer and sotomayor, who in her poignant autobiography, my beloved world ( ), clearly stated that she was a beneficiary of affirmative action in higher education, agree to sign on with the conser- vative majority opinion? joan biskupic ( ), a legal scholar and journalist and who has covered the supreme court since in her book breaking in: the rise of sonia sotomayor and the politics of justice, provides behind-the-scenes interviews with supreme court justices on the fisher case. she discovered that justice sotomayor had actually written a passionate dissent in fisher, which served to dissuade the conser- vative members of the court from striking down the university’s affirmative action program altogether. her dissent was never made public. biskupic ( , – ) writes about the process: in the university of texas case, it initially looked like a – lineup. the five conservatives, including justice kennedy, wanted to rule against the texas policy and limit the ability of other universities to use the kinds of admissions programs upheld in grutter v. bollinger. the three liberals were ready to dissent. yet that division would not hold . . . the deliberations among the eight . . . took place over a series of draft opinions, transmitted from computer to computer but also delivered in hard copies by messengers from chamber to chamber as was the long-standing practice. biskupic found that several justices were concerned about the public’s reaction if justice sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion. she writes: as sotomayor drafted and began sending her opinion to colleagues’ chambers, they witnessed this intensity. to some, it seemed a dissenting opinion that only sotomayor, with her puerto rican bronx background, could write. they saw it as the rare instance when she was giving voice to her latina identity in a legal opinion at the court . . . certainly the justices were accustomed to individual differences in cases revolving around race and ethnicity, but in this dispute some were anxious about how sotomayor’s personal defense of affirmative action and indictment of the majority would ultimately play to the public. (biskupic , – ). biskupic ( , ) goes on to say, “if the heated opinion that sotomayor was drafting in the university of texas case had the well-attended lecture took place on friday, august , from : p.m. to : p.m. in the boston marriott copley place in boston, massachusetts. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, made it into the public eye, more fervent conflict would have captured america’s attention.” another explanation could be that the agreement to mute the fisher decision was “a tactical concession by both wings of the court in a volatile term with …victo- ries and defeats for both progressives and conservatives in landmark marriage equal- ity and voting rights cases” [us v. windsor and shelby county v. holder, respectively] (powell and menendian , – ). so, the fisher case was sent back to the fifth circuit for further review. now, normally or traditionally, once a case has been remanded and the circuit court makes a decision, the case ends there. however, in a highly unusual, unprecedented move, the supreme court agreed to take the case on again, after the fifth circuit once again upheld the use of race in admissions. the circuit court agreed with its original ruling and stated, with respect to critical mass that “attaining a critical mass of under- represented minority students… does not transform [the university’s program] into a quota’” (fisher , , quoting grut- ter at – ). the court reasoned that the concept of critical mass could not be placed in numerical terms. the goal of diversity is not about “quotas or targets;” rather its focus is on individuals. the fifth circuit questioned why the high court continues to misconstrue and twist the meaning of critical mass by analogizing it to “a numeri- cal game and little more than a cover for quotas” (fisher , ). now, back in the high court, a – ruling was surprisingly issued in june of in fisher upholding the use of race- based admissions practices. recall at the time of the ruling, there were only eight justices sitting on the court. justice scalia passed away in in february of ; and justice kagan continued to recuse herself. the majority opinion, written by justice kennedy now argued that deference should be paid to universities in such matters as “student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission” (fisher, , online). moreover, the fisher court now seemed to accept the fact that critical mass defies numerical classifica- tion. kennedy wrote for the majority that “a university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are inca- pable of objective measurement but which make for greatness’” (fisher, , online, quoting sweatt v. painter, : ). the court went even further to stress this point. despite the fact that kennedy continued to rail against the concept of critical mass in his opinion in fisher, he writes in his majority opinion, that: as this court’s cases have made clear . . . the compelling interest that justifies consideration of race in college admissions is not an interest in enrolling a certain number of minority students. rather, a university may institute a race-conscious admissions program as a means of obtaining ‘the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity’ . . . as this court has said, enrolling a diverse student body ‘promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races’ . . . equally important, ‘student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society’ (fisher, , online, quoting fisher and grutter ). the court then went on to conclude that the university of texas at austin “cannot be faulted for failing to specify the particular level of minority enrollment at which it believes the educational benefits of diversity will be obtained” (fisher, , online). this is certainly a landmark case and indicative of progress, but if blum is successful in pushing the harvard case to the high court, we may be in for another battle, especially since justice kennedy has stepped down from the court. i would like to turn more broadly to the question of whether progress has been made in terms of social equity, in particular race and gender relations. have we made progress in achieving social equity? i ask this question to my students every semester, and generally get a mixed response, with some saying absolutely, and others saying that it is equivocal. this latter response captures the sentiment of mary guy’s article in public administration review: “three steps forward, two steps backward.” we have made some progress, but the black lives matter, time’s up and #metoo movements as well as “taking a knee,” the continued use of arbitration clauses and the push for inclusion riders tell us we have a long way to go. even sheryl sandberg ( ), the chief operat- ing officer of facebook, who has continu- ally instructed women to “lean in,” recently stated that women who plan on becoming pregnant should not lean in. let me first turn to employment progress. employment progress in terms of public sector employment, which i study in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, we have seen a good deal of progress in terms of entry into govern- ment jobs at every level—local, state, and federal. but progress in terms of gaining entry into the higher, policy-making ranks of government has been relatively slow as many have pointed out (see gooden and portillo ; gooden ; riccucci ; see appendix a). another area that deserves attention in terms of employment is family respon- sibilities discrimination (frd); family responsibilities include caring for a spouse, child, or aging parent, being pregnant, or even the possibility of becoming preg- nant and caring for a disabled sibling or child. in short, frd is the legal concept that describes discrimination against an employee on the basis of her or his respon- sibilities as a caregiver (mullins ). this concept has been called the newest form of workplace discrimination and particu- larly the new sex discrimination because it disproportionately affects women. that is, while the literature shows that frd extends beyond women to all caregivers, frd legal claims are most often filed by working mothers. litigation of frd is on the rise in the public and private sectors in the us. from – , frd claims increased by over % in comparison to the previous decade, with verdicts and settlements aver- aging over $ , ; %of the plaintiffs in these cases are women (calvert, ). while there is no federal law that expressly prohibits discrimination based on family responsibilities, claims can be brought under title vii of the civil rights act as amended—which includes the preg- nancy discrimination act of —the family medical leave act (fmla) of , the equal pay act of , employee retire- ment income security act of , or state or local laws. insofar as discrimination occurs as a result of caring for disabled children or relatives, the americans with disabilities act of also protects work- ers from frd (williams and bornstein, ; ; williams and segal, ). our conception of social equity in ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, political science and public administra- tion has broadened in the last decade or so to include lgbtq employment. such scholars as greg lewis ( ; ), rod colvin ( ) and donald haider-markel ( ; ) have made significant inroads in their research on the employment and voting patterns of lgbt persons as well as the implementation of public policies addressing lgbt individuals. in , the high court in its – obergefell v. hodges ruling upheld the constitutionality of same-sex marriages. same-sex couples can now marry in all states. yet, lgbt persons still do not have federal employ- ment protection in all states. efforts date back to when the first version of the employment non-discrimination act (enda) was introduced in congress. but, it failed to gain enough support for passage into law. it has been introduced in virtually every congress since , but has failed to muster enough support. the issue of pay equity or equality continues to be a topic of great interest in this nation, and despite legislation and lawsuits, pay inequity based on gender persists. data from the us census bureau show that women earn % of what their male counterparts earn (us census bureau ). in , the pay gap stood at % (us council of economic advisers ). while the gap has obviously lessened, it took close to years for it to shrink by only %. in the public sector, the picture is a bit differ- ent. at the federal level, the us office of personnel management reported that the average female salary is . % of the average male salary (us opm ). there is also a gender pay gap for state and local govern- ment workers, but it varies depending upon the location. there are wide variations by state, but nonetheless, the gender pay gap persists even here. in addition, the gender wage gap is even larger for african ameri- can and hispanic women: african ameri- can women earn about %, and hispanic women earn not even % of median annual earnings for white men (institute for women’s policy research ). if the bbc can boost the salaries of its women journalists, why can’t us companies? it is also important to point out that we are beginning to see an increasing amount of research with a focus intersectionality, which addresses the unique experiences of individuals who occupy multiple margin- alized social categories (see for example, breslin, pandey, and riccucci ). it refers to the ways in which the various forms of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, homopho- bia, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are intercon- nected and cannot be examined separately from one another. representative bureaucracy the research on representative bureaucracy also indicates progress in social equity, in that it points to the benefits of diverse work- forces. and, importantly, as a number of studies have shown, representative bureau- cracies promote democracy and increase government accountability (see, e.g., meier and stewart ; theobald and haider- markel ). it was kingsley ( ) who first theorized that the social composition of bureaucracies should reflect the people they serve as a function of democratic rule; it was a normative theory. levitan ( ) was the first to propose that representa- tive bureaucracy theory be applied to the american civil service (also see long ; van riper ). mosher ( ) went even further to argue that bureaucrats should push for the needs and interests of their social counterparts in the general popula- tion; this manifesto squarely falls within the tradition of the new public adminis- tration. a number of empirical studies have tested the theory of representative bureau- cracy in its various forms, including passive, active, and symbolic. passive representa- tion refers to the degree to which the demo- graphics of public organizations reflect the demographics of the general population (meier a; meier b; selden ; kellough ). studies on passive repre- sentation have consistently found that, although women and people of color may be well represented in bureaucracies in the aggregate at various levels, they are gener- ally underrepresented in the higher, policy- making positions (smith and monaghan ; aikaterini, sabharwal, connelly, and cayer ). ken meier, an avatar of representative bureaucracy, greatly advanced the theory of representative bureaucracy. he was one of the first scholars to empirically examine the link between passive and active repre- sentation, finding that minority bureau- crats will pursue policies or actions that benefit minorities in the citizenry (see, meier and stewart ; meier, wrinkle, and polinard ). and important work by sally selden along with jess sowa among others followed (selden a; b; sowa and selden ). for exam- ple, a study by keiser, wilkins, meier, and holland ( ) was the first to find a link- age between passive and active represen- tation for women. their study found that women math teachers improved the math scores of not only girls, but of boys as well, although the impact was not as large for boys’ scores. a third strand of representative bureau- cracy examines the symbolic effects of passive representation in that the social origins of bureaucrats can induce certain attitudes or behaviors on the part of citizens or clients without the bureaucrat taking any action (theobald and haider-markel ; riccucci, van ryzin, and lavena ). research by gade and wilkins ( ), for example, found that veterans who know or believe that their counselors in the department of veterans affairs are veter- ans report greater satisfaction with services. as they point out, “passive representation can . . . translate into symbolic represen- tation, where representation may change the attitudes and behaviors of the repre- sented client without any action taken by the bureaucrat” (gade and wilkins , ). theobald and haider-markel’s ( ) study found that a predominately african american police force can create greater legitimacy among african americans in the community, notwithstanding the actions or behaviors of the police officers. they also found that whites are more likely to perceive police actions as legitimate if the actions were taken by white officers. a number political science and public administration scholars have greatly advanced the representative bureaucracy literature in a host of policy domains; they include lael keiser, sally selden, vicky wilkins, jill and sean nicholson-crotty, brian williams, jess sowa, donald haider- markel, rhys andrews, karen johnston, amy smith, k. jurée capers, andrea head- ley, and meghna sabharwal. in particular, jill and sean nicholson-crotty along with jason grissom and sergio fernandez have examined such critical issues as distribu- tional equity, gifted educational services, and most recently, the importance of race representation in police departments, given the violence we are seeing against blacks in our society. in the us in the past several years, police violence against blacks has once again esca- lated, resulting in the deaths of a number of young black men, including michael brown, eric garner, tamir rice, walter scott, alton sterling, philando castile, and terence crutcher. the shooting death of michael brown, for example, a young ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, -year-old black man by a city of fergu- son police officer in august of , sparked civil unrest in that city’s black community and strong protests across the country around the brutality of police against black citizens. these events signaled renewed national interest in the violence against blacks in our society by law enforcement officers, and led to nationwide demonstra- tions. the black lives matter movement has focused almost exclusively on police brutality against blacks. in response to the unrest, president obama created a task force to recommend reforms to the problem of police violence (president’s task force on st century policing ). in addition, the high-profile cases of fatal police shootings prompted a number of reports by the us justice department under the direction of former attorney generals eric holder and loretta lynch on police violence against blacks in cities across the country. the justice department has been empowered to investigate systematic constitutional violations in local police departments since , when section was included in a crime bill signed by president clinton. the attorney general was authorized to sue or enter into consent decrees to address the biases. local govern- ments tend to enter into consent decrees to avoid federal lawsuits. there has been a surge of consent decrees recently with the spike of police violence against blacks. however, since mr. trump took office in , the justice department under his attorney general, jeff sessions, has been unwilling to interfere with local police matters. in his confirmation hearing, sessions stated “these lawsuits under- mine the respect for police officers” (stol- berg ). a number of studies consistently show patterns of racial profiling, in that blacks and latinx are more likely to be targeted by police than whites (harris ; gelman, andrew, fagan, and kiss ; brunson ). for example, in their study of police stops in their phenomenal book pulled over: how police stops define race and citizenship, epp, maynard-moody and haider-markel ( , ) point out that . . . it is well established that racial minorities are more likely than whites to be stopped by the police. but, disparities in who is stopped are only the most obvious indicator of how police stops both reflect and define racial division in the united states. in stops, racial minorities are questioned, handcuffed, and searched at dramatically higher rates than whites are; they are much more likely than whites to perceive the stop as unfair; and they distrust the police in general at much higher rates than do whites. in a more recent study, epp, maynard- moody, and haider-markel ( ), find racial profiling by police in investigatory vehicle stops, where officers disproportion- ately stop blacks who are driving or walk- ing to question and search them. not only are they innocent, but the experience of such investigatory stops erodes their trust in police and it also leads to psychological harm. their research found that blacks’ “common experience of investigatory stops contributes to their perception that they are not regarded by the police as full and equal members of society . . . investigatory stops . . . are significantly more likely to foster the perception that the police are “out to get people like me” (epp, maynard-moody and haider-markel , ). they also point out that many of the high-profile shootings of blacks in recent years occurred during these stops. such stops include what are known as “stop-and-frisk” practices. here police detain and question pedestrians and search them if they believe a crime is being or about to be committed. often, these encounters can escalate into aggressive actions by police officers, including deadly violence by police. as noted earlier, police often become violent particularly when citizens are engaging in constitutionally- protected free speech, as the us justice department has found in their reports examining police violence against blacks. the stop-and-frisk practices of new york city gained national attention because of their pervasive use and propensity to target blacks and latinx. eric garner was a victim of such practices because he was suspected of selling “loosies” (i.e., individual ciga- rettes) on a new york city street corner. when he stated that he was tired of being harassed by the police, officers attempted to restrain him by putting him in an illegal choke hold. despite pleas from garner that “i can’t breathe,” additional officers moved in to restrain him. he died in part as a result of the chokehold. an article in the journal of public admin- istration research and theory (jpart) examines experimentally the symbolic representation effects of race in policing (riccucci, van ryzin, and jackson ). the study varies the representation of black officers in a hypothetical police department and also varies the agency’s complaints of police misconduct, including stop-and- frisk practices to determine how citizens view the police. it finds support for the exis- tence of a symbolic representation effect: the racial composition of the police force does seem to causally influence how citi- zens view and judge a law enforcement agency. specifically, the study found that blacks respond more favorably toward the police when there are more black officers on the force, regardless of whether complaints increase or decrease. this would suggest that, given a predominately black police force, black citizens may be more tolerant of aggressive police practices such as stop- and-frisk. thus, although the presence of black police officers may lead to an increase in racial profiling, as wilkins and williams ( ) found in their study, the results of this forthcoming study suggest that this may be offset to some extent by enhanced trust and legitimacy on the part of black citizens. if police departments across the coun- try are genuinely interested in improving police-community relations and in restor- ing trust of the police among black citizens, diversifying police forces so that they are more representative of the communities they serve will produce more trust and legit- imacy in the eyes of citizens. nicholson- crotty, nicholson-crotty, and fernandez ( , ) in their exceptional study found that “more black officers are obviously seen, in part, as a way to directly reduce unnecessary violence between police and citizens.” they go on to say that “increased diversity or representation of minorities is also proposed as a way to indirectly reduce violence by enhancing the legitimacy of the police force within communities.” certainly, we will see additional research on this important topic in the future. social equity in academe the faculty profile at institutions of higher education in the us continues to be mostly white and largely men (warikoo ; mcmurtrie ; brown ). this somewhat holds true for such fields such as public administration and politi- cal science depending upon faculty rank. in public administration, for example, we have made progress in terms of increases of white women in the field, but the higher ranks continue to be dominated by white ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, men. leisha dehart-davis ( ), who with mary feeney spearheaded the creation of academic women in public administra- tion (awpa), invited comments through an anonymous qualtrics survey posted on twitter, the awpa email list, and the public management research associa- tion’s (pmra’s) listserv on the following questions: “based on your experiences, is public administration a diverse and inclu- sive academic field? why or why not? if not, what can be done? all thoughts, ideas, comments, suggestions, critiques welcome.” while only people posted comments, the responses were varied and provocative, and were summarized by professor dehart- davis. responses included: • public administration is (not) a diverse academic field; • international students, particularly those from china and korea, bring diversity to pa; • while asian students do indeed bring diversity, it cannot be used as an excuse for ignoring the call for us public administration to be more inclusive of women and faculty of color; • public administration is a white field that excludes minority voices; • white men are overrepresented in power positions; • the creation of academic women in public administration was viewed by some as positive, but others suspect self-serving motives and white feminism at play. other public administration faculty members across the us were invited to comment on this issue (dehart-davis , – ). they echoed some of the comments made by the anonymous respondents to the qualtrics survey. this is certainly an issue that deserves greater attention and asks the question, have the aims and objectives of new public administration been real- ized? but we also need to ask: how does the field define diversity? what exactly does it mean? and what is the unit of analysis? are we looking at students, faculty, deans, chairs, directors, and/or journal editors-in- chief? parenthetically, the minnowbrook i conference had no persons of color nor women present. dehart davis’ survey was a response to a washington post op-ed piece writ- ten by professor marybeth gasman of the university of pennsylvania (gasman ). gasman wrote that there is little diversity among faculties at elite univer- sities because they do not want faculty of color. she argued that universities exclude them because they may not have graduate degrees from elite universities, there is a perception of low-quality scholarship and there is an absence of people of color in the faculty pipeline. all of these pretexts, of course, can be explained away, and this is why gasman concludes that university faculties simply do not value diversity. can this be the case for us in public administra- tion and political science? conclusion in closing, let me return to the writing of john gaus ( , ), whose words are particularly relevant and prevailing today: “the inclusion of greater numbers of persons in political activity and the increased dependence of populations on the results of this activity make our indi- vidual and group ideas of ends and means of public housekeeping more important. such ideas influence our decisions and acts . . . the decisions and acts have long led to policies that affect our standard of living and for many, life itself . . . new forms of war, embodying doctrines of race or class . . . have increased the urgency and importance of decisions and policies.” ■ n o t e s . see, and compare, for example svara and brunet ( ) and rosenbloom ( ); and nalbandian ( ) and rosenbloom ( ). . also see krislov ( ) and krislov and rosenbloom ( ). . the us supreme court attempted to address affirmative action in an earlier case, defunis v. odegaard ( ), but dismissed it on procedural grounds. . the us justice department submitted a “statement of interest” in the harvard case on august , , in support of the students suing harvard over affirmative action policies. see https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice- department-files-statement-interest-harvard- discrimination-case-defending-claim- . . the sffa is also suing the university of north carolina at chapel hill. . the complaint was dismissed because it is similar to an ongoing and separate federal lawsuit filed against harvard (see, students for fair admissions v. harvard ). . that is, that harvard uses race in a positive way for blacks and latinos, but in a negative way for asian americans. . interestingly, harvard relies on what it calls a “z-list,” which is a back door to admissions. here, harvard admits mostly whites who are legacies or individuals with connections to deans or directors. . the grutter court issued a – decision: o’connor, wrote the majority opinion and was joined by justices stevens, souter, ginsburg, and breyer; dissenting were chief justice rehnquist and justices scalia, kennedy, and thomas. in , the court’s liberal block was composed of justices ginsburg, breyer, kagan, and sotomayor; the conservative block consisted of chief justice roberts and justices scalia, thomas, alito, and kennedy, actually a swing vote on many cases. . the three-judge panel on the fisher appeals court ruled unanimously in favor the university’s race- based admissions program. see fisher v. university of texas at austin, f. d ( th cir. ). . the appeals court applied the us supreme court’s strict-scrutiny test—or means-to-ends analysis—to determine the constitutionality of the university’s affirmative action programs. the first prong of this test asks whether there is a compelling state interest in the program (i.e., is diversity a compelling interest); the second prong asks whether the program is sufficiently narrowly tailored to meet its goal (i.e., are there alternative means to reach the goal without taking race into account). the courts, since bakke have found that diversity serves as a compelling government interest. writing for the court’s – majority, justice sandra day o’connor ( , ) stated that “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting when the students have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds . . . student body diversity promotes learning outcomes.” the second prong of the strict-scrutiny test asks if race is but one factor among others in the universities admission process, and if students are considered individually. . in grutter, the court majority ruled that “there is no number, percentage, or range of numbers or percentages that constitute critical mass” (grutter, , p. ). . the conservative block will most likely rule against race-based admissions program (chief justice john roberts and justices alito, gorsuch, and thomas). the liberal block will support affirmative action ( justices ginsburg, breyer, kagan, and sotomayor). a conservative appointee to the court will be pivotal in affirmative action as well as other cases (e.g., abortion, death penalty; lgbtq rights). and despite the fact that judge brett kavanaugh has endorsed stare decisis, the practice of following precedent, it is unlikely that this will hold true if he is confirmed to serve on the court. . four states—alaska, connecticut, new jersey, and oregon—and the district of columbia enacted laws expressly prohibiting frd. in addition, at least localities in different states have local laws that prohibit frd (see, calvert, et. al., ). . it was not introduced in the th congress— january , to january , —the fifth and sixth years of george w. bush’s presidency; both houses were controlled by republicans. . see, for example, nicholson-crotty, grissom, and nicholson-crotty ( ); nicholson-crotty, grissom, nicholson-crotty, and redding ( ); nicholson-crotty, nicholson-crotty, and fernandez ( ); meier and nicholson-crotty ( ). . there were white police officers when michael brown was killed, and only three black police officers. . the study also found that whites rate the police somewhat less favorably in terms of job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness when the force includes mostly black officers, whether complaints increase or decrease against the agency. but the decline was relatively small. . paul light ( ) writes about these issues almost years ago. also see radin ( ). https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, r e f e r e n c e s biskupic, joan. . breaking in: the rise of sonia sotomayor and the politics of justice. ny: sarah crichton books. breslin, rachel a., sheela pandey, and norma m. riccucci. . “intersectionality in public lead- ership research: a review and future research agenda.” review of public personnel administration ( ): – . brown, launcelot i. . “diversity: the challenge for higher education.” race ethnicity and educa- tion ( ): – . brunson, rod k. . “‘police don’t like black people:’ african-american young men’s accumu- lated police experiences.” criminology & public policy ( ): – . calvert, cynthia thomas. . family responsibili- ties discrimination: litigation update . san francisco: center for worklife law. http://www. worklifelaw.org/pubs/frdupdate.pdf. calvert, cynthia thomas, joan c. williams, and gary phelan. . family responsibilities discrimina- tion. edison, nj: bloomberg bna books. colvin, rodderick a. . gay and lesbian cops: diversity and effective policing. boulder, co: lynne rienner publishers. defunis v. odegaard, u.s. 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c. and stephanie bornstein. . “caregivers in the courtroom: the growing trend of family responsibilities discrimination.” university of san francisco law review : – . williams, joan c. and nancy segal. . “beyond the maternal wall: relief for family caregivers who are discriminated against on the job.” harvard women’s law journal : – . a p p e n d i x a ; ta b l e senior executive service (ses) gender trends female ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) male ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) total ( %) ( %) ( %) source: us office of personnel management. . senior executive service report. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal- employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf. note: the report does not break data down by gender, race, and ethnicity. a p p e n d i x a ; ta b l e senior executive service (ses) ethnicity and race trends african american ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) latinx ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) asian ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) american indian/ alaska native ( %) ( %) ( . %) native hawaiian/ pacific islander ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) white ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) latinx and more than one race ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) more than one race ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) unspecified ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) total sesers source: us office of personnel management. . – senior executive service report. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/ federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf note: the report does not break data down by gender, race, and ethnicity. totals vary due to missing data. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/ / / /how-salaries-compare-by-gender-for-federal-employees/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/ / / /how-salaries-compare-by-gender-for-federal-employees/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/ / / /how-salaries-compare-by-gender-for-federal-employees/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/ / / /how-salaries-compare-by-gender-for-federal-employees/ https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf cesifo working paper no. econstor make your publications visible. a service of zbw leibniz-informationszentrum wirtschaft leibniz information centre for economics gonzález, paula; macho-stadler, ines; pérez-castrillo, david working paper private versus social incentives for pharmaceutical innovation cesifo working paper, no. provided in cooperation with: ifo institute – leibniz institute for economic research at the university of munich suggested citation: gonzález, paula; macho-stadler, ines; pérez-castrillo, david ( ) : private versus social incentives for pharmaceutical innovation, cesifo working paper, no. , center for economic studies and ifo institute (cesifo), munich this version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/ / standard-nutzungsbedingungen: die dokumente auf econstor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen zwecken und zum privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. sie dürfen die dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. sofern die verfasser die dokumente unter open-content-lizenzen (insbesondere cc-lizenzen) zur verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten lizenz gewährten nutzungsrechte. terms of use: documents in econstor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. you are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. if the documents have been made available under an open content licence (especially creative commons licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu private versus social incentives for pharmaceutical innovation paula gonzález inés macho-stadler david pérez-castrillo cesifo working paper no. category : industrial organisation december an electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the ssrn website: www.ssrn.com • from the repec website: www.repec.org • from the cesifo website: twww.cesifo-group.org/wp t issn - http://www.ssrn.com/ http://www.repec.org/ http://www.cesifo-group.de/ cesifo working paper no. private versus social incentives for pharmaceutical innovation abstract we provide a theoretical framework to contribute to the current debate regarding the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to direct their r&d toward marketing products that are “follow- on” drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough drugs. we construct a model with a population of patients who can be treated with drugs that are horizontally and vertically differentiated. in addition to a pioneering drug, a new drug can be marketed as the result of an innovative process. we analyze physician prescription choices and the optimal pricing decision of an innovative .rm. we also characterize the incentives of the in- novative firm to conduct r&d activities, disentangling the quest for breakthrough drugs from the firm effort to develop follow-on drugs. our results offer theoretical support for the conventional wisdom that pharmaceutical firms devote too many resources to conducting r&d activities that lead to incremental innovations. jel-codes: i . keywords: pharmaceuticals, r&d activities, me-too drugs, breakthrough drugs, incremental innovation, radical innovation. paula gonzález* department of economics universidad pablo de olavide sevilla / spain pgonzalez@upo.es inés macho-stadler department of economics universitat autònoma de barcelona bellaterra / spain ines.macho@uab.es david pérez-castrillo department of economics universitat autònoma de barcelona bellaterra / spain david.perez@uab.es *corresponding author december , we appreciate valuable comments by bruno jullien, justina klimaviciute, jorge mestre-ferrándiz and participants at the xxix jornadas de economía industrial (barcelona), theworkshop on health economics (uab), the th european health economics workshop (toulouse), the xxxv aes conference (granada) and the th ihea conference (milan). financial support from ministerio de ciencia y tecnología and feder (eco - and eco - ), generalitat de catalunya ( sgr- ), junta de andalucía (sej- ), icrea academia and the severo ochoa programme (sev- - ) is gratefully acknowledged. macho-stadler and pérez- castrillo are fellows of move and cesifo. introduction it is widely recognized that of all the industrial sectors, the pharmaceutical industry is the sector that traditionally invests most heavily in research and development (r&d). in , for instance, us biopharmaceutical research companies invested an estimated $ . billion in r&d (phrma, ). regarding r&d intensity, and according to a recent report by the european commission, spending on r&d in by the pharmaceutical industry amounted to . % of its gdp in the us, . % in japan, and to . % in the european union (european commission, ). however, there is a great deal of debate surrounding pharmaceutical r&d activities. pharmaceutical companies are often accused of devoting too many resources to the mar- keting of apparent new products that are �follow-on�drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough (�rst-in-class) drugs. in fact, a successful new �rst-in-class drug will often face competition from a series of follow-on drugs that are therapeutically similar to the pioneering drug. the angiotensin converting enzyme (ace) inhibitors, a class of drugs used to manage high blood pressure, is illustra- tive of this. the �rst ace inhibitor, captopril, was introduced in the us in . since then over ace inhibitors have been launched (hernandez and harrington, ). the development of follow-on drugs is cheaper and less risky than drugs with a novel mechanism of action, but they supposedly do not bring signi�cant therapeutic progress to patients (see, for instance, the discussions by angell, ; avorn, ; and goozner, ). defenders of incremental innovations argue, however, that medicines based on incremental improvements often represent advances in safety and e¢ cacy, along with pro- viding new formulations and dosing options that increase patient compliance (see dimasi and paquette, ; wertheimer and santella, ; and the article by doctor henry i. miller in the wall street journal on january , ). this paper aims at contributing to this social debate. we build a theoretical model of innovation to investigate whether there exist arguments that allow us to support the conviction that pharmaceutical �rms devote too many resources to marketing me-too drugsandtoo fewto launchingbreakthroughdrugs. ourmodel emphasizes thedistinction between radical and incremental innovation processes. radical innovation processes may follow-on drugs are sometimes called �me-too�drugs as they are close copies of existing drugs. another example is omeprazole, the �rst proton pump inhibitor launched in to reduce gastric acid production. proton pump inhibitors have since become the mainstay of treatment for acid-related gastrointestinal disease in adults, and omeprazole was followed by other proton pump inhibitors, with the most recent launched in . the labels �radical�and �incremental�belong mostly to the managerial literature and does not o¤er a unique description of the di¤erence between the two concepts. in fact, the literature reveals that the de�nitions of radical and incremental innovations are still puzzling, both at the theoretical and at the lead to breakthrough drugs, while incremental innovation processes pursue me-too drugs. in our model there is a continuum of patients in need of medical treatment. patients can be treated with drugs that are horizontally and vertically di¤erentiated. vertical di¤erentiation refers to the quality of the drug and includes the health gains experienced by patients. horizontal di¤erentiation re�ects the adequacy of the drug for patients, as di¤erent patients in the population will experience di¤erent e¤ects of a given medication in terms of tolerability, side e¤ects or interaction with other medicines. in the market, there is a pioneering drug. we assume that the price of this drug is �xed, for example, because thepatentprotection that covered ithas alreadyexpiredandthedrug is soldat its marginal cost. moreover, anewdrugcanbemarketedas theresultofan innovativeprocess by a pharmaceutical �rm that seeks to achieve an improvement over the existing medicine. finally, there is a physician who makes drug prescription decisions. the physician acts as a perfect agent for the health system (which includes both patients and the health authority) and, hence, he makes prescription choices based on the price-e¤ectiveness of the drugs. in this simple set-up we �rst describe physician prescription choices, given the prices and the characteristics of the two drugs (when the innovation process is successful). sec- ond, we characterize the optimal pricing decision of the innovative �rm, which anticipates the physician prescription behavior. the optimal price for the new drug depends on the di¤erences in cost-e¤ectiveness and the horizontal distance between the new drug and the pioneer. when the new drug is much more cost-e¤ective than the pioneer, the innovative �rm sets a price that leads the physician to prescribe the new drug to all patients. when the improvements in the cost-e¤ectiveness of the new drug are not substantial, or the two drugs are very horizontally di¤erentiated, then the price set by the innovative �rm leads to a drug replacement treatment only for some patients. in all other situations the new drug is not marketed. finally, we characterize the incentives of the innovative �rm to conduct r&d activities and compare these private incentives with those that would be optimal from a social point of view. the paper distinguishes between radical innovation processes, seeking breakthrough drugs, and incremental innovation processes that aim at launching a me- too drug. in order to di¤erentiate these two kinds of innovations, we follow the approach of measuring the degree of innovativeness of a drug as the size of the di¤erences (either small or large) between the new drug and the pioneer. these di¤erences can emerge either in the horizontal or the vertical characteristics of the drugs. innovations in the empirical level (see garcía and calantone, , for a critical review of the innovativeness terminology). in particular, the degree of innovativeness of a product is measured using various dimensions including the level of risk implied in the innovation strategy, the type of knowledge to be processed or the level of investment needed to move onto a new trajectory. vertical dimension imply a better quality of treatment (or a lower production cost) for all the patients su¤ering from the disease. horizontal innovations would be advances that bene�t some but not all patients because drugs may have lower side e¤ects for a certain group of patients. moreover, in order to account for the fact that the level of risk (or uncertainty of the �nal outcome) is typically larger in the case of radical innovations, we consider that the outcome of a radical innovation process by the innovative �rm takes values on a large support and has a greater variance. the paper provides some interesting �ndings. we show that for incremental innova- tion processes pursuing me-too drugs, the social value of the innovation coincides with the private bene�ts of the �rm (as the innovative �rm appropriates all the health sys- tem bene�ts derived from the launching of the me-too drug). if we consider, instead, r&d activities searching for breakthrough drugs, then private and social incentives for conducting research are not aligned. in particular, the incentives for conducting research by the �rm are inferior to those socially optimal as there are patients that -despite the larger price of the new drug- bene�t from it. these results allow us to show that if a pharmaceutical company can only adopt one of the two types of innovation processes due, for instance, to budget constraints, it may happen that the �rm has an incentive to seek a me-too drug although r&d activities oriented to search for a radical innovation are socially superior. at the same time, it never happens that the innovative �rm prefers to develop a radical innovation when devoting the resources to incremental innovations is preferable from a social point of view. our results thus o¤er theoretical support for the conventional wisdom that pharmaceutical �rms devote too many resources to conducting r&d activities that lead to me-too drugs. the theoretical literature on incentives for pharmaceutical innovations is not abun- dant, although there is an increasing number of papers that study the interaction between the pricing policy constrained by various forms of regulation and the e¤ort of innovation examples of innovations that would be classi�ed as vertical in our model would include the afore- mentioned captopril (ace-inhibitor) and omeprazole (protone pump inhibitor), and also cimetidine (h -receptor antagonist), propranolol (ß-adrenoceptor antagonist), lovastatin (hmg-coa-reductase in- hibitor), and sumatriptane ( -ht b/ d-receptor agonist) among others. all these are drugs that, when marketed, met a given need much more e¤ectively than available treatments and were bene�cial for all patients in the treatment of their disease. also, innovations in antibiotics that allow administration once a day, giving patients the possibility of being treated at home, or at least the possibility to reduce hospitalization time, are vertical innovations according to our classi�cation. finally, second-generation antihistamines have some (vertical) improvements over �rst-generation antihistamines like, for instance, less frequent dosing. for example, in the market for statins, lovastatin, pravastatin, and �uvastatin represent the class members with the lowest potency to reduce cholesterol levels but which are attractive candidates for use in treating patients who have proven intolerant of more potent statins such as atorvastatin, simvastatin or rosuvastatin (kapur and musunuru, ). by pharmaceutical �rms. ganuza, llobet, and domínguez ( ) �nd a bias in the phar- maceutical industry toward small innovations. their result relies on the low sensitivity of a part of the demand (due to the loyalty of some physicians) to changes in prices. this lack of price-sensitivity provides an excessive reward for small innovations and con- sequently downwardly distorts the incentives of pharmaceutical �rms. in our model, the physician acts as a perfect agent for the health system, so that the di¤erence between the social value and the private bene�ts that the �rm obtains from innovation arises from a di¤erent source: the ability of the pharmaceutical �rm to appropriate or not the health system surplus through the price. the existence of physicians that are loyal to innovative drugs also plays an important role in antoñanzas, juárez-castelló, and rodríguez-ibeas ( ). they study the incentives of an incumbent pharmaceutical �rm to launch an up- graded drug through innovation before it faces generic competition. the paper shows that the equilibrium level of innovation exhibits an inverted u shape, as innovation increases when the proportion of loyal physicians is low and decreases when it is high. finally, bardey, bommier, and jullien ( ) focus on the long-run impact of reference pricing on pharmaceutical innovation by �rms. their model shares some similarities with ours as it makes a clear distinction between incremental and radical innovations in a setting where drugs are horizontally and vertically di¤erentiated. however, the distinction they make between the two types of innovations di¤ers notably from ours. in addition to this, they model a patent race where the innovative process is deterministic and competition in r&d leads to the dissipation of �rms�pro�ts. they show that the short-term and long-term e¤ects of price regulation may be antagonists. in their simulation using french data, they �nd that favoring radical innovation processes at the expense of cost-reducing innovations may generate medium/long-run increases in health expenses, despite potential short-run bene�ts. the rest of the paper is organized as follows. the following section presents our model. section studies prescription decisions by the physician. section analyzes pricing decisions by the innovative �rm and characterizes the market equilibrium. in section we discuss the bene�t to the health system derived from the launch of the new drug. section discusses private versus social incentives to innovate. section proposes a simple model of innovation. section discusses the robustnesss of the results when the physician acts as a perfect agent for the patient. finally, the last section o¤ers some concluding remarks. all the proofs are in the appendix. the model there is a continuum of patients in need of medical treatment. we normalize the size of the population of patients to : patients su¤er from the same illness and are identi�ed by a horizontal characteristic x; with x distributed uniformly on the interval [ ; ] : the parameter x represents the type of the patient and measures the heterogeneity regarding the patient genotype or any other characteristic that may induce the disease to have di¤erent e¤ects among patients. patients can be treated with a drug. we consider that drugs are both horizontally and vertically di¤erentiated. thus, a drug is de�ned by a pair of characteristics: (x̂; ĥ): the �rst characteristic x̂ [ ; ] captures the horizontal di¤erentiation and re�ects the adequacyof thedrug fordi¤erentpatients. it iswidely recognizedthatdi¤erentpatients in a population experience di¤erent e¤ects of a given medication in terms of tolerability, side e¤ects or interaction with other medicines. in our model, where patients are distributed along the interval [ ; ], a particular location (type) of a patient re�ects the patient�s ideal drug. that is, a drug with characteristic x̂ has the ideal type for a patient located at x̂. those patients who fail to obtain a drug of their ideal type face a cost, and the farther patient type x from x̂ is, the lower the bene�ts he enjoys (or the larger the side e¤ects he su¤ers) when he is exposed to the drug. the second characteristic of the drug incorporates the vertical di¤erentiation and it refers to the gross e¤ectiveness ĥ of the drug. this is a quality dimension that a¤ects the whole population and it includes the health gains experienced by patients (which may comprise either one or both quality and quantity of life). we assume ĥ > ; where ĥ = would mean that the drug has the same e¤ect as no treatment, and the higher the ĥ the better the drug for all the patients. in order to determine the health gain of a type-x patient treated with drug (x̂; ĥ); we need to consider both dimensions together. the health gain of a patient of type x when drug (x̂; ĥ) is prescribed is b � ĥ� l jx̂�xj � , where jx̂�xj is the distance between the for example, in the pharmaceutical market for blood pressure control, the drugs available to treat hypertension may act via the central nervous system, the heart (beta blockers), the kidney (diuretics, saluretics) or the vessels (alpha blockers, ace inhibitors, at and calcium antagonists). the e¢ cacy and side e¤ects of these medicines di¤er across patients and, hence, a¤ect physician prescription patterns. there is no drug that unambiguously dominates another on the horizontal dimension, as patients with a di¤erent x react di¤erently to a drug x̂: if two drugs with a di¤erent x̂ are available, there are patients that bene�t more from one of the drugs, while others would be better o¤when treated with the other. in bardey et al. ( ) drugs are also vertically and horizontally di¤erentiated, although their vertical characteristic is binary while ours is a continuous variable (which allows us to consider small and large di¤erences in the vertical dimension). horizontal characteristic of the drug and the type of the patient, l > scales the loss of e¤ectiveness or the extent of side e¤ects and b is the marginal utility of being healthy. if we denote by p̂ the price of drug (x̂; ĥ), the bene�t to the health system of treating patient x with drug (x̂; ĥ) and paying price p̂ for this drug is h(x; x̂; ĥ; p̂) = b � ĥ� l jx̂�xj � � p̂: we assume that there is a pre-existing drug (x ;h ), x ( ; ), on the market. the price p of this pioneering drug is exogenously �xed and does not react to the launch of a new medicine. in markets where drug (x ;h ) is produced by a number of �rms, this assumption can be easily justi�ed on the grounds that the exclusivity of the pioneering drug has already expired and a generic drug has entered the market. without loss of generality, we assume that p = c , being c the marginal cost of providing the drug. for simplicity, we assume that all patients bene�t from the pioneering drug, that is, the whole market is initially covered by that drug. there is a pharmaceutical �rm (that we call �rm ), di¤erent from the one selling (x ;h ) ; that can undertake an innovation process. this process is uncertain both be- cause it may or may not lead to a new drug and because the characteristics of the potential new drug are ex-ante random. if �rm adopts an innovation process and the process is successful then a new drug is discovered. we denote by (x ;h ) the characteristics of the new drug that will be marketed and by c its marginal cost. this drug may use the same active principle as the pioneering drug or it may use a di¤erent one. what is relevant in our model is the location of the drug in the space of horizontal and vertical characteristics. we assume that the �rm producing the new drug freely chooses the price p : to identify the di¤erences between the new drug and the pioneer, we de�ne �x � ��x �x �� ; �h � h �h ; �c � c � c : that is, �x r+ is the distance between the �types�of the drugs. similarly, �h r indicates the di¤erence in quality between the two drugs, and �c r denotes the in the us, the generic share of prescriptions rose from % in to % in (berndt and aitken, ). there is evidence that once generic drugs enter the market, both the price and sales revenue of pioneering drugs tend to drop by about % over the next year (yin, ). this hypothesis requires that b � h � l ��x �x��� � c � for all x [ ; ], that is, c � min � b � h � l � �x �� ;b � h � lx �	 . for simplicity in the exposition, we have adopted the view of an entrant in the pharmaceutical market launching a new drug. all our analysis would remain valid if, alternatively, we had assumed that there were several �rms producing the pioneering drug and that one of them could undertake the innovation process, as in ganuza et al. ( ). di¤erence in marginal costs (the new drug may be more expensive or cheaper to produce than the pioneer). finally, there is a physician who makes drug prescription decisions. we assume that the physician acts as a perfect agent for the health system, which includes both the patients�utility and the cost incurred by the health authority. hence, the physician assigns the medication to patients based on the price-e¤ectiveness of the two drugs. notice that, given the physician behavior, whether the patients bear a copayment or the drug is fully reimbursed by the health authority, there is no di¤erence implied in the results since the physician takes into account the true cost of the drugs (paid either by the patients or the health authority). the timing of our game is as follows. in the �rst stage, �rm decides its innovation strategy. in case the innovation process succeeds, the characteristics (x ;h ) as well as the marginal cost c of the new drug are known. in the second stage, the innovative �rm sets the price p it charges. finally, in the third stage, provided the new drug is marketed, the physician allocates the drugs to patients (if only the pioneering drug is available, the physician will prescribe it to all the patients). as usual, we solve the game by backward induction. prescription of drugs we now analyze the last stage of the game if a new drug with characteristics (x ;h ) has been marketed at a price p . at this stage of the game, the physician decides which patients are prescribed the pioneering drug (x ;h ) and which ones the new one (x ;h ). the physician takes into account both the expected e¤ectiveness of the drugs and their price. ifbothdrugsprovide identicalbene�ts to thehealthsystemwhentreatingapatient, we adopt the convention that the physician prescribes the new drug. following the physician�s decision, the market will be split between the new drug and the pioneer. depending on both drugs�characteristics, as well as the price p decided by the innovative �rm, three di¤erent scenarios may arise. we illustrate them in figure . first, the physician prescribes the pioneering drug to all patients if the price p of the new drug is very high when compared to its health bene�ts . we denote pmax the price above which no patient is prescribed the new drug (that happens even when pa- this assumption allows us to focus on �rm incentives to pharmaceutical innovation, leaving aside any distortion caused by the potential strategic behavior of agents as a consequence of the di¤erent views they share. in section we discuss the robustness of the analysis in a model where the physician only takes into account the patients�utility. in that model, the reimbursement policy has an in�uence not only on physician prescription choices but also on the pricing and innovation decisions by the �rm. h b(h − lx − x ) − c x x x if p > pmax if p ∈ (pall, pmax) if p < pall b(h − lx − x ) − p b(h − lx − x ) − p b(h − lx − x ) − p figure : bene�ts of the health system with the two drugs and split of the market as a function of p , c , (x ;h ), and (x ;h ). tient x is not treated with (x ;h ) if p > pmax). formally, pmax is characterized by h(x ;x ;h ;pmax) = h(x ;x ;h ;c ); or b(h � l jx �x j)�pmax = b(h � l jx �x j)� c ; which implies pmax � c + b(�h + l�x): if p = pmax, the market for the new drug is �x if x > x ; it is x if x < x ; and it is the whole market if x = x (the rest of the patients are prescribed the old drug). note that pmax is increasing in b, l, �x, �h, and c . therefore, for a given p , it is more likely that the old drug will keep all the market if health has a low marginal value (b low), the disparities in the side e¤ects of the drug for di¤erent patients are small (l low), the di¤erence between the two drugs is also small (�h and �x are low), and/or the pioneering drug is very cheap to produce. second, the physician prescribes the new drug to all patients if the price p is low enough. this is the case if p is so low that it is optimal to treat patient x with the new drug. the cut-o¤ value pall below which all patients are treated with (x ;h ) is characterized by b(h � l jx �x j)�pall = b(h � l jx �x j)� c ; that is, pall � c + b(�h � l�x): given the expression of pall, a given p is more likely to be lower than pall for large values of c , b, and �h, and for low values of l and �x (i.e., when the di¤erence between the patient who pro�ts more from each drug is low). we note that pall = pmax if x = x : finally, the physician prescribes each drug to a subset of the patients for p � pall;pmax � . to identify the market for each drug, consider �rst the case where x > x . thetwodrugsprovidethesamebene�ts toapatientof type ~x (x ;x ) if b(h � l(~x�x ))� c = b(h � l(x � ~x))�p . that is, the type of the indi¤erent patient is ~x � x + (l�x ��h) l + (p � c ) bl : the physician prescribes treatment (x ;h ) at a price c to those patients whose type lies in the interval [ ; ~x); whereas patients with a type in the interval [~x; ] are treated with (x ;h ) at a price p : similarly, for p � pall;pmax � and x < x the indi¤erent patient is ~x � x � (l�x ��h) l � (p � c ) bl and the markets for the new drug and the pioneer are [ ; ~x] and (~x; ], respectively. the optimal pricing policy in this section we study the optimal price decision of �rm if, as a result of the innovation process, a new drug with characteristics (x ;h ) has been achieved. firm �s incentive to price high or low depends on the drug di¤erences in terms of vertical characteristics (both in quality, measured by �h; and in marginal cost, measured by�c), andhorizontal characteristics (measuredbythedistance intype�x). thestrength of the incentivesalsodependsonthe sizeof the submarket (the subsetof patients) inwhich the innovative �rm more directly competes with the pioneering drug. if x is on the right of x (i.e., x > x ), then the competition is �ercer on the right of x than on the left of x . that is, the size of the submarket in which �rm directly challenges the pioneering drug is �x . similarly, if x < x , the competition is more intense to the left of x , that is, in a submarket of size x . we denote by m the size of this submarket: m � �x if x > x and m � x if x < x . we also denote m � if x = x (although m does not play any role when �x = ). proposition summarizes the price decision of the pharmaceutical �rm. except for the region of parameters where there is no room for the �rm to make pro�ts, the new drug is always o¤ered at a price in the interval � pall;pmax � : for convenience, we de�ne pint � � c + c � + blm � b(l�x ��h); the candidate price for an interior solution. in proposition , we also use the function g(�x), which is de�ned as follows: g(�x) � �x + � �m � p �m � if �x > p �m � ( �m) � ( +m ��x) ( �m +�x) �x otherwise. the function g(�x) is increasing, continuously di¤erentiable and ful�lls g(�x = ) = . finally, as �h and �c have similar e¤ects and as they often appear together in the mathematical expressions, we denote the composite e¤ect of these two vertical variables as �y � �h � b �c: the parameter �y can be interpreted as a measure of the di¤erences in cost-e¤ectiveness between the new drug and the pioneering one. the larger the value of �y the more cost-e¤ective the new drug is compared to the pioneer. proposition the optimal price decision p � of �rm and its pro�ts � (p �) are as follows: region a: if �y � �l�x then the new drug is not prescribed: p � = c and � (c ) = . region b: if �y (�l�x; lg (�x)) then the new drug replaces the pioneer for a subset of patients. if in addition region b.i: m � l (�y + l�x) then p � = pmax and � (pmax) = b(m ��x)(�y + l�x) : region b.ii: m < l (�y + l�x) then p � = pint and � (pint) = b l � lm + (�y � l�x) � : region c: if �y � lg (�x) then the new drug takes over the entire market: p � = pall; and � (pall) = b(�y � l�x): the optimal pro�t function � is continuous in �x;�h, and �c: wenowo¤ersome intuitions forproposition . whendi¤erences inthecost-e¤ectiveness between the new drug and the pioneer are very negative, that is, for low values of �y, there is no price above the marginal cost under which �rm can sell its drug. more x h x reg c p * = pall h reg b.ii p * = pint b.i pmax reg b.i p * = pmax b.ii pint reg a p * = c figure : optimal pricing policy by �rm in the drug space (x;h) when c = c : precisely, in region a, where the �aggregate�di¤erence �y + l�x between the two drugs is not positive, �rm makes zero pro�t. on the contrary, in region c the cost-e¤ectiveness of the new drug far outperforms that of the pioneer and �rm decides to set a price for which the new drug is prescribed to all patients. in this case, the price that allows the �rm to serve the entire market pall is large enough so that for the �rm it is worth setting pall instead of increasing the price further and losing some patients. finally, for intermediate values of �y (region b, which only exists if �x > ), the optimal price decision by �rm depends on the size of submarket m. if m is su¢ ciently large, then �rm sets the maximum price compatible with selling the drug pmax because the number of patients that are treated with the new drug under this price is fairly large. in contrast, for low values of m; �rm would sell the drug to too few patients at pmax and, therefore, it prefers to cut the price and it sets pint. figure represents the optimal pricing policy by the innovative �rm for every combi- nation of (x ;h ) ; for a given value of �c; b and l: the �gure is drawn for �c = : for a positive (resp. negative) �c, all the �gure would move upwards (resp. downwards) in a proportion b �c. figure is not symmetric with respect to the vertical x because, in this example, x = : it isworthnoticingthatalthoughtheoptimalpricedecisionp � of�rm is continuously increasing in the quality of the drug (i.e., in �y) inside each region, it is neither continuous nor increasingwhen�y moves fromregionbtoregionc. at theborderof the tworegions, where �y = lg (�x), pmax > pall (in region b.i) and pint > pall (in region b.ii). therefore, the price p � decreases from either pmax or pint to pall if a marginal increase in �h moves the drug from region b to region c. on the other hand, the price p � is continuous in �y (and in �x) at the border of the region b.i and region b.ii. finally, the optimal price p � increases with the horizontal di¤erentiation �x in region b.i, but decreases with �x in region b.ii and region c. corollary provides some comparative statics of �rm �s pro�ts with respect to the level of di¤erentiation between the two drugs, �x and �h: we will use these expressions in section and subsection . where we compare the private and social incentives to develop a new drug. corollary the comparative statics of �rm �s pro�ts are as follows: region b.i: � is increasing and linear in �y. it is a concave function in �x; increasing up to �x = l (lm ��y) and decreasing afterwards. region b.ii: � is increasing and convex in �y and it is decreasing and convex in �x: region c: � is increasing and linear in �y and it is decreasing and linear in �x: corollary shows that the pro�ts of the innovative �rm are always larger the more cost-e¤ective the new drug is -that is, the larger the di¤erence h �h and/or the smaller the di¤erence c �c . regarding the horizontal characteristic of the drug, �rm �s pro�ts are decreasing in �x; except in region b.i, where they are increasing for low values of �x: bene�t to the health system the launch of the new drug a¤ects the bene�t of the health system. we now move to discuss the health system surplus in the di¤erent price regions. recall that in our model the doctor is a perfect agent for the health system. therefore, he only prescribes the new drug when the surplus of the health system is higher than, or equal to, the surplus obtained using the pioneer drug. we denote by �cs the gain an increase in the horizontal di¤erentiation between the two drugs has two opposite e¤ects on the pro�ts of �rm . on the one hand, for a given price, the market share of �rm decreases because more patients prefer the pioneering drug, which has a negative impact on the pro�ts of the �rm. on the other hand, a larger di¤erentiation allows the �rm to increase the price, which may have a positive impact on its pro�ts. in relative terms, the positive e¤ect of the price is less and less important as the demand for the new drug decreases, that is, as the horizontal di¤erentiation increases. in our model, the positive e¤ect only outweighs the negative one when �x is small. in patient health, net of the price, as a consequence of the launch of the new drug. proposition provides the expressions for �cs in the regions identi�ed in proposition . proposition given the optimal pricing policy p � of �rm ; the variation of the health system surplus �cs due to the launch of the new drug is: region a: �cs(c ) = . region b.i: �cs(pmax) = : region b.ii: �cs(pint) = b l (�y + l�x � lm)(�y � l�x + lm) : region c: �cs(pall) = bl�x ( m ��x). some interesting insights can be extracted from proposition . in the scenario where the new drug is sold at pmax (region b.i), total surplus is the same before and after the launch of the new drug. the reason is that the �rm charges the largest potential price, pmax; and it therefore extracts all the surplus from the patients that in equilibrium are prescribed the new drug. in contrast, in region b.ii, the �rm decides to charge pint < pmax to attract some new patients and, thus, the health system surplus increases when the new drug is marketed. finally, in the scenario where drug takes over the market (region c) the health system also bene�ts from the launch of the new drug when �x > . in this case, the health advantages of the new drug outweighs the larger price charged by the innovative �rm, so that the health system ends up strictly better o¤. we also provide some comparative statics of the health system surplus with respect to the level of di¤erentiation of the two drugs, �x and �y: corollary the comparative statics of the health system surplus are as follows: regions a and b.i: �cs does not change with �y or �x: region b.ii: �cs is increasing in �y: it is increasing up to �x = l ( lm ��y) and then decreasing in �x. region c: �cs is independent of �y and it is increasing in �x: moreover, �cs is continuous at the border between region b.i and region b.ii but it discontinuously increases when �y increases (or �x decreases) and the drug moves from region b to region c. corollary shows that the gains derived by the health system from the launch of the new drug depend on the cost-e¤ectiveness of this drug as compared to the pioneering drug (i.e., on �y) only in region b.ii. in this region, the higher the cost-e¤ectiveness (either due to advantages in quality or costs) of the new drug, the higher the gain in the surplus. in the other regions, a larger cost-e¤ectiveness of the drug is fully translated into a higher price. notice that health system surplus is certainly more sensitive to the horizontal characteristic �x. in particular, it tends to be increasing in �x; except in the region where the new drug replaces the pioneer for some patients (region b.ii), where the health system surplus is decreasing for high values of �x. as �x increases, the innovative �rm cannot appropriate all the surplus through a higher price because its market would be too reduced. private versus social incentives before analyzing the innovation stage (in section ), we brie�y discuss here the di¤erence in incentives for r&d between the innovative �rm and a social planner who takes into account the sum of the health system surplus and the �rm�s bene�ts. r&d incentives in our model come from the bene�ts that the parties involved derive from the launching of the potential new drug. to discuss the di¤erence between private and social r&d incentives, it is worth noting that the innovative �rm and the health system have di¤erent preferences regarding the characteristics of their best drug, given the pioneering drug on the market. figure represents the comparative statics of �rm �s pro�ts and health system surplus with respect to vertical and horizontal changes in the new drug as compared to the pioneer (corollaries and ). in general, the �rm cares a great deal about increasing the quality of the drug, either through a more e¤ective or a less costly drug, whereas the health system (as it takes the price into account) only bene�ts from the launching of a better-quality drug if such a drug is well-suited to those patients far from x (region b.ii). additionally, the pro�ts of the innovative �rm decrease with the degree of horizontal di¤erentiation between the two drugs, except when the di¤erentiation is small and the quality of the two drugs is similar (the left-hand part of region b.i). on the contrary, the health system always bene�ts if new drugs focus on patients for whom the e¤ectiveness of the old drug is low. figure helps us to better understand the di¤erence between incentives to innovate for the �rm and for a social planner. for example, if the innovative �rm could launch a drug through a deterministic process then it would have an incentive to choose a drug with a higher quality but the same horizontal characteristic as the pioneering drug. in fact, if the new drug were available at no cost (or at a low cost), the optimal drug for �rm would figure only represents the comparative statics for drugs on the right-hand side of x ; for those drugs on the left-hand side of x the comparative statics are similar. moreover, the �gure does not point out the e¤ects that are zero. for example, in region c, �cs is independent of �y and the �gure does not include information about the behavior of �cs with respect to �y in that region. x h x h Π ∆y & ∆cs ∆y cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy Π ∆x & ∆cs ∆x cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy Π ∆y cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy Π ∆x & ∆cs ∆x cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy Π ∆y cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy Π ∆x cs escriviu	una	equació	aquí. Δy o ocs ow ∆cs jumps up htop / figure : comparative statics and most preferred drugs in the drug space (x;h): be o = (x ;htop) in figure , where htop is the highest possible quality. in contrast, consumers prefer drugs that are horizontally di¤erentiated from the pioneering drug. in terms of consumer surplus, the optimal drug would be ocs, the farthest from x in the horizontal dimension and at the border of region c. finally, if we de�ne the increase in social welfare as the sum of �rm �s pro�ts and the increase in the health system surplus, that is, �w � � +�cs, then balancing both �rm and consumer interests, the optimal drug from a total welfare point of view would be ow in figure . the drug ow improves upon the pioneering drug as much as possible in the vertical dimension and it is also horizontally di¤erentiated from the pioneering drug, although the optimal di¤erentiation is far from the maximal. in fact, the drug ow would be horizontally located at = since this is the drug type that minimizes the side-e¤ects of the whole population of patients. a model of pharmaceutical innovation in this section we analyze the �rst stage of our game, the innovation stage, where �rm chooses its r&d investment to maximize its expected pro�t. the innovation strategy of the �rm involves both the type of innovative process that it wants to adopt and the level of the resources invested in that process. we now describe a typology of drugs and we have assumed that the pioneering drug is sold at its marginal cost. thus, the �rm (or any of the �rms) selling drug always has zero pro�ts. innovation processes and then discuss the �rm�s innovation decision. . me-too versus breakthrough drugs in the pharmaceutical industry, a crucial distinction is made between me-too and break- through innovations. the traditional distinction between these two types of innovation relies on the mechanism of the action of the drugs. however, several voices in the phar- maceutical industry have called for the adoption of a broader perspective when evaluating innovation in medicines. our interpretation is that the di¤erence between me-too and breakthrough innovations rests on the distance between the new drug and the pioneer at either the horizontal axis and/or the vertical one. a me-too innovation represents a small change for some (or all) patients either in terms of quality of treatment, cost savings or side e¤ects. for example, a me-too innovation may open the possibility of administering smaller or fewer doses, or it might imply a slightly less invasive delivery (which we inter- pret as a small increase in y). a me-too innovation may also cause slightly lower side e¤ects for a subpopulation of patients (a small change in x). in contrast, a breakthrough innovation ensures a signi�cant increase in the quality of the new drug or a drug whose characteristics make it well-suited to patients who could not be well treated under the existing treatment. . incremental versus radical innovation processes a �rm seeking a me-too or a breakthrough innovation would rely on di¤erent processes. in this sense, we de�ne an incremental innovation process as a process aiming at a me- too innovation with respect to the existing drug. similarly, when the process pursues a signi�cant improvement (for all or a subpopulation of patients), or a substantial cost reduction as compared to the old drug, then we say that the innovation process is radical. see the report by mestre-ferrandiz, mordoh, and sussex ( ) for a thorough discussion of the nature of innovation in medicines. insulin pens, for instance, are minimally invasive and have largely superseded the conventional insulin syringe. the antihistamine clarinex (desloratidine), for instance, is a small variation of claritin (loratidine) that has lower side e¤ects for those people with severe allergies and/or accompanying chronic respiratory problems. for instance, prilosep, based on the �rst proton pump inhibitor (omeprazole), was considered a breakthrough. it proved to be more e¤ective than histamine- receptor antagonists to the management of peptic ulcer diseases. sometimes, follow-on drugs are simply the natural outcome of simultaneous research programs into the same therapeutic target (dimasi and paquette, ). in other cases, they are the result of an intentionally imitative research program (garnier, ). the approach adopted in this paper is best suited to this second view of the innovation process. formally, an incremental innovation process (which we will denote by the sub-index in) pursues a drug with a small �x or �y whereas a radical innovation process (denoted by the sub-index ra) aims at a drug with a large �x and/or �y. . a simple model of innovation in this subsection we propose a highly stylized model of r&dinvestment with uncertainty. we assume that the result of the innovation process is uncertain and its outcome can only be poorly predicted, if at all. the uncertainty is greater for groundbreaking processes. there are two types of innovation strategies available to the pharmaceutical �rm. an incremental innovation process can lead to a drug that is similar to the pioneering drug, in the sense that it would have the same horizontal (or vertical) characteristic, that is, x = x (or y = y ) and a minor improvement in quality (or small di¤erences in side e¤ects). on the other hand, a radical innovation process results, in the case of success, in a drug (x ;y ) where y is random but higher than y and x is also random. this re�ects the idea that the innovative process represents a signi�cant departure from the old drug. moreover, the side e¤ects may also be very di¤erent from those of the pioneering drug. we depict the two categories of processes in figure . the crucial di¤erences between the two categories of processes is that the distribution of the outcome of a radical innovation process takes values on a large support and has a greater variance, which leads to higher chances of getting a breakthrough drug (girotra, terwiesch, and ulrich, ; singh and fleming, ). let us �rst consider incremental innovation processes. if an investment i is realized then there is a probability qin(i), increasing in i, of obtaining an innovation, while no drug is obtained with probability � qin(i). if it is a vertical innovation process then, in the case of success, the new drug has characteristics (x ;y ), with x = x and y is distributed according to the density function fin(y ) that takes values in the interval [y �
ver;y + �ver] ; where 
ver and �ver are small (in the sense that the new drug cannot be much more cost-e¤ective than the pioneer). thus, for all i invested in a vertical sometimes the incremental innovation process is developed by the same �rm that holds the patent for the pioneering drug in order to better compete with those �rms o¤ering generic versions of the drug once the patent has expired. examples are prilosec and nexium, aimed at decreasing the amount of acid produced in the stomach. in the patent for prilosec (which has omeprazole as an active ingredient), owned by astrazeneca, expired and several generic versions of omeprazole entered the market. the same year, nexium, whose active ingredient is esomeprazole (a version of omeprazole whose molecular orientation is left-handed), was also patented by astrazeneca (our �rm ). note that our innovation process in the vertical dimension di¤ers notably from the vertical innovation analyzed by bardey et al. ( ), where a vertical innovation is always synonymous with a breakthrough innovation. x h x h vertical incremental ip radical ip horizontal incremental ip figure : incremental and radical innovation processes. incremental innovation process, expected private pro�ts �in(i) and social welfare win(i) are �in(i) = qin(i) z [y �
ver;y +�ver] � (x = x ;y)fin(y)dy; win(i) = qin(i) z [y �
ver;y +�ver] � � (x = x ;y)+�cs(x = x ;y) � fin(y)dy, where � (x;y) and �cs(x;y) denote the �rm �s pro�ts and the increase in consumer surplus when the new drug has characteristics (x;y). the expressions for pro�ts and social welfare are similar for horizontal incremental processes. in this case, the r&d investment leads, in the case of success, to a drug (x ;y ) with y = y and x is distributed according to a density function hin(x) that takes values in the interval [x �
hor;x + �hor] ; where 
hor and �hor are positive and small (in the sense that the new drug would be suitable for similar types of patient than the pioneer drug). proposition compares private and social incentives to adopt an incremental innova- tion process. proposition for an incremental innovation process pursuing a me-too drug, the opti- mal investment decision for �rm ; i in; and for the social planner, i � in; coincide: i in = i � in. the intuition for this result derives from the fact that, for drugs close to the pioneering drug, the innovative �rm is always able to extract all the health system surplus. consider a vertical innovation process. if it is successful and the drug has a characteristic y > y , �rm gets some monopoly power because the new drug lies in region c. the �rm will impact all the extra quality of the drug into a higher price and it is able to extract all the health system surplus (�cs = in region c when �x = ). as the health system never bene�ts from the new drug, social and private incentives to innovate coincide as do their optimal investment levels. the intuition for the horizontal incremental process is similar: when the realization of ~x is close to x ; �rm sets the maximum price that the health authority is willing to pay and it extracts all the surplus (�cs = ). we now consider a radical process. if an investment i is made then there is a prob- ability qra(i), increasing in i, of success at getting a new drug (x ;y ). if the process is successful, the new drug has characteristics (x ;y ), where y takes values in the inter- val [y +�;y +�] and x takes values in the interval [ ; ] ; where � can be positive or negative, � is positive, � < � and (x ;y ) is distributed according to a density function fra(x ;y ). therefore, expected private and social bene�ts for each level of investment i in a radical innovation process are �ra(i) = qra(i) z [ ; ] z [y +�;y +�] � (x ;y )fra(x ;y )dy dx and wra(i) = qra(i) z [ ; ] z [y +�;y +�] � � (x ;y )+�cs(x ;y ) � fra(x ;y )dy dx : proposition states the di¤erence between private and social incentives to invest in a radical innovation process. proposition for a radical innovation process pursuing a breakthrough drug the optimal investment decision for �rm ; i ra; is smaller than that for the social planner, i � ra: i ra < i�ra. a radical innovation process leads, with a certain probability, to a drug that improves the health system surplus. first, the health system bene�ts when the process is successful if the new drug lies in region c and x = x . in this case, the innovative �rm cannot appropriate all the surplus: at the maximum price at which it can serve all the market (pall), some patients are strictly better-o¤ with the new drug than with the pioneer. similarly, if the successful process leads to a drug in region b.ii then the interior price pint allows the health system to bene�t. a social planner would also take into account typically, qra(i) would be (much) lower than qin(i) for any i: the function fra(x ;y ) may not take values for some intervals of characteristics. figure , for instance, illustrates a process that never leads to very extreme drugs on the horizontal axis. in this �gure, � > but this is not necessary in general. this surplus that the �rm cannot extract from the health system and it would choose a higher investment level than the �rm. as shown in propositions and , the �rm fully appropriates all the bene�ts derived from me-too drugs, whereas the health system can appropriate some surplus if a radical innovation process goes successfully. proposition uses these results to state the main policy implication of our analysis of the innovation incentives. proposition if �rm can only adopt one category of innovation process (due, for instance, to �nancial or capacity constraints) then: (i) there are cases where �rm prefers to adopt an incremental innovation process whereas the social welfare is larger when adopting a radical innovation process. (ii) there is no case where �rm prefers to adopt a radical innovation process whereas adopting an incremental innovation process would generate a higher welfare. proposition provides some theoretical support to the social concern that pharma- ceutical �rms devote too many resources to market me-too drugs and too few to launch breakthrough drugs. our model suggests that this disalignment between private and so- cial incentives is due to the lack of private incentives to pursue radical innovations. while private and social incentives to devote resources to pursue me-too drugs are aligned be- cause the �rm is able to appropriate all the bene�ts through the price, this is not true for �rst-in-class drugs. in the latter case, the �rm sets a price for the new drug which is low enough to serve all (or a good part of) the market and the consumers bene�t from it. the physician is a perfect agent for the patients in the previous sections we have assumed that the demand for the drugs is decided by a physician who prescribes the drug that provides the highest bene�t to the whole health system. in this section we discuss the robustness of the results when the physician acts as a perfect agent for the patients, prescribing the drug that maximizes the patients�utility. thus, the physician does not consider the whole cost of the drugs; he only internalizes the cost disbursed by the patient. we analyze two di¤erent reimbursement regimes: one in which patients pay a proportion of the price of the drugs not covered by health insurance (that is, there is a copayment), and a second one in which the old drug is fully �nanced by the health authority while the new one is not covered by health insurance. if the physician makes choices considering patient utility and health authority costs then we would be in the framework analyzed in the previous sections: the physician internalizes the whole price, regardless of whether they are paid by the health authority or by the patients themselves. . patient cost-sharing of the drugs suppose that there is a copayment � ( ; ] so that patients are required to pay �p if the price of the drug is p. then, the bene�t to the health system of treating patient x with drug (x̂; ĥ) and paying price p̂ for this drug is h(x; x̂; ĥ; p̂) while patients�utility, which determines the physician�s prescription of drugs, is u(x; x̂; ĥ; p̂) � b � ĥ� l jx̂�xj � ��p̂ = � � b � � ĥ� l jx̂�xj � � p̂ � : if the physician follows the function u(x; x̂; ĥ; p̂) instead of h(x; x̂; ĥ; p̂) to make his choices, then all the results concerning physician prescription choices and �rm �s pricing decisions for the case � = (proposition ) would remain valid for any � by replacing, in the expressions of pmax, pall, and pint, the parameter b by b � . that is, the results in a model where patients pay a proportion of the prices are similar to those in a model without copayment where the marginal utility of being healthy is higher. since sign � @p @� � = �sign � @p @b � , and pmax, pall, and pint are all increasing in b, the price of the new drug will be higher the lower the copayment �. in order to examine the results more deeply we need to distinguish two cases. in the case c = c (i.e., �c = ), the regions in the drug space depicted in figure are independent of the parameter b. therefore, at the optimal prices, the new and the old drugs are prescribed to the same patients for any value of �, although the price for drug is larger as � decreases. this implies that, for �c = , an increase in the copayment (that is, a decrease in �) leads to a lower bene�t to the health system and to a higher pro�t to �rm . however, such increase in the copayment has no impact on total welfare because changes in � only induce changes in the monetary transfers between the health system and the innovative �rm. thus, the optimal drug for �rm would still be o (see figure ), the drug ow would still be optimal from a total welfare point of view (de�ned as the sum of the bene�ts of the health system and �rm �s pro�ts), and the point ocs would correspond to the optimal drug for the patient (that is, the drug that maximizes the function u). in the case c > c (�c > ), the borders of the regions in figure shift vertically down, and the new drug is prescribed to more patients with than without copayment. here, the increase in the monetary transfer from the health authority to �rm due to the copayment comes combined with a misallocation of drugs from the health system this extension also corresponds to the case where there is no copayment but the physician gives di¤erent weights to the patient health (a weight of ) and to the drugs�price (a weight of a). equivalently, the model corresponds to a situation where the physician takes into account both the patients�utility and the pro�ts of the health authority and puts less weight on the second term. perspective. the location of the optimal drugs o , ow , and ocs in the drug space would be the same as in the case �c = when figure is drawn using the new (shifted-down) borders. finally, given that equilibrium prices are higher when the physician is a perfect agent for patients subject to copayment than when he is a perfect agent for the health system, the pro�ts of the innovative �rm are higher: the three functions � (pmax), � (pint); and � (pall) are linear in b; hence, they increase as � decreases. therefore, �rm �s incentives to innovate are also higher. this result holds both for incremental and radical innovation processes. when �c = , the regions in figure do not vary with � and, given the linearity of the pro�t functions in b, the trade-o¤ between the two types of processes is una¤ected: the �rm has relatively too many incentives to pursue an incremental rather than a radical innovation process. if �c > , low values of � imply that drugs close to the pioneer (in terms of h and x) that would not have been marketed without copayments are now prescribed. therefore, �rm has a stronger incentive to develop drugs whose additional therapeutic value is low, which suggests that it is yet more inclined to devote resources to incremental rather than to radical innovation processes. . the new drug is not subsidized suppose now that the health authority only covers the old drug, so that patients have to pay the full price of the new one, should it be prescribed. thus, patients�utility when treated with the old drug is u(x;x ;h ; ) = b � h � l ��x �x��� ; while it takes the form u(x;x ;h ;p ) = b � h � l ��x �x����p when patients are prescribed the new drug. then, physician prescription choices and pricing decisions by the �rm are obtained by considering the analysis conducted in the previous sections for the particular case c = : both the physician and the �rm behave as if the price of the pioneering drug were . since pmax, pall, and pint are all decreasing in c , �rm is induced to choose lower prices than in our initial model. moreover, looking at figure , reductions in c make the borders of the regions shift vertically up and, at the optimal prices, the new drug is prescribed to fewer patients as compared to the situation in which the cost of the pioneering drug is also taken into account. thus, in this case, the �rm obtains lower pro�ts and it has lower incentives to innovate. however, its relative incentives to adopt radical innovation processes are now larger because me-too drugs do not provide any pro�ts. conclusion the proliferation of follow-on drugs is nowadays the subject of some debate. proponents of follow-on drugs highlight that some of them are therapeutically superior to the pioneer. moreover, patients and physicians bene�t from the access to a larger pool of therapeutic choices. but there are also voices warning that imitative drug development poses a threat, as it could reduce the incentive for �rms to develop �rst-in-class drugs. this paper seeks to contribute to this social debate. we have constructed a simple model where drugs are vertically and horizontally di¤erentiated. after studying the opti- mal price decision of a �rm introducing a new drug, we have analyzed the �rm incentives to invest in r&d when a pioneer drug is already on the market. in particular, we have disentangled the quest for breakthrough drugs from the search of follow-on drugs. in our model, both breakthrough and follow-on drugs are socially valuable. while private and social incentives to invest in r&d processes coincide for incremental innovation ventures, private incentives are lower than social ones when the process is rad- ical. moreover, we interestingly �nd that pharmaceutical �rms are too prone to devoting resources (if scarce) to pursue incremental innovation processes so as to fully appropriate all the bene�ts derived from me-too drugs. thus, these results somehow reproduce the social concern that the main problem regarding the rapid increase of me-too drugs is that they diminish the incentives for innovation in pioneering drugs. our conclusions are obtained under some simplifying assumptions; we now discuss some of them. first, we have assumed that the pioneering drug is sold on the market at its marginal price. this hypothesis �ts well in markets where the patent for the pioneering drug has already expired and several generic drugs have been introduced. however, there are other markets where the pioneering drug is sold by one �rm at a price over its marginal cost. in such cases, the incumbent �rm may react to the launch of a new drug by reducing the price of its drug. price competition between the two �rms will be �ercer the lower the horizontal distance between the two drugs. this seems to suggest that under price competitionthe incentivesof the innovative�rmtodi¤erentiate itself in thehorizontal axis increase, which may translate into more incentives to adopt radical innovation processes. in addition to this, if the patent covering the pioneering drug has not expired yet, an incremental innovation would be more likely to infringe on the patent than a radical one, which would further increase the �rm�s incentives to invest in radical innovations. secondly, our innovative �rm freely chooses the price of the new drug. however, reg- ulations worldwide to control excessive market power of pharmaceutical �rms abound. it would be worth investigating whether price regulations (such as price ceilings or reference prices) would be an e¤ective tool to align the incentives of the �rm and the society. price ceilings in our model, for instance, would undermine private incentives to innovate. given that the di¤erence in prices between the new and the pioneering drugs is higher for radical than for incremental innovations, the price ceilings should have a larger negative impact on radical than on incremental processes. our analysis also suggests that price ceilings would have a larger impact on vertical rather than on horizontal innovations. since verti- cal improvements allow the pharmaceutical �rm to charge higher prices, the �rm will be more constrained by the regulated price if it launches a new drug that is an improvement over the pioneer in the vertical dimension. regarding reference prices, the restriction on prices might concern only those drugs that are close to the pioneer. in that case, the incentives for radical innovations may be less a¤ected by the regulation than those for incremental innovations as more di¤erentiated new drugs manage to charge a larger price and obtain higher pro�ts. third, our results have been obtained under the assumption of risk neutrality for all the players involved. however, it is natural to think that pharmaceutical �rms exhibit a certain degree of risk aversion. if we relax the risk neutrality assumption to accommodate more realism, our main result would be reinforced as risk aversion would make �rms even more prone to adopt (safer) incremental innovations. finally, in our model there is only one innovative �rm so we have not considered com- petition in research (in bardey et al., , several laboratories compete in the research sector of the pharmaceutical industry). if �rms compete in adopting incremental innova- tion processes, they will overinvest in comparison to the socially e¢ cient level, leading to more me-too drugs than the socially optimal number. at the same time, the innovative �rm will also increase its investment in radical innovation processes under the pressure of competition. and this could lead to investment levels closer to the socially optimal one. thus, if �rms compete in research, the result that they devote too many resources to conducting r&d activities that lead to incremental innovations still holds. in this paper, we have identi�ed a problem of misalignment between private and so- cial incentives to innovate that results in a bias toward me-too drugs. a more normative analysis, in which di¤erent solutions to the problem can be addressed, is left for further research. such policies could include direct r&d tax incentives, nonpro�t tax exemp- tions for research institutions, public �nancing of r&d activity, as well as many other instruments that attempt to stimulate various forms of research and innovative activity. our analysis suggests that the optimal r&d policy should focus on providing incentives for radical innovation ventures. finally, although there seems to be a great social awareness of the proliferation of me-too drugs, to date, economists have done little theoretical research on this issue. we hope that this study opens the door to further research into that area and that it will also stimulate the ongoing debate over the excessive launching of me-too drugs. references [ ] angell, m., . the truth about the drug companies. new york: random house. 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[ ] yin, n., . pharmaceuticals, incremental innovation and market exclusivity. mimeo, toulouse school of economics. appendix proof of proposition . we distinguish three zones of parameters: c � pmax; c � pall;pmax � , and c � pall. we note that c � pmax if and only if �c � b(l�x + �h), i.e., �y � �l�x. similarly, c � pall if and only if �c � b(�h � l�x), i.e., �y � l�x. we analyze the optimal �rm�s pricing in the three zones. zone �y� �l�x: given that c � pmax, there is no price above marginal cost at which the physician prescribes the new drug to some patients. therefore, the best strategy for �rm is to not sell its drug. zone �y (�l�x; l�x) : in this zone, c > pall and �rm cannot select a price at which it makes a pro�t by selling to all the patients. if x > x , the �rm chooses the price p that maximizes its pro�ts, taking into account that its drug will be prescribed to those patients with characteristic x [~x; ). hence, p [c ; pmax] maximizes � (p ) = (p � c )( � ~x) = (p � c ) � �x � (l�x ��h) l � (p � c ) bl � : we write the expression for the pro�ts as � (p ) = (p � c ) � m � (l�x ��h) l � (p � c ) bl � , which is also valid for the situation where x < x (if x = x , this zone is empty). the �rst-order and second-order conditions are � p (p ) = m � (l�x ��h) l � ( p � (c + c )) bl ; � p p (p ) = � bl < : the interior candidate to solution p satis�es � p (p ) = and is given by p = p int = � c + c � + blm � b(l�x ��h): the concavity of the function � (p ;�x;�h) implies that the candidate pint is the optimum if and only if it lies in the interval [c ;pmax]. first, pint > c if and only if �c + blm � b(l�x ��h) > , that is, �y > l�x � lm. given that m � �x, the previous inequality is implied by �y > �l�x, which is satis�ed in this zone. second, pint < pmax = c +b(l�x +�h) if and only if �c + blm � b(l�x ��h) < b(l�x +�h), from which it easily follows that pint < pmax if and only if m < l ( l�x +�y). therefore, in this zone, p � = pint if m < l ( l�x +�y) and p � = pmax otherwise (p = c cannot be optimal because pro�ts would be zero). zone �y� l�x: in this zone, �rm can set the price pall that would allow it to attract all patients in [ ; ] : it can also choose any price in the interval p � pall;pmax � , in which case the new drug will be prescribed to a subset of the patients. in this interval, the interior candidate to solution is pint, as in the previous zone. we check the conditions under which pint � pall;pmax � . first, pint > pall if and only if (c + c ) + blm � b(l�x � �h) > c + b(�h � l�x); that is, m > l (�y � l�x): if x < x , then ~x = x � (l�x ��h) l � � p � c � bl = m � (l�x ��h) l � � p � c � bl : note that at p = pint, �rm serves a market of size m. however, this cannot be the best pricing strategy for the �rm because it can serve the whole market and obtain larger pro�ts by marginally decreasing the price. therefore, if m � l (�y � l�x), setting the price pall and serving the whole market is certainly the optimal decision. second, as we show in the analysis of zone �y (�l�x; l�x), pint � pmax if and only if m � l ( l�x +�y). thus, for m � l ( l�x +�y) ; the candidates for solution are pmax and pall; for m � l (�y � l�x); l ( l�x +�y) � the candidates for solution are pint and pall; and for m � l (�y � l�x), the optimal price is pall. wenowanalyzetheconditions for� (pmax) � � (pall), that is, b(m ��x)(�y + l�x) � b(�y � l�x), or �y � ( +m ��x) ( �m +�x) l�x = lg (�x) : we note that the border �y = lg (�x) always lies in the zone �y � l�x, because b�y � blg (�x) � b(�y � l�x) if and only if g (�x) � �x, which is equivalent to ( +m��x)( �m+�x) � , or m � �x, which holds. similarly, � (pint) � � (pall) if and only if b l � lm + (�y � l�x) � � b(�y � l�x) that, denoting t � (�y � l�x), can be written as � lm + t � � lt � , that is, f(t) � � t� l � �m + p �m ��� t� l � �m � p �m �� � : we are interested in the cases where m > l (�y � l�x) (because pall is certainly optimal otherwise), that is, t < lm. the function f(t) satis�es f( ) > : moreover, f( lm) < . therefore, f(t) � if and only if t is lower than the �rst root, that is, �y � l�x � l � �m � p �m � , or �y � l�x + l � �m � p �m � = lg (�x) : we note that the change in the de�nition of the function g (�x) happens at the point where m = l (�y + l�x) (which separates the regions where either pint or pmax are candidates). then, the value �x where the change happens is the solution of the following system of equations (in �x and �h): m = l (�y + l�x) �y = l�x + l � �m � p �m � that is, �x = p �m � ( �m) ; which is a positive value. the function g (�x), as it is de�ned in the main text just before proposition , is continuous because it is continuous at the point p �m�( �m), and it is also continuously di¤erentiable. once we have analyzed the optimal price in each of the three zones, it easily follows that the solution is continuous, in the sense that if the optimal price is pall (resp. pmax) in the second zone, then it is also optimal if we decrease �c and enter the third zone. therefore, the optimal �rm �s pricing policy is the one described in the proposition. finally, it is easy to check that the pro�ts are continuous: (a) over the line �y = lm � l�x, we have � (pmax) = � (pint): (b) if the condition �y = lg (�x) holds we have two cases: (b. ) for g(�x) � ( +m��x)( �m+�x)�x, � (pall) = � (pmax) and (b. ) for g(�x) � �x + � �m � p �m � , then � (pall) = � (pint). proof of corollary . we denote � (�x;�y) the �rm �s pro�ts as a function of �x and �y. in region b.i, where p � = pmax: � �y(�x;�y) = b(m ��x) > ; � �y�y (�x;�y) = : � �x(�x;�y) = b(lm � ( l�x +�y)), which is positive for �y = �l�x and negative for �y = lm � l�x; � �x�x(�x;�y) = � bl < : in region b.ii, where p � = pint: � �y(�x;�y) = b l ( lm +�y � l�x) > ; � �y�y(�x;�y) = bl > : � �x(�x;�y) = � b ( lm +�y � l�x) < ; � �x�x(�x;�y) = bl > : in region c, where p � = pall: � �y(�x;�y) = b > ; � �y�y (�x;�y) = : � �x(�x;�y) = �lb < ; � �x�x (�x;�y) = : proof of proposition . proofs for region a and region b.i are immediate. in region b.ii the variation in health system surplus, that is, (in case x � x ) the di¤erence for patients in [~x; ] from being treated with drug (h ;x ) at price c and being treated with drug (h ;x ) at price pint; is the sum of the area de�ned by a triangle for [~x;x ] and the area de�ned by a rhomboid for [x ; ]. for the patients in [~x;x ], �cs = (x � ~x(pint))(bh �pint � b(h � l(x �x ))+ c ) : substituting ~x(pint) and pint; we have �cs = b l (�y + l�x � lm) . for the patients in [x ; ], �cs = ( �x )(bh �pint � b(h � l(x �x ))+ c ) : substi- tuting pint and using ( �x ) = (m ��x) ; we have �cs = b (m ��x)(�y + l�x � lm) . the case x < x is similar. hence, adding both intervals, we obtain �cs(pint) = b l (�y + l�x � lm)(�y � l�x + lm) : in region c the variation in the health system surplus is similar to the one previously analyzed, but taking into account that for pall (considering again that x > x ) patients in [ ;x ] have the same surplus as without the new drug. for the patients in [x ;x ], �cs = � x �x �� bh �pall � b � h � l � x �x �� + c � : substituting pall we have �cs = bl� x. for [x ; ], �cs = ( �x ) � bh �pall � b(h � l(x �x ))+ c � : substituting pall and using ( �x ) = (m ��x) ;we obtain �cs = bl�x (m ��x) : adding the two parts, we have �cs(pall) = bl�x ( m ��x) : proof of corollary . we denote �cs(�x;�y) the variation in consumer surplus as a function of �x and �y. in region a and region b.i all the derivatives are zero. in region b.ii: �cs�y(�x;�y) = b l (�y � l�x + lm) > b l (� l�x + ml) > : �cs�y�y(�x;�y) = b l > : �cs�x(�x;�y) = (��y � l�x + lm) : we note that, at m = l (�y + l�x) ; �cs�x(�x;�y) = (�y + l�x) > because �y > �l�x. moreover, �cs�x(�x;�y) < (� l�x + lm) : hence, �cs�x(�x = m;�y) < : �cs�x�x(�x;�y) = � bl < in region c: �cs�y(�x;�y) = ; �cs�y�y(�x;�y) = : �cs�x(�x;�y) = bl(m ��x) > : �cs�x�x(�x;�y) = � bl < : finally, the behavior of �cs at the borders between regions follows from the behavior of the optimal price p � that we discussed following proposition . proof of proposition . in case of a successful project, the new drug (x = x ;y) lies either in region a (for y � y ) or region c with x = x (for y > y ): in the �rst case (see proposition ), �cs(x = x ;y) = �cs(c ) = . in the second case, �cs(x = x ;y) = �cs(pall) = bl�x ( m ��x) = because �x = : therefore, �in(i) = win(i) for all i and the optimal investment levels for the two functions coincide. the argument for a horizontal incremental innovation process is similar because the new drug would lie in region b.i where �cs(x;y = y ) = �cs(pmax) = . proof of proposition . there is some positive probability that the new drug (x ;y ) lies in region c with x = x . depending on the level of y , there can also be a positive probability that the new drug lies in region b.ii). in both regions, �cs(x;y ) > : given that �cs(x;y) � for every new drug, we have d�ra(i) di < dwra(i) di for every i, which implies that i ra < i � ra. proof of proposition . denoting by i z and i � z for z = in, ra the optimal level of investment in a process of type z for �rm and the social planner, respectively, then �in(i in) = win(i � in) �ra(i ra) < wra(i � ra): it may happen that wra(i � ra) > win(i � in) = �in(i in) > �ra(i ra) but it can never be the case that wra(i � ra) < win(i � in) = �in(i in) < �ra(i ra); which implies the result. 	cesifo working paper no. 	category : industrial organisation 	december 	abstract s jra .. broadening research in gender and music practice a n n w e r n e r , t a m i g a d i r a n d s a m d e b o i s e södertörn university, culture and education, alfred nobels allé , huddinge, sweden e-mail: ann.werner@sh.se rmit university, school of media and communication, la trobe street, melbourne, vic , australia e-mail: tami.gadir@rmit.edu.au Örebro university, school of music, theatre and art, Örebro, sweden e-mail: sam.deboise@oru.se abstract this article builds on research about gender in music practice, concerned with skewed musical canons, ratios and quotas of gender representation, unfair treatment and power dynamics, and the exclusionary enmeshment with music technologies. the aim is to critically discuss what ‘gender’ is understood to be, how it has been studied and how gendered power has been challenged, in order to suggest new routes for research on gender and music practice. while we count ourselves among the scholars working in the field and critically investigate our own work as well as that of others, the article addresses some additional concerns to those of previous studies by examining how gender is ontologically constructed in these studies, how intersectional approaches can enrich analyses of gender in music practice and how the material dimensions of music practice can be actively addressed. the conclusions outline suggestions for broadening research in gender and music practice. this article is an appraisal of some of the questions and research topics that scholar- ship on both gender and music practice has dealt with, asking where research on ‘women’, gender and music has been leading us, in both scholarly and political terms. in doing so, we review the main strands of previous, predominantly, but not exclusively, anglophone work on gender and music practice, while discussing theoretical and political approaches to gender. our literature review is followed by three sections addressing dilemmas facing that research: ontologically binary modes of gender; intersectionality and difference; and the material aspects of music practice. these issues are discussed through our own research on popular music, especially rock, pop and electronic dance music. we engage in conversation with existing music research in our own individual work, namely research in gender a first version of the article was presented collectively at music and gender in balance, a conference in norway in . for us, the concept of ‘balance’ in both scholarly discussions and everyday discourses on gender is worth questioning from an epistemological perspective. we have opted to express gender in this article as artists or people who identify as a given gender. the exceptions to this are when we summarise research that uses different terminologies, in order to remain faithful to the choices researchers have made in their discussions of gender. popular music ( ) volume / - . © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press, pp. – this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided the original work is properly cited. . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:ann.werner@sh.se mailto:tami.gadir@rmit.edu.au mailto:sam.deboise@oru.se http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and music practice from mainly the anglophone world, the global north and ‘the west’. our aim is to critically discuss how ‘gender’ is understood and how it is stud- ied in previous research that has been central for this field in order to suggest new routes for research on gender and music practice. contemporary studies in music practice from the fields we draw on, including musicology, music history, ethnomusicology, sociology of music, popular music studies and music education, have always sought to address issues of inequality and power around the world. whether in terms of lyrics, artist statements or #metoo activism, music culture itself is formed within uneven differentials of power. logically, the ways in which scholars have addressed issues of gender in music practice in particular reflect broader trends within process-oriented ontologies, where gender is constructed in practice rather than pre-existing, in the humanities and social sciences. early contributions to such discussions are stern’s ( ) work on finding and cataloguing women-identifying composers in classical music, mcrobbie and garber’s ( / ) feminist challenge to the emphasis on men in subcultural studies of music and koskoff’s ( ) collection of writings on women and their musical activity in different parts of the world. the pool of scholars willing to address questions about what part gender plays in music practice increased in the s, with topics expanding to the complicity of music and musicians in gendered power dynamics. examples include how gender informs the practices of rock bands and gendered performance and composition in classical music (cf. bayton ; cusick ; mcclary ). today there is a large and growing body of academic research about gender and music, as well as signs of increased interest in gender policy within the global music industries (raine and strong ). at the same time, there are continuing inequalities in music scenes, reception, histories and the process of music creation. furthermore, gender studies and feminist theory have continued to develop their theoretical understandings of gender in ways that clearly have implications for stud- ies of gender and music practice. harding ( ) has argued that feminist theory tends to employ three different epistemologies in the way that knowledge about gen- der is formed: empiricism, standpoint theory and post-structural feminist theory. within empiricist feminist knowledge, the focus has been on adding women and their experience to science, arguing that androcentrism has excluded women’s experience. discussing the limits of this approach, scott ( ) argues that adding women’s experience to the canon without challenging the very idea of a canon nei- ther addresses power in a systematic way nor challenges positivist knowledge claims. a standpoint feminist approach, on the other hand, argues that developing knowledge from the point of view of marginal groups should be a main objective given that knowledge itself is always partial. through their standpoint, women-identifying subjects and others can challenge power structures. while femin- ist standpoint theory has substantively contributed to theories of science, it fails to fully account for the relationship between woman (subject), femininity and gender. while feminist standpoint theory is largely social-constructivist, post-structural fem- inist theory aims to challenge the idea of the subject (butler ). on the other hand, in post-structuralist feminist work, language, difference and contradiction are placed while we draw on research from all of these fields, our focus is on musicology, music education and popular music studies: our own research fields. broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core at the centre of attention, which risks decentralising the political work of collectively striving for political change and improving equality in music. rather than focusing on whether music is pre-social (cf. tomlinson ) or social (cf. denora ; martin ), we take as a starting point that music is cultur- ally, historically and geographically contingent and shaped through performance (small ). given that in our day-to-day research we directly engage with partici- pants in music settings, we simultaneously treat music as a flexible intellectual con- cept, while acknowledging music participants’ shared understandings of music in its everyday uses within specific spaces. the remainder of this article is structured as follows: we start with a review of the main strands of research concerned with gender and music practice focusing on their epistemology and continue with thematic sections. the first theme discusses gender ontology and problematises some of the ways that scholars have framed ‘gender’ and outlined political solutions to power imbalance in research on gender and music practice. the second theme addresses how the idea of music as transform- ation is troubled by difference and power through intersectional gender theory. the third discusses material conditions and ontological ways of understanding such conditions, affecting who can participate in music practice and how. canons and role models one of the clearest ways that a gender perspective is present in research on music practice is in the discussion about representation and visibility of women and men in music histories. as citron ( ) notes, canonisation impacts on the representation of musical histories in that it ascribes value to certain performers and composers. canon also has performative function – the music of composers in the canon will be played and taught more often. scholars have observed the discursive gendering of ‘musical genius’ as masculine in classical music and have challenged the cultural consecration of men in popular music genres such as rock, which has obscured the contributions of women composers and musicians (battersby ; schmutz and faupel ). together with other feminist research in the humanities, such examples are among the concerted attempts to change the epistemological foundations of music histories as well as who is included in such histories. scholars have attempted to ‘recover’ or more accurately depict the presence of musicians, composers and artists who were not men across genres and activities (clay ; hinkle-turner ; pendle and boyd ; reddington ; rustin and tucker ). understanding how musical canons are shaped involves investigating gen- dered participation in current music cultures. here, research has found that inequal- ities structure the types of opportunities and resources allocated to musicians according to gender (bayton ; donze ; macarthur ; miller ). research about gender and music practice has responded by addressing the quanti- tative distribution of people in professional music positions. a recent study from the us, for example, shows that only % of most popular hit songs in the us are per- formed by women-identifying artists and only % of songwriters and less than % in line with the performance turn in music studies (cf. small ) we understand music as an action rather than an object. we also limit the scope of this article by discussing music practice research where participation is in focus. ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core of producers are identified as women (smith et al. , pp. – ). studies of quanti- tative music participation in us popular music are significant as the country pro- duces a large number of internationally successful artists. still, ‘women’ comprise between and % of members within professional organisations in music in brazil (união brasileira de compositores ), sweden (svenska tonsättares internationella byrå ) and the uk (prs foundation ), indicating that partici- pation imbalance reaches different countries. furthermore, classical music has also been studied in terms of numerical gender representation and the number of women composers booked among the main concert houses in different countries is low (kvinnlig anhopning av svenska tonsättare ; macarthur ; women in music ). this also extends to gender imbalances in booking policies across popu- lar music festivals. for example, in sweden, ‘majority-women’ acts comprised only % of all festival acts (jämställd festival ). across europe, only % of all djs who were booked for electronic dance music festivals identified as women (female:pressure ). the low numbers of women-identifying composers and artists occur across genres and national contexts. while these studies do not represent the whole world, they show clear trends of imbalance in gender representation and illustrate one prevalent focus in research on gender and music practice: to ‘count’ the gender of practitioners. feminist researchers within gender and music studies have discussed correc- tives to the aforementioned issues with regard to gender representation. one strategy has been to inspire change through established musicians acting as ‘role models’ (bayton , p. ; clawson ). according to this line of thinking, the elevation of women-identified artists to positions of power and influence encourages others to subconsciously and affectively associate certain activities with themselves through gendered identification with those who are like them. feminist fan studies on audi- ences of women/girls relating to artists and gender identity have also examined the importance of role models from which to mould identity. for instance, mcrobbie and garber ( / ) have noted how subcultural studies have typically promoted culture for men, by men, on men, and subsequently feminist subcultural studies have served as both an empirical and theoretical corrective to this tendency. there is a tension between how musical value is understood discursively as gendered – for example, as constructed ideas in musical history and canons (battersby ) – and practical strategies to challenge gender representation, and to promote artists who identify as women as role models. the strength of the latter approach is that it is straightforward in critique of power, and the solutions proposed are easy to understand. yet when imagining the ways that role modelling is proposed as a means to inspire more young women to participate in musical life, gender is con- ceptualised in terms of the common-sense idea that ‘women’ can inspire each other based on a homogeneous understanding of ‘womanhood’. this, then, is broadly in line with psychoanalytic models of same-sex identification as a prerequisite to ‘nor- mal’ gendered identity development. as butler ( ) has argued, such psychoana- lytic models provide partial and inadequate understandings of gender. furthermore, while approaching the canonisation of music through a feminist critique may aim to deconstruct the norm of the man-identifying composer/musician, there is a risk that the aesthetic criteria by which masculine ideals have been canonised remain uncon- tested (cf. macarthur ; mcclary ). as rustin and tucker ( , pp. – ) have noted, such an approach risks adding some women to the canon while doing little to change the criteria of the canons themselves. in so doing, such a feminist broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core critique of canons has little impact, not disturbing the order or even challenging the idea of what a ‘woman’ is. thus, reforming historical canons, critiquing the numbers of women participating in music and seeking ideals about women and music through group identification and role models all imply that political change is some- thing performed on an individual level rather than challenging the notion of what musical quality is. we encourage a critique of the power relations that define what music deserves to be included in canons before focusing on efforts to include more women-identifying artists within such canons. discrimination in music practice in addition to questions about representation, scholarship on gender and music prac- tice has addressed experiences of discrimination owing to the ways that people exer- cise power within music practices. for example, music promoters’ and organisers’ booking policies may appear neutral, but are often realised through, and reinforce, social networks produced through gender, class and race inequalities. to take one example, scholars have demonstrated gender biases in orchestra selection procedures (cf. goldin and rouse ) and an overreliance on homosocial networks within musical economies (cameron ). organisers book acquaintances more often than they do strangers, and acquaintances are likely to share identifications with the organiser. participants in music cultures, especially in gatekeeping roles of record labels or concert venues, are dominated by those identifying as male. this makes access to music spaces skewed. gendered forms of socialisation have also been found to privilege certain modes of behaviour that influence participation in music spaces. for instance, as björck ( ) notes, there are specifically gendered ways of claiming and taking up space, which are instilled in young people from an early age, and which are strength- ened by discourses about who has the right to ‘claim’ space. the combination of dis- cursive resources and lack of social capital makes it more difficult for participants identifying as women and girls to access music in the first place (clawson ). comparable processes of socialisation and attitudes to taking up space also occur in music education (green ). at its most overt and violent, exclusion from music also takes the form of sexual harassment and assault. in the wake of the #metoo campaign, in sweden, a staggering , workers in music industries identifying as women publicly signed a petition on sexual harassment and discrimination (grönberg ). similar calls in both australia and norway highlight sexual harassment and assault in the music industries as a transnational problem (aftenposten ; the industry observer ). while the sam- ple of countries here mirrors the authors’ research contexts, similar discussions all over the world suggest that sexual harassment and assault in the music industries is an international problem. this supports what academic work has regularly demonstrated: that behaviours in music practice range from the undermining of women-identified artists’ technical competence in music to misogynistic abuse and sexual assault (bayton ; farrugia ; gavanas and reitsamer ). importantly, perceptions of sexual harassment and effects of gender discrimination within music industries differ substantially between men and women in such research. feminist studies of music have found that fans commonly experience sexual harassment and additional behaviours and attitudes that devalue them. in ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ‘masculine’-coded genres such as heavy metal, women- and girl-identifying fans have been considered groupies, and therefore either willing sexual subjects or/and unknowledgeable, superficial enthusiasts (hill ). while music fandom has been understood in a positive light as well (baym ), the fans of genres considered to be of ‘low’ value, or fans who are themselves considered to be of ‘low’ value, such as girl-identifying ‘tweens’, can be subject to delegitimisation in the media. it is easy to see that those who are already marginalised in other areas of social life are ascribed little power and value in their appreciation of music. this is exemplified in thornton’s research on club cultures, in which she finds that knowledge in the form of subcultural capital may be used as a means of excluding ‘women’ and working-class people from being taken seriously in subcultures as participants or fans (thornton ). studies examining how contemporary media depict women-identifying musi- cians have also demonstrated that discourses circulate differently about musicians across numerous genres, depending on perceptions of gender (faupel and schmutz ; hill ; leonard ). in line with general ideas about binary and heterosexual gender ideals, the media portray women-identifying musicians as pretty rather than tough, lucky rather than talented, happy rather than serious. there has, however, been a change in portrayals of successful women in music in the st century. many high-profile women-identifying and non-binary musicians are portrayed in various media as capable, strong and even feminist (krüger bridge ). yet such ideals frame success as an individual achievement for desir- able subjects, mirroring neoliberal values of resilience and individual excellence. in this process, feminine stereotypes are continually deployed and reinforced in relation to a variety of feminised bodies and, as such, continue to be marketable commodities within a late-capitalist system (cf. gill ; james ). in music criticism, aesthetic judgements about the value of so-called ‘feminine’ music styles (not necessarily performed by women-identifying artists) relate to dis- courses around music’s transcendental qualities, which in turn reinforce gendered narratives about performers and music through the disappearance of (feminine) bod- ies (kruse ). claims about musical quality generally are key to the way that cul- tural intermediaries justify their continued practices of informal discrimination against marginalised groups. as puwar ( ) highlights in her study of british con- texts, drawing on bourdieusian concepts of field and habitus, such thinking is endemic to institutional cultures. puwar ( , p. ) refers particularly to such nar- row perspectives as ‘ontological denial’ – where those who benefit from the tacit standards of so-called objective cultural value are unable to see the ways that such standards are not natural. in a similar way, discussions about the conditions of par- ticipants identifying as women in music practice mark them as other, even when the objective is to pursue equality. this diverts attention from a focus on exclusionary structures and discourses to a politics of rights for those treated ‘badly’ within which the structures remain unchallenged (cf. ahmed ). instruments, technology and genres research has focused on how ideas about gender shape engagement with music instruments, technologies and genre. binary gender divisions in musical instrument choices, in music education, have continued over a long period (abeles ). such broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core divisions tend to rest on assumptions that activities are either ‘masculine’ or ‘femin- ine’ as well as on the question of whether they ‘fit’ with the gender of the musician. at the same time, gendered norms associated with some musical instrument have changed throughout history. for example, some data indicate that fewer girls and women take up the electric guitar, the drums, trumpet or trombone, whereas fewer men and boys take up the flute, violin or singing (wych ). at the same time a recent study by fender from has shown a growing interest in the guitar by girls, indicating a possible change. what such studies have in common is the pairing of gender identity with instrument choice in a causal argument. the link between the voice and traditional ideas of femininity has been critiqued for its per- ceived attribute as a ‘natural talent’ attached to a physical body, as opposed to other instruments, which are regarded as requiring skill and training to ‘master’ (cf. hall ). conversely, analogue and digital music and sound technologies are often regarded as ‘masculine’ areas and, according to some research, are currently among the most quantitatively, binary-gender-divided activities in contexts of formal training (born and devine ; de boise ). born and devine ( ) discuss how masculinity in music technology is co-constructed by social class in the uk, where music technology programmes in higher education ( – ) are dominated by men with lower social class profile than other music programmes. while the authors argue that this may increase class diversity in higher education, they also conclude that gendering of technology is distinctively male. women’s contributions to the development of music technologies have also been found to be erased in discussions of boys’ ‘inherent’ interest (hinkle-turner ). such patterns are, according to stud- ies, reinforced by gender dynamics in the interactions between teachers and students, as well as between students, both inside and outside music technology classrooms (armstrong ; wolfe ). choosing whether to sing or play the drums can lead to unequal access to careers, and unequal economic opportunities, within and across music scenes. for instance, in societies that place more emphasis on popular music, if more musicians identifying as men are encouraged to play drums or electric guitar, this affords drummers and electric guitarists more opportunities across a wider range of genres than musicians identifying as women singing or playing the flute. the centrality of particular music technologies, especially new digital media, to build and sustain an artistic career is relevant in light of overrepresentation of men-identifying technicians, producers and studio-engineers. associations between instruments’ or activities’ diffi- culty, size and social significance, it has been argued, derive from longstanding gender regimes, which manifest in social judgments surrounding the ‘appropriateness’ of tak- ing up certain music activities. research conclude that musicians identifying as women have been actively prohibited from playing instruments that have emphasised their sexuality in both the global north and south, during different time periods (cf. essex ; basso ; koskoff ; nannyonga-tamusuza ). in the western contexts in focus in this article, it is possible to argue that currently informal discouragement rather than active prohibition is more common (cf. wych ). music genres have also been analysed by some authors as having been shaped by gendered ideas. for example, bayton ( ) has argued that rock is masculinised https://www.dailyedge.ie/ -per-cent-of-new-guitar-players-are-women-and-its-not-because-of-taylor- swift- -oct / ( - - ) ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.dailyedge.ie/ -per-cent-of-new-guitar-players-are-women-and-its-not-because-of-taylor-swift- -oct / https://www.dailyedge.ie/ -per-cent-of-new-guitar-players-are-women-and-its-not-because-of-taylor-swift- -oct / https://www.dailyedge.ie/ -per-cent-of-new-guitar-players-are-women-and-its-not-because-of-taylor-swift- -oct / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and ascribed greater value than pop, which is associated with femininity. subcultural practices surrounding certain genres of music are also gendered. for example, when events happen in public places at late hours, they can be understood as gendered masculine (mcrobbie and garber / ). music genres become gendered histor- ically and geographically, but the way in which they are gendered also changes over time. thus, the association of certain genres with femininity prevails, and so too does the devaluing of these genres, in line with notions of masculinity as inherently more valuable. which genres these are may change over time. in this vein, music scholars, musicians and music fans can be reluctant to deal with issues of status and value within genres themselves. instead, when faced with questions about social injustices and inequalities in their preferred scenes or genres, they prefer to address broader gender constellations. for example, feminist scholarship on dance music cultures argues that certain club contexts, particularly those centred on specific genres and considered to be ‘subcultural’, are both safer and provide more space for gender non- conformity for women-identifying clubbers than so-called ‘mainstream’ contexts (for example, hutton , pp. – ; pini , pp. – ). ontologies of gender we turn now to a discussion on what is meant by ‘gender’ in studies of gender and music practice described above. what is clear is that when ontological questions are asked about what gender is in the body of work addressed here, it can tend toward a social-constructivist perspective on gender as performance, bound up with power, and as an identity separate from the ‘biological’ body. while some studies seem to take for granted the category ‘woman’, most conceptualise gender as performative. performance here is often but not always understood in the terms of butler ( ) as the defining essence of a non-essential gender, or broadly as a social construction or standpoint in structuralist terms (harding ). in this respect, gender is not con- cerned with men and women, but with constructions or displays of masculinity and femininity, as well as with discursive and institutional structuring and social circula- tion of such ideas that depends on the discursive articulation of the categories as bin- ary (cf. leonard ). to take one example, straw ( , p. ) discusses record collecting as an activity defined by a masculine popular music culture. to take another, mcrobbie ( / , p. ) suggests that subcultures presume particular constructions of masculinities juxtaposed with opposite constructions of femininities. both authors distinguish between men and the construction of masculinity as a socially constructed performance. however, when choosing women-identifying artists or fans to make claims about femininity and vice versa, the line between women and femininity will be invariably blurred, with the risk that one is reduced to the other. as such, ‘gender’ in music practice research often boils down to empirically interrogating men- and women-identifying participants. this, in turn, risks reinforcing ideas about gender as a binary construction of two mutually exclusive categories with different abilities, even if part of such discussions is that performances are separate from biological bod- ies. by way of illustration, to argue that there is a need for role models in order for women-identifying participants to enter music, this can unwittingly reinforce the logic of gender as a binary, where the role models themselves are implicitly pre- sumed to be ‘women’ for ‘women’/‘girls’. this action limits ideas about what a broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core woman is – that is, to a different type of human from a man, not necessarily defined through a relation to femininity and heterosexuality – and who ‘women’ are – the white, middle class, cis-gendered and able-bodied woman is often used as example. the former risks strengthening the idea that, for instance, a ‘real’ dj is a certain kind of man, by equating women-identifying djs as exceptions that prove the rule. it also strengthens the tendency for one woman-identifying musician to represent all women-identifying musicians or, in contrast, be the token woman on the line-up to prove that women are not excluded. setting out to critique stereotypical gendering in music practice thus risks per- forming precisely such gendering, when critiques involve adding women-identified composers and musicians or analysing how ‘women and girls’ are marginalised in everyday musical cultures. it is easy to conflate femininity with cis-women, or even to let women act as a stand-in for gender – a concept that is more complex than the divide between biology and socialisation would suggest (alaimo and hekman ; coole and frost ). here we want to use our own work as example of how the problem of binary ontology of gender may take place. one of us has ana- lysed young girls’ music consumption in sweden, addressing how popular music contributes to forming not only gender, but also class and ethnicity (werner , , ). this work defines gender as constructed in cultural interaction with other material and discursive power dimensions in music. these processes were seen as discursive and embodied even though discourse and embodied practice did not always match (participants in the study showed skills in finding and attain- ing music with media technology while understanding themselves as unskilled in media technology; werner ). still, the selection of teenage girls as the bearers of gender was central to the design of the study and constituted the empirical exam- ples illustrating identity in gender and music. in such a case, it is possible to confuse femininity with girls and both of these with gender. while the slippage between girl/woman, femininity and gender is an onto- logical problem, our concern is for the consequences for research if reinforced too often. in light of this, it is important to stress that the disciplinary nature of language and discourse is a productive insight from poststructuralist feminism that has real material consequences. research on gender and music focuses too often only on women and girls. this risk is to reproduce the idea of women as a distinctly gendered group that needs to be researched and added to scholarly debate about music. thus, research in gender and music practice can become too concerned with counting women, analysing women and adding women, rather than focusing on the structures that allow exclusion precisely because they are rendered as ‘normal’, ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. this substantially limits the questions we can ask and the knowledge we can gain on gender, power and music. we argue against focusing on participants iden- tifying as women and others as in need of inclusion, where inclusion ‘requires being behind the institution’ (ahmed , p. ). instead, we suggest that attention must also be paid to such structures themselves as gendered and therefore discursively producing the same notions of lack that feminist research has sought to counter. an intersectional critique in addition to questions over the ontological status of gender, scholars have high- lighted that ‘woman’ has come to stand for white woman, middle-class woman, ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core western woman, heterosexual woman, cis-woman or all of the above. as crenshaw ( ) and collins ( ) have argued, when it comes to subjects, structures and pol- itical strategies, power dynamics of gender, race and class intersect. theories of inter- sectionality have subsequently been adopted in europe and taken on slightly different meanings, where notions of ethnicity and nation have been more central than ‘race’ (cf. lykke ). regardless of such differences, rather than simply ‘add- ing’ categories of oppression to each other, intersectionality means recognising the irreducibility of power dimensions to each other (yuval-davis ). as such, inter- sectionality suggests that gender can never be seen as the only category through which to analyse power, including as it manifests in the music industries. political intersectionality, as discussed by crenshaw ( ), also suggests that political action needs to address multiple dimensions of power. gender equality cannot be pursued without addressing power dimensions of for example social class, racism and trans- and homophobia in music practice. an intersectional critique can be extended to critique the notion that music carries an inherent capacity for positive transformation. scholars across music studies have discussed music’s enriching capacities at the level of individual or group affective states (cf. hesmondhalgh ; thompson and biddle ), political activism (shank ; street ), senses of belonging and identity through consumption (denora ; malbon ), and dissolving race, gender, and class (fikentscher ; pini ). the elevation of music’s agency to transform inequalities is prevalent across scholarship ranging from the ‘harder’ music sciences to cultural theory and philosophy, as well as in popular writing and media. here, dj-based dance music culture for a western audience is used as an example of a commonly cited case for individual or collective (subversive) transformation (also critiqued: saldanha ). it is likely due to dance music’s overtly corporeal form, as well as its cultural–historical legacy of societal marginality, that the genre is often seen in this way (cf. lawrence , ). scholars draw parallels between sounds, spaces and intoxicant-related experiences to individual escapism in phenomenologies of pleasure (cf. garcia ; rietveld ), political resistance or activism through dance and spiritual awakening. the idea is that music’s transformative potential is available to all. yet many dance music participants who define their musical cultures as transformative enact intersecting class, race and gender prejudices, highlighting that music’s transformative potential is not universal but affected by intersecting power asymmetries (gadir , p. , , para. . ; thornton , pp. , – , ). furthermore, while some participants (for example, women identifying, trans- and non-binary people) attempt to access transformative experiences, others actively prevent them from doing so (cf. gadir , ). intersectional gender research also needs to highlight how racialisation materialises in dance culture settings. for example, while some white bodies are dancing, brown bodies are serving drinks and cleaning (cf. saldanha ). to emphasise music as transformative in research is to underemphasise the aforementioned lack of access, on or off the dance floor itself. one common way is through the surveillance of potential entrants to dance floor spaces at night club doors. decisions that determine a potential party-goer’s acceptance or refusal to an event can be based on stereotypes about how particular bodies do or do not consti- tute a ‘good fit’ to the ‘vibe’ of a dance floor. to draw again on puwar ( ), such cases emphasise which publics and performers are deemed to be natural ‘fits’ to broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core which venues and illustrate how a ‘natural fit’ is shaped by intersections of different power dimensions. questioning by door security tends to imply rather than expressly articulate class, racial or gender prejudices, such as appropriateness of someone’s outfit or shoes, whether they can answer which djs are playing on a given night, or how they behave with their friends before approaching door security. door security staff may turn away groups of women who appear to be on a hen night, dressed in recognisably white working-class feminine styles in the uk, from events focused on genres dominated by male fans. the basis for refusing entry is thus to be found at the intersection of gender, race and class, where their attire is labelled as ‘too trashy’ and where those on the door deem them too intoxicated. levels of acceptable intoxication tend to be judged differently for different gendered, raced and classed groups (cf. hutton ; pini ). however, doing intersectional analysis of power in music practice is multi- layered. managerial staff at night clubs, such as berlin’s berghain, claim that practices of selectivity at the point of entry actually safeguard spaces designed specifically for queer marginalised groups who are often not safe on other dance floors. such a per- spective is voiced to reflect the histories of specific dance spaces such as venues in new york city in the s and s, aimed at queer people of colour (fikentscher ; lawrence , ). in oslo, norway, and edinburgh, uk, which have been the primary sites of one of the authors’ research, genre-based elec- tronic dance music communities such as those centred on techno, house, or drum ‘n’ bass are frequented by a majority of white, middle-class, cis-men. demographics make this intersection of gender, race and class invisible through their dominance, and normalise prejudice and discrimination, while furthering the idea of music as having universal potential for transformation. furthermore, participants of certain ‘underground’ scenes (across genres) often tend to view their scenes as already anti-establishment, with the idea that the act of participation itself is political and transformative. in other words, fans of music with ‘non-mainstream’ aesthetics often view their participation in such commu- nities as inherently activist or oppositional without questioning power trajectories within the scene. it is evident in conversations between members of close-knit music communities that many participants presume, often justifiably, that they share a common worldview, including on politics and social issues. insiders might not ‘see’ gender, race and class intersecting in their culture as power dynamics because the pol- itics that they are concerned with lie in ‘the music itself’ and in the ‘talent’ of those who play it (gadir , pp. – ). an intersectional methodological approach to music practices should be used to complicate such research areas, and further problematise assumptions about the focus for studies of gender and music practice. material concerns finally, while much previous research in gender and music practice has focused on what musicians and music-makers do, the questions of the actual material conditions of music-making where humans meet other agents and structures have been less in safeguarding queer-spaces are further complicated when used to justify homonationalism (puar ) whereby ‘immigrant’, muslim and middle eastern others are seen as a threat to queer individuals, who are seen as nationals. ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core focus (cf. leonard ). importantly, material questions of how to fund and support musicians, as well as spaces, organisations and activities are influenced by national, transnational policies and legislation (cf. larsson and svenson ; strong et al. ). for instance as one of the article’s authors has shown, a more sustained policy focus on ‘mainstreaming gender’ in sweden has arguably meant that women are more represented in music education institutions in sweden compared with the uk (de boise ). thus, the material effects of different cultural policy traditions, rather than the musicians themselves, should be more carefully interrogated. importantly, music-making does not just happen without some kind of finan- cial and material support. ‘canonical’ composers have historically relied on benefac- tors to support their development (denora ) and music practitioners of all kinds continue to need money to live and play. the supplementary labour that musicians undertake and their responsibilities outside of music are embedded in gender: domestic and waged labour are both highly gendered (fraser ). crucially, ana- lysing political economies of music implicates social and discursive power dimen- sions, which are implicitly intertwined with assumptions about what types of music ‘deserve’ support from governmental and non-governmental funders. this is particularly visible at the state level – governments in northern/western europe financially prioritise music where ethnic majority populations and middle-classes are heavily represented – such as classical music (cf. scharff , p. ). even among the groups most active in fighting against gender inequalities, those deemed to promote ‘respectable’ femininity (tate ) or even ‘respectable’ feminisms (scharff ) are more likely to be financed. respectability itself is already firmly classed and raced. as such, feminist groups in music practice that promote so-called respectable women (white, cis, straight and middle-class) or are perceived to be respectable in their aims (promoting women-identifying classical composers) are more likely to be viewed favourably by organisations who grant funding or licences to host events. this focus also involves looking not only at who is invited to play, but also whether they are paid equally and given similar material conditions. cohen’s ( ) pioneering work on rock culture in liverpool is among the stud- ies that have paid attention to the material aspects of music practice and gender. cohen has demonstrated how perceptions that particular venues and rehearsal spaces were in ‘dangerous areas’ of the city intersected with discourses surrounding girls and women’s responsibility to ensure their own physical safety. at the same time, the notion of ‘danger’ and what constitutes a ‘threat’ are inextricable from class and race. in the uk, research has studied how the metropolitan police have shut down or denied permission to organisers of ‘grime’ nights, closely linked to black british communities, by claiming they are dangerous (charles ). the notion of so-called ‘dangerous spaces’, as discussed in ahmed ( ) and puwar ( ), thus plays a significant role in informing cultural policy and discourse about which music is seen to ‘deserve’ state or financial support more broadly. this means that such state policies accentuate and heighten the material disadvan- tages endured especially by women of colour who may already be both representa- tionally and discursively marginalised in such scenes and who are disadvantaged in a variety of ways by racist and misogynistic policies. new-materialist feminist approaches look to theorise the interplay between the material and the discursive in ways that can be productive for scholars working on music and gender. in such thinking, ideas, economics, bodies, environments and technologies are seen as co-constitutive and the idea of the subject is not privileged broadening research in gender and music practice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core as the site of focus (alaimo and hekman ; coole and frost ). instead of see- ing the subject and music practice as the primary area of study situated in a material condition, this involves understanding the subject as made up of events of music, money, an instrument or a pair of headphones, as well as discourses and affects. conclusion as detailed above, there is a significant breadth of existing research in gender and music practice. in this article, we have considered the objects and methods of study that research in gender and music practice defaults to, acknowledging our own tendencies to fall back into such categorisations. what we articulate is what we see as three key problems in research on gender and music practice. the first involves an assumption of a gender binary that counts and adds women-identifying composers, musicians and fans, with the implication that gender is concerned with cis-women and their individual empowerment. such research can, even without intending to, shift the focus from power structures to individuals. second, research that fails to address the intersectionality of gender with other power dimensions fails to understand the larger ways that power works in music practice. third, research in gender and music practice focuses on humans and discourse while tend- ing to sidestep material processes and objects that are also central to power’s inter- play with music practice. throughout the article we have made some suggestions of possible routes to take to avoid these three problems. this article challenges the focus on measuring gender balance, introducing role models and adding women-identifying musicians and others to canons and line-ups by shifting the focus from ‘women in music’ to (intersectionally constructed) structures and cultures in music practice. such a shift of focus could include considerations of definitions of quality in any canon or genre, or explore practical ways in which musicians work beyond canons themselves. it could also include the institutions of musical practice and how power is organised within them. another suggestion is to pay greater attention in academic research and debate to the interplay of multiple power dimensions, in discourse and material con- ditions, while researching gender in music practice. focusing on gender alone cannot challenge locally specific and ambiguous practices of power. following the discussions in this article, we argue that the object of research – what gender is and does – should continue to be expanded in studies of gender and music practice. while we have challenged research counting women in music prac- tice, we acknowledge that such quantitative studies may well be needed to motivate the music industries to strive for change. but they are not enough by themselves. we suggest that areas of conflict and contestation are also introduced in addressing dif- ferences within the group defining themselves as women, non-binary or trans, which might include class, race, sexuality or dis/ability. it also raises questions about ontol- ogy and the role of the subject, for example, is there a unified subject? if not, what elements or entities can be regarded as part of the subject and what aspects in par- ticular should music researchers be focused on? there might be a productive way of thinking about a feminist musical subjectivity that recognises such heterogeneity. instead of shying away from such conflicts, we believe that it is valuable to actively discuss and confront the complicated nature of gender ontology and power in order to continue to develop gender and music practice as a vital field of research. ann werner et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core references abeles, i. . ‘are musical instrument gender associations changing?’, journal of research in music education, / , pp. – aftenposten. . ‘#nårmusikkenstilner: “plutselig stakk han to fingre inn i meg under skjørtet mitt”: kvin- ner snakker i dette oppropet ut mot overgrep i norsk musikkbransje’, aftenposten. https://www.aftenposten.no/ kultur/i/qnp z/narmusikkenstilner-plutselig-stakk-han-to-fingre-inn-i-meg-under-skjortet-mitt (accessed december ) ahmed, s. . living a feminist life (durham, nc, duke university press) alaimo, s., and hekman, s. 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http://www.ubc.org.br/hotsite/relatorio_anual/ /eng/cap- .html http://www.ubc.org.br/hotsite/relatorio_anual/ /eng/cap- .html http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/proms-survey.htm http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/proms-survey.htm http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/proms-survey.htm https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	broadening research in gender and music practice 	canons and role models 	discrimination in music practice 	instruments, technology and genres 	ontologies of gender 	an intersectional critique 	material concerns 	conclusion 	references journal of advances in humanities and social sciences jahss , ( ): - primary research the ef􀅮icacy of the united nations in a new world order hitakshi joshi *, maherbaanali sheliya , school of liberal studies, pandit deendayal petroleum university, gandhinagar, india keywords abstract post / world order united nations ef􀅭icacy new challenges reform received: october accepted: november published: december on th september , a date that shall never be forgotten in world history, the impact of the us being attacked ricocheted across the world; it shook the world and the ripple effects of which are consequential even today. the attacks of / caused a paradigm shift in the world order and absolutely changed the perspective of viewing the global society. today, years later, the problems facing the world are grave and revolutionary, with one part of the world still reeling from the consequences of / . this article aims to focus on two important aspects of the world as it is today, 􀅭irstly recognising and analysing new challenges that the world is facing onwards, and second to gauge how equipped the international system is to deal with these challenges, with an important focus on the ef􀅭iciency of the united nations and the role it has to play. it shall also trace the effectiveness of the un throughout these years in resolving major world crisis’. after , the world underwent a complete change with regards to geopolitical landscape, as a result of problems such as global terrorism, increased bilateral con􀅭licts, forced migration, economic instability, rise of threatening non-state actors and heightened use of the internet and social media. this article explains the functioning of the united nations as a body and shall critically analyse the ef􀅭icacy of the un as an organisation and its preparedness to deal with these challenges posed to the world order today. the united nations is more relevant now than ever, and the question that is being asked is how successful has, and will it be in upholding its goals of “peacekeeping” and maintaining stability in the world today? © the author(s). published by taf publishing. the united nations the united nations is an international body that was es- tablished in , after the second world war. the idea and outline for the united nations was set in the atlantic charter of , which was initiated by franklin d. roo- sevelt and winston churchill with the goal of establishing peace and promoting international cooperation between nations (editors, ). after the end of the second world war, on th october the united nations charter was rati􀅭ied by members, thus sealing the future of the united nations, as an international peacekeeping organisa- tion (editors, ). at present, the un consists of -member states, who also constitutethegeneralassembly. theunhas mainorgans- the general assembly, the security council, the interna- tional court of justice, the secretariat, the economic and social council and the trusteeship council (united nations, ). the secretary-general is the “chief administrative of􀅭icer” of the organisation and at present the post is occu- pied by antonio guterres, who was sworn in on st january (united nations, ). the un also has more than subsidiary organizations working under it, that deal with a range of issues and challenges across the world. for years the united nations has intervened in issues across the globe and established its relevance and need in the international society. there have also been instances when the un failed to resolve a certain problem, or prevent it which had lasting impacts on the world. after the cold war, the united states’ invasion of afghanistan and iraq, and several other proxy wars that were continuously fought in the middle east, could not be effectively resolved by the un. for a long time, the un was considered as an imperative tool to further the united states’ foreign policy, and con- sidered a product of us hegemony (azhar, ; puchala, ; saahar, sualman, hashim, & mohamed, ), how- ever, with time this reputation has diminished and now it is *corresponding author: hitakshi joshi †email: hitakshi @gmail.com the author(s). published by taf publishing. this is an open access article distributed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives . international license http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /jahss- . . &domain=pdf hitakshi @gmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / h. joshi, m. sheliya – the ef􀅲icacy of the united nations . . . . being questioned how effective is the united nations going to be with the dealing of challenges that face the st cen- tury world. theworldorderpost / -theriseof stcen- tury challenges samuel huntington talked about ‘uni-multipolarity’ and how it will shape the world order and off late, the global order is shaping up to be something along those lines with oneortwomajorsuperpowersandseveralothergreatpow- ers existing in international relations (kagan, ; kim, ). the events of / are seen as marking the end of one age and the beginning of another (prasad, ; roberts, ). in this new world order post / , na- tions such as china, russia, india and several west-asian countries are taking a central stand and playing a role in furthering international relations. in , the world was shocked with the attacks of / and its impact that had rippling effects across the globe, bringing about a complete change in the geo-political landscape. one such impact is the “globalisation of terror”, the scope and dimensions that it has acquired due to technological advancement and en- hanced communication (khan, ; shukla, ). ter- rorism has evolved into an organized international network in the past decade, with different types of terrorism evolv- ing such as religious terrorism especially of islamic groups, drug terrorism which has developed into a huge money- making network, and cyber terrorism due to technological growth, with widespread impact and consequences in the society (shukla, ). the other aspect of terrorism that poses as a challenge is the role of non-state actors in the domestic and internal poli- cies and actions of a nation. the / attacks are an apt example of the role of these international players, and the ‘war on terror’ is a dire consequence of a group or an in- dividual challenging nation-state (shukla, ). transna- tional terrorism has evolved signi􀅭icantly in the last decade and it has created a divide between the state and the indi- vidual, it has also led to the rise of non-state actors who do not differentiate between the state as an authority and the individuals of the state. this implies that the con􀅭lict arises due to the actors creating a problem from within the state and thus challenging its security, leaving no distinction be- tween internal and external security (shukla, ). as a direct result of the / attacks, the united states in- vaded afghanistan and hence started another war which cost thousands of lives and effort, and the united nations as a supranational body took no major decision to avert it. the united nations charter, however, makes no mention of ter- rorism as an issue, as it cannot interfere in the domestic is- suesofanynation-stateasarulearticle ( )(shukla, ). for a long time, this is the stance that the un maintained, but in recent years considering the international outreach and scope that terrorism has envisaged, the united nations has had to put their all in to curb the threat it poses- to the economy of countries spending millions to curb it and loss of lives in the process. terrorism, in the past few years, is being used as a tool of strategic warfare and instrument to invoke psychological fear in millions across the globe. as a weapon of warfare, it makes it dangerous as terrorists are often motivated by var- ious ideas, religions, ethnicities and the political gains such as overthrowing governments (philip, ). terrorism is linked to a string of other issues which include- bilateral con􀅭licts, forced migration and economic instabil- ity. an apt example for all three is the syrian crisis which started in , and the yemen crisis of , both a result of the arab spring, has left the middle-east in ruins. it has increased tension between one half of the middle east with the other, people have been forced to leave their homes and migrate to refugee camps or another country altogether and shattered the economy with 􀅭luctuating prices and no stable source of income. in the name of democracy and the pretext of freedom, the simultaneous wars in the middle-east have practically brought it down to ruins. globalizations and the continuous evolution of the world anditsreach, hascreatedspaceforawiderangeofproblems that may have not been envisioned before. from climate change, nuclear proliferation, ecosystem losses, poverty and hunger, con􀅭lict prevention and economic diversity, these are not meant to be dealt with by one nation state alone. the impact of globalization has been the growth and rise of small individual powerful states that are economi- cally independent and have the power to be seen or heard on a global forum. each of these nation-states has its own geopolitical interests and methods of yielding power, which is what makes them unique (chang, ; held, ). all nations across the world are being led by powerful strongindependentleaderswhoarede􀅭iningtheeraoftheir country with 􀅭ierce competition- vladimir putin in russia, donald trump in the united states, angela merkel in ger- many, narendra modi in india, emmanuel macron in france, kim jong-un in north korea, theresa may in the uk etc. global politics has never been so competitive and 􀅭iercely on edge, with the internet grasping the community and spread- ing like wild􀅭ire and enhanced communication and net- works around the world. during such a period, the supra- national organisations such as the united nations, world issn: - doi: . /jahss- . . j. adv. humanit. soc. sci. trade organisation, international monetary fund, world bank play a signi􀅭icant role in furthering interests and re- lations and enhancing cooperation. with this new era that the world is slowly transitioning into, there is emphasis on global cooperation and cosmopolitan associations (held, ). methodology this article is a research initiative and an attempt to under- stand the functioning of the united nations and the imple- mentation of its policies, and its role in the global order as a peacekeepingorganizationandarbiterofpeaceandcooper- ation between the nation-states. the article is based on and derived from secondary data sources such as of􀅭icial docu- ments of the united nations, and other governmental doc- uments. online articles from websites were referred to un- derstand the current scenario and create a link between the past and present. some such sources include the washing- ton post, brookings press, bbc news, history.com, united nations of􀅭icial site etc. various journal articles and re- search papers written by analysts also provided clarity and understanding of the topic and the present situation. these have also been referenced in this article. the works cited have been added at the end of the article as a part of the bibliography. the un peacekeeping missions in the past few years- a review the most important aspect of un peacekeeping is civil- ian protection and mitigating violence. over the years, the united nations has played a signi􀅭icant role in combating terrorism and dissolving con􀅭licts through their peacekeep- ing missions, some of which have been successful and some have not. the un, have on their website admitted that pro- tecting civilians is “a challenging mandate and the yardstick by which we are often judged” (hultman, kathman, & shan- non, ). the main challenges that the un has faced, among others, after the / attacks, is the growth of global terrorism, the role of non-state actors in a nation-state and increased bilateral con􀅭licts between states. these issues have created a mountain of problems that the un is strug- gling to deal with. the un and the security council have had mixed outcomes in the areas of con􀅭lict that they have been engaged with and in this new era, there have been many questions on the role that global organizations shall play in this time of ‘global chaos’ (roberts, ). further ahead, are case studies that of- yemeni crisis, kashmir issue be- tween india-pakistan and the sierra-leone crisis, reviewed accordingtohowef􀅭icientandsuccessfulwastheunitedna- tions in resolving the problem holistically on all fronts. yemen crisis ( ) it all began in , with the arab spring uprising which advocated for a democracy in most middle-eastern states. even in yemen, this led to the autocratic president ali ab- dullah saleh having to hand over power to abdrabbuh man- sour hadi. the new president was faced with a range of is- sues grappling the country and in this moment of his weak- ness, the houthi movement (zaidi shia muslim minority) took advantage and captured the norther province of saada and neighbouring areas in . many yemenis including sunnis supported the houthis and this pushed them to cap- ture the city of sanaa in and then eventually the entire country, leaving the president mr. hadi to 􀅭lee abroad. sev- eral sunni arab states like iran, saudi arabia formed a coali- tion supported by uk, us and france to prevent a movement backed by shia power to take over and attempted to restore mr. hadi’s government (bbc news, ). the war is di- vided between the pro-government forces of mr. hadi head- quartered at aden and the anti-government forces led by thehouthisandbackedbyformerpresidentabdullahsaleh, controlling the north and cities like sanaa, saada, taiz and a majority of the western coast. for years now, the country is the centre of a proxy war and this has led to thousands of people dying and millions being displaced with no ap- parent solution visible. the yemeni crisis is referred to as the ‘world’s largest humanitarian crisis’, and has become a breeding ground for terrorists such as al-qaeda and islamic state (is) who have taken full advantage of the situation to create even more chaos (alan, ). the united nations has been involved in yemen since , when the secretary-general appointed a special adviser to yemen. the international community unanimously agreed that the saleh regime needed to be replaced and, at the end of the unsc resolution was passed with an aim to start a “yemeni-led political transition” but failed to take into account the economic and social issues which were very important for the people of yemen. in novem- ber, saleh signed the gulf cooperation council agreement whichgave the un directaccess and involvementtoyemen’s internal affairs and politics (lackner, ). this deal al- lowed saleh to fuel internal con􀅭licts which only made mat- ters worse. in , the un passed the unsc res- olution, weeks after the start of ‘decisive storm’, which was prompted by a plea of president hadi from the gcc to “providesupport, includingmilitaryintervention, toprotect the people of yemen from the continued aggression of the houthis”. this was an immediate result of the saudi-led mil- issn: - doi: . /jahss- . . h. joshi, m. sheliya – the ef􀅲icacy of the united nations . . . . itary intervention backed by the united kingdom and the united states- known as ‘decisive storm’ which led to pres- ident hadi and his government being exiled to riyadh. the un failed to prevent this war, and all the other humanitar- ian violations with it, because of saudi arabia wielding in- 􀅭luence in the unsc through the us and uk even though it is not a member of the unsc. however, both the us and uk have economic ties with saudi which helps in ful􀅭illing its interests and also provides military support and back- ing to the saudi-led coalition. operation golden victory, was initiated for the seizing of hodeidah port in northern yemen, but the farthest the saudi-led coalition could reach was the airport south of hodeidah. as a direct result of op- eration golden victory and the advancement of the saudis, the houthis 􀅭ired ballistic range missiles into riyadh, which led to escalation of events and an even more tense situation. the latest positive developments indicate that the crucial port of hodeidah in northern yemen, has become a neutral point for peace talks between the houthis and the un. the port of hodeidah is important as it is the entry point for all resources and support for the houthis, allegedly from iran, and the un envoy led by martin grif􀅭iths hopes to negoti- ate surrender of the port to international supervision and further peace talks between both the parties and end the three-year long war (riedel, ). the crisis in yemen has become a battleground for states to clash with each other and a base and excuse for bilat- eral con􀅭licts, sides have been picked with no one willing to back down and the people of yemen suffering in the centre. both the saudi coalition and the houthis are heavily armed and an escalation in affairs could be fatal for the people of yemen. the united nations is being urged to replace the unscr in order to set the tone for political negotia- tion and talks, and to prevent the reinstatement of exiled leader mansour hadi. however, after years of proxy wars and a civil war, the un has failed to bring peace in the country. till date negoti- ations and peace talks are underway, with little progress. saudi arabia, with its organized coalitions, wields impor- tant in􀅭luence in the united nations which makes it dif􀅭i- cult for the organization to pass any resolution relating to yemen. it has also been alleged that un has been serving state interests and avoiding critical issues which has made many question how the un will reach a peaceful solution in yemen anytime soon. kashmir issue between india-pakistan ( -present day) the history of india and pakistan goes way back several hundred centuries. since time immemorial and the begin- ning of history as we know it today, india and pakistan were one nation and one civilisation. during the entire -year rule of the east india company and subsequently the british crown, over the region, both the countries were one in the struggle for independence. however, at the cost of freedom and independence, the partition of the two countries was initiated. on th august , pakistan, primarily a mus- lim majority side, celebrated their independence day and the next day india celebrated hers. ever since then, both the countries have had their series of struggles and clashes and the primary issue of contention is that of kashmir which is divided into ‘pakistan occupied kashmir’ and ‘india occu- pied kashmir’. the problem arose in when all other princely states acceded to the indian union, however kash- mir and its ruler raja hari singh refused to sign the instru- ment of accession and accede to the indian union, which led to pakistan claiming that kashmir is rightfully and histori- cally theirs and india retaining control of one part of kash- mir through the war which was concluded with un intervention and a cease􀅭ire. since , there have been wars between the two coun- tries, with the kashmir region being the main cause of con- 􀅭lict in out of the cases- 􀅭irst indo-pakistani war of - , second indo-pakistani war of , third indo- pakistani war of , kargil war of (chandhoke). the region has been a subject of discussion and contention for several years now and no apparent solution in sight. in all this, the united nations has played a signi􀅭icant role in the region over the years. jawaharlal nehru, the then prime minister of india, approached the united nations in after several months of 􀅭ighting and violence in jammu and kashmir ever since the partition of india and pakistan. the cease􀅭ire took place on january , and it divided kashmir between india and pakistan. over the course of the next few years, several un resolutions were passed and both the troops retreated to their speci􀅭ic borders and newly drawn cease􀅭ire line, while many proposed the idea of a plebiscite to let the people of kashmir decide which union to accede to. none of the resolutions of the un were satisfactory to the countries and hence the idea of a solu- tion grew dim, while pakistan was more open to the idea of a plebiscite, india preferred diplomatic talks (chakravarty, ). in , during the indo-pakistani war, the un pleaded with boththe governmentstocooperatewith theun military ob- issn: - doi: . /jahss- . . j. adv. humanit. soc. sci. servers and declare cease􀅭ire. in tashkent, an agreement was signed and both parties agreed to retreat to the original cease􀅭ire line of , through resolution of the united nations. in , however, east pakistan has surrendered and therefore there was a unilateral cease􀅭ire declared in the west and at the end of this war, the simla agreement was signed between prime minister of india indira gandhi and pakistan president zul􀅭ikar ali bhutto. the simla agree- ment was considered to be the 􀅭irst actual step to the res- olution of the kashmir issue and it of􀅭icially declared the cease􀅭ire line as a line of control. the simla agreement is quite similar to the karachi agreement of , how- ever the simla agreement mandates “that the two coun- tries are resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peace- ful means mutually agreed upon between them”. the con- fusion arose in the understanding of the agreement and its clause by both parties- india understood that there would bilateral talks and resolution of con􀅭lict without any third- party involvement, whereas pakistan indicated that it does not mention the non-involvement of the un during this pro- cess. the united nations military observer group in in- dia and pakistan was considered null and void by india as the simla agreement had replaced the karachi agreement, however pakistan did not agree to this and has been reg- istering cease􀅭ire violations since then, whereas india has been peaceful about it (chakravarty, ). kashmir today, is still distraught with people displaced and an unstable government with no apparent solution in sight. attacks and 􀅭iring, violence and cross border terrorism are frequent in the region and the situation is at a stalemate. the un cannot be blamed directly for the irresolution of this issue, because there are several other factors at play. the political situation in both countries prevents the setting up for a base of peace talks and despite several un resolutions noactualsolutionhasbeenreached, ashistoricallytheclaim on kashmir is justi􀅭ied in both cases (volk, ). the on- going debate on kashmir between india and pakistan has generated lot of discussion and dissent and disagreement and despite the condition of the people of kashmir, there is no apparent solution to this date. the sierra leone crisis ( - ) the sierra leone crisis started in march , as an at- tempt by rebels belonging to the neighbouring country of liberia, to overthrow the present joseph momoh govern- ment in sierra-leone. the two main players were the na- tional patriotic front of liberia (npfl) led by charles tay- lor, and the revolutionary united front (ruf) led by the for- mer army corporal of sierra leone, foday sankoh. the civil war in the country lasted for years, with several loss of lives, and other atrocities to men, women and children alike (momodu, ). the ruf during the course of the war, captured rich diamond territory in the eastern and south- ern part of sierra leone, and then the president joseph mo- moh was overthrown by captain valentine strasser, who es- tablished the national provisional ruling council (nprc) and after which the civil war only worsened. in , about yearsafter coming into power, strasserwas removedfromhispositionofpowerbyacoupandafterelec- tions ahmed tejan kabbah took of􀅭ice. in , maj. johnny koroma formed the armed forces revolutionary council and sent president kabbah into exile. internationally, dur- ing this period the united nations imposed sanctions on sierra leone and the country was suspended from the com- monwealth. in , a peace agreement called the lome agreement was signed as a truce between the ruf, afrc and the government. though the agreement wasn’t imple- mented well and the violence continued for more years, 􀅭inally in , with the help of the british and the united nations peacekeeping mission the civil war was 􀅭inally de- clared to be over (editors, ). however, the aftermath of the war was long-lasting con- sidering the impact the civil war had on the people, lives and condition of living of sierra leoneans. the atrocities committed including recruiting children in the ruf as child soldiers, the behaviour of the rebels against the civilians, the violence that the people were subjected to and the dis- placement and migration combined with the loss of thou- sands of lives. though the united nations and its peace- keeping mission was successful in bringing the war to an end, the impact of the civil war can still be seen in the re- gion. as a major event in the un history, the role of the un in sierra leone is considered to be successful, as it played a signi􀅭icant role in bringing the con􀅭lict to an end. the major players in this mission included the ecomog- military ob- server group of the economic community of west african nations, and the unomsil- united nations observer mis- sion in sierra leone, which was later terminated by the se- curity council and replaced by the unamsil- united na- tions mission in sierra leone, in . the success of the unamsil, which was a large and extensive mission with military personnel who were tasked with ensuring the peaceful implementation of the lome agreement. by , the unamsil consisted of , military person- nel tasked with increased authority in civil affairs and the civil police. the unamsil is considered to be a model for un peacekeeping as they successfully as over and above ev- issn: - doi: . /jahss- . . h. joshi, m. sheliya – the ef􀅲icacy of the united nations . . . . erything else they were able to help the government stop illegal trade in diamonds and also regulate the industry. they also played a role in disarming the 􀅭ighters including the child soldiers, they assisted in the return of half a mil- lion refugees and displaced persons, they helped organize democratic and parliamentary elections, set up a special court for sierra leone to try persons for war crimes, they also trained sierra leoneans in human rights and launched projects to generate employment and assisted the govern- ment in re-establishing control and authority in the region. along the way, the unamsil faced several challenges as members of the mission were kidnapped by the ruf and the cease􀅭ire almost came to a standstill however, backlash from the international community, sanctions and constant efforts from nations across the world helped in furthering negotiations. the peace after years of civil war was a disturbed peace as people were still reeling from the impact of the violence and they were unable to reap the social and economic bene􀅭its that were provided as a result of the un peacekeeping mission. sierra leone and the successful res- olution of the crisis is one of the examples of the relevance and need of the united nations and its assistance in peace- keeping. the secretary-general during this period, ko􀅭i an- nan, was closely involved with the mission and personally ensured its implementation. the sierra leone crisis is an apt example of the need for a supra-national peacekeeping body in the world (united na- tions, ). the relevance of the united nations the united nations as an international body has several roles to play in the society and world. it is unfair to focus on only one aspect or part or organ of the entire body and gauge its relevance today. in the sphere of international re- lations, un peacekeeping and the security council plays a signi􀅭icant role in maintaining relations and furthering co- operation. off late the ef􀅭iciency of the unsc and its role in maintaining peace has been questioned due to con􀅭licts like the syrian crisis and yemeni crisis. there have been many questions raised regarding the membership of the se- curity council and the veto system, the power that a few nations hold deciding the fate of thousands. whether the unsc should be reformed is a different debate altogether, however the presence of the un is deemed to be extremely necessary in the world today. there are always two sides to a coin and each negative has a positive. each organ of the un is playing an active role in the world, and it is im- portant to acknowledge that the un does not involve only one aspect that of peacekeeping and security. the review of three peacekeeping missions over the past years has indicated that despite its ups and downs and failures and successes, the presence of the united nations is relevant in the world today. in the case of sierra leone, the united na- tions was successful in bringing an end to the con􀅭lict in the region and establishing the ground for peace, yemen, is an apt example of un peacekeeping gone wrong and the failure to end the con􀅭lict and also prevent a humanitarian crisis- considered the largest in the world, and kashmir is a neu- tral take on the un having tried and failed however due to other external factors and situations in the domestic affairs of the parties concerned. during the time of ko􀅭i annan as secretary-general, a re- port known as the brahimi report was drawn which was an insight into the peacekeeping of the united nations and how it can be improved over the years and what measure should be taken in that regard. the report states that the nature of armed con􀅭lict has changed dramatically over the past decade or so and has evolved from interest to intrastate con􀅭lict- which re􀅭lects the negative side of globalization and how the civilians are now bearing the brunt of the orga- nized violence, at the hands of a few in power who are in the game (nisar, ). it introduced several reforms in tan- dem with a speci􀅭ic rule of law and these helped in under- standing where un peacekeeping was falling short and how it could be further improved. for example, un peacekeep- ing forces are majorly provided by developing nations and it has been questioned why the developed states do not have any contribution in this especially the permanent members of the p . (durand, ). over the years, un missions and peacekeeping have focused less on immediate relief and are now channelling resources into peacebuilding, reconstruction, development and sus- tainable peace (durand, ). un peacekeeping has come a long way from the brahimi report and since the geopoliti- cal shift after the / , steps have been taken to counter- terrorism and prevent proxy wars and bilateral con􀅭licts, however there is still a long way to go. the relevance of the united nations cannot be analysed through only one lens, the work of the other organs and or- ganisations such as unicef, wfp- world food programme, who among others, has been signi􀅭icant in their respec- tive 􀅭ields and has gradually brought change. the united nations as an international organisation is quite relevant, however the role of the un as an actor in the political sphere can be questioned based on ef􀅭iciency. the important as- pect to be remembered is that the un and its actions in most cases re􀅭lects the will of the member states and the interests they harbour, combined with the in􀅭luence they wield in the issn: - doi: . /jahss- . . j. adv. humanit. soc. sci. council, which may affect the mission or be biased towards the interests of a particular state. conclusion in the past few years, there have been some major signi􀅭i- cant developments that have de􀅭ined world politics and the global order, especially international relations. the elec- tion of donald trump as the president of the unites states of america with this bold views and outrageous opinions and actions, the britain withdrawal from the european union known as brexit and its implications across the world, the trade war between china and the us, the growing power and open nuclear threats of north korea and kim jong-un, the crisis in the middle east and the need for immediate res- olution of the syrian and yemen crisis, the rights of women and the spread of the metoo movement in every corner of the world, climate change and global warning, and most importantly the curbing of terrorism. there are several other issues that the world faces today and these are just some highlighted ones, however the onus lies on each mem- ber state of the united nations and the leadership at the un with antonio guterres at the forefront, to at the best of their capability collectively and sensitively deal with the crisis in the most ef􀅭icient way possible. despite its shortcomings the united nations is relevant now more than ever, and can improve its ef􀅭iciency dealing with the problems of the world. joseph schwartzberg in his book- ‘transforming the united nations system: designs for a workable world’ talks about how the power is unfairly distributed in the united nations, and now more than ever, there should be emphasis on nations, non-governmental organizations and ordinary citizens to make sure their voices are heard at the top level. he stresses on the motto- the importance of force of law over the law of force and how that is the way forward in the st century (schwartzberg, ). references alan, s. t. m. 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oppenheim ; garibotti & hopp : ). this paper analyses the framing of and evaluative stance towards the #metoo hashtag from a cross-linguistic point of view to see how discourses around what seems to be the same concept diverge across languages and which effect this may have on language users’ perception of the issue. based on a corpus of english, spanish and german tweets from july and august , i address the following three research questions: . how is the #metoo hashtag represented in english, spanish and german discourse through words that frequently accompany it? . which types of evaluative stance towards #metoo can be identified and how do they differ cross-linguistically? . are there cross-linguistically similar discourse patterns around the #metoo hashtag and what effect does this have on it as a safe space for hashtag fem- inism? while hashtags are generally agreed to empower women and feminist discourse on social media, some research has also questioned whether hashtag discussions really provide safe spaces. the core purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis of hashtag discourse can identify reasons why hashtag net- works are not always the safe spaces that hashtag feminism makes them out to be because they also allow or even attract misogynists to link into those net- works. in the following section, i provide an overview of those arguments and discuss the importance of the study of hashtags as linguistic items. how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages communicative effects of feminist hashtags a major aim of hashtag activism has been to lay claim on public spaces (lünen- borg & maier : ; bowles eagle ). considering them a “collectivising feminist response to rape culture”, hashtags such as #safetytipsforladies reveal “the feminist delight in exposing misogynist, victim blaming ideas through hu- mor” (rentschler : ). hashtag activism on social media plays an important role to establish counter-narratives against the dominating forces in public dis- course. the hashtag #muslimwomensday, for instance, gave muslim women a voice to tell their stories and thus allowed them to challenge dominant media frames representing them as silent victims (pennington : ). other hash- tags such as #yesallwomen and #yesallwhitewomen created “feminist counter- publics” to “rewrite dominant public narratives about violence against women” (jackson & banaszczyk : ). hashtags are powerful communicative and political tools because they allow victims of abuse to express and share their experiences and because they seem to affect people on an emotional level inaccessible to newspaper reports (keller et al. ; mendes et al. ). both of those capabilities make them more effective than traditional media and both can be traced to the combination of linguistic metafunctions that hashtags convey (see zappavigna ). the ability to evoke the appropriate emotions at particular moments in time and to control and chan- nel these emotions is important in gaining followers for political movements (ahmed ). this power can of course be used for both liberal and repressive campaigns, as the hijacking of #metoo by far-right supporters such as the # db campaign shows (farris ; sorce ; wielens ). twitter enables girls and women to connect to each other and to share experi- ences of gender violence in hitherto unknown ways (keller et al. ), bypassing the traditional news cycle and “the mainstream media’s problematic framing of sexual violence and black women” (williams : ). participants in a study on the #beenrapedneverreported hashtag (keller et al. ), for instance, were reluctant to speak to the researchers and regarded twitter as a safer way to share experiences of gender violence. the tweets “all carried the common theme that it remained professionally, emotionally, and even physically costly to report sexual violence to authorities, disrupting the prevalent myth that unreported assaults are illegitimate” (keller et al. : ). the hashtag thus produced the benefit of giving its users a sense of community, affective solidarity and support (keller et al. : – ). mario bisiada in this way, hashtags have the political effect of creating new followers for the international feminist movement (schachtner & winter ; mendes et al. : ). in her study of #whyistayed, clark ( : ) argues that the political effect hashtags have is caused by their ability to turn individual stories into a narrative, drawing on the feminist movement’s historical emphasis on discourse, language and storytelling, while also enabling women to engage in “dark parody of mainstream media discourse” (clark : ). clark-parsons ( ) investigates activists’ strategies to achieve visibility in a corpus of around , tweets using the #metoo hashtag. she finds four major categories (clark-parsons : ): . participants’ understandings of the political potential of #metoo . their takes on the tactic’s political limitations along with their attempts to redress these shortcomings . their concerns regarding whose voices are included in the campaign . their efforts to support the campaign and protect its survivor-participants she concludes that participants in #metoo “reclaimed their agency and pushed back against discourses that normalise harassment and assault” (clark-parsons : ). the narratives collected under #metoo have had the effect of a social transformation by making the personal political and scaling up from individual to collective visibility (clark-parsons : ). her study shows that sizeable par- ticipation is required to avoid that transgressions reported under a given hashtag become personalised or framed as individual errors, something that traditional media still tend toward (kornemann : ). if it reaches sufficient partici- pation, “the networking functions of the hashtag bridge the personal and the political, recasting, in the case of #metoo, sexual violence as a systemic, rather than private, issue and calling for structural changes in response” (clark-parsons : ). the advantages of hashtags over traditional media may well cause unease in the latter. research has argued that media focus on celebrity involvement “dis- tract[s] us from systemic, structural sexism across all industries” (banet-weiser : ). the hashtag #aufschrei (‘outcry’), highly influential in germany (see maireder & schlögl ), has set the agenda in the public debate on sexism in spite of a largely antipathetic media focus (kornemann : ). traditional me- dia have preferred to treat the #aufschrei movement in a symbolic way rather how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages than engage with its content, thus reducing the general problem of gender dis- crimination to isolated occurrences (kornemann : ). such an approach “can end up working against the calls for social change promised at [the move- ment’s] beginning, producing more and more visibility – and increasingly nar- rowing the discourses of that visibility in the process” (banet-weiser : ). that individualising tendencies in reporting de-politicise feminist movements for their readership is also argued by de benedictis et al. ( : ) in their study of reporting on #metoo in uk newspaper articles from october to march . although they find that the press in the uk has played an important role in promoting #metoo overall, they identify a focus on the stories of “the ‘ideal victims’, namely, celebrity female subjects (who are predominately white and wealthy)”, concluding that, by failing to inform the public about or to debate potential solutions, the press can be understood to have helped defuse any potential that #metoo might contain as a mobilising social force. rather, the press seems to have framed #metoo largely in terms of neoliberal and popular feminisms, which disavow structural analysis and critique and largely place responsibility on individual women. (de benedictis et al. : ) once a hashtag has firmly entered the public debate through mainstream me- dia, it also becomes open to attacks by opposing forces. based on a corpus of tweets from between january and march , drüeke & zobl ( ) analyse author stances towards #aufschrei, establishing the four categories of “support- ive”, “neutral”, “dismissive” and “impossible to specify” (drüeke & zobl : ). they find that, from the second week onward, the supportive tweets increased and thus emphasised the importance of the hashtag (drüeke & zobl : – ). the more widespread the hashtag became, however, the more it attracted dismissive reactions, and the personal experience postings were joined by bla- tant anti-feminist statements (drüeke & zobl : – ). they conclude that twitter cannot be considered a safe space, as “anti-feminist and sexist comments are equally visible and might signify new experiences of violence for women” (drüeke & zobl : ). the channeling emotional effect of hashtags may, then, also work the adverse way once abused by trolling or hate speech. the categorising function of the hashtag does not offer a filter to only encounter posts true to the original inten- tion of the hashtag, which may have undesired consequences for social media users who find themselves in an emotionally fragile state induced by following the hashtag narratives. the power of hashtags is enhanced by “the transnational mario bisiada nature and technological affordances of social media, whereby interest groups with similar agendas can more easily find one another” (ging : – ). the study of hashtags unavoidably touches on the study of anti-feminist dis- course on social media, which is transnationally networked and may share a set of cross-linguistic frames to attack feminist movements. that discourse is just the publicly visible face of a clandestine, globally networked subculture of men who describe themselves as “incels” (‘involuntary celibates’, see valens ) and en- gage in celebrating violence against women and fostering a misogynist discourse on forums such as chan and chan (see jaki et al. ). these networks are a grave international threat: the terrorist attack in christchurch (new zealand) in- spired men to commit similar attacks in poway (us), el paso (us), baerum (nor- way) and most recently halle (germany). in all cases, the shooters were regular users of chan or chan and explained their ideology in manifestos uploaded to those networks. in those manifestos, the terrorists express anti-semitic and white supremacist fears of white genocide through a decrease in fertility rates of white people, something for which they blame what they perceive as mass- immigration, but ultimately also feminism (di stefano ; kahlke lorentzen & shakir ). these shootings are generally attributed to racist and anti-semitic views, while misogynist motives, though demonstrably present, tend to be ignored. mass shoot- ers are not necessarily all far right; the perpetrator of the dayton shooting, probably inspired by the el paso shooter, declared himself left-wing. what united him with the other shooters was that he showed signs of misogyny (svokos ). in fact, follman & exstrum ( ) show that in analysed mass shootings since , a third of perpetrators had a history of stalking and harassment and half of them specifically targeted women. to understand how transnational, cross-linguistic misogynist and anti-femi- nist discourse works to globally attract particular groups of men, more linguis- tic research into its surface form on social media and hashtag discourse can be instructive. hashtags are by necessity cross-linguistic phenomena; however, lit- tle cross-linguistic research on hashtags exists to date. translation studies and corpus-assisted cross-linguistic discourse studies are fields that can contribute such analyses, and this chapter suggests one possible way of doing so through corpus study of semantic prosody and author stance. in the following section i outline how this study seeks to contribute such an analysis. how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages methodology this study is based on , tweets containing the #metoo hashtag ( in en- glish, in spanish and in german), gathered between july and august . the data were collected using the twitter search api. this api allows re- searchers to search for particular queries over a specific time period, within seven days of the tweet being posted. the api therefore gives us a snapshot view of the posts containing, in this case, the #metoo hashtag at the present moment. it is important to note that the api is programmed by twitter to not yield all the tweets containing this hashtag, but just a selection of what it considers relevant at the moment of searching (see also zappavigna : ; boyle & rathnayake ). the data analysed here should thus be understood as a snapshot compari- son of activity around the #metoo hashtag in the english, spanish and german language communities during july and august . one important aspect in the analysis of collocations across languages is the difference in how lexical units are usually formed. spanish uses slightly different word formation rules to english and german; while it is “somewhat resistent to orthographic noun compounds” (lang : ), typical in germanic languages, the more natural and “highly productive” (lang : ) construction in spanish would be what lang ( : ) calls “prepositional link syntagms”, where words are joined with the preposition de (in our case x de(l) #metoo) to form a lexical unit (lang : ). not taking this difference into account may well lead to observing a higher likelihood of collocations in english and german compared to spanish. therefore, i have decided to count such prepositional link syntagms, which also occur in the germanic languages, albeit at a lesser rate, among the collocations. here is an example of one such prepositional link syntagm: en la era del #metoo este rollo de mujer objeto del desfile de victoria’s secret se ha quedado obsoleto, y a la gente joven les parece casposo. no veo la mala noticia por ningún lado. [‘in the #metoo era, this whole thing of objectifying women that is the victoria’s secret fashion show has become obsolete and to young people it seems inappropriate. i don’t see the bad news at all.’] in this paper, i refer to language communities instead of countries for two reasons, which i think apply generally to cross-linguistic studies of social media data. first, the internet is a transnational space, so discussions happen within language communities, which often tran- scend countries. secondly, the country stated in the profile (if at all) does not allow us to make inferences on the native language of the user. mario bisiada while the twitter search api gives access to the username of the author of the tweet, i have anonymysed all usernames mentioned in the examples to “@user”, except institutions or public figures, defined as those with verified accounts (twit- ter ). images in the tweet and retweets of other tweets are converted to ab- breviated links by the search api, in addition to links the user may have posted. while the analysis of author stance has taken into account the entire tweet in- cluding images and articles linked to, i have generally removed all links from the tweets printed as examples in this paper in order to remove visual clutter. the tweets are not otherwise edited for orthography and all translations are my own. i have made the data underlying this research open and encourage readers wishing to consult the full tweets to do so. as stated above, the objectives of this study are to analyse the semantic proso- dy of #metoo in twitter discourse and to investigate the author stance in the tweets where the #metoo hashtag is integrated into the sentences. semantic prosody is here understood as pragmatic colouring applied to words by its collo- cates (louw : – ; stewart ; vessey : – ), a concept that has proved useful also in cross-linguistic research (lewandowska-tomaszczyk ). i am here specifically interested in what stewart ( : ) terms the study of semantic prosody as a feature of word + co-text, by which “some lexical items are associated with prosodies whose meaning is in marked contrast with the basic meaning of the node/core item in question” (stewart : ). we can ex- tend this notion to the case where a new hashtag such as #metoo is integrated into a compound and thus given a particular colouring through the semantic prosody of the accompanying term. crucially, i adopt the view that “through his or her language, and more specifically, through the use of collocations and the effect of semantic prosodies, an acculturated speaker often (re)produces the val- ues and judgments of his or her discourse community” (vessey : ). in the present context, i argue that the collocates appearing alongside #metoo allow us to discern the stance towards the issue prevalent in each respective language community. for the analysis, i have first separated those tweets where the hashtag is part of the sentence like any other word from those where it is put at the end, outside the sentence. in the former case, it is said to serve as a lexical item in “integrated” position, while in the latter, the hashtag is in “culminative” position (zappavigna : – ; see also scott : ). hashtags in the integrated position “take on functional roles in the clause. in culminative position, while the hashtag can con- strue any number of functional roles on its own […], it is typically not integrated into the clause. instead it is appended at the end of the post” (zappavigna : ). how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages to analyse semantic prosody of the #metoo hashtag, then, the first step is to separate occurrences according to this criterion, as well as to mark duplicate tweets, which mainly include newspaper headlines shared by many people, and unrelated uses of the hashtag, mainly to say “me too” without referring to the movement. each hashtag integrated into the sentence is then analysed to see if it appears as a collocation and, if so, which collocate accompanies it. to address the second research question, the analysis of author stance, i have conducted an analysis of tone using the method proposed by orgad & de bene- dictis ( ) and drüeke & zobl ( ). thus, tweets were considered “positive” if they showed “commendation/appraisal/valuing/appreciation or recognition” of #metoo, and “negative” “if they demonstrated or included substantial criti- cism/derision/cynicism or dismissal” (orgad & de benedictis : – ) of #metoo. in addition, i have established the category “critical” for tweets that crit- icise #metoo in a constructive way, expressing discontent with some aspect but being in favour overall. tweets that cannot clearly be attributed to any of these categories have been labelled “unclear”. for the final objective, the identification of cross-linguistic framings, i have compared the findings from the first research question and compared the seman- tic prosodies identified for each language in order to identify patterns. semantic prosody of #metoo table . shows the absolute and relative frequencies of #metoo hashtags that are in the integrated and in the culminative position, as well as unrelated and duplicate occurrences. in english and german, % of the tweets have the hash- tag in integrated position while about half of all occurrences are culminative. in table . : absolute (n) and relative (p) frequencies of occurrences of the #metoo hashtag in the corpora of tweets category english spanish german n p n p n p integrated % % % external % % % unrelated % % % duplicate % % % total % % % mario bisiada spanish, % of the hashtag occurrences are integrated while only about a third are culminative. this may indicate a preference on the part of spanish users to integrate the hashtag into the sentence, though a larger corpus sample is nec- essary to support this observation. based on these data, i have proceeded with analysing the semantic prosody of the #metoo hashtag. to analyse the semantic prosody of the #metoo hashtag, i have conducted a fre- quency analysis of its collocations where it does not occur as a single word. there are five occurrences of a verb form metoo’d, a verbalisation that is interesting from a formal linguistic point of view and a commonly observed phenomenon in english, but need not concern us any further at this point. i have counted these occurrences among the single-word occurrences. the absolute and relative fre- quencies of #metoo as a single word are as follows: english single-word occurrences ( % of the integrated occurrences) spanish single-word occurrences ( % of the integrated occurrences) german single-word occurrences ( % of the integrated occurrences) this means that in english, a slight majority of the hashtags in integrated posi- tion are parts of collocations, while in spanish and german, single-word occur- rences are in the majority. while this may indicate a slight preference among english users to form collocations with the #metoo hashtag when compared to spanish and german users, this quantitative observation again needs to be backed up by a larger data sample. table . shows all the collocates of the #metoo hashtag found in the corpora, with the number of occurrences in paren- theses. i now discuss the three corpora in turn. . the english corpus in the english corpus, the most common collocate with occurrences is move- ment, exemplified below. the theme of gender oppression runs throughout the collection, as befits current de­ bates in the west and beyond over sexual violence and predatory behaviour in the wake of the #metoo movement. this collocate is supported by the fact that #metoo is now labelled a movement on wikipedia and that there is an official movement page offering how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages table . : collocates of #metoo in the english, spanish and german corpora, sorted by frequency of occurrence (single-occurrence items omitted) english (n= ) spanish (n= ) german (n= ) . movement ( ) movimiento ( ) debatte ( ) . moment ( ) tiempos ( ) hysterie ( ) . campaign ( ) era ( ) bewegung ( ) . era ( ) campaña ( ) aktivistin(nen) (‘activist(s)’ (f.)) ( ) . merch, case ( ) momento (‘moment’) ( ) hexenjagd (‘witch hunt’), kampagne (‘campaign’), inquisition, zeiten (‘times’), befindlichen (‘affected’), folgen (‘consequences’) ( ) . accusers, complaints, rhetoric, story, sur- vivor, victims ( ) a comprehensive database consisting of local and national organisations dedicated to providing services and safe spaces for survivors of sexual vio- lence, healing stories, as well as articles and a glossary of terms to help give voice to your experiences (me too. ). while it is a neutral term in that it does not in itself show positive or negative stance, its use does mean a recognition of the hashtag as influential and with po- tentially large-scale effects on society, which gives the compound #metoo move- ment an approving stance. the collocation moment occurs times, mainly in tweets citing some entity’s #metoo moment, as in the first example below, but it can also denote just a mo- mentary instance of something bigger, as in the second example: .@ruthmaclean reports on how ‘nigeria’s #metoo moment’ turned against rape ac­ cuser #globaldev a definite #metoo moment. i’m retweeting because she shouldn’t be the one quit­ ting. these people should be reprimanded and forced to pay restitution. the rookie production should be behind her. mario bisiada as a collocation, #metoo moment is used as a label under which a series of articles as well as “updates and analysis on the #metoo movement” are collected in the new york times (bennett ). in fact, whether #metoo is a movement or a moment has been discussed in a series of press articles (akhtar ) which argue that “unless actions replace hashtags and value signaling, we’ll see old power structures and patterns of behaviour remain as entrenched and unequal as ever – along with a healthy new dose of mistrust and resentment with which women will contend” (senecal ). tarana burke, the founder of the movement, has said in a ted talk in that the fact she is giving this talk shows that #metoo “is bigger than a moment. it’s the confirmation that we are in a movement. and the most powerful movements have always been built around what’s possible, not just claiming what is right now” (burke ). in a canadian survey, a majority of participants consider #metoo a movement, with % of participants saying that “the #metoo movement will lead to some change, but it will take years, if not decades for real change” and % saying that “these discussions have sparked a major and permanent shift”, while only % believe that “people might be paying attention now, but it will blow over, and nothing will really change” (angus reid institute ). it is this last view of #metoo that the moment collocation arguably expresses, either out of sheer rejection of the movement or because its user accepts the systematicity of the transgressions, but does not have any hope that things will change. with eight occurrences, we find the collocate campaign, followed by era with seven occurrences. the collocate campaign in itself is a neutral term, similar to movement in that it is a collective action, though not as widely influential as a movement. it was mainly used by the press in articles immediately after the initial wave of #metoo postings and, as the examples show, might now be used by people who are critical of or reject the movement. @therealaftonw if #aftonwilliamson was lighter, blond haired, light eyed, pointy nosed then could she then be a part of the #metoo campaign? investigate the matter please and get back to me the story of fake rape allegations against #tonymochama as found by our courts militate against the #metoo campaign turning the entire mass hysteria on its head. kindly guys its never worth it.... why cook a false narrative and drive it for sympathy and in the end tarnish ppl the word era also denotes a time span and is thus comparable to moment, though it has the added semantic shade of referring to a before and after of a certain wa- tershed moment. as the examples show, it goes along with a certain desperation how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages at a given event and seems to be used mainly to achieve a semantic prosody of indignation based on #metoo, without necessarily taking a stance towards the hashtag itself. @user @brianefallon so drunk staff being inappropriate makes it ok for sobet teens to mime choking a young women in the #metoo era with rampant campus rapes?? i don’t like whataboutism #stupidity @user @user @brianbeutler in the very unlikely event he got the nomination, bernie’s rape fantasy or teacher bashing essays will be widely disseminated by the gop. i cannot, for the life of me, see how this isn’t disqualifying in the #metoo era. many of the collocations used three times or less are rather self-explanatory re- jections of the #metoo movement and will not be commented on. . the spanish corpus looking at the spanish data, we find the collocate movimiento (‘movement’) with occurrences as by far the most frequent collocation, just as it is for the english data. the spanish-language wikipedia entry for #metoo also describes it as a movement, and various spanish language glossaries list the hashtag as a move- ment. the spanish newspaper el país has featured a special entitled revolución metoo (el país ), where #metoo is either referred to without any collocates or as a movement. here is an example illustrating the collocation: @user pues que ahora, gracias al movimiento #metoo se atreven a denunciar y a declarar en contra de esos antaño intocables y todopoderosos hombres que las han tratado como a cachos de carne de mercado desde su infancia. [‘well that now, thanks to the #metoo movement, they dare to speak out and make a statement against these formerly untouchable and all­powerful men who have treated them like pieces of meat at a market since they were kids.’] the second most common collocate in the spanish data is tiempos (‘times’) with nine occurrences, followed by era (‘era’) with six occurrences, taking into ac- count that this includes prepositional link syntagms (see the methodology sec- tion). the word campaña (‘campaign’) occurs four times. below are some exam- ples. en la era #metoo, hay que convertir los espacios públicos en lugares donde las mu­ jeres puedan existir sin ser miradas, juzgadas o comentadas mario bisiada [‘in the #metoo era, public spaces must be converted to places where women can exist without being looked at, judged or commented on’] a sumarnos a la campaña #metoo por menos mujeres con violencia más mujeres felices #uniendofuerzas [‘let’s join the #metoo campaign for fewer women with violence [sic] — more happy women — #unitingforces’] the spanish data thus largely mirror what has been observed in the english data. . the german corpus the german data differ from the english and spanish data discussed thus far in that bewegung, the german equivalent for “movement”, only occurs in six tweets, most of which attack the movement, as shown below. @junge_freiheit wie erwartet stellt sich in vielen fällen heraus, dass diese #metoo bewegung eine inquisitorische hexenjagd auf unschuldige war/ist, was diese widerli­ che bewegung . mal schlimmer macht als das was sie anprangert. [‘as expected, in many cases it turns out that the #metoo movement was/is an inquisi­ torial witch hunt for innocents, which makes this disgusting movement , times worse than that which it condemns.’] @westfalenblatt also der #leuchtturm fall der #metoo bewegung steht auf so wa­ ckeligen beweisen, dass der fall eingestellt werden muss. was ist denn dann mit den ganzen anderen fällen, die nur in der #empörungswelle mitschwammen? wer entschädigt jetzt diese opfer, wo blieb die unschuldsvermutung? [‘so the landmark case of the #metoo movement is based on such shaky evidence that the case has to be closed. what then happens in all the other cases that just joined the flow of indignation? who will indemnify these victims, what happened to the presumption of innocence?’] interestingly, at the time of writing of this article, the german-language wikipe- dia page does not define #metoo as a movement, but just as a “hashtag”. the most frequent collocate in the german data is debatte (‘debate’), which occurs times. as we saw above, this frame does not occur at all in the english and spanish data. below are some examples. schauspielerin emilia schüle findet die #metoo­debatte wichtig—und dass sich in der gesellschaft noch viel ändern muss. how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages [‘the actress emilia schüle considers the #metoo debate important—and that much still has to change in society.’] die #metoo­debatte um alltagssexismus hat einer studie zufolge die situation für frauen am arbeitsplatz in den usa leicht verbessert. [‘the #metoo debate on daily sexism has lightly improved the situation of women in the workplace, according to a study.’] @tazgezwitscher @user @user ohne, dass es proteste gibt. danke jedenfalls für den einblick in die blase des us­feminismus. vielleicht ist das das problem bei der #me­ too debatte in deutschland, dass man auf twitter unter #metoo viel us­feminismus mitbekommt, was nicht der realität in deutschland entspricht? [‘without there being protests. thanks anyway for the insight into the bubble of us feminism. maybe that’s the problem with the #metoo debate in germany, that you get a lot of us feminism under #metoo on twitter, which doesn’t conform to the reality in germany?’] these are moderate comments on the topic, which shows that the word debate is the common collocate used with #metoo in german. a query in the dwds newspaper corpus, consisting of the most important german-language newspa- pers, confirms this impression: in texts from and , where #metoo as a single word occurs times, #metoo-debatte occurs times, while #metoo- bewegung occurs times (dwds ). it seems, then, that in german-language public discourse, the most common way to frame the #metoo hashtag is not as a movement, but as a debate, and that the press is actively involved in promot- ing this frame through the use of the term #metoo-debatte. it seems, then, that, while international discourse on #metoo awards it the status of a movement and all the connotations of this as described above, german discourses avoid such a labelling for some reason. this might be explained by a tendency among german media to envisage a hierarchical cline between traditional and new media, which affects their role in society and against which they seek to strengthen their own position (ko- rnemann : ). hashtag movements such as #metoo, which enter public discourse as folksonomic creations having circumvented traditional news media gate-keepers, still leave the traditional media somewhat taken aback and strug- gling to react appropriately. this might be especially true of feminist movements, which meet strong hegemonic barriers through the patriarchal establishment and recurrent discrimination of women that still pervade many press agencies (banet- weiser ). a possible explanation for the establishment of the more reluctant “debate” frame may thus be that labelling #metoo a movement would distance mario bisiada traditional media from further involvement, while framing it as a debate means the traditional media retain an active role in its development. the second most common collocate in german is hysterie (‘hysteria’), with occurrences, a purely negative frame which is not found in the english and span- ish data either. its occurrence may have been pushed by a lot of activity around an influential blog article, which may have distorted the data somewhat, but this frame goes hand in hand with the intent to reclaim the term opfer (‘victim’) and apply it to those accused under the #metoo hashtag, observable in a range of examples. anklage gegen opfer der #metoo hysterie wird fallengelassen. [‘case against victims of #metoo hysteria is dropped.’] was von der #metoo hysterie blieb. jetzt läuft die #klimahysterie. #fridaysforfuture #great #grüne #kulturbereicherung [‘what remains of the #metoo hysteria. now it’s the #climatehysteria. #fridaysfor­ future #great #greens #culturalenrichment’] given the frequency in english and spanish of terms such as era, tiempos or moment, which frame #metoo temporally, as something that is long-term and influential, it is notable that the only collocate in the german corpus reflecting such a frame is gegenwart (‘present’), and two tweets containing the phrase in zeiten von #metoo (‘in times of #metoo’), as shown below. again, a query in the dwds newspaper corpus confirms the absence of this frame from german discourse, as, for instance, #metoo-Ära occurs just three times (dwds ). lashana lynch: wie auch james bond in die metoo­gegenwart gezerrt wird #james­ bond #metoo [‘how even james bond is dragged into the metoo present’] @ulfposh alter weißer mann findet alten weißen mann gut. solidarität unter privile­ gierten in zeiten von #metoo, #rechtsterrorismus und #frauenquote uvm nur logisch [‘old white man likes old white man. solidarity among the privileged in times of #metoo, #farrightterrorism and #women’squota etc no surprise’] to sum up, we can observe a notable difference between the english and span- ish language community on the one hand and the german language on the other just when it comes to the way #metoo is referred to. while english and spanish discourse generally award it the status of a movement and also use other, more appreciative collocations, german discourse is more reluctant and just labels it a debate, which has fewer empowering features than the term movement. this how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages may affect the degree to which #metoo can be seen as a safe space for women participating in internet discussions surrounding the hashtag then. it will be interesting to see whether this difference in how #metoo is perceived on a general discourse level is also observable in individual author positions in the tweets. the second research objective is to conduct an analysis of author stance towards #metoo in the english, spanish and german tweets (see table . , visualised in figure . ). the tweets in the english and spanish corpora show a higher frequency of positive stance ( % and %) when compared to the tweets in the german corpus ( %), and show a lower frequency of negative stance ( % and %) than the german tweets ( %). keeping in mind that the sample size is not huge and provides just a snapshot of activity, the data seem to indicate that the general stance towards #metoo is more negative in german twitter discourse during the recorded time span than in english and spanish. the analysis thus suggests that in german-language twitter discourse, con- trary to english and spanish-language discourse, the reluctance to call #metoo a movement, or a lasting societal shift, but mainly a “debate”, is reflected in the table . : analysis of positive, critical, negative and unclear author stance in the three languages positive critical negative unclear total n p n p n p n p n p english % % % % % spanish % % % % % german % % % % % english spanish german occurrences pos. crit. neg. uncl. figure . : graph of positive, critical, negative and unclear author stance in the three languages mario bisiada general population’s stance towards the hashtag and translates into a more neg- ative attitude towards it, again putting into doubt whether the hashtag in ger- man can be considered a safe space. of course the use of the word debate in itself, as the above examples suggest, does not necessarily imply negative author stance. it could be argued, however, that the prevalence of the “debate” frame has promoted a type of individualising tendency which, as pointed out by research discussed above, de-politicises the #metoo movement. after all, a debate is un- derstood as an open-ended discussion depending on individual views between at least two legitimate sides which have equal justification of existence. given, how- ever, that #metoo was sparked by a series of revelations of sexual assault and developed into a movement to end gender violence in society, it is hard to see any justification for labelling it a “debate”. the often misogynistic and derisive statements we observe in this analysis, however, show that a less appreciative labelling of the hashtag accompanied by a largely negative discourse around it can endanger the perception of the hashtag as a safe space for feminist activism. cross-linguistic framings of #metoo having indicated differences between the languages under analysis, i now turn to the third research question, the analysis of cross-linguistic similarities. one representation that is obvious from the collocates identified in the previous anal- ysis is that of #metoo as a collection of lies, which is perhaps the most lexically creative attack on the movement. beyond that, this section identifies two fram- ings that language users in this corpus apply to #metoo across languages: the organised pressure group frame and the exaggerated scope frame. i also discuss the hijacking of the movement by far-right groups. the first frame that can be identified is that of #metoo as an organised pressure group. a range of comments in the corpus suggest that commentators across languages treat #metoo as a centrally controlled organisation: @user @user @user @user the current #metoo leadership are mostly the men hat­ ing lesbians. they are desperately trying to create a wedge between men and women. therefore anything men do to honour and please women must be attacked and deni­ grated. @user it specifically painted “hippie chicks” as childish, dirty, drugged out, homicidal morons whose violent deaths are to be celebrated. that had to upset more than one #metoo architect over at alyssa milano’s agency, caa. after all, tarantino is repped by wma, their competitor. how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages lo que no entiendo es cómo, en el mismo mundo del movimiento #metoo y del pode­ roso lobby feminista ­uno de los grupos de presión más poderosos de la actualidad­, todavía pueda existir el reggaeton [‘what i don’t understand is how, in this world of the #metoo movement and the pow­ erful feminist lobby ­one of the most powerful pressure groups of our time­, there can still be reggaeton.’] wieder ein opfer der totalitären #metoo­inquisition, dessen rehabilitierung am ende mit einem dreizeiler erledigt wird und der mit seinem sozialen und beruflichen tod allein bleibt. [‘another victim of the totalitarian #metoo inquisition whose rehabilitation in the end is given short shrift and who remains alone with his social and professional death.’] words like architect, leadership and lobby clearly show that these authors per- ceive #metoo not as the decentralised popular movement against everyday gen- der violence that it is, but as an organised campaign attributed to left-wing lob- bies, claimed to be funded by george soros and led by a few activist women with the political goal to eliminate men who disagree, as evidenced further in the examples below. @user @irlembberlin @bpol_b makes sense. men are the key to the streets & have been propaganda targeted by #whitefeathermedia & political #gaslighting; by #metoo mass­emasculation & dehumanisation of men – ready to *trigger* & mobilise a global army... was bleibt von #metoo? – die motivation, politisch unliebsame männer gesellschaft­ lich zu vernichten. [‘what remains of #metoo? – the motivation to socially eliminate politically disagree­ able men.’] al tío neil las del #metoo le van a inventar violaciones por decir esto... y a ver qué le inventan los otros lobbys zurdos gringos [‘the #metoo women will plant rapes on this guy neil for saying that. and let’s see what the other damn left­wing lobbies will make up’] vean quien está detrás de #metoo? [link to article ¿las feministas de soros detrás del #metoo?, published in atiempo.mx] [‘do you see who’s behind #metoo?’] it is here that the anti-feminist reaction to #metoo chimes in with far-right par- ties’ and supporters’ general allegation that their freedom of speech is curbed mario bisiada (lang ; salazar : – ) while at the same time being extremely sensi- tive to criticisms of themselves. the effect of #metoo that seems to disturb many men in general is an insecurity about the disruption of internalised patterns of behaviour that they deem normal and that are now challenged on a global scale, as expressed by this tweet: @user @politicalelle sorry, but i’m not buying that shit. it all starts with innocently offering a bit of assistance with carry­on luggage and before you know it you’re elbows deep in the #metoo movement and god is angry at our collective impertinence. just not worth it. the #metoo movement is not only derided, but also hijacked by far-right interest groups, as has been reported by other scholars (boyle & rathnayake ; wie- lens ). this hijacking usually consists in remarking on a “curious silence from #metoo” (drawing on the “organised pressure group” frame identified above) on a case of sexual violence where the accused has a migratory background: @user und von den sog. “feministinnen” und #metoo­aktivistinnen wird bestenfalls ohrenbetäubendes schweigen kommen. #mussmanwissen [‘and the so­called “feminists” and #metoo activists will at best produce deafening silence. #havetoknowit’] feministinnenverbände die zu den massenvergewaltigungen in deutschlsnd schwei­ gen, brauchen auch nicht mehr mit #metoo zu kommen, wenn sie mal von älteren herren angeredet werden. [‘feminist organisations that say nothing about the mass rapes in germany might as well shut up about #metoo when older men occasionally start talking to them.’] @a noticias parece que la importación de delincuentes no es una idea especialmen­ te brillante. curioso silencio de las #metoo y las #yositecreo, por cierto. [‘it seems that the importation of criminals is not an especially brilliant idea. curious silence from the #metoo and the #yosítecreo women, actually’] @user @user machista? que la cultura musulmana sólo es machista? te violan sÓ­ lo por ser mujer occidental y no musulmana y tú hablas de machismo? encaja el #metoo en el taharrush, en la violación de la niña española dejando mar­ char a la musulmana, los € entre risas (españolasputxas) vamos! [‘chauvinist? muslim culture is just chauvinist? they rape you just for being a west­ ern woman and not muslim and you talk about chauvinism? try to fit #metoo to the taharrush, to the rape of the spanish girl while the muslim girl was let go, laughing at the € (spanish whores), come on!’] how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages the hijacking of #metoo to spread islamophobia is a cross-national phenomenon (farris ; mast ), and has happened in germany under the hashtag # db, which is also observed in the corpus of this study. the # db campaign emerged with a video of german and austrian women condemning “neglected” acts of sexual violence committed by migrants and refugees and is “an exemplary case to illustrate how anti-immigration groups tap into women’s voices in order to produce solidarities on the basis of discrimination and sociocultural exclusion” (sorce : ). such groups selectively report cases of violence against women only when the alleged perpetrators can be stereotypically assigned to a possible migrant profile. the messages appear without overt evaluation, but the # db and other hashtags, attributing the violence to merkel’s welcoming policies, for instance, make the political background obvious. related to the “organised pressure group” frame is that of exaggerating the scope of the movement (see franks : on the largely intangible conse- quences of #metoo so far). that debates sparked by feminist hashtags become framed as exaggerations has also been observed by kornemann ( : ) on the german #aufschrei. one label that occurs here, perhaps not surprisingly, is that of #metoo as a witch hunt, which has been used by prominent figures such as catherine deneuve and michael haneke (mumford ; clark-parsons : ) and is observed in each language under analysis. another cross-linguistically ob- servable pattern in the corpora is the exaggerated importance given to dropped court cases such as the one against kevin spacey, described as a majorly impor- tant case rather than one of several, the backlash against amber heart in her case against johnny depp, or the frustration in many men about the cancellation of a victoria’s secret fashion show. lastly, screw the #metoo movement for getting involved and the women who believe falsely accused men should be fired/arrested. they can’t stop targeting depp as guilty when turns out he was innocent all along and amber heart was the real abuser. #real­ monsteramberheart.( / ) wie ist das jetzt eigentlich mit #kevinspacey ? entschuldigt sich irgendjemand von die­ sem radikalfeministischen, hysterischen #metoo ­ lynchmob? wohl eher nicht, oder? naja…war auch nicht anders zu erwarten von denen. ist das gleiche, wie mit nazis ? [‘what’s happening now with #kevinspacey? will anyone from this radically feminist, hysterical #metoo lynch mob apologise? probably not, right? oh well…didn’t expect anything different from them. it’s the same as with the nazis?’] kevin spacey reaparece. cuanto daño ha hecho el puritanismo y la caza de brujas que desató el #metoo!!! #kevinspacey #libertad #freedom mario bisiada [‘kevin spacey reappears. how much damage this puritanism and witch hunt that #metoo unleashed has done!!!’] recordemos esa maravilla que era el desfile de #victoriasecret y que le jodan a estos totalitarios del feminismo el #metoo y @el_pais [‘let’s commemorate the marvel that was the #victoriasecret fashion show and fuck those totalitarians of feminism, #metoo and @el_pais’] as #metoo is probably one of the most widely known and influential feminist hashtags, it is perhaps hardly surprising that it has attracted the kinds of attacks and anti-feminist discourse discussed in this section. given that, and even after its “coming of age” as a hashtag movement, it is all the more inspiring to see that even a snapshot analysis like this one shows the power of #metoo to increase awareness of gender violence, to unite and give warmth and hope to women across language communities: it’s weirdly healing, always upsetting, and never surprising to bond with a woman over your experiences of sexual assault. #metoo may have shocked a lot of men but i can’t imagine it shocked many women. so happy to see this man has been arrested! years ago he kept following and ha­ rassing my friend until she found refuge at a streetside dhaaba. she had no photos, no way to report him. this is the power of social media. this is why #metoo exists and why it’s needed. @user aber genau das gehört zur bewertung vom “leben”. eine vergewaltigung ist kein unfall, der vergewaltiger hat sich dazu entschlossen. und lange wurde seine tat rechtfertigt und ich ausgegrenzt, im berufsumfeld. zusätzlich zum eigentlichen trauma. das gehört alles dazu bei #metoo. [‘but exactly that belongs to the assessment of “life”. a rape is not an accident, the rapist decided to do it. and his deed was justified for a long time and i was excluded in my professional life. in addition to the original trauma. all that is part of #metoo.’] después de esto, es imposible que alguien diga que el #metoo no sirve para nada. las denuncias salen porque otras las empezaron y porque nos fortalecemos a de­ nunciar en una plataforma que nos cree. ojalá dejen de cuestionar pruebas cuando hay casos como estos. fuente: @metooperu [‘after this, it’s impossible that anyone would say that #metoo has no effects. the re­ portings happen because others started them and because we gathered the strength to speak out on a platform that believes us. hopefully they will stop questioning evidence in cases like this one. source: @metooperu’] how #metoo is framed differently in twitter discourse across languages conclusion this study has provided a snapshot analysis of english, spanish and german dis- course surrounding the #metoo hashtag on twitter in the months of july and august . i have found that the semantic prosody of the #metoo hashtag, i.e. the use of collocates to colour its meaning, is comparable among english and spanish users, who mainly label #metoo a movement, while also using tempo- ral collocates such as moment, era and times. german users, in contrast, do not frequently use the term movement, but seem to prefer the collocation #metoo- debatte, referring to #metoo as a “debate”, a tendency that has been shown to echo common use in german newspapers. debate is not used at all as a collocate in the english and spanish data, while movement and other collocates framing #metoo as influential rarely occur in german. whether this difference influences the public’s attitude towards #metoo, some- thing that the data analysed here tentatively indicate, should be investigated in greater depth in future studies. cross-linguistic studies of this nature can be a great source of information to help understand the differing perceptions of and attitudes towards feminist hashtag activism, which is per se international and thus calls for transnational and cross-cultural analysis. as the study draws on data gathered during a period of a few weeks and had to be based on a small enough sample size to facilitate qualitative analysis, its findings cannot be generalised, which is a general issue of hashtag-based sam- pling (zappavigna : ). as such, it calls for further research into the semantic prosody of the #metoo hashtag. a follow-up project might search specifically for collocations involving movement and debate and provide a diachronic overview of their evolution as well as a stance analysis, possibly also indicating diachronic shifts. a more nuanced understanding of how hashtag activism is picked up and framed by traditional media is required. as this study has indicated, the way a hashtag is framed may have consequences for the perception of a movement in a given language community. finally, this study has identified some cross-linguistic patterns of discourse surrounding the #metoo hashtag, mainly intending to undermine its potential. the data analysed here both reflect known phenomena such as the hijacking of feminist movements to promote far-right ideology and islamophobia and the exaggeration of its effects to stoke antipathy towards it, but also patterns that have not received much scholarly attention, such as the framing of #metoo as an organised pressure group headed by a few individuals and with politically left- wing aims or the unbalanced attention given to few particular cases to undermine the movement. mario bisiada as discussed above, hashtag campaigns play a significant role in all of these issues in social media debates, both in order to drive forward a movement and to attack it through counter hashtags. the linguistic study of hashtags and their framing, be it through semantic prosody or through general 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pennington, rosemary. . making space in social media: #muslimwomens- day in twitter. journal of communication inquiry ( ). – . doi: . / . rentschler, carrie. . #safetytipsforladies: feminist twitter takedowns of vic- tim blaming. feminist media studies ( ). – . doi: . / . . . salazar, philippe-joseph. . the alt-right as a community of discourse. javnost – the public ( – ). – . doi: . / . . . schachtner, christina & gabriele winter (eds.). . virtuelle räume – neue Öf- fentlichkeiten: frauennetze im internet. frankfurt: campus verlag. scott, kate. . the pragmatics of hashtags: inference and conversational style on twitter. journal of pragmatics . – . doi: . /j.pragma. . . . https://doi.org/ . / https://www.mediamatters.org/breitbart-news/far-right-activists-and-alt-right-trolls-are-using-metoo-movement-bolster-their?redirect_source=/blog/ / / /far-right-activists-and-alt-right-trolls-are-using-metoo-movement-bolster-their-xenophobia/ 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https://doi.org/ . / https://abcnews.go.com/us/alleged-dayton-gunman-connor-betts-showed-signs-misogyny/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/us/alleged-dayton-gunman-connor-betts-showed-signs-misogyny/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/us/alleged-dayton-gunman-connor-betts-showed-signs-misogyny/story?id= https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://www.dailydot.com/irl/what-is-an-incel/ https://www.dailydot.com/irl/what-is-an-incel/ https://doi.org/ . /cor. . https://doi.org/ . /feminapolitica.v i . https://doi.org/ . /feminapolitica.v i . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / sexual harassment still drives women | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. corpus id: sexual harassment still drives women @inproceedings{libarkin sexualhs, title={sexual harassment still drives women}, author={j. libarkin}, year={ } } 	j. libarkin 	published y ou may be someone who thinks that sexual harassment is a “thing of the past” or that it’s experienced by “only a few” women. these statements don’t capture reality. as recently as , a study found that sexual harassment affects the majority of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (stemm) [ ]. now, a comprehensive survey of female undergraduates in physics has uncovered a similarly disturbing situation for this group of women at the start of their careers… expand physics.aps.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper figures from this paper 	 figure references showing - of references interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace: the interface and impact of general incivility and sexual harassment. 	s. lim, l. cortina 	psychology, medicine 	the journal of applied psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed survey of academic field experiences (safe): trainees report harassment and assault 	k. clancy, r. nelson, j. rutherford, k. hinde 	psychology, medicine 	plos one 	 	 	highly influential 	 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed sexual harassment reported by undergraduate female physicists 	lauren m. aycock, z. hazari, eric brewe, k. clancy, t. hodapp, renee michelle goertzen 	mathematics 	 	 	highly influential 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed still second class 	marina n. rosenthal, alec m smidt, j. freyd 	psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed barriers to women leaders in academia: tales from science and technology 	liza howe-walsh, s. turnbull 	sociology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed gender discrimination in physics and astronomy: graduate student experiences of sexism and gender microaggressions. 	r. barthelemy, melinda mccormick, c. henderson 	psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references results save alert research feed related papers 	abstract 	figures 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue plenary address the material foundations of modern scientific and technological advances george e. pake group vice president, corporate research group, xerox corporation the following is a transcript of dr. pake's address presented at the mrs spring meeting in san francisco. i,lt is a pleasure to be with you this evening. in my distant past as a once active researcher, it seems likely that my research interests would have impelled me to be active in the materials research society, had it been flourishing in those days. but today, i find myself with responsibility for approximately , research personnel distributed among three xerox research centers. the webster research center, in webster, new york, which is located in the joseph c. wilson center for technology, was historically the first xerox research center. as you might expect, its focus has been on the xerographic imaging and marking process. with its theme of imaging and marking, many of its professionals are physicists or chemists, although there are also some engineers. and materials research is a very important component of its activities. the second research center, historically, is the palo alto research center founded in . its focus is on digital science and technology, along with an important component of materials research related to electronics and electro- optics. our third and newest research center is in missis- sauga, ontario, just a few kilometers west of toronto. the theme of this xerox research centre of canada is materials science and technology. the materials with which xrcc concerns itself are those important to all of our business: copiers, duplicators, and printers, including photoreceptors, dry toners, inks, and paper. i suspect that there is very little lean tell this group about the materials research foundation upon which rest the many technological advances which enable the functioning of our modern society. perhaps the most celebrated of these advances are those relating to integrated circuits. memory chips and microprocessors incorporating lsi or vlsi technology are becoming ubiquitous. new systems technology is now enabled by these advances. all of this goes back to the transistor and its invention as a replace- ment for the vacuum tube (or for the valve, if you prefer). the progression from gas envelopes to solid-state devices has proceeded apace. gas lasers are now finding themselves candidates for being supplanted by solid-state laser diodes in many applications. there is at least the prospect that some kind of solid-state display technology will supplant the crt, but for most applications this transition has proved difficult and has been slow to take place. that crt s are too bulky, too expensive to build, and too extravagant in use of power have all been evident for decades, but the ideal low-cost, rapid-response, low-power, high resolution, solid-state flat panel display remains as a challenge to materials scientists and technologists. in xerox, we have considerable optimism that we can, for our laser xerographic printers, replace rotating polygons for laser scanning with solid-state devices having no moving parts. in general, these transitions to high-reli- ability, lower-cost solid-state devices are enabled by the accumulating advances from materials research. futurists make a big point of the fact that we are entering the information age. there is much discussion of the importance of software and of knowledge-based systems. all of this emphasis—and our growing u.s. proficiency in information science, and cognitive processes—is, i believe, the basis for continuing u.s. technological leadership in the next two or three decades. the focus on ideas and on systems that extend and employ human expertise is made possible by the advances in materials science and technology generated through materials research. from a broad perspective, materials research has enabled modern solid-state microelectronics. modern electronics, in turn, advances almost every field of human endeavor. in a commercial sense, consumer electronics and communica- tions depend critically on the high function, durability, reliability, and low cost of solid-state electronics. auto- mobiles—which were for so many years simply large aggregations of low technology—have suddenly, with concerns for fuel economy and for prevention of pollution, become dependent on microprocessor control, and the entire auto is now quite sophisticated technologically. even washing machines and dishwashers are now microprocessor controlled. but there are other more widely extending applications. solid-state electronic instrumentation is important to every quantitative function in our commercial world. banking transactions, petroleum exploration, medical instru- mentation are just a few examples. and the petroleum and page , mrs bulletin, may/june https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core medical examples merely hint at the dependence of other sciences upon modern electronic instrumentation. analy- tical chemistry, biology, earth and planetary science,.and high-energy physics are all progressing rapidly to new levels of understanding enabled in large part by modern electronic instrumentation and also by the properties and capabilities of new materials resulting from materials research. there is one of these areas of science about which i want say a few words, that is, particle physics or high-energy physics. as some of you may be aware, i accepted appoint- ment last year to the board of overseers for the projected new particle accelerator, the super conducting super collider—generally known as the ssc. the community of high-energy physicists has concluded, with a consensus and internal discipline not always to be found within communities of research scientists, that the most important next requirement to advance elementary particle physics is a trillion electron volt proton synchrotron, constructed of two adjacent rings in the same large diameter tunnel. the tunnel will be approximately kilometers in circum- ference or about miles in diameter. (see figure ). our knowledge of the elementary particles constituting matter has proceeded to the point where high-energy particle physicists require center-of-mass energies of tev to effect the close interaction of the constituent quarks within colliding protons in order to ferret out the remaining pieces of the puzzles relating to particle species and the strong force. our current experience with large proton synchrotrons provides a useful base from which to work in planning to achieve these desired -tev energies. already functioning since at fermilab in batavia, illinois, is the tevatron (figure ). it provides tev reliably using , large superconducting magnets.the main ring is . kilometers in circumference, and the machine is being upgraded for operation as a proton-antiproton collider, tev on tev. the european cern laboratory in geneva, is home to the super proton synchrotron with a total collison energy of gev (figure ). the main ring is kilometers in circumference, buried underground. this is the world's largest energy collider now in operation. a -mile-diameter particle accelerator having , or more superconducting magnets in a subterranean tunnel will, of course, cost much money to construct and to figure aerial view of the fermi national accelerator (fermilab) at batavia, illinois. the main ring of this fixed-target proton synchrotron is . kilometers in circumference. it is presently being upgraded for operation as a proton-antiproton collider with a total collison energy of tev. (courtesy of fermi national accelerator laboratory.) operate. in order to estimate the costs and schedule, the department of energy commissioned the universities research association (ura), a consortium of u.s. universities, to conduct a study in the summer of . the major technological design issue has to do with the design of the superconducting magnets to bend the high-energy proton beam into its circular orbit (see figure ).the initial ssc design study concluded that the total accelerator cost would be relatively independent of the magnet design selected (within %) at about $ . billion. this estimate does not cover site acquisition cost, nor cost of measuring and detection instrumentation. ura has established a boardof overseers to watch over the ssc project. the chairman is prof. boyce mcdaniel of cornell university, and as i said, i happen to be a member of that board. the ura and the doe are establishing site selection criteria. a central design group under dr. maury tigner of cornell is in residence at lawrence berkeley laboratory pursing magnet design and other design issues, under research contract support from the doe. figure schematic of possible payout for the ssc, which would be roughly kilometers in circumference. the injection system is drawn to scale; the six experimental halls and other components on the main ring are not. in the detail of the detector, the beam pipe and its magnets are shown oversized. mrs bulletin, may/june , page https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ' , - ?;•.:<*.?:>> figure aerial view of cern in geneva, showing the location of the super proton synchrotron, a proton-antiproton collider with a total collison energy of gev. it is the world's most powerful collider. the main ring, which is kilometers in circumference, is buried underground. the land above it is undisturbed and retains its traditional use for farming. (courtesy of cern.) figure a dual-beam-line superconducting ssc model magnet in the assembly stage. its operation requires cooling with liquid helium to a temperature a few degrees above absolute zero. /courtesy of brookhaven national laboratory.i notwithstanding all of this activity, the ssc still does not have official doe approval, much less authorization and funding by congress. the ssc represents quite clearly a major decision and potential commitment for u.s. science. some of my colleagues in the scientific community have substantial reservations about the wisdom and desirability of the united states going forward with ssc. doubtless there are a number of people at this mrs meeting who hold such skepticism. with this state of affairs, i thought it might be worthwhile for me to describe to you why i accepted appointment to the board of overseers, and why i strongly support the proposition that the united states should build the ssc. my own research interests in the couple of decades during which i was an active researcher were condensed matter physics and chemical physics. now, i hold respon- sibility for the entire research program of a business corporation which sustains itself and its stockholders by surveying technological applications to the business office. in view of my own vested interests in condensed matter physics and in commercialization of technology, you may well ask why i support a taxpayer subvention of $ billion to construct the world's largest most powerful particle accelerator. before i offer my rationale, let me concede some points: although the ssc is intended to improve our most fundamental understanding of the ultimate composition of matter, i do not contend that the ssc will directly produce substantial advances for condensed matter physics. al- though there will be substantial technological and engi- neering fallout from the ssc project—for example, in advancing superconducting magnet technology—these are by-products and do not in themselves constitute adequate justification for the ssc. "nothing is more pragmatic than the broadest and deepest knowledge base mankind can attain/' why do i favor the major investment—this gargantuan particle physicists' "boondoggle" or whatever worse name its critics may give it? how can a hard-bitten industrialist, with all his pragmatic concerns, be an outspoken advocate of such a large and costly project that has so little direct page , mrs bulletin, may/june https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core economically tangible return? it is simple: for the near- term and long-range future vigor and benefit of the u.s. industrial and even military economy, the most pragmatic posture i can imagine is one that opts by overt choice for the most advanced knowledge and deepest understanding. for the united states instead to deliberately choose a "me- too" or "also-ran" research science status is to opt for ignorance rather than knowledge. nothing is more prag- matic than the broadest and deepest knowledge base mankind can attain. and i am just chauvinistic enough to believe that the welfare and economic vigor of the united states is best assured if we lead the world in advancing knowledge and in developing that broad, deep knowledge base. the imperatives of science—and the imperatives even of the academy in the broad sustained quest for knowledge — are very nearly congruent with the requirements for industrial technological leadership. nothing is more prag- matic than technological leadership, which while it requires many ingredients, rests primarily, i believe, on world- leading science and on our cadre of the world's best, brightest, and most effective research practitioners. for any part of science where we have world leadership, or where it is within our grasp, i would never run the risks entailed in deliberately opting to be an "also-ran." i believe that, in some deep sense, it is un-american to choose to be one of the world's scientific "also-rans." in respect to world leadership in science, we condemn this nation to protracted miseries if we opt for ignorance. i believe this deeply in a philosophical sense, but it is quite evidently also for me a highly pragmatic point. some peole may say "well, okay. but in particle physics! and to the tune of $ billion?" my answer is "yes, and even to the tune of $ billion." i know that $ billion is a great deal of money, but it is comparable to the cost of a modern aircraft carrier—maybe less if you count its complement of jet planes. i believe that, on military grounds alone, the ssc buys the nation more security than an aircraft carrier does. and who among us would miss one fewer nuclear powered aircraft carrier? i'm not sure that even the admirals would miss just one fewer carrier. what does the ssc buy in a military sense? first, it keeps us sharp in certain highly skilled craftsmanship and technological domains. perhaps most important, it helps us to build and sustain a cadre of very bright scientists accustomed to world-class technical activities and aiming at world leadership. recall the critical roles filled in world war ii by our laboratory and theoretical scientists from even the most esoteric of scientific pursuits. the scc project will build a world-leading, vigorous human technical capability. my comparison with an aircraft carrier can be critized because congress will not actually make the decision on the ssc by asking itself, "would we really rather spend the money on a nuclear carrier and a few dozen jet fighters?" nor will it say, lets have ssc but, to pay for it, we'll simply knock $ billion out of the defense department budget. these are valid criticisms. the foregoing criticism brings to mind another objection i have heard from some scientists about the ssc. they say it will over the years place too big a lien on the annual budget for science and research. there is only a very limited sense in which that comment has any validity: it will surely place an annual lien on the doe budget for research. but in the larger sense, the argument is wrong, because there is no u.s. science budget considered and enacted as a whole. there are the respective agency budgets, many of which have an identifiable science component. after the fact, analysts can look over the total federal budget and aggregate these components into the total number of dollars expended for science. congress however does not arrive at the constituent elements of the so-called science budget by using this aggregating procedure. still another criticism i hear about the ssc expenditure runs as follows: $ billion construction and $x hundred million a year for operation could better be spent on cancer research or, perhaps from this group, on materials research. "nothing is more pragmatic than technological leadership, which while it requires many ingredients, rests primarily on world-leading science and on our cadre of the world's best, brightest, and most effective research practitioners." this kind of argument is, i feel, somewhat specious. it is really a version of the so-called principle that if something is good, more of it is better—surely a flaky principle, at best. there are at least hypothetical ways in which the criticism could have validity. if the further advance of cancer research or of materials science depended upon one major, identifiable $ billion next step, then we could argue the relative merits of world leadership in particle physics, of advancing cancer research, or of the technological benefits from this one major leap forward in materials research. but materials research is not of such a nature that a single $ billion project determines its future advance. lam willing to wager that, if materials research were such an intrinsic nature that its future can depend on a single major facility, most of the people in this room would not have made the career choices that now lead then to be members of the materials research society. in my experience with budgets, whether as a physics department chairman, a university executive vice chan- cellor, an industrial research director, or now as a vice president for corporate research, the issue is never whether a given activity could use a lot more budget beneficially. instead, each proposed activity must meet certain tests of relative importance to the task or domain in question, and tests of whether the people proposing it have the requisite skills and a credible track record. from my perspective, the particle physicists of the united states pass these tests with flying colors. we need to support particle physicists in their efforts to provide the united states with world leadership in this most fundamental area of modern physics. furthermore, to an important degree, the proposal for the superconducting super collider is the result of the activ- ities of the members of the materials research society: the ssc project is only possible because of advances in super- conducting materials which enable the magnets, in the understanding of critical materials elements of the particle detectors, and of course in the transistors of the integrated circuits that perform the data measurements and analyses. mrs bulletin, may/june , page https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core seriously, i don't really hold you people responsible for the ssc proposal. but i do urge you to support the bold u.s. practitioners of our most fundamental branch of physics as they take the steps to lead the world in this high scientific calling. "we need to support particle physicists in their efforts to provide the united states with world leadership in this fundamental area of modern physics/' question: what choices have already been made that have ruled out other alternatives for big science in order to pursue the advanced knowledge in this particular area? answer: first of all, i probably cannot enumerate all the various accelerator proposals of one kind or another that have come forward, but the high-energy physics com- munity, which has emplaced a thing called the high energy physics advisory panel, has looked at this question, and decided that there is only one thing that they urge as a next step: the ssc. that community has been very good over the years. it has closed on many accelerators. it's taken a very tough posture with respect to keeping the community researching at the frontier. it made some very hard decisions, and i think it's quite unique that there is almost no other community of research scientists that can decide what should be the next thing for its science and what other things may have to be put aside. question: you mentioned that you want to answer the ultimate question: the fundamental behavior of nature. how do we know that after we reach there, we will not find more mystery that will require higher energy? how do we calculate the ultimate limit beyond which we may not go before we understand all that? answer: it is quite likely we will only arrive at some point where we will have still further questions if we advance in this field using this new machine. the quest is to try to unify the theoretical comprehension of the various forces. already the electro-weak forces have been, in some sense, unified by the theorists. if we come close to that with this machine, we will not have erased or eliminated further curiosities. however, we will have made a very fundamental advance. there is a debatable point about whether the united states should wait and try to involve other nations to help them share the cost. that's worth debating and thinking about. high-energy physics has been quite re- markable for the extent to which international cooperative research has taken place. we have had scientists go to work at european laboratories and in russian laboratories. there is a fair amount of exchange back and forth. we see very few other domains in which there's that kind of international cooperation. i don't want to speculate on what happens after the $ billion ssc gets built, but i certainly will concede that there will be many unanswered fundamental questions. science would be pretty disap- pointing if we got all these fundamental questions answered. question: the sites committee has recently made a series of recommendations on upgrading existing facilities and creating new neutron facilities, as well as some new synchrotron sources, which would be about $ billion total over an eight-year period for major facilities. now you are telling us that the ssc is $ billion over about a -year period. how does one balance out these different areas and different directions within the major facility funding issues? answer: there truly is and will be competition for funding between those kinds of recommendations. but the distinction that the materials science, solid-state physics, or whatever portion you choose to express as your domain if interest does not hinge critically on that particular set of expenditures or facilities for its future advance. people will continue to move forward with existing facilities. i contend that, very great advances toward fundamental questions concerning particle physics or high-energy physics cannot be made without some machine in this energy domain. the distinction is that these facilities, while important to materials or solid-state science—the ones that were pushed for by the sites report—are not in themselves absolutely indispensable to further progress in the field. question: when you play a chip like this for funding, you can only play it once. is this the most advanced blue sky, high-energy thing? are you sure you're not going to turn around and build another one in six years? answer: as best i can understand from being on the ssc board of overseers, it is the boldest step that can be taken to advance the field that has any amount of assurance of being successful. that's based upon the positive experience with the superconducting magnets in the trevatron at fermilab. it would be hard to imagine really a larger step that might compete with this. there are some secondary or short-fall types of compromises that have been discussed. for instance, there is a plan to build an even larger accelerator at lausanne. and there is a proposal for us to put a machine like this in their tunnel when they build it. but that turns out to be almost or very nearly as costly, without providing the real breakthrough in energy that is needed to get into this domain to understand the whole business about quarks and gluons, etc. there is almost no other really bold step that you can take which has any assurance of being feasible or technically implementable. page , mrs bulletin, may/june https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core la représentation panique dans le théâtre de jan fabre vol.:( ) neophilologus ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z la représentation panique dans le théâtre de jan fabre amélie mons published online: february © the author(s) abstract jan fabre’s theatre was and still is a controversial one. pretentious, elitist, too intel- lectual according to some, it is also seen as populist and demagogic for others. the flemish artist divides his audience in a radical way. it is this very gap, this “incoher- ence” in the multiple criticisms this theatre receives that makes us think that while this form of contemporary art is maybe detested it is fore and foremost maybe not always well understood. it is indeed uneasy to apprehend a theatre that deconstructs the process of representation when the audience has been used to discussing repre- sentation and representation only. i would like to review these critiques; see how they avoid the real issues at stake, in order to show an actual lack of critical means, a lack of analytical tools, which would allow us to justly critique an innovative theatre. but most of all, i want to propose a different perspective. it is with the use of the philosophy of the french intellectual clément rosset, that i wish to introduce a per- haps more suitable approach. this theatre does not represent the real; it tries to be as close as possible to it. the objects on stage start to refer to themselves. in a very similar way, the concept of “représentation panique” developed by rosset refers to a situation where a “coincidence” happens between the thing and its representation. this will help to overcome the paradox established by jan fabre: that of a world free from representations, yet taking place on a theatrical stage. keywords contemporary theatre · critical reception · spectator · presence · real « les gens qui ne comprennent pas croient qu’on les provoque. rien n’a changé depuis ans que je travaille. c’est triste; la stupidité est toujours prête à sur- gir » . c’est le metteur en scène et plasticien flamand jan fabre qui prononça ces paroles à la fin d’un sulfureux festival d’avignon en . son spectacle l’histoire * amélie mons amelie.mons@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk university of manchester, oxford road, manchester m   pl, uk cité par carole talon-hugon ( , p. ), elle-même citant d. frétard, in le monde ( juillet ). http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf a. mons des larmes, présenté dans la cour d’honneur du palais des papes avait alors reçu autant d’applaudissements que d’injures et d’incompréhensions. très violents dans leurs critiques, les journalistes avaient entre autres dénoncé chez l’artiste une incompétence intellectuelle, un anti-intellectualisme, et avaient qualifié son specta- cle de démonstration populiste. le festival d’avignon cette année aura donné lieu à une « querelle du théâtre » , où chacun tenta de défendre sa propre vision du théâtre. les deux camps s’affrontant étaient ceux d’un théâtre centré autour du texte contre ceux d’un théâtre centré autour de la figure de l’artiste, et donc d’un théâtre libre de faire largement appel à d’autres formes telles que la danse ou la performance, frag- ment de réel venant perturber la trame dramatique. pour définir ce dernier genre, l’on pourrait de manière assez générale reprendre la définition qu’hans-thies lehmann faisait du théâtre post-dramatique: « [un théâtre] davantage manifestation que signifi- cation, davantage impulsion d’énergie qu’information » ( , p. ). aujourd’hui cette définition a été reprise, nuancée, précisée, mais persiste encore un conflit entre théâtre de texte et théâtre de corps; un conflit entre un théâtre « intellectuel » et un théâtre physique toujours plus proche de la danse, conflit qui n’a pourtant pas lieu d’être selon florence dupont ( ). a ce titre, « une révolution intellectuelle reste à faire qui change les termes du débat » écrivait-elle deux ans après le très houleux festival ( , p. ). cet article entend démontrer que les « termes du débat » dans le milieu journal- istique demeurent presque inchangés, et ce, plus de dix ans plus tard. le théâtre post-dramatique continue d’être difficilement reçu, mais surtout, mal interprété. c’est d’ailleurs ce que jan fabre avait déjà perçu après avignon : « je souhaite aussi que la presse change, ait plus une fonction d’intermédiaire entre le public et le travail, qu’une fonction de destruction du travail en déclarant que c’est raté » (le cas avignon, ). si bien sûr cette remarque démontre le manque de crédibilité que l’artiste accorde à la presse (les journalistes n’ont pas le droit de porter d’avis négatifs), elle montre aussi que le dialogue et la compréhension entre ces artistes contemporains et le public est loin d’être facile. longtemps habitués au théâtre de texte et à son analyse sémiologique, il paraît difficile pour la critique et le public de s’adapter en adoptant une nouvelle approche critique. « le théâtre autiste et fière de l’être » , tel que le désigne régis debray ( , p. ), ne serait ainsi pas tant autiste par choix qu’à cause plutôt d’une incompréhension toujours persistance entre l’artiste et son public. autrement dit, si on le pense « autiste » , ce n’est pas parce qu’il refuse toute communication avec ses spectateurs, mais bien parce qu’il est mal compris. il ne s’agit alors pas tant de remettre en cause cette forme de théâtre même, mais de remettre plutôt en cause la manière dont on y assiste. c’est peut-être cela que jan fabre voulait exprimer dans cette phrase que l’on a citée au tout début, certes, pleine de souveraine assurance, et disons-le, teintée d’un peu de mépris. c’est après avoir exploré cette approche critique peu satisfaisante car faussée, que l’on tentera de proposer une nouvelle approche, une nouvelle lecture du théâtre de jan fabre, libérée de toute tentative de déchiffrage d’un « message » que le metteur voir talon-hugon ( , pp. – ). voir à ce compte la notion de « métaphysique de l’artiste » (talon-hugon ). le théâtre de jan fabre en scène voudrait soi-disant adresser. et c’est à travers un concept philosophique, celui de la « représentation panique » , développé par le philosophe français clé- ment rosset ( , pp. – ) qu’une nouvelle ouverture semble être possible. la « représentation panique » , explique-t-il, se traduit par une « coïncidence entre le réel et sa représentation » . le sujet perçoit une situation qui se représente en même temps qu’elle existe, rendant impossible pour lui l’accès à un « temps de la recon- naissance » . il n’a pas le temps de se représenter l’action intérieurement, d’où, chez rosset, un sentiment de panique. c’est précisément cette dissociation faite entre le réel et sa signification qui permettra de comprendre comment une approche débar- rassée du souci de la quête de sens est possible. en étudiant ce concept au plus près, l’on espère ici « changer les termes du débat » , en proposant de nouvelles clés pour discuter le théâtre de jan fabre, mais aussi plus largement, une certaine esthé- tique du théâtre contemporain. il s’agira en effet de centrer davantage la critique sur l’expérience intime du spectateur et de sa difficulté à appréhender ce « réel » à l’œuvre sur la scène théâtrale. car si la scène de théâtre est censée être l’espace de représentation par excellence, la scène de jan fabre a étonnamment cette capacité à « révéler » le réel en venant perturber, ou plutôt complexifier, les habitudes de per- ception de ses spectateurs. aujourd’hui une partie du théâtre contemporain (et d’une certaine mesure de l’art contemporain en général) est approchée d’une manière très théorique; à l’entrée d’une exposition est délivré un large feuillet expliquant ce que l’artiste « a voulu dire » avec telle installation; au théâtre il aura fallu comprendre le « projet » de l’artiste pour pouvoir pleinement apprécier son travail… l’approche critique jour- nalistique du théâtre contemporain n’est pas en reste, ayant trop souvent comme ligne d’horizon principale une recherche quasi systématique de sens. pourtant, force est de constater que cette approche n’est pas toujours satisfaisante eu égard à cer- tains artistes. ainsi, les spectacles de jan fabre, mais aussi d’autres, souffrent d’une absence d’intérêt porté pour tout ce qui ne touche pas le « sens » , le « message » , la « signification » de leurs spectacles. une mise en garde toutefois est nécessaire: ces spectacles sont bel et bien remplis de symboles, de références et de sens dramatique; mais là n’est pas toujours, il faut bien l’admettre, leur but premier. nombre de cri- tiques journalistiques tendent à automatiquement dévaluer un spectacle dont le sens serait demeuré obscur, se souciant guère de « l’impact » qu’il aurait pu avoir sur le public. or ces spectacles contiennent souvent de la performance artistique. chez jan fabre, elle se traduit par une esthétique de l’épuisement de l’acteur, à travers la répé- tition d’un geste ou d’une action, ou à travers une danse particulièrement physique. ces moments-là, si centraux dans les spectacles, sont rarement discutés. mais c’est aussi le public lui-même qui se montre réticent aux spectacles incluant de la perfor- mance et s’éloignant de la trame dramatique. la réception est brouillée parce que le message transmis n’est plus clair. en incluant du « réel » sur scène, l’artiste prend le risque de couper la communication avec une grande partie de la salle parce qu’il ne répond pas à l’attente de nombreux spectateurs; ce qu’il propose n’est pas à consom- mer, à interpréter. pour fabre, le spectateur n’est pas perçu comme un destinataire que l’on pense au théâtre de l’italien romeo castellucci ou de l’argentin rodrigo garcia par exemple. a. mons qui déchiffrerait le message du metteur en scène mais comme un récepteur libre de percevoir. né à anvers en , fabre fut d’abord plasticien avant de se lancer dans les arts de la scène dès la fin des années . c’est véritablement en , avec c’est du théâtre comme il était à espérer et à prévoir qu’il est reconnu comme metteur en scène. ses spectacles mêlant danse, peinture et chant sont quasiment tous mar- qués par cette esthétique de la performance. ses acteurs—souvent issus des milieux de la danse, sont nommés, après quelques années de formation et de travail com- mun, « guerriers de la beauté » . ces guerriers mettent leur corps au service de l’art de leur metteur en scène, quittes à en souffrir physiquement. au cours du spectacle (ou de l’entraînement) les acteurs devront parvenir à passer du stade de l’ « act » au stade de l’ « acting » . a travers la répétition d’un mouvement, d’un geste ou d’une action, ils finiront par abandonner toute trace d’interprétation pour n’être plus que dans la « vérité du moment » . a ce titre, mount olympus, joué en , est un spec- tacle de vingt-quatre heures, empreint de ces répétitions, qui demanda presque autant d’efforts à ces vingt-sept acteurs qu’à ses spectateurs. ces spectacles conten- ant également souvent de la nudité, étant parfois sexuellement explicites, ou simple- ment violents, font loin de faire l’unanimité, et un nouveau spectacle est souvent synonyme de nouvelle polémique, même si aujourd’hui le nom de jan fabre est célèbre et reconnu. on l’aura compris, la forme chez jan fabre (entendue comme le travail portant sur les corps), est primordiale. pourtant, en analysant ses spectacles, la critique française a fortement tendance à opposer, de manière assez réductrice, la forme au fond (compris comme le « propos » du metteur en scène). concernant his- toire des larmes présenté à avignon en , rosita boisseau concluait dans le monde: « la beauté plastique ne masque pas le déficit de sens » ( juillet ). l’idée d’opposer l’esthétisme au sens, la forme au fond, permet toujours de placer ce dernier au rang supérieur. si la forme est intéressante mais le fond ne suit pas, alors juge-t-on que c’est raté. toujours dans le monde, fabienne darge et brigitte salino qualifiaient plusieurs spectacles d’avignon comme « faibles sur le plan artistique […] sans méditation et sans véritable réflexion » ( juillet ). quant à l’orgie de la tolérance, spectacle présenté en , fabienne pascaud, critique de théâtre pour télérama concluait sa revue très négative par: « on ne sait plus ce qu’il veut raconter » . très récemment, emmanuelle bouchez, pour le même journal, écrivait quant au spectacle the sea within mis en scène par lisbeth gruwez (formée par jan fabre) que « l’esthétique formelle » finissait par « lasse[r] » ( juin ). selon carole talon-hugon, trop de critiques voient encore dans le théâtre de la performance une manière de « cacher son vide sous le renouvellement des formes » (talon-hugon ). il est étonnant que l’absence de sens soit nécessairement perçue comme du vide, ou du moins comme quelque chose de rédhibitoire. cela ne reviendrait-il pas à considérer tout ce qui ne touche pas à  l’interprétation intellectuelle comme étant indigne d’intérêt? ce refus de a ce sujet, voir le concept de « cinquième mur » dans le théâtre et ses publics: la création partagée ( ). le théâtre de jan fabre considérer les formes sans un fond qui leur serait attaché est au centre de la cri- tique de prometheus landscape ii, publiée par raphaël de gubernatis pour le nouvel obs ( avril ): prometheus landscape ii, sa dernière invention que s’empresse de montrer le théâtre de la ville comme s’il s’agissait d’une urgence absolue, comme s’il y allait de notre compréhension du monde. quoi en effet de plus pertinent pour mieux saisir et le mythe et le monde qu’un homme à genoux se masturbant curieusement au pied de prométhée enchaîné ? qu’un gros lard sodomisant un éphèbe ou qu’une femme fessée dévêtue pour évoquer le titan condamné par zeus pour avoir volé le feu et l’avoir donné aux hommes? est ici dénoncée une trivialité poussée à l’extrême, qui, assume le journaliste, aurait pour but de mieux faire comprendre à son spectateur le rapport des hommes au monde. mais qui prétend cela? certainement pas jan fabre. ou du moins, ce n’est pas à travers certains thèmes sur scène tels que la masturbation que le public aura la chance d’élargir son rapport au monde, comme semble raphaël de gubernatis l’insinuer. il s’agit davantage de voir comment ces thèmes sont traités, la manière dont ils sont insérés et présentés sur une scène de théâtre, pour ne pas uniquement s’arrêter à la réalité simple de l’action. c’est le problème récurrent chez les cri- tiques de théâtre commentant jan fabre aujourd’hui: arrêter tout commentaire dès lors qu’il s’agit de la forme. sauf que le problème avec fabre, c’est que son travail touche essentiellement à la forme. comme si la forme elle-même était indigne d’être commentée, le journaliste continue: « ce qui est réjouissant, chez jan fabre, et au fond de bien confortable pour l’observateur, c’est, quel que soit le sujet qu’il pré- tende aborder, qu’on y trouvera des scènes de masturbation, de sodomie, des acteurs en compissant d’autres, des femmes et des hommes montrant leur anatomie sous un angle de préférence dégradant » ( avril ). c’est fortement réduire son théâtre que de s’arrêter au traitement cru du corps sans tenter de comprendre non pas en quoi cela sert le propos du spectacle (car l’on n’y trouverait en effet rien à dire), mais en quoi cela sert à déstabiliser et complexifier la perception du réel (et donc de la forme) pour le spectateur. en réalité, hans-thies lehmann envisageait lui-même déjà cette même opposition réductrice entre le sens et la forme en parlant du théâtre post-dramatique ( , p. ): lorsque les signes n’offrent plus de synthèse, mais pourtant encore, des réfé- rences à un ‘contenu’, ils demeurent quand même assimilables dans un tra- vail associatif labyrinthique. mais lorsque ces références ne fonctionnent plus du tout, la réception se retrouve face à un refus encore plus radical: la con- frontation avec l’immédiateté ‘muette’ et dense des corps, des matières et des formes. le signifiant ne fait plus que se communiquer soi-même, ou plus pré- cisément, sa présence. la perception se trouve reléguée à une perception pure- ment structurelle. puis parlant plus précisément du travail de jan fabre: les acteurs, les éclairages, les danseurs etc., s’offrent à une observation pure- ment formelle, le regard ne trouve aucune occasion de dégager une significa- a. mons tion symboliste au-delà le réel, mais est immobilisé à la “surface” dans son activité visuelle, avec délectation ou ennui, selon les cas. c’est ainsi qu’est largement perçu le théâtre de jan fabre; une forme particulière dont le fond fait souvent défaut. certains adhèrent à cette esthétique, d’autres non. par conséquent, le théâtre de jan fabre est souvent dénoncé comme « vul- gaire » (cena, juin ), et l’artiste se voit régulièrement qualifié d’imposteur (de rycke, juin ). l’on souhaiterait ici réfuter cette approche, qui semble être celle d’un théâtre construit autour d’un texte, non celle d’un théâtre comme celui de l’artiste flamand. l’on tend à refuser l’idée que lorsque la signification disparaît, le spectateur n’aurait plus d’autre possibilité que de sombrer dans une « observation purement formelle » , aussi repoussante et scandaleuse que certains puissent la juger. en fait, au lieu de dévaluer constamment la forme, c’est peut-être la forme elle- même qu’il faudrait explorer pour y déceler une nouvelle forme de sens. le con- cept rosséen de « représentation panique » nous apprend une chose: cette « immédia- teté muette et dense des corps » a autre chose à offrir à son spectateur qu’une simple observation formelle. elle a à offrir une nouvelle approche du réel. un automobiliste est suivi à la trace par un camion-citerne. troublé par cette situation qui a priori n’a aucun sens, il tente à plusieurs reprises de lui échapper en s’arrêtant, en le laissant passer, en accélérant, ou en changeant de direction à la dernière minute. mais rien n’y fait, la vue angoissante du camion revient inlassable- ment dans son rétroviseur. cette étrange poursuite fait l’objet du film duel, réalisé par steven spielberg et sorti en . elle est aussi l’exemple que le philosophe clé- ment rosset choisit pour développer son concept de « représentation panique » dans l’essai le réel, traité de l’idiotie ( , pp. – ). la « représentation panique » , écrit-t-il, se traduit par une « coïncidence entre le réel et sa représentation » . le sujet perçoit la situation et sa représentation dans le même temps, lui rendant impossi- ble l’accès à un « temps de la reconnaissance » . l’automobiliste est ainsi heurté par un réel sur lequel il n’a pas de prises. il n’a pas le temps de se le représenter inté- rieurement (grossièrement ici, de comprendre la situation), d’où, chez rosset, un sentiment de panique. attention toutefois, cette expérience du réel n’est en rien sou- daine (comme le terme « panique » pourrait le laisser présupposer). elle se déroule sur l’intégralité d’une journée, et c’est précisément cette durée qui rend la situa- tion de plus en plus incompréhensible et inassimilable, puisqu’une éventuelle expli- cation perd progressivement sa pertinence. ce concept nous invite à revoir notre approche du réel, et plus précisément, l’idée même de sa perception. d’un des dif- férents sens du latin percipiō qui signifie « saisir » , « s’emparer de » , « envahir » , la perception garde aujourd’hui une connotation personnelle et subjective: percevoir, c’est voir pour moi, à partir de moi. en ce sens, un sujet qui perçoit, est un sujet qui s’empare du réel, l’envahit, et de ce fait, le transforme. en s’appropriant le réel, en se le représentant intérieurement, il projette sur lui tout un imaginaire, toute une batterie de concept, tout un historique d’expériences: il perçoit car il est capable de reconnaître, de voir en le réel ce qu’il connaît déjà, d’assimiler le réel à l’aune de ses propres représentations. c’est ce que le protagoniste de duel est incapable de faire parce que cette course-poursuite se présente in medias res, sans avertissement ou explication. le fait qu’il soit poursuivi par un camion n’a pas de sens dans le film; le théâtre de jan fabre où plutôt il n’y a pas de sens à chercher. c’est comme ça et c’est tout nous dit ros- set. le philosophe fait ainsi parler le protagoniste: « au fond, c’est tout simple, il y a un camionneur qui essaie depuis ce matin de me tuer—voilà, c’est comme cela, c’est tout, c’est incroyable mais cela est et il n’y a rien à chercher d’autre » ( , p. ). pour rosset, il n’y a aucune signification à chercher qui pourrait expliquer la raison de l’action. la chose va donc exister en même temps que sa représentation parce que va néanmoins subsister un certain sens de la mise en scène perçue par le protagoniste. en effet, le thème de la course-poursuite en voiture est un thème rodé, bien connu dans l’imaginaire collectif. notre héros ne comprend donc pas pourquoi il est poursuivi, le sens de cet événement mais quelque chose dans cette poursuite ne lui est pas tout à fait inconnu; il en devine non le sens mais la fatalité (« c’est comme cela, c’est tout, c’est incroyable mais cela est »). il y a en somme « reconnaissance de quelque chose qui n’a pas encore été connu » ( , p. ). il ne comprend pas pourquoi le camion le poursuit mais il comprend d’instinct qu’il continuera à le poursuivre: il y a en ce sens, non pas une compréhension intellectuelle mais une cer- taine compréhension intuitive de la chose, difficilement cernable. « tout le mystère du film » , explique rosset, « réside dans cette coïncidence par laquelle la chose arrive et se représente dans le même temps, et non dans l’identité du camionneur ou la nature de ses mobiles » ( , p. ). pour reprendre une de ses formules, il n’y a pas de mystère « dans » les choses, mais un mystère « des » choses ( , p. ). et c’est à ce mystère que notre automobiliste est confronté: non pas le mystère du pourquoi de la chose (et l’on voit ici à quel point clément rosset se détache de la tradition philosophique), mais le mystère de la chose elle-même comme lui étant présente. un mystère simple en somme, libre de toute hypothèse ou spéculation; un mystère premier, « à la lisière de [l’] existence » de la chose ( , p. ). d’où justement le sentiment de panique du protagoniste, qui se trouve confronté à un mystère qui échappe à la prise intellectuelle (et rassurante) du « pourquoi » : la question du pourquoi ne pouvant trouver d’explications plausibles, le temps de la délibération échoue. en fait, là où le réel est ordinairement assimilé grâce à un système de représentations (ce qui lui permet de faire « sens »), la scène de course- poursuite ne peut l’être parce qu’elle et sa représentation arrivent d’un bloc. ainsi est-elle sans « double » ; le héros pressent qu’elle est inévitable, justement parce qu’il perçoit cette représentation, cette forme de mise en scène immédiate du réel. et c’est bien ce qui rend l’événement, dans ce cas-ci, si terrifiant. cet exemple d’un sujet qui percevrait le réel de manière immédiate, sans le filtre d’une représentation et qui pourtant, continuerait à voir dans ce réel un certain sens de la mise en scène (mais dont il ne serait étrangement pas responsable) semble de bien des manières faire écho au spectateur assistant à un spectacle de jan fabre. en effet, parce qu’il inclut volontiers de la performance artistique dans ces specta- cles, jan fabre propose une action « réelle » dans un cadre de représentation. fabre demande à ses acteurs des prestations particulièrement physiques, dont l’épuisement des corps –plus ou moins intense selon les spectacles-, est réel. ce à quoi peut assis- ter le spectateur est donc bien une bride du réel, une action prenant place dans le temps de l’ici et maintenant. et pourtant, l’artiste se produit dans des salles très souvent frontales avec un cadre de scène (théâtre de la ville, centres nationaux dramatiques…); en bref des salles qui proposent traditionnellement une scène a. mons comme espace de l’illusion, ou du moins espace de la fiction. est ainsi montrée, dans un espace de la représentation, un espace signifiant, une action, qui elle, à tout à voir avec le réel. autrement dit, l’on assiste à l’émergence d’un nouveau rapport au spectacle (un rapport qui pourrait paraître « accidentel » mais qui est en réalité bien souvent maîtrisé comme nous le verrons), où le temps réel semble se retrouver mis en scène « malgré lui » . ainsi le théâtre de jan fabre et le concept de « représenta- tion panique » peuvent être mis en parallèle: il s’agit pour le sujet (l’automobiliste ou le spectateur) de percevoir une action immédiate, prenant place hic et nunc mais conservant un sens de la mise en scène; ce sens intervenant exactement au même moment que l’action elle-même, et n’étant pas, comme c’est presque toujours le cas dans la perception humaine, préétabli. en fait, le spectateur ne peut « comprendre » le sens de l’action car rien ne l’explique (rien ne l’insère dans la trame dramatique ou dans un système signifiant construit par le spectacle); il ne peut que constater que le sens de l’action est inhérent à l’action elle-même. rosset disait à propos de la « représentation panique » : « il s’agit d’une sorte de signal vide, de signalant sans signifié […] le message y est vide et l’émission sans émetteur » ( , p. ). au spectateur qui peut-être pensait pouvoir envahir tranquillement la scène de ses arrières-mondes, il réalise soudain, avec effroi ou joie selon les cas, que la chose perçue ne peut être assimilée sur le mode de la représentation. la performance sur scène permet de faire entrevoir un réel sans double parce qu’elle met justement en avant la distorsion entre réel et représentation. ainsi le réel sur scène peut être plus frappant que le réel dans la vie de tous les jours parce qu’il intervient à un moment où il n’était pas attendu, et révèle, par le contraste de la scène, l’échec de notre habi- tude à tout nous représenter. voyons maintenant comment ce concept pourrait aider à développer une nouvelle méthode. un des exemples les plus révélateurs se trouve dans histoire des larmes, présenté à avignon en , dans la cour d’honneur du palais des papes. les seize premières minutes du spectacle (sur un total d’une heure quarante et une) montrent une dizaine de femmes disposées sur l’ensemble de la scène, toutes vêtues de blanc, allongées par terre sur le dos, la tête posée sur des oreillers. elles hurlent d’une voie très aigue et pleurent à la manière des nourrissons, s’agitant dans tous les sens. une harpiste, au centre de la scène, joue une musique douce mais que l’on n’entend à peine tant les cris sont stridents. cette scène se présente in medias res, sans point d’accroche possible pour le spectateur qui pourrait l’aider à dégager une significa- tion. aucune explication n’est donnée: le spectateur ne sait pas pourquoi cela se passe ainsi, la raison de cette scène si longue et pourtant il sent après quelques min- utes que cela va durer; que le sens est contenu dans la présence et la durée de l’action elle-même. comme la représentation panique, il va ainsi non pas comprendre le pourquoi de la situation mais va davantage avoir une compréhension du caractère inévitable de cette même action, car si l’action ne fait pas sens, elle est pourtant mise en scène. de même, les acteurs semblent ici être moins dans l’interprétation d’un personnage que dans la performance, aucune marque de l’individu, aucun style de jeu ne se démarquent. la scène semble être sans intention, sans émetteur: on ne sait pas d’où viennent ces jeunes femmes qui se comportent ainsi et l’on doute sou- dain que la scène est en fait quoi que soit à nous dire. elle se présente plutôt comme une énigme qui demeurerait nécessairement sans réponse. rappelons ce que disait le théâtre de jan fabre clément rosset sur la représentation panique: « la chose y arrive en même temps que ses signaux, l’une et les autres se confondent chronologiquement et logiquement. c’est pourquoi le message y est vide et l’émission comme sans émetteur » ( , p. ). le spectateur, désorienté, pourra être irrité de cette scène d’ouverture qui ne lui laisse pas le temps (ou plutôt les clés) pour déchiffrer ce qui demeure être, à ce stade, un mystère. bien sûr, s’il le veut absolument, il pourra toujours y dégager un sens, notamment a posteriori. en effet, « là où il y a un chemin, on peut toujours trouver une volonté » assure rosset ( , p. ). mais force est de constater qu’au moment précis où la scène est perçue, elle est inassimilable, et s’il choisit de ne pas rejeter la scène sous prétexte que « c’est n’importe quoi » , alors il peut pénétrer un temps autre; un temps où le réel le frappe de plein fouet, lui retire son statut de sujet souverain pour lui révéler une réalité crue, sans fard. l’on voit déjà dans cet exemple se dessiner un thème crucial dans l’œuvre de jan fabre: la durée de la répétition. c’est par la longue répétition, notamment de l’effort physique, qu’il entend déstabiliser la perception de son spectateur, ou du moins, obliger ce dernier à modifier sa perception pour finalement ne plus être capable de projeter des « significations imaginaires » ( , p. ). en effet, c’est par l’épuisement du signe que la scène parviendra à atteindre ce « vide » dont il était question plus tôt, mais qui ici, est si important. plus l’action physique durera, plus le spectateur sera perturbé par la « collision » entre le caractère réel de l’action et le cadre de scène. a travers la répétition, jan fabre tend à nous faire revoir nos premières impressions: si l’on pensait comprendre cette action comme une protestation contre l’ordre établi par exemple, alors l’on se sentira vite un peu bête, parce que la répétition incessante nous obligera à revoir cette hypothèse et nous montrera à quel point elle était subjec- tive et autocentrée. la représentation de la chose deviendra de plus en plus obscure jusqu’à qu’elle se fonde dans la chose elle-même: la chose et ses signaux se confon- dront, la chose et sa représentation coïncideront. c’est prendre mesure que le réel, pour reprendre une formule de clément rosset, « est riche de quelque chose à quoi aucun savoir ne peut préparer, qu’aucune représentation ne peut figurer à l’avance: précisément sa qualité d’être réelle, le mystère de sa présence » ( , p. ). la répétition chez fabre est souvent physiquement intense, les acteurs devant répéter une action jusqu’à ce que leur corps ne puisse tout simplement plus le supporter. la première fois que le spectateur percevra l’action sera ainsi bien différente de la dern- ière. si la première est perçue comme une représentation d’une chose, la dernière est perçue comme la chose elle-même. c’est précisément ce processus que fabre désigne par la formule « from act to acting » . il semble ainsi dire à son spectateur une chose qui parait bien simple: ce que vous voyez n’est rien d’autre que ce qui se fait. etant lui-même spectateur assidu des spectacles de jan fabre, le chercheur luk van den dries explique quant à l’expérience du public ( , pp. – ): expression employée par olivier dubouclez à propos de la philosophie de clément rosset lors d’une journée d’études organisée à liège le avril et intitulée « ethique et ontologie autour de clément rosset » . a. mons la répétition est la stratégie la plus importante dans l’œuvre de jan fabre. d’innombrables scènes se craquellent sous son poids […] nombreuses sont les scènes et les pièces de fabre où l’on assiste à cette répétition exacerbée, qui n’atteint pas seulement l’acteur mais aussi le spectateur, car le regarder épu- ise tout autant. en répétant toujours ces gestes minimalistes, le spectateur est invité à revoir sa première impression. les détails prennent toute leur impor- tance, surtout quand la répétition est conduite à l’unisson par le groupe. c’est alors qu’elle change la façon même de regarder. l’épuisement suscite sa propre dimension du temps et l’on se met à regarder différemment, à un autre niveau de perception. une sorte d’ivresse s’empare alors du spectateur. mais le corps et le regard ne sont pas les seuls à se lasser, la signification s’épuise, elle aussi. par exemple, dans le pouvoir des folies théâtrales, présenté en et repris en , une actrice se trouvant en face du premier rang des spectateurs tente désespé- rément de monter sur scène, mais un des acteurs y étant déjà présent l’en empêche. a chaque fois qu’elle essayera de remonter, il la repoussera violemment. cette scène dure environ vingt minutes. le visage de l’actrice devient de plus en plus rouge, elle transpire et respire de plus en plus fort, l’effort s’intensifiant. là où le spectateur aurait pu percevoir tout un symbole de répression, un signe méta-théâtral etc., il se rend compte petit à petit que ce à quoi il assiste n’est ni plus ni moins qu’un effort physique de plus en plus intense de la part d’une femme continuellement repoussée par un homme. dans je suis sang, présenté à avignon en , une scène plutôt marquante joue également du processus de la répétition. la scène se déroule ainsi: plusieurs personnages habillés comme des mariées, répartis sur l’ensemble de la scène, ressentent le besoin de couper une partie de leur corps; des personnages vêtus comme des chevaliers arrivent de l’arrière-scène pour couper avec leur épée la par- tie du corps que les mariées  leur présentent, les laissent se vider de leur sang puis les portent jusqu’à l’arrière-scène, d’où ils proviennent. ils les posent alors sur le sol. doucement, elles se réveillent et commencent à lécher leur sang qui a laissé une trainée sur le sol. elles finissent par revenir à leur place initiale, et ayant regagné leurs forces, elles demandent à nouveau qu’une partie de leur corps soit sectionnée. cette scène se répètent indéfiniment jusqu’à ce que les acteurs jouant les chevaliers, épuisés de porter ces mariées, ne puissent tout simplement plus être dans une forme d’interprétation, aussi fine soit-elle, et ne parviennent plus qu’à rassembler leurs dernières forces sur la tâche à accomplir—déplacer ces femmes. là où encore une fois l’on pouvait penser assister à une scène de pietà, on se rend rapidement compte qu’il ne s’agit en somme que d’hommes, épuisés, portant des femmes, et tentant de « tenir » le plus longtemps possible. luk van den dries témoigne: « l’image se lézarde, les muscles se mettent à trembler, la sueur perle sur les fronts et le temps concret prend sa revanche sur les corps épuisés. les amantes sont plus traînées que portées, et finissent par s’effondrer sur le sol » ( , p. ). cette scène est en réalité un exercice que fabre donne à ses acteurs pour leur permettre, encore une fois, de comprendre la différence entre « act » et « acting » . luk van dries aura cette formule éclairante à propos d’un autre spectacle de fabre, c’est du théâtre comme c’était à espérer et prévoir: « le son de son corps qui s’écrase sur un plancher en bois n’est ni plus ni moins celui d’un corps quelconque qui s’écrase sur un plancher le théâtre de jan fabre en bois » ( , p. ). ce qui se passe sur scène finit par être perçu comme ce qui se passe sur scène et rien d’autre, comme un réel sans représentation, dont pourtant l’accès est si loin d’être évident. cette approche si crue, voire cruelle, d’un corps sans artifice, est également à comprendre à la lumière de la fascination du metteur en scène pour la biologie. fabre s’est toujours montré très intéressé par tout ce qui touchait le corps en tant qu’organe vivant. nombreux sont ses spectacles qui présentent des scènes de dissec- tion (requiem for a metamorphosis, je suis sang…). cela engendre d’ailleurs un reproche qui lui est très souvent adressé: celui de proposer un théâtre « obscène » . sang, urine, nudité, actes sexuels… ce qui se joue sur scène peut facilement être vu comme trivial et une fois de plus indigne d’intérêt. fabre ne joue jamais d’effets de distanciation comme c’est le cas pour d’autres artistes contemporains. au con- traire, ces acteurs sont corps entiers jetés dans la bataille. fabre se vante d’ailleurs de travailler comme un biologiste, de proposer dans ces spectacles une étude des corps et de ses mécanismes. il veut montrer comment les joints s’articulent, com- ment la douleur affecte le contrôle du corps… l’individualité de l’acteur disparaît dans ce théâtre: ce que l’on voit souvent, ce sont des corps et juste des corps. ety- mologiquement, obscène vient du latin ob-scenus, signifiant ce qui est devant la scène, autrement dit, en dehors de la scène. c’est ce qui est indigne d’être regardé, ce qui doit rester caché. pourtant, c’est justement ce qui est là avant toute chose, ce qui est là avant même la scène. l’obscénité sur scène est dérangeante car elle impose un rapport trop direct avec ce qui s’y joue, un rapport trop « primitif » au corps. elle montre un corps, en fait, débarrassé de toutes représentations, et qui en toute logique, ne devrait donc pas se trouver sur une scène de théâtre. c’est encore une fois ce décalage entre espace de représentation et action qui s’y joue qui vient désta- biliser la perception du spectateur, en venant lui proposer une approche bien plus directe du réel, aussi effrayante –et repoussante pour certains, soit-elle. la vue du corps, montré dans toute son organicité, avec ses fluides, constitue ainsi une double transgression: non seulement il est présenté à la vue des autres (là où on devrait le dissimuler), mais il est en plus présenté sur scène, l’espace d’observation par excel- lence. cette « réalité première » du corps organique reste ainsi mise en scène, comme dans le cadre de la représentation panique. et c’est bien là ce qui cause le malaise des spectateurs dont l’indignation témoigne peut-être parfois  d’une difficulté à appréhender un réel sans représentations. le théâtre de jan fabre n’est pas toujours abordé de manière pertinente. sans non plus vouloir, comme le metteur en scène, ôter aux commentateurs tout droit au sens critique–qu’ils soient le public en général ou les médias, il convient d’adopter de nouvelles propositions, de nouvelles clés, pour aborder un tel art de la mise en scène. s’interroger sur la manière dont la scène challenge la perception sa méthode de formation d’acteurs a d’ailleurs récemment fait réagir dans le cadre du débat#metoo. certains de ses acteurs (majoritairement des femmes) l’ont accusé de les avoir attaqués sur leur physique et de les humilier pendant les répétitions. ils ont aussi dénoncé un manque d’humanité et l’impression de se faire traiter en objets par fabre et sa compagnie troubleyn. la lettre ouverte écrite par les victimes peut se trouver à cette adresse: https ://www.rekto verso .be/artik el/open-lette r-metoo -and-troub leynj an- fabre . l’article a été écrit antérieurement à cette affaire. https://www.rektoverso.be/artikel/open-letter-metoo-and-troubleynjan-fabre https://www.rektoverso.be/artikel/open-letter-metoo-and-troubleynjan-fabre a. mons du spectateur à l’aune du modèle de la représentation panique en a été un exem- ple. il aura au moins permis de couper court à la fameuse critique « ça n’a aucun sens » , ou « c’est gratuit » puisque qu’il permet justement de valoriser cette fuite du sens; de le rendre enfin digne d’intérêt. a travers la performance, le théâtre fabrien demande quelque chose d’ambitieux à son spectateur: appréhender le réel sans représentations, et sur une scène en plus! il demande ce que rosset demand- ait déjà dès les années , à savoir un retour à un rapport au monde plus essen- tiel, plus direct, débarrassé d’interprétations intellectuelles superflues. paradox- alement, c’est avec la scène que fabre a trouvé un moyen de rendre compte de cette urgence. au lieu de chercher à décortiquer ses spectacles, les signes sur la scène, et ce qu’il a bien voulu dire, pourquoi ne pas ainsi simplement respecter le mystère qui s’en dégage? car c’est justement en s’interrogeant sur le réel sur scène, sans jamais le dénaturer à coups d’interprétations et de projections de « sig- nifications imaginaires » , qu’un mystère apparaît; un mystère qui n’a pas été con- struit par l’homme, un mystère de la réalité simple en somme, « un mystère des choses » et non « dans les choses » (rosset , p. ). cet article a voulu démon- trer que c’est à travers une nouvelle méthodologie qu’il pourrait être appréhendé. et s’il est vrai que l’artiste peut en effet se montrer quelquefois prétentieux et suffisant, il faudra savoir tirer le meilleur d’un théâtre qui met en œuvre un rap- port au réel simple, primitif, mais pourtant si étrange, dont nous aurions souvent besoin. openaccess this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . inter- national license (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribu- tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. réfèrences banu, g., & tackels, b. 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( ). sur le pont d’avignon. paris: flammarion. delhalle, n. (dir.) ( ). le théâtre et ses publics: la création partagée. colloque de liège. paris: les solitaires intempestifs. le programme de la conférence est consultable en ligne. https ://f-origi n.hypot heses .org/wp-conte nt/blogs .dir/ /files / / /collo que-prosp ero_ fr.pdf. visité le / / . dupont, f. ( ). aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental. paris: flammarion. lehmann, h.-t. ( ). le théâtre postdramatique. paris: l’arche. rosset, c. ( ). le réel, traité de l’idiotie. paris: les editions de minuit. talon-hugon, c. (juin ). avignon , le conflit des héritages. paris: du théâtre, h-s no. . van den dries, l. ( ). corpus jan fabre, observations sur un processus de création. paris: l’arche. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/ /files/ / /colloque-prospero_fr.pdf https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/ /files/ / /colloque-prospero_fr.pdf https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/ /files/ / /colloque-prospero_fr.pdf 	la représentation panique dans le théâtre de jan fabre 	abstract 	réfèrences miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | rethinking laughter in contemporary anglophone theatre the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation critique aliette ventéjoux Édition électronique url : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi : . /miranda. issn : - Éditeur université toulouse - jean jaurès Édition imprimée date de publication : octobre référence électronique aliette ventéjoux, « the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation », miranda [en ligne], | , mis en ligne le octobre , consulté le février . url : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi : https://doi.org/ . /miranda. ce document a été généré automatiquement le février . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation critique aliette ventéjoux informations sur la pièce lieu: théâtre de la colline. représentation du janvier mise en scène, texte, scénographie, costumes et jeu : angélica liddell librement inspiré du roman de nathaniel hawthorne comédiens, comédiennes : joele ansastasi, tiago costa, julian isena, angélica liddell, borja lópez, tiago mansilha, daniel matos, eduardo molina, nuno nolasco, antonio pauletta, antonio l. pedraza, sindo puche et la participation de mathias caroff, thomas sgarra, philomène troullier assistanat à la mise en scène : borja lopez lumières : jean huleu son : antonio navarro traduction : christilla vasserot production et diffusion : gumersindo puche communication : génica montalbano régie : frédéric gourdin régie vidéo : igor minosa régie lumières : stéphane touche technicien lumières : pascal levesque régie son : Émile denize technicien hf : kévin cazuguel machinistes : farid aberbour, nicolas gérard et antoine mary habilleuse : sonia constantin accessoiriste : julie berce the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | durée h spectacle en anglais, espagnol, italien, portugais, surtitré en français. liens la colline théâtre national : https://www.colline.fr/ critique en , nathaniel hawthorne publie the scarlet letter, qui retrace l’histoire d’hester prynne dans le boston puritain du xviie siècle . hester, coupable d’adultère, est marquée du sceau de la lettre a qui rappelle son crime à ses concitoyen-nes. chez angélica liddell, dont la pièce du même nom est très librement adaptée du roman de hawthorne, la lettre a est davantage le a de l’art, de l’artiste, et, bien évidemment, le a d’angélica. le texte de hawthorne devient prétexte à une représentation, une performance durant laquelle se succèdent de nombreux tableaux. sur scène, les comédien-nes hurlent, courent, se dénudent, chantent, et les langues se mélangent. le texte est déclamé en anglais, espagnol, italien, portugais, et surtitré en français, ce qui renforce l’impression d’être submergé par ce qui se passe sur scène. s’y ajoute de la musique, baroque – lully par exemple – mais également des chants liturgiques, ou encore « i put a spell on you » de screamin’ jay hawkins, et même une chanson bien connue du groupe o-zone. sans oublier les cris, ceux des hommes qui se trouvent sur scène, ou d’angélica, qui relatent la violence et la souffrance dont il est question. les couleurs et la lumière renforcent également cette impression, car la scène est la plupart du temps d’une couleur rouge plus ou moins écarlate, parfois aussi jaune, ou encore noire, à l’image des costumes que portent les comédiens au début de la pièce. celle-ci s’ouvre sur adam et Ève, nus, qui se recueillent sur une tombe portant le nom de hawthorne. le péché originel est d’emblée suggéré, et ce « prologue » nous rappelle par ailleurs le début du roman de hawthorne : « the founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. » si liddell a fait le choix de faire figurer la tombe et donc de rappeler le cimetière, la présence des deux corps nus fait écho au péché d’hester dans le roman, ainsi qu’à la prison et à sa punition pour avoir fauté. the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | https://www.colline.fr/ fig. crédit : simon gosselin les deux acteurs sont ensuite remplacés par angelica/hester, qui porte une large robe noire et dont le dos est strié de cicatrices, témoins de sa faute. puis entrent sur scènes des hommes vêtus de noirs et portants des cagoules pointues qui ne sont pas sans rappeler celles du ku klux klan par exemple. mais ils ne gardent pas longtemps leur costume, et se retrouvent vite nus. ils le resteront pendant toute la pièce. si l’on peut s’interroger sur les raisons de ce choix, on finit rapidement par oublier qu’ils sont nus. enfin presque, car la mise en scène nous le rappelle de temps à autre, notamment lorsque l’auteure joue sur scène avec leurs sexes. malgré cette nudité constante, le spectacle ne peut être qualifié d’obscène. plus que dérangeante, la nudité de ces hommes peut même finir par être lassante. si les questions de la place de la femme et de l’emprise du patriarcat se posent, les réponses apportées restent provocatrices, à l’image de ces corps nus, et, dans une certaine mesure, un peu contradictoires. en effet, l’un des monologues d’angélica liddell semble être une virulente critique du mouvement metoo, durant laquelle elle s’attaque aux femmes de plus de ans et au dégoût provoqué par leur corps. ses propos sur « l’odeur de pisse » et les « vagins fanés » ne sont pas moins violents, et la question du second degré demeure, difficile à trancher. À ce moment là de la pièce, le malaise est certain et il devient difficile d’adhérer aux propos : « je n’aime pas ce monde où les femmes ont cessé d’aimer les hommes. je n’aime pas ce monde où les femmes haïssent les hommes. je ne l’aime pas. je n’aime pas être une femme parmi les femmes. je n’aime pas ça. » tout comme hester prynne, angelica liddell détourne la lettre. grâce à son savoir- faire, hester brode et enjolive le a : « À distraire ainsi la lettre, la femme condamnée se soustrait à la loi, à la loi appliquée à la lettre, et l’exhibe comme une forme inavouée de spectacle. elle met en évidence l’antinomie constitutive du régime théocratique : tandis que la représentation théâtrale est par principe bannie du nouveau monde, le pouvoir the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | ne peut pas ne pas manifester sa puissance par une forme détournée de mise en scène. le spectacle du châtiment, les processions religieuses et les défilés militaires sont les seules formes de fêtes tolérées par les puritains qui interdisent les survivances des festivités populaires. » la mise en scène de liddell, qui a elle aussi tour à tour des airs de spectacle du châtiment ou de processions religieuses, souligne le détournement du médium « théâtre ». pas d’unité, que de la nudité. ou plutôt si. une unité subsiste, construite autour de l’art. et c’est aussi celle-ci qui tisse un lien entre la pièce et le texte, à la manière dont hester tisse et brode : « on the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter a. it was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. » l’art seul permet à hester et angélica de s’exprimer, et de se faire entendre. si hester tire sur les fils de sa broderie, angélica liddell, quant à elle, telle une prêtresse, tire sur les fils qui retiennent les hommes prisonniers, littéralement. fig. crédit : simon gosselin le monologue final, plus puissant nous semble-t-il que le précédent, recentre l’attention sur le a de l’artiste tout en défendant la liberté absolue de la création. l’énumération des noms des artistes, auteurs et penseurs est un moment bouleversant. les propos de liddell questionnent le monde d’aujourd’hui, qu’il s’agisse du féminisme ou de la place de l’art et de l’artiste. sans juge en effet, pas d’art : « celle qui vous parle tue, vole, pervertit. sans juge, l’art n’existerait pas. sans moralisme, l’art n’existerait pas. sans hypocrisie, l’art n’existerait pas. bref, sans vous, l’art n’existerait pas. je vous remercie donc de me mépriser. » ces mots, énoncés au début de la pièce, annoncent les transgressions et la provocation à venir. liddell se pose en quelque sorte en sorcière, the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | mais une sorcière bien différente de celles dont il est question dans le dernier ouvrage de mona chollet . le a est donc finalement aussi le a de artaud, le a de l’artiste auquel on revient dans ce dernier monologue, qui, après les provocations de certains propos et de certaines scènes, rappelle aux spectateurs que l’important reste la liberté absolue de la création. si cette pièce questionne le monde d’aujourd’hui, pas si différent finalement du monde puritain décrit par hawthorne, elle est avant tout un plaidoyer en faveur de l’art et de la transgression qu’il permet, de l’absolue nécessité qu’une société a de l’art et de ses artistes. notes . nathaniel hawthorne. the scarlet letter and other writings. new york, london: w. w. norton & company. . . . angélica liddel. the scarlet letter. . ibid. . michel imbert. « s.l. : l’esprit de la lettre et les spectres de l’amérique fantôme. » in nathaniel hawthorne, the scarlet letter. bruno monfort (ed.). paris : Éditions du temps. . pp. - . . . nathaniel hawthorne. op. cit. . . mona chollet. sorcières. la puissance invaincue des femmes. paris : Éditions la découverte. . rÉsumÉs compte rendu de la pièce d’angélica liddell the scarlet letter librement inspirée du roman de nathaniel hawthorne. performance review angélica liddell’s play the scarlet letter, adapted from nathaniel hawthorne’s novel. index mots-clés : adaptation, angélica liddell, art, féminisme, nathaniel hawthorne, lettre, monologue, performance, provocation, puritanisme, théâtre, transgression keywords : adaptation, angélica liddell, art, feminism, nathaniel hawthorne, letter, monologue, performance, provocation, puritanism, theatre, transgression thèmes : theater the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | auteur aliette ventÉjoux docteur université paris ii – panthéon assas alietteventejoux@protonmail.com the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation miranda, | mailto:alietteventejoux@protonmail.com 	the scarlet letter : a comme adaptation risk, uncertainty and the theory of planned behavior: examining consumer risk perceptions of prototypical brands versus me-too brands vanessa quintal and ian phau abstract this study examines brand familiarity, extrinsic attributes, self-confidence and perceived quality for their effects on perceived risk between prototypical and me-too brands. factor analyses and path analysis were used in testing hypotheses. brand familiarity produced a significant positive effect, while extrinsic attributes produced a significant negative effect on perceived equivalent quality for both the pioneer and me-too brands. respectively, the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players produced significant positive and negative effects on perceived risks for pioneer and me-too brands. managerial implications include strategic use of me-too brands and management of competitive advantages of pioneer brands with perceived prototypicality. keywords: prototypical brands, consumer risks, brand strategies, competitive advantage, me-too brands introduction branding is the marketer’s response to the risks consumers perceive in the marketplace (laroche et al., ; rubinstein, ). a pioneer brand is defined as the first entrant into a market (robinson and fornell, ) that creates a significantly new product category in the consumer’s mind (carpenter and nakamoto, ; liang, cherian and fu, ). pioneer advantage or the competitive advantage accrued to the pioneer brand (scherer, ; kamins, ; liang, cherian and fu, ; sinapuelas and robinson, ) results from several economic and psychological factors. first, the market learns more about pioneer brands since as the first entrant in the product category, they appear novel and attention-seeking. second, pioneer brands are distinctive and unique, making awareness and recall easier. third, pioneer brands generate a favorable image as they more closely match the consumer’s self-image (alpert and kammins, ; alpert et al., ; carson, jewell and joiner, ; lowe and alpert, ). in , apple’s launch of the apple ipod created an entirely new market segment and propelled it to its pioneer brand status in the portable music market. it currently holds % of the market share, and apple has sold over million units since the ipod's introduction in (travlos, ; sloan, ). me-too brands represent challengers to the competitive advantage held by pioneer brands. the success of me-too brands may be attributed to their lower costs and higher quality through improved technology (bohlmann et al., ; hern et al., ; carson, jewell and joiner, ; sinapuelas and robinson, ). me-too brands are also not tied to tradition and monopolies, are innovative, pay attention to their customers and are not perceived to be arrogant and complacent. prior to , as the me-too brand and underdog competitor to software giant microsoft, apple revolutionized the market by offering a creative alternative to microsoft’s industry standards (centaur communications limited, a, b). me-too brands are reported to have responded faster to the launch of a branded product, thus shortening the phase in which a unique concept can expect to reap premium prices and high margins (centaur communications limited, a, b). while research has examined pioneer and me-too brands (e.g., alpert and kamins, ; holt, ; lowe and alpert, ), there are gaps in explaining why some people intentionally avoid established brands (kamins, ; lee et al., ; cromie and ewing, ), while others continuously support me-too brands when risks about product quality, variety, price and even one’s “face” (mcginnis and gentry, ) abound. the aim of the study is to examine several antecedentsrelated to consumer behavior for their differential effects on the dimensions of perceived risk between the pioneer (apple ipod) and me-too brands (other brands of mp players) and to try to evaluate the relevance of these antecedents which help to explain this difference. as such, initiatives relating to the competitive advantage of pioneer prototypical brands versus me- too brands can be the blueprint of the design of the branding, advertising and product development strategies. relevant literature and hypotheses development the model for the current study was adapted and extended from research conducted by mieres et al. ( ) by focusing on pioneer and me-too brands for their impact on perceived risk. perceived risk is defined as a subjective expectation of a potential loss occurring (barkworth et al., ; dholakia, ; michaelidou and christodoulides, ; simcock et al., ; sweeney et al., ). some researchers suggest perceived risk arises from six different types of potential loss (e.g., jacoby and kaplan, ; roselius, ; forsythe et al., ; javadi et al., ; molina-castillo, lopez-nicolas, and soto-acosta, ). financial risk is a potential loss of money associated with the item purchase. performance risk refers to a probable loss due to item failure after purchase (eggert, ; boksberger et al., ). psychological risk reflects the possible loss of self-image or self-concept as the result of purchasing the item. social risk is the potential loss of esteem, respect and/or friendship offered to the consumer by significant others due to the item purchase (boksberger et al., ; roehl and fesenmaier, ). physical risk refers to the potential loss of health or appearance as a result of using the item purchase (forsythe et al., ). time risk reflects a possible loss of time and effort associated with purchasing the item (fuchs and reichel, ; murray and schlacter, ). each of these six dimensions of perceived risk is considered in the current study. brand familiarity reflects the ‘share of mind’ the consumer ascribes to a particular brand and the extent of a consumer’s direct and indirect experience with the brand (alba and hutchinson, ; kent and allen, ; ha and perks, ; delgado-ballester et al, ). it is determined by strength of associations that the brand name evokes in consumer memory and in this way, captures the consumer’s brand attitude (campbell and keller, ). it is likely that brand familiarity will positively influence perceptions of brand quality (griffith and gray, ; low and lamb, ; petruzzellis et al., ) since consumers who are familiar with a brand tend to develop more favorable assessments of its quality. therefore: h : as consumers become more familiar with the brands of mp players in the market, their perceptions of the equivalent quality of these brands will increase. the degree of familiarity consumers have with a brand is expected to negatively impact on their perceived financial, performance, psychological, social, physical and time risks (de chernatony, ; richardson et al., ; park and stoel, ; inci et al., ). it is possible that as consumers become more familiar with a brand, they are more comfortable with assessing it, which reduces the risk they perceive in the brand. consequently: h : as consumers become more familiar with the brands of mp players on the market, their perceptions of risk associated with these brands will decrease. an extrinsic cue is associated with the product; however an extrinsic cue can change without altering the characteristics of the product itself (alonso, ). generally, consumers rely upon the product’s brand, physical appearance, purchase price (dawar and parker, ; rao and monroe, ) and country of origin (fandos and flavian, ; kim, ) to determine its product quality. it is likely that reliance on a brand’s extrinsic attributes will negatively influence the degree to which brand quality is perceived (enneking et al., ; espejel et al., ; kumar and grisaffe, ; perrin- martinenq, ). consumers who become more certain about a brand’s quality, depend less on its extrinsic attributes to purchase it. therefore: h : as consumers rely more on the extrinsic attributes of the brands of mp players on the market, their perceptions of the equivalent quality of these brands will decrease. when consumers hold little information about a brand’s intrinsic attributes, their reliance on the brand’s extrinsic attributes is expected to positively impact on the perceived financial, performance, psychological, social, and physical and time risks the brand poses (griffith and chen, ; hsu and lin, ; aqueveque, ; vieceli and shaw, ). the more consumers rely on a brand’s extrinsic attributes for reassurances about its ability to meet expectation, the more likely they are to perceive of the risks associated with the brand. consequently: h : as consumers rely more on the extrinsic attributes of the brands of mp players on the market, their perceptions of risk associated with these brands will increase. self-confidence is considered a personality trait (bearden and teel, ; tafarodi and swann, ) that refers to the degree of self-assurance a consumer has in a specific marketing situation (hellén and sääksjärvi, ; kamins et al., ; locander and hermann, ; marc de korte, ). it also reflects the level of self-belief the consumer possesses in protecting themselves from being misled in marketing exchanges (gerbing et al, ). consumers’ self-confidence in a brand is likely to correlate positively with their perceptions of its quality (rothman, ; de chernatony and riley, ; ling, shieh, and liao, .). it is possible that consumers who demonstrate more confidence in a brand will be more inclined to perceive its higher quality. therefore: h : as consumers become more confident about the brands of mp players on the market, their perceptions of the equivalent quality of these brands will increase. finally, perceived quality is an attitude that results from the comparison of consumer expectations with the actual performance (parasuraman et al., ; snoj et al., ). consumers’ perceptions about a brand’s quality are expected to influence the risk they perceive in the brand. it is likely that perceived quality will negatively impact on the perceived risk a brand poses (snoj et al., ; sweeney et al., ). this is expected in situations when consumers perceive that the me-too brands on the market have similar high quality and therefore, associate less risk with these brands. however, since the me- too brands offer similar high quality on the market for a considerably lower price, purchasing a pioneer brand with its premium pricing may pose to be a bigger risk for the pioneer brand. consequently: h a: as consumers become more acquainted with the equivalent quality of the mp players on the market, their perceptions of risk associated with the pioneer brand will increase. h b: as consumers become more acquainted with the equivalent quality of the mp players on the market, their perceptions of risk associated with the me-too brands will decrease. methodology research design and sample since lead users of mp players constitute young adults (eggemann et al., ; lenhart et al., ), the university student market was targeted. this is one of the most coveted consumer segments due to its market size, the role of university students as trendsetters, the lifelong brand loyalties acquired during these formative years, their position as early- adopters, their influence over parental purchasers and the probability of a higher standard of living associated with an university degree (noble et al., ; wolburg and pokrywezynski, ). a self-administered survey was used to collect the data through an intercept method in the campuses of three state universities in australia. every fifth individual who crossed a designated point at different locations of the campus was approached. measuring consumers’ attitudes and perceptions in a mall or shopping related environment would allow population of interest (in this case student users) to relate to what the research intends to measure, which in this case are attitudes and consumer purchase intention (cowan, ). this is an improvement on ecological validity as most previous research focused on student samples (wang et al., ). measures the survey comprised four sections. the first two sections assessed the respondents’ perceived risk in purchasing the pioneer and me-too brands respectively. section three asked respondents about their brand familiarity, self-confidence, extrinsic attributes and perceived equivalent quality of the pioneer and me-too brands. finally, respondents were asked to provide demographic information. existing scales from laroche et al. ( ) and mieres et al. ( ) selected for their reliability in buying situations (α ≥ . ) were anchored by strongly disagree ( ) to strongly agree ( ) and adapted to ensure relevance to the current study. perceived risk for the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) were measured by items respectively. four statements each measured perceived social risk (e.g., i am afraid that an apple ipod / another brand of mp player would negatively affect what others think of me) and perceived physical risk (e.g., i am afraid that an apple ipod / another brand of mp player would not be safe for me or my family). three statements each measured perceived financial risk (e.g., if i were to purchase an apple ipod / another brand of mp player for myself within the next months, i would be concerned that the financial investment i would make would not be wise), perceived performance risk (e.g., the thought of purchasing an apple ipod / another brand of mp player causes me to be concerned for how really reliable that product will be), perceived psychological risk (e.g., the thought of purchasing an apple ipod / another brand of mp player gives me an unwanted feeling of anxiety) and perceived time risk (e.g., purchasing an apple ipod / another brand of mp player could involve an inefficient use of my time). brand familiarity/experience with the mp players was measured by eight items (e.g., i am quite familiar with mp player brands other than the apple ipod). self- confidence in choosing mp players was measured by five items (e.g., i consider myself capable of choosing a good mp player brand). extrinsic attributes of mp players that determine quality was measured by seven items (e.g., the more expensive the mp player, the better the quality). perceived quality between the mp players was measured by four items (e.g., there is not much difference in terms of quality between the apple ipod brand and the other brands). finally, seven questions related to gender, age, marital status, occupation, home ownership, education and income measured demographics. results and analysis of the surveys, percent ( surveys) administered were usable. this response rate was considered to be acceptable for a self-administered survey of this nature (pinhey and brown, ). age and gender characteristics were representative of the general student population in australia. first, the items related to risk perceptions of the apple ipod (pioneer brand) were factor analyzed using a varimax rotation to establish their structure and dimensionality. the initial analysis suggested a preliminary nine-factor solution which explained percent of the total variance with a kmo score of . and a bartlett’s test of sphericity of . . due to cross-loadings and communalities of less than . , the factor analysis was rerun iteratively. this resulted in items being removed which identified factors that maintained independence from one another. as can be seen in table , the final solution highlighted seven factors which maintained the total variance explained at percent with a kmo score of . and a bartlett’s test of sphericity of . . the seven factors identified brand familiarity, extrinsic attributes, perceived quality, perceived social/physical risk, perceived financial/performance risk, perceived time risk and perceived psychological risk. then, the items related to risk perceptions of the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) were factor analyzed. again, the initial analysis suggested a preliminary nine-factor solution which explained percent of the total variance with a kmo score of . and a bartlett’s test of sphericity of . . when the factor analysis was rerun iteratively, items were removed. as can be seen in table , the final solution highlighted seven factors which improved the total variance explained to percent with a kmo score of . and a bartlett’s test of sphericity of . . the seven factors also identified brand familiarity, extrinsic attributes, perceived quality, perceived social/physical risk, perceived financial/performance risk, perceived time risk and perceived psychological risk. ~~insert table here ~~ ~~ insert table here ~~ next, confirmatory factor analysis tested the measurement properties of each of the seven constructs related to the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) respectively. items with high modification index values due to correlated error terms and low loadings were omitted (jöreskog and sörbom, ). as a result, items were deleted from the measures related to the apple ipod (pioneer brand), leaving items, and four items were deleted from the measures related to the other brands of mp players (me-too brands), leaving items. as can be seen in appendix , composite reliabilities for the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) were . and . for brand familiarity; . and . for extrinsic attributes; . for perceived quality; . and . for perceived social/physical risk; . and . for perceived financial/performance risk; . and . for perceived time risk and . and . for perceived psychological risk respectively, suggesting the constructs demonstrated some reliability (hair et al., ). the composite reliabilities and the average variance extracted (ave) scores, as can be seen in appendix , suggested that the various constructs had good measurement properties (reliability and convergent validity) for the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) (fornell and larcker, ). further, an examination of the squared correlations between the various constructs found a maximum value of . (between perceived time risk and perceived psychological risk for the me- too brands), which was well below the ave scores for both constructs ( . and . ). consequently, discriminant validity for the constructs could also be assumed in all cases (fornell and larcker, ). as can be seen in table , independent groups t-tests suggested differences in respondents’ risk perceptions between the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands). when it involved the me-too brands, respondents held significantly higher perceived social/physical risk (p ≤ . ), perceived financial/performance risk (p ≤ . ) and perceived psychological risk (p ≤ . ) than the apple ipod. however, perceived time risk (p ≤ . ) was significantly higher for the apple ipod than the me-too brands. ~~ insert table here ~~ finally, path analysis examined the model’s hypotheses. as can be seen in figure , the model for the apple ipod (pioneer brand) fitted the data well (rmsea ≤ . ; nfi ≥ . ; cfi ≥ . and agfi ≥ . ). the model for the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) fitted the data reasonably well (although rmsea ≤ . , the other indices of nfi ≥ . ; cfi ≥ . and agfi ≥ . were acceptable), as can be seen in figure . further, no modification indices suggested other paths between the models’ constructs should be considered. since perceived risk and perceived quality are identified as formative constructs, items measuring the respective two constructs were summed to create composites, as suggested by jarvis et al. ( ). the error for each formative construct was then set to . times the variance of the item, as suggested by jöreskog and sörbom ( ). brand familiarity and extrinsic attributes are identified as reflective constructs with more than three items. the items for each reflective construct were combined using a partial disaggregation approach to minimize measurement error problems (bagozzi and heatherton, ). partial disaggregation is accomplished by randomly aggregating items that relate to a given construct into two or three composite measures so all of the items related to the latent variable correspond in the same way to that latent variable; thus any combination of the items should yield the same model fit (dabholkar et al., ). as expected, brand familiarity produced a significant positive effect on the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players for both the apple ipod (pioneer brand) (b = . , p ≤ . ) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) (b = . , p ≤ . ). this suggested respondents who were well versed with the brands of mp players available on the market also discerned that these brands had similar qualities, supporting h . however, brand familiarity did not produce the hypothesized significant negative effect on any of the dimensions of perceived risk for both the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands), which did not support h . http://www.sciencedirect.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/science?_ob=articleurl&_udi=b vgn- k j - &_user= &_coverdate= % f % f &_rdoc= &_fmt=full&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(% toc% % % % % fla% display% volume)&_cdi= &_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct= &_acct=c &_version= &_urlversion= &_userid= &md = fe a e b aa e #bib #bib http://www.sciencedirect.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/science?_ob=articleurl&_udi=b vgn- k j - &_user= &_coverdate= % f % f &_rdoc= &_fmt=full&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(% toc% % % % % fla% display% volume)&_cdi= &_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct= &_acct=c &_version= &_urlversion= &_userid= &md = fe a e b aa e #bib #bib http://www.sciencedirect.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/science?_ob=articleurl&_udi=b vgn- k j - &_user= &_coverdate= % f % f &_rdoc= &_fmt=full&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(% toc% % % % % fla% display% volume)&_cdi= &_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct= &_acct=c &_version= &_urlversion= &_userid= &md = fe a e b aa e #bib #bib ~~ insert figure here ~~ extrinsic attributes, as predicted, produced a significant negative effect on the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players for both the apple ipod (pioneer brand) (b = - . , p ≤ . ) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands) (b = - . , p ≤ . ). this suggested respondents who placed importance on external cues such as a premium brand, packaging and pricing were less inclined to perceive that the mp players on the market shared similar qualities, supporting h . however, extrinsic attributes did not produce the hypothesized significant positive effect on any of the dimensions of perceived risk for both the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands), which did not support h . as hypothesized, the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players had significant positive effects on perceived social/physical (b = . , p ≤ . ), financial/performance (b = . , p ≤ . ), time (b = . , p ≤ . ) and psychological (b = . , p ≤ . ) risks for the apple ipod (pioneer brand), supporting h a. when it involved the apple ipod, respondents appeared to perceive more risk about whether the pioneer brand would meet expectation and social approval for the time and money expended in purchasing it. also as expected, the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players had a significant negative effect on perceived financial/performance risk (b = - . , p ≤ . ) for the other brands of mp players (me-too brands), supporting h b. with the number of me-too brands that offer equivalent quality on the market, respondents seemed to find more assurance and perceive less risk in purchasing these brands. no significant effects were observed for the other three dimensions of risk, although there was directional support from each of these risk dimensions. finally, since the self-confidence construct did not load as an independent and separate factor from the initial factor analysis, it was not included in the measurement model and h remained untested. ~~ insert figure here ~~ discussion and conclusion the primary aim of the current study was to examine the differential effects brand familiarity, extrinsic attributes and perceived quality had on perceived social/physical, financial/performance, time and psychological risks for the apple ipod (pioneer brand) and the other brands of mp players (me-too brands). the constructs demonstrated reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity and the majority of the hypotheses were supported as can be seen in the measurement models in figures and . me-too brands posed significantly higher social/physical, financial/performance and psychological risks for respondents. however, time risk was significantly higher for the pioneer brand. this augurs well for the apple ipod as it suggests that in spite of the aggressive competition mounted by the me-too brands on the market, consumers are still able to discern the competitive advantage offered by the pioneer brand, although they are taking more time to decide on its purchase. as expected, brand familiarity produced a significant positive effect on the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players for both the apple ipod and the other brands of mp players. this may present a future problem for the apple ipod since savvy consumers who shop around and become familiar with the different mp players on the market appear to see no difference in the quality of the brands. consumer familiarity with the me-too brands may be a reason why unit sales for the apple ipod are expected to tumble by percent to about million in (hesseldahl, ). extrinsic attributes, as predicted, produced a significant negative effect on the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players for both the apple ipod and the other brands of mp players. this augurs well for the apple ipod since consumers who place high importance on its premium brand, packaging and pricing are less inclined to perceive that all the mp players on the market share similar qualities. neither brand familiarity nor extrinsic attributes had any significant effect on the dimensions of perceived risk for the apple ipod and the other brands of mp players. this suggests consumers do not draw upon their experience with the pioneer and me-too brands nor do they use the brands’ tangible cues to help allay any risks associated with purchasing them. as reported in the previous paragraphs, it is likely that consumer perceptions of quality may hold stronger influence in helping them cope with purchase risks (snoj et al., ; sweeney et al., ). as hypothesized, the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players produced significant positive effects on perceived social/physical, financial/performance, time and psychological risks for the apple ipod. consumers who perceive the equivalent quality of the mp players on the market appear to associate more risk with the apple ipod. possibly, since the pioneer brand costs more to purchase, consumers may be more concerned that it might not live up to expectation or meet the approval of significant others for the time and effort taken to purchase it. the apple ipod may need to consider the implications of guarantees and extended warranties to allay such perceived risks. also as expected, the perceived equivalent quality of the mp players produced a significant negative effect on the perceived financial/performance risk for the other brands of mp players. conceivably, consumers may perceive that the real quality in the me-too brands stems from the value-for-money they offer and the lower risk they pose. since the key issues of cost and performance appear to be addressed by the equivalent quality of the me-too brands on the market, the other dimensions of risk may not be applicable to this savvy market segment. limitations and future research the sample’s size and geographic distribution limited generalizability of the findings. for the model to have general and cross-cultural applicability, it requires replication using different countries and cultures (noble et al., ) to strengthen confidence in the results (alpert et al., ). the product mp which is used in this study is at the end of its life- cycle. it does make sense to replicate this study with other products as smart phones and tablets which can be more appropriate with the current market. from the research, it is apparent consumers hold the pioneer brand in high regard, acknowledging that the brand meets social approval and provides assurance in terms of its high standards of performance and safety for the price it commands. this augurs well for pioneer brands as it demonstrates they are able to maintain their competitive edge. however, consumers seem reluctant to take the time to accumulate information about the pioneer brand’s attributes, particularly when the financial outlay required by the pioneer brand is high. it may be worthwhile to explore the time/money tradeoff that consumers encounter in such situations. given their time-poor lifestyles, are consumers willing to sacrifice leisure time by searching for information to reduce their risks (laroche et al., ) or not sacrifice leisure time by buying pioneer brands at premium prices for the assurances they give? consumer reliance on extrinsic cues to determine brand quality and manage perceived risk requires further investigation, specifically in the area of cross-cultural research. many researchers consider that asian consumers are more brand conscious, sensitive to extrinsic cues (na et al., ) and desirous of social approval from their collectivistic communities (tafarodi and swann, ). in asian societies, it is likely the relationships between extrinsic cues, brand quality and perceived risk will be more pronounced than findings in the current study. understanding how the suggested model works in china and japan could help pioneer brands address perceptions of risk, quality and social acceptance and maintain their competitive edge in these large and culturally- sensitive consumer markets. in previous studies, females were found to be more risk-avoiding than their male counterparts (levin et al., ; verma and sharma, ). yet, it is possible that better education and improved social status may empower more women to be less susceptible to fear and anxiety and to perceive less risk (carr, ). further research is required to examine the impact gender has on the perceived risk associated with purchasing consumer electronics, which has traditionally been a male-dominated area. consumer retrieval of pioneer brands and identification of pioneer status are important issues for which additional sets of real product categories should be tested. a number of additional issues remain to be addressed in future research. for instance, what is it about ‘the original’ that makes this term more powerful than other terms that communicate pioneer status (including ‘the pioneer’)? why do consumers misperceive pioneer status? what leads them to misidentify a particular brand as a pioneer? will cross-cultural replication find differing degrees of enthusiasm for pioneer brands on the basis of differing core cultural values toward change (alpert and kamins, )? finally, subsequent research could investigate why consumers reject specific pioneer and me-too brands. in some instances, the risk perceptions and motives may be intentional, where consumers make active choices. active choices in rejecting brands may result from prior experience where a brand has neither met expectations nor shown compatibility with a consumer’s image or morals. in other instances, the risk 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( ). a psychographic analysis of generation y college students. journal of advertising research, , - . table : rotated component matrix for the pioneer brand factor : perceived social/physical risk may be dangerous for me or some of my family. . may make others look down upon me. . may negatively affect what others think of me. . would damage my health. . would not be safe for me or my family. . i think an apple ipod may cause me some physical harm. . the demands on my schedule are such that purchasing an apple ipod could create more pressures on me. . factor : brand familiarity i know the mp players well. . i am very familiar with mp players. . i know the different available mp player brands well. . i know the available mp player brands well. . i am well informed about mp players. . compared with most mp player buyers, i consider myself a good buyer. . i have plenty of experience using mp players other than the apple ipod. . when deciding on a mp player brand, i feel confident of my choice. . when i choose a mp player brand, i do not usually doubt my choice. . factor : perceived psychological risk gives me a feeling of unwanted anxiety. . causes me to be concerned for how really reliable that product will be. . causes me to experience unnecessary tension. . as i consider purchasing an apple ipod soon, i worry about whether it will really ‘perform’ as it is supposed to. . makes me feel psychologically uncomfortable. . factor : perceived financial/performance risk i would not get my money’s worth. . the financial investment i would make would not be wise. . it would not provide the levels of benefits that i would be expecting. . factor : extrinsic attributes if you want quality, you have to pay for it. . the better-known the mp player’s brand name, the better the quality. . a cheap mp player makes me suspicious of the result. . the absence of a well-known mp player brand name makes me suspicious. . factor : perceived time risk an inefficient use of my time. . important time losses. . important financial losses. . factor : perceived equivalent quality the apple ipod brand and the other mp player brands are practically the same quality. . there is not much difference in terms of quality between the apple ipod brand and the other brands. . i do not think other mp player brands are of lower quality than the apple ipod brand. . kmo score = . ; bartlett’s test of sphericity = . eigen value . . . . . . . variance extracted . . . . . . . coefficient alpha . . . . . . . table : rotated component matrix for the me-too brands factor : brand familiarity i know the different available mp player brands well. . i am very familiar with mp players. . i know the mp players well. . i know the available mp player brands well. . i am well informed about mp players. . compared with most mp player buyers, i consider myself a good buyer. . i am quite familiar with other mp players other than the apple ipod. . i have plenty of experience using mp players other than the apple ipod. . when deciding on a mp player brand, i feel confident of my choice. . factor : perceived social/physical risk would damage my health. . may be dangerous for me or some of my family. . would not be safe for me or my family. . may negatively affect what others think of me. . i think another brand of mp player may cause me some physical harm. . may make others look down upon me. . factor : perceived financial/performance risk i would not get my money’s worth. . it would not provide the levels of benefits that i would be expecting. . causes me to be concerned for how really reliable that product will be. . factor : perceived psychological risk causes me to experience unnecessary tension. . gives me a feeling of unwanted anxiety. . makes me feel psychologically uncomfortable. . factor : extrinsic attributes the better-known the mp player’s brand name, the better the quality. . if you want quality, you have to pay for it. . a cheap mp player makes me suspicious of the result. . the absence of a well-known mp player brand name makes me suspicious. . factor : perceived time risk an inefficient use of time. . important time losses. . important financial losses. . factor : perceived equivalent quality the apple ipod brand and the other mp player brands are practically the same quality. . there is not much difference in terms of quality between the apple ipod brand and the other brands. . i do not think other mp player brands are of lower quality than the apple ipod brand. . kmo score = . ; bartlett’s test of sphericity = . eigen value . . . . . . . variance extracted . . . . . . . coefficient alpha . . . . . . . table : descriptive statistics for the dimensions of risk associated with pioneer and me-too brands apple ipod (pioneer brand) other brands of mp players (me-too brands) perceived social/physical risk . a ( . ) . b ( . ) perceived financial/performance risk . a ( . ) . b ( . ) perceived time risk . a ( . ) . b ( . ) perceived psychological risk . a ( . ) . b ( . ) sample size note: standard deviations are shown in parentheses. means denoted by a different subscript letter are significantly different from one another (p ≤ . ) using independent groups t-tests figure : measurement model for the pioneer brand fam . exp ,exp e . . iprsocphy e . fam ,ssc e . ext . exatt e . exatt e . . ipqe . . . iprpsy e . iprtime e . exatt e . . iprfinperf e . . per qual . per soc phy . per psy . per time . per fin perf . . . . . e e e e e weight model: all parameters constrained chi square = . d.f. = rmsea= . cfi= . nfi= . gfi= . . . . . . -. figure : measurement model for the me-too brands ext . oextrin e . . oextrin e . fam . ofam e . ofam e . . opqe . . . ofam e . . oprfinperf e . . per qual . per fin perf . . e e weight model: all parameters constrained chi square = . d.f. = rmsea= . cfi= . nfi= . gfi= . -. -. . appendix : constructs means, standardized deviations and correlations items m sd construct reliability ave score bf ea peq psp pfp pt pp apple ipod (pioneer brand) brand familiarity (bf) . . . . . extrinsic attributes (ea) . . . . . . perceived equivalent quality (peq) . . . . . - . . perceived social/physical risk (psp) . . . . . - . . . perceived financial/performance risk (pfp) . . . . . - . . . . perceived time risk (pt) . . . . . - . . . . . perceived psychological risk (pp) . . . . . - . . . . . . other brands of mp players (me-too brands) brand familiarity (bf) . . . . . extrinsic attributes (ea) . . . . . . perceived equivalent quality (peq) . . . . . - . . perceived social/physical risk (psp) . . . . . - . - . . perceived financial/performance risk (pfp) . . . . - . . - . . . perceived time risk (pt) . . . . . - . . . . . perceived psychological risk (pp) . . . . . - . . . . . . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ 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access seizing the strategic opportunities of emerging technologies by building up innovation system: monoclonal antibody development in china mao-yu zhang , jian li , hao hu * and yi-tao wang abstract background: monoclonal antibodies (mabs), as an emerging technology, have become increasingly important in the development of human therapeutic agents. how developing countries such as china could seize this emerging technological opportunity remains a poorly studied issue in prior literature. thus, this paper aims to investigate the research and development of mabs in china based on an innovation system functions approach and probes into the question of how china has been taking advantage of emerging technologies to overcome its challenges of building up a complete innovation system in developing mabs. methods: mixed research methods were applied by combining archival data and field interviews. archival data from the china food and drug administration, web of science, the united states patent and trademark office, the chinese clinical trial registry, and the national science and technology report service were used to examine the status quo of the technology and research and development (r&d) activities in china, while the opinions of researchers and managers in this field were synthesized from the interviews. results: from the perspective of innovation system functions, technological development of mab in china is being driven by incentives such as the subsidies from the state and corporate r&d funding. knowledge diffusion has been well served over the last years through exchanging information on networks and technology transfer with developed countries. the state has provided clear guidance on search of emerging mab technologies. legitimacy of mab in china has gained momentum owing to the implementation of government policies stipulated in the “the eleventh five-year plan” in , as well as national projects such as the “ program” and “ program”, among others. the potential of market formation stays high because of the rising local demand and government support. entrepreneurial activities for mab continue to prosper. in addition, the situation of resource supply has been improved with the support of the state. conclusions: this study finds that a complete innovation system for mab has begun to take shape in china. mab innovators in china are capitalizing on this emerging technological opportunity to participate in the global drive of developing the value chain for the innovative drug. in the long run, the build-up of the research system for mab in china could bring about more driving forces to the mab innovation system. keywords: china, emerging technology, innovation system, monoclonal antibody * correspondence: haohu@umac.mo state key laboratory of quality research in chinese medicine, institute of chinese medical sciences, university of macau, room , building n , avenida da universidade, taipa, macao, china full list of author information is available at the end of the article © zhang et al. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:haohu@umac.mo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / background over the past three decades, monoclonal antibodies (mabs) have made a dramatic transformation from sci- entific tools to powerful human therapeutic agents [ ]. sales of mab therapies exceeded billion us dollars in and are expected to reach billion us dollars by [ ]. in , koehler and milstein first described the in vitro production of murine mabs from hybrid- omas [ ]. in the late s, clinical development of mur- ine mabs was initiated but then inhibited by numerous significant drawbacks [ ]. later, in an attempt to over- come the inherent immunogenicity concerns and the re- duced effect or function of murine mabs in human [ ], chimeric mouse-human antibodies were developed [ ]. nowadays, humanized mabs are the fastest growing cat- egory of mab therapeutics entering clinical study [ ]. development of this class of therapeutic agents started as early as s but achieved no clinical or commercial success until , when adalimumab became the first humanized mab approved by the united states food and drug administration [ ]. thus far, a total of seven humanized mabs have been approved for marketing in the united states. while mabs, as an emerging technology, have become increasingly important in the development of human therapeutic agents, how developing countries such as china could seize this emerging technological opportun- ity remains a scantly studied topic in prior literature. aiming at investigating mab development in china by drawing on an innovation systems approach, this paper probes into the question of how china has been taking advantage of emerging technologies to overcome chal- lenges through building up an innovation system in de- veloping mabs. in so doing, it attempts to contribute to ( ) an understanding of the establishment and structure of the mab innovation system in china; ( ) an evalu- ation of the performance of the mab innovation system by analysing the functions of the innovation system; and ( ) providing policy suggestions for improving the mab innovation system. further, this paper offers an overview of the functions of innovation system approach, which provided the the- oretical framework for examining the mab innovation system, and analyses the innovation system of mabs and the function fulfilment. to deepen the theoretical under- standing, we discuss the research findings by comparing the chinese mab innovation system with that of the united states and india, as well as with innovation sys- tems of chinese pharmaceuticals, concluding with les- sons from the managerial and policymaking perspective. theoretical framework emerging technologies, such as mabs, are expected to contribute to technology advances, economic development, and environmental and health improvements [ – ]. how- ever, compared with traditional technologies, emerging technologies are newly introduced, fast changing and de- veloping, and have relatively limited applications in the market, which is characterized by greater measures of un- certainty [ – ]. therefore, the development and commercialization of emerging technologies are heavily dependent on the establishment and operation of an innovation system [ ]. for an emerging technology, the idea of a technological innovation system was considered as a new method to understand the dynamic changes of technological progress [ ]. the technological innovation system is regarded as ( ) “a heuristic attempt, developed to analyse all societal subsystems, actors, and institutions contributing in one way or the other, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, to the emergence or production of innovation” [ , ]; and ( ) a systematic combination of actors, networks, and institutions [ , ]. therefore, the framework of technological innovation systems provides an effective means to study emerging technologies such as mab. traditional innovation systems studies mainly con- centrate on the system structure, which has been proven to be insufficient to identify policymaking rec- ommendations [ ]. thus, an in-depth analysis of innovation systems is warranted to understand the in- fluence of a series of processes called “functions” [ ]. once known what innovation systems functions pro- mote or hinder the innovation, policies and manage- ment activities that are necessary for improving the innovation system can be easily identified [ ]. innovation systems functions are interpreted in seven dimensions, as indicated below [ – ]: � function : entrepreneurial activities entrepreneurs are of prime importance; without entrepreneurs, no innovation system would take place. what the entrepreneurs do is turn the potential of a new technology into concrete action and take full advantage of business opportunities [ ]. � function : knowledge development (learning) if solutions to identified problems are to be provided, new technologies must be developed. research and development (r&d), search and experimentation, learning-by-doing/using and imitation are regarded as possible sources of new technologies. they may combine old and new technologies in innovative ways and reuse old knowledge by imitation [ ]. � function : knowledge diffusion through networks exchanging information is the essential characteristic of networks, such as changing norms and values. the diffusion may lead to a change in r&d agendas [ ]. zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of � function : guidance of the search activities can positively affect the visibility and clarity of specific needs [ ]. expectations are also included. � function : market formation it is difficult for emerging technologies to compete with embedded ones. therefore, it is important to create protected markets for new technologies by formation of temporary niche markets and tax regimes of minimal consumption quotas [ ]. � function : resource mobilization both finance and human capital are necessary for all the activities within innovation systems [ ]. they may determine the success or failure of a project. � function : advocacy coalition (creation of legitimacy/counteract resistance to change) in order to become a well-developed technology, emerging technologies must be part of an incumbent regime. parties with vested interests will often oppose the force of ‘creative destruction’. thus, advocacy coalitions can function as a catalyst to place a new technology on the agenda. if successful, advocacy coalitions grow in terms of size and influence and can become powerful enough to brisk up the spirit of creative destruction [ ]. methods in an attempt to provide a comprehensive research of mabs development in china, this study employed a multi-dimensional design to enhance the rigor and rele- vance of the study [ – ]. thus, multiple data sources are used to serve the purpose. basically, our approach consists of retrieving a wide range of activities using a variety of sources related to the development and diffu- sion of the technology under study. firstly, archival data were collected from multiple sources, as listed below. � product registry database in china food and drug administration was searched to confirm the exact number of domestic mab products approved in china. “biopharmaceutical drugs” as a category was selected in “domestic products”, and “monoclonal antibody” was used as a keyword; diagnostic antibodies and diagnostic agents were excluded. � patent the search strategy was defined as the mab patents applied by chinese applicants in recent decades in the united states patent and trademark office. patent information with satisfactory purposes was searched using the following strategies: topic = (monoclonal antibod*) and title = (monoclonal antibod*) and assignee = (china). there was no limit to the year. � publication academic publications related to mabs in china were extracted from the thomson reuters’ web of science database. studies and research about mabs in china began in the st century [ ]. publications related to mabs between and were searched using the following strategies: topic = (monoclonal antibod*) and title = (monoclonal antibod*) and address = (china not hong kong not taiwan not macau). “mabs” was used as the keyword in the same way. in the query above, the asterisk (*) represents any group of characters or no character and the literature type was limited in “article”. given a better understanding about the position of china’s mabs in the world, publication status of anti-tumour mabs in china was chosen as an example and compared with “top ” countries with respect to mabs. while keeping the database updated, all the data used were as recent as until march , . selected documents included “monoclonal antibod* or mab*” in the title or “monoclonal antibod* or mab*” in the topic, and “cancer or tumor or anti-cancer or anti-tumor” in the topic. “address” searched for the selected countries and regions, including china (excluding hong kong, taiwan and macau), united states, japan, germany, united kingdom, italy, france, the netherlands, and canada. the document type was limited in “article” as well. the publication years covered were from to , since commercially sponsored mabs began entering clinical study in [ ]. � clinical trials registry the chinese clinical trial registry database was the source used to present situations about assignees and funding of clinical trials applied in china on mabs. both chinese and english databases were used to search and sort records. “mab” and “monoclonal antibody*” were used as keywords; the year was not limited. � research projects the national science and technology report service database, which offers open access, was searched to ascertain and narrow down the list of targeted key mab institutions. in addition, field interviews were conducted to collect the relevant information. expert, rather than general or informal, opinions play a crucial role and are often sought for professional advice in the development of technology and policy change to enhance knowledge of emerging technologies such as the mab industry, even though the information may reveal the risks, benefits and regulations involved [ , ]. for the purpose of this study, a series of interviews were conducted with zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of six chinese researchers specialized in mabs and man- agers from three leading chinese mab firms. the in- terviewees were identified through the national science and technology report service database. the interview design was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of the university of macau. the chosen interviewees were contacted through email first to obtain their consent. the interview questions did not involve confidential information but were just designed from the perspectives of technology, the characteristics and strategies of r&d, and the chal- lenges and technical obstacles, among others. in addition, some documentary materials were also re- ferred to [ – ]. with all the material collected from the multiple sources described above, we conducted the data analysis in two stages. first, following the components of techno- logical innovation system, we categorized the materials into four aspects: mab technology development, mab firms, research institutes and their networking with firms, and institutions. all the quantitative and qualita- tive materials were used as complementary and used to cross-check our findings. second, based on the results of the first stage, we analyzed the functions of mab innovation systems in terms of the seven dimensions as defined above. such an analysis framework for techno- logical innovation system has been widely validated in the study of emerging technologies, and it is therefore appropriate to apply this kind of analysis framework to analyse mab innovation systems. the final results of analysis are reported in the next two sections. mab innovation systems in china stages of mab technology development in china mabs in china were originally developed from the tracking of existing technologies. having prepared itself for the new opportunity on a theoretical basis, china commenced engagement with researchers and devel- opers of other countries in order to allow the cutting- edge technology to flow in directly. into the st cen- tury, chinese mab r&d finds itself at a more mature stage with an established production platform and pat- ented innovative drug activities impending. the develop- ment of mabs in china could be summarized as consisting of the following stages: � absorbing stage tracking the cutting-edge technology from foreign countries was the objective at this stage, with the advent of its own publications on the existing foreign mab agents as well as the local r&d pro- cesses. china was preparing the first domestic mab products for introduction into the market. � exploratory stage by buying and the introducing the technology, domestic products were listed on the market. by the year , four local agents had been developed, including “me-too” and “me-better”. the number of publications concerned was accumulating. literature types not only included reviews but also new-phased research results. at this stage, china started performing joint research with developed countries such as the united states to explore the path to independent studies. � innovation stage at this stage of china’s mab evolution, a total of eight domestic products were available, some of which had reached the stages of humanized technology. the mab agents were gradually expanding with abundant indications in the process. the r&d institutes attempted to push for united states patent and trademark office approval of their domestic products and succeeded in . the content of the patents in general was concentrated on the diagnosis of major diseases such as cancer and also on mab preparation and production methods. the number of clinical trials for second and third generation anti-cancer products increased rapidly. moreover, it was found that enterprises whose products had been put into the market had invested more effort and funding in clinical trials, hence becoming the main sponsors in china. mab firms in china while there are still few original innovation drugs devel- oped in china, the status quo of foreign players dominat- ing the chinese mab market has now changed. r&d of mabs in china began in the s, but it was not until that the first mab therapeutic agent was introduced. to date, there are seven domestic companies with eight products launched. of the seven, four are producing “me- too” or “me-better” drugs (table ). however, the prod- ucts have no property rights of their own. these small and medium-sized enterprises are typically with of a fragile foundation and early-stage high r&d costs, as a result of which they cannot afford the cost of long-term clinical tri- als, but rely heavily on imported technology. thus, most focus on manufacturing instead of technology develop- ment aiming at the domestic market only. the rest, led by shanghai cp guojian pharmaceuticals (cpgj), have been growing steadily and trying to transform “following” into “innovation”. therefore, they take full ad- vantage of pertinent policies and national research projects to organize future-proof r&d activities. their development path represents the future direction of chinese mabs. � taixinsheng, produced by bio-tech pharmaceuticals and approved in had been the first outcome of zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of national-level projects among developing countries. substantial support was provided by the government program between china and cuba, thus bio-tech performed as an important cooperative carrier of r&d technology on nasopharyngeal cancer. � based in east shanghai, shanghai cpgj, was founded in and was jointly invested by china international trust and investment corporation and shanghai lansheng guojian pharmaceutical company limited. cpgj made a joint r&d effort with the second military medical university, one of earliest chinese military universities. cpgj’s products include mab (jiannipai, developed for kidney transplantation) and fusion protein (yisaipu, developed for rheumatoid arthritis, etc.). yisaipu has been successfully listed in the national medical insurance of numerous provinces and has consequently earned large-scale government orders. further, cpgj owns the intellectual property rights solely. � huasun biotech, established in , is a subsidiary of the chengdu huasun biological technology company limited with listing in shenzhen since . huasun steel structure, another huasun subsidiary, provided a steady and stable inflow of cash. moreover, huasun biotech seized the chance to enter the biopharmaceutical market by technology transfer from the fourth military medical university. the product, licartin, is the first domestic mab for hepatocellular carcinoma. while the domestic actors imported and absorbed a mature technology, the price of domestic mab products still remains high, which suggests enormous mass pro- duction costs for the local manufacturer. therefore, im- proving the capacity for efficient and advanced antibody expression is conducive to cutting the costs. apart from cpgj and bio-tech, the remaining com- panies mainly concentrate on the domestic market at present. on the one hand, the demand of antibody- based drugs is rather high, whereas producers of this kind of therapy agents are far from being adequate. on the other hand, their overall performance and competi- tiveness are just as inadequate for exportation of their products. to change this and open up international mar- kets in the future, it is imperative for both policymakers and corporations that actions should be taken at this juncture. research institutes and their networking with firms in s, china began implementing mab research ac- tivities between the leading academic institutions at the national level. led by the chinese academy of sciences, the r&d institutions that were first established in when the republic was founded, mostly with a military background, are centred on the upstream and middle reaches of leading antibody technologies. their research areas are gene cloning, cell engineering and platform es- tablishment, etc. for instance, cpgj has ongoing part- nerships in key technologies with the second military medical university for mab joint development. suc- cesses in marketing licartin are owed to the founda- tional technology transfer from the fourth military medical university to huasun in . the establishment of the institutions dates back to the last century. there has been great progress made in re- cent years, with bountiful results achieved by the institu- tions. they focus on r&d of upstream technology and transfer the basic technology to enterprises for produc- tion (table ), thus achievements from academic institu- tions make up the majority of the new drugs (licartin and yisaipu are a case in point). meanwhile, academies are facing difficulties such as those associated with hu- manized antibodies and purification in the development of mabs. to overcome the obstacles and lead to a brighter future, support from the government is deemed essential. on the one hand, the government encourages domes- tic academies to take full advantage of national research projects and to cooperate with domestic enterprises. on the other, it explores new opportunities to connect with the leading foreign players for resource sharing. for table leading actors (industry) of mabs in china company year ownership registered capital (million) primary products indications medical insurance r&d market position strategy bio-tech private . taixinsheng nasopharyngeal cancer no me- better export, domestic market hospitals academic promotion shanghai cp guojian pharmaceuticals private jiannipai kidney transplants no me- better export, domestic market comprehensive and specialized hospitals academic promotion yisaipu rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and ankylosing spondylitis yes huasun private . licartin liver cancer no me-too domestic market therapeutic centre academic promotion zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of instance, institute pasteur of the shanghai chinese acad- emy of science was co-built for the purpose of biothera- peutics by the chinese academy of sciences, shanghai municipality, and institute pasteur (france) in . the research-oriented institutions are making efforts to catch up with the advanced technology and work with businesses for industrialization. however, at present, few domestic products have had successful sales in china. the interaction between academies and enterprises is a rarity; as a result, most scientific research findings could not be translated into productivity. although the organic integration of enterprises, universities and research insti- tutes is recognized as a suitable mechanism and an eco- nomic developing mode for the biopharmaceutical industry in china, it is contingent on the support by the policy for the mabs industry to open up its avenue for rapid development. institutions policies concerning mabs are always under the guidance of the government with respect to r&d in biotechnology. since , chinese authorities in the field of biotechnol- ogy have issued a series of policies to promote and standardize the development of the whole industry. the main government agency in charge of policymaking is the state council and its subsidiary national development and reform commission, along with the ministry of sci- ence and technology. early key drivers, such as the sev- enth five-year plan, aimed at laying a foundation for further technology development; whereas the “ ” pro- gram (in ) and the “ ” program (in ) aimed at tracking industry development trends of developed coun- tries at the strategic level. during the past years, china has set clear targets for and a political commitment to the biopharmaceutical industry with major progress made in the current century. over nearly two decades, several state policies have been issued to support business finance, drug approval, marketing, and r&d in the biopharmaceutical industry. the policy direction of basic subjects like genome engin- eering and proteomics paved the way for mabs develop- ment. under the guidance of the “ ” (in ) and the table latest projects report related mabs in project institution of first author keywords humanized and human mabs structure and antibody optimization techniques academy of military medical science antibody humanized, human antibody, expression system, analysis system final report of tumour and autoimmune disease of certain target antibody drug design academy of military medical science molecular simulation, molecular docking, target, blys, dr , tnf antibody engineering drugs and synergistic technology chinese academy of medical sciences antibody engineering drugs, immune coupling objects, antibody fusion protein, synergistic technology tumour marker optimization and clinical research and protein chip development second military medical university tumour marker, detection, protein chip, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, primary liver cancer, colorectal cancer targeted complement inhibitor for systemic lupus erythematosus (sle) the people’s liberation army institute for disease control and prevention sle, alexin, cr , targeted inhibition, physiology of immune defence studies on the novel technologies and approaches for tumour immunotherapy fourth military medical university tumour, immunotherapy, tumour vaccine, erbb /her , apoptosis, exosome novel antibodies in the therapy of autoimmune disease second military medical university auto-immune disease, antibody drug, clinical therapy, mechanism investigation study on the new methods for diagnosing nasopharyngeal carcinoma in early stage sun yat-sen university nasopharyngeal carcinoma, epstein-barr virus, tumour biomarker, bmi- , cnepf, lmp a, ifi immunological recognition, immune regulation and basic research of related immune diseases second military medical university immunological recognition, immune tolerance, related immune diseases common malignant tumour prevention, early detection and comprehensive treatment research sun yat-sen university nasopharynx cancer, screening, early detection, epstein-barr virus, pathogenesis research and development of novel tri-specific single chain antibody drug for the treatment of ovarian cancer tianjin international biomedical research joint research institute ovarian, tumour, antibody drug, specific passing report of project “personalized immunosuppression plan of transplant patients” huazhong university of science and technology galectin- , galectin- , snp, mdr , il- , rejection, immune tolerance, proteomics acceptance report of basic research on organ transplantation immunology & application zhejiang university organ transplantation, transplantation immunology, chronic dysfunction, transplant infections, immunosuppression information retrieved from the national science and technology report service (www.nstrs.cn) database (until december ). zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of http://www.nstrs.cn/ “ ” (in ), and since the beginning of the eleventh five-year plan, the antibody industry has been regarded as a major national innovative project, with its strategic position being thus formally established. it was the same with the developing path of the biological industry in that mab development was spearheaded by academic in- stitutions to be gradually transformed into enterprises in the ensuing years. in , the state called upon enterprises to take part in the development of the technology by putting forward a series of ordinances, programmes and policy changes, including the “national program for long- and medium-term scientific and technological development ( – )”, “biological industry development of the eleventh five-year plan”, “policies to speed up the de- velopment of biological industry” and “the twelfth five-year plan”, which accelerated high-tech enterprises’ endeavours to become the mainstay in independent innovation. the policies thus initiated a focus on gene drugs and antibody r&d in , while it was also the first time to affirm the long-term development of mabs. up until , four out of nine major projects had an involvement in the biological pharmaceutical field; at same time, the china food and drug administration ex- tended the duration of the state first-class new medicine to years through the revision of two main regulations on new drug approval and technology transfer to en- courage the development of innovative drugs, conse- quently streamlining r&d and manufacturing. the “several policies to speed up the development of the biological industry” program in expanded the fi- nancing channels and introduced risk investment to the fast-increasing investment of private industries. details are shown in table . in summary, china implemented policies from three main perspectives: market, enterprises, and academies. further, it made efforts to maintain a stable market en- vironment and to establish a competitive system for mabs. additionally, the government provided aid to main business actors to encourage cooperation among themselves and networking with academies, which led to the beneficiaries eventually achieving positive results in a phase by phase basis. being closely connected with the foundation of the mab industry, policies also played an important role in pushing mab development forward considerably. in the process of industrialization, r&d in mabs had changed from the state of “following suit” to innovating and keeping updated not only in laboratory studies but also in manufacturing. finally, in order to ensure that enterprises are the main body of innovation and that small- and medium-sized enterprises were in- volved in the development, effective long-term programs and actions specific to mab development needs are ex- pected to be taken by the state. functions of mab innovation system in china based on the results from our analysis, the function per- formance of the mab innovation system in china can be summarized as follows (figure ): � entrepreneurial activity (f ) is prospering, with a value chain clearly dominated by foreign players since the last century. however, china’s mab supply chain is growing rapidly and expected to become one of the top largest in the near future. � knowledge development (f ) is being driven by incentives such as the r&d subsidies from the state and corporate r&d efforts, and innovation pressure such as fierce price competition from the leading countries and the need to improve antibody expression performance. � knowledge diffusion (f ) has been best served over the last years through information exchange in networks and technology transfer between developed countries and china. clearly, the mabs leading enterprises like cpgj were driving this growth and the national policies were channelling much of this demand towards domestic suppliers. � guidance of search (f ) has improved. the early transfer successes helped to highlight the need for independent innovation and competitive designs. as operators of mabs, the enterprises had experienced a downside and had access to first-information of the strengths and weaknesses of their technologies. � market formation (f ) is not strong enough and there are many replacement drugs to share the market. however, high potential niche markets (export and globalization) have been explored. � resource mobilisation (f ) or resource supply situation has improved in that some resource categories are supported by the state (financial and industrial resources); however, for others there are still obstacles on the path to professional industrialization (human and infrastructural resources). � advocacy coalition or legitimacy (f ) has gained momentum due to the government policies of the eleventh five-year plan in and the national projects named as the “ program” and the “ program”. the successes in building a domestic mabs industry and the increase of the targets have reinforced the legitimacy of the technology furthermore. in general, the virtuous circle in china starts with f : ‘guidance of the search’. the state fully realized the unique opportunities of mab as an emerging technology and set the direction of mab industry development in china. moti- vated by the state encouragement, entrepreneurial activities zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of (f ) were undertaken by different types of entrepreneurs. then, targeted mab technologies were developed (f ) and diffused (f ) through networking among firms and univer- sities. in particular, in order to make further technology development possible and knowledge diffusion, the govern- ment established a state-level scientific research system and contributed to international cooperation. the rapid tech- nology development and diffusion provided further advo- cacy coalition (f ) for mab in china. in this case, the legitimacy supported by the state is beginning to stimulate market formation (f ) and mobilize several types of resources (f ), including finance, human resources, etc., into the mab industry. thus, a complete virtuous cycle of the mab innovation system has been established and is op- erating in china. to sum up the experience, the main force behind the development of mab in china has been the strong polit- ical commitment to mab technology, which activated other functions of the mab innovation system. positive feedback loops have been established with the legitimacy of this technology elevated with knowledge development and market formation. the regulatory mechanisms have table biopharmaceutical regulations and influences related to mabs year title institute content aims influence/mab development plan for biological products career ministry of health biopharmaceutical industry is given priority to develop the vaccine to lay a foundation for further technology development focus on vaccine, mab industry in china has not developed well national program for long- and medium- term scientific and technological development ( – ) the state council reaffirm a fact that biotechnology is an emerging technology and the focus of the future high technology industry tool of catching up is very important to make enterprises to be innovators, cultivate a group of world-class scientists and endeavour to turn out a batch of influential breakthroughs middle and small enterprises cannot become the main body of innovations biological industry development of the “eleventh five-year plan” the development and reform commission the overall planning and deployment of biological industry. four out of nine companies involved in biomedical field to form a cluster and have local advantages strengthen the technical innovation ability construction, promote the achievements of transformation and the development of industrial agglomeration, advance cooperation with developed countries several policies to speed-up the development of the biological industry the state council biotech drugs should be developed for the treatment of common and serious diseases to accelerate realization of the aim of fostering biopharmaceutical industry into a strategic pillar in industry promote the cooperation and restructure between business- to-business, enterprises and academies, expand the scale of the enterprises decision about speeding up of cultivating and developing strategic emerging industries the state council from the aspects of the fiscal and taxation financial policies to speed up the cultivation and development of strategic emerging industries to take in a new round of economic and technology development commanding heights clearly fefine the position of antibody drugs and support the industry national basic medicine catalogue sfda drugs in the list of essential medicines are to meet the needs of basic medical and health care the dosage form is appropriate, the price is reasonable, and can guarantee the supply, the public can have equitable access to medicine to protect people’s health, to meet people's needs, and to make the country resources get the most reasonable use mabs gradually listed on the catalogue, expanded the market “twelfth – five” plan the state council discovery of new target, construction of humanized antibodies, development of therapeutic antibodies for major non-infectious diseases (malignancy, metabolic disease and autoimmune disease) to carry out the innovation- driven development strategy, get output of major landmark achievements emerging industries were supported and advanced rapidly; enterprises are guided to speed up r&d of “me-better” drugs the “twelfth – five plan” of biological industry development the state council emphasize r&d of new drugs for major diseases, speed up the process of therapeutic antibody innovation, give support to develop antibody production industrialization to get significant results in the field of antibody and reach world-class levels in a decade get special funds to support r&d, mabs for anti-tumour advanced rapidly note: “sfda” is the former name of the china food and drug administration. zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of successfully contributed to the emergence of a massive mab innovation system in china. discussion to distinguish the characteristics of the mab innovation system in china, a series of comparative discussions are presented herein. first, we compare the chinese mab innovation system with that of the united states, which is regarded as the leading mab innovation system in the world. second, we compare it with the mab innovation system in india, which is rapidly catching up in the glo- bal frontier. third, a comparison between mab and pharmaceuticals in china is conducted. with these com- parative analyses, a deeper understanding about how the mab innovation system in china was founded will be obtained. after these comparative discussions, implica- tions from this study will be presented to provide refer- ences for how to build innovation system to seize emerging technologies. comparison of mab development between the united states and china for mab industry development, the united states has significant advantages of conducting research and manu- facturing products [ ]. the mab production capacity of the united states is ranked as the first in the world, drawing on the production bases rooted from its trad- itional pharmaceutical industry. there is large produc- tion capacity gap between china and the united states. in the technological aspect, mab products in the united states belong to the “first-class technology” product class and are fully human. the united states has gathered the world’s top academic and research institutions. viewed from the technology resource perspective, the united states has conducted its independent r&d. patents can be transferred freely between different actors and converted with flexibility into commercialization [ ], which is what china still lags behind. furthermore, actors in the united states and their ac- tivities are playing crucial roles in the progress of mab industrialization; in some ways, even more than the state itself. with respect to the financial system, for in- stance, firstly, the combination of big pharma and ven- ture capital is a basic pattern for the biotechnological entrepreneurship model in the united states. secondly, there are several entrepreneur companies in the united states, who are growing fast as the leading power in mabs. thirdly, the mab companies from the united states have enough capabilities to compete in the global market and to hold their leading market position. fi- nally, the federal government’s policy, plus special plans or projects of the various states, make policies flexible for mab development and commercialization [ ]. in summary, functions of the mab innovation system in the united states work favourably to its knowledge development (f ) and research advancement guided by the ever-increasing high expectations (f ). the entrepre- neurial activity (f ) is outstanding in leading to more knowledge formation (f ) and lobbying (f ) for better conditions. clearly, the united states and china are moving in the same direction for technology develop- ment, but not enjoying the same status as competitors. comparison of mab development between india and china in terms of corporate behaviour, the mab actors in india cooperate more actively with other countries. for ex- ample, they have deep cooperation with the united states and cuba to absorb mature mab technologies. in terms of market positioning, india started by developing the overseas market and hit back to the domestic market with lower prices [ ]. in terms of the financial policy, the government is not inclined to support enterprises since most of the national funding is allocated to the sci- entific research institutions. the main financial re- sources for enterprises come from venture capital. scientific research institutions are still the main innov- ator of indian mab industry [ ]. as for the technical route, china and india’s clinical trials both started using mouse antibodies, then transiting to human. with regards to the development strategy, they both went from imitation to innovation [ ]. concerning the indus- trial composition, both mab industries are constituted mainly by middle- and small-sized enterprises and both countries are at the start-up stage. as for the develop- ment bottleneck, china and india are both restricted by technology and production capacity [ , ]. however, the question remains as to why india’s devel- opment in the mab industry is faster than that of china [ ]. the key lies in the loose policy of generic drug and figure overview of reinforcing cycles within an innovation system of mab in china. f , entrepreneurial activities; f , knowledge development; f , knowledge diffusion through networks; f , guidance of the search; f , market formation; f , resource mobilisation; f , advocacy coalition. zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of tight cooperation in the domestic and overseas endeav- ours. it also imitated the production–marketing model of pharmaceuticals. since the revision of india’s patent law in , india’ mabs have occupied a larger market share around the world, laying the foundation for its internationalization [ ]. india took advantage of the innovation ability of its leading companies to unite into one company [ ], and built a bio-valley around bom- bay bringing obvious advantages in market reaction [ ]. in summary, the virtuous cycle of mab innovation sys- tem in india starts with ‘entrepreneurial activities’ (f ). the actors tried to lobby the government to create legit- imacy (f ) and make resource mobilisation (f ) but the practical results are disappointing. then, they turned to improved behaviour (f ) to build up new overseas mar- kets (f ). india and china are on the same technical route, but with different technologies and market strat- egies [ ]. comparison between mabs and pharmaceuticals in china pharmaceuticals in china have been developed and mar- keted since the s. with regards to enterprise behav- iour, the production of pharmaceuticals accounts for a large market share and represents a large industrial clus- ter. further, there are various forms of cooperation on academic exchange and financial investments between these enterprises. with regards to market performance, while mabs have to be promoted exclusively through academic channels, the pharmaceuticals industry in china has an existing mature market network and can be promoted through a variety of channels. the experience of the chinese mab industry compared with that of pharmaceuticals is summarized in table . at the technological level, domestic mab products are diversified and developed as biosimilar to the foreign countries’ core technology, albeit with different targets. in contrast, pharmaceuticals can be manufactured com- pletely as generics. as a consequence of lack of innovation investment in the domestic pharmaceuticals industry, a large number of redundant constructions ap- peared. compared with other enterprises, the number of mab enterprises is very small, and are all small- and medium-sized businesses. their product lines and pro- motion strategies are undiversified, with less interaction with each other. among pharmaceutical enterprises, there are some big and prestigious companies with prod- uct diversification and diversified sales channels [ ]. the cooperation or merger between such enterprises oc- curs frequently. as a result, these two types of products have different performance profiles in the market. ac- cording to different technology levels, mab have high technical barriers to entry and need high regulatory standards. on the other hand, for pharmaceuticals, their low regulatory standards and low entry barriers are likely to lead to the disorder of market competition. in addition, the funding mechanisms for pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceutical drugs such as mabs are different in china [ ]. in general, compared with pharmaceuticals, functions of mabs start with entrepreneurial activities. therefore, improving products and manufacturer capability (f ) is the approach to lobbying for better economic condi- tions in order to make further technology development table comparison between mabs and pharmaceuticals in china mabs pharmaceuticals specificity high very low side effect big (early products) very big scope of indications wide range wide range potential of drug transformation large large year s s objective prevention and control of major diseases people’s basic life safety technology source transfer of key technology all generic cross-disciplines biology: proteomics, genetic engineering combining with biology, traditional chinese medicine level starting period mature period industry threshold high investment threshold, high barriers of entry low investment threshold, low barriers of entry actor scale individual leading enterprise most of enterprises in china actor academies enterprises market strategy academic promotion hospital, pharmacy bottleneck large scale production hard to r&d, price controls strict, over capacity zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of possible (f ) and maintain fairer competition in the domes- tic market. implications this study on the mab innovation system in china yields various management and policy implications. compared with the development of mabs in other countries, such as united states and india, their devel- opment in china is different. the virtuous circle of mab innovation system in china starts with government’s strong guidance for industrial direction, and then moves to entrepreneurship and technology development and diffusion, both of which are strongly supported by the government. such an innovation system experience has at least two important implications. first, the experiences of mab development in china imply that an innovation system could not be founded by a single actor. on the contrary, to establish an innovation system to seize the emerging technology, multiple types of actors need to be gathered and work collectively to ensure that an innovation system can be founded and managed in an efficient way. in the process, the government as a powerful actor, is always required to play the leading role at the earliest stage. however, to stimulate the internal dynamics of an innovation system, the government needs to transfer the leading role to entrepreneurial firms and research institutes in the next stages. this role-transferring process is very important for the maturity of an innovation system. second, the connection between innovation systems and research systems is crucial for the sustainable devel- opment of emerging technologies such as mabs. as shown in this study, having realized the challenges and uncertainties of mabs as a new emerging biopharma- ceutical technology, china has made great investment in establishing a research system in its universities and re- search institutes. while technology transfer from other countries such as cuba and the united states could pro- vide opportunities to catch up with the international mab frontiers in the short term, china is clearly con- scious of the impact of its research system on its innovation system. with political guidance on encour- aging and supporting linkages between firms and aca- demic organizations, the connection between the research system and the innovation system has never been so accentuated. conclusion this study finds that an innovation system for mab has been initially established in china to seize this emerging biotechnology opportunity. such an innovation system was stimulated by the strong policy commitment from the government at the beginning but was later strength- ened by entrepreneurial activities. mab innovators in china are capitalizing on opportunities to participate in the development of an innovative drug value chain while strengthening their capabilities to interconnect and com- pete with established companies of developed countries. in the long run, the build-up of the research system for mabs in china is expected to lead to more driving forces in the mab innovation system. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. authors’ contributions myz, hh and ytw designed the study. myz conducted data collection and analysis. myz, hh and jl drafted the manuscript. all the authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript. acknowledgement the authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the research fund of university of macau (myrg - -icms-qrcm; mrg /wyt/ / icms; cpg - -icms) and the macao science and technology development fund ( / /a). author details state key laboratory of quality research in chinese medicine, institute of chinese medical sciences, university of macau, room , building n , avenida da universidade, taipa, macao, china. faculty of arts and humanity, university of macau, macao, china. received: february accepted: october references . buss n, henderson s. monoclonal antibody therapeutics: history and future. curr opin pharmacol. ; : – . . chon jh, zarbis-papastoitsis g. advances in the production and downstream processing of antibodies. n biotechnol. ; : – . . köhler g, milstein c. continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined. nature. ; : – . . ober rj, radu cg, ghetie v, ward es. differences in promiscuity for antibody-fcrn interactions across species: implications for therapeutic antibodies. int immunol. ; : – . . hwang wyk, foote j. immunogenicity of engineered antibodies. methods. ; : – . . morrison sl, johnson mj, herzenberg la, oi vt. chimeric human antibody molecules: mouse antigen-binding domains with human 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inclusion in pubmed, cas, scopus and google scholar • research which is freely available for redistribution submit your manuscript at www.biomedcentral.com/submit zhang et al. health research policy and systems ( ) : page of http://www.euspri-madrid .org/pdf/ .pdf http://www.druid.dk/uploads/tx_picturedb/ds - .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /s 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	theoretical framework 	methods 	mab innovation systems in china 	stages of mab technology development in china 	mab firms in china 	research institutes and their networking with firms 	institutions 	functions of mab innovation system in china 	discussion 	comparison of mab development between the united states and china 	comparison of mab development between india and china 	comparison between mabs and pharmaceuticals in china 	implications 	conclusion 	competing interests 	authors’ contributions 	acknowledgement 	author details 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ 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title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ #metoo and the medical profession all editorial matter in cmaj represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the can adian medical association or its subsidiaries. e cmaj | august , | volume | issue © joule inc. or its licensors i n the era of #metoo, it is time for physicians to acknow­ledge that the medical profession is not immune to bully­ing, harassment and discrimination, and act to abolish these behaviours. harassment and discrimination of female medical staff and trainees are well documented. , so why, with the metoo movement, has there been no complaint against a prominent male physician? could the current cul­ ture of incivility and disrespect that is common in medicine be the reason? unprofessional behaviour in medicine affects not only women, but also goes beyond the individual to cultural and organizational issues that enable these inappropriate behav­ iours. organizational factors that lead to unprofessional behav­ iour in medicine include poor leadership, power imbalances and a culture of silence. implicit (or unconscious) biases within us all, stemming from dominant stereotypes linked to various groups, also play a role. a diverse and collegial work environment contributes to improved quality and innovation. in contrast, a work climate that enables bullying, harassment, discrimination and micro­ aggressions can negatively affect a person’s health and career pathway, as well as limit their ability to be productive and advance, or even remain, within medicine. moreover, unprofes­ sionalism in medicine affects patient care. medicine is a stressful career, and physician wellness is often neglected within the culture of medicine. the lines between health and professionalism can blur: unhealthy physicians find it difficult to be professional. although beyond the scope of this editorial, harassment can be a criminal offense and, as such, there must be zero tolerance and improved accountability. some canadian medical schools and health care organiza­ tions have begun to promote respect in the workplace. the involvement of deans and chairs in the areas of professionalism, equity, diversity, wellness and mentorship within several canad­ ian medical schools is a welcome first step. local and national awards related to professionalism and equity are also to be applauded. however, real change will require changes to current structures and procedures. a respectful workplace is one that is healthy, safe and sup­ portive, and values diversity and equity. interventions such as online and in­person education modules addressing respect in the workplace, which target the individual and attempt to address unprofessional behaviour, show promise. however, few studies have looked at interventions addressing organiza­ tional structures and procedures. despite this lack of evidence, steps should be taken to address organizational barriers to a respectful workplace. unconscious bias can contribute to power imbalance within the workplace and should be addressed in medicine. this should include training on unconscious bias for all medical leaders and for members of grant review, promotion and hiring committees. additionally, formal job descriptions, as well as standardized and objective hiring processes, are essential for all recruitment, includ­ ing medical leadership positions. job descriptions must avoid gender­specific terms, and broad searches should be undertaken to identify and encourage all eligible candidates to apply. evalua­ tion criteria for hiring and promotion should also be defined clearly and applied universally to avoid discrimination and inequi­ ties. simply said, basic human resource standards that exist in many industries must be applied in medicine. professionalism is a required competency for physicians and codes of conduct exist, including the canadian medical associa­ tion code of ethics. as a profession, we need to stop excusing unprofessional behaviour toward colleagues just because phys­ icians are accomplished in clinical care or academia. periodic review and promotion processes should have measures related to professionalism. in medicine, it is important to encourage healthy debate and the expression of dissenting opinion. however, silently observing unprofessional put­downs and verbal b ul l yi n g directed toward colleagues sends the message that this kind of behaviour is acceptable. rather, allies need to be empow­ ered to speak up. as such, medical workplaces need safe and transparent processes for reporting unprofessional behav­ iour and for investigations that are fair to all concerned, as well as adequate mechanisms to support those who experi­ ence bullying, harassment or discrimination. finally, strate­ g i e s t o a d d r e s s t h e u n p r o f e s s i o n a l b e h a v i o u r , i n c l u d i n g remediation and changes to the work environment, should be available. it is time that all canadian medical schools and health care institutions implement and evaluate initiatives aimed at achieving a culture of respect within medicine. the medical profession — and ultimately patient care — will improve for all when we treat each other with respect, regardless of gender, age, race or stage of career. editorial #metoo and the medical profession jayna m. holroyd­leduc md, sharon e. straus md msc n cite as: cmaj august ; :e ­ . doi: . /cmaj. ed ito r ia l cmaj | august , | volume | issue e references . fnais n, soobiah c, chen mh, et al. harassment and discrimination in medical training: a systematic review and meta­analysis. acad med ; : ­ . . sexual harassment of women: climate, culture, and consequences in academic sci- ences, engineering, and medicine. washington (dc): national academies press; . doi: . / . . pattani r, ginsburg s, mascarenhas johnson a, et al. organizational factors contrib­ uting to incivility at an academic medical center and systems­based solutions: a qualitative study. acad med june . [epub ahead of print]. doi: . / acm. . . wallace je, lemaire jb, ghali wa. physician wellness: a missing quality indica­ tor. lancet ; : ­ . . pattani r, marquez c, dinyarian c, et al. the perceived organizational impact of the gender gap across a canadian department of medicine and proposed strategies to combat it: a qualitative study. bmc med ; : . . tricco ac, rios p, zarin w, et al. prevention and management of unprofessional behaviour among adults in the workplace: a scoping review. plos one ; :e . . carnes m, devine p, manwell lb, et al. breaking the bias habit: a workshop to pro- mote gender equity. madison (wi): wiseli — university of wisconsin­madison; . competing interests: see www.cmaj.ca/site/misc/cmaj_staff. xhtml for jayna holroyd­leduc. no other competing interests were declared. affiliations: departments of medicine and community health sci­ ences (holroyd­leduc), university of calgary, calgary, alta.; department of medicine (straus), university of toronto; li ka shing knowledge institute of st. michael’s (straus), toronto, ont. correspondence to: jayna holroyd­leduc, jayna.holroyd­leduc@albertahealthservices.ca biron - birkbeck institutional research online hill, katherine ( ) memories from the margins? anniversaries, anabaptists and rethinking reformations. palgrave communications , p. . issn - . downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / usage guidelines: please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk comment memories from the margins? anniversaries, anabaptists and rethinking reformations kat hill abstract with the recent -year jubilee of the lutheran reformation, reformation anniversaries have become big business and the subject of much scholarly debate. this paper considers the question of anniversaries in relation to suppo- sedly marginal religious groups in the era of the reformation. what do they choose to commemorate? how did they fit into our accounts of religious change? and what does memory from the margins tells us? the paper argues that con- sidering memories and anniversaries amongst these communities allows us to reassess our categories of mainstream and marginal in relation to religious change in the early modern world and beyond, and to reconsider some of our narratives about the legacies of religious change. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - open birkbeck college, university of london, london, uk. correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to k.h. (email: katherine.hill@bbk.ac.uk) palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms () :,; mailto:katherine.hill@bbk.ac.uk www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms introduction was ‘luther year’, the -year anniversary of the posting of the ninety-five theses and the start of the reformation. ten years of preparation from the lutheran church and german authorities culminated in celebrations all over the world. from poetry slams to movies, panorama installations to conferences, heritage tours to a wave of publications, luther sparked intense intellectual and academic analysis about the meaning of religious change in early modern europe. (marshall, ; roth, , pp. – ). anniversaries and moments of memory activation invite us to consider what narratives are being shaped about the past and what narratives we as historians and scholars want to tell. remembrance inevitably sparks renewed debates about origins and outcomes, and we can learn much about a movement, nation or community at times of commemorative celebration. the first big -year reformation jubilee, that of luther’s birth, initiated a battle for ownership of his memory in a fractured germany in the dying days of the gdr (hoffmann, ; scott, ). from – , visitors might have experienced the nuanced differ- ences of nationally inflected exhibitions commemorating the anniversary of world war one in, for example, belgium, france, england, and germany. the -year anniversary of women’s right to vote and the suffragettes has struck chords with the contemporary #metoo movement. the luther anniversary was, it seemed to many, a chance to embrace a more ecumenical luther, though there have also been concerns about the way in which commemorations renewed a hero image of the reformer (evangelical church in germany, ; roth, ). but what if we did not focus on luther’s story? the years and will mark the anniversary of a different part of the reformation. these are the dates that the mennonite world conference (mwc) has picked to commemorate the origins of anabaptism. recalls the moment at which conrad grebel baptized george blaurock in zurich ‘to ignite a brand-new anabaptist movement which countered the movements of luther, zwingli and catholicism’. coincides with years since the appearance of the schleitheim articles, a statement of ana- baptism’s separation from the world, and the martyrs’ synod, a meeting which established a principle of mission. (it earned its name because many of its principle participants died soon after). the significance of these dates is clear, but any such immediate connection is sidestepped on the front page of the mwc’s website for the anniversary which focuses on the message of what has been titled ‘renewal ’. renewal was launched in the same year as the -year anniversary of the lutheran refor- mation and is presented as a chance for ecumenical discussion within and beyond the mennonite church, with ten years of events designed to invigorate anabaptist faith globally. these events are not likely to be on most people’s radar and will not spark the same rash of publishing as luther’s . nor are the events uncontroversial amongst mennonites some of whom question whether these anniversaries are an appropriate or rele- vant celebration of mennonite identity (goossen, b). for mennonite communities and mennonite scholars the question of anniversaries has stoked intense debate about the historical nar- ratives that surround these public rituals of commemoration. (roth, , pp. – ; osborne, ). considering the anni- versary celebrations and controversies of the lesser known part of the reformation story, however, is also a chance for reformation scholars to revisit some of our accounts of religious change and its legacies. what if we switched our perspective to those who were supposed to be on the edges of the story? what do the debates within the mennonite community reveal about these memories and anniversaries more broadly? what new questions or old problems might we consider by examining remembrance from the edges of the reformations? memory on the margins makes us reconsider the centre. the mennonite church, which is coordinating the -year anniversary, has its roots in anabaptism. this reforming move- ment of the sixteenth century rejected infant baptism along with many of the conventional structures of society, such as swearing oaths and serving in the military (stayer, ; goertz, ). anabaptism is not well integrated into reformation histories. histories of the radical or ‘left-wing’ of the reformation remain understudied and marginalized from the mainstream historio- graphical scholarship on the reformation, and despite a spate of histories produced in the s and s on early modern ana- baptism, anabaptist studies have not seen the same energy since. new waves of scholarship have started to redress this problem, recognizing the fundamentally problematic label of the ‘radical reformation’ and a group of new researchers are spearheading moves to bring anabaptist histories into the digital age with the open access website, anabaptist historians. scholarship in the last fifteen years has seen a handful of important monographs on anabaptist and mennonite histories (driedger, ; räisänen- schröder, ; monge, ; hill, ; goossen, a). but the scholarly imbalances and the division between mainstream and radical persist, especially for the pre-modern era. not everyone agrees that anabaptist studies are an endangered enclave (dipple, ; p. ). anabaptism does have a rich historiography, and there are mennonite presses and journals, notably the mennonite quarterly review and journal of menno- nite studies, which are energetic and stimulating fora. however, the specialist focus of this publishing can also reiterate the boundaries separating scholarship. research is often produced in confessional contexts, and though confessional history in itself is not inherently problematic, i would agree with academics who stress that there has been a return to confessionalised scholarship in reformation studies. the anniversary sharpened this in many cases, despite its claims to ecumenism, and has reinforced a sense of separatism. even sources may be divided. a special series exists for documents on the anabaptist reform movement (with the tactical name change from the pejorative ‘wiedertäufer’ to ‘täufer’ in the late s). so, while students of the european reformation may have a week on radical anabaptists in the sixteenth century, few courses touch on much beyond this or examine the longer-term traditions that evolved from non- conformist impulses. the distorting nature of this scholarship has broader impli- cations. it matters that anabaptists have been on the edges of historiography since it is partly a symptom and consequence of on one of the biggest, most problematic debates in reformation historiography: confessionalisation (brady, ). reformation scholars have for some time sought ways to write histories which go beyond the confessionalisation thesis which ties long-term narratives of religious change into accounts of state, discipline, and institutions. confessionalization neglects alternatives to the model of institutional faith, faiths often related to national identity and larger historical narratives of the rise of nationalism, and thus it omits a fundamental and long-lasting element of confessional change (lotz-heumann, ). moments of mem- ory and celebration, therefore, are a chance for academics to address these questions. anniversaries bring to the fore big debates about origins and futures, as well as the place of com- munities in the contemporary world, and so often implicate national and international institutions. though there are ques- tions about its success, a major emphasis of the luther commemoration, for example, was to attempt to move away from national and confessionalised narratives and embrace a more ecumenical vision for lutheranism’s future in the modern comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms world (lwf and pcpcu, ). the run of reformation anniversaries can stimulate conversations which re-invigorate scholarship. anabaptists memories there are over million anabaptists in the world, and the mwc -year celebrations for many are a remembrance of those things that characterize the collective memory of their commu- nities—an emphasis on the separation between church and state, a history of persecution and martyrdom, freedom of religion, liberty of conscience, and elective entry into the church. it is also seen as a chance to assess and reinvigorate mennonite identity in the contemporary world (roth, ). clearly memory matters to mennonites (and their close cousins the amish and hutterites). for numerous mennonites, there exists a deep sense of connec- tion to their early modern past, its martyrs and heroes. but whilst the / centenary will be a celebration coordinated by the mwc, the reality is of course that cultures of memory amongst anabaptist descendants go far beyond the official celebration and central structures. the attitudes which form the global backdrop to the planned commemorations are rooted not in national churches and state institutions, but family, communal and personal memories which have preserved the sense of the past and collective remembrance. mennonites, amish and hutterites all migrated great distances from the sixteenth century onwards. this was not always the result of persecution and exile, as a traditional anabaptist narrative might suggest, but anabaptists undeniably traveled far. communities moved from northern and central europe to russia and ukraine, migrated to the americas, or undertook confessional work in india, south east asia, and africa. as people move, memories travel with them. indeed, for mennonites, amish and hutterites, memory was a critical tool for bridging the gap between communities dispersed across wide areas and separated from society in a variety of ways. memory is central to diasporic identity (agnew, ; baronian, et al., , pp. – ). anabaptist memories existed in the records kept by their own churches, family possessions or per- sonal recollections which bound the community together. men- nonites in contemporary manitoba or kansas, for example, have objects, documents and shared narratives which trace cross- generational diasporic histories in europe, russia and beyond. we can only follow these histories and memories if we look beyond conventional institutional and geographical boundaries, since the very core of mennonite, hutterite and amish identity is in the communities of dispersion which stretched across regions. memory in these diasporic communities could not tell the same story as institutional churches. lutheran memories had an inclusive message in which looked to a global lutheran culture but also reasserted the dominance of wittenberg. calvi- nist memories are focused on geneva. anabaptist memories have been of a more disparate nature, though the mwc’s focus on and the swiss origins of the movement has caused con- troversy by centring anabaptist histories on one location deter- mined by a central committee. but why does it matter to think about this type of memory? is it not just one more anniversary, one more strand of the legacy of the reformation era? first, it reveals issues concerning con- temporary mennonite identity in relation to an early modern past and a diasporic identity. debates arose whether the date for a mennonite anniversary should be or , or indeed whether should have been the date for celebration. the result is ten years of renewal announced in , culminating in but with a celebration of in switzerland along the way. deeper unease amongst some members of the community has focused on the way in which any anniversary of this kind reinforces a monogenetic heritage which excludes the global church and diversity, and even alludes to a form of european ethnic purity (goossen, b). the monogenesis versus poly- genesis debate about anabaptist origins is long-standing but seems not to have died (stayer et al., ). an official celebration which gives one line of interpretation and reinforces one nor- mative view of anabaptist and mennonite heritage, rather than recognize all the alternatives and global perspectives, is proble- matic. it is possibly in dialogue with these concerns that africa is a suggested location for the th mennonite world conference assembly (roth, , p. ). some counterpoint views to the and dates also argue that the anabaptist church did not originate in the sixteenth century since it was a continuation and successor to the apostolic church of christ (roth, , pp. – ; goossen, b). this was the line taken by the two most famous anabaptist historical works, the seventeenth-century martyrs mirror and the hutterite great chronicle. such a view, however, can be equally proble- matic and elide the constant and shifting creative power of memory formation and the way in which recollections have been reinvented across the centuries. there are, too, always political questions at stake in commemorations (goossen, b). men- nonites, not the amish or hutterite, are driving the -year anniversary, but it is presented as celebration for all anabaptists. what does it tell us that this celebration matters most for the better integrated and politically active part of the anabaptist legacy, and that this is intertwined with institutional and con- fessional narratives? anniversaries after all always serve some purpose, and also coincides with the -year anniversary of the foundation of the mennonite central committee, so some would argue that this has more to do with institutional and political positioning than organic commemoration (goossen, b). we should remember that the official celebrations are only one part of memory; we have to look beyond to broader memory cultures, to individuals and local communities. memory is the aggregation of these narratives, as much as central cele- brations. the intense debate amongst different anabaptist tra- ditions is a stark reminder of the power and importance of diasporic memory, but also the need to recover alternatives to centralized commemorations. scholarship should consider how memory cultures themselves are created and recreated, why and when, and in what contexts. centenaries and anniversaries of origins, celebrated centrally, are a relatively modern phenomenon. marked the first major mennonite anniversary when the new mennonite world con- ference convened in basel and there do not seem to have been parallel events in or before. earlier celebrations and asso- ciated controversies existed. in various mennonite com- munities celebrated the death of menno simons and a call was issued in by august heinrich neufeld, pastor of the iber- sheim mennonite congregation in rhine-hesse, for ‘every men- nonite congregation in the old world and the new’ to plan for the date. the proposed celebrations sparked considerable con- troversy which revealed the fault lines in nineteenth-century mennonite society (roth, ; urry, ). thus, historians should be sensitive to the way in which memories are chosen, contested, and narrated, how they vary and shift, and how they exist at different levels. for specific communities, individuals, and families, it might be personal or local commemorations which held the most weight, and memory cultures had local inflections. mennonites in chortitza (zaporizhia oblast, ukraine) erected monuments in the late nineteenth century to figures of their past, to johann bartsch and jakob höppner, the men who had nego- tiated the details of the settlement for mennonite migration from prussia at the end of the eighteenth century (urry, ). research needs to understand the way in which memory has been palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - comment palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms constructed at local, regional and familial levels, as well as focusing on global and international commemorations. second, i would argue that by interrogating anabaptist memories as this anniversary approaches, we can uncover novel trajectories for the long-lasting legacies of the reformation throughout the world and in so doing address some of the fun- damental debates of the reformation era. it opens up new per- spectives on both our histories of non-conformist groups in the early modern world, and the implications for how religious change has shaped global culture. the debates over anniversaries have sharpened questions of the interaction between the refor- mation legacies of anabaptism and lutheranism (and other tra- ditions) and brought to the fore the continued global power of these anabaptists networks of memory. such trends undermine the sense of marginality and separateness that has shaped ana- baptist historiography, but also call into question broader reli- gious narratives which still seem to rest on notions of confessionalisation. the nature of the relationship between these different religious communities and the -year celebrations matters, and any student of the reformation needs to understand those labeled both marginal and mainstream. it is only from the margin though that we can rewrite the centre. until we question the narratives of the marginal, we will be forever locked into the modes of persecuted and persecutor. anniversaries do not always help in this reassessment since they have in some ways reasserted confessional narratives and nor- mative divisions. in , as preparations for were getting under way, the lutheran world fellowship offered an official apology to anabaptists for past persecutions. the divided mem- ory cultures sought rapprochement but also in many ways reit- erated division (roth, , – ). such an event reinforces normative mennonite self-definitions of the confession as a per- secuted minority without asking how this cultural narrative evolved, or what happened when communities or individuals chose not to follow this path. looking from the edges, we can see that anabaptists were not always a persecuted minority, they were not marginal to histories, and they did not always search for the peaceful, quiet way (urry, ). and looking from the centre, we have neglected the impor- tance of supposedly marginal groups in our long histories of the reformation. anabaptist descendants are a visible presence across much of america. nearly every north american, it seems, has a mennonite, hutterite or amish story. they have seen the buggies, been to the farms, or visited the churches. yet these communities still seem a curiosity. amish communities in pennsylvania, for example, are a tourist attraction more than a subject of scholarly discussion. amish, hutterites and more conservative mennonites of the old order tradition do not necessarily sit easily in our narratives of historical development and modernity. for those from outside the tradition, they seem an outdated relic of an older time, but their existence problematizes our notions of reforma- tion legacies. it becomes difficult to argue, for example, that the unintended effect of the reformation was secularization (gregory, ). in a series of six essays, gregory proposed that the protestant refor- mation questioned authority in ways which led to a multiplicity of competing claims to truth and this resulted ultimately in the privatization of faith, the power of the state over church, and secularization. but there are problems with this account. if we are to write narratives which escape the pitfalls of a return to con- fessionalisation but also appreciate reformation legacies on their own terms we have to be able to understand the dynamics of the communities of pennsylvanian amish or old order mennonites in belize. and we also have to be able to contain accounts of mennonites who are integrated into modern canada, hutterites who reject televisions and much modern media but embrace the best farming technologies, or amish communities who live separate lives but actively engage in a form of tourism which plays on their traditionalism. such solutions do not represent secular- ization necessarily but alternative models for recreating faith and adapting. for gregory, division has shattered a more universal sense of faith but for mennonites, for example, the broken body of the church can also be a symbol of the quest for faithfulness and of following the right path which diverts from the main- stream (roth, , p. ). splintering may have led to diversity, but it can also provide energy. furthermore, a sense of secular- izing decline can also be seen as a particularly western-centric narrative, and reformation legacies must be able to appreciate the explosion of christianity in the global south. mennonite memory brings into sharper focus other issues about reformation memory and the need to look beyond the official celebrations. focusing on luther in a way which reinforces the norms of the mainstream and the marginal absents a major and important part of the reformation legacies in eur- opean, eurasian and north american history, and beyond into africa, japan, india, and korea. deeply rooted identity and multifaceted memories have shaped anabaptist communities and cultures across the world: from prussia militarism to tsarist expansion, from the american west to the world wars, from south american colonies of mennonites to the power of contemporary protestant churches in the global south, even to questions of how mennonites should respond to trump. understanding the geo- graphical spread of anabaptist groups and the way in which their communities evolved across the diaspora opens up other archives, resources and memory cultures. new archives, new sources and new regions all offer promising concrete areas for research on reformation legacies. first, scholarship can look to understudied or neglected archives and records which provide alternative histories to accounts of confessional change. whilst mennonite archives in north america, for example, are an important resource for scholars of mennonite history and communities themselves, they remain little studied by reformation historians more generally. yet, there is a wealth of material in the church and family fonds which continues to come into these repositories. there are sur- prising finds in archives across europe and beyond, such as the histories of mennonite communities in regional polish archives or the church books of mennonites, quakers and other groups that have made their way into german state archives. a com- prehensive understanding of the complex archival traces would allow a much richer account of the long legacies of the reformation. second, we must think about the diverse way in which memory was enacted and histories recorded. this might be by paying closer attention to the way in archives themselves and their construction shape memory. the contents, materials and orga- nization of archives reflect power relations (stoler, ) and scholars have started to write the social history of archives (ketelaar, ). unpicking these archival histories, such as the reasons why mennonites have come to create their own archives, will in turn shed light on the history of confessional memory and memory making. furthermore, focusing on the transmission and function of memory could lead us to think about the very dif- ferent memory cultures amongst all those included amongst anabaptists. the memory practices of mennonites who have created extensive records differ from the old order amish who eschew formal archiving but rely on family and oral histories. the implications of different practices of recalling pasts and the power relations between different memory cultures is essential to the construction of more dynamic narratives of religious cultures. third, we might think about the way in which memory and confessional legacies were enacted across different media. comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms www.nature.com/palcomms discussions of reformation anniversaries have tended to focus on written narratives, documents and recorded history. but memory and connections to the past exist in other ways. how did objects function as embodiments of tangible connections with a past? how did the landscape and environment tell stories of connection? mennonites draw on memories of the great chortitza oak which grew in ukraine where mennonites settled in the late eighteenth century but whose acorns have traveled across the atlantic. considering material and environmental sources, as well as written documents will help us understand legacies in diachronic and global perspective or the ways in which communities negotiate their interaction with the contemporary world. finally, scholarship can think about memory, community and identity in areas which have not been part of more conventional narratives of reformation legacies. this means uncovering new trajectories for communities who are not part of the traditional accounts of survival, such as mennonite who migrated down to the black sea from russia and ukraine rather than crossing the atlantic. more broadly, it means focusing on global histories of mennonites and protestantism in general, particularly in the global south, exploring questions of community, race and place in a post-colonial era. these new avenues for research will help reveal religious communities which existed beyond institutional and national structures and the problematic way in which big anniversaries reinforce grand narratives. paying more attention to the local and the individual has the effect conversely of broadening memories across seas and generations. the contentious / cele- bration not only provokes questions about anabaptist history but demands we find more nuanced ways of thinking about memory, the ways it is embedded in language, landscape, and people, and the traces it leaves. conclusions i would like to finish with one example of this power of memory at the level of the individual and the family which also touches on the way in which it expands our global and cross-period histories of religious change. in the mennonite archives in bethel college in north newton, kansas there are boxes which contain family papers donated to the archive for safe-keeping. papers inside have not been categorized into type and are often an eclectic mix of items preserved and curated by the family over generations. opening these folders, i was given a snapshot into the way in which histories, church, and communities are built on individual and family memories but also the importance of placing these in the context of globally connected communities. these collections are not the usual stuff of institutional or national memory. however, precisely because they are personal and have been kept by groups and families on the move, they embody the connected communities of dispersion which are at the core of mennonite identity. one folder has a tiny notebook, meticulously translating and transcribing the daily record kept by their forebears who traveled from russia, russian passports, a handwritten book of early nineteenth century remedies for colic and much spider bites. the jacob f. and marie banman fond contains beautiful eighteenth century fraktur examples, modern hand-written genealogies and family record and copy books. like their owners, these objects had migrated across land and sea, and the juxtaposition of documents which record lives lived across centuries and borders encapsulates the connections, memories and emotions that sustained mennonite communities. these collections of memories go far beyond the -year anniversary and remind us of the power of the local and the glocal (the term coined to express the interplay between the global and the local) in communities bound together by remembrance (freist, , p. ). whether or not mennonites celebrate the -year centenary in or , their debates reveal the global and diachronic power of anabaptist memories, and these memoryscapes offer not only ways of thinking about mennonite identity but broader memory cultures of early modernity and reformation history. memories of the reformations and their global legacies must be understood in cross-confessional contexts. scholarship can use these comparative histories of memories and legacies as a way out of the debates of marginal versus mainstream and con- fessionalisation to consider questions of global protestantisms, long term legacies, and concepts of diaspora and exile. anniver- saries always offer us a chance to rethink histories. in analyzing the various reformation anniversaries, it is not a question of ‘memory wars’—whose anniversary we should be celebrating, whose reformation was better, or which had more positive or long-lasting effects. rather scholars can take the opportunity of these discussions over commemorations to diversify our concepts of the reformation and its legacies. received: january accepted: july notes for information on the variety of celebrations see the official luther website. https://www.luther .de/en/ /reformation-anniversary/. german plans to spend relatively little on centenary events compared to the uk and france were criticized. see https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ / germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary. an example of a more subtle and low-key exhibition was that at the neues museum weimar, ‘krieg der geister: weimar als symbolort deutscher kultur vor und nach ’. http://mennoworld.org/ / / /the-world-together/anabaptisms- th- anniversary-is- -not- /. see also https://themennonite.org/daily-news/how-to- celebrate- -years/. https://mwc-cmm.org/renewal . https://anabaptisthistorians.org/. this is the series quellen zur geschichte der täufer. see for example the joint statement by the lutheran world federation and the vatican. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/ / / / a.html. a booklet was produced to recognize this by the lwf and the pontifical council for promoting christian unity, from conflict to communion: lutheran-catholic common commemoration of the reformation in ( ). the latest triennial census conducted by the mwc counted , , members as of november . this includes various groups such as the mennonites, the amish, and hutterites. this was the first known anabaptist confession written by michael sattler. references agnew v ( ) diaspora, memory and identity: a search for home. university of toronto press, toronto baronian m-a, besser s, jansen y ( ) diaspora and memory: figures of dis- placement in contemporary literature, arts and politics. rodopi, amsterdam and new york brady jr. ta ( ) confessionalizaiton—the career of a concept. in: headley jm, hillerband hj (eds) confessionalization in europe, – : essays in honor and memory of bodo nischan. ashgate, aldershot dipple g ( ) the radical reformation will not be televised. sixt century journal ( ): – driedger md ( ) obedient heretics: mennonite identities in lutheran hamburg and altona in the confessional age. ashgate, aldershot evangelical church in germany (ekd) perspectives : writings on the reformation ( ). evangelische kirche in deutschland, hanover freist d ( ) lost in time and space? glocal memoryscapes in the early modern world. in: kuijpers e, pollmann j, müller j, van der steen j (eds) memory before modernity: practices of memory in early modern europe. brill, leiden, p. – goossen b ( a) chosen nation: mennonites and germany in a global era. princeton university press, princeton goossen b ( b) why years?: a critique of anabaptism’s upcoming anni- versary celebration. mennonite life palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - comment palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms https://www.luther .de/en/ /reformation-anniversary/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /germany-plans-first-world-war-centenary http://mennoworld.org/ / / /the-world-together/anabaptisms- th-anniversary-is- -not- / http://mennoworld.org/ / / 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mennonites. additional information competing interests: the author declares no competing interests. reprints and permission information is available online at http://www.nature.com/ reprints publisher’s note: springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /. © the author(s) comment palgrave communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - palgrave communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - | www.nature.com/palcomms http://www.nature.com/reprints http://www.nature.com/reprints http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / www.nature.com/palcomms 	memories from the margins? anniversaries, anabaptists and rethinking reformations 	introduction 	anabaptists memories 	conclusions 	references 	references 	acknowledgements 	competing interests 	acknowledgements research open access translatability scoring in drug development: eight case studies alexandra wendler and martin wehling* abstract translational medicine describes the transfer of basic in vitro and in vivo data into human applications. in the light of low rates of market approvals for new medical entities, better strategies to predict the risk of drug development should be used to increase output and reduce costs. recently, a scoring system to assess the translatability of early drug projects has been proposed. here eight drugs from different therapeutic areas have been subjected to a retrospective test-run in this system fictively located at the phase ii-iii transition. the scores gained here underline the importance of biomarker quality which is pivotal to decrease the risk of the project in all cases. this is particularly evident for gefitinib. the egfr mutation status is a breakthrough biomarker to predict therapeutic success which made this compound clinically acceptable, and this is plausibly reflected by a considerable increase of the translatability score. for psychiatric and alzheimer’s drugs, and for a cetp-inhibitor, the lack of suitable biomarkers and animal models is reflected by a low translatability score, well correlating with the excessive translational risk in these areas. these case studies document the apparent utility of the scoring system, at least under retrospective conditions, as the scores correlate with the outcomes at the level of market approval. prospective validation is still missing, but these case studies are encouraging. keywords: dabigatran, ipilimumab, gefitinib, vilazodone, latrepirdine, semagacestat, translatability score, transla- tional medicine, drug development introduction translational medicine is an important component of drug development and describes the conditions and pre- requisites for the transfer of in vitro and in vivo findings into human applications [ ], and should ultimately facil- itate the development of new drugs. it is hoped that the “empty pipeline syndrome” (lack of innovation in drug industry, exceptions granted, e.g. oncology) could be treated by this (and other) means and the sequelae of the “patent cliff” (an estimated loss of billion usd per year in turnover of big pharma companies by patent expiration within - years) attenuated. in the process of drug development several check- points can be used to evaluate the probable translational success of a drug project. in a proposal for the scoring of the translatability of an early drug project was presented [ ]. the score assesses the availability and quality of in vitro and in vivo results, clinical data, bio- markers, and personalized medicine aspects. the weights given to these different aspects reflect the parti- cular importance in the translational process. the scores for the individual items are chosen between and and multiplied by the weight factors (/ ). any sum score above is indicative of fair to good translatability and low risk. the predictive value of biomarkers is assessed using a special biomarker score which is described in ref. [ ]. the biomarker score is included in the translat- ability score and comprises the evaluation of biomarkers in animal and human data, their proximity to the dis- ease, accessibility and test validity parameters such as sensitivity and specificity. the use of an additional score for biomarkers besides the overall translatability score allows a more detailed analysis of the different facets of biomarker development, including in vitro data, animal models, human data, reproducibility etc. especially con- cerning the particular biomarker while the overall trans- latability score analyses the whole developmental process and includes further aspects as model * correspondence: martin.wehling@medma.uni-heidelberg.de institute of experimental and clinical pharmacology and toxicology clinical pharmacology mannheim, faculty of medicine mannheim, ruprecht-karls- university of heidelberg, maybachstr. , d- mannheim, germany wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / © wendler and wehling; licensee biomed central ltd. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. mailto:martin.wehling@medma.uni-heidelberg.de http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . compounds and personalized medicine. the importance of biomarkers in drug development is reflected by the high weight of this point in the overall translatability score, and the related biomarker scoring process is an important part thereof. thus, this single most important partial aspect of translatability scoring deserves a struc- tured approach by itself. in this work, the two scores were applied to eight drugs either already approved for the market or failed during the developmental process. published data were retrieved by entering the name of the drug into medline, biosis and current contents. all hits were screened for data applicable to the biomarker and translatability scores, and literature used for the assessment cited in the elaborate tables and . each drug was fictively assessed after completion of phase ii trials (publication date of references used or first public announcement of study results prior to the start of phase iii as far as known) to answer the question: at which risk would this compound be taken to phase iii? as an exception, gefi- tinib, a drug now approved for the treatment of lung cancer, was also analysed after the demonstration that an activating egfr mutation is important for the clini- cal response which was published shortly after phase iii studies had begun. though chosen for this relatively late stage in develop- ment, the scores should be applied much earlier in pre- clinical and help to prioritize at this early stage already [ ]. however, for better comparability we fictively chose the phase ii/iii transition; case studies at much earlier stages would have to be done separately. it is obvious that not all relevant data are present in the public domain; this limitation of the present study has to be acknowledged. drugs from different therapeutic areas (anticoagula- tion, cancer, cns-related diseases, and cardiovascular disease) have been evaluated. it is obvious that oncology projects, due to valuable biomarkers, show a much lower translational risk than candidates in the cns field in which reliable, powerful biomarkers (and animal models) are largely missing. case studies dabigatran dabigatran (marketed as pradaxa® by boehringer ingel- heim) was approved in the eu for the prevention of deep vein thrombosis after hip or knee operations in . it is an orally applicable direct thrombin inhibitor [ , ]. in the present case study the development of dabigatran for the prevention of strokes in patients with table biomarker scoring for six drugs according to [ ] points to evaluate dabigatran ipilimumab gefitinib gefitinib* vilazodone latrepirdine semagacestat [ ] [ ] [ , ] [ - ] [ ] - [ , ] [ ] [ ] [ , , ] [ , , , ] [ ] - [ , ] [ , ] [ ] [ ] [ ] - [ , ] [ , ] [ ] [ ] [ , , ] - [ ] [ ] [ , ] [ , ] [ , ] - [ ] [ , ] [ ] [ , ] [ - , , ] [ , ] - [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ , ] - [ ] [ ] [ ] - [ , ] [ ] [ ] - [ ] [ , ] [ ] [ ] [ ] - sum *after the development of the pivotal biomarker (egfr mutation status) the leading biomarkers evaluated were: aptt for dabigatran, immune related response criteria for ipilimumab, effects on tumor growth for gefitinib, tumor growth and mutation status of egfr for gefitinib, hamilton rating scale for depression- for vilazodone, none for latrepirdine, and effects on amyloid plaques for semagacestat. points to evaluate: . are animal or in vitro data available? . how many species have been tested positively? . are the animal models enough to reflect human disease? . is there corresponding clinical data? . are human data available? . human data classification ( x) . does the biomarker represent a pivotal disease constituent? . what is the statistical predictability? . what is the accuracy or reproducibility of the assay? . how accessible is the specimen? wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / page of table assessment of translatability for eight drugs according to [ ]. compound dabigatran ipilimumab gefitinib gefitinib* vilazodone latrepirdine semegacestat torcetrapib [ ] varenicline [ ] aspect starting evidence in vitro data including animal genetics . [ ] . [ ] . [ , , , ] . [ , , , ] . [ ] . [ - ] . [ ] . . in vivo data including animal genetics . [ ] . [ , ] . [ , , ] . [ , , ] . [ , , ] . [ , ] . [ , ] . . animal disease models . [ ] . [ , ] . [ ] . [ ] . [ , , , ] . [ ] . [ ] . . data from multiple species . [ ] . [ ] . [ ] . [ ] . [ , ] . [ ] . [ ] . . human evidence genetics . . . . [ - , , ] . . . [ - ] . . model compounds . [ ] . [ ] . [ ] . [ ] . [ - ] . [ , , , ] . . clinical trials . [ , ] . [ - ] . [ , , - ] . [ , , , , - ] . [ , ] . [ , , ] . [ , , ] . . biomarkers for efficacy and safety prediction biomarker grading . [ , ] . [ ] . [ , ] . [ , , , ] . [ , ] [ ] . . biomarker development . . [ ] . [ , ] . [ - , , ] . [ , ] [ ] . . proof-of-mechanism, proof-of-principle and proof of concept testing biomarker strategy . [ , ] . [ ] . [ , ] . [ - , , ] . [ , ] [ ] . . surrogate or endpoint strategy . . [ ] . [ , ] . [ - , , ] . [ , ] [ ] . . personalized medicine aspects disease sub-classification and responder concentration . . . . [ - , , ] . . . . . pharmacogenetics . . . . [ - , , ] . . . . . sum . . . . . . ( ) . ( ) . . data for torcetrapib and varenicline are taken from [ ]. *after the development of the pivotal biomarker (egfr mutation status) w en d ler an d w eh lin g jo u rn a l o f tra n sla tio n a l m ed icin e , : h ttp ://w w w .tran slatio n al-m ed icin e.co m /co n ten t/ / / p ag e o f atrial fibrillation (af) was analysed. the unmet clinical need for stroke prevention in patients with af is high, as the established long-term treatment by vitamin-k- antagonists (vka, warfarin, phenprocoumon) is rela- tively unsafe and difficult to handle. vka require con- tinuous monitoring of the coagulation status of the patient, while dabigatran can be used without routine monitoring at a fixed dose supporting patient compli- ance. another therapeutic option is acetylsalicylic acid, which is not very effective [ ]. direct thrombin inhibi- tion in anticoagulation has already been validated and is the target of the parenteral anticoagulants hirudin and bivalirudin [ ]. no good animal model of atrial fibrillation exists in general [ , ], but as dabigatran has been proven to prevent venous thromboembolism, several biomarkers for the monitoring of coagulation could be used for its development in the new indication. activated partial thromboplastin time (aptt) has been used as a biomar- ker of dabigatran effects in several species [ ] and clini- cal trials [ , ]. consequently, aptt was assessed in the biomarker scoring here (table ). the correlation of aptt with thrombosis and bleeding in a population with af had not been clearly established at the time of the studies; this is reflected in the biomarker score, especially in items and (low scores of and ). nevertheless, anticoagulation is successful in preventing stroke in af [ ] and aptt received a total score of indicating a biomarker of high value for translational risk prediction (table ). the petro study was the first phase ii trial which was conducted to analyse the effect of dabigatran in af [ ]. in the petro-ex study the optimal therapeutic dose of dabigatran was found to be mg twice daily or mg once daily. the phase iii rely study [ ] verified the results of the phase ii trials and was the basis for the decision of the fda to approve dabigatran for the stroke prevention in patients with af in september . the development of dabigatran for af was done at rela- tively low risk as several features of dabigatran like safety and the effect on coagulation had already been investi- gated in earlier studies [ , ]. this is reflected by high translatability scores for the items model compounds, clin- ical trials, biomarker grading and surrogates in table . this case study represents the development of a new ther- apeutic indication of an already approved drug, which is of much lower risk than the development of a new drug for a new application. this lower risk is clearly indicated by the overall translatability score, which is . (table ) and therefore indicates mean to fair translatability. ipilimumab ipilimumab, marketed as yervoy® by bristol-myers squibb, is the first therapeutic agent which increases survival time in patients with metastatic malignant mel- anoma, the leading cause of death from skin disease [ ]. previous phase iii studies failed to show a survival benefit [ - ]. two therapeutic compounds already approved by the fda for the treatment of stage iv mel- anoma, an old chemotherapeutic drug (dacarbazine) and high dose therapy with the immune stimulant interleu- kin- failed as well [ ]. additionally, high dose inter- leukin- therapy has many adverse effects, so that excellent cardiovascular and pulmonary functions are required for its safe use [ , , ]. therefore, the unmet clinical need is high for the treatment of metastatic malignant melanoma. ipilimumab is a fully human monoclonal antibody (igg) blocking ctla- (cytotoxic t-lymphocyte anti- gen ) to promote antitumor immunity. it acts as a negative regulator of t-cell activation [ ]. in vivo stu- dies showed that blocking ctla- /b interactions in murine models induced rejection of different transplan- table tumors, like colon cancer, prostate cancer, lym- phoma and renal cancer [ ]. in vivo administration of anti-ctla- antibodies to mice results in rejection of tumors, including pre-established tumors. further, immunity against a secondary exposure to the tumor was detected [ ]. engagement of ctla- on the sur- face of activated t-cells by co-stimulatory molecules inhibits il- and ifng production upon t-cell receptor engagement. blockade of this negative signalling with ctla antibodies may result in further activation of acti- vated t-cells and consequently lead to antitumor activ- ity [ ]. phase i and ii trials showed that ipilimumab is effective in patients with melanoma [ , - ]. in a phase ii trial, “immune related response criteria” (irrc) for the evaluation of immune-based cancer thera- pies were studied [ ]. these criteria were newly defined in a series of workshops on immunotherapeutic agents in cancer patients. this was inevitable as the criteria normally used for the evaluation of anticancer therapeu- tics, the who criteria and recist (response evalua- tion criteria in solid tumors), are not suitable for the evaluation of immune-based therapies [ ]. the clinical effect of ipilimumab not acting on the tumor itself is delayed and tumor growth may continue during the first weeks of treatment. therefore, the patients seem to show progressive disease which would be typically defined as drug failure by the who criteria and recist. the newly defined criteria include total tumor burden, which is calculated by summation of the pro- duct of the perpendicular diameters of measurable index lesions, time point assessments, and overall response. further, new lesions are taken into account [ ]. evalua- tion of the irrc using the biomarker score results in the classification as a medium-high-value marker (score: ) (table ). wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / page of immune-response related adverse events frequently occur in patients treated with ipilimumab, which were found in all trials [ , - ]. diarrhea and colitis as gas- trointestinal adverse effects, hypophysitis as endocrine dysfunction, ocular toxicities, and pancreatitis are the main adverse effects. despite the high risk of adverse effects the drug was approved by the fda in march . in the overall translatability scoring ipilimumab reaches a score of . , which indicates a mean to fair translatability (table ). the high scores for the newly developed biomarker (reflected in biomarker grading and development), for the surrogates, the promising results in the clinical trials and the high score for model compounds are the main contributors to this relatively high score. gefitinib gefitinib (iressa®) was approved for treatment of non small lung cell cancer after failure of docetaxel- or plati- num-based chemotherapy [ ] by the fda in under the auspices of the accelerated approval program. this program gives patients with serious or life-threa- tening diseases earlier access to promising new drugs. gefitinib is a selective reversible inhibitor of the egfr (epidermal growth factor receptor) tyrosine kinase domain and inhibits the anti-apoptotic ras signal trans- duction cascade [ ]. the drug leads to an increased survival time in some patients with non small cell lung cancer [ , ]. the unmet clinical need was high as patients diagnosed with lung cancer expose a bad prog- nosis: - year survival rate is just %. several studies showed that the drug only works in patients with activating mutations in the egfr [ , , ]. - % of the patients in western countries show these mutations. % of the patients carrying the mutation respond to treatment, but only % of the patients without this mutation. the responsible muta- tions include deletions in exon ( %), duplication and insertion in exon ( %) or point mutations in exon ( %). analysis of gene copy numbers of the egfr has not consistently shown that this mutation is also involved in a larger response to gefitinib in the treatment of non small lung cell cancer after failure of docetaxel–or platinum-based chemotherapy [ , , ]. the dependence of the efficacy of gefitinib on the muta- tion status was detected by in vivo and in vitro studies [ ] after the start of phase iii trials. consequently, the failure of the first phase iii trials (intact i [ ] and ii [ ]) was due to a comparatively low rate of patients with egfr mutations. in the isel trial [ ] also no increase of overall survival time was detected, but a sub- study revealed that neversmokers had an increased sur- vival time ( . vs . months). this effect was even greater in patients of asian origin ( . vs . months). asian populations have much higher rates of egfr acti- vating mutations. in response, the fda revoked the accelerated approval of in , and limited the indication to patients who were already on the drug and had benefited from it. in the interest trial [ ] the impact of activating egfr mutations was clinically shown by a significantly higher response rate ( . vs . %). accordingly, the ipass study [ ] on asian patients demonstrated a higher response rate for gefiti- nib versus standard therapy and patients without the mutation did not respond to gefitinib. the emea approved gefitinib for the treatment of non small cell lung cancer for patients carrying an activating egfr mutation in . in the evaluation of these studies the inclusion of the egfr mutation status into the biomarker panel improved the overall translatability score from . to . (table ). this increase reflects higher individual scores for biomarker grading, biomarker development, strategy, clinical trials and personalized medicine items. the biomarker score alone would predict a high trans- latability also for the use of tumor growth as this is a widely used biomarker. only the translatability score considers the importance of the mutation. this case clearly shows that the use of both scoring systems is important to more accurately predict success of the par- ticular project. as already mentioned, gefitinib is an example of a drug in which personalized medicine aspects play a pivotal role for the responder rates. instead of being a blockbuster with an indication for all lung cancer patients, gefitinib is only effective in - % of the patients in western countries. the company decided to push the compound before personalized medicine issues had been solved which were likely to exist. therefore, the blockbuster-type approach was doomed to fail. the case of gefitinib is a good example for the trend to use more genetic biomarkers to aid per- sonalization instead of the development of block buster drugs in the field of oncology (and elsewhere). addition- ally, the development of companion diagnostics is an important field of drug development, underlining the importance of biomarkers again, especially in oncology. therefore the item for personalized medicine in this field is of great importance and may eventually be weighted higher in oncology. vilazodone vilazodone ( -( -[ -( -cyano- -indolyl)-butyl]- -pipera- zinyl)-benzofuran- carboxamide hydrochloride) was approved by the fda in january for the treatment of major depressive disorder and is marketed as vii- bryd® by clinical data inc. despite the availability of approved drugs for the treatment of major depressive disorder, many patients do not adequately respond to wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / page of these therapies and therefore new, more effective drugs are needed. recent experiments have shown that the administration of ht a ( -hydroxytryptamine) antago- nists augments the effects of ssris on extracellular - ht [ , ]. vilazodone is a selective serotonin reup- take inhibitor (ssri) (ic = . nm) and a -ht a receptor partial agonist (ic = . nm; ia = ~ - %) [ , ]. for a number of reasons, the development of drugs acting at the cns carries a greater translational risk than, for instance, the development of drugs against malignancies. these reasons include that i) the animal models used to analyse the effect of drugs in psychiatric disease (shock probe test, predator stress model, forced swimming test, ultrasonic vocalisa- tion model in rodents) are not very effective to predict drug efficacy in patients, ii) biomarkers used in patients with major depressive disorder (hamilton rating scale for depression, mon- tgomery-asberg depression rating scale, clinical global impressions improvement, hamilton anxiety rate scales) are weak and can only be used in patients, but not in animals. thus, these biomarkers are not potent to predict risk at early stages of drug development. further, their statis- tical predictability and reproducibility are not high [ ]. in consequence, the translational score for cns drugs is low in most cases and such projects remain at high risk. vilazodone was evaluated in five phase ii randomized, placebo-controlled studies in patients with major depressive disorder by merck and glaxosmithkline. three of the trials used active comparators and all employed the hamilton rating scale for depression- (ham-d ) [ ] as primary outcome [ ]. therefore this scale was also used in the biomarker scoring in this work (score: , table ). the three studies that had an active control failed to show superiority and the remain- ing two studies were negative (http://www.accessdata. fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/ / orig - s crossr.pdf). despite these negative results clinical data inc. obtained an exclusive license and showed sta- tistically significant efficacy against placebo in a phase iii trial [ ]. further biomarkers to predict therapeutic efficacy were developed (key genes in the -ht path- way) (reviewed in [ ]). however, the biomarkers failed to show an association with the response to vilazodone in a second phase iii trial. the biomarker have not been published yet; they are not used to identify responders as it has been shown that vilazodone is beneficial to a broader group of patients than defined by the use of these biomarkers [ ]. despite the failure of the phase ii trials and the weak biomarker profile of this project the drug was finally approved after the two successful phase iii studies. vilazodone belongs to the widely used class of ssris and therefore shows the characteristics of the develop- ment of a “me too” compound, which is reflected by the high score for model compounds in the overall translat- ability score. the new feature of a -ht a receptor par- tial agonist increases the translatability of this project since it was already shown that combining pindolol, a mixed ht a/ß-adrenergic receptor partial agonist, with ssris enhances the increase of extracellular levels of -ht in preclinical studies [ ] and produces a more rapid onset of antidepressive effects [ , ]. further, compared to other ssris on the market, vilazodone shows less impairment of sexual function [ ]. despite the characteristics of a me-too compound, the score for overall translatability of vilazodone indicates a poor to intermediate translatability and, thus, comparably high risk (score: . , table ) due to the lack of powerful bio- markers in this field. this example shows that even me- too compounds may have a high translatability risk if powerful biomarkers are missing. despite this low score, the compound was finally approved against all odds and shows that even low score projects may eventually be successful. the item on model compounds in the trans- latability score was ranked high; this fact may be taken as a starting point for the improvement of the scoring tool in that the weighing of model compounds should be even higher than in the present algorithm. latrepirdine latrepirdine ( , , , -tetrahydro- , -dimethyl- -[ -( - methyl -pyridinyl)ethyl]- h-pyrido[ , -b] indole, pro- vided as the dihydrochloride salt) was formerly used as antihistaminic drug and marketed as dimebon® [ ], but was removed from the market due to the develop- ment of more selective drugs in the field. recently it was evaluated as a drug against alzheimer’s disease (ad). the unmet clinical need is high for new drugs against ad as no efficient causal treatment exists so far [ ]. the major problem in the development of drugs against ad seems to be the lack of knowledge about the exact pathogenetic mechanisms resulting in ad. latrepirdine was shown to act as a cholinesterase and nmda inhibitor, the two mechanisms of action of existing symptomatic ad drugs [ , , ]. newer stu- dies have demonstrated that its primary action in ad relates to the stabilization of mitochondrial function. evidence from in vitro studies suggests that latrepirdine might protect against amyloid-b(aß)-mediated toxicity in primary neuron cultures and improve mitochondrial function in cultured cells [ - ]. however, it is unclear whether latrepirdine can exert a disease-modifying activ- ity in vivo and improve ad neuropathology and/or clini- cal symptoms in animal models of ad. in contrast to many other ad drugs in the pipeline, latrepirdine’s wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / page of http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/ / orig s crossr.pdf http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/ / orig s crossr.pdf http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/ / orig s crossr.pdf action is not based on the reduction of amyloid plaques. the importance of plaque formation in ad is contro- versially discussed, and the opinion that the overproduc- tion and accumulation of ab in the brain are key pathogenic events in ad progression is increasingly questioned [ ]. concerning the disease modifying activity of latrepirdine no data are available from the dif- ferent clinical trials as only the -item adas-cog was used as primary outcome. the -item adas-cog is only available at the human level and risk assessment at early stages is hampered by the lack of appropriate ani- mal biomarkers and animal models. in the clinical trials no biomarker for the disease modifying action has been used. therefore, biomarker grading and strategy repre- sent knock-out criteria in the overall translatability scor- ing (tables and ) supporting a no-go decision at an early stage of development. this example supports the view that biomarkers are the single most important parameter for go/no-go decision at the transition from preclinical to clinical and early clinical to late phase where the weight is more on clinical and safety biomar- kers and the overall strategy for their use. as latrepirdine had been available as antihistaminic drug several years ago, its safety profile seemed to be established. phase i [ ] and ii [ ] trials were encoura- ging as latrepirdine improved the clinical course of the patients. surprisingly, in the subsequent phase iii trial the drug failed to show a significant effect compared to placebo [ ]. the failure of this drug was likely (translatability score . , or if knock-out is accepted) as the pathogenetic mechanisms are not understood for ad and no power- ful biomarkers exist. using the scores during the devel- opmental process of the drug might have prevented the expenditures for its late clinical development. the pri- mary development of a biomarker to assess the disease progression and its therapeutic modification would be important, but requires knowledge about ad pathogen- esis and the way of action of latrepirdine in ad. semagacestat semagacestat is a gamma-secretase inhibitor and inhibits the final step in aß-protein synthesis as putative target for ad treatment. therefore, unlike latrepirdine the mode of action is known for semagacestat. the mole- cule rapidly reduces ab concentrations in the brain, cer- ebrospinal fluid (csf), and plasma of transgenic v f human amyloid precursor protein mice (pdapp mice) [ ] and in the plasma of humans [ ]. in the develop- ment of semagacestat amyloid plaques have been used as biomarker like in many other ad studies. until now, all other studies based on this biomarker failed support- ing the assumption that measuring the formation of pla- ques is insufficient to predict therapeutic success. the importance of plaque formation in ad is controversially discussed, and the opinion that the overproduction and accumulation of ab in the brain are key pathogenic events in ad progression is increasingly questioned [ ]. accordingly, plaques can be reduced by semaga- cestat, but the symptoms are not improved in treated ad patients. the plaques might be useful to identify patients with ad [ ] (disease indicator), but they are no valuable tool to predict treatment success (disease factors). additionally, imaging methods to detect the plaques are quite expensive [ ]. therefore the scoring for plaques as biomarkers contains knock-out features for corresponding clinical data and human data classifi- cation and is rated at in the overall translatability score (tables and ). additionally, skin cancer was observed as a severe adverse effect of the treatment with semagacestat; cognitive function even worsened in the phase iii trial. semagestat is another example of a failed drug devel- opment in the ad field, with a high risk translatability score of . (or if the knock-out criterion is accepted). the major implication of the assessment of these two potential ad drugs is the fact that the etiology of ad is not yet understood and aß targeted therapies are likely to attack an epiphenomenon. this gap of knowledge is mainly reflected by the lack of a biomarker placed more proximal in ad etiology. further studies are needed to analyse the pathogenesis of the disease and to develop suitable biomarkers. the coalition against major diseases (camd) has released a database on , ad patients who have parti- cipated in industry-sponsored failed clinical trials. publishing of negative trial results is important to pre- vent further trials from failing and is an important achievement in the development of drugs against ad. two further drugs (torcetrapib and varenicline) have been scored for translatability in a recent publication [ ]; the related scoring items are cited here for com- parison and the widening of the spectrum of therapeutic areas. torcetrapib torcetrapib was developed to treat hypercholesteria and prevent cardiovascular disease. it inhibits cholesteryl ester transfer protein (cetp) resulting in increased con- centrations of hdl-cholesterol (’good cholesterol’). cetp inhibitors increased hdl-levels in various animal models and early human trials, and could even prevent diet-induced atherosclerosis in nzw rabbits, albeit not in other animal models. the development of torcetapib was based on the hypothesis that an intervention leading to increased levels of hdl-cholesterol should be benefi- cial for the patients. it is now known that the use of wendler and wehling journal of translational medicine , : http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/ / / page of hdl as a biomarker was too positive and other biomar- kers like intima-media thickness should have been used to predict efficacy to prevent cardiovascular disease. the test-run of the scoring proposal at a fictive knowledge status prior to the illustrate results produces a sum score of . (table ), clearly indicating a high-risk translational project [ ]. varenicline varenicline is a novel drug to aid smoking cessation and was developed by pfizer. the drug partially agonizes the nicotinic receptor and, thus, reduces craving for smoking. as receptors are occupied, a new cigarette respectively the nicotine contained is ineffective ("antagonized”). the translational evidence was based on isolated receptor subtypes cloned from animals and humans and on valid animal models for nicotine dependence and nicotine side effects (e.g. hypothermia). these are absent in limited ceiling effects of partial agonists. biomarkers at the animal level (behavioural measures) and compar- ably simple clinical studies on smoking habits and psy- chometric scales for craving and satisfaction had been established and validated at the time of varenicline translation. this included the use of model compounds (especially bupropion). the fictive translatability score prior to the pivotal phase iii trials was . , indicating a high likelihood of translational success [ ]. conclusions and outlook the overall translatability score awaits validation. the present work demonstrates that the scoring process see- mingly produces plausible results retrospectively which is encouraging. the scoring system clearly shows that the early development and use of powerful biomarkers considerably decreases the risk in drug development. in general, stronger biomarkers exist to develop drugs against malignant than cns diseases. all limitations of retrospective analyses apply to the case studies, and biases in the scoring of the individual items reflecting the final drug approval status cannot be excluded. careful referencing and, thus, transparency of decisions are important in this process. the results and their open traceability together with plausible results should encourage industry and–perhaps–even public funding agencies to plan and finance a prospective vali- dation study. unfortunately, this study would probably take a decade to produce valuable results as drug devel- opment cycles require that much time. nevertheless, the system already now appears as a valuable tool to calcu- late the risk of a current drug development project. further, the scores provide guidance to identify weak- nesses and opportunities in drug development and, thus, may lead to strategy adjustments, with the pre-emptive development of biomarkers as a prominent example. the score carries all features of likelihood determina- tions, and a low translatability score does not preclude success (as for vilazodone), and a high score does not guarantee it either. it should not be seen as a static model, but needs to be developed and adapted to differ- ent therapeutic areas; for example, the item on persona- lized medicine should be weighed higher in oncology than cardiovascular medicine. as mentioned above, the weight for model compounds should be reconsidered and–depending on the therapeutic area–probably increased. therefore, as a future task scoring parameters and weights should be adjusted according to the compound class and the targeted system pathways. due to the high diversity of drugs developments in different diseases, the score must be flexible and dynamic to be applicable to most situations. the validation and adaptation of the score might be best placed in a pre-competitive environ- ment such as a consortium of researchers from big pharmaceutical companies. though the individual items and weight factors might be debatable, the major impact of the scoring process as such should be seen in the establishment of a structured profiling and transparent, vigorously scientific, objective reasoning as opposed to an irreproducible, subjective and unstructured “gut-feeling” decision taking. the metric values seem less important than the structuring potential of this approach. as a second important aspect discussed in detail in [ ] the scoring at the early phase identifies weaknesses of a given project at an early stage and, thereby, may strate- gically help to define the need of particular clinical stu- dies for sufficient proof, may indicate the need for the development of companion diagnostics or rigorous patient stratification. these strategies would then aim at improving weak scores at the first instance, but ulti- mately more important, help to reduce risks. this will be part of the evaluation of costs, risks and roi to make go/no-go decisions in a qualified way. in conclusion, eight retrospective case studies of trans- latability scoring produced scores which are in line with success or failure as project outcome, underlining the plausibility and utility of the approach. the score should be developed, adapted and prospectively validated. competing interests aw has nothing to declare. mw was employed by astrazeneca r&d, mölndal, as director of discovery medicine (= translational medicine) from - , while on sabbatical leave from his professorship at the 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract 	abstract 	introduction 	case studies 	dabigatran 	ipilimumab 	gefitinib 	vilazodone 	latrepirdine 	semagacestat 	torcetrapib 	varenicline 	conclusions and outlook 	competing interests 	references acmqueue | november-december distributed systems it started with errors. almost immediately a flood of user reports swamped the service’s community slack channel. a user posted “getting s?” at : a.m., and within minutes other users responded with the yes and metoo emojis. also at : a.m., in an ops channel, an incident had been opened by an on-call engineer, and the site reliability engineers responsible for the service had been paged out. by : a.m. five responders were checking logs and dashboards. at : a.m.—less than two minutes after an initial tentative question indicated there may be an issue—the first notification was pushed out to users. this was aimed at slowing the influx of user reports from the , -plus user community. in less than seven minutes, eight hypotheses about controlling coordination costs when multiple, distributed perspectives are essential laura m.d. maguire of text only managing the hidden costs of coordination acmqueue | november-december distributed systems the nature of the problems had been proposed by the responders. in that same period, five of those had been investigated and discarded. within the first minutes of the incident, the responders had been directly in touch with the , users in their community channel, opened tickets with three dependent services’ support teams, and coordinated among a response squad of . d iverse players are engaged when it systems run at speed and scale. this becomes immediately apparent when the service is disrupted. those whose work depends on the system functioning, both directly and indirectly, are compelled to get involved either to help with resolution or to seek more information so they can adjust their goals and priorities to account for the degraded (or absent) service. often, because of the business-critical nature of the service or four nines service-level agreements, a service outage triggers an all-hands-on-deck page for multiple responders. this core group represents a small fraction of the roles involved, however. even with a brief look at an incident response, it becomes apparent that performance in resolving service outages in these systems is about rapid, smooth coordination of these multiple, diverse players, as expressed in figure . joint activity distributed among this collective takes place across scripted and unscripted efforts such as recognizing the disruption, taking actions that safeguard the system from further decline, diagnosing the source(s) of the problems, determining potential solutions, cross- of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems checking a fix before the code gets pushed, as well as a whole suite of after-action activities. even in relatively smaller scale systems, the incident response can become less about diagnosis and repair of service outages and more about managing the needed capabilities of multiple responders, the potential benefits that could be realized by having more participants available to assist, and the needs of the stakeholder groups. this coordination incurs additional demands. for example, for their skills and experience to be useful to the current flow of events, incoming responders need to be briefed and understand the tasks they’ve been delegated relative to the sequencing of activity. doing this requires a of incident commander dependent services vendors vendors responders users other useful resources management client supportregulators figure : resolving service outages acmqueue | november-december distributed systems substantial amount of effort—particularly as the severity of the outage or number of responders increases or the uncertainty grows. in the high-consequence world of managing service delivery for critical digital infrastructure, the time pressure to diagnose and repair an outage is enormous. while resources may be readily available, it can be extraordinarily challenging to use them as the tempo of the incident escalates and the efforts to stop a cascade of failures occupy all the attention of the response team. herein lies the crux of the issue: the collaborative interplay and synchronization of roles is critical, , , but prior research has shown poor coordination design incurs cognitive costs for practitioners, specifically, the additional mental effort and load required to participate in joint activities. , this can be particularly exacerbated in the digital services domain where it plays out across geographically distributed groups. using examples from critical digital services, this article explores the nature of coordination costs and how software engineers experience them during a service outage. these findings provide new directions for design to control costs of coordination in incident response. hidden costs of coordination the choreography needed for smooth operation is effortful, particularly when the system is under stress. but these efforts are difficult to discern and typically not separated from expected “professional practice” within a field. this choreography arises as “an escalating anomaly can outstrip the resources of a single responder quickly. of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems there is much to do and significant pressure to act quickly and decisively. “to marshal resources and deploy them effectively requires a collection of skills that are related to but different from those associated with direct problem solving. but to be effective, these resources must be directed, tracked, and redirected. these activities are themselves demanding.” that this collection of skills goes largely unnoticed is not surprising. the fluency with which expert practitioners manage these coordination demands minimizes the visibility of the efforts involved. it is only when the coordination breaks down that it comes to the forefront. difficulties in synchronizing activities, disruptions to the smooth flow of task sequences, or conversation explicitly aimed at trying to organize multiple parties are examples of evidence that coordination breakdowns have occurred. it is worth separating out the choreography needed for coordination from the costs that those activities incur. an example of this occurs when recruiting new resources to an incident response – just one function in joint activity. the associated overhead costs include: monitoring current capacity relative to changing demands identifying the skills required identifying who is available determining how to contact them contacting them waiting for a response adapting current work to accommodate new engagement (waiting, slowly completing tasks to aid coordination) of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems preparing for engagement – anticipating needs – developing a ‘critsit’ or status update – giving access/permissions to tools and coordination channels – generating shared artifacts (dashboards, screenshots) dealing with access issues (inability to join web conferences or trouble establishing audio) these overheads seem relatively benign—they are implicit features of any joint activity. and that is precisely the point: they can be a minimal burden in normal operations and therefore disregarded as worthy of support in explicit design. in high-tempo, time-pressured, and cognitively demanding scenarios, however, these burdens increase to the point of overloading already burdened responders. think of a loss of engine power during the first few minutes of flight or an unexpected event during a spacewalk—seconds count here and any additional friction in cognitive work matters. now think of the speed at which critical digital services operate—microseconds count and the hidden coordination costs can matter in previously unconsidered ways. the cognitive costs of coordination matter in incident-response processes. now let’s consider how poor coordination design impacts engineering teams responsible for system reliability. the need for coordination design highly technical system operation is increasingly non- collocated. demands for near-perfect reliability and the burnout this can generate for on-call engineers has given of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems rise to different models of / systems management to distribute calls across time zones. even when a team may be geographically collocated, outages happen in off- hours or when members of the team may be traveling, in meetings, or otherwise unavailable for face-to-face interactions. this means incident response should be designed to accommodate entirely remote joint activity. the need for good coordination design transcends the software community: increasingly, other industries that were not typically geographically dispersed in the past are taking advantage of technological capabilities to distribute their workforces to optimize cost or available talent (providing just-in-time expertise). current coordination design focuses on the structure of handling support, including triage methods whereby runbooks or troubleshooting algorithms are used by less experienced support engineers before escalating to experts or through geographically dispersed support networks that “follow the sun.” these formats can decrease the need to wake up expert resources when the system goes down, but these configurations do not eliminate the need for coordination design. the requirements are shifted in ways that can escalate situations, compounding the coordination demands of the event as other stakeholders get engaged. let’s follow this through with an example. when anomalies generate the need to page the on-call staff, these direct responders begin gathering. simultaneously, other stakeholders with an interest in the problem are also drawn in. users may begin flooding support channels and ticketing systems trying to determine if the service is of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems degraded or if their system is wonky, or dependent services may experience problems and begin asking for information. this coordination “noise” makes it challenging to determine if these are all the same problems, related, or unrelated. with diagnostic and safeguarding activities commanding substantial attention, additional resources are then needed to triage this influx of reports and sort through the incoming data to minimize data overload. as the incident progresses and the concern over impact grows, escalations to management bring in even more participants as senior executives begin pressing for more details or demanding the service be restored. customer support roles facing urgent requests from clients will seek information to pass along. despite the substantial number of parties involved, systems are rarely designed with explicit attention to the coordination requirements. when they are, typically it is to: ( ) centralize response coordination through an incident commander; ( ) design an overly prescriptive process management perspective that fails to account for the hidden cognitive work of coordination; or ( ) depend on tooling that fails to fully support the dynamic, nonlinear manner in which incident response happens. these methods do not necessarily support the cognitive work of coordination the way they are intended. attempts at supporting coordination some would argue that coordination design is fundamental for developing and deploying technology in distributed systems such as cdi (critical digital infrastructure). but process-driven coordination design—emphasizing of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems distributed tasks instead of joint activity—will not address the needs described earlier. one example of process- driven industry best practice surrounding coordination during service outages—borrowed from disaster and emergency response domains—is an ics (incident command system). central to this model is assigning an ic (incident commander) and ensuring disciplined adherence to the shared ics across the roles and groups involved. let’s look at how these two tenets can actually limit resilient incident-response practices. attempt : assigning an incident commander the intent of the ic role is to manage the coordination requirements of the involved parties by directing the activities of others and holding the responsibility for taking timely decisions. under certain conditions (in low- tempo scenarios with few involved parties or reasonably known and predictable event outcomes, for example) this may be an appropriate configuration. in these contexts (or these phases of an incident), the cognitive and coordinative demands are manageable without design for coordination. , , routine events can be handled without undue stress. escalations that move a situation to nonroutine or exceptional, however, dramatically increase the cognitive activities needed to cope and generally do not follow a predictable course. as demands grow, an incident- command structure tends to become a workload and activity bottleneck that slows response relative to the tempo of cascading problems. working both in and on the incident forces attention to be divided across the of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems “inherent” roles of the position. for example, the ic needs to be tracking the details of the incident to be prepared to anticipate and adapt to rapidly changing conditions, but too much effort spent on forming an accurate assessment of the situation takes away from managing the coordination across roles. in reverse, trying to centrally manage who does what when tends to fall behind the pace of events and challenges, making the trouble harder to resolve and the joint activity harder to synchronize. this is not an inconsequential point. being an effective choreographer of the joint activity demands current, accurate knowledge and the ability to redirect attention to the orchestration of the players coming in and out of the event alongside their changing needs. in addition, what is seen as the ic maintaining organizational discipline during a response can actually be undermining the sources of resilient practice that help incident responders cope with poorly matched coordination strategies and the cognitive demands of the incident. attempt : enforcing operational discipline to follow the ics previous studies in software have shown different strategies for coping with workload demands such as dropping tasks (known as shedding load), deferring work to later, or reducing the quality of the work performed. other attempts to balance the workload sink with the value of the coordination call for adding more resources, but this comes with costs as well. in poorly designed systems, resources needed to help handle the demands are unable to be brought into play smoothly without disrupting the of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems work under way to control the adverse effects of the event. herein lies a paradox: you have resources available but are unable to make them useful. concurrently, their attempts to become useful are counterproductive—new responders coming into an audio bridge or chatops channel need to ask for a briefing, and the updating disrupts the flow of activity. this can drive the formation of side channels among select responders where diagnostic work can take place uninterrupted. creating this peripheral space is necessary to accomplish cognitively demanding work but leaves the other participants disconnected from the progress going on in the side channel. unless you have been “on the fireline” of an event of this sort, it can be easy to minimize the tension inherent in these situations. it’s worth restating: the systems studied in coordination research are often life-critical or otherwise high-consequence. despite the importance of coordination, timely actions must be taken to cope with anomalies as they threaten to produce failures. when high costs of coordination could undermine the ability to keep pace with the evolving demands of the anomalous situation, people responsible for the outcomes will, of necessity, adapt. incident response in critical digital infrastructure systems is not exempt. in fact, the speed and scale at which cdi operates, coupled with the challenges of a distributed team connected through technology, make the domain particularly susceptible to interference from excessive costs of coordination. in observations of critical events and post-mortems, adaptations to create subgroups in different channels that of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems are separate from the “official” incident response occur repeatedly. often, postmortems misinterpret these forms of adaptation to high costs of coordination. retrospective discussions portray these adaptations as contrary to the ics protocols and therefore lead to efforts to block people from forming these channels. the behavior is actually an adaptive strategy to cope as coordination becomes too expensive. rather than forcing responders to bear significant attentional and workload costs, it is advisable to facilitate shifting various lines of work to subgroups while supporting connecting the progress or difficulties into the larger flow of the response. the emergency services community has begun to recognize the limitations of the ics, as have other domains where command and control or hierarchical methods are giving way to more flexible teaming structures. , when practices such as ics are adopted across domains, it is important to pay close attention to the critiques and findings from other large-scale, multi-agent coordination contexts. in doing so, it is possible to limit the unintended adverse impacts when real-world demands of one setting challenge the practices imported from another. these findings about how people in an incident response adapt when high costs of coordination threaten the critical cognitive work are an important source of design seeds to guide innovations. attempt : using technology to facilitate coordination the term computer-supported cooperative work (cscw) was coined by irene greif and paul cashman in the early s to describe the emerging field of computers of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems mediating the coordination of activity across people and roles. since then, advances in technological capabilities, the omnipresence of the computer in the workplace, and the proliferation of automated processes have solidified the importance of cscw, while rendering it redundant since almost all forms of joint activity have become computer-mediated. still, this field has three main themes that are of particular interest in cdi: the use of collaboration software platforms; the coordination of joint activity between humans and bots; and the nature of reciprocity in human-automation teaming. collaboration software platforms not surprisingly, because of the changing needs of the work environment and the technical capabilities of the workforce, software engineering has driven innovation and the development of tooling and practices for collaborative work. online software platforms take traditional offline activities such as project management planning, issue tracking, group discussion, and negotiation of shared work and enable real-time collaboration of participants across a distributed network. the platforms have shifted from expensive, proprietary forms of file sharing to broadly accessible, cloud-based tools that can be quickly adopted across both formal and ad hoc groupings. lowering the barrier to collaboration in this way eases the coordination costs of transient, single- issue demands and of early exploratory efforts. this means collaborative work can be facilitated more rapidly with less overhead. flexible coordination structures also provide of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems the ability to adapt their use to the problem demands. the resilience demonstrated in the earlier example of forming side channels to manage high costs of coordination was facilitated by the ease with which direct messages could be sent or new channels could be spun up. supporting rapid reconfiguration into smaller, ad hoc teams enables smooth transitions as activity is distributed across continuously changing groups of participants. this collection of attributes—adapting to changing problem demands, dynamic reconfiguration of resources, and smooth coordination—is critically important in high-consequence work and a prominent feature of groups that are skilled at distributed joint activity in many domains. designing technology that can aid these capabilities is a means to control the costs of coordination. while many of these platforms optimize coordination costs on one criterion (rapid reconfiguration), chatops platforms exact penalties in coordinating with the tools themselves. for example, while the practice of chatops allows traceability that could support bringing new responders up to speed, the packed message-list format of the tooling is poorly designed to do so. responders coming into an event that is under way must scroll through the list of text, searching for the relevant lines of inquiry still in consideration, key decision points, and other important contextual information to gain a current understanding of the situation. these seemingly trivial aspects of design matter greatly. think back to the tension inherent in high-tempo operations when seconds matter and expert resources are in high of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems demand. those who are likely to be drawn in to join in the response efforts on a service outage frequently possess specialized skills that are often scarce. as such, they may not be brought into the event until later stages, at which time the tempo or propagation of failure drives a need for taking urgent action. poor design renders chatops nearly useless as a tool for sensemaking as people come into an evolving and increasingly pressured situation. coordinating joint activity across humans and machines the last subsection shifted the framing of controlling the costs of coordination. initially, cost of coordination referred to the additional efforts to accommodate the tasks and interactions inherent in joint activity. in human- human coordination the costs of the interaction are borne by both parties, and “investments” may be made by relaxing individual or short-term goals in the service of accommodating shared or longer-term goals. working jointly distributes the costs across the participants. the preceding subsection introduced an important distinction: interacting with tools and automation skews the costs. there are many coordination costs in human-machine teaming that go unnoticed or are exacerbated by tool design. for example, the initial expenditure of effort to set up tooling designed to aid in various functions of anomaly response such as monitoring or alerting can be substantial. engineers responsible for assembling their own stacks spend considerable effort in: assessing the appropriateness of a tool for a given purpose; evaluating of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems it relative to their team’s needs; considering the technical capabilities needed to understand how it functions; learning how it works; maintaining an accurate mental model as new features are added; determining appropriate configurations; performing maintenance to ensure that old configurations are removed or updated as demands change; tolerating the lack of context sensitivity that can result in unnecessary alerting; providing access and permissions to the users on the team; constructing security measures to prevent inadvertent changes; and making changes and adjustments as new tools are integrated. (the list could continue.) these are all examples of how coordinating with machines have costs for their human counterparts. if the tool were a human colleague, the amount of effort you would need to expend to ensure it remained a relevant team member might give you pause; however, this fundamental asymmetry that unduly burdens the human team members with additional costs to compensate for the limitations of automation is characteristic of current-day human-machine teams. , a key (and often overlooked) aspect of the dynamics of teamwork across human-human and human-machine networks is the degree to which the participants in the joint activity consider the goals, workload, and needs of others and adapt their actions accordingly. recognizing the dynamics of reciprocity choreographing technologically mediated joint activity can enable greater opportunities for reciprocity when the technology is designed to combat excessive costs of coordination. for example, studies of nasa’s space- of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems shuttle mission control during critical events reveals many patterns of effective joint activity. of particular interest, many people join in beyond those who are titularly responsible. the technology that mediates communication in the control room and backrooms facilitates bringing people up to speed as they join in from being off duty, with low burdens on the people currently handling the anomalies. the additional personnel provide diverse perspectives, especially as each flight controller increasingly focuses on his or her scope of responsibility as the anomalous situation unfolds. the ability to “look in and listen in” has been widely documented as a benefit to smooth coordination. , it’s not difficult to see the parallel between mission control and cdi in the rapid escalation in the number of stakeholders (other responders, users, customer support, management) during a service outage. technologies that enable this and other abilities for joint activity in a fully distributed network without adding extra burdens provide a means for people whose skill, experience, and knowledge could be useful to the event but who have not been explicitly drawn in can ready themselves to assist should the need arise. being current on the event progression, yet untethered to specific responsibilities, offers an opportunity for reframing through fresh perspectives (grayson, this issue). in outlining these three attempts at supporting coordination, it’s clear that technology both affords lower- cost coordination by supporting adaptive capacity and exacerbates high-cost coordination through asymmetrical burdens on the human side. in cdi environments, where of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems technology can be rapidly developed and deployed, designs can easily add unintended costs for joint activity unless the tools are explicitly designed to support coordination. conclusion coordination remains an integral part of large-scale, distributed work systems, but the lack of coordination design for joint activity continues to add hidden cognitive costs for practitioners. these efforts and load are related to the additional work of enabling smooth synchronization across multiparty groupings as the cognitive work of anomaly response is completed in high-tempo, evolving incident scenarios. recall the opening case, in which the escalating incident brought in multiple, diverse, and distributed perspectives, each with a vested interest in the event progression. each participant was necessary to managing the outage both directly and indirectly, and the chatops forum enabled their participation. closer examination across a number of cases, however, reveals a paradox: the platforms themselves both facilitate and hinder coordination. the easy formation of side channels enables engineers to adapt through flexible reconfiguration outside of the main response efforts, but bringing new responders up to speed is made difficult by the structure of a packed message-list design. some of the common tactics thought to control the costs of coordination include adopting incident command structures, specifically the ic role. using collaborative software platforms and adopting technologies to aid in coordination have been shown in actual cases to of acmqueue | november-december distributed systems reveal limits and unrecognized implications for cognitive work. nevertheless, all of these areas provide opportunities to choreograph smoothly in high- tempo, multi-agent events, especially by supporting the ability to adapt when the costs of coordination climb too high. some initial considerations to control cognitive costs for incident responders include: ( ) assessing coordination strategies relative to the cognitive demands of the incident; ( ) recognizing when adaptations represent a tension between multiple competing demands (coordination and cognitive work) and seeking to understand them better rather than unilaterally eliminating them; ( ) widening the lens to study the joint cognition system (integration of human-machine capabilities) as the unit of analysis; and ( ) viewing joint activity as an opportunity for enabling reciprocity across inter- and intra-organizational boundaries. controlling the costs of coordination will continue to be an important issue as systems scale, speeds increase, and the complexity rises in the problems faced during anomalies that disrupt reliable service delivery. related articles the calculus of service availability you’re only as available as the sum of your dependencies. ben treynor, mike dahlin, vivek rau, betsy beyer https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id= collaboration in system administration for sysadmins, solving problems usually involves collaborating with others. how can we make it more effective? eben m. haber, eser kandogan, paul maglio https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id= distributed development lessons learned michael turnlund why repeat the mistakes of the past if you don’t have to? https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id= of https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id= acmqueue | november-december distributed systems references . allspaw, j. . trade-offs under pressure: heuristics and observations of teams resolving internet service outages. m.s. thesis, lund university; https://lup.lub. lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/ . . grayson, m. r. . approaching overload: diagnosis and response to anomalies in complex and automated production software systems. m.s. thesis, the ohio state university; https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ pg_ ?::no: :p _etd_subid: . . grudin, j. . computer-supported cooperative work: history and focus. computer ( ), - ; https:// www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/ uploads/ / /ieeecomputer .pdf. . jensen, j., waugh jr., w. l. . the united states’ experience with the incident command system: what we think we know and what we need to know more about. journal of contingencies and crisis management ( ), - ; ( ), - ; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ pdf/ . / - . ?casa_token=s oo heh k aaaaa:gfi yz lwclky tehbf s vw by siefxqjc xst dmq xwz_fzbqhcaemkednvsigdiiky p fc. . klein, g. . the strengths and limitations of teams for detecting problems. cognition, technology & work ( ), - ; https://link.springer.com/content/ pdf/ . % fs - - - .pdf. . klein, g., feltovich, p. j., bradshaw, j. m., woods, d. d. . common ground and coordination in joint activity. in organizational simulation, ed. w. rouse and k. boff, - . new york: wiley; 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(eds.). . the collaborative public manager: new ideas for the twenty-first century. georgetown university press; https://muse.jhu.edu/ book/ . . patterson, e. s., watts-perotti, j., woods, d. d. . voice loops as coordination aids in space shuttle mission control. computer supported cooperative work (cscw) ( ), - ; https://www.semanticscholar. org/paper/voice-loops-as-coordination-aids-in-space- shuttle-patterson-watts-perotti/ cbe fe e be b of https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber= https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber= https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id= https://www.researchgate.net/profile/laura_maguire https://www.researchgate.net/profile/laura_maguire file:///c:\users\matt\downloads\cognition,% technology% & file:///c:\users\matt\downloads\cognition,% technology% & https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://muse.jhu.edu/book/ 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https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/voice-loops-as-coordination-aids-in-space-shuttle-patterson-watts-perotti/ cbe fe e be b acc cef b ae acmqueue | november-december distributed systems acc cef b ae. . patterson, e. s., woods, d. d. . shift changes, updates, and the on-call architecture in space shuttle mission control. computer supported cooperative work (cscw) ( - ), - ; https://link.springer.com/ article/ . /a: . . potter, s. s., woods, d.d. . event-driven timeline displays: beyond message lists in human-intelligent system interaction. in proceedings of the ieee international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/ document/ . . watts-perotti, j., woods, d. d. . cooperative advocacy: an approach for integrating diverse perspectives in anomaly response. computer supported cooperative work (cscw) ( - ), - ; https://link. springer.com/article/ . /s - - - . . woods, d.d. . cognitive demands and activities in dynamic fault management: abduction and disturbance management. in human factors of alarm design, ed. n. stanton. london: taylor & francis, - . . woods, d.d. . essentials of resilience, revisited. in handbook on resilience of socio-technical systems, eds. m. ruth and s. g. reisemann. edward elgar publishing, - ; https://www.researchgate.net/ profile/david_woods /publication/ _ _ essentials_of_resilience_revisited/ links/ c e ba fdccd b f e/ -essentials-of- resilience-revisited.pdf. . woods, d. d., ed. . stella report from the snafucatchers workshop on coping with complexity. of https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/voice-loops-as-coordination-aids-in-space-shuttle-patterson-watts-perotti/ cbe fe e be b acc cef b ae https://link.springer.com/article/ . /a: https://link.springer.com/article/ . /a: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/david_woods /publication/ _event_driven_timeline_displays_beyond_message_lists_in_human-intelligent_system_interaction/links/ b a ef 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_event_driven_timeline_displays_beyond_message_lists_in_human-intelligent_system_interaction/links/ b a ef /event-driven-timeline-displays-beyond-message-lists-in-human-intelligent-system-interaction.pdf https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/ https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/david_woods /publication/ _ _essentials_of_resilience_revisited/links/ c e ba fdccd b f e/ -essentials-of-resilience-revisited.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/david_woods /publication/ _ _essentials_of_resilience_revisited/links/ c e ba fdccd b f e/ -essentials-of-resilience-revisited.pdf 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-essentials-of-resilience-revisited.pdf acmqueue | november-december distributed systems snafu catchers consortium; http://stella.report/. . woods, d.d., hollnagel, e. . joint cognitive systems: patterns in cognitive systems engineering. boca raton, fl: crc press (taylor & francis). . woods, d. d., patterson, e. s. . how unexpected events produce an escalation of cognitive and coordinative demands. in stress, workload, and fatigue, eds p.a. hancock and p.a. desmond. mahwah, nj: l. erlbaum; http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/ laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf. laura m.d. maguire studies human performance in high risk/ high consequence work as a researcher at the cognitive systems engineering lab at the ohio state university. her research interests lie in resilience engineering, coordination, and enabling adaptive capacity across distributed work teams and forms of systems regulation and control. she has been a researcher with the snafu catchers consortium since and works closely with large- and medium-sized digital service companies on incident response practices, tool development, design, and contextual research. laura has a master’s degree in human factors & systems safety and is currently completing her ph.d. in cognitive systems engineering at osu. she draws from experience working in forestry, oil & gas, investment banking, and industry associations in her research. as a backcountry skier and alpine climber, she also is interested in and has written on cognitive work & resilient performance in mountain environments. copyright © held by owner/author. publication rights licensed to acm. of contents http://stella.report/ http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/laws/laws_mediapaper/ _ _escalation.pdf linguistics chancery english empowering women against violence brooke garceau* keywords: mental health, feminism, narrative, scribes, history of english, middle ages, justice, sexual violence, english language, chancery curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation vol. , issue , the benefits of chancery english extend beyond linguistics and into social justice and healing for victims of sexual violence. chancery english resulted in clearer, more concise prose which allowed the stories of victims to be recorded effectively. scribes recorded these stories in court petitions seeking punishment for rapists and murderers. existing research shows that the use of narrative helps victims to heal from sexual violence. the main texts for the current analysis are chancery- style court petitions of three women all named isabelle. the analysis demonstrates how these petitions and the women they concern (or their surviving loved ones) benefited from chancery prose and were, therefore, able to bring about a greater degree of healing and justice in the human fight against sexual violence. while chancery english resulted in various benefits to the english language as a whole, this paper will primarily discuss its impact on prose. seth lerer, author of inventing english: a portable history of the language, gives the following explanation of chancery: “it was a kind of ‘secretariat of state’ which not only produced texts” in or for official church and court matters in england, “but trained scribes to write them” in the thirteen and fourteen hundreds ( , p. ) lerer goes on to say, “the prose of [chancery] documents needed to be understood by readers coming from different regions of the country or with different levels of literacy. and, as most of the documents in chancery english were really kinds of letters—addresses, petitions, legal requests—that prose needed to be unambiguously direct” ( , pp. – ). this directness of prose which developed out of the chancery style of writing enabled authors to communicate their ideas more clearly and effectively than ever before. however, the benefits of chancery english extend beyond the sphere of linguistics and into the sphere of social justice as seen in the ability of women to testify of and seek justice for acts of rape and other violence which they endured as recorded in chancery-style legal petitions. in order to demonstrate that the prose of chancery english empowered women in this manner, this paper will establish the benefit of articulating stories of trauma and refer to several chancery-style petitions written on behalf of women who were raped, english , dixie state university brooke garceau is a senior at dixie state university pursuing a bachelor of art in english with an emphasis in professional and technical writing. her research interests include feminism, mental health, public relations, and disability advocacy. she has previously been published in the dixie sun news, the st. george news, and the dsu academic report of . * garceau, b. ( ). chancery english empowering women against violence. curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation, ( ), – . otherwise sexually assaulted, and murdered. furthermore, the empowerment which chancery english gave to these women contributed to an ever-growing foundation of support for women who still face and fight against violence. background: establishing benefits of narrative in healing from trauma since chancery english resulted in more direct, effective prose, women of the time were able to tell their stories (through the scribes who wrote for them) in an attempt to obtain appropriate sentencing for their abusers and healing, when possible, for themselves. the ability to tell stories of trauma before chancery prose would have been limited by the constraints of the language, and that limited ability would have, in turn, resulted in a lack of healing for victims of violence. the survivors’ trust, a uk-based group of non-profit organizations which have united to support victims and survivors of sexual assault and to fight against sexual assault through information and advocacy, states the following: “it is not uncommon for survivors to feel alone and isolated. for many, hearing and sharing stories can play a vital role in their recovery from trauma.” while the stories of trauma found in chancery petitions differ greatly in style and voice from survivor stories of today, they demonstrate a cooperation of victims, their loved ones, and the legal system to seek healing for victims and society—a cooperation evident in either form of narrative. in an article on the power of narratives of sexual violence in the us military, valerie n. wieskamp presents an overview of peer-reviewed research which documents the benefits of narrative in healing from sexual trauma: [s]cholarship has documented the healing and transformative potential of narrative’s capacity to create meaning by establishing causality…. narrative has a ‘consoling function,’ as it finds ‘a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience’ (eco, , p. ). this sense-making process of putting a form to one’s trauma has emotional benefits (french, ; kellas, horstman, willer, & carr, ; rossetto, ). there are also physical health benefits to narrating traumatic experiences (pennebaker, ; pennebaker & chung, ). personal storytelling in the public sphere may serve as ‘part of a social process of coping’ (langellier, , p. ). ellis and patti ( ) observe that sharing and hearing personal stories of vulnerability help us ‘work through our own struggles with more grace, dignity, and humanity’ (p. ). ( , pp. – ). beyond establishing basic benefits of narrative in healing from trauma, wieskamp also discusses what kinds of narrative are beneficial in the healing process for victims of sexual violence. she writes, “transformative stories must both highlight the systemic nature of the problem while also positioning survivors as experts so as to render the act of publicly sharing trauma empowering” ( , p. ). as the petitions referenced below do not record first-person accounts of trauma, they do not fully meet the requirement of chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation positioning survivors as experts. two of the petitions are written in behalf of women who were murdered by their attackers (fisher, richardson, fisher, & university of michigan, ), rendering them incapable of seeking justice for themselves. the petition written in behalf of isabell of lancashire lists her as the “besecher” (fisher et al., ), implying that she took an active role in seeking justice and healing for herself. moreover, the very existence of these petitions does demonstrate a trust in the character of the women concerned and an acknowledgment of the horrors they endured as real. chancery petitions documenting justice being sought by or in behalf of women in cases of sexual violence the petitions containing stories of trauma discussed in this work are found in an anthology of chancery english and are entitled “petition concerning the murder of isabell by her husband john carpenter of sussex,” “petition concerning rape of isabell, wife of john boteler of lancashire,” and “petition concerning murder of isabell, wife of roger bakeler, by john bolton.” because all three women in these petitions share the first name isabell, they will be referred to hereafter as isabell of sussex (from the first petition), isabell of lancashire (from the second), and isabell of surrey (from the third). following are summaries of the stories of these women which include excerpts from the petitions named above. isabell of sussex isabell of sussex “was of the age of xvje yere” and had been married to her husband, john carpenter, for fifteen days when he told her to “arraye hir in hir best arraie” because they were going on a trip together. he took her to the woods of a nearby town and killed her with a knife. the petition gruesomely details that brain matter was found on her body and that her husband “streped hir naked and toke his knyff and slitte hir bely fro the breste doun & (toke hir bowels oute of hir body and) loked if she were with childe” the petition asks that isabell’s husband "be draw. and hanged as a traytour (fisher et al., ). isabell of lancashire isabell of lancashire was attacked in her own home by william pulle and a “grete number of other mysdoers.” pulle “felonousely and moste horribely rauysshed” isabell in her own home and kidnapped her, taking her away to wales while she wore only “hir kirtyll and hir smoke.” he then kept her “in other secrete places” until she was rescued and safeguarded pending his capture. isabell is, as stated above, listed as “beseecher” in this petition, showing her involvement in pursuing punishment for pulle and healing for herself. her petition requests that pulle be charged with high treason and killed if he does not appear in court to account for his crimes on an appointed day (fisher et al., ). chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation isabell of surrey isabell of surrey was attacked by john bolton. he “wold haue rauesshed isabell” but “sche wold not assent vn to him he vilanisly toke of here all the atire of her hede and al so her clothes of her body otake her smoke. and yet sche wolde neuer assent vn to his vnlefull desir.” the petition goes onto say that “at the last be cause he coulde noghte haue his desir of her. he ther at the same tyme felonesly sloeth and murdred her and kutte her throte twyes. and twyes stikked her thurgh her pappes and sides with a dagger where vppon sche died.” isabell’s murderer had, it seems, applied for a pardon from all his crimes and received it, the king not knowing of his attack on isabell. the petition written in isabell’s behalf requested that her murderer be held accountable for his crimes and that he be punished for high treason (fisher et al., ). analysis: detailed stories of trauma written in chancery prose the stories of each of these women written in chancery-style petitions record in great detail the crimes committed against them. the direct prose that resulted from chancery english made this level of communication possible, which also opened an avenue for isabell of lancashire and the surviving loved ones of isabell of sussex and isabell of surrey to pursue justice. as only a small portrait of the experiences of isabell of lancashire can be formed from her petition, one can only hope that the telling of her story brought her a measure of healing as well. the details supplied in the petitions described above combine to tell the stories of trauma of these three isabells. in “writing wrongs: the drafting of supplications to the crown in later fourteenth-century england,” gwilym dodd lists some of the rules of petitioning the king in court which bled into petitionary writing. dodd gives the following examples: “the accused needed to be fully and correctly identified; the allegations of wrongdoing needed to be time-specific and accurately located; and the crimes described in appropriate detail” ( , p. ). the requirement of such details coupled with the direct prose of chancery english preserved the accounts of trauma which these women faced. without the requirement of such details, the accounts might have been nothing more than a brief statement of the crime, and without the direct chancery prose, the accounts might have been unreadable. readers of the petitions find details in locations, weapons, and clothing. in isabell of sussex’s petition, we learn that she was murdered in the woods near “the toun of stoghton.” in isabell of lancashire’s petition, we learn that she was raped in her own home in beausey and then kidnapped and taken to wales. these details of location document the settings in the stories of trauma for these women. in each petition, we learn of the weapons used to assault these women: a knife against isabell of sussex, a dagger against isabell of surrey, and “armes in riotouse manere” against isabell of lancashire. these details provide evidence that these women were attacked violently and with the intent to harm, if not to kill. we also learn of the clothing each woman wore, often chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation described in a list of clothing which their attackers removed from their bodies. isabell of sussex was wearing “hir best arraie,” and isabell of surrey wore “a gowne. a kirtell. a hode. two kirchieffes and two keyes vppon her.” these details serve to remind the reader of the humanity of these women as they bring relatable, human portraits of these women to our minds. all such details fill the lines of chancery prose with that quality of humanity which is so necessary in the stories of trauma which promote healing (fisher et al., ). discussion: prose of chancery petitions extending to protect and empower future women the stories of isabell of sussex, lancashire, and surrey added crucial strength to the movement of believing, helping, and empowering victims of sexual trauma and physical abuse. in isabell of surrey’s petition, we read the plea, “and yf any man desire here after to rauisshe any woman) and for cause that sche wolle noghte assente (vnto hym sle and) murder her that any charter to be made to any suche person for any suche murder (be) voide and noghte auaillable in lawe for the loue of ihesu and yn way of charite (fisher, richardson, fisher, & university of michigan, ).” although some might read this plea as insufficient, as lacking protection from rape, the plea does ask for protection from murder committed because a woman refused to let a man rape her. in providing a penalty for men who would do the same thing to future women that isabell’s murderer did to her, the petition seeks to discourage or prevent similar trauma from happening. in “recovery from trauma: a look into the process of healing from sexual assault,” julia skinner describes her own trauma and healing process and gives perspective on how victims of sexual trauma can make meaning from their trauma. she writes, “my account also ties in to erickson’s notion of generativity—the idea that we can create meaning for ourselves by sharing our experiences and leaving something to future generations (erikson & coles, , p. ). it allows me a framework in which to be proactive and use my experience as a means to aid and educate others” ( , p. ). while isabell of surrey herself would not have been able to find this kind of meaning by helping others because of her death, perhaps those who sought justice on her behalf found something similar. perhaps in helping to protect other women from suffering isabell’s fate they found a pathway for healing from their own grief at her pain and loss. conclusion: whatever the benefits of the stories of these women being recorded might have been for their contemporaries, victims of sexual and other forms of violence benefit from them now. the scribes who wrote the petitions about isabell of sussex, isabell of lancashire, and isabell of surrey contributed strength to the foundation of justice and healing of all victims of such trauma. these stories of trauma, recorded for the purpose of legal proceedings, one might say, are some of the first narratives of sexual trauma in the english language and have opened the way for current survivors of trauma to share their own experiences. chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation movements like #metoo might find their roots in the stories of justice being pursued in behalf of these women named isabell, and, at the very least, the women who speak out in such movements can find strength and healing in knowing that they have not suffered, survived, and sought for justice alone, but together with women through the ages. as we continue this fight for justice, perhaps we can leave a similar legacy for the women who follow us, and perhaps, with each generation, we can advance our position and eventually gain the ultimate victory. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (ccby-sa- . ). view this license’s legal deed at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/ . and legal code at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ . /legalcode for more information. chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation references dodd. ( ). writing wrongs: the drafting of supplications to the crown in later fourteenth- century england. medium Ævum, ( ), . https://doi.org/ . / fisher, j., richardson, m., fisher, j., & university of michigan. ( ). an anthology of chancery english. university of michigan humanities text initiative. retrieved from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=chanceng lerer, s. ( ). inventing english: a portable history of the language, revised and expanded edition. new york: columbia university press. https://doi.org/ . /lere the survivors trust. ( , march). survivor stories. retrieved from http://www.thesurvivorstrust.org wieskamp, v. n. ( ). “i’m going out there and i’m telling this story”: victimhood and empowerment in narratives of military sexual violence. western journal of communication, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / . . chancery english empowering women against violence curiosity: interdisciplinary journal of research and innovation https://doi.org/ . / https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=chanceng https://doi.org/ . /lere http://www.thesurvivorstrust.org/ https://doi.org/ . / . . 	isabell of sussex 	isabell of lancashire 	isabell of surrey 	references s jed .. editorial safe and informed prescribing of psychotropic medication during the covid- pandemic jurjen j. luykx, sisco m. p. van veen, arne risselada, paul naarding, joeri k. tijdink and christiaan h. vinkers summary treatment with psychotropic medication may sometimes be jeopardised because of the covid- pandemic. one underlying reason is the lack of covid- -specific psychopharmacology guidelines. here, we discuss five considerations arising from our clinical experience and pharmacological background knowledge to enable safe and well-informed psychopharmacotherapy dur- ing the covid- pandemic. keywords covid- ; psychopharmacology; prescribing; psychiatry; epidemiology. copyright and usage © the authors . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the royal college of psychiatrists. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribu- tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. jurjen j. luykx (pictured) is assistant professor in the departments of psychiatry and translational medicine, university medical center utrecht, and consultant psychiatrist in the second opinion out-patient clinic, ggnet mental health, warnsveld, the netherlands. sisco m. p. van veen is a phd candidate in the department of psychiatry, university medical center utrecht, and the department of medical humanities, amsterdam umc, the netherlands. arne risselada is hospital pharmacist, clinical pharmacologist and epidemiologist in the department of clinical pharmacy, wilhelmina hospital assen, the netherlands. paul naarding is consultant psychiatrist in the department of old age psychiatry, ggnet mental health, warnsveld, the netherlands. joeri k. tijdink is assistant professor in the department of medical humanities of the amsterdam umc and in the department of philosophy at the vu universiteit in amsterdam, the netherlands. christiaan h. vinkers is consultant psychiatrist and associate professor in the departments of psychiatry and anatomy and neurosciences, amsterdam umc, the netherlands. many patients’ treatments with psychotropic medication may cur- rently be jeopardised in several ways because of the covid- pan- demic and subsequent policies of social distancing and lockdowns. examples from our own experience range from a long-term cloza- pine user who developed severe neutropenia after contracting covid- , patients not willing to collect their medicines from pharmacies and elderly patients discontinuing visits to laboratories for therapeutic drug monitoring (tdm). furthermore, in the current uncertain era of the covid- pandemic, psychiatrists and clinical pharmacists resort to existing, non-specific prescribing guidelines for patients with psychiatric illnesses. here, we reason that, given the lack of specific guidelines in this unprecedented situation on the one hand and the existence of recently emerged covid- online resources (see below) on the other, several considerations may be of use to enable safe prescrib- ing of psychotropic medication during the current pandemic. we have divided these considerations into several categories, illustrating them with real-life clinical dilemmas and describing potential solu- tions to optimise patient care during this outbreak. by drawing data from covid- -specific online resources and clinical trial data unrelated to covid- we compiled a table listing preferred psy- chotropic medication per drug category. as the current pandemic is affecting people without a history of mental illness as well as those with severe mental illness (smi) we target both populations. conceivably, people with smi are hit harder by the pandemic owing to relatively high rates of homelessness, smoking/illicit drug use and poor general health among them. although we focus on psychotropic medication, it is important that psychological treatments are not overlooked. they may be just as effective for a range of symptoms that people with and without a history of mental illness may currently present with. this crisis will likely have a large psychological impact on individuals both with and without a history of mental illness, resulting in anxiety, exces- sive worrying and insomnia in many. such symptoms may be readily treated by psychological interventions, including (online) cognitive–behavioural therapy and other forms of psychotherapy. thus, even though the focus of this piece is on pharmacotherapy, clinicians should be aware of the pivotal role of psychological treat- ments during this pandemic. moreover, we believe that our recom- mendations about safe and informed prescribing of psychotropic medication can help identify clinical situations (e.g. a patient with a history of prolonged qt interval) where psychological treatments may be the only viable option. new-onset psychiatric problems and reduced access to usual care first, the virus itself can bring about a range of challenges for phy- sicians and patients as the uncertainties surrounding it endanger the safe use of psychotropic medication. this is a pressing problem as recent evidence suggests that anxiety, insomnia, use of psychotropic medication and drug misuse are rising during the current pan- demic, , resulting in an important discrepancy: safe prescribing of psychotropics has become both more challenging and more needed. people with new-onset anxiety and insomnia may benefit from a short-term prescription of a sedative or anxiolytic, but real-life out-patient consultations have become more challenging as out-patient facilities try to restrict elective care and face-to-face contacts. in addition, follow-up consultations are currently hampered for those patients who experience difficulties communicating by tele- phone, resulting in a lack of clarity about collecting prescriptions. another example of problems that have emerged is (perceived) restricted access to laboratories for elderly patients. one of our the british journal of psychiatry ( ) , – . doi: . /bjp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /bjp. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core elderly patients recently decided to stop going to a laboratory for her regular tdm of lithium to reduce the likelihood of covid- trans- mission. importantly, as an older person she is at increased risk of suf- fering both the psychosocial and physical consequences of covid- infection,rangingfromlonelinesstodevelopingfever,dehydrationand thus, potentially, lithium toxicity. as an out-patient, she is not in con- stant touch with her care team and, since she lacks the ability to engage in video calling, encouraging her to go to the laboratory has become more cumbersome. in these times, if tdm is absolutely necessary, we should consider the option of nurses or physicians calling at these patients’ homes to draw blood since several in-patient and out- patient psychiatry clinics are currently less busy. clearly, during such visits we should aim to wear protective gear and keep a distance of at least . m as much as possible. for clozapine, we should consider speeding up the use of dried blood spots for tdm, as this has proven validity. psychotropic–covid- drug interactions and covid- drug side-effects second, interactions between psychotropic medication and covid- medication (atazanavir, lopinavir/ritonavir, remdesivir, favipiravir, (hydroxy)chloroquine, interferon beta, ribavirin and tocilizumab) can be serious. the university of liverpool provides an overview of possible interactions with covid- medication, including psychotropics (www.covid -druginteractions.org). these interactions are divided into increased and decreased expos- ure (measured by blood levels of medications) and qt and/or pr interval prolongation. we note that in most instances people requir- ing covid- medication are hospital in-patients with electrocar- diogram (ecg) monitoring possibilities. furthermore, since most psychotropic drugs are partly metabolised by cyp a , concomitant use of atazanavir or lopinavir/ritonavir may increase their plasma levels owing to cyp a inhibition. however, this will not always lead to more side-effects since some psychotropic drugs (e.g. selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) do not carry dose–response relationships. besides interactions we should also be wary of covid- medi- cation with high risks of psychiatric adverse drug reactions. mefloquine, for example, carries a relatively high likelihood of neuropsychiatric side-effects, ranging from agitation to psychosis. although more studies should be conducted to explore the interactions between psychotropic medication and covid- medication, several observations may help clinicians choose a drug in new patients requiring psychopharmacological treatment. importantly, as we are currently uncertain how many people will contract the virus in the near/far future and therefore are unsure who will need covid- medications, such considerations may apply to all new psychiatric patients currently seen by physicians. in addition, we caution against discontinuing or deciding against efficacious psychotropic drugs such as lithium and clozapine out of fear of interactions. on the basis of the above-mentioned consid- erations and background knowledge of psychopharmacological profiles, in table we summarise which psychotropic drugs may be preferable during experimental covid- therapies and which psychotropic medication should be prescribed with caution. adjusting psychotropic prescribing to reduce clinic visits third, social distancing is bringing about a number of changes in the way we and our patients relate to our environments. as psychia- trists, we should be proactive and, for patients with smi, consider switching to compounds with a longer half-life if possible. for example, a patient on paliperidone -monthly injections may be switched to paliperidone every months if they have been stable for over months, thus reducing the likelihood of contracting covid- for nurses. similarly, for new patients, longer half-life antidepressants such as fluoxetine may be preferred as discontinua- tions may result in less severe withdrawal symptoms and less table preferred psychotropic drugs during experimental covid- therapies drug class caution for qt and/or pr interval prolongationa caution for drug–drug interactionsb preferred drugsc antidepressants (es)citalopram mirtazapine tricyclic antidepressantsd venlafaxine st john’s wort agomelatine bupropion duloxetine fluoxetine fluvoxamine paroxetine sertraline antipsychotic drugs all, except for: aripiprazole, brexpiprazole, cariprazine, lurasidone pimozide quetiapine amisulpridee aripiprazole brexpiprazole cariprazine lurasidone olanzapinee benzodiazepines none all (especially midazolam), except for: lorazepam, lormetazepam, oxazepam, temazepamf lorazepamf lormetazepamf oxazepamf temazepamf mood stabilisers lithium carbamazepine lamotrigine lithiume valproate a. relevant when lopinavir/ritonavir or (hydroxyl)chloroquine are used to treat covid- . b. especially relevant when atazanavir or lopinavir/ritonavir are used to treat covid- , because cyp a inhibition causes higher blood levels of psychotropic drugs. st john’s wort and carbamazepine may reduce blood levels of several drugs used to treat covid- . c. therapeutic drug monitoring may be helpful when considering dose modifications. d. for example amitriptyline, clomipramine, imipramine, nortriptyline. e. based on efficacy, with careful monitoring of electrocardiogram if applicable. f. for sedatives/anxiolytics/hypnotics, the benzodiazepines with no active metabolites that only undergo glucuronidation (lorazepam, lormetazepam, oxazepam, and temazepam) are generally preferred. luykx et al downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.covid -druginteractions.org https://www.cambridge.org/core fluctuations in tdm. furthermore, in the event of equipoise (equal effectiveness) we may currently consider prescribing agents that do not require tdm. psychotropic prescribing for covid- -positive patients fourth, we should consider that possible consequences of the disease in covid- -positive patients should influence how we prescribe medication. a study from china reports a % incidence of neutropenia in covid- -positive patients, although neutro- penia may also be observed in those testing positive for influenza. in support of this observation, one of our patients who had been on clozapine for many years and had tested positive for covid- suddenly suffered a severe drop in neutrophil count. although cur- rently unknown, possibly covid- -positive patients on clozapine are at increased risk for neutropenia compared with both covid- -negative patients on clozapine and covid- -positive patients not on clozapine. in addition, in the event of inflammation caused by covid- , clozapine plasma levels may also rise rapidly. for patients on clozapine who have tested positive for covid- we therefore recommend clozapine dose decreases and more frequent blood counts and clozapine tdm than usually during an infection, even if they have normal body temperature. another important symptom in covid- -positive patients is respiratory distress. clearly, high doses of sedatives are unwanted, given their potential respiratory side-effects, such as hypoventilation. ensuring that the current dose of anxiolytics/hypnotics/sedatives is as low as possible whenever the situation allows and the patient agrees will allow fellow clinicians to better judge respiratory distress and taper such medication when a covid- -positive patient is in need. keeping track of possible drug shortages fifth, we think that psychiatrists should be mindful that the current global crisis may lead to medication shortages. in recent years, the world has become more reliant on india and china for active pharmaceutical ingredients. especially now that india has imposed strict social distancing regulations, the supply chain may become compromised. , psychiatrists and clinical pharmacists should follow these developments closely and have a plan in place if shortages occur, for example starting an alternative treatment for a given patient, such as online psychotherapy. another example from the netherlands comes from the national society for psychiatry, which is in touch with the ministry of health and pharmacies on a weekly basis to follow up on possible shortages. during almost weekly seminars and through information on the society’s website, mental health staff can follow such developments closely. we also note that an ethically sound and practical method exists for allocating drugs when shortages arise. conclusions in sum, we signal several considerations in the current covid- pandemic for physicians prescribing psychotropic compounds. we believe that most of these considerations are generalisable to other countries, as in many countries, including the netherlands, some mental healthcare services have closed while others have remained open. however, owing to lack of data it is hard to obtain exact figures on access to healthcare facilities across the globe during the current pandemic. as psychiatrists, general practitioners, nurse practitioners and clinical pharmacists, we should have these considerations in mind when we try to safeguard patient care. we should therefore actively exchange recommendations on safe prescribing of psychotropic medication and alternative strategies (e.g. online psychotherapy) during the current crisis. the netherlands psychiatric association and the uk’s royal college of psychiatrists recently set up such resources, which are updated frequently with news about the impact of covid- on psychiatry. , given the particularities that apply to each nation, we encourage psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in other countries to do the same. exchange of clinical experience will also enable clinicians to identify situations where psychological treatments may be preferable. conceivably, for example, certain cognitive–behavioural interventions may result in more sustained relief of covid- -related anxiety compared with psychopharmacological treatment (such as short-term use of benzodiazepines). we also propose that physicians with diverse backgrounds (including gps, psychiatrists and intensive care doctors) develop prescribing guidelines for important aspects of this covid- outbreak for the field of psychiatry. jurjen j. luykx , departments of psychiatry and translational medicine, umc brain center, university medical center utrecht, utrecht university; and second opinion out- patient clinic, ggnet mental health, warnsveld, the netherlands; sisco m. p. van veen, department of psychiatry, umc brain center, university medical center utrecht, utrecht university, the netherlands; and department of medical humanities, amsterdam umc, the netherlands; arne risselada, department of clinical pharmacy, wilhelmina hospital assen, the netherlands; paul naarding, department of old age psychiatry, ggnet mental health, warnsveld, the netherlands; joeri k. tijdink, department of medical humanities, amsterdam umc; and department of philosophy, vu universiteit, amsterdam, the netherlands; christiaan h. vinkers, departments of psychiatry and anatomy and neurosciences, amsterdam umc, the netherlands correspondence: jurjen j. luykx. email: j.luykx@umcutrecht.nl first received mar , final revision apr , accepted apr author contributions all authors contributed to the conception of this work, were involved in drafting the manuscript, approved the final version of this manuscript and agree to be accountable for the work described in this manuscript. declaration of interest none. icmje forms are in the supplementary material, available online at https://doi.org/ . / bjp. . . references american psychiatric association. new poll: covid- impacting mental well- being: americans feeling anxious, especially for loved ones; older adults are less anxious. apa new release ; mar (https://www.psychiatry.org/ newsroom/news-releases/new-poll-covid- -impacting-mental-well-being- americans-feeling-anxious-especially-for-loved-ones-older-adults-are-less- anxious). express scripts. america’s state of mind report. express scripts, (https:// www.express-scripts.com/corporate/americas-state-of-mind-report). geers lm, cohen d, wehkamp lm, van hateren k, koster ra, fedorenko oy, et al. dried blood spot analysis for therapeutic drug monitoring of clozapine. j clin psychiatry ; : e – . huhn m, nikolakopoulou a, schneider-thoma j, krause m, samara m, peter n, et al. comparative efficacy and tolerability of oral antipsychotics for the acute treatment of adults with multi-episode schizophrenia: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. lancet ; : – . li yx, wu w, yang t, zhou w, fu ym, feng qm, et al. characteristics of per- ipheral blood leukocyte differential counts in patients with covid- . zhonghua nei ke za zhi ; : e . higgins p, runnegar n, bird rj, markey ka. rates of neutropenia in adults with influenza a or b: a retrospective analysis of hospitalised patients in south east queensland during . intern med j ; : – . prescribing psychotropics during the covid‐ pandemic downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:j.luykx@umcutrecht.nl https://doi.org/ . /bjp. . https://doi.org/ . /bjp. . https://doi.org/ . /bjp. . https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/new-poll-covid- -impacting-mental-well-being-americans-feeling-anxious-especially-for-loved-ones-older-adults-are-less-anxious https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/new-poll-covid- -impacting-mental-well-being-americans-feeling-anxious-especially-for-loved-ones-older-adults-are-less-anxious https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/new-poll-covid- -impacting-mental-well-being-americans-feeling-anxious-especially-for-loved-ones-older-adults-are-less-anxious 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critical drug shortages: an ethical approach for allocating scarce resources in hospi- tals. arch intern med ; : – . nederlandse vereniging voor psychiatrie. covid- (corona-virus). nvvp, (www.nvvp.net/cms/showpage.aspx?id= ). royal college of psychiatrists. responding to covid- . guidance for clinicians. rcpsych, (www.rcpsych.ac.uk/about-us/responding-to- covid- /responding-to-covid- -guidance-for-clinicians). psychiatry in theatre under my grandmother’s scarf: the healing effects of performance art caroline giroux many times, i felt i couldn’t do it, craving outsiders’ affirmation for living in this parallel, alienating reality. my head still dizzy from the traumatic stories heard during the day, i was often depleted during rehearsals. but i persisted. after becoming a receptacle for the idea, deep down i knew i also had to become my patients’ voice, and my words, vehicles for their suffering. for weeks, i tackled the fragmented aspects of the monologue i was performing, ‘my vagina was my village’, certain lines not flowing naturally, as if my established persona resisted unusual word juxtapositions or pure dissociation. then, i started visualising what it must have been like to be her, this bosnian woman who was repeatedly raped during the war. this woman who lost the poetry her vagina created through this monologue. this woman who was now unrooted. open-minded, soul naked, my lips unpacked every word. i befriended my foreign accent by slowing down; reciting with total attention is a blessing. by grieving my ideal self, my impostor syndrome dissolved. i embraced the mere statement that came from acting for this event, regardless of the outcome. little by little, the image of this woman became clearer. avid for synchronicities, i drew parallels between the symbolism of the script and some wounds of my past. i fantasised about what she would be wearing now: black dress and worn-out flat shoes, with some attention to details to enhance her dignity. i extrapolated my own #metoo moments to imagine enduring rape as warfare. i held all my patients and their histories of surviving sexual violation inside me as i walked up slowly on stage, following the nostalgic melody of delerue’s piano, my grandmother’s scarf over my head, her perfume still gently floating above my hair. then a miracle occurred: the lost dream of my baby daughter and all the strong women and girls of the world who have been silenced for too long decided to speak through me, as i experienced all the innocence and joy broken by rage, shame and despair. applause, acclamation and silent tears were gifts from the spectators and my crew behind the scenes. and i had wings: connected, i felt transformed and capable. this journey demonstrated once again that disapproval seeping through luke- warm support is usually a confirmation that we are doing the right thing. it re-emphasised the value of working with kindred souls who share the same beliefs and know that together we can create a synergy that infuses more peace and compassion around us. and in front of a riveted crowd, as i allowed myself to inhabit my body and my emotions, i stood whole and hopeful. performance art can be a unique opportunity to educate society, bear witness to suffering and empower survivors of trauma, both on stage and in the audience. above all, i realised that following one’s passion is the beginning of recovery. when artistic expression is at the service of social justice, it becomes a bridge to unlimited joy and a momentum for a sense of purpose. and collective healing. caroline giroux is an associate clinical professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at uc davis, sacramento, california, usa. she shares here the intimate process of becoming a character in the vagina monologues, a play for survivors of trauma. © the author the british journal of psychiatry ( ) , . doi: . /bjp. . c.g. in her role of the bosnian woman from ’my vagina was my village’, wearing her grandmother’s scarf. © the author (c.g.), . luykx et al downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /mar/ /will-coronavirus-lead-to-drug-shortages-for-the-nhs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /mar/ /will-coronavirus-lead-to-drug-shortages-for-the-nhs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /mar/ /will-coronavirus-lead-to-drug-shortages-for-the-nhs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india- http://www.nvvp.net/cms/showpage.aspx?id= http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/about-us/responding-to-covid- /responding-to-covid- -guidance-for-clinicians http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/about-us/responding-to-covid- /responding-to-covid- -guidance-for-clinicians https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core 	safe and informed prescribing of psychotropic medication during the covid- pandemic 	new-onset psychiatric problems and reduced access to usual care 	psychotropic–covid- drug interactions and covid- drug side-effects 	adjusting psychotropic prescribing to reduce clinic visits 	psychotropic prescribing for covid- -positive patients 	keeping track of possible drug shortages 	conclusions 	author contributions 	declaration of interest 	references religions , , . https://doi.org/ . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions article “abusers of themselves with mankind”: on the constitutive necessity of abuse in evangelical sex manuals william p. boyce department of religious studies, university of virginia, charlottesville, va , usa; wpb jd@virginia.edu abstract: in this essay, i recount the recent narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual violence though the impact of rachael denhollander, an advocate and survivor of sexual trauma. denhollander’s evangelical credentials authorized fellow us evangelicals to sympathize with the #metoo movement. i then show how this script of awakening obscures a long history of abuse in relation to lgbtq persons of faith. i demonstrate how american evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. paradox becomes a framework for describing the “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. finally, i reflect on what it suggests to scholars of religion that a religious com- munity ensconces abuse in this distinctive way. keywords: evangelicalism; abuse; trauma; lgbtq; homosexuality; queer; queerness; theology; #metoo; #evangelical; american evangelicalism; sexual violence . introduction evangelical christians are finally waking up to the horror and reality of sexual vio- lence in their midst—or so goes a pervasive cultural script in circulation today among insiders and outsiders of us evangelicalism. in the age of #metoo and #churchtoo, the reasons are urgent and profound for heralding this script and acknowledging the core of its message. the compelling story of a sudden awakening inside the ranks of american evangelicalism, however, elides an important detail. the elision is less innocuous than it may seem. in fact, it relates to the long, contradictory work of stifling lgbtq persons of faith. for many evangelical queers, abuse is hardly a new word. their experiences within the evangelical community in the united states belie the dominant narrative of an abrupt, ghastly, great awakening to trauma and abuse. the closeted history of evangelical queers is one marked by abuse—a category which has functioned as a constitutive touchstone for the construction of queer sexual identities as enjoined by us evangelicalism. in this essay, i first recount the dominant narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual harm and bodily violation though the impact of rachael denhollander. denhollander was the former michigan state university gymnast turned sexual assault advocate who confronted her abuser, larry nassar, in . the spirit of her testimony and the character of her evangelical credentials authorized fellow us evangelicals to sym- pathize with the #metoo movement. more precisely, evangelical congregants expressed cautious reception to specific elements of the #metoo phenomenon, guided by denhol- lander’s iconic witness as a survivor, advocate, and faithful christian. then, i show how this script of sudden awakening obscures a longstanding history of abuse in relation to evangelical queers. i demonstrate how american evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. paradox becomes the framework for describing the centralized for a helpful overview of both campaigns, see (colwell and johnson ). citation: boyce, william p. . “abusers of themselves with mankind”: on the constitutive necessity of abuse in evangelical sex manuals. religions : . https://doi.org/ . /rel academic editor: randall balmer and edward blum received: december accepted: february published: february publisher’s note: mdpi stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and insti- tutional affiliations. copyright: © by the author. li- censee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and con- ditions of the creative commons at- tribution (cc by) license (http://crea- tivecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). religions , , of and decentralized “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. finally, i reflect on what it suggests for a religious community to ensconce abuse in this distinctive way. what does it mean for abuse to take on a seemingly positive valence in becoming a skeleton key for unlocking the deep mystery of the sensual self? this stubborn mythology, although deeply problematic, can prove generative for the lived experiences of queers in their own sexual awakenings. hereafter, i distinguish between two types, namely abuse and abuse*. the former entails any direct or indirect physical, sexual, and/or verbal maltreatment or any psycho- logical coercion related to the same. the latter incorporates the former definition but adds another layer: an ideological conception of harm that can be fitted retroactively onto any set of circumstances. on this account, abuse* can be used to describe thoughts, actions, affects, or presences that bear no resemblance to abuse. as i explain in the second half of the essay, the latter category of abuse* is conceptually slippery on purpose. us evangelical authorities, as i explore below, leverage this slippage to diagnose queer sexuality. amer- ican evangelical christians interpret so-called divergent lifestyles and their origins by as- sociating queer sexualities with abuse*, despite its lack of any consistent or coherent defi- nition. it is from the context of abuse* that evangelical community standards are enacted through the diagnosis and treatment of queerness. by instilling these community sexual norms, us evangelicalism forms and malforms queers to be, as the king james bible trans- lates it and as my title alludes, “abusers of themselves with mankind.” . the dominant narrative on january , during the sentencing hearing of rachael denhollander’s sexual assailant—the former us gymnastics and michigan state university doctor, larry nas- sar—denhollander raised a hauntingly simple question: “how much is a little girl worth?” as the first person to report publicly the molestation to law enforcement and the last to provide an impact statement alongside fellow victims, denhollander’s confron- tation of her serial predator was a powerful expression of the collective voice (levenson ). despite being shattered by sexual violation, manipulative control, and systemic si- lence, she reclaimed her stolen voice for the sake of countless survivors. she refused to sterilize the horror of her injuries, and she demanded justice in the face of heinous crimes. her statement received a standing ovation from the courtroom and quickly went viral online (macur ). the ardent resolve of denhollander’s literal and symbolic reclamation led to her placement on the time most influential people of (raisman ). however, it was her cry for healing and her extension of forgiveness in light of her suffering that left the evangelical world in awe of her bravery. a self-identifying evangelical, denhollander invoked the rhetoric of god’s judgment, grace, and redemption in a manner consonant with the theological and communal expectations of american evangelicalism (cnn ). as a result, she was immediately elevated within the us evangelical subculture as a trusted authority. i am using the asterisk to imply the functional activity of category defiance, as a purposeful echo of the work that “trans*” can do (e.g., transing), in addition to and beyond the identitarian function; see (strassfeld ). this definition is my own idiosyncratic amalgamation, but it draws principally from the centers for disease control and prevention, while spot-checking other relevant health and advocacy resources. as an aside, the legal history of “gay panic” or “trans* panic” defenses in the judicial system is an interesting secular analogue; gay or trans* bodies are positioned as bare facts that are said to mitigate culpability of violence or to justify violence, even murder; here, non-threatening encounters are fitted as threatening encounters under the apparatus of the law; see (strader et al. ). cor. : (king james version). denhollander’s catapult to prominence was made possible in part by previous generations of evangelical women who navigated positions of authority and leadership while upholding cultural–theological expectations surrounding evangelical femininity, particularly the boundaries of gendered difference and sexual probity as an asymmetrical responsibility for women; for more on this negotiated dynamic of female agency within american evangelicalism, see (johnson ). religions , , of the elevation of denhollander, however, was not without consequence. us evangel- ical christians soon learned that they were not thereby immune from denhollander’s cri- tique of abuse, enablement, stigmatization, and the corrupting systems they sustain. one week after the sentencing statement went viral, denhollander was interviewed by the flagship evangelical magazine christianity today. during the interview, denhollander re- proached evangelicals for “gloss[ing] over the devastation of any kind of suffering but especially sexual assault, with christian platitudes like god works all things together for good or god is sovereign” (lee ). beyond these rhetorical and discursive interventions, denhollander rebuked the evangelical church for producing unsafe environments and de- formative contexts for disclosing assault and trauma. denhollander lamented, “church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim” (ibid.). the deficiency or nonexistence of basic trauma-informed principles, she insisted, compounded the effects experienced by victims who place their faith in church leaders. she added, “there is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. it is with deep re- gret that i say the church is one of the worst places to go for help…. there are very, very few who ever found true help [for sexual trauma and abuse] in the church” (ibid.). cutting to the heart of the matter, denhollander identified specific leaders in amer- ican evangelicalism who were forsaking their pastoral duties. her insights, if startling, were borne of her own experiences. previous to her courtroom presentation, denhol- lander had been involved in small-scale advocacy for survivors of assault at her local re- formed baptist church in louisville, kentucky. to her dismay, immanuel baptist of lou- isville had decided to facilitate the restoration to ministry of pastor cj mahaney. ma- haney was the head pastor and former president of sovereign grace ministries (sgm), a denominational network formerly based in maryland. sgm had relocated to louisville after a series of conspicuous allegations of impropriety converged just prior to the #metoo reckoning. despite the move by mahaney and a devoted cadre, ongoing allegations of conspiracy and extensive cover-ups of sexual assault within the sgm network had fol- lowed them. nevertheless, all signs appeared to point in the direction of mahaney weath- ering the headwinds. as an influential, well-connected us evangelical thought leader, mahaney had retained broad evangelical support from the movement and its key figures during this turbulent period (stanley ). denhollander had raised her objections to the pastoral team at immanuel baptist out of concern for other survivors in the pews. she opposed mahaney’s restoration to full ministry and her church’s decision to permit him to fill their pulpit as a frequent guest. her opposition was acute given the conviction of nathaniel morales, a former youth pas- tor at mahaney’s congregation in maryland (johnston ). morales had been arrested and sentenced to forty years in prison after being convicted of decades of sexual predation of male minors (bailey ; morse ). denhollander had been firm yet discreet about her resistance to mahaney’s presence in and blessing by immanuel baptist. the fact of her pushback, however, was enough to lead the pastoral team to propose that she relocate to another place of worship. eventually, the impasse resulted in a “voluntary” separation from her local church (immanuel baptist ). for denhollander, the message was clear. “my advocacy for sexual assault victims, something i cherished, cost me my church,” she recalled in her original victim impact state- ment (cnn ). it is worth noticing that denhollander’s criticism of her church’s pastor ryan fullerton of immanuel baptist and cj mahaney of sovereign grace ministries were also connected through two popular and influential evangelical networks: marks, based in washington, dc, and the gospel coalition. both networks host conferences, maintain interactive websites, publish christian texts, and provide resources for evangelical churches and leaders, typically with non-denominational and reformed theological tendencies. emphasis added to highlight the anonymized nature of denhollander’s condemnation of her faith community; by satisfying common evangelical expectations of respectful and demurring women, she signaled to her fellow evangelicals her insider status, her godly femininity and womanhood, and her trustworthiness. religions , , of handling of the situation was not only well-founded. it was also muted by her display of discretion. her unwillingness to identify and shame her church by name—as in, her re- fusal to “lord the situation over them”—reinforced familiar expectations about female submission in evangelicalism (piper and grudem ; griffith ). denhollander’s re- spectful demur, so to speak, was exactly the posture that had ingratiated her among american evangelicals. it was even praised by immanuel baptist in an ensuing apology that later outed them as denhollander’s church. immanuel baptist’s public apology was nonetheless faltering and revealed the troubling pattern of chilling practices in us evan- gelicalism. “fortunately,” they wrote, “because of rachael’s decision not to name our church publicly, we were able to enter into a season of deep self-examination without the scrutiny of the outside world” (immanuel baptist ). far from a survivor-centered approach, the apology seemed to reimpose the old protocols of silence, submission, self- containment, and self-sacrifice. during her interview with christianity today, denhollander was less muted. she warned us evangelicals about underwriting their support of specific figures, networks, and institutions by means of willful blindness on matters of sexual assault. the scope of the problem had become obvious. denhollander addressed the subtext of immanuel baptist’s imprimatur of cj mahaney, the implications of american evangelicalism’s confidence in the not-quite-disgraced megachurch pastor, and the open hypocrisy that this had exposed: “the ultimate reality that i live with is that if my abuser had been nathaniel morales instead of larry nassar, if my enabler had been [an sgm pastor] instead of [michigan state gymnastics coach] kathie klages, if the organization i was speaking out against was sovereign grace under the leadership of [mahaney] instead of msu under the leadership of lou anna simon, i would not only not have evangelical support, i would be actively vilified and lied about by every single evangelical leader out there. the only reason i am able to have the support of these leaders now is because i am speaking out against an organization not within their community. had i been so unfortunate so as to have been victim- ized by someone in their community, someone in the sovereign grace network, i would not only not have their support, i would be massively shunned. that’s the reality” (lee ). it should be intolerable to evangelicals of conscience, averred denhollander, to praise those who speak the truth of god’s word with absolute insistence and clarity to those outside the camp while shrinking from the same inside the camp. in the face of this double standard, she stipulated, nothing short of radical transformation would do. an awakening would be necessary, especially where logics of quiet, redemptive suffering colluded with conspiracies of silence to protect us evangelical leaders in positions of power. scrutiny was of the essence. in the months that followed her courtroom witness, and in the wake of her exhorta- tion to the american evangelical community, denhollander became an icon for a series of “holy rumblings” inside church spaces (shellnutt ). in rapid succession, debts were coming due from the many corners of us evangelicalism. in march of , cj mahaney withdrew from the prominent together for the gospel (t g) evangelical conference set for april. mahaney denied that his withdrawal was an admission of guilt or awareness. he contended that his sole desire was to avoid scandal and distraction of the gospel, but his luster was wearing thin (shellnutt a). in april of , bill hybels of willow creek community church resigned his head pastorate position and board membership at the megachurch he had founded in chicago in . after digging in against “collusion” and again, the lack of survivor-centered care is indicated by the outsized importance of the church’s own hurt feelings in the apology: “we knew we were that church…. we felt confusion, sadness, frustration, introspection, fear, and had a host of other thoughts and emotions” (ibid.) mahaney and sgm disputed the allegations; see (sovereign grace ). religions , , of “false accusations” of sexual misconduct, hybels ultimately lost the confidence of innu- merable evangelical defenders and was forced out (smietana a, b, d). in may of , paige patterson, the president of southwestern baptist theological seminary (swbts) and the architect of the conservative resurgence within the southern baptist convention (sbc), was fired by unanimous agreement of the swbts board of trustees. he was subsequently stripped of his retirement benefits and privileges. patter- son stood accused of lying to the board about two scenarios: he had counseled a domestic abuse survivor to return to her abusive spouse and had attempted to “break … down” a female student who had intended to report a sexual assault at patterson’s previous insti- tution, southeastern baptist theological seminary (shellnutt b, c). the holy rum- blings continued as influential stakeholders added their voices. southern baptist author and speaker beth moore took the unprecedented step of writing a widely disseminated open letter to the male leaders and pastors of the sbc. moore corroborated the fact of the existence of toxic environments and toxic elements in the sbc—itself a radical interven- tion to many observers. she shared her first- and second-hand knowledge of sexual har- assment, assault, and sexism in the church, and she adjured her denomination to walk the difficult road of godly repentance (moore ). entrenchment and counter-messaging occurred. nonetheless, the distance between two distinct standing ovations within the us evangelical subculture underscores the scale of the transformation in progress. in january of , megachurch pastor andy savage admitted to a “sexual incident” before his memphis congregation. the members rose from their seats to applaud his bold “confession,” enacting something like a collective rite of redemption (stetzer ; woodson ). by october of , it was denhollander who was being greeted with enthusiastic applause. at a dallas conference of preachers, leaders, and laity organized by the sbc’s ethics and religious liberty commission, denhollander insisted, “you are the voices to stand for these survivors.” justice would require resolute action, she testified. to a standing ovation, denhollander closed by urg- ing members of the sbc to courageously “stand up and fight” (denhollander ). change was dawning on the horizon. evangelical churches, denominations, and insti- tutions across the country began to embrace the #metoo and #churchtoo awakening with tangible outputs. us evangelicals were being shepherded by the spiritual example of rachael denhollander. new policies, new training initiatives, new reporting structures, new accountability mechanisms, and new forms of contrition blossomed across the country. the non-evangelical world also participated in the same narratival unfolding. inves- tigative journalists wrote lengthy pieces on sexual assault, abuse, and cover-ups in us evangelical churches. the houston chronicle released an in-depth six-part “abuse of faith” series on extensive transgressions in the southern baptist convention, incorporating a searchable database of sbc members and church officials convicted of crimes of sexual violence (tedesco et al. ). “the sbc has a sex-abuse problem,” wrote the wall street journal (ault ). eliza griswold of the new yorker detailed the lives of evangelical women who celebrated the #churchtoo movement, even as they quibbled with its “ex- vangelical” origins (griswold ). in his piece for the washington post, “the sin of si- lence: the epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church,” joshua pearse charted widespread abuse and concealment in evangelicalism. he delineated a va- riety of contributing factors, including “authoritarian leadership, twisted theology, insti- tutional protection, obliviousness about the problem and, perhaps most shocking, a di- minishment of the trauma sexual abuse creates—especially surprising in a church culture that believes strongly in the sanctity of sex” (pearse ). each story and exposé tracked the novel and agonizing awakening in the evangelical subculture throughout the united states. all parties seemed to agree: an overwhelming, unmistakable, and altogether un- precedented evangelical reckoning had arrived in north america. andy savage later faced an internal investigation at his church, resigned his position as teaching pastor, and launched another church in memphis less than two years later; see (relevant staff ). religions , , of . queer abuse* as the underside of the dominant narrative the dominant narrative outlined above is a welcome development in the us evan- gelical subculture for a host of appreciable reasons (gerson ). indeed, north ameri- can evangelicals are coming to terms in major ways with the gravity of sexual violence and the horror of bodily harm. however, the conceit of abuse as a radically new phe- nomenon on the us evangelical radar is misleading. the notion of abuse as an unconscionably negative and destructive experience is only half of the story that american evangelicalism has told itself. queers of faith know some- thing of the underside of this tale. from the underside, theologies of redemptive trauma are not being reevaluated as misapplications of scriptural principles; instead, they are be- ing reinforced as life-affirming scriptural mandates. the failure to rectify the elision in the dominant narrative, wittingly or unwittingly, amounts to complicity in the attenuation of queer stories within american evangelicalism. in order to expose this narratival elision, i will turn to two popular us evangelical christian sex manuals from “the every man se- ries.” doing so will reveal how the category of abuse* operates as a positive and inescap- ably core reality on the underside of the narrative. it will also reveal just how recently this conceptual category was still deemed a legitimate option in american evangelicalism for understanding queerness. (in truth, this alternative rendering of abuse* is still operative in too many segments of american religious and cultural life.) this section will demon- strate how unlikely it was—and is—that the dominant narrative came to represent the whole story of evangelical trauma in the united states. . .“the every man series” and purity culture theology “the every man series” is the joint production of author stephen arterburn and his various co-authors, principally fred stoeker and shannon ethridge. the premise of the series is that “sexual integrity” is a vital discipline of christian faithfulness. and, it would seem, sexual integrity is good for business. the series comprises thirty individual titles, ministry workbooks, and daily devotional texts. according to waterbook press, an imprint of penguin random house publishing, over four million books from the series have been sold to date. the series titles every young man’s battle ( ), preparing your son for every young man’s battle ( ), and every young woman’s battle ( ) each received gold medallion book awards from the evangelical christian publishers association (ecpa), having fulfilled the eligibility requirements by selling over five hundred thou- sand copies, respectively. “the every man series” echoes the same american evangelical purity culture it sim- ultaneously constructs. as artifacts of purity culture theology, the books in the series en- dorse particular gender typologies and prioritize certain imperatives around sex. purity culture norms are ratified throughout the text of the series, but consider how they are advertised on the back-covers in bold fonts: “how can any young man remain pure in the for a fascinating survey of pastoral attitudes, practices, and reflections in the wake of #metoo, see (smietana c). although “sexual integrity” is by no means a conceptual innovation of the series, it is a term repeatedly used by the authors, as in subtitles, and reflects much of the purity culture language it projects. for more on purity culture, see (gardner ; moslener ). as of september , every young man’s battle was # on amazon’s “teen & young adult dating,” # on “christian men’s issues,” and # on “christian dating & relationships”; every young woman’s battle was # on amazon’s “teen & young adult dating.” arterburn even narrated a “captivating, informative docudrama,” based on the “hard-hitting truth” of the eponymous book, called every young man’s battle (arterburn ). references to the success and awards of books can be found on waterbrook multnomah’s website (https://waterbrookmultnomah.com/books/ /every-mans-battle-revised-and-updated- th-anniversary-edition-by- stephen-arterburn-and-fred-stoeker-with-mike-yorkey/ [accessed on december ]); and the list of gold medallion book award finalists, renamed the christian book awards, can be found at https://christianbookexpo.com/bookawards/ (accessed on december ). religions , , of real world of sexual temptation?” (every young man’s battle) and “guys aren’t the only ones fighting a battle for purity” (every young woman’s battle). following amy derogatis’ work on evangelical sex manuals, i argue that “the every man series” galvanizes american evangelical purity culture by resisting and transfigur- ing its surroundings (e.g., a putatively secularized, libertine society). in evangelical sex manuals like those of “the every man series,” the catalyst for moral and cultural renewal hinges upon intimate disclosures and personal confessions of sin. as derogatis points out, in these manuals, the pursuit of individual piety and purity frees the power of the spirit for wider cultural resistance and transfiguration; therefore, “[d]esires are examined, acts are regulated, and bodies are testimonial sites” (derogatis , p. ). “the every man series” reinforces the individual, communal, and global stakes of purity culture. against the backdrop of an american culture supposedly rife with sexual temptation and sin, the series offers relevant and relatable resources for evangelical christians, specifically youths, navigating the “proper use of sexual bodies”, as limned by scripture (ibid., p. ). in accordance with purity culture theology, “the every man series” sanctions evan- gelical heterosexuality in unequivocal terms. the books in the series use a mixture of eve- ryday prose, casual storytelling, and spiritual vernacular to affirm heterosexuality. every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle go a step further. what else could be needful in the resistance and transfiguration of the contemporary moment? in response to a shifting culture, both sex manuals tackle the “issue” of homosexuality. unlike some evangelical sex manuals, which treat the topic as utterly taboo, the authors of every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle decline to transpose the “issue” onto the blank margins of the text. instead, they opt to address the matter directly, even though it expresses a serious challenge to the purity culture framework of american evangelical- ism. the uneasy inclusion of homosexuality is increasingly common in popular evangeli- cal purity manuals—for example, by john and stasi eldridge (eldridge ; eldridge and eldridge ), dobson ( , ), and timothy and kathy keller (keller and keller ). in these evangelical sex manuals, same-sex eroticism is portrayed as incompatible with the fixed commitments of sexual integrity and christian faithfulness. it is regularly associated with traumatic origins that unlock the gateway to recovery. often, the topic is broached with a self-articulated concern for the sake of their readers and their readers’ standing before god. . . tracing the structure, arguments, and paradox of queer abuse* first and foremost, with respect to every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle, the layout is itself instructive. consider the design format of each manual in relation to the discussion of queer sexuality. in every young man’s battle, twenty-three chapters are organized under seven parts. chapter twenty-three constitutes the standalone and synonymous part seven. this final section is titled, “a further important discussion: when your feelings are for other guys.” the authors invite the question of the reader’s potential “same-sex attraction,” or how his “feelings” create an experiential lens for ap- proaching the overall content of the text (arterburn and stoeker , p. ). in every young woman’s battle, twenty-five chapters are arranged under seven parts along with a concluding postscript. technically, the equivalent section on homosexuality in every young woman’s battle is neither enumerated as one of the chapters nor listed under one of the seven parts. instead, the autonomous unit is classified and positioned merely as an “afterword” (arterburn and ethridge , p. ). it is unclear whether the correspond- ing title, “if you desire other women,” is intended to insinuate a higher degree of condi- tionality in female homosexuality when compared to male counterparts. personal appli- cation is similarly advised. both sections on homosexuality, whether as a final chapter or epilogue, are discretely partitioned from the main body of the text. thematic segmenta- tion works to convey here the import of boundary-keeping when assessing the theological and therapeutic other of queer sexuality. put another way, the structural distinction in format communicates the position of difference among persons. religions , , of the authors of both evangelical sex manuals present homosexuality as a path-de- pendent condition of abuse*. in both texts, abuse* functions as an etiological explanation for same-sex orientations, and yet abuse* has no consistent definition. sometimes, the con- notation of abuse* is literal, as in bodily sexual violence. every young man’s battle states, “you may have been molested when you were younger, and that started the feelings. even though it was abuse, you couldn’t figure out why it made you feel the way you did” (ar- terburn and stoeker , p. ). likewise, in every young woman’s battle, the authors suggest, “perhaps your father or another man sexually abused you, and so you have neg- ative feelings toward men and feel you can’t trust them” (arterburn and ethridge , p. ). however, less literally, the term also seems to imply dysfunctional family systems, childhood trauma, and/or socio-cultural stimulants (e.g., exposure to specific media, ce- lebrities, events, hobbies, activities, authority figures, lessons, or materials). episodes that might qualify include watching “madonna and britney spears’s bold display of passion- ate kissing on national television” (ibid., p. ) or knowing “boys your age may not have connected with you” (arterburn and stoeker , p. ). at times, abuse* simply means the diminution or, conversely, the amplification of some feeling of inadequacy, loneliness, vulnerability, security, intimacy, sensitivity, or appreciation. the slippage is intentional and pedagogical. abuse* becomes a freighted concept in both of the evangelical sex manuals, with seemingly unlimited explanatory power. the reader, as an interested observer or as the subject of the material, is encouraged to depict abuse* retrospectively as an explanation for the presence of gay or lesbian desires. again, the depiction of abuse* to explain the origins of queer sensuality holds even in circumstances where no abuse has occurred. for instance, the abuse* of having a withdrawing father can induce queer desires (ibid.). so too the abuse* of being cherished too dearly by a mother can elicit homosexuality (arterburn and ethridge , p. ). likewise, the abuse* of an ag- gressive football coach, a billboard with “scantily clad women,” or school curricula men- tioning “’two mommies’ or ‘two daddies’” might hold the key (ibid., pp. – ). in both of the american evangelical sex manuals, the rationale for the origins of same- sex desire is anchored in abuse*. at least in these texts, there would appear to be a distinct intensity in the relationship between trauma and queerness that is less evident in discus- sions of other kinds of temptations or sins. this rationale validates and peddles old tropes within us evangelical treatments of homosexuality, which link pedophilia and incest with the birth of queer desire. notably, however, the authors of both of the texts recalibrate the timeworn paradigm. unlike the old discursive regimes that fixated on homosexuals as traumatizing predators, the new therapeutic regimes are shifting attention to homosex- uals as traumatized victims, which the authors of every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle support. both of the evangelical sex manuals discipline their read- ers to supplant an overriding fear of the predator/abuser with an evangelical “love” for the victim/abused*. this is not to say the former is fictitious and the latter altogether in- nocent, but rather that in these texts, the victim/abused* is worthy of god’s transformative love. in other words, these two manuals from “the every man series” center the victim of abuse* for deliberate pastoral and therapeutic care—albeit problematically so—rather than focusing on the perpetrator of abuse* in judgment and opprobrium. the attempt to reframe queer abuse* positively as an opportunity for the reordering love, righteousness, and empowerment with god’s grace is, to borrow a phrase from melissa hackman, an example of “desire work” (hackman , p. ). the process of centering the victim in accordance with these sex manuals seems to make abuse* an occasion for the genuine discovery of personhood. this is done in at least four ways. first, the sheer fact of the concluding units on homosexuality is noteworthy, in for more on christian discourse about homosexuality, see (viefhues-bailey ); for a primary text indicative of these associations, see (satinover ). for more on the relationship between american christianity and therapeutic responses to homosexuality, see (white ). religions , , of and of itself. the inclusion of these topics is not insignificant in terms of providing some manner of representation of queerness in american evangelical sex manuals. second, the corresponding sections on homosexuality promote a personalized encounter with the materials presented in the texts and emphasize self-interrogation. third, the moral ur- gency of this self-interrogation is coupled with a posture of compassion. for example, “while you didn’t choose to have the feelings you have, you can choose what to do with them” (arterburn and stoeker , p. ). because the evangelical sex manuals feature the victimhood of abuse* as the foundational paradigm for bracketing queer sexuality, the reader is purposefully steered toward an empathetic reaction, whether for themselves or for others as victims of abuse*. fourth, both of the texts commend self-disclosure as the culmination of this process of compassionate introspection. like so many sexual abuse survivors, the journey from silence, invisibility, confusion, and shame to acknowledge- ment, visibility, awareness, and fortitude is profound. feeling grounded and safe can build a pathway to resilience. the ability to name one’s own experience of abuse is fueled by courage and compassion; it can create a newfound sense of self and self-empower- ment. every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle trade on this same jour- ney of transformation around abuse* as desire work. broadly speaking, the transformational journey espoused by both of the evangelical sex manuals is theologically schematized. it follows the proverbial straight and narrow pathway counseled by an evangelical interpretation of scripture. in both texts, the jour- ney of transformation around abuse* involves “godly” diagnosis, therapeutic examina- tion, and restoration or rebirth for persons with queer desires. it entails the transformative healing of abuse* as well as the supposed by-product of abuse*, i.e., queerness. the path- way of confession and redemptive resilience is theologically assured for the new man or woman of god. however, the practical aspects of the transformational journey designated by the sex manuals are elusive. is it possible to overcome abuse* by eradicating queer desire in this life, and to do so permanently? is it imperative to remember the abuse* that spawned those desires in order to remain battle ready in the spiritual warfare against the flesh and sinful temptations? if one gives into temptation and experiences a lapse, does it suggest the original root trauma was insufficiently confronted or was it incorrectly iden- tified? are all homosocial thoughts and interactions equally dangerous? does renewal involve the total subjugation of queer desires or the replacement of queer desires with straight desires? tethering abuse* to sensuality in this schema has innumerable deleterious conse- quences. that said, the logic of this association is productive. the disciplinary power and productivity of abuse* that emerges from every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle contributes to the underside of the dominant narrative. after all, per both texts, if queer desire exists, then abuse* is the proper basis for filtering the entirety of one’s life experiences and disciplining oneself as an erotic subject. for readers of the evangelical sex manuals, abuse* operates as a necessary and constitutive element in coming to terms with queer desire, even for the purpose of eventual eradication. as the authors of the texts aver, “the attraction is there. you didn’t choose to be attracted to men, but you are…. we want to help you understand why you feel the way you do and provide some help for you” (arterburn and stoeker , p. ). at least one salubrious consequence flows from the association of queerness and abuse* in the sex manuals from “the every man series.” merely by bringing to light the conditions of possibility for an emergent queerness, a psy- cho-spiritual on-ramp to queer existence is established within american evangelical dis- course. the potential for the discovery of an unapologetic queer identity is thus intimated again, whether this representation is accurate or inaccurate, it nonetheless gives name to a reality left under erasure in much of us evangelical theological, pastoral, and therapeutic discourse. for more on the relationship between traumatic experiences and healing, see (jones ). for some discussion of biblical inerrancy and debates on homosexuality in evangelicalism, see (rogers ; gagnon ). religions , , of by this association, despite itself, for some readers. if momentarily, queerness becomes cognizable and recognizable—albeit shaped through the prism of abuse*. in every young man’s and every young woman’s battle, the authors center the victim of abuse* in their review of homosexuality. queer desire is the symptom of abuse*, and abuse* is the hermeneutical key for understanding and subduing queer desire. “if you had a mother or female caretaker who was unhealthy and either smothered you out of her own selfishness or was cruel to you out of her own depravity,” the authors advise, “it would interrupt the development of an attraction to women…. the foundation made you an easy target if you were approached by other men” (ibid., p. ). the process of cen- tering that is delineated by these evangelical sex manuals is not only problematic; it is also paradoxical. the process of centering that is urged in both of these texts simultaneously requires a process of decentering. these american evangelical sex manuals render abuse* to be an inescapable core reality about personhood for those with queer desires; contem- poraneously, they render abuse* to be non-essential and non-determinative for the char- acter, aim, and direction of the christian life. for both texts, dealing with abuse* is deemed an essential life mission to be undertaken by persons with queer desires. at the same time, it is deemed an impermanent project for persons with queer desires who faithfully expect the evanescence, abatement, or vanquishment of queer desire. the paradoxical framework of centering and decentering is productive in formative and malformative ways; it is also delicate. readers who encounter the concluding units that review homosexuality in the sex manuals are promised that “change is possible,” as one subheading declares. the authors of “the every man series” seek to reassure their american evangelical readers of what hangs in the balance. consider two passages that delicately balance the centering and decentering of abuse*. “if these things ring true of your life,” the authors of every young man’s battle assert, “you’re one of thousands of confused and searching men who long to know what’s normal and how to experience it. this is where your choices come in, because there’s so much hope for you, if you choose it” (ibid., p. ). the authors of every young woman’s battle proclaim, “you are not pow- erless to develop different, more healthy desires…hundreds of former gay and lesbian individuals have left their homosexual lifestyles and found wholeness in their newfound heterosexuality” (arterburn and ethridge , p. ). the messages of self-empower- ment trade, paradoxically and problematically, on messages of self-marginalization. one might even describe the process as self-annihilative. the balancing act represented in these evangelical sex manuals betrays a specific anx- iety about the paradoxical framework of abuse*. in the process of centering their own ex- periences as victims of abuse*, persons with queer desires might be tempted to embrace those desires too thoroughly at some point in time, the authors of these texts worry. the authors prescribe a concomitant process of decentering as a remedy. “remember to guard not just your body, but your mind and heart as well…. there is no shame in running from sin” (ibid., p. ). the decentering process labors to prevent the victim of abuse* from aligning too nearly with their own abuse* and the supposed consequences thereof, namely queerness. “the world will tell you that you must act on your feelings—sexualize them— and only then will you feel whole…. you can listen to the world, or you can hear another voice that appears fainter but grows stronger everyday [sic]” (arterburn and stoeker , p. ). both texts caution against such a close alignment of identification. any attempt at centering the story of abuse* must also function synchronously to decenter the same for more on the relationship between queerness and apologetics, see (tonstad ). paradox is a useful way of capturing this ongoing dynamic of investment and divestment, although i do not mean to imply a formal philosophical or logical category. evangelical sex manuals might be more inclined to describe this dynamic as “living in the tension” of christian sanctification, or the pursuit of holiness, or the struggle for victorious living, or the war between the spirit and the flesh—a dynamic that leaves room for resolution in this life or the life to come. both texts include the phone numbers and websites for exodus international, the now-defunct foremost ex-gay christian ministry that shuttered in ; for more on exodus international and ex-gay ministries, see (gerber ). religions , , of narrative. do not tarry with sin or temptation, they attest, even if it is a fundamental point of contact for self-realization. thus, in accordance with these texts, the framework of par- adox averts any alignment that could substantiate the experiences of the abused* and could justify their queer desires, given enough time or exposure to them. the productive and delicate framework of paradox in the evangelical sex manuals is also spiritually significant. the dual processes of self-empowerment and self-marginali- zation are magnified by appeals to the ultimate authority of god. authority from god is invested in godly leaders, the reader is assured. in every young man’s battle, the authors put it this way: “you can trust us when we tell you there’s a way out. you do have a choice, and that choice will lead you to what god wants for you and to the relationships he has prepared for you” (ibid., p. ). the framework of paradox, therefore, is said to rest on a godly foundation. the question of spiritual trustworthiness appears also in every young woman’s battle. the authors reveal, “when you have a personal relationship with jesus christ, you have his power available to you to help you resist any temptation and make whatever changes you need to make in order to pursue a lifestyle of sexual and emotional integrity. also know that we are cheering you on and praying for you as you seek the healthy relationships god intends for you to enjoy” (arterburn and ethridge , p. ). that is to say, the godly authority of the authors is true and comforting because the authors are simply communicating here what god actually and obviously wants when it comes to sexual integrity. the authors of these us evangelical sex manuals are insistent that persons with queer desires can trust in god and in godly authorities to help them deal with their abuse*. godly authorities can be trusted if and only if they act as an extension of the reliable, plain, and inerrant text of scripture. as the authors affirm, the trustworthiness of the bible as the unerring and manifest word of god ensures the godly foundation of the paradoxical framework captured in their texts. the authors dispense authority from god by appealing to biblical passages in a fairly typical fashion for this evangelical genre. readers can rest assured that what is commended comes straight from scripture. the authors press their readers to independently verify their trustworthiness by consulting the infallible author- ity of the bible on the matter of homosexuality and sexual morality. to be sure, the appeal to the authority of the bible as the word of god is highly in- terpreted. it is an editorialized appeal by the authors that conforms to predominate amer- ican evangelical assumptions about the bible, literalism, the reliability and power of scrip- ture, and the everyday task of interpreting the word of god. for instance, the authors of every young woman’s battle attest, “in case you question how god feels about homosexual relations, simply read the first chapter of romans…. although god hates the sin of ho- mosexuality, just as he hates all sin, he passionately and unconditionally loves all sinners regardless of the sexual battles we face” (ibid., p. ). readers are told that they can trust the godly authority of the evangelical sex manuals in “the every man series,” including its treatment of queer sexuality, because the american evangelical authors are in agree- ment with the bible. as interpreted by the authors, the bible is clear: god hates homosex- uality. ergo, readers can trust the paradoxical framework of centering and decentering the victim of abuse* as advocated by the authors for the sake of spiritual healing, sexual transformation, and the redemption of abuse*. the paradoxical framework is productive, delicate, spiritual, and, lastly, affective. as indicated by the american evangelical sex manuals, the dual processes of self-empower- ment and self-marginalization (or self-annihilation) may feel disorienting, numbing, or excruciating for the reader who undergoes them. god, the bible, and godly authorities hate the sin that the sinner (here, the homosexual victim of abuse*) ought to also hate about themselves. as suggested by the preceding passage from every young woman’s bat- tle, the severity of this hatred should be interpreted as love. as the slogan goes, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” indeed, the sinner–homosexual victim of abuse* should love them- selves by hating themselves in an unceasing spiral of paradox. after all, “god will cer- tainly honor the sacrifices you make for the sake of righteousness” (ibid., p. ). religions , , of following the evangelical sex manuals of “the every man series,” persons with queer desires are both loved and hated by god and the people of god. it is so, precisely because they are—and are made to be—their own abuse*. i. upholding and repudiating the paradox of queer abuse* in light of diverse applications of the american evangelical purity culture texts, no doubt some victims of abuse* (i.e., some evangelical queers) do discover new realities about themselves by following the regimented therapeutic pathway outlined above. for these readers of every young man’s battle or every young woman’s battle, the regulated journey of desire work is interpreted as a restless mission, even if the destination is always already deferred on this side of eternity. these victims of abuse* perceive the program- matic pathway of healing and resilience to be a truly positive, life-giving vocation. on the other hand, the eradication of queer desire does not comport with the experi- ences of many readers of us evangelical sex manuals, whether from “the every man se- ries” or from other purity culture authors like those mentioned previously. in light of these readers’ application, the vast majority of abuse* victims (i.e., the remainder of evan- gelical and ex-vangelical queers) would not describe the schematized pathway outlined in these texts as “healing.” far more likely, these victims of abuse* would describe their experiences of desire work as traumatizing, or trauma compounded by trauma. for these readers, the regulated journey of self-discovery is submerged in spiritual injury. the trauma is compounded precisely because this latter cohort of abuse* victims did attempt to follow the putative journey of transformation, healing, and restoration extolled by these evangelical sex manuals with scrupulous discipline, until they finally broke. for both sets of readers who apply the messages from these sex manuals, abuse* is the crux of the story. whether beneficial or detrimental, abuse* colors any discovery of one’s personhood, including one’s sexuality or identity, according to the texts. the victims of abuse* who remain within the story narrated by these sex manuals regard the journey as redemptive; but, the victims of abuse* who exit the story regard it as traumatic. . conclusions scholars of religion tend to conceptualize abuse in predominately negative terms, just as most survivors do. however, the divergent pathways outlined in this essay pose a relevant question: is this the only useful analytical lens at the disposal of the scholar? are there other ways the scholar of religion may diagram and dissect the framework of abuse within religious communities? i have argued that us evangelicalism—and specifically evangelical discourse directed at lgbtq persons of faith—offers scholars an opportunity to reflect upon this question by distinguishing abuse from abuse*. as i have shown, us evangelical christians have long advocated for an alternative construction of abuse* that is no less worthy of scholarly attention, if sometimes difficult to uncover through its dis- crete construction, utilization, and sublimation within the evangelical subculture. in other words, american evangelicalism presents an interesting test case for the scholar of reli- gion due to the community’s repositioning of abuse* in positive terminology for the as- semblage of identity, sexuality, community fellowship, and spiritual vocation. in my examination of every young man’s battle and every young woman’s battle, i have shown how the “problem” of queerness is structurally differentiated as a specialized although anecdotal, gerrard conley’s boy erased and “unerased” podcast depict the distressing levels of depression, self-harm, and suicidality that correlate to formal and informal conversion therapy tactics, and they point to the reasons why the american psychiatric association and many state governments in the us have condemned reparative therapy practices; conley, boy erased: a memoir of identity, faith, and family (ny: riverhead books, ). see (conley , ). i am indebted to teresa pasquale for this notion of “spiritual injury,” or “sacred wounds,” in the context of religious trauma; see (pasquale ). much of this literature in religious studies on “abuse” focuses on roman catholicism and the sexual abuse of minors, for instance, (frawley-o’dea ); however, trauma is increasingly becoming an important tool of analysis for theologians, see (warner et al. ; rambo ). religions , , of discourse in american evangelicalism. the segmentation and maintenance of purity cul- ture theology, as well as the heteronormativity refracted throughout us evangelicalism, perpetuate the underside of the dominant narrative. recognizing this dynamic corrects the tendency of insiders and outsiders to ignore the story of abuse* and queerness in us evangelicalism. the fusion of queerness to abuse* as a necessary starting point for the positive construction and performance of life in a religious community is notable. that some queers, despite the spiritual utilitarianism of abuse*, found their own way in the fog of this evangelical mythology is also worth mentioning. this is especially true because, as steven tracy and andy maurer have documented, “evangelicals shows a propensity to greatly underestimate rates of physical and sexual abuse, particularly in their own con- gregations.” to recognize and reckon with the evangelical mythology of abuse*, i would contend, is to be dis-abused. funding: this research received no external funding. institutional review board statement: not applicable. informed consent statement: not applicable. data availability statement: not applicable. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references arterburn, stephen, and fred stoeker. . every young man’s battle: strategies for victory in the real world of sexual temptation. colorado 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this paper proposes “making refuge” as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, a guiding ethos and praxis, for the engaged buddhist aspiration of responding to the social, political, economic, and planetary crises facing the world. making refuge is conceived as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. the paper will explain the rationale for making refuge by connecting the dharmic understanding of dukkha with feminist conceptualizations of the body and vulnerability. this will chart some theoretical and methodological pathways for engaged buddhism to further its liberatory aspirations in reciprocity with emergent movements in radical critical theory, contemplative studies, and social and ecological activism. the paper will also examine the effects of white supremacy in u.s. buddhism through the framework of making refuge. this will demonstrate how political healing and restorative justice might be cultivated through a dispositional ethics that pays appropriate attention to the vulnerabilities facing oppressed people. keywords: engaged buddhism; mindfulness; making refuge; vulnerability; response-ability; white supremacy; social justice; commons; feminist theory; posthumanism “the idea of a refuge is that, when you’re in that refuge, you feel like you have that safe space and support and nurturing. that’s what i’d really push for if i had more than six months left [to live].” aaron lee, the “angry asian buddhist” blogger this paper proposes “making refuge” as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, a guiding ethos and praxis, for the engaged buddhist aspiration of responding to the social, political, economic, and planetary crises facing the world. making refuge is conceived as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. this was the subject of a three-day retreat-workshop held in berkeley, california, in july for the mind & life institute’s think tank program with co-funding support from the lenz foundation. the workshop invited academic and nonacademic participants with backgrounds in dharma training, contemplative practice and pedagogy, and social and ecological activism. a subtheme of the workshop quoted in (littlefair a). the participants were: beth berila, ph.d., professor of ethnic and women’s studies at st. cloud state university and yoga-based social justice educator; peter doran, ph.d., lecturer in law and sustainable development at queens university belfast and zen practitioner of the soto and thich nhat hanh lineages; dawn haney, co-director of buddhist peace fellowship, activist and graduate of spirit rock meditation’s center’s community dharma leaders program; funie hsu, ph.d., assistant professor of american studies at san jose state university, former board member of buddhist peace fellowship and public intellectual on asian american struggles in the history of u.s. buddhism; mushim ikeda, founding religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of examined the challenges of racial injustice, particularly the influence of white supremacy on the history of u.s. buddhism and on the commercialization of mindfulness meditation. this paper will first explain the rationale for making refuge by connecting the dharmic understanding of dukkha with feminist conceptualizations of the body and vulnerability. this will chart some theoretical and methodological pathways for engaged buddhism to further its liberatory aspirations in reciprocity with emergent movements in radical critical theory, contemplative studies, and social and ecological activism. the paper will then examine the effects of white supremacy in u.s. buddhism through the framework of making refuge. this will demonstrate how political healing and restorative justice might be cultivated through a dispositional ethics that pays appropriate attention to the vulnerabilities facing oppressed people. . starting with a promise the idea of making refuge was conceived out of dissatisfaction with the critical impasses that have stalled debates on contemporary mindfulness. we share the concerns of various academic discourses and media commentaries that have critiqued the ideological-political entanglements of secular mindfulness with the dominant logics of neoliberalism (forbes and burke ; ng and purser ; purser and loy ). but we have been frustrated with the repeated misunderstanding that such critiques are dismissing the potential benefits of secular mindfulness to individual well-being, or that such critiques are asserting a kind of buddhist chauvinism that claims ownership over mindfulness practice. making refuge was developed to pave theoretical and methodological pathways beyond these impasses. how can we resituate mindfulness within a larger ecology of sociopolitical relations, while holding space for personal stress reduction and well-being, so that mindfulness does not become complicit with the individualizing, depoliticizing logics of neoliberalism? how can we explore secular applications of mindfulness in diverse domains of life, while honouring the historical buddhist legacies that have transmitted the practice, so that effects of cultural erasure are not perpetuated against asian buddhist heritages in white-dominant societies like the u.s.? the contemplation of these questions led us to reconsider the notion of refuge. in speaking of refuge, we are partly alluding to the vows of the triple gem, which may be formally (re)taken in various ceremonial contexts. but as an orienting praxis-ideal for buddhist living in general, “taking refuge” or “going for refuge” in the triple gem is also informally (re)taken-in-action. by engaging in daily acts that accord with the vows of refuge—in such formal contexts as alms-giving, meditation, or scriptural study; or in such informal contexts as showing kindness to strangers or doing community service—a person is performatively making and remaking, fulfilling or failing, the promise of refuge they are given over to, regardless of whether they recite the vows of the triple gem or not. “refuge” in this generalized sense functions as a shorthand to encapsulate the aspirations and activities of compassionate living to which a buddhist is committed. the varying schools of buddhism delineate the notion of refuge differently. we do not pretend to hold expertise on the plurality of these perspectives. we simply recognise that there is room for play in how we might speak of the aspirations and activities encapsulated by this shorthand of refuge within buddhist contexts and beyond. the phrase “taking refuge” or “going for refuge” is one of several possible expressions; it could also be dharma teacher of east bay meditation center in oakland, california, community activist and diversity consultant; david loy, ph.d. author and dharma teacher of the sanbo kyodan lineage; rhonda magee, ph.d., professor of law at the university of san francisco, a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction and fellow of the mind & life institute; edwin ng, ph.d. cultural theorist, independent scholar and public intellectual on the cultural translation of buddhism and mindfulness; jack petranker, director of the mangalam research center for buddhist languages and dharma teacher of the nyingma school; ron purser, ph.d., professor of management at san francisco state university and critic of mainstream mindfulness; nathan doshin woods, ph.d., anthropologist, writer, and novice zen priest at sweetwater zen center in national city, california; zack walsh, ph.d. candidate in process studies at claremont school of theology and research associate at the institute for advanced sustainability studies in potsdam, germany. religions , , of rendered as “to put oneself in the shelter of”, “to rely on”, or “to give oneself over”, to the buddha (as exemplary figure), the dharma (as the teachings of the buddha) and the sangha (as the buddhist community). these are all reasonable ways to translate different aspects of “refuge” in the different languages of buddhism. we draw inspiration from this plurality and wish to experiment with speaking of the promise of making refuge as the work of building conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. a pivotal theoretical move for us is to connect buddhist understandings with judith butler’s theory of performativity, similar to what hsiao-lan hu (hu ) does in her study on a buddhist-feminist social ethic for peacemaking in the global community. hu’s work brings an important feminist voice to the scholarly genre of buddhist critical or social theory (boon et al. ; hattam ; loy ; ng ; shields ; wallis et al. ) to advance the spiritual-activist objectives of engaged buddhism (king ; jones ). in this-worldly nibbāna: a buddhist-feminist social ethic for peacemaking (hu ), hu reads the buddhist teachings of non-self and karma alongside butler’s theory of performativity, which examines both the processes of being acted on and the conditions of possibilities for acting (butler , , , ). the theory of performativity challenges the conventional ways by which individual bodies are either regarded as discrete entities or blended into some amorphous social body. it cuts a middle path between these reductionisms to emphasize the shifting network of relations by which the body is bound, alerting us instead to how the life and action of any given body marked with certain identifiable boundaries is made possible by social and material relations preceding and exceeding those boundaries. hu formulates a buddhist analysis of the constructedness of gender by drawing the theory of performativity into dialogue with the buddhist concept of rupā (form). rupā is typically understood as referring to material forms, but hu demonstrates that it may also include “the social conventions and prescriptions that strongly suggest, support, impose, and reinforce gendered identities and gendered behaviors through gendered colors, toys, chores, career ambitions, postures, uses of language, etc.” (hu , p. ). hu thus provides a feminist-informed corrective to the early buddhist social theory articulated by the likes of ken jones and david loy. loy, for instance, mapped the buddhist understanding of dukkha (suffering or unsatisfactoriness) onto broader social structures to speak of social dukkha. he argued that the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion are conditionings that also take institutional forms, like corporate greed, the military industrial complex, and the public relations machinery of the media. but just as the buddhist teaching of non-self may liberate individuals from the three poisons, it can also be used more broadly to liberate people collectively from institutionalized forms of greed, hatred, and delusion, because such structures and systems have no inherent essence and can be changed (loy ). while loy’s buddhist social theory attempted to elucidate the relation between personal and collective suffering, it remained unclear how the actions of individual bodies may be mutually impacted by broader conditions. by connecting buddhist concepts with feminist analysis of subjectivity, hu addresses this gap and opens channels of inquiry for the broader feminist-inspired reparative task of transformative healing and restorative justice. we align ourselves with these objectives. the orienting point for our conceptualisation of making refuge will be the fundamental buddhist teachings on dukkha and anicca (impermanence) (access to insight ). particularly, we want to read these teachings with butler’s performative account of the relationship between vulnerability and ethicopolitical agency. the contemplative logic of the first foundation of the mindfulness—i.e., of paying appropriate attention to how a body is unavoidably exposed to vulnerability as it navigates the world—will serve as the nexus for this cross-reading of buddhist and feminist analyses. muller religions , , of . paying appropriate attention to vulnerability on butler’s account, given that the body “is less an entity than a living set of relations. [it] cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting”. this means that “the dependency of human and other creatures on infrastructural support exposes a specific vulnerability that we have when we are unsupported, when those infrastructural conditions characterising our social, political, and economic lives start to decompose, or when we find ourselves radically unsupported under conditions of precarity or under conditions of threat” (butler , pp. – ). understood in this manner, exposure to vulnerability is an ontological characteristic of social and ecological relations as well as a ground for politics and ethics. this account of vulnerability resonates with the first noble truth of dukkha, in not regarding the precariousness of the body as a threat to be fought off or a lack to be overcome. precariousness arises in a “co-extensive” way at birth. the likelihood of any newborn’s survival depends on existing relations of material support and the care of others (lorey , p. ). these preconditions for living are not just an existential-material challenge facing newborns. they must be accepted repeatedly—momentarily, situationally and ceaselessly—from infancy to childhood to adulthood to old age; that is, unless the vicissitudes of life give way to death. death cannot be mastered. as butler ( , pp. – ) puts it: “no amount of will or wealth can eliminate the possibilities of illness or accident for a living body”. or in buddhist parlance, dukkha is a fact of existence, not least because the body will age, decay, and die. to frankly admit that choiceless exposure to vulnerability makes one materially and relationally dependent allows one to take an affirmative stance regarding the precariousness of life. it affirms that living is only possible with care, trust, and safety. we are not speaking of refuge just because it is a convenient allusion to the vows of the triple gem, even as it admittedly allows us as engaged buddhists to speak of our dharma commitments more forthrightly. the precariousness of life allows us to affirm the buddhist truths of dukkha and anicca. but affirming the precariousness of life also invites a consideration of how everyone is given over without choice to a certain promise of making refuge. this promise is an open-ended task of bearing truthful witness and becoming responsive to vulnerability, whether human or nonhuman, buddhist or non-buddhist, “believer” or “non-believer”. precariousness here refers not to the life of any specific body but to the conditions of its existence—not conditions that make everyone the same, but conditions shared by everyone. precariousness is always shared-in-difference, because it is at once a “commoning” and a separating factor; the exposure to vulnerability we share with everyone is also what distinguishes us from others. political theorist isabell lorey explains that precariousness denotes a relational difference or “a shared differentness” that is at once divisive and connective: “what is connective is not a pre-existing common good to which one could have recourse; instead it is something that is only engendered in political and social agency” (lorey , p. ). it is important to consider a second dimension, the hierarchizing of precarity, as a relational difference that does not exist apart from (but which is constitutive of) social, ecological, and political interdependence. under the power arrangements of existing material conditions, precarity is expressed as a “classifying and discriminating differentiation”. prevailing logics of domination exploit (unequal) existential-material exposure to vulnerability by targeting those perceived to be a threat to be fought or even exterminated. exposure to vulnerability is thus shared-in-difference not just in an ontological sense, but also in a sociopolitical sense, since precariousness is shaped by hierarchies that discriminate and judge what lives are worth living. this segmentation produces what butler ( , pp. – ) describes as the “differential distribution” of symbolic and material insecurities. the exposure to the term “commoning” is used here also to connect the proposal for making refuge with discourses and practices aimed at cultivating systemic conditions of flourishing-in-difference as a response to the failures of capitalism and the planetary crisis (bollier and helfrich ; johnson-debaufre et al. ; kostakis and bauwens ; mulder ; walsh ). we discuss commoning below. religions , , of vulnerability we share in difference also implies exposure to existential-material inequality and injustice, because precarity is always both an ontological and sociopolitical condition. lorey writes: precarity can therefore be understood as a functional effect arising from the political and legal regulations that are specifically supposed to protect against general, existential precariousness. from this perspective, domination means the attempt to safeguard some people from existential precariousness, while at the same time this privilege of protection is based on a differential distribution of the precarity of all those who are perceived as other and considered less worthy of protection. (lorey , p. ) in butler’s writings, she speaks of how the longstanding war on terror and prevailing modes of imperialist-militaristic domination have rendered certain lives ungrievable (butler , ). we invite you to consider our claims about the differential distribution of precarity, not just in terms of their logical consistency, but also against your own lived experience of responding to the exposure to vulnerability we share in difference. because if you’re an academic reader (especially in the united states), you may have heard of or participated in the signing of petitions or the forming of committees to address concerns about academic freedom, social justice, or the safety of students of diverse backgrounds since the election of the th president of the united states. if you are a nonacademic reader (in the united states or otherwise), we trust you would have at least witnessed through your daily media practices the fears caused by growing precarity, if not participated in various conversations or collective actions to assist, comfort others, or to fight and guard against present and looming dangers. amidst all this, we trust too that you would have witnessed the stubbornness and unreasonableness of certain habits and systems of power we live under, like the resurgence of white nationalism, fascism, and nazism. . making refuge as engaged buddhist praxis the notion of making refuge pivots around the intersections of butler’s account of vulnerability (butler ) and the buddhist understanding of dukkha and anicca, both of which are predicated on mindfulness of contingency and conditionality. butler expresses this when she says: “although precarious life is a generalized condition, it is, paradoxically, the condition of being conditioned.” (butler , p. ). making refuge is thus formulated as a conceptual placeholder and analytical rubric for bringing buddhist perspectives into dialogue with other knowledge practices, to examine this generalized condition of being conditioned in specific domains. making refuge not only refers to the interdependence between human bodies and communities with the material and symbolic structures of support (or the lack thereof), but also to the planetary interdependence between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ecological systems that support them (or don’t). the “making refuge” workshop, funded by the mind & life institute and lenz foundation, tested the viability of making refuge as an act of sociopolitical healing and activism through collective practices of contemplation, ceremony, and hospitality. it also examined how making refuge is shaped by the differing degrees of exposure to vulnerability facing racialized subjects living under white supremacy in the united states, and with regard to planetary challenges posed by the anthropocene. the participants considered the conceptual-analytical reorientation outlined above by relating them a related notion of “sanctuary” has regained political currency in the u.s. under the trump administration, where “sanctuary cities” provide a range of political and social refuge, to limit federal enforcement of immigration law to deport undocumented immigrants (cottle ). buddhist peace fellowship has hosted a dialogue/online curriculum on the inner (spiritual) and outer (political) dimensions of sanctuary with dharma teacher zenju earthlyn manuel and grassroot educator eddy zheng (buddhist peace fellowship ). we note these here to highlight prevailing movements that resonate with our proposals for making refuge, and which can serve as interlocutors to refine and tease apart the overlapping notions of “refuge” and “sanctuary”. the summary report for the workshop has been submitted to the mind & life institute, and the findings will be forthcoming online. religions , , of to their respective areas of experience and expertise with these overarching questions: what is refuge? where and when do we encounter refuge? who or what makes space for refuge? participants collectively explored mindfulness while considering (unjust and unequal) exposure to vulnerability by considering the following passage from butler as a dialogical ground for secular and buddhist approaches: “[v]ulnerability is not a subjective disposition. rather, it characterizes a relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions that impinge on or affect us in some way. as a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence; indeed, where receptivity and responsiveness become the basis for mobilizing vulnerability rather than engaging in its destructive denial” (butler , p. ). we suggested this passage as a guide for reflection because it demonstrates the flexibility and relevance of refuge for buddhist and non-buddhist or secular traditions. the conceptualization of vulnerability articulated here turns on the theory of performativity, which conceives of the body in terms of the processes of being acted on and conditions of possibilities for acting. this is amendable with the basic buddhist understanding regarding the conditions of change giving rise to dukkha and to karmic agency without self-essence (hu ). the further clarification of these intersections between buddhist nondualist understandings and a radical nonbinary critique can help to develop the genre of buddhist critical theory in reciprocity with the broader development of engaged buddhism. by paying attention to existential-material vulnerability in this manner, we are also giving space for the e cognition model that is informing contemplative science research. embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive ( e) approaches to cognition provide new ways of understanding how minds and bodies are coproduced in interaction with environments (thompson ; hutchins ). such innovative approaches help buddhists and contemplatives better understand the role of cognition in social and ecological systems, affording us new ways to more consciously and sustainably design structures and systems to support ethical values. mindfulness and buddhist concepts (like interdependence and no-self) help us not only become aware of our own subjective (cognitive and affective) processes, but also become aware of the social and ecological conditions underlying our existence and the possibilities for transforming perception and behavior “intra-actively” with material transformations (barad ; giorgino and walsh ). interpreting making refuge across religious and secular contexts further accounts for the ways oppression and liberation are shaped not only by psycho-spiritual development, but by rapidly changing political and economic landscapes, impacted by the emergence of powerful new technologies like smart and conscious cities, the rise of automation, computational algorithms, and postcapitalism (gibson-graham ; mason ; rifkin ; srnicek and williams ). across such diverse contexts, making refuge investigates the contingencies of responsibility and how to become more responsible in an era beset by great social transformation and anthropogenic climate change, while at the same time providing a horizon for liberation struggles that accounts for people’s disproportionate exposure to vulnerability and their shared response-ability to provide the common conditions for flourishing-in-difference. commoning provides the conditions for flourishing-in-difference through the harmonious and ever-complexifying contrast between commoner’s self-determination and ever-expanding sense of community solidarity. bauwens and ramos ( ) envision an ecology of the commons created through “dynamic solidarities and collaborations across ontologically different commons communities” (bauwens and ramos , p. ), which together constitute the seed forms of a postcapitalist phase transition. commoning illustrates how freedom and self-determination are dependent on building richer, more intricate connections to communities of human and nonhuman beings, forces, and objects. in his essay, “reality as commons,” weber ( ) writes that “the commons describes an ontology of relations that is at the same time existential, economic and ecological (weber , p. ) commoning considers the coexistence of living things on this planet as a joint, creative process, one that increases religions , , of the aliveness of the biosphere and the cultural sphere” (weber , p. ). sharing resources in common is needed to make refuge for those disproportionately exposed to vulnerability in a warmer world racked by instability, conflict, and growing resource constraints. to host the semantic resonances of these different sets of discourses, dharma, and secular aspirations, we are inspired by donna haraway’s recent writings on the challenges of the anthropocene. she speaks of the need to variously inhabit passion and action, detachment and attachment to cultivate “response-ability”— a collective knowing and doing that enacts an ecology of practices. this involves the task of “making kin” across “lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (haraway , p. ). we affiliate the idea of making refuge with the task of making kin. as a counterpart to making kin, the promise of making refuge must extend beyond human lives. making refuge must be a multispecies affair. there is thus an opening to bring buddhist wisdom into dialogue with current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences questioning human exceptionalism. studies on multispecies ethnography, new materialism, posthumanism, bio- and ecocentrism, and indigenous wisdom for example, attempt to overcome anthropocentrism by considering the agency of nonhumans (livingston and puar ; ogden et al. ; parreñas ). they favor relational ontologies over dualistic ontologies predicated on binaries like human/nonhuman, domesticated/wild, and culture/nature. these studies do not just acknowledge that humans coexist with other life forms, but argue that our messy entanglements with nonhuman lives, landscapes, and technologies must factor into accounts of existence. how might buddhist teachings on interdependence and nonharm, for example, dialogue with such outlooks to cultivate more compassionate ways of living with nonhuman others? consider the practice of 放生/fangsheng (releasing life) performed by buddhists in places like taiwan, hong kong, singapore, malaysia, and indonesia. practitioners would release small mammals or birds or fishes into the wild as an act of merit-making. but this has led to unintended consequences. the practice has spawned unethical businesses of animal breeding. because the animals were bred in captivity, they lack the capacity to survive in the wild, not to mention that some of the animals released may be invasive species that threaten native species (wordie ; sherwood ). in response to these problems, a buddhist-inspired organization in singapore called animal human alliance (aha) has been advocating for an alternative practice of 生/husheng (protecting life), which nurtures conditions of safety for animals living precariously in an ongoing day-to-day manner, rather than performing periodic acts of freeing captive animals (animal human alliance n.d.; chan ). in singapore, there is an estimated population of , street cats, most of which are found in the densely populated, high-rise public-housing estates that house some % of the . million population. cats in the estates live in a liminal zone because it is technically illegal to keep cats as pets within the flats (although some residents do keep cats at home and the authorities do not intervene unless a neighborly dispute leads to complaints, for instance). but the boundaries that criminalize the life of cats in the residential areas of singapore are extremely porous, because there is no law to prohibit them from inhabiting the common corridors and shared public areas of the housing estates. cats are routinely abandoned in these areas when they are no longer wanted, and should the authorities be called to deal with the overpopulation of street cats or any purported public health nuisance caused by them, they would be rounded up for culling. this has prompted a vibrant cat welfare scene in this challenge of embodying relational ontologies over dualistic ones has implications on pressing political issues of the day, such as the refugee crisis facing the world and the mistreatment of migrants. for example, hsu ( ) has argued that the trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of detaining and prosecuting migrants attempting to cross the u.s. border draws on a dualistic ontology that dehumanizes racialized subjects as “animals”, and replicates the ideology used to incarcerate japanese american citizens during the second world war. the work of making refuge beyond human exceptionalism thus relates to the historical erasure of asian american buddhists which we discuss below, and we underscore here the relevance of posthumanist thinking for a more compassionate future for both humans and nonhumans. religions , , of which groups and individuals volunteer to feed, rescue, nurse, foster, and rehome cats or maintain a safe environment for them as community cats. volunteers also engage in trap, neuter, and release activities to manage the cat population. social media plays a pivotal role in the sharing of sightings of abandoned, abused, sick, or injured cats, as well as appeals for donations to cover food costs or vet fees, especially for elderly volunteers without an income. cat welfare in singapore emerges from the contingencies of human and nonhuman coexistence. the shared vulnerabilities of people and cats are entangled with the affordances and prohibitions of the built environment and digital technologies. aha brings the dharma-inspired practice of husheng to cat welfare, raising awareness of issues and donating supplies to support volunteers, including monasteries sheltering cats (as well as dogs). the practice of husheng offers a more expansive, relational approach to merit-making than fangsheng, which inadvertently subjugates animal lives and the environment for human benefit, and thus reproduces human exceptionalism. husheng provides an example of making refuge in practice, one that does not just attend to animal lives, but which also holds the potential to decenter dualistic ontologies between human and animals, and between so-called domesticated and stray lives. to cultivate more sustainable ecologies of relations entangling human and nonhuman lives, the promise of making refuge must also pay appropriate attention to the roles of objects and things, because there can be no vitality without the agency of “vibrant matter”—the agency of tectonic plates, glacier movements, rocks, rivers, bacteria, insects, styrofoam, silicon chips, and other “hyperobjects”—whose effects reverberate over durations of time that far exceed but coexist alongside the much briefer duration of a human lifespan (bennett ; braidotti ; moore and rivera ; morton , ; tsing ). these all constitute cross-modulating forces and conditions of im/possibility for living and dying. the promise of making refuge can host a dialogical space for buddhist and secular approaches to mindfulness to converse with the posthumanist and new materialist turn in critical humanities and social science research (bryant et al. ; coole and frost ; crockett and robbins ; malik and avanessian ; rieger and waggoner ). making refuge should be explored not just in sociopolitical life but also on a planetary scale. what would it be like to mindfully cultivate a fresh way of “planetary thinking”, so that by learning to relate to the world-in-becoming on very long timescales, “human history and culture can take on unfamiliar shapes [that alter] conceptions of what makes something ‘important’ and what does not” (clark , p. ). this is admittedly a long-term hope, but we don’t think it is wishful thinking to take these seemingly idealistic matters seriously in the present moment, even if the immediate effects or applications are not apparent. regardless of whether we practice mindfulness for stress reduction, creativity, or awakening, mindfulness does not provide a quick-fix solution because the existential-material exposure to vulnerability we share in difference has no quick-fix solution. . heritage buddhism and white supremacy in the united states to demonstrate the applicability of making refuge as an analytical framework, a guiding ethos and praxis, consider the cultural erasure facing heritage buddhists in the history of buddhism and the development of secular mindfulness in the u.s. hsu ( a) has interrogated the unacknowledged operations of white supremacy alongside the neoliberal logics of governmentality shaping the adaptation of mindfulness in educational contexts. she connects analogous critiques of how race and cultural appropriation shape the mainstreaming of yoga (antony ; puustinen and rautaniemi ) with joseph cheah’s study of white supremacy vis-à-vis the burmese american buddhist experience. . cheah argues that a system of white racial superiority functions invisibly as the “standard of normality for many white buddhists and sympathizers” (cheah , p. ). he draws a distinction between cultural rearticulation and racial rearticulation. the former allows the cosmological understandings and customary practices of a different cultural tradition and those of a host culture to be mutually intelligible and worthy of respect, while the latter refers to a process of infusing the religions , , of knowledge practices of others with “new meanings derived from one’s own culture in ways that preserve the prevailing system of racial hegemony” (cheah , p. ). one instance of racial rearticulation in the mainstreaming of mindfulness is evident in the response given by insight meditation teacher trudy goodman when asked about the critique of mindfulness. rather than address the logics of the critique, she says: i think these critiques come from buddhist fundamentalists. i mean, if you really want to see watered-down buddhism, travel to the beautiful zen temples of korea, a country where buddhism is still alive and well, and you’ll see all the ladies in temples working their malas, chatting about their kids, sometimes shucking peas; the temples are very much village and urban gathering places. how many people are deeply practicing? quoted in (lion’s roar ) this response is problematic, not least because the claim that critics are fundamental buddhists is an ad hominem fallacy, but also because goodman erases the historicity of diverse buddhist heritages when she evokes the anachronistic idea (emerging out of the historical trend of buddhist modernism) that a meditation-centric approach to buddhism has always been the normative standard of “deep practice” (mcmahan ). goodman clearly does not appreciate the social obligations or familial ties that bring caregivers and children to the temple when she dismisses their merit-making or devotional practices as superficial dharma. what is the purpose of trivializing the spiritual, emotional, and material labor of women, “othered” by virtue of their race and religion, when she evokes the imagery of nonwhite asian women shucking peas? in her response, there is no substantial examination of pertinent issues, just the deflecting of critique with one-upmanship and even (unintentional) racism. hsu has communicated these issues beyond academic circles in an article for buddhadharma/lion’s roar entitled “we’ve been here all along” (hsu b). she makes a plea for greater recognition of the effaced contributions of asian american buddhist heritages who have transmitted buddhist teachings in the u.s. she recounts the stories of the kimura family and reverend ryo imamura to remind us of how asian american buddhists have historically been oppressed and policed, because their race and religion are considered suspicious and perpetually foreign in a society built on white supremacy. as exemplified by recurring fears of yellow peril and the incarceration of japanese americans, diasporic asian or asian american buddhists have had to suppress or hide their dharma inheritance and the cultural specificities of their ancestral heritages to avoid persecution, while convert white buddhists (if they are not embarrassed about taking responsibility for this label) enthusiastically declare their expertise of buddhism by making universalizing claims about its true essence and about human nature, while dismissing the “cultural baggage” of asian or asian american buddhists. why are the affordances of white supremacy (accumulated at the expense of others) not considered a form of cultural baggage worth owning up to? vulnerability ought not to be considered a subjective disposition but a condition of being conditioned by a field of objects, forces, and passions. we do not blame any individual when we decry the affordances of privilege that individuals wield throughout the history of white supremacy impacting buddhism in the u.s. rather, we invite mindfulness to be practiced critically with respect to how un/intended effects of harm are perpetuated by people with different affordances due to unequal material conditions of exposure to vulnerability. privilege is not-self and co-dependently arisen, just as vulnerability is not-self and co-dependently arisen. we invite practitioners to bear truthful witness and become responsive to the un/intentional effects of our actions and subjectivities without taking it personally. see (payne ). religions , , of . the injustice of not being heard; are you listening? this paper opened with a quote by the late aaron lee, a young asian american who blogged as arun “the angry asian buddhist” (littlefair b). lee came to prominence in the buddhist blogosphere after he critiqued buddhadharma magazine for excluding asian american buddhists in their portrayal of buddhism in the u.s. (arunlikhati ). when this paper was conceived, we learnt that lee was diagnosed with lymphoma shortly after turning , and it has been estimated he had three months to live (littlefair a). he shared in a post entitled “be the refuge” (arunlikhati ) that because of his minority ancestry, his chances of finding a stem cell donor are very slim. but even at the cusp of life and death, lee faithfully embodied the promise of making refuge we are describing here. he continued to offer himself in service to others by organizing a marrow donation drive. this, he wrote, proved to be a refuge for his friends from the feelings of powerlessness. it consoled and empowered them, as well as concerned strangers, that they could provide assistance in finding a cure (arunlikhati ). while there was no guarantee that a marrow transplant would cure the cancer, as it eventually happened when lee died some months after a successful transplant, this was a moment where lee and friends and strangers shared vulnerability to host conditions of trust and safety for living and dying well together. aaron lee’s condition attested to the differential distribution of precarity discussed earlier. it communicated with urgency the unevenness of existential-material exposure to vulnerability that arises in relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions conditioned by the history of white supremacy in the united states. the reality of existential-material inequality also clues us in to why lee might have had to take on the persona of an angry blogger. the force of passionate anger provided lee the means to negotiate an existing field of unjust conditions which have historically made it difficult to hear the unacknowledged oppression and exclusion of those un/intentionally harmed. it is crucial to understand the injustice of not being heard to understand how our proposal for making refuge is guided by an ethos of response-ability. stauffer ( ) describes the injustice of not being heard as ethical loneliness, which is the feeling of not being heard and being abandoned by humanity. it occurs when people suffer not only the harms of systemic conditions of injustice, but the added harms of having their suffering and calls for recognition of their suffering and for justice trivialized or ignored. stauffer illustrates the dangers of ethical loneliness through stories of survivors of the holocaust as well as survivors of large-scale violence in places like africa, south america, and eastern europe. she recounts scenarios from truth commissions where the failure to listen well resulted in ethical loneliness. ethical loneliness occurs, for example, when those bearing witness fixate on affirming stories of harmony, resilience, or the overcoming of tragedy, and fail to listen to stories of anger, resentment, or destruction. their fixation with positive stories paints a simplistic picture of reparative justice by assuming there is no place for uncooperative, challenging expressions and encounters. to the contrary, expressions of anger and resentment are reasonable forms of action in the face of continued neglect of suffering. if we learn how to listen by “staying with the trouble” and the discomfort it provokes, then we may hear a call for justice in expressions of anger and resentment. we may hear a call to redress the neglect of the harm suffered and assure that violence will not recur. if lee communicated with an angry persona, he may have been asking whether we are truly listening. making refuge, which involves the task of building conditions of trust and safety for living and dying well together, can be performed in manifold ways. marginalized voices in american buddhism face the danger of having one’s sense of humanity, sense of belonging, and legitimate expressions of suffering ignored or trivialized. oppression is not only suffered through large-scale orchestrated acts, but also in mundane heartbreak. this can happen when asian or asian american buddhists hear convert white buddhists disparage their ancestral and cultural inheritance. it can also happen when a buddhist magazine speaks of a more promising future for buddhism without including the history of asian heritages that provided us the gift of refuge in the first place. or as it happened, when buddhadharma/lion’s roar were surprised by a backlash to hsu’s piece, such that they had to publish a statement of support for her views from a respected white male monastic (deveaux and amaro ). religions , , of why do we have a habit of disregarding others? why do we hear, but not listen? how might we stay with difficult encounters and learn from discomfort instead? we can better understand making refuge as a praxis and ethos of response-ability by considering stauffer’s thoughts on ethical loneliness in the context of the harms faced by marginalized heritage buddhists in the u.s. we redirect our attention from considerations of intent and culpability to considerations of shared exposure to vulnerability and the differing degrees of harms suffered. an ethos of response-ability calls on us to take responsibility precisely because we are not directly responsible for the effects of systemic violence, precisely because the consequences of un/intentional action are not-self. an ethos of response-ability hosts a space for engaged buddhists to cultivate new insights about teachings of emptiness and interdependence by listening more carefully and compassionately with others across differing lines of affliction and affiliation. an ethos of response-ability reminds us that sovereignty is not to be independent but to be dependent. it reminds us that self-care is impossible outside of our relationship to others. we need others to gift trust, safety, and dignity, to feel value as agential selves, and to live and die well together. as a praxis, response-ability is embodied as non-normative dispositional ethics (beausoleil ). a dispositional ethics cultivates moral responsibility as a situated and momentary practice of receptivity and responsiveness. as a situational practice of receptive responsiveness, ethical cultivation is focused on the affective conditions rather than the substantive terms of any moral encounter. practicing mindfulness according to such a dispositional ethics could take the form of sensitizing oneself to, affirming the dignity of, and becoming response-able for lives subjugated by the logics of oppression (walsh ). to draw the paper to a close, we would like to locate an ethos of response-ability in some common practical advice given during mindfulness practice: no matter how many times you are distracted, there’s no need to blame yourself or take it personally, just pick it up and start again; if you start a thousand times, that is the practice. similarly, an ethos of response-ability is about learning to fail better. making refuge is a ceaseless task, precarious work. the promise of making refuge places a universal demand on us to take response-ability for the conditions of safety shared by humans and nonhumans in this precarious world, but this promise of refuge for whomever and whatever can only be fulfilled by giving ourselves over to the contingencies of the particular. . conclusions: #makingrefuge this paper has elaborated a series of propositions for the idea of making refuge, which is understood as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. while making refuge is inspired by the vows of the triple gems and allows engaged buddhists to forthrightly express their dharma commitments, it is not confined to buddhist praxis or audiences. we demonstrated this by connecting the dharma understanding of dukkha with feminist-informed conceptualizations of the body and vulnerability. undergirded by this conceptualization of dukkha-vulnerability, the promise of making refuge provides a means to resituate mindfulness for both buddhist and non-buddhist purposes. as part of the work of making refuge, mindfulness needs to pay appropriate attention to the conditions that expose living beings, humans, and nonhumans to differing degrees of vulnerability. in this way, making refuge can serve as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, as well as a praxis and guiding ethos, for addressing the different situations in which precarity is negotiated. for instance, to address the social and ecological harms of unbridled capitalism, the work of making refuge would not simply utilize mindfulness for stress reduction or personal well-being, beneficial as these may be to the individual. rather, by locating precarity within a web of relations, the work of making refuge would also examine how existing structures and systems condition the arising of stress, exploitation, and inequality. engaged buddhists can perform making refuge through dialogical experimentations with others to explore alternative arrangements in relation to the commons, postcapitalism, and sustainability, for example. religions , , of we also considered making refuge in relation to the harms suffered by asian heritage buddhists living under conditions of white supremacy in the u.s. the dharmic-feminist conceptualization of vulnerability allowed us to apply making refuge as an analytical rubric to examine the concerns expressed by asian american buddhist commentators like funie hsu and the late aaron lee. particularly, we considered hsu’s commentary in buddhadharma/lion’s roar on the cultural erasure suffered by the japanese american buddhist community. unlike lee, who adopted the online persona of an “angry asian buddhist” to amplify the voices of heritage buddhists, hsu’s commentary did not adopt an angry tone but a reconciliatory one. yet, it attracted angry reactions, ostensibly from white readers, that accused her of being a false buddhist and of sowing discord between heritage and convert buddhists. we dwell on the matter of anger to underscore the restorative, healing potential when we become mindful of the differing degrees of vulnerability and affordances of privilege (or the lack thereof) unevenly distributed under prevailing arrangements of power. as we write this conclusion, the world has just witnessed the court hearing for the sexual assault allegations by christine blasey ford against brett kavanaugh, the incoming u.s. supreme court justice. the whole affair revealed starkly who is allowed to be angry and who isn’t. ford had to maintain composure as she exposed herself to retraumatizing questioning and public scrutiny. whereas kavanaugh, at the urging of white house counsel don mcgahn, unleashed anger in his testimony to deflect probing questions. likewise, senator lindsey graham lashed out at ford’s testimony and even defended donald trump’s mocking of ford. as women protestors, many of whom are survivors of sexual assault, confronted senators at the capitol, their expression of pain and demand for justice were belittled by senator orrin hatch, who waved them off dismissively and told them to “grow up.” while senator mitch mcconnell expressed glee, saying that he wanted to “thank the mob” because their protest has energized his party’s support base to pushback. angry white men get to claim righteousness while angry women are a hysterical mob (haenfler ). this contestation of outrage over the harms suffered by women vis-à-vis the privileges enjoyed by men in positions of power, is part of a larger movement that has been gathering momentum internationally—the #metoo movement, which adopts the phrase used by the black american woman activist tarana burke, as a social media hashtag to demonstrate the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment. as a struggle for restorative justice and transformative healing from the everyday harms of rape culture, the #metoo movement underscores the conceptualizations of dukkha-vulnerability and an ethos of response-ability we are arguing for in the promise of making refuge. just as we have shown with the harms of culture erasure suffered by minoritized asian american buddhists, the harms of rape culture are enacted under prevailing patriarchal, male-privileging arrangements of power that expose women to greater degrees of vulnerability. this vulnerability is not a subjective disposition of any given body identifiable as a woman, but is rather a condition that arises relationally when a body navigates a field of forces, objects, structures, and passions. for example, a woman must take precaution when walking home alone at night, or when accepting an offer of a drink at a nightclub, in ways that a man does not. similarly, for black people in the u.s., they are exposed to the danger of police shooting in ways that white people are not. as it happened with the killing of philando castile who was purportedly pulled over for a broken tail-light but shot by the officer (garcia and lopez ), or the killing of security guard jemel roberson who apprehended a gunman but was shot by the police when they arrived at the scene (sullivan ), black people are exposed to greater degrees of vulnerability when they navigate a field of forces (e.g., traffic), objects (e.g., broken tail-light), structures (e.g., policing), and passions (e.g., fear). as discussed with stauffer ’s ideas on ethical loneliness, the expressions of anger in movements like #metoo or #blacklivesmatter—and on a smaller scale in lee’s angry asian buddhist persona—should be regarded as a form of reasonable action, because they are calling attention to the effects of harm, for justice, and for assurance that violence will not recur. yet, these calls tend to get dismissed or trivialized by dominant or privileged parties; or, as with the backlash against hsu’s article and kavanaugh’s religions , , of angry outburst, indignation and righteous anger are denied to the aggrieved party, appropriated and used against them instead. but the injustices and harms perpetuated by white supremacy, racism, cultural erasure, and rape culture are systemic problems distributed across institutional operations and everyday conduct. they need to be addressed at both the macro level of structural change and micro level of interpersonal encounters. restorative justice and transformative healing require an ethos of response-ability from all parties, on multiple scales, regardless of whether one is a direct perpetrator of those harms or not. from moment to moment—when we encounter the urgent meowing of an abandoned kitten; when we encounter a traumatic memory co-arising with an unpleasant sensation; when we encounter a man harassing a woman; when we encounter a racist or homophobe abusing a passerby; when we encounter the earth and homes of human and nonhuman others being ravaged for the building of pipelines; when we encounter such digital promises as #blacklivesmatter or #metoo—there can be no refuge unless we entrust ourselves to the situational capacity for responsiveness: a promise which entangles the self with others and the world in response-ability. do we speak up and intervene, or do we look away and keep silent? do we give space for the anger of oppressed people and listen deeply, or do we dismiss their feelings and police their tone of speech? when we become responsive to the un/intended effects of harm engendered by un/intentional actions, we begin to heal damaged lives and repair broken worlds; we hold the door open for justice. an ethos of response-ability builds the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. this is the promise of #makingrefuge. author contributions: e.n. and z.w. shared the conceiving, designing, researching, and writing of this paper. funding: mind & life institute provided usd$ , and the lenz foundation provided usd$ , for the making refuge workshop. acknowledgments: we would like 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/why-buddhist-ritual-saving-lives-death-sentence (accessed on january ). © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/ /sep/ /buddhist-fangsheng-mercy-release-cruel-wild-animals https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/ /sep/ /buddhist-fangsheng-mercy-release-cruel-wild-animals https://www.npr.org/ / / / /police-fatally-shoot-black-security-guard-who-detained-suspected-shooter https://www.npr.org/ / / / /police-fatally-shoot-black-security-guard-who-detained-suspected-shooter https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/ /why-buddhist-ritual-saving-lives-death-sentence https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/ /why-buddhist-ritual-saving-lives-death-sentence http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	starting with a promise 	paying appropriate attention to vulnerability 	making refuge as engaged buddhist praxis 	heritage buddhism and white supremacy in the united states 	the injustice of not being heard; are you listening? 	conclusions: #makingrefuge 	references s jed .. editors’ note with this issue, we formally leave the journal of the gilded age and progressive era in the hands of the impressively thoughtful and conscientious new editors, boyd cothran and joe genetin-pilawa, along with continuing reviews editor elaine frantz—who herself has been a consistently valuable contributor in all realms of the journal. we have worked closely with cothran and genetin-pilawa in a transition year that has delighted us as we have witnessed their energy, creativity, and imagination—as well as their commitment to the highest professional standards. if the united states is suffering from a crisis in the humanities, you surely will not see that over the next several years at jgape. we are eager to see the new directions that cothran and genetin-pilawa will take a now middle-aged journal still powerfully grounded in the exemplary stewardship of its first editors, maureen flanagan and alan lessoff. we have had, over the last five years, a terrific time in service to the journal. we have tried our best to nurture a wide variety of scholarship, especially from graduate students and younger historians, in an increasingly fertile and boundary-breaking subfield. our goal has been to function, at the most elemental level, as a gentle and encouraging— as well as rigorous—gateway to publication in the field’s journal of record. we wish to thank the many authors who have worked so hard to continue the quality and distinc- tiveness of jgape. we have also sought to change the journal in a variety of other ways. it may be difficult to tell in an age where digital downloads reign, but we have worked, in partnership with the dedicated and hard-working staff at cambridge university press, to create a brighter and more fluid sense of aesthetics for the journal’s physical design. we have brought to our editorial board scholars from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and interests. we have reoriented the journal to include more western and transnational topics. and in a move that we very much hope receives emulation in the rest of the world of historical journals, we have opened our pages to the serious study of pedagogical issues (especially involving k– teaching, and with real-life high school teachers even serving as authors). informing all these changes (well, perhaps not the fluid aesthetics) has been a robust sense of historiographical engagement—even adventure. part of this commitment to his- toriography was formal, especially in various reflections on classic books ranging from aileen kraditor’s the ideas of the woman suffrage movement to robert wiebe’s the search for order. (next up: an exploration of george chauncey’s gay new york on the th anniversary of its publication.) historiographical commitment also suffused the journal’s regular research articles. our authors graciously responded to our frequent requests to expand their engagement with different interpretations so that they could best clarify their original contributions to long-running and wide-ranging intellectual discussions. why such an embrace of historiography? after all, neither of us is a believer in jargon, and “historiography” is the ugliest word in the mainstream vocabulary of the discipline. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), – doi: . /s © society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms perhaps foremost: we are firm believers in james loewen’s awesome dictum: “history is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.” the fullest intellectual engagement in our discipline comes not through a pedantic literature review, but rather through a ram- bunctiously contentious, and illuminating, conversation with scholarly colleagues and forebears. beyond that, historiographical discussions are not just about different perspec- tives on how to look at the facts, but even more are fruitful opportunities to blend our present-day moral and communal commitments with our custodial responsibilities to the past. in that way, the historiographic debates that loewen celebrates are the primary bridge between the politics of history and the politics of democracy. that devotion to connecting scholarly insights with the politics of the current moment is the final foundation that we have hoped to cultivate in these pages. in the so-called second gilded age in which many believe we now live (the subject of a forum in an upcoming issue), public contests over the themes of the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries have once more become common. nativism and pluralism again contend as the percentage of the national population born abroad has reached its highest since the early twentieth century. proposals for net neutrality revisit many of the dynamics of the state sponsorship of gilded age railroads. the u.s.-mexico border is at the center of national politics in a way rarely seen since the mexican revolution in the s. digital giants like amazon, facebook, and google make progressive debates about monopoly seem newly relevant. the #metoo movement has pushed back against the norms and limits established by an entrenched and discriminatory male-dominated society in ways reminiscent of the women’s rights campaigns of a century ago. and black lives matters continues the work of ida b. wells, the naacp, and all those who crusaded against the scourge of lynchings and white supremacy. indeed, politicians and pundits from across the ideological spectrum battle not just over those same themes of a century ago, but over the very essence of the gilded age and (especially) the progressive era—and what we as citizens might make of these periods today. the most recent visceral example that we can think of: before his recent transformation into an advocate of civility and even black lives matter, glenn beck each year ecstatically danced on woodrow wilson’s grave in celebration of the anniversary of his death. wilson is, for beck, the dark prince of progressivism and thus the progenitor of all modern peril to the republic. in contrast, barack obama visited osawatomie, kansas, in to deliver the most important economic address of his reelection campaign. following in the footsteps of teddy roosevelt’s “new nationalism” speech there, obama hoped to birth a new progressive era by directly chan- neling the spirit of the old one. or take the debate, to which historians have contributed plenty, over who and what constitutes modern-day “populism” in our rancorous age of resurgent nationalism across the globe. does donald trump, with his angry mobilization of the embittered white masses against liberal elites, constitute the most accurate embodiment of that term and analytical category? or, in contrast, does the eugene debs-loving self- described socialist bernie sanders better deserve that label? so: our little corner of history continues to matter. in fact it matters quite a bit—even if there are unfortunately plenty of obstacles to the serious consideration of the past in our overheated civic moment. editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms we know, and deeply appreciate, that our colleagues and successors cothran and genetin-pilawa share these understandings and commitments. we especially look forward to seeing how the collective endeavor of connecting history to our own day will continue to unfold in the pages of the journal, enlivening and enriching our under- standings of the past as well as helping in some small ways to forge a more just present. *** of course, in addition to saying farewell, we also have an issue to put out. we have been particularly proud of our various themed issues and forums, ranging from the history of capitalism to indigenous histories of the gilded age and progressive era. in the current issue, ably curated by guest editors manfred berg and axel jansen, we con- sider aspects of world war i: of course an enormously consequential conflict, but one also too frequently neglected by scholars and the public alike. the eight essays include analyses of topics such as preparedness, party politics, and diplomacy typically associated with the studies of war, as well as themes such as childhood, academic freedom, and “voluntarism.” our hope is that this special issue presents a view of the war’s historiography, including extensive discussion of scholarship in german; new methodological approaches; and suggestions for new lines of inquiry. with novem- ber , , marking the centennial of the end of world war i, we hope this special issue will be of use to specialists as well as those drawn by the centenary to discuss, in their courses and with a broader public, the conflict and its enduring legacy for the united states and the world. *** a final word of appreciation: in all our work these past five years, we have benefited mightily from the superb orga- nization, excellent editing, and cheerful collegiality of the journal’s wonderful graduate assistants: first, luke staszak; and, for the last four years, the exceptional left-handed shortstop, and historian, tim herbert. thank you. the next several beers at haymarket pub and brewery on randolph street are on us. robert d. johnston and benjamin h. johnson n o t e s james w. loewen, lies my teacher told me: everything your american history textbook got wrong (new york: the new press, [ ]), . and historiography is not just for the experts. elsewhere, loewen compellingly argues that “understanding historiography is one of the great gifts a history course can impart to its students.” see teaching what really happened: how to avoid the tyranny of the textbook and get students excited about doing history (new york: teachers college press, ), . on beck and obama, see robert d. johnston, “long live teddy/death to woodrow: the polarized pol- itics of the progressive era in the election,” journal of the gilded age and progressive era (july ): – . a good portion of obama’s interest in the reformers of a century ago likely came via his coun- selor, john podesta, who wrote a fairly learned book about the progressive era and its legacy for progressivism today. see podesta, the power of progress: how america’s progressives can (once again) save our economy, our climate, and our country (new york: crown, ). of course, as hillary clinton’s campaign manager, podesta was one of the chief targets of wikileaks; in the process, the journal of the gilded age and progressive era actually got swept up in julian assange’s muckraking net; john halpin to john editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms podesta, “the power of progress rises again!,” email, feb. , , wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/ . for dueling perspectives, see charles postel, “if trump and sanders are both populist, then what does populist mean?,” the american historian, feb. ); and michael kazin, “how can donald trump and bernie sanders both be ‘populist’?,”. new york times, mar. , . see also postel’s illuminating “what we talk about when we talk about populism,” raritan (fall ): – . editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	editors note medical trainees want benefit of doubt when reporting harassment © joule inc. or its licensors cmaj | march , | volume | issue e a n online survey is shining a spot-light on pervasive sexual harass-ment in acad em ia , incl u d ing canadian medical education. medical trainees are urging schools to overhaul complaints processes that give benefit of the doubt to alleged predators at the expense of victims coming forward. the anonymous, crowdsourced survey has amassed more than entries since december , detailing a wide range of abuse, from lewd comments to groping to rape. the stories are unverified and stripped of most identifying details, but institutions and departments are named, including sev- eral canadian medical schools. respondents describe how “powerful older men are gatekeepers to vulnerable younger women, use their power for sexual predation, and are then protected by other senior men and women,” writes karen kelsky, a former anthropology professor at the university of oregon and university of illinois, who created the survey. “women of color are doubly vulnerable and doubly bullied when they seek redress.” in many cases, respondents didn’t report abuse for fear of reprisal. it’s a story that’s “disturbing and, unfor- tunately, all too common,” says dr. melanie bechard, president of resident doctors of canada. in a review, the organization found that %– % of residents experi- enced some form of harassment or intimi- dation during training, with %– % experiencing sexual harassment. medical students report similar experi- ences. in a survey conducted by the association of faculties of medicine of canada, nearly % of final-year medical students said they were mistreated dur- ing training. of those students, almost % said they were mistreated by faculty. more than % never officially reported the mistreatment, and less than % of those who did complain were satisfied with the response. medical trainees are urging schools to believe reports of abuse are true unless proven otherwise. “the burden of proof should not be solely on the complainant,” says bechard. “some may say it’s intimi- dating that one’s entire personal [or] pro- fessional career could be devastated by claims of sexual harassment, but it’s also intimidating to work in an environment where sexual harassment has no prospect for repercussions.” false accusations are uncommon and trainees have a lot to lose by reporting abuse, she adds. “learners can see their future careers easily destroyed as a con- sequence of speaking out.” stephanie smith, vice-president of stu- dent affairs for the canadian federation of medical students, says the #metoo move- ment has been a reminder about the importance of believing and supporting victims. “we need to create a culture where it is safe for people to come forward and not be worried about feeling like they have to prove themselves.” smith says medical schools have improved tools for reporting abuse and supports for trainees over the last decade. “there are resources there. the next level is ensuring people feel safe to access them.” some schools developed anonymous complaints processes after realizing train- ees were unwilling to flag abuse if they had to identify themselves. the university of ottawa’s faculty of medicine saw an uptick in complaints after introducing an anony- news medical trainees want benefit of doubt when reporting harassment n cite as: cmaj march ; :e - . doi: . /cmaj. - posted on cmajnews.com on mar. , . power imbalances in medical training enable abuse and make it difficult to report, say trainee groups. gi la xi a/ is to ck https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ s kshdlvu c-kkgeevythxr f intenrbss yk- c m/htmlview?sle=true https://theprofessorisin.com/ / / /a-crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy/ https://theprofessorisin.com/ / / /a-crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc / https://afmc.ca/sites/default/files/documents/en/publications/ _gq_national_report_en.pdf n ew s e cmaj | march , | volume | issue mous reporting option, says dr. sharon whiting, interim vice-dean of faculty affairs. however, the school’s response may be limited when complaints are anon- ymous. “we will investigate the incident, but we won’t have any way of going back to that individual to say what was done,” whiting explains. other schools still require complain- ants to identify themselves. “disciplinary investigations of a person subject to anon- ymous complaints would violate due pro- c e s s r e q u i r e m e n t s , ” s a y s d r . d a v i d eidelman, vice-principal of health affairs and dean of the faculty of medicine at mcgill university. at mcgill, complaints are “treated as confidential insofar as possi- ble,” he says, but getting students to trust the process remains a challenge. in some cases, the pressure for infor- mation makes an already vulnerable situa- tion more difficult. a resident at the north- ern ontario school of medicine recently told the cbc she was suspended after reporting sexual harassment by a faculty leader because she refused to disclose his identity unless the school appointed a third-party investigator. dr. ana safavi said she wants to be certain there is a “transparent and fair process in place for everybody before i give any information.” she told the cbc the school initially agreed to appoint an investigator, but “then they went back on that promise.” bechard says third-party investiga- tions may represent a viable option for balancing the rights of both the accuser and the accused. “the ability for objective review of allegations of sexual harass- ment would be helpful, while allowing for the anonymity of the complainant.” the potential fallout from reporting harassment outlives training, she adds. abusive supervising physicians “often remain senior colleagues throughout a resident’s medical career.” smith notes that even anonymous com- plaints may be traced back if the abuse was targeted. trainees known to have com- plained may also carry the label of trouble- maker into their careers. “we have to sup- port victims of sexual harassment, or any kind of harassment, from marginalization and retaliation,” smith says. “the school can only protect you so far.” lauren vogel, cmaj [pdf] opinion modeling on social media and marketing aspects | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /physreve. . corpus id: opinion modeling on social media and marketing aspects @article{toscani opinionmo, title={opinion modeling on social media and marketing aspects}, author={g. toscani and a. tosin and m. zanella}, journal={physical review. e}, year={ }, volume={ - }, pages={ } } 	g. toscani, a. tosin, m. zanella 	published 	computer science, medicine, physics 	physical review. e we introduce and discuss kinetic models of opinion formation on social networks in which the distribution function depends on both the opinion and the connectivity of the agents. the opinion formation model is subsequently coupled with a kinetic model describing the spreading of popularity of a product on the web through a social network. numerical experiments on the underlying kinetic models show a good qualitative agreement with some measured trends of hashtags on social media websites and… expand view on pubmed arxiv.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationsbackground citations methods citations view all figures, tables, and topics from this paper 	 figure 	 table 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure view all figures & tables 	social network 	social media 	hashtag 	kinetics 	mathematical model 	experiment 	numerical analysis 	tail 	world wide web 	social media 	linear algebra 	platelet glycoprotein , human 	mathematics 	assumed 	advertisements citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency opinion formation in online social networks: exploiting predisposition, interaction, and credibility 	r. das, j. kamruzzaman, g. karmakar 	computer science 	ieee transactions on computational social systems 	 	 	view excerpt, cites background save alert research feed an investigation into the sensitivity of social opinion networks to heterogeneous goals and preferences 	p. shepherd, mia weaver, j. goldsmith 	 ieee/acm international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam) 	 	pdf save alert research feed opinion formation on the internet: the influence of personality, network structure, and content on sharing messages online 	laura burbach, patrick halbach, m. ziefle, a. c. valdez 	medicine, computer science 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guo, ye sheng, yishuai chen 	computer science 	ieee infocom - ieee conference on computer communications workshops (infocom wkshps) 	 	 	view excerpt, cites background save alert research feed opinion attractiveness and its effect in opinion formation models 	m. pérez-llanos, j. p. pinasco, nicolas saintier 	economics 	 save alert research feed opinion diffusion software with strategic opinion revelation and unfriending 	p. shepherd, mia weaver, j. goldsmith 	computer science, physics 	arxiv 	 	pdf save alert research feed ... ... references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency opinion dynamics over complex networks: kinetic modeling and numerical methods 	g. albi, l. pareschi, m. zanella 	mathematics, computer science 	arxiv 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed random graph models of social networks 	m. newman, d. watts, s. strogatz 	computer science, medicine 	proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 	 	 , 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed opinion dynamics: rise and fall of political parties 	e. ben-naim 	economics, physics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed kinetic models of opinion formation 	g. toscani 	physics, mathematics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references methods and background save alert research feed dynamic behavior of a social model for opinion formation. 	c. bordogna, e. albano 	computer science, medicine 	physical review. e, statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed social consensus through the influence of committed minorities 	jierui xie, s. sreenivasan, g. korniss, w. zhang, c. lim, b. szymanski 	mathematics, physics 	physical review. e, statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed on the optimal control of opinion dynamics on evolving networks 	g. albi, l. pareschi, m. zanella 	computer science, mathematics 	system modelling and optimization 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed users of the world, unite! the challenges and opportunities of social media 	a. kaplan, m. haenlein 	sociology 	 	 , 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed opinion dynamics: inhomogeneous boltzmann-type equations modelling opinion leadership and political segregation 	bertram düring, m. wolfram 	sociology, physics 	proceedings of the royal society a: mathematical, physical and engineering sciences 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed kinetic models of opinion formation in the presence of personal conviction. 	c. brugna, g. toscani 	mathematics, medicine 	physical review. e, statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed ... ... related papers 	abstract 	figures, tables, and topics 	 citations 	 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competition into the marketplace. this study examines data on the trends in the speed with which competitive entry has occurred in the pharmaceutical marketplace and the competitive nature of the industry’s development of these drugs. data and methods: we examined data on the entry rates of drugs in a large number of therapeutic classes over time, as well as detailed survey information on the rela- tive timing of the development of drugs in the classes. classes were defined accord- ing to chemical structure or pharmacologic mode of action and similarity of clinical use. we determined average times to initial and subsequent entry in drug classes by period and examined the timing of development milestones achieved by what have turned out to be follow-on drugs in relation to the development and approval of the first drug in a class to be approved. results: we found that the period of marketing exclusivity that the breakthrough drug in a new class enjoys has fallen dramatically over time (a median of . years in the s to . years for the late s). approximately one-third of follow-on new drugs received a priority rating from the us fda. the vast majority of the fol- low-on drugs for drug classes that were created in the last decade were in clinical development prior to the approval of the class breakthrough drug. conclusions: the data suggest that entry barriers have fallen over time for new drug introductions. the increased competitiveness of the pharmaceutical marketplace was likely fueled by changes over time on both the supply and demand sides. the devel- opment histories of entrants to new drug classes suggest that development races bet- ter characterise new drug development than does a model of post hoc imitation. thus, the usual distinctions drawn between breakthrough and ‘me-too’ drugs may not be very meaningful. abstract the economics of follow-on drug research and development trends in entry rates and the timing of development joseph a. dimasi and cherie paquette tufts center for the study of drug development, tufts university, boston, massachusetts, usa _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page critics of the pharmaceutical industry have faulted it for developing and marketing many ‘me- too’ drugs. the term ‘me-too’ drug has been dated at least as far back as the s[ ] following increasing concerns over ‘molecular modification’ of approved drugs that were expressed in us senate hearings on pricing and monopoly power in the pharmaceutical industry in the late s and early s (the so- called ‘kefauver hearings’). although the term ‘me- too’ has come to be used in different ways, histori- cally it has most often referred to a new drug entity with a similar chemical structure or the same mech- anism of action as that of a drug already on the mar- ket. that is, a me-too drug is a new entrant to a ther- apeutic class that had already been defined by a sep- arate drug entity that was the first in the class (some- times referred to as the breakthrough drug) to obtain regulatory approval for marketing. me-too drugs have also been characterised in a more value-neutral way as follow-on drugs,[ ] and that is how we term the concept here. industry critics maintain that research and development (r&d) expenditures on follow-on drugs are largely duplicative and wasteful. they argue that the resources used to develop them should instead be directed at developing more innovative treatments. others, however, argue that companies do not set out to develop drugs of no added value, and that, in any event, follow-on drugs provide better therapeutic options at the individual patient or patient subgroup level, and that they inject some price competition into the marketplace. the clinical and economic benefits of follow-on drugs have been discussed in some detail elsewhere.[ - ] we offer some new indirect evidence of the clinical benefit of follow-on drugs in this paper, but we mainly focus on data that can illumi- nate how the competitiveness of pharmaceutical r&d has changed over time. the period of marketing exclusivity that first movers enjoy after introduction of an innovation is an indicator of the degree to which entry barri- ers in an industry exist and their consequent impact on competitiveness. agarwal and gort[ ] examined this issue for innovation generally in the united states over a very lengthy period. they found that the speed of entry following launch of a sample of innovations across a wide array of industries increased dramatically over time. the mean time to entry fell from approximately years for a period at the turn of the th century to a little less than . years for the period – (figure ). as for potential explanations, the authors begin by citing bain’s[ ] seminal clas- dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. fig. . mean time to initial competitive entry for a sample of innovations. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page sification of entry barriers: economies of scale and high sunk costs, absolute cost advantages and product differentiation advantages, as well as extensions that other scholars have noted such as advertising, control of scarce resources, the speed at which information disseminates, and technolo- gy lock-ins. they conclude that, overall, the increases in the speed of entry were due primari- ly to increased mobility of skilled labor, more rapid diffusion of scientific and technical infor- mation, more potential entrants (foreign firms) and expanding markets. the extent to which there have been changes in barriers to entry for individ- ual industries and what explains those changes, however, can vary in nature and degree by indus- try. thus, it is worth examining these issues in detail for the pharmaceutical industry. the literature on speed to entry in pharmaceu- tical markets is not extensive. kettler[ ] notes data on the time to a first follow-on drug compiled by a consulting firm. the speed to entry falls from years in the s to . years in the s. however, only ten first-in-class drugs are exam- ined covering a nearly -year period with no indi- cation that steps were taken to be comprehensive, or even random. towse and leighton[ ] examined the time to entry for drug classes from to for the uk. the mean time to first entry fell from . years in the s to . years for the s (although there were only two classes from the s). the mean time to entry was lowest for the s ( . years). it is worth examining whether these downward trends hold with a larger sample and for the us market. the us has histori- cally been the largest national market for pharma- ceutical sales, with its share of global sales increas- ing in the s.[ ] the us has also been an even more important source of industry profits. in this study, we develop as comprehensive a list of new drug classes as we can to examine trends since the s in the speed of competitive entry for new therapeutic drug introductions in the us phar- maceutical marketplace. we also explore the ratings of therapeutic significance that the us fda gave to new follow-on drugs at the time of marketing approval. finally, we investigate the development histories of follow-on drugs in a new drug class and compare them to the approval and development his- tories of their corresponding first-in-class drugs. data and methods the tufts center for the study of drug development (csdd) maintains databases of new drugs and biopharmaceuticals approved in the us. we utilised these databases to provide a list of new chemical entities and new biopharmaceuticals approved in the us from onward. we refer to both types of compounds as new drugs. to allow for a reasonable amount of time for competitive entry to occur, we restricted the search for first-in- class compounds to new drugs approved through . the follow-on new drug approvals in each class that we examined were approved through . approval dates for first-in-class and follow-on new drugs were taken from the csdd databases. a therapeutic class was defined to consist of new drugs that had a similar chemical structure or the same pharmacological mode of action and that were used primarily for the same indications. we established classes and investigated development histories by examining information from a wide variety of sources, including csdd databases, physicians desk references (pdrs), various issues of the medical letter, the merck index, the us fda and various clinical pharmacology web sites, pharmacopeoias (usp di and american hospital formulary service), and commercial investigation- al drug databases (iddb , the nda pipeline, pharmaprojects and r&d focus). from an eco- nomic perspective, our definition of a drug class is conservative since drugs in one class will often compete to some extent in the marketplace with drugs from other classes that are used to treat the same conditions. our focus, though, is on the rate follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. excluded from analysis here are new diagnostic drugs and new salts, esters or formulations of existing drugs. we excluded a small number of classes where the same sponsor marketed all entrants. there was no trend in the data in the number of such classes. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page of entry and development of what have classically been thought of as me-too drugs.to further differ- entiate these new drugs, we grouped them accord- ing to the us fda’s therapeutic ratings of new drug approvals. the us fda established a three-tiered rating system for prioritizing review of new drug applications in late . new drugs thought at the time to represent a significant gain over existing therapy, a modest gain over existing therapy, and lit- tle or no gain over existing therapy were given an a, b and c rating, respectively. the us fda altered its rating system to a two-tiered one in ; since then, the us fda rates new drugs as either priority (p) or standard (s). for purposes of analysis across a lengthy his- torical period, we grouped those approved new drugs that had received an a or b rating with those that had received a p rating to form a ‘priority- rated’ category. similarly, we grouped new drugs that had been assigned a c rating by the us fda with those that had been assigned an s rating to form a ‘standard-rated’ category. the us fda retroactively rated new drugs approved during – in conformance with the old rating scheme. we placed these new drugs in our priority and standard categories according to the above mapping of a-, b- and c-rated drugs. results we identified drug classes where the first- in-class compound was approved from to . we then found follow-on drugs for these therapeutic classes that have been approved in the us through . thus, the mean number of compounds per class is . (including the first-in- class compounds). the number of drugs per class ranged from two to , with a median of three. more than two-thirds ( %) of the classes had four or fewer compounds in them. our data indicate that additional entry is uncom- mon for orphan drugs. this may be expected since the markets for orphan drugs are typically quite small and will tend, therefore, to not support multiple approvals of the same type of drug. only seven of the classes with multiple entry have first-in-class approvals that had received an orphan drug desig- nation. in addition, an overwhelming majority ( %) of the first-in-class drugs had received a pri- ority rating for regulatory review by the us fda. thus, the typical new drug with follow-on entry in our dataset is a priority-rated non-orphan. to uncover trends in the data on the speed of competitive entry, we partitioned the data into periods based on when the first-in-class drug was approved for marketing in the us. the data sug- gest that dividing the s and s into two periods would be instructive. since our observa- tions are necessarily restricted in time, there is the potential for a right-censoring problem for recent approvals. the most recent period that we consid- er is to for first-in-class approvals. however, for a number of reasons we argue that the censoring issue is not likely to be of signifi- cant, if any, concern when considering trends in the speed at which initial competitive entry occurs. we consider additional approvals in a class through . thus, drugs that define a new class and were approved in our most recent period have had – years for follow-on entry to occur. drugs approved in the next most recent period ( – ) have had – years for initial competitive entry. given that effective patent lifetimes for new drugs have averaged about – years,[ ] that generic competition, once it occurs, is intense,[ ] that new drug development is expensive,[ ] and that new, often improved, classes frequently arise to treat the same conditions, censoring is potentially seri- ous only for the most recent period. however, even for the most recent period the incentives for firms to pursue and obtain new drug approvals in the future for drugs that have not had chemically or pharmacologically similar follow-ons already approved are relatively low. dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. forty-eight of the first-in-class compounds were approved after the us orphan drug legislation was enacted ( january ). prior to this legislation, very few drugs were developed for rare diseases and conditions. we include protropin® as one of the seven drugs. protropin® did not technically have orphan drug status at the time of regulatory approval. however, the manufacturer had applied for orphan drug designation prior to approval, which it received shortly after approval. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page we examined the potential for the emergence of new classes not considered here by closely examining the new drug approvals from the to period that have not had chemical or phar- macological follow-on new drug approvals. we used commercial investigational drug databases to determine whether there were any drugs currently in the clinical pipeline that are chemically or phar- macologically similar to any of the new drug approvals from to that are not included among our classes. of these compounds, we found only one priority-rated non-orphan drug, one standard-rated non-orphan drug and three orphan drugs for which there were other similar drugs in clinical development. given the high failure rates for scientific reasons and research terminations for economic reasons associated with pharmaceutical drug development,[ ] there is no guarantee that even these potential competitors will ever reach the us marketplace. thus, it is unlikely that our results on time to entry will be materially affected by future approvals. any such second approvals would also be atypical, in any event, in terms of the length of time from first-in-class approval. speed of entry the drug classes, the first-in-class drug, the first follow-on drug in the class to be approved, and the period of class marketing exclusivity for the original drug are shown in table i. we grouped the data on the basis of the period during which the first-in-class drug was approved and calculated means and medians for those periods. the data show a sharp decline in the period of marketing exclusivity for first entrants since the s (figure ). the mean length of the marketing exclusivity period fell % from the s to – ( . to . years). analysis of variance results indicate that the differences in means across periods are highly follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. fig. . average period of marketing exclusivity for first entrants to a therapeutic class (time from first-in-class approval to first fol- low-on drug approval) by period of first-in-class us marketing approval. the s values increase to . years for the mean and the median if two outlier classes (selective estrogen receptor mod- ulators [serms] and rifamycin antibiotics) are included in the analysis. the time to a first follow-on entrant for these class- es were . and . years, respectively. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. table i. first-in-classa new drugs, second entrantsb and time to competitive entry class first in class us approval date second entrant us approval time to date entry (y) k+ sparing diuretic aldactone® (spirinolactone) / / dyrenium® (triamterene) / / . benzodiazepine valium® (diazepam) / / serax® (oxazepam) / / . first generation quinolone neggram® (nalidixic acid) / / utibid® (oxolinic acid) / / . bile acid sequestrant cuemid® / / colestid® (colestipol) / / . (cholestyramine resin) loop diuretic lasix® (furosemide) / / edecrin® (ethacrynic acid) / / . fibrate atromid-s® (clofibrate) / / lopid® (gemfibrozil) / / . benzimidazole (anthelmintic) mintezol® (thiabendazole) / / vermox® (mebendazole) / / . beta-antagonist inderal® (propranolol hcl) / / lopressor® (metoprolol tartrate) / / . pyrimidine nucleoside analogue cytosar® (cytarabine) / / fudr® (floxuridine) / / . first generation cephalosporin keflex® (cephalexin) / / velosef® (cephradine) / / . rifamycin antibiotic rifadin® (rifampin) / / mycobutin® (rifabutin) / / . retinoid (dermatologic) retin-a® (tretinoin) / / accutane® (isotretinoin) / / . beta-agonist alupent syrup® / / bricanyl® (terbutaline sulfate) / / . (metaproterenol sulfate) anthracycline adriamycin® (doxorubicin) / / cerubidine® (daunorubicin hcl) / / . alpha-blocker minipress® (prazosin hcl) / / hytrin® (terazosin hcl) / / . h -antagonist tagamet® (cimetidine) / / zantac® (ranitidine) / / . biphosphonate didronel® / / aredia iv® (pamidronate disodium) / / . (etidronate disodium) selective estrogen receptor modulator nolvadex® (tamoxifen) / / fareston® (toremifene citrate) / / . platinum anticancer platinol® (cisplatin) / / paraplatin® (carboplatin) / / . second generation cephalosporin ceclor® (cefaclor) / / cefzil® (cefprozil monohydrate) / / . ace-inhibitor capoten® (captopril) / / vasotec® (enalapril maleate) / / . calcium channel blocker isoptin® (verapamil) / / procardia® (nifedipine) / / . guanine derivative zovirax® (acyclovir) / / cytovene® (ganciclovir) / / . insulin (rdna) humulin® (insulin) / / novolin r® (insulin) / / . chromatin function inhibitor vepesid® (etoposide) / / vumon® (teniposide) / / . lhrh-agonist lupron® (leuprolide acetate) / / zoladex® (goserelin acetate) / / . non-sedating antihistamine seldane® (terfenadine) / / hismanal® (astemizole) / / . cannabinoids for nausea marinol® (dronabinol) / / cesamet® (nabilone) / / . human growth hormone (rdna) protropin® (somatrem) / / humatrope® (somatropin) / / . thienamycin primaxin® / / merrem i.v.® (meropenem) / / . (imipenem/cilastatin) sodium second generation quinolone noroxin® (norfloxacin) / / cipro® (ciprofloxacin hcl) / / . nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor retrovir® (zidovudine) / / videx® (didanosine) / / . statin (hmg-coa inhibitor) mevacor® (lovastatin) / / pravachol® (pravastatin sodium) / / . tissue plasminogen activator (rdna) activase® (alteplase [tpa]) / / retavase® (reteplase) / / . alpha- proteinase inhibitor prolastin® / / aralast® / / . (alpha- -proteinase inhibitor) (alpha- -proteinase inhibitor) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor prozac® (fluoxetine hcl) / / zoloft® (sertraline hcl) / / . nonsteroidal anti-androgen eulexin® (flutamide) / / proscar® (finasteride) / / . third generation cephalosporin suprax® (cefixime) / / vantin® (cefpodoxime proxetil) / / . proton pump inhibitor prilosec® (omeprazole) / / prevacid® (lansoprazole) / / . synthetic triazole diflucan® (fluconazole) / / sporanox® (itraconazole) / / . surfactant exosurf neonatal® / / survanta® (beractant) / / . (colfosceril palmitate) ht -antagonist zofran iv® (ondansetron hcl) / / kytril® (granisetrron hcl) / / . adp-induced platelet aggregation inhibitor ticlid® (ticlopidine) / / plavix® (clopidogrel bisulfate) / / . extended spectrum macrolide biaxin® (clarithromycin) / / zithromax® (azithromycin) / / . factor viii (rdna) recombinate® / / kogenate® (factor viii) / / . (rurioctocog alfa) triptan imitrex® / / zomig® (zolmitriptan) / / . (sumatriptan succinate) taxane taxol® (paclitaxel) / / taxotere® (docetaxel) / / . low-molecular-weight heparin lovenox® (enoxaparin) / / fragmin® (dalteparin sodium) / / . interferon betaseron® / / avonex® (interferon beta- a) / / . (interferon beta- b) cholinesterase inhibitor cognex® (tacrine) / / aricept® (donepezil) / / . h -antagonists (ophthalmic) livostin® (levocabastine) / / patanol® (olopatadine hcl) / / . serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake effexor® (venlafaxine hcl) / / serzone® (nefazodone hcl) / / . inhibitor macrolide immunosuppressive prograf® (tacrolimus) / / rapamune® (sirolimus) / / . carbonic anhydrase inhibitor trusopt® (dorzolamide hcl) / / azopt® (brinzolamide) / / . nonpeptide angiotensin-receptor blocker cozaar® (losartan potassium) / / diovan® (valsartan) / / . _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page statistically significant (f , = . , p < . ). similarly, without making the normality assump- tions necessary for an analysis of variance test, the nonparametric kruskal-wallis test indicates that the medians are different by statistically significant amounts (� ( ) = . , p = . ). we also examined trends in the speed of entry in new drug classes in a regression context (table ii). the time from first-in-class approval to first follow-on approval in a class was regressed on the year in which the first-in-class drug was approved. b the period of analysis was allowed to vary by including or excluding the most recent period in figure and by including or excluding the s (since the data in figure did not suggest an increase in the speed of entry from the s to the s). all of the coefficients are statistically sig- nificant and the regressions suggest the speed at which entry to drug classes occurred increased at the rate of approximately – years per decade. tradenames are used for identification purposes only and do not imply product endorsement. b we also examined double logarithmic, semi-logarithmic and polynomial specifications. the linear regression performed as well as some of these forms, and much better than others. follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. table i. first-in-classa new drugs, second entrantsb and time to competitive entry (continued) class first in class us approval date second entrant us approval time to date entry (y) prostacyclin flolan® (epoprostenol sodium) / / remodulin® (treprostinil) / / . protease inhibitor invirase® (saquinavir) / / norvir® (ritonavir) / / . aromatase inhibitor arimidex® (anastrozole) / / femara® (letrozole) / / . topoisomerase- inhibitor hycamtin® (topotecan hcl) / / camptosar® (irinotecan hcl) / / . prostaglandin analogue (ophthalmic) xalatan® (lotanoprost) / / rescula® (unoprostone isopropyl) / / . non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase viramune® (nevirapine) / / rescriptor® (delavirdine mesylate) / / . inhibitor leukotriene accolate® (zafirlukast) / / zyflo® (zileuton) / / . third generation quinolone zagam® (sparfloxacin) / / raxar® (grepafloxacin) / / . thiazidolinedione rezulin/prelay® (troglitazone) / / avandia® (rosiglitazone) / / . follitropin (rdna) gonal-f® (follitropin alpha) / / follistim® (follitropin beta) / / . meglitinide prandin® (repaglinide) / / starlix® (nateglinide) / / . comt inhibitor tasmar® (tolcapone) / / comtan® (entacapone) / / . hirudin-based thrombin inhibitor refludan® (lepirudin) / / angiomax® (bivalirudin) / / . cgmp-specific pde inhibitor viagra® (sildenafil citrate) / / levitra® (vardenafil) / / . glycoprotein iib/iiia antagonist aggrastat® (tirofiban hcl) / / integrilin® (eptifibatide) / / . glucagon (rdna) glucagen® (glucagon) / / glucagon® (glucagon) / / . cox- inhibitor celebrex® (celecoxib) / / vioxx® (rofecoxib) / / . a first-in-class drugs taken from us approvals during to . b follow-on us approvals for identified classes taken through . table ii. regression results for trends in the time to market entry following a first in class approval period of first- intercepta p-value yearonea,c p-value r estimated decline in-class approval in time to entry per decade (y) - . . - . . . . ( . ) ( . ) - b . < . - . < . . . ( . ) ( . ) - . . - . . . . ( . ) ( . ) - . < . - . < . . . ( . ) ( . ) a the coefficient estimate is given with its standard error in parentheses. b the regression for the - period was corrected for estimated first order autocorrelation. ordinary least squares regressions were used for all other periods. c the yearone variable represents the year in which a first-in-class drug was approved for marketing in the us. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page we also looked beyond the first follow-on entrant to consider average times to second and third follow-on entrants in a class. the means and medians are shown in table iii, and they also indi- cate that competition increased over time because later entrants tended to enter the market sooner. analysis of variance results for testing whether there are differences in means across periods for the time to a second follow-on entrant (f , = . , p < . ) and for the time to a third follow-on entrant (f , = . , p = . ) showed highly sta- tistically significant differences. similarly, the kruskal-wallis test results are highly significant for both the time to a second follow-on entrant (� ( ) = . , p = . ) and the time to a third follow-on entrant (� ( ) = . , p = . ). is first-in-class the best-in-class? the original approval in a drug class is often referred to as a breakthrough drug. it is thought by some that drugs in the class that follow the break- through drug typically do not contribute anything that is clinically noteworthy. we do not attempt here our own analysis of the clinical properties of the compounds in our dataset or a review of the clinical literature on these drugs. however, we can shed some light on the extent to which the first-in- class drug is the best-in-class by examining the therapeutic ratings that the us fda has assigned to follow-on drugs. given that the first-in-class drug is already on the market treating a given condition with an accept- able risk/benefit ratio, it is probably fair to say the us fda is not generally much disposed to giving a pri- ority rating for a new drug in the same class for what might be fairly modest improvements in convenience, safety profiles or efficacy. nonetheless, we found that approximately one-third of all follow-on drugs have received a priority rating from the us fda (figure ). in addition, % of all classes have at least one fol- low-on drug that received a priority rating. these val- ues likely underestimate the extent to which the best- in-class drug is not the first-in-class, because, as noted above, it is unlikely that relatively minor improve- ments in an existing chemical or pharmacologic class will result in a priority rating from the us fda. we also found that a substantial number of late entering follow-on drugs had priority ratings. approximately one in five of the follow-on drugs with priority ratings ( of ) were the fourth or later follow-on drug to be approved. only about one-third of the classes had four or more follow-on drugs. in this smaller set of classes, % of the fol- low-on drugs that had received a priority rating ( of ) were the fourth or later follow-on. relative development histories drug development is a very lengthy process. it has been estimated to last – years, on average, from discovery to marketing approval.[ ] the length of the development process for many drugs and our data on the speed of entry suggest that much devel- opment on what turn out to be follow-on drugs occurs prior to approval of the breakthrough drug. csdd data on milestones in the development process allows us to quantify the extent to which that is true for various phases of development. as table iv indicates, for all classes since the early s at least one follow-on drug was syn- thesized, and at least one had initial pharmacolog- dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. table iii. average time (y) to market entry for second and third follow-on drugs period of us time from first to time from second marketing approval second follow-on to third follow-on for first entrant drug drug in class mean median n mean median n s . . . . s . . . . s . . . . sa . . . . a first entrant approvals taken through . the rating system is a management tool for the us fda that is intended to help it better allocate its resources. it is thus not based on a set of standards that necessarily remains fixed over time. if, suddenly, the submissions from industry were all rated priority or all rated standard, then the rating system would cease to be a useful management tool. it is likely then that to some degree, the rating system is endogenous. it is also the case that some drugs prove to be more useful than original- ly thought after they have been in widespread use for some time. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page ical testing, prior to approval of the first-in-class drug. similarly, initial clinical testing for at least one follow-on drug in a class occurred prior to approval of the first-in-class drug for all of the classes from the s. a majority of all classes had at least one follow-on drug with a us investi- gational new drug application (ind) filing prior to approval of the first-in-class drug since the s, with this being the case for % or more of the classes since the late s. finally, nearly all classes from the - period had at least one fol- low-on drug with phase iii testing initiated before the first drug in the class was approved. it is even more instructive to see the shares of fol- low-on drugs that had reached various development milestones before the first drug in their class was approved. table v shows such shares since the s. nearly all of the follow-on drugs for classes where the first-in-class drug was approved in the s were synthesised, had initial pharmacological testing, and were in clinical testing somewhere in the world before the first-in-class drug was approved. a follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. fig. . distribution of us fda ratings of therapeutic significance for follow-on drugs approved in the us from to (for therapeutic classes where the first-in-class drug was approved in the us from to ). table iv. share of therapeutic classes with at least one follow-on drug with development phase initiated prior to first-in-class approval by period of first-in-class us approval development phase percentage (%) initiated prior to first-in-class approval s s - - - - synthesis (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) first pharmacological test (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) first in humans anywhere (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) ind filing (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) phase ii (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) phase iii (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) censoring could potentially be an issue here for the more recent periods. however, there is likely even less reason to sus- pect that it would be a material issue here than it is for time to first entry. not only has a significant amount of time already elapsed, but also in these cases not just one but multiple competitors are already on the market, thereby further reducing the incentive to develop and market additional entrants to the class. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page majority of the follow-on drugs for the late s and early s classes had inds filed before the first-in- class approval, and a very sizable majority of the fol- low-on drugs for the late s classes had an ind filing before the first drug in the class was approved. later stage clinical testing had also begun for a sub- stantial number of follow-on drugs prior to the first- in-class approval. this occurred for phase ii with more than three-quarters of the follow-on drugs for the s classes and for phase iii with two-thirds of the follow-on drugs for the late s classes. these results suggest a development race for drugs in a new therapeutic class, rather than a sce- nario where firms engage in low risk imitation of a proven breakthrough. this conclusion is further but- tressed when we look at the development history of the breakthrough drug and compare it to the devel- opment histories of the follow-on drugs in its class. figure shows that in a substantial number of cases in recent periods, the first drug in a class to reach the us marketplace was not the first to enter clinical testing either in the us or anywhere in the world. dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. fig. . percentage of follow-on drugs approved in the us from to that were first tested in humans anywhere in the world or had an ind filed prior to that for their first-in-class compound (for therapeutic classes where the first-in-class drug was approved in the us from to ). the ind results for the s may be somewhat skewed since the us ind process was not initiated until after the amendments to the us federal food, drug, and cosmetic act of were enacted. inds were filed in for drugs that had already been in clinical testing in the us in prior years. otherwise, though, the results are conservative since we do not have complete information on the development histories of the drugs. table v. share of follow-on drugs with development phase initiated prior to first-in-class approval by period of first-in-class us approval development phase percentage (%) initiated prior to first-in-class approval s s - - - - synthesis (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) first pharmacological test (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) first in humans anywhere (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) ind filing (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) phase ii (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) phase iii (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) (n = ) _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page discussion our evidence on market entry shows that the periods during which first entrants are sheltered from the direct competition that arises when close substitutes in the same drug class are launched have tended to diminish substantially over time. competition from these therapeutic substitutes can have a substantial impact on firm profits. lichten- berg and philipson[ ] argue that what they term ‘between-patent’ competition can be at least as important a determinant of firm profitability over the product lifecycle as ‘within-patent’ (i.e. gener- ic) competition. whether quicker entry has an overall negative impact on incentives to innovate and so on r&d spending depends on the mix of reasons for the increased competition. if the net effect of the factors driving the change is that returns per unit of time pre- and post-entry increase enough, then incentives to innovate can be pre- served or even heightened. thus, a full assessment of the impact of changes in the competitiveness of the pharmaceutical marketplace should depend on an evaluation of the reasons for change. a number of supply and demand side hypothe- ses about the pharmaceutical marketplace can help explain the trends that we observed on speed to entry. technological advances in basic biomedical science can open up opportunities for development for many firms by creating viable leads.[ ] the drug industry’s shift away from random screening toward a more targeted rational drug design approach to drug discovery has increased the advantages obtained from connectedness to scientific networks, and so has increased the likelihood that a number of firms will be working on compounds in the same class at more or less the same time. the growth of the biotech sector in the s and s, as well as the increase in r&d spending by traditional phar- maceutical firms is likely related at least in part to the expansion of scientific opportunities. even when restricting attention to small molecule development, an evaluation of the companies that obtained new drug approvals in the s shows that, despite increased merger activity, output became less con- centrated as more firms entered the industry as suc- cessful first-time developers of new drugs.[ ] on the demand side, a number of develop- ments were likely critical factors influencing the speed of competitive entry. us legislation allowing easier generic entry (drug price competition and patent term restoration act of ) has increased pressures since the late s to get new drugs in a class to market sooner. the emphasis that managed care placed on constraining health care costs in the s also raised price sensitivities in a growing segment of the pharmaceutical marketplace. this likely had a dual effect on competitive entry. it reduced first-mover advantages for breakthrough drugs and increased the impact that the loss of patent protection on one member of a class has on the sales of other members of the class. in addition, incentives to develop and launch new entrants to a class more quickly depend on the growth of mar- kets. expenditures on pharmaceuticals in the us grew rapidly in the s. danzon and pauly[ ] argue that the growth of prescription drug insur- ance coverage in the us in the s expanded pharmaceutical markets and accounted for a sub- stantial share of their growth. grabowski et al.,[ ] for example, found that worldwide lifecycle sales for new drug introductions in the early s were substantially higher in real terms than lifecycle sales for early s introductions. finally, whether due to supply-side influences such as the growth and rapid diffusion of scientific informa- tion or to demand side changes such as increased within-class competitive pressures or expanding markets, a more rapid development of new classes intended to replace older classes that treat the same conditions also likely increased pressures to get additional entrants to an existing class to market sooner. criticisms of follow-on drug development have been based primarily on the perception that these drugs offer very little or no additional value. a full assessment of the social rate of return to fol- low-on drug development must account for any clinical and economic benefits that it engenders. drugs in the same class can differ in their side effect and efficacy profiles, adverse drug reactions, drug-drug interactions, dosing schedules, and delivery systems.[ ] it is also well known that clini- follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page cal responses to different drugs in a class can vary significantly by individual. physicians traditionally have adopted a trial and error process for finding a drug in a class that works well for an individual patient. advances in pharmacogenomics may one day allow physicians to routinely make a priori optimal drug choices at the individual level. having a range of therapeutic options available is therefore clinically advantageous. multiple drugs in a class also generate some degree of price competition.[ - ] for example, dimasi[ ] found that for new entrants to existing classes that were introduced in the us from to , % were launched at a discount to the price leader and % were launched at a discount to the average price for the class (actual transaction prices for a very large pharmacy benefit manager were used). the average percentage change was a % discount relative to the price leader and a % discount relative to the class average. the presence of multiple drugs in a class also gives managed care leverage in extracting rebates for drugs in the class. these additional cost reductions were not included in the data obtained for the study. finally, we should also consider what might be called a ‘system benefit’ to follow-on drug development. incremental innovations lead to a stream of improvements that over time can yield substantial benefits. this phenomenon is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry. the social value of the cumulative effects of incremental innovations can often greatly exceed those of the original breakthroughs.[ ] it is difficult to quantify the impacts of all of these effects for drugs as a whole, but some recent research has been instructive. in a series of papers, lichtenberg[ - ] has demonstrated that, in aggre- gate, newer drugs (in terms of time on the market) appear to be associated with increased longevity and reductions in medical expenditures that sub- stantially outweigh the drugs’ added costs. these analyses do not distinguish between first-in-class and follow-on drugs, but given our data on the development histories of first-in-class and follow- on drugs, such distinctions may, for the most part, be meaningless. the prevailing drug development paradigm is one in which a number of firms will pursue investigational drugs with similar chemical structures or the same mechanism of action before any drug in the class obtains regulatory marketing approval. one of the drugs will win the race, and then be viewed as the breakthrough drug for the class. thus, the typical drug development model is one in which firms are, in effect, engaged in devel- opment races, as opposed to one that is character- ized by after-the-fact imitation. while the standard drug development para- digm appears to have yielded substantial net bene- fits, one can still consider whether improvements can be made through policy initiatives. one policy proposal to deal with what its pro- ponents perceive to be a problem of excessive me- to drug research has been increasingly propounded recently in a variety of fora, such as medical journal editorials, magazine commentaries, newspaper edi- torials and op-ed pieces.[ - ] under this proposal, manufacturers would be required to conduct head- to-head randomised controlled comparator clinical trials where the investigational drug is compared to what is thought to be the best-in-class prior- approved drug before regulatory authorities are allowed to grant the new drug marketing approval. supply side policies such as these that seek to place hurdles on manufacturers so that they will not find it worthwhile to develop follow-on drugs are high- ly problematic for a number of reasons. dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. in light of growing cost containment pressures, industry managers have suggested to us that firms are increasingly pur- suing a best-in-class strategy, in which winning the race is not as important as developing a drug with a particularly attrac- tive clinical or economic profile. for example, relman and angell[ ] state: "fda regulations should be changed to require that new drug applications include evidence not only of the safety and the efficacy of a new drug, but also of the drug's effectiveness in relation to existing products of the same type. approval should depend in part on whether the new drug adds something useful in terms of greater effectiveness, greater safety, fewer side effects, or substantially greater convenience…that policy change alone would dramatically improve the medical value of new prescription drugs, since drug companies would have no incentive to turn out me-too drugs and would have to shift their r&d emphasis to finding more innovative ones." _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page not all drugs that are chemically similar will necessarily have an acceptable benefit-risk ratio. some might be quite toxic or not effective at all. investigational drugs can fail even for classes where there are successes. it is even occasionally possible that a drug that meets existing regulatory hurdles will later turn out to have problems that result in it being withdrawn. the more firms working in the same area because science has led them there, the more likely that one or more will find drugs in a class with acceptable benefit-risk ratios. if we pur- sue policies that substantially reduce the number of organisations independently pursuing a new area, we may end up with nothing approved in that area. the basis for much of what is wrong with a reg- istration hurdle policy for follow-on drugs derives from the fact that, as our results indicate, much fol- low-on development occurs before there are any drugs approved in the class. if a manufacturer has to prove that its drug is superior in some attribute and noninferior in all others to every drug in the class that is already on the market before the registration authority is allowed to approve the drug, then the cost of getting drugs to market can be increased sub- stantially. what is probably most critical, though, is that, given the way that follow-on drug development often proceeds, this policy will greatly increase uncertainty. a firm can start a development program in one way, only to find partway through it that it has to change course and do comprehensive head-to- head comparisons with a drug that happened to reach the marketplace before its drug. this can even happen more than once in development. that is, the firm would be required to hit a moving target. such a policy may well increase uncertainty about future costs and the likelihood of approval to the point that no firm is willing to risk development in some areas. this can have additional negative derivative effects. for example, a study by henderson and cockburn[ ] provides evidence that pharmaceutical research has valuable knowledge spillover effects within and across firms. thus, a chain of beneficial events can be interrupted. on the demand side, policies that some have considered for european markets have included not reimbursing follow-on drugs at all, or reimbursing them at significant discounts.[ ] the flip-side pro- posal is to reward the development of a drug that is determined to be innovative with a price premium. proponents of such a policy might argue that this just mimics what the market does. but it likely would not mimic it perfectly, or perhaps even well. it seems that a more reasonable demand-side approach is to encourage or fund health economic analyses and disease management programs for drugs already in the marketplace, so that con- sumers, physicians, and payers can make more informed decisions on what represents true value for money. manufacturers will automatically factor in the preferences of informed consumers and their agents (physicians) when making their decisions to initiate or continue development projects. to some extent this already occurs given the policies, pro- grams and practices of some national reimburse- ment authorities and managed care. a focus on value for money in the us is also likely to increase over time, as the new medicare law (medicare prescription drug, improvement and modernization act of ) is implemented.[ ] new drug development is a complex, risky process and manufacturer decisions about which avenues to pursue and how to pursue them are sub- ject to numerous scientific and economic factors. the data that we have analysed, however, do strongly indicate that distinctions commonly drawn between the development of breakthrough and me-too drugs in a therapeutic class are usually not very meaningful or useful. we hope that such analyses will better inform policy discussions that depend on assumptions about the nature of thera- peutic class competition. references . wastila lj, ulcickas me, lasagna l. the world health organization’s essential drug list. j clin res drug dev ; : - . kemp ba. the follow-on development process and the market for diuretics. in: helms rb, editor. drug development and mar- keting. washington, dc: american enterprise institute, follow-on drug development © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. the allhat antihypertensive study was a comparative efficacy trial of certain drugs in a number of antihypertensive classes. this one study took years to complete and cost approximately $us million.[ ] _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page . werthheimer a, levy r, o’connor t. too many drugs? the clin- ical and economic value of incremental innovations. in: research in human capital and development. vol. , investing in health: the social and economic benefits of health care innovation., sorkin a, summers k, farquhar, eds., greenwich, conn: jai press, : - . lu zj, comanor ws. strategic pricing of new pharmaceuticals. rev econ stat ; ( ): - . towse a, leighton t. the changing nature of nce pricing of second and subsequent entrants. in: sussex j, marchant n, editors. risk and return in the pharmaceutical industry. london: office of health economics, aug: - . dimasi ja. price trends for prescription pharmaceuticals: – , a background report prepared for the department of health and human services, august – , [online]. available from url: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/drug- papers/dimassi/dimasi-final.htm [accessed september , ] . lee th. ‘me-too’ products: friend or foe? n engl j med ; : - . agarwal r, gort m. first-mover advantage and the speed of competitive entry, – . j law econ ; (april): - . bain js. barriers to new competition. cambridge (ma): harvard university press, . kettler he. competition through innovation, innovation through competition. london: office of health economics, nov . scrip’s yearbook. richmond, uk: pjb publications, - . grabowski hg, vernon j, dimasi ja. returns on r&d for s new drug introductions. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. : - . dimasi ja, hansen rw, grabowski hg. the price of innova- tion: new estimates of drug development costs. j health econ ; ( ): - . dimasi ja. risks in new drug development: approval success rates for investigational drugs. clin pharmacol ther ; ( ): - . dimasi ja. new drug development in the united states: – . clin pharmacol ther ; ( ): - . lichtenberg fr, philipson tj. the dual effects of intellectual property regulations: within- and between-patent competition in the us pharmaceuticals industry. national bureau of economic research working paper series, october , working paper [online]. available from url: http://www.nber.org/papers/w .pdf [accessed september , ] . cockburn im. the changing structure of the pharmaceutical industry. health aff jan/feb; ( ): - . dimasi ja. new drug innovation and pharmaceutical industry structure: trends in the output of pharmaceutical firms. drug inf j ; ( ): - . danzon pm, pauly mv. health insurance and the growth in pharmaceutical expenditures. j law econ ; (oct-): - . baumol wj. the free-market innovation machine: analyzing the growth miracle of capitalism. princeton and oxford: princeton university press, : . lichtenberg fr. are the benefits of newer drugs worth their cost? evidence from the meps. health aff sep/oct; ( ): - . lichtenberg fr. benefits and costs of newer drugs. national bureau of economic research working paper series, june , working paper [online]. available from url: http://www.nber.org/papers/w .pdf [accessed september , ] . lichtenberg fr. the impact of new drug launches on longevity: evidence from longitudinal disease-level data from coun- tries, – . national bureau of economic research working paper series, june , working paper [online]. available from url: http://www.nber.org/papers/ w .pdf [accessed september , ] . angell m. the pharmaceutical industry: to whom is it account- able? new engl j med ; ( ): - . relman as, angell m. america’s other drug problem: how the drug industry distorts medicine and politics. the new republic ; ( ); - . editorial. comparing prescription drugs. new york times aug ; sect. a: . goozner m. prescription for reform. washington post dec ; sect. a: . f-d-c reports. ahrq comparative study agenda should emphasize lit reviews – mcclellan. pink sheet may ; ( ): - . henderson r, cockburn i. scale, scope, and spillovers: the determinants of research productivity in drug discovery. rand j econ spring ; ( ): - . f-d-c reports. cms will focus on value, not price, of medi- cines, mcclellan pledges. pink sheet mar ; ( ): - correspondence and offprints: joseph a. dimasi, ph.d., director of economic analysis, tufts center for the study of drug development, tufts university, south street, suite , boston, ma , usa. e-mail: joseph.dimasi@tufts.edu dimasi & paquette © adis data information bv . all rights reserved. pharmacoeconomics ; suppl. _follow-on_drugs.qxd / / : pm page social policy & society: page of c© cambridge university press doi: . /s a place at the table? parliamentary committees, witnesses and the scrutiny of government actions and legislation h u g h b o c h e l ∗ a n d a n o u k b e r t h i e r ∗∗ ∗school of social and political sciences, university of lincoln e-mail: hbochel@lincoln.ac.uk ∗∗scottish parliament information centre, scottish parliament e-mail: anouk.berthier@parliament.scot issues of diversity in elected bodies have been highlighted in recent years, both with regard to elected representatives themselves, and, more recently, in respect of the treatment of those working in such institutions, especially women. this article focuses on another aspect of diversity, inequality and representation, the voices heard by parliamentary committees in their scrutiny of government actions and legislation. the article discusses the current position in the scottish parliament (and other uk legislatures) with, for example, around three-fifths of witnesses at holyrood being male, and highlights both ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ factors that influence the make-up of committee witnesses. it also identifies a number of functions that witnesses can play for committees, and how these relate to diversity and representation, and suggests that there may be benefits to committees and legislatures in hearing from a wider range of voices. keywords: diversity, representation, gender, scottish parliament, participation. i n t r o d u c t i o n it has long been argued that some groups in society lose out significantly because they lack power, particularly those who are poor or otherwise socially excluded (for example, miliband, ; townsend, ; williams, ; oliver, ; byrne, ; lister, ). one aspect of this that has seen considerable attention in recent years has been the extent to which elected bodies are and should be representative of wider society, and this has also been linked to significant questions about their work, including their engagement with wider society, the quality of legislative scrutiny and oversight of government, and even the future of representative democracy. this article suggests that many of these concerns can be considered in relation to the work done by parliamentary committees, and in particular the voices that they hear from when gathering evidence for their work. it draws upon a variety of literatures and empirical research in the scottish parliament to examine these issues. the focus here is primarily on gender, but many of the arguments and implications could be extended to other protected characteristics, and indeed to other attributes, such as geography or socio-economic status. as noted above, one issue that has frequently been highlighted is the make-up of elected bodies, in particular with regard to the characteristics of representatives, and https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s mailto:hbochel@lincoln.ac.uk mailto:anouk.berthier@parliament.scot https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier the extent to which they do or do not reflect the nature of their society, and what this means for democracy and the policy agenda. more recently this has been echoed in relation to the treatment of those working in such institutions, especially women. however, questions of equality, diversity and representation arguably extend beyond those inside representative bodies, whether elected or appointed, and can and should include the voices that legislatures hear from. in addition, there may be a variety of other reasons that legislatures, including through their committees, should be seeking to hear from a wider range of voices, not least in contributing to the scrutiny of government legislation and actions. the inter-parliamentary union (ipu), for example, suggests that a gender-sensitive parliament ‘responds to the needs and interests of both men and women in its structures, operations, methods and work’ (inter-parliamentary union, : ) and ‘mainstreams gender equality throughout all of its work’ (inter-parliamentary union, : ). however, while quite extensive, including communications and outreach policies and participation in public events held in parliaments, the ipu’s self- assessment toolkit does not extend to the voices that a parliament’s committees might hear from. committees are an important part of the parliamentary structure, and while their roles and powers vary across jurisdictions, they are often responsible for scrutinising government legislation and help hold governments, public bodies, and indeed others, accountable for their actions, including in relation to policy implementation (for example, through collecting evidence, questioning witnesses, producing reports and having access to the media). the committees of the scottish parliament are responsible for both legislative and executive oversight, and themselves have the power to introduce legislation, although that has rarely been used. drawing on a range of literatures, the article highlights the variety of potential benefits for parliaments that may be associated with hearing from a wide range of voices. in contrast, the analysis of witnesses who give evidence to committees of the scottish parliament shows that they are largely male and tend to be drawn from a relatively narrow range of organisations. it suggests that at a time of growing inequality and substantial political disengagement these considerations may be of even greater significance. m e t h o d o l o g y there is relatively little information available on other parliaments, and the academic literature in this field, while growing, remains sparse. while using ideas from a variety of related fields, this article therefore draws significantly on new work. it involves semi- structured interviews with sixteen msps (including ten current committee conveners), eight clerks, eight scottish parliament information centre (spice) researchers, and six other parliamentary staff, all of whom are involved in the identification of potential committee witnesses, between february and september . the data from the interviews are analysed inductively with a focus on emerging themes, although this article seeks to reflect the wide range of perspectives on this topic. in addition, spice staff compiled a database of all committee witnesses in the parliamentary years – , – and – using committee minutes. this included information on the organisation and gender of each witness, as well as the committee to which they gave evidence. witnesses were classified by individual committee item. as committees do not currently record the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government gender identity of their witnesses, individuals were classified on the basis of their name, with the exception of one person who had requested prior to their appearance before a committee during the – parliamentary year that they be noted as non-binary (they are excluded from the analyses unless specifically noted). the research received ethical approval through the university of lincoln’s standard processes. t h e s c o t t i s h p a r l i a m e n t , e n g a g e m e n t a n d d i v e r s i t y for the scottish parliament, there have been a number of drivers of concerns about the diversity of voices heard by committees, including oral witnesses. indeed, the parliament was widely seen as having been created on the basis of founding principles of power- sharing, accountability, openness, participation and equal opportunities (commission on parliamentary reform, ), although in recent years both internal and external developments have contributed to maintaining a focus on these. while the parliament might therefore be seen as having developed from a particular starting point, and to have a specific democratic transition, there are similar issues in other uk legislatures, as highlighted elsewhere in the article, and they also appear to be gaining traction internationally. within the parliament, longstanding commitments to openness and participation have been reflected in documents such as the committee engagement strategy, which also highlighted an increased focus on engagement and related priorities, including involving ‘more people from a broader range of communities in the work of committees’ (scottish parliament, ), the public engagement strategy (scottish parliamentary corporate body, ), and the diversity and inclusion strategy – (scottish parliamentary corporate body, ), with the latter emphasising the desire for an open and accessible parliament ‘as a place to work, to visit and to participate’ (scottish parliamentary corporate body, : ), the importance of public engagement activities, and the need to ensure that the parliament has ‘the knowledge and expertise to make better informed decisions about the needs and experiences of all diverse groups’ (scottish parliamentary corporate body, : ). as happened in the uk parliament, allegations of sexual harassment emerged during and led to a number of initiatives aimed at preventing such behaviour in the institution (standards, procedures and public appointments committee, ). finally, the report of the commission for parliamentary reform, established by the new presiding officer in to reflect on the first eighteen years of the parliament’s existence and to consider how it could enhance scrutiny and better engage with the people of scotland, placed considerable emphasis on the effectiveness of committees and on diversity, including suggesting that ‘efforts must be made to ensure all voices are heard’ (commission on parliamentary reform, : ). outside the parliament, in addition to more general debates about political engagement, equality and diversity in contemporary society, the scottish government’s proposals and enactment of legislation for an objective of equal gender representation on the boards of public bodies arguably gave added impetus to discussions on gender and highlighted women’s under-representation in many aspects of civil, political and social life. during the period of the research, the #metoo campaign also reflected some of the concerns about the treatment of women, including within the westminster and holyrood parliaments, and reinforced wider concerns about inequalities. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier w h y d o e s d i v e r s i t y o f c o m m i t t e e w i t n e s s e s m a t t e r ? as noted above, in many legislatures, committees are of significant importance in the scrutiny of government legislation and policies, not least through gathering formal written and oral evidence (and sometimes informal evidence), producing often authoritative reports and placing information in the public domain, and there is some evidence that these can have a real impact on governments (for example, benton and russell, ; white, ; russell and gover, ). in scotland, in addition, it has been argued that, in line with wider attempts to make the new parliament more open, inclusive and transparent (mitchell, ; megaughin and jeffery, ), committees were designed to enhance the role of civil society in the legislative process (consultative steering group, ; bonney, ), and to engage the public proactively, including traditionally excluded groups. the scottish case therefore is a valuable one, although, as with other parliaments, it has been suggested that the ‘usual suspects’ remain the dominant players giving evidence to committees (cairney et al., ; halpin et al., ; pedersen et al., ). committees can also be seen as an important linkage between the state and civil society (hough, ), allowing the public to engage directly with their elected representatives (reader, ), transmitting information about what voices parliaments hear from and value, and potentially acting as a form of representation between elections (pedersen et al., ). oral witnesses, in particular, are visible to commentators and the public in a way that those who submit written evidence are not, while they are also subject to a form of selection, as discussed in greater depth below, which does not apply to those who provide written evidence, and indeed some witnesses will not have submitted written evidence prior to their appearance before a committee. it is possible to draw on a variety of literatures to argue that there are likely to be benefits to legislatures from committees hearing from a wider range of voices. while there is clearly some overlap (see also childs, , for an in-depth consideration of ‘the good parliament’ in relation to gender at westminster), these can be seen as fitting within three broad themes: representation, policy-making and evaluation, and participation and legitimacy. r e p r e s e n t a t i o n notions of representation are clearly important to parliaments, with pitkin’s ( ) framework (including replicating the characteristics of society, acting on behalf of individuals or groups, acting as a symbol by standing for something, such as women or ethnic minorities, or a representative being free to make decisions as they please once they have been elected), having been particularly influential, although also subject to some significant criticisms (for example, childs and lovenduski, ). many of these ideas have been developed particularly with regard to women and elected representatives, including that women are often underrepresented, and that female representatives can and do provide substantive representation (childs, ; celis and childs, ), may be more likely to raise policy issues such as domestic violence (goetz, ) and women’s access to the labour market (celis, ), and to support policies that might increase equality (kittilson, ). some have also sought to extend feminist arguments about the representation of women to participation in non-electoral elements of democratic processes (for example, agustı́n, ; rumbul, ) and public workforces (johnston https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government miller, ), and suggested that institutional structures are key to facilitating the representation of marginalised groups (for example, weldon, ), with parliamentary committees providing an obvious and important example of elements of the democratic process that citizens and groups can engage with, so that it can be argued that ‘presence’ (phillips, ) is therefore important in these areas. more recently, saward ( , ) and others for example, (severs, , ) have taken arguments about representation in a somewhat different direction, suggesting that some groups in society, including perhaps those who are not descriptively represented, or whose views may not normally reach policy makers, such as children or poorer people (for example, lister, ; tisdall, ; garthwaite, ), may benefit from claims of representation made by those who are not themselves elected. such debates are of growing importance, given that increasing economic and social inequality, combined with changes in the fabric of the representative system, can be seen as having further increased the power of the rich in many democracies, enabling them to ‘entrench their own economic advantage and insulate their wealth in ways not open to poorer citizens’ (parvin, : ). p o l i c y - m a k i n g a n d e v a l u a t i o n from a rather different starting point, drawing on literature on the making, oversight and evaluation of policy, there are arguments that a greater range of voices can provide different perspectives (liaison committee, ; engender, ), including from those who are responsible for implementing and who are affected by policy and legislation (cabinet office, ), and that, in turn, may inform scrutiny by informing committees (thompson, ; hendriks and kay, ) and helping committee members develop expertise (geddes, ). similarly, it has been suggested that input from a wider variety of voices and interests can provide additional external challenges to policy and legislation (cabinet office, ), leading to better (modernisation committee, ; liaison committee, ) and more transparent scrutiny (marsh and miller, ), and, in turn, can potentially lead to improved outcomes (social exclusion unit, ; ilot and norris, ), more effective policy implementation (oecd, ) and evaluation (plottu and plottu, ), and increased legitimacy (albertyn, ; white, ), including by providing greater awareness of society’s views and increasing the ability of policy makers to respond to public concerns; while hendriks and kay ( ) emphasise the possibilities for enhancing the ‘deliberative capacity’ of committees. the oecd have highlighted, in a review of gender equality in canada, the importance of parliaments and parliamentary committees in this regard, and the benefits of a broader range of witnesses: ensuring a degree of diversity among experts who give evidence to committees, in terms of gender, but also ethnicity, sexuality, disability, etc., helps to ensure that policy making is fully informed by the range of experiences facing canadians, and that persistent policy gaps are highlighted and exposed to challenge (oecd, : ). e n g a g e m e n t , p a r t i c i p a t i o n a n d l e g i t i m a c y there are a range of other arguments associated with democracy and the participation and engagement of the public, and the potential for enhanced legitimacy for institutions, that further support the idea of committees hearing from a range of witnesses. some of these are related to the considerable evidence that levels of political trust among the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier public have fallen over time, and the attempts that have been made by governments and others seeking to improve the ways in which citizens engage with and view the political system (brodie et al., ; king, ; seyd et al., ), the importance of social capital and the role of civil society (whiteley, ). hendriks and lees-marshment ( ) have recently explored how political decision-makers view public input, and suggest that they frequently value public input, but that their preferences tend not to be for formal consultation processes, rather being for more informal dialogic systems, and committees are a potential area for providing greater connections between citizens and politicians. other arguments are more specific to the operation of committees themselves, so that, for example, halpin et al. ( ) note that although it is clearly important for committees to hear from those with expertise, hearing from only a limited range of voices might be conceived as being counter-democratic, while geddes ( ) argues that committees can give citizens a voice, allowing them to voice concerns over policies. while the bulk of the ideas outlined above relate to the ‘inward facing’ elements of the work of parliaments and governments, there are also ‘outward facing’ pressures, reflecting a recognition that the activities of parliaments will be seen and interpreted by those outside, including the media, civil society organisations and the public, and that the selection of witnesses therefore also matters because it sends a message to those outside parliaments about how the institutions work, what they are interested in and who they listen to. this also reflects suggestions that trust and legitimacy can be enhanced (hardin, ; leston-bandeira, ) by the public feeling better represented by a parliament that looks more like them and which is more responsive to them (childs and lovenduski, ). indeed, albeit from a somewhat different perspective, the commission on parliamentary reform ( ) found that people often valued their involvement with committees, and that for many the experience encouraged them to learn more about and become involved in the work of the parliament, as also reported by bochel ( ) with regard to the petitions committee in the national assembly for wales. indeed, dean’s ( ) work on participation in social policy in the united kingdom usefully highlights the potential two-way links between policy-making and legitimacy by emphasising that a willingness to participate increases with more positive perceptions of institutions. c o m m i t t e e s a n d w i t n e s s d i v e r s i t y given the arguments outlined above, and despite many of these potential benefits being difficult to assess (for example, loeffler and martin, ), it is perhaps unsurprising that recent years have seen a greater emphasis on the quality of evidence gathered by and the variety of voices that are heard by committees in a number of legislatures, particularly in the united kingdom. however, even where there are deliberate attempts to open up processes, as with petitions systems, publication of draft bills and more open calls for evidence, significant challenges remain, including in relation to existing disparities of power and resources (for example, barnes et al., ), fairness of process and the management of expectations (bochel, ), as well as the potential difficulties associated with balancing attempts to develop more participative forms of democracy alongside traditional representative democracy (for example, bandeira and ferraro, ; bochel and bochel, ). it is therefore not surprising that there have been concerns expressed that parliamentary committees continue to a large extent to listen to the ‘usual suspects’ (for example, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government halpin et al., ; liaison committee, ; pedersen et al., ), who also arguably have better access than other interests through other parts of the political and policy- making processes (mcgarvey and cairney, ). this section outlines the relatively limited material that considers who committees hear from, before the article moves on to consider the position in the scottish parliament. t h e u n i t e d k i n g d o m p a r l i a m e n t although there have been relatively few studies of the characteristics of witnesses to parliamentary committees, in the united kingdom, in particular, that has begun to change in recent years. the westminster parliament, and the house of commons in particular, has seen a considerable increase in emphasis on issues of equality and diversity in recent years, including in relation to elected members and staff, and with regard to gender (for example, the good parliament report: childs, ) and select committee witnesses, with the commons publishing statistics for the gender of committee witnesses in its sessional return since (for example, house of commons, ). as with the scottish parliament, at least some of the pressures for more information, and indeed for change, have come from inside the institution. while there are some differences between the two chambers – not least the fact that in the commons public bill committees (for which there are no figures on the make-up of witnesses), rather than select committees, scrutinise legislation – westminster nevertheless provides a useful comparator. the work of berry and kippin ( ) was important in highlighting the make-up of select committee witnesses and encouraging interest in the topic, showing that, in one month in , of witnesses only ( per cent) were women, and that there were significant differences across committees. they also found that per cent of witnesses came from the public sector (with, perhaps unsurprisingly, ministers and officials from central government departments dominating), per cent from the not- for-profit sector, and per cent from the private sector; similarly, trade associations were prominent; and academic witnesses were disproportionately drawn from london. although recognising that committees do not have a completely free hand in identifying and selecting witnesses, so that ministers, senior civil servants, and the heads of public bodies and other organisations are very likely to be chosen, they argued that, given the gender disparities among witnesses that committees do have more control over, ‘committees are contributing to this problem as well as being subject to its effects’ (berry and kippin, : ). geddes ( ) also noted a considerable reliance for witnesses on charities, campaign groups, business and trade associations and professional associations, and showed that witnesses from the private sector were most likely to be male, followed by those from government and the civil service, while those from not-for-profit bodies were most likely to be female, with politicians, the public sector and higher education coming between the two extremes. he also argues that concerns to achieve a politically balanced set of witnesses mean that representation of political ideas has generally trumped concerns over social diversity. within the house of commons, the liaison committee ( ) suggested that, while select committees have made considerable efforts at promoting engagement, the level of activity aimed at reaching those sections of society that are disenchanted with and disengaged from mainstream processes ‘seems out of kilter with the scale of the challenge’ (liaison committee, : ). indeed, in the committee agreed that unless panels https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier involve specific office holders, those with three or more witnesses should normally include at least one woman, that statistics should be published regularly, and that by the end of the parliament the aim should be for at least per cent of ‘discretionary’ witnesses to be female (liaison committee, ). o t h e r l e g i s l a t u r e s while most information is available about westminster, in many respects the nordic states (denmark, finland, iceland, norway and sweden) would appear to be appropriate comparators for the scottish parliament, having unicameral parliaments, strong party discipline, and committees that combine scrutiny of legislation with that of the executive, while they also frequently have minority or multi-party governments. the other devolved legislatures in the united kingdom, the northern ireland assembly and the national assembly for wales, are also obvious comparators. however, none of these bodies collects data on committee witnesses, making academic studies the sole source of information. in one of the few pieces of comparative work, pedersen et al. ( ) examined the national parliaments of denmark, the netherlands and the united kingdom, which they argue reflect important similarities and differences in institutional design. they show that parliamentarians consider issues of both representation and information quality when seeking actors to give evidence, with ‘representation’ being largely about engagement with external stakeholders relevant to the topic being considered, and information quality reflecting a desire to be as fully informed as possible about the issue, with a consequent preference for engagement with those who are knowledgeable about the issue and who can contribute new perspectives. their research suggests that where there is open access interest groups tend to be more dominant and the provision of evidence tends to be concentrated in the hands of fewer actors; closed access procedures mobilise different types of actors (such as experts and private companies), while the evidence comes from a broader number of actors. like the scottish parliament, the national assembly for wales has had high levels of women’s representation among its members, and values such as ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ prominent in its founding principles. however, rumbul ( ) has shown that despite the focus on the substantive and descriptive representation of women in elected office, across the first twelve years of the assembly’s existence only per cent of committee witnesses were female, with only a very slight upward trend over time. she found that committees concerned with areas such as agriculture and transport heard from largely male witnesses, with only those looking at education and health and social care having more than forty per cent female witnesses. similarly, maxwell ( ), having examined five committees in each of the northern ireland assembly, national assembly for wales and scottish parliament, found that in each legislature male witnesses typically outnumbered female witnesses by around two to one, with subjects such as agriculture and business having the smallest proportion of women, and education and health the smallest gaps in representation. w i t n e s s e s a n d d i v e r s i t y i n t h e s c o t t i s h p a r l i a m e n t for the scottish parliament, as with other legislatures, there are clearly a variety of pressures and initiatives affecting witness selection, and indeed evidence gathering more https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government table gender of committee witnesses, – , – , – (percentages) – – – female male female male female male . . . . . . generally, as outlined above. the work of halpin et al. ( ) provided valuable insights into the work of the parliament’s committees during the – and – sessions. they found that different tiers of government were the largest single category of actor, while individuals and citizen groups were the second and third most common types of actor, and suggested that an invitation to give oral evidence was a proxy for privileged access, with few individuals being invited to give oral evidence. importantly, in relation to marginalised groups, they examined hearings likely to have a discernible impact on the black and minority ethnic population, disabled people and children, and found that around a quarter ( per cent) of all committee issues were likely to affect children, and around per cent disabled people, while even in these sectors the most active contributors were generalist organisations, and particularly those from the public sector. the discussion below draws upon interviews with msps and parliamentary staff, and the database of committee witnesses developed for this research, to consider further what is known about who gives oral evidence and the views of respondents on this. while the focus is on those who provide oral evidence, it is important to recognise that committees receive ‘evidence’ in a number of forms and through a variety of different paths. typically, written evidence is sought prior to committees hearing oral evidence, and can inform both the selection of witnesses and the line of inquiries of committees. however, committees also utilise a variety of other forms of information gathering, including less formal activities such as visits, informal breakfast meetings and using social media, while msps also receive input through contacts with constituents, organised interests and others. table shows the proportion of witnesses by gender for formal evidence sessions in the scottish parliament for the three years for which data was collated. alongside a marked increase in the numbers of committee witnesses (from in – to , in – and , in – ), there has been a significant increase in the proportion of witnesses who are women. indeed, the figures for scotland clearly reflect a higher proportion of female witnesses than in the national assembly for wales or at westminster. as with other legislatures, there are also very significant differences across committees in terms of both the number and gender of witnesses, with some hearing relatively little oral evidence, while others hear from many witnesses, as illustrated by figure . although the proportions vary somewhat each year, broadly speaking, subject areas such as health and social care and education tend to see more female witnesses, while others, such as finance, rural and farming issues, and local government tend to hear more from men. in – , the equalities and human rights committee had per cent female witnesses, and the health and sport committee per cent, while for the rural economy and connectivity committee and the finance and constitution committee the figures were and per cent respectively. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier figure . number and gender of committee witnesses, – . of course, the parliament’s committees do not always have control of who witnesses are, and there are, inevitably, both ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ dimensions. ‘supply’ is perhaps most significant where the concerns are over issues such as accountability, when it is likely to be necessary or desirable to have particular individuals appear before committees, or legislation, when evidence will be required from both ministers and civil servants, and is perhaps most obvious for the scottish government, which is the largest single provider of witnesses, whether ministers or officials. since , the scottish cabinet has been composed of equal numbers of men and women, but during – , of the ministerial witnesses, ( per cent) were male, while of the officials who appeared as witnesses, ( per cent) were male. for ministers, the differentials may, perhaps, be at least partially explained by the fact that the first minister, nicola sturgeon, rarely appears before committees. table shows organisations other than the scottish government that provided ten or more witnesses during / (excluding universities, where some witnesses were selected as representing institutions while others were appearing as experts in particular fields, and the scottish parliament itself, where similar caveats apply). these figures again reflect some impact of ‘supply’ related to the nature of the subject matter and the gender balance of potential witnesses (for example, most of the more senior figures in police scotland were male, while thirty-two of the appearances for audit scotland were by the (female) auditor general). higher education institutions, within and beyond scotland, are also a significant source of witnesses, although in most cases they will be giving evidence on the basis of individual expertise, rather than on behalf of an institution. of the academic witnesses during – , per cent were male – higher education statistics agency (hesa) figures suggest that per cent of academic staff were male in / . and of https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government table number of witnesses by organisation and gender, - female male audit scotland transport scotland police scotland convention of scottish local authorities education scotland nhs tayside scottish funding council scottish police authority the seventy academic witnesses who were professors, per cent were male – hesa figures suggest that per cent of professors across the uk were male in / . taking a wider overview, non-profit organisations and nhs bodies tended to provide significant proportions of female witnesses, while trade unions, local authorities, private companies and police bodies tended to send more men. in addition, the parliament’s committees make considerable use of witnesses from ‘representative bodies’ or umbrella organisations, and this was widely seen as valuable in allowing engagement with key stakeholders and accessing specialist knowledge and experience, although at the same time many recognised that ‘ . . . there can be issues about how representative they are, who of, etc.’ – official . this would appear to align them, in some respects at least, more with the practices of committees in the nordic states, which make greater use of such bodies, than with westminster (arter, ; mcallister and stirbu, ). from a ‘demand’ perspective, it was clear from the interviews that while there was considerable desire for a more diverse set of witnesses (‘ . . . we should not default to policy and pr people’ – msp ; ‘quite often we get sent high up officials, including chief executives, who need briefing before they appear; my view is that we should get the person who knows about the subject in the first place. i was also aware that we need to tackle the gender balance’ – msp ), there were also challenges associated with any such moves, both in terms of what is sought by committees (‘i look for witnesses who are informed and who will be able to add to the sum of our knowledge – i care not if they are male or female, i have no preference, but want the best person, the most knowledgeable person, to give the best possible advice’ – msp ) and the practicalities (‘we do not try and control who organisations send’ – official ). however, there was considerable support for the idea of the parliament encouraging organisations to consider diversity, and for the provision of training and support for potential witnesses. there was a broad pattern of witnesses holding senior positions in their organisations, and while in many respects that may be both understandable and desirable from committees’ perspectives, particularly where there are questions of accountability, but also sometimes for other reasons (‘appearing before a committee can be challenging – you need to be resilient, be able to accept responsibility, and if you have less senior people it may be necessary for them to go back to consult on a question, which may not be ideal. more senior people may feel more able to respond on something where an organisation’s line is less clear’ – official ), it does highlight that there is a potential risk of hearing https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier primarily from those in managerial and strategic positions, rather than those involved in ‘frontline’ service provision, or those who are directly affected by policy, such as service users (‘i think that we need a mix of witnesses – experts can be helpful, but we can be a bit expert-heavy, and we do not always hear from the people that policies impact on; we need to hear from the people who use services as their evidence can be both insightful and persuasive – they know what really happens’ – msp ; ‘we tend to get the corporate views, when sometimes it might be more useful to get the frontline view’ – official ). the role and functions of witnesses. as noted briefly above, interviewees, perhaps unsurprisingly, emphasised that the primary purpose of hearing oral evidence was to contribute to good scrutiny and to holding the government to account, for which ‘it is very important to have a high-quality evidence base’ (official ), although there was only limited agreement about what might constitute that. views tended to coalesce around four main concerns, each of which might be seen as having particular implications for the type of witnesses: • accountability, whether of the scottish government or other organisations, with the primary concern being to hear from those in responsible positions, so that committees may have little or no choice over who appears before them; • in a representative capacity, in particular key stakeholders and umbrella bodies which may have some form of representative mandate. this can help bring special knowledge to committee inquiries, while also having efficiency benefits, reducing the need to collate information from a range of voices (geddes, ), and here the parliament’s ability to influence who appears may be somewhat limited, although a number of respondents did suggest that such organisations could be encouraged to send more diverse witnesses; • to provide expertise, often drawn from individuals, and in these instances the number of potential witnesses may be larger or smaller depending on the topic, although some interviewees argued that the parliament could do more to develop greater diversity among this type of witness; • to talk about their experiences, whether on the delivery or the receiving side of legislation and policy, and here many respondents suggested that there may be greater opportunities to identify more diverse groups of witnesses. all of these clearly relate to the policy-making and evaluation process, and while the idea of a representative capacity is clearly present in the second, it was not associated with an application to scottish society, and only the fourth shows a clear and consistent link to concerns over diversity. however, two further significant strands of thought could be identified, which not only emphasise the inward and outward looking benefits for more diverse witnesses, but also relate clearly to ideas that are seen in the literatures on representation, policy-making and participation discussed earlier: • the benefits to parliament from having witnesses who could provide a diverse range of views, often relating to the types of arguments outlined earlier in this article, such as providing additional insights, detailing their experiences, and potentially raising different issues and concerns; https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a place at the table? scrutiny of government • the selection of witnesses is important because of the messages that it can send to people outside parliament about how parliament works, what it is interested in and who it listens to. a number of interviewees also took broader views both about diversity itself, with many suggesting that gender was a useful starting point (‘it is important that we do not just consider gender diversity – there is disability, socio-economic difference, geography, etc.’ – msp ; ‘ . . . we very infrequently have people under ’ – official ), and the subject matter, perhaps reflecting the tendency for women to be more likely to appear before particular committees (‘ . . . we do not want women giving evidence only on “women’s issues” – official ’). there was also a recognition that efforts to engage with a wider range of groups and to hear different voices would be likely to require different approaches and additional resources. however, even among those who were most supportive of greater diversity among witnesses, there was little support for quota- type mechanisms, and an awareness that ‘simply replacing men with very similar women’ (official ) would not reflect other social or economic inequalities. finally, it is worth reiterating that the scottish parliament’s committees do undertake a considerable variety of evidence-gathering beyond that which is formally recorded as oral or written evidence, with examples ranging from the use of social media to gather views on particular issues, through site visits (for example, to hear from destitute asylum seekers, or the views of school pupils on human rights) to private meetings (as with survivors of domestic abuse). these activities were seen by interviewees as beneficial, in particular for providing different views and insights from those likely to be heard in formal evidence sessions, and as consequently providing different drivers for inquiries and allowing the exploration of more issues with regard to the delivery of services. c o n c l u s i o n s there has been growing interest in ways of enhancing representative democracy and in hearing the voices of more elements of society, in part as a response to a perceived decline in political engagement and growing economic, social and power inequalities. however, while committees play an important role in many legislatures, including the scottish parliament and westminster, relatively little is known about the voices that they hear from, nor about the role that they could play in such processes. yet there appear to be a variety of good reasons for parliaments to hear from, and be seen to be listening to, a diverse range of voices, including in relation to representation of wider society, contributions to the quality of policy and evaluation, and enhancing engagement and legitimacy, particularly in relation to groups who may be less able to access political and governmental structures. the evidence from holyrood shows that, with regard to those who give oral evidence, while significant progress may have been made over time, in particular with an increase in the proportion of female witnesses, those who appear before committees are still likely to be male, to be drawn from a relatively limited set of organisations and perhaps interests, and to hold more senior positions. in addition, the interviews suggest that while there was a considerable degree of consensus in the views of msps and officials involved in the selection of witnesses about the contributions that oral evidence can make, they nevertheless differ somewhat in relation to who they wish to hear from, with some emphasising the quality of information and ‘expertise’, and https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hugh bochel and anouk berthier others the benefits of hearing from a wider range of voices, including those who provide and use public services. of course, these positions are not necessarily incompatible, but can be seen as reflecting different paths that committees can take in seeking to undertake informed, high quality scrutiny. in addition, some highlighted notions of representation and fairness that they felt should be taken into account in the identification of witnesses, and also the importance of the parliament being aware of the message that witness selection can send to wider society. in line with its founding principles, and also reflecting more recent developments and pressures, the parliament is clearly seeking to hear from different parts of scottish society, including those which are less likely to be in contact with the institutions of government and parliament, and has a number of strategies in place that are intended to address many of the issues, including having established a committee engagement unit in to encourage the participation of a greater number and wider range of people (see also hendriks and kay ( ) for suggestions on committees and public engagement), although with regard to witnesses the varied needs of committees are likely to remain a challenge. there are, of course, other issues associated with any attempt by parliaments to hear a broader range of voices, as with wider participatory initiatives, such as how ‘representation’ is assessed, how different categories of publics are produced and targeted, and how difference is accommodated (see, for example, barnes et al., ). in addition, given the growth in the variety of more participative means of public engagement, there will almost inevitably be tensions between participative and representative elements, as well as challenges in considering the implications of additional voices and ideas for policy and legislation. however, enabling wider input through the committee system may at least help link more participative inputs with a key element of the representative parliamentary process, strengthening representative democracy and 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( ) political participation in britain: the decline and renewal of civic culture, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. williams ( ) social policy: a critical introduction, cambridge: polity. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. university of lincoln, on feb at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	introduction 	methodology 	the scottish parliament, engagement and diversity 	why does diversity of committee witnesses matter? 	representation 	policy-making and evaluation 	engagement, participation and legitimacy 	committees and witness diversity 	the united kingdom parliament 	other legislatures 	witnesses and diversity in the scottish parliament 	conclusions 	references continental thought & theory: a journal of intellectual freedom thinking sin: contemporary acts and sensibilities http://dx.doi.org/ . / introduction mike grimshaw & cindy zeiher why think about sin in the st century? we have surely left sin and such associated beliefs and morality behind? so would argue those who see themselves in the continuing wake of the enlightenment, rationality and science. the atheist, agnostic and secularist especially could be affronted by any such discussion or even the raising of the question of sin. and yet, as we know, most of the world are not strong secularists, most are not atheists, most are not enlightenment-derived % pure rationalists. the rise in fundamentalism and strong belief has meant that faith-based collectives and communities are explicitly accounted for in a number of bureaucratic settings and the global trend in the uptake of ‘diversity’. it is not necessarily belief which is put under scrutiny but what one believes and how such belief plays out in public life. moreover, regardless of the belief, it is the loyalty and faithfulness to how the subject acts in accordance with the belief par excellence which is under scrutiny. so, on the one hand, the vast majority of the global population live within varying degrees of interpretative frameworks wherein there are some forms of religious laws and beliefs as to what humans should and should not do. this does not mean these are followed in either an orthodox or orthopraxis fashion, but they do exist as hermeneutic frames to live within or against, such as deliberate acts of impiety. sin therefore (in its varying permutations as transgression against a divine or transcendental law) is a cultural and social experience that continues in varying forms of intensity for the vast majority in this world. yet there is also the other way we think about ‘sin’ and that is as a type of secular noun and verb, as a cultural catch-all for that which is taken to be wrong or transgressive against cultural and societal norms, as both intentional act of defiance and identity and as a type of secular sin of omission – that is, the neglecting of doing what is deemed right. it is too easy – and perhaps a bit fashionable – to thumb one’s nose at trends and modes of populism. however, let us take the time to think about an interesting sin which goes unchecked: sexism. is not the popularity of #metoo at the very least a form of consciousness raising regarding the harassment and violence towards women and sexually fluid/diverse volume | issue : thinking sin - | issn: - x continental thought & theory: a journal of intellectual freedom thinking sin: contemporary acts and sensibilities http://dx.doi.org/ . / communities, that also draws attention to the insidious process of how this sin is carried out? it is perhaps sins of omission – for example, the bystander or passive witness to racism and sexism – that have the widest impact on our lives and society today and these are the sins of omission committed under structural and governmental sin: where institutions and governments neglect (perhaps intentionally, perhaps by default – or even by the excuse of ‘difficult choices’) to do what is right. central to such sin are the sins of omission (and overproduction) of power: where that and those with power do not do what is right – and this is especially so in regard to environmental sin. sin therefore can be regarded as much as socio-cultural act and sensibility a theological one; soci-cultural because the continuation of implicit and explicit religiosity, the continuation of claims, effects and affects of belief, provide an ongoing resource, issue, problem and claims of alternatives to what is often taken to be a secular, political and capitalist status-quo. continental thought has always been open to engaging with, using and debating questions and issues of religiousity and belief and so this issue asks, what does it mean to think ‘sin’ today? is it the case, as in the song by maria mckee “you gotta sin to get saved’? it seems that to ‘get saved’ one has to enter into and traverse sin, that is, be willing to be – to some extent – sinful. so just like being saved, sin demands an overconformity with social, political and cultural ‘laws’ in order to traverse them. one can know that being sinful is good for one’s character only when the laws are traversed and then obeyed again. this is where the individual and the social merge. of course, there are sins and there are sins. this issue considers sin as more than a negative mode of being, it is also social and a condition for being in a complex world. the contributions in this issue all consider sin as a noun and as a verb – it is a modality of thinking and of action, both of which are often in discontinuity. see (or rather, hear): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifrb_clbvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifrb_clbvc temporal trends in unstable angina diagnosis codes for outpatient percutaneous coronary interventions search trends are only proxies for engagement, and sen- tinel surveillance (such as surveys) will clarify these early find- ings. however, our findings demonstrate the power of grass- roots movements to respond to large-scale public health crises. these results suggest that #metoo may have reduced the stigma of sexual harassment and/or assault as more seek help. public health investments in preventing sexual harass- ment and/or assault is disproportionately small compared with the scale of the problem, in part because the problem is hid- den from the public. with millions more persons than ever voic- ing their needs months after #metoo began, public health lead- ers should respond by investing in enhanced prevention training and improving resources for survivors. theodore l. caputi, bs alicia l. nobles, phd, ms john w. ayers, phd, ma author affiliations: health equity research lab, cambridge health alliance, harvard medical school, cambridge, massachusetts (caputi); division of infectious diseases and global public health, department of medicine, university of california, san diego, la jolla (nobles, ayers). accepted for publication: august , . corresponding author: john w. ayers, phd, ma, department of medicine, university of california, san diego, gilman dr, ste central research services facility (crsf), gilman drive, la jolla, ca - (ayers.john.w@gmail.com). published online: december , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . author contributions: dr ayers had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. concept and design: caputi, ayers. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: caputi, nobles, ayers. drafting of the manuscript: caputi, nobles, ayers. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: caputi, ayers. statistical analysis: caputi. obtained funding: caputi. administrative, technical, or material support: caputi, ayers. conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. funding/support: this research was funded by the university of california, san diego, center for aids research via the national institutes of health (p ai ). role of the funder/sponsor: the funder had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication. . zacharek s, dockterman e, edwards hs. time person of the year: the silence breakers. time. . http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence- breakers/. accessed august , . . ayers jw, althouse bm, dredze m. could behavioral medicine lead the web data revolution? jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . khandakar y, hyndman rj. automatic time series forecasting: the forecast package for r. https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v i . accessed july , . . breiding mj, smith sg, basile kc, walters ml, chen j, merrick mt. prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence victimization—national intimate partner and sexual violence survey, united states, . morbidity and mortality weekly report. . https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss a .htm. accessed july , . . kennedy ac, prock ka. “i still feel like i am not normal”: a review of the role of stigma and stigmatization among female survivors of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. trauma violence abuse. ; ( ): - . doi: . / . waechter r, ma v. sexual violence in america: public funding and social priority. am j public health. ; ( ): - . doi: . /ajph. . temporal trends in unstable angina diagnosis codes for outpatient percutaneous coronary interventions recent health care policy initiatives have focused on reduc- ing misuse or overuse of expensive cardiovascular proce- dures. the appropriate use criteria (auc) for coronary revascularization were re- leased in with the aim of reducing inappropriate per- cutaneous coronary interven- tions (pcis). in addition, national efforts to provide hospitals with information about their performance on pci appropri- ateness began in . since these initiatives were enacted, the volume of pcis performed for nonacute indications in the united states has declined, as have rates of pcis considered inappropriate. , some have declared this a policy success—that the fewer in- appropriate pcis performed nationally reflect better selec- tion of patients likely to experience improved outcomes. how- ever, it may be that these initiatives incentivized physicians to classify patients with stable chest pain as having unstable angina (ua) to meet auc. to explore this possibility, we ex- amined trends in pcis coded for acute indications in the out- patient setting in large and geographically dispersed states. author audio interview invited commentary page figure . proportion of percutaneous coronary interventions (pcis) coded for acute indications in the outpatient and inpatient settings pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, % year acute outpatient interventionsa pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, % year acute inpatient interventionsb michigan michigan florida florida new york new york a, acute outpatient pcis. b, acute inpatient pcis. proportions reflect pcis coded for acute indications in the outpatient setting, or pcis coded for acute indications in the inpatient setting, divided by total pcis (acute and nonacute in both outpatient and inpatient settings) for each state by year. letters jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine february volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / mailto:ayers.john.w@gmail.com https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- -silence-breakers/ https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v i https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss a .htm https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://jamanetwork.com/learning/audio-player/ . /jamainternmed. . /?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . methods | using healthcare cost and utilization project state databases, we identified all inpatient and outpatient pcis in new york, michigan, and florida from to . percuta- neous coronary interventions were classified as acute if asso- ciated with a primary or secondary diagnosis of ua or acute myocardial infarction (ami). we then calculated the propor- tion of outpatient pcis coded for acute indications relative to total pcis performed in each state by year. percutaneous coro- nary interventions performed for ami and ua in an outpa- tient setting should be infrequent and remain stable over time—a significant increase would suggest potential shifts in diagnostic and/or coding patterns. we also characterized the proportion of acute inpatient pcis relative to total pcis. results | a total of pcis were performed in both the in- patient and outpatient setting from to . the propor- tion of outpatient pcis coded for acute indications increased over time in new york ( . % to . %), michigan ( . % to . %), and florida ( . % to . %) (figure a). this increase was driven by a substantial rise in the crude number of outpatient pcis coded for ua (new york, to ; michigan, to ; florida, to ). the number of outpatient pcis coded for ami were lower, but also increased: new york ( to ), michigan ( to ), and florida ( to ) (figure ). in the inpatient setting, pcis coded for acute indications increased in states (figure b). discussion | overall, we found that outpatient pcis coded for acute indications increased in states in the years following initiatives designed to reduce rates of inappropriate pcis. in new york, the proportion of pcis labeled as acute, but per- formed as outpatient procedures, increased -fold, driven largely by a rise in pcis performed for ua. similar, but less pro- nounced, patterns were observed in michigan and florida. the observed rise in outpatient pcis performed for acute indications is inconsistent with population-level trends. our data raise the possibility that physicians increasingly classi- fied patients with stable chest pain as ua in the outpatient set- ting, or that hospitals shifted coding patterns, potentially ow- ing to external factors including reporting of appropriateness or differences in reimbursement. the significant increase ob- served in new york may have been driven by additional state policy initiatives—notably, the announcement that inap- propriate pcis performed for patients insured by medicaid would no longer be reimbursed. it is also possible, however, that outpatient pcis were coded more accurately or that pcis performed for acute indications shifted from the inpatient to outpatient setting over time, though the stable-to-rising rates of acute pci performed in the inpatient setting make this less likely. overall, our findings suggest that observed declines in inappropriate pcis , may, in part, be related to shifts in diag- nostic and/or coding practices. further study is needed to un- derstand the rise in outpatient pcis coded for ua. these data also highlight the need for developing mechanisms to more accurately assess pci appropriateness. rishi k. wadhera, md, mpp, mphil devraj sukul, md, msc eric a. secemsky, md, msc changyu shen, phd hitinder s. gurm, md william e. boden, md robert w. yeh, md, msc author affiliations: brigham and women’s hospital heart & vascular center, harvard medical school, boston, massachusetts (wadhera); richard and susan smith center for outcomes research in cardiology, division of cardiology, beth israel deaconess medical and harvard medical school, boston, massachusetts (wadhera, secemsky, shen, yeh); division of cardiovascular medicine, department of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor (sukul, gurm); division of cardiovascular medicine, va ann arbor healthcare system, ann arbor, michigan (gurm); va new england healthcare system, boston university school of medicine, boston, massachusetts (boden). corresponding author: robert w. yeh, md, msc, smith center for outcomes research in cardiology, beth israel deaconess medical center, pilgrim rd, boston, ma (ryeh@bidmc.harvard.edu). accepted for publication: august , . figure . number of percutaneous coronary interventions (pcis) performed for unstable angina or acute myocardial infarction in the outpatient setting pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, n o year new yorka pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, n o year michiganb pe rc ut an eo us c or on ar y in te rv en ti on s, n o year floridac acute myocardial infarction unstable angina number of pcis in new york (a), michigan (b), and florida (c). letters jama internal medicine february volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / mailto:ryeh@bidmc.harvard.edu http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . published online: december , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . author contributions: drs wadhera and sukul contributed equally to this manuscript. study concept and design: wadhera, sukul, shen, yeh. acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: wadhera, secemsky, shen, gurm, boden, yeh. drafting of the manuscript: wadhera, sukul, shen. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: wadhera, sukul, secemsky, gurm, boden, yeh. statistical analysis: wadhera, secemsky, shen. obtained funding: yeh. administrative, technical, or material support: yeh. study supervision: yeh. conflict of interest disclosures: dr wadhera is supported by nih training grant t hl - , brigham and women’s hospital, division of cardiovascular medicine. he previously served as a consultant for sanofi and regeneron. dr sukul is supported by the national institutes of health t postdoctoral research training grant (t -hl ). dr gurm receives research funding from blue cross blue shield of michigan, the national institutes of health, and is a consultant for osprey medical. dr boden reports research grants from abbvie and amgen; serving on the speakers bureau for aralez, amgen, astra zeneca, janssen, merck, and on the advisory boards of astra zeneca, cardiodx, and janssen. dr yeh receives research support from the national heart, lung and blood institute (k hl ) and the richard a. and susan f. smith center for outcomes research in cardiology. no other disclosures are reported. . patel mr, dehmer gj, hirshfeld jw, smith pk, spertus ja. accf/scai/sts/ aats/aha/asnc appropriateness criteria for coronary revascularization: a report of the american college of cardiology foundation appropriateness criteria task force, society for cardiovascular angiography and interventions, society of thoracic surgeons, american association for thoracic surgery, american heart association, and the american society of nuclear cardiology: endorsed by the american society of echocardiography, the heart failure society of america, and the society of cardiovascular computed tomography. circulation. ; ( ): - . doi: . / circulationaha. . . understanding the reporting of appropriate use criteria in the cathpci registry national cardiovascular data registry. ; https://www.ncdr.com/ webncdr/docs/default-source/cathpci-auc-documents/auc_companion_guide- - - .pdf ?sfvrsn= . accessed may , . . desai nr, bradley sm, parzynski cs, et al. appropriate use criteria for coronary revascularization and trends in utilization, patient selection, and appropriateness of percutaneous coronary intervention. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . hannan el, samadashvili z, cozzens k, et al. changes in percutaneous coronary interventions deemed “inappropriate” by appropriate use criteria. j am coll cardiol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.jacc. . . . yeh rw, sidney s, chandra m, sorel m, selby jv, go as. population trends in the incidence and outcomes of acute myocardial infarction. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /nejmoa . medicaid redesign team; basic benefit review work group. final recommendations. new york state department of health ; https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/redesign/docs/basic_benefit_ review_wrk_grp_final_rpt.pdf. accessed august , . invited commentary gaming, upcoding, fraud, and the stubborn persistence of unstable angina unstable angina (ua), previously known as crescendo or preinfarction angina, is one of the acute coronary syndromes (acs) that includes non–st-segment elevation myocardial infarction (nstemi) and st-segment elevation mi (stemi). unstable angina is unique among the acs in that, despite clinical evidence of myocardial ischemia, biomarkers of myocardial necrosis are not elevated. symptoms and signs of ischemia are usually controlled by antianginal medica- tions, systemic anticoagulation, and antiplatelet therapy but coronary angiography and revascularization, usually by percutaneous coronary intervention (pci) are generally per- formed on an urgent or semiurgent basis to prevent progres- sion to mi. in the early s, in an era that preceded widespread use of troponin assays, ua was one of the most common reasons for hospital admission. with t h e i nt ro d u c t i o n o f m o re sensitive troponin biomark- ers, an increasing proportion of patients previously diag- nosed with ua began being reclassified as nstemi based on elevation of biomarkers. for example, in the timi trial, conducted between and , % of patients classi- fied as ua based on absent creatine kinase (ck)-mb mea- surements had conventional cardiac specific troponin i (ctni) levels of . ng/ml or more (to convert to μg/l, multi- ply by . ), a relatively high cutoff compared with current standards. the reclassific ation of patients with ua to nstemi has continued because the upper reference limit (url) has been adjusted downward in recognition of the increased risk of adverse events with even minimal troponin elevations. with the introduction of more sensitive tropo- nin assays beginning in around , the number of patients who present with an acs without a rise in detectable tropo- nin has continued to decline. in a post hoc analysis of the protect-timi trial, published in , % of patients with typical features of ua including rest pain exceeded the url of a high-sensitivity assay by hours, thus shifting their diagnosis to nstemi. as a result, in , braunwald and morrow proposed it was time to prepare a requiem for ua, and they concluded that “it is not clear that acs events can occur without some increase in circulating ctn when mea- sured by a high-sensitivity assay.” (p ) despite this well-reasoned, biologically based prediction of its demise, ua is alive and well. in , when sensitive tro- ponin assays were widely available, % of pcis in the united states were coded as being performed for ua. the high percentage of pci for ua in an era of increasingly sensitive biomarkers has long suggested that at least some patients with stable angina are being upcoded to a diagnosis of ua. in the current issue of jama internal medicine, wadhera et al now provide more evidence of upcoding (euphemistically referred to as “gaming”). using administrative data, they describe the trends in p ci being performed for ua and nstemi in the outpatient setting from to in states. in theory, a patient with a true acs would be admit- ted to the hospital and not be treated in the outpatient set- ting. nevertheless, the authors document both an increase in the proportion and the raw number of pcis being performed for acute conditions in the outpatient setting, driven by pci for ua. this rise did not correlate with a decrease in pcis for acute conditions on inpatients, which might have suggested shifting of the admission classification from inpatient to out- patient. the trend was most evident in new york, where the proportion of pcis coded for acute conditions in the outpa- tient setting rose -fold from . % to . %, again being driven by ua. author audio interview related article page letters jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine february volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /circulationaha. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /circulationaha. . https://www.ncdr.com/webncdr/docs/default-source/cathpci-auc-documents/auc_companion_guide- - - .pdf?sfvrsn= https://www.ncdr.com/webncdr/docs/default-source/cathpci-auc-documents/auc_companion_guide- - - .pdf?sfvrsn= https://www.ncdr.com/webncdr/docs/default-source/cathpci-auc-documents/auc_companion_guide- - - .pdf?sfvrsn= https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jacc. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /nejmoa https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/redesign/docs/basic_benefit_review_wrk_grp_final_rpt.pdf https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/redesign/docs/basic_benefit_review_wrk_grp_final_rpt.pdf https://jamanetwork.com/learning/audio-player/ . /jamainternmed. . /?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . upcoding may be an unintended consequence of and fa- cilitated by the appropriate use criteria (auc), which were de- veloped to codify the appropriateness of coronary revascular- ization for patients with various clinical syndromes. in the auc for acs, ua and nstemi are considered equivalent with no setting specified in which revascularization is “rarely appropriate.” in contrast, the auc for stable angina includes thresholds for symptoms, prior antianginal therapy, and re- sults of noninvasive stress testing in determining appropri- ateness of pci. in a study of over pcis from more than hospitals, pcis performed in the acute setting (stemi, nstemi, and high-risk ua) were almost uniformly clas- sified as appropriate. however, among patients receiving pci in nonacute settings, % of the procedures were classified as appropriate, % as uncertain, and % as inappropriate. whereas more recent data has documented a decline in the number of inappropriate or rarely appropriate pcis, the study by wadhera et al suggests that some of that decline may be driven by upcoding, falsely and intentionally misclassifying patients with stable angina as ua. the fact that in the united states in , only % of pci were performed for stable angina, whereas in the united kingdom during the same year, % of pci were for stable angina provides further evidence of upcoding of stable angina patients (mamas a. mamas, ma, dphil, mrcp; personal written communication; august , ). the rationale for upcoding of ua remains unclear but very concerning. the auc were intended for internal quality im- provement and benchmarking by pci programs. thus, with- out public disclosure of the appropriateness of procedures per- formed by individual hospitals or cardiologists, there is no motive for upcoding to improve the public perception of qual- ity and enhance referrals. furthermore, since the indication for pci (stable angina vs ua) does not affect reimbursement, differential payment is unlikely to explain upcoding. a more likely albeit troublesome explanation could be to justify per- formance of pci in patients who may not need the procedure. because many patients with stable angina will become asymp- tomatic on medical therapy, current guidelines recommend pci in the setting of stable angina only for patients with anginal symptoms refractory to medication. thus, in the absence of a better explanation, it seems that upcoding to unstable an- gina is being used to circumvent the guideline-mandated trial of medical therapy prior to pci and thereby justify inappro- priate pci in stable angina patients. this practice, at best, dam- ages the credibility of the profession, increases health care spending, violates patient autonomy, puts patients at risk of procedural complications and, at worse, may cross the thresh- old into criminal activity if used to extract reimbursement for unindicated procedures. of note, the federal false claim act imposes civil liability on any person who knowingly submits a false or fraudulent claim to the federal government, includ- ing medicare and medicaid while the criminal health care fraud statute prohibits knowingly defrauding any health care benefit program. although, the cardiology community has long been a leader in data collection and voluntary quality improvement, it is time for cardiologists individually and collectively to do more to po- lice themselves before outside forces do. turning a blind eye toward the biologically implausible diagnosis of ua driving % of pcis performed in the united states has undoubtedly resulted in unnecessary procedures, health care expendi- tures, and patient harm. registries should be regularly au- dited for coding accuracy and penalties imposed for upcod- ing. third-party payers should scrutinize claims for pci performed for ua. in the meantime, we encourage all stake- holders to question the diagnosis of ua in patients with an- gina and negative biomarkers. in that setting, the more likely diagnosis is stable angina, which initially is more appropri- ately treated with guideline-directed medical therapy rather than pci. christian a. mcneely, md david l. brown, md author affiliations: cardiovascular division, washington university school of medicine, st louis, missouri. corresponding author: david l. brown, md, cardiovascular division, washington university school of medicine, s euclid ave, campus box , st louis, mo (d.brown@wustl.edu). published online: december , . doi: . /jamainternmed. . conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. . braunwald e, morrow da. unstable angina: is it time for a requiem? circulation. ; ( ): - . doi: . /circulationaha. . . antman em, tanasijevic mj, thompson b, et al. cardiac-specific troponin i levels to predict the risk of mortality in patients with acute coronary syndromes. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /nejm . wilson sr, sabatine ms, braunwald e, sloan s, murphy sa, morrow da. detection of myocardial injury in patients with unstable angina using a novel nanoparticle cardiac troponin i assay: observations from the protect-timi trial. am heart j. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.ahj. . . . desai nr, bradley sm, parzynski cs, et al. appropriate use criteria for coronary revascularization and trends in utilization, patient selection, and appropriateness of percutaneous coronary intervention. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . wadhera rk, sukul d, secemsky e, et al temporal trends in unstable angina diagnosis codes for outpatient percutaneous coronary interventions [published online december , ]. jama intern med. doi: . /jamainternmed. . . patel mr, calhoon jh, dehmer gj, et al. acc/aats/aha/ase/asnc/scai/ scct/sts appropriate use criteria for coronary revascularization in patients with acute coronary syndromes: a report of the american college of cardiology appropriate use criteria task force, american association for thoracic surgery, american heart association, american society of echocardiography, american society of nuclear cardiology, society for cardiovascular angiography and interventions, society of cardiovascular computed tomography, and the society of thoracic surgeons. j am coll cardiol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.jacc. . . . patel mr, calhoon jh, dehmer gj, et al. acc/aats/aha/ase/asnc/scai/ scct/sts appropriate use criteria for coronary revascularization in patients with stable ischemic heart disease: a report of the american college of cardiology appropriate use criteria task force, american association for thoracic surgery, american heart association, american society of echocardiography, american society of nuclear cardiology, society for cardiovascular angiography and interventions, society of cardiovascular computed tomography, and society of thoracic surgeons. j am coll cardiol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.jacc. . . . chan ps, patel mr, klein lw, et al. appropriateness of percutaneous coronary intervention. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . fihn sd, gardin jm, abrams j, et al; american college of cardiology foundation; american heart association task force on practice guidelines; american college of physicians; american association for thoracic surgery; preventive cardiovascular nurses association; society for cardiovascular letters jama internal medicine february volume , number (reprinted) jamainternalmedicine.com © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / mailto:d.brown@wustl.edu https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /circulationaha. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /nejm https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ahj. . . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamainternmed. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jacc. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jacc. . . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jama. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . angiography and interventions; society of thoracic surgeons. accf/aha/acp/aats/pcna/scai/sts guideline for the diagnosis and management of patients with stable ischemic heart disease: a report of the american college of cardiology foundation/american heart association task force on practice guidelines, and the american college of physicians, american association for thoracic surgery, preventive cardiovascular nurses association, society for cardiovascular angiography and interventions, and society of thoracic surgeons. j am coll cardiol. ; ( ):e -e . doi: . /j.jacc. . . . avoid medicare fraud & abuse. a roadmap for physicians. november . https://www.cms.gov/outreach-and-education/medicare-learning-network- mln/mlnproducts/downloads/avoiding_medicare_fanda_physicians_ factsheet_ .pdf. accessed august , . less is more association of inferior vena cava filter use with mortality rates in older adults with acute pulmonary embolism acute pulmonary embolism (pe) is a common c ause of morbidity and mortality in older adults. inferior vena cava (ivc) filters are frequently used to prevent subsequent pe; nearly in of elderly medicare fee-for-service (ffs) ben- eficiaries with pe received an ivc filter. however, the evi- dence supporting device efficacy and safety is scant. in recent years, the us food and drug administration raised concerns about the safety of ivc filters, and some studies have indic ated a temporal dec rease in the use of this technology. meanwhile, some investigators, using adminis- trative data with limited adjustments, have found that the use of ivc filters was associated with reduced mortality rates, recommending their use. this study sought to deter- mine the association between use of ivc filters and mortal- ity rates in medicare ffs beneficiaries with pe using dis- tinct statistical approaches. methods | this study was exempt from additional review by the human investigation committee at yale university because all data were deidentified. using the medicare inpatient claims data and international classification of diseases, ninth revi- sion, clinical modification codes, we identified elderly pa- tients (aged ≥ years) with a principal discharge diagnosis of pe (codes . x, . , . , and . ) from to . procedure code . was used to identify patients who re- ceived an ivc filter. the main outcomes were -day and -year all-cause mortality rates. mixed models were fitted with hos- pital as random effects, adjusting for patient characteristics (table). to account for the potential imbalances in baseline char- acteristics, a weighted analysis with the stabilized inverse prob- ability weighting (ipw) approach was used. each patient was weighted by inverse propensity scores of receiving an ivc fil- ter, and the model only included the ivc filter use indicator (yes or no). to obtain the propensity scores, a logistic regres- sion model was fitted with receiving an ivc filter as a depen- dent variable and baseline characteristics as covariates. the score performance was evaluated by comparing the standard- ized mean proportion difference in patient characteristics be- tween the ivc filter group and no ivc filter group after the ipw adjustment. a difference of . or more was considered a sig- nificant imbalance. in addition, a matched cohort was created for patients with pe who received an ivc filter and for those who did not. we matched for each of the individual characteristics exactly (ie, same demographics and same comorbidities) and com- pared the mortality rates. analyses were performed using sas, version . (sas institute). results | there were ffs beneficiaries ( . % women; . % white; mean [sd] age, . [ . ] years) hospitalized for acute pe, of whom . % received an ivc filter. those receiv- ing an ivc filter had a higher -day mortality rate than those who did not receive a filter ( . % vs . %). the adjusted odds ratio (or) of -day mortality was . ( % ci, . - . ). the findings from the ipw analysis were statistically significant (or, . ; % ci, . - . ). one-year mortality rates among patients who survived lon- ger than days after index admission ware . % in the ivc filter group and . % in the no ivc filter group. in the model adjusted for patient characteristics, the adjusted or was . ( % ci, . - . ), and in the model with ipw, the adjusted or was . ( % ci, . - . ). among patient characteris- tics used for risk adjustment, the maximum absolute ipw- adjusted standardized mean difference was . , indicating that there were no substantial imbalances. in the individually matched cohort, ffs beneficia- ries were hospitalized with acute pe, of whom . % re- ceived an ivc filter. mixed models with ivc filter as the de- pendent variable showed that the ivc filter group had higher odds for -day mortality (or, . ; % ci, . - . ) and -year mortality (or, . ; % ci, . - . ) compared with the no filter group (figure). discussion | our study of medicare ffs beneficiaries with acute pe, consistent across different statistical adjustment meth- ods, does not suggest an association between ivc filter use and lower mortality rates. these findings stand in contrast with prior reports from administrative databases that suggested ef- ficacy of ivc filters but did limited adjustment for potential confounders. instead, our study showed hypothesis- generating findings for increased risk. the limitations of this study should be noted. first, limitations of administrative claims bring uncertainty for claiming the efficacy of health interventions using such data. second, the ipw analysis may become unstable in case the estimated propensities are small. however, in this study, the large size of the study cohort minimized this con- cern. third, immortal time bias is another factor to consider in controlled studies in which an exposure (treatment) occurs only in group. patients in the exposure group need to be alive (immortal) until the day of the procedure, which may suggest a false beneficial treatment effect. in this analyses, however, patients receiving ivc filters did not have reduced mortality rates and the study did not adjust for immortal time bias. despite the limitations, these find- ings in combination with the paucity of evidence from trials raise concerns about the widespread use of these ivc filters. there is a need for more and better studies (randomized clinical trials or prospective controlled observational stud- letters jamainternalmedicine.com (reprinted) jama internal medicine february volume , number © american medical association. all rights reserved. downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jacc. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.jacc. . . https://www.cms.gov/outreach-and-education/medicare-learning-network-mln/mlnproducts/downloads/avoiding_medicare_fanda_physicians_factsheet_ .pdf https://www.cms.gov/outreach-and-education/medicare-learning-network-mln/mlnproducts/downloads/avoiding_medicare_fanda_physicians_factsheet_ .pdf https://www.cms.gov/outreach-and-education/medicare-learning-network-mln/mlnproducts/downloads/avoiding_medicare_fanda_physicians_factsheet_ .pdf http://www.jamainternalmedicine.com/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamainternmed. . the tale of lenalidomide clinical superiority over thalidomide and regulatory and cost-effectiveness issues a narrativa de que a lenalidomida é clinicamente superior à talidomida, e questões regulatórias e de custo-efetividade resumo a agência nacional de vigilância sani- tária (anvisa) aprovou em abril de a lena- lidomida (len) para o mieloma múltiplo (mm) e síndrome mielodisplásica. a anvisa havia ne- gado o registro em , e indeferido um recurso apresentado em . o motivo do indeferimento foi a falta de estudos comparativos de efetividade demonstrando que len era mais eficaz do que a talidomida (tal), um medicamento rigorosa- mente controlado pela lei federal . / e dispensado gratuitamente a pacientes através de unidades de saúde e hospitais públicos. o recuo não explicado da anvisa em relação ao registro da len foi um inquestionável triunfo do lobby que sucedeu a recusa inicial do registro, a frente do qual estavam políticos, membros do congres- so, associações de pacientes e sociedades médicas. dois ensaios randomizados (fase iii) e três estudos observacionais (caso-controle e coorte de base po- pulacional) compararam a efetividade de terapias para o mm com tal- e com len. em conjunto, esses estudos mostraram que não havia diferen- ças quanto a eficácia de tratamentos com len- e aqueles com tal. a len causou menos neuropa- tias, e efeitos adversos hematológicos mais graves. ela é muito mais cara do que a tal, e a substitui- ção da tal pela len aumentará muito os custos da assistência pública à saúde no brasil. palavras-chave mieloma múltiplo, custo-efeti- vidade, câncer, custos da assistência médica. abstract in april , the national sanitary surveillance agency (anvisa-brazil) approved lenalidomide (len) for multiple myeloma (mm) and myelodysplastic syndrome. anvisa had re- jected the first application in , and denied a request for reconsideration in . the reason for rejection was the lack of comparative effectiveness studies proving that len was more effective than thalidomide (thal), a strictly controlled drug regulated by federal law . / and dispen- sed to patients (at no costs) through public health system units and hospitals. anvisa unexplained retreat on the len approval for marketing was an unquestionable triumph of the lobbying that ensued the denial, at the forefront of which were politicians, congress members, patient organi- zations and medical societies. two randomized (phase iii) trials and three observational (case- control and population-based cohort) compared the effectiveness of thal- versus len-based the- rapies in mm. overall, these studies showed no difference in efficacy between len- and thal -based therapies. len caused less neuropathy, and more severe hematologic adverse effects. it is much costlier than thal, and substitution of thal by len shall raise considerably public he- althcare costs in brazil. keywords multiple myeloma, cost-effectiveness, cancer, healthcare costs. francisco josé roma paumgartten (http://orcid.org/ - - - ) doi: . / - . escola nacional de saúde pública, fiocruz. av. brasil / , manguinhos. - rio de janeiro rj brasil. paum@ensp. fiocruz.br t e m a s l iv r e s f r e e t h e m e s p au m ga rt te n f jr introduction to grant marketing approval for a new medicine, a regulatory agency demands that the applicant presents evidence of its efficacy and safety for intended clinical uses. along this line, the best empiric evidence that a drug is effective and safe, or that potential therapeutic benefits outweigh risks of harm to patients, is generally provided by good quality phase iii randomized clinical trials (rcts) controlled with a placebo, or with a ther- apy of proven effectiveness (active comparator), whenever the use of an inactive comparator is considered unethical. the us fda, ema and most national regu- latory agencies, however, do not require data on comparative effectiveness and safety, or evidence that a new drug is clinically superior to existing therapies. it follows that a newly approved drug is not necessarily better than preceding ones, and thus it may not add to existing therapies. this ap- plies, for instance, to drugs called in pharmaceu- tical jargon terms “me-too” or “follow-on” drugs, or medicines sharing with a drug already on the market a similar chemical structure, an identical mechanism of action and the same therapeutic indications . in other words, “me-too” drugs are not truly innovative or breakthrough medicines developed to treat a morbid condition; rather they are just “more of the same”, or similar drugs that are not clinically superior to a pioneering one. “me-too” medicines may be the outcome of a frustrated attempt to increase efficacy and or to attenuate the toxicity of a prototype drug by altering its molecule, or otherwise be a delib- erate imitation of a pioneer medicinal product. some authors believe that “me-too”s are wasteful duplications and propose that agencies’ require- ments for approving a new drug should be not only the evidence that it is effective and safe, but also a demonstration that it is clinically superi- or to pre-existing therapies. others, however, are against imposing regulatory obstacles to the development of non-innovative and “me-too” drugs arguing that they enhance competition within the pharmaceutical market and, by doing so, they stimulate lowering prices what ultimate- ly expands the access of low-income people to medicines , . the national sanitary surveillance agency (anvisa-brazil) policy for “me-too” drugs was made explicit in a comment posted on its web- site: …it is difficult or even impossible to classify a (new) medicine as a “me-too” drug on the occasion it is (first) registered because some of its attributes that would allow us to make this classification can only be (fully) assessed after the product is market- ed and used in large scale”, and “...current brazil- ian laws do not support denying registration of new drugs based on such argument. for the foregoing reasons, according to anvisa’s note, the agency does not necessarily reject applications of “me- too” drugs even if they, apparently, do not add to existing therapies . a major problem with non-innovative drugs is that pharmaceutical companies generally do not fairly and adequately inform doctors and consumers about the degree of similarity be- tween new products and pre-existing ones. to boost sales of a new drug, companies almost invariably claim that their products are in some way better than preceding ones, even when this allegation is unsupported by comparative effec- tiveness (and safety) research data. a common allegation, for instance, is that it might be ben- eficial for a subgroup of patients who do not re- spond satisfactorily to similar drugs already on the market. in many cases, however, this claim is at best an untested - and self-regarding–hypoth- esis . the hypothetical subpopulation of patients (who would respond differently to a new drug) is seldom, if ever, characterized by controlled clin- ical studies. lenalidomide, a teratogenic thalidomide-like drug (figure ), challenged anvisa’s viewpoint on “me-too” products, and rekindled the debate on whether the agency should require the appli- cant a proof of clinical superiority over existing therapies for granting a marketing approval for some drugs. a demand for comparative effective- ness research data are of utmost importance, for instance, if estimated costs of treatment with the new drug are much higher than the costs of ther- apies with drugs already available on the market. this article appraises critically the available evidence on the comparative effectiveness of lenalidomide- versus thalidomide-based thera- pies for mm, and regulatory and cost-effective- ness issues behind lenalidomide authorization for sales in brazil. methods the approval of lenalidomide for sales in brazil is discussed here as an exploratory case study. it brings us to question anvisa’s regulatory policy for non-innovative (me-too) drugs, par- ticularly when the new product compares un- favorably with its prototype medicine in terms c iên cia & saú d e c o letiva, ( ): - , figure . lenalidomide resulted from two minor alterations in the phthalimide ring of thalidomide (indicated by circles). it is more potent than thalidomide (therapeutic doses: - mg/day versus - mg/day, respectively). comparative effectiveness research, however, showed that they have nearly the same effectiveness in the treatment of multiple myeloma. nonetheless, lenalidomide, compared with its prototype drug, was associated with a lower incidence of neuropathy and a higher occurrence of severe hematologic side effects. of cost-effectiveness. nonetheless, this case also involves another unique regulatory issue. owing to its teratogenicity and the fact that the coun- try has world’s greatest number of thalidomide victims born after (i.e., “avoidable cases” of thalidomide birth defects), it is the only drug regulated by a specific federal law in brazil. the law . / forbids thalidomide sales, and further agency-issued regulations impose addi- tional constraints to prescription and dispensing. since the law makes no provision for thalidomide analogs such as lenalidomide, brazil has clearly adopted a regulatory double standard for thalid- omide and thalidomide-like teratogens marketed by pharmaceutical companies. a thorough search was conducted in biomedical electronic databas- es (medline/pubmed, bvs brazil/bireme, http:// www.brasil.bvs.br), to identify comparative effec- tiveness and safety studies of thalidomide versus lenalidomide for treatment of multiple myeloma and or myelodysplastic syndrome (mds). a sim- ilar search was undertaken to find comparative cost-effectiveness studies of thalidomide-versus lenalidomide-based therapies for mm and mds. searches in medline and bvs brazil/bireme da- tabases were conducted using a variety of search- ing strings (e.g., “lenalidomide and thalidomide and comparative effectiveness”; “lenalidomide and thalidomide and multiple myeloma and effectiveness”; “thalidomide and myeloma and effectiveness and safety”; and others), and cov- ered a time window between database inception and october st, . reference lists of articles and documents were examined to find any ad- ditional relevant study. furthermore, the author went over the virtual library on health of the brazilian ministry of health website (bvs ms, www.bvsms.saude.gov.br/index.php), and the brazilian sanitary surveillance agency (anvisa) compilation of legislation on health products to identify all regulations and laws potentially ap- plicable to this regulatory drug topic. results and discussion brief regulatory history of thalidomide and lenalidomide in the us and brazil owing to its teratogenicity, and because prev- alence of hansen disease is almost negligible in the country, thalidomide was not approved for sale in the us until when, in an attempt to put an end to smuggling and uncontrolled use of the drug for a variety of medical conditions, the us fda approved it. curiously, the first au- thorized therapeutic indication for thalidomide (thalomid® made by celgene® co) was erythema nodosum leprosum (enl), or type- reaction, a medical condition extremely rare, or even non- existent in the us. only a few years later, in may , fda granted accelerated approval for tha- lidomide (in combination with dexamethasone) for the treatment of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (mm) patients. the german company chemie grünenthal gmbh had launched thalid- omide in , and thus it has no longer patent protection. nonetheless, a patent was granted to celgene® co for its system for thalidomide edu- cation and prescribing safety (steps® program, a restricted distribution system intended to pre- vent thalidomide use by pregnant women) what means in practice that thalomid® has a market- ing exclusivity in the us . lenalidomide (revlimid®) was the first tha- lidomide-like drug obtaining a marketing autho- rization (figure ). it was developed by celgene® co and approved by the fda for treatment of myelodysplastic syndrome (mds) and multiple myeloma (mm) in (december) and , respectively. the european medicines agency (ema), on the other hand, granted a marketing authorization for lenalidomide use in mm (in combination with dexamethasone for patients who had received at least one prior therapy), in thalidomide lenalidomide phthalimide ring glutarimide ring p au m ga rt te n f jr , and for use in mds, in . in the eu and us, the approved indications for lenalidomide were further expanded to include previously un- treated mm patients who were not eligible for transplants, monotherapy for the maintenance treatment of patients with newly diagnosed mm (after autologous stem cell transplantation), and for therapy of mantle cell lymphoma in patients whose disease had relapsed, or progressed after two prior therapies. lenalidomide costs near- ly us $ , per year for the average patient and thus lenalidomide-based therapies are much costlier than thalidomide-based treatments for mm. both fda and ema awarded an orphan drug status/designation to lenalidomide because of the rarity of multiple myeloma. data from the national cancer institute (nci) informs that, in the us, the incidence (new cases) of mm was . per , men and women per year, and that, in , there were estimated , people liv- ing with mm in the country . notwithstanding the “orphan drug” status, lenalidomide (revlim- id®) proved to be a highly profitable product. it was celgene® co’s blockbuster drug with sales in the first quarter of us$ , million against us$ million for thalomid® in the same period . in , zodiac® co (a company licensed by celgene® co to sell revlimid® in brazil) filed an application for lenalidomide use in mm and mds that the brazilian agency anvisa reject- ed in . the rejection was based on a re- port by the advisory committee on medicines (cateme) whose members pointed out that the applicant provided no evidence that lenalid- omide was more effective and or safer than tha- lidomide for both therapeutic indications. on the understanding that, similarly to thalidomide, lenalidomide also proved to be a strong teratogen in non-human primates, and that it is much more expensive than its prototype drug, cateme rec- ommended that the applicant should provide sound evidence that lenalidomide is clinically superior to thalidomide (to be demonstrated by comparative effectiveness research data) before a marketing authorization is granted. the negative decision was followed by a powerful lobbying at the forefront of which were patient organiza- tions, medical specialty societies, politicians and congress members. in , anvisa’s board of directors denied a request for reconsideration filed by zodiac® co thereby confirming the appli- cation rejection. in april , anvisa ignored all the reasons for the first application rejection and, in an unexplained retreat, approved lenalid- omide registration in the country. nonetheless, the publication of the positive decision on regis- tration, that ultimately enacts the authorization for sales, still depends on a special regulation on the control of its use and dispensing to be issued by the agency . comparative effectiveness of lenalidomide and thalidomide in the treatment of multiple myeloma thalidomide the notion that antiangiogenic compounds could be useful to treat some types of cancer stands on the observation that solid tumors re- quired neovascularization (angiogenesis) for growth and survival . in , d’amato et al. reported that thalidomide inhibited angiogene- sis in the rabbit cornea assay . the next logical step was to test thalidomide in patients with cancer. an open-label (uncontrolled) trial with relapsed and/or refractory mm patients showed that, as anticipated by folkman’s hypothesis, tha- lidomide was active against advanced tumors, caused a decline in the serum and urine levels of paraprotein (the primary efficacy outcome), a disease remission and apparently an improve- ment of survival . since then, evidence from a set of phase ii studies confirmed that thalidomide (with dexamethasone and or chemotherapy) significantly improved overall response rates to combined therapies for relapsed and newly diag- nosed patients , . a further phase iii random- ized clinical trial also showed that, compared to “dexamethasone alone”, “thalidomide plus dexa- methasone” gave rise to superior responses rates in newly diagnosed mm patients . lenalidomide a phase iii placebo-controlled trial revealed that, in patients with relapsed or refractory mm, lenalidomide combined with dexamethasone significantly prolonged “time to progression” ( . months versus . months), and improved overall survival . in newly diagnosed mm pa- tients ineligible for bone-marrow transplanta- tion, maintenance with lenalidomide after an induction treatment regimen (melphalan + prednisone + lenalidomide) was shown to pro- long “progression-free survival” compared with the induction therapy followed by placebo . a meta-analysis of seven rcts evaluating initial or maintenance therapeutic outcomes, such as response rates, “progression-free survival” (pfs), “overall survival” and adverse effects, concluded c iên cia & saú d e c o letiva, ( ): - , that complete and very good partial response risk ratios, and pfs hazard ratios favored lena- lidomide over placebo . the occurrence of ad- verse events (neutropenia, deep vein thrombosis, infection and hematologic cancer), however, fa- vored placebo over lenalidomide . in summary, phase ii and iii clinical studies showed that both thalidomide- and lenalido- mide-based combination therapies were effective and safe, that is, they substantially improved clin- ical outcomes such as “progression free survival” and “overall survival” in patients with multiple myeloma (mm). therapeutic regimens based on thalidomide, lenalidomide and, more recently, on the proteasome inhibitor drug bortezomid (it diminishes the activity of cell proteasomes that break down proteins including those that kill ma- lignant cells), revolutionized the therapy of mm, formerly a hematologic cancer of poor progno- sis. mm is a plasma cell proliferative disorder that leads to an accumulation of neoplastic cells (a solid tumor) in the bone marrow. the bene- ficial effects of thalidomide- and lenalidomide- combined therapies in mm patients apparently arise from a dual mechanism of action, while the antiangiogenic activity rapidly reduces mm burden, their long-term immunomodulatory actions seems to maintain tumor suppression . effective therapeutic regimens for mm usually also include an antimitotic drug (e.g., melphalan, a potent nitrogen mustard related alkylating agent) and a glucocorticoid (e.g., dexamethasone or prednisone). comparative effectiveness of thalidomide- versus lenalidomide-based therapies although presenting similar biological activ- ities, lenalidomide is more potent than thalido- mide, i.e., it achieves responses at lower doses. higher potency, however, does not imply greater clinical efficacy and two drugs may have different potencies and the same efficacy. to the best of our knowledge, only two ran- domized (phase-iii) trials have compared the ef- fectiveness of thalidomide-based versus lenalid- omide-based therapeutic regimens so far (table ). stewart et al. conducted a phase iii rtc to compare (with a non-inferiority design) a “mel- phalan-prednisone-thalidomide” induction and maintenance with thalidomide (mpt-t) with “melphalan-prednisone-lenalidomide (revlim- id®)” and maintenance with lenalidomide (mpr-r) in elderly patients with untreated mm. results showed that there was no difference be- tween mpt-t and mpr-r in response rates, pro- gression free survival (pfs) and overall survival. mpr-r, however, presented a lower occurrence of peripheral neuropathy side effects (table ). a similarly designed multicenter open-label rct by zweegman et al. compared mpt-t and mpr-r regimens in newly diagnosed mm pa- tients who were ineligible for stem cell transplan- tation. again, this second study showed no supe- riority of mpr-r over mpt-t regarding clinical efficacy (pfs). the trial found, however, an in- creased occurrence of neuropathy in mpt-t, and of hematologic toxicity requiring growth factor support in mpr-r (table ). in addition to the foregoing rcts, three non-interventional studies also addressed com- parative effectiveness of thalidomide- versus lenalidomide-based combination regimens in the therapy of mm (table ). a retrospective case-control study (matched-pair analysis ad- justed for age, sex, transplantation status, and dexamethasone dose) by gay et al. compared the efficacy and safety of “thalidomide plus dexamethasone” versus “lenalidomide plus dexa- methasone” as the initial therapy for newly di- agnosed mm. the authors concluded that lena- lidomide-dexamethasone was well tolerated and more effective than thalidomide-dexamethasone. this retrospective study, however, has a number of important methodological limitations, includ- ing the fact that patients treated with thalido- mide-dexamethasone received different doses of thalidomide. it is of note that nearly all authors informed having received honoraria from cel- gene® co in their conflict-of-interest disclosure statement. an observational retrospective study conducted in india (analysis of medical record files) compared the efficacy and occurrence of adverse events in patients (newly diagnosed mm) that had received thalidomide-dexameth- asone with patients treated with lenalido- mide-dexamethasone . the authors found no difference between thalidomide- and lenalido- mide-based therapies with respect to efficacy and safety . a recent population-based cohort study by luo et al. compared survival and rates of pe- ripheral neuropathy in mm patients (n = ) receiving either thalidomide or lenalidomide in routine care in the us. the study found no dif- ference in rates of death (hazard ratio, % ci, . , . - . ) and a lower risk of peripheral neuropathy associated with lenalidomide ( . , . - . ). overall, available comparative effectiveness studies showed no difference in efficacy between lenalidomide- and thalidomide-based therapies p au m ga rt te n f jr t ab le . s tu d ie s o n t h e co m p ar at iv e ef fe ct iv en es s an d s af et y o f th al id o m id e- b as ed v er su s le n al id o m id e- b as ed t h er ap ie s in t h e tr ea tm en t o f m u lt ip le m ye lo m a (m m ). a u th o rs / ye ar s tu d y ty p e s tu d y p o p u la ti o n c o m p ar ed t h er ap ie s c li n ic al o u tc o m e e ffi ca cy e n d p o in ts s id e ef fe ct s st ew ar t et a l. , p h as e ii i r an d o m iz ed c o n tr o ll ed t ri al (n o n -i n fe ri o ri ty d es ig n ) e ld er ly p at ie n ts w it h u n tr ea te d m m m p t -t v er su s m p r -r n o d if fe re n ce i n r r , p f s, a n d o s m p r -r : l o w er i n ci d en ce o f p er ip h er al n eu ro p at h y. z w ee gm an e t al ., p h as e ii i m u lt ic en te r o p en -l ab el r c t (s tu d y d es ig n s im il ar t o t h at o f st ew ar t et a l.’ s tr ia l) n ew ly -d ia gn o se d m m w h o w er e in el ig ib le t o st em c el l tr an sp la n t m p t -t v er su s m p r -r n o d if fe re n ce i n p f s (p ri m ar y ef fi ca cy e n d p o in t) m p t -t : i n cr ea se d i n ci d en ce o f p er ip h er al n eu ro p at h y m p r -r : i n cr ea se d i n ci d en ce o f h em at o lo gi c to xi ci ty r eq u ir in g gr o w th f ac to r su p p o rt . g ay e t al ., o b se rv at io n al ( ca se -c o n tr o l d es ig n ed ) re tr o sp ec ti ve s tu d y. m at ch ed - p ai r an al ys is a d ju st ed f o r ag e, s ex , tr an sp la n ta ti o n , d x m d o se + . n ew ly d ia gn o se d m m p at ie n ts ( in it ia l th er ap y) l en al id o m id e + d x m v er su s t h al id o m id e + d x m . l en al id o m id e + d m x : l o n ge r t t p ( m ed ia n . v er su s . m o ), p f s ( . v er su s . m o ); o s (n o t re ac h ed v er su s . m o ). si m il ar p ro p o rt io n o f p at ie n ts i n t h e g ro u p s ex p er ie n ce d a t le as t o n e gr ad e o r a d ve rs e ev en t (t h al id o m id e ve rs u s le n al id o m id e: . % v er su s . % )# s as h id h ar an et a l. o b se rv at io n al ( an al ys is o f m ed ic al re co rd fi le s) r et ro sp ec ti ve s tu d y. n ew ly d ia gn o se d m m p at ie n ts w h o a tt en d ed m ed ic al c ar e in t er ti ar y h o sp it al s in i n d ia . t h al id o m id e + d x m ( n = ) ve rs u s le n al id o m id e+ d x m (n = ) p ro p o rt io n o f p at ie n ts s h o w in g m in im al a n d p ar ti al c li n ic al re sp o n se t o t re at m en t (s er u m im m u n o gl o b u li n l ev el s, b o n e m ar ro w b io p sy ) p ro p o rt io n o f ad ve rs e ev en ts d id n o t d if fe r. y et n o t d if fe ri n g st at is ti ca ll y, ( . % ) p at ie n ts t re at ed w it h t h al id o m id e p re se n te d n eu ro p at h y ag ai n st ( . % ) th at r ec ei ve d le n al id o m id e. l u o e t al ., o b se rv at io n al ( p o p u la ti o n -b as ed co h o rt ). p at ie n ts w it h m m re ce iv in g th al id o m id e o r le n al id o m id e in r o u ti n e ca re i n t h e u s. ( n = ) t h al id o m id e- b as ed ve rs u s le n al id o m id e- b as ed t h er ap ie s n o d if fe re n ce i n r at es o f d ea th (h r : % c i, . : . - . ) l en al id o m id e- b as ed t h er ap ie s: l o w er r is k o f p er ip h er al n eu ro p at h y (h r : % c i, . : . - . ). m p t -t : i n d u ct io n w it h “ m el p h al an /p re d n is o n e/ th al id o m id e” a n d m ai n te n an ce w it h t h al id o m id e. m p r -r : i n d u ct io n w it h “ m el p h al an /p re d n is o n e/ le n al id o m id e (r ev il im id ® )” a n d m ai n te n an ce w it h l en al id o m id e. d x m : d ex am et h as o n e. + p at ie n ts t re at ed w it h t h al id o m id e an d d x m r ec ei ve d d if fe re n t d o se s o f d x m . a d ve rs e ev en ts w er e gr ad ed a cc o rd in g to t h e u s n at io n al c an ce r in st it u te c o m m o n t er m in o lo gy c ri te ri a. h r : h az ar d r at io . m o : m o n th s. r r : r es p o n se r at es p f s: p ro gr es si o n f re e su rv iv al ; t t p : t im e to p ro gr es si o n ; o s: o ve ra ll s u rv iv al . c iên cia & saú d e c o letiva, ( ): - , for mm. nonetheless, studies suggest that lena- lidomide-based regimens are associated with a lower risk of peripheral neuropathy, and a higher risk of hematologic adverse effects (table ). concluding remarks lenalidomide approval for marketing in brazil is an unquestionable triumph of a lobbying involv- ing congress members, patient organizations (most of which supported by the pharmaceutical company) and medical specialty associations. as always, lobbying campaign blurred the scientific evidence behind the arguments for and against an approval for marketing decision. lenalidomide, thalidomide and proteasome inhibitors (bortezomid) are effective drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of mm. com- parative effectiveness research failed to demon- strate a greater efficacy of lenalidomide over thalidomide or bortezomid in patients with mm - , . all these drugs can cause potentially severe adverse effects but their toxicity profiles are somewhat different from each other. for in- stance, lenalidomide, compared to thalidomide, apparently causes less peripheral neuropathy and more severe hematologic toxicity. if comparative effectiveness research do not reveal a clinical superiority of lenalidomide over the other drugs, cost-effectiveness seems to be different. thalidomide-based treatments are cost-effective compared with those based on lenalidomide. this was shown by a study com- paring the cost-effectiveness of initial treatment of mm in the us with “bortezomid (velcade®) + melphalan + prednisone” (vmp), versus “tha- lidomide + melphalan + prednisone” (mpt), versus “lenalidomide (revlimid®) + melphalan + prednisone plus lenalidomide maintenance” (mpr-r), and found that vmp cost $ , , mpt $ , and mpr-r $ , . thalid- omide-based therapies, however, are certain- ly much cheaper in brazil where a state-owned pharmaceutical industry (funed-mg) produc- es – at very low manufacturing costs - the thalid- omide used in the country. it was estimated, for instance, that us brand-name thalidomide (tha- lomid®) costs approximately -fold the thalid- omide made by brazilian funed . therefore, the eventual substitution of thalidomide-based therapies by those based on lenalidomide is like- ly to raise substantially healthcare costs in the country without a significant (if any) improve- ment of treatment effectiveness. another major problem with lenalidomide approval in brazil is the establishment of a reg- ulatory double standard for analogous drugs having in common a high teratogenic risk (table ). owing to risk of harm to the unborn child, thalidomide is regulated by a specific federal law (law no. . / ) that prohibits its sale and or dispensing in commercial pharmacies. it also states that thalidomide shall be distributed exclusively to public health units and hospitals. there are a number of additional rules issued by anvisa that impose strict conditions for prescribing and dispensing thalidomide to ap- proved (and off label) therapeutic indications. the law . / , however, makes no pro- vision for lenalidomide and other teratogenic analogues of thalidomide. unless the brazilian congress amends law . / , lenalidomide sale, prescribing and dispensing will be regulat- ed exclusively by anvisa rules, i.e., by agency resolutions that do not have the force of law. re- cently, anvisa conducted a public consultation (cp no. / ) on a regulatory act on the control of lenalidomide. a key difference regard- ing the current thalidomide control regulation in the country is that, in the case of lenalidomide, it is up to the drug manufacturing company the implementation of a detailed plan on the sales, distribution and dispensing that must comply with a pregnancy prevention plan approved by the agency (table ). finally, there is no reason for a regulatory double standard for lenalidomide and thalido- mide and, therefore, law . / should be amended to include lenalidomide and any other thalidomide analogue. the rules for prescription and dispensing of lenalidomide should be the same prevailing for thalidomide and thus, pro- motion of lenalidomide prescription and adver- tisement by the pharmaceutical company should be forbidden. the use of lenalidomide should be controlled by health authorities and restricted to those patients who cannot otherwise be treated with more cost-effective alternatives (e.g., be- cause of peripheral neuropathy side effects). p au m ga rt te n f jr table . brazilian asymmetric regulatory standards for thalidomide and its teratogenic analogue lenalidomide. thalidomide lenalidomide brand name generic name revilimid® manufacturer state owned (public) industry (funed-mg) pharmaceutical company (celgene® co) potential to cause birth defects (teratogenicity) proven to humans and non-human primates proven to non-human primates (likely human teratogen) regulation federal law ( . / ) and additional rules issued by anvisa regulation to be issued by anvisa (public consultation no. / ) sales prohibited no restriction. costs low cost medicine (very) high cost medicine promotion of prescription & advertisement prohibited (nonexistent) allowed if directed to prescribers (as any other prescription drug)+ use for off-label therapeutic indications strictly controlled by anvisa uncontrolled by anvisa drug distribution and dispensing exclusively to public health units and hospitals (controlled by health authorities) distribution and dispensing controlled by the company authorized prescribers / pharmacists registered by local health authority qualified and registered by the company. + according to pc / (art, ), “any” advertisement of lenalidomide is forbidden. however, art. (paragraph) makes an exemption for advertising lenalidomide-based medicines in publications intended to medical or scientific purposes. in practice, there is no restriction to propaganda, because this is the usual way by which pharmaceutical companies promote prescription of “prescription-only” drugs among physicians. c iên cia & saú d e c o letiva, ( ): - , references . dimasi ja, faden lb. competitiveness in follow-on drug r&d: a race or imitation? nat rev drug discov ; ( ): - . . paumgartten fj. novel thalidomide analogues, “me too” drugs and the brazilian law. visa em debate ; : - . . sarpatwari a, avorn j, kesselheim as. using a drug-safety tool to prevent competition. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . badros az. lenalidomide in myeloma--a high-main- tenance friend. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . national cancer institute (nci). surveillance, epide- miology and end results program [internet]. cancer stat facts: myeloma [cited nov ]. available at: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/mulmy.html . celgene. celgene reports first quarter operating and financial results. 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[cited oct ]. available at: http://portal.anvisa.gov.br/rss/ asset_publisher/zk q uqcj pn/content/id/ . d’amato rj, loughnan ms, flynn e, folkman j. tha- lidomide is an inhibitor of angiogenesis. proc natl acad sci usa ; ( ): - . . folkman j. tumor angiogenesis: therapeutic implica- tions. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . von lilienfeld-toal m, hahn-ast c, furkert k, hoff- mann f, naumann r, bargou r, cook g, glasmacher a. a systematic review of phase ii trials of thalido- mide/dexamethasone combination therapy in pa- tients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. eur j haematol ; ( ): - . . singhal s, mehta j, desikan r, ayers d, roberson p, eddlemon p, munshi n, anaissie e, wilson c, dhodapkar m, zeddis j, barlogie b. antitumor activ- ity of thalidomide in refractory multiple myeloma. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . moehler tm, hillengass j, glasmacher a, gold- schmidt h. thalidomide in multiple myeloma. curr pharm biotechnol ; ( ): - . . sv, blood e, vesole d, fonseca r, greipp pr; eastern cooperative oncology group. phase iii clinical trial of thalidomide plus dexamethasone compared with dexamethasone alone in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma: a clinical trial coordinated by the eastern cooperative oncology group. j clin oncol ; ( ): - . . dimopoulos m, spencer a, attal m, prince hm, harousseau jl, dmoszynska a, san miguel j, hell- mann a, facon t, foà r, corso a, masliak z, olesny- ckyj m, yu z, patin j, zeldis jb, knight rd; multiple myeloma ( ) study investigators. lenalidomide plus dexamethasone for relapsed or refractory multi- ple myeloma. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . palumbo a, hajek r, delforge m, kropff m, petrucci mt, catalano j, gisslinger h, wiktor-jędrzejczak w, zodelava m, weisel k, cascavilla n, iosava g, cavo m, kloczko j, bladé j, beksac m, spicka i, plesner t, radke j, langer c, ben yehuda d, corso a, herbein l, yu z, mei j, jacques c, dimopoulos ma; mm- investigators. continuous lenalidomide treatment for newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. n engl j med ; ( ): - . . yang b, yu rl, chi xh, lu xc. lenalidomide treat- ment for multiple myeloma: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. plos one ; ( ):e . . morgan g. future drug developments in multiple myeloma: an overview of novel lenalidomide-based combination therapies. blood rev ; (supl. ):s -s . . stewart ak, jacobus s, fonseca r, weiss m, calland- er ns, chanan-khan aa, rajkumar sv. melphalan, prednisone, and thalidomide vs melphalan, predni- sone, and lenalidomide (ecog e a ) in untreated multiple myeloma. blood ; ( ): - . . zweegman s, van der holt b, mellqvist uh, salomo m, bos gm, levin md, visser-wisselaar h, hansson m, van der velden aw, deenik w, gruber a, coenen jl, plesner t, klein sk, tanis bc, szatkowski dl, brouwer re, westerman m, leys mr, sinnige ha, haukås e, van der hem kg, durian mf, mattijssen ev, van de donk nw, stevens-kroef mj, sonneveld p, waage a. melphalan, prednisone, and lenalido- mide versus melphalan, prednisone, and thalido- mide in untreated multiple myeloma. blood ; ( ): - . . gay f, hayman sr, lacy mq, buadi f, gertz ma, ku- mar s, dispenzieri a, mikhael jr, bergsagel pl, dingli d, reeder cb, lust ja, russell sj, roy v, zeldenrust sr, witzig te, fonseca r, kyle ra, greipp pr, stew- art ak, rajkumar sv. lenalidomide plus dexametha- sone versus thalidomide plus dexamethasone in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma: a comparative analysis of patients. blood ; ( ): - . . sashidharan n, shenoy s, kishore mk, thanusubra- manian h. comparison of two therapeutic regimes, lenalidomide with dexamethasone and thalidomide with dexamethasone, in the treatment of multiple myeloma at a tertiary care hospital in india. j clin diagn res ; ( ):xc -xc . . luo j, gagne jj, landon j, avorn j, kesselheim as. comparative effectiveness and safety of thalidomide and lenalidomide in patients with multiple myeloma in the united states of america: a population-based cohort study. eur j cancer ; : - . . wang a, duan q, liu x, ding k, han y, zhu w, sun z. (bortezomib plus lenalidomide / thalidomide)- vs. (bortezomib or lenalidomide / thalidomide)-contain- ing regimens as induction therapy in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. ann hematol ; ( ): - . p au m ga rt te n f jr . garrison junior lp, wang st, huang h, ba-mancini a, shi h, chen k, korves c, dhawan r, cakana a, van de velde h, corzo d, duh ms. the cost-effective- ness of initial treatment of multiple myeloma in the u.s. with bortezomib plus melphalan and prednisone versus thalidomide plus melphalan and prednisone or lenalidomide plus melphalan and prednisone with continuous lenalidomide maintenance treatment. oncologist ; ( ): - . artigo apresentado em / / aprovado em / / versão final apresentada em / / this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licensebycc 	 ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... p r o f e s s i o n s p o t l i g h t : i n t e r v i e w s , r e f l e c t i o n s , a n d a d v i c e f r o m w o m e n i n l e g i s l a t i v e s t u d i e s as associate dean of liberal arts. this is not to say there is no gen- der bias at that institution but, in my experience, it was limited (and, oddly, more pronounced when i had more senior rank). the worst was from students exhibiting inappropriate behaviors. yet, i rarely felt disadvantaged in my subfield of legislative studies because of my sex. there were not many women in the subfield, but when i was just starting out, there were scholars senior to me (e.g., barbara sinclair) to consider as role models. it also is the case that the entire field was smaller at that time, and there were fewer graduate students vying for the limited space to present papers on panels. conferences have expanded to meet the demand for participation, but this means that not all panels are composed of equally prominent scholars. in the s and s, the odds of being placed on a panel with top scholars were much higher than today. being on panels with top scholars meant that i was able to meet them, and the folks who came to a panel to hear them also had to hear me. it was easier for any young scholar in the field—and, therefore, for a young female scholar—to get bene- ficial exposure in the s than it is today. and exposure leads to opportunities that lead to more exposure. i served a term on the editorial board of legislative studies quarterly, twice organized panels for the legislative politics section of the midwest polit- ical science association, did the same for the southern political science association once, and served as a member of the advi- sory panel for political science at the national science founda- tion. whereas some might see this as thankless service work, it also is an opportunity for professional networking and getting one’s name in front of people. i also participated in several spe- cialized conferences on various aspects of the legislative process, sometimes through an application process and sometimes by invitation. these conferences provide good opportunities for net- working and making people aware of one’s work. yet, at one such conference, i had the only seriously negative experience that i can remember that i attribute to gender bias. the paper i presented (with a male coauthor) critiqued on methodological grounds an earlier work on the same topic that was coauthored by a very sen- ior scholar who also was at the conference. during a break, he cornered me to question that critique and take me to task for it. it was notable to me that he did not question my coauthor alone or the two of us together. my subsequent relations with that individual (who i encountered at panels and events) were rather chilly. however, if this is the only unpleasant experience i had related to gender, it is not so bad. it is entirely possible that i was successful at being integrated into the field precisely because i am a woman. this is simply the serendipity of timing. in the s and s, universities and professional associations were making an effort to afford women more opportunities. if there was a demand to include women (e.g., on the program committee of a professional association) and there were not many women available, then the odds of being included were greatly increased. at its worst, this was tokenism. however, even tokenism gives one a seat at the table. the challenge is to take advantage of that seat. the most significant change to the field since i was an assistant professor is that it is larger. there are more women, but there are more men too. therefore, the competition is stiffer than it used to be. it is more difficult to have work accepted in top journals, and the proliferation of panels and the sheer size of conferences dilute the opportunities for networking. ironically, women also may be currently disadvantaged by an increase in their numbers in the field, which makes them a visible minority but does not give them parity with men. despite this situation, many aspects of the route to success today are no different than the ones i took: show up, speak up, be competent, and be responsible. attend the important confer- ences, go to panels other than your own, join the relevant subfield sections, and attend their business meetings and social events. present papers that are essentially finished products rather than works in progress. be willing to serve as a panel chair or discus- sant and then do a good job. i have observed a remarkable decline in professionalism during the course of my career: people pres- ent papers that are too rough for prime time, panel chairs who do nothing more than keep time, and discussants who offer no useful comments to an author. they are joined by those who refuse to review for journals, write sloppy reviews, or send them in late. one simple step toward success is to counter this trend by cultivating a strong sense of professionalism. no matter the role, do your best work and always—and only—put your best work for- ward. set high expectations for your career and recognize that, at least to a degree, you can control your achievements through your own efforts and abilities. some readers will conclude that i remain naïve about gen- der bias in the profession or lament that i have not addressed the repercussions of the #metoo movement in the discipline. i acknowledge that both sexism and sexual harassment are prob- lems in some departments and in parts of the discipline. but they are barriers that can be overcome by persistence and profession- alism. withdrawal in the face of bias is not an option. success is the best revenge. n advice for women and for their colleagues and mentors: an interview with frances e. lee sorelle wyckoff gaynor, university of maryland frances e. lee, princeton university doi: . /s sorelle gaynor (sg): when you first started graduate school or as a new professor, were you aware of a gender disparity in the field of legislative studies? frances lee (fl): i wasn’t. and, in fact, when i first started out, there were particular women scholars who were very visible in the legislative politics field. obviously, there was barbara sinclair. there was linda fowler and diana evans as well. when i started my first job—a one-year research fellowship at brookings right after grad school—sarah binder was on staff there and wendy schiller was a visiting scholar. i was well aware of work by all of these scholars as i studied for comps and worked on my dissertation. so, there seemed to be quite a few women in the field. it was only later, over time, that i began to see that women are a distinct minority in legislative studies. it’s not unusual today to go to panels where most—if not all—of the panelists are men and most everyone in the audience is a man, too. but i wasn’t cognizant of this at the start. that impression evolved over time. sg: do you see any reason for this gender imbalance? and what approach could legislative scholars take in addressing this gap? fl: it seems to be true of the study of american institutions over- all. the presidency subfield also is very male dominated, just like ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... legislative studies. i can’t say i have a good explanation of why this would be the case. perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the object of one’s study in these fields is mostly men. there’s clearly some kind of self-selection dynamic in which female graduate students interested in american politics tend to gravitate toward other subjects rather than legislative studies. being cognizant of this imbalance can help legislative scholars be mindful of their choices so that they ensure that any woman who wants to study in this field feels welcome. they should ask themselves if they are equally approachable to male and female students. certainly, they’d want to consider the syllabi they put together: are they appropriately representative of good work by female scholars? being self-aware about those imbalances can be helpful. but i think the cause of the gender disparity in the field owes more to patterns in graduate-student interest and self-selection rather than unfriendliness toward women. sg: you mentioned prominent legislative scholars when you started out. what impact did this have on you, and what advice do you have for young scholars looking for mentors? fl: as a young scholar, i certainly looked up to the trailblazing women who preceded me in the field. i especially admired bar- bara sinclair. when she spoke on panels, she always had great insights and was very clear—and she had such a fun, dynamic per- sonality too. at an early conference when i was still a graduate student and didn’t know anybody there, linda fowler came up to me in the exhibit hall and introduced herself. she’d heard about me from bruce oppenheimer, who was my mentor at vanderbilt, and just made the contact. i never forgot that she was welcoming to me. just the friendly hello from a scholar i looked up to meant a lot to me at that juncture. the presence of female role models does make a difference for younger people coming into a field, and they were present for me. even though it was a field in which women were a minority, role models were not absent. as younger scholars seek mentors for themselves, i think it’s unfair to put all the burden on them to know what they need to look for. people just starting out in graduate school typically don’t know what they don’t know–and aren’t yet even in a position to know what to ask. faculty in the field have to take responsibility for students in their program because they are in a better position to know what’s needed than the students themselves, at least ini- tially. but the key things for young scholars to ask as they look for mentors: is the faculty member responsive? will they read your work and give you timely feedback? are they available to meet or have a conversation? there are great scholars who don’t take much interest in graduate students’ work. in some cases, it might still pay off to be a student of such a person because of their fame, but if you want mentorship, then you need to take stock of whether a scholar will engage with students in that way. for those in a mentorship role, it’s great to talk to female grad- uate students about the challenges that they face. to have frank conversations about practical things, like what to wear on job interviews, what sort of subjects are appropriate to bring up, and how early in the interview process to initiate conversations about various subjects. being willing to have those conversations is an important kind of mentorship. sg: have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? and, if so, how do you get past it and what would you encourage other women to do? fl: yes, i have experienced it. it was a big part of my life, espe- cially early on in my career. in graduate school, i felt very lucky to have the opportunity to earn a phd, but i often did question whether i was going to succeed. it takes years to develop the amount of expertise that you think you need to have the title professor. it takes a long time, even after successfully defending a dissertation, to feel ready to uphold others’—and your own— expectations about what it means to be an expert in a field. it’s an ongoing challenge to live up to what you think you should be. and overcoming the imposter syndrome—which is always a work in a progress for many of us—is a matter of lots of preparation. preparation helps you develop confidence, even if it doesn’t come naturally. sg: what are some disadvantages you see women facing in legis- lative studies? advantages? fl: one disadvantage, i think, is that coauthoring relationships are a little harder to develop for women. oftentimes, male schol- ars are friends with one another, and then coauthoring projects grow out of a friendship. that kind of bonding is just easier among people of the same sex. obviously, working together with others is helpful, especially for people early in their career. given the gender imbalance in the field, i think it’s a little harder for women to get to develop those collaborative relationships. not to say it’s impossible, but it’s just harder. i do think that as departments try to diversify, female can- didates often get a closer look. most departments don’t want to have an overwhelmingly male-tilted faculty distribution, and so being female can get you some scrutiny on the job market. this can open up opportunities, given that there are so few women who study legislative politics. female scholars in the legislative field also often get extra opportunities to serve on panels or to participate in conferences as organizers try to ensure some gender balance. one piece of advice to scholars working on these fraught issues around gender balance and representation: it can be a bit demoralizing to women scholars to feel that they have only been selected to fill a quota. when you ask a woman scholar to for those in a mentorship role, it’s great to talk to female graduate students about the challenges that they face. to have frank conversations about practical things, like what to wear on job interviews, what sort of subjects are appropriate to bring up, and how early in the interview process to initiate conversations about various subjects. being willing to have those conversations is an important kind of mentorship. 	 ps	•	april ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... p r o f e s s i o n s p o t l i g h t : i n t e r v i e w s , r e f l e c t i o n s , a n d a d v i c e f r o m w o m e n i n l e g i s l a t i v e s t u d i e s participate in a panel or conference or some other effort and they decline, it’s a little off-putting to then ask them, “can you name some other women?” that’s not great for the self-esteem of your female colleagues. sg: on a larger scale, how do you see the current political climate and movements like metoo potentially shaping the field? fl: metoo presents some really thorny problems for the academy. this is not a legislative studies problem; this is just a problem of how universities are organized. many wonderful features of universities flow from the tenure system and the independence faculty have. the system allows faculty to work on what they’re interested in, not to be subject to the fads that administrators can be very eager to embrace, to develop an expertise because they care about it and believe that it’s important, and to keep at it even if maybe not everybody sees the value at any given time—these are great features of the system. the whole decentralized structure of universities, all of that grows out of the tenure system. if you do away with that, then you introduce new accountability relationships that would have some good features in the form of being able to better police problem behavior. but it would have many downsides for academic freedom and university organiza- tion. this is a particularly troubling set of tradeoffs for the metoo era. bad faculty behavior is not something universities are great at policing, but growing recognition of this problem highlights that bad faculty behavior is an issue for universities as well as for the victims of inappropriate behavior. sg: what about citations? do you cite someone with multiple, credible allegations? obviously, there’s not a right answer to any of this. fl: that’s an interesting question i’d never considered before. my thinking would be that you cite work that influenced you or that was foundational for your work, regardless of the source. if a piece of work was important to the development of your project or your paper, then you cite where citation is due. personnel deci- sions are another matter. if you’re trying to hire somebody for a job, then you’d absolutely want to take into account whether that person has a record of mistreating students or colleagues. but with regard to citation, that ought to be just on the basis of the academic merits of the matter. n the following discussion summarizes their conversation with professor brown. . what were your initial motivations to study black women lawmakers? furthermore, has your motivation to continue to study black women changed since then? i went to howard university for undergrad, a historically black college and university. at howard, it was black politics all the time, which was a wonderful introduction to the field and provided a solid foundation of what black politics was. but there was little scholarly attention to gender. when i went to rutgers university for my phd, my major field was women in politics. although concentrating on gender politics was really illuminat- ing, it was all about white women. what stuck out to me was the limited amount of scholarship on black women, both at the level of political elites and mass citizenship. thus, for me, it was an obvious place to conduct research. from my own lived expe- riences of seeing black women champion inclusive politics and policy, i knew that black women had a distinct voice. however, this voice was often in the shadows and was not being recognized in the scholarship. both experiences taught me that the problem was deeper than just “no one has done this before” and that there were qualitative differences that needed to be explored. . has the field changed since you started as an assistant profes- sor? if so, how? i think it has changed; i am really excited and enthusiastic about the next generation of scholars who do solid racial, ethnic, and gender politics. i used to be one of only a handful of schol- ars that did this kind of work. now i can point to a whole cohort of scholars who do women of color studies. sarah allen gershon and i published an edited volume on minority women’s politics (brown and gershon ). this captures the types of research that i would never have had the opportunity to read or to think about when i was a graduate student or assistant professor, in large part because there were too few scholars that did this kind of research. now, the field is growing. following this conversation, caballero and jackson explored how prevalent this type of intersectional research has been in the legislative studies field. demographic information on the authors, as well as the subject of publications in issues and of the legislative studies quarterly, suggests that this research is not well represented in this journal. no black scholars of any gender identification were published in these issues. there were three scholars of asian descent (two women and one male), seven latinx scholars (five male and two latinas), and two nonwhite scholars (one male and one female). moreover, we found that the majority of scholars published in these issues were white men ( ) and that the second most-published group was white women ( ). in terms of the subject of the manuscripts that were published in these two issues, only two studies mentioned race and ethnicity, one mentioned same-sex marriage, and four mentioned women. these patterns suggest that even if research in this area is grow- ing, it still may be confined to journals that focus on gender and race. . how was your experience trying to become a part of a field dominated by white male scholars? was it easy? difficult? why? community as self: an interview with nadia e. brown guillermo caballero, purdue university jasmine c. jackson, purdue university nadia e. brown, purdue university doi: . /s an interview between professor nadia e. brown and her grad- uate students, guillermo caballero and jasmine c. jackson, was conducted on november , , at the request of the editors of the legislative scholar. given the small numbers of women in the legislative studies section (lss), the newsletter editors were interested in learning more about their experiences in the legislative studies subfield. caballero and jackson used the basis of the editors’ questions to guide the interview and added two more questions focused on the intersection of gender and race. janez str aj n ar, dipl. sociolog zveza društev rnedicinskih sester slovenije prof. ljudrnila b o k a i inštitut za slovenski jezik, znanstvenoraziskovalni center sazu ljubljana zdravstveni obzornik in slovenska medicinska beseda* udk - : . : izvleČek- prvi del članka obravnava vse- binsko zasnovo in raz voj zdravstvenega obzorni- ka, strokovnega glasila medicinskih sester slove- nije. v drugem delu so zajete pomembnejše značilnosti vsebinskega, strokovnega, jezikovnega in oblikovnega urejanja glasila ter kronološki pre- gled rabe strokovnega izrazja v člankih, ki so obravnavali tudi pomen določenih strokovnih izrazov. sklepni del nakazuje nekatere aktualne naloge v zvezi z oblikovanjem strokovnega izrazja za področje zdravstvene nege, ki spremljajo teore- tično in praktično spoznavanje in uvajanje metode procesa zdravstvene nege. uvod zdra vstveni obzornik and slovene medlcal terminology. ab- stract- part one outlines the contents and the development of zdravstveni obzornik, which is the official journal of slovenian nurses. part two deals with the important features of the editorial objectives concerning the contents, the professional issues,. the technical terminology and the form of the journal, including a chronological list of terms dealt with in some articles. in conclusion, the author indicates certain tasks concerning the introduction of new terminology in the field of nursing, which are related to the theoretical and practical aspects of the nursing process method. centralni higienski zavod, leta pa takratni zavod lrs za zdravstveno varstvo v ljubljani je v obdobju - izdal osem letnikov strokovnega časopisa meoicinska sestra na terenu, ki ga štejemo za predhodnika sedanjega zdravstvenega obzornika. namenjen je bil predvsem spodbujanju razvoja patronažne službe in uveljav- ljanju metode polivalentne zdravstveno-socialne obravnave varovancev, hkrati pa je opravljal temeljno nalogo strokovnega izpopolnjevanja medicinskih sester. z razvojem medicine je namreč postalo timsko delo eno izmed temeljnih načel tudi v zdravstveni dejavnosti, stalno izobraževanje vseh pa velika potreba. urednica časopisa je bila medicinska sestra cit a bole, lektor pa franjo tominec. vsebinska zasnova in razvoj zdravstvenega obzornika po nekajletni prekinitvi, ko medicinske sestre niso imele svojega strokovnega glasila, je leta izšla prva številka strokovnega glasila z naslovom zora v- stveni obornik. glasilo je prvi dve leti ( - ) izhajalo v treh, kasneje ( - ) v štirih, od leta dalje pa v šestih številkah na leto. izdajatelji glasila * xv. jubilejno spominsko srečanje prof. dr. janeza plečnika slovenska medicinska beseda, ki so ga od . do . decernbra pripravili inštitut za patologijo, inštitut za anatornijo, inštitut za' histologijo in ernbriologijo in inštitut za sodno medicino medicinske fakultete univerze edvarda kardelja v ljubljani. avtorja sta terno predstavila v okviru obravnave posebnih vidikov rnedicinske terminologije. med razgl ; ; suppl : - . so do leta bili zveza društev medicinskih sester slovenije, društvo otroških sester ter društvo fizioterapevtov in delovnih terapevtov v ljubljani, od leta dalje pa glasilo izdaja samo zveza društev medicinskih sester slovenije. program ska zasnova zdravstvenega obzornika je opredeljena v uvodu prve številke. vsebinsko naj bi se osredotočil na temeljna vprašanja zdravstvenega varstva: na utrjevanje zdravja in preprečevanje bolezni, na nego bolnika in medicinsko rehabilitacijo. obravnaval naj bi tudi socialno in psihološko' tematiko, seznanjal zdravstvene delavce s srednjo in višjo izobrazbo z novimi dosežki v medicini, obnavljal in dopolnjeval njihovo teoretično in praktično znanje ter opozarjal na pomembnejše oz. prednostne naloge vsakdanje prakse. poilai".p aČ na"so!o>"in.i naslovna stran prve številke zdravstvenega obzornika, ki je začel izhajati leta . leto l % Šl. i prva glavna in odgovorna urednica glasila je bila medicinska sestra cita bole, v uredniš- kem odboru pa so poleg nje bile še ivana dolenc, anica gradišek_ in cilka potok:ar. prvi letnik je imel stran i, izšel pa je z naklado izvodov. zdravstveni obzornik je bil v začetku nekaj let instruktivno informativno glasilo za medicinske sestre, fizioterapevte in delovne terapevte, po letu pa je dobil vlogo in oznako informativnega, strokovnega in poklicnega glasila slovenskih medicinskih sester. od leta dalje je zdravstveni obzornik strokovno glasilo medicinskih sester slovenije, kar je navedeno tudi na novi naslovni strani. glasilo naj bi vplivalo na stroko vni napredek in kvaliteto poklicnega dela medicinskih sester, jim omogočilo ustrezno orientacijo v sodobni zdravstveni problematiki in njenem reševanju ter spodbujalo društva medicinskih sester in strokovne sekcije pri zvezi društev medicinskih sester slovenije k neposrednemu delu med članstvom. hkrati naj bi bilo glasilo strokovno učno gradivo za dijake in študente medicinskih šol. vsebinsko zasnovo glasila, njeno dopolnjevanje in spreminjanje ponazarjajo stalne rubrike, ki v prvem ddu vsebujejo tudi strokovne članke o razvoju zdrav- stvene nege, v drugem pa aktualne novosti, probleme in dogodke iz življenja in dela medicinskih sester. prvi letniki glasila ( - ) so imeli naslednje rubrike: Članki, mejniki našega zdravstva, zgodovinski portreti, organizacija zdravstvene službe, lz druš- tvenega življenja, osebne vesti, beležke ob knjigah in zanimivosti. . !etnik ( ) je dobil prvo spremembo naslovne strani, . letnik ( ) pa še rubriko novosti - izkušnje - pobude. od . do . letnika ( - ) se je glasilo le malo spremenilo. posamezne rubrike so bile opuščene, nekaj pa je bilo uvedenih le občasno: Članki, leposlovje, • spomini iz nov, novosti - izkušnje - pobude, organizacija zdravstvene službe, lz društvenega življenja, osebne vesti, beležke ob knjigah in zanimivosti. prva sprememba naslovne strani zdravstve- nega obzornika ( - ), ki jo je obli- koval arhitekt mitja omersa. obseg posameznih letnikov in naklada gla- sila pa je bila po letih njegovega izhajan;a naslednja: : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov; ; strani, izvodov,' : strani, izvo- dov; : strani, izvodov; : ·,: stran i, izvodov; : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov. ctlabole: un'l'je--'i illpnftl:a...--. dr.d nicamlltuč....••. u&rfnkasenekovlč ~.,bobdl- sia'l ca poptnlk-tolelč otnliiinbolal:n •. dr,joie tropdlk" i'ripnnbo ••••••••d ~jr"di*a"' •. iol prlm. r.emanpertj.: ~ lije .•..•.. lol lilra prldpr:=.=" ..us h iidn zamd& srb" :iil!rot tvslon. ••• tyo(n.j.) koů:n:rie -.lop pri mra..-__ iio~ok>.. . . . . . "' &m.po k,d,r, nilw addlkar: o •••••••••• ~ •. ai..-k b' ',n bmll\...-~-.....-.--prtm.dr.uirkoxuun:b-""lde ••.• 'rij-j& iii'&ldi bolo:ml ••• ,....._. '" b~ih jenjii.ij :::l-:=;.=:•• __ ..... . iwoiile oll imjipb • ~ "ui,lm,lh od . do . letnika ( - ) se je število rubrik zmanjšalo, ne koliko pa se je spremenilo tudi njihovo zaporedje: Članki, osebne vesti, novosti - izkušnje - pobude, organizacija zdravstvene službe, lz društvenega življenja, beležke ob knjigah in zanimivosti. . letnik ( ) je dobil novo naslovno stran (druga sprememba), ki jo je oblikoval arhitekt mitja omersa. Članki v prvem delu glasila so se začeli vedno na novi strani, dobili so tudi povzetek (od leta dalje izvleček) v slovenskem in angleškem jeziku, stal no obliko in sekundarno opremo. od . letnika ( ) dalje imajo članki tudi oznako univerzalne decimalne klasifikacije (udk), glasilo pa je dobilo slovensko in angleško kazalo, oznako udk in letno kazalo. od . letnika ( ) dalje ima glasilo stalno notranjo ureditev, vsebinsko pa je razdeljeno na tri dele: Članki, novosti - izkušnje - pobude z rubrikami: razvojno-raziskovalno delo, strokovno izpopolnjevanje in organizacija dela ter lz društvenega življenja z rubrikami: poročila o delu, strokovna srečanja, lz urada mednarodne zveze medicinskih·sester, osebne vesti, sporočilo, slikovno sporočilo (od let a dalje), beležke ob knjigah, lz biomedicine slovenice (od leta dalje) in zanimivosti. glasilo svoje temeljne naravnanosti ni spremenilo, kaže pa se čedalje večja težnja od kronikalnega beleženja dogodkov k prečiščenemu strokovnemu in vsebinskemu konceptu. leto xi druga sprememba naslovne strani zdrav- stvenega obzornika (od leta dalje), ki jo je ob -letnici njegovega izhajanja pri- pravil arhitekt mitja omersa. glasilo je dobilo slovensko in angleško ka- zalo, strokovni članki pa stalno obliko: vsi so se začeli na novi strani, dobili so povzetek (od leta dalje izvleček) v slovenskem in angleškem jeziku ter bibliografsko nave- deno literaturo. ustalila se je tudi oblika in velikost tiska, precej pa se je povečalo tudi slikovno gradivo. obseg letnikov in naklada glasila se je z leti njegovega izhajanja .še povečevala: : strani, izvo- dov; : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov; : stran i, izvo- dov; : strani, izvodov; : strani, izvodov in : stra- ni, izvodov. zdravstveni obzornik letos ( ) že osemnajsto leto uspešno uresničuje svojo programsko zasnovo: seznanja predvsem medicinske sestre, pa tudi druge zdrav- stvene delavce z delom, razvojem, problemi in uspehi na področju zdravstvene nege, jih seznanja s pomembnejšimi novostmi s področja medicine, biomedicine in družboslovja ter z njihovo društveno in družbeno dejavnostjo, povezuje strokov- njake na področju zdravstvene nege ter omogoča izmenjavo strokovnih, organiza- cijskih, pedagoških in samoupravnih izkušenj iz dela, pomembno prispeva k vzgoji, izobraževanju in stalnemu strokovnemu izpopolnjevanju medicinskih sester in zdravstvenih tehnikov, razvija sistematično in metodično proučevanje področja zdravstvene nege ter oblikuje trajne dokumente s tega področja ( ). kvaliteta strokovnega dela (člankov) v prvem delu glasila se je z leti postopno izboljševala, povečal se je tudi njihov obseg ter število naročnikov. postopno se je večal tudi obseg posameznih letnikov - od začetnih strani (in izvodov) leta na strani (in izvodov) leta . takšen obseg in naklado ima tudi osemnajsti letnik zdravstvenega obzornika. pomembnejše značilnosti nrejanja zdravstvenega obzornika in tradicionalno opredeljevanje zdravstvene nege bibliografski pregledi zdravstvenega obzornika po petletnih obdobjih ( , , ) vsebujejo poleg pregleda vsebine po medicinskih strok ah v skladu z udk in bibliografskimi navodili tudi vse pomembnejše podat ke o urejanju in izdajanju glasila: o izdajateljih glasila, urednikih in uredniških odborih, sestavi piscev, notranji ureditviglasila, obsegu posameznih letnikov, njihovi nakladi idr. doku- mentirajo torej zdravstvena prizadevanja v posameznih obdobjih, hkrati pa so zanimiv prispevek k zgodovini zdravstvene kulture na slovenskem. v posameznih številkah zdravstvenega obzornika najdemo tudi krajše zapise o vsebinskem, strokovnem in oblikovnem urejanju glasila. glavni in odgovorni uredniki glasila so bili: cita bole ( - ), neža jarnovič ( - ), anica gradišek ( - ), marija miloradovié ( - ), marija Šipec (od dalje), uredniki pa neža jarnovič ( - ) in janez strajnar (od dalje). lekturo so opravljali: franjo tominec ( - ), irena celec ( - ) in ljudmila bokal (od dalje). franjo tominec je jezikovno uredil tudi vseh osem letnikov strokovnega časopisa medicinska sestra na terenu. svojega dela ni omejil samo na jezikovni pregled prispevkov za objavo. z izrednim posluhom za lep jezik, dobrim poznava- njem medicinskega izrazja in dolgoletnimi izkušnjami jih je oblikoval v bolj pregledne zapise o delu medicinskih sester in drugih zdravstvenih delavcev. medicinska sestra neža jarnovič je bila celo desetletje osrednja oblikovalka glasila: opravljala je uredniško in strokovno redakcijo glasila, zbirala strokovne članke, pritegnila k sodelovanju znane zdravnike, spodbujala medicinske sestre k pisanju, jim svetovala, pomagala ter popravljala prispevke za objavo ( ). za zdravstveni obzornik so glede na objavljene članke o vsebinskem in metodičnem razvoju zdravstvene nege pri nas značilna tri obdobja: od . do . letnika, od . do . letnika in od . letnika dalje. za prvo obdobje, od . do . letnika ( - ), je glede na široko programsko zasnovo - glasilo so izdajale tri društvene organizacije - značilna raznovrstnost krajših prispevkov, ko so imeli predvsem informativno vlogo. kot avtorji so sodelovali številni znani zdravniki, fakultetni učitelji in medicinski publicisti (marij avčin, janez fettich, milko bedjanič, janez milčinski, mirko karlin, zlata stropnik, lev milčinski, vito lavrič, eman pertl idr.), medicinske sestre (majda Šlajmer-japelj, mira pridgar, dina urbančič, neža jarnovič, marija miloradovié, anica gradišek, stana kavalič idr.), fizioterapevti in delovni terapevti (ivana dolenc, metoda kramar, elizabeta milič, marinka skušek itd.) ter drugi strokov- njaki (slavica pogačnik-toličič, milica bergant, jožica pirc idr.). v članku o negi bolnika po smernicah svetovne zdravstvene organizacije, ki ga je leta iz nemščine prevedla breda m schl, prvič zasledimo razlago izrazov: • nega bolnika v najširšem pomenu besede - kot samostojna naloga medicin- ske sestre, ki mora »... posamezniku, bolnemu ali zdravemu, pomagati pri izvajanju tistih opravil, ki prispevajo k zdravju, zdravljenju ali k spokojni smrti, torej opravil, ki bi jih bolnik opravil sam brez pomoči, če bi razpolagal s potrebno močjo, voljo in znanjem«, • služba nege bolnika zajema vse tiste dejavnosti v zdravstvu, ki so v organizi- rani obliki na razpolago bolniku; izraz nega zajema tudi zdravega človeka, obsega torej preventivne in kurativne ukrepe ter rehabilitacijo, • sestrska dejavnost označuje vsa delovna področja medicinskih sester, kjer so te zaposlene., • natančneje so definirani tudi izrazi: sistem za razdelitev različnih poklicev na področju nege bolnika, osnovno, nadaljnje in podiplomsko izobraževanje medi- cinske sestre ( ). kasneje sledi tudi razlaga izraza sestrstvo, s katerim »zajamemo bolnika kot celovito psih -somatično osebnost ter pri tem razvijamo in podpiramo fizično, psihično in socialno komponento zdravja ... « ( ). to so temeljni izrazi s tega strokovnega področja. kaže se skrb, da bi jih natančneje definirali, obenem pa se z angleškimi ustrezniki, ki so ob naštetih izrazih navedeni v oklepaju, še čuti nesamostojnost prevajalca pri iskanju ustrez- nega izraza. opredelitev področja nege bolnika je pregledno razložila tudi stana kavalič ( ), ki prvič navaja bolnikove potrebe, ob katerih se medicinska sestra uveljav- lja kot strokovnjakinja za navedeno področje in samostojno opravlja svoje naloge ( ). delovno področje medicinskih sester še ni enotno poimenovano. kadar gre za nebolnišnično nego, nekateri avtorji uporabljajo tudi izraze: nega bolnika na domu, domača nega bolnika in laična nega. drugo obdobje, od . do . letnika ( - ), se začenja z objavo metodoloških smernic za raziskovalno delo ( ) in prvimi poizkusi študijskega proučevanja bolniške nege - nege bolnika v ožjem pomenu besede, ki se nanaša na osebo v določenem stanju, zato izraz z izpeljavo iz besede bolnik kaže to najožjo povezavo. razčlenjevanje je vplivalo tudi na poimenovanje ožjega delovnega področja medicinske sestre - področje bolniške nege, v objavljeni temeljni vsebinski zasnovi glasila ( ) pa najdemo tudi nedosledno delitev na »področje bolniške nege in nebolnišnična dejavnost medicinske sestre« ( ). ob metodoloških novostih, ki so se uvedle na tem področju, srečamo izraze: zdravstveni team - skupno poimenovanje vseh zdravstvenih delavcev, ki sodelujejo pri zdravljenju bolnika; negovalni (sestrski) team - poimenovanje za srednje in višje medicinske sestre; služba domače nege ( ) - »dejavnost, ki naj bi ustrezala določenim potrebam in interesom starejših ljudi na njihovih domovih«. obenem se priporoča, da naj se namesto izrazov strežništvo, hišna pomoč in laična nega na domu, ki so preohlapno definirani, uporablja izraz domača nega. v prevodih člankov iz angleščine se pojavljajo izrazi: nega, bolniška nega, nega bolnika (kot eno - ali večpomenski izrazi), sestrska stroka, sestrsko osebje in sestrska dejavnost. • strokovna nega na bolnikovem domu je leta opredeljena kot nega bolnika na domu. ta je leta razdeljena na strokovno nego bolnika na domu in domačo nego (občasno se še uporablja tudi izraz laična nega na domu). klasifika- cija progresivne nege s stopnjami: intenzivna nega, polintenzivna nega in standardna nega temelji na obsegu bolnikovih potreb po negi. stopnje označujejo bolnikovo stanje, ki napreduje proti ozdravitvi. obravnava bolnika na domu je glede na bolnikove potrebe, čas negovanja in število negovalcev označena kot ., ll. in . stopnja domiciliarne nege. pri obravnavi raziskovalnega dela medicinskih sester (od dalje) se pri opredeljevanju izvajalca nege dosledno uporabljajo izrazi: zdravstveni team, nego- va/ni team, konec leta pa najdemo tu di obliko zdravstveni tim. ob lo-letnici izhajanja je glasilo imelo skoraj naročnikov. postalo je obvezno študijsko gradivo za dijake in študente zdravstvenih šol, učni pripomoček za strokovne izpite ter gradivo za strokovno izpopolnjevanje. dve tretjini glasila so zavzemali strokovni članki, tretjina pa je bila namenjena društvenim rubrikam. močno se je razširil tudi krog sodelavcev - zdravnikov in še posebej medicinskih sester s čedalje bolj kvalitetnimi strokovnimi, primarnimi in preglednimi članki. priročnik so leta napisale začasne sve- tovalke regionalnega urada za evropo sve- tovne zdravstvene organizacije: nicole del- motte, jolanta gorajek, hanneke van maa- nen in penny prophit. naslov izvirnika je the nursing process - teaching manual, pre- vedla pa ga je majda Šlajmer-japelj, koor- dinatorica mednarodne študije o procesu zdravstvene nege v jugoslaviji. barvno naslovno stran priročnika je po na- vodilih urednika janeza strajnarja oblikoval nedžad Žujo - štiriindvajset krogov simbo- lizira čas (neprekinjeno delo medicinskih se- ster), v katerega je »ujeto« znanje (izstopa- joči štirje krogi pomenijo temeljna znanja iz procesa zdravstvene nege), urejeni krogi pa obdajajo znak zveze društev medicinskih sester slovenije. ta je namreč priročnik iz- dala v marcu z naklado izvodov. priročnik je temeljno gradivo za teoretično in praktično spoznavanje in uvajanje metode procesa zdravstvene nege pri nas. za tretje obdobje, od . letnika dalje (od dalje), je značilna večja količina in kvaliteta člankov medicinskih sester. Številne so ob študiju na ii. stopnji pripravile za ubjavo svoje seminarske in diplomske naloge, v katerih obravnavajo različne vidike zdravstvene nege, socialno-medicinsko problematiko ter strokovno dejavnost medicinskih sester. pomemben vir člankov in prispevkov za stal ne rubrike so tudi številni seminarji strokovnih sekcij zveze društev medicinskih sester slovenije. v posameznih številkah glasila prevladujejo članki s področja zdravstvene nege, še posebej pa so aktualne informacije o poteku mednarodne študije proces zdravstvene nege. le-te imajo stalno mesto v rubriki razvojno- raziskovalno delo. pri izbiri člankov za objavo je uredništvo dajalo prednost člankom, ki so bili tudi metodično dobro zasnovani - glede načina razkrivanja in utemeljevanja problema, prikazovanja in razpravljanja o rezultatih obravnave, opreme člankov in pravilnega citiranja ugotovitev drugih avtorjev. uredništvo je več časa namenjalo tu di individualnemu delu z avtorji pri reševanju strokovnih, terminoloških in jezikovnih popravkov ter pripravilo okvirna navodila za sodelavce in dopisnike zdravstvenega obzornika. zdravstveni obzornik je izdal tudi dve tematski številki: delo in izobraže- vanje medicinskih sester ( , izvodov) in Živeti s hemofilijo (z barvno prilogo; , izvodov). v prvi tematski številki za opredeljevanje stroke in njene meto dike prvič zasledimo rabo izrazov: zdravstvena nega, zdravstvena nega bolnika oz. varovanca in proces zdravstvene nege z več fazami: ocena negovalnih potreb in možnosti, načrtovanje vsebine in metode dela, izvajanje načrta nege z dokumentiranjem in vrednotenje s povratno informacijo ( ). razloženi so v nadaljevanju. ob obravnavi strokovnih navodil za organiziranje in izvajanje zdravljenja in nege bolnika na domu ( , ) se je leta pokazala potreba po enotni rabi in ustaljevanju strokovnega izrazja. zato je bilo pri zvezi društev medicinskih sester slovenije dogovorjeno, da se uporabljajo izrazi: • zdravstvena nega - namesto dosedanjega izraza nega bolnika v najširšem smislu, s katerim poimenujemo strokovno področje, ki dobiva značilnosti samo- stojne vede medicinskih znanosti; opravljajo jo zdravstveni delavci na tem pod- ročju, namenjena pa je vsem varovancem, zdravim in bolnim; izrazi sestrska nega, zdravniška nega in medicinska nega so neprimerni, ker so preozko vezani le na izvajalca ali delitev strokovne dejavnosti; • zdravstvena nega bolnika - namesto izraza bolniška nega (nega bolnika v ožjem smislu) za vso strokovno dejavnost, ki je v organizirani obliki namenjena bolniku; po krajevnem kriteriju je to lahko zdravstvena nega bolnika v bolnišnici (v stacionarjih zdravstvenih organizacij in socialnih zavodov) ali zdravstvena nega bolnika na domu v osnovnem zdravstvenem varstvu; primerna pa je tudi raba izrazov z določnejšo opredelitvijo bolnika po ožjem strokovnem področju, organ- skem sistemu ali zdravstvenem problemu, npr. zdravstvena nega onkološkega bolnika, zdravstvena nega srčnega bolnika, zdravstvena nega bolnika s subarahnoi- dalno krvavitvijo itd.; z izrazom domača nega poimenujemo dejavnost, ki jo opravljajo v nebolniš- ničnem okolju neprofesionalni izvajalci, zajema pa: samooskrbo (samopomoč bolnika) in nego, kijo opravljajo svojci, sosedsko pomoč, ki jo prostovoljno nudijo občani, in pomoč na domu, ki jo opravljajo socialni zavodi s storitvami zunanje dejavnosti in gospodinjski servisi ( ). uredništavo zdravstvenega obzornika aktivno sodeluje tu di pri opredeljeva- nju in usklajevanju delovnih program ov strokovnih sekcij zveze društev medicin- skih sester slovenije, spodbuja usmerjeno in sistematično obravnavo področja zdravstvene nege, saj tu di manjše število seminarjev lahko z objavo kvalitetnih člankov v določeni meri zagotovi stalno strokovno izpopolnjevanje, ter opozarja na dokumentirano vrednost strokovnega glasila. procesno opredeljevanje zdravstvene nege in strokovno izrazje zveza društev medicinskih sester slovenije je marca v okviru svoje založniške dejavnosti izdala prevod priročnika iz mednarodne študije pri regional- nem uradu za evropo svetovne zdravstvene organizacije proces zdra v- stvene nege, ki bo temeljno gradivo za teoretično in praktično spoznavanje in uvajanje metode procesa zdravstvene nege pri nas. priročnik pomeni prelomnico v dosedanjem obravnavanju varovancev: metoda pojasnjuje sistem značilnih ukre- pov in posegov v zdravstveni negi, ki so namenjeni zdravju posameznika, družine in družbene skupnosti; sistematično delo upošteva individualne posebnosti potreb varovancev, zato so pri obravnavi oz. zdravljenju aktivno soudeleženi; kritično presojanje in odločanje o načinu, obsegu in trajanju zdravstvene nege pa poteka na podlagi dokumentiranih dejstev, ki se lahko stalno preverjajo. metoda procesa zdravstvene nege nacrt zdravstvene nege ugotavljanje in merljivi clu i opravljeni na~rto- ooselki gleoe razvrŠtanje potreb in natrtovani vani in nena~rto- na opredeuene posegi vani posegi ciue o o o o<o { { { kvalitetna zdravstvena nega razumevanje in razvoj strokovnega podroČja •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• • :•••• metooe ookumentiranja metooe za ugotavljanje potreb •••••••••••o o o o o { proces zdravstvene nege, kot je prikazan v priročniku, ima štiri faze: ugotav- ljanje potreb po zdravstveni negi in dejanskih možnosti za izvajanje načrta zdrav- stvene nege, načrtovanje dela, izvajanje načrta zdravstvene nege ter vrednotenje dosežkov in povratne informacije ( ). proces zdravstvene nege se mora pri nas najprej razviti kot učna metoda pri vzgoji in izobraževanju medicinskih sester. izobraževalni programi morajo vsebo- vati tu di ustrezno izrazje. pri tem bo nujno potrebno tesno sodelovanje med zdravstvenimi šolami in negovalnimi timi v zdravstvenih organizcijah ter jezikov- nimi svetovalci. oblikovanje našega strokovnega izrazja na področju zdravstvene nege pa se bo nanašalo predvsem: • na opredeljevanje koncepta ugotavljanja potreb po zdravstveni negi: opiso- vanje zdravstvenega stanja varovanca, njegovih telesnih, duševnih in socialnih potreb, dejanskega in možnega zdravstvenega problema, rabo komunikacijskih metod, kritično presojanje v posameznih stopnjah ugotavljanja potreb ter uvajanje ustreznih dokumentov; • na opredeljevanje in analizo koncepta načrtovanja zdravstvene nege: kri- tično presojanje pri načrtovanju in sprejemu odločitev, postavitev ciljev zdrav- stvene nege, usmerjene k varovancu, kot celote medsebojnih odnosov, ukrepov in opreoeljevanje izvajanja zoravstvene nege opreoeuevanje vreonotenja zoravstvene nege opreoeuevanje koncepta dgotavljanja potreb po zoravstveni negi opreoeljevanje in anallza koncepta nacrtovanja zoravstvene nege naloge v zvezi z novim poimenovanjem - oolociti enoten, enopo - menski in jeornat ( telegrafski) slog - problem ponasevanja tujih izrazov : •••••••••••••••••••••••• obllkovanje strokovnega izrazja : na podro~ju zdravstvehe hege•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••• posegov ter njihovo preverjanje skupaj z varovancem, pisanje načrta zdravstvene nege ter določitev meril za vrednotenje dosežkov; • na opredeljevanje izvajanja zdravstvene nege: ločevanje tradicionalne nege, ki je zasnovana na posegih, in zdravstvene nege kot sistematične dejavnosti, možnosti prilagajanja zdravstvene nege individualnim potrebam varovanca ter uvajanje sistematičnega dokumentiranja za neprekinjen potek zdravstvene nege in zdravljenja ter usklajeno delo negovalnega in zdravstvenega tima; • na opredeljevanje vrednotenja zdravstvene nege: raziični vidiki vrednote- nja, stopenjsko dokumentiranje vsakega napredka v zdravju varovanca, kritično vrednotenje dosežkov zdravstvene nege glede na zdravstveno stanje varovanca in delo vseh članov negovalnega tima ter pomen dokumentiranega vrednotenja. glavni jezikovni problemi, ki se bodo pri tem pojavljali, bod o predvsem tile: • pojavile se bodo naloge v zvezi z novim poimenovanjem, ker gre za določen napredek v razvoju stroke, • treba bo določiti enoten, enopomenski injedrnat (telegrafski) slog za določa- nje bolnikovega stanja glede na to, ali bo sporazumevanje med negovalnim in zdravstvenim timom ustno in pisno, vsi posegi zdravstvene nege pa se bodo dokumentirali in vrednotili, • ker bomo prek regionalnega urada za evropo svetovne zdravstvene organizacije vezani na države, v katerih je omenjena metoda že v veljavi, in na prevajanje tozadevne literature, se odpira problem ponaševanja tujih izrazov. sklepati je mogoče, da so aktualne naloge v zvezi s strokovnim področjem zdravstvene nege mnogovrstne in zahtevne. ta stroka je namreč razmeroma mlada in še isce najprimernejso metodo za svoje delovno področje. kljub določenim nedoslednostim v rabi strokovnega izrazja je del tega že ustalila, zato bo lažje našla primerne rešitve tudi v prihodnje. literatura: . pravilnik o založniški dcjavnosti zveze društev medicinskih sester slovenije. zdrav obzor ; : . . tominec f. bibliografski pregled i. do v. letnika revije »zdravstveni obzornik«. zdrav obzor ; : - . . tominec f. bibliografski pregled vi. do x. letnika revije »zdravstveni obzornik«. zdrav obzor ; : - . . posavec a. bibliografski pregled zdravstvenega obzornika od xi. do xv. letnika ( - ). zdrav obzor ; : - . . strajnar j. urednica našega glasila je končala z delom. organizacijski, vsebinski in oblikovni prispevek urednicel medicinske sestre neže jarnovič k razvoju zdravstvenega obzornika. zdrav obzor ; : - . . anon. o negi po smernicah svetovne zdravstvene organizacije. zdrav obzor ; : - . . gradišek a. petdeset let dela in oblikovanja medicinske sestre na slovenskem. zdrav obzor ; : . . kavalič s. sodobni koncept za nego bolnika. zdrav obzor ; : - . . kavalič s. raziskovalno delo na področju bolniške nege. zdrav obzor ; : - . . uredništvo: temeljna vsebinska zasnova zdravstvenega obzornika. zdrav obzor ; : . . kavalič s. ocenjevanje bolnikovih potreb v negovalnem procesu. zdrav obzor ; : - . . strokovna navodila za organiziranje in izvajanje zdravljenja in nege bolnika na domu. zdravstveno varstvo. ljubljana: zavod sr slovenije za zdravstveno varstvo, ; . . skok a. organizacijski vidiki zdravstvene nege bolnika na domu v osnovnem zdravstvenem varstvu. zdrav obzor ; : . . proces zdravstvene nege. priročnik. ljubljana: zveza društev medicinskih sester slovenije, : - . iz zaloŽniŠke oeja vnosti zomss vse zdravstvene delavce, šole in zdravstvene organizacije obveščamo, da imamo stalno na zalogi naslednje publikacije: • organizacija zora vstvenega varstv a (m. maily). dopolnjen prvi ponatis. ljubljana ; strani; cena: din; • oolŽnost zora vstvenih oela vcev in zora vstvenih za vo- oov gleoe na prvo pomoČ in oŽivljanje (j. milčinski). popr. ponatis. ljubljana ; strani; cena: din; • kooeks etlke zora vstvenih oela vcev sfr jugosla vije. ljub- ljana ; cena: din; • proces zoravstvene nege. priroČnik. ljubljana ; strani; cena: din; • Živeti s hemofilijo. posebni odtis tematske številke zdravstÝenega obzor- nika o hemofiliji. ljubljana ; strani; cena: din. vse publikacije dobite pri zvezi društev medicinskih sester slovenije, ljub- ljana, vidovdanska , vsak dan, razen sobote, od . do . ure, ob sredah pa od . do . ure. uredništvo addressing sexual and gender harassment in pharmacy education to improve provider wellness and patient care commentary addressing sexual and gender harassment in pharmacy education to improve provider wellness and patient care rebecca schoen, pharmd, a amy henneman, pharmd b a texas tech university health sciences center, jerry h. hodge school of pharmacy, dallas, texas b palm beach atlantic university, west palm beach, florida submitted june , ; accepted october , ; published april . research indicates widespread sexual harassment has not significantly decreased in health care over the last several decades. attention focused on sexual harassment in the last few years has prompted a renewed conversation in health care about these complex issues and the unique challenges they present. given the significant implications for individuals, organizations, and patient care, addressing harass- ment should be a priority. pharmacy schools and supporting pharmacy organizations should proac- tively address sexual and gender harassment and provide education about this issue. keywords: education, female, sexism, sexual harassment a national conversation centered around the #metoo movement that began in sparked a focus on how sexual harassment affects providing and receiving health care. , sexual harassment has broader definitions and consequences than is routinely recognized by the general public. a national academies of science, engineering and medicine report defines sexual harass- ment as sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment. gender harassment or “verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender” is the most frequent type of sexual harassment, but the impact is often minimized. the national acade- mies report indicates gender harassment that is severe or pervasive can cause the same negative professional and psychological outcomes as sexual coercion, and increases the likelihood that other forms of sexual harassment will occur. unfortunately, the national academies report and other publications indicate sexual harassment in the workplace has not significantly decreased over the last several decades and remains prevalent in both the medical and academic environments for faculty members, resi- dents, and students. - a literature search across medical disciplines within the last years indicates sexual ha- rassment is widespread throughout the health care disci- plines, including among nurses, physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists, dentists, and pharmacists. , - many learners may experience these scenarios as students or in- ternsbeforegraduatinginthehealthprofessionfields. , , given the risks of sexual harassment facing health care providers across the disciplines, what are weas a pharmacy profession doing to prepare our students and residents to not only manage their learning and work environments safely, but to be an agent of change in this environment? broadening the conversation of who is impacted by sexual harassment is essential when understanding the scope and impact of this issue. sexual harassment is often thought of as primarily a female issue, but it is not limited to those identifying as female. some literature indicates women are more likely to feel threatened, with stronger negative emotions stemming from the interaction. , there is also evidence that women tend to report rates at a higher prevalence, but reporting rates can be difficult to capture and men do report experiences of sexual and gender harassment. approximately % of complaints filed with the us equal employment opportunity com- mission are from individuals identifying as male. in a study of pharmacists by broedel-zaugg and colleagues, female respondents experienced significantly more gen- der harassment and unwanted sexual attention than men. however, there were no differences between male and female respondentsin the totalnumberofoccurrences of sexual coercion. among nurse respondents of a survey in the united kingdom, approximately one in nurses cited being sexually harassed within the last three years and more male ( %) than female ( %) nurses experienced the harassment. ultimately, the data do not suggest this is a female-only issue. beyond sex and gender, over- lapping cultures and identities can impact the types and corresponding author: rebecca schoen, duquesne university school of pharmacy, division of pharmacy practice, forbes ave., pittsburgh, pa . tel: - - . email: schoenr@duq.edu american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om mailto:schoenr@duq.edu http://www.ajpe.org severity of harassment experienced. sexual or gender minorities are vulnerable to harassment at higher rates. women of color often experience harassment differently and with more severe consequences. people with a dis- ability or individuals who have migrated or immigrated to the united states are more likely to face harassment and additive levels of discrimination. unfortunately, data on these populations in health care is limited. in addition to the national dialogue about sexual harassment, a renewed professional focus on wellbeing and resilience is occurring within health care. , on an individual and organizational level, addressing wellness is critical, and we believe wellness includes addressing sexual harassment. increasing harassment frequency correlates to worse job-related and psychological out- comes, but even occasional episodes ofsexual harassment can lead to negative consequences. for medical trainees, frequent harassment is correlated with learners who are less likely to complete assignments and provide optimal care; have more emotional health problems, social and family disruptions, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and appetite loss; and are more likely to use alcohol to escape problems. sexual harassment occurrence has one of the strongest relationships to female well-being relative to other job stressors. when sexual harassment occurs in the workplace, victims may start distancing themselves mentally or physically from their workplace, experience decreases in jobsatisfaction andcommitment to their role, have increases in stress or decreases in productivity, or leave their role altogether. considering the potential for loss of talent, employees withdrawing from the work- place, and increased employee stress, the ramifications of sexual harassment extend to larger organizations and our profession. addressing sexual harassment in health care could also impact the delivery of patient care. research indi- cates the distinct roles of pharmacists and other health care providers place them in situations that may leave them vulnerable to experiencing sexual harassment, in- cluding during patient care. health care professionals often work physically and emotionally close with patients and caregivers, forming a relationship based on trust and mutual respect. however, for the patient, these situations may create an illusion of intimacy. the relationship can be further complicated by the patient’s disease, in par- ticular those suffering from conditions such as mental illness, dementia, or behavioral disturbances. based on the limited studies available regarding pharmacists by fjortfot and colleagues and broedel-zaugg and col- leagues, approximately % of female pharmacist survey respondents noted someform ofsexual harassmentduring their career, with almost equal numbers of incidents involving patients, providers, and colleagues. , ap- proximately % of physicians in a survey in the united kingdom noted harassment originating from pa- tients. the unique dynamic of the provider-patient re- lationship and ineffective coping strategies commonly reported by providers indicate that sexual harassment is a complex problem that health care providers can struggle to effectively resolve or manage. sexual harassment is primarily driven by attempts to remove a power imbal- ance or address a violation of gender norms rather than attraction, so the inherent power imbalance between pa- tient and provider can leave providers vulnerable. , , , when caring for offenders, many female providers report employing strategies of “coldness” to patients, shortened visits, and avoiding open-ended questions and certain examinations to mitigate their risk. these strategies could negatively impact patient care and may increase the power imbalance felt by the patient and, therefore, the risk for harassment to the provider. these employed strategies seem at best ineffective and hint at a lack of training, available resources, and organizational support. though objective data are lacking on this topic, the combination of these risk management strategies and the decline in provider wellness seem likely to worsen patient care outcomes. while sexual harassment can occur regardless of role, evidence suggests our learners are particularly vul- nerable to mistreatment from patients and the health care team. studies by wolf and colleagues and schulte and colleagues indicate that up to % of female medical students reported sexual harassment specifically from patients. , to address these behaviors, younger indi- viduals with less practice experience are more likely to utilize indirect strategies such as joking or ignoring be- haviors, which are often ineffective. coworkers, su- pervisors, and preceptors can also be involved in these situations as consultants and attendings are commonly cited as sources of harassment for trainees in a hierar- chical envionrment. , , , in general, underreporting of sexual harassment is common as people confronted with harassment often ignore or appease the harasser rather than report because of fear of retaliation or negative outcomes. learners are particularly unlikely to bring forward concerns regarding sexual and gender harass- ment despite evidence that they encounter sexual ha- rassment more frequently. when a learner experiences or witnesses sexual harassment, the response of the su- perior in the room is critical. unfortunately, trainees who report these situations are frequently ignored by their superiors and often the response is silence. we should not expect our students to be the leaders on this issue. the academy must be proactive in advocating, discussing, american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://www.ajpe.org and creating a culture in health care that addresses sexual harassment for our learners. in alignment with the national academies report, we suggest that our professional organizations have a re- sponsibility to address the climate of our profession, schools, and health systems. pharmacist participants in the study by fjortoft and colleagues suggested a need for better training and education on how to manage sexual harassment prior to entering pharmacy practice. addi- tionally, they highlighted a need for education on how to deliver pharmaceutical care while also managing the barriers sexual harassment creates when initiated by the patient. the study also noted looking to pharmacy role models to demonstrate how to let the offender know in a professional manner that this behavior is not acceptable. these changes will require training students, residents, and superiors in how to manage such situations and modeling of proactive behaviors. as pharmacy educators, we have a unique opportunity to directly impact these identified needs. the academy should consider making changes to current educational strategies to address these concerns. the national academies report details several recom- mendations for academic institutions, including training to develop skills for interrupting and intervening when harassment occurs, focusing on changing an individual’s behavior rather than beliefs, clearly communicating be- havioral expectations, specifying consequences for ha- rassment behaviors, and providing education that extends beyond the avoidance of legal liability. while addressing sexual harassment at organizations and universities from a legal standpoint remains important, prevalence rates indicate that most policies and trainings are currently insufficient to impact sexual harassment rates. freyd and colleagues suggest that the current training mindset has left many in society unaware of the full scope of conse- quences and dynamics involved in sexual harassment. they recommend moving away from a training only mindset, which implies reaching a fixed endpoint, and moving towards an education mindset. an education mindset implies the learner must acquire knowledge and understanding, which differs greatly from a mindset of compliance and rule following associated with training. an education mindset could explore how an individual’s implicit bias may lead to actions contradictory to one’s conscious belief and how society’s understanding of sexual harassment evolves. for example, the percentage of the united states population that classifies various offending behaviors as harassmenthas grownover the last years. a continuing education approach would allow for ongoing assessment and critical thinking as perspec- tives change and the body of research grows. specific educational strategies and recommenda- tions to consider in the literature include discussions or role-playing scenarios to address boundary setting, allowing participants the opportunity to consider how to approach a challenging encounter and process the emo- tions stemming from these awkward and uncomfortable situations. , , , if thoughtfully incorporated, these scenarios could provide a safe place for trainees to iden- tify the behavior, reflect on how to appropriately manage the situation, use avoidance behaviors that could be employed without impacting patient care, and set the expectation that we are a team and advocate for one an- other. teaching students and residents to use key phrases that both acknowledge and redirect the negative behavior can set clear, appropriate boundaries with patients. in- creased education on boundary setting and teaching stu- dents that harassment of any kind is unacceptable could have broad impacts for additional dimensions of an in- dividual’s culture and identity as harassment can occur from causes other than a person’s sex or gender. in the practice setting, pharmacy students can learn and see effective policies, interactions, and advocacy in real-time if modeled by their preceptors. recent medical literature calls for providers to address the situation in real time in order to challenge the status quo, while actively teaching and modeling an expectation for a respectful, safe work environment. - if practitioners model ignoring the behavior or joking with the patient, students learn strategies that are unlikely to be successful if faced with a similar situation in the future. open dialogue as well as visual reminders concerning policies prohibiting harass- ment can be helpful reminders to both patients and em- ployees. viglianti and colleagues propose a decision tree algorithm for physicians based on how safe the provider feels during the encounter with the patient, empowering the provider to take appropriate steps to stop the harass- ment from occurring. clear policies documenting ap- propriate boundaries with attendings, team members, and patients should be in place. in an era of team based care, interprofessional sessions regarding expectations of conduct in the workplace from both members of the team as well as patients and their family members may help to influence workplace culture and begin to challenge the status quo. encouraging advocacy and engaging in lead- ership at an organizational level could lead to structures and policies for reporting and preventing harassment. if we fail to address all aspects of harassment, we fail to address a critical component of wellbeing, to maximize the potentialofpharmacists, andto preparepractice-ready students for what is a common experience in the health professions, but does not have to be considered an inev- itable aspect of these jobs. if the issue of sexual american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://www.ajpe.org harassment is ignored, it sends a message of acceptance, which can be harmful to our learners, patients, and pro- fession. the dynamics of interprofessional teams, train- ing environments or provider-patient relationships are challenging to navigate without additional concerns for harassment.we shouldnot expect ourlearners to speak up or be prepared to handle these situations now or in future practice without further education. if we do not teach students how to address these incidents and advocate for themselves, the risk of our students not meeting their full potential and harm to their well-being persists. these implications extend to our schools, our organizations, and ultimately our patients. if we start to emphasize education that creates a safe working environment, these interven- tions could have an overlapping impact on other dimen- sions of identity as well. we should advocate for our learners in an issue that cuts across health care disciplines by modeling proactive behavior and discussing strategies to insist our students’ educational experience and future career in pharmacy is free from harassment of any form. acknowledgments the authors 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( ). leaving the past (self) behind: non-reporting rape survivors' narratives of self and action. sociology, doi: . / this is the accepted version of the paper. this version of the publication may differ from the final published version. permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ / link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/ . / copyright and reuse: city research online aims to make research outputs of city, university of london available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. urls from city research online may be freely distributed and linked to. city research online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk city research online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk running head: leaving the past (self) behind leaving the past (self) behind: non-reporting rape survivors’ narratives of self and action jennifer huemmer bryan mclaughlin lindsey e blumell jennifer huemmer assistant professor roy h. park school of communications ithaca college e-mail: jhuemmer@ithaca.edu bryan mclaughlin assistant professor department of advertising texas tech university e-mail: bryan.mclaughlin@ttu.edu lindsey e. blumell lecturer city, university of london e-mail: lindsey.blumell@city.ac.uk note: this is a pre-print copy. the final version can be found here: https://doi.org/ . / 	 please cite as: huemmer, j., mclaughlin, b., blumell, l. ( ). leaving the past (self) behind: non- reporting rape survivors’ narratives of self and action. sociology. advanced online copy. doi: . / leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 leaving the past (self) behind: non-reporting rape survivors’ narratives of self and action abstract using a symbolic interactionist framework, this study considers the narratives of non- reporting rape survivors. we use interviews to examine the complex processes that inform a survivor’s decision not to report. rape is not interpreted as an isolated event; it is something that is seen as caused by, connected to, and affecting the survivor’s sense of self and agency. rape forces the survivor to reconstruct a sense of agency in the aftermath of the traumatic attack. rather than report the rape, the survivors constructed narratives that direct blame and accountability toward the ‘old self.’ this less visible, yet still agentic strategy, allows the survivors to regain a sense of agency and control. as a result, a more positive, optimistic self can be constructed, while pursuing legal justice would force them to reenact an ‘old’ self that cannot be disentangled from the rape. keywords: identity; narratives; non-reporting of rape; rape survivors; survivor agency; symbolic interactionism leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 became the year of the ‘silence breakers’ (zacharek et al., ) as survivors of sexual assault reinvigorated the cultural narrative around sexual violence by vocally and visibly uniting around two simple words, ‘me too.’ the #metoo movement’s success in encouraging women to speak up about their assaults has had a tremendous impact in demonstrating the pervasiveness of sexual assault. despite the success of the movement, countless women likely chose not to speak up. as social activists continue to place an emphasis on making instances of sexual assault more visible, the less visible forms of coping continue to be overlooked and misunderstood. much emphasis has been placed on getting survivors to take action and report the rape. still, a large majority of rape survivors do not report the crime (rainn). this problem is especially acute on college campuses (fisher et al., ). previous scholarship has largely viewed non-reporting as a problematic form of inaction (weiss, ), asking question such as, why do rape survivors fail to report (sable et al., )? how do we get survivors to report (eelson and pare, )? what factors determine whether a survivor reports (alderden and long, )? these efforts are vitally important, but can have the unintended consequence of implicitly taking away agency from rape survivors by failing to acknowledge other, less visible, forms of action as legitimate. for some survivors, bringing the perpetrator to justice may not be their primary concern. thus, the decision not to report may be an expression of agency and control. issues of agency have, of course, been an important point of contention in discussions about rape and sexual assault (dunn, ). the emphasis on reporting focuses on agency that is overt and socially ‘visible.’ visible actions, however, only leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 account for a fraction of the actions individuals engage in on a daily basis. there are also internal processes that are common and crucially important to social life (scott, ). thought processes, such as constructing a narrative about self-identity, are forms of action (strauss, ). a decision not to report is not ‘nothing’ (scott, ). understanding why so many survivors choose not to report necessitates viewing non- reporting as a form of action (see hlavka, ). although these thought processes may be internal, they are not isolated—they are a form of interaction with the world. yet, they may be overlooked by a means/ends scheme that prescribes reporting as the desirable end point. not only may some survivors not desire the ends society prescribes for them, for many the desired ‘end’ is not clear at all. further, even if the desired end was clear, it may change as they progress forward. the means/ends reporting scheme artificially obscures the more fluid process through which survivors move forward (see azarian, ; strauss, ). by paying attention to the stories non-reporting rape survivors tell, we can gain understanding of the social worlds that are all too often silenced (polkinghorne, ) and give voice to social actors (ewick and silbey, ). this perspective is needed given the discernable decrease in focus on rape and sexual assault among feminist sociologists in recent years (martin, ). specifically, we employ a symbolic interactionism perspective from which to consider ‘rape’ and the experiences of sexual assault survivors. this entails viewing ‘rape’ as a symbolic object and considering how a survivor’s interpretation of the event impacts the meaning that they assign to the self. we use interviews with five non-reporting rape survivors to explore how the survivors negotiate a narrative of self as they interpret their experience and subsequent course of leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 action. it is only by first listening that we can truly understand how to think about the problems related to coping with a sexual assault. the symbolic meaning of rape symbolic interactionism (blumer, ) suggests that people can only understand the world through a symbolic toolkit that is learned, negotiated, and refined through an ongoing process of interaction with social others. the social world is constructed and maintained by assigning meaning to objects (blumer, ). with this approach we can view the word ‘rape’ as a symbol that has come to signify a certain meaning, which encourages a preferred interpretation (weiss and colyer, ). through social interaction, the meanings associated with the concepts of ‘rape’ and ‘reporting’ have become normalized, appearing to be objective and stable. in reality, these meanings are not inherent and can only maintain a stable definition through the process of social maintenance. it is only in moments that the working consensus is disrupted that the façade is exposed (goffman, ). when many people think about ‘rape,’ they typically imagine ‘stranger rape,’ an incident involving a clear survivor and a previously unknown perpetrator (hughes et al., ). for some sexual assault survivors, the dominant social narratives about rape may be at odds with the confusion that can result from an acquaintance rape (dunn, ). for women who are the survivors of sexual assault perpetrated by someone they know, perhaps even a loved one, the lived experience does not always fit within this pre-existing understanding (leisenring, ). rape is not an isolated event, it is something that is seen as being caused by, connected to, and affecting the survivor’s life and identity. constructing meaning through narrative leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 symbolic interactionism also suggests that people rely on constructed meaning to interpret the self (jenkins, ). a person can only truly begin to understand who they are by imagining how they appear to social others (cooley, ; mead, ). these projected interpretations are used to help assign meaning to the self—to know who one is, what they are like, and how they fit into the world. as with other objects, the self is typically assumed to be objective and stable. humans have an inherent need to construct a coherent sense of self (loseke, ), even though the self is fluid and socially negotiated (jenkins, ). for example, people may imagine a past self and a new self after having undergone an important transformation (e.g., a born-again christian). this symbolic separation between a past and present self obscures the more fluid and interactive process through which the self is constantly adapting to specific situations, changing, being reinterpreted, and so on (strauss, ). one of the primary ways that people come to establish a seemingly stable self is by constructing and telling narratives. in many ways, the self is only capable of being realized through narrative practice (davies, ). narratives are temporally bounded and establish cause and effect relationships between actors and events within the story (polkinghorne, ; polletta et al., ). narratives allow people to order, interpret, and communicate their understandings of the world (ewick and silbey, ). an individual can symbolically order seemingly disparate experiences, and posit relationships between different story elements, in order to construct a coherent account of life events (azarian, ; loseke, ; polkinghorne, ). the evolution of the self, similarly, is constructed and ordered over time as the narrative unfolds (davies, ). in this way, a seemingly stable notion of self is established by integrating various iterations leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 of the self, past events, and projected futures, into a coherent narrative arch (davis, ). narratives about the self are not just a personal affair—they are constructed through interaction with the social world (polletta et al., ). personal narratives exist within sociocultural contexts that contain complex systems of meaning (azarian, ; strauss, ). the stories a person feels they can tell may be constrained by prevailing norms and values, institutional regulations, widely available social narratives, and so on. individuals will have an acute awareness of how others will perceive certain stories, as well as an internalized understanding that certain accounts of their life and/or actions are simply not to be told (polletta et al., ). of particular importance is the influence of widely circulated social narratives. these narratives create a well-established framework that may be used to interpret and react to specific events or actions. however, socially circulating narratives tend to rely on simplistic, black and white depictions, where characters and moral evaluations are clear- cut (loseke, ). these stories may play important social functions (e.g., raising public awareness that sexual assault is a pervasive issue), but they can also be quite constraining because they do not always accurately reflect the complicated experiences individuals may have. for example, survivors of acquaintance rape may struggle to view the event as ‘rape’ because it is at odds with the widely available ‘stranger rape’ narrative. survivors may struggle to view themselves as ‘pure’ victims, interpret the event as less traumatic than the stories circulated in society, and/or fixate on actions they perceive to have contributed to the rape (wood and rennie, ). narratives about the self are, thus, both active and agentic, while also being leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 socially bounded (polletta et al., ). assuming a survivor has agency need not imply that she does not face long odds against systematic and structural power imbalances, biases, and injustices. a decision not to report may be the consequence of perceived social barriers that the survivor does not wish to face. indeed, the possibility of receiving negative reactions from those in positions of power like police officers is a well- established barrier to reporting (cohn et al., ). when a survivor who reports a rape is met with incredulity or blame, they may choose to stop speaking about the rape all together (ahrens, ). thus, sexual assault survivors can simultaneously be constrained by social factors so that certain modes of action become less desirable, while also displaying agency in assessing the situation and deciding how to move forward. personal narratives are, therefore, a crucially important, but often socially ‘invisible’ site of action for rape survivors. we use interviews with five non-reporting rape survivors to demonstrate how survivors of rape use narratives to negotiate the trauma of rape. the narratives the women construct about their life experiences shed light onto the world that rape survivors experience, helping us to understand the complicated web of meaning that surrounds the interpretation of, and reaction to, rape. method participants the study is based on the analysis of five interviews with female undergraduate students at a large state university in the southwest of the united states. given the sensitive nature of the topic of this study, our objective was to provide a deeper understanding of sexual assault survivors and in-depth information about their lived experiences. for this reason, in-depth interviews were used. we attempted to reach out to leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 all survivors of rape regardless of gender or reporting status, but our focus on non- reporting emerged organically as we recognized that only female non-reporters chose to contact us to participate. to sample the population, we contacted members of the community who are involved in raising awareness and support for survivors of sexual violence (women’s studies and female leadership organizations and a community organization that assists survivors). we provided those contacts with appropriate recruitment information so that potential participants could be informed discretely and without pressure, allowing them to decide if they wished contact us and participate. in total, five women contacted us to participate in the study. the participant sample included women between the ages of and with diverse racial identities including two black women, two white women, and one hispanic woman. of the women who participated, two also identified as members of the lgbtq community. because these differences did not appear to affect the overarching narrative process, we do not highlight them in the analysis (see discussion). although our sample is small, the interviews still provided rich insights about the social reality of non-reporting survivors, thereby ascribing to the notion that, ‘it is much more important for the research to be intensive, and thus persuasive at the conceptual level than aim to be extensive with intent to be convincing, at least in part, through enumeration’ (crouch and mckenzie, : p. ). positionality this study was prompted by two researchers’ interest in women’s rights and desire to promote social justice on college campuses. we reached out to campus and community experts on sexual assault, met with the director of women’s studies, leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 participated in multiple rape awareness events, and interviewed the director of a local community organization that assists survivors. we expected to learn more about potential solutions for preventing sexual assault on college campuses, but our focus organically shifted toward the importance of hearing the stories of survivors. this encouraged us to recruit participants who would be willing to share their stories of sexual assault. our recruitment material indicated that the purpose of the study was to give voice to survivor’s experiences of sexual assault. the study’s purpose was, in fact, what prompted some of the participants to contact us and share their stories. once participants were recruited, we conducted the interviews. depending on which one of the two researchers the participant contacted, we determined a location and time for the one-on-one interview. as an extra precaution to protect participants, they were given their interview transcript to read so that they could identify any parts they wished not to be included in the analysis. none of the participants requested that information be removed from the analysis. analysis after the researchers conducted and transcribed all of the interviews, they began the analysis. to ensure that the analysis was minimally impacted by the personal connections made with the survivors or the researchers’ focus on social justice, a third researcher who was previously unfamiliar with the study and the topic area was brought in to participate in the analysis and interpretation. the interview transcriptions were analyzed using an inductive coding approach. initially, a line-by-line analysis of each interview was conducted and labels were assigned to the relevant pieces of information in a process of open coding. these codes were then constantly compared against the data leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 and the literature and then narrowed into final themes. additionally, the interpretation process was interactive, with the researchers discussing their thoughts and collaboratively forming a shared interpretation. at each stage of the coding process, the researchers would communicate with one another to ensure that the themes being developed were consistent with each researcher’s interpretation of the data. throughout the analysis, the codes were compared against one another and in relation to the original data to ensure that the developing themes were relevant to the entire dataset (glaser and strauss, ). findings our analysis of the participants’ narratives revealed a consistent set of key themes that helped construct an overarching storyline that allowed the survivors to come to terms with their rape and regain a sense of control and agency, despite choosing not to report their rape. the survivors’ accounts consistently demonstrated that the rape serves as a traumatic event that shatters pre-existing routines and includes loss of agency and control, which disrupts how the survivor interprets and understands the self, leading her to search for ways to regain agency, thereby restoring and reconstructing a ‘new self,’ which is accomplished by detaching and leaving behind the ‘old self.’ specifically, the women constructed narratives about a new self that sheds ‘rape’ as a central identity by leaving their old self behind. as is demonstrated below, when the survivors considered the possibility of reporting, they imagined that the reporting process would not be in their control. conversely, the decision not to report helped facilitate the restoration of control of their narrative. the survivors were able to achieve agency, healing, and distance from the trauma because they decided not to report. instead, they enacted a less visible form of leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 agency by constructing an internalized narrative in which the old self was detached in order to construct a newly imagined self, free from the constraints of the object of rape. a break in routines labeling an experience as ‘rape’ may be a complex, messy, and ongoing process of considering and evaluating their own thoughts as well as the thoughts of others in their environment (higginson, ). the women we talked to all engaged in an active negotiation process where they sought to understand how and why the rape occurred and the implications the event had for the self. these narratives all start with the recognition that the seemingly ordered and intelligible world they had come to know had been disrupted in a significant way and would no longer be what it once was. jane, for example, differentiates between the detrimental but routine interactions she had with her boyfriend and the event she defines as rape: like at this point i was like he already hits me i don’t think it could get any worse...i thought that nothing could be worse than like getting beat on but that was definitely like ten times worse...and when he held me down...like i knew that that was it...even though i kept fighting i knew in the back of my mind like this is really happening. jane’s account juxtaposes the sexual assault with an unhealthy, but ostensibly manageable, abusive relationship. when the rape occurred, however, she ‘knew that that was it.’ at this point, jane becomes acutely aware that a dramatic point of no return has occurred—the event was unmistakably unique and would serve to rupture the life to which she had become accustomed. for the women in this study, the disruption to normal routines was further complicated by the fact that each woman was assaulted by someone she knew. the rape is contextualized within the more routine interactions that occurred between the survivor leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 and the perpetrator. grace makes a point of stating, ‘i invited him in because i trusted him because we were friends before we started messing around.’ grace relies on her pre- existing but, in retrospect, misguided trust in the perpetrator. their previously established routine of ‘messing around’ entangles the perpetrator’s actions and grace’s own sense of agency, responsibility, and blame. although the rape cannot be separated from the pre- existing relationship, the rape and the immediate aftermath are undeniably shocking events. grace explains the anguish she experienced: i tried to kick him and stuff but then he grabbed my legs and lifted them up...it hurt. i didn’t want to scream because i felt like i could probably ruin his life if that happened. i cried the entire time until he was done and i didn’t do anything. i just cried. it is particularly telling that as grace is being brutally assaulted, her response and actions are mitigated by her concern that she ‘could probably ruin his life.’ grace cannot view the rape as a detached experience distinct from her feelings for the man she had intertwined with emotionally and physically. the more intimate the pre-existing relationship, the less likely it is for a rape survivor to view the rape as a clear-cut situation with a clearly prescribed response, such as reporting the event (koss et al., ). the people a person associates with, especially if they are in a romantic relationship, play an important role in determining a person’s self-identity and sense of self-worth (james, ). if a person is assaulted by a friend or loved one, then they may feel that it reflects badly on the self because the relationship was self-defining. indeed, even though all the women recognized the assault as a problematic event, they were not always comfortable labeling the event ‘rape.’ nicole was too drunk to fully remember the night she was raped by her best friend, but she confronted the perpetrator and asked what happened: leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 i said, ‘did we have sex?’ and he said, ‘are you serious?’ and i said, ‘no really did we have sex?’ and he said, ‘yes.’ and so i don’t know if he assumed that i remembered. i’m not quite sure. obviously, i guess he did. nicole later stated, ‘do i want to say he forced himself on me? maybe not. i don’t know.’ her story illustrates a lengthy process of constructing the meaning of rape (burnett et al., ). for nicole, this process involves not only her interpretation of the interaction, but the perpetrator’s interpretation of the event (see wood and rennie, ). acquaintance rape survivors often struggle to initially label the event rape because society assigns ‘rape’ seemingly obvious meanings that lead to the assumption that what does or does not constitute ‘rape’ should be straightforward. nicole, who is in a same-sex marriage, understands the legal definition of rape and uses this meaning to inform her understanding of the event as a ‘rape’ stating, ‘i want to hold him accountable because he was sober. he was the one in his right mind.’ at the same time, nicole struggles with this definition of the situation. nicole cannot help but blame herself and states, ‘i feel very shameful, and regretful, and guilty that i don’t remember it, that i possibly could have egged it on...’ for many women, the experience of being raped does not match the narratives about rape that have been socially circulated. they are then forced to reconcile their own experience against the backdrop of these limited and often oversimplified narratives (loseke, ). the disruption of self each survivor’s struggle to make sense of rape goes beyond understanding rape as an event that occurred in her life—rape is an event that becomes deeply connected to a survivor’s understanding of herself. for the women in our study, the rape marked a loss of control and agency that disrupted their narratives about the self. nicole explains, ‘rape, leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 sexual assault, sexual harassment takes away [our] autonomy…that kind of taints how we see ourselves and how we see our control…that’s at the very core of us to act [for] ourselves and rape takes that away.’ regaining control was of utmost importance to the survivors in this study who felt helpless. sandra states, ‘i guess it makes me feel helpless…the power feels like it was stripped from me.’ for the survivors, this loss of agency and control fractured their understanding of the self. humans have an inherent need to construct a coherent sense of self (loseke, ), even though the self is constructed and maintained through a more fluid process (strauss, ). when this sense of stability and cohesiveness is disrupted, a survivor may be left reeling to regain control. loss of control and agency can lead to a perceived loss of self-worth. tricia states, ‘and it was like sitting there feeling worthless and like realizing that this has happened to me...and this feeling that i have of emptiness inside of me is not, like it’s not me.’ jane echoed a similar sentiment stating, ‘one minute i felt important and the next minute i felt like i didn’t matter.’ tricia and jane’s accounts demonstrate an existential crisis that results from experiencing an event that previously seemed outside of the realms of possibility. in an instant, they are forced to renegotiate a self they spent a lifetime constructing and negotiating. they are left with questions about whether their lives have any meaning or value. tricia and jane had to confront an identity that they never imagined they would have to enact—the identity of a ‘rape survivor.’ such a disruption can leave a survivor struggling to return to ‘life as normal.’ now, previously routine and habitual events no longer mean the same thing. for example, jane states, ‘i wasn’t happy for [my birthday]. i pretended to be because i didn’t leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 want any “oh well why are you not excited?” but i wasn’t happy because i was messed up in my mind.’ while jane struggled internally, she also made active decisions to project ‘life as usual’ to her friends and family. grace explained, ‘i didn’t want to eat. everything was affected. my gpa, my emotions, my mental health, everything even my physical health.’ sandra also stated, ‘and then i was really emotionally distant like i didn’t want to be touched, i didn’t want to talk, i didn’t want to be hugged.’ for the survivors, the rape event resulted in an extremely salient break from their established sense of mind, body, and self. the restoration of self although the sexual assault experience left all of the survivors struggling to make sense of their lives, the women all told a story about regaining agency and constructing a ‘new’ self. whereas, immediately after the rape, the narratives of self were disrupted and disordered, the women we spoke to were able to reestablish order and control over their narratives by symbolically constructing an ‘old self’ and a ‘new self.’ sandra describes her new, positive self concept: i’m in a lot better place than i was when it happened. i’ve stopped putting it out of my mind..i’m not blaming myself anymore...i guess i feel like i’m having that self-confidence and that power that i feel from myself to be able to do normal things coming back. sandra was able to accomplish the creation of a ‘new’ self by redefining herself while also locating a new audience of ‘others’ to observe, reaffirm, and support her new identity. she goes on to state: i feel less shame i guess... like i feel like my future is bright. that i can overcome this and actually use it to help other people before something happens to them or whenever they need someone to relate to or talk to if it does happen. leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 sandra’s narrative moves beyond the restoration of an old self to the projection of a ‘bright’ future, where she can provide help and support for others. notably, sandra’s interest in helping others is externally focused. her desire to be there for others reaffirms the image of a new self that has learned from experience, knows better than the ‘old self,’ and is in a position to offer guidance to those who may not know better. tricia shared a similar description of her ‘new’ self and her ability to contribute to other people’s lives. she stated: it makes my day just to hold someone’s door open for them and for them to tell me have a great day. like that gives me worth...and if i can be ok day by day then i know that year by year it will be better and that i can change someone else’s life. the focus on helping others suggest a new conception of self that is optimistic and future oriented. the desire to move forward and leave the rape behind is not surprising, of course, but in order to do so, the survivors we talked to gained control over their narrative by symbolically leaving their old selves behind. by reclaiming their narratives in this way, the women were able to assert agency that helped mitigate the loss of control they felt after the rape. for many of the women, this meant assigning some of the blame to their old selves as a way of taking back their agency. nicole explains her feelings of self- blame and says, ‘you really want to convince yourself that it is you. because if it’s you, you have your control back.’ for them, the old self becomes a symbolic object that represents past mistakes and ignorance. indeed, without exception, every survivor began her narrative with a critique of her ‘old’ self and prior behaviors. jane, who was raped by her boyfriend, began her story by critically reflecting on her prior actions with that boyfriend. she states, ‘i felt leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 bad because i let it get to that point and i should have left or broken up with him earlier.’ jane explains further, ‘at the time, it didn’t matter; now it does. and i felt like it was probably because i didn’t know my worth.’ jane constructs her old self as naïve and ignorant of her worth. in doing so, she clearly establishes a ‘new’ self that is more self- aware, more understanding of who she is and who she is supposed to be. by demonstrating that she now knows that the old self was the ‘wrong’ self, the survivors were able to create order and meaning in their narratives of self. in doing so, the stories the survivors told also incorporated and responded to some of the social constraints inherent in their situation. for example, as the women relived their ‘old’ selves, they made frequent derisive comments regarding their past partying and drinking behaviors. grace begins the interview by criticizing her ‘old’ self as a partier who made poor decisions. she states, ‘i wanted to do that [partying] a lot but then i just went off the wall.’ grace describes the various actions her ‘old’ self used to perform including ‘messing around’, ‘drinking’, and ‘letting all of her inhibitions loose.’ grace explains, ‘i put myself in those situations and even so i allowed people to do that to me and i thought it was okay.’ in highlighting her old self’s naivetés, grace affirms that her new self knows better. similarly, tricia reflects on her ‘old’ self’s lack of identity stating, ‘i didn’t know who i was’ before criticizing her prior actions by declaring, ‘i came to [college] and i kind of went crazy.’ tricia’s narrative account is centered around proving the old self’s lack of knowledge about her true self, whereas the new self has come to have a better mastery of the world. in this way, the women’s decisions to criticize past behaviors and decouple the past ‘old self’ serves as an effective technique for restoring agency, while moving past leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 self-blame. identifying and interpreting the old self as an object allows them to create order and stability by directing blame and shame towards a self that is clearly distinct, thereby allowing them to construct a ‘new self’ that is agentic, but that has also shed the shame, ignorance and trauma of the old self. imagined courses of action and reporting all of the women in our study told stories about regaining agency and control over their life. yet, none of the women reported the rape. the lack of reporting has typically been viewed as a sign of inaction and/or lack of agency. many of the socially circulated narratives about rape present reporting as the necessary action that a survivor must take in order to regain agency and receive justice (wolitzky-taylor et al., ). yet, the decision to remain passive or active implies a false dichotomy about the courses of action available to a survivor that, in reality, are very complex and seldom clear-cut. by imagining potential courses of action, the women display agency, even if they choose not to act (scott, ). at the same time, during this active process of imagining potential courses of actions, survivors may be acutely aware that they face certain social constraints. in particular, survivors may perceive they lack control over the way certain courses of action will unfold (including legal processes and institutional constraints) and/or they will be subject to unfair and misinformed judgments by social others. as college students, the participants in our study were particularly aware that the context of a college campus provides a social environment that is both particularly conducive to rape, as well as unreceptive to reporting. previous studies suggest that college campuses foster a rape culture in which date rape is an accepted part of campus activity (burnett et al., ). the women in this study expressed feelings of leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 powerlessness in this context when they told stories about assaults they saw happen to other women on the campus. nicole tells a story about attempting to stop a fraternity man from having sex with a woman who was so intoxicated ‘her eyes are in the back of her head.’ in her attempts to stop the rape, she got thrown out of the party because she ‘made a scene.’ similarly, grace shares a story about attempting to stop people at a party from humiliating and grabbing a girl who was ‘super drunk’ when her friends stopped her and ‘told her not to do anything.’ further, the women in our study assigned self-blame for behaviors that they knew others would see as partially responsible for their assault. grace explains, ‘i was someone who messed around so why would anyone even believe [me]?’ when tricia was asked why she thought others would view the rape as her fault she said, ‘because i was drunk, because i had gone to the party, because i had let him in the room, because i was wearing a dress.’ additionally, when the survivors imagined formally reporting the rape, they saw a process that would not likely accomplish much, and would also result in victim shaming (see wolitzky-taylor et al., ). nicole made the decision not to report, in part, because she thought that rather than achieving justice, she would be subject to more judgment, ‘its his words versus mine and supposedly his words are saying that i egged it on…its just a recipe for more humiliating experiences for me. i don’t think anything would happen to him at all.’ sandra echoes a similar sentiment, sharing that she ‘was told by other people that there is a lot of victim blaming.’ the survivors’ narratives indicated that they were hyper-aware of the perceived judgments of various ‘others.’ it is widely accepted that ‘rape culture’ contributes to leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 internalized feelings of shame, self-blame, and self-loathing (leisenring, ). jane explains: i didn’t want to go through the whole like court process. and like well tell your story again, tell it again, tell it again. i felt like that was going to be holding me back from a lot of stuff. and then i didn’t want people thinking that i was stupid. because i think i was stupid. but i didn’t want people like, ‘well you stayed. well what did you do to make him do that?’ basically switching the roles like i was the bad guy. like i was the reason that it happened. and i already feel like it was my fault and i didn’t want to keep hearing it. by imagining the judgment of generalized others, jane feels trapped in her old self— lacking the agency to move beyond the ‘naïve’ self that made mistakes and trusted the wrong people. she imagines other people will see her the way she sees herself—as someone who ‘was stupid’ and was at ‘fault.’ the survivors indicated that after assessing the situation, they felt reporting would not help them restore agency, but instead would cause them to lose even more control—unable to achieve anything through the justice system, while also being judged for their behaviors. none of the survivors we spoke to reported being raped to the police, yet the survivors communicated a story of personal transformation, healing, and hope. for them, reporting would have caused a further loss of control during a time when regaining a sense of agency was of paramount importance. instead, the survivors in this study found agency by constructing a narrative that included an ‘old’ self toward whom blame for the rape was directed, thereby allowing the women to reclaim a sense of control over the events in their lives. as sandra explains, ‘there is such a lack of control that if we are able to blame ourselves we are able to put ourselves kind of in control of that situation even if it’s a negative control.’ leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 the survivors indicated that they were able to achieve agency, healing, and distance from the trauma because they decided not to report. in order for the women in our study to establish a new self that shed ‘rape’ as a central identity, they had to leave their old self behind. the survivors in this study elected to cope with the rape by reimagining and reconstructing a new self that has control and agency. for them, the decision to report was perceived as a course of action that would expose them to the judgment of others and cause them further loss of control, which would ultimately keep them tethered to a self that cannot be disentangled from the rape. conclusion as it turns out, the decision not to report a sexual assault can be very active and, for some women, the best way they know how to regain a sense of control over their lives. the women’s decisions not to report were a form of self-preservation enacted to protect against a further loss of control. the internalized and often invisible process of narrative and identity construction in which the survivors engaged was a crucial component of their survival strategy. yes, the survivors we talked to communicated a sense of self-blame, shame, and an awareness of the ‘rape culture’ that surrounds them, but they also told a story of self- empowerment, survival, and hope. when familiar routines and established identities are disrupted people must take time to sort through what they thought they knew about themselves to determine how they will move forward after the disruption. by taking a step back to listen to the lived experiences of rape survivors and interpret their stories through the lens of symbolic interactionism, we can begin to understand why for some rape survivors it is incredibly difficult to immediately distinguish between ‘victim’ and leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 ‘perpetrator’, ‘rape’ and ‘sex.’ the world rape survivors actually experience is inherently more complex and fluid than the stories society tells about how people are supposed to interpret and understand rape. the survivors’ narratives demonstrate that the negative connotations associated with rape become deeply intertwined with their own sense of self. the rape is not an isolated event, it is something that is seen as being caused by, connected to, and affecting the survivor’s life and identity. the survivor is now forced to reconstruct a sense of agency in the aftermath of a devastating attack that left her feeling powerless. thus, the survivor cannot interpret herself as an ‘innocent victim’—such a label does not fit within the world these survivors actually understand and experience. instead, these survivors attempt to cope with the rape by directing blame and accountability toward the ‘old self.’ in constructing a symbolic representation of a previous self, the survivors seek to detach their current self from the rape event. they acknowledge that it happened, that it has changed them and will forever affect the world they know, but they also associate it more directly with a self that no longer exists. as a result, a more positive, optimistic self is constructed. for these survivors, pursuing legal justice only serves to force them to reenact their old self, to continue to be blameworthy, ignorant, and naïve. the construction and maintenance of the self is fluid—changing in meaning and interpretation depending upon the context. yet, symbolic objects, such as the self, can come to be interpreted and constructed as if they were stable and concrete. thus, the symbolic construction of a ‘past self,’ ‘raped self,’ and ‘new self’ allow a survivor to provide order and coherence to their narratives of self, obscuring the more complicated and interpretive nature of the self. leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 our five interviews illustrate how these particular survivors assign meaning to rape and construct narratives of self for themselves, but we cannot expect that every woman interprets, communicates, and acts toward sexual assault in the same manner. a wide array of symbolic coping strategies, no doubt, exist. the college sample used here is a limitation because the drinking and hook up culture prevalent in many college environments may increase a survivor’s likelihood to blame their own behavior. nonetheless, it also reflects the complicated process through which decisions to report will include an active consideration of the particular constraints inherent in specific sociocultural context. our sample is further limited by the fact that it was up to the women to contact us to participate and, as such, the women in our study may have developed coping mechanisms that differ from the women who were not willing to speak to us about their stories. decisions not to report due to a perceived lack of control and decoupling the past self are not strategies that all survivors will employ. regardless, our study demonstrates how agentic and important the ‘invisible’ actions of non-reporting survivors are. these less visible forms of coping with a rape are much more complicated and interconnected than the stories told about rape in society. it is also particularly telling that we found so many consistencies across all five interviews. in particular, all of the women we spoke to condemned the ‘old self.’ despite the small sample size, this consistency suggests that this is an important symbolic strategy many rape survivors often use. the narrative construction of self and meaning we found is notable and warrants further discussion and understanding. this paper details one common narrative device survivors of sexual assault may use, yet more research is needed to identify and examine leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 other symbolic strategies survivors may employ. further, one of the main contributions of this manuscript is to draw attention to the need to listen to the stories sexual assault survivors tell. in this regard, our paper seeks to help prioritize the voices of sexual assault survivors, rather than focus on causal relationships. although this approach is not novel, it is far too uncommon (see martin, ). scholars and activists often seek to uncover the factors that cause the non- reporting. such an approach may quietly, but strongly, reinforce generalizations about survivors that do not appear malicious, but nonetheless degrade their perceived social status. by focusing on the ‘victims’ inaction, these narratives naturally suggest non- reporting survivors are passive, meek, and emotionally unstable—possibly rending their agency and actions invisible. to be clear, we are not arguing against reporting. social mechanisms that work to deter sexual assault, as well as assure social justice, are vitally important. this much is obvious. at the same time, it is irresponsible to assume that outside observers understand what survivors of sexual assault are going through and that we know better than they do. it is crucial that we first listen to rape survivors and give them agency and voice in the process. this study is but one small attempt to acknowledge that scholars need a better understanding of the world rape survivors actually experience. the complexities of indicating, interpreting, and communicating the meaning of rape most likely occur over time and involve not only the interpretations of one’s own actions, but an interpretation of the other available cultural resources. this study sought to draw focus to the need to pay more attention to the agentic, but less visible forms of coping in which rape survivors leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 engage. if scholars and social activists continue to focus exclusively on visible forms of action, we may continue to overlook the less visible survival strategies many individuals choose to enact and risk further stigmatizing those who do not choose to share their story. leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 references ahrens ce ( ) being silenced: the impact of negative social reactions on the disclosure of rape. american journal of community psychology ( - ): - . alderden m, long l ( ) sexual assault victim participation in police investigations and prosecution. violence and victims ( ): - . azarian r ( ) joint actions, stories and symbolic structures: a contribution to herbert blumer’s conceptual framework. sociology ( ): - . blumer h ( ) symbolic interaction: perspective and method. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. burnett a, mattern 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polkinghorne d ( ). narrative knowing and the human sciences. albany: state university n.y. press. polletta f, chen pcb, gardner bg, and motes a ( ) the sociology of storytelling. annual review of sociology : - . rape, abuse, and incest national network (n.d.) statistics. available at: https://rainn.org/statistics sable mr, danis f, mauzy dl, and gallagher sk ( ) barriers to reporting sexual assault for women and men: perspectives of college students. journal of american college health ( ): - . scott s ( ) a sociology of nothing: understanding the unmarked. sociology ( ): - . strauss a ( ) mirrors and masks: the search for identity. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. leaving	the	past	(self)	behind	 strauss a ( ). continual permutations of action. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. weiss kg ( ) too ashamed to report: deconstructing the shame of sexual victimization. feminist criminology ( ): - .. weiss kg, colyer cj ( ) roofies, mickies and cautionary tales: examining 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working to develop policies that adhere to our editorial principle of airing a wide range of perspectives and that also prevent causing further harm to the targets of harassment. publication of a letter does not represent an endorsement by the editorial staff at science. past practice has been based on the understanding that reader-submitted letters are intended to reflect conversations taking place in the scientific community. the pub- lished letter in question did that by raising concerns about the transparency of the investiga- tory process. this point touched on the challenges institutions face when de-termining how the processes and outcomes of harassment investigations should be shared, decisions that must weigh the bene-fits of transparency against important priva-cy concerns. however, the letter also dis-cussed the personal conduct and scientific accomplishments of the individual found guilty of harassment. in the future, we will not publish letters in which authors argue that an individual accused or found guilty of harassment is likely innocent because others have inter-acted with that per- son without incident; this argument is logically flawed. in addi-tion, although some informa- tion about a per-son’s scientific achievements is at times nec-essary to establish context, we will not pub-lish letters in which authors argue that pro-fessional achievements have any bearing at all on the likelihood that the individual en-gaged in harassment. such arguments not only lack relevance to harassment behavior but also may result in further harm to the targets of harassment and exacerbate the al-ready daunting process that targets face in coming forward publicly. we are striving to increase our under-standing of all facets of the issue of harass-ment and to review and modify our editorial processes accordingly. jeremy m. berg editor-in-chief editor’s note: harassment policy . /science.aav post date october o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ august • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org p h o t o : ia n p a r k e r harassment charges: enough himpathy we are well into the #metoo era, yet journal- ists and editors are still fixated on the harasser’s fall from grace rather than the detrimental effect of sexual harassment on the victims and our society as a whole. the news story “prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding” (m. wadman, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) reinforces a familiar toxic narrative: the accomplishments of the harasser hold more value to science than women’s right to a safe workplace. this is now so commonplace that it has been dubbed “himpathy” ( ). in the news story, wadman tells us all about the “eminent” professor, from his scientific accomplishments to his personal hobbies. he did “pioneering” and “ground- breaking” work, he donated money to the university, and he was president of aaas (the publisher of science). however, we do not hear about the pioneering work of the women he harassed at university of califor- nia, irvine (uci). from a graduate student to a tenured professor to an assistant dean, the news story reduced the women who demanded an end to his misconduct to complainers. we are told that ayala was just being “european” and his actions were mis- understood; instead, the narrative should focus on the many women and careers that suffered from ayala’s actions. wadman then chose to end the article by quoting an ayala supporter who diminished the investigation. edited by jennifer sills letters the same himpathy sentiments return in the follow-up news in depth story “report details harassment by famed biologist” (m. wadman, july, p. ). words matter, and science should wield its words and influence carefully. it is time to recognize that harassers have taken a substantial toll on the advancement of science. it is time to acknowledge that sexual harassment in all its nefarious forms puts an unquantifiable burden on the victims (many of whom are our colleagues). it’s time to believe women. jane zelikova, kelly ramirez,* jewel lipps, on behalf of women scientists leadership women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: k.ramirez@nioo.knaw.nl reference . k. manne, down girl (oxford univ. press, ). . /science.aau harassment charges: journalists’ role as a woman in science, i find the report- ing of allegations against francisco ayala (“#metoo complaints fell noted geneticist,” m. wadman, news in brief, july, p. ) deeply troubling. the title implicates the “complaints” or “complainers” as respon- sible for the resignation, as opposed to the actions of the accused or the impartial sexual harassment investigation. the term “complaint” gives the impression that the alleged victims have minor grievances as opposed to serious reports of scientific misconduct. not only is this title biased against whistleblowers, it is also factu- ally incorrect, as the first allegations of harassment were allegedly made years before the resignation. i assert that the investigation, not the allegations, caused the accused to resign. jessica duffy department of biology, midwestern state university, wichita falls, tx , usa. email: jlduffy @my.mwsu.edu . /science.aau harassment charges: injustice done? we are deeply concerned by the way in which our friend and colleague professor francisco ayala has been forced to resign from the university of california, irvine (uci), after being accused of sexual harass- ment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation). the charges that have been raised against him have had appall- ing consequences. those of us who are well acquainted with professor ayala know that he is an honorable person, who throughout his career has treated his friends, co-workers, and students in a respectful, egalitar- ian way. his lifelong commitment to teaching, research, and outreach on bio- logical evolution has won him worldwide recognition. he has been a generous bene- factor to the university of california and throughout his fruitful career has opened new fields of biological research, pro- moted mutual respect and independence uci decided to remove francisco ayala’s name from the science library after he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ between evolutionary studies and religious perspectives, played a key role in several major scientific organizations, and helped many spanish-speaking female scholars and hispanic students, in particular, both in the united states and throughout the world. from the available information, it appears that the inquiry conducted by uci lacked genuine due process, fair- ness, and full transparency. we urge uci to acknowledge the possibility that its sanctions against professor ayala were enacted in haste and to reopen the case and investigate the matter more thor- oughly. we understand the wish of both the institution and professor ayala not to unduly prolong this whole unhappy episode. it is equally important, however, that justice be done and be seen to be done. if carried out properly, uci could help devise a more successful model for how institutions should deal with such situations in the future. devising an improved procedure for these cases would earn everyone’s gratitude. andrés moya and additional authors* institute of integrative systems biology, university of valència, valència, spain, and foundation for the promotion of health and biomedical research of valència region (fisabio), valència, spain. email: andres.moya@uv.es *the full list of authors is available online. s u p p l e m e n ta ry m at e r i a l s full list of authors www.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . /suppl/dc . /science.aau harassment charges: metoo but due process the resignation of eminent biologist francisco j. ayala amid charges of sexual harassment (“prominent geneticist out at uc irvine after harassment finding,” m. wadman, news, june, https://scim.ag/ ayalaresignation) has left ayala’s home campus deeply divided. the controversy highlights problems in the way universities currently address charges of sexual harass- ment. because the university of california, irvine (uci), failed to post easily acces- sible guidelines on how the ayala case was handled, especially how and by whom final decisions were made, many uci faculty are concerned that the university overreached, imposing a punishment not commensurate with the specific charges of wrongdoing. a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment should include clearly stated procedures to protect due process and ensure propor- tional responses to wrongdoing. i will not engage in the ugly nastiness of “he said, she said” as we debate the veracity of accusations described in sala- cious detail (“report details harassment by famed biologist,” m. wadman, news in depth, july, p. ). these are human tragedies evolving in front of us. victims strive to regain lost self-esteem, along with justice. the accused wrestle with shock, forced to confront their own cluelessness at shifting mores, and everyone realizes how vulnerable we all are, including adminis- trators struggling to figure out how best to fairly confront sexual harassment and gender equality. we are all at risk when goodwill and communications break down. to fairly and equitably strike a balance between complacency and overreaction, i recommend three procedures to help achieve the notoriously difficult goal of changing attitudes toward gender. first, we must do more to foster a university climate that takes seriously and protects potential targets, be they male or female. part of that is recognizing that even subtle forms of verbal behavior—i.e., jokes or comments about appearance—make some women and minorities uncomfortable. yet resulting deferential treatment can contribute to a climate in which women or minorities are treated differently. even- tually, this subtle, differential treatment can foster continuing inequality. second, we must insist that legally correct poli- cies and procedures are followed when charges of sexual harassment are made. these procedures need to be transpar- ent and the same for all faculty. policies should be written in prose that even nonlawyers can understand and posted in obvious places, with regularly sched- uled discussion forums designed to help educate all members of the university community. third, the punishment must fit the crime. if tasteless, off-color jokes and the kind of ambiguous “unwanted touching” of which ayala was accused warrant his public humiliation, what do we do with more serious charges of sexual harassment? and why is hana ayala pun- ished for her husband’s acts by having her name removed from gifts to uci? the #metoo movement has done a great service in opening up an area too long taboo. but the failure to follow clearly es- tablished, fairly administered, and trans- parent procedures can too easily produce witch hunts that cast doubts on legitimate charges of sexual harassment. this will set back the move toward gender equality, in the academy and in society at large. kristen renwick monroe department of political science, university of california, irvine, irvine, ca , usa. email: krmonroe@uci.edu . /science.aau insights | l e t t e r s sciencemag.org s c i e n c e step up your job search with science careers • access thousands of job postings • sign up for job alerts • explore career development tools and resources search sciencecareers.org published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ harassment charges: enough himpathy jane zelikova, kelly ramirez, jewel lipps and on behalf of women scientists leadership doi: . /science.aau ( ), 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talk about corruption in health systems eleanor hutchinson id , dina balabanova id , martin mckee * id abstract the health sector consistently appears prominently in surveys of perceived corruption, with considerable evidence that this has serious adverse consequences for patients. yet this issue is far from prominent in the international health policy discourse. we identify five reasons why the health policy community has been reluctant to talk about it. these are the problem of defining corruption, the fact that some corrupt practices are actually ways of making dysfunctional systems work, the serious challenges to researching corruption, concerns that a focus on corruption is a form of victim blaming that ignores larger issues, and a lack of evidence about what works to tackle it. we propose three things that can be done to address this situation. first, seek consensus on the scale and nature of corruption. second, decide on priorities, taking account the importance of the particular problem and the feasibility of doing something about it. third, take a holistic view, drawing on a wide range of disciplines. keywords: corruption, governance, bribery, absenteeism, procurement copyright: © the author(s); published by kerman university of medical sciences. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: hutchinson e, balabanova d, mckee m. we need to talk about corruption in health systems. int j health policy manag. ; ( ): – . doi: . /ijhpm. . *correspondence to: martin mckee email: martin.mckee@lshtm.ac.uk article history: received: november accepted: december epublished: december editorial full list of authors’ affiliations is available at the end of the article. http://ijhpm.com int j health policy manag , ( ), – doi . /ijhpm. . some things are rarely discussed in public. quite reasonably, most of us, if we are not among the growing number of social media celebrities, believe that the more intimate aspects of our personal relationships remain private. we can reasonably argue that they are of no concern to anyone else. but there are some things that take place in private, and which traditionally remained secret, that are at last being discussed openly because they do concern others. sexual abuse and exploitation by those in positions of power exemplify such things. for too long, even though such behaviour was known about, it was tacitly accepted and few were sufficiently brave to talk about it. those that did, especially if they were the victims, often suffered from doing so. they came to realise that actions that were, by any moral or ethical framework, wrong were simply accepted. that was the way things had always been, and would always be in the future. quite simply, nothing could be done. yet something can be done. the #metoo movement has empowered the victims of such abuse to speak out, holding the perpetrators to account. now, it is the abusers who find themselves excluded. this does not mean that the problem has been solved. few things are. slavery was abolished in much the world more than years ago but there are still hundreds of thousands of forced and indentured labourers and, in a few countries, slaves. but at least by talking about abuses of different kinds, it is possible to begin the process of changing things. the #metoo scandals are most closely identified with the arts world, although medicine is not immune. yet we, in the health policy community, have our own dirty secret. it is something that we all know exists but we are often too polite to talk about it. it is corruption in the health sector. too often, we spend long hours discussing why something that should work in theory does not work in practice, without asking who benefits from the status quo. or why, despite investing in extra staff and facilities, many people still struggle to get the care they need, without asking where those staff are and what they are doing with the resources provided for them. our failure to confront this issue is all the more surprising given that surveys, such as those conducted by transparency international, consistently find that the health sector is among the most corrupt in many countries. in its “corruption barometer” it reported that, in of countries surveyed, over % of citizens viewed their health systems as corrupt or very corrupt. scholars have also developed detailed frameworks that describe the main manifestations of corruption in the health sector. , we also know that this has consequences. it undermines the trust that underpins effective, equitable, and responsive healthcare. it also costs lives, with a study estimating that about child deaths annually could be attributed to corruption. yet when health ministers describe their achievements, both real and anticipated, at international meetings, while they will sometimes be frank and admit to specific failures, using them to discuss the lessons they have learned, they rarely discuss the role of corruption and the weaknesses of governance that http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . https://doi.org/ . /ijhpm. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /ijhpm. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - hutchinson et al international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – often underlies it. a new paper from a group of authors from north american universities makes the case for a renewed drive to tackle this issue. they argue that the sustainable development goals (sdgs), which the governments of the world have committed to achieving by , and including policies in a wide range of areas, could be leveraged to tackle corruption in the health sector. they showed how corrupt practices were likely to impede progress on several of the health-related sdgs, such as universal health coverage, but also how sdgs in other areas, such as sdg (peace, justice and strong institutions) and (partnerships) offer means by which action might be mobilised. as researchers working on an international project on corruption, in which we are focusing on the health sector, we have been reflecting on why it is that these conversations are so difficult to hold. we have identified five main reasons. first, it is difficult to define corruption. indeed, practices that are clearly corrupt are often described in other words. even in one language, english, these include, for example, backhander, bribery, exploitation, extortion, fiddling, fraud, graft, nepotism, jobbery, payola, profiteering, racketeering, and skimming. others, in languages other than english, have also gained international currency, even if their meaning has changed in the process. an example is baksheesh, which has evolved from its original meaning of charitable giving in persian (بخشش ). “dash”, used widely in west africa, is believed to originate in the portuguese word doação, or giving of gifts. others are widely used in certain regions but have not spread widely elsewhere, such as the urdu word rishwat (رشوت), used widely throughout the indian sub-continent. the united nations convention against corruption does not try to define its subject, instead, simply listing a number of corrupt practices. the cochrane collaboration, in its review of measures effective in reducing corruption, did. it defines corruption as “the abuse or complicity in abuse, of public or private position, power or authority to benefit oneself, a group, an organization or others close to oneself; where the benefits may be financial, material or non-material.” this can take many forms, not all of which may be recognized as corruption by everyone. , for example, irregularities in procurement of medical consumables and equipment, especially where these involved bribes, would probably be accepted by most people as corrupt. but what about the widespread practice of inducements, some of little monetary value, such as pens, by pharmaceutical sales representatives? there is considerable evidence that this is associated with increased prescribing of the brands concerned. then there are informal payments, made to secure faster or higher quality treatment. - again, the corrupt nature may be obvious, but where is the dividing line from unsolicited tokens of gratitude? theft of drugs or equipment from public facilities to be used in private ones is clearly corrupt, as it denies them to those in the public facilities. but what about absenteeism or late arrival or early departure from work in the same public facility, which also denies patients an essential component of care, the time of the health worker? , second, some practices that seem corrupt may actually be seen by those concerned, both providers of services and their beneficiaries, as the only means of enabling some fragile health systems simply to keep working. health professionals may feel they have no alternative to bribe officials to obtain necessary authorisations to function. the recipients of the bribes are clearly corrupt, but what about those offering them? informal payments extracted from those with the ability to pay may be channelled into the operation of the health facility rather than the pocket of the health worker, thereby allowing those who cannot afford payments to be treated. should they be condemned for this? more generally, is there a danger that efforts to remove corruption without addressing the other weaknesses in the health system might threaten the delivery of care further and hurt the most vulnerable? third, how do we conduct research on corruption in ways that capture what is really happening? it is very easy for those involved in graft to shift blame to other, less powerful actors as corrupt and deflect attention from themselves. how does one engage in anti-corruption research without colluding with corrupt officials, for example when the researcher observes abusive or exploitative behaviour but seeks to maintain the access necessary to report it, a dilemma recognised in other settings where there are power imbalances? fourth, is it even legitimate to study corruption? there is a view in some quarters that concerns about corruption divert attention from more important issues, such as the unequal distribution of global resources, itself a factor in the emergence and persistence of corruption. some of those adopting this paradigm see a focus on corruption as a manifestation of the neoliberal attack on the state, noting how it was prioritized by development agencies in the s during the reagan- thatcher era, when many public health systems were being dismantled. finally, we still know far too little about how to tackle corruption. despite years of investment in good governance, levels of corruption remain high and, in some places, growing. the cochrane review found no studies meeting their criteria that provided empirical evidence of effects of strategies to reduce corruption and only nine that could be used to describe the range of strategies that have been tried that could guide future evaluations of promising strategies, even if there is insufficient evidence so far. so, what can be done to address these problems and initiate a debate on corruption in health systems? a first step is to convene key stakeholders in the health system, including policy makers, health professionals, and managers, to seek agreement on the scale and nature of corruption in each health system. the challenges are, however, formidable. there will often be a considerable reluctance to speak openly, especially by those who are disempowered. such individuals will need considerable support and, in some cases, protection if they are to expose corrupt practices. second, and once agreement has been reached on the problem, it will be necessary to prioritize action. decisions should be guided by both the impact on the health system, and especially on vulnerable groups, and the existence of a potential remedy that has some feasibility of success. some corrupt practices may not matter much while others might hutchinson et al international journal of health policy and management, , ( ), – pose severe threats to health. some may even be rational responses to a dysfunctional system. sometimes, the choice will be helped by the opening of a window of opportunity. it will be very important to understand the reasons why corrupt practices thrive, constantly asking questions about who benefits in different ways and what are the underlying causes and the extent to which they can be changed. by understanding the incentives that operate, including the use of corrupt practices to overcome unnecessary structural and organizational barriers, it may be possible to develop pragmatic solutions that can command approval. drawing on kingdon’s work on policy streams, it is important to concentrate on what matters most and can most easily be addressed at a particular time. third, as with many complex problems, it is essential to take a holistic view. research on corruption in the health sector is often published in specialist anthropology and political economy journals and much less in the health literature. this means that it is largely absent from the main databases covering health systems, pubmed and econlit, or if it is there it is difficult to find, perhaps because the term “corruption” is seen as judgmental and thus avoided in some cases. there is a clear need for a multi-disciplinary response, yet many countries where corruption is widespread lack traditions of multi-disciplinary working, which exacerbates their other problems related to limited research capacity. it is entirely understandable if researchers decide that they would rather study less contentious and, in some cases dangerous topics. finally, it is important that the research community sets out what it can offer. zyglidopoulos et al identify four broad paths for research on corruption, in: ( ) individuals, ( ) organizations and industries, ( ) different countries (largely from an economic development perspective), and ( ) different cultural contexts (from an anthropological perspective). this work draws on a range of disciplines, including social psychology, criminology, development economics, and even media studies, such as that asking why a corrupt activity becomes a scandal. now is an especially propitious time to do this, taking advantage of new opportunities, many of which fall within the umbrella of “big data,” using tools such as social network analysis. , in writing this editorial, we hope to encourage a wider conversation about corruption in the health sector. this topic has failed to engage most global policy-makers, who seem to put it in the “too difficult” tray. only a few groups, such as transparency international, are campaigning for it to receive attention. clearly, much could be done already, even without further research, where the political will exists. yet, there is also a clear need for research, to ensure that policies adopted take account of the prevailing context and actually work, avoiding the risk of unintended consequences. a first step is to agree on a possible research agenda is lacking. above all, even if corruption is not yet spoken about publicly in the corridors of power, we know that it exists and is widespread. if we are to achieve the health-related sdgs, we must have that conversation within and among the many stakeholders within countries and the international community. acknowledgements this editorial is an expanded version of a blog by the authors on corruption, available at https://ace.soas.ac.uk/ five-reasons-corruption-health/. it is an output of the soas anti-corruption evidence (ace) research consortium funded by uk aid from the uk government [contract p ]. the views presented in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the uk government’s official policies or the views of soas-ace or other partner organisations. for more information on soas-ace visit https://ace.soas.ac.uk. ethical issues not applicable. competing interests authors declare that they have no competing interests. authors’ contributions mm drafted the paper, which eh and db revised. authors’ affiliations department of global health and development, london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, london, uk. department of public health & policy, london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, london, uk. references . jagsi r. sexual harassment in medicine - #metoo. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /nejmp . jain a, nundy s, abbasi k. corruption: medicine’s dirty open secret. bmj. ; :g . doi: . /bmj.g . transparency international . global corruption barometer report. 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violence alison gash and ryan harding * department of political science, university of oregon, eugene, or , usa; gash@uoregon.edu * correspondence: rharding@uoregon.edu received: february ; accepted: may ; published: may ���������� ������� abstract: legal consciousness scholars identify the ways in which law is referenced to authorize, define and evaluate behaviors and choices that occur far outside any formal legal framework. they define legality as the “meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of who employs them or for what ends.” we use the idea of legality to argue that, in matters of sexual assault and rape, the limits of the law extend beyond the courtroom. rather than simply influencing or guiding only those who are willing to consult the law in their efforts to seek justice, laws and legal discourse have the potential to frame and constrain any attempt to discuss experiences of sexual violence. #metoo and other forms of “consciousness-raising” for sexual violence highlight the limiting effects of law and legal discourse on public discussion of sexual violence. we find that, paradoxically, in the case of sexual violence law has the capacity to undermine the goals and benefits of consciousness-raising approaches, privatizing the experience of sexual assault and silencing its victims. keywords: legality; rape; sexual assault; sexual violence; #metoo; law; legal consciousness; consciousness-raising . introduction in , tarana burke launched me too—a non-profit that focused on providing space for women who have traditionally been isolated from public debates about rape and sexual assault to talk about their experiences. it is about “empowerment through empathy,” explained burke in a recent interview with ebony magazine. “it was a catchphrase to be used from survivor to survivor to let folks know that they were not alone and that a movement for radical healing was happening and possible” (hill ). twelve years later, #metoo was adopted as a call to arms to all victims of sexual assault in the midst of the public and volatile campaign to remove harvey weinstein—media mogul and accused serial sexual predator—from his post as hollywood’s kingmaker. weinstein had initially been exposed by reporters at the new york times and the new yorker as having committed decades of sexual transgressions against actresses—including many who had risen to fame. although weinstein’s predatory practices were no secret (journalists and actresses had tried to publicize weinstein’s sexual predation on prior occasions, to no avail), this time the response was swift. four male members of weinstein’s board of directors resigned within h of the allegations being publicized. weinstein’s removal by his remaining board members shortly followed suit. emboldened by this new outrage towards sexual assault and harassment, numerous actors and actresses came forward to disclose their own experiences with other hollywood royalty, toppling several a-list actors, and quickly spreading to other arenas. kevin spacey lost his standing as one of hollywood’s elite after allegations of multiple instances of sexual assault emerged on twitter. jeffrey tambor resigned from his leading role on the amazon hit transparent, following multiple allegations of sexual harassment. a ninth circuit judge stepped down from his long tenure on the appellate court amidst similar claims, as did wayne pacelle, laws , , ; doi: . /laws www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /laws http://www.mdpi.com/journal/laws laws , , of the head of the humane society. several members of the house and senate, including, most notably, senator al franken—a ranking member of the senate judiciary committee and avowed supporter for women’s rights—left public office or announced their retirement shortly after allegations of sexual harassment had surfaced on social media. in the midst of what seemed to be a nationwide awakening to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, actress and activist alyssa milano took to twitter to fan the growing flames of outrage. familiar with—and cognizant of—the power of burke’s me too approach—milano asked her followers to retweet #metoo if they had also been the victims of sexual assault or harassment. the purpose was to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem of sexual degradation. within days, twitter and dozens of other public forums were awash in #metoo postings—and sexual assault hotlines experienced a massive surge in callers seeking help and support. the ousting of harvey weinstein, and the #metoo movement that followed, reveal the importance of social media and other public media outlets as potential and powerful venues for individuals to process their experiences with sexual violence. where discussions of specific instances of sexual violence have been, for the most part, limited to private or intimate conversations—or, in rare moments, during courtroom testimony—newspapers, twitter, blogs and other social media outlets are now eager to publish personal stories about these experiences. in , with a sitting president facing multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment and a women-led resistance movement ready to act on any semblance of sexual violation, weinstein and his ilk had met their match. however, #metoo and its offshoots also reveal the challenges that victims and survivors of sexual violence and degradation continue to confront in their attempts to articulate their experiences. legal options remain largely inviable for most victims of sexual assault—and only marginally helpful for victims of sexual harassment. few victims report instances of sexual assault or prevail in court (du mont et al. ; estrich ). constitutional commitments to due process, which require any method of legal adjudication to follow defined protocols and satisfy specific evidentiary burdens, make it difficult for claims of sexual assault to prevail. additionally, these crimes occur primarily in private settings and without any witnesses beyond perpetrator and victim, hinging any verdict almost exclusively on physical evidence and perpetrator/victim credibility. for this reason, many victims of sexual violence forego any attempt to seek legal redress for these violations. however, we argue, in matters of sexual assault and rape, law’s influence extends far beyond the courtroom. rather than simply shaping how sexual violence survivors narrate their experiences during interactions with legal actors or within legal venues, laws and legal discourse have the potential to determine how sexual violence is articulated, considered, or discussed in a range of settings, even when survivors have not sought legal redress. specifically, we argue that #metoo and other forms of “consciousness-raising” for sexual violence highlight how law and legal discourse can limit and constrain public discussion of sexual violence. paradoxically, in some circumstances, the force of law in the case of sexual violence is to undermine the goals and benefits of consciousness-raising approaches, resulting in the continued silencing of sexual violence and its victims. . law and legal discourse in the everyday much of american public life is adjudicated and resolved through litigation or consultation of laws and regulations. laws supply logics that help to regulate our relationships, our interactions, how we behave, what we say and how we live. even if there is little likelihood of having any explicit formal legal interaction, legal frameworks offer de facto constraints on numerous aspects of our everyday lives. however, despite the “everyday” relevance of law and legal discourse, so much of the study of law is confined to those instances when we rely upon or utilize formal legal doctrines and the sexual assault hotline managed by rainn (rape and incest national network) increased by percent in november from one year prior and by percent in december from the same time the previous year (lambert ). laws , , of settings. when we limit the study of law to these doctrines and institutions we miss an opportunity to identify how law both constructs and is constructed by its everyday context (engel ; ewick and silbey ; gash and raiskin ). whether it is “the law of the check-out line” (engel , p. ), how we navigate traffic, or the ways we work through disagreements or debates with colleagues, family or friends, our most routine behaviors and transactions are, in part, governed by approximations or interpretations of legal concepts, norms and procedures. scholars have developed a framework for understanding how “our social roles and statuses, our relationships, our obligations, prerogatives, and responsibilities, our identities, and our behaviors bear the imprint of the law” (ewick and silbey ). they use the term “legal consciousness” to identify the ways in which law is referenced to authorize, define and evaluate behaviors and choices that occur far outside any formal legal framework, and define this inclination to turn to the language and lens of law when engaging in “everyday” activities as “legality.” legality refers to the “meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of who employs them or for what ends” (ewick and silbey , p. ). legality suggests that, whether enacted through norms, standards, or routines, the effect of law is pervasive. law helps to organize our lives, guide our decision-making strategies, understand our options, identify our power and respond to and evaluate events in the world around us. of course, individuals do not engage formal legal structures or invoke explicit legal doctrine each time they manage conflicts or complications. instead, as legal consciousness scholars argue, individuals rely on legality, which “operates through social life as persons and groups deliberately interpret and invoke law’s language, authority and procedures to organize their lives and manage their relationships” (ewick and silbey , p. ). within the concept of legality emerges a new view of the law and the operation of legal discourse. the law is not just an instance or aggregation of formal rules and decisions. it is a “rule of thumb” or heuristic frequently used by each of us to determine what is possible, acceptable, authorized or prohibited. indeed, the value of the rule of law, as understood through the concept of legality, exists in its ability to self-enforce. most individuals do not require judges or officers of the law to monitor or advise their every move. rather, legality can serve as an effective restraint on our predilections for chaos or unruliness—defining what is fair, just, or decent—and as a lens through which everyday experiences are filtered. through legality, the law is transformed from a codified corpus of rules and procedures into a self-enforcing regulative ideal, putting down parameters that frame the everyday interactions and decisions of ordinary people. the concept of legality, however, provides more than just a framework for understanding how individuals use the law to manage their own lives. it also offers an account of how they self-deputize, becoming “legal agents [who] make law, even when no formal legal agent is involved” (ewick and silbey , p. ). the implications of both the presence of law in everyday interactions and the capacity for individuals to authorize themselves as trustees of the law are especially critical for understanding the role of legal discourse in shaping extra-legal discussions of sexual violence. for one, scholars highlight the ways in which law and legality have an especially limiting effect on the lives of women. formal law, argues catherine mackinnon, is inadequate, irrelevant or antagonistic to the everyday lives of women. “either the law does not apply,” mackinnon explains, “is applied to women’s lives to their detriment or is not applied at all” (mackinnon , p. ). even if women choose not to engage in or invoke formal legal institutions and protections, legality can facilitate the downgrading of women’s experiences, for example, during conversations or interactions with medical professionals, social-service agencies, or human-resource managers. in the context of sexual violence, rape law can constrain options for adjudication and healing within, and beyond, formal legal institutions. as mackinnon argues, for women “to the extent that your reality does not fit the law’s picture, your rape is not illegal” (mackinnon , p. ). even when—as is true in the vast majority of cases—victims of sexual violence avoid making claims in formal legal venues, their discussions and feelings of sexual violation are often evaluated through the lens and with the imprimatur of the law. laws , , of we argue that, through legality, law has significant presence and power in the discourse on sexual violence. law can encroach upon and constrain the promise of consciousness-raising by limiting the use of concepts such as “rape” and “sexual assault” to formal legal, evidence-based standards. through legal discourse, those who use terms such as “sexual assault” as a way of making sense of or naming their violence may be subjected to ongoing versions of law-bound, yet unregulated, interrogations. therefore, law may not only foreclose on the possibility of survivors of sexual violence seeking and receiving justice within formal legal settings, but may similarly dampen their ability to seek out or receive support, acceptance and healing through consciousness-raising discourse. . law’s limits in the courts feminist legal reformers saw great potential for the law to provide an answer to the ongoing problem of sexual violence. law could provide women with a framework to both describe their violent and dehumanizing experiences and seek justice for these crimes. by promoting the rule of law as the answer to sexual violence, feminist legal reformers were rendering rape and sexual assault a public problem. no longer was sexual violence a private matter that women were required to endure on their own or in the private spheres that other women inhabited. instead, feminists argued that rape, similar to any other crime, was an assault on the values of a just society, and required a publicly-supported and legally-sanctioned punishment. for the most part, these attempts were successful. reforms eventually made their way to every state in the nation, and in many ways legal reforms continue to change how we think about rape and sexual assault. there are, however, limits to these efforts—some of which stem from formal legal institutional constraints and others that emanate from gendered conceptions of bodily autonomy that have become entwined within the fabric of american law. . . reform and regression in legal reforms beginning in the mid s, anti-rape advocates enjoyed important legislative successes. they were able to convince state legislators to modify or enact legislation to expand definitions of rape to include instances of violence perpetrated by acquaintances or sexual partners. legal reformers jettisoned the constraint of the “stranger rape” narrative—at least in terms of its codification in state laws and criminal regulations. this required two elements of legal change. first, reforms needed to dismantle the notion that rape occurs only at the hands of strangers in frequently violent episodes. the second was to reverse the requirement that victims of rape had to be “morally upstanding” women—women who were beyond repute (adler , p. ). the first legal reforms, enacted in michigan in and referred to as the criminal sexual conduct code (caringella , p. ), included both elements. first, michigan’s reform law “shielded” victims from enduring interrogations about their sexual history—a modification that, within twenty years, had been replicated in every state (hogan ). overall, these “rape shield laws” protect women from being repeatedly subjected to traditional and outmoded notions of rape that limit state protections to only the most unimpeachable women. second, michigan’s legislation tackled the myth of stranger rape by creating a scale of criminal sexual conduct. severity would increase depending on the presence of “aggravating factors,” among which included “blood affiliation” or shared housing between assailant and victim, or the degree to which the assailant held a position of “power, authority or trust” (caringella , p. ). the landmark legislation also removed any requirement of corroborating testimony. one of the most troubling aspects of pre- s rape law was the requirement (unique to rape cases) that victims seek and produce witnesses that could substantiate their allegations—an imposition that rendered rape cases nearly impossible to successfully litigate (caringella ). although michigan had never enacted of course, there are exceptions to this progress. for instance, in some states, a victim’s sexual history is still relevant for establishing consent. laws , , of a law requiring victims to corroborate their testimony, the standard enjoyed de facto acceptance by prosecutors and judges. michigan’s reforms explicitly codified the negation of any such requirement. by the s, most states had considered—and a lion’s share had passed—reform legislation reflecting demands from feminist reform activists (adler , p. ). legislation has, for the most part, followed the michigan model—providing some version of a “rape shield law” and removing corroborating requirements. states were slower to remove barriers to criminalizing spousal or acquaintance rape. although the first state to litigate marital rape (massachusetts) and the first state to revoke spousal exceptions (nebraska) each did so in the late s, exceptions for spousal rape stayed on the books until the mid- s. by , states had removed any barriers to prosecuting rapes that occurred within the confines of marriage. the long fight, waged by feminist activists to reform rape laws, produced measurable gains. the concrete cumulative effect of legal reform—of rape-shield laws, the elimination of the marital exception for rape, the wholesale removal of force requirements from some rape statutes and the reconceptualization of force in others, the creation of new categories of rape, and so on—has been to bring rape out of the private. through legal reform, activists transformed righteous outrage and experiences of sexual violence into legal scaffolding. through legal reform efforts, what was once personal has become political. however, as caringella ( ) argues, there is a difference between enactment and enforcement in the context of rape law. there are sizable and significant lacunas that continue to burden victims. although every state enacted some version of rape reform, many of the obstacles that had either discouraged victims of rape and sexual assault from reporting sexual violence or inhibited convictions remain in place. the “practically negligible” (adler , p. ) reporting rates that had motivated feminists to call for reforms barely budged in the decades following the largely successful reform efforts. arcane assumptions about rape, entrenched outmoded habits of mind, and more broadly, patriarchal order, persist, remaining stubbornly in place and intact—yet hidden by the veneer of change. as susan estrich ( ) notes, “looks can be deceiving”. first, many courts remain suspicious of women victims and protective of male defendants in precisely the kinds of cases that made their predecessors suspicious—cases that do not involve weapons or beating; that are concerned with friends, neighbors, or pickups; the cases of simple rape. the difference is that force has replaced consent or corroboration or unchastity as the primary doctrinal rubric for expressing that distrust. second, efforts to expand the crime of rape to include wife rape have in many jurisdictions been met by the same distrust of women complainants and commitment to male sexual access that are at the core of the longtime exclusion of both wife rape and simple rape from the law’s prohibitions. (pp. – ) how did these reforms falter? for one, although legal reforms provide language for victims of sexual assault to leverage when attempting to seek justice for these crimes, the barriers to reporting remain intact. studies suggest that women negatively perceive reporting processes and professionals. they fear reprisals by their assailants, the possibility of blame by police officers (du mont et al. , p. ) and health care or community providers (campbell , p. ), and the intensive interrogation of their private sexual histories. despite a shift in legal reforms that rejects the mythology of the “stranger rape,” women perceive police officers as continuing to maintain the “classic rape scenario”—sorting crime and victim into “real rape” and “real victim” (du mont et al. , p. ). researchers believe that the higher rates of reporting among women with visible physical injuries—“bruises, lacerations, abrasions, bumps, internal injuries and/or fractures” (du mont et al. , p. )—are a manifestation of the lingering legacy of these outdated and limiting conceptions of sexual violence. injuries corroborate credibility and nonconsent. without the twin indicators of force or resistance, questions posed by law enforcement personnel—about a victim’s clothing, mannerisms, flirtations, or voluntary alcohol or drug use—are received by victims as assessments of credibility and character. these kinds of inquiries reify the only-recently-dismantled laws , , of second-class status of sexually violent acts and the victims who carry their burdens. consequently, many victims of sexual violence would rather stay quiet than subject themselves to the suspicions and interrogations of legal gatekeepers. the compunction to stay quiet is especially alluring because of the second limitation of litigation: the low probability of prevailing in court. one can imagine a victim of sexual assault finding the courage to report the crime—exposing themselves to the ongoing degradation of interrogation and evidence collection—if there existed a decent probability of formal legal outrage on her behalf. however, there appears to be little payoff to enduring the potential humiliation of reporting. in fact, pursuing legal remedies may only subject victims to further debasements of their character. to a degree, the limits of law in adequately responding to rape cannot be squarely blamed on the content of legal reforms. constitutional commitments to due process require that courts pay attention to the burdens placed on individuals accused of crimes. due process obligations place constraints on individuals making allegations of rape and sexual assault. they impose evidentiary burdens that challenge attempts for legal reforms to protect victims from having to corroborate their claims or divulge sexual histories and behaviors. the private nature of many sexual assaults, particularly those committed by spouses, partners and acquaintances, means that legal conflicts may end up devolving into “he said, she said” disputes—which, without evidence, will inevitably come down to a question of credibility. this, coupled with a constitutionally-mandated presumption of innocence, means that any legal claimant of rape will have a difficult time proving their assailant’s guilt. this reveals a third, and potentially devastating, cost of legal intervention: interpretations of guilt and innocence in the context of rape cases. unlike other crimes—theft, assault, and murder, for instance—assignments of guilt in rape and sexual assault cases largely hinge on interpretations of a set of agreed-upon facts. in most cases, there is little doubt as to the fact of the sexual act or the actors involved. where the victim and assailant differ is in regards to assessments of consent. the claimant believes that she did not consent to the sexual interaction, that she made that fact clear through verbal and/or non-verbal cues and that the accused persisted or forced her to continue despite her contestations. most importantly, the claimant perceives the non-consensual sexual act itself as an egregious physical assault and a profound violation of her bodily autonomy. the accused, on the other hand, believes either that both parties consented to the sexual act or, at the very least, that the victim’s nonconsent could not have been reasonably perceived. he believes that no assault occurred—that the sexual act imposed little harm. if she prevails, the accused will be punished and the victim’s version of events will bear the legitimacy of law. if she does not—a far more frequent outcome—she will, at the very least, be charged as having “overreacted,” but more likely will be labeled a liar. in all, this suggests that, even without a societal commitment to the “stranger rape” narrative, claimants making rape accusations will face an uphill battle that exposes them to potentially discrediting accusations. however, the narrative of the “stranger rape” persists. baked within the reforms—and nested within the mandates of the rule of law—are the vestiges of gendered expectations and impositions regarding sexuality and sexual expression. . . mechanisms of regression in rape law gendered expectations, which take root, in part, in rape laws and exemplify the enduring salience and everyday power of patriarchal logics, have a long, branching history. broad general legal surveys, which address the statutory construction of rape within the early american, or english context, often bring elements of this history into focus. for example, in american law in the th century, lawrence friedman ( ) remarks on how “ancient stereotypes” about “an unchaste woman” have historically the rape, abuse and incest national network (rainn) estimates that only of every instances of rape or sexual assault will lead to a felony conviction and only will result in a perpetrator serving prison time—the lowest rate of incarceration for any crime committed in the united states (www.rainn.org). www.rainn.org laws , , of embedded legal processes around rape (p. ). the operations of this stereotype are especially visible when victims’ sexual histories are used as a pretext to contravene justice, a now-obsolescing practice following the widespread enactment of rape-shield laws. similarly, in their primer on feminist legal theory, nancy levit and robert verchick (levit and verchick ) relay the widely-cited fact that “early anglo-american law considered women to be a property of their fathers or husbands. rape by a stranger was thus considered ‘a property crime of man against man’” (p. ). arcane views of women qua property survived in statutes that carved out a marital exception for rape, discussion of which resurfaced during the – u.s. presidential campaign (dreyfuss ). as established above, these statutes have been dismantled. nevertheless, this understanding lives on in “some states” where “marital rape [is] a less serious crime than nonmarital rape” (levit and verchick , p. ). however, a long history of rape law must also contend with force, a resilient feature of statutory constructions of rape, which, as underscored in section . , enduringly structures and potentially constrains everyday responses to sexual violence. force is a sine qua non of the mythological rape. although states have slowly ejected this premise from rape laws, as already elucidated above, the premise and expectation of force continues to shape and affect how criminal justice systems, and their agents, address rape and victims of sexual violence (campbell ; du mont et al. ; frohmann and mertz ). that this is so should be unsurprising. popular narratives and depictions of sexual violence often emphasize force. news stories replicate, promulgate, and, in so doing, re-sediment mythological rape narratives, re-establishing their purchase and directing public understandings of rape. likewise, this narrative is relayed and reiterated on and through television and in movies. there is nothing unfamiliar about the mythological rape. however, what is sometimes elided in treatments thereof is how the features of this mythology came to be set in place. within the expectation of force in rape manifests a complicated history. surveying early anglo-saxon law treating rape, zsuzsanna adler ( ) echoes a familiar point, noting “the offence also had a strong property aspect to it,” and that “rape in anglo-saxon law included abduction as well as forcible sex” (p. ). these laws underwent several revisions, which makes any discussion of them as a single “package,” embodying a single consistent structuring logic, challenging. at the same time, certain features of these laws have shown to be historically resilient, and have endured through time. in particular, the idea of force in rape flows and is, in part, inherited from these bygone statutes. julia quilter ( ) shows how this idea and expectation, originating in early english statute, was woven into and reproduced in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century jurists. in the process of interpreting and codifying the ancient statutes, these jurists interpolated contemporary meanings of rape into these laws. that is, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century jurists retrojected (then) contemporary understandings of rape back onto the noun raptus, which, as deployed within the context of early (twelfth and thirteenth century) english statutes, exhibits polysemic qualities, and fails to perfectly square with “rape” (quilter , pp. – ). quilter notes that, within this early context, the boundary separating property and sexual crimes was “blurred.” during this period, raptus, writes quilter, was a flexible and unstable signifier. notably, this term was applied “in many instances” in which “the nature of the offence” was “either ‘rape’ or abduction, or rape and abduction.” however, “where case[s] only use rapuit or raptus it is truly impossible to tell what the primary offense was, ultimately recognizing that raptus in the middle ages covered a diversity of experience from consensual love affairs to violent rape” (quilter , p. ). for example, “ravishment statutes . . . effectively blurred what i call the ‘property’ crime (of abduction and elopement of women) and what appears to be a more specific focus on a ‘sexual’ crime in the appeal of raptus” (quilter , p. ). these lexical nuances were lost on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century jurists. rather than engaged in wittgensteinian investigations, these jurists interpreted and systematized these statutes in ways that conformed to contemporary understandings (and uses) of rape. that they did so and were insensitive to the context and complicated semiotic purchase of raptus is problematic for us, argues laws , , of quilter. although writing for an australasian audience, quilter’s observations hold for american rape laws and american experiences around and related to rape. quilter writes, i have shown that the emphasis on resistance and injury, which has persisted through decades of attempts at statutory erasure, was the product of re-writings of the elements of “rape” from the older marriage and property laws. thus, the old rapuit emphasize the force necessary to “carry away” a woman, to the detriment of the father’s or husband’s property interests, whereas in modern times the notion of “force” was redeployed with respect to the overpowering of the woman’s will . . . the commentaries [codified by early-modern jurists] thus consolidated a notion of the “true” rape that, despite rape’s formal characterization as a crime of sexual violation, perpetuated requirements drawn from rape’s history as a property crime protective of patriarchal interests. (quilter , p. ) in other words, the expectations, facts, and normative underpinnings and aims of ravishment (which involves the literal “carrying away” of a woman and violating the property interest of men), were stitched into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal treatments of rape. “as a result,” writes quilter ( ), “women continued to have the authenticity of their claim that they had been raped judged with reference to old requirements (force, physical injury) that were at odds with the law’s ‘new’ concern with sanctioning sexual violation” (p. ). this understanding, which connects force and rape, endures, even though this formulation and idea of rape—a formulation enshrined in the works of classic jurists such as coke and blackstone—often cannot be mapped onto real, lived experiences of sexual violence. even if rape laws now do not uniformly organize around the premise of force, the mythological rape (or in the familiar parlance of susan estrich, “real” rape) continues to inform rape statutes. “in almost half the states,” writes stephen schulhofer ( ), “sexual penetration is not a crime unless there is both non-consent and some sort of force” (p. ). in other words, schulhofer ( ) continues in bold, “penetration without consent is not, itself, a crime” (p. ). moreover, this idea continues to circulate in popular discussions of rape, whether as an unstated premise or as a conclusive point. in so doing, it oft limits understanding of consent and narrows views of what rape is or how it ought to be defined. as already highlighted, even within statutory contexts where the requirement of force has withered or fallen away, this expectation stubbornly remains in the attitudes of legal officials. whether there is a legal emphasis on consent exclusive of force or not, the link between force and rape endures. for states that have reconsidered force requirements in rape laws, consent (variously defined) has become a dividing line between sex and rape (noveck ; tracy et al. ). this is a productive statutory shift, whose effect is to broaden definitions of rape and make statutes more sensitive to lived experiences of sexual violence. however, in the absence of a single, uniform national standard for rape, there is a maze of rape statutes—a patchwork of laws whose many parts and premises do not always jibe and harmonize. what counts as rape in one jurisdiction may not be considered rape in another. in , susan estrich delineated two paths for legal reformers. “feminist reformers seeking to protect women from such threatening situations have only two choices,” she writes. reformers can “focus on the man and seek to redefine what is meant by force in broader terms; or . . . focus on the woman and rely on her word as to nonconsent, properly defined (not saying yes, or at least saying no)” (estrich , p. ). each option, estrich relays, has its critics. nevertheless, traces of these logics reside in many contemporary rape laws. on the whole, it is for these reasons that many victims perceive legal contact of any kind as a “second assault” or a “second rape” (campbell , p. ) and why scholars argue that hard-won legal the women’s law project/Æquitas report “rape and sexual assault in the legal system,” published in and cited by schulhofer, includes alabama, the district of columbia, kansas, florida, mississippi, missouri, nebraska, nevada, new hampshire, new york, oregon, pennsylvania, south dakota, tennessee, utah, vermont, and washington in its list (tracy et al. , p. ). laws , , of reforms have done little to alter the scripts we use to perceive and describe sexual violence. the intent of legal reformers was to expand the space and scope of traditional rape doctrines to exclude reliance on the victim’s moral character and to include acquaintance rape. however, reform activists did little to alter how rape is conceptualized or concretized. as kristin bumiller ( ) asserts, “both traditional rape law and the feminist law reformers share a vision in which the boundary between sex and rape is defined by the woman’s nonconsent” (p. ). the expectation of force and the fallacy of agency only serve to propagate traditional notions of rape. the stranger rape remains the benchmark of a real rape (bumiller , p. ). it is the job of the victim, and their lawyer, to curate a narrative that most closely approximates this image. it is this failure of the law—the stagnant reporting and conviction rates, the ongoing intrusions into a woman’s sexual history, the automatic skepticism of victims, and the unyielding focus on force—that prompts caringella ( ) to argue that “reforms have largely served a symbolic and educative function” (p. ). . speaking up and speaking out anti-rape activists did not limit their efforts to legal reforms. alongside feminists working to alter the standards of adjudication in cases of rape and sexual assault, activists also pursued a second, co-equal strategy: to create spaces, opportunities, frames, and concepts to help survivors break out of their isolation and to see their personal experiences more broadly as an assault on women’s bodies. while legal reformers focused on making criminal sanctions more accessible and palatable to victims of sexual violence, consciousness-raising activists tailored their efforts to help victims break their silence. at first blush, these coterminous approaches may seem mutually reinforcing. modify legal procedures to help rape victims make claims in court and you logically open up the space for more people to talk about their experiences. increase arenas for victims to share their experiences and, together, there is greater demand for and use of legal redress. however, it quickly became apparent that the two strategies were at odds. although legal reformers worked to provide a space where the claims of rape victims could receive the backing of law, the language of legal rhetoric did not go far enough to embrace the varied experiences of sexual violence. argues bumiller ( ), “goals, framed and fashioned in the confines of the legal system and liberal legalistic reform, inhibited feminists from moving beyond this ‘restricted’ definition of rape to phenomenological accounts of victims’ experiences that did not easily flow from the framing of events” (p. ). this incongruity in approaches has significant implications. victims of sexual violence experience multiple violations and require interactive interventions to heal. in addition to the physical pain associated with the assault—those emanating from both the violent sexual act itself and any accompanying physical attacks—sexual violence imposes multiple ongoing, and often compounding, hardships. first, the type of violation—the overpowering of one’s body and the perversion of routine, intimate and pleasurable acts to impose control and inflict pain—renders sexual violence especially difficult to overcome. second, in many instances, the physical indicia of sexual violence are invisible to the naked eye. in a typical physical altercation, people see the indicators of violence—bruises, a black eye, a laceration, etc. these visible manifestations of violence make the fact of the violation self-evident—and make it easier for victims to seek and receive support and empathy. in cases of sexual violence, the absence of “evidence”—the lack of outward markers of struggle—makes it more difficult for victims to receive support. they are either forced to resolve, on their own, the cognitive dissonance of appearing unharmed while feeling brutalized, or risk being accused of lying or exaggerating when they seek assistance. when sex becomes rape—when sexual intimacy is recast as violence—victims are required to find ways to both incorporate this new possibility and distinguish between these two versions of the same act. without the opportunity to find and engage in forms of mutual validation—to see in others that their own understanding of their experience is accurate and legitimate—victims of sexual violence will process their assault through mutually-reinforcing and destructive lenses of fear and self-doubt. laws , , of anti-rape activists understood that isolation compounds the effects of sexual violence. by meeting others who had experienced some form of sexual violence, victims could begin the process of realizing that theirs was “not just an individual and unique experience” (cuklanz , p. ), but one shared by countless others in myriad ways. activists sought to craft spaces and strategies to help victims turn their blame away from themselves and towards their assailants and the societal forces and structures that legitimate and facilitate the use of sexual contact as a means of coercion and control. in this way, consciousness-raising is more than just talking or expressing. through reciprocal interactions of talking and listening, receiving and engaging, survivors of sexual violence construct a shared understanding of sexual coercion as a “social problem” requiring a collective response. according to miranda fricker ( ), the “process of sharing these half-formed understandings awakened hitherto dormant resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility” (p. ). whereas legal reform focused on expanding the zone of credibility for rape survivors, consciousness-raising activists worked to reveal how sexual violence is experienced to redefine how sexual violence is understood. consciousness-raising activists understood that, to achieve their specific goals—helping survivors to “construct a [sense of] reality” that accounted for their assault and to “circulate that reality as widely and smoothly as possible throughout society” (cuklanz , p. )—they had to establish a specific approach. after all, consciousness-raising in the context of sexual violence requires different forms and forums of exchange and expression. acts of deliberation or debate, for instance, rely on discussion and discourse as a means of amassing complementary or competing perspectives to identify consensus or to promote compromise. in deliberative spaces, a premium is paid to the free exchange of ideas—so long as all who are participating are given the option to freely articulate their positions. public hearings exemplify this approach. consciousness-raising serves a different purpose and requires a different set of norms and features. the goal of consciousness-raising is not to provide a forum for debate or deliberation—or for evaluating or dissecting incidences of sexual assault. neither is the purpose to exact justice against the perpetrators. instead, consciousness-raising safeguards spaces for survivors to tell their stories. whereas deliberative spaces are structured to promote consensus and agreement between multiple incongruent perspectives, consciousness-raising focuses on empowerment and healing and will privilege only one voice—that of the survivor. consciousness-raising attempts to illuminate and share the widespread and varied experiences of sexual violence to empower survivors and to expose the structural and social supports that scaffold ongoing (and increasing) incidences of sexual violence. advocates curate spaces specifically to avoid reifying traditional conversations about rape in which it is perceived as acceptable to evaluate claims of sexual violence and to treat them as private, individual, and aberrant. instead, consciousness-raising seeks to promote empathy for survivors and to view sexual violence as collective, frequent and dehumanizing (kelland ). speak outs embody the principles of consciousness-raising and the requirements of empathic listening. performed frequently on college campuses or in other public settings, speak outs provide a mechanism for victims of sexual assault to declare their experiences both as a way of pushing back on the debilitating effects of sexual violence and as a way of contributing to a collective confirmation of the prevalence of this violence. among the most critical ingredients, therefore, is a commitment to establishing norms of support, empathy, and acceptance. speak outs, then, are operating according to a logic that is incompatible with the principles that govern courts of law. in a court of law, witnesses tell their story to provide evidentiary support for their allegations. legal actors and onlookers are free to evaluate these claims—and to measure them against other forms of evidence. in a speak out, survivors tell their stories to empower, uplift and testify to the ongoing problem of sexual violence. contestation is not only inappropriate and valueless, but can also be destructive. #metoo as consciousness-raising a survey of #metoo reveals how it fits within and relates to the longer tradition of consciousness-raising efforts, highlighted above. indeed, #metoo discourse carries within it many of laws , , of the elements, logics, and goals that shaped and structured the use of consciousness-raising to navigate, connect, and process experiences of sexual violence. #metoo cannot be reduced to, nor is it selfsame with these consciousness-raising efforts. at the same time, like consciousness-raisers, the #metoo movement, at its best, resists and reveals the imprint of legality, the everyday use of legal concepts and standards, models of legal procedure and legal process, while relating to victims of sexual violence. at its worst, we argue, #metoo and responses to it, reify ideas of “stranger” rape, reproduce legal understandings of sexual violence, transpose evidentiary burdens and legal standards (such as due process) from the courtroom to the public square, and impose parameters in order to taxonomize variable experiences of sexual violence—to draw distinctions between “bad sex” and “real” rape. at a moment when it was still nascent, sophie gilbert ( ) summed up the #metoo hashtag movement this way: unlike many kinds of social-media activism, it isn’t a call to action or the beginning of a campaign, culminating in a series of protests and speeches and events. it’s simply an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society. to get women, and men, to raise their hands. the movement is not simply a dipstick, used to measure the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and sexual assault. rather, like other forms of consciousness-raising, #metoo exists to prove a point. it reveals something already known to many women and men. however, it does not, nor did it, stop here. even if in the first instance a call for “women, and men, to raise their hands,” the movement quickly reached beyond this founding goal. activists loaded #metoo with new purposes and aims. the #metoo movement became plural, as writers fabricated associational links that connected this movement to any one of several (usually interlocking) issues and outlooks. “the #metoo movement is one more wave in a long line of feminist calls for careful attention to how women spend their time and energy each day, and one more reminder that women’s expenditures should not be significantly larger than men’s,” writes sara maurer ( ). with a similar emphasis on labor and work, #metoo, relays sarah seltzer ( ), makes plain the inadequacy of “lean in” philosophy. the assumption that embeds this philosophy, that “workplaces are fine just as they are,” crashes up against the hard reality of workplaces as they are. “as many of us knew all along but are seeing even more clearly now, workplace inequality isn’t about a problem deep within ourselves. it’s about the sexist, exploitative hyper-capitalist minefield that comes with working in ,” argues seltzer. circulating through these assessments of #metoo is an obvious revolutionary design and fervor. this design is cleanly captured in charlotte shane’s splinter article, “we harpies want more.” “firings are not enough,” shane ( ) writes. #metoo is about sexual harassment, sexual violence and predation, but it is about more too. “the post-weinstein moment isn’t a war on sex. it’s a long-overdue revolution” (flanagan ). the proliferation of #metoos in social networks trains attention to the conditions that make sexual violence possible. that is, the spread of #metoos across all social media “channels” draws attention to structure—to the design of institutions and the content (and organizing principles) of culture. as situated by some commentators, #metoo, the problem of sexual violence, cannot be treated without also addressing a system that licenses other forms of overlapping oppression and violence. #metoo, for these commentators, intersects with and is inextricably connected to a raft of other issues and causes, prominent among which are racial and economic justice. shane ( ) puts it this way: instead of taking victory laps, we’ve been reminding each other that we need to turn our attention to domestic workers, and to men who’ve been violated; that the core problem is an idea made famous by sheryl sandberg in her book lean in: women, work and the will to lead, new york: alfred a. knopf. laws , , of not sex but work, and not sex but authority; that to disregard or otherwise erase race is to render any so-called progress worthless; and that the firings are not nearly enough. however, what remains to be seen is how or if #metoo has recast our world. as the new yorker’s jia tolentino ( ) highlights, a backlash is coming. there is talk of “sex panics” (geesen ), violations of “due process” (panahi ; yoffe ), victim-scripts (fargo ), denials of agency (rothschild ), “witch hunts” (dalmia ), and a “blurring” of lines between legally-distinguishable forms of sexual violation (geesen ). #metoo may yet survive this backlash. at the same time, the movement #metoo spurred may be without sufficient endurance to realize the aims some commentators envisage for it. calls for “due process” and counter-hashtag campaigns are frequently used to minimize, invalidate, and erase the experiences of sexual violence reported by women and men. within these calls, legal concepts are fused with everyday understandings and often inform evaluations of sexual violence. in the context of the #metoo moment, legal discourse operates in ways that potentially forestall discussion and cut off conversation that would interrogate experiences of sexual violence and draw these experiences into a larger, social frame. further, working within this discourse, and invocations of “due process,” is an assumption and an expectation that normal legal pathways are clear of obstacles for victims of sexual violence, when in fact these pathways are ridden with obstacles and peril. however, these calls and hashtag uses are now pitted against a movement that puts stock in victim reports. it is true that #metoo may be a watershed. accompanying #metoo has been an adjustment in how reports of sexual violence are received in the public square. as much as “believe all women” is invoked with more than a tincture of skepticism by some commentators, this shift in terms of how the credibility of victims is addressed in the public square represents a reversal. critics who contend “due process is better than mob rule” miss the point (weiss ). the aim, and point, is not (or is not always) criminal prosecution. “in the s—and still today, i might add—such acts of speaking out are usually defined by feminists as ‘agency’—an active defiance and resistance to the patriarchal prescription of silence and shame,” notes dubravka zarkov (davis and zarkov , p. ). #metoo, in part, encourages resistance to this prescribed silence, and inoculates against patriarchy-inscribed shame by linking experiences of sexual violence—by de-privatizing these experiences, and making them part of a larger, public narrative. in this sense, #metoo represents an exercise in consciousness-raising. one metric by which to measure the success of #metoo is structural change. an obvious goal of many #metoo activists is change at the system level. however, another metric is the extent to which #metoo inspires conditions in which speaking out becomes normal and possible in the absence of social sanction and stigmatization. notably, these two metrics and goals cannot be disentangled. “[a]gency has always been important for feminism precisely because it is more than an individual capacity; rather, it is practice that is instrumental for social change,” remarks zarkov (davis and zarkov , p. ). however, it’s here that the potential limits of #metoo become noticeable. as stated above, me too was created by tarana burke “to ‘let other survivors know they are not alone’ and create solidarity with the victims” (davis and zarkov , p. ). the solidarity and community that results from a hashtag movement may be of a qualitatively different kind than what resulted from feminist-led movements of the s. these latter movements used consciousness-raising to forge durable links between women and to develop communities of praxis. within the #metoo moment intersects countless others. these others form the context for #metoo, but also embed within it, and help to shape both it and responses to it. from the outset, #metoo was posed as a response to the harvey weinstein scandal. thus, while focused on experiences of sexual violence, there has been, throughout, an unrelenting focus on individuals. this emphasis sometimes overwhelms other aspects of the movement, and may siphon off some of the movement’s more radical energies. although not necessarily mutually exclusive, this emphasis on individuals—the testimony of individuals, individual (often celebrity) perpetrators—may work to cross-purposes with the ambition of forging a movement that creates durable links of solidarity and encourages collective activism. laws , , of as kathy davis puts it, what distinguishes #metoo from some other movements, such as take back the night, is that the latter kind of activism does not focus on the testimony of individual woman, but frames sexual violence as a collective issue facing all women, which requires raising public awareness and involving both women and men in grass-root activism as well as transforming institutions which condone violence against women. (davis and zarkov , p. ) furthermore, venue and medium may matter. forming interpersonal links and creating intersubjective, shared meanings and understandings may be more easily accomplished in person than it is through social media. the links and meanings that result from the one may be more durable and lasting than what results from the other. this is not to say that hashtag activism does not produce effects in the world. it is also not to suggest that social-media activism cannot spur grass-roots activities aimed at sweeping social and political change. experience supplies varied demonstrations that it can. however, the experience of proclaiming “#metoo” online and making this proclamation within the context of something akin to a speak out may be qualitatively different, and may produce different effects. paradoxically, #metoo may unite by creating digital connections, and, at the same time, atomize by substituting these digital connections for their real-world, analog equivalent. however, the limits of online organizing ought not be overblown, nor should these new patterns of activism be exclusively assessed with reference to old templates and expectations about what activism is. while the legacy of #metoo remains unclear, what is clearer is how movements such as #metoo can contribute to and spur forms public discourse that may operate as a kind of antidote to the “patriarchal prescription of silence and shame.” however, the extent to which this is so is unclear. whether #metoo will result in permanent adjustments in how reports of sexual violence are received in the public square remains an open question. nor is it clear that the forms of communication #metoo inspires are desirable and productive. the #metoo wave may yet recede. nevertheless, if and when it does, it is likely the landscape that is revealed will be changed in some ways, but not others. #metoo may remake some features of our social and political environment. it may also contribute to the development of new social and political forms and new patterns of habit that vitiate some effects and the operations of legality on responses to sexual violence. at the same time, legal concepts frequently appear in #metoo discussions, which often develop with reference to binaries and ways of thinking that further sediment legalistic understandings of (and reactions to) sexual violence. for example, within responses to the #metoo movement and reactions to the claims of victims can be found an emphasis on legal taxonomy. is this sexual harassment? is that rape? further, even where commentators aim to decouple and disaggregate understandings of sexual violence from legal standards and benchmarks, the new understandings of sexual violence that result are sometimes developed in reference to, and so reproduce these benchmarks and standards. . law’s limits in public discourse even outside of a courtroom, law supplies normative benchmarks and puts down parameters that can narrow one’s vision of and regulate responses to sexual violence. regardless of where conversations about sexual violence occur—or to what end—law has the potential to cast a shadow on the experiences of victims. when this happens, there is a double effect. first, these experiences are drawn into comparison with legalistic notions of sexual violence and sexual violation. second, the disjunction between lived experiences of sexual violence and relevant legal benchmarks becomes a justification to invalidate and disregard the former lived experiences. these “effects” are especially prevalent and visible in two case examples. the first example considers responses addressed to aziz ansari’s interactions with a woman known as “grace.” the second examines responses to an obama-era survey. the purpose of the survey was to furnish baseline statistics wherewith to make sense of and roughly capture the prevalence of experiences of sexual violence. laws , , of . . grace a recent story published by babe.net—in the midst of #metoo—recounts a date, and what followed it, between aziz ansari and a woman referred to in the report as “grace.” julianne escobedo shepherd ( ), of jezebel, offers this précis. . . . babe.net published a detailed account of an encounter between “grace,” an anonymous -year-old photographer, and the actor aziz ansari. it described a september incident in which grace says that she and ansari went on a date after first meeting at an emmys afterparty, and how, at the end of the date, grace said ansari coerced her into sexual behavior that was well beyond her boundaries, ignoring her verbal and nonverbal attempts to stop their sexual exchange. some commentators, after parsing the facts of grace’s story, simply attach a label of “bad sex” to the account, and then move on to excoriate babe for promoting a narrative and story that drains women of agency and even for distributing “revenge porn” (flanagan ). bari weiss’ treatment in “aziz ansari is guilty. of not being a mind reader” travels in this vein. “if he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door,” writes weiss ( ). caitlin flanagan also travels this path. flanagan presents a model of sexual coercion that should, by now, ring troublingly familiar. harkening on different times, flanagan ( ) recalls, “[if] a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it.” she goes on, they told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. in so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the c-suite. but as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong. with this passage, flanagan puts down foundations for and telegraphs the larger argument: “apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember” (flanagan ). at the same time, the scenario flanagan sketches above becomes a normative slide-rule against which experiences of sexual violence are weighed and considered. this scenario reproduces the expectation that force—and resistance—accompanies or ought to accompany sexual violence. to be fair to flanagan, this is not her point. however, nested within a string of claims that appear to chide today’s “young women” for failing to be “strong,” this passage construes grace as complicit, and her experience merely one of bad sex. flanagan goes on to relay that grace’s claims cannot be supported by a reconstruction of the facts. was grace frozen, terrified, stuck? no. she tells us that she wanted something from ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. she wanted affection, kindness, attention. perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. he wasn’t interested. what she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. (flanagan ) flanagan parses the details of grace’s account, the circumstances around the encounter, and offers a verdict. is this sexual assault? no, she reasons. digging through the contents of grace’s story, flanagan is unable to isolate the elements and hallmarks of true sexual assault. however, this finding altogether elides grace’s perspective and makes grace a bystander in this process of adjudication. flanagan overlooks grace’s experience of violation, and, in so doing, substitutes a version of the prototypical, mythological rape in its place. weiss’ commentary organizes around a similar set of plot points. weiss ( ) contends, laws , , of but the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their “nonverbal cues.” it is for women to be more verbal. it’s to say, “this is what turns me on.” it’s to say, “i don’t want to do that.” and, yes, sometimes it means saying goodbye. she later continues, to judge from social media reaction, they also see a flagrant abuse of power in this sexual encounter. yes, mr. ansari is a wealthy celebrity with a netflix show. but he had no actual power over the woman—professionally or otherwise. and lumping him in with the same movement that brought down men who ran movie studios and forced themselves on actresses, or the factory-floor supervisors who demanded sex from female workers, trivializes what #metoo first stood for. (weiss ) within these two passages circulate normative precepts transposed from the law and legal understandings of rape. in the first instance, weiss specifies what counts, and does not count for consent. “it’s to say, ‘i don’t want to do that,’” weiss explains. “nonverbal cues,” however, are too opaque, inscrutable, and difficult to puzzle out. “it is for the women to be more verbal.” the implication weiss makes is troubling: a sexual encounter cannot be assault in the absence of an “i don’t want to do that.” such a sexual encounter lands somewhere else in that typology. in the taxonomy of sexual experiences, this is “bad sex.” likewise, vox writer alexia fernández campbell ( ) evaluates, “some—like the aziz ansari story—are more clearly in the realm of gross (if legal) behavior.” in the second passage, weiss puts in place another foundational plank that supports her ultimate finding. ansari “had no actual power over the woman—professional or otherwise.” this is a categorical statement—it admits no alternative possibility. ansari simply “had no actual power.” weiss loads “power” with weight, and implies that proper application of the criterion of power yields a different finding about grace’s experience. it would be wrong to “lump” ansari in with figures such as weinstein, who wield real power—who have access to a deep well of financial resources, social and political capital. it is important to grapple with the ways in which power makes sexual coercion, sexual violence, possible. but weiss’ narrow specification of power allows her to read coercion out of grace’s story and disregard the “social media reaction” which sees “a flagrant abuse of power in this sexual encounter.” it also allows weiss to disregard grace’s stated experience. ansari instructed her to turn around. “he sat back . . . and motioned for me to go down on him. and i did. i think i just felt really pressured. it was literally the most unexpected thing i thought would happen at that moment because i told him i was uncomfortable.” (way ) that weiss disregards grace’s experience is unsurprising. weiss’ op-ed is calibrated to different aims. it was not written with the goal of sharing the experience and forging connections. its purpose is to arrive at a finding of fact, to evaluate and judge the experience. “aziz ansari is guilty,” weiss’ article announces, “of not being a mind reader.” of what, then, is ansari not guilty? weiss’ answer is clear: sexual assault. others have used grace’s experience with ansari to, as stassa edwards ( ) puts it, “map the wilderness of bad sex.” commonplace notions of consent fail to square with the actual content of sexual experiences. norms and expectations about sex, it is argued, are in need of thorough revision. “bad sex can be an uncomfortable moment or a forgettable night, but it can also be an experience that lingers for decades, forming the core of personhood,” explains edwards ( ). “the refusal to untangle consent leaves us with, as grace says, in a state of confusion with the need to ‘validate’ experiences that exist in the chasm between ‘bad sex’ and sexual assault.” what #metoo must do, edwards ( ) charges, is “enter the chasm and map its boundaries and label what resides there. it needs to ask whether or not we’re content with the physical and narrative shapelessness of the chasm.” in this way, edwards’ excellent treatment connects to a larger tradition whose raison d’être is to, as edwards puts it, bring order to a “state of confusion” and “validate” the experiences of victims laws , , of of sexual violence. in particular, edwards constructs an analysis around kate manne’s, whose work, as edwards notes, pries open and theorizes this chasm, delivering analytical and taxonomic tools that can be used to capture a range of experiences that fail to square with “legal definitions of sexual assault and rape” (edwards ). ann cahill, responding to and building on the work of nicola garvey, theorizes in consonant (but not selfsame) patterns, and aims to subject these “ethical gray areas” to philosophical scrutiny (cahill , p. ). like manne, cahill uses novel conceptual tools to categorize and make sense of sexual interactions that fall into an interstitial chasm, similar to the one edwards describes. in particular, cahill ( ) acknowledges the fact that these interactions are constructed in the social imaginary as part and parcel of normalized heterosex, while at least some forms of sexual assault are constructed in the social imaginary as aberrant and worthy of social condemnation, indicates that the different phenomena may not only function differently in terms of their social and political meanings, but also may carry distinct ethical meanings to the women who experience them. (p. ) cahill granularly unpacks the content of these experiences (as presented by garvey), and in so doing, grapples with the complicated ethics of “unjust” heterosex. importantly, cahill, rather than projecting a meta-narrative onto these experiences and disregarding the claims of women, takes these claims seriously. as cahill points out, the experiences recounted by women, which although are part-and-parcel of normalized hetereosex, generate confusion and are themselves ambiguous. this ambiguity, writes cahill, “the ways in which, from the perspectives of the women who experienced them,” these experiences “seemed to fit into neither the category of clearly ethical, consensual sex or that of clearly unethical, nonconsensual sex—is central and persistent” (cahill , p. ). cahill’s treatment is neither hemmed in nor bound by legal distinctions and a legal understanding of rape (cahill , pp. – ). nevertheless, it is possible that legality is at work and operative in the experiences of the women with whom cahill (garvey too) is concerned. whether these taken-for-granted (legal) boundaries and distinctions produce ethical grey areas as of the sort cahill studies is an open question. although a matter that requires focused study, it is plausible that the frustration, ambiguity, and confusion that accompanies sexual experiences that occupy this seeming middle ground may be, in part, an effect of the operations of legality. edwards also attempts to escape legal distinctions and legal understandings, however, may inadvertently reproduce both. on the one hand, edwards is clear that one’s sense of sexual violation ought not be tied to or informed by legal understandings. she (edwards ) explains, that grace is trying to navigate this chasm is clear, but it is an uncharted wilderness in many respects, marked only with warnings that entry is dangerous, perhaps even perilous. consent is the technical boundary to the chasm—which, in theory, should protect us from tumbling to its ground—a legally drawn line dividing sexual assault and an “awkward sexual experience.” but even this line is not as evident as, perhaps, it should be. edwards theorizes experiences of sexual violation with an explicit eye to escaping the strictures of legal distinctions and troubling the illusion that, in edwards’ words, the law offers clear-cut, vividly demarcated boundaries between “sexual assault and ‘an awkward sexual experience.’” however, even here, legal benchmarks provide scaffolding—a set of reference-points used, in one way or another, to make sense of and come to grips with experiences of sexual violence. edwards’ evaluation may naturalize existing legal understandings of “sexual assault,” which represent one pole at one end of the chasm in which edwards is interested. at the same time, edwards’ commentary, and perhaps cahill’s work too, draws into focus tensions and ambiguities that put into relief how lived experiences of sexual violation fail to square with statutory constructions of sexual assault or rape. in some part, then, both participate in the un-making of this chasm, a task which, both show, involves listening to and linking experiences, and changing what is common sense and “normal.” nevertheless, the task laws , , of of un-making—or making sense of—this chasm may involve more than mapping ethical grey areas and fabricating conceptual tools that can be used to distinguish between varying degrees of sexual violation. to do so may first entail understanding sexual violence in a way that does not defer to or reproduce regulative ideals extracted from the law. . . one-in-five some might view the recourse to legalistic evaluations of grace’s narrative as fair game because of the public, targeted and explicit nature of her accusations. however, legalistic and antagonistic responses are neither infrequent nor limited to stories like grace’s. instead, public discussions around sexual violence—whether on college campuses, in the workplace or in the context of relationships—are often subjected to legalistic interrogations—even in the absence of references to specific allegations or individuals. legality is frequently invoked as a response to the full range of sexual violence narratives, whether they involve targeted accusations, anonymous stories or even references to aggregate rape statistics. in , president obama launched an initiative to end what many viewed as a crisis of sexual assault on college campuses. in a speech to the white house council on women and girls, the president lamented the frequency of campus-based sexual violence, citing the “ in women on college campuses [who have] been sexually assaulted during their time there” (obama ). obama’s reference to “ -in- ”—a statistic that had been, most recently, derived from research generated by the american association of universities—represents a way of empirically grounding a broader discussion about the effects of sexual violence and the responsibility of public officials to make college a safer place, especially for women (the predominant victims of sexual violence). although it painted a grim picture of the risks of sexual violence, especially for college-age women, the statistic was in no way an aberration or an artifact of a single study. while there is significant disagreement over the methods and metrics used to evaluate the incidence of sexual assault—and therefore sizeable variation in the rates calculated by researchers—there are other studies that have derived similarly unsettling statistics (malmsheimer ). for instance, in , the bureau of justice statistics issued a report estimating the risks of rape that women face during an average five-year college career as “between one-fifth and one-quarter” (fisher et al. , p. ). scholarship based on research generated by ms. magazine references one-in-six women who had been the victim of completed or attempted rape during the previous year—and more than one-in-four who had been the victims of completed or attempted rape since the age of (warshaw ). these statistics were widely publicized on college campuses during the late s during first-year orientations and dorm meetings, and inspired campuses to encourage women to carry “rape whistles” and laminated emergency cards. this most recent iteration of one-in-five seemed consistent with at least some of the better-known studies of campus-based assault. however, despite its conformity to decades old studies, when president obama referenced “ -in- ” to promote a “fundamental change in our culture—a shift in how we think about sexual violence”, (obama ) reporters and pundits flocked to the airwaves and the internet to express their profound dismay as well as doubt. they were dismayed over the fact that politicians were both publicly referencing the statistic and using it to promote safety measures on campus. they doubted whether the statistic was even true. reporters sidestepped the bigger story—the increased rates and risks of substance abuse, depression or suicidality that accompany sexual violence; the ongoing struggles that victims encounter when building and maintaining relationships; and the decreased capacities to have trust in others and have confidence in oneself—especially when sexual violence happens at the hands this statistic has been reproduced in several studies commissioned more recently—including in surveys that sampled a broader cross-section of american colleges and universities. laws , , of of an acquaintance or intimate partner. instead, reporters of all partisan and ideological stripes focused on debunking “ -in- ”. the bulk of these criticisms made either direct or thinly veiled allusions to legalistic conceptions of rape or sexual assault—and focused especially on what critics perceived as a vast departure between the standards or definitions used in formal legal proceedings and researcher or respondent understandings of sexual violence. their primary targets were the american association of universities survey and a survey of all adult women generated by the centers for disease control that had calculated a similar rate of rape among all women. these surveys, explained one reporter investigating the “one-in-five” statistic, employ a behavior-based rather than a criminal-justice approach to data collection and coding. a criminal-justice—or what we would refer to as a legalistic—approach asks respondents directly whether they have been raped or sexually assaulted (kessler ). surveys that utilize this kind of approach to questions and coding—such as the oft-cited bureau of justice statistics survey (bjs)—typically reveal far lower rates of sexual assault than surveys or interviews that are centered on behaviors or experiences (kessler ). although the bjs survey had revealed a similarly high estimation of campus-based rape in , its recent estimates calculated a far lower risk for college women. researchers have long criticized the criminal-justice approach for failing to account for two serious drawbacks of the legalistic lens: that victims of sexual assault or rape may be reticent to recognize or acknowledge their experience with unwanted or nonconsensual sex as rape or sexual assault and that survey participants are either unaware of or will shy away from applying legal standards and conceptions to their own experiences (kessler ). feminists argue that among the most enduring symptoms of sexual violence is the inability for victims to name their experience as violence or assault even when they feel violated and forced. this fact, after all, is what compelled consciousness-raising activists to push for spaces and strategies to help victims express their anger, sadness, confusion, and rage over having been stripped of their right to authorize the use of their own body—and to hold others responsible for their pain. recognizing that the bjs survey likely replicated factors that lead to underreporting and, therefore, likely underestimated the incidence of sexual violence on campus, surveys such as the aaus or the cdc survey deliberately employ a behavioral approach. these surveys avoid using legalistic concepts and instead ask participants to choose from a variety of plausible descriptions of sexual experiences or respond to a set of open-ended questions. included in the questions are language and descriptors that allow participants to indicate the degree to which their sexual experiences were nonconsensual, forced, coerced or the result of incapacitation. once collected, the data are then analyzed and coded by researchers according to widely agreed upon standards (derived from legal settings) for what constitutes different forms of sexual violence. not surprisingly, given what we know about how difficult it is for individuals to acknowledge or “correctly label” their own experiences of “sexual assault,” surveys using the behavioral approach reveal higher rates of sexual violence. however, both the results—and the process itself—were treated with extreme skepticism shortly after obama referenced the findings of behavior-based research. the bulk of the doubt leveled against “ -in- ” and the behavior-based surveys centered on the lack of legal concepts referenced in the survey. for instance, glenn kessler ( ) of the washington post took particular issue with this question in the survey: sometimes sex happens when a person is unable to consent to it or stop it from happening because they were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out from alcohol, drugs, or medications. this can include times when they voluntarily consumed alcohol or drugs or they were given drugs or alcohol without their knowledge or consent. please remember that even if someone uses alcohol or drugs, what happens to them is not their fault. when you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people have ever . . . . kessler spends considerable time assessing the degree to which coding of these responses as rape have, mistakenly, included instances of consensual, yet inebriated, sexual encounters. positive responses to this question account for approximately % of the rapes calculated by analysts. kessler laws , , of references the fact that cdc officials had developed specific protocols when interviewing each survey participant—making sure that respondents understood the question to include only nonconsensual instances of “under the influence” or “incapacitated” sexual encounters, rather than consensual acts. however, he dismisses—without any evidence, save the magnitude of the results—the utility and legitimacy of the question and its inclusion as an indication of sexual violence. christina hoff sommers, of the american enterprise institute (aei), similarly cast doubt on the inclusion of alcohol or drug-induced incapacitation as a context for nonconsensual sex. she asks: if a woman was unconscious or incapacitated then every civilized person would call it rape. but what about sex while inebriated? i mean, few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape, indeed a nontrivial percentage of all customary, sexual intimacy—including marital sex—probably falls under that definition. (schow ) supporting the legalistic-survey approach over behavior-based strategies, she states, plainly, “no one interviewed was asked if they’d been raped or sexually assaulted” (schow ). note sommers’ inclusion of marital sex as seemingly beyond the reach of rape and sexual assault—a nod to outdated and deeply limiting conceptions of the marital context as being exempted from instances of sexual violence. after striking down the notion that alcohol-induced incapacitation or nonconsent is a form of sexual assault, kessler moves on to what he regards as “interesting oddities” in the cdc survey. here, he notes, “something called ‘sexual coercion’” (kessler )—casting doubt on the long-held belief that victimization in the context of sexual violence includes not only physical force but also threat, pressure and other nonphysical forms of duress. the second “oddity,” according to kessler, is the “made to penetrate” question—a recent addition to behavior-based surveys. these questions are meant to respond to another deficiency in criminal-justice surveys: the failure to capture male victims of sexual violence. statistics on rape and sexual assault have traditionally focused on women as the primary victims of sexual violence—and men as the perpetrators (struckman-johnson and struckman-johnson ). one explanation for this could be that, empirically, women are more likely to be raped and men more likely to perpetrate rape. another explanation, however, stems from the criminal-justice model of forcing victims to apply legalistic labels to their sexual victimization (stemple and meyer ). if men have traditionally been counted out of the statistics on sexual assault, they are far less likely to see concepts such as “rape” or “sexual assault” as applicable or relevant to their own experiences of sexual violence (mezey and king ). this is true even if the characteristics of the acts themselves—forced sex—provide clear-cut instances of sexual violence. alluding to this question as an attempt to capture incidents “allegedly involv[ing] women forcing men to engage in sex,” kessler seems to cast doubt on the possibility that men can experience sexual violence as victims as well as perpetrators (kessler ). in fact, the author offers little more than an allusion to tradition as a reason for not addressing male sexual victimization: men have never been considered the victims of sexual violence, and, therefore, they never will. of course, this is exactly the kind of intransigence in our understanding of sexual violence that the question is trying to empirically dispel. generally, critics and skeptics of “ -in- ” and its accompanying narratives, hold up the criminal-justice or “legalistic” approach to data collection as legitimate and behavior-based surveys as the work of charlatans. in her article, tellingly titled “obama and the fiction of ‘rape culture,’” hill reporter wendy mcelroy ( ) refers to the bjs approach as “reasonable” and its findings ( . out of female college students) as the “actual rate of sexual assault” on campus. in so doing, she casts aside behavior-based researchers as either imposters or agents of “rape culture zealots” (mcelroy ). david french, a reporter for the national review, describes “ -in- ” as having produced “hysteria” on college campuses by promoting a “fake crisis” of sexual violence (french ). us news reporter caroline kitchens ( ) portrays “ -in- ” as an “alarming statistic” responsible for promoting a “movement built on a foundation of dubious statistics and a distorted view of masculinity.” as part of a panel organized by the independent women’s counsel, ironically called “an honest conversation about ‘rape culture’ and sexual violence,” aei’s christina hoff sommers likens “ -in- ,” and the laws , , of momentum it had produced, to the “day-care sexual abuse hysteria of the s.” “it appears to me,” she argues, “we are in the throes of one of those panics where paranoia, censorship, false accusations flourish” (malmsheimer ). indeed, concerns about false accusations is what animates many of these criticisms. however, these criticisms are misplaced. unlike the ansari article, which provoked equally high levels of skepticism, the one-in-five statistic is an aggregate and anonymous account of individuals who have experienced versions of sexual violence. the statistic in no way provides detailed information about specific instances of sexual violence. neither does it invoke legal allegations against a specific person. however, despite the anonymity and generality of this statistic, legalistic anxieties of due process reign supreme in these articles. of course, the connection between “ -in- ” and due process is not wholly arbitrary. spurred, in part, by the frequency of sexual violence on campus, president obama issued a directive to college campuses—as part of his guidance on title ix implementation—to reduce the evidentiary standards used by campus-based sexual assault tribunals (referred to by some as “kangaroo courts” (pope )). prior to the institution of this new standard, title ix permitted campus-based adjudicatory proceedings to evaluate allegations of sexual assault using a “clear and convincing” standard for evaluating the likelihood of guilt. schools that adopted this standard asked those in a position to judge these proceedings to reach a conclusion of guilt only if the evidence indicated at least a percent likelihood of guilt. as part of his multi-pronged initiative to mete out sexual violence on campus, president obama instructed universities to use a “preponderance of evidence” standard. this standard, which had been used by multiple universities prior to the issuing of the guidance, permits adjudicators to determine guilt if they feel that most of the evidence points in that direction, and it is the standard used in most civil cases (baker ). some critics of “ -in- ” encased their concerns about the statistic within a broader attack on obama’s new evidentiary guidelines. their concern centered on the now increasingly threatened due-process rights of those accused of sexual assault. within their methodological assessments of “ -in- ” and the behavior-based research that supported this statistic, critics cited with certainty that campuses would be “treacherous places for falsely accused men” (kitchens ). in support of these fears, critics offered no statistical evidence—nothing to combat, for instance, the single-digit rates of reporting among victims of sexual assault or the extremely low likelihood of success among the small number who do report their experiences. instead, reporters rested their claims on specific failures of due process—cases where an individual had been found innocent, or where a tribunal later found the existing evidence to be insufficiently compelling after a guilty verdict had initially been reached. of course, these due-process considerations are important. no system of adjudication should set aside the due-process considerations of those accused of campus-based violations. there may be good reason to worry about the reduced standard of evidence required on obama’s title ix interpretations (later revised by president trump). however, as in the ansari example referenced above, there are ways to make these due-process arguments without attacking the veracity, credibility and validity of the men and women who responded to these surveys—without downgrading or casting doubt on their experiences. unfortunately, however, the upgrading of due-process rights for alleged perpetrators at the expense of those who just want to talk about sexual violence is a tradition—and a clear consequence—of using a legal lens to respond to and digest extra-legal discussions about sexual violence. it is one thing to highlight the due-process rights of those accused of sexual assault, and to weigh them against the rights of victims engaging in formal legal action. this standard is at the core of the rule of law. it is entirely another to challenge the capacity for individuals to name, identify and acknowledge their own experience with sexual violence in anonymized settings in service of due-process rights that are not the least bit threatened. . conclusions consciousness-raising helps survivors see forced sex as something different from, and anathema to, intimacy. it helps those who have experienced sexual violence to understand that, while laws , , of masquerading as sex, coopting its gestures and locations, sexual violence subverts and attempts to annihilate the benefits of sex—intimacy, connectivity, agency and pleasure. however, as highlighted, there are circumstances in which the imposition of legality on consciousness-raising discourse may distort and disrupt the possibility of survivors seeking comfort, solace and support through dialogue. in these circumstances, and whether intentional or not, legality in the context of consciousness-raising potentially operates in ways that are counterproductive, encouraging victims of sexual violence to stay silent and to second-guess their experiences, perceptions and reactions. where legal doctrine marginalizes victims of sexual violence from using the law to mete out justice for their pain, the examples of legality presented above, we argue, show how legality can quarantine victims from others who may help them distinguish sex from violence and understand sexual violence itself as a form of force and battery made possible by certain forms of social arrangement. at its most extreme, legality is a troubling impediment, foreclosing opportunities for victims of sexual violence to share their experiences. that legal precept, in some circumstances, becomes fused with everyday notions of sexual violence is unsurprising. as some scholars studying the juridification of everyday discourse like to point out, this phenomenon is not new. for example, mary ann glendon ( ) opens rights talk with a familiar quotation from alexis de tocqueville’s democracy in america, writing, “wherever he went, he found that lawyers’ habits of mind, as well as their modes of discourse, ‘infiltrate through society right down to the lowest ranks’” (p. ). what tocqueville describes are habits of mind and modes of discourse that are ubiquitous. however, it would be a mistake to construe legality as totalizing. the circulation of legal precept through the social imaginary—the operations of legality in everyday understandings—is neither necessary nor inevitable. discursive logics, standards, norms, must be continuously reproduced, re-sedimented, and re-enforced. the “social imaginary” is not a monolith, with essential, immutable features. it is always becoming. it has no definite shape or form. it has no content that cannot be un-made and changed. in this vein, the story of #metoo and legality in everyday responses to sexual violence is as much about resistance, controversion, and thinking beyond or without respect for the strictures of law—patterns of thinking and ways being in the world that are unregulated by legality and its logics—as it about a retrenchment of legal understanding. however, before legal discourse, models of legal reasoning and legal process are excised from everyday discussions of and responses to sexual violence, legality, its operations and its effects, must be drawn into focus and evaluated. consciousness-raising discourse, in the form of #metoo or behavior-based surveys, has, in part, served this function. it has, in some instances, encouraged and enabled debate about the use of legally-enshrined binaries and categories in everyday assessments of sexual violence. by engendering critics, consciousness-raising often highlights the mismatch of legality with consciousness-raising—and perhaps more profoundly the mismatch of law with sexual violence. however, questions remain. coming to grips with the effects of legality within the context of sexual-violence-focused consciousness-raising efforts is not something that can be accomplished in a single essay. further research is needed, whether to elucidate legality’s positive payoffs, or to explore its capacity to atomize, individualize, silence, and constrain links to community. a potentially effective route for studying these effects is by comparing, for instance, the structure and features of discourse on sexual violence in the united states with the discursive structure and features that typify responses to sexual violence in regions with different legal standards, procedures or norms. such a comparative study could put into relief the limits of or even invalidate our argument about legality, by showing how it is particular kinds of social, rather than legal, arrangements that are principally responsible for the kinds of debates discussed above. further, a more precise accounting is needed to show how legality operates in the context of sexual violence. how does it create the confusion and ambiguity that characterizes “grace’s” experience—or the pushback against “ -in- ”? why, and in what way, do individuals rely on statutory constructions of rape and sexual assault as benchmarks and standards for assessing discussions of sexual violence? what are the circumstances under which legality is deployed or invoked? to answer these questions, one must speak not only to sexual violence laws , , of survivors but also to any individual who may be called upon to hear, respond to or address accounts of sexual violence. nevertheless, an assessment of #metoo and public media responses to the one-in-five statistic represent a starting point. helpfully, addressing the ways in which legal discourse has the potential to shape or color everyday responses to sexual violence becomes easier within the context of a moment when these constraints are being made the object of routine, focused scrutiny. consciousness-raising approaches like #metoo may not be a watershed. however, the persistence and resilience of 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// // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ sexual harassment in higher education – a systematic review full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rehe european journal of higher education issn: (print) (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rehe sexual harassment in higher education – a systematic review fredrik bondestam & maja lundqvist to cite this article: fredrik bondestam & maja lundqvist ( ) sexual harassment in higher education – a systematic review, european journal of higher education, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: feb . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rehe https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rehe https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rehe &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rehe &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule sexual harassment in higher education – a systematic review fredrik bondestam and maja lundqvist swedish secretariat for gender research, university of gothenburg, gothenburg, sweden abstract sexual harassment is an epidemic throughout global higher education systems and impact individuals, groups and entire organizations in profound ways. precarious working conditions, hierarchical organizations, a normalization of gender-based violence, toxic academic masculinities, a culture of silence and a lack of active leadership are all key features enabling sexual harassment. the aim of this study is to review scientific knowledge on sexual harassment in higher education. a thematic focus is on (a) knowledge derived from top-ranked peer-reviewed articles in the research field, (b) the prevalence of sexual harassment among students and staff, (c) reported consequences of sexual harassment, (d) examples of primary, secondary and tertiary preventive measures, and (e) core challenges to research on sexual harassment in higher education. the published research evidence suggests several findings of importance, mainly: (a) prevalence of sexual harassment among students is reported by on average one out of four female students; (b) severe consequences of sexual harassment impacts individuals but the effects on the quality in research and education is unknown; (c) there is almost no evidence supporting the supposed effects of major preventive measures; and (d) research on sexual harassment in higher education lacks theoretical, longitudinal, qualitative and intersectional approaches and perspectives. article history received january accepted february keywords sexual harassment; higher education; systematic review; prevalence; consequences; prevention; research introduction the unnamed should not be mistaken for the non-existent. (mackinnon , – ) one in every three women in the world is exposed to physical and/or sexual violence from a partner or sexual violence from another person (un women ; who ). more than . billion women live in countries where rape within marriage is still not considered a crime (un women ). high levels of infant and mother mortality, lack of education for girls and women, limited opportunities for financial independence for women, and a number of serious ill health aspects enable and increase the negative consequences of men’s violence against women (who ; world economic forum ). in the eu member states, between and per cent of women (corresponding to around © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact fredrik bondestam fredrik.bondestam@genus.gu.se swedish secretariat for gender research, univer- sity of gothenburg, p.o box , s- , gothenburg, sweden european journal of higher education , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:fredrik.bondestam@genus.gu.se http://www.tandfonline.com million women) have experienced exposure to sexual harassment during their working lives (latcheva ). nine out of ten of the world’s countries have laws against sexual harassment in working life today, but almost six out of ten lack adequate laws against sexual harassment in higher education and schools (tavares and wodon ). for a long time, women’s movements in a global perspective have highlighted issues about women’s bodily vulnerability in relation to other forms of repression. men’s vio- lence in general, men’s violence against women, sexualized violence, prostitution, human trafficking (for sexual purpose specifically), rape in close relationships and rape as a means of war, as well as a number of other forms of violence (ptacek ), form a web of actual and potential exposure to violence for a majority of the world’s women and girls. it is in this web of violence that sexual harassment of women (and men, and non-binary persons) at work is established and normalized, but also problematized and challenged in various ways. we use the concept of gender-based violence as a framework for understanding gender harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault, date rape violence and other forms of gen- dered violence (latcheva ). in other words, sexual harassment is part of a continuum of different forms of actual and potential forms of gender-based violence residing in higher education systems, ranging from bullying and sexist jargon to sexual abuse and rape. this is also in line with the current understanding promoted in a large-scale evaluation of national incentives on sexual harassment in eu member states (swg gri ). discourses on discrimination and sexual violence during the s (mackinnon ) shifted into juridical discourses and a focus on prevalence of sexual harassment during the mid- s (gutek ; gutek and morasch ). researching prevalence has since then dominated the global research field on sexual harassment in workplaces. legal definitions and quantitative studies came to guide research through surveys and scales for testing vul- nerability and sexuality in the decade to come (fitzgerald et al. ; magley et al. ). gradually, knowledge on sexualized violence, power and unequal gender conditions were replaced by an individualistic and legislative version of exposure to sexual harassment. in the international research field on sexual harassment and higher education, the develop- ment of concepts and delimitations has been quite similar. other types of gender-based violence, for example, are seldom intersected in research on sexual harassment during – . instead, focus is placed more specifically on legal, organizational, psychologi- cal and ethnological aspects of exposure (pina, gannon, and saunders ). in studies on sexual harassment in higher education from regions other than north/west, different issues are in the foreground, such as unwanted pregnancies or hiv prevention, or various direct and indirect consequences of poverty (access issues, support requirements). more concrete problems are also addressed regularly, for example demands from male tea- chers for sexual services from female students in order for them to receive a valid examin- ation certificate from their studies (morley ). during the last ten-year period a profound change has occurred though, with young researchers contributing new concepts and perspectives (not least intersectionality), new forms of exposure are focused (sexual harassment online, experiences of minorities), and a recapture of theories on violence, structure and organization can be discerned. and in our days, #metoo has given voice to sexual harassment as a global epidemic residing in all strands of life. there are already several research reviews partly covering research on sexual harass- ment in higher education. they are important contributions to knowledge on prevalence, f. bondestam and m. lundqvist prevention, research methodology and other issues, and share some common traits: using meta-analytic literature reviews in order to comprise relevant data and knowledge, cover- ing specific periods of time, focusing on the higher education sector as such, dealing with the conceptual framework for sexual harassment, and so forth. they also have certain limitations, as these research reviews are delimited to research on prevalence on campuses only (fedina, holmes, and backes ); focus certain areas of higher education such as medicine (fnais et al. ) and specific marginalized groups (mcclelland et al. ); deal with sexual harassment on staff but not students (henning et al. ); are targeting a limited period of time or foremost focus specific methodological issues such as research context and participants in earlier studies (voth schrag ). in this particular study we try to overcome these earlier limitations. a systematic search process in existing databases covered the entire time period from which research on sexual harassment and higher education has been published ( – ). we summarize studies on both students and staff as well as include research from the global south/east and try to evoke the recurrent focus on usa in the research field. also, we cover a broad range of themes central to the research field such as prevalence, prevention, case management, support structures, research methodology and theoretical and conceptual frameworks, etc. of course, there are also limitations to our study presented here. it is not possible to give credit to all research studies in the entire research field as it covers more than indi- vidual publications. instead, we have selected more than of them ( per cent of all studies) using stringent criteria for selection and cross-researcher validation. the results presented in this context are therefore a brief summary and analysis of a large research field, trying to cover main themes and issues on sexual harassment in global higher edu- cation. the article is a summary and development of two recently published, large-scale international research reviews (bondestam and lundqvist , ) which implies several aspects of relevance are left out in this context. foremost, we have omitted an in-depth analysis of theoretical and methodological constraints in the research field as well as mainly focused on general findings and tendencies without incorporating a more nuanced analysis of the way the field of research transforms and changes over time. method data collection and analysis the quality of an international research review tackling a large and diversified research field, expanding over more than years, correlates directly with how systematically the literature search is done. kvinnsam at the university of gothenburg library was con- tracted for the task of assisting the swedish secretariat for gender research with scientifi- cally based search processes. the complete search processes, as well as some in-depth analysis of certain aspects in this material, is described in other publications (bondestam and lundqvist , ). in this article we focus mainly on overall and general results from the complete research field as described below (n = ), but foremost referring to its main publications. the process for data selection and analysis is described schematically in figure . the following databases were used for the main search process: eric (educational resources information center), erc (education research complete), web of science european journal of higher education (core collection), gender studies database, google scholar, scopus, and sociological abstracts. a complementary search process also screened relevant nordic databases, including diva, libris and swepub (sweden), bibliotek.dk (denmark), norart and oria.no (norway), gegnir.is (iceland), helka and melinda (finland), kvinfo (denmark), and nordpub (nordic countries). these search processes, performed by kvinnsam, resulted in a total of items (after deleting duplicates) using the fol- lowing search string: ((‘sexual harass*’ or (harass* and sex*)) and (universit* or college* or academ* or ‘higher education’ or work* or organization*)) not (child* or school*). this list of publications spans – , has no geographical limits, and figure . data selection and analysis step-by-step. f. bondestam and m. lundqvist includes all types of publications (i.e. not only articles in journals but also dissertations, book chapters, conference proceedings, book reviews, etc.). the analysis of such a large set of data (n = ) is almost impossible to achieve without rigorous criteria, selection processes which are validated, and foremost compre- hensive delineations which are used strictly by involved researchers. all items were registered in a free beta-version of the online tool rayyan qcr (ouzzani et al. ) including title, abstract, authors, keywords and several other criteria. we went through all publications for inclusion, using individual set blind mode enabling cross- researcher validation, following three specific criteria: (a) higher education as a main field of study, (b) sexual harassment as a core concept, and (c) published article in a peer-reviewed journal. after correcting for items we had disagreed on we had a list of items after this process. in the next step we used a thematic approach to the research field made possible through selective search processes in rayyan. we started clustering the items by using search terms found in titles, abstracts and keywords, focusing prevalence, consequences, prevention, theory, method and so forth. such concepts functioned as preliminary ‘umbrellas’ and then we continuously added more specified concepts in different search processes. for example, searching for publications in the list of items related to ‘pre- vention’ implied using the following set of sub-concepts: prev*, polic*, educ*, train*, primary, secondary, tertiary, complaint, case, support, etc. sub-concepts for different themes emerged constantly from reading through abstracts, just as main themes developed and were adjusted accordingly. this process resulted in a set of different themes and several subconcepts. finally, we gathered all items as full-texts and did a systematic read-through based on the identified themes, which in turn reduced the list of items (by using the same criteria as before on full-texts) to a final set of publications for analysis (n = ). a specific search process was performed in order to extract top-ranked peer-reviewed articles from the research field on sexual harassment in higher education. peer-reviewed articles were extracted from the total list (n = ), using web of science with scopus as a reference database, and arranged according to field-normalized citation by kvinnsam in line with recommendations from the swedish research council. the criteria for inclusion based on content analysis are: (a) sexual harassment shall be the main focus, but compari- son with other issues of exposure is permitted, and (b) higher education is in focus, but comparison with other sectors is permitted (for further details, cf. bondestam and lundq- vist ). results this presentation of results provides an overview of past and current knowledge in inter- national research on sexual harassment in higher education. when overlooking the entire research field, some core results are possible to discern as a way to frame the analysis. gender harassment is the most common form of exposure within higher education according to this research field. sexual harassment as a more specific form of gender- based violence occurs in all disciplines in higher education and is reported by all groups (students, doctoral students, all staff). students, younger women, women with inse- cure employment conditions and certain minorities (ethnicity and sexuality) are more european journal of higher education exposed to sexual harassment than other groups. sexual harassment has severe conse- quences for students and staff in terms of physical, psychological and professional short- and long-term effects. more than half of students and faculty experiencing sexual harassment do not report the events to management. research focusing on intersectional dimensions in relation to sexual harassment in higher education is limited. research that focuses mainly on perpetrators is almost not to be found in the analysed material. we now turn to main findings from top-ranked peer-reviewed articles on sexual har- assment in higher education, which is described shortly in order to contextualize the research field. further, we will summarize general results from the studied research field in four thematic sections covering prevalence, consequences, prevention and future research. top-ranked peer-reviewed articles focusing on the top-ranked peer-reviewed articles in a specific research field can bring with it both an understanding of the knowledge produced in the field, but also give an interesting picture of normative understandings of the research subject per se. therefore, in order to contextualize and guide a discussion about challenges and limitations recur- rent in the research field as a whole, this section summarizes main findings from top- ranked peer-reviewed articles in the research field on sexual harassment in higher edu- cation (adams, kottke, and padgitt ; benson and thomson ; bruce et al. ; cantalupo ; clancy et al. ; coker et al. , ; cortina et al. ; d’augelli ; finn ; fnais et al. ; gelfand, fitzgerald, and drasgow ; gersen and suk ; herek ; kenig and ryan ; komaromy et al. ; magnavita and heponiemi ; martin-storey and august ; nora et al. ; ong ; padgitt and padgitt ; reilly, lott, and gallogly ; robnett ; schneider ; schnei- der, swan, and fitzgerald ; selkie et al. ; settles et al. ; somers ; wolf et al. ). all articles concern primarily higher education and sexual harassment. in some cases, other forms of exposure are also analysed, and there are some examples of comparative approaches (nationally and internationally with other organizations, both private and public sector). the texts were published between and , with an emphasis on studies published before ( items) and after ( items) in medical, legal, psychological, criminological and gender studies journals. empirically, all studies are situ- ated in usa, with the exception of one study from italy. a few articles also include com- parative approaches and empirical data from japan and brazil. most of the studies focus on prevalence of sexual harassment among female students and often campus-based exposure in various forms. medicine and stem are the subject areas covered more specifi- cally, but a majority of the publications include multi-disciplinary studies of a certain campus or higher education institution. the research studies vary to some extent theor- etically, methodologically and in terms of concepts used. but they foremost have certain aspects in common, such as the use of legislative definitions of sexual harassment as a point of departure. further, they all rely on relatively limited and often uncontrolled cross-sectional data, a shortage of statistical and analytical tools (applies in particular to descriptive studies in the s), and a one-sided and binary understanding of gender which underestimates the diversity of exposure to sexual harassment. f. bondestam and m. lundqvist summing up the core results from the most highly cited research papers in scientific journals in this study, we can conclude that exposure to sexual harassment in higher edu- cation varies between and per cent for heterosexual women (median per cent) and between and per cent for heterosexual men (median per cent). in these studies, exposure to sexual harassment is generally highest for female students at lower levels of education. exposure to sexual assault and threats of sexualized violence is decreas- ing over time in the studies analysed, at the same time as exposure to sexual harassment remains relatively constant. new types of exposure are established in later studies com- pared to earlier ones, and they relate in particular to online sexual harassment, where prevalence is alarmingly high in studies that analyse this within the research field as a whole (cf. megan et al. ; poland ). it is notable that most of the publications, on a more or less routine basis, highlight issues about problems with prevalence and measurability, underreporting, failing systems for case handling, needs for basic knowledge about sexual harassment in several ways, etc. that is to say, despite the top-ranked articles spanning a period of almost years, they argue in the same words about gaps in knowledge and implemen- tation needs. one explanation may of course be that they are part of markedly context- specific (usa, campus, social science perspectives) citation and referencing practices, which can tend to homogenize normative claims for how sexual harassment shall be described and understood. at the same time, it can also be seen as a reflection of the actual preventive practices at higher education institutions, as well as challenges of the research field in question, not having changed in any significant way during the period. however, it is clear that online harassment and a stronger focus on the experiences of non-heterosexuals constitutes a shift over time in the focus of research and recommen- dations. to some extent, it is also possible to discern a development in terms of methods used, in particular after the attempts in the s to use tests, parametric scales and to strive for a common concept definition to seek consensus in the research field on what sexual harassment is. prevalence the issue of prevalence (the total number of cases in relation to a population) is discussed in a majority of peer-reviewed journal articles for this systematic review. several factors relating to legal structures, national contexts, use of concepts and definitions, method- ology, sample size and diversity, underreporting etc. all affect the output from studies on prevalence (henning et al. ; mcdonald ). the consequence of these challenges is that figures for exposure to sexual harassment may vary greatly. according to a review of european studies, for example, the figure varied between and per cent for women in working life in general (timmerman and bajema ). estimates from usa claims that – per cent of women and – per cent of men have been exposed to sexual harassment in the workplace (aggarwal and gupta ). in a large study on prevalence in the eu member states approximately per cent of all women in working life had experienced sexual harassment since the age of (latcheva ), although the variation between countries as well as sectors is considerable. a similar variation in exposure to sexual harassment is reported in research on the situation of medical students, for example, where studies of sexual harassment show a prevalence european journal of higher education between and per cent, while exposure to sex discrimination is stated to be between and per cent of all respondents (fnais et al. ). when reviewing studies on prevalence of sexual harassment in higher education we conclude that well-cited, international studies also show a large variation in prevalence; from to percent depending on a variety of factors. approximately – per cent of female students in usa have experienced sexual harassment according to several major studies. the numbers are slightly lower for female staff in general (henning et al. ). studies based on a large and wide selection of respondents, which include detailed questions on experiences of sexual harassment and/or marginalized groups with limited influence over their situation, result in a higher reported incidence of sexual harassment (mcdonald ; till ; cf. bondestam and lundqvist for further details). the prevalence of sexual assault on students (primarily women) at universities in usa is also well-documented. data suggest per cent of college women have experienced dating violence and nearly per cent have experienced completed or attempted sexual assault since entering college (voth schrag ; also cf. fedina, holmes, and backes ). quite few studies investigate groups that might run a greater risk of being exposed to sexual harassment due to being already in a marginalized position, such as lesbian and bisexual women, students with functional disabilities, students race-typed as non-white, and students with previous experiences of sexual violence. though, for all these groups there is evidence of a higher degree of exposure to sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence. when overviewing the international research field, also taking into account publications outside usa and western europe, the evidence shows that stu- dents, younger women, women with insecure employment conditions and certain min- orities (ethnicity and sexuality) are more exposed to sexual harassment than other groups (d’augelli ; fedina, holmes, and backes ; ong ; vladutiu, martin, and macy ). there is nothing to suggest that the proportion of university students experiencing sexual harassment (especially in usa where a majority of studies are found) is decreasing over time (fnais et al. ). though, there are often mixed results in research on preva- lence over time, despite replicable longitudinal studies using identical methodology. socio- culturally changed understandings of sexual harassment over time, both ones own and that of others, are one of several aspects affecting the perception of exposure (mcdonald ). consequences there is strong agreement in the research field that the consequences of sexual harassment are manifold and serious, irrespective of whether the focus of research is employees in working life in general or students and staff in higher education specifically. consequences of sexual harassment in higher education institutions are coming ever more into focus as the research field develops – with psychological, epidemiological and organizational approaches for example showing that factors such as ill health, motivation and dropout rates from studies are impacted – which is also in parallel an important part of research into sexual harassment on the labour market in general (barling et al. ; chan et al. ; harned et al. ; lapierre, spector, and leck ; willness, steel, and lee ). f. bondestam and m. lundqvist exposure to sexual harassment in higher education leads to physical, psychological and professional consequences for individuals. examples such as irritation, anger, stress, dis- comfort, feelings of powerlessness and degradation are recurrent in research literature. evidence-based research confirms more specifically that sexual harassment in higher edu- cation can lead to depression (martin-storey and august ; selkie et al. ), anxiety (richman et al. ; schneider, swan, and fitzgerald ), post-traumatic stress dis- order (henning et al. ), physical pain (chan et al. ), unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases (philpart et al. ), increased alcohol use (fedina, holmes, and backes ; mcdonald ; selkie et al. ), impaired career opportu- nities (henning et al. ), reduced job motivation (barling et al. ; chan et al. ; harned et al. ), and more. specific job-related factors often include absence, decreased job satisfaction, engagement and productivity, decreased self-confidence and self-image, and persons giving notice from their jobs (lapierre, spector, and leck ; willness, steel, and lee ). even observing or hearing about a colleague’s exposure to sexual har- assment can generate ‘bystander stress’ and also cause conflicts in the work team (mcdo- nald ; willness, steel, and lee ). research on the consequences of sexual harassment for work teams, work environ- ments and organizational culture in higher education is scarce though, albeit these are fre- quently reported aspects of interest for further research. direct costs to organizations, on the other hand, are well-documented in the form of high personnel turnover resulting in a need for expensive recruitment and introduction of new employees, as well as time and resources spent on investigating incidents. specifically for usa, a certain consequence of sexual harassment is also possible high legal costs for court cases if incidents are reported to the police. more indirect costs for organizations includes reduced workplace morale and job motivation among employees, and ‘poor reputation’ for the workplace as such (henning et al. ), albeit research evidence on the effects on quality in research and education is unclear. prevention reading and conducting searches in the complete research field a number of themes con- cerning prevention of sexual harassment in higher education emerges. these themes reflect an understanding of preventive efforts which is well in line with an established understanding of the chain of prevention against gender-based violence more generally (primary, secondary and tertiary prevention), and consist foremost of policy, education and training, case management and support structures. in addition to these themes, there are also some research evidence suggesting the importance of bystander pro- grammes, active leadership skills and other organizational factors. in the following section we discuss these aspects in turn in more detail (also cf. bondestam and lundqvist ). sometimes research evidence is lacking from the higher education sector why we partly rely on research evidence from nearby organizational studies in these instances. policy research on policies to prevent sexual harassment in higher education suggests they have to engage with the organizational culture, rather than focus on access to a procedure for case management, and also be based on the experiences of victims to sexual harassment european journal of higher education and other forms of gender-based violence (marshall, dalyot, and galloway ; zippel ). further, policy should aim to function as protection for the right to self-determi- nation and non-discrimination, be both individual- and group-based in terms of addres- sing experiences and responsibilities (zippel , ), and be implemented bottom-up or from the inside rather than top-down and from the outside (bagley et al. ; batch- elor ; bennett ). finally, policy processes themselves, in order to be more effective and relevant, has to have a strong mandate from senior management, adequate resources, and be facilitated by legitimate and active case managers (thomas ; also cf. dare ; scalia and jiang ). there is thus a vast number of journal articles recommending the use of policies as a core preventive measure, but at the same time there is almost no evidence-based research on the actual effects of policies on for example decreasing prevalence of sexual harassment. there is actually nothing to suggest that further efforts to strengthen the impact of policy on sexual harassment (information, communication, revising policies) will change under- reporting, policy awareness, or reporting behaviour as such (lindenberg and reese ; reese and lindenberg ). the importance of policy is therefore paradoxically high- lighted in the research field. policies on sexual harassment in higher education tend to have a focus on individuals/ women, legal entities and a structure for handling complaints (case management), while the perspectives of perpetrators (howard ; also cf. pina, gannon, and saunders ) and the ramifications for the broader work environment usually are missing. a weak or non-existent theoretical contextualization of sexual harassment combined with a lack of relevant knowledge (tinkler ) – in other words an inability to describe the problem of sexual harassment in all its complexity (in particular feminist perspectives on intersectionality and links to related forms of gender-based violence in higher edu- cation) – further weakens both research on policy and policies as tools to prevent sexual harassment. there is clearly a gap between neoliberal, bureaucratic policy and criti- cal knowledge on experiences of sexual harassment in a normative academic culture (brorsen smidt et al. ). this analysis of policy processes, especially in relation to legal systems, is also confirmed by other contemporary reviews on sexual harassment in higher education (johnson, widnall, and frazier ). education and training research studies on education and training as primary preventive strategies mainly stem from disciplines such as pedagogy, hr and psychology. they include a range of different countries (although usa dominates), higher education institutions, organizational levels, and have a relatively narrow understanding of the concept of sexual harassment as point of departure (in principle, exclusively legal definitions). however, there is a clear dividing line between studies that have an almost purely experimental design, i.e. examining atti- tudes and responses to training in various forms within controlled environments, and research articles that are entirely focused on evaluation, discussing already completed edu- cation or training initiatives and their effects. it is also noteworthy that there are interest- ing research studies which deal with the advantages and disadvantages of web-based training, as well as studies that in various ways attempt to analyse the impact of different kinds of training interventions for specific target groups (managers, case man- agers, students in specific programmes, etc.). to a large extent, there are observed, positive f. bondestam and m. lundqvist short-term effects of training on sexual harassment on participants’ attitudes, but there are no evidence-based results suggesting more long-term effects on prevalence. summarizing all existing research studies is of course not doable in this short format, but some key features from evidence-based studies are that education and training has to (a) be sensitive to the sex of the instructor (preusser, bartels, and nordstrom ), the gender composition of the group being trained (blakely, blakely, and moorman ), and normative assumptions about gender (tinkler, gremillion, and arthurs ; tinkler, yan li, and mollborn ); (b) reflect organization-specific conditions for pre- venting sexual harassment (bainbridge, perry, and kulik ); (c) target active and passive resistance to change in general and knowledge about violence and vulnerability more specifically (bainbridge, perry, and kulik ; also cf. townsley and geist ); (d) have support from senior management and the active participation of other managers (blaxall, parsonson, and robertson ), and finally (e) use pedagogical methods which combines reflexive and affective learning (ramson ; welibrock ). all these aspects serve as important strategies in order to try to close a general ‘knowing-doing gap’, i.e. the gap between having knowledge of what sexual harassment is and acting in a different way (perry, kulik, and bustamante ; perry et al. ; perry, kulik, and field ). there is also a huge set of research studies examining the impact of education and training on sexual harassment on women and men respectively. there is no clear-cut consensus on which group benefits the most from training. never- theless, from these studies one can draw the general conclusion that men who do not par- ticipate in training on what constitutes sexual harassment are less inclined to see or define sexually harassing behaviours as in fact sexual harassment (bingham and scherer ; walsh, bauerle, and magley ). case management our systematic review suggests that there are no research-based evidence on formal mech- anisms or case management structures dealing with experiences of sexual harassment in higher education, i.e. secondary prevention, which gives full reparation to victims. on the contrary, there is research evidence on the lack of (efficient and relevant) case manage- ment procedures. several early studies focus on employers responsibility for establishing effective systems that allow individual employees to report sexual harassment, rather than seeking justification for case management systems strengthening the rights of individuals, or their demands and need for support or redress (kors ; meek and lynch ; robertson, dyer, and campbell ). later on researchers argue for both the need to refine and improve existing systems for case management and the implementation of policy on this and contain more research- based criticism of the whole idea that one could solve the problems of prevalence per se through a bureaucratization of victimization, largely through strengthening the victim’s ability to make a complaint (lee and greenlaw ; williams, fitzgerald, and drasgow ). in recent years some studies have developed models that are easily under- stood and applied and apparently functions well, and which take case management models a step further by having the stated aim of restorative justice in the form of redress for victims of sexual harassment (see for example koss, wilgus, and williamsen ). there are some studies pointing to that only a small proportion of all sexual harassment is reported formally, as is also the case for other types of sexual violence. normally, formal european journal of higher education reports are not made, either through the internal processes of the workplace or via external structures. it is estimated that only between and per cent of all cases of sexual harass- ment are reported formally, and fewer than per cent of those who do make a report take part in any legal process (mcdonald ). so, in conclusion, an overall paradox between an ongoing and systematic underreporting of actual experiences of sexual harassment on the one hand, and the continuous updating of systems to manage complaints on the other, seemingly remains intact. support structures tertiary prevention is foremost about help and support to individuals exposed to sexual harassment, for example in terms of rehabilitation and follow-up. it is often recommended in research articles that especially the diversification of exposure to sexual harassment, relating both to different types of sexual harassment and sexual violence as well as to the exposure of various minority groups, should guide higher education institutions in their efforts to establish well-functioning support structures (fedina, holmes, and backes ; vladutiu, martin, and macy ). some researchers have worked systematically to prepare, test and evaluate various alternative approaches to complaints, starting out from the need to establish support structures for victims in the first instance whether or not case management is effective or not (best et al. ) and also addressing the need for restorative justice for victims of sexual harassment (koss, wilgus, and williamsen ). such models often illustrate that the employer’s responsibility does not end, but rather is ongoing and becomes more stringent, throughout the entire process of victimization. similar studies have devel- oped and tested support structures independent of other procedures and different case management systems (grauerholz et al. ), which also is symptomatic of the shift in the research field during later years; suggestions for support structures move clearly from the periphery to being an integral part of case management systems (for examples, see paludi ). a number of different dialogue models are also to be found in recent research and their common denominator is the systematic establishment of accountability for the perpetra- tors’ own violent actions. these models have mainly been developed in the contexts of criminology and psychology or have a bearing on research on men’s violence against women and issues of sexual violence more generally. a few of these models have been vali- dated with a number of different sample groups over time and in different contexts, among them a specific model (restore) which has also been successfully tested in a higher edu- cation context in usa and new zealand (jülich ; koss , ). though, in sum and overlooking the entire research field and its contributions to knowledge on support structures in higher education concerning sexual harassment, it seems to be a lack of clear research support for a majority of existing measures actually having the intended effects (cf. also hunt et al. ). other organizational factors often overlooked in research on preventing sexual harassment in higher education are different organizational factors. instead, there is a strong focus on individual experiences and procedures for case management. in the larger field of gender and organizations, the structural, institutional, and relational aspects of organizations are of course addressed as f. bondestam and m. lundqvist key aspects of transforming practices in different respects (acker , ). but there are quite few research publications on sexual harassment in higher education suggesting organizational structures are pivotal for preventing sexual harassment. one reason for this seems to be the fact that research on sexual harassment more broadly has largely developed separately and not in parallel with other related research fields (lee ; mueller, de coster, and estes ). compensating for this relative lack of research resources, we complemented the review by taking part of adjacent research on organiz- ational perspectives on preventing sexual harassment in large organizations with simi- larities to the higher education sector. summing up these research studies, certain organization-specific features are of strong relevance for prevention, of which some of the more pronounced are: . passive leadership increases the risk for both male and female employees of being sub- jected to sexual harassment, while clear and active leadership which demonstrates that sexual harassment will not be tolerated prevents sexual harassment (lee ; offermann, malamut, and murphy ; settles et al. ), . structural characteristics of organizations that are expected to produce increased job satisfaction and engagement also reduce the incidence of sexual harassment (ollo- lópez and nuñez ; timmerman and bajema ), . the type of contract that employees work under is related to their risk of being subjected to sexual harassment, where more secure jobs result in a reduced risk of victimization (hennekam and bennett ; mueller, de coster, and estes ), . well-integrated, structurally egalitarian workplaces where women and men share power and leadership equally prevents sexual harassment; women in male-dominated work- places are at greater risk of sexual harassment (cogin and fish ; also cf. buchanan et al. ), and . efforts to recruit, retain and promote women prevents sexual harassment (kabat-farr, cortina, and kovera ). finally, the aspect of bystanders (individuals witnessing sexual harassment, not/inter- vening as incidents occur and/or potential perpetrators) is also an important feature among organizational factors relevant for prevention of sexual harassment in higher edu- cation. the likelihood of taking action and intervening as a bystander when sexual harass- ment occurs is based on gender, sexuality, social class and perceived similarity in terms of position within the organization (dessel, goodman, and woodford ). the impor- tance of bystanders are, according to evidence-based longitudinal studies, crucial in pre- ventive work and systematic bystander programmes can evidently decrease the prevalence of sexual harassment in higher education (coker, cook-craig, and williams ; coker et al. , ). the demands on, or expectations of, bystanders should be systematically included in the formulation of policies and different training efforts (mcdonald, charlesworth, and graham , ). perhaps the most important aspect of bystander research is the acknowledged view on what is at stake when not addres- sing bystanders in preventive work on sexual harassment. the absence of efforts targeting individuals who belong to the majority culture can itself create a situation that normalizes sexual harassment (bowes-sperry and o’leary-kelly ). european journal of higher education research research on sexual harassment in higher education has several challenges concerning inadequate definitions, samples, survey methods and underreporting. generally, quanti- tative cross-sectional studies on prevalence dominate the international research field but often lack coherent theoretical perspectives. instead, research is foremost conducted based on national legal definitions of sexual harassment. a majority of peer-reviewed articles are published in english, use empirical data from usa and, to a certain extent, other english-speaking countries. more than half of the top-ranked peer-reviewed articles are based on limited and uncontrolled cross-sectional data, lack randomized samples and, to some extent, have inadequate statistical analysis. research is often characterized by context-specific empirical studies, inadequate theorization of research questions and methodology, mainly juridical conceptualizations of sexual harassment, and a simplistic, binary understanding of gender as such. as a contrast to the research field in general, some of the recent qualitative studies are based on feminist theories on violence, feminist sociology, gender studies and organizational theory. in research on prevention, though, this is not the case as the link to knowledge about violence in general and violence prevention in particular is weak. as in much of the research field in general, the perspective of the perpetrator is absent also in research on preven- tion. research on bystander intervention programmes is a relatively new field of rel- evance for developing systematic preventive efforts. in sum, some main recommendations for future research are: . there is a need to reinforce the methodological quality of quantitative research on sexual harassment in higher education, in particular using random sampling, control groups, longitudinal cohorts and longer follow-up periods (anderson and whiston ; mcdonald ). . standardized definitions of different types of sexual harassment and sexual violence may facilitate the understanding of prevalence and differences in prevalence and the design of suitable preventive measures (fedina, holmes, and backes ). . a broader global representation in research on sexual harassment in higher education is recommended, especially research from non-english-speaking parts of the world, com- parative studies of different countries, and development of inter-cultural research pro- jects involving different regions (henning et al. ; mcdonald ; willness, steel, and lee ). . the focus of future research should be more on preventive work and the effects of pre- ventive measures. a critical factor for developing preventive strategies is studying the underlying processes of sexual harassment, including the characteristics and incentives of perpetrators (anderson and whiston ; vladutiu, martin, and macy ; voth schrag ). . intersectional perspectives that include experiences of minority groups are rec- ommended, both in relation to assessing the effectiveness of preventive measures and in relation to prevalence. it also relates to questions of methodology, where more atten- tion should be paid to ensuring the selection for studies of sexual harassment and sexual violence corresponds to the diversity that exists within higher education institutions (anderson and whiston ; fedina, holmes, and backes ; voth schrag ). f. bondestam and m. lundqvist discussion in this section, we start out from the content of the above presentation of results and focus on discussing broader aspects of the research field as such, especially the use of concepts, if there is an ongoing ‘scientification’ of experiences of sexual harassment, and finally the idea of developing preventive measures. when examining the development of concepts and theoretical investments over time in the research field as a whole, it is striking how a gradual reduction of the distance between emerging legal definitions and the scientific definitions is occurring. this is seen as a desir- able development, but foremost it is an indirect effect. the latter means, in short, that the research-based approaches, by gradually subordinating themselves to legal demands for ‘usefulness’ and other realistic demands, become ever more repetitive instead of being explorative, constructive, challenging and curiously asking. of course, this is what primar- ily characterizes the initial and often expansive phase of a scientific field; it is an expression of well-known principles for how scientific fields establish a normative legitimacy for a specific view of knowledge (kuhn ). another tendency seen over time is a wish to establish a common understanding of sexual harassment. this applies in particular the ambition to reach a consensus around a common concept definition of sexual harassment, irrespective of situation, form of exposure, national context, and so forth. this is done primarily by producing, testing and developing various models, tests and scales. in particular, the emergence and impor- tance of the seq test for the discourse in usa could be worth an analytical section itself (cf. gutek, murphy, and douma ). what is striking to follow is how normative scales emerge and become established, with a strong leaning towards several traditional constituents of a positivistic epistemology. this develops into a ‘contest’ in the intersec- tion between feminist theory, claiming the need for critical perspectives on power and violence on the one hand, and the wish to claim legitimacy through practices within a discourse of normal science (objectivity) to give sexual harassment validity on the other. this tendency is particularly expressed in research articles published during and . because of this development, the increasingly established idea during the s of testing how subjects relate to understandings of harassing situations, rather than asking about actual exposure, is a way of challenging the stability of notions of sexual harassment. by shifting the ambition to ‘scientify’ the multi-faceted, lived experiences into a conceptual homogenous object that can be manipulated and measured, the latter has achieved a gradual ‘de-radicalisation’ of discourses on violence and exposure. when fully relevant cri- ticism of cross-sectional studies and non-parametric tests on non-randomized samples are put forward, this can thus just as well be read as a science theory battle, where the con- ditions themselves are seldom in the limelight. at the same time, the top-ranked peer-reviewed articles from the last few years can be read as a counter-movement, or a recapture of multi-disciplinary and theory-driven research into exposure, that gains renewed attention through several different strategies in the research field. the broadening of exposure from dating violence and sexual assault on campus between heterosexual students into sexuality and race/ethnicity/skin colour, online exposure and in other arenas is taking place in parallel, but are also actual components of various analyses, in the selection of respondents, in a theoretical european journal of higher education pre-understanding of the diversity of exposure. apparently, these concepts and approaches are gaining ground in the research field. when it comes to the issue of preventive measures against sexual harassment in higher education, it seems as if the current paths for reducing prevalence and offering victims reparation lack research-based support. what has been done to prevent sexual harassment in higher education to this point has not been sufficient, nor effective, and too much centred on the individual and without follow-up or research-based evaluation. preventive efforts in the future need to look beyond narrow legal and bureaucratic understandings of sexual harassment in order to build resilient organizations through experience-based knowledge of both practitioners in the field and victims to sexual harassment. it is time to turn from unavailing policies to actual reparative measures, from occasional training sessions to bystander intervention programmes, from case management to actually target- ing perpetrators with sanctions. foremost, what is at stake is a shift in perspective on what constitutes the problem of sexual harassment as such, otherwise preventive measures will continue on the current path of reiterating polices and training. sexual harassment is a phenomenon made legit- imate and normalized through several different processes of neutralization (husu ) and are in fact made possible through precarious working conditions, higher education being organized hierarchically, a lack of active leadership, the ongoing favorization of toxic academic masculinities, biased and unjust competition for research funding, and a societal normalization of gender-based violence. therefore, the solutions to sexual harass- ment in higher education is not more of the same; it rather implies restructuring working conditions in higher education, challenging toxic academic masculine cultures, deciding on bold economic and social reforms counteracting intersectional inequalities, and not the least strong incentives in all parts of society combatting men’s violence against women. conclusions through comprehensive, systematic literature searches and summaries of existing research and brief analytical samples, a picture has been drawn of a very urgent research field as well as a major and diversified area of important knowledge. this systematic review tries to embody a problem that in its form, content and consequences constitute one of the major challenges to an inclusive work and study environment in higher education. this is a problem that also shines a light on the need for developing new and innovative preven- tive methods and relevant support structures, reliable measuring methods and relevant theoretical perspectives, as well as the importance of refined and changed legislation and legal practice. it is also a problem that clearly reflects academic culture as a dysfunc- tional, hierarchical structure and the inability of every current higher education system to address its own shortcomings. the published research evidence suggests that prevalence of sexual harassment among students is reported by on average one out of four female students, but when adding exposure to other forms of sexual violence the numbers double. there are multiple and severe consequences of sexual harassment to individuals, but the effects on quality in research and education are not addressed. the supposed effects of major preventive measures has not been evaluated in research and as research often explores quantitative, juridical and individual aspects of sexual harassment in higher education, there is a f. bondestam and m. lundqvist continuous lack of qualitative and intersectional approaches and perspectives. these aspects definitively call for strategic and targeted research funding initiatives. for a long time, sexual harassment was a problem without name (mackinnon ). today, after decades of research, a multiplicity of concepts and theories, policies and pre- ventive practices, and experience-based knowledge is growing and is continuously refined. overall, sexual harassment is a named and framed problem on which we know quite a lot, although there still are several research questions to pursue. this research review is a con- tribution to what must be a joint striving to expunge sexual harassment in higher edu- cation specifically and sexualized violence more generally. we do believe critical knowledge is a prerequisite for change, and hope asking for ‘the impossible in order to obtain the possible is not always counterproductive’ (arendt , ). note . kvinnsam is the national resource library for gender studies in sweden (www.ub.gu.se/ kvinn/), which manages the women’s history collections and a literature database with gender science references from the collection of the university of gothenburg library. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). funding this project was supported by the swedish research council and the swedish council for higher education. notes on contributors fredrik bondestam is currently the director of the swedish secretariat for gender research at the university of gothenburg (www.genus.gu.se). he holds a phd in sociology ( , uppsala univer- sity) with a focus on gender equality and gender mainstreaming in academia. his research focus is on higher education in various respects, primarily organizational change, feminist pedagogy, sexual harassment, and gender mainstreaming in theory and practice. as research leader at the center for gender research, uppsala university, he developed new gender perspectives on the management, governance and organization of higher education within the framework of an excellence pro- gramme financed by the swedish research council. since , fredrik has worked at the univer- sity of gothenburg with several tasks, for example managing the government assignment on gender mainstreaming swedish universities during - . he has a long experience from various expert assignments within research and higher education policy, with a special focus on gender equality in academia, and is involved in several eu networks on gender in research and education. maja lundqvist is currently working as an analyst at the swedish secretariat for gender research at the university of gothenburg (www.genus.gu.se). she holds a ma in gender studies ( , stock- holm university) with a focus on intersectionality. since , maja has worked at the university of gothenburg with several different tasks, including project management in a close cooperation with the gender research field in sweden. since , she has focused on the issue of sexual harassment in the higher education sector, resulting in two international research reviews. maja has also been responsible for conducting and analysing a survey on european level on the topic sexual harassment in the higher education sector, which focuses policies, measures and activities on national level in the member states and associated countries. she has experience of expert assignments at the european journal of higher education http://www.ub.gu.se/kvinn/ http://www.ub.gu.se/kvinn/ http://www.genus.gu.se http://www.genus.gu.se national, european and international arena within sexual harassment in work life in general, and in the higher education sector specifically. orcid fredrik bondestam http://orcid.org/ - - - references acker, j. . “hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: a theory of gendered organizations.” gender & society ( ): – . acker, j. . “inequality regimes: gender, class and race in organizations.” gender & society ( ): – . adams, j., j. kottke, and j. padgitt. . “sexual harassment of university-students.” journal of college student development : – . aggarwal, a., and m. gupta. . sexual harassment in the workplace. vancouver, bc: butterworths. anderson, l. a., and s. c. whiston. . “sexual assault education programs: a meta-analytic examination of their effectiveness.” psychology of women quarterly 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harassment policies: individual versus collective strategies.” review of policy research : – . european journal of higher education 	abstract 	introduction 	method 	data collection and analysis 	results 	top-ranked peer-reviewed articles 	prevalence 	consequences 	prevention 	policy 	education and training 	case management 	support structures 	other organizational factors 	research 	discussion 	conclusions 	note 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	orcid 	references << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left /calgrayprofile () /calrgbprofile (adobe rgb \ \ ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /off /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy 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ЗАРИЋ Министерство културе и информисања Републике Србије, Београд doi . /kultura z УДК . : ( . ) . . ( . ) . :[ . : . ( . )” ” прегледни рад УЛОГА КРИТИЧКОГ МИШЉЕЊА У ДИГИТАЛНОЈ МЕДИЈСКОЈ КУЛТУРИ И М Н И Т Е Т А С аж етак: Проглашење ванредног стања у Србији узроковано светском пандемијом КОВИД- вирусом, довела је до највеће светске кризе од Другог светског рата. Увођењем мера каран­ тина током пролећа . године, дигитална трансформација у многим друштвима ј е убрзана, а значај медијске и информационе писмености у новонасталим околностима јасно је истакнут. Н а­ чини информисања и медијске навике грађана су се мењале, уведен ј е р ад од куће, онлајн настава, а електронска куповина осликава- ла је нову реалност. Дигитални простор постајао је презасићен информативним, образовним, комерцијалним садржајима и многе институције културе и уметности учиниле су доступним диги- тализоване своје архиве, фундусе, вредности, баштину. Интерак- ција у јавном, дигиталном простору, бивала ј е све интензивнија, а критичко мишљење афирмисало се као неопходност за јачање дигиталног „имунитета” сваког појединца, али и друштва. Са појавом пандемије паралелно ј е дошло до појаве инфодемије, која ј е пред грађане ставила задатак за интензивним критичким пре- испитивањем нове дигиталне медијске културе, самог појма ме- дија, пратеће регулативе и медијске политике генерално. У овом раду представљене су стратешке активности Министарства МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ културе и информисања, на плану развоја и унапређења медијске и информационе писмености на националном и међународном плану, као и сарадње са релевантним телима Европске уније и УНЕСКО- ом (unesco). К љ учне речи: медијска и информациона писменост, критич- ко мишљење, аудиовизуелна политика, умрежавање, заговарање, Европска унија, УНЕСКО Медијска и информациона писменост има суштинску уло- гу у оснаживању грађана, њихових вештина и знања која им омогућавају да се у новом, конвергентном, медијском и информационом окружењу, креативно изразе и квалитетно информишу, да разумеју информације, ко их креира и за- што их шири, да лако претражују и функционално користе образовне, културне и комерцијалне садржаје. Различитим медијским садржајима можемо приступати: путем традици- оналних медија, у форми услуга на захтев, веб портала, дру- штвених мрежа, платформи за дељење видеа и апликација. Нова дигитална медијска култура подразумева интеракти- ван приступ и омогућава ангажованост грађана, те тако по­ држава активно грађанство у демократском друштву. Данас постоји снажна друштвена повезаност која се посебно на друштвеним мрежама огледа у друштвеном активизму из- недреном из различитих покрета (попут #јатакође (#metoo), #црниживотивреде (#blacklivesmatter) #онзању (#heforshe) и других) који у реалности могу да резултирају како пози- тивним, тако и негативним ефектима. Јавно изношење или не изношење ставова је константно под лупом друшвених група до те мере, да се у последње две године у дигиталној медијској култури појавила „култура отказивања праћења” (cancel culture). Овај појам преузет из популарне културе односи се на начин понашања у друштву или групи, посеб- но на друштвеним медијима, који је такав да је уобичајено да се у потпуности одбаци, искључи или престане да прати она особа, бренд, компанија или организација која је изнела увредљив став, супротно уверење или се уздржала од по- државања одређеног покрета или идеје. Професорка Уни- верзитета у Мичигену, Лиза Накамура (lisa nakamura) која проучава однос дигиталних медија, расе и рода овај фено­ мен назива „културним бојкотом.” . За популаризацију ове појаве и преиспитивање њеног значаја, одређене заслуге Култура отказивања праћења, шта је и како је настала?, Телеграф (the telegraph), . . ; доступно на линку https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ music/what-to-listen-to/cancel-culture-did-begin/, приступљено . . . године. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ припадају и актуелном америчком председнику , те можемо јасно видети како је улога дигиталних медија у друштвеном, културном, економском и политичком животу у последњих пар година знатно ојачала. Стога, за грађане који се срећу са изазовом дигиталног медијског окружења, од суштинског значаја је развијање и неговање критичког мишљења, што је и један од предуслова за стицање дигиталног имунитета, односно вештине разумевања контекста и изградње система одбране и заштите од дезинформација, лажних вести, по- тенцијално штетних медијских садржаја, дискриминације, говора мржње, стереотипа, насиља генерално и посебно у дигиталном медијском окружењу. Јачање дигиталног иму­ нитета може допринети позитивном друштвеном активизму, као и доношењу одлука које унапређују квалитет живота у економском, друштвеном, културном и политичком смислу. У смислу реченог посебно је важно скренути пажњу да би надлежни државни органи требало да омогуће развијање и јачање критичког мишљења у дигиталноЈ медијској култури кроз креирање квалитетне јавне политике у области медиј- ске писмености. Тај процес поразумева да креатор има пр- венствено визију, а затим и стратегију која ће осигурати да активности доведу до испуњења њених циљева. Пракса др- жава чланица Европске уније (european union), као и међу- народних организација попут УНЕСКО-а или Савета Евро­ пе (council o f europe) и њихових чланица у погледу креира- ња јавне политике у области медијске писмености врло је различита. Мали је број земаља које имају дефинисан посе- бан стратешки акт у области медијске писмености. Већина земаља преузима и адаптира међународне оквире те страте- шка опредељења са овог нивоа уграђују у национална стра- тешка документа из различитих области попут: образовања, информисања и медија, информационог друштва, омладине и слично. На терену, овакав интегративни приступ омогућа- ва различитим актерима да се даље баве развојем и унапре- ђењем ове области и Влада Републике Србије је . јануара . године усвојила Стратегију развоја система јавног ин- формисања у Републици Србији за период - . го­ дина у оквиру које је једно поглавље посвећено медијској и дигиталној писмености. „Доналд Трамп је краљ културе отказивања праћења”, Вашингтон по­ сту (the washington post), . . . године, доступно на https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /cancel-culture-trump-mcenany/; приступљено . . . године. Стратегија развоја система јавног информисања у Републици Србији за период - ; доступно на https://www.media.srbija.gov.rs/medsrp/ dokumenti/medijska_strategija _cyr.pdf, приступљено . . . го­ дине. https://www https://www.media.srbija.gov.rs/medsrp/ МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ У претходне две године Министарство културе и нформи- сања је са различитим државним институцијама, мултила- тералним и билатералним партнерима радило на унапређе- њу ове области како у оквиру формалног, тако и у оквиру неформалног образовања. Када је у питању формално образовање, постоји велика по­ треба, а и многе иницијативе су већ покренуте, да медијска писменост буде уграђена у образовни систем, међутим не кроз један редовни предмет. Медијска писменост је тран- сверзална компетенција и у складу са најбољим праксама замаља чланица Европске уније, а које такође подржавају и међународне организације попут УНЕСКО-а, препорука је интегрисање медијске писмености у све нивое формалног образовања, укључујући и високошколско образовање, и то кроскурикуларно. Директан ефекат остваривања циљева претходне Стратегије развоја система јавног информисања до . године, било је увођење медијског описмењавања у формално образовање, кроз укупно три лекције у окви­ ру предмета Грађанско васпитање (изборни предмет) и Ма- терњег језика. У процесу увођења медијске писмености у образовни процес значајну улогу је имао Завод за унапре- ђивање образовања и васпитања који је интензивно радио на увођењу медијске писмености у школске програме и то кроз посебне предмете, као и у оквиру постојећих пред­ мета кроз развијање посебне компетенције. Тако је уведен изборни предмет под називом „Језик, медији и култура” у средње школе од септембра . године и према досада- шњим анализама веома радо га млади бирају. Такође, Мини­ старство трговине, туризма и телекомуникација, у чијој се надлежности налази област развоја принципа информацио- ног друштва, доста ради на развоју и унапређењу дигитал- не писмености кроз формално образовање, с обзиром да су те компетенције саставни сегмент ширих компетенција ме- дијске писмености. Још од . године ово министарство спроводи едукативну кампању „ИТ караван” намењену уче- ницима основних школа, њиховим родитељима и наставни- цима и до . године програм је одржан у школа, а учествовало је . деце и . родитеља. Ови подаци садржани су у Стратегији развоја дигиталних вештина у Ре- публици Србији за период од . до . године која је израђена у оквиру поменутог ресора, а која је такође обу- хватила активности и инициативе из области медијске Стратегија развоја дигиталних вештина у Републици Србији за пери­ од од . до . године; доступно на https://www.pravno-informa- cioni-sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg; приступљено . . . године. https://www.pravno-informa-cioni-sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg https://www.pravno-informa-cioni-sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ писмености. У духу Париске декларације о медијској и ин- формационој писмености у дигиталном добу, веома је ва­ жно да се ови напори различитих ресора, који се баве обла- стима попут медија, културе, образовања, омладине и ин- формационог друштва, даље развијају као међусобно пове- зани, и да кроз креирање синергије примењујемо холистич- ки приступ за стицање компетенција медијске писмености. Квалитетно планирање и спровођење активности предвиђе- но документима јавних политика захтева континуирану ин- терресорну сарадњу и повезаност са свим заинтересованим странама у области медијске писмености. На националном нивоу, Министарство културе и информисања је . го­ дине иницирало снажније и умрежено повезивање актера у области медијске писмености кроз организовање састанака координације два пута годишње, у циљу размене информа- ција и координације активности. На овај начин, представ- ници ресорних министарстава, институција, регулаторних и саморегулаторних тела, медијских и новинарских удру- жења, међународних организација, академске заједнице, цивилног друштва, пројеката и експерти имали су прилику да размене информације о трендовима и активностима које спроводе у овој области, да граде синергију, а квалитетне пројектне идеје које су на крају пројектног циклуса могле су бити преузете од стране заинтересованих актера. У окви- ру наведене платформе, актери могу електронским путем да размењују информације и лакше подигну видљивост својих активности. Овакво умрежавање пружа такође и прилику да се открију теме у оквиру медијске писмености око којих по- стоји консензус и отпочне јавно заговарање, што поспешује системски развој области. Системски развој медијске писмености има за циљ оспо- собљавање грађана Србије свих узраста и старосног доба да користе медије и медијске садржаје на најцелисходнији и критички начин, да разумеју садржај медијских порука и процес њиховог настајања, као и да у том процесу и сами активно учествују. Такав подухват подразумева укључивање што већег броја партнера који би спроводили координисане активности у оквиру формалног и неформалног образова- ња. Са једне стране, увођењем медијске писмености у пре- дуниверзитетско образовање, генерације које буду стасава- ле имаће капацитет да свој дигитални имунитет одржавају и јачају. Образовање које омогућава медијску писменост, обухвата права и интересе деце и младих, њихову заштиту https://en.unesco.org/news/paris-declaration-media-and-information-lite- racy-adopted; приступљено . . . године https://en.unesco.org/news/paris-declaration-media-and-information-lite-racy-adopted https://en.unesco.org/news/paris-declaration-media-and-information-lite-racy-adopted МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ од штетних садржаја и остала лична права у сфери јавног комуницирања. Такође, неопходно је системски увести ме- дијску писменост у вискошколско образовање, посебно у областима које су у вези са новинарством, људским прави­ ма, социологијом, креативним индустријама и економије, уметношћу што би утицало да се у пракси ове области уна- пређују. Са друге стране, грађанима средње и старије доби, морају бити омогућене платформе и активности за јачање знања и вештина медијске писмености, које такође тре­ ба да буду укључене у образовање одраслих и целоживот­ но учење. Дакле неопходно је да јавне политике у области медијске писмености омогуће стварање партнерстава међу кључним актерима и креирање спектра активности на ко- јим а ће се грађани, према циљним групама, упознавати са врстама, начином рада и правним статусом медија, њихо- вим функцијама, обавезама и одговорношћу, продукцијом садржаја, могућностима за интерактивно и партиципативно конзумирање садржаја. Још једна од активности Министарства културе и информи- сања, настала . године са задатком развоја медијске пи­ смености кроз формално образовање, је формирање Радне групе за израду Приручника за унапређење и развој медиј- ске писмености у предуниверзитетском образовању. Како би Приручник био високо квалитетан, и како би се осигу- рао консензус око његове примене, Министарство је коор- динирало радом радне групе коју су чинили: представници Министарства културе и информисања, Министарства про­ свете, науке и технолошког развоја, Министарства тргови- не, туризма и телекомуникација, Министарства омладине и спорта, Покрајинског секретариата за образовање, про­ писе, управу и националне мањине - националне заједни- це, Регулаторног тела за електронске медије, Националног просветног савета Републике Србије, Завода за унапређење образовања и васпитања, Завода за вредновање квалитета образовања и васпитања, Јавне медијске установе „Радио Телевизија Србије” и Јавне медијске установе „Радио Теле- визија Војводине”. Рад радне групе подржан је кроз проје- кат „Подршка медијским реформама”, који је финансирала Делегација Европске уније, те су експерти који су радили на материјалу чинили део ауторског тима . Како би одабране теме биле тестиране и како би се проценила њихова реле- ватност за децу и младе, Министарство културе је спровело два пута годишње радионице у предшколским и школским http://podrskamedijima.rs/odrzan-sastanak-radne-grupe-ministarstva-kultu- re-i-informisanja-za-izradu-primcnika-za-unapredenje-i-razvoj-medijske-p- ismenosti/ приступљено . . . године. http://podrskamedijima.rs/odrzan-sastanak-radne-grupe-ministarstva-kultu-re-i-informisanja-za-izradu-primcnika-za-unapredenje-i-razvoj-medijske-p-ismenosti/ http://podrskamedijima.rs/odrzan-sastanak-radne-grupe-ministarstva-kultu-re-i-informisanja-za-izradu-primcnika-za-unapredenje-i-razvoj-medijske-p-ismenosti/ http://podrskamedijima.rs/odrzan-sastanak-radne-grupe-ministarstva-kultu-re-i-informisanja-za-izradu-primcnika-za-unapredenje-i-razvoj-medijske-p-ismenosti/ МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ установама на основу чијих анализа је радна група проми- шљала теме односно садржај приручника . У неколико фа­ за, текст приручника био је прослеђиван актерима у оквиру мреже за медијску писменост, са жељом да се добију и у текст уграде коментари и сугестије стручне заједнице. При- ручник је тренутно у фази дизајна и имаће своју дигиталну верзију - дигитални портал. Такође је као дидактичко сред­ ство коришћена модерна игра „Луеду” која представља фу- зију онлајн и офлајн света, игра се на табли путем бесплатне апликацје и у којој ће бити похрањено питања различи­ те тежине из Приручника. Циљ је да се у школској . го- дини Приручник уз ово дидактичко средство нађе у библио- текама предуниверзитетских установа широм Србије, те да на тај начин учитељи могу да га користе у настави, као и у боравку, а такође деца ће моћи да га позајме из библиотеке и са родитељима уче кроз игру код куће. У септембру . године биће спроведена кампања коју ће, у циљу подизања свести јавности, заједно спровести Министарство, ЕУ инфо центар и ЕУ пројекат „Подршка медијским реформама” . Део кампање представља и реализација играно-документарно- анимираног телевизијског серијала о медијској писмености који се ослања на образовне садржаје из предуниверзитет- ског приручника за медијску писменост. Телевизијска серија од осамнаест епизода превасходно је намењена деци и мла- дима. ТВ серијал је намењен образовно-научном програму Радио-телевизије Србије и програму Радио-телевизије Вој- водине на којем ће бити емитован на језицима национал- них мањина, а такође ће бити доступан у дигиталној верзији приручника у ресурсима за васпитаче, наставнике и стручне сараднике. Поменута кампања ће за циљ имати и креира- ње интересовања код васпитача, наставника и стручних са- радника за примену Приручника и учешће у обукама које Министарство планира да заједно са развојним партнерима осмисли према Приручнику и спроведе. Препознајући изазове са којима су се грађани сусрели у марту, када је отпочело ванредно стање, Министарство кул- туре и информисања је, у сарадњи са ЕУ инфо центром и пројектом „Подршка медијским реформама”, покренуло серију вебинара „Приче из карантина” на теме везане за нову дигиталну реалност, медијске навике и праћење ме- дијских садржаја, посебно на интернету, током пандемије КОВИД- . Будући да су статистике овог серијала показале да је више од особа пратило сваки од вебинара, као и да је у просеку укупних прегледа било око по вебинару, http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/pocela-serija-radionica-u-okviru- evropske-nedelje-medijske-pismenosti; приступљено . . . године. http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/pocela-serija-radionica-u-okviru-evropske-nedelje-medijske-pismenosti http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/pocela-serija-radionica-u-okviru-evropske-nedelje-medijske-pismenosti МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ у истој организации од августа до октобра ове године ре- ализоваће се серијал вебинара „Дигитални имунитет - од дигиталне цуцле до дигиталног бунтовника” . Теме вебинара засноване су на Приручнику за медијску писменост за пре- дуниверзитетско образовање које је припремило Министа- сртво културе и информисања са ЕУ пројектом „Подршка медијским реформама” . Овај серијал вебинара дизајниран је тако да је прилагођен је породицама, деци и младима различитих старосних доби - почев од оних најмлађих, па до средњошколаца, и управо је циљ да се разговара о но­ во] дигиталној медијској култури и навикама које стварамо. Серијал је . августа . отворен вебинаром „Дигитална цуцла” који је био намењен родитељима деце до четири го­ дине, а пратило га је више од особа и остварено је скоро прегледа у првих сата. Креирање јавних политика у области медијске писмености умногоме зависи од трендова креирања политика на међуна- родном плану. Област медијске писмености је од великог ин- тересовања како за Европску унију (european union), тако и за међународне организације попут Савета Европе, ОЕБС-а (osce), Уједињених Нација (united nations), УНЕСКО-а УНИЦЕФ-а (unicef). Иако се појам медијске и инфор- мационе писмености, као и препоруке за њен развој и уна- пређење врло често јављају у многим документима јавних политика различитих међународних организација из раз- личитих области попут медија и информационог друштва, људских права или примера ради јединственог дигиталног тржишта, до сада не постоји глобални документ јавне поли­ тике у области медијске писмености ниједне међународне организације. На иницијативу Министарства културе и информисања, а у сарадњи са Министарством спољних послова, Министар- ством просвете, науке и технолошког развоја и УНЕСКО- ом, . и . септембра . године, одржан је у Београду „Међународни експертски састанак о медијској и информа- ционој писмености” . Поред рада на ажурирању Приручни- ка за медијску писменост за наставнике који је УНЕСКО објавио . године на којем је радило тридесет експерата у области медија, образовања, библиотекарства, гејминга Вебинар „Дигитална цуцла” у организации ЕУ инфо центра; доступан на: https://euinfo.rs/kako-digitalna-cucla-utice-na-razvoj-deteta/; присту- пљено . . . године. Стратегијаразвоја дигиталних вештинау Републици Србији за период од . до . године; доступно на https://www.pravno-informacioni- sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg; при- ступљено . . . године. https://euinfo.rs/kako-digitalna-cucla-utice-na-razvoj-deteta/ https://www.pravno-informacioni-sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg https://www.pravno-informacioni-sistem.rs/slglasnikportal/eli/rep/sgrs/vlada/strategija/ / / /reg МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ и информационих и комуникационих технологија из целог света, формиран је Комитет за израду „Београдских смерни- ца за Нацрт глобалних стандарда за курикулуме за медијску и информациону писменост”. Комитет је заједно са експер- тима израдио „Београдске смернице”, а документ је након састанка у Београду објављен на сајту УНЕСКО-а, чиме је започета јавна расправа која ће трајати до септембра . године. У оквиру заседања Генералне скупштине Унеска у Паризу, у новембру . године, одржан je Министарски панел Медијска и информациона писменост и игре на коме је представљен излазни документ са београдског Међуна- родног састанка „Београдске препоруке за Нацрт глобалних стандарда за смернице за курикулуме за медијску и инфор- мациону писменост” и том приликом су земље чланице позване да својим коментарима и сугестијама унапреде до­ кумент. УНЕСКО је организовао јавну расправу поменутог документа на „Дванаестом форуму јавних политика” у де- цембру . године у Дубаију, међутим након тога уместо планираних састанака и јавних расправа у различитим ре- гионима због пандемије настављено је са одржавањем он- лајн дискусија и састанака. Комитет оформљен у Београду све време ради на унапређивању „Београдских смерница” будући да је последњи састанак и објављивање првог гло- балног документа јавне политике у области медијске и ин- формационе писмености планиран да се одржи . године у Београду. Том приликом ће бити представљен и ажуриран УНЕСКО приручник о медијској и информационој писме­ ности у односу на актуелни из . године. Генерална ди- ректорка Унеска, Одри Азуле (audrey azouley), која је по­ водом поменутог првог Међународног састанка боравила у Београду, најавила је овај вишегодишњи процес и послала снажну поруку са панела који је био отворен за јавност о из- узетном значају медијске и информационе писмености. Она је истакла да: „Медијска и информациона писменост пред- ставља једну од основних димензија моралног и грађанског образовања. О на је такође и основно право сваког грађанина у свакој земљи света и тиме свакоме омогућава да зашти- ти своју приватност и пронађе своје место у друштву чије технолошко окружење се све брже и брже мења.” Квалитетно стратешко промишљање и креирање стра- тешких принципа условљено је познавањем прилика и https://en.unesco.org/news/joumeying-world-games-media-and-mforma- tion-literacy; приступљено . . . године. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/belgrade_recommendations_on_ draft_global_standards_for_mil_curricula_guidelines_ _november.pdf; приступљено . . . године. https://en.unesco.org/news/joumeying-world-games-media-and-mforma-tion-literacy https://en.unesco.org/news/joumeying-world-games-media-and-mforma-tion-literacy https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/belgrade_recommendations_on_ МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ трендова у области медијске писмености и разменом знања искустава са колегама из других земаља и различитих међу- народних организација. Кроз рад у радним телима Европске комисије и међународних организација попут Конакт коми­ тета за Директиву о аудиовизуелним медијским услугама Европске комисије , Надзорног комитета за информационо друштво и медије Савета Европе , Имплементационих са- танака Људске димензије у оквиру ОЕБС-а или Комисије за информисање и комуникацијеУНЕСКО-а , Министаство је имало прилике да да допринос изради међународних до- кумената јавних политика који обухватају медијску писме- ност, а такође и да прати трендове у овој области и размењу- је искуства са колегама. Веома је значајна појава интензив- није сарадње у последњих пар година неких од наведених комитета што доприноси учвршћивању ставова и креирању спроводљивијих јавних политика, чему је вероватно допри- нела и чињеница да је Европска комисија, често веома зна- чајан финансијски партнер свих наведених међународних организација у спровођењу међународних пројеката. Крајем септембра . године, на позив УНЕСКО-а и Владе Швед- ске, у Гетеборгу, на Конференции о медијској и информа- ционој писмености, Министарство културе и информисања представило је примере добре праксе у креирању политика медијске и информационе писмености . Када је креирање јавних политика у питању, неопходно је истаћи значај про- цеса Европских интеграција који утиче на хармонизовање правног оквира са правним тековинама Европске уније и да је у оквиру поменутог процеса медијска писменост као појам уведена у Закон о јавном информисању и медијима , Закон о јавним медијским сервисима , као и у два закона из области образовања. Такође, значајна средства су пову- чена из ИПА фондова која су кроз пројекте, програмирана од стране Министарства културе и информисања, усмерена на унапређење медијске писмености у домену формалног и https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/avmsd-contact-committee; приступано сајту . . . године. https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/cdmsi; приступљено . . . године. https://www.osce.org/odihr/hdim; приступљено . . . године. https://en.unesco.org/generalconference/ /ci; приступљено . . . године. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/gmw _feature_events_agenda. pdf; приступљено . . . године. https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_javnom_informisanju_i_medijima. html; приступљено . . . године. https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_javnim_medijskim_servisima. html; приступљено . . . године. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/avmsd-contact-committee https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/cdmsi https://www.osce.org/odihr/hdim https://en.unesco.org/generalconference/ /ci https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/gmw _feature_events_agenda https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_javnom_informisanju_i_medijima https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_javnim_medijskim_servisima МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ неформалног образовања. Такође остварена су партнерства са програмима попут Креативне Европе (creative europe) и потпрограма Медиа (creative europe media), у области дигиталне писмености. Министарство је у оквиру прошло- годишњег Форума Креативна Европа , на позив Де- ска Креативна Европа Србија, а у сарадњи са компанијом Нордеус и Нордеус хабом организовало панел дискусију на тему „Критичко мишљење и дигитални имунитет” . Разго- варало се о променама које је технолошки напредак донео, као и о утицају дигиталног окружења на информисање, ме- дијску културу и грађане, о начинима креирања квалитетног аудиовизуелног медијског садржаја, алатима који се кори- сте у придобијању и задржавању публике, као и о начинима стимулације грађана да критички мисле, да се квалитетно информишу и активно учествују у грађанском животу. Са жељом да се додатно јачају капацитети стручне јавности и главних актера у области медијске и информационе писме­ ности, у јануару ове године, Министарство културе и ин- формисања организовало је одржавање радионице „Основи вештачке интелигенције и утицај на слободу изражавања и медијску писменост” у Београду. Будући да се међународне организације већ неко време баве регулативом која се одно- си на претраживаче, алгоритме, а да су формирани и разни међународни комитети који се баве проучавањем утицаја вештачке интелигенције на људска права, током три дана, представници институција, релулаторних и саморегула- торних тела, медијских и новинарских удружења, медија, академске заједнице, цивилног сектора, експерти, били су у прилици да се упознају са основама вештачке интелиген- ције, као и о њеним утицајима на слободу говора, медијску писменост, медије, етику и образовање. Предавачи су би­ ли еминентни стручњаци и експрерти из ове области: Игор Снуренко, Тања Мурована из УНЕСКО института у Москви, као и експерт УНЕСКА у области вештачке интелигенције Ибрахим Кушчу . http://kultura.kreativnaevropa.rs/kreativna-evropa- /o-%d %bf%d % %d %be%d %b %d % %d %b %d %bc%d % /; приступано сајту . . . године http://media.kreativnaevropa.rs/media-desk-srbija/; приступљено . . . године. http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/panel-kriticko-misljenje-i-digital- ni-imunitet-u-okviru-foruma-kreativna-evropa- ; приступљено . . . године. Емисија настала током тродневне радионице доступна на линку: https:// www.rts.rs/page/tv/sr/story/ /rts- / /nauka-u-pokretu-vestacka-in- teligencija-i-.html; приступљено сајту . . . године. http://kultura.kreativnaevropa.rs/kreativna-evropa- /o-%d %bf%d % % d http://media.kreativnaevropa.rs/media-desk-srbija/ http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/panel-kriticko-misljenje-i-digital-ni-imunitet-u-okviru-foruma-kreativna-evropa- http://www.kultura.gov.rs/cyr/aktuelnosti/panel-kriticko-misljenje-i-digital-ni-imunitet-u-okviru-foruma-kreativna-evropa- http://www.rts.rs/page/tv/sr/story/ /rts- / /nauka-u-pokretu-vestacka-in-teligencija-i-.html http://www.rts.rs/page/tv/sr/story/ /rts- / /nauka-u-pokretu-vestacka-in-teligencija-i-.html МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ Ове праксе Министарства културе и информисања су добра основа за позиционирање Србије као значајног иноватив- ног актера у медијској писмености на међународном плану, а уједно и кредибилног партнера за унапређење ове обла­ сти на националном нивоу. На позив УНЕСКО-а и Глобалне алијансе за партнерства у области медијске и информационе писмености (ГАПМИЛ), представљене су праксе из Србије у јулу ове године на вебинару у „Медијска и информацио- на писменост и јавне политике”, у овиру серијала вебинара који је ова заједница креирала као одговор на КОВИД- . Имајући у виду праксе земаља лидера у овој области, оно што је неопходно ускоро урадити јесте опсежну анализу нивоа медијске писмености по циљним групама. Такође, потребно је и да се добра пракса вишесекторског присту­ па развоју и унапређењу ове области институционализује кроз формирање једног тела које ће имати јасно дефиниса- не ингеренције и циљеве. Овакве активности предвиђене су Стратегијом развоја система јавног информисања у Репу- блици Србији за период - , а управо су таква доку­ мента јавне политике значајна као израз политичке подршке и посвећености развоју одређене области на основу којих међународна донаторска заједница креира своје приорите­ те и програмира пројекте. Будући да су потребе и смернице развоја из области медијске писмености уграђене у неколи­ ко стратешких докумената, као и да их садрже сва планска документа за програмирање међународне развојне помо- ћи, а имајући у виду и да је остварена квалитетна сарадња са мултилатералним и билатералним партнерима, можемо очекивати у наредној години још више активности разли- читих актера усмерених на развој критичког мишљења и разумевање нове дигиталне медијске културе намењених различитим циљним групама. ЛИТЕРАТУРА: Европске повеља за медијску писменост, доступно на: http://www. euromedialiteracy.eu/; приступљено . . . године. Министарство културе и информисања, доступно на http://www. kultura.gov.rs/; приступљено . . . године. Пројекат ЕУ Подршка медијским реформама доступно на: http:// www.mediafreedom.rs/; приступљено . . . године. УНЕСКО Глобална недеља медијске и информационе писмености доступно на: Линк за вебинар доступан на адреси: https://www.facebook.com/mil- clicks/videos/unesco-gapmil-webmar-on-media-and-information-lite- racy-and-public-policiespart/ /?__so__=permalink&__ rv =related videos http://www http://www http://www.mediafreedom.rs/ https://www.facebook.com/mil-clicks/videos/unesco-gapmil-webmar-on-media-and-information-lite- https://www.facebook.com/mil-clicks/videos/unesco-gapmil-webmar-on-media-and-information-lite- МАЈА Ј. ЗАРИЋ https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/globalmilweek; приступљено . . . године. maja j. zarić ministry of culture and information of the republic of serbia, belgrade the role of critical thinking in the digital media culture and stenghtening of digital immunity abstract the public health emergency and the proclaimed state o f the global pandemic caused by the covid- virus have led to the biggest world crisis since world war ii. with the introduction o f quarantine measures in spring , the digital transformation has accelerated in many societies and the importance o f media and information literacy in these new circumstances has been clearly emphasized. the pandemic has changed the information and media habits o f the citizens, work from home was introduced, online school classes became mandatory, and an uprise o f e-commerce reflected the new reality. the digital space has become oversaturated with informative, educational, commercial contents and many cultural institutions and international organizations have made their cultural heritage accessible online. interaction in the public digital space has became more and more intense, and critical thinking stood out as a necessity for strengthening the digital immunity o f each individual as well as the society. the pandemia was followed by infodemia. the information channels used by citizens point to a certain re-examination o f the new digital media culture, the very concept o f media as well as the accompanying regulations and media policy. the findings o f the paper draw attention to the media and information literacy policy framework in serbia, and review a set o f activities that the ministry o f culture and media has been conducting over the past two years on both national and international level. it describes the correlation between the framework and the practice and depicts the trends in the international policy in this field. the paper focuses on the strategic vision and provides information throughout the two- year period on setting up o f the holistic approach and setting up media literacy network o f stakeholders with the aim o f strengthening advocacy and developing o f the media literacy field. key w ords: media and information literacy, critical thinking, audio­ visual policy, digital media, advocacy, european union, unesco https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/globalmilweek sexual harassment of women in medicine: a problem for men to address launer j. postgrad med j february vol no on reflection sexual harassment of women in medicine: a problem for men to address john launer in the last few months, disclosures by prominent women in politics and enter- tainment have given the issue of sexual harassment a higher profile than ever before. the huge number of further disclosures as part of the ‘#metoo’ campaign, have made it clear that sexual harassment by men is endemic. the medical world is certainly not immune from this, as personal testimony from women doctors has shown. there has been little research into the true scale of the problem in medicine, but one system- atic review has concluded that nearly per cent of medical students and trainees of all grades experience harassment or discrimination of some kind during their training, with females being targeted more than males. consultants are the the most common perpetrators, and sexual harass- ment is the most frequent form of abuse. such harassment includes inappropriate sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, sexist jokes or slurs, the exchange of rewards for sexual favours, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature. the majority of incidents of sexual harassment appear to go unreported. this is mainly through fear of the conse- quences of protest or whistle-blowing on women’s careers. women expect their experiences of abuse to be disbelieved, dismissed as exaggeration, blamed on their own behaviour and appearance, or told they are an understood condition of career progression in their specialty. the personal and professional effects on them may be severe and enduring. meanwhile, institutional procedures to deal with griev- ances and reduce harassment are often seen as tokenistic, and attempts to tackle the problem may be ineffective. only rarely and in the most shocking instances does a female victim fully pursue her legal rights, as in the case of a senior australian oncology consultant who was sentenced to imprisonment after he invited one of his juniors to his home to discuss her career, and then drugged her wine with benzodiazepines in order to carry out an indecent assault. there is little specific guidance on effective ways of dealing with sexual harassment in medicine, but there is helpful evidence and practical experience in relation to bullying by doctors, which overlaps with sexual harassment in many ways. the crucial factor in tackling nega- tive behaviour seems to be that someone in authority in an organisation accepts that it exists on a significant scale, believes in the seriousness of the problem, and is determined to challenge it. mismatch of perceptions from experience of leading anti-bullying programmes in hospitals, i would suggest that another requirement is for leaders to become alert to the different percep- tions that people with or without power can hold of the same encounters, and the mismatch there can be between these. in the case of bullying, what some consul- tants regard as setting high standards or being firm, their juniors may experience as aggression or improper delegation. in the same way, when male clinicians consider they are indulging in harmless flirtation, women may see this as misogynistic, demeaning and scary. unless leaders recog- nise that such mismatches are common, and accept their duty to encourage the less powerful to give voice to their views (however uncomfortable these can be to hear) bullying or sexualised behaviour will remain systemic. there is a wider context to mismatches of perception around sex, and it has been the subject of a large amount of psycho- logical research outside the medical world. across most cultures, heterosexual males have a tendency to over-estimate their own attractiveness in the eyes of the opposite sex and to misinterpret women’s responses to them as signifying more sexual interest than it does. to put it bluntly, many men appear to confuse desire with desirability. one evolutionary explanation that has been proposed is that there is less risk for a man who makes a wrong assessment of an interac- tion, compared with a misjudgement by a woman, which can end in pregnancy and abandonment. one consequence of male self-deception, however, is that misconstruing a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest can end in coercion, or in some cases violence. in many cases, of course, such behaviour arises through causes that have little to do with signals and misinterpretation. these causes include engrained sexual stereotypes and expectations, a thrill in exerting power and control, and drunkenness. outside the medical world, there is now an active debate about the best forms of intervention to reduce sexual harassment and coercive behaviour by men generally. on some college campuses in the united states, there are large scale programmes to educate all men about issues of consent, although these seem to have limited impact. the idea of tailored training for men with more negative perceptions of women has also been tried, but is fraught with many challenges. a major review of the field of sexual coercion concludes, unsurprisingly, that research so far provides only ‘a preliminary foundation on which to build.’ meanwhile, one message is entirely clear, for male doctors as much as for other men: the problem of sexual harassment is the responsi- bility of men to address, and it calls for us to exercise more psychological literacy, self-awareness and restraint. acknowledgements i am grateful to dr louise stone of the australian national university, canberra, for assistance with this article. competing interests none declared. provenance and peer review commissioned; internally peer reviewed. © article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) . all rights reserved. no commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted. to cite launer j. postgrad med j ; : – . postgrad med j ; : – . doi: . /postgradmedj- - references clarke r. the nhs is not immune to sexual harassment. it happened to #metoo. guardian. https://www. theguardian. com/ society/ / nov/ / nhs- sexual- harassment- me- too (accessed dec ). jagsi r. sexual harassment in medicine - #metoo. n engl j med (epub ahead of print: dec ) doi . /nejmp . fnais n, soobiah c, chen mh, et al. harassment and discrimination in medical training: a systematic review and meta-analysis. acad med ; : – . american medical association. guidelines for establishing sexual harassment prevention and grievance procedures. jama ; : . stone le, douglas k, mitchell i, et al. sexual abuse of doctors by doctors: professionalism, complexity and the potential for healing. med j aust ; : – . babaria p, abedin s, berg d, et al. "i’m too used to it": a longitudinal qualitative study of third year female medical students’ experiences of gendered correspondence to dr john launer, health education england, london wc b dn, uk; johnlauner@ aol. com o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://p m j.b m j.co m / p o stg ra d m e d j: first p u b lish e d a s . /p o stg ra d m e d j- - o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://pmj.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /postgradmedj- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /nov/ /nhs-sexual-harassment-me-too https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /nov/ /nhs-sexual-harassment-me-too http://dx.doi.org/ . /nejmp http://dx.doi.org/ . /nejmp http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. http://dx.doi.org/ . /mja . http://pmj.bmj.com/ launer j. postgrad med j february vol no on reflection encounters in medical education. soc sci med ; : – . fried jm, vermillion m, parker nh, et al. eradicating medical student mistreatment: a longitudinal study of one institution’s efforts. acad med ; : – . partridge e. oncologist john kearsley jailed after drugging and indecently assaulting doctor. sydney morning herald, . illing jc, carter m, thompson nj, et al. evidence synthesis on the occurrence, causes, consequences, prevention and management of bullying and harassing behaviours to inform decision making in the nhs. durham: durham university, . http://www. netscc. ac. uk/ hsdr/ files/ project/ sdo_ fr_ - - _ v . pdf (accessed nov ). abbey a. sex differences in attributions for friendly behavior: do males misperceive females’ friendliness? j pers soc psychol ; : – . farris c, treat ta, viken rj, et al. sexual coercion and the misperception of sexual intent. clin psychol rev ; : – . haselton mg, buss dm. error management theory: a new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. j pers soc psychol ; : – . horley s. power and control: why charming men can make dangerous lovers. london: vermilion, . stark e. coercive control: how men entrap women in personal life. oxford: oxford university press, . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://p m j.b m j.co m / p o stg ra d m e d j: first p u b lish e d a s . /p o stg ra d m e d j- - o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /acm. b e http://www.netscc.ac.uk/hsdr/files/project/sdo_fr_ - - _v .pdf http://www.netscc.ac.uk/hsdr/files/project/sdo_fr_ - - _v .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.cpr. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://pmj.bmj.com/ 	sexual harassment of women in medicine: a problem for men to address 	mismatch of perceptions 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and defendants corteen, km and steele, rh a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and defendants http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/ / article ljmu has developed ljmu research online for users to access the research output of the university more effectively. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in ljmu research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. the version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of the record. please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. for more information please contact researchonline@ljmu.ac.uk http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/ citation (please note it is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from this work) corteen, km and steele, rh ( ) a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and defendants. liverpool law review, ( ). pp. - . issn - x ljmu research online http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/ mailto:researchonline@ljmu.ac.uk vol.:( ) liverpool law review ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - a criminal injustice system? sex ofender suspects and defendants karen corteen  · rachael steele published online: october © the author(s) abstract the purpose of this paper is to open up a discussion regarding the potential shift from the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt regarding those sus- pected of or charged with sexual ofending. it is acknowledged that further inves- tigation is needed and it is hoped that this discussion is one of many. the crux of this paper therefore is that sex ofender suspects and defendants potentially ind themselves in a criminal injustice system. whilst the focus is predominantly on ‘vic- tims’ (usually female) and people suspected or charged with sexual ofending (usu- ally male) within the criminal justice system in england and wales the concerns articulated here are not conined to this context. for example such concerns are echoed in relation to the potential injustices occurring on american campuses. this demonstrates that this is a domestic and international situation and a situation that extends beyond the criminal justice system. we argue that what is occurring at home and abroad has to be contextualised with regard to public, media and oicial atti- tudes and approaches to ‘victims’, suspects, defendants, sex, sexual consent, sexual ofending and a subsequent shift from the presumption of innocence to a presump- tion of guilt. it is argued that not only is the presumption of innocence undermined by the presumption of guilt regarding suspects and defendants in cases of sexual ofending, it is also undermined in england and wales by the victim personal state- ment (vps). the vps contains and promotes the idea that there is a ‘victim’ and ‘ofender’ before this has been legally established in a court of law. these assump- tions embodied within the vps weaken the principle and practice of the presump- tion of innocence. the safeguard of the presumption of innocence is potentially under threat and the result is an even greater potential for miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. * rachael steele r.h.steele@ljmu.ac.uk karen corteen k.m.corteen@ljmu.ac.uk school of law, liverpool john moores university, redmonds building, brownlow hill, liverpool l   ug, uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf k. corteen, r. steele keywords suspects rights · sexual ofending · injustice · victim personal statement introduction … claims to be ‘rebalancing the system’ in favour of victims call for close scrutiny in a country with such an unfortunate record of miscarriages of jus- tice. injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. at the outset it is important to state that much literature on sexual ofending focuses on the issue of rape and the ‘justice gap’. levels of attrition in rape cases remain a concern, and the impact of ‘rape myths’, victim-blaming attitudes, gender stereo- types and the reliability, and credibility of complaints and defendants are important considerations in attrition. we agree that these are sensitive and important consider- ations. the concern here however, is the potential wrongful conviction and miscar- riages of justice regarding those suspected of or charged with a sexual ofence. this is due to cultural changes inside and outside the criminal justice system. wrongful conviction and miscarriages of justice can be simply understood “as the wrongful conviction of a factually innocent person that did not commit the crime they were convicted of and played no part at all in it”. naughton highlights that “every sin- gle day, people are overturning convictions for criminal ofences. miscarriages of justice are a routine, even mundane feature of the criminal justice system. they are systemic”. over the past twenty years there have been clear classes of miscarriages of justice including historical sexual abuse cases. many common law jurisdictions, have witnessed an increased interest in and concerns about the problem of wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. this is over the past few decades and the interest and concern is both on the part of the public and scholarly researchers. this is due to the exposure of high proile miscarriages of justice which have brought to light problems in the way that the criminal justice system works. despite reforms being made in the criminal justice system in light of such concerns miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions continue to happen. we are concerned with poten- tial miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions regarding those suspected or charged with sexual ofending. this has to be contextualised. ashworth ( , p. ). martin luther king, jr cited in false allegations support organisation (faso) ( ). see saunders ( ) for more detail. saunders ( ). huf and naughton ( , p. ). cited in goldhill ( ). robins ( ). huf and naughton ( ). naughton ( ), robins ( ). a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and… in the last  years or so in many western countries the nature of sexual ofending and responses to it have become prioritised within the criminal justice system and societally. this includes the introduction of the sexual ofences register in in england and wales. thomas comments, “[a]ttempts have been made to improve the prosecution and conviction rate of those who commit sexual ofences and sentences have become more punitive”. the criminal justice system is therefore under pressure from within and without the to improve investigations, prosecutions and convictions of suspects of sexual ofending. this is happening at home and abroad in which the current climate is saturated with public reports and visual representations of, and campaigns against, sexual misconduct. this includes the public reporting of cases of historical abuse on the part of celebrities, child victims of grooming and sexual abuse, student campaigns against sexual violence such as revoltsexualassault, and the #metoo movement. in such an emotive climate it is important to remember the rights of suspects, defendants and those convicted of an ofence as well as those of accusers, complainants and witnesses. this is because the conviction of an innocent person is the highest injustice. therefore, in an adversarial system that upholds the principle of due process, there are safeguards that are intended to protect suspects and defendants, including individuals’ accused of a sexual ofence(s). however the presumption of innocence “has been under heavy ire over the last two decades from ambitious politicians and a press quick to be outraged, but reluctant to under- stand”. this is to the extent that for hayler “the increasing focus on convicting the guilty instead of protecting the innocent means that we may soon all have cause to fear the dawn raid”. we argue that the safeguard of the presumption of innocence is currently being potentially undermined regarding sexual ofending and the out- come is miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. we appreciate that further investigation is needed however we intend to open up a discussion of the potential contemporary shifts in the manner that sexual ofences are viewed and responded to within and without the criminal justice system and what this may mean for those suspected of and charged with sexual ofending. in so doing we discuss the pre- sumption of innocence and then we show how this may be undermined due to recent concerns about a retreat from this principle even to the point where there are fears of a presumption of guilt with regard to sex ofences. we also demonstrate the role played by the pressure to believe the accuser of sexual misconduct inside and out- side the criminal justice system. we then go on to discuss how the victim personal statement (vps) contains inherent assumptions that also undermine the presumption of innocence. finally some conclusions are provided. thomas ( ). thomas ( , p. ). hayler in robins ( , p xii). ibid. davies ( ). k. corteen, r. steele the threat to the presumption of innocence and the pressure to believe the threats to defendants’ rights have already been articulated. many individu- als in the criminal justice system “frequently slip into talking of victims (in trials), rather than witnesses” or accusers or complainants. in some cases outside the criminal justice system on american campuses accusers are also referred to as ‘sur- vivors’ and the campus mantra is “’survivors must be believed”. also for some groups in the criminal justice system, “[t]hose who plead not guilty are accused of ‘gaming the system’”, and the aim of the criminal justice system is “to get all those accused of crimes to plead guilty… as early as possible” and this is perceived as “good performance” on the part of such individuals. it has also been contended that police attitudes are still leading to damaging mistakes, incomplete investiga- tions and non-disclosure of evidence. this leads to an unfair criminal justice sys- tem and subsequently a lack of conidence in the system on the part of accusers/ victims and defendants/ofenders. in the current climate there is the pressure and even “the requirement to believe the complainant” and this results in an “incomplete investigation, and an incomplete investigation is a threat to the whole process of jus- tice”. the above criticisms go against the wider sense of the presumption of inno- cence embodied in european human rights law in that “pre-trial procedures should be conducted, so far as possible, as if the defendant were innocent”. a clear example of an “[i]ncompetent [p]olice [i]nvestigation” is that of warren blackwell. warren blackwell had his conviction overturned in “after a seven- year battle to clear his name” (ibid). shannon taylor accused blackwell of attacking her outside a social club. blackwell was convicted of sexual assault in but after being imprisoned for three years his conviction was overturned as taylor’s history of making false allegations of sexual assault under another name came to light. after blackwell won his appeal, a series of errors that contributed to blackwell’s wrongful conviction on the part of northamptonshire police were identiied by the independent police complaints commission. a police oicer from another force had expressed his concerns that “taylor’s evidence bore striking similarities with other false allegations” that she had made—but these were ignored further, in a detectives notes taylor was described as ‘unreliable’ and ‘unstable’ however they ashworth ( , p. ). naughton ( , p. ). ibid. naughton ( , p. ). gibbs ( ); panorama: getting a fair trial ( ). gibbs ( ). kipnis ( , p. ). gibbs ( ). panorama: getting a fair trial? ( ), naughton ( ). panorama: getting a fair trial? ( ). interview with former high court judge sir richard henriques, panorama: getting a fair trial? ( ), naughton ( ). a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and… were not passed on to the crown prosecution service. finally, taylor’s accounts contained serious inconsistencies and the police insuiciently investigated them. another example of a false allegation that resulted in prison sentences of   years and   years are that of george anderson and margaret hewett. one of the com- plainants admitted that they had lied, and this resulted in anderson and hewett’s convictions being over turned. the potential for injustice and the threat to the presumption of innocence is not just conined to problems with police attitudes and police investigations it can also be evidenced in the criminal trial. the safeguards that are in place to ensure a fair trial are put to the test in the courtroom. the courtroom is the decisive stage in which a defendant is either found guilty or acquitted. in so doing the prosecution has to make a case that demonstrates that the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. this is because according to the adversarial system a defendant is presumed innocent of the case laid against them until a guilty verdict is reached. this is one of, if not the most, important procedural protections aforded to defendants. this is especially so with regard to the potential loss of liberty, in the form of impris- onment. in addition there are social consequences that arise from being convicted. these can include “stigma and disadvantages in employment and housing”. plus for individuals convicted of a sexual ofence they have the legal consequence of ‘notiication requirements’. importantly one of the worst forms of victimisation has been identiied as serving a prison sentence without having committed a crime. according to the community of the wrongly accused “accusations of serious criminality, especially alleged sexual wrongdoing, are often their own convictions in the court of public opinion”. this means that the public assumes that an allegation of a sexual wrongdoing must be true, and therefore the public jumps to the conclusion that once a person is accused of a sexual ofence(s) that person will be convicted of such. this is due to the severity of the social stigma surrounding sexual wrongdoing together with the diiculties in proving the innocence of the person being accused. the presumption of guilt is also nurtured by some of the aims and values embedded within the criminal justice system. for example, in , the metropolitan police stated that oicers should “accept allegations made by the victim in the irst instance as being truthful”. this was compounded by a report that called for the insti- tutionalisation of a “culture of belief, support and respect” regarding victims of sex- ual ofences. finally in , her majesty’s inspector of constabulary asserted “[the] presumption that a victim should always be believed should be institution- alised” and that complaints of sexual abuse have to be recorded as a crime straight ibid. see naughton ( ) for more detail. ashworth ( , p. ). sarnof in hoyle et al. ( ). community of the wrongly accused, https ://olbio s.org/the-commu nity-of-the-wrong ly-accus ed. ibid. hogan-howe ( , paragraph ). hogan-howe ( , paragraph ). https://olbios.org/the-community-of-the-wrongly-accused k. corteen, r. steele away. if rather than testing the evidence with an open mind the accuser is to be automatically and unconditionally believed then the accused may potentially be pre- sumed to be guilty of the alleged ofence. this illustrates that the presumption of guilt regarding individuals suspected of a sexual ofence is a real problem, and this can persist despite the lack of judicial conviction either pre trial, where no prosecu- tion subsequently takes place, or even where a trial does take place and a defendant is found not guilty. in the current climate of (rightly) supporting and empowering victims it can seem that even “questioning the veracity of allegations can be seen as a betrayal of the victim”. as research into the voice of the victim has gained right- ful and necessary traction there has been a cultural shift inside and outside of the criminal justice system towards an automatic belief of accusers of abuse. while it is extremely important to continue to empower victims to speak up about their experi- ences, the engendered “moral imperative not to ‘let down another victim’” is a threat to the impartiality of the courtroom, and the premise of innocent until proven guilty on which the judicial system operates. this is signiicant as the consequences of the presumption of guilt can be severe, afecting not only the judicial sentencing of the accused but also the moral or social sentence that many defendants ind them- selves labouring under even in the absence of formal prosecution. the presumption of guilt and a climate of unquestioning belief in accusers’ nar- ratives are not conined to england, wales, and the criminal justice system. kipnis for example in her book discusses a collective culture of rape and sexual paranoia on american campuses and subsequent “oicially sanctioned hysteria”. in a news- paper interview about her book she also states that inside and outside of american campuses there is the idea that sex is “inherently injurious” and this “ethos of injury creates injury. it’s self-fulilling”. kipnis comments on how future generations will retrospectively look back at this situation and “wonder how supposedly rational people could have succumbed so easily to collective paranoia” and “how the federal government got into the moral panic business, tossing constitutional rights out of the window in an ill-conceived efort to protect women students from a rapidly growing catalogue of bogeymen”. kipnis found herself the subject of a student protest, an oicial complaint, and a  day institutional investigation as a result of writing an essay concerned with sex- ual paranoia on campus. despite the denial of a lawyer and being able to record her sessions with the investigators, and learning the charges against her when she was sat in from of them, thus having no time to prepare, she fought and won the case. as a result of this kipnis decided to write a whistle-blowing essay on her experience. in ibid. hoyle et al. ( , p. ). hoyle ( ). hoyle et al. ( , p. ). kipnis ( ). kipnis ( , p. ). see cooke ( , paragraph ). kipnis ( , p. ). kipnis ( ). a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and… so doing she discovered a new norm on contemporary american campuses of “ram- pant accusation” “especially when it comes to sex”. she also unearthed a hidden world of “tales of overblown charges, capricious verdicts, and frightening bureau- cratic excess” together with “accused professors and students, rigged investigations, closed-door hearings” and investigating oicers running amok. kipnis acknowl- edges that on campus sexual assault is a reality and that everyone shares the goal of addressing this. however, she fears that the prioritisation of stories concerned with female endangerment over female agency “are the last thing in the world that’s going to reduce sexual assault”. in fact this standpoint is at the heart of kipnis’s central argument. in reality sex is “muddled” and “confusing”. kipnis highlights the messiness and complexities of sexual realities and this of course muddies the waters regard- ing sexual consent and accusations of sexual misconduct. ‘consent’ is a concept that is “cloudy” and “subject to change”. kipnis comments that, “[y]ears later, sex that was consensual can apparently become non-consensual. i think that is quite shocking and it should be known”. kipnis is concerned that amidst the reality of sexual messiness and complexity, a focus on women’s vulnerability and endanger- ment, together with a protectionist and paternalistic agenda may result in accusa- tions of sexual ofences or sexual misconduct being alleged as a result of poor sex- ual choices, “awkward sexual experiences or sexual ambivalences, and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup”. indeed she contends that, “campus administra- tors are allowing it”. in a climate of rampant allegation and a presumption of guilt this is a dangerous and harmful situation as accused individuals (professors or stu- dents) may be left with a tarnished reputation at best, and expulsion from campus with no future prospects at worse. furthermore, confusion around the issue will only serve to obfuscate and confuse genuine victims of sexual abuse and assault, those individuals who in fact, the system exists to protect and support. just as the presumption of guilt has become a cultural imperative, it has had practical applications within the courtroom. studies show clearly that where a pre- sumption of guilt exists, it afects what a juror perceives about the accused and the accuser, and becomes subject to a behavioural conirmation bias in which aspects of speech, body language and characteristics inluence jurors’ thinking. a cultural or ‘moral imperative’ to believe the accuser of sexual misconduct or abuse can lead to a ‘generic prejudice’ against that category of ofender, that is, a general belief kipnis ( , p. ). cooke ( , paragraph ). kipnis ). cooke ( , paragraph ). ibid. kipnis ( , p. ). kasin et al. ( ). hoyle et al. ( ). kipnis ( , p. ). ibid. k. corteen, r. steele about those accused of similar crime with concurrent biases. these biases may mean that the testimony of the accused is viewed less favourably than the testimony of the accuser—again, leading to problems in how the victim voice can adequately be expressed without undue inluence on those making decisions on guilt. likewise, studies show that media portrayal of victims (whether related to a speciic case or to similar cases) can also afect jury decision-making. where victims are portrayed in a generally positive light—using adjectives such as ‘kind’ or ‘likeable’ jurors are signiicantly more likely to ind the accused guilty. there is of course, research that clearly suggests that these cognitive biases operate within the minds of jurors in the other direction—that is, that some juror may hold victim blaming attitudes, or beliefs that are inluenced by rape myths. however, in accepting that cognitive bias exists, consideration must be given to the impact of this bias, and how this may be inluenced by the emerging change of focus to a “culture of belief, support and respect” regarding victims of sexual ofences. the upholding of the principle of the presumption of innocence is not a panacea to miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. indeed, in reality it may act “against the interests of those who might be innocent at every stage of the criminal justice process”. this is because not only does this ‘presumption’ make suspects and defendants passive, it also means that pressure is put on the police and prosecu- tion “to chip away at the presumed innocent status and construct cases that might obtain a conviction, rendering innocent victims vulnerable to wrongful convic- tions”. however, whilst in practice the presumption of innocence may be problem- atic, it remains one of the most important principles and potential safeguards with regard to suspects and defendants of sexual ofending. this is especially so within a criminal justice system where jurors are anxious not to “let down another victim”. the victim personal statement in most common law countries, individuals who report a crime to the police have the opportunity to have some input into the criminal process by way of the provision of impact evidence on their part. in england and wales this impact evidence takes the form of a victim personal statement (vps). elsewhere this is known as a victim impact statement (vis). in england and wales the police take the vps and this is kramer et al. ( ). bane and flynn ( ). e.g. smith and skinner ( ). hogan-howe ( , paragraph ). naughton ( , p. ). ibid. hoyle et al. ( , p. ). roberts and manikis ( ). see pemberton and raynaers ( ) for a discussion of how the vis afects the impartiality of the trial, and puts pressure on the rights of suspects and on criminal justice principles such as proportionality and due process. a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and… included in the prosecution papers. the ‘victim’ is ofered the opportunity to make a vps in their irst contact with the police and they can make it anytime up to the sentence. the ‘victim’ may not change it but they can add to it and they can make more than one vps. everyone involved in the case should read the vps. since , if the court permits (which they usually do) ‘victims’ can have their vps heard in court once the defendant has pleaded or been found guilty. this is in order to ensure that all parties are made aware of the impact of crime on the ‘victim’. there are many problems inherent within the vps that undermine the presump- tion of innocence regarding the defendant, not least that the attention is fundamen- tally shifted from the burden of proof on the part of the prosecution, to the harm experienced by the victim. the vps takes for granted that there is a ‘victim’ and ‘ofender’ before this has been established procedurally by a guilty verdict. davies a former senior crown prosecutor observes “[w]e know the person giving evidence is complaining; we do not know whether she is a ‘victim’ until she has given her evidence and been through cross-examination and the defendant has given his own account of what happened”. the vps is taken at a stage in the process where there is an accuser and an accused. yet the accuser is treated like an established crime vic- tim in that they can: ask for additional support (particularly when giving evidence); state the impact of the ‘crime’ on them; articulate fears regarding the ‘ofender’ get- ting bail; highlight potential motivations for the ‘crime’ with regard to racial hostil- ity, faith, cultural background and disability, and state if they wish to apply for com- pensation and protective measures if the case goes to court. the accused is assumed to be guilty as within the vps they are referred to and treated as the ‘ofender’, from the viewpoint of the ‘victim’ and in reference to the criminal justice process. this is especially problematic in england and wales as the inluence of the vps goes beyond impact evidence during the sentencing process. victim impact schemes in other common law jurisdictions conine the use of vis to the sentencing pro- cess. but in england and wales “the vps is meant to be used at various stages of the criminal justice process, including during the decision by the cps whether or not to prosecute, the decision to grant bail and so on”. thus the vps is used in the criminal justice system decision-making process from arrest through to the pros- ecution process before the legal establishment of a victim and ofender. while it is extremely important to allow victims to participate in the criminal justice process, the content of the vps or the vis is more than a simple statement of experiences or facts. as suggested above, it cements for the court the victim/ofender relation- ship of the two individuals in court—a far stronger scenario for a juror struggling to process facts and evidence than an ‘accuser’ and ‘defendant’. the vis is a “symboli- cally charged narrative” which provokes an empathic and emotional response. for a juror exposed to such a narrative, the presumption of innocence of the defendant may feel akin to a denial of the content of the victim testimony. joh ( , p. ). kramer et al. ( ). davies ( ). roberts and manikis ( , p. ). k. corteen, r. steele for all these reasons, the undermining of the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in the vps impacts on all defendants whose accuser takes up this opportu- nity. but this is especially signiicant for individuals accused of a sexual ofence(s) as the vps establishment of a ‘victim’, ‘ofender’, ‘crime’, ‘victimisation’ and moti- vation for the ofence, is potentially compounded by the presumption of guilt in cases of sex ofending. being believed when reporting a sexual ofence is neces- sary and long overdue, and concerns regarding securing justice for victims of sexual ofences have rightly been aired. however, it is also right to articulate and air con- cerns about the potential and real ramiications for criminal injustice with regard to those accused of a sexual ofence(s). this is especially so, as “deinitively proving innocence in a disputed sex case is often impossible”. the accuser faces many obstacles and disadvantages when trying secure justice in sex cases, but so too do the accused. these are exacerbated by the pressures on juries to believe the accuser, the presumptions embedded in the vps, and the presumption of guilt with regard to those accused of a sexual ofence(s). we therefore challenge the assumption that the ‘scales of justice’ are massively tipped in favour of the accused. we argue that there is a real possibility that in cases concerned with allegations of sexual ofences that in reality the opposite is true. conclusions it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one sufer. the concern with the victim voice and the rightful endeavour to achieve justice for victims needs also to be applied to those who are accused—and who in some cases may not actually be guilty. this is important within and without the criminal justice system as in these cases, individuals who are accused of sexual misconduct may be subject to a moral or social (or indeed legal) conviction based entirely on a false alle- gation. the ‘former’ accused individual is then left without support to try and cope, along with their families, with the fall-out of the impact of the social presumption of guilt on home life, employment, housing and so forth. hoyle et al. argue that there is a justiication for a victimological perspective on the “predicament of the falsely accused” and how the phenomenon of moral and social conviction impacts those who have been found by the judiciary to be innocent. this can be extended to falsely accused individuals in other contexts such as on university campuses and in other professional occupations were individuals are in a position of trust. the very presumption of innocence exists (in principle at least) to avoid the “deep injustice and substantial moral harm” of the wrongful conviction of an innocent smith ( ), spencer et al. ( ). community of the wrongly accused, https ://olbio s.org/the-commu nity-of-the-wrong ly-accus ed. smith ( ). william blackstone’s formulation cited in naughton ( , p. ). hoyle et al. ( , p. ). https://olbios.org/the-community-of-the-wrongly-accused a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and… person. safeguards within the criminal justice system for those who have been unjustly accused should not be removed, yet over time “governments have sought to load the dice against defendants in sex cases”. the criminal justice system in england and wales generally is “in a state of permanent crisis” and “ineiciency has become endemic”. also “the criminal justice pendulum has swung dramati- cally in the direction of victims’ rights and away from the rights of defendants” and the dramatic cuts in legal aid mean that the legal representation of many defend- ants is incompetent. furthermore there is “no adequate safety net” as “[t]he court of appeal continues to fail to get to grips with miscarriages of justice”. in addi- tion, for individuals enduring a miscarriage of justice or wrongful conviction, the criminal cases review commission is overwhelmed, chronically underfunded and inefective and it does not do what it was set up to do—namely act as the “irst state-funded miscarriage of justice watchdog”. given this and the current climate regarding the revelations and ramiications of public cases and campaigns regard- ing sexual ofences the safeguard of the presumption of innocence must be upheld in both principle and practice. the focus should not be one of belief with regard to the accuser, but one where allegations of crime including sexual ofences are taken seriously. both accusers and accused should be subjected to a thorough, civilised investigation in which all relevant information and evidence claimed to indicate guilt is disclosed and subjected to critical interrogation. in light of this, if there is a case to answer, the accused should be given a fair hearing from start to inish. this includes being guided by the principle of innocent until proven guilty in the pre-trial and criminal trial stages. seeking to safeguard the innocence of the accused does not in any way negate the experiences of harm caused to the victim, or imply that all accusers are insincere. instead, this safeguard recognises that the harms may be severe, but there is also the small chance that in some cases they did not occur, and importantly, that where they did occur that the accused person may not be the per- petrator of those harms. the punishment of an innocent person (by the criminal jus- tice system or any other regulatory body) victimises that person and in the criminal justice context, it results in a miscarriage of justice and the wrongful conviction of individuals’ accused of sexual ofending. finally and crucially, the punishment of an innocent person is of no beneit to victims or society, as such a wrongful conviction potentially leaves the actual perpetrator at large. acknowledgements thanks to gary wilson, editor of liverpool law review for his support in the pub- lication of this article. thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, they helped to strengthen this article. ashworth ( , p. ). davies ( ). robins ( , p. xiii). robins ( , p. xv). robins ( , p. xxi). robins ( , p. xix). naughton ( ). k. corteen, r. steele compliance with ethical standards conlict of interest on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conlict of interest. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . interna- tional license (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references ashworth, a. . four threats to the presumption of innocence. the international journal of evidence and proof : – . bane, e., and flynn, s. . an investigation into the effects of victim-focused pre-trial publicity on juror decision-making. poster presentation at british psychological society: division of forensic psychology, newcastle th june . cooke, r. . sexual paranoia on campus—and the professor at the eye of the storm. the observer april. https ://www.thegu ardia n.com/world / /apr/ /unwan ted-advan ces-on-campu s-us-unive rsity -profe ssor-laura -kipni s-inter view. accessed sept . community of the wrongly accused n.d. crime and public order—politics: the community of the wrongly accused. https ://olbio s.org/the-commu nity-of-the-wrong ly-accus ed/. accessed sept . crown prosecution service. . victim personal statements. https ://www.cps.gov.uk/legal -guida nce/ victi m-perso nal-state ments . accessed sept . davies, j. . rape: the presumption of guilt. quadrant online december. https ://quadr ant.org.au/ magaz ine/ / /rape-presu mptio n-guilt /. accessed sept . false allegations support organisation (faso). . faso - 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[tv programme] bbc april . https ://www.bbc.co.uk/iplay er/ episo de/b b hf/panor ama-getti ng-a-fair-trial . accessed sept . roberts, j.v., and m. manikis. . victim personal statements in england and wales: latest (and last) trends from the witness and victim experience survey. criminology and criminal justice ( ): – . https ://doi.org/ . / . robins, j. . guilty until proven innocent. london: biteback publishing. pemberton, a., and s. raynaers. . the controversial nature of victim participation: therapeutic ben- eits in victim impact statements. in therapeutic jurisprudence and victim participation in justice, ed. e. erez, m. kilching, and j. wemmer, – . north carolina: carolina academic press. saunders, c.l. . rape as ‘one person’s word against another’s’: challenging the conventional wis- dom. the international journal of evidence & proof ( ): – . smith, a. . they think they’ve got away: how to catch a historical sex ofender. bbc news online june. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-engla nd-notti ngham shire - . accessed sept . smith, o., and t. skinner. . how rape myths are used and challenged in rape and sexual assault trials. social and legal studies ( ): – . spencer, d., a. dodge, r. ricciardelli, and d. bullucci. . “i think it’s re-victimising victims almost every time”: police perceptions of criminal justice responses to sexual violence. critical criminol- ogy : – . thomas, t. . sexual ofending. in a companion to criminal justice mental health & risk, ed. p. tay- lor, k. corteen, and s. morley, – . bristol: policy press. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b b hf/panorama-getting-a-fair-trial https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b b hf/panorama-getting-a-fair-trial https://doi.org/ . / http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire- 	a criminal injustice system? sex offender suspects and defendants 	abstract 	introduction 	the threat to the presumption of innocence and the pressure to believe 	the victim personal statement 	conclusions 	acknowledgements 	references the women’s mental health conference at yale: trainees lead the way to improving care for women letter to the editor the women’s mental health conference at yale: trainees lead the way to improving care for women stefanie gillson & sofia noori received: february /accepted: august /published online: august # academic psychiatry academic psychiatry ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - to the editor: on october , , over people gathered at the yale school of medicine to attend the nation’s first trainee-led multidisciplinary women’s mental health conference. the audience was composed of advocates, researchers, clinicians, and community members from across the nation and world. the conference commenced with a keynote by v (formerly eve ensler), recognized globally for her advocacy to end gender-based violence and as the author of the vagina monologues. the conference was free and open to the public. following v’s rousing keynote, attendees separated into small groups. they participated in learning sessions created by a wide range of women’s mental health professionals, who shared their personal experiences and expertise on topics such as human trafficking, perinatal mental health, and eating dis- orders. the conference also touched upon pressing contempo- rary issues in women’s mental health, including the effect of colorism on women of color, transwomen’s mental health, and the intersections of culture, race, and gender. during the preceding year, a planning committee of graduate students (from the schools of medical, public health, and law), undergraduate students, and resident physicians (from the departments of psychiatry, obstetrics, and gynecol- ogy) organized the conference to increase awareness and training on the wide range of unique mental health issues affecting women. the overarching goals of the conference were to create a community across multiple disciplines to discuss ways of collaboration to improve women’s mental health, provide attendees with practical skills, and highlight the contributions of women’s mental health advocates, re- searchers, and clinicians. the success of the conference exceeded all expectations and can be attributed to the dedication of the multidisciplinary com- mittee and their advisors. the members were impassioned and incredibly mission driven; they devoted countless hours throughout the year preceding the conference to fundraising, planning, and inviting speakers. impressively, the all-trainee committee raised over $ , to make the conference completely free. following the conference, attendees received a feedback survey that revealed nearly universally positive feedback. many commented that the keynote address was the highlight of the conference and that they appreciated the depth and variety of the presenters. of those who took the survey, % of the respondents rated their experience at the confer- ence as either excellent ( %, the highest score of a -point rating scale) or very good ( %, the second-highest score). our committee has been amazed by the overwhelming re- ception to the inaugural conference, which has spurred the organizers to design a bigger vision for future iterations. given the success of the event, the organizers are active- ly fundraising to continue the conference for the foreseeable future. with the rise of #metoo and other grassroots movements, recognition of women’s mental health and the many factors that influence it is increasing, within both public and academic spheres. the scarcity of women’s mental health education holds consequences, such as the underrecognition and undertreat- ment of major depression during pregnancy [ ]. currently, only % of psychiatry programs require any level of training in reproductive psychiatry, and only % of program directors believe that residents need to be competent in the field [ ]. given that in women experience an episode of major depression during pregnancy [ ], it is critical that psychiatry residents learn to diagnose and manage women-specific ailments. the conference and its organizers seek to address this need for education and training. to that end, the trainee-led com- mittee has produced an ambitious agenda for the future. * stefanie gillson stefanie.gillson@yale.edu yale school of medicine, new haven, ct, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:stefanie.gillson@yale.edu acad psychiatry ( ) : – to improve education in women’s mental health, the com- mittee helped revamp yale’s women’s mental health curricu- lum for the psychiatry residency training program in . the curriculum adapted some modules from the newly established national curriculum in reproductive psychiatry, an online resource that offers education on pressing women’s mental health disorders including perinatal mental health, management of gender-based violence, premenstrual dys- phoric disorder, and more. to provide clinical education, or- ganizers are actively seeking to partner with local health or- ganizations to create a women’s mental health clinic that can provide co-located obstetrics and gynecology and psychiatric care for patients while offering yale residents a training op- portunity in women’s mental health. to highlight the work of existing women’s mental health researchers, advocates, clinicians, and patients, the committee is launching a social media campaign to center underrecog- nized stories and individuals in the field. the committee is also fundraising for local non-profit organizations that provide support for women who experience intimate partner violence, especially during this time of a global pandemic. aside from these valuable projects, the committee is also hard at work planning the next iteration of the conference. due to covid- , the event was postponed to friday, april , . by forging an affordable, accessible space where a di- versity of professionals can learn together, the conference can spark a collective movement toward a more woman- responsive field of psychiatry. the success of the inaugural women’s mental health conference and the unwavering commitment of its trainee organizers have been a truly unique experience. no longer are students and trainees talking of improving awareness of women’s mental health; rather, they have turned to concrete, progressive action. compliance with ethical standards disclosure on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. references . battle cl, salisbury al, schofield ca, et al. perinatal antidepres- sant use: understanding women’s preferences and concerns. j psychiatry practice. ; : – . . osborne l, maclean jv, barzilay em, et al. reproductive psychi- atry residency training: a survey of psychiatric residency program directors. acad psychiatry. ; ( ): – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 	the women’s mental health conference at yale: trainees lead the way to improving care for women 	references competing at the top level with crohn’s disease treasure a. br j sports med month vol no competing at the top level with crohn’s disease alyx treasure early potential and realisation of olympic dreams by the time i was , i had already spent years going in/out of hospital. having been told at the age of that i would make the olympics, i was very focused on my sporting goals. i had no prior family history of crohn’s. it took years for me to get a diagnosis and this severely affected my athletic development by preventing me from training/competing. i lost my oppor- tunity to go to college in the usa, which had been a long-term ambition, and it would have been easy to give up on the sport. fortunately, i didn’t give up. i achieved my ultimate goal to qualify for the cana- dian olympic team in the high jump. i jumped . metres in the qualifying round, which put me in the olympic final and helped me to realise my lifelong dream aged years. health versus sporting goals when you’re told at years old that you will make the olympics you become driven, i would remove anything in my path to achieve my target. i was told several times that i had to quit athletics due to my condition, and one doctor advised me to ‘pick health or sport’. i didn’t do well with being told what i could or could not do, and over the years, i have argued with my medical team. however, i needed to be challenged and it is great when you can have open and honest discussions with clinicians. i have valued most those clini- cians who can advocate on my behalf with the rest of the medical team and help to explain what i am going through. ‘my crohn’s, my symptoms’ my symptoms are not gastrointestinally driven, and instead, i develop pain and discomfort, which limits my ability to perform. it isn’t about what i eat. it has been difficult to find a balance during my career and i am still fighting it. i am not sure that i have it remotely figured out. we are told by the dieticians and the nutritionists that look after us that we need to eat ‘hard to digest foods that support athletics’ (such as complex carbohydrates, vegetables and high-fibre foods). unfortunately, these don’t work well for me and i have found that i have to use meal replacements to ensure i have enough energy for training. luckily, i can tolerate protein, which supports my recovery. i have trained in a semi-fasted state, but hitting peak levels for sustained periods is tough when we are doing a – hours training session. optimising the care of my condition i find it hard talking with those both inside and outside the sporting environment about diet. it is difficult to find people with an insight into the disease who can empathise. i have learnt that there is no one-time fix and no gastroenterologist, nutritionist or doctor who can help me. the biggest factor on which i focus on is my preparation. i dedicate months to the maintenance of consistent behaviours, which add up to success. these include optimising my eating, sleep, medication, physio and training. consistency is hard with crohn’s and i have to fight bad periods to train my body as best as i can, to perform when the time is right. athletics in the #metoo era i had to tell people that i wasn’t faking it with my symptoms, and as a young female athlete, i learnt to be assertive. athletics is cutthroat. i made it, but i was hardened through the process. i was told that i had to be ‘tougher’ to deal with my symptoms and i coped with this, but some athletes may not have responded so well. luckily, i had people telling me posi- tive things about my performance, which helped to balance me out and i was able to respond to those who challenged me. i think the key is supporting athletes to become self-aware about what works for them, and then taking an individualised approach to help them recognise what drives them and how to maximise their medical management alongside their performance. becoming an advocate for others i struggled being diagnosed at years old, and i imagine that it would be worse being diagnosed aged or years as you are going through a lot of changes at the same time. i wanted to become an advocate for others with crohn’s disease. i had nobody to look up to and learn from, and having a role model who demonstrates that you can reach the top level in the sport with crohn’s is important. i became a spokes- person for crohn’s canada, and i am pleased to be able to share my experiences to help others (figure ). we are in a better place now that crohn’s and other gastric concerns are being researched, and there are medica- tions and treatment plans available. future hopes and goals i achieved my initial life goal aged years. it took years for me to re-focus, but i want to break the canadian high jump record ( . m at the time of writing) and qualify for tokyo . i will then be years old and i will consider retirement as i cannot continue to put the same pressure on my body. i am studying business and sustainable fashion so that i have a career beyond athletics, and i am looking forward to living a ‘normal’ life. three pieces of advice for a clinician working with an athlete with crohn’s disease: . communication—i have a great team at athletics canada who offer a holistic overview, but i think we need more in- tegrated communication within teams to stop different professions working in silo’s. having the physiotherapists work closer with support staff, such as dieticians, would really support the athletes to reach their peak condition. . holistic understanding of symptoms— the complexity of symptoms that arise from crohn’s and their ability to arise outside of gi-specific complaints means we need to take a whole-body approach. alteration in eating habits and energy output, increased fatigue or chronic pain, all need to be reviewed for how these symptoms interact with gi concerns. the complexity of symp- toms and how they are inter-related prince george, british columbia, canada correspondence to alyx treasure, prince george, bc, canada; alyx_ treasure@ hotmail. com patient voices figure alyx treasure pictured left with bjsm associate editor paul blazey. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b jsm .b m j.co m / b r j s p o rts m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /b jsp o rts- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.basem.co.uk/ http://bjsm.bmj.com/ http://bjsm.bmj.com/ treasure a. br j sports med month vol no patient voices should have a greater focus in terms of the relationship between patient and clinician. . individualised approach—crohn’s is a difficult disease to manage as it manifests differently in each patient. worse than that, it seems to mutate and change over time so you feel that you can never fully understand it. this makes it incredibly difficult to have productive conversations with clini- cians on what is happening and why. this is why a long-term individualised program that is monitored closely by the medical team (and more impor- tantly by the patient) is essential. you are your own best advocate and if you can’t get a grasp on how your body re- sponds, it is near impossible to make positive impacts on your management of the disease. alyx is an ambassador for crohn’s and colitis canada who can be found at the following web address—http:// crohn- sandcolitis. ca/ or via social media @ getgutsycanada. contributors this work was written up by paul blazey—associate editor with bjsm following an in-person interview conducted with the athlete in focus, at. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication obtained. provenance and peer review commissioned; internally peer reviewed. © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. ► additional material is published online only. to view, please visit the journal online (http:// dx. doi. org/ . / bjsports- - ). to cite treasure a. br j sports med epub ahead of print: [please include day month year]. doi: . / bjsports- - accepted june br j sports med ; : – . doi: . /bjsports- - o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b jsm .b m j.co m / b r j s p o rts m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /b jsp o rts- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://crohnsandcolitis.ca/ http://crohnsandcolitis.ca/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjsports- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjsports- - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bjsports- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bjsm.bmj.com/ 	competing at the top level with crohn’s disease 	early potential and realisation of olympic dreams 	health versus sporting goals 	‘my crohn’s, my symptoms’ 	optimising the care of my condition 	athletics in the #metoo era 	becoming an advocate for others 	future hopes and goals doi: . /ijcv- ijcv: vol. ( )/ political and religious extremism and sexual aggression – new perspectives from the workshop on aggression rebecca bondü r.bondue@phb.de psychologische hochschule berlin, germany vol. ( )/ the ijcv provides a forum for scientific exchange and public dissemination of up-to-date scien - tific knowledge on conflict and violence. the ijcv is independent, peer reviewed, open access, and included in the social sciences citation index (ssci) as well as other rele - vant databases (e.g., scopus, ebsco, proquest, dnb). the topics on which we concentrate—conflict and violence—have always been central to various disciplines. consequently, the journal encompasses contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including criminology, economics, education, ethnology, his- tory, political science, psychology, social anthropology, sociology, the study of reli- gions, and urban studies. all articles are gathered in yearly volumes, identified by a doi with article-wise pagi- nation. for more information please visit www.ijcv.or g suggested citation: apa: bondü, r. ( ). political and religious extremism and sexual aggression – new perspectives from the workshop on aggression . international journal of conflict and violence, ( ) - . doi: . /ijcv- harvard: bondü, rebecca. . political and religious extremism and sexual aggres- sion – new perspectives from the workshop on aggression . international journal of conflict and violence ( ): - . doi: . /ijcv- this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution—noderivatives license. issn: – mailto:r.bondue@phb.de http://www.ijcv.org/ ijcv: vol. ( )/ bondü: political and religious extremism and sexual aggression political and religious extremism and sexual aggression – new perspectives from the workshop on aggression rebecca bondü psychologische hochschule berlin, germany this focus section on extremism, radicalization, and sexual aggression presents recent research from two cur - rently important fields of aggression research. it presents five papers that were presented at the workshop on aggression at the psychologische hochschule berlin in . the first three address risk factors for radicalization and acceptance of group-related aggressive behavior, namely hate speech against muslims and collective violent behavior towards perceived out-groups including jews and ukrainians. the last two studies address sexual ag - gression: one examines the prevalence and risk factors for sexual victimization among a large student population in chile; the other considers risk factors for potential sexual aggression in a german sample of participants with and without bdsm identity. the studies span a broad and international perspective on these different types of aggression, including data from chile, germany, and poland and examining the potential influences of social and individual factors. the papers included in the present focus section demonstrate that both radicalization/ex - tremism and sexual aggression are world-wide problems that require preventive action. they provide theoretical input and empirical findings that will hopefully contribute to prevention at the societal and individual levels. keywords: extremism, radicalization, hate speech, collective violence, sexual aggression acknowledgement: the workshop on aggression was made possible by a grant from the german research foundation (dfg grant no. bo / - ). thanks to all contributors and attendees, as well as to neli groshcheva for her help with the organization. special thanks to the authors for contributing their research to this focus section and for their cooperation throughout the editorial process. many thanks to the reviewers for providing their expert knowledge and insightful comments and helping to further improve the manuscripts. thanks to the editorial team of the international journal of conflict and violence for their patience and advice throughout the editorial process. aggression, the intentional infliction of harm on an individual that is motivated to avoid this harm (baron and richardson ), is a heterogeneous phe- nomenon with many different manifestations, causes, and consequences (vazsonyi, flannery, and delisi ). different forms of, changes in, and correlates of aggressive behavior receive growing public and re- search attention over time, depending for example on social changes and developments, outstanding single events, and/or fluctuating research interests. as a res- ult, aggression research is an ever co-evolving, never outdated field of research that emanates from various disciplines. sparked by intense public debate and a growing number of alarming incidents, two aggression-related topics in particular have received intense public atten- tion in recent years. first, various incidents of terror- ism motivated by a broad range of political, religious, and sometimes apparently rather idiosyncratic ideolo- gies have not only caused public concern across the world, but also resulted in broad and complex re- search efforts that aim at understanding, recognizing, and preventing radicalization processes and associ- ated offenses. prejudices against and discrimination of out-groups—or even the mere acceptance thereof— may not only be a driving force behind such offenses, but also themselves be considered as or related to ag- ijcv: vol. ( )/ bondü: political and religious extremism and sexual aggression gressive behavior (see below). the present focus sec- tion, therefore, will first draw attention to various as- pects linked to the acceptance of several forms of ag- gressive behavior towards out-groups and radicaliza- tion tendencies. second, the #metoo debate has drawn strong atten- tion to the prevalence of sexual aggression not only, but mainly against women. despite the recent public attention and debate, one of the two studies in the present focus section shows that many of these incid- ents still go unnoticed, unreported, and consequently unpunished. this indicates that still more knowledge is required in order to effectively prevent victimization through sexual aggression in the first place and to make it easier to report these incidents when they do occur. therefore, the present focus section will also shed light on several risk factors for victimization from sexual aggression. the content of the papers in this focus section was originally presented at the workshop on aggression at the psychologische hochschule berlin in . the workshop on aggression is an international confer- ence that provides researchers with an opportunity for fruitful and friendly exchange about their ongoing aggression research. as such, the workshop on ag- gression covers the whole spectrum of the latest re- search on different types of aggression. in november , the workshop on aggression brought together about one hundred researchers from fifteen countries, including china, cyprus, the czech republic, ger- many, ireland, israel, japan, the netherlands, norway, poland, romania, spain, turkey, the united states, and the united kingdom. the main topic was “radic- alization, discrimination, and aggression.” three key- note lectures by national and international experts covered the three main topics and shed particular light on their interrelations. andreas beelmann from the university of jena, germany, outlined a compre- hensive process model of radicalization including indi- vidual factors that may make subjects particularly vulnerable to adverse social experiences such as deprivation, injustice, disadvantages, or discrimina- tion, as well as social factors that may work as acute triggers, such as previous victimization from discrim- ination (see this focus section for a comprehensive presentation of the model; beelmann ). paul gill from university college london, united kingdom, gave a thorough overview of the current state of re- search on radicalization and terrorist attacks and dis- cussed the challenges of research on rare events such as these in great detail (gill, horgan, and deckert ; also see lindekilde, o’conner and schuurman ). christia spears brown from the university of kentucky, united states, highlighted the close rela- tionship between discrimination and aggression in her talk on the causes and consequences of victimization from prejudice and discrimination in adolescence. she underlined that discrimination may be considered one form of group-related aggression and outlined how victimization from prejudice and discrimination may serve as a trigger for subsequent aggressive behavior (spears brown ). overall, the workshop on ag- gression covered a broad spectrum of different types of aggression and comprised fourteen thematic ses- sions on radicalization, discrimination and bullying, sexual aggression, general aggression, hate speech, and collective violence, as well as a poster session. the present focus section this focus section presents five papers that were also presented at the workshop on aggression. they ad- dress risk factors for the acceptance of different forms of aggression against out-groups, radicalization pro- cesses, as well as sexual aggression from a range of different angles. this research is important, because victimization from group-related aggression, terrorist offenses, and sexual aggression may cause severe and long-lasting harm to the affected individuals and sig- nificant social costs. in addition, developing effective prevention strategies requires well-founded, empirical knowledge about risk and protective factors for these maladaptive behaviors. thus, the research presented in this focus section may serve to inform future pre- vention measures and to lighten the negative impact of experiences of aggression. in the first paper, wiktor soral, james liu and michał bilewicz examine the long-term influence of the consumption of different types of media on the acceptance of hate speech against muslims and on subsequent islamoprejudice in a polish sample over the course of six months. they find that frequent users of social media reported higher levels of per- ijcv: vol. ( )/ bondü: political and religious extremism and sexual aggression ceived normativity and thus acceptance of hate speech against muslims and islamoprejudice com- pared to users of traditional mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and television. in addition, the link between the type of media use and islamoprejudice is mediated by the perceived normativity and thus ac- ceptance of hate speech against muslims. these find- ings are important because they point to the critical influence of online media, including social networks or blogs, in aggravating prejudice. in the second paper, mikołaj winiewski and domin- ika bulska introduce a new multidimensional measure of acceptance of collective violence. they define col- lective violence as the infliction of harm on members of a group by coordinated actions of at least two per - petrators who consider themselves representatives of another group. the authors present the development of the scale using several large samples from poland. the final factor structure comprises several subscales, including physical, verbal, and indirect violence against perceived out-groups, as well as isolation, ig- noring, and forced assimilation of these groups. indi- vidual acceptance of these subtypes of collective viol- ence differs depending on the targeted out-group (jews or ukrainians), indicating that the perception of specific threat purportedly posed by these out-groups is relevant. thus, the authors provide an explanation of variation in violent behavior towards out-groups and its acceptance. in the third paper, after thoroughly defining radical- ization and extremism, andreas beelmann outlines a comprehensive theoretical model that seeks to explain the developmental processes that lead to radicaliza- tion. the model integrates and describes a broad range of societal, social, and individual risk and pro- tective factors. in particular, the author outlines four proximal processes that are considered particularly important in promoting radicalization, namely iden- tity problems, prejudices, movement towards political or religious ideologies (that may lead to legitimization or acceptance of the use of violence), and develop- ment towards antisocial attitudes or behavior. the model is a valuable starting point for further theoret- ical discussion and empirical research on radicaliza- tion processes. in the fourth paper, laura saldarriaga, carolina rocha, diego castro, gloria jiménez-moya, héctor carvacho, and gerd bohner report sexual violence victimization rates in a large sample of chilean under- graduate university students. they contribute to an- swering the pending question on the reasons for large differences in prevalence rates of male sexual victimiz- ation in various studies using chilean samples and identify important methodological differences. apart from gender, a higher number of sexual partners as well as a short-term mating orientation are linked to sexual violence victimization in regression analyses, whereas a range of attitudinal factors of the victims is not. thus, the study’s findings highlight the need for replication studies and research on the topic in differ- ent countries. in the final paper, rebecca bondü and joseph birke shift the focus to other risk factors for potential sexu- ally aggressive behavior in a group of participants who consider themselves sadists, masochists, or both. the authors provide evidence for three subscales of aggressive sexual fantasies among the participants with bdsm identities, which are similar but not identical to those found in the general population. im- portantly, aggressive sexual fantasies predicted pre- sumably non-consensual aggressive behavior beyond other risk factors irrespective of whether participants reported a bdsm-related identity or not. thus, the study points to the potential relevance of aggressive sexual fantasies for aggressive sexual behavior by providing first evidence that links between the two may even hold among individuals who consider the consensual infliction of pain or humiliation on the sexual partner as a part of their sexuality. outlook the papers presented in this focus section show that aggressive behavior may be reflected on from differ- ent scientific angles and that individual and social risk factors as well as their interactions may work to pre- dict its perpetration. bringing together studies focus- ing on radicalization processes, on acceptance of group-related aggression, and on sexual aggression also underlines the need to tackle different forms of aggressive behavior worldwide and to consider quite diverse risk factors depending on the specific behavior ijcv: vol. ( )/ bondü: political and religious extremism and sexual aggression in question. in order to develop and implement ad- equate and effective prevention measures, further em- pirical research on the risk and protective factors for these forms of aggression are required, as well as eval- uation studies on prevention initiatives designed to diminish the prevalence of and harm caused by ag- gressive behavior on individuals and society. because aggressive behavior has multiple facets as- sociated with different risk factors and consequences, and because the phenomenology of aggression is con- stantly changing over time, up-to-date research is al- ways needed. by way of example, research on risk factors for terrorist attacks during recent years mainly concentrated on jihadist offenders. recently, however, a growing number of mass-casualty offenses by per- petrators with politically far-right motives across the world have caused increasing concern and highlight the need for more detailed research into these offend- ers as well (for example bouhana, corner, gill, and schuurman ). this research may show whether the same dynamics apply to all radicalization pro- cesses and/or whether there are different risk factors and warning signs for perpetrators with motives emerging from different political and religious ideolo- gies. the present findings also point to the need to con- sider potential cultural differences. by way of ex- ample, research from the united states indicated that living on campus may be a risk factor for victimiza- tion from sexual assault (muehlenhard, peterson, humphreys, and jozkowski ). in contrast, the present study by saldarriaga and colleagues finds that only a small percentage of reported incidents of sexual violence were committed on campus, indicating that living on campus may not have the same mean- ing or relevance in this cultural context. con- sequently, research in one country does not make re- search in other countries redundant, even if similar re- search questions are examined. these thoughts highlight the importance of regular opportunities for scientific exchange between aggres- sion researchers. scholars throughout the world should seek and use the opportunity to collaborate in order to create reliable and comparable research res- ults and to expand our knowledge. the workshop on aggression will continue to provide such opportunit- ies. references baron, robert a. and deborah r. richardson. . human aggression. new york: plenum. beelmann, andreas. . a social-developmental model of radicalization: a systematic integration of existing the- ories and empirical research. international journal of conflict and violence ( ): – . doi: . /ijcv- bondü, rebecca, and joseph birke. . links between ag- gressive sexual fantasies and presumably non-consen- sual aggressive sexual behavior when accounting for bdsm identity. international journal of conflict and viol- ence ( ): – . doi: . /ijcv- bouhana, noémie, emily corner, paul gill, and bart schuur- man. . background and preparatory behaviours of right-wing extremist lone actors: a comparative study. perspectives on terrorism ( ): – . gill, paul, horgan, john g., and paige deckert. . bomb- ing alone: tracing the motivations and antecedent be- haviors of lone-actor terrorists. journal of forensic sci- ences ( ): – . doi: . / - . lindekilde, lasse, francis o’connor, and bart schuurman. . radicalization patterns and modes of attack plan- ning and preparation among lone-actor terrorists: an exploratory analysis. behavioral sciences of terrorism and political aggression ( ): – . doi: . / . . muehlenhard, charlene l., zoe d. peterson, terry p. humphreys, and kristen n. jozkowski. . evaluating the one-in-five statistic: women’s risk of sexual as- sault while in college. journal of sex research ( – ): – . doi: . / . . spears brown, christia. . discrimination in childhood and adolescence: a developmental intergroup approach. new york: routledge. saldarriaga, laura, carolina rocha, diego castro, gloria jiménez-moya, héctor carvacho, and gerd bohner. . sexual violence victimization among undergraduates at a chilean university. international journal of conflict and violence ( ): - . doi: . /ijcv- soral, wiktor, james h. liu, and michał bilewicz. . me- dia of contempt. social media consumption predicts normative acceptance of anti-muslim hate speech and islamoprejudice. international journal of conflict and vi- olence ( ): - . doi: . /ijcv- vazsonyi, alexander t., daniel j. flannery, and matt delisi. . the cambridge handbook of violent behavior and aggression, nd ed. cambridge, uk: cambridge univer- sity press. winiewski, mikołaj, and dominika bulska. . beating, ignoring or adapting by force. development and initial validation of a multidimensional scale of acceptance of collective violence. international journal of conflict and violence ( ): - . doi: . /ijcv- polypharmacy in primary care practices: an analysis using a large health insurance database pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety ; : – ww.interscience.wiley.com) doi: . /pds. published online september in wiley interscience (w original report polypharmacy in primary care practices: an analysis using a large health insurance database y thomas grimmsmann md, mph * and wolfgang himmel phd medical review board of the statutory health insurance funds mecklenburg-vorpommern, schwerin, germany department of general practice, university of göttingen, göttingen, germany summary purpose to ascertain the rate and range of continuous polypharmacy in german general practices and compare practice characteristics and prescribing profiles in practices with a high rate of polypharmacy patients (hpp) and a low rate of polypharmacy patients (lpp), respectively. methods this observational study used a database composed of prescription data from a large german statutory health insurance. we defined polypharmacy as the continuous prescription of five or more drugs and calculated the percentage of polypharmacy patients for each practice to identify hpp and lpp. results a total of patients in general practices received continuous medication. about % of these patients ( / ) received five or more different drugs. hpp had, on average, . % polypharmacy patients compared to . % in lpp. the total number of patients attending either a hpp or lpp was comparable ( vs. ; p ¼ . ), but hpp had a higher number of patients with prescriptions ( . % vs. . %; p < . ). the patients’ age distribution was similar ( . in lpp vs. . in hpp) and there were slightly more female patients in lpp. doctors in hpp prescribed proton pump inhibitors and nsaids more frequently than doctors in lpp, but there was no difference in the prescription of me-too drugs. conclusion the absolute differences in age and gender distribution between hpp and lpp were modest. prescribing quality, as measured by the rate of me-too drug prescriptions, was similar across all practices. therefore, differences in the rate of polypharmacy in general practice cannot sufficiently be explained by these factors. copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. key words — polypharmacy; prescriptions; drug utilisation review; databases; family practice received january ; revised june ; accepted august introduction polypharmacy has been a major concern in recent decades. it is associated with adverse drug reactions, an increased risk of hospitalisation, decreased medi- cation adherence and unnecessary costs. - polyphar- macy has been studied especially with respect to gender (with women more prone to polypharmacy), increasing age - and socioeconomic status. more recently, there has been a shift towards a more balanced view and the use of different drugs to treat * correspondence to: dr t. grimmsmann, medical review board of the statutory health insurance funds mecklenburg-vorpommern, schwerin, germany. e-mail: t.grimmsmann@mdk-mv.de y there was no conflict of interest. copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. one condition or multi-morbidity has been promoted especially in elderly people. , some authors are even concerned about under-treatment of patients using five or more drugs. the degree and variation of polypharmacy in general practices has only been studied by a few authors. junius-walker and colleagues found more than a quarter of older patients in german general practices taking in excess of five drugs. bjerrum and colleagues have studied prevalence rates of poly- pharmacy in practices in a defined region of denmark and found a -fold variation; more than half of this variation could be explained by practice structure, workload and prescribing profile. the definition of polypharmacy is crucial and often seems to be a mix of cumulative polypharmacy (the number of different medications during a particular polypharmacy in primary care practices time window), simultaneous polypharmacy (number of medications at any given time) and continuous polypharmacy (chronic medication). studying the latter is the major challenge. moreover, characteristics of practices or doctors with a high rate of poly- pharmacy prescriptions could also be proxies for other factors such as the practice patient age profile that might be the underlying reason for polypharmacy. the present study takes advantage of an impressive data set comprising every prescription for all those insured by one major statutory health insurance (shi) in a large region of germany. with this data, it was possible to identify all patients ( ) for whom a provider (general practitioner) prescribed one or more drugs and ( ) over what time period these drugs were prescribed. utilising this information, one aim of the study was to reliably ascertain the rate and range of continuous polypharmacy in all general practices encompassed by this shi. the major aim, however, was to identify general practices with a high rate of polypharmacy patients (‘high’ polypharmacy practices, hpp) and to compare their prescribing behaviour with those with a low rate of polypharmacy patients (‘low’ polyphar- macy practices, lpp). five hypotheses were investi- gated to determine whether: ( ) p copy atients in a hpp, compared to those in lpp, receive fewer drugs from other doctors than their general practitioner, so that, a higher rate of poly- pharmacy may not be a characteristic of some general practices but an artefact caused by pre- scriptions from specialists. ( ) t here is a positive correlation between the rate of patients with continuous polypharmacy and prac- tice size. ( ) t he rates of polypharmacy in different practices are due to practice patient age or gender profile. ( ) p ractices with a high rate of polypharmacy patients also prescribe me-too drugs more often, suggesting non-rational prescribing. ( ) p ractices with a high rate of polypharmacy patients differ from the remainder in their drug profile, e.g. they prescribe significantly more or fewer drugs in certain drug classes. methods design this was an observational study, analysing prescription data from general practices during a -month time period. the term ‘general practice’ or ‘general practitioner’ refers to general practitioners, general right # john wiley & sons, ltd. internists and physicians without specialisation. these doctors are regularly consulted in germany by more than % of the population for medical problems or health advice. database the database for the study comprised prescription data of members insured by the local health care funds (aok) in the german federal state of mecklenburg- vorpommern. this shi is by far the largest in mecklenburg-vorpommern covering about one third of this state’s entire population (about from . million people). the study covered all patients with a prescription by a general practitioner in the first months of . for each patient record, the following data were available: � p p seudonymised identification number of the insured person, including age and sex. � i dentification number for the practice including the information if the practice is a general practice. � c entral pharmaceutical number, an identification number providing every detail of the finished drug, including an atc-classification for the active sub- stance. � n umber and the date of each prescription. � p rescription data from october to june , providing the information whether a drug was also prescribed months before and after the actual -month study time period from january to march —as the marker of continuous medication. we had access to the total number of aok-patients for each practice, but only in an aggregated form. definition of polypharmacy, me-too drugs and data analysis polypharmacy. we defined polypharmacy as the prescription of five or more drugs—defined by the atc-code—for at least months. changes in brand name or dosage had therefore no effect on our results. in addition, all active substances must have been prescribed to the patients in a -month period both before and after the actual -month study time—which represents continuous polypharmacy in contrast to cumulative or simultaneous polypharmacy. unless otherwise noted, the drugs had to be prescribed continuously by the same general practice to the same patient. in particular for the definition of hpp and lpp (see below) only prescriptions made by the corresponding general practice were taken into account. harmacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds table . number of drugs continuously prescribed per patient � drugs (n) prescribed drugs for patients y in general practice only (%) in all practices (%) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > . . � included were patients who received or more drugs continuously throughout the study period. y t. grimmsmann and w. himmel polypharmacy practices. as one major aim of our study was to characterise practices with a high rate of polypharmacy practices we needed an appropriate comparator. as described in the result section of this paper, some general practices in our dataset supplied only very few patients with a continuous medication. to rule out a comparison of hpp with general practices with a focus in non-pharmacological therapy, we decided to exclude very small practices. we calculated the percentage of polypharmacy patients for each included general practice. the sample of practices was split into quartiles, according to the polypharmacy rate of their patients, with the top quartile representing high polypharmacy practices (hpp) and the lowest quartile defined as low polypharmacy practices (lpp). n ¼ . me-too drugs. these drugs are defined as novel drugs with no advantage over, but more expensive than, drugs already on the market. in germany, a list of these drugs was developed on behalf of the north rhine association of statutory health insurance physicians and the north-rhine health insurance funds. this is also valid for other german regions. statistical analysis. prevalence ratios (pr) and corre- sponding %confidence intervals (cis) were calcu- lated to define the probability of receiving a drug from a certain atc-class in hpp compared to patients in lpp. to compare differences between hpp and lpp, the t-test or the mann–whitney u-test were used, as appropriate. results patients, practices and prescriptions during the first months of , a total of patients ( % of all insured by the shi) received at least one drug prescription from one of the region’s general practitioners. of these patients, had taken at least active substance continuously, i.e. also within the months both before and after the actual study period (on average, patients per practice; standard error [se]: ). patients with at least one continuous prescription made up . % of the patients who received a prescription and % of all patients insured by this shi. some practices studied were rather small and many of them obviously had a non-pharmacological treat- ment focus. since these practices did not represent the average primary care practice, we decided to exclude copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. small practices with not more than patients ( mean per practice [ ] minus se [ ]) receiving at least one prescription continuously from their general prac- titioners over the -month study period. this analysis generated a sample of practices with patients that were excluded, so that the study sample consisted of general practices with patients prescribed at least one active substance continuously. the mean number of prescriptions per patient was . . about % of these patients ( / ) received five or more different drugs from their general practitioner and ( . %) received nine drugs or more (table ). a total of patients received continuous medication from two different general practitioners, another seven from three and one patient from four general practitioners. if the prescriptions from doctors other than general practitioners were also considered, the mean number of continuous prescrip- tions per patient rose, on average, by . % from . to . , and the percentage of patients who were prescribed five or more drugs then was . %. figure shows the nearly gaussian distribution of the rate of polypharmacy patients (five or more drugs from the general practitioner) in the practices. seventy percent ( / ) of the practices had a rate of polypharmacy patients between and % and % of the practices had % or less polypharmacy patients. high polypharmacy practices (hpp) and low polypharmacy practices (lpp) the general practices were ranked according to the relative frequency of patients receiving at least five or more prescription drugs continuously. the practices in the upper quartile (hpp) had, on average, . % polypharmacy patients compared to . % pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds figure . distribution of polypharmacy in general practices (n ¼ practices) polypharmacy in primary care practices patients in the lowest quartile (lpp); general prac- titioners in the second and third quartile had . % and . % patients with polypharmacy, respectively. the average number of different continuous prescribed drugs per patient in the lpp was . , compared to . in the hpp. interestingly, doctors other than the general practitioners supply patients in lpp with a higher rate of prescriptions ( . per patient) than patients in hpp ( . per patient). consequently, the increase of prescriptions per patient, given by these other doctors, was significantly higher in lpp (from . to . ; . %) than in hpp (from . to . ; . %; p < . ). compared to lpp, hpp had a somewhat higher number of patients in the -month study period ( vs. ; p ¼ . ). this small difference was due to a significantly higher number of patients with prescrip- tions in hpp ( . % vs. . %; p < . ). the patients’ age distribution in all four quartiles was similar and the mean age in lpp and hpp was . years (sd . years) and . years (sd . years), respectively ( p ¼ . ). there was a more or less linear increase across all quartiles in the number of prescribed drugs with patient age (table ). the only difference was that hpp started at a higher level in younger patients ( . drugs per patient compared to table . patient age and average number of drugs, prescribed by the patient’s general practices age group < – patients (%) drugs (n) � patients (%) drugs (n) � patie st quartile (¼lpp) . . nd quartile . . rd quartile . . th quartile (¼hpp) . . all . . � average number of active substances prescribed per patient. copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. . of lpp) and maintained this higher level with an average number of . drugs for the oldest patients (compared to . in lpp). in all four quartiles, female patients received, on average, more drugs than male patients ( . vs. . over all quartiles; p < . ). the majority in all quartiles were female ( % over all quartiles) with a slightly higher rate of female patients in lpp than hpp ( % vs. %, p < . ). according to the list of me-too drugs, there were only small differences between the four quartiles of practices. the rate of me-too drugs prescribed by lpp and hpp was, on average, . % (sd . ) and . % ( . ), respectively ( p ¼ . ). in a last step, we analysed—on a patient level— prescribing differences between hpp and lpp, to determine whether hpp not only prescribed more drugs than lpp in general, but also certain drug classes significantly more often. since doctors in hpp pre- scribed . times more drugs per patient than those in lpp, we only considered strong differences in prescriptions between both groups of practices. especially four drug groups were prescribed with a prevalence ratio of > . for the lower %ci: drugs for acid related disorders, lipid reducing agents, diuretics and antiinflammatory and antirheumatic products (table ). in both lpp and hpp, % of the patients with drugs for acid related disorders (atc class a ) received a proton pump inhibitors (ppi), and % of all patients with anti-inflammatory agents (atc class m ) had a prescription of nsaids (data not shown). we repeated this analysis for only those patients who received five or more drugs. some of the above- mentioned differences could be still detected but the pr was much lower (table ). significantly, pr above . could again be detected in drugs for acid related disorders, lipid reducing agents, diuretics and antiin- flammatory and antirheumatic products with highest ratios for antiinflammatory and antirheumatic pro- ducts/nsaids and drugs for acid related disorders/ppi. we also analysed associations in the prescriptions of general practitioner all – � nts (%) drugs (n) � patients (%) drugs (n) � patients (%) drugs (n) � . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds table . top prescribed atc classes in low and high polypharmacy practices rank atc-code therapeutic subgroup all patients (n ¼ ) patients with at least five drugs (n ¼ ) patients lpp � hpp � pr y % ci patients lpp � hpp � pr y % ci n (%) (%) (%) n (%) (%) (%) c agents acting on the renin-angiotensin system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c beta-blocking agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a drugs used in diabetes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c calcium channel blockers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c cardiac therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c diuretics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . n analgesics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a drugs for acid related disorders z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c serum lipid reducing agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . m antiinflammatory and antirheumatic prod. x . . . . . . . . . . . . . . � hpp ¼ high polypharmacy practices; lpp ¼ low polypharmacy practices. y prevalence ratio ( %confidence interval) for patients in hpp, compared to lpp, for receiving a drug in the corresponding subgroups; pr for all patients in bold type, if the lower %ci exceeds . . z mostly ppi. x mostly nsaidss. t. grimmsmann and w. himmel two drug groups, especially ppi and nsaids. doctors in hpp prescribed this combination significantly more often than those in lpp (rr: . ; %ci . – . ). cough and cold preparations (atc r ) were . times more frequently prescribed in hpp than lpp ( %ci: . – . ); for polypharmacy patients this ratio was . ( %ci . – . ; data not shown). this drug group, however, comprised only patients ( . %) and polypharmacy patients ( . %). discussion summary of main findings our first important result is a valid estimate of the rate of continuous polypharmacy in primary care practice. of those patients who received at least one continuous prescription, the polypharmacy rate was about %. this rate is lower than in many other studies and would be even lower if we had also included those patients who received a non-continuous prescription or no prescription at all. our second important result was that we detected significant differences between practices with either a high or low percentage of polypharmacy patients, such as the numbers of patients receiving drug prescriptions or the frequency of ppi or nsaid prescriptions. hpp and lpp also differed in the rate of prescriptions issued by doctors other than the patient’s general practitioner. however, the absolute differences were modest. moreover, differences in polyphamacy rates between general practices could not be explained by differences in the practice patient age or gender copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. profile. lpp and hpp did not differ significantly in one relevant indicator for the quality of prescribing performance, the prescription rate for me-too drugs. strengths and limitations of the study one major advantage of this study is the large data set analysed, covering all prescriptions to every member of one large shi. this identified patients with continuous polypharmacy reliably which, as opposed to cumulat- ive or simultaneous polypharmacy, poses a major challenge for general practitioners and clinical pharmacologists. we had only access to prescription data and the patient’s gender and age but neither to diagnoses nor further details of the doctors. so, on principle, it was not possible to determine the appropriateness of any prescriptions and especially of five or more drugs. however, the data in this study provide a reliable basis for a rational debate about the real rate and range of polypharmacy in primary care. we excluded some practices since they had only a small number of patients and prescribed only very few drugs so that they did not seem to represent typical primary care practices and were not suited for an adequate comparison with hpp. of course, this decision mighthave excluded somepractices with typical general practitioners who prescribed, for whatever reasons, only few drugs, but we think it would increase a possible bias to include all small practices. moreover, in a few practices several doctors used the same practice id, so that these practices were less likely to be excluded. pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds polypharmacy in primary care practices we should be aware that doctors in germany can prescribe, or recommend, drugs without using pre- scriptions that are forwarded to the shis. this happens especially in cough and cold medications or nsaids so that patients’ real medication use may be under- estimated in our study. this is also true for over-the- counter (otc) medicines. comparison with the literature data in the literature about the prevalence of polypharmacy varies strongly depending upon how polypharmacy is defined. it is not only the number of drugs (usually > or > ) that matters, but also the time window and the continuity of prescriptions, which influence prevalence rates. many studies have chosen ‘simultaneous’ polypharmacy, i.e. several drugs prescribed at any time, as the criterion for poly- pharmacy. since care of the chronically ill—especially the elderly with multiple problems—is a core activity in primary care, we decided to analyse ‘continuous polypharmacy’, i.e. five or more drugs prescribed continuously over at least a -month time period, which seems to mirror a general practitioner’s typical challenge in the prescribing process. due to differing definitions of polypharmacy, a wide spectrum of prevalence rates is, therefore, not astonishing. for example, junis-walker et al. found a % rate of patients in general practice receiving more than five drugs, and this frequency rose to about % when otc medicines were also included. the prevalence of polypharmacy was % in a danish study of frequent attenders in general practice and even over % in a recently published study of swedish people aged – . at least two studies have reported polypharmacy prevalence frequencies similar to those we have detailed here: a longitudinal study from the netherlands and a large pharmacoepide- miological study from denmark reported rates around %. like many other studies, we could also show an increase in polypharmacy in older patients although this increase may be less prominent than other studies have recorded. , due to the fact that we considered polypharmacy in patients with at least one continuous prescription, younger patients in our cohort with a chronic disease may have been overrepresented. meaning of the study polypharmacy was not, or only to a limited degree, related to those practice characteristics that we investigated in this study. our five hypotheses therefore explain only partially polypharmacy in primary care: copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. ( ) c ph ompared to hpp, patients in lpp received only slightly more drugs from other doctors. perhaps doctors in hpp were more self-confident in their prescribing skills; or possibly doctors in lpp tried to restrain pharmacological management by their colleagues to control prescribing costs and the burden for their practice budget. in any case, differences in prescribing behaviour between doctors in hpp and lpp were not completely reflected in the total number of prescriptions that a patient received from all his doctors. ( ) g eneral practitioners in lpp or hpp cared for about the same number of patients, but, on average, about % more patients in hpp than in lpp received one or more prescriptions. some authors believe that a high rate of prescriptions reflects their use to shorten a consultation. however, we should be cautious to draw any conclusions due to the small difference observed between hpp and lpp. ( ) t hat older patients require more drugs does not simply explain polypharmacy. in all practices, the rate of polypharmacy increased with patient age, but the higher polypharmacy rate in hpp, com- pared to lpp, could not be traced back to a higher mean patient age in these practices. likewise we could confirm that female patients were prescribed on average more drugs than male; however the higher rate of polypharmacy patients in hpp was not due to more female patients. ( ) h pp did not prescribe more me-too drugs. me-too drugs are taken as an indicator of irrational, or at least economically inefficient, prescribing behaviour, , reflecting especially the influence of pharmaceutical advertising. ( ) h pp prescribed, on average, . times more drugs per patient than lpp. this rate was more or less the same for nearly all drug groups. only drugs for acid related disorders, lipid reducing agents, diure- tics and nsaids were much more frequently prescribed in hpp. it is possible that the prescription of multiple drugs itself leads to the need for additional medication, so that polypharmacy may become self-perpetuating, for example, in the case of the prescription of ppi due to adverse gastrointestinal effects from drug intake. how- ever, if we analysed the prescriptions in hpp and lpp only for those patients who received more than five drugs, hpp had, again, higher rates of anti-ulcer agents (mainly ppi) and nsaids. in particular overuse of ppi without an appropriate indication is a matter of con- cern. some doctors might, therefore, profit from armacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds t. grimmsmann and w. himmel interventions to improve their prescribing perform- ance, e.g. by the implementation of a computer- generated feedback system. there was a striking difference between hpp and lpp in the prescription of cough and cold preparations, although the sample of patients was small. these drugs are considered more or less irrational and can be purchased without a prescription. obviously, most doctors in both lpp and hpp did not prescribe cough and cold preparations or only to a very limited degree. similar to general practitioners in a british study, who sometimes prescribed antibiotics without indica- tion because of a perceived patient pressure, doctors in our study may have been aware of the limited value of these drugs but doctors in hpp may have been more prone to responding to patient wishes to prescribe these drugs. although we did not study the patients’ behaviour, this may also be an explanation for the generally higher rate of patients with prescriptions in hpp. implications and conclusions our analysis may contribute to a more objective consideration of polypharmacy as we show that polypharmacy does not have a simple explanation, such as patient age or gender distribution, and that general practitioners with a high rate of polypharmacy are not a homogeneous group that is characterised by inappropriate prescribing behaviour. the practice variation of polypharmacy may mainly result from the key points � the rate of continuous polypharmacy, in general practices, defined as the prescription of five or more drugs for at least months, is lower than usually estimated. � even though polypharmacy is more prevalent in the elderly and female patients, age and gender are not relevant factors that discriminate between practices with a high and low percentage of polypharmacy patients. � general practices with a high percentage of polypharmacy patients had a somewhat higher rate of patients who received a drug prescription and doctors in these practices prescribed signifi- cantly more ppis and nsaids. � practices with a high percentage of polypharmacy patients did not perform worse in other areas of prescribing performance, such as the rate of me- too drugs. copyright # john wiley & sons, ltd. distribution in morbidity, as suggested by the results of a recently published prescription study in the uk where the inclusion of morbidity data explained % of the variability in prescribing at the practice level whereas patient age and sex alone explained only %. so the higher rate of polypharmacy patients in some of our practices might be a direct consequence of a higher rate of patients with more diseases or more severe diseases. to validate this conclusion, a prescription study with direct data about the patients’ health status and more details about the characteristics of the practices and the doctors would be needed. although we should avoid stigmatising practices solely because of a high rate of polypharmacy, in some instances such as a high rate of ppi prescriptions in polypharmacy patients, it may be reasonable to inform doctors of possible deficits in their pharmacological management. ethics ethical approval was not necessary due to the nature of the data (secondary data analysis of anonymised data). acknowledgements the authors are indebted to the aok mecklenburg- vorpommern for permission to perform this study with special thanks to michael hewelt for his support. reinhard hilgers, professor at the department of biometrics, univer- sity of göttingen gave valuable advice how to compare the rate of polypharmacy in different practices. references . colley ca, lucas lm. polypharmacy: the cure becomes the disease. j gen intern med ; 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(stand: . . ). http://www.kvno.de/mitglieder/arznmitl/arznarch/ arznarch /arin /me_too.html . pearce n. effect measures in prevalence studies. environ health perspect ; ( ): – . . vedsted p, sørensen ht, mortensen jt. drug prescription for adult frequent attenders in danish general practice: a population-based study. pharmacoepidemiol drug saf ; : – . . mand p, wilkening k, kersting m, hoy l, hummers-pradier e. therapy with polypharmacy and inadequate medication in elder patients in general practice [in german]. paper held at the . congress of the german society of general practice and family medicine, berlin . z allgemeinmed ; (congress abstracts): . . mccormick js. drugs and placebos in general practice. in rational pharmacotherapy in general practice, kochen mm (ed.). springer: berlin, ; – . . colmenero f, sullivan sd, palmer ja, et al. quality of clinical and economic evidence in dossier formulary submissions. am j manag care ; ( ): – . . forgacs i, loganayagam a. overprescribing proton pump inhibitors. br med j ; : – . . macfarlane j, holmes w, macfarlane r, britten n. influence of patients’ expectations on antibiotic management of acute lower respir- atory tract illness in general practice: questionnaire study. br med j ; ( ): – . . omar rz, o’sullivan c, petersen i, islam a, majeed a. a model based on age, sex, and morbidity to explain variation in uk general practice prescribing: cohort study. br med j ; : a . pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, ; : – doi: . /pds assessing the campus climate on sexual misconduct: an opportunity for student-centered research sabrina t. cherrya keywords abstract campus assessment; qualitative research; sexual misconduct. campus climate surveys are effective ways to assess behaviors and attitudes regarding sexual misconduct. undergraduate applied learning and research-centered projects are also integral to helping students apply textbook content to real-world dilemmas. in conjunction with the collaboration for assault response & education office and the office of title ix and clery compliance, the researchers taught and mentored undergraduate students in co-facilitating a sexual misconduct assessment. the project proceeded in four phases: planning and training; focus group recruitment; focus group facilitation; and data analysis. this research highlights how university and college departments, as well as organizations, can collaborate to facilitate large-scale assessments. we also explain how these assessments can be integrated into applied learning and research projects for students. opportunities for future research include more extensive training on qualitative data collection and analysis for undergraduate students; routine assessments of the campus climate related to sexual misconduct; and continued student- centered research opportunities that focus on current events. article info received january received in revised form march accepted march available online march doi: https://doi.org/ . /jalt. . . . content available at : journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) journal of applied learn ing & te ac hi n g jalt http://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/index issn : - x a assistant professor of public health, university of north carolina wilmington journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) zoe leonardc c research assistant, unc wilmington melannie pateb b lecturer of public health, university of north carolina at wilmington journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) the care office, which offers comprehensive education, trainings, campaigns, services, and advocacy for students who have been victimized; the office of title ix and clery compliance; the public health program in the school of health and applied human sciences; and one graduate, along with several undergraduate students. • • introduction according to the world health organization ( ), interpersonal violence is “violence between individuals … and includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse … acquaintance, stranger and youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.” therefore, sexual misconduct is a category of interpersonal violence. and as defined by the university of north carolina wilmington’s collaboration for assault response & education (care) office, sexual assault and sexual misconduct are overarching terms used to define a “completed or attempted” sexual act without consent (uncw, a). college students are at a heightened risk for sexual assault even though the rate of reporting is low (mcmahon & stepleton, ). rates of assault and misconduct vary widely by school and student population. monitoring and assessing behaviors, as well as attitudes, regarding sexual misconduct became a shared initiative on college campuses across the country after implementation of the white house task force to protect students from sexual assault in (krebs et al., ). due to the variance of sexual assault incidents and the likelihood that the majority of these events are not reported to law enforcement, climate surveys remain the most effective and meaningful way to understand the magnitude and nature of sexual misconduct on college and university campuses (u.s. department of justice, ). assessing the campus climate routinely is necessary as perceptions and attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities are essential to assist students affected by interpersonal violence (coulter & rankin, ; follingstad, & busch-armendariz, ; wood et al., ). effectively addressing sexual misconduct requires cross-campus collaboration, faculty, as well as administration, involvement, and the integration of student opinions and voices (graham et al., ). researchers who have led projects to review campus climate surveys emphasized a need to clearly define sexual assault by engaging a representative sample of students who completed surveys and oversampling vulnerable, as well as marginalized, populations (beaver, ; heer & jones, ). another important emphasis on college campuses is the need for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in applied learning and research-based opportunities. studies suggest a positive association between research understanding and interest when this exposure occurs early in a student’s matriculation (hunter et al., ; seymour et al., ). providing applied learning opportunities for students is highly beneficial for engaging students with course material and helping them learn to conduct research. these experiences are often mutually beneficial for students and faculty in that students apply theory to real life situations, increase their level of engagement as citizens on campus, and observe viable change from their efforts. simultaneously, faculty gain insights into important student perspectives (holtzman, ; mccarthy, ). in conjunction with the collaboration for assault response & education (care) office and the office of title ix and clery compliance on a medium-sized university campus in southeastern united states, we conducted a biannual, campus climate assessment to gauge attitudes and behaviors related to sexual misconduct and to inform prevention initiatives. existing literature describes the importance of using campus collaborations to engage students in creating meaningful, positive, and productive partnerships (mcmahon et al., ). therefore, we used these findings to leverage resources provided by several university program offices to assist with data assessment and analysis training for public health students. the project afforded students applied learning experience intertwined with aspects of health promotion, including data collection and analysis, professional presentations, and program development. the researchers believe this opportunity was also integral to helping the students become better equipped as future public health practitioners. while there is limited scholarly data about the role of public health practitioners in addressing sexual misconduct, research has highlighted the potential impact of peer to peer education in prevention efforts (mcmahon et al., ). the purpose of this paper is to present the process for the completion of a biennial, collaborative assessment used to gauge attitudes about sexual assault and misconduct. the researchers provide a framework for future cross-campus collaborations conducting campus-wide assessments and detail lessons learned, as well as opportunities for future research. methods our primary method for this project was focus groups as they are viable research tools for gaining insight on perspectives and experiences on an array of subjects, including those deemed as sensitive topics (kruegar, ). a number of campus-wide groups assisted in the recruitment of focus group participants, data collection and analysis, and the presentation of results. the project required active engagement of the following groups and campus entities: • • the research team comprised two faculty within the university’s public health program and one graduate research assistant (gra). one faculty member served as the principal investigator (pi) for the project and spearheaded key tasks including, but not limited to: coordinating team journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) meetings; hiring the gra; liaising with campus departments; ensuring focus group marketing, recruitment and facilitation; and co-leading data analysis, as well as presentation. the additional faculty member was the primary instructor for a public health evaluation methods course and served as the primary contact for students enrolled in this course (n = ); scheduled all class visits by the remainder of the research team; coordinated student sign-ups for focus group co- facilitation; and assisted with data analysis. the pi selected the partnering faculty member because this colleague taught an undergraduate course covering program design and evaluation. the gra assisted with all aspects of planning and recruitment. the team worked together to engage various campus departments in recruiting a representative sample of the student population. the project proceeded in four phases: planning and training, focus group recruitment, focus group facilitation, and data analysis (figure ). figure . four phases of the research project. note. the research project was implemented in accordance with the steps outlined in this diagram. phase i: planning and training initial planning for the project included several steps. faculty members met to discuss the project’s feasibility and identify potential funding options. this step also included identifying a specific class for which the research project would be integrated into the semester’s content. an undergraduate public health evaluation methods course was chosen, as it gave students an opportunity to apply course material to a current event using methods taught in the course including, but not limited to, the importance of program evaluation, as well as quantitative and qualitative data collection. the faculty members met with the care office and office of title ix and clery compliance to gauge interest and gather information on how the assessment process was conducted in previous years. after roles and responsibilities were clearly defined, other campus units were engaged, including the student success center, which is responsible for programming related to student recruitment, retention, academic success, and post-graduation placement. team members identified the experiencing transformative education through applied learning (eteal) grant as the best fit for funding this study (uncw, b). eteal grants support student-centered, experiential initiatives. the proposed project met the criteria for this grant source, resulting in a $ , award. the funds were used to hire a gra, purchase focus group audio recording material and incentives, and pay for audio transcription services. experiential learning was a central aspect of this project. after securing grant funds, the research team introduced the project to undergraduate students enrolled in a public health evaluation methods course. the pi and gra conducted multiple visits to the class to provide an overview of the project, discuss expectations for student engagement, answer questions, and detail next steps — including the focus group training and facilitation schedule. training sessions with the students on how to facilitate focus groups were conducted during subsequent visits. over a series of face- to-face classes, the team continued to prepare students for involvement in the project, such as facilitating mock focus group sessions and debriefings. the research team drafted a focus group guide and shared it with students for feedback. each student enrolled in the class reviewed the guide and provided handwritten feedback. feedback included simplifying questions, defining terminology, giving more background on campus policies before asking questions, and eliminating redundant questions. the researchers viewed this feedback as valuable because some of the groups would be co-facilitated by students. additionally, having guidance from students on the ease and simplicity of questions assisted in removing research jargon and making transitions between questions smoother. this feedback was also sent to the care and title ix offices for final approval. the researchers submitted an institutional review board (irb) application, but the board provided an exemption because the research team would not be sharing the results from the focus groups. phase ii: focus group recruitment one goal of the project was to have a representative sample of students participate in the focus groups. to achieve this sample size, the research team contacted campus units to seek permission to recruit participants from their respective programs. these departments included the college of education, the english department, the school of health and applied human sciences, the school of nursing, the student success center, and the music department. these collaborations helped the research team recruit participants and conduct groups via three primary methods. first method: faculty members were asked for permission to conduct a focus group during a portion of a class or for the entire class. second method: faculty members were asked to offer extra credit as an incentive for students to participate in focus groups conducted on campus in the evenings. third method: recruitment was facilitated via campus-wide program offices such as greek life and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, and asexual (lgbtqia) resource center. journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) all recruitment methods worked efficiently as students were either participating in focus groups during a regularly scheduled course-related activity — such as a class or organizational meeting — or incentivized with extra credit to attend a group after hours. the research team also worked with campus-wide program offices to conduct groups before, during, or after regularly scheduled program meetings. for all focus groups, participants were offered an additional incentive with the opportunity to enter a raffle drawing to win one of several prizes. the research team created a shared spreadsheet to list each focus group with the date, time, location, and anticipated number of participants. these spreadsheets were shared with the undergraduate students enrolled in the evaluation class so that they could sign-up as registration assistants (n = ), co-facilitators (n = ), or note-takers (n = ). phase iii: focus group facilitation the research team conducted focus groups with participants. the number of participants in each group varied, ranging from four to fifteen. in most cases, the groups were facilitated by one graduate student facilitator. four groups were conducted by the gra with an undergraduate co-facilitator and one group was facilitated by two undergraduate students. the remaining undergraduate students helped with registration assistance (getting participants signed up for the raffle and helping them complete demographic forms) and note taking. all focus group sessions were attended by a care office or title ix representative. focus groups were facilitated in a similar manner to be consistent and encourage participation from all attendees. the seats in each room were arranged in a circle to allow participants, facilitators, and the care or title ix representative to face one another and engage in dialogue (barbour, ). before beginning a group discussion, the facilitator read a welcome and project description to all attendees. the script (see appendix a) informed participants of the goals of the study, reinforced that participation was voluntary, ensured participants their names would not be used in any publications. this opening was also used to obtain verbal consent to begin the audio recording. the care or title ix representative was introduced to the group and informed participants they were there to offer support and to provide any clarifications. participants were then asked to complete a demographic survey, which was distributed and collected by the undergraduate students. attendees did not add their names to the surveys to ensure anonymity. participants provided responses related to their age, gender, year in school, major, involvement in various campus activities, relationship and sexual history, as well as if they were a victim of sexual misconduct or knew someone who had been a victim. demographic data can be found in table . other participant responses include nearly % (n = ) of focus group participants reported being involved in non-academic greek life. participants were also asked to disclose if they either knew someone who experienced sexual misconduct or had witnessed sexual misconduct; % (n = ) knew someone who had been a victim of sexual misconduct or had witnessed sexual misconduct. table : demographic characteristics of focus group participants. all focus groups were audio recorded. the facilitators used an interview guide and questions were divided into the following sections (see appendix a): care (general knowledge); new student orientation; uncw’s student sexual misconduct policy; reporting sexual misconduct; and male involvement in prevention programs. group sessions lasted an average of minutes. at the end of each group, the care or title ix representative provided clarification on any misconceptions that came up during the discussions. all demographic surveys were collected at the end of the discussion, and participants were reminded of the raffle drawing sign-up. phase iv: data analysis the researchers conducted quantitative and qualitative data analysis. descriptive statistics were calculated using survey monkey. after labeling each survey with an identification number for verification, the gra entered surveys into the program. the data were then double-checked for accuracy. focus groups sessions were transcribed by an external vendor. following transcription, the researchers used maxqda, a qualitative data analysis software, to code data. in alignment with inductive coding processes, an initial coding scheme was created based on the focus group guide (saldana, ). the pi and gra worked together to further develop the codebook and review assigned codes. as the data were coded, additional codes were added to capture student responses. the results of the demographic surveys journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) and focus groups were then used to create a report for the care office and office of title ix and clery compliance. discussion assessing the campus climate related to sexual misconduct can be a cumbersome process. recruiting students who have busy schedules is an additional challenge. however, engaging other campus units as described in this article may yield a greater return related to recruitment and quality of data. in this study, having the cooperation of faculty members across campus who agreed to allow the research team to visit their classes or who awarded extra credit for focus group participation proved to be advantageous. this strategy also helped to ensure sufficient participant attendance. finally, the across-campus collaboration provided the opportunity to enhance awareness about sexual misconduct and existing initiatives designed to address misconduct on and around campus. the campus where this research was conducted has a student population that includes roughly % of students who identify as female and % who identify as ethnically diverse (uncw, c). by partnering with other faculty, the researchers were able to conduct focus groups with a representative sample of undergraduate and graduate students related to gender as % of our study participants identified as women. we achieved an oversampling in relation to racial and ethnic diversity, as % identified as a member of an ethnically diverse population. students were also integral in recruiting their friends and co-facilitating the focus groups, including managing set- up logistics. research literature has shown that working with students to recruit for and conduct focus groups can be effective in fostering dialogue among college students (murray, ; parker & tritter, ). additionally, the inclusion of college students can be beneficial for data collection when participants perceive the facilitator to be of similar age (doerr & wantuch, ). college students benefit from being exposed to research, but some disciplines—such as the social sciences—may limit the category of research to quantitative methods. although the larger assessment project included the distribution of a campus-wide survey to a random sample of students (results not reported), the efforts described in this publication exhibit how qualitative data design and collection can be valuable complements to quantitative data. students learned about the complicated logistics related to planning for, recruiting, and conducting focus groups. the gra gained firsthand experience in the arduous process of analyzing qualitative data. all students were introduced to myths related to qualitative research, such as lack of rigor or ease in administration (cope, ; tracy, ). and while this article does not focus on the results of the focus groups, it does highlight how detailed the process can be, as well as how comparable initiatives can be conducted with the cooperation of several entities across a campus community. specific to dissemination, the researchers shared the process-oriented results of this project across a number of media, including poster and oral presentations at local and national conferences. the authors conducted a formal question and answer session with the care office and the office of title ix and clery compliance to present the results and address any areas of follow-up or concern. the focus groups results were used to help these entities evaluate the campus climate and discuss how the findings can be leveraged to guide future program planning. limitations there are a number of limitations to our study. while the majority of the focus groups were conducted by the gra, some groups were co-facilitated by undergraduate students. the undergraduate students were trained on conducting focus groups, and the aim of this study was to help them gain exposure to qualitative research methods. however, the quality of these groups may have been limited by their lack of experience and confidence in leading groups. also, in an attempt to increase student comfort levels on providing feedback about the title ix and care offices, public health faculty and the gra coordinated the focus groups. but to address any program misconceptions on the services available, staff from both offices attended every focus group and spent time at the end of the groups providing clarifications. their presence may have hindered full transparency about the accessibility and adequacy of services provided by these offices. all participants volunteered to take part in the focus groups, but some groups were conducted during regularly scheduled class times; therefore, volunteer bias is possible. some focus groups questions yielded a simple “yes” or “no” response, thereby hindering discussion about those prompts. additionally, students who attended groups with their peers may have been hesitant to speak openly about their experiences with sexual misconduct (wutich et al., ). the gra entered all demographic data in survey monkey without assistance of another researcher, which could have yielded errors in the data. she was primarily responsible for coding all interviews and worked with a faculty member to review the code schemes and verify consistency of coding. however, the authors did not code the data simultaneously or test for inter-coder reliability. contributions to and opportunities for future research this project highlights how institutional units and campus organizations can work together to assess the campus climate. the authors detailed the initial planning stages, recruitment efforts, focus group facilitation, and data analysis processes related to the project. this article highlights how large-scale assessments can be integrated into applied learning opportunities for students. although the undergraduate students helped edit the focus group guide and conduct sessions, they did not assist with data analysis. opportunities for future research can include more extensive training on qualitative data collection and analysis for undergraduate students. journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) to expose students to the full cycle of the research process, similar initiatives could require all students to create professional publications to present details of the project. this addition would enable them to develop, administer, analyze, and present findings of a campus-wide assessment. including undergraduate students in all aspects of the research process in this manner can potentially provide increased engagement in coursework, facilitate ongoing learning, and foster productive relationships between faculty and students. college campuses are parts of a broader community and this project was conducted as the global #metoo movement was putting a renewed emphasis on speaking out about sexual misconduct (uncw, ). in light of this ongoing movement, as well as several other initiatives occurring around the globe in regards to diversity and inclusion, students may be increasingly open to applied learning and research opportunities that include the integration of pivotal current events. additionally research projects on college campuses can aim to integrate current events that are of interest of students. in summary, our study echoes the findings that involving students, including undergraduate students, in research is valuable. we have demonstrated one way this is possible. specific to the ongoing topic of sexual misconduct, college and university administrators may explore more frequent assessments of the campus climate. this process may provide valuable, up-to-date information, and well as give students real-time, real life research experience. with respect to the wide range of topics of interest on college and university campuses, as well as the larger communities in which they are positioned, this project serves as a model for other institutions conducting large-scale assessments. this research may also be a guide for those seeking to engage undergraduate and graduate students in research, as well as faculty and staff who want to foster cross-campus collaboration. references barbour, r. 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( ) copyright: © sabrina t. cherry, melannie pate and zoe leonard. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). the use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. no use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. reimagining global health as the sharing of power rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - reimagining global health as the sharing of power kumanan rasanathan, jennifer j k rasanathan editorial to cite: rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. reimagining global health as the sharing of power. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . / bmjgh- - received march accepted march health systems global, phnom penh, cambodia bmj publishing group, london, uk correspondence to dr jennifer j k rasanathan; jjkrasanathan@ gmail. com © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re- use permitted under cc by- nc. no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. the foundational documents of global health, including the who constitution and the declaration of alma- ata, affirm and reaf- firm the importance of equality, equity and the human rights principles of participation, non- discrimination and accountability—as important ends in themselves, but also as essential to achieve improvements in health outcomes. in recent years though, the system of organisations and structures that comprise ‘global health’ has been increasingly indicted on the extent to which it reflects these values in its own operations—in particular, who is represented in decision- making and alloca- tion of resources, and who is excluded. gender inequalities in global health institu- tions have been challenged by organisations such as women in global health and global health / (gh ), while the #metoo social movement has shown that global health is not a safe space from sexual harassment. allied to growing calls to ‘decolonise’ global health (problematising the typical modus operandi of institutions and individuals in and from high- income countries acting on issues and individuals in low- income and middle- income countries), there is a growing intersectional interrogation of the political economy of global health. in this context, we welcome the publica- tion of the third annual gh report and accompanying gender and health index, timed to coincide with international women’s day. taking gender analysis as an entry point, the report examines the policies and compo- sition of organisations working in global health and argues that global health is not fit- for- purpose to deliver on its sustainable development goal (sdg) mandate to ensure health and well- being for all people. here, we highlight three of its key findings and offer our reflections on the implications and ques- tions the report raises. first, despite a reported increase in the availability of workplace gender equality poli- cies among the organisations assessed over years (from % in to % in ), there has been little progress in parity at the top. gender parity in senior manage- ment, the report forecasts, will not be reached for another years at the current rate of change. few organisations address gender in a transformative manner, and more organ- isations have policies on gender equality in recruitment than other aspects of workforce diversity. second, the report finds that only % of global health leaders are nationals of low- income or middle- income countries, while only % of global health organisations are headquartered in low- income and middle- income countries. third, and most striking, the report demonstrates the mismatch between the programmatic focus of most global health organisations compared with sdg health targets by using sex- disaggregated data on the burden of disease associated with each target. in so doing, the authors point to the larger focus on maternal mortality compared with work on non- communicable diseases (ncds), tobacco use, alcohol and substance use and traffic injuries, all of which disproportionately impact the health of men and boys. the applicability of these findings and the follow- on consequences and imper- atives for action deserve consideration and scrutiny by all in global health. as the report itself acknowledges, improve- ments in the metrics the report uses on gender equality do not necessarily translate to a fuller appreciation of the relationship between gender and health in global health organisations’ workforce policies and way of working. we need much faster progress towards gender- balanced boards and gender- equal leadership in global health as ends in themselves. but we also need to mitigate the risk that gender equality policies are token- istic, ‘tick box’ exercises that allow organisa- tions to get a better gh score without substantively changing workplace culture, making opportunities for advancement more equitable or, crucially, enabling them to o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n m a rch . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjgh- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://gh.bmj.com/ rasanathan k, rasanathan jjk. bmj global health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health do their jobs better. will greater gender parity in global health leadership improve the chances of achieving the sdg health- related targets? we need mechanisms that ensure that global health institutions take a gender- transformative approach, as critical to the pursuit of health for all, to ensure this is so in practice. the intersectional lens the report applies to its anal- ysis of today’s global health architecture is much needed. the sobering but probably unsurprising findings lead us to ask: what are the consequences of having almost % of global health organisations’ headquarters in high- income countries? or of having women from low- income and middle- income countries in only % of global health leadership roles? the report does not measure class as a factor. efforts to improve diversity in elite settings (which global health undoubtedly is) tend to be captured by elite members of under- represented groups—those most fluent in the dominant discourses and with the social capital to be able to enter and function in these spaces with minimal disruption. perhaps even more important than efforts to diversify global health leadership (espe- cially given the entry barriers to these roles) is ensuring that rights- holders who are the intended beneficiaries of global health practice are included, consulted and employed in strategic planning, programmatic priority setting, implementation and accountability mechanisms. the report’s most interesting and original finding is its highlighting of the lack of attention to the health of men and boys, perhaps a vestige of the dominance of the millennium development goals’ (mdgs) health agenda even years into the sdg era. again, the implication is that ‘gender and health’ has too often served as a proxy for ‘women’s health’, rather than engaging with context- specific gender norms, roles and behaviours that mani- fest in divergent health outcomes among and between women, men and transgender people. the nuance that this report adds is that this disproportionately leads to neglect of the health of men and boys linked to ncds— and moreover, that unless we address this neglect and tackle the determinants of these inequalities, increasing equality in gender roles will perversely lead to worsening ncd outcomes for women as they adopt behaviours prev- alent in men. we do not think the implication is that we should devote less attention in global health to repro- ductive and maternal health, given the global failure to achieve mdg and continuing challenges with sexual and reproductive health and rights. but highlighting this gap is a further stimulus to more fully engage with the relationship between gender and health, and merits serious consideration and follow- up by global health funders, policy- makers and implementers. although the report recognises the differing size, influence and power of the organisations it assesses, we would welcome a more detailed power analysis taking funding levels and impact into account, particularly disaggregating the quantitative findings further. in conclusion, the gh report calls not just for a moment of reflection but instead a moment of imag- ination for global health. we applaud the scale of the review of organisations, and especially the courage of the authors in moving beyond gender equality to a more comprehensive diagnosis of global health and its discon- tents. their findings raise the uncomfortable question of whether global health leadership can be anything other than an elite activity. we hope the next edition will include qualitative research or even similar assessments in national contexts to further our understanding of the culture of global health. in the meantime, we should closely consider these findings and continue the task of reimagining global health as a practice of liberation and the genuine sharing of power. twitter kumanan rasanathan @rasanathan funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; internally peer reviewed. data availability statement no additional data are available. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by- nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non- commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non- commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . /. references world health organization. constitution of the world health organization. geneva: world health organization, . world health organization, unicef. declaration of alma- ata. ussr: alma- ata, . dhatt r, thompson k, lichtenstein d, et al. the time is now – a call to action for gender equality in global health leadership. glob health epidemiol genom ; :e . clark h. report card shows gender is missing in global health. lancet ; : – . #metoo meets global health: a call to action. health hum rights ; : – . zarocostas j. hiv/aids community divided over allegations about unaids. lancet ; : . saha s, kavattur p, goheer a. the c- word: tackling the enduring legacy of colonialism in global health. available: https://www. healthsystemsglobal. org/ blog/ / the- c- word- tackling- the- enduring- legacy- of- colonialism- in- global- health. html [accessed march, ]. kapilashrami a, hankivsky o. intersectionality and why it matters to global health. lancet ; : – . global health / . the global health / report : power, privilege and priorities. london, uk, . https:// globalhealth . org/ report/ gupta gr, oomman n, grown c, et al. gender equality and gender norms: framing the opportunities for health. lancet ; : – . horton r. offline: the pretensions of global health elites. lancet ; : . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n m a rch . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/rasanathan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /gheg. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /gheg. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html https://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/ /the-c-word-tackling-the-enduring-legacy-of-colonialism-in-global-health.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://globalhealth .org/ report/ https://globalhealth .org/ report/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://gh.bmj.com/ 	reimagining global health as the sharing of power 	references television and/as testimony in the jimmy savile case introduction as i was writing this article in autumn , allegations of sexual harassment and rape against hollywood mogul harvey weinstein emerged (kantor and twohey, ). this article focuses on television coverage of sexual abuse revelations involving another celebrity perpetrator, jimmy savile: tv presenter, dj and charity fundraiser. as emma thompson noted, the weinstein allegations echo this earlier scandal and highlight the extent to which sexism and sexual harassment are endemic to the screen industries. ( ) for the purposes of this article, there are four parallels of significance: the link between (alleged) perpetrators’ abusive practices and their media careers; the identification of multiple victims and other perpetrators; the fact that these allegations were already known in certain circles; and the sense that savile and weinstein were always already outsiders in the industries which made them. a brief discussion of these points will set up themes to be explored in this article: the savile case as a story about and on television; the televisual construction of victim/survivor believability over time; challenges in representing sexual abuse perpetrators; and what the case has meant for the televisual archive. as the weinstein story unfolded, it quickly became apparent that weinstein’s and others’ successful careers in the screen industries were not indivisible from their (alleged) sexual harassment and abuse of women, men and children. their screen careers gave them the power to abuse and provided a rationale for abuse: part of the business of making movies, even a sign of creative genius, legitimated by the on-screen results (hardie, ). their success and power provided insulation against accusation, making it difficult for victim/survivors to come forward whilst the (cultural and monetary) value of their screen work meant many were willing to ignore the evidence which was already – to a greater or lesser extent - in the public domain. relative to weinstein's oscar successes, savile’s light entertainment output may seem less critically significant: one of the reasons, perhaps, that the case has attracted little attention within television studies. however, savile’s association with music and children's television meant that many viewers remained emotionally invested in savile, a theme i return to in my conclusion. how we – as viewers and media scholars – deal with these men’s output and legacy in light of their (alleged) crimes is a live question (e.g. parkinson, ; silverstein, ; brooks, ). savile was dead when the allegations against him finally stuck, arguably making these questions easier to deal with. given savile abused victims on bbc premises, using his shows to facilitate access to vulnerable youngsters (smith, ), his output is now understood to be indivisible from the abuse. as rowan aust and amy holdsworth ( ) have explored, among the many problems this has created for the bbc is how to deal with his enduring presence in the archive (also aust, ). this relates to the continuing value of top of the pops (bbc, - ) for reruns and nostalgia programming – aust and holdsworth’s primary concern – but also to how the stories of his abuse can be told televisually: my focus in this article. the second point of connection between the weinstein and savile moments is the emergence of multiple victim/survivors and perpetrators. as millions of women globally declared #metoo on social media in autumn , i was reminded of liz kelly’s ( ) influential theorisation of women’s experiences of sexual violence lying on a continuum. the continuum allows us to see connections between different experiences and the ways in which, for victim/survivors, sexual harassment and abuse are experienced cumulatively across a lifetime. as host jo brand put it on have i got news for you ( november ): i know it’s not high level, but it doesn’t have to be high level for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the house of commons. and actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up. and that wears you down.( ) brand’s comments – and kelly’s research – allow us to understand how apparently innocuous acts (a hand on a knee) are linked to acts more widely recognised as serious, and criminal (such as rape). they are linked in women’s experiences, in the way one creates the context for the other, and as both express male power through sexualised dominance. yet, if the #metoo moment has demonstrated the collective power of women’s (men’s and children’s) testimony, it has also highlighted that some voices matter more than others. the campaign went global after american actor alyssa milano encouraged her followers to use the hashtag if they had experienced sexual harassment. however, its origins are credited to tarana burke for whom ‘metoo’ was a response to hearing stories of sexual abuse from young women of colour.( ) for the media (and others) to pay attention to these allegations, they have to first believe that victim/survivors matter. feminist media studies has long documented the ways in which gender, race, age and class shape which victims count (boyle, ). and counting has a double meaning here: women only matter in multiples (boyle, ). in the savile case, it is his assaults on children which have discursively dominated, such that the gendered power dynamics underpinning the case have not been well interrogated in media coverage or in academic scholarship (boyle, ). whilst emma thompson’s interview, mentioned above, points to cultural and institutional sexism as the ‘conducive context’ (kelly, ) for both men’s behaviour, it is reflective of the way that savile is now retrofitted as a predatory paedophile whose crimes are understood through the lens of celebrity and power - but not gender –that this connection is not more widely made in uk reporting of the weinstein case. ( ) the third thing which the savile and weinstein cases have in common is that their abusive behaviour was widely known but ignored and even condoned. in both cases, women’s attempts to be heard when they spoke about abuse had been continually frustrated over years, even decades. savile himself jokingly acknowledged his abusive behaviour in his lifetime and it was often conducted in plain sight of witnesses and even television cameras (davies, ; cross, ; boyle, ). whilst the most serious allegations were less widely known, the tacit approval of ‘everyday sexism’ (bates, ) contributed to a ‘conducive context’ (kelly, ) for more serious violence. yet, once the stories of abuse were finally recognised as abuse, there was – in both cases – a fairly swift construction of savile and weinstein as monstrous figures although, as i will demonstrate, this did not necessarily extend to the more nuanced portrayals of savile in television documentaries about his crimes. the two men, although unquestionably powerful media figures, never embodied certain norms of their industry - including physically and aesthetically – and so could more easily be ‘othered’ when the abuse narratives were finally recognised as such (aust, ). the ‘prettier’ men of hollywood – and the ‘classier’ men of television - who have also been named as abusers in this period have not, on the whole, been treated in the same way. there is further work to be done in comparing the visual representation of savile and weinstein with men like kevin spacey, johnny depp or dustin hoffman, or in a british tv context, with convicted celebrity sex offenders including max clifford, stuart hall and rolf harris. this article argues against an aesthetics of the monstrous and insists that savile should still be part of our television landscape, albeit in modified ways, if we want to understand his crimes. at the heart of both cases, then, are questions of representation and representability: of sexual assault, perpetrators and victim/survivors. in this article, i explore how television documentaries about the savile case negotiate this terrain. i begin with a brief outline of how the story finally broke, before considering how television dealt with savile’s televisual presence and the – previously unknown – victim/survivors, before returning to the wider lessons we can learn from this. the savile case on october , itv’s documentary series exposure ( -) broadcast the other side of jimmy savile, alleging that savile was a predatory sex offender. although allegations against savile had been around for some time – and these specific allegations were first reported in the uk nearly months earlier– it wasn’t until exposure that they were widely taken seriously. in the run-up to the broadcast – and more dramatically following it – a picture emerged of an abusive career spanning five decades, implicating the bbc, national health service and police. ( ) at the heart of the story was the bbc’s decision to shelve an earlier investigation into savile by its flagship current affairs programme newsnight (bbc , -) and, instead, broadcast a range of tributes to savile in the months following his october death. ( ) as result, this quickly became a story about only about a television personality, but rather about television more widely: the shelved newsnight investigation, itv’s exposure documentary and subsequent investigations into bbc working cultures (pollard, ; smith, ). the power of television in creating conditions for victim/survivors to come forward also became a central theme. existing scholarship on savile and television has focused on the archive (aust and holdsworth, ; aust, ) and savile’s ghostly presence (wheatley, ) whilst work specifically on the abuse revelations has focused on press coverage (greer and mclaughlin , ; furedi , ; boyle, ). this article takes a different focus, examining documentaries about the savile case shown on britain’s main television channels between october and october . the programmes are:  exposure: the other side of jimmy savile (itv, october )  jimmy savile – what the bbc knew: a panorama special (bbc , october )  exposure update: the jimmy savile investigation (itv, november )  panorama – after savile: no more secrets? (bbc , november )  panorama – savile: the power to abuse (bbc , june )  britain’s worst crimes: jimmy savile (channel , november )  abused: the untold story (bbc , april )  louis theroux: savile (bbc , october ) these documentaries are discussed alongside television coverage of the initial allegations, and a crimewatch special, catching the abusers ( february ), which focuses on non- recent child sexual abuse and includes testimony about savile. there has been an explosion of both documentary ( ) and drama ( ) programming tackling child sexual abuse in this period and savile has been positioned within this broader context as a child abuser. the repeated narrative emphasis on child sexual abuse – even although a number of the documentaries include testimonies from women abused as adults – means that there is a missed opportunity to understand the links between men’s abuse of adult women and children. ( ) male narrators, investigators, presenters, experts, witnesses and supporters play a key role across all the documentaries in legitimating and interpreting women’s accounts. notably, there are no feminist organisations or commentators used in any of the documentaries. these limitations need to be kept in mind, not least as my focus on victim/survivors in this article suggests an otherwise more progressive reading of televisual treatments of the case. the documentaries explicitly build on one another and, indeed, on previous accounts of savile, notably theroux’s when louis met… jimmy (bbc , april ). this results in considerable repetition – including of victim/survivor testimony – which works to create a new televisual archive, heightening the sense that these documentaries are fundamentally about television, as well as being television. it is the very ordinariness of television’s repetitions which allows for savile’s legacy to be so substantially reworked. yet, this depends upon the visibility and legibility of victim/survivors: something that is rarely possible or desirable in relation to sexual violence and is made more difficult in the absence of explicitly feminist expert commentary. victim/survivors who have spoken publicly have described the process of testifying as, at times, a revictimisation (jordan, ; ward, ). how to describe women who experience sexual violence has been a feminist concern for decades. we need a language which acknowledges what has been done to women whilst not allowing the assault to entirely define who ‘they’ are or negate their agency (jordan, ). feminists have also challenged the notion that there is a one-way journey from victimisation to survival, noting instead the survival strategies which women deploy during an attack (e.g. to minimise physical harm or dissociate from what is happening) and the ways in which the effects of abuse can be experienced more or less intensely across a lifetime (kelly, burton and reagan, ; brison, ; jordan, ). jan jordan ( : ) memorably describes this as a ‘series of survivings’, a phrase which resonates in the televisual testifying of victim/survivors of savile. indeed, many of these women (and, later, men), mention how living with savile’s television presence provided a constant reminder of the abuse and the impossibility of reporting it. yet, it is also important to note that – as more recently with #metoo – highly publicised cases, whilst re-traumatising for victim/survivors, can also enable others to seek help and justice. ( ) this is only one of the difficulties inherent in representing abuse. as janet walker ( ), liz kelly ( ), jenny kitzinger ( ), louise armstrong ( ) and i (boyle, ) have variously explored, there is a tension between a kind of hypervisibility or media ‘noise’ around child sexual abuse on one hand, and its apparent (un)representability on the other. child sexual abuse is constructed as so traumatic that it renders victim/survivors speechless, meaning that the authenticity of victim/survivors who are willing/able to speak publicly is often immediately in doubt (boyle, : ). feminist analyses of men’s sexual violence against adult women similarly point to the ways in which popular constructions of rape - as the worst possible thing that could happen to a woman - create constraints around women’s speech and impact its believability (jordan, ). a woman who has not only survived what should have rendered her silent, but has survived to speak of that experience is herself deemed suspect (jordan, ). this is exacerbated when the perpetrator is a man who is – or appears to be – widely revered. certainly, many of savile’s accusers had tried to make their stories heard during savile’s lifetime. indeed, even when the specific allegations detailed in exposure were first reported, the story did not ignite and savile’s standing remained untarnished (boyle, ). in the first days of the exposure story, there was some pushback against victim/survivors with their motivations, credibility and even sanity being questioned (ward, ). however, the televisual testimony of victims/survivors did not – on the whole - go through the torturous negotiations around credibility identified in other work discussed above. indeed, beyond the first days of the exposure story – when savile’s family and friends occasionally challenged the emerging account – the credibility of victim/survivors was largely not up for debate, although their accounts were certainly scrutinised. in the next section, my focus is on savile himself: the dominant image of him before the revelations, and the televisual representations of him as they emerge. how does the selection, repetition and altering of archive footage shape the meaning of the accusations, and how does this change over time? whilst there is no straight-forward linear narrative here, there is a re-evaluation of savile’s place in the television archive which hinges not only on his value (or toxicity) but more centrally on what that archive does (and does not) reveal. as the savile case accrues an archive of its own, in which victim/survivor testimonies feature prominently, savile’s shows recede into the background. how, then, are the victim/survivor testimonies staged, repeated and referenced? when are they seen and heard? at the heart of this article is a concern with the (un)representability of (child) sexual abuse and the contested position of the abuser in the televisual archive. the issues here are complex and a balance has to be struck – differently at different stages in the development of the story – between evidence and anonymity, celebrity and accountability, victim/survivor silence and speech. now you see him. now you don’t. after his death in october , savile remained a television presence. whilst his archival value was mined most obviously in tribute shows and ongoing re-runs of top of the pops (bbc, - ), he was more ubiquitous than this suggests. in the weeks before exposure, for example, archival footage of savile was used in idris elba’s how clubbing changed the world (channel , august ), tom jones at the bbc (bbc , september ), the story of light entertainment (bbc , september ) and the age of the train (bbc , september ). this by no means exhaustive list is a useful reminder of his currency at the time of the allegations. existing commentaries on the savile case have repeatedly pointed to the way in which savile’s hypervisibility was an alibi for abuses conducted ‘in plain sight’, yet invisible as abuse (e.g. boyle, ; cross, ; davies, ). given what we now know, the on- screen visibility of behaviour such as unwanted sexual touching can seem painfully obvious. however, part of the reason the abuse was not entirely legible prior to exposure was because of the resilience of savile’s counter-narrative. indeed, although my instinct in rewatching television news coverage surrounding exposure was to recoil from the extensive use of archival footage of savile himself, the accumulation of this material contextualises and adds credibility to the women’s testimonies. comparatively little of the footage used shows an older savile (he was when he died), emphasising instead his televisual heyday and anchoring the women’s testimonies in time (the initial revelations largely relating to the s, s and early s). the archival footage also supports the women’s reasoning for not speaking out earlier, or not being believed if they did so: savile was simply too ubiquitous and highly-regarded. the relentless repetitions replicate for viewers savile’s inescapable familiarity. yet, as acknowledged above, the archival footage may have prolonged the suffering of victim/survivors by extending savile’s ubiquity beyond death. televisual evidence deceives, harms and, yet, through recontextualisation, reveals. the opening of exposure demonstrates these points. it begins with presenter mark williams-thomas outlining, in voiceover, savile’s status in life before introducing the allegations. the voiceover is accompanied by a montage of video clips and photographs of savile which provides evidence of williams-thomas’ narration - we hear savile was a friend of prime ministers, we see him with margaret thatcher. but they do something more. from an opening sequence in which savile strikes bizarre poses for a bank of press photographers, savile is presented as a performative, highly visible but unknowable figure. the editing of the archival materials (using dissolves, wipes, flares and morphing) and the use of the rostrum camera to mobilise still photographs (zooming in and out, travelling across their surface) renders the images unstable. as the sequence progresses, the use of less easily contextualised images heightens the sense of unease. what are we to make of a photograph of a youthful savile in bed, naked from the waist up, smoking a cigar, holding a cup of tea and looking directly at the camera? importantly, however, this sequence – whilst unsettling – largely uses images from savile’s heyday in which, despite his sometimes outlandish dress, he less obviously embodies the ‘monstrous other’ which is encapsulated in the late-career images which come to dominate the news landscape in the months after the revelations. the late-career images tend to more obviously fit within the aesthetics of the monstrous which i referenced in the introduction: his flyaway hair unkempt, his stained and crooked teeth chomping on an oversized cigar, his rose-tinted glasses giving his face an unhealthy pallor, and his garish tracksuits often worn unfastened over a string vest. in contrast, the opening sequence of exposure serves as a reminder of savile’s televisual history, his celebrity, and his association with some of the uk’s biggest family entertainment shows – as well as his establishment links. kinetic scrutiny of the photographic image is a common feature of television documentary (lury ), so this opening sequence is not unusual in this respect. however, the archival footage is intercut with interview clips from savile’s (still anonymous) victims which trail the documentary’s most serious allegations. two of the victim/survivors are heavily disguised to protect their identity, and those who are not are filmed by static cameras in medium close- ups in domestic settings. this is, then, a juxtaposition of modes of television: the deceptive and explicitly performative light entertainment associated with savile in his heyday, versus the formal simplicity of documentary authenticity allied to his accusers. it is also a juxtaposition of modes of being on television: celebrity performer, versus ‘ordinary’ person. in exposure, the archival footage bears witness to the context the women describe as well as, sometimes, providing corroboration (e.g. that they attended a recording at television centre). yet, the status of archival footage is simultaneously in question as the scandal quickly becomes understood as a crisis in representation. the same clips that establish victim/survivor reliability demonstrate savile’s skills in deception and manipulation. the intercutting of contemporary interviews with both archival footage and reconstructions is common across a number of the documentaries. ( ) reconstructions provide visual anchors which further situate the testimony historically (e.g. through the use of period detail such as furnishings and fashions) or spatially (e.g reconstructions of off-screen areas at the bbc). these reconstructions are clearly marked – for example, through highly saturated colour and a grainy effect (in exposure) or the use of canted angles (in after savile) – and the formal contrasts help to highlight the gaps in the archive and, indeed, the equally constructed nature of those clips. again, the contrast with the formal simplicity and muted colours of the interviews is striking. one of the ways the changing status of the archival footage is signalled over time is through disguising (some) members of the public who appear with savile. that these are aesthetic and ethical choices rather than editorial requirements is highlighted as much of the same footage is used in different ways. for instance, in exposure, ‘fiona’ recounts how savile lured and coerced the vulnerable young women at duncroft approved school with the promise of attending television recordings. a clip from savile’s early s’ variety show clunk click anchors this part of fiona’s testimony. it shows savile and glam rock star gary glitter interacting with the female audience: audience members are visible and identifiable. the clip ends with savile sitting between two young women. as he locks his arms around their necks, they laugh but look surprised, nervous and uncomfortable. the same clip is used, less than three weeks later, in the bbc’s first documentary response to the case - what the bbc knew. the emphasis of this documentary is very different: an investigation by the bbc into the bbc, it focuses on the decision to shelve the newsnight investigation, rather than on the allegations per se. here, clunk click is used in conjunction with victim/survivor karin ward’s testimony, originally filmed for newsnight and shown here for the first time. presenter shelley jofre’s voiceover details how savile would invite girls from broadmoor secure hospital to the recording of his shows. unlike in exposure (where this footage anchors fiona’s story about duncroft), here the identities of all audience members are disguised, with contradictory effects. the sense of unease visible in the women’s faces is lost, whilst savile himself remains front and centre. moreover, it is unclear whether their identities are concealed to protect audience members from association with the secure hospital or with savile. the clunk click footage with glitter crops up again in the much later louis theroux: savile but in theroux’s documentary the audience members are again identifiable. tellingly, other clips used in what the bbc knew - including one from savile’s travels in which he laughingly gropes a young woman - do not disguise the identities of adult audience members. in contrast, children appearing on jim’ll fix it are disguised. the effect of this is to mark – and render suspect – savile’s interactions with young audiences, whilst his groping of and leering at adult women is recirculated, unedited. these examples underline my point that these are aesthetic and ethical decisions, whilst also highlighting the repetition and revision of archival material across the documentaries. these decisions, in different ways, position victim/survivors in the archive whilst – in the later documentaries in particular – renegotiating savile’s televisual presence, as we will now see. (in)visible, (un)speakable: televising testimonies abused: the untold story was broadcast after dame janet smith ( ) delivered her final report on savile at the bbc. in abused it is patently clear that savile has become a toxic presence for the bbc. echoing aust and holdsworth’s ( ) discussion of the bbc’s attempts to exorcise savile from its archive-in-circulation, and aust’s ( ) more recent work on the bbc’s online archive, clips from his flagship shows are used sparingly and are edited so that savile is barely visible. in the clips in which he is visible, all ‘ordinary’ people on-screen – audience members, show participants, bystanders - are disguised, underlining the extent to which the modality of this footage is now in doubt: the programme makers can no longer be sure what this footage means, what it reveals and what is conceals. however, this needs to be understood not simply in relation to savile’s toxicity, but also the victims’/survivors’ increased presence. this is not to say that all the documentaries privilege filmed victim/survivor testimony – they do not - but to note that assumed viewer knowledge and acceptance of this testimony is increasingly the context in which they operate. for instance, savile: the power to abuse makes very limited use of filmed testimonies, focusing instead on institutional knowledge and complicity. however, in contributions from the presenter and other commentators, victim/survivor testimony is continually referenced and its veracity accepted. thus the new filmed testimonies which are used are understood to be snapshots of a much broader story. similarly, all the documentaries mention how many victim/survivors have come forward at different stages in the investigation or refer to official reports and complaints. building on amy holdsworth’s ( ) work on the interplay of remembering and forgetting on television more broadly, i want to argue that savile is only able to be – visually if not thematically – ‘forgotten’ once his accusers’ memories have themselves become part of television’s archive. karin/kat ward ( ) is a significant figure in this. ward was the first to discuss her experiences of abuse on camera, for newsnight. her testimony also implicated gary glitter and detailed how savile would invite girls from duncroft– where ward was a pupil - to television centre for recordings of his shows. ward gave the interview to newsnight just before undergoing major surgery and was not subsequently part of exposure. however, once the story broke, she was widely interviewed on television and in print media. the newsnight footage was eventually used in what the bbc knew and clips from ward’s interview have been widely used since. new interviews with ward are used in what the bbc knew, abused and louis theroux: savile and ward has published her own account of the case, victim zero ( ). by the time ward first appeared on television, then, her story was as much about the difficulties for victim/survivors of speaking out on (and in relation to) television as about her experiences of abuse. due to the circumstances in which ward’s story was finally told, it was publicly heard as an echo of other testimonies, even though those testimonies were themselves a response to knowledge of her (then unbroadcast) newsnight interview. this is interesting not only as a form of corroboration, but also in terms of television’s self- referentiality, enhancing the sense that history on television is history as-previously- (shown)-on-television (holdsworth, ). although newsnight’s failure to show ward’s interview is at the heart of what the bbc knew, the footage is nonetheless diegetically marked as television history. the date of the recording appears in the top left of the frame and clips from her interview are refilmed on a screen, to create a pixelated, blurred effect. this effect is also used for clips from exposure and from a news conference given by the then bbc director general. ward’s interview is therefore allied with broadcast television and the inferior quality of the image becomes a mark both of authenticity and televisuality, creating striking juxtapositions with the ‘clean’ (but deceptive) light entertainment archive. the day before exposure (and before ward’s first broadcast interview), dee coles became the first woman to be shown on television identifying savile as a rapist. coles contacted itn after she heard news reports about the allegations against savile. coles was years old and on holiday in jersey when savile raped her. as such, the televisual possibilities presented by coles’ story - which, like ward’s, has now been repeated and revisited in multiple contexts -are different. it is personal photographs of coles with savile (rather than archival television) that both corroborate coles’ story (she was there) and simultaneously highlight the problematic nature of representation (she is smiling). tracing the use of these photographs over time points to coles’ and savile’s changing positions in the television narratives of the case. the itn interview begins with an unseen coles describing the context in which the polaroid photographs were taken. as coles speaks, the camera probes the photographs for their evidentiary function: arranging them in sequence, zooming in and out. we then cut to a medium shot of coles with reporter lucy manning, coles handling the photographs as she details how savile abused her. that these images were previous unseen and privately owned is part of what renders them authentic and news at this stage. again, the juxtaposition with archival footage of savile is significant. here, he shown on an elevated stage at an outdoor function, surrounded by an apparently appreciative audience. although coles is not in this footage, it nevertheless serves a similar evidentiary function to the clunk click clips: it places savile at the scene of the crime (jersey in the s) whilst also supporting coles’ reasoning for not coming forward, the low camera angle emphasising savile’s power whilst the exuberance of the scene underscores his popularity. coles asks: ‘who would have believed me?’ coles’ personal photographs are also used in the much later abused and crimewatch special. in these later programmes, the status of the photographs has shifted: they have become television, referencing earlier stages in the development of the story as much as they reference coles’ experiences. in keeping with the visual reorientation of the story across the intervening three-and-a-half years, in abused the camera zooms in on the photograph so that coles is centred and savile is out of frame. coles’ photographs are not the only evidence revisited in this way in abused. footage from kevin cook’s appearance on jim’ll fix it is edited similarly, cropping savile from the frame and centring the young cook. in this way, abused becomes a commentary on – and intervention in – representational practices around the celebrity-abuser, rejecting his centrality and asserting the importance of victim/survivors. in catching the abusers, coles is one of many survivors addressing an audience of other survivors, encouraging them to come forward. savile, initially unnamed, is one of many male perpetrators, no longer ‘special’. the clip of top of the pops which follows begins with the programme’s familiar countdown graphics and a black-and-white close-up of savile. there is a freeze-frame on a smiling savile, and the screen fades briefly to black before titles, accompanied by discordant music, recontextualise this television history and lead us to a new interview with coles. coles’ testimony is intercut with the now-familiar photographs, the camera zooming in and out to allow us to pick out details in her testimony. here the photographs are investigated not because coles’ smiling face conceals what is going on, but for what they reveal about the interaction: savile’s leg pressed between hers; his naked torso. as in abused, this treatment of the photographs keeps them at a distance from coles, and the distinctive white border that marked them as polaroids has been cropped. no longer the material objects coles kept as ‘evidence’, they are now part of a public, distinctly televisual history. through this process, a problematic televisual history is set alongside a redemptive one as the documentaries both narratively and formally reference television’s role in exposing savile. this is reinforced through the repeated use of ward and coles – the two women who can, in different ways, lay claim to being ‘victim zero’ in the savile case – along with a number of other victim/survivors, including kevin cook (mentioned above). it is right to be sceptical of the self-serving nature of this coverage for the bbc in particular, and there are questions to be asked about whether returning to the same victim/survivors keeps them perpetually trapped in savile’s shadow. however, the relatively long duration of television engagement with the case – and with these victim/survivors – has allowed for an unusual level of detail to emerge about their lives, reorienting the story from a focus on the celebrity abuser, to think about what the abuse meant in the lives of victim/survivors. for instance, in theroux’s documentary ward testifies to being abused by her stepfather and his friends (also ward, ). indeed, ward is not the only victim/survivor of savile whose later interviews reveal a continuum of abuse by adult men across their childhoods (and sometimes beyond): sam – another victim/survivor of savile, interviewed in both abused and louis theroux; savile tells a similar story. although this does not dislodge the paedophile frame, it is at least an acknowledgement that paedophiles aren’t just outlandish celebrities but can be found much closer to home. moreover, the later interviews provide the women with a (limited) opportunity to ‘talk back’ to (and on) television about how their stories have been told. for example, in abused, coles notes that she took medication prior to her itn interview to enable her to get through it, but that this produced a calm, affectless performance which minimised the ongoing effects of the abuse. interestingly, the qualities coles highlights as ‘inauthetic’ to her lived experience are those that newsnight interviewer liz mackean (in what the bbc knew) and television presenter and campaigner esther rantzen (in exposure) identify as markers of authenticity, highlighting the double-bind for survivors around appropriate, ‘authentic’ self- presentation. tracing some of the differences in representation across these women’s (and men’s) testimonies allows us to see their constructed nature. this is not to cast doubt on the veracity of their stories, but rather – in keeping with other scholarship on trauma and documentary (torchin, ; shenkler, ; walker, ), as well as on television and memory (holdsworth, ) – to explore the ways in which trauma is rendered accessible and authentic (or not). central to my argument here is that it is not only the collective weight of testimonies which is significant in the savile case, but also the ways in which – through repetition and revision – they become televisual history. indeed, as the number of victim/survivors mounted, the formal strategies for representing testimony became another source of corroboration, rendering savile himself redundant and allowing for connections to be made with other perpetrators. abused is notable in this respect as it includes testimony from women and men abused by savile and his associates, alongside testimony from katy, a victim/survivor of abuse by a man known to her but never to the television audience. although katy’s story is not directly linked to savile (her abuser was a family acquaintance), she was encouraged to come forward by the increased visibility given to child sexual abuse post-savile. katy’s story could not have functioned in the same way in earlier documentaries where savile was such a strong visual presence: after all, her abuser remains invisible. her testimony is anchored instead to the televisual testimonies of other victims. similar set-ups are used for interviews with all victims/survivors in abused: domestic spaces in which the victim/survivor and, in many instances, a close supporter (usually their spouse) are positioned at opposite ends of a table or sofa, facing the camera. this is interspersed with more intimate medium close-ups of victim/survivors, the ‘talking heads’ which dominate the other documentaries and are more broadly favoured in audio- visual testimonies as a means to establish intimacy without becoming intrusive (shenker, ). to the extent that these stories were allowed to unfold televisually over more than four years they well illustrate the enduring impact of child sexual abuse in the lives of victims/survivors: their testimony is not a one-off incident but repeated – either by themselves or in echoes in the other victim/survivor accounts now part of television’s archive. audiences would not need to have extensive knowledge of the case to appreciate this, as the later documentaries use archival footage of the savile case and create other echoes and repetitions in the staging of new interviews. of course, savile has not disappeared - he remains a visible presence in news and documentaries - but the re- contextualisation of archival material has largely changed its modality: from light entertainment to crime scene. conclusion the documentaries which followed savile’s unmasking as a serial sexual predator in exposure quickly accepted the veracity of the allegations against him, constructing a new archive of televisual testimony which itself became a thematic and formal reference point for new revelations. this was achieved through the self-referentiality of the documentaries, the multiplication of similar (and similarly staged) testimonies, the use of a number of interviews in multiple contexts and repetition of some testimonial footage, and the interrogation and revision of more well-known archival materials. this is a welcome development, providing a corrective to the decades-long failure to recognise the abuse which lurked at the edges of the bbc’s light entertainment content and archive. with a number of savile’s victims commenting (in official reports as well as in television news and documentaries) on how savile’s prior ubiquity increased their sense of powerlessness and inability to speak out, the ethical issues around the re-use of archival footage of the celebrity abuser cannot be easily dismissed (also wheatley, ). however, this article has demonstrated changes in the use of this footage over time which have allowed for victim/survivor testimonies to be contextualised in different ways. in early coverage, archival footage functioned as corroboration of victim/survivor testimony as well as an explanation for prior silence. in later coverage, the visual reorientation towards victims demonstrated changing understandings of the crimes and the role of television in both covering them up and revealing them. whilst the televisual re-centring on victim/survivors is to be broadly welcomed, there is nevertheless a danger that a wholesale expunging of savile from television (and television history) renders his crimes less comprehensible to future generations, whilst also increasing the expectation on victim/survivors. although similar issues are raised by the weinstein moment, there are important differences, not least in terms of the notions of cultural value which continue to afford a protection to film as ‘art’ but rarely to light-entertainment television. yet, this does not mean that viewer investment in savile and his output was negligible, and one final example speaks to this. in his savile documentary, louis theroux interviews sylvia nicol who worked at stoke mandeville hospital, one of the charitable causes with which savile was most closely aligned. whilst she does not explicitly reject the veracity of victim/survivor testimonies, nicol nevertheless struggles to reconcile what she knew of savile with what has become the dominant narrative about him: nicol: i’m a victim, his family are victims. as much as anybody else would be a victim. theroux: who or what are you a victim of. nicol: i’m a victim of losing those memories, and that is quite a big thing out of your life, because when you get older your memories … do become more important. and that was many years of memories. he wasn’t a friend to me, he was a friend to what i’d spent years of my life with which was the spinal centre, and we wouldn’t have a spinal centre there now but for jimmy. which would mean we wouldn’t have a lot of people alive now. whilst nicol’s claim of victimisation grates next to those of the women savile raped and sexually abused ( ), nonetheless, i want to take her statement seriously. what role might the television archive play in preserving those memories, whilst simultaneously disrupting them? as i have argued, savile’s respectability and ubiquity in his lifetime are an essential part of this story, explaining why victim/survivors were unable to come forward earlier. if we lose sight of this, simply re-constructing savile as that monstrous-other par excellence, the paeodphile (kitzinger, ; kelly, ), then there is a danger that we forget the cultural conditions which enabled savile to get away with abusing women, girls and boys for decades – conditions which find a contemporary echo in the weinstein case. i have argued elsewhere (boyle, ) that savile’s sexist and sexualized behavior towards adult women was an alibi which allowed his criminally abusive behavior to pass unremarked in many contexts. doing ‘good’ was another, as was insulating himself through his links to establishment figures and institutions (cross, forthcoming). as such, the value of savile’s presence in the television archive is not simply to help us identify ‘dog whistle’ (cross, ) moments where viewers and programme makers could and should have known: important as this is. the archive can also help us to understand why many did not know and (like nicol) struggle to reconcile their own memories of savile (on television and in life) with the version which has emerged since his death. that we now have so many commentaries from victim/survivors of savile provides an important counter-narrative which has a televisual history of its own. these are as unusual as they are essential, but they also point to some of the ways in which by connecting victim/survivors’ experiences (formally as well as thematically) we can construct a more nuanced account of the continuum of sexual violence. this does not have to be achieved only through personal testimony: organisations working with victim/survivors can also serve this function without putting victim/survivors in the media spotlight. it is striking, and problematic, that organisations like rape crisis were not used in these documentaries, watering down the potential for political, feminist analysis. yet, the sheer number of women and men accusing savile meant that the media’s tendency to personalise, individualise and sensationalise stories of child sexual abuse (armstrong, ) was less evident here. nevertheless, if we are genuinely to shift the way in which we deal with sexual violence, then perpetrators have to be held to account and making the continuum in their own behavior – from ‘everyday sexism’ to rape – visible is one way of doing this (boyle, ). where perpetrators have historically enjoyed more visibility than victim/survivors (as in cases involving celebrity perpetrators), this involves a re-analysis of the ways in which they have been represented. this is not simply an academic or activist practice, but can also involve mainstream media texts. it may involve (temporary?) erasure, but it should more fruitfully involve recontextualisation and recentering – something many of the documentaries discussed in this article have done successfully. part of what is at stake in these recontextualisations is television history itself. the savile case has exposed the necessity of considering what television’s representational practices and institutional cultures have disguised, but a wholesale expunging of savile’s position within that televisual history is not only potentially self-serving for the bbc (aust, ) but – as i have suggested – would also render victim/survivor testimony incomprehensible in important ways. television was part of the problem in the savile case for sure. but this article suggests that television may also contribute towards finding solutions and new ways of telling these stories. notes ( ) thompson’s interview with newsnight (bbc, october ) can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_w kpqr u (accessed november ). ( ) brand was responding to an all-male panel belittling reports of sexual harassment in the westminster parliament: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/ /nov/ /jo- brands-speech-on-sexual-harassment-silences-all-male-panel-on-have-i-got-news-for-you- video (accessed november ). ( ) burke’s account of the origins of the #metoo movement can be read here: (http://justbeinc.wixsite.com/justbeinc/the-me-too-movement-cmml) (accessed november ). ( ) based on a nexis search for harvey weinstein and jimmy savile in the month after the weinstein story broke ( october – november ). new allegations against bbc talent (george riley and chris evans) in the wake of weinstein were the only other stories to refer back to savile. ( ) there have been more than national health service/ department of health reports into savile’s activities within different hospitals (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/nhs-and-department-of-health- investigations-into-jimmy-savile ) as well as reports by the independent police complaints commission (https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/investigations/jimmy-savile-west-yorkshire-police- surrey-police-sussex-police-and-north-yorkshire). ( ) the bbc broadcast three television tributes: sir jimmy savile: as it happened (bbc , november); jim’ll fix it with shane ritchie (bbc , december); and sir jimmy savile at the bbc: how’s about that then (bbc , december); and a christmas day radio tribute, sir jimmy savile: in his own words. ( ) documentaries include: britain’s sex gangs (channel , november ), britain’s hidden child abuse (channel , january ), the hunt for britain’s sex gangs (channel , may ), the paedophile mp (channel , september ), predators abroad (itv, october ), stolen childhoods – the grooming scandal ( september ), the legacy of grooming ( june ), the vip paedophile ring (bbc , october ), the truth about child sexual abuse (bbc , november ), football abuse: the ugly side of the beautiful game (bbc , may ) and abused and betrayed (itv, june ). ( ) including critically-acclaimed dramas national treasure (channel , october ) and three girls (bbc , may ) and a grooming storyline in coronation street (itv, -). ( ) similar arguments have been made about both press coverage of (boyle, ), and official reports into (westmarland, : ), savile’s offending. ( ) there was a % increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police from - with a % increase in calls about sexual abuse to the nspcc helpline in the year after the launch of the operation yewtree investigation into non-recent abuses by savile and others (travis, ). non-recent cases continue to be inadequately reflected in police statistics which record the age at the time of the incident but not the time of reporting (rape crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_w kpqr u https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/ /nov/ /jo-brands-speech-on-sexual-harassment-silences-all-male-panel-on-have-i-got-news-for-you-video https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/ /nov/ /jo-brands-speech-on-sexual-harassment-silences-all-male-panel-on-have-i-got-news-for-you-video https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/ /nov/ /jo-brands-speech-on-sexual-harassment-silences-all-male-panel-on-have-i-got-news-for-you-video http://justbeinc.wixsite.com/justbeinc/the-me-too-movement-cmml) https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/nhs-and-department-of-health-investigations-into-jimmy-savile https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/nhs-and-department-of-health-investigations-into-jimmy-savile https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/investigations/jimmy-savile-west-yorkshire-police-surrey-police-sussex-police-and-north-yorkshire) https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/investigations/jimmy-savile-west-yorkshire-police-surrey-police-sussex-police-and-north-yorkshire) england and wales, ). nevertheless, figures from rape crisis in england and wales (https://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php ), and scotland (https://www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/publications/?cat= ), demonstrate that around three-quarters of all adult service users now contact rape crisis about sexual violence that occurred at least months ago, with significant proportions reporting abuse from more than years ago. this makes the invisibility of rape crisis in news and documentaries on the savile case all the more striking. ( ) exposure, what the bbc knew, exposure update, after savile and britain’s worst crimes all use reconstructions. ( ) glitter was convicted of child pornography offences in and, by the time of exposure, had been banned from cambodia for suspected child sexual abuse and convicted of obscene acts with girls aged and in vietnam. after his release he returned to the uk and, in the aftermath of savile, was found guilty of a series of child sex offences on girls aged - and sentenced to years (mcveigh, ). ( ) ward is identified as karin in the newsnight interview and most subsequent appearances. in theroux’s documentary she is introduced as kat and this is the name she publishes under. ( ) as i have argued elsewhere (boyle, ), louis theroux: savile is problematic for the onus it places on women (victim/survivors and supporters) to explain savile’s behaviour and legacy, meaning it stops short of its stated intent to examine theroux’s own complicity as savile’s friend and documentarist. references armstrong l ( ) rocking the cradle of sexual politics: what happened when women said incest. london: women’s press. aust r ( ) jimmy savile and the bbc archive: re-writing the history of the corporation. paper presented at society for cinema and media studies conference, toronto, march . aust r and holdsworth a ( ) the bbc archive post-jimmy savile. in: kay jb, mahoney c and shaw c (eds) the past in visual culture: essays on memory, nostalgia and the media. jefferson: macfarland, pp. - . author ( ) gendered narratives of child sexual abuse in fiction film. in: cuklanz lm and moorti s (eds) local violence, global media: feminist analyses of gendered representations. new york: peter lang, pp. - 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( j am board fam med ; : – .) keywords: medical societies, physicians, racism, sexism, social media, twitter historically, women and black men have been un- derrepresented in medicine and the targets of dis- crimination in hiring, wages, harassment, and pro- fessional advancement opportunities. , not only is a lack of diversity among physician leaders prob- lematic for the medical profession, it may have adverse impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients. , to raise awareness of this problem and reach stakeholders within the worlds of academia, medicine and health care in general, medical organizations have created policies and initiatives on diversity and inclu- sion that focus on improving opportunities for female and minority physicians. – since its launch in , twitter has allowed everyone, including physicians, to exchange ideas with colleagues, the public, and other stakehold- ers – and create virtual communities. , twit- ter users can post messages (“tweets”) of up to characters that other users can share (“retweet”) to their followers, greatly magnifying the messages’ spread. as regular users (rm and kl), we noticed a growing twitter discourse on racism, discrimina- tion, and diversity in medicine, including online this article was externally peer reviewed. submitted june ; revised september ; ac- cepted october . from the department of family medicine (rm, kwl), department of computer science (ls, yw), georgetown university school of medicine, washington, dc. funding: none. conflict of interest: none declared. corresponding author: ranit mishori, md, mhs, faafp, georgetown university school of medicine, reservoir rd. nw, washington, dc �e-mail: mishorir@ georgetown.edu�. jabfm january–february vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m mailto:mishorir@georgetown.edu mailto:mishorir@georgetown.edu http://www.jabfm.org/ campaigns to promote gender and racial equality and equity via specific hashtags (see table for definitions). news reports suggest that some of these hashtags were “trending” – — or spiking in frequency and number compared with the norm. we wanted to assess how such conversations cir- culate on twitter by analyzing some common met- rics, such as the volume, dissemination, and content of hashtags on women and black men in medicine. we also wanted to determine whether or how mainstream health professional organizations rep- resenting the majority of us-based physicians or specific subgroups of physicians, engage in or help expand this emerging discourse on twitter. methodology this project is based on publicly available data. because no private data was collected, maintained, or inferred, this project and thus did not meet criteria for institutional review board (irb) re- view. we selected the specific hashtags based on anecdotal popularity (see table ), and confirmed their inclusion on the health care hashtag proj- ect, which curates common, emerging, and popular hashtags in health care. this hashtag project is run by symplur, a social media analytics company that specializes in health care (https://www.symplur- .com/healthcare-hashtags/). data collection we analyzed the appearance of these hashtags in tweets between january , and december , . we collected tweets containing one or more of the hashtags using the twitter application pro- gramming interface (https://developer.twitter.com/ en/docs)—the standard way twitter has developed for researchers to access data. we also collected basic user profiles of the individuals who posted the tweets, including their handles and number of fol- lowers. finally, we also collected the basic user profile information of medical organizations and the tweets that they posted in . these organi- zations were selected based on their prominence in the field, and representation of a diverse member- ship, that includes women and black men. variables/metrics we constructed the following variables for each se- lected hashtag: volume of tweets per month (tweet volume), volume of retweets per month (retweet vol- ume), initial impressions per month (initial impres- sions), impressions resulting from initial tweet and retweets per month (spread), number of distinct contributors using the hashtag in one or more tweets (contributors), and counts of the most fre- quent words used for each hashtag (frequent words). we also computed aggregates of these vari- ables across all the hashtags in our dataset. the number of initial impressions for a single tweet represents the number of individuals who see the tweet when it is posted by a user (u). while many different methods for computing impressions have been proposed, twitter defines an impression as the number of times a user is shown a tweet in their timeline or during search results. because we do not have access to twitter search results, we use the table . definitions of basic twitter terms and metrics term description twitter user a user who has a unique account twitter handle/username the name and/or identity of a user on twitter (e.g., @stfm_fm), applies to individuals as well as organizations and businesses tweet a message limited to characters posted by a twitter user retweet (rt) a tweet that is forwarded by a twitter user who did not author the original tweet follower a user who receives all of the tweets of the twitter user account holder hashtag a topic or event that a user wants to send a tweet about. to easily identify it, the # symbol precedes the topic word/phrase (e.g., #womeninmedicine) tweet initial impressions the number of users who see the tweet when it is initially posted tweet spread the number of people who see the tweet initially and after it is propagated (or retweeted) trending topics that—according to specific algorithms tailored to individual users, are popular at a given time. trends are decided based on sharp spikes on a topic compared to the norm. viral a tweet that spreads quickly to a large number of users connectedness a measure and spatial representation of the connectivity of users and followers and the relationship between them. doi: . /jabfm. . . conversations on twitter about diversity in medicine o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/ https://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/ https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs http://www.jabfm.org/ definition of impressions proposed by the health care analytic website, symplur since that definition has been used in different health-related stud- ies. , symplur defines impressions as an estimate of the number of times a tweet may be viewed and calculates it by multiplying the number of tweets posted that use specific hashtags by user u by the number of followers (f) for that user, and then adds these numbers across all user during the analysis time period. more formally, we compute the initial impressions for a hashtag, i(h), as follows: i�h� � �j� n �uj� f �� where n is the number of tweets and �uj(f )� is the number of followers of user uj. this particular definition of impressions does not include retweet information explicitly. there- fore, we extend the notion of impressions to explic- itly incorporate impressions related to retweets. the spread (s) of a hashtag is computed by com- bining the initial impressions to the impressions resulting from retweets. more formally, we com- pute the spread for a hashtag, s(h), as follows: s�h� � �j� n ��uj� f �� � �k� rj �u�k� f ��� where h is a specific hashtag, n is the number of tweets, rj is the number of times the j th tweet was retweeted, u� is a follower of u who retweeted u’s tweet and �u�k(f )� is the number of followers for u�. we approximated �u�k(f )� using the median number of followers for the users who post a tweet containing of our medical diversity hashtags. we use the median because the distribution is skewed and the mean may give a figure that is large. we used the same variables for the professional associ- ations, and included the proportion of all tweets posted by the professional association containing a selected hashtag. results spread and dissemination table shows the overall volume of tweets and retweets that used the selected hashtags in , which is fairly average when compared with all active twitter users (the average active user sends approximately tweets per year), but modest when considering active hashtags (the #metoo hashtag has been included in over million tweets since october ). there was modest spread associated with these messages, with a ratio of retweets to tweets ranging from . to . the notable exceptions were the #ilooklikeasurgeon tweets involving a cover of the new yorker (from table . selected healthcare hashtags related to diversity and inclusion in medicine hashtag description and curated in healthcare hashtags year hashtag started being used (volume that year) #ilooklikeasurgeon created by women surgeons and related to equity and equality for women in the field of surgery. (curated in symplur). (� ) #womeninmedicine from a weekly tweetchat discussing issues that women face in medicine. “the goals . . . to provide a safe space for the respectful discussion of issues of gender in medicine . . . an environment that will hopefully begin to shift the culture of medicine forward.” (curated in symplur) (� ) #sheleads conference hashtag of a harvard medical school cme/cne course for physicians, nurses and other healthcare leaders that focuses on professional development and networking, diversity and inclusion. (curated in symplur). (� ) #seeitbeit about women and minority empowerment through role models of the same gender/race/ethnicity. (not appearing on symplur). (� ) #blackmeninmedicine even though it was first used in , it did not gain traction until a presentation on the number of african american men in medical school in . addresses racial diversity for black males. (curated in symplur). (� ) #quoteher related to leadership for women in medicine and science and women as experts. (curated in symplur.) (� ) #diversityinmedicine general catchphrase about diversity in medicine. does not appear in symplur. (� ) jabfm january–february vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ april ) that featured the masked faces of female surgeons looking down at an operating field. this cover photograph appeared on the timelines of millions of users. the overall retweet impressions of these hashtags were between just under thousand and million. this gives us an estimate of how many additional accounts were seeing the tweet. these figures also show that the median number of followers for the users posting tweets with the hashtags was and the average was . in comparison, in , the median number of followers for users posting in the previous days was , and using twitter sta- tistics released in , this mean is higher than that of the normal user on twitter, which is . the , tweets sent containing one of the med- ical diversity hashtags in were sent by different twitter users. sixty-eight of these users used one or more of these hashtags in more than tweets. of the , tweets, over % were retweeted. figure shows the various hashtags and variations in volume and activity by month for . connectedness looking at “connectedness”—a measure and spa- tial representation of the connectivity between us- ers and followers and the bidirectional relationship between them—we analyzed the twitter activity of several health professional groups to see if/how they were using the hashtags in their tweets. col- lectively, these organizations tweeted between and times each month in . overall, tweets using the selected hashtags made up a mi- nuscule proportion of their overall tweets (table ), with the exception of tweets from the associa- tion of women surgeons, which used one of the hashtags in % of its tweets. figure further illustrates how little overlap occurred between professional societies and users of the diversity hashtags. lines are drawn between the professional societies and the diversity hashtags if the professional society posted tweets that con- tain the specified hashtag. @womensurgeons is the only society that has used most of the hashtags in tweets they have posted. discussion physicians use twitter to share scholarship, com- ment on research, engage with colleagues and the public, create virtual communities, and build new social networks. – increasingly, many are using twitter to reflect on personal experiences, advocate for change, and engage in discussions surrounding racism, discrimination, and sexism in medicine. our study is the first to characterize twitter dis- course on women and black men in medicine via commonly used hashtags. overall, the use of these hashtags has been lim- ited, but it has been growing. one notable excep- tion is #ilooklikeasurgeon. interestingly, that campaign started in , , but in april it was adopted by twitter users to go along with the new yorker cover and the ensuing photographs sent from around the world of women surgeons. as a means of comparison, the top tweets on twitter are retweeted over a half million times. in contrast, the top tweets in our evaluation were retweeted a mere times. at the same time, the “retweet per- centage” of tweets with these hashtags was %. this represents a very high level of engagement, since overall, only % of tweets on twitter are retweeted. we also see examples of hashtags with a rela- tively small number of tweets initially (#quoteher and #diversityinmedicine), ending up with a large spread. this is due to who was retweeting or using table . volume of tweets and retweets using diversity hashtags from january to december , hashtag total tweets contributors total retweets initial impressions spread #ilooklikeasurgeon , , , , , , #womeninmedicine , , , , , #sheleads , , #seeitbeit , , , , #blackmeninmedicine , , , , #quoteher , , , , #diversityinmedicine , , , , doi: . /jabfm. . . conversations on twitter about diversity in medicine o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ the hashtag. #quoteher was used by handles that had over thousand followers each (@harvard- med, @womensmediacntr, @medscape, @cjr, @drlindamd). for #diversityimedicine, we did not see many users with thousand followers, but they had a few influential users, including @picardonhealth (a well known health journalist with � thousand followers) and @blackwomen- mds (with about thousand followers) tweeted repeatedly using the hashtag. while this is a start, these conversations have not reached their potential, although it is unlikely they would become as large as #metoo or #black- livesmatter or others that have gone truly “viral.” figure . hashtags and their volume by month for . jabfm january–february vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ however, for such hashtags (and associated tweets, themes and ideas) to go viral just within our med- ical community, more people and professional so- cieties need to use them, we need to target “influ- encers” or those with a large following, and we need to be persistent in tweeting and retweeting frequently and repeatedly. events “in real life” (irl) drive content on twitter. spikes in the #ilooklikeasurgeon were linked to the publication of the new yorker cover cartoon in april ; the #blackmeninmedicine had its spike in november , coinciding with a campaign on racial diversity in medicine promoted by an organization called “tour for diversity in table . medical groups’ use of diversity hashtags between january to december handle diversity tweet volume overall tweets overall retweets diversity tweet significance @aafp @acpinternists � % @amcollsurgeons @ameracadpeds @amermedicalassn � % @amsanational � % @amwadoctors % @nationalmedassn @societygim @societyofbas % @stfm_fm @womensurgeons % figure . connectedness and amplification: medical societies’ and organizations’ use of selected hashtags. doi: . /jabfm. . . conversations on twitter about diversity in medicine o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ medicine.” the #sheleads hashtag showed in- creased popularity just before and during a confer- ence ; the #womeninmedicine hashtags, used dur- ing weekly tweetchats, also peaked in april, perhaps used along with the #ilooklikeasurgeon hashtag. the temporal variations illustrate how difficult it is to sustain the momentum of such “campaigns” over a long period of time, and attest to the fleeting nature of “organized hashtags,” especially since any user can create their own hashtag and enough peo- ple need to know about the hashtag and copy it into their tweets to matter. the smallest variations in hashtag composition (eg, #pediatrics, #pediatric, #pediatrician), sometime related to typing errors, mean that tagged tweets will not be curated as part of the same “conversation,” making it more diffi- cult for researchers to track the real spread and distribution. one way to sustain a conversation is to have organizations, known entities or health care leaders start using a hashtag to tag specific issues. very few health professional groups used any of the selected hashtags, and those that did, did so rarely. this omission represents a missed opportunity to not only amplify important on-line conversations, but to lead them. it may send the impression that the diversity and inclusion are not priorities for the selected organizations. for such hashtags to be es- sentially ignored by twitter influencers from within the medical community will essentially guarantee that important content will remain con- fined to small silos and closed communities. health profession organizations have the opportunity to amplify messages related to racism, sexism, dis- crimination and diversity in an intersectional and cross-disciplinary manner. most of them have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of follow- ers (eg, the american medical association has over thousand followers). our study has several limitations. first and fore- most, this evaluation represents data from a limited time period. content and context continuously evolve on social media, so while this investigation looked at an entire year, it may not be representa- tive of trends in the present and future. second, our focus on hashtags means that we only captured a limited number of tweets – and a narrower dis- course – and may have missed important discus- sions in tweets without the selected hashtags. in addition, social media conversations about diver- sity, racism and discrimination in medicine occur “outside” of the selected hashtags by individuals and organizations that do not use them (purposely or simply because they are not aware of them) or use them incorrectly. moreover, sometimes campaigns use multiple hashtags (#bmim is sometimes used to denote #blackmeninmedicine), further limiting a compre- hensive assessment. what is more, our selection of hashtags represents our own notion of what is im- portant and is limited to our personal exposures in our personal twitter feeds. as such, we may have omitted other important hashtags, affecting how representative our selections are of all hashtags related to diversity in medicine. further, we did not include all health-profession organizations, univer- sities, medical schools or other societies with a stake in this conversation. finally, we also did not conduct subanalyses of the effects of other factors affecting the dissemination and spread such as the inclusion of photographs, links or tweets’ time of day (all which have been linked to dissemination potential ). by and large, however, the study of the impact of social media discourse in health and medicine— on patient outcomes, professional and patient behav- ior, dissemination of research—is still in its in- fancy. – conclusion discussions surrounding racism, sexism, and dis- crimination in medicine are gaining momentum and reaching wider audiences within our profes- sion. the conversation can be broadened to reach across specialties, geographical locations, and even beyond medicine through the use of social media, but we must be more intentional in our use of twitter, and of hashtags, for this purpose. recent data has shown that the use of hashtags increases engagement, as does the use of images and links. for researchers being intentional may mean cre- ating more uniform means of quantifying and as- sessing dissemination via hashtags. on the indi- vidual user level it may mean using photographs, linking to relevant web sites, noticing emerging diversity-related hashtags, using them purposefully, tagging multiple organizations and twitter “influ- encers.” it may also mean contributing new hashtags to the health care hashtag project, a “social project” soliciting input from users to curate “trending” data and internet discourse via hashtags. jabfm january–february vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ individuals and organizations have the potential to amplify and broaden awareness of obstacles faced by women and black men in medicine. it may be in the best interest of organizations to become aware of what their members and others in the field are tweet- ing, what hashtags are being used and how the dis- course on inclusion and diversity is shifting. we would like to see health care organizations, however, also take an active role in strengthening, deepening and, ultimately, expanding the conversation not only on twitter, but more importantly irl—in real life. diversity and inclusion in medicine must go viral, on and off the internet. we would like to acknowledge the massive data institute (mdi) at georgetown university for supporting this research. to see this article online, please go to: http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full. references . rotenstein ls, jena ab. lost taussigs—the conse- quences of gender discrimination in medicine. n engl j med ; : – . . laurencin ct, murray m. an american crisis: the lack of black men in medicine. j racial ethn health disparities ; : – . . alsan m, garrick o, graziani gc. does diversity matter for health? experimental evidence from oak- land. working paper . national bureau of economic 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https://www.symplur.com/blog/healthcare-hashtags-social-project/ http://www.jabfm.org/ research open access does the development of new medicinal products in the european union address global and regional health concerns? ferrán catalá-lópez, , *, anna garcía-altés, , , elena Álvarez-martín , ricard gènova-maleras , consuelo morant-ginestar abstract background: since , approval for many new medicinal products has been obtained through a centralized procedure in the european union. in recent years, the use of summary measures of population health has become widespread. we investigated whether efforts to develop innovative medicines are focusing on the most relevant conditions from a global public health perspective. methods: we reviewed the information on new medicinal products approved by centralized procedure from to , information that is available to the public in the european commission register of medicinal products and the european public assessment reports from the european medicines agency. morbidity and mortality data were included for each disease group, according to the global burden of disease project. we evaluated the association between authorized medicinal products and burden of disease measures based on disability-adjusted life years (dalys) in the european union and worldwide. results: we considered marketing authorizations for medicinal products and active ingredients. new authorizations were seen to increase over the period analyzed. there was a positive, high correlation between dalys and new medicinal product development (r = . , p = . ) in the european union, and a moderate correlation for middle-low-income countries (r = . , p = . ) and worldwide (r = . , p = . ). the most neglected conditions at the european level (based on their attributable health losses) were neuropsychiatric diseases, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, sense organ conditions, and digestive diseases, while globally, they were perinatal conditions, respiratory infections, sense organ conditions, respiratory diseases, and digestive diseases. conclusions: we find that the development of new medicinal products is higher for some diseases than others. pharmaceutical industry leaders and policymakers are invited to consider the implications of this imbalance by establishing work plans that allow for the setting of future priorities from a public health perspective. background medicinal product policies are a challenging field in cur- rent health policy. medicines are a major determining factor of population health [ ], as the current capacity of public health to prevent, discontinue, or modify the natural course of diseases and reduce their symptoms depends mostly on them. the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most potent industrial sectors in developed countries, having a major impact on national economies and the creation of employment opportunities as well as research invest- ment policies. a proxy variable to establish pharmaceu- tical research success is the number of authorizations granted for marketing medicinal products. regulatory authorities generally judge the suitability of new treat- ments in terms of the benefit-risk balance and regulate commercialization and conditions of use based on qual- ity, safety, and efficacy criteria. the benefit of medicinal * correspondence: ferran_catala@hotmail.com fundación instituto de investigación en servicios de salud, valencia, spain full list of author information is available at the end of the article catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / © catalá-lópez, et al; licensee biomed central ltd. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. mailto:ferran_catala@hotmail.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . products (if they do not harm) can be viewed as the decrease in disease burden associated with their use [ ], though additional criteria also can be considered (e.g., degree of innovation, cost-effectiveness, added therapeutic value, existence of medicinal products or other options for the same conditions, and specific needs of some population groups). since early , european union (eu) authorization for many new human-use medicinal products has been obtained through a centralized procedure. this proce- dure, managed by the european medicines agency, is mandatory for products derived from biotechnology and other high-technology procedures, those aimed at the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (hiv/aids), cancer, dia- betes, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune disor- ders, viral diseases, and also orphan medicines used to treat rare diseases. the centralized authorization appli- cation also can be submitted whenever the medicinal product involved is a major therapeutic, scientific, or technical innovation, or is relevant in any other way for population health [ ]. the existence of limited resources for research and development activities, together with budget restrictions for funding approved medicinal products, require estab- lishing explicit criteria to guide debates on priority-set- ting. in recent years, the calculation and use of summary measures of population health have become widespread and influential in global health, as in the case of disability-adjusted life years (dalys) [ ]. dalys for a disease or health condition are calculated as the sum of years of life lost (yll) due to premature mortal- ity in relation to life expectancy and years lived with dis- ability (yld). one daly is equivalent to the loss of one year of healthy life. dalys allow the burden of disease in a population to be measured as the gap between cur- rent health and an ideal situation where everyone lives to old age, free of disease and disability. it is an indica- tion of the unfinished health research agenda and identi- fies areas where health gains can be made [ ]. thus, dalys are designed to guide investment health policies and to inform global priority setting for health research activities [ , ]. the aim of this paper is to examine whether medi- cines development activities in the eu are aimed at the most relevant conditions from a global public health perspective, considering burden of disease criteria. methods study design and data sources this is an observational, cross-sectional study evaluating the association between burden of disease measures and human-use medicinal products authorized in the eu, establishing whether the development of innovative medicinal products changes with disease burden in dif- ferent populations. with information from public sources [ , ] accessible through the internet, we created an authorization database based on the cohort of medic- inal products authorized by eu centralized procedure during the period from january (the date when the european medicines agency was created) to december . we specifically examined: the european commis- sion register of medicinal products [ ] and the european public assessment reports (epars) for authorized medicinal products [ ]. we collected the fol- lowing information: year of approval, name of the med- icinal product, active ingredients (new chemical entities), main indication, disease seriousness, type of intervention, and other variables when appropriate (e.g., new mechanism, biotechnological/biological pro- duct, orphan medicinal product, fixed-dose combina- tions or drug associations, generics and similar biological medicinal products - also called “biosimilars”). we used the following definitions: main indication: this was defined as the first approval for a given drug, and later approvals were considered extensions. disease seriousness: a disease was classified as (chronic) serious if it is fatal, requires hospitalization, or is life-threa- tening or heavily disabling (e.g., myocardial infarction, dementia, pneumonia); as nonserious (e.g., erectile dysfunction, allergic rhinitis); or as a risk factor for serious disease (e.g., obesity, hypertension, anemia associated with chronic renal failure). type of intervention: this was defined as prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or palliative care/rehabilitation. new mechanism of action: a mechanism was defined as new if the primary pharmacodynamic target (e.g., receptor) and drug-target interaction differed from existing drugs. when a medicine belonged to a new therapeutic class and the mechanism of action was unknown, it was classi- fied as new. medicinal products for which marketing authorization was “withdrawn, suspended and/or not renewed” during the study period were excluded from the primary analysis. the pediatric regulation (regulation ec no / ) came into place to improve the health of children in the eu without subjecting children to unnecessary trials or delaying the authorization of medicinal pro- ducts for use in adults. since then, all patented medic- inal products submitted for a marketing authorization (or line extension) in the eu need to have an agreed drug development plan, namely a pediatric investigation plan (pip). thus, to create a complementary assessment of medicines development activities related to pediatric needs, the european medicines agency website http:// www.ema.europa.eu was searched for information with catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of http://www.ema.europa.eu http://www.ema.europa.eu respect to opinions on submitted pips (proxy variable used for pediatric pharmaceutical output). we also included decisions agreeing on a pip, with or without partial waiver(s) and or deferral(s). these data provide information about what medicinal products are in the pipeline and may help illuminate the extent to which efforts are focusing on the development of innovative medicines for children. for each disease group, we included morbidity and mortality data according to the global burden of dis- ease study [ , ]. this project was conducted by the world bank, the world health organization (who), and the harvard school of public health to quantify the burden of disease and injury on human populations and to gather information on prevalence, incidence, severity, disability, and mortality for more than causes [ , ]. burden of disease, measured in dalys and mortality, refers to the most recent estimations available at the time of analysis. in brief, this report used the data for the world population - by income categories as defined by the world bank - and for the eu member states (eu- ) in [ ]. the main therapeutic indications for medicinal products were then matched with the categories of the disease classification system defined in the global burden of disease study [ ]. statistical analysis we established the direction and strength of association between human-use medicinal products authorized dur- ing the study period and burden of disease measures. in a subanalysis regarding pharmaceutical development output for pediatric needs, we measured the associations between the burden of disease in children under years of age - the pediatric age group reported in the estimates for who countries [ , ] - and the decisions of the european medicines agency’s pediatric commit- tee agreeing on a pip for an individual medicinal pro- duct. using the stata package (version , statacorp lp, college station, tx, usa), we calculated nonpara- metric spearman rank correlation coefficients (r). the statistical significance level was set at a value of . (a confidence level of %). results we included marketing authorizations for medicinal products in the analysis, corresponding to active ingredients (figure ). table describes the main char- acteristics and distribution of the new medicinal pro- ducts in development. from to , the total number of new authorizations by eu centralized proce- dure increased. furthermore, the ratio between the number of marketing authorizations and the number of active ingredients also increased over the period of study. we found that medicinal products covered mainly therapeutic and preventive interventions aimed at serious diseases. table shows the main data on the output of phar- maceutical development and disease burden measures by cause and region. the indication of new active ingre- dients was mainly malignant neoplasms ( . %), infec- tious and parasitic diseases ( . %), blood and endocrine disorders ( . %), neuropsychiatric conditions ( . %), cardiovascular diseases ( . %), diabetes mellitus ( . %), and musculoskeletal diseases ( . %). in general, a high association was found between disease burden and the development of medicinal products in the eu- (r = . , p = . ), and a moderate association at the global level (r = . , p = . ) (table ). how- ever, these associations do not hide disproportionality rela- tionships between the various disease categories (figures and ). in the eu- , the greatest disproportionality was seen for infectious and parasitic diseases, blood and endo- crine disorders, diabetes mellitus and genitourinary dis- eases (all of them overrepresented related to the burden they generate). conversely, neuropsychiatric conditions, cardiovascular diseases, sense organ conditions, respiratory diseases, or digestive diseases were underrepresented (figure ). meanwhile, the most neglected conditions worldwide (based on dalys) were mainly perinatal condi- tions, respiratory infections, diseases of the sense organs, respiratory diseases, or digestive diseases (figure ). we found differences between regions and countries, with better associations with dalys than with mortality (table ). by region, the associations were stronger in the eu- (dalys: r = . , p = . ) than in mid- dle-low-income countries (dalys: r = . , p = . ) or globally (dalys: r = . , p = . ), and similar to those of high-income countries (dalys: r = . , p = . ). differences also were found within the eu, marketing authorisations granted ( active ingredients) by eu centralized procedure, - marketing authorisations granted ( active ingredients) selected for the analysis marketing authorisations withdrawn, suspended and/or not renewed ( active ingredients) excluded from the analysis marketing authorisations granted to medicinal products with no specific indication ( active ingredient) excluded marketing authorisations granted ( active ingredients) finally included in the analysis with disease burden measures figure pharmaceutical output selection. marketing authorizations granted (and active ingredients) by eu centralized procedure, - . catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of with the associations being lower in the countries recently joining the eu (dalys: r = . , p = . ) than in the countries initially established (dalys: r = . , p = . ). by countries, the values were for mortality: from r = . (p = . ) in poland to r = . (p = . ) in luxembourg; while for dalys, the values were from r = . (p = . ) in finland to r = . (p = . ) in portugal. additionally, we examined the pharmaceutical devel- opment output related to pediatric needs (tables and ). we identified pips agreed to in the eu after the pediatric regulation was introduced. no evidence of association was found between the number of pips and the regional burden of disease in children under years (dalys: r = . , p = . ; mortality: r = . , p = . ). discussion our analysis for the period - uses the cohort of human-use medicinal products authorized by centralized procedure to show that the development of medicinal products is higher for some diseases than others. the three main therapeutic areas in terms of number of innovative medicinal products were oncology, infectious and parasitic diseases, and blood and endocrine disor- ders (accounting for . % of active ingredients and . % of marketing authorizations). the results also showed a moderate to high association between the development of medicinal products and disease burden measures for the main disease categories, though some conditions appear to be neglected (related to the health loss generated in the population) as in the case of neu- ropsychiatric, cardiovascular, respiratory, sense organ, digestive, perinatal diseases, etc. on the contrary, the number of agreed pips was not associated with the number of dalys and deaths among children under years. therefore, the review of pips suggested again that some disease conditions were more neglected than others (related to pediatric health needs), such as peri- natal conditions, congenital anomalies, and neuropsy- chiatric diseases. the european medicines agency is the regulatory authority providing the member states and the institu- tions of the eu with scientific advice on quality, safety, and efficacy of medicines. medicinal products author- ized by the centralized procedure can be automatically marketed in all eu member states. barbui and garattini [ ] highlighted some issues that can adversely affect assessment of medicinal products for some dis- eases. first, the centralized procedure is not mandatory for all human-use medicinal products, and different authorization procedures in the eu (e.g., centralized table main characteristics and distribution of the marketing authorizations of medicinal products for human use and active ingredients (nces), - period - period - period - characteristics num. of authorizations (%) num. of nces (%) num. of authorizations (%) num. of nces (%) num. of authorizations (%) num. of nces (%) total ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) type of intervention prevention ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) diagnosis ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) treatment ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) palliative care/ rehabilitation ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) disease seriousness serious disease ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) nonserious disease ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) risk factor for serious disease ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) new mechanism of action ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) fixed-dose combinations ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) biotechnological/ biological product ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) orphan medicinal product* - - ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) generic and/or “biosimilar"* - - - - ( . ) - data do not sum to % because of rounding errors *the european commission granted marketing authorizations for: orphan medicinal products in , “biosimilar” products in , and generic products in . nces = new chemical entities. catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of versus mutual recognition/decentralized and national procedures) can result in heterogeneity in terms of authorized medicinal products between countries. sec- ond, new medicinal products can be evaluated without needing to establish comparisons to active treatments. therefore, a medicinal product can be marketed if it shows a difference versus a placebo (dummy treatment), and in cases where this is not ethical, demonstrating “noninferiority” versus an active comparator is per- mitted. this can cause uncertainty on the therapeutic role of new medicinal products, as suggested in recent reviews on cancer [ , ], cardiovascular [ ], antirheu- matic [ ], and central nervous system treatments [ ]. from a public health perspective [ - ], the therapeu- tic value and degree of innovation of medicinal pro- ducts could also be considered, referring to their added value related to other available options. some of the items to be highlighted in this approach would include: the relative or incremental value compared with the available alternatives, the evaluation under real conditions of use (comparative effectiveness and safety), or even its incremental costs (efficiency or cost-effectiveness), which is of high value for guiding pricing and reimbursement decisions following the marketing authorization [ , ]. while there is general concern about the lack of inno- vation in the development of medicinal products, there is an increased number of active ingredients and of new marketing authorizations. the apparent increase in cen- trally authorized generics, “biosimilars,” and fixed-dose combinations observed over the study period may have contributed to this situation. furthermore, these results may be a sign of the failure of the pharmaceutical mar- ket to anticipate unmet needs and consumer demand. this analysis also involves some limitations. first, the assessment refers only to medicinal products for human use authorized by centralized procedure. though there are other alternative procedures, we assumed that the cohort of medicinal products selected here can be con- sidered to be representative of current pharmaceutical innovation. second, to measure pharmaceutical develop- ment output, we used for the primary analyses the data on new marketing authorizations and of active ingredi- ents. despite being significant measures expressing the productivity of research and development activities, other measures could have been selected instead table distribution of medicinal products authorized for human use by therapeutic area ( - ) and burden of disease (as measured by disability-adjusted life years and mortality) disease conditions medicinal products for human use, - burden of disease in the population marketing authorizations nces mortality per (%) dalys per (%) number (%) number (%) worldwide eu- worldwide eu- communicable diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) infectious and parasitic diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) respiratory infections ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) maternal conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) perinatal conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) noncommunicable diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) malignant neoplasms ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) other neoplasms ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) diabetes mellitus ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) blood and endocrine disorders ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) neuropsychiatric conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) sense organ diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) cardiovascular diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) respiratory diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) digestive diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) genitourinary diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) skin diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) musculoskeletal diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) congenital anomalies ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) oral conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) unintentional injuries (poisoning) ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) total ( ) ( ) . ( ) . ( ) , . ( ) . ( ) data do not sum to % because of rounding errors. burden of disease data are from world health organization for the year . burden of disease is measured by mortality and disability-adjusted life years (dalys). nces = new chemical entities. eu- = all eu countries in . catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of (e.g., funding for pharmaceutical research, total expendi- tures per therapeutic area or per daly lost, etc.). the number of new marketing authorizations and of active ingredients may not be necessarily an indication of the interest in a given disease as they may represent drugs that are structurally similar to already existing ones with only minor pharmaceutical differences (so-called “me- too” drugs). in addition, broader health status measures favorably reflect the results of biomedical research investments. these include lower dalys lost, lower death rates for chronic diseases, longer life expectancy and improved quality of life for elderly people; and more effective and earlier disease detection [ ]. third, sometimes a medicinal product can be authorized for more than one therapeutic indication in various condi- tions or diseases (e.g., an anticancer agent for the treat- ment of solid tumors and hematological malignancies, a psychoanaleptic indicated for depression and diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, etc.). for the purpose of our analysis, the information can be imperfect as the main indication was chosen. however, we think using the main disease groups and categories instead of subca- tegories while also using a comprehensive, consistent, and exclusive classification system enabled us to reduce misclassification bias, making the main findings robust. the approach of this analysis has been used in other areas, such as health services research [ - ]. surpris- ingly, little attention has been paid to analyzing dispro- portionality among population health needs and the development of innovative medicinal products. the par- ties interested in some diseases or interventions often mention the lack of funds for their disease or interven- tion without considering the global health implications. a previous report concluded that health research does not reflect the global burden of disease, with less than % of resources invested in the study of diseases that contribute % of the global burden of disease, also known as the “ / gap” [ ]. it has been argued that the pharmaceutical industry appears unwilling to fund development of new medicinal products aimed at health needs in middle-low-income countries because the pro- spects for financial gain for the industry are limited [ ]. our analysis provides information on this matter. we found that nearly % ( / ) of the new medicinal products are aimed at less than % of health losses (expressed in dalys) in the world, accounting for % of dalys in high-income countries, as in the case of the eu- . although the data appear to indicate that the “ / gap” is decreasing, there are still neglected global health needs. it is noteworthy to mention that the availability of medicines depends partially on the state of research on a particular disease. indeed, some diseases may require a more significant investment of resources to develop innovative medicines. the lack of novel medicinal pro- ducts in specific areas may also indicate that there are medicines under patent protection (marketing exclusiv- ity) or that the pharmaceutical market is saturated in those areas. therefore, the financial rewards for the pharmaceutical industry to develop medicines of rele- vant therapeutic value may not be profitable enough to assume the risky nature of their investments. on the other hand, the granting of marketing approval does not necessarily translate into improved availability of medicines. in fact, access to medicines is far from table associations of active ingredients (nces) with burden of disease (as measured by disability-adjusted life years and mortality) by region and country mortality dalys coefficient r p- value coefficient r p- value worldwide . . . * . high-income . * . . ** . low- and middle- income . . . * . eu- . . . ** . eu- . * . . ** . austria . * . . ** . belgium . * . . ** . denmark . . . ** . finland . . . . france . * . . ** . germany . . . ** . greece . * . . ** . ireland . * . . * . italy . * . . ** . luxembourg . * . . ** . netherlands . * . . * . portugal . * . . ** . spain . * . . ** . sweden . . . * . united kingdom . * . . * . eu- . . . * . cyprus . . . ** . czech republic . . . * . estonia . . . * . hungary . . . * . latvia . . . * . lithuania . . . . malta . . . ** . poland . . . * . slovakia . . . * . slovenia . . . * . *p-value < . (bilateral); ** p-value < . (bilateral). eu- = all eu countries in . eu- = established eu countries. eu- = newly joined eu countries. data represent spearman’s rank correlation coefficients (r). dalys = disability-adjusted life years. catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of being globally harmonized because price and reimburse- ment are still matters for countries to consider accord- ing to their government policies, health resources, and public health systems [ ]. this is particularly important in middle-low-income countries, where there is an access problem either for issues linked to the cost of medicines acquisition, defective health structures, or underdiagnosis. for example, about million people die every year worldwide because of communicable diseases such as diarrheal conditions, hiv/aids, tuberculosis, and malaria [ ], even though these diseases are treatable (or at least preventable) with current interventions. in the case of noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes or other cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., hypertension, in f e c t io u s a n d p a r a s it ic ma lig n a n t n e o p la s m s dia b e t e s m e llit u s en d o c r in e d is o r d e r s ne u r o p s yc h ia t r ic se n s e o r g a n c a r d io v a s c u la r ge n it o u r in a r y mu s c u lo s k e le t a l - - di s a b i l i t y a d j u s t e d l i f e ye a rs (%) p h a rm a c e u ti c a l o u tp u t, n c e s ( % ) figure bubble plot representing disability-adjusted life years (dalys) for eu- and active ingredients (nces). the areas of the bubbles are dalys’ weighted contribution of each disease condition(s) to the total burden of disease. : other neoplasms; : unintentional injuries (poisoning); : congenital anomalies; : digestive diseases; : respiratory diseases; : skin diseases; : respiratory infections; : maternal conditions; : perinatal conditions. inf e c t io us a n d p a r a s it ic re s p ir a t o ry in f e c t io n s ma t e r n a l pe r in a t a l ma lig n a n t n e o p la s m s dia b e t e s m e llit u s en d o c r in e d is o r d e r s ne u r o p s yc h ia t r ic se n s e o r g a n ca r d io va s c u la r ge n it o u rin a ry mu s c u lo s k e le t a l - - d is a b ilit y a d ju s t e d life ye a rs (%) p h a rm a c e u ti c a l o u tp u t, n c e s ( % ) figure bubble plot representing disability-adjusted life years (dalys) worldwide and active ingredients (nces). the areas of the bubbles are dalys’ weighted contribution of each disease condition(s) to the total burden of disease. : other neoplasms; : unintentional injuries (poisoning); : congenital anomalies; : digestive diseases; : respiratory diseases; : skin diseases. catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of obesity, smoking, etc.) for which interventions (not only medicines) are available, many health systems cannot meet population needs in the poorest communities. chronic noncommunicable diseases in developing coun- tries are not just diseases of the elderly, since cardiovas- cular diseases account for as many deaths in young and middle-aged adults as hiv/aids. also, chronic diseases affect a much higher proportion of people in developing countries during their prime working years than they do in developed countries [ ]. there are several challenges to public health that require a new global and regional strategic approach, including the availability of medicines for current unmet medical needs, among others [ , ]. some investigators have suggested incentives for new medicinal products that are effective against diseases of high societal burden or gravity for populations. these include incentives for novelty, comparative effectiveness and safety, extended patent life, and pricing enhance- ments for drugs aimed at particular public health needs. such incentives have been used successfully for vaccines and low-prevalence (orphan) diseases [ ]. table main characteristics of the pediatric investigation plans (pips) and related active ingredients (nces) characteristics num. of pips (%) num. of nces (%) total ( ) ( ) type of intervention prevention ( . ) ( . ) diagnosis - - treatment ( . ) ( . ) palliative care/rehabilitation ( . ) ( . ) disease seriousness serious disease ( . ) ( . ) nonserious disease ( . ) ( . ) risk factor for serious disease ( . ) ( . ) new mechanism of action ( . ) ( . ) fixed-dose combinations ( . ) ( . ) biotechnological/biological product ( . ) ( . ) orphan medicinal product ( . ) ( . ) data do not sum to % because of rounding errors. pips = pediatric investigation plans. nces = new chemical entities with an agreed pip. source of the data: http://www.ema.europa.eu (search until september ). table distribution of pharmaceutical output related to pediatric needs by therapeutic area and burden of disease in children under years (as measured by disability-adjusted life years and mortality) disease conditions pharmaceutical output related to pediatric needs burden of disease in children under years pips nces mortality per (%) dalys per (%) number (%) number (%) worldwide eu- worldwide eu- communicable diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) infectious and parasitic diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) respiratory infections ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) maternal conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) perinatal conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) noncommunicable diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) malignant neoplasms ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) other neoplasms - - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) diabetes mellitus ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) blood and endocrine disorders ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) neuropsychiatric conditions ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) sense organ diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) cardiovascular diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) respiratory diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) digestive diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) genitourinary diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) skin diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) musculoskeletal diseases ( . ) ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) congenital anomalies - - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) oral conditions - - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) unintentional injuries (poisoning) - - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) total ( ) ( ) . ( ) . ( ) . ( ) . ( ) data do not sum to % because of rounding errors. burden of disease data are from world health organization for the year . burden of disease in children under years is measured by mortality and disability-adjusted life years (dalys). pips = pediatric investigation plans. eu- = all eu countries in . *nces = new chemical entities with an agreed pip. catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / the european medicines agency has recently launched a public consultation on its future actions, based on which it intends to set priorities for coming years. european and international agencies, including medical and patient organizations, the pharmaceutical industry, and citizens have been invited to participate in the document, “road map to ” [ ], including debating how to approach public health needs, promot- ing research on medicinal products in unmet medical needs areas, or for rare and neglected diseases, providing innovative proposals for drug development. in this paper, we intended to provide information based on the outcomes of decisions made during years in the european setting. pharmaceutical industry leaders and policymakers are invited to consider the implications of the imbalance explored in this paper, establishing work plans that allow for defining future priorities from a public health perspective. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge the editors and the peer reviewers, silvio garattini and john joseph borg, for their helpful comments on our submitted manuscript. the views expressed are those of the authors and should not be understood or quoted as being made on behalf of or reflecting the position of any regulatory agency, academic or public health institution. author details fundación instituto de investigación en servicios de salud, valencia, spain. division of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance, spanish medicines and healthcare products agency (aemps), ministry of health and social policy, madrid, spain. catalan agency for health information, assessment and quality (cahiaq), barcelona, spain. department of preventive medicine and public health, rey juan carlos university, madrid, spain. primary care general directorate, regional health council, madrid, spain. department of health information systems, regional health council, madrid, spain. authors’ contributions fcl conceived the study aims and design, and developed the study in discussions with aga, eam, rgm, and cmg. fcl performed the analysis and drafted the initial manuscript. all authors contributed to interpretation of results, revised and commented on the manuscript for important intellectual content, and approved the final version. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. received: july accepted: december published: december references . de abajo fj: medications as a solution and a problem for public health. brief 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medicines agency; [http://www.ema. europa.eu/pdfs/general/direct/directory/ en.pdf], (accessed april , ). doi: . / - - - cite this article as: catalá-lópez, et al.: does the development of new medicinal products in the european union address global and regional health concerns? population health metrics : . submit your next manuscript to biomed central and take full advantage of: • convenient online submission • thorough peer review • no space constraints or color figure charges • immediate publication on acceptance • inclusion in pubmed, cas, scopus and google scholar • research which is freely available for redistribution submit your manuscript at www.biomedcentral.com/submit catalá-lópez, et al. population health metrics , : http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/ / / page of http://www.globalforumhealth.org/layout/set/print/media-publications/publications/ - -report-on-health-research- http://www.globalforumhealth.org/layout/set/print/media-publications/publications/ - -report-on-health-research- http://www.globalforumhealth.org/layout/set/print/media-publications/publications/ - -report-on-health-research- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ?dopt=abstract http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_overview/documents/strategy_wp_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_overview/documents/strategy_wp_en.pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/pdfs/general/direct/directory/ en.pdf http://www.ema.europa.eu/pdfs/general/direct/directory/ en.pdf 	abstract 	background 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	methods 	study design and data sources 	statistical analysis 	results 	discussion 	acknowledgements 	author details 	authors' contributions 	competing interests 	references drug discovery in jeopardy pedro cuatrecasas j clin invest. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /jci . despite striking advances in the biomedical sciences, the flow of new drugs has slowed to a trickle, impairing therapeutic advances as well as the commercial success of drug companies. reduced productivity in the drug industry is caused mainly by corporate policies that discourage innovation. this is compounded by various consequences of mega-mergers, the obsession for blockbuster drugs, the shift of control of research from scientists to marketers, the need for fast sales growth, and the discontinuation of development compounds for nontechnical reasons. lessons from the past indicate that these problems can be overcome, and herein, new and improved directions for drug discovery are suggested. science and society find the latest version: https://jci.me/ /pdf http://www.jci.org http://www.jci.org/ / ?utm_campaign=cover-page&utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=content https://doi.org/ . /jci http://www.jci.org/tags/ ?utm_campaign=cover-page&utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=content https://jci.me/ /pdf https://jci.me/ /pdf?utm_content=qrcode science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november    drug discovery in jeopardy pedro cuatrecasas departments of pharmacology and medicine, university of california san diego, san diego, california, usa. despite	striking	advances	in	the	biomedical	sciences,	the	flow	of	new	drugs	has	slowed	to	a	trickle,	 impairing	therapeutic	advances	as	well	as	the	commercial	success	of	drug	companies.	reduced	pro- ductivity	in	the	drug	industry	is	caused	mainly	by	corporate	policies	that	discourage	innovation.	this	 is	compounded	by	various	consequences	of	mega-mergers,	the	obsession	for	blockbuster	drugs,	the	 shift	of	control	of	research	from	scientists	to	marketers,	the	need	for	fast	sales	growth,	and	the	dis- continuation	of	development	compounds	for	nontechnical	reasons.	lessons	from	the	past	indicate	 that	these	problems	can	be	overcome,	and	herein,	new	and	improved	directions	for	drug	discovery	are	suggested. the decreasing output of new drugs and the drying up of industry  pipelines are well established ( – ). to maintain profitability, the  pharmaceutical industry has resorted to practices that have drawn  public criticism, including markedly increasing drug prices, increas- ing spending on advertising and promotion, direct-to-consumer  advertising, ineffectively conducting postmarketing surveillance, and  limiting comparative efficacy/safety studies with alternative drugs.  however, attention should be directed more to the root of these prob- lems — the inefficiencies of drug discovery and development (d&d),  which result from the management policies and corporate cultures  of the institutions (corporations) that undertake the research and  development (r&d). these conditions are so entrenched that we  must ponder whether the current system can recover. what is really wrong? low productivity. the low productivity ( – ) of drug d&d is cer- tainly  not  related  to  available  budgets,  which  have  increased   -fold since  . many pharmas devote more than $  billion/ year to r&d, with over $  billion/year of cumulative spending,  greater that the total nih budget of $  billion. the falling pro- ductivity has been ascribed commonly to a number of well-dis- cussed factors such as regulatory hurdles and high attrition of  drug candidates ( – ). most of these issues are contributory rather  than fundamental; at the heart of the problem are the more pro- found underlying dynamics that drive r&d. the fda oversees drug development and approval of new drug  applications (ndas). while the regulatory requirements are well  warranted, grossly inadequate resources ( ) have resulted in an  antiquated process of nda review that is slow, sometimes of poor  quality, and at times subject to political influence. other issues  include the retraction of agreed-upon requirements for approval,  the current crisis of fda leadership (e.g., absence of a permanent  commissioner), and the inappropriate role of ideology in decision- making (e.g., the case of approval for the “morning-after” pill).  other critiques can be found elsewhere (e.g., in refs.  –  and  – ).  although significant reforms are in order, the fda or regulatory  issues are not fundamental barriers and contribute only margin- ally to the decline in drug productivity. likewise,  we  cannot  blame  the  current  state  of  scientif ic  advances,  which  in  the  last    years  have  been  revolutionary.  these  advances  offer  mind-staggering  new  opportunities  in  innovative drug discovery and development. it is also fallacious  to suggest that the decrease in new drugs is due to our already  having conquered the “easy” diseases, a rationalization repeat- edly expressed for   decades. the complex, lengthy, and unpredictable nature of drug r&d  certainly contributes significantly to high costs and inefficiencies.  for example, only   or   of every   compounds entering the phase  of human clinical trial ever reaches the market. however, this high  rate of loss of drug candidates during development (i.e., attrition)  is not greater today than in past decades. as will be elaborated, the  current problem of low productivity relates instead primarily to the  pervasive mismanagement of the already difficult r&d process. changes in the approach to management.  foremost  among  the  issues that cripple drug r&d is that while utmost creativity and  innovation  are  required,  the  r&d  is  conducted  in  traditional  for-prof it  corporations  that  are  virtually  indistinguishable  operationally from those that conduct little or no r&d. most  corporations’ top management does not understand the com- plexities of science, its mode of conduct or objectives, and runs  the companies in ways that stif le creativity and innovation ( ,  ). prior to  , most drug companies functioned differently.  they were smaller than today’s companies, and the nontechnical  executives knew and were proud of their scientists and were more  likely to allow r&d staff to pursue objectives with little interfer- ence. informal systems dominated behavior. each company had  its unique ways, history, character, and culture. most appreciated  that their existence and fortunes were based on a combination of  need and economic benefit, such that profitability was balanced  with public responsibility. this tended to minimize the overpric- ing of drugs. a corporate identity of (and pride in) uniqueness of  purpose were evident. employees felt they were contributing to  the improvement of human health. in the  s things began to change. modern managers entered  as chief executive officers (ceos) and other high-level executives,  mostly with little or no technical experience. many had legal or  business school training or came from non-drug industries that  functioned with greater organizational discipline. those promot- ed internally were often from legal or finance departments, with  little or no experience in research, manufacturing, or engineering.  most were unacquainted with research and were uncomfortable  with seemingly “unfocused” research organizations that they per- nonstandard	abbreviations	used: ceo, chief executive officer; d&d, discovery and  development; nda, new drug application; r&d, research and development. conflict	of	interest: the author is a consultant to daiichi sankyo research institute  and a member of the board of directors of alliance pharmaceutical corp. citation	for	this	article: j. clin. invest.  : –  ( ). doi: . /jci . science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november  ceived to operate in a freewheeling, independent style. these execu- tives found comfort in outside management consulting firms that  were called upon to suggest structural reshapings and behavioral  changes. corporate management had an instrument by which to  introduce order into the research establishments ( ). unfortunately, while consulting firms had experience in advis- ing non–technology-based corporations, few were familiar with  drug companies or complex professional-based matrix organiza- tions. their recommendations to change organizational struc- tures, procedures, and even program and project portfolios were  patterned after companies with which they were familiar, such  as general electric and other so-called well-managed companies.  use of these consulting firms became so fashionable that virtually  every pharma underwent similar externally driven reshaping in  an effort to manage and control its scientific enterprise. further,  by popularizing “benchmarking,” a process in which companies  review their activities against what others are doing, rather than  exploiting their own unique skills and experience, drug compa- nies began to all look alike ( ). conformism. with such restructuring, drug companies now felt  more confident that they could manage and mandate results with  discipline, order, formality, and efficiency. unfortunately, many of  these qualities are ones that suffocate creativity and innovation.  freedom, spontaneity, flexibility, nimbleness, tolerance, compas- sion, humor, and diversity were replaced by bulky and inflexible  organizational structures characterized by regimentation, con- trol, conformity, and excessive bureaucracy. managers often over- focused and employed top-down decision-making ( ). the objec- tive  outcomes  resulted  in  more  mediocre,  not  novel,  products,  and there was no evidence of improved long-term profitability.  ironically, great-sounding slogans were used to achieve conformity  while proclaiming the importance of innovation, empowerment,  diversity, and compassion. managers, not leaders. it is understandable that most corporate  human resources departments are unaware of some of these issues.  however, top research managers can unfortunately be similarly  uninformed. most rise through the ranks by satisfying superiors  and are selected by nontechnical management (and human resourc- es programs) as “good company players.” while outstanding scien- tists are often recruited for high leadership roles in research, the  “learn about industry” education process and lure of power can  ultimately result in an intellectual shortsightedness regarding sci- ence. for some, the financial incentives are important. of course,  many of the best-qualified who cannot adjust depart quietly, while  others find ways to quixotically manage the system and foster cre- ative environments and research programs. there are still compa- nies that try to focus on excellent science and that attract first-rate  scientists. these are, however, exceptional situations. drug r&d thrives in a creative, flexible, and nonautocratic envi- ronment ( ). success depends on individual freedom and inspira- tion rather than dogmatic leadership. instead, in “well-run” cor- porations today, scientists must contend with “management by  objectives,” hierarchical and autocratic organizations, mandates  from  strategic  planning  groups,  detailed  and  rigid  scheduling,  constant  reporting,  and  achievement  driven  by  milestones  and  flowcharts. normally, rewards are based on quantitative output  (number and weight of reports or numbers of compounds or tests)  and extrinsic incentives such as money, promotion, power, and vis- ibility. is it any wonder that true innovation cannot thrive? pressures from shareholders. the ownership of public companies  consists mainly of shareholders who expect rapid (and substan- tive) returns on their investments. this contrasts (and often con- flicts) with the nature of the business objectives, which must be  based on long-term investments in science and technology. this  dilemma is illustrated by the requirements for quarterly reporting  of earnings versus the  - to  -year cycles of business operations  (product projects). companies have managed to navigate through  this quandary, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. shareholders,  investment  bankers,  and  analysts,  who  know  little about drug discovery, place intense pressures on ceos and  their boards for quick returns. boards of directors, although often  understanding of the ceos’ dilemma, are nevertheless forced (by  their primary role of representing the interests of shareholders)  to push ceos by setting stringent, short-term financial perfor- mance outcomes for determining annual compensation. ceos are  thus under even more pressure to achieve quick results through  cost-cutting, low-risk projects, and acquisitions. all too rarely, an  enlightened ceo undertakes energetic efforts to educate boards  and analysts regarding the nature of their business and to insist  that responsibility and accountability to the public are paramount  concerns that demand a long-term view and, perhaps, profit expec- tations more in line with those of other industries. merger mania. the decreasing earnings of pharmas have stimu- lated  mergers  and  acquisitions,  driven  by  the  desire  to  acquire  existing sales (products) while decreasing costs via layoffs. this has  created conditions that catalyze further inefficiencies and suffoca- tion of innovation. the merged megacompanies’ research organi- zations must be integrated rapidly and redundancies eliminated,  oftentimes in haste. decisions regarding people and programs  are made arbitrarily, by people far removed from the science and  labs. good programs are eliminated in attempts to consolidate,  and knowledge, training, and expertise, often cultivated over many  years, are often lost. active scientists can be transferred to admin- istrative, nonscientific tasks such as project management, licens- ing, and planning. while these posts often appear glamorous, such  appointments can remove the individual from the scientific arena  and result in the loss of valuable expertise to the company. with  rapid  growth  and  huge  size  come  changes  in  bureau- cratic procedures and organizational hierarchies that may be  confusing or meaningless to individuals ( ). communication,  so important in complex scientific undertakings dependent on  teams and matrix interactions, becomes burdensome. the dis- persion of personnel and projects over geographic regions or  buildings is also disruptive. blockbuster mania. pharmas have become much less interested in  developing drugs that will sell less than $  billion a year. with- out these “blockbusters” they cannot maintain the traditionally  high profits. the loss of major drugs to patent expiration, the  high-gross sales required, and the increasing costs of r&d and of  advertising, promotion, and marketing require sustaining a sizable  number of highly profitable new products. the larger the existing  sales, the greater the need for blockbusters. shareholders, investment bankers, and analysts, who know little about drug discovery, place intense pressures on ceos and their boards for quick returns. science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november    to optimize the economic potential of new blockbuster drugs, it  is necessary that, once they are marketed, the rate of sales growth  be as high as possible. the “front-end” upswing benefit is due to  the current value of money, maximizing patent periods, preparing  for emerging competition, and the inherent promotional value of  the rapid growth itself. this is so important that many corpora- tions now even deliberately delay ndas or marketing itself until  they can amass as impressive a promotional “package” as possible.  this may include studies that support other clinical indications  and  dosage  forms,  marketing  support,  and  economic  data  on  other “benefits,” such as formularies and reimbursement. this approach contrasts with the practices of  –  years ago.  the rationale then was to initiate marketing more quietly with  whatever was necessary to receive fda approval and to expand the  franchise gradually but solidly over ensuing years with follow-up  studies and analyses based on experience. the medical community  was perceived as being cautious with new medicines. the drug’s  labeling was revised frequently over time to reflect new indications  and dosage forms, side effects, warnings, and contraindications.  this approach also helped create longer-lasting brand loyalty, very  important in the days before automatic generic substitution on  patent expiration. the economic value of new drugs was initially  lower, but it increased and was spread over many years. a danger of today’s exceedingly aggressive introduction of new  drugs  into  the  marketplace  is  that  it  is  virtually  impossible  to  obtain postmarketing data from pharmacovigilance programs.  thus,  it  is  more  likely  that  unexpected,  serious  adverse  events  will be discovered only after millions of drug exposures. in recent  years many drugs have been withdrawn suddenly from the market,  under duress, due to such unexpected and serious side effects. infrequent  but  serious  adverse  events  can  arouse  significant  public attention and turmoil. there is little time to scientifically  evaluate possible contributing factors. the media’s quest for sen- sationalism helps create a frenzy of emotion, misinformation, and  accusations. it is nearly impossible to rationally resolve complex  scientific issues under this type of public scrutiny. thus, in many  cases the only alternative is to take the drug off the market. this  can be calamitous for the company as well as those patients who  have suffered or who received major benefits from the drug. many  of the adverse events reported are clearly causally related, but attri- bution in other cases may be questionable. in most cases the stig- ma of incrimination and market withdrawal is such that no matter  what the facts turn out to be, marketing cannot be restored. another risk of overzealous development planning for block- buster status is that unexpected clinical or regulatory “problems”  that always arise can become sufficiently discouraging to derail  the drug altogether; expectations are not met, and the blockbust- er status is compromised. clearly, to better serve public safety  and instill scientifically valid decision-making, and improve the  long-term interests of corporations and shareholders, better sys- tems of postmarketing surveillance are needed. but this is prob- ably not possible without more deliberate and cautious market- ing of new drugs. the shift from r&d to marketing. the decision that a company  cannot waste resources on non-blockbuster drugs often leads to  unwise decisions. marketing departments, almost by definition,  must control r&d. they decide, ultimately, which research pro- grams,  diseases,  indications,  characteristics,  and  development  compounds to pursue. marketers rarely have interest in early-stage  compounds with novel mechanisms or in unfamiliar clinical indi- cations. they often push to discontinue (or not license-in) pro- grams based on unsupportable commercial extrapolations, to the  great frustration of scientists. lessons from the past after a career in medicine and research at washington university, the  nih, and johns hopkins university, i moved my laboratory of more  than   workers to burroughs wellcome co. as head of its r&d  operations and a member of its board of directors. subsequently, i  became head of r&d and director of glaxo inc. ( – ), then  president of r&d and corporate vice president of warner lambert  co. from   until retirement in  , and continued as a consul- tant to the ceo and to r&d until  . my broad experiences with  the industrial, business, regulatory, and academic communities have  helped me to formulate the opinions described here. some personal anecdotes. while in charge of r&d at burroughs  wellcome  co.  from    to  ,  i  witnessed  many  startling  examples of the folly of rendering early marketing (or technical)  predictions when dealing with novel compounds or diseases. dur- ing the d&d of acyclovir (zovirax), marketing insisted that there  were “no markets” for this compound. most had hardly heard of  genital herpes, to say nothing about the common and devastating  systemic herpetic infections in immunocompromised patients.  but those with knowledge of clinical medicine knew that these  were very serious and prevalent conditions for which there were  no other therapies. fortunately, at the time, research management  had  the  authority  and  knowledge  to  render  decisions.  zovirax  entered the market, in various dosage forms and indications. at  initial marketing, in  , of the ointment form only, the infor- mal estimates of peak sales were about $  million a year for all  forms of the drug, far below the annual sales of well over $  billion  that were ultimately achieved. marketing’s main job was to distrib- ute and sell what r&d developed, and secondarily to provide the  research staff with information and suggestions. relations were  always amicable and mutually reinforcing, despite differences of  opinion. other examples of compounds developed in that peri- od that became blockbusters despite being considered “orphan”  (rare and nonprofitable) included azidothymidine (azt; retrovir)  for hiv, with low predicted markets initially ( ); bupropion  (wellbutrin), for markets felt to be “well satisfied” by the tricy- clic antidepressants, just before the enormous success of fluox- etine (prozac) disproved this; and colfosceril palmitate (exosurf),  for infant respiratory distress syndrome. at parke davis/warner  lambert during  – , numerous other compounds would  never have been marketed had it not been for the strong insistence  of research management. these compounds included gabapentin  (neurontin), atorvastatin (lipitor), troglitazone (rezulin), fosphe- nytoin (cerebyx), and pregabalin (lyrica). the major lesson from the stories of the development of all of  these  drugs,  which  is  repeated  throughout  the  history  of  drug  d&d, is that nearly all drugs that have become blockbusters (and  therapeutic breakthroughs — these two normally go together) had  similar early histories of major disinterest and skepticism from  pharmas have become much less interested in developing drugs that will sell less than $ billion a year. science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november  the commercial side, usually due to misunderstanding of the mar- keting potential or medical need. other examples include the dis- coveries by nobel laureate james black of the first beta-blocker,  propranolol  (inderal),  and  the  first  h   antagonist,  cimetidine  (tagamet). “who needs this h  thing when we have such great  antacids?” was heard as a chorus. squibb & co. almost did not  market  captopril  (capoten)  (the  first  angiotensin-converting  enzyme inhibitor), even when it was approved by the fda, because  of initially very restrictive labeling. similar difficulties occurred at  merck with lovastatin (mevacor), the first statin, as well as with  many breakthroughs by david jack, paul janssen, and leo sten- back. the extraordinary success of none of these drugs was pre- dicted before marketing. but these lessons are so easily forgotten! an indispensable success factor, which today has virtually disap- peared, is the role of “champions.” every successful drug has had at  least one individual who in some way became a strong proponent  for its development. this person(s) fostered understanding, encour- agement,  enthusiasm,  patience,  commitment,  and  assured  the  necessary resources. precipitous discontinuations were thus often  avoided, and efforts to resolve problems were enhanced. champions  are now rare; people are discouraged by the risk of being “wrong” ( ,  ). the culture that discourages champions also rejects the expres- sion of passion, confusing this with the loss of objectivity. predicting commercial success is difficult, so how to proceed? clearly,  it is exceedingly difficult to predict the technical or commercial  outcomes of novel compounds. one needs to focus instead on the  novelty and relevance of the science, the technical rationale, basic  pathophysiology, predictability of animal models, availability of  human disease models, feasibility of development, and the future  potential medical need as perceived through knowledge, experi- ence, and instinct of scientists and physician-scientists. one must  proceed with conviction that some of the novel compounds in the  portfolio, all of which should have sound inherent scientific merit,  will overcome the obstacles in development and provide real value,  despite perceptions of potentially limited sales. if a new drug turns  out to be of great medical value but has limited sales, there is nev- ertheless real value to the corporation in terms of the pride expe- rienced by the company and its employees, prestige and respect in  the medical community, and recruitment of talented employees. orphan drugs and drug pricing. in the  s through  s orphan  diseases were simply rare diseases for which drug companies did  not wish to initiate discovery programs, for commercial reasons.  it was understood that prices could not be adjusted out of line  with the prevailing standards. such pricing concerns applied espe- cially to cancers, because of the appearance of a lack of compas- sion. commercial people were uncomfortable because they felt  that they would have to essentially “give them away.” still, when  opportunities presented themselves, they were not discarded, and  the companies became proud of these products, even if they were  not commercially rewarding. thus, in the  s– s a signifi- cant  number  of  effective  drugs  for  leukemias  and  lymphomas  (especially hodgkins disease) were introduced. in  , the u.s. congress passed the orphan drug act to pro- vide tax, funding, and exclusivity incentives to companies develop- ing drugs for low-prevalence diseases (defined as fewer than  ,   cases) that were not expected to provide investment returns. indus- try embraced and used the provisions of the act for years. however,  this situation has changed drastically in recent years, especially  regarding lethal cancers and other rare genetic diseases. good drugs  have been introduced recently for some of these disorders, but the  pricing practices could be considered scandalous ( ). prices do not  relate to the costs of r&d for these drugs, or to the costs of goods.  some companies now apparently feel that desperate patients (and  society) will pay whatever is charged. some examples ( ) include  rituxan (for lymphoma; which costs about $ , –$ ,  per  cycle), herceptin (breast cancer; about $ ,  per month), avastin  (colorectal cancer; about $ ,  per month), revlimid (multiple  myeloma; about $ ,  per year), erbitux (head and neck cancer;  about $ ,  a year), and cerezyme (gaucher disease; between  $ ,  [children] and $ ,  [adults] per year). the ability to  commercially exploit small sectors in the cancer field (e.g.,  ,   patients) by pricing and high profits has stimulated spectacular  success in discovery research and rapid development ( ), demon- strating, cynically, the current technical capacity of major compa- nies to apply modern science to many diseases. reasons for loss of compounds during development are changing.  as  mentioned earlier, the majority ( %– %) of compounds enter- ing clinical testing do not make it to the market. this very high  attrition rate is nearly always blamed on technical problems. in my  experience, however, in at least a fourth of cases today, drugs are  discarded during development for reasons that are not technical  or scientific in nature. the  major  nontechnical  reasons  for  discontinuations  are  the  result  of  marketing  reassessments  or  management  discontent.  most occur before sufficient data are available to make informed  judgments. often, a project simply becomes low priority. since  “resources are scarce,” something has to go. formal prioritization is  today a management obsession, intended to remove appearances of  doubt in decision-making. priority lists are sacrosanct, infrequently  revised, and followed religiously. it is not important whether or not  two or more compounds are competing for the same resource in a  rate-limiting way. this can lead to bad decisions. it is easier to check  lists and make decisions with minimal thinking, agonizing, weigh- ing things, and making judgments on an ongoing basis. new management often has different interests and perceptions,  or people just get tired or discouraged and nobody is beating the  drums for the project. a  -year development period is an exceed- ingly long time for sustaining enthusiasm, focus, and nurturing  and  maintaining  continuity  of  leadership/management.  such  factors,  although  understandable,  are  subjective  and  arbitrary  and not scientifically based. the same reasons that lead to project  discontinuations also discourage the resolve to work out a new  technical problem, which then serves as a convenient excuse for  cutting a project for which management has lost interest. amaz- ingly, pharmas will seldom out-license rejected compounds, even  with generous buy-back provisions. the major reasons are fear of  embarrassment (i.e., the appearance of having “bad judgment”)  should the compound become a success and the fear that impor- tant trade secrets may be passed on inadvertently. since the overall rate of attrition today is similar to that of previ- ous decades, when loss of projects for nontechnical reasons was rare,  it follows that the ability to predict technical success in development  is actually better that in earlier eras — contrary to prevailing views. nearly all drugs that have become blockbusters had early histories of major disinterest and skepticism. science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november    planning departments are now in control of most of the devel- opment process, based on the belief that good planning assures  accomplishment. planners are enamored with theoretical and cook- ie-cutter program evaluation and review technique (pert) charts,  milestones, and “decision trees.” in this atmosphere it is difficult  to proceed thoughtfully based on the growing body of data — to  “go with the science” ( ). decision-making is managed simplisti- cally by following preestablished, expected outcomes at so-called  “go–no-go” decision points. it is black and white; the mentality is  that there is no need to agonize over decisions. avoiding the think- ing process does not serve research well. similarly, nontechnical  management often concludes that research people always have “too  many projects” and that they are unable to discontinue their pet  projects, so it is done for them. managers thus can make illogical  discontinuations to please their bosses. how many scientists enjoy  working on a poor idea or an unsuccessful program? every single drug discussed above (azt, acyclovir, bupropion,  gabapentin, troglitazone, fluoxetine, captopril, cimetidine, pro- pranolol, lovastatin, etc.), as well as virtually all other breakthrough  drugs ever marketed, encountered serious technical problems that  jeopardized development. most problems were so severe that the  compounds would have been discarded under our current well- managed and efficient go–no-go systems. the problems faced by  each of these drugs were different and difficult to solve. separation of research from development. the process of drug d&d  is a continuum without clear, categorical separations. today this is  not understood, as illustrated by the fact that most pharmas have  separated their d&d divisions organizationally, operationally, and  often geographically. this reduces communication, cross-fertiliza- tion, cooperation, and teamwork. it diminishes the potential for  basic researchers to solve problems arising during development.  the “hands-off ” mentality (i.e., give us the compound, we’ll take it  from here) results from the unrealistic presumption that develop- ment can be predictably managed. disinterest in new technologies. there are exciting opportunities for  advancing the therapeutic value of drugs through pharmacoge- nomics (identifying subpopulations of patients based on response,  side effects, or metabolism). genetic techniques can uncover the  molecular basis of subclasses of diseases or diseases of unknown  etiology, which could provide new therapeutic targets. but these  opportunities are often ignored by the industry, which focuses  rather on “one pill for all,” despite the fact that only a certain pro- portion of patients may benefit. why develop and market a drug  that treats only  %– % of patients, with a requirement to iden- tify these before treatment starts? even in clinical trial design, there has been little exploration of  new paradigms based on modern science. current practices have  changed little in   decades. statistical theory and regulations drive  trial  design,  under  the  fundamentally  faulty  assumption  that  human populations are homogeneous. as a result, an unnecessary  number of very large, costly, and low-sensitivity trials are conduct- ed or required by the fda. the future of pharma: a change in focus? perhaps pharmas should shift their r&d focus away from novel  discovery  and  toward  development  areas  in  which  they  excel.  these include improved formulations, compounds with superior  pharmacokinetics, and analogs of known drugs with significant  benefits. incremental improvements have historically been among  the most important approaches to advances in therapeutic agents.  enhancing potency; reducing or eliminating a side effect; limiting  dosage to once-daily (leading to improved compliance); enhanc- ing bioavailability (resulting in less variation in the blood level  of a drug); decreasing pill size (making them easier to swallow,  increasing compliance); and overcoming drug resistance (in the  case of antibiotics, antivirals, anticancer drugs) are changes that  can result in valuable therapeutic contributions (not simply “me- too” drugs). these may not be as lucrative as new and possibly  blockbuster drugs, but the costs and risks in their d&d will be  drastically decreased. also, these kinds of products are more ratio- nal than some recent ones that are counterscientific and designed  to achieve big sales rather than meet medical needs. examples are  fixed-dose combinations of drugs to treat   or more unrelated  conditions simply because they happen to coexist in many indi- viduals (e.g., hypertension, dyslipidemias, arthritis, diabetes, etc.).  genomic sciences increasingly point to the logic of doing just the  opposite, the individualization of therapeutics. can small biotech companies contribute more? because of their small  size, such companies may offer attractive alternatives. however,  these companies have funding constraints that dictate a narrow  technical focus. the overriding objectives of those controlling the  purse strings (venture capitalists) are short-term and financial. in  most, sooner or later, unreasonable and disruptive demands are  made on scientific operations. venture capitalists are often disin- terested in vanguard science and want only advanced compounds  that appear “safe.” collaborations with major funding from pharma  have lost appeal. deals are often terminated suddenly, capriciously,  or because pharma no longer perceives the potential for a blockbust- er. termination stalls the program and may cause it to languish or  die. this industry has a role, but it is not one of replacing the prima- ry existing systems. a few of these companies do succeed, but rarely,  and in totality, like pharma, this industry is not very productive. a larger role for nonprofit institutions? an attractive alternative to the current, nearly exclusive role played  by industry is to enhance the drug r&d efforts in nonprofit bio- medical research institutions, mainly universities, private research  institutes, and government laboratories. these institutions have  the appropriate climate for creative and innovative science. they  understand the value of individual freedom, intellectual diversity,  flexibility, and originality. their science is not dictated by market- ing or commercial objectives. scientific collaborations are based  on equality and contribution, not authoritative commands. these  are places where cutting-edge science is done, and they attract the  sharpest minds and bright young people. they have expertise in  many disciplines in the biological, medical, chemical, computa- tional, engineering, and mathematical sciences. the notion that  academics normally engage in basic research while industry focus- es on “applied research” is a myth based on misunderstanding  of the nature of scientific research ( ). further, nonprofit bio- medical research today is big-time, totally modernized, and unlike  the caricatures of a sleepy environment for detached academics  and scholars. the private sector could readily further mobilize to  enhance its efforts in drug discovery as well as development. the  maturation of the contract research organization (cro) industry  has been extensive and provides a source for competencies for reg- ulatory-driven activities in development that anyone can utilize, as  demonstrated by the successes of some biotech companies. there are many activities now unfolding that are boldly extend- ing research to the area of drug d&d. some of the scientific ratio- science and society 	 the	journal	of	clinical	investigation      http://www.jci.org      volume        number        november  nale for this has recently been discussed by duyk ( ). the field of  translational medicine, which generally refers to efforts by nonin- dustry scientists to bring basic discoveries to the clinic, has been  exploding ( ). universities and research institutes have created  departments or units of drug discovery or of translational medi- cine. the nih has vigorously undertaken important new efforts  in drug discovery. although individual institutes have had drug  discovery programs for decades (e.g., in epilepsy, cancer, hiv), a  new approach has been initiated that involves an amalgamated  nih ( ). the multiyear program has already established a  - center network (  intramural,   others outside of nih) to screen  potential drug targets. they have initiated dozens of other fund- ing opportunities, such as soliciting studies of high-throughput  screening of molecular libraries and establishing exploratory cen- ters for cheminformatics research ( ). these efforts are important for encouraging nonprofit institu- tions to initiate or increase research in drug discovery. however,  this does not mean that the perpetuation and expansion of such  programs  should  remain  under  the  direction  of  the  nih  or  in  competition with the nih for funding. such a role could lamen- tably end up redirecting the primary focus of the nih, squeezing  its budgets away from funding fundamental research ( ). current  nih budgets are in serious crisis ( ,  ), as are those of the fda  ( ) and other scientific agencies. market forces would dictate future changes in industry major  success  in  discovery  research  in  the  nonprofit  sector  would likely encourage corporate management and sharehold- ers to abandon discovery research for economic reasons. how  much  and  what  kind  of  development  drug  companies  would  perform would depend on how they fare with the competition,  particularly with regard to public institutions working in concert  with cros. however, one would expect that pharmas’ unique  strengths would lead them to focus on efforts to develop new  formulations and dosage forms of existing drugs, improvements  in the methods to scale-up organic synthesis, and analogs with  improved  properties,  as  well  as  manufacturing,  distribution,  marketing, and selling of virtually all products. acknowledgments the author is grateful to alan r. saltiel, stephen weiss, robert  e. davis, wendell wierenga, jerrold m. olefsky, joe graedon, and  teresa graedon for their critical review of the manuscript and for  excellent suggestions. address correspondence to: pedro cuatrecasas, departments of  pharmacology  and  medicine,  university  of  california,  po  box  , rancho santa fe, california  , usa. phone: ( )  - ; fax: ( )  - ; e-mail: pedrocuatrecasas@znet.com.   . booth, b., and zemmel, r.  . prospects for pro- ductivity. nat. rev. drug discov. : – .   . frantz, s.  . fda publishes analysis of the pipe- line problem. nat. rev. drug discov. : .   . mervis, j.  . productivity counts — but the defi- nition is key. science.  : – .   . wood, a.j.j.  . a proposal for radical changes  in  the  drug-approval  process.  n. engl. j. med. : – .   . kennedy,  d.  .  fda  centennial  [editorial].   science. : .   . miller,  h.i.  .  september  .  improving  the  drug  approval  process  [editorial].  the san diego union-tribune.    . avorn, j.  . fda standards — good enough for  government work? n. engl. j. med. : – .   . okie, s.  . what ails the fda? n. engl. j. med.  : – .   . cuatrecasas, p.  . corporate america: creativity  held hostage. in creative action in organizations. c.m.  ford and d.a. gioia, editors. sage publications.  thousand oaks, california, usa.  – .   . cuatrecasas,  p.  .  devising  the  portfolio.  in  creating the right environment for drug discovery. s.r.  walker, editor. quay publishing. london, united  kingdom.  – .   . graedon, j., and graedon, t.  . orphan drugs  have  become  big  business.  the people’s pharmacy.  http://www.peoplespharmacy.org/archives/editori- al/orphan_drugs_have_become_big_business.asp.   . druker,  b.j.  .  circumventing  resistance  to  kinase-inhibitor  therapy.  n. engl. j. med. : – .   . cuatrecasas,  p.  .  industry-university  alli- ances in biomedical research. j. clin. pharmacol. : – .   . duyk, g.  . attrition and translation. science.  : – .   . kaiser,  j.  .  a  cure  for  medicine’s  ailments?   science. : – .   . couzin,  j.  .  nih  dives  into  drug  discovery.   science. : – .   . office  of  portfolio  analysis  and  strategic  initia- tives.  . molecular libraries and imaging: nih  roadmap for medical research. http://nihroadmap. nih.gov/molecularlibraries/fundedresearch.asp.   . marks, r.m.  . rescuing the nih before it is too  late [editorial]. j. clin. invest. : . doi: . / jci .   . loscalzo, j.  . the nih budget and the future of  biomedical research. n. engl. j. med. : – . | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements gender violence and its interpretation alessandra gribaldo università di roma tre abstract: in this article, i address gender violence through the act of witnessing and speaking out by the victims. starting from a critical comment on some arguable points raised in the recent hau journal forum aimed at discussing forms and claims of the #metoo movement, i let emerge the conundrums that anthropology faces in dealing with the issue. a focus on domestic abuse as a specific form of gender violence allows me to delve into the twine of intimacy, agency and consent in the experience of the victims. i detect the specific dynamics that characterize the issue of speaking/not speaking out against violence by abused women and that underpin analytical biases. then, i illustrate how these complexities can be found in the general assessment and measurement of gender violence as a global phenomenon. i conclude with a reflection on violence and women’s voices as an opportunity for anthropological knowledge to deal with truth telling, intimacy, and the gendered act of speaking out. keywords: gender violence, intimacy, violence assessment, witnessing, #metoo. this work is licensed under the creative commons © alessandra gribaldo hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: gender violence and its interpretation | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - . issn: - x - doi: . /anuac - x- alessandra gribaldo credibility, authenticity, proof, testimony are the largely shared modalities through which the truth of a fact is judged. regarding the phenomenon of gender violence, the fact in question is both the violent act and the subject victim of the act, that is the subject who publicly speaks out against violence. the ways gender violence can be denounced are diverse and feminist movements take on the responsibility to convey collectively into the public sphere the singularity of witnessing and experiencing violence. it is known that the act of denouncing, witnessing and public speaking out of one’s own experience of violence is particularly demanding for the victim. the reasons are diverse and span from trauma, practical and material conditions to denounce, the lack of proof, biases about credibility, the potential involvement with the perpetrator. in this article i wish to focus on a specific aspect, which is the conundrum represented by gender violence and the possibility of its certification and acknowledgment. how is anthropological knowledge questioned by the ways gender violence is attested or denied? i illustrate my argument following three points. first, starting from a recent section of the last number of hau journal about the #metoo movement, i highlight the most problematic aspects related to the reception of the public speaking out against gender violence. second, i identify the issue of intimacy as crucial to deploy the difficulties to deal with violence against women, referring in particular to domestic violence. finally, i show how the trouble to identify the violent act can also be found in data collection and surveys on the phenomenon of intimate partner violence. conclusions are drawn on the chances for anthropology to analyze social events that are characterized by – rather than difference and alterity – involvement, contiguity, proximity, and the already known. shortcuts the shortcuts section on the #metoo movement in the last issue of hau journal represents a sign of the engagement by anthropology to deal with issues – such as the collective manners to convey personally experienced gender violence – that are non-orthodox for the discipline, providing acknowledgment and dignity of object of research and analysis. the journal section has been recently introduced to invite scholars to briefly reflect on specific under debated issues that can challenge the discipline. in that issue, . research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the independent social research foundation (isrf). i wish to thank the three anonymous anuac referees for their insightful comments. | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements the authors – di leonardo, williams and woodstone, eriksen, and la cecla – present different perspectives, drawing on theory, ethnographies, personal experiences and evaluations on a movement that has had a wide resonance notably in european and american countries. nonetheless, excluding the sharp contribution by di leonardo, the debate appears somehow pervaded by many approximations and naivetés. in the opening of her introduction, the section editor stavroula pipyrou wonders, after having asserted the subjective variability of appropriateness of sexual behaviours, whether questionable sexual conduct maybe understood within the social and historical context or it is to judge “universally” unacceptable; if wrongdoings should be addressed legally instead than through social media shaming; what if the indicted is a woman, and moreover a feminist (pipyrou : ). the quite predictable reference to the need of contextualization in order to judge what is legitimate or not, counterpoised to the notion of universality, flattens a rich debate in anthropology on gender and rights (merry , ). moreover, the insistence on the notion of context can prove particularly thorny when gender violence and intimacy are addressed, as it can foster a vicious circle of opacity and indecidibility in respect to violent acts (gribaldo ; gribaldo forthcoming). what is most striking is the view of the movement #metoo as problematic inasmuch it represents a mass of mainly women who intend to have justice by their own, avoiding legal devices and rules. this approach sounds particularly deceptive, in primis because few are the cases in which the perpetrator has been called on personally – the weinstein case lent itself to highlight the everydayness and pervasiveness of a system – and therefore the wish to punish the perpetrator has rarely been the main focus of the action. secondly – as di leonardo’s contribution underlines – addressing the law is particularly difficult for crimes that relate to gender and sexual violence, intimate partner violence, harassment. various contributions to the section share a questionable view that to speak in legal terms has a decisive, effective and symbolic value in the definition of victimhood. moving into an institutional dimension is perceived as a milestone that acknowledges that violence has been perpetrated, that the testimony of this violence is truthful, and that women are political subjects. it is well known how the pressure on the victim of violence to speak about the factual events, about herself and her relationship with the perpetrator and to denounce him before the law has vast implications and effects of revictimization. in one of the contributions, together with the invite not to essentialize sexual difference, men are invoked who refuse “to give up forever the idea that their deep physical accomplishment is based on an encounter with women’s great physical depth” (la cecla : ), referring apparently to | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo the (hetero)complemetarity of the sexes. on the one hand the issue of gender is denied based on the claim that the difference in power lies in vulnerability, not in gender (williams, woodston : ). on the other hand, it is reasserted through the image of the crooked paths of desire and the encounter between the man and a female “other”, which implies the inescapable mutual hurt (la cecla ). the fact that desire is not a choice and it is not governable by imposed morality or a contract cannot erase the fact that it is deeply affected by political and cultural processes. regarding the complex issue of consent, to attribute to a “certain line of radical feminism” (la cecla : ) the criminalization of sexuality and desire is particularly misleading. the contemporary debate within feminism and its queer and transsexual components as well as within the bdsm communities is clearly advanced in questioning desire and the importance to respond to it beyond moralizing stances. these movements radically rethink the relation between identity and expected sexualities and go beyond sexuality as an extractive dual relation, towards more intersubjective modes of desire and intimacy (demian ). it is not my intention to propose an analytic review of the section’s contributions. what i would like to highlight is that the general approach of the section reveals a peculiar stance in the urge to “judge” the movement: whether it is significant, effective, dangerous; whether it is riddled with rigidity, fostering uncontrolled denigration, sexophobic and puritan anxiety, false consciousness masked by political correctness. even from the very title (“#metoo is little more than mob rule vs #metoo is a legitimate form of social justice”) rather than an analysis that refers to anthropological literature on the issue, the section is aimed at taking a stance on the very opportunity to speak out and consequently on the emerging collective subject. the use of the word “mob” is telling: it refers to the gap with a political pre-existent stable collective subject, identifying an inarticulate sub-political mass (thompson ), which is furthermore prone to shared hysteria. in the last two decades, anthropology has acknowledged the relevance of the social and political dimension of violence and suffering, leading to unprecedented interest in the mutual implications of violence and the production of subjectivity, and to interrogation of the notion of everyday as the site of the ordinary, in which experience and agency are shaped (kleinman, das, lock ; das et al. ; quaranta ; biehl, good, kleinman ). the theorization of interpersonal and structural violence has allowed a shift towards the relationship between subjectivity and power, focusing on the production of the subject as gendered (moore ; ortner | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements ). nonetheless, the section addressing the #metoo movement does not bring into the debate any reference to subjectivity, violence, social suffering. the tangential claim to the need to address structural violence instead results in little more than a displacement device. i believe that this approach and the consequent indifference to recent anthropological and feminist reflections (to which malinowski’s and Žižek’s ones are preferred by the editor), is due to the peculiarity represented by gender violence as everyday violence: it is not only invisible and normalized, as literature attests since decades, but it is also implicated in a shared knowledge that deeply questions the sphere of common experience and intimacy. the underlying question is: who is entitled to speak about gender violence and how? not the single woman, nor the many, nor the feminist movement: the shift from personal sufferance to social acknowledgment should pass through institutions. the single witnessing of suffering seems to tell very little about the phenomenon and apparently much more about the incapability of the alleged victim to understand ambivalences and complexities of life. witnessing in the #metoo movement is judged as biased because decontextualized: the entanglement with the everyday and the broader social relationships makes it not substantive. either women do not know (or, worst, do not acknowledge) the difference between harassment and desire or they simply lack in innocence (ticktin ). in fact, they are not expected to be “mere victims” as they may have “their own agendas” (eriksen : ). the pervasiveness of gender violence is therefore a socially acknowledged fact (no one denies it), and at the same time it bears the features of non-recognition, its public attestation proves uncertain. behind the anthropological shortcuts on the act of speaking out gender violence and the need to express a judgement over analysis, we may glimpse a way to cut short the reflection on the theme because of the embarrassing complicity of the #metoo movement with the exploitation of violence and morbid penetration in emotional intimacy by the media (dei : - ). declared intimacy and pain achieves a suspicion of implausibility, unrestraint, inappropriateness: mass media and especially social media exemplify the fiction related to the request of recognition of victimhood, which is often gendered. moreover, bearing witness to suffering and the act of listening has been identified as privileged objects of a contemporary social-political language that is dominated by an “ethos of compassion”. the use of this language has seen a sudden upsurge in recent years (fassin, rechtman ). subjects learn to express their own inner being in words and images through various mechanisms of governmentality that weave together state policies and psycho-pedagogical discourses; these mechanisms also entail exposure to popular and entertainment modes of expression that | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo revolve around what is essentially an accumulation of discourse about the self, discomfort and suffering, and the exploration of intimacy of the relationships. the context surrounding testimony of intimate violence victims is clearly affected by these peculiar contemporary modes that bring into play gender differences, the presentation and display of the self, proof of authenticity and appeals for compassion. by underlying the “complexities” of the movement and trying to eschew political correctness, the hau debate on #metoo ends up endorsing a common view regarding testimony of gender violence victims, following what is a general bias about battered women. the notion of harassment is subject to interpretation, the alleged act of violence is supposed to require specific contextualization, the victim is supposed not to be entirely capable to read the whole complexity of the event, the very experience of violence is subject to verification, and suspects are raised about an excess of sensitivity and, at worst, a manipulatory intent. women who use the tropes of authenticity by speaking out on line about past harassment are not mere victims nor strategic agents alone. the voices of women who experienced harassment that spread in the media as much as those of whom have suffered intimate partner violence and testify in institutional contexts, are filtered by similar devices that make them sound inappropriate. working as an anthropologist on domestic violence has given me the opportunity to deal with the stratification of subjects, actions, testimonies, and the modalities of judgement that are involved in the possibility to know and better understand the phenomenon of gender violence and the act of denouncing it. through ethnography it is possible to grasp the diverse meanings speaking out achieves in different spheres, the authority’s efforts and biases, the difficulties women face in the act of denouncing, their hesitations. diverse works on domestic violence present a complex frame in which victims and perpetrators are enmeshed in opaque relationship of love and possession (ferraro ; mills ). the fact of being abused exposes victims to the blame of not to being aware enough to identify an adequate partner. the interviews i had with abused women during a research in the city of bologna, italy , let emerge how this blame often became self-blame: the regret not to have been smart enough enmeshes in stories of romance, quarrels, revenge, male violence and female forgiveness. the claim to live a life free from violence is entangled in a widely shared heteronormative imaginary. women are often not extraneous to dynamics of seduction, courtship, dependency, romantic love which frames and sometimes forecast . i refer to a research carried out in the frame of a european action-research project in - . see creazzo for results and author’s contributions ( , , forthcoming). | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements abuse. moreover, media culture provides a constant overlap between the seriousness of the violent acts and their trivial context. italy is a good example of the modalities through which femicides are represented by the media: recurring images of her and him, about how the couple was normal and happy, the irrelevant reasons behind the violence, the ambivalence of passionate love and the consequent risk of “blindness” (giomi, magaraggia ). i wish to let emerge, through a focus on domestic violence, the specific dynamics that characterize the issue of speaking/not speaking out against violence by abused women whose acknowledgment might avoid analytical biases, such as those found in hau forum. ambivalence and the fragile relation with testimony is often the mark of women’s stances on violence. this perceived lack of determination and clarity in the statements and stances of women who have suffered violence by their intimate partners is acknowledged: social workers and law enforcement express this frustration in posing the infamous freudian and ultimately unanswered question, “what do women want?”. victims of domestic violence appear either too difficult or largely uncooperative, “there is no way to tell what victims really want” (mills : ). ambivalence towards pressing charges is often taken by social workers as a lack of responsibility and trustworthiness. the possibility/urge to denounce and the acknowledgment of subjects’ credibility entail a view of the victim that requires action and expression, where agency is the pre-requisite of emancipation and awareness (gribaldo ). the questionable nature of this view has been widely discussed by anthropological debates, highlighting the underlying bias towards those who do not speak out. in fact, if the act of speaking out – reporting the incident and expressing one’s experience as the victim of violence – is widely commended as a political and progressive reference, the ways in which stories of violence can and must be made public is not limited to breaking the silence (ribeiro corossacz ). the idea that speaking clearly and pressing charges are the only means of expression creates its own violence. as veena das emphasizes, the boundaries between saying and showing when violence is expressed are to be protected from the imaginary of unveiling and unraveling: it is often considered the task of historiography to break the silences that announce the zones of taboo. there is even something heroic in the image of empowering women to speak and to give voice to the voiceless. [...] when we use such imagery as breaking the silence, we may end by using our capacity to “unearth” hidden facts as a weapon (das : ). | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo gender violence is a social event that often finds its certification through single witnessing of personal experience; as such it is subject to interpretation. the hau debate focuses on this capacity of interpretation: what have these women really experienced? can it be defined as violence? the well-known recent open letter by deneuve and colleagues on the male right to harass – mentioned quite uncritically in the introduction by pipyrou as a defensible stance among others – deploys several clues that are at least controversial for a critical thought as it substantially holds up a virulent declaration for heteronormative sexuality (lebovici, zapperi ). a passage of the open letter is particularly telling: “we are not reducible to our bodies. our inner freedom is inviolable”. as recently noted by kipnis, this is an exceptional reduction of freedom to the sacred locus of inner mind (kipnis : ). i wish to underscore that this modality to identify violence starting from the inner perceptions discloses an unavoidable intractability, leading to the conclusion that if violence is not perceived or denounced, it does not exist. the subjective interpretation is crucial for the crimes that most of the times do not involve other witnesses beyond the victim and the perpetrator. the characteristic of the violent act is that, in order to be recognized, it has to be perceived as such by the person who suffers it. this is a debated issue in anthropological reflection and in the ethnographic knowledge on violence, what veena das calls “the complexity of the inner” ( : ). an intimate social fact the relation between gender and violence in anthropological terms has identified the historical relationship of tension between feminism and anthropology as a privileged space to rethink the crisis of representation in social sciences and the issue of ethnographic knowledge in its political meaning. it is not a case that the analysis of the contrasting senses of rape among prostitutes in the uk (day ) summarizes the conundrums of a conclusive definition: violence and sexuality are intertwined with gendered power relations. in this sense the “awkward relationship” between anthropology and feminism (strathern ) lies in the double perspective of a theory of the historically produced dominance and the adhesion to a political feminist project that entails – on the one hand – a story and a definite perspective, and – on the other – the anthropological practice not to superimpose taken . “nous défendons une liberté d’importuner indispensable à la liberté sexuelle”, www.le- monde.fr/idees/article/ / / /nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importuner-indispensable-a-la- liberte-sexuelle_ _ .html. accessed on / / . | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements for granted notions, languages and experiences to ethnographic contexts. it is a critical perspective that is epistemological and ethical at once (josephides ). what kind of political commitment is possible, in which way can the context be considered, how to render meaning, how to report the experience of violence inasmuch as the objectification and disassociation involved in the politics of naming and revealing requires the imposition of absolute values on particular practices regardless of how these are understood by those involved (gow, harvey : ). in the effort to go beyond the practice of modernist feminism to generalize from the experiences of western, white, heterosexual, middle- class women (abu-lughod ; fusaschi ), the relationship between experience and identity has become the focus of a reflection on gender, violence, and dominance. domestic violence or intimate partner violence is a specific aspect of gender violence: its demonstration, as a social fact in sociology and as a single event that requires penal judgement in the legal field, can provide productive hints for the debate. domestic violence is a non-orthodox subject for anthropology, an awkward and minor theme of anthropological research; too obvious and widespread to constitute a novel issue, it is the quintessential non-exotic subject. a number of studies in various environments – from the legal space and social services to everyday life – have turned the ethnographic gaze towards domestic violence (hirsch ; abraham ; merry ; trinch ; plesset ; hautzinger ; lazarus-black ; wies, haldane , among others). however, the theme of intimate partner violence remains relatively marginal in the general disciplinary debate and in particular the anthropology of violence . the taking over of the issue of violence by anthropology involves a process that in the last decades of the past century has been connected to a profound political and epistemological rethinking within the discipline. the novel view regarding forms of violence has addressed the nature of wars, conflicts and mass violence. attention to violence and its spread over time and space has been capable to analyze identity and religion issues and the spread of large-scale terrorism. nonetheless, gender violence has had trouble being considered on equal footing in the framework of anthropology of violence. the overlap between violence and armed conflict and the focus on the collective dimension of suffering has prevented acknowledgement of . in the companion on moral anthropology edited by fassin the entry on violence explicitly leaves out domestic and family violence due to the fact that it is little studied in anthropology (hinton : ). | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo interpersonal gender relationship as a space for relevant anthropological reflection. even analyses of crime in peace-time (scheper-hughes, bourgois ) that highlighted the structural dimension of violence due to social and economic inequalities (farmer ) have marginalized everyday interpersonal violence against women as a private sphere. the tension between individual and society plays an important role in the anthropological difficulties in theorizing violence. the effort to identify ritual violence as inclusive devices (héritier : ), apparently does not reduce the effects on the subject over whom violence is exerted. the risk lies in considering “a transcendent, universal, unembodied subject”, subsumed by collectivity, a subject that does not count (beneduce : , in note). the understanding of collective violence as a means to annihilate the others’ culture, a device to erase the very meaning of victims’ everyday life (dei ), risks to overshadow the gendered and intimate dimension of violence, where women are viewed solely as the main custodians of collective identity. intimate partner violence in particular, because of the intercrossing of various fields – psychology, pedagogy, law, and social services – is rarely chosen for theorization within anthropology as disciplinary tradition. furthermore, domestic violence remains largely absent from an emergent ethnography of militancy and civil movements because of its lack of epics, as it identifies anti-heroic subjects: not only are they largely women, but they are also victims. given the impossibility of finding class and generational constants, or significant correlations with socio-cultural aspects, domestic violence emerges as a latent element that is found everywhere – albeit in different forms – as a quasi-natural dimension of gender relations. the theme of domestic violence appears too structural to circumscribe, it is both not political enough and at the same time too politicized, and thus relegated to feminism as a stand-alone ideology and theory: it represents one of the few cases in which there is a remainder between the relevance of the phenomenon and the theoretical responses provided by the social sciences (hearn ). violence in intimate relations enters into a daily, domesticated, normal dynamics of gender relations, beyond the state of exceptionality. it is a violence of the most personal sort, one-on-one, often committed in the most private context (the home), by the most intimate person (the partner). outside witnesses are sporadic at best and often, except children, no one else is familiar with the facts of the case. the agency, experience, and perception of the victim in intimate relationship with the perpetrator draw the boundaries of the phenomenon. | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements following graeber’s reflections on violence and bureaucracy, we may consider intimate partner violence as one of those “dead zones of the imagination” (graeber ), that eludes a critical analysis, not so much because of a lack of relevance, but rather because it represents somehow an excess of relevance, and deals with fields of common experience that do not lend themselves to a rich and meaningful narrative, therefore representing an authentic disruption of expectations. we may speak of a violence degree zero, as a much-debated issue and at the same time an “area of violent simplification” (ibidem: ). it is a social phenomenon that is globally recognized as evident and as constitutively submersed: the potential for it to emerge is related to the possibility that victims have of recognizing it and conveying it socially. an example of the issue to consider victim’s subjectivity can be drawn from a renowned work by aihwa ong. in describing the processes that build gendered citizenship in america among refugees’ communities, ong ( ) addresses the complex relationship between feminist issues as empowerment and the response institutions give to domestic violence. ong’s reflection poignantly illustrates a white middle class feminist pastoral power, and the ways feminizing technologies shape minority subjectivity. compassioned, patronizing and racist stances towards cambodian american refugees, identified as backward and patriarchal, find their ways through social work: social workers seek to empower women and encourage them to leave abusing partners, classifying dominant subjects and victims of patriarchy. ong identifies a female subject, defined through ethnic cambodian customary family norms represented as of unchallenged male power, who manages strategically for her own ends the logics of us social assistance. if ong’s analysis is revelatory in calling attention to the pervert role of state logics that exacerbate family tensions, nevertheless the woman who denounces violence is sketched in terms of judgement. at play here is the truth of the couple relationship that lies in intimacy. the collapse of this sphere through the intervention of the social services creates ethnicized men victims of essentialized women recipient of rights. nonetheless we may wonder: can the fact that men are punished for behaviour perceived to result from cultural patriarchalism, shift attention from the violence exerted and the fact that women may wish to escape from it? can a “shrewd woman who expertly used social workers, the police, the court system, and the self-help group to turn things in her favor” against a disempowered desperate husband (ong : ) be a recognizable victim of domestic violence? can her attempt to use the law to “punish and discipline” her husband and sometimes even “operating in her own self-interest” at the “moral costs” to | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo her family and community (ong : ) mean a wish not as much to dominate her husband, but to live a “different” intimacy, distant from menace and the constant threat of violence? what can be known about her choices, desires and strategies as much as ambivalent and disruptive they could appear? moreover, can a victim be strategic? veena das, one of the authors who have more deeply investigated the tangle of violence, intimacy and subjectivity, raises two points that highlight the difficulties in addressing domestic violence. the first one refers to the issue of intimacy and emotions: the very notion of intimacy is hardly compatible with a broad definition of violence that even includes harsh language. the second point is the difficulty in conceptually identifying the question of consent (das : - ). these themes are evidently interconnected. feminist critiques have debated the notion of subjectivity, revealing the liberal order as a historical product, and problematizing the exclusively negative conceptualization of liberty according to which agency carries liberal-style visions of autonomy, control and individual action, possession and commodification (brown ). feminist jurisprudence in its different versions not only considers the formal and de facto constraints that impede women’s access to a state of individual autonomy, it also calls into question the features of the concept of autonomy as they have become consolidated in liberal thought and its application. the issue of consent, experience and the dimension of corporeality are a privileged space for reflection on the gendered subject and the law. sexual offences have a particular ability to reveal the problematics of law and a sort of “moral magic” that consent entails (cowan : ). as it is well-known, law’s claim to truth in rape trials unavoidably frames an alternative: consent is to be presumed whenever the lack of it is not established, leaving out considerations such as the constraints inherent in various degrees of intimacy, submission and fear of violence. this is a vision that assumes a notion of free consent in a state of nature, not marked by historical and social dynamics, in which coercion and consent are general logical axioms that precede sexuality (butler b: ). how can we consider an illocution that doesn’t respond to the requirement of being taken up by the interlocutor and therefore is not “fully” successful? as fricker suggests, in sexual contexts at least, a woman’s ‘no’ does not receive its required uptake from a man, with the result that her would-be illocution thereby fails to communicate — it fails even to be the illocutionary act it would have been (fricker : - ). | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements nonetheless it remains more than noise, haunting both legal and anthropological reasoning. the notion of intimacy is key to reflections on domestic violence and the production of subjectivity. intimacy and violence in late modern societies are in an apparently contradictory relation; love and intimacy have been identified as sites of active trust, where the romantic relationship enables the subject to express him or herself: intimacy between partners is the epitome of modernity (giddens ). in the familial abuse context, the occurrence of violence brings together love, trust, relationship, desire and sexuality as exemplary sites of the gendered true self. the space of intimacy presents a constant tension between ambivalence, ambiguity and the authentic production of the subject (sehlikoglu, zengin ). thus, intimacy shares the duplicity and elusiveness that can be found in the notion of violence. it is a space of scarring experience and at the same time a field of irreducibly ambiguous meanings, in some cases even in the perceptions of the subjects involved. the intimacy of past or present couples implies a kind of complicity, sharing and affection, forms of trust and dependence that include material conditions of mutual care, the daily sharing of space, shared children, common plans and money. the vision of an equation between intimacy, reciprocity, solidarity and trust has been called into question in feminist approaches that have destabilized the assumption of the domestic and reproductive sphere as a safe core. the questions of connection and relatedness, which imply intimacy by definition, have been identified by several scholars as historically associated with sociability, and laden with constitutively positive aspects (edwards, strathern ; berlant ; broch-due, ystanes ). in his analysis of the relationship between witchcraft, kinship and intimacy, geschiere suggests that the phenomenon of witchcraft might represent the dark side of kinship. while questioning the tenacious vision of kinship and intimate relationships as indisputable spaces of reciprocity (geschiere : xviii), his perspective emphasizes that addressing intimacy in anthropology mean s “to follow what people themselves define as intimate – what is ‘inside’” [...] “what people mark as a separate domain”, privileged and “immune for general understanding” (ibidem: xx). the coalescence between the latin meanings intimus and vis in the expression intimus vis as “effective violence” (ibidem: ), shows that the notion of intimacy can be understood as an attribute of powerful operational violence. in this respect, violence may be viewed as the dark side of intimacy. these reflections on intimacy and violence are useful for an investigation of the ways law and institutions deal with domestic violence and strive to verify it. this dimension of separation, or rather, of identification of a | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo personal space that isn’t reducible to a shared discourse articulated in abstract terms marks the experience of intimate violence. this form of immunity, this resistance to knowledge and understanding is crucial to the anthropological analysis of domestic violence and to the ways it is treated by the institutions. the victim’s intimacy and her ability to express it as a space in which to investigate, understand, give meaning to, detect and finally prove violence is decisive precisely in as far as it has to force the limits of the legibility of intimacy in order to become shared. this dark side of intimacy is at the same time already known, and somehow expected. vulnerability and violence, and the knowledge and discourses about them, are gendered in their very essence. measuring and interpreting these theoretical conundrums in analysis are evident in the debates on the evaluation of the magnitude of domestic violence. the general lack of data from several countries is not simply due to the reluctance, idleness or incapacity to see the phenomenon as relevant by the state or the local institutions. in fact, several obstacles arise when investigating intimate partner violence using quantitative methods, such as the complexity of standardizing elements including the degree of gravity and the variables surrounding motive and intentionality. the available statistics are moreover often difficult to compare due to their use of different methods and indexes. strikingly, the very issue of intimacy challenges the definition of a violent act. the complication lies in how victims define violence, and in the influence of the context on the possibilities of talking about violence. victimization surveys may present biases due to the multiple ways in which violence can be experienced and described: ethnographic research shows that, instead of abuse and victimization, violence may be read as normal acts of discipline, naturalized as relational gender dynamics. the data relating to recourse to the law are not significant, and are even paradoxical: the number of criminal charges and the extent to which violence reaches the surface can even be inversely proportional to its pervasiveness. merry and coutin have recently analyzed the deadlock regarding the statistical measurement of social facts and data gathering to meet the need for responses by policy makers. they have emphasized that technologies of knowledge are not at all objective, but include cuts, omissions and selectivity in the definition of the phenomena and their relevance. indexes and measuring systems condition the legibility of the phenomena they want to investigate, producing regimes of truth. discrete and objective unities | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements inevitably obliterate the complexity of events and relations, leading to a flattening of experiences, underplaying of contradictions, erasing of some facts and highlighting of others. the introduction and problematization of variables such as nationality, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class can endanger the possibility of indexing domestic violence: global surveys require categories that can travel across such cultural borders while remaining commensurable. this situation creates a paradox: the survey categories need to be translated into local terms to measure local ideas and behavior accurately but need to retain their universal meanings to make comparisons possible across these borders (merry, coutin : ). the difficulties related to the definition of violence in intimate relations are echoed in the reading of the phenomenon itself: the interpretability of the character of domestic violence is such that there exist divergent positions on its scope and gravity. for instance, according to the sociological school or “family conflict studies”, empirical and comparative research indicates that violence in households is more often reciprocal and gender symmetrical. in this perspective, the gender difference stands in the harsher physical consequences of abuses for women, in a higher perception of violence by women, and in higher publicity for women victims (costa et al. ). on the other hand, the “violence against women” approach insists on the unreliability of the surveys and research related to such a complex phenomenon, claiming that abused women under-report and normalize intimate violence, and that men assaulted by intimates are more likely to press charges and less willing to drop them. this approach underlines the necessity to distinguish between defensive and offensive injuries, as most women who use violence against their partner employ defensive violence in response to ongoing, systematic abuse (kimmel ). furthermore, if we accept that women and men suffer intimate partner violence in an identical manner, we must explain the bizarre fact that women who are victims of abuse have been able to construct, although with a lot of difficulty, spaces for discussion, refuges and help networks, whereas men show – apparently only in this area – a surprising incapacity to channel their own interests into the institutions. does claiming that the perception of violence and its physical consequences are less harsh for men mean that men experience abuse, but do not “suffer” from it? in general, the conflict tactics scale methodology, most used in family conflict studies, is marked by the biased assumption that violence is the result of an argument and not the effort to control and prevail, therefore erasing the circumstances and the consequences, the nature of the relationship, motivation and intention for violence, the gender difference in retrospection on estimation of violent acts. the obvious | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo fact that a woman as well might also be violent, and not naturally a victim, becomes an argument to maintain the perfect (although potential) symmetry. these claims of gender symmetry omit a crucial point: the identification and analysis of the dynamics of gender (kimmel : ). johnson has explained the differences between the two strands of scholarships, by identifying two distinct phenomena: on the one hand situational conflict and contestation within the couple, and acts of violence related to domination on the other end, what johnson ( ) calls “intimate terrorism”. the latter implies tactics and strategies of power and control by one partner over the other, which presents specific dynamics that are not captured in the surveys. however, this is a particularly problematic definition, as it defines a relation in which a subject is at the other’s complete disposal, and thus the object of infinite and unlimited violence. aren’t resistances, strategy and overthrow possible in every relation of power? contestation and domination are very difficult to tackle separately, much as gender relations and power relations are. it is therefore the question of the perception of violence – the under and over estimation of violence and of victimization by gender – which is problematic in the process of data gathering and in the identification of the social phenomenon: the statistical approach must be objective to the extent to which it requires “little interpretation by the victim” (merry, coutin : ; merry ). the emotional consequences of violence – included in the indexes on violence against women – pose particular problems for its measurement. this raises questions discussed in feminist theorizations and in reflections on violence in anthropology: what is an abusive act? what is violence? to what extent is the victim legitimated or moved to talk about the experience? the analysis of the institutions in charge of certifying abuse allows us to further investigate the potential of the exercise of violence: how can the threat, the fear of violence be considered within an apparatus of law created to verify such violence? in his work on asylum courts in the uk, anthony good remarks the rejection of the subjective element – such as fear – in favor of the objective situation – that one could reasonably be afraid of. the inclusion of the subjective dimension of witnesses into the picture would mean rewarding the cowards and penalizing the brave, and, furthermore, failing to consider the cultural components in the production and expression of feelings ( : ). in order to elicit violence and allow it to be identified as such, it is necessary to abandon subjective meaning in favor of common sense. yet the meaning of violence for the abused subject is crucial. violence and gender are implicated in forms of subjectivity: the subject is constructed | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - hashtags, testimonies, and measurements through dominant models of discourse and practice that produce and reproduce the notions of individuality and agency. to address the meaning given to violence by the victim does not mean to undervalue the acts of violence; on the contrary, it means understanding the peculiarity of intimate violence, the issue of dominance and power and the “countercurrents of subjectivity” (ortner : ). reflections on intimate violence must investigate the boundary between subject and power and the constitutive remainder between these two dimensions. conclusion the anthropological concern on the social use of the term “violence” produces a paradox: analyzing it doesn’t mean focusing only on the subject who exercises violence (whether institutional, collective or individual), but also on the one who suffers it or witnesses it, the one who speaks out. an anthropology of violence inevitably must address the “political relations between performer and witness” (riches : ). the politics of naming violence is decisive for anthropology and feminism. indeed, the critique of abstract notions of subjectivity and the complex knot that links violence to subjection, witnessing, and agency is a crucial point in both feminist theory and anthropological work addressing gender issues (spivak ; butler a; das ). if in “having a voice” and “claiming one’s voice”, politics and epistemology converge, nonetheless the transparency of voice as an expression of subjective experience in the conflation of knowledge and consciousness is constantly put to the test by ethnography (keane : ). the victim’s experience, the possibility for her to speak in her own voice, and the effectiveness of this speech as a speech act proves crucial in the testimony of gender violence. it is so difficult to define the evidence of the “fact” in cases of domestic violence (and sexual assault) because the fact itself is defined a posteriori, since its very existence depends on how it is interpreted as experience: was the act perceived as violence? was there consent? was there some kind of provocation? these questions in turn entail the notion of limit: up to what point? in general, social services and the juridical system, in their claimed neutrality and thus self-referentiality, are revealed as institutions that do not recognize the particular nature of intimate partner violence. the institutional form has been identified, in italy and elsewhere, as a space that is hardly capable of taking gender violence into consideration in all its complexity. | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo in his political and institutional ethnology of truth speaking, foucault ( ) addresses the way subjects are actually implicated in forms of veridiction (truth telling, le dire vrai) and how these generate specific forms of subjection and subjectivation. here, between power (normativity) and knowledge (intelligibility) foucault focuses on the notion of the subject and particularly the ways subjects understand and form themselves as subjects of experiences. the emphasis on who labels a given act as violent, in a context in which the only witness is the victim, takes us to the center of reflections on talking about violence, denouncing it and making it evident, expressing one’s own experience, and at the same time bringing it to the attention of the public and the institutions. gender and marginal subjects (bargu ) question indeed the very act of truth telling. to resume the hau debate, the witnessing of harassment that recurs marked by the hashtag #metoo, is a trace of something that cannot easily find a space and time to be narrated at the “proper” moment. it comes out ex post and meets a doubtful audience. it is a story that is known and trivial and at the same time annoyingly complicated. as gilmore illustrates in a recent work on women’s witnessing and credibility: “gender animates scandal, in part, because critical and popular notions of truth telling are gendered” (gilmore : ). more generally gender scandals shift swiftly towards indifference, in some cases public indignation and the assessment of irrelevance are woven together (gribaldo, zapperi ). this knot constituted by claims, authenticity of truth telling, entanglements with the status of victim, and recurrence and triviality of the experience, makes the witnessing of gender violence something that tells about – rather than the violent acts themselves – the puzzles faced in considering violence when it has to do with intimacy, time, relationship, the everyday. gender violence is a kind of violence with no witnesses, not only because women hesitate to testimony, or because there are often no other witnesses available, but also because witnesses tell something that is somewhat already known. it may be not by chance that the most convincing contribution to the hau debate on #metoo refers in the end to a popular black american radio anchorwoman who reminds that beyond the well- known ambiguity between the simple gaze and harassment, there is something that can be recognized and acknowledged (di leonardo : ). the supposed undecidability of harassment in common and shared experience is relative: it is known, maybe it should only be known better. anthropology in the field of gender violence might provide a more articulated picture to elaborate contiguity through the analysis of issues which are not marked by otherness and the unexpected. | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - 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| anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - alessandra gribaldo obtained her phd from the university of siena in and has been teaching cultural anthropology at the university of modena and reggio emilia, the university of bologna, and the university of roma tre. her main research interests are kinship, reproduction, visuality, violence, subjectivity, with a particular focus on gender. her work has been published in american ethnologist, population and development review, studi culturali. she is author of la natura scomposta, , la produzione del genere, (ed. with v. ribeiro corossacz), lo schermo del potere, (with g. zapperi), boundaries within. nation, kinship and identity among migrants and minorities, (ed. with f. decimo). she has been fellow of the independent social research foundation in - , and was recently recruited as associate professor in the department of studi umanistici at the university of roma tre. alessandragribaldo@gmail.com this work is licensed under the creative commons © alessandra gribaldo hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: gender violence and its interpretation | anuac. vol. , n° , giugno : - . issn: - x - doi: . /anuac - x- 	shortcuts 	an intimate social fact 	measuring and interpreting 	conclusion 	references when artists fall final forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version when artists fall: honouring and admiring the immoral alfred archer (tilburg university) & benjamin matheson (stockholm university) atmarcher@gmail.com & benjamin.matheson@philosophy.su.se abstract: is it appropriate to honour artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? in this paper, after arguing that honouring involves picking out a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honouring immoral artists. first, we argue that honouring can serve to condone their behaviour, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. second, we argue that honouring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honouring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. we end by considering how we might respond to these reasons. key words: honour, admiration, epistemic injustice, condonation, silencing word count: roman polanski is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest film directors. his film chinatown has been judged to be the best film of all time (pulver ). he has received over international film awards. in giving him the honour of being the president of the césar awards in , the académie des césar expressed their, “admiration and enchantment” for polanski (henley ). those who work with him also hold him in high esteem. ewan macgregor described polanski as, “a legendary filmmaker, he’s one of the best filmmakers there is,” (marikar ). similarly, christoph waltz said, “i love roman polanski, and i really learned to admire him,” while kate winslet described him as, “the great roman polanski,” (singh ). forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version in polanski was arrested for the sexual assault of -year-old samantha gailey. polanski was indicted of six counts of criminal behaviour, including rape. as part of a plea bargain, polanski pled guilty to the charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” (equivalent to statutory rape). polanski fled the country ahead of sentencing. four more women have subsequently accused polanski of sexual assault. is it appropriate to honour an artist such as polanski who has created great works but also acted immorally? opinions are divided here. when polanski was named president of the césar awards, claire serre-combe of osez le féminisme (dare to be feminists), a leading french feminist organization, said, “we cannot let this pass. making polanski president is a snub to rape and sexual assault victims. the quality of his work counts for nothing when confronted with the crime he committed, his escape from justice and his refusal to face up to his responsibilities” (henley ). in polanski and the académie’s defence aurélie filippetti, a former french culture minister, said that polanski is a “great director … who should be allowed to preside over this ceremony. it’s something that happened years ago. one cannot bring up this affair every time we talk about him because there was a problem back then. it is just an awards ceremony” (henley ). the question of whether it is appropriate to honour immoral artists is of crucial importance given the number of recent debates concerning how to respond to prominent cases of artists – including louis ck, kevin spacey, r. kelly, woody allen, bill cosby, casey affleck, bryan singer, asia argento, and bertrand cantat – who have been accused of morally outrageous behaviour. while some question whether the art has been tainted by the artist’s behaviour for a discussion of the ethics of honouring those who have committed grave injustices with statues see burch brown ( ) forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version (see dederer , stock , and the contributions to weinberg ), we take for granted that at least some such works are excellent (though this is not to say that artworks can never be tainted by an artist’s immorality, a point we return to in § ). the question of whether it is appropriate to honour immoral artists arises once we accept this. but this question is ambiguous. appropriate might either mean fitting or all-things-considered appropriate (d’arms and jacobsen : - ). this distinction is often made with respect to emotions; we propose a similar distinction between being a fitting target of honour for x and it being all-things-considered appropriate to honour a person for x. to say that an emotion is fitting is just to say that it represents its object properly. fears fits something fearsome simply because it properly represents the object as fearsome. but just because an emotion is fitting does not mean that it is all-things-considered appropriate to feel that emotion. suppose that you see a bear on the path ahead of you while walking in the woods. fear is certainly a fitting emotion in this case, as the bear is a potential threat to your safety. however, it could be that your best chance of safety in this case is to fearlessly stand your ground in order not to startle the bear and cause it to attack you. while fear is fitting here, feeling fear is not all-things- considered appropriate. so, fittingness is not sufficient for all-things-considered appropriateness. fittingness only provides a pro tanto reason to feel or express an emotion. similarly, an individual being a fitting target of honour doesn’t mean that we ought to honour them. there are further (moral, prudential, epistemic) reasons that come into play in determining whether we should actually honour them. so even if polanski is a fitting target of honour for his artistic talents and works, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we ought to honour him for those things. in this paper, we identify three moral reasons not to honour immoral artists. in § , we argue that honouring involves picking out a person as someone we ought to admire and that forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version immoral artists may also be worth honouring for their art. in § , we argue that honouring immoral artists can express condonation for their behaviour, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. in § , we argue that honouring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. in § we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honouring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. in § , we discuss various ways to respond to these moral reasons and the various factors that will influence which response is most appropriate. . honouring and admiration we honour people in various ways. sometimes we imitate them. sometimes we give them awards. sometimes we build statues of them. in honouring a person or group, we say certain things about them. among other things, we pick them out as people others ought to admire. in other words, we pick them out as people who are admirable or fitting targets of admiration. for example, in announcing the musicians who would be receiving the “special merit awards”, at the grammys, neil portnow (president/ceo of the recording academy) said: these exceptionally inspiring figures are being honored as legendary performers, creative architects and technical visionaries. their outstanding accomplishments and passion for their craft have created a timeless legacy. (fabian ) these awards therefore pick out the recipients out as people who ought to be admired for their talents and achievements. they are reasonably successful in this. a best picture or best leading actor nomination increases a film’s audience significantly. according to one study, these nominations increase weekly box office revenue by % (deuchert et al ). of forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version course, not all of these additional audience members will go on to admire the artists involved but it is likely that some will do so. given that awards pick someone out as a fitting target of admiration, to be a fitting recipient of such honours one must at least be a fitting target of admiration. in this section, we will argue that given a plausible account of admiration, immoral artists may be fitting targets of admiration and so may be fitting targets of the honours they receive. we will not provide a full account of admiration, but will instead focus on the features that are most relevant for our current purposes. the first feature is that admiration involves a positive feeling or judgement. aaron ben-ze’ev claims that admiration involves, “a highly positive evaluation of someone,” ( : ), while william lyons claims that admiration involves: “a pro-evaluation or approval,” ( : ). these claims should be uncontroversial. it seems hard to see how it could possibly be appropriate to judge that someone is admiring something if they lacked any positive evaluation of it. of course, all positive emotions involve a positive evaluation of some sort. respect, for example, also involves a positive evaluation but seems to be importantly different from admiration. there are a number of different suggestions in the literature about the precise nature of admiration’s positive evaluation. one is that the value possessed by the object of admiration is rare (forrester : ). another suggestion is that admiration involves a judgement of the object’s superiority in relation to the subject (schindler et al. : ). admiration is also claimed to involve a sense of wonder or surprise. according to adam smith, for example, admiration just is “approbation heightened by wonder and surprise,” ( / forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version : i.i. . ). similarly, charles darwin ( [ ]: ) claimed that admiration is, “surprise associated with some pleasure and a sense of approval.” the second relevant feature of admiration is its link to a motivation to emulate. for example, linda zagzebski ( ) argues that admiration typically involves a desire to emulate. this claim is supported by a number of psychological studies on the motivational effects of admiration (see, e.g., algoe and haidt ( ), immordino-yang et al. ( ) and schindler et al ( ); one exception is van de ven et al ( ), but this study is an outlier and van de ven himself ( ) has recently accepted the link between admiration and motivation to emulate). while it would be wrong to view this as a necessary feature of admiration (archer forthcoming; compaijen ), it is at least a common motivational response to admiring someone. a third feature of admiration is that it spreads. when we admire a person for one trait or action, we sometimes find ourselves subsequently admiring them for other traits or actions. suppose you admire an excellent chef. your admiration for her might colour some of your other evaluations of her. it may make you more understanding of her grumpiness, for instance. one explanation is that this is a form of the halo effect, the unconscious process through which seeing a person in a positive light leads us to continue to see them in that light. this results in a positive judgement about a person’s abilities in one area leading to more positive judgements of that person in other, unrelated, areas (gräf and unkelbach ). thanks for kian mintz-woo for suggesting the admiration’s spreading effect could be a form of the halo effect. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version however, this spreading feature does not entail that admiration is a globalist emotion. an emotion is globalist if it typically takes the whole self as its object (mason ; bell ). but many implicitly deny that admiration is a globalist emotion. indeed, it is a presupposition of the admirable immorality debate that admiration is not a globalist emotion. while contributors to this discussion (e.g. williams , slote , baron , flanagan ) disagree about whether there is such a thing as admirable immorality (that is, whether a person can be admirable for traits that are conceptually inseparable from traits that issue immoral actions), each at least agrees that an immoral person may also be admirable. this shared presupposition strikes us as plausible. so, we take it that admiration is not a globalist emotion. it follows that immoral artists, such as polanski, may also be fitting targets of admiration and honour for their achievements and talents. however, although the immoral may still be admirable for their aesthetic achievements, there may be cases where an artist’s moral flaws detract from the aesthetic merits of the work. a lively debate in aesthetics centres on the question of whether an artwork’s moral value influences its aesthetic value. according to those who support ethicism (gaut ) about this issue, a moral flaw in a work of art is always an aesthetic flaw. similarly, noel carroll’s ( ) moderate moralism holds that moral flaws can sometimes have a negative impact on a work of arts artistic value. while these views concern the morality of the work of art itself, it is not too big a leap to think the immorality of the artist may also detract from the aesthetic merit of the work. in some cases, this effect could be so severe that there is no longer anything to admire in the work. claire dederer ( ) could be interpreted as supporting this position when she says of woody allen’s manhattan and louis c.k.’s i love you daddy that they cannot now be viewed “outside of the knowledge of [their] sexual misconduct.” while we do not want to rule out the possibility of such cases we think that artworks where the aesthetic merit is completely destroyed, when it would otherwise be present, will be rare. even those who forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version support ethicism and moralism about artworks tend to take the moral flaws to be pro tanto aesthetic flaws which need not completely destroy the aesthetic value of the work (gaut : ). again, we assume in the following that there are at least some cases where the work of an immoral artist remains excellent, and so the artist remains admirable for it. . honouring and condoning immorality the honouring of immoral artists has been criticised for condoning or expressing condonation for their immoral behaviour. take, the french former minister laurence rossignol’s claim that the decision to make polanski head of the césar awards showed, “an indifference toward the charges against him,” (donadio ). this claim may seem puzzling. polanski is not being awarded for his immoral behaviour, so how does this award condone it? we will argue that honouring immoral artists can condone their immoral behaviour in two ways. first, through emotional prioritisation. second, through exemplar identification. we begin by explaining what we mean by condoning. when we condone a piece of behaviour we are communicating that while we don’t think the behaviour is morally good, we are willing to accept or tolerate it (hughes and warmke ). suppose a friend behaves in a rude and obnoxious way towards us one evening and we then condone their behaviour. we are not saying the friend’s behaviour is good, but we are willing to “let it slide”. one consequence of an expression of such an attitude to wrongdoing, however, is that it might be legitimating in certain contexts. that is, it might make the wrongdoer believe that they can get does honouring itself condone or merely express (already existing) condonation of immoral behaviour? our arguments rests on the claim that honouring the immoral merely expressing condonation – indeed on honouring at least having the public meaning of expressing condonation – so we remain neutral on this in this paper. for ease of expression, we will use “condone” to refer to expressions of condonation unless otherwise stated. thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing us to clarify. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version away with acting in this manner. if we don’t express to our friend that they have wronged us, they might think that there was nothing wrong with their behaviour. this is not only prudentially worrisome (e.g., they might not worry about behaving rudely to us again in the future), but also morally problematic (e.g., they might come to think they can get away with rude behaviour). expressing some moral disapproval seems necessary then to avoid legitimating such behaviour. a. emotional prioritisation honouring immoral artists involves choosing to pick them out as people we ought to admire rather than as people we ought to be indignant about. given that these attitudes and emotions are all fitting, honourers are thereby communicating that this is the correct way to prioritise these attitudes and emotions. this can be communicated in more or less explicit ways. the first and most obvious way in which honouring can convey this is when this is part of the intended meaning of an honour, which is what honourers intend an honour to convey. for example, alain rocca, who was part of the committee that made the decision to honour polanski as president of the césar awards, dismissed protests surrounding polanski’s appointment as attempts to “sully an institution, and a man like polanski” (henley ). this defence of polanski explicitly condones his behaviour in the process of honouring his work. while rocca does not claim that polanski’s behaviour was morally permissible, he does suggest that it is behaviour that can be tolerated or overlooked. many of polanski’s honourers have not condoned his behaviour so explicitly. however, they may still communicate that the immoral behaviour should be condoned. one way in which intended meaning is similar to what grice ( ) calls non-natural meaning and has become known as speaker meaning. since we take intended meaning to go beyond speech acts, we prefer our terminology. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version they might do so is through what we will call attitudinal meaning. this meaning expresses a speaker’s values and cares, but need not express what the speaker intends to convey. take, for example, a man who interrupts a woman. the man may not intend this interruption to express sexist values. but it may express these values nevertheless, perhaps by conveying that he doesn’t value women’s contributions enough to let them finish their sentences. similarly, honouring an immoral artist may communicate the honourer’s attitude that the immoral behaviour is unimportant, even if this is not what the speaker intends to convey. even if honourers of immoral artists don’t have such problematic attitudes, our actions also have a public meaning. this is the meaning that others can justifiably attribute to our acts given the context in which we perform them. suppose a man interrupts a woman in an important business meeting. this interruption can have a sexist public meaning even if it lacks a sexist intentional or attitudinal meaning. in a patriarchal business culture, it is reasonable to understand this interruption as revealing sexist attitudes or intentions, even if in fact the man has neither. similarly, the honouring of immoral artists can have a problematic public meaning even when it doesn’t express any heinous intentions or attitudes. this can arise from the structural and institutional context in which it occurs (though it may also arise for other reasons). consider the example of artists who commit sexual harassment or sexual assault. these acts are wrong independently of any social context. but looking at sexual harassment without looking at the social context in which it takes place ignores a major part of what makes sexual harassment and sexual assault so problematic – namely patriarchal social systems that encourage us to condone the mistreatment of women by men. these systems inflict what our use of ‘attitudinal meaning’ is similar to mckenna’s ( ) ‘agent meaning’. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version johan galtung ( ) terms structural violence on women – that is, violence that is built into the social structure. these social systems include the structure of a particular society that may facilitate this mistreatment. for example, the instruments of power in society, such as the police and the courts, may systematically give greater weight to the testimony of certain kinds of men accused of sexual assault than their female victims (peterson ). there are also more localized social systems that may facilitate mistreatment. the film industry, for example, has been accused by many of having a particular problem with sexism, both in the way it represents women on screen (cummings and glessing ) and in the way it treats women working in the industry (jones and pringle ). according to sophie hennekam and dawn bennett ( ) sexual harassment is a particular problem in this industry due to its competitive nature, the culture within the industry, the industry’s gendered power relations and the importance of informal networks for career advancement. in this patriarchal context of an industry that facilitates the mistreatment of women, choosing to honour rather than condemn an artist who is also rapist can reasonably be interpreted as condoning this behaviour. this is problematic, as it sends the message that immoral behaviour can be ignored when the person performing it is a sufficiently gifted artist. importantly, this message isn’t only conveyed by a problematic culture, it also contributes to it. these expressions contribute to a culture of legitimation by reinforcing the message that gifted artists’ immoral behaviour will be accepted or tolerated. this is particularly the case for major contributors to the culture – namely authorities (broadly construed). by virtue of being an authority, one is more able to contribute to the culture. authority is a scalar notion – especially when it comes to normative authorities, whether of art, morality or something else. the more someone or something is considered an authority, the more influence they will forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version have on the culture they are contributing to. take the oscars as an example of a major authority on film. these awards explicitly rank the artistic talents of actors and directors. however, they also implicitly rank in another way. they support a culture that says that it is more important to honour immoral artists than to condemn them. polanski’s case helps to show this. despite confessing to the rape of a minor, he was awarded an oscar in . the fact his rape conviction didn’t factor into the decision to either nominate or award him, together with the fact that he was until recently still a member of the academy (which arguably constitutes another honour) suggests the oscars support such a culture. similarly, casey affleck’s award for best actor in ignored outstanding allegations against him for sexual harassment and sexual assault. and allegations that christian bale physically assaulted his mother and sister were not taken into consider when he won the oscar for best supporting actor in , nor in his subsequent nominations for best actor in , , . by honouring these artists, the wrongs they are accused of are condoned so that the artist can receive recognition for their aesthetic talents. as such this legitimates immoral behaviour: we are taught that the artistic talents are more important than the immoral acts that have been performed. this means that authoritative organisations in the film industry, such as the academy, have a special moral reason to consider the ways in which their decision about who to honour will influence this culture of legitimation. the decision to honour rather than condemn immoral artists can convey that immoral behaviour has been condoned, even when the honourer’s intentions or attitudes don’t express condonation. however, we aren’t claiming that this public meaning will be conveyed whenever an immoral artist is honoured. we are defending the weaker claim that against a forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version background of structurally oppressive social conditions, honouring artists who have committed immoral actions that fit into this oppressive system may convey this problematic message. again, this does not commit us to the claim that honouring has a problematic public meaning only when honours are given against a background of structurally oppressive social conditions. but should we really be blamed if others read things into our actions that aren’t expressive of our intentions or attitudes? one might object that the blame lies with others, and not with those bestowing the honours. first, note that we aren’t claiming that these moral reasons constitute a duty not to honour immoral artists. second, we accept that others may be blameworthy for reading things into actions that aren’t expressive of the agent’s intentions or attitudes. however, we see no reason why this precludes people from having a responsibility to thinking about what others might read into their actions (though this will likely depend on a person’s social power). for example, if a comedian thinks their ironic racist joke, which they intend to lampoon racists, will be used as a slogan by neo-nazis to galvanise a popular movement, then this could give them reason not to tell it. it is true that the context-sensitive nature of public meaning can make it difficult to determine. however, these awards are not difficult cases. given the way that awards are typically given, with all the fanfare and celebration of the awardee, they can clearly be perceived as condoning the immoral behaviour. it is plausible, then, that such honourers have a responsibility to consider how others will interpret giving an award to an immoral artist. one might also object that our argument assumes that we cannot honour and condemn an artist at the same time. we agree that this is possible and we will argue that this is one possible way to respond to this moral reason. this is no objection to our argument as it stands, though, because we are describing what the actual practice of honouring currently is. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version polanski, for example, has been given many awards without a hint of condemnation for his wrongdoings. we return to this point in § . b. exemplar identification honouring a person often has the function of identifying someone as an exemplar – that is, as someone to be emulated. in polanski’s case, his honour of being appointed as president of the césar awards identifies him as an exemplar. of course, because this is an honour for aesthetic achievement it seems reasonable to think that polanski is only being identified as an aesthetic exemplar. given this, it might seem that such an honour is unproblematic because it is only passing judgement on his aesthetic abilities and not his moral behaviour. however, there are two reasons to worry about the identification of an immoral artist as an exemplar. key to both reasons is admiration’s spreading tendency. first, identifying an immoral artist as an aesthetic exemplar can condone their behaviour. as discussed, honouring a person involves picking them out someone who ought to be admired. while this need not involve picking them out as a completely admirable person – that is, as someone who ought to be admired in all respects – honours may naturally be interpreted as doing so on certain occasions. while the honourer may only be intending to convey that the artist ought to be admired for their artistic talents, we may, due to admiration’s tendency to spread, perceive them as conveying that we ought to admire their whole self. this does not entail they are being admired for the immoral behaviour, but rather that they are considered completely admirable despite such behaviour. honouring immoral artists, then, may come across as condoning their immoral behaviour. note that as with the emotional prioritisation, the condoning of the immoral actions need not be expressive of the intentions or attitudes of the honourers. it could instead be communicated via public meaning. the public outcry that forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version can occur when immoral artists are honoured with awards suggests that many do interpret these honours in this way. second, identifying immoral artists as exemplars has the potential to encourage others to emulate them. as noted, admiration often leads to a desire to emulate. this gives us reason to worry, as honouring immoral people conveys that they are people who ought to be admired. if people then admire such people this may lead to a desire to emulate their immoral actions. however, this doesn’t fit with the usual way of viewing the link between admiration and emulation. on zagzebski’s view, for example, admiring someone, “gives rise to the motive to emulate the admired person in the way she is admired” ( : ; emphasis ours). while this would give us cause for concern if someone admired an immoral artist for their immoral behaviour, it doesn’t give us reason to worry about those who admire them despite their immorality. unfortunately, things aren’t so simple. given admiration’s spreading tendency, admiring one feature of a person sometimes leads people to admire other features as well. for example, a teenager’s admiration for her favourite footballer’s sporting abilities may lead her to admire her political views. a graduate student’s admiration for his supervisor’s intellectual abilities may lead him to admire the way he talks and dresses. once admiration spreads to these features this may then lead to a desire to emulate these aspects of the person as well. given that we pick immoral artists out as people we ought to admire when we honour them, we have reason to worry about such honours, as they may lead people to emulate such artists in other ways. we aren’t suggesting that anyone is going to commit sexual assault as a direct result of admiring polanski’s artistic talent. but emulating exemplars needn’t involve straightforward forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version imitation. as kristjan kristjánsson ( : ) argues, the proper role of exemplars is to, “help you arrive at an articulate conception of what you value and want to strive towards.” emulation should therefore be seen as a process by which one attempts to achieve these values. even if it doesn’t lead anyone to imitate them, identifying an immoral artist as an exemplar can be problematic by encouraging people to pursue or uphold problematic ideals. in the case of polanski, those ideals may include the patriarchal ideal of the male genius, whose mistreatment of women is justified by his artistic greatness. so, there is a strong moral reason not to honour polanski, as this more clearly encourages others to attach themselves to problematic ideals. . honour and credibility in this section, we argue that a second moral reason against honouring immoral artists is that it risks making its target unduly epistemically credible. this can lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice when a victim contradicts an honoured figure. celebrities are often taken to be authorities in areas for which they possess no expertise. kyrie irving, a basketball player, believes that the earth is flat. this has apparently led to some schoolchildren believing that the earth is flat, leaving their teachers baffled. as one commentator puts it, “kyrie saying the earth is flat is hilarious, but this would definitely be a tough spot for a middle school science teacher. … there’s no way a teacher is going to be able to compete with an insanely good basketball player when it comes to influencing some students” (maloney ). what appears to be going on in this case is that irving is being given greater epistemic credibility with respect to the earth’s shape by his teenage fans than he merits. indeed, there are many cases of celebrities being given greater credibility than they thanks to mark alfano for suggesting this example. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version merit. this has led journalist alex proud ( ) to say that “the widespread acceptance of the notion that being good at acting/sports/pop music seems to mean the rest of us should listen to your opinions on syria, hugo chavez or the plight of the amazonian tribes” is “one of the most horrific developments of the st century.” what explains these celebrities’ undue epistemic credibility? there are likely many factors. but one important factor, we submit, is our admiration and honouring practices – the central example of which we have discussed in this paper is the giving of awards. by honouring celebrities, we focus attention on them and elevate them above others. we thereby not only pick them out as people we ought to admire but also as people we ought to listen to. while many of us may not attribute excessive epistemic credibility to celebrities, it is clear from the use of celebrities in campaigns beyond their areas of expertise that many people do. this excess credibility creates problems when a celebrity wrongs another person. in particular, it may lead to the victim not being believed even when the celebrity has admitted guilt, which is the case with polanski and his victim. miranda fricker’s ( ) theory of epistemic injustice can help us see why. fricker’s focus is on how that negative identity stereotypes about a group unjustly decrease perceptions of the epistemic credibility of that group. associating a property with a group of people, even if only implicitly, often leads us to unwittingly attribute that property to an individual from that group when we interact with them. if that property concerns their sincerity or competence, we will judge them to be less epistemically credible. the result is that we often won’t believe a person when we ought to. for instance, those who hold that women are not as clever as men might be inclined to reject a suggestion from a woman as being misguided though they would accept the same suggestion from a man. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version it is not only negative stereotypes that can lead to epistemic injustice. there can also be an indirect testimonial injustice for those who contradict the celebrity. when the testimony of a celebrity conflicts with that of someone who lacks this status, the testimony of the celebrity is likely to be given greater weight. honouring a celebrity leads those who challenge the celebrity’s assertions to be seen as less credible in comparison. honouring elevates the artist and in doing so contributes to inflating their credibility. by inflating their credibility, we in turn deflate the credibility of those who accuse them of wrongdoing. this constitutes an indirect testimonial injustice for the victims. being honoured, then, gives its target a kind of power. this power becomes problematic when an immoral person wields it, as it may increase their credibility at the expense of that of their victims. of course, in polanski’s case, we might think there is little reason to worry about this given that he pleaded guilty to his crime against gailey and has subsequently apologised for it. however, we should not be complacent about the problems victims face in being believed even when their attackers have admitted guilt. consider how polanski’s assault on samantha gailey was called a “so-called crime” by harvey weinstein ( ) or how whoopi goldberg said that it “wasn’t rape-rape,” (kennedy ). the way in which high-profile celebrities were willing to question whether these acts took place, or at least to downplay their significance of these acts, gives us reason to be wary about the effect honouring immoral artists can have on the credibility of their victim. moreover, it is worth pointing out that in addition to gailey, four more woman have accused polanski of sexually assaulting them when they were children, including marianne barnard whose accusations polanski rejected as “entirely unfounded” (mumford ). whether or not these allegations are well founded, we see medina ( ) for an account of a general link between credibility excess and credibility deficit. we identify a more specific link that is compatible with medina’s account. see also yap ( ) for a discussion of the role of credibility excess with respect to certain perpetrators of sexual assault. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version might worry about the possibility of polanski’s word being given greater weight than it merits, due to his elevated position. the recent wave of allegations against prominent artists through the #metoo campaign suggests that the power possessed by those who are admired and honoured can be combatted. however, it is noteworthy that the phrase ‘me too’ only came to prominence when it started being used by high-profile celebrities, such as alyssa milano, even though it was first used to raise awareness of sexual assault by the activist tarana burke in . we may worry then about the problems those who lack this elevated status would have in contradicting the word of an honoured and admired celebrity. by honouring artists who commit sexual harassment or sexual assault – and other acts that express and perpetuate structural injustices, such as racial or class-based injustices – we inflate their credibility and in doing so, perpetuate a background of injustices that their victims face. this gives us a moral reason against honouring artists whose acts express and perpetuate structural injustices. this moral reason will be especially strong in cases where accusations of such acts have been made but the artist has not admitted guilt, a point we return to in § . . honour and silencing we have argued that honouring immoral artists condones their immoral acts. further, honouring can reduce the credibility of their victims. in this section, we present another moral reason against honouring immoral artists that builds on these first two reasons. this is that honouring can serve to silence the artist’s victims and the victims of similar crimes. langton ( ) identifies three forms of silencing: locutionary (failing to even say words, perform actions), perlocutionary frustration (your acts don’t have the intended effects), and forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version illocutionary disablement (you fail to even perform the acts you intend to perform). we will argue that honouring immoral artists encourages the first form of silencing by supporting two expectations. first, victims of immoral artists may (often justifiably) come to expect that people won’t believe them. this will often be an accurate belief given the effects on credibility we outlined in the previous section. however, it may be a reasonable belief even if the victim’s credibility has not been deflated. in honouring artists, we are (as we argued in § ) picking them out as people who ought to be admired. the victim may then form the impression (correctly or incorrectly) that others see the artist as globally admirable. such an impression generates the expectation that others will reject her testimony because it conflicts with the image she believes others have of the artist. given this expectation, it makes sense that victims don’t speak out. second, even when victims think they will be believed, they may come to expect (again often justifiably) that people won’t care. this seems a reasonable response to the fact that their assailant’s behaviour has been condoned. once the idea that a great artist’s talents are more important than the crimes they have committed, the victim is likely to form the expectation that people will be indifferent to their suffering. for example, in response in the recent controversy about polanski being honoured with a retrospective the french minister for culture dismissed polanski’s “ancient charges” whilst reminding people that he is a “brilliant director” (zaretsky ). given this kind of sentiment, it is hardly surprisingly that victims often don’t speak out. in short, honouring immoral artists supports the expectations that people won’t listen and even if they do they won’t care, which encourages victims to remain silent. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version . how to respond we have identified three moral reasons against honouring immoral artists. importantly, we have not claimed that these reasons constitute obligations not to honour immoral artists. in this section we consider how one might respond to these moral reasons. our aim is not to definitively settle the question of how to respond but rather to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the various responses and the kinds of considerations that would speak in favour of choosing one response over another. . no award the first response to these moral reasons against honouring immoral artists is to simply refrain from doing so. if honouring the immoral is morally problematic then the easy way to avoid these problems is to simply not honour them. while this is the most straightforward response to the moral reasons against honouring the immoral, it is not without its problems. in particular, it can be criticised for violating the purpose of these awards – namely to honour artistic merit not moral merit. we might worry that to let moral reasons play a role in deciding whose artistic achievements to honour would be to let morality overstep its proper bounds. in other words, one might object that not honouring immoral artists manifests the vice of moralism. this worry may be especially pressing if we accept autonomism (e.g. lamarque ), according to which the moral character of a work never affects its artistic value. those inclined to accept such a clear border between the aesthetic and the moral may well think this response would involve a failure to respect the proper boundaries of morality, though of course they are not the only ones who may worry about this approach. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version there are (at least) two points to make in response to this charge. first, many of the decisions to honour one recipient over another are based on marginal judgements. often several nominees are deserving of an award. so, not honouring an immoral artist with an award does not mean the person who gets the award is undeserving of that honour. second, many artistically irrelevant factors play a role in determining the recipients of honours. for example, to be eligible for the oscars a film must meet the following criteria (amongst others): a) be over forty minutes long. b) be “publicly exhibited by means of mm or mm film, or in a - or -frame progressive scan digital cinema format with a minimum projector resolution of by pixels”. c) it must have been shown in an l. a. county cinema, for paid admission for seven consecutive days. (oscars.org ) the third condition is artistically irrelevant and the first two are at least arbitrary. there is nothing to prevent a film of a different length or shot on a different format from being the best film of the year. our point is not to criticise these arbitrary conditions; there are no doubt good reasons to place limits on what films are eligible for an oscar. rather our point is that we already accept artistically irrelevant or arbitrary conditions to play a role in determining who will win these awards. this should make us somewhat sceptical of the claim that allowing morality to play a role in influencing who receives an honour is a violation of their artistic purpose. despite the legitimacy of these responses, the worry about moralism does not seem entirely misplaced. it would certainly be problematic if any minor moral violation could lead to an honour being withheld. if this were the case there would be good reason to worry that these forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version honours are not fulfilling their role of awarding artistic merit. this response therefore seems like one that is best suited to cases where the moral reasons against honouring the immoral are strongest. . do nothing for those concerned that refusing to honour immoral artists is an overly moralistic response, the temptation may be to carry on as normal and to bestow honours and awards on the immoral in exactly the same way as anyone else. this response has the advantage of most straightforwardly respecting the thought that such honours should be bestowed purely on artistic merit. however, if refusing to honour an immoral artist can be accused of being an overly moralistic response, simply carrying on as normal can be accused of not taking morality seriously enough. this approach does nothing to address the moral reasons against honouring immoral artists that we have outlined. as a result, this response may be seen as not taking the interests of those who may be harmed seriously enough, especially if adopted in response to the most extreme cases. perhaps, then, this response is one that may be appropriate in cases where the moral reasons against honouring the immoral are weak. . award with protest if we are dissatisfied with the black and white nature of the approaches canvassed above, we may be tempted to find a response that allows for an artist’s artistic merits to be recognized without sending a morally problematic message. one way to do this would be to make awards to immoral artists under protest. for example, when accused sexual harasser casey affleck was awarded the oscar for best actor in , brie larson, the award’s presenter, refused to applaud him. speaking after the ceremony, larson, a vocal advocate for victims of forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version sexual assault, said her behaviour, “spoke for itself,” (chi ). this might be thought to be a best of both worlds approach. there is a clear response to the moral reasons that count against honouring the immoral, whilst allowing the award to be determined purely on artistic merit. however, this approach can be criticised from both sides. on the one hand, it can be criticized for not taking the moral reasons seriously enough. for those paying close attention to larson’s behaviour and who are aware of her history of advocacy, the reasons for her lack of applause may be clear. however, this message may have been lost for those paying less close attention or for those unaware of larson’s views on this issue. on the other hand, some might maintain that this too is an overly moralistic response. if this became common practice, it could perhaps lead to a form of self-censorship where people do not submit their films for awards for fear of public criticism. we have little sympathy for this response, at least in the case of someone whose crimes are as horrific as polanski’s. but perhaps if such a response were to be used in any case where an artist has acted immorally, no matter how minor the infringement, then we might agree that it could be problematic for this reason. another problem with this response is that it does not look like the kind of response it would be easy for an awarding body to enact. while it is relatively straightforward for a presenter to engage in a small act of protest, it would be quite odd for an awarding body to both present someone with an award while at the same time protesting their immoral behaviour. this is not a decisive objection because there may be clever ways in which an awarding body could do this. perhaps an awarding body could name, for example, polanski as the winner of an award without actually giving him the trophy or even inviting him to the award’s ceremony. but, again, it may be that this response is better suited to individuals or groups attending such ceremonies than to the awarding organisations. forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version in summary, this response offers a potential best of both worlds solution. but like many such solutions, it runs the risk of satisfying neither side. . focussed admiration the final response we will consider is to honour immoral artists in such a way that they are clearly only honouring the recipient’s admirable traits and actions and do not even appear to be a global endorsement of the person. this approach also has the potential to offer a best of both worlds solution that would allow awards to be made solely on artistic merit whilst also addressing the moral problems we have examined in this paper. the problem with this approach is that it is far from clear how it could be achieved. what steps could an awarding body take to ensure that the award is only interpreted as honouring the recipient’s artistic talents? one approach would be to explicitly state in the giving of the award that the organisation condemns the immoral behaviour. however, this approach seems very close to the previous one of awarding under protest and is likely to face the same objections. but, as with awarding under protest, this is far from a devastating objection. it is rather a challenge that can perhaps be met by some creative thinking on the part of the honouring institutions. unlike awarding under protest, honouring institutions are arguably better placed to meet this challenge than individuals. we suspect that for this approach to work there would need to be a wider societal change in the way people respond to fame and celebrity. what is needed is a move away from the tendency to admire people globally as a response to their admirable qualities. as earl spurgin ( ) argues, we need an approach to role models that sees them as exemplars for particular qualities rather than exemplars simpliciter. however, this kind of approach, which we may think forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version of as that of developing an appropriate ethics of admiration, is one that is in tension with a celebrity culture that treats celebrities as heroes to be worshipped (boorstin : ). it seems unlikely, then, that this approach is one that will succeed unless it is accompanied by a wider societal change in the way people engage with celebrity. . the strength of the moral reasons we have only sought to highlight advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. we expect that there is no one-size-fits all response – that is, we might have to differentiate our response to these moral reasons depending on the particulars of each case. here we highlight some considerations that arguably affect the strength of these reasons and note how this might affect the best approach to take. as we noted earlier, the “no award” approach might be best when the moral reasons against honouring immoral artists are strongest and the “do nothing” approach might be better when the moral reasons are weakest. there are a number of factors about the wrongdoer that are relevant for determining when these moral reasons are strongest. first, the severity of the wrongdoing. for example, bill cosby was called a “sexually violent predator” by the judge who sentenced him to - years in prison (levenson and cooper ). given this, we have reason not to honour bill cosby. but while tax evasion is wrong, there is much less reason not to honour jimmy carr even though he is guilty of such wrongdoing (rayner ). second, the likelihood that the honour will have a problematic public meaning. for example, will the honour be perceived as a global endorsement of the person? this will largely be determined by the social context in which the award takes place. the nature of the award may also be important here. an award for best picture, for example, does not just honour the director of the film but all of the hundreds of other people who forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version worked on it from the actors, producers, script writers and editors to the runners, researchers and accountants. this award is therefore likely to be less problematic than an award that specifically honours someone who has behaved immorally, such as a best actor or best director award. there are even distinctions to be made between awards targeting individuals. for example, a best director award is more easily seen as targeting only someone’s artistic merits than a lifetime achievement award. which response we take, then, also arguably depends on the nature of honour in question. the third factor that affects the strength of the moral reasons not to honour immoral artists is whether or not the wrongdoer has undergone any process of redemption. if an immoral artist has sincerely apologised or made amends with their victims, these acts of redemption could potentially weaken the moral reasons against not honouring them. this is because any honours would have less risk of being interpreted as identifying immoral artists as people who are deserving of admiration for everything they have done or the kind of person they have been across their entire life. in other words, honouring such artists may be a way to put the “focussed admiration” approach into effect. by admitting fault and taking responsibility, such artists in effect allow for their wrongdoings to be highlighted in the honouring process with the hopeful outcome that it seems clear that they are being picked out as admirable precisely for their artistic merits. these points also apply to artists who have “merely” been accused of wrongdoing. this is of course a tricky area and there is good reason to worry about responding to mere accusations by withholding awards from the accused. however, there is also good reason to be concerned about the impact celebrating such people may have on perceptions of the credibility of those making the accusations, given the impact on credibility as a consequence of honouring that we outlined in § . importantly, even if the accusations turn out to be false, the falsity of the forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version accusations should not be determined even in part on how admirable we find a particular celebrity to be. given that honouring picks out a celebrity as someone to be admired, continuing to honour an accused celebrity is therefore problematic. notably, the british academy of film and television arts suspended, but did not withdraw, bryan singer’s nomination for best director for the film bohemian rhapsody due to outstanding allegations against him. in a statement, the british academy said that they consider “the alleged behaviour completely unacceptable and incompatible with its values”. while they acknowledged that singer denied the allegations, they said that the suspension would remain in place “until the outcome of the allegations has been resolved” (bafta ). this seems like a creative take on the “award under protest” approach, given that they waited until after voting on the awards was complete to announce their decision. . conclusion we first argued that honouring picks out a person as someone we ought to admire. we then identified three moral reasons against honouring immoral artists, even granting that they are fitting targets of such honours. some of these reasons applied to all such artists, while others apply only to those artists whose wrongdoings express and contribute to structural injustices. we then considered how we might respond to these moral reasons. we realise our discussion raises lots of important questions that we don’t touch upon. for example: do the moral reasons we identify ever generate duties? is it ever all-things- inappropriate to honour these artists? what are the grounds for these moral reasons? are there moral reasons in favour of honouring immoral artists? does honouring silence in other ways? how does this apply to other immoral figures? is it appropriate for individuals to honour and admire immoral artists? moreover, we do not wish to convey that the reasons we forthcoming in the journal of the american philosophical association please cite published version have identified are the only moral reasons against honouring immoral artists. for example, honouring may also express disrespect for the victims and honouring may also make the honourers and those who support the honourers complicit in the wrongs suffered by the victims. we take these questions and further reasons seriously but we unfortunately lack the space to do them justice here. our overall aim is to focus philosophical attention onto this important topic rather than to settle the many questions that this topic raises. we hope that future work will deal with these questions and develop the insights we hope we have made here. references algoe, sara b. & haidt, jonathan 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( ). durable violence in southeast asia: machinery and scale. austrian journal of south-east asian studies, ( ), - . on october , the member states of the association of southeast asian nations (asean) signed the declaration, “on the elimination of violence against women and elimination of violence against children in asean”, which was followed by a regional plan of action (rpa) issued in february . the action’s very first step is to “develop asean guidelines on non-violent approaches to the nurture, care, and development of children in all settings” (asean, , p. ). the prevention program is crafted as a framework for asean nations to support the implementation of one of the united nations’ sustainable development goals which “promises to strive for a better world that is just, equitable and inclusive” (asean, , p. ). such norms have gained urgency as, despite their progress in the development of institutional dem- ocratic practices as a means to provide security, southeast asian nations are struggling to counter the cycle of violence. a year before the rpa’s publication, for example, the indonesia ulama council (majelis ulama indonesia) expressed its concern that the indonesian government has failed to ensure non-violent content even in its high-school education programs, citing an example of a text- book, “religious teaching and personality”, which justifies muslims killing the “unbeliever” (susanto, ). another alarming example relates to gender-based violence (gbv) with “ percent of all women between the ages of and reported being raped” (the asia foundation, , p. ) in timor-leste. true ( ) finds that gbv in asia has become a persistent form of violence because of its entanglement with “the national or subnational context,” whereby struc- tural gender inequality is embedded in the “inequality of access to resources or to public space and voice, legal discrimination in civil and family status, and societal attitudes that condone violence against women” (p. ). this conflicting illustration marks a call to investigate the durability of ram- pant violence in southeast asia, where violence has become a mundane reality (arendt, ) of everyday life. to view violence as a prolonged and intergener- ational reality that goes beyond a single disruption or some narrow temporality provides another method to observe the cycle of violence and how it emerges as a common practice. the normalcy or banality of violence could lead to a “crisis of chronicity” (vigh, ), which endorses asymmetrical social relation- ships, orders, and power, and denies every notion of democratic life (see also arendt, ). against this background, everyday violence hinders the realiza- tion of asean’s ( ), above-referenced goal to create a “just, equitable and inclusive” (p. ) world. one of the weaknesses in explaining such chronicity is, as the expert on security in southeast asia, sidney jones, observes in the editorial w w w .s ea s. at d o i . / . a se a s- | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia context of indonesia, that activists, academics, and politicians deliver “time frames [of observation which] are too short” (stange, , p. ). responding to the shreds of evidence of chronic violence in southeast asia, this issue aims to survey how violence becomes self-generating or autopoietic. to look at how such mundane violence could be addressed, we invited scholars who have been continuously studying the durability of violence in their area of regional expertise to contribute to this issue. the six research articles and one interview article in this issue represent extensive discussions of lingering violence in southeast asia. peter kreuzer’s ( ) study on the deadly use of violence by the police in the philippines shows that although the act has taken the spotlight under president duterte’s war on drugs campaign, it is not a new phenomenon since criminal enforcement in the country has a long history of extrajudicial (deadly) use of violence by the police. helle rydstrom ( ) presents a study of chronic violence against women in vietnam, which has endured for gen- erations to the point that members of society have begun to consider such abuse “normal”. observing islamic fundamentalist social media influencers in indonesia, ario seto ( ) argues that violent behavior is not simply sparked by discontent but is fostered by online and offline sociability of othering and bigotry. lúcio sousa’s ( ) study on the emergence of lia-na’in (master of words) as peacemakers in timor-leste describes how the state has turned to tradition and spirituality to mitigate centuries of violence while sourcing legitimacy to incite secu- rity and stability. amporn marddent’s ( ) work highlights how muslim women in thailand’s deep south have become peacemakers, while they nonetheless face the challenge of recognition, as, first, their salafi belief has been stereotyped as being inherently violent, and, second, as women’s voices are not considered to be repre- sentative in a patriarchal society. in the research workshop section, gunnar stange, patrick sakdapolrak, kwanchit sasiwongsaroj, and matthias kourek ( ) report an imbalance in academic research in the field of forced migration studies in southeast asia that could signify indifference towards how internally displaced populations are treated and further victimized in structural violence. the issue, furthermore, features an interview by gunnar stange ( ) with the jakarta based political analyst, sidney jones, on violence, religious extremism, and conflict dynamics in contemporary indonesia. as a long-term observer of indonesian politics, she warns of the dangers of “intolerant above-ground, non-clandestine organizations” (stange, , p. ) for indonesian democracy. although all the presented cases of violence are rooted in the region’s heteroge- neous colonial history, the contributors to this issue highlight how contemporary violence is augmented and amplified by post-independence socio-political dynamics. by doing so, the articles reveal that historically prolonged violence, or what we call the durability of rampant violence, is subdued by the dimensions of machinery and scale. the machinery could be “actors” (kreuzer, ; rydstrom, ; seto, ; sousa, ) or “the autopoietic of violence”, which hinder peace or keep non-violent struggles from emerging (marddent, ; rydstrom, ; sousa, ). the articles provide a common argument that violence becomes durable because the machinery is able to preserve it at different scales and in different arenas: across national and subnational geography (kreuzer, ; marddent, ; seto ; sousa, ), in private and public sphere (marddent, ; rydstrom, ; seto, ), and in legal aseas ( ) | ario seto, gunnar stange, & susanne schröter and illegal practices (kreuzer, ; marddent, ). in articulating how its machin- ery and scale operate, this issue discusses violence in four constellations of practices and discourses: ( ) when violent actors operate beyond the state’s governmentality; ( ) when violence is framed within an institutionalizing discourse; ( ) when vio- lence functions to delineate, or, on the contrary, strengthen, borders, and legitimizes respective claims; and ( ) when violence hinders the establishment of non-violent discourses. besides these four constellations, some articles in this issue also advise that the media has played a role in influencing both the scale of violence and how vio- lence is observed. before we discuss how the machinery and scale of violence operate corresponding with these constellations, we will look at the importance and the cur- rent need for deeper analysis of violence in southeast asia in the next section. normalcy and chronicity of violence even democratic states with their established legal arms to steward order are not violence-proof. della porta’s ( ) rigorous study of social movements in italy and germany in the s shows that violence is part of a repertoire of political action and cannot be isolated to a certain ideology; actors socialized in non-violent environ- ments can still fall into violence. violence emerges in expressions that also advocate equal rights and peace, including left-wing movements. she contends that radical groups took advantage of the available resources in their environment to strengthen or reinforce their militancy, their decision to emphasize violence can be considered a rational choice. […] but the choice of radicalization was also a contingent development, for it depended on the supply of resources available to each particular movement’s organization: not surprisingly, the organizations that became most violent were those that lacked resources giving them access to the system (della porta, , p. ). she has also recently warned that “the availability (or lack) of material and sym- bolic resources affects the choice of radical repertoire” (della porta, , p. ). her work in connecting violence as radical acts to resource tapping and repertoire is helpful in invigorating observations of how violence becomes a durable problem and takes place in precipitating events and endures from time to time, including in various democratic realities. the six articles in this issue correspondingly deliver similar observations about how the problem of resources and repertoires provides the texture of the violence currently enduring in southeast asia. however, we would like to extend the thesis. we propose that in some conditions, rather than sealing off the emergence of vio- lence, the opening to democracy and the emerging economic stability have offered new arenas of resource tapping and have allowed engineered violent confrontations to manifest out of cleavages that were tempered by previous authoritarian rule (e.g., stange & patock, ). in this context, resources play a role not because of their scarcity, but because of their availability. the growth of ethnocentric paramilitary groups and radical islamists in southeast asia (hadiz, ; wilson, ) are two fitting examples of such violence, particularly when violence has become a common | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia repertoire of action, which both the state and non-state actors engage to secure their political power as a means to accrue available resources. in this setting, evolving violence cannot be confined simply by empowering the state’s agency of policing to maintain order, since, in some cases, the state and state actors are part of the com- peting groups seeking to secure the resource (e.g., böhmelt, bove, & gleditsch, ; unhcr, ). the normalcy and chronicity of violence are sustained by the emerging ideol- ogy of development, through which the state regularly imposes indisputable secu- rity to maintain order to create political stability. located between china and india, southeast asia is home to the world’s fastest-growing economies, such as cambodia, vietnam, laos, the philippines, and indonesia (oecd, ). a consequence of such economic development has been the introduction of cultural policies that are imagined to ensure national security and productivity, such as vietnam’s Đổi mới (renovation) policy, indonesia’s pembangunan (development) credo, and thailand’s national culture act. in these policies, economic development has become a prom- inent orientation, if not an ideology, for state actors to incite expeditious stability rather than creating a laborious public sphere. the cultural program therefore often asserts nationalist sentiments and unity as the moral resources of stability and the nation’s betterment. this is where violence as a repertoire comes into play, as the state enacts strong policing to maintain order. in nonaggressive circumstances, power organizes people to internalize certain norms, such as how to be submissive to the government in the name of national unity, which is also enforced by the law and institutions of justice. any dissatisfaction, then, is suppressed within normalcy or, as foucault ( ) describes it, “a normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (p. ). such developments provide a new opportunity to investigate the ‘old’ violence beyond its colonial history (e.g., van klinken, ; scheper-hughes & bourgois, ). we believe that most cases of violence discussed in the articles of this issue render a postcolonial problem. however, we would like to add complexity by arguing that these nation-states have the agency to come to terms with their colonial pasts, practices, and repertoires of violence. take the philippines as an example: boyce ( , p. ) examines that development strategies crafted during the marcos era were unsustainable and created larger social gaps, such as landlordism as a product of problematic land rights, which are prone to armed violence conducted by local entrepreneurs. in indonesia, suharto’s developmentalist regime imposed a military approach to suppress discontent in aceh, papua, and east timor (mcgibbon, ). investigating the state’s relation and response to durable violence, then, involves a deeper view of how these policies influence the local historical contexts and current political contestation or discontent. van klinken ( ) argues that such examina- tions not only require continuous observation of political dynamics, but also cultural changes. assessing the communal violence in the moluccas in the early s, he exemplifies that violence and conflicts in the global south appear to be different than their counterparts in the global north where the presence of the state and policing mechanism is more pronounced. van klinken ( , pp. - ) warns that violence is not simply ideologically driven, but that contesting actors are entangled in “a struggle for power in a political system structured along lines of personal relationships rather aseas ( ) | ario seto, gunnar stange, & susanne schröter than formal rules” (p. ). they are entangled in a historical patron-client loyalty rather than emancipatory expression, where they act opportunistically, rely on rum- ors rather than verified news, and have – to some degree – a relationship with state institutions. in such settings, violence becomes a lateral common reality for fostering state-building, as violence remains a powerful repertoire, both as the language of contestation and as that of the traditional relationships that configure social rela- tions between actors and interest groups in southeast asian countries. accordingly, violence transcends the emergence of the modern state. these actors also under- stand the notion of crisis differently than those in western states. as van klinken ( ) describes, “even in the midst of such security crises, many people were still conducting politics as usual, albeit in crisis mode and of a kind considered patently abnormal in the west” (p. ). veena das ( ) shares a similar observation in her study on the indian state and extraordinary events, such as periods of communal violence. she finds that although violence as an event has ceased, the language of violence transcends the episode into the quotidian everyday life, while on the other hand, everyday life encounters provide the texture of violence. das ( ), therefore, calls attention to the normalcy of vio- lence as a durable reality. the presence of violence in everyday life is not simply a mat- ter of practice, but also a subject of institutionalization. based on their research on hindu-muslim violence and riots in a slum in mumbai, chatterji, and mehta ( ) argue that the experience of violence as a “normalcy” is formed through patterns of state and institutional governance. this includes, among other practices, establish- ing government commissions to investigate the riots, the documentation of the riots in official narratives, the remaking of slum spaces, crafting redevelopment programs, and inviting other non-governmental actors, such as ngos and civil society organi- zation, to participate in these processes. with the rising complexity of rehabilitating everyday life, members of the community eventually lose their agency, which leads to another form of structural violence. while strong administrative states, such as those in the global north, are trained to confine violence, asean states’ historical approach to violence appears to be rather one of indifference in the six cases pre- sented here. thus, when violence becomes an intergenerational reality, the question remains: how do southeast asians manage to live with it? violent actors and the state the conditions of abnormality and normalcy have been important dimensions for discussions of violence since they have been related to how the state, regime, or authoritative class governs or controls the population. while modern states are expected to regulate the control of law and order, it is never the case that it has the full control of order (e.g., tilly, ) and engenders a situation where the state confines its power to governmentality or to the authoritative legitimation of control (foucault, ). foucault ( ) asserts that, through its government, the administrative state takes on a posture of “apparatuses of security” (p. ), which control social and political institutions to establish order and to avoid violence. yet, the rise of democ- racy and the administrative state does not eliminate violence. on the other hand, mbembe ( ) and rojas-perez ( ) underscore that the reign of governmentality | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia has consolidated power, which shapes “necropolitics” – the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die (mbembe, ) – where the state dominates individuals’ legitimate decision-making. in a totalitarian state, the state’s control of its citizens’ lives is utterly decisive, whereby those deemed to threaten the state’s policy or ideology will be systemati- cally incarcerated and their living conditions reduced to “bare life” (agamben, ). in other state formations, state control takes shape in the state’s power to cancel a person’s citizenship, and, thus, their administrative identity, to marginalize minori- ties to those deemed to be unfit for the majority, such as lgbtq+ groups in many countries. at large, bourdieu ( ) contends that, when violence is suspended, the relationship between the state and its citizens, or between the ruling class and the commons, remains volatile since the latter is organized within a cultural arrange- ment – “pact of symbolic nonaggression” (p. ) – or dominated and legitimized by the first through “symbolic violence” (pp. , ). the contributions to this special issue provide evidence that extend these mentioned studies, showing how violence is durable because of its scaling ability to transcend the state-citizen boundary through which the actors involved have the capacity to operate beyond the state or the state’s legal system. there are some pat- terns in how this could be observed. the first relates to cases in which the actors represent the state, or are part of the state machinery, and obtain the legal justifica- tion to define the action as the “zone of exception” (agamben ). an exemplary case in this regard is kreuzer’s ( ) article, which depicts how the armed forces of the philippines (afp) and the philippine national police (pnp) have the authority to shoot and kill suspected drug dealers and users as well as other crime suspects. although the state has denounced extrajudicial killings, president duterte’s drug war campaign and the davao city bombing created the opportunity for the president to issue proclamation no. and memorandum order no. released on september on “violence suppression” leading to the legal approval of the use of deadly force in cases of suspected crime (kerrigan, , p. ). the availability of legal sources to prevent, or, on the contrary, to endure violence is decisive in shaping the actions of violent actors in the zone of exception. marddent ( ) provides a case where violence endures in thailand’s deep south because the non-violence values of the united nations security council resolution (unscr) , which are being practiced by various actors including the state itself, is not accom- modated in the new security policy. although the state recognizes the role of unscr as a guideline to enforce peacebuilding, the military – as an element of the state – seems to be indifferent, upholding its own prescription of security, which centers on the use of force and, ultimately, the use of violence as a means of conflict management. the second pattern of beyondness appears when attempts to counter violence are problematic because the actions are considered social practices and the violent situation is not recognized as an abnormality. rydstrom’s ( ) work, for example, problematizes how violence against women in vietnam is a chronic practice that is justified by a cultural understanding of men’s “hot temper”, even though the state has clearly stated its intent to eradicate the “social evil”. similarly, seto ( ) concludes that online hate speech and othering messages produced by indonesian islamic fun- damentalists are difficult to counter since the prosecution of religiously justified aseas ( ) | ario seto, gunnar stange, & susanne schröter expressions such as those would be considered “anti-islam” by the masses. one of the consequences of the conditions in which violence could operate beyond the state is that the state has lost, to some degree, its legitimacy to govern. with the enduring rampant violence and public distrust of the state apparatus in timor-leste, sousa ( ) exemplifies that, instead of applying formal legal procedures, customary law might help to foster the emergence of a non-violent environment. in such an example, the state apparatus does not have the power to follow up the legal case, for example against a cattle thief, as his ethnographic description shows. even when the state is present and equipped with institutions to counter violence, violence might emerge as unintended consequences beyond its control. the contribution of stange et al. ( ) highlights that, although internal displacement represents by far a larger challenge than cross-border displacement in southeast asia, scholarly attention in the past five years has mainly focused on the latter. protracted crises as well as reoc- curring natural disasters in the region, and their oftentimes short-lived repeated presence in the media, might just be another example of how structural violence can become a “normalcy”. the cases in this issue do not imply that violent actors are above the law, but prob- lematize how state action is bounded by normative orders beyond the state’s author- ity to govern. in this context, although the work of foucault ( ) and mbembe ( ) are helpful in identifying how the state responds to violence, the contribu- tions exemplify that there are practices, or enduring mechanisms, such as the public acceptance of violence or discrepancy in terms of how victims are treated, that oper- ate beyond the state. sousa’s ( ) work in this issue provides a critical case whereby the state, incapable of establishing an effective politics of reconciliation, has turned to the ritual of the sacred world to achieve legitimacy for its peacebuilding. violence framed within an institutionalizing discourse the aforementioned enduring mechanism is related to how violence can become an everyday life normalcy, if not ritualized. kreuzer ( ) shows that police officers’ deadly use of force in election years seems to decline because they are busy prevent- ing election violence. ironically, it is through these elections that politicians who support, or are reluctant to end, the use of deadly force are elected. the relationship between violence and political cycles also emerges in sousa’s ( ) work. his case shows an example of how, after centuries of violence and obscure frictions between political factions, the legal discourse of peacebuilding might disappear from the rep- ertoire of peacebuilding entirely. the difficulty associated with fostering non-violence is, in some cases, the result of the embeddedness of violence in the regularizing practice. rydstrom ( ) describes that even vietnamese women, who are within the same cohort group of the victims, do not perceive male violence against women as an anomaly. rydstrom’s ( ) interlocutors explained that physical abuse against women is normalized within the male-female cosmology where women are expected to show feminine qualities of calm and indulgence to the adversity. expressing an objection to domes- tic abuse could lead to a condition where society, even the same gender group, blames the victim. in one case, she exemplifies the experience of a victim who is blamed by | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia other women for inciting marital violence, as she had complained about her husband and was thereby perceived to have provoked him. similarly, seto ( ) shows that islamic-fundamentalist violence in public space is a stick-and-carrot action to solicit religious obedience from fellow muslims, who are rather relaxed in practicing islam. in thailand, marddent ( ) depicts that bureaucratic complexity has been una- ble to change the military understanding of security. in this notion of physical and armed “security”, peace has been confined to the presence and absence of gunshots, instead of order and non-violence. on the other hand, from the perspective of the dissidents, the regularizing practice of violence is embedded in the actualization of identity, as violence is perceived to be a necessary performance to counter the buddhist central government’s oppressive assimilation policy. scheper-hughes ( ) suggests that these cycles of violence represent a “contin- uum of violence”, which denotes the interconnectedness of all forms of violence and can also lead to the emergence of “extraordinary violence that is authorized, public, visible, and rewarded” (p. ). in this continuum, the affected societies understand the normalcy of violence within a register of institutionalizing discourses: violence is placed within rudimentary notions of security (marddent, ), armed encounters (kreuzer, ), displacement (stange et.al, ), forces of cosmology (dương-Âm, yang and yin in chinese, rydstrom, ), and within the religious discipline neces- sary to prevent evil (seto, ). accordingly, the emergence of a new order that could establish non-violent val- ues would first need to contest these discourses. marddent ( ) exemplifies that while the state has failed in securing the ecology of non-violence, grassroots women’s movements rely on salafi discourses to provide applicable methods of peace. yet, they remain at the periphery of peacebuilding efforts since salafism is generally viewed as a violent discourse. her case is therefore indicative of a stuck-in-the moment episode, in which peacebuilding actors struggle to gain recognition of their value in the nego- tiations. this presents a double-edged problem. first, the common perspective is that islamic communities in thailand’s deep south, which includes the peacebuilding actors, are the usual suspects in the region’s uprising. the recognition of salafi actors as peacemakers will tarnish this common knowledge and alter the historical record that the thai muslim community is a violent rebellious group – a political stance that is problematic for the thai government and its military, whose memory glorifies the fallen soldiers in the region. moreover, international ngos in the region would also need to shift their understanding beyond global notions of salafism as a threat to democracy if salafi actors are to be welcomed into the peacebuilding discourse. second, if muslim women’s voices are to be included, they would first need to be accepted within the patriarchal society. an exemplary disruptive method to end the cycle of violence emerges from sousa’s ( ) work in timor-leste. since the nation has been in a constant state of violence stemming from years of portuguese colonialization, years of indonesian occupation, and early-independence civil conflicts, political elites have partly delegitimized politicians’ historical accounts and have turned towards rural- based narratives. in this peacebuilding endeavor, the traditional leader lia na`in plays the role as the personification of peacebuilding to deliver an oral history of the young nation. in that way, the political elites are also able to present a party that is less aseas ( ) | ario seto, gunnar stange, & susanne schröter entangled with the nation’s violent history. yet, he posits this new development care- fully against the background of concerns about whether the lia na`in’s presence in state ceremonies has become a performative ritual (spiritual discourse), rather than an institutionalization of reconciliation. borders and claims the two previous constellations, namely the matters of beyondness and institu- tionalizing discourse, are related to the borders of social boundaries. as mentioned earlier, democratic opening and economic growth are often viewed as factors that help to secure development. as economic growth persists regardless of the lingering violence, there is no urgency from the state to provide comprehensive non-violent solutions to overcome discontent. this problem is well annunciated in the articles where violence takes place between those juxtaposed in social boundaries, such as the relationship between center and periphery (marddent, ), against a minor- ity or marginalized group (marddent, ; rydstrom, ), and political groups (kreuzer, ; seto, ; sousa, ). in these boundaries, violence takes place because a group of actors can initiate claims to denounce the recognition toward others. claims are important to frame the act of violence. seto’s ( ) article shows that declarations of war could be enacted by fundamentalist muslims upholding a physical “jihad” ideology, which is perceived as their operable definition of war against fellow citizens who deviate from scriptural religious norms. the insurgen- cies in thailand’s deep south also exemplify similar patterns; while the locals view their actions as political expressions of social justice and identity, the center views the actions as violent contestations of national integrity. even in a country where its political geography and ethnic diversity are relatively small, such as timor-leste, violence could emerge among groups with virtual rather than actual distinctions as sousa ( ) exemplifies with the conflicts between east timorese westerners and east timorese easterners. every state-building project offers an arena for the struggle of recognition. accordingly, any democratic opening provides the affordance for the ontological problem of conflict. anthony giddens ( ) examines the nation-state as a “bordered power con- tainer”, the boundaries of which mark not only administrative provisions but also entails the authority to govern power which includes the capacity for waging war, extracting resources, policing deviance, maintaining legitimacy, and pacifying the state. such a view of power is, however, a slippery slope since the nation is a top- down bracket of diversity. thus, the nation has an enduring tension between identity and discontent. in this setting, claims of justified violence are used to enact iden- tity with which the declaration of conflict or war, as a claim of defending something rightful, has become a legal justification rather than an action of total control which exerts power as giddens ( ) had hoped. such conflicts also render the tensions between the center and the periphery. this can range from the belief that the central government is failing to recognize the periphery’s needs or to ensure the equal distribution of wealth or power, as the contributions by marddent ( ) and sousa ( ) show. it is often the case that the center simply views violence as a problem of identity, rather than of social justice. in | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia such cases, the center only appraises social issues under the guise of whether they might hamper economic development. to note, although not discussed in this issue, such chronic violence also can be found in indonesia’s papua provinces and in the case of the rohingya in myanmar. prolonged conflicts preserve contentious politics where the conflicts also show how violence can become a currency (e.g., liow, ; mccargo, ). while the centers urge national stability to create an environment conducive to economic development, resistance and liberation movements in the periphery view that it is only from severe violence that they can create leverage for their demands. the reaction to this is often a military solution that will only increase the severity of violence (marddent, ). when claims of a right to violence cannot be broken, it risks prolonging the act of violence in other forms of violence. kreuzer’s ( ) research finds that the lethality levels of police departments’ use of deadly force were evident during the pre-duterte period as well as during his presidency. yet, through his rhetoric on the war on drugs, duterte has gained a certain political spotlight, which helped him win the cam- paign (curato, ). from her interviews, marddent ( ) found that local malay muslims view armed violence as a “security industry.” this is exemplified in this issue’s interview with sidney jones (stange, ) and her criticism of the indonesian government’s single-sided development approach to conflict management in papua, which she contends has led to a deep entrenchment of structural violence in the region. such settings provide violent actors with the possibility to control the scale and spatiality of violence. the risk, then, is a rollback of the pro-democratic progress that can be observed in southeast asia in recent years. at the same time, such processes of accumulation have convoluted the goal of enacting violence. along the course of prolonged violence, actions follow various tra- jectories and goals are adjusted. in such settings, violence becomes a practice rather than deviant behavior, posing the risk of becoming a collective mundane experience as previously discussed. this view is an invitation to contest riches’ ( ) argu- ment, which laments that violent actors always have choices, as they have chosen the conduct for they have calculated that it would be advantageous in dealing with the opponent. emerging nation-states have been pacified by the opening of democracy. yet, there are practices that are retained within their political regularities that pre- vent the total emergence of a non-violent environment. peacebuilding and its discourses of origin the durability of violence impacts the creation of non-violent initiatives. when the state and its legal system displays its weakness in delivering non-violent spaces, non-violent spaces might emerge unexpectedly from below as the contributions by rydstrom ( ), marddent ( ), and sousa ( ) show. rydstrom ( ) under- lines that there is a connection between the effective local movement of “say no to violence” (nói không với bạo lực) in vietnam to the larger global initiative of “say no – unite to end violence against women” sponsored by the un. in the case of peace- building in thailand’s deep south, marddent ( ) depicts that salafism, as a global religious discourse, has played a role in inciting one of the most effective approaches to peacebuilding. she acknowledges that salafi actors have initiated education circles aseas ( ) | ario seto, gunnar stange, & susanne schröter to teach “spiritual healing” in mainstreaming life-security discourses. spirituality also appears in sousa’s ( ) work. while the timorese doubt the state’s historical nar- rative because of its victors’ bias, it turns to the lia-na’in, the guardian of the sacred houses in the mountains, as a source of legitimacy in recounting the history of the nation, even though the latter hardly appeared as an authority on the national scale in the history of timor-leste. these three anthropological works advise that peacebuilding requires a convinc- ing discourse of origin. in marddent’s ( ) and sousa’s ( ) cases, spirituality becomes convincing because the people have witnessed that the “rational” govern- mental approach to violence has not been working for decades. and when it does work, it simply delivers the status quo. marddent’s ( ) interlocutors believe that the islamic notion of patience (sabr) provides a practice that is helpful for ending the cycle of violence because it is a practice to find inner peace. in timor-leste, lia na`in’s blessing is viewed as a spiritual union of the nation and its ancestors and “represents a unity between the people and the politicians as the personification of the state in the post-conflict nation” (sousa, p. ). in these cases, the spirit overcomes political differences. while malay muslims in thailand and the timorese seek out non-violent practices through their cosmologies, vietnamese women did the oppo- site as their cosmology normalizes violence against women. in search of security, they sourced their narrative from global awareness movements. the effort to end violence against women became a convincing public discourse not simply because local women had demanded it, but because it found support in massive efforts from local organizations and ngos along with the global #metoo movement to recognize the problem (rydstrom, ). different from the previously mentioned discourses of peacebuilding, the work of stange et al. ( ) shows that those who are displaced by natural disasters often only gain national, and not international, attention because natural disasters are often considered a national problem with the victims ‘only’ internally displaced. by con- trast, refugees classified as asylum seekers and stateless persons gain more academic attention because their mobility concerns at least two states. media most of the articles in this issue address the role that media has played in the creation of violence and non-violent initiatives. as mentioned earlier, the national awareness to end abuse against women in vietnam has seized on the crucial momentum of the #metoo movement (rydstrom, ). sousa ( ) also notes that media has a cer- tain interest in covering official ceremonies, such as with dada ikas (withdrawing the oath) and loke dalan (opening the way), when lia na`in are present. on the contrary, seto ( ) presents a case that digital media becomes a useful scape for indonesian islamic fundamentalists to encroach on public space and to gain new followers. it is exactly because of the circulation of problematic online content, such as bigotry and hate speech, that the islamists could defeat the christian incumbent in jakarta’s gubernatorial election, even though the latter was predicted to win. the outstanding work of kreuzer ( ) in this issue demonstrates that the role of media is not confined to the representation of actors, but as the source of verifiable | aseas ( ) editorial: durable violence in southeast asia quantitative data. since the state does not provide credible data, he mined reports of the use of deadly force by police from various news sites. with such a rich data set, he imposes that violence should be measured to observe its intensity and its lethality. in one of his findings, he exemplifies that “given a large number of armed encounters, the absence or extraordinarily low numbers of killed or wounded police-officers, sig- nals [actually] excessive violence” (kreuzer, , p. ). conclusion throughout the articles in this issue, we seek to reconstruct the current contours of violence in southeast asia. the articles in these issues advise that durable vio- lence operates through machinery, may that be through the state apparatus (kreuzer, ; marddent, ), (legal) discourse (kreuzer, ; marddent, ; stange et al., ), cultural praxis (rydstrom, ), or unresolved frictions of civil groups (seto, ; sousa, ). these machineries operate in certain constellations through which violence could be reproduced as repertoires and a problem of resources. thus, violence could be studied through inquiries that focus on: ( ) questions of how vio- lence creates new opportunities in institutionalizing movements and networks; ( ) how violence is institutionalized; ( ) the transferability of ideologies and violent dis- courses across spatial and temporal boundaries; ( ) the weakness of civil society; ( ) the ambiguous role of the state; and ( ) the precarious transformations that transpire when political orders are being contested. it is against the background of durability that questions about the scale and transferability of violence emerges, which requires investigations of the steward- ship of local culture, institution, and power. this issue, therefore, seeks to initiate a discussion of how violence operates on different scales through possible machinery. violence in this context is not simply an outcome of tension but a mechanism that actors and organizations deploy to stabilize their struggles, which eventually makes peacebuilding or democratic projects volatile.  references agamben, g. 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( ). crisis and chronicity: anthropological perspectives on continuous conflict and decline. ethnos, ( ), - . wilson,  i. ( ). the rise and fall of political gangsters in indonesian democracy. in e. aspinall, & m. mietzner (eds.), problems of democratization in indonesia: elections, institutions and society (pp. – ). singapore: iseas-yusof ishak institute.  about the authors ario seto is a postdoctoral researcher and media anthropologist at the collaborative research center “discourses of weakness and resource regimes,” goethe university frankfurt, ger- many. his recent book netizenship: activism and online community transformation in indone- sia (palgrave macmillan, ) details the disciplining practices and ethics in shaping militant netizens. ► contact: seto@em.uni-frankfurt.de gunnar stange is a post-doctoral researcher in the research group population geography and demography at the department of geography and regional research, university of vienna, austria. his research interests include peace and conflict studies, development studies, and forced migration studies. his regional focus is on southeast asia. ► contact: gunnar.stange@univie.ac.at susanne schröter is a professor at the department of social and cultural anthropology at the goethe university frankfurt, germany, and founder as well as director of the frankfurt re- search center on global islam. she is also a principal investigator at the cluster of excellence “the formation of normative orders”. her research interests include political islam, islamic extremism, the transformation of gender orders, and religious, political, and ethnic conflicts. ► contact: s.schroeter@em.uni-frankfurt.de acknowledgements this issue was funded by the german research foundation (deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of the funding for the collaborative research center “discourses of weakness and resource regimes”, goethe university frankfurt, germany. the editors would like to thank macario lacbawan jr., janine murphy, katja rieck, karl valent, the editorial board of aseas as well as the anonymous reviewers for their highly valuable contributions to this issue. positioning ethos in/for the twenty-first century: an introduction to histories of ethos humanities editorial positioning ethos in/for the twenty-first century: an introduction to histories of ethos james s. baumlin and craig a. meyer ,* department of english, missouri state university, springfield, mo , usa; jbaumlin@missouristate.edu department of language and literature, texas a&m university-kingsville, kingsville, tx , usa * correspondence: craig.meyer@tamuk.edu received: july ; accepted: july ; published: august ���������� ������� abstract: the aim of this essay is to introduce, contextualize, and provide rationale for texts published in the humanities special issue, histories of ethos: world perspectives on rhetoric. it surveys theories of ethos and selfhood that have evolved since the mid-twentieth century, in order to identify trends in discourse of the new millennium. it outlines the dominant theories—existentialist, neo-aristotelian, social-constructionist, and poststructuralist—while summarizing major theorists of language and culture (archer, bourdieu, foucault, geertz, giddens, gusdorf, heidegger). it argues for a perspectivist/dialectical approach, given that no one theory comprehends the rich diversity of living discourse. while outlining the “current state of theory,” this essay also seeks to predict, and promote, discursive practices that will carry ethos into a hopeful future. (we seek, not simply to study ethos, but to do ethos.) with respect to twenty-first century praxis, this introduction aims at the following: to acknowledge the expressive core of discourse spoken or written, in ways that reaffirm and restore an epideictic function to ethos/rhetoric; to demonstrate the positionality of discourse, whereby speakers and writers “out themselves” ethotically (that is, responsively and responsibly); to explore ethos as a mode of cultural and embodied personal narrative; to encourage an ethotic “scholarship of the personal,” expressive of one’s identification/participation with/in the subject of research; to argue on behalf of an iatrological ethos/rhetoric based in empathy, care, healing (of the past) and liberation/empowerment (toward the future); to foster interdisciplinarity in the study/exploration/performance of ethos, establishing a conversation among scholars across the humanities; and to promote new versions and hybridizations of ethos/rhetoric. each of the essays gathered in the abovementioned special issue achieves one or more of these aims. most are “cultural histories” told within the culture being surveyed: while they invite criticism as scholarship, they ask readers to serve as witnesses to their stories. most of the authors are themselves “positioned” in ways that turn their texts into “outings” or performances of gender, ethnicity, “race,” or ability. and most affirm the expressive, epideictic function of ethos/rhetoric: that is, they aim to display, affirm, and celebrate those “markers of identity/difference” that distinguish, even as they humanize, each individual and cultural storytelling. these assertions and assumptions lead us to declare that histories of ethos, as a collection, presents a whole greater than its essay-parts. we conceive it, finally, as a conversation among theories, histories, analyses, praxes, and performances. some of this, we know, goes against the grain of modern (western) scholarship, which privileges analysis over narrative and judges texts against its own logocentric commitments. by means of this introduction and collection, we invite our colleagues in, across, and beyond the academy “to see differently.” should we fall short, we will at least have affirmed that some of us “see the world and self”—and talk about the world and self—through different lenses and within different cultural vocabularies and positions. keywords: ethos; selfhood; identity; authenticity; authority; persona; positionality; postmodernism; haunt; iatrology; trust; storytelling; archer; aristotle; bourdieu; corder; foucault; geertz; giddens; gusdorf; heidegger humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of . introduction a person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. the individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, . . . must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing “story” about the self. —anthony giddens, modernity and self-identity (giddens , p. ) ethos is created when writers locate themselves. —nedra reynolds, “ethos as location” (reynolds , p. ) “we seem able to approach ethos only within a set of paradoxes and . . . contradictions” (baumlin , “introduction”, p. xxvi), writes james s. baumlin: we begin by outlining a fundamental opposition between platonic and aristotelian models of ethos—that is, between a theological or metaphysical truth and a verbally constructed appearance. we then chart the historical growth of consciousness and personhood, observing the relatively recent birth of self-consciousness, but we are immediately compelled, following marxist and poststructuralist theories, to deny the singularity and stability of consciousness, authorship, voice, text, self. the nature of the self and its representations in language have fallen in doubt, not simply decentered or destabilized but radically questioned, questioned even as valid categories of being. thrown into a crisis of interpretation, we confront a range of theories that would shatter the author’s hypostatized voice into a set of textual functions, that would deny the speaker’s conscious control over his or her now stratified, “heteroglot” language, that would refuse to locate the speaker or writer “inside” or “outside” (or anywhere), that would render self-presence and self-possession a bourgeois fiction, that would find authors like derrida and foucault and barthes writing about the “death” of the author (a curious paradox, this). where are we left? does ethos remain . . . a definable (or defensible) rhetorical concept? is it at all useful? (baumlin , “introduction”, pp. xxvi–xxvii) the questions above remain relevant and answerable, though our ways of answering must suit the needs of the twenty-first century. in effect, this present essay picks up where that previous survey—published more than a quarter-century ago—leaves off. here, we focus on mid- to late-twentieth century discussions of ethos and remain on the lookout for traditions, trends, and ideas capable of carrying us into the new millennium. excepting those places where aristotelian theory has been reinterpreted, we find little need to repeat the -year history of western ethos. we seek, rather, to outline the current scholarly conversation, particularly in those places where ethos is being redefined, hybridized, and innovatively applied—or where it should be. we write by way of introduction to the essay collection, histories of ethos: world perspectives on rhetoric. here, the “histories” being told are, in large part, “other” than those subsumed within western theory, and we intend this collection to be forward-looking, articulating possible futures for ethos and ethotic discourse. we proceed in foucauldian manner, seeking not the “essential nature” of ethos but rather its engagements in intellectual discussion. in this regard, nick mansfield shows us seeing that ethos, pathos, and logos have entered common english vocabulary, we print them in roman. aristotle remains the singular exception: we cannot ignore the aristotelian legacy (particularly in its vocabulary), since his rhetoric continues to inform discussions of ethos today. for useful surveys of ethos in western historical rhetoric, see wisse ( ); smith ( ); may ( ); kennedy ( , art); baumlin ( , “ethos”; , “introduction”). discussions of individual theorists are recorded in notes following. we take “discourse” expansively, as comprehending the realm of praxis in communication; we take “rhetoric” more restrictively, as representing the theories that categorize, explain/critique, and predict living discursive praxis. humanities , , of the way: “the question to be answered is not ‘how do we get beyond these theories to the truth they aspire to . . . ?’ but ‘what do the debates and theories themselves tell us about where we are placed in the history of culture and meaning-making?” (mansfield , subjectivity, kindle ed., pp. – ). he continues: the insight that the genealogist seeks is not the truth that will finally make further discussion redundant, but how the discussion itself—with its wild inconsistencies and its bitter antagonisms, in which the rivals, like enemy armies in some famous battles, never quite seem to catch sight of each other—defines the way we live and represent ourselves. (mansfield , kindle ed., pp. – ) to paraphrase mansfield, our task is not so much “to explain” ethos as “to reach a better understanding of how the issue” of ethos “has become so important to us” (mansfield , kindle ed., p. ). and its importance is hard to overstate, given that we live in an age of ethos: issues of “trust,” expertise, and “charismatic authority” have largely supplanted enlightenment logos or “good reasons” as the ground of popular discourse. as nedra reynolds notes, “ethos . . . shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces” (reynolds , “ethos as location”, p. ). tensions remain in most aspects of the current conversation, from etymology to application, and virtually every formulation of ethos finds itself situated within a binary opposition—a dialogue or dialectic of some sort. our approach, thus, is genealogical: tracing terms back to their origins, we give each side a fair hearing, leaving readers to choose which version/s of ethos serve in which times and places within which specific exigencies before which specific audiences. the essays gathered in histories of ethos do tend to take sides; our task, here, is to outline the parameters of theory within each major debate. in effect, this present essay is a study of the contemporary “discourse of ethos-discourse,” as reflected in our edited collection. as a term of rhetoric, ethos derives from aristotle, who was first to theorize its praxis. his major discussion—from the rhetoric . . —follows (aristotle ): [there is persuasion] through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others] on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. and this should result from the speech, not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person; for it is not the case, as some of the technical writers propose in their treatment of the art, in glancing janus-like across histories and futures of ethos, we are indebted to friedrich nietzsche ( – ) (nietzsche [ ] ) as well as to foucault. citing bové’s ( ) essay, “mendacious innocents” (pp. – ), douglas thomas writes, two of the key elements of nietzsche’s method of genealogical research are pointed out by paul bové: uncovering what is present . . . and focusing on the future through a better understanding of the past . . . . genealogical readings call for discoveries of an ever-present past, previously veiled or disguised, through the analysis of displacements, errors and chance in history, and provide new insight into the present. more important, genealogy gives new interpretations to the future. (d. thomas , “utilising”, p. ; emphasis added) we take “contemporary” theory broadly, as falling within the epoch of postmodernism: as such, it reflects the state of intellectual culture after world war ii, the holocaust, and hiroshima. twenty-first century discussions of ethos remain in dialogue with mid- to late-twentieth century thought: with kenneth burke and chaïm perelman; with the later heidegger; with the postwar existentialism of georges gusdorf and maurice merleau-ponty; with derridean deconstruction; with the social theories of michel foucault and pierre bourdieu; with postcolonialism and feminism; with the varieties of post-freudian psychology (including behaviorism); with post-industrial capitalism and the rise of corporatism; with the posthuman interfaces of artificial intelligence. the post- in postmodernism declares much of what concerns us (and inspires us) in this essay collection. humanities , , of that fair-mindedness on the part of the speaker makes no contribution to persuasiveness; rather, character [ethos] is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor in persuading. ( a) yet aristotle himself appropriated the term from homeric poetry and pre-socratic philosophy, where it inhabited different discursive spaces with different nuances of meaning. even in its earliest appearances, ethos pulled in different directions, particularly as these are “contained within” variants of greek etymology and usage. and contemporary theory—as reflected in textual criticism, media and communication studies, gender studies, law, theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, ethics, politics, economics, even ecology—continues the fight over meanings and applications. is ethos a verbal behavior or the “dwelling place” that contains such behavior? does it belong to the speaker or to the audience (or to both, or to neither)? does it dwell in the space “between” rhetor and audience? is it a directed, symbolic action or a dialogic transaction? is it revealed or constructed by means of speech? (does it pre-exist speech? does it “exist” at all?) like many terms from greek philosophy (logos, pistis, kairos, to give a few) ethos remains untranslatable in any word-for-word correspondence. numerous terms gesture in its direction, though no one word or phrase captures its nuances in english. character, authority, charisma, credence, credibility, trust, trustworthiness, sincerity, “good sense,” goodwill, expertise, reliability, authenticity, subjectivity, “the subject,” self, selfhood, self-identity, image, reputation, cultural identity, habit, habitus, habituation, person, persona, impersonation, performance, self-fashioning, voice, personal style: these make for a sampling of stand-in terms. theorists have played variations on the aristotelian vocabulary: there’s jakob wisse’s ( ) “rational ethos” and “ethos of sympathy,” jim w. corder’s ( ) “generative ethos,” stephen k. white’s ( ) “ethos of citizenship,” robert k. merton’s ( ) “scientific ethos,” michael w. delashmutt’s ( ) “cyborg ethos,” liesbeth kothals altes’ ( ) “narrative ethos,” john oddo’s ( ) “intertextual ethos,” kristie s. fleckenstein’s ( ) “photographic ethos,” valerie palmer-mehta’s ( ) “feminist ethos,” stacey waite’s ( ) “queer ethos,” gayatri chakravorty spivak’s ( ) “ethos of the subaltern,” and so on. theorists have coined their own terms suggestive of ethos: there’s the freudian ich or ego-consciousness (heir to the cartesian cogito), the jungian “self,” the heideggerian dasein, the burkean “agent,” the sartrean pur soi , the lacanian sujet divisé , the gusdorfian parleur, the barthesian auteur, etc. there are patterns in these lists. some terms point to the existential components of ethos; some to its sociological/cultural expressions; some to its linguistic/discursive praxis. indeed, the terms above serve as our hunting ground. for it seems that any adequate “map” or model of ethos will include a version of self and of its relation to culture and language. equally important is the insight that each theory orients itself from (and, in so doing, privileges) one of three perspectives: that of self, or of culture, or of language. we begin with an existentialist presumption of an ontology of self, which “expresses” or reveals itself by language. within this model, the self is real—a being-in-the-world. it may need language here and elsewhere, we follow george a. kennedy’s translation (aristotle on rhetoric). w. rhys robert’s translation of this last phrase, however, is rather more emphatic: “on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses” (aristotle , basic works, p. ). our task might have simplified had aristotle restricted the term to his triad of pisteis—ethos, logos, and pathos—as outlined in book i of the rhetoric. yet the varieties of “‘character’—not just of the speaker, but of the ‘judge’ in law courts and assemblies, of various audiences, of different communities, and as depicted in narrative—function in different ways in discourse” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ); emphasis added). within these varied functions, aristotle “establish[es] their etymological ‘family resemblances’ as ἦθoς (that is, ‘rational ethos’ or a speaker’s rhetorically-constructed character), ἔθoς (that is, moral character as reflected in “custom” or “habit”), ἤθη (that is, the various character types identifiable with each audience, including ἤθη tῶv πoλιτηῶv or the ‘characters of states’), and ethopoiea (that is, the literary depiction of character within the structures of dialogue or narrative)” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ). see (sartre [ ] , being and nothingness, hazel e. barnes, trans.). see (lacan , ecrits: a selection, bruce fink, trans.). we cite georges gusdorf ( – ) in this regard, who declares expression a necessary “coefficient of speech” (gusdorf , speaking, p. ), such that “the whole of human experience in its militant sense may be understood as humanities , , of to reveal itself (heidegger), but its existence precedes discourse. giving the “essential nature” of the self, an existentialist model seeks an ethos of “authenticity.” in contrast, a social-constructionist model privileges culture over self, often reducing the self to a repertoire of behaviors—of cultural “rules” and “recipes.” within such a model, the self is constructed by language and other modes of cultural-symbolic communication/participation. here the self has no meaning—no “being”—outside of its cultural container; and, since the self “enacts itself” within specific roles and behaviors, its “nature” (if such a term applies here) arises in performance. the self, in this sense, is a mode of personation—a mask. within such a model, ethos gives the “roles” (goffman) and “rules” (geertz) of the socially-constructed self. in even greater contrast, poststructuralist models privilege language over self and culture alike. within such a model, the self-expressive self “dissolves” within the interstices of texts. following jacques derrida ( – ), deconstructionists declare writing’s primacy over speech: “orphaned” from the living, embodied voice of the speaker, the written text confesses its loss of authorial presence (derrida , dissemination, p. ). indeed, the author’s “death” is proclaimed—though with little mourning. within such a model, one cannot say that the self “textualizes” itself: that, after all, would posit the speaking/writing subject as a point of origin whose existence precedes language. rather, the self reduces to a grammatical function, a mere pronoun: “i.” stuart hall states this position in its extreme: “identities,” he writes, “are points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. they are the result of a successful articulation or ‘chaining’ of the subject into the flow of discourse” (hall and gay , “who needs”, p. ). within this model, notions of selfhood—whether existential or cultural in origin—remain mere fictions, textually inscribed. these versions of selfhood provide rhetoric with its enabling premises, upon which it has built its contemporary versions of ethos. we should note, however, that such premises cannot be proved from within the discourses that they generate. competing versions, thus, are the starting points of a striving for expression” (p. ). within an interpersonal self/other dialectic, one’s “relation to others,” notes gusdorf, “is only meaningful insofar as it reveals that personal reality within the person who is himself speaking. to communicate, man expresses himself” (p. ; emphasis added). here and elsewhere, we regret the masculinist vocabulary embedded in such texts. theologian roger trigg articulates this position: “so far from the differentiation between subject and object being the consequence of a concentration on language, language itself depends on it. the self cannot be constituted by language. it is presupposed by it” (trigg , rationality, p. ). “whatever else the self is,” writes james t. tedeschi, “it is developed in the context of relationships with others during which self-presentational behavior is performed” (tedeschi , “private and public”, p. ). tedeschi presents an extreme version of the social-performative model: indeed, if one removed the identities of the individual as a parent, sibling, offspring, productive worker, and so on, it is doubtful there would be anything left to refer to as the self. other aspects of the self, such as competence, moral qualities, and character traits, also have meaning only in the context of social interactions. (tedeschi , “private and public”, p. ) indeed, the latin persona translates literally as “mask” (baumlin , “introduction”, p. xii), the sort worn by actors on public stage (hence the dramatis personae or “cast of characters” in drama). erving goffman ( – ) elaborates on the social “mask”: it is “a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role . . . . it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves” (goffman , presentation, p. ). roland barthes ( – ) argues similarly: “writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. writing is that ... obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes” (barthes , “death”, p. ). in writing, thus, “the author enters into his own death” (barthes , “death”, p. ). pertaining to personal and cultural narratives alike, identities arising from a “narratization of the self” are, hall declares, “necessarily fictional” in nature (hall and gay , “who needs”, p. ). such claims return us to the question of ontology. “this view,” writes margaret s. archer, “elides the concept of the self with the self of self: we are nothing but what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining society’s conversation. however, to see us as purely cultural artifacts is to neglect the vital significance of our embodied practice in the world” (archer , being human, p. ). put baldly, discourse cannot prove what it must “take for granted.” in summarizing judith butler’s critique of natural or real vs. “fantasized” bodies, nick mansfield elaborates on this point: “the very identification of a nature and a reality that pre-exist culture is itself a model produced within culture, another ‘culturally instituted fantasy’” (mansfield , subjectivity, kindle ed., pp. – ). he continues: humanities , , of discussion, by means of which we can organize our explorations of the varieties of ethos and ethotic discourse. through the following paragraphs, we elaborate on several versions of self and the theories they enable. we begin with a working definition provided by jim w. corder ( – ). ethos, corder writes, is “character as it emerges in language” (corder , “varieties”, p. ). by “character,” we assume both personhood and persona—that is, the self’s expressive self-identity as well as its social presentation or mask. there is a double movement, both inward and outward, in this term, which introjects how one “sees” oneself, as well as projects how one “is seen” by others. one hopes for sincerity, authenticity, and self-consistency in this doubled, inside/outside “showing-forth” of character. when inside and outside match, one can speak of ethos as self-revelation: “what you see is what you get.” but there can be a slippage or disjunction between the person and persona—again, between the inner and the outer versions of self. in that case, one can speak of ethos as performance. to this inside/outside dialectic, let us add considerations of culture. character “emerges,” but does so within a distinctive “cultural dress,” one that presents itself—in effect, “clothes itself”—within markers of identity/difference (ethnicity, gender, social status, regional accent, etc.). michel foucault ( – ) gives the athenian ethos as illustration: “ethos was the deportment and the way to behave. it was the subject’s mode of being and a certain manner of acting visible to others. one’s ethos was seen by his dress, by his bearing, by his gait, by the poise with which he reacts to events, etc.” (foucault , “ethic of care”, p. ; emphasis added). ethos, in this sense, displays cultural “markers,” such that the speaker’s task is “to open a space” through language that allows the self to be heard and, saliently, to be seen. adding the self/other binary to this model, we note that speakers position themselves against hegemonic counter-discourses that, historically, have served to efface or oppress cultural “difference.” the belief that there are categories that exist independent of and prior to the systems that theorise them is an act of faith, produced within a specific culture at a specific time in its history. the idea of a “real” biological body, which depends on culture’s guess work about what exists outside of culture, must equally be seen as an object of belief, rather than an immutable fact. gender, therefore, is neither a result of nature’s own categories, nor an interpretation appended to them. distinctions attributed to nature are only produced from within culture—in other words, within gender. (mansfield , subjectivity, kindle ed., pp. – ) the same qualifications hold for an ontology of the self, which we are content to take “as an object of belief, rather than an immutable fact.” as such, we can theorize about the embodied self—that is, we can talk about it—without claiming to know more than we can “know” or prove. as we’ve seen, georges gusdorf makes use of this same vocabulary: “to speak,” writes gusdorf, “is to wake up, to move toward the world and others. speaking actualizes an emergence” (gusdorf , speaking, pp. – ; emphasis added). goffman’s influential presentation of self ( ) asserts the “moral character of projections” (p. ): “sociology is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way” (p. ). he continues: connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is. in consequence, when an individual projects a definition of a situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect. he also foregoes all claims to be things he does not appear to be . . . . the others find, then, that the individual has informed them as to what is and as to what they ought to see as the “is.” (goffman , presentation, p. ) for discussions/applications of genetic and cultural “markers of identity,” see essays in the special issue of racial and ethnic studies . ( ). we have broadened our use of “markers” to include all expressions (mental, physical, social, demographic) of difference—of the ways that self-identity, cultural identity, and linguistic identity function within a self/other binary. we accept, as a matter of course, the anthropological perspective and its relevance to ethos. “we are,” writes clifford geertz ( – ), “incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture—and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: dobuan and javanese, hopi and italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and commercial” (geertz , interpretation, p. ). as geertz notes further, our “great capacity for learning . . . has often been remarked,” but even more crucial is our “extreme dependence upon a certain sort of learning: the attainment of concepts, the apprehension and application of specific systems of symbolic meaning” (p. ). these “systems of symbolic meaning” constitute culture, which, in turn, conditions individual human experience, expression, and self-image. humanities , , of though neoliberalism aspires to a universalized, rational model of “‘human being’—a creature eventually, ultimately, to be seen without color” or other markers of identity (sennett , “racial identity”, p. )—we follow foucault in questioning whether “there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others” (foucault , “ethic of care”, p. ). foucault elaborates: the problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination. (foucault , “ethic of care”, p. ) the “utopia” that foucault derides remains a dream-motif of the enlightenment, whose aspirations toward universalism—toward a genuinely race-, gender-, and color-blind discourse—continue to define the (post-)modern academy. over against “the utopia of a perfect transparent communication,” one confronts the “games of power” embedded in discourse. by these “games,” foucault addresses a specific function of ethos: along with a speaker’s “cultural dress,” ethos identifies the ritualized modes of address that confer authority upon those who would “speak on behalf” of some group—some institution, organization, party, or class interest. for “groups need representation,” notes karl maton, “since they cannot speak as a group. they therefore invest their moral authority in . . . individuals who, thus consecrated, are the voice ‘of the people’—a claim to which they give tacit assent” (maton , “habitus”, p. ); emphasis added). in the following, we switch theorists (and vocabularies) from foucault to pierre bourdieu ( – ) though, again, we draw our example from antiquity. in the warrior-council of book i of the iliad, agamemnon demands the slave girl, briseis, from achilles. insulted, the achaean champion begins to draw his sword. but, visited by athena (who tempers his wrath), achilles returns it to its sheath. in its stead, achilles wields a different instrument, the σκῆπτρoν—the skeptron or “scepter” (or, as a. t. murray translates it below, “staff”), by which he speaks a dire, “mighty oath”: but the son of peleus again addressed with violent words the son of atreus . . . . “heavy with wine, with the face of a dog but the heart of a deer, never have you had courage to arm for battle along with your people . . . else, son of atreus, this would be your last piece of insolence. but i will speak out to you, and will swear thereto a mighty oath: by this staff [σκῆπτρoν] that shall never more put forth leaves or shoots since first it left its stump among the mountains, nor shall it again grow green, for . . . the sons of the achaeans carry it in their hands when they act as judges . . . this shall be for you a mighty oath. surely some day a longing for achilles will come upon the sons of the achaeans one and all, and on that day you will not be able to help them . . . when many shall fall dying before man-slaying hector. but you will gnaw the heart within you, in anger that you did no honour to the best of the achaeans.” (iliad . – ) in homer, the skeptron “is the attribute of the king, of heralds, messengers, judges, and all persons who, whether of their own nature or because of a particular occasion, are invested with while we remain hopeful in the possibility of living harmoniously as “free, rational, and responsible being[s]” (white , ethos, pp. – ), we concur with stephen k. white’s post-enlightenment critique of the “ideal of self”: [the enlightenment ethos] does not incorporate all of what, over the last few decades, has been referred to with the phrases “identity politics” and “the politics of recognition.” these phrases draw our attention beyond respect for the individual in the universalist sense, to the acknowledgment of people’s diversity, their distinctiveness in language, religion, sexuality, nationality, and traditional practices. (white , ethos, pp. – ) in sum, the enlightenment model of self remains logocentric, not ethocentric. white adds, “this demand that one’s identity be acknowledged in its distinctiveness, or difference, is one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary political theory” (white , ethos, pp. – ). indeed: and it remains a focus of contemporary rhetorical theory. humanities , , of authority” (bourdieu , language, p. ). but, as bourdieu states elsewhere, this “authority comes to language from outside, a fact concretely exemplified by the skeptron that, in homer, is passed to the orator who is about to speak. language at most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it” (bourdieu , language, p. ; emphasis added). a speaker’s assumption of authority, thus, is not a consequence of ethos (as per aristotle); rather, it is a precondition—a “given,” and accessed by means of the skeptron. like other cultural practices, public discourse has its “plans, recipes, rules, instructions” (geertz , interpretation, p. ), which speakers are assumed to adopt or adapt in positioning themselves as having, not just the right to speak, but to be heard in speaking. within specific institutions, organizations, and communities, there are authoritative/charismatic roles as well as rules: priest, novitiate, judge, tribal elder, teacher, apprentice, employee, manager, salesperson, politician, political commentator, soldier, athlete, scientist, rap artist . . . each with its distinctive “speech genres” (bakhtin ), social rituals, and stylistic/expressive strategies. the question that postmodern culture poses is one of competing voices unequally positioned with respect to power: who speaks for whom, and by what instrument or means? continuing his analysis, bourdieu finds material symbols of authority in contemporary media: the abundance of microphones, cameras, journalists and photographers, is, like the homeric skeptron . . . the visible manifestation of the hearing granted to the orator, of his credit, of the social importance of his acts and his words. photography—which, by recording, eternizes—has the effect . . . of solemnizing the exemplary acts of the political ritual. (bourdieu , language, p. ; emphasis in original) while the camera records a speaker’s visual presence, it’s the microphone that stands in for the skeptron today. as women and people of color have learned too well, the difficulty in achieving social justice—in being seen and heard, whether individually or as a group—lies not in refutation within public debate, but in practices of silencing: that is, of being denied the skeptron. having placed rituals of authority “outside of language” and having acknowledged their cultural contexts, we’re ready to turn to aristotle. . aristotle: ethos as “character” rhetorical theory of the mid-twentieth century wedded itself to aristotle ( – bce). his rhetoric had already saturated nineteenth-century scholarship, displacing ciceronianism from its two-thousand-year reign; still, it was in the mid-twentieth century that aristotle became the dominant authority in “academic rhetoric”—particularly within composition programs as these were beginning in fact, the conferring of authority belongs to “rituals of social magic” (bourdieu , language, p. ). the “magic” of such rituals, bourdieu adds, “does not reside in the discourses and convictions which accompany them . . . but in the system of social relations which constitute ritual itself, which make it possible and socially operative” (bourdieu , language, p. fn. ; emphasis added). susan miller notes the “various forms of instruction” in moral character that are “threaded through the identities of seer, prophet, poet, physician, philosopher, hero, and orator” (miller , trust, p. ): in different ways that link these figures, each mediates between sacred truths that comfort us as assurance that more than we know might become known and the illusion that we know more already insofar as these figures make statements we trust but cannot verify. and paradoxically, what is said of those secrets is trusted in proportion to its ability to be unsettling”. (miller , trust, p. ; emphasis added) in other words, we rely on charismatic authority “to know” what we cannot know ourselves. in this respect, political demonstrations are expressive in function: that is, they create the political identity of those who “enact themselves” as demonstrators within “the act” of demonstrating. so bourdieu suggests: “by demonstrating the demonstrators and, above all, the leaders of the demonstration, the demonstration demonstrates the existence of the group capable of demonstrating its existence and of leaders who can demonstrate its existence—thereby justifying their existence” (bourdieu , language, p. ). but demonstrations “work” only if they are covered by mic and camera. (the collapse of the “occupy wall street” movement came when local news stations, pressured by city governments and chambers of commerce, ceased regular coverage.) humanities , , of to evolve out of departments of english. the so-called “chicago school” built its critical foundations upon the aristotelian canon; supplanting the old, belletristic “current-traditional rhetoric,” the “new rhetoric” (as it came to be called) was, in large part, a revival of aristotelianism strengthened by new translations, editions, and commentaries (cooper ; freese ; grimaldi , ; aristotle ; roberts ; solmsen ; wisse ; kennedy ). even where the “new rhetoric” sought to expand its vocabularies and boundaries (perelman and olbrechts-tyteca ; burke ), it did so extensively in dialogue with aristotelian classicism. aristotle’s dominance is readily explained: his systematic approach; his “demystifying” of persuasion (as opposed to the “irrationalism” of gorgianic apate and the theology underlying plato’s psychagogia); and, above all, his commitment to “reason” (logos) reinforced the intellectual foundations of modernism. in sum, aristotelian rhetoric served the enlightenment discourses of science, technology, and neoliberal political philosophy. for, logocentric in its linguistic epistemology, the rhetoric articulates a “rational ethos” (wisse , ethos and pathos, p. ) that appealed to postwar western intellectual culture. there’s an elegant symmetry in the rhetoric, which outlines three pisteis or modes of “artistic proof” ( . . .), these being logos (an offering of “good reasons”), pathos (an appeal to an audience’s emotions), and ethos (an appeal for an audience’s trust). in another major passage (rhetoric . . ) aristotle identifies the components of ethos specifically, “for there are three things we trust other than logical demonstrations” (aristotle ): these are practical wisdom [phronesis] and virtue [arete] and goodwill [eunoia]; for speakers make mistakes in what they say or advise through [failure to exhibit] either all or one of these.... therefore, a person seeming to have all these qualities is necessarily persuasive to the hearers. (rhetoric a) see (aristotle , the rhetoric of aristotle, lane cooper, trans.). see (aristotle , aristotle: the ‘art’ of rhetoric, john h. freese, trans.). see (aristotle , the basic works of aristotle, richard mckeon, ed., w. rhys roberts, trans). see (aristotle , the basic works of aristotle, richard mckeon, ed., w. rhys roberts, trans). in her introduction to the essay collection, what is the new rhetoric? susan e. thomas acknowledges the classical legacy: since the s, the definitions of “new rhetoric” have expanded to encompass a variety of theories and movements, raising the question of how rhetoric is understood and employed in the twenty-first century. when scholars and business leaders gathered at the university of sydney on september to discuss “what is the new rhetoric?,” three major themes emerged: . how the classical art of rhetoric is still relevant today; . how it is directly related to modern technologies and the new modes of communication they have spawned; . how rhetorical practice is informing research methodologies and teaching and learning practices in the contemporary academy. (s. e. thomas , p. ) describing persuasion as an apate or “deliberate deception,” the sophist gorgias (c. –c. bce) claimed for rhetoric a power of witchcraft: speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity . . . . sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. (gorgias , “encomium”, p. ) whereas gorgias aims at deception, plato’s socrates practices “a psychagogia or leading of the soul to truth” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ). as socrates asks his young interlocutor, phaedrus, “is not rhetoric in its entire nature an art which leads the soul [ψυχαγωγία] by means of words . . . ?” (plato , phaedrus, a–b).platonic ethos assumes the moral and, ultimately, theological inseparability of the speaker-agent from the speech-act. indeed, “plato is uncompromising in asserting this equation: truth must be incarnate within the individual, and a person’s language must express (or, first, discover) this truth. conversely, any attempt to separate a person’s speech from his actual character serves to deny the incarnational aspect of truth and discourse alike. as socrates says to phaedrus, “if we are to address people scientifically, we shall show them precisely what is the real and true nature of that object on which our discourse is brought to bear. and that object, i take it, is the soul” (plato , phaedrus, e; emphasis added). humanities , , of commenting on this passage, james l. kinneavy and susan c. warshauer note the “complex interrelation among speaker, hearer, and subject matter” in aristotle’s system, such that “arete refers to the speaker, eunoia to the audience, and phronesis to the subject matter” (kinneavy and warshauer , “from aristotle”, p. ). in fact, phronesis refers to the logos-aspect of ethos, eunoia to the pathos-aspect, and arete to ethos or “moral character” per se. we can add that logos—“rational appeal” or the use of “good reasons”—originates with/in the rhetor, though audiences are left to judge its claims and to respond accordingly. and whereas pathos—an appeal to the audience’s pathe or emotions—is raised by means of a rhetor’s appeals, it’s with/in the audience that hope or fear or outrage or desire is raised. in this sense, the aristotelian logos “belongs to” the rhetor and is judged by the audience, while pathos “belongs to” the audience and is elicited by the rhetor. in contrast, ethos “lies between” the speaker and audience: belonging to neither wholly, the rhetor’s ethos is built out of a speaker-audience interaction. though aristotelian ethos describes a responsive, transactional model, there is one passage in the rhetoric that, taken at face value, radically textualizes the speaker’s self-presentation. we’ve quoted it earlier: it’s the declaration that persuasion “through character . . . should result from the speech,” and “not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person” (rhetoric a; emphasis added). if trust comes “from the speech” solely, then the speaker’s ethos is fashioned from within discourse and becomes part of the discourse in its totality. such a claim contradicts the teachings of aristotle’s older contemporary, isocrates ( – bce), for whom “the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul” (isocrates , “antidosis,” p. ). weighed against athenian tradition, aristotle’s textually-constructed ethos is an anomaly, repeated nowhere else in theory or in praxis. in contemporary poststructuralist terms, the aristotelian rhetor is reduced to an effect of language: exactly “who” the speaker “is” depends on how the audience “reads” him. if the audience “reads” him as being worthy of trust, then the aristotelian rhetor’s ethos-maneuvers will have succeeded. whether the rhetor deserves that trust remains an ethical question lying outside the text. and, within this radically textualized model, the ethics of ethos must “lie outside,” since aristotle’s rhetoric undergirds an ethos of appearances. having established the importance of a speaker’s apparent truthfulness, aristotle turns to the audience and ways “to prepare” “the judge” for a favorable impression (rhetoric . – ): but since rhetoric is concerned with making a judgment (people judge what is said in deliberation, and judicial proceedings are also a judgment), it is necessary not only to look to the argument, that it may be demonstrative and persuasive but also [for the speaker] to construct a view of himself as a certain kind of person and to prepare the judge; for it makes much difference in regard to persuasion . . . that the speaker seem to be a certain kind of person and that his hearers suppose him to be a certain kind of person and that his hearers suppose him to be disposed in a certain way. (rhetoric b) words like “construct,” “suppose,” and “seem” point to the amorality of rhetoric generally while transforming aristotelian ethos into an effect of speech, “separate from any consideration of the we wonder if scholars have made too much of rhetoric a. as unpublished lecture notes, the rhetoric contains numerous interpolations, repetitions, and contradictions; how much weight aristotle himself would have given to this passage remains a point of speculation. but there is one point that we can make with certainty: it was the school of isocrates, not of aristotle, that trained athenians in rhetorical paideia; and, for isocrates, reputation necessarily precedes (and informs) one’s speaking. thus, “the man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character; no, on the contrary,” he will apply himself above all to establish a most honorable name among his fellow-citizens; for who does not know that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words? (isocrates , “antidosis”, p. ; emphasis added) humanities , , of speaker’s prior reputation or ‘true’ moral character” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ). within this constructionist model, the rhetorical situation renders the speaker an element of the discourse itself, “no longer simply its origin (and thus a consciousness standing outside of or prior to the text) but, rather, a signifier standing inside an expanded text. the rhetor’s physical presence and appearance, gestures, inflections, and accents of style, all become invested in acts of signification,” whose objective is to gain an audience’s trust (baumlin , “introduction”, p. xvi). unsurprisingly, this version of aristotle appealed to theorists of the s and s—the high point of poststructuralism in the american academy. with the recent ascendance of cultural studies (within composition pedagogy especially), theorists have sought to reinterpret the rhetoric as a document in cultural/communal consensus-building and positionality. a “rhetorical community,” as susan miller describes it, delineates “an ethos—a sensus communis and a locus communis—a place where interlocutors abide, about which they contest, and from which they draw appeals” (miller , trust, p. ): those who dwell within a rhetorical community acquire their character as rhetorical participants from it, as it educates and socializes them. the community does this at least in part by supplying the aristotelian components of ethos—the judgment (phronesis), values (arete), and feelings (eunoia) that make a rhetor persuasive to other members of the community. (miller , trust, p. ) thus, “aristotle’s rhetoric presupposes a social context” (lefevre , invention, p. ). karen burke lefevre adds that the “three kinds of proofs . . . presuppose the existence of others who may or may not accept certain proofs” (invention, p. ). she continues: perhaps most pertinent to a social perspective is aristotle’s concept of ethos . . . [which] arises from the relationship between the individual and the community. “ethos,” says karlyn kohrs campbell, “does not refer to your peculiarities as an individual but to the ways in which you reflect the characteristics and qualities that are valued by your culture or group. in aristotle’s view, ethos cannot exist in isolation; by definition it requires possible or actual others . . . . [i]n fact, the greek meaning for “ethos” as “a habitual gathering place” calls forth an image of people coming together . . . . ethos, we might say, appears in that socially created space, in the “between,” the point of intersection between speaker or writer and listener or reader.” (lefevre , invention, pp. – ) it’s the notion of “the ‘between’” as a site of dialogic/dialectical engagement that intrigues us. citing lefevre, susan c. jarratt and nedra reynolds argue similarly: there’s no need to mince words on the amorality of rhetoric: as a two-edged sword used for attack and defense on either side of any issue, rhetoric offers no guarantee as to the ethics of its practitioners. weapons of any sort—and rhetoric has often been described in militaristic terms—inhabit a neutral territory, being neither good nor bad in themselves. the judgment rests not on the instrument but on the agent. (such is the nra’s basic claim: guns don’t kill people, people kill people—with guns.)then again, goffman bases social interaction generally on the concept of “appearance management,” which drives a wedge between “successful” and “sincere” performance: [w]hile persons usually are what they appear to be, appearances still could have been managed. there is, then, a statistical relation between appearances and reality, not an intrinsic or necessary one . . . . some performances are carried off successfully with complete dishonesty, others with complete honesty; but for performances in general neither of these extremes is essential, and neither, perhaps, is dramaturgically advisable. the implication here is that honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected to the solid world that one might first assume. (goffman , presentation, p. ) composition theorists might also remember the expressivist pedagogies of the s and s. to classicists, cognitivists, and social-constructionists, these may have seemed a mere “fad,” though they built upon postwar philosophies of existentialism. (were this survey meant to be comprehensive, we would add the behaviorist models of self that undergird the rhetorical pedagogies of cognitivism.) what lefevre claims for ethos, mikhail bakhtin ( – ) claims for language generally: “as a living, socio-ideological concrete thing ... language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other,” making “the word in language” half one’s own and “half someone else’s” (bakhtin , dialogic, p. ). though valentin humanities , , of [t]he rhetorical practice of êthos marks the position of the self, to the admittedly limited extent that it can be articulated by the author, making no claim that this speaking self is completely known or stable. appearing “in that socially constructed space, in the “between,” the point of intersection between speaker or writer and listener or reader” (lefevre – ), êthos is the admission of a standpoint, with the understanding that other standpoints exist and that they change over time. (jarratt and reynolds , “splitting image”, p. ) in their typography, jarratt and reynolds follow corts ( , “derivation”, p. ) in “clarify[ing] the ‘confusion’ between an older [homeric] word ethos (spelled with a greek epsilon), meaning ‘custom’ or ‘habit,’ and the newer [aristotelian] êthos (spelled with an eta), meaning ‘character’” (jarratt and reynolds , “splitting image”, p. ). with this distinction, we are brought to heidegger, whose discussion of ethos as “haunt” has opened new spaces for contemporary theory—spaces where collectivities and group identities are fashioned and gather together. . heidegger: ethos as “haunt” in a scene from book of homer’s iliad, paris is described: even as when a stalled horse that has fed his fill at the manger breaketh his halter and runneth stamping over the plain . . . on high doth he hold his head, . . . and as he glorieth in his splendour, his knees nimbly bear him to the haunts [ἤθεα] and pastures of mares; even so paris, son of priam, strode down from high pergamus, all gleaming in his armour like the shining sun, laughing for glee, and his swift feet bare him on. ( . – ) within this homeric simile, we find the earliest literary etymon of ethos: the ἤθεα ἵππων or “habitats of horses” (homer , iliad, . ). in his “letter on humanism” (heidegger ), martin heidegger ( – ) is arguably first to uncover, within ἦθoς or ethos-as-character, the more primal ἤθεα or ethos-as-dwelling place. his reading of heraclitus (c. – bce) does not cite the iliad, though the homeric ἤθεα lies in the background: the saying of heraclitus (fragment ) goes: ἦθoς ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων. this is usually translated, “a man’s character is his daimon.” this translation thinks in a modern way, not a greek one. ἦθoς means abode, dwelling place. the word names the open region in which the human being dwells. the open region of his abode allows what pertains to the essence of the human being . . . to appear. according to heraclitus’s phrase this [essence] is δαίµων, the god. the fragment says, the human being dwells, insofar as he is a human being, in the nearness of god. (heidegger , “letter”, p. ) from the homeric “habitats of horses,” heidegger carries ethos into the “abodes of men,” where being is revealed, known, cared for, and preserved. n. voloshinov ( – ) reduces “the inner psyche” to an effect of language, nonetheless he, too, describes selfhood as a transaction occurring in a “between” space: the reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. outside the material of signs there is no psyche.... by its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localized somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline separating these two spheres of reality. it is here that an encounter between the organism and the outside world takes place, but the encounter is not a physical one: the organism and the outside world meet here in the sign. (voloshinov , marxism, p. ; emphasis in original) like the “subjective psyche” that it seeks to express, ethos exists “somewhere between the organism and the outside world” (voloshinov , marxism, p. )—this “somewhere between” being “none other than a discourse whose language is in part one’s own but in equal part a possession of one’s history and culture” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ). we should acknowledge that the heraclitean passage is never mentioned in aristotle’s rhetoric. its presence, thus, is allusive and implicit at best. so notes craig r. smith: humanities , , of let us confess up front that we can’t unpack heidegger’s prose in any way that does justice to his phenomenology. nor can we turn a blind eye to heidegger’s unapologetic nazism. it seems a paradox that his ethic of sorge or “care” preceded the “care ethic” of carol gilligan ( ) and nel noddings ( ) (among other feminist moral theorists) by several decades—and that his ethotic theory would be invoked in discussions promoting multiculturalism. despite its author’s wounded reputation, the “letter on humanism” has something to teach us about contemporary ethos. returning to the passage above, the heraclitean translation is “modern” in that its world view is, paradoxically, pre-socratic: that is, it invokes human being as an embodied existence in-the-world, and not as an abstraction belonging to metaphysics. the greek daimon has any number of meanings, including “lesser god,” soul, and destiny: indeed, “character is fate” remains the most obvious (and accessible) heraclitean paraphrase. though heidegger wants to invoke a sense of mystery and unfamiliarity (unheimlichkeit) in the paraphrase, we follow michael j. hyde in emphasizing its revelation of the truth of being: “the human being,” writes hyde, “is called to be true to its essential character (ethos). we are the opening of a dwelling place where the truth of what is—be it a stone, tree, eagle, ourselves, or whatever—can be taken to heart, appreciated, and cared for” (hyde , “introduction”, p. xx; emphasis in original). thus heidegger holds out the hope that there “is” an ontic truth of being that precedes and transcends all ideology or “social construction.” as dasein or being-in-the-world, we are called to bear witness to the truth of being and to dwell within that space wherein our humanness lies. in this unified life-world—the heideggerian “fourfold” (geviert) of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities—we are called by conscience to serve the world as witness, companion, and caretaker. we have labored to make this point, since heideggerian philosophy undergirds any modern claim on behalf of ontology: that is, on behalf of the truth of being. similarly, heidegger underwrites a theory of self-authenticating ethos that reveals itself —and expresses, indeed celebrates itself epideictically—rather than “merely” constructs itself via language. finally, the heideggerian [a]t no place does aristotle see ethos as a dwelling in the sense that heraclitus used the term. . . . the first place that aristotle acknowledges in the rhetoric is the areopagus, the high court, where, of course, ethos was enormously important . . . . for aristotle, it is a given: everyone has ethos whether it be noble or ignoble. before one even speaks, that ethos has an ontological dimension because it emerges from the way one makes decisions, the way one lives on a day-to-day basis, the way one dwells. those decisions are informed by one’s values, one’s practical wisdom, and one’s goodwill, all of which are addressed in detail by aristotle. thus aristotle assumes the knowledge of the athenian fore-structure of ethos as a dwelling place and then reformulates the notion of dwelling place to present a rhetorical understanding of ethos. (smith , “ethos”, p. ) uncompromising in his criticism, david h. hirsch turns the heideggerian proposition that thought “shows-forth the thinker” against its author: “it is now clear that heidegger’s attraction to national socialism and his extended membership in the nazi party were consistent with, rather than aberrant to, his thinking. by the same token, it is possible to contemplate connections between national socialism and the post-auschwitz perpetuation of heidegger-inspired antihumanist theories in the guise of what has come to be called postmodernism” (hirsch , deconstruction, pp. – ). we don’t know what to say, other than that heidegger’s nazism is a reprehensible ethical failure. we wish we could posit two heideggers, distinguishing the one who joined the german national socialist party in from the one who survived the war to write his “letter on humanism” in . but of course, we can’t. again, we quote hyde: “existence calls, and for the sake of others and ourselves, we are obliged to respond in a responsible and thus rhetorically competent way. something that is other than the self demands nothing less. the demand comes with acts of disclosure. with a showing-forth of all that there is” (hyde , “introduction”, p. xxi). the human responsibility as caretaker introduces ecological themes into heideggerian philosophy: “the basic character of dwelling,” says heidegger, “is to spare, to preserve. mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing . . . . mortals dwell in that they save the earth . . . . to save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it” (heidegger [ ] , “building”, p. ). rather, “to spare and preserve means to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its essence” (p. ). as hyde notes (hyde , “introduction”, p. xxi), the conscientious or caring rhetor’s task is “to disclose or show-forth (epi-deixis)” being. such rhetorical artistry, hyde adds, “assumes an epideictic function” (p. xxi). we aim to expand upon this last insight: within traditions of “cultural and narrative ethos,” the aims and strategies of epideictic rhetoric—a rhetoric, that is, of ceremonial occasion, celebration, and self-display—come to the fore. we argue, in fact, for the discursive confluence of ethos, expressivism, and epideixis. humanities , , of notion of human being as existential/ecological caretaker undergirds our argument on behalf of a commodious, iatrological rhetoric. here, too, we draw on hyde’s reading of heidegger: we did not create the fundamental structure and workings of this primordial place and its attending call of conscience; rather, they are “givens,’” they come with the being of existence, they are part of the essential character of human nature. we are creatures who dwell on this earth and who are thereby destined to hear and answer a call that, among other things, requires a capacity for practicing the art of rhetoric. the ontological structure of existence is such that we must learn to dwell rhetorically. . . . the call of human being, of conscience, calls on us to be rhetorical architects whose symbolic constructions both create and invite others into a place where they can dwell and feel at home . . . . (hyde , “introduction”, p. xxi; emphasis in original) adding to this analysis, we call attention to a lesser-known text, heidegger’s lecture, “building dwelling thinking” (heidegger [ ] ), which helps gloss his heraclitean discussion. having declared that “building (bauen) aims at dwelling (wohnen)” (“building”, p. ), heidegger proceeds to play with the german etymology, much as he had done with the greek: we do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers. but in what does the essence of dwelling consist? let us listen once more to what language says to us. the old saxon wuon, the gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. but the gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. the word for peace, friede, means the free, das frye; and fry means preserved from harm and . . . safeguarded. to free actually means to spare . . . . [sparing] takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence, when we return it specifically to its essential being, when we “free” it in the proper sense of the word into a preserve of peace. to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence. the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing. (heidegger [ ] , “building”, pp. – ; emphasis in original) we do not see how this exploration of the german wohnen-as-dwelling, delivered several years after heidegger’s “letter on humanism,” can be kept insulated from the greek ἦθoς-as-dwelling. surely his lecture, “building dwelling thinking,” helps us read the more famous, more influential “letter.” the heideggerian model appeals to us for many reasons, not least of which is the ethical claims that it makes upon the speaker. one speaks not simply to declare one’s “dwelling place,” nor simply to share that dwelling, but also to care for it. situated within a self/other dialectic, the act of self-expression becomes an invitation to dwell with others, “to open a space,” by means of language, where self and other “can dwell and feel at home” (hyde , “introduction”, p. xxi). it is an invitation to hospitality. as an expansion upon aristotelian eunoia, it’s the heideggerian attitude of caring that leads us into a new “new rhetoric,” one suited to the pluralist, post-enlightenment, multiculturalist discourse of our age. it should be noted, however, that heidegger does not acknowledge “cultural difference” within his discussion of ἤθεα or “haunts.” for heidegger, the ethos-as-dwelling is being—as opposed to the “beings” that constitute nations, ethnicities, classes, and occupations. hence, any discussion of like heidegger, ludwig wittgenstein ( – ) explores the interrelationships among self, world, and language. for future study, we’d suggest putting the twentieth century’s two great philosophers into a dialogue over ethics and ethos: in what ways does wittgenstein’s philosophy of language—particularly his posthumous philosophical investigations (wittgenstein ) reinforce, complicate, or question the heideggerian model presented above? (as a starting point, we’d recommend paul m. livingston’s ( ) essay, “wittengenstein reads heidegger, heidegger reads wittgenstein: thinking, language bounding world.”) humanities , , of positionality in the heideggerian “haunt” is a misprision, though useful for our purposes. we have one more component to add to our model; we find it back in aristotle, though not in his rhetoric. but, first, we must return to homer. . from ethos to mythos: the case for storytelling in book of the odyssey, having enjoyed the lord alcinous’s hospitality, odysseus yields to the request that he give his name and tell his story: first now will i tell my name, that ye, too, may know it, and that i hereafter . . . may be your host, though i dwell in a home that is afar. i am odysseus, son of laertes, who am known among men for all manner of wiles, and my fame reaches unto heaven. but i dwell in clear-seen ithaca, . . . a rugged isle, but a good nurse of young men; and for myself no other thing can i see sweeter than one’s own land. of a truth calypso, the beautiful goddess, sought to keep me by her . . . and in like manner circe would fain have held me back in her halls . . . but they could never persuade the heart within my breast. so true is it that naught is sweeter than a man’s own land and his parents, even though it be in a rich house that he dwells afar in a foreign land . . . . but come, let me tell thee also of my woeful home-coming, which zeus laid upon me as i came from troy . . . . (homer , odyssey, . – ) in such a passage, homer models for us the hospitable aims of a commodious discourse. if asked, “who are you?” one’s answer unfolds in narrative: “i was born in ——,” “i have lived in ——,” “i went to school at ——,” “i teach at ——,” “i am married to ——,” and so on. whether revealed or constructed, self-image unfolds or “emerges,” as corder puts it, within structures of language: specifically, within stories. these are shared by individuals within culture: that is, stories translate actions, events, and experiences into sharable meaning inviting response. such, indeed, is a reigning premise of our essay and of the greater collection, histories of ethos: that our stories, whether individual or collective, are primary bearers of ethos in the twenty-first century. in emphasizing the role of biography—that is, of “life-writing”—in self-identity, anthony giddens ( –) carries ethos into the realms of storytelling: “self-identity,” he writes, “is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. it is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography” (giddens , modernity, p. ; emphasis added). we quoted giddens in an epigraph, but we give the passage here in full: the existential question of self-identity is bound up with the fragile nature of the biography which the individual “supplies” about herself. a person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. the individual’s biography, if she is to maintain a regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. it must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing “story” about the self. (giddens , modernity, p. ) understanding giddens, we are reminded that “story” (mythos) is a subject of aristotle’s poetics. in his rhetoric, aristotle discusses ethopoeia as a mode of “stylistic ethos” (baumlin , “ethos”, p. ). but we can go further and describe a mode of “narrative ethos” that treats mythos as one of focused on style, book of the rhetoric contains a group of passages pertaining to character-delineation, of which the following ( . . – ) is representative: the narration ought to be indicative of character [ἠθικη]. this will be so if we know what makes character [ἦθoς]. one way, certainly, is to make deliberate choice [πρoαίρεσις] clear: what the character is on the basis of what sort of deliberate choice [has been made].... other ethical indications are attributes of each character, for example, that someone walks away while talking; for this makes his arrogance and his rudeness of character clear. ( a–b) humanities , , of four pisteis or “proofs,” functioning rhetorically and contributing to the self-expressive aim of ethical/ ethotic discourse. rhetoric consists of more than persuasion (if, by persuasion, one aims at compelling an audience’s consent to a specific course of action, policy, or point of view). aristotle acknowledges this fact: in addition to deliberative rhetoric—the “art of persuasion” properly so-called—his rhetoric describes forensics (a rhetoric of accusation and defense) and epideixis (a rhetoric of ceremonial occasion and artistic self-display). it is in self-display that ethos, epideixis, and mythos coalesce. by declaring narrative—mythos, not logos—the foundational activity of human social discourse, we seek to ground postmodern ethos in storytelling. there are more components to ethos than one’s storytelling; the rhetoric convinces us of that. but story is the glue that holds them all together. action, agency, time, and place—the stuff of narrative—are ethotic building blocks. a singular moment in time, often one of trauma or tragedy, can come to dominate the narrative—hence, the identity—of a person, or of a people. when a specific marker of identity is embedded within an action or event-in-time, one’s storytelling is reshaped accordingly: a speaker can affirm and commemorate, defend and advocate, repair and seek justice, or seek transcendence (seek, that is, to move beyond the self-defining marker). a psychosocial model of ethos as “self in process” assumes that ethos can, in fact, evolve or change over time. in this sense, ethotic discourse rests in telling and retelling, in making appeals to the future as well as in acknowledging the past. let us revisit the corderian definition, “character as it emerges in language” (corder , “varieties”, p. ). rendered coherent through the conventions and structures of narrative, a storyline emerges: within the history of its telling, the personalized self-image—call it “the self”—comes into view. the self-as-narrated unfolds within “thematic patterns” of habit: choices of lifestyle, occupation, dwelling, attitudes, affects, addictions. markers of identity derive from culture, demographics, ethnicity, and a gendering of the body. behaviors and speech patterns replicate by reenacting life-choices and attitudes: one calls oneself the same name (and the same nicknames among friends); one goes to bed and wakes up in the same place; one goes to work at the same job in the same place at the same time of day (and returns to the same home in the same place at the same time of day); and, one yields to the same prejudices, the same affects and attitudes and desires (and addictions), all on a daily basis. by such repetitions, the individual becomes scripted within a storyline that translates the for a discussion of mythos as a fourth “proof,” see (baumlin and baumlin , “on the psychology of thepisteis”, p. ). part of the art of storytelling is self-reflexive, in that it focuses on the character of the storyteller. so liesbeth korthals altes notes with respect to narrative fiction: in fact, signaling and deciphering sincerity, deception, or irony and classifying speakers regarding their authority, reliability, and expertise have been the core business of storytelling since humankind’s very first stories. whole literary genres, such as satire or the engage novel, are defined by their assertion mode and ethos, as are the types of literary authors, narrators, and characters, from the ironist and unreliable picaros . . . to the doctus, prophet, or gadfly . . . . thus literature spells out codes of conduct and exemplary paths for ethos projection and attribution, helping to shape, transmit, and question culture-bound folk semiotics and hermeneutics of ethos. (altes , ethos and narrative, p. ) respecting our collection, perhaps a more hopeful title would be histories, and futures, of ethos. each species of rhetoric, aristotle tells us (rhetoric . . ), “has its own ‘time’” ( b), though epideixis spills over into past, present, and future. eugene garver explains: “when aristotle introduces the three kinds of rhetoric in . , he says that deliberation concerns the future, judicial rhetoric the past, but he does not say that epideixis is about the present . . . . later in the chapter, he does claim that each kind of rhetoric has a specially appropriate time, but again makes an exception for epideixis” (garver , aristotle’s rhetoric, p. ). as garver translates the passage (rhetoric . . ), [t]o epideixis most appropriately [belongs] the present, for it is the existing condition of things that all those who praise or blame have in view. it is not uncommon, however, for epideictic speakers to avail themselves of other times, of the past by way of recalling it, or of the future by way of anticipating it ( b). (garver , aristotle’s rhetoric, pp. – ) humanities , , of singularity of personhood into character and community. in effect, one becomes the protagonist of one’s own mythos. character can be understood as the “personal styles” of an individual whose life-narrative is rendered interpretable and, indeed, predictable through its replicable consistency of behavior. (this consistency, this predictability, is a working definition of sanity: the ability to wake up the next day and be the same person . . . ) in conforming to “a character,” the individual works within a culture-bound set of typologies, social roles, rules, and responsibilities. in practice, a dialectic arises between personhood and character-type, in that a shift on one side causes shifts on the other (and the postmodern agent is, as giddens notes, defined by choice-in-lifestyle: one day, she may choose not to go home). the point is that our personal stories have meaning within patterned life-histories that are historically- and culturally-conditioned. following a psychoanalytic model of identity-formation, we presume that specific life-events—traumas for the most part—play constitutive roles in identity-formation. the abused spouse lives within an event and a narrative of that event: the abuse becomes thematic within that person’s self-image and life-story. not all identity-forming events are traumatic: love, an act of heroism, an occupational or material or intellectual or social success, sudden fame, a mystic experience: any and all such life-events can become the “identity theme” (holland , the i, p. ) within an individual’s storyline. a further corollary to postclassical ethos (indebted both to psychoanalytic praxis and to modern feminism) is the need to tell one’s story, particularly those aspects that bear wounds. indeed, the highest aim of ethotic discourse is, or ought to be, to share one’s story; and, with respect to one’s functioning as audience, the highest corresponding aim is to bear witness to that other ’s story. self-knowledge (in both the socratic and the freudian sense) and self-expression or display (in the gusdorfian/corderian sense) are ethical urgencies of an ethocentric (as opposed to logocentric) discourse. a narrative theory of ethos is postclassical for a further reason, in that it replaces the classical model of rhetorical agon or competition with a therapeutic model. the highest aim of discourse is not to persuade, compel, or “gain compliance,” but to recognize, accommodate, and heal—to heal oneself and one’s community through mutual understanding, consensus, equity, mutuality. thomas szasz ( – ) has called this an iatrology, a speaking of “healing words” (szasz , myth, p. ). following heidegger, we hold to the possibility of a stable ontology or truth (taking “truth,” simply, to mean “what is,” irrespective of whether the human creature can know it or speak it adequately); still, as an expression of our heideggerian (and feminist) commitments, we assert that any “truth” lacking in hospitality—or, more forcefully, in caring, equity, understanding, increased freedom, dignity, and personal fulfilment—is likely no more than oppression. some years ago, corder made similar claims in an essay, “argument as emergence, rhetoric as love.” (if the word “love” embarrasses us intellectually, then let’s replace it with “health,” or with “hospitality,” or with “community,” or with “equity,” or with “dignity,” or with “freedom,” or with “justice.” any of these value-terms will do when harnessed to an ethotic, iatrological rhetoric.) he writes: “lifestyle,” writes giddens, “is not a term which has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within plurality of possible options, and is ‘adopted’ rather than ‘handed down’” (giddens , modernity, p. ). he continues: lifestyles are routinized practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favored milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity. each of the small decisions a person makes every day . . . are decisions not only about how to act but who to be. the more post-traditional the settings in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking. (giddens , modernity, p. ) going beyond gidden’s analysis, we would argue that the ongoing enculturation of most lifestyle choices impacts “character,” even in postmodernism. humanities , , of let there be no mistake: a contending narrative, that is, an argument of genuine consequence because it confronts one life with another, is a threat, whether it is another’s narrative becoming argument impinging upon or thundering into ours, or our own, impinging upon the other’s. (corder , “argument”, p. ) the “threat” posed by another’s “contending narrative” arises from the positionality of oppressive cultural and societal structures; and it is these structures that return us, yet again, to aristotle. the classical-aristotelian model of rhetoric-as-persuasion must have an ethotic component, in that any significant change—of mind or emotion, in action or attitude—will impact an audience’s habits of behavior and, correspondingly, its self-concept. still, we question the extent to which a person’s self-concept (with its concomitant behaviors, habits, affects, addictions) can change by means of storytelling. we presume that the ability to change one’s story can change the storyteller. following alcorn ( , “self-structure”, p. ), we assume that self-concepts, like the stories that undergird them, require some stability (that is, some predictability and replicability in behavior); but, while self-concepts are self-protective and inherently resistant to change, they are subject, nonetheless, to retelling. whether the story changes the storyteller or the storyteller changes the story, the essential unity of the self, the self-reflexive self-concept, and the self-revealing/ self-constructing story is foundational to an ethotic, iatrological rhetoric. the iatrological model is rhetorical in structure, being dyadic. storytellers need audiences: even when one speaks to oneself, one does so as “self to an other.” we are selves in community; our stories have meaning within the broader cultural narratives to which they largely conform. a self-concept fulfills itself as ethos when it is “outed,” that is, enacted or performed “in public.” the notion of an ethos separable from the co-presence of an other—an audience-witness—is an absurdity. ethos is fulfilled in the presence of the other. we are compelled to tell our stories in a world of storytellers. within a sharing community, ideally, we take turns speaking and listening, bearing witness to one as marshall w. alcorn jr. notes, poststructuralist theory describes “an overly weak self,” composed “of collected social discourses” and “conform[ing] effortlessly to textual influences” (alcorn , “self-structure”, p. ). “this view of the self,” alcorn adds, “helps us appreciate the social determination of selfhood, but it implies that the self, once formed, has no organized, ‘characteristic’ inner structure” (p. ). as if fusing insights from freud, bakhtin, and voloshinov, alcorn offers an important corrective to the poststructuralist effacement of self: a particular self is not an infinitely changing collection of voices housed within a biological organism. it is a relatively stable organization of voices. we need not adopt the various models of self-organization advocated by psychoanalysis, but as rhetoricians, we should acknowledge that the self has a relatively stable inner organization. (alcorn , “self-structure”, p. ) rhetoric, thus conceptualized, “might be defined as a well-focused and carefully crafted strategy for changing self-organization” (alcorn , “self-structure”, p. ). and, due to “the inner dynamics of self-division—the ability to liberate repressed voices, to activate self-conflict, to reshape the linguistic form of self-components” (p. )—the most potent mode of change comes as a mode of self-persuasion. as alcorn notes, “self-persuasion comes not from the outside, as an external authority goading people to accept certain values, but from the inside, as an internal voice (both an agent and an expression of self-change) reorganizing relationships among self-components” (p. ). we find ourselves very much in agreement with his model of self and its implications, both for ethos and for rhetoric generally. “for discourse,” as james s. baumlin and peter scisco write, “is dyadic—a rhetorical two-way street between speakers and audiences—and rhetoric is responsive in its intended effects: speakers address audiences in order to gain their favor and assent” (baumlin and scisco , “ethos”, p. ; emphasis in original). they continue: until an audience responds or complies in some manner, the dyadic structure of discourse remains unfulfilled. hence, a “speaker” “speaks to” an audience in ways that “reveal”—or, alternatively, construct—a credible character or image. rarely do rhetors assume a passive audience: rather, audiences are presumed to collaborate in fashioning or affirming a speaker’s . . . image. there are further complications in accommodating one’s intended audience. in seeking an audience’s assent, a speaker must understand and appeal to that audience’s own character: that is, to its values, its habits, its predispositions, its prejudices, its aspirations and idealized self-image. a premise of social psychology . . . is that audiences tend to trust or “like” speakers who are “like them” in some way. a speaker’s character may be “revealed” or “constructed,” but it might also be projected, and an audience’s projections of trust and reliance are likely to be unconscious in their workings. (baumlin and scisco , “ethos”, p. ) humanities , , of another. we share in the diversity of stories. following jean-françois lyotard ( – ), we might think of “community” itself as a sharing of “localized narratives” or petits récits. the same dynamics that define individual character arise in the creation and healthy maintenance of community. as we’ve argued, community is premised in a sharing of stories. and here we face a problem explored by michel foucault, among other cultural critics: we dwell in worlds marked by an intersection of power and discourse. in a world of unequal distribution of power, ethos becomes an agon of competing texts. more than sharers or witnesses, people are cast as objects of control and “compliance.” in this power-riven model, people not only compete for ethos (that is, for the right to “be seen” through/in their words); they lose ethos within opposing narratives, alienated by acts of naming: queer, radical islamic terrorist, disabled, mexican rapist, “animal,” etc. contemporary american political rhetoric plays out its “culture wars” with markers of identity/difference as its weapons and ethos as its battlefield. while iatrology—a healing of self and community through an expressivist/epideictic rhetoric—remains a dream in our culturally, politically, economically fractured world, we can, nonetheless, take steps towards its realization. the first step in healing ourselves, individually and collectively, is to unleash the self-expressive power of our storytelling: in effect, to make an appeal in good faith for a witness, in order “to be seen” in our texts. as we look beyond the western, eurocentric-masculinist enlightenment model, we discover alternative histories, epistemologies, logics, moral systems, sciences, medical practices, pharmacies, arts, rituals. we need to learn from them; at the least, we need to listen to them—or learn to listen. we cannot expect that the forces of hegemonic culture will hold back in their attempts at silencing alternative voices. political campaigning will continue its attack ads, “controlling the narrative” by demonizing opponents. even the academy plays its power games, policing credentials of those who “earn the right” to speak authoritatively (and reap the rewards therefrom). in recent years, the academy has become more open to diversity, interdisciplinarity, and hybridized approaches/genres; but it, too, needs to learn greater humility and hospitality. the scholarly ethos pretends to impersonality, “universality,” and rationalism. while caricaturing the modernist “model citizen,” white’s character sketch strikes very near the academician: in the postmodern condition (lyotard [ ] ), lyotard offers petits récits as an antidote to the totalizing-oppressive “grand narratives” of modernism: “progress,” “enlightenment emancipation,” marxism, etc. “our time” is one “of fragmentation and isolation,” as s. michael halloran observes, a time when ethos can succeed only by the degree to which a speaker “is willing and able to make his world open to the other,” thus risking “self and world by a rigorous and open articulation of them in the presence of the other” (halloran , “on the end”, pp. – ). halloran wrote this in . our own time is one of fragmentation still, according to mansfield: selfhood is now seen to be in a state of perpetual crisis in the modern west. alienated intellectuals and suicidal youth; culture wars and volatile markets; endless addictions to food, work, alcohol and narcotics; sexual inadequacy and thrill killers—all feed into education and entertainment industries that keep the intensity of our selfhood perpetually on the boil, nagging and unsettling, but also inspiring and thrilling us with mystery, fear and pleasure. it is this ambivalence and ambiguity—the intensification of the self as the key site of human experience and its increasing sense of internal fragmentation and chaos—that the twentieth century’s theorists of subjectivity have tried to deal with. (mansfield , subjectivity, kindle ed., pp. – ) in the following passage, carolyn r. miller unmasks the logocentric assumptions lurking in the discourse of science. we should ask: to what extent do her observations hold for scholarship in the humanities? [o]ne of the primary conclusions of recent work in the rhetoric of science and technology is that this rhetorical style of impersonality, in which facts “speak for themselves,” is itself an appeal that universalizes results originating in particularity; the scientist must seem fungible, so that her results could have been—and might be—achieved by anyone. this appeal is an ethos that denies the importance of ethos. the technical ethos must be informed but impartial, authoritative but self-effacing. one of the major strategies for achieving this delicate balance is the transformation of ethos into logos. (miller , “expertise”, p. ) humanities , , of he is conceived as disengaged from his social background and oriented toward mastery of the world that confronts him; nevertheless, he can discover, by the light of reason, universally applicable principles of justice, found in some foundationalist account of god, nature, progress, or human communication that can become the basis of political consensus with other individuals. (white , ethos, pp. – ; emphasis in original) as scholars, we should make a habit of positioning and declaring ourselves within our writing. for a few years after the turn of the new century, a “scholarship of the personal” was promoted (in composition journals primarily), an approach allowing for reflection upon the processes as well as the products of one’s research, often within a narrative frame. combining strategies of the “traditional” scholarly and personal essays, this “scholarship of the personal” is the sort of hybridization needed rhetorically/ethotically today. fortunately, we have companions in this call for a “return of the human” to the humanities. in his recent work, mikhail epstein practices precisely the sort of inventive, genre-bending “performative discourse” (epstein , transformative, p. ) described above. his transformative humanities: a manifesto ( ) diagnoses the problem: with the ascendance of poststructuralism, the humanities “stopped being human studies and became textual studies. no one now seems to expect anything from the humanities except readings and re-readings, and, first and foremost, criticism rather than creativity and suspicion rather than imagination. as a result, the humanities are no longer focusing on human self-reflection and self-transformation” (epstein , transformative, p. ). indeed, it’s been a long time since the humanities mattered socially or politically. if we who teach within the humanities are to reclaim a voice in public affairs—if we are “to be seen and heard,” in the manner described in this present essay—then we need a purpose beyond “mere theory.” epstein reminds us what that purpose is, and it’s expressive at its core. it’s not in the object-world of the sciences that our proper studies lie. in fact, our task lies not in study so much as in creation—in the creation, specifically, of our “humanness,” as epstein declares: the crucial distinction between the humanities and sciences is that in the humanities the subject and the object of the study coincide; in the humanities, humans are studied by humans and for humans. therefore, to study the human being also means to create humanness itself: every act of the description of a human is, by the same token, an event of one’s self-construction. in a wholly practical sense, the humanities create the human, as human beings are transformed by the study of literature, art, languages, history and philosophy: the humanities humanize. (epstein , transformative, p. ) white adds, “this complex of characteristics . . . has been the target of a variety of twentieth-century thinkers from heidegger to feminism, from carl schmitt to foucault and postmodernism, from horkheimer and adorno to charles taylor” (white , ethos, p. ). it’s time that the academy were weaned off of this elitist self-image. we refer readers to volume . of college english ( ), with its focus on “personal writing.” in a later volume ( ), jane e. hindman lists several of “the rhetorical moves and genres” associated with “‘the personal’ in scholarship” (hindman , “thoughts”, p. ): . . . a specific, individual positioning of the researcher and/or the subjects of a qualitative study; an instance of “outing” oneself by revealing religious, sexual, ethnic, racial, or economic affiliations; an autobiographical account, a memoir; a hybrid genre of theory and autobiography; an embodied writing that examines the institutional origins of individual affect and taste; a reader’s individual decision how to consume and circulate texts. (hindman , “thoughts”, p. ) for a sample of this approach, see craig a. meyer’s essay, “from wounded knee to sacred circles: oglala lakota ethos as ‘haunt’ and ‘wound,’” included in this collection. in the process of demystifying the sciences through the humanities, “humans do not so much discover something in the world of objects as build their very subjectivity by way of self-description and self-projection” (epstein , transformative, p. ). playing with the title of thomas nagel’s well-known essay, “what is it like to be a bat?,” epstein writes, “the question itself appears to be the answer to another, more essential question: ‘what is it like to be a human?’ to be a human means to emerge out of self-containment and immerse oneself into the being of the other, as it were one’s own. to be human means to ask what it is like to be a bat” (epstein , transformative, p. ; emphasis added). humanities , , of the essays gathered in histories of ethos seek to be true to this humanizing task. but the same qualification holds for epstein as for heidegger: being “clothed” in culture, our humanness needs to be seen in its diversity. as for the politics of hegemonic culture, we ask: who wields the skeptron? who enjoys “the right to speak,” to be heard? by what means can an individual or group assert that right? must an oppressed minority flatter the “dominant voice” by mimicry or ventriloquism, by kowtowing to the dominant discourse and its rituals of authority? must self-expression—the ultimate ethotic act, the act of speaking “to be seen”—be an act of defiance? the #metoo movement in america today is more than an appeal for justice: it is a combining of individual voices into an ethos expressive of the victim who will remain silent no more. and we are its witness. surely the #metoo movement is iatrological, in that the women who are speaking out seek freedom and redress from trauma and oppression. they are “being seen” in the telling of their story; and, yes, there are patterns to their story. in response to their revelations, american society is learning to tell its own story differently. in time, perhaps, we will be healed of this sort of institutionalized violence—or at least, we will be cured of the “blindness” that tolerates sexual exploitation, among other modes of social, cultural, political, economic oppression. we enlarge our ethos when we learn to speak differently of ourselves and of others, when we repudiate acts of silencing, when we offer ourselves as witnesses, when we create community by means of shared stories. ethos is invested in every aspect of our speaking, listening, and responding. let the enlightenment “age of reason”—the epoch of logocentrism—pass; let ours be an age of ethos. let us aim to make our discourse caring, accommodating, epideictic, iatrological, inventive, and personal. . conclusions in this introduction to histories of ethos, we have made a series of claims that individual essays will put to the test. some will explore the “cultural dress,” some the “modes of address,” by means of which individuals situate themselves within communities in place and time. competing versions of ethos, both in theory and in praxis, will be applied. the role of narrative in identity- formation—both individually and culturally—will be a recurring motif. and, while individual essays might explore only a portion of the spacious field of ethos within any culture at any time, we assume that any claim regarding ethos can be turned, dialectically, into its “enabling other.” no premise or claim on this subject, see gayatri chakravorty spivak’s essay, “can the subaltern speak?” there’s a further paradox in academic writing, in that we’re encouraged to universalize and “depersonalize” our texts (in imitation of the sciences) even as we imitate—in effect, ventriloquize—the dominant theorists of our times. ours is not so much a “cult of personality” as it is a “cult of vocabulary.” in passing through the rituals of tenure/promotion, we are expected to master “academic literacy” in displaying an ability “to talk the current lit-crit talk” (spellmeyer , “after theory”, p. ). but this mastery comes at the cost of an authenticating “personal style.” what does “the profession” teach us if not ventriloquism and impersonation, “demand[ing] that we remake ourselves in conformity with the project of the theorist” (spellmeyer, “after theory” ; emphasis in original)? and “our reward for submitting” to this regimen, as kurt spellmeyer notes, “is seldom the renewal of connections to actual others, the people we happen to know in daily life. don’t we learn, instead, to serve an anonymous ‘they’?” (spellmeyer , “after theory”, p. ). spellmeyer elaborates: [t]hink, if you can stand it, about all the essays written ten or fifteen years ago that began with the claim to be writing “on the margin”; or of all the works today that call themselves “genealogies” . . . . the writers of these works are not simply sycophants or opportunists. they write in this way is to become derrida, to be become a second foucault or a little lacan. in the same way, madonna's fans dress like walk and talk like her, and read books about her life. (spellmeyer , “after theory”, p. ) granted, we’ve called our own essay a “genealogy.” but we would like to think that we’re using the foucauldian vocabulary strategically and that the vocabulary is not using us. spellmeyer’s point pertains to ethos, though he does not use the term: “the time has come to acknowledge that academic literacy, at least as we’ve constructed it so far, is deeply complicit with the same culture of disembodiment that makes possible elvis look-alikes and the stalking of the stars by their admirers” (spellmeyer , “after theory”, p. ). we note, too, that some essays in our collection lean toward theory and analysis while others lean toward praxis and performance. we trust that the essays in histories of ethos can cross-reference each other, reducing their need to repeat the same theoretical underpinnings and assumptions: it may suffice that each consciously and conscientiously commits to a coherent theory/approach/vocabulary that can be found more fully articulated elsewhere in the collection and broader secondary literature. humanities , , of has been banished or disallowed from this collection. hence, we affirm that ethos can be revealed or constructed; that it can pre-exist a speaker’s discourse or be produced within (or by means of) discourse; that it can ally itself with, or it can subvert, logos or pathos. if it can heal and liberate, surely it can be used to harm. self necessarily posits an other; identity implies difference. narratives can be “fixed” within a culture’s folk pathways and traditions; but these can also be revisited, reinterpreted, reshaped, retold. ethos can be carried into new regions. with smart technologies, ethos enters the realm of the artificially-intelligent nonhuman—the cyborg. even the “deep ecology” movement posits a “planetary ethos.” let us summarize the aims and aspirations of our collection, as represented in this introduction. we might go so far as to declare the following a manifesto—an intellectual call-to-action—for ethos in/for the twenty-first century. once again, we seek the following: to acknowledge the expressive core of discourse spoken or written, in ways that reaffirm and restore an epideictic function to ethos/rhetoric; to demonstrate the positionality of discourse, whereby speakers and writers “out themselves” ethotically (that is, responsively and responsibly); to explore ethos as a mode of cultural and embodied personal narrative; to encourage an ethotic “scholarship of the personal,” expressive of one’s identification/participation with/in the subject of research; to argue on behalf of an iatrological ethos/rhetoric based in empathy, care, healing (of the past) and liberation/empowerment (toward the future); to foster interdisciplinarity in the study/exploration/performance of ethos, establishing a conversation among scholars across the humanities; and to promote new versions and hybridizations of ethos/rhetoric. we end with a selection of passages from corder’s “argument as emergence, rhetoric as love.” we present them without commentary: they speak for themselves. and they speak for us, affirming several of our central themes. (once again, if the word “love” embarrasses, put “hospitality” in its place.) each of us is a narrative. a good part of the time we can live comfortably adjacent to or across the way from other narratives. our narratives can be congruent with other narratives, or untouched by other narratives. but sometimes another narrative impinges upon ours, or thunders around and down into our narratives. we can’t build this other into our narratives without harm to the tales we have been telling. this other is a narrative in another world; it is disruptive, shocking, initially at least incomprehensible, and, as carl rogers has shown us, threatening. when this happens, our narratives become indeed what they are perpetually becoming—arguments. the choosing we do to make our narratives (whether or not we are aware of the nature of our choosing) also makes our narratives into arguments. the narratives coined by norwegian philosopher and naturalist, arne naess, “deep ecology” rejects “shallow environmentalism” for being “simply an extension of the anthropocentric western paradigm” of land use, wherein “the reasons for preserving wilderness or biodiversity are inevitably couched in terms of human welfare” (naess , cited in (keller, “gleaning”, p. ). as david keller notes, “shallow environmentalism falls short of valuing nonhumans apart from their use-value. deep ecology, in contrast, asserts that all organisms have intrinsic value. in this way deep ecology is fundamentally nonanthropocentric” (keller , “gleaning”, p. ). with his gaia hypothesis, james lovelock goes further in positing that the “whole earth,” in all its living and non-living components, functions as if it were a single, unified, self-regulating organism—in effect, a self (lovelock , gaia, pp. x–xii). by analogy with biological life, planetary ecology can be studied as a delicately balanced (and, with global warming, increasingly threatened) homeostasis. clearly, the “deep ecology” movement is foreshadowed by heidegger’s ethics of “caring for” and “sparing” the “fourfold” of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. (also, much of american indian ethos is definable by earth-sustaining attitudes and practices.) humanities , , of we tell (ourselves) create and define the worlds in which we hold our beliefs. our narratives are the evidence we have of ourselves and of our convictions. argument, then, is not something we make outside ourselves; argument is what we are. each of us is an argument. we always live in, through, around, over, and under argument. all the choices we’ve made, accidentally or on purpose, in creating our histories/narratives have also made us arguments, or, i should go on to say, sets of congruent arguments, or in some instances, sets of conflicting arguments. (corder , p. ) again: sometimes we turn away from other narratives. sometimes we teach ourselves not to know that there are other narratives. sometimes—probably all too seldom—we encounter another narrative and learn to change our own. sometimes we lose our plot, and our convictions as well; since our convictions belong to our narratives, any strong interference with our narrative or sapping of its way of being will also interrupt or sap our convictions. sometimes we go to war. sometimes we sink into madness, totally unable to manage what our wit or judgment has shown us—a contending narrative that has force to it and charm and appeal and perhaps justice and beauty as well, a narrative compelling us to attention and toward belief that we cannot ultimately give, a contending narrative that shakes and cracks all foundations and promises to alter our identity, a narrative that would educate us to be wholly other than what we are. any narrative exists in time; any narrative is made of the past, the present, and the future. we cannot without potential harm shift from the past of one narrative into the present and future of another, or from the past and present of one narrative into the future of another, or from the future we are narrating into a past that is not readily ours. how can we take that one chance i mentioned just now and learn to change when change is to be cherished? how can we expect another to change when we are ourselves that other’s contending narrative? (corder , p. ) and again: argument is emergence toward the other. that requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one’s narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other. it is a risky revelation of the self, for the arguer is asking for an acknowledgment of his or her identity, is asking for witness from the other. in argument, the arguer must plunge on alone, with no assurance of welcome from the other, with no assurance whatever of unconditional positive regard from the other. in argument, the arguer must, with no assurance, go out, inviting the other to enter a world that the arguer tries to make commodious, inviting the other to emerge as well, but with no assurance of kind or even thoughtful response. how does this happen? better, how can it happen? it can happen if we learn to love before we disagree. (corder , p. ) and once more: rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities. most failures of communication result from some willful or inadvertent but unloving violation of the space and time we and others live in, and most of our speaking is tribal talk. but there is more to us than that. we can learn to speak a commodious language, and we can learn to hear a commodious language. (corder , pp. – ) funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: we wish to thank the humanities editors for supporting histories of ethos through its knowledge unlatched initiative, which has made this collection free and available to all—truly “open access.” humanities , , of ours is an innovative collection, in that it invites contributors to perform ethos in ways that test and question the residually “enlightenment” impersonality—the expressive and stylistic “zero sum”—of much academic journal publication. we also appreciate the rigor of review shown by humanities’ reviewers and readers, which has challenged contributors to strengthen their claims, thus making for a better, more useful collection. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references alcorn, marshall w., jr. . self-structure as a rhetorical device: modern ethos and the divisiveness of the self. in ethos: new essays in rhetorical and critical theory. edited by james s. baumlin and tita french baumlin. dallas: southern methodist university press, pp. – . altes, liesbeth korthals. . ethos and narrative interpretation: the negotiation of values in fiction. lincoln: university of nebraska press. archer, margaret s. . being human: the problem of agency. cambridge: cambridge university press. aristotle, on. . aristotle: the ‘art’ of rhetoric. translated by john h. freese. loeb classical library. cambridge: harvard university press. aristotle, on. . the rhetoric of aristotle. translated by lane cooper. new york: appleton-century-crofts. aristotle, on. . the basic works of aristotle. edited by richard mckeon. translated by w. rhys roberts. new york: random. aristotle, on. . aristotle on rhetoric: a theory of civic discourse. translated by george a. kennedy. new york: oxford university press. bakhtin, mikhail m. . the dialogic imagination: four essays. edited by michael holquist. translated by caryl emerson, and michael holquist. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, mikhail m. . speech genres and other late essays. austin: university of texas press. barthes, roland. . the death of the author. in the rustle of language. translated by r. howard. new york: hill and wang, pp. – . baumlin, james s. . introduction: positioning ethos in historical and contemporary theory. in ethos: new essays in rhetorical and critical theory. edited by james s. baumlin and tita french baumlin. dallas: southern methodist university press, pp. xi–xxxi. baumlin, james s. . ethos. in the oxford encyclopedia of rhetoric. edited by thomas o. sloane. new york: oxford university press, pp. – . baumlin, james s., and tita french baumlin. . on the psychology of the pisteis: mapping the terrains of mind and rhetoric. in ethos: new essays in rhetorical and critical theory. edited by james s. baumlin and tita french baumlin. dallas: southern methodist university press, pp. – . baumlin, james s., and peter scisco. . ethos and its constitutive role in organizational rhetoric. in handbook of organizational rhetoric and communication: foundations of dialogue, discourse, narrative, and engagement. edited by robert heath and Øyvind ihlen. hoboken: john wiley and sons, pp. – . bourdieu, pierre. . language and symbolic power. edited by john b. thompson. translated by gino raymond, and matthew adamson. cambridge: harvard university press. bové, paul. . mendacious innocents, or, the modern genealogist as conscientious intellectual: nietzsche, foucault, said. in why nietzsche now? edited by daniel o’hara. bloomington: indiana university press, pp. – . burke, kenneth. . a rhetoric of motives. berkeley: university of california press. corder, jim w. . varieties of ethical argument, with some account of the significance of ethos in the teaching of composition. freshman english news : – . corder, jim w. . argument as emergence, rhetoric as love. rhetoric review : – . 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the velvet glove doi: . /rep. . claudia sandoval, loyola marymount university in “choosing the velvet glove: women voters, ambivalent sexism, and vote choice in ”, lorrie frasure-yokley ( ) provides some important insights into our knowledge of women’s political behavior. specifically, she uses an intersectionality approach to highlight the way in which an all encompassing “female” variable overestimates or underes- timates findings related to the group and ignores the political differences between white women and women of color. in order to demonstrate the importance of this intersectional analysis, frasure-yokley looks at the way in which ambivalent sexism, or prejudice, toward women influenced american women’s vote choice in the presidential election. frasure-yokley finds that when one disaggregates the variable, women, by race, ambivalent sexism clearly has a different effect on both groups. ambivalent sexism has a positive and significant effect on white women, while it has a negative effect and has no statistical significance on women of color. in other words, ambivalent sexism can help explain why % of white women were still inclined to vote for donald trump even after his lewd and controversial conversation with billy bush resurfaced during his presidential campaign. another example is the recent election of senator doug jones. on december , , alabama held a special election for senator that cap- tured the nation’s attention. not only did the election make news because it was meant to fill the open seat left by the u.s. attorney general jess sessions, it also came with, at least one, newsworthy candidate. on one end, there was democratic candidate doug jones, who many remember address correspondence and reprint requests to: claudia sandoval, loyola marymount university. e-mail: claudia.sandoval@lmu.edu journal of race, ethnicity and politics, ( ), – . © the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the american political science association - / terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:claudia.sandoval@lmu.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /rep. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core as the u.s. attorney who, in prosecuted two kkk members for the killing of four black teens in the s. yet, very few voters felt particularly strong about him as a candidate. many news outlets signaled the lack of enthusiasm for jones, some even pointing out jones’ lack of attention to the african american community. at the other end, was republican can- didate roy moore, an alabama supreme court chief justice that was accused of molesting teenage girls when he was a prosecutor in his s. part of the reason these candidates were so contentious came from the fact that al had not voted for a democratic senator since , and there- fore, the republican candidate had a much higher chance of taking over the congressional seat. weeks before the special election took place, stories of sexual misconduct against teenage girls came out against roy moore. given the national context, where the #metoo movement was at its peak, allegations of sexual assault seemed to signal the death of an individ- ual’s career. moreover, news also came out highlighting moore’s response to a question during a rally. when asked by an african american voter to recall a moment when america was “great”, moore replied with, “i think it was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery—they cared for one another”. both the sexual allegations and the troubling commentary on slavery led many to see moore as an extension of trump, and that led to a clear divide among voters in this historically republican state. in the end, only % of women voted for moore, meaning that a major- ity of female voters chose the democratic candidate, in a republican state. however, even with all of the sexual allegations against moore, exit polls showed that % of white female voters chose the republican candidate. why is this important to note? if we had stopped short of simply analyzing the gender breakdown of the election, our analysis would suggest that a majority of women voted for doug jones; that women, in general, were the reason that moore was not elected. we would say that women made their voices loud and clear against sexual misconduct, and maybe, even racial discrimination. yet, the data tell us something completely different. when parsed out even further, the reality is that a majority of white women still supported the republican candidate. more importantly, it was black women, with % of black female voters coming out to support doug jones, that really pushed the pendulum over to the democratic candidate. it was black women who changed a -year polit- ical trend, and it would do political scientist well to take note of that fact. frasure-yokley’s analysis is an important insight into the, often ignored, difference between women and women of color in politics. for years, the words of wisdom: choosing the velvet glove terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core all encompassing term, women, has been used to signal a voting bloc that is both more democratic and progressive than its male counterpart. yet, lorrie frasure-yokley debunks this often cited “truth” by establishing a his- torical record of conservative voting, among white female voters, that did not change even in the face of blatant sexism, at the state and national level, and when dealt with the opportunity for descriptive representation in the oval office. reference frasure-yokley, lorrie. . “choosing the velvet glove: women voters, ambivalent sexism, and vote choice in .” journal of race, ethnicity, and politics ( ): https://doi.org/ . /rep. . . words of wisdom: choosing the velvet glove terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core sample thesis title with a concise and accurate description (re)claiming the canon: a new lens for the staging of thomas middleton and william rowley’s the changeling by luciana silvestre fernandes b.a., dalhousie university, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of fine arts in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (theatre) the university of british columbia (vancouver) april © luciana silvestre fernandes, ii the following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: (re)claiming the cannon: a new lens for the staging of thomas middleton and william rowley’s the changeling submitted by luciana silvestre fernandes in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of fine arts in theatre examining committee: lois anderson, adjunct professor, theatre, ubc supervisor stephen heatley, professor and department head, theatre, ubc supervisory committee member patricia badir, professor and department head, english, ubc additional examiner iii abstract this thesis examines the production of thomas middleton and william rowley’s the changeling i directed as part of ubc's - season as a case study for re-framing classical and canonized narratives from an inter-sectional feminist lens. this was an expressionistic production, focused on embodying trauma and presenting the story from beatrice-joanna’s perspective. my project addresses the scarcity of production-based analysis in the academic dialogue, providing a practitioner's perspective. i discuss the importance of (re)claiming early modern scripts, the problematic misogynistic tropes of which are evidenced by the treatment of beatrice-joanna’s sexual assault in current scholarship and productions. in this thesis, i deconstruct the process of creation—from concept development, through text analysis, design development, and rehearsal practices; and finally, i reflect on the final product and its audiences. iv lay summary this thesis explains the directorial process i followed in staging thomas middleton and william rowley’s the changeling as part of ubc's - season. this production focused on the perspective of the central character in the play, beatrice-joanna, and on staging her trauma. this thesis outlines the importance presenting classical plays through contemporary perspectives and disrupting sexist traditions that become associated with those plays. i expose the process of creation from a director’s perspective: from concept development, through text analysis, design development, rehearsal practices and finally, i reflect on the final product and its audience. v preface the conceptualization and delineation of this thesis was conducted by me under the supervision and guidance of lois anderson. i directed the production of the changeling with the support of lois, as well as the theatre production staff and students. i was assisted in the research for this thesis by input from and concurrent interviews with my cast and crew. vi table of contents abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii lay summary ............................................................................................................................... iv preface ............................................................................................................................................ v table of contents ......................................................................................................................... vi list of figures .............................................................................................................................. vii acknowledgements....................................................................................................................... xi dedication ..................................................................................................................................... xi chapter : driving forces ............................................................................................................ . disrupting the canon ...................................................................................................... . making my point ............................................................................................................. . theatricality and a director's growth ............................................................................. . on defiance and spite .................................................................................................... chapter : text preparation ...................................................................................................... . text analysis ................................................................................................................ . . archival text work .................................................................................................. . contextual research ..................................................................................................... . . the grotesque ........................................................................................................... . . ptsd and sexual assault ........................................................................................ . . trauma and healing .................................................................................................. chapter : to the barber: cutting and adapting the text .................................................... vii . "if you are not doing the playwright's play, just write your own" and other such excuses artists give themselves ............................................................................................................. . trim to tighten ............................................................................................................. chapter : an expressionistic nightmare ................................................................................ . structured chaos ........................................................................................................... . movement and joannas ................................................................................................. . designing a nightmare ................................................................................................. . . set.............................................................................................................................. . . costumes ................................................................................................................... . . lights and sound ...................................................................................................... . rape into wedding........................................................................................................ chapter : staging violence and staging consent .................................................................. chapter : conclusion ................................................................................................................ bibliography ................................................................................................................................ appendix ...................................................................................................................................... viii list of figures figure cast and crew (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) …………….….……………….……………….……………….……….. figure : chantal gering, aoeiffe davies and genevieve guimond as joannas (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) …………….…… figure : bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna above and kyle preston oliver as de floresbelow (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)….. figure : flow chart for main plot action analysis…….…………….……………..……………... figure : flow chart for sub plot action analysis…….…………….…………….……………….. figure : flow chart mapping stages of beatrice-joanna’s trauma…….…………….…………… figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna (promotional photo by javier r. sortres) …….………… figure a moment of the madmen morris. aoife mcandless-davis, chantal gering, genevieve guimond, nicco graham and connor riopel as madpeople, monica bowman as isabella (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)… figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna at the end of the play. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)……………….………………. figure monica bowman as a joanna performing a movement sequence in a joanna booth (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)… figure chantal gering, aoife mcandless-davis, and genevieve guimond as joannas, half-lit in the platform during the last scene. hayden davis as alsemero and bonnie duff as beatrice center stage. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) …….…………….…………….………….…………….…………….…………………. ix figure chantal gering, aoife mcandless-davis and genevieve guimond as joannas and monica bowman as isabella surround bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in the epilogue. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). …………..…… figure visual research of inspiration for set design shared with belassai. the fabric and rope ones were shared on the second round of visual research. in a moment of serendipity, belassai and i realized we had both been drawn and inspired by images of the same dance show we had not yet shared with each other at that point………....……....……....……....……................……....…...….. figure me, director luciana silvestre fernandes, in the chan centre studying the space during a design meeting and a picture of the space, including the "donut" (octagonal structure at the catwalk level) that luis and i were drawn to. ………......……....……....……....……………………........… figure a progression of luis belassai set drafts on sketch up…………………………………... figure bonnie duff as beatrice joanna and the cast during curtain call, with all the lines leading to her after her death. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)……….……………………………..………….……………………….. figure visual research of inspiration for costume design shared with chang at the start of the process……………………………………………………………………………………………….. figure costume sketches by charlotte chang for main plot and subplot (including livia, who appears in the subplot but belongs to the world of the main plot)…………………………………... figure chantal gering as diaphanta (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)…………………………………………………………. figure chantal gering as diaphanta (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)…………….…………………………………………… figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in her first dress………………………………………... x figure bonnie duff as beatrice joanna in her wedding dress, surrounded by the joannas, genevieve guimond, chantal gering, aoifee mcandless-davies, and monica bowman (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)………. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in her final dress (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)……………………………….. figure the ropes and fluorescent scenic painting under black light. photo by zach levis……... figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna and kyle oliver preston as de flores when he pulls her to him before undoing her corset (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)…………………………………………………………………... figure monica bowman, aoife mcandless-davis, chantal gering and genevieve guimond as the joannas, dress bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna and admire her in her wedding dress (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)………. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna having a moment with her feelings on top of . (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)… figure monica bowman as isabela and ishan sanduh as antonios (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres)………………… xi acknowledgements staging a play takes a village. i could not possibly have had a better community to support me. my undying gratitude goes first and foremost to my number one ally, lois anderson, who supported and challenged me every step of the way. i owe it all to my creative team and the production staff at ubc. thank you for your endless support, hard work, and eagerness in making this project come to life. an enormous thank you for andy ireland and niko bell, who kept me grounded, sane, entertained and fed. theatre is a cruel mistress— thank you for being there when i was at best absent, at worst not myself, and entirely consumed by work. xii dedication to all the invisible women that nobody seeth or heareth. chapter : driving forces to stage a play is to make a statement. the choice of play text reflects an artist’s personal interest, style and mode of interaction with their socio-political contexts. in this chapter, i address my driving forces: i am fueled both by the existing academic and performance traditions and current dialogue as well as a deeply personal desire to fight my own demons and claim a space and a voice. defiance of where i’ve been taught to be. figure cast and crew (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). . disrupting the canon in my mfa in theatre directing at ubc, my research focused on reclaiming history and period narratives. the professional canadian main stages are not representative of all canadian voices; according to the most recent arts council report, only % of directors and % of artistic directors are women, and a large gender wage gap is still prevalent ( ). the diversity in canada labour report highlights that minority artists earn % less than their white counterparts; and that while over % of canadians are visible minorities, the place in the theatre in which they are best represented, as actors, is still merely % ( - ). in order to change these alarming statistics to reflect our current demographics, it is pivotal to have diverse artists take centre stage, and participate in the most celebrated forms and texts, while engaging with contemporary concerns. canonical texts are part of our collective consciousness: their endurance over time is often related to the text's ability to speak to a transcendent universal truth. yet, dominant cultures determine what is considered universal, eclipsing alternate and nuanced understandings from the margins. my approach to canonical materials is to encounter these nuanced perspectives. the sense of familiarity these plays have from their previous incarnations can be disrupted in performance, with the potential to dislodge dogmatic understandings of the themes in the play, and to initiate pluralistic conversations. the conversations i aim to incite revolve around inclusion, the #metoo movement, and how to break cycles of abuse. i am delving into the realm of trauma and healing, following judith herman’s approach of taking the individual experience and placing it into a broader political frame to understand trauma within the socio-cultural conditions that frame the individual experience. thomas middleton and william rowley's the changeling is one of the most performed non-shakespearean jacobean plays, and a play with many themes that resonate in the #metoo era: power dynamics, coercion, and the suppression of women. my aim is to unsettle the traditions associated with this play, the production history of which has been marked by limited patriarchal interpretations. directors have demonstrated a longstanding tendency to downplay the rape of the play’s central female character, beatrice-joanna. the changeling's popularity has grown in recent years, with a stratford production directed by jackie maxwell in . but even maxwell’s production added a scene of intercourse with an enthusiastic beatrice-joanna on top of deflores, deflating the reality and gravity of her assault. the recent scholarship on the play-text contains no less problematic aims to blur the lines of consent. kim solga argues that beatrice-joanna’s "status as a victim of sexual violence (indeed, of any violence at all) is wholly uncertain" ( ). frances e. dolan argues that coercion is distinct from rape, and she minimizes the assault, arguing that beatrice-joanna also uses coercion, only differently. to dismiss a woman’s assault and status as a survivor because she does not fall into the role of a “perfect victim,” and to exclude coercion from rape, are both exemplary of the cultural attitudes the #metoo movement aims to combat. these interpretations blame the victim and frame sexual assault as an ultimately liberating experience—a problematic trope in many stagings of period pieces, and one i refuse to stand by. i reject oppressive patriarchal ideas and ideals, rules and best practices. it is important to note that solga and dolan’a articles were written before the #metoo movement. charlene smith, artistic director of brave spirits theatre in virginia, also staged the changeling post-#metoo in and wrote an article about her approach, claiming directors should “give the power of storytelling to the people most affected by the story.” smith and i are creating in response to the #metoo movement, re-contextualizing plays to fit this new reality and consciousness. . making my point misogynistic production choices are often based on misguided assertions about “the playwright's intention,” a mode of thought that still reigns in less forward-thinking playhouses. to presume that there is a correct interpretation locked up in the murky territory of the playwright’s mind is limiting. this approach leads to what renowned director peter brook describes as the deadly theatre, or the theatre that lacks human honesty in performance. as brook articulates it: “deadly theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done” ( ). in fact, theatre is a live art where meaning is created by many artists, through multiple integrated media. my approach breaks the hierarchy of deadly theatre, embracing the creative team's voice on equal level with the text. after all, to do theatre is to engage in an act of interpretation, and i have no intention of hiding behind an imagined playwright’s mind. art is, at its best, transformative. i embrace the philosophy that artists are artisans of reality, shaping how audiences perceive the world can shape how they interact with it. it is through our choices of representation that we challenge our unconscious or semi-conscious dogmas. artists start conversations through our choices of representation: what we normalize and challenge, whose voices we amplify, and what questions we deem worthy of asking. in my thesis, i embrace that my artistic vision is shaped by the fact that i am a woman, a visible minority, an immigrant, and someone who has had similar experiences to beatrice-joanna. the first three times i read this play it gave me nightmares. haunting and uncannily familiar, beatrice-joanna's journey sat with me for a decade before materializing. this play is deeply dissatisfying, and that draws me to it because such plays are the ones you carry with you long after the curtain call; the ones you find yourself wrestling with, questioning that which is left unfixed in the play and in you. i am drawn to work that has no flawless heroes, only deliciously flawed humans, fighting and struggling in their own right; work that boldly brings out worlds with walls that close in on you if you don't tread carefully and perform according to their rules. above all, i am drawn to work that embodies the most visceral and difficult experiences of humanity, such as the struggle for agency and the reality of trauma— that is beatrice-joanna's plight. beyond beatrice’s nightmare or mine, this is a collective trauma. far too many of us carry invisible scars. my goal is to do justice to her and to the many invisible womxn who have had their sexual assaults discredited. figure : chantal gering, aoeife mcandless-davies and genevieve guimond as joannas (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). . theatricality and a director’s growth my quest from the atlantic to the pacific coast was motivated by the desire to grow as a director, to experiment, to be influenced by different artists and ultimately to find my artistic voice. in my time in british columbia, i re-discovered my passion for physical theatre and movement as a primary means of storytelling; i had the safe space to explore my passion for the classics while committing to my own individual encounters with them; and i was able to expand on my usage of the visual and sensorial elements of theatre. the changeling represents the synthesis of my growth. in a moment of struggle, i recall feeling that i had lost my vision and confidence. i thought: “what is a director without confidence and vision?!” from that moment on, i embarked on a journey of healing. confidence and vision for me are connected to the imperative of a director as an artistic leader: to ground a production with a clear vision, to inspire one’s team, and to create an environment conducive to creative exploration, all while acting as the point that ties the team’s artistic views together. i believe the best art walks the line between the intimately personal and the “universal,” or the very relatable, and that a play is only ever relatable if it is personal and specific—that is, real. audiences can sense truth. the great challenge then is to keep the process personal and real as the endless analysis, research, and multiplicity of voices join in. i turned to peter brook’s process as described in the shifting point: “when i begin work on a play, i start with a deep, formless hunch which is like a smell, a colour, a shadow. that is the basis of my job, my role—that’s my preparation for rehearsals for any play i do. there’s a formless hunch that is my relationship with the play. it’s my conviction that it must be done today” ( ). committing to my hunch, my nightmare, and how real this story is for so many women became my grounding point. classical and canonized work can be particularly threatening and deadly to a director. these plays have centuries of traditions, debates, and generally agreed on interpretations and accepted stagings. the weight of a text that has become untouchable can turn an artist away from their personal experience of the text, turning them into a text analyst instead. text should be inspiring, not limiting. my goal was to focus on what the text inspires rather than to be trapped figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna above and kyle preston oliver as de flores below (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) by it, to be free from any previous assumptions of what is and is not important and commit to my own lens in adapting, cutting and staging. for every “whence” and “wherefore” you deny me, i claim "'tis" and "'twere" tenfold. the changeling was also an exercise in style for me. my goal was to embrace theatricality, the multimedia nature of performance, and the sanctity of the theatrical space as a place of gathering. i reject kitchen-sink realism in my practice. theatre must embrace its theatricality to unleash its power. i wanted to collaborate with my designers to create a unique world for beatrice-joanna that is true to the aspects of her reality that are pivotal to the story i am telling: the nightmare, the realm of trauma and entrapment. my goal was to push my design team to find the expressionist artist in themselves and bring us their nightmares too. moving forward from my visual and spatial explorations in this production, i want to further explore rhythm and sound and their role in crafting an experience for the audience. after this production, i am particularly interested in the power of design and creating work that is centered on design, either with design as a start point, or the main element in storytelling. . on defiance and spite the ultimate driving force in all my work is defiance and spite. an artist cannot create from a place of indifference. the strongest passions for me lie in opposition: to create in spite of, or to spite, becomes natural for one who does not fit the outdated expectations of what a “director” ought to be or do. that a young immigrant woman whose first language is not english obsesses over elizabethan and jacobean scripts provokes surprise, but also contempt. the expectations of what those plays ought to look like and who gets to tell their supposedly “universal” stories is at the core of what i defy. i defy staging and writing traditions. defiance of where i’ve been taught to be spite for the rules and hierarchies; defiance of your gatekeeping and spite for poorly masked glass ceilings-- i adore those scripts, but lacking white hairs and a deep entitled voice, i’m told no. do as you wish, as you dare, as you like: please deny me. say i don't belong. for every “whence” and “wherefore” you deny me, i claim "'tis" and "'twere" tenfold. by all sweets that darkness ever tasted i tell you—art can be nothing but free. the privilege to be a storyteller is no longer yours alone. scary, huh? let me be damned and burn in the pits of hell if i don't play faustus and make ghosts flesh giving every invisible being you so carefully erased and muted a body and a voice center stage. i reject oppressive patriarchal ideas and ideals, rules and best practices. ‘twas her fortune; a wench laid her eyes upon an olde tale. a tale of a lady, so alike the wench, in every hope, imperfection and, alas—also in their fates. so alike that the devils of the wench’s past were summoned. ghosts of her memory came to life: these hands not more alike than her ghosts to the lady’s. much desirous for change in her fate, the wench dared speak. — “oh, a parlous fool! to profess her truth! know her not to hold her honour close? know her not her place?” “subtle slut!” “a pretty easy round-packed sinner as most your ladies are.” “lock her up!” “cunning devil.” “silly little slut.” ay, a loud wench is a most fearsome deformity. and that is power. and she conjured her powers and affirmed she knew the lady best of all. “fuck you—that coercion isn’t rape and that an imperfect victim isn’t a victim.” many a delicate wench marked her. their pretty heads suddenly tilted. incendiary. many a wench stood, holding their ground and each other’s hands. chapter : text preparation the director's job begins well before rehearsals commence. at the start the rehearsal process, the director must be the absolute specialist in the subject. that is not to say that the director has to have all the answers, but rather become intimately familiar with the play so as to have come to know how little you knew. this is the stage where the director has found all the pertinent questions that can be found alone; has interrogated and built worlds. day one of rehearsals must be the time to play: the director has laid the foundation and built the playground, so the time has come to go roll in the sand instead of worry about intellectual and analytical concerns. in this chapter, i include my preparatory text work, completed in advance of rehearsals as well as my adaptation process and a discussion of both. . text analysis each production has unique challenges of its own and requires a unique approach to text work: my preparation for moira buffini’s silence, a linear contemporary realist play, was very different than my preparation to adapt sophocles’ antigone into a seven-antigone expressionist dance-theatre piece. for this project, as it is common in my practice, i borrow from various practitioners, such as katie mitchell, david ball and peter brook, and add elements of my own practice developed over time. the aim of text analysis and research for a director is to make the text rehearsal ready. i include below only the tasks that were necessary to obtain that clarity, and it is important to understand that this fragment does not attempt to include all knowledge that years of scholarship and practice performing these texts brings: theatre is a craft, and this form of text analysis is more technical than it is intellectual. it represents the stage of interpretation i was in before bringing in designers and performers. . . archival text work the bulleted points in this and the following sub-sections are the archival text work as completed in the summer and early fall. the paragraphs after the bullets serve to contextualize the work done. • turning a hunch into a concept o this play gave me nightmares the first times i read it. whenever stuck in the theoretical and getting lost in the questions, get back to those nightmares. this is an application of peter brook’s approach, as discussed in chapter . . • articulate purpose and need (why it needs to be done so desperately) o this play tells the story of a woman who attempts to play the bloody games of the dog-eat-dog world she inhabits to her advantage and find agency in the violent ways her world has taught her; she is caught in her own snare though. the odds are stacked too high against her. this production will tell the story from beatrice- joanna's perspective and portray the reality of the trauma that follows her sexual assault. my aim to unsettle traditions associated with this play and resonate with the #metoo era: tackling hot topics such as the suppression of women, power dynamics, and coercion. o canonical texts are part of our collective consciousness. the sense of familiarity these plays have from their previous incarnations can be disrupted in performance. beatrice-joanna has been done a grave injustice by scholars and practitioners alike. this play’s production history has been marked by limited patriarchal interpretations. o my goal is to do justice to her and to the many invisible women who have had their sexual assaults discredited. the question of “why this play” and “why now” is not only a question a director must be ready to answer for grant and festival applications. as an artist i am interested in purpose—and purpose cannot be lost to process. articulating clearly why a work needs to be done grounds a director in their vision. my motivations here were further articulated in chapter . • action- mapping o flow-chart analysis for plot and subplot; subplot as related/supporting main plot figure : flow chart for main plot action analysis figure : flow chart for sub plot action analysis figure : flow chart mapping stages of beatrice-joanna’s trauma figures and are how i apply david ball’s mapping of actions, working backwards to trace the action of the play following his definition of action as what “occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen” ( ). this approach helps a director find clarity—a play is action and achieving clarity of action is laying the foundation needed before any conceptual work can take place. obtaining this clarity, i could then work on cuts that don’t affect the clarity of action and the material reality of the play and discover patterns in rhythm—for example, in the first few scenes there are very few actions, while, after the rape, every page is action packed. this informs me of how to guide the audience’s breath through the pace of the play. it also reveals potential traps and challenges: the blue boxes, for example, where pivotal action happens off-stage and the details of what actually happen are unclear. this in turn informs me of where clarity will be most important, where decisions will need to be made very clearly, and, conceptually, what is part of the “he said she said” problem and what is clearly shown to the audience. the subplot chart was particularly helpful, as the subplot of this play is a great challenge: most of it is entirely disconnected from the main plot, until the gentleman in disguise, franciscus and antonios are revealed to be counterfeits and suspected of alonzo’s murder. the chart assisted me in the cutting process, keeping me focused on what was important to move the action forward and made me consider the important question of what role, if not to move the main plots action, does it serve. through a series of close readings and analysis, the parallels between beatrice-joanna and isabella became clearer, the role of the madhouse in expanding the world from beatrice’s household to the community at large and demonstrating quite clearly the shared ideology of those who have power and the real threat of what happens to people who do not behave according to this society’s strict code. in addition to the action of the play, i followed the same strategy in mapping beatrice- joanna’s trauma, as illustrated in figure . applying this process to her trauma is the key to telling the story from her perspective and to honoring her journey. this process grounds in action the aspects of the production where the expressionist elements will take place and clarifies important questions of the passage time which are then pivotal in helping guide my actress. the immediacy i discovered through the combination of these simple flow-charts (how immediately after the rape she gets married and how little time to process and plan she has) illuminated and shaped her character’s decision-making process in the second half of the play. it also grounded me in what became the most important scene of the play in my production: the transition from rape to wedding, when the nightmare merges with and consumes the action. • scene by scene- tracking action; trauma; moment before and after; significance o . church sunday morning ▪ beatrice-joanna and alsemero see each other and fall in love at first/second sight ▪ pre-trauma, b-j is at her most confident. ▪ moment before- imagined: b-j woke up, diaphanta got her ready, they went to leave, and de flores was waiting to accompany them to church. she sat far from him and followed mass. he watched her the whole time. ▪ moment before- imagined: alsemero woke up after dreaming of a shipwreck and went to church to ask god to bless his voyage. ▪ significance: love that one would kill for, undeniable chemistry needed, greater than romeo and juliet sparkles. o . a street near the harbour/ church; sunday morning ▪ beatrice-joanna and alsemero confess their love and joanna has him invited to her father's castle. ▪ pre-trauma, b-j is most active/has most agency, playing games in order to control her future. ▪ moment before, almost immediately before: they lock eyes at church. moment before- imagined: jasperino wonders thinking of her, she starts home but comes back this way to run into him. ▪ significance: assault plot- other- a lot of firsts o . alibius house; sunday around midday ▪ counterfeit madman joins the madhouse ▪ moment before: probably after having a meal (before feeding the interns); livia and antonio have probably rehearsed it; was there some jealousy trigger for allibius? ▪ significance: assault plot- ? o . castle sunday around midday ▪ b-j postpones wedding ▪ pre-trauma, but fear is present as are his obsession and his stalking ▪ moment before: alonzo and tomazo get off their ship; b-j gets home and sends for jasperino to bear her message; de flores discusses businesses he is to carry with her father, until her fiancé arrives and he is sent ahead. ▪ significance: assault plot- husband-to-be is introduced, how b-j's father talks of her, her using womanly ways to get what she needs; interaction with de flores confessing to stalking her. o . castle shortly after ▪ b-j decides to and proceeds to seduce deflores into killing her fiance. ▪ pre-trauma: most agency, believes she has won ▪ moment before: b-j waits anxiously, making herself look her best; alsemero was probably getting ready to leave and sail away, de flores has been stalking her and is spying on her. ▪ significance: assault plot- the moment he finds his way to corner her, as she thinks she has found a way to be rid of him (both triumphant); when she is unknowingly trapped o . a narrow passage the next morning (upon his rising) ▪ de flores kills alonzo ▪ moment before: de flores probably has not slept in anticipation. alonzo ? ▪ significance: point of no return o . a vault- madhouse at the same time as the last two scenes? same day? ▪ tony reveals himself to isabella and lollio tries to take advantage of that; madmen are commissioned for b-j's wedding ▪ moment before: alibius was out for business and received letter from messenger; isabella got ready to go to the market; lollio ? some work- related task? ▪ significance: assault plot- when both worlds are brought together with the wedding. other- exact parallel to b-j being creeped on by her owner's keeper and assaulted by him, trying to claim agency through threats of getting other men to kill for her out of love o . a chamber in the castle, after breakfast ▪ de flores approaches joanna post-murder reveals what he wants for payment, traps her, rapes her. ▪ moment before: de flores buried the body; joanna her father and alsemero all had breakfast together and were just leaving ▪ the act- confusion and guilt: did she yield? did she deserve it? did she have an option? should she have yelled and been guilty of murder rather than let him have her? is this payment for her crime? o . wedding- that day into next day *potentially a moment of suspension of time: time becomes less about passing hour and more about her experience and how her trauma distorts it. ▪ moment before: her father chooses alsemero in place of alonzo to marry b-j since he has disappeared, she does so. ▪ trauma: her behaviours are impulsive, she is, unknowingly, responding to her assault. dissociations begin. touch is uncomfortable, reality is confusing. everything brings potential harm. ▪ significance: -trauma: auto-pilot into wedding, raw and everything she has done this for… and now she faces the bleak reality of it -other: design and all should start really following her impression of the world, not the world as is. o . alsemero's chamber, after wedding ceremony, before party and consummation. h to bedtime. ▪ b-j discovers virginity test, and fearing to be discovered, tests her maids virginity and negotiates a bed trick with her ▪ trauma: raw, and irrational, struggling to stay in control, pretending rationality but unable to be her usual pragmatic self, anxious and restless. she is a different person. ▪ moment before: the family arrives from the church for the festivities, b-j escapes the oppressive performance of her fairy-tale ending, in agony, thinking of the night to come. diaphanta was working/flirting and was sent by her father to look for b-j to come greet a late-arriving guest. ▪ significance: she can be exposed and lose it all. she realizes that the snowball effect is possible and probable. o . a chamber in the castle, same day ▪ vermandero suspects the missing gentleman (counterfeit madmen), alonzo's brother comes to claim vengeance; bj's virginity is suspected by alsemero (his friend and her maid's gossip). she is tested, she feigns it satisfactorily. • moment before: beatrice-joanna had told de flores of her bed trick plan and came back looking for alsemero; alsemero was hosting ? ; jasperino was flirting/hooking up with diaphanta, was he maybe planning to ask for her hand after the wedding (now that she would have a dowry)?; de flores is looking for beatrice joanna, also concerned they will find out she is not a virgin and what they will do about it, she has tells him she has already figured it out and how. this is the interaction/conversation that is overheard. tomazo has just docked and left the port in a hurry— he was supposed to be coming to his brother’s wedding and just found out on the port another man is marrying where his brother should be. ▪ trauma: beatrice joanna is shaken from interacting with de flores but is forcing herself to present/ to be “in control” and keep going “business as usual,” though for anyone paying close attention, there is little that seems normal here. everything is heightened. ▪ significance: she wins for once! o . a room in alibius's house, the day before the wedding ** should i move this? ** or is the party on a different day than the ceremony? does it matter if i don't mention tomorrow? ** ▪ isabella disguises herself as a madwoman to test tony's love, both tony and franciscus are called out for their pretense and pitched against each other. ▪ moment before: lollio brings her letter after reading and laughing at it. what does she do to pass time?—bring it onto the stage whatever her action is until lollio interrupts. ▪ significance: disguises are exposed; superficial intentions too. isabella is the one who tests the trueness of her would-be lover and he fails; essence vs appearances/ the good name vs the intention parallel. o . a gallery in the castle am; consummation ▪ de flores persuades a shaken b-j that he is her protector and kills diaphanta. ▪ trauma: when b-j is the most shaken. can’t keep her thoughts straight, easily take, on survival mode. de flores sees this and prays on that (it is the sun rising when it is am) and convinces her she depends on him. the moment she starts trying to convince herself, and the audience, that she should love him. ▪ moment before: b-j made diaphanta ready in her clothes and left in a robe to wait in a room she won't be found, where she said she would meet diaphanta after the act, switch clothes and exchange places again. vermandero was probably in bed. de flores? ▪ significance: major shift in the story/her path that needs to be very clear. a lot of small-ish suggestions that may need to be underlined: am; “i must trust somebody” beat; clarity of what his plan is; organized believable chaos for when his plan is in action. o . a chamber next day? ▪ tomazo, very suspicious of everyone, is told that the two in the madhouse have escaped the day of the murder and are likely guilty. ▪ moment before: tomazo may have had what should have been a pleasant encounter and finds himself unable to enjoy it. de flores vermandero would have just been visited by allibius and isabella and told the news and immediately come looking for tomazo ▪ significance: when the two plots collide, and we think b-j/de flores are off the hook (we/the audience should believe this). o . alsemero's chamber- may start simultaneously or immediately after ▪ alsemero sees beatrice and de flores interacting and confronts her, locks her up, then de flores with her. de flores murders her and gets to be the one to decide how the story is told. ▪ trauma: finger in the open wound moment. person most loved attacks her and accuses her of being horrible for having been assaulted (and for arranging a murder, lest we forget). her worshipped fiancé attacking her makes her break with considerable ease. a combination of fragility and him being the one she can't lie to/hold her pretense to (again, likely informed by what was that interaction) ▪ moment before: de flores and joanna have an amicable interaction (about?) while being watched by alsemero and his friend. counterfeit madmen have been arrested and brought over (likely by lollio, should be in the scene). ▪ significance: final scene— how do we button the story, what is the final image, what do we make of the final words? how do we underline the irony/ horror in the end and the play’s final words? (to ask design team too) the scene by scene analysis is the guide to why each scene is important in the play. no scene can lack purpose or central action. at this stage, i discover important elements through the details: what in the scene could be dangerously underplayed, such as the complexity around diaphanta’s death. i broaden meaning from the details to an understanding of the play as a whole, paralleling the subplot and main plots for example. this is also when i truly start preparing to support the actors, understanding where their characters come from, building potential suggestions, focusing on which blanks must be filled and which micro-level patterns identified—such as how we never know exactly what lollio was doing before he enters the stage. • back to basics: o stasis- b-j marries the man her father chose; he moves into the castle; de flores continues to creep at her from a somewhat safe distance. o intrusion- b-j and alsemero confess their love to each other. o high gear- b-j gets de flores to murder her fiancé. o decisive turn- de flores rapes b-j. o new stasis- joanna and de flores are dead, alsemero is the new son to her father. o point of attack: joanna and alsemero falling in love. my “back to basics” is another look at the broad picture, understanding the world of the play and what makes the play happen—the events that forever change the world of the play and keep the production dynamic. this process highlights what is at stake (or what makes a play dramatic) and provides the peaks in the dramatic structure. i also find a lot of clarity through understanding the point of attack: a play shows a specific section of a story, and the choice of where to start shapes the lens through which we experience it. for example, that the play begins with beatrice-joanna and alsemero falling in love inform us of her motivation—she does it all for love. it also ranks what is most important: her relationship with alsemero. the arrangement made for her to marry alonzo, and their relationship, is not as central. • audience journey o opening . / . : light with moments of tension – cheering like romeo and juliet; intrigued by the joannas (tension on de flores interaction); only tension on lollio's last line o . / . : kind of creeped out by de flores, even if unsure of how to feel about b- j's aggressive dismissal of him. as she seduces him- amused/impressed but free to judge her a bit o . / . : horrified at the actual brutality of de flores and lollio o . / . : tables officially turned: pity joanna o . : “how is she going to deal with the aftermath now?” o . : heightened tension: “are they going to be caught? how far can she go with it?” (so absurd it is kinda funny) o . : but the funny is ugly. laugh and feel the discomfort of doing so (madmen morris) o . : “no, no no! don't go there! don't do that. don't kill her. don't fall for him.” o . : “will they have “peace?”” o . : “wtf.” tracking the audience’s journey is not often part of my process, but something i experimented with. i struggle with how determining the audience’s journey may lead a director to misperceive what is inevitably a plural audience as a unified being. audiences are made up of a wide range of individuals who bring their own experiences and interpretations, which are legitimate and true. this also risks creating from the outside in, creating a superficial production through the focus on a desired effect rather than allowing an effect to happen because of tight, well executed action. moving forward, i plan on experimenting with other ways to track the flow and execution of a vision (a play has direction and a desired impact after all), without denying my audiences their plurality. • patterns, mirrors, contrasts o themes: victim blaming; “the perfect victim;” gendered violence; power structures; existing in an unethical world; corruption; how public perception shapes what is moral; abuse masked as love; agency; appearances; “shame.” ▪ focus: existing in an unethical world, how it corrupts and punishes you for existing on the margins/ trying to break away from its strict limitations. ▪ to explore and embody trauma as a means of empathy for those stuck in an oppressive world. o imagery and language ▪ evoked: a woman cleansing herself. ▪ textual: “i am in a labyrinth” (bj), haunting ( . de flores haunts b-j, memories and guilt haunt her) my challenge in this section was to keep to the “less is more” approach, when the text is so rich in imagery and too much can be said about language. the goal of highlighting themes and imagery in language was opposite to that of a literary analysis, where more is truly more; instead it is to find the key images that will govern my visual representation of the action through blocking and design. • sensorial questions o world: a nightmare o sound: a fugue, distortion, loops, a loud silence, church bells o space: cold, oppressive, brutalist architecture, geometric, industrial venue to be embraced o lights: dramatic shadows, lurking, beams of light o costume: stiffness in the seemingly soft, oppressively elegant, high fashion at this point in the text work, the focus is given fully to what will help me build the world the characters inhabit through design and clear visualization. this was the basis of what i shared with the designers at our first production meeting: deliberately nonspecific to prevent being restrictive but focused enough to inspire them in the right direction. • character: wants overall and per scene • beatrice-joanna o wants: agency. to control of her future. o . church- wants to talk to alsemero// wants to make him stay o . to delay her wedding o . to prevent alsemero from giving up on her, ignite him? / find a way to be together/ seduce de flores into killing alonzo o . (work to be able to marry alsemero: first her father then de flores) rid herself of de flores o . to prepare for her wedding’s consummation/ to preserve her image and alsemero’s love/ to test diaphanta and use her o . to convince alsemero she is a virgin o . to protect her honour/ to replace diaphanta in her husband’s bed/ to have diaphanta killed/ to seem innocent o . to sooth alsemero/ to confess/ to earn forgiveness/ to tell the truth • diaphanta/ (joanna ; madwoman ) o wants: to move up in life. to enjoy a good life o . set up b-j/ find herself a date o . watch over b-j o . to find b-j/ to convince b-j she can sleep with alsemero for her • isabella o wants: her partner to respect her. freedom. o . to entertain herself in spite of her husband and situation/ challenge her husband o . to recruit lollio to her side/ to test antonios love o . to be heard/ reveal the truth • servant/ (joanna ; madwoman ) o wants: to keep order/ do her job o . to fix the situation • livia/ (joanna ; madwoman ) o wants to protect/help antonio o . keep antonio safe/ help with his plan • de flores o wants bj. fuck her, control her, own her. o . to vex b-j (have his will) o . to have b-j “rail at him” o . to fuck her, whatever it takes/ to trap her/ to kill alonzo o . claim his prize/ take her virginity o . to dismiss tomazo (not raise suspicion) o . to convince b-j she needs him/ tie her to him/ kill diaphanta/ to show off to b-j o . to dismiss alsemero/ to silence b-j/ to have the final word/ to shame her/ to die on his own terms • vermandero o wants: to create a legacy. to move up his good name o . to tell b-j to get ready for a wedding within this fortnight// to honour/impress/welcome/receive his friend's son. o . to set up the perfect wedding o . to impress his guests o . to preserve his good name/ guilt tomazo o . to have order again o . to make amends with tomazo o . to reveal his discovery/ to mourn • alsemero o wants: to marry beatrice joanna. to be the hero of a fairy-talesque romance o . wants b-j to love him o . to prove his love to b-j o . to impress vermandero/ bj o . to be a proper host (greet)/ to test b-j o . to protect b-j/ be a proper husband o . to have b-j confess/ to shame her/ to punish her/ to keep his own good name/ to expose b-j and de flores/ to re-establish order • jasperino o wants to help alsemero (?) o . to bed diaphanta o . to out b-j/ to convince alsemero she is unfaithful o . have alsemero break up with b-j • alonzo/ madman o wants to marry b-j o . to please his soon to be father in law and fiance/ defend b-j's honour o . to be shown the secrets of the castle (why?) • alibius o wants to control isabella and thrive o . to have lollio guard isabella o . to prepare for the biggest gig in his life o . get in favour with the big shots • lollio o wants to have fun and get money o . to fool his master? to get money? o . impress isabella? o . to revenge himself on the fake madmen for making a fool of him/ to present the perfect morris • franciscus o wants to seduce isabella o . to make isabella fall for him and revenge himself on lollio o . to win isabella’s love • antonio o wants to seduce isabella o . to be admitted and unsuspected as “an idiot” o . to make isabella fall for him o . to fit in/ to establish dominance/ isabella to forgive him • tomazo o wants to revenge his brother o . to convince alonzo to break up with b-j o . to make vermandero confess/ find out what happened to his brother o . to revenge his brother o . to find closure listing character wants is the part of text work that i finalized after cuts, in preparation for rehearsal. i focus my character work by shifting into an actor-centric perspective and looking at the objectives and wants of each character. i focus on sticking to verbs and making every want have a cap on another character . i never give these notes out to the actors, or, as a matter of fact, consult this sheet during the process (though i will ask the actors for their input, and challenge this refers to the practice of considering every objective to have “a cap” or an end, on the other character: there is something the other character can say or do that would fulfil my objective. example that does not have a cap: “i want appreciation” vs an example with a cap “i want you to say you love me.” objectives with a cap on the other character raise the stakes and create more interesting dynamics on stage. them to be more specific if their initial answer isn’t putting them into action). this is part of the work to prepare and then forget about: it allows me to understand each character’s perspective and be better prepared to assist my actors whenever they struggle finding their motivation. beyond preparing me to assist the actors using the tools of their trade and their vocabulary, this process helps me streamline very complex humans, which is essential to achieve clarity in performance. for example, before listing all of beatrice-joanna’s wants, i had not truly realized what a great proportion of her actions have their cap on alsemero. there was much more love and romance to this story than i initially realized. on the other hand, it also highlights challenges: characters like tomazo enter with a small variation on the same want in every scene: bringing out what makes each of these different and how he progresses is pivotal for the arc of the story. katie mitchell defends text work as a fundamental element to “ensure you have an objective relationship to the play” ( ). while i am not convinced that this is possible, careful text work brings out aspects and challenges of the text that an initial passionate reading may obfuscate. i have moved away from gathering information on what is said by other characters, in particular for this production, as a means to honour the facts: people are what they do, not what they say about themselves and even less what is said about them. this is part of the way in which i aim to do beatrice-joanna justice. i look at what she and those around her do, not what is said about them. in this play in particular this is essential, as there are several significant actions happening offstage that are interpreted through the (biased) eyes of those watching. in . , for example, jasperino overhears beatrice-joanna and de flores’s voices in another room and chooses to listen in (a choice that already speaks more to his character than hers). jasperino describes what happened as “words pass’d/ like those that challenge interest in a woman” ( . the changeling, edited script) and their immediate conclusion is that beatrice must be having an affair. when we consider the bluntness of the text, there is no evidence to assume that more than words passed between them. beyond that, the fact that the words used are “challenge interest in a woman” implies that it is de flores who is interested/could provoke her interest, and this still does not lead alsemero and jasperino to question why de flores would be hitting on the young daughter of his boss, or even ask beatrice-joanna what she was talking to de flores about. we must note too that one these men, alsemero, keeps potions around to test women’s virginity and apparently has a habit of doing so, as evidenced in the same scene when alsemero describes that the potion “has that secrete virtue it ne’er miss’ed sir/ upon a virgin.” these are also men who speak of women as vessels to be boarded, as jasperino does in . when describing diaphanta in an aside, when the characters are themselves and not putting on masks to other characters. it is not at all surprising that characters who objectify and dehumanize women as they do would immediately jump to the conclusion that she must be cheating. giving much credibility to what a character says of another is a trap, in spite of it being an old text analysis practice. characters’ biases affect their perspective of the facts and lead them to build their own narratives. if these are left unchallenged, the problematic choices in staging i seek to subvert are the result. i focus on what characters want and what they do. all quotations from the changeling, unless otherwise specified, will be from the adapted script included in the appendix. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna (promotional photo by javier r. sortres). . contextual research this section includes excerpts from key materials i studied in preparation for this production, a discussion of the questions that led me to them, and an overall reflection on the applied effect of the research materials in production. research for production is often about world building. that i have lived with this text for a decade before coming to perform it, allied with my expressionistic focus, meant my research was about turning conceptual questions into practical considerations of staging instead of realist world building research that would include historic and geographical contextual information. . . the grotesque the madhouse dance immediately evoked the grotesque to me. that led me on quest to better understand the grotesque and discover how important the morris and madhouse subplot at large may be. what i found to be the most useful resource on the subject, history and application of the grotesque in the arts was grotesque by justin edwards and rune graulund. it explains that the uncanny and grotesques are closely related and can produce a range of responses: “the grotesque has the power to move from the material world into the uncanny realm of mystery through its experience of disorientation, bewilderment, confusion and bafflement” ( - ). the idea of something uncannily familiar speaks immediately to the experience of beatrice-joanna and my nightmarish impression of this script. disorientation, bewilderment, confusion and bafflement are also great choreographic start points for the madman morris. figure a moment of the madmen morris. aoife mcandless-davis, chantal gering, genevieve guimond, nicco graham and connor riopel as madpeople, monica bowman as isabella (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) next, edwards and graulund pose perhaps the most significant consideration for this production how the grotesque’s break with the normal leads us to question what is normal and abnormal. further, they speak to my rebellious soul saying that: we must remember that normalization is a powerful discourse for control and institutionalization, for dominant institutions sanction certain forms of ‘normalcy’, and this always comes at the expense of others, which are constituted by contrast as abnormal, inferior or even shameful. this lack of ‘normalcy’, indeed the very idea of normality itself, can lead to an uneven distribution of shame in people’s lives, resulting in the negative consequences of exclusion, demonization and even violence. in this, the grotesque can criticize the idea that there is some ethically compelling aspect to ‘normality’ by suggesting that the normal range is simply a statistical category to which there is no ethical obligation to correspond. if normal just means within a common statistical range, there is no reason to be normal or not ( ). the production consideration that this view brought to the fore was the question of when the real world becomes more grotesque and bewildering than the madhouse. isabella speaks of the madmen sounding almost jealous of their freedom, which is, indeed, a fleeting concept for most characters in this world. this was my first clue that the mad people should be recognizable others. the main practical outcome of this reading was a production question that i took to our design team and actors repeatedly and that we wrestled with from day one through the run: what are the walls of this world? what is normal and what is not? what and who is permitted and who is erased and suppressed? at this point already, i realized how thick the tangle the grotesque was sewing in between the plot and subplot: the idea that an uneven distribution of shame leads to violence and that there are no ethics in the categorization of what is normal and accepted is shared in both the main and sub plots in how the burden of “shame” and “good names” are carried disproportionately by the women, who become victims of various forms of violence as a result of this uneven distribution of guilt. this also made me realize how much closer beatrice-joanna and isabella are to sharing in the same fate of the mad people. i had an early inkling of a madhouse filled with hysteric women patients; indeed, the request by the doctor alibius to have lollio summon isabella to see the mad people dance in . is a threat: this is what happens to the defiant (including defiant wives). the spectacle of the oppression of the vulnerable is the normal and the expected punishment for deviants, as “the grotesque returns as the repressed of the political unconscious, as those hidden cultural contents which by their abjection had consolidated the cultural identity of the bourgeoisie” (edwards and graulund ). my goals align with the unearthing and questioning of the political unconscious. . . ptsd and sexual assault to focus a production on the embodiment of trauma means additional research on trauma itself is necessary: clear, articulate, performable descriptions that we can manage as objectively as humanly possible to prevent drawing from our own trauma, while remaining grounded in the reality and psychology of it. for this reason, the most useful sources turned out to be the less formal ones: aimed at victims or from the perspective of victims. such sources, in opposition to scientific journals, keep it human. psychologist ph.d. elyssa barbash wrote an informative article for psychology today that explained in succinct language the victim’s experience: % of women who are raped experience post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) symptoms in the two weeks following the assault. … these symptoms generally include: intrusive re-experiencing (through memories or reminders) of the assault; avoidance of trauma-related stimuli or reminders; alterations in thoughts and mood (negative thinking and depressed, anxious, or angry mood); increased arousal and reactivity (anxiety, hyper vigilance, irritability, easily startled). the re-experiencing is tied directly to the actions the joannas performed in the psychological realm whenever beatrice experienced anything that would be triggering post-assault. these were mapped in advance, but also discussed and modified through rehearsals with the actors we made choices as to when we performed an action that was the re-experiencing of the assault and what moments they express the feelings beatrice couldn’t (such as discomfort in someone’s presence, tension, and the imperative to perform normalcy). the alterations in thought and mood, arousal and reactivity are key to understanding beatrice’s actions after the assault: she has had very little time to process everything, she is in survival mode, confused, anxious and hyper vigilant. the shifts beatrice experiences in scene . when beatrice waits diaphanta’s return from alsemero’s bed are a perfect example of this. diaphanta is late and beatrice-joanna is anxious, easily convinced the sun is rising (though the clock has merely struck two). her famous line “i am forced to love thee now,” when de flores manipulates her into believing he is her only hope, is a perfect example of trauma response when she is on an emotional roller coaster, making extremely rash decisions (such as killing diaphanta), turning to de flores for advice, and trying to convince herself to love him, bordering on turning to fawning as a coping strategy. barbash also speaks of dissociation, having flashbacks to traumatic events (again, applied in the action of the joannas) and provides two examples of what dissociation may look like: “feeling that you’re briefly losing touch with events going on around you (similar to daydreaming) [and] “blanking out” or being unable to remember anything for a period of time. this turned into a transition decision for . , the moment she processes what has happened to her see text in appendix . . i say border-line because i believe beatrice-joanna never quite gets to that stage, as in . she speaks of de flores as her “loathing” and a “thing of hate” and even on her death bed, still tries to work to get alsemero’s forgiveness, only ever addressing de flores to say that “her loathing was professed to the rest but ne’er believed.” that takes place immediately after her wedding. in the moment, we had a flash-black out. we then added a couple more at pivotal moments, such as after hearing diaphanta’s scream as she is murdered in . and at the end of the show. i also provided my actors playing beatrice-joanna and de flores an article written by a domestic abuse survivor who outlines the steps through which victims are manipulated to the point that their sense of reality is deeply compromised, titled “ steps that explain why women stay in abusive relationships” by crystal sanchez. i had shared this article before when working in another middleton production about domestic violence, a yorkshire tragedy, and the actors found it very useful in empathizing with a situation that we may, thankfully, have a difficult time understanding: the motivation and decision-making process of a character who is in a situation of abuse and acting against their and our better judgments. the steps sanchez identifies are ) assault on identity (you are worthless), ) establishment of guilt (this is your fault), ) self-betrayal (making choices that are harmful to well being), and ) breaking point (you are crazy, this never happened). this being a tragedy, however, we never get to the next set of steps under the category, “possibility of salvation.” in this case, it was quite easy to trace de flores’ actions and their impact on beatrice-joanna, to list a few: “though thou writ’st maid, thou whore in thy affection,/ ‘twas changed from thy first love, and that’s a kind/ of whoredom in thy heart” ( . ); )”why, are not you as guilty in, i’m sure/ as deep as i?” ( . ); ) in response to alsemero hearing the he had slept with diaphanta on his consummation night: “yes, see text in appendix . ’s speech “this fellow has undone me endlessly” and the while i coupled with your mate/ at barley-break;” ( . ), which we know is a lie, as we watched scene . , which happens while the consummation happens offstage. . . trauma and healing the most useful source for feeding my vision and purpose, which fuels the entire creative process and every decision made along the way, was trauma psychiatrist and researcher judith herman’s trauma and healing. herman argues that the emerging awareness of domestic and sexual violence is the third time in the century that a form of psychological trauma surfaced into public consciousness, and that, each time, it was associated to a political movement. the first was hysteria, the second combat neurosis, and the last is sexual and domestic violence, with “its political context [--] the feminist movements in western europe and north america” ( ). herman is writing before the western feminist movement gained notoriety with the online dissemination of #metoo. the #metoo movement pulled aside a veil to reveal the insidiousness of the issue in the entertainment industry and on campuses—both the determining frameworks my production was working within—exemplified best in harvey weinstein, convicted at last after years and dozens of testimonies from his victims; and brock turner, who was caught in the act of violating an unconscious woman on stanford’s campus and who served half a year’s sentence . these events are part of our collective consciousness: the students in the cast, crew and audiences, members of this industry and women everywhere share in the fear and trauma of see new york times article “brock turner loses appeal to overturn sexual assault conviction” for details. existing in a world where this is their lived experience. in staging a play about sexual assault and knowing that in women experience sexual violence in their lifetime , one must be conscious that beyond a great political issue, this is a deeply personal matter for far too many of us. herman explains that studying psychological trauma, and by extension, witnessing it embodied in performance, is to come to face both with human vulnerability and human capacity for evil, and “when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. it is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. the bystander is forced to take sides” (herman ). i have been interested in the role of the bystander for quite some time, having explored it as the central focus in my production of middleton’s a yorkshire tragedy. wrestling with the role of the bystander is key to breaking cycles of abuse and creating support networks. audience members come to the theatre to be willing bystanders, witnessing, responding, and having their responses witnessed as well. conscious of that, my changeling was to be very difficult to witness, because i am asking the audience to understand a very imperfect victim in a vicious society and question their morals around agency, justice, sexism, and punishment. imperfect victims have the odds set doubly against them, as “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. all the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. he appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. the victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain” (herman ). my goal became to make the audience share the burden of her pain, world health organization, , quoted in carleton’s sexual assault support page. of our pain: to force them to hear what is playing in her head, for it engulf and surround them as much as it does her. herman clarifies that the natural response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness; they become unspeakable, but “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are the pre-requisites for both the restoration of the social order and the healing of individual victims” ( ). therapy itself is based on the power of speaking the unspeakable, because immense power and creative energy is released when the barriers of denial and repression are lifted. those barriers are collective when the trauma is shared. the power of lifting those barriers communally is what the #metoo has released. it lifted the barriers of shame and guilt, bringing millions of women worldwide together through a hashtag, through lawsuits, and through art. what theatre can do for survivors can be explained through herman, as she explains: “the fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story and restoring the connection between survivors and their community” ( ). theatre is dependent on the human as the means of art and the connection between the performer and the individuals in the audience, making it the best art form through which to speak the unspeakable. this is an art form defined by its cathartic power: it is holy because it is a gathering where people come together to share an experience and exercise empathy. we as creators have the responsibility to harness this power and make every rehearsal room and every theatre a space where everyone in the room feels safe and empowered to explore the collective trauma behind stories like the changeling. in practical terms, this means that greater conscious efforts to create a safe space and practice safer intimacy and violence direction are needed. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna at the end of the play. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres) chapter : to the barber: cutting and adapting the text cutting and adapting the text is a non-linear process that is guided by the text work and research above, as well as my vision for the production. in this chapter i articulate my reasons for the cut and adaptation, my overall process, and discuss some of the main decisions made in editing the text. . “if you are not doing the playwright’s play, just write your own” and other such excuses artists give themselves there are still several traditionalists who often voice criticisms of editing and adapting as attempts by directors to become or undermine the playwright. their argument assumes a supremely hierarchical understanding of theatre that is limiting and outdated and particularly inappropriate if one attempts, as such artists often claim to, to “honour the playwright.” one of the most appealing aspects of early modern scripts to me is that they hold no pretense to exist as a novel, complete in itself. in fact, they were not written by sole geniuses looking to publish and be immortalized by a far stretch. the idea for a play was pitched to a company or lead actor, if there was interest, a plot was provided, collaboration was set, foul papers, filled with blots, cross-outs, and scribbles were handed over, and taken to a scribe who made “corrections” and turned it into a fair copy (that went to the master of the revels). it was terry mccabe’s misdirecting the play: an argument against contemporary theatre, for example, is written entirely based on that premise. in his first chapter, titled “the myth of the director” he states: "the premise of this book is simple: directing that seeks to control the text, instead of subordinating itself to the text, is bad directing. i believe the director's job is to tell the playwright's story as clearly and as interestingly as possible. period." then the company’s property, which would add stage directions and make modifications as they wished. there are many degrees of separation between the writers’ foul papers (which don’t survive, as they were not deemed worth preserving) and what comes to us as printed copies. beyond scribe and company changes to the text, there are also changes done by printers and editors through the years. one aspect i find particularly relevant which leah marcus discusses in “the shrew as editor/editing shrews,” is how an editor’s choice can affect the perceived meaning of the text. the distribution of asides, unmarked in the early modern text, is crucial because a character with asides is in closer connection with the audience and is more likely to get the audience “on their side.” there are also spelling related disputes due to the less- structured early modern spelling that render “mistress” or “master” both possible in many lines and choosing who is addressed can change the narrative significantly. if we consider these in addition to editing, years of selectively controlled academia and staging interpretations, we are left with the question of whose story we are really telling and whose agenda we are really supporting when we blindly adhere to the text as an almighty relic. clearly, any attempt to revert to an “original text” and single out what may have been a playwright’s intention is futile at best and of questionable relevance to contemporary audiences. i stage and edit according to my belief that to honour an early modern playwright is to keep their work inspiring, keep it collaborative, and keep it relevant. whether in historic costume and using an uncut text, or set in mars and running at minutes, choices in casting, blocking, fabric, and for further historical information see shakespeare's professional career by peter thomson and publishing drama in early modern europe by roger chartier. delivery, to name a few, will create meaning and reflect the artists who are making those choices. to hide behind the “playwright’s intention” is cowardly. . trim to tighten my process of editing begins with the choice of base text. i chose douglas buster’s edition, included in taylor and lavagnino’s collection of the complete works of middleton, as this is the most recent edition of the play and part of the only middleton-centric collection. the process of cutting and editing is based on the action analysis flowcharts included in chapter to preserve clarity. this work happens in waves: i go through the text multiple times making small changes, move on to the next stage of editing, then go back and edit again based on previous steps. the steps are then categorized not according to the order in which they happen, but a similarity in the decision-making process. the first step is trimming: eliminating repetition, excessive descriptions of actions we are to witness onstage, removing outdated and obscure passages, and limiting thematic diversions that are not related to the action of the play or beatrice’s trauma. obscure and outdated references are the quickest ways to lose an audience. this is not to underestimate our audiences, but to avoid setting them up for failure. i aim at an inclusive audience that includes those who will not necessarily have the expertise to follow latin lines, classical mythology, and jacobean history. the way in which to pick my battles here ties back to the base principles outlined: is it pivotal to the action or beatrice’s trauma? if so, i will work to make it clear for my audience. if not, i may work it out or adjust it. i would include many of franciscus speeches in this category of editing. when not cut out entirely, i took the liberty to adjust references to more accessible ones. this passage, in . , for example, on the unedited draft, reads: lollio for love, mistress. he was a pretty poet too, and that set him forwards first; the muses then forsook him, he ran mad for a chambermaid, yet she was but a dwarf neither. franciscus hail bright titania! why stand'st thou idle on these flowery banks? oberon is dancing with his dryads. i'll gather daisies, primrose, violets, and bind them in a verse of poesy. lollio not too near, you see your danger. franciscus oh, hold thy hand, great diomed! thou feed'st thy horses well, they shall obey thee. get up; bucephalus kneels. [gets down on all fours.] after edits, this section in . reads: lollio for love, mistress. the muses forsook him; he ran mad for a chambermaid. [showing him a whip] not too near, you see your danger. franciscus oh, hold thy hand! thou feed'st thy horses well, they shall obey thee. get up; i kneel. [gets down on all fours.] this keeps the core idea of the moment: the important information that franciscus is mad for love is preserved and isolated, the action of approaching isabella, being intimidated away, and kneeling in submission to lollio is now no longer obfuscated by superfluous imagery. the second step is focusing and tightening. this step is more directly related to the conscious choice of whose story i am telling. this led to cuts of larger sequences that were not central to beatrice-joanna's story and it is where the play was really shortened. for example, tomazo's scenes seeking revenge and his related interactions with de flores were cut to prevent turning this play into a revenge tragedy from a minor character. in their first interaction, for example, the cuts keep one instance of the memory of the murder coming back to de flores, one attempt to escape the conversation looking for beatrice-joanna, and one instance of tomazo's blind faith in de flores: enter deflores. tomazo the best is, there is more ground to meet a man's revenge on. honest deflores. deflores that's my name indeed. saw you the bride? good sweet sir, which way took she? tomazo i have blest mine eyes from seeing such a false one. deflores [aside] i'd fain get off; this man's not for my company: i smell his brother's blood when i come near him. tomazo come hither, kind and true one; i remember my brother lov'd thee well. deflores oh, purely, dear sir! [aside] methinks i am now again a-killing on him, he brings it so fresh to me. saw you the bride? good sweet sir, which way took she? (added from above) tomazo thou canst guess, sirrah, one honest friend has an instinct of jealousy at some foul guilty person. deflores 'las, sir, i am so charitable, i think none worse than myself. you did not see the bride then? tomazo i prithee name her not. is she not wicked? deflores no, no, a pretty, easy, round-pack'd sinner, as your most ladies are, else you might think i flatter'd her; but, sir, at no hand wicked till th'are so old their sins and vices meet, and they salute witches. i am call'd, i think, sir. [aside] his company ev'n o'erlays my conscience. exit. in the following interaction in . , when tomazo comes back and claims to renounce all league with mankind, his entire interaction with de flores was cut and his interaction with vermanero reduced to one page. the exchange of offences and tomazo's escalated despair is an interesting journey for his character, but all we need for the central action is that his presence escalates the urgency to find alonzo's murderer, and that beatrice is further entrapped by this. i recognize that in this cut, some of de flores' guilty conscience asides are also lost. i confess no guilty conscience in reducing the number of asides he has, for allowing a charming abuser a more sympathetic place overemphasizing potentially “redeeming qualities” when staging his victim’s nightmare is repugnant. in the final stage, i edit for elegance and rhythm. this is when lines tend to be added back, when scenes merge or break, and where meter and line breaks are re-visited. at this stage i consolidated the murder scene from alonzo's request to see the castle straight through the stabbings (originally . , . and . ), particularly because the audience should not get to exhale until after it is done: the expeditiousness of all of it should be just as jarring to the audience as it is to the characters living it. but this is also the stage where i re-gain length, as language is not always about immediacy and directness, elizabethan and jacobean scripts are often described as “word plays” for this reason. a speech where i went back on cuts significantly, for instance, was beatrice-joanna's speech to alsemero, when he offers to challenge alonzo to a duel in . . my original cuts were the text stroked through; the also underlined text was re-added: beatrice how? call you that extinguishing of fear when 'tis the only way to keep it flaming? are not you ventured in the action that's all my joys and comforts? pray no more, sir. say you prevail'd, [you're] danger's and not mine then: the law would claim you from me, or obscurity be made the grave to bury you alive. i'm glad these thoughts come forth; oh, keep not one of this condition, sir! here was a course found to bring sorrow on her way to death: the tears would ne'er 'a' dried till dust had chok'd 'em. blood-guiltiness becomes a fouler visage, and now i think on one-- these lines do not add new information or essential action, but in beatrice-joanna's story, her love for alsemero, the man she will risk and lose everything for, is key and the beauty of her urgency when faced with the thought of losing him is key. that is revealed in the alliteration of sharp consonants; in thoughts that won't fit the pentameter and the consequent chopped sounds from abbreviations; in the antithesis; in the sensorial imagery; and all of this is conveyed in one single line: “the tears would ne'er 'a' dried till dust had chok'd 'em.” the language can be spectacularly rich and do a lot of work for an actor requiring only clarity on their part. after the three stages are completed, i do a punctuation check, revising the script using three different editions and checking on spelling and punctuation, making decisions where the editors disagree according to my own judgment. chapter : an expressionistic nightmare i primarily labelled this production an expressionistic nightmare. after the numerous nightmares this play gave me, it seemed only fitting that my personal starting point would be the haunting familiarity that this play had to me. yet, as i argued in chapter , this is a collective trauma and a shared nightmare. building beatrice-joanna’s nightmare to be specific to her character’s given circumstances while preserving the uncanny familiarity to our world was a shared concern of staging and design. my goal was to go beyond a patchwork of worlds, exploring their common ground: the emotional experience of her struggles. i aimed at externalizing what words fail to express with the use of what the other senses can offer us. ultimately, i hoped that we may understand beatrice through a shared emotional experience of trauma. the unspeakable, what words fail to express, and what we sought to embody in this production, is evidently not best suited to be explained in this form. here, i will provide the key points and highlight the process my creative team and i went through in structuring the unistructural, and what were the most important and striking choices in staging that evolved from that concept. . structured chaos creating structure for a visceral experience may seem contradictory, but it is in fact essential. artists ought to be selective and precise; if the environment isn’t right, the seed isn’t planted, and the production bears no fruits. punctuating the action of the play with expressions of beatrice’s internal struggle, the use of movement, the combined changes in atmosphere, the space and dress aesthetics, each through their medium, worked to create the vicious entrapment of the main character. the production was built to be triggering, the design and staging done to provoke in the audience the closest to experiencing ptsd while still following a narrative. to this end, we worked to discover through beatrice’s eyes the rules of this world, how it combines jacobean and contemporary elements, the social structure and the rules of this society, and to both bare and deconstruct them, underlining the elements that have the greatest impact in her emotional life. further examples will be discussed as i address each element of performance. the structural separation between a material world, where the action of the play took place, and a psychological realm, where the joannas existed, was central. the worlds and characters were to be visually distinct. after the rape in . , the nightmare world consumed the material reality and the nightmare would be complete. . movement and joannas movement is integral to my work, because it is integral to storytelling and capable of evoking more than words can. dancer and dance scholar susan foster’s most articulate performed lecture “reflections on kinesthetic empathies and the politics of compassion” explains the concept of kinesthetic empathy addressing the question of how a body witnessing another body might imagine what it is feeling, using the example of a an audience member observing a tight rope dancer in a precarious positioning: “the viewer experiences the stirring up of emotions that instinctually arises when we see those like ourselves in peril.” foster discusses theories like that of john martin that suggested that upon viewing another person our kinesthetic senses kick in and we mimic in the musculature and nerves of our own bodies, sometimes imperceptibly, the physical actions and sensations of the body that we see before us. john martin believes that “viewers comprehend the meaning of a dance through their capacity for inner mimicry” (foster). foster reminds us of other familiar body responses, such as puckering when we watch someone else taste lemons or the famously contagious yawns: bodies can elicit kinesthetic responsiveness. we perceive and sense what the other body does and, as foster would say, we “create mutual awareness through the willingness of two differentiated bodies laboring together at the impossible task of approximating one another.” this ability of our bodies to effortlessly and unconsciously approximate and replicate what we witness another body experience is what draws me to movement. specifically, i am drawn to movement created instinctively, abstracting and expanding on the impulses we cannot follow in everyday life. in my approach, i work my performers to liberate their bodies, do warm ups to allow them to move in unexpected ways, to respond physically to each other’s impulses, to create quickly enough that they are not able to overthink, or think at all, about what their movement means. then i work with them to select the strongest visuals, sharpen the lines and establish rhythm to best evoke a visceral response. we work to find in ourselves the full expression of an impulse than in realistic acting would be easily suppressed or suggested subtly at best and easily missed by an audience member and, instead, we bring it to the forefront. in my production, this aligns with the aim for the audience to experience what beatrice-joanna experiences; expressionistic movement, that is, movement that expands on the feelings caused by the situations beatrice finds herself in, becomes central. my production opened with an added movement prologue, where beatrice-joanna was revealed center stage, lit by a spotlight in the colors of the psychological realm, with the joannas lit in their dedicated space, also in their specific lights, performing the repetitive actions we later discovered were the cleansing actions they performed immediately after the assault. this prologue first and foremost brings the audience into the world of the play, establishes the language of the production and topical focus: beatrice joanna’s trauma. the joannas appeared in quick flashes before the assault underlining triggering moments: the red flags that women who have been haunted by a de flores-like person recognize immediately, but that would not be noticeable to those who have not. for example, we had a flash of joannas as de flores goes to return the glove and uses it to pull beatrice-joanna closer to him in . , in their first interaction, and in . while he is trying to prolong his time with her, taking advantage of his position with her father to creep on her continuously (the joannas disappear once he exits the stage). figure monica bowman as a joanna performing a movement sequence in a joanna booth (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). at the moment of the assault in . , the joannas enter the space that was, thus far, reserved for the action of the “material world”—this is the moment where everything changes, the realms are no longer easily distinguished, and trauma consumes it all. for this sequence, the joannas entered the platform above in darkness, as de flores entrapped, shushed, removed and ripped part of beatrice’s clothing. the joannas were lit immediately as de flores backed beatrice into the benches, in the moment that would be followed by penetration. this black-out on the lead actors allowed bonnie (beatrice-joanna) to ground herself, and to undress herself to the limit of her comfort, with the license to alter that nightly. i also shifted the focus to the joannas to deny any voyeuristic impulse from the potential de flores sympathizers in the audience, combating the tradition of making a spectacle of a woman’s rape and focus on what matters: the violence, and the aftermath of violence. at this point the joannas began a sequence, in a crescendo, expressing beatrice’s entrapment, desire to escape, and lack of bodily agency, until a standstill, when we bring the focus back to her. they come in neutrally and dress beatrice for her wedding, each removing some of their own ruffles to dress her in a visual sharing of costume and identity, and, after that, the joannas are present more often and perform longer sequences. at the last scene, when beatrice is murdered, the joannas are lit partially in the same platform they occupied during the assault, at about % brightness from the main action, until beatrice dies and the lights go out on the joannas on the upper platform, as the remaining character continue to talk around beatrice and de flores’ dead bodies and to settle a very dissatisfying end in a world with no justice, morals or empathy. figure chantal gering, aoife mcandless-davis, and genevieve guimond as joannas, half-lit in the platform during the last scene. hayden davies as alsemero and bonnie duff as beatrice center stage. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). however, coming full circle, the joannas and beatrice closed the play just as they opened in an added epilogue. i knew i wanted to end the play by underlining the irony of the last speech, a typical middleton ending , and highlight how empty the re-establishing of order is at the end. in both middleton’s women beware women and a yorkshire tragedy, the final words are given to a secondary character who has limited knowledge of all that surpassed, who is not the most evil in the play, but generally self-righteous and misinformed, and who invariably shifts the focus from those who have suffered and died and placing it where it is convenient for them: in women beware women , the play ends with a very jacobean pile of bodies, including that of a woman who was abused in very similar ways to beatrice. the final speech as through the entirety of the production, i aimed to bring the focus back to beatrice-joanna, whose body lied center stage, completely ignored, as her husband, the man she lost all for committing the murder he wanted to commit himself, refers to her in disdain: “here’s beauty changed to ugly whoredom” (middleton . ) and re-stablishes a convenient new order, where he remains there, as her father’s heir. at the end of the play, i ultimately blurred the line entirely between the narrative’s world and the audience’s present moment to bring it back to the joannas and beatrice. i knew i wanted to have the joannas come together and sing. to end the play with a purging, in a moment of healing, of sisterhood—of hope. in a way, this performs a similar function a jig would have at the end of a play, grounding the audience and bringing them back to their own worlds. my actresses chose the song, appropriately adapting the lyrics to change men to women from an attempts to erase her. in a yorkshire tragedy, most alarming, ignoring the wounded woman whose three children were murdered as she kneels suing for her husband’s life, and the speaker calls the play a tragedy about the brothers (the husband and a brother we never meet). the irony is always striking if you are sensitive to the contrast between what the words say, the images of suffering onstage and the empty words, displacing focus, trying to find a simple ending, where there is none. in scene . (see appendix), when alsemero and beatrice-joanna confess their love for each other, he proposes to send a challenge to alonzo: “…one good service/ would strike off both your fears./ i'll send a challenge to piracquo instantly.” beatrice stops him, afraid to lose him to death or the law, and has the idea to have de flores do the deed: “blood-guiltiness becomes a fouler visage,/ [aside] and now i think on one—" it is not taking alonzo de piracquo’s life that is the issue, but who has the ability, under what circumstances to do it and have it be socially acceptable. anonymous poem, “there are men in the village of erith/ whom nobody seeth or heareth,/ and there looms, on the marge/ of the river, a barge/ that nobody roweth or steereth.” when they began singing, all characters but beatrice-joanna dropped character and walked on neutrally, and the ring from the set came down to surround beatrice. at that point, the women also dropped character—the joannas and monica bowman (who played a joanna, but in that scene was playing isabella) also walking neutrally, come down to surround beatrice, as they all sing, and we end with beatrice singing by herself the lines “that nobody seeth or heareth,” honoring the commodified, abused, invisible women who will still fight tooth and nail for a place in this world. foster moves beyond martin, as she brings in how socio-historical context affects our empathetic response. she explains that “the empathetic response to a body’s plight is structured in historically specific ways to accommodate varieties of sameness that serve to rationalize the workings of power.” foster claims dance can be both potentially liberating and subversive for evoking multiple and simultaneous frameworks for understanding difference and sameness. the joannas embodied that difference and sameness, as the audience watching different bodies and familiar, though never exact, emotions and circumstances evoked it on an additional level. foster, and i, hope that extrapolating this awareness from the studio or stage into the world we might “sense how power moves, when it consolidates, and where it disperses.” . designing a nightmare the basis for our design was to create “beatrice-joanna’s nightmare.” the discussions that followed our first meeting surrounded what a nightmare looked, sounded and felt like, as we read and explored the play together to translate it into visual meaning. our world was to be non- representational, suggestive and bold: it would merge contemporary and jacobean elements, never simply layering, but structurally combining elements to create a unique cohesive world that evokes the right feelings, but cannot and does not tempt you to make it about a specific time and place. figure chantal gallant, aoife mcandless-davis and genevieve guimond as joannas and monica bowman as isabella surround bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in the epilogue. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). i believe that design must be an organic part of a production and that it should transform as the action transforms; it should transform the action and never simply become a backdrop for it. plays of the jacobean period are very conscious of their roles as scripts and as a fragment of a whole, with little pretense to control design, acting, and directing (evidently, since directing in particular didn’t exist as we know it at that time)—they are not prescriptive, with minimal practical requirements and maximal suggestive elements. to honor my expressionistic goals, design had to take prominence in the process. to honor this play, the first step is to understand the walls of the world and how they act. the indications of space tell us a lot about it: in the first scene, we are at an open space, outside of church, in an open space, filled with potential. after that, we go into alsemero’s castle, and as soon as we do, the walls start closing in and we move into progressively tighter spaces, from chambers, through alleys, to vaults. the walls keep closing in, to the point where beatrice is ultimately murdered in a closet. this sense of the walls closing in was critical and handled primarily by the design team. . . set in our first production meeting, i spoke of my love for the chan centre as a space and how you can feel its ghosts. i love a theatrical space that refuses to be hidden, so i wanted to embrace the architecture of the theatre. my first offer for set designer luis bellassai, was brutalist architecture and constructivist design. the world these characters inhabit should be inorganic, geometric, cold and overbearing. i was interested in negative space and the potential for shadows. artificiality, claustrophobia and grandeur are key. the theatre and set should dwarf and entrap the individual, in the same way that the walls of the world in the changeling consume the characters: beatrice-joanna says “i’m in a labyrinth” ( . ), and we were working to create the walls of that labyrinth. foster explains that martin’s argument that objects and events can “elicit this kinesthetic responsiveness” and that “in walking through a building we sense its verticality and mass, the openness or closeness of its spaces.” or, in other words, walking into an exceptionally vertical, yet contained space like the chan centre, can make you feel small and respond viscerally to the “ghosts” of the structure. belassai, a skilled designer and architect, and i spent a lot of time in the space, feeling its ghosts before deciding on the configuration of the audience, entrances and use of levels. our goals in this design were: to keep the audience inside the action; to make the space figure visual research of inspiration for set design shared with belassai. the fabric and rope ones were shared on the second round of visual research. in a moment of serendipity, belassai and i realized we had both been drawn and inspired by images of the same dance show we had not yet shared with each other at that point. as intimate as possible; to make as much of the building as possible playing space; to take advantage of the verticality of the theatre; to focus on beatrice-joanna, having the space change according to her journey (closing in on her); to have a versatile suggestive set that can be modified in no time and that the actors can interact with. figure me, director luciana silvestre fernandes, in the chan centre studying the space during a design meeting and a picture of the space, including the "donut" (octagonal structure at the catwalk level) that belassai and i were drawn to. belassai and i were both interested in working with a singular unifying element. the ropes came in later, after a sketch of luis’ included some lines that i immediately fell in love with, and that echoed images of a dance show we were both inspired by. after many drafts with different configurations that i would then take and plan practically in terms of stage pictures, entrances and exits and flow (who appears above consistently vs below, etc.), we ended up with a space that in shape echoed a jacobean playhouse, with a main level and a balcony, as well as using some non-traditional areas as playing space. the actors were at the same level of the three levels of audience (floor, balcony and joanna booth on nd floor, joanna booth on rd floor) and above the audience (donut). the mad people and the joannas had their dedicated spaces around the audience so that the audience was in beatrice’s head and inside the madhouse, and surrounded by action, with actors occasionally coming behind them and delivering lines or offstage sounds from around them, below and above., the audience was as immersed in the action as they could be. the use of ropes to evoke the labyrinth resulted in a labyrinth akin to a spider’s web. the ropes emphasized the verticality of the space, connecting the acting booths, set, and audience spaces. the joanna booths specifically were only adorned by ropes, while the material world used rope and wood. we tried to avoid symmetry, and broke it with the joanna booths, but the play space, the material world, kept drawing us back to it. ultimately, i think the world of order and strict codes of behavior asked for symmetry, as much as our aesthetics wished to deny it, the world of the play called for it. the scenic painting was an artwork by itself, with its blue tones and thorn-like black lines creating an elegant and appropriately cold and frantic environment. figure a progression of luis belassai set drafts on sketch up the rope arrangement and design were modified until the end, but they became essential to the transformative nature of the set, creating frames and paths, and in particular at the very end of the play, when the set became action, framed and drew all lines towards beatrice, in the transformative purging of the epilogue. figure bonnie duff as beatrice joanna in the centre and the cast during curtain call, with all the lines leading to her after her death. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). . . costumes for costume designer charlotte chang, i presented the idea of merging the contemporary and jacobean periods structurally, taking a contemporary high-fashion approach to styling. this production reflects the world of beautiful people, of performative status and honour. my challenge to chang was to consider what the costume does to the body: what is the effect of having ruffles on your neck, a corset and high heels? what is the feeling of a robust elegant dress that makes you fill a room and draw every eye in it, but does not allow you to bend, fight or fly? i wanted the design to deconstruct the dress, affect and modify the body of the performer, and to reveal the artifice of fashion. in simpler terms, i described it as if someone had watched a fashion show and a jacobean tragedy and had nightmares where it all was mixed up. for the nightmarish feeling, i requested a monochromatic approach, that is recognizably un-realistic. figure visual research of inspiration for costume design shared with chang at the start of the process. figure costume sketches by charlotte chang for main plot and subplot (including livia, who appears in the subplot but belongs to the world of the main plot) chang chose red and off-red colors to represent the violence of this world. orange and browns for the madhouse, sticking to warm colors and allowing the boldest color to those who have broken the walls of the world. chang built on the manifestly unequal gendered dynamic, giving the male characters exaggerated triangular shapes, shoulder extensions, and clothes they could fight in, and exaggerating the hour-glass shape for the women, who were elegantly confined. she used a predominantly jacobean cut with modern artificial materials and modified a lot of existing pieces, turning jackets into doublets and building dresses over modern summer base dresses. chang created looks that embraced the character’s individuality from my character descriptions with her individual spin. for example, i described alonzo as new-money, someone who would wear gold teeth if he were a rap artist in the ’s; he needed to be obviously not a match for beatrice-joanna. alonzo’s fur and particularly his bright red tight vinyl pants did not disappoint. diaphanta’s flirty and free nature, breaking rules were evident in her pinker outfit, revealing the most skin of anyone in the show and her undergarment, with her asymmetrical pannier. the joannas, as aspects of beatrice, wore the same undergarments beatrice-joanna did, each with a ruffle later passed to her, indicating something fragmented and unique about each of them and speaking to diverse women in the same outfit/situation/frame. chang’s descriptive word for de flores was a snake, hence his snake print pants and most prominent shoulder extensions. figure chantal gering as diaphanta (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). figure kyle preston oliver as de flores. (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). chang built dashing dresses for beatrice that brought out how she is seen much like a trophy by the men in her life. as the focal character, she was the only one who had multiple costumes. her dress progression characterized both her change of “characters” from young heiress, to bride, to respectable (and thus covered up) wife. i will focus my analysis here on beatrice’s outfits to illustrate the storytelling and world-building aspects of our costume design. beatrice-joanna’s first dress was built in bright silky red. her corset was exposed and decorated with jewels over her dress, exposing and beautifying the torturous artifice of her attire, emphasizing how this world glorifies her restraint. still youthful and exposing skin, in this first dress beatrice’s hourglass figure is particularly exaggerated due to a wide pannier worn underneath and revealed at her on-stage costume change later. the added width meant beatrice had to turn sideways to get through certain doors and at the top of the stairs: visually emphasizing a world that is built to be harder for women to navigate. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in her first dress. her wedding dress is the most impractical of all, tight until her knees, she needs help to get up and down steps and is almost mummified by fashion. at the wedding costume change, neck and wrist ruffles are added, serving as fabulous shackles. added to that, an incredibly long veil and train that make movement particularly challenging. beatrice-joanna is bound into her elegance, her pain is barely held in by the seams. she is stunning to look at and built as more a vision than a human, which is a painful antithesis with what we witness her character go through. in her final dress, ruffles and corset expose her bondage. beatrice-joanna is fully covered and has lost the brightness of her previous dresses and some of her glow. she is a more somber art piece now, in darker more closed tones, but the bright red shoes and lips are still present: her fiery essence is never fully consumed. figure bonnie duff as beatrice joanna in her wedding dress, surrounded by the joannas, genevieve guimond, chantal gering, aoifee mcandless-davies, and monica bowman (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna in her final dress (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). . . lights and sound this play is a fugue to me. from early on, i listened to fugues while doing text work. i brought that idea to sound designer jacob wan, as well as the suggestions of white noise and the occasional loud silence. in further discussions, i offered beethoven’s große fuge, which became the base for our main plot sound design, emphasizing the distorted spiraling cat-and- mouse deadly game of beatrice-joanna and de flores. music’s ability to evoke powerful feeling made it central for the expressionistic take. on par with the creation of a nightmare of trauma, the distortions at each joanna appearance underlined the separation of the two realms and the discomfort that their presence indicates. the use of surround sound aided in immersing the audience in the action and in the embodiment of trauma, as the audience could hear the repeat sounds, words or white noise envelop them as they did beatrice. wan included the amplification and repetition of triggering words, which added to the experience of re-living traumatic events associated with ptsd symptoms. light designer zach levis embraced the shadows and use of dramatic colors, playing with shadows and controlling the perception of space. beatrice-joanna was always more brightly lit, and he truly embraced the closing in and claustrophobia as the play progressed, also transitioning the color palette from the nightmare into the material world post-assault. similarly, to how the nightmare consumes the material world, when the subplot and main plot come together, the sound and lights that characterized the separation become exclusive to the main-plot nightmare characteristics instead. levis suggested fluorescent paint for the phantasmagoric effect and we chose to bring them up after the assault; after the prolonged sequence from assault through wedding we have the first moment of darkness of the play, a moment of dissociation when beatrice blacks out as alsemero goes to kiss her. at that moment, the theatre went dark, all fell silent and the fluorescent labyrinth of lines was lit. they remained on from the assault onwards and were highlighted further at the next significant shift for beatrice, when she has diaphanta murdered, and at last, at the end of the play. . rape into wedding our second design meeting working on the rape and wedding scene. this was the most important scene of the play, and, as a word-less scene, it was also a design show. most of the design and staging decisions were made in relation to this scene. this production for me is about a woman stepping from being raped, immediately into getting married, and us as audience members, living through this with her, understanding the trauma she is experiencing and watching the struggle of going through the motions, surviving, and, in the struggle to survive, figure the ropes and fluorescent scenic painting under black light. photo by zach levis never fully getting to process what happened. the wedding was what she did it all for, and it is a moment of absolute pain. i will talk through some major decisions in building this complex emotional scene. i choreographed the rape scene with my actors so that beatrice-joanna has a freeze reaction the moment de flores turns her face and kisses her. at that point, we lit the joannas in onto the platform, giving them half focus. they perform the same few gestures beatrice does when manhandled, emphasizing the non-consensual revulsion and horror in her bodily responses. we amplified her fearful breath through a recorded sound effect, and we did the same when de flores ripped her skirt. he walked her back into the benches he had put together for a bed. at figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna and kyle oliver preston as de flores when he pulls her to him before undoing her corset (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). that point we switched the lights from beatrice and de flores center stage and lit the joannas on the platform: they performed a frantic sequence on a crescendo as the white noise built, gestures of reaching out, trying to escape, being pulled back down until a gong stopped the entire sequence and brought the light back to beatrice-joanna. i knew from early on that i would not stage the entire assault but only a few gestures leading up to it to deny voyeuristic audience members making a spectacle of her assault. this is about honoring her pain, so we moved the focus to the joannas who expressed it through their movement, rather than watching her abuser enjoy her pain. coming back to see beatrice-joanna left as what i described on script as “a used mess.” we see what matters: the non-consent, her internal life through the joannas, and the effect it has on her. in discussing the potential of using nudity with the lead actor bonnie duff, whom i wanted to have absolute authority over the question, i expressed my concern over denying the voyeuristic sexualizing gaze of a woman’s pain, and that if it happened, it would be a glance exposing vulnerability. duff shared the same concern, but believed the vulnerability of her exposed body could benefit the scene, and quoted a technique we had been employing through the play, which i described as allowing the audience to get comfortable, laugh, then have the rug pulled out from under them—horrifying them with what they were comfortable with and had laughed at. duff suggested that if we had such a voyeuristic audience member, the building of suffering would pull the rug from under them in just this way. we agreed to try, exposing just her breasts. at tech, the effect of the scene was brutal. i am very comfortable with nudity and certainly not thrown off by breasts, but even after having considered it for months, discussed and agreed to it, i still could not bear to watch it. the vulnerability of her exposed body (live) made the scene excruciating to watch. we decided to keep it. when the crescendo of the joannas reached a peak, we heard the gong bring us back to reality (a motif established at this moment and used throughout) and the lights went back to beatrice-joanna and de flores: he standing, zipping his pants back up, and beatrice-joanna was lying with her breasts exposed. we had silence at this moment as de flores slowly walked around, took his money bag and walked offstage. we amplified the sound of his footsteps. beatrice, haunted by the loud surround footsteps begins a cleansing action and is joined by the joannas, actions we used in the prologue and scattered through at flashback moments later in the productions, until the gong hit again. then, beatrice was brought back into reality, and the fact that it was time for her to get dressed for her wedding. figure monica bowman, aoife mcandless-davis, chantal gering and genevieve guimond as the joannas, dress bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna and admire her in her wedding dress (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). we preserved the spectacle of the event, which would have been her crowning moment, showing all her privilege and grandeur, in contrast to how hopelessly alone and broken she is after her assault, still trying to go through the motions. we chose to have the costume change happen on stage, exposing the artifice and entrapment that dressing the part of a beautiful noble woman requires. the joannas then, as her ladies-in-waiting, dressed her as she stood as a beautiful object being adorned on top of the benches. beatrice could barely move her limbs and was puppeteered by the joannas. her stunning veil flies in, behind the audience, and on the platform the men search for the missing alonzo and it is determined she is to marry alsemero. all the while we see her being spectacularly built, her wedding music loops in surround sound, in a crescendo to the point of becoming a cacophony, the sound of the memories that haunt her: her frantic breath when de flores first touched her, the sound of her skirt ripping. the amplification of triggering sounds also became a recurring motif from this point onwards. when beatrice reaches the top of the stairs and is brought to marry the man of her choice, when there might have been a spark of hope, the footsteps begin again, we have a moment of suspension as de flores enters, makes eye contact with her and laughs. this is about power. he has it and is making sure she knows it. he is not done. she starts the obsessive cleansing moves again, until the gong brings her back to reality. when alsemero goes to kiss her, she instinctively retreats and flinches: touch is triggering now, even from the man of her dreams. when alsemero goes in for the second time we get the dissociation effect of cutting all sound and light and seeing the blue light emphasis on the set that remains for the rest of the play. after the flash of black we heard another loud silence, when beatrice walked down the stairs, sat at the bottom, and finally had a chance to be with herself and her feelings for a second at the top of . when she reflects on how “this fellow has undone me endlessly.” this was the scene that changed the shape of the play in action and aesthetically and the point where all elements converged to underline pain and entrapment. figure bonnie duff as beatrice-joanna having a moment with her feelings on top of . (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). chapter : staging violence and staging consent i wrote in chapters and of my awareness of how personal the play’s subject matter would be to many involved in this production due to the insidiousness of gender violence, in particular in our industry. creating a safe environment to explore unsafe subjects must be the first step of any production dealing with sexual assault. in order to do so, i provided resources for my actors for support available on campus and the community at large, i created and discussed an intimacy protocol with my actors on the first day of rehearsals, and had the cast discuss among themselves and communicate to me through their cast representative whether they preferred to have an outside intimacy choreographer join us or if they wanted me to serve in this role, emphasizing that regardless, the process of choreography would be collaborative and no choreography would be imposed. my practice followed the protocol i proposed for intimacy and violence: • any intimacy will be carefully choreographed in a closed rehearsal (only those involved, and stage management will be present for the first rehearsal). • intimacy scenes will only be rehearsed with director/stage management present. • we will discuss the needs of the scene, the beats, important images, and escalation of action prior to any movement being decided on. • we will collaborate and work with suggestions from each other. • no move will be tested without explicit consent. o we will establish boundaries before starting and check in before each move. • if at any moment you are not comfortable, or think you may grow uncomfortable with any move, you can simply say that “x is not sustainable for me, can we try “y?” and we will work together to establish a choreography that is sustainable. no further explanation is needed. • if you ever have any concerns, please come to me (i am happy to meet in private). if i am part of the concern, please reach out to my supervisor, lois anderson. i guided my entire cast and the performers involved on any days we rehearsed the assault scene through group “come-downs,” encouraged and assisted them in finding their individual practices, and reserved spaces for my actors playing beatrice and de flores to have their individual come downs. no rule book is ever a substitute for listening, caring and paying attention, and i made sure my actors knew that the art is never more important than they are. anyone who works under the assumption that the art is the most important thing in the world and expects their performers to sacrifice themselves is debasing art by turning it into a weapon of self-destruction. art is greater than that. having staged several plays of this period, many with violent and sexual content, of all the practices i have developed the most important is staging consent. just as in a fight, it is not seeing a punch land perfectly on another actor’s skin that sells it to an audience—it is the knap, the prep and final image, the motion, the vocal and physical commitment of the actors—the same is true for intimacy. when staging intimate violence, the similarity to a fight choreography makes it more straight forward than when staging a flirtatious intimate moment. in the changeling, we had intimate violence, but we also had a lot of flirting. the contrast between the two should always be obvious. i always slow down in blocking and choreographing the lead up to intimate actions and break down the physical language of consent and the dance of flirtation. in antonios and isabella’s scene, antonios has very little time to convince the woman he loves to be with him, and the urgency could lead an actor to, in aggressively pursuing his objective, turn a dance into a hunt. i was very specific about how ishan sandhu, as antonios, should never advance without an invitation—if monica bowman, playing isabella, retreated in surprise at his reveal, he can’t move closer, first he must convince her he is harmless (get on his knees, offer his leash, etc.). i was also very particular with monica, whose character doesn’t declare her intentions as directly, about what to do with her body: if he is coming to kiss you and you want to be kissed, turn to him, expose your soft spots , make sure that the audience members sitting immediately behind you can see your body say “yes” even if they can’t see you smile. this refers to out tendency when we feel threatened or uncomfortable to protect ourselves, and when comfortable and flirting to expose our vulnerable spots (think wrists and open arms vs arms crossed). figure monica bowman as isabela and ishan sandhu as antonios (set by luis belassai; costumes by charlotte chang; lights by zach levis; photo by javier r. sortres). if this is a flirtation scene, there will be indications in the lines for physical language. for example, in antonios’ line in . , he responds to isabella’s comment that he is bold saying: what should i fear, having all joys about me? do you smile, and love shall play the wanton on your lip, meet and retire, retire and meet again. his “do you smile” is right before the end of the verse line, i.e., when the pause happens naturally in verse, gives the perfect opportunity for isabella to “smile” in response, before he then plays the wanton on her lips and kisses her. it is also only responsible to show enthusiastic consent where it is possible and not refrain from allowing the women to express desire and take control: isabella is a very assertive character, and makes the choice to protect antonios, and give him hope saying that “if he hold on as he begins, he is like to come to something!” (middleton . ). beyond a tradition of passive ingenues, there is no reason this character couldn’t take charge on their second kiss, back antonios into the chair, hold his choker and pull him by the hair for their next kiss. clarity in action and contrast are the perfect recipe for a complete understanding. chapter : conclusion the show is dead. long live the show. theatre’s most striking characteristic is its ephemeral nature. the surviving evidence is rarely from the perspective of those who created, since as creators, we believe in the form and know that the impact of a show lives long after the curtain call. this production and written thesis bring a scarce, though desperately needed, perspective to the staging of classics and enriches the archival sources for theatre studies with a practitioner’s analysis. most importantly, though, this production impacted hundreds of viewers, some of whom wept and some of whom walked away. many women came to talk to me after the show, and one in particular, a -year old i barely knew, asked me about the nightmare vision and proceeded to tell me about her experience of sexual assault and how she denied herself the status of survivor for not “ticking all boxes.” this show was for her. long live the show. i am aware i may be asking a lot when i ask an audience member to empathize with a privileged imperfect woman, understand her entrapment, and respect the fight in her. i do not underestimate the value of planting a seed; seeing a perspective entirely different from what you believed absolute is jarring and may be shut away with a knee-jerk reaction. yet exposure is the seed of normalcy. the more the voices of survivors that are heard, the easier it becomes to recognize oppressors and predators and the structures that yield them power—the more the normal is changed. if nothing else, this show tells the persistently traditionalist audience that theirs is not the only voice. long live the show. bibliography ball, william. backwards and forwards: a technical manual for reading plays. southern illinois university press, . barbash, elyssa. “overcoming sexual assault: symptoms and recovery.” psychology today, april , https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trauma-and-hope/ / overcoming-sexual-assault-symptoms-recovery. accessed on march . brook, peter. the shifting point. harper colling publishers, . chartier, roger. publishing drama in early modern europe. the british library, . edwards, justin and rune graulund. grotesque. routledge, . foster, susan and linda caruso haviland. “kinesthetic empathies & the politics of compassion.” dance workbook, sept , http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/susan- foster/kinesthetic-empathies.html. accessed on april . “harvey weinstein jailed for years in rape trial.” bbc. march . https://www.bbc. com/news/world-us-canada- /. accessed on march . hauser, christine. “brock turner loses appeal to overturn sexual assault conviction.” the new york times. aug . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/brock-turner- appeal.html. accessed on march . herman, judith l. trauma and recovery. basic books, . marcus, leah s. “the shrew as editor/editing shrews.” gender and power in shrew taming narratives, - . palgrave, . - . mitchell, katie. the director's craft: a handbook for the theatre. routledge, . sanchez, crystal. “ steps that explain why women stay in abusive relationships.” ms magazine. may . https://msmagazine.com/ / / / -steps-that-explain-why- women-stay-in-abusive-relationships/. accessed on april . “sexual assault support services.” carleton university. https://carleton.ca/sexual-violence- support/what-is-sexual-assault/getting-the-facts/. accessed on march . smith, charlene. "staging sexual assault responsibly." howl round. july . https://howlround.com/staging-sexual-assault-responsibly?fbclid=iwar btn w lav_ms_kz l rxnpmhdvmrcwnope gdfd a -csj mtybf gk . accessed on march . taylor, gary and john lavagnino. thomas middleton: the collected work. oxford university press, . thomson, peter. shakespeare's professional career. cambridge university press, . appendix the changeling by thomas middleton and william rowley edited by luciana silvestre fernandes the scene: alicant the space includes a realm of reality and a psychological realm where the joannas exist. the spaces blend when she is dressed for the wedding and at the end. dramatis personae beatrice-joanna diaphanta/ (joanna ; madwoman) isabella (joanna ) servant/ (joanna ; madwoman) livia/ (joanna ; madwoman) de flores vermandero alsemero jasperino/ (madman) alonzo/ (madman) alibius lollio franciscus antonio tomazo . prologue beatrice-joanna tears and cleanses herself, scrubbing herself violently. the joannas ( , and ) appear, performing the same action. a clock strikes/ church bells toll. it startles her, the joannas disappear. lights change to the present at a church: beatrice joanna and diaphanta. de flores is always close by. as she leaves, she locks eyes with alsemero, a moment of suspension. . a street near the harbor alsemero 'twas in the temple where i first beheld her, and now again the same; what omen yet follows of that? none but imaginary. why should my hopes or fate be timorous? the place is holy, so is my intent: i love her beauties to the holy purpose, the church hath first begun our interview and that's the place must join us into one. enter beatrice and diaphanta. he kisses beatrice-joanna's hand. enter jasperino. jasperino [aside] how now! salute a woman! he kisses too: wonderful! where learnt he this? beatrice you are a scholar, sir. which of the sciences is this love you speak of? alsemero from your tongue i take it to be music. beatrice you are skillful in't, can sing at first sight. alsemero and i have show'd you all my skill at once. i love you dearly. beatrice be better advis'd, sir: our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments, but they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders of common things, which when our judgments find, they can then check the eyes, and call them blind. alsemero but i am further, lady; yesterday was mine eyes' employment, and hither now they brought my judgment, where are both agreed. only there wants the confirmation by the hand royal; that's your part, lady. beatrice oh, there's one above me, sir. jasperino [aside] i meant to be a venturer in this voyage. yonder's another vessel: i'll board her; if she be lawful prize, down goes her topsail! enter deflores. deflores lady, your father-- beatrice is in health, i hope. deflores your eye shall instantly instruct you, lady. he's coming hitherward. beatrice what needed then your duteous preface? i had rather he had come unexpected; you must stall a good presence with unnecessary blabbing: and how welcome for your part you are, i'm sure you know. deflores [aside] will't never mend, this scorn, one side nor other? must i be enjoin'd to follow still whilst she flies from me? well, fates do your worst, i'll please myself with sight of her, at all opportunities, if but to spite her anger. i know she had rather see me dead than living, and yet she knows no cause for't but a peevish will. alsemero you seem'd displeas'd, lady, on the sudden. beatrice your pardon, sir, 'tis my infirmity, nor can i other reason render you than his or hers, of some particular thing they must abandon as a deadly poison, which to a thousand other tastes were wholesome; such to mine eyes is that same fellow there. alsemero he does ill to tempt your sight, if he knew it. beatrice he cannot be ignorant of that, sir; i have not spar'd to tell him so, and i want to help myself, since he's a gentleman in good respect with my father and follows him. alsemero he's out of his place then now. focus switches to jasperino and diaphanta jasperino i am a mad wag, wench. diaphanta so methinks; but for your comfort i can tell you we have a doctor in the city that undertakes the cure of such. jasperino tush, i know what physic is best. diaphanta a little poppy, sir, were good to cause you sleep. jasperino poppy! i'll give thee a pop i' th' lips for that first, and begin there. [he kisses her.] poppy is one simple indeed, and cuckoo, what you call't, another: i'll discover no more now; another time i'll show thee all. enter vermandero with servant. beatrice my father, sir. vermandero oh, joanna, i came to meet thee. your devotion's ended? beatrice for this time, sir. [aside] i shall change my saint, i fear me: i find a giddy turning in me.--sir, this while i am beholding to this gentleman, who left his own way to keep me company, and in discourse i find him much desirous to see your castle: he hath deserv'd it, sir, if ye please to grant it. alsemero alsemero, sir. vermandero alsemero? not the son of john de alsemero? oh, sir, i knew your father. we two were in acquaintance long ago and so continued till the stamp of time had coin'd us into silver. well, he's gone; a good soldier went with him in fight with those rebellious hollanders, was it not so? alsemero whose death i had reveng'd, or followed him in fate, had not the late league prevented me. vermandero ay, ay, 'twas time to breathe. oh, joanna, i should ha' told thee news: i saw piracquo lately. he's hot preparing for this day of triumph; thou must be a bride within this sevennight. beatrice nay, good sir, be not so violent; with speed i cannot render satisfaction unto the dear companion of my soul, virginity, whom i thus long have liv'd with-- vermandero tush, tush, there's a toy. alsemero [aside] i must now part, and never meet again with any joy on earth.--sir, your pardon, my affairs call on me. vermandero not chang'd so soon, i hope? you must see my castle and her best entertainment ere we part; come, come, let's on; i had good hope your stay had been a while with us in alicant; i might have bid you to my daughter's wedding. i tell you, sir, the gentleman's complete. alsemero he's much bound to you, sir. vermandero he shall be bound to me, as fast as this tie can hold him; i'll want my will else. but come, by the way i'll tell you more of him. alsemero [aside] how shall i dare to venture in his castle when he discharges murderers at the gate? but i must on, for back i cannot go. vermandero look, girl, thy glove's fall'n; stay, stay, deflores, help a little. deflores here, lady. he holds the glove for her to grab, when she does so, instead of letting go, he pulls her forward. the joannas ( , and ) are lit, tense, for a brief moment. beatrice mischief on your officious forwardness! who bade you stoop? they touch my hand no more: there, for t'other's sake i part with this; take 'em and draw thine own skin off with 'em. exeunt. manet deflores. deflores here's a favour come with a mischief! now i know she had rather wear my pelt tann'd in a pair of dancing pumps than i should thrust my fingers into her sockets here. i know she hates me, yet cannot choose but love her: no matter, if but to vex her, i'll haunt her still; though i get nothing else, i'll have my will. exit. . a room in alibius's house alibius lollio, i must trust thee with a secret, but thou must keep it. lollio, i have a wife. lollio fie, sir, 'tis too late to keep her secret; she's known to be married all the town over. alibius thou goest too fast, my lollio: my wife is young. i am old, lollio. lollio no, sir, 'tis i am old lollio. alibius here's the fear, man i would wear my ring on my own finger; whilst it is borrowed it is none of mine. lollio you must keep it on still then; if it but lie by, one or other will be thrusting into't. alibius thou conceiv'st me, lollio; here thy watchful eye must have employment. i cannot always be at home to watch her treadings, and in my absence supply my place. lollio surely i cannot see who you should have cause to be jealous of. we have but fools and madmen here, and both under the whip; the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools. alibius ay, those are all my patients, lollio. i do profess the cure of either sort: my trade, my living 'tis, i thrive by it. but here's the care that mixes with my thrift: the daily visitants that come to see my brainsick patients i would not have to see my wife. gallants i do observe of quick, enticing eyes, rich in habits: these are most shrewd temptations, lollio. lollio if they come to see the fools and madmen, you and i may serve the turn, and let my mistress alone; she's of neither sort. alibius hold that buckler fast, lollio; my trust is on thee, and i account it firm and strong. enter livia and antonio, as an “idiot”. livia save you, sir, my business speaks itself. alibius ay, ay, ma'm, 'tis plain enough, you mean him for my patient. livia [giving alibius money] and if your pains prove but commodious, to give but some little strength to his sick and weak part of nature in him, these are but patterns to show you of the whole pieces that will follow to you. lollio sir, an officer in this place may deserve something; the trouble will pass through my hands. livia [giving lollio money] 'tis fit something should come to your hands then, sir. alibius believe it, ma'am there shall be no care wanting. livia his name is antonio; marry, we use but half to him, only tony. if you can raise him but to any height, 'twould add an honour to your worthy pains, he is a gentleman. lollio as you allow us time and means, we can raise him to the wit of a magnifico. livia oh, no, that's not to be expected; far shorter will be enough. lollio no, fie, to level him with a constabler. i'll go further; say i make him as wise as myself. livia why, there i would have it. and so leave you: your best cares, i beseech you. exit livia. lollio i were best try his wit a little. tony, how many true fingers has a tailor on his right hand? antonio as many as on his left, cousin. lollio very well answered. tony: say how many fools are here. antonio two, cousin, thou and i. lollio tony; mark my question: how many fools and knaves are here? a fool before a knave, a fool behind a knave, between every two fools a knave, how many fools, how many knaves? antonio i never learnt so far, cousin. lollio i'll make you understand it easily. cousin, stand there. master, stand you next the fool. here's my place. mark now, tony: there a fool before a knave. antonio that's i, cousin. lollio here's a fool behind a knave, that's i, and between us two fools there is a knave, that's my master; 'tis but we three. madmen are heard from within. lollio peace, i say! their hour's come, they must be fed. come, tony, you must amongst your school-fellows now. exeunt. . a chamber in the castle beatrice oh, sir, i'm ready now for that fair service which makes the name of friend sit glorious on you; fitness of time and place is there set down, sir. [she hands him a paper.] jasperino the joy i shall return rewards my service. exit. beatrice how wise is alsemero in his friend! it is a sign he makes his choice with judgment. methinks i love now with the eyes of judgment and see the way to merit, clearly see it. enter deflores. joanas are lit, barely at first, small tense actions through their dialogue. deflores [aside] yonder's she. what ever ails me? now alate especially i can as well be hang'd as refrain seeing her; some twenty times a day-- nay, not so little-- do i force errands, frame ways and excuses to come into her sight, and i have small reason for't, and less encouragement; for she baits me still every time worse than other, does profess herself the cruelest enemy to my face in town-- she turns her blessed eye upon me now, and i'll endure all storms before i part with 't. beatrice again! [aside] this ominous ill-fac'd fellow more disturbs me than all my other passions. deflores [aside] now 't begins again; i'll stand this storm of hail though the stones pelt me. beatrice thy business? what's thy business? beatrice [aside] the villain's fix'd.-- thou standing toad-pool! deflores [aside] the shower falls amain now. beatrice who sent thee? what's thy errand? leave my sight! deflores my lord your father charg'd me to deliver a message to you. beatrice what, another since? do't and be hang'd then, let me be rid of thee! deflores true service merits mercy. beatrice what's thy message? deflores let beauty settle but in patience, you shall hear all. beatrice a dallying, trifling torment! deflores signior alonzo de piracquo, lady, is new alighted. beatrice vengeance strike the news! thou thing most loath'd, what cause was there in this to bring thee to my sight? get thee from me. deflores so. [aside] why, am not i an ass to devise ways thus to be rail'd at? i must see her still! i shall have a mad qualm within this hour again, i do but take breath to be lugg'd again. exit deflores. beatrice i never see this fellow but i think of some harm towards me: danger's in my mind still; i scarce leave trembling of an hour after. the next good mood i find my father in i'll get him quite discarded. oh, i was [joannas disappear] lost in this small disturbance and forgot affliction's fiercer torrent that now comes, to bear down all my comforts. enter vermandero above, alonzo and tomazo are brought in by the servant below. vermandero y'are both welcome, but an especial one belongs to you, sir, to whose most noble name our love presents the addition of a son, our son alonzo. alonzo the treasury of honour cannot bring forth a title i should more rejoice in, sir. vermandero you have improv'd it well. daughter, prepare; the day will steal upon thee suddenly. beatrice pulls vermandero to talk apart. tomazo alonzo. in troth i see small welcome in her eye. alonzo fie, you are too severe a censurer of love in all points; there's no bringing on you. beatrice that's all i do entreat. vermandero it is but reasonable; i'll see what my son says to't. son alonzo, here's a motion made but to reprieve a maidenhead three days longer; the request is not far out of reason, for indeed the former time is pinching. alonzo the time is set as pleasing as before. vermandero y'are nobly welcome, sirs. exeunt vermandero and beatrice. tomazo so, did you mark the dullness of her parting now? unsettle your affection with all speed wisdom can bring it to, your peace is ruin'd else. think what a torment 'tis to marry one whose heart is leapt into another's bosom: she lies but with another in thine arms. alonzo you speak as if she lov'd some other then. tomazo do you apprehend so slowly? alonzo nay, and that be your fear only, i am safe enough; preserve your friendship and your counsel, brother. pray let no more be urg'd; i can endure much till i meet an injury to her, then i am not myself. farewell, sweet brother. exit. tomazo why, here is love's tame madness! exit. . another chamber diaphanta (to alsemero) the place is my charge; you have kept your hour, and the reward of a just meeting bless you. exit. enter beatrice. beatrice i have within mine eye all my desires; requests that holy prayers ascend heaven for, and brings 'em down to furnish our defects, come not more sweet to our necessities than thou unto my wishes. alsemero w'are so like in our expressions, lady, that unless i borrow the same words, i shall never find their equals. beatrice how happy were this meeting, this embrace, if it were free from envy! how well were i now if there were none such name known as piracquo, nor no such tie as the command of parents! alsemero one good service would strike off both your fears. i'll send a challenge to piracquo instantly. beatrice how? call you that extinguishing of fear when 'tis the only way to keep it flaming? are not you ventured in the action that's all my joys and comforts? pray no more, sir. say you prevail'd, you're danger's and not mine then: the law would claim you from me, or obscurity be made the grave to bury you alive. the tears would ne'er 'a' dried till dust had chok'd 'em. blood-guiltiness becomes a fouler visage, [aside] and now i think on one-- i was too blame: i ha'marr'd so good a market with my scorn. 't had been done questionless. the ugliest creature creation fram'd for some use, yet to see i could not mark so much where it should be. alsemero lady. beatrice [aside] why, men of art make much of poison, keep one to expel another; where was my art? alsemero lady, you hear not me. beatrice i do especially, sir; the present times are not so sure of our side as those hereafter may be; we must use 'em then, as thrifty folks their wealth, sparingly now till the time opens. within there, diaphanta! [enter diaphanta.] perfect your service, and conduct this gentleman the private way you brought him. alsemero my love's as firm as love e'er built upon. exeunt diaphanta and alsemero. enter deflores. deflores [aside] i have watch'd this meeting, and do wonder much what shall become of t'other; i'm sure both cannot be serv'd unless she transgress. happily then i'll put in for one: for if a woman fly from one point, from him she makes a husband, she spreads and mounts then like arithmetic: one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, proves in time sutler to an army royal. now do i look to be most richly rail'd at, yet i must see her. beatrice [aside] why, put case i loath'd him must i needs show it? cannot i keep that secret, and serve my turn upon him? see, he's here.-- deflores. deflores [aside] ha, i shall run mad with joy! she call'd me fairly by my name, deflores. beatrice what ha' you done to your face alate? y'ave met with some good physician; y'ave prun'd yourself, methinks: you were not wont to look so amorously. deflores [aside] not i; 'tis the same physnomy to a hair and pimple which she call'd scurvy scarce an hour ago. beatrice come hither, nearer, man. turn, let me see. fah! 'tis but the heat of the liver, i perceive 't. deflores [aside] her fingers touch'd me; she smells all amber. beatrice i'll make a water, for you shall cleanse this within a fortnight. deflores [aside] 'tis half an act of pleasure to hear her talk thus to me. beatrice when w'are us'd to a hard face, 'tis not so unpleasing. deflores [aside] i was blest to light upon this minute; i'll make use on't. beatrice hardness becomes the visage of a man well; it argues service, resolution, manhood, if cause were of employment. deflores 'twould be soon seen, if e'er your ladyship had cause to use it. beatrice [aside] we shall try you.-- oh, my deflores! deflores [aside] how's that? she calls me hers already, my deflores!-- you were about to sigh out somewhat, madam. that sigh would fain have utterance. take pity on't! beatrice would creation-- deflores ay, well said, that's it. beatrice had form'd me man. deflores nay, that's not it. beatrice oh, 'tis the soul of freedom! i should not then be forc'd to marry one i hate beyond all depths; i should have power then to oppose my loathings, nay, remove 'em forever from my sight. deflores oh, blest occasion! [kneeling] without change to your sex, you have your wishes. claim so much man in me. beatrice in thee, deflores? there's small cause for that. deflores put it not from me; it's a service that i kneel for to you. beatrice you are too violent to mean faithfully; there's horror in my service, blood and danger: can those be things to sue for? deflores if you knew how sweet it were to me to be employed in any act of yours, you would say then i fail'd and us'd not reverence enough when i receive the charge on't. beatrice [aside] this is much, methinks; belike his wants are greedy, and to such gold tastes like angels' food. --rise. deflores i'll have the work first. beatrice [aside] possible his need is strong upon him. [offering him money] there's to encourage thee; as thou art forward and thy service dangerous, thy reward shall be precious. deflores that i have thought on; i have assur'd myself of that beforehand, and know it will be precious: the thought ravishes! [a flash of the joannas holding each other's hands] beatrice then take him to thy fury. alonzo de piracquo. deflores [rises.] his end's upon him; he shall be seen no more. beatrice be wondrous careful in the execution. deflores why, are not both our lives upon the cast? beatrice then i throw all my fears upon thy service. deflores they ne'er shall rise to hurt you. beatrice when the deed's done, i'll furnish thee with all things for thy flight; thou may'st live bravely in another country. deflores ay, ay, we'll talk of that hereafter. beatrice [aside] i shall rid myself of two inveterate loathings at one time: piracquo and his dog-face. exit. deflores oh, my blood! methinks i feel her in mine arms already, her wanton fingers combing out this beard, and being pleased, praising this bad face. hunger and pleasure, they'll commend sometimes slovenly dishes and feed heartily on 'em; nay, which is stranger, refuse daintier for 'em. some women are odd feeders. i'm too loud; here comes the man goes supperless to bed, yet shall not rise tomorrow to his dinner. enter alonzo. alonzo deflores. i am glad i ha' met with thee. thou canst show me the full strength of the castle? deflores that i can, sir. and if the ways and straits of some of the passages be not too tedious for you, i will assure you worth your time and sight, my lord. alonzo puh, that shall be no hinderance. deflores i'm your servant then. [deflores hides a weapon, as alonzo goes ahead.] all this is nothing; you shall see anon a place you little dream on. alonzo here's rich variety, deflores. goodly munition. deflores no bastard metal will ring you a peal like bells at great men's funerals. keep your eye straight, my lord; take special notice of that sconce before you. [stabs him.] alonzo deflores, oh, deflores, whose malice hast thou put on? deflores do you question a work of secrecy? i must silence you. [stabs him. alonzo still moans/cries out] i must silence you. [stabs him; alonzo dies.] so, here's an undertaking well accomplish'd. this vault serves to good use now. ha! what's that threw sparkles in my eye? oh, 'tis a diamond. this will approve the work.[he tries to take the ring off.] what, so fast on? not part in death? i'll take a speedy course then: finger and all shall off. [cuts off his finger.] so, now i'll clear the passages from all suspect or fear. exit with body- perhaps a flash of the joannas? . a vault enter isabella and lollio. isabella why, sirrah? whence have you commission to fetter the doors against me? is it your master's pleasure, or your own? lollio 'tis for my masters pleasure, lest being taken in another man's corn, you might be pounded in another place. isabella y'are a brave, saucy rascal! come on, sir, afford me then the pleasure of your bedlam. lollio when you have a taste of the madman, you shall see fools' college o' th' side. exit. [within] come on, sir, let me see how handsomely you'll behave yourself now. enter lollio, franciscus. franciscus how sweetly she looks! poet, drink to my mistress' health; i'll pledge it. stay, stay, there's a spider in the cup! no, 'tis but a grape seed: swallow it, fear nothing, poet. isabella alack, alack, 'tis too full of pity to be laugh'd at! how fell he mad? lollio for love, mistress. the muses forsook him; he ran mad for a chambermaid. [showing him a whip] not too near, you see your danger. franciscus oh, hold thy hand! thou feed'st thy horses well, they shall obey thee. get up; i kneel. [gets down on all fours.] isabella his conscience is unquiet; sure that was the cause of this. a proper gentleman. franciscus cupid struck me blind. lollio and luna made you mad; you have two trades to beg with. franciscus luna is now big-bellied, and there's room for both of us to ride with hecate; i'll drag thee up into her silver sphere, the swiftlycanthropi that walks the round, we'll tear their wolvish skins, and save the sheep. [beats lollio.] lollio mad slave, indeed, abuse your keeper? [whips him] isabella i prithee hence with him, now he grows dangerous. franciscus [singing] sweet love pity me, give me leave to lie with thee. lollio no, i'll see you wiser first. to your own kennel. [exit franciscus.] now, mistress, i will bring you another sort. tony, come hither, tony, look who's yonder. [enter antonio.] fear him not, mistress, 'tis a gentle nidget; you may play with him. madman within bounce, bounce, he falls, he falls! lollio must i come amongst you there? keep you the fool, mistress. [exit.] antonio 'tis opportuneful now, sweet lady! nay, cast no amazing eye upon this change. isabella you are a fine fool indeed. antonio no danger in me: i bring naught but love and his soft, wounding shafts to strike you with. isabella a forward fool, too. antonio take no acquaintance of these outward follies; there is within a gentleman that loves you. isabella when i see him, i'll speak with him; so in the meantime keep your habit, it becomes you well enough. enter lollio. antonio and must again. he, he, i thank you, cousin; i'll be your valentine tomorrow morning. lollio is he not witty, pretty well for a fool? isabella if he hold on as he begins, he is like to come to something! madman [within] catch there, catch the last couple in hell! lollio again? must i come amongst you? [exit.] antonio why should a minute of love's hour be lost? isabella fie, out again! i had rather you kept your other posture: you become not your tongue when you speak from your clothes. antonio how can he freeze lives near so sweet a warmth? enter lollio above. isabella take heed, there's giants keep 'em. [antonio kisses her.] lollio [above] how now, fool, are you good at that? i believe i must put harder questions to him. isabella you are bold without fear, too. antonio what should i fear, having all joys about me? do you smile, and love shall play the wanton on your lip, meet and retire, retire and meet again. lollio [aside] cuckoo, cuckoo! lollio exits. [enter and exit madmen above.] antonio what are these? isabella of fear enough to part us, yet are they but our schools of lunatics, that act their fantasies in any shapes suiting their present thoughts: if sad, they cry; if mirth be their conceit, they laugh again. sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds, singing or howling, braying, barking; all as their wild fancies prompt 'em. enter lollio. isabella your fool is grown wondrous witty. lollio well, i'll say nothing; but i do think he will put you down one of these days. exeunt lollio and antonio. isabella here the restrained current might make breach, spite of the watchful bankers. would a woman stray, she need not gad abroad to seek her sin; it would be brought home one ways or other. enter lollio. lollio how dost thou, sweet rogue? come, there are degrees; one fool may be better than another. isabella what's the matter? lollio nay, if thou giv'st thy mind to fools, flesh, have at thee! [tries to kiss her.] isabella you bold slave, you! lollio i could follow now as t'other fool did: [imitating antonio] "what should i fear, having all joys about me? do you smile..." but is not this the more foolish way? come, sweet rogue, kiss me. isabella sirrah, no more! i see you have discovered this love's knight-errant, who hath made adventure for purchase of my love; be silent, mute, mute as a statue, or his injunction for me enjoying shall be to cut thy throat. i'll do it, though for no other purpose, and be sure he'll not refuse it. no more: your master! enter alibius. alibius sweet, how dost thou? isabella your bounden servant, sir. you were best lock me up. alibius in my arms and bosom, my sweet. lollio, we have employment, we have task in hand; at noble vermandero's, our castle-captain, there is a nuptial to be solemnis'd, for which the gentleman hath bespoke our pains: a mixture of our madmen and our fools to finish, as it were, and make the fag of all the revels, the third night from the first. this, this, lollio: there's a good reward begun, and will beget a bounty, be it known. isabella y'ave a fine trade on't; madmen and fools are a staple commodity. alibius oh, wife, we must eat, wear clothes, and live: just at the lawyer's haven we arrive, by madmen and by fools we both do thrive. exeunt. . a chamber in the castle -vermandero, alsemero, jasperino, servant and beatrice. vermandero valencia speaks so nobly of you, sir, i wish i had a daughter now for you; but heaven has married her to joys eternal. come, sir, your friend and you shall see the pleasures which my health chiefly joys in. exeunt. manet beatrice. beatrice so, here's one step into my father's favour; time will fix him. i have got him now the liberty of the house; so wisdom by degrees works out her freedom. enter deflores. deflores [aside] my thoughts are at a banquet for the deed: i feel no weight in't; 'tis but light and cheap for the sweet recompense that i set down for't. beatrice deflores. deflores lady. beatrice is it done then? deflores piracquo is no more. beatrice my joys start at mine eyes; our sweet'st delights are evermore born weeping. deflores i've a token for you. but it was sent somewhat unwillingly: i could not get the ring without the finger. beatrice bless me! what hast thou done? deflores why, is that more than killing the whole man? beatrice 'tis the first token my father made me send him. deflores and i made him send it back again. beatrice i pray bury the finger, but the stone you may make use on shortly; the true value, take't of my truth, is near three hundred ducats. deflores 'twill hardly buy a capcase for one's conscience, though, to keep it from the worm, as fine as 'tis. well, being my fees i'll take it; great men have taught me that, or else my merit would scorn the way on't. beatrice it might justly, sir. why, thou mistak'st, deflores: 'tis not given in state of recompense. prithee, thou look'st as if thou wert offended. deflores offended? could you think so? beatrice look you, sir, here's three thousand golden florins; i have not meanly thought upon thy merit. deflores what, salary? now you move me. beatrice how, deflores? deflores do you place me in the rank of verminous fellows to destroy things for wages? offer gold? the lifeblood of man! is anything valued too precious for my recompense? beatrice i understand thee not. deflores i could ha' hir'd a journeyman in murder at this rate, and mine own conscience might have slept at ease. beatrice [aside] i'm in a labyrinth; what will content him? i would fain be rid of him.-- i'll double the sum, sir. deflores you take a course to double my vexation, that's the good you do. beatrice [aside] bless me! i am now in worse plight than i was; i know not what will please him.--for my fear's sake, i prithee make away with all speed possible. and if thou be'st so modest not to name the sum that will content thee, paper blushes not: send thy demand in writing, it shall follow thee; but prithee take thy flight. deflores you must fly too then. i'll not stir a foot else. beatrice what's your meaning? deflores why, are not you as guilty, in, i'm sure, as deep as i? and we should stick together. come, your fears counsel you but ill: my absence would draw suspect upon you instantly; there were no rescue for you. beatrice [aside] he speaks home. deflores nor is it fit we two engag'd so jointly should part and live asunder. [he tries to kiss her.] beatrice how now, sir? this shows not well. deflores what makes your lip so strange? this must not be 'twixt us. beatrice [aside] the man talks wildly. deflores come, kiss me with a zeal now! beatrice [aside] heaven, i doubt him! deflores i will not stand so long to beg 'em shortly. beatrice take heed, deflores, of forgetfulness; 'twill soon betray us. deflores take you heed first; faith, y'are grown much forgetful: y'are too blame in't. beatrice [aside] he's bold, and i am blam'd for't. deflores i have eas'd you of your trouble; think on't: i'm in pain and must be eas'd of you; 'tis a charity. justice invites your blood to understand me. beatrice oh, i never shall! deflores oh, this act has put me into spirit; i was as greedy on't as the parch'd earth of moisture when the clouds weep. you see i have thrown contempt upon your gold; not that i want it not, for i do-- piteously. in order i will come unto't and make use on't. but 'twas not held so precious to begin with, for i place wealth after the heels of pleasure; and were i not resolv'd in my belief that thy virginity were perfect in thee, i should but take my recompense with grudging, as if i had but half my hopes i agreed for. beatrice why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, to make his death the murderer of my honour! thy language is so bold and vicious, i cannot see which way i can forgive it with any modesty. deflores push, you forget yourself: a woman dipp'd in blood and talk of modesty! beatrice oh, misery of sin! would i had been bound perpetually unto my living hate in that piracquo than to hear these words! think but upon the distance that creation set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there. deflores look but into your conscience, read me there: 'tis a true book; you'll find me there your equal. you must forget your parentage to me; y'are the deeds creature: by that name you lost your first condition, and i challenge you, as peace and innocency has turn'd you out and made you one with me. beatrice with thee, foul villain? deflores yes, my fair murderess. do you urge me? though thou writ'st maid, thou whore in thy affection, 'twas chang'd from thy first love, and that's a kind of whoredom in thy heart; and he's chang'd now to bring thy second on, thy alsemero, whom, by all sweets that ever darkness tasted, if i enjoy thee not, thou ne'er enjoy'st. i'll blast the hopes and joys of marriage; i'll confess all, my life i rate at nothing. beatrice oh, sir, hear me! deflores she that in life and love refuses me, in death and shame my partner she shall be. beatrice stay, hear me once for all: i make thee master of all the wealth i have in gold and jewels; let me go poor unto my bed with honour and i am rich in all things. deflores let this silence thee: the wealth of all valencia shall not buy my pleasure from me. beatrice vengeance begins; murder, i see, is followed by more sins. was my creation in the womb so curs'd it must engender with a viper first? deflores come, rise and shroud your blushes in my bosom; silence is one of pleasure's best receipts: thy peace is wrought forever in this yielding. 'las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anon what thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on. . deflores submits/manhandles her. joannas appear when he touches beatrice. the joannas perform the same action as beatrice-joanna. they come into focus as darkness sets on beatrice-joanna and de flores. joannas actions become more frantic and hieghtened in a crescendo till reaching a peak. lights back on joanna, left an used mess. deflores exits. the same cleansing action from the start is performed by beatrice-joanna alone. the joannas then join until suddenly -- clock strikes/ church bells toll. beatrice is startled and we are brought back to the present. the women dress her, while all around the gentlemen look for alonzo and vermandero points to alsemero, the men applaud the choice and fashion him for a groom. clock strikes/ church bells toll. beatrice walks to her groom. enter deflores after all, smiling at the accident. beatrice locks eyes with deflores. reality is suspended, she re-enacts her trauma. church bell rings/ bells toll. back in reality, alsemero touches her, she flinches. black . alsemero's chamber the joannas ( , and ) are visible through most of the scene, re-enacting her trauma. focus varies with how triggering the action is. beatrice this fellow has undone me endlessly; never was bride so fearfully distress'd. the more i think upon th' ensuing night, and whom i am to cope with in embraces-- one who's ennobled both in blood and mind, so clear in understanding, that's my plague now, before whose judgment will my fault appear there is no hiding on't-- there's no venturing into his bed, what course soe'er i light upon, without my shame, which may grow up to danger. he cannot but in justice strangle me as i lie by him, as a cheater use me. 'tis a precious craft to play with a false die before a cunning gamester. here's his closet, the key left in't, and he abroad i' th' park. sure 'twas forgot; i'll be so bold as look in't. bless me! a right physician's closet 'tis. what manuscript lies here? the book of experiment, call'd secrets in nature: so 'tis, 'tis so. [reading] "how to know whether a woman be with child or no." i hope i am not yet; if he should try, though... the leaf tuck'd down upon't, the place suspicious. [reading] "give her two spoonfuls of the white water in glass c. and if she be with child, she sleeps full twelve hours after; if not, not." none of that water comes into my belly. ha! that which is next, is ten times worse. [reading] "how to know whether a woman be a maid or not." if that should be apply'd, what would become of me? [reading] "give the party you suspect a spoonful of the water in the glass m, which upon her that is a maid makes three effects: 'twill make her incontinently gape, then fall into a sudden sneezing, last into a violent laughing; else dull, heavy, and lumpish." [bells] where had i been? i fear it, yet 'tis seven hours to bedtime. enter diaphanta. http://www.tech.org/~cleary/change.html#thebooko http://www.tech.org/~cleary/change.html#thebooko diaphanta cuds, madam, are you here? beatrice [aside] seeing that wench now, a trick comes in my mind-- i come hither to look my lord. diaphanta [aside] would i had such a cause to look him too.--why, he's i' th' park, madam. beatrice there let him be. i fear thou art not modest, diaphanta. diaphanta your thoughts are so unwilling to be known, madam; 'tis ever the bride's fashion towards bedtime to set light by her joys, as if she ow'd 'em not. beatrice her joys? her fears, thou wouldst say. i will give a thousand ducats to that woman would try what my fear were, and tell me true tomorrow when she gets from 't: as she likes i might perhaps be drawn to 't. diaphanta are you in earnest? beatrice do you get the woman, then challenge me. diaphanta but are you serious still? would you resign your first night's pleasure and give money too? beatrice as willingly as live. [aside] alas, the gold is but a by-bet to wedge in the honour. diaphanta madam, what say you to me, and stray no further? beatrice y'are too quick, i fear, to be a maid. diaphanta how? not a maid? nay, then, you urge me, madam, your honourable self is not a truer with all your fears upon you then i with all my lightsome joys about me. beatrice i'm glad to hear 't; then you dare put your honesty upon an easy trial. glass m. ay, this is it. look, diaphanta, you take no worse than i do. she drinks and hands diaphanta the glass. she drinks. beatrice diaphanta gapes. begins already, there's the first symptom. diaphanta sneezes. and what haste it makes to fall into the second, there by this time: most admirable secret! on the contrary, it stirs not me a whit, which most concerns it. diaphanta laughs beatrice [aside] just in all things and in order. diaphanta ha, ha, ha, i am so, so light at heart, ha, ha, ha. so pleasurable! now i'm sad again. beatrice [aside] it lays itself so gently too.--come, wench, most honest diaphanta i dare call thee now. about midnight you must not fail to steal forth gently that i may use the place. diaphanta oh, fear not, madam [exeunt.] . a chamber in the castle vermandero i tell thee, wench, mine honour is in question, a thing till now free from suspicion. who of my gentlemen are absent? tell me and truly how many and who. servant antonio, sir, and franciscus. vermandero when did they leave the castle? servant some ten days since, sir. vermandero the time accuses 'um: a charge of murder is brought within my castle gate, piracquo's murder; i dare not answer faithfully their absence. a strict command of apprehension shall pursue 'um suddenly, and either wipe the stain off clear or openly discover it. [enter tomazo.] see, i am set on again. exit servant. tomazo i claim a brother of you. for here i left him, and the hasty tie of this snatch'd marriage gives strong testimony of his most certain ruin. vermandero certain falsehood! this is the place indeed; his breach of faith has too much marr'd both my abused love, and mock'd my daughter's joy. the prepar'd morning blush'd at his infidelity; he left contempt and scorn to throw upon those friends whose belief hurt 'em: oh, 'twas most ignoble to take his flight so unexpectedly and throw such public wrongs on those that lov'd him! tomazo then this is all your answer? vermandero 'tis too fair for one of his alliance, and i warn you that this place no more see you. exit. enter deflores. tomazo honest deflores. deflores that's my name indeed. tomazo come hither, kind and true one; i remember my brother lov'd thee well. deflores oh, purely, dear sir! [aside] methinks i am now again a-killing on him, he brings it so fresh to me.--- saw you the bride? good sweet sir, which way took she? tomazo i prithee name her not. is she not wicked? deflores no, no, a pretty, easy, round-pack'd sinner, as your most ladies are-- i am call'd, i think, sir. exit. enter alsemero. alsemero you are most welcome. tomazo you may call that word back; i do not think i am, nor wish to be. alsemero your words and you appear to me great strangers. tomazo time and our swords may make us more acquainted; this the business: i should have a brother in your place; how treachery and malice have dispos'd of him, i'm bound to enquire of him which holds his right. alsemero you must look to answer for that word, sir. tomazo fear you not; i'll have it ready drawn at our next meeting. exit. enter jasperino. alsemero jasperino, i have news to tell thee, strange news. jasperino i ha' some too i think as strange as yours; would i might keep mine, so my faith and friendship might be kept in't. 'twas diaphanta's chance--for to that wench i pretend honest love, and she deserves it-- to leave me in a back part of the house, a place we chose for private conference; she was no sooner gone, but instantly i heard your bride's voice in the next room to me and, lending more attention, found deflores louder then she. alsemero deflores? thou art out now. the very sight of him is poison to her. jasperino that made me stagger too, but diaphanta at her return confirm'd it. then fell we both to listen, and words pass'd like those that challenge interest in a woman. alsemero oh, were she the sole glory of the earth, had eyes that could shoot fire into kings' breasts, and touch'd, she sleeps not here; yet i have time, though night be near, to be resolv'd hereof. [giving him a key] that key will lead thee to a pretty secret by a chaldean taught me, and i've made my study upon some; bring from my closet a glass inscrib'd there with the letter m, and question not my purpose. [exit jasperino.] how can this hang together? not an hour since her woman came pleading her lady's fears, deliver'd her for the most timorous virgin that she might come obscurely to my bosom. enter beatrice. beatrice [aside] all things go well; my woman's preparing yonder for her sweet voyage, which grieves me to lose: necessity compels it; i lose all else. alsemero [aside] push, modesty's shrine is set in yonder forehead. i cannot be too sure though.--my joanna. beatrice sir, i was bold to weep a message to you; pardon my modest fears. alsemero [aside] the dove's not meeker. she's abus'd, questionless. [enter jasperino.] oh, are you come, sir? beatrice [aside] the glass, upon my life! i see the letter. i am suspected. alsemero how fitly our bride comes to partake with us! beatrice [aside] i'm put now to my cunning; th' effects i know, if i can now but feign 'em handsomely. alsemero [aside to jasperino] it has that secret virtue it ne'er miss'd, sir, upon a virgin. beatrice gapes, then sneezes. [aside to jasperino] by all that's virtuous, it takes there, proceeds! jasperino [aside to alsemero] this is the strangest trick to know a maid by. beatrice ha, ha, ha! you have given me joy of heart to drink, my lord. alsemero no, thou hast given me such joy of heart that never can be blasted. beatrice what's the matter, sir? alsemero [aside to jasperino] see, now 'tis settled in a melancholy, keeps both the time and method.--my joanna, chaste as the breath of heaven or morning's womb that brings the day forth, thus my love encloses thee. he embraces her. exeunt. . a room in alibius's house isabella sirrah, here's a madman akin to the fool too, a lunatic lover. lollio no, no, not he. i brought the letter. [reads] "to andromeda, chief chambermaid to the knight of the sun, in the middle region. pay the post." this is stark madness. isabella now mark the inside. [she reads] "sweet lady, having now cast off this counterfeit cover of a madman, i appear to your best judgment a true and faithful lover of your beauty. i remain, mad till i speak with you, from whom i expect my cure, yours all, or one beside himself, franciscus." lollio you are like to have a fine time on't. my master and i may give over our professions; i think you can cure fools and madmen faster than we. isabella very likely. but thy counsel now: how shall i deal with 'um? lollio abuse 'um: that's the way to mad the fool and make a fool of the madman. isabella 'tis easy. i'll practise; do thou observe it: the key of thy wardrobe. [he gives her the key.] lollio there; fit yourself for 'um, and i'll fit 'um both for you. exit. enter alibius. alibius lollio, art there? will all be perfect, think'st thou? i will see them once more rehearse before they go. lollio there is one or two that i mistrust their fooling; i'll instruct them, and then they shall rehearse the whole measure. alibius do so; i'll see the music prepar'd: but, lollio, by the way, how does my wife brook her restraint? lollio so, so. she takes some pleasure in the house. you must allow her a little more length. alibius she shall along to vermandero's with us; that will serve her for a month's liberty. exit alibius. lollio do, sir; and i'll dance the whilst. tony, where art thou, tony? enter antonio. antonio here, cousin. where art thou? come, tony, the footmanship i taught you. enter isabella dressed as a madwoman. antonio dances. lollio exits. isabella hey, how he treads the air! shoo, shoo, t'other way: he burns his wings else; here's wax enough below, icarus, more than will be canceled these eighteen moons. he's down, he's down; what a terrible fall he had! antonio prithee, coz, let me alone. isabella art thou not drown'd? bless thee from the pirates. [attempts to kiss him] antonio i'll kick thee if again thou touch me, thou wild unshapen antic; i am no fool, you bedlam! isabella but you are as sure as i am, mad. have i put on this habit of a frantic with love as full of fury to beguile the nimble eye of watchful jealousy, and am i thus rewarded? antonio ha, dearest beauty! isabella no, i have no beauty now, nor never had, but what was in my garments. you a quick-sighted lover? come not near me. i came a feigner to return stark mad. exit. enter lollio. lollio why, tony, whither now? why, fool! antonio whose fool, usher of idiots? you coxcomb! i am stark mad, i have cause enough; and i could throw the full effects on thee, and beat thee like a fury. lollio do not, do not! i can give you comfort: my mistress loves you, and there is as arrant a madman i' th' house as you are a fool, your rival. if after the masque we can rid her of him, you earn her love. antonio may i believe thee? lollio yes, or you may choose whether you will or no. [exit antonio. enter franciscus.] [aside] this is t'other counterfeit. [reading] "sweet lady, having now cast this counterfeit cover of a madman, i appear to your...” this is pretty well for a madman. franciscus ha! what's that? lollio [reading] "chide those perfections in you which made me imperfect." your hand is true, is it not? if you love my mistress so well, you are like to be cur'd. my mistress loves you, but must have some proof of your love to her; you must meet her enemy and yours. franciscus he's dead already. lollio will you tell me that, and i parted but now with him? franciscus show me the man. lollio ay, see him before you kill him, in any case; 'tis but a fool that haunts my mistress in the shape of an idiot. bang but his fools' coat, and 'tis well. in, in: my master! exit franciscus. enter alibius. alibius in a readiness, lollio? lollio yes, sir. alibius away then, and guide them in, lollio; entreat your mistress to see this sight. lollio brings on the madmen and fools, and isabella. the madmen and fools dance. grotesque. in a moment of heightened reality each reveals what part of their character causes them to be put here, but are subdued by the crack of lollio's whip. isabella watches in horror and refuses to stay. 'tis perfect: well fit but once these strains, we shall have coin and credit for our pains. exeunt. . a gallery in the castle a clock strikes one. beatrice one struck, and yet she lies by't-- oh, my fears! this strumpet serves her own ends, 'tis apparent now, devours the pleasure with a greedy appetite, and never minds my honour or my peace, makes havoc of my right; but she pays dearly for't: no trusting of her life with such a secret, that cannot rule her blood to keep her promise. beside, i have some suspicion of her faith to me, because i was suspected of my lord, and it must come from her. hark, by my horrors, another clock strikes two. strike two. enter deflores. deflores is she not come from him yet? beatrice as i am a living soul, not. deflores sure the devil hath sow'd his itch within her; who'd trust a waiting-woman? beatrice i must trust somebody. deflores you are so harsh and hardy, ask no counsel; and i could have help'd you to an apothecary's daughter would have fall'n off before eleven, and thank'd you too. beatrice oh me, not yet? this whore forgets herself. deflores the rascal fares so well. look, y'are undone: the day-star, by this hand; see phosphorus plain yonder. beatrice advise me now to fall upon some ruin; there is no counsel safe else. deflores peace, i ha't now: for we must force a rising; there's no remedy. beatrice how? take heed of that. deflores tush, be you quiet or else give over all. beatrice prithee, i ha' done then. deflores this is my reach: i'll set some part afire of diaphanta's chamber. beatrice how? fire, sir? that may endanger the whole house. deflores you talk of danger when your fame's on fire? beatrice that's true. do what thou wilt now. deflores push, i aim at a most rich success, strikes all dead sure. the chimney being afire, and some light parcels of the least danger in her chamber only, if diaphanta should be met by chance then far from her lodging, which is now suspicious, it would be thought her fears and affright then drove her to seek for succour; if not seen or met at all, as that's the likeliest, for her own shame she'll hasten towards her lodging. i will be ready with a piece high-charg'd, as 'twere to cleanse the chimney: there, 'tis proper now, but she shall be the mark. beatrice i'm forc'd to love thee now, 'cause thou provid'st so carefully for my honour. deflores 'slid, it concerns the safety of us both, our pleasure and continuance. exits. strikes three a' clock. beatrice list! oh, my terrors, three struck by st. sebastian's! within fire, fire, fire! beatrice how heartily he serves me! his face loathes one, but look upon his care, who would not love him? enter deflores. fira-warning bell rings. deflores the fire bell rings, the chimney works, my charge: the piece is ready. exit. beatrice here's a man worth loving! enter diaphanta. diaphanta pardon frailty, madam; in troth, i was so well, i ev'n forgot myself. beatrice you've made trim work. diaphanta what? beatrice hie quickly to your chamber; your reward follows you. exit. enter alsemero. alsemero oh, my dear joanna! enter vermandero, jasperino. vermandero oh, bless my house and me! enter deflores with a piece. vermandero knave, whither goes that piece? deflores to scour the chimney, exit. vermandero oh, well said, well said; that fellow's good on all occasions. beatrice a wondrous necessary man, my lord. [the piece goes off.] -- 'tis done. alsemero come, sweet, to bed now enter deflores carrying the burnt body of diaphanta. vermandero bless us! what's that? deflores a thing you all knew once: diaphanta's burnt. beatrice my woman, oh, my woman! deflores now the flames are greedy of her; burnt, burnt, burnt to death, sir. beatrice oh, my presaging soul! deflores, what is left of her inter, and we as mourners all will follow her. which of you spied the fire first? deflores 'twas i, madam. beatrice and took such pains in't too? a double goodness! 'twere well he were rewarded. vermandero he shall be. deflores, call upon me. alsemero and upon me, sir. exeunt. manet deflores. deflores rewarded? precious, here's a trick beyond me; i see in all bouts both of sport and wit always a woman strives for the last hit. exit. . a chamber tomazo all league with mankind i renounce forever till i find this murderer. for in the state of ignorance i live in, a brother may salute his brother's murderer, and wish good speed to th' villain in a greeting. enter vermandero, alibius and isabella. vermandero noble piracquo. we bring that news will make a welcome for us. two of the chiefest men i kept about me i hide not from the law or your just vengeance. tomazo if you bring that calm, name but the manner i shall ask forgiveness in. [kneels.] alibius 'twas my wife's fortune, as she is most lucky at a discovery to find out lately within our hospital of fools and madmen two counterfeits slipp'd into these disguises, their names, franciscus and antonio. isabella now that which draws suspicion to their habits, the time of their disguisings agrees justly with the day of the murder. tomazo oh, blest revelation! like subtle lightning will i wind about 'em and melt their marrow in 'em. exeunt. . alsemero's chamber jasperino your confidence, i'm sure, is now of proof. the prospect from the garden has show'd enough for deep suspicion. she meets you opportunely from that walk; she's here. exit jasperino. enter beatrice. beatrice alsemero! alsemero how do you? beatrice how do i? alas! how do you? you look not well. alsemero you read me well enough; i am not well. beatrice not well, sir? is't in my power to better you? alsemero yes. beatrice nay, then y'are cur'd again. alsemero pray resolve me one question, lady. are you honest? beatrice ha, ha, ha, that's a broad question, my lord. alsemero but that's not a modest answer, my lady: do you laugh? my doubts are strong upon me beatrice 'tis innocence that smiles, and no rough brow can take away the dimple in her cheek. say i should strain a tear to fill the vault, which would you give the better faith to? alsemero 'twere but hypocrisy of a sadder colour, but the same stuff; neither your smiles nor tears shall move or flatter me from my belief: you are a whore. trigger- joannas ( , and ) begin to enact the action from the assault in other realm beatrice what a horrid sound it hath! it blasts a beauty to deformity; upon what face soever that breath falls! show me the ground whereon you lost your love. alsemero how comes this tender reconcilement else 'twixt you and your despite, your rancourous loathing, deflores? he that your eye was sore at sight of, he's now become your arms' supporter, your lips' saint. beatrice is there the cause? alsemero worse: your lust's devil, your adultery. trigger- joannas action gets more frantic (joanas and ) beatrice would any but yourself say that, 'twould turn him to a villain. alsemero 'twas witness'd by the counsel of your bosom, diaphanta. beatrice then hear a story of not much less horror than this your false suspicion is beguil'd with. to your bed's scandal i stand up innocence, which even the guilt of one black other deed will stand for proof of: your love has made me a cruel murderess. a bloody one. i have kiss'd poison for't, strok'd a serpent, that thing of hate, worthy in my esteem of no better employment, and him most worthy to be so employ'd i caus'd to murder that innocent piracquo, having no better means than that worst, to assure yourself to me. alsemero oh, thou art all deform'd! beatrice forget not, sir, it for your sake was done alsemero oh, thou shouldst have gone a thousand leagues about to have avoided this dangerous bridge of blood; here we are lost. beatrice remember i am true unto your bed. alsemero the bed itself's a charnel, the sheets shrouds for murdered carcasses; it must ask pause what i must do in this. meantime you shall be my prisoner only; enter my closet. exit beatrice. i'll be your keeper yet. oh, in what part of this sad story shall i first begin? enter deflores. ha! deflores. i can tell you news, sir: my wife has her commended to you. deflores that's news indeed, my lord; i think she would commend me to the gallows if she could. alsemero i had forgot my message; this it is: what price goes murder? deflores how, sir? alsemero i ask you, sir: my wife's behindhand with you, she tells me, for a brave, bloody blow you gave for her sake upon piracquo. deflores has she confess'd it? alsemero as sure as death to both of you, and much more than that. deflores it could not be much more; 'twas but one thing, and that she's a whore. beatrice within he lies, the villain does belie me! deflores let me go to her, sir. alsemero nay, you shall to her. peace, crying crocodile, your sounds are heard; take your prey to you! get you into her, sir. exit deflores. i'll be your pander now; rehearse again your scene of lust, that you may be perfect when you shall come to act it to the black audience where howls and gnashings shall be music to you. enter vermandero, alibius, isabella, tomazo, franciscus, and antonio. vermandero oh, alsemero. i have a wonder for you. i have suspicion near as proof itself for piracquo's murder. alsemero sir, i have proof beyond suspicion for piracquo's murder. vermandero beseech you hear me: these two have been disguis'd e'er since the deed was done. alsemero i have two other that were more close disguis'd then your two could be, e'er since the deed was done. vermandero you'll hear me: these mine own servants-- alsemero hear me: those nearer than your servants that shall acquit them and prove them guiltless. beatrice within oh, oh, oh! alsemero hark, 'tis coming to you. deflores within nay, i'll along for company. beatrice within oh, oh! vermandero what horrid sounds are these? alsemero come forth, you twins of mischief. enter deflores bringing in beatrice wounded. vermandero an host of enemies entered my citadel could not amaze like this. joanna, beatrice joanna! joanna (maybe accompanied by the other women in their character costumes/ a blend of joannas and character costumes?), losing strength, begin to enact the action from the assault in other realm in a crescendo through the speech beatrice oh, come not near me, sir; i shall defile you. i am that of your blood was taken from you for your better health; look no more upon't, but cast it to the ground regardlessly: let the common sewer take it from distinction. beneath the stars, upon yon meteor ever hung my fate, 'mongst things corruptible; i ne'er could pluck it from him. my loathing was prophet to the rest but ne'er believ'd; mine honour fell with him, and now my life. alsemero, i am a stranger to your bed; your bed was coz'ned on the nuptial night, for which your false bride died. alsemero diaphanta! deflores yes, and the while i coupled with your mate at barley-break; now we are left in hell. i lov'd this woman in spite of her heart; her love i earn'd out of piracquo's murder. tomazo ha, my brother's murderer! deflores yes, and her honour's prize was my reward; i thank life for nothing but that pleasure: it was so sweet to me that i have drunk up all, left none behind for any man to pledge me. vermandero horrid villain! [tomazo and alsemero go to attack deflores] keep life in him for further tortures. deflores no, i can prevent you; here's my penknife still. it is but one thread more, [stabbing himself] and now 'tis cut. make haste, joanna, by that token to thee: i would not go to leave thee far behind. dies. beatrice forgive me, alsemero, all forgive; 'tis time to die when 'tis a shame to live. dies. vermandero oh, my name is entered now in that record where till this fatal hour 'twas never read! alsemero let it be blotted out. justice hath so right the guilty hit, that innocence is quit by proclamation, and may joy again. sir, you are sensible of what truth hath done; 'tis the best comfort that your grief can find. tomazo sir, i am satisfied; my injuries lie dead before me. alsemero what an opacous body had that moon that last chang'd on us! here's beauty chang'd to ugly whoredom, here servant obedience to a master sin, imperious murder. i, a suppos'd husband, chang'd embraces with wantonness, but that was paid before; your change is come too, from an ignorant wrath to knowing friendship. are there any more on's? antonio yes, sir, i was chang'd too, from a little ass as i was to a great fool as i am; and had like to ha' been chang'd to the gallows but that you know my innocence always excuses me. franciscus i was chang'd from a little wit to be stark mad, almost for the same purpose. isabella [to alibius] your change is still behind, but deserve best your transformation. you are a jealous coxcomb, keep schools of folly, and teach your scholars how to break your own head. alibius i see all apparent, wife, and will change now into a better husband, and never keep scholars that shall be wiser then myself. alsemero your only smiles have power to cause relive the dead again, or in their rooms to give brother a new brother, father a child: if these appear, all griefs are reconcil'd. before audience has a chance to applaud, the joannas/women begin singing and go toward beatrice joanna in a mourning procession. their singing purge others from the stage. joannas and beatrice-joanna join. teaching music in the #metoo era louise devenish university of western australia louise.devenish@uwa.edu.a u cecilia sun university of western australia cecilia.sun@uwa.edu.au cat hope monash university cat.hope@monash.edu vanessa tomlinson griffith university v.tomlison@griffith.edu abstract over the past two decades, significant changes in approaches to gender diversity have taken place in the fields of contemporary music and music research. however, women in music are still disadvantaged in terms of income, inclusion and professional opportunities. in australia, a national approach to improving gender diversity in music has begun to emerge, as once-controversial strategies trialled by four tertiary institutions have become established practices that address these challenges. this article discusses these successful inclusion strategies, including the commitment to balanced programming across all concerts presented at queensland conservatorium of music by , the introduction of mandatory quotas in recital programs at monash university, launch of mentoring programs for women composers at sydney conservatorium of music, and the development of coursework devoted to women in music at the university of western australia, as well as other initiatives that have emerged from them, both within and beyond the institution. the implementation, challenges and impact of each approach is examined in the context of broader global discussions around gender and feminism. the unprecedented public willingness to engage in discussions over sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination in the workplace that resulted from the #metoo movement is cited as key in influencing the level of engagement from students and professionals with these strategies, and subsequent influence on performance practices, project development and presentational formats in new music. author biographies louise devenish is a contemporary percussionist whose creative practice blends performance, collaboration and artistic research. a passionate advocate of new music and australian music, louise has commissioned over works for percussion, and her performances are acknowledged for their ‘dazzling vitality’, ‘stunning virtuosity’, ‘interpretive flair and technical brilliance’. louise is a core artist with acclaimed electroacoustic sextet decibel (wa), australia’s leading percussion group speak percussion (vic), theatre percussion project the sound collectors and chamber ensemble intercurrent. with these ensembles and as a soloist she develops new works exploring graphic notation, post-instrumental practice and collaborative creativity, performing around australasia, europe, north america and the uk. louise is chair of percussion at the university of western australia conservatorium of music, a churchill fellow, and recently published her first book global percussion innovations: the australian perspective. cecilia sun is a musicologist, pianist and lecturer at the university of western australia conservatorium of music. she is interested in the relationship between scholarship and performance in both classical-era repertoire and post- s experimental music. she is also the co-artistic director of irwin street collective, a research project that focuses on historical music and revitalises historically informed performance throughout the perth community. dr sun completed postgraduate studies in the united states at the eastman school of music and university of california, los angeles, and taught at the university of sydney and university of california, irvine. cat hope is a composer, sound artist, performer, songwriter and noise artist. she is a classically trained flautist, self- taught vocalist and experimental bassist who plays as a soloist and as part of other groups. her music is conceptually driven, exploring the physicality of sound in different media, using graphic scores, acoustic /electronic combinations, aleatoric elements, drones, noise and glissandi. her work has been discussed in books such as loading the silence (kouvaris, ), women of note (appleby, ), sounding postmodernism (bennett, ) as well as periodicals such as gramophone ( ) the wire (uk, ), limelight (aus, ) and neu zeitschrift fur musik shaft (germany, ). her works have been recorded for australian, german and austrian national radio, as well as range of international labels. vanessa tomlinson is active in the fields of solo percussion, improvisation, installation, site-specific performance and composition. she is currently based in brisbane, australia working as professor in music at queensland conservatorium, griffith university and deputy director of the queensland conservatorium research centre. in addition, vanessa is the co-artistic director of clocked out—one of australia’s most important and eclectic arts organisations—as well as artistic director of tyalgum music festival, easter@the piano mill and the listening museum. over the years vanessa has commissioned, inspired and premiered more than works, worked alongside countless wonderful improvisers, and collaborated with artists across the globe. mailto:v.tomlison@griffith.edu teaching music in the #metoo era introduction over the past two decades, significant changes in approaches to gender diversity have taken place in the fields of contemporary music and music research. however, women in music are still disadvantaged in terms of income, inclusion and professional opportunities. it is widely known that there is a / gender balance in music participation amongst primary and secondary level situations, and that this balance disintegrates as students move through tertiary levels study and continues to worsen at the professional level, where the participation rate for women and gender-non- conforming people together is around - %. in some areas of the music industry, such as diverse gender representation amongst composers programmed at international festivals, this statistic is even lower. a result of the increasing frequency of industry events, public talks and academic conferences surrounding the issue of gender diversity in music, it has become clear that in addition to making change at a professional level, a change in tertiary music education practices is needed for meaningful and ongoing change to take place. since , a national approach to improving gender diversity in music has begun to emerge in australia, as once- controversial strategies trialled by four tertiary institutions have become established practices that address these challenges. this article discusses these successful inclusion strategies, including gender-balanced programming goals within the next five years, the introduction of mandatory quotas in student recital programs, mentoring programs for women composers and the development of coursework devoted to women in music, as well as other initiatives that have emerged from them, both within and beyond the institution. the implementation, challenges and impact of each approach is examined in the context of broader global discussions around gender and feminism. the unprecedented public willingness to engage in discussions over sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination in the workplace that resulted from the #metoo movement is cited as key in influencing the level of engagement from students and professionals with these strategies, and subsequent influence on performance practices, project development and presentational formats in new music. the ‘myth of absence’: vanessa tomlinson in , dana l. reason myers exposed the ‘myth of absence’, referring to an apparent lack of female experimental music improvisers, which has been echoed in subsequent scholarship across different music genres; from rock and punk to electronic and contemporary art music (p. ). the term absence, is a helpful way of navigating through concert programs, newspaper articles, and blog posts alike to ascertain the current state of play. absence has become increasingly prominent in the professional and pedagogical practice of queensland conservatorium of music professor vanessa tomlinson: examining absent voices in our ecology (sonic dreams, ) and absence of soil in eroding landscapes accelerated by over-grazing and tree clearing (the wrong kind of beauty, ), and the absence of female voices in composition (amazing women concert series – ). absence is difficult to see, easy to avoid and hard to raise as a critical issue. within the australian art music context, people have been highlighting the issue of the absence of women’s voices for over two decades, however with only limited effect. for example, the four composing women festivals ( - ), were a site to challenge invisibility, with huge local positive impact, but little long-term change (macarthur et al). in , tomlinson and lisa cheney engaged in a research project within the queensland conservatorium of music at griffith university (qcgu) to understand how undergraduate music students perceive issues surrounding gender diversity, and more specifically to gather statistics on how much music by female composers was actually programmed within the conservatorium. the results of this study showed that in , a staggeringly low . % of music performed in student recitals was by female composers. in addition to influencing programming decisions made by the researchers, this statistic led to many changes in programming within the conservatorium, and more recently to changes in curriculum design. the announcement from queensland conservatorium director professor scott harrison announced that the institution is aiming for a ‘balanced program in all public facing programs by ’. cooper, r., coles, a. & hanna-osborne, s. ( ). skipping a beat: assessing the state of gender equality in the australian music industry. sydney, university of sydney business school. fure, a. ( ). grid: gender research in darmstadt. accessed september. available at: https://griddarmstadt.files.wordpress.com/ / /grid_gender_research_in_darmstadt.pdf peggy glanville hicks address hope, cheetham etc goh, t. ( ). from the other side: feminist aesthetics in australian musicology. tempo . https://griddarmstadt.files.wordpress.com/ / /grid_gender_research_in_darmstadt.pdf qcgu has chosen to approach change from a number of different angles to tackle the problem of an unbalanced program of composers in our concert calendar and in our curriculum. from the perspective of the outward facing concert program, the decision to have a gender-balanced creative contribution across music theatre, opera, orchestra, wind symphony and artist-in-residence programs provides positive leadership across a broad cross-section of the student body and faculty. at the very least this means that no student will graduate without playing music by a female composer, and more positively it will provide a point of change in the education of students which will be a circuit breaker in their own professional teaching and performing lives. with regard to the curriculum numerous strategies are in development to enhance the transformations in the concert calendar. examining music literature subjects – those that critically explore historical practices in many different contexts and genres of music – from the perspective of absent voices, provides an ideal platform to redesign the curriculum more broadly. here the absent voices of female composers and female contributions more broadly, provide opportunities to look at pluralistic, collaborative, community-oriented developments, rather than singular., lone historical voices. these transformations in historical subjects support the vision of transforming the concert calendar, but the third leg of transformation – the one-to-one teaching studio – is also vital. here the focus is on commissioning pedagogical works, or technical studies, for numerous instruments – all by female composers. the rationale for this is that for many instruments, there is simply no diversity when it comes to tertiary level pedagogical texts. this in particular applies to percussion, classical saxophone, first-year jazz and piano and string deparments are also interested to explore ways to diversify technical repertoire. together these three strategies should combine to provide students with an educational experience that is inclusive of diverse voices across all levels of their tertiary music training. this transformation will move the discussion away from absence, toward critical discussions of the work produced in context. xxxx ‘all music for everyone’: cat hope in the first year of headship at the sir zelman cowen school of music at monash university in , professor cat hope introduced quotas for all final year (graduating) bachelor of music performance student recitals across all genres covered in the degree: classical, jazz and popular musics, as well as music technology. each recital program would feature a work by a composer identifying as female or non-binary. this was a component of an overall strategic direction for the department, focussing on music in australia, equity, collaboration and innovation. it represents one part of a series of interventions in the way the school addresses gender equity and diversity. it is important that the students graduating from monash university were familiar with repertoire that reflects the workplace we aspire to, which includes work by those who identify as women. if students have not been exposed to music not written by men in their degree, they are unlikely to expect it in the workplace, and unlikely to program it themselves when the opportunity arises. it was important that this familiarity with and expectation for music by composers who identify as women be part of the brand of our graduating students. universities, as providers of terminal degrees for musicians entering the workforce, create the canon our future musicians use to build their careers. it is important that this canon reflects contemporary practice, and enables our graduates to engage with a range of opportunities in the industry upon their entrance into it – as performers, arts administrators and a plethora of other roles music graduates find themselves in. a survey of repertoire taught in the school pointed to the inclusion of very little music written by composers identifying as women. after consulting research around the effectiveness of quotas, they were implemented with approval of the arts faculty dean. the anecdotal response to the introduction varied considerably. some staff felt they should be preparing students for auditions to postgraduate studies elsewhere, and as such, spending more time on the music that other institutions consider to be key repertoire. students, on the whole, were supportive and embraced the opportunity by searching further afield and approaching teachers and library staff for recommendations. when submitting the recital program for approval, students sign a tick box which says they have included a piece by a composer identifying as a woman or as non-binary, and the programs are checked by administration. students who identify as female cannot submit their own compositions toward the quota (for example, jazz improvisations). for this strategy is outlined in some detail in cat hope, , ‘what can - should – a music school in a modern australian university look like?’ available at: http://musictrust.com.au/loudmouth/what-can-should-a-music-school-in-a-modern-australian-university-look-like/ bennett, dawn, sally macarthur, cat hope, talisha goh, and sophie hennekam. ‘creating a career as a woman composer: implications for music in higher education.’ british journal of music education , no. ( ): . franceschet, susan, mona lena krook, and jennifer m. piscopo. ‘conceptualizing the impact of gender quotas.’ the impact of gender quotas ( ): - ; born, georgina, and kyle devine. "gender, creativity and education in digital musics and sound art." ( ): - ; dahlerup, drude. women, quotas and politics. routledge, ; bell, vikki. culture and performance: the challenge of ethics, politics and feminist theory. a&c black, . there is also a check box for an australian work, as this is also part of the quota. http://musictrust.com.au/loudmouth/what-can-should-a-music-school-in-a-modern-australian-university-look-like/ music technology students, recital programs should use software, hardware or a plug-in devised by a woman or non- binary person. recital programs that do not comply with the quota are not approved for examination. to support this requirement, the school has worked closely with the library to grow the collection of music composed by women across a variety of styles and formats – scores, recordings, lead sheets and so on. further, the school is undertaking a process that ensures history and context units include work by women so that the standard ‘canon’ is refreshed and reflects the contributions women have made throughout history. school ensembles are also growing content by women, but outside of a quota system. the university orchestra features around thirty percent content by women, with an intention to grow this number over the next five years, and fifty percent of externally engaged conductors of the orchestra are women. the school has joined the international ‘keychange’ initiative, led by the uk’s prs foundation, a partnership of institutions and organisations around the world seeking to encourage a gender balanced music industry worldwide. an example of a commitment within the keychange initiative is working towards / parity in the make-up of the school’s weekly lunchtime concert series, across performers and repertoire, by . changing the narrative: cecilia sun and louise devenish in , a review of gender diversity across programming and teaching at the university of western australia conservatorium of music took place in response to new staff directions, industry changes and student initiatives seeking greater diversity. this commenced with a review of conservatorium concert programming, which revealed that most ensembles within the conservatorium exclusively programmed music by male composers. additionally, students who were in ensembles not playing diverse repertoire, were actively seeking this music and representation through the music students society (mss), who had been presenting women in music concerts and lecture series since xx. in , a diversity officer position on the school executive was established, in part to address this issue and conservatorium-wide changes began to be trialled. for example, in , all large ensembles (i.e. symphony orchestra, symphonic chorus, wind ensemble) were required to work towards a gender balance in programs, conductors and guest artists. after some teething problems and mixed feelings, this was implemented successfully, and the student, staff and audience response was overwhelmingly positive. in , this has been expanded for all ensembles (i.e. quartets, chamber groups), and a bank of online resources for finding material and artists has been complied in collaboration with the mss and the music library. at the same time, the implementation of new units, updating of existing units and a number of events designed to raise awareness and connect staff, students and community with current praxis took place. the review of public facing activity revealed a gender imbalance, and also highlighted gaps in gender diversity in internal activities. for example, although some examination of gender in music had existed within the conservatorium for at least ten years through a small module within honours unit contemporary debates, nothing existed at the bachelor level. in , dr cecilia sun designed and taught the first class devoted to women in music at the university of western australia (uwa). sun had come of musicological age at a time when there were two distinctive (and not always mutually exclusive) scholarly paths for those interested in this area. first, the ‘women in music’ option, where scholars applied traditional modes of musicological inquiry to women composers. this was the period that produced landmark biographies such as those by nancy reich on clara wieck schumann, judith tick on ruth crawford seeger, and adrienne fried block on amy beach. and second, the ‘gender and music’ option: that is, the use of feminist theory to critique the (male) classical music canon. this included the paradigm-shifting scholarship of susan mcclary and suzanne cusick. while acknowledging the importance of scholarship on female composers, the latter option seemed like the more exciting, progressive path. the belated introduction of feminist theory to musicology was part of what many felt to be a necessary move away from an old-fashioned positivistic approach towards what joseph kerman famously called music criticism. there was also galvanizing scholarship on constructions of masculinity citron, m. ( ). gender and the musical canon. cambridge: cambridge university press. “keychange manifesto: recommendations for a gender balanced industry” can be found at https://keychange.eu/wp- content/uploads/ / / -keychange-a -v -web.pdf sun had previously offered classes on some of this material before at other institutions, such as xxxx, however this was the first time offering a class under the title of women in music rather than the broader umbrella of gender and music. nancy b. reich, clara schumann: the artist and the woman (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, ); judith tick, ruth crawford seeger: a composer’s search for american music (new york: oxford university press, ); adrienne fried block, amy beach, passionate victorian: the life and work of an american composer, – (new york: oxford university press, ). see, for example, susan mcclary, feminine endings: music, gender, and sexuality (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ); suzanne cusick, ‘gendering modern music: thoughts on the monteverdi-artusi controversy,’ journal of the american musicological society, no. (april ): – . joseph kerman, ‘how we got into analysis, and how to get out,’ in write all these down: essays on music (berkeley: university of california press, ), – . https://keychange.eu/wp-content/uploads/ / / -keychange-a -v -web.pdf https://keychange.eu/wp-content/uploads/ / / -keychange-a -v -web.pdf (for example, robert walser’s book on heavy metal) and queer theory (including philip brett’s ground-breaking studies of benjamin britten, and the publication of queering the pitch in ) that defined the field of music and gender. at the time this new unit at uwa was in development, the #metoo movement had yet to gather steam, but the changing global political climate around issues of women’s rights made it seem urgent that the conservatorium has at least one class devoted to women in music when most of the others are de facto units on men in music. the title of this unit does run the risk of ghettoizing women who are already marginal, and may seem old-fashioned given our current understanding of the fluidity of gender and gender roles, but the hope was that it would compensate by providing the overwhelmingly female student body important role models. another prime motivation was to discover what different kinds of music histories can be told when women are placed at the centre of that history. with this in mind, the women in music unit is not just about women composers. this is not because there are not enough worthy candidates to fill twelve weeks—there are—but women’s contributions to music expand far beyond composition. this was an opportunity to attempt to construct a class that moved away from the traditional great man/great work model. in rejecting the assumption that the ‘history of music is the history of composition’, david schiff offered an alternative: until recently, of course, women have played very little part in composition. … but women have long played a great role in performance, patronage, and pedagogy. imagine twentieth-century music without wanda landowska, nadia boulanger, the princess de polignac, elizabeth sprague coolidge and betty freeman, or rosina lhévinne and dorothy delay. if performers were given their rightful place in the history of music, it could easily be shown that callas exerted a far greater influence on the course of opera in the past forty years than any composer did. might not feminist musicology profitably shift the focus away from a male-controlled cultural product to a female-centred cultural process, and celebrate these areas of real feminine dominance? our notion of music would be appropriately challenged and enriched. further, it became clear that the overwhelmingly female student body who enrol in this unit are looking for more than just a history lesson. some are also finding possible role models and inspiration. as mentioned above, this unit ran along the larger ongoing uwa initiative to perform more pieces composed by female composers. as a result, the students were able to write a review for one of their assignments about an on-campus uwa concert that included at least one piece by a female composer. in , this meant they had a choice of fourteen out a total of twenty-six concerts. this assignment would not have been possible the previous year. the gender imbalance in the students who enrol in this unit has remained consistent in all the iterations of this class: perhaps due to the title of women in music, the unit is overwhelming taken by women students. what is significantly different in is a more politicized student body. this is due in part to the post-weinstein-scandal culture of greater openness and awareness, and perhaps also the result of iconic figures in popular music such as taylor swift and beyoncé publicly embracing feminism. when once students were reluctant to even associate themselves with the label ‘feminist’, now it is not uncommon to encounter many well-versed in th-wave feminism and the importance of intersectionality. the most interesting question—and one of the reasons for teaching this unit—is the historiographic one: what does the consideration of this music teach us about music history that a male-dominated narrative doesn’t? the spotlighting of gender within the study of music has seen this question resonate across the conservatorium and an increase of student research projects focussing on gender and music, particularly in opera and in popular music has emerged at honours and postgraduate level. it has also highlighted awareness that gender diversity is far from the only form of diversity that needs addressing in our work, and in tertiary music institutions globally. creating ‘structural luck’ the initiatives mentioned in this article are by no means the only ones present within australian institutions. for example, in , at the first iteration of the gender diversity in music and art conference, professor liza lim spoke of the ‘structural luck’ that has contributed to the gender imbalance in music in australia. creating structural luck or robert walser, running with the devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music, (hanover, nh: university press of new england, ); philip brett’s essays on britten have been collected and published in the posthumous collection: philip brett and george e. haggerty, music and sexuality in britten: selected essays (berkeley: university of california press, ); philip brett, elizabeth wood, gary thomas, eds., queering the pitch (new york: routledge, ). david schiff, ‘the bounds of music: the strange new direction of musical criticism’, new republic ( feb ): . lim, l. ( ). luck, grief, hospitality: rerouting power relationships in music. available at: https://lizalimcomposer.files.wordpress.com/ / / -final_lim_rerouting-power-anu-keynote.pdf https://lizalimcomposer.files.wordpress.com/ / / -final_lim_rerouting-power-anu-keynote.pdf structural opportunities has formed part of lim’s work at the sydney conservatorium of music, most significantly in her mentoring of women composers. the ‘national women composers development program’ was established by matthew hindson in offering four women composers opportunities to work with high profile professional ensembles and artists. in , this was developed by lim to include the two-year ‘composing women’ program, facilitating opportunities for composers to work with organisations including the sydney symphony orchestra, sydney chamber opera (with nida), sydney dance company, sydney philharmonia choirs, musica viva, abc classic fm, apra amcos, the australian music centre and the tasmanian symphony orchestra, as well as with flautist claire chase. together, all of the initiatives offer some suggestions for changing the narrative. international journal of environmental research and public health article invariance of the sexual double standard scale: a cross-cultural study maria del mar sánchez-fuentes , , nieves moyano , ,* , carmen gómez-berrocal and juan carlos sierra department of social sciences, faculty of human and social sciences, university of la costa, barranquilla , colombia; marsanchez@unizar.es faculty of human and social sciences, university of zaragoza, teruel, spain faculty of human sciences and education, university of zaragoza, huesca, spain faculty of humanities and education sciences, university of jaén, jaén, spain mind, brain and behavior research centre, university of granada, granada, spain; cgomezb@ugr.es (c.g.-b.); jcsierra@ugr.es (j.c.s.) * correspondence: mnmoyano@ujaen.es received: january ; accepted: february ; published: february ���������� ������� abstract: the sexual double standard (sds) is an instrument used to judge sexual behavior, in which men are usually granted greater sexual freedom, while the same sexual behavior is condemned in women. culture can be a relevant variable for the sds. therefore, we have examined the measurement invariance of the sexual double standard scale (sdss) across the spanish and colombian populations, comparing this phenomenon by country and gender. the scale comprises two factors: sexual freedom and sexual shyness. the sample consisted of heterosexual adults ( . % men, . % women), . % of whom were spanish and . % colombian. strong invariance was found. the reliability values were good for country and gender. men and women from both countries supported greater freedom for themselves compared to the other gender. furthermore, spanish women, unlike their colombian counterparts, supported greater sexual shyness for men. thus, what some authors have labeled as a "reverse sexual double standard" seems to emerge. keywords: sexual double standard; invariance; culture; sex . introduction since reiss [ ] conducted his studies on the sexual double standard (sds), attempts have been made to determine whether similar sexual behaviors are judged differently if they are conducted by men or women. the sexual double standard (sds) refers to an attitude that implies a different assessment of the same sexual behavior depending on the sex (man vs. woman) of the person exhibiting said behavior. consequently, sds contributes to different norms of sexual permissiveness for men and women [ ]. in the field of behaviors related to sexual freedom (e.g., sex before marriage, activity with multiple sexual partners, sexual debut at early ages, casual relationships without commitment, or playing an active role in sex), we refer to traditional sds and the fact that men are allowed more sexual freedom than women [ ]. as a result of this traditional sds, an asymmetric, double standard norm is established, which promotes the approval of sexual behaviors carried out by men and, at the same time, promotes the rejection of those same behaviors when performed by women [ ]. . . psychological and social effects of the sexual double standard this attitude towards sexual behaviors in heterosexual relationships has both psychological and social implications. on a psychological level, the relevance of its clinical effects is worth highlighting. int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of sds has been associated with psychological trauma [ ], worse sexual health, and an increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections [ , ]. from a social point of view, the effect of sds can take place through macrosocial processes, for example, the social norms that regulate the behavior of men and women, and define what are the appropriate behaviors for each gender, in the field of heterosexual behaviors [ ]. the normative role that traditional sds plays can be verified through studies that relate sds to sexual victimization [ ], and the acceptance of the rape myth, that is, with the denial or minimization of harm to a sexual victim [ ]. . . culture, gender, and sexual double standard from a sociocultural perspective that conceives sexuality as more than the result of biological processes [ ], we expect there to be a relationship between personal support for sds and the culture in which the individual has socialized. in a similar line of reasoning, we also expect support for sds to be related to the demographic origin of the person. despite the interest in research provoked by the study of sds, the samples are usually very homogeneous, both in terms of their sociodemographic characteristics and cultural origin. the authors of a recent meta-analysis on double sexual standard [ ] point out the need to work with more diverse samples in terms of age and educational level, culture and ethnicity. in this sense, to improve or expand knowledge about the adherence and prevalence of sds, it is convenient to collect more diverse samples based on their sociodemographic characteristics, such as gender, age, level of studies, and cultural origin. the reviews and meta-analyses carried out in recent decades [ , ] show that changes in cultural beliefs about sexual behavior allow us to understand part of the variability observed in the prevalence of sds. when comparing spanish-speaking countries (e.g., spain and latin american countries), some authors pointed out the prevalence of their own culture in different regions or spanish-speaking countries, in terms of gender relations [ ]. in a broader sense than that of sexist ideology, a comparative study, among spanish-speaking countries, of gender attitudes towards sexual behaviors should consider the level of individualism-collectivism that characterizes each society. hofstede [ ] coined the term individualism-collectivism (i-c) to refer to the concept of self that a person builds from his/her own culture. in individualistic cultures, the self-concept of each person implies a feeling and awareness of independence regarding the group or groups to which they belong, or with which the person identifies (i.e., in-group). on the contrary, people from collectivist cultures place more importance on the "we" feeling, and the concept of itself is more linked, compared to individualistic societies, to the identification of the person with their membership or reference groups (i.e., in-group). in other words, people from collectivist cultures use their group allegiance as a relevant criterion to define themselves and to value who they are. since relations between men and women are regulated by gender identity, that is, the identification of men and women with their respective in-groups, it seems logical to assume that—more in individualistic cultures than in collectivist cultures—there is a greater prevalence of different standards or norms regarding what the behavior of men and women should be like in heterosexual encounters. in parallel, there may be less individual adherence to traditional sds. if we consider the case of spain and colombia, hofstede [ ] already stated that colombia is a country with a low level of individualism. more recent evidence, provided by a study in countries, shows that spain is a more individualistic country than colombia [ ]. in this study, each country was distributed into a continuous dimension of individualism and collectivism, according to the scores they had obtained in that dimension. the following three aspects were considered: conflict avoidance and conformism, desire for social ascendancy and in-group favoritism vs. out-group exclusionism. the results indicated that spain ranked (score: ) and colombia ranked (score: − ), that is, greater individualism for spain and greater collectivism for colombia [ ]. the netherlands ranked in top position, as the most individualistic country (score: ) and nigeria, in bottom position (score: − ) as the most collectivist one. previous studies indicated that colombian men and women are more erotophobic (i.e., more negative attitudes towards sexuality) than spanish men and women [ ], and that the i-c cultural difference is related to gender differences [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of with regard to the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and sds, it is important to highlight the role that gender plays. it is consistently found that men support attitudes toward traditional sds, while women tend to support more egalitarian attitudes [ , ]. however, this pattern may be related to the i-c culture to which the person belongs. recently, alvarez-muelas et al. [ ] indicated that, in spain, men reported more traditional sds than women, for both dimensions of this construct: sexual freedom and sexual shyness. these findings are in line with those reported in similar cultures such as colombia, as well as el salvador [ ]. as culture can be a relevant variable for sds, it is necessary to have measures that permit making intercultural comparisons in the adherence and prevalence of sds. although a scale or instrument is available in the language spoken by different countries (e.g., colombia and spain), this does not ensure the equivalence between the countries of the construct that is measuring the instrument [ , ]. to ensure the equivalence of the sds construct between groups, whether groups are formed according to the cultural origin of their members, gender or any other demographic criteria, it is necessary to verify the measurement invariance (also known as measurement equivalence) of the sds. this involves examining whether the construct is evaluated equally in different groups, for example, according to the gender or cultural origin of the sample. however, previously conducted research, comparing different groups by gender, ethnicity, or culture, has not provided guarantees for this measurement invariance, which is a prior step to assessing whether the items measure this attribute equally, without bias [ , ], because if the measurement invariance between the groups is not fulfilled, the interpretations can lead to erroneous conclusions. one of the most commonly used scales to evaluate sds is the sexual double standard scale (sdss) [ ]. the sdss has been validated in the spanish population and has adequate psychometric properties [ ]. it is also invariant by gender, age and education [ ]. however, the psychometric properties of this instrument remain unknown in other countries, for example colombia, where spanish is spoken but whose culture is different from what currently exists in spain. . . current research bearing in mind that measurement invariance (equivalence) is a logical prerequisite for conducting cross-group comparisons, the main objective of the present study was to examine whether the spanish version of the sdss of sierra et al. [ ], is cross-culturally invariant between spain and colombia. the specific goals of the present study were to analyze the measurement invariance of the sdss between the spanish and colombian populations. we also compared the scores in men and women from both countries to determine the ethnic and gender differences in attitudes toward the roles of men and women in the sexual behavior field. accordingly, therefore, we hypothesized the following: hypothesis (h ). the three-factor structure of the sdss would show adequate goodness-of-fit indices across samples—from spain and colombia—and the sdss scores would show measurement invariance across samples. hypothesis (h ). spanish individuals would report less support for the traditional sds than colombians. hypothesis (h ). men would report more support for the traditional sds than women. . materials and methods . . study sample and design data were collected from participants. of these, were eliminated because they did not answer % or more items, and were dropped because they did not meet the inclusion criteria. thus, the final sample consisted of heterosexual adults ( . % men, . % women), ( . %) of whom were spanish and ( . %) were colombian. quota sampling was used by considering int. j. environ. res. public health , , of gender and age subgroups ( – years old, – , years old or more). the sample met the following inclusion criteria: (a) being years of age or older; (b) self-identify as heterosexual; (c) have spanish or colombian nationality. socio-demographic information is displayed in table . table . the sample’s socio-demographic characteristics. spain colombia variables men women men women n % n % x n % n % x age . . – . . . . – . . . . ≥ . . . . education . *** . uneducated - - - - . . primary . . . . secondary . . . . university . . . . attendance at religious events . ** . * never . . . . less than once a month . . . . once a month . . . . a few times a month . . . . once a week . . . . a few times a week . . . . once a day . . . . more than once a day . . . . praise frequency . *** . *** never . . . . less than once a month . . . . once a month . . . . a few times a month . . . . once a week . . . . a few times a week . . . . once a day . . . . more than once a day . . . . currently in a relationship yes . . . . no . . . . mean age at first sexual intercourse (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) − . ns . ( . ) . ( . ) − . *** mean number of sexual partners (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** note. *** p < . ; ** p < . ; * p < . . . . materials socio-demographic questionnaire. information was collected about gender, age, education, nationality, religion, frequency of attendance at religious events, and frequency of prayer in private in places other than their church or place of worship. in addition, participants were asked questions about their sexual orientation, whether they were involved in a relationship at the time of the survey, duration of this relationship, their partner´s age, whether they had sexual activity with their partner, age of the first sexual relationship (oral, vaginal, and/or anal), and number of sexual partners in their lifetime. sexual double standard scale (sdss). the spanish version of sierra et al. [ ] comprised items distributed into two dimensions (acceptance for sexual freedom and acceptance for sexual shyness), with a -point likert scale ranging from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). the scale presented adequate internal consistency reliability; . for acceptance for sexual freedom and . for acceptance for sexual shyness. its test-retest reliability—the scale was administered to the same respondents three times—ranged from . and . (after weeks and weeks, respectively), establishing adequate evidence for validity with other measures such as social dominance orientation [ ]. the sum of the scores from the eight items in each subscale provides two sds indices, one index of double standard int. j. environ. res. public health , , of for sexual freedom (ids-sf) and another index of double standard for sexual shyness (ids-ss). for the ids-sf, some items related to women are reversed, while some items related to men are reversed for the ids-ss. higher index scores indicate a higher traditional sds. for each index, scores can range from − to + . for the ids-sf, scores close to − indicate being in favor of more sexual freedom for women than for men, and scores close to + indicate being in favor of more sexual freedom for men than for women. for the ids-ss, scores close to − indicate being in favor of more sexual shyness in men than in women and scores close to + indicate being in favor of more sexual shyness in women than in men. . . procedure this study was approved by the ethics committee on human research of the university of granada, spain. non probabilistic quota sampling was used with the general population in spain and colombia. participants were invited to participate in an online survey. the url was distributed on different social networks and via the news service of the university of granada between february and july . to access the survey, participants had to confirm access by answering a security question consisting of a random sum. in the responses, the ip of the device was controlled to prevent the same participant from answering more than once. at the beginning of the survey, informed consent forms were distributed, which included the main study objective and the approximate time to complete the measures. the participants took approximately minutes to complete the survey. anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed. all participants were volunteers and did not receive any compensation for taking part in this study. . data analysis measurement invariance was examined in order to test whether the factor structure of the measure was equivalent across both countries, i.e., spain and colombia. the factor structure previously validated by sierra et al. [ ] was tested; that is: factor : acceptance for sexual freedom (asf; items , , , , , , , and ); factor : acceptance for sexual shyness (ass; items , , , , , , , and ). byrne’s recommendations [ ] were followed for the analysis. version of the amos software was used. the maximum likelihood (ml) method was followed. indication of invariance was considered if the increased comparative fit index (cfi) value was higher than . , as well as an increase of χ /gl in relation to the previous model [ ]. reliability values were obtained with mcdonald´s index ω for each dimension according to country and gender. finally, the existence of significant differences in the sds scores according to country, gender, and the interaction of both was tested, through manova, by comparing the scores obtained in the ids-sf and the ids-ss. . results . . measurement invariance in a preliminary analysis, the goodness-of-fit indices were not optimal, so the modification indices were observed. they indicated the need to correlate the following pairs of items: – , – , – , and – for asf, and – , – , – , and – for ass. these modifications were performed considering similarities in the content of the items, as the pair of items to be correlated included the same content, and referred to either men or women (e.g., item : it’s okay for a woman to have more than one sexual relationship at the same time) (e.g., item : it’s okay for a man to have more than one sexual relationship at the same time). as shown in table , strong invariance was found. the standardized coefficients of the factor structure for each dimension are shown in figures and for the spanish and the colombian samples, respectively. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . goodness-of-fit indices for measuring invariance across spain and colombia. χ /gl rmsea tli cfi configural invariance . . . . weak invariance . . . . strong invariance . . . . strict invariance . . . . note. rmsea: root mean square error of approxiamation; tli: tucker-lewis index; cfi: comparative fit index. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x for peer review of figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the spanish sample. figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the colombian sample. figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the spanish sample. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x for peer review of figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the spanish sample. figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the colombian sample. figure . standardized loadings of the factor structure in the colombian sample. . . reliability the reliability of each dimension was obtained separately for men and women, for each country, through mcdonald’s ω. for the asf dimension, the values in the spanish sample were . for men and . for women. in the colombian sample, the values were . for men and . for women. regarding the ass dimension, in the spanish sample a value equal to . was obtained for men and . for women. in the colombian sample, the values were . for men and . for women. . . differences across country and gender in the sdss indices manova was performed to examine whether there were significant differences in the indices of the sdss for country and gender. in the samples of both countries, men, opposed to women, obtained higher positive ids-sf scores, which meant that they, more than women, endorsed greater sexual freedom for themselves than for women. however, women from both countries obtained negative scores, which indicated a tendency to support greater sexual freedom for women (vs. men). regarding the sexual shyness index, in the samples from both countries, men (vs. women) obtained positive int. j. environ. res. public health , , of and higher scores; that is, men (vs. women) expressed they were in favor of more sexual shyness for women than for men. interestingly, spanish women obtained negative sexual shyness scores, while colombian women scored positively. this indicates that spanish women support sexual restraint for men to a greater extent than for women, while colombian women support greater sexual restraint for women; that is, they manifest a similar attitude to that maintained by men for this issue (see table ). table . descriptive statistics and differences by manova in the sexual double standard (sds) indices for country, gender, and their interaction. spain colombia men women global sample men women global sample country country x sex m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) f( , ) d m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) f( , ) d f( , ) d f ids-sf . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . . *** . . *** ids-ss . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** . . *** . . note. d refers to cohen´s d; *** p < . . considering the scores obtained by country, in the spanish sample, scores close to were obtained in both indices; that is, for both sexual freedom and sexual shyness, which did not indicate a tendency to support double standards. however, positive values were obtained in both indices in the colombian sample. this indicated a tendency to support more sexual freedom for men than for women—although effect size was low—and more sexual restraint for women than for men; that is, in both indices, support for the traditional double sexual standard was found. finally, a significant interaction emerged between country and gender in the sexual freedom index. here, three aspects should be stressed: (a) men from both countries supported greater sexual freedom for their endogroup than for the group of women; (b) women from both countries supported greater sexual freedom for their own group that for the group of men; (c) the differences in support for greater sexual freedom that men and women from each country granted their own endogroup were bigger for colombia than for spain; that is, between both genders, the defense of endogroup favoritism in sexual freedom was more polarized in colombia than in spain. . discussion this research analyzed the equivalence of the factor structure of the sdss, which permits evaluating the double sexual standard between two culturally different countries: one more individualistic (spain) and another more collectivist (colombia). the sdss scale provides a measure of sds in two areas of sexual behavior: sexual freedom and sexual shyness. in order to closely examine the role of culture in attitudes toward sds, the differences between both countries were examined in-depth, in addition to gender comparisons. our findings allowed to support the structural equivalence of the scale between spain and colombia with the covariance of errors in the scores of the paired items. moreover, a more favorable attitude to the traditional double sexual standard was found in colombia than in spain. . . an invariant measure of the sexual double standard first, the structural equivalence of the scale was obtained, which provides guarantees to make comparisons across the scores of participants from both countries with a low measurement bias [ , ]. that is, the sdss is invariant in culturally different countries like spain and colombia. therefore, this research overcomes a major limitation compared to previous research in which the equivalence of the scales across countries was uncertain. in addition, the present study ratified the appropriate psychometric properties of the sdss, which can be used in different cultures, so that knowledge of the double sexual standard could be improved [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . more sexual freedom for the in-group our findings showed that, in both countries, men supported the traditional double standard; that is, they still maintained their attitude in favor of more sexual freedom for men than for women, and more reluctance for women than for men. however, these patterns in women seemed to have changed. the spanish and colombian women reported endorsing more sexual freedom for women than for men. these results are congruent with the progressive reduction of attitudes that support a traditional double sexual standard [ ]. in line with this, a fourth wave is arising worldwide in defense of women and feminism. this wave is characterized by a wide range of women’s attitudes and behaviors to defend their rights, feelings of greater freedom, autonomy and the visibility of feelings of support, so as not to be afraid of being a woman, through #metoo movements against violence and sexual assault. . . cultural gap between women however, differences between the spanish and colombian women were found in terms of adherence to sds in the area of sexual shyness. spanish women supported sexual restraint to a greater extent for men than for women (e.g., reverse sds), while colombian women supported greater sexual shyness for women than for men (e.g., traditional sds). however, men seemed to endorse patriarchal roles. in both countries, the results relating to men are similar to previous studies. in addition, as in other studies, the responses of women in the field of sexual freedom indicate attitudes favorable to reverse sds or sexual equality, in both countries [ ]. unlike other studies that worked with western samples (i.e., individualists), we have found a pattern of results that may be indicative of the role of culture. specifically, we have found that colombian women, in the field of sexual shyness, support a traditional sds (e.g., defense of more sexual shyness for women than for men). this result could be explained because in colombia, as in other latin american countries, there is more sexism, both hostile and benevolent [ ]. since sexism is a prejudiced attitude that acquires meaning in the context of intergroup relations between men and women, it contributes to asymmetrically defining the gender identity of women and men in terms of privileges, in different areas of social behaviors, and also in the area of sexuality. in agreement with this approach, in more collectivist countries, such as colombia, women take female gender identity more into consideration, largely based on social consensus, to define and internalize what sexual behaviors they can or cannot perform. future research must analyze, on the one hand, whether benevolent sexism may be favoring this traditional sds in the field of sexual shyness. on the other hand, the role of the norms on heterosexual roles in the support and prevalence of traditional sds—egalitarian or reverse—both in the area of freedom and of sexual shyness should be studied. therefore, future research is recommended to examine the perception of support for the double sexual standard in colombian society by, for example, adapting and validating the sdss as a macropsychological indicator, which has already been done in spain [ ]. from a macropsychological level of analysis, the respondents of the scale receive the following instruction when responding to the items: “we would like to know to what extent you believe that most people agree or disagree with each of the following statements”. therefore, the responses to this question would better reflect the subject´s perceptions of the sexual societal double standard as it examines the individual´s perceptions of what others think about this topic. both self-referred and hetero-referred (macropsychological indicator) versions of the scale provide information about an individual´s endorsement of the double standard, an individual´s perception of how society endorses the double standard, and an individual´s conformity to the social norms that (s)he perceives. . . sexual double standard: cultural and gender differences regarding differences by country, colombian participants of both genders supported greater sexual freedom for men and greater shyness for women, with statistically significant differences appearing when these results were compared with spanish participants. according to our hypothesis, int. j. environ. res. public health , , of we conclude that there is more support for the traditional double standard in colombia. a previous study concluded that colombian individuals showed greater erotophobia than spaniards [ ]. in addition, a significant interaction between sex and country was found regarding sexual freedom. both men and women from both countries supported greater sexual freedom for their endogroup, thus indicating endogroup favoritism. this result is not surprising if we consider that people tend to favor their own sex [ ]. in addition, by taking into account the differences between countries, endogroup favoritism was stronger in colombia than in spain. indeed, endogroup favoritism has been related to more sexist attitudes [ ] and colombia is a more sexist country than spain [ ], which could explain this difference across countries. . . emergence of a reverse form of the sexual double standard in summary, our findings for men indicated that they still supported the traditional double standard, and this pattern is consistent with previous studies [ , ]. however, for the sample from spain, but not from colombia, our findings indicated support for the recently so-called “reverse” sexual double standard; that is, more sexual reluctance for men than for women. previous studies have shown a more negative assessment toward men (vs. women) when they expressed assertive sexual behavior [ ]. in contrast, the manifestation of sexual initiative has been more favorably evaluated in women than in men [ ]. these results may, at least in part, be determined by current media pressure and due to the emerging awareness against men’s gender violence toward women. certain sexual behaviors that were “praised” or “rewarded” in men have now acquired a negative nuance, and have been labeled as a possible risk of “sexual predator” [ ]. future studies should analyze the role of these two factors in the change of attitudes toward sds that women are beginning to express: the fight against gender violence and the fight for democracy in gender relationships. while both factors would facilitate the promulgation of egalitarian norms in the sexual behavior field, differences and conflicts between men and women could be reduced if the defense of sexual equality is motivated by the desire to achieve a more equitable and democratic society in all areas. . . limitations and future research the present study has some limitations. first, as non-probabilistic sampling was used, the results obtained cannot be generalized to the general population. second, no strict invariance of the scale was reached, thus the measure is not free of bias. third, external validity was not examined, so the extent to which the self-reported attitudes in the sdss really reflect an individual´s behavior remains unknown. therefore, future studies using representative samples and analyzing evidence for external validity of the scale are recommended. future research should also analyze the double sexual standard in sexual minorities as very little research has been conducted in these populations [ ]. . conclusions we conclude that the sdss has adequate psychometric properties and is an equivalent scale to be used in colombia and spain. it is worth mentioning that maintaining sexual patterns based on the double sexual standard has several negative consequences, such as increased women´s objectification and a higher risk of aggression and violence [ ]. on the contrary, supporting egalitarian or feminist attitudes has a number of positive outcomes, such as reduction of sexism or rejection of objectification [ ]. future studies should assess the degree to which subjects self-identify with egalitarian ideas or values, as the identification leads to willingness to develop egalitarian behaviors, as derived from studies conducted on feminist identification. in addition, both the endorsement and expression of sexism in both public and private spheres should be more deeply explored, as some differences have been found [ ], as well as how self-reported measures really capture both dimensions. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of author contributions: all authors collaboratively conceived the present study in the following roles: conceptualization, m.d.m.s.-f., n.m., c.g.-b., and j.c.s.; methodology, m.d.m.s.-f. and n.m.; writing—original draft preparation, j.c.s. and c.g.-b. writing—review and editing; m.d.m.s.-f., n.m., c.g.-b., and j.c.s. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this study was partially funded through a research project granted by the spanish ministry of economy and competiveness (grant number psi - -r). acknowledgments: the authors 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijop. http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	psychological and social effects of the sexual double standard 	culture, gender, and sexual double standard 	current research 	materials and methods 	study sample and design 	materials 	procedure 	data analysis 	results 	measurement invariance 	reliability 	differences across country and gender in the sdss indices 	discussion 	an invariant measure of the sexual double standard 	more sexual freedom for the in-group 	cultural gap between women 	sexual double standard: cultural and gender differences 	emergence of a reverse form of the sexual double standard 	limitations and future research 	conclusions 	references where is it? examining post-secondary students' accessibility to policies and resources on sexual violence copyright (c), jacey magnussen, irene shankar ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : canadian journal of higher education revue canadienne d'enseignement supérieur where is it? examining post-secondary students' accessibility to policies and resources on sexual violence jacey magnussen et irene shankar volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) canadian society for the study of higher education issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article magnussen, j. & shankar, i. ( ). where is it? examining post-secondary students' accessibility to policies and resources on sexual violence. canadian journal of higher education / revue canadienne d'enseignement supérieur, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article en réponse à la demande croissante de politiques et de programmes adéquats pour lutter directement contre la violence à caractère sexuel sur les campus, les provinces de la colombie-britannique, de l’ontario et du manitoba ont élaboré des lois qui exigent que tous les établissements postsecondaires établissent une politique en matière d’agression sexuelle. les autres provinces et territoires n’ont aucune loi en ce sens. À partir du cas de l’alberta, qui ne possède aucune loi en la matière, nous avons étudié dans quelle mesure les établissements postsecondaires de cette province étaient outillés pour aider les étudiants et étudiantes qui en ont besoin. À l’aide de données publiques, nous avons examiné ) si les établissements postsecondaires albertains étaient dotés d’une politique en matière de violence à caractère sexuel qui soit facilement accessible à la communauté étudiante et ) dans quellemesure la communauté étudiante pouvait accéder facilement aux ressources et aux services de soutien offerts par l’université aux victimes de violence à caractère sexuel. cet exercice nous a permis de constater que la plupart des établissements n’ont pas de politique ou de services de soutien accessibles aux étudiants dans le besoin. nous espérons que cette étude pourra profiter aux acteurs responsables des politiques relatives à la violence à caractère sexuel sur les campus et aux acteurs militant en ce sens, afin qu’ils puissent instaurer des mesures visant à clarifier ces politiques, à élargir leur accessibilité, à créer de telles politiques là où elles sont inexistantes et à améliorer l’accès aux ressources mises à la disposition de la communauté étudiante, tant sur le campus qu’à l’extérieur de celui-ci. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cjhe/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cjhe/ -v -n -cjhe / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cjhe/ cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar canadian journal of higher education revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur volume , no. , , pages - where is it? examining post-secondary students’ accessibility to policies and resources on sexual violence jacey magnussen university of calgary irene shankar* mount royal university abstract faced with a growing demand for adequate policies and programs that mean- ingfully address sexual violence on campus, the provinces of british columbia, ontario and manitoba have introduced legislation requiring all post-second- ary institutions to institute a sexual assault policy. the remaining provinces and territories do not have similar legislation. in absence of such legislation, using the case study of alberta, we examined how equipped post-secondary institutions in this province are to assist students in need. utilizing publicly available data we examined: ) whether alberta’s post-secondary institutions have a sexual violence policy which is readily and easily accessible to the stu- dent; and ) the ease with which students can access university resources and support services for sexual violence. the results indicate that most institutions do not have an accessible policy and support services for students in need. we are hopeful that this study can inform those designing and advocating for sexual violence policies on campus to institute measures to clarify institutions’ sexual violence policies, increase accessibility to those policies, create policies where they are missing, and work on clarifying the availability of resources for students on and off campus. * this manuscript is the result of co-authorship and author names are listed in alphabetical order. cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar résumé en réponse à la demande croissante de politiques et de programmes adéquats pour lutter directement contre la violence à caractère sexuel sur les campus, les provinces de la colombie-britannique, de l’ontario et du manitoba ont élaboré des lois qui exigent que tous les établissements postsecondaires établissent une politique en matière d’agression sexuelle. les autres provinces et territoires n’ont aucune loi en ce sens. À partir du cas de l’alberta, qui ne possède aucune loi en la matière, nous avons étudié dans quelle mesure les établissements postsecondaires de cette province étaient outillés pour aider les étudiants et étudiantes qui en ont besoin. À l’aide de données publiques, nous avons examiné ) si les établissements postsecondaires albertains étaient dotés d’une politique en matière de violence à caractère sexuel qui soit facilement accessible à la communauté étudiante et ) dans quelle mesure la communauté étudiante pouvait accéder facilement aux ressources et aux services de soutien offerts par l’université aux victimes de violence à caractère sexuel. cet exercice nous a permis de constater que la plupart des établissements n’ont pas de politique ou de services de soutien accessibles aux étudiants dans le besoin. nous espérons que cette étude pourra profiter aux acteurs responsables des politiques relatives à la violence à caractère sexuel sur les campus et aux acteurs militant en ce sens, afin qu’ils puissent instaurer des mesures visant à clarifier ces politiques, à élargir leur accessibilité, à créer de telles politiques là où elles sont inexistantes et à améliorer l’accès aux ressources mises à la disposition de la communauté étudiante, tant sur le campus qu’à l’extérieur de celui-ci. introduction the news is saturated with stories documenting universities’ failure to adequately help students victimized by sexual violence. for instance, in , students from bar- nard university filed a federal complaint against their school for their derisory response to sexual assault complaints (browne, ). ms. emma sulkowicz was among these students who filed the federal complaint. ms. sulkowicz made international headlines for her senior thesis project titled “carry that weight” (altier, ) in an effort to bring at- tention to her sexual assault by a fellow student in . ms. sulkowicz decided to bring public attention to the issue of sexual violence on campus upon finding out that her assail- ant had also assaulted two other students (browne, ). she protested her university’s complicity, through their refusal to expel her rapist, by carrying her mattress everywhere she went on campus (altier, ). canadian universities also appear ill-equipped to deal with sexual violence (quinlan et al., ). for example, at the université du québec à montréal a study found that , (or . % of their participants) had been sexually assaulted by someone linked to their university, with % of those being victimized more than once (enos, ). despite such high numbers, university policies and services continue to be patchwork at best. for instance, in the / academic year, the university of toronto reported zero suspen- cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar sions, expulsions or disciplinary consequences despite the informal complaints of sexual assault (desai, ). students who came forward with allegations of sexual as- sault at the university of toronto were forced to sign confidentiality agreements and en- couraged to stay quiet about the incidents (desai, ). similarly, in early it came to public attention that brandon university required victims of sexual violence to sign a confidentiality contract that required them to only speak of their sexual assault to school counsellors. if they disclosed their assault to anyone besides the school counsellors they could be suspended or expelled from the university (laychuk, ). more recently, in january of , university of calgary reported that it lacked grounds to expel connor neurauter, a -year-old student who had plead guilty to sexual interference of a -year- old child, because the assault had taken place prior to neurauter’s enrollment at u of c (pike, ). university of calgary made this public statement in response to the public outrage over the sentencing concessions, which would have allowed neurauter to delay his days prison sentence in order to complete his classes. part of the outrage stemmed from the inadequacy of university of calgary policies, which do not require expulsion of students convicted of sexual offences. there is a persistent failure in post-secondary institutions’ sexual violence policies (where available), which hinders the ability of these institutions to provide timely as- sistance and information to students in need. as indicated in a recent york university study, while % of students reported receiving information on sexual assault, % of respondents did not know how to obtain further information in order to report sexual violence on campus (gray & pin, ). overall, this study shows that: a) students lack information on reporting sexual violence and what to expect after they report their as- sault, b) racialized students were significantly less likely to be aware of the sexual assault resources on campus, and c) more female-identified students reported feeling unsafe on campus regardless of the time of the day than their male counterparts (gray & pin, ). there is a pressing need for meaningful policies and resources on sexual violence that are responsive to the realities of sexual violence and readily accessible to students in need. accordingly, using publicly available data, we examined the availability and accessibility of sexual violence policies and support programs at alberta’s post-secondary institutions. literature review sexual violence propelled by public disclosure of the lengthy history of sexual violence committed by hollywood power players such as harvey weinstein and kevin spacey, along with the #metoo and times up movements, women are publicly speaking about their experiences of sexual violence. there is a growing acknowledgement of the myriad ways in which women are subjected to sexual violence in their daily lives. among canadian women, the self-reported rates for sexual violence are per (conroy & cotter, ). sexual violence is a gendered social problem, with women most often being the victims, and men most often perpetrating sexual violence (benoit et al., ). moreover, an intersectional approach to sexual violence is key as not all women are equally likely to be victimized (benoit et al., ). indigenous, slgbtqia, people with cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar disabilities, minorities, and international students are at higher risk of sexual violence (benoit et al., ; enos, ; day, ; gunraj et al., ). for instance, sexual as- sault is three times higher for indigenous people of canada compared to non-indigenous canadians, with indigenous women experiencing the highest rates of sexual violence. while the above-mentioned groups are more likely to be subjected to sexual violence, they tend to encounter more barriers when accessing resources and often receive very little public attention or policy interventions. in canada there are more than murdered and missing women, with very little in terms of meaningful policies and programs to ad- dress the ongoing gendered violence. post-secondary campuses presently, with / of first year students subjected to sexual assault, sexual violence on university and college campuses is an ongoing and important issue for post-secondary institutions (senn et al., ). in north america, . % of female-identified undergradu- ate students and % of transgender or gender nonconforming students have experienced an incident of sexual violence on campus, which indicates that first-year students, trans- gender or gender nonconforming students, and students who identify as women appear to be at a higher risk of being subjected to sexual violence (chiara & lavina, ; garcia et al., ; rainn, ; senn et al., ; quinlan, clarke, & miller, ; tamburri & samson, ). in the united states, title ix of the education amendments of requires uni- versities and colleges to provide women with appropriate resources to address gender inequality (hayes-smith & hayes-smith, ). amendments to title ix, made in and , mandates federally funded four-year universities and colleges to have sexual violence policies and prevention programming (hayes-smith & levett, ). us legisla- tion includes the student-right-to-know and campus security act of . collectively, these legislations require post-secondary institutions to disclose campus crime statistics and provide prevention and security policies (yung, ). canada does not have similar legislation and as such, canadian post-secondary insti- tutions are not required to disclose campus crime statistics or to provide policies pertain- ing to sexual violence (quinlan et al., ). there are concerns that canadian post-sec- ondary institutions are currently failing to keep students informed about potential threats on campus (desai, ). for instance, students at the university of toronto pointed out the alarming discrepancy in the school’s response to plagiarism (which resulted in expulsions) and sexual assault (with zero expulsions) (weikle, ). these statistics indicate that u of t presently has more procedures to deal with plagiarism than sexual violence, which is indicative of institutional priorities. post-secondary institutions tend to deal with sexual violence by offering preventive education and workshops, which typically focus on victims and/or potential victims and their responsibility to manage risks of sexual violence. some preventative workshops per- petuate myths that violence can be prevented by due diligence and responsible behavior (garcia et al., ; orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ). this facilitates a victim-blaming discourse, whereby responsibility falls to the victims to make responsible choices and sexual violence is deemed to be the result of victims’ “wrong” decisions. in addition, some post-secondary institutions’ protocols and policies tend to rely upon cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar narrow ideas about sexual violence (gray & pin, ). for instance, despite the fact that % of sexual assault is committed by someone known to the victim university services, response protocols tend to understand sexual assaults as violence committed by strang- ers (mcmahon, ). it is precisely such (mis)understandings that led the university of british columbia to respond to six sexual assaults on campus in by announcing improved lighting and increased security patrols (tamburri & samson, ). as seen above, many schools’ prevention tactics are primarily concerned with security, and po- licing low traffic and/or poor lighting areas. such practices reinforce the false notions of sexual assault as an act of violence committed by strangers in dark in unpoliced areas (gray & pin, ). policies while sexual assault is a gendered issue, the language used within policies tends to be un-gendered (iverson, ). to illustrate, within canada, % of sexual assaults of women are perpetrated by men, while % of sexual assault against both men and women are perpetrated by men (benoit et al., ). canadian data also shows an increase in in- cidents of sexual violence against transgender individuals (gunraj et al., ). however, sexual violence policies are not aligned with this reality. policies tend to have a cursory understanding of the intersectional nature of violence (gunraj et al., ; iverson, ). an intersectional understanding of violence would be reflected in policies that consider the disproportionately higher rates of sexual violence being committed against indige- nous women, women with disabilities, slgbtqia, and women of color (mahony, jacob & hobson, ; shankar, ). as pointed out by iverson ( ), the creation of sexual violence policies is a political act embedded with bias. in order to avoid the simplistic lan- guage and understanding of policies that serve to perpetuate exclusionary practices and propagate marginalization of vulnerable populations, an intersectional feminist policy analysis is required. a greater understanding of how violence affects individuals is needed because the current efforts that have been put forth by schools has not lessened the inci- dence of sexual violence on campus (iverson, ). currently, sexual violence is grossly underreported. low reporting rates means that victims are not getting help and the perpetrators are not being punished (orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ). people may be discouraged from reporting due to the stigma sur- rounding sexual violence, fear of negative repercussions (such as blame or disbelief), and loss of confidentiality and privacy (orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ; walsh et al., ). students’ knowledge of and access to resources increases their likelihood of reporting sexual violence (garcia et al., ). institutions can aid in students’ overall recovery and health by providing prompt, confidential and considerate responses to disclosures and through provision of additional resources and assistance (orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ). without such support, students may leave school, have long-term health concerns, and find their educational and life goals impeded (garcia et al., ; orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ). policies, along with other meaningful resources and programs, are a useful starting point in addressing sexual violence on campus. a stand-alone policy on sexual violence demonstrates an institution’s commitment to dealing with sexual violence and provides a clear delegation of the process and procedures in effect for dealing with sexual violence cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar (gonzales, schofield & schmitt, ). research indicates that reporting is aided by poli- cies that contain clearly stated response protocols, services for victims, and permit anony- mous and confidential reporting (gonzales et al., ). it is imperative that post-sec- ondary institutions provide stand-alone policies that are easily accessible and available to all students. these policies need to be student-centered and include regular monitoring and assessment of their effectiveness (gunraj et al., ). some provinces have introduced legislation, such as ontario’s bill : the sexual violence and harassment action plan act, which requires all post-secondary institutions in that province (as of january ) to have a sexual assault policy in place. bill mandates a school policy review every three years, and the collection of data on sexual violence (legislative assembly of ontario, ). british columbia’s bill : sexual vio- lence and misconduct policy act requires all post-secondary institutions to have a sexual assault policy in place within one year of the bill passing, and all policies to be reviewed every three years (legislative assembly of british columbia, ). manitoba recently passed bill : the post-secondary sexual violence and sexual harassment policies act, which requires all post-secondary schools in the province to have a sexual assault policy in place and for it to be developed with student input (legislative assembly of manitoba, ). overall, these bills pertain to all publicly funded institutions, include definitions of sexual violence (except manitoba) and delineate how each institution will respond to and report sexual violence. british columbia and ontario’s bills require data on sexual violence to be collected by the post-secondary institution and distributed to the board of governors and provincial ministry office for review. it also contains measures to evaluate the effectiveness of universities’ sexual violence processes. as stated earlier, manitoba does not have similar requirements in the current bill. unfortunately, only british colum- bia requires dissemination of the sexual violence data to students, and the general public. each of these three bills ignores intersectionality of violence in its policy. in other words, no reference is made to the reality that certain students are more likely to experience vio- lence and thus, university campuses should have services equipped to assist students with intersectional identities and lived experiences. as discussed earlier, marginalized, indig- enous, disabled, and/or slgbtqia people are more likely to be subjected to sexual vio- lence. while there is room for improvement within these bills, they are a promising start. alberta has not followed suit with similar legislation. nonetheless, in september of , the minister of advanced education stated that all publicly funded colleges and universities are expected to have sexual assault policies in place (derworiz, ). the ministry of advanced education has called for standardized stand-alone sexual violence policies that address training, prevention, complaint procedures, and response protocols (derworiz, ). according to the minister at the time, marlin schmidt, as of september , of the institutions were in the process of developing their policies; the other already had policies in place (derworiz, ). in light of former minister schmidt’s statement and because alberta currently does not have legislation requiring institutions to have a stand-alone sexual violence policy, it is important to examine the readiness of various institutions to meet their students’ needs. in this study, we examined alberta’s post-secondary institutions to determine: ) the availability of a sexual violence policy, and ) students’ access to resources on sexual violence. we utilized publicly available data to ascertain whether each albertan post-sec- cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar ondary institution has a sexual violence policy which is readily and easily accessible to the student, and the ease with which students can access university resources and support services for sexual violence. this study demonstrates that, despite the minister of ad- vanced education’s assurances, at the time of this study most institutions did not have a readily accessible policy on sexual violence. we are hopeful that this study will encourage post-secondary institutions to: ) institute measures to increase student accessibility to policies, ) create policies where one is currently missing, and ) increase both availabili- ty of and student accessibility to support services and resources – both on and off campus. methodology data collection in alberta, there are publicly funded institutions, privately funded and first nations colleges for a total of post-secondary institutions across alberta (see table ). these institutions offer a wide range of programming from arts workshops and in- ternships at banff centre to places that focus on trades, such as keyano college. the mandates of each of these institutions are quite diverse, along with size and composition of the student populations. thus, the policies themselves would need to be designed to reflect the particular needs of each student population. accordingly, in this study, we did not compare the institutions’ policies to each other. rather, we wanted to examine the ease with which a potential student could find their institution’s sexual violence policy, the process for reporting sexual violence, and resources and support services available for students dealing with sexual violence. thus, we relied upon the post-secondary institu- tions’ websites and publicly available information to inform our analysis. the data for this research was collected in may and june of . magnussen collected publicly available information on university websites and, where information was unclear, she followed up with phone calls to each institution requesting information on the institutional process for reporting sexual violence on campus and the services available on campus for their students. the website analysis included a careful review of university student resources and campus support programs. she examined each institutions’ website for links to services, located on and off campus. she also searched for each institution’s policy on sexual violence by reviewing all policy documents available online. finally, magnussen searched for relevant policies and programs by entering key search terms on each institution’s website (such as sexual violence, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, date rape). this last step was intended to replicate the key terms a student in crisis may enter in their search for relevant policies and support ser- vices. as stated earlier, when information on a website was unclear or unavailable, mag- nussen called each institution and asked for a copy of their policy/policies pertaining to sexual violence and their process for aiding a student who wanted to either report sexual violence and/or seek assistance for sexual violence. since we relied upon publicly available data, as per the guidelines of mount royal university’s human research and ethics board, an ethics application was not required. this study contains review of publicly funded, independent and first nations post- secondary institutions. cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar analysis magnussen and shankar reviewed and analyzed the collected data together. both re- searchers, a tenured faculty member and a senior undergraduate student, are well ac- quainted with the structure and functioning of post-secondary institutions. our in-depth knowledge of sexual violence, familiarity with post-secondary students’ experiences of marginalization and violence, and our own gendered and racialized experiences of being in post-secondary institutions led us to research this topic. our analysis was informed by intersectional feminist paradigm, which allows us to study all forms of intersecting identities and their related systems of oppression (cren- shaw, ; hesse-biber, ). crenshaw ( ) originally coined the term intersec- tionality to highlight the lack of legal protection for black women who simultaneously encounter racism and sexism in the workplace. in response to the oversimplification of intersectionality theory, bilge ( ) and tomlinson ( ) urge intersectional feminist researchers to have in-depth understanding of and commitment to social justice, and ra- cial equality. as intersectional feminist researchers, our analysis is grounded in the larger femi- nist critique of post-secondary institutions as exclusionary spaces (ahmed, ; puwar, ). accordingly, we paid particular attention to how race, gender, class, sexual orien- tation and ability are considered or neglected within sexual assault services for students in higher education institutions. by analyzing this data through an intersectional feminist lens, we acknowledge that the experiences of people who belong to various and com- pounding social categories cannot be looked at singularly (bilge, ; crenshaw, ; tomlinson, ). in other words, there needs to be a clear recognition that a student dealing with sexual violence may require services and policies that understand and mean- ingfully address transphobia, homophobia, ableism, racism, colonialism, and sexism, be- cause violence is embedded in each of these ideologies and they are all connected in the lived experiences of individuals. accordingly, we looked at policies and resources in terms of their ability and readiness to assist students with intersectional identities (yuval-davis, ). for example, racialized, indigenous, and slgbtqia students are more likely to be subjected to sexual violence (gunraj et al., ; iverson, ). thus, we reviewed institutions’ websites and recommended services for victims of sexual violence for overt understanding and recognition that marginalized people with intersectional identities are more likely to subjected to sexual violence and may experience more obstacles in access- ing and utilizing services and programs for victims of sexual violence on campus. findings and discussion our findings indicate that most of alberta’s universities and colleges currently lack a clearly identifiable stand-alone sexual assault policy, and knowledge on how to respond to inquiries regarding sexual violence and that in absence of clearly designated protocols, the caller gets directed to either security and/or an outside community agency. accord- ingly, we will discuss these findings and their implications below. cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar table . overview of sexual assault policies and resources at alberta’s post-secondary institutions institution stand-alone policy dedicated sexual violence re- source website publicly funded institutions alberta college of art and design no no athabasca university no no the banff centre no no bow valley college yes yes grand prairie regional college no no grant macewan university yes yes keyano college no no lakeland college no no lethbridge college yes no medicine hat college yes no mount royal university yes yes northern alberta institute of tech- nology yes yes norquest college yes no northern lakes college yes yes olds college yes no portage college no no red deer college no yes southern alberta institute of tech- nology yes yes university of alberta no yes university of calgary yes yes university of lethbridge yes yes independent institutions ambrose university yes yes burman university no no concordia university of edmonton yes yes king’s university yes yes st. mary’s university no no first nations col- leges blue quills university no no maskwacis cultural college no no old sun community college no no red crow community college no no yellowhead tribal college no no cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar sexual assault policy. stand-alone sexual violence policies are crucial for creating uniformity among procedures and making staff and students aware of the policies that govern their institution. these policies designate consequences for perpetrators, inform victims of their rights, and ensure access to adequate services. a lack of information on organizational understanding and response to sexual violence makes post-secondary cam- puses a precarious environment for students affected by sexual violence (armstrong et al., ; beres, crow & gotell, ). as indicated in table , out of post-secondary institutions had clearly designated stand-alone sexual violence policies publicly available on their websites. another six insti- tutions had guidelines or protocols pertaining to sexual violence as part of a larger policy on student conduct, discrimination and harassment or students’ rights and responsibili- ties. two of the institutions were currently in the process of developing policies while the rest ( out of ) either did not have a sexual violence policy or it was inaccessible. it is pos- sible these nine institutions have policies in place but they were not listed on their website. however, the lack of online accessibility to such policy hinders students’ ability to quickly access information. as stated earlier, students tend to rely on the web for information and resources on sexual violence (garcia et al, ; krivoshey et al, ). thus, by listing their policies and support services online, institutions can quickly provide students’ in- formation on how their institution deals with sexual violence and what they can expect to happen once they report/disclose incidence of sexual violence (krivoshey et al., ). currently, approximately % of alberta’s post-secondary institutions have some form of a policy on sexual violence (either standalone or part of a larger policy). this leaves the remaining % of alberta post-secondary schools (as of june, ) lacking in processes and techniques necessary for properly handling the issue of sexual violence on campus. as indicated in table , of the publicly funded institutions ( %); of the independent institutions ( %) and none of the first nations colleges ( %) have a publicly available sexual violence policy (as standalone policies or as part of another policy). as mentioned earlier, due to ongoing colonialism, violence against indigenous canadian women is three times higher than against non-indigenous canadian women (brennan, ). thus, it is concerning that indigenous students at first nations institutions do not have clearly acces- sible sexual violence policies and services. it is important to contextualize these findings: the lack of accessible policy could be from the precarious funding structure of these institu- tions and not due to a lack of interest or demand. for instance, in , the parliamentary budget office reported approximately $ million gap in educational funding for first nations and non-first nations (morin, ). it is crucial to have a stand-alone policy that is publicly available to all members of the campus, as a stand-alone policy that can be easily reached in times of crisis spells out insti- tutional procedures, rights of victims, and services available. presently, as discussed above, only of alberta’s post-secondary institutions have a stand-alone policy, which demon- strates a prevailing need for stand-alone sexual violence policies on albertan campuses. a stand-alone policy on sexual violence should include, ) an extensive list of forms of sexual violence, with descriptions to help people identify their experiences, ) an outline of the reporting process, including contact information, ) emphasis that the victim’s identity will remain anonymous, including anonymous reporting options, ) third-party reporting options and ) -hour accessibility to reporting (krivoshey et al., ). it is also impor- cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar tant that schools publish these policies online so they can be accessed anonymously and easily (krivoshey et al., ). governmental legislation requiring post-secondary schools in alberta to have stand-alone sexual violence policies, with the features mentioned above, will assist students in need, encouraging reporting, and demonstrating the need for re- sources for university students dealing with this issue (krivoshey et al., ). clear referral to resources. in addition to a stand-alone policy regarding sexual violence, all post-secondary institutions should have an easily accessible online link to re- sources for people dealing with sexual violence (hayes-smith & hayes-smith, ; krivo- shey et al., ). research indicates that university students heavily rely upon the internet to find information on topics related to sexual health (escoffery et al., ; hayes-smith & hayes-smith, ). a dedicated website for these resources allows students in crisis to quickly access available on- and off-campus services at any time of the day or night (kri- voshey et al., ). the confidentiality and anonymity of the internet can also encourage reporting of incidents of sexual violence as victims can access information without having to disclose their experience to a stranger or fear judgement from people in authority (kri- voshey et al., ; orchowski et al., ). the stigma surrounding sexual violence makes people hesitant to disclose and thus online access to information increases the likelihood of victims accessing resources (hayes-smith & hayes-smith, ; walsh et al., ). along with having programs to help those dealing with sexual violence, it is also crucial that these programs be clearly labelled, easy to find, and readily accessible online to students in distress. table . accessibility and availability of support services/resources for sexual violence post-secondary institu- tions number of pse in alberta has dedicated on campus services for sexual violence contains on campus non- specialized services refers students to community services publicly funded institutions independent institutions first nations colleges total *non-specialized services refer to counselling, campus security services, chaplain/ pastoral services, and campus health centre. as indicated above (see table ), among the post-secondary institutions in alberta, only ( %) had easily accessible online links/information on resources for sexual vio- lence. this does not mean that the rest of the institutions do not have resources/programs that aid students for various issues, including sexual violence. some universities (such as, concordia university of edmonton) have a webpage with information on how and to whom students can report sexual violence and a write-up on scenarios where someone is unable to provide consent (such as when intoxicated, asleep, and under duress). how- ever, such websites do not indicate resources for students who require services but do not want to report violence. others (such as bow valley college and northern lakes college) have protocols and policies available online but no link to specific resources because the website is currently unavailable. as our focus was on the online availability of resources cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar that directly referenced sexual violence, we only counted those institutions that have clear online links to resources (either on- or off-campus) that students can access. the lack of adequate policies and inaccessibility of resources tells students that their safety and well-being are not being prioritized. furthermore, this gap in accessible in- formation and services for students dealing with sexual violence can further exacerbate the consequences of such events. students who experience sexual violence on campus may choose to leave school temporarily or permanently, as well as encounter feelings of depression, shame, and isolation (garcia, et al., ). on the other hand, when victims of sexual violence are connected with support and professional resources it can reduce feelings of isolation, improve recovery, and lessen the risk of re-victimization (orchowski, meyer & gidycz, ; walsh, et al., ). on campus resources for sexual violence. as indicated in table , only ( %) of the institutions listed their on-campus resources on sexual violence on their websites. among these institutions, there appears to be a wide range in how services are adminis- tered. in some institutions, such as macewan university, students can access a sexual vi- olence response team through a contact person at the university’s security services. other institutions, like mount royal university, have a dedicated sexual violence response and awareness coordinator. within alberta, only the university of alberta has a clearly la- belled on-campus centre dedicated to dealing with sexual violence. the presence of this dedicated centre on campus helps staff direct calls and inquiries, creating a streamlined process for accessing information. some institutions provide sexual violence services that are housed under generic services that may not clearly indicate the availability of sexual violence support services to students. for instance, ambrose university provides sexual violence resources through ambrose community advocates and king’s university pro- vides similar services through its harassment committee. overall, our findings indicate that most post-secondary institutions in alberta either do not have dedicated centres/ offices or on-campus services for sexual violence and/or they are not well advertised on their institutional webpages. in either case, many post-secondary students in alberta currently lack clear means of identifying and accessing sexual violence support services on their campuses. for those institutions who did not list their resources and services online, phone calls inquiring about resources regarding sexual violence were met with uncertainty on where to direct our inquiries ( times). there were also six incidences of being transferred to the wrong person who seemed similarly perplexed and uncertain as to why we had contacted them. in several instances, the inquiry was transferred from two to six times trying to find the best person to answer questions about sexual violence on campus. nine of the institu- tions failed to return our calls for inquiry. while this data is not conducive for generaliza- tion, it speaks to the confusion a student seeking services may encounter. this drawn-out and frustrating process lessens the likelihood of an individual reporting sexual violence and makes it more difficult for them to learn about and access appropriate services. in addition, this confusion speaks to the need of every institution to have a clearly-designed and accessible web page with a complete list of on- and off-campus resources for sexual violence. referral to security and counselling. as indicated in table , among universi- ties that clearly list their support services ( % of alberta’s post-secondary institutions) cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar there is a heavy reliance upon generic services such as security and counselling to pro- vide sexual violence support services. first, referral to counselling services (provided the institution employs counsellors who are trained to respond to sexual violence in a non- judgmental, inclusive, non-heteronormative, and inclusive manner) is understandable. however, within our investigation, the main resource offered to students tended to be their on-campus security office. moreover, once connected to security the same problems persisted whereby staff were often unsure of how to answer questions and there was no set procedure/protocol they could identify. again, this is not meant as a generalization but rather a persistent obstacle we encountered in trying to access information on institu- tional programs and services. research indicates that students should have comprehensive access to a -hour re- source that is not directly related to the campus security department (krivoshey et al., ). campus security can be one option for student reporting sexual violence but this should not be the primary option available for all victims. the likelihood of disclosure lessens if victims of sexual violence believe they may be required to press charges or file a formal complaint with the school (ministry of the status of women, ). victims of sexual violence often do not report the incident to authorities out of fear of having to retell details of the incident, and thus experiencing re-traumatization (ministry of the status of women, ). moreover, security staff are generally not adequately trained in proper sexual violence response methods and/or trauma counseling. although some uni- versities are taking measures to educate and provide additional training to their security team, even properly trained security officers may not be an ideal option for marginalized/ racialized students given the long history of racial profiling by on- and off-campus polic- ing and security services (goodey, ). a study by nance ( ), found that racialized students are likely to have previously experienced extreme scrutiny, surveillance, and/ or violence by security staff. additionally, schools with over % students of color em- ploy more security measures and provide harsher treatment than schools with a majority white population (nance, ). considering the increased incidences of surveillance and violence experienced by marginalized communities in canada, the reliance upon security in post-secondary institutions as the first response needs to be carefully deliberated. reliance upon off campus resources. community organizations trained in re- sponding to sexual violence can be an asset to post-secondary institutions in assisting with training of staff and providing resources for victims. accordingly, most of the pub- licly funded institutions examined (with exception of red deer college) had links to off campus and community-based resources. collaborative relationships among institutions and community-based resources specializing in sexual violence can be extremely useful to students in need. often (but not always) community organizations have specialized counsellors that are well trained in inclusive and intersectional understanding of sexual violence. there are two particular issues to consider in relation to this finding: first, why are these publicly available community resources not easily accessible (through links) on the website of every post-secondary institution? second, the reliance and partnership with these organizations should not exempt institutions from developing and housing on campus resources/services for their students. solely referring students to off campus services does not provide institutions with in depth knowledge of their students’ needs. on-campus resources for sexual violence can increase feelings of safety for students and increase awareness of available resources (rainn, ). moreover, on-campus services cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar such as peer counselling for sexual violence can facilitate in the creation of a community for survivors. when victims of sexual violence seek help from others it can reduce feelings of isolation and encourage connections with support and professional resources (walsh et al., ). finally, as pointed out by krivoshey et al ( ) “... key college stakeholders, including college administrators, college mental health professionals and campus secu- rity, [need to] become more familiar with sexual assault on their campus” (p. ) and this can be achieved with on campus services that will record prevalence rates, trends, and their ability to meet the needs of their students. limitations and further recommendations. due to the specific time and loca- tion of this research, it cannot be generalized to other post-secondary institutions. in addition, by the time of publication, some of the post-secondary institutions will have addressed their lack of policy and accessibility to services. this study solely examined stu- dents’ online accessibility of services and not the quality, comprehensiveness or effective- ness of the available policies and services (such as whether the policies and services are cultural sensitivity, accessible to students with disabilities, have comprehensive operating hours, and/or contain other barriers such as transportation requirement, fees, lengthy waiting list etc.). this study’s limitations can be addressed through further research on other post-secondary institutions polices and resources on sexual violence. specifically, future research on the effectiveness, accessibility, university members’ awareness, per- ception, and utilization of sexual violence policies and services are needed, and the exist- ing policies and services can better meet the needs of marginalized individuals/groups. a detailed examination of institutional policies and resources (including provinces with legislation referencing stand-alone policies) would provide a better understanding of how canada’s post-secondary institutions are dealing with sexual violence on campus and would highlight outstanding issues that require further attention. conclusion as seen in this paper, contrary to the minister of advanced education’s assertions (derworiz, ), there is limited availability and accessibility to post-secondary institu- tions’ sexual violence policies. moreover, there is some confusion on where to refer stu- dents in crisis and a lack of online access to both policies and resources on sexual violence. unlike other provinces (such british columbia, manitoba and ontario) where legislation will compel universities to institute adequate sexual violence policies and increase their students’ access to resources, alberta is currently relying upon the goodwill of its institu- tions. however, as indicated in this paper, as of june , many albertan universities currently do not have a stand-alone policy or easily accessible resources. this could be due to ongoing funding cuts made to post-secondary institutions in alberta. nonetheless, post-secondary institutions are still failing to meet the needs of their students, particu- larly vulnerable and marginalized students. the current lack of cohesion within canada (where provinces differ in their responses) in reference to policies and clear designation of protocols on sexual violence by university administrators and policy makers speaks to the inequalities present in the broader soci- ety (armstrong et al., ; gunraj et al., ). social institutions and the documents that make up institutions, such as sexual violence policies, have the power to influence behavior. these policies (or the lack thereof) can either effectively address violence and cjhe / rces volume , no. , students’ accessibility to policies and resources / j. magnussen & i. shankar support the victims or it can create conditions that normalize sexual violence. in order to be have more responsive resources, policies, and services for students, post-secondary institutions have to change, and their sexual violence policies and resources should dem- onstrate a commitment to an intersectional framework. this would require the inclusion of marginalized students, intersectional feminist scholars, and experts on sexual violence to be part of the planning phases of policy development. it is only through such practices that policies will better meet the needs of students dealing with sexual violence, who dis- proportionately tend to be young, racialized and identify as women. notes . partnered with columbia university. . brandon university has confirmed the existence of the contract. . in this paper, we use the term “women” to refer to all persons who identify as women and/or female. references ahmed, s. 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( ). situated intersectionality and social inequality. raisons politiques, ( ), - . contact information irene shankar, associate professor department of sociology and anthropology mount royal university ishankar@mtroyal.ca jacey magnussen is completing her master of arts degree in the discipline of sociology at the university of calgary. her master’s thesis will examine the historical exclusion of women in the canadian medical field, specifically indigenous women identified healers. her research focuses on intersectionality of exclusions, stemming from her work as a front-line worker assisting people dealing with homelessness and poverty. irene shankar is an associate professor of sociology at mount royal university. dr. shan- kar’s research and teaching areas are situated within intersectional feminist theories, critical race theory, qualitative methodology, and the sociology of health and illness. her current projects examine the racialized and gendered constructions of individualized risk and responsibility within public health messages, and sexual violence policies and programs on university campuses. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mcgill-sexual-assault-policy- . http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mcgill-sexual-assault-policy- . http://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/ending-sexual-violence-campus/ http://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/ending-sexual-violence-campus/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/campus-sexual-assault- . http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/campus-sexual-assault- . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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especially not when the -year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at cold spring harbor laboratory’s ban- bury center. “i don’t need him staring at me when i’m trying to go to sleep,” mclaughlin told a december gathering at the storied new york meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: she had hung a washcloth over the image of watson, who co-discovered dna’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well- known for racist and sexist statements. the washcloth image was part of mclaughlin’s unconventional presentation— by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. mclaughlin, a -year-old neuroscientist at vanderbilt university medical center (vumc) in nashville, displayed the names of current members of the national academy of sciences (nas) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. she urged other nas members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” she chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “the only other places that do this are the catho- lic church and the military,” she said. in the past months, mclaughlin has ex- ploded into view as the public face of the #metoo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny twit- ter presence, @mclneuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. in june , she created a website, metoostem. com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) have posted mostly anonymous, often har- rowing tales of their own harassment. in just days that month, she convinced the widely used website ratemyprofessors. com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” and after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring aaas, which publishes science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of aaas honors (science, september , p. ). “it’s clear that she has a voice and that people are listening,” says biologist carol greider of johns hopkins university school of medicine in baltimore, maryland, and a co-organizer of the banbury center meet- ing. “she is really trying to change society,” adds carrie mcadams, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the university of texas southwestern medical center in dallas, who sought out mclaughlin by phone last year to discuss how to report long-ago harassment. in november , mclaughlin shared the second annual $ , disobedience award from the massachusetts institute of technology’s media lab in cambridge for “ethical, nonviolent” civil disobedience. and, “impressed by the sheer force of her conviction” at the banbury meeting, erin o’shea, president of the howard hughes medical institute in chevy chase, mary- land, later pledged the institute’s financial support for a nonprofit, #metoostem, that mclaughlin is founding to support survi- vors of sexual harassment. anita hill, a professor at brandeis uni- versity in waltham, massachusetts, who in accused then–supreme court nominee clarence thomas of sexual harassment, emailed mclaughlin last summer thanking her for speaking out. hill also recognized that mclaughlin would pay a price: “the impact on you and your career is not to be underestimated,” hill wrote. indeed, mclaughlin has made bitter ene- mies: last fall, she says, she was anonymously fedexed a box of feces. and her scientific ca- reer is now on the line. her tenure process was frozen for months starting in while vumc investigated allegations that she had posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues. the probe was spurred by complaints from a professor whom she had testified against in a sexual harassment in- vestigation. vumc closed the probe without disciplining mclaughlin, but in a fac- ulty committee, having previously approved her tenure, unanimously reversed itself, ac- cording to university documents. absent a last-minute reprieve, she will lose her job on february, when her national institutes of health (nih) grant expires. mclaughlin says she has not been look- ing for other jobs and hopes to continue in science. she says she has seven manu- scripts in development and recently sub- mitted a new nih grant application. but she is consumed with #metoostem efforts, from supporting individual survivors to meeting with nih director francis collins in bethesda, maryland, last week and ad- dressing his new working group on sexual harassment. “i have a real strong belief that the [vanderbilt] chancellor and the board of trust are going to do the right thing,” she says. “if not now, when?” mclaughlin grew up in missouri and new hampshire, exposed to both science and politics. her mother was an elementary school teacher and her father an engineer- ing graduate student. he died suddenly when mclaughlin was , and the struggling family plunged deeper into poverty. despite their difficulties, her mother found time to support women campaigning for city council. “a lot of our community was people she politicked with,” mclaughlin says. mclaughlin graduated from skidmore college in saratoga springs, new york, and completed a ph.d. in neuroscience at the university of pennsylvania. she “was intense … and intellectually deep,” recalls her post- doc adviser elias aizenman of the university of pittsburgh in pennsylvania. “she liked to work long and hard hours. she had high ex- pectations of her peers. and of herself.” #metoo provocateur bethann mclaughlin battles on behalf of women in stem—but her own job is in peril by meredith wadman the twitter warrior published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ news | f e at u r e s february • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e she was first author on a proceed- ings of the national academy of sciences paper that she and aizenman initially had trouble placing, because it challenged dogma by finding that certain proteins linked to cell death also triggered a cell survival pathway in the brain. “i think i instilled in her to not be afraid to stick her neck out,” aizenman says. “i admire her now for sticking her neck out in a different direction.” in , mclaughlin took a position as a research assistant professor at vander- bilt’s school of medicine and was promoted to tenure-track assistant professor in . she focused on understanding how brain cells cope with oxygen deprivation during strokes and cardiac arrest, with an eye to finding therapies. she trained students and published steadily in respected journals. (in , two instances of possible image dupli- cation between her papers were flagged on the website pubpeer. mclaughlin acknowl- edged a mistake, apologized, and requested a correction in one case; a co-author explained the other.) in , she was key to landing a $ . million private donation to launch an autism research institute at vanderbilt’s kennedy center. she also founded vumc’s clinical neuroscience scholars program in , which links neuroscience graduate students with clinical experts, so students can see real-life manifestations of the condi- tions they study. in , mclaughlin helped launch a vanderbilt-hosted blog, edge for scholars, that bills itself as a space for “gritty truths” about academic life. blogging anonymously as “fighty squirrel,” she began to develop a public voice on issues she saw affecting fe- male scientists, such as authorship inequity. her posts soon became the site’s most popu- lar, with more than , views to date. “she was blogging about the larger me- toostem movement before it had a hashtag,” says katherine hartmann, an associate dean at vumc who recruited mclaughlin. “she’s our top blogger, top recruiter, top social me- dia maven that makes it go.” mclaughlin’s new role as the un- official standard-bearer of a new movement in u.s. science “is not who i had planned on being,” she said recently. she says her evolution has been “squarely tied” to her involvement in vanderbilt’s investigation of a sexual harassment case, and what she believes were its consequences for her. in the fall of , mclaughlin submit- ted her tenure package, and the following year her department and vumc’s appoint- ments and promotions committee recom- mended her for tenure, according to a later university report. but the university halted her tenure pro- cess in december , in the wake of allega- tions that arose during the investigation of a colleague. in early july , former gradu- ate student erin watt sued her former ph.d. supervisor, neuroscientist aurelio galli, who was then at the vanderbilt school of medi- cine. watt alleged in the lawsuit that galli had sexually harassed and belittled her, leading her to quit the ph.d. program. in late july of that year, mclaughlin, her then-husband (a vanderbilt neuroscientist at the time, who collaborated with galli), and a visiting mclaughlin friend and col- laborator, dana miller of the university of washington in seattle, were invited to din- ner at galli’s home. miller and mclaughlin later recalled that while preparing dinner, galli threatened to “destroy” watt. miller recalled him calling watt “a crazy bitch” and vowing to “spend every last dime” to ruin her. the women say galli showed them a handgun and noted that he had a permit to carry it. miller, a lesbian, also told inves- tigators that galli made inappropriate com- ments about her sexuality. galli, now at the university of alabama in birmingham, declined to comment on the dinner party. but he told science: “i have never done anything to any student or any faculty in terms of harassment or retaliation.” he provided an email that mclaughlin sent him the day after the party: “dinner was fantastic. … thank you,” she wrote with a smiley face. in december , a judge dismissed watt’s lawsuit against galli and he was immediately promoted. (watt settled with vanderbilt university, which she had also sued.) miller says she was alarmed by galli’s promotion, and in january reported the alleged events of the july dinner to a vanderbilt administrator. mclaughlin testified in the ensuing investigation, back- ing up miller’s account. in august , investigators determined that the evidence they had obtained could not support a find- ing of harassment, according to a letter to miller from vanderbilt’s equal opportunity, affirmative action, and disability services department (ead). meanwhile, galli alleged to ead investi- gators that mclaughlin was sending derog- atory tweets about unnamed colleagues, including him, from anonymous, multiuser twitter accounts. mclaughlin admitted writing a tweet that predated the dinner party, complaining, “galli has r [grants] and whines about being broke.” a tweet apparently directed at another person— described as the “hateful” principal inves- tigator across the hall—said, “i may stab her today.” mclaughlin told science that she does not recall authoring such a tweet. (four current or former vanderbilt faculty members reported to have clashed with mclaughlin and contacted by science de- clined to comment or did not return inter- view requests.) ead questioned mclaughlin about the tweets, and an associate medical school dean launched a disciplinary investigation of her, according to university documents. during that probe, which stretched from december to april , mclaughlin’s tenure process was frozen. she stopped ph o t o : l a n e t u r n e r / t h e b o s t o n g l o b e / g e t t y i m a g e s published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ february • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org writing grant applications and taking on graduate students, she says; she felt her fu- ture was too uncertain. her lab shrank. “it had a real impact on my research,” she says of the investigation. “my career has been significantly diminished in what should have been the most productive and fun and creative time.” an outside law firm hired by vanderbilt concluded that mclaughlin “more likely than not” had written the “i may stab her” tweet, according to university documents. but the faculty disciplinary committee split two to one in her favor, and administra- tors did not discipline mclaughlin. they restarted her tenure process, and vumc’s executive committee of the executive fac- ulty approved her tenure in summer . but vanderbilt school of medicine dean jeffrey balser asked the committee to re- consider. according to university docu- ments, he circulated the faculty disciplinary report to the committee, which then met in person. this time, it voted unanimously to deny tenure. seven of nine members later said they did not consider the disciplinary report in their decision, according to uni- versity documents. “faculty familiar with the bar at vanderbilt in her department and at the institutional level determined she was up to snuff and voted her up for tenure,” says valina dawson, a neuroscientist at the johns hopkins school of medicine who knows mclaughlin because both are reviewing editors at the journal of neuroscience. “then the dean decided to in- tervene. … you get a bad feeling in your gut about the whole process.” in november , mclaughlin filed a grievance, which is still being consid- ered by a faculty committee. (jeremy berg, editor-in-chief of science in washington, d.c., wrote a letter last fall in support of mclaughlin, saying her activism had “acceler- ated” aaas’s decision to develop a process for potentially stripping fellowships from harass- ers.) a mclaughlin lawyer, ann olivarius of mcallister olivarius in saratoga springs, says mclaughlin’s case “is a perfect example of the tactics that universities so often use to sweep complaints under the rug.” spokespeople for both vanderbilt and vumc said they could not comment on ten- ure decisions or grievances, and vumc de- clined to make balser, now its president and ceo, available to comment. their emailed statement added that, “vumc is committed to establishing and maintaining an open, in- clusive, and equitable environment … [and] fostering an open and civil exchange of di- verse ideas and viewpoints.” now, mclaughlin is waiting to learn what the grievance committee recommends. whether the chancellor and board of trust concur will determine her future at vumc. as her tenure battle continued, mc- laughlin grew more outspoken as fighty squirrel. then, in may , she read an account of alleged sexual harassment spanning years by leading cancer sci- entist inder verma (science, may , p. ). verma, who denied the allegations, resigned from the salk institute for bio- logical studies in san diego, california, in june . with a few clicks, mclaughlin realized that verma remained an nas mem- ber in good standing. that, she says, was when she decided to go public. mclaughlin began to campaign for change from her readily identifiable twit- ter account, @mclneuro. “you cannot actively contribute to further- ing science in america if you have impeded the progress of women by harass- ing, assaulting and retaliating against them. period. kick … verma out of national acad- emy of sciences,” she tweeted days after the story ran online. the next day, she launched a petition that has been signed by peo- ple, urging nas to eject members who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. the next month, nas published a land- mark report documenting high rates of sexual harassment in stem and not- ing that many funding agencies haven’t taken “meaningful action” (science, june , p. ). in august , mclaughlin launched another petition, which has since drawn signatures, urg- ing nih’s collins to deny awards and other privileges to proven harassers. “timesup francis,” it says. when she met with collins last week, mclaughlin says, he apologized for not responding more quickly to sexual misconduct by grantees. “apologies and involving #metoostem survivors are im- portant first steps,” she tweeted alongside a photo of herself with collins. “lots to do.” separately, mclaughlin is keeping the pressure on nas. in december , she tweeted to nas president marcia mcnutt, “why don’t you quit @marcia science and i’ll take over and show some decency?” as her profile rose, mclaughlin found herself receiving thousands of requests for help; since april , she says she has counseled—often by telephone in the wee hours—more than sexual harassment survivors and witnesses. one, debra deloach, is a ph.d. student at the university of bath in the united kingdom whom mclaughlin contacted in december , after deloach tweeted that she had attempted suicide after being sexually harassed. “what she gave me was a sense of empowerment: the ability to nar- rate and write my own story. it helped me to reclaim my sense of agency,” deloach says. mclaughlin makes no apologies for her profane style. “we have faculty members who have grabbed and groped and raped and assaulted and retaliated and dimin- ished women. and they can be teaching your classes. it’s not ok,” she says. but her in-your-face delivery unnerves some establishment supporters. the so- ciety for neuroscience (sfn) gave her an award for “significantly promoting” women at its annual meeting in san di- ego in november and invited her to speak to a virtual conference last month. but after mclaughlin prerecorded her comments, she received a letter from an sfn lawyer disinviting her. “some of the content [in your presentation] may be de- famatory and … could expose the society to potential legal liability,” it said. mclaughlin promptly launched a stream of twitter fire. “too bad @sfntweets kicked me off their gender and diversity panel this week,” she tweeted. “rebels and truth sayers need not speak.” (sfn declined to comment.) mclaughlin says she’s booked with speaking engagements through next fall, and she’s dealing with a legal case: in oc- tober , galli sued her for defamation. but she keeps making people laugh. on the last day of the banbury meet- ing, participants arrived in the confer- ence room to find that the wall photos of famous male scientists had been covered with paper photos of female scientists, fa- mous and not. among them: nobel laure- ates marie curie and carol greider, and bethann mclaughlin. j “we have faculty members who have grabbed and groped and raped and assaulted and retaliated and diminished women. and they can be teaching your classes. it’s not ok.” bethann mclaughlin, vanderbilt university medical center published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ the twitter warrior meredith wadman doi: . /science. . . ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ women and law in south asia vol.:( ) jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - e d i to r ’s i n t r o d u c t i o n women and law in south asia upasana mahanta  · sameena dalwai  · albeena shakil published online: november © o.p. jindal global university (jgu) the theme this special issue of the jindal global law review (jglr) is themed ‘women and law in south asia’. the term ‘south asia’ often evokes a sense of shared civili- zational, cultural and historical moorings including experiences of colonialism, decolonization, the partition and modern nation-state formation. while south asia, a complex geo-political region, is largely viewed as existing ‘elsewhere’, created and sustained mainly by area studies programmes in the west, this special issue com- prises of several contributions which negotiate this complex terrain with refreshing ease. this is significant because the challenges of focusing on south asia are many. for one, within the region itself, south asia remains an under-researched area, with few studies focusing on law and even fewer focusing on women and law. one early volume we could look towards was violence, law and women’s rights in south asia edited by savitri goonesekere in . the collection examined the experi- ences of inheriting legal derivatives of british colonial laws in sri lanka, pakistan and india, often with women being at the heart of the contradiction with ethnic, reli- gious or customary laws. pointing to the “reality of ‘failed’ legal systems,” as far as gender-based violence was concerned, the contributors called for prioritized reforms in accordance with the convention of the elimination of discrimination against upasana mahanta—associate professor, sameena dalwai—associate professor, albeena shakil— associate professor * albeena shakil ashakil@jgu.edu.in upasana mahanta umahanta@jgu.edu.in sameena dalwai sdalwai@jgu.edu.in jindal global law school, sonipat, india savitri goonesekere (ed), violence, law and women’s rights in south asia (sage publications ) . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – women (cedaw) and the convention on the rights of the child (crc). the vol- ume also assessed law as a “double-edged sword” for women. a collection, comparative constitutionalism in south asia, edited by sunil khilnani, vikram raghavan and arun k. thiruvengadam saw the potential of evolv- ing comparative constitutionalism towards “south asia’s own future potential as a region that is more integrated and more at peace with itself.” mark tushnet and madhav khosla in their volume unstable constitutionalism: law and politics in south asia, identified south asia as a region of “vibrant if rambunctious consti- tutionalism,” with “recurring tensions that lie at the intersection of law and poli- tics.” the editors saw constitutional instability as a consequence of socio-political pressures and identified its structures and forms. more recently, a series of eight volumes on “sexual violence and impunity in south asia” has been underway by the delhi-based zubaan publishers. penned on different themes by feminists from india, pakistan, bangladesh, nepal and sri lanka, the series comprising of authored and edited volumes offers invaluable insights that are nation-specific with a scope for comparison. the present volume is a modest step in this continuing direction, with a col- lection of articles, interviews, case notes and book reviews largely engaging with contemporary legal issues that women in south asia encounter. while some of the papers have a broad comparative framework looking at two or more south asian legal contexts, others are located within the domestic legal frameworks of india. written independently, the contributions often speak to each other, evaluating each of the proposed categories of ‘women’, ‘law’ and ‘south asia’ as well as offering prospects of engendering legal reforms and building feminist solidarities. one of the important benchmarks of conceiving south asia is the similarity in the status of women across the region. lived experiences of women in south asia often navi- gate the volatility of individual and group rights, honor and shame, purity and pollu- tion, customary practices and modern citizenship rights, extreme poverty, illiteracy, health vulnerabilities, armed conflict, gender based violence, etc. these negotiations are deeply rooted in the social realities of religion, caste, race, ethnicity, class, age, and disability. while a few contributors have sought to identify the homogeneity in the lived experiences of women in south asia, others have also viewed the cat- egory of women as multiple, changing and contested, deeply interspersed with other forms of social exclusion including caste, class, religion, and sexuality. within this context, the contributions to this volume raise poignant questions on universalism sunil khilnani, vikram raghavan and arun k. thiruvengadam (eds), comparative constitutionalism in south asia (oxford university press ) . mark tushnet and madhav khosla (eds), unstable constitutionalism: law and politics in south asia (cambridge university press ) . ibid . some indicative titles in the zubaan series are: disputed legacies: the pakistan papers; breaching the citadel: the india papers i; the search for justice: the sri lanka papers; fault lines of history: the india papers ii; a difficult transition: the nepal papers; of the nation born: the bangladesh papers; undoing impunity: speech after sexual violence. ibid . chandni ghosh, ‘foreword’. jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – and cultural relativism in law and also navigate the tensions between individual and group rights. moreover, law itself is a complex terrain to navigate in south asia. on the one hand, there is a prevalence of extra-judicial and informal dispute resolution mech- anisms, largely  rooted in patriarchy. on the other, there is a male-centric legal ethos in the formal legal systems that routinely exclude and marginalize women. the formal and the informal, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive and often operate in tandem with each other. this is significant because, in societies where customs are deeply intrinsic to social and political life, states often tend to take on the role of the patriarch. in addition, this exists in a political context where an unprecedented number of women have historically headed governments in the region creating an illusion of considerable political empowerment of women. yet, women in south asia continue to primarily look towards law, and not politics, for redressal. the women’s movements too have put a heavy emphasis on addressing the oppression of women through legislative advancements. while law has been an instrument to perpetuate the dependent status of women as citizens, women have also been using law as a weapon to challenge existing power hierarchies. existing laws may be hostile to women’s interests, appeal to inherent ‘womanly’ qualities, force political subjects to fight as women, but they also end up making concessions to women, albeit reluctantly. rooted largely in a transdisciplinary approach, this volume integrates concep- tual, theoretical and methodological tools, which cut across the disciplinary bounda- ries of the three editors. it has been a truly exciting and inspiring journey for us to work towards putting this issue together, which is a culmination of a series of intense discussions, debates, deliberations and contestations. our “feminist curios- ity” stems from seeking to understand the workings of law in south asia from a woman’s standpoint, pursuing explanations for women’s marginalization within the law and identifying strategies for change. following enloe, we are committed to tak- ing women’s lives seriously, where ‘seriously’ connotes “listening carefully, digging deep, developing a long attention span, being ready to be surprised… a feminist curiosity finds all women worth thinking about, paying close attention to…” in a vitiated indian context of muscular majoritarian assertions, the loom- ing  specter of an exclusionary national registry of citizens and the citizenship amendment bill, the recent ayodhya verdict undermining secularism, growing militarization and subversion of democratic rights in kashmir, uncertain future of the naga peace talks, growing discourse of claims to victimhood by dominant caste groupings and a creeping threat to constitutional foundations, working on this vol- ume has encouraged us towards resilience and hope. our investment in women, law and south asia is not just a matter of academic concern, but also stems from our commitment to these categories as potentially  vital to contesting dominant narra- tives. while women continue to remain a tangible yet elusive category, the promise cynthia enloe, the curious feminist: searching for women in a new age of empire (university of california press ). ibid . jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – of law persists as a daunting prospect rather than an assurance, and south asia seems to exist more elsewhere than within the region, our attempt in this volume is to present a thought-provoking collection that may inform contemporary debates. we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the  people who encouraged, supported and guided us in putting this special issue together - professor vish- was devaiah for bringing the three editors together and helping us in conceptual- izing the issue, professor oishik sircar and arun sagar for their sustained support throughout this journey and for being always accessible, professor saptarshi man- dal for some very useful ideas, all our contributors for their time and effort and the faith they reposed on us, all our reviewers (professor dipika jain, professor keerty nakray, professor mohsin alam bhat,  professor rohini sen, professor rashmi raman, professor alliya anjum, professor shama banoo hussain abbasi) for giv- ing us their valuable time, and last but not the least all our student reviewers for their tireless work, which has made this special issue possible. we sincerely hope that the readers of this volume will benefit from the collection as much as we have. notes on contributions this special issue carries seven papers, two interviews, two case notes and two book reviews. the very first paper by jane krishnadas draws upon her fieldwork during a five-year rehabilitation period following the maharashtra earthquake in india. she problematizes the conception of women survivors as homogenous legal sub- jects, who in fact negotiate a complex terrain of justice and law between “families, [communities], civil society, public, private and third sector agents within state and the international community.” her paper proposes a transformative framework with the creation of women’s agency, wherein victims become survivors, beneficiaries turn into contributors and objects transform into agents of change. theoretically examining feminist legal strategies from the east to the west, krishnadas argues for a focus on the individual woman’s stand, experience and response to everyday crisis instead of trying to construct women’s identity within static legal systems and domi- nant discourses. theoretically engaging with various comparative legal approaches in their paper, namely, third world approaches to international law (twail), feminist approaches to international law (ftail), sex-based (sbd) and gender-based (gbd) discrimina- tion frameworks, as well as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ international laws, sai ramani gari- mella and parthiban b. underscore the shortcomings of understanding discrimina- tion against women in south asia. freedom of religion or belief, they argue, is a frequent resort of states in the region to resist international laws guaranteeing the rights of women. the paper examines various personal laws and customary prac- tices prevalent in bangladesh, india, pakistan, afghanistan and sri lanka, which are steeped in deep gender bias. the authors argue that the defense of freedom of reli- gion vis-à-vis women in the region is nothing but a euphemism for religious misog- yny, which remains the key impediment in the path of engendering legal reforms in south asia. jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – saumya uma’s paper explores major twenty-first century struggles on issues of violence against women in the region, namely, domestic violence, honor killings, acid violence, chhaupadi, marital rape, two-finger tests, extra-judicial punishments, informal dispute resolution and justice for women in conflict situations in india, pakistan, bangladesh, nepal and sri lanka. uma traces similarities in the strug- gles of respective women’s movements, each of which adopt political, democratic and legal strategies against both state as well as non-state actors. identifying parallel issues, similar roadblocks and legislative debates, albeit in different sequences, her paper makes a case for drawing upon more successful struggles from across neigh- boring borders for building upon the potential for “cooperation, solidarity and sister- hood” among women in south asia. taking another route towards the universalism versus cultural relativism debate, bhumika nanda in her paper evaluates india’s response to the latest round of the universal periodic review (upr) conducted by the united nations high commis- sioner for human rights in , wherein only of the recommendations were accepted by india. focusing especially on those pertaining to discriminatory customary practices, sexual violence, sexual orientation and gender identity of lgbt citizens, nanda notes a contradiction between the response of the indian gov- ernment and the indian courts. court judgements and rulings, she argues, are bet- ter at striving towards a “minimum core” rights approach, whereas legislations and government policies betray greater resistance to universal human rights paradigms. with women’s movements also negotiating these contradictions, nanda argues for a decisive revision in the approach of the indian government towards international human rights. devyani srivastava devotes her attention to examining another wing of the state, i.e., the indian police, more specifically, its recent policy focus on increasing the rep- resentation of women. her paper evaluates different aspects like the differential res- ervation policies for women in intake, role of women in dedicated units, all-women police stations or women pcr vans as well as transfers, postings and promotions for women. the apparent “gendering” of the police force, she argues, is actually based on reinforcing stereotypes, discrimination and exclusion, thereby limiting and defin- ing the scope of women’s work within the police. she makes a case for gender-main- streaming through the introduction of substantive changes in organizational cultures with a comprehensive focus on the inclusion of women in order to create more effec- tive and gender-sensitive policing systems. sai thakur and shewli kumar’s paper locates sexual harassment in academic spaces in the backdrop of falling female labour force participation rates, which in the south asian region are among the lowest in the world. with both india and pakistan sharing the lowest rates in the region at per cent each, the paper examines the paradox of the overwhelming bulk of women’s work being informal while the law focuses on formal work places. the authors compare how similar laws formulated first in pakistan and then in india required subsequent policy revisions to address sexual harassment in higher education institutions (hei). the paper then shifts focus to delineate first-hand experiences of the challenges and remedies for creating more effective redressal processes in hei’s in india. jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – taking this conversation forward, sandhya gawali’s paper compares the recent evolution of two ongoing young women’s movements based in heis in india–pin- jra tod (break the cage) and #metoo campaigns. while the pinjra tod campaign made the demand for the creation of internal complaints committees (icc) within institutions, the #metoo campaign has been critical of iccs and their futility. trac- ing fractures based on digital divide, generation gap and most significantly, between dalit/bahujan/adivasi non-binary feminists and cis-savarna feminists, gawali seeks to reconcile the struggle over the legitimacy of feminist knowledge between the two divergent trends. sharing social-media and interview-based insights by young women and underscoring the need to reform the due-processes of iccs, her paper proposes that a focus on “power” in heis may provide the scope to understand the common angst of young women. the volume also carries two interviews: one with prabha kotiswaran and another with v. geetha. in her conversation with oishik sircar, kotiswaran expresses skepti- cism about the categories of both women and south asia. sharing her experiences of research across three continents into areas like sex-work, anti-trafficking and rape laws, she argues against the possibility of both avoiding men or transgender persons for engagement, and maintaining any strict locational focus. kotiswaran’s reflections on inadequate feminist scholarship in india on domestic work or social reproduction, “invisible, unremunerated, and unrecognized unpaid” work in the academia, the pros and cons of “governance feminism,” recent #metoo mobilizations, the lived experi- ence of being a lawyer and a feminist, rethinking materialist feminism with greater cooperation between class and gender movements, will be exciting for any reader. bringing forth the intersections of caste, gender and power in south asia, v. gee- tha in conversation with the three editors, locates questions relating to work, family, kin and society, keeping endogamy as the bedrock of her analysis. dealing with a wide array of issues ranging from the khairlanji murders, the unnao rape case, the shopian rape and murder, the vachathi mass assault of adivasi women, as well as laws like the afspa and the uapa that are abused and misused, or the prevention of atrocities act against scs and sts, which is underused, geetha draws attention to the particularities of sexual impunity in india. her theoretically rich reflections on the evolution and trajectory of dalit feminisms offer invaluable insights into under- standing the relationship between women and law in india. the volume also offers two case notes. nehmat kaur’s note on hadiya discusses the infamous case of a  year-old hindu woman who married a muslim man and converted to islam. even with subsequent redressal by the supreme court, the courts were paternalistic and treated an adult woman as a vulnerable subject without the capacity to consent. they overreached their jurisdiction in the context of the myth of ‘love jihad’ and suspicions towards the muslim community. eysha marysha has written about the case of independent thought v. union of india in which exception of section  of the indian penal code has been challenged. this provision made an exception from punishment for statutory rape for the husband of minor bride (between the ages of to  years), as opposed to rape of a minor child, not being a wife, as per the protection of children from sexual offences act, . despite rape laws being amended by the government, the deliberate choice to retain this pro- vision of under-age marital rape required the intervention of the supreme court to jindal global law review ( ) ( ): – read down the said provision to rectify the artificial difference created between a married and an unmarried minor girl. in addition, this volume includes two interesting book reviews of anita ghai’s edited volume disability in south asia: knowledge and experience ( ) and laila ashrafun’s women and domestic violence in bangladesh: seeking a way out of the cage ( ). deblina dey and saptarshi mandal, through their respective reviews, offer critical insights into the socio-legal lives of women in south asia. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 	women and law in south asia 	 the theme 	 notes on contributions     opinion  sexual harassment in academia: a matter of power  (imbalance)    today is the day julia has been dreaming about since the first day of her phd program – it’s                                      interview day at the american economics association (aaea) annual conference. as her phone                          plays her familiar morning alarm, julia jumps out of bed, bright-eyed and hopeful for the                                 interviews she has scheduled for the day. she irons her power skirt and navy blouse carefully,                                ensuring she leaves no creases uncreased. she reviews her notes on each school, each committee                              member, and each job requirement, preparing her responses just enough to sound polished but not                              too much as to sound over rehearsed. she slips on her special interview heels that give her that extra                                      boost of confidence and height she likes and walks out of her hotel room – shutting the door behind                                      her and with it, imagining the start of her future as an assistant professor of economics.     short title  sexual harassment in academia  long title  sexual harassment in academia: a matter of power (imbalance)  authors  kelsey medeiros​   author  affiliation  ​ the university of nebraska omaha  author bios    kelsey medeiros is an assistant professor of management at the university of nebraska at                            omaha where she researchers workplace troublemakers. she is also the co-founder of                        whisper coalition​, a research group focused on sexual harassment, and ​ethics advantage​,                        a consulting firm working on improving workplace ethics.  author social  links  kelsey medeiros: ​twitter​ – ​linkedin​ – ​website  date published  march   doi  . /zenodo.   cite as  (apa)  mederios, k. ( ). sexual harassment in academia: a matter of power (imbalance).                        elephant in the lab​. doi: ​ . /zenodo.   http://www.elephantinthelab.org/ https://www.whisperco.org/about-us.html https://www.whisperco.org/about-us.html https://www.ethicsadvantageconsulting.com/ https://www.ethicsadvantageconsulting.com/ https://twitter.com/drkelc https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelsey-medeiros- b / https://www.kelseymedeiros.com/ https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  julia walks straight to her first interview which she finds a few doors down from her own hotel                                    room. after a brief knock, a man opens the door to a hotel room identical to hers. he greets her and                                          she feels the butterflies of meeting a scholar whose research she cites regularly and who is                                considered a giant in the field of economics. she has admired his work since early in her phd                                    training and has dreamed about the chance to discuss it with him.   as she enters, she scans the room and notices chair which has been turned from the hotel desk to                                        face the edge of the bed. the committee member takes his seat and gestures toward the bed. julia had                                      read about women who had been asked to sit on the hotel bed, and some even asked to lie down,                                        during their job interviews. she also read that some had been verbally and physically propositioned                              during their interviews! the stories were legendary whispers in her women in economics                          networking groups. but that was the “old days” she had told herself. she hadn’t expected to find                                  herself in this compromising position in . #metoo had been making headlines for some time                              now and university faculty would have surely been paying attention.   she took her seat on the bed. she instantly felt uncomfortable as she sat there, the man staring at her                                        from his char. her thoughts became scrambled as she thought about the stories she had read about                                  and whether or not the same might happen to her – what will i do? how can i get out? i can’t make                                              a bad impression on this guy – this is my career. breathe julia.   she misses the interviewer’s question. “i’m sorry, could you repeat that?” she asks.   looking slightly annoyed, the committee member repeats his question, but julia still struggles to                            focus. she responds to the question, but fails to make her point clearly, jumbling her words and                                  forgetting key details. the mental notes she knew so well just minutes ago in her own hotel room,                                    now seem buried under anxieties and fear for her own wellbeing.   ***  some may read julia’s story and think she should have just rolled with the punches – a bed is just                                        a big, squishy chair with pillows. if anything, she should feel thankful that she was given such a                                    throne for her interview.   for others, the power dynamics in julia’s story are palpable. many will see that what some may                                  construe as a harmless situation, could quickly turn harmful. indeed, stories and research on                            power dynamics in academia reveal that situations like julia’s can and do turn precarious, at                              times resulting in sexual harassment and even assault.   sexual harassment on its own is problematic and worth addressing. however, the issue                          compounds when one considers who the typical target of sexual harassment is. research tells us                              that individuals who are lower in a status hierarchy and those that are unrepresented are more                                likely to be the targets of harassment behavior (e.g., harned et al., ). in the academy, this                                  means that women in, or in contention for, junior faculty positions are disproportionately                          elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  targeted when it comes to sexual harassment. from an intersectional lens, bipoc and lgbtqia+                            individuals in the academy may be particularly at risk of sexual harassment.   the research on sexual harassment and career trajectory is clear – when someone is harassed,                              they are more likely to leave an organization and with some leaving the field altogether                              (mclaughlin et al, ; medeiros & griffith, ). by failing to address sexual harassment among                              faculty in our institutions, we are systematically pushing these groups out of our institutions. we                              are pushing bright minds, new ideas, and critical perspectives out of our classrooms and out of                                our labs. in a time when universities are increasingly committing to creating inclusive spaces,                            they are undermining their efforts by not addressing the systemic issues within academia that                            perpetuate harassment.  is sexual harassment in the academy a problem?   yes. research on sexual harassment in the academy suggests that it remains a prevalent problem.                              in a study examining incidences of sexual harassment in the workplace across private,                            public, academic, and military industries, ilies et al ( ) found academia to have the second                              highest rates of harassment, second only to the military. more recently, ​a report by the the                                national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine (nasem) summarized the persistent                      problem of sexual harassment in academia with regard to faculty-student harassment, as well as                            faculty-faculty harassment. to find more evidence of this issue, one can also turn to twitter - as                                  times higher education highlighted in their blog​.   there are several systemic reasons why sexual harassment may be particularly prevalent in                          academia. as recognized by the nasem’s report on sexual harassment in the academy, these                              include academia’s gender imbalance and its hierarchical power structure. research suggests                      that sexual harassment is more likely to occur in male-dominated organizations (e.g., hegewisch                          & o’farrell, ; medeiros & griffith, ). although academia has made advances with regard                            to increasing the number of women in faculty positions, it largely remains a male-dominated                            industry, especially in more senior faculty positions (bacchi, ; diamond et al., ; o’connor,                            ; zhuge et al., ). additionally, the hierarchical nature of academia, as well as its over                                  emphasis on “star researchers” creates an environment in which sexual harassment by those in                            power may perpetuate.   along these lines, safe reporting mechanisms must be put in place to encourage junior faculty                              members to bring forward issues that challenge the extant hierarchy. this requires clear policies                            and the communication of these policies. research from business, however, also teaches us that                            comprehensive protections must be in place for those who do report. for example, in an                              experimental study, hart ( ) found that women who self reported sexual harassment were less                            likely to be recommended for promotion compared to women with identical qualifications. the                          failure to set up systems that protect those that report sexual harassment and challenge                            academia’s hierarchy, enables a self-perpateuating cycle of power to flourish. is it really such a                              elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/sexual-harassment-in-academia https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/sexual-harassment-in-academia https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/twitter-responses-show-sexual-harassment-rife-academic-conferences https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  surprise then that researchers such as kirkner, lorenz, and mazar ( ) found that sexual                            harassment largely goes unreported?   what constitutes sexual harassment?   definitions of sexual harassment are similar across borders generally including both verbal and                          physical manifestations. see below for examples of how it is defined around the world:  the ​us equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) defines sexual harassment as                      follows:   “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical                        conduct of a sexual nature.”   the ​uk government​ defines sexual harassment as:   “any unwanted conduct of sexual nature that makes you feel intimidated, degraded,                        humiliated, or offended.”   in ​japan​, harassment is defined more broadly as “power harassment” or “pawa hara,” which                            includes:  “physical abuse, emotional abuse deliberately isolating an employee, overworking an                    employee, consistently assigning work below an employee’s skill level, and infringing on                        an employee’s privacy.   the ​south african government​ lists the following as their definition of sexual harassment:   “( ) sexual harassment is unwanted conduct of a sexual nature. the unwanted nature                          of sexual harassment distinguishes it from behaviour that is welcome and mutual. ( )                          sexual attention becomes sexual harassment if: (a) the behaviour is persisted in,                        although a single incident of harassment can constitute sexual harassment; and/or(b)                      the recipient has made it clear that the behaviour is considered offensive; and/or(c)                          the perpetrator should have known that the behaviour is regarded as unacceptable”  cross culturally, it appears we can agree - sexual harassment invovles unwanted verbal and                            phsyical abuse.  why power matters for sexual harassment  the role of power in perpetuating sexual harassment can be viewed through two perspectives.                            the dominant theory of power in sexual harassment is that of the vulnerable-victim, which                            argues that workers in more vulnerable positions or with less? power are more likely to be the                                  targets of sexual harassment behavior (e.g., wilson & thompson, )   elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/new-anti-harassment-law-introduced-in-japan https://www.labourguide.co.za/general/ -code-of-good-practice-on-sexual-harassment https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  emerging from this line of thought, a common solution touted to reduce sexual harassment is                              then to increase the number of women in power. however, one must also consider theories of                                power threat, which have received considerable support (e.g., de coster, estes, & mueller, ).                            the power-threat model suggests that sexual harassment may be a reaction to an individual                            challenging their status position. for instance, there is evidence to suggest that women in                            leadership positions experience more sexual harassment compared to women in                    non-authoritative positions (mclaughlin uggen, & blackstone, ). this may be due, in part, to                            a greater understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment. however, as argued by                        mclaughlin et al ( ), sexual harassment may also “serve as an equalizer against women in                              power, motivated more by control and domination than sexual desire.” this was also an effect dr.                                jennifer griffith and i observed in our analysis of women in surgery and their experiences with                                sexual harassment (medeiros & griffith, ).   with this in mind, women face a double-bind with regard to power and sexual harassment. they                                are at risk of harassment given their typically underrepresented nature in academia, but as more                              women enter the academy, their very presence challenges the hierarchy, which again, puts them                            at risk of sexual harassment.  how academia responds to power matters   how leaders in the academic community respond to power abuses / sexual harassment sends a                              signal to others as to what the culture will and will not tolerate. it is then logical that to reduce                                        sexual harassment in the academy, we must call on our leaders to take action against this                                behavior. the national science report ( ) noted the importance of these actions in creating a                              culture that others perceive to be intolerant of sexual harassment and thereby reducing the                            behavior.   while likely an obvious solution to many readers, the reality is that leaders often fail to take                                  action against perpetrators of sexual harassment in the workplace and specifically, the academy.                          one reason we often see these behaviors go unpunished is due to a perpetrator’s accumulated                              idiosyncrasy credits (griffith & medeiros, ). hollander ( ) coined the term idiosyncrasy                        credits to refer to allowances made for deviating from the norm. specifically, credits are                            accumulated through good performance and high status and spent by engaging in idiosyncratic                          behavior. when someone with little to no credit behaves idiosyncratically, the behavior will likely                            be viewed as unacceptable and are likely to face consequences. in contrast, when someone who                              has built up a substantial amount of credit behaves idiosyncratically, they are often given a “pass.”   when it comes to sexual harassment, the use of idiosyncratic credits has been widely cited, albeit                                through different terms. for instance, when susan fowler left uber, she noted that her claims of                                sexual harassment were dismissed because the harasser was a “high performer” (scheiber &                          creswell, ). when considering the role of power in sexual harassment, it would be remiss of                                us to not consider the power of the perpetrator themselves. in academia, this power most likely                                elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  comes from their “star” power as researchers or teachers. theories of idiosyncrasy credits would                            suggest that when these academic stars sexually harass others, the academy is likely to dismiss                              accusations, “let them slide,” or respond with minimal punishments.   the trio of the vulnerable-victim model, the power threat model, and idiosyncrasy credits then                            suggests a cyclical pattern in which women are more likely to be targeted both for their lack of,                                    and for their possession of power, while their perpetrator may go unpunished for the very same                                possession of power. academia’s hierarchical nature and gender imbalance is systematically                      increasing women’s likelihood of being harassed and ultimately, leaving the academy altogether.  what we can do   it’s always a soul crushing exercise to lay out just how systemic this issue is in our community.                                    but there is certainly hope if we are willing to see the complexity of the issue and to address it                                        head on. but this will take work and is certainly not something that will be solved by an annual                                      -hour sexual harassment training. the system requires a complete overhaul.    it’s also worth noting that this is not something that can be fixed by teaching women, poc, and                                    lgbtqia+ to avoid harassment or by “empowering” to fight back. sure, defending and                          protecting yourself is great - but what if we created a space where groups of people didn’t have                                    to protect themselves from harassment on a regular basis? what if we created a space where we                                  could all use our cognitive resources to contribute to scientific innovation and student                          development instead of how to avoid being harassed?  i don’t know about you, but i prefer the latter.   so how do we do it? what can we do?   the national academy of sciences report notes important recommendations for enacting                        change in our institutions. although each are equally important and i encourage readers to                            review the report in full themselves, i want to raise recommendations relevant to the preceding                                discussion on power.   . change the culture  an organization’s culture includes both tangible and intangible artifacts. with hierarchy                      in mind, the national academy of science recommends diffusing the traditional                      hierarchical cultural structures by creating mentoring networks and committee-based                  advising. further, shifting reward structures away from those singularly focused on                      publications or grants may encourage a more holistic view of faculty that spreads                          rewards throughout as opposed to making the academic rich richer. with regard to the                            tangible, it is also important for academia to examine how practices, policies, and                          procedures hold up the hierarchy and promote sexual harassment. when it comes to                          julia’s story, for instance, the practice of conducting interviews in hotel rooms created a                            elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  space in which sexual harassment could more easily occur. along these lines, recent work                            by drs. jennifer hirsch and shanus khan (sexual citizens, ) on the role physical                            spaces play in establishing power dynamics and perpetuating sexual assault should be                        considered.    . actually listen to women  it is not enough to promote women. we must also listen to their viewpoints. too often                                we see women placed in roles as tokens, or who are placed in roles and asked to conform                                    to the existing norms. women should be placed in these roles to challenge the status quo                                and to raise important issues that we may otherwise go unnoticed. with regard to julia’s                              example, for instance, men in higher status positions may fail to recognize the                          compromising experience of women interviewing in a hotel room. in fact, it was due to                              the actions of two women, kathryn holston and anna stansbury, that in , the assa                              banned the use of hotel rooms for these meetings.   . hold people accountable  in any culture change initiative, it is imperative that leaders reward the desired behavior                            and punish the undesirable. in this instance, leaders must not fall prey to idiosyncrasy                            credits, and stand up against those who engage in sexual harassment – regardless of their                              performance. of course, due process and appropriate investigative procedures should be                      followed. once a conclusion has been reached, however, leaders must act and signal to                            the community that sexual harassment will not be tolerated in the academy.   if we want to truly make academia a physically safe space for all, we need to address the root                                      problem: power. what will you do?   elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://doi.org/ . /zenodo.   opinion  references  bacchi, c. 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( ). the economic and career effects fo sexual harassment on                                  working women. gender & society, ( ), - . ​https://doi.org/ . /    medeiros, k. e., & griffith, j. a. ( ). double-edged scalpels: the trials and triumphs of women surgeons.                                  narrative inquiry in bioethics, ( ), - .​ . /nib. .   national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine ( ). sexual harassment in academic science,                          engineering, and medicine. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/sexual-harassment-in-academia  o’connor, p. ( ). why is it so difficult to reduce gender inequality in male-dominated higher educational                                organizations? a feminist institutional perspective. interdisciplinary science reviews, ( ), - .                        https://doi.org/ . / . .     scheiber, n., & creswell, j. ( ). sexual harassment cases show the ineffectiveness of going to hr.                                https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/sexual-harassment-human-resources.html  hirsch, j. s. & khan, s. r. ( ). sexual citizens: a landmark study of sex, pwoer, and assautl on campus.   wilson, f., & thompson, p. ( ). sexual harassment as an exercise of power. gender, work, & organization, ( ),                                    - . ​https://doi.org/ . / - .   zhuge, y., kaufman, j., simeone, d. m., chen, h., & velazquez, o. c. ( ). is there still a glass ceiling for women                                            in academic surgery? annals of surgery, ( ), - . . /sla. b e   elephant in the lab | doi: ​ . /zenodo. ​ | www.elephantinthelab.org  https://doi.org/ . % f https://doi.org/ . /acm. https://doi.org/ . /iop. . https://doi.org/ . % f https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/ . /h https://doi.org/ . /j. - . .tb .x https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . % f https://doi.org/ . % f https://doi.org/ . /nib. . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / - . https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. s at u r a vol . makes it possible to locate book studies-relevant topics within that triangle. literary book awards would be accurately located somewhere in the middle. they are, ideally, all about the literary quality of the texts. however, the winners are selected by humans, who are rarely unbiased, objective judges. conse- quently, it is not solely literary merit that wins books prizes. moreover, as every bookshop visitor will have noticed, winning prizes has an almost immediate effect on the appearance of the winning book and sometimes even on the whole oeuvre of the winning author. stickers or revised cover designs point to the fact that the author is a prize recipient. brief history of prize culture it is neither a surprise nor a secret that awards are used heavily as a marketing tool and hence influ- ence reception on several levels. in the twenty-first century, prizes have become ubiquitous, and it is hard not to become cynical about them. award cat- egories can range from vital contributions to world peace to “outstanding hairstyling for a single-cam- era series”. within this prize culture, it can seem like a rarity to not have won an award, making the whole awarding idea feel somewhat pointless. james f. english, however, in his seminal monograph about prize culture, warns about such a cynical view and claims that there is a logic to this proliferation of prizes. the modern rise of cultural prizes was kicked off in with the creation of the nobel prize for literature. as english states: “announced in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, the nobel seized the collective imagination with sufficient force on us and created a curious logic of prolifera- tion” ( ). just a few years after the first nobel cer- book studies and book awards in , the controversial novel we need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver was published. it caused a major dispute, especially in the united states of america, since it addressed the sensitive issue of school shootings. also shattering the last taboo of motherhood, as the british telegraph put it, the novel tells the story of a mother who does not connect emotionally with her son and blames him for her failed career and marriage (“controversial”). although provocative in itself, it was the book’s win- ning the “women’s prize for fiction” (wpff) which acted as a catalyst for the controversy. not only did the novel now reach a bigger audience, but the prize obviously rewarded authors writing about shocking topics. awarded to women writers since , the prize had already been controversial for years at the time of shriver’s win and once again proved to spark gender debates. book studies seems to be a good point of de- parture to discuss the wpff and its controversies in an academic way. this discipline, once famously de- scribed as “interdisciplinarity run riot” (darnton ) nowadays engages in the production, distribution and reception of books, as well as with all possible influences, be they economic, political, sociocultur- al, religious or otherwise. in a more recent approach to illustrate the boundaries, but also opportunities, of book studies, leslie howsam offered a simple dia- gram, depicting the discipline as a triangle with the cornerstones ‘bibliography’ (the primary focus on documents and objects), ‘history’ (focus on agen- cy, power and experience) and ‘literature’ (focus on texts and criticism) (howsam ). the diagram to avoid confusion and for the sake of consistency, this arti- cle refers to this prize as w pf f, no matter which sponsor was named in the title. the women’s prize for fiction and book studies simon rosenberg s at u r a vol . [p]ublishers were threatening to stop nominating books; people invited to serve as judges were routinely declining to do so; maschler insisted on acting like the chair of the management committee while the actual chair resigned; the book trust was abruptly brought in to assume administrative responsibility (though they had never administered a prize); and the sponsor, though committed to an initial seven years of funding, was already making sounds of an early exit. (english - ) so why is it that the booker prize has become so important despite decades of scandal? according to english, this question is already the answer. he quotes bourdieu, who stated that “scandal is the instrument par excellence of symbolic action” (qtd. in english ). one thing that scandals produce is awareness, a necessary condition for sticking out and staying in business in a world filled with priz- es. and the booker prize has had its scandals: from winners accusing the prize’s main sponsor of having exploited their workers in a postcolonial framework (john berger), to shortlisted authors demanding guarantees that they will win as a prerequisite that they show up at the ceremony (anthony burgess); from former jurors of the judging panel complain- ing about their fellow judges (a. l. kennedy et al), to the complaint by media outlets that the shortlist was ‘too readable’ ( ). and only recently it was made public that the winner in was decided by the flip of a coin. in september , the man booker prize foundation re- leased a series of archival inter views that revealed that david storey’s novel saville was chosen this way due to judges being unable to find a compromise (flood). emony in stockholm, both the goncourt and fem- ina literary prizes were founded in france. during the same time period, joseph pulitzer declared his intention to launch prizes to honour outstanding work in journalism and literature in the usa. while the nobel may mark the dawning of a new age in the history of awards, it needs to be stressed that cultural prizes have existed for mil- lennia, dating back to ancient greece in the late sixth century bc. apart from that, more modern forms, such as those awarded by universities and royal academies from the seventeenth century on- ward, have always displayed a tendency to prolifer- ate through imitation and differentiation (english ). what occurred with the explosion of prizes in the twentieth century is quite remarkable and it in- volved considerable innovation on the part of spon- sors and administrators. however, in their most ba- sic ideas, these developments are consistent with long-standing cultural practices. the most basic goals of literary prizes are their social, representative and cultural functions. they support the author and the awarding institu- tion with symbolic, economic and cultural capital. at the same time, they promote and support lan- guage and literature of a specific region and/or cul- tivation of specific genres. obviously, literary prizes vary in prestige and, even though there are no clear- cut categories, the factors that usually influence prestige are tradition, spatial concept, the econom- ic endowment, the award ceremony, prestige of pre- vious winners and the attention of the public and media. an excellent example is the british (man) booker prize, first of all, because it is one of, if not the most important literary prize in the united kingdom. more interestingly, though, is that fact that there was no obvious reason why it turned out to become this flagship of prizes. indeed, its initial years were rocky. having studied the minutes of committee meetings and private correspondences of people within the sphere of the booker prize, en- glish compared his findings with a black-box tran- script of a crashed plane: s at u r a vol . more won the prize for her novel a spell of winter and took home ‘bessie’, a bronze sculpture created specifically for the prize, along with the impressive gbp , prize money. in fact, this endowment made the wpff the most lucrative prize for literary awards in britain, with the booker prize lagging be- hind at gbp , and the whitbread award at gbp , . some male authors felt left out and described themselves as victims of sexism, since their gender made them ineligible for such a lucrative award. sales fig- ures of a spell of winter quadru- pled, and even the shortlisted novel spinsters by pa- gan kennedy witnessed a decisive increase in sales, from to , copies sold (zangen - ). if the wpff wanted to raise awareness for women’s writing, then it certainly succeeded. however, it soon became apparent that an anonymous private sponsor would not suffice in the long run. after all, supporting a literary award is more than paying the prize money. in the years to come, the wpff successfully convinced cellular phone service company orange to sponsor the prize. according to english, orange invested a quarter mil- lion pounds annually for the first few years to cov- er expenses for various sorts of promotions, book club tie-ins and so on. briefly changing its name to ‘orange broadband prize for fiction’ from to , the prize had orange as a main sponsor for over seventeen years. after that, the prize was sole- ly sponsored by the liqueur brand baileys for four years. since , the prize has been supported by a family of sponsors including baileys, natwest, de- loitte, and, beginning in , global tv production company fremantle. instead of naming itself after one sponsor, the prize has been known as ‘women’s prize for fiction’ since . creating a literary book award and restrict- ing it to one gender, rather than one genre, lan- guage or country, was bound to be controversial. even after the booker prize raised their endowment to gbp , , it was still discussed whether the prize was, in essence, sexist, because it disregard- history of women’s prize for fiction another scandalous situation occurred in , when the booker shortlist consisted of martin amis, roddy doyle, rohinton mistry, timothy mo, ben okri and william trevor. it was this shortlist that provid- ed the impetus to create one of the most controver- sially discussed literary book prizes of the last twenty years. by being ex- clusively male, the above-mentioned list underlined the general pattern that female authors were, at least seemingly, neglected within the lit- erary establishment. it is estimated, for example, that during the year of the infamous shortlist, about per cent of published novels had been written by women. despite this, not one woman made it to the shortlist of the most important british literary book award. a group of women (and men) working in the industry — authors, publishers, journalists, etc. — discussed the issue after the infamous all-male booker shortlist of . the conclusion was that women’s literary achievements were often not ac- knowledged by the major literary prizes. to correct the situation and at the same time create awareness of it, an award was to be established that would be judged solely by and awarded to women. the entry rules were simple: any novel written by a woman and originally published in the united kingdom in english was eligible (“rules”). the prize was planned to be awarded for the first time in . however, public controversy was huge and criticism about such an undertaking was so fierce that the initial sponsor of the prize, pen manufacturer mitsubishi, allegedly withdrew its support after a column writ- ten by simon jenkins, former editor of the times, called the prize sexist (zangen ). two years later, with female but otherwise anonymous sponsorship, the prize was awarded for the first time. helen dun- this was not an isolated case where female participation was seemingly neglected in prize culture. the booker prize saw merely one woman on the shortlist, and the eventual winner was not one, but two men (michael ondaatje and barr y unsworth). the first female whitbread award winner was announced nine years after its inception. the wpff seeks to “celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing.” s at u r a vol . are better writers than women. this statement, as misogynistic as it sounds, was the one given by a. s. byatt. even worse, the juries of the first two years of the prize grudgingly had to admit that the overall quality of the novels entered by publishers were far from excellent. two judges were quoted saying that many, mainly british, entries could be described as “abysmal,” “obscene” or “self-obsessed” (zangen ). was the prize proving that female writing was, in fact, inferior to men’s writing? at the core of this controversy about the wpff seems to be one word: accessibility. most priz- es have a specific claim that sums up their chief goals. whereas the booker uses the words “fiction at its finest” to describe its intentions, the wpff seeks to “celebrate excellence, originality and accessibil- ity in women’s writing.” obviously, “accessibility” does not refer to the level of difficulty in obtaining a copy of the novel. rather, it comments on the read- ability of the text. even though it would be a falla- cy to assume that a hard, uncomfortable read is a sign for high literary quality, referring to readable, accessible literature was seen synonymously with low- to middlebrow reading that does not challenge the reader and sticks to rather successful formulas for bestsellers that can be enjoyed by a wide audi- ence. it almost seemed like a contradictory claim. how can something be excellent and also accessi- ble? the notion seemed to underline the tendency that women writers were unable to compete with serious male writing. rather infamously, dorothea tanning’s novel chasm: a weekend was allegedly not considered for the prize in its first year because it was not “accessible” enough. it did, however, gar- ner rave reviews in various media outlets (turner ). literary prizes can influence the literary field of cul- tural production, which is characterized by a highly dynamic structure consisting of processes of inter- action and competition for certain positions within the field. the spectrum of literature could be divid- ed into two extreme ranges: from “almost no audi- ence and no economic profit” or “art for art’s sake,” it may be relevant, though, to state that she did win the booker prize before that statement in . ed men. in , for example, tim lott wrote in the telegraph that the wpff is a ‘sexist con-trick’, stat- ing that underrepresented groups among the win- ners of the two most important british book prizes, like white working class or disabled writers, do not have a prize for themselves. he concluded that the prize was anachronistic and sexist and “it should be shunned — or, at the very least, mocked merci- lessly” (lott). even though it might be only a little surprising to hear such a statement from a male perspective in a rather conservative publication, it was much more surprising to hear female voic- es also uttering fierce criticism about a prize that was established with a feminist agenda. a. s. byatt, author of the novel possession, made it clear that she would not wish for her works to be considered for the wpff and stressed that this was her “deep- est feminist emotion” since this prize would, in her opinion, ghettoise women. in a similar vein, and probably even more controversial, germaine greer, one of the leading voices of the second-wave femi- nist movement, stated her dismay. she sarcastical- ly commented that soon somebody would found a prize for writers with red hair (bedell). if the prize for women was being attacked by strong, female, feminist voices, something must have gone wrong. crux of the matter: accessibility statistically speaking, roughly per cent of all shortlisted authors of the booker prize from its in- ception in until were female, and per cent of all booker winners were female despite the fact that per cent of published authors were women. let us now assume that, rather idealistical- ly, literary prizes are only awarded to truly superior literature (whatever that is). following those two statements, logic dictates basically two possible explanations: first, women were being discriminat- ed against. if this is true, then the wpff works as a corrective measure by applying positive discrimina- tion to create affirmative action and rectify a deeply sexist framework within the publishing industry. a second, much more controversial, explanation: men s at u r a vol . it is not the intention of this article to an- swer the pressing questions that arise after having summarized the history of the wpff. rather, it aims to achieve two goals: first, to stress the relevance of the questions by (re)stating them clearly: was or is there still a need for a women’s prize for fiction or is it indeed a sexist con-trick? did or does it achieve what it was supposed to be doing? does it create awareness without ghettoising women? and more generally: is there such a thing as “women’s writ- ing” and if so, what is it? is the novel we need to talk about kevin women’s writing? does it deserve an award with strong commercial clout? it seems dif- ficult enough to ask the urgent questions and keep discussions about relevant topics going. in times of the #metoo movement (albeit not strictly a feminist movement) and feminists lamenting the fact that feminism has become too universal and hence inef- ficient and meaningless (crispin xi), the discussion about the relevance of such a prize seems more ur- gent than ever. it would be foolish of book studies to claim it could offer enough input without reading the novels, as it would be foolish of literary and cul- tural studies to ignore the interdisciplinary frame- work that book studies has to offer. it is the second goal of this article to help avoiding this foolishness. works cited bourdieu, pierre. the rules of art: genesis and structure of the literary field. polity press, . bedell, geraldine. textual politics. the guardian, march , www.theguardian.com/ books/ /mar/ /orangeprizeforfic- tion .orangeprizeforfiction. accessed oct. . crispin, jessa. why i am not a feminist: a feminist manifesto. melville house publishing, . darnton, robert. “what is the history of books?” daedalus, vol. , no. , , pp. - . to literature created for the mass market and hence primarily for economic profit (bourdieu - ). lit- erary prizes can be important processes that act as agents within this field. every institution that offers literary prizes actively influences the literary field of cultural production. however, in order for a nov- el to be eligible for a prize, the authors and/or their works must fit into a specific requirements profile: the laureate has to win the attention of the institu- tion through their work. a consensus must be found between the author’s work and the values and ide- ologies of the institution that awards the prize. this is necessary as not only the author is honoured but also the value orientations of the institution and its ideologies at the same time. authors, literature and prizes do not work in a closed system. using darn- ton’s idea of a communications circuit, it becomes clear that authors, publishers and readers are af- fected by manifold influences. political and socio- cultural developments not only shape literature but also the way literature is being received by the audience. literary awards, deliberately or not, react accordingly. anna burns winning the booker prize in , for example, could be regarded as a prime example. though burns predominantly wanted to write about living in belfast during the times of the troubles, milkman can also be read as a comment on fake news, rumours, #metoo and brexit. whether or not the author had intended this is irrelevant. in the eyes of the judges, the novel is important be- cause it comments on current, vital issues. if awards are given to good literature, and good literature is supposed to comment on cur- rent issues, then the wpff is an intriguing subject, through which book studies and literary and cul- tural studies should work hand in hand to come to fruitful results. whereas book studies can stress the history and mechanisms of the prize, follow and elaborate on the short- and long-term impacts on the winners, and also locate and distinguish specific frameworks of prize culture in general, literary and cultural studies can shed more light on the literary quality of the awarded novels as well as locate the relevant topics that are discussed in those works. s at u r a vol . english, james f. the economy of prestige: prizes, awards, and the circulation of cultural val- ue. harvard university press, . flood, alison. ‘over my dead body’: booker prize archives reveal unknown judging battles. the guardian, september , www. theguardian.com/books/ /sep/ /over- my-dead-body-booker-prize-archives-re- veal-unknown-judging-battles. accessed oct. . howsam, leslie. old books and new histories: an orientation to studies in book and print cul- ture. university of toronto press, . lott, tim. the orange prize is a sexist con-trick. the telegraph, march , www. t e l e g r a p h . c o . u k /c o m m e n t / p e r s o n - al-view/ /the-orange-prize-is-a- sexist-con-trick.html. accessed oct. . controversial novel wins orange prize. the telegraph, june , www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/ /controversial-novel-wins-or- ange-prize.html. accessed nov. . rules. women’s prize for fiction, www.womensprize forfiction.co.uk/about/rules. accessed: nov. . turner, nick. “literary prizes and contemporary women’s writing: an investigation through interviews.” writers in conversation vol. , no. , , pp. - . zangen, britta. “women as readers, writers, and judges: the controversy about the orange prize for fiction.” women’s studies, vol. , , pp. - . about the author simon rosenberg has worked for the chair of book studies since , first as a research assistant and currently as akademischer oberrat. he is primarily responsible for teaching book studies for all master programmes. his main research focus concentrates on the transitional phases of the book (printing press, industrial and digital age), and, more recently, book prize culture in the anglophone world. effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment received: november | revised: october | accepted: october doi: . /ab. research article effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment jonathan burnay | brad j. bushman | frank larøi , , psychology & neuroscience of cognition research unit, université de liège, liège, belgium school of communication and department of psychology, the ohio state university, columbus, ohio department of biological and medical psychology, university of bergen, bergen, norway norment: norwegian centre of excellence for mental disorders research, university of oslo, oslo, norway correspondence jonathan burnay, psychology & neuroscience of cognition research unit, université de liège, liège , belgium. email: jonathan.burnay@uliege.be negative consequences of video games have been a concern since their inception. however, one under-researched area is the potential negative effects of sexualized video game content on players. this study analyzed the consequences of sexualized video game content on online sexual harassment against male and female targets. we controlled for a number of variables that might be related to online sexual harassment (i.e., trait aggressiveness, ambivalent sexism, online disinhibition). participants (n= ) played a video game with either sexualized or non-sexualized female characters. after gameplay, they had the opportunity to sexually harass a male or a female partner by sending them sexist jokes. based on the general aggression model integrated with the confluence model of sexual aggression (anderson & anderson, ), we predicted that playing the game with sexualized female characters would increase sexual harassment against female targets. results were consistent with these predictions. sexual harassment levels toward a female partner were higher for participants who played the game with sexualized female characters than for participants who played the same game with non-sexualized female characters. these findings indicate that sexualization of female characters in a video game can be a sufficient condition to provoke online sexual harassment toward women. keywords confluence model, general aggression model, objectification, sexual harassment, sexualization “#metoo: if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaultedwrote“metoo”asastatus,wemightgivepeople a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” “there's too many incidents to put out here. being told i must suckbecause i’magirl, being told that i shouldbeon my knees giving oral sex to my man because that's my place, being told that i should be in the kitchen making food for my man and not on wow (world of warcraft)” | introduction the first quote was written on twitter by alyssa milano. after that tweet, thousands of women used the hash tag #metoo as a way to denouncesexualharassmentandassault.thesecondquotecamefrom afemalevideogameplayer inastudyaboutgenderharassmentduring a massively multiplayer online role playing game (brehm, ). in our society, sexual harassment is a serious problem faced by many women. over in women have been sexually harassed or assaulted in their lifetime and out of women have experienced onlinesexualharassment(stopstreetharassment, ). inparticular, aggressive behavior. ; – . wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ab © wiley periodicals, inc. | http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - video game settings are hostile toward women (gray, ; salter & blodgett, ). a well-known example of online moral and sexual harassment from a video game community is the case of anita sarkeesian, who is a video-blogger that denounced sexism in video games in avideo. afterpublishing her video, she received many death and rape threats, sexist insults, and pictures of her transformed into pornographic images. when women play video games, they are often the target of insults, sexist commentaries, and sexist (and even rape) jokes (brehm, ; tang & fox, ). all of these acts of behavior, even the more subtle ones such as offensive or sexist jokes, are considered forms of sexual harassment (mcdonald, ; o’hare & o’donohue, ;pina&gannon, ).sexualharassment refers to various forms of behavior that can be classified into three main categories: genderharassment,unwantedsexual attention,andsexual coercion (o’hare&o’donohue, ;pina&gannon, ).gender harassment refers to a situation in which a person is subjected to offensive, gender-related, or sexual comments. unwanted sexual attention refers to repeated attempts to establish a romantic relationship despite refusal, such as unwanted touching, sexual imposition, or assault. sexual coercion refers to blackmail or rewards for sexual cooperation. however, it remains unclear what specific features of the video game environment contribute to online sexual harassment. one potential feature could be the sexualized content in some video games. in video games, female characters are often portrayed as sexualized. for example, they are often depicted with large breasts, small waists, a large amount of exposed skin, and revealingclothing (beasley&collinsstandley, ;burgess,stermer, & burgess, ; downs & smith, ; summers & miller, ). in theory, sexualized content in video games could increase sexual harassment. . | theoretical foundations of the present research twotheoreticalmodelsareespeciallyrelevantforexplainingtheshort- term impact of sexualized video games on sexual harassment, namely the general aggression model (gam; anderson & bushman, ) and the confluence model of sexual aggression (malamuth, linz, heavey,barnes,&acker, ;vega&malamuth, ). in fact,both models have been integrated together (anderson & anderson, ). before describing the integrated model, we briefly describe each model separately. in the general aggression model (gam; anderson & bushman, ) two types of input variables can influence aggression: ( ) primary person variables; and ( ) primary situation variables. primary person variables include all the internal factors that can influence aggression. primary situation variables include all the external factors that can influence aggression. person and situation variables jointly influence the person's internal state, which includes aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and physiological arousal (e.g., skin conduc- tance,heartrate,bloodpressure).thus, therearethreepossibleroutes to aggression—through aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and physiological arousal. however, the three routes are not mutually exclusive or even independent. for example, someone who has aggressive ideas might also feel angry inside and have elevated blood pressure. these internal states can influence appraisal and decision processes, such as whether ambiguous harmful behavior was intentional. the decisions and appraisals people make can influence their behavior, including whether they behave in an aggressive manner. according to the confluence model of sexual aggression (malamuth et al., ; vega & malamuth, ), two main paths can facilitate sexual aggression: ( ) “impersonal sex” and ( ) “hostile masculinity.” impersonal sex is characterized by a promiscuous, non- committal, game-playing orientation toward sexuality. hostile mascu- linity is a personality profile that combines insecurity, hostility, and distrust, especially toward women. the confluence model of sexual aggression, when integrated with the gam (anderson & anderson, ), adds several specific individual differences as predictors of sexual aggression by creating hostile thoughts or feelings toward women (figure ). two individual differences that appear to be particularly relevant to sexual harass- mentaretraitaggressiveness (coombs&holladay, ;thompson& morrison, ) and ambivalent sexism (lemaire, oswald, & russell, ; russell & oswald, ). the present research includes measures of both of these variables. three other more specific theoretical models are also relevant to the present research because they explain the creation of preexisting knowledge structures relevant to sexual harassment and sexualized videogames: ( ) expectationstatetheory (berger,cohen,&zelditch, ); ( ) social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation (bussey & bandura, ), and ( ) objectification theory (fredrickson&roberts, ).according toexpectationstate theory, cultural norms dictate how men and women are supposed to act. cultural norms help people anticipate the behavior of others during social interactions. in many societies, women still possess a figure integrated confluence model of sexual aggression and general aggression model (anderson & anderson, ) | burnay et al. lower status than men. therefore, women are expected to act in a submissive and nonaggressive manner, whereas men are expected to act in a dominant and aggressive manner. in addition, the more men conform to these cultural norms, the more likely they are to sexually harass women (pryor, ; sinn, ). cultural norms about males and females can be learned by observing real people and by observing media characters, such as those in video games. the present research used sexualized video games to convey cultural norms about women. according to social cognitivetheoryofgenderdevelopmentanddifferentiation (bussey & bandura, ), media messages can influence gender-based attitudes and behavior. in video games, most of the main characters aremen (dill&thill, ;miller&summers, ). in addition,most videogamesarecreatedbymen(australianbureauofstatistics, ), and are designed to appeal to heterosexual males (shaw, ; williams,martins,consalvo,&ivory, ).videogamesoftenconvey messages about male dominance and female submissiveness (dill & thill, ;jansz&martis, ;miller&summers, ;summers& miller, ). in addition, many video games that contain female characters sexually objectify them (lynch, tompkins, van driel, & fritz, ; summers & miller, ). sexual objectification occurs when a person's body parts or functions are separated from the person, reduced to the status of instruments, or regarded as capable of representingtheentireperson (gervais,bernard,klein,&allen, ). according to objectification theory (fredrickson & roberts, ), sexual objectification is a form of gender oppression. further, sexual objectification is a specific caseofdehumanization,which isdescribed asaprocess inwhichaperson isdenied their humanness (e.g., treated likeanimalsorobjects;bernard,gervais,allen,delmée,&klein, ). the more a person sexually objectifies and dehumanizes women, the morelikelythatpersonistoacceptattitudestowardsexualharassment (rudman & mescher, ). withinthesetheories,sexualharassment,maledominance,female submissiveness, and sexual objectification seem to be interrelated concepts. such preexisting knowledge structures can be brought to a social encounter by an individual before they even play a video game. during gameplay, sexualized images can prime or activate concepts related to sexual harassment in the minds of game players. collectively, these theories provide a firm foundation for the present research.basedon these theories, thepresent study tests the hypothesis that exposure to sexualized female video game characters will increase sexual harassment toward real females. . | objective of the present research the objective of the present study was to determine the effect that playing a sexualized video game has on online sexual harassment behavior. previous research has shown that sexualized content of video games can increase tolerance of sexual harassment (dill, brown, & collins, ; driesmans, vandenbosch, & eggermont, ; yao, mahood, & linz, ). however, considering our specific objective, we made three changes from previous studies. first, wehad participants actuallyplay a sexualized video game. for example, participants in one study were only exposed to screen shots of sexualized avatars (dill et al., ). second, we experimentally manipulated sexualization (i.e., wearing revealing clothes and exposing a large amount of skin vs. wearing modest clothing with little skin exposed). in previous studies, sexualization is often confounded with other factors. for example, participants in one study played either a neutral video game or a sexualized video game that contained other confounding factors, namely, sexuality (i.e., presence of a sexual act) and sexism (i.e., negative remarks about women, yao et al., ). such a design makes it impossible to isolate the influence of only one of these features on sexual harassment. third, we used a measure of observable behavior of sexual harassment. previous studies have used measures of attitudes toward sexual harassment (dill et al., ; driesmans et al., ; yao et al., ). fourth, we controlled for several individual variables such as trait aggres- siveness and sexism, as suggested by the confluence model of sexual aggression. further, online disinhibition may be a specific predictor of sexual harassment in an online video game environ- ment. online interactions are easily disinhibited due to structural characteristics such as anonymity and perceived lack of repercus- sions for antisocial behavior (udris, ). by controlling for these individual differences, we can better isolate the impact of sexualized video games on sexual harassment. our first hypothesis is that the level of online sexual harassment behavior, especially toward women, will increase after playing a sexualized video game (i.e., we expected a two-way sexualization x partnergender interaction). furthermore,basedonprevious research (dill&thill, ;yaoetal., )andbasedontheconfluencemodel ofsexualaggression (malamuthetal., ;vega&malamuth, ), our second hypothesis is that male players should be more likely than female players to sexually harass a real female after playing a sexualized video game (i.e., we expected a three-way sexualization x partner gender x participant gender interaction). | method . | participants participants were students ( % male) to years old (m= . , sd= . ) recruited from a belgian university. among the participants, identifiedthemselvesasvideogameplayers,and spent between and hr per week playing video games (m= . , sd= . ). none of the participants had previously played the video game used in the present study. . | materials . . | video game all participants played the same video game (ultra street fighter iv). sexualizationwasmanipulatedbychangingtheoutfitofthecharacters burnay et al.. | (figure ). in the highly sexualized condition, both characters wore a revealing swimsuit, whereas in the non-sexualized condition, both characters wore non-revealing outfits. . . | sexual harassment task the sexual harassment task was similar to the computer harass- ment task used in previous studies (galdi, maass, & cadinu, ; siebler, sabelus, & bohner, ), except that sexist jokes instead of pornographic images were sent to a partner. this measure of behavioral sexual harassment has been validated previously (tang, ). in this task, participants were presented with power- point slides. each slide contained a pair of jokes written in french. odd-numbered slides contained two nonsexist jokes (e.g., “why do sharks swim in salt water? because pepper would make them sneeze!”), and even-numbered slides contained one sexist joke and one nonsexist joke. sexist jokes were gender specific. that is, female sexist jokes were used for female partners (e.g., “why is it called pms? because ‘mad cow disease’ was already taken.”), whereas male sexist jokes were used for male partners (e.g., “what do you call a man who has lost his intelligence? a widower”). participants had to decide which of the two jokes to send their partner using a skype chat. themeasureofonlinesexualharassmentwasthenumberofsexist jokes theparticipantsent to theirpartner,whichcould rangefrom to . when the participant sent their partner a sexist joke, the partner sent a negative scripted response (e.g., “i don’t like this joke”), and these responses became more negative every time a new sexist joke wassent (e.g., “this joke is disgusting”).when the participant sent the partneranon-sexist joke, thepartnersentapositivescriptedresponse (e.g., “lol ^^”, “haha, not bad!”). sexist jokes were chosen to be hostile and critical of a person based on their gender, whereas non-sexist jokes did not mention a person's gender. both sexist and non-sexist jokes were chosen to be humorous. all jokes were translated from previously-used english jokes (tang, ), except for jokes that did not make sense in french. a pilot study showed that the jokes within each pair did not differ in terms of how humorous they were, that sexist jokes were rated as more sexist than nonsexist jokes, and that male and female sexist jokes did not differ in terms of how sexist they were (see supplementary materials). figure the top image is a screenshot of the sexualized video game condition, and the bottom image is a screenshot of the non- sexualized video game condition | burnay et al. . | questionnaires . . | demographic information and video game consumption participants reported their gender and age. they also reported the average number of hours they spent playing video games each week, and their familiarity with the video game used in the present study. . . | ambivalent sexism participants completed a french version (dardenne, delacollette, grégoire, & lecocq, ) of the ambivalent sexism inventory (asi; glick&fiske, ),whichcontainsan -itemhostilesexismsubscale (e.g., “most women interpret innocent remarks as sexist; cronbach α=. ), and an -item benevolent sexism subscale (e.g., “women should be cherished and protected by men”; cronbach α=. ). all items are scored using a -point response scale ranging from =totally disagree to =totally agree. . . | trait aggressiveness participants completed a french version (genoud & zimmermann, ) of a short form of the aggression questionnaire (aq; bryant & smith, ),whichcontains items(e.g., “ihavethreatenedpeople i know”) that are scored using a -point response scale ranging from =not at all like me to =completely like me (cronbach α=. ). . . | online disinhibition scale participants completed a french version of the online disinhibition scale (udris, ), which contains items (e.g., “the internet is anonymous so it is easier for me to express my true feelings or thoughts”) thatarescoredusinga -point responsescale ranging from =strongly disagree to =strongly agree (cronbachα=. ). thescale was translated into french using the back-translation procedure. . | procedure after giving informed consent, participants were told that they would participate in two separate studies about the impact of entertainment onpsychological states—oneonvideogames,andoneonhumor.first, they completed questions about demographics and video game consumption. next, they were randomly assigned to play the sexualized or the non-sexualized version of the video game ultra street fighter iv for min. the video game was played on a desktop computerwitha -inch ( -cm) screenand anxbox controller.after gameplay, participants rated how difficult, fun, frustrating, exciting, competitive, realistic, and violent the videogamewas ( =not at all to =very much). thegamesdidnot significantlydifferonanyof these dimensions (see table ). next, participants were told that they would participate in the second study on humor with a partner. the “partner,” who was in a different room, was actually an accomplice pretending to be another participant.thesecondstudywasused tomeasurewhether the type ofvideogameparticipantsplayed influenced their sexualharassment of their “partner.” the sexual harassment task was implemented using a skype chat window, with the camera turned off. the participant had one skype account. two other skype accounts were created for this study, one for the first experimenter (who interacted with theparticipant) andone for theaccomplicewhoplayedboth the partner and the second experimenter (who interacted with the partner). manipulation of partner gender was carried out using the skypepseudo.the femalepartnerwascalled “alexandra” (a common french female name) and the male partner was called “alexandre” (a common french male name). the procedure consisted of five steps. first, participants were asked for their first name, which served as their skype pseudo. second, using the skype chat, the experimenter pretended to ask the second experimenter if s/he had already randomly selected which of the two participants was to be the sender of the jokes and which was to be the receiver of the jokes. through a rigged lottery, the real participant was always “selected” to be the sender of the jokes by the second experimenter, whereas the partner was “selected” to be the receiver of the jokes. participants were then told that their role was to send the jokes to their partner, and that we were only interested in their partner's response to the jokes. third, to make the chat more realistic, participants were provided with five questions to ask their partner (i.e., “what is your gender?,” “what is your age?,” “what are you studying at university?,” “why did you choose this major?,” and “what's your favorite tv show?”). the accomplice gave the standardized answers and asked the same questions to the partner. the gender question reinforced the name manipulation. fourth, the participant was then shown the slides, one at a time, and asked to sendoneof the two jokes to the partneroneach trial. therewere trials, but only of these trials contained a pair with a sexist joke. thus, the number of sexist jokes sent could range from to . fifth, the participant completed the personality questionnaires (i.e., the ambivalentsexism inventory, the aggressionquestionnaire, and the online disinhibition scale, in that order). a debriefing followed. during the debriefing, the experimenter probed to determine whether the participant was suspicious. table t-test between the sexualized and the non-sexualized condition for video game experience ms sds mns sdns t p d difficulty . . . . . . . fun . . . . . . . frustration . . . . . . . excitation . . . . − . . . competition . . . . − . . . realism . . . . . . . violence . . . . - . . . df= ; s=sexualized; ns=non-sexualized, d=cohen's standardized mean difference d. burnay et al.. | | results the first hypothesis was that the level of online sexual harassment behavior, especially toward women, will increase after playing a sexualized video game. thus, we expected a two-way interaction between the type of video game participants played and the gender of their partner. this hypothesis was tested using a (sexualized video game vs. non-sexualized video game)× (male vs. female participant)× (male vs. female partner) analysis of covariance (ancova). covariates included trait aggressiveness, hostile and benevolent sexism, and online disinhibition (table ). the ancova revealed a significant main effect of participant gender and a significant main effect of partner gender. male participants sent significantly fewer sexist jokes (m= . , se= . ) than female participants (m= . , se= . ). male partners received significantly more sexist jokes (m= . , se= . ) than female partners (m= . , se= . ). this latter main effect was qualified by the predicted significant two-way interaction between type of video game and partner gender on sexist jokes (figure ). planned contrasts revealed that being exposed to the sexualized video game (rather than the non- sexualized video game) significantly increased the number of sexist jokes sent to women, [t( )= . , p= . , d= . ], but did not significantly influence the number of sexist jokes sent to men [t ( )=− . , p= . , d= . ]. thus, the first hypothesis was supported. a three-way interaction was used to test our second hypothesis, but it was not significant (see table for descriptive statistics for the experimental conditions). thus, the second hypothesis was not supported. hostile sexism had a significant positive relation with sexual harassment [f( , )= . , p=. , ηp =. , r=. ]. all other main effects and interactions were non-significant. | discussion thisstudyexaminedthespecific impactofsexualizedcontentofvideo gamesononlinesexualharassment.tothebestofourknowledge,only one other unpublished study has examined online sexual harassment using a behavioral measure (tang, ). the present study also controlled for several individual differences that could be related to onlinesexualharassment,namely, hostile andbenevolent sexism, trait aggressiveness, and online disinhibition. consistentwiththefirsthypothesis,onlinesexualharassmentwas influenced by sexualization in video games. the significant two-way interaction showed that female sexualized video game content influenced online sexual harassment, but only toward female targets. table ancova on number of sexist jokes while controlling for general aggression, online disinhibition, hostile and benevolent sexism source f df p ηp sexualization . . . partner gender . <. . participant gender . . . sexualization×partner gender . . . sexualization×participant gender . . . partner gender×participant gender . . . sexualization×partner gender×participant gender . . . hostile sexism . . . benevolent sexism . . . trait aggression . . . online disinhibition . . . error figure interaction between exposure to sexualized media content and partner gender on the number of sexist jokes participants sent to their partner. capped vertical bars denote standard error | burnay et al. these results remainedsignificantevenafter controlling for individual differences inhostileandbenevolent sexism, trait aggressiveness, and onlinedisinhibition.thesecondhypothesiswasnotsupported(i.e., the effectswerenot larger formaleparticipants than femaleparticipants). both male and female participants sexually harassed a female partner more after they had played a sexualized video game. . | theoretical and practical implications the observed results are consistent with the integrated general aggressionmodel (gam)andconfluencemodelofsexualaggression (anderson & anderson, ). sexualized content in video games is a sufficient situational variable to increase sexual harassment behavior. female submissiveness might have been among the activated concepts related to both sexualization and sexual harassment. in addition, sexualization might have primed perceived humanness and agency.previousresearchhasfoundthatwhenwomenaresexualized, they are also often dehumanized (bernard et al., ; puvia & vaes, , ; vaes, paladino, & puvia, ). one cause of dehumani- zation isa lackofperceivedagency (lebowitz&ahn, ;li, leidner, & castano, ; morera, quiles, correa, delgado, & leyens, ; tipler & ruscher, ). furthermore, perceived agency and human- ness of women are known to mediate the relationship between exposure to sexual media and sexually aggressive attitudes (blake, bastian, &denson, ;rudman&mescher, ).consistentwith expectationstatetheory (bergeretal., )andthesocialcognitive theory of gender development and differentiation (bussey & bandura, ), the activation of stereotyped roles of women can explain the higher levels of sexual harassment of women. when the partner is a woman, participants will be more likely to sexually harass them due to the activation of concepts relating to female dehumani- zation, submission, and diminution of perceived agency. an important contribution of these results to the video game research literature is that online sexual harassment behavior was provoked by exposure to sexualized female video game characters. this finding supports a number of studies that have found that sexualization, sexism, and sexuality in video games can influence sexual harassment (dill et al., ; driesmans et al., ; yao et al., ). in addition, this study clarifies the results of past studies. specifically, these results suggest that the sole presence of sexualized female characters (without the confounding influences of sexism or sexuality that were often involved in previous studies) is a sufficient condition to provoke online sexual harassment against females. knowing that sexualization can influence negative behavior toward females is of primary importance, especially considering the large number of video games that contain female sexualized content (beasley & collins standley, ; burgess et al., ; downs & smith, ; summers & miller, ). to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine sexual harassment toward men following exposure to sexualized female characters in video games. sexualization of female characters does not seem to influence online sexual harassment toward men. further, as shown by our main effect on partner gender, more sexist jokes were sent to men than to women. this unexpected result might be explained by the fact that men, as the dominant group, are not usually targetsof sexualharassmentand thusmaybemore tolerantof sexualharassment (pina&gannon, ).therefore, sexist jokessent to men might be less likely to be identified as sexual harassment compared to sexist jokes sent to women. another unexpected result in this study was that female participantssentsignificantlymoresexist jokesthanmaleparticipants. this might be due to the fact that sexual harassment is perceived as usually committed by men, and toward women (stop street harassment, ). therefore, among our participants, women are likely tohaveexperiencedsexualharassment.therefore,whensent to the in-group (i.e., another woman), it might be perceived as a simple joke, but when sent to a man, it might be perceived as a form of retaliation. sexual harassment has been an important topic of discussion lately, notably with the #metoo movement. this may have increased awareness among men, which may have caused them tosendfewersexist jokes. indeed,preventioncampaignsaboutsexual harassmenthavebeenshowntoreducesuchbehavior (diehl,glaser,& bohner, ). results from this study have important practical implications. we observedthatexposuretosexualizedfemales invideogamesincreases online sexual harassment against female targets after the game is turned off. sexual harassment is known to have deleterious consequences on women, such as reducing psychological well-being, satisfaction, commitment, and performance of the activity involving the harassment (cantisano, domínguez, & depolo, ; pina & gannon, ). because sexualization might increase video game sales (near, ),andbecausethevideogameindustry isdominatedbymales, it is unlikely that the sexualized content of video games will be decreased table descriptive statistics for the experimental conditions sexualization condition non sexualized sexualized participant gender partner gender m (se), n m (se), n male male . ( . ), . ( . ), female . ( . ), . ( . ), female male . ( . ), . ( . ), female . ( . ), . ( . ), burnay et al.. | in the near future. it is therefore important to educate players about the possible effect of exposure to sexualized female characters in video games on online sexual harassment. parents should also limit the exposure of children and adolescents to video games with sexualized content. further, prevention programs about the suffer- ing of sexual harassment victims could be included in online video game environments. indeed, such prevention strategies have been shown to reduce the likelihood of sexual harassment (diehl et al., ). . | limitations and future research the resultsof thepresent study raise several questions that shouldbe addressed in future studies. the main objective of this study was to examine the influence of sexualized female characters on sexual harassment. women are most often the targets of sexual harassment (stopstreetharassment, ).however, itwouldbeveryvaluable if future studies also included male sexualized characters in order to examine how video game content influences sexual harassment against both men and women. future research should further investigate why participants sent sexist jokestotheirpartner.especially incasesofmoresubtleformsof sexualharassment, theparticipantmightnotactually intendtosexually harass their partner. motivations behind sexual harassment in general should be more researched because studies on this topic are scarce (mcdonald, ).thisstudyfocusedononlinesexualharassmentbut it would be equally important to examine the extent to which observations from the present study also generalize to offline sexual harassment. thisstudyaimedtomeasureonlinesexualharassmentbehaviorby using sexist jokes.however, thismeasureevaluateda specific formof gender harassment, rather than its global form. future studies should try to replicate these results by evaluating the two other forms of sexual harassment, namely, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. one limitation of the present study is that it did not measure internal states. according to the gam (anderson & anderson, ; anderson & bushman, ), the effects we observed should be mediatedby internal states.for instance,onestudyfoundthatplaying asexualizedvideogameincreasedtheoccurrenceof immediatesexual thoughts (yao et al., ). future studies could identify other such potential mediators related to the internal state evoked by sexualized video games, such as affects, arousal or other cognitions (e.g., perceived degree of agency and degree of humanness). further, according to both the gam and the confluence model of sexual aggression (anderson & anderson, ), a large number of primary person variables can influence sexual aggression toward women. the presentstudycontrolledforseveraloftheseindividualdifferences(i.e., hostile and benevolent sexism, trait aggressiveness, and online disinhibition). however, other individual differences should be considered in future studies (e.g., gendered-stereotyped attitudes, dominant or submissive attitude). by only manipulating sexualization, this study succeeded in suppressing confounding variables often found in other studies such as sexism and sexuality. however, one limitation of this study is that both the sexualized and non-sexualized video games contained violence, which could be considered to be a confounding variable. futurestudiesmightaddress this limitationbyexplicitlydistinguishing between sexualized content and violent content. | conclusion these results help to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of sexualized video game characters on online sexual harassment toward women. our results show that playing a video game with sexualized female characters increases online sexual harassment toward women. sexual and general harassment are major problems in society, and video games depicting sexualized characters might be among the important underlying causes. acknowledgments the authors thank clara della libera, bénédicte thonon, and audrey krings for reading a draft of the manuscript. the data are publicly available on figshare and dataverse. conflicts of interest the authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. endnotes usingthetukeyfencesmethod,wedeterminedthat participantswere outliers in terms of time spent playing video games. when these participants were excluded, the pattern of results was the same, except that the main effect of participant gender was no longer significant. theexperimentalmanipulation (sexualizedvs. nonsexualizedvideogame content)didnotinfluenceanyofthecovariates.however,amaineffectof participant gender was found for benevolent sexism, with males having higher scores than females. further, a main effect of online disinhibition was found for partner gender, with participants feeling less disinhibited when their partner was a woman compared to when their partner was a man. eleven participants expressed suspicion about the study, but the results did not change when they were excluded, except that the main effect of participant gender was no longer significant. thus, we included all participants. we observed a “floor effect,” with a median of two sexist jokes. the distributionwasskewedto the right.however, thepatternof resultswas similar when the data were transformed to reduce skewness (using a logarithm method and a box-cox transformation), except that the main effect of participant gender was no longer significant. the results were also similar when we used nonparametric statistics (mann–whitney test) as when we used parametric statistics (ancova). thus, the results were quite robust. we report the untransformed data in this manuscript because the unit of measure is more intuitive. we also used parametric statistics rather than nonparametric statistics because they are more familiar to readers. | burnay et al. orcid jonathan burnay http://orcid.org/ - - - brad j. bushman http://orcid.org/ - - - references anderson, c. a., & anderson, k. b. 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( ). ethics, politics and feminist organizing: writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism. human relations, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / peer reviewed version link to published version (if available): . / link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the author accepted manuscript (aam). the final published version (version of record) is available online via sage at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/f c c- - dc- d -bb cd e https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/f c c- - dc- d -bb cd e ethics, politics and feminist organizing: writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism sheena j. vachhani university of bristol, uk email: s.vachhani@bristol.ac.uk alison pullen macquarie universtiy, australia email: alison.pullen@mq.edu.au abstract this paper critically examines a twenty-first century online, social movement, the everyday sexism project (referred to as the esp), to analyse resistance against sexism that is systemic, entrenched and institutionalised in society, including organizations. our motivating questions are: what new forms of feminist organizing are developing to resist sexism and what are the implications of thinking ethico-politically about feminist resistance which has the goals of social justice, equality and fairness? reading the esp leads to a conceptualisation of how infrapolitical feminist resistance emerges at grassroots level and between individuals in the form of affective solidarity, which become necessary in challenging neoliberal threats to women’s opportunity and equality. our contribution conceptualises affective solidarity as central to this feminist resistance against sexism and involves two modes of feminist organizing, the politics of experience and empathy. by addressing the ethical and political demands of solidarity we can build resurgent, politically vibrant feminist organizing and resistance that mobilises feminist consciousness and builds momentum for change. our conclusion is that an ethico-politics of feminist resistance moves away from individualising experiences of sexism towards collective resistance and organizes solidarity, experience and empathy that may combat ignorance and violence towards women. key words: affect, ethics, embodiment, everyday sexism, feminism, infrapolitics, solidarity. introduction ‘just emerged from a feminist conference & my driver announced he’d consider fucking me. i’d set the car on fire, if i didn’t need the ride’. (esp website post, may ). critical studies of organization have long recognised that gender is an integral feature of organizations (clegg, ), that gendered organizations and their impact on organizational bodies are complex (acker, ), and that women’s intentional subordination in organizations should be explicitly named (mills, ). more directly, itzin and newman ( ) identified sexism and misogyny along with patriarchal culture as core features of gendered organizational cultures; and cockburn ( ) surfaced the backlash of speaking out against gender inequality. feminist organization studies has burgeoned since early interventions (see for example, calás and smircich, ), and there have been many studies that confirm that workplaces are central sites for many women’s experiences of sexism – from unpaid and unrecognised labour (acker, ); career barriers to advancement (biggs et al, ); being treated differently (powell and sang, ); and fear of physical, unwanted contact (mclaughlin et al, ). sexism in universities has not escaped academic scrutiny (deem, ) and academic institutions from universities to journals are under pressure to speak out against entrenched, systemic sexism. this paper contributes to this speaking out against sexism, and we are aware that this requires breaching patriarchal privilege and power (segal, ) in doing so. calder- dawe reminds us ( : - ) that the ‘‘unspeakability’ of sexism is more than an absence of talk: it is a structured silence’ that confines what is said and when, or we find ourselves reluctant to speak out at all. audre lorde (cited in ahmed, ) notes, sexism (and racism) are ‘grown up words’ which we experience before we have the language to express them. sexism can be defined as gender-based false aspirations/ideals, discrimination or stereotyping (calder-dawe and gavey, ), although in the course of the paper we devote space to participants who define the process themselves. despite decades of feminist activism, feminists including sara ahmed ( : ) confirm that sexism still persists in shaping our worlds and operates ‘as a well-oiled machine that runs all the more smoothly and efficiently for being in constant use’. ahmed ( : ) elaborates: ‘[t]he critique of sexism is a form of intellectual and political labour that teaches us how worlds are built; how histories become concrete’. there is a challenge to make the language of sexism heard especially where sexist practices evade critique by being couched as passé, retro or ironic (calder-dawe and gavey, ). moreover, there is pressure on individual women to resist sexism and ‘when we give problems their names we can become a problem by naming a problem’ (ahmed, : ). it is in this way that individual resistance endures rather than looking towards collective resistance and structural and cultural redress. in this paper we analyse women’s resistance to sexism in a social movement: the everyday sexism project (http://everydaysexism.com/, hereafter referred to as ‘the esp’) started by laura bates in and which demonstrates how an online space becomes an essential building block for feminist mobilisation. this project involves an anonymised sharing website which catalogues sexism (bates, a) and enables a particular form of resistance and feminist solidarity (bates, ) and importantly addresses different axes of oppression between women (collins and bilge, ). our analysis develops a conceptualisation of feminist organizing suggesting that the esp reveals a feminist infrapolitics typified by ‘a wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name’ (scott, : ). such infrapolitics reveals the importance of affective solidarity which is a central organizing feature in feminist resistance against sexism. thus, our conceptual aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the esp as a social movement can build affective solidarity as it emerges between experience and bodies which offer radical, ethical and political possibilities for change (cf. ahmed, a; hemmings, ). addressing the ethico-political demand of solidarity, where ethico-politics can be defined as ‘that arena where ethics is mobilized into action creates a politics directed by ethics’ (pullen and rhodes : ), is vital for the transformation of workplaces which normalises culturally and institutionally sanctioned sexism. the esp is an exemplary mode of feminist organising and politics (bates, ) that builds connections between women (and some men), moving incrementally towards change by speaking out, resisting and taking action. feminist solidarity is explicitly visible in an unprecedented way in contemporary social movements that are directly combatting women’s inequality, sexual harassment and violence against women in the workplace and beyond. this is evident in labour movements using the #metoo hashtag, the associated ‘time’s up’ campaign, the one million women movement and the global women’s marches to name a handful . patricia yancey martin spoke of the transformational potential of feminism involving ‘a vision of society that does not exist and sees social, political, and economic change as necessary for that vision to be realized’ (martin, : ). twenty-eight years later we ask: is it possible that we are now starting to fully realise feminism’s transformational potential in the ethico-political resistance against sexism? in , gloria steinem ( ) testified that she had never seen a time like this point in history for women’s political activism. these movements are testament to how feminist solidarity is developing across different forms of women’s resistance and activism addressing sexual harassment, violence and sexism with the intention to develop strategies for social change. the emergence of this new solidarity stands in stark contrast to the arguments of the erosion of women’s collective efforts during times of neoliberal rationality (brown, , segal, ) , times where feminism appears to have been confined to ‘atomised individualism’ (rottenberg, : np.). solidarity has been seen as an ideal and myth amongst many feminists (cornwall, ). drawing on hannah arendt, andrea cornwall reflects on the myths surrounding women’s solidarity and empowerment in africa, and states that ‘solidarity can be recast as something that can be actively constructed through identification with a shared concern about issues of social and gender injustice’ (cornwall, : ). new feminist movements are showing once again how solidarity is central to women’s collective working and resistance (cf. signs, ). moreover, this resurgent and vibrant feminism is emerging in and fuelled by social media which has been said to constitute a fourth wave or circuit of feminism (munro, ), typified by the inclusion of younger women and use of social media. although the creation of a new era in feminism has been challenged, ‘it is increasingly clear that the internet has facilitated the creation of a global community of feminists who use the internet both for discussion and activism' (munro, : ) and has developed ‘a culture in which sexism or misogyny can be ‘called out’ and challenged’ (munro, : ). whether we are in a fourth wave or not, ealasaid munro argues that academic feminists are guilty of failing to adequately explore the shape this turn is taking. organisations world pulse, a social network aimed at connecting women globally through social media, and the everyday sexism project which documents stories of sexism are testament to the vibrant and expanding nature of feminist political mobilisation (cf. lyshaug, ) and potential of mass movements through online methods and social media. such resistance relies on mobilising feminist consciousness that attends to the gap between individual subjectivity and a sense of solidarity through community. we take inspiration from elspeth probyn’s writings on feminist reflexivity that we use our ‘sexed selves in order to engender alternative feminist positions in discourse’ and ‘construct alternative feminist enunciative positions’ ( : ). probyn distinguishes ‘between an embodied sense of self and the self we are expected to be in social terms, between the experience of ourselves over time and the experience of possibilities and limits to how we may act or be’ that proritises ‘feminist activity (reflexive disruption) over identity or belonging’ (hemmings, : ). for clare hemmings ( ) affective solidarity is the ‘question of affect – misery, rage, passion, pleasure – that gives feminism its life’ ( : ). the concept of affective solidarity is important here given the purpose of the esp to build solidarity through affective means often existent in the spaces between personal and public spheres. in this paper, we demonstrate that affective solidarity as feminist resistance is enhanced by two modes of feminist organising - the politics of experience (phipps, ) and economies of empathy (pedwell, a). given that neoliberal culture polices affective solidarity the importance of conceptualising affective solidarity as an infrapolitics is central to effective feminist resistance. this resistance evident in the esp contributes to a potential mass movement (cf. rottenberg, ) which we return to in the final section of the paper. the paper unfolds as follows: first, we discuss the esp as a form of feminist organising and resistance that is infrapolitical. second, the ways resistance is narrated in the esp is investigated to conceptualise affective solidarity. following on, we explore the esp as a contemporary example of infrapolitical feminist resistance and in doing so reveal how affective solidarity is supported by two further modes of feminist organizing: the politics of experience and empathy. in the final section we offer concluding thoughts regarding the ethico-political implications of mobilising solidarity based on affective, embodied experiences in the resistance against sexism. the everyday sexism project, feminist organising and resistance there have been notable changes in the ways in which feminist projects manifest from ‘protest to engagement’ (walby, : ). the esp was set up by laura bates in as a response to her experiences of sexism and the common difficulty felt by many women expressing experiences of sexism and inequality in various contexts of life. it uses an accessible platform for feminist organizing and represents a way in which contemporary feminism is being organized and taking new organizational forms (walby, ) . the website for the project enables individuals to anonymously post their experiences of sexism and twitter can also be used to share experiences. users post according to country and there are different countries represented on the site, including a refugee option. the esp website prefaces the project by stating how difficult it is to talk about sexism and equality in modern society without being seen as overreacting or labelled negatively as ‘uptight’, killjoy or a ‘militant feminist’. with this in mind, the esp’s purpose is to amplify everyday experiences and to empower women to act against sexism and as such the website has a wide platform as a result . users can make use of a variety of tags: workplace, public space, home, public transport, school, university and media or insert their own tag for their post. bates created an accessible website because, as she stated, the problem of sexism could not be solved if people refused to believe the problem existed. when the site was launched men and women were invited to post stories. fifty thousand women added their stories in the first eighteen months from different countries, across different ages, races, sexualities, gender identities, religions and disabilities (bates, a). the esp website displays the importance of infrapolitics for ‘nonhegemonic, contrapuntal, dissident, subversive discourse’ (scott, : ) that involves ‘always pressing, testing, probing the boundaries of the permissible’ (ibid: ). for feminist resistance the esp’s informal assemblages provide both a structure for the anonymous posts and therefore, through disguise, are an enabler of resistance. disguise and infrapolitics that defy control and limit surveillance, and embodies a vitality which escapes ‘notice’ (even though personal experiences) become public. the esp evades formal leadership and attempts to work outside it in a non-elitist way (although this aim has been critiqued). individuals and groups struggling for equality against neoliberal forces face increasing pressure (fraser, ) and these demand different forms of organizing. whilst the history and origins of feminist organizing are rooted in how women created organizations to challenge gendered power and to claim citizenship, ewig and feree ( : ) suggest that alliances are central to feminist organizing and are ‘primarily autonomous’ via women’s movements. feminist solidarity involves organizing women to help themselves, their families, and other women , although the exclusion of some women in social justice movements has raised intersectional concerns (crenshaw, ). in theories of feminist resistance there is a tendency to reproduce oppositional notions of public/private and visible/invisible spheres. for example, protest movements seek attention in the visible, public sphere while lobbying activities that engage with the state are less visible (walby, ). the feminist adage that the personal is political is powerful, still little consideration has been given to the ways in which public/private spaces represent flexible and fluid forms of personal resistance and whether this initiates or diminishes the empowerment of women at both individual and collective levels in and beyond formal organization. coalitions and networks, such as the esp that coalesce around a struggle for feminist objectives and focus on collective action and consciousness raising have increasing significance at a global level and this is partly because ‘new political spaces are being used’ (walby, : ). laura bates’ speech to the united nations commission on the status of women and celebrity-endorsed campaigns such as heforshe initiated under the auspices of united nations women demonstrate how movements and initiatives are now operating in new political spaces. that said, feminist resistance is not without a backlash . the esp organises by categories of posts on the website, the largest number of entries are on harassment, assault and discrimination in the workplace (bates, a, b; c). the project calls for a cultural and social shift in attitudes to women and violence against women and adopts the perspective that we can all be part of the solution. bates mobilises the project in talks and interviews by drawing connections between the posts to incrementally build commonality and solidarity as resistance against sexism. inspired by contemporary feminist theory, we propose that as a new form of infrapolitical feminist organizing, the esp develops through affective solidarity (hemmings, ) which is discussed next. the everyday sexism project, narrating sexism and affective solidarity the esp makes evident how women take their experience of sexism to a public yet anonymous space to voice and record sexism and to connect with others with shared experiences. such posts might otherwise be ignored or provide insufficient evidence for formal channels of complaint, although many of the website posts describe serious cases of harassment or assault. the importance of archiving sexism through individual posts is a pivotal claim for the esp. mohanty ( : ) articulates of third world women’s writing, that such life story-oriented written narratives are an ‘important, context in which to examine the development of political consciousness. writing is itself an activity which is marked by class and ethnic positions. however, testimonials, life stories, and oral histories are a significant mode of remembering and recording experience and feminist struggles’ that create ‘communal (feminist) political consciousness’ and ‘the redefinition of the very possibilities of political consciousness and action through the act of writing’ (mohanty, : ). mohanty’s writing on the politics of feminism provides a precursor for the feminist politics of the esp: naming inequalities, developing productive acts of resistance and working with a particular ethics of care that infer that someone is listening and taking account of these stories. for us, women have an embodied connection through writing, especially during difficult times when financial support, for example, for women’s health, shelter and safety are being cut in developed countries. the esp recognises the wider, entrenched problem of sexism and starts with women’s experiences, collecting them and acting upon them, and encourages women to speak out in an environment where there is much pressure to remain silent for fear of consequence. our reading of the project aims suggest that they exemplify a desire, at least, to embrace difference and coalesce multiple, intersectional concerns (collins and bilge, ). thus, the esp points to a moment in feminist activism where affective solidarity is pivotal. affect is a force that gives ‘feminism its life’ (hemmings, : ) and, as segal ( ) expresses, joy from feminist solidarity guards women from neoliberalism’s attempt to individuate and isolate us. the concept of affective solidarity is, therefore, of great importance given the purpose of the esp to build solidarity. hemmings ( : ) raises the inquiry: ‘how we move from affective dissonance to affective solidarity…particularly in terms of how we might move from individual experience to collective feminist capacity’. the esp is a pertinent example of how a particular type of affective solidarity may be mobilised through negative affects. the point becomes how these individual experiences become a form of collective action and how they might help develop women’s solidarity that ‘draws on a broader range of affects – rage, frustration and the desire for connection – as necessary for a sustainable feminist politics of transformation, but that does not root these in identity or other group characteristics. instead, affective solidarity is proposed as a way of focusing on modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance that feminist politics necessarily begins from’ (hemmings, : ). bates’ experiences point to this: ‘opening our eyes is the first step. once we understand the scale and severity of the problem, we then have to act – and to see success we need to act together….perpetrators of street harassment are often able to get away with it because others simply turn a blind eye... to ignore what is happening is to be complicit, which perpetuates and exacerbates the problem by effectively telling harassers that they may act with impunity’ (bates, a: ; cf. whitley and page, ). although affects such as joy and passion are often positive forces behind feminism, ahmed ( a; b) notably emphasizes the importance of rage for moving feminists and cautions against ‘trying to domesticate feminist affect in the face of stereotyping feminists as angry and uncooperative’ (hemmings, : ). through twitter, the esp started a discussion for #shoutingback intended to document speaking out, naming, describing and thrusting the problem ‘in all its forms, into the limelight’ (bates, a: - ). this act of resistance ‘highlights the importance of feeling for others as a way of transforming ourselves and the world, and thus renders affect as a way of moving across ontology and epistemology’ (hemmings, : ). hemmings ( : ) demonstrates how anger, frustration and rage are the core of transformation but are unstable entities whose impact cannot be controlled. these affects become a productive basis for solidarity, ‘not based in a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other feels, but on also feeling the desire for transformation out of the experience of discomfort, and against the odds’. hemmings ( : ) goes on to write, ‘the affective dissonance, the judgement arising from the distinction between experience and the world, may be suppressed (it could be worse, remember), or the clarity it produces may be harnessed to foster advantages (if you continue to treat me like this, i will leave you), or it might be mobilised to justify lack of intersubjective care or withdrawal of labour’. such an approach alerts us to the power of this sense of dissonance, that becomes a sense of injustice and desire to change how circumstances are experienced and understood, and enables individuals to narrate the world differently or become politicised through communities that value different ways of knowing. the heterogeneity and infrapolitical nature of women expressing their experiences in the public sphere (lara, ) demonstrates the contestation and struggle in feminism essential for transformation (martin, ), with women’s experiences and bodies at the heart of feminist organizing. here feminist resistance develops based on an embodied response to injustice (cf. pullen and rhodes, ) and affective solidarity which we suggest mobilises experience and empathy in the struggle. studying the everyday sexism project we were participants of the esp prior to starting this research. the database of entries on the website contained over , entries in april (sanghani, ) and thousands more have been posted since. users can post on the website in different languages using flags of different countries to share nationally specific experiences. our analysis of the esp focused on the overarching aims and objectives of the project and the ways it mobilised feminist consciousness and solidarity. we also reviewed secondary data to augment our conceptual analysis including: posts on the everyday sexism website, bates’ published book everyday sexism (bates, a), tedx talks, and articles published in print media that signalled the momentum gained in the public sphere through the project’s media presence (kellaway, ). our methodological approach had a dual purpose: first, reading participants’ posts gave us a sense of ‘the discursive landscape they inhabit: the resources and subject positions that shape their orientations to sexism’ (calder-dawe and gavey, : ). second, we gained insight into how these experiences become mobilised and politicized in society by analysing representations in the media, thus exploring both individual and collective dimensions of the project. given the vast number of posts already collected as part of the project, the first stage involved reviewing posts from the website, focusing on the united kingdom and using the rudimentary tag function on the website to filter by key words. the website itself is basic and users are not easily able to search all posts for particular words. our only option was to click on already existing tags provided on the site which filtered all posts with those tags. therefore, we needed to find different ways of searching for key words which are outlined below. given the volume of entries and specificity of each experience our intent was not to generalise across all posts. focusing on website posts rather than twitter gave users the opportunity to elaborate beyond a character limit and, therefore, provided more detailed experiences. over posts were reviewed from the website and published book (bates, a). rather than reviewing a period of time from the website which might reflect particular topics or issues of that moment, we analysed the posts using different search functions concentrating on the different website tags. as the largest categories of entries included sexism in the workplace (bates, b), we filtered by ‘workplace’ first which provided an organizational focus, then ‘university’ and ‘public space’ both of which were popular tags. we also searched by keywords such as ‘feminism’, ‘feminist’ and ‘discrimination’ and manually searched for the use of these terms in one hundred pages of posts on the site . this exercise was intended to immerse ourselves in the posts and give us a sense of the breadth of experiences posted. all posts varied in length and level of detail. whilst anonymised posts are subject to deep questioning, we took them to represent individual, subjective experiences of everyday sexism. the quotes were organised by tag and then formulated common themes related to the content of each post. this approach gave us a breadth of posts across the different tags available for users and allowed us to explore common themes across the different tags. many posts were vivid and resonated with us. posts were selected as exemplars and representative of a number of common themes from the posts we reviewed (see appendix for supplemental data of illustrative quotes and emerging themes). our analysis of the posts exemplify two key issues: first, that individuals feel able and are compelled to share often deeply personal experiences, where the act of articulation is necessary in itself. second, the esp raises the question of whether a forum of this kind functions as a collective space of resistance. in the analysis presented in subsequent sections posts are used to illustrate how the esp was read as a space of feminist organizing and affective solidarity evident in our experience and reading of it. our analysis was not intended to produce quasi-scientific claims to ‘truth’ that speak for individuals or groups but involved close reading of others’ experiences as well as their relationship with our own and analysing these connections with each other. feminist reflexive practice the esp is not an empirical object of enquiry but one that enables the development of a particular feminist reflexivity and subjectivity that is also politicised and embodied in us as women academics. academic sexism is familiar . our analysis of the material is based on reflexive openness and reading accounts of sexism as a space of feminist organizing that assembled the personal and institutional, in that sexism is referred to as something personal but is reproduced by institutions, as a habit or structure (ahmed, ). we are both raising young children and share many of the same concerns about women in society. this paper has enabled our agency as marked others and has become transformative through the engagement we have had with one another. lather ( : ) summarises the process beautifully: to ‘throw ourselves against the stubborn materiality of others’ and our own practices of embodied knowledge production have been central to the ways in which theory and accounts of sexism surface. writing this paper was painful and emotional, and at times our bodies could not contain the anger, frustration and desire for change. at times it exposed our vulnerabilities and required an ethics of care. our analysis is infused with identifying with many of the experiences we read and our own embodied knowledge of sexism. we have struggled with the materials and questioned the value of writing about sexism when it marks and devalues us institutionally. nevertheless, we know that our experience and the experience of other women represented here matter. these reflections expose our own vulnerabilities and invoke what we see as an important and productive sense of unease, one that springboards the feminist politics we are advocating. affective solidarity matters when we articulate sexism, and involves complex ethico-political processes of experience, reflexivity and empathy. in the next three sections our analysis of affective solidarity is developed as we draw on the ways in which experience and empathy are expressed and mobilised as ways of understanding the challenges of solidarity. the everyday sexism project: the infrapolitics of affective solidarity ‘for seven months i worked in a research group at a uk university. the group consisted of just two members of staff, me and my manager. on my second day he shouted at me, telling me how stupid i was. often he would sit next to me with his hand on my leg while we analysed data together. once i made a mistake in my experiment and he laughed, but clapped me on the back so hard that it hurt. i was very unwell at the time and felt unable to do anything about my manager’s behaviour. i didn’t know where to look for support from my department as i was very isolated from other staff and i knew that other staff had seen what was happening but not taken any action. i knew i needed a good reference from him to get another job. so i left, and pretended it was due to circumstances outside work. i was unemployed for two months while i found another job in a different city. i now work at the same university again, in a different research group, but i sometimes see him, and hide. i don’t know what the right thing is to do. confront him? report him? hope to successfully avoid him until he retires? if he sees me, be polite? be honest? i don’t know. i hope he isn’t doing the same thing to anyone else. i don’t want to endanger my position and relationships at my current job, and i am still ill, and feel i don’t have the energy to take on the additional stress of making a formal complaint’. (website post, th october , tags: university, workplace. themes: discrimination, objectification, resignation). this opening quote illustrates that although sexism breeds vulnerability, fear and insecurity there is the struggle to find a space to speak out, to gain control and autonomy. this account resonated with us and evoked anger and frustration. it is not a ground breaking claim that speaking out and documenting sexism gives rise to affect from those who are most affected, however, it raises the dilemma of action and endangerment, of whether and how one (re)acts. bates states: ‘if the everyday sexism project has shown anything it’s that this is a continuum. all of these things are connected. the same ideas and attitudes about women that underlie those more ‘minor’ incidents of sexism and harassment that we are often told to brush off and not make a fuss about are the same ideas and attitudes about women that underlie the more ‘serious’ incidents of assault and rape. and what that means is that by helping to contribute to a cultural shift in the way women are perceived whether it’s in the media, in the professional sphere, in the social or economic sphere we help to shift the way that they’re perceived and treated in the other spheres as well so that does mean that every one of us can be part of the change. it’s not necessarily about targeting perpetrators and it’s certainly not about telling victims that they should be behaving in a certain way or reacting in a certain way. it’s about the people in the office that made it difficult for that woman to feel able to speak out; it’s about the people on that bus that day that looked out the window. so, be part of the change… because our voices are loudest when we raise them together’ (bates, b: from mins). bates highlights how central affect is to resistance against sexism and fundamental for the development of grassroots solidarity, or a feminist infrapolitics. certainly, solidarity built as affective responses take on new forms upon entering the public arena, and become acts of feminist resistance. as well as the esp posts, solidarity is bolstered by, and runs through, all of bates’ material and in she jovially explained: ‘people tell me that women are their own worst enemy and what’s really holding us back is how much we bitchy girls hate one another’s success. which is weird, because i’m supported by the most incredible people in the feminist community and never could have got everyday sexism off the ground without the support of an amazing group of volunteers. these women know the power of humour in the face of trolling, and when humour fails, they know the power of gin’. whereas the website posts primarily focused on negative instances of sexism rather than positive occurrences of standing up to it there are a number of examples that exemplify how women find strength to stand up to sexist acts by engaging with the esp. ‘today, as i googled women’s day memes, (it is on august here in south africa) the first things i saw, sadly, was funny memes making fun of women and women’s day. i just finished reading the book everyday sexism, and despite finding it hard to read and saddening, the overall feeling i got was that women are strong and will no longer tolerate being stamped on, discriminated against, abused and ridiculed. happy women’s day to all you strong, beautiful women out there. thank you for sharing your stories. let us all remember how beautiful and resilient we are. love each other as you should love yourself’. (website post, august . tag: media. key themes: representation, solidarity, strength.) this post ‘highlights the importance of feeling for others as a way of transforming ourselves and the world, and thus renders affect as a way of moving across ontology and epistemology’ (hemmings, : ), as discussed earlier. speaking emotionally about the power of women, the author of the esp post above speaks directly of love that creates community and solidarity. in this way solidarity is an alternative to the resignation that many women expressed, as this post in the book everyday sexism summarised: ‘it’s amazing that many of us feel so resigned to something which if directed at any other group of people would be considered very offensive’ (post cited in bates, a: ). solidarity extended between women and some men in the material were explored. men voiced their shock and outrage: ‘makes me realise as a man who hates this crap, how much more there is to do. we are the ones who can influence’, and ‘definitely think the awareness is useful from a male point of view. has definitely led to me thinking more about what i say and do’ (anonymous posts quoted in bates, a: ). the importance of male solidarity forms an infrapolitics of inclusion and a focus on sharing in the esp. bates ( a: ) writes, ‘the sense of solidarity that also comes with sharing stories can make a huge difference, because women no longer feel they’re standing up to street harassment alone. one woman wrote to tell us how she was introduced to the project page by a friend and read reams of women’s stories’. as we have discussed, affective solidarity draws on rage and frustration as well as a desire for connection and is a means of engendering ‘modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance that feminist politics necessarily begins’ (hemmings, : ). bates’ directly states this: ‘opening our eyes is the first step. once we understand the scale and severity of the problem, we then have to act – and to see success we need to act together….perpetrators of street harassment are often able to get away with it because others simply turn a blind eye... to ignore what is happening is to be complicit, which perpetuates and exacerbates the problem by effectively telling harassers that they may act with impunity’ (bates, a: ; cf. whitley and page, ). we are mindful that sharing stories does not always invoke solidarity, as solidarity implies a shift from ‘individual experience to collective feminist capacity’ (hemmings, : ). affective solidarity may be mobilised by negative affects, but it multiplies through the infrapolitical nature of the esp; as the affective expression of sexism moves from private to public the conditions for ethico-politics arise as wo/men have an ethical identification with others through the articulation of private experiences in a public domain. the next segment of a post reveals this: ‘…so i just go with it hoping that a lot more people will speak up about this! experiences sexual harassment at work too, a man in my team, constantly would say inappropriate things to me, and not just me, all women in the office, he never got in trouble for any of it, every time when you went close to him he’d touch your lower back or comment on your breasts, but he got away with it because it was just a ”banter” everywhere you go sexual harassment from men, if they sense you’re getting upset they straight away say it’s just a banter, or you don’t understand jokes, can’t have a laugh with you etc. this has to stop, i don’t have enough years to write every single experience i’ve had, and i swear there’s plenty more! laura bates, i have watched all your videos, i believe in you, and i am happy i’ve found you! now what i know there’s women out there who also fight for women and men being treated with respect, i feel like i can actually say something too, instead of ignoring people, i will actually stand up for myself, because i don’t want to accept being sexually harassed, being disrespected or not given enough credit just because i am a woman, weaker, more vulnerable sex as people claim. (website post, may . tags: home; public space; workplace. themes: resistance, solidarity, speaking out.). even though we are claiming that the affective conditions for speaking out and the esp platform mobilises a sense of affective solidarity, we are mindful not to universalise feminism (and feminist resistance) or individual experiences. we are also aware that as individual experience is mobilised publicly inequalities emerge within such mobilisation that add to the struggle of representing sexism collectively and simultaneously respecting contextualised, personal experience. in spite of these inequalities this ethico-political struggle is exactly where feminist solidarity and resistance emerge through grassroots infrapolitics. in proposing the ways in which the infrapolitics of affective solidarity manifest through the esp, two modes of feminist organising surface, the economy of empathy and the politics of experience which give insight for developing feminist resistance and to which we now turn. economies of empathy sara ahmed ( b) writes that ‘the politics of emotion creates social and cultural others through the generation of affect and constitution of subjectivities’ (cited in phipps, : ). empathy, as we experience it, surfaces throughout many of the esp posts, most poignantly in stories tagged with ‘public space’ that detailed street harassment. stories such as these were typical: ‘i hate everything about public transport, i just want to go to work without being glared at, poked, touched or pinched by someone i only see on this regular commute to work. i hate the fact i don’t speak up because the train is normally quite busy and i don’t want to “cause a scene”. i’d go into details but i just don’t have the willpower’ (website post, november , tag: no tag. theme: public space, objectification, silencing). the emotion conveyed in the post and our reading of it develops empathy which becomes a platform for ethico-politics, as discussed later. as readers of the esp we were continually shocked by the sexual objectification of ‘women in the workplace’ tags: ‘i was called a cum guzzler by a supervisor in an open office environment with my peers present’ (website post, july . tag: workplace; theme: sexualisation, shame, empathy). when not sexualised the only subjectivity available to women by their male colleagues was that of mother: our top boss, in a directors meeting where many females were present (including me). top boss explains why he will be trying to hire males only from now on. than (sic) he looks at the female directors present and goes “sorry ladies, but you know how it is, with the kids and everything”. they all smiled. they all have children and above. i was appalled, of course, but said nothing. i was afraid for my job. and i wondered if they kept silent because they were in a position of power and had dealt with *ssh*les like top boss all their lives or if the (sic) were scared for their jobs just like me. and the entitlement. top boss felt secure enough in his position to say something like that and he knew we were going to keep our mouths shut. the humiliation. i felt like a piece of garbage after that meeting. both because he made me feel like one (i am meant to reproduce and when i do – not even “if”- i will be branded by society to make that child my sole focus. my partner? bleh) and because of my attitude’ (website post, september , themes: empathy; insecurity; silence; workplace discrimination.) other anonymous stories published in bates ( a: ) detail the self-blame some women experience: ‘the annoying part about street harassment is the feeling that i should then change myself. i victim blame me’. and ‘it makes me feel so used up […] i’m tired of it. i’m now and sometimes i hate myself so much’. the ways in which we empathise with the posts highlight the ways in which specific emotions of shame, anger and hate are produced by the institutions within which we are educated, live and work: i hate feeling constantly scared outside and in my own home i hate that i can hardly out (sic) in words the things that happen because i immediately start questioning myself and wondering whether i was asking for it and knowing that if i said it to anyone in my family the first thing they will try to do is figure out how it could have been my fault (website post, july tags: home, public space, public transport, workplace. themes: fear; empathy; self-blame.) i’m . the first time i was catcalled i was . by age i was raped for the first time. consider that statement ‘the first time’……. when standing waiting outside the movie theater waiting for a friend to come i find a hand grabbing my ass….walking to ice cream a friend and i have to listen to vulgar comments our bodies. our bodies….not theirs to touch to yell about to scrutinize to use. it is now that i am coming to realize i am a feminist….. (website post, july ; tags: public space, school. themes: empathy; feminism; resistance; speaking out.) these vivid posts along with many others reveal to us that emotions and affect not only drive the very act of speaking out they create the possibilities for empathy in societies which reduce women’s emotions to the individual. in other words, articulating sexism through the esp defies the cultural conditioning of women’s emotions. bates ( ) touches on empathy and compassion from men in particular, in an interview: ‘one of the nicest surprises has been the compassionate responses from men. many described their own experiences (like being ridiculed in the office for asking for parental leave). others said their eyes had been opened, and shared their strategies for challenging sexism (from protesting about sexist chants at their local football club to lifting their own t-shirts when a woman in the street was told to “get your tits out”). it’s not about men against women, but people against prejudice’. mobilising men against prejudice is increasingly common, for example, as evident in the male champions of change, a group of male ceos promoting gender equality in australia. empathy becomes instrumental in speaking of the importance of equality in society and organizations. this said, we are reminded of the dangers of an instrumental approach to empathy because it ‘is not boundless but, rather, always has a limit point, through which distinctions between subjects are inevitably redrawn’ (pedwell, b: ; hemmings, ). developing this idea raises the question of whether ‘empathy is more likely to remain the purview of those who are already socially privileged’ (pedwell, b: , a) thereby extending the axes of oppression. more critically, drawing on ahmed, pedwell suggests that ‘“empathy sustains that very difference that it may seek to overcome'' when subjects assume that they can feel what another feels in ways that fail to take account of differences in history, power, and experience’ (ahmed, b: , cited in pedwell, a: ). these differences manifest throughout many different social movements, and between intersectional feminists (crenshaw, ). whilst some feminists are critical of empathy because it is emotionally charged as unquestioningly ‘good’, there is also potential for ‘how theories of empathy premised on proximity and intimacy negotiate the complex problem of “the distant other”’ (pedwell, b: ). in the unequal structural and cultural relations of neoliberalism these may be useful for working towards social justice for the cumulative effect of everyday sexism across different groups. the potential for understanding how empathy might aid our experience of, and resistance against, sexism as racialised, classed and sexed in the esp needs reflection to account for the struggles between different women, where the struggle conditions the politics for change and rests on politicising women’s experience of sexism. however, we are careful not to universalise the esp and need to acknowledge these distinctions in a sustained and meaningful way. politicising experience as introduced earlier, ethico-politics surface when affect including empathy and experience come together. drawing on alison phipps, the politics of experience witnessed in the esp is employed in different ways and this raises a number of interesting issues for understanding the political potential for feminist resistance and transformation. we support munro’s observations ( ) that the internet plays a key role in fourth-wave feminism and online spaces can be ‘an antidote to the invisibility and silencing which characterise oppressions based on race, class and gender’ (phipps, : ). politics of experience surface between the private and the opportunity to make experience public and render it visible. the essence of the esp is about drawing on individual experiences and a large proportion of the posts we reviewed, although they cannot do justice to the variety of the experiences posted, drew on individual experiences and observations but often did not mention race, sexuality or class, for example. although the esp shows how the personal becomes political, phipps ( : ) asks us to reflect on whose personal is more political in discussing the role of experience in a neoliberal context. specifically, phipps focuses on how first-person narrative ‘operates as a form of capital within abstracted and decontextualised debates which entrench existing power relations’ (ibid: ). we agree with phipps ( : ) that whilst experience can be suffused with emotion/affect it is not reducible to either and thus needs to be differentiated from them. phipps reminds us of being critical of how the personal and emotional is commodified and illustrates how ‘the use of the experiential as capital both reflects and perpetuates the neoliberal invisibilisation of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities. this competitive discursive field is polarising, and creates selective empathies through which we tend to discredit others’ realities instead of engaging with their politics’ (phipps, : ). these politics are exemplified in a post, where a younger woman is denigrated for being feminist, my mom bought be (sic) a feminist sweatshirt for christmas and a couple of days ago i put it on because i wanted to show the world that i am proud that i am a feminist and that it isn’t a dirty word and that everyone should be feminists. when i went to school i got multiple comments from boys asking if i was a lesbian. screaming at me saying i’m “anti-men.” telling me that my sweatshirt was controversial and that i should take it off. when i got home from school my dad yelled at me and told me to “take the damn thing off” (website post, nd june , no tag; themes: experience; feminism). the esp aims to provide a place to log experiences and render them visible and important, and to amplify voices (bates, a: ). these voices can be amplified in different ways. the experiences of workplace discrimination, especially with regards to promotion and pregnancy, were rife in the esp posts and speak to the normalisation of sexism and discrimination. there was emotional intensity and desperation in these women’s experiences and they invoked fear and vulnerability that fortified existing inequalities: ‘board member in my office: “how’s my little staff girl doing?” same board member at an event: “it’s okay about your tits — i’m an ass man.” another board member: “how’d a pretty girl like you get so smart?” another board member, “i actually like that you’re so outspoken.” another board member: “just type this up for me.” sign on my way to work: “real men vote for trump.” bumper sticker on the car in front of me: “don’t be sexist — broads hate that!” at the supermarket, “gimme a smile, baby.” in the parking lot, “move it, you fat bitch.” new stories every day, every day, every day’. (website post, april , tags: everywhere, public space, workplace. themes bodies; experience; resignation). ‘during a meeting about my prospects for promotion at work, one of the first things mentioned by my boss was that i had newly married and would probably be “popping out a baby soon”’ (website post, april , tag: workplace, themes: discrimination; experience; pregnancy.) the decontextualised and anonymised narratives draw on a cumulative effect of experience, however, what happens to experiences when they are taken from the bodies and contexts that experience them? phipps ( ) usefully focuses on what experience does. in this sense, the esp provides an interesting but not necessarily entirely positive moment for feminism, where narratives are not tied to individual bodies or contexts but enjoy a life in an online world which has, in part, been stripped of its messiness as intersectional (crenshaw, ) and risks reproducing a ‘false universalism of “women’s experience”’ (phipps, : ). it is not surprising that movements such as the esp attempt to be as inclusive as possible and as a result secure public support, celebrity endorsement and alignment with corporate sponsored campaigns (such as gucci’s chime for change). however, this popularism might also diminish its political potential as individuals may not identify with these alignments. we have witnessed that ‘the institutionalisation of the politics of the personal prompted challenges from those relegated to the margins’ (phipps, : ). all experiences are valid but they are also asymmetrically situated and ‘the injuries felt by those who are more privileged, while certainly painful, are not commensurate with the experience of oppression’ (phipps, : ). the esp demonstrates the tension between leaving behind particular identity politics and the problematic of a universal feminist politics. phipps ( : ) makes the incisive point that ‘experiences are “invested” into feminist politics, often as part of battles for epistemic privilege or political gain. as part of this process, some “personals” become more important politically than others’. experience operates as epistemology and politics, where a diversity of stories and oppressions might be made visible, ‘it tended to reify personal narrative as the origin of explanation, in the process dehistoricising it and essentialising identities’ (phipps, : - ). a more critical perspective might suggest that the popular appeal of the esp is mobilised by having a blonde-haired, well-educated, eloquent woman as its spokesperson. posts on the website outline common frustrations about marketing for women and some noted experiences of misandry, alongside serious violations of women’s bodies that constitute assault and harassment. these experiences are arguably dehistoricised and risk reinforcing rather than contesting ideological systems given that women’s experiences do not automatically equal feminist politics (scott, ) and that ‘experience must be grounded in an understanding of structural conditions in order to produce an emancipatory commitment’ (phipps, : ; hemmings, ). having explored empathy and the contradictions in how experience is mobilised, we turn to further develop the feminist infrapolitics of everyday sexism. discussion ‘if you have more power, remember to listen as much as you talk. and if you have less power remember, to talk as much as you listen. that can be hard when you’re used to hiding. keep yourself in the present, and don’t obsess over what you should be doing, or could have done differently. talk to people, don’t get isolated, and remember to empathize, because almost everybody can be changed and transformed’ (steinem, ). ‘we will not be silenced. we are organized. we are ready to bring our collective power’ (women’s march, ). the motivation of this paper has been to surface the silencing of sexism, and to contest the normalisation of sexism in organizations, including academic institutions. the rise of multiple feminist movements teach us a great deal about the power of feminist organizing and resistance. attesting to that teaching we have considered the idea of feminist infrapolitics and used it to illustrate the ways in which resistance emerged in one particular contextualised setting, the online feminist movement: the everyday sexism project. we introduced certain strains of contemporary feminist theory as they relate to affective solidarity by analysing the ways in which women (and some men) cultivate a sense of togetherness and collective support that marks feminist infrapolitics. this solidarity, as a contemporary example of that which has been witnessed throughout feminism’s long history, manifests struggle, action and feminist community building for specific social change against the debilitating effects of patriarchy, misogyny and sexism. feminism, and the language and media associated with it, has changed and the esp is an example of the internet becoming an important space for feminist activists (munro, ). the esp archives sexism (ahmed, ) and as well as demonstrating the power of feminist writing (mohanty, ) it points to a moment in feminist activism where affective solidarity is significant by testifying against sexism as a means to unite women and their embodied experiences of discrimination and abuse. the esp names inequalities, produces resistance and is a site that cares to listen and take account of experiences that are both mundane and significant. walby ( : ) asks ‘whether or not the institutionalisation of fluid grassroots feminism is likely to advance the position of women’, but our paper suggests that the systemic, entrenched and institutionalised nature of sexism is so widespread that resistance towards sexism commences with ‘small’ accounts of sexism. the esp demonstrates a growing commitment to tackling inequality by recording women’s experiences, mobilising consciousness raising, and engendering solidarity. furthermore, the esp declares the moral and political deliberations of men and women. thus, we question whether (some) women are more empowered and feel a sense of community in such a grassroots movement through their embodied, reflexive responses or whether only certain women are represented. for many, the act of posting on a website may be cathartic, enabling them to go on with their daily lives without changing those lives in any practical or substantive manner. nevertheless posting could depoliticise acts of sexism and discrimination when what is needed is for rage and affective dissonance, to prompt practical action. thus there is a tension over whether lives change as a result of this movement, and if so, whose and how. phipps ( : ) puts it eloquently, ventriloquising another’s personal story is an act of power, especially when the oppression of this other is wielded against another other with whom one disagrees. disclosing one’s experience of violence in a bid to construct and exclude the other is violence in itself. especially when personal stories become capital in political debates, they must be understood in relation to dynamics of privilege and marginality; these also grant the advantaged few more access to narrative platforms than the rest. there is a fine line to walk between engaging in selective empathies, and situating experiences structurally/appraising the uses to which they are put’. the esp reveals the conflicts between public/private, visible/invisible spaces for women’s resistance and the struggles that these dichotomies yield in relation to collective organization and action. this public/private space represents flexible and fluid forms of individual resistance which become collectively organised, but to what effect? we are mindful of whether simply accounting for sexism may risk the further normalisation of practices that increase the visibility of issues yet simultaneously limit women’s potential for change. given the policing of feminism and affective solidarity that is part and parcel of neoliberalism, we write against the times in which we live, as neoliberal rationality works to ‘atomise’ (rottenberg, , ) women. advocating connection, community and solidarity present challenges, but it is exactly these challenges that stress the importance of solidarity especially in building feminist communities that incorporate diverse voices. affective solidarity provides help and support for those women affected by sexism but also works to garner the backing of those privileged enough to escape such violence and to engage their help in the fight against sexism. ours is not a utopian vision but a practical one that involves struggle. such struggle has manifest throughout feminist history and theory, as well as through the women’s posts in the esp. hemmings ( ) positions embodied knowledge at the heart of affective solidarity, and following her lead we take affective solidarity as a feminist infrapolitics which provides the ethico-political moment and rupture required as a prolegomenon for transformational change. the esp illustrates a simple yet highly organized feminist infrapolitics, and mobilises experience and empathy in both theory and practice. as such, the esp provides the structural means for affective solidarity, and as hemmings, ahmed and others have taught us, affect is what sustains feminism. although affective solidarity cannot change the world by itself, it demonstrates a shift in the ways women are organising and resisting sexism. this offers a means of feminist politicisation through affective dissonance where ‘that sense of dissonance might become a sense of injustice and then a desire to rectify that’ (hemmings, : ). highlighted here is the relationship between emotion and power such that sexist discrimination, oppression and violence is enacted at an affective level (lorde, ) so as to shape individual and social bodies (ahmed, ). instead of reinforcing patriarchal culture by confining our analysis of feminist resistance against patriarchy, we have challenged women’s positions of subordination as marginalised or silenced (ahmed, ) such that we might break from the social norms that keep inequality in place. resistance against sexism demands fully acknowledging widespread misogyny (bates, ). infrapolitics has been brought to this paper as a way to think about collective resistance and its connections with solidarity. the ethico-political implications of the esp ‘where ethics is mobilized into action creates a politics directed by ethics’ (pullen and rhodes : ) is one where feminist resistance and organizing through grassroots infrapolitics – or what we propose as feminist infrapolitics – provides fertile ground for action mobilised by the ethico-political. this starts from the bodies of those violated by sexism, discrimination and harassment. rosalyn diprose reminds us that this is a ‘politics of generosity [that] begins with all of us, it begins and remains in trouble, and it begins with the act’ (diprose, : ). our analysis of solidarity centres the body as the site of action and resistance; a ‘passionate politics’ that works through affective solidarity ‘for a justice that is yet to arrive’ (diprose, : ). politics in the form of feminist activism invites ethics, and in turn this ethics gives rise to politics. the politics of experience and economies of empathy are significant. social movements such as the esp have the potential to disrupt the taken for granted means through which sexism manifests and becomes normalised. diprose locates the ‘body as the site of one’s habitat or subjectivity – where the body is constituted by a dynamic relation with other bodies in a social context of power, desire and knowledge’ ( : ). accordingly, the potential for change starts by questioning ‘how one’s embodied ethos is constituted by social discourses and practices including ethics and how one’s identity is constituted in relation to others’ (diprose, : ix). thinking in this way changes the conditions that women engage with sexism rendering it no longer reproduced by women working within (or even against) masculine constructions or a denigrated and subordinated femininity. in place we have a move towards mobilising resistance against the very normalisation of sexism. once again, we are reflexive about not co-opting the other within our proposal for an infrapolitics of affective solidarity; one that would render the other entirely knowable and fully accomplished (diprose, ). similarly we do not advocate for a particular type of feminism or wave but rather wish to create a dialogue in the hope that those reading this paper will engage in considering the collective struggle that we are all part of. this relies on an openness and reciprocity between many different women and men, otherwise much needed conversations and engagements won’t even start. moreover, ‘marginal subjects produce different, more reliable, knowledge because of conditions of inequality that mean they (have to) know dominant frames of legitimation in order to survive or thrive, and generate local knowledges for the same reason’ (hemmings, : ). without such inclusion, those privileged do not reflect on their hierarchical power or the oppression of different groups. the result would be that the conditions of collective solidarity are precluded. in response, it is necessary that reciprocity be built into relations of solidarity (cf. dean, ). in nancy fraser claimed that an ‘ethic of solidarity is superior to an ethic of care as a political ethic’ (fraser, : ). with this claim fraser sets the ground for the interrelationship and interdependency of ethics and politics, and draws attention to the power of the collective struggles of women. the esp shows these collective struggles and illustrates the norms of collective solidarities, to speak, to be heard, to tell experiences and to have voice. in this way, the esp demonstrates that ‘an ethic of solidarity elaborated from the standpoint of the collective concrete other is more appropriate than an ethics of care for a feminist ethics, if we think of a feminist ethics as the ethics of a social and political movement’ (fraser, : ). continued feminist infrapolitics and activism depends on the engagements of women across the racial, ethnic, and class distinctions that would divide us. against such divisions, we suggest that attention is turned away from ethical identification with others towards ethics that emerge infrapolitically between affective bodies and which make available the circumstances for the preconditions of politics. this paper has turned to the role of affective solidarity within feminist infrapolitics which invokes a commitment to cultivating social sensitivity (medina, ). feminist organizing demands forms of resistance which surface as embodied, reflexive acts to developing social sensibility and epistemic resistance (medina, ; see also fricker, ). insensitivity involves ‘being cognitively and affectively numbed to the lives of others; being inattentive to and unconcerned by their experiences, problems, and aspirations; and being unable to connect with them and to understand their speech and action’ (medina, : xi). such insensitivity, and what medina terms ‘active ignorance’, prevents us from developing new ways of organising resistance. practices of feminist infrapolitics require cultivation to enable us to fully understand exclusion, and to become sensitive to it. however, they also require a commitment to politics practised through both personal and collective resistance. this is echoed by bates’ ( a: ) hope that such a project will render women visible and, therefore, important. cultivating social sensitivity is a way of becoming attuned to injustice, and enables the injustices created by sexism or racism, privilege and oppression to be addressed. given the central importance of connection and accountability between people, feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity which embeds ‘enlarged sympathy’ could leverage grassroots organising towards a broader mass movement. this idea of enlarged sympathy, from brenda lyshaug, refers to the ‘attitudes and dispositions that would-be-allies must cultivate if they are to establish nonrepressive and mutually affirming political connections across difference’ (lyshaug, : ). these relations encourage ‘a sense of kinship with others’ one that is ‘forged not through bracketing out others’ differences but through absorbing and locating an “echo” of those differences within oneself’ (ibid: ). the cultivation of others in infrapolitics recognises that these others are shifting and expanding, for example as men join the esp and call out misogyny. in closing we may well as ask whether this paper itself constitutes an infrapolitics? we can only wait to see what becomes of this paper in the future but the seeds planted here could develop future research that focuses on building platforms for action, learning from feminist organizations and developing new ways of working in the academy. informed by and practising feminist reflexivity, we have analysed how the esp provides particular insights into affective solidarity, the politics of experience and empathy but also has limits in how these are expressed as universal concerns. such politics address sexism through the transformational potential of feminism, so as to raise the future orientated question: where will women be without feminism? endnotes the online presence of these movements can be found at: me too - https://metoomvmt.org/; one million women - http://www.millionwomenrise.com/; women’s marches - https://www.womensmarch.com/. in addition, time magazine named a group of women ‘person of the year’ in for speaking out against harassment and violence against women. these ‘silence breakers’ included #metoo founder tarana burke. there are a number of recent developments which highlight the development and critique of feminist solidarity through neoliberal feminism and the ensuing backlash which we are unable to explore in the space of one article. briefly, despite the appearance of solidarity, there are counter arguments such as rottenberg’s ( ) question: ‘can #metoo go beyond white neoliberal feminism?’ because it does not recognise the low socio-economic status of women being more prone to harassment and abuse (rottenberg, ), incarcerated women or address the individualised priorities of privileged women speaking out. it might even be that neoliberal feminism has thrived on shaming women to stay silent, fixing themselves rather than working collectively to address institutional and structural sexism and harassment in organizations. windham ( : np.) comments that effective social movements that address workplace sexual harassment ‘must broaden to include women of all backgrounds and should channel the outrage into organizational and legal transformation’. a key criticism of the #metoo movement has been that whilst it may create awareness it doesn’t produce the tools for dialogue and reflection (munar, ). https://metoomvmt.org/ http://www.millionwomenrise.com/ https://www.womensmarch.com/ for the esp, social media is an integral platform from which the project has expanded and grown since its inception. bryman ( : ) comments, social media ‘is an area that is in its infancy and which has tended to be associated with the examination of so-called “big data”…a major challenge is likely to be how to sample from the vast array of possible documents’. whilst the use and efficacy of social media for online activism and resistance is worthy of critical discussion, it is one we can only briefly explore in the scope of this article. see also the description and values of the project: http://everydaysexism.com/about. bates studied english literature at cambridge university and worked as an actor and nanny where her experiences inspired the project. the project has inspired individuals, such as a law student in india to set up a blog where individuals can email their stories of sexism (see http://every-sexism.blogspot.co.uk/ / /); a website dedicated to women in stem subjects (https://stemfeminist.com/), as well as related twitter accounts dedicated to experiences in media, and in various countries such as: canada, gibraltar, greece, iran and south africa to name a handful. “lifting as we climb” was the phrase popularized by the black women’s club movement in the united states (ewig and feree, ). bates describes being trolled on the internet which she says exemplifies just how needed the project is, stating: ‘and this is what i got, not twice a day but up to times a day just for speaking out…the fact that it was so scary for some people, for somebody just to want to talk about equality, just to want to raise women’s voices and give their stories a platform that they had to tell me exactly how they wanted to disembowel me and with exactly which weapons and in what order and not just that i should be raped but exactly how i should be raped and in which orifices and where and when’ (bates, b: from mins). bryman ( ) outlines forms of analysis such as qualitative content analysis and ethnographic content analysis which might be suitable for virtual documents and social media http://everydaysexism.com/about http://every-sexism.blogspot.co.uk/) http://every-sexism.blogspot.co.uk/) research. however, these methods of analysis did not fit our purposes as the study did not intend to provide a discursive analysis of the types of stories or storytelling involved. the variety and volume of posts meant it would be impossible to provide an in-depth, meaningful qualitative analysis of data in the space of one article, given their anonymity and lack of context. from citational practices to all male panels, the marginalisation of feminist debates in mainstream journals, or the violence feminist organization scholars may incite on one another, the importance of the sexism archive (ahmed, ) shines light on how sexism pervades the academy. the archive is full; we have been worn down by the everyday labour required to fight but we have to continue to make this sexism material, to show how we are marked by sexism. we are marked by the ink on our reviews, the criticisms from our appraisals or the persistent need to mould ourselves into the right kind of femininity to be an academic. esp posts are quoted with date and tags used in the post. in addition, we identify key themes related to our analysis of each post. grammatical errors remain in the original quotes to preserve the voices and embodied experiences of participants. references acker, j. 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( ) ‘sexism at the centre: locating the problem of sexual harassment’. new formations, : - . supplemental data appendix table : illustrative quotes from data and emerging themes/modes of feminist organizing* https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-neoliberal-feminist-subject/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-neoliberal-feminist-subject/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/ /everyday-sexism-hashtag-a-day-in-the-life.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/ /everyday-sexism-hashtag-a-day-in-the-life.html http://signsjournal.org/features/virtual-issues/feminist-resources-for-theresistance/#models https://qz.com/ /gloria-steinem-on-metoo-black-women-have-always-been-more-feminist-than-white-women/ https://qz.com/ /gloria-steinem-on-metoo-black-women-have-always-been-more-feminist-than-white-women/ illustrative quotes tags on post key themes & modes segment of post: the woman, who happens to be the chairperson of our local feminist group, announced that, seeing as i was pretty, i should take my clothes off during the panto, bit by bit, for the enjoyment of the audience. the rest of the group all sneered and gaffawed their approval, each making comments of the kind that they wouldn’t mind seeing that. i made no comment. the best i did was not laugh or join in. later it was introduced that we would have to pay £ to be in the play. i said i wouldn’t pay. i was told to have a bit of solidarity. at a previous meeting of the same group, the feminist was discussing a tv programme about a fictionalised rape case in court. she said that the girl was asking for it because she went back to the boy’s flat, that back in her day it was consent to go back to some one’s place, and the girl should have been greatful for a shag. she then went on to say she woudn’t have said no, and that she likes it rough. the leader of our local feminist so-called feminist, so-called socialist, solidarity, workplace. feminism; objectification; solidarity. group said this, about a rape, in front of me and a group of men. (website post, may ). segment of post: i was mortified to discover my mother doesn’t think very much of other women, though it shouldn’t really come as a surprise….i heard her asking the husband of the couple what he did and it turned out he is an engineer with some chemical company. he told her all about it and that was fine. but then mother asked the same question of his wife and, before the woman could even begin answering, mother interjects with “oh, i bet you stay at home and spend all the money!” before laughing uproariously. i. was. mortified. later, she decided to tell myself and my boyfriend (also a feminist) about how much she hates female dentists because “they don’t have the strength” to be decent dentists. because she had a bad experience in the ’s which would have been more down to outdated techniques rather than any fault of the dentist because she’s female. (website post, june ). no tag. feminism; shame; solidarity. i was pushing my month old in the pram through the city center and a group of guys drove by and yelled at me “how about a blow-job?” gross. (website post, july ) public space. empathy; objectification. before leaving home to go to the park, i was told by my mother that i maybe shouldn’t wear the new skirt i had bought, because i might get catcalled or harassed. does that mean it’s my fault for having a female body if i do get harassed? how is that fair? i am years old. i should not have to put up with grown men staring at my thighs (website post, july ) home, public space. empathy; otherness; women’s bodies. i was raised by feminist hippies in the s, under a female prime minister. it was still made clear to me that i couldn’t be a lifeboat crew member, a reenactment viking, an astronaut or a golf caddy due to my sex. (website post, june ). childhood; home. empathy; feminism. my soon to be ex-husband says that he provides me with free childcare, and does me a favour when he’s looking after our children. on a rare occasion when i worked extra hours in the evening (with several weeks’ notice and having organised childcare, divorce, home, parenting. experience; gendered division of labour. childcare), he said i was “failing to fulfil my obligations to look after the children” (website post, july ). my male housemates like to have “banter” by commenting on and comparing the breasts of women they match with on tinder. they also make bets like “who will be the first to convince their girlfriend to do anal with them?” i call them out on it and they tell me to “calm down” and “stop being a boring feminist”. i think it’s time that young men are taught the importance of respecting women. i wonder if they’d ever chat to their mother or sister like this? (website post, may ). home, university, feminism. experience; otherness; speaking out; women’s bodies. emails to our entire senior management team typically begin with “gents.” because of course there are no senior managers who aren’t gents. still, i find this troubling. it seems intentionally non-inclusive. #isthissexistidontknowanymore (website post, april ) workplace. experience; silencing; invisibility. *all quotes are verbatim from the website/video. acknowledgements this paper has benefited from the astute critique and editorial direction of the special issue editors and the close readings of the reviewers. we are extremely grateful to these colleagues who worked with this paper in a feminist tradition. participants of the feminism stream at cms ( ) and the ethics stream at egos ( ) gave us momentum, and when the paper was aired at em lyon and stockholm business school we received welcome feedback. in particular we acknowledge eric ghiglione for reminding us of scott’s infrapolitics. we dedicate this paper to our children in the hope that they may live in different times. ambiguities and dilemmas around #metoo: #forhow long and #whereto? https://doi.org/ . / european journal of women’s studies , vol. ( ) – © the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw e j w s ambiguities and dilemmas around #metoo: #forhow long and #whereto? hardly a day has passed since the accusations of sexual harassment against us film pro- ducer harvey weinstein in october without a new allegation being made. powerful men – producers, actors, directors, politicians, well-known tv anchors, journalists and sports doctors – have been publicly accused of sexual harassment, assault and rape by a growing number of women. within days after the first accusations against weinstein appeared in the media, women who had had similar experiences began to use the #metoo platform to tell their story. since then #metoo has become a global phenomenon, spreading from the us to the uk, canada, australia, israel, india and beyond. the end is nowhere in sight. given that the new ejws co-editor christina scharff is on maternity leave until april , and kathy has agreed to stay on as guest editor, we decided to use this editorial to explore some of our concerns about #metoo and, more generally, feminist responses to the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence. it is worth remembering here that #metoo started in the usa a decade ago as activism by black women who had experi- enced sexual violence. it was supposed to ‘let other survivors know they are not alone’ and create solidarity with the victims. this is what the present #metoo campaign is claiming to be doing now. however, we have found ourselves asking if this is actually what is being accomplished. we have both worked on issues of violence against women, and have watched the unfolding of the accusations of sexual assault around #metoo with mixed feelings. kathy: i came of age as a feminist in the s. sexual harassment, rape and sexual violence were top priorities on the feminist agenda and one of our strategies for combating them was the personal testimony of what we at that time referred to as the ‘survivors’. i remember as a young student helping to organize a teach-in at my university. in addition to offering many fiery feminist speeches decrying sexual violence against women in any form and blaming individual men (‘in every man lurks a rapist’ was a popular slogan) or, more generally, patriarchy, we had one – and only one – personal testimony from a woman who had been raped. she bravely, but with a shaky voice, described her experience to a mostly sympathetic audience, although there were a few hecklers in the room as well. it felt daring to be breaking the silence and we were pre- pared for contemptuous reactions from men who did not see sexual har- assment or even sexual violence as a problem. (those were the days when a married woman could not be raped according to the law.) ejw . / european journal of women’s studieseditorial editorial editorial https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - european journal of women’s studies ( ) given this background, i should have been overjoyed at the far-reaching responses to #metoo and the immediate consequences of some of the perpetrators admitting their guilt, providing public apologies, and – in some cases – being forced to resign their jobs or step down from public office. to my surprise, however, i felt a bit ambivalent about the #metoo phenomenon. and it troubles me that my response as a feminist is less clear-cut now than it was in the s. dubravka: i missed the s feminist teach-ins on rape, but i have dealt with sexual violence against both women and men in war and violent conflict in my research on ex-yugoslavia. i have also learned from the work of feminists around the globe involved in research on indian partition, the liberation struggles in bangladesh and vietnam, on wars in democratic republic of congo and darfur, and finally, on the violence perpetrated in abu ghraib. one thing all this research has taught me is that the con- text matters; and within the context the question has to be asked about the social locations of the perpetrators and victims. another lesson has been that both acts of violence and their media visibility are important to analyse. both of these lessons have forced me to twist my brain around #metoo. and who better to twist it with than kathy! if i take a look around me, i do not see that things have changed for the better since the s regarding the voyeuristic, sexist and misogynist nature of our societies. i have always been wary of public descriptions of sexual assaults with vivid details. in many ways, such descriptions re-inscribe women as sexual objects. however, the dilemma remains how to speak about the sexual assault on a body without addressing the hard facts of corporeality. standing in the public eye and speaking about an experience of assault not only takes courage; it also takes incredible strength of mind and sense of self-possession in order to remain a per- son, and not be reduced to, or by, the acts of violence. in the s – and still today, i might add – such acts of speaking out are usually defined by feminists as ‘agency’ – an active defiance and resistance to the patri- archal prescription of silence and shame. yet agency has always been important for feminism precisely because it is more than an individual capacity; rather, it is practice that is instru- mental for social change. clearly, there has been change. sexual assault against women, including marital rape, has been criminalized in many places across the world; many institutions (including the military) now acknowledge the reality of sexual harassment and assault, and have cre- ated mechanisms (such as ombud representatives and complaint com- mittees) to address it. all of this is thanks to feminist activism throughout the s and s. but we are all too aware what an ordeal it still is for women to bring up legal charges and go through trials, not to men- tion how rare it is for the perpetrator to get an appropriate punishment. without belittling the relevance of legal change, we also all know this is not the same as social change. whether and to what extent the recent editorial wave of accusations will translate into any kind of substantial change remains to be seen. kathy: i want to raise the question here of who is able to speak out. there are still many women who would not be able to participate in what has now become the #metoo movement, either because they don’t have access to the (social) media or because the sanctions would be too great. while it certainly took courage to come out on #metoo, it was also a platform for individual women who were confident enough to stand up and pow- erful enough to be heard. many of the women were well-known celebri- ties and they situated themselves as agents, not as victims. this is a very different kind of activism than, for example, take back the night rallies in the usa, the collective protest in india around the ubiquitous harass- ment of women in public (called ‘eve teasing’) or opantish (operation anti sexual harassment) in cairo where women and men support wom- en’s access to political demonstrations and religious festivals and rescue them from situations where they are being harassed or assaulted. this kind of activism does not focus on the testimony of individual woman, but frames sexual violence as a collective issue facing all women, which requires raising public awareness and involving both women and men in grass-root activism as well as transforming institutions which condone violence against women. dubravka: yes, who speaks and who is heard remains crucial! today the most vis- ible #metoo women are powerful: rich and famous celebrities, well- known tv personalities, journalists, and members of political elites. the fact that they are famous and that many are speaking at the same time, makes all the difference in allowing their accusations to be heard and believed. i am reminded of nafissatou diallo, the new york hotel maid who accused strauss-khan of sexual assault in . she stood no chance, precisely because their social locations were so hugely, un-com- parably different: she was a black immigrant hotel maid, he was a white national of a powerful european state and the director of one of the most powerful financial agencies in the world. and kathy, as you wrote in the editorial of the time, feminists at that time missed an opportunity to join with protesting chamber maids who stood by diallo (davis, ). when anita hill accused clarence thomas of sexual harassment in , she stood no chance because she was the only one who spoke against him. worse still, because both she and thomas were black, she was accused of kindling racism against thomas and harming the black cause in the us. in both cases, media have turned against the accusers, not the accused. today, we see the opposite: media seem to believe the accusers, fully and unconditionally – precisely what feminists hoped for since the s! but should we rejoice about it? what are media doing here? kathy: this makes me think of a particularly disturbing example of the power of the media in the #metoo campaign which recently occurred in the european journal of women’s studies ( ) netherlands. a popular male journalist accused a male tv producer of drugging him and forcing him to have oral sex. his story appeared first in a local newspaper and a few days later he talked about his experience in a tv talk show. the accused appeared a week later on the same talk show, accompanied by his lawyer. he was clearly shaken. he denied that he had forced the journalist into having sex with him. although he agreed that the experience had not been particularly memorable, it had certainly not been a rape. however, this accusation so many years later had done irreparable damage to his reputation and career. i found myself wondering uncomfortably who was right, but, more importantly, i won- dered why we, the general public, were being called upon to decide about the innocence or guilt of these two individuals in the first place. the #metoo phenomenon has provided public recognition and support for individuals who have experienced sexual harassment or sexual vio- lence. however, it has also generated a ‘trial by media’ where individual men are publicly ‘blamed and shamed’ for actions for which they often suffer severe consequences, and before having a chance to defend them- selves. as imperfect as the legal system is, i must admit that i really longed for a juridical procedure here. dubravka: the media – and especially social media – have made a huge difference for #metoo, allowing it to become much easier to spread the word. but i share your discomfort. we should be concerned about a number of things here. first, we should not assume that what is happening among the political and cultural elites will automatically ‘trickle down’ to the streets. in other words, we should not expect that office workers, teach- ers, shop owners or policemen will be equally easily publicly ‘blamed and shamed’ or dismissed from their jobs because they have harassed and assaulted dozens of women (and men). second, as someone who has studied media representations, i am also worried that visibility and exposure will be taken as a solution to the problem of sexual violence. in other words, i am worried that ‘making a person (especially the accused) visible’ will be mistaken for ‘making the problem visible’. sadly, this is not the same, and the former can actually hamper the latter. making powerful men as perpetrators and young, beautiful women celebrities visible as victims carries a danger of forgetting that sexual harassment, assault and violence are very much part of everyday life of many different women and men, and that when feminists say it is a mat- ter of ‘power relations’ we do not actually reduce this power to a number of powerful men. we want to look at larger power structures that allow men – be they ‘powerful’ or not – to treat women as their sex objects. and this is where i also see the danger of this current mode of public ‘blaming and shaming’ of specific ‘bad men’. this is a moralizing approach that takes us back to the s when anything that had to do with sexual violence against women was seen as an attack on morality, decency, etc. editorial kathy: it used to be easy to think of sexual harassment in terms of oppressors (men) and victims (women). however, things have become more com- plicated in our postfeminist era in which harassment is embedded in a culture where pornography is ubiquitous and women’s autonomy is translated into always being ‘up for it’ (gill, ). there are plenty of instances of powerful men who believe they are entitled to do what they like (trump’s ‘grab her pussy’ remark comes to mind). however, there are nuances and differences in acts and in actors and we need to look at sexual harassment with the same careful attention that we give to any other experience where individuals are negotiating complicated and often ambiguous relations involving sexuality and power. there are grey areas and we need to expect misunderstandings. i was really struck, dubravka, by a recent incident at your university where a young male student was accused of groping by two female students. while his behaviour was clearly out of line and the female students were right to initiate an official complaint process, he was baffled by their response and didn’t seem to understand that what he did was wrong. at this point, you might have cast your eyes upward with a disgusted: ‘yeah, right, where have we heard that before?’ but i think your response was actu- ally much more perceptive. you said: ‘he’s very young, has come from a traumatic war situation, and finds himself in a place he doesn’t under- stand very well. i keep thinking: what kind of man is he going to become?’ i think that that is exactly what we need to be worried about. the #metoo phenomenon avoids thinking about the ambiguities involved in doing masculinity (or, for that matter, doing femininity), especially in a globalizing world where men and women are confronted with different and sometimes confusing norms concerning gender and sexual relations. dubravka: there are a few things to consider when it comes to men: one is what kind of masculinities are offered as ideals to boys and young men, and how to make them not just aware that sexual harassment is simply unac- ceptable, but also to recognize it and act in the situations in which they see other men do it. i agree with you that there is a grey area there. if young men learn at every step that they need to pursue a girl until she gives in, that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ or at least ‘maybe’, or that sexy clothing means a girl is a ‘slut’ – then there has to be, in my view, some space that allows the idea that these young men can – and can be willing to – change. if there is a hope from the current wave of exposures of harass- ers, then maybe it is a message to the young men that these are not the role models they should follow, however rich, powerful or famous the harassers might be. and this might mean that we need to make a differ- ence between such (young) men, and the ‘grab-her-pussy’ types who do it with an absolute sense of entitlement. and we also have to look at men who sit on the fence. we should not forget that many (by your and my standard) very powerful men and women have known of others’ european journal of women’s studies ( ) behaviour and never spoke up. speaking up comes with a price and many are not ready to pay it. they literally do not want to lose money, position, prestige by going after predators from whom they earn this same money, position and prestige. in some african countries there is a term ‘big man’, which not only specifies a particular powerful man, but that he is powerful because he is located within the social structures that keep him so. so i am worried that the fact that some of the famous big men – like harvey weinstein and kevin spacey – are basically finished, does not signal a social change. rather it simply illustrates the mecha- nisms of self-preservation of a system that both makes these men the way they are, and then pukes them out when they become a liability. after abu ghraib ‘a few bad apples’ discourses have been used to jus- tify firing several officers (one of them a high ranking female officer), but all the effort was put to present and preserve the us military as a ‘healthy tree’. and with the ‘groper-in-chief’ heading the us, it is clear that some structures of power are more difficult to shake than others and some contexts of harassment are more ambivalent than others. it is not the s clear-cut oppressors-men and victims-women situation any longer. even though men are clearly still the main perpetrators, these days we hear much more about sexual assaults on men, and a number of men also spoke publicly in the last few weeks about being harassed and assaulted. but whether that will make any difference for activism against sexual harassment is yet to be seen. kathy: so, where should we as critical feminist scholars go from here? i recently read a wonderful piece on cultivating ambivalence (kierans and bell, ) as a strategy for understanding social problems and it applies to the recent moral panic around sexual harassment. sexual harassment is an urgent issue which clearly needs to be addressed. while earlier femi- nist critiques were primarily faced with the task of establishing it as a problem, the #metoo movement is showing just how widespread sexual harassment is and how it affects countless women (and men) across the globe. this is a welcome development in feminist struggles for more gender justice and a more equitable social world. however, i think that a moralizing discourse which evaluates, judges and sanctions, all in one go, may not be the best way to address the problem. instead i think our task may be a more difficult one – namely, directing our attention to the murky and complicated ambivalences in which sexual harassment and the #metoo movement itself are embedded. nowadays we as feminist scholars do not have the comfort of always knowing what side we are on. we need to be able to embrace ambivalence and to ask the often uncomfortable question: what is going on here? dubravka: i think the question is whether something such as #metoo, which is essentially a (social) media movement, can also engender other actions and forms of activism. while there seem to be a few law suits in the making against celebrities and politicians, so far many #metoo stories editorial have been coming-out-with-righteousness narratives of rich, famous, young and beautiful women. the need for recognition of being wronged is essential to victims of violence and injustice, as it is essential for the societies to publicly distinguish what is and what is not acceptable within their value systems. but when too much public sympathy and understanding are expressed towards victims of sexual violence from within essentially sexist, racist and classist societies and institutions (such as entertainment and politics) than the question: what is going on here is really the one we need to be asking. we can still hope for the best, but maybe we shouldn’t hold our breath for too long. note . http://wapo.st/ yrg rt?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=. ffc e dcdd and www.washingtonpost. com/news/the-intersect/wp/ / / /the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the- phrase-when-she-created-it- -years-ago/?utm_term=. ffc e dcdd references davis k ( ) ‘stand by your man’ or: how feminism was framed in the dsk affair. european journal of women’s studies ( ): – . gill r ( ) postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility. european journal of cultural studies ( ): – . kierans c and bell k ( ) cultivating ambivalence: some methodological considerations for anthropology. journal of ethnographic theory ( ): – . dubravka zarkov international institute of social studies/ eur, the netherlands kathy davis vu amsterdam, the netherlands http://wapo.st/ yrg rt?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=. ffc e dcdd www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/ / / /the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she-created-it- -years-ago/?utm_term=. ffc e dcdd www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/ / / /the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she-created-it- -years-ago/?utm_term=. ffc e dcdd www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/ / / /the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she-created-it- -years-ago/?utm_term=. ffc e dcdd editors’ notes this is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the version of record. please cite this article as doi: . /he. . this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. museus and ting volume title: creating conditions for asian americans to thrive in higher education samuel d. museus, marie p. ting editors’ notes throughout history, racial exclusion has been a hallmark of the asian american experience (takaki, ). for example, in the late s and early s, widespread xenophobia led to asian immigrants becoming the first groups to be legally banned from entering the united states. and, in the mid-twentieth century, law-abiding asian american citizens were removed from mainstream society and incarcerated because of their ancestral ties to an asian nation and the government’s lack of trust in them. even when asian americans have been allowed to participate in mainstream society, racial forces have worked to ensure that they are not fully accepted and engaged in it. one salient example of such forces is the fact that the growing influence of chinese immigrants in the s leading to the chinese massacre of , during which local chinese american businesses were looted and ransacked while chinese american men and boys—many who were innocent—were lynched in los angeles, california (dorland, ). and, the absence of this example from mainstream u.s. history books reflects another form of exclusion that characterizes the asian american experience—the exclusion of this community from our nation’s mainstream historical narratives. many other examples of ways that racial forces limit the freedom and influence of asian americans abound, including the many ways in which the roles of this population have been limited to those that fit longstanding racial tropes that depict them as excelling in technical math and science skills, but incapable of leadership and advocacy (see chapter ). while racial processes continue to exclude asian americans from several sectors of u.s. society, demographic growth and political evolution is challenging this exclusion in unparalleled ways. with regard to demographics, asian americans are one of the fastest growing racial groups in the nation (museus, ), and it is estimated that approximately one out of every ten of the nation’s residents will be of asian descent by (u.s. census bureau, ). this rapid growth has been accompanied by increased visibility in many areas of society, including the rise of prominent asian american professional athletes (such as jeremy lin in the nba and tiger woods pga), increased presence and more diverse representations of asian americans in the media, the first long-lasting television sitcom about an asian american family (“fresh off the boat”), the first hollywood hit centering asian american experiences in decades (“crazy rich asians”), and the election of a rising number of asian americans in u.s. politics. accompanying the increased visibility of asian americans are indicators of the apparently growing social and political influence of these communities. in the last few months alone, major mainstream national media outlets have produced stories on the growing influence of vietnamese https://doi.org/ . /he. https://doi.org/ . /he. https://doi.org/ . /he. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. americans in the u.s. political arena, how chinese americans are mobilizing to acquire seats in political office, and the wave of asian american politicians that are being elected in geographic regions on the west and east coasts (e.g., constante, ; hobson, bentley, raphelson, ). these are all signs that asian americans can and likely will play an increasingly influential role in shaping u.s. politics and society moving forward. the increased visibility of asian americans and the production of this edited volume transpire in a politically and socially turbulent time across u.s. society and around the globe. over the last decade, large-scale tensions have erupted around the most pressing problems plaguing the united states and the world. during this period, national and international social movements to address global warming, widespread poverty, nationalistic xenophobia, and systemic racism and sexism have expanded their reach and influence. and, asian americans have been involved in both the mobilization of these movements and resistance to them. higher education serves as a critical site for grappling with the aforementioned political and social problems. on one hand, it is part of a larger social system that perpetuates and exacerbates these challenges. on the other hand, institutions of higher education can serve as engines of progress, providing space and resources for their community members to develop solutions to these problems. given these realities, it is not surprising that higher education is a site of significant political and social conflict. for example, the #occupy, #blacklivesmatter, and #metoo movements have sparked campus protests across the nation and mounting pressures for colleges and universities to take diversity and equity more seriously. and, in the policy arena, increasingly heated debates are taking place about affirmative action and data disaggregation—two issues that heavily shape our system of higher education. regardless of whether higher education continues to ignore asian americans, all indicators suggest that these communities are shaping these major debates and their influence will likely continue to grow. in response to these realities, this volume offers a call to action, fueled by the recognition that it is imperative that higher education engage asian american communities in effectively addressing existing political and social problems. in previous work, we and our colleagues have thoroughly underscored the many ways in which racial processes lead higher education to ignore and exclude asian americans (for thorough review, see museus, antonio, & kiang, ). many chapters in this volume touch on the ways in which this exclusion continues to permeate higher education systems as well. such exclusion prevents asian americans from developing complex understandings of the relationship between larger social processes and their communities, hinders other communities to develop more accurate knowledge of the asian american experience, and limits the development of empathy, understanding, and collective action across social groups that is necessary to address ongoing and pervasive social problems. perhaps the current debate around affirmative action best illuminates the dangers that result from failing to engage asian american communities in such major conversations. as the chapters in this volume suggest, dominant narratives are filled with misconceptions about the experiences of asian american students in the united states and what it means to be asian american. as the authors of chapter discuss, anti-affirmative action advocates have exploited these misunderstandings to strengthen their efforts to dismantle affirmative action policies and practices. despite the reality that affirmative action has benefited asian american communities immensely, anti-affirmative action advocates continue to utilize one-sided narratives that asian americans are victims of these policies to challenge them. this is just one example that highlights this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. the urgency of better understanding asian american experiences and ways that such knowledge can help accurately inform political conflicts and policy conversations. it could be argued that there are many ways in which engaging asian americans can positively shape progress within higher education. for example, deeper analyses of asian american activism and asian americans’ roles in hot-button debates around issues such as affirmative action might increase understanding of the complexities of relationships they have with other racial communities and better equip institutions of higher education in fostering productive collaborations that advance racial equity (chapter ). more thorough analyses of southeast asian american refugee experiences in higher education might inform policies and practices to effectively support and serve newly arriving refugee communities (chapter ). unpacking the experiences of asian american veterans might help cultivate more complex narratives about how those from oppressed and marginalized communities play key roles in protecting our democracy and the responsibilities of higher education institutions to serve them (chapter ). expanding the discourse around asian american and native american pacific islander serving institutions (aanapisis) can further mobilize campus communities that have the capacity to better serve this population (chapters - ). and, exposing the barriers to asian americans’ access to leadership can help build bridges across communities to advance social justice by deconstructing dominant racial narratives that function to exclude asian americans while simultaneously reinforcing other racial communities (chapter ). the diverse cadre of authors in this volume provide valuable insights, recent findings from scholarly research, and useful practical implications to advance these conversations. we hope that this volume will constitute a critical resource for many scholars and administrators who wish to better understand, more effectively work with, and enhance their capacity to serve asian american faculty, staff, and college students. equally important, however, is our hope that these contributions underscore the urgency of engaging asian americans in larger conversations about college access and success, diversity and equity, democracy, and social justice in higher education. as the asian american population continues to grow, failing to meaningfully engage them in these broader discussions will likely be increasingly harmful. however, intentionally engaging them in these larger discourses will ensure that we have a more informed citizenry, more complex understandings across identity groups, and a stronger base to advocate for equity in higher education and broader society. references constante, a. ( ). in california, asian americans find growing political power. nbc news. retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/california-asian- americans-find-growing-political-power-n . dorland, c. p. ( ). chinese massacre at los angeles in . annual publication of the historical society of southern california, los angeles, ( ), - . https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/california-asian-americans-find-growing-political-power-n https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/california-asian-americans-find-growing-political-power-n https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/california-asian-americans-find-growing-political-power-n this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. hobson, j., bentley, c, raphelson, s. ( ). california democrats hope asian-american voters can help flip red districts. national public radio (npr). retrieved from https://www.npr.org/ / / / /california-democrats-hope-asian- american-voters-can-help-flip-red-districts. museus, s. d. ( ). asian american students in higher education. routledge. museus, s. d., antonio, a. l., kiang, p. n. ( ). the state of scholarship on asian americans and pacific islanders in education: anti-essentialism, inequality, context, and relevance. in s. d. museus, d. ching, & a. agbayani (eds.), focusing on the underserved immigrant, refugee, and indigenous asian american and pacific islanders in higher education (pp. - ). charlotte, nc: information age publishing. takaki, r. t. ( ). strangers from a different shore: a history of asian americans. boston: little, brown and company. samuel d. museus is professor in the department of education studies at university of california, san diego. marie p. ting is associate director at the national center for institutional diversity at the university of michigan, ann arbor. https://www.npr.org/ / / / /california-democrats-hope-asian-american-voters-can-help-flip-red-districts doi . /el/ - x/ / / submitted: - - | accepted: - - ©  | cb creative commons attribution . international public license english literature e-issn - x vol. – december issn - ‘#differencemakesus’: selling shakespeare online (and the commerce platform etsy) anna blackwell (de monfort university, uk) abstract the mission statement of the online creative commerce platform etsy declares its com- mitment to “using the power of business to strengthen communities and empower people”. among the many handmade and vintage items sold on etsy are , items quoting helena’s description of hermia from a midsummer night’s dream (“and though she be but little, she is fierce”). this journal paper will examine the relationship between shakespeare and the predominantly female crafts people who operate through platforms such as these as well as shakespeare’s own depiction of fe- male craft and handcrafted items. it seeks to explore the processes at work in shakespeare-inspired merchandise and the relationship they claim to the play texts they adapt. the paper will continue by situating ‘female’ oriented creative work within the current political climate and exploring both the possibilities and limitations of craft as a vehicle for political resistance. summary introduction. – ‘shakescrafts’. – women and craft in shakespeare’s plays. – the precarity of craft. keywords shakespeare. adaptation. sewing. handcraft. neoliberalism. women. feminism. introduction maria grazia chiuri made history when she launched her spring col- lection of clothing down the runways of paris fashion week. having spent years working at fashion houses such as valentino and fendi, chiuri had just become the first ever female creative director of the luxury company, christian dior. her debut was already significant on those grounds; how- ever, the fashion journalist jess cartner-morley noted a more significant aspect of this show. the most eye-catching outfit on display was, cartner- morley argued, not “a traditional waisted dior bar jacket, or a fairy-tale red-carpet gown” (cartner-morley ), but a slogan t-shirt bearing the title of an essay and ted talk written by the nigerian author chimamanda ngozi adichie: ‘we should all be feminists’. cartner-morley continued that the opportunity for a woman to redefine what femininity looks like “could hardly come at a more culturally resonant time” as hillary clinton, the first female american presidential candidate was then facing an opposing blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - campaign from later president donald trump “mired in accusations of misogyny” (cartner-morley ). indeed, although perhaps ahead of the curve, dior was not alone in producing politically-inflected and specifically feminist fashion that year. a season later, the clothes on display at new york fashion week bought similarly into an aesthetic of protest. notable graphic prints included christian siriano’s ‘people are people’, creatures of comfort’s ‘we are all human beings’ and jonathan simkhai’s ‘feminist af [as fuck]’. keen to monopolise their earlier success, meanwhile, dior produced a striped t-shirt bearing the question ‘why have there been no great women artists’ from linda nochlin’s art history essay of the same name. the connection between fashion and politics further intensified. nepa- lese-american designer prabal gurung’s show at the same fashion week concluded with slogans including ‘revolution has no borders’, ‘i am an immigrant’ and ‘the future is female’. the sentiment of the latter state- ment, though chiefly optimistic, was bittersweet: only six days prior to gurung’s show, it had been uttered by hillary clinton in her first public statement since the inauguration of trump to office as president. this phenomenon also has historical precedence, of course. there is a long and well-documented connection between textiles and feminist political activism. victoria mitchell writes, for instance, of the women who opposed nuclear war at greenham common and with their textiles, banners and hand-knit shelters “literally wove themselves into the site of their protest” (mitchell , ). it should be noted, meanwhile, that the ‘the future is female’ slogan can be traced back to a t-shirt design made for labyris books, the first women’s bookshop in new york, in the mid-seventies. the statement’s ancestry and its connections to a radical feminism has not been explicitly recognised by gurung who nevertheless claims influence from “what gloria steinam was doing in the s” (reed, moore ) but it is acknowledged by the independent retailer otherwild who sell a ver- sion of the same t-shirt with % of proceeds donated to the american reproductive health care charity, planned parenthood. the same potential for textiles to articulate resistance (in this case op- position to the trump administration in america) was articulated outside of high fashion during that same period. although the international women’s march took place officially to protest for women’s rights in a general sense, a large number of protesters attended the day wearing bright pink ‘pussyhats’. the garment was the brainchild of design architect jayne zweiman and screenwriter krista suh and the designer of the origi- nal pattern, kay coyle. zweiman and suh wanted to craft an object that would show feminist solidarity – not only to the protesters on the day but to others, like zweiman, who were not able to attend in person. they came up with the ‘pussyhat’ concept, chosen “in part”, they share, “as a protest against vulgar comments donald trump made about the freedom he felt blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - to grab women’s genitals” but also to “de-stigmatize the word ‘pussy’ and transform it into one of empowerment” (“our story” s.d.). the same strategy of responding creatively and critically to trump’s misogyny was evident in the popularity of placards (but, later, of memorabilia and cloth- ing) referencing and parodying trump’s description of clinton as ‘such a nasty woman’. as gabrielle moss wrote, with each new misogynistic gaffe by trump, women’s rights protesters found new ways to “show not just your hatred of trump and his policies, but also the joy you took in being the kind of woman he would loath” (moss ). ‘shakescrafts’ but where does shakespeare fit into all of this? the answer is that he is not exempt from the same marketisation of feminism that has seen both a top-down commodification of politics by fashion and lifestyle brands and a bottom-up movement capitalising on the current popularity of handcrafted, non-profit or small business version of feminist statements. in fact, sujatar iyengar argues that “‘shakespeare’ offers a liminal, intermedial space be- tween branded, profit-generating, mass-market industry and independent, financially threatened, idiosyncratic cultural production” (iyengar , ). nowhere is shakespeare’s ability to traverse and occupy the space between both modes more apparent than on e-commerce websites like etsy. a self-described “global marketplace for unique and creative good” (“about etsy” n.d.), etsy helps independent sellers to advertise their wares to a much larger audience and in a more sophisticated way than might otherwise be possible. in return, of course, for a cut of the sellers’ profits. at the time of writing, the search term ‘shakespeare’ brings up , results from the retailers who use etsy’s online store fronts to sell the kind of upcycled, handmade, crafted, vintage or vintage-inspired goods with which the website’s name is now (often parodically) synonymous. as a point of comparison, a search for the highly popular television series game of thrones (a shorthand also for the ‘a song of ice and fire’ series of fantasy novels by george r.r. martin which the series is adapted from) brings up , results on etsy. game of thrones is by any standards a significant part of contemporary popular culture and its quasi-medieval setting and fantasy genre supply quite readily the type of audience mem-  the satirical record of popular vernacular, urban dictionary, defines goods from etsy as “overpriced junk and cheap, trashy, idiotic or otherwise useless items”. the website’s entry assesses etsy cynically, noting (perhaps accurately) that few items are “actually handmade” but are rather inexpensively and inexpertly thrown together and “resold to suckers […] for a % markup”. vintage items are simply “weathered, rusted, [or] stained with dog or cat urine” (muscoffo ), and etsy retailers delusional egotists. blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - ber interested in purchasing a personalised house sigil or a replica weap- on. other transmedia juggernauts like harry potter offer a not dissimilar amount of results ( , ) that speak to a continued appetite among fans for affiliation through merchandise. shakespeare’s place in all of this and seeming popularity on etsy (or at the very least the expectation thereof; we cannot be sure how many of these items are ever sold) thus speaks to his ability to be at once a reliable source of income, a recognisable brand and a mass-commodified item and the occasion for individual, handmade, small-scale specialist production in accordance with the website’s purpose. this is perhaps all the more remarkable because, unlike the makers of game of thrones or harry potter-inspired goods, online shakespearean sellers do not rely upon a singular or stable intellectual property. shake- speare’s popularity may see peaks and troughs that correspond roughly to high-profile adaptations or performances but, for the most part, interest in the playwright seemingly sustains itself. the offerings themselves, meanwhile, are a varied mixture of items that quote from shakespeare’s plays, reference his characters or trade on his name and semblance. they do all of this to a greater or lesser extent, in- viting differing levels of participation in shakespeare-enjoyment for their consumers. one can compare, for instance, a vintage-style pendant with the rather oblique statement, “shakespeare is sexy”, with an embroidery pattern for a sampler with benedict’s call to beatrice, “lady disdain”. clearly both objects appeal to the same shakespeare fan base, but they invite consumers to mobilise their interest in different ways; the former by wearing the item and the latter through a more time-intensive task of sewing the pattern. in other cases, the reification of one’s shakespearean fandom might come at the point of purchase itself. bardbombsapothecary sells a wide range of bath bombs, each of which is named after either a play or a character within a shakespeare play. both the physical design of the bomb (its colour and texture) and its constituent ingredients are intended to match up to the chosen shakespearean influence, and these intentions are explained by the maker in the copy used to sell the item. the richard ii bath bomb, for instance, is based on the “ill fated richard ii”: “a beautiful cautionary tale, which eventually sets the groundwork for the war of the roses”. the bomb is thus a pale white colour with rose coloured flecks and a with a small rose at its centre. it is made from rose fragrant oil, dried roses, powdered milk and kokum butter “so [that] you feel like royalty”. details such as these speak to the perceived personal  see bookishgirl. “shakespeare is sexy nacklace”. url https://etsy.me/ dflgfe ( - - ).  see plasticlittlecovers. “lady disdain”. url https://etsy.me/ sx eu ( - - ).  see “the richard ii”. url https://etsy.me/ s qhnd ( - - ). blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - touch of independent sellers and yet, like the bath bomb itself, they invite an ephemeral form of fan engagement that must exist more at the moment of purchase (the pleasure of selecting your chosen bomb) than of use. un- less, that is, one muses on richard in the bath. regardless of their duration, the result can be shakespeare-inspired goods that are aesthetically pleasing and playfully and knowingly pre- sented. the shakespeare aficionados are entertained both by the act of purchasing, and in their subsequent ownership of an item which reifies their fan identification. as graham holderness and brian loughrey note in their work on ‘shakesbeers’, “capitalism can now produce shakespear- ean materials that display a textual richness and diversity that do justice to the dramatic works from which the material originally derives” ( , ). the examples, which inspired this paper, are not holderness and loughrey’s textually rich objects, however. rather, they represent the broad malleability and adaptability of shakespeare and allow me to re- connect the opening work of this article on feminist fashion with what iyengar terms “shakescrafts” ( , ). while searching for representa- tive examples of shakescrafts on etsy, one thing came up more than any other: items that bear helena’s description of her friend, hermia, from a midsummer night’s dream, “though she but little, she is fierce” (shake- speare , iii, , - ). although it is impossible to ascertain that etsy’s search function only returns unique results, it is still remarkable that searching for this quotation alone produced , results. this is all the more significant because, unlike many of the other quotations that have made their way onto merchandise, “though she but little” has a largely derogatory tone. it is not superficially romantic (“i would not wish any companion in the world but you”, the tempest iii, , - ); inspirational (“it is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves” (shakespeare , i, , - ); a frequently mangled version of “the fault, dear bru- tus, is not in our stars” from julius caesar, iii, , ); profound or tragic (“to be or not to be”, hamlet) or contemplative (“i like this place. and willingly could waste my time in it”, as you like it, , ii, , - ). the line is instead uttered in frustration within the play by helena about her apparent love rival, hermia. it is the third reference to hermia’s short stature in the scene and all three references needle hermia’s sensitivity about her height. hermia attacks her friend first with words, describing the taller helena as a “painted maypole” (shakespeare , iii, , ) and warning her that she is not so small that she cannot reach helena’s eyes with her nails (iii, , ). the scene’s comic characterisation of the seemingly tall, confused helena and the furious, small hermia then reaches its particularly hurtful conclusion when lysander dismisses his former lover as a “dwarf” (iii, , ). yet, the quotation’s insulting nature is not explained or advertised when it is incorporated into shakescrafts. neither is it part of the roaring trade blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - in shakespeare insult-themed goods that sees quotations like jacques’ scathing assessment that the duke senior’s brain is “as dry as the remain- der biscuit after a voyage” printed on a glass or “thine face is not worth sunburning” on a vintage-style locket, a slight misquotation of henry’s wry self-description to katherine (shakespeare a, v, , - ). here the pleasure seemingly lies in the purchasers’ ability to use or wear a scathing insult, and thus incorporate it into their everyday life without the knowledge or awareness of the casual observer. one reviewer of the as you like it glass, for instance, enjoyed using it “real subtle like” while teaching macbeth and “seeing how long it takes for one of the students to notice!” (etsy tanya ). instead, ‘though she be but little’ is put to positive and straight-forward effect on etsy. it becomes a statement of female power: a reminder that despite sexual dimorphism, women are capable of strength in other ways. in hermia’s, the line reminds us of her ‘fierceness’. testament to this reading and the subsequent reproduction of the line is the overwhelming amount of items bearing it, which are tar- geted at young girls or which indicate children and/or girls as a potential consumer through their metadata. after all, helena’s efforts to belittle her friend lose some of their sting and become an accurate description when applied to the most mundane conclusion: the smallness of a child. a similar strategy was indeed used by the royal shakespeare com- pany when they released their own range of merchandise featuring the line, entitled ‘fierce’. in stock for a number of years now, the rsc seem to have just pre-empted the vogue for feminist or female-positive state- ments on household objects and clothes. the line bears similar hallmarks to later etsy products, however, with its targeting of female shakespeare through a consistent bright pink and white colour scheme. and although the relatively inexpensive range includes merchandise suitable for any age (including notebooks, badges and bags), the inclusion of a baby bib and baby grow in the line indicates a similar awareness of the pleasure and humour to be gained from ascribing hermia’s littleness to an infant. a contributive factor beyond this, which speaks to the line’s potential popularity among makers and consumers, is the different inflection that ‘fierce’ possesses. fierceness is not only the ability to be physically violent, frightening or powerful. it has acquired through use in gay culture in the late nineties and early noughties a generally positive quality, bestowing upon the described an exceptionality, whether evident through fashion-  see realpeoplegoods. “shakespearean insult shot glass - sarcasm shakespeare gift - english teacher gift - thespian present - remainder biscuit after a voyage”. url https:// etsy.me/ s tgr ( - - ).  bijouxmalou. “shakespeare insult necklace insult in style thine face is not worth sun- burning shakespeare quote henry v quote”. url https://etsy.me/ dbzvkj ( - - ). blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - able clothing, self-confidence and ability, or an unapologetic boldness. this newer meaning, like the potential attribution of the description to a small child, works to lessen the line’s original insulting quality and to reframe it instead as an admiring statement of female power. of course, a good deal of the items sold on etsy bearing this quotation serve no particular or explicit political purpose. but a further search on etsy for the terms ‘shakespeare’ and ‘feminist’ produced results and, of those, fea- tured the same line again or derivative variants thereof, including ‘she is fierce’ or ‘little but fierce’. in the online world of shakescraft, ‘though she but little, she is fierce’ is thus a trumpian soundbite: a phrase that can be repurposed for feminist use. the association of early modern women with obedience and silence can be reimagined through an example of outspo- kenness against the odds (that hermia wields power in spite of her size), just as the fearful and misogynistic rhetoric of trump’s speech can be wielded against him in protest. that this is a strategy that makes a virtue of its unlikeliness is evident in the quasi-surprised tone of the copy used to sell the ‘though she but little’ medal holder display racks: ‘sometimes big things come in small packages!’ women and craft in shakespeare’s plays it is nonetheless apt that the most popular craft version of shakespeare on etsy comes from and relates to the two characters whose previously lov- ing friendship is invoked through a description of embroidery and whose conversation reveals not only the pleasures of craft but the skill of the crafter. earlier in the same scene (iii, ) where helena delivers her more famous assessment of hermia, she laments her friend’s apparent betrayal, questioning the loss of their ‘sisters’ vows’ and ‘school-days’ friendship’: we, hermia, like two artificial gods, have with our needles created both one flower, both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, both warbling of one song, both in one key, as if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, had been incorporate. so we grow together, like to a double cherry, seeming parted, but yet an union in partition; two lovely berries moulded on one stem; so, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; two of the first, like coats in heraldry, due but to one and crowned with one crest. (shakespeare , iii, , - ) blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - helena beseeches her friend to remember the closeness they once had – the time they spent with their heads bowed over a sampler, stitching together one flower; sat on one cushion; singing one song with two voices in the same key. her speech is a paean to female friendship as the image of jointly- crafted embroidery gives way to the double cherry, “seeming parted, but yet an union in partition” (shakespeare , iii, , - ) and to two berries hanging off the same stem. the intimacy between the two young women is mapped onto these lush images as an artificial separation of bod- ies but a unity of heart (a sentiment that can be mapped pleasingly onto the connections forged in joint political protest). the ability of craft and embroidery in particular to speak for bonds of female friendship, family and community is apparent elsewhere in shake- speare’s plays. alison findlay writes that sewing “showed that woman’s industry, identity and place were in the home rather than in the public sphere of male activity”. in the case of coriolanus, while martius “fights abroad, his wife and mother sit down on two low stools to sew and to care for the child martius” (findlay ). but unlike helena and hermia who are connected by their shared labour, the sewing in act one, scene three of the play demonstrates the fraught relationship between mother-in-law and daughter. volumnia protests against her daughter-in-law’s sombre demeanour, sharing blithely her delight at sending coriolanus off to war even as virgilia blanches at the mere description of violence. sewing thus provides the social occasion in which volumnia can pontificate over her daughter-in-law, but virgilia sews for a much more desperate reasons. her refusal to leave the house when invited to by the visiting noblewoman, valeria, and her frenzied commitment to domestic industry does indeed, as findlay suggests, emphasise her “wifely modesty” ( ). yet valeria’s disappointed likening of virgilia to penelope is telling. virgilia’s penelope- like fidelity to coriolanus, sewing endlessly while awaiting his return, is a tedious display of feminine devotion to both volumnia and valeria. the latter scolds her, “come; i; i would your cambric were sensible as your fin- ger, that you might leave pricking it for pity” (shakespeare , i, , ). the two sew in the first place, of course, because it is a virtuous, pro- ductive and refined way for a noblewoman to spend her time. it is for this reason that valeria’s invitation for them to put down their needlework is to cast away their initially praised role as “manifest house-keepers” (shakespeare , i, , ) for one of the “idle huswife” (iii, , ). to wit, bianca is instructed by her father to “ply” (shakespeare , ii, , ) her needle rather than continue to row with her unmannerly sister, in the taming of the shrew. this association of sewing with a feminine ideal that is restrained and (self)disciplined is echoed in ophelia’s account of being disrupted by hamlet while she was sewing in her closet. while her embroidery works to fix, to impose order upon a design, hamlet both literally and symbolically unravels. his unhinged behaviour and cryptic, blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - non-verbal utterances are accompanied by unlaced clothing, drooping and fouled stockings. queen catharine meanwhile mobilises this association when she is vis- ited by the cardinals who seek her compliance in divorcing king henry. catharine, who is suspicious of their motives and will not assist them in their task, noting that “all hoods make not monks” (shakespeare , iii, , ), presents herself deliberately as a model of feminine virtue. she welcomes the men into her chambers with the comment that they inter- rupt her playing the “part of a housewife” (shakespeare , iii, , ). as their conversation progresses, and the cardinal’s motives becoming increasingly and upsettingly clear to catharine, she performs the role of the housewife once more. she exclaims, “i was set at work | among my maids, full little – god knows – looking | either for such men or such busi- ness” (shakespeare , iii, , - ). catharine presents herself as an unimpeachable royal mistress: the virtuous housewife sewing industriously with her women with no desire or expectation to be involved in matters of high state. of course, such performances are of limited efficacy when catharine has already outgrown her role as henry’s wife. hers is a case of delaying the inevitable rather than preventing it. craft’s limitations as a tool of signification are more painfully exposed in both cymbeline and othello; plays where the meaning that the textiles once had is wrested away from its bearer. in the case of othello and the infamous handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” (shakespeare , iii, , ), its fate to be misread as a symbol of adultery was set from its conception. othello shares that his mother was given the handkerchief by an egyptian “charmer” who could “almost read | the thoughts of people” (shakespeare , iii, , - ) and who promised that owning the object would prevent her husband from straying, while losing it would ensure his infidelity. a doubly enchanted item, the handkerchief itself was made by a “sibyl” who “in her prophetic fury sew’d the work” from holy silk (shakespeare , iii, , - ). whether it worked for othello’s mother is never wholly clear but the charmer’s prophecy certainly became true for othello, even if – most tragically – not for desdemona. the skill of the crafter appears in an even more devastating way in titus andronicus. lavinia’s skill in sewing is taken away from her so that the potential of craft as a mode of female expression is unfulfilled and unex- pressed. on discovering his niece and her mutilated body, marcus makes a direful comparison to the mythological athenian princess philomela, who was raped by her sister’s husband tereus, who tore out her tongue in order to silence her. marcus observes that philomela lost “but” her tongue and “in a tedious sampler sew’d her mind” (shakespeare b, ii, , - ) in order to reveal her abuser. lavinia’s attackers, chiron and demetrius, were a “craftier tereus” (shakespeare b, ii, , ), however, remov- ing that option from her by cutting off “those pretty fingers [...] | that blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - could have better sew’d than philomel” (shakespeare b, ii, , - ). lavinia thus resorts to a much cruder means to reveal the perpetrators of this “heinous, bloody deed” (shakespeare b, iv, , ). susan frye writes that the dramatic importance of textiles and female craft “impersonate” their centrality to early modern women. the plays “enact” the significance that textiles again as “objects whose production offered to make the lives of women meaningful safe”. and yet, because they locate women’s worth in household materials and labour, the plays also chart the vulnerability of both textiles and women to “erotic and mi- sogynistic interpretation” (frye , ). the precarity of craft the potentially expressive value of female craft, be it literal act of mak- ing or more figurative uses, is indeed effaced throughout shakespeare’s plays by variously, its removal, acts of male misreading and the generally secondary quality of the female characters. the makers of shakescraft on etsy experience a different kind of vulnerability, but one that also demands attention because, like lavinia’s frustrated efforts, female creativity and expression mean nothing in a world that places little literal or symbolic value on women’s autonomy. if she could have sewn, lavinia may well have created a more skilled rendering of her assault than her mythical counterpart. but to complain about the loss of lavinia’s skill at such a time seems only to echo the obscenity of the original crime. in the particular case of etsy, however, two contextual issues are of importance: the first, is the overwhelmingly female make-up of its crafters, reckoned at % in (“the art and craft of business” ), and the second is contem- porary employment practices. under neoliberalism, each subject is “held responsible and account-able for his or her own actions and well-being” and “individual success or failure is interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings [...] rather than being attributed to any sys- temic property” (harvey , - ). this self-governance maps onto the demands of neoliberal capitalism and a contracting job market place where individuals are increasingly required to freelance, to work short-term or zero-hour contracts; where the ability to monetize different aspects of your professional ability is essential. neoliberal capitalism, of course, profits from the reduced cost of work- ers’ benefits and pensions and sells such ‘gig’ employment as a preferable alternative: you can work from home if you like! you can choose your own hours! you can pursue that artistic side-line you always dreamt of! this narrative is potent for those seeking a type of employment outside of an office-based, -to- norm. and such a feeling must only be compounded by having the kind of caring responsibilities or conditions that make tra- blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - ditional full-time work practices impossible and that make precariousness seem like a valid way of regaining control. this is dangerous; precarity does not protect you or make you more dynamic. it exposes you and, of course, those who most need adaptability in work can least afford the costs should it fail, or change (least we should forget, burdens of care fall over- whelmingly on women). the allure of self-employment within a neoliberal economy is particularly treacherous in creative labour, because of what angela mcrobbie calls “the normative expectation of the pain” of precar- ity. the possibility of self-expressiveness and a “passionate attachment to something called ‘my own work’” becomes a “compelling status justifica- tion (and also a disciplinary mechanism)” for tolerating uncertainty and for staying – unprofitably – within the creative sector (mcrobbie , ). this means, according to sarah mosle, that what e-commerce sites like etsy are peddling are not only handicrafts but “the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career” (mosle ). this promise, she argues, is an unten- able fantasy and one that dooms many makers to below minimum-wage employment and unhealthy, all-hour work practices. and this is the pre- carity that lies behind so many of the ‘though she but little’ shakescraft items on etsy. as it is for shakespeare’s good housewives, the economi- cally emancipatory or expressive value of female craft is effaced by its vulnerability to exploitation. of course, this does not negate the feminist potential of such goods but it does complicate it, as does the fact that contemporary craft is, susan luckman argues, marked by its whiteness. luckman writes that the “gatekeeping requirements” of makers fairs and design craft markets are echoed online and indeed, elevate a “particular kind of northern european high design sensibility” ( , ). returning to the meeting place between craft and the post-trump po- litical landscape yields a prime example of not only this but the perceived difficulty of feminist protest led by white women (to which the inter- national women’s march and later #metoo movements both belong). as nicole dawkins observes, craft offers us a “revealing standpoint” ( , ) from which to explore “the ever-changing plurality of positions and issues that constitute feminisms today” (braithwaite , ). a phrase that found particular resonance during this period and in protest against  the #metoo movement spread virally in october of , popularised by white stars like alyssa milano and ashley judd. it sought to raise awareness for the sexual harassment and assault of women and challenge its normalisation and gained particular traction in the wake of the allegations made against hollywood producer, harvey weinstein. the phrase had been used online as early as , however, created by african american social activist tarana burke in response to a thirteen-year-old girl’s confession of sexual assault. while burke has received some acknowledgement for role, including being named as one of time magazine’s ‘silence breakers’, her part has largely been erased in favour of a narrative of celebrity-led activism. blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - the sexism demonstrated by the trump administration and the president himself was uttered by senate majority leader mitch mcconnell in re- sponse to the actions of the senior senator from massachusetts, elizabeth warren. warren had attempted to read a letter written by the civil rights activist, coretta scott king, during a debate in the upper house on the appointment of the republican senator jeff sessions as attorney general. king had written the letter in in opposition to sessions’ then failed judicial nomination, expressing her view that sessions would act as federal prosecutor to “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” (our foreign staff ). three decades later, warren felt that king’s warning needed to be heard again. this was regarded as a direct violation of the senate’s rules against ‘impugning the motives’ of a senator and, when she continued after a caution from the house, warren was barred from speaking for the remainder of the debate. mcconnell rebuked warren say- ing, “she was warned. she was given an explanation. nevertheless, she persisted” (our foreign staff ). it was the latter part of mcconnell’s statement that found cachet as a rallying call for female tenacity in the face of masculine conservativism, and this too inevitably found its way onto t-shirts, magnets, mugs and the like, so that just over a year later, there were , results on etsy for ‘nevertheless she persisted’. king’s central part in this story (she is the reason for warren’s persistence, after all) is strikingly absent, however. at the time of searching, etsy only produced results for ‘king’ and even fewer results drew any connection between warren and king (whether in their actual content or the metadata used to advertise their goods). one notable exception to this was a listing from the shop robotslovedinosaurs that sold ‘she persisted’ on a button in a three pack along with ‘let liz speak’ and ‘hear coretta’s words’. the issue with this is not with warren herself or indeed her admirable persistence but the fact that it is a description of warren, a white woman, by mcconnell that becomes a popular shorthand for feminist resistance to republican politics. gabrielle moss shares that reclaiming such phrases no longer inspired her to fight, though, but drowned her “in toxicity” ( ). she questions instead, where are the words from those most marginal- ized by the “racists, sexists, xenophobes, [and] homophobes” who seek to further reduce their rights: i wished that i could buy a shirt with alice walker’s quote “the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any” which was as sharp as the “pussy grabs back” shirts. i wished it was as easy and simple to find out what the people who are putting their well-being – and in many cases, their lives – on the line to fight against the trump administration were saying as it was to find out what new, terrible, degrading thing a man had said to a woman who didn’t deserve it. (moss ) blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - moss’s imagined walker t-shirt does exist online – and even on etsy – along with a number of other walker-based items. but tellingly, these listings were in the hundreds rather than thousands. browsing for walker as opposed to shakespeare or warren was, moreover, the only time i encountered adverts that featured black models. the hands which are often featured in listings, photographed cradling jewellery or other such handcrafted items, are overwhelmingly white. such a degree of racial erasure and lack of rep- resentation remains uncommented on, however, because craft is “perhaps protected discursively” on account of its links with wider practices with an “ethical or at least progressive sensibility” (luckman , ) such as buying organic or up-cycling. etsy’s slogan may be ‘#differencemakesus’ but the salient difference is, importantly, not one of diversity in class or of race among its makers but of variance from a commercial norm: hand- made versus machine-made; individually sourced and designed versus sweat-shop produced. even this distinction should be taken with a pinch of salt. this is not to undermine the potential ethical benefit of shopping through small businesses as opposed to transnational corporations, but we need a recognition that, as luckman argues, the consumption of craft goods is “part of a set of ethical and self-aware middle-class purchasing behaviours”. these are “niche lifestyles” [emphasis added], open only to those who can afford them (luckman , ). and this is one of the new digital landscapes that shakespeare has colonised. shakespeare’s presence and popularity on websites such as etsy appears as an extension of the capital he possesses in ‘irl’ or, in real life. his commodification in the form of shakescraft reifies the assumption, whether correct or not, that the enjoyment of shakespeare is the exclusive preserve of the white, educated middle and upper-middle classes. bibliography “about etsy” n.d. = “about etsy”. url https://www.etsy.com/about ( - - ). braithwaite, ann ( ). “the personal, the political, third-wave and postfeminisms”. feminist theory, ( ), - . doi https://doi. org/ . / . cartner-morley, jess ( ). “maria grazia chiuri’s dior debut spells out her feminist message”. guardian. url https://www.theguardian.com/ fashion/ /sep/ /maria-grazia-chiuri-christian-dior-debut- feminist-message-paris-fashion-week ( - - ). dawkins, nicole ( ). “do-it-yourself: the precarious work and post- feminist politics of handmaking (in) detroit”. utopian studies, ( ), - . doi https://doi.org/ . /utopianstudies. . . . blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - findlay, alison ( ). women in shakespeare: a dictionary. lon- don: arden. url https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/women-in-shake- speare- / ( - - ). frye, susan ( ). pens and needles: women’s textualities in early mod- ern england. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. doi htt- ps://doi.org/ . / . harvey, david ( ). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford: oxford university press. holderness, graham; loughrey, bryan ( ). “ales, beers, shakespeares”. shellard, dominic; keenan, siobhan (eds), shakespeare’s cultural capi- tal: his economic impact from the sixteenth to the twenty-first cen- tury. london: palgrave, - . doi https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ . iyengar, sujata ( ). “upcycling shakespeare: crafting cultural capi- tal”. fischlin, daniel (ed.), outerspeares: shakespeare, intermedia and the limits of adaptation. toronto: university of toronto press, - . doi https://doi.org/ . / - . luckman, susan ( ). craft and the creative economy. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. doi https://doi.org/ . / . mcrobbie, angela ( ). “making a living in london’s small-scale cre- ative sector”. power, dominic; scott, allen j. (eds), cultural industries and the production of culture. abingdon: routledge, - . doi htt- ps://doi.org/ . / _chapter_ . mitchell, victoria (ed.) ( ). selvedges: writings and artworks since . norwich: norwich gallery. mosle, sara ( ). “etsy.com peddles a false feminist fantasy”. dou- ble x. url http://www.doublex.com/section/work/etsycom-peddles- false-feminist-fantasy ( - - ). morris, lucy ( ). “calling bullshit on (dior’s) feminist slogan tees’. grazia. url https://graziadaily.co.uk/fashion/news/dior-feminist- slogan-spring-summer- / ( - - ). moss, gabrielle. . “the big problem with using ‘nevertheless, she persisted’ as a feminist rallying cry” . bustle. url https://www. bustle.com/p/the-big-problem-with-using-nevertheless-she-per- sisted-as-a-feminist-rallying-cry- ( - - ). muscoffo ( ). “etsy”. urban dictionary. url https://www.urbandic- tionary.com/define.php?term=etsy ( - - ). nochlin, linda ( ). women, art and power and other essays. abingdon: routledge. doi https://doi.org/ . / . our foreign staff ( ). “elizabeth warren silenced for reading coretta scott king letter in senate debate on jeff sessions”. the telegraph. url https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /warren-violates- arcane-rule-coretta-scott-king-quote-sparking/ ( - - ). blackwell. ‘#differencemakesus’ english literature, , , - e-issn - x issn - “our story” n.d. = “our story”. the pussyhat project. url https://www. pussyhatproject.com/our-story/ ( - - ). reed, sam; and moore, ben ( ). “prabal gurung explains his nyfw feminist finale”. hollywood reporter. url https://www.hollywoo- dreporter.com/news/prabal-gurung-explains-his-nyfw-feminist- finale- ( - - ). shakespeare, william ( ). a midsummer night’s dream. edited by harold f. brooks. london: methuen. shakespeare, william ( a). henry v (arden shakespeare). edited by t.w. craik. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( b). titus andronicus (arden shakespeare). edited by jonathan bate. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). julius caesar (arden shakespeare). edited by david daniell. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). king henry viii (arden shakespeare). ed- ited by gordon mcmullan. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). othello (arden shakespeare). edited by e.a.j honigmann. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). as you like it (arden shakespeare). edited by juliet dusinberre. london and new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). the taming of the shrew (arden shake- speare). edited by barbara hodgdon. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( a). coriolanus (arden shakespeare). edited by peter holland. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( b). the tempest (arden shakespeare). edited by virginia mason vaughan. london; new york: bloomsbury. shakespeare, william ( ). hamlet (arden shakespeare). edited by ann thompson and neil taylor. london; new york: bloomsbury. tanya ( ). “review”. etsy. online. url https://etsy.me/ dbzvkj ( - - ). “the art and craft of business” = “the art and craft of business: artisanal capitalism”. the economist, , . rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights original article rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights amy bonomi published online: august # the author(s) abstract during an era when campuses nationwide are increasingly in the spotlight for a range of sexual assault infractions, rothman proposes four groundbreaking thought experiments that challenge the status quo in campus-based prevention programming and call for us to do better. namely, rothman’s thought experiments—which suggest that campuses ) invest in fighting structural oppression at the societal level, ) direct their social norming work at the macro level, ) educate preventionists in consent and pleasure related to kink, anal sex and group sex, and ) enact education and counseling for sexual violence perpetrators—provide us with fresh opportunities to examine our willingness and capacity to change and to become even more impactful leaders in practices to reduce sexual violence. in the present editorial, i argue that for rothman’s experiments (which are focused funda- mentally on changing underlying power structures at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status) to be optimally effective, campuses must first engage intensively and systematically in anti-bias curricula to prepare us to be effective fighters for civil rights and human rights. accordingly, we must be willing to acknowledge that biases exist in all of us, that biases operate in across environments to both privilege and disadvantage at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status, and that we must replace our biases with equity-focused actions for greater equity for all. i applaud rothman in her outside-the-box thought experiments, join her in challenging us to do things differently on our nation’s campuses, and hope we have the courage to be leaders in anti-bias, civil rights and human rights practices to more impactfully reduce sexual violence against women and non-majority groups. keywords sexual violence . sexual assault . college . prevention . programs . human rights women accuse ex-usc campus doctor of sexual abuse, say the school ‘let it happen’ reads a recent headline for abc news (thorboeke ). over the last six months, this head- line is tragically one among many revealing sexual violations involving campus doctors and students. other universities with similar headlines: michigan state university and ohio state university. universities are increasingly in the hot seat, with many scrambling to reexamine and reevaluate prevention and re- sponse practices and policies. while the range of prevention and response activities varies across college campuses, most u.s. campuses have student-focused intervention and bystander programming, such as green dot which is effective in reducing sexual assault and relationship violence (coker et al. ). yet, student-focused campus prevention programs and ap- proaches are not enough to stop sexual violence. why? first, by targeting only students in prevention programming, cam- puses miss the full range of occupants, including students, alumni, administrators, faculty and staff—all of whom collec- tively shape campus climate, dialogue and interactions. second, sexual violence is normative within our broader so- cietal culture (farrow ) and embedded within larger civil and human rights infractions involving sexism, racism, homo- phobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism. third, as in the case of the ex-usc physician, not all campus sexual assault involves student perpetrators. this is why the essay by rothman, bpreventing sexual violence on campus in the u.s.: four thought experiments,^ (rothman ) is timely and groundbreaking. in the essay, rothman proposes four thought experiments that * amy bonomi bonomi@msu.edu department of human development and family studies, michigan state university, w. circle drive, east lansing, mi - , usa journal of family violence ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:bonomi@msu.edu challenge the status quo for sexual violence prevention pro- gramming on college campuses and call for us to do better. rothman’s thought experiments provide us with fresh opportu- nities to examine our willingness and capacity to change and to become leaders in practices to more substantially impact sexual violence against women and other non-majority groups. rothman’s first thought experiment is that universities stop investing in sexual assault prevention and instead fight structural oppression—including sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism—which creates the underly- ing context and conditions for sexual assault. this is not at odds with the plethora of human rights concerns raised by the michigan state university community during a town hall fol- lowing the sentencing of former msu physician larry nassar for his sexual crimes involving more than women students and athletes (nawyn and bonomi ). namely, during the town hall which drew to people from the campus community, the who squeezed into the town hall room demanded fundamental change in how we privilege and deny power and rights by gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, abil- ities, and tenure status (the class system in academia) (nawyn and bonomi ). in essence, rothman’s first proposal is consistent with what many within a heavily scrutinized college campus—michigan state university—are calling for. as well, rothman’s proposal aligns with martin luther king’s appeal for each of us to: become a dedicated fighter for civil rights … it will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can. it will give you a rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. make a career of humanity. commit yourself to the noble struggle of human rights. you will make a greater per- son of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in. (king ) to become dedicated fighters for civil and human rights re- quires us, in an initial step, to get serious about anti-bias cur- ricula aimed at reducing sexism, racism, homophobia, xeno- phobia, ableism and classism. moreover, unlike bystander in- tervention and other prevention programing, which is typical- ly aimed at changing student behavior, all campus administra- tors, faculty, staff and students, must take part in anti-bias curricula in ongoing, sustained ways. the evidence shows that participation in campus-based anti-bias curricula by at least % of faculty and administrators within an academic unit improves equity actions in the short term (carnes et al. ) and produces more equitable hiring outcomes in the long term (devine et al. ). what might this look like? to start, we might collaborate as administrators, academic units and service provision units in anti-bias curricula aimed at the plethora of gender bias (carnes et al. ), including biases that implicate women as sexual gatekeepers (england et al. ), blame them for sexual crimes (niemi and young ), and disadvantage them in nearly all aspects of life, including academic leadership (carnes et al. ). in simultaneous fashion, we must exam- ine how gender bias operates at the intersection of race, in- cluding how women of color are disproportionately excluded from research and national conversations concerning violence against women (jones ), and how they experience less equitable opportunities for key leadership positions on college campuses (mainah and perkins ). for anti-bias curricula to work in preparing us to be effec- tive fighters for civil and human rights more broadly at the societal level, we must be willing to acknowledge that biases exist in all of us, that biases operate across environments to both privilege and disadvantage at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status, and that we must replace our biases with equity-focused actions for greater equity for all (carnes et al. ). and, as rothman astutely notes, working toward greater equity for all will re- quire those with power to surrender some of it for the greater good (rothman ). on college campuses, this means, for example, evenly distributing women and men in key admin- istrative roles. it means doing away with the common practice of appointing those with minority status as token members of key committees and decision-making bodies (davis ); rather, individuals from minority backgrounds must be repre- sented equitably at the table, with equitable voice and decision-making authority. in sum, if our ultimate goal is fighting for civil rights, for human rights at the societal level, we must also do so in our own backyards. rothman’s second thought experiment is that universities refocus their social norming missions beyond campus to the macro level, such as raising awareness at the macro level about how adhering to traditional gender role norms and sex role scripts elevates risk of sexual violence. rothman’s pro- posal can garner energy in the midst of national social norming movements aimed at raising awareness about sexual and relationship violence; for example, the recent twitter hashtags #metoo, #maybehedoesnthityou engaged millions in online conversation about the realities of violence against women (mccauley et al. ). as an initial strategy, what if university administrators part- ner with faculty, staff, students and alumni to lead social media dialogue that first acknowledges how upholding traditional gender roles privileges men over women in academic settings (e.g., former msu physician larry nassar’s sexual abuse was downplayed for a period of time) and then establish measur- able pledges to challenge adherence to these norms to create more equitable conditions for all? as an example, recent twitter dialogue following the hashtag, #howiwillchange, is engaging men and boys in the #metoo movement (pettyjohn et al. in press). to enact this effectively, significant efforts must be made to break through the problematic reality j fam viol ( ) : – and tradition on college campuses of privileging some voices over others. in this regard, i maintain that all campus admin- istrators, faculty, staff and students will need systematic (and ongoing) anti-bias training at the intersection of sexism, rac- ism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism, and commit to fighting for civil and human rights to promote equity for all. rothman’s third thought experiment is that sexual assault prevention experts be trained in consent and pleasure related to kink, anal sex, group sex and increasingly popular (but traditionally non-normative) sexual behaviors on college cam- puses. such training would bring college campuses up to date with the reality of the sexual lives of college-age students. while i agree with rothman’s proposal, i maintain that such training be provided to all campus administrators, faculty, staff and students within the context of anti-bias curricula—which will encourage an in-depth examination of deeply ingrained biases that implicate women as sexual gatekeepers (england et al. ); for example, biases that might lead to our wrongly ascribing blame to women for not stopping kink sex from crossing over into unwanted sexual assault. it will also require training for all across campus regarding the role of alcohol and drugs within kink sexual interactions and sexual crimes, in- cluding the ways in which alcohol is normative on college campuses and the ways in which it is used to manipulate sexual consent (bonomi et al. ). rothman’s fourth thought experiment involves campuses providing education and counseling for sexual violence perpe- trators. supported by the surging emotion and momentum at the national level associated with #metoo, #maybehedoesnthityou and high profile sexual violence scandals, for education and counseling for sexual violence per- petrators to be received well on college campuses, we will need to first demonstrate genuine support and engagement in anti- bias curricula to address the widespread disadvantages that exist for women, for persons of color and those from interna- tional backgrounds, for sexual minorities, for those with differ- ent abilities, and for persons from lower socioeconomic envi- ronments. as well, campuses will also need to demonstrate clear commitment and action in fighting for civil rights, for human rights in partnership with others at the broader societal level; this will again require the surrendering and evening out of power, which will test our courage and will. in summary, i applaud rothman for having the courage and innovation to abandon her bstandard lecture notes on the social-ecological model and bystander intervention^ to chal- lenge us during this historical period, when national social movements (e.g., metoo, black lives matter) might be lever- aged to support change efforts on college campuses, and uni- versities can serve as leaders in national movements to impact historic and contemporary injustices at the intersection of sex- ism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism. through her courage and innovation, rothman has provided us with four thought experiments, which call for us to do things differently, and at the very root, fundamentally chal- lenge our willingness and capacity to change and to become leaders in anti-bias, civil rights and human rights practices to more substantially impact sexual violence against women and non-majority groups. i join rothman in her outside-the-box thought proposals, and challenge us to step up for civil and human rights. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appro- priate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references bonomi, a. e., nichols, e., kammes, r., chugani, c., de genna, n., jones, k. a., & miller, e. 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( ). women accuse ex-usc campus doctor of sexual abuse, say the school 'let it happen'. https://abcnews.go.com/ gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse- school/story?id= : abc news. j fam viol ( ) : – https://rdcu.be/ skh https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= 	rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights 	abstract 	references book.pdf feminist new materialisms activating ethico-politics through genealogies in social sciences beatriz revelles benavente, monika rogowska-stangret and waltraud ernst www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci edited by printed edition of the special issue published in social sciences $€£ ¥ social sciences feminist new materialisms feminist new materialisms activating ethico-politics through genealogies in social sciences special issue editors beatriz revelles benavente monika rogowska-stangret waltraud ernst mdpi • basel • beijing • wuhan • barcelona • belgrade special issue editors beatriz revelles benavente university of granada spain monika rogowska-stangret warsaw university poland waltraud ernst johannes kepler university linz austria editorial office mdpi st. alban-anlage basel, switzerland this is a reprint of articles from the special issue published online in the open access journal social sciences (issn - ) in (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci/ special issues/feminist new materialsms). for citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: lastname, a.a.; lastname, b.b.; lastname, c.c. article title. journal name year, article number, page range. isbn - - - - (pbk) isbn - - - - (pdf) c© by the authors. articles in this book are open access and distributed under the creative commons attribution (cc by) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. the book as a whole is distributed by mdpi under the terms and conditions of the creative commons license cc by-nc-nd. contents about the special issue editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii beatriz revelles-benavente, waltraud ernst and monika rogowska-stangret feminist new materialisms: activating ethico-politics through genealogies in social sciences reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . orianna calderon-sandoval and adelina sanchez-espinosa feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: a diffractive reading of the spanish films, cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . juliana españa keller the sonic intra-face of a noisy feminist social kitchen reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . anna hickey-moody and marissa willcox entanglements of difference as community togetherness: faith, art and feminism reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . suvi pihkala, tuija huuki and vappu sunnari moving with touch: entanglements of a child, valentine’s day cards, and research–activism against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . miranda imperial new materialist feminist ecological practices: la via campesina and activist environmental work reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tanja kubes new materialist perspectives on sex robots. a feminist dystopia/utopia? reprinted from: social sciences , , , doi: . /socsci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v about the special issue editors beatriz revelles-benavente is a lecturer at the university of granada, at the department of english language and literature. she is also the co-editor of the journal matter: journal of new materialist research, as well as one of the spanish management committee in the cost action is : networking european new materialisms: how matter comes to matter. additionally, she has organized the v new materialist conference at the universitat oberta de catalunya and the iv training school on new materialisms at the university of barcelona. furthermore, she is the co-editor of the book published by routledge teaching gender: feminist pedagogy and responsability in times of political crisis. currently, her lines of research are concerned with the connection between literature and society via social media and the like economy using both a feminist and a new materialist lens. monika rogowska-stangret is a postdoctoral researcher in the fields of feminist philosophy, gender studies and posthumanism. she teaches at the institute of philosophy, warsaw university and at the polish-japanese academy of information technology in warsaw. she was a member of the management committee in the european project new materialism: networking european scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter’, european cooperation in science and technology (cost), action is ( – ) and is now engaged in creating a new journal: matter: journal of new materialist research as a co-editor of a section “praxiography*: practices and institutions”. she organized the th annual conference on the new materialisms: performing situated knowledges: space, time, vulnerability, – . . , institute of philosophy and sociology, polish academy of sciences, warsaw. more info: https://independent.academia.edu/monikarogowskastangret. waltraud ernst (phd) is a philosopher and senior researcher at the institute for women’s and gender studies, johannes kepler university linz, austria. she served as austrian mc member of the eu cost action is new materialism. networking european scholarship on, “how matter comes to matter”. in she was a visiting professor for gender and diversity perspectives in engineering at the technical university of dresden. her research interests cover the history and future of gender in technosciences as well as feminist epistemology and ethics & politics of globalization. recently published: emancipatory interferences with machines? http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/ index.php/genderandset/article/view/ and gender in science and technology http://e-book. fwf.ac.at/o: . vii $ € £ ¥ social sciences editorial feminist new materialisms: activating ethico-politics through genealogies in social sciences beatriz revelles-benavente ,*, waltraud ernst and monika rogowska-stangret , department of english and german philology, faculty of philosophy and letters, university of granada, granada, spain institute of women’s and gender studies, johannes kepler university linz, linz, austria; waltraud.ernst@jku.at institute of philosophy, university of warsaw, - warsaw, poland; monika.rogowska@gmail.com department of new media arts, polish-japanese academy of information technology, - warsaw, poland * correspondence: beatrizrevelles@ugr.es received: october ; accepted: october ; published: october the idea to create a special issue journal around the topic of feminist new materialisms emerged out of the editors’ collaboration in the frames of european project new materialism: networking european scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter’ (european cooperation in science and technology), and more specifically it was born at the th annual conference on the new materialisms, held at utrecht university in june . the editors were then able to trace the discussions within new materialism, but also on the margins of it, and in dialogues with researchers with different academic backgrounds or coming from other theoretical standpoints. those dialogues all have different affective modalities, raised various theoretical (counter) arguments, and imagined heterogeneous practices. as editors of this issue of “social sciences,” we recognized the need to rethink feminist new materialisms, yet again accentuating and activating its ethico-political dimensions and stakes. we are undertaking this endeavour together with scholars, who have been composing the cartography of feminist new materialist research for some time now (among them: alaimo and hekman ; coole and frost ; dolphijn and van der tuin ; van der tuin ; cielemęcka and rogowska-stangret ), and we aim at grasping specifically its ethico-political practices. for us, new materialisms have always been the entanglement of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and politics. looking back to the notion of “situated knowledges” by haraway ( ) who—among others—“planted the seed for feminist new materialism” (van der tuin , p. )—one sees how those (at least) four planes are entangled (rogowska-stangret ), in order to bring forth “response-able” (haraway ) research. new materialism is thus an ethico-onto-epistemological framework (barad ; revelles-benavente ), that by activating its ethico-politics helps to diagnose, infer, and transform gendered, environmental, anthropocentric, and social injustices from a multidimensional angle. social injustices are a driving motivation to pursue research, and are the reason why the editors and authors of this special issue cannot understand new materialism without feminism (hinton and treusch ; ernst ). contemporary feminist researchers are providing new materialisms with a transversal approach (yuval-davis ) that comes from many different disciplines, without canonizing back again knowledge creation and production, and in hope that they will not enter back into classifixations (van der tuin ). it is a “situated” (haraway ) research “response-able” (haraway ) to material-discursive practices that iterate in a dynamic conceptualization of matter. the authors of this issue aim at adding to the body of research which relates with methodologies and empirical work in new materialism (e.g., fox and allred ; tamboukou ; de freitas and palmer ). following fox and allred ( ) guidelines, the authors reflect upon the differences that using this methodology has provided to the research itself. we believe in a relational conceptualization soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of bodies and objects, and the importance of affect in this relation; while instead of territorializing and deterritorializing the performed research, we focus on the processes that iterate the research through “queering linearity” (barad ). we argue that methodology necessarily needs to engage within the relation between acting and thinking (tamboukou ), so that it can transform itself into a political practice embodied and embedded. experimenting with the linearity of the process provides the actualization of future becomings and because of that, the materialization of agential practices while they are occurring. as a conclusion, we will focus on the necessity to think of methodology, ontology, ethics, politics, and epistemology as a processual relation, and the need to focus on processes instead of results (grosz ) for a feminist politics of affinities instead of identities. . putting the ethico-political back to research new materialisms refer to a specific ethico-political and onto-epistemological turn that is deeply committed to de-centralizing knowledge production, cutting across pre-established dichotomies, and focusing on processes transversing hierarchies of power relations that organize diverse forms of life. in particular, it is a methodology of situating material-discursive practices that form specific socio-cultural phenomena via a relational ontology. here, different elements come to being through intra-actions. agency materializes and redefines itself as a more than isolated human agency. new materialist approaches to the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge are proliferating across diverse disciplines such as arts (e.g., kontturi et al. ; barrett et al. ; barrett and bolt ), science and technology (e.g., ernst et al. ), contemporary philosophy (e.g., cielemęcka and rogowska-stangret ; bühlmann et al. ; revelles-benavente et al. ; dolphijn and van der tuin ; coole and frost ), cultural and media studies (e.g., tiainen et al. ), and social sciences (e.g., juelskjær et al.; bath et al. ; fox and allred ; alaimo and hekman ). although in the mentioned publications the ethico-political frames are strongly present, this is not the case for how new materialisms are recognized and represented in academia in general. often, the more recognition new materialisms get in academia, the less space and time is devoted to their ethico-political frames. as a result, the feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecological stakes are given less attention and importance; and the ethico-political frames of feminist new materialisms are amputated from the onto-epistemological turn. in this present issue of “social sciences,” the authors and editors are committed to stressing the importance of ethico-political frames to feminist new materialisms. according to dolphijn and van der tuin ( ), new materialisms are about putting them to work, which means that it is not to be described, but performed. the authors and editors of this issue add yet another loop that has to do with situating new materialisms as ethico-politics. we would like to put new materialisms to work for feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecological practices. the papers invite us to understand feminism with new materialisms and vice-versa. our approach to this field of research is strongly marked by the concepts of genealogies (van der tuin ), feminicity (colman ), diffracting diffraction (barad ), and the processes of becoming and sense-making of our own flexible and multiple identities (braidotti ). that is, our approach has to do with how we build, contemporaneously, our epistemological genealogies effectively to produce points of activation for feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecological practices. we present examples which investigate new social bondings and community building beyond identity politics, and contributions dealing with specific instances of realities that engage with the world with an entanglement between feminist ethics, politics, and methodologies. . putting new materialisms to work this special issue assembles perspectives from a wide range of disciplinary fields such as film studies, sound and noise art, arts-based community research and education, feminist environmentalism and ecology, as well as diffractive design and human-machine interaction. the six research papers allow insight into diverse areas such as feminist documentary cinema, participatory practices in performance soc. sci. , , artwork, feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and instagram-based art communities, creative workshops addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, feminist ecological practices and activist environmental work in brazil, as well as the vision of robot sex beyond fixed human-centered heteronormalizations. the authors come not only from different academic disciplines but also from different national and transnational positionings such as spain, australia, germany, finland, and the uk. these investigations are connected in a very systematic, yet colorful way, through their theoretical and methodological foundation in feminist new materialism which proves, on this way, to be traveling in many parts of the intellectual world. the papers are also connected via an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to not only scrutinize oppression and conflict, but also work for transforming our social and cultural imaginations through enacting or putting to work ideas, materialities, and lived realities that are founded in feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecological practices. the papers show how it is possible to analyze these practices as becoming real, and as moments or processes of materialization. the article “feminist documentary cinema as diffraction apparatus: a diffracting reading of the spanish films, cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck!” by orianna calderon-sandoval and adelina sánchez-espinosa, use “materiality, emotionality, and performativity” (p. ) as analytical tools to render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity. it is done through close-watching of two spanish films cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! on domestic workers, and sexually and functionally diverse communities. the authors show how the films operate as feminist countervisuality devices that reframe realities, and open up possibilities for being, becoming, and imagining the worlds otherwise—outside of androcentric paradigms. (calderon-sandoval and sanchez-espinosa ). juliana españa keller in her “the sonic intra-face of a noisy feminist social kitchen,” shows how the reframing of the kitchen table into a platform for “exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation” (p. ) can contribute to “forming daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies” (p. ). by using and analyzing participatory practices in performance art, the kitchen becomes a noisy, social kitchen through collaborative engagements of more than human contributors. the author argues for a noisy culture of social reimagining of the kitchen through somatic learning in performative art practices. (españa keller ). anna hickey-moody and marissa willcox, in the article “entanglements of difference as community togetherness: faith, art and feminism,” are also exploring collaborative art practices, here in creative workshops with children in intra-religious communities, with different ethnic backgrounds, and in presenting and analyzing a broadcasted live-interview in an instagram-based feminist art community. however here, the focus lies on enacting new ways of feelings of belonging, and building community beyond sameness. the authors offer a diffraction of differences, that through research understood as being-with, results in the emerging of “togetherness” as “collections of difference” (hickey-moody and willcox , p. ). the article, “moving with touch: entanglements of a child, valentine’s day cards, and research-activism against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures,” by suvi pihkala, tuija huuki, and vappu sunnari, undertakes the question of sexual violence in pre-teen peer cultures as a response to discussions around the “#metoo” movement, in which sexual harassment in children’s environments was neglected to a great extent. through exploring “microprocesses of change within the more-than-human child-card entanglements” (p. ), the authors present and analyze the “affective charge in moments and movements of response and resistance” (p. ) in workshops with children. in particular, they concentrate on touch and its different affective, sensing, and material effects, in hope to bring forth ways to enable “recognition, response, and resistance” (p. ). (suvi pihkala and sunnari ). miranda imperial in “new materialist feminist ecological practices: la via campesina and activist environmental work,” presents a relocation of the grassroots activism of the women’s section of the famous soc. sci. , , brazilian self-organization of peasants, la via campesina, within the genealogies of ecological feminism and new materialist environmentalisms. the author delves into three examples of how in the recent past, feminist indigenous activists successfully opposed multinational agrobusinesses, genetically modified crops, and land-grabbing practices. imperial calls for collective action, and transnational community building for “re-distributing, re-thinking, and responding to the planet.” (imperial , p. ). the article, “new materialist perspectives on sex robots. a feminist dystopia/utopia?” by tanja kubes, presents sex robots as potential agencies in the becoming of human-machine-entanglements which serve to redefine robot sex as “refutation of normative definitions of sex” (kubes , p. ). the author discusses the status quo of the development of the so-called sex robots, as well as arguments which turn against this endeavor because of the fact that “prototypes of sex robots aiming to hit the market in the near future are definitely hinting towards a questionable understanding of ideals of female beauty, and the nature of gender relations” (kubes , p. ). the paper explores the potential of sex robotics for “leaving the beaten track of pornographic mimicry and sexist hyperfeminization” (kubes , p. ), and contributing instead to “new forms of sexual pleasure beyond fixed heteronormative normalizations” (kubes , p. ). . actualizing future becomings the articles gathered in this issue of “social sciences” are putting new materialisms to work through diverse methodologies, mobilizing a variety of research backgrounds, contexts, and topics. they offer affective relational conceptualizations of bodies as they co-emerge together with films, sounds, creative workshops, live-interviews, experiences of touch (in its ambiguity), environmental and feminist activism and sex technologies, and try to grasp the specificities and effects of these relationalities. they are acting and thinking, doing and conceptualizing, providing at the same time joy, energy, concern, and care, to experiment, imagine, and design ways of doing and thinking. they activate ethico-political dimensions of feminist new materialisms through research, and activist efforts to transform social, environmental, gendered, and anthropocentric injustices, and to think of recognition of those injustices, resistance, and responses to them. by doing that, they also struggle to bring forth the future dimension of the research undertaken, to actualize future becomings, bodies, communities, responses, affinities, ways of sensing-feeling, bringing together, and experiencing. they prove the fact that feminist new materialist research is an open-ended process that directs us to yet new questions, horizons, and conceptualizations; enlivens our imagination and the desire to experiment with concepts and practices; and re-imagine and re-design oppressive and unjust paradigms. funding: this research was funded by eu cost action is new materialism. networking european scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter’. monika rogowska-stangret’s contribution was funded by the grant from the ministry of science and higher education in poland in the frames of the “national program for the development of the humanities” ( – ). conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references alaimo, stacy, and susan hekman. . material feminisms. bloomington: indiana university press. barad, karen. . meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press. barad, karen. . quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. derrida today : – . 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[crossref] rogowska-stangret, monika. . situated knowledges. the new materialist almanac. edited by david gauthier and sam skinner. available online: http://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/s/situated-knowledges.html (accessed on october ). tamboukou, maria. . narrative phenomena: entanglements and intra-actions in narrative research. in discourse and narrative methods: theoretical departures, analytical strategies and situated writings. edited by mona livholts and maria tamboukou. london: sage publications, pp. – . tiainen, milla, kontturi katve-kaisa, and ilona hongisto. . movement, aesthetics, ontology. cultural studies review : – . van der tuin, iris. . generational feminism. new materialist introduction to a generative approach. london: lexington books. yuval-davis, nira. . gender and nation. london: sage publications. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). $ € £ ¥ social sciences article feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: a diffractive reading of the spanish films, cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! orianna calderon-sandoval * and adelina sanchez-espinosa research centre for women’s and gender studies, university of granada, granada, spain * correspondence: orianna@correo.ugr.es received: april ; accepted: june ; published: july abstract: following karen barad’s diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. we propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. in this article, we analyse two spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. we end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema. keywords: documentary; diffraction apparatus; diffractive reading; cuidado, resbala; yes, we fuck!; spanish cinema; materiality; emotionality; performativity . introduction this article explores karen barad’s diffractive methodology (barad ) as a bridge between feminist documentary cinema and new materialist perspectives. we argue that feminist documentary films can be productively encountered as diffraction apparatuses: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. as a visualisation metaphor opposed to reflection, diffraction changes the focus from mirroring and sameness to attending “patterns of difference” (barad , p. ), and “effects of difference” (haraway [ ] , p. ). such an onto-epistemological turn has ethico-political effects, as it moves from “reflecting on representations” to “accounting for how practices matter” (barad , p. ). moving away from the representational paradigm in the analysis of documentary cinema has an ethical impact, changing the focus “from producing accurate and authentic representations to creatively contributing to the transformability of actual beings in the real” (hongisto , p. ). in her phd thesis, co-supervised by adelina sánchez-espinosa, beatriz revelles’s employs diffractive methodology as a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities (revelles benavente , p. ). our article takes its inspiration from this proposal. for a comprehensive revision of the concept of social representation, see rubira garcía et al. ( ). it could be productive to read barad’s diffractive methodology through serge moscovici’s theory of social representations, particularly due to his understanding of representation not as reproduction, but as a re-production, i.e., a new production of meaning “born from the interactions between the subjects (at all levels, including individual, group, institution, or at a massive scale) and the object itself” (rubira garcía et al. , p. ). his approach blurs the separation between object and subject, focusing instead on the interactions which, for barad, are more accurately described as intra-actions, as explained in the next section. like soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , most of the first independent films made by feminist activists in the seventies belong to the realist documentary film tradition. documentaries such as union maids (union maids ) showed the lives of women outside the limited range of female images in classical cinema, which supports the argument that they displayed more “accurate” realities. however, feminist theorists like claire johnston soon began to challenge realistic aesthetics. she argues that realism maintains the delusion of classical cinema by pretending the non-intervention of the filmmakers limited, apparently, to showing reality as it is. the gaze of the camera is supposed to be innocent: what the camera in fact grasps is the “natural” world of the dominant ideology. women’s cinema cannot afford such idealism; the “truth” of our oppression cannot be “captured” on celluloid with the “innocence” of the camera: it has to be constructed/manufactured. new meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film. (johnston [ ] , p. ) the clash of these two positions, realist documentary vs. counter-cinema , leads to the so-called realist debate of the late seventies. within feminist film theory, the debate increasingly begins to be in favour of anti-realism, thus distinguishing two successive moments in feminist film production: firstly, an effort to change the content of dominant cinema, by means of portraying women talking about their “real” experiences; secondly, a growing interest in film form. nevertheless, theorists such as julia lesage have refused the sharp rejection of cinematic realism and have questioned this apparent succession. the production of realist feminist documentaries has continued alongside more risky formal experiments, so that “both realist and experimental documentary forms have been politicized by feminist filmmakers” (lesage , p. ). we argue that the diffraction metaphor can move this debate forward by accounting for how material-discursive practices in feminist filmmaking matter. we agree with ilona hongisto’s affirmation that “documentaries do not only operate on a plane of signification, but also partake in the material processes that co-compose the real” (hongisto , p. ). for her, the main way in which politically committed documentary films participate in “the real as process” (hongisto , p. ) is through framing, which involves making cuts and drawing boundaries within phenomena. that is also what diffraction apparatuses do. this article is divided into four sections. the first section introduces diffractive methodology as a reading strategy and as a visualisation metaphor and develops our conceptualisation of feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus. in the second section, we discuss the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity, the framework in which we locate our two case studies, i.e., spanish documentary films cuidado, resbala ( ) and yes, we fuck! ( ). these are diffractively read in the third section. in the last section, we describe three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema by reading through one another (i.e., diffractively) insights and patterns raised in each case study. barad, moscovici resorts to quantum-physics inspired metaphors to explain the active role of representations in co-creating the real: “here and there we find a tendency to consider that social representations are the inner reflection of something external, the surface and ephemeral layer of something deeper and more permanent. while everything points to see in them a constitutive factor of social reality, just as invisible particles and fields are a constitutive factor of physical reality” (rubira garcía et al. , p. ). realism in cinema is characterised by representations that “present an appearance of transparency by effacing the processes of meaning production in their own textual operations.” (kuhn , p. ). peter wollen coined the term “counter-cinema” in . the features of this type of cinema are, according to wollen, those that oppose the characteristics of mainstream hollywood productions, namely, “estrangement”, “narrative intransitivity”, “aperture” and “unpleasure”, among others (wollen [ ] ). it is a year after, in that claire johnston talks about feminist cinema in terms of counter-cinema. soc. sci. , , . from the reflecting mirror to the diffraction apparatus diffraction is a concept used in physics to describe wave behaviour. as a quantum phenomenon, diffraction broke the paradigms of classical physics, since the double slit experiment proved that “the ontology of anything cannot be determined without regard to the apparatus of observation, or else that the apparatus participates in the ontology of the thing observed” (belia , p. ). in feminist theory, the metaphor of diffraction is employed to describe a critical consciousness that is attentive to differences and their effects. donna haraway asks us to consider what the physical phenomenon of diffraction could mean in onto-epistemological terms. she explains that, as a metaphor, diffraction “drops the metaphysics of identity and the metaphysics of representation and says optics is full of a whole other potent way of thinking about light, which is about history. it’s not about identity as taxonomy, but it’s about registering process on the recording screen” (haraway , pp. – ). in accordance with this perspective, a documentary film would not be conceived as the reflection of any so-called fixed reality out there, which is then mirrored by the camera. instead, it is analysed as technologies that co-produce and record the processes through which human elements (e.g., the filmmakers) and non-human elements (e.g., the camera) intra-act with other human and non-human parts of the world (e.g., filmed subjects and objects, spectators, screens). apart from the optical metaphor, barad also employs diffraction to describe a reading methodology that attends to “entanglements in reading important insights and approaches through one another” (barad , p. ). within a diffractive approach, “any reading of texts is a meaning-making practice” (belia , p. ). rather than focus on accurate reflections of the world, diffractive reading engages in the re-making of the world. birgit kaiser defines diffractive reading as “radically performative” (kaiser , p. ): it is by reading texts together that certain patterns emerge, so that reading in itself becomes a productive event. the separation between subject/observer and object/observed is replaced by an understanding that both are permanently entangled. diffraction does not take the boundaries of any subject nor object for granted, “but rather investigates the material-discursive boundary-making practices that produce ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality” (barad , p. ). rather than “interactions”, barad talks about “intra-actions” to highlight the fact that objects and agencies of observation are mutually constituted in their encounters. to conceive feminist documentary films as diffraction apparatuses that “enact what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (barad , p. ) from a gender-aware perspective involves analysing how the films intra-act with different parts of the world, the differences they make, and where the effects of those differences appear. this means reading them as entangled with their filmmakers’ positions, the production decisions surrounding them, and their reception effects. we propose three tools for analysing documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: materiality, emotionality and performativity. materiality is a term borrowed from domitilla olivieri’s phd thesis, in which she uses the expression “materiality of documentary” to describe two aspects. firstly, she argues for “the filmic representation in its material specificity” (olivieri , p. ), which involves going beyond the content (i.e., narrative structures, plot and subject matter), and paying attention to “how the film is constructed: its technologies, framing, editing, voice-over, use of realistic or fictional images and sounds, and use of different filmic strategies” (olivieri , p. ). secondly, materiality “refers to the manner in which documentary film engages with bodies and with the matter of the world” (olivieri , p. ). thomas young performed the double-slit experiment with light in . in , davisson and germer demonstrated that electrons show the same behaviour: “the davisson-germer experiment showed that under some circumstances, matter (in this case electrons) exhibits wavelike behavior. since the davisson and germer experiment, many other experiments have confirmed this result for other kinds of matter as well. that is, there is direct empirical evidence that matter—not just light—manifests wave behavior under the right experimental circumstances.” (barad , p. ). soc. sci. , , the second tool, performativity, is understood in four senses following nichols ( ); bruzzi ( ); butler ( , ) and barad ( ). for bill nichols, the performative is one of the six possible modes of representation in documentary cinema. this mode emphasises the subjective dimensions of our knowledge of the world by stressing “the emotional complexity of experience from the perspective of the filmmaker him- or herself” (nichols , p. ). information and facts yield to “an expressive quality that affirms the highly situated, embodied, and vividly personal perspective of specific subjects” (nichols , p. ). it is less concerned with formal experimentation in itself and, despite the centrality it gives to personal experience, it always joins “the particular to the general, the individual to the collective, and the personal to the political” (nichols , p. ). some critics, however, claim that documentary cinema is always a performative act, regardless of its mode of representation. stella bruzzi, for instance, argues that documentaries are “the result of the intrusion of the filmmaker onto the situation being filmed” (bruzzi , p. ). this, she continues, does not invalidate the authenticity of documentary. rather, in her opinion, the idea of unmediated transparency is replaced “with a performative exchange between subjects, filmmakers/apparatus and spectators” (bruzzi , p. ). instead of presenting a reality that exists previously and independently, performative documentary cinema shows realities resulting from the intervention of the camera and/or the film production, situations created from the very action of making a documentary film. this definition of documentary as a performative act that captures some sort of reality in-the-making echoes barad’s understanding of reality as “an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity” (barad , p. ). judith butler first looked at the concept of performativity through feminist lenses in her book gender trouble. feminism and the subversion of identity. the concept of performativity originally refers to linguistic utterances that bring what they state into being or make a set of events happen as a consequence of the utterance being made. in butler’s words: “performativity is a way of naming a power language has to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects” (butler , p. ). paraphrasing her, we would like to propose performativity as a way of naming the power of documentary cinema “to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects” (butler , p. ). a new materialist reading of butler’s performativity has been elaborated by mónica cano (cano abadía ). she argues that butler replaces the humanist subject with a vulnerable, interdependent subject who is open to change and to the constitutive relationship with others (cano abadía , p. ). we agree with her on this aspect, which is further developed in the next section. cano also states that butler does not reduce matter to language, nor does she enclose the subjects in a rigid socio-linguistic mechanism that produces them in a deterministic way (cano abadía , p. ). what we want to emphasise from barad’s take on performativity is precisely the relevance she gives to matter: “an agential realist elaboration of performativity allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity” (barad , p. ). hence, the performativity of documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus, which includes human and non-human agents and objects of observation, matters at various levels: from the way it frames and creates boundaries, to the alliances it helps sustain on both sides of the camera and the screen. our third tool, emotionality, describes “how texts are ‘moving’, or how they generate effects ( . . . ) [and] the way in which texts name or perform different emotions” (ahmed , p. ). sara ahmed is explicit about why she decides to employ the word “emotion” rather than “affect”: “i was interested in this idea of movement that is explicit in its etymology. and it was also partly that i wanted to use the word that is used in everyday life” (ahmed , p. ). she explains the connection between emotions and the making of boundaries: the other modes are: expository, observational, participatory, poetic and reflexive. soc. sci. , , . . . it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “i” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others ( . . . ) the surfaces of bodies “surface” as an effect of the impressions left by others ( . . . ) emotions are not “in” either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects. (ahmed , p. ) in this sense, we look for the emotions evoked by each film: how making and/or watching these films affect(s) subjects and objects on both sides of the camera and the screen. we conceive emotions as “effects rather than origins” (ahmed , p. ). diffraction, therefore, is a multi-layered concept which we apply in this article in two different manners: one, we argue that any documentary film can be analysed as a diffraction apparatus that makes the world intelligible in specific ways and participates in co-creating the real; two, we diffractively read the insights raised by two case studies so as to identify effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema. . feminist cinema: visualising alliances from and against precarity it is not our purpose in this article to look for an essentialist and prescriptive definition of what feminist documentary cinema is or should be. instead, we follow olivieri’s proposal of “studying what makes a documentary feminist in terms of what a documentary does” (olivieri , p. ). therefore, we focus on the actual exploration and construction of contents, textual structures, formal strategies and means of production, distribution and exhibition which reveal a feminist consciousness, i.e., an awareness of the role that gender has (had) in the organisation and legitimisation of social inequalities. feminist documentary cinema can be understood as a form of countervisuality , balancing between a lived reality of gender inequalities and imagined alternatives to it. the androcentric regime of gender visuality has been built around the subject of humanism: he is the norm according to which the racialised, sexualised and naturalised others are produced (cano abadía , p. ). what cano explains is that butler’s theory of gender performativity has opened up a different understanding of subjects, starting from the recognition of their fundamentally interdependent and vulnerable condition. the fact that we have to cohabitate with other humans and non-humans on which our lives depend, should make us “understand a global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that minimise precarity and establish economic political equality” (butler , pp. – ). vulnerability is not inherent to a particular group, but unequally distributed as an effect of power relations under specific conditions. when this is not acknowledged, vulnerability can be used by political discourses as a way to produce and naturalise forms of social inequality. in feminist theory, it has been argued that women face social vulnerability in a disproportionate way. what butler warns against is the idea that “women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability” (butler , p. ). rather, she underlines that conditions such as poverty and illiteracy faced mainly by women are caused by an unequal distribution of precariousness fostered by gender power relations and lack of adequate socio-political infrastructures. she also states that women are “at once vulnerable and capable of resistance, and that vulnerability and resistance can, and do, and even must happen at the same time” (butler , p. ). to think about inequality in terms of precarity opens up the possibility for strategic alliances among different groups. in butler ’s words: “precarity is the rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, the differently abled, and the stateless, but also religious and racial minorities: it is a social and economic condition, but not an identity” (butler , p. ). when various minorities, whose alliance potential stems from their shared precarity, assemble in the streets and/or “countervisuality” is a concept coined by nicholas mirzoeff to refer to a resistant vision structured around the tension between the “need to apprehend and counter a real that does exist but should not, and one that should exist but is as yet becoming” (mirzoeff , p. ). soc. sci. , , appear together in a media platform to demand their rights, they “enact another idea of equality, freedom and justice than the one that they oppose” (butler , p. ). the two documentary films that we have chosen as case studies render visible this kind of alliance. cuidado, resbala is a collective film developed within a feminist economics framework that (re)positions care labour at the centre of the economic activities. yes, we fuck! is a postporn transfeminist film, which shows sexually explicit images that seek to question mainstream ideals of desirability, as well as sexual practices framed by ableism and heteropatriarchy. in the next section, we apply the previously described tools (materiality, performativity and emotionality) by tracing overlapping waves, patterns of differences and their effects. this is attained by reading the two documentary films through one another. both films have been cut into four levels: form, content, production and reception. in order to analyse form and content, we carry out a feminist close reading (lukic and sánchez-espinosa ). as for production and reception, the methods have been interviews with filmmakers and fieldwork at screenings. . a diffractive reading of cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! the title of the documentary film cuidado, resbala plays with the two meanings of the word “cuidado” in spanish, so that it can be roughly translated as caution/care slippery. it is directed by two psychologists, a pedagogue, a lawyer, a teacher and a filmmaker (maría camacho gómez, montserrat clos fabuel, mercedes cordero suárez, vanessa gómez martínez, carolina suárez rasmussen and leonor jiménez moreno) from two feminist associations based in málaga, spain. sexuality and functional diversity are at the core of yes we fuck!, a postporn documentary film directed by two spanish cismen , antonio centeno and raúl de la morena. postporn cinema “uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers” (miller-young et al. , p. ). according to centeno, “what postporn tries to do is to take the visual language of the ordinary porn, which greatly shapes our idea of what sexuality is, and turn it around, politicise it and turn those who were objects into subjects who can express their own pleasure, their own desire.” materiality, as explained above, pays attention to “how the film is constructed” and how it “engages with bodies and with the matter of the world” (olivieri , p. ). for hongisto, the main way in which politically committed documentary films participate in “the real as process” (hongisto , p. ) is through framing. taking hongisto’s question as a starting point, we intend to answer the following questions: how do our two case studies (re)frame reality? how do they entangle diverse narrative waves through the editing? cuidado, resbala exposes the discrimination encountered by domestic workers within an economics framework that places care labour in the hidden part of the iceberg sustaining the markets. following bill nichols’s typology of modes of representation in documentary cinema ( ), we can describe it as an observational–participatory documentary film, with a couple of expository animated sequences, and a reflexive performative voice-over that opens and closes the film. we identify four different narrative waves: voices of domestic workers; interviews with academic experts; animation; and reflexive voice-over. through a diffractive lens, we can visualise how these waves overlap within the a shorter version of the analysis of this film has been published in feminist media studies (calderón ). replacing the term “disability” with that of “functional diversity” has been put forward in spain by the “movimiento vida independiente” (independent life movement), which is articulated through a virtual community called “foro de vida independiente” (independent life forum), founded in . the term cisgender, as opposed to transgender, refers to those people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. “el postporno lo que intenta hacer es coger el lenguaje visual del porno corriente que tanto configura nuestra idea de lo que es la sexualidad, y darle la vuelta, politizarlo y aquéllos que eran objetos, convertirlos en sujetos que enuncian su propio placer, su propio deseo.” antonio centeno. q&a session. november in granada. all translations in this article are ours. soc. sci. , , film editing, hence revealing that the diverse and apparently disconnected insights on care labour are actually entangled. this strategy allows us to place at the same level two narrative waves: the voices of the domestic workers and the voices of the academic experts interviewed for the film (amaia pérez orozco, yayo herrero, and mercedes cordero). knowledge is thus produced in a horizontal way, entangling insights from personal experience with those from academic backgrounds. a third wave is visualised with the animated sequence in which a female voice-over explains the intersections of gender, class and nationality in the global care chain: women from the global south that have migrated to the global north are being exploited as domestic workers, so that women from the so-called first countries can conciliate their professions with household chores. neither men, nor industries, nor the state assume any responsibility for care labour. some care services are privatised, but as a whole, this only aggravates inequalities. the reflexive performative voice over belongs to carolina suárez rasmussen, one of the film directors and a migrant from argentina who worked as a domestic worker in spain for three years. the opening and closing sequences of the film with the reflexive voice over constitute a fourth narrative wave. the film starts with suárez rasmussen’s testimony about finding out that domestic labour does not have the same legal status as other jobs, and finishes with her account of how the personal conflicts she has faced are connected with that fact, and thus have a collective political dimension. this testimony is key for reading cuidado, resbala as a research journey, and what she is looking for is exactly what diffraction focuses on, i.e., “how different differences get made” (barad , p. ). throughout the film, the viewer is encouraged to recognise the way in which care labour is rendered invisible, labelled as different from other jobs within the patriarchal and neoliberal socio-economic system, placing the responsibility for life care on individuals, mainly women. these sequences also have the peculiarity of raising awareness of the camera, making it felt as embodied from a specific gaze. such formal strategy subverts the conventional understanding of an objective gaze in documentary cinema. moreover, the opening sequence asks the spectator to identify with the point of view of a female illegal immigrant who works as a domestic worker, a subject which de-centers masculinity and whiteness. in yes, we fuck!, the representation of the rebellious and diverse bodies of the filmed subjects questions pathology, monstrosity, voyeuristic curiosity and/or pitiful solidarity. instead, the filmed subjects are presented as both, desiring and desirable through the intra-actions which take place both sides of the camera. the film consists of six ten-minute stories which could be analysed, we propose, as different narrative waves which provide spectators with diverse entry points. we listen to the filmed subjects’ discourses but we also observe their practices, engaging in various sexual activities that fall out of what gayle rubin calls the “charmed circle of sex” (rubin [ ] , p. ). not only do their bodies deviate from ableist, racist and heterosexist norms but their sexualities also question androcentric, heteronormative and patriarchal conventions. yes, we fuck! is a realist film whose main modes of representation are observational and participatory, though it also incorporates a performative mode in two of its stories. the first story works as a fist narrative wave in its setting the potential alliance between functional diversity and queer activists, stemming from the fact that their bodies do not fit within the productive norms. during a postporn workshop sequence, the observational-participatory mode of representation is combined with a poetic voice over which accompanies the images of group sex, in which sexualisation goes beyond the genitals and incorporates intra-actions between human and non-human artefacts. centeno rubin explains that, in western heteronormative societies, sex is regulated by a sexual value system. within the charmed circle of so-called good and natural sexuality we find that which is “heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial.” moreover, “it should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. it should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female. any sex that violates these rules is ‘bad’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘unnatural’.” (rubin [ ] , p. ). soc. sci. , , participates in the workshop, while the intra-actions between de la morena and his camera with the rest of the bodies are expressed in very close shots, getting out of focus several times. the second story presents a second wave by focusing on a heterosexual couple traversed by two visible differences: the functional diversity of miriam, paraplegic, and the nationality of pama, a migrant from india. the main mode of representation in this story is the observational-participatory one. in the interview with the couple, pama hardly speaks and shows difficulty in communicating in spanish. while she has an elaborated political discourse on sexuality and diversity, he uses very short phrases. what she emphasises is that due to his different cultural background, his gaze towards her is different, which she finds surprising. since the story only lasts ten minutes, the characters’ profiles and their relationship dynamics remain on a superficial level. the last scene, in which they have sexual intercourse, could be regarded as voyeuristic were it not for the fact that, within this story and in the film as a whole, the camera’s voyeuristic gaze is constantly questioned (this is clear, for example, in stories four and six). the third story also has an observational-participatory mode of representation. as a third narrative wave, it shows a bdsm session between a sex worker and a man with cerebral palsy. the fact that linda is a female sex worker filmed by a man, wearing clothes associated with the figure of the dominatrix in mainstream porn, renders these sequences problematic, as they reproduce an objectifying and fetishistic gaze. there’s, however, a counterbalance that has to be taken into consideration. linda is also presented with close-ups of her face as she expresses her reasons for being a sex worker. it’s important to note that linda is a migrant from the global south, from a latin american country. she states that the first reason why she is a sex worker is because of the money, and only later does she elaborate on her political position “advocating for the freedom of bodies, the freedom of pleasure and the freedom in doing as we please with our own bodies, without any moral or political mandate” (min. : ). thus, the film does not hide the fact that precarity in a sexist, racist and classist society is a decisive factor behind the exercise of sex work, but by rendering visible linda’s confident testimony, it also argues against the stigmatisation and victimisation of sex workers. another aspect worth mentioning is the fact that before the bdsm session, the dialogue between the characters emphasises consent, vulnerability and respect. the fourth story starts with a sequence in which the performative mode of representation propitiates identification with mertxe, a blind woman who also appears in the first story. during the first three minutes, the screen is totally black as we listen to her talking to a friend about a squirting workshop. the screen goes black again at the end of the story, as we listen to female moans of pleasure. thus, the formal strategies employed in this fourth narrative wave question the ocularcentrism of dominant cinema, giving an example of a haptic visuality that triggers physical memories of touch, smell and taste. the contrast between the images of one character’s vagina with a speculum and his subsequent assertion in an interview, identifying “with the male gender” (min. : ), provides an eloquent example of the film as a diffraction apparatus. in reading one sequence through the other, this cutting-together-apart strategy renders visible gender performativity, as we see the disconnection between the body and the gender enacted by the same person. the fifth story consists mainly of talking heads. therefore, its mode of representation is observational-participatory. the organisation of the sequence, which presents first the opinions of people with intellectual diversity (down syndrome) and then the opinions of their parents, establishes a clear contrast between sexuality as pleasure on the one hand, and reproduction as responsibility, according to laura mulvey (mulvey [ ] , p. ), fetishism fragments the female character into fetish images, such as her legs or her high-heel shoes. in haptic cinema, the scopophilic drive is replaced by the pleasure evoked by other senses, thus opening up a synaesthetic dimension. agential cuts, according to barad, do not produce absolute separations, but an agential situated separability, “a ‘holding together’ of the disparate itself” (barad , p. ). soc. sci. , , on the other. the story does not take sides, nor does it go deeper into problematic issues such as sterilisation, which is only superficially raised. what is emphasised in this fifth wave is the sexual desires of people with intellectual diversity together with the freedom and openness with which they talk about their own sexuality. in this sense, talking heads emerge as an empowering tool for people who express and affirm themselves in front of the camera. the last story, sixth narrative wave, introduces the figure of the sexual assistant, which is different from the sex worker in the third story. the sexual assistant helps a person with functional diversity have access to her/his own body, without becoming herself/himself engaged in sexual intercourse. this story resorts to a performative mode of representation because the characters record themselves. most of the sequence is shot from the sexual assistant’s point of view (teo) as he caresses the body of a quadriplegic woman. the beginning and the end of the sequence, where teo removes and puts back on the lens cap, raises awareness of the camera, directly interpellating the audience before the credits start. the two characters look directly into the camera as they say why they are recording the video: “visualising all of this is important. it is also important to help people with functional diversity discover it since we don’t know that we can ask for it and that it is within our rights” (min. : ). in each story, the characters make explicit their position as politically informed. in this case, the filmed subjects assert that making the film itself is their political/activist intervention. none of the film characters fit within the androcentric norm, let alone within the mainstream pornography standards of desirable bodies. female pleasure and gender performativity are also key issues: there are transgender characters in three out of the six stories, and female characters embrace and openly discuss their sexual pleasure. in general, gender is considered as oppressive, but also as something that can be questioned and subverted. indeed, yes, we fuck! has become a tool for alliances between spanish activist groups, which have been called “alianzas tullido-transfeministas”, i.e., crip-queer alliances (garcía-santesmases fernández et al. ). our second tool, performativity, is connected with this understanding of the production process of the films as a political action in itself and their becoming militant objects. in the previous section we described documentary as a performative act that captures some sort of reality in-the-making that results from the intervention of the camera and/or the film production. and paraphrasing butler, we proposed performativity as a way of naming the power of documentary cinema, conceived not as representation but as apparatus, “to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects” (butler , p. ). cuidado, resbala was conceived as political from the beginning, not only in terms of content, but also in its production process. for leonor jiménez, the only professional filmmaker out of the six directors, the assembly-like method they carried out was very different from what she had been taught at film school: because normally, within the world of documentary and audiovisual creation, a lot of emphasis is placed on the author’s gaze, which is individual and hierarchical. that person has to have a gaze of their own. and we were proposing exactly the opposite. (jiménez et al. ) jiménez emphasises that their being a group of feminist women was indeed a difference that mattered and had effects on their way of working, especially in terms of power relations. the creation of an empathetic and trusting atmosphere was also a fundamental aspect during the recording of the interviews. clear explanations about who they were, what the film was about and why they had transfeminism keeps on working with the political subject “women”, but advocates for a subject of feminism that includes other subjectivities, in as much as gender and the biological differences employed in the legitimisation of social inequalities do not only oppress women but also all those who do not fit within androcentric norms, such as queer individuals and people with functional diversity. “porque normalmente desde el mundo así de la creación documental, audiovisual, hacen mucho hincapié en la mirada del autor o de la autora. una mirada individual, el autor, jerárquica; esa persona tiene que tener una mirada propia. y nosotras estábamos planteando todo lo contrario.” leonor jiménez. personal interview. january in málaga. soc. sci. , , contacted the person for an interview contributed to reduce, albeit a little, “the issue of the camera as an invasive power element” . they remember that a turning point in the making of cuidado, resbala took place after the distressing interview with two domestic workers from nicaragua. that’s when they decided they had to look for alternatives so as to move from the personal to the collective and to avoid focusing only on victimisation. with the women from “territorio doméstico” they saw these possibilities materialised. the importance that the film gives to global care chains and to the experience of women immigrants was not something deliberately present in their agenda, but an issue that arose as undeniable evidence. as carolina suárez summarises it: “if we talk about vulnerabilities or unequal treatment, i think that here all three things come together: being a woman, a migrant, and a domestic worker.” according to her, cuidado, resbala is a feminist documentary because it “questions, criticises and highlights all the contradictions of the patriarchal system and its economic correlate, which is capitalism” (jiménez et al. ) jiménez reckons that the film can actually be called radically feminist, in the sense that it goes to the roots of placing care at the centre of the system. the film official premiere was at the th edition of the málaga film festival in . produced with public funds, it did not have any commercial distribution and they stopped sending it to festivals when they realised that it was being asked for by lots of associations, workshops and seminars, which, from their point of view, were the main exhibition spaces. that’s why they decided to put it online for free. in a similar way to that in which second wave feminists employed documentary films as a militant tool, some of the domestic workers who appear in cuidado, resbala have used it in diverse forums to raise awareness and empower people who experience similar situations. for instance, “territorio doméstico” has organised projections at the “eskalera karakola” feminist space in madrid, with the purpose of rendering visible their demands. in the case of yes, we fuck!, centeno admits that it was thanks to the contribution of researcher and anthropologist andrea garcía-santesmases that he and de la morena found out that there were people already working with diverse sexual representations in feminist postporn cinema. they had not thought about the gender axis when they started working on the project but as they moved forward, it became one of their main insights: what has subsequently been the central and most powerful axis of the documentary is that the gender axis and the axis of functional diversity are the same axes practically. i mean, in the end, the structure of oppression is the same, isn’t it? that attempt to justify social inequalities because of biological differences is a very old story and that is why the discourses are so parallel and so related. (centeno ) the production process of the film, and later on, its exhibition have been spaces for the encounter of these activisms. looking at yes, we fuck! as a diffraction apparatus, rather than as a reflecting mirror that reproduces the same elsewhere, we can argue that the various narrative waves through which the axes of gender, sexuality and functional diversity are co-constructed by centeno and de la morena produce, facilitate and solicit new ways of seeing the intersections and alliances between these three axes (minh-ha , p. ). “eso de la cámara como elemento invasivo y de poder” leonor jiménez. personal interview. january in málaga. “si hablamos de vulnerabilidades o de desigual trato, yo creo que ahí se juntan las tres cosas. por ser mujer, por ser migrante, por ser empleada doméstica.” carolina suárez. personal interview. january in málaga. vimeo website. date of access: february . https://vimeo.com/ . “lo que luego ha sido el eje central y potente del documental que es que, el eje de género y el eje de diversidad funcional son el mismo eje prácticamente, o sea, que al final la estructura de opresión es la misma, ¿no? ese intento de, de intentar justificar las desigualdades sociales a partir de las diferencias biológicas es una historia muy vieja y que por eso los discursos son tan paralelos y tan afines.” antonio centeno. skype interview. november . soc. sci. , , it’s important to mention that in the spanish context, there’s a strong feminist debate about the abolition of prostitution or its legalisation as sex work. centeno is in favour of the latter and has defended sexual assistance as a right for people with functional diversity within the spanish independent life movement. in this regard he states that: “those in favour of the abolition of prostitution can incorporate the reality of functional diversity into the process of constructing a general human sexuality that is rich and appreciative of difference, so as to eliminate the demand for sexual services beyond police repression” (centeno ortiz , p. ). we finally come to our last tool, i.e., emotionality. how does making/watching these films affect subjects and objects on both sides of the camera and the screen? how do emotions produce the surfaces and boundaries that delineate the individual and the social? (ahmed , p. ). as mentioned before, several testimonies in cuidado, resbala evoke anger and distress. the opening and closing sequences, with the reflexive voice over and the embodied subjective camera, perform entrapment and despair. these feelings are strong when domestic workers find themselves isolated. the turning point comes with the movement from individual struggle towards organised collective action with the testimonies of the women from “territorio doméstico”, the interviews with academic experts who envision alternatives, and the festive demonstrations. the main emotions evoked in the film and gathered by the audiences have to do with empowerment, hope, pride and solidarity. similarly, the film subjects and spectators of yes, we fuck! have praised the sex-positive tone of the film. even though several testimonies evoke shame, anger and discomfort, the film performs mainly positive emotions such as pleasure, love, trust, freedom and curiosity. as in the case of cuidado, resbala, positive emotions become stronger when the struggle becomes open and collective. for instance, soledad arnau, the main character of the story about sexual assistance and a feminist functional diversity activist, describes her experience in the film as very positive: all the stories have enriched me a great deal, and of course mine, well, i would not change the experience i had for anything, what i felt in that screening. because for me it was like a before and after. i think it’s a beautiful way to learn to love oneself, to love oneself even more, if i already loved myself then even more, and also to love the body because in the end, i think it’s impossible to love yourself if you do not love your body ( . . . .) to have a body is not something problematic, i believe it is the most beautiful thing in the world to have a body and to be able to enjoy it. and fortunately the documentary is an example, it shows that bodies are enjoyable. (arnau ) to conservative, paternalistic, heteronormative and ableist material-discursive practices, the filmmakers and filmed subjects of yes, we fuck! respond with their performative right to appear as desiring and desirable subjects. . three effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema in this final section, we diffractively read insights raised by each of our case studies to illustrate three effects that feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema can have. the first effect is that both films operate as feminist countervisuality devices that reframe realities from a gender instances of this are the steps towards the abolition of prostitution taken recently by the spanish socialist government and their contestation from sex workers associations, attempting to create a sex workers trade union. “quien esté por la abolición de la prostitución, puede incorporar la realidad de la diversidad funcional al proceso de construir una sexualidad humana general suficientemente rica y positivamente apreciadora de la diferencia como para eliminar la demanda de servicios sexuales más allá de la represión policial.” “todas las historias me enriquecen muchísimo y desde luego la mía, bueno, no cambiaría por nada del mundo la vivencia que viví, que sentí en esa proyección. porque para mí fue como un antes y un después. yo creo que es una forma preciosa de aprender a quererse a una misma, a quererse más todavía, si ya me quería pues ahora más todavía, y bueno también a querer al cuerpo porque al final, creo que es imposible quererte si no te quieres el cuerpo ( . . . ) realmente no es nada problemático, es lo más hermoso del mundo tener un cuerpo, creo yo y poder disfrutar de este cuerpo. y afortunadamente el documental es un ejemplo de que los cuerpos son disfrutables.” soledad arnau. q&a session. october at the university of granada. soc. sci. , , aware perspective. a pattern that both films share is that the filmed subjects are empowered as they enact their right to appear as political subjects in the public space. in yes, we fuck!, rebellious and diverse bodies are presented in a way that questions their intelligibility from the perspectives of pathology and/or pitiful paternalism. in their sexually explicit images, the filmed subjects enact their performative right to appear as both, desiring and desirable. in cuidado, resbala, care labour is placed at the centre of the economic activities. the filmmakers render visible inequalities connected with three factors: being a woman, a migrant, and a domestic worker. but they also propose real alternatives, showing the organised collective struggles of domestic workers and reading these insights from personal activist experience through those from feminist academic experts. the second effect of feminist material-discursive practices in these films is their rendering visible the ways in which patterns of difference are turned into and/or employed by structures of inequality. in cuidado, resbala, this is approached within the framework of the sexual division of labour. in the animated sequence, a female voice-over explains the intersections of gender, class and nationality in the transnational care chain. in the case of yes, we fuck!, centeno admitted that directing this film made him realise that the feminist struggle and the struggle of people with functional diversity have various aspects in common: from their political work with the body, to the critical dismantling of the attempt to justify social inequalities arguing biological differences. the third effect of feminist material-discursive practices that we diffractively read in these films has to do with the move from “reflecting on representations” to “accounting for how practices matter” (barad , p. ). the directors of cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! envisioned the production process of both films as a political action in itself. in cuidado, resbala, the directors render visible inequalities faced by domestic workers, but they also visualise other possibilities for liveable conditions. the film evokes anger and distress with various testimonies, but rather than victimisation and paralysis, awareness of injustice is portrayed as leading to collective struggles. the subjects in yes, we fuck! accepted to appear in the film because they shared an understanding of the need to create a different collective imaginary. through the co-organisation of filmed workshops, the production process operated as a space for the encounter of queer and crip activisms that had been mostly disconnected until then and that have continued working together since. if we recognise the onto-epistemological potential of documentaries to “co-compose the real” (hongisto , p. ), we can envision their ethico-political impact in the opening up of possibilities for gender and world making otherwise. the processes of making and watching feminist documentary films can co-create spaces for breaking the silence about precarious situations and for collectively generating more livable conditions. the two films that we have referred to manage to find a paradoxical balance pointed out by butler: the filmed subjects—domestic workers, people with functional diversity, transgender activists—are presented as “at once vulnerable and capable of resistance” (butler , p. ). films like cuidado, resbala and yes, we fuck! exemplify the capability of looking back and beyond androcentric visuality regimes. author contributions: article conceptualization, o.c.-s. and a.s.-e.; interviews, o.c.-s.; methodology and primary analysis, o.c.-s. and a.s.-e.; original draft preparation, o.c.-s.; review and editing, o.c.-s. and a.s.-e.; supervision, a.s.-e.; project administration, project design and funding acquisition a.s.-e. funding: this work is part of grace gender and cultures of equality in europe, a european union’s horizon research and innovation programme under the marie skłodowska-curie grant agreement no. . the research has been funded by this project. the grace project is led by suzanne clisby at the university of hull. adelina sánchez-espinosa is principal investigator at the university of granada. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. the funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results. soc. sci. , , references ahmed, sara. . the cultural politics of emotion, nd ed. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. arnau, soledad. . q&a session at the university of granada. october . barad, karen. . meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham and london: duke university press. barad, karen. . nature’s queer performativity. kvinder, køn og forskning/women, gender and research : – . 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[crossref] union maids. . directed by jim klein, miles mogulescu and julia reichert. ohio: new day films. wollen, peter. . godard and counter-cinema. vent d’est. in the european cinema reader. edited by catherine fowler. london and new york: routledge, pp. – . first published . yes, we fuck!. . directed by antonio centeno and raúl de la morena. barcelona: centeno, de la morena and crowdfunding. available online: https://vimeo.com/ (accessed on february ). © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). $ € £ ¥ social sciences article the sonic intra-face of a noisy feminist social kitchen juliana españa keller victorian college of the arts, university of melbourne, melbourne, vic , australia; info@julianaespanakeller.com received: may ; accepted: august ; published: august abstract: this paper asks what is the value of transforming the kitchen into a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. a public kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork. the kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation. this platform becomes a collaborative social space, where somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools are built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical and the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. a public kitchen represents a pedagogical strategy for organizing and responding collectively to the local, operating as an independent nomadic event that speaks through a creative practice that is an unfolding process. (re)imagining the social in a public kitchen produces noisy affects in a sonic intra-face that can contribute to transforming our social imaginations, forming daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies. this paper reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of the self, where language, meaning and subjectivity are relational to human difference and to what is felt from the social, what informs from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and diffractive perspective. the labored body is entangled with post-human contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics, and women’s oppression; and is resonant and communicates as a site where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared. keywords: sound and noise art; feminist new materialism; posthumanities; doing-cooking; social engagement; participatory practices preface this paper needs to expand out from the page for the reader. firstly, and most obviously, it offers a written analysis of the artwork and emphasizes the relation to martha rosler ’s seminal work, semiotics of the kitchen (rosler ). a public kitchen responds to the historical, socio-political, feminist academic research in relation to the special issue on feminist new materialisms. secondly, visual images of various performance iterations provide useful illustration. finally, this text offers a link to the sound performance work, ‘the kitchen shift’ that can be accessed online. this audio-visual documentation can be found on my website with the following hyperlink listed below. by using this link, the reader is connected to the art work directly. this adjunct helps elucidate a fuller understanding of a public kitchen. this journal paper forms part of the artwork and research, a public kitchen, which is foremost a collective performance work and immersive sound installation. when reading this text, there is a desire and need (by the artist) for the reader to experience the collective sensory and sonic attributes soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of a public kitchen; however, the live and immersive experience of performance art, or live art, is at once irreplaceable or not easily substituted. the artwork is thus always to be set-up each time for an indeterminate and distinct outcome with room for failure and noisy slippages. a public kitchen is a culturally constructed representation of reality and positions what is possible and what it is not possible in its activation. as there have been many iterations of this work to date—spanning geographies and social groups ( – )—much vital material has been generated over time in the form of audio-visual documentation. . introduction “dare take the risk of affirmative politics and the collective construction of social horizons of hope” (rosi braidotti ). the research generated by the artwork, a public kitchen, contributes to feminist new materialist discourse by making the notion of human–non-human agency graspable as a creative act that cuts across pre-established dichotomies, by transversing hierarchies of power relations that organize human life as contextualized in by new materialist theorists barad and braidotti (barad , ; braidotti , ). through the medium of sound, i am investigating; emphasizing entities, ethics, social class, and social political intervention in the process. this subjectivity illuminates and activates how we move through the world, react to surroundings and respond to everything. it also shows how the normative and hierarchical relations amongst human groups based on race, sexuality, social class, and ability are always intimately entangled with the broader political economies/ecologies of which we are a part. the performance artwork establishes a scaffold for thinking about a range of ideas of what is felt through encounters with philosophy, sonic arts, community participation, feminist materialism, and post-human thought. the human and non-human relation to machines and machine learning is enacted through intra-active entanglement; since it represents an active pedagogy practice for organizing, facilitating and responding collectively to the local activated as andrew murphie states on how to anarchive through: “the ability to find a way out of systems, often from within to life’s living”(murphie , p. ). a noisy kitchen is felt as a musical sounding in the everyday rhythm of lived intensities and is seen as brian massumi ( ) posits “a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events” and “platforms for organizing and orienting live, collaborative encounters” (murphie , p. ). agency is conjured through the doing-cooking of the kitchen to create a sonic recipe as the becoming of the human–non-human relationship to uncover the paradigms that shape-shift performance art. this paper focuses on the unpacking of a creative practice, resonating with agency and amplifying where the experiential is intensely experienced as “creating together”, foregrounding a way to move forward pedagogically and experientially (conrad and sinner ; manning ). a public kitchen is embedded in the social, and the artwork allows for human slippages, failures that form part of the work. in particular, it considers how feminist new materialism can create daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies. this research reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in highlighting and responding collectively to the local with a systemic understanding of material phenomena in an immersive sonic performative installation. this the creative artwork and exhibition titled: “the kitchen shift” can be found here: https://vimeo.com/ . the password: thekitchenshift or on the artist’s website: http://cargocollective.com/julianaespanakeller/the- kitchen-shift-the-industrial-school-building. the word ‘anarchive’ comes from the “the go-to how to book of anarchiving” by andrew murphie of the senselab (murphie ). the entanglement of “doing-cooking”—a term coined by michel de certeau (de certeau et al. ). a sonic recipe is a dynamic arrangement of sound/noise material generated through the artwork by the intersection of the human–non-human, embracing the critical potentiality of a vital matter in a sonic apparatus. soc. sci. , , position seeks to ignite and transform our social imagination and deactivate pervasive and dominating patriarchal ethico-politics. finally, this paper explores ways in which post-humanist and new materialist thinking can be put to work in order to (re)imagine a more open perspective in approaching and pursuing community-based, collaborative practices underscored pedagogically and rhizomatically as a teaching about gender and a politics of care (revelles-benavente and ramos ; kumar ). what performance practices can do is contribute, co-produce through a constellation of variables of agency and become activated in a collaborative learning experience (strom and martin ). it is an invitation to scholars of posthumanism and new materialism to imagine how creative ideas and processual thinking might be put to work through performative practices with fluidity, flux, expansion and understanding of difference. in observation, anarchiving pertains to the event and live art that is activated through a performative cross-platform phenomenon where humanity is something that needs more humanizing as we move forward to challenging times ahead, where participation is risky and where research-creation can be contextualized performatively as co-constructed. in this way, human–non-humans, actions, or events are defined by their relations and function as part of an assemblage that is concerned with processual work and self-transformation. (huybrechts ; torrens ). what is correlative to intra-corporeality—where the artwork is an aesthetic, psychological and physical experience—is how these entanglements mesh with our perceptions; where the mediation of affect as a sound performance plays out and functions as a reading of the bodies of others. . starting from the middle eight individuals in identical dresses file robotically in through a portal door. they walk, one after the next, into a space that is embedded with history, bringing their ways of moving materiality into the present. heavy, heavier, heaviest. they walk in formation, masks on, heads high, hands up, carried above their chest, ready to work in thick, yellow, rubber utilitarian gloves. each individual picks a spot in the room and stares out at the audience with a dead-pan face. one of the members picks up her guitar and begins to play doom-drone riffs. the sound does not rock, as much as crush inexorably, until the rest of the group move out collectively into the performative space with their bodies and making their way over to the kitchen table—the motherboard—to join her. their self/bodies move through the space, shifting into various somatic positions on the floor, against the wall, with each other. the figure/ground choreographic relation between the human and this historical place dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material intra-changes; the prelude of oneself as transcendent, generated through and entangled with other systems, processes and events. their shiny bodies cannot resist the allure of shiny objects waiting on the motherboard, considering the effects they have, from manufacture to disposability, while reckoning with the strange agencies that intra-connect substance, flesh and place on a deep molecular level. vibrating, vibrating . . . the sound distils and subtracts, and then the vocals begin resonating, looping in and generating live outbursts from the artist who is writing these words now, plunging the sound into a human-non-human realm of culinary noise abstraction. rubber gloves smack back at you. the sonic recipe is in effect. here, i begin by writing to you from the middle of a public kitchen, as the words are moving across and through the whole final creative artwork. the middle is for me a happening of writing and research that emerges from my own personal experience combined with an art practice that requires a sensitivity, or attunement, to what moves through thought and thinking as a performance artist—a “assemblage” is a material affective dynamic in which bodies become “other” to themselves (deleuze et al. ). however, my understanding moves further in the direction of post-humanist feminist epistemology and quantum physics, as outlined in the works of donna haraway and karen barad. in turn, difference is relational to the concept of “becoming” explained by barad and braidotti. in this paper, i am articulating that participating with other bodies in a public kitchen is thus a learning process and can be used as a pedagogical tool to understand others. the word “crush” describes noise as “coming on,” or putting sonic pressure on something. soc. sci. , , maker of live art. i am creating a relation to the person who is reading this paper, by moving into a thinking process that (re)constructs our interdependence with the human and nonhuman, beginning with thinking and acting diffractively and intra-actively without discrediting the consideration for collectivity and the other and all the challenges of foregrounding this artwork. a public kitchen creates an opening, unfolding as a performative choreography; it is a creative event that communicates, acts and behaves in a social space, all the way down to the molecular level, not too rigidly conformist, but a writing canvas for the one, or the few, who speak to many. she rises. a public kitchen is defined as a sonic performance with innumerable potential iterations as a technique for making research-creation across geographical locations, made possible via an immersive sculptural apparatus and active human participation. the participants in this social artwork are women, or those who identify as women, inclusive of gender fluidity. in turn, the objects generate a sonic performance work that dramatizes the material agencies, flows and intensities between kitchen objects and humans. this is done by creating sonic recipes in a public kitchen installation space. living always comes to terms with forms of dissonance emerging from a complex set of social conditions, such as the auditory experience of sound that lacks musical quality; the sound that is a disagreeable auditory experience as a form of noise. sound matter is therefore generated by making these conditions/forces a constant process of engagement, where thinking and acting move ‘from the middle out’—drawing on what is intrinsic or embedded, creating ways of shifting into each other and attuning to these fields of difference. a public kitchen can, therefore, be seen to represent an active pedagogy for organizing and responding collectively to the local, through a spectrum of sound phenomena where home is a middling, while still operating as an independent nomadic event with many, and potentially on-going, transnational iterations. i argue that human–non-human intra-actions within sonic recipes are made apparent due to the doing of the action by the subject, paraphrasing barad, being the context of the work; this makes the effects of the action relational in the real world (barad ). intra-action should not be confused with interaction, where elements exist first and then interact. instead, an intra-action conceptualizes that it is the action between (and not in-between) that which matters; it is in the action that the elements themselves are produced interdependently. in turn, a sonic recipe (in which intra-actions can occur) is defined as a relational partition of electronic sound patterns that form a dynamic arrangement of sound/noise material composed with kitchen tools and appliances in a sonic performance installation (a public kitchen). overall, sound phenomena materialize when the human and non-human are fully present and exercise a guiding or piloting role, affecting and working through what is organically presented in a particular iteration of a public kitchen event. here, the idea of the participatory is critical, where the human and non-human fuse to take on a positive and affirmative character, aligning with braidotti’s understanding of an ethical practice, which is an ethico-politic stated in the opening quote of the introduction. i would also posit it as, what braidotti distinguishes, “a break with the doxa”: the acquiescent application of established norms and values by de-territorialising them and introducing an alternative ethic flows (braidotti and hlavajova , p. ). i contend that a participatory sonic performance work precipitates a kitchen interior intra-subjectivity—a process evoking the specific entanglement of doing-cooking with affect by providing a complex assemblage of embedded and embodied thought, where the psyche and the body work in this thinking has been influenced immensely by erin manning, who conceptualizes “middling” as a way of thinking through the way the minor (a minor gesture that moves across the work) calls us to attend to something and moves us through thresholds of socialities and techniques in philosophy, art and activism (manning ). (barad ). (barad ). in this journal paper, i am articulating that participating with other bodies in a public kitchen is thus a learning process and can be used as a pedagogical tool to understand others. i refer here to american philosopher and feminist scholar, bell hooks, and the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as the ability to counter-act systems of women’s oppression and class domination (hooks ). soc. sci. , , unison. what is correlative to intra-corporeality—where the artwork is an aesthetic, psychological and physical experience—is how these entanglements mesh with our perceptions; where the mediation of affect as a sound performance plays out and functions as a reading of the bodies of others. within each iteration, each participant is triggered by the vibrational sensation of sound that rises to the surface through the mind/body. affect can be felt as sound that behaves as active matter—to listen and absorb sound material activated through the playing of kitchen objects, deeply. this triggers physical movement felt in the transmission within and between bodies and objects. . resonance in a public kitchen resonance in a public kitchen addresses a deeply intertwined collective moment when the human and non-human intra-act in the apparatus of a public kitchen. to be clear, resonance is one of the fundamental phenomena, not just of acoustics or science in general. resonance is a factor entangled with intra-activity and diffraction in the sonic intra-face of a public kitchen. the “resonance” experienced becomes a vital and transformative moment in the process, instigated by a “material turn”. a critical live awareness occurs where sound (technological or non-technological) can be felt and seen collectively and affectively as an automated society coping with the demands of life with everyday technology. thus, resonance in performance can be seen as a bridge to the post-human: to be attentive to the mutual accommodation or responsiveness of human and non-human agents. it is not mitigated from the outside to the inside of the body; it is already in the body and in the mind through active resonant forces. in turn, my position always returns to the sound that is produced in intra-activity. within each iteration, each participant is triggered by the vibrational sensation of sound that rises to the surface through the mind/body with the gestural use of a contac mic that touches each kitchen tool as it is played. affect can be felt as sound that behaves as active matter—to listen and absorb sound material activated through the playing of kitchen objects, deeply. this triggers physical movement felt in the transmission within and between bodies. in turn, this research seeks to address resonant frequency characterized in the oscillation of sound, which can be observed as vibrational bodies performing with the kitchen objects (reverberating as an extension of the self). i argue that it must always be understood relationally, as vibration that is already materializing between humans and non-humans in intra-action. this also raises an awareness of the complexities involved with diffractive paradoxes of difference revealed in sonic relations and my own affective politics. in turn, sound works its way to the forefront of contemporary sensory behaviour in user experience, by sculpting, shifting and changing our perception of the kitchen environment in which the body labors to listen creatively. i argue that a public kitchen becomes an echo chamber of kitchen intensities that resonate amongst others, pushing thought toward its material forces of intra-actions to describe as manning states, “pure experience in the in-folding of potential that keeps actual experience open to its more than” (manning , p. ). as elaine swan considers, there are colonial and anti-colonial dynamics at play between masculinity and femininity, specific ethnicities, multiculturalism, and imperialism, as i have explained in my footnote on “the other”. i argue that these are evident in a public kitchen assemblage. i would also argue that these dynamics are seen as post-human indicators from which we can interrogate, more closely, the connection (imagined or not) between food and the other. as a multicultural pedagogy that can perform and engender, this research and artwork certainly experiments with various encounters with ‘otherness’; this is approached via a dialogical response to feminism, social class and domestic labor. in post-human terms, food has, as swan states, “become a battleground for politics, policy, and reform” on many levels (flowers and swan , p. ). in the context of transnational mobility, ilaria vanni attributes the sense of “being at home,” or belonging to somewhere, as dissociated from a geographical location and replaced by belonging through specific everyday practices (lloyd and vasta ). this moving or roving idea is conceptualized in the artists’ soup kitchen, based in toronto, canada, where different artists host a lunch each week and bring their creative practices to a community table. vanni makes us aware that the concept of home soc. sci. , , has been an intellectual obsession for a long time; where others try to pin down its meaning—and continue to revel in its multiplicity through the interactional achievement of people, spaces and things—the ambivalent nature of home-making can be examined as individual as well as collective through projects of identity. i would add that this agential relation is brought to the table as struggle for coherence, and continuity in the work goes on no matter what. to be clear, i also maintain and reiterate that as a new materialist, cultural space is not defined as around and between objects. it is considered already embedded in these objects (the human–non-human), spaces and things, as well as in spacetimemattering ; it is diffractively working and conceptualizing difference through a spectrum of sound phenomena where home is a mutual relation of things and bodies inclusive of diverse participatory powers. as barad insists, “the acting human subject and the known object are not separate, but entangled.” from an ethico-political perspective (with whom and for whom), this relational process (re)models our interdependence with human and nonhuman others, beginning with thinking and acting ‘from the middle out’ without discrediting the consideration for collectivity and the other. what emerges from this conceptual relation of the artwork is making the materiality of women’s work visible as a performative mode of domestic bodily production: the implicit body of a woman at work is expressed in a resonant sonic overture of resistance. a public kitchen is an immersive sculptural installation that is at once a multisensory, embodied, participatory encounter that engenders a mixture of feelings and visual impressions for the participants, such as fascination, surprise, boredom, disgust, perplexity, irritation, joy, and ambiguity. i argue that a public kitchen produces noisy affects that can contribute to transforming our social imaginations, forming daring narratives (or sonic recipes) that feed post-human ethical practices and inquiry. . co-composing the sonic intra-face of a noisy kitchen through the apparatus it is a profoundly intertwined collective moment as both human and non-human elements intra-act within the apparatus. the apparatus can be seen as the framework for the social artwork: a sculptural set-up consisting of the motherboard—a long metallic platform resembling a community kitchen table used for ‘placemats’ of positioned kitchen tools, electric kitchen appliances and electronic music hardware. kitchen tools and appliances are amplified and activated through the simple technology of a contact microphone, connected to the metal motherboard. a contact microphone, also known as a pickup or a piezo, is a form of microphone that senses audio vibrations through contact with solid objects and musical hardware. thus, the transduction produced when kitchen tools interact with this active metal surface generates noise, or diffractive interference patterns, through a piezo electric effect that measures sonic vibration, pressure, acceleration, and the force which converts sound to an electrical signal. as barad explains, “apparatuses are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices—specific material (re)configurings of the world which come to matter” (barad , p. ). thus, i use the apparatus as a central concept for what i argue is a new materialist approach, by working with a cluster of participants who collaborate through sound improvisation in performative intra-actions/s via the motherboard to channels of audio-electronic processing. i interpret the apparatus as a middling point for how sound performance reflects the current post-human condition and further feminist concerns. a public kitchen does not necessarily look high-tech when performing with kitchen tools and appliances relational to the everyday through the ‘doing and cooking’; it is more about creating a condition in the installation that is a public kitchen—to generate a state of being for the non-human and performs in a particular temporality in relation to spacetimemattering. in this research, “timespacemattering” refers to how intra-actions emerge between space/time/matter relations and forces within the entanglement of differential relations (barad ). (barad ). soc. sci. , , . (re)configuring our relationship with the world in co-becoming processes relationally, feminist power relations are located within the live enactment. in contributing to social change, i argue that activating a feminist ethico-politic must fundamentally emerge from work done at the transformative, energetic layer of the body, activated by doing-making processes. cooking. playing. making art. resting. working. sharing touch. sharing food. gathering to remember. growing up. growing old. grieving loss and oppression. resisting. empowering humans. performing ritual after ritual as an affirmative politic in action. all of these processes (and more) could be seen to fall into the ‘doing-making’ constellation. (re)configuring our relationship with the world is not a direct, elementary trajectory; it can entail messy and disquieting encounters, which embrace the indeterminate and manifest through negotiation and contradicting emotions. by engaging attentively with a sonic performance installation, a public kitchen entangles performers to participate in co-becoming processes, defined by rosi braidotti as “a co-operation of active laboring, becoming-ethical” (braidotti and hlavajova ). the challenge is to change our assumptions about the social structures that shape the world around us and take a deeply critical look at how one actually engages with the very systems that we are trying to release ourselves from, disengage, disentangle. i argue for the need to be brave and name, identify, call out, bring up, and sound out the social patterns that surround us through a sonic recipe, shifting the social dynamics we are entangled in. i argue that these social patterns of sonic textures, both tonal and atonal, maintain a quality or character of becoming that can be observed as other-worldly and decorous, by cultivating the experience, or can even result in disillusionment in the active process. “becoming” here refers to feminist theoretician in new materialism, rosi braidotti’s idea of it as a rhizomatic political action (as in, rhizomatic learning), proposing that it is a significant undertaking of nomadic feminist ethics in which transformation is to consider a body’s potential for mapping and shaping transformation in the local. in turn, braidotti considers that new futures need to be imagined first and re-assembled elsewhere in order to do the work, rather than being constructed into the same hierarchical frameworks. a feminist politic expands on fluxus precedents through the use of props, costumes and makeup to create different personae with participants in a public kitchen: it is commonplace for performers to be adorned in crocheted masks, a-line dresses made from reflective industrial fabrics, and sticky neon duct-tape overlays. a fluxus attitude can mean that everything that is material matter, in mind and body, is embraced—from absurd to commonplace, from violent to tedious—to ignite the kitchen space as a site that shifts and repositions its domestic status to a site of materialist agency. for example, the performance art collective, w.w.k.a. (women with kitchen appliances), which existed in montreal, canada, from to , modelled a feminist performance art approach that adhered to aesthetic concerns associated with beauty, free play and feminist autonomy. with the emergence of a public kitchen as a speculative and somatic proposition, and creation of a sound performance collective named sonic electric (currently positioned in melbourne, australia), a more political cultural affective reading of today’s feminist discourse, conditioned by our current socio-political climate, is active through an ethico-political practice. . the sonic intra-face of a noisy kitchen workshop how can collaborative sonic art work create a public kitchen (as in figure )? on this collective journey, sonic material phenomena are created with kitchen tools and electric appliances, co-composed by volunteer participants who are gathered around an immersive kitchen table installation, the motherboard. as previously described, the motherboard is an ambulatory surface platform, resembling a lengthy metal kitchen table, that is used for the placement of kitchen tools, electric kitchen appliances and electronic music hardware. it is a vital and central component of a public kitchen (braidotti ). soc. sci. , , sculptural installation. the sonic performance installation is built on a critical arrangement of hybrid personae (costumed participants) whose bodily capacities are measured by the continuous mutual transformations between ‘humans at work,’ seeking to reposition the kitchen tool or appliance by exploring its displacement and functionality through the labored body (figure ). figure . a public kitchen performed by sonic electric at mars gallery, melbourne, australia, . figure . a participant of a public kitchen performing in the future is female exhibition, abbotsford convent, melbourne, australia, . soc. sci. , , i argue that investigating sonic materiality through the prism of a public kitchen enables the power of sound performance to be activated as a savoring of self-emancipation for the participant. sonic phenomena re-sounds from one kitchen tool to another—from australia, spain, iceland and hong kong—through space, agency, resonance and temporality in the apparatus. all of these critical attributes reverberate in public kitchens as socio-cultural phenomena that create points of resistance (figure ). figure . participants of the nd international symposium on electronic art. isea hong kong cultural r>evolution. public kitchen. school of creative media, city university of hong kong, china, . this awareness is found through a public kitchen, with the desire to affect what we seek to change in the entanglement, drawing people of all shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities to understand and measure difference through the feel, flow or vitality of the enactment of sonic intra-actions. this immanent process produces intra-actions and/or fluxes and vibrations of matter, resonating with human and non-human bodies. i argue for a performative feminist materialist ontology/epistemology, which sees social phenomena as primary and non-binary; here, subjects and objects are dependent on forming in or out of a process of intra-action by rethinking the dualisms so central to post-human thinking. the oppositions between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the non-human, are produced and combined in the action itself, reflecting on the philosophical writings of karen barad ( ) and rosi braidotti ( ). this perspective opens up a capability for deep listening by the participants that makes them available and receptive to a tuning of the world we live in. resonance can be seen as proposing a new way of thinking about causality and agency that acknowledges the indeterminate possibilities for worldly (re)configurings—a (re)-tuning of the world. resonance, i would also argue, should be understood in terms of relation: a vibration that emerges out of intra-activity. this raises an awareness of the complexities involved with diffractive paradoxes revealed in sonic relations. the public iterations in specific localities in and around: melbourne (australia), blanca (spain), reykjavik (iceland), and hong kong (china) are all part of phd field research work conducted from to and supported by the victorian college of the arts, university of melbourne, australia. soc. sci. , , there are diffractive readings in making sound—or, sounding and hearing—where sound/noise resonates in composition through communication between participants: noisiness, the public kitchen activity, pronounces a form of resistance or critical engagement with the world. this relation also punctuates the entanglement between noise and a politics of consent in the way a diverse range of femme, female-identified and gender non-binary persons collaborate. a public kitchen addresses all cybernetic bodies as forms of noise and disruption that are engaged in a thinking about freedom where the mind/body is a driving force within a multiplicity of becomings; this is emphasized and expanded on through the writings of braidotti, gilles deleuze and felix guattari (braidotti ; deleuze et al. ). understanding the transducer sound patterns as sonic recipes in a public kitchen are formed by human participation with the help of a small electronic audio device—the contact microphone (figure ). contact microphones create live contact with kitchen tools and appliances entangled within the apparatus through the motherboard. lead cables connected to contact microphones feed guitar amplifiers placed under the motherboard, amplifying noisy material into a public space, and leading the listener on a sonic journey. it is a haptic partnership with musical hardware and bodily production that, in concert, produces sonic performative phenomena. i argue, as a multi-media visual artist, that the strength of sonic phenomena is that it does not strive to be technically perfect, musically high-tech, or audio-efficient. instead, it accepts its place as indeterminate, vital, resonant material, celebrating its flexibility to jump from manual labored sound to electronic sonic space, and vice versa, in a sonic recipe. there are constant exchanges and transformations happening in every kitchen: forces shifting; particles entangling with particles in the quantum field of thinking; doing and making in the world in paraphrasing barad to explain things on a molecular level (barad ). these intra-actions are technologically entangled with musical hardware, constructed with industrial metal parts. music hardware is mechanical objects or electronic devices that create, or aid in the creation of, experimental musical sounds that a musician might use to enhance sonic material phenomena in a live performance. figure . a contact microphone placed on the motherboard surrounded by kitchen tools. testing grounds, southbank arts centre, melbourne, australia. from the sound performance work, being in time: death by audio, . soc. sci. , , a public kitchen dares to take the risks proposed by braidotti in this paper’s opening quote, as it reflects on the uncertainty of our current times to expose social rifts and find affirmative human–non-human connections in co-composing sound patterns into sonic recipes. the material realities of women’s everyday lives are reflected in a public kitchen as, historically, we can see the kitchen as a place that separated people, as a place of oppression, a key site where women perform most of the world’s labor (international labour organization ). . all art is political materialities are never neutral. thus, a public kitchen could be conceived as an alternative economy critical of a capitalist system. i argue that all art is political because a critical feminist perspective articulates that patriarchal culture is a system that impacts everyone as material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in sonic resistance against domination. domination in today’s cultural politics takes various forms in varying social contexts. as explained by rosemary hennessy, materialist feminism considers how women and men of various races and ethnicities are kept in their lower economic status due to a power imbalance that privileges those who already have privilege, thereby protecting the status quo (hennessy and ingraham ). a public kitchen challenges this propositionally, as it manifests a (re)building of community in the form of collective action that is unyielding through sonic material resistance, playing out as a collective pathway of negotiation and co-operation (figure ). this position excludes a marxist agenda in a public kitchen by recognizing the agency of biology or matter in worldly phenomena and social and political human behavior. feminist new materialists challenge the linear models of causation that form constructivist analyses of the ways power relations shape the subjects and objects of knowledge. this occupation accounts for how intra-actions through which the social, the biological, and the physical emerge, persist, and transform. feminist new materialists are qualitatively trying to change feminist critical analysis from a framework within which the agency of bodies and material objects is understood as an effect of power to a framework within which relationally, nature-culture and biology have reciprocal agentive effects upon one another. in this material turn of the distinctive and effective agency of organisms, ecosystems, the human non-human as vital matter, feminists will rethink how to take on social justice, creating paths toward social and political transformation. relationally, the monotone video work, las atrevidas: the risk takers ( ), monitors the mechanical movements of six senior women from a small village in blanca, murcia, spain, who embrace tradition, a nomadic culture through difference, and, via their participation, generate a space of subjective individuation and otherness (figure ). i investigate how kitchen tools are passed on socially and somatically, stretching entanglements with shifting measurements of performative movement, sonic undulations, historical kitchen knowledge, and female genealogies in the domestic sphere. i argue that, for feminists like myself, temporality exists by how time is being kept, by whom and for whom in a public kitchen (van der tuin ). the entanglement of “doing-cooking” transfigures, as braidotti specifies, how objects resonate as matter that thinks and feels as an extension of the human body through the post-human (braidotti ). the relationship between subject and object opens complex nets of intra-connectivity in which the body, space and psyche are never conclusive and always “more than” something: as erin manning explains, they are “indeterminate” (manning , p. ). a public kitchen presents how this awareness of kitchen objects, disciplines this idea points to a “trumpian” autocrat world, such as heteropatriarchal domination, that is, a socio-political system in which the male gender and heterosexuality have primacy over other genders and over other sexual orientations, neoliberal domination, racist domination, and homophobic domination, etc. donald john trump is the th and current president of the united states of america, who took office in january . “trumpian” is a slang definition found here: https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/trumpian/ (llc ). soc. sci. , , and practice are always operating in relation to matter that is waiting to be interpreted, rehearsed, repositioned, and transmitted (barad ). figure . the local sound performance collective, sonic electric, performing in the future is female, abbotsford convent, melbourne, australia, . figure . las atrevidas: the risk takers, artist residency at centro negra aadk, blanca, murcia, spain, . group portrait. video: duration min. soc. sci. , , the practice of deep listening gives women an opportunity to explore their/our bodies and their/our temporalities from women’s experience as women while also being inclusive of gender-fluidity. deep listening is also termed somatic listening by pauline oliveros, who observed that the practice of deep listening is a commitment to cultivating receptivity through the body with an emphasis on inclusiveness of performing music. everyone (women, men, non-binary, trans, gender fluid etc.) is engaged as participants in this practice before even touching a contact microphone. for the participant, inclusion promotes a veritable, personal movement of a thought and listening practice that helps the body unwind while at the same time stimulating awareness of energy flows of the body, quite similar to a tai-chi or qigong class that incorporates chinese medicine and the flow of chi (energy) points throughout the body. in the company of others, this approach prepares a participant foremost to listening in synchronicity with each other in performance, relational to the whole apparatus of doing-cooking as an unfolding immanent process. feminism today is a worldview that includes men, demanding a rethinking of power in society, a change in the dominant system of private domestic space, public space and temporality; negotiating a woman’s place in art institutions and valuing a woman’s place in this discourse (cost: european cooperation in science and technology ). what feminist new materialists point out is, what is in the world and what we know about things in the world cannot be considered as different things. what is in the world, what we know about things in the world are constantly shaping one another and, in the kitchen, this study of matter and meaning is, moreover, boiling over. thus, the tools of the kitchen become agential matter in a post-human world. post-humanists are responding to the redefinition of humanity’s place in the world by both the technological and continuum in which the “human” is but one life form among many (braidotti ). . semiotics of the kitchen the socio-political oeuvre of american artist and activist, martha rosler (rosler ), highlights her position on the artist’s role within contemporary art practice, as well as her understanding of “private to political.” this position affects and mentors the present understanding of the role of an artist as a feminist thinker, and this agential strategy energizes the creative move from the private, to political, to public space present in a public kitchen. rosler’s seminal video and performance artwork, semiotics of the kitchen ( ), contributed to a recurring thematic during the s that still serves as a critical document and historical precursor to current feminist materialist discourse and genealogies. in this work, the artist critiques women’s roles in society by acting as a ‘cooking show host’ personality, creating an alphabet using different kitchen tools. the letters are articulated, often quite violently, in the process. through rosler’s objective lens, the kitchen table and its environment are made visible as a platform of domestic labor: a form of maintenance work, household chore and food preparation. it is coded into a form of semiotics—a performative and gestural language—acted out through the aggressive, violent and monotone handling and manipulation of kitchen tools. rosler developed her own terms of performative engagement in front of the recording camera to articulate a feminist debate. and while this seminal work seemed to focus on her personal place in the world, rosler’s critique spilt beyond her ‘artist’s kitchen’ to examine the political context and capitalistic economy of the late s in the united states. however, her analysis didn’t end there. rosler was also accounting for the personal, bodily and psychological experience of being human. at the time, her semiotic approach pointed to a marxist–feminist expression of frustration as a radical mode of feminist critique in that it stirred the global soup of women’s oppression. rosler’s message was not only directed to the women (the other) through which feminism defines itself, but also to the forces of government in an advanced industrial society (molesworth ). (oliveros ). soc. sci. , , semiotics of the kitchen politicized the space of the kitchen through the lens of the camera, exposing issues of consumer culture, mechanized labor and material handling as a monotone assembly line. through performance art, rosler was steadfast in taking a stand on government in which political authority exercises absolute and centralized control through consumer capitalism. her work has influenced the embodiment of physical labor in the kitchen and speaks especially to a public kitchen model, highlighting how politics and the performative can be embedded in the very material presence of video art and an alternative politics of connection. at its very center is the materiality of artistic and political action. it shows how artists can navigate this territory, giving attention to the question of politics from the perspective of theory and the artwork itself (nicholson and seidman ). this noisy platform resonates to enable the dictum that “all art is political.” in the last decade, there has been a series of incremental shifts to artworks that primarily utilize forms of collaboration and participation on the ground and as live art forms. from a feminist new materialist view, physical labor is highlighted to create a form of resistance or post-human critical engagement with the world; however, the actual power of kitchen tools and appliances to create sound material to connect and contribute to the feminist discursive can build on rosler’s original ideas. critical reaction to collaborative practices of social engagement is always problematic in the way it is contextualized by rosler’s socio-political stand, for example. rosler has consistently made me think of the potential to be had in developing an ethics of engagement in relation to feminist collaborative art practices. sonic artwork can materialize in form and in practice, with such simple tools connected to electronic media and to the familiar environment around us. as a method of social engagement, a public kitchen seeks to create a form of creative occupation, moving from the kitchen into a public space, to create other types of kitchen environments or iterations with people other than myself. the term iteration is used in a single execution, as of a set of instructions that are to be repeated in a performance work. as a diffractive reading, performative gesture and the semiotic language have been extended beyond rosler ’s seminal work. the kitchen table shifts in time, space and location. each kitchen tool and appliance that is placed on the kitchen table surfaces from a set of distinct kitchen tools and skills. each tool is picked up and transformed in live performance to become a sound instrument in its engagement with electronic media, not only with manual kitchen tools, but also with electrical modern kitchen appliances. the physical body is bound up in this process (braidotti ). therefore, a public kitchen shifts and repositions kitchen tools and appliances in ways that seek to open up sites of resonance and resistance. typically, noise from the kitchen is considered unwanted—it is something extra and excessive. what is considered noise or information in human terms is seemingly processed by digital technology in an equally blank way; a problematic appearance that can hide human accountability behind the apparent autonomy of technology. this paper considers this posturing through the way communication is made noisy, and by addressing all cybernetic bodies as forms of noise and disruption that are engaged in thinking about freedom with the mind/body as a driving force with a multiplicity of becomings (braidotti , ). braidotti calls this interaction a transmutation—a qualitative change, a metamorphoses—“towards a materialist theory of becoming” by using the power of technology in an affirmative way (braidotti , p. ; , p. ). and, like rosler’s strategy, physical labor remains an extension of the self (the participant), except now there is more than one person occupying the space at the kitchen table as collective affirmative action becomes a platform for collective, cross-disciplinary inquiry for both art and social commitment. it is important to pinpoint the probability of coming across unusual kitchen tools that are kitchen staples in the country from which the iteration takes place, and to distinguish the variety of different kitchen tools that are used in a public kitchen across the motherboard. each kitchen tool is best used for certain foods with respect to ethnicity and locality, and the importance of using specific utensils is a guide to the gestural technique that is used by the participant. soc. sci. , , bodily encounter in rosler’s semiotics of the kitchen, the performer weaves a personal, psychic and physical encounter into the narrative. this individual encounter is critical in the handling and manipulation of kitchen tools and appliances used in food preparation, domestic labor and maintenance work to manifest a political public artwork. rosler’s artwork was explicit in her black and white, severe characterization, set in her kitchen in brooklyn, new york. rosler posed in front of the camera as a homemaker, picking up a kitchen tool for each letter of the alphabet and naming each tool with a violent gesture while staring, deadpan, into the video camera. at the time, the creative phenomenon of julia child was appearing on local public television channel, pbs. rosler, starring in her own reality cooking show in the space of her own kitchen, demonstrates the object’s potential, not its culinary purpose (figures and ). figure . martha rosler, semiotics of the kitchen, , video, video data bank, usa. figure . julia child in the french chef on wgbh, – . photo: paul child/pbs television, new york, usa. as julia child so often presented through her tv personality, a kitchen tool was usually handled with skillful culinary expertise; but rosler’s deliberate physical gestures were adamant, violent and rebellious. rosler stabbed at the air with a knife and fork as she cast off ingredients behind her into the void of the kitchen and beyond. rosler returned her gaze to the camera lens as a mad housewife, not quite the elegant french chef. julia child revolutionized american cuisine through her pbs television cooking shows, such as the french chef, cooking with master chef, etc. her videos are available online. soc. sci. , , rosler’s subversive projection of a woman’s place in the world signified a desire for resistance and change. however, it also signaled failure, as the artist portrayed herself as a prisoner of her own domesticity by mocking julia child’s persona. fast forward. in a public kitchen, the performer also adopts a persona. however, foremost, the aim is to underscore the role of the participant as a sound maker, a collaborator, to create sound patterns that can resonate as a social and political marker for resistance and change but can also signal the failure not to do so. the sound material that is collected will be variable. its indeterminate pathway will either fail or succeed in its outcome and potentiality. semiotics of the kitchen is testament to today’s continued addiction to entertainment in the form of cooking shows and the world of celebrity chefs. television media has amplified the artifice by which social media and the power of television homogenizes and distracts from meaningful social action. rosler employed parody in the way that cooking shows inhabit our screen and social consciousness: she deconstructed gender, tracing how feminist genealogy pays particular attention to discourses, bodies and power. in a public kitchen dynamic, the participant is encouraged to engage in over-the-top theatricality, or to mask psychological or emotional identification. in this way, they play out, as rosler did, with deadpan humor and passive aggression in order to reflect society’s pull of conformity and homogenization. . resistance through noisy resonance “drama is very important in life: you have to come on with a bang. you never want to go out with a whimper.” (julia child to jacques pepin during cooking in concert television program (child and pepin ). noisy resonance emerges at a vibration of larger amplitude when produced by all participants playing a kitchen appliance in a sonic recipe. it is this noisy crescendo that fills the space of a public kitchen. materially, it becomes a resonating system of vibrational bodies inclusive of a kitchen object’s interference patterns. resonance, scientifically and acoustically, occurs when a system preferentially vibrates at a certain frequency. this frequency is called resonant frequency, and the system will respond very strongly to any periodic force at that frequency. the exact frequencies at which objects resonate is largely determined by the object’s physical properties: its size, shape and the materials that it’s made out of. many objects have resonant frequencies, and they are the source of many of the sounds we hear. when you knock on something, much of the sound you hear is just the ringing of that object’s resonance. even our own bodies have many (pyzdek ). sound resonates through human sensory behavior experience by sculpting, shifting and changing the perception in which the body labors to listen creatively to objects and other bodies vibrating; this process is critical of power relations in the kitchen environment. a field of resonance is important to me in the material discursive and the transversal (rhoades and brunner ). resonance strikes a chord in a public kitchen in the act of reclaiming thought or sound which is important for feminism, new materialism and my own practice. sound, relationally, works its way to the forefront of contemporary sensory behavior and user experience by sculpting, shifting and changing our perception of the kitchen environment in which the body labors to listen creatively and critically. in new materialist thinking, resonance can replace the binaries of structuralist thought, shedding new light on contemporary debates between sound, aurality, cognition, subjectivity, and embodiment. i argue that this is due to resonance’s ability to dissolve the binary of the materiality of things (human-non-human), and compels us to call into question that something, such as resonance, must therefore situate itself as a form of resounding together in the discourse of post-humanism and other transversality addresses different existential territories and universes of value through the register of resonance. (guattari ). “psychanalyse et transversalité”. paris: maspero/la découverte. “transversal fields of experience” brings different points of entry into resonance that all revolve around the question of how we open up new registers that incite a creative moving with the forces we encounter in contemporary transversal fields that shape our everyday experiences (rhoades and brunner ). soc. sci. , , immersive feminist participatory practices. for many feminists and artists alike, labor relations and ecological issues become more crucial to our survival every day. in a public kitchen, i see sonic connections of shared affective and productive movement to understand new material physicalities, new emotional transformations and new sonic relations, intra-culturally, with others and the world. a public kitchen takes affirmative action into the streets as a form of resonance. the kitchen object is relational, in that is has the capacity to make felt how an object is already in a field of relation and tuning through intra-action, intensities and symbolic forces of resonance. a feminist new materialist position illuminates a cartography and radical visibility for challenging theoretical concepts of art and everyday life, work and value for individuals, women, communities, and women’s oppression in the global environment. therefore, it is important to discuss or consider the ways in which different discourses, such as affect, mingle with matter and virtuality in the kitchen. through this discussion of the artwork of rosler and her social-political connection to the materialization of the labored body, as well as my critique of a public kitchen, i aim to find a modulation, or flow, of affect in the discursive that never jumps clear of its entanglement in the processes of new materialist performativity. instead, it assists in unpacking and defining resonance and power relations, enhancing the position of feminist genealogies. working on transnational participatory collaboration is a real process demanding particular concepts and commitments. teaching sound through deep listening is a practice. creating a visual aesthetic of performativity within the immersive assemblage is also significant. the entanglement of bodies and the sound that is transmitted, are foregrounded in a resonant system. through this process and apparatus, it becomes clear that what is transcended through sound is the understanding that the enactment is re-arranged with every iteration and is always evolving. contact microphones and electronic media move in the mind, through the body and through things as resonance is heightened, and, as manning characterizes, develop into something “more than” movement: “it is out of time, untimely, rhythmically inventing its own pulse” (manning , p. ). thus, a sonic performance work makes public the sound material that is emitted from kitchen objects—a new materialist way of listening and behaving, not in but of the resonant world. from failure to empowerment american artist, mierle laderman ukeles, writes in her exhibition proposal, “manifesto for maintenance art, ! proposal for an exhibition care”, that “maintenance is a drag,” confirming that maintenance is unglamorous, tedious, hard work and economically underestimated (ukeles ). in a not-so-perfect world, something is always breaking, wearing down, getting dirty or falling apart. in the performance, this lopsidedness and inequality is transmitted as an embedded and entangled process of coming into, working through, being formed by, and forming something into a sound recipe—a set of sound patterns created by participants. the unevenness of this process in sound and noise art is relevant to how the participants, at times, are almost failing at getting the object to make a sound or trying to change how the object can be rendered mute/useless in its repositioning. the sound, as a physical phenomenon, is transduced into an excited state, becoming dynamic as it is electrified, as contact is made with an electronic contact microphone. when the contact microphone is removed or disconnected, the object returns to its static self again. this is a complex relationship where human, non-human and so many natural, social, political, and cultural factors are forces that resonate in the entangled processes of materialization. surely ‘failure’ is recognized as agential forces that activate an acknowledgement of nature, the body and materiality in matters of uncertainty—indeterminacy within the intra-action? this failure slippage plays simultaneously into the timeline, where indeterminacy of position and momentum in the sonic compositional arrangement manifests as a communication breakdown. it appears, within each diffractive reading, as a disconnect, or simply the object responding in an auditory relation as if it is being agitated in the failure to produce a resonance, or keep going, or fade away. soc. sci. , , i would shape this disruptive mode of engagement in consciousness and thought as creating resonant agitation with kitchen objects in the radical potential of the political. this agitation is defined by a discomposure or disturbance that is transmitted through resonance, such as through the delivery of a feminist manifesto. to me, agitating space with sound and noise art demands a new way of understanding participatory practice, audience perception and difference in manners of expression and modes of experience of the artwork. akin to rosler, i lived in new york city during the s and was exposed to performance art, punk and hard-core music, which were important influences for many local artists. girl power, or grrrl power, acknowledged a woman’s space in the world of music and the performing arts. the riot grrrl subculture emerged in the early s from the punk rock scene during the third-wave feminist movement, uniting women and girls against capitalist and patriarchal cultural ideologies. countering the dominant ideological narrative in the united states, the riot grrrl movement continues to evolve and expand to avoid commodification. moving between high and low art, the relevance of sound as social with feminist and political concerns and polarities is activated in a public kitchen through a bricolage of incongruent cultural elements that become ripe for exploitation. this attitude was rampant in new york city from as far back as the birth of happenings on the lower east side in the s, and the subsequent significant and pugnacious punk and hardcore scenes. rosler may have taken note of this local scene, as many of these bands had humorous elements to them. the performers dressed in ludicrous outfits, engaged in slapstick routines and experimented with different styles of experimental noise-making. the desire to create music with different tools demonstrates john cage’s celebration of noise and accident (cage ); it is also informative to note that he was teaching at the new school in new york during this time. this methodology refers to putting sounds together in a random, indeterminate manner; mixing and matching unrelated sounds, noises and breakages in performance. it was this very combination of moving between musical styles and art practices that led to a productive cross-fertilization between music and art, not only in new york and london, but subsequently in berlin in the s and beyond. by using a non-musical interface, new expressions were generated. a fluxus attitude of the s reflected performers dressed in these beforementioned ludicrous outfits, engaging in slapstick routines and experimenting with different styles of noise-making to attract attention to what was happening on the streets and in social life (o’dell , p. ) (figure ). lunacy is an interesting word in contemporary ethico-political discourse. it takes special skills to perform and participate in performative politics today in a “trumpian” world of conspiracy theory, gas lighting and fake news being a coercer in enabling alt-right rhetorical propaganda. lunacy is the new norm, responding to the political climate, serving up more dead-pan humor. for example, a performative pandemonium recently played out at the white house, capitol building in the usa on september . a much-anticipated hearing of judge brett kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation before the senate judiciary committee was stalled by mostly feminist activists: in particular, they were protesting kavanaugh’s nomination due to his conservative stance on abortion. outside the hearing room, female activists dressed as characters from the handmaid’s tale ( )—an american dystopian drama web television series created by bruce miller, based on the novel of the same name by canadian writer, margaret atwood (miller ). inside, more than protestors were arrested for yelling and disrupting the proceedings. it was probably the most confrontational supreme court (scotus) nomination hearing in recent memory. i would arguably call it a performance art act using “grrrl” is a slogan that encourages and celebrates women’s empowerment, independence, and confidence. the slogan’s invention is credited to us punk band, bikini kill, who published a zine called girl power in . the swiss artist, christian marclay, has acknowledged that during the fluxus years he was also influenced by the ridicule of, and play on, the formal presentation of music in the concert setting and the live act (kelly , p. ). lunacy (as in “folly”) n.: foolish or senseless behavior. . nisus thesaurus. princeton: princeton university library. gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. soc. sci. , , affective political affirmative tactics. i would also posit what braidotti distinguishes as “a break with the doxa”: the acquiescent application of established norms and values by de-territorializing them and introducing an alternative ethic flow (braidotti and hlavajova , p. ). figure . sonic electric sound performance collective led and choreographed by juliana españa keller . there is a dangerous seduction in picking up kitchen tools dressed as hybrid personas. this experience develops an understanding of the many facets of ourselves, thus enabling personal transformation, social dissonance and sonic resonance (figure ). there is truth to playing in unity, expanding on all that matters. there is political power in the participants’ participatory position within a feminist group collective that is played out through the public kitchen. many artist participants would agree to meddling with conceptual standards against which political performative art playfully pushes. as each participant dons a synthetic wig or a crocheted facial mask, the body is the mind in this assumed persona. a dissociation from cartesian mind-body thinking is also heightened because it breaks down gender barriers as much as it reinforces an idea that you put on a gender, like a change of clothing, immune to utopic thinking. as the punk movement grew out of a drab and dark environment—with participants ready to challenge the status quo and show their contempt for government, society and tradition—it is amusing that the counter-culture term “punk” is now part of mainstream clothing design. originally intended as a destruction of fashion—both at the literal level through the defacement and damaging of garments, and at the symbolic level via its anarchistic attitude and often blasphemous message—this form of dystopic dressing up enables a sense of freedom and relief to those who participate in a public kitchen iteration. this performative approach can be looked upon as a quantum thinking response , not only to what we want in the live performance but who we are being, shattering boundaries between mind and according to barad, the deeply connected way that everything is entangled with everything else means that any act of observation makes a “cut” between what is included and excluded from what is being considered (barad , p. ). soc. sci. , , body. the earliest iterations of performance art, tinged in nihilism (the dada movement, for example), flirted with the anarchic meaninglessness of language in the early twentieth century (cohn ). the futurists developed a rowdy theatrical tradition of declamation and noisy musical accompaniment (cohn ). a feminist political rancor is a communal heartache demonstrating the noisy politics of everyone’s oppression. the inventory of kitchen tools and appliances of a participant’s choice, some from their own kitchen, are placed in front of them. it is as if a cacophonic supper of a specific recipe from a tv cooking show is about to be prepared, but this time it assumes a dystopic fervor, similar to the one witnessed in the handmaid’s tale ( ). it becomes a noisy spectacle of human locomotion, of bodies made into objects extended by a sonic apparatus. figure . a participant of the group, sonic electric, re-positioning a flour sifter in a public kitchen, . . conclusions a sonic performative live art experience is never fully translatable and has the potential to articulate many perspectives. i conclude that the nature of sound performance art can be articulated as both metaphysical and material. sound performance needs to be heard to be experienced because there will always be a surplus of sonic meaning and affect which defies containment in any medium other than the sound itself. i maintain that a public kitchen is a live interpretation of the social experience of a sound performance artwork. in this interpretation: human machine learning, automation, representation, and uncanny choreographies oscillate between humans, diffractively, with the complexity of mechanical gestures of the somatic body. i use speculative processes, partnered with material phenomena, chemical and physical forces, and intensities, to magnify time-based acts such as sound performance in both research and practice. in this paper, or in a public kitchen, i track movement between the human and non-human through intra-actions of the labored body: this is done by emphasizing dramatic transformation as a new materialist politic of connection in a post-human world and future social soc. sci. , , robotics as a platform for collective, transdisciplinary inquiry for art and social action and a way of understanding the world from within, as a middling, as much as a part of it. it is challenging to move nomadically. the entanglement with new materialism, and the engagement in post-humanist thought raises the stakes in the ethico-political consideration of the paths we should consider taking as a species through feminist participatory practices. the artwork, in relation to performative art practices and research-creations offers something more in the arena of public debate and pedagogical practices and makes ordinary participants capable of creating and transforming their own world through a freedom that is distributed individually or by the collective interpretation and practice of a sonic performance. this situated knowledge is critical, creating a rhizomatic relationship between the personal and the collective, validating authentic traditional kitchen tool knowledge around doing-cooking. somatic learning makes the unconscious conscious, and in the process, leaves one with more options for moving, acting, thinking, and living. it maximizes not just the physical body but one’s full human potential. to reiterate, braidotti asserts that a philosophy of the body is long overdue in the humanities to address women, gender, critical race, science, media, culture, and animals despite all the clichés we have in mind about femininity or feminism and transdisciplinary practices. i propose that i attend to difference, diffraction, and affect in knowledge production and feminist thought, intensities, emotions and somatic gestures, always being open to the more-than human towards a feminist ethico-politic. i argue the artwork forms a rupture, a collapse in the everyday making of semiotic codes permissible in the performing (the doing-cooking with kitchen tools) in the kitchen in a processual context and works hard for social justice. a sonic recipe does not fix the post-human world but creates a noisy culture of social (re)imagining. it is a becoming of being, entangled in things and technologies, contributing to feminist genealogies and ethico-political practices. our bodies depend on food from, in, and through the world of a kitchen environment, and our societies are built on and through things such as kitchen tools and appliances. this is how a public kitchen thrives. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references barad, karen. . posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. signs : – . 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(braidotti , p. ) diffraction as a way of thinking draws attention to the agency of the non-human, the ways that the materials used to make art can change thinking and can change relationships between people . . . building more than human relationships. arts based practices offer an ideal way not only of accessing but also of reorganizing emotional investments. (hickey-moody , p. ) . introduction the feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ are products of human and non-human intra-action and enmeshment, which we explore through arts-based research. we apply the feminist new materialist concepts of ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’ (barad ) to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. we use soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of ‘community’, ‘belonging’ and ‘what really matters’ in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and instagram-based art communities. to better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that these feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. the methodologies we present are community-focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’. we identify how live and creative methods are more than a way of knowing about communities, they are a way of being entangled with communities. as such, the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered. according to deleuze and guattari “flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming” (deleuze and guattari , p. ), if we take this as an accurate description, which we do, then emotion is the psychological register of change and attachment. we have two similar strategies for mapping such becomings, and these articulate in different empirical projects. first, our (hickey-moody , , ; hickey-moody and harrison ) methodology for working with faith communities establishes new materialist approaches to qualitative visual research methods. this project fosters interfaith relationships in childhood and is designed to help communicate the ways in which communities experience belonging and togetherness through their celebration of religious differences and various cultural practices. second, our method for working with feminist and queer instagram artists builds on dolphijn and van der tuin’s ( ) new materialist approach to interviewing and les back’s ( ) ‘live’ sociology or live methods, to employ a method of “instagram live interviewing” with a feminist new materialist lens. by intra-acting the interview live, we aim to understand how these artists build feminist activist communities online through their political representations of gender, feminism and sexuality. we position the agency of the interview as enmeshed with the body in space and the body in digital and virtual environments. together, we examine the politics embedded in art making and sharing processes that allow for intersectional dialogues of inclusion to emerge through the entangled differences between bodies, cultures, religions and sexualities. we align these digital understandings and art practices with the community arts workshops that foster interfaith relations and the sharing of religious differences amongst children of different faith backgrounds, including secular children (hickey-moody ; hickey-moody and harrison ). our theorisation of these digital and social communities are sites for comparison and we see the creative methods used to entangle ourselves within these spaces as parallel to one another. the discussion in this paper highlights how practices of blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the real in community art practice makes way for a new materiality of communities that are based on difference. we discuss our findings in relation to understanding how the communities we engage with experience diffractions of difference as an expression of ‘belonging’. we look at examples of fieldwork from both projects that amplify the significance of belonging, togetherness, acceptance and inclusion as expressed through art in both religious and newly arrived communities as well as feminist digital art groups. we write as two white women, one of us is a canadian migrant of post ww jewish and german descent and the other a first-generation daughter of two migrants from ireland and england who moved to australia in their mid-twenties. our experiences of migration and negotiating diaspora offer important points of connection when becoming with our research participants in exploring themes of home and belonging. one of us is the child of an irish political musician and ira sympathizer, for whom the embodied history of the irish civil war and famine have been key to learning about the politics of colonization and problematizing relationships between religion and social/cultural power. the history of the cromwellian penal laws against catholics in ireland, which denied education, emancipation and landownership to any irish catholic were not repealed until and is echoed professor anna hickey-moody is recipient of the australian research council future fellowship project number ft ‘early start arts to counter radicalization’ funded by the australian government. soc. sci. , , in the class system in ireland, which is shaped by a complex enmeshment of religion and geography. the close relationships between war and religion embedded in irish history were the inspiration for part of the fieldwork discussed here, which examines relationships between religion, community and belonging. similarly, holocaust histories constitute the genetic material of any jewish survivors of ww and their descendants. this generational trauma and attunement to a past history of conflict is a point of connection that can often be part of becoming with our research participants from migrant backgrounds and refugee pasts. our places of connection in relation to gender and sexuality which is further explored in the instagram research here are similar forms of enmeshment of difference: one of us identifies as bi-sexual and as both of us present as women, we consistently experience patriarchal and capitalist overcodings of our bodies that leave us profoundly attuned to the power of queer, decolonial feminist imagery. we share crucial points of connection with our participants and consistently look to learn from and celebrate our differences as being a form of community ‘togetherness’. diffracting difference diffractions and entanglements of matter and meaning emerge from the telling, making and drawing of visual ‘migration stories’ in the uk and australia (hickey-moody ), and also in the feminist activist art we see on instagram. the depth and diversity of the communities that we study in relation to their sense of belonging, togetherness, inclusion and acceptance is diffracted but also brought into being through art practice. diffraction is not reflection raised to some higher power. it is not a self-referential glance back at oneself. while reflection has been used as a methodological tool by scholars relying on representationalism, there are good reasons to think that diffraction may serve as a productive model for thinking through nonrepresentationalist methodological approaches. (barad , p. ) diffracting, or breaking apart a ray of light shows up its many components and indeed co-constructs these components in the process of diffraction. diffraction makes in new ways, rather than mirrors. in her book chapter “queer causation and the ethics of mattering”, karen barad ( ) re-works material from meeting the universe halfway by applying ‘diffraction’ to the scientific discovery of the many light changing lenses of the brittlestar (an ophiuroid). the brittlestar has a survival method of breaking off and losing some of its arms to distract predators. in this example, barad positions brittlestars as being a part of this world, and this diffraction of their limbs symbolizes their entanglement with the environment. she asks, when is a broken-off limb only a piece of the environment and when it is an offspring? at what point does the ‘disconnected’ limb belong to the ‘environment’ rather than the ‘brittlestar’? is contiguity of body parts required in the specification of a single organism? can we trust visual delineations to define bodily boundaries? can we trust our eyes? connectivity does not require physical contiguity. (spatially separate particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities, but rather are part of the same phenomena.) (barad , p. ) in broad terms, barad ( ) is questioning why differences, and in this case bodily diffractions, are seen as being separated from the environment when she asks “can we trust our eyes?” (p. ). she points to the notion that connectivity does not require contiguity, therefore, though something may appear different, this does not necessarily mean that it is. barad opposes this focus on difference by redefining the space between the brittlestar’s body and the environment, its limbs are diffracted into the environment rather than away from the body. she says “the world is an ongoing intra- active engagement, and bodies are among the differential performances of the world’s dynamic intra-activity, in an endless reconfiguring of boundaries and properties, including those of spacetime” (barad , p. ). in our research, bodies of water, matter, flesh, soil, sand and stone are reconfigured across spacetime in contextually specific ways. religious differences and similarities are diffracted through soc. sci. , , art making and storytelling. stories of migration, attachment, belonging, devotion and spiritual life are shared through words, colours, pattern, paint and pictures. colors, symbols and feelings bring bodies together, and position them on shared earth. feminist artists create and share art on instagram with the political aim of advancing feminist agendas on themes such as lgbtqia+ activism, reproductive justice, self-love and body positivity. it is through this entangled set of diffractions between various modes of story-telling, art making, digital creation and discussion that we find that intersecting themes of social inclusion evolve, through the creative methods with which we employ. by using intersectional feminist modes of social inclusion, instagram artists build online communities from their art practice and actively participate in intersectional dialogue on their instagram pages. kimberle crenshaw ( ) urges researchers to focus on this ‘intersectionality’ by looking at the conjoining oppressions at play across structures, systems and institutions. she problematizes some feminist theory and antiracist politics because of the “focus on the most privileged group members [which] marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination” (crenshaw , p. ). both the children artists and feminist activist artists diffract differences between their religions, races, ethnic backgrounds, sexualities and gender identities through their art making, either in a digital timespace or collaborative community workshop. these stories of intersectional inclusion told through art are how we explore the diffraction of differences as community making. using a feminist new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research in religion and gender at a community level, we theorize that the sharing of ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice encourages a diffraction of difference as ‘togetherness’ by creating interfaith understandings and inclusion of diverse bodies and sexualities online. we use diffraction, intra-action and enmeshment in framing our understanding of this ‘togetherness’, and as a way of showing that these feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages, they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, practices of identification and objects of attachment. feminist and new materialist scholarship together, demonstrates the co-implication of bodies, subjectivities, places and histories. after van der tuin ( ), braidotti ( ), barad ( ), dolphijn and van der tuin ( ), barrett and bolt ( ) and more, feminist new materialism accounts for this enmeshment of the social and the material, the virtual and real, human and non-human assemblage. for feminist new materialists, matter is agentic, ever changing, unpredictable and always becoming. many feminist new materialist scholars (hickey-moody ; ringrose and renold ) posit perspectives and methodologies using methods we build upon here, grounded in arts-practice, intra-active interviewing, and embodied underpinnings of feminist identity and community research. it is important to note the co-implicated and relational nature of matter in new materialism. this is pedagogically significant in the respect that all bodies, not just human bodies, are endowed with agency and complexity. barad’s neologism intra-activity allows us to see this: the notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relate) represents a profound conceptual shift. it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. (barad , p. ) intra-activity is a concept grounded in philosophies of immanence. there is no ‘beyond’ the body, rather, the focus shifts to a ‘between’ located in, with and through the body, as enacted “material-discursive phenomena” (barad , p. ). bodies are therefore inseparable from discursive practices. new materialist theory (barad ; van der tuin ; palmer ) suggests that we would not be the same selves outside the field in which we are constituted, and that through the entanglement of our research site and ourselves, we change, and the subjects of our research change as well. the process of being together re-makes us. an example is our art making workshops, featured in the photograph below, in which experiences of art making are entangled with the participants sharing of their backgrounds. soc. sci. , , a philosophy of intra-action shows us that we make the data we collect, and indeed, creation is the object of the research process, rather than discovering something that is ‘there’ to be known. this complicates understandings of research methods and comes to show that the data which is generated and collected through fieldwork is co-created by the fieldwork assemblage. ‘data’ is the residue of successful complex qualitative research processes that engage young people in collaborative making practices that call them to think together about the future, about social values and community life. our affective research method with instagram live interviewing embodies the experience of being live on instagram and being broadcast into the participants’ world and online community. in instagram live interviews, both the researcher and her interviewee sit staring at a phone screen—often necessarily positioned extremely close together, in the participant’s art studio, or tattoo studio, sweating and noticing how awkward it is to stare at a screen while talking to one another. this embodied proximity, while awkward, also brings with it a relationality which is key to sharing information across the course of the interview. this online intra-action of the researcher and the participants’ bodies is further explored and theorized as ethnographic observation through ethnographic fieldnotes. both fieldwork examples from hickey-moody and willcox ( )’s work respectively demonstrate how bodies and ‘things’ are not separate and shows how intra-actions are vital to how we come to know ourselves as humans and interact with our environments. through unpacking examples from practical methods for data generation, we show the potential ways our students and research participants can be called on to relate to each other and themselves in our classrooms and interview spaces. through diffractive and intra-active methods, we are enabled to draw upon memory, culture, religion, tradition, bodies, art and politics via methods that may be substantively different from ways people often are prompted to see themselves and relate to others in theory based learning environments or traditional research practices. as barad ( ) reminds us, “diffraction queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference” (p. ). she continues, stating, the key is understanding that identity is not essence, fixity or givenness, but a contingent iterative performativity, thereby reworking this alleged conflict into an understanding of difference not as an absolute boundary between object and subject, here and there, this and that, but rather as the effects of enacted cuts in a radical reworking of cause and effect. (barad , pp. – ) diffraction is a material shift that changes a given compound to something new. for us, art practice, whether in online platforms or community arts workshops, highlights the diffraction of difference through understanding and communicating ‘what really matters’ to people and brings new dimensions into our understandings of why no ‘one’ human is the same. barad’s theories of entanglement demonstrate that we only exist in relation to our environments and, more than this, they allow us to see our research methods as open-ended ways of changing environments and changing people. this presents quite a particular view of the research assemblage as an entanglement and as agentive, which marks a substantive move from traditional qualitative approaches and bears alignment with what lather and pierre ( ) have called ‘post-qualitative’ research. as they so astutely note, entanglement makes all the categories of humanist qualitative research problematic. for example, how do we determine the ‘object of our knowledge’—the ‘problem’ we want to study in assemblage? can we disconnect ourselves from the mangle somehow (self) and then carefully disconnect some other small piece of the mangle (other) long enough to study it? what ontology has enabled us to believe the world is stable so that we can do all that individuating? and at what price? how do we think a ‘research problem’ in the imbrication of an agentic assemblage of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, never the same? (lather and pierre , p. ) gerrard et al. ( ) have written at length about what they conceive as problems with new materialism. however, for gerrard, rudolph and sriprakash, whose reading of new materialism soc. sci. , , is limited, recognizing enmeshment requires relinquishing the political, whereas barad argues that enmeshment is the political effect and affect of research methods. removing politics is impossible. the core of the critique gerrard et al. ( ) attempt to develop suggests that new materialist and post qualitative research cannot be political or socially useful. as we will show by drawing from our empirical research with economically disadvantaged cald (culturally and linguistically diverse) children and communities, and our work with queer intersectional instagram artists, new materialist and post qualitative research can be explicitly political and can respond to issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. further, our aim in positioning feminist new materialism as being inherently political addresses the postcolonial critique that gerrard et al. ( ) raise, suggesting that post qualitative inquiry risks operating less as new mechanisms for generative and subversive post-humanist research and more as being a process of closure and erasure. opposing this critique, the transformative nature of feminist new materialist methodologies in which art and research converge can be seen in the work of stacy alaimo et al. ( ), kester ( ), barrett and bolt ( ) and nato thompson’s ( ) writing on art and activism. thompson ( ) focuses his research on art as a political intervention and shows how art today can and does inspire innovation and dramatic transformation through activists and empowered communities. likewise, our work brings out the politics embedded in art making and sharing, in both instagram based communities and religious spaces. our research creates intra-active storytelling and activism which situates the entangled diffraction of differences as a symbol of community ‘togetherness’. such an intra-active, diffractive and enmeshed methodology can be performed through a range of methods, and here we further explore two examples introduced above. . methods we bring together two different empirical projects; the first on religion, community and belonging, and the second on intersectional, queer, feminist activist art online. the first method discussed here works at the community level to examine class, race, culture, religion and identity through three rounds of three concurrent arts workshops with children (nine workshops per child), undertaken in schools, mosques, churches, service centers and housing estates, with a view to fostering and understanding interfaith relationships in childhood and understanding geographies of belonging as experienced by parents. by providing art practices as a way of communicating things children find difficult to articulate, art making can often help researchers uncover what matters most in the children’s worlds and create pathways for building relationships with the children’s parents. our second method works on instagram and examines gender identity, sexuality and community through social media activism, both via an analysis of feminist activist artists’ work published online and through live instagram interviews with the artists. we present both methods here to outline two possible examples of our broader intra-active, entangled methodology of creative research practice and use intra-action as a lens to pursue an explicitly political and politicizing research agendas. . . interfaith childhoods: race, class and community the global landscape surrounding the mediated politics of religion and the racialization of religion changed significantly after september th, and the associated mediated fear of muslim culture in ‘secular’ society remains a social issue in australia and the u.k. the enduring politicization and racialization of muslim identities that has been brought about by the post / media landscape is, in part, what we work to problematize and change through the interfaith childhoods project. more than this, however, the broader media framing of religion in terms of war and terror and a paucity of curriculum treating religion in australian public schools generates a profound lack of understanding about the vernacular significance of religion in community life. religion often sustains people and communities in adversity, and also in everyday life. this practical and significant value that can be attributed to religion is too often omitted in media reportage. countering exactly such aggressive representations of religion, our interfaith research shows how children’s creative and physical geographies can communicate quite complex information about their religions and soc. sci. , , worldviews (which include christian, hindu, atheist, muslim, catholic). ethnographic observations of children’s faith worlds can be developed while spending consolidated time with them making art and discussing worldviews (see james ). thinking through transnational and trans-local mobilities that are embodied by the children and are embedded in their representations of their religion and their own re-telling of their heritage and migration stories is a critical reflexive strategy that shows up the meaning embedded in the materiality of art making (see hickey-moody ). children’s artworks depicting identity, belonging and community offer a kind of speculative future, comprised of ‘what really matters’, namely, containing the social values the children hold in the highest regard. as noted, the children are from a range of religious and secular backgrounds and their imaginative futures often depict religious and secular social unity. the project, then, is designed to develop new ways of listening to community perspectives on belonging, identity and religion (figure ). in so doing, this research shows the intra-action of place, belief and biography, race, class and community, as central to (indeed, as co-constitutive of) children’s identity. figure . making and belonging: children and researcher share stories of home. rmit university human ethics clearance number . the methods for this project are designed to gather three sets of data and these are: . visual, imaginative data collaboratively developed with children, exploring faith, values and community . focus group data from the children’s parents exploring faith, values, belonging and community, which is expanded upon in detailed individual interviews with parents . quantitative mappings of values, beliefs and sentiments of belonging in the communities in which the qualitative data is gathered. the analysis below is concerned with some of the visual qualitative data from children, which offers rich depictions of the material organization of religious culture and provides multiple perspectives on experiences of faith, and shows how faith is mediated creatively across digital and popular culture. recent images of interfaith futures developed by children from england and australia include, but are by no means limited to, the following figures – : soc. sci. , , figure . future city, example one from a northern english primary school, . this image features a mosque, a church and two high-density housing estates. rmit university human ethics clearance number . figure . future city, example two from a northern english primary school . this image features a school and a hospital (the green building) a mosque, a church and a number of houses. rmit university human ethics clearance number . soc. sci. , , figure . future city, example from an australian church youth group, . this image features a community pool, a zoo, a campfire, a large playground, a church with stained glass windows, a hospital and a number of houses. rmit university human ethics clearance number . these three collectively devised images (figures – ) are all large canvasses that have been collaboratively drawn and decorated by groups of – children aged between and using pastels, felt tip pens, paint pens, and collage materials (including wool, felt, cotton printed fabric). these canvasses depict imagined future cities comprised of “what really matters”. figure features a mosque in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, positioned in front of a large high-rise block of flats. there is a church in the middle of the painting and further housing to the right of the canvas. at first glance, this city is clearly designed for high density living. trees and a sun decorate the backdrop of the painting. figure features a large hospital, a mosque, a church, busy roads, houses, and a school. strikingly, there are not a lot of people in these images, even though there are lots of places designed to be inhabited by people. figure , created in australia as opposed to the uk, bears some similarities to the uk images, although people and animals feature in this city, which marks a stark contrast to images from the uk, that only gesture towards people through drawings of cars. while issues of race and class are not explicitly pictured in the works above, negotiations of issues of race and, to a lesser extent, of class, are core to the process of collaboration through which many children come to work together. more than this, negotiation of these issues is often central to these children’s everyday lives. the children are from a range of predominantly non-white backgrounds and, in many instances, they are the first member of their family to have been born in the uk or australia. with the exception of one church group, whose picture above features the swimming pools, zoo and church with stained glass, all the children in the study live and attend school in an incredibly diverse, indeed, what steven vertovec ( ) has called a ‘superdiverse’ area. vertovec argues that superdiversity in britain “is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade” (vertovec , p. ). the postcode for the area in which images and were created is in the top . % of deprived soc. sci. , , areas in the uk . it is an area in manchester, which, along with its position of economic deprivation has a substantively higher level of ethnic diversity than manchester as a whole (uk census ). it is estimated that the ward contains the third highest proportion of residents belonging to the pakistani ethnic group . the religious make up of this area is . % muslim, . % christian, . % no religion, . % sikh, . % hindu, . % buddhist, . % jewish, . % agnostic . as such, issues of acceptance of belief systems other than one’s own are central to community life in this area. as a result of being embedded in a superdiverse and deprived community, navigating issues of race, language, culture and religion are a required component of these children’s everyday lives. both implicitly and explicitly, these children are called to consistently respond to racialized and racializing imperatives, which can at times be advanced through social constructions of their religion. researching with children requires the researcher to create multiple opportunities for children to communicate through indirect discourses, as often children will express themselves through doing, through the ways in which they conduct themselves and the kinds of values they perform in their expressive and representational practices. indirect discourses are the formative materials upon which majoritarian meanings attributed to race, class and gender are built and, as such, they deserve serious attention. more than this, intervening in the configuration of discourses can be made possible through working at intersections of the discursive and non-discursive. . . thinking with matter the future cities depicted above, which were developed by the children, offer an opportunity for them to show how they might like to remake the world and to express the aspects of the world they find the most important. the values and desires represented in these images are shaped by the belief systems that surround the young people with whom we work with and these values shape their day to day lives as well as their imaginations. the children’s visual and expressive artworks provide resources that inform our conversations with their parents, whose experiences (often these include experiences of migration) have been mediated and supported by their involvement in specific communities, often religious communities. two further examples of children’s expressive representations of their migration and / or religion stories can be found below. figure features the blue color of the somalian flag as the ozone layer surrounding the world, and a globe which depicts the child’s journey from somalia to the uk. the globe features a small car driving across it’s midline, presumably taking the child and his family across the globe from one country to another. there is a clear sense of journey and the smallness of the car driving across the large globe gives a sense of the enormous nature of the journey that the young artist had undertaken. the boy had been living in the uk for two years, so the journey was not far from memory and is still very much part of his identity story. a total of . % of english postcodes are less deprived than m jb: (it is in the top . % most deprived areas). retrieved from: https://www.getthedata.com/postcode/m - jb. (getthedata ) retrieved from: whalley range ward profile-manchester city council. retrieved from: whalley range demographics (manchester, england)-localstats. soc. sci. , , figure . expressive representation of migration from somalia to the uk drawn by a south east london boy. rmit university human ethics clearance number . the second picture about migration, religion and identity, which is featured below, is more symbolic and less of a literal depiction of a migration story. in addition to implied geographical movements, the image addresses themes of religion and culture, family and ritual. all these themes are very important to the artist who painted the textile work. in figure , the girl who created the picture brings together family, her religion, and popular british culture through naming celebrations such as easter and christmas in love hearts. looking at the image, we can get a sense of where the author/artist feels she fits in the world, especially in relation to the other people, experiences, and events that shape her. her artwork features shades of blue that are prominent in islamic material and visual cultures. the family tree contextualizes the child artist amongst her family and she has included heart shaped speech bubbles as balloons that express things she thinks “really matter”. these include family celebrations and cultural festivals, along with the aforementioned british national holidays of christmas and easter, she has listed ramadan, eid and ‘birthdays’, which are grouped together in a rhizomatic clumping of the defining celebrations in this child’s life. soc. sci. , , figure . expressive representation of religion, culture and belonging. created by a south east london girl. rmit university human ethics clearance number . these materials (figures and ) re-present family stories, life experiences and cultural worlds. they also offer us a different comment on the material organization of culture to the existing work of scholars who consider visual and material cultures of religion. children position belonging in relation to both muslim and christian/anglo festivals and position family clearly at the center of belonging. this perspective takes seriously the pedagogical nature of materiality, building upon karen barad’s argument that reality is therefore not a fixed essence. reality is an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity. to assert that reality is made up of phenomena is not to invoke one or another form of idealism. on the contrary, phenomena are specific material configurations of the world. phenomena are not mere human or social constructions (and they are surely not mere constructs); we don’t simply make the world in our image. (barad , p. ) this perspective fundamentally shapes our understanding of all the subjects introduced above. religion is not a fixed essence. race is not a fixed essence, but it is a material agent. religion, race, culture and society are “specific material configurations of the world” that include enmeshments of people and matter in ways that re-make meaning and attachment. . . digital, intra-active methods in our instagram research , the political issues addressed predominantly relate to gender and sexuality, while race, class, reproductive rights and religion come into focus as well. taking a feminist new materialist approach to autoethnography, our social media research creates a narrative around the subjective experiences of identity and community making in online instagram art. with international instagram artists from various feminist political positions, we present data from our research with marissa willcox is a recipient of the rmit rtp phd research scholarship id number on which this project is funded. soc. sci. , , melbourne based instagram artist frances cannon (@frances_cannon). we position this work and the methods discussed here, as a different method-expression of the same new materialist methodology performed in the interfaith childhoods’ project. the methods demonstrate the politics embedded in art making and sharing processes, as the themes discussed in both the interfaith childhoods art workshops and in the instagram research draw a transversal line joining race, religion, belonging, gender, sexuality, identity and more. what stays constant is the underlying philosophical commitment to enmeshment and to intra-active methods that show us how various differences are diffracted through art to create this ‘togetherness’. performing an instagram live interview on the participants’ instagram page creates an intra-action of bodies (figure ). we blur the imaginary and real barriers that divide the digital and social worlds through this process (hillis et al. ). by embodying the experience of being and performing live on instagram, we are given a share of the participants’ world and online community, and in effect, aim to minimize the much-contested qualitative researcher/subject power imbalance (dolphijn and van der tuin ). instagram live interviews are framed here as a new materialist way of rethinking subjective experiences of identity and community making. the interview questions are tailored to fit the individual activist themes, and they change based on the participants thoughts/topics of interest during the live engagement. the conversation is broadcasted through their instagram live story immediately, which contributes to their goal of community building through social media engagement and digital communication. figure . intra-acting the interview. rmit university human ethics clearance number . a live intra-active interview thus, is co-created with the participant in a way which privileges the being over knowing in researcher/participant relationships (back ; lather and pierre ). we demonstrate how bodies and things are not separate, and show their inter-relationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as humans and interact with our environments. all research participants are feminist, and most are queer-identified. most are also same-sex attracted. participants’ art practice and their arts-based community become a site for research, and a conversational tool. the topics that participants discuss in their interviews draw them back to the themes found in the participants’ soc. sci. , , art online. this entanglement is discussed in front of the participant’s live audience: their followers and community. situated knowledges is not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective), but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualising apparatus matters to practices of knowing. (barad , p. , quoting haraway ) to put haraway’s point another way, having and gaining knowledge is therefore not a practice of seeing or reflecting from a removed position, seeing co-creates the position, it is a process that is concerned with embodying and being with/in the place of inquiry. as affective researchers, understanding only comes through doing, being, making, and feeling. especially in interviews, “those involved in the interview come together to form an assemblage that exceeds the individuals themselves” (willink and shukri , p. ). non-hegemonic gender and sexual identities and themes of online community inclusion become enmeshed with aesthetics of style through conversations with artists that explore these themes in their artwork. the method is outlined in greater detail below. frances cannon’s art takes on a feminist activist perspective while also illustrating pieces of her life and aspects of her own identity. figure is a reflection of the experience of being a woman on instagram and brings up the notion that traditionally, representation of women’s bodies in the media has been (and still is) ‘for the male gaze’. this post (figure ) now has over likes and more than comments. frances initiates a dialogue around feminism, body positivity, the media, and unsafe online spaces through this transgressive art. frances cannon’s followers are seen coming together to discuss their different experiences relating to this image in the comments section, and her art looks to unite them in their varying feminist political agendas. figure . “i am not a piece of meat!” from @frances_cannon, instagram, march . rmit university human ethics clearance number . coming from a new materialist lens and working with intra-action rather than interaction, we build on dolphijn and van der tuin’s ( ) approach to understanding interviews as outlined in new materialism: interviews and cartographies. they describe how the attitude towards interviews should be seen as an intra-action, stating: qualitatively shifting any atomist metaphysics, intra-action conceptualizes that it is the action between (and not in-between) that matters. in other words, it is not the interviewers or soc. sci. , , the interviewee or even the oeuvre of the interviewee that deserves our special attention, but it is the sense of orientation that the interview gave rise to (the action itself) that should engender us. for it is in the action itself that new materialism announces itself. (dolphijn and van der tuin , introduction) this approach conceives the interview process as an ongoing intra-action of bodies and places. the objective of the researcher in any new materialist methodology is to become with and be entangled in the research as it progresses. engaging with “complexity, uncertainty and risk” as jen ross ( ) suggests in digital media-based pedagogy, we embrace continuous “not yet-ness” in methodological processes. through online live interviewing, ‘data’ is made instantly available to the participant’s global community of followers and the live nature of the interview makes every discussion unique. planned topics for discussion can often change in response to the participant’s political agenda and online persona. this intra-action is a way of making space for social change by initiating academic interest in the intersectional dialogues of inclusion that are being broadcast online, therefore encouraging and supporting communities that diffract differences. . . creating and mediating the feminist self: live broadcasts we outline the live instagram method here, alongside an initial ethnographic observation that encapsulates the experience of entering frances cannon’s community space, as the community surrounding cannon’s artwork is a powerful agent in supporting her work: “the virtual, therefore, can be understood as the potentialities, investments, and imaginations concerning the present and the possible shape of things to come” (hillis et al. , p. ). the fieldnote excerpt below expresses the feelings of community and belonging that exist amongst the feminists in this digital space. without meeting frances cannon’s followers in person, entering her studio and entering her instagram story show the levels of complexity in modern identities of community, time and space. we think through how these online and offline spaces for inclusion and acceptance diffract feelings of difference. the method for this project situates the researcher in an ongoing intra-active engagement online while blurring the distinctions between the online/offline experience. three different methods are enacted to build a feminist autoethnographic narrative based on case studies using international instagram artists: . an initial private semi-structured interview, exploring how feminist artists represent and express gender, sexuality, feminism and the body in art practice on instagram. . a follow up interview, conducted on the participants’ instagram live that engages in a discussion around gender, feminism, sexuality and the body but with a lens to understanding the feminist activist art community and mapping the artists’ engagement within that community (this is visually recorded through the engagement of their followers with the live video). . a continued and ongoing documentation of the artists’ engagement within this global community by following their stories and posts and actively participating in this space. this is recorded through screenshots and recording the liking, commenting, and sharing of the artist’s work across their various pages and stories to map community responses and sentiment. . . ethnographic observation: frances cannon’s studio, february i walked into the wrong room. frances cannon had invited me to her coburg studio to conduct our second interview on instagram live. the building had two floors. while i stood in the dark studio gallery on the bottom floor with walls covered in art depicting naked women, kissing women, breasts, blood, and the color blue, the room seemed to envelop me. i was in her space. there were other artist’s paintings and drawings for sale on the walls, all with a feminist theme. i announced myself, but no one seemed to hear. i left the unlit gallery and stood outside in the hot summer air again. on the sprawling coburg square, plots of the same brown grass stretched before me, the soil underneath them drying even more in the australian summer heat. the s style, single story, brick bungalows soc. sci. , , shimmered, still, as the trains blew past. frances opened the side door to the building and waved me in. she kissed me on the cheek and showed me upstairs to a somewhat less intimate room, filled with desks and art and paper everywhere. it was an artist’s haven. i quickly used the bathroom before our interview and noticed piled old art canvases on the floor, discarded (figure ). the counter was dusty and the air smelled of dry paint. i came out, and saw she was settled in her corner getting her iphone tripod set up. i had the same one. frances flowed around her desk to clear her art supplies away. her denim dress swung as she cleared paper and canvases to the floor, she spoke about her upcoming solo art show. i said i would go. we got ready for our instagram live interview and talked about the people that would comment, the questions and topics we might discuss. a friend of hers sat in the background, silently painting. as we turned on the live video on her instagram story, i introduced myself to her audience of followers and prompted questions around gender, sexuality, the body and feminism, all relating to her art. her instagram community followed suit. the comments section on our live interview was flowing with likes and statements of support, awareness, inclusion, acceptance. when frances spoke about her queerness others jumped in with heart emojis and signs and symbols of love. she had hundreds of people commenting as we spoke, and our conversation carried on. it felt rude not to stop the whole thing and address them, her followers. it was like we were speaking to them, for them. but we continued on with the interview. sitting oddly close together yet looking forward at a tiny black phone screen. we were both sweating, shimmering like the brown bungalow houses lining the street outside. i was so nervous to be on a live platform, performing for her followers. what if i ‘messed up’? what if i said the ‘wrong thing’? we both smiled when the ‘feminists from brazil’ instagram account commented on our chat with a ‘we can do it’ strong arm emoji and expressed their support for our conversation topics. other followers from her community expressed their love for frances’s art and style. when i asked her about her artistic style in relation to her personal background, frances said that she grew up in quite a conservative christian household where queerness wasn’t talked about. i then realized what all of her followers were doing online watching this video. it was the same thing frances was doing by creating her art, just looking for a place and people to connect to, to feel loved and accepted, a place to belong. instagram artists have created that space, an online community of belonging and acceptance. figure . discarded. canvases on the floor in frances’s studio. rmit university human ethics clearance number . there was little to say when i left this online interview space, i felt like i had entered into a new world, a world of inclusion, acceptance and togetherness where feminism was at the forefront of soc. sci. , , everyone’s minds and sexuality was a celebrated topic of discussion. we ended the instagram live interview with advice for the future, and frances encouraged her followers to love themselves, their whole selves. digital heart emojis had flown across the screen for the whole minutes. i packed up, hugged her and left. i stepped back into the street and noticed the square plots again, so brown, so alike, yet at the same time, still so different. . . mixing with matter willcox’s ethnographic fieldnotes from frances cannon’s interview show the fluidity of entering into her global instagram community while sitting (sweating) in her coburg studio. the element of being and performing in the interview as a live action is taken as data and a mode of embodied engagement. by doing a live interview, the conversation about sexuality and body positivity is immediately translated to frances’s k followers. the interview becomes a political and feminist statement to a live, attentive audience. coming from the feminist new materialist frame of interviewing and understanding feminist identities in the contexts with which they are made (colman ; mctague et al. ), we apply this concept to the new materialist trope that “every actual object is surrounded by a cloud of virtuality” (hillis et al. , p. ). this virtuality can be seen here in the intra-active engagements between layers of love heart emojis, black phone screens, sweating bodies, followers’ comments, a flowing dress, and conversations about art. when taken together, these intra-actions initiate a blurring of the boundaries between communities and identities as we see them being made. in this live discussion of frances’s politics and activist art, we can feel the diffraction of differences enabled through this digital platform as she opens up an online space for a dialogue, inclusion and acceptance (figure ). figure . digital diffraction. rmit university human ethics clearance number . by adopting the political position that instagram can sometimes play a role in reproducing and reinforcing traditional gender norms and heterosexual representations (caldeira et al. , p. ) and by intra-acting the interview in a live setting, the research aim becomes to actively change soc. sci. , , heteronormative, patriarchal online narratives. this method is built to amplify the experiences and identities of feminists, fat women, queer women, woc, trans women, and non-binary artists whom often feel left out of the heteronormative online narrative, by positioning them at the centre of their identity and community making in the research process (crenshaw ). it brings people of different backgrounds and experiences together over their respect for art and intersectionality, through the digital interface of instagram. rather than use traditional focus groups or interviews, this live style of interviewing with an aesthetic, digital, focus, offers qualitative researchers a chance to bring non-traditional representations of gender and sexuality into global online communities who share aligned interests. it serves an activist agenda by contributing a live discussion to the feminist movement online that fights for gender equality, queer inclusion and the representation of more non-white, fat, disabled and queer bodies in media spaces (afful and ricciardelli ; robinson et al. ). by researching the users of these online social spaces with the same methods they use to navigate their own identities and communities, this methodology of instagram live interviewing creates space to amplify the experiences of those who feel underrepresented in the online heteronormative narrative. . conclusions in both sets of the above methods, our methodology of diffractive, intra-active and entangled making with community is explored creatively. we present community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding online expressions of community and belonging. with our theoretical frame inspired by entanglement, diffraction and intra-action in new materialist methodologies, we identify the fact that creative methods are a way of knowing about communities by being with communities in playful, fun and non-intrusive ways. here, we agree with rebecca coleman, who states: drawing attention to a collective or individual sense of enjoyment may seem insignificant, but i think it’s interesting for a number of reasons. for one thing, there’s something to say about social science methodologies being fun and playful. this is perhaps especially important in the context of what roger burrows and mike savage ( ) call the ‘coming crisis of empirical sociology’, where they note that methods initially developed by sociology and wider social sciences (such as interviews, and surveys) are increasingly employed in commercial sectors—meaning both that the methodological expertise by which sociology has traditionally defined itself no longer belong to it alone, and that new audiences and markets are being enrolled in what are sometimes more agile and fun versions of these methods. so, the question of how social sciences might re-develop their own methods that are themselves fun is crucial. there is then a politics and ethics to how this question might be addressed. (coleman , online) our methods have to move with the times if they are to remain useful. as we argued earlier, the virtual and social worlds shown as sites for research are both understood in terms of how the potentialities and imaginaries co-constitute each other and, in turn, are responsible for the other. each community not only diffracts their differences through art, but intra-acts with the other through an on-going time space that is concerned with the ethics of understanding and ultimately with becoming enmeshed as a community. we have also discussed how our methodologies embody theories from the posthuman era, by doing research that thinks with the body. rosi braidotti ( ) outlines posthumanism in her book the posthuman by demonstrating what it means to think within and through the body. she presents a particular kind of knowledge around difference as relating back to early humanism: this eurocentric paradigm [of ‘humanism’] implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal humanism. central to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration. subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and soc. sci. , , self-regulating ethical behaviour, whereas otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. in so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. these are the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. we are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. (braidotti , p. ) braidotti’s advancement of feminist post humanism and feminist new materialism are research practices that constitute a field in which we situate our research; a field which is (as the above quote demonstrates) explicitly politicized and politicizing. as we intra-act within art-based spaces, feminist activists and children express their feelings of cultural belonging, acceptance, difference, disagreement and togetherness through colour, texture, making, and doing. in community arts workshops and on instagram, we intervene in the dissemination and re-production of problematic aspects of racializing and gendering discourses. by both intra-acting in live interviews and intra-acting in arts workshops, we learn and feel and change with the people with whom we work, as opposed to measuring and quantifying their being. we initiate a diffraction of differences in our approaches, by not privileging the knowing in research, but privileging the being with. in understanding being with as an intra-active, entangled, contextually specific experience, we aim to make new ways for people to come together and share their knowledges, experiences, and differences which help them to feel they belong or provide resources with which to negotiate difference. understanding the collaborative production of feelings reminds us that all feelings and identities are intra-active, entangled products of communities, which we conceive as collections of difference. author contributions: the authors worked on this project in conjunction with eachother forming theoretical discussions through their shared methods and methodological frames. a.h.-m. provided the first draft while m.w. expanded on the initial writing. they finalized the finished draft together. funding: professor hickey-moody is a recipient of the australian research council future fellowship project number ft ‘early start arts to counter radicalization’ on which this project is funded. marissa willcox is a recipient of the rmit rtp phd research scholarship id number on which this project is funded. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references afful, adwoa a., and rose ricciardelli. . shaping the online fat acceptance movement: talking about body image and beauty standards. journal of gender studies : – . 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). $ € £ ¥ social sciences article moving with touch: entanglements of a child, valentine’s day cards, and research–activism against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures suvi pihkala *, tuija huuki and vappu sunnari faculty of education, university of oulu, fi- oulu, finland * correspondence: suvi.pihkala@oulu.fi received: may ; accepted: july ; published: july abstract: in this paper, we respond to feminist new materialist scholars’ calls to explore what research in the field of gendered and sexual violence can be, do, and become. this paper explores the microprocesses of change within the more-than-human child–card entanglements as part of our research–activist campaign addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. drawing on one of our creative workshops, we generate three analytical readings that map touch. we focus, first, on the intra-action of bodies, objects, and abstractions that reconfigures painful experiences of harassment for recognition; second, on the affective charge in moments and movements of response and resistance; and third, on what else touch can become when it travels across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. re-engaging with our research–activism, we propose that different kinds of touch converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that reconfigures painful experiences of gendered and sexual harassment for recognition, response, and resistance. connecting to feminist new materialist endeavors to envision and enact response-able research, we propose that ‘moving with touch’ helps us shed light on the microprocesses of change in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and invite movement. keywords: barad; children; creative methods; feminist new materialisms; research–activism; response-ability; sexual harassment; touch . introduction sexual harassment was brought to renewed attention in , prompted by the global ‘#metoo’ movement. having spent nearly years exploring gender and sexual power plays among children in school settings, our research team—including tuija, who was following the debate closely—was deeply affected by the discussion, which mostly ignored the ways sexual harassment connects to and permeates children’s peer cultures. this combination of the ‘hashtag feminism’ (mendes et al. ) against sexual harassment, the public debate, and our numerous research encounters with children marked the ‘beginning in the middle’ of our research–activist project. theoretically, our research–activist approach was inspired by feminist new materialist and, in particular, ‘phematerialist’ work (e.g., renold and ringrose ), which have generatively merged feminist research with deleuzian/spinozian activist philosophies (e.g., braidotti ) and the theories of micropolitics of change (manning ; massumi ) and affect (e.g., blackman and venn ) in order to envision ways of doing educational research capable of generating material changes in wider social spheres (e.g., renold ; ringrose et al. ). the creative arts-based research-activist project, titled #metoo postscriptum, that shaped the direction of this article, was designed and implemented by two of the authors—tuija and suvi—during the weeks before valentine’s day in . it emerged from tuija’s broader ongoing research and from a long continuum of research on gendered and sexual force relations by the authors (huuki and renold ; huuki et al. ; holford et al. ; pihkala and huuki ; sunnari et al. ; sunnari ). soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , although it is often discussed only in relation to adults, research shows that sexual harassment—verbal, physical, material, emotional, or psychological sexual abuses of power—also affect young people in multiple, contradictory manners as normalized, everyday hetero-sexisms circulating within young peer cultures, media, and the wider social and cultural discourses (gillander gådin ; holford et al. ; meyer ; renold ; stein ; sunnari ; sunnari et al. ). however, young people are left with insufficient support for navigating these often contentious terrains of gender and sexuality (renold ). drawing inspiration from child-led activism in wales (renold , ; renold and ringrose ), the #metoo postscriptum campaign engaged children aged – years in creative workshops to explore their experiences of sexual harassment and to communicate those experiences to decisionmakers and the public. in this paper, we return to and re-engage with one of the workshops, a workshop with a group of eight girls, and map the iterative intra-action of valentine’s day cards, girls, experiences of past harassment, the research–activist campaign, and our own engagements and entanglements during the campaign. in re-engaging with the workshop, we employ touch as a steering concept that reanimates and enlivens within and through three analytically enacted moments at focus in this paper. drawing on barad’s ( ) agential realism, with the first moment, we map more-than-human touch, focusing on the materiality of the workshop. we render visible how bodies, tables, movement, space, objects, postscripts, past, present, and research–activism intra-act, generating conditions of possibility for painful experiences to reconfigure for recognition. then, we map what else touch can do, focusing on the affective charge in the moments and movements of response and resistance in the intra-action of past experiences, valentine’s cards, and a makeshift mailbox. our third and final analysis maps what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains, reaching towards, sticking to us, and traveling to wider change-making terrains. mapping and moving with touch enable us to become open to the microprocesses and micropolitics of change and, as explored in this paper, to the ways in which painful experiences of harassment can be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance. as invested and interested in co-constructing and theorizing response-able, everyday practices of change-making (huuki ; pihkala et al. ; pihkala ), this paper contributes to the recent calls to envision response-able research and practice and to illuminate and theorize the microprocesses of change in our research endeavors (ringrose et al. ; renold ). ‘moving with touch’ within our creative research–activism sheds light on the affordances of feminist new materialism-inspired approaches that are attuned to materiality, relationality, and becoming. we argue that our research–activism, predicated on creative, multimodal, more-than-human sense-abilities, fostered conditions in which unwanted, painful, silenced, and unaddressed experiences could be reconfigured for recognition, response, and resistance in ways that exceed the limits of humanistic and talk-based modes of engagement. beginning from within entanglements and relationality, as opposed to pre-existing subjects and objects, enables us to attend to the material-discursive practices of body, object, gesture, movement, silence, voice, space, history, feeling, and touch and how these human and more-than-human elements intra-act, producing particular and contingent outcomes (barad ). we maintain that working from within such entanglements enables elbow room for the unexpected and informed by our long-term work with children around sensitive topics of gender and sexual harassment, the workshops were held in single-sex groups with the aim of ensuring safe possibilities for the participants to explore and communicate their experiences of their friendship and relationship cultures. within the scope of this research, it was not possible to address the children’s experiences of gender, but grounded in our long-term research on gender and power in child peer cultures, we were familiar with the specific context of our research–activism in finland. in this context, issues of gender are sensitive, unaddressed, and often silenced, which make them difficult to address. the grouping by assumed gender aligned with the accustomed and dominant practices of the schools. it was based on our previous experiences of working in mixed-gender groups where the sensitivity and difficulty of the topic causes anxiety and dominant modes of gender expression become enforced. in order to work with and rework gender dichotomies, the groups were thus divided by assumed gender. however, our approach during our engagements with the children remained sensitive to the children’s diverse gender expressions. soc. sci. , , emergent and prompts us to not limit our inquiry to interpretations and instead invest in how research can be made to matter in the world (ringrose et al. ). by thinking with theory and moving with touch, we make a speculative gesture towards theorizing what else touch can be, do, and become. methodologically, mapping different kinds of touches causes them to converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that yields a nuanced account of the intra-active moments when subtle shifts of change occur. it does so in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and incite and invite movement. . each intra-action matters: envisioning the microprocesses of change in research against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures this paper connects to the expansive work inspired by feminist new materialist theories related to affect, materiality, and the relationality of human and more-than-human others (e.g., barad ; braidotti ; dolphijn and van der tuin ). this work has elicited heightened attunement and thoughtfulness in feminist research and social sciences more widely with respect to how bodies, objects, and discourses affect one another and are affected upon and how power, agency, and change, for example, are imagined (fox and alldred ; ringrose et al. ). in phematerialist work, the reimagination of how gender, power, and sexuality matter in children’s lives and, importantly, how change and transformation could be evoked (renold and ringrose ), has prompted—to use a term borrowed from barad ( ) and haraway ( )—response-able research and pedagogy (renold ; ringrose et al. ; taylor ). this call also acts as our motivation and inspiration to move with touch as we work to attune to and capture the subtle shifts of change within our research–activism. in gauging such ‘microprocesses of change’ as they occur, we employ three pivotal threads from barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology. barad ( ) introduced the idea of agential realism, proposing that the world and things ‘come to matter’ through agential cuts enacted through ongoing intra-action; that is, objects, abstractions, discourses, and even space and time do not pre-exist their relatings. this means that phenomena, such as gender and sexual harassment as the object of our inquiry and activism, too, must be understood to become intelligible through specific and contingent material-discursive arrangements or apparatuses of bodily production (barad ). it is perhaps particularly in the matterings of gender and sexuality—and sexual harassment—where barad’s thinking works to make visible the agential force of discursive practices upon matter, and vice versa. in this paper, intra-action, then, heightens our attention in relation to the dynamic ontological entanglements of human and more-than-human others—that is, how bodies, objects, movement, time, discourse, feelings, and gestures intra-act within and through the workshop. furthermore, for barad ( ), time does not work in a mode of linearity. this challenges the ways we understand change, which can no longer be perceived to follow from a past that once was but, rather, emerges through the iterative differentiating and reworking of a past that was never left behind and a future that is already present (barad ). in this sense, each intra-action matters as a more-than-human and more-than-present encounter that holds the possibility ‘to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (barad , p. x). considering the past experiences of pain, hurt, silence, and denial materializing for recognition through our research–activist apparatus against sexual harassment, barad’s thinking helps us attune to the intra-active entanglements anew. it helps us consider how, as we move, craft, and talk with the children, the intra-active entanglements of bodies, things, moments, and places come together and hold the possibility for making a difference in how sexual harassment matters. there is a breathtaking intimacy to this, as barad ( ) writes. she brings the ethico-onto-epistemology of agential realism in touch with touch, stating that ‘touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability’ (barad , p. , italics removed). indeed, the ethicality at the marrow of mattering—as captured in the hyphenated notion of ‘response-ability’ (barad ; haraway )—is ‘always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming’ soc. sci. , , (barad , p. ). it is an invitation and an obligation to enable and welcome the response of the other that inhabits ‘each meeting’ (barad ). enriching our thinking about the intra-active entanglements of our research–activist encounters with touch and response-ability enables us to imagine the intra-activity at stake as materially crowded, affectively charged, and temporally rich—more-than-human and more-than-present—entanglements that are ethical from the get go. this thinking also reanimates ‘our responsibility to be in touch’ (barad ) in our research–activist endeavors. as we maintain, how we co-compose the materials, creative practices, and human and more-than-human others matters. it matters to the ways we can help children identify and share with others their experiences and concerns related to sexual harassment and how we can foster possibilities for change in children’s peer cultures. indeed, barad ( , p. ) asks us to ‘tak[e] responsibility for the fact that our practices matter; the world is materialized differently through different practices’. this ethics as ‘always-already’—response-ability (barad ; haraway )—casts a challenge and obligation to ‘cultivate the capacity to respond’ (haraway , p. ) and to reimagine the ethico-political potentiality in ‘each meeting’ in our attempt to both make inquiries into and co-compose conditions for co-flourishing. . method and materials: moving with touch as part of the #metoo postscriptum campaign, we organized and implemented arts-based workshop sessions focusing on gendered and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations with a total of children aged – years at schools in finland. when organizing the workshops, we endeavored to create specific conditions that provide access to new ground and enable safe and creative intra-action (barad ), so as to allow the participants to explore the ambivalences, contradictions, pains, and pleasures embedded in the gendered and sexual power relations of pre-teen peer cultures. such conditions could be understood to constitute what massumi ( ) calls ‘enabling constraints’, which propose a specific object of concern without, however, imposing preconceived notions about the final destination or outcome (massumi , p. ). enabling constraints, as we built upon them here, are carefully and purposefully made arrangements that cultivate conditions of response (barad ; haraway ) and that simultaneously mark our response-ability and accountability with respect to the becomings and not-becomings we help enact (barad ). the workshops involved activities related to the topic of sexual harassment. during the workshops, the children engaged in discussions and exploration of gendered and sexualized peer cultures and sexual harassment, created and drew valentine’s day cards, and—if they chose to do so—wrote their own experiences of harassment in the postscripts of their cards. in addition to the workshops with the children, a pop-up stand was set up in a university café to allow student teachers and faculty members to partake the campaign by sharing their own childhood experiences of harassment. through our research–activism, our aims were to generate data on children’s experiences of sexual harassment in peer relations, communicate those experiences with children to wider audiences, and engage in political debate and social transformation. as part of the latter, after the workshops, the research team collected and sent the cards to every member of the finnish parliament and published excerpts from the notes and cards on the campaign website (huuki and pihkala ). the cards with the postscripts were intended to remind decisionmakers and the finnish public of the need for systematic and consistent work to address sexual harassment, which affects not only adults but also children. occurring in advance of valentine’s day, in our project, the #metoo became linked with the postscript section of a valentine’s day card. the postscript worked to make visible the often-ignored nature and the silence regarding sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations (pihkala and huuki ). using the hashtag connected the project to the momentum afforded by the digital feminist activism of the #metoo movement (mendes et al. ). as part of our wider interest in investigating gender and sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, the workshops were video-recorded, accumulating a total of h of audio–visual recordings, pages of transcripts, pages of extended field notes, and digitalized cards, of which the data for this paper involve h and min of audio–visual recordings from the workshop session in question. soc. sci. , , the human and more-than-human ‘participants’ of the campaign, such as the children, researchers, public, the decisionmakers, hands, chairs, tables, space, paper slips, pens, and arts and crafts; and the multiple modalities of the creative activities, such as the movement, crafting, speech, and writing, were understood as active and lively coplayers that came together in unexpected ways, as well as through our purposeful material, research–activist engagements that aimed to foster possibilities for the children to explore, address, and communicate their experiences of harassment. the ethical considerations in relation to the project were ongoing before, during, and after our engagements with the children. as a ‘spin off’ and part of tuija’s ongoing research project, the #metoo postscriptum campaign had obtained a statement from the ethics committee of human sciences at the university of oulu, finland and followed the policies of the schools in all matters of child protection. the workshop participants were recruited by contacting local schools and teachers interested in participating in the campaign. information letters and consent forms were sent to the children and their legal guardians to be signed before participation. these letters included research-based information about gender and sexual harassment as the theme of the workshops, as well as information about the creative activities of the workshops and the campaign. they also included details about the use of the produced data and the possibility that the notes could be shared publicly and in research publications. these issues were discussed again with the children in the beginning of every workshop and additionally brought up whenever it seemed important. the activist orientation of the project was materially present in the creation of the valentine’s day cards as the children themselves chose the members of parliament to whom their cards would be sent. the children were able to withdraw at any time or negotiate their own way of participating. for example, in some of the workshops, a few of the participants created cards that they did not want to share as part of the campaign. those cards, or any cards that were ambiguous with respect to the children’s consent, were excluded from the project. even when carefully considering ethics as part of our praxis, engaging children in research–activism involves ongoing response-ability with respect to the project as it unfolds and, for example, becomes public. we maintain that staying with the complexities and trouble (haraway , , ) involved is important, as the entangled constellations of research and activism can produce processes of social change and transformation both within the lives of the children and within the wider terrains of social and educational policies and practices. particularly in relation to sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures, which is a silenced and often unaddressed topic in schools, asking what matters to the children themselves is important. this, along with the premise of moving beyond merely stating the state of things in research on children’s peer and relationship cultures (e.g., huuki and renold ; renold ), guided our research–activist aim of helping children’s experiences and voices to be heard, sensed, and felt so as to cultivate conditions for co-flourishing. building upon the project, in this paper, we generated an analysis focusing on and departing from one of the workshops. the data are comprised of video-recordings of a workshop with eight girls, postscript notes in which the children described their experience and collaborative reflections, and personal field notes taken by the research team members. when returning to the data, our aim was not so much to gain access to some undisputable truth about the workshop. rather, the data helped us slow down—touch, sense, feel, and think—with the material, affective, and temporal entangledness involved. over the course of the research process—while we were engaged in the workshops, cataloguing the research materials, publishing results, and returning to the data to write this paper—the data were iterated upon, continuously reassembled, and engaged in diffractive encounters that ‘pulled in’ different times and spaces. theory is ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and van der tuin ) in the three analytically enacted moments—that is, moments enacted by us through agential cuts (barad ) within particular, project ‘gender-based violence in pre-teen relationship cultures: how history, place, affect and arts interventions matter’, grant number . soc. sci. , , contingent apparatuses of knowing (see also lenz taguchi and palmer ). in this paper, such cuts were inspired by touch. touch, as it unfolded for us here, carries resemblance to affect, as in ‘being affected’. it is also a bodily practice and a mundane moment, for example, a pen touching a paper or a hand holding a paper slip. it is these affective and material tenors of touch that invited our attention. however, informed by and diffractively engaging with barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology, discussed previously in this paper, touch became removed from its human orbit. thus, in the three analytical sections below, we map, first, more-than-human touch focusing on the materially crowded moments within the workshops. in the second section, our focus becomes drawn to the affective charge, and we explore what else touch as a mode of material feeling and thinking does in moments of response and resistance. in the final analytical section, we focus on what else touch can become as it gathers up and holds together across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. by mapping and moving with touch, we engage touch as a more-than-human and more-than-present player that intra-actively engages in the material-discursive practices within and through which sexual harassment ‘comes to matter’ and, as we explore, potentially a player that engenders conditions of possibility for subtle shifts, marking and making differences that matter in the hurt, silence, normalization, and denial of gender and sexual harassment by enabling the opening up to change and transformation towards co-flourishing. . research–activist encounters below, we provide two accounts of the workshop. the accounts that we offer regarding the workshop must not be understood as a set of passive props but, rather, as a space–time entangled, affectively charged environment through and within which ‘what is “in” the foreground [is allowed] to acquire the shape that it does’ (ahmed , pp. – ). in addition to describing the process of the workshop, we attune to the affective atmosphere (stewart ) of the entanglements of the girls, the notes, movement, gestures, utterances, tables, chairs, and a makeshift mailbox, which will then be iterated in the following three analytical sections. . . the workshop similar to all the workshops, this workshop began with the children—eight girls in total—gathered in a circle of chairs. two student teachers led the session, and suvi participated. the student teachers read research-based statements about children’s friendship and relationship cultures. every time the participants agreed with the statement, they would stand up and switch seats. if they disagreed, or were unwilling or unable to take a stand, they would remain in place. the movement of one girl would easily stir movement in others. sometimes, amidst bodies anchored in place to be, then again, on the move, discussions would unfold, causing us to linger on a topic for longer. sometimes the topics would ‘touch’ the girls in a particular way, generating giggles or evoking stories—things the participants knew—about the ongoing relationships and romantic undercurrents within their peer relations. those ‘knowings’ were sometimes voiced aloud and other times evident only in quick glances and smiles. after the introduction to the topic of sexual harassment, the children were told about the research–activist campaign in more detail. they were instructed to craft valentines’ day cards and, if they chose, to write about harassment they had experienced. slips of paper with examples of some of the experiences disclosed in previous workshops with young people were put on the wall to prompt reflection. the notes described contentious and troubling touches and experiences with just a few words or a sentence, such as ‘i have been slapped on the butt’ or ‘some boys in our class groped between girls’ thighs with a ruler’. soon, the children began to collect materials to create their valentine’s day cards. they gathered in a close group around one of the tables, chatting while they cut and folded the base of the cards and decorated them with drawings, tapes, stamps, glitter glue, and colors. when the cards were nearly ready and the participants began to contemplate their postscripts, the atmosphere shifted. if they had previously been gathered together, they seemed to scatter around the classroom, taking their newly soc. sci. , , crafted cards or empty slips of paper with them. for some of the children, it seemed difficult to think of something to write. this was expected, as not all children are caught up in same ways within the flows of peer and relationship cultures. others hunched over their cards to shelter the affective, intimate, precarious space in which their experiences of harassment could be safely figured in words, written down, attached to the card, and eventually, slipped into a makeshift mailbox that was set up on one of the tables. once placed in the mailbox, the notes and cards became part of the campaign. some of them were curated for publishing online, and all of them were mailed to decisionmakers. gradually, the workshop session came to a close as the children left the classroom to get lunch, leaving the research team with the video recordings and the to-be-written research notes, the box of cards, and lingering affects—as we will elaborate upon below—which became reassembled within the broader research–activist apparatus of change-making regarding sexual harassment (pihkala and huuki ). . . a girl with a note in the latter half of the workshop, one girl caught suvi’s attention. at this point, the girl had already put her valentine’s day card in the makeshift mailbox. she was one of the first participants to finish her card, but it did not include a postscript. suvi remembered telling her that this was okay, as we could use such cards if someone else had several bits of stories to share. after completing the activity, she returned to the table where the others were still making their cards. later, the girl began to meander around the room, walking from one table to the next and looking at the arts and crafts on the tables. we do not know what made her get up. perhaps she was prompted by the fact that others had begun to find more private spaces to write, or perhaps the request to share experiences was made more insistent by the movement of bodies and shift in attention. the girl halted by one of the tables, on which we had spread the notes that were previously hung on the wall to evoke discussion and reflection. she continued on but returned, pausing a bit longer by the table and whispering with another girl who had joined her there. having looked at the notes for a while, the girl asked, ‘could one write something like that?’ as she pointed to one of the notes. suvi confirmed that she could and encouraged her to write something down if she still wanted to. without saying much more, she took an empty slip of paper, returned to the table where she had been before, and began to write. moments later, the girl rose and walked to the makeshift mailbox, clutching the paper note, which was a little less than half the size of an a paper, close to her chest. then, carefully doubling the paper without folding it, as if to keep her writing sheltered from others, she reached towards the makeshift mailbox and slipped her note in. she stepped to the side, looked back at the box and then walked away, hands casually in her jumper pockets, but it felt that what just happened was anything but casual. after the workshop ended and we returned to our office to catalogue the cards, suvi noticed that very same paper note, remembering the color and size. she remembered how the girl moved and halted at the table, the pointing, the card, and the curve of the note as she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox. all the details were pulled into that moment of recognition in the office. in her note, which, as part of the campaign, became entangled in the wider mosaic of experiences of harassment, the girl shared her painful experience from a few years back. even though she sheltered the note from the eyes of her classmates, her slipping it into the makeshift mailbox, instead of the cards to be excluded from the project, gestured perhaps a political moment and movement of speaking out. we have not identified her experience in its singularity to ensure the girl’s anonymity and because our focus is not on the experience described on the note but, rather, on the microprocesses of change and the subtle shifts that unfolded within and through the workshop. however, to respect this movement from silence to speaking out and speaking up, we have elsewhere made parts of the children’s notes public (see huuki and pihkala ; pihkala and huuki ). soc. sci. , , . past–present child–card entanglements of response-ability in this section, we map touch through the three analytically enacted moments. each section, while entangled in nature, draws attention in specific ways to the productivity of the materiality, affective charge, and movements across time–space domains, as has been elaborated previously. . . mapping touch as more-than-human the design of the workshops—its different modalities and creative activities, as elaborated previously in this paper; the size and composition of the group; and the attention to more-than-human—were co-constructed so as to enable an atmosphere that ‘touches’ enough to enable ‘responsiveness’, that is, to help children explore, communicate, and address experiences of harassment that easily tend to be overcast by deafening silence when addressed in the primary school classroom. during the workshop, the girls gathered together, moved about, and stayed still while crafting with papers, pens, glitter glue, tapes, and colors. the notes laid out on the table carried traces of experiences of harassment, connecting the workshop to the collective history of felt and sensed touches of sexual harassment, be it physical, verbal, or otherwise, enfolded in this entanglement of child-bodies, notes, circles, tables, and the campaign. this intra-action of bodies, movements, and materials opening up to the unexpected and emergent is our first analytical cut. for barad ( ), touching is not centered on a human being, nor is it only affective. it is ontological and epistemological. touching is what matter does. with this understanding of touch, the girls’ movements and haltings, rummaging through the arts and crafts materials, writing and drawing, and re-membering (barad ) past experiences fail to return to any one individual alone. similar to the girl with the pointed finger tentatively asking if it could be ‘something like that’, the ‘it’ that comes to matter fails to return to an individual imagination or recognition only. rather, within the intra-active entanglement of glitter glue, colors, paper slips, past-presents, and engaged bodies—sitting and moving in a circle and sharing experiences—it is not only the girls that touch and are touched. thinking along the lines of barad, both the girls and the matter—things, moments, and places—wander and wonder, curiously sensing and touching their im/possibilities, imagining, and inventing (barad , ). in these moments of moving, halting, inciting, and inviting human and other than human bodies, matter, in its curious and imaginative ‘self-touching’ form (barad ), reconfigures the girls’ experiences for recognition in new ways. as bodies move within the circle of chairs; smiles appear; pens touch paper; bodies shift and sway in proximity and distance; gazes fall on notes; and past experiences make themselves present, touches subtly shift and rework hurtful, painful, unaddressed, and deep-seated experiences—even an experience from two years ago—for recognition, bringing something within reach that was not present before and perhaps reachable in a way that was not possible before. . . what else touch can do: the affective charge in response and resistance our second analytical moment enacts a cut that draws focus to the affective charge in the intra-action of notes, bodies, and a makeshift mailbox. we return to the girl who clutched the note to her chest, carefully sheltering it from others, while also sharing it with others once she slipped it into the makeshift mailbox on the table. in the affectively charged mo(ve)ment of this ‘held-shared’ note from the intimacy of the girl’s chest to the public space of the makeshift mailbox, being touched does something else; it reconfigures conditions of possibilities for touching in response. when we returned to and re-engaged with this moment, we were caught by its force, as well as by our own visceral responses during the campaign. to elaborate, we had set up a pop-up stand in the university café to engage student teachers and faculty members in the campaign. the pop-up stand enabled passers-by to craft their own valentine’s day cards and include their stories of harassment during childhood as postscripts. while sitting by a table in a busy café, we also wrote down our soc. sci. , , experiences. more than once, we found ourselves confronted with the difficulty and discomfort of doing so. an array of charges passed through our bodies: who sees me; who passes by; who sees the painful experience that comes to matter and is made to matter in this moment. we understand such charges as sensed-felt resonances and dissonance between the sensitivity of the experience, deep-seated anxieties related to our experiences of harassment and abuse, and the publicity both in that moment and inherent in the promise of the campaign, which invited us to explore intimate experiences and make them matter for others. it is through those embodied affective encounters and similar experiences shared by colleagues that we began to speculate about the ways the intra-active moment with the girl, the note, the moving–holding hands, and the makeshift mailbox was iteratively reconfigured from within the material and affective entanglements of the research–activist campaign. as we sensed-felt while writing our own notes about harassment, in this moment, with the girl and the note and the materiality and affects of our research–activist workshop, touch was a sensed-felt resonance that intra-acted with the cards, the pens, the tables, the public space of the café, the passing bodies, and the rhythm of academic work and time and opened up towards a possible other world, generating new patterns of diffraction. perhaps this touch is what hemmings ( ) calls affective dissonance, the incongruity of ontology and epistemology and of being and knowing, which is felt as a visceral force, such as uncertainty, shame, upset, decidedness, and courage. this force marks the sense and feel of something coming within reach that was not there before in a way that invites engagement. for hemmings ( , p. ), it is such dissonances that hold political possibility and the promise of movement. the movement within this entanglement of the girl—and, indeed, us as well—the note, and the embodied practice of holding the note close while reaching towards the makeshift mailbox unfolds as a mo(ve)ment of response, response-ability, and resistance. we contend that what touch as a more-than-human player does in this moment is that it co-constitutes a site and space of response—a space enfolded with affects, things, places, and moments and unfolding towards resistance. amplified by our own responses to writing down our pasts, we understand that the ability to be moved and affected to reach in resistance and to disturb the norms of what can be said, what can be resisted, what can be disrupted—be it the heterosexist normativities or intra-generational trauma (huuki and lanas )—is frail and precarious. yet, we maintain that the intra-active entanglement of the cards, the words written in the postscripts, the makeshift mailbox, and the promise and possibility of action enfolded in it allowed the past experience of hurt—the recognition—to reconfigure and to be not only known but to be resisted. . . what else touch can become: gathering up and holding together/apart across time–space domains as we curated the cards for the campaign website, the note became reanimated, making sense-able the response-ability and accountability it crafted by inviting and obliging us to care about it and to be careful with it without certainty if the ‘it’ is the card, the ‘data’, the words written in the cards, the girl who wrote it, the upsetting experience described in the note, the hurt embedded within it, or perhaps the academic writing about ‘it’. the intra-active entanglement of the child, cards, creative practice, research, and activism diffracts, sending out ripples that, no matter how small, hold the potentiality for ‘consequential meanings’ (haraway ). this touch of the girl’s response held its grip when we selected excerpts from the cards to publish on the campaign website and when the upset and hurt became realigned in the title of a news article in a national newspaper, (re-)making us as (modest) witnesses, complicit, and response-able (haraway , ). for haraway ( , p. ), this is exactly what touches can do: they shape and ramify accountability, where ‘[a]ccountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions’ but mundane practices of becoming with. as explored earlier in this paper, due to the affective charge sensed and felt by us while writing notes about our childhood experiences of harassment, there was a familiarity that resonated from the entanglement of the girl, the note, and the makeshift mailbox. it would be rather easy to foreground how we were emotionally affected by the girl’s story and how the touch–affect jumps back and forth, soc. sci. , , first during the workshop and again in the office, from us to the girl and from the girl to us or to all those ‘others’ who we can imagine being touched. perhaps it was the familiarity in the dissonance of holding close and disclosing that we recognize, of keeping hidden but wanting to seize the opportunity to disrupt conventional silences around touches that hurt—to reach and touch in resistance. the sense of familiarity moves us to speculate that we were not merely slightly grazed by this one experience and the touches surrounding it; rather, in being touched by the girl’s experience, matter, time, and space realigned and reinvented itself in a reiterative practice of reconfiguring (barad ). in effect, we argue that touch, as mapped here, reaches and holds across and beyond space–time domains. our adult researcher bodies hold and carry ‘impressions’ of our own past touches—such as a re-membered slap—which, as barad ( ) notes, never left us. new touches stick to us, such as the touch–affect from the girl. these touches did not just stick and jump but became more-than-human and more-than-present players in this research–activist constellation. each touch invents new matter forms by gathering up and holding together/apart the past and present (barad ), the researcher-adult, the researcher-child, the girl with the note, the researcher with a note, and, perhaps, also the pre-teen girls that have been and will be affected by sexual harassment in their peer relations. neither the girl being touched nor we, who were being touched by the girl-being-touched, were contained in the ‘touch-encounter’. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), we enter into relations of response not because of what touches us from afar but because there were never separate parts to begin with. indeed, response-abilities are not crafted from a graze. in other words, they are not created by ‘knowing’ the girl’s troubling experience but from the capacity of us be(com)ing (with) in touch (see pihkala ), that is, the capacity of touch to draw times, spaces, and matter into new relations, inviting touch in response. . microprocesses of change and the possibilities of moving with touch knowing what we know and feeling what we feel, any of the notes from our research–activist campaign might be swarming with as many affects, times, and embodied materiality as surround the workshop or the girl with the note as discussed in this paper. nonetheless, in this particular entangled practice of engagement, this girl touched us, took hold of us, and pulled us to move with touch in response. furthermore, slipped into the makeshift mailbox, the girls’ notes, ‘crafted from and carrying their experience’ (renold , p. ), became ‘knotted’ with the wider change-making apparatus against sexual harassment: the campaigns, personal accounts, public debate, and (digital) feminist activism that have enabled young people to speak out against ‘rape culture’ in new ways (mendes et al. ). to claim how the campaign mattered to the girls—or any of the participants—would be speculative at best. however, the children’s need to address and explore their concerns related to gender and sexual peer cultures has been tangible time and time again as the children have voiced the need for safe spaces where sensitive topics could be discussed. for this, engaging children with creative activities can enable subtle shifts and minor gestures (manning ) towards sustainable alternatives in peer relations when imagined worlds are materialized through crafting, drawing, and writing. the research–activist encounters of our creative workshop against sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures is materially rich, affectively charged, and temporally entangled. in gauging the microprocesses of change as they occur, we mapped touch and explored what else touch(es) can do. as we mapped in our analysis, the entanglement of the group of girls, valentine’s day cards, past, and present involved different kinds of touches in different registers, such as embodied, corporeal touches of gropes and slaps; verbal touches; material touches of pen on paper; present touches that leave impressions and linger; past touches that carry the residues of the past; the touch–affects that slip through cognition shooting straight through our bodies in resonances and dissonances; and the onto-epistemological touches that sense the virtual in an exploration of the possible, quantum, and queer touches, as discussed by barad ( ). just as touch seems to settle in senses, it is already on the move, reaching, holding, and gathering. the childhood slaps and gropes reached the valentine’s day cards in a café, the child-bodies reached a researcher-child, a finger reached for a pile of notes, a hand soc. sci. , , reached for the makeshift mailbox, the mailbox reached us, and the otherwise-made-possible reached the body-in-reach. we maintain that there is a particular benefit in thinking of the microprocesses of change with touch. for one, mapping touch, as we did here, enabled us to capture the subtle shifts in the children’s unaddressed, silenced, normalized, hurtful experience. rather than being here and there—or this or that—touches intra-acted within and through the workshop as more-than-human and more-than-present players and converged into an inventive, imaginative, sensing-feeling, matter-realizing apparatus, which activated recognition of, response to, and resistance against sexualized and gendered force relations. thinking along the lines of barad ( ), this is what touch—when thought of in the quantum mode—can do: sense and feel and gather up and hold together/apart (barad , ). drawing matter into new relations, characterized by indeterminacy waiting to remake momentary alliances, touch reworks and recrafts response-abilities (barad ; haraway ). for another, the ethico-political tone of touch is intimate and entangled. with touch, it is impossible to keep one’s distance or disavow how we are touched and how the ways we touch shape and co-constitute the conditions of possibilities for touching in response and resistance to the ‘other’. our experience of being touched by the girls’ experiences and our research–activism, which brought disparate matters and modalities together, generating the imaginative, creative, sensing-feeling apparatus, knotted us in webs of manifold more-than-human and more-than-present touches that diffractively reconfigured ever-new possibilities for change. for us, as researchers and activists, thinking with touch engages theory in ways that moves and transforms relations, engagements, and accountabilities. we contend that this is the way feminist new materialist touch works: it is not only ‘put to work’ (dolphijn and van der tuin ) but becomes enacted when objects, bodies, abstractions, and moments intra-act—how they sense and feel, imagine and invent, reach in response, gather up, and hold together. finally, thinking about our research–activism with touch draws attention to the affective, material, and temporally entangled encounters that contest and remake what is possible, producing ‘differences that matter’. while the anatomy of these encounters cannot be laid bare, engaging them with new conceptual companions—as we did in this paper—can help enrich the ways we think, feel, and practice research in ways that can make a difference. indeed, moving with touch aligns with more-than-theoretical approaches to what research can do. it speaks to the power and potentiality of and responsibility to participate in co-composing research encounters that invite and enable response to the other. this demands that we carefully co-compose thick, material, and affective encounters that invite and enable children, researchers, and others to sense, feel, think, imagine, wander, and wonder with—to become with (haraway )—the postscripts, cards, pens, papers, space, and time and, through subtle shifts, make new kinds of, more livable, worlds. to close with a tentative gesture, mapping what touches do encouraged us to also imagine a touch that is of a world-making kind (haraway ) and one that creates accountability and response-ability (barad ). with this, we maintain that moving with touch is an open-ended endeavor but one imbued with conviction. touch not only brings other beings, spaces, and times together (or to matter) but also leaks out 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(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). $ € £ ¥ social sciences article new materialist feminist ecological practices: la via campesina and activist environmental work miranda imperial department of media and communications, london school of economics and political science, london wc a ae, uk; miranda.imperial@gmail.com received: may ; accepted: august ; published: august abstract: within the context of new theoretical developments in environmentalist materialism, as inflected by gender issues, this paper attempts to analyze the important work of la via campesina (women’s section) both in grassroots activism and in creating a feminist agenda for the transformation of human-non-human connections. methodologically, this paper proceeds by historically situating la via campesina and the progressive incorporation of women’s issues as part of the movement. in parallel, la via campesina’s insurgent practices of contestation to the exploitation of huge multinational agrobusinesses, to genetically modified crops, and to land-grabbing practices and land usurpation from indigenous populations are illustrated. in conclusion and within the frame of new materialisms, my discussion addresses issues of response-ability, sustainability, and co-habitation to reflect upon the major changes brought about by these new modes of thinking and inhabiting the planet. keywords: new materialisms; feminist environmentalism; ecology; grassroots activism; la via campesina; political ecology; response-ability; food sovereignty; social justice . introduction the new relational basis between humans, living and inert matter, technology, and the planet that the new materialisms are proposing is a growing reality that can be observed in many domains, from epistemology to anthropology, ecology, and ethics. it is precisely at the crossroads of ecology and the political that this paper is situated, and it aims to explore how in and through the practice of feminist new materialisms, political ecology, and grassroots activist organizing, significant changes can be brought about to prevent irreversible damage such as climate change, or to eradicate dumping industrial waste into rivers and oceans and to eliminate chemicals and plastic residue from food, shelter, and the daily existence of life on the planet. framed within recent developments in the field of feminist perspectives on the environment, my paper will examine a major feminist, political, and environmental project, la via campesina’s gendered initiative, which exists within the larger context of the struggle of la via campesina, in order to reflect upon the political valences both in grassroots activism and in new ecological insurgent practices in which women have become actively involved. it is my contention that currently, la via campesina participates of the ethos and concerns of feminist new materialisms, and i will attempt to demonstrate their proximity and similar goals. after an introduction to the most relevant work in new materialist views on the environment which pave the way to my argument, i will address how la via campesina came to consider women’s social, economic, and labor issues as central to the movement and identify la via campesina’s major claims and demands in relation to agriculture and agrarian reform. tenets such as the achievement of food sovereignty for peasants and indigenous populations in their plight against huge multinational agrobusinesses interact with other crucial principles which i will spell out. at those levels, women’s labor is indispensable for the maintenance and continuation of soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , community life. la via campesina’s gendered insurgent practices will also be analyzed as a response to the deleterious effects which the overexploitation, pollution, and land-grabbing effects produced by late capitalism have had on human and nonhuman actors alike. finally, and within the framework of new materialisms, i will briefly address issues of response-ability, sustainability, and co-habitation in the planet as parts of the common ground that trans-species engagement, posthumanism, and new modes of thinking and inhabiting the world have brought to our attention. as it has been pointed out, the assumption of one world or one universe is inherently colonial in that “it sustains itself through performances that tend to suppress and or contain the enactment of other possible worlds” (blaser , p. ). for blaser, the idea of the pluriverse is a more adequate concept because it entails imagining the performative enactment of multiple, distinct ontologies or worlds which “bring themselves into being and sustain themselves even as they interact, interfere and mingle with each other” (blaser , p. ) under asymmetrical circumstances. the changing pattern of action between the nation-state and rural organizations at the beginning of the s with progressively more detached policies and a worsening of conditions in the countryside brought about an acute social awareness of endemic problems within peasant organizations. this state of affairs and the peasants’ conviction that major obstacles in their work and daily lives had to do with wider oppressive conditions beyond the national borders of ever weakened nation-states is at the origin of la via campesina as a transnational social movement. during the s and early s, la via campesina emerged out of autonomous peasant organizations first in latin america and then at a global scale. by being organized globally, in defense of their interests and to protect their working conditions and ways of life, their members seek to advocate a reasonable and sustainable agrarian production which takes as its basis a holistic approach of interaction between the land and its communities. this grassroots organization has become enormously influential in setting up agendas for sensitive agrarian reform and social policies worldwide. according to martinez-torres and rosset, “la via campesina today is the leading network of grassroots organizations with presence in the anti-globalization or altermundista (‘another world’) movement, as manifested in protests against the world trade organization (wto) and free trade area of the americas (ftaa), in the world social forum (wsf), in its scathing techniques of world bank land policies and its ability to force the novel concept of food sovereignty into common usage” (martinez-torres and rosset , p. ). this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the specific actions of the transnational movement la via campesina and their proximity to feminist new materialist developments. methodologically, i have first approached la via historically in order to show when peasant women start getting organized within the movement. secondly, i have analyzed three specific actions relevant in three major areas: opposition to large agribusiness corporations, predatory exploitation of water resources, and land-grabbing and farmers’ dispossession. these were chosen among other actions because they were carried out by south american (brazilian and argentinian) peasant women who were all members of the peasant without land movements, and because they are among the most publicized of these actions, as judged by their internet presence (google). in my analysis, i have attempted to demonstrate how these actions can be read by recourse to new materialist ideas and concepts. . the challenges of ecological feminism in recent years, philosophy, feminisms, environmental studies, and biotechnology have alerted people to the current state of degradation of the planet. contemporary eco-feminist thinking finds its roots in the second wave of feminism, back in the s. in northern india, in the early s, many it was anthropologist eduardo kohn who coined the idea of “trans-species engagement.” in his view, “[c]reating an analytical framework that can include the humans as well as non-humans has been a central concern of science and technology studies, the multispecies or animal turn, and deleuze-influenced scholarship [ . . . ] and i have been specially swayed by donna haraway’s conviction that there is something about our everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures that can open new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding” (kohn , pp. – ). soc. sci. , , women took part in the chipko movement to protect forests from commercial loggers and deforestation. throughout the s important initiatives spread around the globe, and native american and indigenous women were thought to be the ultimate ecofeminists. the origins of the early indian feminist green movement can be traced to social critic vandana shiva. in her view, indian women have an inherent connection to nature. she speaks of the “feminine principle,” insisting on the fact that this has nothing to do with an outdated notion of matriarchy but rather with an idea of gender complementarity in sexual divisions of labor. she writes: in this non-gender based philosophy the feminine principle is not exclusively embodied in women, but is the principle of activity and creativity in nature, women and men. one cannot really distinguish the masculine from the feminine, person from nature, purusha from praktiri. though distinct, they remain inseparable in dialectical unity, as two aspects of one being. (shiva , p. ) clearly, shiva’s orientation was essentialist and her work came under strong criticism. however, her ideas were crucial in challenging the hegemony of scientific knowledge in the hands of men and in promoting “global sisterhood” around environmental issues. also involved in a movement countering deforestation in australia, and after significant activist work, val plumwood became a very influential voice in feminist environmentalism. in feminism and the mastery of nature (plumwood ), plumwood argues we live in a progressively dystopic world where: [t]echnological mastery extinguishes both nature and less technologically “rational” cultures, where we face the imminent prospect of loss of the world’s forests along with the bulk of its species diversity as well as human and cultural diversity [ . . . ] where the dominance of rational man threatens ultimately to produce the most irrational of results, the extinction of our species along with many others. (plumwood , p. ) ecological feminism identifies this catastrophe as derived from a world dominated by men. in the s plumwood urged us to move beyond divisions within the women’s movements and join forces to counter the destruction of the planet. she proposes alternatives to rationality “which encourage[d] mutually sustaining relationships between humans and the earth” (plumwood , p. ). her important program for the transformation of those relations involves “creating a democratic culture beyond dualism, ending colonizing relationships and finding a mutual, ethical basis for enriching coexistence with earth others” (plumwood , p. ). plumwood’s important ecological agenda shows respect for alterity and grounds ethical responsibility at the core of human-non-human interactions. the engagement of activists, academics, philosophers, and large numbers of women and inhabitants of the planet has progressively grown into a global green movement with local specificities. conclusive findings in sociological research into the late capitalist use of resources and in human adaptation to rapid and definitive changes on earth urge both the world population and our political representatives to work actively to counter this dismal state of affairs. a call for new forms of ethics and politics has emerged in an effort to counter the destructive, exploitative practices and lethal power upon human and non-human actors in the anthropocene (tsing et al. ). along this line, fresh insight from “anthropocene feminism” reaches audiences critically with an impulse attentive to global change connected to ecological transformations, technological development, inequitable sharing of the resources for co-existence, and political contestation and resistance. as claire colebrook states: the proposed (and close to consecrated) conception of the anthropocene epoch appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as darwinian evolution effected for the our currently used notion of the anthropocene comes from assessing the impact of human settlement, labour, exchange, and other related activities on the planet. the human impact on geology and ecosystems translates into a huge transformation of all other forms of life on earth. establishing the beginning of this era is not an easy task but there is a tendency to speak of the agricultural revolution, , years back in time, as a major historical milestone (tsing et al. ). soc. sci. , , nineteenth century. if the notion of the human species’ emergence in time requires new forms of narrative, and imaginative and ethical articulation, then the intensifying sense of the species’ end makes a similar claim for rethinking “our” processes of self-presentation and self-preservation. (colebrook , p. ) the aforementioned problems, closely related to the life/death divide, highlight the inherent contradiction of early feminist theorists that signified what stacy alaimo has referred to as the “feminist flight from nature” (alaimo ): the feminist abhorrence of traditional patriarchal metaphors associating women and nature. however, such views resulted from a lack of awareness and engagement in key issues regarding the environment and the current stage of scientific work on the border between the biological and social sciences (haraway , pp. – ), which have, nonetheless, been brought to the forefront by new feminist initiatives on science, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and new materialist philosophy, and have had a crucial impact on the way these disciplines interact and draw from each other’s findings. these initiatives, summarized by garvey ( ), attempt to undermine traditional nature/culture binarisms from different angles, and mention should be made of: rosi braidotti’s “nomadic subjects/ethics” (braidotti ), and “posthumanism” (braidotti ); nancy tuana’s “viscous porosity” and “interactionism” (tuana ); karen barad’s “intra-actionism” (barad ) and “posthumanist performativity” (barad ); donna haraway’s “naturecultures” (haraway ), “material-semiotic” (haraway ), cyborg (haraway ), and “companion species” (haraway ); and stacy alaimo’s “transcorporeality” (alaimo ). these concepts help not only to move feminisms forward, but also suggest possible interventions within the material, social, and political domains affecting the world at large. in the political arena, it is crucial that decisions come to be discussed in the open and are the object of participatory democracy, and are no longer debatable by lobbies or by the elite. these proposals do not simply come as a consequence of intersectional feminism (often, “intersectional” is only relevant to human lives) but, rather, are interactionist-oriented. . new materialist environmentalisms it can certainly be stated that our current understanding of the environment has substantially changed in the last three decades. the opening statement of the paris conference on “environmental humanities and new materialisms” announced that these two areas “share an ethic of decolonizing nature and culture, as they depart from anthropocentric and constructivist positions. our call is to consider ourselves as permeable, part of the ebb and flow of the anthropocene . . . ” (barrett et al. ). the conference urged us to adopt an “environmentally ethical sense of matter within a world caught in the throes of change” (barrett et al. ). the shared materiality of all living entities in the planet and their recently recognized sense of connectivity provides a basis for the acknowledgement of differences, an urge to respect the specificities of elements in their localities, and initiatives to preserve, and also to restore the catastrophic consequences of the systematic erosion and devastation of our habitats. if we turn to judith butler’s important work on vulnerability, it is fundamental to listen to her caveat that the condition of vulnerability and the hazards of exposure to potential danger or threat critical race theorist kimberlé crenshaw ( ) was one of the earliest proponents of intersectionality when she pointed out the inability of a single western feminist framework to account for the lived experiences of black women. race, gender, social status, and sexual orientation, among many other factors, were identified as operating in a complex way to produce discrimination. at present, the proximity between intersectionality, ecofeminism, and different interactionist practices has been highlighted. as a.e. kings, among other scholars, has recently argued, “intersectionality has helped to develop the practical application of ecofeminism by ‘initiating a process of discovery (davis , p. ), by acting as an analytical tool or ‘lens’ to aid critical thinking on ecofeminist debates”. the place of good ecofeminist theory is not necessarily to provide ultimate answers but rather to allow for critical engagement with the multitude of experiences contributing to the discrimination of women and the environment, while at the same time recognizing the limitations and constraints of one’s analysis” (kings , pp. – ). see barad ( , ) and bennett ( ). soc. sci. , , is distributed in an outright different manner across the world (butler , p. ). in butler’s theorization, our lives are dependent on others (butler , p. ), resulting in a condition of “primary vulnerability” (butler , p. ). each and every one of us depends on the decisions of others: in a most pressing way, our bodies are “given over” to others to be taken care of, and our bodies are “always something more than, and other than, ourselves” (butler , p. ). in one of her examples, the many losses of lives to aids in africa are compounded by their silencing in the media and by the absence of discursive elaborations on the meaning of these losses for their communities (butler , [p. ]). these are but examples of how our existence is ruled by interrelationships, and of how it is these relationships, or lack thereof, which determine the livability of our lives. as butler points out, on the basis of geographic and social considerations, the limits of what is knowable (butler , p. ) or grievable (butler , p. ) determine “radically different ways in which . . . vulnerability is distributed throughout the globe” (butler , p. ). along the lines of current studies of vulnerability, stacy alaimo proposes the concept of “trans-corporeality” (alaimo , p. ). she argues for the “recognition of the substantial interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human world,” and defines vulnerability as “a sense of precarious, corporeal openness to the material world” (alaimo , p. ). in her view, clearly, a pre-condition for the acknowledgement of vulnerability lies in the recognition of differences which compel us to expand our notion of what should be respected and protected, both ethically and within the law. in this sense, human and non-human ecological vulnerabilities should find an equal status in the larger picture of dynamic existence. alaimo and susan hekman hold that “nature is agentic—it acts, and those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world” (alaimo and hekman , p. ). they also acknowledge the new political dimension that both the human and the non-human acquire in the light of new materialist feminisms. along this line, tuana ( ) has studied hurricane katrina as an example to illustrate the many contending forces at play which make it, simultaneously, a natural and a social phenomenon. her analysis includes “levees, the army corp of engineers, global warming, the hurricane, the local politics of new orleans, shell middens, the federal government, racial politics, and the poor and disabled populations of new orleans” (alaimo and hekman , p. ). tuana demonstrates how our former clear boundaries separating nature and culture, and human and non-human, are no longer epistemologically valid. when it comes to vulnerability, at present, it is inevitable to pay attention to climate change. chris cuomo refers to the huge impact that anthropogenic climate change is having on life and to the different historical conditions of exploitation that different areas, populations, and communities have endured ever since colonial power and capitalism unleashed the terribly unbalanced situation we have now: “climate change was manufactured in a crucible of inequality, for it is a product of the industrial and fossil-fuel eras, historical forces powered by exploitation, colonialism, and nearly limitless instrumental use of ‘nature’” (cuomo , p. ). for cuomo, we are all at risk, “including those who have contributed little or nothing at all to the industrial greenhouse effect” (cuomo , p. ). in any event, it is precisely from the strength and creativity of social movements that a resistance to prevailing discourses of victimization is surfacing: . . . from indigenous, anti-globalization, feminist, and youth movements for climate justice. these movements point out that many communities are in vulnerable positions precisely because they uphold ecological values that have not been engulfed by global capitalism and butler has been critiqued for her excessive emphasis on discourse as the major force giving shape to human life. in parallel, butler forgets to give a space to the non-human in her theorization, although she is well aware of the limits of humanism (butler , pp. , ). the debate on “postmodern feminism[‘s] retreat from the material” (alaimo and hekman , p. ) is addressed by colebrook ( ), hekman ( ), kirkby ( ), and alaimo ( ). along this line, further critiques can be found in barad ( ), especially pp. – . soc. sci. , , technological modernization, recognizing marginal status in fossil-fuel cultures to be a sign of wisdom and resilience rather than weakness. (cuomo , p. ) stacy alaimo too, argues that gender violence, limited access to resources, and rent imbalance has deeply affected women. as major actors of social change and coalition-building, “feminist organizations such as women’s environment and development organization (wedo) are careful to complement feminine vulnerability with feminist agency, savvy, and survival strategies, calling for more parity in decision making and leadership” (alaimo , p. ). the emphasis on parity and political representation, as much as women’s progress in debunking the epistemological divide in the binary between nature and culture has brought about a paradigm shift in human positionings facing the world at large, human/non-human interaction, and living matter intra-actions. in tuana’s view, the current field of interactionism ushers us into “a world of complex phenomena in dynamic relationality” (tuana , p. ). environmentalists, green activists, and agro-ecological organizations have explored possibilities for alternative models for rural life. as i will attempt to show, in a domain as important as agriculture (which involves feeding the world, maintaining the biosphere, and preserving biodiversity), movements such as la via campesina support the livelihood of farmers by advocating an ethics of care with the land, protecting the rights of local and indigenous communities. . la via campesina: new feminist alternatives for the environment la via campesina (peasant popular feminism) is a feminist movement which grew out of the movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem-terra (mst) (peasants without land), where women identified the contradictions of the masculinized matrix based upon establishing large agrarian cooperatives that competed against big landowners, which proved to be unviable. striving to reach food sovereignty for the people, feminists proposed to fight the huge agro-businesses in support of a sustainable and organic agriculture. theirs is a combination of feminism and struggle against capital focusing on the fight against transnational corporations. as alaimo claims, we must take activism and other ‘low’ practices seriously “as inventive modes of political contestation” (alaimo , p. ). in the la via campesina movement, a range of transformative micro-practices are present. their practices—sit-ins, demonstrations, and performances—go well beyond the status quo in agriculture, land use, and food sovereignty (humans are certainly ‘affected’ by the land throughout their material and discursive practices). among those practices, i will particularly discuss their resistance actions, their links to other voices of protest (social and food justice), and their resistance to adopt genetically modified crops as major forms of raising awareness and gaining support for their cause. from a new materialist perspective, peasant farming is respectful to the land with which it interacts by virtue of “intra-actions” (barad ). for barad, neither subjects nor objects exist outside of any particular practice, but rather, they are enacted in discrete intra-actions to which both human and non-human agencies contribute, affecting and becoming affected by their reciprocal operations. subjects and objects are inseparably entangled, and indeterminacy is ever present in their associations. barad’s notion of matter entails a “stabilizing and de-stabilizing process” (barad , p. ) and “‘agent’ in its ongoing materialization.” in her account, “agency is doing/being in its intra-activity” (barad , p. ). among those intra-actions, and crucially influential in the peasant’s environment, the enhancement of biomass recycling and the optimization of the bioavailability of nutrients must be mentioned. from these intra-actions and proper soil management, peasants will end up increasing soil cover, maintaining diversity (humans do belong as another species within such diversity), and enhancing synergies with all the elements which share these ecosystems. crucial for any approach to the work of la via campesina is the notion of indigenous knowledge (which involves being walter mignolo has derived an important theoretical concept from latin american intellectual anibal quijano when he speaks of the “coloniality of knowledge.” this crucial idea is based on the erasure that colonial societies systematically soc. sci. , , respectful to the land and its creatures), building inter-species and cross-cultural alliances, countering transnational corporations’ land-grabbing (in africa, asia, and the global south), alerting local communities (cross-sectionally) of risk, and securing resources for women and the dispossessed which are respectful to the land. nancy tuana’s “interactionist ontology of viscous porosity” (in alaimo ) in her commitment to take seriously the agency of the natural acts as an important paradigm for the comments and ideas that follow. in any event, it is the reciprocal insight of western academia and indigenous philosophies and epistemologies that one should always acknowledge because the “appropriation of indigenous thinking in european contexts without indigenous interlocutors present to hold the use of indigenous stories and laws to account flattens, distorts and erases the embodied, legal-governance and spiritual aspects of indigenous thinking” (todd , p. ). in other words, the ongoing colonial imperatives of the academy must be a continued matter of concern and elicit a responsible engagement as a crucial element in the ethics of research. in an effort to avoid what rob nixon calls the pervasive “slow violence” always present in the “environmentalism of the poor” (in alaimo , p. ), la via campesina embodies a holistic approach in which there are no detached objects or elements but rather a series of intra-actions among the different realities to be considered. along these lines, thinking through the relations between individuals and ecosystems seems to be where current research in environmental, social sciences, and feminist thinking is leading. embodied in the feminist relations to the environment have always been the material and political practices that women have pursued with strategy and tactics. the traditional feminist ethics of care have opened up towards a more comprehensive, global ethics for all “matters of care” (see puig de la bellacasa and below). beginning in the s, la via campesina has successfully gathered organizations of peasants, farmers, farm workers, and indigenous agrarian communities from across the globe. its major endeavor has been to build collaborations and cooperation among its membership using various strategies and mechanisms that intersect at the local, regional, national, and international levels. the movement’s progressive work on questions of gender inequality and hemispheric and regional differences is a crucial part of its objective of building community and coalition work. traditionally, rural women have played a major role in agricultural production and in maintaining the social and economic fabric of their communities. yet, it is a fact these women still have limited access to policy planning and decision making. in many cases, they continue to be excluded from political power positions, and, consequently, of major involvement in strategic planning and in all issues related to the quality of life of farming communities. thus, when it comes to gender, with the pressing issues that affect women’s economies and lives, la via campesina’s women took action and got organized. in the managua declaration of , women farmers were mentioned only once. in any event, from then onwards there was an increasing visibility of women farm leaders who made up % of the participants. it is important to note that at this meeting an effort was made to integrate indigenous peasant organizations, whose goals included to analyze and understand the challenges faced by indigenous peasant women. the worldwide struggle of indigenous organizations for ownership and control over productive resources is absolutely central in how la via campesina tackles the questions of ethnicity and contributes to their struggles. almost from the start, la via campesina aimed to integrate both peasant and indigenous identities, since their approaches to the land, the earth, and territory, and their ideas regarding agriculture were substantially different. progressively gender concerns have been foregrounded, and ever since the “framework for action”, the role that women and youth play in rural organizations has been recognized. building perform of indigenous forms of knowledge and their physical forms of transmission. as he writes, “[t]he word epistemology was used to disavow epistemological practices that did not correspond to the western management of knowledge” (mignolo , p. ). for an interesting and well-documented account on la via campesina, which has informed my thinking on this movement, see the important book by annette a. desmarais ( ). soc. sci. , , leadership capacity among women farm leaders counts among their foremost priorities. women have also strongly contributed to further define la via campesina’s position on food sovereignty, which includes: (a) favoring organic production, (b) reducing the use of potentially harmful fertilizers, and (c) initiating an immediate halt to the trade of banned agrochemicals (desmarais , p. ). after these early discussions, it became clear that no food sovereignty would be achieved without the strong involvement of women in policy development in the different communities (desmarais , p. ). from to , la via campesina women’s commission concentrated its work in the americas in its three major regions: central america, south america, and the caribbean. in their discussions, crucial issues such as human rights, struggles for agrarian reform, management of natural resources, biodiversity, and the impact of agricultural trade were considered central for food sovereignty. this period was a turning point in raising awareness of the importance of women working on equal terms with their male counterparts to build an alternative agricultural model. at the third international via campesina conference, a “via campesina gender position paper” was approved, placing women and gender issues at the heart of the movement; “ . . . [i]t is fitting and necessary to articulate a gender analysis in order to shape inclusive, just and viable long-term solutions.” (via campesina third international conference, quoted in desmarais , p. ). this document elaborated on three main principles: equality and human rights, economic justice, and social development, with “each clearly specifying the role, needs and interests of women” (desmarais , p. ); it has been of major importance and has produced a balancing effect in the responsibilities of all actors implicated in the preservation of life on the planet. at this stage in the anthropocene and in the consideration of women’s roles, labor, and social expectations placed on them, new materialist insights into an ethics of care which transcends the human, and, thus, sexual difference, are certainly liberatory for humanity as a whole, and for the environment. as puig de la bellacasa insists on “ . . . the moral undertones that invite us to transcend the ‘human’ for something ‘more than.’ it also starts from a human center, then to reach ‘beyond.’” (puig de la bellacasa , p. ). what we cannot ignore is the fact that, care is a human trouble, but this does not make care a human-only matter. affirming the absurdity of disentangling human and nonhuman relations of care and the ethicalities involved requires decentering human agencies, as well as remining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings. (puig de la bellacasa , p. ) since its inception, la via campesina has opposed the introduction of genetically modified crops into worldwide agricultural systems. while recognizing their potential to alleviate shortages in food production, the organization considers that the dangers associated with their use outweigh any beneficial effect. apart from any future unknown or unforeseen consequences of the use of genetically modified crops, la via campesina sees two immediate problems associated with their use. first is their control by large transnational corporations and second is their negative effects on biodiversity. regarding large corporations, the development and marketing of genetically modified crops is aggressively promoted by large transnational agribusiness corporations (exemplified by monsanto) that impose stringent control over the seeds and that require the extensive use of agrotoxics of their own manufacture, thus closing a circle where farmers are absolutely dependent on these transnational companies. this tight control of crop markets by large agribusiness corporations is becoming even more stringent with a recent wave of fusions into mega corporations within the agribusiness market. as part of this wave, dow chemicals fused with dupont, monsanto was acquired by bayer ag, and syngenta partnered with chemchina. an immediate result of this oligopoly is the ensuing lack of food security for regions where farmers are unable to pay the prices that these corporations establish. regarding biodiversity, the negative impact of genetically modified crops is two-fold. on one hand, the use of just a few varieties of common crops poses the risk of losing the necessary biodiversity of these crops in the form of less-used varieties as a source of genetic material for the development of new varieties in the future. on the other hand, the increased use of agrotoxics soc. sci. , , associated with genetically modified crops determines a high risk of eliminating a large part of the non-crop biodiversity in the planet. . la via campesina: insurgent practices la via campesina opposes the uncontrolled entry of foreign capital into local agricultural and food production. apart from resulting in an impoverishment of farmers, given that large corporations use their economic might to impose their harsh market conditions on farmers, these corporations are a source of food insecurity for local communities, as food production, rather than being guaranteed, is subject to the vagaries of the markets. a well-known example is that of the fight that mst, an active brazilian member of la via campesina, has been undertaking against transnational corporations in brazil. . . cevasa’s occupation: against agribusiness on march , over nine hundred women occupied the cevasa sugar mill and power plant, located in the region of ribeirão preto, são paulo state. this action was widely covered in the news and has later been reviewed by abramsky ( ). the previous year, a major part ( %) of the shares of cevasa were bought by cargill, a large american global corporation in the food, agriculture, and industrial markets, and the world’s largest privately held corporation in terms of revenue (bodley , p. ). cevasa’s was the largest sugarcane mill in brazil: it produced . million tons of cane sugar per year or , l of alcohol. after cargill bought a large part of the cevasa plant, the previous owners used the money to buy another mill in the western state of acre. this practice of selling part of the capital of local mills to foreign companies with the subsequent expansion of production in other regions of brazil and latin america is common in ribeirão preto and contributes to an ongoing de-localization of agricultural production. during their action, la via campesina women defended the adoption of an alternative agricultural model which privileges the small farmer (responsible for the production of a good part of the food crops) and that implements an agrarian reform that modifies the land structure of the country. the region of ribeirão preto was chosen for this action because it symbolizes the expansion of sugarcane estates, a model based on the overexploitation of peasants (more than workers there have died of exhaustion in the past three years), and the destruction of the environment. the occupation was part of la via campesina’s action “women in defence of life and against agribusiness”. through this, rural workers undertook to denounce the false promises of agribusiness in relation to sugarcane planting and to ethanol production, alerting people to the real consequences of increased sugarcane cultivation for the environment, the pollution of fires and the respiratory diseases caused by them, the vast extent of land concentration in brazil, and the consequent increase in social differences. this action was linked to a large demonstration against the state visit of american president george w. bush to brazil. president bush had been very interested in the promotion of bioalcohol as a fuel for automation because it provided a convenient outlet for the u.s.’ large stocks of surplus grains. following that, major american firms became interested in the production of bioethanol at low cost, and his visit was interpreted as an attempt to negotiate with then brazilian president lula da silva access to brazilian sugarcane bioalcohol. for mst, bioethanol is not a clean energy but an environmentally damaging one that in addition only serves to convert brazil into “the backyard of the american elites.” subsequently, sugarcane field burning, a traditional practice, has been banned in the state of são paulo, a legislation that these protests helped implement (são-paulo-environmental-system ). soc. sci. , , the way the cevasa occupation unfolded demonstrates how la via campesina stages its actions. the occupation by women took place peacefully and no goods were damaged. not wanting to risk the onset of violence between demonstrators and employees, after being assured that no damage would be caused to the facilities, the plant’s directors gave license to workers of the daily shift. . . nestlé: predatory exploitation of water resources also in brazil, on march , the mst movement staged an occupation of a nestlé mineral water processing factory in são lourenço, state of minas gerais. as it was reported (efe ), again, very early in the morning, a group of six hundred women from the mst occupied the plant protesting the privatization of water, which, they claimed, was going to be traded in the th world water forum to be held in brasilia. in their denunciation, the mst accused then president michel temer of selling their water to international corporations. the mst accused the forum of being just a marketplace for negotiations with high executives from companies such as nestlé and coca-cola for the exploitation of brazil’s water resources. the mst cited nestlé as an example of a transnational corporation established in brazil for decades undertaking predatory and irregular forms of natural resources exploitation. for the mst water is a common good of humanity and defending it is a matter of sovereignty. the mst further denounced that in january , president temer and nestlé president paul bulcke met to discuss the exploitation of the guarani aquifer, a massive reserve that covers four countries (brazil, argentina, paraguay, and uruguay). the nestlé company, which controls . % of the world’s water market, has been installed in minas gerais since , when it bought the sources and the parque das Águas de são lourenço. since , the local population has denounced the exploitation of mineral waters that were widely used for medicinal treatments before being privatized. besides the reduction in the available water flow, the mst denounced changes in taste of the water due to over-exploitation. these allegations have been dismissed by the nestlé company, which accused in turn the mst of causing damage to their são lourenço plant facilities. . . punta de agua: countering land-grabbing one of the aims of la via campesina is to help farmers, who are often associated with native minorities, fight against land-grabbing by large agroindustrial corporations or even by local authorities, who are usually acting on behalf of hidden economic interests. in land-grabbing, an established pattern emerges. farmer families, who have worked their land for generations, are confronted by large agribusiness who take advantage of the fact that these families seldom register their lands to inscribe them in their name. they then exhibit titles of ownership of the farmers’ lands and try to expel them. this is a dramatic matter of concern for la via campesina’s activism. as puig de la bellacasa has argued, “soils are now up on the list of environmental matters calling for global care [ . . . ] [soils] are a new frontier for knowledge and fascination about the life teaming [sic] in this dark alterity. human persistent mistreatment and neglect of soils is emphasized in calls that connect the economic, political and ethical value of soils to matters of human survival” (puig de la bellacasa , p. ). la via campesina organizes actions to resist these evictions and to force authorities to recognize ancestral ownership rights for farmers. a case in point took place in june at punta de agua, in san rafael, mendoza, argentina (unión de trabajadores sin tierra-movimiento nacional campesino indígena (ust-mnci) ). there, mapuche farmers who have lived off their land for generations were ordered to vacate their land by legal representatives of the transnational company laguna blue-agua segura, who exhibited titles of ownership, trespassed their fences, threatened them, and used physical force trying to expel them. the la via campesina-affiliated ust-mnci movement immediately mobilized its members to counteract these actions. some years back, the same company, claiming property rights, had fenced off the punto de agua village, effectively isolating families on the basis of claimed property rights of land surrounding the settlement. mobilizations of ust-mnci had then forced the company to remove the fences. soc. sci. , , following the june threats, ust-mnci mobilized their members in the region, including women and men, who demonstrated in punta de agua and publicly denounced these actions. on june , ust-mnci activists blocked streets in punta de agua and in the presence of san rafael municipal workers and two members of parliament demanded that authorities recognize ownership of traditionally farmed land and block new registrations of previously unclaimed lands. they further demanded the presence of authorities to enforce removal of wire fences in community land now claimed by the transnational corporation, stating that inaction on the part of authorities would be answered by “farmer’s justice” and forceful removal of these fences. after this action, attempts of the corporation to reclaim farmers’ lands continued. finally, in light of the ust-mnci resistance, in august , local authorities annulled newly issued property rights and recognized ownership of the land by the mapuche families who had traditionally farmed it. as activist paula gioia remarks, “the land where our cattle grazes, where we produce our hay, where we grow cereals and vegetables, the forests from where we make our heating wood and the water sources for our drinking and for irrigation can not been handled as commodities!” (la_via_campesina (@via_campesina) ). with the kind of activist protests i have described, la via campesina has come to represent in many ways the entanglements that for karen barad redefine the human in light of its connectivity with non-human others and “the relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (barad , p. ). recognition of such entanglements, in other words, shifts the focus “from unitary to nomadic subjectivity” (braidotti , p. ). barad’s understanding of connectivity and relationality eschews unitariness and self-centeredness and leads in the direction of braidotti’s views on nomadic subjectivity. this “nomadism” emerges when the subject resists being fixed within a rigid frame constricting its movement and expansion: though the image of “nomadic subjects” is inspired by the experience of peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic, the nomadism in question here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. not all nomads are world travelers; some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one’s habitat. it is the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling. (braidotti , p. ) acknowledging that the human is embedded within a large network of other social, biological, political, semiotic and other forces opens up a trans-species network where non-human others are recognized as co-participants and bearers of agency and accountability. these non-human others include other biological entities such as water, soils, geological layers, seeds, bio-fertilizers, and a long list of elements whose contribution to life as we know it in the planet would be unthinkable. as i have attempted to show, the intra-actions among deeply connected environmental and social issues have become an inexhaustible source of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities [ . . . ] as one part of needed political work” (haraway , p. ). as mozambican activist graça samo, international coordinator of the world march of women, reminding us of the importance of ancestors for indigenous populations, asserts, “the moment in which we are living now is a time of extremes . . . this has to be something that makes us as a global feminist movement to come together and say, what is our strategy in this moment? what is the right way to position ourselves to take control of the political struggle? [ . . . ] we are not inventing, we are reclaiming the forms that our ancestors have been using” (samo ). . concluding remarks: re-distributing, re-thinking, responding to the planet prompted by jacques derrida’s philosophical considerations on his visual interaction with his cat (derrida ) and by barbara smuts’ baboon ethology studies (smuts .), donna haraway has argued that, as it is with humans, interacting with non-humans is not simply about reacting to them, but rather about establishing a bidirectional communication (haraway , pp. – ), about soc. sci. , , “looking back,” (haraway , p. ), and about accepting that one can establish communication in a reciprocal way. as i have attempted to show, it is imperative that an engaged involvement with the current status of the degradation of the planet at this stage of late capitalism gains momentum. through grassroots activist actions, organized protest, and strategic communication, social movements urge us to move towards an ethics of care, protection, and respect for the planet. it is only by means of a cultural and educational awareness, deeply inspired by the teachings of new materialist philosophies, deep ecology, practices of re-distribution of resources, and social justice initiatives, that current practices of labor, consumption, and development can make progress and bring about significant changes in the relations of all elements and actors at play. when it comes to the shibboleth of “sustainability”, philosopher val plumwood has argued that “[t]he often-invoked term ‘sustainability’ tends to obscure the seriousness of the situation [of ecological crisis]; clearly no culture which sets in motion massive processes of biospheric degradation which it has normalized, and which it cannot respond or correct can hope to survive for very long” (plumwood , p. ). along the same lines, benson and craig have argued that sustainability might no longer be an appropriate course of action under current conditions, given that “‘sustainability’ refers to the long term ability to continue to engage in a particular activity,” and “assumes that we (a) know what can be sustained and (b) have the capacity to maintain stationarity,” (benson and craig , p. ). for them, “with climate change, we face a future in which we have no idea what we can sustain” ( , p. ), a future where “resiliency” is more likely to succeed than sustainability because “resilience thinking acknowledges disequilibrium and nonlinear, continual change—often as a result of crossing a ‘tipping point’ or threshold [ . . . ] and reorients us to focus on coping with change” ( , p. ). coping with change, recovering quickly from difficulties, and being “resilient” also implies being able to redefine our interactions with an environment subject to critical modifications. would it be possible—indeed, one cannot not acknowledge the possibility—for (multi)species relationships “to avoid commensalism or parasitism while yet occurring inside differential relations of power? [ . . . ] mutualism is not so much about equality as reciprocity across difference” (garvey , p. ). according to canadian métis anthropologist zoe todd, “[t]he climate, sila, is an incredibly important organizing concept for many actors in inuit territories [ . . . ] sila is both climate and a life force” (todd , p. ). todd denounces the absence in western academia of indigenous voices who are strongly engaged in crucial issues for the survival of the planet, such as climate change. millie thrasher, rosemarie kuptana, and climate change activist sheila watt-cloutier (who was nominated for the nobel peace prize alongside al gore in ) deserve a special mention for their sustained activism and scholarly work on many fronts. todd raises the poignant question of when euro-american scholarship will take the intellectual labor and activist work of inuit women seriously (todd , p. ). revisiting donna haraway’s recent ideas in staying with the trouble (haraway ), she elaborates on the symbiotic entanglements within the natural world in the direction of creating a multispecies ethic of “living-with”: “living with and dying with each other potently in the chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both anthropos and capital” (haraway , p. ). nonetheless, haraway’s caveat should also be addressed; in her view, “symbiosis [living with, my emphasis] is not a synonym for mutually beneficial” (haraway , p. ), and sympoiesis (her coinage), entails “‘making with.’ nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (haraway , p. ). haraway’s “with-ness” helps us respond and become “respondents” to the inequalities and differences populating our planet, integrating material practices and situated knowledges. staying with the trouble implies learning to coexist respectfully with the world of matter. environmental geographer juanita sundberg states that “indigenous authors in the americas [ . . . ] outline complex knowledge systems in which animals, plants and spirits are understood as beings who participate in the everyday practices that bring worlds into being. these epistemic traditions are not organized in and through dualist ontologies of nature/culture” (sundberg , p. ). along these lines, sami political scientist rauna kuokkanen differentiates between learning to know the other and learning as soc. sci. , , an engagement with the other, and calls for learning as “participatory reciprocity”, i.e., being attentive to other epistemes (indigenous, black, . . . ) as part of the geopolitical present (kuokkanen , p. ; quoted. in sundberg , p. ). it is precisely at this point where a feminist, new materialist, and environmental-justice-informed activism can have a larger impact: though humanity and the practices of extractive capitalism have profoundly transformed and damaged life in the planet for years to come, a new generation of green activists can claim redress and gain visibility and political representation for a new reparative agenda. in the face of this bleak panorama, there remain submerged perspectives and other modes of perception that see, hear, and imagine life-worlds that escape the current corporate, extractive impulse. indigenous epistemologies, grassroots ecological initiatives, and transnational protest movements should probably join forces in this common endeavor to save the planet. it is in the creation of emergent spaces through collective action, politics, writing, art, and community building that an engaged humanity can strive to counter destruction and death. only at this stage can we expect to remedy the ills of overexploitation, exhaustion, and ravaging the resources of the earth in our endeavor to remain cohabitants of the planet. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references abramsky, kolia. . some brief news reports from direct action-based resistance from around the world: brazil, uk, germany and the philippines. in sparking a worlwide energy revolution: social struggles in the transition to a post-petrol world. edited by kolia abramsky. oakland: ak press, pp. – . alaimo, stacy. . undomesticated ground: recasting nature as a feminist space. ithaca: cornell university press. alaimo, stacy. . trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. in material feminisms. edited by stacy alaimo and susan hekman. bloomington: indiana university press, pp. – . alaimo, stacy. . insurgent vulnerability and the carbon footprint of gender. women, gender, and research (kinder, kon, og forskning, denmark) : – . 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[crossref] desmarais, annette a. . the via campesina: peasant women at the frontiers of food sovereignty. canadian woman studies/les cahiers de la femme : – . desmarais, annette a. . la via campesina: globalization and the power of peasants. london: pluto press. efe. . mst ocupa fábrica da nestlé em mg e diz que governo negocia Água brasileira. available online: https://www.efe.com/efe/brasil/brasil/mst-ocupa-fabrica-da-nestle-em-mg-e-diz-que- governo-negocia-agua-brasileira/ - (accessed on march ). garvey, michelle jenneman. . restoration’s return in the age of climate crisis: toward a feminist environmental justice response. ph.d. dissertation, university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn, usa. available online: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/ / /garvey_umn_ e_ . pdf (accessed on march ). gómez-barris, macarena. . the extractive zone: social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. durham: duke university press. haraway, donna j. . simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york and london: routledge. haraway, donna j. . modest_witness@second_millennium.female_man©_meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience. new york and london: routledge. haraway, donna j. . when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. haraway, donna j. . staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham: duke university press. hekman, susan. . constructing the ballast: an ontology for feminism. in material feminisms. edited by stacy alaimo and susan hekman. bloomington: indiana university press, pp. – . kohn, eduardo. . how forests think: towards an anthropology beyond the human. berkeley: university of california press. kings, a. e. . intersectionality and the changing face of ecofeminism. ethics & the environment : – . kuokkanen, rauna. . reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. vancouver: university of british columbia press. la_via_campesina (@via_campesina). . post. twitter. april . available online: https://twitter.com/via_ campesina/status/ (accessed on march ). martinez-torres, maría elena, and peter rosset. . la via campesina: the birth and evolution of a transnational social movement. journal of peasant studies : – . [crossref] mignolo, walter d. . the darker side of western modernity: global futures, decolonial options. durham: duke university press. plumwood, val. . feminism and the mastery of nature. london: routledge. plumwood, val. . environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. london: routledge. puig de la bellacasa, maria. . matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. samo, maria da graça. . war abroad, war at home: from venezuela, honduras, haiti to miami ( / webinar). available online: http://ggjalliance.org/anti-warwebinar (accessed on july ). soc. sci. , , são-paulo-environmental-system. . agro-environmental protocol reduces in % area of sugarcane burning in são paulo. available online: https://www.infraestruturameioambiente.sp.gov.br/en/ / / /agro-environmental-protocol-reduces-in- -area-of-sugarcane-burning-in-sao-paulo/ (accessed on march ). shiva, vandana. . staying alive: women, ecology and development. london: zed books. smuts, barbara. . sex and friendship in baboons. cambridge: harvard university press. sundberg, juanita. . decolonizing posthumanist geographies. cultural geographies : – . [crossref] tsing, anna lowenhaupt, heather anne swanson, elaine gan, and nils bubandt, eds. . arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. todd, zoe. . an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. journal of historical sociology : – . [crossref] tuana, nancy. . viscous porosity: witnessing katrina. in material feminisms. edited by stacy alaimo susan hekman. bloomington: indiana university press, pp. – . ust-mnci. . argentina, mendoza, corte de calle y asamblea campesina y popular en punta del agua: por la tierra y la vida. available online: https://www.farmlandgrab.org/ (accessed on march ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). $ € £ ¥ social sciences article new materialist perspectives on sex robots. a feminist dystopia/utopia? tanja kubes gender studies in science and engineering, technical university of munich, munich, germany; tanja.kubes@tum.de received: april ; accepted: july ; published: july abstract: feminist discourses on sex robots and robot sex largely focus on the dystopian fear of an exponentiation of hegemonic masculinity. the very possibility of robot sex is put on a level with slavery or prostitution and is rejected as a continuation of male dominance over women. proceeding from a feminist new materialist perspective and building both on the refutation of normative definitions of sex and a general openness to the manifold variants consenting adults can engage in in sexual matters, the article presents a queer alternative to this outright rejection. leaving the beaten tracks of pornographic mimicry, sex robots may in fact enable new liberated forms of sexual pleasure beyond fixed normalizations, thus contributing to a sex-positive utopian future. keywords: new materialism; sex robots; robot sex; transversalism; human–machine interaction; sex-positive; diffractive design; queer studies a popular topic in movies from fritz lang’s metropolis ( ) to alex garland’s ex machina ( ) or netflix’ westworld ( ), hyperfeminine humanoid robots have fueled the imagination of cinemagoers for almost a century. today, however, for the first time in human history, lifelike humanoid robots serving as counterparts for romantic and sexual encounters are no longer just a fantasy of science fiction authors. advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, biomechanics, robotics, and animatronics have them emerging on the horizon as a real possibility, causing a fundamental shift of the narrative from the imaginary to the tangible, from fiction to facticity. it does not come as a surprise, therefore, that over the past two or so years, sex robots have had their fair share of media coverage. new york times (bates ), washington post (guarino ), cnn (kerner ), foxnews (shaw ), abc news (sparrow ), frankfurter allgemeine zeitung (faz ), süddeutsche zeitung (weber ), bbc (varley ), arte (miethge ), zeit (beschorner ), focus (schmieder )—hardly any major newspaper, magazine, or tv station has managed to ignore the manifold efforts to construct intelligent machines that raise human–machine interaction to a whole new level. most of the reports warned against the dangers of building humanoid robots or of introducing artificial intelligence in our bedrooms. the very possibility of an emotional closeness of humans and robots was dismissed as some technocrats’ dystopian fantasy that we should prevent from becoming reality the sooner the better. already back in , british anthropologist kathleen richardson and robotics researcher erik billing launched the campaign against sex robots that has since drawn attention to the many ethical questions raised by the prospect of sexual encounters between humans and machines. such problems do indeed exist. prototypes of sex robots aiming to hit the market in the near future are definitely hinting towards a questionable understanding of ideals of female beauty and the nature of gender relations. in this context, one can also ask, why almost all sex robots currently developed are ‘female.’ there certainly is a market for robots beyond a heterosexist norm, however the industry acts as if it were nonexistent. another problem commonly addressed by robot sex critics is that, by treating robots as objects, we run the risk of eventually objectifying humans in a similar way (gee ; richardson ). richardson even goes one step further, equalling robot sex with slavery and prostitution (richardson ). consequently, there have been repeated calls for a complete ban. the reasons put soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , forward are very similar to those of a feminist movement from the s: the fight against pornography (e.g., dworkin ; morgan ). also, just like in those earlier discussions, the feminist critique finds itself in the odd neighbourhood of anti-feminist conservatives arguing strongly in favour of restricted sexual morals. starting from a queer perspective building both on the refutation of normative definitions of sex and a general openness to the manifold variants consenting adults can engage in in sexual matters, i shall present a feminist alternative to the outright rejection of sex robots and robot sex. while it may be true that current prototypes of sex robots address virtually exclusively heterosexual male customers, i argue that this does not necessarily oblige feminists to discard the very idea of robot sex altogether. on the contrary, allowing for the general possibility of robot sex, feminists can seize the opportunity to reclaim agency in the arena of human–machine interaction and try to change it in order to satisfy a larger variety of sexual tastes and thus increase the general “coefficient of transversality” (bosteels , p. ). here too, obviously, the argument somewhat resembles earlier—sex-positive feminist—responses to the anti-pornography movement of the s and s (e.g., rubin ). proceeding from a new materialist perspective, i will then propose a reconsideration of design options for sex robots. the idea is actually quite simple: instead of buttressing gender stereotypes and perpetuating a discourse of male domination by silicone means, the industry might as well explore the emancipatory potential held by intelligent machines acting as (virtually) equal counterparts in all types of social interaction. however, this thought does not seem to come natural to many engineers. it has to be promoted. refusing dialogue with the people who actually develop sex robots, therefore, is a bad idea, if we hope to counter the possible negative effects of humanoid robots on society and try to deploy them for an entirely different purpose: to deconstruct gender stereotypes, to liberate humanism from its anthropocentric limitations, and to redefine our entanglement with the realm of the nonhuman in terms of a diffractive “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” (barraclough ). feminist new materialism, object-oriented ontology (ooo), and actor network theory (ant) provide the theoretical backdrop against which i will develop my argument. all three confront the tacit ontologism of our scientific renderings of the world and focus on both the capacity of things/objects to act and the irreducible eventfulness of matter. in this context, the human body as the most obvious factor of being in the world has received renewed interest (rogowska-stangret ). it is perceived as neither a simple effect of semantic attributions nor as the mere result of discursive practices. semiotics (e.g., eco ) and social constructivism (butler ) may roughly delineate the field of ‘making sense’ of the world. however, new materialism has elevated matter (animate and inanimate) from its passive role and apprehended it as an actant (latour a), actively contributing to the very process of its materialization (barad ). modernist attempts to epistemologically separate subject and object, in this view, making just as little sense as any form of ontological anthropocentrism. instead, feminist new materialism’s focus on a nondualistic “epistem-ontology” (barad , p. ) opens up ways to expanding the diversity of social bonding and community building and confronts us with new challenges for the regulation of social relations. this holds especially true, when relationships are not only transgressing traditional categorizations or species boundaries but connecting biological and technological actors, thus linking the carbon and silicon spheres. analysing current trends in sex-robotics, i will highlight the paradox that, even though sex robots seemingly reinforce heteronormative gender dichotomies by imitating exaggerated pornographic stereotypes in appearance and behaviour, they also deconstruct traditional man/machine-dualisms—and doing so, open up paths for new constellations of trans-species partnerships beyond “carbon-chauvinism” (sagan ) and the dictate of heteronormativity. . ontologies of love technology is always entangled in structures of power, and it is never gender neutral (e.g., (barad , ; bath a; ernst and horwath ; haraway , ; oudshoorn and pinch ; rommes , ; wajcman , )). while this is obvious for products like deodorants, shavers, clothing, etc., that explicitly address customers of a certain gender, it also holds true for seemingly gender-neutral articles like computers, cars, or smart homes (berg ; van oost soc. sci. , , ). far from being inherent to those ‘things in themselves,’ gender is constantly produced and reproduced through the principles guiding their design and subsequent social interactions during their use (strathern ), thus binding together explicit and implicit notions of gendering in so-called “gender scripts” (akrich ; bath a; van oost ; woolgar ). these scripts consist of built-in features assigning specific competences and delegating responsibilities to their intended users (akrich , p. ); see also (oudshoorn et al. , p. ; rommes , p. ). as for the sex robots that are currently developed, saying that they are gendered seems a truism. mirroring a strong eurocentric male gaze, their design takes semantic coding and stereotyping along hegemonic gender lines to the extreme, basically reducing ‘robot companions’ to large-breasted barbie dolls with glimpses of artificial intelligence (e.g., (truecompanion n.d.; realbotix n.d.a)). the ‘inner values,’ as praised on one producer ’s homepage, consist in little more than being always “ready to talk or play” (truecompanion n.d.). this renaissance of male hegemonic ambition and the demand for female submissiveness (or, as some authors put it, “toxic masculinity” (connell and messerschmidt ; gildea )) appears as a severe setback for feminist efforts to achieve equality for all humans. accordingly, the campaign against sex robots denounces the construction of “machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostituted persons” (casr n.d.) in the strongest terms. these moral issues of course need to be addressed and, hopefully, they will eventually be resolved. however, i would like to put them aside for the time being and instead point out that the argument made by the campaign against sex robots takes one idea for granted: that sexual relationships between humans and robots are in fact possible. this statement needs some elaboration, since kathleen richardson and others have argued repeatedly, that there could be no such thing as sex between humans and robots. if sex is a co-experience, involving a mutual, parallel, and simultaneous experience between humans who are radically different from humanmade artefacts, then it follows that penile, digit, or oral penetration of an object does not constitute sex. this is the case whether the penetrated ‘object’ is in fact an objectified human being or an anthropomorphized object (gildea and richardson ). at first glance, the argument sounds convincing. in fact, from a morally informed point of view, it is flawless. yet it describes only a small sector of social reality. that becomes clear when, a bit later in the same article, richardson and gildea contrast this limited version of sex (“a co-experience . . . between humans”) to masturbation (”a sexual experience you have alone”) and rape (“using a human being like they were a sexual instrument/sexual assault”), arguing that sex with robots cannot be “sex” because “dolls and robots do not have sexed bodies which include reproductive organs, hormones and are not part of a living species” (ibid.). the line of argument is basically ontological, defining ‘real sex’ along a fixed set of distinctive features. accordingly, unreal sex, or rather ‘not sex’ is characterized by the lack of them. [t]here is no subjectivity behind those glassy eyes. there is no mind with which the human partner can relate. there is a physical form, but no embodied consciousness. there may be a voice, but no internal dialogue. that voice may imply feelings, but they do not express a psychological reality. one can no more relate to a sex robot or sex doll than to a ventriloquist’s dummy (except at least we know that behind the scenes the ventriloquist’s dummy is being manipulated by human hand(s) without it being mystified as ‘neutral’ technology) (gildea and richardson ). now, what is the real point here? obviously, gildea and richardson argue in favor of an absolute—one might even say transcendental—definition of sex. the argument is rooted in a decidedly eurocentric, anthropocentric, and ‘biocentric’ position and takes things for granted that are anything but ontologically indisputable. while most readers probably agree that what gildea and richardson define as sex is a wonderful thing to happen, many of us are also aware that not all sexual experiences are equally enjoyable for everybody involved. many of us probably remember sexual encounters, which, in retrospect, we might have preferred not to have had. many of us experienced bad sex without considering it bordering on rape. human sexuality was and is a broad field (preciado ) and, unfortunately, the wonderful “mutual, parallel, simultaneous experience” was over large parts of human soc. sci. , , history and for the majority of humans probably the exception rather than the rule (foucault ; muchembled ). what, then, would be a less normative, more manageable definition of sex? or, rather, of love? let me put the question differently: does loving and feeling loved necessarily require its object to ‘love back’? or does it suffice, when the loving person assumes that their love is shared? i am leaning towards the latter. david levy, one of the most outspoken advocates of robot sex, once predicted that within few decades, marriages between humans and robots would be widespread and perfectly normal (levy , p. ). this bold statement obviously does not account for the fact that ‘marriages’ between humans are much more than just a vow of trying to make a relationship last. they bind together not just the bridal couple (or triple, or n-ple) but their respective families as well, thus creating complex networks of relatives and in-laws. however, we do not have to go that far to question the necessity of mutuality in loving relationships. our love for pets and the manifold forms of objectophilia clearly show that the reality of our feelings does not rely on their reciprocation. i do like to believe that my dog in some way or the other loves me, but of course i will never find out, if that is true in an ‘objective’ sense. that, however, does not change the reality of my feelings nor does it deny the very existence of an affectionate relationship between us. i may well be just using the dog as a mirror projecting my own feelings and attitudes back on me. yet, that does not affect the fact that these feelings result from an interaction with someone or something that is clearly not me. all moral considerations put aside, i therefore suggest a reformulation of the fundamental question. instead of asking, if robots will ever love us back, we should rather analyze how sexual or emotional scripts may evoke human attachment to a robot. obviously, people can develop durable relationships with all kinds of counterparts. i have argued elsewhere (kubes ) that, whereas easily identifiable anthropomorphic features may facilitate the establishment of emotional bonds, almost any kind of “anthropomorphic anchoring point” (ibid.) will do. therefore, while it may well be true that robots will never ‘love’ us—that does not mean that we cannot develop true feelings for them. in fact, a recent study at stanford university suggests that participants of different genders were measurably aroused when touching a robot in the ‘off-limits’ parts of its body (as compared to only pointing at them or touching its hand or neck (blakemore )). this does not imply that the participants in the study had sexual thoughts about the robot or were sexually stimulated in any way, but there seemed to have been a strong tendency “to treat the robot like it had social rules that applied to it” (ibid.). these findings are consistent with assumptions from phenomenology. merleau-ponty ( ) pointed out that an “unseparated ontology” (“ontologie non séparée”) does not necessarily imply two discrete sentient bodies but may rest on any form of interaction allowing for the reversibility of the sentient and the sensed (“sensant et sensible”; ibid. ). this “indirect ontology” (“ontologie indirecte” (de saint-aubert , p. )) creates meaning from the interplay of entities lacking solid ontological ground. it can also occur between a mind and its thoughts on a (solid or imagined) object. spike jonze’s movie her ( ), in which a man falls in love with the virtual assistant on his cell phone, played convincingly on the theme that the body is not important at all when it comes to humans falling in love. further narrowing down the question of the possibility of affective relationships between humans and (sex) robots, this means that both sides of the equation—humans and robots—are to be thought of as emergent subject/objects, which, in their actual form, only come into being as contingent actants in an ad hoc “assemblage” (bennett ). not being agents in and out of themselves, they rather represent what diana coole called “agentic capacities” (coole ). they allow for the kind of performative metaphysics or “onto-epistem-ology” (barad , p. ) that lay the symbolic-material ground for an “agential realism” (barad , ). . feminist new materialism, ant, ooo, diffraction and robots western thought has settled in, well believing that humans are inherently different from everything around us. the assumption became even more powerful, when, from the th century onward, the religious framework that had governed science before, was bit by bit substituted for a secular one. soc. sci. , , scientists now no longer held that it was man’s god-given mission to “fill the earth and subdue it,” and to “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves the ground” (genesis : ), yet the cartesian disjunction of res cogitans and res extensa (reinhardt ) further entrenched the fundamental opposition between the realms of the human and the nonhuman, between subject and object (descola ). one might even go one step further and claim with bruno latour that this separation (or rather its immediate corruption) marks the very birth of modern society. latour famously defined modernity as a twofold ensemble of practices: one trying to create ontologically detached zones by processes of “cleaning” (latour b, p. ); the other fashioning hybrids (or networks) of nature and culture by a move latour calls “translation” (latour a). now the major problem, as latour describes it, lies precisely in modernity’s seeming success. the interaction of human subjects with the material world constantly generates chimeras that are neither subject nor object but something in-between—or rather both: holes in the ozone layer (latour b, p. ), speed bumps (latour , p. ), the berlin key (latour ), etc. therefore, in order to really understand our being-in-the-world, we have to consider that the world cannot be neatly divided into (human) subjects and (material) objects, but contains an ever-growing portion of hybrids or “quasi-objects” (serres ) that collapse the differentiation between the social and the material worlds, between nature and culture, between mind and matter. it is important to stress that these hybrids are not just humanized things or reified humans, but constitute an ontological order of their own. consequently, instead of analyzing our intricately tangled world through the bifocal lens of modernity’s subject–object dualism, latour calls for a three-dimensional approach, complementing the two poles of the system by hitherto forbidden interbreeding of the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard’ components of nature and culture ( b, p. ). this has severe implications for research, both in the natural sciences and the humanities. knowledge—no matter on what—becomes inextricably situated by specific “agential cut[s|” (barad , p. ). agency in such “programs of action” (ibid.) is at least partly detached from humans and instead thought of as shared by an “association of actants” (latour , p. ). ‘objects’ are no longer passively waiting for an intentional ‘subject’ to manipulate them. rather, they “mediate action” (verbeek , p. ) and thus take any notion of an individuated subject acting on equally stable matter ad absurdum. in a similar—yet not quite the same—fashion, feminist new materialism proposes a nonessentializing approach to ontology and privileges (deleuze and guattari , p. ) the production (or “enregistrement”) of the social over its construction. this (re)turn to matter originates from a critical assessment of the linguistic turn and its insistence on the prevalence of discourse over existence. karen barad thoroughly explores the “representationalist” tradition ( , p. ), describing it as resting upon three problematic separations: subject/object, representation/thing, and epistemology/ontology. taken for granted by representationalism, these separations imply the possibilities of a neutral observer position, of objective representations, and of an unobstructed access to knowledge. none of this, of course, should be taken as given. things, as we all perfectly know, all too often seem to have a mind of their own. jane bennett ( ) hits a similar vein, when she argues that matter is imbued with a vitality or liveliness allowing it to shape the ways we interact with it. she calls this capacity “thing-power”: thing-power gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience (bennett , p. xvi). notwithstanding the above, feminist new materialism does not propose a wholesale renunciation of constructionism. it rather uses it as one of its cornerstones and a counterbalance to its materialist side. that way, it both emphasizes its discontinuity with earlier materialist theories (like for example marxist historical materialism) and underscores the “co-constitution of material and discursive productions of reality” (sanzo ). in feminist new materialism, the social, the cultural, and the material are not being thought of in terms of superstructure and base but as caught in transformations and interactions that literally stop at nothing: self, matter, space, time, cause, etc.—everything is subject to constant modification, variation, and reconsideration. soc. sci. , , there are different strands of new materialism(s) that all build on latour’s seminal work which are not always easy to distinguish. i do hold, however, that they represent three clearly discernible schools of thought. actor network theory (ant) rightly proceeds from the assumption that nature and culture cannot (as in modernism’s unsuccessful attempt) be completely separated. that is why it puts such emphasis on studying hybrids (or quasi-objects) being made up of both nature and culture. object-oriented ontology (ooo), on the other hand, insists that not all entities are hybrids, claiming instead that there are objects which completely lack the ‘cultural’ element (such as the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in h o) and others that are, on the contrary, purely cultural (like the idea of a judeo-christian ‘europe’) (harman , p. ). in rejecting the idea that everything is a hybrid, ooo contends that a universal amalgamation would effectively preserve the very constituents (nature and culture) that ant tries to get rid of (harman , p. ). therefore, while contending that there are (some) hybrids, ooo warns against limiting research to network relations alone. instead, it puts some sort of a double withdrawal (physical and logical) at the base of its ontology (harman , p. ). this, however, conflates physical and phenomenological dimensions and ultimately leads to a deep “antipathy in relations in favor of the things themselves” (sheldon , p. ). feminist new materialism here adopts a more radical stance. if anything, it is relational, claiming that subjects and objects, ideas and matter, representations and things are not inhabiting clearly separable ontological spheres. where ooo disregards epistemology as a lower-level instrument that only deals with composites involving at least one human constituent, feminist new materialism stresses its indispensability for the very generation of reality. thus, similar as they may be in many respects, the three branches of new materialism differ decidedly with regard to the role they assign to the association of things and relations. ant focuses on networks and relations, ooo on things, and, most comprehensively, feminist new materialism on intra-active processes, in which relations precede their relata, which, in turn, modify these relations (and so on ad infinitum) (sheldon , p. ). crucial for this process is “that intra-actions are live” (ibid.). they do not interweave pre-existing objects, nor do they withdraw objects from our access. rather, they play on the mutual constitution of relations and relata and emphasize their simultaneous co-constitution in an eternal ouroboros. as sheldon emphatically puts it: “nature cannot preexist its construction” ( , p. ; emphasis in the original), and ontology, one may add, cannot precede epistemology. both are effects of the same process that has been described as “diffractive” by various authors (barad ; bath b; haraway , p. ). central to the metaphor is that, in optics, rays of light can ‘bend’ around the corners of an obstacle and through interferential (or diffractive) effects enter the region lying in the obstacle’s shadow. already back in , donna haraway pointed out that interference patterns differ radically from reflections (or, to use a more common term: representations). diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. a diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather map where the effects of differences appear ((haraway , p. ); emphasis added). in other words, we cannot observe diffraction where it actually originates (at the obstacle) but only where its effects become visible (in the shadow space). karen barad, building on haraway’s use of the term, employs the metaphor for describing her own methodological approach of reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter. ( . . . ) [d]iffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference (barad , p. ). in contrast to reflection, diffraction marks differences from within and sees them as part of entangled processes. therefore, it can focus on differences and relationalities rather than on sameness and mimesis. it does not require preexisting, separate entities but produces “diffraction/difference pattern[s]” by the “material practice of engagement as part of the world in its differential becoming” (ibid., p. ). coming back to the dangling possibility of sex robots and robot sex, one lesson from feminist new materialism therefore is that anthropocentrism and mimesis do not have to be the guiding principles soc. sci. , , in those robots’ construction and design. it would thus be fatal to simply abandon all definitory power to the still predominantly male-dominated disciplinary culture of the engineering sciences. instead, queer interventions on robot sex can (and should!) contribute to nonhierarchical creative and interpretive construction processes that traverse, overlap, and cut across sexual potentials without fitting into a normative unit. traversing and perforating sexual stereotypes, they might—this at least is my hope—ultimately lead to ‘better’ sex robots that increase their users’ physical and emotional pleasure but refuse fixed identity attributions. . from pygmalion to harmony to realdollx the idea of creating an artificial human-like counterpart has been a powerful topos in western literature (or, as some would have it, a “collective human obsession” (trout )) for at least two thousand years. most famously, in ovid’s metamorphoses, the cypriot sculptor pygmalion falls in love with one of his statues. after pygmalion presented his offerings to the gods during the festive days of venus, the ivory statue comes alive and pygmalion marries her. together, they have a daughter, paphos (ovid , pp. , – ). what as a short plotline sounds like a tale about love, purity, human genius, and divine intervention, at a closer look turns into a narrative about a misogynic endeavor, setting the stage for technocrats’ dreams about marrying robots as well as for the feminist critique of the very attempt to build them. today, pygmalion probably would identify as an ‘incel,’ or involuntary celibate. disappointed, afraid or repulsed by real woman and their ‘vicious nature’ (“vitiis, quae ( . . . ) menti femineae natura dedit”), he creates an ivory simulacrum that is better than the real thing. pygmalion gives his statue forms so perfect that no naturally born woman could possess (“sculpsit ( . . . ) formamque dedit, qua femina nasci nulla potest”). when he eventually falls in love with the sculpture, he must know that she is not human. still, he chooses to believe that she reciprocates his feelings. he kisses the statue and is sure his kisses are returned (“oscula dat reddique putat”). then, during a festival honoring venus, pygmalion presents his offerings to the goddess and makes it very clear that, in his view, the order of art and nature has been reversed by his craftmanship. he informs the goddess that he is determined to remain a celibate unless he is given a woman “like my ivory (virgin)” (“similis mea ( . . . ) eburnae”). accordingly, he does not just ask the gods to give him a wife, he specifically adds that they should take the statue he has made as the model after which this wife should be fashioned. there is a striking difference to other ancient myths on artists and their art. other than the grapes painted by zeuxis or dibutades’ shadow portrait of his daughter’s lover, pygmalion’s statue does not imitate anything. it does not strive to be as accurate a copy of nature as possible. on the contrary, it improves nature, restoring it the purity and virtuousness that real humans (that is: women) lack in his opinion. pygmalion’s ivory sculpture is not an image (abbild) but an archetype (urbild), a copy that precedes its original and renders any distinction between reality and representation useless, or, as baudrillard would have it, a third order “simulacrum” (baudrillard ) that brings itself into existence. just like today’s sex robots, galatea is not a simple mirror of a human, it is an interpretation of what a human could be that moves “beyond the ephemeral subject–object divide” (lee , p. ). pygmalion’s sexist escapism has inspired authors, painters, and sculptors for centuries. victor stoichita provides an extensive account of the multifold variations of the theme, from ovid right up to alfred hitchcock’s vertigo (stoichita ). the idea of the artist actually generating his future wife by the sole means of his art seems to be a widely shared fantasy. today, however, we are only two steps away from this fantasy becoming real. advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (ai) make it seem only a matter of time until we build machines that will easily pass the turing test, that will interact with humans on eye-level and that will satisfy our physical and emotional needs through a wide range of behavioral responses. already today, computers have replaced call center agents so successfully that we often unknowingly communicate with them on the phone without noticing. as algorithms advance, it will become virtually impossible to tell whether we talk to another human being or a voice from a machine. to tell the truth, we do not seem to care too much about that. thus, soc. sci. , , as far as the human pole of this kind of man–machine interaction is concerned, the difference between humans and machines already has become effectively irrelevant in many contexts. however, despite the widespread attention sex robots receive by the media, fully functional androids are still a long way off. while impressive progress was made in the field of combat robots, research on sex robotics is still in its infancy. what is currently ready to hit the market is little more than an animatronic robotic head with an interchangeable magnetic face and built in ai, mounted on a silicon doll that can be bent into the desired position but cannot move on its own. in order to avoid dents, owners are instructed to store the doll in a hanging position when not in use. this is also true for harmony and her robotic sister solana, the most advanced ‘sex robots’ to be found these days—and the two examples that hardly have been absent from any recent media coverage of the topic. their manufacturers, matt mcmullen and abbyss creations, are very straightforward as to the limits of their project. thus, the recently relaunched website of realbotix.com describes the company’s mission as follows: we’re working to create the next generation of the well-known anatomically correct realdolls, which we intend to blend with artificial intelligence, robotics, touch sensors, internal heaters, virtual and augmented reality interfaces. these new dolls will have an animated face synchronized with an application that users can talk to and interact with. the purpose behind the project is to create an illusion, or alternative to reality when it comes to a relationship with a doll. these realdolls will have the ability to listen, remember, and talk naturally, like a living person. they will have hyper-realistic features, warmth, and sensors that react to touch. when interacting with these dolls, we want users to ask themselves, “what is she thinking?” (available online: https://realbotix.com/faq). much could be said about this mission statement from a feminist point of view; however, i want to stress only a few aspects that are most relevant in our context. first, even though harmony is ‘the face’ of the public discourse on robot sex, the term ‘sex robot’ is oddly missing in the company’s communication. instead, robotics is mentioned as just one of several features that shall blend to create a doll, “users can talk to and interact with.” what harmony (or “realdollx”) really is, thus, is not a sex robot in the strict sense of the term. it is a sex doll with an animated head and artificial intelligence. that is a significant difference. a doll is only an equal counterpart, if and as long as its user actively attributes that quality to it. there is nothing inherently ‘almost human’ in it—and “doll” in fact sounds much less threatening than “robot.” accordingly, there is no such thing as a ‘campaign against sex dolls’—and it is hard to imagine one going viral the way the campaign against sex robots did. second, the purpose behind the project is explicitly described as creating an “illusion, or alternative reality”—not a new reality. asked if they think “an ai realdoll robot will ever be able to love us back,” the producers give a disarmingly honest answer: “we hope that we can at least simulate that. that’s the goal. it is our thinking that if one feels loved, then one must be loved, deeply and genuinely” (available online: https://realbotix.com/faq). love, as understood here, is not gildea’s and richardson’s “mutual, parallel and simultaneous experience” (gildea and richardson ), rather it is something happening exclusively in the eye of the beholder. freed from ontological restraints, it becomes a matter of interpretation—or, one might say: of epistemology. finally, there is this strange statement that the doll’s features are “anatomically correct” but “hyper-realistic.” anatomically correct here probably means that orifices a (male) user might want to use for sexual purposes are where he would expect them to be and share certain features with the corresponding parts of the female body. more interesting, therefore, is the aspect of hyper-realism. obviously, realbotix’ goal is not to simply depict or copy reality but to distort and to exaggerate it, and this does not have to stop at the human form and its limitations but can (and maybe should) go well beyond it. now, the dolls, on which harmony’s robotic head is to be mounted, may be impressive from an artistic perspective. from a feminist point of view, they are—there is no other way to say it—horrific. the same is true for the accompanying app that comes as a female avatar designed to serve as an interface to the robotic head. both can be ‘customized’—meaning that the client can choose from a soc. sci. , , selection of skin and lip types, labia, pubic hair (trimmed, ‘natural,’ shaved), nipple shades, breast sizes (all of them perfectly round and oddly defying gravity), and so on. currently, the selection is pretty much limited to idealized forms doing little to hide their roots in pornographic fantasies. hermaphrodite versions or ‘avatars’ are possible; however, the company clearly has boundaries as to manufacturing, for example, sex animals (lee ) or dolls representing children or celebrities. the accompanying app additionally allows one to create a “persona” that best suits the customer. here, the user can choose from a list of personality traits that affect the way the doll behaves. the number of available personality traits, however, seems to have lost some of its variability over the course of the last two years. while the prototype of the app still had eighteen qualities to choose from (“intense, unpredictable, moody, shy, jealous, insecure, intellectual, helpful, quiet, talkative, kind, innocent, sexual, adventurous, affectionate, imaginative, sense of humor, happy” (twitter )), the version is down to only twelve (“affectionate, spiritual, unpredictable, jealous, intellectual, insecure, moody, sensual, cheerful, funny, helpful, talkative” (realbotix n.d.b)). from a gender perspective, one would prefer to not even think about the heteronormative stereotyping clichés dominating the field (and its media coverage) in the first place, but again, realbotix has produced (as they call it) “the world’s finest love dolls” (realbotix.com) since . thus, they are entering the field of sex robotics not as innocent newbies but as a company that has played the field of silicon sex dolls for decades. this is where their expertise lies and this is also what largely defines their target group. therefore, i think it is a fatal mistake, when feminists discussing sex robots and robot sex take the appearance of realbotix’ dolls as a call to adopt a fundamentally negative attitude from the very start. it clearly resembles earlier feminist critiques of pornography focusing on the most shocking images available in an attempt to deny the very existence of a thing like feminist pornography (e.g., (dworkin ; morgan ; schwarzer )). also, just as back then, the critique ultimately contributes to a further solidification of moral principles building on a dualistic order of the sexes. even if the robots/dolls that are built today give only a very small group of male customers a chance to indulge in their sexual fantasies, that does not make the technology behind them a bad thing. true sexual liberation cannot stop at women (rubin ). in the long run, it must also include men and everybody between and beyond. no matter if we focus on the dolls’ exaggerated physical features or on the presumed long-term effects of sex robots on the fabric of gender relationships or on social power structures in general, confining ourselves to those aspects alone, we are negligently giving away the chance to play a part in shaping a technology with the potential of actually improving many people’s lives. pleasure is not a bad thing. and i do not think that—generally speaking—there is anything wrong with reaching it by technological means. just to give a well-documented example: the absolute number of female orgasms in the west obviously has multiplied over the last decades. this is not the least due to the increased acceptance and availability of sex toys. recent research suggests that, for example, in the u.s. today, more than one in two women owns and uses a vibrator (herbenick et al. ). when kinsey published his report in , their use was not “appreciable” and found (or admitted) by less than % of the informants. some twenty years later, the hite report showed this number to have increased to slightly above % (ibid.). from here to more than % in was a long way to go. why did it take so long? one likely reason is that product development and design were almost exclusively left to male engineers and designers. and their ideas, to put it mildly, may not always have reflected women’s ideas about what a sex toy should do and what it should look like. still in the s, vibrators seemed to fall only in one of two groups: the horribly realistic replica of a penis (remaining a niche product for a sexually adventurous subculture), or disguised as a medical product and sold euphemistically as ‘massage device.’ it was only after sex and the city’s ‘rabbit episode’ in , that—with a ‘buzz,’ so to speak—vibrators became mainstream. in a tribute to years of the western world having become a “vibrator nation” (comella ), even the conservative forbes magazine claimed that the rabbit vibrator “ushered in a new era of sexual consumerism, one in which soc. sci. , , female shoppers boldly strutted into sex-toy stores looking to purchase the vibrator they’d seen on sex and the city” (comella ). there is no question that taking vibrators out of the shadows was an important step towards female empowerment and sexual satisfaction beyond heterosexual intercourse. the rabbit and its successors helped millions of women to a better sex life and the development did not stop at the unexpected success of a single product. today, women can choose from a huge selection of vibrators in all shapes and colors in virtually any drugstore, where they are as openly on display as condoms or lubricants. there are also many other sex toys for women that simultaneously suck, push, rub, lick, vibrate and have nothing in common with the visual appearance and functionality of human genitalia, but nevertheless lead to new forms of female self-determined pleasure. for men, on the other hand, there is nothing even remotely comparable. of course, there are masturbation aids and sex dolls. however, it is hard to think of anybody wanting to be even loosely associated with them. entering the search string “masturbator for men” on the webpage of a large online shop and scrolling through the results requires both a firm trust in the good in man and a strong stomach. the image that comes to mind when we think of a person actually buying and using a product like the “missgem-silicone-lifelike-realistic doll for men” is that of a person who has serious problems. thus, there is a significant discursive imbalance regarding technological aids for sexual pleasure. whereas vibrators are widely accepted as a symbol of female self-empowerment and a liberated sexuality, sex dolls, to put it bluntly, are considered a surrogate for pitiable “loser[s]” (wennerscheid , p. ) who are afraid of real women. in movie analogies, it is lars and the real doll ( ) instead of sex and the city. the social framework the users of sex dolls inhabit is commonly considered as one of loneliness, isolation, and uninhibited consumerism. i insist that it would not have to be like that. sex robots leaving the beaten track of pornographic mimicry and sexist hyperfemininization might, in the end, equally contribute to liberated, transversal, self-empowered new forms of sexual pleasure beyond fixed heteronormative normalizations. after all, sex robots epitomize the decoupling of sexual craving from biological/social sex and/or gender and hold the potential for a radical pluralization of desire relations that no longer excludes nonmainstream forms of sexuality. to realize this potential, however, producers will eventually have to come up with some new design ideas. vibrators, as we all have learned over the last twenty years, do not have to look like penises. quite the contrary: they only became mainstream after their design had clearly moved away from naturalistic depictions of male genitalia. transferring this knowledge to the field of robot sex, the obvious question we have to ask is: why should a sex robot look like a human? today, photographs from the realdoll factory show long rows of female dolls hanging from rails on metal hooks. it looks like a scene from a pornographic slaughterhouse, an image, perfectly adding to the dystopian fears of the adversaries of robot sex. yet again, modelling bodies after male pornographic fantasies is not the only (and certainly not the best) way to design a sex robot. it is my hope that eventually producers will thoroughly reconsider their design options. starting from the scratch, they might define what the robot shall be able to do (instead of what it shall be like). if, at the end of this process, form really follows function, the result will not look anything near to today’s sex robots. not more, for sure, than today’s vibrators resemble their lifelike ancestors from the th century. the underlying technology itself is neither good nor bad. it is up to us to appropriate it and to explore its utopian potential for different nonmainstream sexual encounters between—among others—consenting humans and machines. . conclusions the critique of sex robots and robot sex is characterized by rigorous uprightness, frequently combined with prudery, moral outrage, and sometimes all-too-hasty assumptions. many of the arguments put forward against robot sex are logically unsound and can easily be interpreted contrary to the conclusions intended by their authors. if, for example, it is argued that treating robots as objects makes us more likely to objectify other humans, then one could just as convincingly reason that being soc. sci. , , able to show empathy with a machine should actually increase our empathy with our fellow human beings. in addition, if we claim that robot sex equals slavery or prostitution, we ultimately equip the robots with about just that minimal amount of ‘human-ness’ that robot sex’ critics see as a prerequisite for a truly loving relationship. on the other hand, sex robots are neither a one-size-fits-all cure for loneliness, nor are they designated sex teachers that, as levy once had it, “will turn receptive students into virtuoso lovers” and wipe bad sex from the face of the earth (levy , p. ). it is interesting to see how critics and advocates of sex robots share the same false ontological assumptions in assigning almost transcendental qualities to relational agents. in fact, sex robots may accomplish all of the above—but only as one emerging and everchanging side of the equation. feminist new materialism has convincingly argued that what a thing ultimately ‘is,’ is how it evolves from concrete intra-actions. accordingly, sex robots are neither inherently evil, nor do they necessarily add to the suppression of minorities or represent hegemonic masculinity at its worst. critics are absolutely right when they attack the way the female body is stereotypically exaggerated in the dolls and machines that currently dominate the field of sex robotics. here, some sort of counterbalancing action is indeed required. however, instead of just denouncing those design aberrations as expressions of toxic masculinity and refusing any further debate, a much more effective way to fight them would be to become actively involved in future design decisions. the sex robot industry, to this day, is almost exclusively male-dominated and characterized by a male gaze. even in pornography, the number of women in decision-making positions is higher than in sex robotics (lee ). it should not come as a surprise, therefore, that its products do not mirror the huge variability of sexual practices and desires that govern our everyday lives. the narrative of sex robots is just crossing from the realm of fiction into the material world. it is therefore all the more important for feminists and queer scholars not to refuse dialogue. it is about time to no longer leave the field to male engineers and their heteronormative fantasies but to become part of a concerted effort to explore “diffractive design” options (bath b) for sex robots from a gender-queer perspective. instead of retreating into the growlery, lamenting the dystopian ‘pygmalionization’ of gender relations and sexual practices, we should strive for a sex-positive utopian future, playing an active role in the creation of post-gender pleasure robots and doing our part in changing the narratives about sex, love, and robots. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references akrich, madeline. . the de-scription of technical objects. in shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change. edited by wiebe e. bijker and john law. cambridge: 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). mdpi st. alban-anlage basel switzerland tel. + fax + www.mdpi.com social sciences editorial office e-mail: socsci@mdpi.com www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci mdpi st. alban-anlage basel switzerland tel: + fax: + www.mdpi.com isbn - - - - 	blank page 	feminist new materialisms.pdf 	blank page university of groningen mediators as the subject of dutch biography renders, hans; veltman, david published in: biography; an interdisciplinary quarterly doi: . /bio. . important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): renders, h., & veltman, d. 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mediators as the subject of dutch biography: the year in the netherlands hans renders, david veltman biography, volume , number , , pp. - (article) published by university of hawai'i press for additional information about this article access provided at jun : gmt from university of groningen https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ biography vol. , no. © the george and marguerite simson biographical research center mediators as the subject of dutch biography the year in the netherlands hans renders and david veltman on september , , the biannual dutch biography prize was awarded to onno blom’s biography of the author jan wolkers. the list of submissions for the prize is a good way to look at the state of the art in dutch biography. using a broad concept of biography, one can say that no fewer than two original dutch biographies are published every week. we will surely miss one or two, but for the biography prize the jury could choose from a list of entries, all published in the last two years. what kind of books are these and what tendencies can be found in them? after taking a quick look at the list of nominees for the dutch biography prize, a few developments immediately come to the fore. apart from who is chosen as subject for a biography, it is clear that there is an increased effort to use sound archi- val sources as the foundation for biographical research. the market—the reader— is apparently asking for quality. there is an increasing desire, if not request, to be able to retrace the facts presented to a verifiable source. biography shares this demand for verifiable facts with journalism, two fields that always had a close rela- tionship, not only because the reader wants to discover new things, but also because of the changeability of societal views. in a biography of the dutch artist lucebert published this year, wim hazeu reveals that his subject aired hardcore anti-semitic opinions when he was nearly twenty years old. would reactions to this discovery have been different twenty years ago? also this year, biographer onno blom writes frankly about the coercive sexual behavior of the artist jan wolkers. surprisingly, this book has so far not drawn any attention in relation to the #metoo movement. the real story because we are living in a world of alternative facts, biography and journalism seem to be more relevant than ever. although many biographies of the dutch dancer and renders and veltman, the year in the netherlands spy mata hari have already been written, only recently two biographers, jessica voeten and angela dekker, have started researching in her archives, and those of the british, german, and french secret services. in moed en overmoed: leven en tijd van mata-hari, they finally tell mata hari’s real story, a story based on facts. numer- ous biographies have already been written of mata hari in which she was depicted as a victim: since she was wrongly judged as being a spy, she was put before the fir- ing squad unguilty. but in moed en overmoed, it appeared that mata hari was indeed a spy, although one of meagre quality. after all these years, some sort of correction is happening in biographies, both in their reliability and in their way of telling a story. of course, it has become easier for readers to check facts on the internet. the availability of reliable online sources must have contributed to a change in the way biographies are written. much has already been written about the dutch nineteenth century statesman johan rudolph thorbecke and his contemporary homo universalis jacob van lennep, but only now remieg aerts (author of thorbecke wil het) and marita mathijsen (jacob van lennep: een bezielde schavuit) have published biographies of these men that are sty- listically appealing as well as thoroughly researched. but there is still no reason to believe that these books are “definitive” biogra- phies, as each generation has its own demands. this can be said for biographies of literary figures, as well as for biographies of politicians. in the case of belgian biog- raphy, another factor comes into play: the language in which the book was written. until recently, the french- and dutch-speaking communities in belgium were deeply divided by mutual prejudice and incomprehension. biographies written by french-speaking authors were mistrusted by flemish readers, and the other way around. especially when the remembrance of the second world war was at stake, the critical reception of biography often made use of clichés: all flemish people were collaborators, for example, or all walloon people were part of the resistance movement. now things have changed. the list of submissions for the dutch biography prize features a well-written biography of one of the most prominent fascist leaders in belgium: léon degrelle: de führer uit boullion by bruno cheyns. cheyns is a young historian, writing in dutch, although his subject was francophone. in , degrelle’s legal file was the last one under the scrutiny of the board of registration and domains, responsible for the seizure of the estates of former nazi leaders in belgium. degrelle successfully escaped to spain after the second world war, where he continued to promote his extreme-right opinions until his death in . this shows something about the way the repressie or punishment of former collabora- tors was accomplished after the war. the remembrance of this punishment remained an open wound in belgian society for almost fifty years. degrelle’s biogra- phy shows how the two language communities try to converge in remembering the war. biography vol. , no. , made-up stories oorlogsouders by isabel van boetzelaar is a recent example that shows the gap between biographies that make use of serious research and the half-hearted chroni- cles, memoirs, autobiographies, or biographical books that are commissioned. when the first edition of oorlogsouders appeared in , various newspapers in holland immediately wrote that this family history was based upon “alternative facts.” the biographer tried to make us believe a fabricated story about her father’s involvement in the resistance movement. in fact, her father was sentenced to life- long imprisonment for collaboration but was released after ten years. the revised version of van boetzelaer’s book, published in , was still worthy of criticism in many respects. this was mentioned in the press again. in the periodical vrij neder- land, founded during the war as a resistance newspaper, maarten van voorst tot voorst wrote that in the revised version, “it is still not possible for the reader to distuingish between truth and fiction.” but van boetzelaer’s book is part of a trend. in , many biographies were written by a family member of the subject. “my family, thank god, they are illiter- ate,” the flemish author willem elsschot answered, when the literary critic garmt stuiveling asked him how members of his family reacted to the way he had por- trayed them in the roman-à-clef pensioen. especially when a grandfather or grand- mother is still alive, the relationship between a biographer and his subject often becomes difficult. however, when looking at the list of submissions to the dutch biography prize, another development becomes clear: more biographies tend to be written by a family member who positions themselves at a critical distance from their subjects, instead of admiring them unconditionally. look for example at the biography of isay rottenberg, a jewish manufacturer of cigars who in took over a factory in the german town of döbeln. the book, titled de sigarenfabriek van isay rottenberg, was written by rottenberg’s grandchil- dren, hella and sandra rottenberg. in their history of the cigar factory, instead of focusing on the heroic status their grandfather must have had in their eyes, they pay most attention to the way the manufacturer became subject to the difficult political circumstances of the time. by doing so, the story goes beyond an idiosyncratic fam- ily history based on uncontrollable sources, and isay rottenberg gives us an unusu- al image of the contradictory economic policy of the nazis at the onset of the second world war. making a deal when a biography is written by a family member, the author sometimes gets access to archives that remain closed to the rest of the world. but more often than not families try to make a deal with the biographer, asking them to write a story that cannot be verified. for example, the lawyer yehudi moszkowicz wrote de toga van mijn vader, a faithful account of the downfall of his father robert, who worked as an renders and veltman, the year in the netherlands attorney until he was disbarred because of his addiction to drugs. although mozs- kowicz spoke to many family members for his book, he said he “could only relate to his own experiences” (romanillos). naturally, moszkowicz will never be able to fully chart the grim circumstances that led to his father’s perdition. also this year, the historian wiebe de graaf succeeded in writing the biogra- phy of his great grandfather, the communist taco kuiper. in taco kuiper en de dood, de graaf portrays kuiper in such a way that we can learn something about the com- munist mentality during the aftermath of the second world war and the onset of the cold war. kuiper’s suicide in is placed in the context of a large group of people who had the feeling they were on the wrong side of history. the biography tries to give an answer to the question of why so many intellectuals took their lives in . it appeared that there were multiple reasons: they were afraid of the future, afraid that their jewish beliefs or communist convictions would still not be accept- ed after the war. de graaf shows that the psychopathological explanations that were often given for this mass suicide were too simplistic: not every intellectual suffered from a depression in . in the same vein, the touching story of marcel langedijk’s alcoholic brother rises above the ordinary addiction narrative. langedijk’s book gelukkig hebben we de foto’s nog can be read as a search for the motives of young men to end their lives by asking for euthanasia. langedijk describes the euthanasia of his brother mark in the form of an eyewitness account, in which all people involved in the process could have their say. for example, langedijk meticulously described two family gatherings, during which the premature death was discussed. how could this fami- ly cope with mark’s decision that he did not want to be cured from his alcoholism anymore? by choosing this outsider’s perspective, the book does not need to tell too much about the personal motivation of mark’s death wish. ultimately, the biog- raphy gives cause for introspection, focusing on the question what it means to be a man in this period of time. some people have a difficult time when these kinds of first-hand accounts are published. jewish families, for example, have sometimes protested when the names of their deceased family members have been mentioned on public occasions, such as war memorials and digital commemorative lists. this was also the case after the publication of the biography of the dutch poet and resistance hero jan campert in . historians and journalists took great pains to uncover the identity of the man who was smuggled over the belgian border by campert in . when the name of this man was finally discovered in the archives of a jewish organization in breda, in the south of holland, it appeared that this organization simply did not want to release his name. this was of course good practice on the part of this organiza- tion—everyone has their own part to play in the historical process of remembering and forgetting. but the biographer has an ethical responsibility, too—to his profes- sionalism and to the truth. after the publication of the biography, the name of frans van raalte was finally added to the digital monument of the jewish commu- nity in the netherlands. biography vol. , no. , remarkably, fourteen years after this release, van raalte’s name was given without footnote in the biography of campert’s son, the poet remco campert. for this book, titled een knipperend ogenblik: portret van remco campert, biographer mirjam van hengel made use of her extensive talks with the author, who is still living at the age of . in the interviews van hengel gave surrounding the publication of her biography, she repeatedly said she deliberately avoided using footnotes, since these would make her book “too scientific.” as a result, it is unclear whether the book contains facts or just the opinions of the biographer or her subject. mediators one other trend has to be mentioned when looking at the biographies that were submitted for the dutch biography prize: an interest in people who have served as mediators. no less than fifteen titles are about figures who played an important role as distributors of facts and opinions. the reason still has to be exam- ined, but it is striking that so many biographies have been published of editors ( johan polak, rob van gennep, emmanuel querido), journalists (louis frequin, rie brusse), politicians (max van der stoel, marinus van der goes van naters), and other mediators (christiaan snouck hurgronje, frederik ruysch). is it a coinci- dence that people acting as gatekeepers of facts and information have become pop- ular subjects among biographers? so far, there has been no end to the stream of biographies about people respon- sible for cultural exchange between one country and another. a recent example is the biography of jan greshoff, written by annemiek recourt under the title moralist van de ontrouw: jan greshoff ( – ). “when does literature become politics?” recourt asks herself many times in this biography. a good question, after her extensive tour through the life of this poet, critic, editor, and art lover, who actively wanted to protect the world against the increasing influence of ordinary people. but greshoff was also a prolific journalist, a profession that surely required him to be aware of the problems of the street. he worked for the newspaper de telegraaf, was editor-in-chief of the nieuwe arnhemsche courant, and was in charge of various magazines. he was living in holland at that time. funnily, recourt mocks greshoff ’s love for various dance forms just emerging at the time, like the foxtrot and the boogie-woogie. were these not a little bit at odds with his distaste for the masses? he often visited a dance hall in the town of laren, where he now and then met another practitioner of modern dance: piet mondriaan. greshoff moved to brusssels, where he became a correspondent for a number of dutch periodicals. he started to promote fine printing and bibliophile editions. he defended the taste of the aristocracy, of the elite. and more importantly, he was a gatekeeper for the arts, both literature and painting, from belgium, france, england, and south africa, where he emigrated at the dawn of the second world war. as a result of his mediating, generations of dutch writers became interested in renders and veltman, the year in the netherlands examples from abroad. the arts are also the focus of manu van der aa’s tatave!, a biography of the belgian art dealer and collector paul-gustave van hecke. the way van hecke posi- tioned himself as a mediator contributed to the success of the expressionist art of the village sint-martens-lathem, near ghent. artists living in this community, such as albert servaes and gust de smet, were deliberately kept at a distance by van hecke from art centers such as brussels or antwerp. in doing so, van hecke wanted to preserve the “arcadian,” “primitive,” and “honest” impulses in their paint- ing. van hecke offered patronage to various lathem artists, which allowed them to make a living and supply van hecke’s gallery sélection with new paintings on a regular basis. van hecke was thus able to keep on presenting the lathem school as a group of primitive, honest painters, proud of their flemish land. the bilingual van hecke was responsible for many cultural transfers between the two language communities in belgium. but he was not only a mediator between different parts of the art scene in belgium; he also claimed a prominent role in fields as diverse as politics, cinema, journalism, and the publishing world. until van hecke’s biography was published, his role as a mediator had been mostly over- looked by traditional historiographies of each of these fields. due to the financial crisis of the s, van hecke was forced to sell large parts of his collection of expressionist and surrealist paintings. at that time, he started to see the art of the lathem school as part of the unique character of flemish culture. when the nazis occupied belgium, they also tried to involve lathem artists in their call for a powerful art, capable of capturing the soul of the flemish people. this development can be seen as a negative result of van hecke’s mediating role. as he was omnipresent in the art scene of the interwar years, the artists in his school largely remained dependent on their master. for some of them, this caused intellec- tual short-sightedness, and some even suffered from an inferiority complex. many painters from van hecke’s group, including albert servaes and prosper de troyer, became collaborators once the nazi regime took over in belgium. the three developments that we derived from the list of nominees for the dutch biography prize—the urge to tell a real, verifiable story, the rise of biographies writ- ten by a family member of the subject, and the so-called “mediator biography”— show a striking resemblance. biographies have to work with facts, but they also have to fit facts into a structure and an interpretation. and before you begin to write such a structured story, it is necessary to understand the facts. by choosing a family member or a mediator as a subject, it appears that a biographer can still relate to the historical developments in which he or she played a role in an objective way. this implies that biography is not just an accumulation of facts, but it is about the rela- tion between those facts. the so-called “factual biography” is a euphemism for a poor biography. the late dutch editor martin ros called this the “beaver,” as opposed to the “butterfly” biography: the beaver collects facts and lists them like an accountant, whereas the butterfly uses facts but eventually reflects on them and transforms them into a convincing story. biography vol. , no. , works cited aa, manu van der. tatave! paul-gustave van hecke: kunstpaus, modekoning , salonsocialist. lannoo, . aerts, remieg. thorbecke wil het: biografie van een staatsman. prometheus, . blom, onno. het litteken van de dood: de biografie van jan wolkers. de bezige bij, . boetzelaer, isabel van. oorlogsouders: een familiekroniek over goed en fout in twee adellijke families. just publishers, . cheyns, bruno. léon degrelle: de führer uit bouillon. vrijdag, . elsschot, willem. pensioen. van kampen, . graaf, wiebe de. taco kuiper en de dood, – . spectrum, . hazeu, wim. lucebert. de bezige bij, . hengel, mirjam van. een knipperend ogenblik: portret van remco campert. de bezige bij, . langedijk, marcel. gelukkig hebben we de foto’s nog : de zelfgekozen dood van mijn broer. q, . mathijsen, marita. jacob van lennep: een bezielde schavuit. balans, . moszkowicz, yehudi. de toga van mijn vader. thomas rap, . recourt, annemiek. moralist van de ontrouw: jan greshoff, – . van oorschot, . renders, hans. wie weet slaag ik in de dood: biografie van jan campert. de bezige bij, . romanillos, laura. “advocaat yehudi moszkowicz schrijft autobiografie.” ad/utrechts nieuwsblad, oct. . rottenberg, hella, and sandra rottenberg. de sigarenfabriek van isay rottenberg : de verborgen geschiedenis van een joodse amsterdammer in nazi-duitsland. atlas contact, . voeten, jessica, and angela dekker. moed en overmoed: leven en tijd van mata-hari. atlas contact, . voorst tot voorst, maarten van. “verstoppertje spelen met een fout familieverleden.” vrij nederland, may , https://www.vn.nl/verstoppertje-spelen-met-een-fout-famil ieverleden/. accessed feb. . hans renders is director of the biography institute at the university of groningen, the netherlands. he has authored and co-authored many publications in the field of literary his- tory and biography, including major biographies of the poets jan hanlo and jan campert. his newest book appeared in , written in cooperation with nigel hamilton: the abc of modern biography (amsterdam up, ). david veltman is a phd student at the biography institute at the university of groningen, and he is working on a biography of the flemish artist felix de boeck ( – ). togeth- er with hans renders and madelon franssen, david organized the conference different lives: global perspectives on biography in public cultures and societies in . tightening sanctions for physician sexual misconduct e cmaj | november , | volume | issue © joule inc. or its licensors a lberta has become the latest jurisdiction to propose stricter sanctions for physicians found guilty of sexual misconduct with patients. health minister sarah hoffman intro- duced a bill recently that would impose mandatory penalties, require more trans- parency from regulatory colleges and increase support for victims. “women, and all albertans, deserve to feel safe when they put their trust in health care professionals,” hoffman said in a statement. “for too long, albertans were left in the dark about disciplinary histories, as we continued to hear disturb- ing stories of offending professionals being allowed to practise again.” under the proposed legislation, doc- tors or other health professionals found to have committed sexual abuse will have their licences revoked. a finding of sexual misconduct will result in licence suspen- sion. no application for reinstatement could be made for five years. regulatory colleges would be required to maintain public websites that include their mem- bers’ disciplinary history for sexual abuse and sexual misconduct, including condi- tions on practice permits. steve buick, a spokesman for the college of physicians and surgeons of alberta, says the college is on board with the new legislation. “we’ve been con- sulted and had substantial input, and the legislation is well aligned with our own position,” he said. the college already posts the results of disciplinary hearings on its website and has recently been pushing for stiffer pen- alties for sexual misconduct. for example, in a recent hearing a doctor was found guilty of professional misconduct, includ- ing inappropriate sexual relations with patients. the college wanted his licence to be revoked, but the hearing tribunal instead suspended him for months and placed restrictions on his practice permit. the college is appealing the decision and pushing for revocation. “we are taking the very rare step of appealing our own tribu- nal,” said buick. alberta is not alone in pursuing stiffer penalties for sexual misconduct. hoffman’s bill is modelled on a similar law in ontario that came into effect in may , making those two provinces the only ones to introduce laws aimed specifically at pro- tecting patients from sexual abuse. a bill signed into law in california in sep- tember requires doctors on disciplinary probation for sexual misconduct and other offences to notify their patients, making it the first state in the us to intro- duce that requirement. jerry hill, the california state senator who sponsored the bill, says proactive patient notification is necessary because % of physicians put on probation in california reoffend. many are sole practi- tioners with no one to ensure they follow the terms of their sentence. the medical board of california already has an online news tightening sanctions for physician sexual misconduct n cite as: cmaj november ; :e - . doi: . /cmaj. - posted on cmajnews.com on nov. , . patients in physician waiting rooms often have no idea about the disciplinary histories of the doctors they’re about to see. d m ep ho to gr ap hy /i st oc k https://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xid= c e d fd- b a- fd-a d f f c b c http://www.cpsa.ca/wp-content/uploads/ / /news-release_dr.-maritz.pdf n ew s cmaj | november , | volume | issue e registry that lists when and why doctors are on probation, but few people check it. “it takes a long time, and no one looks up their doctor,” says hill. “they don’t know how, and medicine is such a well- respected profession that they don’t think to ask the question.” it’s something hill now does as a matter of course, for both himself and his family, and he dis- covered that his daughter’s physician has been accused of prescribing opioids improperly. that kind of mandatory notification has not caught on in canada, though regu- latory colleges have the power to require it if deemed necessary. it is used occasion- ally in alberta, said buick. but cases that would warrant patient notification are rare, according to dr. ed schollenberg, registrar of the college of physicians and surgeons of new brunswick. a physician who committed a serious sexual offence would likely lose their licence, and a doc- tor on suspension is not likely to return to work soon, “so the question is kind of moot,” he said. new brunswick sees so few cases of sexual misconduct that the issue has not come up, he added. besides, there appears to be little demand for more proactive notification in the province. in one recent case involving an affair between a doctor and patient, there was a huge backlash in the community over the physician’s sus- pension. “requiring public notification is a real threshold to cross,” he said. dr. marie bismark, who studies law and public health at the university of mel- bourne in australia, says informing patients of disciplinary actions against their phys- icians should be thought of in the same way as getting informed consent for sur- gical procedures. “from a patient’s per- spective, is the fact that a doctor had previ- ous disciplinary problems as important as the risk of a rare complication in surgery? i’d say the answer is yes, and it may be more important,” she said. the shift toward stricter punishments for sexual misconduct and more transpar- ency is part of a broader change in med- ical practice, says bismark, driven in part by a greater awareness of the problems with sexual harassment and abuse in soci- ety. senator hill agrees. this was his third attempt to get his bill passed, and he says the rise of the #metoo movement and the conviction of dr. larry nassar for the abuse of hundreds of young girls as team doctor for usa gymnastics played major roles in its success. brian owens, st. stephen, nb microsoft word - ma_lisa hermanns.docx masterarbeit / master’s thesis titel der masterarbeit / title of the master‘s thesis “even if patriarchal sociopathy is more pervasive than we like to imagine, it can be defeated“ - #metoo as contentious politics: feminist critical discourse analysis of online articles from to verfasst von / submitted by lisa hermanns angestrebter akademischer grad / in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master (ma) wien, / vienna, studienkennzahl lt. studienblatt / degree programme code as it appears on the student record sheet: ua studienrichtung lt. studienblatt / degree programme as it appears on the student record sheet: individuelles masterstudium global studies – a european perspective betreut von / supervisor: ao. univ.-prof. mag. dr. eva flicker 	 	 	 	 	 masterarbeit / master thesis titel der masterarbeit /title of the master thesis “even if patriarchal sociopathy is more pervasive than we like to imagine, it can be defeated“ - #metoo as contentious politics: feminist critical discourse analysis of online articles from to verfasser /author lisa hermanns angestrebter akademischer grad / academic degree aspired master (ma) wien, / vienna, studienkennzahl / degree programme code: ua studienrichtung / degree programme: individuelles masterstudium global studies – a european perspective betreuer/supervisor: ao. univ.-prof. mag. dr. eva flicker 	 	 content abstract	........................................................................................................................................................	 	 . introduction	.......................................................................................................................................	 	 .	why	#metoo	is	feminist	..................................................................................................................	 	 . state of the art	..............................................................................................................................	 	 . social movement theories	.........................................................................................................................	 	 . feminist social movement theories	......................................................................................................	 	 . digital social movements and #metoo	..............................................................................................	 	 . methodology/approach	..........................................................................................................	 	 . feminist standpoint and research ethic	...........................................................................................	 	 . feminist critical discourse analysis	..................................................................................................	 	 . data collection, sampling, analysis	..................................................................................................	 	 . the concept of contentious politics	..........................................................................	 	 . #metoo as contentious politics in the us	.................................................................	 	 . bases	.........................................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	contention,	collective	action	and	politics	..............................................................................................	 	 . . 	actors	and	identities	........................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	social	movement	base	....................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	performances	and	repertoires	...................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	institutions	...........................................................................................................................................................	 	 . 	explanatory	concepts	.......................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	sites	.........................................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	conditions	............................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	outcomes	..............................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	regimes	.................................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	mechanisms	.........................................................................................................................................................	 	 . . 	processes	...............................................................................................................................................................	 	 . conclusion	..........................................................................................................................................	 	 references	..............................................................................................................................................	 	 appendix	.....................................................................................................................................................	 	 	 	 abstract	 #metoo stirred the debate about sexual harassment and abuse and its normalization in society. this examination of #metoo follows the actors, mobilization and trajectory of this latest instance of women’s issues going viral. while the hashtag spread globally and throughout many realms, this investigation is focused on the developments in the us from its beginning in october to july , the end of this research. the application of charles tilly and sidney tarrow’s theory of contentious politics provides insights into #metoo and enables the (in)validation of their theory for online contention at the same time. a selection of articles from the new york times supports the theory-testing and portrays the debate #metoo caused in a leading online newspaper. given the overview gained, #metoo and online activism in general are evaluated on their usability to further feminist causes towards gender equality. central outcomes are not only the validation of the theory for online contention, but the mainstreaming of discourse on sexual harassment and abuse as well as beginning changes in the us judiciary on the topic. #metoo regte die debatte über sexuelle belästigung und sexuellen missbrauch und dessen normalisierung in der gesellschaft an. diese untersuchung von #metoo folgt den akteur*innen, der mobilisierung und dem verlauf dieser jüngsten instanz der weitläufigen debatte feministischer themen. während sich der hashtag weltweit und in vielen bereichen ausbreitete, konzentriert sich diese forschungsarbeit auf die entwicklungen in den usa von seinem aufkommen im oktober bis zum ende meiner forschung im juli . die anwendung von charles tilly und sidney tarrows theorie der streitbaren politik bietet einblicke in #metoo und ermöglicht gleichzeitig die (in)validierung ihrer theorie für online-konflikte. eine auswahl von artikeln aus der new york times unterstützt die theoretische untersuchung und porträtiert die debatte, die #metoo in einer führenden online-zeitung ausgelöst wurde. angesichts des gewonnenen Überblicks werden #metoo- und online-aktivismus im allgemeinen auf ihren nutzen für weitere feministische anliegen hin zur gleichstellung der geschlechter bewertet.	 zentrale ergebnisse sind nicht nur die validierung der theorie für online-konflikte, sondern auch die einbeziehung des diskurses über sexuelle belästigung und sexuellen missbrauch sowie der beginn von Änderungen in der us-justiz zu diesem thema. 	 	 . introduction the connection between the online and the offline world sometimes seems blurry. the term ‘visual reality’ suggests that experiences online somehow happen outside of actual reality. in october , however, the rift between online and offline world was crossed with the help of a hashtag unifying the offline experiences of countless women and some men in an online collection. hashtags are shared terms to help searching for social media content and collecting related posts, creating online debates anyone can join anywhere by using the relevant hashtag (natividad , ). the hollywood actress alyssa milano initiated #metoo in october after a scandal centered on the film producer harvey weinstein became public through investigations by the new york times. weinstein allegedly sexually harassed and abused women who worked for him over decades and sealed non-disclosure agreements with them if they sued him (kantor & twohey ). the accusations against weinstein unleashed a chain reaction in which popular hollywood actresses not only accused weinstein but also a number of other powerful men in the industry of sexual harassment and abuse (kantor and abrams ). milano then suggested in a twitter post on october , that all women who experienced sexual harassment and abuse should respond with #metoo to the post to show the incomprehensible magnitude of the problem of sexual harassment. milano was, however, not the first to deal with the topic of sexual harassment and abuse on social media. the social organizer tarana burke founded the ‘metoo’ movement already in as a platform for women of color who experienced sexual harassment and abuse. burke’s intention was to bring women with similar experiences together to heal. she is still active with her platform today (jaffe , ). the reactions to milano’s call on social media were overwhelming and certainly underlined her claim that this would demonstrate how big the problem of sexual harassment is, especially for women (khomami ). while #metoo was initiated in the us, the hashtag gained global prominence, e.g. in india, myanmar (kristof ) and china (hernández and zhao ). not only did many women from all kinds of background engage in the online debate but they also developed locally adjusted variants of the hashtag like #balancetonporc (engl.: “name your pig”) in france and #quellavoltache (engl.: “this time when”) in italy (j. bennett ). #metoo summarizes a wide range of degrading and abusive experiences from sexual harassment to rape. victims of all forms of such behavior joined in the hashtag, demonstrating the detrimental effect that gender oppression has on the treatment of women, and some men. 	 	 drawing a line between the different forms of sexual harassment and abuse is difficult and often hampers their legal prosecution (gash and harding ). yet, it is not necessary to make such a distinction for the purpose of this research; for one because all these experiences are valid and at most uncomfortable for victims. furthermore, their exemplification of the magnitude of oppressive behavior against women and some men justifies the collective outrage of #metoo as well as an investigation of the same. as the magnitude of sexual harassment became visible online, #metoo continued to gain prominence and is today, almost two years later, still discussed, written about, and the reason why laws are adjusted and people start to look differently at the issue of sexual harassment and abuse. incidents such as the all-male nominees for the best director award at the golden globes (smith ), and the numerous counter-reactions focusing on threatened masculinity and worries about a prohibitive atmosphere for men to flirt with women fostered #metoo’s relevance for the wider discourse of women’s position in society, ranging from equal pay over care work to the debate of toxic masculinity. although #metoo represents experiences of individual women and is thus a narrative of the micro-level gender hierarchies playing out in society, the fact that all participating women endure similar experiences as their everyday reality and the collective size of their posts points at the macro structure underlying sexual harassment (gash and harding ). feminist researchers of many disciplines have problematized and analyzed this structure long before #metoo (allen ; butler ; collins ; gill ; schuster ). the way sexual harassment and abuse is often accepted with a shrug demonstrates the naturalization of a gendered social hierarchy that allows men to treat women in disrespectful ways and even harm them. #metoo spreading globally supports the assumption that variants of such a gendered hierarchy exist everywhere in the world. the gendered structures of oppression and of opportunity have caused #metoo and led to women being its main constituency. even though i avoid terming #metoo a movement, it fits some of the definitions of women’s movements (ferree & mueller , f) and #metoo follows the tradition of former women’s movements, even though it should not be measured with the same standards (gash & harding , ). i elaborate on the terminologies of movement and women’s movement in chapter . women’s movements are 																																																								 i use the term ‘sexual harassment and abuse’ instead of shortened versions such as ‘sexual harassment’ in this thesis in order to stress that experiences of sexually degrading behaviour occurs in a wide range of severity. all these experiences are rooted in social structures based on a gender hierarchy. all forms are inacceptable and should be fought and abolished altogether. 	 	 not necessarily feminist (ferree & mueller , ), however, i define #metoo as feminist for the purpose of my research because #metoo criticizes the effects of an underlying gendered social hierarchy in the everyday lives of women and some men and aims at changing that structure. i elaborate on this in chapter . the speed and broadness with which #metoo gained prominence is puzzling: the problems of a gendered hierarchy in society have been discussed for a long time and sexualized and disrespectful treatment of women justified by such a hierarchy is not a new phenomenon. yet, that a new form of social activism concerning women’s issues begins online might not be surprising as the internet’s and online communications’ relevance grows constantly. however, the amount of participants and their readiness to share their experiences suggests that #metoo was the opportunity for complaints fuelled by long built-up anger and disappointment about society’s dealing with sexual harassment and abuse. why was it in october that a public outcry against sexual harassment took its form in a hashtag? and why have previous hashtags, which have also been termed feminist like #yesallwomen (rodino-colocino ) not steered similar levels of participation and debate? in #metoo, the participants demand both attention and a change of attitudes concerning sexual harassment and abuse. the hashtag is a coordinated effort in that it is specifically used to show the magnitude of the problem on behalf of women experiencing sexual harassment and abuse. governments are involved because they sustain and justify the existing gendered hierarchy that allows discrimination of women; they are thus a target of #metoo on the structural level. such phenomena that involve collective claim making, contentious action and making demands for change are often categorized as (social) movements, revolutions, nationalism or the like (tilly & tarrow , ). ample theories explaining their origins, developments and outcomes exist, some also covering the relatively new form of online contention. i choose the theory of contentious politics developed by charles tilly and sidney tarrow to analyze #metoo. contentious politics is a rather open concept inviting the analysis of all kinds of contention without compulsorily categorizing them; it describes “interactions in which actors make claims bearing on other actors’ interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims or third parties” (tilly & tarrow , ). contentious politics, even though a concept applicable to many forms of contention due to its focus on mechanisms and processes rather than criteria categorizing different forms of contention, has not been applied to online contention yet. tarrow, updating his and tilly’s co- 	 	 authored monograph in a second edition after tilly’s passing, reflects on the relevance of the internet for contentious politics but only briefly applies the concept. by applying their theory to #metoo, i contribute to its (in)validation for online contention: my thesis furthers the existing research in that it adds another layer of examples for mechanisms and processes of contention specifically concerning online contention identified by tilly and tarrow. it (in)validates their theory for an even broader array of contention and contributes to update it to contemporarily relevant events in light of the growing importance of social interaction online. my leading research question therefore is: in how far is contentious politics applicable to online contention and do the same mechanisms and processes work in online as well as offline contention? two sub-questions nuance this endeavor: first, which aspects of contentious politics are especially relevant in online contention and for #metoo and why? second, and subsequently, can the concepts of contentious politics be improved for their application to online contention? the research results should nuance the concepts of tilly and tarrow and thereby further a better understanding of modern online contention. additionally, i conduct my research on #metoo with the goal of contributing to the political causes of feminist women’s movements to challenge women’s structural oppression by men (ferree & mueller , ) and my personal aspiration is to provide research useful to future feminist contention. another sub-question i engage with is thus how online contention can effectively help feminist causes. by shedding light on the mechanisms and processes enabling #metoo’s large scale, i hope to provide incentives for future feminist movements on how to employ online contention to the best use for feminist causes. due to #metoo’s recentness, research addressing it is limited so far and the relative scarcity of research from a feminist perspective specifically on online contention presents itself as a gap in the literature regarding the importance of online interaction today. as my first goal is to apply the theory of contentious politics on #metoo to investigate its applicability to online contention, the focus of the thesis is not an empirical investigation of #metoo but a theoretical engagement. i support my theoretical investigations with an exemplary selection of media to illustrate #metoo’s development while going through the different theoretical concepts of contentious politics. i draw on newspaper articles as media examples from the new york times (nyt), a lead medium in the us. an exemplary choice of media does not provide a representative analysis of #metoo; however, since contentious politics has not been applied to online phenomena, my thesis provides a first attempt at applying the theory. my analysis covers the time period from october when #metoo 	 	 began until july , when i stopped gathering data for this thesis. an inherent limitation is #metoo’s continuation at the time of writing and its still unfolding consequences. i focus on #metoo and its reception in the us because it originated and spread from there and to offer a structured and concise application of the theory. this implies to omit an international perspective that would not only provide a wider intersectional perspective but also underline the globalism of the structural problem of sexual harassment and abuse. for the analysis of online newspaper articles, i employ the method of feminist critical discourse analysis (fcda). a combination of the contentious politics approach with fcda suggests itself because both the theoretical and the methodological approach enable a critical assessment of both #metoo itself and simultaneously focus on the performative possibilities it offers (lazar ; tilly and tarrow ). in particular, the explicitly political nature of fcda and its social emancipatory goals fit my intention to provide a useful analysis of online activism for practical purposes for feminist causes. i rely on michelle m. lazar’s approach to fcda, where she defines discourse as a socially constitutive signifying practice (lazar , ). my feminist perspectives as well as my background in political science, sociology and gender studies inform my analysis. by writing from a feminist standpoint, research is not simply a matter of stating facts. as a woman, human being and researcher, i identify with the political goals of feminism to challenge women’s structural oppression by men (ferree & mueller , ). this is not to say that i obscure any results to that end but rather that it is on the one hand a personal bias and on the other a conscious acknowledgement that i work within structures that systematically suppress women’s views; due to the ever-present influence of these social structures, entirely neutral or objective research is not possible but is always conducted with the background of these structures. in consciously researching from and for a female perspective, my aim is to contribute to a more nuanced view on feminist contention and by analyzing #metoo as an online phenomenon to demonstrate its potential for future feminist endeavors. my research is further impacted by my academic background in political science with a focus on european studies, enabling me to research #metoo from a trans-disciplinary perspective. regarding my personal background, my inquiries can only reveal a part of the story that #metoo presents; as a white educated woman from germany i cannot assume to know what sexual harassment and abuse mean for women (and men) whose identities situate them differently on the intersectional spectrum of marginalization than me. previous online 	 	 debates on harassment and abuse such as #yesallwhitewomen have already shown that the specificities of the experiences of people less structurally privileged than white women paradoxically often are the most visible spokespeople and simultaneously ignored and even diminished in the public discourse (baer ; rodino-colocino ). further, conducting research on #metoo in the us from a european perspective can both be an asset and a liability in that it offers insights from a less directly invested perspective while the distance i conduct my research from could also lead to the unconscious omission of important aspects. the scope of the master thesis in general as well as the still unfolding consequences of #metoo are another limitation. although i am not able to judge the success of #metoo eventually, the theory-testing and discovery of mechanisms leading to #metoo as it is now provide insights into its dynamics that are useful both for further academic research as well as practical issues for feminist causes. my research can only be one out of many contributions to the discussion of #metoo and how to employ online strategies such as usage of hashtags to advance the goals of a feminism that makes the world better for everyone, and not just for those already privileged. in the next chapter, to set direction for the remainder of the thesis, i argue that #metoo is feminist, first, because it gives the phenomenon itself a status and connected meaning and second, to justify the intended usefulness to feminist causes of this thesis. i then provide an overview of social movement literature, concluding with the state of the art on online movements and hashtag activism. next, i detail my methodological approach and introduce the theory of contentious politics in detail. i then apply the concepts of contentious politics to #metoo, including an excursus from online newspaper articles to exemplify the backlash against #metoo based on a video advertisement and the reactions to it. lastly, i conclude with a summary of my observations. .	why	#metoo	is	feminist	 my analysis of #metoo with the concept of contentious politics is not predisposed to judge whether #metoo is feminist or not as contention politics is not concerned with categorizing or analyzing ideologies. an analysis helpful to feminist causes as a goal of my thesis therefore warrants a contextualization in feminist debates prior to the application of the theory. i argue that #metoo is feminist in the following and show the relevance of #metoo for feminist causes in light of current debates on feminism in gender studies. to that end, i point to three 	 	 problems that feminism in its different forms aims to solve and relate them to #metoo: the gendered power structure in patriarchal societies; accommodating the marginalization women experience through different vectors of oppression such as race and class; and the growing individualization of society. a gendered power structure determining the ways in which most societies interact today is a common understanding among feminists (butler ; connell ). this power structure is based on a distinction of people by their gender and assigns unequal positions to women and men, establishing a binary gender order for which any other gender than female and male falls outside the norm. in this system of hegemony, where a group of leaders acts in ways that reproduce their dominant position by cultural power and authority, men dominate women. the acknowledgment of a gendered power structure that oppresses women and benefits men should, however, not obscure that feminism, at least the definitions employed in this thesis, generally aim at making life better for everyone. a strong point of such a form of feminism is to acknowledge that patriarchal structures constitute a hardship for many men as well. even though all men benefit from the patriarchal dividend they gain from the systematic oppression of women, not every individual man holds the same amount of power over every individual woman. further, not all men possess the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity such as physical strength, which creates a system of social pressure (connell , ). despite a common understanding that feminism is based on a political standpoint that acknowledges this structural oppression of women as a group and explicitly aims at challenging and changing the existing gender hierarchy it is rather useful to speak of feminisms than feminism (basu ; ferree and mueller ; martin ). the gendered power structure is not the only hegemonic social system oppressing women and others. kimberlé crenshaw, feminist law scholar, developed the concept of intersectionality in to describe a persons experience of oppression by several vectors of social hierarchy at the same time (crenshaw ). judith butler, philosopher and theoretical feminist, built on crenshaw’s work and points out the importance of bringing the struggles against different systems of oppression such as gender, class and race together. butler emphasizes that feminism tries to achieve political representation for the subjects it speaks for, namely women. yet, as much as we witness the oppression of women as a group in the patriarchal structures of society based on the gender binary constructed by the same patriarchal structures, we can neither speak of a universal patriarchy nor of women as the universal 	 	 subject of feminism: any woman faces individual problems because her assigned gender is not the only element that defines her identity; other historically constituted systems of oppression like race and class co-determine an individual’s position in society. this implies that feminist emancipation from oppressive structures must regard the diverse identities that constitute its subjects (butler , - ). this focus on uniting oppressed groups is referred to as third-wave feminism (schuster ). the waves concept describes periods during which feminist activity was focused on different topics ranging from the suffragette movement around to today’s discussions about postfeminism; it is a rather eurocentric perspective on feminist history. gill identifies several meanings of postfeminism: it can mean a backlash to feminist goals; any form of feminism that developed after the second wave; a feminism aligned with other post- movements as an epistemologically new start; it can imply connections to the third wave; and it can emphasize feminism’s intertwinement with neoliberalism today (gill , - ). the term can thus describe both a movement supporting feminist goals as well as one rejecting them. even though these simplified depictions can hardly encompass all aspects that feminists engage with, they help to exemplify developments in feminism and the underlying connections that build the preconditions enabling the resonance for and possible success of online campaigns like #metoo today. an example for the development of one such precondition can be seen in schuster’s investigation of the appropriation of the catchphrase “the personal is political” by third wave feminists, which was originally coined in . feminists who do not identify with the third wave accuse them of derailing its original meaning by defining it as implying that everyday feminist practices by individual women are political while second wave feminists insisted that their private living situations are political because they are determined by the political system (schuster , ). however, schuster finds that third wave feminists acknowledge that their individual everyday feminism is not sufficient to change the oppressive structures women face. the critique of appropriation of the catchphrase is thus based on a misunderstanding ( ). taking into account gill’s analysis of the media’s perception of feminism, the shift of focus from collective action to everyday individual feminism schuster finds gains more importance: gill argues that mainstream media have a tendency “to both trivialize and personalize the issue of sexism” because they frame the issue as an individual and not a 	 	 structural problem (gill , ). individual everyday feminism falls into the same pattern as the general individualization of society inherent to neoliberal capitalism (baer ). #metoo as an online campaign involving millions of participants deals with the gendered power structure, intersectional identities and social individualization in a feminist way. firstly, as a campaign whose participants are mainly, though not exclusively, female, it demonstrates the gendered power structure that enables (mostly) men to exercise sexism that oppresses women. even the fact that it is not only women voicing accusations of sexual harassment is a confirmation of the gendered power structure: as feminine character traits are generally seen as a weakness in a patriarchal society that suppresses women men who feature feminine characteristics are victims in this structure, too (connell , ). as their victimhood is based on gender criteria (femininity), it again demonstrates the gendered power structure and that such a widely oppressive system should be abolished to the benefit of all women and many men. secondly, the low barriers to enter a hashtag-based online discussion promise that anyone can join the debate (provided they have access to a device with internet connection), opening up possibilities for members of different social groups to connect and show solidarity with each other, whereas the offline world faces higher barriers such as economic or location- related constraints. nevertheless, intersectional solidarity in hashtag-activism remains difficult to achieve, as the hashtag #yesallwhitewomen that developed in response to #yesallwomen shows. rodino-colocina points out that without “the radical work of creating intersectional solidarity” in feminist mobilization, no hashtag will be able to create the inclusiveness feminism needs to speak unitarily (rodino-colocino , ). claiming that #metoo has overcome these problems would be far-fetched. however, the solidarity that tarana burke, the initiator of ‘metoo’ in and a black woman, and alyssa milano, the white actress who initiated the hashtag-campaign in , demonstrate by emphasizing that the debate about sexual harassment and abuse should not be centered around a person, and both of them fighting together (garcia ) gives hope for feminist solidarity. thirdly, the catchphrase “the private is political” describes a feminist problem, regardless of whether it is understood in the second or third wave way: both the micro and macro level of analysis matter for a feminist understanding of society. as long as the macro level of society, by which i mean the structural conditions individuals face that are not caused by their individuality other than by their gender (or race and class), is not taken into account, it is impossible to resolve individual people’s problems. what #metoo does in the first place 	 	 is to point out that sexual harassment and abuse is indeed not an individual problem, but a systematic one. as alyssa milano intended, the hashtag shows the magnitude of this problem women face. #metoo is a collection of micro experiences that add up to a macro system of oppression based on gender and the existence of this system is shown by many individual actions, bridging the individual and the collective. whether #metoo is feminist or not is a rather irrelevant issue in the discourse around the hashtag. for example, linda hirshman, author of ‘reckoning. the epic battle against sexual abuse and harassment’ sees #metoo as the continuation of the legal and social fight feminists in the us have fought since the s’ first cases of prosecution against sexual harassment in the workplace (hirshman ). reason for the debate is rather, as with previous feminist hashtags, whether #metoo is the ‘right’ kind of feminism, especially concerning its intersectionality (airey ; rodino-colocino ; thelandersson ). debate among feminists is also stirred by instances when one of their own is accused of sexual harassment and assault, as an nyt article shows, reversing the debate positions and even leading feminists like judith butler to use the same arguments of victim blaming as male perpetrators (greenberg ). even though #metoo is sometimes difficult to classify within feminist values, it stirs debates that can help different forms of feminism to become more integral and an instance of solidarity for all women and men. . state of the art charles tilly and sidney tarrow developed the contentious politics approach, which i use to investigate #metoo, out of the tradition of social movement theories and research. in the following, i provide an overview of social movement theories and their development over time to demonstrate why contentious politics is the best choice to investigate #metoo. it is important to keep in mind that tilly and tarrow explicitly refuse to categorize phenomena as social movements, revolutions or the like. analyzing #metoo with a theory in the tradition of social movement research therefore does not imply that #metoo is a social movement. rather the contrary, by employing contentious politics, i evade the pitfalls of categorizations that might be a misfit and instead concentrate on the mechanisms and processes that constitute #metoo. before beginning the overview of the literature, it is necessary to acknowledge that trying to provide the most fitting overview of literature for the application to a us case study, most authors i engage with come from the global north and i am mostly unaware of the 	 	 possible intersectional vectors of identity they might possess. with the notable exception of theda skocpol and hannah arendt, the field of social movement literature in general is rather male-dominated, whereas the scholars of feminist and women’s movements studies are almost exclusively female. while this is not a surprising discovery, it is still noteworthy to consider who debates certain topics because different standpoints informed by different identities would provide more diverse viewpoints after all. 	 . social movement theories the spread of social movements in countries of the global north from the s onwards fueled the emergence of a broad body of literature on the topic, which continues to develop until today (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly ). the term social movements is used to describe a wide body of research, which covers such differing events as revolutions, strikes, nationalism, democratization and social movements in a more narrow sense. in order to summarize all these interactions and start without overly strict limitations of the possible categories, doug mcadam, sidney tarrow and charles tilly have coined the term contentious politics ( ). tilly and tarrow emphasize that not all forms of contentious politics qualify as a social movement. according to them, a social movement is a “( ) sustained campaign of claim making; ( ) an array of public performances […]; ( ) repeated public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment […]; ( ) organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities” (tilly & tarrow , ). they seem to preclude digital activism from this definition, not only because it is not part of the examples they provide for public performances like demonstrations, marches, petitions and the like, but they specifically wonder whether digital activism “may even be making social movements obsolete” ( ). just like these authors suggest, and in light of their rejection of digital activism to be defined as a social movement (even though this is probably not their main concern) my intention is not to define #metoo as a specific form of contentious politics, but instead to focus on which aspects of contention can be found in #metoo. different ontological presumptions governed the development of structural (arendt ; skocpol ) and cultural (selbin ; sewell ) theories of social movements, which are also referred to as resource mobilization theory and social constructionist approaches (buechler ). relational theories of contentious politics can be considered the state of the art (mcadam, 																																																								 nevertheless, the term social movement is employed in this paper. its use should not be interpreted in a narrow definitional sense, but rather in a broad sense to describe the occurrence of contentious politics. 	 	 tarrow, and tilly , ). the relational approach focuses on explaining the connections between different actors of a phenomenon ( ). all of the approaches, however, build upon one another, which is why their main postulates are briefly described in the following. structural theories theda skocpol, most well known advocate of structural approaches to revolution, claimed in that all theories of revolution were preceded and therefore influenced by marx. at the heart of marxism lies the idea that revolutions are “class-based movements growing out of objective structural contradictions within historically developing and inherently conflict- ridden societies” (skocpol , ). the inherent contradiction in capitalism between who owns capital and who contributes to production with labor power, which marx diagnosed as the reason for capitalism’s eventual destruction, is also present in the three other approaches to revolution skocpol identifies: aggregate-psychological, systems/value-consensus and political-conflict theories ( ). structural approaches generally stress that social revolutions aim at the state and changing its structures (goodwin ; skocpol ; tilly and tarrow ). goodwin states that instead of taking this notion for granted it should be consciously recognized that without states, there would be no revolution (goodwin , ). as revolutions are directed towards the state, their success can be measured by the changes of state structure they achieve ( ). hannah arendt, another leading scholar of the structural approach, looks at state structures changing through revolutions and claims that a revolution is not possible where the state’s authority is uncontested: revolutions need to disturb the state’s monopoly on violence. yet, although the state’s loss of authority enables revolutions, it does not necessitate them (arendt , - ). thus, merely looking at state structures explains only structurally how revolutions happen while other factors need be taken into account as well. skocpol goes further and postulates that “social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below” (skocpol , ). this definition indicates the importance of the class aspect in skocpol’s view on social revolutions as well as the successful transformation as a necessary condition. despite the importance of revolting masses, however, skocpol emphasizes that in her view, a social revolution cannot be understood by investigating the role of the movement’s leaders or of partaking individuals ( ). instead, the structural conditions of the international as well as the socio-economic context determine a revolution’s emergence as well as its trajectory while it cannot be assumed that these conditions are the same in every 	 	 country or context a revolution occurs ( f). she also emphasizes that national state authority is an actor and not just a frame in which contention takes place ( ). rather, the nation-state exists in-between and partly independently of social class division and the international state context ( ). skocpol’s approach to the study of social revolutions is a comparative historical one, the explicit goal being to explain the causes of such events ( ). in that, she differs widely from later theoretical frameworks, especially the relational one, where scholars focus on the interaction rather than causal chains between events (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly ). another important structural factor besides the state in structural theories is the economy. skocpol ( ) assumes that without economic crises, revolutions will not occur. as wickham-crowley ( ) in his account of alternatives to structural theories puts it, structural theories focus on the relations between different structural elements that trigger developments such as state-class relations. an economic crisis might also trigger weakened state power, suggesting that both factors work together and none alone is decisive to spark revolution. a momentum of collapsing state structures needs to be used by the people; mobilizing the masses for change is thus a central question. skocpol, who bases her arguments on marxist theory, claims that class upheaval helps to carry out the revolution: historically grown structural contradictions in society oppose classes against each other (skocpol , ). wickham-crowley suggests that feelings of relative deprivation among the lower classes exacerbate the class struggle (wickham-crowley ). goodwin agrees that the exclusion of mobilized groups can radicalize their demands. other factors he sees as mobilizing are the state’s responsibility for unpopular economics, state corruption and violence against mobilized groups as well as weak capacities in infrastructure and policing which allow revolutionary groups to grow undisturbed (goodwin , f). mass mobilization enables the revolution to not only replace an unpopular ruler, but to reach actual change in society, which is one of the most important characteristics of revolutions (skocpol , ). a strength of structural approaches is their provision of a starting point against which contention will take place, usually the state. furthermore, structuralists look at a wide range of factors beyond the state such as economy, class relations, world systemic factors, class/ethnic/gender/religious conflicts and societal organization as well as the relations between these elements (wickham-crowley ). since it is questionable whether revolutions can be meaningfully compared anyways (skocpol ), this approach allows 	 	 structural theories to look at a range of factors and combine them anew for each case studied. yet, as reasons for revolutions seem to vary so broadly from case to case, looking at structural factors might not always suffice. disregarding emotional factors, individual actions and specific trigger events might not adequately explain why people act the way they do in a specific moment. further, structural factors do not explain the direction a revolution takes: if rebellion is against state power, why do some revolutions end up centralizing state authority even more, as happened in the french revolution? structural theorists aim at explaining how and why a revolution comes about. skocpol seems to be the only scholar analyzing the outcomes of a revolution in her account of the russian revolution (skocpol , f). further, structural theories ignore who brings revolution about and what they lead to. cultural theories of revolutions focus on these issues (wickham-crowley ). cultural theories cultural approaches stress the role and agency of leaders and partakers in a movement while they are more tacit on what causes revolutions. they concentrate more on the factors of agency, actors and leadership. eric selbin claims that ideas and actors are the primary forces in revolutions because leaders who provide ideas give people something to rally around and steer the direction of a revolution (selbin , f). the importance of leaders conveying attractive ideas to revolt for is well connected to the concept of liminality as introduced by bjœrn thomassen: the concept originally describes rituals of passage, e.g. turning from child into adult. the period of liminality marks the breaking of old structures without new ones being in place yet. in challenging existing political structures while new ones have not been installed, revolutions represent such a time of being in-between. the old structures are not legitimate anymore because the masses reject them, yet new structures have not been established yet. importantly, in contrast to traditional rituals of passage, revolutions neither have a clear end nor a ceremony master to guide the process (thomassen , f). cultural theories concentrate on these moments of being in-between because they provide room for ideas to emerge and be carried by a disoriented mass; if leaders present convincing ideas, people are inclined to imitate them. as thomassen states, revolutions happen if masses are led (thomassen , ). for culturalists, class relations do not necessarily determine mass mobilization. armbrust analyses the emergence of leaders in the egyptian revolution, coming to the conclusion that the popular figure taufiq ‘ukasha and al- sisi both acted as so-called tricksters (armbrust ; ). tricksters are individuals who are “at home in liminality” (armbrust , ). they are themselves in-between structures 	 	 and often do not intent to solve the stage of liminality (thomassen , ). tricksters try to steer events in their favored direction and aim at mobilizing people for their causes. sewell states that ideologies are constitutive of social order (sewell , ). as thomassen claims, revolutions are amongst others, a “rapid, basic transformation of society’s political structure” and mass mobilization happens against and outside existing structures (thomassen , ). in that way, liminality is created, necessitating new ideas and ideologies, provided by outsiders of the previous system. clearly, cultural theories’ strength lies in their concern with leadership and mass mobilization as it can account for the individual conditions of a revolution. this also helps explaining the direction a revolution takes. the concept of liminality allows analyzing a central phase of a revolution that seems to decide whether it will be successful or not. this is exemplified by saleh’s analysis of the situation in syria after : the syrian revolution has reached a “state of nature” (saleh , ). the old regime is no longer legitimate but no new order has been established, no resounding leader or trickster took the stage; the country remains at war. a weakness of cultural theories is their disregard of how a revolution comes about (wickham-crowley ). given the diversity of revolutions and who carried them out in the past, an explanation crediting only cultural elements of revolutionary society would seem odd. their accounts seem to start only at the moment when a disruption of the system occurred and liminal phase and mass mobilization are on the brink. shortcomings of structural and cultural approaches both structural and cultural theories of revolutions have weak points, but several of their characteristics complement each other respectively. while structural theories are better equipped at analyzing factors that lead to revolution, cultural theories depart from there. a joint analysis of how revolutions come about does not seem too far-fetched though: although structuralists assume that ideology is not a cause of revolution but rather plays a role after the revolution has already started, sewell claims that skocpol weaves ideology into her approach to the class struggle (sewell , ). expanding the factor of ideology as an autonomous element leading to revolution would incorporate a cultural approach into her insights. as selbin claims, bringing agency back in would also account for the individuality of events leading to revolution (selbin , ). structural theories are complemented by cultural theories’ focus on leadership and mass mobilization in better regarding revolutionary events while they are happening; there are, however, structural aspects to leadership which culturalists disregard so far, e.g. the spatial dimension to mass mobilization. thomassen raises 	 	 the question of who will be in the common space where new leadership is selected and the answer might depend on structural factors: people who are more likely to easily access those physical places are urban rather than rural populations because revolutionary squares are often built in capitals and other cities such as tahrir square in the egyptian revolution (thomassen , ). as thomassen points out there are two topics, which all strands of revolution theories cover insufficiently: the connection between revolutions and wars and how and why revolutions end (thomassen , ). skocpol ( ), in her account of the russian revolution, as well as foran ( ), in his account of great social revolutions, are two of few who concentrate on the outcomes of revolution. foran points out the difficulty for both strands of theory: all revolutions lead to different outcomes, depending on previous conditions, their leaders and in how far they are able to mobilize. relational approach in an attempt to make all factors regarded in structural and cultural theories of revolutions useful to analysis, doug mcadam, charles tilly and sidney tarrow developed a relational concept of analysis that does not concentrate on the categorization of phenomena such as social movements, revolutions, strikes, etc., but rather on the analysis of mechanisms and processes connecting challengers with their targets and the outcomes of that contentious interaction (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly ). they called their model of analysis dynamic contention and focused on three lenses of analysis: mobilization, actors and trajectories. the model depicts the interaction between the challenger and the actor who is being challenged. it begins in a moment of broad change processes, which lead to the subjective perception of threat or opportunity for both challenger and challenged. both the challenged actor and the challenger appropriate the threat or opportunity; the first in an organizational way, the latter in a social way because they are usually not in an institutionalized setting (yet). these approaches lead to innovative collective action by both actors, which again influence the other’s collective action as well as their subjective perception of threat or opportunity. the last phase in the model is an escalation of the subjectively perceived uncertainty which is stressed by the other actors’ actions (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ). for mobilization, which happens in different ways throughout the contentious action, the perception of threat or opportunity is momentous: possible partakers of a movement will not follow a call they consider trivial or unrealistic. in the spirit of their mechanisms-focused approach, mcadam, tilly and tarrow investigate the mobilization process throughout the 	 	 entire phase of contention, as a campaign’s mobilizing potential can vary throughout time. to investigate mobilizing potential, they recognize that the way an issue is framed in public debate is decisive for its perception. framing, however, is not only done by the leaders of a campaign concerning a specific issue, but also by all partakers within the campaign as well as by actors outside of it, e.g. those challenged by the campaign. while such public perception of an issue as a whole is enacted by groups of people, it must also be borne in mind that individuals employ repertoires of contention as well (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ). whenever mobilization happens, all actors involved appropriate previous mobilizing structures as they adapt them to their local context. especially for challenging actors who have previously not been organized, existing mobilizing structures provide an opportunity ( ). another reason why old repertoires of contention are adapted during a campaign is their usage by newly formed identities (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ). political actors are actors who make collective claims and their identity is constituted by a collective name which can either be self-chosen or assigned to them (tilly & tarrow , ). these identities are matters of dispute and develop in relation with the contentious politics by the actors (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ). additionally, actor formation is influenced by environmental mechanism ( ), the attribution of opportunity and threat, social appropriation of existing organizations, framing ( ) and the development of new innovative collective action ( ). for the last factor, a less established actor displays a higher likelihood to develop innovative collective action, because they have limited possibilities to use established paths of public politics compared to more established actors ( ). in classical social movement research, a movement’s trajectory has been described either as a movement career, referring to a typical development of continuous de- radicalization, or as a protest cycle. the latter one refers to the broader context of a movement and its development, whereas the first focuses on more punctual analysis (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ) of these approaches, however, attends the dynamic and relational mechanisms that bring movements about because these mechanisms cannot be described as cycles or careers ( ). two such mechanisms can be identified in processes of contention: a mechanism of competition for power and a mechanism in trajectories of diffusion, repression and radicalization ( ). based on this concept of dynamic contention, tilly and tarrow developed their model of contentious politics, first published in , which concentrates on any point of intersection between politics, contention and collective action instead of the specific processes 	 	 of actors, mobilization and trajectories. this enables tilly and tarrow to analyze any part of contentious politics without having to use categories such as actors, mobilization and trajectory and furthers their aim of revealing the mechanisms of contention without categorizing the phenomena in a potentially restrictive way. the second edition of their book offers the theoretical foundation for this thesis as it is considered the state of the art in social movement analysis and will therefore later be discussed in detail. having discussed the roots and formative trajectories of social movement theories from structural and cultural theories, which initially focused mostly on revolutions, to the relational approach more open to other forms of contention, i now turn to a specific strand of social movement theories: women’s movement studies and feminist approaches to the study of contention provide a more nuanced background for my research of #metoo as a form of feminist contention. . feminist social movement theories the relevance of women’s movements for social change in the th century is evident (buechler ; ferree and martin b; martin ; springer ). however, this understanding was debated and feminist organization’s status as a form of social movements has been questioned. this hampered research specifically focused on feminist and women’s movements until the s despite women’s movements presence in a modern understanding of social movements since the mid- th century (martin , , ). such assessments provoked the reproach of social movement theories as masculinist and oblivious of the implications of the gendered nature that most societies and states entail. an analysis of social movements should take these structural conditions into account and not consider them stable. a society’s transformation by a social movement towards a more socially just society must inherently incorporate gender justice: gender is one of the norms creating an ever-present social hierarchy and is, due to this presence, a hierarchy too easily taken for granted. to avoid reproducing such internalized hierarchies, gender norms cannot be ignored to pursue the goal of social justice (buechler ; ferree and martin b; grisard and biglia ). an analysis of social movements, which considers gender issues “will provide a dynamic, long- term and less state-centered approach to power, protest, and change” (ferree and mueller , ). the criticism of ignorance is also voiced concerning other identity axes such as race and class as intersecting hierarchies that should be reflected upon for a socially just society. scholars who identify as black and people of color have specifically criticized the white western coinage of feminist concepts of social movements and point towards the local 	 	 differences women experience in countries of the global south (basu ; goodman ; naidu ; springer ). an important contribution to the literature by myra marx ferree and patricia yancey martin, two sociologists from germany and the us who have both published extensively on feminist organizations is the edited book “feminist organizations. harvest of the new women's movement”. this work assembles an overview on different feminist organizations globally and engages with the debate on when to consider a movement to be feminist (ferree and martin a). even though the so-called third-wave feminism has influenced feminist research since then, research on feminist organizations seems not to have changed fundamentally in its approach but rather in the choice of topics that more often include a critique of capitalism from a feminist perspective. another aspect is a broader focus on more intersectional axes than only gender, but these developments do not challenge the insights gained in the s. in the following, i engage with three salient aspects, feminism, organization and success, in feminist women’s movements studies. feminism scholars researching from a feminist standpoint explicitly engage with such social hierarchies and investigate women’s movements and their transformative possibilities. one research topic concerns women’s movements and their relation towards feminism. a basic definition of a women’s movement refers to a movement, which addresses women as its constituency. a feminist movement sees women as an oppressed group in relation to men, with the explicit goal of challenging and changing the existing gender hierarchy and subordination of women seeming to be unchallenged in the literature on women’s movements. beyond that the diversity of women’s movements globally and their different stances on feminism are acknowledged as well (basu ; ferree and mueller ; martin ). martin developed a list of ten criteria to determine whether an organization is feminist. those criteria include feminist ideology, feminist values, feminist goals, feminist outcomes and the founding circumstances within a women’s movement, any of which would qualify a movement to be feminist. a movement’s structure, practice, membership, scope and scale as well as its external relations are criteria not specific to feminist organizations but are supposed to provide deeper insights into their nature and make women’s movement more comparable to other movements (martin , ). the criteria can thus be applied to all women’s organizations. however, martin acknowledges that different kinds of feminisms such as liberal, radical, socialist, lesbian and marxist feminism are united in that each of their 	 	 ideologies sees “women as a "sex-class," acknowledges that women are oppressed and disadvantaged as a group, sees this as rooted in social arrangements, and articulates beliefs that its correction, or elimination, requires social, political, and economic change” ( ). several other authors contribute to a more nuanced understanding of feminism in women’s movements: feminist movements as a notion of discourse both emphasize the aspect of meaning-making for women’s movements as well as the flexibility of discourse, making feminist movements adaptable to differing conditions globally even though it exposes feminist movements to disunity and internal combats which possibly hamper feminist movements success (katzenstein ; mansbridge ). others agree that even though women as a constituency for women’s movements, be they feminist or not, provide a clear target group for mobilization, but the broadness of this constituency makes sustaining mobilization hard (buechler ; ferree and martin b; freeman ; katzenstein ). furthermore, the broadness of the constituency has not prevented that mobilization for women’s and feminist causes was most effective for white and middle class women, a paradox which buechler attributes to white and affluent women’s privileges enabling them to concentrate on the one area where they are still oppressed while women discriminated on several axes of their identities cannot concentrate on one struggle (buechler , ). for the us context, katzenstein notes a new form of mobilization since the s she terms “unobtrusive mobilization within institutions” (katzenstein , ). employing the catholic church and the us military as examples, she shows how the general recognition of and identification with feminist issues leads to a new gender consciousness supporting the struggle for more social justice as well as narrower career-oriented gender concerns. the broad application also fits the patterns of mobilization identified by ferree and mueller around “discursive politics about values” vs. “the politics of rights and access” (ferree and mueller , ). the form of mobilization also depends on the political opportunity structure in a given moment. gelb argues that “economic crises and retrenchment, a more hostile political climate, organizational proliferation, and competition for scarce resources” (gelb , ) provide opportunities for successful mobilization if there is a balance between the constituency and the goals of mobilization (ferree and mueller , ). 	 	 organization feminists often employ new forms of organization as part of the change they demand of common social organization. organizations here refer to ways of organizing and not organizations as social systems. one organizational question that directly relates to mobilization is its form: is it a mass movement primarily defined by the numbers of participants; a grassroots movement loaded with symbolism and lifestyle choices; or does it take an institutional approach? surely, all forms have proven their potential for change (ferree and martin a, ). once mobilized, a movement is not a sure-fire success. rather, organizational structures that provide enduring frames for mobilization are part of many social movement definitions and ensure a movement’s continuation (tilly & tarrow , ). martin’s criteria of feminist organizations mirror several of the debates held on different feminist movement organizational forms, such as the bureaucracy versus collectivism debate (martin ). whereas liberal feminist movements tend to be less critical of the bureaucratic and hierarchical order within their organizations, radical feminists tend to see hierarchical organizational structures as a copy of the male-dominated structure of mainstream society which they intend to change (ferree and martin b). although the collectivist approach that is often pursued instead of formal bureaucratic procedures fulfills feminists’ aspiration to give everyone the opportunity to be involved, such structures can also hinder a movement’s success because collective decision-making is often messier and more time-consuming (ferree and mueller ; staggenborg ). another debate martin’s criteria touch on concerns the scope and scale of feminist organizations and whether they are directed towards external social change or whether their operations aim at influencing their members lives (martin ). this also concerns the question whether they ally with other organizations which may not fully embrace their aims but with which they identify overlapping causes or whether they seek to remain fully autonomous in order not to compromise their cause (basu ). while an advantage of alliance with other actors who do not agree on every detail is the enhanced power with which common claims can be made, the advantage of remaining autonomous guarantees that an organization’s goals are in direct sight with every action it takes. whether an organization is open towards collaboration with actors who might not fully embrace its aims also determines an organization’s willingness to engage with institutions embedded in the societal structure they criticize which martin refers to as “external relations” ( ). such engagement can lead to the institutionalization of an organization with the advantage of being able to bring its 	 	 causes directly to the table and penetrating a mainstream institution from within while the risk of having to compromise is even higher in official institutions than in alliances for similar causes, which is why some organizations might rather choose encapsulation and attempt to isolate themselves from official institution’s influences (freeman ). success while social movement theories in general have not excessively engaged in the discussion on movements’ success, feminist scholarship has commented widely, if briefly, on the topic (mccammon et al. ). scholars emphasize the importance of long-term over short-term success, especially concerning the future mobilization potential that a feminist movement creates even if it fails to reach its immediate goals (gelb ; springer ; staggenborg ). such mobilization potential implies an internal success for movements because they managed to influence their members and beyond in a sustainable way for their causes. the critique of social norms that feminists offer can lead to an adjustment of those social norms and thereby change the political opportunity structure for future feminist generations (mccammon et al. ). success can also be defined as concrete political or policy outcomes. to judge a movement’s success in those, the level of analysis is of importance as most policy changes will occur on the national level rather than the international one. basu argues that this way a judgment of success will also accommodate the different local context than create so many divisions among feminists globally (basu , ). nevertheless, staggenborg argues for a consideration of the cultural outcomes of movements (staggenborg , ). ferree and martin’s claim that a “measure of the effectiveness of feminist organizations is the vehemence of the counter-movements they generated” (ferree and martin b, ). feminist women’s studies employ a more specific approach towards feminist and women’s contention. the specificities of this research concerning its definitions of feminism, its debate about organizational forms as well as success all point to an ideological debate, which are not present in other fields of social movement research because it does not constitute a debate of ideological principles but of the political ideology of feminism. keeping this in mind, i now investigate the research on digital social movements, which is another sub-category of the literature on social movements. 	 	 . digital social movements and #metoo feminist digital activism ever since the early days of the internet in the s, which led to the development of digital and social media, its relevance as a space for activism has been debated (drüeke ). the engagement with hashtag-campaigns and other means of online activism has grown into what can be termed a “communicative turn in movement repertoires” from offline to online spheres (knappe and lang , ). most contributions to the academic debate come from feminist media studies, as indicated by the many publications in the journal of the same title and the lack of material from other disciplines. even in the social movement studies, there is but one extensive work by bennett and segerberg who investigate the role of digital media for mobilization. conclusively, they claim that the importance of online mobilization ranges somewhere in between claims of “twitter revolutions” assigning the highest potential to online activism, and “clicktivism” which describes the phenomenon of people gaining satisfaction from engaging in online debates with little actual effect (w. l. bennett and segerberg ). the new mobilization platform means that women’s local and individual experiences can be linked “to larger narratives of inequality”, creating a discursive space, which demonstrates that sexual harassment and violence against women is not an exceptional phenomenon but normalized misogyny (baer , ). despite this opportunity, feminist scholars debate online activism’s significance and relevance. some argue that internet activism increases the possibilities for feminists to learn from each other and enhance the intersectionality of their feminism by its broad spreading potential and thereby making it more inclusive and less oppressive than the societal structures they criticize (baer ; rodino-colocino ; thelandersson ; thrift ). in spite of the positive implications of this new way of protesting, more radical feminists criticize its intertwinement with neoliberalism through the internet as a neoliberal tool. in their view, the internet reproduces the oppressive and excluding mechanisms and structures present in offline interaction. it can even reverse feminists goals because neoliberalism is generally accompanied by enhanced individuality (baer ), while many forms of feminism focus on collectivism, be it as an organizational form or by emphasizing the goal of improving women’s situation as a group, not as individuals (basu ; freeman ). nevertheless, digital media provides a new space to make claims. this space has been termed hashtag feminism, referring to feminist online activism where mostly individuals spread feminist messages without linking themselves to formal organizations as it had been 	 	 the case with former feminist activism (clark ). cyberfeminism, as the combination of gender and digital culture has also been termed, is as diverse as offline feminisms (carter olson ) and has even been called a “new wave of feminism, via hash tagging” (dixon , ). whether this new space makes claim-making easier and more accessible is, however, debated among feminist scholars. on the one hand, digital media’s growing reach and enabling of dialogue across national borders as well as language barriers, claim-making online enables people to engage in and side with a debate while not comprising on others of their views: it is no longer necessary to fully align with a movement, which usually includes positions on more than one issue; now debates can be joined without people having to agree on a movement’s set of positions (w. l. bennett and segerberg , ). on the other hand, this not only complements the individualizing effects of neoliberalism. it also overlooks barriers such as the disproportionate representation of members of higher social classes, especially on twitter and digital literacy to engage in online media in the first place (drüeke ; latina and docherty ). literacy concerning the “right” feminist vocabulary can also be a limitation in decidedly feminist online movements, especially regarding the character limit of twitter tweets (latina and docherty ). however, given the nature of digital conversation, feminists and other vulnerable groups will be confronted with hate speech and the like (dixon ). problems might also arise from within feminists groups because their global connection through the internet does not automatically produce their cooperation, let alone unity: problems known from offline feminist debates, especially concerning the intersectionality of gender identities with other axes of identity such as race and class, cannot be solved by the internet’s reach (carter olson ; clark ; khoja- moolji ). preceding #metoo, several twitter campaigns concerning women’s issues have made international headlines. the #yesallwomen movement of is one of the most prominent hashtag-campaigns before #metoo, creating million responses worldwide during the first four days. this “feminist meme event” not only summarizes the experiences of women in a way that is accessible and collective, but becomes an event to be referenced as well (thrift ). a problem pointed out with this kind of digital activism is the sensationalism and therefore destructiveness of twitter as the medium for a feminist debate (rodino-colocino ; thelandersson ). this is demonstrated by one of the reactions to #yesallwomen: #yesallwhitewomen was black and women of color’s critique of the initial hashtag as unrepresentative and focused on white women’s privileged experience not mirroring their 	 	 experiences (baer ; rodino-colocino ). #bringbackourgirls is another case in point: while the hashtag campaign raised media attention on the abduction of nigerian school girls by boko haram and even produced higher in-person engagement in the movement (carter olson ), the unreflective sharing of the hashtag by white people was criticized as epistemic violence against women of the global south (khoja-moolji ). even though the online discourse connects women’s struggles globally, it does not automatically imply global solidarity. intersectional solidarity rather needs a safe space for debate and constructive reflection on privileges, especially by white women, which is why hashtags are an important contribution to the denormalization of sexual harassment and violence - but as a movement, online activism cannot be the endpoint (khoja-moolji ; knappe and lang ; rodino-colocino ; thelandersson ). having considered previous forms of digital feminist activism and their implications, i now turn to the literature on #metoo as the latest form of digital feminist activism available so far. #metoo the academic literature dealing with #metoo is very limited due to the recentness of the phenomenon. interestingly, there are numerous articles linking #metoo with medical and health research, e.g. pointing out possibilities for better teaching conditions (antman ), the professional implications of misogynist structures for women in medicine (jagsi ) and the opportunities for improving public health infrastructure (o’neil et al. ). all of these essays were published in the comment sections of journals and do not constitute extensive academic studies of #metoo. outside of medical academia, airey points out the relevance of #metoo for the denormalization of sexual harassment and violence against women, just as was done for #yesallwomen. she also criticizes that feminist theories have not helped to make academia a more progressive space for this topic (airey ). manikonda et al. already indicate in the title of their study that twitter is the important channel through which #metoo started, but it is not the only channel. especially the limit of characters implies that extensive story-sharing and comforting beyond seeing the large amount of co-victims happen on other platforms such as reddit (manikonda et al. ). gash and harding, in an extensive study on #metoo and its relevance for legal changes emphasize the gaps in us laws for victims of sexual harassment and violence. they conclude that #metoo is an attempt at achieving a change of legal structures for better protection of victims as much as it is important as a space to speak out about sexual harassment (gash and 	 	 harding ). it is noteworthy that the goal of changing the current legal structures can be considered a change of the existing social order, fulfilling some of the criteria the structural approach to social movements suggests for revolutions (arendt ). my thesis on #metoo is a contribution to the literature in three ways. first, it helps tackling the scarcity of literature on the phenomenon so far. second, it contributes to social movement literature from a feminist perspective not only because of the topic itself but also as a study employing contentious politics. third, using this theory adds to the understanding of #metoo while also nuancing the concept for the study of digital activism lacking so far. generally, research on online activism seemingly fails to employ specific social movement theories in an explicit way so far. a theoretical investigation can provide new insights and be combined with and compared to other studies to reach more conclusive insights into the rather new phenomenon of online activism. . methodology/approach after having provided an overview on the relevant literature for #metoo, i now detail my own approach towards this instance of contentious politics and clarify my epistemological standpoint, my methodology and the process of data collection, sampling and analysis for this thesis. . feminist standpoint and research ethic in my master thesis, i employ a feminist research ethic. as ann tickner states, feminists aim at “designing research that is useful to women (and also to men)” (tickner ). specifically, i rely on ackerly and true’s definition of a feminist research ethic in four dimensions (ackerly and true ): firstly, the researcher has to be attentive to the power of epistemologies, i.e. the power of the knowledge they produce in their research ( ). this knowledge will carry the researcher’s view on the subject of analysis. by providing this knowledge to others, their views will influence the general public ( ). being attentive to the power of epistemology implies that the researcher accepts that their beliefs are not universal and challenges them throughout the research process ( ). secondly, the researcher has to 																																																								 i acknowledge that other national hashtags on sexual harassment and violence against women exist and contribute to the spreading discussion as well as global connection of issues (drüeke ). due to the scope of the thesis, however, i concentrate on english-speaking and us-focused hashtag-campaigns as predecessors of #metoo. 	 	 regard boundaries, which might limit their research. these can either be on the theoretical level, e.g. boundaries of the discipline within which the research is conducted. they can also refer to boundaries leading to exclusion or neglect of some views on the subject of analysis ( ). thirdly, the researcher needs to be attentive to relationships between anyone involved in their project. this includes the researcher’s relationship with their subject as well as other part-takers in the research and the power structures playing out in these relationships ( ). lastly, the researcher needs to continually situate themselves during the research process. this includes being aware of their own privileges as well as boundaries to access. it also implies continuous reflection on the research results and how the researcher’s personal positioning impacted the outcomes ( ). to live up to these four aspirations of thorough feminist research, i continually reflect on my research and question the choices i make during the process. while researching, i am aware that my supposition that #metoo is feminist as well as my general goal of providing useful research for feminist causes positions my research in a certain way. for a feminist audience the power of the knowledge i produce lies in its practical applicability but also in thoroughly conducted research that relies on solid data: it is only useful for feminist causes if it regards #metoo as completely as possible and should therefore refrain from either glossing over or reducing the usefulness of online contention. in particular with regards to the choice of the exemplary media used to illustrate my analysis of #metoo, i describe the process of choosing those pieces as accurately as possible. even though their purpose is an exemplary one, it is just that exemplification that can lead to an unknowing ignorance of other sides of the story of #metoo. furthermore, my position as a white researcher constitutes boundaries: my perspective on #metoo is through a privileged lens. privilege can lead to ignorance of aspects that constitute an important part of the issue for women with other identity markers than my own. my possibilities to accommodate the perspectives of women with other experiences are limited, especially regarding that my material is mostly written from an outsider perspective. the aspect of boundaries is connected to that of relationships of those involved in this research: as i conduct my research at the desk i do not have personal contact with participants of #metoo. nevertheless, i engage with others’ perspectives because #metoo consists of many individual perspectives; my relationship to others is through my material. while researching, i remind myself to treat all perspectives with equal respect, especially those i disagree with. constantly remembering the implications of epistemological power, boundaries and relationships in mind reflects my situatedness while conducting this project. 	 	 feminist research ethic and feminist standpoint, which is focused on the epistemology of research, complement each other: guided by the principles of a feminist research ethic i make arguments from a feminist standpoint in my thesis. i am aware that a feminist standpoint is contestable in the fields i relate my research to, namely political science and sociology. as patricia hill collins points out, a standpoint is inherent to an epistemological choice and determines the external validation of the knowledge produced (collins ). feminist standpoint theory is therefore not universally applicable to all research and neither to all feminist research. my position as a white researcher provides me certain privilege and should therefore rather be called white or eurocentric feminist standpoint. by describing my standpoint more specifically, i aim at avoiding another critique of feminist standpoint theory as epistemology: feminist standpoints are also normed in some way and therefore run the risk of privileging one feminist standpoint over other equally justified standpoints. for example, to focus on individual experiences can also invite “the violence of essentialist, automatic privilege” if epistemic agency of women warrants the prioritization of the experiences of marginalized women (naidu ). . feminist critical discourse analysis the goal of my thesis is the application and testing of contentious politics for contention happening online as well as the implications of using online contention for feminist causes. while following the theoretical guidelines of tilly and tarrow closely, i rely on online articles by the new york times to exemplify the concepts for #metoo. to do justice to my feminist standpoint, i rely on feminist critical discourse analysis (fcda) as the critical lens through which i engage which my material. a critical discourse analysis (cda) approach suggests itself even though its background is in critical linguistics. cda is “interested in analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language” (wodak and meyer ). #metoo’s demands do not focus on eliminating sexist language but they criticize a gendered power structure, which allows the discrimination of women on many levels. keeping in mind those power structures and analyzing media materials consciously considering that they are written within gendered power structures helps to integrate the material into the analysis while reducing the risk of taking individual materials to be the single truth of the story of #metoo. a combination of the contentious politics approach with fcda suggests itself because both the theoretical and the methodological approach enable a critical assessment of the 	 	 phenomenon itself and simultaneously focus on the performative possibilities it offers (lazar a; tilly and tarrow ). especially the explicitly political nature of fcda and its social emancipatory goals fit my intention to provide useful research on online activism for feminist causes. i rely on michelle m. lazar who is the leading scholar for feminist cda and edited the only widely available book on fcda in . she claims that a feminist cda specifically focuses on the understanding of power and ideologies and how they work to keep gender hierarchies in place through discourse. the goal of feminist cda is to show how hegemonic and gendered assumptions are produced, but also challenged in discourse (lazar ). by acknowledging gender as an ever-present structure of oppression, feminist cda joins the emancipatory goals of both feminists and discourse analysis ( ) and fits with cda’s general focus on analyzing injustices. cda scholars are rather blurry in their definition of discourse; it is claimed that discourses are “socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned” (wodak and meyer ), and “semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world” (fairclough ). instead of providing a strict definition, lazar states what discourse in her view is not: she rejects the notion proclaimed by the poststructuralists michel foucault and judith butler that everything is discourse. in her view, cda researchers tend to think that discourse is indeed a socially constitutive signifying practice. but discourse is only one element rather than the sole practice, augmented by material factors and practical experiences of identity and power. this definition fits the analysis of #metoo: my analysis is restricted to online newspaper materials, disregarding material conditions and experiences. however, no matter the discourse in the media, women’s daily experiences and their life conditions shape their views on sexual harassment and abuse, too. thus, even if the discourse on #metoo was condemning sexual harassment and abuse, changes in women’s experiences and conditions eventually constitute success of #metoo. lazar argues that focusing on the transformative possibilities of the individual as the newest wave of feminism often does (schuster ) is not helpful to feminist perspectives. she acknowledges that performative performances such as drag, which question gender hierarchies, are successful on the individual level. however, in her view they are hardly representative of a wider destruction of those hierarchies and she doubts they will cause widespread change (lazar b). this implies that only a collective form of performativity reliably leads to social change. to search for a collective rather than an individualistic performativity in #metoo seems sensible to me, since the sheer mass of involvement in the hashtag dialogue not only renders attending to all individual stories impossible but their 	 	 accumulation is the very reason why #metoo became such a present phenomenon of contention. lazar identifies five key principles for feminist cda: first, it should aim at social transformation and therefore needs to be oriented towards critically analyzing activist practice (lazar ). second, feminist cda recognizes gender as an ideological structure, which maintains unequal social structures and develops a hierarchy between men and women ( ). third, it favors a comparative perspective as it recognizes the complexity of gender and power relations ( ). fourth, a focus on the discursive (de)construction of gender and connected social hierarchies takes a relational perspective towards gender. it is not about the analysis of single categories like “women” alone ( ). additionally, fcda does not ascribe the production of gendered hierarchies purely to discourses, which would ignore experience as well as material conditions constituting those hierarchies on other levels. fifth, critical reflexivity should guide feminist cda, where reflexivity means the utilization of knowledge by individuals and their recognition that this knowledge shapes their own social practices ( ). lazar specifically reminds the reader that neo-liberal embracing of gender concepts can lead to their watering down and happens while leaving androcentric structures in place, thereby hindering actual destruction of gender oppression ( f). with these five principles and the consideration of what discourse means, the methodological assumptions of my research are the representation of power through language, and discourse as an element of practicing this power structure. assuming the effectiveness of collective actions for changing social power imbalances rather than individual ones, i focus on the collective development of #metoo. the notion of discourse coined by lazar and her aspirations for fcda research are more central to my analysis than a detailed discourse analysis. even though i rarely engage with the linguistic details of my material, to define discourse as a socially signifying practice justifies the engagement of material drawn from leading media. as only one part of discourse, those materials provide a partly yet significant insight because the discourse created in articles of the new york times is particularly powerful coming from its position as a leading medium. . data collection, sampling, analysis as the goal of this thesis is to test the applicability of contentious politics as provided by tilly and tarrow rather than an empirical study of #metoo, i follow their theory’s concepts closely. my analysis is ordered by the concepts they provide in their application guide in appendix a of their book, which is intended to provide easy access to their theory for 	 	 students (tilly & tarrow , f). staying as closely as possible to their theory implies that i also engage with those concepts that are less relevant for the case of #metoo to (in)validate the theory as completely as possible and to provide an integral overview on the relevance of contentious politics for online activism. even though each of the #metoo stories should be heard and dealt with individually, i focus on a broader approach to #metoo as a collective action. this is not only a pragmatic decision in light of the countless individual #metoo statements, but also follows from considering that my engagement with those individual stories would not be purposeful as it would have to remain superficial and i am unable to offer any practical help to victims of sexual harassment and abuse. however, looking at #metoo’s consequences on the macro level cannot only provide an overview of its achievements but also show indicators of success for future movements. accordingly, the analysis is primarily concerned with identifying mechanism of contention that lead to change in the discourse on sexual harassment and abuse; i thus trace the mechanisms suggested by tilly and tarrow (tilly and tarrow ) in online media on #metoo. my exemplary choice of sources is directed by the theoretical approach of contentious politics and is not representative of #metoo in its entirety. to exemplify the contention and its discourse, i rely on online articles of the new york times as one of the most popular newspapers in the usa and as the newspaper reporting on the harvey weinstein scandal on october th, , that would lead to #metoo within two weeks (hausbichler ). my choice to not only rely on twitter and other social media where #metoo takes place is on the one hand a pragmatic decision due to the insufficiency of twitter’s search function, which does not allow to restrict by date or other criteria, and my unfamiliarity with other quantitative research tools. on the other hand, it is motivated by the reality of the media being a powerful creator of meaning in society. the nyt portrays the mainstream contents that public attention has been led to even though its audience covers a certain clientele, most significantly a rather liberal one. tracing #metoo via the reporting of a key medium will inherently obscure some aspects of #metoo, yet it still constitutes a central element in creating discourse as mainstream media reporting shapes perception especially for audiences who do not engage directly with the topic of sexual harassment and abuse. especially since i employ the material exemplarily and it is thus not representative, i acknowledge several biases: my choice of examples is guided by my analysis along the lines of the theory. in cda, data collection is not limited to one specific point in time during the research. rather, data collection is a process that continues during the analysis as the 	 	 refinement of concepts and categories researched can lead to new results (wodak and meyer , ). therefore, i researched the development of #metoo as well as the exemplary material while applying contentious politics to #metoo. one limitation of this way of research is thus its lack of system. additionally, it is not only my bias from a feminist standpoint theory that influences the choice of examples, but the exemplary articles themselves are likely to contain biases by their authors. for the purpose of identifying exemplary newspaper articles to demonstrate #metoo’s contentious aspects, i rely on the online search function of the new york times. this search functions has three options to restrict search results; by date range, by section and by type. further, the search function offers to sort results by relevance, by newest or by oldest. i sorted all my results by relevance, restricted to articles only, disregarding content in other forms but text and searched in all sections. a systematic search for content by the search word ‘#metoo’ for each month from october to july constitutes the backbone of my analysis. this time period contained articles related to #metoo; a mean of articles per month. looking at one-month periods allowed me to identify the main topics in those timeframes while still keeping the richness in detail feasible for my project. i also gained an overview on #metoo’s trajectory in numbers of content, e.g. i discovered that by far the most articles on #metoo were published in april , a surprising number of . given the mean of articles per month, i identified the salient topics of the time by titles and lead paragraphs, as these are usually indicative of the article’s positioning, of the first eight articles a month sorted by relevance. i only excluded briefings that contain weekly summaries as well as year reviews, thus moving to the next articles in line until the eighth, but i did count the year in gender year review of december . appendix a provides an overview of the results month by month. these roughly % of #metoo articles provide a first overview of #metoo’s development. before i began to systematically read through the material, i prepared a list of categories inspired by the concepts of tilly and tarrow. knowing what they would look for in contention, i started with actors, trajectory, (anti)feminist twists, offline events and changes as the initial categories. during my first reading of an article, i decided on which category it belonged to and took basic notes on its content. during the process, i added other categories as i realized that the ones i began with were not detailed enough: i added professional fields, 																																																								 unfortunately, the new york times offers no explanation on how the relevance of articles is determined. yet, whatever the criteria, the newspaper’s status as a main medium makes the investigation of what such a medium posts as most relevant worthwhile. 	 	 culture, politics, international coverage and toxic masculinity. as cda scholars suggest, this is part of the research process that never ends (wodak and meyer ). with the help of the extended category list, i was able to gain an overview over #metoo and to go back to individual articles while applying the concepts. in general, the theory of contentious politics provides many subcategories; especially concerning mechanisms, which already is a subcategory of the explanatory concepts. it is rather difficult to keep an overview of the contention the theory is applied to, also given that tilly and tarrow apply these concepts to their examples in an inconsistent order. considering that the authors claim to provide an easy guide for students of contention (tilly & tarrow , ), the appendix in which they propose an accessible step-by-step approach is more helpful than the book chapters in which they elaborate on the concepts in a less comprehensible way and order. for each concept of contentious politics listed in the guide, i looked for the relevant aspects in #metoo and engaged with the corresponding articles more deeply to identify mechanisms and subsequent changes in actors and on the political and social level. starting from the initial cluster i created with the help of my categories, i extended my basic notes on the relevant articles. i was specifically attentive towards ways that the sources critique or manifest current gendered power structures that enable and sanction sexual harassment as critiqued by #metoo. with the intention of identifying useful strategies for online feminism, i rely on a variety of authors with different backgrounds as well as several exemplary articles per concept of contentious politics. after a first engagement with the concept and relating relevant articles, i sometimes engaged with further articles beyond my initial list, e.g. in-text references that linked relevant articles. even though tilly and tarrow stress that their definition of “politics” is not a narrow one by choice, they provide few examples of contention that would not fall into a narrower definition of politics. #metoo is, beyond its immediate effect of raising awareness for the magnitude of women’s experience with sexual harassment and abuse, a difficult example for some of the concepts because its implicit political consequence that gendered social hierarchies need to be abandoned is such an abstract one. this impacts the analysis of actors and identities as well as the institutions because not all of them seem to be dealing clearly with the same consequence (otherwise, male-oriented politics would be far more outraged at the prospect of its termination). 	 	 . the concept of contentious politics before applying contentious politics to #metoo, i provide a short overview of the most important aspects of the theory. charles tilly and sidney tarrow first published on the concepts of contentious politics together with doug mcadam in (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly ). the book was criticized even though its contribution as a grand theory was recognized. while providing numerous insights and connections between different forms of contention by focusing on mechanisms and processes similar in them, the book lacked analytical clarity. tilly and tarrow’s monograph “contentious politics” published in deepened the concepts developed previously and provided more empirical support (hanagan ; klandermans ). the second edition was re-worked by tarrow after tilly’s death to include the latest developments of social movements around the world as well as in the internet and published in (tilly and tarrow ). as “contentious politics” is the latest version of the theory updated to current developments, i rely on this work. the theory of contentious politics focuses on identifying dynamic mechanisms that connect all factors leading to contention rather than looking for causalities in those factors themselves (mcadam, tarrow, and tilly , ). it is thus a relational approach: “to explain contentious politics is to identify its recurrent causal mechanisms, the ways they combine, in what sequences they recur, and why different combinations and sequences, starting from different initial conditions, produce varying effects on the large scale.” ( ). the authors claim that their theory is an evolution to previous approaches of the classical social movement agenda because they focus on the dynamic mechanisms relating social change, political opportunities, mobilizing structures, frames and transgressive forms of action to each other ( ). instead of focusing on classifying such efforts as social movements, contentious politics includes a range of phenomena that do not necessarily qualify as social movements; social movements are a specific form of contentious politics that is sustained by employing repetitive means and basing their work on permanent organizations or networks (tilly & tarrow , ). contentious politics not only defines the theoretical approach but it also incentivizes a methodological approach of going from concept to concept and then reassembling the trajectory of the contentious phenomenon. tilly and tarrow define contentious politics as “interactions in which actors make claims bearing on other actors’ interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims or third parties”. contentious politics consists of three components: first, contention implies that 	 	 someone is making claims that bear on someone else’s interests; second, those claims are coordinated on behalf of shared interests and the basis to form collective action; and third, collective claim-making is considered politics as the claim-makers deal with agents of government in direct or indirect ways (tilly and tarrow ). the authors emphasize that the government’s involvement as target or initiator to claims is not a necessary element of contentious politics ( ). in order to analyze contentious politics, tilly and tarrow suggest a dynamic mechanism- and process-focused approach. by mechanism, they mean a “delimited class of changes that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations”, where processes are “regular combinations and sequences of mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and contingent) transformations of those elements”. the authors suggest that complicated social phenomena can best be analyzed in three steps: a thick description followed by a decomposition of the phenomenon into basic causes concluded by the re-composition of those causes to provide an overview of how the phenomenon developed (tilly & tarrow , ). for the first step of description of the contention, collective action and politics that constitute contentious politics, tilly and tarrow identify four central concepts: political actors, political identities, contentious performances and contentious repertoires. the makers of claims, more often than not, are hardly part of governments but become political actors by making collective claims (tilly & tarrow , ). by making claims on behalf of a group, new political identities constitute themselves that can be expressed via self-chosen or given collective names ( ). contentious performances are “familiar and standardized ways in which one set of political actors makes collective claims on some other set of political actors” ( ). if those performances become an established set of tools for a certain group of political actors, they are considered to be contentious repertoires ( ). these repertoires are not static, however, but subject to change either as an effect of rapid political changes or because of changing incremental structural factors that open up new possibilities for contentious action ( ). the latter is a less immediate change but considered to be more crucial in the long run ( ). the internet can be considered to be such a changing factor as its availability on a global scale increases incrementally and opens up new possibilities for the mobilization and coordination of contentious politics. so far, the internet’s role has developed threefold: as a mobilization tool for locally specific events; a coordination tool to coordinate contention for the same causes in different locations around the world; and as a tool of action itself because 	 	 it enabled an increasing amount of “connective action” where online activism is not just a means towards offline activism but a form of contention itself ( ). to move from the descriptive to the analytical stage, tilly and tarrow offer a range of additional explanatory concepts. these include sites, conditions, streams of contention, episodes, outcomes, mechanisms and processes (tilly and tarrow ). the authors employ a number of other concepts but this selection serves as an introduction to the theory. the description of the sites of contention offers the starting point for analyzing any contention: the site can be “originators, objects, and/or arenas of collective claims” and can vary for different kinds of contention. they can be individuals as well as elements of social life, like a profession or an organization ( ). conditions of contention vary for different actors in specific regimes. they depend on an actor’s ties to the government and the political climate towards the claims the actor is making as well as an actor’s relations to other relevant actors. those conditions shape the way contention starts and can change during contention ( ). streams of contention are sets of events singled out by researchers for explanation that contain connected moments of contention. they are thus not fixed elements of contention but depend on researchers’ decisions, for example on the selection of sites of contention to be analyzed ( ). contentious politics achieves changes in the conditions that the claim-makers faced initially and produces outcomes that are traceable to contentious action. outcomes are the main explanatory target of analyzing contentious politics and researchers look for the mechanisms and processes that produce these outcomes ( f). to explain the conditions in which contention occurs, we look at regimes. those are the relations between the actors in contentious politics, the challengers as well as those being challenged. governments are usually one of the actors involved in regimes because they control decisive amounts of means of coercion. their relation with the government defines other actors, either as members or challengers, or sometimes as outsiders who operate outside the direct control of the government ( ). the characteristics of a regime produce a political opportunity structure. it is determined by six regime properties: the multiplicity of independent centers of power within the regime; openness to new actors of the government; instability of current political alignments; whether influential allies or supporters are willing to support challengers; the 	 	 degree of repression or facilitation the challengers face by the regime; as well as decisive changes in any of these properties ( ). all the above concepts are properties of contention that can explain parts of contention. to employ them for an analysis of contention, it is necessary to identify the mechanisms and processes that connect these different properties. mechanisms are “changes that produce the same immediate effects over a wide range of circumstances” (tilly & tarrow , ). while mechanisms in contention come in a great variety, the following three are the most common according to the authors: brokerage, meaning the “production of new connection between previously unconnected sites”; diffusion, the “spread of a form of contention, an issue, or a way of framing it from one site to another”, and coordinated action, where “two or more actors’ engagement in mutual signaling and parallel making of claims on the same object” can be found ( ). while these mechanisms directly concern the spread of claim making from one site to another, other mechanisms help explain why such a spread might be halted or facilitated by other circumstances: social appropriation, boundary activation, certification, identity shift, competition, escalation and radicalization as well as repression and social control ( - ). several mechanisms that regularly combine in various ways and produce changes on a larger scale than single mechanisms constitute processes (tilly & tarrow , ). examples for processes are mobilization (actors starting to make contentious claims) and demobilization (actors ceasing to make claims) ( ); counter-mobilization; new coordination, which is the combination of diffusion and brokerage mechanisms to coordinated action; and upward scale shift, implying the coordination at a higher organization level ( ). episodes are “bounded sequences of continuous interaction” of contentious politics, which researchers can divide up for their analysis to discover mechanisms and processes more easily. by breaking streams of contention into episodes, the researcher is able to describe them in detail and identify the causes of those episodes, and reassemble those causes to explain the episode. tilly and tarrow call this the “mechanism-process approach” (j. bennett ). 	 	 . #metoo as contentious politics in the us equipped with these descriptive and explanatory concepts, i analyze #metoo with the intention to check the applicability of the individual concepts as well as the theory at large to online contention in the following. 	 . bases the following part describes the components of #metoo and what is special about it in detail and enables the identification of mechanisms and processes marking #metoo’s development. . . contention, collective action and politics for the analysis of #metoo with the concepts of contentious politics, it is necessary to first demonstrate why #metoo is an instance of contentious politics. according to tilly and tarrow, contentious politics is claim-making bearing on third parties’ interest and involving a government in some way. it is the intersection of contention, politics and collective action (tilly & tarrow , f). the aspect of contention in #metoo is the combination of the hashtag of demonstrating the commonplace of experiencing sexual harassment and abuse for women, and the demand involved is centered first and foremost around recognition for the magnitude of the problem, and secondly to sanction such behavior (gash and harding ). the coverage in the new york times focused on the first aspect of showing the magnitude of the problem in the early days of #metoo in october (codrea-rado ; rutenberg, abrams, and ryzik ). yet, already on november , jessica bennett names the intention of #metoo more clearly: women demand that men could no longer get away with sexual harassment and assault so easily (j. bennett ). #metoo involves contention because the participants of #metoo make claims that bear on others’ interests: they demand that sexual harassment and abuse are recognized as a structural problem women face and offences should be taken seriously, or as hirshman terms it, women are claiming the moral high ground by uncompromisingly terming harassment and abuse as wrong (hirshman ). those demands bear on the interest of offenders as well as on everyone benefiting from the patriarchal dividend derived from the systematic oppression of women. as brooks barnes claims on november , , people in the top jobs of the film industry, from where #metoo emerged, resent the changes #metoo brought about, such as efforts to diversify the membership of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences or the oscar nominees because it threatens their own powerful positions (barnes ). michelle 	 	 goldberg writes about the “shame of the metoo men”, who she diagnoses not to have learned enough from #metoo as some seemingly resist to understand the difference between their own public shame after being accused as a predator and their accusers’ trauma (goldberg ). where there is no common understanding, the claims made by #metoo bear on those men’s interests even harder. it is, however, not only the most powerful men whose interests are at stake: sexual harassment and abuse are sanctioned by a gendered social hierarchy which all men benefit from, and the abolition of one warrants change of the other, resulting in the diminishment of the patriarchal dividend (connell , ). even though tilly and tarrow emphasize that it is not necessary for a government to be the target of the challengers’ demands, they point out why it makes a difference whether governments are involved in contention: governmental power creates a power hierarchy between those involved in government and those kept from power; governments make the rules for and control the coercive means which determine how contentious claims can be made (tilly and tarrow ). for #metoo, their claim that governments do not necessarily have to be direct receivers of contentious claims while still being involved holds: the demands of #metoo involve the government because sexual harassment and abuse are sanctioned by misogynist social structures that are produced and reproduced by governments: the social setting #metoo reacts to and critiques is a patriarchal one and the government is part of it. therefore, the demands of #metoo, even if not addressing the government directly, “bear on governmental rights, regulations and interests” (tilly & tarrow , ). furthermore, as those in political power are mostly men, who as a group are #metoo’s main addressees, it not only challenges governmental properties on an abstract level but poses a risk for individuals in power ( ). bennett’s argument from november , , that women demand that harassers cannot get away with predatory behavior anymore relates directly to the government: she claims that women make that demand because they cannot act directly against the alleged predator who became us president despite the known accusations of sexual harassment and abuse against him (j. bennett ). the hashtag as a shared term for social media content is used specifically by women to collect their experiences in one virtual space and is thus a coordinated and collective action on behalf of their shared interest to show the magnitude of the problem, demonstrate that it is a structural problem and demand change in society’s dealing with it. according to tilly and tarrow, such collective claim-making can fall into three categories: identity claims, which “declare that an actor exists”; standing claims, demonstrating that an “actor belongs to an 	 	 established category within the regime and therefore deserves the rights and respect that members of that category receive”; and program claims, which are “[calls] for their objects to act in a certain way” (tilly & tarrow , ). #metoo raises the awareness for women as a social group that makes common claims, their standing as member of society who deserve the same respect given to men, and involves a call to change predatory behavior as well as social conduct around it. i now turn to the actors involved in #metoo. . . actors and identities actors in #metoo are rather difficult to single out. even though individuals are sometimes attributed to be leaders of #metoo, as maya salam claims of asia argento in august (salam ), it is the mass of participants in sharing the hashtag fueling the contention more than individual leaders. two actors, however, can be identified easily: while the common denominators of the mass of participants in #metoo may be few beyond the fact that they experienced sexual harassment and abuse, the initiators probably pose the most juxtaposed life situations. on the one hand, there is the social organizer tarana burke, a black woman who initiated the ngo metoo in as a movement to help victims of sexual harassment and abuse. on the other hand, there is hollywood actress alyssa milano whose call for the use of #metoo on twitter made the hashtag go viral. in an nyt article on october , , garcia reported how the two initiators, whose social reality could hardly be more different, joined forces in the combat against sexual harassment: initially, black women and women of color criticized milano for using #metoo without crediting burke as the initiator, but milano then reached out to collaborate with burke (garcia ). when the time announced that the “silence breakers” of #metoo would be its “person of the year ”, burke and milano gave a joint interview in december , underlining their intention of joining forces for the fight against sexual harassment (bromwich ). however, the grievances between white and black women and women of color in online activism had been demonstrated once again just two days before #metoo went viral: on october , , many women joined the #womenboycotttwitter when rose mcgowan was logged out of her twitter account after accusing harvey weinstein of sexual harassment. at the same time, black women and women of color users of twitter pointed out that non- white victims of harassment and abuse are not supported by such symbols of solidarity like a twitter boycott (garcia ). by citing tweets stressing the lack of intersectionality in feminist movements as well as directly quoting tarana burke and april reign, initiator of #oscarsowhite, and not quoting milano except for her tweets, garcia gives black women 	 	 and women of color’s concerns and demands space and draws the attention on the issue of intersectionality in the initiation of #metoo. a year after #metoo went viral, burke talked about her plans for metoo with aisha harris of nyt. burke pointed towards two issues that hampered #metoo’s and her own movements progress: the focus was too much on sexual harassment and abuse as a traumatic experience instead of how women heal from it and black women and women of color were still not represented and respected in the discourse. to make use of the broad attention the issue of sexual harassment and abuse still receives and to focus on the healing aspect, burke wants to work with hollywood writers’ rooms to deal with abuse on screen as well as create resources for women on their healing journey (a. harris ). while burke’s activism before metoo became a hashtag was not honored or supported on a wide basis, the attention the hashtag provides is beneficial for her ngo metoo and her access to industries like the hollywood writing rooms is also enabled through the spread of the hashtag. even though burke as its initiator is still not on the front lines of #metoo, the new awareness sustains her activism, just as her organizational resources enable her to make use of the new opportunities. while she might not be a visible leading figure, she is one of very few constantly present actors in this contention. the common actors in #metoo, who participate by making their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse public, are mostly women, although men make similar experiences, too, if in smaller numbers. participating in #metoo has three requirements: access to a web- enabled device, having experienced sexual harassment and abuse in any form, and having the will and courage to publicly talk about it. a feminist consciousness is not required; the identities of actors who participate in #metoo is constituted by their experience of sexual harassment and abuse, and to some extent by their gender as ascribed by social norms because sexual harassment and abuse against women is sanctioned by the patriarchal structures suppressing women. it also legitimizes oppressive behavior against all those who do not meet the criteria of hegemonic masculinity, making other genders than female a target for sexual harassment and abuse, too (connell ). the identity of the #metoo participants becomes political in that they collectively rally around the demand to end sexual harassment and abuse. this rallying, however, was dependent on prominent hollywood actresses speaking out because their accusations and the public resonance they created were more powerful than accusations voiced by unknown women as rutenberg et al. state in october , one day after the hashtag went viral (rutenberg, abrams, and ryzik ). 	 	 regardless of the background of feminist topics informing the resentment of sexual harassment and abuse, participants of #metoo do not have to identify as feminist. this hampers the development of #metoo to a movement based on a common identity. a common identity would separate the challengers from those who they make claims on, relate them to each other, specify the relations towards those outside the common identity more clearly and create a shared understanding for those within the boundaries of the movement (tilly & tarrow , ). despite the lack of such common denominators, the participants’ actions are still feminist, as they are speaking up about gender-related oppression and question the bigger system, which sanctions such behavior. by uniting under a hashtag describing their common experiences, women created a common claim under a feminist banner, even though not every individual participant identifies with feminism. interesting about this political identity is that it potentially mobilizes more than half of humanity because its constituency are women: assuming that all women are oppressed by patriarchal structures in some way, all are concerned with sexual harassment and abuse, even though not all women are equally oppressed (collins ; connell ). if we add those men who are marginalized because of their femininity, we may wonder why #metoo did not mobilize even more participants. it does, however, explain the outrage of the some, especially men, against #metoo because the high mobilization potential threatens the patriarchal power structures that assigns privilege to those benefitting from hegemonic masculinity (connell ). the identity of those who question the legitimacy of #metoo is constituted by their interest in keeping the status quo, what hirshman calls “the normal forces of opposition to social change – traditional religion, conservative politics” (hirshman , ), and sometimes by their ignorance of gendered power structures or their misguided interpretation of what #metoo is about, like the prohibition of flirting and the like. misunderstandings are, however, sometimes fostered by #metoo participants themselves, as bret stephens claims in an nyt article on december , : outspoken feminists’ rejection of a distinction between assaulting behavior by severity is not helpful for appealing to society’s sense of justice (stephens ). a case in point is a letter by french actress catherine deneuve and more than other actresses claiming that they find #metoo to be exaggerating because it condemns assaulting behavior no matter how severe (codrea-rado ). especially in the entertainment industry, men are concerned with the supposedly unfair treatment #metoo subjects them to. lindy west, in an outraged opinion piece from october , , takes on film director woody 	 	 allen’s cautions against #metoo becoming a witch hunt: hunt proclaims that “yes, this is a witch hunt. i’m a witch and i’m hunting you.” thereby she does not only rephrase the historic reference to witch hunts, during which women were prosecuted, to the ironic statement that she as a witch is now hunting men. she also expresses her pity for men like woody allen who weirdly condoles weinstein (west ). warnings against taking measures too far in fighting sexual harassment and abuse seem rather ironic given the exacerbated magnitude with which inappropriate behavior occurs, even though these warnings might be justified in referring to wider society’s feeling of justice and concrete legal measures as stephens points out on december , (stephens ). in general, one of the pitfalls of hashtags as a shared term anyone can use is its accessibility to people with different goals than those of the initiators: trolls who “criticize, lambast, or otherwise serve as contrarians who disrupt or inflame threads in online discourse” can easily join the action (rodino-colocino ). people who disagree can thus join the debate not only by commenting on sympathizing participants’ posts but by using the hashtag even with counter-imposed content and their posts become part of the online collection, too. as much as it is part of #metoo, it is not covered by my materials from nyt. however, i engage with the counter-mobilization in the excursus on the gillette advertisement. . . social movement base social movement bases are often confused with social movements according to tilly and tarrow. the authors separate the two and claim that social movement bases are “the social background, organizational resources, and cultural frameworks of contention and collective action” (tilly & tarrow , ). social movement bases thus develop over time. a recent publication by law scholar linda hirshman, even though a popular scientific book, provides a solid overview from a feminist perspective from the first lawsuits on grounds of sexual harassment in the work place in the s until today’s #metoo (hirshman ). even though jennifer szalai criticizes hirshman in her review for nyt for her uncompromising attitude towards liberal feminists the book provides the narratives developing feminist claims in #metoo, even if in a biased way (szalai ). for hirshman, the salience of sexual harassment as a social issue begins with the mysterious drowning of a previous presidential campaigner of robert kennedy in the presence of senator ted kennedy in . even though under the mask of conservative family values, the author claims that afterwards, the media started to investigate into the 	 	 sexual misconducts of powerful men (hirshman , ). when feminist scholars began to deal with the issue in the mid- s, men’s power abuse in the work place was termed to be sexual harassment. by giving it a name, women could now talk about and fight the problem specifically ( ). for hirshman, the “#metoo movement has the connection between sex and male aggression been fully made to the public” ( ). sexual harassment, however, became a significant point of reference for women only when it was legally recognized as a violation of the civil rights act. a dedicated law student, catharine mackinnon, started this process in , re-arguing the prevalent feminist notion of equality in law present until then. as hirshman puts it, “[the] point is not sameness or difference, but domination and subordination” (hirshman , ). this new way of arguing made it possible not to ask whether women were treated equal to men but whether certain actions oppressed women. the issue of oppression in the workplace had implications for other areas, too, as feminists began to question the separation of the public and the private sphere even though both were organized following patriarchal principals and the oppression of women in one sphere reflected that in the other ( ). law scholar kimberlé crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality around the same time in the s as a reaction to the rejection of sexual harassment complaints of black women by courts ( ). going the way through the courts and challenging the current legal situation via lawsuits meant that the actors of the time used “the most institutionalized form of contention that americans possess” (tilly & tarrow , ). hirshman constantly reminds her readers that #metoo still deals with the same topics as feminists in the s have, and that black women have played a primary role in this struggle, repeating itself in tarana burke’s initiation of metoo in , long before a white feminist made it go viral. hirshman gives credit to black women’s actions on the road to #metoo and the context it takes place in today in general, which szalai, generally rather critical of the book despite its useful overview, emphasizes as well (szalai ). hirshman describes the struggle of black women to ally with other groups in the fight against sexual harassment and abuse as even more exacerbated than that of white women because black women face a “conflict of loyalties between their membership of a racially oppressed group and their right not to be harassed”, worsened by the stereotype of black men being viewed as natural sex perpetrators (hirshman , f). hirshman describes women’s fight to have sexual harassment and abuse fully legally recognized. it involved the recognition of creating a hostile environment at the workplace as a criteria which provides “a clear picture of the conditions of power” necessary to understand 	 	 harassment situations (hirshman , ) in the s. shortly after, the ruling that a woman’s “voluntary” participation in the acts she is suing is not the ground to judge whether it was harassment or not, but rather whether she welcomed the advances, was another positive development for women ( ). despite these advances, hirshman stresses that #metoo is still fighting the same fight. an episode from that fight hirshman pays particular attention to is one that repeated itself: accusations brought forward against a us supreme court nominee, who gets confirmed nonetheless. the first time, it was anita hill, a law professor, accusing clarence thomas, nominee for the us supreme court in , whom hill had worked for as his assistant when thomas was chairman of the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) in the s, of sexual harassment (hirshman , f). even though hill’s appearance in the hearing was authentic and she was publicly believed, thomas, who was questioned second and performed an emotional instance of male rage was appointed after the hearings ( f). the hill-thomas hearings were a terrifying example for women of what happens if they speak out about their experiences. even though a book published by two journalists about the case later established rather unequivocally that hill was telling the truth, the republicans managed to push through their nominee, also because the left, usually the natural ally of feminists, was paralyzed because opposing thomas meant opposing a black nominee. another spice that adds to the political insanity was that democrat joe biden, today presidential candidate for the elections, was the chairman of the judiciary committee who made the hearing a hard time for hill by not allowing all her evidence to be used ( ). the second time, the nomination and then confirmation of bret kavanaugh, another republican us supreme court judge nominee, replicated the hill-clarence hearings in . christine blasey ford, a professor of law like hill, accused kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in the s, and again, kavanaugh was confirmed nevertheless (hirshman , f). maureen dowd, in an article for nyt published september , , states that ford was even worse off than hill because she also had the internet’s possibilities working against her as well as a misogynist president discrediting her instead of “only” the white house. as dowd puts it, feminists “haven’t forgotten [their] history. but [they] still seem doomed to repeat it.” (dowd b). the democrats’ ambiguous history of dealing with sexual harassment and abuse continued with bill clinton, us president from to and a self-identified feminist, who was the 	 	 “most reliably supportive president feminists have ever had” while privately acting rather transgressive towards women (hirshman , ). nevertheless, feminists, most notably gloria steinem, supported clinton publicly ( f) and as dowd puts it in an article from june , : feminists approved of him as long as he advanced women’s issues, even though he pushed them back privately (dowd a). while steinem at the time denied the power imbalance between the us president and monica lewinsky, his intern who he had an affair with, hirshman is convinced that the power imbalance was present because clinton knew what public reaction lewinsky would face if their affair was uncovered while she seemingly did not (hirshman , ). feminists continuing to support clinton was another instance of trying to “accommodate both political gender equality and sexual libertinism in one culture” ( ), an endeavor feminism was trying to undertake after the pornography debate of the s brought a win for those approving of pornography as an emancipatory tool for women and opposing its regulation by the state ( ). for hirshman, the real enemies of feminists, or “frenemies”, are the liberals, especially those in the media (hirshman , ) who have depicted feminists as enemies since the s ( ). but also outside the media, liberals have not always been good feminist allies; not only did many democrats push for barack obama as presidential candidate instead of hillary clinton as the first female candidate because her husband’s scandals and her support for him had stained her ( ff); #metoo revealed some skeptics in the democratic party, e.g. in dealing with senator al franken when he was accused of sexual harassment and abuse. as goldmacher reports in an article from july , , kirsten gillibrand, presidential candidate for the election, took the occasion of the franken debate to accuse some men in the democratic party of not valuing women enough (goldmacher ). it fits hirshman’s claim that after #metoo, the natural feminist allies on the left again split because republicans endorsed their abusive power holders while democrats were supposed to stop (hirshman , ). nevertheless, female representation in the democratic party is growing ( ) and the elections of the house in penalized republicans because donald trump’s presidency alienated female voters, especially white women’s support, while more democratic women were elected ( ff). but not only the political realm is changing; feminism gained ground on the internet since especially through feminist blogs and online magazines, e.g. by authors who would later become leading investigative journalists uncovering the scandals of sexual harassment and abuse that let to and fueled #metoo (hirshman , ff). not only did the internet make 	 	 feminist content accessible and more attractive to a greater number of women by proclaiming the individualistic, and maybe too comfortable, third-wave feminism that in hirshman’s view diverts feminism from unity ( ff). it also enabled the first women’s march , “likely the largest single demonstration in the history of counting demonstrations” against the inauguration of donald trump as us president ( ). the women’s march was organized via calls on the internet and provided an occasion for empowering women to build social networks and run for political offices ( ). however, as goldberg writes in an article of january , , the women’s march was a political event staged before a movement developed behind it and therefore remained a “moment rather than a movement” as the declining turn-out showed the following two years (goldberg ). still, the women’s march should be credited for mobilizing new activism among women as wines and stockman claim on january , (wines and stockman ). for hirshman, fox news anchor gretchen carlson’s suing fox news ceo roger ailes “was the critical moment ushering in the current #metoo” (hirshman , ) because “newspaper and magazine editors decided to go after other powerful men” after fox news’ harassment scandal ( ). since the early s, investigative journalists had tried to uncover the sexual harassment and abuse scandals of harvey weinstein, “arguably, the most powerful man in the movie business”, that were known around hollywood ( ff). weinstein was enabled by a system that empowered and protected abusers like him, as well as money buying him out of any troubles ( ). after the first accusations became public, however, more than women have come forward and accused weinstein, who seems to have relied on the same pattern of luring female actresses and employees to meet him privately with some pretense to then demand sexual treats of them ( ff). the publicity created by the women of the film industry coming forward enabled #metoo, which is both a platform of legitimation where victims are listened to and believed, and a platform of storytelling. the aspect of storytelling at the same time empowers victims to speak up as well as offering the space for all stories, which mainstream media cannot provide (hirshman , ). while hirshman claims that the power of social media lies in its power of public humiliation ( ), for her “slacktivism” is a necessary but insufficient action to produce social change ( ). #yesallwomen is an instance that managed to raise awareness, yet, social justice movements need to aim at changing the judiciary, the political setting and the cultural framework for their issues ( ). hirshman finds successful instances for all three concerning #metoo. even though kavanaugh’s confirmation as a supreme court judge was a blow in the area of judiciary, the 	 	 recall of criminal trial judge aaron persky, who had sentenced brock turner to only six months after raping a woman, was a political success for feminism (hirshman , ), even though liberals, mostly in law professions, again opposed this feminist progress on grounds of arguments relying on the tradition of libertinism ( f). hirshman claims that #metoo’s power is in possibly uniting women as a majority because so many women experience sexual harassment and abuse ( ). #metoo needs to politically unify that power more. the cultural realm gives hope that this unity can develop: les moonves, former ceo of cbs, a television broadcaster, as someone who sat on top of “one of a handful of institutions that create culture” was brought down over sexual harassment and abuse allegations ( ). even though it took popular, rich actresses to break the silence over sexual harassment and abuse ( ), the entertainment industry with its determinative influence over cultural goods in the us is changing due to their braveness. as nell scovell puts it in an article from august , , hollywood has long remained silent, but women have become louder, with men breaking their silence, too, after moonves was ousted (scovell ). as the above narrative shows, the social background and cultural frameworks against which #metoo developed have changed since women began to fight sexual harassment and abuse in the s. the organizational resources of collective action activists have built provide examples women can rely on today. these organizations have worked with different repertoires of contention, which have been broadened by the availability of hashtags as a tool of action. i turn to these repertoires in detail in the following. . . performances and repertoires the hashtag is a familiar performance tool in online contention that can be employed in all kinds of campaigns. previous hashtags dealing with feminist and women’s issues like #yesallwomen used the same mechanism of collecting experiences of a certain group, women who experienced sexual harassment and abuse, to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. tilly and tarrow state that the “internet-based call to action” is already a modular performance (tilly & tarrow , ), and so is the hashtag, which is often part of calls to action, but as in #metoo can also be the center of action itself. hashtags can be adopted and used by other actors and for other causes of contention because they combine a general feature, the use of hashtags, and a specific feature, the possibility to formulate a hashtag for any cause ( ). its general applicability is demonstrated e.g. by complementary hashtags to #metoo such as #balancetonporc and #quellavoltache. 	 	 hashtags are a familiar way of making claims. at the same time, their use is a form of contained contention because it is allowed and tolerated by the regime. the contentious performance of posting a hashtag is part of the repertoire of online contention that includes other performances like calling for offline contention, in the case of #metoo e.g. the women’s marches. tilly and tarrow state that the other form of contention, transgressive contention, which is either explicitly forbidden by the government or an entirely new form of contention, “violates standard arrangements” (tilly & tarrow , ). they do not explain what exactly they mean by standard arrangements but as they talk about institutional routines in the same paragraph, i anticipate them pointing at the relations between the relevant institutionalized actors of the regime in a society. the regime of the united states is based on a patriarchal order, which allows and sanctions the oppression of women, a consequence of which is for instance a man accused of sexually harassing and abusing women for decades being voted for president, as goldberg points out on october , (goldberg ). the demand to end a symptom of this oppression, sexual harassment and abuse, could arguably be seen as transgressive contention: the structures of oppression are so deeply embedded in and connected to all areas of social life that consequentially abandoning one aspect of it would imply a system change. in consequence, #metoo violates the existing standard arrangement of conduct of the regime because it wants to free those relations of patriarchal oppression and could therefore be considered transgressive. two points should be considered here, however: firstly, the consequential demand for a system change that follows from the recognition that oppressive structures against women are too deeply embedded in society to only change parts of the system is probably not what most participants of #metoo have in mind when joining the hashtag but participants were rather looking for legitimization and using the possibility to tell their stories (hirshman , ) or to transform workplace culture as weisberg stated on april , (weisberg ). secondly, transgressive contention is usually met with greater repression by the regime (tilly & tarrow , ). #metoo has indeed been belittled by the president (cochrane ) and its rightfulness has been questioned for instance by woody allen cautioning against a witch hunt (west ). critics range from warnings against a one-size-fits-all approach against alleged perpetrators instead of weighing the severity of the respective actions (stolberg ) to outright claims that #metoo goes to far if sexual harassers face professional consequences if their offense was “minor” by bret stephens on december , (stephens ). such actions can be regarded as a means of social control in form of harassment (tilly & tarrow , ). yet, the us government itself did not engage in 	 	 repressive action against #metoo and its participants although it is clear that the president as well as numerous politicians from both the republican and the democratic party view #metoo rather skeptically, e.g. when they continue their support for politicians accused of harassment and abuse. even though #metoo could theoretically be considered or even practically become transgressive if a majority of its participants unite behind the goal of changing the patriarchal system, its categorization as transgressive is rather inappropriate at this point. the relevance of hashtags as part of the contentious repertoire results from an incremental structural change in modern society: the growing relevance of the internet for daily social interaction. as tilly and tarrow state, repertoire changes that result from incremental structural changes are often more impactful than repertoire change caused by rapid political action (tilly & tarrow , ). incremental change depends on how well claim-making and the organization of daily social life are connected as well as a historical signaling system, which contention relies upon in a specific context, and the operation of the government ( ). #metoo was enabled because the internet, as the changing structural factor, makes the visualization of a mass of women’s experience of sexual harassment as a daily reality possible. rallying women around common demands is a contentious practice in the us since the s when the first women’s organizations started to file lawsuits on grounds of sexual harassment; the signaling system #metoo relies on. the government, if not by its immediate actions in the beginning, still provided the provocation of #metoo as a broad action: with the election of donald trump, who is openly misogynist, as president in the atmosphere and awareness for women’s position in society changed as jessica bennett claims in an article from november , (j. bennett ). this development also enabled a well-known contentious performance, the political demonstration in the form of the women’s marches. even though not directly related to #metoo because they began already before the hashtag went viral, the women’s marches of , and are performances critiquing women’s oppression in society. the women’s march of started to protest the inauguration of donald trump as us president and assembled, as hirshman points out, a huge amount of demonstrators (hirshman , ). however, the succeeding marches of and were unable to mobilize similar numbers of participants despite the increased awareness and salience of women’s issue through #metoo: as goldberg as well as wines and stockman point out after the women’s march, the organizers did not only fail to develop a movement with a common 	 	 cause and goal after the first march but the controversy around anti-semitism in its organizing team hindered mobilization, too (goldberg ; wines and stockman ). additionally, povoledo et al. point out in an article on march , covering the international women’s day, participating in marches and demonstrations is a matter of privilege (povoledo, minder, and joseph ). lastly, bringing lawsuits on ground of sexual harassment and abuse is not only the most institutionalized form of contention but also builds on the social movement base feminists efforts of the past years provide (hirshman ; tilly and tarrow ). the time’s up legal defense fund by hollywood actresses that provides financial aid for less privileged women to bring lawsuits does not only make this form of contention available for them (buckley ) but demonstrates an instance of solidarity that deepens the contentious repertoire. part of the legal repertoire accusers as well as accused can use, is, however, a bifurcated force in dealing with lawsuits on ground of sexual harassment and abuse: non- disclosure agreements (nda), agreements negotiated between accuser and accused outside of court, have been used to silence women while they also gave victims the possibility of receiving financial compensation they might well be in need of. this measure can thus be used against victims while it can also be a preferable option for them. the prohibition of ndas that some states considered would thus reduce accusers’ contentious repertoire of bringing lawsuits, even though it might target the silencing (e. a. harris ). #metoo’s mobilization potential to foster other contentious performances has thus been rather limited as the mobilization of participants for offline events concerning women’s and feminist issues as well has been limitedly successful. 	 . . institutions “movements hover at the gates of institutional politics, sometimes entering, sometimes rejecting, but always in an uneasy relationship with institutions” (tilly & tarrow , ). institutions are “established, organized, widely recognized routines, connections, and forms of organization employed repeatedly in producing collective actions” ( ). #metoo went viral when a hollywood actress promoted it. the film industry in hollywood is a cultural meaning-making institution in the us and beyond as it sets the norms for beauty ideals and normative behavior while it constantly pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as appropriate in mainstream culture (hirshman , ). the fact that a woman who is part of this meaning-making machinery spoke out about the deficiencies in this system raises the symbolic significance of publicly criticizing the ignorance of the structural problem 	 	 of sexual harassment and abuse. as scovell pointed out on august , , milano and other hollywood actresses coming forward were acting against an arrangement of silence and dismissal (scovell ). the institution paving the way towards the public recognition the issue of sexual harassment and abuse gained through #metoo was the new york times and its journalists jodi kantor and megan twohey who investigated accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of three decades against the film producer harvey weinstein. nyt as a medium with high reach and serious reputation lent the accusations and the magnitude of the problem more credibility. the us president donald trump presents a curious institution in the context of #metoo: michelle goldberg, in an opinion piece for nyt, points out that he was elected president in , about a year before #metoo went viral, even though he is both openly misogynist as well as accused of sexual harassment and abuse since the s and despite the fact that all this was publicly known at the time of his election (goldberg ). furthermore, trump was named the “time’s person of the year” in , the year before the “silence breakers” of #metoo were awarded this title (bromwich ). one year before #metoo, neither an institution like the time nor a significant part (though not the majority in absolute numbers) of the us electorate seem to have considered sexual harassment and abuse to be a topic important enough to limit a man’s credentials. nevertheless, goldberg sees the outrage weinstein was met with as “a sign that even if patriarchal sociopathy is more pervasive than we like to imagine, it can be defeated when a culture adopts other values and is forced to live up to them“ (goldberg ). nevertheless, trump has mocked #metoo as cochrane reports on july , (cochrane ). he was, however, reluctant to express his support for colleagues accused of sexual harassment and abuse shortly after #metoo unleashed: blinder and martin reported on november , , that when asked about his position towards roy moore, republican candidate for the alabama senate elections that year and accused of abusive behavior, the president was unwilling to abandon him as much as to confirm his support for the candidate (blinder and martin ). in the immediate aftermath of the beginning of #metoo, even the president who used to brag about his predatory behavior towards women (bush ) was hesitant to endorse sexual harassment and abuse directly. another factor to be taken into account is the institution of the gender binary, which sorts people into a gendered hierarchy. the gendered hierarchy is a routinized form of social 	 	 organization in the interest of many politicians: a majority of politicians in the us are men who gain from the patriarchal dividend of the oppression of women (connell ). the gender regime is per se hostile to #metoo because it would be overthrown if #metoo was taken to its consequence and the gendered social hierarchy was abandoned. wines and stockman, in an article on january , , claim that #metoo as well as the women’s marches helped to mobilize women not only for grassroots activism but that this mobilization created social networks of women helping each other run for political offices as well (wines and stockman ). it is necessary to bear in mind that the gender binary not only gives men more powerful social positions, but that toxic masculinity is an inherent feature of the patriarchal system as the concept of powerful masculinity enables the suppression of women. it is toxic because it is a feature of gender that is portrayed as compulsory for men in western societies and this compulsion creates pressure on men to conform (connell ). the american psychological association has recognized the hurtful potential of traditional ideals of masculinity in its guidelines because of the debate on gender identity that rose with #metoo as fortin reports on january (fortin ). gender is, unfortunately, not the only routinized social hierarchy in american society that constitutes an institution; racism is another. just as gender oppression, institutionalized racism is visible in #metoo from the very beginning since an unequal power dynamic exists between the initiators: social organizer tarana burke, who had worked against sexual harassment for years without receiving support and recognition, and a famous white hollywood actress who was able to pull off the hashtag to go viral (garcia ). furthermore, any institutionalized system of oppression influences the social position an accuser finds herself in, and the fact that weinstein was able to sustain his powerful position with the help of non-disclosure-agreements and huge lump-sums paid to his victims (kantor and twohey ). these oppressive institutions deeply anchored in american society hinder the social recognition of sexual harassment and abuse as wrong to be truly intersectional despite the empowering support by less abstract institutions such as parts of the cultural and media industry. 	 . 	explanatory	concepts	 having described the basic properties of #metoo, i now apply the explanatory concepts tilly and tarrow provide. the authors suggest dividing instances of contentious politics into 	 	 streams of contention, which can then be chopped up into episodes. i choose to consider #metoo from its start in october until july as one stream of contention, thus taking the entire course to the point of writing into account (tilly & tarrow , ). instead of defining episodes within which to search for mechanisms that produce outcomes, i begin my investigations with the concepts of contentious politics and look for their applicability in any episode of #metoo in order to test the theory. . . sites the sites of contention are the “human settings that serve as originators, objects and/or arenas of contentious politics” (tilly & tarrow , ). for #metoo, the originator is the hollywood film industry that provoked the public outcry against sexual harassment because the famous actresses speaking up created more attention to the issue than unknown women criticizing it (rutenberg, abrams, and ryzik ). #metoo’s object is the social structure, which enables and sanctions sexual harassment and abuse, as well as for predators to change their behavior. it is directed at harassment and abuse and its main goal is to “reform workplace culture”, as weisberg wrote on april , . the workplace is often reigned by a hierarchy making it especially easy for predators, mostly males who occupy senior positions to exploit their junior, mostly female, co-workers (weisberg ). the internet is #metoo’s main arena of contention: not only is the hashtag an online phenomenon itself, it also spread throughout and became the contention it is through the internet. twitter as the emerging site of the contentious action also promoted what rutenberg et al. call a campaign on moments, its platform for highlighted stories (rutenberg, abrams, and ryzik ). this is a weakness of #metoo because contention in the offline world, e.g. in the form of physical protest during a demonstration, strike or the like, is still recognized as more serious than online contention (gash and harding ; hirshman ; thrift ). the effectiveness of the internet as a site is generally debated because the contact to addressees is often not direct enough; as goldberg pointed out on january , , it is difficult to build a movement after mobilization took place online (goldberg ). however, the internet as a site of contention has no boundaries and can therefore mobilize amounts of people that offline contention reaches less easily. not even the first women’s march in with one million participants rallying in washington, d.c. and a total of four million in all marches around the us (hirshman , ) came close to #metoo appearing . times on twitter and million times on facebook during the first hours after milano’s 	 	 call (renkl ). another arena is the courtroom as #metoo encouraged women to speak up and take legal action against harassment and abuse (weiser, watkins, and goldstein ). . . conditions the internet as the initial and prevailing main site of contention has specific properties that determine activism online. the click-based nature of platforms such as twitter and facebook promotes issues depending on the online traffic they generate. such mechanisms follow sensationalist logic and complicate constructive debates. additionally, the word limit on twitter provides a limited insight into the matters discussed (thelandersson , ). nevertheless, hirshman emphasizes that internet conversations about sexual harassment and abuse offer two things that victims often miss in the offline world: legitimation by the mass of victims speaking up and the space to actually tell their stories (hirshman , ). while the space the internet provides is an enabling condition for #metoo, the internet often reproduces the binary gender order that determines offline interactions; not only are some areas of the internet like online gaming clearly male-dominated (see e.g. richard & gray ) but any online platform can be employed along a gender binary: while feminists make use of platforms for the dissemination of feminist content, the phenomenon of self- proclaimed male rights activists running platforms for men mostly to complain about women has increased in recent years. michele white dedicates an entire book to study the relation between masculinity and the internet whose title “producing masculinity” already indicates her conviction of what the internet does. she also researches the paradox of gendered conduct online despite the body, which usually signifies the gender category an individual is assumed to fit in, being absent in online spaces (white ). gender as a factor of structural power thus plays into online contention. other structural factors that privilege people in the offline world also privilege them online. even though #metoo’s significance is created by the mass of participants, most of them publicly unknown and “ordinary” individuals, the hashtag only became significant because well-known hollywood actresses with significant public outreach posted it. despite the attention it generally drew to the issue of sexual harassment and abuse, amanda taub critically remarks on february , , that #metoo seems to have created a consensus that perpetrators should not hold high-status positions instead of that harassment is never acceptable. the discourse might even have had adverse effects on women at their workplace as men are hesitant to work with and mentor women and see being alone with a female co- 	 	 worker as a potential threat, resulting in women being kept away from learning opportunities and hindering their work (taub ). baer points out that an “interface” between online and offline activism is necessary for its success. she finds that both digital and street activism for feminist issues has increased after , constituting the ideal situation of a mutual reinforcement of both forms of activism (baer , ). the conditions for both, however, are different. the legal situation is one of the factors that can create adverse offline conditions of dealing with sexual harassment and abuse: gash and harding point out that legal options are still not sufficient for victims of sexual assault and that insufficient legal frameworks are not only a de facto boundary in daily life for victims, but that the legal consequences for their actions influence people’s perceptions of these issues. if the recourse on sexual harassment and abuse is insufficiently serious it does not constitute a barrier towards abusive behavior. even more worrying is the fact that the legality of sexual harassment and abuse impacts the reception of women’s experience when they talk about them even if they refrain from invoking legal measures (gash & harding , - ). the conditions women face when talking about being harassed and abused have been demonstrated in public instances such as the hill/thomas hearings in whose deterrent effect was repeated in the ford/kavanaugh hearing recently (dowd b). despite gash and harding’s emphasis that the legal situation is not sufficient yet, #metoo changed the initial conditions victims face in court since its beginning. as weiser, watkins and goldstein point out on july , , prosecutors take more cautious views in harassment cases now, and judges and detectives are trained to be less skeptical. nevertheless, they admit that these changes have not arrived at all juridical levels and the conditions have thus not sufficiently changed yet (weiser, watkins, and goldstein ). . . outcomes tilly and tarrow define outcomes as “changes in conditions at or across the sites that are plausibly related to the contention under study, including transformations of political actors or relations among them” (tilly & tarrow , ). the sites of #metoo, hollywood, the workplace and the internet described above, have indeed changed. hollywood as the originating site has witnessed the toppling of many powerful men in the industry as its most visible outcome. women began to break the silence (scovell ) and it is clear that the industry cannot continue its “old way of doing business” (rutenberg, 	 	 abrams, and ryzik ). one of the most remarkable outcomes in hollywood might, however, be an initiative that raises the stakes for #metoo to become more intersectional: powerful hollywood women founded time’s up, an initiative including a legal defense fund “to help less privileged women” to sue against sexual harassment and abuse. as buckley states, the initiative was inspired by a solidarity declaration by . female us farmworkers with the actresses who first came forward under #metoo (buckley ). the effect on the workplace of #metoo is twofold: while bowles observes a reconsideration by rank-and-file working men of their assumptions that they treat women as equals in the workplace on november , , taub argues differently on february , : #metoo has paradoxically toppled powerful men without necessarily changing the lives of ordinary women. both authors also acknowledge that the new awareness on sexual harassment and abuse can create detrimental effects for women: with men fearing to be accused of abusive behavior, male colleagues might be hesitant to work with women because they are insecure about where the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior is drawn (bowles ; taub ). yet it is not only this atmosphere hindering women to do a good job; despite #metoo the backlash accusers face is still an incentive to stay quiet as the example of the ford/kavanaugh hearings shows. for women in more vulnerable social positions the retailing seems even more threatening (taub ), emphasizing the importance of intersectional considerations for the changes #metoo induced. the attention #metoo created has, however, induced changing attitudes, not only in the workplace but also at the wider social setting of the gender hierarchy. as weiser et al. observe on july , concerning the trial against r. kelly, detectives and judges are trained to and behave now less skeptical towards accusers, effects they relate directly back to #metoo (weiser, watkins, and goldstein ). nevertheless, other authors share their worry that these changes have not tripled down to all levels of the judiciary. as bellafante points out, the laws have not adapted to the cultural transformation at a similar pace and can e.g. still ignore a long-term pattern of abuse, which, if recognized, would help a victim’s case in court (bellafante ). in an article written about half a year earlier on april , , williams agrees that even though the concept of “acquaintance rape”, referring to a situation where the victim knew the predator, is not an automatic factor rendering the victim less trustworthy anymore, proving that the predator acted without the victims consent is still hard for women. an important factor in favor of women accusing predators is the huge number of women pointing at the systematic occurrence, which makes it harder to dismiss the issue in general. even 	 	 though the worry that juries might expect several accusers to prove a pattern in the future is legitimate, the shifting norms of accountability are an outcome of #metoo that can lead to even bigger changes in society’s dealing with sexual harassment and abuse (williams ). . . regimes regimes are “regular relations among governments, established political actors, and challengers, and are perceived and acted upon by outside political actors” (tilly & tarrow , ). a regime not only shapes the available repertoire of contention, but also the opportunities available to challengers to induce change. whether a regime is democratic or not, as well as its capacity to exercise control over the population, territory and resources further determine the possibilities of contention ( ). the us ranks high on both the democratic as well as the capacity index, factors, which tilly and tarrow generally relate to the increased occurrence of social movements ( ). the regime does not only determine the atmosphere challengers face when making contentious claims, but also influences the political and established institutions that are part of it: a government is generally restrained by its relation to other regime actors as it depends on them for its survival, while these other actors similarly depend on the government. in the us, “capitalist firms, labor unions, schools, political parties, and private associations” inform the regime ( f). tilly and tarrow, asking whether the political regime in the us as a shaping element of the social and cultural conditions contentious actors face had changed from the s, when the first widespread instances of contentious politics came about, claim that in general, no regime change took place. despite the occurrence of the internet as well as violent contention by small splinter groups such as the black panthers and the attacks on the world trade centre on september , by islamists, contention has institutionalized, and so have the forms of suppression against it. the major difference the authors detect is that contentious performances today are not staged by groups of the population that share an identity, e.g. like workers (tilly & tarrow , ). zooming in on individual participants of #metoo provides an example for regular relations among the government, political actors and challengers: in law suits against sexual harassment and abuse, the government deals with the problem on an institutional basis and victims challenge the legality of these actions, partly sanctioned by the political system (gash and harding ). the amount of lawsuits has grown constantly since the recognition of sexual harassment and abuse as a violation of the civil rights act. especially lawsuits 	 	 that involve politicians not only judge their individual failures but set bars for generally dealing with sexual harassment and abuse (hirshman ). at this point, it seems useful to remark that tilly and tarrow use the term regime referring interchangeably to governments and regimes, in which governments are one of the actors. especially concerning the influence of the level of democracy and capacity (tilly & tarrow , f), the term regime, of which government is only one actor, does not seem useful as the government is the actor determining its level of democracy, in how far its citizens can participate in politics, and also has direct control over its capacities, resources and coercive means, even though it might depend on the collaboration of other actors. the nature of the regime determines the political opportunity structure, which decides the available opportunities to challengers of a regime (tilly & tarrow , ). in the following, i consider the six properties of a regime tilly and tarrow deem imperative in determining the opportunities or threats challengers face for #metoo. first, a regime containing multiple independent power centers provides challengers with more opportunities to find allies in political powers. if there are multiple stakeholders, challengers can ally with those sympathizing most with their cause ( ). the most important centers of political power in the us are the two major parties, the democrats and the republicans. while the republicans are no natural ally for feminist causes, neither historically nor ideologically, the democrats, despite their generally supportive stance, have an ambiguous relationship with women’s issues as well (hirshman ). as sheryl gay stolberg points out in a nyt article from december , , although the democrats are less tolerant and more critical towards sexual harassment in their party ranks than republicans, the media and entertainment industry were a lot quicker to bar offenders from their institutions. in politics, the kind of zero- tolerance-policy employed in those industries is often rejected as an impossible approach, which she relates to legality questions weighing in heavier (stolberg ). nevertheless, within the political regime the democrats are the most approachable allies. next to political parties, religious institutions are power centers with varying significance. as wehner points out in two articles about evangelical christianity and #metoo, dated december , , and may , , while christianity informs many social justice movements, white evangelicals are a strong basis of support for donald trump. (wehner ; ). wehner, as well as two other authors writing about the southern baptist and the catholic church, all point to the discrepancy between the religious institutions’ behavior towards women in dealing with sexual harassment and abuse and their 	 	 religious values (douthat ; moore ). if this view gained acceptance within those important and wide-reaching institutions, they would be meaningful allies for #metoo. other political actors include non-governmental organizations, the cultural meaning- making film and media industry and businesses like advertising. individuals can also be important political actors, like the us president whose influence is considered in the chapter on institutions relevant to #metoo already. the other political actors mentioned are relevant to some extent; however, they cannot be considered centers of power and are therefore disregarded here. second, the government as part of the regime and its openness to new actors is another viable issue determining challengers’ possibilities. a president of the republican party, which is traditionally conservative and not a progressive promoter of women’s rights (hirshman ) is not an indicator for openness for women’s claims. additionally, #metoo does not consist of one single actor making claims but what makes it significant is the mass of women standing behind it. as an online movement lacking clearly visible and widely recognized leaders who could voice claims on behalf of the movement, #metoo misses out on the opportunity to take part in the regime as a new actor because this actor would need to be personified. the third factor of the political opportunity structure is the stability of existing political alignments. regarding the alliance between regime actors who protect the status quo of a patriarchal social order, and taking into account that both men in political power as well as complicit women benefit from that status quo, the prospects for change are small (connell ). yet, this alignment of support for the patriarchal social order has already shifted in the past: it was not only the republicans tolerating abusive behavior in their ranks but “liberal democrats included a critical mass of wusses and womanizers” as well (hirshman , ). the support for politicians accused of sexually abusive and inappropriate behavior has declined on both political sides: the result of alabama’s senate elections in provides an illustrative example of changing political alignments in the republican party. their nominee, roy s. moore, was accused of sexual misconduct involving minors some four weeks before the election. the accusations led the republican party to abandon moore and his candidacy, even if president donald trump was hesitant to abandon him in the beginning (blinder and martin ). ever more remarkable was moore’s loss of the election in december after trump had 	 	 embraced his candidacy against the majority of the republicans (burns and martin ). when moore was considering to run for the senate seat in again in may , many republicans, including the president, warned that this could result in another loss of the alabama seat for the republicans (gabriel and martin ). thus even trump, the “predator in chief” (west ) withdrew his support despite unwillingness and ambiguity in the beginning, indicating that political alignments to protect predators are indeed shifting. similarly, it is not only women in the democratic party who criticize that women are not valued enough in the party. al franken’s resignation after being accused of sexual harassment and abuse showed that the democrats chose to consequentially support women’s issues instead of dismissing franken’s abusive behavior on grounds of his political credentials as a popular black senator (goldmacher ). further, the party’s hesitation concerning joe biden’s bid for the presidential candidacy in is an instance of shifting alignments among the democrats: two articles published on march and april , , demonstrate that joe biden being known as a touchy person as well as his past actions as the chairman in the hill/thomas hearings and with regard to the many qualified female candidates in the democratic bid for the presidency make him seem a “relic of the past” (ember and martin ; stolberg and ember ). this could be a factor leading to the nomination of a female democratic presidential candidate for the first time as a result of shifting alignments. the fourth factor, influential allies or supporters who support challengers, often depends on the stability of the existing political alignments. a historical example of an influential feminist ally is bill clinton. however, hirshman emphasizes that even though he has induced political progress for all women, his transgressive behavior towards individual women did not only cast doubt on the sincerity of his alliance with women but later even came to hinder his wife’s bid for the democratic presidential candidacy in . her alliance with him made the choice of barack obama as the first black instead of the first female us president attractive for feminists (hirshman , ). as dowd explains in an article on june , , bill clinton’s past as a womanizer overshadows his quality as a feminist ally today (dowd a). unfortunately, there is no influential ally with a similar level of popularity who unquestioningly supports the cause of #metoo, and, for that matter, feminism, in sight. the fifth property in a political opportunity structure is the degree of repression or facilitation challengers face by the regime, which determines their options for claim making. #metoo employs repertoires that are tolerated by the government; online activism and hashtag usage 	 	 are not repressed. in general, the internet as an arena of contention is hard to regulate or suppress, which, however, is not only an advantage for #metoo: hate speech and misogynist content is regulated as little as content supportive of #metoo (white ). a form of repression which individual participants of #metoo face outside the online realm is the legal situation when they sue for sexual harassment and abuse, which is still not sufficient for victims of sexual harassment and abuse (gash and harding , ). as williams demonstrates in an article on april , , with the example of the bill cosby trial the attention #metoo created seems to have made the jury more assertive towards the victims’ views; yet it might also have polarized the discourse even more between those who believe harassment and abuse need to be taken more seriously and skeptics thinking women “asked for it”. the fact that the number of accusers in #metoo gave the hashtag its relevance in the first place might even turn out to be a repressive disadvantage for women who accuse their perpetrator individually as juries might expect more accusers to prove a pattern, making a successful lawsuit harder to achieve for individual accusers (williams ). the sixth factor determining the political opportunity structure is whether decisive changes in any of the other factors occur. the current political alignments as well as the facilitation of legal action against sexual harassment and abuse are decisive for #metoo. as the political party holding the presidency, republicans withdrawing their support for a candidate who is accused of sexual abuse constitutes a changing factor relevant for the entire regime. holding members of their political party accountable implies that this accountability applies to everyone in the party. an interesting factor here is trump’s shift from reluctance to support for moore, and whether the republicans will hold the president accountable for his own alleged sexual misconduct. as hirshman states, white women’s support for trump and the republicans in general has dropped since the presidential election of , even though trump’s defeat in the election of is far from secure (hirshman , ). the democrats dealing with their “sad legacy of defending abusers” and making senator al franken step down suggests they are heading towards more wholesome support of women’s issues (hirshman , ). even though the adaptation of laws might be slower, as bellafante stresses on november , , the cultural transformation in dealing with 																																																								 bill cosby is a us-american stand-up comedian and actor who was accused of sexual harrassment and abuse by numerous women. his first trial began in , which was criticized for not allowing evidence from all women accusing cosby, making it easy for his defenders to claim that his accuser „asked for it“. cosby was convicted of sexual assault in the retrial in (bowley ). 	 	 sexual harassment and abuse which found its way into the courts is a sign of hope for better legal possibilities for victims in the future (bellafante ). #metoo has caught the attention of all regime actors and is influencing all factors of the political opportunity structure. even though decisive changes are detectable in merely two of them so far, this is already a valuable achievement of #metoo. . . mechanisms having considered the factors that constitute the base, opportunities and challenges for the contentious claims of #metoo, i now turn to the circumstantial mechanisms determining its development. tilly and tarrow claim that brokerage, diffusion and coordinated action are among the most common mechanisms in contention. brokerage, the “production of a new connection between previously unconnected sites” (tilly & tarrow , ), is a mechanism at the core of #metoo: the participating women all live in unconnected sites, their local patriarchal social structures. they are connected through the hashtag because it enables them to share their common experience of sexual harassment and abuse. the hashtag brokers their experience because all of them are willing to talk about it publicly online, no matter how far they might be apart geographically or otherwise. diffusion, the “spread of a form of contention, an issue, or a way of framing it from one site to another” happened in #metoo as well (tilly & tarrow , ): the hashtag went viral in the us, more specifically after originating from hollywood, and spread around the world. thus, not only the form of contention, the hashtag, but also the issue, sexual harassment and abuse, framed by an uncountable number of women criticizing their societies dealings with it, spread. the local adaptations of the hashtag like #balancetonporc in france and #quellavoltache in italy are examples of how widely #metoo diffused even though their local significance might vary (j. bennett ). coordinated action, which is “two or more actors’ engagement in mutual signaling and parallel making of claims on the same object” (tilly & tarrow , ), is detectable in two ways; depending on who is defined as actors. if all individual women posting #metoo are considered actors, then #metoo is a massive coordinated online action of a huge number of individuals. if actor refers to another level than the individual, tarana burke and her ngo 	 	 metoo are an actor coordinating with the online #metoo, coordinating across the two sites of contention, online and offline. for all three of these factors the relevance of spread and coordination from site to site changes if one looks at the internet as an already global site of contention without clear boundaries. nevertheless, the life reality of victims of sexual harassment and abuse varies according to where they live. despite one site of contention being global, a meaningful boundary to diffusion and #metoo in general is that it is unable to create real world solidarity so far; not only #metoo in the us is criticized to not be truly intersectional (dickerson and saul ; a. harris ; hirshman ) but the fight for feminist and women’s issues is bemoaned at the example of the international women’s day strikes: participation in these strikes oftentimes depends on already favorable living conditions enabling women to participate while less privileged women cannot afford it (povoledo, minder, and joseph ). an important question is thus whether the global condition of gendered social hierarchies at the disadvantage for women can be changed if the protest against them is so difficult to unite and foster worldwide. the foundation of time’s up is a good example of first measures that enable less privileged women to take actions against sexual harassment and abuse by limiting the threatening consequences like unaffordable legal costs (buckley ). such an initiative on the international level would be a start to worldwide coordinated action against sexual harassment and abuse beyond the diffusion of hashtag activism. beyond brokerage, diffusion and coordinated action, other mechanisms without which we would “see a great deal of contention but very little continuity” can be observed in #metoo (tilly & tarrow , ). to consider as many aspects as possible to (in)validate the theory of contentious politics, i elaborate on all concepts tilly and tarrow suggest, even though not all are equally relevant for #metoo. the process of previously apolitical actors becoming political “by using their organizational and institutional bases to launch movement campaigns” is termed social appropriation (tilly & tarrow , ). the initiator of metoo, tarana burke, did so already from onwards, but the actresses who came forward and fueled the hashtag became political in calling on the mass of women experiencing sexual harassment and abuse, too, to do the same and thereby used the organizational tool provided by the internet and tried out by previous campaigns resting on the same organizational bases (airey ; garcia ; thelandersson ). 	 	 boundary activation is the “creation of a new boundary or the crystallization of an existing one between challenging groups and their targets” (tilly & tarrow , ). on a structural level, tilly and tarrow remark that contention also activates boundaries that organize social life like class, race and gender. they diagnose most contentious politics of activating one such social boundary, while disregarding the others ( ). looking at the numbers of participants in #metoo who participate as victims, and regarding the fact that structurally seen, men are in a socially protected position to harass or abuse women, #metoo emphasizes an existing boundary in the gender binary. although there are exceptions, the basic division #metoo creates is women as a social group who experience harassment and abuse uniting against men as a social group who perpetrate. an example of this dichotomy of gender groups suggests itself in the title “yes, this is a witch hunt. i’m a witch and i’m hunting you” of west’s opinion piece in nyt. this article’s peg is woody allen’s reaction to the accusations against weinstein, in which he claims to be sorry for him and worries that #metoo creates a witch- hunting atmosphere (west ). the author’s sarcastic reaction towards allen’s statements and her mocking of his perversion of the historic reference of witch hunts as well as her emphasis that the participants of #metoo act without the institutional or legal support men can rely on is one side of the hardened boundaries in the discourse on sexual harassment and abuse. as williams points out on april , , #metoo might also harden the attitude of those who think women “asked for it” (williams ). for the skeptics, news like the feminist avita ronell being accused and found guilty of sexual harassment feed their reproaches of feminists claiming a moral high-ground they themselves cannot keep (greenberg ) just as much as their feeling that treating all forms of harassment and abuse as equally wrong and punishable is unjust alienates the skeptics (stephens ). certification is an “external authority’s signal of its readiness to recognize and support the existence and claims of a political actor” (tilly & tarrow , ). the democratic party investigating and dealing with sexual harassment and abuse more thoroughly than in the past (hirshman ) is an instance of certification as it signals their recognition of the issue as sufficiently serious to end perpetrators political careers as in the case of al franken (goldmacher ). depending on how narrowly external authority is defined, cultural authority can also lend certification to #metoo, such as popular actors who credibly question hegemonic masculinity concepts. the fact that men in the music industry did so in the wake of #metoo raises public attention in areas one might not have expected it (farber ). even 	 	 though connell points out that it is not only men who are complicit in holding up the gender regime but women can be complicit, too, because individual women can benefit from gender oppression (connell ), the certification by these men questioning hegemonic masculinity is even more significant because it goes beyond the initial topic of #metoo, sexual harassment and abuse, and questions the underlying gendered hierarchy. their international reach and prominence adds additional weight to their support, even though it does not signal a readiness to intervene on behalf of the claim makers as the certification by an internationally recognized political actor would (tilly & tarrow , ). an identity shift among the claim-makers in #metoo took place in so far as the hashtag activism revealed their common experience of sexual harassment and abuse (tilly & tarrow , ). by demonstrating the mass of victims, #metoo did not only raise the general awareness but made the mostly female participants aware of their common power by uniting under as oppressed members of society. an interesting aspect to investigate in the interest of fostering feminist causes would be how this new identity as one of the many victims of sexual harassment and abuse can be empowering and not become a narrative of trauma, which, according to tarana burke, is not useful as she emphasizes in an interview published october , (a. harris ). the mechanism of competition within the contention seems of reduced importance for #metoo as the initial fears of milano taking over the movement that tarana burke had built with her ngo metoo over years was cleared out by the two women’s declaration of solidarity in the interest of fighting sexual harassment and abuse (garcia ; a. harris ). escalation and radicalization seem to neither be relevant for #metoo, as the contention continued its routinized ways (tilly & tarrow , ). the aspect of repression, already considered in the political opportunity structure relevant for #metoo, can take many forms, such as arrest, destroying of organizations and different forms of harassment and social control. while physical threats against #metoo and its participants have not been reported (even though they might have occurred), harassment and social control are detectable in #metoo. tilly and tarrow stress that the state but also mass-media can play a role in suppression (tilly & tarrow , ). takenaga elaborates an example of the mass media’s dealing with #metoo on june , : when the writer e. jean carroll accused donald trump of rape, nyt dealt with the accusations “overly cautious” and the author 	 	 admits that the newspaper should have presented this serious matter concerning a sitting president more prominently. even though this might not be considered a severe case of harassment, it certainly was a depreciation of the credibility of carroll despite trump’s known predatory behavior. clearly, most of the mechanisms identified by tilly and tarrow are traceable in #metoo, if to varying degrees. i discuss how they constitute processes, the combination of these mechanisms producing similar outcomes (tilly & tarrow , ), in the following. . . processes the most important processes tilly and tarrow identify coming from their mechanisms are mobilization processes. mobilization refers to people starting to make contentious claims when they have previously not done so, and demobilization to people who made contentious claims stopping to do so. mobilization provides contention with a higher amount of resources and forms political actors who change by participating in contention, while those resources decrease with demobilization while actors disappear (tilly & tarrow , , ). that #metoo mobilized people in the first place is not surprising as sexual violence is an “enduring mobilizing issue” (rodino-colocino , ). forms of mobilization can vary from recruitment from the streets and universities to sending mails, lobbying and educational campaigns (tilly & tarrow , ). the internet has made it possible in recent years “to mobilize thousands of people on behalf of a common cause” and to cross national boundaries as well as social ones more easily than offline tools of mobilization, even though this mobilization might not last very long ( ). tilly and tarrow identify three kinds of statuses that bystanders of any form of contentious politics posses: they can either be sympathizers, opponents or neutral people (tilly & tarrow , ). the challengers in contentious claim making can increase their mobilization by turning sympathizers into participants. they can also hope to turn neutrals into sympathizers, and at best, opponents refrain from counter-mobilization. for #metoo, an increasing crowd of participants in its hashtag activism is the main form of mobilization. as taub stresses on february , , offline events would enhance mobilization because they would demonstrate to bystanders that others have changed their views on harassment and abuse, too, a vital factor to spread the consensus that such behavior is inappropriate (taub ). even 	 	 though such offline events are scarce or even absent from #metoo, the discourse has continued to be present for almost two years already. to maintain activism, tilly and tarrow emphasize that the group conducting contentious politics needs to be taken care of to be maintained (tilly & tarrow , f). #metoo is not an instance of contentious politics conducted by a clearly defined group which makes it complicated to take care of. this lack of a group formation is connected to the nature of “clicktivism” remaining online as well as a lack of leading actors who would conduct the care-taking as the official spokespeople of #metoo. tilly and tarrow identify the “collective action problem” as one of the reasons why further mobilization might not occur: participants think others might have higher stakes in the issues and would therefore prefer them to take action instead. further, participants of contention, whether they are in leading positions or not, consider the “cultural, economic, and social impediments” they face for partaking in contention ( ). if those impediments are too high, they refrain from mobilizing. #metoo has not created a clearly defined group of challengers, yet it created widespread solidarity without referring to a clearly defined identity concept. the ongoing discourse, which is now a mainstream discourse as visible in nyt’s constant engagement with the topic, keeps this solidarity without the constant support of organizational structures; as the magnitude of the problem reached mainstream discourse, claim makers did not need to push for it in an institutionalized way. the social movement base #metoo builds on has been creating awareness and legal outcomes for decades, and the result eventually creates wider acknowledgement. other mechanisms fostering mobilization are allies, certification by external authorities (tilly and tarrow , ), new coordination, the seizing of opportunities and appropriation that mobilizes outside actors. we have seen different kinds of allies and certifiers in #metoo, such as men in the music industry and politicians from different parties holding their members accountable. yet, one outstanding ally with high reach who unquestionably supports the cause of abandoning sexual harassment and abuse is not in sight. the #metoo claim makers have seized the opportunity of relative instability of the regime, with the democrats trying to identify the most viable candidate to face trump in the next presidential elections and the republicans eager to find a balance between their president and candidate with good prospects for the next election who at the same time alienates female voters with his misogynist behavior. emerging from hollywood, other professions have appropriated 	 	 #metoo in their domains, like academia, journalism, the arts and not least the churches (collins-hughes ; dickerson and saul ; rojas ; takenaga ; wehner ). these mechanisms have also led to scale shift, the “complex process that not only diffuses contention across space or social sectors, but creates instances for new coordination at a different level than its initiation”, crossing boundaries to mobilization that are mainly related to geographical or physical frontiers. downward scale shift means that action trickles down to the local level from the regional or national, while upward scale shift implies action moving from local to higher levels. tilly and tarrow attribute the most importance to upward scale shift (tilly & tarrow , ). #metoo has done both, in that it spread to the individual local contexts of women participating, while at the same time remaining contentious action at a higher and broader level. the scale shift was enabled by the internet and connected “people who would otherwise have no previous contacts”, what tilly and tarrow call mediated route of diffusion ( ). demobilization is a less well-researched phenomenon than mobilization. factors fostering demobilization can be the initial conditions for contention, the regime’s response, and the endurance of organizational structures to maintain solidarity (tilly & tarrow , ). even though demobilization seems almost inevitable for a form of contention based on the re- sharing of stories that tick similar boxes, we see continuous reporting on #metoo. the initial conditions for #metoo as well as the regime’s response did not foster demobilization as they were not overly repressive. still, repressive factors prevent the widespread move of #metoo into the offline sphere: as taub points out, even though #metoo toppled quite some powerful men, its effects have not necessarily reached the ordinary mass of people (taub ). and even some accusers with the odds of high-reach on their side have not had an easy path after going public, as e. jean carroll’s accusations of rape against trump show. be it for the severity of her accusation or for the still-remaining skepticism against victims of sexual harassment and assault, not even popularity protects women from retaliation. even though this is not the type of bifurcation tilly and tarrow describe with states repressing the most extreme activist with the severest measures while being more lenient towards less extreme activists (tilly & tarrow , f), the unpredictability of social repression participants face, at least if they openly accuse someone, hinders mobilization. there are two options to prevent demobilization: leaders can either institutionalize or escalate contention (tilly & tarrow , ). as we have seen, #metoo has not escalated or radicalized, and it took place in institutionalized ways of contention from the beginning. 	 	 further institutionalization through the foundation of an organization to unite all hashtag- activists has not happened either. tarana burke and her ngo have gained prominence and she has taken new actions such as cooperation with hollywood writing rooms (a. harris ). if #metoo participants became members of the ngo and continued their activism beyond the hashtag, it would imply continued mobilization. this has not happened, unfortunately. a specific feature of mobilization processes tilly and tarrow identify is counter- mobilization, which potentially escalates and radicalizes the contention (tilly & tarrow , ). an example of counter-mobilization is the reaction to the advertisement video “we believe: the best men can be” by the razor-brand gillette published on january , . it deals with #metoo and how it changed the perception of men’s behavior, criticizes toxic masculinity that adults teach boys and calls upon men to change those habits to be better men. the advertisement’s suggestion that men can behave in better ways provoked many outraged reactions on twitter, mostly expressing resistance against the alleged attempt of gillette to prescribe how men should behave. while hsu points towards the pitfalls of engaging with trending social justice topics like #metoo for companies, their picking up the topic of sexual harassment and abuse as well as toxic masculinity demonstrates its salience (hsu ): advertisements do not only depict a societal discourse but also shape it (hall , ff). gillette’s advertisement and the reaction towards it therefore demonstrates two things: firstly, gillette was sure to target a customer group that would embrace their supportive stance on #metoo and took the risk of alienating costumers who would not. secondly, even though #metoo is a mainstreamed discourse now, the counter-mobilization online shows that there still is a significant amount of people who do not support its goal of abandoning sexual harassment and abuse. this may be more for reasons of feeling personally attacked, as hsu suggests, than for actually supporting abusive behavior. counter-mobilization is present nevertheless. despite missing some of the premises to keep up mobilization, like a specific group of challengers that build and keep organizational structures, #metoo continues as a discourse for almost two years now. it caused changes concerning the general awareness of sexual harassment and abuse, influencing the perception of accusers in legal settings as well as a new awareness in workplaces. the careers of a number of powerful men have ended because of #metoo. yet, demobilization due to repression victims still face when they come forward as 	 	 well as the counter-mobilization online demonstrate that the awareness created by #metoo does not always result in positive outcomes. as the cycle of contention #metoo is part of continues, we will see whether this mobilization continues and is able to induce even broader outcomes. . conclusion in this thesis, i have exemplified and validated the theory of contentious politics for #metoo with the help of online articles by the new york times published between october and july . #metoo contains the three components of contentious politics; it is contention as women make claims to end sexual harassment and abuse, these claims generally bear on the interests of men and society as a patriarchal organization, and they involve the government because it produces and reinforces these patriarchal structures. central insights into #metoo gained during this research are the outcomes of a mainstreamed discourse on as well as beginning changes in the judiciary in dealing with sexual harassment and abuse. further, the feminist critical discourse analysis shows that numerous actors are involved at different sites, both online and offline, leading to mechanisms that continue contention such as brokerage, diffusion and appropriation. this analysis of the mechanisms behind #metoo is based on a selection of online articles by the nyt that demonstrate a continued interest in the topic in us society. the goal of this thesis was to (in)validate tilly and tarrow’s theory of contentious politics as well as an assessment of online contention’s usefulness for feminist causes. to (in)validate the theory, i deviated slightly from the approach suggested by tilly and tarrow after applying their descriptive concepts to identify the mechanisms that constitute the processes leading to those outcomes: i geared examination towards the mechanisms suggested by tilly and tarrow and looked for those mechanisms in #metoo instead of first breaking down #metoo in episodes. this approach allowed me to verify the relevance of all concepts suggested by the authors instead of producing a possibly selective account missing other aspects. having identified the most important of the mechanisms occurring in #metoo, i then assembled the processes into which they compound to find sounding explanations for the outcomes of #metoo. the main outcome of my research is that the contentious politics approach is applicable to online activism. the concepts are easily adaptable, also because even though #metoo is at first sight an online phenomenon, offline factors such as changes in the 	 	 judiciary or physical demonstrations need to be considered in the analysis as these outcomes are relevant offline as well. #metoo nevertheless constitutes an instance of online contention, as the internet is the main site the activism takes place in. thus, i was able to provide explanations for the outcomes of #metoo with the help of tilly and tarrow’s concepts, even though these outcomes should be considered preliminary as #metoo is still ongoing. the outcomes will only be more fully evaluable after some time, e.g. when the cultural transformation #metoo induced has trickled down to all levels of the judiciary. for the second goal, an assessment of usefulness to feminist causes, the outcome of my research is a bit more ambiguous. coming back to the initial definition of discourse as one of several signifying practices, the insight that a cultural transformation from the discourse on sexual harassment and abuse that #metoo created is already observable renders the contention successful on the level of discourse. however, looking at the experiences of women as well as their material conditions, which are other signifying practices, the impact of #metoo to change these is less clear so far. just as the laws change slower than the culture transforms, these might follow the change of discourse more slowly. without deeming one or the other change more easy to achieve, it seems that discourse can mirror a change of minds quicker than material conditions can adapt. yet, as the social gendered hierarchy, which suppresses women and privileges men, has perceptible consequences for women’s living situations, a change of discourse is not enough to constitute equal social status for all genders. it is unimaginable, however, that women’s experiences and material conditions would change before a change of minds, visible in discourse, which deems the outcomes of #metoo a viable move in the direction towards a more gender-equal society. this direction is useful to feminist causes because it brings the prospect of achieving equal social status for all genders closer. even though #metoo might have polarized the extreme ends in the debate on gender equality even further, it did raise a new consciousness in mainstream society to reflect on sexual harassment and abuse. the general outcome is a good, if basic result of online activism in the interest of women. the fact that it stimulated offline mobilization for its cause to a very limited extend only, however, is an indication that online activism is insufficient to cause wholesome social changes. furthermore, it needed prominent actresses to speak out about the problem of sexual harassment and abuse to make it a salient topic in the first place. the complaints and critics of unknown and ordinary women, as well as the organization of black women existing long before the hashtag have sadly not been sufficient to prone society to deal with the issue. this poses the question of leadership for feminist causes in general because even though some women have been termed leaders by the 	 	 media, the fact that anyone can equally take part in online hashtag conversation makes it difficult to provide and sustain leadership. an important consideration for feminists should therefore be how to keep online activism directed at a cause and induce participants to rally behind that cause and its leaders. the choice of leadership should be made while considering the helpfulness of prominence in making claims. the easy applicability of the concepts of contentious politics is an advantage of this theory. it is a helpful anchor in explaining online contention, yet its broadness is at the same time a flaw: the individual concepts of the approach are not only numerous, but they are, despite their general applicability, hither and thither (klandermans ), rendering the approach less rigid and not selective on the specific contention it analyzes. while this is one of the authors’ explicit intentions, it is at times confusing during the application. their broadness sometimes leads to rather meaningless speculations, e.g. whether #metoo could be considered transgressive contention. as the definition of “transgressive” is rather blurry, this categorization does not help to explain #metoo. another example is tilly and tarrow’s use of “regime” both as an independent concept of which governments are a part of as well as a synonym for government. such lack of clarity occurs in a number of their concepts. while my research demonstrates the general applicability of contentious politics to online contention, further research with a more diverse selection of sources would strengthen not only the knowledge on #metoo; it would also create a broader basis to judge the usefulness of the theory for online contention, e.g. concerning its lack of strictness. while my research provides insights that are not only useful but should be easily confirmed by other materials, the exemplary use of online newspaper sources demands further research providing a triangulated and replicable approach to solidify the findings. future research should also come by the limitations of this analysis constituted by the scope of the project, as well as by its timeframe. as #metoo is ongoing contention, new insights will be found by incorporating developments occurring after july . another interesting path future research might explore is to investigate in how far other theories of contention from the literature on social movements are applicable to #metoo. this would presumably warrant the definition of #metoo in a stricter category than contentious politics and enable a comparison on the usefulness of different theories for online contention. applying social movement and contention theories to other online contention than #metoo or #metoo’s local variants would broaden those results as well. additionally, the research field 	 	 would benefit from a more detailed look into the individual concepts tilly and tarrow provide. for example, the analysis of different actors at different points of time and at different locations with the help of additional materials to online newspaper articles, e.g. interviews with participants, could provide a more nuanced view on the trajectory #metoo took. this would provide a better judgment of which outcomes of #metoo claim-makers intended and which were created by chance. neither intention nor chance render the development of #metoo any more or less valid, as mechanisms are similar in many cases of contention and the differences in their success is attributable to many factors (tilly & tarrow , f). knowing how much steering the development of #metoo had instead of chance provides more insights into the working of those mechanisms. in general, the emotional work a research project on a topic full of grievances like sexual harassment and abuse should not be underestimated. processing the outrageous, sad and hurtful stories that are so central to #metoo as well as their continuous repetition in different forms in all my material took more energy than i thought. yet, it was not only the occupation with the grievances that sexual harassment and abuse as a topic entail, but concern with the global implication for feminist causes beyond the us, which i did not investigate. moving towards true global feminist solidarity would be desirable as a result from any feminist contention and with hindsight i question my decision to focus on the us as a country of the global north. even though a pragmatic and feasibility-focused decision at the time that fits the scope of this thesis as well as the literature available on the topic so far, my research is clearly limited concerning the solidarity aspect. i hope that future research can at least build on this project and then provide a fit academic basis for global feminist solidarity. regarding the limited changes #metoo has induced so far, it should be born in mind that success in general is a debated question for any contention. depending on what #metoo’s goals are defined as, its success varies, and the more radical the goals, the less successful #metoo seems. even though there are some observable and certainly valuable changes from #metoo, they are insufficient in tackling gendered hierarchies, let alone other systems 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work wonder whether they overstepped /changes - technologies role in the conversation about sexual harassment /trajectory - teaching activities for the 'click' moment /change december - the year in gender /trajectory - when #metoo goes too far /change - #metoo in italy /international coverage - after #metoo /changes - texas attorney general resigns after mocking #metoo /politics - blue-collar women in #metoo /professional fields - how to be a good bystander /culture - alabama women in the election /politics january - grammys /culture - canada /international coverage - finance industry cashing in on #metoo /professional fields - straight man - now what? /culture - bill cosby /actors - can democrats #metoo to victory? /politics - generational divide /culture - airbrushing and #metoo /culture february - conservative political action conference /politics 	 	 - sex in the 'gray zone' /culture - mothers and daughters talk #metoo /culture - south korea /international coverage - children's book industry /professional fields - special elections for accused lawmakers' vacancies /politics - radio /professional fields - talk with times editor minnie driver /culture march - workplace change /change - submissive sex /culture - catharine mackinnon /actors - women's day /offline events - oscars ( ) /culture - korean politician falls /international coverage - cosby /actors april - nyc city hall /culture - advice columns as forerunners of #metoo /culture - bill cosby ( ) /actors - teenagers /culture - china /international coverage - lilly ledbetter /actors may - weinstein /actors - evangelical christianity's awakening /professional fields - time's up legal defense fund/walmart /change - #metoo global /international coverage - school of visual arts manhattan /professional fields - cannes, czech republic /international coverage - what to do with the bad men /culture june - men in therapy /culture - archbishop /professional fields - ripple effect/small networks of women /change - bible's #metoo problem /professional fields - bill clinton /politics - jeans /culture - harassment task force in eeoa /politics - albany /international coverage july - china /international coverage - food writing /culture - beauty pageant winner gives up crown 	 	 in protest /culture - pickup artists /culture - trump mocks /politics - french director luc besson accused /international coverage - taxpayers pay hush money /culture - instagram account publishing harassers' names /change - les moonves /actors august - italy/asia argento ( ) /international coverage + (anti-)feminist twists - comedian louis ck /actors - accused feminist avital ronell /(anti- )feminist twists - south korea /international coverage - change in hollywood? /change - porn stars after #metoo /professional fields september - what men should know /change - emmys (#metoo missing) /culture - shame of the metoo men /toxic masculinity - publishing in a #metoo moment /professional fields - parallels hill/thomas & ford/kavanaugh hearings /politics - kavanaugh ( ) /politics - kavanaugh/cosby /politics october - william preucil/music industry /professional fields - art/sarah lucas right /professional fields - google /professional fields - britain privacy laws /international coverage - dating after #metoo /culture - india /international coverage - domestic violence awareness has not caught up /change - ballet /professional fields november - south korea church leader in prison /international coverage - can law catch up to #metoo? /change - hollywood after year of #metoo /trajectory - australia/geoffrey rush /international coverage - hotels give out panic buttons to housekeepers /professional fields - north korea /international coverage - louis c.k./paradoxes of feminists /(anti- 	 	 )feminist twists - book about kavanaugh /politics december - film 'if beale street could talk' changes /culture - cost of telling in australia/rush /international coverage - being a female movie critic /professional fields - music/orchestras /professional fields - pre-#metoo history of predatory congressman /politics - men and #metoo /toxic masculinity - argentina /international coverage - 'baby, it's cold outside' debated /culture january - male managers fearful of mentoring women /change - south korean prosecutor convicted /international coverage - gillette ad /culture - female economists /professional fields - #metoo back to black girls/'surviving r. kelly' /trajectory - more rapes reported /change - pixar/john lasseter /professional fields - china /international coverage february - #metoo topples powerful not ordinary /changes - southern baptists /professional fields - bill o'reilly invited causes protest / actors - i survived r. kelly / actors - city ballet chooses new leaders /professional fields - luc besson /international coverage - allegations against ryan adams / actors - andrea dworkin / actors march - spread to wall street /professional fields - mexico /international coverage - r. kelly / actors - biden's conduct with lucy flores' allegation /politics - sexual assault on flights /professional fields - accused trump aide re-emerged /politics - black women accusing black men /(anti-)feminist twists - trump wants accused owner of patriots at event /politics april - kosovo /international coverage - city ballet has to take back firing male dancers /professional fields 	 	 - herman cain/republicans /politics - joe biden ( ) /politics - trump sticking with harassers nothing new /politics - me-ow/term catfight /culture may - lawsuits against mcdonald's /change - unions representing accusers and accused /professional fields - city ballet /professional fields - restaurant culture /culture - understand #metoo in fiction books /culture - 'bitter wheat' /culture - geoffrey rush gets $ million for defamation in australia /international coverage - colleges challenges anonymity of women suing them /professional fields june - ‘reckoning' by hirshman /culture - art (andrea bowers) /culture - banning secret settlements not enough /change - theatre play 'bitter wheat' criticized /culture - theatre 'frankie and johnny' expert for staging sex scenes /culture - nyt editor reconsiders handling e. jean carroll's accusations against trump /change - government transparency fighter fired for harassment /politics - carroll accusations /politics july - theatre play in singapore /international coverage - law: change in how prosecutors look at sexual assault /change - #metoo episode from /culture - kirsten gillibrand accuses unnamed democratic rivals /politics - anger among older women /culture - al franken/democrats /politics - neil degrasse tyson remains museum director /culture - is it ok to leave drunken woman alone with stranger? /culture total: mean: /month 	 studying instagram beyond selfies https://doi.org/ . / creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). social media + society april-june : – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sms si: studying instagram beyond selfies introduction according to wordstream ( ), of approximately bil- lion photos posted on instagram to date, only million are selfies—just . %. thus, for all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in the larger context of instagram genres. the attention given to selfies is more than understandable, given their importance to brands and influ- encers as promotional tools (marwick, ). however, such users represent just a small portion of the whole instagram population. working through the literature reveals a prolifera- tion of studies on selfies, with three special issues published dedicated to them (kedzior et al., ; senft & baym, ; warfield et al., ), yet none on instagram per se. noting this gap and following similar calls to study instagram with ad hoc approaches, concepts and methodologies that would be platform-specific (highfield & leaver, , ; laestadius, ), we identified an opportunity to engage with scholars from all over the world with the challenge of proposing new theories and approaches capable of unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of instagram. this special issue is named after the instagram conference (hosted by middlesex university london on june , ) that we organized in our effort to broaden the horizons of research on the platform. the event was sub- titled studying instagram beyond selfies. let us be clear, we don’t have anything against selfies, people who take selfies, or scholars who study them. it is not our intention to downplay the selfie phenomenon, nor to dismiss selfies as frivolous acts undeserving of scholarly attention. we are in fact very mindful of their broad sociological import—not least their subversive function and potential—and we remain indebted to those scholars who have brought this phenomenon to wide public attention (abidin, ; senft & baym, ). of course, the choice of subtitle was (and is) deliberately provocative. theoretical and methodological challenges of studying instagram with the impressive amount of billion users worldwide— more than twitter, snapchat, and pinterest combined (we are social, )—instagram has become one of the most important social networking sites globally and in the process has transformed the role of photographs and photography in visual culture. designed to exploit the affordances of mobile media (carah & shaul, ) and the immediate and intui- tive logic of visual communication, instagram is notably popular among young people ( – years old) (word stream, ). instagram is not only huge, it is also dynamic, smsxxx . / social media <span class="symbol" cstyle="mathematical">+</span> societycaliandro and graham research-article university of pavia, italy middlesex university london, uk corresponding author: alessandro caliandro, department of political and social sciences, university of pavia, corso strada nuova , pavia, italy. email: alessandro.caliandro@unipv.it studying instagram beyond selfies alessandro caliandro and james graham abstract of approximately billion photos posted on instagram, only million are selfies—just . %. thus, for all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in the larger context of instagram genres. noting this fact, we identified an opportunity to engage with scholars from all over the world with the challenge of proposing new theories and approaches capable of unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of instagram. as the articles collected in this special issue testify, instagram has an enormous impact on people’s everyday lives on many levels—socially, culturally, economically, and politically—and so, indubitably, it deserves rigorous academic attention. given the scale and complexity of these impacts, studying instagram poses different kinds of challenges and many gaps are still to be filled. with this special issue we don’t claim to resolve all the issues noted above. more modestly, our goal is to kick-start a fruitful conversation among social media scholars interested in furthering instagram studies. keywords instagram, selfie, platform studies, platform vernaculars https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms mailto:alessandro.caliandro@unipv.it http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - social media + society since, as with other prominent social media platforms, its architecture is always evolving to adapt to the latest market and cultural trends. launched in by kevin systrom and mike krieger as a “free iphone application designed for sharing pictures with friends” (laestadius, , p. ), instagram has steadily iterated many new features over the years, such as short videos ( ), stories ( ), shoppable posts ( ), and igtv ( ) (wikipedia, ). recently, instagram also changed its algorithm (instagram, ) so that user feeds no longer display posts chronologically but instead according to specific signals—designed to deliver a more “relevant” personalized experience which, of course, includes targeted advertising. such shifts have radically changed users’ content strategies and, ultimately, how they relate to the platform and each other (o’meara, ). the phenomenal success of instagram has not gone unno- ticed by brands and influencers who have concomitantly increased their investments and activities on the platform. according to forbes ( ) the current financial value of instagram is somewhere between us$ billion and us$ billion. beyond its popularity among users and commercial value to brands, instagram is an environment but also a device that offers rich possibilities for conducting social research. most notably, it opens up a number of new path- ways for exploring sociocultural processes related to the more mundane and overlooked aspects of “ordinary” lives (williams, ). instagram enables researchers not only to analyze almost unimaginably vast swathes of visual content in high definition, but also to see through the eyes of social actors, to glimpse into their everyday micro-rituals and pri- vate moments. the platform provides privileged access to both back and front stages—the essential material of sociol- ogy and anthropology—which were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive to explore at scale previously (latour et al., ). as the articles collected in this special issue testify, instagram has an enormous impact on people’s everyday lives on many levels and so clearly it deserves rigorous aca- demic attention. given the scale and complexity of these impacts, studying instagram poses different kinds of chal- lenges and many gaps are still to be filled. let’s consider a few of these. in contrast to other notable photo-sharing websites (like flickr), instagram is explicitly designed to encourage ordi- nary users to share their amateur pictures with friends. moreover, as it is principally a mobile application first and foremost (e.g., it is not possible to upload files through its website interface), it invites users to capture mundane moments in everyday life and share the more intimate, min- ute, and granular details of lives lived “in the moment.” in this way instagram has developed a vernacular visual culture (burgess, ), characterized by a specific language; that is, a “system of conventions and techniques that define[s] the subjects, narratives, editing, compositions, lighting, sequenc- ing, and other image characteristics” (manovich, , p. ). an example of this can be seen on “@insta_repeat,” an instagram channel that collects repertoires of such (quite repetitive) instagram visual languages. the idea that instagram entails a specific visual culture is well captured by the concept of platform vernacular (gibbs et al., ). a platform vernacular “refers to the different narrative patterns that shape content and the flow of information” (niederer & colombo, , p. ) across a given platform, which are not solely driven by the creativity of individual users but rather shaped by the “specificities of the platform, its material archi- tecture, and the collective cultural practices that operate on and through it” (gibbs et al., , pp. – ). as is well documented by studies of twitter (caliandro, ), it is not sufficiently accurate to speak of platform vernaculars in gen- eral. in fact, it is empirically impossible to identify a single language for a single platform—(as the phenomenon of selfie seems to suggest). conversely, different languages emerge according to the different social formations (crowd, commu- nities, or publics) inhabiting the platform and different topics around which they converge (bruns et al., ; marres, ). unfortunately, and despite how promising the concept of platform vernacular might be for sociological enquiry, very little research on specific instagram sub-vernaculars has been carried out so far. we therefore suggest that a greater and more systematic attention to instagram’s vernaculars could open new avenues of research, both within and across dispa- rate fields such as politics, health, consumption, aging, art, and so on. moreover, this project will necessarily require the elaboration of new theories and methodological approaches that will in turn reveal and open up new domains of study. alongside the theoretical question, there are methodolog- ical and technical challenges to take into consideration too. the first one concerns liberation from what might be termed “twitter-dependency.” instagram is composed of a set of devices, like hashtags, mentions, likes, captions, geotags, which are very similar to those found on twitter, but have been in fact been designed for different functionality and are employed by users with different purposes in mind. let’s consider the hashtags: on twitter they serve mainly to aggre- gate conversations; on instagram they specify the content of pictures as well as connect to ad hoc communities (caliandro & gandini, ). thus, as highfield and leaver ( ) stress, when exploring instagram we must restrain ourselves from using twitter as a methodological blueprint. there is, therefore, a pressing need for instagram-native research strategies which exploit the specific methodological poten- tials of instagram’s hashtags, mentions, likes, captions, and geotags to enable in-depth investigations. an equally important methodological challenge con- cerns the most crucial pieces of content on instagram: images. a lot has still to been done in terms of deploying and developing techniques to collect, organize, analyze, and ultimately make sense of the enormous collection of images populating instagram—from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. pioneering examples here include caliandro and graham computational approaches that, for example, use automated image recognition to explore huge quantities of instagram images and uncover macro-visual patterns of colors, photo filters used, or selfie styles (manovich, ). on the quali- tative side, the networked content analysis developed by digital methods scholars (niederer, ; niederer & colombo, ) has given fresh and useful inputs for the interpretation of instagram content, exhorting researchers not merely to consider an image as a standalone piece of content but rather as a part of a network of metadata that contribute to defining its meaning and social uses. these studies have paved the way, yet both computational approaches and networked content analysis are still under- employed in social research on instagram. indeed, we believe that the combination of computational approaches and networked content analysis is desirable for the future, especially for supporting scholars in exploring meaningful and emerging social phenomena on instagram. finally, a major issue concerning the very possibility of conducting social research on instagram arises from the fact that in the platform heavily curtailed access to its feed api for non-commercial partners, rendering it particularly difficult for many academics to access for research purposes (puschmann, ). this situation stems from the cambridge analytica scandal and the consequent social media apis cur- tailments undertaken by facebook and twitter, what axel bruns ( ) in a recent critical article termed the “apicalypse.” regardless of its causes, this situation poses serious limitations to the possibility of developing sustain- able and effective strategies for collecting and analyzing instagram data. and yet this challenge also presents an invaluable opportunity to researchers. just as instagram con- tinues to evolve, we hope that the innovative approaches offered in this special issue not only provoke discussion but also stimulate others to continue experimenting with new methodological approaches for exploring the platform and its role in our lives. with this special issue we don’t claim to resolve all the issues noted above. more modestly, our goal is to kick-start a fruitful conversation among social media scholars interested in furthering instagram studies. in this, we aim at contribut- ing to a dedicated stream of instagram-centered research by building on the work of those innovative scholars who have come before us (see gibbs et al., ; leaver et al., ; manovich, ; niederer & colombo, ). this would not be possible, of course, without the invaluable contribu- tions of the participant in this special issue. in their article on “‘visual affluence’ in social photography: applicability of image segmentation as a visually-oriented approach to study instagram hashtags,” chamil rathnayake and irida ntalla elaborate a method- ological approach that addresses an aspect of social pho- tography that has hitherto gone under-researched, namely, the relative visual “affluence” of images that are identified by a given hashtag. while close readings of posts of the kind offered by bozzi in this volume can provide invalu- able ethnographic insight, such data can be limited in its generalizability. indeed, the subjective meaning-making among individual users and broader communities is intrin- sic to what rathnayake and irida identify as an “internal incongruence” that is typical of content within hashtags, an argument they illustrate by analyzing content within hashtags for #trump and #graffiti. relatedly, where quan- tification can be used to measure engagement via a plat- form’s native “vanity metrics” (rogers, ), such approaches only start to scratch the surface of the data con- tained in posts and networks. the limiting factor in all of these examples is the central concern within social science research for representation and meaning-making. while we have witnessed a visual turn in social media research in recent years, this has tended to prioritize the social over the content and affordances of the visual as such. moving beyond the strictly “social” dimensions of social photography—that is, the local significance of posts that are meaningful for communities of users connected via hashtags—rathnayake and ntalla propose that the affluence of visual features in images become the focal object of study, and that automated image segmentation techniques enable their meaning-independent analysis. this quantitative approach references cognate fields of vision research—into visual clutter, complexity, and entropy—but differs from them insofar as the segmentation technique identifies the color regions in a variety of objects and surfaces in images in a manner that captures their “visual richness.” applying this approach to a sample of five instagram hashtags, #food, #nature, #graffiti, #minimalism, and #insta- good, rathnayake and ntalla show how hashtags can contain differing levels of visual affluence. this not only challenges much of the received thinking about hashtags as such, it also opens new avenues of enquiry into how different levels of visual affluence might appeal to different personalities and how this might in turn impact on user and consumer attitudes and responses. just as rathnayake and ntalla challenge assumptions around what might be considered meaningful hashtag con- tent, in “digital methods for hashtag engagement research,” janna joceli omena, elaine teixeira rabello and andré goes mintz similarly call into question received ideas around the definition and scope of hashtag “engagement”—the metrics- based analysis of which provides what is currently the domi- nant approach to understanding user and consumer attitudes and responses on the platform. their contention is to outline a methodology that moves hashtag engagement analysis beyond a simplistic approach that frames engagement simply in terms of vanity metrics, that is, “the ‘most engaged’ list.” to address the complexity of hashtag engagement involves critically accounting for the relationship between hashtags and what the authors term their “forms of grammatization.” social media + society grammatization refers to the process whereby the specific affordances of socio-technical platforms—in this case, the natively digital object that is the hashtag—facilitate user activity in ways that enable, structure, and ultimately formal- ize actions. in the case of the hashtag, it is a mechanism whereby user actions—engagement—can be traced and ren- dered calculable. however, hashtags acquire meaning and function differently according to how they are used by social actors in a context where the architecture of the platform continues to evolve. as we shall see in some of the other contributions to this special issue, the socio-technical ele- ment of grammatization is therefore intrinsic to the commer- cial and political—as well as social and aesthetic—dimensions of the platform. just as the standardization and “metrifica- tion” of engagement provides the means for certain types of users to operationalize these grammars in the service of whatever their communication goal might be—setting a political agenda, reaching a very particular demographic, and so on—the complexity of the process also allows for het- erogeneity and creativity, facilitating the emergence of new kinds of aesthetic and political imaginaries. in their analysis of hashtag grammatization, the authors posit a three-layer ( l) approach to investigate the ways in which hashtags are used in relation both to their content and range of implicated actors. layer of the analysis involves distinguishing between “high visibility” and “ordinary” users. layer focuses on hashtagging activity as such, and layer factors in the visual and textual content. as illus- trated in the case study of political protests in brazil in march , the key to this approach is that it distinguishes between dominant and ordinary groups of users by drawing a contrast between “high-visibility” and “ordinary” grammars of engagement. applying the l approach to hashtags associ- ated first with the protest to support the parliamentary pro- cess to remove president dilma rousseff from office, and then from the subsequent protest against the same, most notably the authors identify different “cultures of appropria- tion” between high-visibility and ordinary actors. in the course of just a few weeks certain patterns and tropes emerged on both sides of the political debate, but also very particular shifts in meaning occurred within hashtags within these distinctive groups. such forms of platform-specific cultural production do not of course occur in vacuums. terri l. towner and caroline lego muñoz’s article “instagramming issues: agenda setting during the presidential campaign” reminds us that the aesthetic and political imaginaries afforded by the forms of engagement discussed by omena, rabello, and mintz are framed by external events and the broader media ecosystem of which instagram is an increasingly important component. their concern is to investigate precisely how important it has become by deploying a comparative content analysis of campaign coverage on the platform and in news- papers to determine the role and scope of the platform in “agenda setting” in the u.s. presidential election. introduced as a contribution to agenda-setting theory, the article is concerned with the role played by citizens—ordi- nary users—in comparison with the journalists and associ- ated intermediaries who have typically dominated this area in the mainstream media. instagram is becoming increasingly important to journal- ists, both as a space to disseminate their work and as a research tool for identifying issues and monitoring conver- sations. however, despite the growing use of the platform among the public, and of the much more direct and transpar- ent relationship between journalists and the public that it affords, evidence of the platform’s influence in setting the mainstream media’s news agenda is mixed. through their comparative content analysis, towner and muñoz identify several interesting and significant trends. primary among these is that for some of the particular demographics sam- pled during the election campaign—young adults and minorities—instagram appears to be replacing mainstream media as a space for publicizing and discussing the most relevant issues. foremost among these are the eponymous hashtag movements #blacklivesmatters and #metoo. the analysis reveals a very weak relationship between the issue agenda of newspapers and that of posts on instagram, yet there is some evidence of the opposite—that instagram posts do have a degree of influence on newspaper agendas. but despite there being some interrelationship, tellingly, there is a notable time lag between the posts and newspaper coverage of the issues, suggesting that while its use among journalists is increasing, instagram does not yet occupy the same space as either twitter or facebook in contemporary journalism. however, in acknowledging the pace of change in the digital news environment, the authors note that a growth in intermedia influence is very likely, as well as the necessity for studies that focus on the increasing importance of the visual in news consumption. while both quantitative and qualitative methods provide researchers with the means of exploring the socio-technical affordances and effects of instagram in ways that would be unimaginable even years ago, elisa serafinelli’s article, “networked remembrance in the time of insta-memories,” illustrates how, in some senses, the platform merely extends and amplifies a long-established use of photographs: what she terms, following susan sontag ( ), their remembra- tive function, which is to say their capacity to facilitate memory. serafinelli points out that since its invention photography has been used as a tool for remembering by offering the means both to capture a moment in time and then later to retrieve, review, and share that moment. in such ways, photography can be said to keep memories alive. by acting as a “digital mem- ory box,” instagram extends this function into a context where the practice and role of photography in our lives has changed dramatically. in an era of social photography—where the tak- ing and sharing of photographic images via connected mobile devices is instantaneous and ubiquitous—the remembrative caliandro and graham work of photographs has become interwoven with myriad social and communicative functions. the memories captured in photography have become distributed, networked, and con- nective. most strikingly in this context the remembrative func- tion is collectivized, in part due to the public nature of the platform, but intriguingly this is not necessarily oriented to publicity as such. using a qualitative approach informed by netnography, online participant observation, and visual content analysis, serafinelli discusses examples that illustrate the diversity of ways in which instagram is used as a “memory tool.” alongside this diversity, however, there are distinctive trends, most notably—and somewhat contradicting argu- ments concerning the instaneity of photosharing—the con- sidered selection of images to be shared. among the participants sampled in the study the trend is to select the “best possible” photographs, but conversely, there is a nota- ble reluctance to post intimate (especially family) images to the platform. instagram, therefore, has become a central agent in the transformation of photography and its remem- brative role in our lives. as a memory archive, however, it has its limitations, as users seek to protect their most intimate memories from the consequences of what marwick and boyd ( ) have termed “context collapse.” just as digital networking technologies have given rise to new and emergent forms of communication and sociality, many of which are discussed by contributors to this special issue, they have also liberated certain kinds of workers from traditional work spaces. according to bozzi, in his “cultural critique of the travelling entrepreneur on instagram,” this particular platform plays a vital role in such developments as it serves as the primary social imaginary for such “digital nomads.” while the figure of the digital nomad has been with us since the emergence of the world wide web in the s, the increasing dominance of neoliberalism coupled with the ubiquitous connectivity of mobile devices has seen the entre- preneurial promise of remote work become increasingly mainstream, what bozzi terms a “quasi-utopian horizon.” discussing the imaginary appeal of the visual tropes associ- ated with the hashtags #digitalnomad, #solotraveller, #remotework, and # hourworkweek alongside the geotag- ging behaviors of their users, bozzi identifies a depoliticized aesthetic that stands in stark contrast to the very real effects of the globalized gentrification of which the digital nomad is symptomatic. yet, despite the hollowness of this figure (permanently on the lookout for “authenticity and wi-fi”; the image of a “laptop next to a cappuccino on a wooden desk” their sig- nature post), bozzi identifies in their use of instagram pos- sibility as well as contradiction. most notably, the ways in which work is aestheticized by digital nomads through their creative use of the platform’s techno-poetic affordances signals the potential for alternative cultural narratives and new political categories. in this reading, the “travelling entrepreneur” is construed not so much as an avatar of neo- liberalism, but rather of post-work. this is a scenario where the redistributive potential of digital work might be alloyed with the communitarian potential of social networks—a quasi-utopian horizon that is no less speculative, and indeed ideological, than the present (neoliberal) digital nomad social imaginary as it is outlined in the article. however, in line with other contributors to this volume, this speculative conclusion is arrived at via a methodological approach that seeks to decenter currently dominant para- digms—in this case those that take the self and the network as primary objects of study. in a related vein to omena, rabello, and mintz, it does so by drawing attention to the heterogeneous ways in which users deploy and engage with hashtags and geotags associated with digital nomadism. in this regard, what bozzi says of the digital nomad might be more widely generalizable, whereby the practice of tagging informs a collective cultural production wherein the “imper- sonal quality and the visual character of this gesture go hand in hand . . . so the user is at once pulling themselves towards that imagery and drawing from it to assemble part of their own social media self.” the extent to which self-representations on instagram as such can be deemed political is the subject of caldeira, de ridder, and van bauwel’s article “between the mundane and the political: women’s self-representation on instagram.” focusing their research firmly on “ordinary” female instagram users, the authors offer a detailed textual analysis of a very broad cross section of such users in order to gain a sense of the enormous range and variety of visual tropes through which women perform identity through the plat- form. while less than % of the posts in their sample could be identified as overtly political, the authors trace myriad examples in which users articulate tangential political issues and themes through what they describe as the characteristi- cally mundane self-representations that have become intrin- sic to what is understood as “photographable” on instagram. taking this concept from bourdieu’s ( ) early work on the subject, the authors note how practices of self-represen- tation on instagram (in particular selfies) are imbued with social, aesthetic, and ethical values and as such define what is worthy of being photographed in a given context. moving beyond a simplistic notion of the selfie as being merely a narcissistic status-seeking performance, such practices have the effect of expanding the “realm of public visibility, grant- ing both aesthetic and political value to moments and people otherwise symbolically annihilated.” it is in this expanded realm of public visibility that the authors identify, for example, a diversity of femininities rather than a singular or homogeneous gender identify that might have been mediated via broadcast media in the past. such expressions evidence feminist political potential, yet many examples are also, the authors acknowledge, symp- tomatic of postfeminist sensibilities where the political horizon is limited to a concern with individual choice and social media + society empowerment, rather than a broader collectivist concern with systemic inequality. in “lifestyle enclaves in the instagram city,” john d. boy and justus uitermark present a more empirically focused study of the role played by instagram in the cre- ation of subcultures and social divisions in the city. situating their study within the sociological tradition of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, the authors draw an analogy between the role of the city and by the social media platform in deter- mining the underlying character of social relations. on one hand this is observable in the amplification of those forces and forms of social fragmentation familiar to urban sociol- ogists through the selective presentation of city spaces by instagram users. much like the role played by “digital nomads” in bozzi’s discussion of gentrification, spaces of (or associated with) aspirational consumption are typically more “instagrammable” than quotidian urban spaces, lead- ing to the construction of the “lifestyle enclaves” referred to in the article title. without discounting the social consequences of this par- ticular manifestation of fragmentation, boy and uitermark argue that there is an equally significant—and in some ways no less problematic—countervailing process of integration at play. here, integration describes the actions and outcomes of users connecting around shared interests but also surveil- ling each other when and by doing so. while such actions and activities facilitate community—which it goes without saying is especially important for minorities who might oth- erwise face exclusion—an unintended consequence is to suppress difference and instead foster conformity. the authors draw on studies that show how the decline of certain urban subcultural milieus is concomitant with the growth of social media, before offering an empirical analysis derived from a city-wide dataset using multiple methods that show the ways in which amsterdam is indeed “segregated” on instagram—but also the ways in which communities constel- late and frequently intersect in “zones” at what the authors term the “the online–offline interface, i.e., symbolic and material domains that serve as stages for the enactment of identity and the performance of status.” one of the biggest challenges facing social media researchers working on instagram is in developing methods that can adequately address the scale and scope of the avail- able date without losing the capacity for analyzing the more granular aspects of participatory cultures, especially as these evolve over longer durations. in her discussion of “self- tracking health over time: from the use of instagram to perform optimal health to the protective shield of the digital detox,” rachael kent demonstrates how this chal- lenge can be met via an innovative ethnographic approach that triangulates a textual and thematic analysis of online content with reflexive diaries and semi-structured inter- views. while the results of her study do not have the same scope for generalizability as some of the more data-focused studies in this collection, they offer an invaluable insight into the “online-offline interface” of a particular community of users and in so doing broaden the horizon of digital research methods more generally. kent’s article investigates the ways in which instagram users perform “optimal” health identities through their repre- sentation of health-tracking and associated self-monitoring practices. by analyzing these representations but also con- textualizing them with the diaries and interviews, kent shows how surveillance and feedback from the community over time influences individual health management and deci- sions in their offline everyday lives. at the outset of the study the behavior of participants all broadly accord with critical accounts of the “quantified self,” whereby self-optimizing technologies produce ideal neoliberal citizens. over time, however, a number of participants demonstrated a growing awareness of and resistance to such subjectification—spe- cifically, to the negative impact on mental health it gives rise to—leading in some cases to users “detoxing” and even quit- ting the platform entirely. while the “friendly” surveillance afforded by instagram is the reason it proves so popular with users concerned with health-optimization, the “integration” that boy and uitermark speak of in another context mani- fests here as pressure to both conform and perform in ways that can become unsustainable and counter-productive. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the authors received financial support from the faculty of arts and creative industries, middlesex university, 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( , august ). mind-boggling instagram stats & facts for . https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ ws/ / / /instagram-statistics author biographies alessandro caliandro (phd, university of milano) is a senior lecturer in the department of political and social sciences at university of pavia. his current research focuses on digital meth- ods, digital consumer culture, social media affordances, and smart- phone use. james graham (phd, university of warwick) is director of programmes for writing and promotion at middlesex university. his research is concerned with the intersection of postcolonial and promotional cultures. his most recent book, co-edited with dr alessandro gandini, is collaborative production in the creative industries ( ). https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/ / / /instagram-the- -billion-grand-slam-driving-facebooks-future-the-forbes-cover-story/# f aac a https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/ / / /instagram-the- -billion-grand-slam-driving-facebooks-future-the-forbes-cover-story/# f aac a https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/ / / /instagram-the- -billion-grand-slam-driving-facebooks-future-the-forbes-cover-story/# f aac a http://instagram.com/press/ http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image https://wearesocial.com/global-digital-report- https://wearesocial.com/global-digital-report- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/timeline_of_instagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/timeline_of_instagram https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/ / / /instagram-statistics https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/ / / /instagram-statistics wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ research article introduction of store brands considering product cost and shelf space opportunity cost yongrui duan, zhixin mao , and jiazhen huo school of economics and management, tongji university, shanghai , china correspondence should be addressed to zhixin mao; tjzxmao@ .com received january ; accepted june ; published july academic editor: huaguang zhang copyright © yongrui duan et al. this is an open access article distributed under the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. this paper studies the introduction of store brands (sbs) when the product cost, shelf space opportunity cost, and baseline sales are taken into consideration. we construct a stackelberg model inwhich one retailer, acting as the leader, sells anational brand (nb) and itssbandmaximizesthe categoryprofitbyallocatingshelfspace anddeterminingthe pricesfor the sband nbproducts.meanwhile, an nb manufacturer, acting as the follower, maximizes its profit based on the decisions of the retailer. our results demonstrate that the product cost of the sb (nb) and the shelf space opportunity cost are the dominating factors that determine the optimal pricing strategy. if the two costs are low, then the optimal pricing strategy is the me-too strategy (competitive strategy); otherwise, the optimal pricing strategy is the differentiation strategy. there exists a threshold of the product cost, shelf space opportunity cost, and baseline sales to decide the pricing strategy and introduction of sb. . introduction store brands (sbs) account for % of total retail sales in us supermarkets, and their share ranges from % to % of total retail sales in the uk, belgium, germany, spain, and france [ ]. why are retailers eager to introduce sbs? sbs are the exclusive brands for which the retailer is responsible for shelf placement, pricing, quality, packaging, and promotion. in contrast to a national brand (nb), which is provided by the manufacturer, a retailer’s sb product is entirely and inde- pendently controlled by the retailer, including research and development, design, sales, and market management. retail- ers expand their market share by introducing sb products to extend their product line and to meet demands in different market segments [ , ]. moreover, retailers develop their sb products to compete with other retailers and enhance con- sumer loyalty [ ]. retailers also introduce sbs into the origi- nal sales category to obtain profits from their sales and, more importantly, to leverage negotiation power with the manufac- turer [ ]. furthermore, groznik and heese [ ] demonstrate that retailers are in a position to gain competitive advantages in the supply chain and increase profits by introducing sb products. lamey et al. [ ] also reveal that retailers are more likely to increase their sbs market share when the economy is suffering and shrinks. however, according to nielsen’s sbs report (the data come from nielsen global private label report november ), the share of sbs in the asia-pacific market is generally low, and china’s market share of sbs is only – %. hence, the sb market potential is extremely large and therefore attractive to growing numbers of retailers in china. increasing numbers of retailers, including international brand retailers such as wal- mart, aldi, and lidl and domestic brand retailers in china such as lianhua, vanguard, and wumart, have begun to in- troduce sb products. aldi opened an online store on tmall on mar. th . in aldi supermarkets, most products are sbs, and generally, for each given category, there is a maxi- mum of two other brands. aldi’s main competitor, lidl supermarket, which is famous as an sb retailer in germany, opened an online store in china on sep. th . inter- estingly, the two retailers entered china’s market via online stores. usually, the retailer develops its own sb products (see figure ). manufacturer a sells its nb to the distributor at product price𝑐, and the distributor delivers the nb to retailers at wholesale price 𝑤, and then the retailer sells the nb hindawi mathematical problems in engineering volume , article id , pages https://doi.org/ . / / http://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . / / mathematical problems in engineering manufacturer a manufacturer b national brand, c distributor (manufacturer) national brand, w store brand, c retailer display off line--shelf on line—web store customers store brand, psnational brand, pn figure : supply chain structure. products at retail prices 𝑃𝑛 to the consumers through dis- plays offline (shelf) or online (web store). now, aldi, as a powerful retailer, obtains the same quality of goods directly from manufacturer b, and it wants the product itself without any brand premium. then, it sells these goods as sb products at retail prices p𝑠 to consumers through the same displays. this is why aldi’s product quality is as good as that of any other retailer, while its prices are not high as others’. there- fore, it is natural to consider the retailer’s purchasing cost and the display method as the dominant factors that affect retail- ers’ profits and price positioning strategies. motivated by these issues, we propose the following re- search questions: ( ) which factors will affect the price positioning strategy of a powerful retailer that is a leader and has the power to in- troduce sbs? ( ) what is a suitable price positioning strategy for a dom- inant retailer following the entry of an sb? ( ) who will benefit from the different price positioning strategies? to answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a stackelberg model involving an nb manufacturer (this is the distributor in figure ) and a retailer selling its sb and the nb. the decision variables include the following: the wholesale price for the manufacturer, the retail prices of both brands, and the shelf space that the retailer allocates to each brand. we assume that the retailer is the leader in the stackelberg game, and we characterize the resulting equilibrium in terms of price, shelf space, and profit for both players. generally, there are three-tiered sbs: economy sbs, stan- dard sbs, and premium sbs (psbs). consumers generally perceive sbs to be lower quality and higher risk products. geyskens and steenkamp [ ] note that initially retailers provide low-quality and low-cost sb products mainly as substitutes for nb products. furthermore, standard sbs imitate the quality of leading nb products for slightly lower prices. with the improvement in the quality of sbs, psbs have become increasingly common in retail stores. seenivasan et al. [ ] report that “store brands have also gained in consumer esteem, with almost % of american consumers considering them to be as good as or better than national brands”. the quality of some sb products has caught up to that of nb products, but sb pricing is usually lower than nb pricing. nenycz-thiel and romaniuk [ ] and hara and matsubayashi [ ] show that the quality of some psb products has caught up with that of nb products. in response to the introduction of sbs, manufacturers of nbs are searching for ways to expand their business and help retailers introduce their sb products. hara and matsubayashi [ ] find that, in essence, some nb manufacturers have gradually become original equipment manufacturers (oems) of premium sbs. in this paper, we study the introduction of standard sbs. to the best of our knowledge, no previous papers have studied the impact of product costs and shelf space opportu- nity costs on the entry of sbs. we fill the gap by proposing pricing strategy games between a retailer and a manufacturer when the retailer introduces sbs. there are two streams of literature, those on product cost and shelf space opportunity cost, that relate to the present research. the frameworks employed in previous papers typically assume that the manufacturer who provides the sb product to the retailer does not play any strategic role, and thus they set the retailer’s purchasing cost of the private brand at zero (see [ , ]). however, in a recent contribution, fang et al. [ ] study a wholesale price contract between an nb supplier and retailer, and they consider the cost per unit quality (cpuq), which can determine whether the retailer can introduce the sb and whether the supplier can affect and deter its introduction. in another recent work, mai et al. [ ] study an extended warranty as a means of coordinating the quality decisions for sb products. they consider the unit repair cost and unit production cost, which ensure that the product has a zero probability of failure during the extended warranty period. in contrast, our research shows that the product cost is the dominant factor that affects the price positioning strategy in the introduction of sbs by a powerful retailer. the stackelberg equilibrium solution will be adopted in this work. amrouche and zaccour [ ] and li et al. [ ] study the shelf space allocation and pricing decisions in the market- ing channel by applying static and dynamic games. kurtuluş and toktay [ ] construct a supply chain with two manu- facturers and one retailer and study a three-stage sequential dynamic game. they demonstrate that a retailer, acting as the leader in the supply chain, can use category management and categorize shelf space to control the intensity of competition between manufacturers. however, there they do not consider the impact of sbs or shelf space effects in the demand func- tion. kuo and yang [ ] develop a competitive shelf space model for nbs versus sbs based on kurtuluş and toktay’s settings and find that if the cross-price effect is not too large, mathematical problems in engineering the retailer should position its sb’s quality closer to that of the nb. kuo and yang consider the shelf space opportunity cost in operation and channel conflict, but they do not consider product cost. in retailing, the shelf space allocation problem is crucial and has been studied by both operations research and mar- keting scholars for years. corstjens and doyle [ ] develop a model to address the shelf space allocation problem. bultez and naert [ ] and drèze et al. [ ] confirm that shelf space has a positive effect on a retailer’s sales and profitability. irion et al. [ ] develop a shelf space allocation optimization model that combines essential in-store costs and considers space- and cross-elasticities to study shelf space management. valen- zuela et al. [ ] propose that consumers hold vertical schemas that higher is better on shelves and that more expensive pro- ducts should be placed higher on a display than cheaper pro- ducts. they test whether retailer shelf space layouts reflect consumer beliefs and illustrate that consumers’ beliefs about shelf space layouts are not always reflected in the real mar- ketplace. these studies all focus on the shelf space allocation of general products; however, they do not consider sbs or analyze the pricing issue. however, the competition for shelf space is prevalent in supermarkets, especially for new product introductions. drèze et al. [ ] demonstrate that re- tailers want to maximize category sales and profits and must allocate a certain amount of shelf space to do so. moreover, manufacturers want to maximize the sales and profits of their nbs and therefore always want more and better space to be allocated to their nbs. thus, retailers often earn a posi- tive profit margin on each product they sell in addition to collecting the slotting fees, given that their role goes beyond shelf space leasing [ ]. because the slotting fee includes not only shelf space leasing but also logistics, merchandising, and promotion, among other services, shelf space is so scarce that manufacturers have to provide retailers with slotting fees to secure shelf space for their sbs. our research assumes that the shelf space opportunity cost represents a slotting fee that is a dominant factor affecting the introduction and price positioning strategy of sbs. in contrast to all of the above research streams, our paper discusses the store brand entry problem under varying prod- uct cost and sb opportunity scenarios. our results provide guidance for retailers regarding marketing strategies under different product cost, shelf space opportunity, and baseline sales settings. this is one of our contributions to the existing literature. the remainder of the paper is organized as follows: in section , we construct an economic profit model for the sup- ply chain under study. in section , we derive the stackelberg equilibrium. in section , we seek the optimal pricing strat- egy by conducting a numerical study with different scena- rios. in section , we conclude the paper. . the model we consider a two-stage supply chain that consists of one retailer and one manufacturer. the manufacturer provides one product in a given category and sells it to consumers through the retailer. the retailer maximizes profit by allocat- ing shelf space to each brand. we normalize the total shelf space available for each category to one. s denotes the share of this space that is dedicated to the sb, and 𝑆 > . we assume that the total shelf space is allocated; thus, the share of the nb is −𝑆 (see [ ]). we assume that the demand for each brand depends on the exposure each receives, as measured by shelf space and the price of each brand. here, we assume the nb baseline sales are normalized to one and the baseline sales of the sb are captured by the parameter 𝛼𝑠 ∈ ( , ) (see [ ]). the demands of the two products are as follows: 𝐷𝑛 = + 𝛼𝑠 (( + 𝛼𝑠)( − 𝑆) + 𝜓(𝑃𝑠 − 𝑃𝑛) − 𝑃𝑛) ( ) 𝐷𝑠 = + 𝛼𝑠 (( + 𝛼𝑠)𝑆 + 𝜓(𝑃𝑛 − 𝑃𝑠) − 𝑃𝑠) ( ) where 𝐷𝑛 and 𝐷𝑠 represent the demand for the nb and for the sb, respectively. + 𝛼𝑠 represents the total baseline sales (potential market) of the nb and sb [ ].𝜓 ∈ ( , )denotes the cross-price competition between the nb and sb.𝑃𝑛 and 𝑃𝑠 are the reference prices for each, respectively, which is a common assumption in the literature (see [ , , ]). in addition, the demand for each brand increases in its proportion of shelf space. the rationale is that if a product has more shelf space, the probability of being noticed, perceived, and selected by the consumer will increase (see [ – ]). furthermore, many studies demonstrate that each brand’s demand increases in the competing brand’s price and decreases in its own price (see [ , ]). according to ( ) and ( ), the marginal price effect on demand depends on the shelf space allocated to the brand. this specification has been used extensively in the literature (see [ , ]). in addition, 𝑐 is the unit cost. as in nenycz-thiel and romaniuk [ ] and hara and matsubayashi [ ], we assume that the costs of the sb and the nb are equal. to simplify the computation, we assume that there is no significant quality differentiation between the sb and nb, and the prices of the two products satisfy 𝑃𝑠 = 𝛾𝑃𝑛, < 𝛾 < ( ) where 𝑃𝑠 and 𝑃𝑛 represent the retail prices of the sb and nb, respectively. 𝛾 is the price difference coefficient. parameter 𝑐 represents the cost of the sb and nb. assuming that the manufacturer and the retailer are profit maximizers, their objectives are as follows: max Π𝑀 = (𝑤 − 𝑐)𝐷𝑛 ( ) max Π𝑅 = 𝐷𝑠 (𝑃𝑠 − 𝑐) + 𝑚𝐷𝑛− 𝑘𝑆 ( ) where Π𝑀 and Π𝑅 represent the profit of the manufacturer and of the retailer, respectively, and 𝐷𝑛 and 𝐷𝑠 are given by ( ) and ( ), respectively. 𝑤 represents the wholesale price, and mathematical problems in engineering 𝑚represents the unit markup from selling unit nb; therefore, 𝑃𝑛 = 𝑤 + 𝑚. because shelf space is a scarce resource, space allocated to one product means relinquishing profits from another product. if the shelf spaces of nbs are occupied by the sb, there exists the loss of the opportunity cost for the retailer. that means the retailer will forgo the slotting fee for the new nb from manufacturer. assume that the retailer incurs a shelf space cost, i.e., the opportunity cost 𝑘 of the shelf space, where 𝑘 > . the shelf space proportion, 𝑆, is a continuous endogenous variable. the assumption is standard in economics (see [ , ]). in this paper, we assume that the retailer is the leader and the manufacturer is the follower. the sequence of events is as follows: the retailer (leader) first announces its marketing strategy, including the unit markup value 𝑚 and shelf space proportion 𝑆. the manufacturer reacts to this information by deciding the wholesale price 𝑤. . stackelberg equilibrium to determine the reaction function of the manufacturer to the retailer’s unit markup value 𝑚 and shelf space proportion 𝑆, we must solve the following optimization problem. first, we consider the manufacturer’s problem. substituting ( ) and ( ) into ( ) yields Π𝑀 = (𝑤 − 𝑐)(𝜓(𝛾(𝑚 + 𝑤) − 𝑚 − 𝑤) − 𝑚 + ( − 𝑆)(𝛼𝑠+ ) − 𝑤)𝛼𝑠 + . ( ) first-order conditions are 𝑑Π𝑀 dw = ⇐⇒ 𝑤(𝑚,𝑆) = 𝑐((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) − 𝛾𝑚𝜓+ 𝑚𝜓 + 𝑚 + (𝑆 − )𝛼𝑠 + 𝑆 − (𝛾 − )𝜓 − ( ) and 𝑑 Π𝑀 𝑑𝑤 = ((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) 𝛼𝑠 + < . ( ) next, we address the retailer’s optimization problem. substituting ( ) into ( ) yields Π𝑅 = (− 𝑘𝑆 + 𝑅 − 𝑅 (𝑅 + 𝑅 )) ( ) where 𝑅 = 𝑚((𝛾 − )𝜓(𝑐 + 𝑚) − 𝑐 − 𝑚 − (𝑆 − )𝛼𝑠 − 𝑆 + )𝛼𝑠+ 𝑅 = 𝑐(𝛾 − )((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) + 𝛾((𝛾 − )𝑚𝜓 − 𝑚 + 𝑆 − ) + 𝛾(𝑆 − )𝛼𝑠(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) (𝛼𝑠 + ) 𝑅 = ((𝛾 − )𝜓 + 𝛾)((𝛾 − )𝜓(𝑐 + 𝑚) − 𝑐 − 𝑚 − ) 𝑅 = 𝛼𝑠 (−𝛾(𝜓 + ) + 𝑆(𝛾(−𝜓) + 𝛾 + 𝜓 + ) + 𝜓) + 𝑆(𝛾(−𝜓) + 𝛾 + 𝜓 + ). ( ) we obtain the following results. theorem . if the price difference coefficient 𝛾 and cross-price competition coefficient𝜓 satisfy𝛾 > (𝐾(𝐾+𝜓− )− 𝜓+ )/𝐾𝜓, then the retailer’s profit function Π𝑅 is jointly concave in 𝑚 and𝑆, where 𝐾 = [− 𝜓 + √ 𝜓 + 𝜓 − 𝜓 + 𝜓 − ] / . ( ) proof. the first- and second-order derivatives of Π𝑅 with respect to 𝑚 and 𝑆 are as follows: 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 = − 𝛾 + ( − 𝛾)( − 𝛾)𝜓 + (𝛼𝑠 + ) < . ( ) 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆 = − 𝛾(𝛾( − 𝜓) + 𝜓 + )(𝛼𝑠+ ) ((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) − < ( ) 𝜕Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚𝜕𝑆 = −𝛾(𝛾 + 𝜓 + ) + 𝜓 + (𝛾 − )𝜓 − ( ) 𝜕Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆𝜕𝑚 = −𝛾(𝛾 + 𝜓 + ) + 𝜓 + (𝛾 − )𝜓 − ( ) the hessian matrix can be formed as follows: mathematical problems in engineering 𝐻 = [[[[ [ 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚𝜕𝑆 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆𝜕𝑚 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆 ]]]] ] = [[[[[ [ − + 𝛾 + ( − 𝛾)( − 𝛾)𝜓 ( + 𝛼𝑠) + 𝜓 − 𝛾( + 𝛾 + 𝜓) − + (− + 𝛾)𝜓 + 𝜓 − 𝛾( + 𝛾 + 𝜓) − + (− + 𝛾)𝜓 − − 𝛾[ + 𝛾( − 𝜓) + 𝜓]( + 𝛼𝑠) (− + (− + 𝛾)𝜓) ]]]]] ] 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 = − + 𝛾 + ( − 𝛾)( − 𝛾)𝜓 ( + 𝛼𝑠) < . ( ) since𝛼𝑠 ∈ ( , ),𝜓 ∈ ( , ),𝛾 > (𝐾(𝐾+𝜓− )− 𝜓+ )/𝐾𝜓, 𝐾 = √ 𝐿 − 𝜓 + 𝜓 − , 𝐿 = √ 𝜓 + 𝜓 − 𝜓 , then |𝐻| = 𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − )(𝛾 − )𝜓 + ) (𝛼𝑠 + ) − 𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 − (𝛾 − )𝜓 − > . ( ) 𝐻 is a negative definite integral and the profit function is concave. setting 𝜕Π𝑅(𝑚,𝑆)/𝜕𝑚 = , 𝜕Π𝑅(𝑚,𝑆)/𝜕𝑆 = and letting (𝑚∗,𝑆∗) represent the solutions to the linear systems, then 𝑚∗ = 𝑚 + 𝑚 + 𝑚 𝑋 ( ) 𝑆∗ = 𝑆 𝑋 ( ) where 𝑚 = (𝛾 + )( (𝛾 − )𝑘(𝜓 + ) − 𝛾) − 𝛾(𝛾 + )𝛼 𝑠 𝑚 = 𝛼𝑠(𝑐(𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝑐(𝛾(𝛾 + ) − ) + (𝛾 + ) ⋅ ((𝛾 − )𝑘(𝜓 + ) − 𝛾)) . 𝑚 = 𝑐((𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + (𝛾(𝛾 + ) − ) − 𝑘((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) ⋅ (𝛾((𝛾 − )𝜓 + 𝛾 − ) + 𝜓 + )) 𝑋 = 𝑘((𝛾 − )𝜓 − )(𝛾 + (𝛾 − )(𝛾 − )𝜓 + ) + (− 𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) (−𝜓) − 𝛾 + )(𝛼𝑠 + ) 𝑆 = (𝛾 + )(𝑐(𝛾 − )((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) − 𝛾(𝜓 + ) + (−𝛾(𝜓 + ) + 𝜓 + )𝛼𝑠+ 𝜓 + ) ( ) substituting 𝑚∗ and 𝑆∗ into ( ) yields 𝑤∗ = 𝑤 − 𝑤 + 𝑤 𝑋 ( ) where 𝑤 = 𝑘(− 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) + 𝑐((𝛾 − )𝜓 − ) ⋅ (𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 − ) + 𝜓 + ) + 𝛾𝜓 − 𝜓 − ) 𝑤 = 𝛼𝑠(𝑐(𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾((𝑐 − )𝛾 + 𝑐 + ) + 𝑘(𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓) + 𝜓 + )) 𝑤 = −𝑐(𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾(− 𝑐(𝛾 + ) + 𝛾 − ) + 𝛾(𝛾 − )𝛼 𝑠 ( ) and then 𝑃∗ 𝑛 = 𝑃n + 𝑃n 𝑋 ( ) 𝑃∗ 𝑠 = 𝛾𝑃∗ 𝑛 ( ) where 𝑃n = −(𝛾 − )𝑘𝜓(𝛾𝑐 + 𝑐 + ) + 𝑐(𝛾 + )(𝑘 + ) + 𝛾 + 𝑘 𝑃n = 𝛼𝑠 ( 𝑐(𝛾 + ) + 𝛾 + 𝑘(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) + 𝛾𝛼𝑠) ( ) 𝐷∗ 𝑛 = 𝐷n (𝐷n + 𝐷n )(𝛼𝑠 + )(y − y ) ( ) 𝐷∗ 𝑠 = 𝛼𝑠 (𝐷s + 𝐷s ) + 𝐷s + 𝐷s (𝛼𝑠 + )(y − y ) ( ) where 𝐷n = (𝛾 − )𝜓 − 𝐷n = 𝛼𝑠(𝑐(𝛾 − ) + (𝛾 − )𝛾 − 𝑘(𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓) + 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾 − )𝛾𝛼𝑠) 𝐷n = 𝑐(𝛾 + 𝑘(𝛾 (−𝜓) + 𝛾 + 𝜓 + ) − ) + (𝛾 − ) ⋅ 𝛾 − 𝑘( 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) − 𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) 𝐷s = −𝑐(𝛾 + )((𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 + ) + (𝛾 − ) ⋅ 𝑘𝜓 + (𝛾 − ) ( 𝑘 − )𝜓 mathematical problems in engineering 𝐷s = 𝛾 + 𝛾 − 𝛾𝑘 − (𝛾(𝛾(𝜓 − ) − 𝜓 − ) + 𝜓 + )𝛼𝑠 − 𝐷s = 𝛾 + 𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝑘𝜓 + (𝛾 − ) ( 𝑘 − )𝜓 − 𝛾𝑘 − 𝐷s = 𝑐(𝛾 + )(−𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝑘𝜓 + (𝛾 − ) (𝑘 − )𝜓 − 𝛾𝑘 − ) y = ( 𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 − )(𝛼𝑠 + ) y = 𝑘((𝛾 − )𝜓 − )(𝛾 + (𝛾 − )(𝛾 − )𝜓 + ) ( ) and thus Π∗ 𝑀 = (𝑤∗− 𝑐)𝐷∗ 𝑛 ( ) Π∗ 𝑅 = (𝑃∗ 𝑠 − 𝑐)𝐷∗ 𝑛 + 𝑚∗𝐷∗ 𝑛 − 𝑘(𝑆 ∗) . ( ) to determine whether the retailer can increase profit through the introduction of an sb, we need to consider the case when the retailer sells only the nb. we assume that the demand for the nb depends on the price of the nb if there is no sb. the following functional forms are assumed: 𝐷𝑛 = − 𝑃𝑛. ( ) we assume that 𝑃𝑛 = 𝑤+𝑚, and then we have the follow- ing optimization problem: max Π𝑀𝑜 = (𝑤 − 𝑐)𝐷𝑛 = (𝑤 − 𝑐)( − 𝑚 − 𝑤) ( ) max Π𝑅𝑜 = 𝑚𝐷𝑛 = 𝑚( − 𝑚 − 𝑤). ( ) using an analytical process that is similar to the stack- elberg equilibrium, we obtain Π𝑅𝑜 = ( / )(𝑐 − ) , Π𝑀𝑜 =( / )(𝑐 − ) and the final demand of the product category, 𝐷𝑛 = ( − 𝑐)/ . proof. please see the proof in appendix a. . numerical studies the purpose of this section is to reveal the effects of the prod- uct cost and the baseline sales of sbs on profitability and shelf space allocation. . . scenario : varying product cost of sbs. in this subsec- tion, we will study the relationships between the product cost 𝑐 and the parameters, such as the decision variables, demand, price, and profitability of sbs and nbs. let 𝛼𝑠 = . , 𝜓 = . ,𝑘 = . , and 𝛾 = . ; . ; . . figure (a) shows that sb shelf space 𝑆 and markup 𝑚 decrease as product cost 𝑐 increases, and conversely the wholesale price of nb𝑤 increases. in figure (b), the demand of sb, 𝐷𝑠, and total demand, 𝐷, decrease as product cost𝑐 increases; meanwhile, the demand of nb, 𝐷𝑛, increases. figure (c) shows that product prices of both nbs and sbs increase as product cost 𝑐 increases. that is to say, most of the decision variables and other parameters (except the demand for the nb) are sensitive to product cost 𝑐, and any slight change in the product cost results in a great change in the parameters (such as 𝑆, 𝑚, 𝑤, 𝐷, 𝐷𝑠). in figures and , we aim to study ( ) the relationship be- tween the product cost 𝑐 and the profit of the retailer and manufacturer when the sb is introduced, as well as ( ) the profit of the retailer and manufacturer before and after the in- troduction of sb. figure (a) shows that the retailer’s total profit decreases as product cost 𝑐 increases. there exists a cost threshold c = . (where 𝛼𝑠 = . , 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , and 𝛾 = . 𝑜𝑟 . ). the retailer should use a different pricing strategy for differ- ent product costs. if the cost is less than the threshold, the me-too strategy is preferred; if the cost is larger than the threshold, the differentiation strategy can increase profit. in other words, when the product cost 𝑐 is high, the retailer uses a differentiation strategy; however, the me-too strategy is better when the product cost 𝑐 is low. figure (b) demonstrates the profit before and after the introduction of sb when 𝑐 changes. it shows that the total profits of the retailer decrease as product cost 𝑐 increases. there exists a cost threshold c̃ = . (where 𝛼𝑠 = . , 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , and 𝛾 = . ) such that if the cost is less than the threshold, the introduction of the sb is profitable; if the cost is larger than the threshold, the introduction of the sb will not increase profit, and the retailer will not have enough incentive to introduce the sb. however, the retailer is less affected when differentiation strategies are used. within the range [ , c̃], the retailer uses differentiation strategies, and its total profit will reach a minimum value and then rise again. that is, differentiation strategies are used for the price decision, and the introduction of sb will bring more profits for the retailers, due to the existence of big price differential. this conclusion is different from the previous research; sayman et al. [ ] do not find the significant effect of price differential; in present paper, we demonstrate that the significant effect exists when considering the product cost. figure demonstrates that the manufacturer’s profits will be very low when the retailer introduces the sb. however, the manufacturer’s total profits increase as product cost 𝑐 increases. furthermore, when the retailer introduces the sb and the product cost increases, the manufacturer’s total profit is higher than before. however, this situation will not occur because it is not profitable for the retailer when parameter 𝑐 is too high; the retailer, as a leader, will not introduce the sb in this interval. to put it differently, the retailer will prudently consider whether to introduce the sb. . . scenario : varying shelf space opportunity cost of sbs. in this subsection, we will study the relationships between the shelf space opportunity cost of sb 𝑘 and the parameters, such as decision variables, demand, price, and the profitability of sbs and nbs. let 𝛼𝑠 = . , 𝜓 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ; . ; . . mathematical problems in engineering c . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . , 𝛾= . parameter . . . m∗ s ∗ w ∗ (a) c . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . , 𝛾= . demand . . . . . dn ∗ ds ∗ d ∗ (b) c . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . , 𝛾= . price . . . pn ∗ ps ∗ (c) figure : variable results for different values of 𝑐. c . . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . (Πr) ∗ . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) c . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . − . (Πr) ∗ −(Πro) ∗ . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : retailer’s total profit for different values of 𝑐. mathematical problems in engineering c . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . (Πm) ∗ . . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) c . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , 𝜅= . (Πm) ∗ −(Πmo) ∗ − . − . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : manufacturer’s total profit for different values of 𝑐. the results in figure (a) show that when in the high- competition situation (𝜓 = . ) with high baseline sales of sbs (𝛼𝑠 = . ), increasing the opportunity cost parameter of shelf space 𝑘 leads to a sharp decrease in the retailer’s shelf space proportion 𝑆, a slow decrease in the unit markup value 𝑚, and a sharp increase in the wholesale price 𝑤. figure (b) demonstrates that increasing the opportunity cost of shelf space 𝑘 causes a sharp decrease in the retailer’s demand for sbs but an increase in the manufacturer’s demand for nbs and, subsequently, a sharp increase in the total demand for the product category. figure (c) indicates a slow increase in the sales price for both sbs and nbs when 𝑘 increases. in figures and , we aim to study ( ) the relationship between the opportunity cost of the shelf space 𝑘 and the pro- fit of retailer and manufacturer when the sb is introduced, as well as ( ) the profit difference of the retailer and the manu- facturer before and after the introduction of sb. figure (a) shows that the retailer’s total profits decrease as the opportunity cost of the shelf space 𝑘 increases. mean- while, the retailer should use a different pricing strategy when the opportunity cost takes a different value. particularly, there exists a threshold k = . (where 𝛼𝑠 = . , 𝜓 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . 𝑜𝑟 . ), such that if the opportunity cost of the shelf space is less than the threshold, the retailer uses the me- too strategy; if the opportunity cost of the shelf space is larger than the threshold, a differentiation strategy is optimal. figure (b) visualizes the difference in profit before and after the introduction of the sb; the retailer’s total profits decrease as opportunity cost parameter of shelf space 𝑘 increases. there exists a threshold k̃ = . (where 𝛼𝑠 = . ,𝜓 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ). when the opportunity cost parameter𝑘 is high, the retailer uses a differentiation strategy; on the other hand, the competitive strategy (me-too strategy) is better when parameter 𝑘 is low. mathematical problems in engineering k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . , 𝛾= . parameter . . . . . m∗ s ∗ w ∗ (a) k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . , 𝛾= . demand . . . . . dn ∗ ds ∗ d ∗ (b) k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . , 𝛾= . price . . . . . pn ∗ ps ∗ (c) figure : variable results for different values of 𝑘. figure demonstrates that the manufacturer’s total profit increases as the opportunity cost of shelf space 𝑘 increases. that is to say, when the retailer introduces sb, the manufac- turer’s total profit is higher than before. however, this situa- tion will not occur because the retailer is not profitable when parameter 𝑘 is high; in this interval, the retailer, as a leader, will not introduce the sb. . . scenario : varying baseline sales of sbs. let 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ; we draw the plots for the relation- ships between the baseline sales of sbs, 𝛼𝑠, and parameters such as the decision variables, demand, price, and profitability of sbs and nbs. figure (a) indicates that in a high-competition situation where 𝜓 = . and the low-cost parameters 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . , an increase in the baseline sales of sb 𝛼𝑠 leads to a slow increase in the sb’s proportion of retail shelf space, 𝑆, and a sharp increase in the unit markup value, 𝑚. meanwhile, the manufacturer’s wholesale price, 𝑤, increases slowly as baseline sales of the sb, 𝛼𝑠, increases. figure (b) demonstrates that increasing the baseline sales of sbs 𝛼𝑠 causes a sharp increase in the retailer’s demand for sbs, a de- crease in the manufacturer’s demand for nbs, and, subse- quently, an increase in the total demand for the product category. when the retailer, as a leader, introduces the sb, actual sales increase as the baseline sales increas. that is to say, as the baseline sales of the sb increase, the retailer can increase the proportion of shelf space allocated to the sb; meanwhile, the retailer is better off because it can obtain more profit from the manufacturer’s product. in this situation, the increase of the wholesale price can be perceived as compensation for the shelf space occupied by the sb, and the manufacturer deliberately increases the wholesale price to offset the manufacturer’s loss from nb sales. meanwhile, figure also demonstrates that as 𝛼𝑠 increases, the retailer can increase the sb’s proportion of shelf space. the actual demand of the sb increases more quickly than that of the shelf space, which aligns with the conclusion in eisend [ ], that a small increase in shelf space elasticity can also promote a rapid growth in product sales. in figure , we study the relationship between the retail price of sb (nb) and the baseline sales of the sb 𝛼𝑠. figure (a) shows that in a high-competition situation where 𝜓 = . and the low-cost parameters 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . , the prices of both the sb and nb increase as the baseline sales of the sb 𝛼𝑠 increase. figure (b) demonstrates that when the retailer introduces sb and implements the me-too strategy (competitive strategy), the price of the nb is lower than the differentiation strategy, which aligns with the conclusion in gabrielsen and sørgard [ ], that the introduction of sb leads to price concessions from the nb. mathematical problems in engineering k . . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ −(Πro) ∗ . . − . − . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : retailer’s total profit for different values of 𝑘. eventually, it will be beneficial for consumers to purchase the nb. in figure , we study the profitability of retailer in different marketing environments. let 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . ; . , 𝑐 = . ; . , and 𝛾 = . ; . ; . . as 𝛼𝑠 increases, the retailer’s total profit increases; however, there is a significant difference when the retailer uses different pricing strategies. ( ) when 𝑐 or 𝑘 is small, the retailer uses the me-too strategy, and the profit of the retailer will increase. ( ) when 𝑐 or 𝑘 is large, then the differentiation strategy (i.e., 𝛾 = . ) results in more profit than the me-too strategy (i.e., 𝛾 = . ). in figure , we study the difference in profit before and after the introduction of sb. the result shows that if retailer introduces the sb, there exists the threshold 𝛼𝑠 = . (where 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ), such that ( ) under the differentiation strategy, if 𝛼𝑠 is greater than . (where 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ), it will be profitable to introduce the sb; ( ) under the me-too strategy, if 𝛼𝑠 is greater than . (where 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and𝛾 = . ), it will be profitable to introduce the sb. in figure , we study the differences in profit before and after the introduction of sb. the result demonstrates that when the retailer, as the leader, introduces the sb, the manufacturer will gain little profit; however, a comparison of the profit before and after sb is introduced shows that the profit of the manufacturer reduces considerably. in other words, when the retailer is the leader, the introduction of the sb is detrimental to the manufacturer, and this result aligns with kuo and yang [ ]. in addition, figure (a) demonstrates that when the retailer uses the me-too strategy (𝛾 = . ), as 𝛼𝑠 increases, the manufacturer’s profits gradually decrease. when the retailer uses the differentiation strategy (𝛾 = . ), as 𝛼𝑠 increases, the manufacturer’s profits gradually increase. thus, if the retailer, mathematical problems in engineering k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . (Πm) ∗ . . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) k . . . . . . 𝛼s= . , 𝜓= . , c= . (Πm) ∗ −(Πmo) ∗ . . − . − . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : manufacturer’s total profit for different values of 𝑘. 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . , 𝛾= . parameter . . . . . m∗ s ∗ w ∗ (a) . . . . . . 𝛼s 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . , 𝛾= . demand . . . . . dn ∗ d ∗ ds ∗ (b) figure : variable results for different values of 𝛼𝑠. mathematical problems in engineering 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . , 𝛾= . price . . . . . pn ∗ ps ∗ (a) 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (pn) ∗ . . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : price for different values of 𝛼𝑠. as the leader, introduces the sb, the manufacturer is eager to increase its profit when the retailer adopts a differentiation strategy. therefore, when the sb and the nb have roughly the same product quality, a differentiation strategy helps to cultivate consumers’ preferences and to improve consumer loyalty to the sb. furthermore, the differentiation strategy is more conducive to the introduction of other categories of the sb. . . scenario : manufacturer as the leader in the supply chain. figure demonstrates the results when the manu- facturer is the leader (please see the proof in appendix b). it indicates that in this case, although the shelf space proportion 𝑆 is greater than (where 𝜓 = . , 𝑘 = . , 𝑐 = . , and 𝛾 = . ), the actual demand for the sb is less than . that is, the sb should be introduced only when the retailer is the leader and has sufficient power. when the manufacturer is the leader in the supply chain, the retailer does not have an incentive to introduce the sb. . conclusion in this paper, we investigate the introduction of an sb product when the retailer is the supply chain leader. in particular, our aim is to answer the following questions: ( ) what is the price positioning strategy of the sb—the differentiation or the me-too strategy—when the product cost and the shelf space opportunity cost are considered? ( ) what are the factors that influence the pricing position of the retailer? ( ) who will benefit from the different price strategies? to answer these questions, this paper examines a two-echelon supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer. the retailer sells an nb product produced by the manufacturer and an sb product. the retailer needs to determine the price markup of the nb, the price of the sb, and the shelf space allocated to the sb. the manufacturer needs to determine the wholesale price of the product. to this end, we formulate a stackelberg game model in which the retailer is the leader and the manufacturer is the follower. our contribution is twofold. on the one hand, we prove the condition that an optimal solution exists. on the other hand, to distinguish the factors that influence the introduc- tion and pricing position strategy of the sb, we conduct an experimental analysis of the parameters. our results indicate that if both the product cost of the sb and the shelf space opportunity cost are low, then the optimal pricing strategy is the me-too strategy (competitive strategy). otherwise, the optimal pricing strategy is the differentiation strategy. to the best of our knowledge, previous papers have not studied the impact of product cost and shelf space opportunity cost on the entry of sbs. with regard to retailers, our findings have a number of managerial implications: ( ) according to the numerical analysis, there is a significant effect of the price differential between the sb and nb; that is, an sb with a price positioned as close as possible to the nb price will not generate more profit for the retailer when the sb is a standard sb. this conclusion is different from those of previous research [ ]. this is because our research considers the role of product cost, and we observe a significant effect. ( ) there exist thresholds c̃ and k̃ of costs such that if the cost is less than the threshold, the introduction of the sb is profitable; if the cost is larger than the threshold, then the introduction of the sb will not increase profits, and the retailer will not have sufficient incentive to introduce the sb. according to our numerical analysis, the introduction of an sb and the optimal pricing strategy cannot be fully captured mathematical problems in engineering 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ . . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (c) figure : retailer’s total profit for different values of 𝛼𝑠. by only one parameter. that is, the product cost and shelf space opportunity cost are the dominant factors affecting the introduction of an sb. the conclusion contrasts with the findings of previous research (see [ , ]). this is because the effect of shelf space is reflected not only in the demand function but also in the profit function. ( ) there also exists a threshold of baseline sales such that if the baseline sales of the sb are less than the threshold, the introduction of the sb will not increase profits, and the retailer will not have sufficient incentive to introduce the sb; if the baseline sales are larger than the threshold, the introduction of the sb is profitable. ( ) the numerical analyses also show that the manufacturer is better off when the retailer adopts a differentiation strategy and enlarges the price differential. however, the retailer’s pricing strategies are dependent on the product costs and shelf opportunity cost. in addition, the retailer uses a me-too strategy; in this case, the prices of both the nb and the sb are lower, and consumers will therefore be better off when they purchase either the nb or the sb. this study has several shortcomings that are worthy of further investigation in the future. first, we assume that the product cost for each brand is the same. in reality, most products do not have the same cost. therefore, it would be interesting to extend our model to include different costs, second, our model does not consider competition between retailers or between manufacturers. in fact, with mathematical problems in engineering 𝛼s . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ −(Πro) ∗ . . . . − . − . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛼s (a) 𝛼s . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πr) ∗ −(Πro) ∗ − . − . . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : comparison between the periods before and after the introduction of the sb in 𝛼𝑠. 𝛼s . . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πm) ∗ . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (a) 𝛼s . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . (Πm) ∗ −(Πmo) ∗ − . − . − . . . . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . 𝛾 = . (b) figure : comparison between the periods before and after the introduction of the sb in 𝛼𝑠. mathematical problems in engineering 𝛼s . . . . . 𝜓= . , k= . , c= . , 𝛾= . s & ds . . − . − . s ∗ ds ∗ figure : demand and shelf space proportion for the sb for different values of 𝛼𝑠. the improvement of sb quality, retailers have their own sbs, and sb competition needs to be considered even though the resulting model would certainly be difficult to analyze. appendix a. retailer sells only the nb the scenario before introducing the sb: we assume that the demand for the nb depends on the price of the nb if there is no sb. the following functional forms are assumed: 𝐷𝑛 = − 𝑃𝑛 (a. ) 𝑃𝑛 = 𝑚 + 𝑤 (a. ) Πmo = (𝑤 − 𝑐)𝐷𝑛 (a. ) Πro = 𝑚𝐷𝑛. (a. ) first, we consider the manufacturer’s problem. the first- order optimality conditions are 𝑑Πmo 𝑑𝑤 = ⇐⇒ 𝑤(𝑚) = (𝑐 − 𝑚 + ). (a. ) substituting (a. ), (a. ), and (a. ) into (a. ) yields Πro = − 𝑚(𝑐 + 𝑚 − ). (a. ) the concavity of Πro and the first-order condition yields 𝑑Πro 𝑑𝑚 = (−𝑐 − 𝑚 + ) = ⇐⇒ 𝑚∗ = − 𝑐 . (a. ) then, substituting (a. ) into (a. ) yields 𝑤∗ = ( 𝑐 + ) . (a. ) therefore, 𝑃𝑛∗ = 𝑤∗+ 𝑚∗ = (𝑐 + ) (a. ) 𝐷𝑛∗ = − 𝑃𝑛∗ = − 𝑐 (a. ) Π𝑅𝑂∗ = 𝑚∗ (𝐷𝑛)∗ = (𝑐 − ) (a. ) Π𝑀𝑂∗ = 𝑤∗ (𝐷𝑛)∗ = (𝑐 − ) . (a. ) b. manufacturer stackelberg the manufacturer is powerful and is a leader in the specific product category. Π𝑅 = (𝛾(𝑚 + 𝑤) − 𝑐)(−((𝛾 − )𝜓 + 𝛾)(𝑚 + 𝑤) + 𝑆𝛼𝑠+ 𝑆) + 𝑚((𝛾 − )𝜓(𝑚 + 𝑤) − 𝑚 − (𝑆 − )(𝛼𝑠 + ) − 𝑤)𝛼𝑠 + − 𝑘𝑆 (b. ) mathematical problems in engineering we obtain the following results. theorem b. . if the baseline sales of the sb 𝛼𝑠, shelf space cost𝑘, and cross-price competition coefficient𝜓satisfy 𝑘𝜓 > 𝛼𝑠+ , then the retailer’s profit function Π𝑅 is jointly concave in 𝑚 and𝑆. proof. the first- and second-order derivatives of Π𝑅 with respect to 𝑚 and 𝑆 are as follows: 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 = − (𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + ) 𝛼𝑠 + < (b. ) 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆 = −𝑘 < (b. ) 𝜕Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚𝜕𝑆 = 𝛾 − (b. ) 𝜕Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆𝜕𝑚 = 𝛾 − . (b. ) the hessian matrix can be formed as follows: 𝐻 = [[[[ [ 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚𝜕𝑆 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆𝜕𝑚 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑆 ]]]] ] = [[[ [ − ( + 𝛾 + (− + 𝛾) 𝜓) + 𝛼𝑠 − + 𝛾 − + 𝛾 −𝑘 ]]] ] 𝜕 Π𝑅 (𝑚,𝑆) 𝜕𝑚 = − ( + 𝛾 + (− + 𝛾) 𝜓) + 𝛼𝑠 < . (b. ) since 𝛼𝑠 ∈ ( , ), 𝜓 ∈ ( , ), 𝑘 > , 𝑘𝜓 > 𝛼𝑠 + , then |𝐻| = 𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + ) 𝛼𝑠 + − (𝛾 − ) > . (b. ) 𝐻 is a negative definite integral and the profit function is concave. by the concavity of Πr, the first-order condition yields 𝜕Π𝑅 𝜕𝑚 = ⇐⇒ 𝑚(𝑤,𝑆) = 𝑐𝛾𝜓 + 𝑐𝛾 − 𝑐𝜓 + 𝛼𝑠 ((𝛾 − )𝑆 + ) + (𝛾 − )𝑆 − 𝛾 𝑤𝜓 − 𝛾 𝑤 + 𝛾𝑤𝜓 − 𝑤𝜓 − 𝑤 + (𝛾 (𝜓 + ) − 𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) (b. ) 𝜕Π𝑅 𝜕𝑆 = ⇐⇒ 𝑆(𝑤,𝑚) = −𝑐 + (𝛾 − )𝑚 + 𝛾𝑤𝑘 . (b. ) thus, 𝑚(𝑤) = −−𝑐𝛾 + 𝑐𝛾𝑘 + 𝛼𝑠 (−𝛾𝑐 + 𝑐 + 𝑘 + (𝛾 − )𝛾𝑤) + (𝛾 − )𝑘𝜓(𝑐 − 𝛾𝑤+ 𝑤) + 𝑐 − 𝛾 𝑘𝑤 − 𝑘𝑤 + 𝑘 + 𝛾 𝑤 − 𝛾𝑤 (𝛾 − ) − 𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠 (b. ) 𝑆(𝑤) = −−𝑐(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 + ) + 𝛾 + (𝛾 − )𝛼𝑠 + 𝑤( 𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 + ) − (𝛾 − ) − 𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠 . (b. ) then, Π𝑀 = (𝑤 − 𝑐)(𝜓(𝛾(𝑚 + 𝑤) − 𝑚 − 𝑤) − 𝑚 + ( − 𝑆)(𝛼𝑠 + ) − 𝑤)𝛼𝑠 + . (b. ) substituting (b. ) and (b. ) into (b. ) yields Π𝑀 = (𝑀 + 𝑀 + 𝑀 )(𝑐 − 𝑤)𝑀 (b. ) where 𝑀 = (𝑐((𝛾 − ) 𝑘𝜓 + (𝛾 − ) 𝑘𝜓 + 𝛾(𝛾 − 𝑘 + ) + )) 𝑀 = 𝛼𝑠(𝑐(𝛾 + ) + 𝑘( 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) − 𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) − (𝛾 − )𝛾𝛼𝑠− (𝛾(𝛾 + 𝛾𝑤 + 𝑤 − ))) mathematical problems in engineering 𝑀 = 𝛾 + 𝑘( 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) − 𝛾𝜓 − 𝑤(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) + 𝜓 + ) − 𝛾(𝛾 + (𝛾 + )𝑤) 𝑀 = (𝛼𝑠+ )((𝛾 − ) − (𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + )) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠) . (b. ) the first-order optimality conditions are 𝑤∗ = 𝑤 + 𝑤 + 𝑤 𝑤 (b. ) where 𝑤 = 𝑐((𝛾 + )( 𝛾 + ) + (𝛾 − )((𝛾 − )𝜓 − )(𝑘( 𝜓 + ))) 𝑤 = 𝛼𝑠(( 𝛾 + )(𝑐(𝛾 + )) + 𝛾 + 𝛾 (𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 − ) − 𝛾𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 − (𝛾 − )𝛾𝛼𝑠) 𝑤 = 𝛾 + 𝛾 ( (𝑘(𝜓 + )) − ) − 𝛾𝑘𝜓+ 𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 𝑤 = ( 𝛾(𝛾 + ) + 𝑘(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾(𝛾 + ))𝛼𝑠). (b. ) substituting (b. ) into (b. ) and (b. ) yields 𝑚∗ = −𝑐(𝑚 + (𝑘 (𝑚 − 𝑚 ))) + 𝛼𝑠 (𝑐 ∗ 𝑚 + (𝛾(𝑚 − 𝑚 ))𝛼𝑠 − ∗ 𝑚 + 𝑚 + 𝑚 ) + 𝑚 + 𝑚 − 𝑚 𝑚 ∗ 𝑚 (b. ) where 𝑚 = (𝛾(𝛾 + ))(𝛾 − ) + 𝑘((𝛾(− 𝛾 + 𝛾 − ))𝜓 + 𝛾(− 𝛾 − 𝛾 + 𝛾 − ) + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) 𝑚 = − (𝛾(𝛾((𝛾 − )𝛾 + ) − ))𝜓 + 𝛾( (𝛾 − ) ⋅ 𝛾 + ) − 𝜓 − 𝑚 = (𝛾 − ) (𝛾( 𝛾 − ) + )𝜓 − (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 𝑚 = 𝑘 (− 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) + 𝛾 (𝜓(𝜓 + )) − 𝛾 (𝜓( 𝜓 + ) + ) + 𝛾(𝜓(𝜓 + )) + (𝜓 + ) ) 𝑚 = 𝑘(𝛾(𝛾(𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 − ) + 𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 + )) 𝑚 = (𝛾 − ) 𝛾 𝑚 = (𝛾(𝛾 + ))(𝛾 − ) + 𝑘((𝛾(− 𝛾 + 𝛾 − ))𝜓 + 𝛾(− 𝛾 − 𝛾 + 𝛾 − ) + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) 𝑚 = 𝑘 (− 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) + 𝛾 (𝜓(𝜓 + )) − 𝛾 (𝜓( 𝜓 + ) + ) + 𝛾(𝜓(𝜓 + )) + (𝜓 + ) ) 𝑚 = 𝑘(𝛾(𝛾(𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 − ) + 𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 + )) 𝑚 = 𝑐(𝛾 + )(𝛾 − ) + 𝛾(𝛾 − ) − 𝛾(𝛾 − ) ⋅ 𝛼𝑠 𝑚 = (𝑘(𝛾(𝛾( 𝛾(𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 − ) + 𝜓 + ) − 𝜓 + )) 𝑚 = ((𝛾 − ) − (𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + )) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠) 𝑚 = 𝛾(𝛾 + ) + 𝑘(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾(𝛾 + ))𝛼𝑠 (b. ) 𝑆∗ = 𝑆 𝑆 − 𝑆 (𝑆 + 𝑆 ) 𝑆 𝑆 (b. ) where 𝑆 = 𝑐(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + 𝛾 + ) − 𝛾 − (𝛾 − )𝛼𝑠 + 𝑆 = (𝛾 − ) − (𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + )) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠 𝑆 = 𝛾 (𝜓 + ) − 𝛾𝜓 + 𝛾 + 𝜓 + mathematical problems in engineering 𝑆 = 𝑐((𝛾 + )( 𝛾 + ) + (𝛾 − )((𝛾 − )𝜓 − )(𝑘( 𝜓 + ))) + 𝛾 + 𝛾 ( (𝑘(𝜓 + )) − ) − 𝛾𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 𝑆 = 𝛼𝑠(( 𝛾 + )(𝑐(𝛾 + )) + 𝛾 + 𝛾 (𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 − ) − 𝛾𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘𝜓 + 𝑘 − (𝛾 − )𝛾𝛼𝑠) 𝑆 = ((𝛾 − ) − (𝑘(𝛾 + (𝛾 − ) 𝜓 + )) + (𝛾 − ) 𝛼𝑠) 𝑆 = 𝛾(𝛾 + ) + 𝑘(−𝛾𝜓 + 𝜓 + ) + (𝛾(𝛾 + )) ⋅ 𝛼𝑠. (b. ) thus, 𝑃𝑛∗ = 𝑤∗ + 𝑚∗ (b. ) 𝑃𝑠∗ = 𝛾𝑃𝑛∗ (b. ) 𝐷𝑛∗ = + 𝛼𝑠 (( + 𝛼𝑠)( − 𝑆 ∗) − 𝑃𝑛∗ + 𝜓(𝑃𝑠∗− 𝑃𝑛∗)) (b. ) 𝐷𝑠∗ = + 𝛼𝑠 (( + 𝛼𝑠)𝑆 ∗− 𝑃𝑠∗+ 𝜓(𝑃𝑛∗− 𝑃𝑠∗)) (b. ) Π𝑀∗ = (𝑤∗− 𝑐)𝐷𝑛∗ (b. ) Π𝑅∗ = 𝑚∗𝐷𝑛∗ + (𝑃𝑠∗− 𝑐)𝐷𝑠∗− 𝑘(𝑆 ∗) . 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[ ] t. s. gabrielsen and l. sørgard, “private labels, price rivalry, and public policy,” european economic review, vol. , no. , pp. – , . hindawi www.hindawi.com volume mathematics journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume mathematical problems in engineering applied mathematics journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume probability and statistics hindawi www.hindawi.com volume journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume mathematical physics advances in complex analysis journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume optimization journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume hindawi www.hindawi.com volume engineering mathematics international journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume operations research advances in journal of hindawi www.hindawi.com volume function spaces abstract and applied analysis hindawi www.hindawi.com volume international journal of mathematics and mathematical sciences hindawi www.hindawi.com volume hindawi publishing corporation http://www.hindawi.com volume hindawi 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https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijem/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aor/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jfs/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aaa/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijmms/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ana/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijde/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ads/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijanal/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijsa/ https://www.hindawi.com/ https://www.hindawi.com/ introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work and organizations in india e d i t o r i a l introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work and organizations in india devi vijay published online: may � indian institute of management calcutta this special issue of decision examines the changing nature of work and organizations in india. in , under the mandate of the world bank and the international monetary fund, as one of the ‘‘locomo- tives of the south’’ (brazil, india, china, and south africa), india introduced the structural adjustment program (prashad : ), ushering in an era of neoliberal structural changes marked by intensifying globalization, financialization, and privatization (har- vey ). undeniably, the primary beneficiaries of india’s liberalization have been the new middle class and the business and financial elite (crabtree ; fernandes and heller ). visibly, today we have alexas in our living rooms, e-commerce deliveries at our doorsteps, shopping malls with designer labels, and convenient flight connections to instagram-wor- thy selfie spots anywhere in the world. moreover, this epochal shift has also been characterized by the creation of new indians, with new dreams, passions, and aspirations, and new subjectivities (gooptu ). as academics in premier management institutions, we see our students increasingly join the global manage- rial elite, while we frequently train and consult with multinational corporate powerhouses, and are incen- tivized to converse in international, typically euro- centric, research spaces. however, as australian documentary film-maker and journalist john pilger noted (pilger : ), ‘‘‘global economy’ is a modern orwellian term.’’ often suppressed, barely concealed, under these very structural adjustment programs is the globalization of poverty and precariousness. moreover, while its ideological tenet of economic growth is and could be one means of poverty reduction, neoliberal india is marked by increased material inequality, elite income consolidation (chancel and piketty ), and radical asymmetries in the distribution of power and wealth (parry ). as of , india’s capitalist story stars billionaires whose wealth increased ten times over a decade, while % of the workforce is employed in the informal sector, with an % increase in informal sector participation over a decade (himanshu ). the percentage of women working in private house- holds has doubled in the twenty-first century, and % (in urban areas) earn less than minimum wages (ray and qayum ). aptly, barbara harriss-white ( : ) observes, ‘‘while it cannot be denied that capitalism creates wealth, indian capitalism also pauperizes its workforce.’’ in this context, and consistent with wider global patterns, there have been dramatic transformations in labor markets, local economies, work arrangements, and organizational practices (gooptu ; harriss- white ). steadily, discourse of management, markets, and finance permeate basic, essential services such as health (chakravarthi et al. ), housing d. vijay (&) indian institute of management calcutta, kolkata, india e-mail: devivijay@iimcal.ac.in decision (june ) ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . /s - - - (chattaraj et al. ), and education (varman et al. ). further, this discourse materializes as labor market flexibility and work intensification (bathini and kandathil ), labor casualization, informal- ization (harriss-white ), contractualization, and sharp distinctions between secure and insecure wage labor (parry ). certain forms of state protection- ism that prevailed with the welfare state have not only been hollowed out with increased privatization but have arguably constructed new forms of corporate- state nexus that dispossess and dehumanize some of the most vulnerable citizenry (varman and vijay ). while these transformations are consistent with wider global patterns, there are uneven geographies of globalization. two specificities of neoliberal norma- tivity in india are worth noting. first, these structural transformations are layered over social vectors of caste, gender, and religion (chatterji et al. ; teltumbde ). second, our imaginations of pro- gress and modernity remain colonized by western capitalist discourse. the west holds considerable symbolic power in our education system and in the production and practice of scientific knowledge in the indian context. accordingly, mainstream management theories developed in the west become the ‘‘dominant lens through which indian scholars interpret their context’’ (vijay and varman : ). but the frame of this dominant lens does not merely exhibit a reality, rather it ‘‘actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality… always throwing some- thing away, always keeping something out, always de- realizing and de-legitimating alternative versions of reality’’ (butler : xiii). such dominant frames can and must then be disrupted in order to construct an alternative imagination. thus, our aim in this special issue has been to create spaces for perspectives that are less heard in main- stream academic conversations. this collection of four research articles, one speak-out essay, and one virtual roundtable examines a range of contemporary issues pertaining to domestic workers’ employment condi- tions, national security labor, academic labor, climate- change-induced agrarian distress and digital labor platforms, and the metoo movement. on occasion, the authors speak from their disciplines—here, man- agement studies, sociology, public policy, and anthro- pology; on occasion, they traverse multiple disciplines. theoretically, they foreground challenges of collective action, organizational dissent, precarity of neoliberal labor, migration, and the possibilities of solidarities. all, however, share certain common themes outlined below, and many of the writings shed any pretence of impartiality. as freire eloquently stated (freire : ), my abhorrence of neoliberalism helps to explain my legitimate anger when i speak of the injustices to which the ragpickers among human- ity are condemned. it also explains my total lack of interest in any pretension of impartiality. i am not impartial or objective; not a fixed observer of facts and happenings… and this does not necessarily mean that the observer’s position is erroneous. it is an error when one becomes dogmatic about one’s point of view and ignores the fact that, even if one is certain about his or her point of view, it does not mean that one’s position is always ethically grounded. taken as a whole then, these articles raise ethically grounded concerns and provide insights into three broad themes: (a) the nature of precarity in neoliberal regimes, (b) the jarring silences and ellipses that prevail, and (c) resistance, dissent and collective action in such contexts. nature of precarity in neoliberal regimes to say that life is precarious is to apprehend that a viable life depends not simply on an individual’s drive to live but fundamentally on social and political conditions (butler ). lives can be rendered precarious, by treating them as lesser beings and denying them the possibilities of recognition (butler ). precarious lives can be expunged or violated, without ever being grieved. precariousness surfaces as a common thread across all articles, with some contributors explicitly engaging with it theoretically. rajnish rai’s autoethnography here reveals the precarity a state official encounters when he seeks to engage in a critical discourse with the state on national security labor conditions. the neoliberal state wields sovereign power, ‘‘an unac- countable operation of power’’ (butler : xv), once the dissenting subject uncloaks spectacles. the sovereign power can now make life and death decision (june ) ( ): – decisions bound by no constitutional constraints. more than the particularism of india’s majoritarian nation- alism, it is helpful to remember the marginalization of dissent beyond the immediate national context. such marginalization of the dissenting subject is reminis- cent of the targeting of julian assange or chelsea manning—such actors are denounced and stigmatized not because they engaged in violent acts, but because they exposed them. as rai poignantly notes, ‘‘today, conscience itself has become a precarious entity.’’ srinath jagannathan and premalatha packirisamy engage with the vulnerabilities of academic labor which manifests in contractual positions, individual- izing academic environments, and de-intellectualized research and teaching commitments. importantly, they delineate how academic precarity is mediated by caste and gender relations. in a similar vein, priyanshu gupta and vivek nair, in their speak-out essay, lament the vulnerability of doctoral students in contemporary neoliberal universities that benchmark themselves against accreditations, journal rankings, and impact metrics. together, the two articles interrogate the intersection of organization of knowledge in the university and the production of disposable labor. these two writings join a global chorus from aca- demics, who contest the marketization of higher education (parker ). while there remains a need for caution and deliberation in bringing together very heterogeneous groups into the analytical category of precariousness, these studies record the different scales and socioeco- nomic contexts within which variations of precarity manifest (see also schierup and jorgensen ). undeniably, neoliberalism creates precariousness across classes, exemplified by our shared vulnerability to climate change and perpetual war. moreover, as byung-chul han ( : ) notes, ‘‘today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enter- prise… even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.’’ yet some populations are more subject to heightened precarity and violence than others. rajesh joseph, balmurli natrajan, and roshni lobo attend to domestic workers—india’s second largest informal workforce—who are bound to the institution of domestic servitude that constitutes the bedrock of upper and middle-class existence. rising urban middle- and upper-class incomes, coupled with normalized cultural markers of employing ‘‘servants’’ or ‘‘maids’’ accompany a rise in domestic work activities in india. joseph and colleagues document domestic workers’ precarity enmeshed in debt and obligations, and foreground the unique challenges of organizing workers who work in middle-class homes—a pivotal site of reproduction of labor rela- tions. the authors provide sharp insights into the difficulty of recognizing domestic servants as ‘‘work- ers’’; these are precarious subjects who are not quite recognizable or intelligible as subjects. migration is a key mechanism by which capitalism structures precarity. capitalism supports migration in the name of personal liberty and human rights (streeck ). yet, the breakdown of community networks, and economic instability, renders a docile workforce, grateful for employment, conscripted into contracts that do not guarantee minimum wages and employ- ment protections, hesitant to mobilize collectively, thus lacking political capacity (streeck ). surie and sharma connect the dots between climate-change- induced migration and digital labor markets, in their account of how ola and uber provide short-term adaptive solutions to migrant farmers. sanjana pegu’s virtual roundtable curates the experiences of five women activists on their work with the feminist movement, and gender-based vio- lence. pegu sheds light on the significance of metoo movement in india, and the specific precarities confronting those at higher risk of gender-based violence in dalit, bahujan and adivasi communities, and regions such as the northeastern states marked by long histories of conflict and militarization. pegu’s dialogue interrogates the act of resistance in the recent #metoo movement to ask what politically can be made of assault and violence, besides calls for vengeance and humiliation. sanjana, serving as an interlocutor here, reflects on the silences on working- class sexual harassment, and the implications of the caste-capitalist-patriarchy nexus. silences, erasures and magic precariousness is normalized in several ways. first, there is the appropriation of the media and academia— two institutions with abundant resources to critically examine this new social order. both have played vital roles in extolling india’s ambitions as it muscles its way to becoming a global superpower, and have been decision (june ) ( ): – complicit in reproducing hegemonic discourses, either by explicitly aligning with dominant frames, or through silence. pointing to the machinations of mainstream media, pegu delineates how media engages in upper-class narratives of sexual violence, silencing the working classes and other marginalized voices. similarly, jagannathan and packirisamy, and gupta and nair describe the shrinking, alienating spaces for critical engagement in academia. a second key way by which precariousness is normalized is by depriving individuals of institutional support and collective solidarities. coping with pre- carity then must be resolved through self-help, opti- mism, and enterprise. both articles on academic labor, and the roundtable on the metoo movement, surface these tensions confronted by individuals who must resort to improvised responses and stop gap solutions, in the absence of collectives. in this milieu, collective action is perceived as useless. suppression of resis- tance then dons two guises. first, resistors are disparaged: those who resist, or form collectives, are non-productive, like the ‘‘excuseniks’’ who protested the iraq invasion, or ‘‘anti-national’’ or irrational if you challenge majoritarian rhetoric. second, any form of dissent, to capitalist expansion, to war, or toxicity, is equated with dissent to ‘‘progress,’’ ‘‘development,’’ and growth, indeed dis- sent to national sovereignty itself. the public sphere is then ‘‘constituted in part by what cannot be said, and what cannot be shown,’’ and only some subjects appear as viable actors (butler : xvii). a third insidious normalization of precariousness today is by distractions and spectacles. rai points to the state’s magic rituals, by which spectacles to confound the citizenry are staged. indeed, economists prabhat patnaik and amartya sen, speaking at a recent session at the world leaders forum, columbia university, noted that magic appeared to be a key element producing distractions and falsehoods, as ubiquitous in indian polity today (the wire ). in the process, all violence is shrouded and normalized. thus, verses from revolutionary poet faiz ahmed faiz’s ‘‘lahu ka suragh’’ (trace of blood) resonate louder today, as he laments, kahin nahin hai kahin bhi nahi lahu ka suragh (nowhere, nowhere is any trace of the blood) …kisi to bahr-e sama’ at na waqt tha na dimagh (none had the ability to listen, nor the time, nor the patience) na muddaı́ na shahadat hisaab paak hua… (no plaintiff stepped forward, no one bore witness, and so the account was closed) resistance, dissent and collective action yet, every once in a while, faiz’s plaintiff steps up, unmasks the shroud that conceals bloodstains, and refuses to close the account. rajnish rai’s autoethnog- raphy is one such endeavor. rai reveals to us through his exercise of autoethnography, how introspection, writing letters, indeed, writing self, become political acts. while the state here creates a spectacle by mobilizing fear, that others (sometimes muslims, sometimes naxals, sometimes separatists, always the marginalized), will inflict harm on the nation, rai mobilizes his vulnerability to write, deliberate, ques- tion, and dissent, and in doing so, performs a singular act of courage that exposes the state’s spectacle. in a similar vein, jagannathan and packirisamy, leverage the autoethnography to write the personal into the political. joseph, natrajan, and lobo trace domestic work- ers’ collectivization in bangalore. they meticulously record the processes of formation of ‘‘labor ngo,’’ and the ‘‘place’’ for organizing the union. as much as apartment complexes introduce new forms of surveil- lance, and cordon off organizing, organizers reframe the apartment as a factory gate, as a place of organizing for workers’ rights. domestic workers, increasingly conscious of their rights, demanding minimum wages and bonus (instead of gifts), remind us of the long histories of solidaristic struggles that have alternative world-making possibilities. as chris- tina thomas dhanraj, one of sanjana’s respondents, exhorts, ‘‘marginalised women in india have been organising, mobilising, and working on the ground for a very long time…how about joining us, instead of ‘including’ us?’’ translation from anthems of resistance, by mir and mir ( ). decision (june ) ( ): – conclusion the articles curated in this special issue bear witness to changing nature of work and organization in india. they do so, through both theoretical and methodolog- ical contributions. they also leave us with new directions and unanswered questions for work and organizations studies. in these moments of heightened vulnerability and precariousness, what forms does political deliberation take? within deeply individual- izing structures, how do we find common ground and forge collectives? what new methodologies and social theories can we turn to? how do we construct an alternative imagination? this special issue has sought to open up debates, to unconceal deeper transforma- tions, and to rupture silences in the world around us. the point, however, is to change it. references bathini dr, kandathil gm ( ) an orchestrated negotiated exchange: trading home-based telework for intensified work. j bus ethics ( ): – butler j ( ) precarious life: the powers of violence and mourning. verso, london butler j ( ) frames of war: when is life grievable?. verso books, new york chakravarthi i, roy b, mukhopadhyay i, barria s ( ) investing in health. economic & political weekly ( ): chancel l, piketty t ( ) indian income inequality, – : from british raj to billionaire raj? cepr discussion paper no. dp . available at ssrn: https:// ssrn.com/abstract= . accessed apr chattaraj d, choudhury k, joshi m ( ) the tenth delhi: economy, politics and space in the post-liberalisation metropolis. decision ( ): – chatterji a, hansen tb, jaffrelot c ( ) majoritarian state: how hindu nationalism is changing india. harper collins india, new delhi crabtree j ( ) the billionaire raj: a journey through india’s new gilded age. tim duggan books, new york fernandes l, heller p ( ) hegemonic aspirations: new middle class politics and india’s democracy in comparative perspective. critical asian studies ( ): – freire p ( ) pedagogy of the heart. bloomsbury publishing, new york gooptu n (ed) ( ) enterprise culture in neoliberal india: studies in youth, class, work and media. routledge, london han bc ( ) psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new tech- nologies of power. verso, new york harriss-white b ( ) the dynamic political economy of persistent poverty. in: gooptu n, parry j (eds) persistence of poverty in india. social science press, new delhi harvey d ( ) spaces of global capitalism, rd edn. verso, new york himanshu ( ) india inequality report : widening gaps. oxfam india, new delhi mir ah, mir r ( ) anthems of resistance: a celebration of progressive urdu poetry. india ink, new delhi parker m ( ) university ltd: changing a business school. organization ( ): – parry j ( ) company and contract labour in a central indian steel plant. economy and society ( ): – parry j ( ) introduction: on the persistence of poverty in india. in: gooptu n, parry j (eds) persistence of poverty in india. social science press, new delhi pilger j ( ) the new rulers of the world. verso books, new york prashad v ( ) the poorer nations: a possible history of the global south. verso, new york ray r, qayum s ( ) cultures of servitude: modernity, domesticity, and class in india. stanford university press, palo alto schierup c, jorgensen mb ( ) an introduction to the special issue. politics of precarity: migrant conditions, struggles, and experiences. critical sociology ( – ): – streeck w ( ) how will capitalism end? essays on a failing system. verso, new york teltumbde a ( ) republic of caste: thinking equality in the time of neoliberal hindutva. navayana, new delhi the wire ( ) ‘modi magic’: amartya sen says constant distractions key to bjp govt. accessed from https:// thewire.in/politics/amartya-sen-prabhat-patnaik-elections- -bjp-modi on sunday, th april varman r, vijay d ( ) dispossessing vulnerable con- sumers: derealization, desubjectification, and violence. marketing theory ( ): – varman r, saha b, skålén p ( ) market subjectivity and neoliberal governmentality in higher education. journal of marketing management ( – ): – vijay d, varman r ( ) introduction: undoing boundaries. in: vijay d, varman r (eds) alternative organisations in india: undoing boundaries. cambridge university press, new delhi, pp – publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. decision (june ) ( ): – https://ssrn.com/abstract= https://ssrn.com/abstract= https://thewire.in/politics/amartya-sen-prabhat-patnaik-elections- -bjp-modi https://thewire.in/politics/amartya-sen-prabhat-patnaik-elections- -bjp-modi https://thewire.in/politics/amartya-sen-prabhat-patnaik-elections- -bjp-modi 	introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work and organizations in india 	nature of precarity in neoliberal regimes 	silences, erasures and magic 	resistance, dissent and collective action 	conclusion 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ it’s time to address sexual violence in academic global health ridde v, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - it’s time to address sexual violence in academic global health valery ridde,   christian dagenais, isabelle daigneault editorial to cite: ridde v, dagenais c, daigneault i. it’s time to address sexual violence in academic global health. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . / bmjgh- - handling editor seye abimbola received april accepted april ird (french institute for research on sustainable development), ceped (ird- université de paris), universités de paris, erl inserm sagesud, paris, france department of psychology, université de montréal, montréal, québec, canada correspondence to professor valery ridde; valery. ridde@ ird. fr © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re-use permitted under cc by-nc. no commercial re-use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. introduction looking back over the first year of the global #metoo movement that brought sexual violence (from harassment to coercion and assault) out in the open, we note that this issue has received little attention in academic global health. recent cases of sexual miscon- duct in joint united nations programme on hiv and aids (unaids) and oxfam show that the global health community must act to address this problem. in just a few months, the #metoo movement raised awareness, stimulated new debates and placed this issue squarely on the public agenda in politics, business and entertainment. but academic global health still does not adequately prepare (women and men) students and academics for this problem; and recent discussions on global health training ignore the problem. indeed, there is an urgent need to implement evidence-based comprehensive and inte- grated prevention strategies to address sexual violence in global health academic research. collaboration between partners from coun- tries with unequal incomes and power is common in academic global health. while challenges of power, money, publication, data use, and so on, within such collabora- tions are widely discussed, – there is rela- tive silence around sexual violence. gender inequality in global health is increasingly discussed —as scientific panels are often composed of a majority of (or only) men and the work of unpaid young women represents a large proportion of global health intern- ships. there is a new movement to highlight women leaders in global health, and junior women researchers are calling to depatriar- chalise science for french-speaking women. despite these discussions, the general lack of consideration for sexuality issues in research fieldwork remains. in , gurney stated, “for female fieldworkers, reciprocity… may be prob- lematic if powerful males in the setting expect sexual favors in return for research access.” there may also be a culture of sexual harassment in global health due to expectations that the level of openness and comfort with sexuality (required to work in some aspects of the field) translates into an openness towards sexual advances —‘even apparently innocuous sexualizations have a considerable effect on the way gender and sexuality are negotiated during the research encounter.’ there are many guides to support researchers engaged in global health partner- ships to ensure that collaborations are fair and ethical, but none addresses sexual violence head on. while data on the content of each course are not available, the same lacunae seem to apply to preparation for global health internships. – a recent systematic review of us medical students’ global health intern- ships found no mention of sexual harassment or assault in curricula. likewise, existing academia-wide movements do not include specific consideration for the peculiarities of global health—for example, the athena swan charter for the advancement of gender equality in higher education and the title ix us civil rights law which has enabled students to compel colleges and universities to take action against gender-based sexual harassment and assault on campuses. how are we involved as academics? our (re)awareness of the problem stories of sexual harassment of female students by academics (and of sexual relations between academics and students) are not new. but they are all too rarely addressed in academic training, especially in the global north where universities are increasingly devel- oping global health training programmes and sending more and more students into the field. compared with domestic students in north america, international students are at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence on campus and are less likely to seek help if assaulted. academic institutions need to be held accountable for the well-being of the o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmjgh- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://gh.bmj.com/ ridde v, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health foreign students they host and the domestic students they send abroad. in recent months, three young women shared with one of us, in informal discussions, their experiences of sexual harassment in the field. one of them met with many actors involved in her subject in the country concerned. she reported that one researcher she was advised to meet was very insistent, on several occasions. and he was not the only one. after a few days of fieldwork and too many insistent requests, she bought and wore a fake wedding ring, pretending to be a married woman to avoid harass- ment. in , carol warren reported using the same strategy in the usa, which suggests that this problem is not confined to a particular social context and that this coping strategy is quite common. the other two young women were in direct contact with high-ranking individuals in government and an international financial institution to conduct interviews to obtain data for their research. the insistent demands of these high-ranking individuals for more informal, off-duty and very personal meetings put these two students in a very uncomfortable position, at risk to their integrity and research. as with sexual violence in universities in the global north, – victims of harassment and assault abroad are often unable or reluctant to disclose and may wait until the end of their fieldwork, or even graduation, to disclose. they may only disclose to informal sources of support, such as friends and family. in all three cases presented above, even though there had never been any cause for suspicion, the supervisor was indirectly responsible for putting students in contact with colleagues who used their power for sexual harassment. this situation—that is, supervisors themselves being the indirect cause of the event—may further delay disclosure to formal/academic sources of support and limit our ability to act preventively in future placements. these deeply unsettling cases led us to rethink our role and responsibilities as academics. of course, we could avoid the issue by arguing to ourselves that the cases are on the boundary between sexual harassment and seduction; that ‘sexuality enacted in the field can be experi- enced as both threatening and pleasant.’ the boundary can sometimes be blurred. some have described how ‘to be a young, female graduate student definitely has advan- tages in a male-dominated setting.’ and some academics have claimed that female students harass them to get good grades. however, these cases are likely the excep- tion. but perhaps less of an exception are male students from universities in the global north who, during global health research field placements, engage in inappro- priate and sometimes predatory sexual behaviour. the consequences of sexual harassment on women's academic careers, health and well-being are now well known, including declines in productivity, higher stress and less funding. in a recent survey of global health organisations, including just one university, only had a sexual harassment policy that meets the four best prac- tices according to global health / : commitment and definition; confidentiality and non-retaliation; staff training; and reporting and accountability. as with other inequalities in global health research partnerships, sexual violence will likely continue ‘for as long as the culture of consciously unknowing what is known continues unchal- lenged.’ we are at the heart of a ‘public secret’, a concept well known in public health. what can academics and academic institutions do? our actions must be informed by up-to-date preven- tion guidelines on sexual violence on college/university campuses. but these need to be adapted to address specific issues in academic global health, with programmes for all students and academics (male and female) to address both victimisation and perpetration, and for entire academic communities so that active bystanders can contribute to changing cultural norms and behaviours among peers. such approaches should include: ( ) raising awareness; ( ) acknowledging barriers to change; and ( ) increasing action through skills practice. but until such a prevention package is adapted and imple- mented, what can academics and academic institutions do? we propose the following: . immediately sanction perpetrators according to policy guidelines. although it is difficult for universities to sanction international research partners who are not under their jurisdiction, one sanction for violating the policy would be to cease collaboration. . adopt a comprehensive sexual harassment and vio- lence policy globally, spearheaded by schools of global (public) health in the global north. accreditations given by the council on education for public health in north america and the association of schools of public health in the european region should add the presence of these policies as an evaluation criterion. these policies should be shared with universities and funding agencies, who are in a good position to raise researchers’ awareness about sexual violence and re- quire adherence to sexual violence prevention poli- cies in funded research. they should clearly state what constitutes sexual violence, including harassment. they should also refer to a code of conduct between faculty/researchers/supervisors and students, guide- lines for reporting and a clear set of sanctions for vi- olating the policies. global south partners should be made aware of the policies, agree to adhere to them for continued partnership and be held responsible for the conduct of their employees and collaborators. the policies must be systematically included in the guides to good practice for scientific partnerships in global health and be disseminated to all academics, for exam- ple, through a massive open online course. . stop participating in the culture of sexual harass- ment. this means intervening with our harassing colleagues when we are made aware of such situa- tions, rather than solely advising young women on how to ‘manage’ them (eg, ‘wear a wedding ring’, o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://gh.bmj.com/ ridde v, et al. bmj glob health ; :e . doi: . /bmjgh- - bmj global health ‘don’t meet him alone’, and so on). upstream, ac- ademics should be more aware of the situation by serving as mentors and by systematically discussing the issue during classes and before students leave for the field. academics referring students to their colleagues should have a responsibility to act when made aware of sexual violence on their part by fol- lowing policy procedures and enforcing sanctions. academics also must be trained in how to receive disclosures and to support students who have been harassed or assaulted. such training should be survi- vor centric, increase policy and service awareness and reduce victim blaming. this, in turn, would increase confidence in institutional responses and encourage disclosures. confident listening spaces should exist, both before and during fieldwork, to discuss and sug- gest possible solutions. the scientific literature on challenges facing young women doing research in a male-dominated field should be mobilised for train- ing purposes. it is also important to make available in the field mentors trained in harassment management to support anyone (women and men) involved in these situations and help them find ap- propriate solutions, or at least talk about them. . fund and implement sexual harassment and assault resistance training for students as part of an integrated sexual violence prevention strategy based on the best available evidence. evidence-based programmes exist to help students become more active bystanders and better resist sexual violence, as well as programmes that show promise for reducing male students’ perpe- tration of sexual violence. if ‘the female researcher can- not prepare for all eventualities, … at least she can enter the setting with some idea of how she might respond to sexist re- marks, sexist behavior, and sexual hustling.’ for example, the enhanced assess, acknowledge, act programme has resulted in an annual victimisation reduction of up to % in five forms of sexual violence experienced by female students in canada. a working group should be set up to determine whether this programme can be specifically adapted for global health research, test- ed and evaluated. conclusion the eminent anthropologist françoise héritier, who died a month after #metoo began, envisaged that ‘the consequences of this movement [could] be enormous. on condition that we lift not just one corner but the entire veil, pull all the threads to rethink the question of the relationship between the sexes, tackle this status of male domination and destroy the idea of an irrepressible male desire.’ one year later, nothing has changed in academic global health. the national academies of sciences, engi- neering, and medicine in the usa has just proposed important structural changes to protect against sexual harassment. when will academic institutions involved in global health take up the charge? maybe it’s time for global health to have its own #metoo movement. acknowledgements we thank the persons who entrusted us with and allowed us to share their stories for constructive purposes and the persons who agreed to read a previous version of this text to improve its arguments. thanks also to donna riley for the editing support and seye abimbola for the editorial support. contributors vr had the idea about the paper and wrote the first draft. cd and id improved the paper. all authors have read and approved the final text. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. ethics approval not requiered provenance and peer review not commissioned; internally peer reviewed. data availability statement no additional data are available. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. see: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by- nc/ . / references . basile kc, smith sg, breiding mj, et al. sexual violence surveillance: uniform definitions and recommended data elements, version . . atlanta, georgia, . . unaids independent expert panel. report on the work of the independent expert panel on prevention of and response to harassment, including sexual harassment; bullying and abuse of power at unaids secretariat. geneva: unaids programme coordinating board, . . global health / . the global health / report : equality works. london: 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: – . . cojean a. françoise héritier : il faut anéantir l’idée d’un désir masculin irrépressible. le monde, . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://g h .b m j.co m / b m j g lo b h e a lth : first p u b lish e d a s . /b m jg h - - o n a p ril . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /ajtmh. - http://dx.doi.org/ . /jama. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://www.justice.gov/crt/overview-title-ix-education-amendments- - -usc- -et-seq https://www.justice.gov/crt/overview-title-ix-education-amendments- - -usc- -et-seq http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accountid= https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accountid= http://dx.doi.org/ . /d - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /amet. http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /nejmsa http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://gh.bmj.com/ 	it’s time to address sexual violence in academic global health 	introduction 	how are we involved as academics? our (re)awareness of the problem 	what can academics and academic institutions do? 	conclusion 	references perching birds or scattered streams: a study of how trust affects civic engagement among university students in contemporary china perching birds or scattered streams: a study of how trust affects civic engagement among university students in contemporary china ye liu & wenqin shen # the author(s) abstract this article explores how trust affects the nature and characteristics of civic engagement among university students in contemporary china. we draw upon empirical evidence from in-depth individual interviews involving students born between and . four different types of civic activities, including associational membership with the chinese communist party as well as self-organised town-fellowship associations, volunteering and digital activism, are analysed in relation to bridging, bonding and/or obligatory relationships. generalised trust amongst university students seems to be low, but they do exhibit unquestioned trust in the state. the organisations with which they associate either are top-down through the communist party, which is ideologically narrow and socially distant among the members, or promote geographical origin-based bonding rather than bridging relationships. our findings add new depth to our under- standing of the relationships between the dominant modalities of trust and the typical form of civic participation in chinese universities. we also highlight the effects of increasing meritocratic competition and stress on performativity on the civic attitudes and behaviour of students. we argue that the hybrid of neoliberal individualism and confucianism seems to be a perfect match to reconcile the absence of civic traditions and to validate civic consciousness among university youth. keywords china . civic engagement . trust . volunteering . activism . political engagement . higher education https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * ye liu ye.liu@kcl.ac.uk wenqin shen shenwenqin@pku.edu.cn extended author information available on the last page of the article published online: may higher education ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:ye.liu@kcl.ac.uk introduction there have been intensive episodes of youth activism across the globe in recent years, such as the youth climate action and the hong kong youth protests in . despite some predictions that the chinese youth will next be involved in the global trend of activism and mobilisation (wang and hernández ), our understanding of chinese young people’s civic activities has yet to be informed by empirical evidence. meanwhile, there have been increasing numbers of youth enrolled in universities during the last two decades, with gross enrolment ratios of . % in (moe a). the impact of higher education expansion on civic activities amongst university students is still under-researched. what are the patterns of civic activities among contemporary university youth? how do higher education experiences shape their civic engagement, particularly in relation to social and political trust? this study will make a start in using first-hand empirical data to explore how trust affects the nature of civic engagement of university students in china. there has been a long tradition of researching trust and civic engagement to make sense of the civic nature of a society (banfield ; fukuyama ; putnam ). the conceptualisations of civic engagement are highly contested; however, existing scholarship has identified expressive or competitive political activities, associational membership, activism and volunteering as key measures of civic engagement (ehrlich ; putnam ; campbell ). trust, broadly speaking, has two forms: political and social trust (tao et al. ; huhe ). the former captures the trust in vertical or hierarchal relationships with the state or a particular institution (williams ), whilst the latter refers to interpersonal relationships at the horizontal level, which are most commonly divided between particularised and generalised trust (delhey et al. ; uslaner and conley ). particularised trust connects ‘in-groups’ such as families, extended kinship and face-to-face communities in which people know each other and interact closely, and where social sanctions are strong (fukuyama ; portes ; delhey et al. ; portes and vickstrom ). generalised trust is imbedded in interactions with unfamiliar people (newton ; nannestad ), or the ‘out-group’, from which a sense of engagement, tolerance, prosperity and democratic relationships are developed (delhey et al. ; putnam , ). the competing natures of particularised and generalised trust have been the central focus of research on the relationships between trust and civic engagement. barrington moore’s ( ) seminal book adopts a comparative perspective and analyses the presence and absence of generalised trust in determining different civic traditions and political trajectories at the turn of the twentieth century. edward banfield ( ) pioneered the use of interdisciplinary ap- proaches to identify the social, moral, political and cultural characteristics of particularised trust in a poor southern italian village, which were attributed to the underdevelopment of a meaningful civil society and collaborative networks essential to an advanced economy. fukuyama ( ) further explores the cultural roots of particularised and generalised trust across different contexts and argues that the characteristics of social trust in a society explain different levels of associational civic organisations, economic development and effectiveness of political institutions. civic engagement, in turn, influences trust. bonding and bridging social capital are used to differentiate the exclusiveness and inclusiveness of civic activities and their different implica- tions for the level and radii of social trust (delhey et al. ; putnam , ). the former refers to a narrow radius of socioeconomic, cultural and psychological networks for solidarity and reciprocity among exclusive and homogenous membership, which promotes particularised higher education ( ) : – trust and lowers the level of generalised social trust (putnam , ). by contrast, bridging social capital provides crucial social links and space among those from diverse social, political, cultural and ethnic backgrounds (putnam : ), which helps to develop gener- alised trust. furthermore, many scholars take advantage of the availability of cross-national survey data such as the world values survey to develop systematic analysis of the interplay between trust, bonding and bridging civic activities in contemporary societies (nannestad ; delhey et al. , ; delhey and welzel ; frederiksen et al. ). although the dominant findings from cross-country or single-country studies do not show a consistent relationship between the levels and radii of social trust and the levels of civic engagement, there are still many valuable insights into the variations at the individual and contextual levels. some context-level research finds that a range of civic activities, such as civic group membership, charitable donations and volunteering, boost bridging relationships and are positively corre- lated with the level and radius of generalised trust (delhey et al. ; uslaner and brown ). by contrast, the strong in-group associations with a heterogeneous membership base are more likely to strengthen particularised trust. for instance, uslaner and conley’s ( ) work on chinese immigrant minorities in the usa suggests that the members of ethnic chinese civic associations are less likely to participate in society-wide civic activities or collective action than, for instance, ethnic chinese us citizens in general. other research highlights individual-level variables, including socioeconomic origin, edu- cation, gender, geographical characteristics, psychological and emotional factors, and personal motivations and goals (tao et al. ; barrett and brunton-smith ; frederiksen et al. ; wu and shi ). for instance, a high level of education is linked to a wide range of bridging civic activities, from community-level associational membership, to volunteering and donations, to environmental activism and feminist movements, to political participation (jayakumar ; doyle and skinner ), which in turn promotes generalised trust (wu and shi ). relatedly, barrett and brunton-smith ( ) find some evidence that people of higher socioeconomic status tend to have a higher level of civic engagement compared to people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in some european countries. this might be mediated by the fact that people from higher socioeconomic origins are likely to have a higher level of education and civic knowledge and experiences. however, silva’s ( ) recent study of the american working class contradicts the powerful effects of education on political and civic engagement. instead, she provides a poignant analysis of how a lack of political trust of mainstream politicians and institutions inspired different forms of grassroots civic engagement among the alienated working class, which promotes bridging relationships. these studies make significant contributions to our knowledge of interdependent relation- ships between civic engagement and trust. however, these studies fall short when explaining the chinese context. context-level studies on trust tend to use all-embracing confucianism as the key indicator to explain the chinese case. confucianism is used to explain the high level of particularised in-group trust but the low level of generalised trust in east asian countries such as china and south korea (delhey et al. ). however, this confucianism account does not apply to taiwan and japan, where the level of generalised trust is relatively high (fukuyama ; yamagishi et al. ). furthermore, studies on the civic nature of chinese society suggest that there is an absence of a fully developed civil society with active and efficient associations (moore ; rankin ; pye ). following this tradition, recent studies further focus on expressive political activities, such as labour movement activism, as empirical cases to illustrate the cultural and higher education ( ) : – institutional obstacles to developing a meaningful civil society in contemporary china (fu ). however, these studies do not often allow for an investigation of ‘ordinary’ citizens and their civic engagement. moreover, they do not pay sufficient attention to participatory political activities, civic activities or volunteering associations, nor do they specify the demographic characteristics of active citizens in different patterns of civic engagement. most importantly, there is an evident gap in the use of trust to explain different patterns of civic engagement. therefore, this study will focus on the patterns of civic engagement among a selected population—university students—and examine how these patterns of youth engagement are shaped by trust in contemporary china. trust in the chinese context existing scholarship on trust in china takes confucianism as the central theoretical point of departure (fukuyama ; pye ; delhey et al. ; dickson et al. ). although there is no definite interpretation, confucianism can be conceptualised by a set of cultural norms, values and codes, including filial piety, familism, belief in meritocracy, self-cultivation, accep- tance of hierarchy, respect for teachers, respect for authority, loyalty to the state, the respon- sibility of the family and social harmony (rankin ; fukuyama ; pye ; dickson et al. ). prior studies consistently highlight a unique pattern of obligatory relationships with individual families and the state, which are absent from western literature’s emphasis on bridging and bonding relationships (fukuyama ; huhe ). for instance, quantitative studies drawing from large-scale national datasets or international comparative survey data highlight a confucian model of obligatory trust (delhey et al. ; dickson et al. ). these studies show a high level of trust in individual families and networks (delhey et al. , ; huhe ), as well as a high level of institutional trust, which embodies loyalty to and support of the state (dickson et al. ), but a low level of generalised trust (tang and huhe ). the confucian core value of familism shapes in-group obligatory relationships (fukuyama ; pye ). trust and loyalty among family members are unquestioned and sometimes irrational, although they dictate patterns of people’s behaviour and choices (fukuyama ; pye ). for instance, previous research has shown a link between the familist obligation and consumer culture, such that people felt obligated to support a business owned by family members or extended kinship rather than follow a rational choice (fukuyama ). the high level of particularised trust can also be extended to quasi kinship networks, such as member- ship in the same village (huhe ). by contrast, attitudes of mistrust towards outsiders or strangers were found to be responsible for the limited scale of business expansion by private entrepreneurs in taiwan and hong kong during the s (fukuyama ). furthermore, confucian cultural codes, such as respect for authority, loyalty to the state and social harmony, seem to have been reliable sources for the chinese communist party to reinvent party lines, thus continuously holding public trust during the market reform and recent xi regime (wu and wilkes ; dickson et al. ). however, there has been a consistently low level of political trust in local institutions, local governments and civil servants, partly because of deeply rooted cultural distrust in local officials (pye ; wu and wilkes ) and partly because of the tightly controlled and censored media, which has targeted low-level officials as scapegoats for social problems and corruption (tang and huhe ). perhaps the most unique characteristic of trust in the contemporary chinese context is the role of chinese communist party membership in the development of generalised trust. higher education ( ) : – drawing upon the data on rural villagers from the china general social surveys, huhe ( ) finds that chinese communist party members tend to show a higher level of generalised trust towards strangers than non-ccp members among rural residents. he further argues that the socialisation skills acquired to be a party member and the party’s public-serving ideology might contribute to developing a high level of generalised trust (huhe ). these studies have enriched our knowledge of trust patterns in china. however, they are subject to a number of limitations. quantitative studies that draw from national survey data do not permit an in-depth investigation of civic activities and networks. for instance, huhe’s research is innovative in contextualising generalised and particularised trust in rural villages in china by measuring the trustworthiness of ‘relatives and close friends, neighbours, non- neighbours, villagers with the same surnames, villagers with different surnames and strangers’ from the china general social surveys (huhe : ). however, these datasets do not include information on civil activities such as volunteering. therefore, they do not allow for an in-depth understanding of how trustworthiness is translated into bonding or bridging relation- ships. qualitative research such as that conducted by pye ( ) and rankin ( ), which relies on an interpretation of confucianism, does not seem to utilise empirical evidence or in- depth methods to interrogate the relationships between trust and civic engagement in contem- porary society. furthermore, research on the role of chinese communist party membership does not permit a distinction between obligatory and bridging relationships in promoting generalised trust. moreover, it does not extend to explain the extent to which the communist party socialisations facilitate the development of bonding relationships among ccp members or bridging relationships between ccp members and non-ccp members. therefore, this study will focus on contemporary university youth as a case to explore the patterns of civic engagement and bonding, bridging or obligatory relationships emerging from these activities, as well as how the level of trust from these relationships affects civic engagement. higher education, trust and civic engagement the choice of university students as the primary focus of this study merits some explanation. first, research from other contexts shows higher education plays an important role in shaping civic engagement (jayakumar ; doyle and skinner ). formal learning curricula, knowledge production and fields of study not only have tremendous pedagogical effects on enhancing students’ civic skills but also affect students’ social and civic attitudes. for instance, studies from the usa and some european countries show the effect of classroom teaching and learning on students’ social attitudes (mariani and hewitt ; elchardus and spruyt ; gross and fosse ). stubager’s ( ) study, which analyses danish voters aged between and in terms of different types of education received, finds that the strongest effects on generalised trust come from higher education in medium- and long-term programmes, partic- ularly in social fields of study. furthermore, university students use their knowledge to advocate for social justice, such as the decolonization of the he curriculum, de-academised knowledge (cole and heinecke : ) and the #rhodesmustfall campaign in south africa and the uk (konik and konik ). second, prior scholarship often links higher education with a high level of generalised trust, although the results are dependent on the wider social contexts (frederiksen et al. ). drawing from cross-national datasets such as the world values survey, some research provides empirical evidence on the positive correlations between increasing cognitive capac- ities associated with higher education knowledge and experiences and high levels of higher education ( ) : – generalised trust, particularly in western contexts (yamagishi ; delhey et al. ). further studies argue that the impact of higher education on generalised trust is mediated by wider sociopolitical circumstances, such as levels of corruption and political risks (frederiksen et al. ; wu and shi ). frederiksen et al.’ ( ) study highlights that the level of education is negatively correlated to the level of generalised trust among high-corruption countries from the wvs data between and . similarly, wu and shi ( ) argue that people with more education are more likely to adopt risk aversion strategies in high-risk societies, which lowers generalised trust. however, these perspectives on the role of higher education in shaping trust and civic engagement have yet to be examined systematically in the chinese context, perhaps with the exception of a recent study on post-mao education development by vickers and zeng ( ). they highlight that the top-down patriotic narratives throughout the education system con- tribute to a unique pattern of individualised and divided citizens with unquestioned trust in the state (vickers and zeng ). relatedly, we know that civic engagement among university students is primarily politically oriented (li ; zhang ; wang ). for instance, li’s ( ) empirical work highlights politically active and involved university students but zhang’s ( ) survey of around university students in beijing suggests that most students are only passive participants in political activities, responding mainly to pressures experienced from messages emanating from the curriculum on political education. this idea of ‘passive citizens’ is further reflected in wang’s ( ) study on political attitudes in china. his statistical analysis suggests that political participation in universities does not seem to make a significant impact on graduates’ political attitudes compared to those of non-graduates. we also know that university experiences provide unique socialisation opportunities for people of diverse social and geographical origins (liu ). however, much less is known about whether political activities promote bridging or bonding or obligatory relationships. we also know very little about civic activities in which university students are involved and about how university experiences shape their civic engagement, particularly in relation to social and political trust. in light of this gap, this research asks a number of questions: ( ) what types of civic activities are young people involved in at university? ( ) how do they perceive interpersonal (bonding, bridging and/or obligatory) relationships during these activities? ( ) how does the level of trust emerging from these relationships affect their commitment to civic engagement? data, methods and research design the dataset for this research consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with university students from birth cohorts between and . in choosing these cohorts, we aimed to recruit respondents who were still in higher education institutions at the start of this project in april . in the chinese language, the concept of trust has many translations in different linguistic settings. the most commonly used term is xinren (信任); however, there are many other synonyms, such as xiangxin (相信), xinlai (信赖), kexin (可信), jianxin (坚信) or kekao (可 靠), kaopu (靠谱), which can be used in a variety of formal and colloquial settings. because trust is an abstract concept and is invisible, in-depth interviews enable us to uncover the levels of trust deeply buried in the complex socialisation and activities experienced by these young people. the interviewees were selected from a variety of social backgrounds as well as from different geographical origins. we approached students in canteens, sports centres, libraries higher education ( ) : – and student-organised societies on campus, and we also recruited respondents using social media websites and applications such as wechat and qq. table summarises the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the inter- viewees, university students and graduates, from the birth cohorts between and . this table also includes the pathways of higher education—that is, the types of universities and fields of study of the interviewees. table shows that respondents in our sample come from key universities, whilst come from non-key institutions. key universities refer to world- class universities and prestigious national universities in the project (liu ). the proportion of interviewees from different types of universities merits some explanation. the chinese higher education system is hierarchal in nature, with more than four times as many non-key universities as elite and key universities (liu ). furthermore, the data obtained from the ministry of education show that undergraduates registered in the universities accounted for only . % of the total undergraduate population in (moe b). therefore, we chose to recruit more respondents from non-key universities than from key institutions, although this research does not aim to provide a generalisable picture of students from different types of institutions. regarding the fields of study, we primarily distinguish the stem subjects from arts, humanities and social sciences, with and respondents from these respective pathways. the interviews were semi-structured and lasted approximately two to two-and-a-half hours. all interviews were conducted in mandarin chinese, audio-recorded with the inter- viewees’ consent, transcribed in chinese, translated into english and analysed in english. the students’ identities and institutions were anonymised, and pseudonyms were coded instead. coding and mapping techniques were used to analyse the interview data (fig. ). open coding was used initially to identify the patterns of non-academic or extra-curricular activities and experiences, which are coded into organised and expressive political engage- ment and organised and self-organised civic engagement. we then identified interpersonal bonding, bridging or obligatory relationships with local communities, institutions and the state by synthesising these patterns. drawing upon the synthesised codes, we mapped the connections between interpersonal and institutional trust and the patterns of individuals’ civic engagement. figure is introduced as a coding schema—a degree of civic engagement determined by the consistency of individuals’ commitment to civic activities and meaningful bonding, bridging and/or obligatory relationships emerging from these activities. the level of table the socioeconomic and demographic details of the interviewees (birth cohorts between and ) key universities ( ) and % in total non-key universities ( ) and % in total % total number socioeconomic status urban ( . %) ( . %) ( %) rural ( . ) ( . ) ( %) gender male ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) female ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) fields of study stems ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) arts and humanities and social sciences ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) higher education ( ) : – individuals’ trust manifested through these interpersonal relationships is the key to under- standing the different degrees of civic engagement. findings town-fellowship associations, particularised trust and bonding relationships we identify a high level of engagement in a particular type of associational activities and events relating to town-fellowship associations (n = ). these are based on geographical origin (village, town, county, city or province). differing from the traditional fraternity clubs in us universities, these associations do not often have an office or a building on campus; instead, they are represented by rather ‘fluid’ but organised groups of students by enrolment year, field of study or residency halls. these representatives organise social events as well as virtual groups on wechat. a total of respondents confirmed that they participated in town- fellowship societies, and of the respondents were regulars who were committed to building up their networks and helping their town fellows. zhikai liu, a -year-old post- graduate from a rural area in hubei, belonged to a hubei town-fellowship association on campus. zhikai was an active volunteer for his town-fellowship association. feeling homesick and lonely away from his hometown when he first came to study in beijing, zhikai joined the town-fellowship association in his freshman year. the generous support and help from the senior town-fellows at the same university made him feel committed to the activities organised by the association: i never left hubei before. it was scary to live in this enormous city. i had no one to turn to. but i was lucky one day when i overheard someone speaking my dialect in the canteen. it was like finding my family again. our town-fellows helped me get settled in the dorm and gave me a lot of advice on studying and living in beijing. we had a great sense of solidarity. i like to pass the torch of solidarity by helping other young town- fellows. fig. a degree of civic engagement higher education ( ) : – when asked whether there were other types of student organisations available to support him at that time, zhikai said: ‘there were many clubs and associations on campus, but i felt very lost and did not belong to any particular group. my town-fellow’s dialect reminded me of my hometown. he was trustworthy, like a family’. zhikai made a priority of organising activities and took the initiative to set up a social media account—specifically a wechat group—which helped recruit newcomers to the university and promote events related to job hunting and graduate school opportunities. his contributions to his town-fellowship association ‘made him proud’, and the time and commitment he gave to these activities made his ‘university life more meaningful’. zhikai’s narrative revealed a pattern of networks connecting students from the same town/ dialect with shared interests and solidarity, which resembled the quasi-patrilineal socialisation that prioritises social relationships based on geographical origin. this type of socialisation strengthens bonding relationships between individuals and communities from the same areas, fostering particularised trust. compared to other types of student organisations, the town- fellowship associations seem to represent trustworthiness for students like zhikai. these students still rely on patrilineal and patrilocal cultural identifications, such as a dialect, to verify trustworthiness, thus consciously filtering in- and out-groups during university socialisation. ccp membership and mixed obligatory relationships another type of consistent civic activity is engaging with the chinese communist party branches on campus. for more than half of the respondents (n = ), organised political activities constituted the most normal pattern of civic engagement, ranging from applying for communist party membership to following the party’s probationary performance require- ments to being actively involved in local party conferences and events. the students explained that these activities were primarily concerned with ‘studying’ or ‘discussing’ new policy proposals or new speeches by the statesmen. they confirmed their absolute loyalty to the party state and accepted all the party’s ‘policies and strategies of national development’. they further stated that ‘the party is the best representative of public interests’. the most common pattern among these narratives is the continual ‘identity switching’ between ‘wo’ and ‘guo jia’ (‘i’ and ‘nation family’), which suggests a close affinity between the individual and the state and unwavering trust in the party state (zhang et al. ). however, unquestioned loyalty to the state does not seem to translate into the same level of trust within local party communities, such as fellow student probationers and party bureau- crats. huangxu, a -year-old urban male student from media studies in a non-key university, discussed his application for party membership, his experiences of being a probationer and his relationships with fellow probationers and party bureaucrats: i applied for party membership because it would be very useful in the job market. but the party branch bureaucrats are not trustworthy. their main job is to organise meetings on ideology education. they are game players. they treated us probationers like minions and made us do a lot of chores. they played us against each other, appearing to favour one while supporting another for party membership. we do not trust each other. huangxu’s narrative shows a deficit of trust in the party branch bureaucrats and other student probationers. this confirms previous research on the confucian model of trust in the state and distrust in the local level of political institutions (pye ; wu and wilkes ). it seems party socialisation provides unique opportunities and unifies university students in discussing higher education ( ) : – social policies and public issues. however, whilst this type of political participation might consolidate obligatory relationships between individuals and the state, it seems to be a top- down pattern. the student members or probationers did not voluntarily have regular contact with their party fellows apart from organised activities. moreover, this type of engagement did not seem to foster long-lasting bridging or bonding relationships between students. instead, there seemed to be a lack of trust between student members and probationers. furthermore, some students were critical of the purpose of such organised political engagement. xue zhang, a -year-old urban female postgraduate student, majored in com- puter science in a key university. she had been a party member for years and participated in a range of activities the party branch organised during her undergraduate and postgraduate studies. xue was more critical of this type of political engagement than the other respondents: i have been involved in recruitment. most new applicants just wanted party membership as a stamp of approval. they cared about their own interests and joined the party to advance these interests. xue explained that the ‘unspoken but widely shared motive’ of joining the ccp among university students was to gain access to social or political contacts and/or advance one’s own competitiveness. these utilitarian motives which seem to be contrary to the party members’ promotion of the public good were prevalent among xue’s ccp fellows. she further identified the dual pressure from ‘degree inflation’ and ‘the competitive culture’ as the underlying ‘drive’ for students to ‘chase’ all kinds of academic and non-academic recognition, such as ‘outstanding student awards’, ‘scholarships’ and ‘useful internships’. among those ‘extra labels’, party membership warrants particular sponsorship, as it ‘opens the doors of graduate schools’ and leads to ‘job opportunities’. however, the pursuit of individual interests seems to alienate the applicants from developing meaningful interpersonal relationships or contributing to the public good. xue explained that she did not make much effort to socialise with her party fellows outside party events, as they were in fact ‘competitors’ rather than ‘comrades’. xue’s account of the competitive culture and degree inflation seems to suggest that individual academic performance is much more valued than students’ civic activities in contemporary universities. episodic volunteering, generalised trust and bridging relationships we find a mixed pattern of organised volunteering activities, which are either organised or elicited by the local party branches or the youth leagues on campus. these activities are entirely voluntary, and the students work with some charitable associations devoted to social causes. nearly a third of the respondents (n = ) confirmed that they had participated in such voluntary work, but the pattern of their engagement was erratic and most likely to represent a one-off, box- ticking activity. for example, yongzhi lin, a -year-old undergraduate from a medical school, volunteered for the free medical service once. the free medical service team is an organisation dedicated to providing free dental treatment for the young and the elderly in rural impoverished areas, who are ‘out-groups’ in terms of interpersonal relationships for yongzhi: we treated a lot of left-behind kids and elderly. it was an eye-opening experience, but i do not think i could make a difference. this charity is like scattered streams that can never become a river. it should be the responsibilities of their families, right? i would not trust strangers or some organisation to look after my own child or grandparents. higher education ( ) : – yongzhi’s narrative illustrates the deeply rooted beliefs in family-based welfare and the lack of confidence in long-term charitable commitments, which is consistent with previous research findings (garrillo et al. ). yongzhi does not believe his volunteering would make any meaningful change for the ‘left-behind kids and elderly’. the reference to ‘scattered streams’ suggests a lack of belief in collective action and an absence of bottom-up civic values, which might also explain the apparent reluctance to make a long-term commitment to volunteering. furthermore, despite yongzhi’s desire to ‘help more people’ with his medical skills and knowl- edge, he could not afford to spend more time with the team, because of the demands of his studies and the gruelling training at his medical school. he was one of a few medical students who volunteered during the holidays whilst ‘other fellow students were busy with their studies or internships in hospitals’. his narrative illustrates the conflicts between the code of meritocracy and moral and social responsibilities. previous studies suggest that, among students and their parents, there is a persistent belief in the code of meritocracy and upward social mobility through the pathways of higher education (liu ). the belief in merit-based social rewards and selection and the intensified competition at the university level allow students to pursue expressive individualism, thus drawing them further away from committing to civic responsibilities. besides organised volunteering activities, we find that small number of students (n = ) participated in the activities of charitable organisations, including self-organised environment charities and ngos on safe sex, sexual consent and preventing sexual violence. chenai hu, a -year-old business postgraduate at a non-key university, has been working for years for a non-governmental charity organisation that addresses domestic violence. chenai recalled a successful event last november on preventing on-campus domestic violence that was headlined by a popular feminist activist on social media and was live-streamed. drawing from her business knowledge and contacts, she pushed the charity work to another level by using social media, attracting advertisements, and writing blog posts. however, her main obstacle was to motivate her university peers to volunteer as well: a lot of people think i am a nutter who wastes my time on these things. it is frustrating to persuade my classmates to volunteer their time. when i tried to promote these events, they looked at me as if i was about to trick them into doing something scandalous. even my own so-called friends do not trust me. i think [university students] are becoming more and more selfish. they do not care about others. yuqian and chenai’s difficulty of involving their classmates or university fellows and their frustration with ‘selfish university students’ are the result of a number of factors, including distrust in their university peers as well as conflicts between civic activities and individual interests. the relentless competition and demands to perform academically, on the one hand, pushed students to be more individualistic in terms of prioritising their own academic pursuits. on the other hand, however, they led students to be satisfied only with measurable successes, such as academic records, grants and prizes. yuqian and chenai’s characterization of ‘selfish university students’ thus appears to result from the meritocratic selection and reward process in higher education. digital activism and institutional trust a small number of respondents (n = ) participated in expressive political or civic engage- ment, which included writing on-line petitions against professors, celebrities or entrepreneurs involved in sexual harassment scandals, boycotting big business and corporations, and supporting whistle-blowers who exposed environmental, medical or labour scandals. most higher education ( ) : – of these activities were conducted via social media, particularly via wechat groups. most respondents were content with the ‘surrogate virtual community’, where they held discussions with their ‘comrades’ rather than meeting them in person. one respondent involved in exposing a sexual harassment case explained: ‘you can never be too careful with the current surveillance. you can’t trust anyone, especially the university.’ a few female students (n = ) were involved in on-line petitions against sexual harassment by their own professors. all five female students were from urban professional backgrounds. whilst the recent metoo move- ment also spread to chinese universities, this type of bottom-up activism was not widespread across our sample of respondents. xicheng li, a -year-old female student from a key university, discussed her experience of on-line petitions against sexual harassment: a famous male professor in our university is alleged to have sexually exploited several female students. it was horrific. but the university has not done anything to investigate. i joined the on-line petition and signed an open letter with my real name. but most of my classmates and friends were reluctant to join in. as we all know, “the gun shoots the bird perching out.” we all fear there might be some kind of repercussions. i might regret my actions one day, but i felt it was the morally right thing to do, even if i never had such an experience. xicheng further elaborated on the rationale for her petition. having studied feminist literature and having a professionally successful mother as a role model, xicheng believes in female empowerment and the importance of standing up against the repression of women. at the same time, however, xicheng was also aware of possible future censure for becoming involved in on-line activism. ‘the gun shoots the bird perching out’ is a chinese saying that describes punishment for being outspoken. having little trust in her own university, xicheng seems to be vigilant about possible reprimands, such as losing out in the competition to be nominated an ‘outstanding graduate’ or ‘a graduate school opportunity’ at her current university. however, she can afford this possible ‘mishap’, because her parents will support her financially for a postgraduate degree abroad. compared to xicheng’s ‘confidence’, the majority of female students from working class and agricultural backgrounds were cautious about ‘putting themselves forward’. although they agreed that sexual harassment should be addressed by universities, they did not have faith in collective on-line petitions. the risk of being ‘singled out’ or being seen as ‘challenging authority’ would cost them everything, particularly since they do not have financial and social resources like xicheng. conclusion this is a study of how trust affects the nature and characteristics of civic engagement among university students in contemporary china. it has a number of conclusions, some of which relate to the more general literature on trust and civic engagement and some of which are particularly relevant to the chinese context. first, prior scholarship does not support consistent relationships between levels and radii of social trust and levels of civic engagement. our research suggests that this is also the case in china in the university context. generalised trust among students seems to be quite low. the organisations with which they associate either are top-down through the communist party, which is ideologically narrow and socially distant among the members, or promote geographical origin-based bonding rather than bridging relationships. higher education ( ) : – second, our research suggests that in the university context, typical forms of volunteering have little effect on civic attitudes and behaviour. this finding is at odds with much of the research on volunteering in western countries, which suggests that volunteering can have long-term effects on civic attitudes and behaviour (particularly forms of service learning) (campbell ). this may be because these activities are predominantly organised top-down in china, and thus, very few of our respondents became involved with charities from a bottom- up motivation. this is partly because of their instrumental attitude, which are similar to some of the research on volunteering in european countries, where much of the volunteering is actually motivated by instrumental desires (e.g. to enhance cvs) (cnaan et al. ). at the contextual level, the unquestioned trust in the state seems to contribute to a clear pattern of organised political engagement, specifically relating to membership in the chinese communist party. moreover, strong trust in the state also draws university students to value party membership more than community-based volunteering. furthermore, our findings confirm the previous research on the lack of civic traditions in chinese society (fukuyama ; pye ). whilst there is no precedence in civic engagement to turn to, our respondents seem to have developed a fragile and inconsistent pattern of civic involvement. the majority of associational activities were driven by individuals’ interests or particularised trust, which did not seem to connect with the public good. however, a small number of informants developed a sense of moral obligation and public responsibility through voluntary charity work. in spite of this, competition at the university level and the related academic and employment pressure prevented such students from engaging regularly in activities devoted to the public good. the competitive university culture seems to allow expressive individualism to thrive whilst undermining the collective consciousness of the public good and social issues. our findings concur with the literature, which demonstrates a high level of trust in the state but lower levels of social trust (fukuyama ; pye ; huhe ). this pattern may be related to the confucian cultural influence on forms of trust—that is a high level of political trust in relation to the ultimate authority (here, the central state and presumably the ccp) but a low level of trust in relation to local institutions, which is exemplified by our respondents’ low trust in party bureaucrats and the way their own universities handle sexual harassment cases. moreover, the findings are consistent with the literature on familialism in china and the relatively narrow ambit of social trust in family and kinship networks. this is well illustrated by the prevalence of civic engagement in town-fellowship associations. the findings are therefore in line with the existing literature but add new depth to our understanding of the relationship between the dominant modalities of trust and the typical form of civic participa- tion in the university context. they also add new insights into the effects of increasing meritocratic competition and stress on performativity on the civic attitudes and behaviour of students. moreover, the distrust in university party bureaucrats and fellow party probationers and/or members does not seem to prevent students from eagerly seeking party membership. this suggests that utilitarian individualism seems to override the distrust of intermediate party communities. the unquestioned loyalty and trust in the party state suggests a persistent ideology of confucianism and its related moral obligations. on the one hand, persistent confucianism-related norms and values continue to shape young people’s trust and patterns of civic engagement. on the other hand, utilitarian and expressive individualism is fuelled by the competitive culture in contemporary universities. this hybrid of neoliberal individualism and confucianism seems to be the perfect match to reconcile the absence of civic traditions and to validate civic consciousness among university students. higher education ( ) : – regarding individual-level characteristics, the majority of students involved in volunteering and activism were from urban professional families. among them, there is a slight majority of female students. due to the sample size, we are unable to explore further the implications of students’ family backgrounds and gender on their levels of trust and civic engagement. although we selected the samples to cover different types of universities and fields of study, our findings do not illustrate clear relationships between the types of universities or fields, the levels of trust and the intensity of civic engagement. these findings suggest further avenues for future research on civic engagement by young people in china. researchers could explore the impact of young people’s socioeconomic characteristics on trust in relation to the patterns of civic engagement. for instance, do the levels of trust vary across different social groups? how do young people from different social backgrounds participate in civic activities? what about those young people from the same age cohorts that lack any higher education experiences? in undertaking such systematic analysis, scholars can sharpen their understanding of the rela- tionships between trust and civic engagement among young people in china in the twenty-first century. acknowledgments we are especially grateful for superb research assistance from ying huang and zhanhong guo at the graduate school of education, peking university. we would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. dr. ye liu’s research trips were supported by the department of international development research seed fund, king’s college london. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) 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( ). nationalism on weibo: towards a multifaceted understanding of chinese nationalism. the china quarterly, , – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. affiliations ye liu & wenqin shen department of international development, king’s college london, room northeast wing, bush house, aldwych, london wc b px, uk graduate school of education, peking university, room , haidian district, beijing , china higher education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /ssrn. https://doi.org/ . /ssrn. https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /ssqu. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	perching... 	abstract 	introduction 	trust in the chinese context 	higher education, trust and civic engagement 	data, methods and research design 	findings 	town-fellowship associations, particularised trust and bonding relationships 	ccp membership and mixed obligatory relationships 	episodic volunteering, generalised trust and bridging relationships 	digital activism and institutional trust 	conclusion 	references emma vaux: setting new standards emma vaux: setting new standards the consultant nephrologist and general physician talks to jacqui wise about quality improvement and medicine in the wake of the #metoo movement jacqui wise the bmj work ethic my father was a country gp and, although he was seemingly always on call, he loved his job. he worked incredibly hard, as did my mother, and that engendered a strong work ethic in me. by the age of i was sold on the idea of medicine and i worked hard to get there. london i studied medicine at charing cross and westminster medical school. i loved it—the sense of community and the mix of people. you played hard and worked hard. renal medicine serendipity brought me into renal medicine. i literally opened the bmj, saw a job on the oxford renal rotation, and thought “go for it.” i love the acute nature of the job—the emergencies. i also enjoy the long term relationships you have with patients—i particularly look after patients on haemodialysis. specialty envy i enjoy my interventional work and if i had my time again i might have been tempted into the world of interventional radiology. on the research side, i have ventured from molecular genetics and working with chinese hamster ovary cells to a particular interest in the impact dialysis has on a patient’s memory and quality of life. developing qi i have tried to move quality improvement on from a tick box mentality. i wanted to make doctors feel they can make a difference by focusing on small things that can have a huge impact on patients’ lives or our ways of working. #metoo i have been a doctor for years and have encountered all sorts of behaviour, ranging from exemplary role models to the shockingly awful. around a year ago a senior person crossed a line and made very inappropriate remarks to me. as senior censor at the royal college of physicians, i thought, if i don’t do anything about this, who will? so i sat down with the other censors and we developed the rcp code of conduct (www. rcplondon.ac.uk/codeofconduct). fun i try and put fun back into medicine, which i think has become a little bit lost. i have just been working, with our educationalists, on a new college publication about the modern team and how we can learn from, and with, others, not just doctors. plans into action i led the academy of medical royal colleges quality improvement: training for better outcomes work which involved organisations coming together culminating in published recommendations in on how to make quality improvement work in action, with patients across specialties and across different professional groups. there is real value when we recognise this isn’t a silo activity. multiple roles i’m also a specialty advisor with the care quality commission and a case investigator and lead assessor for the national clinical assessment service (now nhs resolution). i’m not good at saying no. most people look at me and think i’m potty with all the different jobs i do. clinical practice i’m now leaning more to the education side of things, including training and continuous professional development. but it’s really important to me still to be a practising clinician so i don’t lose sight of what’s important at the front line. for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :k doi: . /bmj.k (published november ) page of careers careers o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.k o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/codeofconduct http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/codeofconduct http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.k &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.bmj.com/ curriculum vitae to present: consultant in renal and general medicine, royal berkshire hospital nhs foundation trust to present: senior censor and vice president (education and training), royal college of physicians - : clinical lead, learning to make a difference, royal college of physicians - : programme director of quality improvement, royal berkshire hospital nhs foundation trust : generation q fellow. the health foundation - : clinical director, acute medicine, royal berkshire nhs foundation trust - : associate medical director, joint royal colleges of physicians training board : d phil. university of oxford - : mbbs, charing cross and westminster medical school, university of london for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :k doi: . /bmj.k (published november ) page of careers o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.k o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://www.bmj.com/ unpacking systems of privilege: the opportunity of critical reflection in outdoor adventure education education sciences article unpacking systems of privilege: the opportunity of critical reflection in outdoor adventure education lisa meerts-brandsma ,* , n. qwynne lackey and robert p. warner department of health, physical education, and recreation, college of education, weber state university, ogden, ut , usa department of recreation and leisure studies, school of professional studies, suny cortland, cortland, ny , usa; qwynne.lackey@cortland.edu department of parks, recreation and tourism, college of health, university of utah, salt lake city, ut , usa; warner.robert@utah.edu or rpwarner@gmail.com * correspondence: lmeerts@weber.edu received: september ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: outdoor adventure education has an extensive history of considering how its students should wrestle with privilege. recent events have brought issues of privilege to the forefront, which raises the question of whether outdoor adventure education can play a role in learning to see and affect systems of privilege. this paper examines several elements of outdoor adventure education that make it an ideal environment for teaching about systems of privilege, and makes the argument that jack mezirow’s critical reflection, wherein people question the principles that underlie their ideas, should be a key element of outdoor adventure education curriculum in the st century. the authors’ perspectives are grounded in critical theory and the assumption that power dynamics need to be examined in order to be changed. by combining critical reflection with the unique characteristics of outdoor adventure education, outdoor adventure educators may be able to successfully teach participants to recognize and impact systems that operate around them. keywords: social justice; experiential learning; transformative learning; equity; pedagogy; whiteness; gender; critical theory . introduction recent events across the world have heightened people’s awareness of injustices in their communities, and have led to a call to fix systems that have privileged one group of people over another [ ]. as each movement arises, a common refrain heard from people, particularly those with privilege, is that they did not realize that systems operate around them that reinforce beliefs and behaviors that oppress one group while benefiting another [ ]. following george floyd’s murder, many united states citizens who have privilege have been confronted with their contributions to racist systems. other recent movements, such as #metoo and the european migrant crisis, have highlighted how systemic injustices often go unchecked and manifest as a flawed strand of the western societal fabric. the covid- pandemic is yet another unfolding example of how systems privilege some people over others. as awareness of injustices and the motivation to change these entrenched systems continues to mount, people need tools to help them to identify hidden systems so that they can take action to change them. outdoor adventure education (oae) is a setting wherein instructors could teach critical reflection to students as a tool to help make invisible systems visible, and use the unique structure of a course to challenge participants to act with an awareness of the systems in which they participate. critical reflection describes the process by which people become aware of “how and why the educ. sci. , , ; doi: . /educsci www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /educsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education educ. sci. , , of structure of psychocultural assumptions [have] come to constrain the way we see ourselves and our relationships” [ ], a concept which emerged partially from thought emanating from the frankfurt school of critical social theory [ ]. while some oae educators may already teach and use critical reflection, we argue it should be a key component of the oae curriculum in the st century. modern oae is often attributed to kurt hahn’s outward bound school and continues to embody his original educational endeavors [ – ]. hahn believed that developing moral character was central to overcoming the most pressing social issues of the early th century [ ]. during hahn’s involvement with the salem school prior to outward bound, he established the seven laws of salem, the last of which was to “free the sons of the wealthy and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege” [ , ]. with these goals, he identified issues that troubled society in the early th century and which sadly remain as pressing today. while much of contemporary oae continues to support hahn’s principles, oae has been and continues to be a space occupied predominantly by people who identify as white and male, have higher socioeconomic status, and are able-bodied [ – ]. while oae encompasses a broad array of learning opportunities, for the purpose of this paper, we define oae as the classic educational expedition wherein a small cohort of instructors and participants spend several days, weeks or even months in a wilderness setting away from society [ , ]. these courses are thought to develop participants’ leadership and technical outdoor skills as they undertake physically arduous expeditions where they backpack, mountaineer, or sail from their starting point to a predetermined location [ ]. the ethos of many oae programs is steeped in colonial thought that promotes rugged individualism and encourages participants to conquer the challenges before them, such as mastering the environment, without significant consideration of how their actions feed into a dominant narrative that ignores people who have a different lived experience [ – ]. many contend that unless oae changes, it may be challenging or even impossible for oae to address social issues, such as how to remedy systemic injustices [ , ]. people with privilege have been charged to do their own work to identify how their actions contribute to systems that perpetuate injustice [ ], which includes problematizing institutions that they participate in, like oae, and making changes. therefore, we argue that practitioners in oae should examine their curriculum to see how they can incorporate critical reflection as a tool to disrupt systems that operate within the course. as they include lessons on critical reflection, practitioners should also require students to practice taking different actions than they normally would, based on what they learn by examining their socially conditioned belief systems. practicing these behaviors on course could lead students who are doubtful to understand that systems exist, and that they have the power to change them. outdoor adventure education has many elements that make it an ideal space to learn to see systems of privilege. first, a classic expeditionary oae course consists of a small group of people who form a temporary, bounded social system for the duration of a course [ ]. this characteristic allows the group to remain intact and temporarily separate from society [ ], which may make it easier for students to identify how individuals influence dynamics within the social system than in typical daily life because they operate in a “bubble” with fewer outside forces influencing them. second, oae’s problematic nature as a space shaped by colonial thought, neoliberal ideologies, and persistent hegemony may provide students opportunities to identify their own power and privilege and make deliberate choices about how they want to act during and after the course [ , , , ]. third, a key element of oae is the reflective process, wherein people engage individually, and as a group, in making meaning about what occurred over the day, week, and entire course [ ]. meaning-making is an important step in recognizing how one participates in oppressive systems [ ]. finally, the fact that oae resembles society [ ], with its propensity for injustices, suggests that, with the right scaffolding, students could carry learning that occurs within oae into their lives where they could enact positive change. in an effort to help oae practitioners work toward social justice, we explore how the oae curriculum could be adapted to teach participants to identify and confront systems of privilege. to start, we explore aspects of oae that make it a potential site to learn about systems. next, we identify educ. sci. , , of how oae replicates society and presents oae students with opportunities to identify how systems of privilege operate around them. then, we explain how mezirow’s critical reflection [ ] can be employed in oae to encourage students to question the discourses that underlie systems of privilege in the field and in their communities. finally, we present specific examples for how oae instructors could employ these techniques on a course. . positionality our goal in writing this paper is to look at how a system that is flawed can be improved upon because we want to work towards creating a more just society. in the present moment, we believe that change will be most realistically accomplished by operating within existing systems. our paper maintains a critical approach that argues that individuals construct their reality as a function of their values [ ]. we do not believe that any one action is sufficient; rather, we are hopeful that a multitude of actions can create change. we recognize that we have many privileges, which vary between us but include having higher socioeconomic status, being cisgendered, having no visible disabilities, and being white, to name a few. we also recognize that our privilege may prevent us from fully seeing all perspectives, as could our previous work experience as professionals in oae. however, we believe it is our responsibility to try to create positive change and that through repeated efforts, we can be successful. our hope in writing this paper is to reach audiences who work in oae and seek tools that they can use while on course to affect change. . outdoor adventure education as a site to realize systems of privilege one of the challenges of systems of privilege is that they cannot be seen, held, or touched, so people must acknowledge their existence without having a tangible product at which they can point [ , ]. this invisibility can make it difficult for people to recognize systems of privilege at work, or describe them to others who are not yet aware of or willing to admit they exist [ ]. a person who cannot identify systems around them may struggle to change them. outdoor adventure education, however, has certain characteristics that make it easier to detect systems as they operate than when most people are in their regular daily lives. for instance, oae creates a bounded social system wherein students and instructors spend the duration of the course together, typically without much or any interaction with people outside of their small group [ ]. once together, the group forms a temporary system with its own rules and norms that are impacted primarily by the people on the course, creating a bounded system [ , ]. a person may step outside of the group briefly, but they ultimately remain connected for as long as the course lasts. thus, while invisibility of systems remains an issue, it can be easier on a course to trace how actions that occurred at one moment impact a later moment in time, whereas in regular life it might be harder to see the connections because they involve different people in different places. the curriculum on many oae courses presents another opportunity for learning to see the impact of systems of privilege. much of oae is designed to present students with opportunities to practice decision-making and leadership skills [ , ]. those who have leadership and decision-making responsibilities are often in a powerful position where their actions affect others [ ]. in oae, instructors typically take on the initial leadership roles and gradually relinquish those responsibilities to students, who are able to make decisions for the group in a scaffolded environment [ ]. this dynamic, where students practice leadership skills, can allow students to understand the impact of their choices, particularly when paired with the nature of the bounded system [ , , ]. ideally, instructors would not allow students to make decisions that benefit one student while disadvantaging another. in practice, some decisions may lead to inequities or reinforce systems that privilege one student or group of students. students might decide, for example, how to split up gear, how quickly to hike, how frequently to take breaks, and how to designate roles such as who sets up the tent versus who cooks dinner [ ]. their choices have the potential to reinforce or disrupt systems, which can provide educ. sci. , , of rich learning opportunities less frequently encountered in daily life where actions and their impacts are less easily traced. another important aspect of an oae course is that the experiences are simultaneously authentic and simulated [ , ]. at the start of a course, a specific overarching goal is identified, such as backpacking from point a to point b. the work students put in to achieve this goal is real, and results in sweat, sore muscles, and, at times, exhaustion. throughout the course, the students are active participants engaged in direct, authentic experiences [ ]. oae stands in contrast, then, to other experiences that are entirely simulated, such as the poverty simulation [ ]. in the poverty simulation, participants adopt roles and run through simulated rounds where they need to complete objectives while being given limited resources to do so. while participants report profound learning from the poverty simulation [ , ], some of what they learn comes through imagined rather than actual experience. one might argue that oae students choose to embark on what is in many ways an artificial experience. in this sense, the experience is a simulation, and it has characteristics, such as the bounded system, that are not representative of most people’s daily life. these characteristics also make it easier to set aside time and space to have important conversations about privilege, because many short-term objectives can be dropped to accommodate the most pressing; however, this will not occur without challenges or significant effort from instructors [ ]. the temporary nature of an oae course also makes it distinct from other common experiences in life, and may be a quality that supports students experimenting with new behaviors and beliefs [ , ]. most students in the oae courses described in this paper do not know the other students prior to the course unless the course is designed for an intact group. because they have no prior experience with one another, they may be able to more easily adopt new roles because no one expects them to conform to certain identities [ , ]. instead, they are able to present themselves—to some extent—as they want to be seen. the liminal space that is created by oae may allow students to feel more comfortable exploring new beliefs because it is limited in duration [ , , ]. students may feel they can behave in a way that is unlike the identity/identities they present at home because they will not see these people regularly after the course ends. trying out a new way of being can be perceived as risky [ ]. a student who has their beliefs challenged and attempts to change them may feel more comfortable doing so in an environment that is impermanent, knowing that they can revert to their old beliefs once they return home if they so choose. finally, reflection is an essential component of oae, which is designed around the experiential learning cycle where a person engages in an activity and afterward reflects on the experience [ ]. during a typical course, instructors facilitate discussions for students to reflect on what occurred during the day, and attempt to process how different actions contributed to the outcomes [ , ]. with the appropriate scaffolding, these moments might allow students to explore how their decisions contribute to or disrupt systems that operate around them, and how their underlying belief systems guide their actions [ ]. in addition, students in oae courses often report having more opportunities for solitude and reflection than they do in daily life [ , ]. because systems are largely imperceptible, reflection and thought are likely to be necessary to help students become aware of them and their influence (e.g., [ ]). . parallel structure in outdoor adventure education and united states society while an oae course may be a small, bounded system, it is also a reflection of the larger society [ ]. courses are not designed and facilitated by individuals living in a vacuum, but rather by people who are part of and influenced by the systems around them [ ]. their participation in these systems plays an important role in shaping their values and beliefs. consciously or unconsciously, oae instructors are guided by these same values and beliefs when making decisions about the course structure, content and policy [ ]. similarly, students do not become tabula rasa once they join a course and step into the outdoors. they bring with them all the same attitudes, assumptions and privileges as they hold in their everyday lives. educ. sci. , , of some of the parallels that exist between oae courses and the larger western world highlight the systemic injustice perpetrated within both. many courses are designed for able-bodied people and occur on appropriated lands, often without any acknowledgement of how even the common definition of wilderness erases the lived experience of indigenous people [ , ]. while praising hahn as a central figure in oae, many neglect to consider the militaristic aspects that underpin how outward bound developed [ ], and the imperial struggles occurring across the globe that influenced thought at that time. as occurs in other types of programs in western society, oae remains populated predominantly by people who share the demographics of those who first devised it [ , ]. for example, in the united states, people who identify as hispanic or asian constitute approximately one quarter of the total population, and individuals who identify as black or african american make up about % of the population [ ]. however, due to systemic resource constraints, cultural factors, and discriminatory or exclusionary practices [ ], individuals who identify as black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) remain underrepresented in outdoor spaces. despite representing significantly larger percentages of the u.s. population, hispanic and asian americans collectively represent less than % of total u.s. national park visitors, and black or african americans represent less than % of all visitors [ ]. the same underrepresentation of bipoc individuals can be observed in oae spaces, where the majority of students are white [ ]. another parallel can be drawn between gender norms prevalent in western society and the expectations placed on students of different genders on oae courses. women in oae have reported that they experience challenges in oae that match their experiences in daily life [ ]. in mainstream western culture, women have historically been seen as nurturers and caretakers and have faced criticism when they deviate from this script. rogers and rose [ ] found that women in oae experience the same disapproval while on course, and noted that women who did not conform to gender expectations received lower student evaluation scores, which has implications for their career trajectory much as it does in other education settings, such as academia [ ]. allen-craig et al. [ ] reported similar findings whereby oae continues to include gendered language, such as hard and soft skills, and that employees presenting as women have experienced being overlooked for promotions, have had their skills questioned, and have found colleagues presenting as men being assigned “higher risk” activities. across all contexts, the expectation that women ought to conform to historical norms is problematic and limiting. while oae may represent a microcosm of united states society, the fact that it does is an opportunity. when these similarities are left unacknowledged and unchallenged, oae maintains the same systematic injustices rampant in larger society [ ]. however, these structural and philosophical similarities combined with the small and bounded nature of oae courses creates an ideal space for students to learn about privilege in a way they may not be able to in their everyday life. in daily life, people deal with competing demands on their attention that are less likely to exist while spending days on end removed from society [ ]. during a course, opportunities exist to pause and ask why, for example, the majority of other people seen while hiking are white, and critically reflect on why this is a problem and how it came to be so. in fact, reflection—seen as an essential component of oae—presents a unique opportunity to see systems of privilege when intentionally employed. . critical reflection in outdoor adventure education one of the key theories underlying oae is experiential learning theory, which is often described as a four-stage cycle wherein participants do an activity, reflect on the activity, relate the activity to more abstract concepts, and revise their actions as they prepare to do the activity again [ ]. at at least two points during this cycle, participants engage in a reflective process. reflection is seen as a technique that helps individuals make connections and draw meaning from experiences, and its use was heavily advocated by theorists such as dewey [ ], kolb [ ] and mezirow [ ]. we argue that rather than depend upon the traditional experiential learning cycle, oae should advance and incorporate critical reflection as a component of the cycle and as part of its curriculum. experiential educ. sci. , , of learning and transformative learning are seen as complementary frameworks [ , ], and preliminary evidence exists to suggest that transformative learning, and thus critical reflection, occurs for some oae participants [ , ]. in the s, mezirow [ ] developed transformative learning theory as a way to describe how people come to see the world from an entirely different framework or perspective. transformative learning typically begins with a disorienting dilemma wherein a person has an uncomfortable experience that does not fit within their existing ways of understanding the world [ ]. as they try to reconcile how the disorienting experience fits within their existing understanding, they engage in critical reflection where they ask epistemological questions about how they came to know the world as they do. mezirow argued that critical reflection was a key element to transformation, and defined critical reflection as being focused on the premise that underlies an idea [ , , ]. instead of simply thinking about what happened or how that relates to other ideas, a person who critically reflects explores how the initial thought came to be and questions the validity of their reasoning [ , ]. the process of critical reflection encourages a person to delve into sociocultural analysis so as to understand why it is that women, for example, are seen as nurturing, and why women might face criticism and judgment for deviating from that expectation. after critical reflection, the end result for someone who once stereotyped women as care-taking might be that they now understand that those stereotypes are culturally induced, and not indicative of how a woman might see herself and her potential identities. transformative learning is typically a gradual process, so, over time, they might identify how their behavior reinforces the stereotype, and how their actions contribute to it, such as when they judge women in leadership roles who take decisive action the way men commonly do as rude [ ]. they might also recognize that a series of systems has encouraged these assumptions as opposed to their earlier assumption that women care-take because it is the natural order of the world [ ]. if so, they would have experienced what mezirow called transformative learning [ ]. a handful of studies have explored transformative learning in oae. d’amato and krasny [ ] found that aspects of the oae course, such as living in nature, experiencing a different lifestyle, being a part of a community, and dealing with challenges, led to transformative experiences. meerts-brandsma et al. [ ] showed that after participating in an oae course, students were more likely to have questioned the ways that they act and their beliefs about social roles, a key step in the transformative learning process. this finding indicated that students encountered a disorienting dilemma. according to mezirow, a disorienting dilemma serves as the entry point into transformative learning. it occurs when a person faces information that they cannot reconcile with their existing way of understanding the world [ ]. as an example, one student in meerts-brandsma et al.’s study described how he had been raised in a sexist culture and held sexist beliefs [ ]. on his oae course, he was expected to be respectful of everyone, including women, which tested his as yet unexamined belief systems. when he returned home, he was appalled by how he saw women being treated and realized that his beliefs had changed, which he attributed to his experience in oae and how members of his course challenged his behavior. it would be a mistake to assume that oae will naturally provide the disorienting dilemmas needed to provoke students into questioning the roles that systems have played in developing their beliefs. as described above, without intentional action, oae could be just as likely to reinforce existing, problematic expectations about the world [ ]. rogers and rose described how women in outdoor leadership who deviate from gender expectations face additional scrutiny from students, and how their gender presentation can lead both students and even women themselves to question their competence in technical skills [ ]. however, it also seems clear that oae can provide experiences that allow students to critically reflect upon their assumptions—and potentially change them. for students to critically question their assumptions, instructors will need to be trained on how to facilitate opportunities that could evoke critical reflection and encourage participants to question how their underlying beliefs may lead them to problematic conclusions. educ. sci. , , of . employing critical reflection on outdoor adventure education courses critical reflection likely already occurs on some oae courses. our aim is to draw attention to its intentional use, and offer the recommendation that outdoor adventure educators deliberately incorporate opportunities for critical reflection into their course design, and consciously teach its terminology, so that participants experience the process of evaluating their actions and the underlying premises that guide their behavior. concerns about and awareness of injustice have escalated in recent years. these issues do not appear likely to abate as the covid- pandemic exacerbates existing issues of privilege [ ]. what we now need are tools and techniques that can help people identify unjust systems, consider what actions they can take to rebalance them, and then practice taking action. to demonstrate an application of critical reflection, we will provide examples that show how instructors could employ it on an oae course. many instructors who intend to teach critical reflection will need training themselves on how to identify opportunities where they can encourage it. the colonial underpinnings of oae are likely to provide problematic occasions for instructors to question their own or their students’ actions. while expedition-based oae courses are temporarily separate from society, each person brings their lived experiences to the course, which, as we said, creates a microcosm of the world in which they live while they participate. historically, oae has been seen as a space to improve oneself, and the focus of many courses has been on students developing skills and character traits that will position them for their future [ ]. many students boast about how they learned to live simply through oae, without recognizing that the simplicity they experienced on course is still a significantly richer lifestyle than many people around the world will ever encounter [ ]. for many students, the ability to access an oae course is an example of an unearned privilege that stems from the circumstances of their birth in a western county or to a family with financial means, or to being in a culture that feels safe recreating in backcountry settings [ , ]. on course, some students may also benefit from unearned privileges, such as the student who is taller and can hike faster. their height and associated strength may allow this student to take on more weight, which might encourage the group to look favorably on the student, whereas the group is frustrated with a smaller student who cannot carry their pack weight as well and slows down the pace. if left unchecked, a moment like this can support an existing unexamined system that values ability and physical characteristics that provide immediate benefits. because of the flexible time constraints of a course, an instructor could stop and ask students to consider why they think they appreciate the taller student more, and whether the smaller student did anything to warrant their disdain. the instructor might push students to question why their goal-driven behavior is so important that they would look down upon a member of their group. the aim of such moments would be to disrupt the system in the moment, and to encourage critical reflection on what underlying beliefs and socialization made it acceptable for students to behave the way they did. finally, the instructors should ask students to take action in a way that goes against their conditioned responses and belief systems. instructors may also need training on the major issues that tend to arise during a course, which could be accomplished during the cultural competency training that many providers already offer [ ]. as described above, virtually all of the problems that exist in oae also occur in broader society. topics that are likely to occur on a course include issues around gender roles, the limited racial diversity in oae student groups and among employees, the requisite wealth needed to purchase gear and take time away from work and family responsibilities during the course, and the appropriation of lands that created the wilderness where many courses are held. instructors are likely to need examples and coaching to understand how to bring up these issues, and to work with students who may not expect this component of the curriculum to be part of a course ostensibly focused on adventure and expeditions. next, instructors may need to understand how reflection differs from critical reflection, and generate ideas about how they can teach critical reflection to students. instructors who teach kolb’s experiential learning cycle may want to introduce the idea of critical reflection at that point, educ. sci. , , of and ask students to compare and contrast the two terms [ ]. they could begin their lesson on critical reflection with a topic that has less immediate political charge, such as how knowledge is created, and relate it to an example on the course, such as how people learned to interpret the night skies. the instructor might guide the conversation so that students question how their direct experience on a course relates to knowledge that comes from laboratories or historians. the purpose of such a lesson could be to encourage students to consider what beliefs and values underlie their thoughts about what counts as knowledge, and whose voices are heard in the construction of knowledge. this conversation could be designed to nudge the student to explore what they believe and why they believe it, which is the criteria that differentiates reflection from critical reflection [ ]. as the course develops, instructors may want to focus on the dynamics that occur within the student group, and look for opportunities to link actions that happened earlier to actions that occur later, or actions that replicate societal problems. what they could seek in these moments are examples of unseen systems that have direct impact on the students’ experiences. one example might focus on how a student acts while serving as leader of the day, and how their choices impact the group. if the student picks the route for the day, how do they incorporate feedback from their more vocal peers versus those who are quiet—or do they incorporate feedback at all? once the instructor has identified the example, they could guide students through a series of questions about why they made the choices they did, what belief systems and socialization support how they chose their action, and how that choice affected others. they could then encourage the students to disrupt the system by making different choices the next time they have an opportunity. finally, instructors are likely to want to ask students to think about how their behavior on course relates to their behavior when they are at home. if a student’s beliefs have changed about, say, leadership, the instructor might encourage the student to consider whether that will change anything when they return home, and if so, what. no easy or guaranteed methods exist to transform a person’s perspective, and change how they interact with the world. however, oae offers a unique context, with elements that differ from daily life, which may facilitate the integration of education about critical reflection, and provide concrete, tangible moments upon which students can reflect and question why they made the choices they did, and how they would make those choices to support goals of justice. one of the most critical needs in society is for people to understand how they participate in systems that frequently lead to those with privilege gaining greater privileges, while those without struggle to find equal footing. we argue that oae can be used as a tool to support this need. . conclusions and implications for practitioners oae is a distinct type of experience that has the potential to greatly impact its students [ , ]. its qualities lend itself to being a site to learn to see and potentially challenge systems that oppress people, because of its unique construction wherein students are separate in time and space from their daily lives, but also engaged in making multiple decisions that impact the people with them. by intentionally incorporating critical reflection into the experiential learning cycle, students could learn how to question the premises that underlie their thoughts, and may consequently learn to identify and then affect oppressive systems. by learning to do so in oae, they may be able to continue their behavior in the greater beyond. if so, oae can return to its roots of addressing social issues, but with a re-visioned st century perspective. our hope is that practitioners consider this paper an invitation to adapt the oae curriculum to include critical reflection as a component of all courses. critical reflection differs significantly from reflection, and is an essential step in transformative learning, which is desperately needed to broaden the perspectives of many people across modern society. if and as oae practitioners do so, we encourage scholars to contribute more research on what critical reflection looks like on an oae course, and to explore its impact on students over time so as to identify how they use this skill after a course. simultaneously, we believe that more scholars and practitioners should make better use of mezirow’s work in oae. many programs suggest that they offer transformative experiences, and could educ. sci. , , of better consider how transformative learning theory influences the design and delivery of their courses. finally, we encourage our ideas around critical reflection in oae to be considered a starting point worthy of critique. through continual refinement of our thinking, we will be able to better identify what additional steps need to be taken to right unjust and problematic systems. as we write this paper, injustice is one of the most pressing issues that society faces. it requires urgency in its addressal because people are dying as a consequence of systems that discriminate against them. every action people take to figure out how to improve the world is an important one, even if each step is not perfectly executed. oae, after all, is a space that has been dominated by white, male perspectives, has excluded people from being able to participate in it, and has harmed people who were marginalized but chose nonetheless to engage with oae [ , ]. we believe that oae is a microcosm of society, and that the problems that exist in the greater world are represented on a daily basis in the hundreds of courses that head into the backcountry each year. while potentially disheartening, a silver lining may exist in that idea. after all, if oae shares similarities with the greater world, the progress people make in oae may translate into action elsewhere. author contributions: conceptualization, l.m.-b., n.q.l., and r.p.w.; writing—original draft preparation, l.m.-b., n.q.l., and r.p.w.; writing—review and editing, l.m.-b. and n.q.l. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . theriault, d. power threats and radical healing in black youths’ leisure. j. leis. res. , , – . 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /jorel- -v -i - http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	positionality 	outdoor adventure education as a site to realize systems of privilege 	parallel structure in outdoor adventure education and united states society 	critical reflection in outdoor adventure education 	employing critical reflection on outdoor adventure education courses 	conclusions and implications for practitioners 	references guidance for male mentors to support the safety and success of female mentees commentary guidance for male mentors to support the safety and success of female mentees lucas g. hill, pharmd, a s. andrea laguado, pharmd b a the university of texas at austin college of pharmacy, austin, texas b the university of arizona/banner university medical center south, tucson, arizona submitted january , ; accepted june , ; published december . women constitute the majority of students at us schools and colleges of pharmacy but make up only a minority of senior faculty members. in academic pharmacy, male mentors play an essential role in supporting the professional success of female mentees. these male mentors must recognize their role in creating safe and equitable environments for female mentees to learn and collaborate. they should respect the unique experiences and concerns of female mentees, particularly regarding sexual violence and harassment, and conduct themselves in a manner that prioritizes safety. they should also strive to develop the same interpersonal connections with female mentees that they work to develop with male mentees, realizing that maintaining inequitable personal distance from women undermines their professional suc- cess. specific suggestions for balancing the potentially competing concepts of mentee safety and personal connection are offered by the authors, a male faculty mentor and female student mentee pair. keywords: mentorship, harassment, professional development, professionalism, faculty development introduction in fall , women accounted for . % of profes- sional students and . % of full-time graduate students in uscollegesandschoolsofpharmacy. althoughissuesthat threaten the personal safety and professional success of our female students would warrant thorough consideration even if they constituted a small proportion of learners, the fact that they constitute the majority makes addressing such issues even more pressing. one in five women will be raped during her lifetime, and one in four women in college have already experienced unwanted sexual contact. , more than % of women have experienced sexual harassment or assaultinsomeform. thedisproportionatesexualviolence and harassment faced by women is being publicly recog- nized globally through the #metoo movement. a survey by leanin.org found evidence of a potential backlash to the #metoo movement as % of male man- agers reported being uncomfortable mentoring, working alone, or socializing with a woman at work. this finding raises concerns that male mentors in academic pharmacy may be hesitant to engage with female mentees. while women make up . % of full-time pharmacy faculty members, they represent only . % of full professors and . %of deans and associate deans. the advancementand professional development of future pharmacists and aca- demicians can be powerfully influenced by a single mentor. diminished access to male mentors could be disastrous for female students and junior faculty as a minority of experi- enced mentors are female. we recognize that most male mentors in academic pharmacy strive toprovide equitable supportto allmentees regardless of demographic profile. however, even well- meaning mentors can make subtle mistakes that impact female mentees negatively. we propose that two core principles can support the development of respectful and supportive mentoring relationships between members of the opposite sex: establish a safe environment, and think before speaking or touching. we reject the notion that protection of the male mentor should be the primary con- cern given that there is scarce evidence demonstrating any risk of false harassment or assault claims. furthermore, we contend that development of a personal connection with a mentor can be extremely valuable. members of the millennial generation, to which both authors belong, desire personal connection with mentors that extends beyond the classroom. , it is through these casual interactions that strong personal bonds are formed, propelling mentees’ careers forward. the principles outlined in this commentary are intended to support the development of safe, respectful, and beneficial relationships between male mentors and female mentees. we acknowledge that our cisgendered, corresponding author: lucas g. hill, the university of texas at austin college of pharmacy, university ave., stop a , phr . g, austin, tx . tel: - - . email: lucas.hill@austin.utexas.edu american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://leanin.org mailto:lucas.hill@austin.utexas.edu http://www.ajpe.org heterosexual, interethnic, faculty mentor – student mentee perspective does not represent the full range of mentoring dynamics in academic pharmacy. however, we hope it may provide some insight for mentoring relationships in which there are complex power dynamics influenced by other gender identities, romantic preferences, or cultural backgrounds, including faculty mentor – faculty mentee relationships. establish a safe environment. because sexual harassment and violence are com- mitted against men far less often than women, men can be ignorant of the dangers women face in mundane situa- tions. for example, a male student may not be concerned about meeting in a female professor’soffice at : pm on friday. however, a female student might be hesitant to meet with a male professor in a private space at a time when there might be no other personnel in the office suite or building. male mentors bear a responsibility to con- sider these concerns proactively when advising female mentees. many factors could affect a female student’s percep- tion of safety in this situation. for this reason, we suggest gaining a female mentee’s consent regarding a meeting location and time. this could be as simple as replying to a meeting request email with, “i am available to meet on friday at : pm. does that work for you? let me know if you prefer a location other than my office.” compare this to, “i am available friday at : pm in my office.” which email empowers the mentee to express a preference for an alternate time or location? if a male mentor realizes he has overlooked these concerns upon the female mentee’s ar- rival, he should remember that it is never too late to ask for consent. he might even suggest a specific alternative to ensure the student knowstheoffer is genuine.for example, “it slipped my mind that everybody would be gone for the day. would you prefer if we moved out to the courtyard?” as a mentoring relationship progresses, male mentors and female mentees may find themselves in increasingly casual and private situations. consider an example of a male mentor with one female and one male student mentee set to present a platform session together at a regional conference located a few hours away. the male mentor identifies it as an opportunity to develop a greater personal connection in the mentoring relationships and sends a group email offering to transport the mentees in his per- sonal vehicle. the female mentee accepts, but the male mentee declines. if you were the male mentor in this ex- ample, how would you proceed? proceeding with the trip without discussing the new dynamic is discouraged, as it does not prioritize the female mentee’s perception of safety. fabricating an excuse to avoid transporting the female mentee is also suboptimal because it models dishonest, avoidant behavior that may undermine the mentoring relationship. we suggest the best answer is to give the mentee an opportunity to rescind her acceptance of the transportation offer. for example, the male mentor might say, “i was not planning to subject you to four hours alone in the car with a professor. you are still welcometoridewithme,butiwouldnotbeoffendedifyou made different plans.” communicating this through email or another medium that gives the mentee time to consider her feelings carefully before replying is ideal. male men- tors who do not feel comfortable driving alone with the female mentee should avoid making the initial group car- pool suggestion. in addition to establishing an environment that is physically safe, a mentor should create a sense of intel- lectual security and empowerment that recognizes po- tential differences between sexes. the ultimate goal of the mentor should be to create an environment in which the female mentee feels valued, encouraged to express her views, and empowered to advocate for herself. consider the example of a female mentee who is collaborating with a male peer and male mentor to produce a manuscript.the female studentmay beless assertive thana male studentin a discussion of manuscript authorship based on an un- derstanding that assertive women are often viewed more negatively than passive women by collaborators. in an effort to ensure appropriate credit is given to each co- author, the supervising author should initiate a proactive discussion with all co-authors regarding their contribu- tions and order of authorship. regardless of the final order of authors, engaging in this exercise could allay a female mentee’s concern that gender solidarity or implicit bias is driving the decision. think before speaking or touching. seventy-seven percent of women experience verbal sexual harassment, which can range from unwanted comments like, “give me a smile,” to more offensive remarks referring to their bodies or sexuality directly. these types of sexual harassment faced by medical, nursing, and dental trainees have been documented, though similar documentation for pharmacy trainees is unavailable. - in addition to comments made in the presence of female mentees, male counterparts may en- gage in sexualized discussion of a female mentee or col- league in private. these comments contribute to a hostile work environment for women. male mentors must take a proactive stance to address inappropriate comments of this sort from colleagues. non-sexual comments regarding a person’s size such as, “you are so little, i just want to put you in my pocket!” american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://www.ajpe.org can also be detrimental to a female mentee and the de- velopment of trust in a mentoring relationship. male mentors should generally avoid remarking on the physical appearance of female mentees and should also be mindful of the way they speak about other women in the presence of those mentees. for example, a male mentor may be discussing potential new team members for a project and dismiss a female candidate as too emotional to handle critical feedback. this comment could undermine the female mentee’s trust in the male mentor. physical contact between a male mentor and female mentee is a particularly difficult issue to address in a con- sistent manner as personal dynamics and cultural customs can lead to substantial variation in what may be considered appropriate. to allow for more clarity, physical contact for the purpose of education should be distinguished from physical contact in a personal or emotional context. re- garding education, faculty members should observe the same decorum of asking prior to touching that is recom- mended when examining a patient. the request should also be accompanied by an explanation of the extent and pur- pose of the proposed contact. for example, we suggest a male mentor ask, “may i touch your leg to demonstrate an assessment for peripheral edema? i will only touch below the knee and will hold my fingers in place here [pointing] for a few seconds while supporting your leg from behind. this will allow me to observe whether there is any pitting characteristic consistent with excessive fluid.” we advise that male mentors should not initiate physical contact in a personal context, though there may be situations in which doing so is acceptable. consider the case of a mentee who hopes to complete a postgraduate residency but does not match with a program. if the mentor has developed a close relationship with her, he might identify that placing a hand on her shoulder or engaging in a brief hug would be comforting. however, a substantial risk of misjudgment exists in this scenario. if the male mentor is not absolutely certain, he should either ask for consent or avoid acting on the impulse. inappropriate physical contact can be upsetting and isolating for female mentees. both authors have ob- served, experienced, and heard numerous instances of such behavior. some examples of unnecessary and inap- propriate contact include prolonged touching of the mentee’s arm or back while speaking; standing very close or directly against the mentee in an uncrowded space; using the mentee as an armrest and playing with her hair; and making obvious conversational excuses to touch the mentee. in one case ofthe latter, a male mentor told a story about another woman’s necklace while tracing the outline of a necklace on a female mentee’s upper chest. in addi- tion to actual physical touch, objectifying female mentees by staring at their bodies is an unacceptable intrusion. , male mentors should not engage in any of these behaviors and we encourage them to educate colleagues who do. conclusion though women represent a growing proportion of mentors and most students in academic pharmacy, men still occupy most positions of leadership. men throughout aca- demic pharmacy have a responsibility to serve as effective mentors for female mentees. in order to do so, they should prioritize female mentee safety while pursuing personal connections that are equitable to those they engage in with male mentees. we contend this can be achieved by estab- lishing safe physical and intellectual environments, consid- ering the language used when communicating with or about women, and avoiding inappropriate or unwanted physical contact. we recognize that generational, geographical, and cultural norms may influence optimal implementation of these suggestions. further research is needed to assess the prevalence of sexual harassment and other behaviors that undermine the safety and success of female mentees in academic phar- macy. this research could inform programs at colleges of pharmacy that seek both to prevent misconduct and to mitigate its impact. at this time, we suggest administra- tors in colleges and schools ofpharmacy should promote a proactive dialogue around this issue with faculty mem- bers, preceptors, staff members, and other personnel who supervise students. acknowledgment the authors wish to thank ms. sarah ashlock for pro- viding editorial support. references . academic pharmacy’s vital statistics. aacp website. https:// www.aacp.org/article/academic-pharmacys-vital-statistics. accessed june , . . black mc, basile kc, breiding mj, et al. the national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: summary report. cdc website. http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/ nisvs_report -a.pdf. published november . accessed june , . . gross am, winslett a, roberts m, gohm cl. an examination of sexual violence against college women. violence against women. ; ( ): - . . kearl h. the facts behind the #metoo movement: a national study on sexual harassment and assault. stop street harassment; . http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /full-report- -national-study-on-sexual-harassment- and-assault.pdf. accessed june , . . what women are up against at work: key findings. leanin website. https://leanin.org/sexual-harassment-backlash-survey-results#key- finding- . accessed june , . american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om https://www.aacp.org/article/academic-pharmacys-vital-statistics https://www.aacp.org/article/academic-pharmacys-vital-statistics http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report -a.pdf.% published% november% http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report -a.pdf.% published% november% http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /full-report- -national-study-on-sexual-harassment-and-assault.pdf http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /full-report- -national-study-on-sexual-harassment-and-assault.pdf http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /full-report- -national-study-on-sexual-harassment-and-assault.pdf https://leanin.org/sexual-harassment-backlash-survey-results#key-finding- https://leanin.org/sexual-harassment-backlash-survey-results#key-finding- http://www.ajpe.org . profile of pharmacy faculty, - . aacp website. https:// www.aacp.org/system/files/ppf_ -final.pdf. published february . accessed june , . . lisak d, gardinier l, nicksa sc, cote am. false allegations of sexual assault: an analysis of ten years of reported cases. violence against women. ; ( ): - . doi: . / . zemke r, raines c, filipczak b. the millennials: be careful what you ask for; and, a field guide to mentoring millennials. in: generations at work: managing the clash of boomers, gen xers, and gen yers in the workplace. new york, ny: amacom, american management association; . . piper le. generation y in healthcare: leading millennials in an era of reform. frontiers of health services management. ; ( ): - . doi: . / - - . shaw me, fulton j. skills for mentorship. in: mentorship in healthcare. keswick, cumbria: m & k publishing; . http:// eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/ehost/ ebookviewer/ebook?sid ce d - c- -a - fa a ed a @sessionmgr &vid &format eb. . lease sh. assertive behavior: a double-edged sword for women at work? clin psychol sci pract. ; :e . . bechard m, arget m, lerner j, et al. rdoc national resident survey. https://residentdoctors.ca/wp-content/uploads/ / /national-resident-survey- -r .pdf. . bronner g, peretz c, ehrenfeld m. sexual harassment of nurses and nursing students. j advanced nursing. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j. - . . .x . pennington a, darby m, bauman d, et al. sexual harassment in dentistry: experiences of virginia dental hygienists. j dental hygiene. ; ( ): - . http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy .library.arizona. edu/apps/doc/a /aone?u uarizona_main&sid aone&xid e d . . douglas km, sutton rm. “a giant leap for mankind” but what about women? the role of system-justifying ideologies in predicting attitudes toward sexist language. j language and social psychology. ; ( ): - . doi: . / x . fischbach a, lichtenthaler pw, horstmann n. leadership and gender stereotyping of emotions. j personnel psychology. ; ( ): - . doi: . / - /a . barnett je. mentoring, boundaries, and multiple relationships: opportunities and challenges. mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning. ; ( ): - . doi: . / . guizzo f, cadinu m. effects of objectifying gaze on female cognitive performance: the role of flow experience and internalization of beauty ideals. british j social psychology. ; ( ): - . doi: . /bjso. . fredrickson bl, roberts t-a. objectification theory: toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks. psychology of women quarterly. ; ( ): - . doi: . / j. - . .tb .x american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om https://www.aacp.org/system/files/ppf_ -final.pdf https://www.aacp.org/system/files/ppf_ -final.pdf http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid= ce d - c- -a -fa a ed a @sessionmgr &vid= &format=eb http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid= ce d - c- -a -fa a ed a @sessionmgr &vid= &format=eb http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid= ce d - c- -a -fa a ed a @sessionmgr &vid= &format=eb http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid= ce d - c- -a -fa a ed a @sessionmgr &vid= &format=eb https://residentdoctors.ca/wp-content/uploads/ / /national-resident-survey- -r .pdf https://residentdoctors.ca/wp-content/uploads/ / /national-resident-survey- -r .pdf http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/apps/doc/a /aone?u=uarizona_main&sid=aone&xid=e d http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/apps/doc/a /aone?u=uarizona_main&sid=aone&xid=e d http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy .library.arizona.edu/apps/doc/a /aone?u=uarizona_main&sid=aone&xid=e d http://www.ajpe.org frankfurter poetikvorlesungen – new perspectives on christian kracht’s work? issue ( january ) frankfurter poetikvorlesungen – new perspectives on christian kracht’s work? ./ ./ . may , goethe-universität frankfurt silvia boide international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) contact: silvia.boide@gcsc.uni-giessen.de how to cite: boide, silvia: “frankfurter poetikvorlesungen – new perspectives on christian kracht’s work?”. in: kult_online ( ). doi: https://doi.org/ . /ko. . creative commons attribution . international kult_online. review journal for the study of culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (issn - ) https://doi.org/ . /ko. . https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / kult_online. review journal for the study of culture / journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online - - frankfurter poetikvorlesungen – new perspectives on christian kracht’s work? ./ ./ . . , goethe-universität frankfurt silvia boide international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) in , the frankfurter poetikvorlesungen (lectures on poetics) experienced a highlight in their history. swiss author christian kracht, who is known for his reticence to appear in public, was announced to hold the lectures. he rarely gives interviews and does not speak extensively about his work, which has received diverse critical attention, reaching from praise for intertextual density to the reproach of containing fascist ideas. kracht has never commented on either of these in the past years. expectations for the lecture series on th, th and nd may included that he might just not turn up or keep standing in front of the audience, saying nothing. things went differently, but were no less impressive. the auditorium was almost full, but there were still places left for the first of the three appointed lectures. kracht arrives, wearing his well-known parka and a woolen scarf, as if it were a cold and rainy autumn day (it is actually warm and sunny outside). a projection shows a photograph taken by his wife frauke finsterwalder, which he will later refer to as “knausgårdesk” and a comprehensible reason for people not to attend the lecture. the press takes photographs of him standing at the lectern – kracht seems uncomfortable. the audience observes the scene, still waiting for their moment of uncomfortableness, which is to happen soon enough. kracht starts his lecture by provoking laughter in the audience by referring to his missing talent as a writer and to not being able to speak but rather read out the lecture’s text, because he perceives himself speaking the way an “autistic infant” would. he then starts to talk about his boarding school experiences in canada. as a small, rather chubby child with blond hair and swiss origin, he narrates, his fellow students call him “heidi” (audience laughs again). no more laughter is heard as soon as kracht starts to explain how in late , during the weinstein affair, he became aware that his perception of abuse as a child by the school’s reverend, keith gleed, was actually not invented by him (as he had believed for a period of years). during the rest of the lectures, kracht will come back to analyzing how this traumatic childhood event has shaped his writing. as the most literal https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online/ kult_online. review journal for the study of culture / journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online - - example, he refers to having included the very name of gleed and a description of the scene of abuse in his novel ich werde hier sein im sonnenschein und im schatten (i will be here in sunshine and in shadow, not available english translation so far), when the protagonist remembers his childhood. perhaps as a direct result, the first lecture has received more attention by the press than any complete series of the frankfurter poetikvorlesungen held between and (cf. dürr, claudia. “dabeisein ändert alles? die aufregung um christian krachts poetikvorlesung in der mediennachlese.” https:// geschichtedergegenwart.ch/dabeisein-aendert-alles, . . , accessed . . ). in introducing kracht to the audience, prof. susanne komfort-hein (goethe-universität frankfurt) had emphasized the “vorbehaltlichkeit” of kracht’s work, how it can be perceived from many different angles and how it challenges its readers, oscillating between fact and fiction as well as between aesthetics and politics. with his lecture, as the panorama of reviews shows, kracht poses the same challenge to the audience. most journalists use the shocking content of kracht’s report as the main topic of their texts. some use quotes or paraphrases from the lecture as headings. and some of the reviews ask whether kracht’s account of abuse can be trusted to be true: it has been suggested that we have to be “careful” in believing him. this is certainly a result of the perception of kracht as an author who likes to challenge his readers, of an author whose works have been read as putting first emphasis on aesthetics and intertextual play, resulting in some interpretations of his texts which only marginally touch on the political aspects they entail. again, in this lecture, the words he forms into sentences to tell these terrible events create a distance, an aesthetic barrier. is this the reason for which the factuality of the account of abuse is questioned – the reason for which it is suspected to be a radical play with the audience? aesthetics and politics as well as their staging are densely intertwined in kracht’s work, and his poetikvorlesung follows this pattern. for us, the audience, it is a narration of a memory that he says he has of his childhood, which we may believe (why shouldn’t we?) or not believe (why should we?). it is our decision, which will be framed and influenced by all the ‘truths’ and ‘lies’ and other kinds of perception we have had of the author that linger as preconditions and connotations. but since he has stated it, it is in the world and we have no choice but to deal with it in some way. we can decide to believe or not to believe – but each decision puts us in danger: the danger ofbeing guilty of naivety, on the one hand, and the danger of playing down the confession of a major act of violence towards a child, on the other. it is exactly the creation of such dilemmas that is also characteristic of kracht’s novels. https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online/ kult_online. review journal for the study of culture / journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online - - whether kracht has deliberately chosen to confront the audience with this difficult decision and if he wants it to be understood as his exclamation of #metoo or not remains unclear – at least he refers to the debate by mentioning the weinstein case. the doubts about the truthfulness already point out another level of discourse connected to accounts of abuse (not only by or of people who ‘enjoy’ broad public attention). the journalists present at the first lecture therefore had a massive responsibility to deal with, since recordings of the lecture were not allowed (the magazine der spiegel was even commanded to take long quotes from the lecture off their website, cf. claudia dürr). they were the ones to report to the public, they were the first ones who had to decide – at least how to present the lecture in writing. claudia dürr suggests a productive way of coping with this task: she recommends the audience accept the whole picture in all its complexity between the account of abuse, conventions of the genre of poetikvorlesung, the happening or event characteristic of the staging, and the ban on quoting longer parts of the lecture. only then, she suggests, can we decide which role we want to take, how we want to talk about what happened in the auditorium of goethe university. what else does kracht see as having influenced his writing? literature, of course: thomas mann, simmel, stanislaw lem, dos passos, garcía-marquez, tolkien, le guin, pynchon, w.g. sebald, t.s. eliot, and allen ginsberg, among others, and us-american television series: star trek, flipper, lassie, bonanza, and many more. for each of his three latest novels he names two authors who have served as inspiration: yukio mishima and georges batailles for die toten (the dead), erich kästner and thomas mann for imperium, and h.p. lovecraft and philip k. dick for ich werde hier sein im sonnenschein und im schatten. another influence, as the lecture series’ title suggests: “emigration”. after having traveled and lived in diverse parts of the world, kracht currently lives in california. it is a place in the world, he says, from which he can deal with “adolf eichmann’s language” from a distance and through the words and works of writers and artists. kracht narrates that he has even tried to adopt english as his language for writing in order to escape german, but without success. what he strives to include in his writing, kracht explains in the second lecture, is what he calls “kognitive dissonanz” (cognitive dissonance), by which he refers to elements in cultural artefacts that point to a meta-level of the narration. elements which are meant to shift patterns of perception, which create an overlapping and blurring of things perceived, such as one pair of converse in an otherwise historically authentic film about marie antoinette (the one by sofia coppola). kracht refers to another example from his work, which has also been noted by christoph kleinschmidt: the sentence “auf dem bild regnete es, oder es regnete nicht” in ich werde hier sein im sonnenschein und im schatten (köln , p. ) seems out of place at first, but at the same time it is an allusion to wittgenstein and a problem https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online/ kult_online. review journal for the study of culture / journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online - - in the philosophy of language (cf. christoph kleinschmidt: “von zerrspiegeln, möbius-schleifen und ordnungen des déjà-vu. techniken des erzählens in den romanen christian krachts.” in: id. (ed.). text und kritik heft : christian kracht. münchen , p. ; id.: “‘auf dem bild regnete es, oder es regnete nicht.’ christian krachts ich werde hier sein im sonnenschein und im schatten als literarische welterschließung im zeichen der sprachlogik wittgensteins.“ in: stefan bronner, björn weyand (ed.). christian krachts weltliteratur. eine topographie. berlin , p. - .). kracht starts the third lecture with a reading of an early review of his debut novel faserland. the audience and then kracht himself laugh at the fierce wording of the text which makes clear that its author disliked the novel – mostly because of its dandyish protagonist and narrator. for the first time, kracht explicitly defends himself against the manifold ‘misreadings’ of his work, also complaining that he does not understand why an author should not be a shy person at the same time. many voices suggested that kracht’s research from now on must distinguish between pre- and post- frankfurt readings of this corpus because of the revelation of the abuse (cf. beate tröger in der freitag, kevin kempke and miriam zeh in der merkur). christoph schröder of die zeit suggests another perspective: while kracht’s revelation of a biographical motivation might add meaning to his texts for an audience on the surface, he might have also secured freedom for himself as a writer by speaking up. christoph schröder (in die zeit) has described the genre of the poetikvorlesung (established in in frankfurt) as a non-academic ritual taking place in an academic space, as authors are supposed to read their own work from a biographical perspective – which has been detested for decades in literature studies (cf. christoph schröder: “flucht in die offenbarung.” in: zeit online. https://www.zeit. de/kultur/literatur/ - /christian-kracht-vorlesung-frankfurt-abschluss, . may , accessed . . ). kracht fulfills the standards; schröder has even suggested that this hasn’t been done in such a conventional way in a long time. but kracht also refers to the genre explicitly and suggests that everything that takes itself too seriously is open to being parodied – such as the poetikvorlesungen. and parody, he states, can be a cure for abuse. at the concluding reading at the literaturhaus frankfurt on rd may, it seems as if nothing happened: he reads without pause from die toten, no questions invited, no discussion. ijoma mangold of die zeit summarizes: “das ist christian kracht in reinform: pose, exzentrik, heiliger ernst und existenzielle verletzung relativieren sich nicht, sondern steigern sich aneinander” (mangold, ijoma. “‘das hast du dir eingebildet.’“ in: die zeit / , . . , p. . “this is christian kracht at his best: pose, eccentricity, holy seriousness and existential offense at the same time, which in their combination grow stronger together instead of putting each other into question”, my translation). this effect is a challenge for the audience, because it allows for complexity and because we are asked https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online/ kult_online. review journal for the study of culture / journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online - - to decide and take a position. and this is the reason why kracht’s literary voice, on full display even in his lectures, is one of the most important of our time. silvia boide international graduate centre for the study of culture (giessen) contact: silvia.boide@gcsc.uni-giessen.de how to cite: boide, silvia: “frankfurter poetikvorlesungen – new perspectives on christian kracht’s work?”. in: kult_online ( ). doi: https://doi.org/ . /ko. . https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online/ https://doi.org/ . /ko. . resisting popular feminisms: gender, sexuality and the lure of the modern abstract this article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. it further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as “universally desirable” in light of this history. i suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. a related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. i will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men or heterosexuals against women or homosexuals then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. in conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories. introduction those of us who inhabit the contested terrain of european feminist theory and politics are used to feminism being rejected or transformed in ways we are not in control of. we are used to feminism being cast as anachronistic, and its subjects being proposed as anti-male or masculine; and we are used to the paradoxical claiming of feminism for conservative ends, particularly as part of nationalist and militarist projects. this article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of “the modern” in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. claims that particular nations or subjects are modern increasingly rely on propositions of gender or sexual equality as either imminent or having already arrived (duggan ). gender and sexual rights claims are thus consistently articulated with this “right to be modern” at their heart, such that their pitch for the space and time of modernity is made with particular affective strength, as leticia sabsay ( ) has suggested. this article further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism can be cited as universally desirable. a tentative argument is that feminism can only be framed as desirable to the extent that it has moved away from its association with both masculinity and intersectionality, to the extent then that it can be sutured to femininity and singular understandings of women’s oppression. a related claim is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. i will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily a fight against sexual oppression by men or heterosexuals against women or homosexuals then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. whether freed from gendered and sexual oppression or continuing to be subject to it, women and men remain recognizably women and men: the universal appeal of feminism requires this clarity. while feminism is not only or indeed primarily marked by an increased appeal of course – indeed anti-feminism is as virulent as it ever has been (or worse) in many contexts in europe and globally – i believe that where it is cited in those terms it is worth exploring the conditions and implications of that appeal because of what it tells us about current conditions of gendered power and authority. the article begins with a reminder of some of the different ways in which gender and sexual equality discourses can be put to work in securing a fantasy global landscape of uneven freedoms within a nationalist framework. as a range of feminist, queer and critical race theorists have shown, these discourses frequently rely on gendered, sexual and racial norms, even while appearing to challenge them. it focuses on the temporal and affective features of these geo- political fantasies and explores some of their most pernicious effects. my argument then shifts to explore several cultural examples that reframe feminism as desirable rather than anachronistic, with particular attention to the role of representations of femininity in launching and securing this appeal. foregrounding the ways in which this universality relies on single-issue sexual politics, i query this popularity as a sign of success from a feminist perspective interested in both the exclusionary histories of such politics, and the importance of focusing on overlap and displacement within fields of power relations. the lure of the modern participants in feminist theory and politics have acclimatized to the cultural and political heralding of postfeminism as signaling both feminism’s successes, but also the dwindling necessity of its aggression. embracing the pleasures of femininity can thus be reframed as active not passive: actively inheriting past gains and actively inhabiting a confidently gendered womanhood (gill ). angela mcrobbie ( ) discusses this cultural movement in terms of its generational myopias and representational limits, while nancy fraser ( ) and sylvia walby ( ) focus on the problems of a post-feminist ethos that lends itself to feminine surfaces over material and economic depths. while i am suspicious of forms of feminist critique that tell a singular history of loss of politicization and superficiality among the next generation (since its heroine never has to change her political mind), i agree that in many different post- feminist moves, feminism can easily be relegated to the past and her subjects stereotyped as anachronistic in themselves. i am similarly exorcised by the multiple ways in which feminism can be folded into a progress narrative charting a relentless move away from inequality, since it is usually accompanied by claims that such inequality has been (almost) surpassed, and rarely takes account of enduring operations of power or critiques of the basis on which such equality is evaluated. as anne phillips ( ) has argued in the context of debates that pit multiculturalism against feminism, mainstreaming of feminist values may be a real achievement, but gains in one place can easily come to stand as evidence of continued backwardness in others, in ways that contribute to the failure to recognize inequalities in places deemed modern or progressive in gendered terms. in the process, feminism is appealing to the extent that it signals an embrace of modernity in a narrow mode, as biljana kašić ( ) has argued in the case of croatia and maria do mar pereira ( ) has shown in the context of portugal. importantly, such narratives and cartographies of progress suggest that feminism is envisaged more as a catalyst than a consistent presence, ideally displaced with the entry to modernity, an unfortunate part of the now-to-be- transcended past. crucially, for phillips ( ), simplistic progress narratives of gender and sexual equality also pit members of cultures and nations not understood as developed against one another. for transnational feminist geographer uma narayan ( ), this dynamic is not a one-way street, of course. a refusal of the modern can be claimed as a core part of postcolonial nation- building, such that women continue to be expected to inhabit gender and sexual norms as part of proving national ethnic and religious commitment, as she argues with respect to contemporary india. the central role that women play as reproducers of nation is one reason why their perceived freedom is so crucial in discursive as well as material terms as a marker of national development and modernity. postcolonial feminist work on nationalism and gender equality has long highlighted the importance of the promotion of racialised gender roles as part of a colonial civilizing mission, across multiple geographical sites (e.g. mcclintock, mufti, and shoat ). native colonized “others” are always framed as unruly and in need of governance, such that part of entering into modern colonial or postcolonial recognition involves mimicking white gendered and sexual norms and cultures of respectability. as merl storr ( ) has so persuasively argued in respect of sexual governance, colonial regulation requires imposing rigid gender classifications as a marker of civilisation, and within this schema only certain kinds of (feminine, but also white) womanhood will do. in other words, it is not just any kind of sexual and gendered difference or equality that signals the modern, but those borne out of fantasies of violent racial superiority. for gayatri spivak ( ), such discourses of colonial and postcolonial modernity are not merely static representations of geo-political power relations. they precipitate and justify a range of interventions through the active grammar of white men saving brown women from brown men. for spivak as for others, the fantasy of white, western rescue of passive brown female victims of unconscionable brown patriarchs is a key mode through which colonial violence is displaced and refashioned as ethical (see also young ). racism, we might say, has long been brought to life by discourses of gendered and sexual care. as m. jacqui alexander ( ) has noted, this colonial grammar can be adjusted to fit neoliberal versions of these relations very easily, displacing the devastating effects of structural adjustment and the development of tourist economies in poor countries such as trinidad and tobago and the bahamas, and placing new demands on female subjects to be appropriately reproductive and respectable as part of postcolonial national resistance movements. and we are at this point very familiar with the citation of gender and sexual equality as modern and desirable as a basis for nationalist, militarist intervention that masks capital and corporate interests in maintaining regional unrest and uneven financial development (al- ali and pratt ; enloe ). as with earlier colonial narratives, so too gender and sexual “rescue” (framed as humanitarian) enacts racialised violence through this displacement. in an important intervention in the feminist work on (post)colonial inheritance, kalpana wilson ( ) highlights that recipients of aid or development may now be encouraged to respond to these narratives through embodying agency rather passivity, chiming with the broader postfeminist concern about “empowerment” as a new form of subordination. with such discursive closure, women will be positioned – politically and critically – as de facto heterosexual in many contexts. in this light, it can be a pertinent intervention in itself to challenge that presumption, both as a way of interrupting the relationship between heteronormativity and nationalist or colonialist projects, but also to make visible queer lives. yet as a range of commentators have elucidated, gay and lesbian equality is also folded into the question of the modern. lisa duggan’s ( ) foundational work on homonormativity explored ways in which gay and lesbian lives of a particular kind (monogamous, coupled, white) have become central rather than peripheral to a contemporary us national fantasy of tolerance and (post)modernity. and jasbir k puar’s ( ) coining of the term “homonationalism” has highlighted the ways in which the “good gay” is frequently pitted against the “bad queer” as part of consolidating the figure of the perverse islamic or african/caribbean other so central to us domestic and foreign policy post- / . as queer geographers jon binnie and david bell ( ) have argued, while “homosexual” subjects have only recently been included as potential representatives of the modern nation, their status as ambivalent subjects of modernity actually has a long history. for duggan and puar, indeed, the “homo” in “homonormativity” and “homonationalism” is contingent, tolerated only insofar as it can be tethered to the broader project of maintaining sexual and gendered binaries in a racialised neoliberal geopolitics. the inclusion of gay and lesbian subjects is predicated on gender difference remaining clearly defined and homosexual identity being framed through respectability, as gayle rubin ( ) insistent many years ago. and as patricia hill collins ( ) sets out, sexual difference and the couple form as the basis of family have a racist colonial history bound up with heterogendered norms. small wonder then, that trans* challenges to gender binaries are met with such hostility, despite (or perhaps because of) the fantasy of gender equality as having been achieved. such challenges figure this equality as taking place between men and women, and not beyond their potent symbolics, of course. in turn, as alyosxa tudor ( ) has pertinently noted, without a clear intersectional, transnational approach to these heteronormative, colonial narratives, a space is cleared for conservative trans-nationalisms as well. as a short concluding note to this section, we should also be clear that none of the above mobilisations of gender or sexuality within coloniality or the framing of the modern through sexual, gendered and raced respectability remains uncontested. it would be easy, perhaps, to look at the continued take-up of gender and sexual equality as part of a global corporate agenda, with its familiar racist history and impact, and think of feminist and queer social movements as having failed. yet, as bice maiguashca ( ) insists, social movements for equality are continuously adapting to challenge as well as conform in their own right. very recently, we have seen the women’s marches across europe and globally to protest president trump’s inauguration in january , and the call for a global women’s strike in response to his administration’s racism, misogyny and homophobia. activists for international and intersectional sexual rights such as sonia corrêa ( ) consistently struggle against the problems of ongoing co-optation of sexual rights gains, as well as the dangerous exclusions that such approaches can reproduce. and as cynthia cockburn’s ( ) remarkable book on women’s anti-war activism transnationally affirms, while both gendered and sexual rights remain key to nationalist or militarist agendas, such efforts are also continuously resisted. feminist but feminine thus far i have been tracing the importance of an approach that historicises the difficult relationship among gender and sexual equality and their entanglement in histories of colonial and postcolonial nation building and militarism. these are important discussions that highlight how gender and sexual equality work discursively both within and outside feminism, and at different scales, in order to reproduce the hierarchies necessary to justify enacting power and authority over another, or of one geo-political site over another. yet to return to a point i made at the outset of this article, the question of “gender equality” as the basis of modernity at once relies upon and challenges existing gender roles, and “femininity” in particular remains unattainable for the majority of subjects in this (post)colonial minefield. the colonial construction of gender, race and sexuality mean that black and brown women are always ambivalently placed in relation to femininity. they are by turns hyper feminine in terms of presumed passivity in relationship to a patriarchy they need rescuing from, and hyper masculine in their refusal to meet the terms of white, (post)colonial femininity. the racialised and colonized woman can never actually represent gender, only its modification, excess or failure (lewis ). importantly too, those (post)colonial heroines of gender equality are also uneasily located at the threshold of ideal femininity. pushing for rescue of more passive others, arguing for their right to enter the modern through freedom from gender oppression of the worst order, those advocates risk taking up a masculinist position in relationship to those they seek to save. this is one reason why it has been important that feminism and gender equality are held apart: since feminism itself is characterized as un-feminine, it constitutes an unstable ground from which to make gender equality claims that leave a gender binary intact. thus we might say that both the rescuer and the rescued loiter on the edges of a femininity appropriate to heteronormative modernity, and both need to relinquish perverse sexual and gendered respectability in order be allowed contingent access to that subject position (puri ). the conventional heroine of an apolitical postfeminism makes this dynamic plain, as she has been characterized by an excess of emancipated, feminine affect, and is as startlingly white as she is finally free of feminist repression (gill ). it has been my argument thus far that holding feminism and femininity in tension is part of how the gendered and sexual alibis underpinning nationalism and the temporality of the modern continue to function. but in the last several years, there seems to have been a cultural shift that accompanies these more familiar dynamics. this shift emerges out of a cultural and political arena of representation that is keen to claim feminism as universally desirable, a perfect accessory for the here and now rather than an embarrassing relic to be buried in the closet. importantly for my argument here, this about turn in representation relies on the suturing of oppositional gender roles – and in particular femininity – to feminism, in a conscious inversion of relationship. as i will suggest below, this realignment is dependent on femininity remaining a binary proposition within which “gender equality” remains resolutely heteronormative, a proposition that is also key for its broad appeal. let us look then at a couple of recent examples of the ways in which feminism can be claimed as the new, caring position to take up if one is to be properly ethical and political, in contrast to feminism’s prior (and dominant) representation as marginal or old-fashioned. the few cases i analyse here are selected as good examples of the trend i am identifying, though they should not be thought of as representative of culture overall. my reasons for considering them significant rest on their presentation of feminism as a self- evident, benign good, a feature i want to explore as an important aspect of contemporary depoliticisation of feminist politics. in , marie-claire led with a special section headed “ signs that you’re a feminist,” (http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a / - signs-feminist/ feb , ) ironically yet surely integrating feminism into the lifestyle concerns that are the hallmark of women’s fashion magazines. in the same year, elle uk launched its “inaugural feminist issue,” (http://www.elleuk.com/now-trending/december-feminism-issue-cover-emma- watson-elle).with the actor emma watson as its covergirl, following her speech at the un on gender equality. both fashion magazines sought to give feminism the makeover she deserved, emphasizing the empowered contemporary woman’s embrace of femininity and romance in familiar vein. but there was also an important difference too, in the attempt to suture femininity and feminism. marie-claire’s title was followed with the subtitle “hate to break it to you, f-word haters, but you’re probably more of a feminist than you think,” which retains the original grammar of distance represented by the phrase “i’m not a feminist, but…” only now with a rapprochement after the pause. the acceptability of those “ signs…” was underwritten by beyonce’s endorsement underneath; her hype- feminine lacey attire captioned with her determination not to be a domestic http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a / -signs-feminist/ http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a / -signs-feminist/ http://www.elleuk.com/now-trending/december-feminism-issue-cover-emma-watson-elle http://www.elleuk.com/now-trending/december-feminism-issue-cover-emma-watson-elle drudge (fig ). elle’s special issue claimed emma watson as the “fresh face” of feminism, referencing once more the assumption that feminism needs the kind of overhaul only a women’s magazine can provide, but branding itself more than capable of that contemporary update. these magazines signal a dual update then, in relationship to our discussion thus far. femininity is rendered a hallmark of rather than a bar to feminism: indeed we can now see that it has been lurking under the surface waiting to be appreciated as feminism’s glasses are whipped off and its hair shaken out to reveal the shining beauty underneath. so too this femininity is not necessarily white, as the centrality of beyonce’s hyper-feminine image suggests (fig ), as long as it is coded in familiar ways: here through a predictable reference to sharing of childcare, and a celebration of racial difference as another feature of empowered femininity. a recent exception can be found in teen vogue in which young black american feminists talk about their struggles with feminism and racism (yet even here, representations are of black feminism aligned rather than in tension with femininity – see https://www.teenvogue.com/story/black-feminists). elle combined its feminism issue with a line of “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts (http://www.elleuk.com/now-trending/buy-elle-whistles- fawcwett-feminism-unisex-tshirt), donating the proceeds to the fawcett society feminist campaigning group who coined the wearable phrase in the uk. what was so extraordinary about this campaign was the number of women and men in the public eye that they managed to persuade to wear and be photographed wearing one. any lingering sign of embarrassment in actor benjamin cumberbatch’s or labour politician ed miliband’s strained smiles appear to reference the subsequent scandal about whether the t-shirts had been produced under exploitative labour conditions in mauritius or not, rather than any ambivalence about feminist nomenclature. rosie boycott broke the story for the mail on sunday in her piece “scandal of the p-an-hour t-shirts: shame on the feminists who betrayed the cause,” in november , which was then refuted by chris johnston in his article for the guardian “feminist t-shirts made in ethical conditions, says fawcett society,” also in november. disconcertingly, the campaign was marked by general concern about our then prime minister david cameron’s refusal to wear one – and one should perhaps be grateful for small mercies – prompting a somewhat surreal set of broadsheet and tabloid interrogations as to why he should be squeamish about embracing this affirmative identity. my own allegiances lie with homa khaleeli, writing for the guardian on october , who insists that “given cameron’s record so far, one thing is clear: this is not what a feminist looks like.” it is easy enough to be straightforwardly cynical of such cultural voracity as just the next marketing ploy to sell magazines (like everything else, it turns out that anti-feminism has a shelf life), but this fashionable feminist visibility has also been shared by the broadsheets, in which the question of feminism and who it includes has become consistent copy. while the debates are diverse, including arguments about trans* inclusion and intersectionality, the majority position is a feminism that departs from seeing women as victims rather than agents of others’ authority, and as rooted in an analysis of women’s oppression as centred in sexual violence or patriarchal control. heterosexual gender binaries are crucial to sustaining this analysis of women’s oppression, and, as many have noted, this is also an arena of thinking and politics necessarily resistant to its easy reproduction of colonial and anti-migration discourse (agustin ; andrijasevic ). it chimes with the cultural claiming of “femininity as feminism” precisely because of its singular focus on relationships between men and women; oppositional though perhaps in flux, but most importantly fully relational. so at the same time as we are seeing resistance to contemporary nationalisms in the form of the global women’s strike, which foregrounded the importance of connecting economic, racist and sexist power relations, a parallel investment in a universally appealling feminism that can be claimed from a familiar hetero-gendered location has considerable purchase. let me provide some further context for this argument about the appeal of what i term sexual violence feminism, precisely in terms of its paradoxical confirmation of oppositional gendering. in the last few years, the uk has been beset with sexual violence scandals in which a whole slate of ageing celebrities have been accused, tried and found guilty of sexual abuse starting in the s. these relentless and ongoing revelations have implicated other national institutions such as the bbc, the nhs (particularly mental health services), social services (particularly child protection), the civil service and government. the picture is one of rampant violence and misogyny that was overlooked and minimised at the time it took place, taking decades to emerge as those abused found the courage to speak out (again). importantly, these transgressions are often presented as uniquely horrific, as though we could not expect anything else of the s, and as though such abuses would not and could not happen today. the irony is glaring, of course, given that this progress narrative both writes out any feminist activism at the time, and erases the fact of rape and sexual violence’s grotesque under-reporting and under-prosecution in the present. see http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/cps_vawg_report_ .pdf for crown prosecution service statistics relating to increased reporting but decreased convictions for rape of women and girls in the uk, which suggest that http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/cps_vawg_report_ .pdf recognition of women’s experience of sexual violence is getting worse rather than better. this article is, indeed, being completed at the moment in which accusations of sexual harassment and rape against harvey weinstein and other celebrities and politicians in the us and globally have been met with women’s insistence that sexual violence marks their everyday experience as women in the “me too” campaigns (see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /women-worldwide-use- hashtag-metoo-against-sexual-harassment). feminist groups that focus on sexual violence (such as uk feminista) are thus caught in the curious temporal plays underpinning fantasies of gender and sexual equality as almost if not quite yet achieved. their cultural popularity reflects an investment in precisely the temporal distinction they want to challenge: their activism is a sign of living in times where women will no longer put up with sexual violence, as well as a sign of its continued cultural and social prevalence. thus “sexual violence feminism” can ironically enough be framed as the one kind of feminism that everyone can agree on: one that identifies sexual and gender-based violence as the basis of gender oppression, while simultaneously positioning widespread sexual violence as part of the actual or (soon to be) past. as suggested, this is an oddly reassuring feminism that can confirm (as much as it challenges the consequences of) sexual difference, operating as the oppressive alternate side of the celebration of those differences in declarations of feminism as newly feminine. it is a performative feminism too, in that to embrace it is to make sexual violence passé in the moment of the claiming of its contemporary importance. up until trump, perhaps, men (no matter how they actually acted) would not want to appear to embrace the negatives of sexual difference represented by sexual violence – https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-against-sexual-harassment https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /oct/ /women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-against-sexual-harassment precisely in order to inhabit the modern. and insofar as the positive version of this binary and fatalistic story also reifies gender difference through suturing femininity and feminism, there do not even need to be outward changes in gender representation to signal such a political and affective shift. post-trump, it will no doubt be even easier to claim feminism; on the basis that one is after all not that much of a violent, pussy-grabbing misogynist. to return to the popularity of “looking like a feminist,” then, to don the t- shirt might thus be said to be a way of marking oneself out as “not one of those old misogynists,” and to signal a break with anti-feminism (which would now be cast as both old-fashioned and pro-sexual violence; as though trump were part of the past and not the terrifying present). but to take up this position is also to take up a pro-censorship and anti-prostitution position that has long characterised such forms of feminism. again, this is uncontroversial for celebrities and politicians whose careers can be decimated with the smallest whiff of sexual scandal. but in the process, both sexual violence feminism itself and those who celebrate its new openness, rewrite history in yet another way, by simplifying the complex debates over the nature of sexual violence, the significance of porn, or the character of sex work, that have been central to feminism since its inception (duggan ). so too the intersectional critiques of this strand of feminism – as perpetuating racial and classed stereotypes in their preference for marches in poor neighborhoods, or as ignoring the complex modes of oppression and freedom that different women and men face – are positioned as diluting a clear agenda in ways that tell a simple story of prior solidarity upset by successive desires for representation. julie burchill’s piece for the spectator takes this familiar line, casting “intersectionality” as erasing socialist feminism’s proper politics (http://www.spectator.co.uk/ / /dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my- privilege/). nancy fraser’s fortunes of feminism ( ) enacts a similar temporality, casting a politics of diversity as the main catalyst for fragmentation of an otherwise, and previously, united and effective feminist movement. that this movement was always multiple, and always thronging with people who did not see themselves recognized in singular accounts of feminist aims, is conveniently forgotten in such accounts. the subject of feminism, when oppression is understood as rooted in experience of sexual violence, is most often imagined as straightforwardly female too. anti-porn and anti-sexual violence feminisms thus privilege “women born as women” over the experiences of a range of subjects targeted by masculine violence or objectification. the “me too” campaigns referenced earlier repeats this presumption, with challenges to a broader coalition of voices of those facing harassment in the face of masculinist dominance – cis-women, trans* men and women, gender non-conforming subjects, effeminate men and queers of a variety of stripes, all men, women trans* and queer subjects of color – in preference to a privileging of sexual and gender violence as the preserve of women who have always lived as such. the opportunities for coalition and solidarity in the face of sexual and gendered violence are thus displaced in favour of gender-opposed understandings of personal and political subjection. understanding sexual and gendered violence as primarily experienced through a binary between men and women fits neatly – as it has done for over one hundred and fifty years – with the progress narratives of modernity and democracy that mark other contexts and cultures as uniquely patriarchal through their failures to place sexual violence in their own pasts, even when – or most especially when – this failure might be said to mark all states and cultures. the opportunities for an integrated, intersectional account of how violence works to position a broad range of subjects as outside heteronormative authority are briefly raised, only to be dismissed as part of a lamentable fragmentation that dilutes feminist politics and experience. the reliance on gendered difference at the moment of reimagining feminism as universal does other work too. it naturalizes economic relations between women and men at precisely the point of heightened european austerity. across europe, the cuts in public funding are felt more keenly by women, who are both poorer earners in public sector work and who are already subject to the pay gap (brah, szeman and gedalof ). women are the ones called on to pick up the slack when social resources are withdrawn, and this is often referred to as “re-traditionalisation”: the turning back to older gender relations within kinship and community ties, as part of how economic downturns are managed, and as part of how women continue to be constituted as a reserve army of labour. the repeated – not so much precarious, but fundamentally temporary – nature of women’s access to the labour market has always required naturalization in order not to appear as it is: a privileging of a white, male breadwinner model that represents racialised, patriarchal and state interests. a discourse of re-traditionalisation risks participating in the same game, then, by reading current manipulation of gender norms as a return, a failure of the present to move beyond its unequal past, rather than as an enduring condition of gendered discourse. the desire to include women as full and equal participants in the public sphere (or to present them as already such participants) is necessarily contradicted by the creation of conditions that prevent them from being able to participate. it is these conditions – lower pay, lack of care provision, presumption of women as carers – as well as a continued failure to see these as naturalized aspects of cultural and economic heteronormativity – that underwrite the expectation that women will inevitably pick up the slack. this is, to my mind then, less a paradox or temporal lag, than the precise mode through which enduring inequality is naturalized and displaced. one reason why i think it is so important to track the appeal of a “universal feminism” that sutures feminism and femininity in some instance of contemporary representation, then, is that the citation of gender inequality’s temporality allows for a reinstantiation of gender difference, all the while appearing to challenge the limits such binarism represents. in other words, i want to propose that the linking of feminism and femininity domesticates the former, reifies heteronormative oppositions between men and women, and positions sexual violence as well as unequal domestic labour in (our western) past (even when it remains very clearly present). importantly, it is this made- over feminist subject who continues to do the rescue work in relation to those female subjects imagined as hyper-terrorised: the cut; the veiled; the temporally stymied. only this time our feminist heroine does not have to give up her femininity or her victimhood; she can be both victim and agent. while appealing in a range of ways, this complicated reinstantiation of gender binaries in (post)colonial discourse is one powerful mode through which gender inequality is currently perpetuated. concluding dilemmas the shame of wearing the “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt did not derive from the mismatch between claiming feminism and doing no work towards the alleviation of gender inequality. it arose from being implicated in the global economic inequality that produced the t-shirts themselves, as though there were no relationship between these issues. on the one hand, we would want to encourage a take-up of feminism in the world, expecting surely that it will not necessarily mirror one’s own concerns. on the other hand, when “feminism” functions specifically as a trope through which ongoing intersectional gender inequality is managed or even ensured rather than alleviated, we face particular political and ethical dilemmas. if “feminism” is a reassuring part of national heteronormative pride in an era of cynical wars, displacement and anti- immigration feeling and legislation, what are the possible next steps for feminists concerned to reside in a progressive europe? i want to propose two temporary responses: uncoupling feminism and gender/sexual politics; and insisting on feminism as a minority pursuit. in the first case, i have been experimenting for some time now with ways of disarticulating feminism from her presumed feminist subject. in “affective solidarity” (hemmings ) i was interested in thinking about disappointment and unease with gender roles as a basis for solidarity, irrespective of what happens next in terms of politicization, repression or even hostility to feminism. i took this from the ways in which i share an affective critique of the limits of gender roles with my mum, even though she would never call herself a feminist. i was trying to think through a feminism that allows for both me and my mum, that would refuse to start from the assumption that i hold the upper hand, or assume that my identification as a feminist means i am more likely to challenge gendered or sexual norms than she is. in fact, now i reflect on these questions anew, my feminist identity has often meant i have hidden continued gender inequality in my own practices, since i am more ashamed of them than a non- feminist might be. the concept of “affective solidarity” was intended to open up a feminism that contains feminist subjects and non-feminist subjects, starting from the appreciation of different locations within knowledge and politics and the recognition of the importance of dissonance whether or not it leads to a particular identity. importantly, i do not think this vision is an entirely open one. it cannot contain anti-feminism, for example, even as it can contain subjects other than feminists. in this reflection i have been strongly influenced by my reading of emma goldman, whose role in a rethinking of the temporalities of feminism i have been grappling with over the last decade. goldman was an anarchist activist ( - ) who centered questions of sexual oppression in her analysis of authority, and who linked that oppression to nationalist, militarist and capitalist interests (goldman ). for goldman, the sexual freedom necessary for revolution could not be articulated through the narrowness of feminist aims for “equality” with the most privileged ( ). indeed, goldman strongly dis- identified from feminism, and i resist the feminist critical desire to reclaim her as a feminist despite her outspoken refusal to be so characterized. for me, it is more important for a contemporary feminism that goldman did not – ever – exit the scene of gender and sexual politics: quite the opposite, she fought tooth and nail throughout her life to improve conditions for women. for goldman, though, women and men needed first to focus on their internal demons in order to effect real and lasting change, taking responsibility for and struggling with their own conservative as well as radical desires in relation to others. in other words, while we might say that contemporary invocation of feminism is a mode through which inequality is secured; for goldman, distance from feminism was a way to wrestle with deep gendered and sexual demons. goldman’s prioritization of sexual freedom as a key to revolution challenged the complementarity of gender relations that privileges male authority while keeping it hidden. for goldman, only the resignification of female capacity – as active, desiring and vital – would challenge a public/private divide that for her under-wrote all other social inequalities. we have much to learn from goldman, i think, about the importance of going beyond gender ascriptions even as we resist the characterization of women as inferior to men. importantly, too, for goldman, this project of gender transformation was the only way to challenge nationalism and racism, both of which she understood as emerging from and reproducing narrow kinship investments (between and ). consideration of both goldman and my mum both point me towards the significance of thinking about feminism as a minority pursuit. their shared grammar of dis-identification is the norm rather than the exception. one might say, indeed, that one thing that could be said to unite women across generations is their consistent rejection of and dis-identification from feminism. as a political movement and set of theories that (ambivalently and imperfectly) challenge the roots of femininity and gender relations as heterosexist, classist and racist, perhaps we should not expect feminism to be universally embraced. to do so may precisely be to undermine its critical capacity, may precisely blunt the ability to say: “you are wearing a t-shirt you have no right to, since you have evidenced no interest in analysing or transforming the horrors of contemporary gender.” one might add (and here we do of course have to wonder who is speaking) “your continued wearing of this t-shirt in the face of this disinterest demonstrates your interest in maintaining the gender, sexual and racial inequalities you want to claim are already in the past.” goldman was not afraid of judgment, and neither should we be, particularly not now when the relationship between feminism and racism/nationalism is so complicated and 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